Gateway Cinephiles

[Note: This essay contains NO significant spoilers.]

We drive up the motorway, the M1, listening in silence as the stories eventually change, as they move on to two and a half million unemployed, a job lost every two minutes, on to H Blocks and the Eastern Bloc, to a local woman who cut her own throat with a pair of electric hedge clippers.

‘Jesus,’ mutters Murphy as we approach Leeds. ‘What a fucking place.’

–David Peace, Nineteen Eighty

Every now and again, one comes across a film in which genuine aesthetic greatness might be thwarted by various defects in story or style, but which nonetheless works a curiously potent voodoo on the mind.  Such a film bores deep into the brainstem, filling one’s subsequent hours, days, and weeks with its unsettling visions and vibrations.  Such a film may not be a masterpiece under any levelheaded assessment, but that is precisely what renders its profoundly affecting character such a mystery, lending it a touch of the sublime.  Now that 2010 is drawing to a close, one work from this year’s relatively drab offerings stands out as a superlative example of this phenomenon, wherein a film’s peculiar emotional frequency resonates to a degree far out of proportion to its cinematic consequence. That work is Red Riding, a sprawling, perplexing 295-minute excavation of an earthbound Hell.  It is a film that has left me hollowed and haunted, unable to right my emotional life after months of cogitation and revisitation.

The Hebrew Scriptures refer to a place for the departed called Sheol, a chthonic region that the Psalmist describes as forgotten by God and cut off from His hand.  This is an apposite characterization of the setting of Red Riding, where a spiritual darkness pervades each sad little basement pub and lonely moorland hillock.  It is a place without hope: cruelty falls like the gray, ceaseless rain, while corruption seeps into every dwelling and every heart.  Netherworlds of such unrelenting bleakness are usually confined to the realms of fantasy, but this particular Sheol is terribly real, and its miserable adornments are all too familiar to anyone over thirty years of age. For Red Riding is a grim tale of 1970s and 1980s Yorkshire, and while the names and faces are slightly fictionalized, the feeling–the atmosphere of the North in this era of mortal terror and broken promises–is chillingly pristine.  This is the beguiling paradox that throbs at the heart of the film: Its towering, nearly overpowering mood of desolation transcends time and place, and yet to evoke this mood the filmmakers rely on a setting that is ruthless in its specificity.

David Peace knows this setting well.  Born in 1967 and raised in Ossett, West Yorkshire, Peace penned the four Red Riding novels on which Channel 4’s film adaptation is based, giving dread form to the woes that scuttled through the landscape of his childhood and adolescence. The novels are murky and rambling things, a fusion of crime thriller conventions and flashy modernism that never quite finds full-throated success in either sphere. Deep within this strange amalgamation, however, Peace unearths a mood as evocative and unsettling as anything in contemporary fiction, literary or otherwise.  The Red Riding quartet quivers with a despair so acute that submitting to Peace’s prose is an oddly exquisite experience, a plummet into an abyss whose dismal splendor and sheer scale can only be cherished from within.  The potency of the saga’s atmospherics is exceeded only by their remarkable endurance: across seven protagonists, nine years, and over 1,400 pages, Peace conveys an unremitting abhorrence for the world and everything it contains.

Screenwriter Tony Grisoni takes copious liberties with the narrative details of Peace’s desolate epic, above and beyond excising an entire novel (Nineteen Seventy-Seven, the second work in the quartet). Grisoni trims the cast significantly, although his adaptation retains ample characters to suit the film’s portrayal of widespread corruption and conspiracy. Roles are amalgamated or written out altogether, while events are rearranged, relocated, and repurposed. The elaborate alterations to the story provide ripe opportunity for an obsessive side-by-side comparison of novel and film, but such evaluation is wholly unnecessary.  To be sure, narrative detail is essential to Peace’s novels, as its accrual serves to convey the enormity and obscurity of the series’ malevolent world, amplifying the reader’s sense of vulnerability and powerlessness. However, Grisoni’s shrewd and outstanding adaptation comprehends that while the occurrence of complexity is essential to Red Riding, it is feasible to tinker with that complexity without diminishing the work’s power.

It is no shame to lose one’s way in the labyrinth of Red Riding, a dim realm cobbled together from muddy construction sites, dank bedrooms with peeling wallpaper, and gray corridors that buzz with fluorescent sickness.  In Peace’s novel Nineteen Eighty, a recurring line hints that the story’s density is not an obstacle course to be negotiated: On the dark stair, we miss our step. If our ankle turns on Red Riding’s countless sins–the bribes and blackmail, the blowjobs and betrayals, the rapes and murders, and the lies upon lies–we can take cold comfort in the fact that it is by design.  In imitation of our Virgils–Eddie Dunford (1974), Peter Hunter (1980), John Piggott, Maurice Jobson, and BJ (all 1983)–our expanding comprehension of this world’s dark contours requires that we lose our way, that we stumble and scrape our palms raw.  In its affection for a flurry of often bewildering detail, Red Riding echoes the stratagem of two late American masterpieces about real-world crimes, Oliver Stone’s JFK and David Fincher’s Zodiac.  The crucial thematic concerns of those films are not evident from a dry reading of the facts, but emerge only when the facts swirl about in an esoteric true-crime maelstrom (with a liberal dose of fiction). However, where JFK aims to give cinematic form to the conspiratorial mindset of modern American politics, and Zodiac offers an uneasy reproach to our collective need for concrete conclusions, Red Riding’s timbre is not political or psychological but fiercely existential.  It poses a world replete with madness and wickedness and asks: What can we do but scream?

