Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 207

February 23-24, 2019: Crowd-sourced Non-Favorites

[For my annual Valentine’s follow-up, I wanted to keep the FilmStudying going and highlight some non-favorite filmmakers and films. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses and nominees of fellow Non-FavoriteStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]In response to Monday’s Scorcese post, Rob LeBlancwrites, “This is an interesting critique, and one that has a lot of merit to it, but I have managed to view that movie [Goodfellas] as the moralizing tale that he wanted it to be, when I've been in the right mood. It is very hard to view a protagonist who gives the voiceover as a willing cog in a wheel of corruption when he constantly argues that he has been harassed or mistreated, but I think the voiceover could be viewed as the most pathetic time yet in Henry's efforts at pulling himself into a glamorized, criminal American image that he talks about in the opening portion.”Nancy Caronia responds, “Yeah, I find Goodfellas a tale that suggests you can be a criminal, but your ending can be no good. All three main characters are either dead physically or spiritually. Henry Hill is like Stephen Burroughs—the tale he weaves is an attempt to make himself look like the victim, but he only comes across as the biggest ass. I think he understood your critique and that’s why he made Casino—a movie I find hard to watch because there is no glimmer of hope in any of the characters at all. No romance, no life, just crooks who will die alone in a hole somewhere. Teaching a film class focused on Italian Americans in film. My students were freaked out by The Godfather—too violent (ironic considering our state is about to legalize campus carry). We will see how they do with Goodfellas.”Andrew DaSilva adds, “What about Silence or Street Scenes which are so very different than his usual crime sort of movie?”Ian Murray writes, “My least favorite movie, that other people seem to like, is The Wolf of Wall Street. I was disgusted within the first ten minutes and that's all I needed to know about the Wolf.” He adds, “I'm glad I didn't go to the theater, it would have been the second film I walked out of. The other was Van Helsing, which I didn't have high hopes for to begin with. As it is, I have never made it all the way through Wolf and I don't plan on revisiting it.” And he also adds, “I don't care for Natural Born Killers , either.”Mark Lawton responds to Thursday’s Shiningpost, writing, “It’s also no secret that King famously HATED the film adaptation by Kubrick. I’ve seen the film several times and too feel like I am missing something. Ben, did you happen to check out King’s sequel, Doctor Sleep ? (Also coming soon to a theater near you). Of course, to understand that book, you would have to forget everything about Kubrick’s ending.”Other non-favorite nominees:Tim McCaffrey writes, “Time travel ruins everything,” adding “It is an incredibly common and, I think, lazy plot device. Even [SPOILER] in the new Lego Movie - like, why does the Lego Movie need time travel?”AnneMarie Donahue nominates “ Girl Defined … bleck.”Padmini Sukumaran writes, “I ABSOLUTELY, TOTALLY hate the 2006 film, Apocalypto ! The main character is a complete insult to the classification of a ‘hero.’ Rather, he is the textbook definition of a Narcissistic Sociopath!” And Diego Ubiera agrees with the nomination of Gibson's film.Marty Olliffshares, “ To Kill a Mockingbird . My problem isn't the book, the movie, or Harper Lee, but the fawning fan base who drip saccharine as they gush and swoon. Thus does TKAM (when you can refer to it by initials, things have gone too far) suck all the air out of the room for AL literature.”On Twitter, One Love nominates, “ The Catcher in the Rye . The whiny entitled man child.”R.J. Reibel writes, “The film version of A Wrinkle in Time was so so bad when compared to the book.”Jeff Renye goes with The Interview .Maria DiFrancesco nominates American Psycho .Kate Smith shares, “ La La Land . Tear my eyes out. Then again, I've never slept so well on a plane as I did when I decided to watch that movie, so maybe it's a love/hate thing.”

Jacquie Carter-Holbrooks writes, "Although I like Geoffrey Rush very much, I really disliked the film version of The Book Thief . I’m not sure anyone could have played the Papa / Hans character adequately."

Jonathan Silverman nominates Forrest Gump .  And to end on a more positive note, Olivia Lucierwrites, “Clark Gable III was found unresponsive in his room this past weekend. How about a tribute to the great Clark Gable and his films!” Hopefully soon, as this blog will always focus more on favorites than non-favorites, I promise!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to these nominees or other non-favorites you’d share?

