FrostyChud Reviews

You Were Never Really Here (2017)

Not what it appears

[7/10 · 29 November 2017]

If you thought this was a film about a disturbed loner avenging an innocent, you got snookered.

The only way to understand YWNRH is through a Freudian lens.

The theme of this film is not father-daughter incest as it appears, but rather mother-son incest.

Joe has an incestuous relationship with his mother. "Stay with me a little longer," she says when he puts her to bed. In the next scene, she is trying to cajole him into coming into the bathroom where she is naked. The multiple references to PSYCHO are not a coincidence: this too is the story of a man transformed into a serial murderer by his obscene mother.

The story proper is nothing is a paranoid delusion: hence the title of the film and the mysterious "invisibility" of the main character.

The true story: Joe, as a child, is dragged into an incestuous relationship by his mother. His father, whose job ought to be to prevent this regressive fusion, does not have the authority to separate them. He is too violent, too weak, or too absent: we never find out. All we ever see of him is a hand holding a hammer. This scene must be understood as a metaphor. Father discovers their relationship and explodes; as he rages impotently with his hammer, mother and son exchange a complicit glance under the bed. Translation of the mother's wink: "He's impotent. You're still MINE." On mother's credenza is a photo of her as a young and beautiful woman and a photo of her son. Father has been eliminated from the picture.

Joe rescues abused girls. This is a fantasy. No abused girl ever existed, only an abused boy. Joe invents the story of a girl abused by her father as a displacement of the true abuse: a boy by his mother.

What actually happens in the movie, and what is fantasy? What actually happens is very simple. Joe murders his mother. Joe commits suicide. Perhaps the homosexual encounter in the sauna and the drugs are true. Everything else is a delusion that he creates to escape from the horror of the truth. In Joe's fantasy, he is a powerful man and not a victim. He has a benevolent father figure (McCleary). He makes ample use of the hammer which appears to be the only trace of a paternal legacy. The Nina character is how Joe sees his mother: as a beautiful, innocent, prohibited object of desire. Joe's delusion is simultaneously an attempt to understand the truth and an attempt to flee the truth. David Lynch uses this technique more explicitly in LOST HIGHWAY, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, and TWIN PEAKS. It is very effective on film and Lynne Ramsay is right to exploit it. In Joe's delusion, the father (represented by the two- dimensional Votto and Williams characters) takes "illegal" possession of his daughter. In reality, this is how the young Joe perceives his father's possession of his mother: as an unbearable crime that must be punished. Did Joe murder his own father? It is possible. Note that in all of Joe's traumatic flashbacks, women are being murdered, not men. These flashbacks are not real. They are irruptions of Joe's deepest fantasy: murder his mother. He never went to Iraq.

One day, like Ed Kemper, Joe finally kills his mother. He is the one who shot her in the head. To exculpate himself, he flees into an unbelievable political conspiracy fantasy in which all symbolic fathers are pedophile criminals. Why is Joe so protective of his mother's privacy? Because he doesn't want anyone to find out what is going on between them.

I wasn't sure the director understood her own story until the moment she replaced Joe's sinking mother with Nina. Here she could not be clearer: Nina is just a fantasy screen for Mother.

In reality, Joe really does shoot himself in the diner. The fantasy of a happy future with Nina is just a screen.

I have read Jonathan Ames before and the theme of maternal incest is often implied (his fascination for transsexuals is further proof of an Oedipal thematic).

Good movie.

What Happened to Monday (2017)

Feminist propaganda

[1/10 · 4 September 2017]

The whole movie turns on the unbearable existence of men and, by extension, exogamy. For all of human history, exogamy has been the law: a mate must be found outside of the family unit. The problem with this family unit is that there are no possible mates: we have seven women and no men. This film is not about overpopulation. It is about the escape from the incestuous family unit into a society in which one can come to be as a sexualized adult. Quite unintentionally the screenwriter and director have given us an honest portrayal of a perfect feminist society: seven unhappy women bickering and insulting each other in a claustrophobic yet tastefully decorated apartment.

Although there are seven sisters in this film, only two are real characters: Monday and Thursday. The others exist on a continuum between the two. Monday is heterosexual, sexually active and enjoys the outside world. Call her a conformist if you like. Thursday is homosexual and a fierce protector of the sisterhood. She is the guard dog of the group. At the beginning of the film, her job is to prevent any of the other sisters from leaving the clan. By the end of the movie, her job has become messianic: she is the New Woman whose emergence hastens the destruction of a corrupt society.

The tall, blonde, blue-eyed uber-Nazi henchman, whom we know to be evil solely based on his Aryan physiognomy, at one point spreads his arms like Jesus on the cross, just in case we didn't already understand who the enemy is: white Christians. This henchman is not to be confused with the other tall, blonde, blue-eyed uber-Nazi sexual harasser from the beginning of the movie. The male sidekick and lover is of Middle Eastern origin: not a coincidence. The heavy-handed message: white men are irredeemable prima facie enemies. Immigrant men will be tolerated as sperm donors and loyal assistants. Note that instead of making love to Saturday, Adrian dutifully performs oral sex on her, proving he is a good feminist. Here something curious happens. His gallant ministrations bore her, and she asks him to take her. The sisterhood is betrayed. Her punishment for daring to enjoy straight sex with a man is immediate: a bullet to the head. Note too that Saturday is a mocking caricature of traditional feminine virtues: her blonde hair, virginity, and outmoded belief in the sanctity of sex are here shown as evidence of her stupidity and weakness.

Paradox: if this is a feminist fantasy, why is the dead father figure presented as kindly, resourceful, and loving? Why is it Mother who is trying to murder them? Father is the only white man in the movie who is not a Nazi. Mother, on the other hand, is clearly supposed to be evil incarnate. What's going on here? The writer of the movie, too clever by half, has allowed the founding inconsistency of feminism to appear on the screen.

Remember, all this is a metaphor. The whole overpopulation thing is a red herring. This is a movie about childhood Oedipal conflicts. Seven fairy- tale sisters trapped in a single house have come to view the outside world with hatred and suspicion. What Monday discovers is that the outside world is not bad at all. Sex with men is great. Work can be liberating. And Mother is quite right about overpopulation. Monday's liberation is intolerable for the other sisters because it endangers their incestuous community. The six betrayed sisters stand in for the grand metaphorical sisterhood that every non-brainwashed woman in the world knows to be treacherous.

The caricatural villainy of the Glenn Close character is a clue to what's really going on. No real human being acts this way. It's a tell that we are dealing with a fantasy. When Monday escapes the psychotic aerie, she realizes that Mother is not a murderous deity but a loving protector. The six other sisters (federated around Thursday) cannot see this because they have refused the principle of reality (which is also the principle of exogamy). In their perverted, paranoid vision, Father and Mother are bloodthirsty Nazis. They must be ruthlessly exterminated and replaced with a New Man, a New Woman, and a New Race. Thursday's flight into eschatological delusion is a synechdoche for the regression of Europe in general and Sweden in particular.

Willem Dafoe incarnates here a figure identified by Freud, namely the Father of the Primal Horde. He has sequestered his seven daughters: a symbol for incestuous possession. Contrary to appearances, Thursday the butch lesbian is Father's servant. Her job is to protect the integrity of the harem. Note that no mention is made of Father's passing: it is as if he were still in the apartment. Here is the embarrassing, politically incorrect illusion at the heart of feminism: worship of a fantasy Father. In reality, Willem Dafoe is not a brutal, incestuous, finger-chopping Primal Father. This is Thursday's unconscious fantasy. In reality he is a lonely man crying in his room because the weight of reality on his shoulders is too heavy for him to bear. Only Monday understands this. The other daughters wilfully misread his finger-cutting as sadism. They prefer the fantasy of a terrible, murderous dictator to the reality that they are free and have no one to blame for their suffering but themselves. It isn't Father who wants to possess them; it is they who want to be possessed by Father, and they will kill anyone who attempts to disturb this incestuous fantasy. And who is a girl's greatest rival for Father's affection? Mother, of course. Monday has, alone of the six, renounced her delusion of a primal Father and chosen a mate from another family. Because of this, she no longer sees Mother as a rival and can make a deal with her.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Sadistic and regressive

[3/10 · 25 January 2017]

Star Wars fans are by definition sexually immature. I sat next to one in the cinema. He teared up when Jyn's father died. I judged him. My first criticism of Rogue One is that there is no sex in it. Adults like sex. Children fear sex. Instead of sex we get violence. I like violence in film when it serves a purpose: hypostasizing Radical Evil. Here its principal purpose is to excite boys and man-boys who cannot stomach sex because they are stuck in an archaic stage of psychic development in which lasers, swords, and phallic corvettes stand in for the terrifying organ of generation and its even more terrifying counterpart. Despite its superficial feminism (more on that further on), the form of the film is deeply anti-woman. Events succeed each other in an airtight masculine logic of cause and effect in which first principles inexorably lead to a predictable conclusion. All the writers have done is swap a biological male out for a biological female. This go-girl Hillary pseudo-feminism abolishes true femininity, which is the domain of ambiguity, desire, and intelligence. Women introduce cuts and gaps into stories. They get bored with the war play. This decentering power is their Jedi skill. Women don't like swords and guns. The phallic woman that is trotted out here (and everywhere else these days) is a little boy's fantasy. Women, don't fall for it.

