Train of Consequences

 

Despite their surface differences, Circle and Train to Busan basically ask the same question: What happens when you put a set of strangers in a dangerous situation and ask them to choose between selfishness and thinking beyond themselves?

They even have similar endgames. Both of them come down to a lone male balancing his needs against that of a child and a pregnant woman.

In spite of those similarities, it feels as though they approach the question with very different attitudes.

Circle, to me, feels almost agnostic in its approach. It shows you what the characters choose, but never passes judgement. Nor, does it seem to have a conclusive answer. Is selfishness better than altruism? Maybe. It seems to say, perhaps there's even no way to be sure.

Train to Busan, on the other hand, takes a stand. Not only does it say that selflessness is better than selfishness, it says that selfish people are actually in the minority, and that most people, most of the time, will do their best to help one another. It also touches on the possibility of learning to care and that change is possible.

So are these movies arguing? Is one of them right and the other wrong? Is one work true and good and the other amoral? Conversely, is one of them honest and truthful and the other mawkishly sentimental?

To me. they don't necessarily contradict each other.Which brings me to the biggest difference between the moral problem set up in Circle and the one in Train to Busan.

And that difference comes down to context and consequences.

In Train to Busan, both the viewer and the characters have a lot more information and can see the problem from a wider lens. They have a much better sense of context.

Furthermore, their decisions are subject to natural consequences. The choices they make play out to their inevitable conclusion.

Circle, however, is an unknown and artificial situation. Because it is unknown, neither the viewers, nor the characters have any sense of context. And because it is artificial, the natural sequence of cause-and-effect is replaced the the rules of the game.

I make different decisions in a game of Call of Duty or Candyland or a laboratory psych experiment because I am constrained by context. I don't manage my finances like I do in Monopoly, and I don't drive a vehicle like I do in Grand Theft Auto because I understand natural consequences.

That said, there are situations in real life when both context and potential consequences are unclear or ambiguous. Or there are times we have to weigh the known against the unknown. We are neither as knowledgeable as the passengers on the Train to Busan or as ignorant as the strangers standing in Circle. In such cases, neither movie can tell us what to do.

We can only take the best parts from each, and do the best we can.

Warrior: The Final Chapter (FINALLY!)

 Fight scenes are hard to do well, and  the fight scenes in Warrior are awesome.

Four rounds of tournament fighting could easily get tedious, but the pace is perfect. Not only that, We always know what’s going on, which is my biggest problem with the fast-paced shaky cam fighting we see in the Bourne Identity. 

Moreover, we see the different personalities in the way the brothers fight. Tommy punches people’s lights out (Wait. Isn’t he supposed to be a WRESTLING champion? Never mind). Brendan uses timing, resilience, and his intelligence to take advantage of opportunities; all his victories come from submission holds, which a jiu jitsu lover like me. Tommy dominates people. Brendan does not dominate, he catches you off guard and turns the tables.

The fights themselves are great. Two of Brendan’s fights in particular--his debut match and the Koba battle--are so emotionally engaging you wonder how the movie is going to top them with the finals. 

The fight scenes in the second half propel the movie out of the hole it digs itself into in the first half. But it also leaves one wondering: why couldn’t the dramatic scenes have the same sense of direction, economy, and clarity as the fights?

Take Tommy and Brendan‘s scene on the beach. It’s Tommy and Brendan’s first and only conversation, and it should hit us hard. It doesn’t. The performances are fine, but it feels like the dialogue is meandering, and the scene itself is visually uninteresting. Many of the early scenes, including Pop’s apperance on Brendan’s porch, and even Tommy and Pops’ opening scene feel the same way. There‘s a lot there, everything is there, but it isn’t quite…put together. 

But let’s go away from that, and back to the reason I started this essay series in the first place.

Many, many words ago I talked about two-heroes in a competition only one man can win and the problems therein.

Like Cabin in the Woods or The Prestige,  Warrior has its protagonists working at cross-purposes, leaving me ambivalent about who I want to succeed. I was confused, but assumed the movie was playing it straight. We were supposed to be torn between rooting for Brendan and rooting for Tommy. 

Which was why it was a total surprise when I saw the semi-final brackets. Brendan would be facing the Russian Koba. Tommy would be facing…the same guy he beat up in the gym ten minutes into the movie.

That doesn’t make sense dramatically, unless….unless they’re going to have Koba take out Brendan--the weaker brother--in the semis and then meet Tommy in the finals. Tommy wins and redeems himself by giving the money to his estranged brother.

Which sort of works, but also borders on a cheat. We were never explicitly promised a Tommy-Brendan fight--Tommy and Brendan have only shared one scene so far and they don’t even talk about the fight--but it still feels like ducking

Except that as one of the filmmakers tells us in the director’s commentary: “Tommy has to lose to win, and Brendan has to win to win.”

Once that’s clear,  the movie starts to fall into place.

None of the other plots I complained about seem to matter all that much. None of the people in Brendan’s life seem to  matter. Even Frank’s voice fades away over the course of the fight

Brendan needs to win to win and Tommy needs to lose to win.

The crowd noise goes away. The announcers--who up until now have served as a pugilistic Greek chorus-- have only one line and that comes at the middle of the fight, when Brendan starts to fight back with relish. 

We move inside the cage instead of watching from through the fence. It is the most intimate fight in the film, but also the most initmate dramatic scene. Instead of watching dispassionately from a distance, the camera crowds into the cage with the two brothers. 

None of the other plots matter. It’s just the two of them, Brendan and Tommy alone in deep waters where no one else can follow.

The Dude In Me: I'm A Lebowski, You're A Lebowski

"Being able to express something is not the same as being able to put it into words."
--Dogen, The Meditative State That Bears the Seal of the Ocean (Hubert Nearman translation)

"What the fuck are you talking about?"
-multiple characters in The Big Lebowski


The Big Lebowski has me convinced: there's a little Dude inside of me.

That came out wrong. There's not literally a Dude inside of me.

What I mean is, I can relate to the Dude, the way he's pulled back and forth by whoever he talks to, not knowing who to believe, absorbing bits and pieces of their speech, speech which sounds meaningful but is at its core, bullshit.

