North Korean ideology vs American ideology

North Korea operates under a single, pervasive, ongoing illusion (the greatness of its Dear Leader), while Americans need to experience several sharp, colorful, but fleeting illusions every day

The Weird Career of Paul Thomas Anderson

Another December, another hugely anticipated Paul Thomas Anderson uber prestige pic...another evident disappointment. His seventh film, Inherent Vice, has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 72% fresh, his lowest by far, coming in seven points under Punch-Drunk Love, which itself was five points under Magnolia, his third lowest rated. (About Magnolia, quickly: when "ambitious" is one of the nicest things that critics say about your work, that is generally code for this).

Of course, Rotten Tomatoes scores are not at all perfect determinants of film quality, but they are useful indicators, and more often than not capture the overall reception of a film pretty accurately. I find it's always troubling when audience scores are below critics scores, as critics can tend to rationalize themselves into liking a movie that isn't actually very good on its face. The audience, far from being "dumb," is nowadays fairly discerning about their entertainment, and know what they like and why they like it. Inherent Vice has an audience score of 55%. That is shockingly bad.

This process of giddy anticipation followed by the hollow, disappointing thud of reality feels an awful lot like The Master's life-cycle, Anderson's previous film from two years ago. Expectations for that were much higher than for Vice, as The Master was his first film five years after the acclaimed There Will Be Blood.  Now we don't really know what to expect, other than a film likely to be something of a chore to sit through.

Blood came five years after Punch-Drunk, and signaled a definitive break with his earlier, more freewheeling, celebratory style, most notably achieved in Boogie Nights. Punch-Drunk itself marked a break from the ensemble efforts of Boogie Nights and its followup Magnolia, focusing on a single star, Adam Sandler. Blood similarly shows Anderson's fascination with showcasing, and perhaps leaning on, a singular star with whom he is greatly enthralled. Now it's on to Joaquin Phoenix, who Anderson evidently thinks is far and away the best actor in the world. In interviews for Punch-Drunk, Anderson gushes about his admiration for Sandler's comedic gifts, calling him a "great communicator," and their collaboration was his attempt to make a middle of the road, crowd-pleasing Adam Sandler mega-hit comedy.

He felt that he failed in this attempt, wishing that it was a funnier movie with more laughs. He's right--it isn't a laugh out loud Adam Sandler comedy like Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, or even Big Daddy. But there is something unmistakably compelling about watching Sandler's comedic persona treated by a serious director--the fundamental disjunction in their sensibilities is itself a fruitful, compelling thing to behold. Anderson sincerely wants to tap into Sandler's comedic gifts, to form a cinematic symbiosis with his star's understanding of communication, which at the time were close to their peak--he just doesn't know how to do it.

There Will Be Blood featured a frighteningly lived-in performance from Daniel Day-Lewis, seeming to channel the beating, demonic, selfish heart at the very core of American capitalism. Expectations for The Master were that Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix, two actors of nearly similar gifts as Day-Lewis (though without the insanely over-the-top Method dedication), were ready to shed as much light on the suspect nature of American religion as Day-Lewis did on American capitalism. Only, the target was an odd one: Scientology, which is not nearly as pernicious, influential, or interesting as the media seems to want it to be. But we were all more than willing to go with it.

After watching The Master as generously as I could, I still had no idea why Anderson was drawn to the material. What was he trying to say about Scientology? Why was he saying it? Does the film teach us anything new about Scientology that we didn't already know, or at least suspect? Or even more broadly, about the nature of cults and frauds? I don't know who said it, it might have even been on Twitter, but the most accurate review of it I remember was: "The Master has the most acting of any movie this year!" It was meant to laud the two showy lead performances, yes, but also as a not so gentle jab at the unmistakable self-indulgence Anderson was clearly veering into.

The Master seems to me to continue a habit Anderson began long ago in Magnolia--deep, nearly solipsistic immersion in his own world, portraying it with too much fidelity, so that we, not being privy to his own mind and memories, don't have enough associations with the signifiers to register much of anything. I'm thinking especially of all the father-son stuff in Magnolia, which seemed way too personal and more important for Anderson himself to have created as a catharsis than for an audience to appreciate as part of a film.

The many weird sexual signifiers of The Master seem similar symptoms of solipsism, of an inability, or unwillingness to get out of his own head. The ultra-creepy masturbation scene, the bizarre naked dancing scene, Joaquin Phoenix's ongoing sexual attraction to the ocean/sand, to name only a few at the top of my mind. Anderson really seems to think that by portraying his own sexual oddness in bluntly unsublimated form he is creating brave, important, capital A Art. This is dangerously close to @GuyInYourMFA territory.

Again, this impulse has been around since Magnolia, but that film at least had the energy of youth, a talented ensemble of dynamic actors, a packed narrative with plenty of other incidents, and the honeymoon afterglow from Boogie Nights in its favor. The Master sees that solipsism take center stage, with little else but the yelling of its two admittedly very game leads.

Of course, since we need to have an American auteur to feel good about, someone to whom we can attach our beliefs in the eternal power of art, and Anderson seems to be the only one around who can fit the bill. Increasingly irrelevant, ridiculous cine-snobs like Richard Brody gushed about the "haunting, utterly inward stillness" of Hoffman and Phoenix's performances. When the chief merit in a very long movie (movies being, you know, a visual medium) is something that only exists inside the actors (who are physicalized extensions of the director's brain), that is not astonishing power--that is emotional autism. Brody actually considers the "opacity" of the film to be a great "achievement." But opacity is not an achievement. It is a failure of communication. Critics like Brody are enabling this autistic streak, which, as youthful energy and the ambition and facility to create interesting ensembles and coherent stories fades, has overtaken just about everything else in Anderson's artistic arsenal.

In reconsidering Anderson's status as an eminent American filmic auteur, one always rubs up against the evident unimpeachable genius of Boogie Nights, which is for Anderson what Pulp Fiction is for Tarantino--an unshakeable bedrock upon which his reputation can rest, no matter what happens.

Looking back on Boogie Nights, it's clear that there is much less there than we have managed to convince ourselves there is. More than anything, I think its sterling reputation rests on the performance of Burt Reynolds, and, secondarily, on the emergent, undeniable star birth of Mark Wahlberg. To a lesser extent, also, nostalgia for Goodfellas, the film that Boogie Nights so clearly wants to be, and just the general joyful exuberance inhering in the best art of the nineties, in a way that doesn't really happen in our more staid, analytic, ironic, compacted age.

Way too much has been said and written about how Pulp Fiction rejuvenated John Travolta, plucking him from irrelevance and setting him back on a dumb track to a lot of these movies for a long time. (Thankfully, that seems to have pretty much ended by now). But Travolta is the worst thing about Pulp Fiction--he has no idea how to play a super cool super dangerous hit man. Just watch how embarrassingly bad he is in this scene, as he says "She's fuckin' OD-ing on me!" about as thinly and un-urgently as possible. Burt Reynolds, on the other hand, is far and away the best thing about Boogie Nights. He's so good it's like he's acting in an entirely different movie, one with real stakes, gravitas, and poignancy.

