Disney Daemonized – Part Two of Two

Disney’s second animated feature, Pinocchio, would lamely attempt to reconfigure Snow White’s Queen positively, in the character of the Blue Fairy. That the experiment was a failure can be gauged by the very different fairy godmothers we would later see in Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty – more matronly specimens of dotty grandmothers or eccentric aunts. The similarities between Snow White and Pinocchio, however, end there. Whereas in Snow White, the Queen’s death is obviously just there for form’s sake, the first thing one notices about Pinocchio is how it goes through four sets of quite scary villains, none of whom are punished in the slightest for their deeds. The incomparably-named “J. Worthington Foulfellow,” and his buffoonish assistant Gideon, make some money selling Pinocchio to Stromboli, and then some more selling him again to the Coachman, and that’s the end of it. Stromboli of course loses considerable earning prospects when Pinocchio escapes, but his business will presumably continue successfully enough otherwise. We see the Coachman’s slave trade in donkey-boys have a successful day, although Pleasure Island must represent a pretty considerable overhead. And apart from presumably bruising his snout smashing into the cliff-face, Monstro remains free to terrorize the oceans for years to come.

The world, Pinocchio seems to be saying, is filled with terrors and dangers for little boys, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about them, even if you’re determined to behave well. You’ll probably just get shanghaied or kidnapped anyway, to be sold off to be worked to death and then gruesomely mutilated. This is a message you wouldn’t see Disney spinning in today’s PC-positive-obsessed society, and they probably only keep Pinocchio in release because they’re confident most people won’t see it in these terms. The preferred reading however – about “always let your conscience be your guide” – is so childish as to be impossible to take seriously, particularly in light of how it all really boils down to the bad old ethos of “don’t touch yourself.” The business about “give a little whistle” when you feel your will start to slide essentially means to give your penis a good whack or douse it in cold water. And if, on the other hand, you give yourself over to immorality, then you will be shamefully and visibly marked out when your appendage sprouts into prominent, wooden visibility.

In light of all this, the Pleasure Island sequence is a bit of a red herring, but still interesting inasmuch as we find out that, when loosed from this repressiveness, Pinocchio is actually a pretty resilient party animal. From what we see, it appears that all the other boys have drank, smoked, and brawled themselves into complete exhaustion, but Pinocchio and Lampwick are still up and at it. Lampwick, incidentally, is a new milestone for Disney. In the non-Queen sections of Snow White, and in Pinocchio thus far, all the characters have been basically pantomimes. The thinking was apparently that in animation, one wants to get the maximum interest and screen time out of every movement, and so one sees the dwarfs and Cleo, Figaro, Jiminy, et. al. taking exaggerated amounts of time and effort to get from point A to point B, and having broadly comic difficulties articulating any point of dialogue. Lampwick, however, breaks with all this and becomes the first Disney character to be tersely forthright in a distinctively American idiom. One wonders if Disney had seen Dead End and realized how much further he could go with animation. Lampwick’s joyously vulgar American common sense also serves to highlight the degree to which Disney was working in a very un-American tradition of European folklore and fairy tales. Jiminy Cricket made sense on his own terms hitherto, but no sooner does Lampwick say “you take orders from a beetle?” than we start to wonder why. It shows just how unprecedented Snow White really was that it managed to be so un-self-conscious about its fairy tale European setting, and how it only took one more film for some self-consciousness to set in on Disney's part.

Finally, one of the most famous images from Pinocchio is the scene where he is about to head off for his first day of school, all chipper, upbeat optimism – and to demonstrate the fact visually, he turns his body abound 360º below his neck, without his head moving an inch. For modern viewers, the image will immediately evoke memories of the demonically-possessed Regan in The Exorcist, and perhaps produce instinctive mewling about how things were so much more innocent back then, before all this diabolical perversity we have to live with nowadays. This, I submit, is totally to mistake the line of evolution. What Pinocchio really shows is how much of the daemonic was in Disney at its very first, and how much the infantile “positive/therapeutic/wholesome/reassuring” patina that’s been spread over Disney since has obscured the fact. This disconnect would become even more pronounced with Disney’s next film, Dumbo.

Dumbo is chiefly remarkable as an illustration of child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim’s notion that all authentic fairy tales are, at heart, horror stories which have been strategically diluted to the point of providing a memorable frisson to very young children. One’s most immediately vivid memory of the film is likely to be that yes, clowns are indeed very scary (see picture at left). Only in an obnoxiously sanitized American circus are they supposed to be funny in a cute and harmless way – in the sort of Old World manifestation Disney offers here, they channel our gallows humour about how gruesome and turbulent life is.

The list of shudder-inducing images accumulates from there: the elephants being used as slave labour to erect the big top in a cruelly driving storm; the way the children are all feral little monsters tormenting Dumbo’s mother; Dumbo’s drunken hallucinations after mistakenly sampling the clown’s moonshine; and so on and so forth. Like Pinocchio, this is another of those films whose reputation as sweet family fare survives only because adult refuse to actually see the film on visceral level, as opposed to simply watching it on a narrative level. Indeed Dumbo is particularly cunning in this regard, as it opens with the most sanctimoniously wholesome business possible: all the cute little baby animals being immaculately dropped down before their mommies by the storks. Surely a film which has begun on this note can’t go on to contain anything nightmarish?

