There are a few movies in which machines take over the earth. In the "Terminator" series of movies, the machines get so bolshy that they decied to wipe out those irrational humans. In other films however, such as the recent Disney film "WALL-E," the machines take over, but they attempt to have the best interests of humans at heart. They are continuing to obey one of the laws of robotics, or some such.
Okay...let us say that at some point in the future, machines have taken over. They run human society. They make the laws and policies, and they make them in such a way as to make us humans happy. After a lot of experimentation the machines find that human happiness is something that we don't get used to easily. It needs practice (would you agree?). Upon this observation, and with a view to the fact that resources for producing happiness are limited, the machines decide that rather than giving humans a mediocre life for all of their lives, it is best to give us humans a period of happiness and a period of relative suffering. The machines decide that humans should spend a period of their lives that has quite a lot of suffering, and a period of our lives that is fairly happy. Bearing in mind that it takes a while to get used to happiness, the machines decide that it would be best to diivide human life (or lifespan) in the middle and make one half of it happy and one half of it more painful. So the machines decide that since learning how to have fun takes a while, and providing the resources for people to have fun requires effort, the cut human life (about 70 years) in the middle and decide that one half will contain work and the other half will contain play.
But then the machines reach a disagreement about which half should contain the work and which half should contain the play? Which would you rather?
Some of the machines decide that giving the young folk the fun time is a good idea. They reason that by so doing, young people will havve a great time and then in the second half of their lives while they are working and suffering they will be able to look back and remember the great time they had, and work to provide the great time that they experienced for the next gneeration.
Some of the machines decide that giving older people the good time is the way to go. They reason that if people suffer while they are young then it won't be so bad because they will know that they have good times ahead of them.
The little Prince travels the solar system to find that "adults" are all caught up in one thing or another. I guess I am caught up in a theory, that we think in words and images, and that we exist at their intersection. It is from that (Lacanian??!) perspective that I watched Los Cronocrimenes. It seemed to me that the film articulated the stages of Lacanian development of the ego. I believe that we have a self by virtue of the fact that we reflect upon ourselves, or represent ourselves in two ways - visually and linguistically.
Contra this claim, a Russian thinker, in common with many Western perspectives, claims that the animal mind is like a mirror, and as a mirror it can not reflect itself. Whereas the human mind, has another mirror, that of language, it is our ability to mirror ourselves, name ourselves in language that enables us to have self reflexivity, a self.
The Russian is drawing our attention to two types of self relection - that of a mirror and that of language, and yet encouraging us to forget one of them. The mirror of language, he argues, is powerful. It allows the looking glass mirror to function. The visual mirror is nothing on its own. Even animals have them. The ability to reflect visually is a given, something that requires no art, no culture. Visual reflectivity is a nothing, a blank sheet, a un-ploughed field, that must wait for the plough of language.
Is this fair? First of all, it is far from clear to me that animals do have the power of visual reflection. The metaphor of the mirror for animal consciousness has two prongs of meaning. Like a mirror, animal consciousness is something quintessentially and entirely visual; a vision is not the thing itself. Just as things reflected in mirrors are not really in the mirror, so the things in animal consciousness are not really in the animals mind. In other words, the mirror is a metaphor of the image. Not wishing to argue with Bishop Berkeley, let us say so far so good. Animal minds are not dark. Animals too have a visual field, a more or less multicoloured disk. Secondly however, a mirror is something that not only displays, but also bends light such that viewers can (if they have language at least) see themselves in mirrors. Is this something that animals can really do?
First of all let us consider the physical technology required for visual reflection. We have mirrors, things made of glass or polished metal. Animals too have at least the occasional water surfaces. In addition however, humans have the ability to draw to mind images from other perspectives than their own. Just as I can imagine what I would see were I to stand up and look down at the road below my 3rd floor window, I can also imagine what I would see were I to be in the position of the mirror and looking at my face. My consciousness can, as it were, bend light. Now it seems to me that, not only are animals not too good at making looking glasses, but also they may not be able to do the perspective taking required for visual reflection.
I am suggesting that a lot of animals do not "REflect" at all. The eflect;f they just see. When we put mirrors in front of them, something moves in the mirror that they are able to recognise as an animal of their kind. But it is at least not proven that they are able to take any perspective but their own so even if they had a "name" for themselves, they would be unable to realise that the name also applies to that other animal in the mirror.
To cut to the chase, it seems to me that the Russian is being unfair. He should recognise that there are two forms of reflection going on, and that humans are good at both of them. And it is the coexistence of both that allows humans to 'see' themselves. Both abilities are required, there is a double return, a double feedback loop.
The Spanish film Los Cronochrimes, is about a man that goes back one our in time twice to visit himself. The first time came a bit of a shock, to the protagonist and to the viewer, but when the hero demands to return to the past again so that there are two doubles of his original self, is this not excessive? On the contrary. It was the double return of Hector that made the film resonate for me as an allegory of growing up. There were other hints that made me think my interpretation was not merely capricious.
At the start of the film Hector is rather young, and visual. He likes to sit and watch, though his house is only partly decorated. Though he does not appear to work, his wife offers her body to him. He is like a baby. This is in sharp contrast to the more commanding Hector that the hero becomes by the end of the film.
Furthermore, the first time-slip of Hector is so spatial. In both cases we presume Hector travels back in time the same amount, but in his first time-slip, Hector merely seems to jump accross space, to take a perspective looking back at himself, with the same binoculars from the other side of a divide. This first bandaged, cloaked Hector is only a pair of eyes outside of himself. He becomes a perspective upon himself from without. Using only his scary gaze he manages to force the second hector to follow the same path. But he makes a mistake. He attempts to return to his wife while still in swaddling, causing the woman to fall to her death. Utterly dissatisfied, Hector decides he must return to the past again. This time, he takes control. We learn that through the machinations of the time machine, the second double of Hector, or Hector #3, has scripted the actions of the first too. The volition powering the Hectors is no longer the gaze, but the voice of Hector #3. Hector #3 has determined what each of the other Hectors should do in advance. Finally, he manages to make another woman look like his wife, having her fall to her death, and ends the film very much older, less philandering and in charge, having returned to himself twice.
My only disappointment is that rather than two travels in a time machine, the first doubling might have been achieved by more spatial means.
As Derrida points out however, we Westerners tend to see the possibly of doubling ourselves as a process of differance.
"Stranger than Fiction" (2006) is an okay film. At one level it is a love story about a nerdy tax inspector and a coffee shop owner. The tax inspector that lives for numbers and punctuality, that lives his life in a fastidious, perfectionist, a-sensual fashion wakes up to the world of cakes and kisses and he dives, into the sensual world. In this movement he is aided by the was-once-a-bit-of-a-nerd, coffee shop owner that dived herself, many years before, out of law school in the sensual-world-more-important.
At this level "Stranger than fiction" has the hallmarks of many a love story, where the impediment to love lies in the character of one or more of the protagonists. Love stories with nerdy heroes and heroines are not few in number. I enjoyed "A New Leaf"(1971) starring botanist-nerd Elaine May, and cynic Walter Matthau, athough this film tracked the movement towards love of a cynic rather than a nerd. There are perhaps even more love stories about cynics meeting their match and taking the plunge, such as "When Harry met Sally"(1989) and "Wedding Crashers"(2005). Cynics and nerds have this in common: they both don't know how to do that loving stuff. Other love stories feature a Briton, who in Hollywood are all both cynical and nerdy, such as "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Nottinghill," which feature Hugh Grant becoming aware of his mojo. Upping the brow-level perhaps there are love stories about idealists taking the plunge, such as "Wings of Desire (Himmel Uber Berlin)", its naff remake "City of Angels," and "The Legend of Nineteen Hundred," although in the latter case the idealist sticks with ideals rather than love.