Maybe Reynolds was just too old to experience a complete career rejuvenation like Travolta, who had the good fortune of sliding into irrelevance at an unusually early age, before Pulp Fiction. And perhaps this was all Reynolds had in him, properly so for something that is so clearly the role of a lifetime. You can't have two roles of a lifetime. His award acceptance speech shows just how deeply similar he is to his character Jack Horner, the gentleman pornographer, always insisting that his porn films have class and integrity. He says those same things about his hope for how Boogie Nights would come out--"we brought some humanity to it [the porn industry], and hopefully some class." Burt Reynolds is Jack Horner, he oozes faded, compromised, but ever resilient, dignity and earnestness. John Travolta was not Vincent Vega, he was just massively visible because of a hugely popular movie, and could be slotted into countless cash-grab action movies and mawkish dramedies immediately after his own rejuvenation.

Part of me can't help thinking that Reynolds exerted a decisive influence on the making of the film. After all, Anderson, though a wunderkind, was only 27 when he made Boogie Nights, and Burt Reynolds exudes such authority and effortless wisdom as seen-it-all film director Jack Horner, I can't imagine him totally turning that off when the cameras stopped. I could be totally wrong about all of this, but I feel like he must've acted like a co-director in his scenes, and he's in most scenes in the movie. Maybe that's why Boogie Nights is so much better than all his other movies (though it's still not nearly as good as its reputation)--there was someone there exerting a checking directorial influence.

Wahlberg is great as well, which is good, because he's just about the only other character who is on screen long enough to do anything interesting. The vaunted Boogie Nights ensemble is more like a recurring series of cameos than real roles, as one after another these bright, shiny faces strut into a room and the scene, or their part in the scene, ends twenty seconds later. It's a three hour movie where only a couple key scenes last longer than a minute or two. The reason the drug deal shootout with Alfred Molina is so memorable and impactful is because it's probably the longest scene in the movie, and it's barely five minutes long itself.

But Wahlberg's effectiveness in the role is deceptive, as he is far more convincing as a sweet, innocent young guy than the supremely confident, universe shattering cocksman he becomes. Wahlberg seems insecure in the role, shaking off his Marky Mark baggage, and that works, because Eddie Adams, or "Dirk Diggler," is insecure, knowing deep down that he is just a dolt who lucked into a freakishly huge penis. Wahlberg seems very much to be playing at being an actor, which mirrors and informs how his character Eddie Adams is playing at being the star "Dirk Diggler."

This almost embarrassing mirroring of real life that was certainly intentional in casting Reynolds, debatably in the casting of Wahlberg, is powerfully present in the tone of the movie as a whole. Indeed, if there is genius in Boogie Nights, it is in how eerily closely the tone of the film mirrors the superficiality of its many characters.

In Dirk Diggler's world, you meet someone at a party and he becomes your best friend and you become his, because you're both chill, rad, fun guys with awesome cocks who are great at banging babes and doing coke. The film itself as a whole takes on that unearned intimacy of its characters. Anderson seems drawn to that fake world because of how deeply entrenched shallowness is in its culture--everyone is kept an arm's (or penis's) length away, no one really opens up, everything is great and super and fun and cool because to act otherwise would be to court reflection, and their lives are too miserable to withstand any tiny fraction of self-analysis. Anderson treats the audience the way that his characters treat each other, and it is not a pleasant feeling.

Of course, a director has no obligation at all to make the audience feel pleasant--doing the opposite is often a nobler, truer aim. It's just that Anderson seems a bit too comfortable doing this, and that tone has continued in his later, more solipsistic work. In The Master, I felt like I was inside him and totally alien to him all at once. He really wants to communicate, but seems incapable of doing so, yet his inability to communicate is praised as high art. Such is the confused, desperate state of American cinema.

So what of Inherent Vice? I actually think it's his best movie, by far. Boogie Nights is juvenile, though inspired, and Punch Drunk Love was purposefully trifling. This was his first movie that combined the inspiration and lightness of his early period with the heft and consequentialness of his later films. It's the movie that his whole career was leading toward, and is a promising sign.

Book Review: "Who Owns The Future?" by Jaron Lanier

In his second book, Who Owns the Future?, pioneering virtual reality researcher turned philosopher of the digital economy Jaron Lanier attempts a tricky maneuver: urging us into both a more purely capitalist direction, while also encouraging us to be far more humanistic. It may strike leftists as too acquiescent to the exponential stranglehold that capital has over human potential, and it may strike rightists as excessively concerned with spreading financial security to a wide base. But that's the strength of the book--it is revolutionary, but modestly so, in a way that might actually apply to the rapidly approaching digitized future.

Spreading human dignity to more people by becoming collectively more capitalist than we already are is at first glance a strange idea, but Lanier makes the case quite convincingly. Capitalism, digitization, and human dignity need not be thought of as incompatible. Who Owns the Future? is a unique blend of clearheaded realism about digitization's exponential narrowing effect on our economy, with a decidedly hopeful and far from dystopian tone.

In 2014, we spend countless hours contributing to the hive mind and the general pool of content through Facebook posts, tweets, upvoting/generating reddit content, uploading YouTube videos, Yelping, reviewing Uber drivers, running fan sites, message boards, movie review blogs, and a thousand other ways. All of this is done for free, because that is how it started out--people simply jumping on the internet and doing things.

As the context that this free content was delivered into grew more sophisticated, however, tremendous profits started being derived from it. Lanier asks why the people giving information that is combed through for huge value by a small cadre of firms he dubs Siren Servers haven't partaken of the massive upswing in value taking place online. The familiar saying underlying Web culture is that information and content "want to be free"--Lanier suggests that, while this may be true, the human beings from which that information and content originate should look not want to work for free. This brazenly sane idea is Lanier's concept of "humanistic information economics."

The base of digital value is as vast as the population is, yet the actual money is filtered through the Siren Servers, leaving the real creators of value out in the cold. Lanier asks us to reconceive of what kind of behavior merits monetary compensation. Why should only the firms that have figured out how to sell the value offered in staggering volumes by the masses have all the money, while unemployment and underemployment grow, the labor force shrinks, and hopelessness pervades? We need to reconceive of what value is, as the traditional economy is so obviously devoid of it, while the new economy has such an obscene overabundance of it, the overwhelming majority of which is divorced from monetization.

We have enabled advertisers to specialize their outreach to us in ways that Don Draper could only dream about. Lanier's book is filled with galling examples of how Siren Servers like Facebook and advertising technology are being leveraged to tailor consumer experiences directly to you, like "differential pricing." This is the practice of algorithms based on information obtained about you through your Facebook activity that will allow firms to judge how much you are capable and willing to spend on an item. Someone else, buying the exact same item online but whose digital footprint indicates that they are less inclined and capable of paying more, will be charged less.

The current economic outlook is that the dignity resulting from having money should go only to those cunning enough to be successful predators, leeching off the digital information offered by the public. The masses are merely low level actors providing ever increasing opportunities to be exploited.

The humanism in Lanier's thesis is that people who share information that could come only from them, even if it is unsolicited, are contributing to the overall pool of value, and should be compensated. Money should not only accrue to those who find ways to exploit, but to those who create of their own volition on their own time.

Lanier's concrete suggestion for how humanistic information economics would actually work hinges on the idea of two-way linking, deriving from pioneering but insufficiently influential technologist Ted Nelson. A direct path would always be present between an originator of even the most trifling bit of content and a firm that utilizes it for a potentially monetizable practice.

This would also require a reconception of how money accrues to people. The way we spend money, dribs and drabs throughout the day and the week, with occasional big purchases every few months or so, would also be how money comes in to us. For each bit of content or information we offer online that is used to make ad tech algorithms more robust, we would receive a micropayment.