Stripped down to its most basic level, the conclusion of Dumbo is actually quite uplifting in its horror-story way. Dumbo’s eventual vindication and acceptance comes not because his supposed monstrosity has somehow been healed (like Pinocchio’s woodenness), or because he’s somehow redeemed himself in the eyes of the community by performing some great deed, but because he finally embraces the monstrosity of his huge ears, and learns to fully draw upon their power. The ensuing spectacle simply overawes people, and earns him fame and fortune as a world-beating freak, where he had only been shunned and abused as a marginal freak. This is a truly daemonic and amoral universe, so unlike the facilely therapeutic messages that the corporatized Disney of later years would churn out. To get some contemporary equivalent, you’d have to rewrite Tangled to have Rapunzel set herself up as a tyrant queen, and use her magic hair to deal out immortality in exchange for fealty.

For anybody harboring lingering illusions about Disney’s old “innocence” – of the sort that would lead them to take Dumbo’s storks seriously – Bambi provides an open and shut case that they are deluding themselves. It is quite simply one of, if not the most, sensual films ever produced by Hollywood in the era of the Production Code. All the slinkiness and thinly-veiled aura of sex that one sees in The Lion King’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” sequence can be traced back to Bambi, which demonstrates again the way that people view these older Disney films through a different set of critical eyes. They are “historical classics” – with all the irrelevance and lack of visceral immediacy which that fusty phrase implies – rather than living texts to which you react the same way you would a newly-released film. Thus, when one sees a rival buck backing Faline behind a hedge, and Bambi bounding in to see him off, and the two of them fighting fiercely, and Bambi and Faline then sleekly promenading through the forest, and then vanishing into a glen, and one cut later lying asleep beside each other on a bed of soft grass, one knows it doesn’t mean anything – it’s simply an arbitrary accumulation of shots – because this is a “historical classic,” by Disney no less.

The emphasis on the reproductive function of sex is strikingly frank in Bambi, and would be reproduced absolutely verbatim in The Lion King fifty-two years later. The film opens with the birth of the male protagonist, with the father looking so proud and the mother so sensate and physical that one knows there were no storks involved here. Likewise, the film ends with the male protagonist having reached sexual maturity himself, having switched roles from newborn to father, and now witnessing the birth of his own offspring. In-between-times, thus, the narrative function of the rivalry-and-courtship sequence becomes clear – simply to propagate the species by doing what their affection-instincts tell them to. This is a remarkably earthy tone to strike, naturalizing the physical side of sex at the complete expense of any “higher” spiritualizations of love, and getting right to one of Christianity’s perpetual problems – the way that Nature constantly makes nonsense of the notion of original sin. Reading As You Like It, my favourite part was when in Act III, Scene 2, Touchstone tells the shepherd Corin that he is surely damned because he brings “the ewes and the rams together,” and essentially gets his living as a pimp through “the copulation of cattle.” This is Shakespeare posing an impishly devious paradox for his religious audience, since Touchstone seems to have logic on his side, but basic common sense tells us that what he’s saying is ridiculous. Seeing animals go at right out in the open with no embarrassment can presumably be an awkward experience even for people who may think of themselves as open-minded and liberated. We still have the human traits of self-consciousness and foresight, and religion has long been expert at exploiting those to make us feel uncomfortable about our bodies and sex. 

With Bambi, however, Walt Disney is using his new medium of realist feature animation to put us into a completely different mindset, where the mating urge is totally naturalized – all just part of the circle of life. This makes the Christian Right’s attempt to treat the old Disney films as artefacts of a sort of pre-lapsarian innocence – as opposed to the more cynically knowing tone that came to characterize the company after Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Frank Wells took over – particularly idiotic. It is precisely the ultra-knowingness of the Eisners and Katzenbergs of the world that prevented The Lion King from achieving Bambi's graceful lack of self-consciousness in this regard. Sure the famous “look” from Nala is totally unmistakable, but it comes at the price of any more sustained narrative. Bambi’s mature courtship of Faline stands in opposition to his aversion towards her as a fawn. In a scene that rings agonizingly true for any male who remembers their childhood, we see how the two are first introduced by their mothers, who take a sort of a sort of passively sadistic delight in Bambi’s fumbling uncertainties in the face of a girl. He only finds his confidence at the sight of a troop of virile young stags bounding into the meadow, which immediately makes him want to show off his masculinity in the most crudely boyish way – challenging Faline to fight. The two have nothing in common, and Bambi despises being outmatched three-to-one. This scene makes me suspect that the famously heartbreaking moment of Bambi’s mother’s death has a much more vengeful dimension to it that is generally appreciated. Once it has happened, however, we next see Bambi at the age of sexual maturity, and all uncertainty about Faline’s purpose has vanished. The courtship begins with no pretence at developing her as a character.