At the same time however, "Stranger than Fiction" crosses genres, and adds a irreal, crazy, almost Matrixical alterity; the hero of "Stranger than Fiction" finds that he is the hero of a woman's novel. We see the (female) novelist fretting over ways to kill him off.
The hero eventually tracks down and meets the novelist but reading her book, he decides to run with the story, and in front of a bus to his nemisis, at which point the novelist decides to make the accident, no longer accidental, non-fatal. At this point, in her words, the love story takes that sensual realistic dive into the world of the little things. The taste of coffee and lipstick, the brush of someones eyelashes accross your cheek. Rather than the grand design, rather than the objectives, and conclusions of works of great fiction, the hero and his novelist choose the everyday.
Dead interesing. But what of dreams?
At the same time I was watching a program on Japanese television about a lady that gave up the everyday to pursue her dreams. At 50 or thereabouts she says that we all have dreams but usually we give up on them and opt for life. She describes dreams (by that she means goals) as a bomb that we carry with us, and that most people, caught up with the everyday allow it not to explode.
At the same time again I found myself watching the concluding song to "Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat" wherein we are told, "Any Dream Will Do." This recently the title of a reality TV series to find the next incarnation of Joseph on stage.
All very confusing. Is love a dream? Or does it present us with the real world? Is choosing love a cop-out or a higher ideal?
A recent survey by a student I know found that there is a strong correlation between honesty and romanticism. An unexpected result?
Sin City is an interesting film. I am not particularly keen on violence but I am a long time fan of Mickey Rourke and I have an interest in hard boiled, film-noir. Another thing that appeals to my structuralist mind is that is that Sin-City is in three or four parts and these parts repeat, share a commonality of structure and device. One of the minority of damning reviews of Sin City - damning of the gratuitous violence - points to one common theme: "See a pattern? Women in this movie are all whores and strippers..." That is not the only common theme.
The most interesting one for me is that all the men in the movie are talking to themselves. The three lead charters Hartigan (Bruce Willis), Dwight (Clive Owen) and Marv (Mickey Rourke) in true hard boiled film noir style spend the whole film nurdling on to themselves cynically, explaining what is going on, and making up for the lack of light. Who are they speaking to?
They are speaking to themselves and the audience and perhaps also to the woman that they love. The women that all these men willingly sacrifice themselves for (two dying in the process) are not only prostitutes, they are
(1) the targets of an enduring and powerful love that tears the heroes to pieces
(2) unobtainable in one way or another (dead, too young, past tense),
(3) the reason why the heroes die
(4) generally silent but often imagined and in one case an avid letter writer,
(5) violent, sexually preditorial, hermaphrodite
(6) and as we have seen, perhaps the superaddressee of the film noir narration.
Why do heroes mumble themselves into oblivion for a whore-goddess of love? Why is it that, and this is what makes it so tragi-dense, the heroes half know they will never get the the whore-goddess get? Recently I have been born of a son, born on the 30th May 2006. He is called Ray Takemoto. He cries quite a lot, a plaintiff warbling cry that cannot be predicted and seems at times to know no satisfaction. Sometimes the solution is simple: Ray needs his nappy (diaper) changed or more often some of his mother's milk. Often at the same time the reason seems to be general malaise or dissatisfaction with the fact of being born to a world where he has desire but almost no power to achieve their ends. He must have quite a frustrating time. We all must have quite a frustrating time, since we are born "foetalised," weirdly incapable of even the ability to stand.
Our only defense, is our lovability and the volume and mesmeric persistence of our cries. Here in Japan they say that "crying is a babies occupation". To cut a long story short, looking at baby Ray I see Hartigan, Dwight, Marv and myself. The wail has become less of a whimper now and has taken on the pretension of gravelly, 'hard-boiled,' machismo. But it is still a long drawn out moan about how tough things are. Most importantly it seems that perhaps in all cases the hard boiled whimper is a whimper of love. But only Ray - thank you Ray - has anyone listening. Are our heroes doomed to sacrifice themselves selves speaking to the him-her fantasy forever? It is not so bad, since there is beauty in it.
Sin City was, from a certain angle, a beautiful movie. Self-sacrificing, self-narrating men, such as Fabrizio Quattrocchi (a baker from Sicily who wanted to save up to buy a house for his family but ends up narrating his own death) are indeed heroes. But who are all these violent, whoring, silent, hermaphrodite goddesses that the sniveling super-hunks of Sin City die for? I suggest, I guess, that these women are the protagonists themselves.
Why did two of Holywood's most successful actresses vye for this movie, "In the Cut"? The rights to the book were bought by Nicole Kidman. It ended up being a recently divorced Meg Ryan that played the lead part. But it was panned by the reviewers and the majority of the buying public.
But for me it was one of the most interesting and ambitious films that I have seen in some time. It interested me so much because I think that it is film that... Roland Barthes would have approved of. It is a film that gives power to the reader, or rather watcher, because even at the end, it does not let the cat out of the bag. I will, let the cat out of the bag, as I see it, in a very anti-Barthian way. Please see the film before you read this spoiler.
First of all, what does the title mean? There is a lot of cutting in this film. The is the physical cutting of human bodies. There is the backwards forwards flashbacking and changes scene. But most importantly it seems to me that "the cat" or, since this is a crime movie, the scene where we find out who dunnit, is also cut. We are not told who dunnit, that scene is cut. This is a very brave thing to do. Too brave it seems because most people watching it do not seem to have realised.
The film starts in a bar. Meg and her hunky aspiring boyfriend are having a drink. Meg goes to the toilet and sees a woman giving peforming oral sex to a man with a tatoo on his wrist. She watches transfixed. But not for all that long (it should be emphasised). When she returns to the bar the-hunky-aspiring boyfriend is no longer there. He says later to Meg, "you were gone ages."
The next day we find that a body part of the woman that was giving the blow job is found in the garden of Meg Ryans apartment. The police question her. And the policeman doing the questioning has 'that tatoo' on his wrist.
Despite the fact that he is the person that she has last seen with the woman that was murdered, Meg starts to have a fling with this hunky cop.
Another woman is murdered, this time a medical student. The audience is left worrying for Meg since it seems that one of the three men in her life is the slasher.
The policeman has that tatoo on his wrist, and he seems capable of treating women like objects.
Meg's ex boyfriend played by a typically psychotic Kevin Bacon. He is obsessed with Meg and cannot accept their split. He is also a medical student, so we are left to wonder whether he has killed one of his medical student friends.
The "hunky-aspiring-boyfriend," one of Meg's students is fond of writing essays about serial killers and he is want to attempt rape (he comes on strong to Meg.)
But then, Meg's sister is killed, just after Keven Bacon says that he wants to date her.
