Woody Goes West: "Blue Jasmine"

With each film, the whole “career retrospective” thing for Woody Allen proves unavoidable–which is ridiculous, considering how he has a film every year, and, seeing the 90+ year life span of both his parents, may well be active into his 90s. But since watching Blue Jasmine, a fantastic serio-comic study of unraveling materialist Jasmine (Cate Blanchett, staggeringly good) who’s tumbled from Fifth Avenue riches to the modest guest-room of her just-making-ends-meet adoptive San Fran sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), I’ve been on an Allen kick, going through my collection which plays like ambient background noise as I go about my day. Does this happen with every new Allen release? And if so, isn’t having a 14-day Allen immersion kind of like a seasonal cold? Again I’m delighted with Love and Death, fawning over the Gordon Willis compositions from Manhattan and Sven Nykvist set-ups from Crimes and Misdemeanors, and even struggling to watch the why-so-serious September from beginning to end without falling asleep.

Reviews typically bring up how Allen’s either “lost it” or is “back in good form,” so talk about the macro career while mining the micro details of the new picture on hand is familiar, if distracting, stuff. Yet bridging the hills and valleys of yesterday to what’s new can be a positive exercise. Current movies want to pound us to dust with rapid sensory firepower, immersing us in right now without much perspective. But Allen is bent on reminding us, to quote Midnight in Paris (or rather, William Faulkner), the past is not past.  Maybe the bulk of mainstream films are like Allen’s protagonists, such as Jasmine, overpowered by present temptations that impel her to feign ignorance or reformat history to suit short-lived opportunities (when coping with real history proves too difficult).  Blue Jasmine‘s first image has Jasmine fleeing her past in a grossly obvious CGI airplane, while Allen pulls us back into the pre-digital.  Nearly 80 and bearing the same creative sensibilities of someone who cinematically matured 40-50 years ago, Allen is uncannily old fashioned, maybe, some might say, “out of touch”–I’ve seen Facebook posts complaining about how he uses the phrase “making love,” which I guess people in reality never say anymore. He’s still tirelessly punching out feature-length scripts, presiding at an altar like an existential bishop with sacramental reiterations of perennial themes, humor, despair, and, in collaboration with some of the very best cinematographers (such as Willis, Nykvist, Carlo DiPalma, and in more recent years the likes of Darius Khondji and Harris Savides), unshowy though absolutely impeccable craftsmanship.

I suppose if Allen’s “lost” anything–aside from not scaling the heights of Annie Hall, Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Crimes and Misdemeanors (and you know, like Francis Ford Coppola with his ’70s masterpieces, he really doesn’t have to)–it’s his woman foil, embodied by Keaton in Love and Death and Annie Hall, Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, and most especially Mia Farrow throughout the 1980s, each case reflecting brilliantly on Allen’s male directorial voice.  The collaboration with Farrow was severed, infamously, with 1992′s Husbands and Wives and in a way he’s not recovered. He’s written wonderful women since that period (Dianne Wiest and Jennifer Tilly in Bullets Over Broadway, Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite, Samantha Morton in Sweet and Lowdown, Elaine May in Small Time Crooks, Penelope Cruz in Vicki Cristina Barcelona), but they’re marked less for stalwart attributes than for self-deluded silliness, hubris, duplicity, stupidity, naivete, and destructiveness (to be fair, the men can be just as bad). They’re in the irrational vein of Anjelica Huston’s scorned lover from Crimes and Misdemeanors, or the manic Judy Davis from Husbands and Wives.  Farrow might have exhibited negative characteristics, for example as the tough-talking mob moll from Broadway Danny Rose or the aspiring ditzy performer who evolves into a sophisticated diva in Radio Days, even displaying facepalming weakness by choosing slimy Alan Alda over Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors. But she was still a pillar of assured stability balancing out Allen’s misanthropy, a glimmering sentience in the muck of a world given up for folly. Allen has never created as soulful an image as Farrow’s Cecilia, the neglected Depression-era housewife in The Purple Rose of Cairo, gazing up at the movie screen with adoration and fascination, escaping God’s crapshoot universe. Since Farrow’s split with Allen, we’ve lost Hannah and are left only with her sisters.

Blue Jasmine has Allen’s most remarkable character since Martin Landau’s guilt-stricken eye-doctor Judah Rosenthal in 1989′s Crimes and Misdemeanors, and his most potent woman since Farrow. That’s not to say Jasmine is as lovable or exudes the integrity of Farrow’s best creations, but she’s the richest ink-blemish born from Allen’s antique typewriter in many moons. A woman absorbed in overactive delusions, much like the New Age fancifulness lightly parodied through Gemma Jones in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Blanchett dazzles as someone who initially reads like a Blanche DuBois reprint, a hungry ghost assaulted by passing shades of departed happiness.  Her wealth went away with her conniving Madoff-like husband Hal (Alec Baldwin), incarcerated for unethical financial behavior.  Tapped out and babbling incoherently about her life, she pursues an artificial dream.  After Allen opens with the aforementioned CGI airplane, she name-drops Horace Greeley, “Go West,” fleeing her infamy and worn-out prospects, but her spirit is stuck in the past, in Manhattan, and in her wealth.  Even though the government has taken everything she’s got, she’s still somehow splurging, flying First Class with the best luggage and casually giving her cab driver $100.  Unable to be independently prosperous–plagued with the “freedom” of free enterprise– she’s increasingly rattled and alone with the damning consciousness of her self-made undoing.  Allen effortlessly relaxes the film in a perfect rhythm of downward spirals and beaming prospects, through San Francisco’s Inferno with flashbacks of Manhattan’s 1% Paradiso. Through different times, places, and economic conditions, Blanchett could be playing two women. But she’s not.  Indeed, she’s not playing one or three women either. What we come to understand in Blanchett’s performance is that Jasmine is an assorted myriad of drives acting and reacting, groping and adapting. Constructed by the contagion of wealth, there’s not really a “there” there.

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Predictably, Blue Jasmine continues the director’s long-held Freudian notions of instinct-driven human nature and his commitment to exploring human despair, but, rare for Allen, it’s a topical film bridging present day realities to his protagonist’s madness–in this case, an insane economy enabling amoral privilege for the lucky few.  That might not sound like too novel a framework as it joins a corpus of recent Too-Much-Excess pictures like The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers, the upcoming Wolf of Wall Street, and The Great Gatsby (it also suggests that Woody Allen’s The Great Gatsby would, believe it or not, be much better than Baz Luhrmann’s), but Allen’s loudest condemnation of the ruling class, whom he’s always mocked even as he lives and dines among them (remember Rachel McAdams’ contemptible right-wing family in Midnight in Paris, eager to prosecute their lowly hotel maid for some missing jewelry, McAdams telling her sympathetic nice-guy fiancé Owen Wilson, “You always take the side of the help! That’s why daddy says you’re a communist.”), has an unexpected flavor in tying elites to the most famous enemies of human freedom.

In Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen asked his father “How can there be a God if there were Nazis?”  In Blue Jasmine, the post-2008 world leads him to examine a present day Banality of Evil with Hal and Jasmine. The rich get by moral perimeters with a winning strategy of flagrant, casual sinning.  Hal’s affairs occur as openly as his shady financial dealings, with propositions to sexy lawyers, personal trainers, and decorators in Jasmine’s plain sight.   She pleads ignorance when it comes to her husband’s money matters.  She has her habit, we’re reminded, of looking the other way. Hal, meanwhile, even has that heralded bad-guy Nazi line, “There are ways,” when asked how it’s possible to keep one’s fortune out of the government’s hands.  The casting of Andrew Dice Clay and Bobby Cannavale as the uncouth men in Ginger’s life doesn’t simply tie them to Streetcar’s Stanley Kowalski, a macho demeanor juxtaposed against Jasmine’s pretentiousness, but emphasizes an ethnic barrier between the two worlds.  When Augie (Clay) and Ginger visit Hal and Jasmine, there’s a tacit contempt exchanged between the wealthier couple for the earthier tourists.  Though siblings, we’re reminded of the differences between Jasmine and Ginger, who aren’t biologically related but were both adopted.  Ginger ran away from home while their parents favorited Jasmine because, according to Ginger, she has “better genes.”  Jasmine may deny it, but she can’t resist implicating Ginger and her men she attracts as second-class citizens.

