they shoot horses, don't they? by sydney pollack

Last week, when writing about Bonnie and Clyde, I spoke on how the film makes a life of crime look exciting and glamorous. Even though we know that the film probably won't end well for the central couple, and even though this knowledge generates a few moments of real pathos, the overall tenor of the film is largely playful: the film invites us to join the Barrow Gang, and succeeds in making that invitation enticing by making the experience of being among the gang one that is, in a word, fun.

This week, we turn to They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. This film also is made in the late 1960s, and also examines the lives of people struggling through the Great Depression, but it could not be more different from Bonnie and Clyde in terms of its tone or its narrative devices.

The premise is simple: a canny promoter (Gig Young, in an Oscar-winning role) orchestrates a dance marathon, in which various couples compete for a cash prize. Essentially, it's an endurance test: the couples get a ten-minute rest period every hour, but beyond that they must remain on the dance floor, in constant motion. (You're welcome to sleep on the dance floor, as long as your partner can keep holding you upright.)

It should go without saying that this isn't going to be as much fun as robbing banks, and, indeed, as the contest wears on, from days into weeks, the contestants slowly transform from dancers into zomboid shells. I've seen Saw, and I've seen Hostel, and I've seen my share of Asian shock cinema, and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? still took me aback: its depiction of physical and mental suffering is as sustained and extensive as any that I've ever come across.

Focused as it is on the anguish of the participants, the film mostly keeps its attention on the dance floor and the complex of rooms that immediately surround it. This zone, inhabited by a shifting field of couples, functions interestingly as a kind of networked narrative space, but there is, indeed, a central couple, who function essentially as the film's protagonists. Here they are:

If the Protagonist Factor—discussed here last week—is operational in this film, it should dictate that we identify with this suffering couple, even though the circumstances are more grim, and the process of identification more discomfiting. But director Sidney Pollack, in a series of exquisitely cruel gestures, attempts to deny us whatever cathartic pleasure we might glean from this identification. He does this by emphasizing the presence of the audience that consumes the spectacle of human ruination unfolding before them.

Our protagonist couple has an observer, a little old lady who roots enthusiastically for them:

...and by including her, and the other audience members, Pollack reminds us, repeatedly, that to imagine ourselves as the body that suffers is falsely self-validating. We aren't the dancers there on the floor, exhaustedly jerking; we are the the ones who watch them, the ones who, for some unexamined reason, enjoy witnessing the horror of other humans undergoing something terrible.

Now, one could argue that making a movie that criticizes people for coming to see your movie is kind of a cheap thing for a filmmaker to do (see also: Showgirls (Film Club 42), or the flap that emerged last year around Michael Haneke's Funny Games remake). I'd argue, instead, that it's a variant on the benign masochism that undergirds the bargain that horror films and tragedies make with their audience (see also: The Vanishing (Film Club 40). In either case, I'm impressed with the lengths to which Pollack's critique extends: this film is not only anti-capitalism and anti-spectacle but also explicitly anti-narrative (as anti-narrative as a narrative film can be, anyway).

This emerges from the way Pollack presents the character of Rocky, the promoter, who also serves as the Master of Ceremonies.

In order to engage the audience more, Rocky literally narrates the entire event, verbally adorning the occurrences on the dance floor with little story hooks. And yet, we repeatedly get a sense that these story hooks are simplistic, distorting—in a word, false. And Pollack refuses, really, to provide any counternarrative: we're given only the most fragmentary and incomplete backstory for any of these characters. The protagonists are our protagonists not because they're better or more likeable; not because they're more noble than any other couple, but simply because they're the ones put in front of us. (The old lady, our nearest analogue, favors them for chance reasons: the number assigned to them is her favorite number.) What Pollack seems to be saying, ultimately, is that there's no story here, only spectacle, specifically, the spectacle of desperate humans being transformed, by capitalism, into twitching meat-puppets. Extend this logic to the entire world, and it becomes clear that the only real way to retain any kind of dignity is simply to opt out, to take death by a bullet over the agony of continued existence. (Hence the title.)