More generally, ROGUE ONE is anti-adult. The fact that everyone dies in the end makes it look adult, but it remains a child's fantasy of adulthood. Why? Because by dying, the main characters preserve the ontological closure of the Star Wars universe. Their sacrifice means something. An adult is someone who realizes that deep down, nothing means anything. Parents hide this from their children.

I get the feeling watching this that if these characters could simply learn to have sex with each other, the whole overblown cycle of revolution, war, saber slashing, blaster fire, and death might end. Han Solo was a man and Princess Lea was a woman. Here there are only preteens.

The chump who wrote this movie directed American PIE in 2002. It makes sense. That film too concerns the impasses of juvenile sexuality.

The battle scene at the end is particularly repulsive from an ideological standpoint. The director chose to give the grunt soldiers (all very masculine-looking men, here symbolically demoted to cannon fodder) uniforms and helmets reminiscent of World War Two and the D-Day assault on Normandy. As if Mr. American Pie knows anything about battle or sacrifice. Once again we are dealing with a child's idealized fantasy of reality. Will we ever stop cynically using the iconography of World War Two as an excuse not to do the work of understanding each conflict in its singularity?

I was disturbed by the way the storm troopers were slaughtered here. We are encouraged to cheer on the main characters as they murder dozens of faceless humans (probably teenagers drafted into service) with all sorts of aesthetic flourishes. Killing is fun!

But sex? It has no place in Star Wars.

The Girl on the Train (2016)

Feminist Propaganda

[6/10 · 4 November 2016]

TGOTT is two films in one. The first is a ruthless, unflinching portrait of the female unconscious. For the first half of the movie, the most politically incorrect (and universal) feminine fantasies are presented to us: being married, being beaten, being bad, possessing a baby...but above all, being unsatisfied. After the first half hour, I was ready to give Paula Hawkins a medal for breaking the feminist omerta and showing us how dark it can get in there.

By the time a drunk Emily Blunt smashed a mirror with a golf club, I began to wonder when the other shoe was going to drop. We are simply not allowed today to think that women are capable of evil. The unofficial censors would never let such a truthful portrayal of feminine indigence, jealousy, and rage to appear on the screen without brushing it under the rug through some clever legerdemain.

I was right. A handy-dandy scapegoat is soon trotted out to take the fall.

Of the three main female characters, two experience themselves as lacking, whereas the third, Anna, experiences herself as full. Why? Because she has a baby. The other two want that baby. They want it bad. Freud is clear here: in the female unconscious, the baby is the ultimate phallus substitute. No one cares about life, or the world, or politics, or the economy, or music, or philosophy, or anything else...all they care about is that damn baby.

The three male characters are all figments of the female imagination. One is the nice guy (the therapist), one is the fiery fantasy lover from romance novels (Scott), and one is the "real man" (Tom), which is to say, a frigid woman's fantasy of what a man is: a heartless player whose only pleasure in life lies in humiliating women.

TGOTT is a regressive, chilling female fantasy. Rather than facing their own inner emptiness, the three women in this film prefer to project it onto a man who has the nerve to possess a phallus. The terrible thing is that penis envy does not have to be the horizon of feminine sexuality. Read Maria Torok. Where I live, in Paris, it is still occasionally possible to meet courageous women who do not accept the life-negating ethics of revenge and reparation trumpeted by today's triumphant feminism and personified by Hillary Clinton.

None of the women in this movie actually like sex. All they care about are babies. How depressing. No wonder Tom is so frustrated. He cannot find a woman who is not frigid. Welcome to 21st century America, Tom. Something awful happens to a woman when she begins to need a baby. She dies to the world of desire. Life contracts to a single, sterile point. Unfortunately, in our puritanical society, the dark side of maternity is something that we are not prepared to see. Paula Hawkins glimpses it, but she doesn't have the balls to take it to its logical conclusion.

TGOTT is a dangerous film for women. Rachel was in a position to learn something about herself at the beginning of the movie. The path to the truth always lies through a traversal of one's constitutive abjection. I liked the alcoholic Rachel. Drinking too much and not working are reasonable, authentic responses to the awful world we live in today. But Rachel is too attached to conformity and narcissism to pursue her psychoanalysis to its term. The film must be read as a series of dreams produced by a patient undergoing analysis. The only "true" scenes in the movie are the scenes with Rachel and the therapist. Everything else is a distortion. The three characters are three aspects of her unconscious. When she begins to come too close to the ugly and dangerous fantasies that haunt her and make her ill (she is mutilated, empty, barren, castrated, humiliated, abject, a stain), she cooks up a pathetic fairy tale about an evil ex-husband whose dark penis is responsible for the suffering of not one but three separate plucky women. The deus ex machina Tom absolves her of taking any responsibility for her own alcoholic suffering. A competent psychoanalyst would know how to liquidate this convenient screen-fantasy and shepherd Rachel to a more authentic relationship with her own unconscious. But Kamal is not a competent analyst. He privileges her neurotic desire for revenge (killing the husband by penetrating him with her imaginary phallus, now transformed into a corkscrew) over a traversal of her penis envy, which alone might lead her to the discovery that the essence of femininity is not lack and emptiness so great it can only be filled with a baby, but rather a plenitude that is not endangered by the existence of masculine desire.

But that isn't what happens. We live in a world in which we are constantly thrown back on our most regressive fantasies. After all, a society of emotionally mutilated men and women for whom sex and love are mercantile transactions grounded in lack and resentment is a society of perfect consumers. By the end of the movie, Rachel is cleaned up and ready to go back to her soulless corporate job in Public Relations, which is to say, as a propagandist for a corrupt capitalist order. In other words, she becomes Paula Hawkins.

Nocturama (2016)

Limp

[4/10 · 9 September 2016]

NOCTURAMA starts with a thrilling lesson in pure cinema. For fifteen minutes we follow ten different characters as they silently navigate Paris. We know nothing about them. There is no dialogue. Yet it is gripping.

Bonnello takes his first wrong turn when the bombs go off. The explosions aren't nearly big enough.

The film devolves into mush as soon as the characters end up in the department store. All of the tension that Bonnello built up in the first part of the movie evaporates and the story becomes a heavy-handed critique of capitalism. I hate directors who try to push a political agenda. Bonnello did the same thing in his whorehouse movie. I don't think I'll be seeing another of his movies.

From an ideological point of view, NOCTURAMA swims in bad faith. Today's terrorism does not resemble this. It is much less glamorous and much less innocent. It is not perpetrated by people like Bonnello's good- looking United Colors of Benetton cast. It is perpetrated by schizophrenics and religious freaks. By distorting reality in this way, he robs his story of the power that only fidelity to life could confer on it.

At least we get to see each of these repulsive young fools shot in the end. I think Bonnello wants us to identify with them. "Whoa...this is like...a metaphor for our society...they give us all these luxury consumer goods...but we lose our souls, man...and when we attempt to rebel...we finally understand that we're powerless against the faceless pigs with truncheons and laser scopes!" He ends the film with a pathetic appeal to sentimentality, by having a young black boy (probably supposed to represent Syrian immigrants) beg the SWAT team to help him. All I can say is that I cheered inside when they put a bullet in his heart. Bonnello, you chose propaganda over reality and for that you are an enemy of art.

The Neon Demon (2016)

Hypocrite

[3/10 · 14 June 2016]

My ex-model ex-girlfriend, who is as heartless and superficial as the evil models in this movie, would find THE NEON DEMON to be a perspicacious criticism of the fashion world. This alone should discredit the movie.

