Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Link to a review of the film American Sniper (2014) by Ross Caputi:
Bonus links: “Zero Dark Thirty: Hollywood’s Gift to American Power”, “‘American Sniper,’ Clint Eastwood and White Fear” and “War Porn: Hollywood and War from World War II to American Sniper”
Matt’s review of Zabriskie Point
Slavoj Žižek: “The Politics of Batman”
Premium Rush (2012)
Columbia Pictures
Director: David Koepp
Main Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Shannon
Can’t tell if this was better than Gleaming the Cube (1989) or not. Actually, it doesn’t matter. Both are terrible.
The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2013)
Zeitgeist Films
Director: Sophie Fiennes
Main Cast: Slavoj Žižek
Making a film about philosophy is not an easy task. The main problem being: how to keep the audience awake? Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has said that good films can put you to sleep. But these sorts of films are not always widely appreciated, for very much that reason.
Enter Sophie Fiennes and Slavoj Žižek, with a documentary — the sequel to The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) — that makes contemporary philosophy as entertaining and engaging as possible. Some may say it is still not engaging enough. But the intellectually curious should find a lot to wrestle with, and at least will walk away with a list of interesting movies from around the world that they have probably not yet seen. Ultimately, the film paints a beautiful and horrifying picture of how movies stage our dreams, where desire arises, and how ideologies correlate those desires to objective circumstances to create meaning.
Desire comes from the symbol of the “Big Other”: a god, or, in this case, cinema. It provides meaning to otherwise meaningless, solitary existence. In Fiennes’ and Žižek’s earlier collaboration, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Žižek said, “Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire.” It would have been helpful to repeat that assertion here, to better explain the new film’s title. Still, the underlying concepts of importance are revisited here. A key one involves Žižek’s attempts to philosophically preserve free will, as a small but crucial factor set against a backdrop of philosophical concepts that increasingly explain relationships traced back to determined, objective conditions.
“[M]an is not simply a product of objective circumstances. We all have this margin of freedom in deciding how we subjectivize these objective circumstances, which will of course determine us: how we react to them by constructing our own universe.”
The way these objective circumstances are subjectivized is through ideology.
“Ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world – how we perceive each meaning and so on and so on.”
But every ideology has to “work as an empty container, open to all possible meanings.” He illustrates with deft examples from Cabaret (1972) to The Fall of Berlin (1950) how different efforts to portray fascist or communist propaganda can utilize the exact same ideological frameworks, the same “empty container”. This analysis of ideology can be applied to anything. To look outside this film, take “business management” gurus. They recommend, for instance, setting a big hairy audacious goal, but it should be attainable. This might help explain why business attracts (and selects for) unhealthy people. They seek simple pleasures from defined goals within the existing organization and obtain excess enjoyment from the social prestige and career advancement that comes with achieving those defined goals.
“How come it is easier for us to imagine the end of all life on earth — an asteroid hitting the planet — than a modest change in our economic order?”
He suggests not waiting for such a magical event to produce change from without, but rather,
“It depends on us, on our will.”
“We should draw a line of distinction, within the very field of our dreams, between those who are the right dreams — pointing towards a dimension effectively beyond our existing society and the wrong dreams, the dreams which are just an idealized, consumerist reflection, [a] mirror image of our society. We are not simply submitted to our dreams – they just come from some unfathomable depths and we can’t do anything about it. This is the basic lesson of psychoanalysis — and fiction cinema. We are responsible for our dreams. Our dreams stage our desires — and our desires are not objective facts. We created them, we sustained them, we are responsible for them.”
He takes a complex view of desire.
“A desire is never simply the desire for certain thing. It’s always also a desire for desire itself. A desire to continue to desire. Perhaps the ultimate horror of a desire is to be fully filled-in, met, so that I desire no longer.”
There are different ways to control desire. Žižek is quite explicit about the methods he favors.
“The conservative solution is we need more police. We need courts, which pass severe judgments. I think this solution is too simple.”
