Burn After Reading

The Coen Brothers new film, Burn After Reading, suffers from the fact that it followed No Country for Old Men, last year’s best picture Oscar winner. By comparison, Reading looks a tad lightweight—a goofy black comedy without the obvious “prestige” elegance of No Country. But I think that Reading is a very good, concise, underrated film. And perhaps the Coen’s most timely movie ever.

On a filmmaking level, you have to appreciate the razor-sharp economy with which the Coens make films. In No Country, they showed just how evocative a film can be when its most crucial, waited-for moments are only implied (as in, the moment when Javier Bardem lifts up his shoe at the end of the film). In Reading, they do the same thing. The Coens use an effective narrative device—C.I.A. officials being “briefed”—to comically tell us how the most horrendously violent scenes unfold. It is often said that good filmmakers “show” rather than “tell” a scene, but in the case of violence, I think that the Coens have found a way to effectively render it in our minds without always showing it. Certainly the endings of Reading and No Country are effective in this way.

But I also appreciated Reading for other things: its great cast (Brad Pitt and Richard Jenkins are especially fun), for one thing, but also its strange, quirky ability to capture the zeitgeist of America (well, Washington) in 2008.

The film has a resigned feeling to it—an almost nihilistic sense that everyone is stupid, selfish, and self-destructive. It’s a dark, cynical film, but it captures a familiar weariness that I think rings more true than ever today—in these days when Washington seems more inept than ever, more self-serving, and more prone to make a problem worse by trying to “solve” it in a quick and easy manner.

Burn After Reading never directly addresses one political party or another, and certainly it may be interpreted as a critique of the 8-year-long train wreck that has been the Bush years, but I see it more as a commentary on Washington D.C. in general, on bureaucracy, on the failed systems of power and secrecy and cover-ups that have made this generation of young Americans the most cynical ever about politics.

No Country felt timely as well, but not in a way that felt particularly American. Reading feels completely and utterly about America—about big, dumb, angry, short-tempered Americans who are scared about the future, paranoid about the present, dubious about anyone or anything “official,” and perpetually engaged in a downward spiral/comedy of errors.

At a time like this—when faith in America is dropping with the stocks, when many of us are losing all interest in the election and just wish it would end—perhaps Burn After Reading is not the best film for us. But then again, maybe it’s exactly the film we need.

Hipsters Getting Married

I saw Rachel Getting Married over the weekend, and really enjoyed it. It features a performance by Anne Hathaway that more than meets its billing, as well as some remarkable supporting performances from Debra Winger and Rosemarie DeWitt (in the title role). The movie is artfully made and certainly Jonathan Demme’s best directorial effort since Silence of the Lambs.

But the thing I like most about this movie is its commitment to hipster realism. It has an almost ethnographic-like attention to the details and culture of hipster, which I—as a person who is currently writing a book about hipsters—readily appreciated.

The movie is about a wedding—the marriage between Rachel (a pasty white woman in her early thirties) and Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), who is black and an uber-hip musician. As the film’s wedding weekend unfolds, the two families mix and mingle like one big happy hipster reunion, with no racial unease to be found. Race is never acknowledged in the film, nor is it ever hinted at that this wedding is in any way stylistically unorthodox.

The wedding is India-themed, in part and parcel. The bride and bridesmaids wear saris and the groom and groomsmen wear kurtas, and there is a sitar player. Oh, and the cake is in the shape of an Indian elephant. The rest of the wedding is a diverse hodge-podge of other cultures and traditions, with eclectic backyard decorations, red meat on the Barbie for food, and a wild assortment of music/dancing all through the night.

The music is really where the film hits the nail on the hipster head. It is eclectic with a capital E. Dozens of Sidney’s bohemian musician friends are bumming around the house during the entire wedding weekend, jamming to jazz and folk and whatever they feel like. A drums-and-guitar emo punk plays a Hendrix-style wedding processional. Sidney sings Neil Young's "Unknown Legend" for his wedding vow. There is hip hop, an African drum collective, a jazz trumpeter, and an androgynous DJ for everything in between. And that’s only what I can remember.

In the N.Y. Times, A.O. Scott lauded the way that Rachel “gathers races, traditions and generations in a pleasing display of genteel multiculturalism,” all the while painting a “faithful and affectionate” picture of blue-state America. It’s an apt description, certainly, but I would substitute “blue-state America” with “hipster-state America.”

The people partying with gleeful, postmodern abandon (when they are not embroiled in family drama and emotional catharsis) are the very essence of hipsterdom today. It's about pastiche, de-contextualized pop commodities, “subversive” stylistic fusion, and non-committal, consumer-oriented multiculturalism.