The Lion King can do none of this. The childhood uncertainty has been rewritten to make Simba and Nala best friends, in a childishly spunky way, so that their eventual mating is less brazenly biological. Likewise, the birth of their cub at the end comes only after the entire stretch of the third act has blunted the cause/effect relation to the courtship sequence. Furthermore, the totally patriarchal tone of Bambi’s sexual economy would no longer wash by the 1990s, so some effort had to be expended on making Nala into a real character, however vaguely defined. Her best moment is her introduction, where she has the most vividly realistic and animalistic moment of any character in the film, chasing down Pumbaa with a ferocious hunting face devoid of the prettified anthropomorphism that would return only moments later.

This ability to immerse oneself in the sensual, physical aspect of nature, with no moralizing denial, existed more fully in Disney’s earliest feature films than its resurgent ones of recent decades. It would reach its absolute zenith in the one film I have neglected from these two posts, simply because I can’t do it justice: the work of genius that was Fantasia. In the “Rite of Spring” sequence, unlike The Lion King, the hunt is allowed to succeed, and the likable duffer of a stegosaurus gets mauled and killed by the tyrannosaurus. It’s an astonishing instance of the rhythm and implications of art overriding facile concerns of what’s appropriate to show children, and the contrast with Disney’s 2000 feature Dinosaur shows just how far from that peak of maturity things have slid.

Disney Daemonized – Part One of Two

When examining the history of Disney animation, one of the most significant facts is that there’s an interregnum of fully eight years between the studio’s first four feature-length films – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi – and all the others that followed, right up to the present day. That would be significant enough in itself, but when one remembers that the first group of films represented the very first feature-length animations that most moviegoers had seen, this makes them a truly incomparable island in the history of cinema.

The reason for the halt after Bambi was, of course, World War II. With much of the world market suddenly in doubt, and materials and labour now at a greater premium, the phenomenally capital-intensive production of full-length animated features was simply not tenable any more. For the next several years, Disney essentially turned the clock back to his pre-Snow White years, and the studio got by producing cartoon shorts. Many of these were for wartime propaganda purposes (remember Donald Duck’s song “The Fuhrer’s Face”?); others were assembled into feature-length revue films such as Make Mine Music, Fun and Fancy Free, Melody Time, and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad; and still others reflected Disney’s contribution to the U.S. propaganda drive of the “Good Neighbour Policy,” attempting to cultivate better relations with Latin America – the rest of the only continent currently safe from German and Japanese imperialism.

When Disney finally did release its first post-war feature film, Cinderella, moreover, the cultural landscape had changed profoundly. The supposed innocence and populism of the earlier films wouldn’t quite fly in a nation that was now adjusting to a position of global superpower as opposed to isolationist industrial/economic power, and a society that was now enjoying a post-war boom rather suffering through the pre-war Depression. Accordingly, Cinderella, as well as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, and Sleeping Beauty after it, all feel somewhat more slickly professional and by-the-numbers. As brilliant as these films of course are, there isn’t quite the same sense of infectious joy in inventing the wheel – that anything and everything is possible and every new scene is something genuinely unprecedented. Accordingly, there seems far greater interpretive freedom with those first four films, and a lot more to interpret given that, the in the flush of first creativity, Disney and his artists ended up saying a lot more than they seemed to. What follows are just a few of the observations I made when I recently tried revisiting these four films with this mentality.

My organizing term must not be confused with “demonized,” with all its absolutist Judeo-Christian associations of sin, damnation, wickedness, temptation, etc. “Daemonized” draws upon the Ancient Greek and Roman concept of the daemon – a spirit being who is not a pawn in some grandiose celestial binary between simplistic “Good” and “Evil,” but who is distinguished by the sharp delineation of individuality and the self. The daemon is a self-contained entity, knowingly and appraisingly observing and engaging the world, rather than totally at one with the world and creation. “The daemonic” ideal is of individual genius and creative potential, rather than virtue through sublimation to an overarching cosmogony. The daemonic is thus profoundly amoral, and lends itself readily to Decadence. Obviating any hysterical raptures towards the “the Good,” or equally hysterical condemnations of “the Evil,” it coolly recognizes that both co-exist within the human individual, and no mature sense of self is possible without a synthesis of them. As Rilke once said: “If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.” The childish insistence upon absolute good or evil is only possible when one has abandoned exactly the sense of mature individual continence and complexity that daemonism is defined by. This might sound like the last mentality that could be profitably applied to the earliest films of Walt Disney Studios, but in my next two blog posts, that is exactly what I intend to do…

 

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When viewing Snow White today, viewers may find its overall narrative arc childishly naïve. There’s the obvious temptation to ask “well, what then?” after Snow White is revived by her Handsome Prince, set upon the back of his horse, and escorted off to his castle to live “Happily Ever After.” A bit over-simplified, isn’t it? What happens after the initial rush of euphoria wears off and the day-to-day reality of married life sets in?

