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.

rebel without a cause, by nicholas ray

I spent some time trying to think of a scene that was most representative of the mind-fuck that is Rebel Without A Cause, and I ended up picking this one:

Aside from the weird assortment of power objects on the left-hand side of the frame, the scene is innocuous enough: a father and a daughter enter a dining room. The impression of normality isn't entirely blown when she leans in and kisses Dad on the mouth:

Dad's reaction, however, which is to act appalled and say things like "We should have stopped doing that a long time ago" sounds a bit like "protesting too much"—and when the daughter protests the protestation, explaining the kiss away as just a girl "[loving] her daddy," the overall atmosphere has begun to sink into a squirm-inducing miasma of sexual tension.

"Girls your age don't do things like that," insists Dad, "You need an explanation?" It's probably fair to say that a more overt explanation isn't really necessary for most viewers: at this point the hidden incest subtext is pretty much threatening to burst out and become, well, the text. Not to be daunted, she goes in for another kiss (the addition of the young brother to the scene only compounding the Freudian dynamic here):

Dad's reaction, this time, is violent:

Judy storms out, and Mom makes the effort to rationalize the whole episode by saying that she—Judy—is at "the age where nothing fits." The little brother gives that age a label—"The atomic age!" and he fires sparks across the table:

—and that's the point where you really start saying "Did the film really go there? Did they really just draw some kind of unholy quadrangle joining up unconscious incest fantasy, domestic violence, the 1950's, and atomic technology? And what's all this doing in a film that I thought was supposed to be a piece of classic-Hollywood fluff about rebellious teens?"

OK, yeah, on one level Rebel Without A Cause is in fact about rebellious teens. It has some sequences—a knife fight, horseplay with cars on a dangerous bluff—which offer the old promise of revealing "what today's kids are really up to": the kind of prurient moralizing tease also engaged in by more recent films like Larry Clark's Kids (1995), or next week's pick, Thirteen (2003). But Rebel Without A Cause is about a much broader set of social anxieties, of which "out of control kids" is only a minor subset.

The film seems to be anxious about everything, ranging from psychosexual family dynamics (above) to the literal end of the world. The kids go on a school trip to the planetarium which culminates in a Scary As Fuck cosmic apocalypse:

Then there's also the major uneasiness about contested masculinity—best exemplified by Mr. Stark, James Dean's henpecked dad:

Speaking of"henpecked"—there's also a subtle but recurring hangup about the "animal other" going on here: Dean complains repeatedly that his family is a "zoo," and a few times in the film he's called a "chicken," an insult he seems to take literally, even before the film goes to the trouble of literalizing it for us:

Basically, the filmmakers stuff 20 pounds of cultural anxiety into a 10-pound bag, and the vision of the world that results is leaking enough dread that it borders on into the surreal. It's menacing enough to leave me thinking of it as a clear influence on fucked-up processing-the-baggage-of-the-50's films like John Waters' Female Trouble (1974) or David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986). (Note that Rebel Without a Cause features a young Dennis Hopper as a rather beautiful thug who could easily turn into Frank Booth 30 years down the road.) These later films represent a full bursting-open of the overstuffed, oozing anxiety-bag that is Rebel Without a Cause, and in this regard seem practically therapeutic in comparison.

Unscrambled's write-up is here, and Skunkcabbage's is here.

cool hand luke, by stuart rosenberg

or, "strategies against architecture"

Picking up on a visual reference in last week's pick, 25th Hour, Skunkcabbage and I moved on this week to Cool Hand Luke (1967).

I wrote last week that 25th Hour is concerned with Impartial Law and its inherent abuses; Cool Hand Luke announces similar concern with its very opening shot:

The parking meter functions here as the perfect picture of Ultimate Impartiality, a kind of clockwork judge literally incapable of concern with ambiguity or context. And the very next thing we see is Paul Newman's Lucas Jackson wandering down the street, calm, determined, and drunk, slicing the tops off of those parking meters:

Needless to say, the episode doesn't end well:

This scene is the primary dramatic unit of Cool Hand Luke in microcosm: Luke, the charismatic rebel, engages in some gesture of resistance, which results in Authority moving on to the next level of punitive force, which in turn sets the stage for more resistance, beginning the cycle anew.

Luke's acts of resistance—along with the acts he uses to ingratiate himself with his fellow prisoners—are frequently anarchic and playful, situating him firmly in the American Trickster tradition, somewhere between Huck Finn and Bugs Bunny. Unfortunately, dudes like this guy here on the left aren't exactly Elmer Fudd:

That's the guard referred to by the prisoners as the Man With No Eyes, who functions even more memorably than the parking meters as an icon of cold impassivity, so much so that James Cameron cribbed the mirrorshades look for the T-1000 in Terminator II (1991). (In the interest of fairness, I should note also that Cool Hand Luke director Stuart Rosenberg has himself cribbed it from the equally impassive Eyeless Cop who pulls over Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960).)

In any case, he and the other "bosses" aren't simple rubes, so Luke's attempts at clever subversion, although symbolic successes, often result in violence being visited upon him. Any time you start emphasizing the vulnerability of a male hero's body, you're only half a step away from dusting off the old Christ metaphor, and Cool Hand Luke fully indulges this impulse in some man-interrogates-God sequences and some pretty shameless shots:

That said, it's also worth noting that Luke demonstrates a detachment from his own schemes that's more Buddhist than Judeo-Christian: he plans none of them in advance, and he consistently downplays any praise that comes his way afterwards. So that's Luke in a nutshell: part Huck Finn, part Bugs Bunny, part Jesus Christ, part Buddha. It's no wonder that he's taken on something of the status of folk hero by the end of the film. (It's also no wonder that Paul Newman's easy charisma and charm here gave him star power that lasted him a generation.)