The whole thing reminded me of this article I read recently on PopMatters.com, in which Erik Hinton writes this:

The rise of the hipster signals our waning ability to experience the other. The world at large is quickly losing touch with alterity. As a result, we are losing the capacity to create meaning. The shallow virtual reality of hipsterdom—the world remade as simply an empty aggregate of trendy bands and silly clothing—is merely the first indication of this.

Hinton goes on to point out, quite correctly, that the hipster’s tendency to collapse and collect bits and pieces of all culture and boil it up in one “totally unique” persona stew, ultimately creates a void of meaning wherein cultural distinction and difference is lost. For example, as hipsters become more and more identified by the styles and tastes they accumulate, they lose their own sense of identity. “Who am I?” gets lost in the more pressing hipster question: “what bands, brands, and quirky styles do I like?”

As Hinton continues:

…our lists of particulars become the whole of our personalities. This is why we see that kid at parties dressed like Hunter S. Thompson and break-dancing with gold chains around his neck, the girl reading Byron, wearing a Siouxsie T-shirt and hanging out at the bike shop… The hipster is no more than a conscious manipulation of the freedom to live these piecemeal identities, comfortable in the awareness that identity can be constructed out of any bands, clothing, cheap, regionally esoteric beer, and inane micro-fiction that pleases. The hipster is a pastiche of old and new culture, free from the limits of meaning or the constraints of authentic identity.

Given this, it is appropriate, I think, that the characters in Rachel (with the exception of the three aforementioned female leads) seemed rather hard to pin down. They were gloriously complicated in a hipster/stylized/quirky-is-good sort of way, but I didn’t get a real definite sense of who they really were.

Which is the problem of hipsterdom in general: there is an ironic loss of unique identity (alterity, difference, etc) in the all-consuming desire to fashion a “unique,” rebellious identity. It’s about getting lost in style and subversion, and forgetting that skinny jeans and Parliament cigarettes can only go so far in setting us apart.

Religulous: Outrageously Innocuous

Bill Maher’s new “I hate religion” agit-prop indulgence, Religulous, is appreciatively passionate and occasionally funny, but all things considered, it’s a rather trifling little film.

There are numerous things to be said about it (both praises and criticisms), and you can find some of them in my 2 star review of the film for Christianity Today.

My reaction was not exactly what I—or Bill Maher—expected. I assumed that I would leave the film totally offended and perhaps a bit distraught. Maher no doubt was banking on me (i.e. the average person of committed religious faith) having a reaction like that.

But after seeing Religulous, I didn’t have much of a strong reaction at all. Maybe it’s because I’d seen all of this stuff before. Maher’s film merely pulls up all the worst, most unrepresentative spokespersons of these faiths. And that is nothing new. Jesus Camp did this in 2006; the “what is Pat Robertson saying this time” media does it on a daily basis.

Religulous is offensive, yes, but not in the sense that Maher hopes it will be. It insults the audience’s intelligence not only because it tells them they are dumb to believe in a deity, but because it assumes—counter to all statistics—that large portions of the potential viewing audience agree. Maher’s film presents an achingly narrow view—the view that religions are all dumb and religious people all stupid—and it doesn’t seem to recognize just how marginal such a position really is.

Bill Maher lives in a bubble if he thinks that there are many people in the world who share his opinion that “religion is the most dangerous threat facing humanity.” He seems ignorant (perhaps willfully) of the fact that most of the smartest people in history have been religious, and that most reform movements and humanitarian aid has had religious origins.

Ultimately, this is why Religulous is so disappointing. It is too wrapped up in itself, too out-of-touch, to have anything to say to anybody. It can be cute, and funny (and frequently is), but it’s not important. It’s intellectually boring. And for a movie so devotedly about a “call to arms” against religion, intellectually boring is the last thing you want to be.

Lest you think I’m uniquely harsh on the film, here is what some other critics are saying:

Kenneth Turan, L.A. Times: “Because [Maher] wants to be amusing above all else, he takes his questions not to sober religious thinkers but to the assorted fruits and nuts that populate the fringes of religion just as they do the fringes of atheism. The humor he creates at their expense proves nothing except that dealing from a stacked deck benefits no one but the dealer.”

Rafer Guzman, Newsday: “It's a nasty, condescending, small-minded film, self-amused and ultimately self-defeating. Its only accomplishment is to make atheists look bad.”

Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter: “The problem, if you're going to take Maher's inquiry seriously, is whom he chooses to question and where he chooses to go. For the most part, he verbally jousts with evangelical charlatans and redneck whack jobs… Maher doesn't risk questioning a learned theologian.”

Fireproof

So I saw Fireproof over the weekend (as did, apparently, quite a few people: the $500,000-budgeted film earned $6 million in its opening weekend and landed at #4). I previously had no intentions of seeing the film, until my colleague Peter Chattaway gave it a surprisingly positive (3/4 star) review for Christianity Today. Having seen the trailer earlier this summer and lamenting the maudlin quality of Christian film, I had very little hope that Fireproof would be good, and suspected that it wouldn’t even be particularly watchable.