After viewing it again, however, this question no longer arises for me. The answer seems totally self-evident: Snow White will of course develop into the Evil Queen all over again. She cannot help it. They are organically successive stages of the same organism, just as a caterpillar cannot help pupating into a butterfly. It’s an ironclad law of human culture that Romanticism always mutates into Decadence – that every Wordsworth always lays the ground for a Swinburne, a Wilde, a Dante Rossetti. The innocent dreaminess that sees one wish to pick flowers and commune with the cute animals cannot be sustained forever without going stale, and will eventually mutate into the imperious domineeringness that will demand rigorous aesthetic perfection of one’s entire environment. Once Snow White is ensconced as a princess again, presumably to become a Queen in the fullness of time, her chief occupation will of course be to consolidate and defend her “happily ever after” – to let nothing whatsoever disturb the utopian plateau her life has attained. Thus, any unromantic or unhappy discordant notes must be suppressed with all necessary force. This might of course take the form of charity and kindness at first, but that can’t last forever. And of course it’s essential that the prince’s eye must never stray, so maintaining the position as Fairest in the Land which she usurped from the last Queen will be absolutely imperative, and will necessitate making her own reassuring trips to the Magic Mirror….

All this to say, I now find the Queen’s demise at the end of Snow White less offensive and unjust than I used to. The film’s misogynistic moralizing is too transparent to really take seriously, and it especially gives the game away by never having Snow White share a scene with the Queen when she’s in her imperiously beautiful true form. Obviously the sheer gulf in intensity and charisma between them would put Snow White at an unacceptable disadvantage. In her true form, the Queen only takes up a small minority of the film’s running time, but it’s so disproportionately memorable that it feels like far more. The sheer arch, hierarchical, will power that she exudes is the backbone of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ lasting artistic reputation. Efface her, and leave the film entirely to the childishness of its eight titular characters, and it would probably have been forgotten by 1938. As it was, I strongly suspect that, twenty-two years later in Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent is in fact Snow White all grown up into the Queen she was destined to become. 

This sort of dramaturgy set the template that Disney was to follow for another seventy years or so – where the heroes are expected to be bumptious and unsophisticated, albeit with a certain humorous charm to them, and the heroines were expected to be totally simpering and obedient, forever in need of being led or rescued. Against this supposedly positive "norm," we are given villains – both male and female – who are the epitome of elegance, power, and sophistication; always knowing exactly how things stand, always ready with a quip and a witticism about it, and able to intelligently act upon it for their own ends. Thus, we are supposed to hissingly abominate them as evil. It's inconceivable that the adults who were making these films really believed this sort of thing themselves, or expected their target child audience to take it totally at face value. The sheer gulf in cool agency and articulacy between the supposed "good" and "evil" is just too great, and Snow White seems to implicitly acknowledge this in a way that its later successors did not. As for its immediate successors, however, my next post will get to that very soon...

The Debt

When one first begins to watch John Madden’s film The Debt, there is one obvious influence hanging over it: Steven Spielberg’s Munich. Indeed, I suspect that Munich was the enabling condition in how the Israeli thriller, of which Madden’s film is a remake, originally got made. The two year time gap between 2005 and 2007 seems to fit perfectly…

There is no way for this film – about a team of a team of crack Mossad agents heading to Europe undercover to avenge an atrocity committed against the Jewish people – to even pretend that it isn’t standing in a very large shadow, and so one suspects Madden and his DP Ben Davis just went with it. A lot of the unglamorous, dimly-lit scenes in the streets of East Berlin seem uncannily like the look that Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski achieved in Munich. Both sought to emphasize how much the look and feel of Europe has changed between the mid-20^th century and the late 20^th/early 21^st century – how there used to be so much less glass, plastic, and stainless steel, and so much more brick, stone, and grim iron. Unlike today’s gleaming neo-liberal world which seems to consider last week ancient history, this world phlegmatically evokes the centuries of history that lie in virtually everything in Europe, and the subjectivity that comes with this knowledge. Likewise, the film’s violence is much more close and intensely visceral than one expects from a film of this sort. But I’ll get to that in due course…

Even more telling than all this, however, is the fact that Ciaran Hinds is cast as essentially the same character as in Munich, albeit older and sadder. There is also an Australian beefcake as another of the Mossad heroes, but whereas Munich had Eric Bana, The Debt has Sam Worthington, and it was here that my troubles with the film began. After Terminator Salvation, Avatar, and Clash of the Titans, Worthington’s presence carries certain connotations, and I was expecting The Debt to be far brisker and pulpier than it eventually was. Whereas I went in thinking only of Munich, by the time the credits rolled I was in a very different place, thinking of a totally different roster of influences. These include films such as Atonement, The Reader, and Sarah’s Key – films of our time which are still fascinated by World War II and the Holocaust as the defining events of the twentieth-century, but are nonetheless grimly aware that we are now heading into the second decade of the twenty-first century. By 2010, we are fully three generations removed from this era – four for the younger generation that watches the most movies today – and it is becoming progressively more difficult to come up with plots that make it viscerally and immediately relevant. Far more often, these films are about memory and closure at the end of one’s life, or in relation to an older relative’s. Atonement is about an author trying to honour her sister’s memory, but only once she’s on the cusp of retirement and senility; The Reader is about an established and disillusioned lawyer revisiting a boyhood love long after it has ceased to mean anything; and Sarah’s Key is about a mature woman who becomes determined to learn the truth about a wartime story which involves her in-laws’ apartment, even though all concerned are by now dead or geriatric.