Jumping back a bit, we have seen Meg and her sister quite a lot. They are very different in especially their attitude to sex. Meg is miss repressed. Meg is ideally suited for this part because she always plays, very well, the eternal innocent (that is one of the reasons why she is so massively popular in Japan). In this film we see her sexual awakening but her sister, a stripper, is very fond of sex. The other difference between the two sisters is that they do not share the same mother. Meg relates how their shared father proposed to Meg's mother, and how her father left for another woman. This has clearly left a scar upon Meg, who finds it difficult to trust adult men. The proposal scene starts of as being romantic. Daddy dumps his at that time betrothed, to marry Meg's mum (also played by Meg) the most beautiful woman skating on an iced over lake. But later in the film we see the horror version of the same proposal, showing what in effect dad really did do to Meg's mother - cut her up. We see the mother/Meg fall do the ice and be cut to pieces by daddy's skates.
The film builds to a climax where, Meg alone in her room with the cop suddenly doubts him, since he in in possession of the cot knick nack that has fallen from her bracelet possibly when she was molested in the street. Fortunately she has the cop chained to a drain pipe so she can make her escape.
She leaves the apartment to find the cop's partner, and that he also has a tatoo on his wrist. He takes her "to the lighthouse," (a book that Meg teaches in class) and then turns out to be the killer. The killer always leaves an engagement ring on this victims wrists. Meg shoots him. She returns to the appartment, to find the cop still chained up. She hugs him. Happy end.
On the face of it then, we are provided with a murderer -- the cops partner.
But hold on a minute.
Surely the murderer is Meg herself. Or perhaps there have been no murders at all.
On one level, it is surely Meg that is the person that has been chopping women up. We know that she has a thing about engagement rings from her past. We know that she has a scar regarding how her father treated her mother. We know that she is really repressed. We know that she has dreams of women being cut up when they are given engagement rings. We also know that she is one of the last people to see the first victim alive.
All in all the plot works much better if we assume that it is Meg, that cannot express her own sexual desire, that is cutting up women that can, especiallly when they do it with men that Meg silently desires. There is no other reason why the killer should be killing women that Meg knows or putting body parts in her garden. There is nothing connecting the victims other than their relationship with Meg. The first woman clearly riled her, and Meg took "ages" to get back from the toilet in the bar in the first scene. We can only guess who the medical student was, perhaps a girl that had designs on her ex boyfriend. And we know that Kevin Bacon, her ex boyfriend was about to start dating, or attempting to date, Meg's sister.
Meg is an English teacher and novelist. Her theme song is "Its just my imagination." There is a case for believing that, as is in fact the case, the whole thing is the imagination of a pretty mixed up English teacher.
The film does not let the cat out of the bag. But the discerning viewer should be left with a feeling of unease. Something important has been left in the cut.
Since I am not Barthes, and like film that does have a conclusion, even if the conclusion is unsaid, for me the film did not quite work. It did not quite leave us with an "unsaid cat". I think that there will be more films, mark my words, that do leave us with a plot that we can taste and feel, but that we are not shown. "Big Fish" is perhaps one of them.
After the first three scripts (this, Reservoir dogs, and Pulp Fiction) Tarantino is sometimes entertaining, always clever duff, but this film is high art.
Some people say that "True Romance" takes a while to warm up, but personally I prefer the beginning. After it arrives in Hollywood and becomes an action film, it is still excellent, but in inception it is perfection.
"True Romance," refers I believe, like "Pulp Fiction," to a genre of novels that cater to the dreams of the unfulfilled. And this film shows use the sort of dream that might-satisfy. But, the tragic beauty of "True Romance" is that, unlike the genre it parodies, it is self-aware: it is aware that "true romance" can only ever be pulp fiction.
The emphasis is on dream. Despite what big-richard-critic below says, super-nerds know, that there is no fullfilment in this world. Like J. Alfred Purfrock, they have been through it all in their heads.
The opening soundtrack by Zimmer, complete with whistling wind, sirens, and a background of Detroit down-and-outs, hangs in my mind as theme for this movie: unfulfillable hope.
The music, and this film, as big-Richard says, crystalise the unearthly hope of those out in the cold, comic-book (or video rental) shop of despair. It nerds like this that show us the way things might have been. Think Wuthering Height's Emily Bronte, who never got to know anyone, let alone a guy, outside her immediate family circle.
Other reviewers have noted the fourtuitousness with which Clarence finds a girl that likes Comic Books and Kung Fu movies, but does she? She is a call girl that is paid to be there. All the same even in the face of that -- the scene on the roof does it for me -- they hold on to the dream.
(Admitedly though there are no women in this film. The only woman is the Super-nerd's anima. )
The rest of the movie is a collection of dream sequences, all driven by a refrain of "wouldn't it be really cool if.." the males could incarnate machismo, 'sell the contradiction'. And the scenes are very, very cool.
"True Romance" is full of monologues. The characters, walking through dreams on their own, rarely really interact. But the monologues by Hopper, Walkren, and Gandolfini rank with Shakespear. Even Christian Slater's phone call, "If you want my movie, Lee, you're just gonna have to come to terms with your Fear and Desire," or the hard boiled cop duo Nickolson and Dime's monologue a deux -- "somthing's rotten in Denmark," -- are redefining cool all the way.
But, just as Cathy and Heathcliff's fantasy on the moor -- they are prince and princess -- is just that, Clarence and Alabama's fantastic journey from Detroit to Hollywood never touches down. People complain about the unreality of this film, but "True Romance" is meant to be that way, at least until until the end.
I think that Tony Scott did a good job (even outdoing his brother's genuius) but I wish that he had stayed with the original script's ending. At the same time, I think we know how the film should have ended.
"So, what say we throw caution to the wind and let the chips fall where they may."
Fortunately I did not know that the film's director was Ridely Scott (a genius) so I was watching without knowing what to expect. Okay so this is a con-film, possibly the earliest genre of BuddhaMovie, and true to the genre, I expected a twist. I thought that the twist was just going to involve Frankie's double dealings and, thanks to the intervention of Angela, we were going to be left with some polly-anna, silver moon thing and actually, it was a little like that.
But also I was taken in. And yes I admit it, I wept. I wept when, after an arguement, Angela, refused to get out of daddy's car. I wept at the thought of a little girl losing her father againg, and just at Alison "I can cry on cue" Lohman's pretty tears.
But it all turns out to be a big con. I did not expect such visciousness in Hollywood. After building up our hopes for patrifillial bliss, the prodgigal daughter, Angela turns out to have been an actress employed by Frankie in order to fleece Roy.
In an epilogue we see her has her real-self, looking closer to her real age, buying a carpet from Roy, who has ended up a carpet salesman. When she asks if Roy wants to know her real name, he replies that he already knows. She calls him "daddy," and drives off in her boyfriends car. For a higher Satori-ranking, should the film have ended there, in the carpet remnants shop of mediocraty?
Okay, sad for the squeamish, we get a little Hollywood treat at the end. We get see Roy go back to his immense while detached home (why Frankied did not screw him for the deeds, I am not sure) with its swimming pool and there Roy's new, pregnant wife. Happily Ever After?
The actress Alison Lohman cries, in real life, when she wants to get let off a parking ticket apparently. She is a good actress. But it is not really her acting that pulls it off. It is more the combined weight of our desires, to believe in children's tears and fairytales of long lost loving daughter, and the fact that Hollywood usually panders to them.