Allen and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe capture San Francisco in a way that accents ethnic idiosyncrasies (building murals, the multicultural grocery store) in addition to something working class.  The film’s most troubling–and overlooked–chapter, regarding Jasmine’s part-time job as a receptionist in a dentist’s office while she tries to understand computers (so that she can take online classes for interior decorating), addresses an unspoken racial dimension.  Jasmine retreats the advances of Dr. Flicker (Michael Stuhlbarg), who is undoubtedly creepy, but his Semitic attributes (Stuhlbarg’s appearance in a dentist’s office can’t help but spring the very Jewish A Serious Man and “The Goy’s Teeth” to mind) juxtapose against the WASPy “substantial” men Jasmine gravitates toward, like Hal or the up-and-coming politician Dwight Westlake (Peter Sarsgaard), with whom she sparks a flirtation at a party.  All three men are successful, but considering how Jasmine voices bitterness toward the government it’s curious how she has no problem in adjusting, chameleon-like, to the prospect of being a wealthy politician’s wife while refusing to even acknowledge Flicker–the one man who would make demands on her (he chides her for doing homework on the job).  Allen invites us to ponder the dark observation spilled by Ginger earlier: she had better genes (Flicker himself mentions how she has good teeth), and the dark eugenicist mindset that’s explicit in fascism is implicit throughout the almost exclusively white world of Jasmine and Hal’s luxurious parties.

Those “genes” work behind Jasmine’s gears, and miserable as she is throughout her San Francisco ordeal, her luck is astounding when we consider how easily she bags Westlake through some recklessly drastic self-reinvention, rewriting herself as a widowed interior decorator, whose surgeon husband had a fatal heart attack.  And of course he buys it–Jasmine has the poise, diction, and genes (tall, blonde haired, blue eyed, aesthetically sharp) to sell it, even if it’s totally absurd.

The dark haired and ganglier Ginger has different problems.  She struggles with Augie, to whom she’s now divorced, and new beau Chili (Cannavale), both despised by Jasmine as “medial” brutes. Augie’s bitter because Hal and Jasmine ruined his one big chance to be an honest businessman after luck granted him a $200,000 lottery win.  He was convinced by Hal, for whom such money is a drop in a bucket, to invest in offshore real estate, and the money was lost with Hal’s subsequent imprisonment. Augie’s now laying pipe in Alaska; “Go West” isn’t about individual achievement. For Augie it’s linked to necessary servitude to big capital (oil) interests.  Chili, “another version of Augie” for Jasmine, isn’t afraid to interrogate her about Hal’s guilt (“Did you not suspect anything or did you just not care?”), but he’s susceptible to being childishly overwrought when Ginger meets sex-crazed sound system installer Al Munsinger (Louis CK), a “gentleman” who pays sweet compliments before getting dirty in cheap motels.

It’s not about genes.  Things aren’t fixed. Adaptation is aided by inheritance, opportunity–and finally fate (to quote Husbands and Wives, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe, he plays hide-and-go-seek”).  The Manhattan women we see with garish wedding bands can afford to luxuriate in baths, go to yoga, and spend hours with a personal trainer. A child born from money, like Hal’s son Danny (Alden Ehrenrich), can transition from an Ivy League golden boy to an unkempt and addiction-rattled seller of used musical equipment in a matter of years. Under Jasmine’s influence and Al’s “charms” (his craft does, after all, change the atmosphere of an environment), Ginger lies to Chili and irresponsibly leaves her children under the care of booze-drenched Jasmine, telling them her life story, at Chuck-E-Cheese. People change all too easily.

Allen shows this in an early and unexpectedly moving scene between Augie and Ginger, fresh from their lotto win and vacationing in New York, returning to their hotel room after Jasmine’s birthday party. Ginger is disturbed because she believes Hal’s cheating on Jasmine with a family friend, Raylene (Kathy Tong). She struggles to express the suspicion to an inebriated, though affectionate and sympathetic, Augie.  Augie remembers Raylene by name, which means that she also caught his attention (when we see her talking with Hal at the party, her nipples threaten to burst through her dress). Ginger jokes with Augie that she has nothing to worry about, because a woman like Raylene would never sleep with him anyway.  Allen’s banter between the two is very poignant, because the scene conveys how if things were a little different (say, Augie wasn’t the kind of person to tell Polish jokes), he could be as unfaithful as Hal, and the imperfections these two modest characters wear openly make them closer to each other than Jasmine and Hal ever could be.  We also know how misfortune will tear them apart.  Later on, audiences may scoff at the sexual politics between Ginger and Chili as being crude and regressive (“the man always gets the last slice of pizza!”), but Jasmine, with either of her lovers, is bereft of that organic degree of intimacy.  In Allen, love is always seeking if rarely successful, and even when it’s honest and true it treads on fragile thread.

We’re told that Jasmine’s real name is Jeanette, but that she changed it for something classier, demonstrating how the wealthier characters tap dance and shape shift their way through life. Hal can fix some financial glitches by switching a few words around in the paperwork. Even if she’s disdainful of the government, Jasmine isn’t lying when she tells Ginger that she has the pedigree for a life in politics. An empty vessel who babbles about her life to uninterested strangers, Jasmine once majored in Anthropology, the study of human origins, ironic considering how she severs her own roots and lacks an origin. She now wants to go back to school and be an interior decorator, reflecting her tendency to camouflage psychologically, deceiving herself along with others when she’s in the throes of fantasy. She recalls another one of Allen’s great characters, the far more sympathetic human chameleon Leonard Zelig from Zelig, whose insecurities lead him to transform into the guise of surrounding people.  As with Jasmine, he also undergoes “Edison’s medicine” of electric shock therapy in attempts to set his mind right. But in the meantime, he has several wives in accordance with multiple personalities. Both Jasmine and Zelig are strained by the uncertainties of freedom and become aligned with respective evils–the absurd greed of Wall Street, and the Nazi Party.

Zelig is saved, though, by the one person who would listen to him, Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Farrow), a voice from the past who calls him back from Hitler’s circle, the epitome of evil conformity.  Fleeing Germany with Fletcher, Zelig heroically lands a faulty plane by flying upside down. “It goes to show that you can accomplish anything if you’re a hopeless psychotic,” he tells a crowd.  Psychosis almost saves Jasmine too, in her compulsive lies to her prospective trophy husband, Westlake. As with Zelig, her Manifest Destiny is also interrupted by a voice from the past, Augie, who by perplexing chance runs into Jasmine and Westlake in front of the jewelry store where her new ring will be purchased.  He lays his bitterness on thickly and the carefree Jasmine dismisses him, “Can’t you put this behind you?”  Confronted with reality, Jasmine’s defenses regress her from high class sophisto to an unreasoning adolescent.  The blueprint for her new golden pavilion begins to crumble.

Luxury affords Allen’s heroes to live life disconnected and rootless, unbound to relationships and responsibilities, morals and ethics. When we hear Jasmine say, “Can’t you put this behind you?” and later see how Hal eventually falls in love with one of his mistresses and then, without much discussion, has plans for moving on to his third wife, you could speculate that Woody Allen is sublimating some feelings about Mia Farrow and his own infamous affair, his excuse for which simply was, “The heart wants what it wants.” His son with Farrow has, much like Danny to Hal and Jasmine, become hopelessly estranged from him, which certainly affects his creativity (it’s a strain that undoubtedly influenced a troubled father-son relationship in the more buoyantly comic Hollywood Ending).