Next week, though, we'll attempt to see if there aren't other strategies for surviving and navigating a hostile world: we'll be watching "angry young man" Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).

peeping tom, by michael powell

One of the things that's going on in Diary of the Dead that I didn't write about last week is the film includes a critique of spectation: the human desire to look at things. Specifically, the film wonders aloud about the part of human psychology that wants to look at horrible things—violent acts, accidents, etc.—and it repeatedly holds up the film's documentary-filmmaker character as a character who possesses a hypertrophic form of this particular desire. (It's not too hard to speculate that Romero intends this criticism to extend to horror filmmakers as well, and thus functions as a form of self-critique.) For Romero, spectation serves at best as a form of passivity and at worst as a kind of morbid perversion. We don't look because we want to help, we look because it gratifies some vaguely unwholesome impulse in us.

As a critique, Romero's definitely holds water, although there are more extreme critiques of spectation out there, including the one found in this week's pick, Peeping Tom (1960).

Peeping Tom announces its interest in "looking" pretty baldly in its opening shot:

...and, like Diary, it draws a bridge between "looking" and "filmmaking": our main character is not only an aspiring filmmaker with a handheld camera:

...but he also works as part of a film-production crew (making a suspense thriller entitled The Walls Are Closing In):

...and, just to emphasize the focus on "looking" even more strongly, the film has him also working as a smut photographer:

In terms of its take on pornography, Peeping Tom would seem to echo Diary's concerns about spectation (or LOL's for that matter): in all three of these films, the consumption of visual matter is seen as a somewhat gross indulgence of the suspect desire to look. Here's how Peeping Tom portrays the average consumer of pornography:

However, Peeping Tom is willing to go a bit further, explicitly equating the viewing of bodies with the suffering of those bodies. It does this both subtly... (note the repetition of the word "PAIN" here outside the newsstand among the bodies of pin-ups):

...and also, as we will see, more explicitly. For, in the world of Peeping Tom, it's not merely that suffering is connected in some vague way in the production of pornography, but rather that the act of viewing in and of itself is a form of violence, making the camera a sort of weapon-technology. Here's the view through Mark's camera:

Those hairlines aren't just there for show, either: the main premise of the film, for those of you who don't know it, is that Mark is not merely a voyeur, but also a psychopath. Periodically he converts one leg of the camera's tripod into a blade, which he then uses to murder the women he's filming, while simultaneously filming the murder. We've learned this before the opening credits are finished:

Mark's obviously an extreme case, but the film doesn't hesitate to draw parallels between his behavior and the behavior of every other filmmaker in the film. The director of the film-within-a-film is also governed by sadistic impulses, as we see when he presses his lead actress to do take after take, until she collapses from exhaustion:

[To cement the parallel as explicitly as possible, Mark later murders the actress' stand-in, on set: a sequence during which he occasionally sits in the director's chair.]

There's a third sadistic filmmaker in the film, too, namely, Mark's father, a psychologist studying the physiology of fear in children. As the film unfolds, we learn that the young Mark was subjected to fear experiments, being used essentially as a human guinea pig, and having the results documented, on film, by Dad himself:

So. An interesting result of the filmmaker's decision to show Mark as having himself been the subject of spectation and the victim of sadistic impulses is that the film ends up generating a considerable amount of empathy for him (putting this film perhaps in the category of earlier Film Club picks like Spike Lee's 25th Hour (Film Club VII). In point of fact, Mark ends up being one of the most sympathetic serial killers in film history (Mark's character owes more than a small debt to Peter Lorre's portrayal of an also not-entirely-unsympathetic killer in Fritz Lang's fantastic M (1931)).