Probably the most vivid instance of this sort of thing in the culture today has been the phenomenon of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The catalyst to the story is the oldest in the book – a reclusive millionaire hires our investigator-hero to learn what happened to his granddaughter – but again, it’s initially not about living results but about closure. Even the investigator, Blomkvist, is by now middle-aged enough and established enough to be more worried about salvaging his reputation and keeping his apartment than blowing the lid off anything. The real interest to the story, however, is Lisbeth Salander, who is in her mid-20s and whose life is still very much a volatile live wire. Her youth and backstory -- as we learn it in the next two books -- mean that the events at issue took place decades before she was even born, and in a totally different world from the digital age of which she is a child. Her intensity is such that she's able to give a jolt of new energy to a case which has gone old along with those concerned in it. Even its resolution, when the 50-something Harriet is finally found alive and well, feels rather flat and perfunctory in Lisbeth's absence.

In light of all this, The Debt hinges above all on Helen Mirren’s performance as the “30 years later” iteration of Jessica Chastain’s character, and her evocation of weariness with life – of having lived with baggage and issues for so long that one would be uncomfortable changing things, even for the better. By the time one is pushing 60, after all, one has already been through marriage and divorce, one’s career is for better or worse set, and you have grown kids just starting upon theirs. Even if one does re-enter the fray, one does so relying on experience rather than vigour, and the prospect of being killed in action is less horrific than merely sad and ignominious. The climactic fight scene, for instance, is deliberately the stiffest and most by-the-motions one I’ve ever seen, both participants not having nearly the passion for this they once did.

The aesthetic of these films, in turn, very much determines their audience and their reception. These are obviously films for mature cinephiles – either adults who directly identify with their protagonists, or younger viewers who are educated enough to appreciate what is at issue – and as such their basically middle-brow mentality is unsurprising. The fast, loud, and unrelenting tones one finds in films openly pitched at the teenage market today are so vulgarly presentist that these films seem even smarter than they are by comparison. And yet somehow there is still a sense of cop-out; a pathetic declaration that once one has passed a certain age one should simply surrender to the burden of history and no longer even think of taking part in it. This is then legitimized by the impression such films give that all the bumptious, brutal, horrors of the mid-twentieth-century are safely back there, and totally over with now, in our tranquil twenty-first century world of neo-liberal consumerism. This is, we all know, utter rubbish, and it was here that a third point of comparison struck me.

The Debt is particularly telling when you compare it to Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book. The connection first struck me at the film’s mid-point, in its sole outrageous and provocative moment. Because the Mossad agents’ target is working as a gynecologist now, the only way to get to him is for Jessica Chastian’s character to pose as a patient, which thus entails putting her feet in stirrups and letting him minutely examine her vulva region. Watching him try to engage her in friendly small talk under these conditions, knowing of her mission as we do, is frankly hilarious in a warped way, and receives a brilliant punch line when he observes that “you had intercourse last night! That’s good. I think we’ll see results.” She has, you see, half-heartedly had sex with her other teammate, Sam Worthington having taken too long to make a move. It’s the sort of thing you don’t usually see is such staid, middle-brow films as this, and it reminds one that Black Book is also about an Isreali woman who has a husband, a couple of kids, a job as a schoolteacher, and whose wartime experiences in occupied Holland would seem totally remote from her current life. Diabolically brilliant cynic that he is, though, Verhoeven would never let it rest thus. The film’s opening subtitle – establishing that it’s 1957 – seems innocuous enough, and after more than two gripping hours of the movie’s flashback narrative, likely nobody would remember it.

Only in the last minute of the film, however, when our heroine ceases her recollection and heads off with her family, do we see that they are heading towards the kibbutz which she’s founded with the Holocaust loot she recovered twelve years ago, and which is now surrounded by a barbed wire fence and bristling with sandbags and gun emplacements. Suddenly it comes back to one that since this is 1957, the Suez war is still going on, and Israel will be on high alert for the Palestinian troops augmenting Nasser’s army. This in turn cues one to think of Israel’s obnoxious habit of continuing, to this day, to provocatively build settlements inside the West Bank, just as a general fuck-you to Palestine, and forestall any peace that might require concessions. The contrast with The Debt is total. Even with the best intentions, Verhoeven seems to be saying, you can never really escape from history, and in trying to retire peaceably to home and family after the buffetings of one war, you may in fact do your humble part toward starting the next.

Women's Horror

 I recently watched two very different horror films, one of which made me curious enough about the other to seek it out. Martha Marcy May Marlene was recommended to be me by a dear friend, and upon hearing about the plot, I somehow formed a vague impression that it was made by a woman. This turned out not to be the case – it was the feature debut of a young man named Sean Durkin – but the thought having been planted in my mind of a horror film articulated from a feminist perspective led me to seek out Jennifer’s Body, directed Karyn Kusama and written by Diablo Cody, the latter fresh from her Oscar-winning success with Juno. In the event, the two films could not be more different, and confirmed for me again the dangers of pigeonholing by gender. The few people who heard of or saw Martha Marcy May Marlene tended to praise it rapturously, declaring Durkin to have masterfully caught a woman's nightmare, whereas the higher-profile Jennifer’s Body received excoriatingly bad reviews and basically fizzled commercially.