Taking a page straight from filmmaker John Waters (“I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty.”), Žižek talks about how religion, using the example of catholicism, puts in place prohibitive injunctions with a hidden message to enjoy transgressing those limits. This is too simple, though, because it takes away freedom, and responsibility.
“Freedom hurts. The basic insight of psychoanalysis is to distinguish between enjoyment and simple pleasures. They are not the same. Enjoyment is precisely enjoyment in disturbed pleasure — even enjoyment in pain. And this excessive factor disturbs the apparently simple relationship between duty and pleasures.”
Rather than seek something superficial and take unhealthy enjoyment from an excess, Žižek suggests pursuing deeper desires that will likely not be fulfilled and accepting the superficial pleasure that arise along the way. He cleverly illustrates this while eating a Kinder Egg chocolate candy, the chocolate covering a simple pleasure and the toy inside something further.
Once freedom of this degree is put on the table, Žižek is talking about revolutionary potentials. These have been tried before, and have failed, but he sees them as still worth pursuing. On failed revolutions, he diagnoses the problem: “The dreams remained the old dreams; and they turned into the ultimate nightmare.” All these examples, with movies, Kinder Egg candies, and so forth, provide easily grasped examples of where the breaking points are among the stuff of everyday life.
This is a well-made film. Its subject is weighty, yet leavened with the constant references to film and pop culture. Terry Eagleton, reviewing a pair of later Žižek’s books, wrote that “Academic philosophers can be obscure, whereas popularisers aim to be clear. With his urge to dismantle oppositions, Žižek has it both ways . . . .” This is precisely the paradox that makes The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology such an interesting film. We have discussions of philosophy that make substantive points worthy of both academic and unschooled audiences. And along the way, viewers can enjoy the “simple pleasures” of seeing Žižek dressed up in a ridiculous Stalin costume, or sitting in a re-constructed set of the club from Kubrick‘s A Clockwork Orange (1971). Viewers unfamiliar with anything Žižek has written or said before should still be able to grasp this film, with some mild effort. It represents one of the most potent distillations of his philosophical worldview.
The Lone Ranger (2013)
Walt Disney Pictures
Director: Gore Verbinski
Main Cast: Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, William Fichtner
The Lone Ranger is a bit like taking every western movie you can think of and throwing it in a blender. All the little tried and true formulae are called up. The Searchers, Man of the West, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and especially Rango… Even when this film is trying to steal from the best, it is done in the most ham-fisted way possible. Granted, the costumes and such are great. Still, the less said about this terrible film the better.
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
MGM
Director: Vincente Minnelli
Main Cast: Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien, Tom Drake
Probably the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. The plot revolves around a family so fearful of any and all changes from their preconceived notions of life in America (without the family ever questioning those preconceived notions) that they are literally doomed to live in the aftermath of the past. Horrifying. A good movie.
Mamma Roma (1962)
Cineriz
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Main Cast: Anna Magnani, Ettore Garofolo
It is common to look at Pier Paolo Pasolini as a Marxist, but that is inaccurate, or at least, it presents an incomplete picture. What Pasolini took from Marx was a view of class relations. That is the focus of his second feature as a director, Mamma Roma. His directorial debut, Accatone (1961), was a story of a pimp and other people around him at the fringes of Italian society, told in a way that made him an anti-hero. It drew on the sort of perspective that Jean Genet had developed in writings like Journal du voleur (1949), making an existential transposition of the ideologies of virtue and fulfillment of dominant society to those of vagrancy, theft, and prostitution. Pasolini, like Genet, made his characters, who by accepted standards were the lowest of low, come across to the audience as sympathetic. They strove in different ways than “respectable” society, but they struggled and strove nonetheless.
