The Sadism of the Lucas/Spielberg Syndrome

During my years in grad school, I happened to mention to a faculty member my lifelong affection for Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. He replied that he couldn’t really share my liking because he found Jurassic Park “such a sadistic film.” This remark stayed with me for the obvious reason that my professor was absolutely correct. With its litany of attractions – such as a man being unceremoniously plucked off the toilet to be devoured by a T-Rex, a young girl being drenched with brachiosaur snot, an even younger boy being zapped with 10,000 volts of electricity, and a woman being menaced and terrified to the point of near catatonia – Jurassic Park is indeed a pervasively sadistic film. My liking for it nonetheless, however, is due to the fact that it uses a certain aesthetic register of sadism – one that Spielberg and his friend and collaborator George Lucas largely innovated between themselves.When he first undertook Star Wars, George Lucas was just coming off the success of American Graffiti, a project he had only undertaken in reaction to the failure of his first feature, THX-1138. That film had failed to resonate with American audiences who were, to say the least, unused to coolly cerebral art films couched in an idiom of hard science-fiction (2001 would seem the obvious exception, but perhaps that film had already been reified into total uniqueness). Ever since film school, Lucas’s interests had been clinical ones of formal experimentation – abstract filmmaking, tone poems, collections of images – with emotive human drama incidental, if there at all. His 1966 student short Freiheit (which can be seen you YouTube here) shows this sensibility in full effect. Following the failure of THX 1138, however, Francis Ford Coppola apparently encouraged Lucas to try something warmly human and emotive – an idea that Lucas fiercely resisted, saying that “emotionally involving the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded, get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.” But he eventually came round, and the nostalgia-fest American Graffiti was the result. It was a big success, but still nothing compared to the pop cultural waves that would be made two years later by Jaws – the work of twenty-nine year-old wunderkind Steven Spielberg.

This was the film that introduced American audiences to devoured beach bunnies, dead children, chomped-off legs, eyeball-less severed heads, and sundry other horrors – and American audiences loved every second of it as the most fun they’d had at the movies in years. Clearly the rules for cinematic convention had changed. The “movie brat” generation, as they were sometimes called – the first generation of filmmakers raised from infancy on post-war pop culture – were clearly no longer interested in maintaining a pretence of narrative “innocence” that a movie’s formal logic didn’t merit just out of sheer dutiful convention. From now on, they would have to self-consciously fake it.

Star Wars, therefore, was the result of Lucas having learnt that cynically calculated positivity could produce big aesthetic breakthroughs. He duly approached the film in the spirit of filling the lacunae whereby “Disney had abdicated its reign over the children’s market, and nothing had replaced it.” His goal was thus to reactivate the sort of affect that old-fashioned pirate and western matinee films used to produce – creating a one-dimensional spectacle that would “reintroduce a kind of basic morality. Everybody’s forgetting to tell ‘Hey, this is right and this is wrong.’” The problem is that this sort of thing isn’t as easy to fake as Lucas thinks. The history of American film is filled with artists like Walt Disney, Robert Flaherty, Frank Capra, and Clarence Brown, whose own sensibilities pretty much matched the warm-and-fuzzy-inner-child glow of their films. And the more generic old kiddie matinees were, by and large, made by journeymen whose imaginations presumably didn’t stretch much further than the complacent products they were making. For a more cerebral artist like Lucas, however, so filled with formalist ambitions and ideas, preaching a faith that you don’t really believe is always going to create a lot of evasions and suppressions that will inevitably return in all kinds of nasty forms. Hence, the sadism to come.

