orlando, by sally potter

When we last convened, we watched Brand Upon The Brain!, a film deeply fascinated with the mystique that androgyny, er, engenders. From there, it wasn't much of a leap to Sally Potter's Orlando, from 1992, a film for which gender (and the conturbations surrounding gender expectations) are even more central.

In this particular film, androgyny is embodied in the form of Tilda Swinton, playing the title character, an effeminate young man in the during the 17th century. Swinton's always excellent, and it should surprise no one that she's utterly striking in this role:

This strikingness—the strikingness of Swinton's / Orlando's androgyny—is not just there to delight the audience: it is, in fact, the motive force for the entire narrative, For it is Orlando's beauty that attracts the attention, of Queen Elizabeth I (played, in a sly bit of casting, by Quentin Crisp):

And it is Elizabeth's attention (perhaps envy) that causes her, like some folk-tale gypsy, to place a benediction / curse on Orlando: specifically, that his beauty shall never fade. This has the effect of eliminating Orlando's aging process, effectively converting him into an immortal. And Orlando's progress through the centuries thus comes to form the armature upon which film's narrative is structured, following him through various historical episodes, including an entertaining comic stint as a political ambassador in North Africa:

But the movie has a lot more up its sleeve than simply being a collection of entertaining episodes through history. What follows is a spoiler, I suppose, although it's also a major component of the movie's conceptual thrust, and there's virtually no writing on the film (including the Netflix summary-blurb) that doesn't reveal it. Perhaps it's best to just say it simply: halfway through the film Orlando's biological sex changes. "He" simply wakes up one morning and discovers "himself" newly female.

Many of us would likely be alarmed by such a development, but Orlando takes it completely in stride, declaring "Same person. No change at all. Just a different sex." This puts the film pretty squarely in line with contemporary theorists and medical professionals—beginning with John Money and Anke Ehrhardt in 1972—who distinguish between sex and gender, with "sex" referencing the anatomical apparatus of a given individual and "gender" referencing the performance (or lack thereof) of certain sets of social behaviors associated culturally with one's sex. Orlando has changed sex, but initially she seems determined to carry on as before—to proceed with the performance of an essentially androgynous gender.

In a perfect world, this might have been possible, but in our world (as theorists like Judith Butler or Mia Consalvo have pointed out), an individual's ability to "author" one's own gender is constrained by institutional and ideological practices. This is true today and is, of course, no less true in the early 1700s, when Orlando undergoes this transition. Put another way: she may want to stay the same, but social norms of the time demand that women engage in a very different set of performances:

Watching Swinton navigate around in an unwieldy dress is good for a laugh, but institutional practices involving gender don't simply begin and end with the strictures of fashion, and before long Orlando is learning that they are reflected and codified in the practice of law. At this point, things grow deadly serious, specifically around the issue of whether it is legitimate for the transformed Orlando to retain property.

The film's great merit, ultimately, comes from the way it represents, in very pointed fashion, the rather diabolical repressive network that emerges when state networks use sex as a justification for regulating gender performance and legal status. It may, however, lack the force of some its convictions: it refuses, for instance. to represent what would be the likely result of the wrath of this repressive network coming down on Orlando with the full brunt of its ideological force. But maybe that's to the good: I'd rather watch the scene we're given, including a lovely one of Tilda Swinton and Billy Zane indulging in post-coital snuggling—

—than watch a scene wherein Orlando dies a penniless Dickensian death in the gutter. Asking why that might be is a question I don't intend to meditate on today. Instead, I'll point out that, happily, Swinton's post-Orlando career has been pretty sunny: loads of films, from Michael Clayton to The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, seem to have supporting roles that are well-suited for a "Tilda Swinton type." But I haven't seen her as the lead in a film since this one. This is the situation I intend to rectify with next week's pick, Julia, a 2009 crime drama in which she plays the title character.

brand upon the brain, by guy maddin

So it's been a while since I've updated the Too Many Projects Film Club blog. We'd convened a little less frequently than normal because of a couple of busy months, but it looks like we might be getting back to some sort of a regular schedule right about now.