Such angst-laden queries sprout with distressing ease in Peace’s Yorkshire, a land where the damp newspapers bleat of backhand deals, hunger strikes, and bloody ball-peen hammers.  Grisoni and the film’s three directors–Julian Jarrold (1974), James Marsh (1980), and Arnand Tucker (1983)–are all British natives or emigrants, and they are vigorously aware of the distinct, fearsome aura that Peace’s setting demands.  Indeed, the novelist is, in a sense, the film’s ambivalent, fearful auteur, and the success of Red Riding is due in no small part to how superbly the filmmakers translate the trappings and essence of Peace’s world to celluloid (or pixels, in Tucker’s case).  The Yorkshire of Red Riding is an exaggerated vision of the North–uglier, meaner, more rotten in its teeth and heart–but the amplification is slight. Within Red Riding’s warped boundaries, the jagged malaise of the Wilson and Thatcher years feels uncommonly genuine and urgent, bestowing on the film a formidable transporting quality that few period pieces can boast.  Sinking into the film’s abyssal folds renders the past decades of real-world history as little more than a dream.  Here, the Devil still cruises the M1 in a rusty Transit van, and the future is still awash in Soviet-born nuclear fire.

Setting is the central component of Red Riding’s dread spell, and the film’s sustained and persuasive attentiveness to place is all the more striking given that the three chapters employ distinct production designers (Christina Casali, Tom Burton, and Alison Dominitz) and cinematographers (Rob Hardy, Igor Martinovic, and David Higgs). The film’s spaces are familiar: sitting rooms, offices, pubs, restaurants, garages, holding cells, hotel rooms, hospital wards, alleyways, vacant lots.  More than mere backdrops, these spaces comprise a visual vocabulary of menace and desperation. “All great buildings resemble crimes, they say,” Yorkshire Post reporter Barry Gannon (Anthony Flanagan) muses provocatively, but in Red Riding every building seems to be a transgression wrought in cheap laminate, linoleum, aluminum, and concrete.  Every room is drained and shabby, yellow with cigarette smoke, full of worn, chipped furnishings to accommodate worn, chipped souls.  Fissures–visible and invisible–run through everything, even Shangri-La, the lavishly designed abode of construction magnate John Dawson (Sean Bean).  Hideous, modern buildings loom over the landscape, monolithic testaments to the foolish sanguinity of yesterday. Rain-slick motorways snake over the lonely moors, stitching together grimy cities and shitty little towns, while in the distance nuclear cooling towers belch Christ-only-knows-what into slate skies.  In surveying these sights, one gradually becomes sensitive to the peculiar black magic of Red Riding: the cruel fidelity of its vision establishes that we are in a real place, and yet the stench of Purgation is everywhere.

Nearly as essential are the visages of the vast ensemble cast.  Many of the performers seem to have been tapped solely on the basis of their expressive eyes, brows, or lips. Critics might justly dismiss the casting of the film for its reliance on expedient shorthand in lieu of deeper characterization, but given the vast and multifaceted character of Red Riding’s tale, the faces and voices provide a vital means of orienting the viewer.  They are landmarks in a sea wracked by confusion and alienation: Dawson’s menacing smirk; Bill Malloy’s (Warren Clarke) bullfrog scowl; Jack Whitehead’s (Eddie Marsan) splendid sneer; Michael Myskin’s (Daniel Mays) doughy countenance and slack grin; Martin Laws’ (Peter Mullan) twinkling eyes; Bob Craven’s (Sean Harris) oily mustache on a weasel mug; BJ’s (Robert Sheehan) uneasy scoffs and glances. Then there are the women, who all wear the same expression of apprehension and simmering bitterness, the look that eventually settles over the faces of all Yorkshire lasses after hearing the same hissed words–”cow,” “slag,” “bitch,” “whore”–relentlessly, day after miserable day, year after miserable year. Observing the women, one can see how such a place could birth the Ripper: the way Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall) pulls her thin sweater over her thin frame; the way Helen Marshall (Maxine Peake) is perpetually averting her eyes; the way Libby Hall (Julia Ford) inclines her head and smiles a little too quickly.  Red Riding is too immense and impressionistic to qualify as a “performance film,” and yet every one of its performers seems remarkably attuned to the tale’s dense, pungent miasma. Every sideways look and nervous swallow, every heaving sigh and spitting retort contributes to the verisimilitude of the setting, if not the story.

What of the story, then? It is a dizzying thing, resistant to the sort of forensic scrutiny that the Yorkshire detectives might apply, where they not complicit in the tale’s ghastly crimes.  Like the policemen in David Simon’s episodic urban tragedy The Wire–whose glacial, accretive narrative and moral ambiguity mark it as a cousin to Red Riding–one might sketch an organizational chart for the film and populate it with names, places, dates, crimes, even tidbits of evidence in tiny plastic bags.  No earth-shattering revelation would be forthcoming from such an exercise, however. By the conclusion of Red Riding, one knows (with some uncertainty) who extorted whom, who molested whom, and who murdered whom, but there is no shock or outrage, merely a vague sense that what has come to pass is terrible, just as everything that happens in this forsaken Yorkshire is terrible. Even Christmas, it turns out, is full of raging fires and moldering corpses.