That's the thing about these people. They love to emit pseudo-criticisms of themselves and their corrupt world...pseudo because although the content is critical, the form is not. This is even a handy heuristic for outing hypocrites of all stripes: does he or she adopt a cynical critical distance towards his or her persona while continuing to engage in bad behavior? If so...run away.

This director is such a pompous sell-out that he has actually transformed his initials into a brand that appears during the credits. Buddy...in this life, you can't have it both ways.

Every shot in this movie is an homage to surfaces. The script is vacuous. There is nothing resembling subjectivity here. The very form of beautiful, static images is oppressive. By cloaking itself in a self- righteous message, THE NEON DEMON can attain its true objective all the more efficiently: making the spectator feel as envious, as worthless, and as empty inside as the "bad" models, who are the true heroines of this movie. Try to imagine how they were cast.

I should also mention that THE NEON DEMON is a rip-off of a much better movie: David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE.

I will never see another film by this evil man.

Arabian Nights: Volume 2 - The Desolate One (2015)

One of the worst films I've ever seen.

[1/10 · 5 August 2015]

There is probably no point writing this review. The film left theaters here in Paris yesterday and will probably never be screened anywhere ever again.

However, this film is so bad that I have to write something. I can feel it in my body like a bad meal that I've eaten and need to throw up.

I should have walked out of the theater when I realized that it was a political movie. Before the story starts, the director tells us that the stories were inspired by the austerity measures implemented in Portugal in 2014. Political films are never good. Political "art" films are universally terrible.

The first chapter in the movie is the best. We follow an old criminal around. The camera work itself generates a sense of mystery. Not much...but just enough to keep the spectator from walking out. We don't need dialogue. A story looks like it is beginning to take shape, but it never does.

The film begins to go off the rails with the next section. The director treats us to a heavy-handed, juvenile illustration of the impossibility of assigning blame in a corrupt society. I found myself averting my eyes from the screen the way you avert your eyes from someone who is humiliating themselves in order not to embarrass them further. I breathed a sigh of relief when it was over.

The last section, however, is the worst. It is so depressing. It is depressing because it is boring. There is no life here. The director is trying to show us the nefarious effects of austerity on the Portuguese people...he succeeds only in making us feel joyless.

I don't want to dedicate any more time to this terrible film. Above all it is boring, dreadfully boring. People were walking out at a rate of one person every twenty minutes. There were only about twelve people to begin with. Indeed, I walked out fifteen minutes before the end of the film...my way of giving the bird to this awful movie.

DON'T WATCH IT!

Before I Go to Sleep (2014)

Life without Logos

[4/10 · 5 October 2014]

As a thriller, BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP works well enough. We know that some sort of twist is coming, and it comes. It is probably predictable to someone who enjoys figuring these things out in advance. I don't. I like to go in to the movies like an innocent little child.

What I want to talk about is Nicole Kidman. She looks dead inside. Did she ask her plastic surgeon to make her look like one of the Olsen Twins? From some angles the illusion functions but from others her Botoxed and lifted face looks like a creepy mask. The skin on her hands looks cracked and withered...probably from shoving them down her throat every day to make herself vomit. She looks unhealthy and anorexic. Hollywood transforms humans into monsters.

Kidman is a perfect choice to play Christine precisely for this reason. Christine is a battered woman who prefers being beaten to remembering anything about who she is. Her amnesia is a metaphor for the loss of self to which abused women consent by remaining with their abusers. Her life is an endless present.

The emotional tonality of the film is flat and depressing without being dark or foreboding. Perhaps this is what it is like to be in an abusive relationship: no color, no variety, no other people, just empty days spent wandering through a hollow life punctuated with blows and hysterical fits.

What strikes me about so many films today is the total lack of engagement with Logos of any of the characters. No one in this film has a meaningful relationship with thought, knowledge, faith, reflection, science, philosophy, art, music or any other of the avatars of Logos that alone are capable of extracting us from our mortifying, fusional relationships with our family members. Is anyone else out there sick of the way that spouses and above all children are presented by Hollywood as the unique objects capable of giving meaning to life? I would have given this movie ten stars out of ten if Adam had turned out to be an ugly, disagreeable, pimply teenager who told his mother to go to hell, thereby destroying Christine's narcissistic illusion that she is an eternally beautiful perfect mother with a perfect husband and a perfect son, but of course he weeps with joy when she sings her stupid lullaby to him. Give us a break with this stuff. This stupid scene alone cost the movie a star in my super important rating that the producers will certainly take into account when making their next turkey.

www.timothylachin.com

Palo Alto (2013)

Vanity, money and marketing

[3/10 · 1 July 2014]

Is this a music video? A sneaker commercial? No, it's a poignant drama about the pain, angst, and heartbreaking beauty of the teenage years!

The writer/director is Francis Ford Coppola's granddaughter. The male lead is Val Kilmer's son. The female lead is Julia Roberts' niece. Keep it in the family, guys!

As you might expect given the cast, PALO ALTO is an exercise in vanity, more fashion propaganda than narrative. Rather than using the camera to go beyond the narcissism of her characters, Coppola uses it to shore it up. On the level of explicit content the film is a perfectly honorable drama about teenage life, but on the level of diegetic form the film is a refusal of the depth constitutive of drama in favor of surfaces. Now, I've read my Hegel. I know that form and content determine each other mutually. These young punks are just too cool. Their clothes, poses, attitudes, and thoughts have no substance beyond this contentless coolness and as such they constitute an active refusal of subjectivity proper. Not only does Coppola leave their posturing untouched, she validates it. These boring and unfree adolescents wander around under the gaze of a director who is so seduced by the spectacle of raw teenage authenticity that she cannot bring herself to help them by offering them access to a NO that might liberate them a little. In this she is a perfect dupe for our corrupt consumerist culture which substitutes objects and postures for the emancipatory potential of Logos and subjectivity.

Some concrete examples: April sitting in her locker is a detail worthy of the castrated twee peddler Wes Anderson. The scene in the skate park towards the end..."if you thought 17-year-olds were cool, wait until you see how raw and real and cool 14-year-olds are!"

Every character is desperately in need of some intervention from without, some access to something beyond the stifling, repressive world of appearances and "fun", and Coppola refuses to give it to them, because to do so would extract them from the authentic-y angst that makes these teens so raw and cool.

Of course, the film was made when Coppola was only twenty-five years old. This is far too young to be given this kind of creative control. Like her aunt, Coppola has nothing to say. All she knows how to do is project her own life onto the screen. There is no authentic artistic vision here, just vanity turbo-charged by the absurd sums of money these people have access to.

At the end of the credits, there is a "The director would like to thank..." section in which she shouts out every cool brand, band, actor and director that inspired her. What kind of monster is inspired by a brand? The list is super long and betrays the nature of the universe in which Gia Coppola lives. It is the world of money and marketing...nothing more.

Her (2013)

Where are the Chinese child slaves?

[7/10 · 23 March 2014]

The first thing that struck me about this film was that all of the characters are immature narcissists. The men are petty, castrated obsessional neurotics incapable of action and commitment and the women are frigid, castrating hysterics equally incapable of action and commitment. They deserve each other. Everyone is constantly apologizing to each other. Everyone is rich. Nothing is real.

I kept wondering when Jonze was going to show us the factory in China where the artificial world of Theodore and Amy is produced. He never does. The closest he gets is showing us the futuristic L. A. skyline. We never see a single poor person. This leads me to think that Jonze himself does not fully understand the scope of his own film. The wimpiness and emotional immaturity of every single human character in this film is a direct result of their double alienation from the truth.

How is this alienation double? To answer this question we must ask another question: why does Theodore suffer so much? We never find out. The superficial explanation would be that he is unlucky in love. But his poor luck in love has to be seen as a consequence of his suffering and not its cause. Theodore is a masochist. He does not have the courage to find a good woman, one who realizes that freedom and flight are not the same thing. He does not have the courage to find a woman who will not make him suffer. He picks narcissistic women who will abandon him as they pursue some vain avatar of self-realization. Some version of this is true of every other emotionally stunted character in the movie. Now, why is this the case? Well, to put things bluntly, this is the case because the true (Oedipal) conflicts responsible for their masochistic behavior remain buried in their unconscious. Jonze goes nowhere near them. None of them have parents or children. None of them have pasts. Theodore and Amy are locked vaults. They can talk and cry and emote all they want. They never come anywhere near the truth. And this is precisely why they suffer. It has nothing to do with their sterile love stories, which ultimately are just screens.

