Furred, murky, ominous cloud-wet
Baklava soil strata, all pistachio and pomegranate
Trees, tiny, trembling under & hungering for all that smudgy threat
See more of Memory Layne’s work here.
A film review by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com
I was definitely putting this one off — I simply hadn’t yet been in the mood for a movie that would chain me up for two hours in a cell with my inner hand-wringing political alarmist.
I never did find that mood. I just got so sick of not having anything new from Netflix that I sucked it up, stuck in the disc and turned down the lights.
Back when this movie came out, tons of paste-headed critics got dandered up about it not being subtle, probing, & nuanced enough as a study of politics, totalitarianism, the state, Law, Justice, Fear, Art, Man, God, blabbity blah.
Nonsense. I mean really, is it this movie’s obligation to deliver a finely shaded political-philosophical treatise? Why? Who said it had to play out with the rigor of Thomas Hobbes or Machiavelli? Who the hell goes to Hollywood for in-depth socio-political analysis anyway?
“The Prince” this is not. The movie’s fascist ruling party feel more like caricatures than rounded human beings, for instance. And you never feel that hopeful that the chaotic England V leaves behind is going to be that much of an improvement after all the explosives and fireworks are over. Probably just a bunch of mask-wearing looters burning shit.
But what we do have in this movie is an entertaining, well-paced pop-parable about the paralysis of fear (in a person, in a nation), and how that paralysis can be overcome. We also get a nakedly emotional Natalie Portman, an ugly & committed John Hurt, not to mention a compelling, conflicted Stephen Rea. Finally, not only does this movie stir up sometimes-volatile (if undeveloped) ideas — no mean feat within Hollywood’s constraints — it’s also a breakneck revenge story (V’s favorite movie, tellingly, is “The Count of Monte Cristo,” Alexander Dumas’ classic epic of vengeance).
Is it a bit clumsy, a bit hammy (the all-masked marching crowd scene at the end is a fat sack of corn), a bit blunt-force (think of the rain-cleansing scene with the fiery flashbacks; we get it, we get it), a bit reductive? Yes, yes, yes and yes. Are the brush-strokes broad, are the characters flattened? Another couple Yesses.
Why don’t these things bother me then? Well, they do, it’s just that to the extent that this movie is a parable, I receive it as such — and, like most parables, the aim here is the communication of ideas more than faithful mirroring of life’s layered complexities.
Put another way, I don’t read Animal Farm expecting the same layered psychological gray-area that I find in, say, Henry James or Alice Munro. And I don’t read James or Munro expecting the same stripped archetypes that I find in Animal Farm. I’m not saying this is either James or Orwell — far far fucking cry. But a film should be judged with its conventions in mind, and in this case, I was able to enjoy this thoroughly as the noirish swashbuckler political-parable it is and accept its shortcomings in other areas as part and parcel of its virtues.
To this extent, I’m reminded of horoscopes. Just as a horoscope, however flattened and simplistic, is useful inasmuch as it gets us thinking about ourselves, what we believe in, what we hope for, what we want — just so, this movie, with its welter of ideas offered (security, freedom, anarchism, art as necessary lie), does much the same. Provided, that is, we engage with it as thoughtful viewers, willing to relax, enjoy the Scarlet Pimpernellishness, suspend disbelief a little and put away our Bakunin & Marx (&, okay, lots of other books) for 133 minutes.
Oh and there’s lots of bloody Zorro moves.
And a yummy buzzcut Portman.
Go rent it.
How are you?
What did you eat for breakfast?
Did you remember your dreams?
Did you pray last night?
Any regrets?
Cabiria, Cabiria. I just saw you, Cabiria.
I saw you walking, wreathed in music and smiling faces.
The stark thin trees on either side.
Your mouth making that funny, smirky smile.
Guided where? How does your night end?
Shepherded by laughing kids on bikes
To what boat, what river?
A final water?
Or soft folds of wave
To help ferry you
To where we start again?
Dream: I’m in a car. A small portable electronic keyboard is on my lap. Despite its size it’s filling the car with massive grand piano resonance as I play. I’m performing one of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes (something which in waking life would be laughably, absolutely impossible). I find I haven’t prepared well, but I’m playing my best. I can approximate on a general level the activity of the piece — I’m roughly outlining the music, giving an impressionistic account of it — if the music were a relief map then I was slicing everything away but prominences, peaks, valleys and deep oceans — the other passengers aren’t really paying attention. They’re talking idly, it’s beginning to irritate me. My embarrassment at their indifference alternating with brazen confidence.