Sometimes those voices come from others. In my case, they often come from the inside. There's entitled anger (my inner Walter Sobchak). There's icy intellectualism (Maude). There's selfish greed and exploitative lust (The Big Lebowski and Jackie Treehorn). There's the desperate urge to please, to have everything go smoothly (Brandt) and the rigid desire for order in the environment I believe belongs to me(the Malibu Sheriff). And of course, there's the narrator telling my life story as it happens, whether that story makes any sense or not (The Stranger). Am I wrong?

So there's no reason--and here is my point--to distinguish between the voices inside and the voices outside; both are capable of bullshit. As within, so without. Our task is to recognize that so many of the voices that sound so meaningful, important, and necessary, neither entirely make sense, nor have our best interests at heart.

At one point in The Big Lebowski, The Dude looks at himself in the reflection of the Big Lebowski's various commendations, awards. He sees himself in the Big Lebowski, and he sees the Big Lebowski in himself. It's interesting to compare this scene with the scene in Reservoir Dogs where Mr. White attempts to separate himself from one of his heist partners. He talks about not wanting to kill people while admitting he will do it if he has to, but claims he's different from Mr. Blonde, all while looking into a mirror.

"I ain't no madman," he tells his reflection.

But the truth is, we all have our madman qualities. The Dude is the hero of the Big Lebowski but by the end of the movie, he and Walter are participating in the very behavior, the very aggression that both of them claim will not stand. They are bracing first a teenage boy and then a disabled person using lines that the thugs that attacked Lebowski at the beginning of the movie used on him "Where's the money, Lebowski?" or "See what happens?"

Meanwhile, we discover the Big Lebowski is less un-dude than he appears. In our first meetings with him he extolls the virtues of employment and a life of achievement. But by the end, we learn from Maude that Lebowski  has no job or ability to achieve on his own; he depends on an allowance from his daughter's inherited wealth. He is one of the very bums he despises.

Work is important in Reservoir Dogs too. The gang is united only by work; they know nothing about one another otherwise, and they try and fail to keep it that way. They wear work uniforms--identical suits. They erase their real names and refer to each other by color: Mr. Brown; Mr. White; Mr. Blonde; Mr. Blue; Mr. Orange; Mr. Pink. They talk obsessively about jobs and work and what it means to be a professional, and the unworthiness of those who fail to hold that standard.

But their personalities come out. Their personalities tear them apart.

The characters in Reservoir Dogs try to make themselves identical and fail. The Big Lebowski tries to make himself different from the Dude, the other Jeffery Lebowski, and fail. Lebowski and the Reservoir Dogs came try to measure each other through differences or similarities in external appearances, in ways of speaking, of dress. In Picture of a Rice Cake, Dogen warns his monks not to "hold up some measure of difference or similarity as the gauge of someone's capacity to train."

Dogen might not be a brother shamus to the characters in these movies, but they are part of him too. They are separated by oceans, centuries of time, and the space between movie characters and historical figures, but they are also has real as he is.

We define ourselves with our names. We define ourselves with our work. We define ourselves with our clothes.

Maybe most of all, we define ourselves with our words. We make up sounds, give them meaning, and then dress ourselves in them. But whether we being dressed in clothes from others (Your name's  Lebowski, Lebowski. My art has been commended as highly vaginal) or putting them on ourselves (I'm not Jeffery Lebowski...I'm the Dude), it behooves us to remember that we are all naked.

We are all emperors.

Magic Mike XXL, It Follows, and The Americans (Season 3)

Q: What do a horror movie, the third season of a TV show about married spies, and a fun but plotless romp about male stri--pardon me, entertainers have in common?

A: Um…I watched them all recently?

The nice thing about seeing unconnected things close together is you can make connections with your own mind. It’s in that spirit that I think you can actually learn more about your own attitudes on a topic by looking at what others have to say about them.

Take sex for example.

Magic Mike XXL has been widely praised for its sex positive stance. It’s probably the most feminist movie starring a carload of shirtless dudes ever. It puts its emphasis on humour, on connection, on making the other person feel good. Characters repeatedly emphasize that people deserve to be happy in their relationships, that sexual and emotional satisfaction isn’t too much to ask for. It even makes sexuality about more than just the act of sex; there is oddly little actual sex in the movie and what there is happens off screen.

As a former burlesque performer, I also liked the attitude towards performance--using the striptease as a form of self-expression instead of just regurgitating back popular fantasies. I liked the relationship performers had with the audience. That we are showing ourselves, but we are showing ourselves to these people specifically, that they are as important a part of the show as we are.

The Amercians also treats sex as a performance. Both Phillip and Elizabeth, the married spies at the heart of series, are regularly called upon to seduce other people for information or blackmail purposes. One season 3 episode shows a flashback to Philip learning to be with different people including an elderly woman and an overweight unattractive man.

“The told me to make it real for myself,” Phillip tells his wife to explain how he is able to do it.

Sex is not an end in itself. Sex is not about wanting. Sex is about getting something.

If sex in The Americans is a power play, at least it is still fundamentally about relationships. The sex in It Follows is a lonely business. The Follower will pursue its victim until he or she passes on the curse through having sex with someone else. In other words, sex is not about the other person at all. Sex is about the choice to either accept the curse’s consequences or to save oneself by passing it on to another victim.

It Follows turns sex into a selfish act. Instead of being about connection, sex becomes about survival. Different characters approach the problem in different ways and settle their consciences via different methods, but it ultimately is a lonely decision with minimal involvement from the other person.

Until then end.

The character Paul is willing to take it on. He‘s seen the Follower and understands the consequences. He is still willing to go through with it. And Jay is willing to let him make that choice.

It’s not just about sex though. Once the Follower kills the last person suffering from the curse, it starts working its way backwards up the line. So the most basic strategy for the second-last person in line is to put as much distance between yourself and the person you have sex with as humanly possible.

Jay and Paul don’t do that. The movie ends with them walking hand in hand. Behind them, we see an indistinct silhouette following them--but it doesn’t matter. Instead of fleeing in different directions, they’ve made the choice to face whatever comes together.