We left off back in April [!] with Johnny Got His Gun, a film which dwells on the horror of a young person's radical facial disfigurement. We followed that up with my pick, Eyes Without A Face, a surprisingly ghoulish French film from 1960, which centers around a psychotic doctor's disquieting attempts to repair his daughter's own facial disfigurement. Here's the trailer, which gives some sense of the film's creepiness:

The imagery of that trailer is pretty much all sinister labs, diabolical parents, and vulnerable young people, which leads quite neatly to our newest pick, Guy Maddin's marvelously unhinged Brand Upon the Brain (2006).

Like Eyes and Johnny, Brand Upon the Brain is obsessed with the beauty of the young. Brand, in particular, is interested in the particular androgynous beauty of adolescents:

This concern fits well with Maddin's career-long fascination with the "look and feel" of early film. Here he seems especially interested in recreating the capacity of the silent cinema to evoke a nearly otherworldly glamour. (Watching this film, I was reminded of filmmaker Maya Deren's remarks that early film stars constitute "a mythology of gods of the first magnitude whose mere presence lent to the most undistinguished events a divine grandeur and intensity.")

It's not unusual, of course, for a film to be enamored with the appearance of the young: we can see this everywhere from (say) Larry Clark's Kids to, I don't know, National Lampoon's Van Wilder. What makes Brand a little more interesting (and less prurient) is that it seems especially interested in making its viewer inhabit the subjectivity of the young, specifically this kid here, who is our protagonist:

The movie's greatest merit is perhaps located in the way it ends up being a spot-on recreation of the confused fever dream that is existence on the cusp of puberty: a welter of strange adventures, intense infatuations, and erotic pleasure / confusion made all the more bewildering by the fleshy horror involved in the actual realities of carnality.

Of course, to a sensitive child, everything that is disturbing about carnality is most literally embodied in the form of any given adult, and so it follows that the adults on display in the film should be appropriately monstrous, a mix of repressive attitudes, undecodable rituals, and grotesque physicality:

It doesn't give too much away to say that since youth is, by its very nature, fleeting, that the pleasures of youth to be found in the film are also presented as fleeting (see also: Krapp's Last Tape, Film Club XXXV). It comes as no surprise, then, that every single adult character in the film is to some degree concerned with recapturing their youth, eventually driven to the extreme of consuming the young, both metaphorically and/or literally (!). Great stuff; thanks to Tiffanny for her pick.

We followed up by pursuing the idea of androgyny, and just yesterday we watched Sally Potter's Orlando (1992). I hope to have a write-up of it ready soon...

the maltese falcon, by john huston

[Note: the following post contains some discussion of the resolution and closing scenes of the film.]

So last week, when Film Club looked at It Happened One Night, I presented a pair of screenshots and did a quick little analysis of the power dynamic reflected between the man and the woman depicted therein. This week, we watched The Maltese Falcon (1941), and if you wanted to play the same game, you could... try doing a read on this image:

It doesn't take a degree in semiotics to figure out which one appears to be in charge here. And yet the gender politics of Falcon are more complicated than this image might initially suggest.

The woman who Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is haranguing here is Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), and she's a prime example of that quintessential noir figure, the femme fatale. The question of whether the noir fatales are progressive is a thorny one, but one thing that can be said in the affirmative is that O'Shaughnessy certainly possesses a certain autonomy, with goals that are, for lack of a better word, self-directed. (Specifically, she's one of a number of people in search of a priceless figurine, the falcon of the title.)

Now, to be sure, there's certain degree of self-directedness in last week's female lead, Ellie Andrews—the plot of It Happened One Night is set into motion by her active resistance of her father's wishes for her—but a lot of the "comedy" of that film actually involves the breaking-down of her will in a variety of humiliating and debasing ways. The Maltese Falcon also ultimately punishes O'Shaughnessy—she's shipped off to prison for her role in one of the film's murders—but it's hard to know, exactly, how to read that fact. If I were to read the film from a feminist perspective, I would argue that the film is built around the notion of masculine authority, and the presence of a sufficiently headstrong woman unsettles that authority—it is only once that "uncontrollable feminine" is safely contained that the film's equilibrium is restored, and the narrative can draw to a close.