Turns out Fireproof was watchable (certainly moreso than its predecessor, Facing the Giants, which I couldn’t watch with a straight face), though by no means was it good.

I didn’t laugh as much during Fireproof as I did during Facing the Giants, and I only felt the urge to look away from the screen a few times. There were oodles of uncomfortably saccharine moments and heavy-handed digressions of overacting, but it was a huge, huge improvement over Giants. This makes me happy, but it neither excuses Fireproof for its numerous failures nor justifies it as a successful film.

Fireproof takes a promising, nicely compact premise—a relationship falling apart and the fight by one man (Kirk Cameron) to keep it alive—and removes most subtlety and nuance from it. What is left is a melodramatic, Hallmark Hall of Fame film riddled with clichés and one too many Kodak moments. The filmmaking is clunky and features some truly ghastly montages and sequences of editing (a “he said/she said” comedic bit is particularly bad), replete with Third Day songs and heavily-accented Southern supporting actors.

The heavy-handedness of it all is truly unfortunate. The whole “fireman” metaphor is clever but ultimately overplayed. “Marriages are not fireproof,” says Cameron at one point. “Sometimes you get burned.” Do people really talk like this in normal life? Do we really string together movie-tagline clichés when speaking of our personal struggles?

I also didn’t get why there were so many sequences of firemen rescuing people: girl stuck in a car on a train track (with train approaching), girl caught in a burning house (rescued by Kirk “why do I get respect from everyone but my wife” Cameron), etc. These moments had nothing to do with the rest of the story. The same could be said for some other sequences such as an unfunny comedic soliloquy for one of the requisite funny-guy supporting players.

This is not to say there is nothing good to be found in Fireproof. There are definitely some tender moments (especially featuring the elder “mom and dad” characters) and an overall feel-good vibe. Kirk Cameron and the female lead (Erin Bethea) have occasional moments of humane acting, to be sure.

Ultimately, though, Fireproof left a bad taste in my mouth, and it goes beyond the clunky filmmaking. Several ideas—both explicit and implicit—in Fireproof felt a bit wrong-headed to me. The film seems to argue that marriages can only really survive when God is at the center (Kirk Cameron only can start loving his wife again after he converts to Christianity). Certainly I agree that a Christ-centered marriage is a good idea; but isn’t it a bit problematic to assume that just because one converts to Christianity, marriage somehow gets easier? And what about all the millions of successful, long-lasting marriages that have existed throughout time outside of a “Christ-focus?” And what about the statistics about Christians having just as many or more divorces than anyone else? Don’t get me wrong: I think it does a marriage great good to have Christ at the center. And for a movie that is being made by a church (Sherwood Baptist), I can’t really fault them from honing in on this. But, to be honest, the least truthful part of this movie was the “Christianity saved my marriage” part…

There are other problems I had with the film: it felt pretty sexist, occasionally racist (why are the black people in the film the only real authorities on divorce?), and a bit too afraid of going to dark places (the words “divorce” and “porn,” which are crucial to the plot, are rarely spoken of directly). For a film about a failing marriage, the PG glow is not really the best fit.

Alas, this is a film made by a church. A church! The cast and crew (minus Kirk Cameron) are members of the church, and if they want to make a film, they have every right to make it however they please. Congratulations to them for creating a film from the ground up—a film that is now the #4 film in the nation. Not an easy feat.

As a critic, though, I can’t give them a ringing endorsement because of these extra-filmic circumstances. The best I could say is that Fireproof is probably the “best film to ever be made by a church.” It’s not a good film, but it is a small step forward for Sherwood Films and a tiny step forward for Christian filmmaking in general. A tiny step.

Ten Underrated Actors

It's been a long time since I made a list about actors, so I figured I'd do a list of ten underrated actors working today. Actually, maybe "under-known" is a better word. Have you heard of them? You should rent their movies if not. I'd be interested to hear about other underrated actors people feel deserve more acclaim...

Crispin Glover: See him now in Back to the Future, River's Edge, and Willard; see him soon in The Forlorn.

Michael Shannon: See him now in Bug or Shotgun Stories; see him soon in Revolutionary Road.

Laura Dern: See her now in Citizen Ruth and Inland Empire; see her soon in Tenderness.

Catherine Keener: See her now in Full Frontal and Into the Wild; see her soon in Synechdoche, New York.

Danny Huston: See him now in Birth and The Proposition; see him soon in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People.

Paul Schneider: See him now in All the Real Girls and Lars and the Real Girl; see him soon in This Must Be the Place.

Samantha Morton: See her now in Sweet and Lowdown and Mister Lonely; see her soon in Synechdoche, New York.