Phillip and Elizabeth in The Americans also make the decision to face life together. Sometimes they choose it, sometimes it feels forced. But it is never a black and white choice, and equally often they make the choice to put emotional distance between each other as well.

“Do you have to make it real with me?” Elizabeth asks her husband after he tells her his method for making his partners feel loved.

“Sometimes,” he admits.

I’ve often heard The Americans described as grim, miserable, and tragic in the way it portrays interpersonal relationships, but I don‘t subscribe to that reading. If anything, the depiction of relationships feels normal. Heightened, but normal.

Maybe that says more about my relationships than anything. But I don’t think so.

We never truly know what life is like for the ones around us, even the ones we love. Even the ones we’re closest to. No matter how close we are, there is that unfathomable seperation. There is the struggle between the forced closeness and closeness we choose, distance we take and distance taken from us. We try to understand each other. Sometimes we are so far apart, we can’t even find a way to try. Our loved ones surprise us, betray us, or hurt us. Sometimes we are able to make the choice to go on loving them and sometimes we can’t.

Sometimes we do both at once.

We are alone AND together.

I think it’s a stretch to describe The Americans as unrelentingly alienating. The characters are often trying to connect. Not always perfectly and not always at the same time, but they are trying.

And once and a while they succeed. One of my favorites--from season 3--is when Phillip and Elizabeth find themselves smoking a joint out the window of their bedrooom, giggling to one another about the ridiculousness of their predicament. It’s a tiny moment in the grand scheme of the show, but its smallness makes it no less real. Maybe it makes it even more precious.

The characters in Magic Mike XXL have no problems talking and connecting. In fact, it’s so easy, there’s no real lasting conflict in Magic Mike XXL. It’s a strangely easygoing, affirming movie. The fact that such a conflict-free movie can also be so watchable is a testament to all involved. When it comes to the ability of men and women to reach each other, it acknowledges that it doesn’t always happen, but it is optimistic about people’s ability to do so.

Here’s my question.

Which one of these shows represents the way things are?

I think they all do.

So what’s the difference between moments when we are lonely and self-involved, when we are positive and wonderful, and something that seems to be a mix of both.

Part of the difference is time. The characters in The Americans are harried, dividing time between multiple-missions, parenting, and being as spouse. The protagonist of It Follows is fleeing the Follower’s relentless creeping approach. The boys in Magic Mike XXL have nothing but time, endless hours and stretches of open road in which they have time to give themselves, each other, and the people they meet all the time they need.

The other difference is the answer to the question: ‘Are we thinking aobut ourself or are we thinking about others?’ It Follows is all about the person with the curse. Magic Mike XXL’s performers make it all about the women, committing themselves to her pleasure. The Americans swim in a shifting seas that combine compassion and self-interest in various ways at various times.

Spies. Strippers with hearts of gold. Shape-changing monsters invisible to anyone that doesn’t have the curse.

But also truth.

Which truth do you sleep with?

Jurassic Shark

Jurassic World the movie has a lot in common with its own primary antagonist. Like the Indominus Rex, it’s one movie with the DNA of other movies stitched in: I could have sworn they used elements of the Marine ambush (including the use of helmet cams and life support readings sent to a control room) from Aliens at least twice, the Predator camouflage gimmick, bits of Jaws and Jaws 3D, the Birds, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Oh yeah, and there were one or two nods to Jurassic Park.

Truthfully though, I don't see a close relation between Jurassic World and Jurassic Park.

Instead, Jurassic World most closely resembles Deep Blue Sea.

Ridiculous, you say. Deep Blue Sea featured genetically-modified super-sharks. Jurassic World's antagonist was a genetically modified super-dinosaur.

See? Totally different.

There are still a lot of similarities. There's the  animal wrangler/hard-headed boss lady dynamic between the male and female leads. The rich guy dies in a fashion dies in underwhelming fashion while trying to be inspiring and heroic. Even the composition of some of the actual shots in Jurassic World (mostly involving the mosasaurus but also one where the female lead steps vulnerably into the Tyrannosaurus paddock) seemed to call back to Renny Harlin’s schlock non-classic.

Perhaps most importantly, both Deep Blue Sea and Jurassic World submitted entries to the Most Incompetent Helicopter Crew Hall Of Fame. 

Deep Blue Sea is different from Jurassic World in one respect--Deep Blue Sea knows exactly what it is. I’m not so sure the same can be said for Jurassic Shark.

Watching Jurassic World left me thinking a line in the movie Joyride where Steve Zahn’s character, while looking for pornography on a motel television,  asks Paul Walker: “Are you in the mood for a story or more of a collection of scenes?”

Jurassic World‘s dinosaur pornography mostly falls into the ‘collection of scenes‘ category. There are the disconnected bits cribbed from other movies. Characters are inconsistent. The story has a beginning, middle, and end, I suppose, but for the most part feels like something my four year old nephew would tell: This happens and then This and then This, with each moment having only the flimsiest connection to the next.

It isn’t just the story and character that is inconsistent. The ideas behind the movie are inconsistent, which makes for interesting watching. Because the movie isn’t mindless--it DOES put forth some ideas. The trouble is, it can’t seem to decide what those ideas are.

Consider the treatment of gender.

Some critics accuseed Jurassic World of misogyny. The most violent death is reserved for a woman. The kids in the movie prefer the male lead to the female lead, and on one level it seems to be criticizing her choice to be more committed to her work than to family and mawwiage.

At the same time,  the film subverts as many gender tropes as it reinforces

While fleeing from the Indominus, in a moment of benevolent sexism we’ve seen in countless movies, Chris Pratt as Owen reaches back to take Bryce Dallas-Howard's hand…and she blows right by him, high heels and all.

In terms of beats of physical action, it's Bryce Dallas Howard's character Claire that is the most effective--she saves Pratt from a a dinosaur's air attack (My four-year old nephew‘s note--pternadon isn‘t a dinosaur. It‘s a flying reptile). She drives the van in the only car chase in the movie and does a hell of a job, escaping the dinosaurs and saving the children (immediately followed by the inexplicable moment where the kids express that they want to stay with Pratt). She is the one who comes up with and executes the plan that frees the Tyrannosaurus.