It's a tempting read, and yet there's a way in which the film's ending seems more bittersweet, or even downright bleak, rather than triumphant. Part of this is complicated by the (improbable) romance that erupts between Spade and O'Shaughnessy:

...and part of it is complicated by the fact that the film and Spade both always seem to maintain a respect for this headstrong woman, even when she's at her most manipulative and dishonest. In fact, you could make the argument that the film respects her because she's manipulative and dishonest. (On more than one occasion, Spade catches her in some sort of lie, and he replies (ungrudgingly) "You're good.")

In order to really buy this as a read, however, one has to understand that, in the moral universe of The Maltese Falcon, the people with the greatest claim to authority are the people who are the most proficient in their ability to control and manipulate the truth. O'Shaughnessy lies, hedges, and omits key information throughout the entire film, but Spade himself does the same, and at least as frequently. Viewed through this lens, the film's narrative can be understood as being "about" various characters attempting to establish their version of the film's narrative as dominant. Half the fun as an audience member is attempting to keep on top of the ever-shifting narrative, which means managing an incessant flow of reversals, revisions, and reveals.

Spade and O'Shaughnessy, of course, are both experts here, as is Spade's "girl Friday," Effie Perine (Lee Patrick), another tough-headed female character held in high regard by the film. The process of watching them managing and responding to this flow of information is a delight—and we're listening as well as watching, given that so much of the information is deployed verbally, through dense, nearly impenetrably rapid patter. (This is a continuation, most likely, of the sound-enabled motion picture industry of this era being "drunk on speech"—and yet these characters also feel utterly contemporary in their way: they are, essentially, prototypes for the knowledge-workers and data-managers of our own current 21st century.)

Returning to the gender issue, however, it does have to be said that in the end Spade emerges as the one highest in this hierarchy—both Effie and Bridget, ultimately, are subordinated to his mastery (Effie is in Spade's employ, and Bridget's eventually loses control of the narrative and goes down in flames). Part of the reason that Spade maintains his enduring appeal as a character, of course, is because of his ability to think so effectively on his feet: to fast-talk his way through even the most dire circumstances until he works his way back into control. (Full disclosure: as a male viewer, it's hard for me not to want to be Spade, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only man who has had this experience.)

And yet our director, John Huston, makes this process of identification a little more complicated than it might be in the hands of a less-ambitious director. Specifically, the film is full of little hints that Spade is kind of a creepy guy. At one point he grabs Effie's wrist and squeezes it, unconsciously, until she has to protest "Sam—you're hurting me."

And the film's closing moments don't exactly show Sam as the most noble fellow, either. This is compounded by the fact that he delivers much of his final monologue with a glassy, faraway look in his eye that makes him look sinister, almost sociopathic:

In a way, what Huston is doing in this film is sort of the reverse of what Hitchcock does in Psycho (Film Club XXXIX). In Psycho, we're introduced to a person who is obviously creepy and later forced into unsettling identification with him; here in The Maltese Falcon we're introduced to a character who's easy to identify with and only as the film proceeds are we made to question just exactly what we've gotten ourselves into by doing so. Genius stuff.

For next week, we'll stick with Bogart, noir, and unstable narratives: we'll be looking at 1946's The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks from a William Faulkner screenplay.

it happened one night, by frank capra

This week, Film Club decided to continue our whirlwind tour through Early American Comedy, turning to the first of the "screwball" comedies, 1934's It Happened One Night.

Part of the enduring appeal of the screwball comedies derives from the fact that they essentially lay the groundwork for what will eventually become the contemporary romantic comedy. Anyone who has seen more than a couple romantic comedies will recognize the basic tropes on display here: a man and a woman who initially seem to dislike one another are thrown together by chance circumstances, have a series of escapades, and come to realize that through the course of their misadventures they have fallen in love with one another.

Devising a romance that works this way—one in which your two main characters intially don't like one another very much is a time-honored narrative device: it allows for the introduction of conflict every time your characters are on screen together. However, even as this device solves one problem—keeping the happy conclusion from feeling forgone too early—it does so only at the cost of creating another problem. Specifically, the more you emphasize the characters' opposition to one another, the more territory they need to traverse before the love that the genre demands can emerge. (A secondary double-bind: if your characters are likeable at the outset of the film, going through the process of learning or growing or whatever else they might need to do runs the risk of watering down or eliminating what we liked about them in the first place. On the other hand, if they aren't likeable at the outset of the film... well, the problems there are obvious.)

