Thru Fragments of Cinema: History

The achievement of HBO’s miniseries John Adams is a visual one.

History can be difficult to portray on film. Too often what you get on screen is a display of technical prowess with characters that feel like toy soldiers and overdressed dolls.

On the other end of the spectrum is a backlash to this style – a sort of post-modern historical drama – which thrives by accentuating those aspects that are more likely to click with the modern mind. Most notably these include Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Romeo + Juliet, and 300, all of which received mediocre critical reviews despite strong box office performances.

Escapism

Both styles – at their best – provide escapist entertainment, as powerful and fun as the made-up worlds of Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. But what makes this discussion about more than just aesthetics is the fact that these historical worlds actually existed. Their big-screen portrayals represent overlapping ways of looking back in time: That of immersing oneself in the past and understanding it from their perspective; and that of pulling distinctly modern lessons out of the past.

Real

The more traditional approach – deemed period pieces, costume dramas – take a prim and proper Jane Austin-like approach, with the tension emerging out of a patient, slow, and literary restraint. But what often limits these films is the director's inability to use more modern elements of filmmaking.

Another part of the problem is that, not only were many past societies more formal than the present, but our hindsight of them is crystallized as well. Once again, this reflects our inherent view of history as setting the seeds for today. As Henry VIII narrates in the opening to Showtime's The Tudors, we know how the story ends; the interest is in how it got there.

Surreal

The modern approach is often criticized for looking like a long music video. Critics, for instance, dismissed the use of songs by The Cure and Air in Marie Antoinette. But isn’t there something artificial about watching a period drama in a movie theater anyway? Mood music – be it pop, classical, or ambient – never existed in the real world to begin with, and neither did quick cuts or long takes.

Regardless of which style you prefer, the contrast betrays the value – and slight contradiction – of looking at history in the first place: That it is in the context of the past; that it is being scrutinized with a modern mind; and that it is informing a modern world.

History

I’ve recently been taking great joy in reading Paul Johnson’s History of the American People. Johnson capriciously flips between narrating the story of America and stepping out to discuss parallels to modern times. Afterall, it’s worthless – perhaps impossible – to analyze and not interpret. Interpretation without analysis, however, often comes off as empty opinion. The mix one employs is a choice of style, rhetoric, and taste, and it can make or break a non-fictional account.

Perspective

I’ve come to enjoy learning about history. In one sense, historical accounts make me feel lucky to be alive today, that I’m able to look back on such a rich history of man to take it in, as if I were sitting on a tall royal throne with the entirety of history at my disposal to learn from and hone my decisions. On the other hand it imbues me with a strong sense of humility that so many chapters of mankind have yet to be written, and that future generations will look back on our time with the same sort of curiosity, attention to detail, and awkwardness as Sofia Coppola looked back at Marie Antoinette. It reminds me of Pascal’s sentiment of being stuck between two infinite abysses.



In this context, HBO’s John Adams takes an alternate approach in which it is true to the details of the time –costumes, architecture, dialect, mannerisms, and all – while subtly eschewing the neat toy doll-look of films that do the same. It largely accomplishes this through a cinematography style that favors slanted planes and off-angles. The Constitutional Convention is held in an orderly wooden house with period furniture and right angles, but it is shot from an angular perspective, with camera tilted on tripod, to the point where it almost makes you seasick while remaining tasteful nonetheless. The characters, speeches, and passions seem set in time – they are just as what one might expect – but the visual style goes to length to remind the viewer that from their perspective, the future, along with its stakes, was just as unpredictable – if not moreso – as it’s ever been.

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Poster of John Adams, HBO Miniseries; (2)Shot from 1988 film, Dangerous Liaisons; (3)Poster from 2006 film, Marie Antoinette; (4)Seeeking Solace, 11/28/2009, anjan58.

Video: (1)MaKn channel, Opening to Showtime's The Tudors; (2)jaa2010 channel, Trailer for HBO's John Adams. Sphere: Related Content

Thru Fragments of Cinema: Southwestern Sunshine

The new movie Sunshine Cleaning is a real Southwestern film: Comedy, drama, slice-of-life, it can’t quite make up its mind, but it all kind of fits together. It’s well-made, but more than anything it made me miss the Southwest.