While it made sense, there was nothing particularly slick about this con film. If the film acheinves, and messes with, the suspension of disbelief, it does so because we want to believe in it, we "want to give our money away". What is Alison when we see her again at the end of the film? Both the audience and Roy is not sure how to treat her. Should Roy punch her lights out? Do we want to know who she really was? What was she till then? It is This is the story of a neurotic con-man called Roy, played by Nicolas Cage, and his parter Frankie, played by an ever-effervescent Sam Rockwell. The film starts with paranoid, twitching Roy, fleecing an old couple because, according to Roy, they "want to give their money away". The film charts the way Roy changes when his daughter Angela comes back into his life. Angela is played by the talented Alison Lohman. kind of a confusing moment. But I found Roy's choice kind of inevitable and comforting. He starts playing the daddy again - "Hey, so do you like this guy then?" He asks about her boyfriend. We are back here again, believing in Hollywood, because it more comfortable that way. We could have watched angela's car roll of into the sunset, fade to grey.
Did Ridely Scott want to end the film there? I don't think so. This is mahayana Buddhism at its best. Or the film can also been seen as a successful psychotherapy. Paranoid Roy is thick with phobia's ticks and twitches. Their origin is hinted as being in his rejection of fatherhood. Roy has thrown Angela's mother out of the house when she is two months pregnant. But by the end of the film, he has come to terms with his fear and inadequacy and, embraced reality by selling carpets and bringing up bratts. Wifey waits with good home cooking, bun in the oven and flowers on the table. Perhaps life is as simple as this? Perhaps if we can give up on our "con artistry," it can be?
Matchstick Men darker and more realistic than that. As Roy explains as carpet salesman, he feels differently now. He realises that he too wants to give his money away. In Roy's final choice of fantasy, indeed, Matchstick men is way up there (past Solaris) in getting to the shocking truth of the human condition - we prefer the bullshit. This is a film that speaks deeply about our desire to be in fantasyland, and it is clear that Sir. Ridely Scott is a lot more enlightened than I.
First of all I must say that I don't think that Solaris was a very good film, as a film. It was neither sufficiently entertaining, emotionally absorbing, or beautiful for me to recommended it to others.
However for someone that is interested in Dream Films (films/movies that portray life as a dream), Solaris was not only a must, it was also perhaps a first, in Hollywood at least (Solaris is remake of renowned Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel). I will explain why at the end of this review.
The plot of the film was not all that difficult. A psychologist, played by George Clooney, is sent to find out why the crew of a space station, orbiting the planet Solaris, refuse to return to earth. He arrives to find only two remaining crew members, a man (Snow) and a woman (Gordon), played by actors that were very good at what they do. Finding it impossible on the first day, to get any information from the two crew members (and an infant that it is inexplicably aboard the ship) the psychologist goes to sleep and dreams of his wife, who we learn is dead.
When the psychologist awakes, he finds that a replica of his dead wife, as she was when she was alive, is in bed with him. This replica wife is precise and complete in almost every way; she is all that he knew of his wife. She does not have any memories that he did not have of her. She is the replica of his memory or dream of his wife. At the same time she behaves, feels, and believes herself, at first at least, to be an autonimous human being.
It transpires that this is the reason why the crew of the space station have refused to return to earth. They have all dreamt into existance the person that they most wanted to meet, who arrive as a "visitor" at the bedside of the waking crew member.
The psychologist packs the first replica wife into an escape capsule and sends her into outer space to die. But when the second replica-dead-wife arrives (with no memory of the first) the psychologist falls in love with her.
This is not enough however to prevent the replica-wife from attempting, and finally suceeding in committing suicide. Realising that she is not a complete person, having only the memories and tendencies that her husband has of her (one of these a suicidal tendency, since the psychologist's wife did in fact commit suicide), she drinks liquid oxygen. But due to the power of the planet (? more of an outer space Gaia) her wounds heal and she is brought back to life.
There follows a period of dilemma. The female crew member, Gordon, insists that the psychologist allow his replica wife to die, using a super death ray that they manage to invent. She argues that replica (in Japan they say "dutch) wifey is not real and potentially dangerous. The psychologist argues that it does not matter, and that if Solaris meant harm then it clearly has the power to achieve that aim in a more effective manner.
The psychologist tries in vain to stay awake in order to prevent his replica wife from obliterating herself but fails. She zaps herself into oblivion.
Before deciding to return to earth however, they find that the male crew member, a spaced out nerdy type, with an articulation problem, is not the original crew member but rather a replica of that crew member's twin brother. The replica claims that as soon as he came into being his "brother" attempted to kill him. So he killed his dream creator in self defense. He argues, rather effectively, that it was not his fault. He says something like "There I was, just come into being, and I am confronted with this guy that wants to kill me (shouting "you replica, you fake," one might presume). So in the resulting struggle I ended up killing him."
Perhaps the two humans, the psychologists and the female crew member, might have attempted to zap this replica but realising that the zap beam has reduced the power of the space station such that it is being sucked into Solaris - which is glowing brightly now - the female crew member and the psychologist go to leave.
At the last moment, however, the psychologist baulks. It would seem that he stayed inside the doomed space station with the two remaining "vistors," the infant and the twin kiling replica.
The psychologist awakes to find himself back on earth feeling pretty lifeless and wondering what has happened. All seems pretty normal however until he cuts himself while chopping veg. The wound in his hand heals before his eyes. It is then that we realise that he has not returned to earth, but rather is in a Solarian dream world. He is himself now a replica. His wife arrives and tells him that they have been forgiven, they embrace, very much in love. End of film.
Despite being directed by the talented Steven Soderberg (Traffic is a film I admire), being produced by the great James Cameron, and having such excellent material, this was a rather disappointing film. While the supporting actors were excellent, the choice of George Clooney for the main part was for me a mistake. A fatal mistake in a film about doubts about the nature of reality, it seemed as if George never really seemed to believe in his part. The set was realistically made but perhaps unecessarily disconnected and claustrophobic. The whole movie was rather dimly lit.
More importantly however, the film did not spend enough time on its own creative orginality. The important differences between Solaris and the 1972 Soviet original, are also those passages that I felt deserved more attention: the final part back on dream-earth, and the character and dilemma of the male crew member, Snow.
If life is a dream of sorts, as Buddhism and Lacan would have us believe, then it is clear that we are not aware of this fact. As I type here at my keyboard, watching meaning appear at the cursor, I am not aware that I am caught in its throws. While I am able to read Lacanian and Buddhist machinations on the topic, and understand, at an intellectual level, what they have to say, I am certainly not wise to the fact that I am a marrionette made of various parts of speech.
So while it was very daring and commendable that Solaris to give give the game away, in respect of the visitors, and still manage to inject some emotion into the dilemma of rejecting a dream, it was a shame that it failed to have more of a punchy twist. The dream world sequence at the end was all too short and the ending (for me) predictable. We had seen after all the space station, with the psychologist on it, fall apart in cosmic smoke. I like my "DreamLife BuddhaMovies" to draw the viewer in and trick us into believing that what we are seeing is real.
The first part of the film, before arrival at the space station, showed the day to day life of the psychologist treating patients, one of whom claimed that they did not feel that life was real. Perhaps it would have been more effective if the space station part of the film was a flashback and that the beginning of the film be set also in the dream-world? I would have liked to believe in the dream world a little more and to have been shocked by its eventuall rejection, as I was shocked for instance by the revelation of "Angel Heart."