Value should not be viewed as it is traditionally, in terms of great big spurts, but rather in the steady, accretive way that take place every day. In his great book The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil conceives of a human being, and by extension a modern city filled with people, as a machine with countless parts constantly in motion generating an incredible amount of energy: "A man going about his business all day long expends far more muscular energy than an athlete who lifts a huge weight once a day. This has been proved physiologically, and so the social sum total of everybody's little everyday efforts, especially when added together, doubtless releases far more energy into the world than do rare heroic feats. This total even makes the single heroic feat look positively miniscule, like a grain of sand on a mountaintop with a megalomaniacal sense of its own importance." This is how energy, value, and force are really generated, so it's about time we use our amazing new technology to monetarily honor that fact, rather than praising the Siren Servers that, in the nascent days of digital economics, figured out how to siphon value. The work of offering valuable information that tech spy companies make billions from should be treated as the source of wealth that it is. We need to evolve past our culture that lauds and fetishizes self-aggrandizing, heroic, ambitious billionaires, since the value and power they are capable of pales in comparison to the little bits of energy generated by each and every person throughout the day.

More of our activity should be monetized, not less, which is both an admission that commerce is the soul of our society, and an appeal to offer chances for being paid to far more people than now. This is the unique blend of capitalism with leftist populism in Lanier's thinking.

The core of this process is in rethinking the meaning of 'rights.' As of now, civil rights, our rights simply as humans qua humans, are what we mostly mean when we think of rights. This was more appropriate in earlier phases of socioeconomic development, before the current phase of neoliberal capitalism, in which people have limited value simply for being people, and more as vectors through which money can be generated.

So because of this, commercial rights need to become as ubiquitous and vocally defended as civil rights, indeed perhaps more so. Commerce is the soul of capitalism, and having dignity in a capitalistic system requires comprehensively detailed commercial rights for each and every citizen. Each aspect of a person's life is fodder for generating revenue by some ad tech company, so a person should be protected and compensated for every instance of this happening. Lanier excels at giving examples of this: "If you are tracked while you walk around town, and that helps a government become aware that pedestrian safety could be improved with better signage, you'd get a micropayment for having contributed valuable data" (317).

Lanier shies away from critiquing ideology, or the ways that such obvious points remain obscured and villainized. He doesn't comment on how, instead of distributing funds to those who in piecemeal ways help tech giants build their fortunes, we celebrate the mere fact that genius elite technologists have so many billions of dollars. "Yay, Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire before he was thirty! He did it by selling the information contributed for free by people who use his website! How great! People are rich! Yahoo!"

A humanistic information economy requires that human beings view themselves and their situation, their lot, clearly--but as recent political history demonstrates with such crippling force, ideology has become thicker and more pervasive than ever, with no sign of dissipating. Ideology is anything that dissuades us from seeing ourselves as valuable, so a humanistic information economy has little chance of winning the day. We have pretty much already conclusively decided that we don't care about ourselves, each other, or the concept of humanity. We have more important things to worry about, evidently. Lanier doesn't get into how ideology obscures our own best interests from us, making us perversely love the chains that keep us controlled and exploited. He really does his best to objectively analyze the troubling trends in the digital economy, and to offer solutions.

In his second book, he shows all the signs of maturing as a thinker that you would want. His first book, You Are Not A Gadget, while great, was more focused on individual cases of how specific internet tendencies were narrowing the realm of freedom, expressivity, and creative potential. This book, while still filled with specific, concrete examples to build its case, exhibits more comfort with big picture thinking, which is a welcome sign.

He has gotten over some moderately unfortunate writerly tics, like his tendency to congratulate his and his cohort's accomplishments, creativity, and genius. While understandably very proud of his own biography, Lanier at times can seem like he's showing off, sometimes about his genius, but more often about how cool him and his pioneering Silicon Valley milieu were, in ways that today's up and comers just can't fathom. There are only so many sentences starting with "My friends in Silicon Valley..." you can read before you start to roll your eyes.

The book does seem longer than it needs to be, at 367 pages, the last eighty or so of which devolve into a hodgepodge of related thought fragments. This latter part of the book is very much Lanier throwing ideas out into the world, for us to benefit from, yes, but it also seems like he is trying to sharpen his own grasp of his admittedly compelling thesis. Much of these later sections read like notes, but in fairness he is first and foremost a computer scientist, and for one of those, he is a great writer.

The many good ideas in this book, I fear, will have little impact on the course of history. The reason is that, for a book appealing to our sentimentality over the notion of human dignity, it is too even tempered. Being human is not a condition amenable to moderate appeals--to be reached, a human being needs rhetorical appeals. Lanier is far too polished, intelligent, and scientific to fill his books with rhetorical appeals.

The problem is that drumming up renewed collective feeling for our shared humanity can best, and perhaps only, be achieved through stirring rhetoric. The fact that such a modest proposition as advocating a more humanistic economy is presented with as much diplomatic caution as Lanier exhibits throughout the book is evidence that we may already be too far gone--humanism may already be too passe.

Birdman: Or, the Unexpected Allure of the Status Quo

I resisted seeing Birdman, or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance for a while, nearly two months, and I see most of these buzzy prestige movies their opening weekend. I've long had a minority opinion that director Alejandro Iñárritu was one of the most overrated people in Hollywood. This piece over at The Dissolve does a nice job of articulating the visceral distaste I felt for his films, since 21 Grams: "...everything-is-connected dramas that used violence as an organizing theme." Yes yes yes. Is there anything worse than a self-serious everything-is-connected drama, which pivots around violence? They're all just Vantage Point. Crash is Vantage Point for the emotionally autistic and secretly racist. Iñárritu's own Babel? So Vantage Point, but Vantage Point as Syriana. So, boring Vantage Point. Just admit when you're Vantage Point. It's okay to be Vantage Point sometimes. Really. (Not really).

Luckily, Birdman is not a bundle of interlocking stories, but nearly the exact opposite. It's a series of very long takes, edited as minimally as possible. It's Iñárritu's best film by a mile. For a film filled with bravura monologues to play so seamlessly is a truly impressive feat of editing and directing--some of the highest achievements the art form has ever seen, in terms of getting actorly energy on the screen in all its unfiltered glory.

The film's concept, which, like everything else about the film, has been nearly universally praised, to me seems in the same ballpark of stupid as Kevin Smith's pot-fueled idea that turned into the instantly forgotten Tusk: let's take a fairly washed up Michael Keaton, who used to be Batman before superhero movies were the cinematic sine qua non, and cast him as a fairly washed up actor who used to play a superhero called Birdman. Cool!

Keaton's "character" Riggan Thomson (is Riggan an actual name?) self-finances a Broadway engagement of his own adaptation of the Raymond Carver short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" (so that's where that awful phrase comes from!). He's trying to prove to himself and the world that His Integrity As An Artist was worth abandoning the lucrative, famous life of superhero movie stardom. So he produces the Carver adaptation, because, as he tells Edward Norton's "character" Mike Shiner at a bar, Carver attended one of his high school plays and wrote him a note thanking him for giving an honest performance. He's reconnecting, in the only way he knows how, with the foundation of his artistic integrity, which he pissed away all those years starring in the artistically bankrupt but financially massive Birdman movies.