Jon Hamm: See him now on the AMC show, Mad Men; see him soon in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Chiwetel Ejiofor: See him now in Children of Men and Redbelt; see him soon in Tonight at Noon.

Rebecca Hall: See her now in The Prestige and Vicky Cristina Barcelona; see her soon in Frost/Nixon.

In Defense of Vicky Cristina Barcelona

I almost didn’t go see Vicky Cristina Barcelona because of a 1.5 star review I read by one of my favorite film critics, Jeffrey Overstreet. But the fact that it was a Woody Allen film with a high percentage on rottentomatoes ultimately led me to go see it this weekend. I’m so glad I did. Just seven months after he crafted one of the tightest and most underrated films of the year in Cassandra’s Dream (read my review here), Allen has done himself one better with this film, his best since Match Point.

I respect and accept Overstreet’s criticisms of the film, as being demeaning to its female characters and a celebration of self-destructive behavior. The film can certainly be read in this way, and certain tonal attributes do indicate that Allen is gleaning much pleasure out of watching his characters suffer under their own silly neuroses. But don’t all comedies take pleasure in the misfortunate of their characters? Sure, this is slightly closer to home than the fakeries of Tropic of Thunder, but it’s crafted with the same storytelling logic: point out the faults and fireworks of human nature (lust, narcissism, etc) and milk it for laughs. It’s exactly what Shakespeare did in his comedies. Don’t tell me that The Taming of the Shrew was any less cruel to its characters than Allen is to his.

Beyond that, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is just an amazingly well-made film. One doesn’t have to agree with all of its philosophical conclusions (and with Allen, one rarely does) to enjoy that it is remarkably sharp, erudite, and entertaining. I couldn’t help smiling at how utterly precise the film’s script was, nailing its characters (albeit bathed in unabashed stereotypes) with the punctual economy and poise of an experienced and world-weary storyteller. And the actors Allen picked work so, so well for the story. Newcomer Rebecca Hall is a stunner, Javier Bardem proves his worth playing a non-psychopath, and Penelope Cruz sizzles with unbridled and hilarious intensity.

And a word about Scarlett Johanssen. I don’t know why people pick on her acting so much. She was totally convincing in this role, playing the same sort of confused, naïve, hormonal youngster in search of herself that she played in Match Point and which serves as Allen’s muse. Yes, it’s a type, and no there is not a lot of nuance to it. But the majority of people don’t have a lot of nuance to them, and someone has to play them. If anything, Johanssen gives her character (Cristina) more depth than she deserves. She’s funny and tragic and remarkably beautiful, and I wouldn’t have had anyone else play the part.

I also don’t think it’s fair to hold this film up to Allen’s oeuvre and pronounce it lacking the “insights about faith or true love” that his best films supposedly have in spades. This is a gorgeous film, vibrant and alive and everything a film should be. But beyond it’s artistic merit I do think it adds to the thematic and, yes, spiritual explorations of Allen’s films. This is a film about individuals longing to be other than what they are… each character has lofty ambitions and dreams and is not satisfied in their current predicament (even while they are all middle or upper class with scant reasons to be dissatisfied). Whether it be a home in Bedford with a tennis court, an aspiration to have a more open and “European” soul, or a desire to eschew fidelity for a passionate dalliance with a Spaniard, this is a film that is fueled by the very human (but perhaps particularly American) desire for the unattainable. Allen is not sanctioning or vilifying such desires, he’s just acknowledging them—in the same way Beethoven acknowledges insatiable passion in his music or Picasso in his painting.

The artistic and truthful representation of passion and longing (even through the somewhat ironic and cynical lens of Woody Allen) is, I argue, innately spiritual. It may not be intentionally so, but Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a spiritually relevant movie. It’s a harsh and hilarious critique of just how self-indulgent and ridiculous we are in our bourgeois spiritual searches, but it is also an earnest lament for the fact that we can’t escape our prevailing discontent if we keep looking for it in the wrong places.

"Christian Film": Still Abysmal After All These Years

As someone who has lived, worked, and/or studied in the film industry for the last three years, it pains me to say it, but say it I must: the "Christian film" is no better today than it ever was. Of course, I would be the first to suggest that there shouldn't even be a Christian film industry, that "Christian" makes no sense as a generic modifier. But there IS a Christian film industry, and will be as long as there is a Christian subcultural marketplace; thus, the least we can do is make good films, right? Wrong. We make films like this.

Does anyone want to see that movie? The problem is not the concept; I would welcome a film that uplifts marriage and argues against divorce as the easy way out. The problem, of course, is the execution. This film--as evident from the trailer--features antiquated filmmaking techniques, cheap-looking sets and costumes, horrible acting, and a cheesy Christian music soundtrack. There is nothing aesthetically interesting going on in the trailer. It's painstakingly ordinary and grievously cliched. God help us if this is the best we can do.