The Empire Strikes Back is still unarguably the best of the six Star Wars films because, unlike the first instalment, Lucas had the sense to largely drop the “Disney moralism for children” pretence, and make a film that, while still available to kids, is aimed squarely at adults, or at least bright teenagers. Its most grisly moments seem not so much gratuitously sadistic as just organically chilling. There is the moment when, following the Millennium Falcon’s dodge into the star destroyer’s sensor blind spot, a deck officer reports “Captain Needa, Lord Vader demands an update on the pursuit!” Needa – played by Michael Culver, one of those indefatigable British character actors – blithely declares: “get a shuttle ready. I shall assume full responsibility for losing them, and apologize to Lord Vader,” evidently not fully realizing what this means. We, however, having seen Admiral Ozzle’s abrupt demise earlier in the film, know better. A few scenes later, thus, we get a shock cut onto Needa collapsed to the floor, his eyes bugging out as he’s gruesomely strangled by the Force. “Apology accepted, Captain Needa,” intones Darth Vader, as a pair of flunkies immediately dart in to drag away his body like a piece of carrion. One wonders how many thousand military officers in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia one just saw encapsulated

It’s only when you get to Return of the Jedi, however, that the bills for Lucas’s insincere moralism really start to fall due. The early scenes in Jabba’s palace centre around the trapdoor leading down to the rancor pit, which for sheer sadistic fantasy value surpasses even Ernst Blofeld’s various death-devices for his henchmen. We first have it established with the Twi’lek dancing girl Oola, who for resisting whatever unspecified sexual overture Jabba was making, immediately finds herself down in the deep dark pit, her fate conveyed only by a great roar and her bloodcurdling scream heard back up in the throne room. It’s that single brief shot of her picking herself up upon landing down there – hobbled by terror at knowing what’s coming, and her garish lipstick, makeup and costume suddenly forming a grotesque contrast with the stygian dungeon surrounding – that always gets me, however.

This is only the set-up, however, for the later scene where Jabba drops Luke into the rancor pit, and one his porcine Gammorean guards, Jubnuk, accidently falls in too. The first few moments down there, accordingly, are devoted to Jubnuk’s pathetic attempts to get back up the drop shaft, and his plaintive squeals. These switch to shrieks of terror as the grille is raised and the rancor emerges and makes straight for him. Lucas makes sure the ensuing shot is held for long enough that we really get to savour the spectacle of Jubnuk being hoisted screaming up to the rancor’s mouth and devoured in one huge chomp. Meanwhile, a few yards away, Luke seems no more concerned than if a twig or an icicle had been broken.

After Luke battles and kills the rancor, the emphasis shifts. C-3PO, in his immortally effete tones, then informs our heroes that they are to be “taken to the dune sea, and cast into the Pit of Carkoon, the nesting place of the all-powerful Sarlaac.” “That doesn’t sound so bad,” says Han, cuing viewers by now used to the Lucas/Spielberg aesthetic to think “wait for it…” And, of course, C-3PO then continues that “in its belly you will find a new definition of pain and suffering as you are slowly digested over a thousand years.” This line/image then conditions our viewing of the following battle sequence above the Sarlaac pit, as we get the full sadistic import of seeing innumerable of Jabba’s lackeys fall or be knocked into the Sarlaac pit. By now, Lucas’s assertion that he was making a Disney film for children, that would re-introduce a basic white-hat morality, could be fully appreciated for the self-delusion that it was.

After Return of the Jedi, Lucas was pretty much finished as an original filmmaker, his subsequent projects adding nothing to his original achievement with the Star Wars trilogy. Howard the Duck would prove totally unwatchable; and Willow, while not nearly as bad, now in the age of Peter Jackson, seems more of historical interest – for introducing audiences to the digital morph – than something one watches for real entertainment. The Star Wars prequel trilogy would vastly expand the imaginative/spectacular horizons of the original trilogy, but it would all be on such a grand, de-personalized scale that the sadistic frissons of the first films would not be recaptured. After this, therefore, it fell to Spielberg alone to continue the evolution of the trend they had initiated, and Jurassic Park would be one of the most significant milestones in this regard.