His condemnation of Jasmine, the architect of her own demise (like Chili, heartbreak and neediness leads her to do something quite destructive with a telephone), might be an attack on what he sees as Mia Farrow’s over-reaction; or, rather, perhaps it is his own self-censure, however subconscious.  Neither the guilty or the innocent can put the past behind them, and it’s the human condition to deny, rationalize, and run. Andrew Dice Clay, a comedian whose star has drifted far from the heights of 25 years ago, almost breaches a fourth wall when he tells Jasmine, “Some people, they don’t put things behind so easily.” It’s a moment beautifully played by Clay (whose work as a Lefty Rosenthal-type in Michael Mann’s Crime Story proved long ago that he had solid acting chops), embracing his derided Ford Fairlane persona by tossing a barely-smoked cigarette on the ground after speaking his piece, the specter of What Could Have Been having the final word before sadly walking away.

Blue Jasmine is an immaculate and fascinating portrait of a scattered identity being painfully exposed, going from First Class airs to rambling nonsensically as armpit sweat builds up on an expensive blouse. It’s a funnier film than it’s been given credit for, and also a richer one, but its bitterness–and sympathy–toward human folly is the lacerating testament of a great misanthrope and human observer. Jasmine has hidden from herself in the ritual of the remembering the lyrics of “Blue Moon,” the song playing when Hal swept her off her feet. But young Danny’s lowly station in life emphasizes how the instruments behind music are used, refurbished, and resold cheaply, just as the slimy Al Munsinger can change a room with a little iPod. Did the Hal she construct from her imagination during that incipient musical moment ever exist?  Did Danny, a holdover from his previous marriage that she’s nearly taken as her own adopted son?  Did anything from that warm and luxurious life, quickly taken away from her, actually belong to her, when she wasn’t even there? The anthropology of Jasmine/Jeanette is a foolhardy expedition, another delusional Manifest Destiny, and now she wanders aimless and mad while the words to “Blue Moon” are forgotten, just a mash of jumbled words.

Born Free: Joshua Oppenheimer's "The Act of Killing"

“I know my bad dreams came from what I did. Killing people who didn’t want to die. I forced them to die.” -Anwar Congo

Anwar Congo

(This writing on THE ACT OF KILLING is based on the 115-minute theatrical cut of Joshua Oppenheimer's film, distributed throughout specialty cinemas in the United States. It's one of 2013's best films and the most unsettling. However, the 160-minute director's cut, presented at such venues as The Walker Art Center, is immensely superior, and, more than the best motion picture of 2013, will probably be considered one of the best motion pictures ever made, period). 

Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary The Act of Killing is an exposé of a person’s soul, or as the filmmaker calls it, “a documentary of the imagination.” Its images and staged recreations of 50-year-old atrocities are probably less illuminating about concrete historical incidents than they are about the veiled and jagged contours of the perpetrators’ inner lives. This is a film that understands the power of images, the viewfinder reaching inward, the undertaking an exercise in psychological voyeurism not only taking us into the mystery of a mass killing, but also the dark heart of how we now, presently, reflect on the creation and ingestion of moving images – how they influence us, how we see ourselves in them, and how we want to use them to project our inner lives. In filmmaking, a monument is given to memory, and the anti-heroes in The Act of Killing are play-acting through memories quite happily, emulating the Hollywood films that inspired and entertained them. But we also see how the process of “seeing” may, Hamlet-like, set up the mousetrap to catch conscience and provoke a deep and painful reflection. The film forces us to excavate this mystery further, transcending its setting with perennial exhortations of identity and guilt. Is the guilt real, when heinous past deeds have given power and happiness? Or is it performative, even in cloistered intimacy with only the watchful gaze of one’s conscience?

Danse macabre at the beginning and end of civilization: Lake Toba in "The Act of Killing"

Oppenheimer’s main subject is Anwar Congo, a leisurely and genteel grandfather who observes his haughtier peers with searching eyes, his relaxed walk exuding control and sage-like calm, but also muted lethality. This man is a killer made by — and made for — the movies. Cinema has bookended his existence as a gangster. Unable to find normal work as a youth, he scalped tickets outside of a theater, falling in love with the Hollywood films that featured masculine Western icons he would emulate, like John Wayne and Marlon Brando. He appropriated the postures and techniques of movie murderers for the state-sanctioned killing of over 1000 people during the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66, when over a million so-called “communists” were exterminated by paramilitary officials and gangsters like him. He would sometimes exit a movie theater, dancing giddily across the street with Elvis songs running in his head, and proceed to torture and murder — “happily” — his victims who were detained in a building across the street. With his bloated and ridiculously outspoken gangster friend Herman Koto, he mentions how the leftists were responsible for banning the Hollywood films that not only entertained him, but also gave him bigger profits as a scalper. Murdering them could have been the vengeance of the most opportunistic and outrageous of film programmers.

The Odd Couple: Anwar Congo and Herman Koto, on the street where they scalped tickets for Hollywood films.

Now he’s the guiding hand of his own motion picture, trying to accurately recreate those brutal years. With Oppenheimer’s funds, Anwar and his friends gladly are starring in a film about what happened in 1965. Anwar might be luring in his audience by comparing the “action” here to what you’d see in a James Bond movie. He also grasps the morbid sadism of a commercial audience, claiming that he can make something more sadistic than any film about Nazi atrocities. Though the grueling gangland violence of The Godfather trilogy, Goodfellas, and Scarface came years after the genocide, his name-dropping of Brando and Pacino indicates how those pictures reinforced his tastes, and as such films glamorized the gangster life, he insinuates that, if the result is accurate, his life story will be equally entertaining.

"There are many ghosts here."

A fan of these iconic gangster films myself, I’ve always been somewhat convinced that they’ve been unfortunately misunderstood and hijacked from their true themes of dehumanization. Businessmen, drug dealers, and military strategists idolize the Corleones and Tony Montana for their surfaces showcasing success.  Anwar appears to be no exception. Yet at times caught unaware of Oppenheimer’s camera, we observe a more thoughtful and enigmatic individual.  His story shares something else with those aforementioned motion pictures: a sense of operatic tragedy alluding to the hollow and dark side of success, the empty void in the center of prosperity and “freedom.” Surrounded by a web of remarkable characters, Anwar Congo is no less compelling as a dramatic figure than Michael Corleone through The Godfather trilogy, or Henry Hill in Goodfellas, if not, as executive producer Errol Morris has pointed out, the tragic figures of Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, two individuals representative of the insolubility of identity: we ask “who’s there?” and there’s always another layer of the onion to peel away before we have nothing at all.

Ridiculous and sublime: Anwar's victims returning as ghosts.

Throughout The Act of Killing, Anwar is not only a mystery to us. Does he even know what’s driving him? We’re uncertain of his motives, which appear distinct from his peers, who are uniformly less conscientious of their history, of their “karma,” of eternity.  Like Michael Corleone, Anwar  is a man held in deep respect by his society, in love with his comforts and sensitive to family matters. But as mortality becomes a very real thing, he’s restlessly haunted.  