HER made me uncomfortable. "Am I like this?" I kept wondering. "Is my own love story this futile and sterile?" It wasn't until I left the theater and returned to my concrete life that I was able to answer this question. NO. Unlike these characters, I want to know the truth. Not a single one of the human characters gives a damn about knowledge or reality. None of them question the world they live in. All they care about is their feelings. They are not just complicit in the fraudulent ideology of the totalitarian world they live in, they are active participants in its elaboration. Theodore fabricates emotions and Amy is working on a snarky video game designed to destroy a mother's confidence in her femininity. In other words, they are literal propagandists for a bankrupt moral order. They hide this disturbing fact from themselves by maintaining an "ironic distance" from their dishonesty. No wonder they're alienated and unhappy.

Either Spike Jonze is a master of subtle understatement or he is a dupe of his own story. Every character is white or Asian (super-white). Every character is rich. Every character has a "creative" job. Does Jonze realize that he is leaving out 99% of humanity here? I'm not sure he does. He does not make even the barest of gestures in their direction. Now, this is not a criticism of Jonze as such. He can make a movie about whomever he wants. What I am saying is that Theodore's alienation from the true nature of his own emotional conflicts is nothing but an analog for his alienation from the conflicts inherent to capitalism. In both cases these foreclosed, invisible conflicts generate the secondary "sentimental" conflicts that seem so real to these decadent characters. In reality their romantic woes are nothing but epiphenomena. These characters are as remote from the true nature of their emotional suffering as they are from the Chinese child slaves who build their gadgets. The floating world in which Theodore and Amy live is a tiny artificial bubble maintained by a huge network of production and exchange. One cannot live in a bubble of any sort and expect to have an authentic experience of life. The (real) emotional suffering of these characters can only be understood as a blind unconscious response to the structural misery and suffering of an (economically and emotionally) corrupt world, a misery and suffering that they refuse to see because they actively participate in its propagation. Jonze's film is an unwitting meta-statement on the radicality of this split that increasingly dominates our lives. The irony here is that Jonze himself is, by all appearances, unaware that this is the true thesis of his film. HER is a devastating critique of hypermodern ideology and he may not even realize it.

Until Theodore and Amy begin to dare to find out the ugly truth about themselves as well as the world they live in, they will remain in their sterile universe of video games and childish emotions.

Nymphomaniac: Vol. II (2013)

Portrait of a failed psychoanalysis

[10/10 · 30 January 2014]

NYMPHOMANIAC is the most exciting, intelligent film I have seen in a long time. The moment I saw Seligmann shuffle out of his apartment to Rammstein, I knew I was in the hands of a filmmaker I could trust. This scene was the first of many at which I found myself exulting inside. GO, LARS, GO! NYMPHOMANIAC is von Trier's F-14 and he takes it on bombing run after bombing run, destroying a different pious hypocrisy each time. The film is full of all sorts of audacious touches that no other filmmakers working today have the guts or brains to include in their boring, sentimental, ideological films.

NYMPHOMANIAC is also very funny.

What I liked best about NYMPHOMANIAC was its total refusal of the consolations of ideology. Sexuality is presented truthfully, which is to say, as something which simply cannot be integrated into the smooth social order without one or the other being damaged. No one in the movie has a "healthy" sexuality. In a certain sense, the nymphomaniac herself is the closest thing to a healthy person in that she refuses to adhere to any of the hypocritical moral orders represented by the other characters, from conformism to abstinence to impotent cognitive-behavioral therapy to S&M to crime and so on. She is a stain no matter where she goes and in this sense she incarnates the truth, which also has the status of a permanent stain.

At the same time that von Trier does everything right, he gets everything wrong, but in the best possible way. NYMPHOMANIAC reminded me of the book that OJ Simpson wrote in which he describes how he would have killed Nicole and Ron "if he had done it". What OJ wrote is a confession in scare quotes, one in which every detail is present except the most important one, namely, the actual acknowledgment of guilt. NYMPHOMANIAC has the same structure, although instead of being the story of a murder, it is the story of a psychoanalysis.

A troubled person on a bed is encouraged to speak to a learned, wise, benevolently neutral man who is sitting next to the bed. She is encouraged to tell her whole story. He will refuse judgment and simply listen.

Over the course of a psychoanalysis, patterns and unlikely coincidences slowly take shape and are spotted by the analysand, who eventually comes to recognize them at their true value, namely as the traces of an emergent repressed discourse. Lars von Trier has brilliantly condensed and rendered this process by making Joe's story full of improbable coincidences. How much of this really happened and how much of it is a delusion? Could she really have run into Jerome so many times? Could she really have had a vision of the Whore of Babylon as a pubescent girl? Etc.

The sex life of Joe starts and ends with the exact same scenario: 3+5=8. This circularity is also characteristic of the psychoanalytic process. An analysis reaches its conclusion when the analysand recognizes that she has done nothing but repeat, again and again, her own contingent, sexualized unconscious interpretation of a traumatic encounter. By superimposing this sum on the screen, von Trier condenses and renders visible the fundamentally signifying, even meaningless kernel of the compulsion to repeat trauma that Freud called the death drive. Joe's analysis comes to an end when she is able to witness how insubstantial and senseless her compulsion is. All tied up, right?

And then Seligmann tries to have sex with Joe! At this moment everything crumbles. The moment he whips it out, Seligmann invalidates the nascent story that has begun to emerge from between the lines of her official story. The fragile consistency of this new liberating interpretation of Joe's story is entirely dependent on Joe's confidence in Seligmann's ability to see clearly where she can only dimly intuit. His actions prove to her retroactively that he heard nothing but her symptomatic demand to be used, and in so doing he symbolically annuls her true desire.

Such an ending is a logical necessity in that Seligmann's "asexuality" is completely hypocritical, as is Joe's decision to renounce her sexuality. Here we see why a psychoanalyst must go through analysis himself: if he does not, he can only validate the patient's resistances. Since Seligmann has not integrated his own sexual drives, he is incapable of leading Joe to such an integration. All he can do is lead Joe to his own failed neurotic solution: a refusal of sexuality. But Joe incarnates the intractable stain of truth, which is also the stain of sexuality, and as such she necessarily explodes Seligmann's hypocrisy.

It all holds together. Where von Trier gets it all wrong is in his implicit condemnation of psychoanalysis. Here von Trier is properly perverse. His entire movie is a truthful "confession" and then, like OJ, he winks and tells us that it was all hypothetical. This last act of resistance invalidates everything that came before it, conveniently rendering the exercise sterile and allowing Joe/von Trier to continue ignoring the truth and enjoying their symptoms. In Joe's case, the symptom is nymphomania. In von Trier's case, the symptom is his gratuitous melancholia, his nihilism. Were he to take the quotation marks off of his confession, he would risk facing the consequences of his act, namely freedom with all of its attendant complications and miseries.

Lars walks us right up to the edge and then fails to take the last decisive step. I do not think that this failure takes anything away from the film. On the contrary, this final gesture transforms the film from a poignant depiction of psychological suffering into a meta-depiction of the attachment to this suffering. This is even a necessity, inasmuch as psychological suffering itself always has, by its very nature, such a double structure.

Out of the Furnace (2013)

Not buying it

[5/10 · 22 January 2014]

The down-home music...the worn down working folk...the unspoken black/white solidarity of Steeltown, USA...the little leftist touches..the deer hunt...the self-consciously meditative pacing...the quiet dignity...nope, not buying it! Russell Baze is too tragic/heroic. The whole thing drips with so much gritty authenticity that it parodies itself. I don't believe that life is actually like this wherever it is that this movie was filmed. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that working-class life isn't hard, that working folk don't struggle, or that tragedies like this don't happen. I'm saying that they got the tone wrong. I did a Google image search for the director and he looked exactly how I was expecting him to look: a gin-and-tonic sipping LA man right out of SWINGERS...callow and earnest...enthusiastic...ultimately an attractive dupe with no real style and nothing to say...someone who tells himself that he really wants to tell a sincere story about real people...and why shouldn't I get paid handsomely for it? I am an artist!

I can imagine Mr. Cooper sipping cocktails in Hollywood with his screenwriter pals, getting excited as they come up with more and more little touches of quiet authenticity to stick in the screenplay. "I've got an idea! When his dad dies he gets a jailhouse memorial tattoo! Yeah!"