By way of contrast, Pratt is pretty much treated like the token female love interest in shows from less enlightened times. His crowning physical moment is hiding under a truck. We're told he’s a badass navy SEAL and he gets some token moments such as  taking down a couple pterodactyl redshirts, but at the end of the day, he’s cowering in a pipe with the kids waiting to be rescued.

The scene where he kisses Claire is a similar reversal. Some said it was an unearned moment where the male grabbed the heroine and planted one on her in a moment of sexist, unearned, tone-deaf entitlement. Yet from my end, I  thought Pratt kissed her because she'd just saved his life from the dinos----sort of a gender-swapped "my hero moment." The scene works both ways. It simultaneously subverts and reinforces.

Let’s also not forget that what he lacks in action beats, Pratt gets in emotional beats, a role typically played by women. He’s the pretty, plucky animal trainer who is the only who can get through to the raptors with the power of his FEELINGS.

He’s Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side. He’s Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds.

(Which doesn’t, by the way, mean I’m comparing the raptors the kids from the bad side of the tracks or accusing Hollywood executives of being unable to tell the difference between inner-city youth and dinosaurs. Clearly they can: One is a cunning, hyper aggressive, pack-hunting super-predator and the other is less scary covered with feathers. I’m just saying according to Hollywood, the only thing a genetically engineered Mesozoic theropod problem needs to thrive is also the only thing poverty-stricken minority teens in areas blighted with crumbling infrastructure and rampant economic equality are lacking--an empathetic white woman to care and believe and get to know them as people and whatnot.)

In Jurassic World, Chris Pratt is that empathetic white woman. His kindness, and goodness even leads to the tragic end of one of the raptors in a sequence that calls back to Muldoon’s death in the original Jurassic Park. The dinosaur hesitates when it sees him and is consequently outflanked and killed by a soldier with a rocket launcher.

Chris Pratt is Raptor Muldoon‘s “clever girl.” Twas beauty killed the beast.

The movie sends mixed messages on other themes. It uses the park as a metaphor for blockbuster sequels, and then sends contradictory messages about the value of them. Its multiple references to the original Jurassic Park seem to alternately deify and devalue it.

The movie’s final battle is a case in point. The new Indominus creature is beaten and the T-Rex from the original Jurassic Park and one of the raptors stand tall, as if to say that nothing compares to the original. Except that the T-rex and raptor actually LOST the fight. The Indominus was foiled by the intervention of the Mosasaurus, a dinosaur introduced in this movie.

Symbolically it feels like the movie first says that the Original will fight the Sequel (T-Rex and Raptor challenge the Indominus) but they cannot hope to defeat it (Indominus wins the fight) until the sequel eventually defeats itself (Mosasarus eats Indominus) and returns to the pool from whence it came, leaving on the originals (the final shot of the T-rex).

Actually, you know what? Written out like that, it kind of works as a thematic statement, albeit a complicated one. Unfortunately, if a movie’s theme has to be worked through and written out after the fact to be understandable, it‘s not really a theme. It‘s one thing to allow a viewer to connect the dots; but you need to give them enough dots to connect.

Finally, the movie seems to want to make a statement about the martial mind through the character of Hoskins. He is framed as a bad character wanting to do bad things by militarizing the dinosaurs  When he proposes using the velociraptors to hunt the Indominus, the other characters are incredulous and appalled.

And with good reason. Hoskins' plan is ludicrous. I have the solution to our escaped dangerous animal public safety problem. We’ll release other dangerous wild animals to hunt the first one. The polar bear is loose! Quickly, unleash the jackals! Lives are at stake!

 A woman I dated worked at a zoo. There were a number of protocols in place for dealing with, say, an escaped tiger, and exactly zero of them involved throwing open the wolf cages and strapping cameras to their heads.

If you were looking to make a critical or satirical statement about our tendency to think we can resolve a conflict by escalating it, Hoskins and his plan would be a great way to do it.

To me it seemed like that’s what Jurassic World was doing. Except for a few niggling points.

A) None of the primary protagonists offers a reasonable alternative. Or an effective alternative. Or ANY alternative for that matter.

B) Our heroes eventually go along with Hoskins’ plan. Willingly. They just sort of roll over. Which makes them, well…not the heroes.

C) Hoskins’ plan eventually works. Not without a few hiccups along the way, granted, but still…Hoskins was right and the protagonists were wrong. We thought Hoskins was the bad guy. This whole time Hoskins was Sheriff Brody and Claire and Owen were city council. In fact, not only does Hoskins plan works, it works when…

D) Claire doubles-down on Hoskins original plan. The problem wasn’t that releasing deadly, uncontrollable dinosaurs to hunt other deadly, uncontrollable, dinosaurs is a bad idea. The problem is the deadly and uncontrollable dinosaurs he released weren’t big ENOUGH.

A villain needs to be more than a jerk. He needs to provide some form of opposition to the heroes--physically, morally, or philosophically. But other than lip service, the heroes have no opposition to Hoskins. The security team deployment and the helicopter sortie are Hoskins’ plan--find it and kick it’s ass--without dinosaurs. Claire’s plan is Hoskins’ plan with different dinosaurs. There is no difference in approach; there is only a difference in degree.

So what are we left with?

Part of me wants to say that the conflicting messages in Jurassic World are deliberate. After all, the movie doesn’t seem to be saying nothing or sending unintentional or unintended messages. The messages seem deliberate--they just seem contradictory.

I enjoyed Jurassic World so I’d like to believe its incoherence is the point. In some ways, it has a certain resonance with what I see in my own life. It’s possible for me to be both progressive and sexist, sometimes in the course of a single interaction. I find meaning in the events of my life and sometimes those meanings completely  contradict each other. I judge people more for being unlikable assholes and less on whether they actually oppose me in any meaningful way.

Also, like Jurassic Park, in my life, the characters in my life are inconsistent and the protagonist never accomplishes as much through his own efforts as he’d like.

Also, the pacing is horrible.