Moreover, should one persist in sketching those lines of connection and then take a step back, one would discover that the arrows and names have encompassed the whole hideous world. Somewhere, an arrow will point to each of us.  As Barry Gannon declares, “Everything’s linked. Show me two things that aren’t connected. Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), evincing the sort of naïveté that is the singular province of the hot-blooded and the ambitious, claims that he cares about the murder of children, not shady real estate deals and political corruption. (”If it bleeds, it leads.”)  Spotlessly clean Manchester copper Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) goes to Leeds with crystal-clear mission parameters: expose the Yorkshire police blunders that have permitted the Ripper to butcher thirteen women.  Each of these men suffers form the delusion that their search for the truth can be constrained by boundaries, even as Red Riding proves time and again that borders are mutable and porous.  On the dark stair, we miss our step, stumbling across borders without even realizing it.

Eddie and Hunter are too heedlessly zealous and too convinced of their own righteousness to penetrate Yorkshire’s bulwarks.  It is no accident that the truth is finally cracked open by defeated, self-loathing lawyer John Piggott (Mark Addy), a man the North has ground down to a wad of sweaty nothing, and by crooked detective Maurice “The Owl” Jobson (David Morrissey), who sold his soul so long ago that its fresh stirrings seem like the slurred rumblings of a drunken enemy. Piggott and Jobson–and poor, wounded BJ–understand what Eddie and Hunter cannot. All of Yorkshire’s sins are connected, and they all sprout from the same place: the Red Riding, a spiritual wasteland not found any map of the county, ancient or modern.  It leaves its traces on greasy takeaway wrappers and sticky skin magazines. It bubbles up wherever a weary mother catalogs fresh drywall dents and bruises; wherever unlucky hustlers taste concrete and broken teeth; wherever wicked men gather to raise glasses to their venality and greed, as though such failings were gleaming medals.

Viewers with little patience for unrelenting gloom may be skeptical of Red Riding’s worth as a work of entertainment. The films relies upon the tropes and patterns of crime thrillers, but nothing in its formal or thematic character suggests a whodunit gewgaw unfolding for our pulse-quickening titillation. This is not cinema as diversion, but a five-hour hymn to the awfulness of the world, with little in the way of nuance or qualification.  What distinguishes Red Riding from the thickheaded nihilism embraced by most contemporary horror films (or, for that matter, underlying most Hollywood fare) is the sheer poetry of its grim vision.  It is the most engrossing and haunting kind of art, in which loveliness is not a conspicuous surface feature but an emergent phenomenon, the product of foul raw materials that do not suggest such potential.  Admittedly, Red Riding’s loveliness is the blackest sort conceivable, but it is loveliness just the same.  Grisoni’s adaptation alters the unbearably bleak conclusion of Peace’s novels, providing some semblance of release and salvation for the characters, but the message of Red Riding is not that happy endings can still occur in this fallen world. Rather, the film’s meaning is revealed by the very existence of the film: even in Sheol, there is splendor.

The sublime brilliance of Ethan and Joel Coen’s A Serious Man hinges on how seamlessly the brothers blend the film’s absurdist comedic elements with its grave, even despairing ruminations on sin, mystery, and revelation. It’s a film in which the broad silliness of a stoned bar mitzvah can co-exist comfortably alongside a devastatingly affecting moment of brotherly love. A Serious Man’s spirit is distinctly comical, but the dense, perceptive script favors moments that are funny because they hurt, with the pain often resulting from an emotional mangling. Larry Gopnik’s velvet steamrolling by his wife Judith and her creepy-avuncular paramour Sy at the ludicrously incongruous Ember’s (not the forum for legalities) is hilarious in the way that a grand piano landing on Donald Duck is hilarious. Both contain a glimmer of self-satisfied relief: “Thank God I’m not so stupid as to let something like that happen to me!” Unlike most comedies, however, A Serious Man presents questions that are genuinely vexing, and shares with us pains that are profoundly felt. It is a story, contra our confidence that we are more assertive and discerning than Larry, about the universality of calamity and the philosophical and spiritual agonies that often flow from personal ruin. [Spoilers below.]

Most explications of the film’s story have taken note of its similarities to the biblical story of Job, and, indeed, the film includes a few overt allusions to that tale (more on that later). However, in the original story, Job was an exceedingly prosperous and righteous man, and the momentum for Satan’s wager with God was his cynical suspicion that a man would abandon the latter if deprived of the former. Larry Gopnik, as the Brothers themselves have pointed out, is neither especially prosperous nor especially righteous. His middle-class success, although it represents the sort of sweeping absorption into the majority culture that would have been unthinkable to the shtetl-dwellers in the film’s prologue, is purely middle-of-the-road in the context of 1960s America. Meanwhile, Larry’s faith is strictly of the “only-on-holidays” stripe, a cultural marker rather than a way of living. Prayer never crosses his mind, and he has to be prompted by a family friend to even seek out the temple’s rabbis for advice when troubles start to swallow his life.