It’s weird how some places can carve themselves into your heart. It might have been the time and circumstance under which I was in the Southwest. There’s always an understanding that life is an inward journal – that when you experience some new place you’re finding something about yourself. But it is strange how places - being external - can etch themselves upon your personality as if they were people themselves.



That’s how Santa Fe hit me, for the few years I was there. Growing up in the East, each summer we visited one portion of that part of the country for a week, but living in one of them was completely different. I expected that after living in any given city – particularly in America – that after some time, it would just be the same as every other city. Maybe I had that impression from Kerouac’s On the Road - in which lively characters impetuously zigzag across America, searching for something, settling in, getting restless, and moving on, and devouring the American highways in the process.

That might've been a misread of On the Road. To my surprise Santa Fe never quite wore in as I expected it to. The sunsets were one of the first things I noticed. You could see far over the land. The flat dessert and lack of buildings was somehow easier on the eye. I expected to get used to the sun setting. But so many evenings it was completely unique and beautiful as if it was God’s blank canvas. Its wonder might have sunk in some, but never completely.



Around then it struck me – at first explicitly through conversations with people from that side of the county - that America’s landscape is one of its prominent characteristics. At the time I was accustomed to conceptualizing America as a political construct, delineated by Democrat, Republican, and GDP. It was as if it never occurred to me that it was a country as well. The diversity of the American landscape really is one of its most beautiful and unique features.

There were other more subtle differences out West. No one was quite so worried about being on time. Where I grew up, mileage markers on the side of the highway are often posted every tenth of a mile; makers out there are posted every mile. Driving on the interstate you might see signs for your final destination when you have over 500 miles to go.



It’s not bad just different. You learn that sometimes there’s something to be said for a lack of precision. Afterall, when you're in the desert there’s no need to mark the highway every tenth of a mile . Things seemed different when the horizon appeared endless. There was a different sort of beauty. I noticed a different sort of beauty to women as well.

Sunshine Cleaning captures a small piece of that: the wind-swept prettiness of the lead; the way the plot doesn’t wrap up perfectly, but still feels adequate; the loose connections between the characters.

Other films capture the Southwest too. Or, it’s not that they capture it, but they depict it, and think like it. These sorts of films have solidified in my mind as belonging to their own genre. Paris, Texas remains my favorite, which includes more panoramas of the scenery. The Tao of Steve is another. They’re not all great films. Others like Off the Map have struck me as too loopy. Sometimes the Southwest was as well. It’s just open, that’s all. Even Scorsese’s classic Casino gets at it.



I visited Las Vegas once and was awe-struck by how this area of lights, entertainment, and mischief seemed plop in the middle of desert. But I guess where else are you going to put it?

Centered around gambling – you can lose your lifesavings all at once if you’re so inclined - the city almost has a magical feel, until you stay out late a couple of nights and see the intensity of some of the losing ones. You can see it in their eyes. It was uglier in the smaller hotel-casinos located in neighboring Death Valley. There you don’t even have any of the lights and show. And the whole casino would be empty at 1am except for sometimes one or two desperate gamblers who are still pissing away all they’ve got. That side of it all made me feel dirty for just being there.

The city lies opposite – figuratively, and almost geographically - of the Mormon Salt Lake City. It’s almost as if it's there so that when the Utah citizens feel a bit too religiously pure they can soil themselves a bit, or when the gamblers are too in a rut then can cleanse themselves a bit among the Mormons. It’s probably not really like that.

Still though the most impressive aspect of the city is its location – as if an oasis of bubbling human life and distraction and sin in the middle of an infinite nowhere.

-KJ

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Media(in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Promo from the 2009 film Sunshine Cleaning; (2) Jack Kerourac, 01/13/2008, tompalumbo; (3)Santa Fe 2, 08/22/2007, by Javier ST; (4)On the road...., 12/17/2008, by Spejo Blano Negro; (5)Highway sign; (6)Hammock IV, 07/09/2008, also by tompalumbo; (7)Vegas at Night from the Sky, 07/15/2006, by Starr Gazr.