Shiner is visibly disappointed and disgusted that such a shallow, superficial, sentimental impetus is driving Riggan to produce the play. It's a great moment. Shiner, a wildly, recklessly committed artist, is rightly disgusted that his director and co-star is putting the show on so directly for his own self-assurance and ironing out of his self-doubts. Art should be about taking chances and discovering new things, new expressions, new sensations, new subtleties. Riggan is trying to reconnect to a time in his life when he had integrity, and calling it art.

There are some other really perceptive, sharp digs at the meaninglessness of artistic preciousness throughout the film, perhaps most notably Emma Stone's long, angrily righteous, piercing assassination of her father's entire character. After he catches his recovering drug addict daughter Sam (Emma Stone) smoking weed, he chastises her and says he doesn't need this distraction right now, because he has a play to put on and all that. This sets her off, as she rightly makes it abundantly clear that he is the only person the play is important to, and the audience is filled with old, rich, white people who at best vaguely remember who Raymond Carver was, and are using the theater going experience that night mainly to have something to discuss over coffee and pie afterwards. This monologue alone should put Stone in the running for a Best Supporting Actress nomination (although she is an absolute grease-fire in all her scenes). There's a lot of schizophrenia going on here. For every time the film verges into A Love Letter To Art territory, someone smacks it down viciously to earth.

The best thing about the film is seeing Edward Norton really let loose in a way he hasn't since the late nineties and early oughties. Since The 25th Hour in 2002, he's been stuck in something of self-parody, and at best in neutral. After years of roles in a big superhero film, a big spy action franchise, cop dramas, minor roles in the Wes Anderson repertory, and limp greatest hits parodies, it's great to see that he's still a shockingly fluid and compelling actor. Keaton is great too, probably better than he's ever been, but Norton has the better part.

After having a row with a New York Times theatre critic who promises to trash his play and condemns his and his Hollywood ilk's incursion into legitimate theater, Riggan reaches a particularly low point (which is saying something in a film that is little more than the charting of a man's nearly complete unraveling). He finds solace in the one thing that he really has: he is motherfucking Birdman! He could call the studio any time and say he wanted to be in the third Birdman sequel, and he'd get a fat paycheck, booked on all the late night talk shows, and the good times would roll again. He hallucinates that he is in fact actually Birdman, flying around everywhere with a dramatic heroic score crashing all around him. In reality, he was just humming along to the music in his head while a cab took him back to the theater.

That is the closest thing to a villain in the film--the safety and security of the Birdman character itself. Riggan spends the film, other than that brief moment of embrace, running away from it. He hides in the trappings of a Serious Artist, using it to shield himself from the incessant chirping voice of Birdman in his head. Near the end of the film, Riggan confesses to his ex that, at the peak of his Birdman fame and fortune, he tried to drown himself in the ocean. He failed because he had unwittingly waded into a thicket of jellyfish, causing him to run ashore and roll around until the horrible monsters detached. The only thing keeping him from killing himself was the belief that he was really a great artist, so he took his shot and proved it to the world.

The final scene of the play within the film ends in Riggan's character shooting himself, saying over and over that he feels invisible, that he doesn't exist, then kapow. I read this as a barb against actors--Riggan chose this play because, as an actor, he only really exists if he is seen by others--they have no integrity of their own.

At the end of Birdman, Riggan replaces his prop gun with a real one, fully loaded. We don't really know why, other than a continuation of his suicidal past and his increasingly obvious psychotic break. He shoots his nose off but survives, and there are a few minutes tacked on where we see him in a hospital bed with a new nose, his daughter telling him how his failed suicide went viral and made him a huge star. He even got a glowing review, whose title gives the film its cringey, @GuyInYourMFA-esque subtitle, from the prickly critic, praising him for unwittingly creating a new artistic style by deforming himself live on stage--super realism! Riggan's producer Jake (Zach Galifianakis) tells him how the show will run in Paris and London. He is at once virally popular, critically acclaimed, and the inventor of a new art form. He achieved all his lofty goals.

Problem--this is not a repeatable art form. He can't keep blowing his nose off night after night, from New York to Europe. Just like Birdman is not a repeatable cinematic direction--Keaton can't keep commenting on his fraught real life experience with superhero films, and Iñárritu can't keep commenting on how Real Filmmaking is better than profit driven acting. Super-realism is a one time deal.

I suppose you could be charitable and say that Iñárritu's super-realism is akin to a Happening type of message--telling us to create something really eventful that will shake things up as much as Birdman has shaken up the Hollywood Oscar race in 2014, and Keaton's career.

When his family and friends leave him alone in his hospital room, Riggan goes to the window and steps out onto the ledge, to try to fly. At this point, I thought he had plummeted to his death, like how his earlier flying hallucination was in reality just him freaking out in the back of a cab. That would have been amazing--it would have been the best ending to a movie I've seen in years, and made me unequivocally love Birdman.

But that's not what happened. Sam comes back in the hospital room, crosses to the window, and looks out, and down...there's a look of horror on her face, which is good...maybe she saw his dead body on the sidewalk below! Oh wait...she's looking up...and smiling in disbelief!?

Oh no. He's actually flying.

The message? Through art, anything is possible. If you follow your artistic convictions, you will soar. Soar! Committing yourself whole hog to art is not a delusive, selfish, arrogant way to live at all--it is not a function of capitalist ideology, forcing your hopes and dreams into a self-aggrandizing, inner-directed imaginary world at all--rather, it is the seed bed from which all possibilities may spring! It is a glorious and supreme human achievement to inhabit a fantasy world, hooray huzzah! Strength through narcissism! Glory and salvation through selfishness!

The villain of the piece is the aspect of Riggan's personality that drives him to take shelter under the lucrative, fame-bringing wings of the Birdman franchise; the hero of the piece is Riggan's heroic impulse to pursue the limits of honest, authentic art. But both are flights from reality--one is just better paid, while the other is more creatively fulfilling. Neither has anything to do with making the world less insane, violent, and hopeless.

Just as super-realism is no salvation, since it could happen only that once, impassioned commitment to artistic exploration is no salvation, as it distances you from the world in which you really live, requiring endless escapes, lest your feet actually touch the ground and you lose your mind. The world does not need so much art, even well-made art like this. It needs logic. Logic can change things. Art needs a solid status quo in which to incubate. Praising art is praising the status quo.

In its own way, this is more shameless and effective capitalist propaganda than anything Michael Bay ever made. Art is no shelter and no levee against the systematical dehumanization of neoliberal capitalism--it is a force field that we erect around ourselves to provide ourselves temporary oases of sanity and purpose in an intentionally exploitative, vicious world. Praising and loving and worshiping art is little more than loving one's chains.

$20,000 Flash Fiction Contest Entries

Did you hear about this absurdly great $20,000 prize for a 100 word story? I wrote three "stories," though you can only enter two. Thought it would be fun to share them. They're all pretty stupid. Here they are!


Two Poets

Two poets sat arguing about how their words would change the world.

"My words are so beautiful that they will inspire the people to overthrow their oppressors," said one.

"No, my words are so haunting they will drive people into each other's loving, warm embraces, where forever they will linger," said the other.

"Romance is a low aim of poetry," said the first poet. "My poems will bring justice!"

The second poet laughed. "What are you, a virgin?"

The first poet, deeply embarrassed, silently nodded yes.

"It is okay," said the second poet. "I am too. Like all poets."

Squirrel Birthday Party

I saw a squirrel in a jar. How did it get into the jar? Did it climb in, searching for the last bit of peanut butter? Was it stuck there by a sadistic child?

I let it out, and was surprised when the squirrel turned to me and asked why I had removed him from his resting place.

