The Better of the 'Oughts

Nobody knows what to call these past ten years, either as a decade or a personal experience. All we can be sure of is that they were troubled. This column is not going to get in to that trouble; we all saw it. But nobody will know what to call the films that came from the oughts (as some prefer to say), either. From the short distance we are at, we can say some looked a little bit like a rehash of sixties cinema without the freshness or sincerity, while others remained trapped in the all-is-irony mode that filmmakers--at least in America--don't plan on escaping from any time soon. In the purely mainstream realm, technological advancements including more and more CGI animation and 3-D movies diluted the moving image instead of enhancing it. Equally distressing as it was sometimes marvelous was the continuation of static-take driven, music-absent, "contemplative" cinema. This kind of cinema could come off as a cheap reaction against the perceived junk of Hollywood cinema, thereby defeating its own integrity.
If this opinion on the past decade sounds bitter, that's because no decade is a geyser of fantastic cinema and the majority of films produced will always fall from our memories in due time. So as a way of showing the bright side of the decade-- the decade as a whole, why not-- here is a personal list of the memorable parts from five of its best films. At nine months in to 2010, the distance is good enough to make a foggy judgement.

1. Cache (2005): In what theater did audiences not leap out of their seats when the coldest, most nonchalant most shocking suicide scene in film history occurred? While Daniel Autiel paced back and forth, the dead body slumped against the wall with a streak of blood behind it, we were as directionless as he was. We waited for him to leave that room, knowing that he wouldn't, with the static camera that may or may not have hidden recording it all for us.
2. Tropical Malady (2004): This was a film where watching  the structure develop was more rewarding than any single image. But that structure-- a two part film, first a contemporary narrative, then a jungle folk story-- gave us its greatest distance with a shot on top of a sunny hill overlooking the Thai jungle. The hunter (the boy)stepped to the top and surveyed the scene, pausing for some moments as if finally wondering, like us, just what kind of story he belonged in.
3. There will be Blood (2007): The sight of something gushing uncontrollably has long been one of the most dizzying and perverse images a film can offer. It happened with blood in The Shining and it happened with oil in The Wages of Fear. Here, it happens literally with oil and figuratively with blood.
4. Werckmeister Harmonies (2000): At the dawn of the decade, before we thought anything cataclysmic might happen, Bela Tarr knew better.
5. In this World (2002): This is one of the better films of the past ten years, though most people wouldn't know it. Part of the reason is that its director, Michael Winterbottom, makes so many films, that he has lost us by now. This one--sentimental at just the right times, a quintessential journey film, a sly blend of fiction and documentary, and a truly worldly movie-- is one that he shouldn't have let us forget. Jamal shoving his way through a nighttime crowd of refugees, staged to middle eastern vocal music, is one of the better shots Herzog never captured.

Internal Monologue in Taxi Driver

              (from the Taxi Driver Screenplay, 1976/written by Paul Schrader)

Despite the fictional screenwriting teacher’s declaration in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation that “God help you if you use voice overs,” Paul Schrader’s screenplay for Taxi Driver is one of many highly successful and popular films to utilize such methods for the expression of interior monologue.

In Taxi Driver, interior monologue is used specifically to guide the audience through the psychological issues that protagonist Travis (Robert DeNiro) battles with throughout the film as he expresses them in his personal journal. As Schrader wrote of Travis in the screenplay itself, “His deformities are psychological, not physical.”

Travis early on expresses his indifference towards working his taxi shift in the seedy parts of town and with the “spooks”, but this attitude slowly degenerates into one of intolerance and believing that “they’re [the people he sees at night] all animals anyway.” As Schrader puts it in his screenplay, “Travis believes he is cursed and therefore he is.”

The main issue here is a man who isn’t properly taking care of himself besides monetarily (he works 70-80 hours a week)—his apartment is in disarray, he eats pie, sugar cereal with added sugar, white bread, drinks coffee and brandy, works nights, and complains (via voice overs) of his sleeplessness. Here is a man who could benefit from some holistic health advice, but instead he frequents porno theaters, then nonchalantly brings his new and beautiful friend named Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), without any thought of possible repercussions, to a porn movie. She quickly walks out, which is the end of their relationship. This only exacerbates Travis’ psychological tailspin.

