The Lesser Feat

Directors whose films go unmentioned in 'The Classical Hollywood Cinema' (1985)...

2012-01-02T07:30:00.001-08:00

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That is: directors who (while they may be named in passing) do not have their films mentioned or taken into account in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristen Thompson's long-canonical survey The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985). I've gathered the information through re-reading the book, as well as by performing word searches for all the titles in the directors' bodies of work, via Google Books.

To be periodically updated...

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Dorothy Arzner
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E.g.: Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

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Leo McCarey

E.g.: The Awful Truth (1937)

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Oscar Micheaux
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E.g.: Body and Soul (1925)

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Max Ophüls
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E.g.: Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)

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Nicholas Ray
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E.g.: Johnny Guitar (1954)

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Frank Tashlin
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E.g.: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1957)
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Book Review: Britton on Film

2011-09-12T07:44:00.000-07:00

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I'm happy to be able to provide a link to downloadable version of a book review I wrote for CineAction; the book in question is the indispensable Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, edited by Barry Keith Grant. Britton is one of my very favourite film critics, so it was a pleasure to be able to delve in detail into his work and argue its merits. Thanks to editor Richard Lippe for permission to reprint the article online.

Here's a brief extract to give a flavour of my approach:

Andrew Britton believed in setting out his stall. A merciless critic of hypocrisy and evasiveness in others, in his own work he sought always to declare his attitudes and assumptions as explicitly as possible, often opening articles with declarations of principle that served as landmarks for the field upon which battle was soon to commence. As he writes in ‘The Philosophy of the Pigeonhole: Wisconsin Formalism and the “Classical Style”’, “If readers do not know where the critic stands in relation to the work, they have no means of defining or assessing the critic’s judgments” (p. 125). In tribute to such candor, let us begin this review with the conclusion I hope will be reached by anyone upon closing this book: the marginalization of the work of Andrew Britton by the field of film studies must be regarded as nothing short of a scandal. This review will in large part attempt to argue why I consider such a conclusion unavoidable.

Originally published in CineAction no. 84, (2011), pp: 44-49.
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2011-08-11T04:09:00.000-07:00

"For me, the root cause of this mindless selfishness is [...] a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society - people allowed to feel that the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities, and that their actions do not have consequences."

- David Cameron, 10/8/2011
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Notes on Empathy in the Quirky: Bunny and the Bull

2011-07-06T12:59:00.000-07:00

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In his book Wes Anderson: Why His Movies Matter, Mark Browning objects to Anderson's supposed occasional shifts from 'ironic' detachment to moments of 'sincere', melodramatic engagement with characters' emotions:

It is very difficult to maintain a dominant tone of detached quirky irony and then expect audiences to engage emotionally with characters to the level where tears are expected. This kind of tonal seesaw does not really work. (62)

I remembered this passage whilst watching one of the first British films to be transparently influenced by what I've defined as the quirky sensibility of American indie cinema, Bunny and the Bull (2009). If Wes Anderson is guilty of mismanaging his tonal ironic detachment to the point of seriously endangering our ability to empathise with characters at moments of pain and suffering, then Bunny and the Bull should be convicted ten times over.

In my view, Anderson is on the whole extremely skillful in the way he envelops his entire films in largely the same melancholic, yet gently amused, tone. Comic moments tend always to still be slightly sad, sad moments still slightly comic. Even the funeral in Darjeeling Limited (2007) is dealt with using the director's trademark slow-motion-and-retro-song combination, which encourages us to reflect on the extent to which the film is in a significant sense performing this gesture of transcendence and seriousness. (I'd need more time to get across this completely convincingly, but allow me to take this point as read...)

Bunny and the Bull, by contrast, is a film which most certainly for the most part strives to "maintain a dominant tone of detached irony". Strongly cribbing from the quirky - and particularly Michel Gondry/Jared Hess - most of the film is told via a flashback that takes the form of highly stylized cut-out-cartoon locales and unreal landscapes. See, for instance, the restaurant near the opening:

There's nothing to say that, just because the places they inhabit are always patently artificial, we couldn't empathise with this film's characters - it could mobilise any number of conventions or devices to try to bring the viewer into a close empathetic relationship with its central figures. However, despite the seemingly clinically depressed nature of the movie's main character, Stephen, the film is determined always to undercut the integrity of its world and the feelings it potentially has at its disposal - often via either absurd surrealist humour that places us near the realm of Monty Python (see: Julian Barratt's dog-suckling cameo), or through bathetic bawdiness (at the moment when our hero finally goes to bed with the girl of his dreams, the camera pans away and we hear "Hmm, nice penis!"). Basically, this seems to be a film that is unconcerned with placing us into a relationship of empathy with its characters and reality - more Mighty Boosh than anything else.

And that would be fine. Except that, very close to the end, the film reaches the primal scene it's been hinting at throughout: Bunny's fateful encounter with a bull in the field. And at this moment, the film really wants us to feel something. The problem is that the trauma comes so suddenly, emerging unheralded from beneath the veneer of "detached irony", and doing so all but literally.

The sequence begins with us in the artificial, naively-rendered fantasy world that the majority of the film has taken place in, with Bunny on the field with the (at this point mechanical) bull...

...and Stephen watching from the wings by a nearby fence:

However, just when it seems that Bunny might have bested the beast, dark music begins. At this, we begin quickly intercutting shots of what we have till now seem only as a Mechano-like toy (on a patchwork rug) with a real-life bull (in a real-life field)...

As it begins to charge Bunny, this pattern continues - frantic cuts between the stop-motion animal and its real-life counterpart...

From the moment it makes contact with Bunny, we're exclusively in the 'real world' - a world we've never before seen in this film. Stephen scrambles terrified over the fence, pursued by a handheld camera (a further aesthetic signifier of 'real'), over to his fallen friend, who is now dead...

So, seemingly believing that - if it wants to elicit empathy from the viewer (which it quite clearly does) - it is necessary to strip away 'artifice' wholesale, the film at this moment transforms itself into an entirely different sort of aesthetic object than it has previously been. The result is a huge tonal lurch which the movie cannot handle, feeling entirely unearned - precisely the kind of "seesaw" effect Browning claims takes place in Anderson's films.

But no Anderson film attempts anything as clumsy as this. Indeed, Bunny and the Bull makes you realise quite how impeccably nuanced and coherent Anderson's approach tends to be, reminding us that the reason the quirky sensibility works (at least, when it does) is that it is concerned above all with tonal balance, not tonal shifts. While clearly a descendent of the sensibility, Bunny and the Bull doesn't have enough faith in this fundamental lesson of quirky cinema: empathy doesn't require a 'real', merely consistent relationships and attitudes towards the 'real'.
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V. F. Perkins on 'Inception'

2011-07-05T09:53:00.001-07:00

"‎ANATOMY OF A MURDER could run for another three hours after the end titles, cover another three years in the life of its hero, and we should still be no nearer the truth of the case. In LA NOTTE the ‘real ending’ is knowable, but has been withheld. The picture would need to cover at most another two or three hours in its protagonists’ lives in order to resolve the ambiguities of its last sequence. In Preminger’s movie the story ends with a major issue unresolved. In Antonioni’s the story is abandoned when it has served the director’s purpose."

- Film as Film (1972: 148)
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On the Feminism of Sucker Punch

2011-05-29T05:23:00.000-07:00

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I have a new article over at Alternate Takes about the much maligned and misunderstood Sucker Punch. I think that there have been few more fascinating Hollywood blockbusters, so I was very pleased to be able to delve into this movie - both its strategies, and its reception. An extract from the piece:

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Sucker Punch seems to me to be one of the most widely misunderstood films of recent years. By this I don’t just mean that it’s underrated - though in my opinion it is also that. I mean that an alarming number of commentators (i.e.: almost all) somehow seem to have failed to grasp its basic aims, and thus haven’t been able to assess it appropriately.

Other than the many complaints about the lack of narrative tension and rounded characters (neither of which, as I suggested in my short review, need necessarily be seen as significant problems), the main objections to the film have, of course, tended to be made on the grounds of its sexual politics. I want to address this matter head-on, looking at some recurring complaints about the movie’s approach to gender, and argue that most of them stem from a fundamental misperception of what the film is trying to do. I should also say that I’m certainly not going to argue that the film is unimpeachable - only that it’s far more interesting than it has usually been given credit for. My point is essentially that, before we call a film a failure, we first need at least to be sure what exactly it is failing at.

The thing that seems to drive people crazy about Sucker Punch is that it appears to offer “faux feminism” but in fact constitutes a “fantasia of misogyny”. Yet I think that the film, far from offering something like lipstick feminism, does in fact genuinely strive to be a rather forceful and angry feminist film, and comes closer to earning the title than most have acknowledged. The thing is: its attempts at feminism aren’t to be found in the areas where people have generally been looking. Stated briefly, this film is primarily about itself - that is, it’s about the problems involved in trying to find positive images for women within the kind of popular culture which it itself embodies. Of course, given that this strategy naturally involves irony and flirting with having-your-cake-and-eating-it, this is a difficult and dangerous game to play - and one that Sucker Punch is perhaps only half-successful in. But it is frankly bizarre that so few people seem to have noticed that such a game is even afoot - preferring to say that the movie’s problems stem from stupidity rather than over-cleverness (which would be closer to the mark). But this is to get ahead of ourselves...
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Read the rest of the article here. Hope you enjoy!
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Does the Hollywood Happy Ending Exist?

2011-05-25T01:23:00.001-07:00

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I am happy to be able to provide a link to a downloadable version of my first published piece on the Hollywood 'happy ending' - the subject which was the focus of my doctoral thesis 'The Final Couple: Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema'. This essay, the opening chapter of an edited collection called Happy Endings and Films, offers an account of the invariably negative critical reputation that the 'happy ending' has acquired in film studies, arguing for the need to interrogate this reputation. Along the way we touch on David Bordwell, 'Screen theory', the 'self-consciously artificial' happy ending, and Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956).

A brief extract:

"We tend to assume we understand the ‘happy ending’ of Hollywood cinema – both that it exists, and what it is. This essay will question that assumption. [...] Although the term is used again and again in discussions of Hollywood, it is startling to realise that the cinematic ‘happy ending’ has received barely any sustained critical attention, nor has an adequate definition of it ever been agreed upon. [...] It is my belief that most film studies discussions of the ‘happy ending’ reflect less a wish to meaningfully discuss the feature than a widely-discernable desire to construct it as a critical ‘bad object’."

Many thanks to the editors for giving me permission to reprint the piece online.

MacDowell, James. 'Does the Hollywood Happy Ending Exist?' Happy Endings and Films. Eds. Armelle Parey, Isabelle Roblin & Dominque Sipière. Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2010. 15-27.
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Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism - Issue 2

2011-05-17T04:37:00.000-07:00

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For anyone who may not have come across the news elsewhere, I'm very pleased to announce that Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, of whose editorial board I am a member, has published its second issue (available here).

One thing I find particularly exciting about this issue is the form of our tribute to the late Robin Wood: several rare pieces by Wood, including his first published article - on Psycho (from Cahiers du Cinema, published here both in its original French and in English) - as well as several pieces he wrote for the Times Educational Supplement during the 70s.

The contents of Issue 2 are below; I hope you enjoy it.

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Contents:

Susan Hayward in the 50s - by Edward Gallafent

Madame Bovary, C’est Moi – Signed, Vincente Minnelli - by Mark Rappaport

Fritz Lang Dossier, Part 1 - by the editorial board

Notes on Metropolis - by Michael Walker

M: Leading the Blind - by Douglas Pye & Iris Luppa

Das Testament des Dr Mabuse - by Michael Walker

Robin Wood: A Tribute - by the editorial board

Psychoanalyse de Psycho / Psychoanalysis of Psycho - Robin Wood

Attitudes in Advise and Consent - Robin Wood

In Memoriam Michael Reeves - Robin Wood

Sense of Dislocation - Robin Wood (about Last Tango in Paris)

Signs and Motifs - Robin Wood (about High Plains Drifter)

Moments of Release - Robin Wood (about Cries and Whispers)

Call Me Ishmael - Robin Wood (about Fanny and Alexander)
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Thumbsucker and the Quirky

2011-03-30T07:53:00.000-07:00

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Apologies for the lack of updates recently. Two main reasons for the drought are that I have been busy with helping prepare the new issue of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism (which should be appearing before too long!), and managing/contributing to Alternate Takes.

Given this, allow me to indulge myself by pointing to a piece which addresses a subject I've written on in both these places: 'quirky' American indies. I first attempted to tackle this concept with this rather informal piece over half a decade ago (yikes...), then approached the matter far more extensively and academically in this article for Movie. I have now written another piece for Alternate Takes which strikes a tonal balance somewhere between these other two.

There's something fitting about this, and not only because I myself am interested in such balance in criticism, but also because the quirky itself - as I define it - is a mode of filmmaking defined by balance; as I put it in the most recent article:

this is surely a sensibility made up of tensions: between indie and mainstream, comedy and drama, naturalism and artificiality, innocence and experience, and - perhaps above all - ‘irony’ and ‘sincerity’.

I recently rewatched a movie that seems to me to reflect this fact particularly clearly: Mike Mills' Thumbsucker (2005). This film follows Justin (Lou Taylor Pucci), a suburban Oregonian teenager living with his parents (addressed only by their first names, Audrey [Tilda Swinton] and Mike [Vincent D'Onofrio]). Putatively structured around Justin's struggle to let go of the titular childhood habit, the film is part bildungsroman, part a modest tapestry of unsatisfied American lives. In their own way, each character in the movie struggles with the pains of either growing up or growing old, and with questions of at what point goals transform into fantasies, coping mechanisms into crutches.

The movie can usefully be seen as expressing many of the productive tensions often found within the 'quirky' sensibility. Firstly, as a semi-independent film (produced independently, distributed by major subsidiary Sony Pictures Classics), the film unsurprisingly indulges both commercial and more niche impulses: starring an unknown actor, yet also populated by major players; handling drug use and addiction fairly lightly, but concerned to wean its characters off the lifestyles they encourage; dealing primarily in disillusionment, yet offering the possibility of redemption. The movie lives a million miles from, say, the wholly bleak teenage wasteland of a film like Gummo (1997), but also far from the milieu of mainstream teen pictures. Narratively, Thumbsucker emerges as an amalgam between a meandering patchwork piece and a more goal-oriented mode of storytelling - an approach in fact entirely appropriate to depicting the lives of purposeless characters refusing to give up entirely on the search for 'purpose'.

Thumbsucker's use of the tonal possibilities common to movies of its ilk locates it in a similarly ambivalent middle ground. This comic drama is nowhere near so whimsical as, for instance, Napoleon Dynamite (2004), nor so comparatively naturalistic as, for example, The Squid and the Whale (2005), though contains elements of both. One measure of this is that it can encompass both a vignette about anal drug-smuggling gone gorily awry, and pretty, pink-tinged dream sequences set in something like a candy-floss Heaven. This is very much a movie struggling to temper grounded reality with the liberating possibilities of fantasy, something which again reflects a central thematic concern.

Virtually all the characters pursue artificial solutions to their problems: prescribed medication, corny psychological mysticism, dreams of a lost career, desire for a beautiful star from “out there in 'picture land'” (as Mike puts it), and so on. In their stymied dreams of greatness, these people in a sense feel like indie characters striving to achieve the eminence of Hollywood heroes - a predicament familiar from the work of Wes Anderson, but one that feels slightly less safe when taking place in a less fanciful and hermetic context than Wes's worlds. The film may contain escapist dream sequences, but we never forget that they are indeed dreams - temporary flights from a far more disappointing reality.

Yet, this being a 'quirky' movie, it does not finally encourage us to despair. All the characters are subject to a degree of criticism from the film - Justin himself often appears misguidedly petulant towards, rather than unfairly wronged by, those around him - but we are ultimately nudged towards sincere empathy rather than ironic disengagement. The tension between pessimism and optimism at the film's heart is neatly conveyed by the songs which punctuate it - half of them having been written by the wistful Elliott Smith (who committed suicide before completing the project), the remainder by Tim DeLaughter of the notoriously joyful Polyphonic Spree. Were Smith to have scored the film in its entirety, it would undoubtedly have a different feel than it does. As it is, somberness coexists here with a quixotic triumphalism, and we are permitted to leave the film's world with a characteristically quirky sense of qualified, but nonetheless enveloping, hope, as Justin runs excitedly towards an uncertain future.
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Alternate Takes

2011-03-17T13:54:00.000-07:00

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A site that I set up six years ago, but which has been on a long hiatus for the last two, has just relaunched. It is edited by me, and written by myself and an assortment of excellent film critics, most of whom have studied the subject at university, but who also desire a less purely academic outlet for their cinematic musings.

I offer a few extracts from 'The Alternate Takes Approach', an article that offers some thoughts about the ethos and methods of the site...

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While obviously recognising that both popular film reviewing and academia can serve very valuable functions, Alternate Takes seeks to contribute to this intriguing space that exists somewhere between the two. [...]

A problem for much movie reviewing is the issue of ‘spoliers’. Arguing for the fundamental need to ‘spoil’ aspects of a film in order to discuss it properly, Jonathan Rosenbaum has said, “it’s impossible to function as a critic if one can’t describe anything in a movie or a book in advance. So if I’m expected to write a review of something, am I also expected not to analyze it?” We might say that this speaks to a basic distinction between reviewing and criticism: film reviewers have to assume that their readers haven’t seen the film under discussion, while film critics can assume that they have. To this extent, Alternate Takes practises both reviewing and criticism. [...]

The most obvious way by which we bridge the gap between reviewing and criticism is that we write about new films twice. First there is a short, evaluative piece that ‘spoils’ as little as possible about a film, but still grants a sense of the sorts of pleasures, or otherwise, that it offers; this is a review to read before you see a film. After you return from the cinema, you can read our Alternate Take - a longer, more in-depth critical analysis that discusses whatever the writer found to be most interesting about the movie. [...]

Speaking very broadly, film journalism tends often to write to the taste of its presumed readership. A film fan or movie geek might read, say, Empire, whose focus is skewed towards mainstream pictures, while a self-defined cinephile might read a more ‘high-end’ publication like Sight and Sound or Film Comment for its coverage of arthouse or festival films. Concerned first and foremost with evaluation, both these kinds of writing usually share and encourage assumptions with their readers about what sorts of films are worth discussing. Film studies, on the other hand, while certainly not immune from issues of taste, isn’t nearly so often interested in passing judgment upon a film’s value - at least not overtly. This in turn opens up the option of writing about a film for a multitude of other reasons - what it might tell us about a social issue, for instance, or an industry, or a genre’s history, or a philosophical problem - and thus means that any film can be treated as interesting for reasons other than whether or not it might be up the critic or reader’s alley.

One problem with writing overtly to a particular taste is simply that it can mean that - due to pressures of space - films which lie outside the taste bracket become sidelined. Thus, Empire gives a film like I Am Love (2010) a positive review that nonetheless runs to a mere 107 words, while the usually more loquacious Sight and Sound grants a movie such as No Strings Attached (2011) just two paragraphs (see the April ’11 issue). This, surely, is because both publications assume that their core readership just won’t be interested in reading lengthy pieces on these sorts of movies. [...]

Of course, it would be foolish to claim that any of our critical judgments can ever be free from personal taste (something acknowledged in our scoring system [...]). But it would be equally foolish to deny that there are degrees to which taste dictates the focus and tone of a discourse. Alternate Takes tries to adopt something akin to film studies’ more democratic attitude towards cinema, but without abandoning the evaluative dimension of journalistic film reviewing. The result, hopefully, is an approach that considers any kind of film worthy of detailed discussion, but which assesses that film on its own terms rather than chastising or ignoring it because it isn’t something that it never attempted to be. We may not always be successful in this aim, but it seems an ideal to strive towards.
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Kiss. Fade Out. The End: Embracing the Happy Ending

2011-03-08T02:29:00.000-08:00

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The following is a conference paper delivered at Rom Com Actually: A Two Day International Conference on Romantic Comedy in Film and Television, held at De Montfort University, Leicester, 2 – 3 March, 2011.