"I was trying to help," I replied.

"Well, sometimes things are best left alone," said the squirrel. "Don't you know glass jars are the best places for smelling your own farts? You ruined my birthday!"

I apologized and put him back.

Paws Off!

“Paws off!” the girl whispered to her dog. She had taken him to the art gallery with the explicit understanding that he was not to touch the paintings. “But it looks so real,” said the pup, admiring a still life of a fish and basket of fruit. “You should know better,” chided the girl, “your father was an artist.”

“My father was a drunk with a paintbrush”, the dog said bitterly. The girl thought maybe he was just saying this to sound interesting and decided to ignore the comment. “Let’s get a snack in the café”. The dog wagged his tail.

Comedy Boom Boom

Although stand up comedy has been an identifiable form of entertainment since at least Lenny Bruce in the fifties and sixties, and Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin elevated it to a beloved art form in the seventies and on, it didn't come into its own as an industry until the early eighties.

There weren't comedy clubs until then, but when entrepreneurs realized how much potential there was in building bar/theater hybrids where comedians could play to several mid-sized audiences every night, they sprang up all over the place. Now we sort of take them for granted as an entrenched part of the American entertainment business landscape, so much so that lots of people have stopped going, and many legendary clubs have become unprofitable.

The comedy boom held strong throughout the eighties, when most of the well-known comics of today made their bones. Jerry Seinfeld, Marc Maron, Louis CK, Dave Attell, and countless others came up in the eighties (in Seinfeld's case, the very early eighties), playing legendary clubs that don't exist anymore, making hundreds of dollars every night. A big part of the appeal of a show like Maron's popular WTF podcast is hearing old salts from a bygone heyday recount how much fun it was to be breaking into an industry flush with possibility and opportunity.

All booms end, eventually, in a bust, and the comedy boom was no different. In his WTF appearance, Louis CK recounted how the comedy boom ended for him in dramatic fashion, as he got in a motorcycle accident, lost his hair, and saw many of the clubs that provided him hundreds of dollars a night close their doors all in the same brief time-span.

Still, countless careers and reputations were made, carrying countless comics for twenty years. After a fallow period, it feels like there's a bit of a comedy boom happening again now, but with the wrinkle of a this generation of boomers finding their comedic endeavors demonetized and devalued.

It's not quite the same as what's happening with music--rock and roll is dying, if not dead, because it just isn't interesting to young people today. Play them a really fantastic guitar part from a classic punk rock song, let alone an actual classic rock song, and they most likely just won't get it. They won't like or dislike it--they'll just regard it the way a grizzly bear would regard a Frisbee or something. They've moved on to other kinds of music more appropriate to the post-human future we're hurtling toward.

But comedy is as popular as it was in the nineties, maybe even more so. Comedy podcasts (search turns up 7.5 million results), comedy festivals, Last Comic Standing, entire radio stations devoted to comedy, slews of sitcoms. Comedy, comedy, comedy everywhere you look. The interesting thing is that comedy is possibly as popular as it has ever been, yet comedy clubs are shutting down. Sure, some sitcoms, like The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family are about as big and popular as any sitcom has ever been, but they aren't at the sweet spot of mass appeal and critical consensus that shows like Cheers, Seinfeld, Frasier, and even Roseanne and the early seasons of Friends managed.

Big Bang and Modern Family are well-written, well-produced shows that are easy and fun to watch, but there's no mistaking them for cultural artifacts that will still be discussed and revered twenty years down the line, like the strongest NBC shows. NBC's attempts, and failures, at reestablishing their sitcom superiority during this present comedy boom are fairly fascinating. There was last year's big swing and a miss of The Michael J. Fox Show, which was essentially just placing a big 80s sitcom star in a show and hoping that simply having him around again would get people to watch out of comfort and habit. Didn't work out.

The more recent, compelling example of NBC's inability to do something that should, given the current cultural climate of comedic conduciveness, is Mulaney. Plenty has been written about its intentional debt to Seinfeld, down to Nasim Pedrad's hypercharged, psychotic take on Elaine Benes, John Mulaney playing himself as an NYC showbiz type, and all the rest. Mulaney's standup comedy is more or less universally liked, as Jerry Seinfeld's was.

The disjunction is clearly glimpsed in this NPR blog entitled "Please Don't Judge John Mulaney by 'Mulaney.'" We like John Mulaney, just not the single best career opportunity available to a person such as him. We like him, but not in a way that will allow him to earn money, like people in his exact position could do twenty years ago. We like him, but the apparatus around which liking someone could allow that person to benefit and create more of what we like has been dismantled (by us).

Is the sitcom still a viable context for comedic entertainment? It seems like it would always be--it's a chance to hang out (sort of), with really funny, familiar people. That is basically what has propelled the podcast boom. It's a more direct, unfiltered version of what used to require huge staffs and production schedules to achieve, and better yet, it's pumped right into your ears, oftentimes several installments worth a week. Stripped of all artifice except the indomitable will of an energetic, opinionated human to shove their view of the world in your direction, comedy podcasts are hailed for their rawness and realness. But the realness doesn't extend to appreciating how the purveyors of this raw entertainment in great volumes make a living (or, more accurately, don't make a living). We want something real, coming from a distinctive place and point of view, but we don't want that place to be one that can afford to not live with its parents. The privilege of offering content-hungry people their hard-created content should be compensation enough!

Here we can see a symptom of the much vaunted openness that internet pervasiveness into every last crevice of the entertainment industry--tearing down without building up. Sure, it was great when all music ever became immediately available to everyone free of charge. But what replaced the record industry was the YouTube lottery: now anyone can record themselves singing and post it to YouTube. Some have gotten popular and made it, only they get a fraction of what a real music star got back in the day. The odds have gotten even longer, and the payout has gotten worse. As this article points out, YouTube is responsible for 70% of music consumption, but under 3% of revenue.

Perhaps one explanation for the current glut of young people going into comedy, fueling the comedy boom, is the lack of legitimate employment options available to the exponentially growing pool of students earning degrees from unprecedentedly numerous (and increasingly valueless) institutions of higher learning. Do a few open mics, and see how many people there have at least Bachelors degrees, and how many even have graduate degrees. Simply going out and saying things on a stage is considered as good, or better, an option as any other available.

Chris Rock, possibly the biggest comedian of the 1990s not named Jerry Seinfeld, has been in the news a lot lately as he ramps up the marketing push for his new movie, Top Five. This fawning New Yorker piece by Kelefa Sanneh was fascinating for a few reasons, but mostly for how it bent itself up into a pretzel trying to rationalize Rock's inability to produce anything remotely as compelling, beloved, or relevant in the past nearly twenty years as his 1996 breakout standup comedy special Bring the Pain.

Interestingly, Sanneh cites the a huge chunk, verbatim, of the standout joke from that special--you know the one--comparing "good" African Americans to "bad" ones. It's as if she needs to remind us, and herself, why Chris Rock is still being given such a string of high-profile chances after all this time. There are some laughs in the joke that hold up all these many years later, but ethically, the joke really shows its age. But that (fairly huge) issue aside, isn't Chris Rock's continuing relevance, despite over a decade of making nothing but forgettable stand up and films, at least a bit puzzling? Even so discerning a publication as the New Yorker is hellbent on figuring out a way to rationalize giving so many turns at bat to a comedian who, even by its own admission, is in his enviable position today for writing one very resonant joke nearly twenty years ago.