My very limited contact with people who have succeeded as screenwriters in LA has led me to a theory. I think there is a perfect intelligence range to write and produce the kind of movies that make money. Maybe intelligence isn't the word. You have to be sharp and observant enough to be able to seize and reproduce the dominant (ideological) discourse in such a way that it is palatable to the movie-going public and emotionally immature enough not to want to step outside of this discourse. The best is when you hit the sweet spot right at the intersection of pure commercial film-making and "artisty". Scott Cooper is a perfect example of the kind of ideal, well-paid dupe I am talking about...fake vision, fake gravitas, fake art, but well-packaged and intelligent enough to be a sure investment.

In short, this movie feels like someone's voyeuristic fantasy of working-class authenticity and not a real portrait of life in a place like Braddock. It also feels a lot longer than it is. Also, the cast is good, but everyone is miscast.

Elysium (I) (2013)

Boss is going to be mad!

[6/10 · 16 August 2013]

Rather than writing a long review I just want to drop some bullet points on ELYSIUM.

1. Jodie Foster plays uptight and unlikable well but that accent was awful.

2. Did anyone else notice how much Earth in Elysium resembled the future in IDIOCRACY? The bar codes on the wrists, the overcrowded hospital, people shuffling around in dusty slums, the tattoos.

3. Politically, of course citizenship for everybody is great, but it solves none of the problems that created the situation in the first place: overcrowding and disease...

4. I thought the movie's best touch was having Kruger's face blown off and then reconstructed.

5. I think that on a less conscious level ELYSIUM is a meditation on the body. Matt Damon's body does nothing but receive pain. He is stabbed, irradiated, beat up, surgically upgraded...I think the boilerplate politics are just a screen for Blomkamp's more primordial (and more interesting) body fantasies.

This movie is OK.

Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (1980)

My Life

[9/10 · 12 August 2013]

I've just returned after seeing this movie and it has messed your dude up. This was my life for the two years I spent with my Milena. The parallels are uncanny. I am kind of nerdy just like Garfunkel...same pathetic physique...but like Garfunkel I have a certain magnetism. Garfunkel's not exactly a wimp...there's some steel in his gaze. My Milena was just as magnetic and beautiful as Theresa Russell...really. My Milena also lived in a sordid, messy, sexy aerie with a big bed, overfull ashtrays, half-read books everywhere. The alcohol? Check. The infidelity? Check. The suicide attempts? Check. The much older other man? Check. The sleazy, disgusting party friends? Check. The late-night drunk calls that may or may not have been suicide attempts? Check. The intense sex that regularly turned into something twisted? Check. Just like Garfunkel I was hooked...just like Garfunkel I had a "together" life...my God, I even study psychoanalysis...and just like Garfunkel there was more than a hint of bad faith in the togetherness I opposed to my Milena's sloppiness. Like Garfunkel, the idea that Milena had other lovers made me crazy...like Theresa Russell, my Milena needed secrets...lies...she couldn't breathe without her lies and secrets.

The scene where she sets Garfunkel up with her fake suicide attempt only to loose the full force of her hysterical cruelty on him...check...down to the blows and the broken bottles...and it marked the moment our love died, even if things dribbled on for a while after that.

Anyway...you get the picture. You know a movie is good when it shows you things about YOUR OWN life that you hadn't noticed before. That's the secret of a great movie: you feel like it's talking to you and to you alone. I have a feeling I'm not the only person who walked out of the cinema feeling like he had just seen his own life on the screen. Almost everything is perfect. This film is even more disturbing than DON'T LOOK NOW. That is saying a lot. The one wrong note for me was Harvey Keitel. I liked the contrast of his healthy virility with Garfunkel's nerdiness...but Keitel got something wrong. Not sure what...it was certainly a tricky role, and he wasn't exactly bad, but something was wrong.

Frances Ha (2012)

Depressing

[5/10 · 6 August 2013]

I almost walked out of this one after ten minutes. Frances and Sophie are two silly, immature young women in a world that is organized around the fantasy of an eternal childhood.

Everyone is shallow and clever. Nothing matters.

Frances grows more likable over the course of the film. We want to see her humbled because she needs to be humbled. It is only when she begins to make sacrifices that we can begin to empathize with her. Everyone in this movie needs to be humbled. Sophie is particularly unlikable.

What Frances needs is a man. Men and women need each other, and this is an idea that doesn't get a lot of traction in the demographic Frances belongs to. Everyone in the movie suffers from some version of this refusal. Sophie and Patch take refuge in a sterile simulacrum of a couple. Lev racks up the meaningless conquests. Benji and Frances act like prepubescent children.

The director implies that Frances and Benji get together in the end. Well, that's a step forward, but they are not meant for each other. Frances needs a real man, and Benji needs a real woman.

Benji is a dog's name, not a man's name. Benji acts like a dog, not a man. Benji isn't even a cool dog like a Pit or a Tosa Inu. Benji's eager masochism made me cringe. Frances is not much better, but she is better, and she deserves better than this goofy, wimpy chump.

What chilled me most about this movie was realizing that this empty discourse, a form of passive lying, now passes for truth. The epistemological model that all of these characters implicitly adhere to (their definitions of love, masculinity, femininity, success, truth) is shallow and impotent.

Frances' success comes too easily at the end. She hadn't hit bottom yet and for that reason it rings false.

Ideology.

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

Boring

[2/10 · 27 July 2013]

This movie is boring. Marguerite Duras sucks. I've been in love and gotten freaky with lovers and it was not like this. It was a lot more interesting than this. Want to make a Hiroshima movie? Make a movie about the dude with the burned-off lips. Show a day in this guy's life. The woman played by Emmanuelle Riva is unbearable. The Japanese dude is happy he got a piece of Western tail. The whole thing feels like the fantasy of a hysterical, frigid woman. My life is sad. I have an incurable disease. I am depressed and when I go to the movies I want to see Life. I wanted to burn something after seeing this film. I am a man and when I see this kind of self-indulgent feminine sterility on screen it drives me crazy, just as I imagine it drives women crazy to see the male equivalent...stuff like Armageddon or whatever. There was a pretty girl in the theater and I would have liked for her to think I was poetic and sensitive but after an hour of "poetic" dialogue I walked out. The babe probably thought less of me. I don't need her anyway. Who am I kidding? Of course I need her.

Man of Steel (2013)

Superman as a paranoid schizophrenic

[5/10 · 25 June 2013]

Anyone who has ever studied or worked with schizophrenics will immediately recognize the paranoid flavor of this story. Young Clark Kent discovers that Kevin Costner is not his real father, at which point everything falls apart. The triggering moment in paranoid schizophrenia always concerns some version of an impossible paternal identification. Usually, the failure of the father is linked with an inability to articulate id and ego in a satisfactory way. The only way Clark can save his sanity is by constructing a paranoid delusion that would replace the defective Costner with some higher father. Enter the two godlike alien fathers, one a force of pure good and one a force of pure evil. Ever wonder why there were so many Jesus Christs in psych wards? In addition to a pervasive existential homelessness (= Clark's troubled peregrinations), the absence of a paternal legacy (a "symbolic phallus") renders the schizophrenic incapable of being a man with a woman. Notice how Superman trembles when he finally kisses Lois Lane. Superman had to destroy the world simply to be able to approach a woman sexually. Of course, as soon as he kisses her, General Zod rises from the dead for his last stand...for schizophrenics, the "evil" father incarnates and displaces the unruly (sexual, aggressive) drives that cannot be integrated into the fragile ego (incarnated by the "good" father). In other words, Superman needs to kill Zod so he can finally have a sexual relationship. Incidentally, this gives us a clue to why the Superman/Zod fight scenes are so boring: we sense intuitively that no matter how hard they punch, neither can actually hurt the other because they are just two aspects of the same person. Notice too that although Superman is very good-looking, he is completely asexual. This is because our sexuality is simultaneously what makes us human and what corrupts us. Only a eunuch can be super in the way that Superman is.

The phallus is front and center here. It seems like everything has a phallic shape: the rockets, the spaceships, the guns, the knives the weird snakes that attack Superman when he tries to destroy the world engine, the "key" given to him by his father...the only way to destroy the evil machine at the end is by shoving the key into the hole, but there's a problem: "It won't go in!" (Read: Superman, unable to integrate his primordial drives, cannot conclude the sexual act when he is called upon by Jor-El to do so.) The phallic key represents Jor-El's entire symbolic legacy (the future of his entire race), one that is just too much for Superman to bear, hence his inability to take rightful possession of the key and dispatch Zod.

The end of the movie shows Clark finally abandoning his delusion and accepting Costner's humble but human paternal legacy, which allows him to occupy a place in the world (as a "stringer").