Video: (1) Trailer for the 2009 film Sunshine Cleaning; (2) Trailer, from AustralianRoadShow channel, for the 1984 film Paris, Texas.
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Thru Fragments of Cinema: Objectivism Questioned

At 43 Jean Bauby suffered a stroke and awoke to find himself with locked-in syndrome – a rare condition, as terrifying as it sounds, in which the patient is almost completely paralyzed yet remains fully conscious and aware. Able to blink one eye, Bauby was taught to communicate one letter at a time with the help of an aid who recited the alphabet until he blinked. Using this system, Bauby authored the memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; I recently had the pleasure of seeing the movie based on it.

“I decided to stop pitying myself,” wrote Bauby, “Other than my eye, two things aren't paralyzed, my imagination and my memory.”

As the narrative digs deeper into Bauby’s trapped mind, it becomes increasingly sensuous, marked by bright colors, strong breezes, swirling cinematography and score.

He’s also visited by various friends. Some of them, like his elderly father, go so far as to compare their condition to his - one of a soul locked within the body. He’s visited by a distant friend who was held prisoner under inhumane conditions for 4-some years. You can lose your body, he advises Jean, but nothing can steal your humanity.

The film has an unfortunate tendency to wander, but its impact remains. Its underlying tragedy is universal: that of not knowing what you have until it’s gone. The narrative goes in 2 figurative directions corresponding to the metaphors in the title: The diving bell sinks further underwater and the butterfly flies effortlessly up.



The film strikes a chord with me, similar to the book Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which attests to the hollowness of objectivism. My political beliefs are generally libertarian, and in high school I enjoyed a few Ayn Rand novels. They seemed empowering at the time. But despite their food for thought, the ideas lacked staying-power with me. From the start, I never understood why her novels were so much more famous than her essays. Novels teach through experience. They’re a perfectly suitable way to get a lesson across, but they’re anything but an objective medium. After reading other authors in college, Rand seemed shallow in comparison.

Rand is often associated with libertarianism – even Alan Greenspan (who describes his views as libertarian-Republican) was deeply influenced by her in his youth. But aside from individualistic values, I’m not sure how much Rand overlaps with libertarianism.

I hate to throw around such intellectual jargon – as if they were interesting in and of themselves – but to come back down to the real world, undue objectivity can often pose more harm than good. Nowhere is this more evident than in the economy.


A frequent myth is the belief that the value of money is objective - that it's fixed. This mistake has led to hundreds of years of mistrust against certain ways to use money. Money-lending is almost universally despised, across cultures and religions, as a greedy way of using money to make money. Despite this hatred towards money-lending, using money to make money, in almost any other endeavor, is considered the norm. This is why the economy is built upon money-lending. Banks play an integral role by distributing money to be used for its greatest potential. Their distributive actions run contrary to liberal concerns about skewed distributions of income; however, trying to “fix” their distribution of money has as dire consequences as toying with income distribution.

Value is subjective. This is why banking works – the value of a small business loan to a businessman of great potential is greater than the value of that loan to someone who won’t know how to use it. Likewise, the value of lending money for interest is worth more to a rich man with no use for that money than to a poorer man. The value of receiving lent money is worth more to someone who needs it and has a reliable credit history. The value of giving a loan to someone with reliable credit is greater than the value of giving a loan to someone of poor credit. Viewed purely objectively, the whole economy – perhaps even freedom - really makes little sense.

Another danger of unbridled objectivity is the use of statistics. This is bared out in the common concern about lying with stats – obviously stats don’t lie themselves, it’s the people who use them that lie. Numbers are of course very objective. But their use – both in gathering and making sense of them – is considered more of an art.

Even Greenspan wrote that he supplemented statistics about the macroeconomy with more subjective measures. During the oil crisis of the Nixon years, he created measures to estimate weekly fluctuations in GDP, which included surveying small business owners about their present difficulties and concerns. The later were of comparable value to objective numbers. During the internet boom of the 1990’s, Greenspan noted that despite rises in GDP, surveys showed that workers were becoming more skittish about the economy, largely due to increased employee turnover. This discrepancy led him to conclude that the rising GDP & stock indexes gave the public an overly rosy depiction of the economy.