How come so little went so far in the nineties, while so much counts for so little today, when the means of production, and distribution, have been so radically democratized and horizontalized? Weren't those things supposed to help us? Tell one very good joke in 1996, and you're making million dollar movies twenty years later. Tell one hundred very good jokes in 2014, and you should be grateful that anyone heard them, and go happily on your way to your day job.

The problem is that, in embracing the possibilities digital media provided us to dismantle corporate hegemony, we performed the perverse neoliberal maneuver of energetically thinking of ourselves as our own mini corporations. Stay on brand, bro.

All of this is to leave aside the most fundamental question: is it right to buy and sell the most physically tangible manifestation of human joy? Should it be so bandied about and wasted? What would be a better use of that energy? Laughter is a waste of good happiness, transferring it into a surface, disposable level. It isn't real happiness, which can be meditated upon inwardly and used to sustain a person throughout the unending moment by moment onslaught of dull gray nothingness which constitutes the essence of the experience of life.

Does it really feel good to laugh? Laughing is an unconscious experience--I forget I did it almost before I'm done doing it. It evaporates immediately as it happens. We can laugh hilariously, deeply one moment and be perfectly miserable the next. It augurs neither ill nor well particularly for our daily mood. It is a violent, overbearing, relatively isolated experience, occurring when an aspect of externality invades our consciousness so abruptly and manipulatively that we emit an unintentional, really animalistic noise. Deeply miserable people can laugh hilariously, and indeed often laugh the loudest and deepest, as they are more susceptive to being stirred by life's absurdities.

Does laughter benefit the person who caused the laughter? Comedians are well known for being among the most miserable and darkest people alive. Perhaps they have access to some version of happiness that is beyond the reach of mere mortals, but I doubt it. It seems like being in the trenches where laughter is generated on a full-time basis grinds them down into nubs of wretchedness.

The cliché "everyone's a comedian" is generally mocked for (besides being a cliché), being weirdly bitter about people partaking in an activity that generates a response (laughter) which causes smiling. Its bitterness seems to imply that the energy people expend toward generating laughter in others could, and should, be spent in more worthwhile, less ephemeral pursuits. Laughter is a momentary experience of inexplicable physiological response. Its popularity perhaps comes from the ability to abandon oneself to this momentary physiological response. Love of comedy is in this way a desperate, untenable form of existence--stringing together moments of surrender, crawling from one opportunity of being overpowered to the next.

It might be that a more humane, decent society, in which human life was taken seriously as a valuable thing that ought to be given firm direction and purpose, would have little, or at least less, use for comedy. It seems a cynical world in which every public experience of truth is permitted only because it is always leading to a punch line. Everyone is bored until they have something make them laugh.

Comedy is the most potent form of cultural information ever devised--it shakes you so that your throat makes an involuntary noise. Only a society as accustomed to, and in love with, doing nothing, would have such a deep, unending need for comedy. A healthy society would have little need or time for comedy.

Nightcrawler, Taxi Driver, & Cinematic Claustrophobia

Already drawing comparisons by more than a couple outlets to Taxi Driver, especially in what it can do for star Jake Gyllenhaal as that film did for Robert De Niro, the new film Nightcrawler is certainly an impressive, tight little thriller. Nightcrawler is probably as close to that riveting study of contemporary sociopathy as we are likely to get nowadays, but other than being a sustained depiction of an intensely Other young man desperately trying to make his way in this cruel, cold world of ours, they are completely different animals. The ways in which they are different are fairly instructive with respect to the evolution of film in the last thirty or so years.

Gyllenhaal's Lou Bloom speaks in rapid-fire, pre-packaged LinkedIn profile self-summaries, usually without blinking his enormous eyes. His intense self-promotion is rewarded fast, as the film charts his meteoric rise to the top of the grimy Los Angeles crime scene news footage hustle. There's a whole world of bottom feeders who rush to midnight crime scenes and car crashes to get raw footage to sell to local news stations--they have the advantage of prowling the streets, glued to police scanners, while their union counterparts are sleeping. The prominence of local TV stations does make Nightcrawler feel somewhat like a period piece--aren't they all mostly on their last legs, at best? But their desperation for outrageous footage that will pull in big numbers plays right into Lou's career goals.

Lou starts and ends the film as a complete psychopath--this shot is from about a third of the way in, and is a reaction to hitting a snag in his plans for exponential career growth. Does Travis Bickle ever go that insane? If he does, it certainly wasn't because of a hitch in his personal career growth outlook.

Unlike Travis, Lou never attempts to engage with another person on any level that isn't entirely manipulative. Everything he knows about the world comes from trawling the internet for information and taking online classes. The rest he fills in with sheer intensity and mastery of careerist buzzwords. The world eventually comes around to seeing him for the talented psychopath he is, and rewards him accordingly with his own company, Video Production News, complete with his own set of eager interns.

My favorite scenes in the film are between Lou and his clueless employee Rick (Riz Ahmed), starting with an appropriately awkward Craigslist-facilitated diner interview. Rick "sells himself" in the interview as someone who just wants a job, any job, and will do whatever he is told. Having grown up in and around Los Angeles, he knows how to get around, and has a phone with GPS on it, so Lou hires him on the spot. As their working relationship evolves, Rick becomes self-assured, and takes care of all the little things, freeing Lou to dive maniacally into the seedy world of guerilla TV news. Lou shows himself to be a fine mentor to Rick, despite being a complete sociopath. Lou offers plenty of great advice to his feckless employee, coaxing surprising levels of professionalism and tenacity from the wishy-washy stoner. The lesson is clear--you can, and indeed probably should, be a sociopath in order to successfully grow your own business in today's economic climate.

Capitalist critique is latent in Nightcrawler, but it's never didactic or explicit--it's more focused on showing how removal from human feeling, severing all connections to anything other than a laser-focused drive to improve your own business, are qualities that are quickly rewarded. The key to being successful in 2014 American capitalism is to whittle away as many human qualities as possible. To Lou's great advantage, he doesn't appear to have had very many of those to surmount in the first place. All he needed was a direction, an industry, in which shameless ambition and self-reliance could be rewarded.

Lou has no connections to anyone in any industry that could offer him a chance to start a career. He starts the film by begging for a full-time job at a scrap yard to which he just sold a bunch of stolen metal. (The scrap yard owner tells him he doesn't hire thieves). For most young people (meaning pretty much anyone between 22 and 35, the generation that employment forgot), this desperation to merely get your foot in a door, any door, is pretty close to accurate.

Unless you know someone who can help you get your foot in the door, or if you are already doing the exact thing that a job requires and get poached by another company, there is no chance for you to start your life. The only option is to find an industry that you can enter into on your own and scratch out success through your individual obsessive effort and undeniable dedication. Earning a living in a decent job is the luxury of rock stars only.

The aporia is familiar enough to be a cliche at this point, but it's no less dauntingly true: you need experience to get a job, but you can't get experience without having been given an opportunity. So you need to carve opportunities out of the universe by any means necessary. Are you psychotic enough to make it in America?

Travis Bickle was a lonely Vietnam vet back from the war trying to fit into society. He made earnest attempts to get involved with Cybil Sherpherd's Betsy, going to the campaign headquarters she worked at, and taking her to a movie (a porno movie, yes, but still, it was an attempt to create a shared experience of some sort, that he very wrongly thought she would like). For me, the truly compelling parts of this most ballyhooed of De Niro's performances are when he tries to pass, to be a citizen who could share his life with someone as well-adjusted and desirable as Betsy. When this fails, he gets caught up in his hero fantasy of murdering the pimps and lowlifes exploiting Jodie Foster's adolescent prostitute Iris. Of course, he carries those fantasies out in a real life killing spree, but prior to that he did try to engage with society on society's own terms, in an earnest attempt to be a decent citizen.