I’m now at home, playing the piano while my mother and Uncle are watching television. Again I’m playing Liszt, and I go to seek my 16-yr. old sister’s guidance. I carry the portable keyboard to her bedroom. She is giving cryptic looks and begins to explain chords and basic music theory, subjects of which she’s wholly ignorant in waking life. She begins to talk about Eugene: a former student who had displayed some level of mastery early on in his career and who was later famous for asking amazingly incisive questions about harmony or structure or the proper rubato to apply to a difficult piece, who would appear to absorb the answers, the key distinctions and lessons, but who would apply none of it to his work, leaving everyone baffled. His skills disintegrated rapidly, his career crumbled. I listened to her, envying his arrogance. Missing the point that he was a failure, I became jealous and vowed to outperform him.
The phone rings. I pick it up in my room. Carissa — that’s my sister — is with me. The receiver is quiet, but soon there are sounds in the background as if someone else had picked up on the line. I immediately suspect my father. Whoever’s calling isn’t saying anything, and my dad’s listening in again. I know to go to his bedroom, where he always is. I never stop to think that it may have been father himself calling me from his room just to get my attention. I leave my sister and walk into his room.
His presence fills the space like molasses, oozing, oppressive, without safe gaps and spaces to breathe in, I feel him in waves — he is holding the phone and in the middle of muttering something like “why the fuck doesn’t he come in right away he knows I’m calling him” — he sees me, throws the portable receiver at me and I think to catch it but I can’t, I’m carrying a giant book, so I can’t make a clean catch, I watch the phone bounce on the floor. He is pissed as hell yet stays in his chair, looking at me. As if to justify his flinging of the phone at me, and make me feel guilty about not catching it, he shows me the palm of his hand, which is ruined, scarred, mutilated from some accident.
I nod.
Suddenly the oppressiveness in the room relaxes. His tone becomes whispery, confidential. He tells me that “something bad happened to your mother last night — one of the cats got very sick. It almost died. She had to take care of it. This upset your mother greatly. … It almost died.”
I knew he was going to suggest I comfort her. I was to be his carrier pigeon, his ambassador of comfort to mother. All prior, similar failures of his seemed to gather and flow around this present one — I was conscious of a sudden spinning wheel of resentful memories, with what he was asking now of me as the hub — this sudden congress of memories struck me numb.
Father still held his hand up in earnest, gnomic, votive sign, palm facing me, the skin of it a spidery network of gouges, some raw, all crisscrossing. A glove of scar.
I stood there, breathed slowly.
I accepted everything.
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2007
Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com
(10 more like him here)
19th century thinkers like William Paley argued for the existence of God based on brilliant, beautiful, complex designs in nature — flowers, trees, bird plumage.
You might as well argue for the existence of God based on the ten astonishingly repulsive submarine lives in the link above: Alien forms so ugly they resist all aesthetic valuation. With walleyed gill-flutter they shatter the mirror and slither into the soft void beyond, where symmetry, harmony, color, line & beauty all become meaningless. They’re defiantly themselves, in silent, weird, ultra-pressurized pitch — Holy fuck, look at these critters.
My throat catches when I scan them all. The glutinous blobfish. The estuarine rockfish, severe & implacable as an Olmec head. The wheezing porcine lumpfish.
Why do I start to feel this way? Is it because I catch myself finding them wretched and laughable, ridiculously abhorrent, and then become ashamed with myself, knowing they can’t help how they were made?
Is it because I feel humbled in their presence, their ancient miles-removed presence, so coldly distant from mine that they might as well be martians wriggling among asteroids?
Is it because I feel smaller and uglier & more pathetic compared to their spiny, encrusted, cartilaginoid, mucoused, jellied but unselfconscious & heedless & glaring faces? More purely themselves in all their horrorshow gristle than all of us with our dissembling and meta-shit and second-guessing?
There they are, these deeptrench lives, captured in shock at the foot of ours, drinking all our drainage, our oldest and strangest cohabiters, blinking and mouthing in black while we feed them more plastic.