There are a number of fine romantic comedies out there that manage to satisfyingly resolve these problems, setting up situations in which all the elements are in balance. In the Platonic ideal of this type of romantic comedy, two likeable (yet flawed) people come together and clash, but then each of them grows a little, straightens out their flaws while preserving key elements of their individual selves, and learns something key about the other person, whereupon both of them can then meet in the middle, in a conclusion that's essentially egalitarian in spirit. It Happened One Night, however, is not that film.

The power dynamic in this film can probably best be indicated by a pair of screenshots. First this one:

These are our principal characters, Peter Warne (Clark Gable) and Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert), meeting up by chance one night the back of a bus. You can see that Ellie's a little reluctant to get too close. By morning, however, it's a different story:

The movie's telegraphing to us the idea that they might be able to get along after all (at least when one of them is unconscious). It's notable, however, the way the gender dynamic is set up here: that the only character who really has to change her tune is Ellie. There is no meeting in the middle: she's the one who has to "come around" to liking Peter, not vice versa.

Now, the plot of the film is arranged around her attempt to travel clandestinely (she's trying to avoid her powerful father's interference in her marriage to a celebrity aviator). Peter's a down-on-his-luck newspaperman, and the film suggests that he's sticking with her so that he can land a big scoop. So one could concievably argue that he has to overcome his own aversion to her. You could, for instance, point to the way he spends a good deal of the film's run-time insulting and correcting her, including on the finer points of donut-dunking:

However, he's also the one who repeatedly orchestrates the situation so that they can remain together, and his aversion never quite seems as pronounced as hers. He actually seems quite content to remain in her company—provided he can constantly belittle and control her. Over and over again, the movie is about bringing her down a peg. (She's high class to Warne's working-stiff, so this might have something to do with pandering to a nasty side of Depression-era class fantasy.) Regardless, by about a third of the way through the film, my Film Club companion Skunkcabbage was making comments about Foucault ("constant surveillance and correction") and I was starting to read their relationship as an early cinematic example of a BDSM relationship... this is less When Harry Met Sally and more, er, Secretary. I was so involved in this read that I wasn't actually surprised when Gable starts literally spanking her:

So, uh, yeah, unless she's got a submissive streak, it's not quite clear what Ellie is getting out of all this. At times there's a palpable disconnect between what she seems to want and what she's actually getting in Peter: at one point in the film, she lets her guard down and reveals that she's always felt trapped and stifled by her domineering father. One begins to wonder, at this juncture, whether the film is even aware that what Ellie appears to be doing is swapping out one domineering man for another. (The scene seems intended to be heartwarming, but it actually just struck me as tragic.)

The film's not without its strengths: it has a handful of charming moments, and the storyline is by far the strongest of the last four films we've watched (its three-act structure could be described as "classical"). But the dated gender attitudes really hobble the film. The tide, in some ways, is about to turn: the later, more engaging screwball comedies are not without their feminist qualities, and we're also on the cusp of the noir cycle, whose fatales represent some of the most strong-headed and autonomous female characters from this era. (Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that the films from the noir cycle are all that progressive: certainly many of them also manifest a great interest in controlling the feminine. This'll be the lens we'll use to kick off our look at next week's pick, The Maltese Falcon (1941).)

the virgin suicides, by sofia coppola

I'm fighting illness this week, so forgive me if the logic of this piece overheats or goes off the rails.

The opening title of The Virgin Suicides (1999) makes it more-or-less plain that it's going to be concerned with what we might broadly call "girl culture":

Representing the title of the film as a series of doodles that evoke a "girlish" school notebook evokes one of the major poles of adolescent girl culture, namely, its tendency towards secrecy, towards a kind of private involution and elaboration. The film orients around this pole again and again; it is endlessly riddled with codes, secret messages, notes, diaries, and cryptic signs of all sorts:

The other pole of "girl culture," of course (and herein lies one tie to last week's pick, Picnic at Hanging Rock), is beauty. Preternatural, Venusian beauty, nicely embodied here in the figure of Kirsten Dunst, aka "Lux":

Taken together, this combination—beauty plus privacy / secrecy—adds up to something that can perhaps best be described with the single word "mystique." The main people fascinated with this mystique, of course, are boys:

—and the movie, in essence, represents the efforts of boys (and, to a lesser degree, men) to observe, decode, or otherwise, er, penetrate this mystique.