February 22, 2019: Film Non-Favorites: Prequel Trilogies

[For my annual Valentine’s follow-up, I wanted to keep the FilmStudying going and highlight some non-favorite filmmakers and films. Share your own non-favorites, film or otherwise, for what is always the most fun crowd-sourced post of the year!]On two fundamental flaws with prequels revealed by the Star Wars and Hobbit prequel trilogies.I know this could be said by many people, especially those of a certain age and/or of a certain level of science fiction/fantasy fandom, but it feels on the surface like the Star Wars and Hobbit prequel films were more or less engineered to appeal to this AmericanStudier. I’ve loved the Star Wars films since I saw Empirein theaters at the age of four, and the films (past and present) have become a central multi-generational through-line for me, my parents, and my sons over the last few years (so much so that we really missed having a new Star Wars movie this past holiday season). The Hobbit was one of the first books my Dad and I read together when I was old enough to take part, the Lord of the Rings trilogy some of the first big books I read to myself and some of the first of that type I shared with my sons, and I count Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films among my very favorite movies ever made. If that’s not enough, I’ll add that I mean the Extended Editions of the LOTR films, which are the only editions I own and want to watch, and the only ones I’ve shared with my sons. Think that establishes my cred sufficiently!So it pains me to say it, but both the Star Wars and Hobbit prequel films are among my greatest disappointments (and I say this based on the experience of having watched both trilogies multiple times, as my sons when they were young were, let’s say, not as discerning). Moreover, I think each reveals with particular clarity a central problem of prequels more generally. While there are many (many) problems with the Star Wars prequels, I would say that one of the most glaring is a tendency to over-explain (or really feel the need to explain at all) elements from the original Star Wars trilogy. By far the worst example of this is the Force—I can’t imagine there are very many viewers of the original films who felt that they needed a great deal more explanation of what the Force is and where it comes from, as we get just enough explanation from Jedi characters like Obi-wan and Yoda without making this mystical concept too mundane. And then George Lucas came up with the brilliant idea of midichlorians—I’ll admit that every time Liam Neeson’s Qui-gon starts talking to young Anakin Skywalker about these tiny organisms that inhabit us all and can give us the Force if they start doing who the hell knows what, my eyes glaze over; and I submit to you that the Force is one of those pure storytelling elements that should never make our eyes glaze over. I might be able to forgive the prequels Jar Jar, but never that.The Hobbit films don’t suffer from quite that problem, but among their many flaws is another one common to prequels: the need to resemble the movie(s) to which they serve as a prequel too closely. Anyone who has read The Hobbit knows that it is a very different book from the Lord of the Rings novels, and those differences can be boiled down most succinctly to tone: The Hobbitis a light-hearted children’s adventure, full of mystery and darkness to be sure but filtered through that tonal lens; while it does get more complex and fraught in its final chapters, even there it maintains a tone quite distinct from what we find in most of LOTR. But because Peter Jackson had made LOTRfirst (and because he ended up directing the Hobbit films as well, although he had not intended to), it seems that he felt obligated to make the Hobbit films very similar in tone to LOTR. And so we get all kinds of giant battle sequences, Sauron and his minions as major villains, recurring characters like Legolas and Saruman shoe-horned in, and many other choices that (among other problems) make the Hobbit films so bloated that three of them were required to tell the story Jackson wanted to tell. I’m not saying it’s impossible for prequels to work—Daniel Craig’s James Bond films are in many ways prequels, and they’re among my favorite Bonds—but they have to navigate these and other problems if they’re gonna do so.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Responses to this post or other non-favorites you’d share?

