Judgement Day, Part 1

The first dream I remember had something to do with the Disney dark sci-fi epic 'The Black Hole' and the seven dwarves from their earlier fantasy arriving in my bedroom to amuse a lonely four year old; five years after that, I watched an episode of 'TJ Hooker' in which a serial killer claimed his victims with a hammer - that night granted me a terrifying nightmare involving Leonard Nimoy, my beloved grandmother's house, and a set of kitchen knives.  (Yes, I know Leonard Nimoy wasn't in 'TJ Hooker', the show that William Shatner presumably hoped would put some distance between him and Captain Kirk, but I suppose the fact that my subconscious was able to link Nimoy and Shatner even at the age of nine telegraphs the reasons why the cinematic image means so much to me even now.) After the Leonard Nimoy-tries-to-kill-me-at-my-grandmother's-house-and-shes-worried-that-I'll-get-blood-on-the-carpet nightmare, my dreams went quiet for a few years.  Now I know they (and when I say 'they', I guess I mean Freud and friends) say you dream every night; and this may well be the case.  But for the longest time, I couldn't remember my dreams; so I don't know if they were happening or not.  I do recall that, at eighteen and twenty, on the deaths of a friend and my grandmother respectively, I had dreams in which they appeared and said goodbye to me, and I was comforted.  Plenty of people have told me of similar experiences when loved ones cross the threshold; I'm guessing that there's some kind of integration that occurs in the deep levels of the psyche, enfolding the shock of death into something more manageable.

I've had more vivid dreams lately; two in particular have been about my own death.  One of these is still too complex and strange for me to share just yet; but the other seems necessary. I'll write it down here, without comment for now; maybe someone reading can tell me if it provokes any thoughts; and I'll try to write something more interpretive about it later in the week.  Please note that this does not come naturally to me; this really is a kind of transcript of something that happened to me when I was asleep, so it may be entirely indulgent and a waste of time; but I'm risking sharing it because I think it might mean something to some of you reading.  I make no comment about the content of the dream.  Not yet.  But your comments are welcome today.

The setting was the typical Judgement Day scenario, beloved of conservative evangelical and Catholic Christians alike (there may be a similar notion in other faiths too, I'm not sure).  The entire human race was lined up, Nuremberg rally-style, and naked, awaiting their fifteen minutes of shame.  God was on his throne, white-bearded and cliched, but visible to all, and not as frightening as he had appeared in the fears of my younger days (in this dream, God was definitely male).  The person at the head of the line would gingerly step forward, and stand gently shaking before a small TV dinner table on which sat an old top-loading VCR - of the kind that you probably watched 'BMX Bandits' on in 1983.  One of God's assistants would bring a cassette with the name of the person at the front of the line on it, hand it to God, and God would put it in the top-loading VCR.  He'd press play, and then, on a white screen to the left of the throne, the details of your life would be played back for the rest of us to see.  Only the bad stuff.  When, as a kid, you stole from a corner shop; when you mistreated a girlfriend; when you lied to your parents; when you lived in apathy, giving your devotion to consumerism and stress.  It wasn't clear in the dream what happened after the film of your mistakes was shown, but soon enough, I found myself at the top of the line.

God looked at me, but I wasn't sure what the look meant, and some events from my life flashed through my mind.  When God didn't intervene to save the life of someone very close to me, who had a good ten years of life left, and deserved it after five decades of serving her husband; when God didn't stop people who were threatening me, and causing untold psychological impact; when God couldn't figure out a way to allow me to have a sense of innocence in childhood without interference from guilt and persistent fear; when God didn't save me from the trauma that all of us who grew up in the same place were touched by at some point.  And then, images not from my life per se, but those horrifying events that I observed through the TV twenty years ago and more; the obvious ones, like the Ethiopian famine of 1984, the Armenian earthquake, the wars in Afghanistan and the Balkans and everywhere, a slide show of horrors I remembered seeing at an age when brain plasticity was pliable enough for the Nine O'Clock news to embed itself.

God had put the cassette in the top-loader.  He was about to push down the flap, and show my mistakes to the world.  But then, with the definitive power of a reflex, my right hand found its way to his, pushing it away from the machine.  God looked at me, smaller now than he had been just a few seconds before, his eyes conveying what I can only call perturbation - confusion mingled with disappointment, as if he was a child who had just had her ice cream taken away.  Then I spoke.  The words that came were simple:

'I tell you what, God.  I won't judge you if you don't judge me.'