Additionally, again from a Freudo-Lacanian, or Buddhist perspecitve, the character of the male crew member Snow deserved more time. If life is a dream, and we are characters in that dream, then we have in a sense killed, or repressed, the dreamer (the Buddha or Id?) that created us. We live as the characters we have dreamt up, and we have forgotten, lost or abandoned the person that did (and is doing) the dreaming.
Again, in the vain hope that this film be remade again or that there is a directors cut (are you listening, Steven Soderberg? James Cameron!) it might be nice if the dilemma of the man wishing the ressurection of his wife be reduced to a subplot and the "psychologist" and twin-killing-Snow, be one and the same.
And creator on a dying space station.
This reminds me of a comic by Yoshiharu Tsugi, the Kafka of Japanese manga. In one of his shorts he created a story of a dective that eventually tracks down a criminal, who he comes to admire along the way, and handcuffs him inside a cave on a mountain. After much trial and tribulation the dective returns to the society, but not in time to get back to save the criminal who has by this time died in that cave. Or again, the wonderful theme of "The English Patient", where a man leaves his (rather maternal) girlfriend in a cave and cannot return in time to save her. If it is the case that the human condition is one in which we fabulate ourselves into this existance, then we have all left someone, the most important person, the dreamer, the lover, the person we seek, trapped somewhere until death.
Returning to Solaris however, the most exciting part about the film was that it came out in favour of the dream. In most films of this genre we are brought back to reality. Solaris ends in the dream and represents that dream as being the place in which we are happiest. In that sense Solaris attempted to be a a very positive film giving a postive spin to the lie which is our truth.
Phone booth is a film about our relationship with our super-ego. In the main we can forget about him, but as we con people and try to cheat on our wives, there comes a time when can feel someone is observing us, someone is listening.
Phone booth takes place almost entirely in a phone booth where the hero argues with his concience made real, and armed with a sniper rifle. But pehapp we are all always in that phone booth, and we feel that there is some "super addressee" who listens in on our phonecalls and even our thoughts, who is with us all the time.
When we are in touch with ourselves we would not even attempt to do something to annoy the best part of ourselves. But sometimes, we have issues and desires that are strong enough to cause a disconnection so that we cannot hear, or feel what our superaddressee thinks of our behaviour. Often this disconnection can continue for a very long time but occasionally, sometimes on a couch, sometimes at the point of death, we are brought back in touch with the view of the internalised other. It is this moment that Phone Booth is effective in portraying. And, as it should be, the hero comes back to his senses, apologises to his wife and the world and weeps.
This is quite a straightforward film. There are few surprises, but it alegorises the structure of our mental life very well. It will leave you feeling more moral and inclided to say "thank you" to your spouse.
Joel the director gave us Flatliners in which medical students edited visual experiences from their lives, and then reexperienced the edits at the point of death. Flatliners allegorises the relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness in the visual field. Phone Booth is set securely in the symbolic. While I am rather fond of Keifer Sutherland, I don't think that he should have appeared in the film at all.
I guess it was the demand of the actor, who probably has not yet gotten over his dad.
Perhaps as a result of my obsession with films of the Total Recal/Existenz/Fight Club/Vanilla Sky genre, where we find out that "it is really all a dream", I was convinced that Dreamcatcher was going to turn out to be someone's nightmare. Perhaps someone had let their "dreamcatcher" fall onto their forehead. Perhaps, a la "Mulholland Dr." it was going to turn out to be the dream at the point of dying of that shrink with a gun to his temple. Either way, I was sure that we would all wake up back to reality at the end.
Aside from the title and the reference to the native Canadian dream catching weaved things, there was plenty to encourage the viewer to believe that we are going to wake up from the nightmare. Even the heros, non-plussed, bantering, never quite suspend their disbelief. But more than this, the cheesy lines (especially those of Morgan and Friends), the overtly borrowed monsters (the locals infected with the alien b. bandits are called "Ripleys"), the scooby doo fan perpetually carrying the same lunch box, and the GUN FROM JOHN WAYNE! THAT TURNS INTO A TELEPHONE! WITH A HOMING DEVICE IN IT! This was really big cheese. It had to be a dream! I was checking for clues that appeared repeatedly, such as the lunch box, to see if I could guess what the dreamers reality could be, after we wake up, such as the ashtray in Mulholland or the gun carrying dog in eXistenZ.
Even after watching this surely-a-spoof, to the world-saving, bitter end and even after finding that NONE of the characters woke up, I still remain convinced that this film is indeed a nightmare, but one that probably belongs to its author. After all, it contains enough of the themes that recur in his other books. This film is Steven King's recurring nightmare: the only sane explanation.
But why? What does it mean? And what of the butt bugs? Are they representative of an Aliens/Misery/Carrie style gynophobia, a sort of gory scatological birth fantasy feared by men with strong mothers? Or is it more down, dirty, and intesticular? I hear that Steven King is somewhat overweight and that eating diet pills prevents the metabolism of fat, causing the sort of side effects that may have inspired this movie. Or perhaps it was both gynophobic and intesticular, i.e. overdetermined, with a bit of closet gay, homophobia thrown in? After all this was perhaps a film about close male friendship and fear of pregnancy, as result of giant, spermatazoan weavels attack from the back. Personally I think that it is probably a touch of dynophobia, with a modicum of homophobia thrown in.
Incidentally, Shyamalan films such as "Unbelievable," give me the same 'wake-up-bud!' feeling.
And as a complete aside, Dreamcatcher bears a resemblance to two rather good Japanese manga called "Devil Man" and "Kiseijuu" (Parasitic Beasts, Parasyte - a fabourite of Utada Hikaru, with film rights owned by James Cameron!).
Finally, I am a Steven King fan and mean him no disrespect. Even if I were right in my analysis of Mr. King, and he were scared of women and scared of being a homosexual, that would in my view be no bad thing.
Matrix Reloaded hints that Revolutions will be Lacanian
I just watched Matrix Reloaded . I thought it was dosh, but the bit with the architect gave me pause for thought! Not particularly deep thought, but it gave me a clue to where the brothers Wacko are going to take the sequel - in a direction I approve of.
I think it went something like this -
The architect told "Neo" (I hate the names in the matrix) that he as "the one" was part of the system. The reason being that if everyone was forced to take part in a perfect illusion then people got bored and realised it was dosh. So the old bag suggested that all humans should be given the choice, subliminaly at least, of opting into the illusion or being hunted outsiders in Zion. Percentage wise, most humans opt for the illusion but gradually the number of opt-outers grows. And every once in a while a really anarchic Neo/type come along and breaks the system. At which juncture, all the outsiders are killed, and somehow the game starts again. Perhpas Neo makes a new Zion? The Architect said that he would be the seed for the next generation of opt-outers.
Well anyway Neo escapes. But, and here is a big giveaway, we also see Neo stoping the spider monsters when they come to attack down below in the land of Zion. That is not meant to happen. Neo only has special "powers" since he is able to see through the illusion. So? Well it seems to me that answer is that Zion, the underworld, and the spiders are an illusion too.
And indeed, Neo is part of the game.
Well, perhaps this is a direction I approve of because the problem with this film is, from a Buddhist or post-modern philosophical standpoint, there should be no Zion. Or rather, if there is a Zion then it is much more strange than the underground world of rock'n rollers. The Wacko brothers should be aware of this.