The takeaway point is that when the stats don’t seem to match reality, the fault is more often found with the former than the latter. This has vast implications, particularly for medicine, which alienates whatever it can’t explain as psychological or somatic. A large chunk of medical progress in the 20th century consisted reclassifying phenomena from psychological/somatic into medical. The fallacy however is that, at any given time, the categorization of conditions as psychological or somatic is thought to reflect the nature of the conditions rather than the progress of science. This has led to many misunderstandings between doctor and patient, and between researcher and object of study.

The vast difference between a human and a computer attests to how off objectivism is. It’s almost a tautology to say that we live in a subjective world. Objectivity is simply one tool among others. It can be a useful tool to help us crawl out of our locked-in subjective holes, but it can also lead to as many misconceptions as truths.

Even emotions – one of the cornerstones of subjectivity – evolved for useful objective reasons. Ignoring your emotions because they’re too subjective would be to block yourself off from one of your most carefully honed tools. I find them useful for intellectual discourse: When an idea just doesn't feel right (or wrong), you can use that as a springboard for further inquiry, and guide yourself in the right direction. Of course you can’t say that something is wrong because it feels that way. But you can use those emotions to then identify objective explanations. Objectivism's distinction between reason and irrationality is meaningless; as both reason and supposed irrationality can have the same utilitarian purpose in their proper contexts.

And what role do dreams play in a purely objective world? Consider what occurs when wake up and feel you've had an incredibly moving dream, but you try to describe to a friend to little avail. The dream's objective content somehow can't stand up to its subjective impact.

Objectivism’s biggest mistake is focusing on the “bottom line”. Because life occurs in everything above the bottom line. Humans come and go; they’re born and they’re dead; they consume calories and they expend calories; that’s the bottom line, that’s the objective perspective, as if from a disinterested party observing us from the moon. Obviously that perspective does injustice to the value of life. Robert Pirsig’s solution to the discrepancy between objective and subjective reality was to meld the two by focusing on the point where they meet. That’s quality, he believed. It's the value gained in voluntary exchange. It’s life. It's the loss that Jean Bauby suffered in the objective; the gain he won in the subjective.



-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Movie poster from the 2007 film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; (2)Photo of Jean-Dominique Bauby, 1997; (3) curving, swirling, 04/09/2006, by David Pham; (4) Logo from book cover of Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; (5) Portraits of Ayn Rand and Allan Greenspan; (6) Movie poster of the 2004 film The Merchant of Venice; (7) tools, 08/30/2006, by Striatic; (8) Blue Marble (Planet Earth), 01/25/2008, woodleywonderworks; (8) M.C. Escher's 1948 lithograph Drawing Hands.

Video: (1) Music collage, 02/08/2009, filmlasse with music from the 1959 film The 400 Blows. Sphere: Related Content

Thru Fragments of Cinema: (New Years) Resolution

Life gains meaning through taking responsibility.

I’ve heard that a few times in my life in a few different contexts. The latest is from an unexpected source - my improv acting teacher. (A few months ago I capriciously decided to sign up for improv acting classes, inspired thru this article.) We witness great art, he claims, when characters own up and take responsibility for things. Part of it is the ability to admit you’re wrong and the willingness to be vulnerable in front of others. You can see it in the best actresses. The more that I think about it, the more I’m beginning to see that true beauty – at least in other people – lies in vulnerability. Good looks are important, but vulnerability underlies it. It’s what makes good looks look good, and it extends so much further. Consider



Back to taking responsibility. In order to judge a principle’s worth, Robert Pirsig (author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) believed, you use the principle like a scalpel to divide and classify phenomena, and then you ask yourself whether you’ve made a clean deep cut. By these standards, the idea of taking responsibility seems meaningful. It makes a clean cut in my life.



But it’s not as obvious as it may seem. Another student in my improv class pointed out that Steven Speilberg’s main characters are notorious for doing everything except taking responsibility. They never change, they never do anything but just run around and have things happen to them. This really set my mind turning. I’m a sucker, you see, for good movies. There’s nothing better than a well-made film, and it’s not just about the explicit elements of character and plot, it’s about the visual and audio portrayal of human experience. That’s why Shakespeare rarely makes for great cinema and why black and white is rarely as good as color. Directors make up their own grammar in the style in which they make films. And Speilberg is one of the best at doing this.