We need to put a moratorium on making films like this until we can prioritize craft. We have to appreciate aesthetics as valid apart from didactic storytelling (aka preaching). Good can be done (dare I say: converts won) by an achingly beautiful cinematic image just as effectively as by the most clear-cut conversion scene. We must recognize the value of style as itself a crucial form of content.

But mostly we just need to strive for excellence and stop churning out bilge.

Why We’re Obsessed With Taking Crazy Risks

I saw an extraordinary film tonight, a British documentary called Man on Wire. It’s a sharply made film about Frenchman Philippe Petit’s notorious, unauthorized high-wire walk atop the World Trade Center towers on August 7, 1974. The film is a funny, tender, fascinating, thrilling examination of one strange man’s obsession with flirting with death and living on the edge (literally).

It’s an extreme example, no doubt, but the film’s beauty is that Petit’s story serves so well as an archetype for humanity in general: we are wired to seek risk, to challenge ourselves, to dare death.

As I watched the film and marveled at Petit’s precarious, balanced walking across wires suspended thousands of feet about Manhattan, I thought of last night’s women’s gymnastics final and the amazing performances on the balance beam. Am I the only one who finds the beam the most impressive of all gymnastics feats? Watching Nastia Liukin tumbling and flipping and twirling on this narrow beam was utterly breathtaking. How do these people do it? And more curiously: why?

Indeed, my thoughts after seeing Man On Wire and a week’s worth of Olympic sports centers upon the question of why humans are subjecting themselves to such extreme, risky, unnatural challenges. Why are people like Michael Phelps consuming (and burning) 12,000 calories a day so as to be able to swim fast back and forth in a 50 meter pool? Why are weight lifters risking gruesome joint dislocations to raise unholy loads of metal above their heads? (as in Hungarian Janos Baranyai’s unfortunate accident earlier this week). Is it because in our post-industrial, ultra-pampered, developed world we have so little else to channel our primitive needs to conquer and destroy? Or maybe we’re just bored and looking for something—even bodily harm or death—that will jolt us awake?

With the Olympics we could say: well, there is the end goal of a gold medal and Wheaties box… And I guess that is as good a thing as any to spend one’s life painstakingly seeking. But something tells me that most of these athletes do what they do not just to get some shiny medal or trophy. There is something deeper and more elemental to it—a uniquely human willingness to sacrifice oneself physically (and mentally) for something that doesn’t have anything to do with survival. It’s not like Phelps is swimming for his life; it’s not like Petit is risking death on the high wire in order to escape a burning building (an image all too easily called forth given the twin towers’ ultimate iconic legacy).

No, these men are doing insane things because it is a thrill to do so… to push the limits of their being and transcend regular existence. I think we all have this desire, actually. But is it a good desire? Or is it a desire (like pride, lust, etc) that we must carefully keep in check? I don't know, but it sure does make for thrilling entertainment.

Putting on a Front for the World

Much has been made of how important these Beijing Olympics are for China—not for their economy (which hardly needs a boost) or for their patriotic morale, but for their PR on the world stage. Quite simply, the Chinese have an image problem, and they’re fiercely committed to spinning themselves in a better light.

But spin is increasingly easy to detect, and China—God bless her—is not doing a very good job of rebranding itself as a country of freedom-loving citizens of a democratic world.Rather, China comes across as a top-down, control-obsessed behemoth willing to do whatever it takes to present its ideal image to the world. Take a few of the examples from the opening week of the Olympic games:

• Opening ceremony deceptions: First came the news that some of the more elaborate fireworks we saw on TV were merely CGI effects, then came the juicier scandal that the cute pigtailed girl in the red dress who serenaded the worldwide audience was lipsyncing "Ode to the Motherland” because the actual singing girl (performing from somewhere off stage) was deemed too ugly (crooked teeth!) to be the “face of China.”
• Mysteriously teensy Chinese gymnasts: Suspicions abound about the ages of two of team China’s most talented female gymnasts, He Kexin and Jiang Yuyuan. Various recent press reports have placed the ages of the diminutive stars as low as 13 or 14, but the Chinese government has since submitted passports that “prove” their ages to be 16, making them eligible competitors. We can’t say for sure, but the obvious conclusion from this is that the government was more than willing to “adjust” the official ages of these young athletes whose participation in the gymnastics competition was integral to that ever-important gold medal.
• Suppression of protests: Don’t the Chinese know that the best thing they could do for themselves would be to allow very public protests to occur? An Olympic games is just not right without them. Everyone knows about the Chinese abuses of human rights, the Tibet debacle, etc. Thus, we all know that there should be throngs of protesters at these games. That there are not very many (at least visible to the outside observer) shows that China is up to its freedom-suppressing old tricks. Numerous reports have demonstrated that China will stop at nothing to keep news coverage of protests or dissenters from reaching the outside world.