Holllywood films demand a happy ending so I am sure that a real world will be found in the 3rd part. But at least it seems, they are heading towards the twist that the "real world" (Zion, Rockn'roll, people sitting in vats of jelly, spider robots) is also an illusion. The script writer was about 13 years old. The effects were okay. The pontificating was dull. But at least the Wacko brothers may have another twist in stall. And that was the amusing thing about the first film. This second part was all a given, and thus only amusing if you like wire work.
Verticle Limit is particlarly tractable to analysis since the oediple drama is played out in a particularly direct, visual, geometric way. What follows won't be all that intlelligible unless you have seen the film. And I don't recommend the film. But it was interesting because it kept repeating itself.
The film starts before the action proper gets underway in a sort of preface or flashback to a time, back in the good ol' days, in home, in America, in a land of happy familial love.
Three people - the hero, his sister, and his father are rock climbing on a cliff face attached to each other by a rope. In what follows I am assuming that the "sister" is, from a Freudian point of view, an allegory for the hero's mother.
The father falls,
The father falls, pulling the hero/son off the cliff face too, leaving only the hero's "sister" and her piton, percariously attached to the rock. The father says, "Cut the rope! This rope won't hold all three of us. If you don't, you will be not just killing yourself but your killing your 'sister' too." The hero cuts the rope, and kills his father and remains with his "sister". But the hero feels terribly guilty about it, and until the action proper starts, the hero does not climb again. The rest of the film explains how the hero gets over his guilt.
While the film uses "sister" not mother, I see sort of a linearised version of the oediple triangle in this taught vertitle tug of war. It is a rope with the hero in the middle and his "sister" and father on either side. The dilemma it presents is "Who cuts the rope, and where?" "Who should be sacrificed" The same dillema repeats throughout the film.
The "film proper" is set in the Himalayas. Now impotent as a climber, the hero lives as "the only Westerner not interested in conquest," working for National Geographic, shooting off only his camera, at wildlife, in an all male environment.
The icy tundra of the Himalayas, like the desert at the start of the film (or the midway stop-over that is Cassablanca - see earlier posts), seem to represent Moritorium the sitting on the fence, the half-way house of the oedipallly challenged. The rest of the film shows the hero going back to repeat the drama that had castrated him, and to refind his balls.
Once the scene has been set, the action is split spaciallly into four parts - three people trapped in an icy cave and the three teams attempting to rescue them.
The people in the icy cave waiting to be rescued are the hero's sister, a millionaire (Elliot), and a climber (Tom). Again there is a dilemma over a human sacrifice, but this time it is the father figure (the millionaire) that is asking the injured climber to give up his own life. Repeating the line at the beginning of the film, Elliot says to Tom, that by choosing to live on and use up the three's limited resources, he is killing not only Elliot but Annie as well. Tom refuses to sacrifice himself. At last Elliot kills him. This cave, like the caves in the English patient, represents the hero's unconcious. Still locked in battle with his father in the fight for his "sister," we see the origin of the hero's guilt --- The hero cut the rope and sacrificed his father but he realises that he is not able to perform that sacrifice himself. The film never raises the question as to why, in the first scene, the hero did not cut his own link to the rope, saving his father and sister. The question is raised here in the icy cave, as the three teams of rescuers come to save them. Down in that cave, another climber that cannot climb, the hero's double, Tom, is being asked to make the same sacrifice that his father made - "Sacrifice yourself for your 'sister' and I!" But he cannot do it. He cannot make the sacrifice. If this cave is a theatre for the hero's guilt, then perhaps it explains his impotence.
He has rejected his father, but he cannot identify with him, he cannot accept the sacrifice that fathers must make.
Where does this leave him? I think that the hero's dilemma and the options he takes to attempt to solve it, are played out in the others that are camped at the base camp below the mountain K2.
At the base camp, which is a half-way house par-excellence, there are others that are caught, frozen, unable to take a challenge, waiting, impotently trying to get over their problem in different ways. In particular their are the two australian brothers "Bench". (Perhaps this has something to do with the way that they are always sitting around). They are almost twins but at the same time very different. They both seems to represent some sort of oediplally challenged position, one partial solution to the oediple dilemma.
One of the twins "is like a dog, who tries to shag everything, eats what he can't shag, and pisses on what he can't eat." Unable to make indenify with the father and make the sacrifice, he lives beyond the law of the father, but living beyond the law, his relationships with women are agressive, short lived, and barren. He spends the film asking "the woman" that the hero eventually finds as a replacement for his sister/mother, to "blow him" (suck his penis) until he is blown off a cliff.
The other twin seems to be a homosexual, who idolises his lawless brother, kisses him, and enjoys a relationship with another male fixated man.
It is these two brothers that form two of the six that go to rescue the three people trapped in the cave. They are split into three pairs.
They are
Lawless brother and the Woman
The woman, a nurse, is in her looks and expression just like the "sister" trapped in the icy cave. The nurse tries to save the lawless brother (and women are always portrayed as unendingly self-sacrificing in this patriarchal film), but even as he is saved by her he ridicules here, forever making lewd jokes and asking for sexual favours.
"The shy brother" and a man that is looking for a lost man. The two brothers are separated leaving "the shy one" (this is what he calls
himself) to climb the mountain with a pakistani who is in search of his male friend who is lost on the mountain. The shy brother kisses his lawless brother and "his ass good bye" when, laughing and having a drink with his new friend a bomb goes off which blows them to pieces. This shy brother seems to represent another "position" offered to those oedipally challenged. If you can't make the father's sacrifice, if you can't get over your guilt, then you can live beyond the law, or live as a man/woman. This film does not portray this option in a positive light.
The hero and another father figure "Wick" Cool, taciturn, commanding, chiselled a loner, Wick is the the man with the dick in this film. He is a friend of the hero's dad. His function is played out in reassuring the hero that he was right to cut that rope saying "If your father had the knife he would have cut the rope himself." And Wick the dick (exactly the same pun is used another Freudianly informed film based on the book
"Girl, Interrupted") has a knife.
In the climax of the film we have another taught dangling rope. This time the structure is as follows.
1) New woman, nurse, sister-look-alike, replacement mother, target of heros
love.
2) Hero
3) Sister, prone being pulled out from the cave, helpless mother?
4) Wick, good father,
5) Elliot the millionaire, bad father
Five people on a rope. Who makes the cut this time?
There is a subplot where we learn that Wick hates the Elliot the millionaire, becuase he killed Wicks wife. Four years previously Elliot and Wicks wife were on the same mountain, and Elliot made her sacrifice himself for him as he tries to do to all those that are in the cave with him.
At the end of the film, it seems that the hero is cured. His seems to have regained his ability to climb, the suggestion is that he gets it together with the nurse, and he keeps the love of his sister.
The cures seems to be affected when Wick cuts the rope. And, together with Elliot, the good and bad father fall into the abyss. Wick not only *said* "Your father would have cut the rope if he had had the knife" but he did it, he proved it.
But why? What is going on here? How is the hero cured? How is he now able to make the sacrifices required when walking the way of the father?
Perhaps it goes something like this.
In the tug of war of love between his mother and father, he can cut out his father, kill him, choose the mother. But his guilt is immense because he cannot make the same sacrifice himself. He is caught in a land of questions. What if it were the other way around? Could he have sacrificed himself? And he realises that he could not. So he can not move on. He is stuck in a limbo. "If I become a father, I am am going to be cut out, away from the relationship that my woman has with her son." Guilty and impotent he plays out other alternatives, the playboy, the woman. And he fantasises about the dark side of the father that would have had the sacrifice the other way around.