Martha Marcy May Marlene has all the flaws and all the virtues of a first film. One of the most vivid things I noticed is the degree to which Durkin is in love with the image for its own sake. He shows an affinity with old Dietrich and Garbo melodramas in the way he often simply lets the camera linger on heroine Elizabeth Olsen’s face, revelling in the spectacle of her sheer physical presence, and only allowing us to guess at the roiling emotions inside. In general I’m all for the digital simulation of actors via performance capture, but I’m still not convinced it can ever capture the experience of watching shots like this.

Durkin likewise shows an almost preternatural gift for atmosphere and implication, and establishing a dialectic between them. During the sequences set on cult’s commune farm, the atmosphere sometimes seems almost as utopian as it’s supposed to be. The white-painted wood of the house and barn, the green of the grass and surrounding treeline, the unaffected naturalness of the people there – it seems to confirm that here is a place where you can be simple, natural, and virtuous, away from a life in the modern world which has allowed you none of these things. Durkin wisely abstains from any one melodramatic scene which contradicts all this and reveals a horrific nightmare beneath the surface – it’s only in the gradual accumulation of small details, intercut among the seemingly positive atmospherics, that we grasp what a nightmare this cult really is. One of the first images in the film establishes how meals are separated, with the men eating first; we later see how they slip drugs into the food of the new arrivals; and then the truly chilling line about how all the babies on the commune are boys. It’s the oldest and most fundamental axiom of horror: what you imply but don’t show will always be scarier in the viewer’s imagination.

And it’s on this point that Jennifer’s Body is pinned down. It implies nothing, but just lets everything hang out as blatantly as possible. Unlike many critics, I genuinely enjoyed the film, but I acknowledge it’s not a sure-fire sell. Whereas Durkin with Martha Marcy May Marlene was crafting a truly original movie that only incidentally lent itself to the horror genre, Cody and Kusama were very much having fun tweaking and punking the conventions of the teen gore-fest horror film. The film casts Megan Fox as a vain, slutty, high-school cheerleader who becomes demonically possessed and begins gruesomely devouring all the boys she can beguile, leaving it to her bookish, bespectacled, and perpetually-put-upon best friend (played by Amanda Seyfried) to stop her. This plot is so obviously run-of-the-mill genre fare that it’s perfectly excusable to have some feminist fun subverting expectations, but by the end one suspects Cody and Kusama have had a bit too much fun, and in the process neglected to make sure that it all hangs together coherently.

The casting is key to both films, and for better or for worse, Jennifer’s Body is defined by the fact that it stars Megan Fox in her first non-Transformers leading role. It does not settle the question of whether she is a real actress. What it does do, however, is prove indubitably that she has star power. Kusama is only slightly more restrained than Durkin in devoting long, spectacular takes to the sheer spectacle of her, and she dominates them totally. Amanda Seyfried may be a far better actress (witness her turn in Atom Egoyan’s Chloe the same year), but very few human beings can upstage hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of CGI robots just by leaning over a car engine...

Martha Marcy May Marlene, in turn, is defined by providing an organic follow-up to John Hawkes’s Oscar-nominated performance in Winter’s Bone. This latter was a revelation from a man who had been a working actor in Hollywood for twenty-five years – often in blockbusters like The Perfect Storm or critically-lauded films like Me and You and Everyone We Know – but had yet to become more than a vaguely-recognizable face. Teardrop in Winter’s Bone changed that, bringing an air of lethally-focused danger to a character who, on paper, might seem like a disposable piece of white trash. The depraved power in his eyes of that role transfers somewhat to Martha Marcy May Marlene, and you have no difficulty accepting Patrick as a modern-day Charles Manson who can bend a whole community of followers to his will. Even more worrying, however, is his chief subordinate Watts. Whereas Patrick exudes a certain detachment and wisdom to go with his menace, Watts is a sheer enforcer – viewing women as mere animals to be wrangled and feeling an unqualified sense of his right to do so. The very first sequence in the film, with him putting animalistic speed and intensity into chasing down a stumbling and irresolute Martha, made it crystal-clear to me that this film had very much been made by a man.

Jennifer’s Body’s virtues lie in its not mere inversion, but ridicule of this kind of thing. Coming from a Canadian cinema studies context, where the cringe-inducingly misogynistic Ginger Snaps is often touted as a national success, it’s refreshing to see a comparable story be so breezy and insouciant about its gruesomeness, and how the two girls react to it. The film is deliciously ambivalent, rather than expecting us to go with our “good girl” hero and moralistically spurn her friend once her monstrosity manifests itself. Likewise, it doesn’t end on an all-is-well note once the “good girl” has killed her best-friend-turned-monster, but rather has the demonic power pass to her, leaving her free to do some slaughtering of her own. Also, the monster-catalyst is not mystified as some pseudo-Christian condemnation of female sexuality, but as an obnoxiously pretentious yuppie “indie band” who have learned the Satanic arts so they can hurry up and get the point of being so famous that they can drink, smoke, fuck, snort coke and trash hotel rooms to their heart’s content. There’s no subtlety, but it works on a certain exhibitionist level.