Whereas the business with the rancor and Sarlaac in Return of the Jedi felt somewhat gratuitously sadistic – a case of cramming too much into the first act – Spielberg, with Jurassic Park, would succeed in organically integrating the same sort of business across the whole length of the film. The key scene here is when, early on, Dr. Grant goes over to the obnoxious kid who says that velociraptor “looks like a six-foot turkey,” and brandishes his velociraptor claw. Grant then gives a monologue about how velociraptor is a pack hunter, and would attack you with “a six-inch retractable claw, like a razor, on the middle toe. He doesn’t bother to bite your jugular like a lion, say,” but will rather slash you, “here, or maybe here,” he says, sharply drawing the claw down the kid’s side and across his sternum to mime to point. “Or maybe across the belly, spilling your intestines,” he continues, drawing the claw across the kid’s tummy. “The point is, you are alive when they start to eat you. So, you know, try to show a little respect.” 

It will be well over another hour into the film before we see an adult velociraptor, but that initial scene is not going to go away, and conditions our understanding of what’s at stake when the scenes do come where our heroes are menaced by the raptors. Also what’s in store when we see the matriarch raptor tackle Muldoon to the ground and the camera cuts away. It’s a lot less gratuitous-seeming than the Sarlaac business in Return of the Jedi, but the foreshadowing principle is basically the same. It also provides the basis of one of the most vivid framings in film – the one where Lex and Tim are hiding low on the kitchen floors, and the under the counter they see one of those claws attached to a live velociraptor, ominously clicking up and down against the tiled floor. We know what it means, and since Spielberg has actually succeeded – against much Hollywood practice – in making these kids sympathetic instead of so annoying that we’re rooting for the raptors, the suspense is very acute. It’s a calculated sadism, but one managed masterfully. 

By the mid-1990s, in the wake of Jurassic Park, a new generation of blockbuster filmmakers had emerged – Roland Emmerich, Michael Bay, and Stephen Sommers being among its most prominent members – who had absorbed the lessons of Lucas and Spielberg’s kind of calculated sadism, and were raring to try it out for themselves. Emmerich’s 1992 film Universal Soldier – about Vietnam casualties being resurrected as genetically enhanced super-soldiers – doesn’t quite follow the pattern strictly, insofar as its sadism isn’t of the foreshadowing type discussed hitherto. What it does instead is have its hero and villain kill each other within the first five minutes, as a way of setting up a rationale whereby since they’re already sort of “dead” anyway, they and their fellow “Uni-Sols” can be abused and re-killed to absolutely any extent whatsoever throughout the course of the film.

More in the orthodox foreshadowing vein described above is Michael Bay’s The Rock, in which one hears about the effects of VX poison gas in the following terms: “It's a cholinesterase inhibitor. Stops the brain from sending nerve messages down the spinal cord within thirty seconds. Any epidermal exposure or inhalation and you'll know. A twinge at the small of your back as the poison seizes your nervous system...Your muscles freeze, you can't breathe, you spasm so hard you break your own back and spit your guts out. But that's after your skin melts off.” In a Hollywood film made under the Production Code, you wouldn’t even have been allowed to hear all that, the imaginative pictures it conjures up are so outrageous. Now, however, under this second, purer generation of blockbuster sadism, you stand no chance of not actually seeing it – not once even, but twice.

The Rock nonetheless works brilliantly as a film, however, because Bay actually knows what he’s doing. The aesthetic of blockbuster sadism described here only goes horribly wrong when a film is helmed by a horrifically clueless director who has no idea how things actually signify or win empathy from the audience. And this brings us to Deep Rising and Stephen Sommers – the future dubious auteur of The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, Van Helsing, and G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra. With all of those films, however, he would obey the corporate Hollywood diktat to always neuter things for the PG-13 rating. With Deep Rising, however, he was allowed to embrace the R, and all the sadism that allows. The result is what is, without a doubt, the most horrible and repulsive film I have ever seen produced on a mainstream blockbuster scale.  