Mama Roma is the story of a former prostitute (Anna Magnani) whose now former pimp is getting married. She plans to move from the rural backwaters of Italy to Rome and open a fruit stand. In doing this, she reclaims her 18-year-old son (Ettore Garofolo) to live with her for the first time. This involves something like a Beverly Hillbillies scenario. Mama Roma wants to take on a different social position, and to renounce and conceal where she came from. She comments in the film about how what she did in the past was to make possible her future, for her and her son. Mama Roma tries to win her son Ettore’s affections. She buys him a motorcycle. While they have a fun ride together, it is only at the level of consumer materialism that she can relate to her son. He ultimately finds material possessions unfulfilling. Ettore lacks the particular social ambition of his mother, and harbors some resentment that his mother has transplanted him to a city in which he is forced to take on new roles, such as work that does not interest him. Numerous incidents occur in which he tries to prove his worth to local ruffians and a girl. This includes a brazenly ill-advised attempted robbery that lands him in jail, at which point an illness takes his life. In the throes of illness, he repents, in a way, by reaffirming that he is who he is, and should not force himself into the expectations of a social strata that is not his own. The film ends with Ettore strapped to a table by his jailers, dying with his arms out, implying a crucifixion.
It is clear that Pasolini sees Ettore as the moral center of the film. He, eventually, takes on what the philosopher Parmenides called the “way of truth”. Mama Roma’s attempts to take on a new social position, in crummy high-rise apartments, are a betrayal of her rural roots. She follows what Parmenides called the “way of appearance”. This is portrayed in numerous scenes in which to take control of situations, or to avoid conflict, she lapses back to her old ways. In spite of her aspirations, the real Mama Roma is the part of her she denies. Ettore is pressured to have ambitions, and it is only when thrust into the milieu of city life that he finds himself in despair and ashamed of his roots. He rediscovers this by the end of the film, but only when his mortality catches up to him.
The script of this film is excellent. It explores the social field almost like a sociologist. There is much focus on the idea of social trajectory and momentum, and a rejection of those things at a fundamental level by insisting instead on a kind of radical egalitarianism of singular, unitary social standing. The film as a whole, though, is something of a failure. Pasolini was still in his early phase as a director. The influence of neo-realism is still strong. But the main problem is that the acting is inauthentic. Pasolini admitted that Anna Magnani was miscast, because she had never lived a subproletarian existence (her habitus was that of semi-autonomous peasantry and small-scale merchants, who emulate and reflect the lifestyles of of capitalists and the upper middle class). Magnani was not someone from the rural poor, and therefore she did not know that life. Pasolini had this to say in an interview:
“Well I’m rather proud of not making mistakes about the people I choose for my films . . . . The only mistake I’ve made is with this one with Anna Magnani — though the mistake is not really because she is a professional actress. The fact is, if I’d got Anna Magnani to do a real petit bourgeois I would probably have got a good performance out of her; but the trouble is that I didn’t get her to do that, I got her to do a woman of the people with petit bourgeois aspirations, and Anna Magnani just isn’t like that. As I choose actors for what they are and not for what they pretend to be, I made a mistake about what the character really was, and although Anna Magnani made a moving effort to do what I asked of her, the character simply did not emerge. I wanted to bring out the ambiguity of subproletarian life with a petit bourgeois superstructure. This didn’t come out, because Anna Magnani is a woman who was born and has lived as a petit bourgeois and then as an actress and so hasn’t got those characteristics.” Pasolini on Pasolini (1969)
While Mama Roma is engaging in concept, it also is less successful on its own terms than other Pasolini films. Accatone, for one, provides a more fluid verisimilitude. Mama Roma is something of a sequel, and suffers from all the limitations that such a label implies. The bawdy, direct humor of Pasolini’s later films is not yet present either, nor the intellectual commentary in his repurposing of classics. This is not one of Pasolini’s best films, but even Pasolini on an off day is something.