There’s more: Sometimes kids like the adult that seems the coolest and talks the biggest game instead of the one that is competent and actually has their best interest at heart. Sometimes when the new thing clashes with the old, instead of a clear winner, everything comes out muddled and confused. Sometimes, in a dinosaur movie, for no reason at all, you get scooped up and dropped into a tank and suffer an ignominious, pointless extended death sequence torn between the jaws and claws of two creatures, neither of which is technically a dinosaur. Now that’s rain on your wedding day.

Maybe Jurassic World’s thesis, it’s thematic eye in the hurricane of self-contradictions is in Wu’s speech. He’s describing the Indominus Rex, but he’s also describing the movie….and maybe describing how the more short-sighted of us go through life, grasping at what we want in the moment without thought towards a bigger picture, focusing on pieces without considering the whole. You wanted this, so I gave you this. You wanted that, so I gave you that. You criticized, complained, demanded more…so long as you didn’t have to do any of the work yourself. You ordered fundamentally incompatible things stitched together without sparing the slightest thought as to how these things came about or what the result of trying to stitch them together would be. You wanted the cool parts without the downside. Reality never entered into your plans. And then you come crying to me when all I did was give you exactly what said you wanted.

Much of Jurassic World comes to us directly from other movies. Maybe it’s only fitting that its thematic statement does as well.

Remember, you asked for this.

Made Of Stories

I am made of stories.

Most of them are my own stories, in the form of memories, ideas about the world and how it should be navigated, or my beliefs about who I am.

I’m not going to talk about those right now.

But I am also built from other people’s stories or at least the way those stories shape me and my perceptions.

I’m talking about comic books. I’m talking about video games. I’m talking about movies and sports columns and television shows.

I’m don’t mean this symbolically. I have the Decepticon logo from Transformers tattooed on the inside of my right forearm. I am wearing a fake concert t-shirt featuring the Max Rebo Band from Return of the Jedi. These stories are a literal, physical part of the self I present to the world.

A t-shirt and a tattoo. Something I can put on and take off and something that’s a part of me. Shirts and skins.

My stories are like that too.

Let’s talk about shirts first.

*  *  *

I’ve never known a world without the original Star Wars trilogy.

It was so much a part of my life growing up, I have no idea if it’s I actually like it. I know the characters, the lines, but I don’t have an OPINION on it per se. That would be like having an opinion on gravity or weather.

Then again, whether Star Wars is good or not or how much I like it is beside the point.

To me, Star Wars is a community story, which is to say the story itself isn’t as important as its role as a marker of my cultural identity.

The interesting thing about stories in this role is not only is liking them or not beside the point, but also that stories don’t even need to be seen or experienced to engage with them on this level.

For example, a few weeks ago, an episode of the TV show Game of Thrones, one that ends with one of the show‘s major characters being sexually assaulted, is dominating the internet conversation.

The conversation is about the use of rape as a plot device.

I feel like I have to have a public opinion on this Game of Thrones episode even though I haven’t actually seen it (*), and I also feel this opinion says something about the kind of person I am.

In other words, we aren’t talking about the stories. We are using them as jumping off point to publicly identify where we stand on social issues, our cultural identity, or our belief systems.

It‘s a way of saying who you are and which tribe you belong to. The stories themselves are beside the point. My opinion tells other people what kind of person I am.

Star Wars shirts are like that. Over the last few years, I have watched much MUCH more UFC than I have Star Wars. But I would never wear a UFC t-shirt. It’s not because I’m ashamed of watching UFC, but because mixed martial arts does not feel like part of my public identity. It’s not the first thing I want people to know about me.

I don’t wear Star Wars t-shirts because I feel a connection with Han Solo. I wear it so other people know I know Star Wars and we can quote Han Solo line at one another.

But Star Wars is not a part of me. Like the shirt, it’s something I can take off.

Not every story is like that.

*  *  *

There’s another way I engage with stories. It’s more primal, more direct, and harder to explain because as soon as I try to put it into words, I feel as though I’ve put something between me and my experience.

No explanation is required. It hits you or it doesn’t.

In some ways, music is a great example of this. I can write about Queensryche or Vinnie Vincent Invasion all I like. None of those words will ever be able to make you feel what I feel when I listen to them. I can write about how these songs mattered to me, but can never make you feel what I felt when they first touched my life.

Sometimes the personal becomes part of our identity. Skid Row was a big part of my life during the late eighties early nineties. It was personal to me. Now…not so much.  So I consider myself a Skid Row fan even though years pass without me listening to their music and when I do my only connection with the music is sentimental--hey, I remember that song. And these lyrics coming up are ones I used to really like (**).

Sometimes the community prevents me from wanting to make a personal connection with the material. I remember the hype around The Phantom Menace when it came out. I distinctly recall walking into a department store and seeing row and row of Phantom Menace projects--coloring books, action figures, puzzles, posters as far as the eye could see.

And I thought, Nope. I don’t need to see this movie.

I still haven’t.

Sometimes, the fact that there is no community or cultural narrative built up around a show leaves me more space to engage with the material. I can quietly watch it and process it in my own way and not feel any need to Have an Opinion on it.

The Americans is great for this. The show is well-acted, well-written, and non-judgemental, and far from the public consciousness. It shows me the choices the characters make, the consequences of those choices, and how they feel about it all, but it rarely asks me to feel any particular way about it or invite me to draw any conclusions about What it All Means.

In some ways The Americans goes beyond shirts OR skins. It’s neither a part of my community, nor a part of my identity, and thus it manages to transcend both. I relate to it on its terms instead of trying to fit it into my own.

I might be made of stories, but there are other stories out their besides my own.

It’s a joy to be able to see them.

(*) Oddly, in some cases not seeing the source material HELPS. For example, I learned a lot from the Game of Thrones debate. I got a clearer picture about what the people who objected to the scene found objectionable and understood better what the scene‘s defenders were defending.  And I found it significantly easier to see to what others were saying about the show when I wasn’t blinded by my own opinions on the scene.

(**) Who am I kidding? I still enjoy Skid Row’s lyrics, especially the ones off the Slave to the Grind album. Check them out--they’re more evocative than you might think.