This empathy is pretty essential for the narrative of the film to hang together, because it's set up not so much as a horror-thriller (the way it seems to commonly be understood) but rather as a kind of doomed romance between Mark and his downstairs neighbor, Helen.

Helen is kind, and reaches out to Mark in a way that he's clearly not accustomed to: she invites him to her 21st birthday party, and even after he declines in the most squirrely, nervous way possible, she brings him a piece of her birthday cake:

Like other romances, then, Peeping Tom is structured narratively in a way that sets up a couple that looks like they should be together, and has them attempt to surmount obstacles that are in their way. It's just that, in this case, the obstacle is, well, irreperable psychosis. Much of the film is spent showing Mark putting energy into attempting to resist his psychotic impulses, an endeavor that also involves actively attempting to re-think his relationship to women, in order to think of Helen as something other than prey.

It's an odd choice, and in order for it to be successful we have to erase our memory of the humanity of Marc's vicims, and our desire to have him be brought to justice. However, this aspect does add a lot of extra pathos to a story that's already shocking, and clever, and theoretically interesting to boot. Next week we'll compare it against that other 1960 proto-slasher-film, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Stay tuned!

25th hour, by spike lee

After a brief hiatus, film club was able to resume this week, and we picked up where we left off, specifically with Spike Lee. Our choice this week was 25th Hour (2002).

Like Do the Right Thing before it, 25th Hour can be read as a long exercise in the practice of empathy. The two take pretty different approaches, though. Do the Right Thing introduces a wide variety of characters and places them in interpersonal conflict—since all of them, on one level or another, can be thought of sympathetically, we (can) watch these conflicts with a degree of empathy towards all parties involved. 25th Hour avoids this method: opting instead to work with a smaller palette of characters, and to ratchet the interpersonal conflicts way down—the main characters are not individuals forced to interact by the dictates of neighborhood geography but rather a set of old friends. (It's true that their long-running friendship is accompanied by the usual long-running suppressed resentments, and also true that these resentments bubble over into outright hostility at times, but this is still a far cry from the screaming-fights-in-the-street that punctuate Do the Right Thing.)

The primary way Lee elicits our empathy here, then, is through showing us sympathetic characters in conflict not with one another but in conflict with an impartial State. It's not for no reason that our protagonist, Edward Norton's Montgomery Brogan, has a Cool Hand Luke poster up in his apartment:

Monty, we learn fairly early, is a drug dealer, and although he's got a whole set of fairly reasonable—or at least symapthetic—reasons for getting into the drug dealing business, he learns pretty quickly (once nabbed by the DEA), that there's a whole set of Statist mechanisms in place, the Rockefeller Laws, that are designed to render these motivations pretty much meaningless, in the pursuit of impartiality. He learns about these laws in this room, production-designed to be the very picture of Impartial Objectivity in action:

The other primary character who's up against Impartial Law is high school English teacher Jacob Elinksy, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Grade A squirrelly repressed weirdo mode. What Elinsky wants / doesn't want, is to sleep with his student, Mary D'Annunzio:

She's 17, so sleeping with her would be statutory rape, but the film takes pains to make the point that Mary is not exactly the portrait of untrammeled innocence:

Of course, that doesn't matter, in the eyes of the Law (whether it should or should not is another question all together). Point is, the film rather daringly asks us, for over two hours, to extend our sympathies to what we'd traditionally think of as the lowest of society's lows: a (convicted) drug dealer and a (potential) statutory rapist. An exercise in empathy indeed. It helps, of course, not only that Lee provides them with motivating backstories (Brogan more so than Elinsky) but also that they are articulate, intelligent white dudes... whether this is intended as subtle commentary by Lee is anybody's guess.