The basic plot involves a luxury liner attacked by an absurd deep-sea octopus monster whose tentacles double as innumerable mouths and throats. Described as “some kind of strange off-shoot of the Archaea Ottoia family,” the creature, we are told, does not “eat” people. “No, they drink you. They drink you alive. Sucking all the fluids out of the body before excreting the skeletal remains.” This is the key bit of foreshadowing exposition, and if this sounds to you like it would be intensely, horrifically, agonizingly painful, the film makes clear in no uncertain terms that you’re right. There’s one particularly horrific sequence where we see the “heroes” (none of the character are really prepossessing or sympathetic) shoot open one of the Ottoia tentacles, only to see it spill out one of their previously-devoured comrades, who is now, thanks to CGI, partially-digested but still alive, and obviously in the most acute agony possible. In supplying a large cast just to have the maximum number of victims for this established fate, this film’s sadism is some of the purest I’ve ever seen.  

All this would still be potentially workable if Sommers possessed a competent understanding of screen presence. Alas, he doesn’t, and in casting Kevin J. O’Connor as the insufferable “Joey Pantucci,” Sommers creates the most vivid example I’ve ever seen of what might be called the MUCHAS (Mind-bendingly, Unwatchably Creepy, Hateful, Annoying Sidekick) character. Seriously – every moment this guy is onscreen, there is only one candidate a viewer can possibly be thinking of for who needs to be drunk by the Ottoia tentacles next. And yet Sommers persists in the delusion that he’s somehow funny and likeable, and wins viewer empathy. This reaches an absurd peak at the end of the second act when, trapped by one the tentacle-maws, one of the (actually empathy-winning) mercenary-villains uses his last bullet trying to kill MUCHAS instead of sparing himself a gruesome and horrible death. Of course it doesn’t work and MUCHAS just does some more stupid “WTF?” mugging. Badly done sadism of this sort works very differently than the competently-done kind: namely, the latter plays on your humane impulses, while the former simply turns you into a sadist yourself. Watching Return of the Jedi, I always wish I could save Oola and Jubnuk, and watching Jurassic Park, I almost never find myself cheering for the raptors to eviscerate and devour Lex and Tim. Remembering Deep Rising, however, beyond wanting to see MUCHAS get half-drunk, regurgitated, and then drunk again, my only thought is that, for using the character the way he did, I wouldn’t feed Stephen Sommers to the Ottoia even if I could. It would be too good for him.

Voices of a Distant Star

This is a film that I discovered back in the summer of 2013 purely by accident, picking it up off the shelf of a public library on nothing more than a vague whim that its cover looked interesting.  This is, incidentally, the same way that I discovered my reigning favourite film: Ken Russell’s The Devils. And in exactly the same way, coming across Voices of a Distant Star introduced me not only to a great new film, but opened a doorway to the world of a fascinating new filmmaker: Makoto Shinkai. As a Japanese animated film, Voices of a Distant Star is situated within the established traditions of anime: the character designs are the familiar simplified bodies with exaggeratedly expressive eyes; their movement in the frame is minimal, compensated for by the inordinate atmospheric detail of the backgrounds; and the plot is a genre work that eventually involves giant combat robots, here called “Tracers.” The benefit of being part of such a well-established tradition, however, is that you can hit the ground running and know that you and your audience are on the same page. Voices of a Distant Star is a debut independent short that Shinkai made totally according to his own lights, but the film manifests none of the qualities that we associate with “independent” filmmaking here in the West – such as an a priori rejection, on principle, of the norms of the mainstream. Like the features that Shinkai would go on to make after it, the film’s visual style and tone are essentially the same as innumerable more mainstream anime films or series, but just better – the product of a superior imagination at work on its own terms.

The film’s basic narrative has a teenage girl, “Mikako Nagamine,” being separated from her (boy)friend “Noboru Terao” by virtue of being recruited as a pilot cadet for the “UN Space Armada” about to depart Earth. Off in space, Mikako can only communicate with Noboru via cell phone messaging. Voyaging via hyperdrive further out into, and finally beyond, the Solar System, however, her messages – moving only at the speed of light – take progressively longer and longer to reach their recipient. Mikako and Noboru’s relationship inexorably becomes more theoretical, as however deeply they reside in each other’s hearts, millions of kilometres of separation nonetheless take a toll. The UN Space Armada to which Mikako belongs is notionally heading out into space to find and engage a hostile alien force called the “Tarsians,” but this narrative premise is left highly ambiguous. Shinkai certainly doesn’t go into full-on Starship Troopers-style sardonic satire, but there’s nonetheless an inescapable suggestion that this whole deployment and war might not be necessary, or could have been avoided. This makes the pathos of Mikako and Noboru’s separation all the greater.