But the student was completely right, I just hadn’t thought about it that way. And it’s not just Spielberg. A lot of films are chock-full of producing a range of experience all of which just swirl around the main character. This post was partly inspired by a review of the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (an intelligently shot and edited film which, I believe, fell way over top-side from a gimmicky story that went on for too long). Here are some snippets from the review. Consider how many other films the criticism could apply to.

Button is the star of the film, but also its least interesting, least developed character, a soothing blank of a protagonist who seems to want little, feel nothing, and never have anything to say.

Most of the scenes in the movie consist of Pitt giving pleasantly docile looks while others blather on. During one fairly long scene with a woman he's having an affair with, Button utters a total of three lines, two of which consist of only two words: "You make me feel young." "What mistakes?" And finally, "I'm freezing." Later, he's asked about his years of travels, and the only answer he provides is, "I saw some things." Which is accurate enough: he's an observer, a cipher, a blank screen, but nothing more.

Though the movie stretches past the two and a half mark, and Button is in every scene, it is impossible to say anything specific about him, except that he appears to desire Daisy. Button is not merely generic, he is utterly empty, like one of those carefully wrapped fake Christmas gifts displayed under a department store tree.

These points can apply to every other film produced these days. And I have to admit they apply to some of my favorites.

Consider Tom Hank's empty expressions throughout Forest Gump (written by the same screenwriter as Benjamin Button).

Or the classic American action hero.

How vulnerable is he?

But maybe there’s an appeal to the story of the man who is victim of his circumstances. The sort of person who merely has to watch life unfold around him, and he can come out saying, “The things I’ve seen. Oh, the life I’ve led.” Tom Cruise in Steven Speilberg’s War of the Worlds - all he had to do was run from the machines, and honestly what a great movie that made. Maybe that’s part of our modern world. Or maybe humans have always felt that way. Modern society can certainly be so alienating that it’s easy to feel like we’re just the victims of our surroundings or technology, and that that alone gives life a meaning worth fighting for – or running from.

Pirsig makes the point that while it’s easy to feel alienated from everything, technology was made to benefit us. There’s nothing inherently wrong with technology, or the system, or it all. It’s our mindset that’s wrong. Science has advanced so quickly that we lack the proper tools for incorporating it into our mindset. When your computer freezes your first thoughts are “it’s acting up again, what in god’s name is it up to?” You just want to take a bat to it! But the computer is just a tool, one that was meant to work with us. What the situation needs is someone to take responsibility for it. Because surely it’s not the computer’s fault. And I don’t think you have to know much about computers to realize this. But it’s not necessarily intuitive. And it doesn’t mean that you’ll solve the problem. But on the other hand the “condemnation of technology”, Pirsig wrote, “is ingratitude, that's what it is.”

I’d like to take more responsibility and perhaps allow myself to be more vulnerable. I’m not sure if that’s a tangible goal, or what it’d necessarily look like. But that’s my New Year’s resolution.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance):

Photo: (1) Natalie Portman II, 10/23/2007, Mira(on the wall); (2) Portrait of Julia Roberts; (3) zooey deschanel of she & him, 04/23/2008, by Dese'Rae L. Stage; (4) vlcsnap-959983, 02/22/2007, dooby brain;(5) Portrait of Jennifer Gehrt from the 2007 documentary Confessions of a Superhero; (6) zooey deschanel of she and him, 04/23/2008, by Dese'Rae L. Stage; (7) Photo of Kathryn Aselton, from the 2005 film The Puffy Chair; (8) Promo from the 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; (9) Photo from 1994 film Forrest Gump; (10) Photo from the 2008 film of Rambo; (11) Photo from the 2005 film World of the Wars; (12)Happy Christmas Shopping, 12/16/2006, by Sherlock77; (13) Jason Campbell of the Washington Redskins.

Video: Music video of the song "Lovers in Japan (acoustic version)" by Coldplay from the 2008 album Viva La Vida.

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Upcoming ideas:

• Seeing things in perspective in the stock market
• (another) example of why the economy's not a zero-sum game
• One solution for some times when you may get stuck in thought
  

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