Like the characters in the film, we have no knowledge of what, if any, cosmic bets are driving Larry’s travails. (There are no privileged scenes of gods playing chess as in Clash of the Titans, or of angelic exposition as in It’s a Wonderful Life.) Larry’s sheer ordinariness and the absence of any God’s-eye view leaves us to wonder, as our hapless protagonist does, just what his misfortunes mean. This, of course, is the tension that powers the film, and A Serious Man is, in essence, the Brothers’ theodicy piece. It confronts what theologians term the Problem of Evil: If God is all-good and all-powerful, then why do bad things happen? The dilemma would more accurately described (with a Buddhist spin) as the Problem of Suffering, as it is concerned not only with malevolent acts, but also the panoply of Bad Stuff that can befall us, from root canals to tsunamis. Monotheistic theology generally forestalls a karmic rationale for misfortune: not every stubbed toe and dribble of bird shit on the car can be traced back to a particular sin. Larry’s mantra–”I didn’t do anything!”–is therefore somewhat misplaced. As his conversations with the rabbis make clear, the salient question is what, if anything, God is trying to communicate to him through his miseries.

Catholic priest Robert Barron points out in his video commentary on A Serious Man (hat tip: Jim Emerson) that the characters in the film dwell in a world where the existence of God and his involvement in humanity are accepted as foregone conclusions. Larry’s quest is to discern the presumed meaning in his misfortunes; no one suggests to him that his misfortunes have no meaning and that God is not behind them. Put less delicately, no one remarks that shit just happens. The film is thus a piece about people of faith and how they confront adversity, although it is by no means a film solely for them. In this, A Serious Man reveals itself as a religious companion to No Country For Old Men. The latter film pulls a stunning fake-out in its third act, as what seemed like a pitch-perfect thriller centered on Llewellyn Moss abruptly diverges into a harrowing lament by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. Through the lawman’s despair, the film confronts the problem of how a world filled with unfathomable evil and terrible injustice can be navigated without God. A Serious Man is the religious reverse of this coin, focused instead on a man for whom faithlessness is not feasible (it’s not even within the universe of possibilities presented to him, really). In contrast to No Country’s absence of meaning–that film ultimately rejects Ed Tom’s “signs and wonders” and Chigurh’s destiny–A Serious Man assumes the significance of earthly events, although it is never clearly asserts whether the meaning of those events can be divined by mere humans.

I’m not religious, and I’m still struggling with why exactly A Serious Man had such a profound effect on me. I think it’s because Larry’s plight resonates as a truly universal experience, one that should be familiar to all viewers, whether devout, apostate, or indifferent. We’ve all had days (or weeks, or months, or years…) when it seems as though the universe is taking a colossal dump on us, when we feel like we’re getting kicked while we’re down. There’s a natural impulse, whatever our beliefs, to ask “Why?” when misfortune lands with a thud on our heads. (Although not so much when positive things come along; curious, that.) Fundamentally, A Serious Man is about the search for answers. Not in the abstract manner of greybeard philosophers, but the raw need of someone who has been bloodied and battered by one calamity after another. Whether that search for answers is pointless, misguided, or underlain by erroneous assumptions, that doesn’t detract from the film’s potent evocation of the sensation of that all-too-common crisis state.

Still, my approach to A Serious Man is predominantly an irreligious one, and from such an angle I regard the film’s recurring motif to be failure: the failure of Larry’s beloved physics or his neglected faith to provide answers; the failure to accept that there may not be an answer; the failure to hear or heed messages; the failure to act to prevent calamities big and small. To my eye, the film possesses a palpable cynicism regarding the utility of that “deep well of tradition” so glowingly described by Larry’s friend, as our poor schlemiel protagonist ultimately discovers that the rabbis (the ones who will even deign to see him) only answer his questions with airy quips and more questions. Most films portray religion as a character trait that signifies uprightness, sincerity, or, more rarely, bigotry. Few films are willing to call out the broader phenomenon of religion out as a big pile of nothing, sucking up its adherents’ money and time in return for worthless bromides.

That said, the Coens obviously have a lot of nostalgic affection for Jewish traditions and sensibilities. Despite the film’s flabbergasted stance towards the rabbis and the apparent uselessness of their advice, Father Barron is correct in that the Coens also include moments that seem to validate (or at least call back to) that advice. As hollow as Rabbi Scott’s parking lot sentiments might be, it’s undeniable that a “change in perspective” plays a significant role in the film at select points.  It’s evoked literally in Larry’s rooftop aerial adjustments–an attempt, pointedly enough, to pick up an incoming message–which provides him with a glimpse into Mrs. Samsky’s libertine world. Larry’s and Danny’s pot-smoking also represents a kind of chemical change in perspective. And in one of the film’s most emotionally potent moments, Larry is gobsmacked with the realization that his brother regards him as a profoundly blessed man. (Was there an actor’s moment in 2009 more devastating that Richard Kind’s blubbering wail, “Hashem hasn’t given me shit!”?) This isn’t to say that Father Scott is “right”; his advice is so bland and obvious that Larry could just as easily have arrived at it himself. It’s just that the Coens, in their inimitable way, are loathe to dismiss the words of any of their characters, no matter how repugnant or foolish. (Look at how easily the Dude picks up words and phrases from those around him in The Big Lebowski, whether they are friends or enemies, intellectuals or lackwits.)