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In the 1964 romantic comedy Paris When it Sizzles Richard (William Holden), a screenwriter, tells Gabrielle (Audrey Hepburn), his secretary, that a Hollywood film necessarily ends in the following manner:

The climax. The music soars, and there, totally oblivious to the torrential rain pouring down upon them, the two fall happily and tenderly into each other’s arms. And as the audience drools with sublimated sexual pleasure, the two enormous and highly-paid heads come together for that ultimate and inevitable moment: the final, earth-moving, studio-rent-paying, theatre-filling, popcorn-selling kiss. Fade out. The end.

Accordingly, this film, which is dedicated throughout to sending-up various cinematic clichés while simultaneously enacting them, does itself end in precisely this way. Speaking of the new script Richard is writing, Gabrielle asks, “It will have a happy ending, won’t it?” The couple then intone Richard’s earlier words to one another (him: “Theatre-filling…”/ her: “Popcorn selling…”) before falling into a passionate embrace as the words, “Kiss. Fade out. The End.” are typed onto the screen; we fade to black.

David Bordwell has said that “few conventions of the Hollywood cinema are as noticeable to its producers, to its audiences, and to its critics as that of the happy ending”. Robin Wood calls the happy ending the “most striking and persistent of all classical Hollywood phenomena”. Assumptions like these are widespread. It’s exceedingly common for critics to precede the term happy ending with words like “standard” (Dolar, 1991: 38), “standardised” (Mulvey, 1977: 54), “typical” (Booker, 2007: 42), “usual” (Žižek, 2001: 7), “traditional” (Benshoff & Griffin, 2004: 61), “formulaic” (Umphlett, 2006: 38), “conventional” (Dunne, 2004: 78), “clichéd” (Orr, 1991: 380), “expected” (Rowe & Wells, 2003: 59), “predictable” (Schatz, 1991: 152), “customary” (Sterrit, 1993: 10), “inevitable” (Kracauer, 1960: 65), “necessary” (Mayne, 1990: 363), “required” (Sharrett, 2007: 60), “requisite” (Tally, 2007: 129), “statutory” (Brownlow, 1987: 122), “mandatory” (Kapsis, 1990: 39), or “obligatory” (Shapiro, 1995: 197).

Despite being viewed in this way, the 'happy ending' has received barely any in-depth attention from film studies. This paper is an extension of my doctoral work, which is dedicated in part to dispelling some myths about the convention. In particular, today I want to discuss the kind of happy ending familiar from so many romantic comedies: the kind in which ‘boy gets girl’, which for convenience’s sake I call the final couple.

In a sense I feel that this conference may actually be one of the few places where I’ll be preaching to the choir, since romantic comedy criticism has produced probably the best work on happy endings thus far. Nevertheless, I hope you’ll bear with me.

In a 1947 article called ‘Happily Ever After’, Fritz Lang wrote:

The traditional happy-ending story is a story of problems solved by an invincible hero, who achieved with miraculous ease all that his heart desired. [...] Boy will get girl, [...] dreams will come true as though at the touch of a wand.

I think we can see something like this description as charting the basic discursive field surrounding the ‘happy ending’. Of course Lang isn’t right when he calls this ‘happy ending’ “traditional”; instead it is prototypical. This is the abstract idea of a happy ending – exaggerated and hyperbolic. Because it has never been unpacked or interrogated, I think that this image has also tended to control film studies’ own attitudes toward happy endings, causing us to construct it as a critical ‘bad object’ rather than engage with it in detail.

That is to say: the ‘happy ending’ is an amalgamation of the kinds of exaggerated images conjured up here, or presented in a film like Paris When it Sizzles. Rather like the way in which genres are sometimes treated, it is essentially a Platonic ideal, existing in the minds of critics, filmmakers, and audiences, and often exerting its influence most forcefully by what it represents as an ideal. Just as Hollywood cinema has plainly produced a great many of what we call Westerns, but never the prototypical Western, so has it produced a great many of what we call ‘happy endings’, but never the ‘happy ending’. Yet, unlike the case with genre, this oversimplified conception of the ‘happy ending’ is still rife in film studies, and is what has allowed the convention’s reputation as a whole to become what it is today. It’s what permits critics to speak of “the Hollywood happy-ending convention” (Buckland, 2006: 219), or “the Hollywood convention of the always-happy ending” (Bratu-Hansen, 1997: 101).

It seems to me that in any happy ending there are two happy endings at play: the 'happy ending' – this clichéd, perfected ideal – and the actual happy ending we are watching, which will almost always be more ambivalent, or at least in some way distinguishable from its Platonic counterpart. I think we need to always to be aware of which we're talking about at any given moment: the 'happy ending' (which requires quotation marks), or a happy ending?

I’m also interested in the interplay between these two endings – the imagined and the real, and I’ll talk today about some assumptions about the former that are complicated if we pay proper attention to the latter – in particular, assumptions about the clichéd, ‘closed’, and ideological character of happy endings.

First though, we need to ask: why does the happy ending have such a negative critical reputation?

The Happy Ending in Film Theory

In 1967 Frank Kermode wrote in his seminal book The Sense of Ending that there had developed “a modern degree of clerical skepticism” towards narrative in general, and endings in particular. This skepticism has only increased and diversified within critical and theoretical discourse since.

Perhaps the most central reason for film studies’ hostility towards the ‘happy ending’ is its perceived links with narrative closure. Since the 1960s various theoretical approaches to both film and literature have managed to draw metaphorical parallels between narrative closure and virtually every ‘conservative’ impulse in Western culture: capitalism, patriarchy, masculinity, the Oedipal trajectory, bourgeois ideology, and so on.

It was a central tenet of 'Screen theory' in particular that a Hollywood movie usually strives to be what Commoli and Narboni called “a closed circuit, endlessly repeating the same illusion”. Theoretical models like Colin MacCabe’s ‘classic realist text’ regularly described Hollywood aesthetics using terms such as a “heavily ‘closed’ discourse”, and so on.

Of course, the excesses of 'Screen theory' – such as the concept of the classic realist text – have now received decades of critical drubbing, and its shortcomings on this particular matter of closure are easily diagnosed. The convention of closure, in-and-of-itself, conveys no ideology whatsoever. It is merely a formal device that can be used in the telling of a radical story as easily as a conservative one. This is because, a Andrew Britton says, a film’s ideology can “be gauged not by the fact that it uses certain conventions but by its use of them”.

Yet the critical enmity towards narrative closure per se on ideological grounds certainly outlived the 'Screen theory' boom, and can be seen to have continued through psychoanalytic approaches of various stripes, feminist film theory, postmodern theory, and still persists today.

One measure of this is the survival of a concept that was central to 70s Screen's dealings with Hollywood closure.

The 'Self-Consciously Artificial Happy Ending'

The theoretical climate that abounded in film studies' early years essentially made it necessary that, if one wishes to make positive claims for a ‘closed’ happy ending, one needs to argue that it doesn’t in fact convincingly ‘close’ the film. This produced a very prevalent – and resilient – category: the “happy ending in which the mechanics of cinema are exposed” (Geraghty, 2009: 106), because it seems “unmotivated” (Neupert, 1995: 72), “ironic” (Grant, 2007: 79) or “forced” (Pollock, 1977: 109). We can call this overarching critical category what Shingler and Mercer dub the “self-consciously artificial” ‘happy ending’. This model was very useful for the development of ‘Screen theory’ as a whole, playing a key role in the development of a concept that Barbra Klinger has dubbed “the formally subversive ‘progressive’ text”.

But the model is by no means confined to this period or theoretical tradition. For instance, in The Classical Hollywood Cinema – which is still one of the most influential of film studies books, and is critical of much 'Screen theory' – David Bordwell writes that an “unmotivated happy ending” can “break down the ideological unity of the classical Hollywood film”. And today we can still regularly see readings which suggest that an individual happy ending is either tacitly ironic or unintentionally unconvincing, thus counteracting closure, and thus containing some sort of progressive potential, or at least additional interest.

An important point to make about this argument is that it is based on the assumption that, unless it’s being subverted, a happy ending is likely to merely conform to the standardized Platonic happy ending of our imagination. A second point is that ‘open’ and ‘closed’ aren’t static categories which endings simply are or are not – there are infinite shadings of closure. We can see this by looking even very briefly at a handful of individual final couples.

Variation and 'Closure'

The final couple is regularly assumed to guarantee complete closure – the resolution of all crises and contradictions through romantic union. Sometimes it does, but it needn’t.

The uncertainty of the future may be literalised openly. In Double Wedding (1937), Margit and Charles ultimately lie knocked out on the floor after a brawl at a misfired nuptial, a wreath reading “Good Luck!” strewn over their unconscious bodies. Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) sees its couple on the verge of restarting their marriage but with Gary Cooper in a straightjacket and rendered virtually mute by rage and sexual frustration. More recently, I Could Never be your Woman (2007) has its heroine admit of her new relationship “So, it might not last...”

Equally, the lovers might not finally know each others’ true identity. The Lady Eve (1941) famously ends with Hopsy still not having realized that Jean has been pretending to be two different people. In Bachelor Mother (1939) David finally remains under the illusion that Polly is the mother of the abandoned baby; Charade (1963) ends with the line "I love you, Adam, Alex, Peter, Brian – whatever your name is…”; Housesitter’s (1992) last words are “I love you, Gwen.” / “Actually, it’s Jessica…”

As an aside, it’s also worth briefly drawing attention to a very common strategy of romantic comedy of all eras, which is to use an epilogue, not to shore-up closure, but to follow a final couple with a dissonant gag. This may perhaps refer back to an earlier issue between the couple – say, The Ugly Truth’s (2009) final faked-orgasm gag – or it might bring back a secondary figure of fun – in Ninotchka (1939) we finally cut to the protesting Russian envoy. Equally, Four’s a Crowd (1938) has Errol Flynn accidentally kiss the wrong new bride before switching to his actual wife, while their car is being pursued by hunting dogs, dispatched by an angry father . As Kathrina Glitre points out, “far from reinforcing the return of the status quo, [...] the Hollywood romantic comedy epilogue tends to destabilise the final union by the return of a source of conflict”.

My point isn’t that these films necessarily encourage us to envision pessimistic futures, but only that the problems of the narrative need by no means be unilaterally closed by a final couple. Furthermore: it is crucial that no ‘subversion’ of a prototypical model is required in order to create these happy endings which are equivocal, ambiguous, or in some other way simply distinctive. Celestino Deleyto is in my view absolutely correct when he says that “a closer look at this [...] convention proves that ambiguity and variety are relatively frequent”; more to the point, he is virtually revolutionary when he goes on to suggest what no other critic has ever acknowledged: that such ambiguity and variety are “even part of the convention itself”.

And indeed, we should probably admit that this ambiguity is unsurprising, given that the final couple is simultaneously the most familiar of endings and also manifestly a moment of beginning – the beginning of a romantic relationship. This is something that particular happy endings acknowledge to varying to degrees, but it’s always central to the convention, and can be one reason for the relative ‘openness’ of particular final couples.

Another reason it’s unsurprising that we should find moments of equivocation in many final couples is because of the overbearing weight of the clichéd, Platonic image of the 'happy ending'.

This is something that has often been acknowledged about contemporary rom coms, or New Romances, which often display, as Frank Krutnik puts it, a “knowing embrace of the artifice of convention” – with the 'happy ending' high on the list of conventions regularly considered artificial. A famous example of this is Pretty Woman (1990), which ends with a modern version of the fairytale-style rescue of a princess by a prince, followed by a chorus-like figure announcing “this is Hollywood, land of dreams!” I would agree with the numerous critics of romantic comedy who argue that this trend needs to be explained at least partly in relation to the rise of postmodernism.

But it also needs to be seen on a continuum with the far older convention of drawing attention to the clichéd nature of the final couple. We’ve already seen Paris When it Sizzles parodying the 'happy ending' back in 1964. We might go back to Platinum Blonde in 1931, which finishes with the hero talking to the heroine, telling her about the happy ending of a play he’s writing, whilst acting out that ending with her. Or we could look at Sherlock, Jr. in 1924, which shows Buster Keaton taking romantic advice from a movie playing onscreen...

...until the film-within-a-film shows its onscreen couple kiss, then dissolves immediately to a shot of hero and heroine holding several babies; Buster is left looking confused.

In fact, as far back as Shakespeare we can see the final couple being treated as a hackneyed convention – towards the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost Berowne comments on the interruption of the play’s courtship plots by observing that “our wooing doth not end like an old play; Jack hath not Jill”.

This is because for hundreds of years it has been true that, as David Shumway puts it, “‘Boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back’ is exhibit A of standard plots in all fictional media”. Given this, while postmodernism might have caused what was once, in Jameson’s terms, ‘residual’ to have became a ‘cultural dominant’, the clichéd reputation of the final couple has long been one of its defining features. This in turn would seem to mean that, just like many film scholars, most romantic comedies are themselves suspicious of this prototypical image, and thus tend to find ways of avoiding conforming to it uncomplicatedly – either via the kinds of minor dissonance mentioned earlier, or by, as Kruntnik puts it, presenting “the fulfilment fantasy of heterosexual union, while underscoring that it is only wish fulfilment after all”.

Of course though, it isn’t just its clichéd nature that regularly causes anxiety about the final couple, but also its perceived politics.

Variation and Ideology

Other than perhaps somewhat outdated de facto associations of closure with a reactionary ideology, the main reason for political suspicion of the final couple is because to end in this way both sets up marriage as an ultimate goal, and necessarily consigns it to a narrative afterlife that remains unrepresented, and thus unchallenged .

Yet the fact that this genre often ends with marriage (or more broadly monogamy) doesn’t mean it always seeks to relegitimize it, nor that it is unable to represent anxieties about the institution. While of course usually framed within a comic mode, marriage can be criticised in romantic comedies for many reasons.

For Gillian in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) marriage “would mean giving up a whole way of thinking, behaving – a whole existence”, while Tira in I’m No Angel (1936) sees marriage “only as a last resort”. Following the fall of the Production Code the critiques have only tended to become more overt: “You want a happy marriage?” Mac asks Eddie in The Heartbreak Kid (2007), “Do what I do: plaster on a fake smile, plough through the next half century, sit back, relax, and wait for the sweet embrace of death.” Marriage is described in contemporary romantic comedies variously as “something that’s got about a fifty-fifty shot of making it out of the gate” (27 Dresses [2007]), a “patriarchal” form of “ritualised property transfer” (The Bachelor [1999]), “a prison” (Forces of Nature [1998]), “a form of institutionalised rape” (Forget Paris [1994]), “not natural” (What Happens in Vegas [2008]), “filled with loneliness and sadness” (Bride Wars [2006]), and accused of being based upon “a bourgeois desire to fulfill an ideal that society embeds in us from an early age to promote a consumer-capitalist agenda” (Definitely Maybe [2008]). Even the assumed ideological link between marriage and the 'happy ending’ can be explicitly called into question: “Then what happens?” medical student Paige asks of a burgeoning relationship in The Prince and Me (2005), “We get married and live happily ever after? Then all my hard work goes down the drain because I’m too busy shopping for groceries and picking my kids up at soccer.”

Of course, though, these dissenting voices tend not to have the ‘last word’, since the narrative does indeed usually culminate in the beginnings of a romantic relationship. But it has too often been assumed that, whatever progressive potential a romance narrative may possess, the final couple which ends it will always signal a return to conservative values. Of course, I don’t wish to suggest that final couples can’t serve to, say, ‘tame’ strong women, and it is certainly valid and necessary to pay attention to what Laura Mulvey calls “the amount of dust the story raises along the road”. This should not, however, come at the expense of asking how much “dust” can also be raised by a final couple. We’re free to view as equally conservative all endorsements of any monogamous heterosexual couple if we wish. However, this view will logically leave us entirely unable to differentiate between the ideological meanings of one couple and another.

I think it necessary to adjust our thinking and recognise that the final couple, while always dealing with similar ideological concerns, will nevertheless have different meanings depending on its specific treatment. As Kathrina Glitre puts it,

It is not enough to claim that [...] simply by ending with the union of the heterosexual couple, romantic comedy is about the traditional institutions of patriarchal society and must be inherently conservative. The context of The End must be taken into account.

It is true that romantic comedies usually encourage us to endorse their ultimately united romantic couples. But that couple will be different in each case, which will in turn change the implications of our endorsement of it. More important than the fact of the final couple is the kind of future a final couple invites us to imagine – as well as who the people getting married are, and how equal their relationship is. Two final kisses shared by the very same stars within a couple of years of one another can have extremely different ideological overtones depending on - to take one blatant example - who has been pursuing and educating whom. We can see this in the huge gulf separating the sexual politics of, say, The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Bringing Up Baby (1938).

The first of these final kisses has been arrived at after two hours of male characters paternalistically putting Tracy in her place; the latter is the end result of the couple's joyous escape from virtually all traces of patriarchal dominance in their relationship.

There are lots of questions we must ask of individual final couples if we wish to move beyond a view which accuses every romantic comedy ending of conveying the same ideological message.

For instance: is the final couple predicated on the woman having to give up a career opportunity, as in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), or is it founded explicitly on her professional success, as in something like His Girl Friday (1940)?

Is the woman desperate to be a wife, as in Every Girl Should be Married (1948), or is she finally reluctant to wed and has to be talked into it by the man, like in Indiscreet (1958)?

Is the final marriage presented as the fulfilment of all the woman’s dreams, as in 27 Dresses (2007), or does it seem strangely threatening, as in She Done Him Wrong (1933), which ends with Cary Grant telling Mae West “you’re my prisoner and I’m going to be your jailer for a long time...”

Whereas the final couple under the Production Code tended to be synonymous with marriage, now it need only constitute a committed relationship. Given this, if a contemporary film wants to marry its couple off, does it make this seem logical by structuring its entire narrative around weddings, as in The Wedding Planner (2001), or does marriage seem a strangely anachronistic tacked-on addendum, as in Blind Date (1987)?

If the couple is already married by the start of the film, does the movie flirt with but finally steer clear of adultery, as Wife vs. Secretary (1936) does? Does it suggest that an infidelity can actually save a marriage, like Kiss Me Stupid (1964)? Or is the final couple itself adulterous, as in Same Time Next Year (1978)?

What age is the couple? Teen romances can often make their final couples feel tentative and provisional. The teenage heroine of A Cinderella Story (2004) says in voiceover at the end of her film “and we lived happily ever after. At least for now – hey: I’m only a freshman!” In Clueless’ (1995) final scene we cut to a wedding that we expect to be that of the main couple, only to be told “as if!”

While the marriage can seem to be all about the couple, it can also focus far more on the friendship between two women, with the husbands cast as merely incidental, as in, say, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), or more recently, Bride Wars (2008).

All these things will have distinct significance for the politics of particular final couples. And this is before we even start talking about happy endings which don’t feature a final couple at all, like Roman Holiday (1953), My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), Prime (2005), and so on.

So – to wind things up...

The assumption that a happy ending fundamentally requires irony or subversion in order to avoid being monolithic and conservative is a damaging one. While film studies may have largely left categories like the standardised classic realist text firmly behind, those surrounding the standardised ‘happy ending’ tend to continue unabated. Though it certainly does have its uses, the model of the self-consciously artificial 'happy ending' is a rather anachronistic remnant of an earlier critical climate, and deserves to be rethought.

Because the final couple is so widespread a feature of Hollywood conclusions, it can be tempting to assume that it will always be the same and mean the same thing. Yet I would suggest that its very prevalence should in fact encourage a contrary assumption: that this convention will be bound to serve many varied functions depending upon the needs of varied films. If we recognise this, it will allow us to see the 'happy ending' for what it is: a tenacious Platonic ideal whose influence is important for our understanding, but which can by no means tell us all we need to know about what can be conveyed by 'Kiss. Fade Out. The End'.