The temptation here is to read this as autobiographical: it's nearly impossible (for me at least) not to read the film as Jeffrey Eugenides—the author of the novel on which the film is based—reflecting on his own youth, and his fascination with this mystique. The story is pretty clearly framed as an outsiders-looking-in tale—it's narrated by the boys, and an argument could be made that the story, as such, is more about the boys than it is about the girls. This gets considerably more interesting when you consider the fact that it's a female director (Sofia Coppola) who has chosen to adapt the book: if we stick with the idea that girls / women are on the "inside" of "girl culture" and that boys / men are on the "outside," then Virgin Suicides, interestingly, becomes an "insider's" take on an "outsider's" story.

Coppola seems generally pretty sympathetic to the boys, which can lead to some curious conclusions if you think about it too hard: sometimes I think (admittedly cynically) that Virgin Suicides (the book) is a calculated piece of flattery, a premise leads to the rather nasty conclusion that Coppola's movie serves, perhaps inadvertantly, to amplify the praise of someone who is essentially her own sycophant.

Another interesting effect of Coppola's sympathies here is that Suicides ends up performing a rather spectacular inversion of the critique implied by Laura Mulvey's concept of the "male gaze": in Suicides we are presented with a world where "gazing" is not reprehensible / critiquable but is in fact the most admirable thing a man can do in relationship to women. Being observed, then, is one of the things, if not the thing, that a woman can most aspire to, at least in the universe where that inversion is functioning. (Compare this against Lost in Translation (2003), Coppola's follow-up, which is also very much about a beautiful woman struggling with the issue of being unseen.)

But is that it, exactly? Ultimately, decoding the film's stance on the value of being viewed, depends around how one reads the suicides that form the end of the line for the girls' narratives.

The uncertainty circulating around the suicides is in some ways the film's most intriguing element, and Eugenides and Coppola both seem to know it, suggesting overtly that the fundamental inexplicability of suicide represents a terminal expression of what I've been calling "mystique": it is a gesture that raises questions that cannot be answered. One question we could ask of it, then, is this: do the girls commit suicide because they are inadequately seen, because their desire to be fully understood goes thwarted and unfulfilled? Or do they commit suicide because the prospect of a life of being endlessly observed is in and of itself inadequate? To a degree, the film lays the blame for the suicides at the door of the repressive parents, although this doesn't so much answer the question as it reformulates it: when children suffer from parental repression, are they suffering because they can't be observed, or because their observation is all too total?

Next week: Dazed and Confused.

i walked with a zombie, by jacques tourneur

So Film Club has now reconvened, and its kickoff film for 2008 was 1943's I Walked With A Zombie, which continues the "undead" theme we've been working with of late.

It's an interesting and provocative film. It opens in Canada, with a young nurse ("Betsy") accepting an assignment that brings her to the island of St. Sebastian, to caretake and potentially cure Jessica, a woman who has fallen into a seemingly irrevocable trance state:

No one is exactly certain what has happened to Jessica—there are at least three different hypotheses. Roughly speaking, they can be grouped into the medical ("she never recovered from a fever"), the psychological ("her cruel husband drove her mad"), and, of course, the supernatural ("she has become a zombie"). Our nurse learns about this theory from a representative non-white island person:

Some of these trappings, of course, are familiar from other films that deal with the idea of possession. I'm currently reading Carol Clover's Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film—my notes on the book are here—and there's a whole chapter in there which examines patterns in the "occult film." In this chapter, she notes that the occult film often contains a struggle between Black Magic and White Science (she borrows these terms from another Haitian zombie film, The Serpent and the Rainbow). That struggle is definitely depicted here, and—again similar to many other films—the body being struggled over is female. (Clover writes that women's bodies, in these types of films, are spaces to be "exposed, denied, fixed, filled, colonized, [and/or] detoxified," and that's pretty much in full effect here.)