Alas, the Chinese are not the smoothest operators when it comes to slyly manufacturing a skewed image of themselves. We can make fun of them for this, and be outraged, but the truth is they are not much different than any of us. Anyone with a Facebook page, blog, or Flickr account cannot really critique China for their heavy-handed image maintenance. We live in a day and age where the image or presentation of reality is more important than the reality itself (thank you Baudrillard), and China is just the largest and perhaps most clumsy offender.

All of this makes me reflect on reason #187 why The Dark Knight is the most relevant film of the decade thus far. It is all about this “truth distortion” spin zone—the civil importance of telling the public only so much truth and lying about certain things “for their sake.” Problem is, when you can see through these intricate PR spin maneuvers (as we can with China’s Olympics), the result is that we trust the spinner even less. Hopefully Batman will be a better spin doctor than Beijing is.

Films About Guys Who Can’t Grow Up

I saw Step Brothers earlier this week, and laughed a lot. It’s a film about two forty-year-olds (Will Ferrell and John C. Reilley) who act as if they are thirteen and bond over shared interests such as velociraptors and Cops. It’s a very funny, highly enjoyable film; but it’s also a very familiar film. How many of these R-rated “guys stuck in adolescence” films have we seen in the last ten years? Call it the “frat pack” or whatever you will, but the trend is hard to miss: films about guys hanging out with other guys and getting into all sorts of immature mischief.

The list of films is very long, and includes such hits as Wedding Crashers, Anchorman, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Dodgeball, and Superbad. These are films celebrating the R-rated, testosterone-fueled hijinks of man-boys who refuse to grow up.They are films that are immensely popular with mainly male audiences, but why? What is it about watching pathetic grown men acting like infants that we find so fun and appealing? (And I laugh too… certainly).

I suspect it has something to do with the larger trend of demasculization in culture that has taken place in the last few decades. After the first couple waves of feminism, the divorce boom in the 70s and 80s, and the pushing of all sorts of sexual boundaries in the 90s, gender has become a very confusing issue. Men have come out of this time the most damaged, it seems, with fewer and fewer father figures and role models to show them the right way to express adult masculinity. It’s only natural that film and television would express this confused identity in comedic form—historically the site of much of our collective working-out of contradiction and paradox.

I suppose the films of Adam McKay and Judd Apatow are popular not only because they are full of hilarious actors, but because they are giving voice to a large population of American males who feel stuck between an adulthood they aren’t prepared for and an adolescence that’s never felt completely comfortable. We don’t know quite what to think about masculine identity anymore, so the logical thing to do is just parody and laugh at it.

Evil Incarnate in Cinema

Because I had other things to say about The Dark Knight in my previous post, I avoided too much discussion of Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker. But there is a ton to say about it, and after seeing the film a second time today, I really feel like writing more…

Heath Ledger’s Joker is, in a word, evil. Pure evil. He goes beyond a villain. As others have suggested, he may even be the devil incarnate. He’s motivated not by money but by a desire to see good go bad, to show the world that there is no escaping from sin (in the way that Satan hoped to tempt Christ in the desert and prove him susceptible to sin like everyone else).

In addition to Ledger’s maniacal, full-bodied (possessed?) acting, there are other things Nolan and crew do to make the Joker so utterly disturbing. The fact that he just pops onto the Gotham crime scene, seemingly from hell, makes him all the more devilish. We know nothing of who he is, where he’s from, if he’s really human. When incarcerated, the police can’t find any traces of anything remotely useful for identification. He’s a ghostly ghoul, a specter of chaos who seems to have superhuman abilities to orchestrate mayhem in all corners of the city. (And I’d be lying if I said the ghost-aspect wasn’t all the more eerie in light of Ledger actually being dead.)

Other, more subtle filmmaking touches add to the character’s malevolence. Sound, for example: the dissonant, buzz/drone Joker theme (as devised by Hans Zimmer) is spine-tingling; and the scene where Nolan cuts all sound as the Joker frightfully sticks his head out of the speeding cop car hammers home just how utterly serious this sometimes-funny demon actually is.

Portrayals like this—where evil is totally unexplained and yet so thoroughly convincing—are far more disturbing than the “look what happened in my childhood” villains of the horror film pantheon. Ledger’s Joker reminded me of Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh, or even Daniel Day Lewis’s Daniel Plainview—other recent embodiments of amoral men wreaking havoc, death, and destruction in the worlds they inhabit. It is interesting to me that these performances are increasingly the most lauded and rewarded in our culture. Both Bardem and Day Lewis won Oscars for their performances last year, and Ledger will doubtless be nominated for one (if not win) this year.