But perhaps it is in that subplot that the cure is affected as a result of the subplot between Wick and Elliot, the two sides of father in the hero's mind. As he gets to know the father Wick he begins to understand why Wick can make the sacrifice.
Both Wick and Elliot are father figures. Wick is the ultimate climber. Elliot is the man with money and power that sets the scene for the action. Wick is not only the friend of the father that the hero has killed but his double. He is the father the father that has lived on in the desert, after having lost his wife. Elliot is father that comes to haunt the hero in his heart, offering him the challenge to cut himself out of that relationship to save "his sister" from having two men and not enough *syringes.* The Elliot and the sick climber fight over who gets to use the syringe.
But what they also find in the icy desert in the Himalayas is the frozen body Wick's wife and the empty packet of syringes that Elliot had taken from her. "Is this what you are looking for?" the hero asks Wick the dick. The syringes are all gone. Elliot has used them up.
When Wick cuts the rope he takes Elliot with him. The good and the bad father fall away and cease to plague the hero. They are unified. In that act, in the cutting of the rope that is repeated throughout the film, we realise that the father(s) have another reason to cut the rope. It is not simply because the want to leave the hero with his sister. The father is no longer a superhero that cuts himself out into the cold. Now he has a bad side. Now we see that for part of him, his wife is already dead, already lost to him. He is also cutting the rope because he has a dark side, a dark side that has already used up the syringes for his wife, that can no longer penetrate her, that wishes her dead. He hero realises that when the time comes to make the sacrifice, the sacrifice will not be so difficult to make.
And of course, the other reason why the cut is easier this time is that their are more people on the upper part of the rope. There is the hero's new mother substitute. All she wants is cash we are told, but it is okay, he gets into her pants and, in the final scene of the film, we see that the hero keeps the love of his mother/sister too. She improvises a song which goes "Only one woman.
These social constructionists have surpassed the cottage industry stage, methinks. They have invaded Hollywood with a vegence. But you knew this, because you have seen "The Matrix" and "Fight Club."
The plot - (not for those that do not want to spoil seeing the film).
Based on Chuck Palahniuk's first novel, Fight Club is about a yuppie, called Jack (played by Edward Norton) with insomnia. To attempt to cure his insomnia Jack has been attending self help groups for patients with incurable diseases such as tuberculosis and testicular cancer. At first, the sense of openness and catharis that Jack attains at these meetings, in the arms of a mamoth breasted Bob (played by Meatloaf) enables him to "sleep like a baby". This temporary cure is disturbed by the arrival of a depressive, suicidal woman at the meetings, who Jack appears to have very ambivalent feelings towards. One day Jack comes home to find his yuppie apartment, and all his scandanavian furniture, has been blown up. He moves in with an agressive, sexually potent, Neitzschian who also hates and lacks a father, called Tyler Durden (played by Bradd Pitt) Jack and Tyler enjoy a fight and then sets up a fight or brawling club. Jack then finds meaning in his life from the sense of pain that he inflicts and is inflicted upon by others. The fight clubs escalate to unrealistic proportions when Tyler forms a terrorist group that blows up coporate art, Starbucks Cafes and credit card companies. Eventually Jack realises that Tyler is a figment of his own imagination, his own alter ego. After brawling with himself at length Jack manages to "kill" Tyler by blowing a hole through one of his own cheeks, convincing the Tyler that he has blown the back of their head off. (This reminds me of a story by a psychriatrist at a local hospital, telling of a schizophrenic that was, so it was claimed, cured by a near death experience) ?
BTW I hear that multiple personality disorder is pretty rare, and often brought about as a result of exposure to literature (fictional or otherwise) about multiple personality disorder. There are those "houses" (I think that was the name that they gave themselves) on the internet, that disagree. Anyway...
Like that other social constructionist violence "The Matrix", "Fight Club" seems to have been influenced by the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard. The scene where the hero describes his Scandanavian (annotated with captions showing make and price) furniture and kitchen-ware that shows that it was made by a real craftsman, as signs that represent his self, is very nearly a quote from Baudrillard's "For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign". The film explores, and shows the heros attempt to create and then reject his identity as expressed by his consumption of furniture as signs.
This attempt would seem to be a failiure, since the hero "kills" his free-spirited alter ego, who is anyway at best only an anti-hero, defined only by this attempt to be free of the consumerist social construction of self. Perhaps psychoanalysis tells us that all those that attack the status quo are the most oediple and the least free of it? Similarly, perhaps, the film also comes down on the side of "anti-social constructionism" implied by the final scene where the hero, beside his girlfriend, finds himself, his true self, while the towers of consumerism, in the form of credit card companies, fall to the ground. Rather naff and Hollywood romance, or a pleasingly Freudian conclusion -- the hero finds his desire, monogomous and tamed but potent, in the end?
Links with other films and psychoanalysis(?).
I rather like films that end up pointing the finger at the hero such as "Angel Heart," "Sixth Sense," and to a lesser extent "Seven," (by the same director, David Fincher) and "The Usual Suspects." The climatic moment in each of these films, (when Mickey Rourke realises that he has been doing the murders etc. & perhaps with the exception of "Seven") may be similar to a revealing experience in psychoanalysis where one finds that the enemy is within.
Like Cinema Paradiso in reverse, we find that Tyler works a projectionist splicing sex scenes into family entertainment. The projectionis in Cinema Paradiso removes the sex (kiss) scenes from otherwise family enterntainment, on the advise of a priest. How entirely appropriate a metaphor for the workings of a sane superego. I have argued that the censoring projectionist in Cinema Paradiso seemed to represent the young hero's super-ego.
Some have claimed that Tyler is Jack's id that *slips* sex back into the footage, between the frames, but based upon my interpretation of cinema paradiso, the projectionist Tyler is a revengeful super ego, mirroring the Jack's oediple conflict -- both Jack and Tyler have been betrayed by their father.
The Hero in his "fight club" finds meaning in conflict, in the attempt to destroy meaning -- the enevitable end game of postmodernists and others oedipally challenged, perhaps.
However, these reviews below suggests that Tyler is Jack's id. (I have often wondered about the close connection between the superego and the id, in my ignorance.)
http://www.crosswinds.net/~flatbroke/sight.html
http://www.renaissancemag.com/arts/movies/default.asp?article=1199
http://theteenage.com/Movie_Reviews/fightclub.htm
Other reviews can be found at -
http://www.crosswinds.net/~flatbroke/empire.html
http://upcomingmovies.com/fightclub.html
Main unofficial page
http://www.geocities.com/~favoriteplum/fight.html
Cinema Paradiso and the Projectionist in the Mind
Cinema Paradiso is very beuatiful, and good, too good to submit to a blunt analytical knife, but also at the same time very analysable. So here it is.
Cinema Paradiso is a film about growing up to be a man, in a flashback. The film starts when the director recieves a phone call from his mother to tell him that a projectionist has died.
At the beginning of the flash back we find that the projectionist, and surrogate father to the hero as a boy, cuts the sex scenes from movies and "looks after them" for the boy at the request of a priest. This function of controlling what we see, and removing sex from our consciousnes, at the behest of religion, makes the projectionist for me an analogy for the boy's super-ego, the other within, God the father.