The ambiguity regarding the rabbis–are they empty vessels or founts of wisdom?–of course reflects the film’s emphatic preoccupation with mystery and uncertainty. Physicist Larry, who “understands the math,” knows that we can’t ever really know anything, but he has failed to internalize the lesson of Schrödinger cat and apply it to his everyday reality. Most of us, like Clive, can wrap our heads around the alive/not-alive cat (sort of), but would quickly become lost in Larry’s voluminous, arcane equations, which serve as his own secular kabbalah, only slightly less obscure than Arthur’s Mentaculus. Larry, meanwhile, admits that he doesn’t understand the cat’s dual state, just as he can’t accept that Clive both did and did not attempt to bribe him (”You can’t have it both ways!”). Larry has been agitated by the mystery of his own misfortunes, and unlike Dr. Sussman, he can’t just let go and get back to his life.

Larry might crave answers, but we repeatedly see that he is willfully deaf to messages. His secretary hands him messages from Sy and Columbia Records, but he disregards them until the consequences come home to roost. He seems to have had entire conversations with Judith that he barely recalls, and is only vaguely aware of the overwhelming signals that she has evidently been broadcasting for some time (”I begged you to see the rabbi!”). Even his television aerial is unable to pick up the one program that his son obsesses over, F-Troop. (That show, incidentally, featured the advice-dispensing Chief Wild Eagle, who, echoing the rabbis of the film, was full of vague Indian sayings that he rarely understood himself.) When Columbia Records finally track Larry down, he at first denies his identity, then hotly rejects the monthly selection, Santana’s Abraxas. Knowing that “abraxas” is a Gnostic title for a god or other primeval entity renders Larry’s vehement refusal all the more stinging: “I do not want Abraxas, I do not need Abraxas, and I will not listen to Abraxas.”

This refusal to listen highlights Larry’s most essential flaw: his lack of attention to his own life. At first glance, the film presents Larry as a pathetic victim, on whom a spate of terrible misfortunes are inflicted through no fault of his own. However, many aspects of Larry’s situation stem from his own inaction and lack of assertiveness. He permits those around him to step all over him, and his feeble attempts to resist only render him all the more pathetic, a milquetoast who practically asks for others to shove him aside. Time and again, he is presented with opportunities to take command of his situation–with his wife, children, Arthur, Clive, Mr. Brandt, and particularly Sy–only to let such openings slip through his fingers. Larry’s statement of blamelessness, “I didn’t do anything!,” becomes one of inaction, “I didn’t do anything!” This shift in meaning is hinted at by Larry himself when he admits that he has not published or performed any research as a professor. And, as the Columbia Records fellow explains, one can, in fact, incur debts by doing nothing. The infernal dybbuk is invited into one’s house by a lapse in the duty to sit shiva for a departed soul; similarly, Larry invites all kinds of terrible things into his life by his sins of omission, by his negligence towards the integrity of his own life.

The final scenes of the film invite an inevitable question: Is the phone call from Larry’s doctor, intruding at the very moment that he changes Clive’s grade, a message from God, a indirect punishment for his trespass. Is the tornado bearing down on Danny an extension of God’s retribution, a cruel instance of the sins of the father being visited upon the son? Despite the link the Coens establish between Larry’s actions and his (presumably) dire medical news, I think the Brothers are playing with us a bit. Elsewhere, the film makes it clear that the juxtaposition of an action and an event has no particular significance (or perhaps simply a significance that is forever beyond our ken). Again, Larry does not live in a karmic universe. We should draw no inferences between his decision to accept Clive’s bribe and the phone call / tornado. (One could even argue that Larry is indeed “helping others” as Rabbi Nachtner urged, in that he is helping Clive avoid the loss of his scholarship, a probable expulsion, and deep family shame.) The arrival of a grim prognosis, just after Larry’s happiest day in weeks, is not a divine sign, but merely an unfortunately timed example of the cosmos’ random indifference. Cancer doesn’t care whether we’re having a good day or a bad day. It simply is. Like a tornado, it is one the “evils” that theodicy must account for in this world. As Danny stands outside his school, his determination to do the right thing and pay his debt to Fagle (and thereby avoid a beating, not incidentally) fades at the sight of nature’s fury. Moral duty diminishes in the face of such uncanny chaos, and we are reminded of God speaking to Job from within a whirlwind. If God truly exists in the world of A Serious Man, he is speaking to Danny through the tornado. It is not a direct communication, but a stark demonstration that Danny’s preoccupations–money, weed, television, his radio, even the Torah–are paltry in the grand scheme of things. For all the harrowing despair roiling in those final images, it in fact represents a mellowing of the film’s indictments. Larry is responsible for much of his plight, but what we can control in our lives is far outweighed by that which we cannot control. That fearsome funnel cloud epitomizes the universe at its most capricious and destructive, and highlights the fragile character of human life. The threat of the tornado urges us, paradoxically enough, to relax. It’s out of our hands.

It took about forty-eight hours for me to tumble to the fact that Quentin Tarantino’s superb Nazi-stomping fantasy, Inglourious Basterds would occupy a niche similar to Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York and the Coens’ No County for Old Men did in 2008 and 2007, respectively.  That is, while it may not be the best film of the year, it has prompted me to a greater quantity and deeper quality of reflection than any other cinematic offering of recent vintage.  Happily, it took only a week or so for me to discover that Basterds has also provoked a comparable level of deliberation from just about every American film writer and blogger worth a damn (not that I count myself among that number.)  The poobahs of my favored haunts—Glenn Kenny, Tim Brayton, Jim Emerson, Kevin J. Olson, Charles Bowen Jr., Sam Juliano–and their commenters are all in fine form, whether their assessment is positive or negative.  However, a particular shout-out needs to go to Dennis Cozzalio of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule and Bill R.of The Kind of Face You Hate, who have offered up a meticulous, marathon exchange about the film (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). The tone of their back-and-forth has been unabashedly gushing (as it should be), but the conversation has nonetheless been vigorous, enlightening, and often pointed, especially where the film’s lonely detractors are concerned.