He’s swimming between the sacred and profane, and the film likewise wavers on an unsteady–and unsettling–beam of simulation and reality, true horror and staged performance, with all the blurriness between them. We wonder what scenes and utterances are real and what’s scripted.  Much of it we’ve seen before in other films.  A rapacious and repugnant thug passive aggressively demands money pay-offs from Chinese merchants, so much like the “Black Hand,” Don Fanucci, in Godfather II. Is this happening now or is it a recreation of what these men saw as “the good old days”? The merchants give odd smiles after they’ve hesitantly handed over money, as if they were awkwardly gripped by the camera’s vice-glare. Wearing fedora hats and smoking cigars, Anwar and Herman act out an interrogation scene, lit like a noir crime film. As the moment of strangulation approaches, Anwar breaks, noting, “It’s morning prayers.” There’s something observant about him (the director's cut--40 minutes longer and exponentially superior to this already fantastic film--has Anwar talking about how his mother instructed him to pray as a child), and we have other hints denoting an uneasy and strained relationship with something “eternal,” permanent, spiritual. During this break and pacing between shadows he gives a speech which he recites so assuredly that we wonder if it can’t be scripted. “Human rights. All this talk about ‘human rights’ pisses me off. We want a little human rights. Back then there was no human rights.”  Is he wary of international law coming down on men like him, who prospered at a time when “human rights” weren’t an option? Trying to convince himself of legitimacy? Or playing his role as “a movie theater gangster, a free man.”  

A very "Black Hand" moment from "The Act of Killing," as Chinese merchants are forced to pay off paramilitary enforcers.

But the darkness around him, swallowing his face, betrays his words just as they corroborate them. His foil in this film is a man named Adi Zulkadry, who speaks of the transitory hollowness of language in international law, especially when other genocides perpetrated by winners — the Native Americans, segregation, the British Empire, Belgian colonialism — go unpunished. Both Anwar and Adi are right about the emptiness of language, the performative stage act which leads politicians to become “soap opera actors,” something we hear while Herman runs for parliament–the thuggish killer of union leaders now claiming to fight for worker’s rights, our villain wearing a Transformers good-guy Autobot t-shirt.

As with Shakespeare where tyrants’ sins are manifest in apparitions–Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III–Anwar sees ghosts. He takes Oppenheimer’s camera on a tour through a building rooftop where a thousand people died “unnatural deaths.” He says, “There’s many ghosts here.” He’s been having bad dreams where the dead linger with hateful visages. He’s staged his murders and interrogations like the lurid gangster film, but we also see scenes that look like Westerns, and the spectacle of a consoling heaven as Bollywood musical number, the philosophy of being “free” affirmed as Anwar and company dance with thankful victims, “Born Free” on the soundtrack. He films his nightmares, overseeing one of his peers in heavy makeup and a freakish costume, playing the cackling ghost who won’t let Anwar sleep. “But I killed you!” Anwar cries, pointing a finger as the film crew looks on. The ghost is not terrifying or sad. Rather, the vengeance of the dead is absurd, ridiculous, even hilarious.  Because Anwar is tortured by the reality of what he's done, he cannot simulate it correctly. 

Anwar Congo plays out his nightmares for the camera, Herman in drag looking on.

Notice how between takes Oppenheimer cuts to Anwar alone on his bed, imprisoned in the camera’s frame and visibly wrestling with the source of his hackneyed script-writing. The artifice of filmmaking is a buffer for him, assuaging guilt as he processes his deeds. He cannot reconcile the purposeful terrain of artistic representation with the terrible corporeal reality of the what he’s done — stage blood doesn’t become real blood any more than wine does during Mass. Off the set, he’s still a respected man whose reputation is built on corpses who were efficiently dispatched with piano wire and then dumped in ditches.  He can show his grandchildren the images of his crulety and teach them lessons of kindness as a limping duck passes by. But this is “only a film.” The dead are still dead, and they knew they would die and that they were powerless. Anwar’s masochistic endeavor — going so far as to act as one of his victims — is futile and troubling, whether or not “terror possesses his body” while it’s happening. I don’t think Anwar is simulating remorse for us, but I do question whether or not he’s doing it so that he can live with himself.

Propaganda kept the political officials for whom Congo killed in power to this day (another excision from the theatrical version shows one of brutal, anti-communist films children were forced to watch; the red overtly artificial blood can't help but remind one of Alex watching thuggish films with pleasure in A Clockwork Orange) . Even though there is apparently a semblance of “democracy” now in Indonesia, the paramilitary rallies we see in the picture show how strong-arm fascism, hijacking and twisting the word “freedom” along with it, is running the show. “It’s not about ‘fear,’” we’re told about this “happy” and “accurate” depiction of mass murder staged by the murderers. “It’s about image.” Everything is about sight, of open secrets that are transparent though ignored out of convenience. Adi proclaims his lack of remorse while also being skeptical about the film project because, he says, “I believe God has his secrets.” Adi says, “Killing is the worst crime you can do. So the key is to find a way not to feel guilty. It’s all about finding the right excuse.” We see him sitting with his family in a shopping mall, looking dispassionately near fancy perfume counters, escalators, and flat screen televisions as his voice-over describes the sadistic things he did many years ago. His family members take selfie pictures with a smartphone.

"It's not about fear. It's about image." An unrepentant mass murderer with his selfie-ready family at a shopping mall in "The Act of Killing."

It’s a powerful moment, and Adi’s chosen lack of conscientiousness parallels ours, as a Western audience far away from the sweat shops of the distant East. The “open secret” of genocide runs alongside the suffering enabling our access to ingenious tools of mass communication and entertainment, to easily create and reconfigure our self-images (like Adi’s family) while the laborers creating those tools could never dream of possessing them. Without an image, they have no voice and are as easily forgotten by us as Adi’s victims (including a girlfriend’s father) were by him.  At times while listening to him, I couldn’t help but think of Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), the eye doctor and philandering murderer who chooses to look the other way from Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors. “People carry awful deeds around with them,” Judah says. “This is reality. In reality we rationalize. We deny or we couldn’t go on living…I’m talking about reality. If you want a happy ending, you should go see a Hollywood movie.”  Adi denies nothing, but he is able to carry his awful deeds around without any problem, nihilistically embracing Identity as a vacuum with his practical sensibility. He’s probably the most intelligent and philosophically sophisticated character we see in The Act of Killing, even if that philosophy endorses something shallow. It might be representative of our philosophy more than we care to acknowledge.

*

By design or by accident, Oppenheimer’s exploration of these killers has an archetypal quality. The film opens with the dark reflective water of an ancient lake, and we’ll see Anwar’s soul searching accompanied by images of him fishing. The film’s most notorious image is of a giant goldfish, out of which dance women smiling and beaming joy for the camera. It’s a startling and surreal picture out of a dream, running counter to the manufactured fish decoration that sings Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” seen later. In contrast to the “Relax and Rolex” free-man gangster-life celebration of apathy and willful Don’t Worry Be Happy blindness, Anwar’s guilt stems from a pair of open eyes. He tells us about a man he decapitated, the corpse’s eyes catching him offguard. “Why didn’t I close his eyes?” he asks. “That is the source of my nightmares. I’m always gazed at by those eyes that I didn’t close.” 

But limiting to that one set of eyes is a cop-out. It's an ocean of dead with which he struggles. He’s now surrounded by the dark, looking on, detached and guilty, on replayed sins.  Anwar is reflecting against the indifferent landscape at Lake Toba, his dreamlike dance macabre–much like the conclusion of Fellini’s 8 1/2–playing out next to that rusting giant goldfish. A cataclysmic volcano erupted here 75,000 years ago which, according to some scientists, killed all but one group of our ancestors. Some fishing line in his hands, Congo ponders karma, “the law of nature, straight from God.” Distant lightning strikes behind him as he speaks and turns on a flashlight into the dark water of the lake. Oppenheimer cuts to a full moon, a symbol of clarity and reflection, an emblem of a light revealing something that’s not real (what we see of the moon is only the sun’s light reflecting on it). “Imagine in all this darkness,” he says, “it’s like we’re living at the end of the world. We look around. There’s only darkness. It’s so very terrifying.”