So the film wants us to expand our own empathy, to get it broad enough to the point where it can include these two. This transition is mirrored by an expansion of empathy taking place in Monty's own sensorium over the course of the film. On his last night of freedom, Monty is inspired by a piece of bathroom graffiti ("Fuck You") to embark upon a monologue reminiscent of both the inflammatory invective in Do the Right Thing and Travis Bickle's diary-rants in Taxi Driver (1976). Monty's monologue is surprisingly completist; stereotyping nearly every ethnic group in the city:

This is significant, because it's precisely this crazy-diverse panoply of New Yorkers who Monty will be separated from when he's imprisoned the next morning: the hell of imprisonment is precisely the hell of being separated from the richness of an everyday experience involving others. Monty eventually learns this, towards the film's final moments, but not before he's gone through a set of transformative experiences. As Monty suffers, he learns. (My film club compatriot, Skunkcabbage, argues that this is the key to the 9/11 imagery that circulates within this film: that Monty's suffering is an allegory for America's, and that Monty's epiphany—that the world contains others, and that his comfort is predicated at least partially on the suffering of others—could be the same epiphany that a post-9/11 America could, optimistically, reach.)

Two final notes:

1. This film may represent part of Lee's effort to increase his own personal empathy: there are times when he seems to have set himself a project of making at least one film about every ethnic subculture in New York. Summer of Sam (1999) is Lee's "Italian" film; this one is his "Irish" film.... [?]

2. All this empathy-building aside, there's still a Monstrous Other in this film, specifically the other convicts that presumably lie in wait for Edward Norton to join them. The specter of homosexual jail-rape is evoked about every ten minutes in this film, with both suicide and disfigurement being raised as potentially desirable alternatives. The film's moving final sequence presents a narrative bifurcation—two possible paths—were I to cynically reduce this bifurcation to a formula it would be "Americana Vs. Male Rape."

do the right thing, by spike lee

After last week—in which our two-man film club looked at Mathieu Kassovitz's depiction of culture and tension in the Parisian banlieues—it seemed only appropriate to move on to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), still one of the best films ever made about urban life.

The first shot in the film (not counting the nondigetic "Fight the Power" dance sequence) opens in a radio DJ's booth and slowly pulls back, out through the window, to end here:

The final shot in the film (not counting the nondigetic still photo of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X ) is this:

These two shots roughly establish our narrative environment—the built world of our film, to stick with the terminology I was using on Saturday. One of the many strokes of genius in this film is that Lee keeps his world essentially narrow: everything that occurs in the film occurs within walking distance of everything else. Lee not only narrows the scope in terms of space, but also in terms of time—the entire narrative takes place in a single 24-hour period.

By resisting the temptations of going wide, Lee is able to go deep: he crams the world of the film with at least 20 characters who recur throughout the course of the day. Even the more minor characters are incredibly well-realized and vivid, bordering on the indelible. If you've seen the film, you probably remember many of them:

By packing many different characters into the narrow space-time frame of the film, the end result is density. I can think of only precious few films that approach or supersede this one in terms of narrative density (you could make a good argument for Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), a film a little broader in the time dimension, but even more narrow in the spatial dimension). This density yields a sense that the world is a layered sheaf of simultaneous narratives—precisely the sensation that emerges when one is alert to life in an urban environment (or a globalized world). (As an aside, it's also the experience I've been trying to capture in my own creative writing (Exhibit A, Exhibit B).)

This alertness, if approached compassionately, can give rise to a deep understanding of / sympathy to the nature and motives of others, and Lee not only possesses this understanding, but has effectively transferred it to the screen. Every character in this film, from Spike Lee's own deliveryman alter ego all the way down to the thuggish white cops, is both sympathetic and flawed. In giving over the entire run-time of his film to having sympathetic (yet flawed) characters observe, comment upon, and ultimately clash against the flaws of the other (sympathetic) characters, Lee nails the way that conflict—and tragedy—can emerge even when everyone involved imagines their own motivations to be morally justified (hence the title). This is the human dilemma, captured precisely, elegantly, and succinctly. As fine a piece of moral art as anyone could ever wish for.

Skunkcabbage's write-up (contains spoilers!) is here.