The film's thematic richness provided me with a lot of possible avenues to pursue—penal institutions, vulnerable bodies, male camraderie, martyrdom: you could follow it up with anything from Down By Law to 300. But ultimately it's the theme of the "charismatic outsider" that carries the day, so next week we'll be watching Rebel Without A Cause (1955).

Skunkcabbage's write-up is here.

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."

malcolm x, by spike lee

For our film club this week, we decided to stick with the Spike Lee trajectory begun last week, and so we watched his terrific, uncompromising biopic Malcolm X (1992), which I'd not seen before.

On one level, the film is an extended examination of persuasion: specifically, it looks at the difference between persuasion and coercion.

Persuasion can be powerful, but when power itself is the means of persuasion we cross a line into coercion. The film is very interested in how people and institutions weild power, as it announces baldly in its opening juxtaposition:

The Rodney King tape is, of course, among some of the most iconic coercive footage ever shot, but the early portion of the film has no shortage of additional examples. For instance, here's someone making a point to Malcolm's mother:

And here's someone making a point to the young Malcolm himself:

These experiences are illuminating; they inform a person how power works, how to establish your place in hierarchies founded upon dominance. The young Malcolm learns this lesson well, as we can see from the way he settles a dispute early in the film:

So, on one level, the story of Malcolm's development is a story of renouncing coercion in favor of persuasion: doing work through lectures and argument, using the intellect as the tool rather than the body (or a club, or a gun):

The film is at its most interesting, however, when it blurs the dividing line between these two modes. The turning point in Malcolm's experience, as readers of the Autobiography will know, is his stint in prison and subsequent conversion to Islam. In the film, the catalyst for this is a mentor figure named Baines (invented for the film), who steers Malcolm, with a firm hand, to some tools of intellectual power:

The experience is undoubtedly positive for Malcolm—but as with any mentorship, it is not free of hierarchy, and it comes with its own dynamic of dominance and submission (the sequence culminates with a resistant Malcolm learning to kneel in submission before Allah). The difference would appear to be that the submission here, ultimately, is given voluntarily, without threat of force, but the territory is getting tricky all of a sudden.

Even more interesting is the sequence when one of the Nation of Islam brothers is injured by police and taken to prison without medical care. Malcolm goes to the police station and demands to be taken to see the injured party. The police consent, but it certainly helps that Malcolm has this force waiting outside:

Is this coercive? Is it the threat of violence that these ranked men (might) represent that causes the police to submit to Malcolm's request? Is it morally right to use coercion to save a man's life?

Further complicating this scene is the fact that the Nation of Islam members, in fact, act as a restraint on the even more coercive force represented by an inflamed crowd of people who gather outside of the hospital, demanding justice:

Cops, a black man wounded by those same cops, and an angry mob: this is the same formula we have at the conclusion of Do the Right Thing, and it is precisely the addition of the Nation of Islam members that allows the scenario to be reimagined as triumph rather than as tragedy. Whether this is because they represent reason instead of force or reason in addition to force is perhaps the key question involved with understanding Malcolm X, the figure. The film, to its credit, provides no easy answer.

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.

la haine, by mathieu kassovitz

Picking up on the black-and-white dystopian vibe of last week's selection, Alphaville, this week Skunkcabbage chose for us to take a look at Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film La Haine (aka Hate), a film which follows three friends through the aftermath of a neighborhood riot.

Kassovitz proves, pretty quickly, that he has an unerring eye for the dystopian zones built into the contemporary French urban landscape:

The film takes place over the course of a single day, and follows three friends as they wander through this environment, having a set of episodic encounters, clashing with police, rival gangs, and one another, and generally riffing. In this way, La Haine invites comparison some other films from around the same time period, such as Larry Clark's Kids (1995), or any of early Richard Linklater's films (Slacker (1991), Dazed and Confused (1993), Before Sunrise (1995)). The attention to social turmoil and class tensions also recalls Spike Lee's similarly-structured Do the Right Thing (1989).

As in many of these films, it's not entirely clear whether our sympathies are fully intended to lie with the young people the film observes. Kassovitz looks at certain aspects of their cultural life in a way that's unmistakably affectionate:

But there's also a degree of dramatic irony happening here: the battles that our protagonists engage in with the police or other authority figures lack any real strategic value. Here they are, for instance, pointlessly harrassing a grocery store clerk:

If the primary flaw in our protagonists is that they don't know how to choose their battles (or, perhaps more accurately, they don't have access to a battle worth choosing) this flaw is amplified when one of them, Vinz, gets his hands on this:

Remember the cliche: when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Updated for this film, it's a little closer to "when all you have is a gun, every problem looks like something that needs shooting"—

This is pretty much the basic Chekovian tension: once we've seen the gun, it's a given that it'll go off, the only question that remains is exactly when and where. And, perhaps, whether it will be likely to actually improve anyone's lot. If your answer to that last question is "probably not," La Haine may be your type of film.

Skunkcabbage's write-up is here.