'Unforgiven' and the Roots of Violence

I took another look at 'Unforgiven' the other day - one of those films whose original impact was muted by the fact that I saw it amidst hype, and, precisely half a lifetime ago, when I didn't know that I had no idea what I was talking about. The difference today, I suppose is twofold; I still have no idea what I'm talking about, but at least I think I know this; and I've seen a few more films and thought a lot about violence and masculine archetypes.

'Unforgiven' has the reputation of being the revisionist Western to end all revisionist Westerns; but this misses the point, and isn't quite accurate - 'Dances with Wolves', whatever you think of its aesthetic and philosophical merits, wasn't exactly a cowboys-beat-Indians actioner, the genuine masterpiece 'Heaven's Gate' shatters the myth of the glorious frontier, Clint had done revenge-as-a-living-hell before in 1973's 'High Plains Drifter', even the otherwise ridiculous and xenophobic 'Cattle Queen of Montana' had Barbara Stanwyck going off into the sunset with the unlikeliest pardners this side of the cast of 'Twins': Native American hero on one arm, Ronald Reagan on the other.  (See below for an analogy of how grating, if appealing, that particular contrast appears.)

So to see 'Unforgiven's strengths as merely relating to how 'different' it may be from other Westerns about men-who-might-as-well-have-no-name is to reduce its value to nothing more than an innovation. It's far more important than that: it reveals the gaping wound in the typical Western vision of the male psyche, exposes the roots of violence, and seeks to provide a serious answer to the question of why people kill, and why portrayals of killing constitute so much of our entertainment complex.  This answer, if taken seriously enough, could change everything.

The short version: people kill, and we like to watch portrayals of killing because we're afraid of death.

There are some fascinating thoughts about this at the International Psycoanalysis blog here.  If the author (Herbert Stein, M.D., in his “Double Features: Discovering our Unconscious Fantasies in Film” (EREADS, 2003)) has a point, and it seems pretty compelling to me, then the causes of violence can be traced to an attempt at asserting power over death; which opens a fairly large can of worms when it comes to considerations of what happens when fear is, itself, the dominant lens through which some of us have been wounded into viewing life.  This may all sound a bit flowery for the Film Talk or for a Friday, but I just wonder...if we accept the premise that politicised fear can lead to real death, can't cinematic fear give some grounding to that same fear, and that same death?  In that regard, would 'Unforgiven' be better seen as part of the pantheon of, or a kind of retrospective prequel to, films like 'A Matter of Life and Death', 'Wings of Desire', and 'Magnolia' where the notion of something transcendent gathering up the mystery of being human into a space that may not make sense as we understand it now, but constitutes an interruption of grace that cuts the poisonous flow that oxygenates the myth that violence fixes things?   Just a thought.

Conversation as Violence/Conversation as Love

I’m grateful to Glenn Kenny and David Poland for their very human, very humble interaction over at The Auteurs film website (read the comments under Glenn's main article from the 4th September), reflecting on the negativity that propels so much of what passes for mature conversation about movies (or indeed, about anything) on the blogosphere.   I trust that it is not inappropriate for me to write something in response; if it is inappropriate, I hope that the desire to advance the good will remit the sin of presumptuousness.  Observing the conversation has had the effect of waking me up to some thoughts that had been stirring for a while, and now seem undeniable. Now, I’m not much for reading blogs. My other vocational commitments require too much attention; and I'm very easily captivated by the temptation to gossip, or to read it, and thereby overcome my plans for any given day. I’ve been allowing the view to permeate that my laptop should be used sparingly; at the risk of sounding like Jan Rubes’ Amish patriarch in ‘Witness’, for me, recently, it doesn’t belong at the dinner table, it doesn’t belong in the bedroom, and there’s a difference between work (an activity that has, to be sure, spiritual contours) and play, (spiritual, too, but not the same thing as reading other people’s commented skirmishes). So I'm choosy about which blogs I read; this is why I don’t usually know who is fighting with whom, or who has just been arrested for what, or what the 'right' thing to think about whatever happens to be.