February 21, 2019: Film Non-Favorites: The Shining

[For my annual Valentine’s follow-up, I wanted to keep the FilmStudying going and highlight some non-favorite filmmakers and films. Share your own non-favorites, film or otherwise, for what is always the most fun crowd-sourced post of the year!]On why I greatly prefer the ending to King’s novel than Kubrick’s film.I don’t like losing readers, even for the best of reasons; but if you either haven’t read Steven King’s The Shining (1977) or haven’t seen Stanley Kubrick’s film version (1980) of the novel, and are interested in checking them out sometime, you should probably skip this post, as I’m gonna SPOIL the heck out of the endings to both. Because while there are definitely stylistic and even thematic differences between the two versions throughout (and while I prefer the novel throughout for reasons related to those I’ll focus on in this post), it’s really the endings where they become not only distinct but starkly contrasting and opposed. I won’t spoil every single detail, but suffice it to say that King’s novel ends hopefully, with notes of redemption for its protagonist Jack Torrance and especially for his relationship to his son and family; whereas Kubrick’s film ends with Torrance murderously pursuing that same son with an axe and, thwarted, freezing to death, more evil in his final moments than he has been at any earlier moment in the film (during which he has already gotten plenty evil). There are various ways we could read this striking distinction, including connecting it to the profoundly different worldviews of the two artists (at least as represented in their collected works): King, despite his penchant for horror, is to my mind a big ol’ softie who almost always finds his way to a happy ending; Kubrick has a far more bleak and cynical perspective and tended to end his films on at best ambiguous and often explicitly disturbing notes. Those different worldviews could also be connected to two longstanding American traditions and genres, what we might call the sentimental vs. the pessimistic romance (in that Hawthornean sense I’ve discussed elsewhere in this space): in the former, such as in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the darkest supernatural qualities give way by the story’s end to more rational and far happier worlds and events; in the latter, such as in his contemporary Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (also 1851), the darkness is only amplified and deepened by concluding events, leaving us adrift (literally and figuratively) in an eternally scary world.King’s and Kubrick’s texts, and more exactly their respective conclusions, certainly fit into those traditions. But given that both create similarly horrifying worlds and events right up until those endings, I would also connect their distinct final images to the dueling yet interconnected ideas at the heart of my last book project: dark histories and hope. Where the two versions differ most overtly, that is, is in whether they offer their audiences any hope: in King’s novel, Torrance finds a way through his darkest histories and to final moments of hope for his family’s future (achieved at great personal sacrifice); in Kubrick’s film, hope has abandoned Torrance as fully as has sanity, and both his family and the audience can only hope that they can survive and escape his entirely dark world. Obviously you know which I personally prefer; but I would also argue that, whatever the appeal of horror for its own sake, without the possibility of hope and redemption it’d be a pretty bleak and terrible genre.Last non-favorite tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to this post or other non-favorites you’d share?

February 20, 2019: Film Non-Favorites: The Coen Brothers

[For my annual Valentine’s follow-up, I wanted to keep the FilmStudying going and highlight some non-favorite filmmakers and films. Share your own non-favorites, film or otherwise, for what is always the most fun crowd-sourced post of the year!]On three contrasts that illuminate the shortcomings of the unique and talented filmmaking duo.1)      Fargo(1996) and A Simple Plan (1998): The Coens had been making movies for more than a decade by 1996, but I would argue that the multi-Oscar winning Fargo nonetheless elevated them to a new level of cinematic attention and acclaim. Fargo is a smart and entertaining crime and mystery thriller with a dark sense of humor, but for my money it’s inferior to A Simple Plan, another film about crime and punishment amidst a wintry landscape. As I wrote in that last hyperlinked post, Plan is incredibly thematically rich, with threads about class and poverty, multi-generational family inheritances and legacies, the American Dream and its dark undersides, and more. But it also has something that I didn’t quite find in Fargo(or, if I’m honest, in most Coen films I’ve had the chance to see): a beating human heart and a deep sense of sympathy for its characters, even (maybe especially) when they’re at their worst. 2)      O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and Mudbound(2017): This is a closer and tougher one, as O Brother is a very engaging and likable film, with a marvelous turn by George Clooneyat its heart, and it even manages to adapt The Odyssey in the Depression-era American South quite successfully. But I would also argue that it has a central weakness, one shared by too many films about the white South: that it takes histories of race and racial violence (including a prominent role for the Ku Klux Klan) and turns them into plot developments for its mostly white protagonists. For that reason, I would always make the case for the rare films that tell those stories of race and the South with more breadth, depth, and nuance, and found 2017’s Netflix original film Mudbound to be much stronger in that regard. It’s not a perfect film, and as usual with the Coens Brother is far more sophisticatedly and entertainingly made; but I think the historical and cultural questions are dealt with much more successfully in Mudbound, making it an important complement to Brother at least.3)      No Country for Old Men (2007) and Hell or High Water (2016): This one is far easier for me, as I think No Country, despite wonderful performances by Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones, is a deeply limited and flawed film. Indeed, I think it succeeds mostly as a sort of high-brow slasher film, with Javier Bardem’s unkillable, single-minded killing machine with a strange but rigid personal code echoing the Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees of the world quite closely. Which is fine as far as it goes, but to my mind not nearly deserving of the praise I’ve seen heaped upon it. And to elucidate my point, I would point to Hell or High Water , a much less acclaimed film that does a much better job capturing its Texas settings and communities, its small-time criminal protagonists and their individual and family identities, and its themes of class and poverty, crime and punishment, and family legacies and changes. Plus it features Jeff Bridges as a Texas Ranger in a performance worthy of putting in conversation with Jones’s, if not even slightly more lived-in and compelling. Which I suppose is my point in this whole post: there’s room to see lots and lots of movies, so by all means let’s keep seeing Coens Brothers’ films; but there are other, and to my mind, better films to see and share as well, is all.Next non-favorite tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to this post or other non-favorites you’d share?