In that spirit, I want to expand on some thoughts that have been rattling around in my cranium since I authored my review, particularly since I’ve now had a chance to view Basterds for a second time and also to peruse a fraction of the excellent commentary that’s been pouring forth from the Internet’s tubes. [SPOILERS AHEAD]

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Many pixels are being expended on the topic of Inglourious Basterds’ morality, or lack thereof.  Interestingly enough, the furor seems to be as much about the response of some critics (*cough* Jeffrey Wells *cough*) to the film’s violence as it is about Tarantino’s own notorious inscrutability on the matter.  I find myself mostly sharing Dennis Cozzalio’s stance on this, which is to say that my own feelings about Basterds’ violence are comprised of a heaping helping of giddy enthusiasm with a twinge of nagging discomfort.  However, while I can’t say that I share Bill R.’s full-throated enthusiasm for the film’s violence, his commentary on the topic has prompted me to examine my own reactions to Basterds more carefully.  I still stand by my assessment that the gleeful bloodthirstiness of the Basterds’ “work” (and Shosanna’s revenge scheme, to a lesser degree) has an undercurrent of moral ambiguity.  I can’t deny that I feel some uneasiness at the prospect of reveling in the execution and mutilation of German enlisted men and civilians.  Is it telling that I never had so much as a twinge of remorse for the eighty-eight (or so) ninja bodyguards that The Bride mercilessly hacked her way through in Kill Bill, Volume 1, even though many of them were guilty of nothing more than fervent loyalty to their mistress?  Perhaps this distinction depends on the particular cartoonish quality to Kill Bill’s violence in the House of Blue Leaves sequence, but I think there’s something else going on.

Nazi stories seem to have a particular capacity for evoking considerations of violence, culpability, and racism.  I suspect that when confronted with the swastika in either a historical or fictional context, any person will dwell, however briefly, on their own morality, and how easily human beings set aside decency in the name of tribalism, jingoism, and pure sadism.  Of course, in a film like Inglourious Basterds, this has the effect of prompting second thoughts about wishing violence on the very monsters that prompted those second thoughts in the first place.  Tarantino equivocates quite a bit about this in the film.  He coaxes us to whoop with delight as Nazis are machine-gunned and roasted alive, even as he presents us with a Nazi audience…whooping with delight as Allied soldiers are picked off like rabbits on screen at the Nation’s Pride premiere.  It’s hard not to feel a little sting at the comparison.  On the other hand, there’s Shosanna’s fate, wherein her momentary pity for Zoller gets her brutally murdered.  This suggests that whatever hesitation we feel for dishing out punishment to the deserving is softhearted folly, and likely to have nasty consequences for us.  No doubt some authoritarian-minded Neanderthal will latch onto this as a validation for contemporary American warmongering and torture, but Tarantino has never been so overtly political.  His provocations are far deeper, striking at the intersection of pop culture and unexamined social values.  Bottom line, I don’t think that Tarantino is offering any easy messaging in Basterds, certainly nothing in the vein of Death Proof’s rather uncluttered (yet still misconstrued) indictment of misogyny and male entitlement.

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One thing that struck me square between the eyes on a second viewing is how much Inglourious Basterds is interested in celebrity, as a plot point, motif, and theme.  Consider that nearly every major character in the film—with the conspicuous exception of Shosanna—is well-known in certain circles.  Aldo Raine, Donny Donowitz, Hugo Stiglitz, Hans Landa, Fredrick Zoller, Bridget von Hammersmark, and even Smithson “The Little Man” Utivich are all celebrities in one way or another, and much of the film’s intrigues are related to their identities and reputations.  And, of course, the film also includes the real-world figures of the Third Reich.  This current of celebrity is consistent with Tarantino’s filmography, which has often been concerned with identity, and especially with its capacity to bestow power on the one hand and to confine and suffocate on the other.  Tarantino’s exploration of identify achieved its pinnacle in Kill Bill, wherein a wronged woman’s road to vengeance becomes an exploration of the self, but it can also be observed as a major component of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

While Tarantino’s characters have always been larger than life, he’s never before trafficked in a cast of characters that is consistently renowned within their own universe.  This is more than appropriate, given Inglourious Basterds’ conspicuous fixation on cinema.  Andrew Dominik’s casting of Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was a self-consciously clever feat that paid significant dramatic dividends, and Tarantino seems to be playing a related game here by tapping the tabloid darling to portray Aldo Raine.  Yet, consistent with his prankster spirit, the director casts Pitt not as the steely man of war, but as a broadly comical good ol’ boy, and not even in the lead at that!