I want to make a (hopefully) humble declaration of intent - in this case, focused on film criticism, but I mean it to apply generally to how we talk to each other.

Continue reading this post at The Film Talk, where it's entitled 'Film Criticism as Violence/Film Criticism as Love'; but it's really about all kinds of conversation.

A Non-Dogmatic Declaration of Intent (Part 1)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKkBEOOzIjk] In light of the three recent posts on ‘2001’ at The Film Talk – in which I reflected on how and why I love this movie; we had the pleasure of interviewing the man-ape himself, Mr Dan Richter, and most recently Jett told us about a kind of High School Musical version of the opening titles – listener Kyle Meyers wrote to us to explore our thoughts further, asking if we agree/disagree with some comments from Michael Roberts at The Auteurs, which makes an eloquent case for the movie as an atheist tract.

Well, for a film as complex and transcendent as ‘2001’, ‘agree/disagree’ must be a trick question.  I’ll say this: we know that Kubrick tended not to publicly interpret his films, even saying that he wouldn’t contradict a viewer’s perceptions even if they differed from his own intentions; so we’re not going to find a meta-interpretation from the Creator, this side of the Stargate at least.  And, even if we could, I’d suggest that the search for one Ultimate Meaning in a film is not the richest way to approach it.  What purpose is served by me ‘proving’ myself ‘right’, and you ‘wrong’ if what you get out of the film serves you already?  Why would I want to tell you that you’re misguided if ‘Mr Holland’s Opus’ makes you want to be kinder to people?   (To the person with whom I had that very conversation, I apologise.  I think I’m growing up.  I hope.)  This does not mean that I won’t advocate for certain films being rich and beautiful experiences; it just means I have reached a turning point where I realise that I have zero interest in competing with other people’s opinions.  I’d much rather participate in a conversation that allows for a variety of interpretations to enhance each other.  So, please, tell me why you love ‘Transformers 2’ or ‘The Headless Woman’, or ‘GI Joe’ or ‘Goodbye Solo’.  I’m genuinely interested.  I’d like to tell you what I thought too.  But I’m not interested in proving you wrong.

This is important to me – I love films, some more than others.  Some people I love happen to enjoy some of the same films, some more than others.  Some people really dislike some of the films that I love.  There are ways of talking about this that serve the purposes of better human relationships, and ways that push us apart.  The opening titles of ‘The Film Talk’ have me saying ‘I could never love anyone who didn’t love ‘Field of Dreams’’; this is mostly a joke, and a hyperbolic way of underlining my admiration for a much-maligned movie; one that I happen to think is both profoundly true on an emotional level, and one of the most elegantly told linear narrative stories in recent US American cinema.  But of course I don’t mean that I could never love anyone who didn’t love it.  Invert that statement, and you might be closer to the truth – it’s easier to relate to people who share common interests; and so if you like some of the same movies I do, or perhaps you like movies in the same way I do, it might mean we’re more likely to be friends.

But I suspect this should not be so.  I declare it only as a confession of my own human weakness: I am as superficial and fickle as any of us; I’m a work in progress, and it will serve me better to try to remain open to whatever nurtures the common good.  Disdaining someone because her favourite movie is ‘Crank’, or because all he likes to do on a wet Saturday is to indulge in the collected oeuvre of the makers of what Cahiers du Cinema might call ‘les flics des chicks’?  Does that make my life more whole?  Does it grant more light in the world?  Does my indulgence in snark give me anything other than a sensation, to quote the late Northern Irish politician David Ervine’s reference to sectarianism, not unlike urine down the inside leg – a warm glow that turns bitter pretty soon?

If these rhetorical questions sound patrician, I beg your indulgence; I’m not trying to impose my opinions on anyone.

In fact, that’s the point.

I’m tired of snark in film criticism; tired of attempts at monopolizing the conversation; tired of skirmishes whose purpose appears to derive more from a desire to be seen as ‘superior’ than to express what is, for me, the highest experience of art: to reflect us back to ourselves, and offer, as Professor Levy says in the coda to ‘Crimes and Misdeameanors’, the courage ‘to keep trying, and even to find joy from simple things, like … family, their work, and their hope that future generations might understand more’.

Next week, I'll post my own faltering attempt at a theory of how my approach to films (and life generally, or at least how I communicate about life) is radically changing.