Sex, Rom Coms, and Final Couples, Part 2

2011-02-13T03:13:00.000-08:00

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It has come to my attention that there are, not just one, but two 'casual sex' romantic comedies on the horizon: No Strings Attached (trailer here), and the even more literal-mindedly titled Friends With Benefits (trailer here). This is on top of last year's Love and Other Drugs, the raunchiest mainstream rom com for some time (even if it does develop, not entirely convincingly, into something of a melodrama).

As I've said before, many (academic) critics like to characterise contemporary romantic comedy as perversely chaste, suggesting that these movies usually find some reason or other to keep couples out of each others' beds. This just isn't true, however, as the appearance of films like these makes all the more obvious.

The final couple happy ending has long been seen as a standardised, conservative end to a genre that is concerned in virtually every instance to repeat the same mantra regarding marriage and monogamy. Yet I'm more in agreement with Celestino Deleyto when he says that the main purpose of romantic comedy is

the artistic articulation of current discourses on love, sex and marriage - discourses that [are] multiple and contradictory. The apparent universality of the happy ending and its obvious conventionality have led many to defend a homology between the genre’s narrative structure and a stern defence of monogamy and heterosexuality, distorting what, in my view, is its main discursive space: the exploration of love and human sexuality and its complex and fluid relationships with the social context.

There have certainly already been plenty of romantic comedies in which casual sex or one-night stands have taken place between final couples (only to lead to something more), but these two films - taking, as they do, the parlance of our times in their very titles - make it very clear that they are concerned to explore this particular aspect of their "social context". Urban Dictionary's first entry for the phrase 'friends with benefits' seems to have appeared in 2003. Well, better eight years later than never.

Of course, it is almost certain that these movies will end with their final couples deciding that they want to try for a monogamous relationship; but meaning doesn't just reside in the ending - it's also conveyed by the beginning and middle. Equally, one final couple can mean something very different to another depending on what has come before it. For instance, once it has been demonstrated that sex can be separated from emotions outside a relationship, it follows that they can also be severed inside one. I predict tentative conclusions.

Regardless of how they turn out, though, what could make more clear the rom coms' desire to wrestle with changing sexual politics than the appearance of films with titles like these? How long until we see a movie called Fuck Buddies?
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Ellipsis and Occlusion in Rear Window

2011-01-30T02:09:00.000-08:00

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I provide here a link to my first academic article to appear in print, 'What We Don't See, and What We Think it Means: Ellipsis and Occlusion in Rear Window' (The Hitchcock Annual, Vol. 16. New York: Columbia University Press. 2010: pp.77-101). Thank you to the editors of The Hitchcock Annual, Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Allen, for their permission to republish the piece online.

An extract from the article to give a sense of what it's about:

In the line from Rear Window that inspired this essay’s title, Lisa instructs Jeff to “tell me everything you saw, and what you think it means.” David Bordwell has said that this line “concisely reiterates the film’s strategy of supplying sensory information [...] and then forcing Jeff (and us) to interpret it,” and furthermore that, in this sense, “every fiction film does what Rear Window does.” The line is similarly cited by Richard Maltby to help make the point that “when we remember a film we [...] tell ourselves what we saw, and interpret it. The result is a story.” It is easy to see why these words might be alluded to in illustrations of the processes by which we understand film, given that they combine the visual, narrated, and interpretive aspects of filmic storytelling and viewing in a pleasingly economical way. If we are serious about using the line as a metaphor for the spectator’s activity, however, it is worth pointing out that what it does not include is any acknowledgement that what we don’t see in a film also plays a very important role in our sense of what we “think it means”.
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Encounters With Moments: Before Sunrise

2011-01-26T15:49:00.000-08:00

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Partly because I'm currently reading the fascinating Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory, it has occurred to me that one nice ongoing project for this blog might be to occasionally point to some particularly striking critical attempts to describe cinematic moments, along with an image or two which evokes them. Sometimes I may offer my own description of these moments, at other times not. Either way, I intend the series to stand as a tribute to one of the prime tasks of the film critic - as Victor Perkins put it: "to articulate in the medium of prose some aspects of what artists have made perfectly and precisely clear in the medium of film". As any film critic knows, this process constitutes an always challenging, and often exhilarating, experience (as Girish, with the help of Stanley Cavell and Christian Keathley, begins a discussion about here).

It seems strangely fitting to begin with an instance of a critic finding that words in fact fail him when faced with a moment he especially prizes: Robin Wood, speaking of a scene from Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995) in his book Sexual Politics and Narrative Film. Wood's admittance of failure here is a touchingly honest reminder of the difficulty of our endeavour when we try to put into words the ineffable.

Wood writes,

"I have to confess, at this point, to a failure: even on first viewing I told myself that I would 'one day' analyze in detail the scene in the listening booth of the record store, in which nothing happens except that Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy either do or don't look at each other, their eyes never quite meeting. After a dozen viewings I abandoned the project. I suppose one might try an elaborate system of charts and timings, annotating 'direction of the gaze', when and how long each looks (or doesn't)... which would demonstrate nothing of the least importance. With no camera-movement, no editing, no movement within the frame except for the slight movements of the actors' heads, nothing on the soundtrack but a not-very-distinguished song that may vaguely suggest what is going on in the characters' minds and seems sometimes to motivate their 'looks' ("Though I'm not impossible to touch / I have never wanted you so much / Come here"), the shot seems to me a model of 'pure cinema' in ways Hitchcock never dreamed of (not merely 'photographs of people talking', but photographs of them not talking), precisely because it completely resists analysis, defies verbal description. All one can say is that it is the cinema's most perfect depiction, in just over one minute of 'real' time, at once concrete and intangible, of two people beginning to realize that they are falling in love."

A number of years ago I attempted my own partial account of this moment, focusing on one aspect of it in particular, in this piece comparing Linklater's movie with Minnelli's The Clock (1945). Yet neither Wood nor I have captured its essence; both despite and because of its simplicity, it remains elusive, "at once concrete and intangible".

I look forward to revisiting other instances of critics trying to do justice to their encounters with moments. The amazing thing is that, sometimes, we almost succeed.
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Sex, Rom Coms, and Final Couples

2011-01-20T05:05:00.000-08:00

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In a 1948 article called ‘The Argument of Comedy’, Northrop Frye made a playful aside suggesting that “the average movie of today is a rigidly conventionalized New Comedy proceeding towards and act which, like death in Greek tragedy, takes place offstage, and is symbolized by a final embrace.” It is certainly true that, thanks to the Hays Code, Hollywood movies made between approximately 1934 and 1967 were generally required to abstain from sex in order that “pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing”. Thus, since marriage in narrative so often comes at the end rather than the beginning or middle – if, that is, we’re talking about happy marriages (it’s so hard for actual depictions of wedlock not to become melodramas!) – a final couple happy ending did indeed very often serve the function Frye suggests. Film critic James Harvey has a blunter way of describing this narrative pattern: “the delayed fuck”.

Of course, this didn’t stop classical films from letting our imaginations wander, with ellipses between scenes sometimes offering tantalising hints of hank panky. In the excellently-titled article ‘A Brief Romantic Interlude: Dick and Jane go to 3 ½ Seconds of the Classical Hollywood Cinema’, Richard Maltby spends a great deal of time explaining that a single shot of an airport tower in Casablanca (1942) intentionally left contemporary audiences the option of constructing two opposed interpretations of what exactly Rick and Ilsa get up to in Rick’s room.

However, regardless of the extent to which a studio-era movie might flirt with its possibility, the eschewing of sex was nevertheless for the most part necessarily maintained (at least as far as the final couple is concerned: heroes and heroines were frequently suggested to have had sexual relationships with ‘unsuitable’ partners). This meant that what a final kiss often symbolised was indeed, to a significant extent, activities proper to the marriage bed, which could only take place after the camera stopped rolling. I’ve always felt that Teresa Wright’s hat falling from her head in the final shot of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) gives a particularly nice indication of this.

More subtle at least than, say, North by Northwest’s infamous concluding images.

Of course, the absence of sex is particularly important for genres such as the romantic comedy, which are so much about sex. As well as knowingly nudging audiences in the ribs in the manner of North by Northwest (1959), classical rom coms could also make jokes about the narrative structures that the Code’s moral prescriptions so often led to. For instance: I Married a Male War Bride (1949) sees its couple wed about two-thirds of the way into the film, only to continually frustrate their attempts to consummate the marriage until the very last seconds. Meanwhile, Lover Come Back (1961) marries its couple in order to allow them to have sex, then divorces them, then has them remarry once again in the final scene whilst Carol (Doris Day) is in labour with their child; “Now that’s what I call cutting it close!” comments an onlooker.

But what of romantic comedies made after the fall of the Code in 1968? Some commentators predicted an explosion of sexual activity that would effectively put the genre out of business by ridding it of the sense of frustrated desire that so often served as its central motivation. And for a while during the 1970s the genre did indeed seem to be in bad health, with only a few movies by directors such as Woody Allen keeping the comic battle of the sexes waging. Of course, this changed in the 1980s when there began appearing a trickle, and then ultimately a flood, of comedies that have come to be called the ‘New Romances’; by the 1990s and 2000s the genre was back to the level of popularity it enjoyed during the height of the studio period.

Yet many critics have suggested that these new romantic comedies are peculiar precisely for the fact that – despite the lack of moral censorship, the centrality of sexual desire to the genre, and the rise of post-60s permissiveness – they feature barely any sex. Pat Kirkland for instance asserts that in modern films “sex is an activity indulged in only by non-central characters”, and Tamar Jeffers McDonald suggests that such rom coms “have to find ways to explain why sex is not happening”.

It is certainly true that there exist films like, say, Sleepless in Seattle (1993) or Serendipity (2001) which ensure the sexlessness of their central relationships by keeping their couple far apart for most of the film’s running time, and, in the process, imbue their endings once again with the kind of meanings Frye identified. This pattern has, however, been greatly overstated, as I have discovered whilst watching copious contemporary romantic comedies over the course of my research. Though it is true that we seldom actually see couples having sex (the ellipsis once again becoming handy in this respect), sexual relationships are nevertheless extremely common between modern (unmarried) romantic comedy heroes and heroines, meaning that sex is by no means something reserved until after a final fade-out.

Thus, for prurient posterity – and in the style of something a pre-internet 12-year-old might construct – I offer a brief list of the times at which some contemporary romantic comedy final couples have sex:

A Lot Like Love – 4 minutes in
Fools Rush In – 12 mins
Speechless – 13 mins
Housesitter – 15 mins
What Happens in Vegas – 17 mins
Pretty Woman – 29 mins
Down to You – 30 mins
Splash – 35 mins
Failure to Launch – 40 mins
The Back-Up Plan – 42 mins
Lucky You – 44 mins
Along Came Polly – 47 mins
Shakespeare in Love – 47 mins
Sliding Doors – 50 mins
Happy Together – 53 mins
I Could Never be Your Woman – 55 mins
Head Over Heels – 56 mins
Something’s Gotta Give – 1 hour
The American President – 1 hour
America’s Sweethearts – 1.05
Mannequin – 1.07
When Harry Met Sally – 1:07
Overboard – 1:16
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days – 1:23
Chasing Liberty – 1:24

Needless to say, there are infinitely more examples than these – the above list consists merely of moments about which I happened to remember to make notes during viewings.

While it’s convenient for critics to speak of the perverse chastity of modern rom coms (it helps reinforce the sense of the genre as a whole as conservative), such assertions don’t actually stand up to scrutiny. Now severed from its earlier function of symbolising “an act which [...] occurs offstage”, this, then, is one unambiguous way in which the final couple has changed its ideological meaning over time.
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The Final Couple

2011-01-19T18:13:00.000-08:00

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The fantastic tag-line for Hal Hartley's The Unbelievable Truth (1989) is "Can a nice girl from Long Island find happiness with a mass murderer?" This has little relevance to this post other than the fact that the line suggests (somewhat misleadingly, as it turns out) that this film may bring together conventions from two genres which together provided me with a term that became central to my PhD thesis: the 'final couple'. Since this is a phrase I'll likely be bandying about on this blog, I thought I would introduce it.

Not that it needs much in the way of introduction, being already fairly self-explanatory. The final couple is essentially my term for the-romantic-couple-as-ending: the moment just prior to the conclusion of so many films at which 'boy gets girl'. Since it is routinely considered such a standard feature of Hollywood happy endings, I chose this convention as the focus for my thesis, and dedicated myself in large part to investigating the flexibility of this seemingly most inflexible of tropes.

In her excellent book Men, Women, and Chain Saws Carol Clover coined the term ‘Final Girl’ to refer to the heroine of the slasher film, a female character who ultimately survives the killer’s murderous rampage, and often dispatches him. While it clearly has its origins in very different traditions than those with which my thesis is concerned (focused as my work is mainly on romantic comedies and melodramas), there are nevertheless a few ways in which the conventions of the ‘Final Girl’ and the final couple are suggestively related.

(1) Obviously referring to endings in its very wording, the term ‘Final Girl’ also particularly refers, in its own way, to a type of ‘happy ending’: the killer’s threat eliminated (or at least temporarily overcome), this indomitable character may go on living her life.

(2) Just as we will usually be able to predict the putative outcome of a slasher film by quickly recognising who will likely become the ‘Final Girl’ (often distinguished, says Clover, by features such as her virginity and her tomboy appearance), so in a romantic comedy will we virtually always be able to predict which characters will make up the final couple. This fact has similar significance for audience expectations and thus narrative drive in both genres, as I explore in the thesis in relation to closure in romantic comedy.

(3) The sexual politics of the end of a slasher film (a male violent/sexual threat to women having been overcome by a resilient female) constitute a very different treatment of similar ideological issues addressed in the image of the final couple. Whereas sexual difference in the slasher film requires a fight to the death, in the romantic comedy it may be overcome through a far safer ‘battle of the sexes’ which tends to result in an either utopian or uneasy union. That the ‘happy ending’ of the slasher film usually constitutes a woman managing to rid herself of a man, rather than uniting with one, is indicative of the different approaches used by two genres working through comparable ideological terrain. As Robin Wood says, looked at ideologically, genres are seldom discrete, but rather “represent different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions”.

Though I don't investigate the parallels much further than this in the thesis, there is more to be said about the relationship between these two 'final' conventions - something I may well attempt here in the future.
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Endings and Beginnings

2011-01-13T07:05:00.000-08:00

Let us take, as a very simple example, the ticking of a clock. We ask what it says: and we agree that it says tick-tock. By this fiction we humanise it. […] Of course, it is we who provide the fictional difference between the two sounds; tick is our sound for a physical beginning, tock our word for an end. […] Within this organisation that which was conceived of as simply successive becomes charged with past and future.

Since the aeon ago that I last wrote an entry here, many things of significance for me and for this blog have taken place.

Back in August, on the day of my last post, the literary critic Frank Kermode passed away. In his seminal book The Sense of an Ending, whose first sentence gave this blog its name, Kermode speaks of the essentially contingent nature of time as seen in its true form: chronos – successive, passing time, unordered and unmeaning. This kind of time he contrasts with kairos: time as experienced in narratives, “filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relationship to the end”. “Normally we associate ‘reality’ with chronos,” he goes on, and “in every plot there is an escape from chronicity, and so, in some measure, a deviation from this norm of ‘reality’”. Because, says Kermode, we “need to show a marked respect for things as they are”, it is common for us to distrust the apparent neatness of kairos – an impulse he suggests lies behind many modern authors’ flights from conventional plotting.

Despite such skepticism, however, there will always remain a fundamental need to temper the arbitrary chronos of reality, meaning that the human mind is unavoidably destined to “make considerable imaginative investments in coherent patterns which, by the provision of an end, make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle”. Thus craving “organisation that humanises time by giving it form”, argues Kermode, “we make up adventures, invent and ascribe the significance of temporal concords to those ‘privileged moments’ to which we alone award prestige”.

A week ago today I submitted my PhD thesis, ‘The Final Couple: Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema’. I have been thinking about the subject of endings on and off since at least 2004, when I began writing my undergraduate dissertation, and I now find that this task is finally over; for now. I applied the last full-stop to my conclusion on Christmas Eve, an hour-glass Advent having provided me with an artificial, but bracingly blunt, countdown.

There is nothing objectively significant about the fact that I completed this project in the year which saw the death of a man who had exerted so much influence upon my thinking. I never met Kermode and, while his writing has been important to me, my familiarity with his body of work barely extends beyond The Sense of an Ending itself. Nevertheless, I was saddened by the passing of a mind that had expressed many ideas which, almost forty years later, would become so key to the workings of mine. Furthermore, I could not help but be struck by what is, in point of fact, no more than the most unimportant of coincidences. “What human need can be more profound,” asks Kermode, “than to humanise the common death?”

So: a finished thesis; a finished year; a finished life – all, to greatly differing degrees, offering “fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems”.

A central plank of my understanding of happy endings is that they are simultaneously beginnings, containing specific promises of continuation – provisions for the future. The span since my last post has also been rife with personal beginnings, origins. I have moved from one town to another. I have seen my first article appear in print, in The Hitchcock Annual. I also had my first piece published in a book – an edited collection called Happy Endings and Films that grew from a conference on this subject held at the University of Caen Basse-Normandie in 2009. Equally, the completion of my thesis marks the start of the next stage of my career – a beginning which, given the current crisis in higher education (caused in part by another "privileged moment", the replacement of one government by another), points towards a very uncertain future indeed.

To invoke one of the most common ways in which we use temporal concords to “make up adventures”, the New Year’s Resolution: one of my plans for meeting this future is to return to this blog. I intend to use it to share some writings which did not ultimately make it into the thesis; I plan to make more public the work I have had published elsewhere; I aspire to be less precious about new pieces aired here, allowing myself to vent half-thought concepts, moments of transitional thinking, which will hopefully in turn lead to more frequent posting.

In short, I plan to return, with a renewed vigour provided by one particularly striking ending, to what Kermode called “the lesser feat”.
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On the greatness of Tommy Wiseau's The Room

2010-08-17T07:41:00.001-07:00

“You must be kidding, underwear – I got the picture!”

The Room is a celebrated cult phenomenon (the latest in a long line of movies dubbed the ‘worst ever’) and, as such, has unsurprisingly spawned a great deal of discussion. I want to take a slightly different approach to it than many, however. Rather than focussing on a run-down of its countless dreadful pleasures or the participatory culture that has sprung up around it, I want to look in detail at one short sequence to try to explain something of how it works, and what this can tell us about the film as a whole. I have a few reasons for doing this.

Firstly: although one of the great things about the kind of cult fandom The Room has attracted is that it encourages a focus on details (The spoons! The football!), I haven’t read many accounts of the movie that try to discuss how these details add up to form patterns of (wonderfully absurd) meaning within sequences or the film as a whole. Secondly, one thing I find slightly offputting about fan screenings of the film is that they tend to fetishise these marvellous individual details to the point where noticing them (and yelling out the traditional responses to indicate that they have been noticed) drowns out any sense of the peculiarly unorganically-organic flow of their scenes, and of the movie more generally. The extreme oddness of how The Room’s scenes feel as scenes (not merely as successions of quirks) is one of the things that makes the film so brilliant, and I think a close analysis should allow me to capture some of the feeling of this.