February 19, 2019: Film Non-Favorites: The Big Short and Vice

[For my annual Valentine’s follow-up, I wanted to keep the FilmStudying going and highlight some non-favorite filmmakers and films. Share your own non-favorites, film or otherwise, for what is always the most fun crowd-sourced post of the year!]On the value and the limits of satire when it comes to contemporary, contested events.One of the more interesting artistic transformations of the 21st century has been that of writer and director . McKay rose to prominence through his collaborations with comedian Will Ferrell (and others) on a series of extremely silly comedies: Anchorman (2004) and its sequel, Talladega Nights (2006), Step Brothers (2008), and The Other Guys (2010). If you haven’t had a chance to see any of those films, the most important thing to emphasize (and one you can gather from just about any clip from any of them) is that they are almost entirely, and very purposefully, non-thematic, overtly not interested in social or cultural issues and just trying to make audiences laugh as consistently and hard as possible. But in 2015, McKay wrote and directed The Big Short , a satirical dramedy based on Michael Lewis’s book of the same name about the 2008 housing crisis and financial meltdown. And this past Christmas saw the release of a second, very similar McKay film, Vice, a satirical dramedy based on the life and political career (to date) of Dick Cheney (starring Christian Bale as Cheney, Amy Adams as his wife Liz, Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush, Steve Carrell as Donald Rumsfeld, and many more actors).These satirical yet serious takes on hot-button contemporary issues parallel in many ways one of the 21st century’s most popular cultural genres: the satirical news commentary and comedy program. Originated by Comedy Central’s The Daily Show (especially once Jon Stewart took over the hosting gig), this genre has become one of the most prolific in recent years, from Stephen Colbert and John Oliver to Samantha Bee and Hasan Minhaj (among others!). Even late-night talk show hosts have gotten in on the act in diverse but equally compelling ways. What unites all these satirical news programs is their desire to walk a fine line between making audiences laugh (not constantly, but at least consistently) and providing thought-provoking commentary on current events, and I would say McKay’s recent films are aiming for that same sweet spot. I haven’t had a chance to see Vice yet, but I did see The Big Short and it was most definitely seeking to provide both laughs and knowledge, often in the exact same sequences (as with the famous and controversial use of random beautiful actressesto talk about the fine points of housing policy and economics). As that hyperlinked sequence featuring Margot Robbie notes, knowing these seemingly boring details is pretty vital to understanding the last decade in American life, and the goal of using comedy and satire to convey such details links McKay’s recent films to these news programs.Yet I have significantly more ambivalence about McKay’s films than I do about those programs, and I think it boils down to one factor: the use of talented, likable actors to create sympathy for figures who have contributed negatively and destructively to these recent histories. That was somewhat the case with The Big Short’s protagonists, mortgage brokers (played by highly likable actors such as Ryan Gosling and Christian Bale) who seemingly fought the system yet at the same time profited greatly by predicting and betting on the upcoming crash and crisis. And it’s very definitely the case with Vice—again, I haven’t had a chance to see it as of this writing, but part of the reason why is that I love watching Christian Bale in anything, and really don’t relish the thought of him playing Dick Cheney, to my mind one of the truly evil figures in the last century of American political and social life. Every historical figure is a flesh-and-blood human being, with various layers and sides, and so I suppose every one is also worth extended attention and even sympathy. But I don’t know that we need an entire film creating such a multi-layered portrait of Dick Motherfucking Cheney (that’s his full name, y’know), and I likewise am not at all sure that the lighter touch of comedy and satire are appropriate when it comes to depicting such a figure. I suppose there’s a place for such films, but they’re likely to remain non-favorites for this AmericanStudier (and for reviewers such as Slate’s Bilge Ebiri , it seems).Next non-favorite tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to this post or other non-favorites you’d share?