Woodstock: 'The biggest hassle is dealing with politics'

In preparation for the release of Ang Lee's 'Taking Woodstock', which Jett and I discuss on Episode 86,  I watched Michael Wadleigh's director's cut of the original documentary (a gorgeous, filled-to-the-brim Blu-Ray) - a telling experience, given that it's so full of the evocation of an era gone by that we're all supposed to want to live in.  Some immediate reactions followed by a question or two:

The film really takes its time to get ready; the split screens give a sense of the fantastic madness of the endeavour, what immense planning has gone into it, and how enormous the scope of the event was when it actually happened.

'There has to be some way of stopping the influx of humanity' - Bill Graham's considered opinion of how to keep the show business-friendly.

'It's about what's happening now' - the succinct thoughts of someone who typically says 'man' at the end (and/or beginning) of every sentence.

'I want to know why the fascist pigs have been seeding the clouds' - concertgoer disappointed that the CIA or somesuch have made it rain.

'Helen Savage please call your father at the Motel Glory in Woodridge' - either an indication of just how community-oriented this festival was, or proof to conspiracy theorists that coded messages were being sent from the stage to J Edgar Hoover.

'The brown acid is not specifically too good' - a lovely understated piece of pharmaceutical advice.

When the concert finally starts, the most obvious thing is how enormous Richie Havens' hands are; he's not precious about asking for guitar mikes to be turned up; it's clear that nobody cared about professionalism or needing to show i.d. or, by the mid-point, making money.  It was about communication; people unshackling themselves; taking the risk of looking stupid because social norms have made them afraid to smile at strangers.  Or at least that's what I want to hope it was about.

James Parker in The Atlantic recently called this the last time we were able to police ourselves; there was only a brief window before the festival gave birth to its evil twin, Altamont, infamous for being the site of the killing of Meredith Hunter during a Rolling Stones concert.  Parker tells us that Woodstock itself was not without tension - the burning to the ground of 12 food stands in an outbreak of less than peace-enhancing radicalism not making the final cut of  Wadleigh's extraordinary framing of 'what's happening in America'.

'America is becoming a whole', according to Sri Swami Satchidananda's on-stage invocation, whoe sentiment I want to embrace.  But the mingling of idealism, optimism, wish-fulfilment, fear and anger about the war, and whatever else was going on then gives way today to, at the very least, a question: What the hell happened to these people?  These people, who looked so beautiful, who spoke without embarrassment about the potential for love to be realised as a political strategy, and some of whom created communitarian experiments that actually worked, who, at their most open were willing not to refuse light from any quarter - knowing that the only recently baptised military-industrial complex was failing humanity, so let's look East...  What happened to them?

Well, they became my parents - and I can still see traces of the sentiments expressed in the field when my mum and dad talk about politics and tolerance, especially in a general suspicion of institutions that try to tell you how to be.  But my folks are just two people; and they weren't even there.  It's fashionable to say that more of the Woodstock generation learned indulgence than self-costing activism for a better world; that the gruesome scenes of Reaganite techno-greed a decade or so later were built on the foundations of a social cohort that had taught themselves they could have anything they want, and now.  And there may be some truth in that; surely some of the people responsible for nurturing the vision of being American as selfish, angry and afraid that came to dominate pubic discourse over the past forty years were in that field at Bethel.  But let's also acknowledge that the leaders of recent social movements that have achieved real change were there too, at least in spirit.  There are still true believers out there; they still have something to say; they're still doing things that would slow the world down, and would give us peace and music if we were ready to listen.

So, what 'Woodstock' means to me?

1: I'd love to make a film like this; and the democratisation of cinema may well allow someone to do just that right now.

2: My generation is lonelier than they were.

3: The Who look ridiculous; but so does everyone else.  Some in a good way.

4: The contrast between the anti-war movements of 1969 and 2009 depends on the existence of the draft.

5: The most pessimistic thing I can say?  Some of these people are saying the same things today that they said then.  And it didn't work.

6: The most optimistic thing I can say? Watching Joe Cocker redefine what a human body needs to do to make a sound in 1969  (and it's amazing) looks not that different from watching what Joe Cocker does to make a sound today (and it's still amazing); if he can do it...well...