One of the very first things one notices about Voices of a Distant Star is its utter lack of any concession to the inattentive spectator. Like so many Japanese artists throughout history, Shinkai possesses a keen eye for the juxtaposition of visual elements within a composition, as well as an apparent fondness for the “pillow shots” (like at left) that some Western scholars have attributed to Ozu – cut-aways to details of a sequence’s environment that have no immediately apparent narrative motivation, but which do an inestimable amount to create atmosphere. All these, however – like most of the film’s images, in fact – zip past at a split-second rate, such that a spectator who glances away from the screen for even the briefest of moments is royally screwing themselves. This isn’t done in the name of Michael Bay-style hyperkineticism, however, but is a considered aesthetic choice to cram the maximum amount of narrative information in to the film’s short 25-minute running time. Probably very few spectators could maintain the required level of sharp-eyed attentiveness for a full 100-minute feature length, but for a quarter of that, it works.

One result of this editing style is that the film really gets an aesthetic of intellectual montage going. The spectator who has an active visual imagination, and a long-standing interest in science fiction matters, will get far more out of this film than one who doesn’t. For instance, getting to the space station in Jupiter’s orbit, Mikako mentions “the Flux Tube between Io and Jupiter… the hugest lightning in this Solar System!” and “I never get bored of looking at Jupiter’s clouds.” These observations are only accompanied by brief images, but their dramatic treatment and the sentiments at work unlock a whole host of reminiscences in me, of images such as the above painting of Jupiter’s “surface,” or the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impact in 1994. A film that offers me these sorts of pleasures is incredibly rare, and resonates deeply with me.

Before this, however, one of the film’s absolute highlights is a sequence on Mars, where Mikako’s training as a Tracer pilot takes place. We dissolve in on an astonishing vista of the Martian surface, with a vast canyon wending its way from the bottom of the frame up, between vast craters. White and green clouds hover above it all, still beneath the frame’s point-of-view… and then the silence of it all is shattered as Mikako’s Tracer blasts down from the top of the frame, zooming off across this vast horizon. We soon hear about how she’s seen Mount Olympus and the Marineris valleys, again accompanied by brief-but-vivid accompanying images, and some further shots of a squadron of Tracers swooping across an awesome Martian vista of plateau tops poking out above the clouds. And all this isn’t even to mention the Tarsian ruins (pictured) that now exist on Mars in this film… Later, the UN Armada reaches the very edge of the Solar System, and we see the Lysithea pulling up to the bleak twin worlds of Pluto and Charon. Images such as these speak to my deepest-held instincts about animation: the idea that the graphic nature of the medium frees you to realize any narrative spectacle whatsoever, making filmmakers limited only by their imaginations.

In this spirit, the film’s moments of greatest sublimity come after the UN Armada – after a sudden and vicious engagement with the Tarsians – has had to make an emergency hyperspace jump away from Pluto and Charon which takes them 8.6 light years away from Earth, to the Sirius Alpha Beta system. “Since the last century, we’ve known that Sirius has its own planetary system,” Mikako narrates, “but we are the first in all humanity to observe another planetary system with our bare eyes.” The film then takes us down onto the surface of the new planet, christened “Agartha,” with some vertiginously huge tilting shots – one from above the planet up in orbit, another down to the surface from below. We see an alien stag-like animal, standing on a hilltop, looking up at the Tracers as they descend through the sky. This presages an astonishingly beautiful sequence on another world that is Earth-like, but subtly different. In just one beautiful image among many, we see Mikako’s Tracer standing on a ridge before a vast grassy landscape, with the edges of cliff faces surrounding her. Rain clouds are pouring across the landscape, but through a few scattered holes, sun beams shoot brilliantly down.