Finally, I want to look at The Room in this way partly simply to reward it for being the extraordinarily entertaining and fascinating thing that it is. In her excellent blog entry about teaching the film to students, Amanda Ann Klein suggests that watching ‘bad’ films like this one “makes us feel better about ourselves”, arguing that “when we watch The Room and mock it we are essentially saying ‘I am better than this. I am superior to this’.” There is doubtless an element of truth to this: the very act of enjoying something for its ‘failings’ does necessarily involve a kind of assumption about one’s own superiority. Yet a part of me also wants to resist this characterisation of my relationship to the film. I can honestly say that I deeply love this movie in no less a sense than I deeply love, say, Vertigo (which, incidentally, as another San Francisco-set tale of romantic obsession, has its parallels in The Room: the two even share some locations!). The nature of this love is certainly different, but it is no less real. This is an important point to make about cult pleasure in general. As with Trapped in the Closet, I value The Room not because it is ‘bad’, but because it is ‘bad’ in very special and very strange ways – ways that are unique to it alone, and which, even after multiple viewings, I still can’t quite master. In order to feel superior to something one must first feel one understands it; I am far from being able to say this of The Room. Close analysis is a way for a critic to show that s/he is not above a film, passing judgment from on high, but rather wants to live up to it by briefly existing within it, exploring its intricate workings, honouring it with time and attention. For me, The Room most certainly deserves such treatment.

So – to begin.

Some context: the film tells the story of Johnny (Tommy Wiseau - also the writer and director) and the way in which his life unravels after discovering that his fiancé (or, as she is only ever called, “future wife”), Lisa (Juliette Daniel), is cheating on him with his best friend, Mark (Gregg Sestero). From this basic set-up Wiseau is able to weave a rich tapestry of confusing secondary characters, sub-plots, and superfluous scenes; I want to look in detail at one of these scenes. It’s approximately two minutes long, and is based around Johnny’s friend Mike (Mike Homes) recounting to Johnny something we saw in an earlier scene about fifteen minutes previously – specifically: that (a) he and his girlfriend were caught almost in flagrante by Lisa’s mother (Carolyn Minnott), (b) they left quickly, only for Mike to realise that he had left behind his underwear, upon which he (c) embarrassedly returned to retrieve it. It is a scene whose many glorious mysteries I have (despite the grandiloquence of my build-up and the length of what follows!) only begun to unravel. You can watch it below.

Let’s break our consideration of this scene down into a few parts. First:

Redundancy

The first thing to say about the scene is that it is entirely redundant to the plot. This is also partly why it can stand as a beautifully representative moment of the film, since excessive narrative redundancy is one of The Room’s defining and most endearing characteristics. This scene, however, is not merely redundant in the way that, say, Denny’s dramatic encounter with a drug dealer is (which, like Claudette’s revelation that “I definitely have breast cancer”, establishes a major sub-plot that is never to be revisited) – no: this scene takes redundancy to the next level by existing solely in order that we may be retold of something which we have already witnessed: Mike’s “underwear issue”. To pile inconsequence upon yet further inconsequence, the original event to which the anecdote refers was itself wholly surplus to narrative requirement, a moment of ‘comic relief’ whose relevance we have already likely had cause to wonder at. Indeed, since Mike takes part in no other significant action throughout the entire film, the whole reason for his character existing – as difficult as this is to countenance – seems to be solely to take part in the original incident, and then tell us about it again.

As such, one of the most magnificent things about the sequence is that it forces us to grapple with the question of why, in a film so prepared to summarily drop what in any other movie would be major plot points, are we being subjected to such a lengthy reminder of something this meaningless? Our bewilderment is only heightened as the scene continues: we are already initially surprised when Mike begins to tell Johnny about the incident, and grow moreso the longer he goes on (“Go on, I’m listening,” urges Johnny, and later, “Tell me more…”); then, when Denny enters the discussion continues, our surprise now heightening to become incredulity; finally Mark arrives and the characters are, somehow, still talking about Mike’s underwear. By this point our inner Aristotlean, who craves order and motivation in our art, is screaming, “NO! NO!! NOOOO!!!” while at the same time the mischievous part of us that desires precisely this kind of assault on storytelling logic – the part that deeply loves The Room – is satisfyingly murmuring, “Yes, oh yes, OH MY, YES…”

So why is this scene in the movie? One answer seems to be that it is an attempt to show day-to-day life, and, as such, needs to be understood in the context of the way in which The Room constantly seeks – and spectacularly fails – to achieve a sense of naturalism.

Naturalism and performance style

On one level the scene is clearly meant to be a demonstration of the minutiae of everyday life, which here consists of friends chatting about the funny things that have happened to them lately, and – crucially – a casual catch-and-throw football session. This activity famously crops up an awful lot in The Room (leading to the ubiquity of American footballs at fan screenings). Indeed, throwing a football around seems intended by Wiseau to almost be a basic signifier of ‘normality’: this is, the film suggests, simply what men do when they get together. Unfortunately (by which I of course mean fortunately), two things significantly scupper this sense. Firstly, there is the fact that it happens quite so emphatically often, thus highlighting the extent to which it is being used as a flashing sign that reads “This Is Usual, This Is Real Life – You Probably Do This Too”. Secondly, there is the notorious tininess of the distances that the ball is always being thrown, which draws attention to the fact that the action’s other function is to serve as a strikingly strange answer to the perennial question faced by film directors: what should characters be doing whilst talking? (The games of catch don’t just accompany throwaway ‘comic’ sequences like this: at other points it also goes hand-in-hand with serious heart-to-hearts.) First and foremost, the characters need to be close to each other when throwing a ball so that dialogue can take place; the resulting oddness is merely a brilliant side-effect.

What the attempted naturalism also causes is an awkwardness brought on by what appears to be the extensive improvisation going on in the scene, leading to odd, mis-chosen words and phrases. For example: Mike setting up his story by saying “I’ve got a little bit of a – a tragedy on my hands…”; the bizarre wonderfulness of “me underwears” (that strange mis-hitting of casualness again); Mark’s weird questioning, “Underwear? What’s that? Underwear, man…?”, and so on. Of course, what makes all this quite so peculiar is the clash with the extreme un-naturalism of everything surrounding such statements. It would be difficult to find many melodramas that fail harder than The Room does at convincing us that they are presenting a credible world, yet here its actors are, visibly straining to replicate the messiness of real-life conversation. Maybe in another film, with other actors, lines like “I don’t study like that” / “He doesn’t” might convey the awkwardness of speech, but here they convey the awkwardness of Tommy Wiseau’s unique conception of filmed drama. If it has not been felt already, the unbridgeable gulf between these two modes – ‘naturalism’ and whatever it is that The Room offers – comes crashing spectacularly and deliriously into focus when Mark somehow manages to send Mike flying into the trash can, supposedly causing him to be hurt badly enough for someone to ask whether he needs a doctor.

Ending scenes

Speaking of the ‘accident’, this needs to be seen in relation to the great difficulty The Room has with ending its scenes. Apparently completely unwilling to indulge in (or perhaps functionally unaware of) the accepted convention of cutting away from a scene which has run its course, Wiseau instead seems to feel the need to have characters exit the space where a scene has taken place. As well as the ubiquitous “Oh, hi!” which will often begin sequences, “I gotta go” is one of the most repeated phrases of the movie (as this montage makes clear). It is almost as if Wiseau is afraid that the viewer will be confused unless s/he has been explicitly told scenes have begun and finished. Occasionally, as in this scene (as well as in another entirely extraneous football-throwing-gone-awry sequence) Wiseau even resorts to an act of unexpected violence to bring the action to a close. These mini climaxes come at the expense of earthly motivation, and have precisely the opposite effect to the one intended: far from providing closure for the scenes they belong to, such moments open up whole new sets of questions – “For what conceivable reason did that just happen?” being chief among them. (The confusion is even more extreme here because of the shift in tone caused by the music, which changes in the final seconds from the comic oompah-pah that helpfully underlined the joviality of the football-throwing, into the dark, moody strings that accompany Mike’s treacherous tumble. How seriously are we being encouraged to take this injury?)

The wonderfulness of Johnny

So why does this ‘accident’ take place? One answer comes in the scene’s final moments. “Mike, listen,” says Johnny as he helps his friend up from the floor, “if you need anything call me – anytime, alright?” With this it becomes clear that this moment is another of many in the film which serve to reinforce quite what an outstandingly great guy Johnny is. Mike needs to be hurt, in part, so that Johnny can show him compassion. The same thing motivates the whole discussion of the underwear: it is Johnny’s desire to be a good friend that prompts Mike to keep talking (“I’m listening…”), as well as Tommy’s exclamation “That’s life,” which is delivered with a mysterious and undue emphasis on the word “life”, transforming throwaway platitude into wistful philosophical observation. (In retrospect it might remind us of his later pained cry to Lisa, “Do you understand LIFE? DO you?!” Clearly Johnny does understand life only too well, and knows that it sadly necessarily consists of such things as underwear “tragedies”.)

One the most fundamental pleasures of The Room is the way in which it unsuccessfully tries to be a bizarre paean from Wiseau to himself, presenting him as a great and loving man who becomes the undeserving victim of all around him (“Everybody betrayed me!” is his later anguished exclamation). Yet, as this scene shows, his character’s goodness is often expressed in ways that are by turns unimpressively conventional (buying Lisa red roses and calling her his “princess”), awkwardly expressed (being a good customer and kind to animals, always being interested in friends’ problems), and deeply weird (sort-of adopting a teenage boy [Denny], letting friends [like Mike] use his apartment for sex). The ultimate result of this is that the film comes to feel like a parody of the masculinist narcissism that lies at the heart of its conscious project, exposing the fact that this troubling ideology is troubling, and opening it to ridicule. This is one of the many things that contributes to making The Room not just a ‘failure’ but a fascinating “passionate failure” (one of Sontag’s descriptions of camp). Wiseau has poured his heart and soul into this fevered tribute to himself, and it is a mark of his specialness as an artist that his heart and soul can produce a tribute that ended up feeling this consistently baffling, and this unintentionally self-critical. I do not say this ironically.

Intention and the greatness of Wiseau

As I have suggested before, trying to work out a filmmaker’s intentions is a very important part of the process of cult pleasure; but the matter doesn’t stop there. We certainly need to assume that Wiseau was not intending to make a self-parodic comedy in order to laugh at The Room in the way that we do, but appreciating the film for reasons other than those intended does not necessarily mean that we should automatically call Wiseau a ‘bad’ artist. Although the wholesale removal of the ‘intentional fallacy’ from our critical appreciation of art can certainly go too far (causing us to forget that artworks are indeed made up of a series of decisions) we are nevertheless surely long past the point at which we consider greatness to reside wholly in an artist’s conscious intentions.

To return briefly to Vertigo, my earlier example of a film which I love in a more ‘straightforward’ way: most of my admiration for this film comes from my appreciation for what I take to be Hitchcock’s extreme skill as a filmmaker, but by no means all (ignoring, too, any arguments we might want to make about collaboration). I don't know, for instance, to what extent Vertigo is the product of Hitchcock consciously working through his troubling psychological issues with women, or precisely how aware he was of what a damning critique the film offers of masculine possessiveness and domination – nor, importantly, do I need to know. The film is a great work of art regardless of such matters, and Hitchcock is a great artist for having made it. In order to appreciate The Room as a great work of art, and Wiseau as a great artist for having made it, I admittedly need to disregard the link between greatness and intention to a significantly larger extent than I do in the case of Vertigo. The principle, however, is the same, and the judgment requires me simply to place the two films at different ends of one single, sliding scale – not to use two different scales altogether (say, one scale charting ‘happy accidents’ and their beneficiaries, and another measuring ‘great artworks’ and their creators). As with Hitchcock and Vertigo, whether intentional or not, the endless complexity, fascination and enjoyment that I gain from The Room would, finally, simply not be there were it not for Wiseau - and, while I have no doubt that it will seem to many (perhaps most?!) that I am already giving this film far too much credit, I would maintain that I still haven’t managed to get very far in explaining the beauties of even this scene.

When I am this sure of the hidden treasures a film holds – when I feel a desire this strong to rewatch, discuss and explore – I can’t help but feel that I am in the presence of great art. Those who don't agree are invited either to leave their stupid comments in their pockets, or alternatively write them below.
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Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism

2010-08-05T08:15:00.000-07:00

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Another quick post, this time to announce the launch of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, a freely-accessible online relaunch of the seminal – but recently dormant – British film journal MOVIE, of whose editorial board I am extraordinarily proud to be a member. I am also very happy that Issue 1 features a piece by me (my first published peer-reviewed article, in fact!) – an essay on the concept of ‘quirky’ in American indie cinema. The journal will be published bi-annually, and will aim to continue MOVIE’s tradition of providing a forum for perceptive analyses of film and television grounded in close textual criticism.

Speaking personally, it is especially pleasing that the journal is being provided in an ‘open access’ format (rather than by paid subscription) since this ensures its availability not only to film scholars and students, but also to the interested general reader. One of MOVIE’s many great strengths – and something that always set it apart from most of its peers – was its commitment to remaining accessible to a non-academic readership even after the development of Film Studies as a discipline. Blogs and free journals now provide the opportunity for the resurrection of a critical terrain that sits somewhere between the poles of academia and journalism – an entirely necessary and desirable space that has for too long been too sparsely populated. It is to be hoped that Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism will be able to play a significant role within this new context, and will once again be valued for promoting a critical practice whose belief in the necessity of detailed textual evidence (not to mention rhetorical elegance) invariably makes it not only nuanced and revealing, but also eminently readable.

With that said – I hope you all enjoy Issue 1!
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Notes on Metamodernism & Glory At Sea

2010-07-28T04:26:00.001-07:00

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Just a quick post to point you in the direction of the new blog Notes on Metamodernism, whose ranks I have recently joined. The blog is dedicated to trying to make various inroads into the question of where arts and culture is headed after the end of postmodernism, suggesting that one productive answer lies in something like a perpetual oscillation between modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony. My first post is about the wonderful short film Glory At Sea (2008).
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A telling chance encounter

2010-04-26T18:53:00.000-07:00

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A brief entry while you’re waiting with baited breath for the promised (and by now almost certainly over-hyped!) post on The Room…

Yesterday I witnessed a comically stark warning against the smug sense of superiority that can sometimes haunt contemporary responses to older cultural objects. On the website College Humor I came across the following hosted video, labelled ‘Misogynistic Coffee Commercial’:

Fair enough: an amusingly/outrageously dated and embarrassing example of a sexist 50s (or early 60s?) impulse to position women as single-mindedly domestic housewives (the discussion with the friend taking place in the kitchen too, of course – no work, or even life outside the home, for this character).

However, imagine my amazement when this video immediately segued (College Humor being a site funded by advertisements) into the following new commercial for Twix:

The irony, I think you’ll agree, is painful. It’s all too easy to reassure ourselves about the supposedly more enlightened era we live in by sneering at the shortcomings of the past, but we should always remain wary of such complacency. In some ways, the contemporary commercial is even more depressing than its older counterpart: not only does it casually treat the very idea of a woman's political commitment as risible, its point of view also places us firmly within the mind of this chauvinist chump, while the coffee ad’s female focus at least allows us a glimpse into some of the anxieties underlying this marriage's sexual economy (that constant threat of “the girls at the office”!).

What's more, this latest ad appears in a cultural moment when received post-PC knowledge routinely tells us that it is now men who are getting unfairly treated by advertising (as claimed by this typically outraged Daily Mail article). This is certainly a complex issue, but, as this chance meeting across the decades reminds us, we are definitely still a long way from being able to consign institutionalised sexism to Folgers’ anachronistic world of black-and-white film stock and high-neck, floral-patterned shirts.
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Apologies...

2010-03-27T05:23:00.000-07:00

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I owe an apology to any readers I may have for the embarrassingly long silence, particularly since it came in the middle of what I promised would be a series of posts. Life – or, rather, doctoral study – has intervened of late. I just wanted to shoot off this quick communiqué to let you all know that I'm still alive, and that I have a number of entries in the pipeline which will start appearing soon. You can expect one on Tommy Wiseau’s incomparable The Room, one trying to come to terms with the inexplicable After Last Season, as well as one assessing some of the significantly more classical pleasures of Gilda.
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“Crazier than a fish with titties”: Naïve and deliberate cult in Trapped in the Closet

2010-01-26T16:28:00.000-08:00

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[This is part two of a series of posts on and around the idea of cult pleasure; part one is here.]

Trapped in the Closet is the name collectively given to a bizarre (to put it mildly) series of music videos created by and starring the R & B lothario R. Kelly. It began life as a cycle of songs which together told a slowly unfolding story, divided into chapters, and featuring the same backing track and sung melody. It was later developed into a 41 minute video called Trapped in the Closet Chapters 1-12, released in the Summer of 2005. The songs and video told the dramatic saga of a group of couples whose lives are gradually revealed to be intertwined by one another’s infidelities. Each chapter ended with a pointed cliffhanger – a surprising revelation intended to keep the viewer eager to know what will happen next. Kelly is both star and narrator of the video, and all other characters are also voiced by him.

The apparently unintentional hilarity of Chapters 1-12 caused the video to quickly become a viral cult hit on the internet. It was widely viewed and shared through the then-newly-created Youtube, blogged about by enthusiasts, screened at sing-along parties, championed by pop culture commentators like Adam and Joe and Charlie Brooker, and repeatedly spoofed (never quite successfully, in my opinion) both by fans, and professionally by Weird Al Yankovich, Jimmy Kimmel, Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, Mad TV, and South Park. In short: its reputation as an enjoyable cult object was clearly very much built around its seeming naïveté and the idea that Kelly didn’t, for the most part, intend the video to be comic.

In 2007, ten more chapters were released on the independent film website IFC.com. The tone of these chapters seemed different, and there was apparently little doubt that Kelly now seemed to be often attempting a broad comic style. I liked them far less.

In this post I will both detail some of the pleasures that make Chapters 1-12 so enjoyable, and also suggest that their lack makes Chapters 13-22 less successful. I will argue too that the cult pleasures afforded by the first group of chapters, and resisted by the second, are deeply tied up with assumptions about authorial intention. As such, I will be claiming that the difficult question of intention can often have a very important role to play in the success or failure of cult pleasure.

The particular kind of cult pleasure I’m concerned with can be linked with Susan Sontag’s famous definition of camp as usually constituting a “failed seriousness”, specifically one marked by “the proper mix of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate and the naïve”. Also relevant is Sontag’s distinction between ‘naïve’ and ‘deliberate’ camp; as she puts it:

Pure camp is always naïve. Camp which knows itself to be camp is usually less satisfying.

These points are important not only because I think we can see Trapped in the Closet as straddling both these forms of camp, but also because of their implicit claim that intention – even if only imaginary – can play a major role in how we respond to cult objects.

Chapters 1-12

Before I get into this, though, you will need to see at least some of Trapped in the Closet for yourself, if you haven’t before, since it is almost impossible to describe to the uninitiated (personally, I would strongly endorse watching the first 12 chapters in full). The moment below comes from Chapter 2, and takes place after Sylvester, played by Kelly, has been found hiding in a closet by the man whose wife he slept with the night before.

This scene is fairly representative of the tone of the first batch of chapters: although the action is over-dramatic, there are no overt gags, and emphasis seems to generally be firmly placed upon trying to convey the emotions of the characters. By and large, chapters 1-12 are are played, as we might say, with a straight face. For one thing, the acting is relatively naturalistic throughout: indeed, one of the incredible things about the first half is that the actors actually manage to look rather convincing whilst ‘speaking’ Kelly’s words - as if their characters were merely talking normally and believably, but their real-life soundtrack has for some reason been dubbed over with a melodramatic R & B track that is synchronised perfectly to their words. There is little mugging, little over-the-top comic physicality, and little campy caricature.

Secondly, there are very few 'gags', and when jokes are made, they tend to be jokes shared between characters in the world of the fiction, which are then laughed about. The fact that these jokes aren’t funny, yet the characters think they are, is actually one of the sources of pleasure of the first half. For example, Kelly and his wife fall about laughing when he adds that, on top of a whole list of other traumas he’s experienced that day, he was also given a speeding ticket:

"Baby, first of all: I got a hangover, been trapped in a closet, slept with who-knows, threatened to kill a pastor..."/ She says "What?!"/ "Baby this is no lie: he had a lover, turns out to be a gay guy!"/ She says "Damn, you've been through a lot of shit..."/"Plus I got a ticket!"