It's interesting, though, that the selected representative of White Science is female—traditionally, of course, it's male. And it's further interesting that as an agent of Science, Betsy is also an unusually sympathetic one: it isn't long before she decides that maybe taking Jessica down to the nexus of Vodou activity on the island (the "Home Fort") might actually work out as a way to cure Jessica:

It's important to point out that, at least in this point in the film, Betsy doesn't necessarily buy the theory that Jessica is, in fact, a zombie: it's more that she sees the line between White Science and Black Magic not so much as a sharp demarcation but rather as something that is potentially permeable or negotiable, with Psychology representing a kind of murky middle realm. (The film repeatedly considers the possibility that a psychological state can be the cause of a "medical" ailment, and Betsy's willingness to try magic ritual as a cure shows that she might accept the idea that a ritual can enact medical change via the conduit of its psychological force. In other words, Magical = Psychological = Medical.)

All of this is pretty intriguing (and it gets even more complicated before the film ends), and the blurry lines in effect go some way towards complicating the easy binary wherein non-white-people equal Magical (but simple) and white people equal Rational (but blinkered). The film does even more interesting things with regard to race, though: a number of times the island's Black characters, who (unsurprisingly) mostly play the roles of servants, refer overtly to the island's slavery past. as Betsy effuses about how "beautiful" everything is at the same time her Black carriage driver is calling the island a place of deep suffering. It's difficult to read this as anything other than a privileging of the Black point of view over the White one: not because the Black characters are "simple" or "noble savages" or any of that horseshit, but because they simply hold a knowledge that the White protagonist doesn't have. It's not a supernatural, "primitive" knowledge, but a literal, modern knowledge about colonial violence and its effects. The fact that the film opens with a voice-over from Betsy and closes with a voice-over from an unidentified Black character is also provocative in this regard.

This isn't to say that the film is super-progressive: it definitely trades in the image of the Black body as a source of uncanny creepiness:

—but this is still a film making unusually thoughtful and sophisticated points about race and colonialism, especially given that it was produced during a time when Black people still weren't, say, allowed to vote in this country. I'd be curious to revisit The Serpent and the Rainbow, a product of an age we like to think of as being more enlightened about matters of race, to see if it comes anywhere close to being this pointed, although I won't be doing this next week, because as my follow-up I've instead opted for us to take a look at Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).

Skunkcabbage's write-up on I Walked With A Zombie is here.

daughters of the sun, by maryam shahriar

This is how Maryam Shahriar, director of the Iranian feature Daughters of the Sun (2003), chooses to shoot a wedding procession:

And this is how she chooses to shoot a funeral procession:

Does the similarity between these two shots imply a world-view? Something about the relationship between human beings and the larger forces of the World? Before you answer, check out a few more shots of human endeavor from the film:

So, OK. Film club compatriot Skunkcabbage picked this film as the follow-up to last week's pick, Thirteen (2003), in part to investigate how the experience of teenage girlhood plays out cross-culturally. In our own culture, adolescence is a period in which we (ideally) have the luxury to undergo the process of "individuation," but given that the role of the individual seems pretty radically downplayed in the Iran we see in Daughters of the Sun, we should maybe expect the process to look pretty different. And, sure enough, adolescence in this film functions as little more than mark the period at which you get to go off and start laboring as a weaver:

Maybe if you're especially canny you can get a marginally better supervisior-type position at the weaving station by concocting a scheme wherein you disguise yourself as a boy, like our protagonist does:

It's important to underline here that Amanagol's disguise here is something born of sheer financial necessity: it is never presented in the film as anything resembling self-expression or gender exploration. There's no "I don't know who I am" angst in this film, any more than there are any of the other "normal" (read: Western middle-class) dramas of adolescence ("no one understands me"; "I never get to do anything"). If there's any familiar marker of teenage girlhood in this film, it's in the occasional expressions of palpable yearning for a better life, but there's never any sense the social system they're in will ever reward that yearning with anything but a swift reduction to dust.