Anwar Congo, blindfolded, plays one of his victims.

Like Claudius in Hamlet, Congo’s awakening has paradoxically thrown him in an omnipresent darkness, the insatiable void of black time that laps up the transitory trifles of politics and quick fixes. Claudius was driven to his private quarters after seeing how the art of Hamlet’s play reflected his act of fratricide. His new crown has given him legitimacy: “In the corrupted currents of this world / Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice, / And oft tis seen the wicked prize itself / Buys out the law,” he says. But then he realizes, “[But] ’tis not so above, / There is no shuffling, there the action lies / In his true nature…” (Hamlet, III.3) Oppenheimer’s setting at Toba is fitting, as the beginning and end of human civilization becomes the film set of Anwar Congo’s fantasies and fears.

*

The dynamism of Oppenheimer’s innovative approach to documentary filmmaking makes Anwar one of the most ecstatic characters in any film, fiction or real. The Act of Killing is certainly an admirable document of humanism and activism, but its descent with Anwar into the bottomless well of the past only leaves us more uncertain, if even more resolute to get at the core of a person or incident. It’s a beguiling and monumental journey into the nature of identity. Film as Collective Memory was recently invoked by Martin Scorsese’s lecture “The Persisting Vision.”  Scorsese is the architect of several gangster sagas that feel eerily similar to Anwar’s journey (especially when we consider Scorsese’s Catholic relationship to guilt and penance, paying for sins “my way” beyond the bullshit of words, if we recall the opening minutes of Mean Streets), and his fraternal mob movies meditate on a violent culture’s history (the motifs of violence and good food go hand-in-hand in the Inferno of Goodfellas, for instance). Scorsese brings up Thomas Mann’s opening to Joseph and His Brothers, “The deeper we sound, the further down into the lower world we probe and press, the more do we find that the earliest foundations of humanity, its history and culture, reveal themselves unfathomable.” Anwar’s dreams by Lake Toba feel like pure cinema, and are the culmination of his story even though it leaves us wondering “What the fuck?” in the web of an indiscernible mystery of human nature. In his lecture, Scorsese is wondering about the beginnings of humanity running alongside the origins of cinema, bringing up the Chauvet caves from 30,000 years ago, the subject of one of The Act of Killing‘s most vocal champions Werner Herzog with his documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

"I imitated Hollywood movie stars." A photograph of the young Anwar as executioner and "gangster."

Herzog was framing the drawn images of primitive human beings, wondering how these ancient artisans were transmuting action into representation. Unfathomable, we’re still brought closer to distantly removed ancestors living in contexts alien to our own. Oppenheimer’s film, with its archetypal quality and Ring of Fire setting of searching eyes amidst shadow, is descending into the dreams of humanity’s worst capabilities, and becoming intimate with figures we’d gladly relegate to a dustbin of handily labeled antagonism. In this soul-and-species searching odyssey of sight and sound and history and memory, we become aware that cinema is probably the only art that could make us feel this way. The perplexing emotions and numbing truths of The Act of Killing would be ill-served by a book or play or photograph, where it would be too abstracted and detached from our senses. Seeing and hearing these people, the actual role-players of an ugly history, perform for a camera and become immersed in their dreams–or, like Adi, openly discussing why they’d rather not immerse in them–could only work with the intimacy of filmmaking and filmgoing. It’s problematic because of the resistance to identifying with these people. And though you’d think that totalitarian government figures would work to ban and burn films, note how the official we see feels “awful” while watching the recreation of a village being burned, with crying children whose trauma feels too visceral to be performed. “It’s dangerous for our organization’s image,” he says, though later amending himself, “Don’t erase it! Use it to show how ferocious we can be! In fact, we can be worse.”

It’s the most perverse and unexpected side of film preservation. Such propaganda has kept descendants of the genocide victims living in fear since 1965, preventing them from forming unions. It reminded me of a moment from Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, where the filmmaker shows us Nazis filming Jews being boarded onto trains that will take them to a final destination. Whether it’s the (however we label them) heroes or villains that are documenting cruelty, it’s still important that it be preserved so that we can see, accurately, who we were and what we did, comparing past contexts to present ones, however much the camera affected the historical performers encaged in the frame. This was an important–and often overlooked–theme of Spielberg’s Lincoln, where Spielberg and Tony Kushner have special emphasis given to Alexander Gardner’s photographs of slaves. The president, mindful of how history is always wavering through an ongoing dialectic, says, “Be careful with them.” We’re also meant to note how particular relationships in the film mirror now derided representations in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the first filmic depiction of Lincoln from nearly a century before.

Images might be born from cruelty, but upon reflection in the darkness, the light projected is, quite possibly, an awakening, where, so much more important than textbook documentation, the maelstrom of an inner life’s ecstasies unfold. The Act of Killing magnificently traces the cautious boundary of that window between spectating seeker and projected imagination. We can’t ever know Anwar Congo, and no matter what he does he can never atone for what he’s done or know with certainty that he is sorry. But the past won’t release him and he keeps on looking. Like the aging Michael Corleone, who prayed but still wouldn’t repent, his mind suffers and his body cries out. Looking over a ghostly destination, he bends over with unnatural sounds of regurgitation, but only spit comes out. The past won’t release him, and I fear his bad conscience won’t either. This is a film about how the division of past and present is illusory. So it is with film goer and film, where what we’re seeing isn’t separate but so often a component of our identity, controlling conscience when we delude ourselves into thinking we’re born free.

Nicolas Winding Refn's "Only God Forgives"

When Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling’s Only God Forgives premiered at Cannes in May, there was a chorus of booing followed by pans. Having seen the film and thinking about what critics and audiences were expecting from it, I can see why. But I also ravenously luxuriated in it, my eyes infatuated with its languid rhythm and saturated images, my ears adoring its ambient textures and stretched silences. Greased with Cliff Martinez’s silky synth score, it’s a film in which one alertly bathes as it massages the senses.  In alignment with its strained Oedipal themes, where a muted son has to sever himself from a crassly verbose mother, the fleshy warm glow is womb-like.

Two years earlier, the pair’s first collaboration Drive won Refn a directing prize at Cannes. Though not a hit, it was well on its way to becoming a cult film. But the less-than-welcoming reception for the follow-up was imminent. Drive has its fair share of intelligent cinephile detractors (Quentin Tarantino said of it, “Nice try”) just as it had disappointed mainstream audience members not expecting the slow-burn urban fairy tale when the trailer (apparently) promised a Fast and Furious-tempered action vehicle. Gosling, meanwhile, has been caught in a handsome stoicism that is increasingly grating: looking at you quietly, talking gently with the ghost of a smile, and then punching people in the teeth (after Drive, think of Gangster Squad, The Place Beyond the Pines).  Only God Forgives feeds into this tiresome Gosling type. His character, Julian, runs a boxing club in Thailand that fronts for a drug business controlled by his family, including older and more assured brother Billy (Tom Burke) and mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas). Julian wordlessly stares while his mouth lingers in shadows. Calm, silent, gazing, beautiful, chaste–this is very much like the Driver relocated to Thailand.

Refn’s new film isn’t as accessible as his previous one.  With Drive, audiences could be fascinated and puzzled with the enigmatic Driver, but in ways relate — or at least be comfortable with — the familiar noir types in Hossein Amini’s screenplay like Carey Mulligan’s single mom, Albert Brooks’ delightful and lethal gangster Bernie Rose, Bryan Cranston’s crippled mechanic, Oscar Isaac’s ex-con struggling to go straight, and even Ron Perlman’s despicable and vulgar “Fine Ass Pussymobile” bully.  The beautiful contemporary synth-pop soundtrack plugs into the story’s romanticism as it flirts with an attractive filmic iconography preceding it, of Western heroes like Shane, Kenneth Anger’s leather/cars/pop fetish fest Scorpio Rising, Melville’s Le Samourai, and the glitzy sheen of ’80s B-movies.