February 18, 2019: Film Non-Favorites: Scorcese

[For my annual Valentine’s follow-up, I wanted to keep the FilmStudying going and highlight some non-favorite filmmakers and films. Share your own non-favorites, film or otherwise, for what is always the most fun crowd-sourced post of the year!]
On why the acclaimed filmmaker doesn’t do it for me—and why that’s an American problem.
There was a good deal of controversy and debate over director Martin Scorcese’s 2012 film The Wolf of Wall Street . More specifically, there was significant debate over whether the film celebrates the Wall Street swindlers and criminals it depicts, especially Leonardo Di Caprio’s Jordan Belfort; whether it instead portrays those criminals as over-the-top buffoons; and, for that matter, whether Scorcese has any obligation to think about ethics or morality at all while making a feature film about such characters (a topic on which the daughter of one of Belfort’s real-life victims has weighed in). I never got around to seeing Wolf (for reasons that this post will likely make clear), so I can’t offer an opinion one way or another—but I can say that I have found these same questions to be present and a significant issue in nearly every Scorcese film I’ve seen, and certainly in his highly acclaimed Goodfellas (1990).
The protagonists of Goodfellas, such as the three leads played by Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Ray Liotta, are of course far more overtly and proudly criminal and reprehensible than Jordan Belfort. But as far as I can tell (and I haven’t seen all of the film in nearly two decades), Scorcese’s film glamorizes and celebrates them far more than it offers any critique or even analysis. True, Pesci’s hot-headed and violent gangster is frightening even to his friends, but that’s due simply to his own character traits and flaws, and if anything is contrasted with the smoother (and not much less violent) other criminals. Moreover, Scorcese’s choices as a filmmaker—his montages and musical backdrops, his camera moves and bravura sequences—all seem designed to amplify the coolness and compellingness of these violent criminals. And his famous final shot of Liotta in witness protection, overlaid by the voiceover in which the character calls himself “an average nobody … [I] get to live the rest of my life like a schnook,” likewise contrasts unfavorably with the glamorous gangster life.
I’d say much the same about the protagonists of many other Scorcese films—the Las Vegas gangsters in Casino , De Niro’s violent psychopath in Taxi Driver and his violent brute of a boxer in Raging Bull , even the Irish draft rioters in Gangs of New York . Scorcese may want to portray these characters with nuance and complexity, perhaps examine the social and historical worlds out of which they emerged—but I find more often than not that he ends up glamorizing their violence and their crimes, perhaps even more so because they allow them to transcend and (at least briefly) triumph over their settings. And in doing so, I’d say his works have tended to fall squarely into a tradition about which I’ve blogged a few times already: our longstanding and fraught national embrace of the outlaws and the gangsters, of the violent outsiders who seem to offer individual escapes from our social codes and limitations. Sometimes they’re targeting criminals (like De Niro in Taxi Driver), sometimes they’re the criminals (like in Goodfellas and Casino)—but the similarities seem to me more pronounced than the distinctions. As Jack Nicholson puts it in the (typically bravura) opening sequence of The Departed: “When I was your age, they would say we can become cops or criminals. Today, what I’m saying to you is this: when you’re facing a loaded gun, what’s the difference?”Next non-favorite tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to this post or other non-favorites you’d share?

February 16-17, 2019: Joe Moser’s Guest Post on Steve McQueen and 12 Years a Slave