Enough for the psychoanalytic interpretation. This completely unintentional exploration of paranoid schizophrenia is by far the most interesting thing here. The movie itself is not that good. We are treated to the same boring, meaningless CGI destruction that we get in every other movie. With no external limits to what can be shown, everything turns into a video game. Actually, the logic here is psychotic as well: in the absence of externally-imposed "paternal" boundaries, there is nothing to stop the on-screen phantasmagoria from degenerating into a seething, vague imaginary chaos that infects everything until the entire world has been destroyed/purified. This schizophrenic logic of an absolute split between good and evil can be seen in the two female leads as well: the blonde, boring, sexless Lois Lane and the super sexy evil lieutenant of General Zod (those blue eyes!). The actress who plays Lane deserves to be singled out for her awful performance and total lack of charisma. Who cast this sub-Nicole Kidman nobody? On the other hand, the actor who plays Superman is excellent. His too-innocent good looks and smile capture perfectly the schizophrenic nature of the character, one whose preternatural goodness must be understood as a (failed) attempt to refuse his sexualized dark side.

I wanted to yell at the screen every time a character clenched his fist in resolution or cocked his head before attacking somebody...pure stock blockbuster tropes. I find it interesting that these superhero movies are often directed by young no-name technicians. I suppose that everything has to be so formulaic that the studios just pick some visionless clone whom they can dictate to. I think here of Jon Favreau, fundamentally a spineless nobody, one who probably believes that he is somebody because "Iron Man" has marginally more personality than the other boring superhero movies out there.

Verdict: charmless, but of didactic interest for psychiatrists.

The Call (II) (2013)

Average!

[5/10 · 5 June 2013]

First of all, THE CALL is well-paced and well-executed. It does what a thriller is supposed to do, and that is...thrill. For this alone it gets five IMDb stars, or the equivalent of a gentleman's C.

It gets no bonus stars because there are no surprises here. The characters have no depth. Why can't they make movies with characters instead of types? Why couldn't the dude have kidnapped the slutty friend instead of the good girl? I bet she would have fought harder and been more resourceful than her soft, boring friend.

I thought it was ridiculous that the girl's bra stayed on during the entire last scene...more proof that scenes of extreme torture and sadism are considered less shocking than the idea that a sixteen-year-old girl has a nipple and perhaps by extension a sexuality. Can I say "nipple" on IMDb?

The scene where the kidnap victim leaves a maudlin message for her mother made me want to yell at the screen. Can't American movies give it a rest with the family values? How much more interesting would it have been if the girl had responded that her favorite movie was something like Tarkovski's STALKER? Jordan: "I don't know that one." Girl: "It's a long, slow meditation on faith, desire, and subjectivity." Jordan: "Uh, sounds interesting." Or how about: "You're a Capricorn, like me. We're fighters." "I don't believe in astrology." Hardly Tom Stoppard but it could potentially lead to...something. Every time I've been in a dangerous or traumatic situation, like being threatened with a knife and beaten, I find myself thinking and saying absurd stuff like this.

Halle Berry is not great here. She has never struck me as anything but a blandly pretty face...a fabricated quasi-black star whose whole appeal is that producers have deemed her to be white/pretty enough to be palatable to white audiences...the female equivalent of the dreadful Will Smith. Jordan's cop boyfriend was the most interesting character in the movie with his dapper Lou Gossett Jr. mustache but he didn't do much. I thought the actor who played the psycho did a good job.

Only God Forgives (2013)

A clinical study on perversion

[24 May 2013]

Either Nicholas Winding Refn is a Freudian scholar who has made a didactic film illustrating the nuances of the Oedipus complex, or psychic reality really does have an Oedipal structure. I vote for the latter.

We have Julian, played by Ryan Gosling, who is even emptier than the character he portrayed in Drive. He barely speaks, has no center, and cannot be a man with the woman he loves. In an early scene, we see him sliding his hand up her skirt in a nightclub. He is not just copping a happy feel; trembling, he is approaching the altar of Woman. We then see him walking down a scary hallway. He extends his hand to open a dark door when...SLICE...Chang cuts his arm off. It doesn't take a psychoanalyst to deduce the symbolism of the arm that must be severed when it reaches out. In the next scene, Gosling opens the door in reality and finds...his mother waiting for him on the bed. So, putting the pieces together, when Julian approaches a woman he imagines a door (and is not Woman always a door for Man?). Behind this door in his unconscious hides his castrating, phallic mother. But before he can open this door, a man with a knife appears and castrates him. Why? Castration sucks...but it is not as bad as what is behind that door in Julian's unconscious (psychosis).

Now, it happens that for perverse subjects like Julian (and, I am guessing, the director), the unconscious representation at the heart of their suffering is that of the phallic mother. Kristin Scott Thomas plays an excellent phallic mother here: obscene, castrating, oversexual...one who goes as far as to belittle Julian's manhood in front of his girlfriend.

Notice too that we never find out if Julian's girlfriend is a woman or a ladyboy. This confusion is alluded to in the opening scenes with Billy at the brothel and is further confirmed by the way in which Refn films Mai slowly lifting her skirt to show a breathless Julian whatever it is he/she has under there. Like all perverse subjects, Julian is haunted by the fantasy of the maternal phallus. Hence the popularity of ladyboy prostitutes in Thailand: they bring to life, in a non-threatening form, a powerful and archaic unconscious fantasy. What else but the hidden maternal phallus could Julian be looking for when he cuts open the stomach of his dead mother and reaches in? What Julian lacks is an unconscious representation of the womb, one that he tries here to generate. For the perverse subject, femininity is intolerable because in his unconscious, women are nothing but castrated men. He cannot understand that the essence of femininity is infinite interiority. Notice too how Refn's dojo is a surreal labyrinth: Julian has no representation for the labyrinth of femininity because he is stuck INSIDE the labyrinth of his mother's body.

The clinic shows us that nothing destroys a son's sexuality like a phallic, castrating mother. For Julian to save some shred of masculinity, he needs a father strong enough to castrate his mother. Enter Chang, who must be considered a pure fantasy. Here is a man strong enough, phallic enough, silent enough (he doesn't even speak English) finally to defeat the Gorgon and extract the phallus from her dead body. Once amputated, the hidden maternal phallus becomes the visible paternal phallus (=Chang's knife), one that is not attached to the body but can be symbolically passed from father to son. This is how the Oedipus complex "normally" operates. The perverse subject, however, has not accomplished this step. He has no phallus, no symbolic masculinity. He is still stuck in his mother's body, and as such he does not have the right to any sort of accomplished manhood. Hence the importance of cutting, of severing, of dismemberment for the perverse subject: he dreams of the paternal knife that would finally separate him from Mother and allow him to exist as his own man. Notice too that Julian's "final castration" takes place outside, in an empty field: through this paternal intervention, he is extracted from mother's body.

Of course, the super-phallic, super-castrating father that the perverse subject needs to accomplish this amputation is a formidable figure in his own right, one who is hardly better than the phallic mother in a certain sense. However, his violence is essentially just and limited by the Law, whereas the violence of the maternal superego knows no limits.

Julian's fight with Chang, in which he gets beaten up terribly, is an illustration of the logic of masochism: submit to the father in order that the father might finally castrate the phallic mother.

"Only God Forgives" is the depressing story of a perverse subject's difficult (impossible?) struggle to detach himself from an obscene, oppressive maternal superego. He doesn't really succeed. At the end, the disappearance of Julian's mother his simply led to the masochistic fetishization of Chang. The movie's last scene is ambiguous. Does it show us that Julian cannot see Chang as a man he might one day equal, a man whose phallus he might one day possess, but as an omnipotent God on stage? Or does it show us Julian's deep love and gratitude towards the lawman powerful enough to liberate him?

The slow pacing and static shots seem gratuitous at first, but as the movie picks up steam, we begin to understand their raison d'etre: Julian lives in a dead world in which nothing can move or change because everything is paralyzed by his mother. I almost walked out after twenty minutes, but I'm glad I stayed - there are some powerful archetypal figures here. The radical otherness of Chang illustrates well the secret of paternity: in our unconscious, our fathers are all Changs. The movie is worth seeing for this character alone.

Adoration (2013)

Chilling Stuff

[7/10 · 29 April 2013]

The director of this movie is a Frenchwoman. Of course, in French, "mother" and "ocean" are homonyms.