Ender’s Game (2013)
Summit Entertainment
Director: Gavin Hood
Main Cast: Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford, Hailee Steinfeld
What a piece of garbage. This film (based on the book by Orson Scott Card) tries far too hard to incorporate teen and pre-teen appeal, aping Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and The Troll Twins of Underbridge Academy. The plot is stupid and the characters implausible. There are many pseudo-intelligent plot devices that are not even a fraction as intelligent as the filmmakers apparently think them to be. The main character Ender (Asa Butterfield) is closely scrutinized by military superiors who see potential in him. Yet they go so far as to extrapolate the future of humanity from a five-minute schoolhouse incident in which Ender gets into a fight. The pop psychology is laid on very thick. It might have been tolerable if it had any sort of connection to legitimate psychology. It doesn’t. Again and again, nothing really adds up. Why are there a total of four adults in the international military that is trying to save the Earth from aliens? And why are children, and only children, necessary to their plans? None of that is explained. The main character is portrayed like some kind of savant of sorts–recalling Herman Hesse‘s Magister Ludi [AKA The Glass Bead Game]. But there is little attempt at Hesse’s sense of irony. The film gets a little better at the end, when it tries to find a moral center. But the ending winds up being much the same as Starship Troopers (1997). Skip this.
The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014)
Director: Ken Burns
Main Cast: Meryl Streep, Paul Giamatti, Edward Herrmann, Peter Coyote
Ken Burns’ documentary of the Roosevelt family, focusing on Teddy, Franklin Delano, and Eleanor, is for the most part the same sort of pablum found in almost all of his films. It posits the Roosevelts as the greatest political family America has ever seen, and probably ever will see, and the protectors and masters of liberal politics. If you want a film that questions political dynasties at a fundamental level, or any such critiques, you are watching the wrong sort of film. As Mason Williams has written, the documentary focuses on the personal somewhat to the detriment on the public aspects of the Roosevelts. In that sense, it is a film built on a very reductionist, essentialist worldview, not far off from biological determinism.
The film is organized chronologically, beginning with the family’s move to America and their success in business, and then leads into Teddy Roosevelt’s political ascent. This is followed by Franklin’s political ascent, and then Eleanor’s widow years.
Commentary on Burns’ Jazz still applies:
“By now his technique is as predictable as the plot of an episode of ‘Friends’: the zoom shot on a still photo, followed by a slow pan, a pull back, then a portentous pause — all the while a monotonous narration explains the obvious at length.” Serpents in the Garden
One quirk in this film is the casting for voice actors. Paul Giamatti portrays Teddy, and he’s a hilariously poor choice. Nick Offerman seems more apropos. It may seem like a minor issue, but it sheds light on a problem with the entire project. The film seems like it fits the facts to the people working on it, rather than the other way around.
We are to believe that the Roosevelts were great due to the individual greatness of people like Teddy, a favored son of a wealthy family with opportunities most would never dream of. As a portrait of his personality, largely irrelevant to his public legacy, it probably is fair. There is some treatment of his activism against business — this was the only president to give a speech railing against the “malefactors of great wealth” and back it up with some action. Though Burns’ stops well short of adopting historian Gabriel Kolko‘s position that Teddy’s administration actual helped big business (to achieve stability) rather than constrain it. His hubris following his presidency is his undoing, and the film does thankfully look askance at Teddy’s racism and imperialism.
The story of FDR’s life is most interesting in describing the time before he contracted polio. He was a dandy and a mamma’s boy. And he was insufferable. After contracting polio, the narrative shifts to his overcoming the effects of the disease to forge his political career. It certainly was an achievement. There is discussion of how his medical condition was concealed from the public with the assistance of the media. There is, however, a clear bias in favor of FDR, in that the filmmakers clearly see FDR as knowing what is best for the public more than the public does for itself, thereby justifying this media complicity. One historian after another lines up to emphasize how the media of today wouldn’t do that, and someone like FDR, or Teddy even, would never win a major office as a result. But they don’t talk about a media “propaganda” model, or campaign financing. Instead, it is a matter as simple as tabloid journalism focusing on personal ailments and the like rather than the “real issues”.