The projectionist also cuts the sex scenese out of the boy's real life by preventing him from getting together with the girl that he is obsessed with.
At first the boy tries sending here many many letters but he never gets a reply. The boy goes away to be a great movie maker and have lots of success and girlfriends.
When the projectionist dies he leaves a momento to the boy (now a famous
movie director), a film made up of all the sex scenes spliced together. I am not sure that we ever do get the cut scenes back, at least until we die but the way in which our friend, father, and master of the projector applies a bit of taboo to our conciousness can be found in Cinema Paradiso and my interpretation of Freud.
I think that perhaps also "the purloined letter" of Lacan is making a come back. The projectionist hides a letter from the boy's girlfriend in an obvious place and it reaches its destination eventually. One might argue that there is an overlap between the lost girl and the hero's mother in that they both remain in the hero's hometown.
This film portrays happy tragedy that happens to all of those that make it into the big wide world of adult men. It is also something that the hero of the director's more recent film "The Legend of 1900" was not able to do.
In one version of the film the boy eventually gets back to bed with the girl. This is the version that I saw. I think that I would prefer the version where the boy never meets the woman again I am not sure which is "the directors cut".
The music is also very pleasant written by Ennio Morricone who also wrote the theme music for True Romance.
I saw the film The Matrix recently and wondered about how the film could be changed to make it more "Lacanian," or Buddhist.
The first thing that dissappointed me was that there was an ordered reality outside of "the matrix".
That "reality" is a sort of simulation lies well with my understanding of Lacan. But that there should be a another world - where we are all plugged into some alien/robotic lifeform's power supply in rows upon rows of cocoons - seemed definately paranoid.
I wished that the rebels had found out eventually that both worlds were part of the matrix: that the world of the cocoons in the "power station" just another simulation.
And then perhaps that they have found yet another "world" resembling the grey mist (or, to follow the computer analogy, static as shown by an untuned television) like that Zizek uses as an analogy for the real in his use of the novel "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag".
"[they are told]... do not under any circumstances open the window of their car.... Randal and Cynthia start to drive home. Things proceed without mishap as they follow the prohibition. But then [for one reason or another] Randall asks Cynthia to lower the side window a little. (Zizek then quotes from the novel)
"She compiled, then gave a sharp intake of breath and swallowed a scream. He did not scream, but wanted to. Outside the window was not sunlight, no cops, no kids -- nothing. Nothing but a grey and formless mist, pulsing slowly as if with inchoate life. They could see nothing of the city through it, not because it was too dense but because it was -- empty......" (Zizek then comments)
This "grey and formless mist, pulsing slowly as if with inchoate life," what is it if not the Lacanian real, the pulsing of presymbolic substance in its abhorrent vitality?" (Looking Awry" p15-16)
Secondly it seemed a shame that there should have been 'an other of the other', a menacing desiring, enemy/other behind the Matrix. I would have preffered, from my "Lacanian" perspective that "the robots" that seem to be controlling the matrix for their own ends should, I think have been found to have no "ends" "goals" or "desire" but (as the rebel sees the cocoons dissolve into the above grey mist) he finds out that the machines were active only in their production of the matrix, which they made for the "enjoyment" or joussiance of those within it, and as computer programs, found to be not other than the matrix itself. (An agent could say, as he dissolves, "We were only doing for you, we are you,
a tool of your desire")
Thirdly, I would have preffered a less romantic, less "hollywood" climax to the film. That "Neo" should have been able to see through the simulation (matrix) as a result of being loved by a woman outside of it (in that final scene where he stops the bullets) seems the precise opposite of what it should have been. Instead I would have preffered that it had been shown at first that the woman in the cocoon world loved him, and thenwhen he realised that that world too, including especially her, is another essentially narcissistic (since the machines/matrix are on his side) simulation that he broke through "both" matrices. But it was a hollywood film.
Perhaps the hero should have been the "traitor", who pointed out that Morpheus was simply preventing the traitors from having their fun with (in my version) illusory stories of a rebel reality.
While I think that the agents should not have been autonimous I think that what the chief agent had to say about human's being unhappy with the first version of the matrix - designed as a paradise - was interesting... "Unless there is suffering, minds try to wake up" might translate to be an interpretation of the reality principle? Reality is suffering? I dunno, but the film was quite stimulating in a nerdy sort of way.
I wrote the above review in 1999. Now in 2003, having seen "Reloaded" it looks like Revolutions may show that the rebel world is also indeed an illusion. After all Neo has started to have powers in the rebel world (at the end of Reloaded) which he should not have if that world is reality.
"Flatliners" (1990) by chance it yesterday and thought it rather good and very synchronous with the conversation about "Naikan" ("inner sight/seeing") therapy that I had been having with a local therapist the night before. I claim that Nakain is a visual version of Freudian psychotherapy.
"Naikan" patients are asked to sit in a smallish room from 6am to 9pm and remember episodes in their childhood (and to a lesser extent their present life) particularly those for which they might feel grateful and particularly with their mother. In short, they *imagine* the relationship with their mother, rather than speak about the one with their father.
Naikan is said to work well on alcoholics and smokers and others that are affecting their physical health (and body-image, presumably). They do little in the way of speaking about their memories but do report minimally. The act of "Naikan" rather than the report afterwards is considered to be curative. The doctor is a facilitator who says "thank you" and encourages the mental act. There is a Naikan group in Austria apparently but mainly it is carried out in several hospitals/clinics in Japan. In my own view it is only really effective on Japanese and those of other nationalities who have a primarily visual self consciousness but I may be wrong.
Thinking Lacanianly, the symptom is a signifier that has been repressed from (or at least not expressed in) the linguistic symbolic and, makes itself heard, manifests itself in the body, behaviour or, at the very least, gaps in the speech of the patient. Could the symptom also be an image repressed from the imaginaire of the patient? When suppressed must they be said, or can they be curatively seen, relived, remembered?
In the film "Flatliners" four medical students stop their heart, and EEG, so that the line on the cardiograph goes flat. Purportedly they experience death. These experiences were dream-like, collages of visual and audio memory. The problem is that they bring back their memories as visual hallucinations to haunt them even once they are back to the world of the living.
Joe Hurley/William Baldwin (the playboy's) and Rachel/Julia Roberts' (the only woman's) flatline experience were particularly visual. In reality Joe had been taking videos of women that he seduced during sex. He had effectively conned women into giving him images of themselves during sex. After his 'flatlining' he saw the the videos that he had taken, now distorted to contain their accusative gaze, in TV sets and windows as optical hallucinations.
Rachel had seen her father shooting heroine as a little child but had blocked the memory, her forgiveness of her father, and his forgiveness of her (for looking). As a result of "flatlining" her memories returned to her and she hugged and made up with a fantasy-father.
Whatever the reality of (near)death experiences, in effect the flatliners underwent Naikan therapy they re-inspected the images within themselves and allowed themselves to see them all. They re-saw things they had not allowed themselves to see. The experiences are "very difficult to verbalise". They were not verbalised. "I am sorry" is about all the words that they needed re-seeing the vision, and the accompanying release, seem to bring about a cure.
I don't recommend flatlining. Sitting in a small room and going over your past is probably much better for you but it may only work on Japanese.
On the other hand, a near death experience once cured a schizophrenic of his illness I am told, as I have written elsewhere.