Finally, the story itself is relatively naturalistic: it takes place mainly in domestic spaces, involves conventional themes of family drama like adultery and marital jealousy, and – although full of surprises and excessively violence-prone characters – stays just about within the bounds of believable fiction.

Overall, its intention seems primarily to be to tell an engaging, surprising story, full of twists and turns – not to mock the telling of that story. Although the infamous appearance of a midget hiding in a cabinet in Chapter 10 stretches plausibility, and is certainly intended to be funny and shocking, we have to ask for what reason he is supposed to be funny.

'Big Man' isn’t intended, I don’t think, as a device that shatters the illusion that what we are seeing is a believable drama – though this, coupled with a hysterically un-PC laugh of disbelief, is precisely his effect. His appearance doesn’t seem to be in quotation marks; instead he seems meant to be surprising first and comic second – and this comedy, far from seeming ironic or self-conscious about its offensiveness, instead feels raucous and excitable. This plot development is, I think, intended to be ‘crazy’ in the sense of ‘wild’ or ‘unforeseeable’ rather than ‘insane’ – or, put another way: it is meant to make us think that it is the characters’ situation, rather than the film we’re watching, that is crazy.

Chapters 13-22

Now let's look at a quick clip from Chapter 13, the first chapter of the second crop, in which Kelly is now playing both Sylvester and the previously unseen character of an elderly husband, Randolph. (Note: the clip is preceded by a framing device that I'll be addressing in a moment).

The contrast with the first clip is, I think, obvious: we now have Kelly wearing an abundantly fake belly, and a beard that seems to almost fall off; we have the use of exaggerated voices and physical comedy; we have pauses in the dialogue being used for comic effect; we have the sometimes almost surreal comedy dialogue; furthermore, the whole scene with Rosie and Randolph is almost entirely irrelevant to the plot, so can be seen mainly as an independent comic set-piece.

Admittedly, this scene is a relatively extreme example of the kind of comedy in the second lot of chapters; but, in Chapters 1-12, even where overt comedy exists – and it does exist – it is nowhere as broad as it is here; by contrast, recognisably comic details such as those I just outlined are inserted continually throughout Chapters 13-22.

The second batch of chapters takes the raucousness that appeared so late in the first (with the midget) and runs with it. We now meet aggressively over-the-top characters (like the one Kelly plays here), wishing birds would shit on their wive’s faces, and a stuttering, massively caricatured, pimp (also played by Kelly) who vows to never stop “p-p-p-pimpin’ all these hoes”. We have other highly stylised characters too, like a fat Sicilian mob boss eating a giant plate of pasta, a James-Brown-in-Blues-Brothers-esque preacher, and a gold-toothed ‘gangsta’ named Streets.

As these characters suggest, the plot too becomes far less naturalistic, taking in mob movies, urban 'gangsta' pictures, and even film noir – each of which are pastiched for all their genres are worth. Also, while the story of the first half was, for all its inspired madness, actually very tight and focused, the second half constantly diverges from its main plot for unconnected comic set pieces like Rosie and Randolph’s or Pimp Lucious's.

Finally, the music and lyrics themselves are often used for clearly comic effect, the beat sometimes cutting out at moments to add to comic timing, and the 'dialogue' now containing lines like “You must be crazier than a fish with titties if you think I’m gonna let you smoke that shit up in my car...!”

There were a number of reasons why these new chapters disappointed much of Trapped’s cult fan base, myself included, but an important one was the sense that much of it had been created with comic intent due to the cult appreciation of the first chapters. In short, it seemed to be attempting to create ‘deliberate cult’. Speaking as a fan, I wasn’t disappointed because the comedy of the second half somehow suggested that the first half was also intended as comedy – I was disappointed that this intentional comedy wasn’t nearly as entertaining as the apparently unintentional comedy of the first 12 chapters. Kelly seemed to have tried to give us what he thought we wanted, but instead made Trapped into a parody of itself.

Intention

However, following the release of Chapters 13-22, a number of journalists began suggesting that Kelly had always intended the series to be intentional parody, and that those cult fans who believed it to be unintentionally funny were (a) missing the point, and (b) merely expressing a condescendingly superior attitude. The fact that the second batch of chapters were released on IFC.com, and that each was preceded by an interview between Kelly and a white, bespectacled, 20-something host, also made commentators uncomfortable – some essentially accusing those who wished to see the video as naïve of a veiled form of racism being practiced by, as one writer put it, “silver-spoon hipsters”.

One of the arguments used to back up this view is that Kelly is known, within the R & B community, as an artist who does sometimes use humour as a tool within his music – something that might not be known by many fans of Trapped who weren’t previously R & B fans. Another is that, at least in the second batch of chapters, it often seems as if Kelly is trying to ape the style of what’s sometimes known as 'chitlin’ circuit' theatre: a style of broad comic theatre, created mainly by and for African Americans, which often uses instantly recognisable archetypal characters and an exaggeratedly comic performance style.

These debates are clearly centred around the question of intention. It has often been argued that it doesn’t matter what the intention behind a work is – or, equally, that we can never know it for certain, so it’s meaningless to debate it. Discussions of authorial intention have become increasingly unfashionable within the academic study of the humanities ever since the publication of ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ in 1946, and the concept has received more and more apparently deadly blows over the last forty years, from Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ to postmodernism’s challenges to the very concept of coherent textual meaning. Nevertheless, I think that there are still many contexts in which the issue of intention can still be seen to be relevant – if never simple – and one of these is in the area of cult.

I say this because it is very common indeed for a film to achieve cult status through the reception of fans who see their appreciation of the film as being opposed to, or in some sense other than, the work’s original intentions. In the introduction to their Cult Film Reader, Ernest Mathius and Xavier Mendick write that

Traditional fandom remains largely respectful to a film’s interpretive integrity, but other ways of commitment involve challenges to its interpretation, either by robbing it of its meaning, or replacing it with one that may counter its intentions.

While this talk of challenges to interpretive integrity has the ring of a reader-response criticism and the rejection of singular textual meaning, it also in an important sense assumes that we can know – or presume to know – what the authorial intention of a work is in the first place.

I must confess that I’m not an expert on cult theory, but it seems to me from the research I’ve done that the issue of intention may be an under-explored area in cult studies. I say this because, speaking as a ‘fan-critic’ (to use I. Q. Hunter’s term), it is important for me – as it is for other fans of Trapped in the Closet – to be able to see Kelly as 'naïve' in order for the cult pleasure I gain from chapters 1-12 to feel valid.

Seeing Kelly as 'naive' means, for one thing, that I can construct an image of him as a fascinating and rampant egoist based on the evidence of Trapped. He wrote, produced, co-directed, sings, and stars in the video, giving him Ed Wood-level of creative control, and thus potential self-absorption. On top of this there is the fact that in chapters 1-12 he appears not merely as one character, but two: the main protagonist, Sylvester (which is, incidentally, Kelly’s middle name) and the story’s nameless narrator who comments on the action from chapter 8 onwards. Combine with these factors the film’s main conceit, that he also sings every other character’s part too, and Trapped thus consists of one R. Kelly relating to us a narrative in which another R. Kelly comments of the actions of a third R. Kelly, who is constantly having arguments with characters who all sing with the voice of R. Kelly. One seeming byproduct of this is that he seems to become confused by all this himself at times, since he will sometimes refer to his protagonist in the third person, as Sylvester, and sometimes in the first person, as “Me”.

It’s also important that I see Kelly as 'naïve' for Trapped to appear to be, as Sontag puts it, a “passionate failure”. In the commentary, Kelly tells us that, the more he delved into the story and its themes, the more he realised how profound they are – how we are all, in a sense, trapped in closets, and that there exists, in his words, “this global closet thing…” Such vague delusions of grandeur seem unbelievable and instantly comical; they also, however make me love the man a little too. In much the same way as, say, Glen or Glenda’s confessional nature makes it into a strangely moving experience, so does Trapped in the Closet’s apparent basis in an attempt to say something meaningful make it seem charmingly, touchingly, bad.

It's particularly vital for my appreciation of chapters 1-12 that I am able to assume that its plot is not calculatedly ridiculous, but that it relies upon a mesmerizingly child-like conception of storytelling, character-motivation and tone - one that values surprise over cause-and-effect, and action over traditional forms of plausibility. It’s important that I am able to conclude that drama in Kelly’s mind appears to be synonymous with potential danger, and that, in order to achieve potential danger, he must create characters who are unimaginably highly-strung, constantly on the edge of launching into violent frenzy, and who perennially own and carry weapons. The first example of this bizarre narrative tendency comes at the end of the very first Chapter, when Kelly is about to be discovered hiding in the closet: his immediate reaction is to “pull my Beretta out”. At this point we didn’t yet know that he even had a Beretta, let alone can we see why it should be appropriate to instinctively brandish it now. This continues to happen throughout, usually at hilariously unnecessary moments: when Sylvester learns that Rufus is gay, when James thinks he hears Gwendolyn crying, when Sylvester hears an apparently inoffensive knock at his front door, and so on, and so on…

Even more than this, it's important that I am able to assume that the chain of events in 1-12 shows that Kelly has never thought particularly hard about how to tell a story that flows in conventional narrative terms - or is even physically possible. There are numerous instances that seem to display a bizarre grasp of storytelling basics, containing many incidents that are simply impossibilities (such as a policeman flashing down Kelly from behind when it later transpires that he must just have come from the direction Kelly is driving), or unfeasible, such as Bridget’s decision to call a random telephone number she found in her husband’s pocket at a moment of crisis.

Being trapped in a world that operates in this bizarre way – a way that suggests not mere bad writing, but rather an entirely different conception of our world’s logic – is addictive, intriguing, and thrilling. One of the main things that makes chapters 1-12 so fascinating is that they seem to be not just another example of something that is so-bad-it’s-good: rather the specific ways in which they seem to be ‘bad’ are so peculiar, so unique, and so baffling, that they practically require judgment by a whole new set of criteria. As a fan, I have put a lot of stock in the idea that this must be because it is the brainchild of a man whose mind works in a very different way to the kind of person who we usually find telling stories. This seems to be a man who doesn’t consider the very concept of a 41 minute hip-hopera voiced entirely by one person a funny concept, but does think that calling a decrepit, spatula-weilding old woman “a G, no doubt” is hilarious. It is important that Kelly’s mind appears to be a twilight zone – one that it is infinitely entertaining to feel one is getting a glimpse into.

So have I just had my elitist, condescending cult fun stopped and am petulantly aggrieved? Have the new chapters simply made plain what was always there – an essentially spoof-like nature – and I just don’t want to admit this fact? Because of the huge cult pleasure I’ve derived from the first 12 chapters, I have a great deal emotionally and intellectually invested in answering No, since this would not only irretrievably alter the way in which I’m able to enjoy chapters 1-12, but would also suggest that my original pleasure was not only misguided, but also rather arrogant and distasteful.

I also, however, genuinely believe that this isn’t the case, and that I can demonstrate this by pointing to things such as Kelly’s director’s commentary, in which he talks about the “intensity” and “realism” of the video far more than its comedy – and when he does discuss comedy, he’s usually claiming that he had to lighten the mood with a comic set-piece because we’ve just undergone a particularly "intense" series of scenes.

More important for my broader argument, though, is the very fact that I feel I need to convince you of this at all. This is because whether Trapped is an instance of naïve or deliberate camp makes a huge difference both to the ways in which I can value it, and to the validity of that judgment. I want to be able to treat it as naïve camp because I gain so much pleasure, fascination, and excitement from understanding that its brilliance is at least partly accidental. I appreciate the idea that it is akin to the poignant unintentional camp of Ed Wood much more than the notion that it’s a lesser version of the intentional camp of, say, John Waters – to which it has also been compared. If the latter were the case, I wouldn’t be able to love it nearly as much as I do (and camp taste is always, as Sontag says, “a kind of love”). Equally, if I am mistaking a work of deliberate camp for naïve camp then that opens me up to accusations of, not just critical narrowness, but cultural insensitivity – or even racial prejudice. I strongly believe I’m not making this mistake, but it’s nevertheless important that I have been forced to address the possibility that I could be.

I believe that it is sometimes imperative to try to deduce the intentions of a work – if not necessarily the intention of the author, then at least what Umberto Eco called the “intention of the text”. As Eco warns us in The Limits of Interpretation, even if we admit that texts are open to multiple readings – as we must – we must simultaneously acknowledge that these potential readings aren’t unbounded, and we can’t make a text mean simply anything. We can at the very least often see what kinds of meanings a text discourages; for example, it would be rather meaningless to argue that, say, Double Indemnity is a musical, or that Singin’ in the Rain is a film noir, because we can plainly judge that their intentions are unconcerned with these genres. This is a caricatured example, but it illustrates that we are in fact making assumptions about intention in different ways and on different levels all the time. Whether it’s possible to ever come to a definitive conclusion in a particular case or not, attempting to do so is sometimes inescapable, since confronting intention is often an important, indeed necessary, part of the process of cult pleasure.
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Thoughts on cult pleasure

2010-01-25T18:15:00.000-08:00

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This will be the first of a series of entries on and around the idea of cult pleasure. As an earlier post about the brilliance of an incidental element of Twilight: New Moon may have hinted, I am someone who is periodically drawn to a kind of film appreciation that could be called cult – specifically: I occasionally praise the joys of the perplexingly terrible, the thrillingly awful. My desire to write about this subject comes, in one sense, simply from the fact that I feel a need to share my deep enthusiasm for a few things that most people would likely agree are ‘bad’. Another reason, however, is that I find cult pleasure a fascinating phenomenon in itself, and believe it has the potential to encourage film criticism to address a number of important issues. For instance…

Evaluation

Value is too often the unacknowledged spectre at the film studies feast. Regularly functioning implicitly (sometimes seemingly unconsciously) rather than being openly engaged with, the question of artistic value will often be ignored in favour of a supposedly more ‘objective’ tone. Yet, try as we might, we can – of course – never wholly avoid it. One benefit of the kind of cult pleasure I’m concerned with is that it manages to place evaluation front and centre, demanding we address and interrogate the concept. Firstly, if we are calling something ‘bad’ then we immediately face the responsibility of justifying why: for whom? according to what criteria? Secondly, if we then wish to claim that something is pleasurable (or interesting, or valuable) despite being ‘bad’, our reassessment will be based around matters that were clearly not taken into account by the original evaluation. Given that cults are by definition grounded in taste communities, they also require that we acknowledge the irreducibly personal (and indeed social) nature of value. This leads me on to another issue...

Passion

Although it would hypothetically be possible to write about a cult object which you yourself didn’t share in the cult of, I would imagine that it would be both rather difficult and rather tedious. Given this, cult pleasure has the power to inject passion and love into the critical act – particularly since the pleasure of the so-bad-it’s-good also seems absolutely to require explanation and elaboration. In the same way as cult fans construct communities in order to share their passion with like-minded people, so can cult pleasure push the critic to be similarly generous.

Intention

Finally, another supposedly hoary critical concept with the potential to be revitalised by thinking about cult pleasure is artistic intention – a concept that has been unfashionable in the academic discussion of the arts for around half a century. While the idea of gay audiences reappropriating Rock Hudson movies or college students getting stoned in front of anti-drug morality tales may seem to fly the flag for the instability of textual meaning, what such cult appreciation also quite obviously presupposes is that we can accurately gauge the original intention of these films. This should by rights make us revisit this most fundamental – and, again, largely ignored – issue for criticism: to what extent can we presume to prove or infer intention, given that we clearly and necessarily do so regularly?

Over the next week or two I will be trying to probe some of these questions and issues. I should say that I’m choosing to do this now since, coming up, I’m scheduled to attend screenings of two of my own favourite pieces of cult phenomena: The Room and After Last Season. My next post, though, will be about R. Kelly’s infamous Trapped in the Closet, so for now I will simply leave you with a clip from this masterpiece of absurdity. Enjoy.

Kreativ Blogger Award!

2010-01-19T17:59:00.000-08:00

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I’m extremely flattered that Catherine Grant at Film Studies For Free has thought of me for this award. While I usually share her skepticism of most things resembling a 'chain letter', who can be expected to turn down such an ego boost!?

As such, in accordance with the rules (as laid out on Catherine's blog), here are seven (vaguely film-related) facts about me:

1. I am in the final year of my PhD at the University of Warwick. My thesis is on the Hollywood ‘happy ending’. (Could this blog be a procrastination technique? Surely not...)

2. In 2002 I made a pilgrimage to the bowling alley in Buffalo where a key sequence of Buffalo ’66 was shot. I bowled on the lane Vincent Gallo plays on in the film.

3. I am on the editorial board of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, a new, freely-accessible online incarnation of the journal Movie, which will be going live soon.

4. At age 16 I made a mockumentary called The Blair Witch Project Project. It was about me and a friend going to see The Blair Witch Project at the cinema on Halloween, venturing into a local park in order to scare ourselves, and, in the process, losing our camera. It was hilarious.

5. I currently live in a flat whose previous tenant was Gemma Arterton. I so badly want her to make a film I admire so I can be more proud to be occasionally receiving her mail.

6. In 2003 I travelled to Bruges specifically to see the directorial debut of the lead singer of what was at the time my favourite band (the Belgian group dEUS). The film (Any Way the Wind Blows) was in Flemish, without subtitles, and didn’t appear to be particularly good.

7. I recently covered (and combined) ‘You Give a Little Love’ from Bugsy Malone and the main theme from Jurassic Park for a friend’s wedding.

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And now, the seven blogs I am in turn nominating (none of whom, I’m sure, needs my championing):

1. James Zborowski’s wide-ranging and penetrating Between Sympathy and Detachment.

2. Jeffrey Sconce’s always thoughtful and often hilarious Ludic Despair.

3. The prolific and gorgeously presented Precious Bodily Fluids.

4. David Lowery’s Drifting, in part a companion to his beautiful movies.

5. Dave Kehr, whose comments section hosts some of the most extended and stimulating film discussion on the net.

6. The Enemies of Reason, for its scabrously funny critiques of the British press.

7. Amanda Ann Klein’s Judgmental Observer, which makes me want to be taking her courses.
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Stepped Over: John Cazale

2010-01-15T18:09:00.000-08:00

Fredo – well… He’s got a good heart. But he’s weak, and he’s stupid. And this is life and death.

-Michael, The Godfather Part 2

John Cazale has what is probably the most impressive complete resumé in Hollywood history. He appeared in only five films before succumbing to bone cancer at the age of 42; those films, however, were The Godfather, The Godfather Part 2, Dog Day Afternoon, The Deer Hunter, and The Conversation. Whatever one may personally think of them, it is difficult to think of another actor who appeared solely in movies that have been so consistently highly praised; apart from anything, each one was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and three won.

Last year a short documentary called I Knew it was You was made about Cazale’s life and career (watch it here). It features interviews with those one would expect, including Francis Ford Coppola, Robert De Niro, Gene Hackman, Meryl Streep (whom Cazale was dating at the time of his death), and Al Pacino – who claims he learned more about acting from Cazale than from anyone else he has ever worked with. It also features testimonials from a number of younger actors equally eager to praise him for his craft, such as Steve Buscemi, Sam Rockwell, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The overall thrust of the documentary, hinted at in its title, is to suggest how unfair it is that Cazale is not more well known, given his talent and track record. While I certainly agree with this, I would also suggest that it is in a sense unsurprising – and even somehow perhaps sadly fitting – given the roles he played and his films’ treatment of his characters.