The coverage of FDR’s presidency is mostly fawning, uncritical gushing. Ken Burns has always forged a sort of suburban liberalism in his films. This one is no different. FDR is presented as the president of the people, the most leftist. Anyone to the left of FDR is simply ignored. This is problematic. There is little to no mention of FDR’s “brain trust” and the assortment of advisors who urged more leftist policies than FDR was willing to accept, often to the detriment of lasting outcomes. FDR’s programs are praised, criticized for tactical errors but not for being inadequate at a theoretical level. FDR’s VP Henry Wallace is marginalized, to Eleanor’s chagrin, and Harry Truman is unleashed on the world. Negotiations during WWII are the most curious part of the film. Burns’ view of the war is unreliable, and clings to Cold War paranoia. For instance, there is constant suspicion of Josef Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s concern about Western encroachment is dismissed as paranoia. And yet, history has shown Stalin’s concerns to be entirely justified. As Burns’ film aired on TV, the U.S. was actively involved in fomenting a coup in Ukraine, to move NATO closer to Moscow and implement a financial takeover.
FDR and Winston Churchill are portrayed as the saviors of the world who defeated the Nazis. This, again, isn’t particularly accurate. The Nazis were defeated primarily by the Soviets, in what they called the Great Patriotic War, as the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, violating a non-aggression pact with the Soviets, with the largest invasion force ever assembled in the history of warfare. Over four million Axis troops participated in the invasion. Over five million Soviet citizens died repelling the invasion. You won’t hear any of this from the Ken Burns film (details are available, for instance, in Harrison Salisbury‘s The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad). Instead, Stalin is a skeptic holding back Churchill and FDR. D-Day turns the tide of the war (really, it barely worked, and then, only because of failures of the Axis powers during Barbarossa).
FDR gets very much a pass on his support for the Manhattan project. Robert Oppenheimer ran the program, and later famously commented that it should have bee shut down “the day after Trinity,” in reference to the test explosion code-named Trinity. Sure, Truman ordered the bombs dropped not FDR, but he was just carrying to conclusion an FDR program created for that purpose.
Burns is yet another of those “liberals” who asserts that politics should go a certain amount to the center-left and not one step further, with no justification whatsoever for where that line in the sand is drawn. There are no leftist critics of FDR featured. The late historian Howard Zinn noted how much of FDR’s presidency can be explained through simple imperialist ambitions. He also wrote “The Limits of the New Deal” in New Deal Thought (1965):
“When the reform energies of the New Deal began to wane around 1939 and the depression was over, the nation was back to its normal state: a permanent army of unemployed; twenty or thirty million poverty-ridden people effectively blocked from public view by a huge, prosperous, and fervently consuming middle class; a tremendously efficient yet wastefully productive apparatus that was efficient because it could produce limitless supplies of what it decided to produce, and wasteful because what it decided to produce was not based on what was most needed by society but on what was most profitable to business.”
Economist Alan Nasser has written about how FDR worked to undermine Social Security and preserve business profit interests. FDR was a committed fiscal conservative. He was not a supporter of social programs. He was forced to adopt them by popular pressure and unrest. Burns’ film makes a particularly egregious mischaracterization of the Bonus Army. These were WWI veterans who protested outside the White house to receive a promised bonus early, in view of the dire circumstances of the Great Depression. The film mentions them being a problem of the Hoover administration. This is true, as far as it goes, but the Bonus Army marched again during FDR’s presidency. The film does not mention this fact. FDR opposed their demands, and congress overrode FDR’s veto to pay the veterans their bonuses early.
Eleanor emerges as the best of the Roosevelts. Not only as the lead author of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also as a voice of conscience against FDR’s crass political machinations. It is too bad she wasn’t president, or at least that FDR had listened to her and made Henry Wallace his final running mate instead of Truman. Like the others profiled, her public accomplishments take a back seat to personal details of her life.