All that made Drive a richer experience, as Refn, working on assignment, was like an alien making the familiar L.A. terrain seem startlingly new. It was a fairy tale and super-hero movie, and its off-beat pathological longing left the ultraviolence (which only figures into the picture at about the 45-minute mark) as a problematic afterthought. The Driver’s protective vengeance might have been seen as sleek noir posturing and flexing, but I felt that this character resembled the titular character (Ryan O’Neal) from Walter Hill’s The Driver or one of  Jean-Pierre Melville’s or Michael Mann’s criminal loners (James Caan in Thief, Robert De Niro in Heat) less than Mann’s scoptophiliac killer Francis Dollarhyde from Manhunter. That sense of pathology made the picture feel more fantastic and twisted in its solipsism, in addition to being more tragic.  Gosling’s bouts of rage stemmed more from a frustrated–and even psychopathic–sense of inadequacy and apart-ness than heroism. The “victory” over Bernie and the gangsters at the conclusion felt like a beautiful delusion and fantasy more than cathartic triumph. Or maybe it was both at once, which makes Drive more and more interesting to me, as if I’m losing my mind while watching it.

In Only God Forgives, the sense of the hero’s real-world inadequacy is addressed.  The passively observational and silent Julian is in the shadow of his brother, a man with aggressive eyes with specific demands to satiate his fetishes. Looking through a window into a room of prostitutes (all lounging on a set that feels like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey), Billy says to the manager, with chilling affectless speech, “Are those women? I want to fuck a girl. I want to fuck a 14-year-old girl.”  Violently making his way to another bordello, Billy rapes and murders a teen prostitute who happens to be the pimp’s daughter. The investigating police lieutenant, Chang, known as “the Angel of Death” (Vithaya Pansringarm, who exudes a magnificent presence), allows the father to do whatever he wants to the placid and almost catatonic Billy–before having his own arm sliced off by Lt. Chang as punishment for selling off his daughter. We see the after effects of a terrible bludgeoning, Billy’s cranium opened up and spilling curdled brain matter.

When Julian hesitates to avenge the murder because of the context (“I’m sure he had his reasons,” he says of the pimp father), mother Crystal shames and humiliates him. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” she says when Julian tries to explain things. A real man would have brought her the head of Billy’s murderer on a plate. At a dinner, she points out to Julian’s date Mai (Ratha Phongam), a prostitute who dances at a club Julian frequents, how Julian (whose name is feminine) always envied Billy for, among other things, the elder brother’s superior penis.  After the prostitute’s father has been killed by some of Crystal’s hired thugs, Lt. Chang looks at Julian and judges he had nothing to do with it (“He’s not the one”)–not because of evidence, but because, so it seems, he intuits that Julian doesn’t have it in him to carry out vengeance the way men like Billy and Chang do.

It’s a darker avenue of fantasy where what’s dream and what’s real tumble together with uncertainty. The film’s shady and maze-like interiors reminded me of David Lynch’s Red Room from his Twin Peaks universe, particularly as used during the prequel film Fire Walk With Me and the television finale, where characters are lost between real and unreal, waking and dream, good and evil, White Lodge and Black. Characters speak in riddles, their dialogue recorded backward and played forward. Fire Walk With Me was also booed at Cannes, but it demands viewers adjust to its wavelength.  Alongside its Laura Palmer storyline of incest and murder was the mystery of the Red Room, the other-world where garmonbozia (pain and suffering) is dished out through bargains between supernatural characters.  Lynch’s abstract methods are in sync with what I think Refn is doing with Julian, who is wandering through the landscape of the film as through the quandary of his mind. Only God Forgives has other Lynchian motifs like singers on stages (with karaoke instead of lip-syncing) and a terrifically rich sound design of saturated noise and ocean-deep silences that drown everything, much like what we hear in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and INLAND EMPIRE (or Kubrick’s The Shining). As with Lynch’s universe, I don’t think the bell-ringing of movie references of Refn function as a base so much as another texture, surrounding characters who drift tonally through a labyrinth of artifice and longing.

The picture is problematic because of its sexuality. But I don’t think Refn wants to do anything progressive so much as raw and ecstatic, and that means delving into the insecurities of his male protagonists (or himself as a filmmaker) and projecting them onto everything we see. Like with Drive, Gosling’s strong-silent-type hero is chaste but the ubiquitous sexuality of Only God Forgives‘ lurid clubs and bordellos, in addition to the profane and all-too-direct dialogue of Crystal and Billy (Crystal memorably calls Mai a “cum-dumpster”), makes that chastity all the more alienating for the protagonist.  While watching Mai dance, Julian’s gaze becomes a fantasy where he’s tied to a chair as she masturbates in front of him, her imagined climax coinciding with an image of his dismemberment, as a sword comes from the darkness and down on his outstretched arms. Speech, sex, and violence swirl in a tainted soup for Julian (and Refn), and stuck in the confines of his mind and gaze, he’s unable to do what he sees around him, what others can do so easily.  The cutting in the scene, where her groin shifts to his, and the fantasy doubles for cabaret performance, indicates how locked up Julian is within himself. We watch this world that Julian seemingly is apart from and wonder if he’s somehow the inventor of what we’re seeing.

That’s how Only God Forgives functions in the vein of a violent Asian-influenced revenge fantasy. Whereas Drive gave audiences the satisfaction of its B-movie set-up with the hateful evil-doers foiled and (in the case of that infamous elevator, literally) stamped out, Refn refuses such a release here, as the hero’s victory and transformation is his own immolation. Only God Forgives indulges in the grotesque with its visceral ultraviolence, for example a character’s rib cage bursting through a wound after he’s been sliced open. But the violence is spread out between luxuriously moody sequences of staring and wonder. It’s also off-screen most of the time. Refn often denies us seeing the penetration of bludgeoning, stabbing, and shooting. And as the story addresses Julian’s gendered inadequacies of what being a “real man” is supposed to mean, Refn addresses how we intake violence as viewers. Before a grueling session of violence commences in a crowded club, Lt. Chang says, “Girls, keep your eyes closed. Men, take a good look.” Chang then gets all Duke of Cornwall on a poor chap’s eyeballs before going a little Mr. Blonde on the ears.

Maybe it’s that I’m not a real man, but my eyes were admittedly not open for the whole proceeding. “You can’t see what is good for you,” Chang says as his point goes into the vile jelly of the eyeball. I don’t know if Refn wants us to look at everything (I have the same problem with the elevator boot-stomp in Drive, where I think the audience’s double is the horrified Carey Mulligan; and then there are those intestines from Valhalla Rising), but there definitely is a masculine code in Only God Forgives which causes anxiety for Julian, and then it becomes our anxiety.  I have my problems with Refn’s violence as I do with Tarantino’s gleeful “movie violence” (as opposed to Scorsese’s philosophy of violence, where he wants you to be horrified and look away), but at least it’s not blindly cathartic. It’s more like an endurance test.