What is it about seeing evil so convincingly rendered on screen that attracts our praise? Why are there so many more “tour de force” performances of dastardly wretches than there are of good people? Indeed, why is it so hard to evoke a convincing portrayal of good, pure, moral characters in film and literature? Dostoevsky tried it in The Idiot (in the character of Myshkin) but ultimately failed. Is it even possible to evoke a righteous person as convincingly as an evil one? Perhaps it is because we are fallen and so unfamiliar with righteousness that we cannot produce these performances. But that still doesn’t answer the question: why do we celebrate the evil characters so much? Why are we going so ape-wild over Heath Ledger’s presentation (and I’m guilty of it, for sure) of an evil that is perhaps unparalleled in screen history?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for great acting performances. But at what point should we worry about our attraction to something so devilish as Heath Ledger’s Joker?

The Dark Knight

Some have accused The Dark Knight of being too much movie, and if there is any fault with this epic film, this is probably it. Knight is so absolutely full—overflowing, really—with ideas and provocations… it is almost too much for one movie to bear. As such, I’ve had a hard time deciding just what I wanted to say here about it. I could go on and on about Heath Ledger’s performance (which was spectacular, frightening, funny, disturbing, etc) or talk about the film’s striking resonances with a post 9/11, terrorism-stricken world (not to mention a presidential election year).

But as much as this film is about politics and terrorism and psychopaths and crime, it is also a film about ethics and epistemology and the questioning of the hero myth.

As the marketing campaign indicated it would be, Knight is chiefly about three men: Batman, the Joker, and Harvey Dent. Each has his own way of dealing with a world gone wrong. Batman compensates for his own emotional injuries by donning a mask to battle one city’s criminal underworld to whatever extent he can. The Joker compensates in a different way: by making things even more anarchic. Because he suffers from the world’s cruelty, the Joker makes everyone else suffer. And then there is Harvey Dent, the “white light” of Gotham who offers the city’s best hope for reform. Dent is an idealist, answering the insanity of the world by aggressively dealing in fixed binaries: good vs. evil.

In the end, the approaches of the Joker and Dent (Two Face) prove unsustainable. The Joker’s thesis that chaos necessarily reigns supreme because humans are irredeemably self-destructive is proven untrue in the film’s final setup, but this is no big surprise. The world is obviously not quite as malevolent as the Joker hopes it is.

What happens to Dent and his ideologies, however, is far more disturbing. Doubtless he is sincere about his desires to make things better for Gotham, but his sense of justice ultimately proves his downfall. He appeals only to himself for ethical jurisdiction, rather than any transcendent norms or guidelines. “I make my own luck” is his mantra early in the film, with his two-headed coin his symbolic way of mocking fate. But as the film progresses, Dent comes to see that his bifurcated moral lens is altogether arbitrary and unable to wield much authority over the complexities of morality and law. Having lost faith in “the good guys” by film’s end, Dent loses trust in himself. His coin becomes the two-sided, fate-driven determinant of crucial ethical choices.

This is, of course, exactly what the Joker wants: for Gotham to see that even its most “moral” hope is ultimately subject to the collapse of his unsupportable dogmas. But Batman will not let this happen, and herein the film’s most incisive commentaries come to fruition. Batman orchestrates a cover-up so that the public will not see Harvey Dent’s moral collapse. Taking on the mantle of the “Dark Knight,” Batman becomes public enemy #1 so as to maintain order and hope in a “for the greater good” sort of way. In the film’s beautiful (and tragic) final scenes, director Christopher Nolan’s point is hammered home: in a world as crazy as this one, sometimes deception is necessary to protect the world from itself. If the true ugliness of everything were revealed, perhaps chaos would reign supreme. We need examples, figureheads, Aristotelian moral guidance—otherwise we might give in to the worst within our selves.

This is a stark and disturbing conclusion, and it bothers me in many ways. I’m not sure if Nolan is arguing that this is how it should be (lying for the greater good) or this is how it is, but either way it is frightening.

It is immensely dangerous, I think, to protect our heroes from fallibility. The end of Knight suggests that letting the public see a flawed, morally (and physically) disfigured Dent would cause irreparable damage to the fight against crime. But isn’t it true that things would be even worse if later on people found out that Gotham authorities had covered up Dent’s failings, holding the wool over the public’s eyes to keep them gleefully ignorant? Though not a parallel example, the film made me think about Pat Tillman—how the government lied to us about the circumstances of his death to offer us a heroic figurehead who died at the hands of the enemy terrorists (turns out he died by friendly fire). How many other cases are there in politics where we’ve been deceived by a government who concluded it was in our best interest to not know the “full truth”?