The way the latter half of Taxi Driver plays out, viewers believe that Travis is an evil psychopath who will meet a deservedly grisly, undignified end. But after killing the men he hates, to save the "innocent princess" Iris, Travis is unexpectedly lauded as a righteous vigilante who was the only one brave enough to take necessary action to clean up the filthy New York City streets. This is one of the key similarities between Nightcrawler and Taxi Driver, in how indulging your most ruthless, anti-social tendencies leads to acclaim, promotion, and success in American society.

But while Travis struggles with the choice, before eventually concluding that it was the only option left to him, Lou is as bloodthirstily ambitious from minute one as he is at the end of the film. He never has to try to pass--he just has to present the full force of his psychopathy to the right industry gatekeepers. The subtleties of growth, development, and change have no place in the socioeconomic environment of 2014 America--one must know who they are, embrace their strengths, and find any outlet for building their empire and, to quote our main deity, put a dent in the universe. You can't make a real dent in the universe if you don't know exactly who you are, if you aren't marshaling all of your resources to aid you in the bloody fight.

So it's Gyllenhaal's movie, but how are the other performances in Nightcrawler? Aside from Riz Ahmed's excellent Rick, Rene Russo is really the only other player of note. She is back in a big way here, after what felt like a long time just doing Thor movies and veering into something of a Viggo the Carpathian territory looks-wise. As the news director of the station Lou sells his slimy footage to, she excels at first being impressed by the exceptionally eager young footage hound, to eventually being intimidated by how completely he has mastered the seedy local TV news game, figuring out a way to manipulate her, a seasoned, wily veteran, into giving him exactly what he wants.

Even she, necessarily cutthroat and self-focused after a career of perpetually being at the mercy of the latest ratings book, can't quite fathom Lou's career goals. She even offers him a coveted foot in the door as an entry level production assistant, but this is not nearly enough for him. He wants to build his own business, dammit! Working for someone else is not good enough, because some other very ambitious young psycho could come in and hold him hostage as he did her. It's a good performance, but she has fairly limited screen time, and not much of an arc beyond reacting to Lou's aspirational maneuvers.

Bill Paxton could have been the real standout, if he had been in more than two or three scenes. In his very limited screen time, he dials in a truly vintage Bill Paxton performance, letting loose in the way only he can, channeling the raucous Aliens era Paxton. As rival crime footage scrounger Joe Loder, Paxton imparts some vital wisdom to Lou and exemplifies the pirate lifestyle needed to succeed in that field, but dies early on. The movie, like the Los Angeles nightcrawling game, just isn't big enough for both of them.

Nightcrawler has no room for anyone but Gyllenhaal, really. Maybe that's the point--to succeed in our desperate, post-employment economic environment, there is only room for yourself and your necessarily outsized ego. But compare the lack of other indelible performances in Nightcrawler with the at least four classic, career-altering performances in Taxi Driver. Obviously, Travis Bickle is probably the biggest De Niro role ever, and he is probably the most famous actor ever. But it also put Jodie Foster on the map and launched her multi-decade career as a huge star. Cybil Shepherd made a permanent impression as Betsy, and went on to having a long career and being a household name. Harvey Keitel as the vicious pimp Sport blew audiences' minds, and took his already promising film career to the next level. You could even say the film was a huge boost for Albert Brooks, in a smaller but key role, as the wary Tom.

How come there was room for so many classic performances in that film, and no room for anything but one giant fat star turn in Nightcrawler? Where did this cinematic claustrophobia come from?

Maybe it's a product of our hyperfast, hyperselfish American moment--there was no room in Nightcrawler for anyone else to make an impression, and there was no time for Lou to change. All there was room for was one man doggedly assaulting the universe until it submitted to his will. In our economy, subtlety and personal growth are luxuries you can't afford.

So don't contemplate who you are--just dig in with both hands to whatever you suspect your identity may be, play up your most aggressive tendencies, and start battering down everyone and everything in your way, until you reach an unimpeachable position. It's funny how an unrelentingly bleak film like Taxi Driver is absolute peaches and cream compared to its contemporary equivalent.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour: You Make Me Really Want to Fall in Love

A restoration of the 1959 French New Wave film Hiroshima, Mon Amour is screening at the wonderful Film Forum, and I was lucky enough to catch it as it entered its final week. I decided to see it because I knew nothing of it, other than a passing familiarity with the lofty reputation of its director, Alain Resnais. I think it's important to engage in cultural experiences that are mostly unknown--we know too much of everything before we do it nowadays.

The film isn't long, but it feels about twice its 90 minute running time. There isn't an entertaining moment to be found anywhere in it. I've never seen such a resolutely un-entertaining film. It's quite a different feeling, watching something that not only has absolutely no interest in entertaining you, but that finds the very idea of people being entertained by a series of filmed images to be absurd.

Americans tend to have two modes: work and play. We get very uncomfortable when we're neither working nor being entertained. We need at least one or the other at all times, otherwise we start to feel odd. The confidence with which the film refuses to entertain you is the most striking political element it communicates.

As the title suggests, Hiroshima, Mon Amour is all about love, that most important, but least understood, aspect of the human condition. It starts off with a woman's voice (Emmanuelle Riva) talking about witnessing the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, while images of unimaginable but real life suffering assault our eyes. Her feverish musings are periodically punctuated by a man's voice (Eiji Okada) doubting the veracity of her claims. 

After a good long stretch of the woman's voice mixing with the truly garish images, we finally see the source of the voices. Riva and Okada are laying naked in bed together, tightly, greedily squeezing each other's flesh. The woman (who, like her male counterpart, goes unnamed) reveals herself to be a French woman visiting Hiroshima to play a bit part as a nurse in an anti-war film. She met the man, a Hiroshima native who speaks fluent French, at a bar the night before, and they've been rolling around smitten in bed all night.

As they both take their time getting dressed for the day the next morning, her in a nurse outfit, him in some casual business attire, she starts closing off and icing him out, if only just a bit. Understandably, as beautiful as she is, he tries to keep their effortlessly warm mutual flirtation going, while she keeps pulling away. It comes across mostly as the necessary putting up of a front after an intense, though initial, encounter. Her cavalier attitude toward commitment is attractive, playful, confident, and irresistible. It's a supremely healthy outlook on courtship, and exactly what someone as beautiful as late 1950s Emmanuelle Riva would do.

He refuses to allow the passionate night, which was probably among the most memorable and significant of his life, to be cast as a typical, casual thing to be treated with cool indifference. He has to believe that it was as good a thing for her as it was for him, and he doesn't believe that the night means as little to her as she's making it seem.

Later, they meet up in a cafe for drinks, and her defenses come crashing down. In a scene that by itself takes up about half the film, she tells him everything about her past. She was a teenager in a tiny town called Nevers in occupied France during the war, and fell in love with a Nazi. We see images of her younger self running around to barns, cabins, and fields with her Nazi lover, while she narrates to her Hiroshima lover. When the war ends and her affair is discovered, her parents lock her in a cellar for years, cutting her hair short, and depriving her of food. She takes to licking saltpeter from the walls to sustain herself, and claws at the walls until her fingers bleed. These are hard images to look at, as upsetting in their own way as the deformities caused by the nuclear bomb.