[For this year’s Valentine’s series, I wanted to highlight and contextualize some of the movies I most love. Leading up to this special weekend Guest Post from one of our most impressive scholarly FilmStudiers!]
[I’ve written a few times in this space about my Fitchburg State English Studies colleague Joe Moser. Joe wrote two great paragraphs toward the end of his first book on director Steve McQueen’s first two films, and I asked his permission to quote those paragraphs here. And then he’s followed them with two new paragraphs giving part of his take on McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave!]
[Quoting Joe’s book:] “Productively complicating this artistic landscape further is another phenomenal Irish film from 2008, Hunger. This is the work of Steve McQueen (b. 1969), also a Londoner, who is the son of West Indian immigrants. A renowned photographer and fine artist, McQueen transitioned to cinema to craft his visceral interpretation of the IRA hunger strikes at the Maze Prison in 1981. An astounding, revelatory debut, Hunger is by equal turns horrifying and breathtaking, as well as restrained and careful in its attention to the humanity of pro-British guards and IRA prisoners alike.
McQueen followed up Hunger with a second collaboration with the versatile and enigmatic Michael Fassbender, the Irish-German actor who portrayed hunger striker Bobby Sands with harrowing depth and conviction. Their 2011 film Shame is another meditation on human degradation—one that reveals, through its portrait of sex addiction, the angst and excesses of modern Western masculinity with unflinching, clinical precision and insight. Fassbender’s Irish-American protagonist, Brandon, spends much of the film plundering New York City for increasingly lurid erotic stimulation, leading him to the brink of psychological breakdown and alienating him from his only close human connection, his fragile sister, whom Brandon abandons in her time of direst need. McQueen’s film leaves viewers in a Beckettian state of penultimacy, wondering if someone as damaged and self-destructive as Brandon, so far gone down the road of addiction, can ever lead a remotely normal, healthy life again. The movie is a devastating critique of the half-truths, self-deceptions and outright lies upon which patriarchal masculinity relies to maintain its ascendancy.”
[Joe’s new paragraphs:] “McQueen’s third feature film, 12 Years a Slave(2013), is at once his most accessible and challenging film. Whereas Hunger’s portrayal of Bobby Sands is ripe for misinterpretation in some key respects, 12 Years offers few comforting illusions of masculine moral agency for viewers. The earlier film has been attacked by some critics and admired by others as a valedictory portrayal of an ambiguous historical figure (Bobby Sands); those who ignore McQueen’s sympathetic portrayal of the IRA prisoners’ adversary, the conflicted Long Kesh guard played by Stuart Graham, will fundamentally misunderstand the film. On the other hand, from its opening scene, 12 Years a Slave confronts viewers with the essential psychological horror of slavery: the systematic destruction of any individual will to resist and the coopting of humane men and women into acts of brutality and subjugation. McQueen amplifies the terror of Solomon Northup’s ordeal by rendering familiar scenes and tropes of American literature and film atrociously unfamiliar and pregnant with dread, including pivotal riverboat voyages, noble defenses of vulnerable women, benevolent authority figures confronting abusive underlings, and ingenious escape plans and attempts. Viewers able to endure the succession of visceral shocks wrought by the film’s first hour, however, will likely settle into a slightly more conventional latter half, as Solomon and his female counterpart, Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), contend with their mercurial, tormented, vicious master, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender, once again). This is no fault of the film, and the imbalanced battle of wills between Epps and his chattel Solomon and Patsey builds to a shattering but admirably restrained climax.
If McQueen has erred in his handling of this breakthrough film, it is only in his marketing efforts. While promoting 12 Years a Slave to the brilliant satirist and tongue-in-cheek Southern apologist Stephen Colbert on cable television, McQueen touts his film as “a true story about an American hero.” With all due respect—tremendous respect—I emphatically disagree. The director’s greatest artistic coup with this work is the manner in which he assiduously pares away any notion of heroism and shows an oppressive system for precisely what it is: an authoritarian affront to human dignity and a concerted effort to turn its victims into degraded mirror images of its perpetrators. Fittingly, then, the film’s most intense moment of liberation parallels a demoralizing concession and betrayal from the opening act. In this sense, one of the most notable outlying critical opinions of 12 Years, that of Slant Magazine’s Ed Gonzalez, gets the film exactly right (in his two-star review): “Solomon almost appears deaf to the world. This is because the film practically treats him as passive observer to a litany of horrors that exist primarily for our own learning.” I completely agree that Solomon is frequently characterized by passivity, but regrettably, Gonzalez fails to appreciate McQueen’s scrupulous intelligence and artistic (as well as educational) purpose in holding his protagonist, and vicariously, his viewers, in that agonizing condition for the duration. Even the lone white abolitionist depicted in the movie—a carpenter (Brad Pitt) working briefly on Epps’ plantation—finally answers Solomon’s plea for help with a muted promise of action punctuated by the caveat: “I am afraid.” By the film’s close, we are all afraid—of freedom as well as bondage. Indeed, Solomon’s tragedy, and that of millions of others coopted into oppressive systems, is that survival and the hope of freedom ultimately depend on passivity and deafness to the suffering of others, on repressing the capacity for moral agency, much less heroism. It is McQueen’s monumental achievement that he has crafted a Hollywood film that cuts straight to the heart of this painful, damning truth.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Beloved movies you’d highlight?