Few commentators have observed that the Basterds’ questioning of their Nazi captives in Chapter 2 is a callback to Hans Landa’s interrogation of LaPadite in Chapter 1, and moreover that both confrontations hinge on the characters’ reputations and infamy.  Landa seems genuinely interested in whether LePadite knows of him, and specifically whether his moniker, “the Jew-Hunter,” is known to the dairy farmer.  Likewise Aldo Raine asks his Nazi prisoner if he has heard of Donny, Hugo, and Aldo himself.  Both scenes also hinge on the subject giving up some vital piece of information, although the threat of violence is much more explicit for the Nazis the Basterds have under their thumbs.  It’s a bold twinning, as it overtly links the menace that Landa cultivates about himself with the fear that the Basterds aim to inspire among the Germans ranks.  While Tarantino is drawing a line of connection between Landa and Raine, and therefore critiquing his own (and our own) glee at the Basterds’ brutal methods, he’s not really posing the comparison as a moral equivalency.  This is made clear late in the film, when Landa expresses a kind of professional respect for Raine, and seems crestfallen when the American lieutenant fails to exhibit a reciprocal admiration.  Raine won’t, of course, because he’s a practical sort, and not preoccupied with abstractions like honor.  More significantly, Raine regards Landa as a moral monster, and therefore he is undeserving of any respect at all.

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Mélanie Laurent has received a lot of attention—and deservedly so—but can we talk for a moment about the luminous Diane Kruger and her portrayal of Bridget von Hammersmark?  Kruger was colorless eye candy as Helen of Troy in Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 swords-and-sandals epic, and apparently she’s been a recurring character in those National Treasure films, which I’ve studiously avoided.  Certainly, I had seen nothing that prepared me for her deliriously captivating performance in Basterds.  Tarantino deserves credit for scripting Bridget as one of the most fascinating and most precisely drawn characters in the film, and also for his well-established ability to bring out the best in his performers.  Let’s not short-change Kruger, however.  She slips effortlessly into the role of a 1940s screen diva, right down to the poised yet relaxed way she perches on her chair with cigarette and coquettish smirk.  Kruger is the picture of Teutonic sparkle, but the allure of Bridget isn’t simply due to the actress’ appropriation of the Marlene Dietrich look.  Watch the whirl of emotions that Kruger permits to peek from beneath Bridget’s mask of droll, eager-to-please sweetness.  Listen to her carefully during the now-notorious tavern scene, and you’ll see how cunning and fearless Bridget is, and also how apparent it is that Archie Hicox and the Basterds, not her, are the ones who let their anxiety get the better of them.  Every step of the way through that scene, Bridget attempts in vain to keep the Allied spies from panicking, to maintain a sense of calm and even warmth.  It’s not so much that Bridget is a good liar—I don’t think she is—but that she knows how to use her looks, her charisma, her fame, and her audience’s expectations to her advantage, to smooth out things that might otherwise look suspicious.  And, good Lord, what a death scene!  If any viewer harbored a speck of sympathy for Landa, surely his unusually graphic strangulation of Bridget banished it?  (The slaughter of the Dreyfus family should have, but no matter…)  Forget the re-writing of history: Tarantino exhibits epic chutzpah in presenting an act so violent and overtly misogynistic without flinching from it.  Only the brutal daylight stabbings in Fincher’s Zodiac have come close in recent memory to banishing the sex appeal of fictional violence.

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Wandering outside the film blogging world for commentary on recent releases is always an enterprise fraught with peril, but Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has long been providing consistently enlightening insights into pop culture from a feminist perspective amid her postings on reproductive rights and other issues.  It was Amanda’s take on Death Proof that got me to appreciate its sexual politics, and has had a strong influence on the way I approach the film.  Her assessment of Inglourious Basterds is no less enlightening, and while her writing at Pandagon is in the conversational style of political blogging, she uses the mode she’s familiar with to raise some interesting points.  Most fascinating in my mind is Zoller’s embodiment of the Nice Guy archetype that has long been an object of discussion among socially-minded Third Wave feminists.  Tarantino addressed the Nice Guy phenomenon with a gentler hand in Death Proof, but Zoller represents a much more frank repudiation of the obsequious, resentful sexist.  The Shosanna-Zoller subplot seems designed to resonate with any woman who has ever had to parry a sycophant who refused to take “No” for an answer.  The rather unfair characterization of Tarantino as a purveyor of a hyper-masculine sensibility has also been a stubborn one, to the point where four (or five) consecutive films featuring assertive female protagonists have been insufficient to dispel it.  Although not all of these films pass the Bechdel Test, I suspect it’s Tarantino’s obsession with genre and his awestruck attitude toward female sexuality that ultimately hinder him being taking seriously as a male ally of feminism.  That said, notice how sympathetic Basterds is to Shosanna’s utterly no-nonsense stance towards Zoller.  She never gives him an inch, and Zoller’s frustration builds until his underlying entitlement boils over into violent rage.  The viewer never really trusts Zoller either, and not just because he’s a Nazi and a Goebbels protege.  It’s the false modesty during his early scenes that made my Spidey-Sense tingle, if only because it’s so unusual to see a character take such a stance in a Tarantino film.  The trait that seems to hold for almost all of Tarantino’s characters is their swagger, whether warranted or not.  Who was the last modest Tarantino character?  Poor Marvin from Pulp Fiction?  This more than anything signaled to me that Zoller’s initial “humility” about his fame was a disingenuous strategy to impress Shosanna.  And, again, what does Shosanna’s momentary softening for the schmuck get her?  A brutal, agonizing death.  As much as Shossan’s ugly demise seems an affirmation of the film’s merciless Nazi-snuffing, it equally represents a warning never to let your guard down around your creepy wannabe-boyfriend.