In his seminal book Stars, Richard Dyer says that, “Stars… are the direct or indirect reflection of the needs, drives and dreams of American society.” Cazale’s career suggests that this holds both for those figures who are constructed to embody such dreams, and for those who are required to embody their lack or failure. While Cazale was emphatically not a ‘star’ in the conventional sense, this fact is in itself telling in relation to the kinds of roles he played, and holds a special significance for Cazale’s relationship to the kinds of needs and drives Dyer is referring to.

All of the five films John Cazale appeared in during his short career can be seen as indicative of the well-documented sense of malaise that was so observable in certain corners of the post-Vietnam American cinema. They are all films that, in different ways, asked demoralising questions about what it took, and meant, to achieve that form of success so often referred to in mythic terms as ‘The American Dream’. In each film he plays a supporting role to a major Hollywood star which, in pre-Vietnam cinema, could easily have been comic: each has the potential to be the role of the dim-witted friend or side-kick who amuses with his charming ignorance. These, however, were films of the 1970s ‘Hollywood Renaissance’ – films that often attempted to reflect the extent to which Vietnam and had given the U.S. a sense of its own mortality, and the possibility of failure: films in which pursuit of the American Dream was a dangerous, and perhaps doomed, matter of “life and death”. I want to look briefly at how Cazale’s characters are treated in two of these films: The Godfather Part 2 and Dog Day Afternoon. (I should say, if such a warning is needed for these films, that there will be spoilers...)

In both The Godfather Part 2 and Dog Day Afternoon Cazale's characters are continually being undermined, in different ways, by the star of both films, Al Pacino. This happens on the level of plot, but it is also happening consistently stylistically. For instance, one way in which The Godfather Part 2 often communicates Cazale’s inferiority to Pacino is through framing. We can see this, for example, in the scene in which Michael disowns Fredo (watch it here). In the scene’s long shots Fredo is seen sprawled on a recliner along the bottom right-hand side of the frame while Michael towers over him, commanding the eye.

This power relationship is carried over into the scene’s medium shots too, which show Fredo only in high-angles that mean we share a similar view of him to Michael’s: he is being both metaphorically and literally looked down upon.

Similarly, in a previous scene in which Michael is subtly testing Fredo’s loyalty over drinks in an outdoor café in Havana, the shots of Cazale demand that he share the frame with a background of many constantly-moving extras – including, in an especially extreme act of undermining, a wandering band playing “Guantananera”.

Any extras in Pacino’s frame, meanwhile, are seldom and so far away as to be too out-of-focus to be conspicuous.

This ensures that the shots of Cazale are far more cluttered to look at, reducing his visual command within them and generally treating him in a manner that is almost as undignified as the banana dacquiri he is drinking (and which protrudes unfortunately from the bottom of his frame).

The more aesthetically free-wheeling Dog Day Afternoon often communicates the same basic message using camera movement and editing. A recurring visual motif in the film is for Cazale to be given very quick insert shots in scenes in which Pacino is energetically engaging in some classically Pacino-esque histrionics. For example, in the famous “Attica! Attica!” moment Pacino paces outside the bank and whips up the crowd and, more importantly, the camera, into a frenzy (it follows him unblinkingly, handheld and seemingly enthralled by its star), while Cazale, inside, receives one incredibly short, static shot of him craning his neck, trying to see what his showboating partner is up to.

The reason for this one-sided power relationship in both films is that Pacino’s characters represent everything that Cazale’s lack. Firstly, Fredo has to live daily with the fact that, being the eldest living Corleone son, he should be the head of the family but was “stepped over” in favour of Michael because of his inferior smarts. The bane of his life, his stupidity, is continually illustrated throughout the film – an example from the Havana scene being his confusion over the correct Spanish translation of “banana daicquiri”. This of course ultimately culminates in his final, fatal, error of collaborating with Hyman Roth: he is shown not even to be able to betray properly. Similarly, in Dog Day Afternoon Sal’s ignorance is constantly stressed, as in the moment when he announces he wants to fly to refuge in Wyoming because he believes it to be a foreign country.

Secondly, neither Fredo nor Sal is offered as being anywhere near as charismatic or appealing as Michael or Sonny. To begin with, Cazale just does not have the ‘movie star looks’ in the same way Pacino does: with his wiry frame, slightly balding head, and overall sickly-appearance, he is simply not as conventionally attractive as his co-star. This is perhaps most obvious in Dog Day Afternoon, in which Pacino is looking his unkempt, androgynous best.

Regardless of natural beauty, however, Cazale is also made to look especially unappealing through costume. In the café scene in The Godfather Part 2 he wears a rather tacky pink suit, while in the disowning scene his costume is as crumpled and dishevelled as both his conscience and his pose – an old-looking polo shirt and cardigan contrasting pointedly with Pacino’s sharp, formal suit. Whereas Pacino is presented as the classically-handsome, smooth, dark Italian American male, Cazale is suggested to be a long way off such an ideal. This is symptomatic of the status of his characters, but also of Cazale himself and his position as a perennial supporting ‘character actor’ rather than a star: he lacks the look and style (and perhaps the inclination) to be a Pacino – to be successful in that way.

A third trait that Fredo and Sal share is what the films suggest to be a naïve and pitiable religious belief. In Dog Day Afternoon Cazale’s biggest scene is one in which he tells a bank employee that she shouldn’t start smoking because “the body is the temple of the lord” (an admonition he delivers so weakly that he can barely look the woman in the eye).

This suggestion is treated with a similar derision as greeted another pious character’s complaint that those around her should stop swearing because “I’m a Christian and my ears are not garbage cans”. In The Godfather Part 2 Fredo too possesses an almost childlike conception of religion, as we discover near the film’s close when he is teaching Michael’s young son, Anthony, the ways of fishing: the secret, he says, is to say a “Hail Mary” before casting your line. Cazale delivers this advice with such a sincerity that he gives us to understand he truly, deeply believes it (and, indeed, he does go on to say a “Hail Mary” himself out on the lake, seconds before his death).

One knows – to continue the comparison between Cazale and Pacino’s characters – that Michael would not believe the juvenile story of the “Hail Mary” for one second: his success has taught him the necessity of cynicism.

What all this undermining of Cazale’s characters does is set them up as people whom we find pathetic, yet also sympathetic. They are characters we do not admire, but whom we certainly don’t believe deserve to die. However, the film worlds in which Fredo and Sal live are not forgiving ones: these are worlds created by the Hollywood Renaissance cinema, in which the myth of the simpleton overcoming all odds does not exist. Only the strongest, the privileged – the stars – can survive the desolate landscape, and even then they must be arrested, or bankrupt themselves morally, in order to do so. Pacino’s Sonny is momentarily able to live a version of the ‘American Dream’ in Dog Day Afternoon (media adoration, money, power) while Sal stands in the wings, watches, and eventually dies. Equally, Michael is really the epitome of the ‘Dream’ (he has wealth, control, he has bettered himself), and Fredo must be sacrificed in order to maintain it. Both films present a view of an America in which the wounded are not carried: the weak and stupid are left to die.

The attitude of these films doesn’t seem to be that this is good or bad, but simply that it is. The death of Sal at the climax of Dog Day Afternoon does not feel tragic: it feels numbing. We are used to seeing the deserved death of the evil and the heroic death of the good, but not the inevitable, truthful, death of the weak. Fredo’s killing too is dealt with ambiguously, as Robert Johnson says in his book Francis Ford Coppola: “Cazale’s Fredo ends up exasperating us because we come to realize that Michael’s punishment of him is both wrong and, somehow, just”. We do not want him to die, and yet we know – as Michael does – that he must. We know, apart from anything else, that a man who believes all one need do in order to catch a fish is pray to the virgin Mary does not belong in this world (and, perhaps, we simultaneously long for a time and a world in which we didn’t). Cazale in this way is used as a virtual embodiment of the disillusionment of the Hollywood Renaissance, relied upon to show what can happen to the innocent – or ignorant – at a time of “life and death”.

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Twilight: New Moon and the joys of Face Punch

2010-01-11T07:49:00.000-08:00

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There are many potentially interesting things to be said about New Moon and the staggeringly successful vampire-romance saga Twilight more generally. For instance: have we ever seen a romance movie (let alone a romance movie series) more unwaveringly committed to showing a woman who wants so badly to simply jump someone’s bones? Say what you will about the anti-feminist message seemingly inbuilt into Bella’s relentless hero-worship of her lover Edward (and I would argue that last year’s The Time-Traveler’s Wife was far more guilty in this regard: she waits lovingly at home while he tours across the months and years? This is the old settling/wandering, passive/active, division of gender roles written offensively large)... The combination of Twilight’s central premise (Edward’s inability to let himself become too passionate with Bella for fear of killing her) and Kristen Stewart’s absurdly lustful performance style (seldom has an actress bitten her bottom lip more licentiously, nor more frequently) have meant that these films offer images of unremitting (though frustrated) female sexual desire the likes of which are very uncommon in contemporary Hollywood cinema. We can, and should, obviously debate the films’ sexual politics beyond this structuring principle, but this fact alone makes the saga at the very least interesting, and surely goes a long way towards explaining its popularity with a female audience so starved for cinematic depictions of what happens ‘when the woman looks’.

This isn’t what I want to talk about here, however, because – aside from areas of interest like this – what New Moon also happens to contain is something that I simply cannot let pass without comment: perhaps one of the most bizarre, hilarious, and spectacularly ill-judged incarnations of the convention of the film-within-a-film ever committed to celluloid.

Asking what kinds of films exist within the world of a film is often an intriguing way into matters of how a movie views itself and how it is asking to be viewed by us. For example: when, in a horror film, events start happening that clearly resemble other horror films (say, teenagers being killed one by one, or bodies showing up with mysterious bite marks on their necks), one question will immediately be raised: are the characters in this film’s world familiar with horror movies? If they aren’t, then this clearly separates them and their world unambiguously from ours, which in turn encourages us to view them in a different way than we would characters who express incredulity at finding themselves in situations they’ve previously only encountered in fiction. Of course, there aren’t hard-and-fast rules governing this, and a film can exploit cinematic awareness in more or less self-conscious ways. The werewolf movie Ginger Snaps, for instance, briskly acknowledges then dispenses with its character’s film knowledge: Brigitte discovers the popular lore regarding werewolves doesn’t apply to her sister’s lycanthropy, leading her to “forget the Hollywood rules,” and move on to finding different solutions. A film like Scream, on the other hand, repeatedly uses its characters’ knowledge of slasher films in order to first announce, and then either enact or buck, the clichés of its genre – all the time asking us to recognize that this is precisely what it is doing.

New Moon does something very different and very, very strange with the idea of the film-within-a-film. About a third of the way into the movie we reach a scene in the school cafeteria that sees Bella rejoin her group of friends after the period of self-imposed isolation that followed her latest abandonment by her true love, Edward. Happy to see her again, Bella’s friend Mike (who has always very clearly had a crush on her) asks if she would like to go to the cinema with him. “We could check out, um, Love Spelled Backwards is Love,” he offers, “You know, it’s a dumb title, but… It’s a romantic comedy – it’s supposed to be good…” “No – no romance,” says Bella, who wants nothing less than to be reminded about her own romantic heartbreak. “How about Face… Punch?” she asks, “you heard of that?” “Well, that’s an action movie,” responds Mike. “Yeah, it’s perfect – guns, adrenaline: it’s my thing…”

So, let us rewind and pause for a minute. Face Punch. Just let the gloriousness of this made-up title roll around in your head… Face Punch.

Now turning to the rest of her friends at the table, Bella invites them along to what she obviously wants to become less a date than a movie night. “How about it – do you guys want to go see… Face Punch?" The only other boy at the table, Eric, responds positively: “Oh, Face Punch – yeah!” he exclaims enthusiastically, “We were supposed to go see that, you remember?” he asks Mike, “The trailer’s all like ‘pow, pow,’… punch faces…”

In the next scene, Mike stands awkwardly outside the cinema next to Jacob, the most recent dark and mysterious man to make romantic demands of Bella; sexual rivalry is unmistakably in the air. “So… Face Punch,” Jacob says, somewhat derisively, “You like action movies?” “Not really,” replies Mike. “I heard it sucks – bad,” offers Jacob.

Let’s mull over this title again, which the characters insist on continually repeating: this film is called Face Punch.

In the cinema, the characters are now watching the movie. We hear the following dialogue intoned in voices that can only be described as sub-sub-sub-Sylvester Stallone:

Voice 1: Put your gun down!

Voice 2: Put YOUR gun down, or I’m gonna blow your frickin head off!

Voice 3: BOTH of you put BOTH of your guns down or I’m gonna blow BOTH of your frickin’ heads off!

Voice 1: Alright, forget it – let’s DO THIS!

(Sounds of gunshots and explosions fill the cinema.)

Face Punch. This is a truly, truly strange use of the convention of the film-within-a-film. Clearly, this imagined film (and Love Spelled Backwards is Love) is intended as a satirical side-swipe at the crassness of contemporary Hollywood. But what on God’s green earth, you might ask, is such satire doing – and doing so suddenly – in a film like New Moon? In what kind of a film world might films with titles like these exist?

In Film as Film, V. F. Perkins rightly says that a film’s credibility relies upon “the inner consistency of the created world”:

In a context where people are known to burst into song on the tops of trolley-buses, with the full support of invisible orchestras, or sprint down hillsides actively pursued by bouncing boulders, or drag wild leopards up the steps of Connecticut jails (and I would be the last to suggest they cease exhibiting such fine accomplishments), the concept of credibility needs careful definition. As an illusion-spinning medium, film is not bound by the familiar, or the probable, but only by the conceivable. All that matters is to preserve the illusion.

He develops his point with reference to Hitchcock's The Birds:

It is important that we avoid confusing credibility with authenticity... We can make no difficulty about the fact that the feathered kingdom is seen to declare war on humanity. That is given. But it is also given that the attackers are ordinary, familiar birds. Nothing in our experience or in the film's premises permits them to develop intermittent outlines of luminous blue as they swoop, or to propel themselves in a manner that defies the observable laws of winged flight.

In short, as Perkins says, “the created world must obey its own logic”. The title Face Punch punctures the inner consistency of New Moon so fantastically oddly because it flies inelegantly, but gloriously, in the face of its world’s logic in a similar manner to Hitchcock's birds. In the context of the film’s created world, the existence of werewolves is entirely acceptable. The existence of a film called Face Punch is not.

This is because, other than its mythical creatures, there is little to separate New Moon’s universe from ours: in fact, the very normalcy of everyday life is constantly stressed in order to highlight how exceptional and exciting Bella’s initiation into the supernatural realm is (and, it is worth saying, the actors’ performances also feel more consciously ‘naturalistic’ here than in the original Twilight). As such, this world frankly just does not seem at all as if it is one in which a person could write, many other people could make, and many more still could go to see, a film with the title Face Punch. This title is so ridiculous as to absolutely demand a ridiculous reality.

For it to be credible, the world of New Moon would probably need to resemble something like the hilariously dumbed-down future U.S. imagined by Mike Judge’s satire Idiocracy, in which big Oscar contenders have names like Ass, and the number one television show is called Ow! My Balls! Both Idiocracy’s world (an exaggeratedly stupid future) and its genre (absurdist satire) admit these kinds of jokes with ease; those of New Moon – a relatively naturalistic present day placed in the context of a moody teen romance/horror crossover – plainly, obviously, emphatically, do not.

What is perhaps going on here is an appeal to the film’s core audience of young readers/viewers, who (it seems to be assumed) might be flattered by joining in the mockery of a ‘dumb’ mainstream culture they can enjoy feeling superior to. They are, after all, watching a ‘sensitive’ film about doomed love that has already made an appeal to tragic status by quoting Romeo and Juliet (Bella is studying it in school); New Moon, the film seems to be implying, is no Face Punch. Yet this is also, lest we forget, a film featuring gigantic werewolves fighting one another, and moments like Bella complimenting Jacob on how warm his body is by telling him, “You’re like your own sun”. To aim stones at the loopiness of popular culture from within this glass house seems a very risky strategy.

If the film does still want to do this, though, it would need to be done with a modicum more subtlety than Face Punch affords – a gag as smack-you-in-the-face obvious as the very thing it’s parodying. For one thing: this isn’t even a throwaway moment – we’re forced to contend with the troubling concept of Face Punch for a good five minutes of screen time. Equally – and this is particularly difficult to accept – the scene at the cinema serves a number of important narrative functions: that it’s an action film continues Bella’s adrenaline addiction; that she goes with both guys shows her split between ‘normality’ (Mike) and the supernatural underworld (Jacob); that Mike is made queasy by the film reinforces his (and normality’s) unsuitability; that Jacob enjoys it and clashes with Mike develops his aggressive side, and so on. The fact that these narrative developments all rest on the shoulders of something as weird as Face Punch gives the joke far more significance than it could ever hope to withstand: we can’t just laugh and move on – we have to keep thinking about it, asking again and again, “Really? Really…?!”

It somehow makes the whole incident yet more odd that the characters themselves are shown to be aware of how absurd these names are: Mike acknowledges the terribleness of Love Spelled Backwards is Love (honestly, Mike: “dumb” doesn’t even begin to cover it – “unthinkable” would be closer to the mark), and Bella gives an absolutely precious faltering pause in between “Face” and “Punch” the first time she hears herself about to say the words out loud. While this should in theory probably make the titles feel more credible, it actually has virtually the opposite effect, making it instead seem almost as if the characters are either (a) making them up on the spot, (b) suddenly struck by the weirdness of living in a world that could allow such titles to exist, or (c) channeling the embarrassment of the actors who suddenly find themselves in the unenviable position of being contractually obliged to vocalize these names.

However – while we can talk about this little slip of genre/world/register as a failing all we like (and it most assuredly, most unambiguously, is a failing) – I can’t help but feel very happy that Face Punch managed, against all odds of good taste and common sense, to somehow make it into this movie. (That’s another thought: how many people had to give the OK to this little joke in order to ensure it was included in the final draft of the script, rehearsed, shot, and kept in the finished movie?! The mind boggles…) This isn’t just any old failing: this is the kind of magisterially beautiful blunder that can actually enrich our viewing experience with its idiosyncrasy, creating little shocks of indefinable feeling, encouraging the mind to wander in directions it otherwise wouldn’t have done. The value of such failures is that they can’t be explained away or resolved, but rather remain stubbornly, productively confusing. If the film-within-a-film had been called, say, Firefight, New Moon would certainly have felt rather more coherent, but it would also have missed this golden opportunity for such confounding, disorientating, delicious oddness. As a fan of cinema that has the power to surprise me and make me consider matters important to the medium, I can finally only be truly thankful for this quite monumental lapse in coherence – a lapse that, coincidentally, does indeed feel rather like a (particularly enjoyable) punch to the face.
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Romance, Fantasy and Escape in As Good As It Gets

2010-01-04T09:34:00.000-08:00

“It feels a little confined in here – let’s take a walk.”

– Melvin, As Good as it Gets

Romantic love is a concept that necessarily relies upon a degree of mutually-shared idealization and fantasy. It makes sense, then, that for hundreds of years the genre of romantic comedy has developed a number of conventions for dramatising the link between romance and fantasy. Whether this be through plots revolving around masquerade and role-playing (as in, say, Twelfth Night, or, in Hollywood, Pillow Talk), courtships relying on artificially-manufactured romantic schemes (e.g.: Much Ado About Nothing or, say, The Proposal), or the use of the supernatural (say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Ghosts of Girlfriends Past), the romantic comedy has repeatedly found ways of suggesting that romance is to an extent synonymous with, and made possible through, fantasy.