February 15, 2019: Movies I Love: The Opposite of Sex and You Can Count on Me

[For this year’s Valentine’s series, I wanted to highlight and contextualize some of the movies I most love. Leading up to a weekend Guest Post from one of our most impressive scholarly FilmStudiers!]On two wonderful recent films that challenge and enrich our images of family.  
The combination of being a professional analyzer of literature for nearly two decades now and being a consistent reader of children’s books for a significant part of my last dozen years means that I spend a good bit of time—some might say way too much time, but I yam what I yam—analyzing those books. That’s especially true of the ones that I’ve read enough by this point to be able to recite them largely by heart, freeing my mind for even deeper such analyses. And near the top of that list, both because I have read it a ton and because it’s just full of mysteries awaiting—nay, demanding—my analytical attention, is Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat. The most striking mysteries are the most central ones: why is the Cat so thoroughly destructive a presence in the home of Sally and the unnamed narrator, and what are kids to take away from this tale of an uninvited house guest who bends rakes, tears gowns, traumatizes fish, and the like? But underlying those mysteries is an even more foundational, and (given the book’s 1957 publication date) even more striking, one: why has Mother left her two young children alone for the day, and where’s Father?
I might be reading too much into it (shockingly), but it seems to me that Mother is a single parent, and that because of that status she sometimes has to leave her kids at home alone (leaving them open in the process to the advances of strange men, or male cats at least, and their wild and destructive Things, but again I’m really not sure what to make of that). If so, that would make Cat a pretty significantly alternative vision of family in the era of Leave It to Beaver and, more relevantly, of the Little Bear books , which feature Mother Bear who stays at home and sews and cooks and Father Bear who goes off on long fishing trips in his hat and tie. Over the next few decades, of course, our pop culture images of family would become significantly more diverse and varied, and single parents thus less striking of a prospect (although in many representations, as in the 1980s TV shows Who’s the Boss? and Full House, those single parent families are due to deaths, not divorce or children born out of wedlock). But I would argue that our most dominant narratives of family identity still rely heavily on very traditional nuclear models; and relatedly, one role for many out-of-the-mainstream texts (such as independent films) has been to push back on those models and construct their own alternative visions of family.
Two of the most smart and successful indie films of the last twenty years, Don Roos’ The Opposite of Sex (1998) and Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count On Me (2000), are centered on precisely such alternative family units. Lonergan’s is slightly more conventional, with pitch-perfect Laura Linney’s never-married single mother trying to balance raising her son, working full-time (and beginning an affair with Matthew Broderick’s married co-worker), and mothering her wayward brother (played to equal perfection by Mark Ruffalo); but the reason for their close sibling relationship, the death of both of their parents when they were very young, makes them a fundamentally distinct kind of family. On the other hand, Roos’s vision of family is purposefully non-traditional and extreme—the film’s central family unit features a teenage runaway (Christina Ricci), her gay step-brother (Martin Donovan), his young boyfriend who then becomes Ricci’s boyfriend (Ivan Sergei), and the sister (Lisa Kudrow) of Donovan’s former boyfriend who had died of AIDS—but by the end of the film makes clear how much these characters, and the few others who have come into their circle, have become most definitely a family in the fullest senses, including the presence of two newborn babies in the mix. Similarly, both movies take very cynical and sarcastic tones toward themes like love and loyalty for much of their running time, yet by their conclusions they have become (in entirely believable and not at all clichéd ways) testaments to how much their characters and relationships emblematize those themes (if at times in spite of themselves). Such non-traditional families are, of course, no more necessarily representative as images of the American family than were Beaver’s and Little Bear’s; it is, instead, very much the spectrum of possibilities for what family is and means that represents the variety and diversity of American experiences and models. And thanks to some of our most talented artistic voices, from Dr. Seuss up to filmmakers like Roos and Lonergan, our popular culture includes, and thus helps make more present and (ultimately) more fully accepted, many more of those possibilities. Guest Post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Beloved movies you’d highlight?

February 14, 2019: Movies I Love: Memento

[For this year’s Valentine’s series, I wanted to highlight and contextualize some of the movies I most love. Leading up to a weekend Guest Post from one of our most impressive scholarly FilmStudiers!][FYI: this post will focus on some key elements to the final sequence in Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000). Which if you haven’t seen, go watch and then come on back. I’ll be here.]On the dark, cynical, and unquestionably human final words of a contemporary American classic.I might be stretching things a bit by calling Memento (2000) an American classic—after all, it was directed by ; adapted from a short story, “Memento Mori,” by his equally English brother Jonathan; and stars Aussie Guy Pearce and Canadian Carrie-Anne Moss in two of the three principal roles. But I’m sticking to my guns, and not just because the film is set in the western United States (specifically Nevada, I believe, based on the glimpses we get of license plates; key earlier events and flashbacks take place in California). To me, some of the film’s central themes, while unquestionably universal in significance, echo particularly American narratives: the idea, or perhaps the myth, of the self-made man, creating himself anew out of will and ambition, writing his own future on a blank page (or, in this case, his own body); the Western film trope of a lone warrior, a quiet and threatening man with seemingly no identity or past, traveling on a quest for justice and/or revenge, and entering and changing a corrupt town in the process. In those and other core ways, Memento is deeply and importantly American.Given that Americanness, and given that it’s a mystery—if a highly unconventional and postmodern one to be sure—it’s likely no surprise that I love the film. But compared to many of the loves I’ve shared this week, and compared to my general AmericanStudying attitude for that matter, Memento is also strikingly dark and cynical; it takes that tone throughout, but most especially in its final revelations and in the interior monologue with which it concludes (that scene is more spoilerific than I’m going to be here, so don’t watch if you haven’t seen the film!). That monologue’s middle section feels logical and rational enough, particularly the lines “I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world’s still here.” But it begins with the speaker, protagonist Leonard Shelby, making one of the most blatantly and purposefully self-deceptive and disturbing choices ever put on film, while thinking, ““Do I lie to myself to be happy? … Yes I will.” And so when Leonard (and the film) ends by arguing, “We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I’m no different,” it seems, in the specific context of what he has done and is doing, who and what he has been revealed to be, to be a profoundly pessimistic perspective on human nature and identity.Maybe it is that pessimistic—it’s okay if so, not everything can end on notes of hard-won hope, much as I enjoy the concept. The world’s more complex and multi-faceted than that. But if we take a step back from some of the specifics of what Leonard is doing at this moment, it’s also possible to read his actions here, and throughout the film, as purely and simply and definingly human. He’s trying to make meaning out of the world around him, out of the details of his own life (and most especially the hardest and toughest of them), out of what has happened and what is happening and what he hopes to make happen in the time to come. What Leonard does overtly—in those tattoos on his skin, in his photographs and note cards and wall hangings, in his constant interior monologue—is what we all do more subtly but just as constantly: read and respond to the world around us, and make it part of our developing narratives and stories and identities. Granted, I hope that we can do it in less destructive ways than Leonard; he does have that unique condition to contend with, after all (spoilers there too!). But we all do it, and one of the things I love most about Memento is its ability to hold that mirror up to us and how we move through the world.Last movie tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Beloved movies you’d highlight?