Is Only God Forgives punishment? Not to be at all in agreement with its detractors, but it’s a sincere question as to whatever Refn’s motives are. The blonde haired and blue-eyed Hollywood hero isn’t the one doing the tolling out in this picture; it’s this Asian “Angel of Death,” whose katana sword, though pulled from behind his back, supernaturally materializes from nowhere.  Revenge violence is fantasy that locks us in a spellbound gaze much like Julian’s sexual fantasy with Mai, during which eyes  looking directly at us before he’s untied–and dismembered in this separate filmic/fantastical plane.  Chang may be a corrupt police lieutenant, but he’s a warm family man who reads to his daughter at bedtime, and his crafty violence is inflicted on pimps or thugs who’ve conspired against him and fellow officers. Julian and his family are drug dealers and foreign invaders–much like Refn’s film is invading Thailand–a Danish director and American star leading a crew of mostly Thai employees. Crystal refers to the natives as “yellow niggers” and doesn’t have time for their property or perspectives.  The confrontation of familial revenge is the song we’re expecting, but Refn changes the lyrics and point-of-view.

Refn’s pictures of lethal silent observers provoke us to wonder about perspective (people have told me that re-watching Drive while thinking that the Driver is a delusional psychopath changed their opinion of the film); the director could be “having a wank” (a phrase people love to use when describing indulgent filmmakers, I guess) with his web of allusions, his films a kind of midnight-movie karaoke. But the karaoke displayed in Only God Forgives points to a sense of how Refn’s appropriations are reverent, even strangely religious. Instead of good-time off-key humor, the karaoke crowd — mostly of policemen watching Chang at the mic — stares and listens attentively as if during a ritual. The artifice is part of the design. Refn’s film in tone, movement, and design feels very Kubrickian, and with the deep reds against chilly blues I was particularly reminded of Eyes Wide Shut (whose principal lighting cameraman, Larry Smith, is Only God Forgives‘ cinematographer), another film set on the blurry boundaries of dream and waking, artifice and myth, where the primal and haunting sounds of the Somerton orgy are undercut when we see how Nick Nightingale’s organ is hooked up to an amplifier. That film, with its scenario of a man set on revenge fucking with strangers as retaliation against a spouse who’s revealed her fantasies of infidelity, also, like Only God Forgives, denies the protagonist–and audience–the expectant orgasm.

From what I’ve read, the negative reviews about Only God Forgives are neglectful of its title which denotes something religious. Here, Refn continues to think about transformation: we see the metamorphosis with criminal-artist Charlie Bronson (Tom Hardy) in Bronson, the silent one-eyed viking (Madds Mikkelsen) — who gives himself up for sacrifice to American natives (and may be the god Odin)  — in Valhalla Rising, and the quiet Driver who becomes a violent action-hero savior, dying and resurrecting with Drive‘s final moments, the College song reminding us that he’s become a “real human being and a real hero.” With its cavernous hallways and crimson dream-like environs, Only God Forgives is like its own temple or church, the plot secondary to a ritual’s solemn function. Gorgeously rendered, its movements and atmosphere are wholly engrossing. The implication is that Julian, like Bronson, One-Eye, and the Driver–in his failure as a hero–becomes a “god,” if only in his own head, or the hermetical universe of the film.

The boxing club where Julian works is replete with its own gods and icons, the statues and pictures of the fighters from the past. Julian and Billy groom adolescents for the ring, and we could see this as a factory where aggression is manufactured. But the boy led to the ring by Julian–which feels like a sacrificial altar–catches the riotous crowd off-guard when he kneels and prays before his fight. As he does with much of the film’s violence, Refn declines showing us a victorious blow and instead cuts backstage afterward. His emphasis is on the ritualistic element, and the young fighter’s meditative sensibility is linked to his trainer, the watchful Julian, so different from the aggressive automaton Billy.

Chang has a sense of sage conscientiousness distinct from other characters.  He leaves the stations of the cross in his wake, but what of mercy (the “forgiveness” of the title)?  Led to the hideout of a poor man who was hired by Crystal to kill him, he slices open the ratting informant but, presumably, lets the other man live.  This other man tells Chang that he’s ready to face the consequences but pleads “spare my son,” a handicapped child whose eyes stare at us into the camera and refuse to look away from the carnage.  The man accepts responsibility and his concerns are unselfish.

This marvelous and unforgettable sequence, with that child’s inscrutable and unflinching face looking at us/Chang, reminded me again of where I was coming from with this pulp revenge story.  Julian’s family is representative of a privileged class.  Crystal verbally abuses workers at the luxurious hotel in which she stays. Billy takes advantage of poor working girls and their families, so poor they are compelled to sell off their daughters. Chang, our presumed antagonist, is fighting on behalf of the proletariat. He’s God’s messenger bringing justice and retribution, ascending to the 42nd floor to confront the nefarious and terrible Kali-Ma mother Crystal.

Julian is a movie hero who was born into the house of villains, and Only God Forgives rather unsubtly delves into his struggle to return to–or be severed from–the womb. It might sound, in our post-Freudian time of academic flippancy, a little (or a lot) pretentious, but I think Only God Forgives works because it hits some uncomfortable primal cords, in its solipsistic and masculine cell, relating to Refn’s sense of cinema that ring true. Refn himself says, “The idea was to make a movie that takes place in the vagina and I wondered what that would look like. Man’s fear of sexuality is the basis of all horror from the male perspective.”  I think there’s something cheeky about his words, but it’s also sincere.  The draped red confines of the film’s clubs have a corporeal feeling, and Julian’s fascination or desire for sex is not procreative but precocious. His fetish is to see hands, his instruments of violence, in orifices (his first violent assault in a club has him slapping–not punching–two male patrons and dragging one of them through a hallway by the mouth).  In a film that confuses reality for dream, it’s possible that what we hear Crystal say is in his self-loathing and sexually anxious imagination (such as that colorful vaginal euphemism “cum dumpster”). Scott Thomas leaves an incredible impression as Crystal, and seeing how she seems to be existing on an alternate plane of existence from the rest of the film’s characters, the performance is a work of art not out of line with what Julian may have concocted in his imagination–though she governs his movements, even if he knows they’re irrational.

She is the terrible mother who will eventually beg Julian to protect her, who was told by doctors to “terminate” the pregnancy she had with him, and who voices the hidden secret of what he’s done with his bare hands to his father. Having given birth to him she now admits that she’ll never understand him and never will. She’s a woman who might as well be conversing with herself and naming all of the son’s sexual insecurities. Julian really wants to get back inside of her (yeah…he does), as if to do everything over or will himself out of existence.

His confrontation with Chang at the boxing club is an anticlimax of atonement (and one of the reasons audiences who dug Drive and Tarantino’s revenge movies will be disappointed with Refn here). He’s not a worthy adversary for Chang, but his will to receive punishment, as someone who doesn’t feel he deserves to live, is what’s remarkable.  The film’s structure, as sacrament more than plot-driven narrative, is reminiscent of Raging Bull, also about a self-destructive man who takes punches like he doesn’t want to live. Redemption in that film wasn’t verbal or narrative, but came with the audience seeing a man who was the worst kind of sinner. “That’s entertainment!” becomes a kind of Holy Rite.

The instinct in revenge is the same for revenge-movie-going: self-satisfaction.  Refn’s film is a self-flagellating exercise where we’re meant to contemplate otherness, be it races, reasons, or perspectives. The opening credits refuse to translate themselves from Thai to English for us. Words flow like money from Crystal’s mouth and are used to control others, along with aggression. Julian’s most verbal moment is when he walks on the streets with Mai after introducing her to his mother. She says that she doesn’t want to keep the dress he bought her and he wrathfully tells her to take it off immediately. But silence is cinema for Refn, and the ritual of solitary gazing, like Chang and the handicapped child looking at each other, or like Julian looking at another child in the film, whom he has been instructed to kill, shifts perspectives and makes people more receptive–a thought coinciding with the symbolic castration/silencing (the reality of which is uncertain) preceding the picture’s concluding karaoke moment of a spellbound audience listening to the Angel of Death.

"The Lone Ranger": Stupid or Just Pretending to be Stupid?