Maybe it's just because I am celibate these days, but unlike some of the other reviewers, I saw a lot more morbidity here than I did desire.

One of the other reviewers praises Robin Wright's performance as a "strong woman". What? These women aren't strong...they are as craven and callow. They cede to the ultimate taboo: mother-son incest. Sure, they didn't quite officially cross that line...but they might as well have. The reason incest (by hook or by crook) is taboo has nothing to do with inbreeding...it is because it leads to subjective ruin. Nothing has quite the same devastating effect on one's subjectivity as a blurring of this one particular line. I thought that the film was a success here: what happens to these four characters is catastrophic. Two stunted, brainless male children...two decadent aging women who continue to giggle like preteen girls when they are together. Try to imagine these monsters in twenty years. Notice that no one is interested in anything...yes, we see cursory hints that they are interested in something besides fusion with each others' bodies (the art gallery, the yacht business, the theater stuff) but all of it is strictly external to the characters. They never use language with each other for any reason other than to seduce each other. This loss of the liberating force that is Logos is the consequence of incest. If you cross this line, you are ruined for the outside world...all that's left is your little floating island in the ocean. These two women with their endless glasses of wine, their silly giggling, their vanity, their narcissism...are nothing less than evil. Their sons are not likable either, and even though they are both portrayed as instigators in the narrow sense of the word, they are by definition victims. The failure of their respective attempts to break away from the womb can be laid at the feet of these two women who refuse to sacrifice anything for their precious pleasure. I am thinking of the scene where Ian spills the beans and sends the wives and babies running for the hills. When Ian claims, rightfully, that he was just telling the truth, Roz reproaches him with some chilling sophistry about "hurting people" or whatever. The director does a good job here of illustrating, without needing to belabor the point, how incest and Logos/subjectivity are incompatible, and how even if you do your best to tell the truth, the situation is in itself so dishonest as to be irredeemable through acknowledgment of any sort.

I took a couple of stars off because the pacing is a little slow. The actors are all good. The audience laughed when the two wives found out what was going on...I doubt that was the director's intention.

Oblivion (I) (2013)

What does a woman want?

[8/10 · 14 April 2013]

I think I would be a great director. An exercise I love to engage in after seeing movies like Oblivion is to imagine the sequel, only this time told from the point of view of everyday life. I think that Oblivion 2 could be a hit. The central conflict of the film would be that Jack Harper 2 is still beating himself up over the fact that he lost the fight to Jack Harper 1...Jack Harper 1 dug deep and found his human soul, whereas Jack Harper 2 just watched the Tet blow up from Earth like a shmo. How humiliating...Jack got his butt kicked by himself. In the three years it took JH2 to find Olga Kurylenko, he's turned bitter and in fact misses flying his mosquito and skinny dipping in the sweet pool in the clouds with Vika...screw subsistence living, eating berries, and hanging with a bunch of grungy resistance fighters. As for Olga, she misses the "real" Jack...never stops reminding Jack 2 he's not up to the standard of Jack 1...disgusted with his cowardice, she begins cheating on Jack 2 with the hunky Sykes character. Sykes turns out to be an absolute dog and after she catches him sleeping with every other woman from the underground tribe she loses it completely and runs away from the idyllic cabin in the hopes of finding a better Jack Harper. The little girl finds a turtle in the pond and adopts it as her pet...a cute detail. Etc. This is how they would film such a movie in France...of course, the price of this emotional verisimilitude would be the epic scope and philosophical tone that make these movies an American specialty.

As for Oblivion 1...I liked it. I go for these epic, super sincere science fiction stories. This one is similar to all of the other ones...there aren't that many twist possibilities out there and there's no shame in adding one more variation to the basic theme. Apocalypse...cloning...the official truth versus the real truth...redemption through love...sure, we've seen it before, but we've seen everything before. These science fiction movies are a conversation that we as a society are having with ourselves...playing out in the collective unconscious all of our fantasies about the present of humanity. Of course they're going to resemble each other...they have to if they want to say anything about our world. One important theme here is feminine desire. What does a woman want? The question that famously stumped Freud is front and center here. A million Jack Harpers and only one Julia...the idea is intriguing. And couldn't the whole premise be considered Vika's fantasy? Is not the Tet a big V? Vika is attractive in a prosaic English way...whereas Olga is a Continental fox and femme fatale who completely blows her modest domestic charms out of the water. And who is the culprit? Vika's overweight, insecure mother, of course, whose only advice to the young Vika was something like: the way to seduce a man is by making a good shepherd's pie. Have you ever been to England? It's not a very sexy place...here in France I regularly see bands of chubby young English girls on vacation who clearly look shell shocked by how much sexier and more comfortable with Eros their French counterparts are. This brings us to Sally: who is Sally if not the castrating mother figure whose meddling prevents Vika from becoming the kind of independent, sexy woman that Julia is? Vika's inability to sever the tie with Mother turns out to be the source of the raging force that destroys Earth...beware of a woman's desire...

Side Effects (I) (2013)

Super tight thriller with lots to say

[8/10 · 6 April 2013]

This film does everything right. First, the pacing. SIDE EFFECTS covers a lot of ground. Soderbergh takes his time with the exposition and it pays major dividends at the end. There are three films here. Act one is the story of a woman's struggle with depression. Act two is the story of a man's confrontation with his own hubris. Act three is...the truth of the two previous stories.

Like all good films, this is a film about the truth. What is it? Where is it? Soderbergh attacks the dreadfully corrupt pharmaceutical industry at every one of its weak points. He shows how every single person involved, at every level, is complicit in the charade. Money rules the day. At the beginning of the movie, Jude Law is a slick psychiatrist with a blonde wife, an understanding gaze on tap, a prescription tablet, and loads of bread. Life is good. Why try to dig into the muck of anyone's unconscious when you can just give them drugs and collect the ca$h? Win-win, right?

Rooney Mara is straight out of an ad for antidepressants: the fragile young bird who has everything going for her...a nice job, a pretty face, a hunky husband, the best intentions...but can't seem to escape the "poisonous fog" of that insidious "brain disease", depression. (Let it be said in passing that I was happy to see William Styron's dishonest book about depression skewered here.) One of Soderbergh's masterful touches is giving this all to us straight, with no implicit criticism of these characters. He lets the story tell itself, and when judgment comes, not externally, from him, but internally, from the necessary consequences of being who they are, it packs a punch. Every character in the movie is living a lie. Pharmaceuticals both represent and perpetuate the absolute refusal of the unconscious that typifies modern consumerism. These drugs allow everyone, psychiatrists just as much as patients, to flee the hard truth, namely that we are subjects and not chemical processes. We own our actions. We have free will and responsibility. Our actions do not come from nowhere; they come from somewhere, from our past, from our unconscious, from our drives, from our desires. What is this film if not the passage from a superficial and impotent cognitive/behavioral form of psychotherapy, one that is fundamentally complicit with the symptom, to a proper psychoanalysis in which what is at stake is not the symptom divorced from any context but the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? One of the two major story arcs in this film is the transformation of Jude Law from a self-satisfied shill for the system into a real psychotherapist, someone who is dedicated above all to the truth. Anything less is not psychotherapy but simply palliative care and laziness.

Notice too how every person in Jude Law's life begins to turn against him once he starts to get closer to the truth: his blonde, empty, "perfect" wife who is so neurotic, so insecure, so alienated from herself that she is jealous of his patients and doesn't trust him; his patients, who are right not to trust him; his decadent, morally bankrupt partners, who care only about their money and their reputation. Jude Law had wrapped himself in a comfortable but false blanket in which, once again, the unconscious had no place. For him to become a real psychotherapist he had to lose all of these illusions.

The other main story arc, that of Emily, shows a similar progress from appearances to truth. By the end of the movie we see her for what she is: a greedy, empty woman who murdered, in cold blood, a greedy, sleazy finance creep who, like her, used money to fill an inner void. Ironically, it is only once her true self surfaces that the possibility of any beneficial therapeutic work being done emerges. The person we see at the end of the movie is the real Emily, the lost soul, the nobody, the woman who really, really doesn't want to know anything about who she really is. This film also shows how hard it is to be a real psychotherapist: it is not just a question of smiling and empathizing at the right moments, but of leading the patient out of the comfort zone and forcing the hard truths out, through ingenuity, persistence, and forensic skill. Of course, this involves leaving one's own comfort zone as well. The fact is that by the end of the movie, Emily is put in a position in which she may be capable, one day, of healing, of facing the consequences of her actions with dignity and honesty, something that would have been impossible for her at the beginning of the movie. It's not going to happen tomorrow...but that's one of the hard rules of life. When you ignore who you really are for twenty-eight years, it takes a long time and a lot of pain and suffering to get better.