The chink in Martha Marcy May Marlene’s armour, likewise, comes from the fact that Durkin’s command of subtle implication mysteriously deserts him during the scenes where Martha is back in the “real world,” with her sister and brother-in-law. Possibly displaying his neophyte status, Durkin takes no chances on us not seeing these people as inhumanly hateful and narrow-minded, totally oblivious to anything beyond their careers, house prices, pharmaceutical treatment, or safety in conformity. Sarah Paulson is too archetypally cast as Martha’s sister, forever given to crying out “what’s wrong with you?!” or slapping her in the face for nibbling while cooking; and Hugh Dancy is used to reflect the lazy American sense that British yuppies signify even more hatefully than American ones, because they bring spiteful class condescension into the equation. The sledgehammer effect of these scenes shakes, but mercifully does not sink, the film.

Overall, in spite of its missteps, Martha Marcy May Marlene fully deserves all the accolades that it has received, and one fervently hopes it marks the beginning of fruitful careers for Durkin and Olsen. It’s a virtually original work that seems unbeholden to any clichés or conventions. Jennifer’s Body, in contrast, works in the same sense as does Amanda Seyfreid’s next critically-reviled horror film, Red Riding Hood. The sheer pleasure lies in watching its joyous vulgarizing, nee vandalizing, of well-worn conventions, rather than its achievements in narrative, acting or mise-en-scene. This is the sort of Hollywood product, however, that critics chronically refuse to extend the benefit of the doubt to. It was the same with Kusama’s film Æeon Flux in 2005, which was critically excoriated but which I appreciated in a certain arch, symbolist, sense. After all, if one is going to start a movie with the premise that it’s the year 2415, and that the surviving 1% of the world’s population inhabits one hyper-controlled walled city called "Bregna," then you’d be a fool to go with a conventional visual aesthetic. Kusama’s next film is apparently called The Rut, and will star Chloë Grace Moretz as a young girl compelled, apparently for want of paternal affection, to venture into the woods to experience the kill-or-be-killed lifestyle of nature. I’m willing to bet that the “father’s love” aspect will be a pure MacGuffin, and that we’ll see more bizarre, critic-baiting, treatment of our stylistic and narrative expectations. I’ll certainly watch for it with interest.

Cradle Will Rock

Cradle Will Rock was Tim Robbin’s third and last film to date, and it turned out, paradoxically, to be both his best and his worst effort. It was his best because it broke fascinating new ground, which I’ll get to in due course. It was his worst, however, because he simply did not learn the lesson he should have from Dead Man Walking: that he could only improve as a filmmaker by scaling up into more iconic and archetypal human emotions, and abandoning the hysterical attempts at political urgency which had marred Bob Roberts.

If anything, Bob Roberts was more excusable on political grounds. It was, after all, 1992, and with the Reagan/Bush dark ages having dragged on for twelve years, it was perfectly understandable for Leftists, liberals, and anyone with a conscience to be on the verge of snapping. Also, the film’s crudity was substantially leavened by the sheer evil brilliance of Robbin’s own performance as the titlular character. The stupidly manipulative, oh-it’s-all-hopeless-the-system-is-against-us bits were the same sort of thing one always finds in liberal dramaturgies, from The Ox-Bow Incident to The China Syndrome to Redacted. It’s the facilely optimistic belief that things should always turn out happily/peacefully/amicably/etc. in the world, and if they don’t then humanity/society/polity/etc. has grown so depraved as to be beyond redemption and all we can do is cry in anguish. The segments of Bob Roberts that simply savour the spectacle of Robbins, however, implicitly concede just how limited and anti-aesthetic all that is. The sheer nuanced detail of Robbins/Roberts allows us the sardonic pleasure of watching the human comedy play out in all its grimness, as the total cynicism of the evil neo-con yuppie wins out over the doddering, well-meaning, Gore Vidal liberal. It’s depressing, but paradoxically, depressing in an electrifying way, rather than in the simply infantile, whiny way of Ox-Bow/China Syndrome/Redacted-type films.

With Cradle Will Rock, however, the context was different. Clinton had now been in office for seven years, and Hollywood’s treatment of political themes had become identical to his: disingenuously inveighing against liberalism and big government in a cynical play for Middle American votes, or box office dollars as the case may be. This sort of thing reached its apotheosis with Robert Zemeckis’s Contact, in which actual news footage was manipulated to make Clinton a character in the film, James Woods turned in another cartoon villain performance as the evil big-government bureaucrat, and one buffoonish Republican congressman frets over whether the aliens believe in God. These were not propitious times in which to undertake a reappraisal of the Leftist politics of the Federal Theatre, and the only wonder is that the film wasn’t more of a train wreck than it was.

Cradle Will Rock is marred from the very first by the Montaigne-ian aspect of liberalism: the dogmatic refusal to be dogmatic. In this spirit, the relative justice of a totalizing ideology like Communism is not really of concern to Tim Robbins, so much of the fact that it is an all-totalizing ideology, and thus must be critiqued, however much you may agree with its ideas. To actually bring the course of the film into alignment with its ideological sympathy would be too shocking a notion – one might actually have a solid, uplifting work that left viewers feeling galvanized and confident, and that would of course be unacceptably dogmatic. One must, this doggerel goes, leave them feeling frustrated and unsatisfied if a work of art is to have fulfilled its purpose. Cradle Will Rock actually contains a running gag where Hank Azaria’s playwright character is lectured about his work by the ghost of Bertolt Brecht, but Brecht himself would likely be turning in his grave if he could see the point to which Hollywood liberals have mongrelized his ideas.