Travis writes in his journal after the botched movie outing, “May 8, 1972. My life has taken another turn again. The days move along with regularity...“ He then proceeds to be rejected by Betsy on the street, send her flowers which she “doesn’t receive”, and call her with no response. Fed up, he barges in on her at work and causes a scene, which is broken up by the straight-shooting, normal, harmless-seeming male coworker of Betsy’s. This experience is particularly harmful to Travis because he projected onto Betsy all that he wanted her to be: a serene fountain of beauty and perfection amidst a chaotic urban jungle of filth and despair. He thought she was “different” in the same way he considers himself to be. Instead, she is just an average (except, perhaps, by her beauty) young woman working in the normal, daytime, workaday world. Travis writes in his journal, which the audience hears as voice over, “I realize now how much she is like the others, so cold and distant. Many people are like that. They are like a union.” It is classic “Me against the world” mentality, which explains his perpetual internal monologue about loneliness

So he buys guns and practices aiming and shooting them with no bullets at the mirror, slipping them out of his sleeve, and he gets in shape through push-ups and pull-ups. “Every muscle must be tight”, he writes. He goes to see a prostitute whose name, after much prying, is Iris. Then he attempts to assassinate a senator who is also a presidential candidate, but fails. The audience is left to assume that the senator’s campaign slogan, “We are the people” is meant to explain the otherwise elusive reason behind Travis’ motivation to do such a thing. In other words, if the senator “Is the people”, and the people are who Travis hates, then perhaps that explains Travis’ motivation to kill the candidate. Otherwise, why would Travis assault a senator who is, by all intents and purposes, above “the people”, especially the miscreants that Travis despises?

Schrader utilizes voice over towards the end of the film when Travis writes to his family and lies about the happenings in his life. This marks the beginning of what Travis intends to be the end of his life and his life’s purpose, but, as we all know, life doesn’t always unfold as planned.

He visits Iris and gets in a gun fight with her pimp and co., which ends in three men dead, Iris severely rattled, and Travis pulling the trigger on an empty gun to his head. The police come, and Travis is heralded as a hero by at least Iris’ family.

In the final scene, all of the internal monologue and Travis’ emotional transformation comes to a head when Betsy rides in his cab and makes a vague pass at him, but he just drives away with his classic slight grin on his face. This scene can be interpreted multiple ways. Was it a figment of his imagination? Was it a dream? A hallucination? Was it real? If it’s real, has Travis learned to embrace his lifelong loneliness? Has it dissipated? Does he view Betsy as too much of a conformist for his taste? Is he bitter that he finally reached out to one of “the people” (simply because, let’s be honest fellas, she was beautiful) and got rejected? Or, perhaps, as every man has wanted to do at one point or another, Travis was reveling in the slightly twisted satisfaction of rejecting someone who formerly rejected him.

(Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver, 1976/ Columbia Pictures)

The Expendables

(Sylvester Stallone, Rambo: First Blood Part 2/Tristar Pictures) 

     Just look at that face. Sylvester Stallone has the face of a man who could have just finished oiling your car, thought it was tough, but wants you to know he’s okay with that. He looks classically paternal, as if he could be teaching his son how to shoot a bow and arrow and telling his daughter to be careful around boys at parties, even when he’s actually blowing some baddie’s brains out. He has always passed as an underdog star who just pushes on despite how much work it all is. In other words, he’s an action hero of the old-fashioned sort. It is probably because of his face and his ragged, pragmatic way of delivering lines that keep our eyes on the screen for the length of The Expendables, even if the film itself is not very classical or modest, and even though all those eyes enjoying it belong to other men.

            The Expendables is the most recent film Stallone not only stars in, but also co-wrote and directed. The story has something to do with a group of mercenaries known as The Expendables who are based out of some sunny suburb, but have been hired by Mr. Church (an uncredited Bruce Willis) to go take out an army headed by an FBI defect (Eric Roberts) that has taken control of a remote Spanish-speaking island. Whatever. The point is that we laugh at the outrageous sequences of face-painted soldiers getting their limbs blown off, of Stallone leaping from a dock on to the hatch of the Expendable’s airplane as a whole army chases him and the plane spews water against the tirade of bullets. We can also laugh at some of the non-action scenes, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger walks in and out of the film, or in which Jason Stratham’s Lee Christmas walks on to a basketball court where his former girlfriend’s abusive new boyfriend emphatically calls him ‘some punk.” Scenes like these give the impression of an unabashed, self-referential male fantasy that only the dourest soul wouldn’t find amusing. 