Fury Road

Mad Max Fury Road has been praised on a number of levels. Much of the conversation has been centered around it’s use practical special effects and its treatment of gender. Those are worthy elements, but I want to talk about other things.

First of all, there’s the movies unique rhythm. Many action movies--even well-made ones like Guardians of the Galaxy or Captain America: The Winter Soldier suffer from a samey-ness, not because the characters or stories are anything alike, but because the movies themselves are structured similarly. There are no wasted moments . Everything important is there and everything unimportant is left out. But rhythmically, this strength can become a weakness. Because they are paced similarly It means the movies FEEL the same on a physical level even if the stories themselves are very different.

Fury Road is different.

Fury Road opens with a flurry of character introduction, plot, and world-building that would take up the first third- to one-half of most movies. Max is chased, captured, escapes, and is recaptured again with such whiplash speed, I wondered what was the point of having him escape at all.

After this initial whirlwind tour, the movie hits us with a car chase through the desert that stttreeettttches on and on. Furiosa escapes the Citadel is a single-beat of action on par with “Nick Fury is attacked“ in Winter Soldier or the prison break scene in Guardians of the Galaxy. Yet where these beats last only moments in the latter to movies, in Fury Road, Furiosa’s escape provide the spine of the film.  In Fury Road the character moments don’t  happen around the action scenes, they happen inside of them.

Later it does the opposite, taking a sequence that other movies would build into a set piece--the night fight with the Bullet Farmer--and has the majority of the sequence happen completely off screen.

Bizarre.

And then there’s the climax. Theoretically, this should be the moment where things get bigger and better, where we build to the ultimate moment--is just a repetition of what we’ve seen before…a car chase through the same desert they just passed through back the way they came.

Structurally and literally, the movie is going backwards.

On paper, pacing-wise, this story is an abomination.

On screen, it works beautifully because the rhythms are so different from what we’re used to seeing, we can’t predict where the next beat will land and thus we remain totally engaged.

Great stuff.

Secondly, I like how quietly examined the different ways we use religious ritual in our lives. Immmortan Joe, the War Boys, the Vulvalini, and the Wives all used ritual movements or gesture. In other words, those rituals weren’t just things they believed with their minds or said with their lips, it was something they enacted with their bodies.

I think many times, when it comes to religion, we want to equate it with the mind, with what we believe. Something that we can support or disprove with reasons and rationality.

But religion and religious rituals operate on a level more primal level. Sometimes they control us, sometimes they inspire us, sometimes they are part of our community--helping us celebrate or as a way of telling insiders from outsiders…and sometimes they bring us comfort even if we don’t completely understand, remember, or believe in them.

A third  thing, I liked about the movie was its approach to death. The film might make a statement about gender and politics, but the violence is apolitical--hero and villain alike are stabbed, shot, or thrown under wheels.

And while certainly some deaths are bigger, sadder, or more satisfying than others because of our connection with the characters, no life is treated as inherently more important or valuable than another. It’s  a rare thing in action movies

In Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, Groot’s death is treated as heroic and tragic and valorous; the death of the dozen or so faceless goons he skewered several minutes earlier is treated as a fuck yeah/comedy moment.

Yes, Nux sacrifices himself to save his friends in Fury Road just as Groot does in Guardians of the Galaxy, the deaths feel different. Nux’s death is about Nux--in a sense it is a victory for him as a good death is something he has been working towards the whole movie. Whereas Groot’s death doesn’t seem to be about Groot or even about death. It seems to be about getting an emotional reaction from the audience.

Fury Road treats death with respect, neither glamorizing nor trivializing it. In Fury Road, death is simply death. What matters is our attitudes towards it or our reactions in the fact of it.

The last thing that struck me about Mad Max Fury Road is the thing that struck me the hardest, even though it’s also the thing about which I have the least to say.

It’s the moment where the villainous henchman shouts with a mixture of pride and grief: “I had a little baby brother! And he was perfect! Perfect In Every Way!”

It’s not because of what the line reveals about Rictus Erectus’ character. It’s not because of how the scene speaks to the objectification of mothers as breeders and children as success objects or the role of body perfection and gender and their relationship to power in Immortan Joe’s--and by extension our own--society. It’s not because Rictus was played by Nathan Jones and I like seeing ex-pro wrestlers--even obscure and unsuccessful ones--in movies.

It’s because I once had a little brother too.

Thursday the 12th

The axe was an old friend, and Jason spent the morning with it, chopping firewood until his shoulders ached. He stacked it neatly by the cabins and when he was finished, he lay in the sun on top of the picnic table. When the sun got high enough and bright enough that he could feel it even through his closed lids, he draped one arm over the eyeholes of his hockey mask to shield his vision.

It was a beautiful day.

His favorite time of year was the week before the counsellors arrived. He had the camp all to himself. There was enough to do to keep him occupied, but not so much to do that he ever had to rush. He could work leisurely and enjoy the stillness, the solitude.

In the afternoon he went through the campsite, testing the light bulbs. When he was done, he put the new bulbs on a shelf in the supply shed, as close to the back as possible.

As he left, he noticed the door wasn’t closing right. He inspected the latch, the frame. A rusted hinge was the culprit, he decided.  It needed replacing.

He tested the door again. It was okay, just a little sticky. Good enough for this summer, but he made a mental note to look at replacing it next year. As he rose, he stretched out his back, circled his shoulder a

He spent the rest of the afternoon wiping down surfaces, taking special care to with the kitchen. When he was finished, he put his cloths and bucket away and went through the camp, gathering up any dirty dishes he might have inadvertently left, washing them and putting them carefully away in their place.

With nothing to do in the evening, he sat on the dock with his machete on one side of him and his battered copy of Birds of North America on the other. He dangled his toes in the waters of Crystal Lake and watched the sun set. On the other side of the lake, loons warbled.

He watched them land on the water until it was too dark to see and then he rose, picked up his boots and machete and stretched out his back before lumbering towards the woods. It was still early, but he wanted to get a good night’s sleep , for tomorrow, the counsellors would arrive.

It was going to be another beautiful summer.