One of the most common ways in which this happens is via a comedy’s couple escaping from a drab and/or repressive social reality that stifles their romance into a quasi-magical elsewhere where the resolution of love becomes possible (e.g.: All’s Well That Ends Well, or It Happened One Night). In Shakespearean romantic comedy this place is often a forest or other natural space – what Northrop Frye dubbed the ‘green world’: a space that suggests enchantment, and the possibility of living an ideal that is impossible to achieve in workaday reality. In contemporary Hollywood romantic comedies the magical space has often effectively been the space of cinema itself. Often seemingly an attempt to counteract a contemporary audience’s assumed cynicism about depictions of romantic love, many recent romantic comedies tacitly acknowledge their status as cinematic fantasy in order to allow their characters to fall spectacularly and fantastically in love. A film may do this through mentioning other romance films (as in, say, When Harry Met Sally), or by having its plot mirror another classic romance plot (Sleepless in Seattle), or even by virtually openly announcing its fictional status, like Pretty Woman, which accompanies its lovers’ final kiss with a chorus-like extra saying “Welcome to Hollywood! Land of dreams. Always time to dream, so keep on dreaming…” This kind of modern romantic comedy implicitly tells us “we know that you know that this is a fantasy, but we also know that you/we want it – here it is”. (See here for a piece by me on contemporary romantic comedy which touches on some of these issues.)

One (relatively) recent romantic comedy that resists the impulse to use the cinema itself as the site of fantasy is James L. Brooks’ 1997 film As Good As It Gets, which in fact returns – in a relatively subtle way – to the notion of the helpful fantasy of the ‘green world’. Through looking briefly at the narrative and style of the film, I want to try to explain why it makes so much sense that the union of Melvin (Jack Nicholson) and Carol (Helen Hunt) can only take place after the couple decide to “take a walk”.

The romance plot of As Good As it Gets revolves around the relationship between Melvin, a rich but heavily neurotic and obsessive-compulsive popular romance writer, and Carol, a warm and down-to-earth waitress with a very sick young son, Spencer. A regular customer at the restaurant where Carol works, Melvin initially butchers any chance of a relationship with her through his uncontrollable insensitivity towards her and others’ feelings. The couple grow closer when Melvin offers to pay for Spencer’s medical care, an offer that Carol – after initial indecision – gratefully accepts. The possibility of romance first rears its head during a trip Melvin and Carol take to Baltimore with Melvin’s neighbour, Simon (Greg Kinnear), where they share their first kiss. Melvin ultimately manages to self-sabotage once again, however, and Carol tells him, on returning to New York, that she doesn’t want to be around him anymore since “All you do is make me feel bad about myself”. This sets the scene for Melvin’s final attempt: at trip over to Carol’s apartment that then leads to a shared 4am walk on a deserted street, where the film ultimately ends.

Interior spaces in As Good as it Gets – particularly those of home and work – are largely negative spaces. They are associated with violence (Simon’s apartment, where he is robbed and beaten),

illness (Carol’s apartment that houses her sick son, the hospital, Melvin’s shrink’s office),

loneliness (Melvin’s apartment),

and uncomfortable encounters (the restaurant Carol works in, various scenes held in doorways).

In short, they represent the claustrophobia of an oppressive and often upsetting reality. This is made clear when Carol brings home a date, only for him to be put off by the appearance of her sick son, which causes him to leave with the line, “Just a little too much reality for a Friday night…” Equally, the geographical dimensions of unhappiness are illustrated when Carol caustically tells Melvin that

“I want your life for one minute – where my big problem is someone offers me a free convertible so I can get out of this city.”

Considered very broadly and colloquially, we can also say that ‘reality’ is the obstacle to Melvin and Carol’s relationship. The progress of their romance relies on the couple escaping (via a trip in a convertible, an out-of-town restaurant, a walk on a street) the suffocating and grounded nature of humdrum reality and finding refuge in a shared emotional space of fantasy. While fantasy is always an important component of romance, it seems particularly important here given quite how unlikely a pairing Melvin and Carol are: they seem so unsuited to one another in so many ways that any relationship they might have would seem to require a certain disconnection from the ‘real world’. (The film is also unlike other more schematic romantic comedies in that it does not give each character flaws that will complement or counteract the other’s – contemporary romance’s answer to how to present ‘fated’ love to an audience who might be sceptical of the concept.) That happiness is also for them partly a matter of space is made clear when Melvin at one point speaks of what stories might be told by people whose lives are happier than his or Carol’s:

“Some of us have great stories, pretty stories, that take place at lakes with boats, and friends, and noodle salad – some of us, just no one in this car.”

The couple’s movement from claustrophobic reality to liberating fantasy is also often neatly and economically conveyed at a stylistic level, and this is one of the things that contributes to making this not only a thematically but a cinematically rich variation of this convention.

In the first scene between the couple Carol takes Melvin’s order at the restaurant. Here the enclosed nature of the space – and the fact that it is not shared space – is strongly stressed. First the cramped, uncomfortable nature of the setting is stressed through the staging of the clumsy navigation that takes place at the scene’s opening, when Melvin crowds Carol, demanding to be seated at his favourite table. His invasion of her (professional) space causes Carol to physically move him out of her way,

and to close a counter-top in order to keep him on the customer’s side of a staff area (“Go on, sit down – you know you’re not allowed back here…”).

After Melvin has eventually been seated, the couple’s conversation is framed in shots that serve to enclose each character tightly. Their talk mainly concerns Spencer (the most important symbol of grounded ‘reality’ for Carol’s character) and Melvin’s unwitting insensitivity towards him. Having overheard a conversation about Spencer’s health, Melvin flippantly comments that “We’re all going to die soon – I will, you will, and it sure sounds like your son will,” causing a furious Carol to threaten to bar him from the restaurant (the dialogue and acting here are deeply felt: “If you ever mention my son again you will never be able to eat here again… Do you understand me – you crazy fuck…?”) Spencer’s and Melvin’s conditions are the major factors in the progression of – and obstacles to – romance throughout the film, and in this scene we see our two protagonists still very much in their emotional grip. As such, they are prevented at this stage from achieving any kind of mutual understanding. This predicament is reflected in the shooting style: both are framed almost exclusively in single mid-shots and close-ups, their faces never clearly inhabiting the same frame.

There is no connection between, and no shared space for, the couple at this point: they are trapped in their lives, stuck in their ways, and caught in their own private spaces.

A later scene shows a significant progression for the romance since it marks the first time that either member of the couple visits the other in their own personal surroundings (as Carol says to Melvin when he shows up unexpectedly at her apartment: “Are you totally gone?! This is my private home!”), and is also the first time of many that they will confront each other in a doorway. Melvin, a man who lives in his own world (because of his neuroses, his money, his self-enforced isolation) is making a sudden leap here into a very ‘real’ space, and the two extremes are not yet ready to mix. Consequently the space is stressed again as being very claustrophobic: we repeatedly come back to shots of Carol into which her front door protrudes, and shots of Melvin framed against the corner of the hallway – both visual elements acting as reminders of the solid and enclosed nature of the space.

(Though note the painting behind Melvin: a kitsch depiction of Paris, which hints, in its modest, sentimental way, at possible romantic escape).

The couple are shown once again in tight mid-shots and close-ups, seldom breaking one another’s frames. As well as this, as Melvin stands in the doorway, he is framed against the light background of the hall’s wall, while Carol is set against the very differently-shaded door and apartment, making the spaces they inhabit look physically dissimilar. At one moment Carol moves into her kitchen and Melvin falteringly follows. This symbolically significant moment for their relationship is marked stylistically by a shot in which they are both visible at once.

However, even here, both their faces still never clearly inhabit the same space. The progression of their romance depends on Melvin’s ability to do more than peer into this reality – he needs to enter it slightly more; equally, Carol needs to move away from it, and not simply throw Melvin out (as she does so here, when he fails to interact well with Spencer), returning to her sink and exclaiming, “Back to life…”

The final scene I want to look at is also the final scene of the film (watch it here). It takes place after Melvin has made an attempt (though still one that allows him to keep Carol’s messy life at arm’s length) to interact with the ‘real world’ via his gift of paying for Spencer’s medical care, and after Carol has accepted that she can occasionally take time out from her life via the trip she makes with Melvin to Baltimore. In Baltimore they came close to resolving their romance, but Melvin managed to foul it up by offending Carol once again. On the night of their return to New York, Melvin decides to have one last stab at winning Carol over. He first tries visiting her at her home, but the setting proves unsuitable: for one thing, the impossibility of privacy is once again stressed (as it was in the failed date scene) by Carol’s mother being just a curtain away in the next room.

In Melvin’s words: “It feels a little confined in here – let’s talk a walk.” We now cut from the couple exiting the apartment…

…to their walk on a deserted street, the first shot immediately demonstrating the drastically different treatment of space.

In a clear juxtaposition, we cut from the familiar tight, static mid-shot the ends the previous interior scene to a graceful, gliding long-shot, craning slowly down from above to frame the couple as they walk.Throughout the scene Melvin and Carol are shown in generous, often tracking, two-shots in which they move around freely and in which we can see their faces occupying the same space.

As well as this, even when separated by close-ups, the street background – rather than being stark and defined in the manner of previous interior scenes – is often seen as tranquil, blurred darkness and soft, out-of-focus street and car lights.

This, clearly, is a helpful, ‘enchanted’ space – the privacy of the hour allowing the creation of a modest ‘green world’ in the centre of New York.

The scene sees the couple making their final progression into a different, hopeful sense and space of fantasy that allows them to feel they have chance of a relationship together. Consequently, the formal elements (camera movement, framing, depth of focus) present us with a far less rigid and ‘real’ space – a space they can share. The tentative nature of the conclusion is made clear by the framing of the final shot: it is split in two – the exterior of the street and the interior of the bakery, light and dark, soft warm rolls inside and cracked, potentially anxiety-inducing pavement outside.

Yet the enchantment experienced on the street suddenly now feels possible, at least for this moment, on the inside too – the bakery that opens at 4 in the morning having a pleasingly helpful and nearly-magical quality to it. In this moment – Melvin having just managed to step on cracked paving for the first time in the film – neither inside nor outside feels especially threatening or claustrophobic. How long will this last? Perhaps not long – it will be dawn soon: will the rising sun chase away the enchantment, the bustle of rush hour in the bakery and the street turn magical New York back into merely everyday New York once more?

There is a sense at the close of the film that this relationship is perhaps founded more on a valiant, perhaps misplaced, optimism in the face of disheartening reality than in reality itself, and that the developing romance is based more on a near-desperate need for, rather love of, one another. The eternal hindrance to the relationship, Melvin’s neurosis, seems to be weakening, but is by no means gone, and the most important thing in Carol’s life – Spencer – has only met Melvin once, and it was, even then, a rather unsuccessful encounter. They have progressed from a suffocating ‘reality’ to a more tentative, free and hopeful ‘unreality’ by half overcoming, half side-stepping, the obstacles in their way. The romance may not be perfect – there is no mention of love here (the final proposition is not “I love you” / “I love you too”, but Melvin’s clumsy “Is that something that it’s bad to be around – for you?”) – but it is as good as it can get for these two at this time; and that, I think we are encouraged to feel, isn’t too bad.
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[2] "...Well it doesn't, Mister Potter."

2009-12-25T02:10:00.000-08:00

'

"Now, you listen to me! I don't want any plastics, and I don't want any ground-floors, and I don't want to get married - ever - to anyone! You understand that? I want to do what I want to do. And you're... and you're... Oh, Mary, Mary... Would you?... Would you?..."

"Just a minute - just a minute. Now, hold on, Mr. Potter. You're right when you say my father was no businessman. I know that. Why he ever started this cheap, penny-ante Building and Loan, I'll never know. But neither you nor anyone else can say anything against his character, because his whole life was… Why, in the twenty-five years since he and Uncle Billy started this thing, he never once thought of himself. Isn't that right, Uncle Billy? He didn't save enough money to send Harry to school, let alone me. But he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter, and what's wrong with that? […] You, you said – what'd you say a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait? Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they're so old and broken down that they... Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars? Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about – they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so. People were human beings to him. But to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they're cattle. Well, in my book he died a much richer man than you'll ever be."

"Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls! Merry Christmas, movie house! Merry Christmas, Emporium! Merry Christmas, you wonderful old Building and Loan!"

EDIT: Go here for an excellent article by James Zborowski on some of the joys and complexities of It's a Wonderful Life.
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[1] "You think the whole world revolves around you and your money..."

2009-12-24T05:37:00.000-08:00

'

"Where's that money, you silly, stupid old fool? Where's that money? Do you realize what this means? It means bankruptcy and scandal and prison - that's what it means... One of us is going to jail - well, it's not gonna be me."

"Hey look, mister - we serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast, and we don't need any characters around to give the joint "atmosphere". Is that clear, or do I have to slip you my left for a convincer?"

"You call this a happy family? Why did we have to have all these kids?"
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Robin Wood: 1931-2009

2009-12-20T09:39:00.000-08:00

“You know, I believe that if there's any kind of god, it wouldn't be in any of us, not you, or me, but just... this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed, but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.”

– Céline (Julie Delpy) in Before Sunrise

Robin Wood was one of the greatest and most influential of film critics. He was also one of the main causes of my learning to love writing about the cinema. Some kind of personal tribute to mark his passing feels absolutely necessary, since – apart from anything – it is probable that this blog itself wouldn’t exist had I not encountered his work.

Many film scholars and cinephiles who grew up in the 60s and 70s can trace their serious interest in film back to Wood’s classic book Hitchcock’s Films (1965). It is easy to see why, given it appeared both before Hitchcock’s reputation had been consolidated (Wood felt it necessary to open the book with a question that would never be asked today: “Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?”), and indeed before American film itself was regularly treated with seriousness by English language critics. However, I (and many friends and colleagues my age) am proof that one certainly needn’t have been around at this seminal moment in order to have been inspired and influenced by Wood’s work.

The first piece of Wood’s that I definitely remember reading is his article ‘Rethinking Romantic Love: Before Sunrise’ (from Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond). It was with a beautiful, sharp shock that I read its first words:

I knew, the first time I saw Before Sunrise, that here was a film for which I felt not only interest or admiration, but love.

Most of the articles and books I had previously read as a film studies undergraduate attempted an ‘objective’ tone, avoiding first-person emotion at all costs. Wood, clearly, was attempting something different. What drew me in was not only the fact that he felt the same way about this film as I did, but that he had felt it necessary to open an article in such a forthrightly, nakedly personal manner. It seemed to me that this writer was being open about something that was being problematically repressed in so much other scholarship: the absolutely central, unavoidable, importance of the critic’s own personal response – what V. F. Perkins calls “the evidence of feeling”. The article went on to engage in a detailed, impassioned reading of Before Sunrise from various angles (authorship, structure, historical context, ideology, performance, style), yet this reading had clearly been prompted, as Wood makes clear, by love. Never before had I been moved by film criticism.

Looking back on this moment now, perhaps the reason I was so immediately seduced was because Wood was writing from a perspective of love about a film that I too loved, which in itself was concerned with love. In one sense, there was probably already enough romance in this to have caused a young fan and critic of Before Sunrise to swoon. Yet, even more, I remember being struck in particular by the way in which the emotions Wood admitted to were placed in perfect dialogue not only with the film, but with the critical act itself. Towards the opening of the piece, Wood (making reference to a line of dialogue from the film) says that he immediately knew Before Sunrise was a film that

I would ultimately want to write about, as a means at once of exploring it more systematically and of sharing my delight in it with others – of finding that "magic" in the "attempt".

Then, at the end, writing of the film’s own beautiful final sequence (watch it here), he writes:

The sequence evokes the ending of Antonioni's L'Eclisse, but without its sense of desolation and finality: rather, the feeling is of sadness and happiness inextricably intermingled, regret for the separation and the uncertainty but a deep satisfaction in the degree of mutual understanding and intimacy two human beings have achieved in a few hours, how nearly successful the attempt to bridge “this little space in between”. And, as Celine says, the “answer”, the “magic”, must be in the attempt. The same might be said of the critic's relationship to the films s/he loves.

Of course, part of the beauty of the personal quality of Wood’s writing is simply that it allows you to feel as if you in some sense know him, meaning that to engage with his arguments is to – as he once said of another critic’s work (Jim Kitses’ Horizons West) – “engage with another mind, another psyche, in a fully human way”. For Wood this was not just a question of honesty: it was a matter of the irreducibly social nature of criticism as an act of intellectual and emotional communication. I think this fact is made poignantly transparent in the quotation above.

Wood finds a way to make the entire article – like the greatest cinema – have a ‘form’ that is inextricable from its ‘content’. The personal nature of his writing here is not only a matter of frankness, but also a necessary response to the themes of the film, to the relationship between critics and films in general, and to the relationship between critic and reader. Furthermore, in one final layer of coherence, Wood’s writing very often ensured that the particular nature of this relationship between critic and reader was – as I can attest to – one of love.
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Notes on Paranormal Activity, Antichrist, and Andrew Britton

2009-12-16T19:03:00.000-08:00

'

Paranormal Activity and Antichrist ostensibly come from entirely different filmmaking traditions and seem to implicitly address themselves to different audiences. This has meant that, as we would probably expect, they have been received in very different ways by the critical fraternity. The former has tended to be treated as an arthouse picture steeped in a symbolism considered to be either intellectually profound or emptily provocative (depending on the reviewer), while the latter has largely been regarded as an ingenious, but ultimately functional, genre exercise designed to elicit scares and nothing more. There are, however, undeniable parallels between the two films which demand to be engaged with – particularly given they were released within months of one another. I’m nowhere close to reaching any conclusions on these parallels, but the fact that they are so clearly there, combined with the fact that (as far as I am aware) no one seems to be noticing them, is interesting enough to require a few words.

I’m certainly not saying it’s wrong to view these films in the ways I’ve described – indeed, in order to retain perspective and context it is necessary on some level to do so. Antichrist of course is the latest in a long line of intentionally controversial and formally inventive works by the international art cinema’s leading provocateur, Lars Von Trier; likewise, Paranormal Activity certainly is a pleasantly creepy updating of the ghost movie and a fun night out at the cinema. But such categories, dictated by production, mode, and marketing, can sometimes blind us to more deep-rooted similarities that are grounded more in matters of narrative (and, as a consequence, ideological) convention.

One immediately obvious, and broad, convention shared by the films is the horror genre: in Antichrist this genre is viewed through the lens of art cinema, and in Paranormal Activity it is tweaked via the style of recent ‘realistic’ horror movies such as The Blair Witch Project (1999). Another shared tradition is that of the male/female ‘two-hander’, since both films are focused almost entirely on a heterosexual romantic couple. Beyond this, though, another more specific convention that I think both films clearly engage with is what Andrew Britton has called the "persecuted wife melodrama" (and elsewhere the “Freudian-feminist melodrama”).

Britton set out his case for this cycle of films in the essay ‘A New Servitude: Bette Davis, Now, Voyager, and the Radicalism of the Woman’s Film’ (which can now be found in the indispensible Britton on Film). Put very simply, Britton describes the persecuted wife melodrama as being focused on a female protagonist who is married to an impressive and overbearing man, and who (for reasons that vary across the films) comes to feel hysterical, threatened and trapped in both her marriage and her marital home. The narrative tends to see the husband exert considerable control over the woman, to the point at which he may either be revealed as the cause – or at least as standing in the way of the cure – of his wife’s distress. Depending on the film, the narrative will conclude either with the expulsion of the husband or the revelation that the woman misunderstood his malevolent intentions towards her.

This is a tradition Britton sees as indebted to the image of women in Gothic 19th Century literature (particularly Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw), and which found expression in classical Hollywood in films such as Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943), Minelli’s Undercurrent (1946), Preminger’s Whirlpool (1949), and Ophuls’ Caught (1949). Bringing the cycle slightly further up to date, I would suggest that another key movie is Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – a film that brings the tradition’s conventions directly into contact with contemporary horror, and which can thus be seen as a necessary stepping stone on the path towards the cycle’s presence in 2009 with Antichrist and Paranormal Activity.