(Sylvester Stallone in The Expendables/Lionsgate Films)
Yet would be unfair, in the midst of this testosterone surge, to dismiss Stallone outright as a craftsman. At least he has an idea of how artists function. It is interesting, for instance, that he thought to temper the film with vague gestures towards feminism. Several key developments attempt to put every movie bad guy and misogynist in their place by sending the message that it is not okay to abuse women. Unlike the paint-by-the-numbers dullness of most other action films, Stallone is so hooked on his chosen genre that he isn’t afraid of occasional kookiness. Within the endless action scenes, the camera whirls over and gets shot at directly, or cuts abruptly to the point of view of a security camera being shot to static. As bizarre as it sounds to call Stallone a visual stylist, he at least has a grasp of how to cut things up, thrillingly.

Yet cutting things up thrillingly may be Stallone’s only actual cinematic skill. His morals and compassion don’t quite translate to artistry. The overall effect of The Expendables is a ludicrous story that the filmmakers clearly have poured their hearts in to; there is more than money at stake for them. But this translates, like Stallone’s paternal, weary persona, in to a way of being, not in to a skillfully made film. Here is a film that we like because it is, not because it does anything useful. Characters are under-developed, the plot starts predictable and stays that way and the film inevitably exhausts its hilarity by the end, turning a gun battle outside a large palace in to a set piece of boredom. Lord knows we will forget every single image in The Expendables in due time, because again, Stallone didn’t do anything useful for movies, he just did things effectively. He pulled it off by being him. Yet one gets the sense that he has never had any greater intent in his entire career. Judging by the expression on Stallone’s face, he knows he has always been a guy whose only skill is to cut things to pieces and then move on, hoping his limitations might somehow be transcended. He is like Buster Keaton minus the grace. He is a man who speaks for other men and that’s his way of making sense of life.

(Jason Stratham in The Expendables/Lionsgate Films)

Motion Studies: “Witness number 2: Trent”

 

Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) has some thrilling cuts. Chief among these cuts is a shot of Johnny Barret (Peter Breck) sitting on a bench in the corridor of the mental hospital he has committed himself to in order to pin the murderer of a patient in the kitchen. A catatonic man sits beside him, his arm forever raised in a half-salute to some invisible war commander. But in this shot, only his rigid hand is visible, outstretched as if pointing Johnny towards the culprit. Johnny looks to where the man points. Then there is the cut. A burst of horns accompany a sign that reads: “Integration and Democracy don’t mix. Go home, Nigger.”

            The sign is lowered to reveal the calm and convinced face of a young black man, Trent. He was the second witness to the murder, as Johnny’s voice over tells us. Naturally, it is shocking to see a black man holding this sign. But the visual curiosity undercuts the shock for the next few seconds. Trent’s black face is held in a dead-center profile, like the introduction to most other characters in this loony ensemble. His profile reminds us of a courageous portrait of a civil rights demonstrator, marching calmly against the tide of animosity. Except that Trent is marching against a gray background of white patients whose minds have long deserted them, wandering in and out on either side of the frame. A strip of white that lights the corridor recedes in to the background above Trent’s head. His dark face is an absolute contrast to this scene. It would be a moving image if we did not know that his sign read; “Go home, Nigger.”

            The cut is a great fact of film, a form of motion in itself. But what follows that cut must always sustain itself; live up to the cut, so to speak. What follows the cut to Trent’s sign in Shock Corridor could have been better if the music had not blared immediately and if Johnny had kept his voice-over introduction for later. Should Fuller have introduced the sick irony of the shot—the racist sign being held by a black man—after the stunning profile of Trent? Perhaps that would have sustained the shot better, adding a major element of surprise after the more subtle visual surprise. These are ways of arranging motion that directors must think of, but of course, they also have to think of the logical completion of the shot. The shot of Trent ends with him approaching Johnny. The camera has by now backed up some distance, and two orderlies come to either side of Trent to make sure he won’t act out. But the most interesting part of the end is the thing that doesn’t move at all and has stopped having any relevance on the direction of the scene. It is the catatonic soldier, still saluting, though he may as well be pointing the finger at every lunatic of the American experience trudging down this corridor.