And yet having been exposed to this long succession of sublime cosmic images, Mikako’s ability to feel awe and rapture ultimately fail her. Inside her Tracer pod, we see the rainfall suddenly stop as the clouds above her part. Seeing the beams of the alien sun break through and fall upon her – a distant star becoming her own – she looks directly upwards in reverential awe for a moment, then breaks down in tears. She simply wants “to be hit by the rain,” and “to go to a convenience store and eat ice cream” with Noboru, she narrates.

At this point, taking a cue from Robert Zemeckis’s Contact, Shinkai has Mikako have a telepathic encounter with one of the Tarsians on Agartha. The telepathic avatar appears to her, hovering in mid-air outside her cockpit, as herself, dressed in her old school uniform again, rather than her Tracer flightsuit. It then says to her, in her own light, ingenuous teenage voice, that “to become an adult, pain is necessary to. But you will probably be able to go much, much farther, even to other galaxies and other universes.” This is the final humdinger of the film’s narrative evocation of the Tarsians, since it’s the most diametrically-opposed moment imaginable to Independence Day’s captured alien demanding “DIE…” This alien emissary seems to be offering nothing but wise and inspiring words, indicating a utopian vision of humanity someday taking its place a larger galactic community. And yet then the big climactic battle starts up anyway.

In the course of the following, extremely gruesome, combat, the film’s aesthetic agenda reaches new heights of fascination. We’d already learned from the battle around Pluto and Charon that, regarding her actual Tracer piloting skills, Mikako is a brave and resourceful pilot. This is confirmed again as, during the ensuing sequence, she royally kicks ass, at one point pinning a Tarsian warrior-entity by the neck and bloodily blasting its head off with her Tracer’s wrist-mounted guns. The film, however, is not really interested in this side of things, and treats it all in a very detached and aestheticized manner. The soundtrack, for instance, consists of an ethereally romantic pop song called "Hello Little Star." During the battle, Mikako rockets back up into orbit over Agartha, all the while narrating an imaginary conversation with Noboru about all the small pleasures of everyday life on Earth, which she misses so sorely out in the distant reaches of space. They include “things like summer clouds and cold rain; the smell of fall breeze; the sound of rain drops hitting an umbrella; the softness of spring soil; the feeling of peace at the convenience store in the middle of the night; the cool wind after school; the smell of chalkboard erasers; the sound of a truck passing by in the middle of the night; the smell of asphalt in the rain.” Once this recitation ceases, the battle reaches its climax, with Mikako making a kamikaze run against the Tarsian mothership. This leaves her Tracer crippled and drifting off into space, both it and its pilot seemingly totally drained and spent.

With Voices of a Distant Star, thus, Shinkai has made what amounts to a pessimistic rewriting of 2001. Mikako is so wedded to all her Earthly loves and attachments that she can’t let go of them even when confronted with cosmic visions of incalculable wonder. As an analogue to Dave Bowman, she fails to become the Star Child, and instead ends up like Frank Poole. Her constant attention to texting on her cell phone thus seems an appropriate master metaphor here. Even though, narratively speaking, her use of it is entirely valid – keeping in touch with Noboru – it nonetheless ultimately seems a limiting device, what with her glancing down at it whenever any important new development beckons – exactly, BTW, the habit you need to avoid when watching this film. Shinkai certainly isn’t belaboring any moralizing point about the younger generation of today, but just seems to be making a simple observation – one that, again, deeply resonates with me. 

Around the same that I first saw this film, I had a dream that I woke up having been transported tens of thousands of years into the future. My humble little apartment now opened out onto a balcony, from which one could appreciate the view from an upper-atmospheric skyhook (roughly like the image at left). There was nothing but cloud visible beneath me, and looking up, I could clearly make out a 2001-style space station hanging in low orbit – probably equidistant to me, or closer, than the Earth’s surface. And yet, I remember from my dream, my first thought upon taking all this in was “damn, what’s millennia worth of e-mail Inbox build-up going to do to my cell phone?” This is the level of simpatico with my deepest subconscious imagination that Shinkai shows with this film. Truly a rare experience.