As I have said, I don’t have a final reading on the significance of the inflections these films play on the persecuted wife melodrama. The fact is, though, that its conventions are undeniably present, and they ensure that both movies (not just the one explicitly concerned with gendercide) are as much about sexual politics as they are about ‘horror’. In the absence of a more in-depth analysis (which may well come at a later date), I will for now restrict myself to simply quoting a few of Britton’s points regarding the cycle and suggesting briefly how they manifest themselves in each film.

[NOTE: If you haven’t seen one or either of the films and want to avoid spoilers, then read no further.]

The marriage takes place at the beginning of the narrative, the rest of which is concerned with the bloody aftermath of “the happy ending”.

Neither film begins with a marriage, but the relationship in both is already well under way by the film’s start. This is fully in keeping with the famously disconcerting trend (embodied perfectly in the persecuted wife melodrama) that, in Hollywood cinema at least, a story about courtship is a comedy, while a story about marriage is a melodrama.

In some cases, though not in all, the film emphasizes the Oedipal aspect of the heroine’s love [by stressing that] her husband is older than she is and/or her superior in social rank.

This is certainly more obvious in Antichrist, where Dafoe’s character is both clearly older than Gainsbourg’s and seemingly a successful (judging from the couple’s apparent wealth and the fact that Gainsbourg doesn’t work) psychotherapist. In Paranormal Activity too, however, Micah is surely the earner in the household, given that Katie (like, in fact, Gainsbourg) is a student. In both films the male partner is also very strong-willed, and certainly perpetually behaves as if he were his partner’s superior.

Enter “the house” – archaic, marmoreal, labyrinthine, patriarchal: the prototypes are Brontë’s Thornfield Hall on the one hand and Poe’s House of Usher on the other.

In both films the uneasy domestic setting is key, and is where most of each film takes place. In Antichrist ‘Eden’, the holiday cabin, is clearly central to the drama and partly represents the malevolent forces at play in the narrative, both being wracked by storms like those that bedevil Poe’s House of Usher (resulting in the hellish falling acorns), and containing hidden secrets like Brontë’s Thornfield Hall (Gainsbourg’s thesis notes, the photographs). In Paranormal Activity we are told that the apartment is not the reason for the haunting, which would likely accompany Katie wherever she leads; yet the film nonetheless takes place entirely in the couple’s shared home, and the supernatural occurrences are initially only manifested in and on the fabric of the apartment (objects moving, lights and televisions switching on and off, unexplained noises [again, see: Usher and Thornfield]).

The marriage bed becomes the site of the heroine’s ultimate terror and humiliation and of the displacement of her sexuality into hysteria.

This most certainly describes the function of the marriage bed in Antichrist, since Gainsbourg’s guilt at having been unable to save her son is tied so intimately with sex, causing her to initially engage in sex obsessively and later to punish herself through a horrific and permanent disavowal of sexual pleasure: the circumcision. This theme is less overt but still present in Paranormal Activity via Katie’s refusal to let Micah film their lovemaking, and the fact that the great majority of the hauntings happen in the couple’s bedroom, where they set up the camera each night (guaranteeing that the image of the couple being frightened in bed is probably the most representative image of the movie – and also the film’s poster).

Masculinity, as the Freudian-feminist melodrama perceives it, is driven by an obsessional horror of lack, [represented in] the husband’s profound conviction of his impotence [which in turn results in] a corresponding project of domination.

This is where the conventions of the persecuted wife melodrama are felt most strongly in each film. Both Dafoe in Antichrist and Micah in Paranormal Activity are shown to be deeply threatened by the fact that they cannot rationally explain what is happening to their partners. They therefore engage in an extended process of domination over both the woman and her problem that is putatively presented as attempts to ‘solve’ them. In Antichrist this situation is exacerbated by Dafoe’s profession as a therapist, which causes him to take Gainsbourg away from the specialists treating her because he believes he can cure her himself. Micah also rejects offers of help from others (the psychic) in favour of solving Katie’s problems in his own way. Indeed, both are obsessed with handling their partners’ problems themselves in their way (despite many contrary pleas from the women in their lives), betraying assumptions of ownership and mastery (see Micah’s line, “I'm not having something coming in my house and fucking with my girl...”). In Antichrist the chosen tool of the indomitable power of male reason over the ‘irrational’ female is psychotherapy, in Paranormal Activity it is the video camera (at the film’s opening we learn Micah has bought the biggest, most expensive camera on the market – a purchase that it is certainly not especially difficult to read in Freudian terms). In both films there are veiled and not-so-veiled power battles going on in virtually every exchange the couples share – battles that the man, initially at least, wins every time.

She is exemplary for the passion and intensity with which she has internalized the desires, fantasies and ambitions which the culture encourages her to have.

This is manifestly the case for Gainsbourg, who – it emerges – has (at least following her son’s death, and probably earlier) internalised patriarchal culture’s most extreme misogynist attitudes, ultimately resulting in her belief that womankind as a whole is inherently evil. Has Katie perhaps taken on less pronounced assumptions regarding female passivity and male power, which cause her to allow Micah to so thoroughly dominate her?

The powerful female energies which the male protagonist has sought to disavow erupt, the house is destroyed, and the patriarchal line is extinguished.

In both films repressed female energy certainly eventually erupts, and violently, but with rather different consequences. In Antichrist Gainsbourg exacts a terrifying reign of violence upon Dafoe, only for Dafoe to recover and finally feel justified in killing her. Does Von Trier’s desire to provoke in this respect actually result in him forfeiting some of the more radical potential of the persecuted wife conventions? In Paranormal Activity, a more modest genre film, Katie is ultimately taken over fully by the demon and disposes of Micah, escaping to ‘whereabouts unknown’, thus enacting a destruction of an embodiment of patriarchy that earlier examples of the tradition could only begin to hint at. Perhaps one of the things to be learned from comparing these films is that genre movies still retain the potential to express ideas that would prove unacceptable in other forms – even perhaps in the form of the ‘shocking’ art film…?

These are very preliminary notes on the subject and, as such, the questions above are not rhetorical. I think there is a great deal more to be said about the relationship between these movies and the tradition to which I am arguing they relate, but this will have to wait till a later date. One thing at least that I hope is clear, though, is that assumptions about mode, production and implied audience need not necessarily blind us to potentially telling similarities between the ideologically-charged conventions used by seemingly disparate films.

“Once upon a time there was a girl and the girl was very married.”

2009-12-12T08:31:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time there was a girl and the girl was very married. And she danced to the music with her marrier. And then there was a big bad wolf sneaking while she was dancing. And then they looked behind them and then they saw a wolf and the wolf gobbled them up. And then they was alive again. And then they went home and they saw a broken chair. So much they liked the broken chair it broked into little pieces. And then they sitted on their new settee.

(Bethany, aged 4)

Although I imagine that in future this blog will be mostly dedicated to film, I came across something recently that has compelled me to devote my inaugural post to a different subject. However, while in one sense the topic is unrepresentative of what will likely follow, in another sense it is almost too on-the-nose in relation to what I envisage this blog to be for: a forum for loose attempts at, as Frank Kermode puts it, “making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives”.

So, to begin…

Last week I saw a show by the London-based children’s educational theatre company MakeBelieve Arts called The Woman Who Cooked Everything. A large part of the performance consisted of stories dreamt up by children between the ages of 3 and 5. The stories were produced using the ‘helicopter technique’ of storytelling and story-acting originally developed by the kindergarten teacher and education researcher Vivian Paley (who has written books with such magnificent titles as Bad Guys Don't Have Birthdays: Fantasy Play at Four). The show’s accompanying book describes this technique as follows: “Children dictate their stories to a workshop leader who scribes their words verbatim. At the end of the session the class gather together and act out the stories of their peers”.

This sounds to me like a wonderful technique: it invites the children’s imaginations to run wild, gives them the satisfaction of being listened to intently, encourages them to interpret one medium into another, and lets them see their work be performed. That’s not what I want to focus on here, however. Instead I want to look at the stories themselves. This is because what the ‘helicopter technique’ also apparently produces is some of the most baffling, hilarious and fascinating narratives you could ever hope to encounter.

This is surely down to the verbal and unedited nature of the storytelling. These stories are not what you get when a teacher tries to get a child to write a story with pen and paper, or helps them to construct a narrative: this is an expression of the moment-by-moment thought processes of very young children as they struggle with the conflicting demands of their early understanding of story structure, their minimal yet deeply-felt life experience, their limited abilities with language, and the sheer batshit craziness of their fantasy worlds. The results are astonishing on a number of levels. Always inventive, often incoherent – yet clearly indicative of a strong desire to make sense of the world around them – these stories are bursting at the seams both with entertainment value and matters of critical interest.

I’m no child psychologist, nor am I particularly well-versed in children’s literature. I’m simply a fan and critic of popular culture with an addiction to close analysis and a particular interest in the ways in which narrative conventions both reflect and shape our view of the world. As such, on the one hand I want to look at a few of the stories contained in The Woman Who Cooked Everything with a view to bringing out some of the tensions they seem to display between unfettered imagination and conventionalised narrative form. Equally, I also just want to share with others what a treat it is to come across stories of such unfathomable, contradictory, delicious absurdity.

The story that gives the collection and the performance its name goes as follows:

Once there was a woman who liked to cook. She liked to cook everything.

(Millie, aged 4)

Yes…?! Setting up an undeniably intriguing conceit and then denying us any closure whatsoever by finishing before the narrative has even really got started, this is one of the most elliptical and un-story-like stories of the bunch. Yet, even here, we see the use of that most familiar of literary conventions: the setting of the scene with ‘Once there was…’ But the presence of this turn of phrase, which inevitably brings with it expectations of a traditional tale to follow, makes the arbitrariness of the ending even more confusing: we want to know the consequences, the effects stemming from this cause, but are instead left only with blank page. This is a more radical form of storytelling than the most postmodern of novels could hope to achieve: not only does the story simply stop rather than conclude, it also barely begins.

More mind-boggling still, however, is this mini-masterpiece from Alice, aged 3:

He got in again, and he got out again, He got in again, he got out again, He got in again, he got out again, he got in again, he got out this time. He went in this time and closed the lid.

I love this story. To begin with, there is the fact that it begins when ‘he’ (who, you might ask? We will never know) gets in ‘again’, thus implying a prior chain of events which doubtless consist of yet more getting into and out of whatever it is that is being got into and out of (what, you might ask? We will never know). It feels as if there is an actual, existing character’s life here, which we are joining in medias res – as if in Alice’s imagination this world is already concrete enough that she needn’t bother setting the scene, and that this is merely the third or fourth chapter of an ongoing story rather than an entire story in itself. Alice has actually achieved here the goal of much realist fiction: she has made it seem as if we are looking through a ‘window’ onto an existing world rather than at a ‘picture frame’ containing a world constructed specially for our benefit. Yet, if we look closely, there are also formal strategies that point to an inkling of classical order. To put a stop to the hypnotic repetition by using the (again) nonsensically concrete phrase ‘this time’ (full stop) is a stroke of bizarre genius for the way it implies significance without any hint of a reason for doing so (perhaps Alice understands why...? We will never know). Yet, structurally, the use of repetition-then-difference is something that poetry has been doing for hundreds of years – something I’m sure Alice doesn’t know, yet clearly also somehow feels to be correct. There is also even some ‘book-ending’ (i.e.: the end echoing the beginning) through the isolated uses of ‘and’ in the first and last sentences. Finally, the sudden revelation of a 'lid' at the end acts both as a surprising climax and, through being the last word, as a sort of lid to the story itself: against all odds, this story actually feels resolutely concluded.

Some of the more abstract stories, on the other hand, achieve a kind of closure by making us experience something like the sort of transcendence we expect from romantic poetry. See, for example:

One day flying pencils fly. And then they explode like fireworks. Then they vanish forever.

(Osayi, aged 5)

Or, even more poignantly (that use of ‘vanish’!):

Twinkle, twinkle, and the twinkle just disappears. The girl was sleeping and she go to her bed. And then the little girl just ran away. And she ran away and there was a fish eat her. And the fish just disappeared. And the fish just run away and see the stars. And then big eyes were coming; A dragon! And the dragon just run away and see the stars. Twinkle, twinkle.

(Daniella, aged 5)

Both these tales encourage the feeling that – were they written by adults rather than 5-year-olds – there should be something metaphorical at play here. That we know there almost certainly isn’t doesn’t necessarily detract from the sense that these stories are self-contained and oddly meaningful by virtue of an emotional logic that transcends their literal meaning, whether intended or not.

However, the use in the ‘twinkle, twinkle’ story of another instance of ‘book-ending’ is one more testament to how often familiar narrative tropes recur. For instance, twenty of the forty stories in the collection begin with some variation on ‘Once upon a time’, ‘once there was…’, ‘one day…’, and so on. This is obviously something the kids have picked up from stories they’ve encountered: they know that this is how stories are supposed to begin. As we saw in ‘the woman who cooked everything’ though, part of these stories' charm is witnessing how such a solid beginning can quickly unravel when told by a person who has learned some of the notes, but not the music, of conventional storytelling. Take, for instance, the basic story structure of ‘equilibrium – disruption – new equilibrium’. Most of the children seem to know that a story needs some kind of antagonism, or at least change in status-quo, in order to achieve the tension necessary for narrative. But, equally - thankfully, as it turns out - they haven’t yet mastered the arts of either plausibility or consistency. For instance:

Once upon a time there was a fairy ghost. And then the fairy ghost turned into a lion. And then the flowers came down from above. Some children came along and the children said, “Please can we have some flowers?” And the lion said “RRRAAAA”.

(Georgia, aged 4)

(As an aside – let’s first acknowledge the brilliance of ‘fairy ghost’, a creature referred to in such a matter-of-fact way that we know Georgia can picture it, and also know we’d love to be able to too: is this a type of ghost that is also a fairy, or a fairy that died and became a ghost...?) We see here a definite linear development, but one not bound by anything resembling causality. The fairy ghost turns into a lion not because, say, a witch has cast a spell, or even because it has performed a transformation on itself, but just because. Then flowers descend ‘from above’ – strange, to be sure, but perhaps fair enough according to the principles of just because that govern this story. Now some new characters - the group of children - enter the story and (probably understandably) want some of the aforementioned flowers – a wish answered with an entirely naturalistic roar from the lion - who was, of course, so recently a fairy ghost. Impeccably linear, near classical in its movement from one equilibrium (a fairy ghost minding its own business) to a new equilibrium (a lion being the apparent guardian of the flowers-from-above), yet utterly inexplicable at the same time: the tension here between structure and (by adult standards) insanity is a beautiful thing to behold.

Another nice tension in a number of the stories is that between surreal situations and the entirely rational way they are recounted by the author. For example:

One day there was a little girl. She lived inside a prince and she couldn’t get out. And when she got up her legs were too tight because the prince folded up his legs and that was the end.

(Shamari, aged 4)

Clearly, this is a wonderfully odd twist on stories about little girls and princes. However, it also treats its central situation in a fascinatingly naturalistic manner that actually invites us to relate to the girl’s situation: yes, we think, our legs would be too tight if we were inside a prince and he folded his legs. (Let’s note too, again, the desire for solid closure despite all the craziness: ‘and that was the end’.) Or, another example:

Once upon a time a little girl was walking in the pond and a dinosaur came to gobble her up, and she was running as fast as she can, but she went out of breath. Then she was trying to go home and the dinosaur took her home. And she said, “Thank you,” to the dinosaur. And she hugged him. And she told her mum that she went too far. And her mum said “Who bring you back?” And she said, “The dinosaur.”

(Judith, aged 4)

Apart from the requisite ‘once upon a time’, this story seems almost procedural in its straightforwardness, as if Judith were merely relating to a journalist, step by step, the events leading up to this little girl returning safely home (the constant repetition of ‘and’ obviously helps here). There is also something beautiful about the way the pay-off manages to make a story about a dinosaur giving a little girl a ride appear borderline banal by doing something that endings are never meant to do: reiterating exactly what the reader already knows.

Speaking of endings, it’s interesting to note that, while ‘Once upon a time’ gets a great amount of play, not a single one of the stories ends with the equally famous ‘happily ever after’. (Could it be that this phrase has accrued so much negative press over the years that now not even children’s writers use it so regularly as they once did?) However, despite the fact that the language of the happy ending isn’t used, its broader meanings and tonal functions have certainly been internalised, since many of the stories beguilingly present us with some potentially very unhappy situations suddenly and inexplicably being reversed to enable the story to end on an upbeat note. For example:

The tiger comes and the lion tried to eat the tiger. And the wind blow them over. And they was stuck together, rolling, and then they was friends again.

(Usaf, aged 3)

Or:

Once upon a time there was a little butterfly and it was flying all around the garden. And the sun was in its eyes. And it started to rain. And the sun died. And the butterfly died too. And it came alive again as a caterpillar. And the butterfly is back to life as a beautiful baby butterfly. And it was so happy.

(Jessica, aged 5)

Or:

There was a giant and Action Man killed the giant. And then Superman came to the rescue. And Superman was trying to shoot the flying birds but he couldn’t. Then Action Man was dead. Superman started to fight, then he saw the flying birds but he never killed them. He took them home because they were cold.

(Faisal, aged 5)

The self-consciously unconvincing ‘happy ending’ has long been loved by critics of Hollywood cinema for the way it highlights the supposed artificiality of the convention (probably most famously in the films of Douglas Sirk). What we have here is similar, but of a slightly different order. Clearly, the sudden turnarounds are unbelievable, and thus make us notice the convention as a convention; however, just as obviously, there’s no ironic intent here. As such, the artificiality feels neither cynical nor a cop-out, but is rather allowed to be charming and moving in its naïveté – a balance often strived for by happy endings, but seldom achieved so convincingly as it can be by someone who actually is naïve.

I want to finish by looking at what can happen when not only the structural, but also the potentially ideological, functions of a convention have been internalised – as seen in this bizarre and wonderful story by Freya, aged 4:

The princess was locked away in a castle. Then the girl rescued her. Then the girl gives her some money. The giant takes the girl into his cave. Then the girl goes back to her house, then the girl and the princess is running away from the giant. They haven’t got very far when they meet a big serpent. Then the little girl does run on ahead with the princess. Then the giant gets the princess and then the giant is dead and the little girl is married.

You’ll notice that there is no man in the story - except for perhaps the giant, who we can probably assume is supposed to be male. Yet the princess is certainly threatened by forces that would usually be embodied by a male villain, and which would traditionally pose an implied sexual threat: she is locked away in a castle, taken into a cave, and even – in what in any other circumstances would seem an excessively Freudian touch – accosted by a ‘big serpent’. Given the lack of men, it is thus rather surprising that the little girl is suddenly revealed to be married at the end of the story. Again, Freya has no doubt learnt that marriage is how stories about princesses are supposed to finish. Of course, it isn’t difficult to see that this convention – especially when constantly repeated to children – has rather pointed ideological overtones (as feminist critics have always pointed out). However, the fact that Freya provides this conclusion without having the ability to adequately prepare for it means that the story both draws attention to the arbitrary nature of the marriage-as-happy-ending, and even allows for some almost subversive meanings to emerge. Instead of a prince, it is here a little girl who saves the princess from the castle, flees alongside her, and even (inexplicably, but quite brilliantly) gives her some money. Judging from the set-up, then, it’s hard not to infer that at the end of the story the girl has in fact married… the princess!

I’m not arguing that this story is any kind of evidence for Freya expressing some of Freud’s “constitutional bisexuality”, but rather simply that, as I have said, the tensions between the unruliness of a child’s mind and the strictures imposed by narrative form can yield joyous and unexpected pleasures. Some of these are comic, some are melancholic, and some (apparently!) are borderline political. It’s enough, at least, to make you want to see what kinds of narratives might be written by a generation of children raised not on books written for them by adults, but on stories such as these. I have a feeling that what would be produced is a lot of happy endings, but endings that are happy in rather different ways, and for rather different reasons, than any we're used to seeing.