Defining Gravity: Outer Space as Inner Space

I probably should have chosen a different title for this post. That Wicked song is going to be stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

Still, Gravity is a strange title for a movie that takes place in an environment where there isn't any.

Or is it?

The secret, perhaps, is to not watch Gravity as a disaster movie about an astronaut lost in space after debris from a ruined satellite destroys her shuttle.  Instead, we examine it as a movie about psychology...outer space is in fact inner space.

There's a lot we could talk about.

We could talk about the simplicity of the movie. Eighty eight minutes. Very few characters and minimal development of those characters. Long, slow takes instead of frantic cutting. To paraphrase, Dolly Parton, "It takes a lot of complexity to look this simple."

 We could talk about the rebirth motif. Gravity contains two rebirth scenes: the one in the space station where she floats in the embryo like a fetus in the womb and the end of the movie, when she emerges from the water, mud, and plants to stand unsteadily on her two feet, millions of years of evolution compressed into just a few moments. Each of them comes after Stone has reached a point of hopelessness.

We could talk about the focus on talking. Kowalski mentions maintaining a constant stream of communication; he doesn't care what they talk about, so long as they are talking. We see this again later in the movie when Stone's distress call somehow reaches an Inuit fisherman in Greenland (*). Neither of them are able to communicate any meaningful information to the other...and yet, they are still talking.

We could also note how much dialogue in the movie takes place, as the characters call it, "in the blind"--characters talking but being unsure if anyone is actually listening or hearing. Kowalski to Mission Control. Stone to Mission Control. Mission Control to Stone during the rescue sequence. Stone to Kowalski. Stone to herself.

Is it about prayer? Is it about hope or faith that someone is out there? Is it about how saying the things out loud makes them more easy to deal with? Or do these questions even matter? Maybe it's just speaking to that same part of our psychology that writes in journals and confesses to bartenders in foreign countries--that sometimes the act of communication is more important than whether or not we are actually communcating. 

And speaking of prayer...

 We could also talk about the repeated appearance of articles of faith. Among the dead astronauts and abandoned space stations, we see a lot of artifacts, references to where people put their faith: A Jesus picture and a Buddha statue appear, but so does a photograph of a man's family...not to mention a lingering shot of, um, Marvin the Martian.

Interestingly, we never see any such artifacts among the live astronauts, possibly for two different reasons. Kowalski finds his faith in the moment; he talks during multiple moments about the beauty of the space around him. Stone, on the other hand, has nothing.

In fact, let's talk about Stone. Because it's through her, and through her relationship with Kowalski that we find the pot of gold at the end of Gravity's rainbow (sorry, couldn't resist).

"You're gonna have to learn to let go."

Like many of us, Ryan Stone is a person holding on to a lot of things. She holds on to her desire to fix the transmission card even after it is safe to do so. She holds on to her fear of the situation she's in. She holds onto the guilt and grief over her daughter. She holds on to the fear of loss.

When we think of 'letting go,' we often think of it as a metaphor for death or giving up on something or someone. We rarely think of how it relates to life.

But in this case, it is.

We see this most explicitly in the scene when a despairing Stone prepares to kill herself by releasing the remaining oxygen from her space capsule.

It looks like Stone is letting go, but she's not. She's still holding onto control, this time by trying to control the way she dies.

Earlier in the movie, when Kowalski tells Stone she needs to learn to let go, he's telling not telling her to give up.

He's telling her to let go of the things that keep her from living. No matter how long or short that life may be.

"Where you go, I go"

Matt Kowalski is a handsome. He's an astronaut, an adventurer, and a storyteller. He has brown eyes.

He's also something else.

Matt Kowalski is a case study in the power that comes with acceptance.

He has a bad feeling, but he doesn't fight the badness. Bad or good doesn't matter to him--he treats them with equal aplomb. He brings up the space walk record that he wants to break, but he is  comfortable whether he succeeds or not. He has preferences, but he is not tied to them.

Many of us resist acceptance because we believe that it means submitting to whatever life brings. We fear that acceptance will take away our motivation to act, to defend ourselves, to right injustice. How will I motivate myself if I just accept things? If I'm content with whatever happens, what will get me out of bed in the morning? We confuse acceptance with passivity.

Kowalski shows us how we can accept and still act. If anything, Kowalski's equanimity makes him MORE effective, not less. When Stone is trapped by focused on what she wants to do with the module, Kowalski sees the debris coming and prepares to act. While Stone is rendered ineffective by fear and the gravity (there's that word again) of the situation, Kowalski sees what is possible and acts accordingly.

Yet while Kowalski is pragmatic, he is never cold or clinical. He rescues Stone. He never loses his temper with her or barks orders. He remains gently encouraging throughout. Kowalski is also the one who remembers to look in on the rest of the shuttle crew and makes the decision to retrieve Sharif's corpse.

Kowalski is compassionate, accepting, effective...oh yeah, and he looks like George Clooney.  If we met him on the street, we would think: who can live up to that? But he's not a person. He's a personification of Stone's--and by extension of all of our--capability for finding those qualities in ourselves.

As the dialogue makes clear, Stone has brown eyes too.

Where we go, acceptance goes.

 Three times Stone is saved by this acceptance personified. Once when he finds and binds himself to her. A second time when he shows her how to let go. And a third time when...well, that's a hell of a story.

Gravity

In the end, Stone re-enters Earth's atmosphere, and for the first time in the movie gravity asserts itself, pulling her landing craft downwards. For the first time, she is being pulled by gravity.

And yet for the first time, she is also free of it.

She is in a dangerous situation, but it is no longer holding her down. She does not know what will happen and there is no Kowalski to save her.

But he accepts her options: burn up in the atmosphere or survive and have a hell of a story to tell. Either way, she says, "No harm, no foul."

She is free.

And after she lands, after she emerges from the ocean and stands on her own two feet, she walks away...perfect in her relationship with gravity.

(*) For those interested, the director's son made a short spin-off film called Aningaaq that shows this scene from the fisherman's perspective.

Brawling In The Deep: Pacific Rim



It’s been a few years since I lost my younger brother to a climbing accident, but that didn’t make the opening of Pacific Rim any easier to watch.