This week I’ve been embroiled in a lively discussion at The Film Doctor regarding Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, a film that has risen to a personal pinnacle among last year’s cinematic offerings since I first experienced it in November. Perhaps unsurprisingly, mulling over Synecdoche’s intricacies with other commentators—who are generally cooler to the film’s bitter pleasures than I—has been helpful in evolving and solidifying my own views. There’s enough to chew on in Synecdoche to occupy one well into the gumming years, but for now I just want to offer a few post-scripts to my initial review of the film. [VERY MILD SPOILERS AHEAD.]

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1. While Synecdoche, New York addresses depression with a bracing forthrightness, it’s increasingly apparent to me with each viewing that it is not, in any sense, a depressing film experience. There seems to be a temptation to label any film that takes up timeless, “negative” themes such as mortality, failure, and loss as intrinsically dismal, but such shorthand does a disservice to the efforts of those artists who deign to work with such moribund clay. Shouldn’t it matter what a film has to say about mortality, failure, and loss, and how it says it? This is where Synecdoche gets its goofy, ghastly fingers into me. Rather than a mere two-hour repetition of the fact that Things End, it emerges as a harsh indictment of those trapped within ridiculous loops woven from this self-evident sentiment. My personal struggles with such snares render Kaufman’s accusatory finger—crooked and mischievous through it may be—as an especially stinging critic. However, Synecdoche offers a balm: It’s not just about you. Through the peculiar telepathy of cinema, I know with some certainty that Kaufman struggles with such despair as well. It doesn’t end there: Synecdoche presents a message of universal suffering–“This is everyone’s experience. Every single one.”–and therefore the possibility of universal love.

To elaborate: One of the Synecdoche’s primary effects is to jolt the viewer into a recognition of the overwhelming magnitude of the human dilemma of transience, to remind us that it is a human dilemma, not your dilemma. Caden only understands this imperfectly. He calls attention to his cast’s mortality to satisfy his own ego and sorrow-addled sadism. (Especially that cutting amendment, “[E]ach of us secretly believing we won’t [die]”.) He’s not commiserating with his performers out of compassion, or even acknowledging their humanity. Given the potency of our own traumas and disappointments, as felt from within the oubliette of our skulls, it’s easy to forget (or ignore) that every other person feels their own traumas and disappointments just as keenly. The isolation we feel within our suffering is illusory. And so a remarkably Buddhist sentiment surfaces within Kaufman’s film: By clinging to our misery as if it were unique, we only deepen our misery. By instead reaching out to embrace the misery of others, to make it our own, and pursue its diminishment as fervently as we pursue the diminishment of our own, we might create a connection, an artery through which a spiritual palliative can flow, sweetening our brief time in the world.

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2. Over at FilmDoctor, I noted that Kaufman, like David Lynch, has a spooky flair for shaping his cinematic worlds according to dream-logic, a talent I describe as an “intuition for intuition.” I never sense that Kaufman’s surreal visuals or jumbled narratives represent a contemptuous weirdness for weirdness’ sake. Not that the reason for every odd jot up on the screen is immediately apparent, but where films like Synecdoche and Mulholland Drive succeed is in striking a consistent aura of aptness, whatever bizarre tongue they choose to speak. Caden’s complaint about Madeleine Gravis’ self-help book (“I’m not really getting it”) and Madeleine’s response (“Oh, but it’s getting you”) could be an exchange between myself and Kaufman. Given the intense, intuitive character of both Synecdoche’s stimuli and my own responses, it’s impossible for me to adequately articulate why exactly the film works as art.

Is this just a cop-out? Is it a hand-waving means to avoid a fair-minded, clear-eyed examination of the film’s flaws? Fair enough. Yet it seems significant that a dense exegesis of the film is possible not merely due to the presence of its staggering detail, but the arrangement of that detail and the manner in which the characters interact with it. It’s easy to dismiss a work as vast and perplexing as Synecdoche as a disjointed hodge-podge simply because it doesn’t effortlessly coalesce into a neat package at a certain angle, like some Magic Eye picture. Yet dreams don’t conform to this expectation, so why should a film do so when it so plainly strives for an oneiric sensibility? Internet forums such as those at IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes are littered with viewers who ostensibly enjoyed Synecdoche, but are oddly obsessed with discerning some secret talisman that will unlock its mysteries, an answer that will snap all of its peculiarities into focus. Lynch himself gave voice to this compulsive need to quest for a skeleton key, when in an early episode of Twin Peaks, Agent Dale Cooper coins the slogan: “Crack the code, solve the crime.” Of course, Lynch and his partners (and adversaries) on that seminal show went on to metaphorically bash Coop’s teeth in for presuming that a solution could be had by a sufficiently meticulous reading. Art is not a cryptogram, and vice-versa.

This is why the frustrated questions that seem to stem from Synecdoche’s surreal particulars—“Why the burning house?”—lack easy answers, or at least easy answers that are not simultaneously misleading on some level. There is no grand solution buried deep in Synecdoche’s mordant heart, but rather a plethora of truths, some observational, some instructive, that are underlined and bolded every time one scratches at a given detail, often uncovering hidden, gilded layers.

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3. One final note: Manohla Dargis’ intensely personal review and Roger Ebert’s stream-of-consciousness “anti-review” have received a lot of attention, but if you haven’t read Nick Davis’ vast, superlative treatment of Synecdoche yet, do so now.