The result of all this in practice is that one is forced to sit through scene after inept scene in which sympathetic Left-leaning figures are needled and browbeaten, and not allowed by the script to stand up for themselves; ambivalent figures are introduced solely for the purpose of defaming Leftism; and hysterical anti-Leftist figures are coddled by the narrative due to the naïve liberal shibboleth that you have to “show both sides.” This stubborn refusal to distinguish the dynamics of art from those of real-world politics leads to a remarkable cast – including Vanessa Redgrave, Emily Watson, Joan Cusack, Bill Murray, Susan Sarandon, John Turturro, and more – fumbling about with crude dialogue and contributing nothing to the proceedings. If Robbins’s goal had been to make a My Son John-style anti-communist film, these scenes would require only minimal rewrites.

There are two plot strands, however, which intertwine to form the film’s real DNA, and these not only redeem the film from the stupidities outlined above, but elevate it above Robbins’s achievement with Dead Man Walking. It is, after all, no great conceptual challenge to be sombre and serious about such a sombre and serious subject as capital punishment, however much genius is required to actually make the film. To be raucous and anarchic in the face of sombre and serious things, however, is a far greater test of an artist’s skill, and that’s what Robbins achieves in the segments of Cradle Will Rock which deal with Orson Welles and Hallie Flanagan, played by Angus Macfadyen and Cherry Jones, respectively. As played by Macfadyen, this Welles is a thundering, megalomaniacal, drunken, and rapacious iconoclast who nonetheless has the genius to back it all up. In a vacuum, this could render him just another object of sententious “critique,” but is saved from that fate by the way he’s given a comic foil in Cary Elwes’s John Houseman. Between them they generate enough loud, fast-talking, broadly gesticulating comic energy to keep Robbins’s politics at bay, and create a real life of their own for their characters. On paper, a scene of them questioning the seemliness of eating at such an expensive and upscale place as 21 Club could have been as lame as so much else in the film, but is redeemed by some business with Welles’s flask. And a childish ego-contest, shouting “Isn’t!” “Is!” “Isn’t!” “Is!” at each other, manages to be more articulate than anything else in the film.

 

Cherry Jones’s Hallie Flanagan is the opposite extreme to this. She represents the film’s one sublime stroke of political genius: to simply reverse the usual moralistic denial of politics which one gets from the Right, and award it to the Left. Anyone who has ever read the Chronicles of Narnia stories will have a feel for how appallingly simple it is for arch-Right-wing Tories and born-again evangelicals to deny that there is anything political to them, and declare that they are simply morally innocuous stories for children. They're really about being “nice” and “good,” and all the monstrous misogyny, racism and chauvinism is simply in the minds of Left-wing spoilsports and churls. With brilliant perversity, Cradle Will Rock simply reverses this, and has Flanagan blithely deflecting questions about a children’s play Revolt of the Beavers, declaring that it’s all about a mean and unkind beaver getting his comeuppance, and the themes of insurrection and redistribution of wealth are just illusory projections by Right-wingers. Jones’s performance in these scenes is amazing. She keeps her head very steady and rarely blinks, so that one can’t tell if she is very determinedly sticking to a script, or if she has such wonderful gifts of self-persuasion and tunnel vision that she actually believes what she’s saying.

The film which these segments bring most vividly to mind is Robert Altman’s MASH, which is in itself pretty illustrious company for any film to keep. Cradle Will Rock, however, actually surpasses MASH in the sense that Altman’s film was subversive purely due to its adolescent, insouciant, anarchist sensibility. One could not imagine Pierce, McIntyre, and Forrest having a real discussion of ideas any more than one could imagine them donning uniforms and saluting. It’s this, however, that Robbins more or less accomplishes in Cradle Will Rock. The Welles/Houseman segments match MASH for anarchic glee, but have a real, coherent political line to them rather than just a vague anti-everything absurdism. Moreover, Flanagan compounds this by creating an almost exact Henry Blake analogue. The sort of benignly blank-eyed authority figure, whose verbiage may outweigh their acumen but who thankfully is in your corner, is exactly the sort of character that Roger Bowen (and McLean Stevenson on TV) created, and is always a treat to watch when done right.

Ultimately, Cradle Will Rock can’t be called a success because the central helix of Macfadyen/Elwes/Jones takes up too little of the film’s running time. Too much is wasted on digressions that either don’t work or aren’t followed through. Writing William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies into a film about Orson Welles sounds like a no-brainer, but to introduce them and then make nothing at all of it is just absurd. A scene near the end has Hearst and a steel tycoon Gray Mathers discussing how they can set the course of art in the future by patronage. The scene would function perfectly as a set-up for an allusion to how Welles’s first foray into cinema would humiliatingly deflate Hearst’s pretensions, rising inexorably to the top of the canon in spite of the fact that its signature line, “Rosebud,” was Hearst’s pet name for Marion Davies’s yoni. As it is for this bit, so it is for Cradle Will Rock as a whole – moments of genius, but ultimately a missed opportunity.