Last, Catherine Zeta-Jones...something of an enigma here...she embodies the link between sex and money that lurks inside the unconscious of so many people...of all the characters in the movie, she is the one who incarnates the dark truth of our drives. Not only is she the hidden truth of Emily, but she is Jude Law's hidden truth as well. Money...sex...power...this person exists inside all of us, and is the source of so much of our suffering. Use a pill to ignore her and it will just make her stronger...

Spring Breakers (2012)

Hit and miss with some Nuggets nonetheless

[7/10 · 7 March 2013]

Had the director treated his audience with a little more respect, this could have been a great movie. As it is, it is only a good movie.

The theme is simple and worth exploring: the brainless pursuit of fun and excitement ultimately leads to perdition.

The opening montage is excellent. In fact, all of the party montages are excellent. This is what the characters came here for: close-ups of bare breasts and beer bongs...throbbing music...glistening bodies...the sun...the beach.

I loved the long scenes of the four immature but silky and buttery young bikini babes drinking, shaking their butts, and acting like the worst kind of children. The director does a good job here of communicating visually what we should not hesitate to refer to as evil. That's what these girls are: evil. We are still in thrall of the Victorian idea that children are angels. They are not. I think that children are generally better than adults at furnishing us with the closest thing to a representation of pure evil that we ever encounter in everyday life.

Where the director goes wrong is shoving his message in our faces. I hate it when they do this. Just tell the story and let us draw our own conclusions. The idea is genius: four heartless and brainless girls wilding out during spring break fall in with a charismatic gangster. Korine should have let the story tell itself. He should have shot it in a more traditional way so we could have come to the conclusion ourselves that what he is showing us is Hell.

Let me say also that James Franco is GREAT in his role as Alien. All of his lines are well-written and perfectly delivered. He steals the movie. He is hilarious. The "Look at all my s***" scene is the best scene in the movie.

Korine makes the girls 90% unsympathetic. Two of the girls are snakes. One of them is more pathetic than anything else. The "good" girl, who is totally boring and just as much of a stupid hypocrite as the others, disappears early, which is fine. I would have liked to see her act like even more of a coward. These are all people who have refused anything like an ethics of subjectivity, choosing abstract pleasure over existence as "real" people. This film is the story of the consequences of refusing to be a real person.

Korine should have made them 100% unsympathetic. Or rather: they were 100% unsympathetic but Korine tried to redeem them a little bit. Those telephone conversations with their parents were not a bad idea as such but I sensed that he was trying to redeem the girls instead of showing just how deep their hypocrisy went.

Alien, on the other hand, is a straight up snake and for that you like watching him.

There are a lot of really nice small scenes that point up the absurdity of everything that's happening...the scene where Gucci Mane talks about his starving baby...also the scene where he is with two women in bed...in addition of course to the scene in Alien's bedroom mentioned above. These characters are so ridiculous, so disgusting...these are true villains. The camera loves them.

Harmony Korine missed a lot of chances here but he also put some really nice images and characters on the screen for us. With a little more discipline and distance this could have been a great movie, but even despite the missed opportunities there is much to like.

Maniac (2012)

A deep and subtle meditation on sexuality and subjectivity

[8/10 · 8 January 2013]

Man! I was not expecting this kind of a knife to the gut when I bought my ticket for "Maniac" knowing nothing about the movie.

I like horror movies...sort of...but I don't like gory movies. It scares me and disturbs me to see that kind of thing. This movie...is full of gruesome, unwatchable scenes of torture.

But...it works. This is one of the only gore films I've ever seen where the gore is necessary. Well, why is it necessary? Most of the film is shot in first-person perspective, from the eyes of the troubled killer. He cannot reconcile his sadistic, aggressive impulses to torture and punish women with his tender impulses to love and be loved by them.

Whenever he is sexually attracted to a woman he responds with a host of symptoms that might be seen as unconscious attempts to protect him from something unbearable inside. He washes his hands until they bleed, he blacks out, he has hallucinations, he has crippling migraines...but nothing works as well as killing and scalping women...reducing them to objects. The director plays cleverly with this conceit by making him a restorer of mannequins.

So far, so good. What this film does well...and I can't remember the last horror movie that had this effect on me...is to hit dangerously close to home. I recognize myself in this killer...I recognize that masculine desire as such has the potential to turn into what is presented here...the main character barely appears on screen...he is nothing but a desperate gaze seeking an object to consume with his scary watery blue eyes. It is only once he has killed his victims and transformed them into inanimate objects - their bloody scalps (the scalping in this movie is even worse than in Inglourious Basterds) - that he is able to come to be (temporarily) as a subject and not as a pure restless gaze. The director makes us feel his relief by only giving us third-person glimpses of the titular maniac when his blood lust is (temporarily) sated. I found myself letting out a deep breath every time the camera backed away from Frank for a few short seconds after a kill. We feel, viscerally, the back-and-forth between the libido's ruthless injunctions and the stifled desire to be a human being among other humans (here, being included literally in the frame with others). Incidentally, this is why this film works in a way that "The Lady in the Lake" doesn't - the "pure" first person fails in that film because in life we do not experience ourselves "only" from the first person but rather from a back-and-forth between the first and the third person.

The many scenes of the maniac stalking the women are very creepy, for the simple reason that much of what he does - looking at women, maybe following them a little, perving on their curves - is just normal male behavior. On my way home from the movie, lost in thought, late at night, on an empty street, I nearly walked into a young woman, walking home alone, and then found myself walking behind her on the sidewalk. I hope she didn't see the same movie I did.

But why is the gore necessary? The gore is necessary because this film is a meditation on the subject/object split constitutive of subjectivity as such. The "pure subject" that is gaze can only be satisfied by encountering a "pure object", one that can only be found somewhere inside the body of a woman. Freud might say that Frank is searching for the fantasized maternal phallus...an interpretation that fits perfectly with the maniac's backstory. We need to see the gore because we need to feel the frustration that this character feels...we come to understand that he is so oppressed by his own "subjectivity", the prison of his own gaze, that he is compelled to commit horrible crimes, to cut through bone and skin, just to get some relief from his drives.

Another creepy and effective feature of this film is that at least one of his victims is an awful human being whom we want to see die. It is disturbing to realize this. "Get her, Frank!" I found myself rooting as he followed the gallerist home. It was also perspicacious of the director to present Anna to us first as a sort of angelic soul who presumably sees the maniac's inner beauty only to reveal to us later that in fact she is a shallow narcissist whose interest in Frank was always self-serving. We are as surprised as Frank when she says she has a boyfriend...why? Because she has been leading "us" on until then. The nickel drops when we meet her boyfriend in the bathroom: he is a sexy macho jerk, the kind of man women like Anna like in real life. Anna turns out to be almost a female counterpart to Frank: a woman not interested in other human beings but in objects...in the mysterious object inside herself (hence her own face projected on the mannequins)...we sense that the difference between her and Frank is a question of degree, not of kind...the true difference between them is that they occupy asymmetrical positions vis-a-vis the same hypnotic object: the maternal phallus hidden somewhere inside a woman's body.

A brave role for Elijah Wood...brave because it uses to full advantage his weird blend of adult and infantile features...his very body and face (especially the eyes) are turned into disturbing external manifestations of his inner conflicts.

8 stars for a movie that has made me feel, viscerally, some disturbing truths about sexuality and identity that previously only registered on the intellectual level.

American Masters: Woody Allen: A Documentary (2011) Season 25, Episode 7

Only OK

[6/10 · 5 June 2012]

I used to be a major Woody Allen fan. This documentary was disappointing for a couple of reasons. First of all, it doesn't go deep enough. It's a little fluffy. We want to hear more about Woody's private life. Woody also seems to have lost the verve he used to have. He looks and sounds old, tired, and boring. He doesn't reveal anything. You sense that he's not making any particular effort to tell the truth...just rehashing private talking points. It feels almost like a press release.

Woody Allen married his stepdaughter, whom he first met as a little girl. Let's say that again: Woody Allen cheated on the woman he had built a life with with her teenage daughter. Any biography that does not confront this is fluff.

The man appears to have been swallowed up by his famous neuroses.

Ultimately we learn nothing new here...it's nice to see where he grew up and nice to see the old photos but that's about it.