February 13, 2019: Movies I Love: Chinatown

[For this year’s Valentine’s series, I wanted to highlight and contextualize some of the movies I most love. Leading up to a weekend Guest Post from one of our most impressive scholarly FilmStudiers!]On a classic film noir mystery that’s also a pitch-perfect historical fiction.
I don’t think I need to use too much space here arguing for the greatness of Chinatown (1974). By any measure, from contemporary awards (ie, nominated for 11 Oscars and 10 BAFTAs and 7 Golden Globes) to historical appreciations (named to the National Film Registry by the Film Preservation Board in 1991) to ridiculously obvious criteria (a 2010 poll of British film critics named it “the best film of all time”!), Roman Polanski’s film noir (although it feels at least as right to write “Robert Towne’s film noir,” since the screenplay is to my mind the greatest one ever filmedand of course Polanski is now a rightly disgraced figure) about a world-weary private detective and pretty much everything else in 1937 Los Angeles is one of the most acclaimed and honored American films. It stars Jack Nicholson at the absolute height of his career and powers; features a pitch-perfect supporting cast including legendary director John Huston as one of the great villains of all time; centers on a multi-generational Southern California familial and historical mystery that would make Ross MacDonald proud; is equal parts suspenseful, funny, sexy, dark, and emotionally affecting; and has the single greatest final line ever (not gonna spoil it or any main aspect of the plot here). If you haven’t seen it yet, I can’t recommend strongly enough that you do so.
On top of all of that, I think Chinatown is one of the very few hugely successful and popular American films that is deeply invested in complex and significant American Studies kinds of questions (interestingly, it lost the Best Picture Oscar to another such film: The Godfather Part II ). By the 1970s it was likely very difficult to remember—and is of course even more unfamiliar in our own Hollywood-dominated cultural moment—just how unlikely of a site Los Angeles had once been for one of the nation’s largest and most important cities; despite its close proximity to the Pacific Ocean, LA is more or less built in a desert, and by the turn of the 20th century, when the city’s population had just moved past the 100,000 mark, it seemed impossible for the city to provide enough water to support that community. It took the efforts of one particularly visionary city planner, William Mulholland, to solve that problem; Mulholland and his team designed and constructed the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a mammoth project that, once completed in 1913, assured that the city could continue to support its ever-growing (especially with the rise of Hollywood in the 1920s) population.
But if that’s the basic historical narrative of LA’s turning point, an American Studies perspective would want to push a lot further on a number of different factors and components within that: where the water was coming from, and what happened in those more rural and agricultural communities are a result of the aqueduct’s creation; how much of the money involved was public, how much was private and from whom, and if the project benefited the whole of the city equally or if its effects were similarly linked to class and status; what role LA’s significant diversity—even in those early years it already included sizeable Mexican, African, and Asian American populations, for example—played in this process; whether the city’s built environment, its architecture and neighborhoods and streets and etc., shifted with the new availability of water, or whether there were other factors that more strongly influenced its planning; and so on. And perhaps the most impressive thing about Chinatown is that it manages at least to gesture at almost all of those questions and issues, without becoming for even a moment the kind of (forgive me) dry historical drama that they might suggest.Next movie tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Beloved movies you’d highlight?