Her new lover makes it clear that he still loves her, indeed loves her more for sharing her dark past. She is nevertheless despondent. She takes to wandering around Hiroshima in a melancholic haze, while he trails behind her, giving her space to sort through her perma-gloom.

During her prolonged confession, she says the name of the town where she loved a Nazi and was later imprisoned over and over and over again, Nevers, Nevers, Nevers. He is enchanted by the name as well, saying it repeatedly, Nevers, Nevers, Nevers. It takes on a sort of mythical quality within the film, as a code word for a past that intrudes into every present.

When the film ends, it becomes clear to both of them that they won't be able to move forward with their relationship. Though she's free of her past now, she can't be free with the person who helped her escape. She's ready to live in the present, and had to fall in love to be able to do it. But it is a love that had to be used as a pivot point, a building block for future loves, not as a resting point in itself. It's a shame they didn't meet after she had already been freed.

We fall in love so we can be close enough to another person to express our hang ups and work through them--hopefully eventually this way reaching a point where we have a nearly negligible amount to work through, and can be empty of our past enough to build a future with someone else. We can't truly empty ourselves of our past through our own efforts alone--we need someone else to help us, but for them to help us as much as possible, they have to fall in love with us. But it is a cynical, goal-oriented love.

This is why he tells her, in the film's final line, that he will remember her as Never, after she tells him she will remember him as Hiroshima. To each other, they are representations of a time when they made real strides in being able to journey toward full lives. A doomed love, but a necessary one. Perhaps we need a certain amount of doomed loves to become who we are.

Revisiting X-Men: Days of Future Past

Like many others, I saw the latest X-Men movie in theaters, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I left the theater feeling like I had finally seen the bonafide, all out, sentinels-infused X-Men movie that had, at best, only been hinted at before in good, but muted outings like X2: X-Men United. On top of making more money than its predecessors, Days of Future Past beat out the previous best franchise Rotten Tomatoes score by five percentage points.

So when it showed up on iTunes recently, five or so months after its theatrical release, I thought I'd give it a rent and have some more fun with my favorite X-Men movie. The problem is, upon second viewing, I realized that it actually sort of sucks.

A big reason is that there's just no chance for it to be a movie and let us meaningfully hang out with these allegedly beloved characters. It is a finely tuned plot delivering machine. The intense focus on plot suggests how insecure the franchise is about its characters, and how unsure Bryan Singer, returning to the franchise after a ten year hiatus, is about how to make these characters relate to each other. The characters in Days of Future Past are functions of plot only, and briskly entering scenes to charge the story into its next phase. I can't think of a single scene that isn't maniacally intent on thrusting the story forward. I can watch any movie to get a nice dose of tight story--I watch X-Men movies to, you know, hang out with the X-Men. 

The only characters who make more than cameos are the ones on the Blu-Ray cover. Actually, Future Professor X and Future Magneto are on the cover, and they are barely more than cameos. We get little to no sense of the wider mutant community. The whole point of making an X-Men movie is to explore as many mutants with obscure abilities as possible, to build a rich world where the reality of mutancy delights, fascinates, and sometimes terrifies us. 

Look, Singer's enthusiasm for his version of the X-Men universe is admirable. He has excelled, as many have noted, at treating the idea of mutancy as an allegory for the gay experience. That is a big, important part of what makes the X-Men interesting. But it is only part of it. Teamwork is the other. The real focus of an X-Men movie should be showing them coming together as a team to use their strange powers to help themselves grow and to fight evil.

The emphasis on star power in this franchise makes that difficult. (The other characters literally exist inside of Hugh Jackman and Jennifer Lawrence's bodies in the main theatrical poster). It's also tough to showcase teamwork when you've used the leader of the X-Men, Cyclops, so poorly, or cut him out entirely, as the two New Universe movies have done. It is nuts that Beast is the only classic X-Men character in Professor X's orbit when Wolverine goes back in time --that absolutely would have been Cyclops. 

And the movie would have been better for it. Constantly butting heads due to their opposing styles, Cyclops and Wolverine have a naturally interesting dynamic between them, which Wolverine and Beast kind of don't. There's little reason for Beast to have been one of the, like, four mutants with any kind of real screen time, other than as cynical fan service. (And maybe also that Nicholas Hoult has become a fairly popular actor, whose fame was boosted no doubt by his long relationship with Jennifer Lawrence). This movie isn't about allowing characters to interact in ways that don't shove the story forward. When Wolvie tells Young Beast that in the future they would be good friends, you wonder what those relationship building experiences were and when we'd ever get to see them.

But what about the sentinels! Yes, it's true, we finally got sentinels. The whole plot is about them, and we finally get to see them in action threatening mutants and challenging them to push the limits of their powers. But like Beast, this is a case of throwing in fan favorite characters without really understanding what's cool about them.

We don't get to see the actual sentinels that X-Men fans think of when they think of sentinels. We get to see plenty of weird, cybernetic future sentinels and a couple 1973 prototypes in limited, brief scenes. We don't get to see the big purple sentinels that chase Wolverine around, forcing him to he has to claw his way up to their heads and stab out their cranial circuitry like we all want. 

The sentinels were cool because they were an everyday looming threat to the X-Men. We got used to them battling our heroes, and dug them as cool foes between boss fights against Mr. Sinister or Apocalypse. The movies didn't give them a chance to become cool. In their rush to appease fans, they just immediately made less cool versions of them into boss battles.

But what about that awesome slo-mo Quicksilver scene! Yes--Quicksilver breaking Magneto out of prison was a truly memorable set piece. The audience I saw it with broke into three separate applause breaks during the prison break. This is a capital M Moment that feels like it was intentionally stuck there to offset the lack of moments in the rest of the film. A film without moments needs to have a Moment. A film that can't generate its own moments between characters, since it has little room for characters in the headlong story rush, needs to construct a scene that compensates for that lack. If audiences remembered anything about the movie, it was probably that scene.

The cynicism of the production behind Days of Future Past isn't surprising, and it certainly led to a successful project. "Let's just throw sentinels and Jennifer Lawrence and Hugh Jackman at it and stick to a tight script, book-ended by action scenes from the original cast members." Done and Done!

Lawrence is great as Mystique, as she is in everything. But having the film be so focused on her and Hugh Jackman, albeit understandably so considering how hugely famous and popular they both are, makes this not an X-Men movie. They should both star in a big budget action movie together and it will make a bunch of money. Let Hugh Jackman make the talk show rounds and discuss how fit he is to promote that movie. But they've tried to make that and call it an X-Men movie.

Fox lucked into getting a huge star out of the material in Jackman, and got new life a decade later by having Jennifer Lawrence involved in the franchise just before she got super duper big. (Not to mention getting in on the ground floor of Michael Fassbender). These are all just star vehicles, not real X-Men movies. The very idea of Cyclops baffles that studio--they can't get the most important X-Men team member right. That would be like The Avengers movie leaving out Iron Man. 

It was too perfect that the biggest, most emotionally charged scene in the film, the impending violent death of the remaining X-Men at the hands of the unbeatable future sentinels, evaporates entirely when Young Mystique decides not to assassinate Bolivar Trask, the creator of the sentinels. That unbearably tense moment vanishes into thin air, like it never happened. That's basically how I feel about this cynical movie.