So, at the end of the many, many hours of this film, one is left knowing rather little about what the Roosevelts accomplished politically, and is instead given more of a portrait of the lifestyles of the rich and famous who like to dabble in politics.
Redacted (2007)
Magnolia Pictures
Director: Brian De Palma
Main Cast: Rob Devaney, Daniel Stewart Sherman,
Patrick Carroll, Izzy Diaz
Although director Brian De Palma won accolades in early European film festivals, Redacted was a commercial failure in the United States. It opened in barely more than a dozen theaters and hardly anyone saw it. That might be explained — in the post-Jaws manner of direct marketing — that the film wasn’t advertised enough. Regardless, it remains a difficult film to watch, but is still among the more significant made thus far about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The film does not devote itself to the reasons for the invasion and occupation, or the political motives for doing so. Rather, it takes aim at the withholding of the “facts” about what actually was happening during the occupation. As the film’s title implies, this is partly about the U.S. government covering-up and concealing what was happening, but perhaps more so the role of the media in enabling a deception on the American people who ostensibly enable the war and occupation. The story is fictional, but was based on real events involving the rape and murder of an Iraqi civilian by U.S. troops.
What has attracted the most attention is the technique of interspersing different perspectives. The film is presented as if assembled from a video diary by the soldiers themselves, footage from French and Arabic television crews, security cameras, as well as Internet videos. The notion of presenting multiple perspectives goes back to films like Rashomon (1950), though the extensive use of first-person video recalls the zombie movie Diary of the Dead (2007), which was released a mere week later. Like that zombie movie, the acting in Redacted has some weak spots, exacerbated by poor casting.
The central plot of the film involves a couple of clearly mentally disturbed soldiers who decide to rape a local girl who passes through their military checkpoint daily. Although they inform other soldiers in their unit, those others do little or nothing to stop them. In this way, De Palma frames the plot around something close to Hannah Arendt‘s famous notion about the “banality of evil”, developed when she wrote about the Nazi concentration camp administrator Adolph Eichmann (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil). In a historical sense, the rape incident in Redacted resembles the My Lai Massacre from the Vietnam War, a story broken after the fact by independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Following the rape, one of the soldiers, who was making the video diary throughout the movie, is kidnapped by insurgents and beheaded on camera, as revenge for the rape and murder (though it is unclear if these insurgents knew that the kidnapped soldier was directly involved). The highest ranking soldier of the unit reports the incident, at which point his account is suppressed and distorted — this is where the “redaction” by the government occurs.
The film’s harshest judgment seems reserved for the solider making the video diary, who goes along with the others who commit the rape and murders (the girl’s family is also killed) to document the event like a journalist. Journalists often espouse an “ethics” of non-involvement, in which they act as passive observers and do not act affirmatively to assist their subjects. De Palma is puts that position up for debate. The other perspective is that maybe journalists act as collaborators and enablers. This other point of view has long been espoused outside of mainstream journalism. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is perhaps the most well-known formulation..
De Palma’s film was a failure, in the sense that it did not raise awareness of the issues it presents. And yet, history has absolutely vindicated the film’s perspective. The Wikileaks organization released a trove of documents about the Iraq war and occupation that contradicted official claims and denials, most famously the “Collateral Murder” video, with an extensive campaign against the leaker Chelsea (Bradley) Manning and the operator of Wikileaks, Julian Assange. As this review is being written, hired mercenaries who worked in Iraq were just convicted for the Nissour Square Massacre. Another recent story showed that weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) were found in Iraq, but they were old ones leftover from the war with Iran in the 1980s, and had been made with U.S. assistance. With this information in hand, De Palma’s film looks like a chillingly accurate portrayal of what can be expected to happen in a military occupation, and how those at the bottom deal with those realities. This film deserves much credit for extending its moral concern not just to U.S. soldiers but also to the locals subject to the U.S. military’s use of force.