The film, in fact, takes some pains to systematically discount the potential of hopeful alternatives. We see some, here and there, including a rough-and-tumble travelling musician who looks like he might function as a romantic lead:

Or this guy, who has a homemade Ferris wheel that looks like it's meant for a world where there's some mirth, somewhere:

Or this guy, a person from the government, vaguely associated with the promise of social services:

The overlapping narrative lines here begin to recall something like Do the Right Thing (Film Club V), but whereas Do the Right Thing portrays a lively (if tense) community, Daughters of the Sun is very much the opposite: there's no community at all, just a series of atomized individuals, who could potentially help one another but who end up amounting to nothing but so many missed connections. The musician turns out to be a common thief, the Ferris wheel operator never encounters a single child, and the government agent, in a near-Beckett-grade development, spends the whole movie driving around looking for the village he's assigned to. Pretty grim stuff, not exactly the celebration of "the strength of Iranian women" that the Netflix sleeve promises.

Next week we continue with the theme of Suffering Teenage Girls with my pick, Carl Dreyer's 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, the fourteenth-most acclaimed film of all time, according to the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? aggregate list.

Unscrambled's write-up is here.

thirteen, by catherine hardwicke

Here are two shots of Thirteen's protagonist, Tracy. For clarity's sake, let's call them "Before" and "After."

Here's "Before," wherein Tracy is out in the park, walking her dog:

Here's "After," four months later:

Anyone who is familiar with the words "After School Special" can take a pretty educated guess at some of the narrative touchstones that are going to appear between Before and After: popularity-chasing, stealing, drinking, drugs, sexual experimentation, exposure to a debased culture and bad-seed friends:

Thirteen dutifully hits each one of these marks, which on the surface makes it look like your standard-issue "moral panic" film, a little piece of propaganda designed to scare kids straight (and to scare permissive parents into laying down the law). If it's simultaneously titillating us with the glamour of what it forbids... well, that's never been a problem, that kind of Yes/No witchery is good for keeping a culture jumpy and insane.

But as the film unfolded we in the Film Club began to wonder if it were really so simple. In order to have force as a Cautionary Narrative, the film needs to move us towards one of a number of different possible conclusions: rape, prositution, automobile accident, death resulting from conflict with police, overdose, drug-related murder, whatever. These are the standard endings not only of more obvious Cautionary Narrative films but also of more acclaimed films which (seem to?) transcend the label, but which also deal with sex and/or drugs: think Requiem For A Dream (2000), Drugstore Cowboy (1989), Kids (1995), La Haine (1995), etc.

Thirteen, oddly—but perhaps more realistically?—chooses to avoid these endings, and in doing so, it undercuts its own status as a Cautionary Narrative, and gains a greater ability to make the claim that it's operating in a more noble neorealist tradition. It does not culminate in shattering disaster but rather in a sense that life (especially working-class life) contains bad choices, conflict, and struggle, but that it essentially goes on: in this regard it functions less as After-School Special and more as a distant sibling to something like Killer of Sheep (1977).

One of the film's most important choices in this regard is its decision to have recovering addicts play a central role in its narrative, most prominent among them Tracy's mother, Mel (Holly Hunter, in a powerful performance). The idea that addicts can recover is anathema to the Cautionary Narrative: think of how seldom this idea appears in, say, the average Partnership for a Drug-Free America ad. (And when it does appear—in, say, the current series of anti-meth commercials running in Illinois—note how the (uncharismatic) people-in-recovery without fail talk about the life-destroying consequence of their addiction: "I lost custody of my son" or what have you.) Mel is not exactly a person who has emerged from addiction undamaged:

—but the film takes pains to present her as neither a monster, nor a failure, but rather as a person struggling to make the most of what she has available to her: in short, human. The film never says that drug and alcohol (ab)use are actions that don't have consequences, but it does seem to be saying that those consequences, ultimately, are negotiable—a conclusion that feels surprisingly complex.

In La Haine (Film Club IV), one of the characters tells a joke about a man who is falling from the top of a building. As he passes each floor, he says "so far, so good." The punchline?: "It's how you land." That's fitting for La Haine, where the characters seem to be getting by relatively comfortably, even pleasantly at times, until the jolting, destructive impact of the film's final seconds. But the joke doesn't explain the world of Thirteen. Thirteen's characters aren't in a "so far, so good" free-fall but are rather engaged in the effort, each day, of trying to crawl painfully towards something better. It's not about how you land. It's about how you keep going.

Unscrambled's write-up is here; Skunkcabbage's is here.