It changed the way I watched the movie.I saw a different story than was on the screen.

Superficially, the movie asks:  Who’s tougher: Giant robots or giant monsters? It then presents its evidence in the form of two hours of chest rocket-firing, acid-spitting  and punching. Lots and lots of punching with great big robot fists. There are so many biological and technological weapons on display that the combatants themselves sometimes fail to keep track of them.

KAIJU: Oh yeah, I forgot. I have wings.

JAEGER: Oh yeah, I forgot. I have a big-ass sword.

And while the punching and clawing and monster-robot arms race is interesting enough (KAIJU: Surprise, motherfucker. I can shoot EMPs from my shoulderblades!) I spent most of the movie sitting there in 3D glasses, thinking about what it means to rebuild intimacy in the face of loss.

The interesting thing about the pilots in Pacific Rim is the way they are connected to one another. They are husbands and wives, parents and children (both natural and adopted), siblings, friends, and potential lovers who are connected  via mind-meld. While the movie touches on it, I wish the movie had spent more time exploring how those relationships are affected by a) the Drift process and b) the emotional weight of going into battle side by side with someone with whom you have an intimate relationship.

The monster/mindmeld dynamic makes for a metaphor between the fears of engulfment (the Drift) and abandonment (death via giant monster) that characterizes family/intimate relationships

How would your relationships change with your family if you could see each other’s innermost thoughts, if you were able to see past events from their perspective, if you were able to see the parts of them that they kept separate from you? How would you feel to know that you no longer have any secrets from someone that close to you?

And what would it feel like to know that if you screwed up, weren’t quick enough, or were just unlucky, that person could be taken away before your eyes?

As Raleigh shows us, loss changes a person, and not always in big ways.  Not necessarily in the “I will never pilot a giant robot again,” but in small decisions. This time instead of risking it all to save a boat, we use the boat to bash the monster’s head in.  Most importantly,  this time, when we defeat a Kaiju, we make damn sure it’s dead.

Loss also gives us a chance to empathize and connect. Our grief experience means we are in a better position to recognize the loss of others.  As Raleigh does when Mako Drifts into a traumatic memory of Onibaba’s attack on Tokyo, we can help others work through their own emotions, simply by being there.  

This healing is not just a one way process. In being there for other’s losses, we come to terms with our own. By helping them, we help ourselves.

In order to give and receive this kind of help though, we have to open ourselves to intimacy. Sometimes, especially after we’ve had someone or something we’ve been intimately connected to ripped away, that’s a hard thing to do.

The “Australian(*)” father and son team of Herc and Chuck Hansen is an example of this. While the source of the tension between them  is never explained on screen (if you’re interested, their backstory can be found here), it’s clear that they have some problems. They alternate between bickering and silence. The only way they can show affection towards each other is through the pet bulldog that serves as their emotional surrogate.

The father admits that he doesn’t “know whether to hug him or kick his ass.”

Later, after being injured, Herc tells his son that when you Drift with someone, you also think nothing has to be said, that words are unnecessary. He wonders awkwardly and aloud to Chuck if maybe there were things he should have said more often.

Is that not true of the way many of us behave in relationships with those closest to us? We experienced shared events with them and we expect them to know what we were thinking or feeling. After all, they were there. How can they not know how we feel about them? It’s written in our faces, on our bodies, threads through every word that comes out of our mouth.

Sometimes we even believe we know what they were thinking or feeling. They’re the people we know best after all. We believe we know them better than they know themselves.

And yet…

And yet for good or ill, it is often the people we think we know the best who surprise us the most. We take them for granted. We make assumptions. We hold them to expectations both spoken and unspoken.

As a wrestling theme goes, we think we know them.

We don’t think—or don’t think we should have to—say certain things to them. 

Often we find out we’re wrong.

And sometimes, sometimes that discovery comes when it’s far, far too late to do anything about it.

Loss strikes at the heart of us. It attacks our past and future as much as it does our present. We feel the pain we’re going through now, but it also reminds us of the past with this person we can’t go back to and a future we will never have with them.

It’s particularly tough when our loss is something that enables others to gain, such as Chuck Hansen’s sacrifice in Pacific Rim.

Action movies often wallpaper over grief-- Luke Skywalker shows no signs of grief over the loss of Biggs, for example. Films  either ignoring the loss completely (there is a spoof of this in the deleted scenes of the original Austin Powers movie), wallpaper over it with a simple “He died a hero” or—most crassly of all--use it as a plot point: “I will avenge you, my brother”. Maybe that’s the nature of the genre. Showing death is okay, but showing bereavement is verboten. 

That’s what makes Herc’s understated but unmistakeable grief during the celebration scenein the control room poignant. While everyone else is celebrating victory, Herc remembers the cost.  

You can make the argument that Chuck died a hero. You can say he was doing what he loved. You can talk about freedom and sacrifice and victory all you want. But is that really comfort to a bereaved father, a grieving widow or an uncomprehending child.

He died doing what he loved. He made the ultimate sacrifice.

Good for him.

But what about me?

 What about those of us left behind? Brothers and children. Parents and lovers. Aren't we important too? How could he just...just leave us?

Was it worth it? 

On paper it makes sense, yes. Intellectually, sure.  But in our heart of hearts…?

Pacific Rim doesn’t try to tell Herc the answers.

Why should it? Sometimes there are no answers to give.

But while it tells us nothing, it shows us a lot. Through Raleigh and Mako we see  grief can change and shape us, the way it can either cut us off from others or bring us closer, and the way we can make peace with it by allowing it be a part of us without being consumed by it.

That, to me, is why Pacific Rim, for all it's scorpion-tail spearing and rotor-blade-arm slicing (and punching, of course. Let us never forget the punching) is ultimately not about giant monsters and giant robots.

It is about normal-sized humans.

And that's plenty big enough for me.

(*) The Accent Police were out in full force for the Australians, presumably the same folks who complained about Kevin Costner in Robin Hood and Connery in The Hunt for Red October. They seemed ok with Mickey Rourke cutting his way out of a giant monster baby after being eaten alive though. I guess we all have our limits for suspension of disbelief.