The danger and deception of holding our leaders and heroes to too high a standard is never more evident than in the church today. Time and time again the church is made to look foolish because of fallen leaders (Catholic priests, Ted Haggard, etc) who—because they have been painted as incorruptible moral exemplars—do immense damage to the overall legitimacy of Christianity. If we are more about hiding sin than dealing with it, why would anyone look to our gospel for any sort of relevant, reconciliatory truth?

Whether it is a letter than we burn to protect someone from the truth (as Alfred does with Rachel’s letter to Bruce), or a surveillance technology we use in secret “for the greater good,” we must sacrifice full disclosure—The Dark Knight seems to suggest—for the sake of order rather than chaos. Though I agree that things are complicated (morality especially), I’m not sure that protecting people from the dark truths in the world is the best course of action. We need heroes, yes, but not heroes that are too perfect.

I read an essay once by Jenny Lyn Bader that described the transformation of heroes in American culture over the past fifty years, and I think it is instructive here. She argued that our “larger than life” heroes have proven less and less relevant in a world in which life is now larger. Because we now realize that the good guy/bad guy split is a reductive approach to life, we have to look beyond superheroes to more everyday, imperfect yet admirable role models, though it may prove more difficult:

A world without heroes is a rigorous, demanding place, where things don’t boil down to black and white but are rich with shades of gray; where faith in lofty, dead personages can be replaced by faith in ourselves and one another; where we must summon the strength to imagine a five-dimensional future in colors not yet invented. My generation grew up to see our world shift, so it’s up to us to steer a course between naivete and nihilism, to reshape vintage stories, to create stories of spirit without apologies.

In Knight we see the polarities of naivete (Dent) and nihilism (Joker), and how Batman tries to forge the gray middle ground between the two. In the end I’m not sure how I feel about what Batman has become, though I suppose that is how we are supposed to feel. On one hand his is a story of spirit without apology—a man willing to bear the weight of hatred and “be the villain” in order to truly be the hero. But I also don’t feel completely comfortable with his willingness to deceive the public—to keep them from the horrific truths that he is somehow uniquely able to bear. It is a dangerous thing to designate oneself as somehow more capable of dealing with truth than the “average Joes” of the world. Dostoevsky could tell you that. So could Shakespeare. And if Batman continues down that path, he’ll become in truth the villain he is now only pretending to be.

Best Summer Blockbusters of all Time

I fully expect that when The Dark Knight tallies its opening weekend haul on Sunday, it will rank among the highest grossing summer blockbuster openings of all time. Sadly it will join the company of lots of blockbuster bilge—such $75M+ openers like The Da Vinci Code and Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. But there have been a number of certified summer blockbusters that have also been really, really good films. In honor of them, here is my top ten list of the best summer blockbusters of all time.

10) Braveheart (5/24/95): The grandaddy of three hour historical epics, Mel Gibson's Braveheart was the rare summer blockbuster that went on to win oodles of Academy Awards.

9) Superman Returns (6/28/06): Though Brian Singer's superhero film underperformed at the box office, I think it hit all the right notes. There is a somber beauty to this film that is revealed upon each subsequent viewing.

8) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (5/24/89): This third installment in the Indy franchise may not have made as much money as this year's Crystal Skull already has, but in terms of summer blockbuster qualifications, I think The Last Crusade fits the mold most.

7) Forrest Gump (7/6/94): Another rare example of a summer film that beat the odds and won awards six months later. Tom Hanks' iconic role made for a perfect summer film: a chronicle of postwar Americana, complete with war, love, and comedy.

6) Back to the Future (7/3/85): The awesome first installment in the Back to the Future franchise was a stunning sci-fi adventure like no other. Crispin Glover steals the show.

5) The Sixth Sense (8/6/99): This late summer sleeper hit gave birth to the "shocking ending" trend in contemporary cinema, as well as introducing the world to M. Night Shyamalan. I still remember the thrill of seeing this movie for the first time in the theater, having no idea what was coming.

4) Jaws (6/20/75): Jaws invented the summer blockbuster. It was the first film to use a simultaneous nationwide release (in hundreds of theaters) and saturation marketing. It also caused millions of beachgoers everywhere to think twice about getting in the water.

3) Jurassic Park (6/11/93): This film ushered in the CGI/Digital era of blockbuster filmmaking with a thundering roar. I still remember seeing this epic adventure film twice in the movie theater that summer, and being utterly terrified as a 5th grader.

2) Independence Day (7/2/96): This is the ultimate summer movie: a combination of star power (Will Smith), aliens, doomsday destruction, and patriotism. And the special effects were pretty great for the time.

1) Terminator 2: Judgment Day (7/3/91): The ultimate white-knuckle summer thriller. Every minute of this action-packed film is adrenaline-fueled. It also introduced never-before-seen digital effects that made that liquid metal villain all the more menacing. Here's hoping next summer's Terminator: Salvation will take its place high on this list as well.