“I’m trying to figure out if this horse is stupid or just pretending to be stupid,” Tonto (Johnny Depp)–whose name in Spanish means “Stupid”–says while looking deeply into the eyes of the pearly white “spirit horse” supposedly guiding him to revenge and redemption.

The line struck me while watching Gore Verbinski’s $215+ million dud The Lone Ranger, one of the worst-reviewed pictures of 2013 which threatens, with its meager grosses over the holiday weekend, to be exactly the kind of death-blow fiasco threatening the current paradigm of studio moviemaking. The Lone Ranger was, as a concept, intuited by the critics and public as its own kind of dead horse–a popular radio, television, and cartoon icon from simpler times: dads and granddads might find something appealing, but this is the generation of 1980s Hasbro and Mattel toys. This misbegotten project serves little modern function as this particular “Buddy Cop” team, comprising the Lone Ranger and his loyal helper Tonto, belongs to regressive stereotypes of rugged white masculinity with the stoic noble savage at the wayside.  Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, one of the main arbiters of (sometimes admittedly delicious) trash in Hollywood, casting Depp as Tonto — problematic in spite of the actor’s presumed Cherokee heritage — and directed by Verbinski, whose two latest Pirates of the Caribbean collaborations with Depp were superfluous special effects shipwrecks of high-starch blockbusting bloat, there’s every reason to presume this Horse is indeed Stupid. The trailer’s ramped style of CGI, BOM-de-BOM-BOM-BOM music, fast-cutting momentum, and eye-rolling comic asides defines what is soul crushing about the modern day Marvel-dominated franchise laden multiplex of high-octane short-attention-span videogame sensations.  This movie’s existence pissed me off. The Lone Ranger just looks like everything that’s freaking wrong with the modern age. 

But I saw the film. And Jesus. I now have to wonder: Was the horse just pretending to be stupid after all?  Is there a more strangely perverse Hollywood “novelty” film to open on the July 4th weekend, whether in its rather loud subtext of angry politics or even in its offbeat way of revealing itself? The presumption was that The Lone Ranger, like Pirates, was going to kickstart another expensive Bruckheimer/Verbinski/Depp franchise in addition to making Armie Hammer, who plays the straight-laced Ranger, a star. It would fit into that Bigger & Louder is Better paradigm of spare-no-expense studio noise, its drive for profits alongside a carpet-bomb campaign obscuring any sense of social responsibility (Subway unfortunately got stuck with the food tie-in). The Lone Ranger, from beginning to end, feels strangely personal for the filmmakers, anachronistically photographic for an event blockbuster, riddled with detail and allusion, and even, as if in accord with the passing of a race that’s had their land stolen from them, understanding of its own tragic decline, as if it knew it would bomb and then perhaps be reevaluated and championed in the years to come.

Negative reviews and my impulse to “take it easy” led me to not think of taking notes during the screening, and I didn’t write anything in the immediate days following. But, if my memory of details are hazy, I can’t shake The Lone Ranger from my mind. What I saw was a reckless adventure that courts derision, an imperfect, offbeat, and longish Western — and really a true Western more than an amusement park blockbuster — about how the mythologies of America and American entertainment intertwine. As if to acknowledge our summer movie expectations, its first images are of a carnival of amusement park rides, the incomplete constructs of San Francisco in the background of 1933, the year of the Lone Ranger’s radio debut. The camera follows a young boy in love with the spoon-fed legend of the Lone Ranger (he wears the mask, the hat, and has the toy gun) into a waxworks tent exhibit of American history. He peers up at “The Noble Savage,” an old Native American mannequin standing in front of a tent and matted background of Monument Valley.  Then, quite creepily, the “Savage”‘s eyes move and looks squarely at the boy, who responds by instinctively firing his gun.

It’s a weird prologue, for one thing the boy believing his toy gun has any power over a moving specter, and for another how it acknowledges the inadequacy of movie makeup to truly capture a semblance of real life, as Old Man Johnny Depp is locked in the wax of an appropriated image, “Tonto,” a white actor dressed up as a Native American.  This Tonto is an exploited employee, frozen in time in his “uniform” of indigenous clothes before putting on a suit and tie and walking off into the weathered terrain, a somber final image that recalls both Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) John Ford’s The Searchers (to which The Lone Ranger pays much homage) and even the Tramp — emulated by Depp in Benny and Joon – at the conclusion of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.  In all of these cases, modernity has not only rendered these characters extinct, but also the film styles in which they thrived — John Ford seeing classic Hollywood eclipsed by new acting methods and a richer perspective on American history, and Chaplin’s visual ballets of sublime choreography suffocating under the oppressive weight of Sound.

Like the 120-year-old Jack Crabbe (Dustin Hoffman) in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, the aged Tonto serves as narrator to the acutely attentive boy, who, much like the most aggravating of smart-asses one would encounter at a Geek convention (such as I did during a few panels this last week), points out continuity errors and how Tonto seems to be getting the story wrong, the first flashback entrance of the Ranger, aka John Reid, being a bank robbery with the Ranger and Tonto as the thieves. Why would a famous lawman, even a renegade one, be a bank-robber? The myths are literalized and linearized by the fans, the meaning of the Mask — which Tonto instructs never to take off — lost as it becomes a costume prop.  Tonto’s musings in the exhibit sometimes interrupt the action of The Lone Ranger saga, his past and present tied up in similar gestures and props indicating that what we’re seeing isn’t necessarily true, though it obviously means something for him. I think a lot of critics and viewers are too flippant with this film, The Lone Ranger. It’s far from cynical, though like some of the Ranger and Tonto’s plans, maybe a little irresponsible.

Law student John Reid is on his way out West to visit his rugged Ranger brother Dan (James Badge Dale). The twist in the relationship is that Dan is married to the woman John’s always loved, Rebecca (Ruth Wilson), a scenario drawn straight from The Searchers.  Dan patiently waits at a railway station for the arrival of the mangle-mouthed outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner, reliably excellent), Verbinski’s attention to detail at this setting evoking the opening to Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.  The Lone Ranger is very much like Leone’s epic of expansion and revenge, with avenging figures from the past materializing like ghosts in the landscape as rail barons (such as one played by Stephen Root here) struggle, through corruption, to align the young fractured nation. But whereas Leone and Henry Fonda’s lethal gunslinger Frank called the shots over the money-men, now the politician, Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson), has maneuvered things so that he can control everything: commerce, law, politics, the military (here represented by Barry Pepper’s Custer-like corruptible cavalry man), and of course what to do with the Comanches, with whom there are treaties.  John, a reader of John Locke’s ideas of establishing a civil government for the people, believes there are rational ways of due process to deal with all conflicts. Dan, who’s mingled with the Comanches (he wears a Comanche necklace), understands things on the frontier are more complicated.

The Ivy League “rational” lawman of ideal abstractions and the hard-edged “real-world” lawman of the frontier recalls The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, where the chief irony was that the violent and renegade actions of the John Wayne character allowed Jimmy Stewart’s political man to establish political order in the West. And as Ford’s film reminded us, legends supersede reality (“Always print the legend”), their duplicities established as necessary evils. The Lone Ranger fools us a few times, for example presenting a Comanche raid that turns out to be Cavendish’s henchmen in disguise, a staged massacre meant to rupture an Indian treaty. Beyond machinations, however, we’re reminded of how nature is “out of balance,” with carnivorous rabbits and horses on rooftops and treetops. Any “established” law and order here is inherently twisted and sick, malignant like the scorpions that are roused from the soil.  Tonto seeks the cannibalistic “Wendigo” spirit, projected onto the butcher Cavendish (who cuts out a character’s heart and, if we see things through a reflective eye correctly, eats it).  But the Wendigo doesn’t belong to metaphysics. The butchery of Cavendish is endorsed by respectable members of society.

Genre films mirror cultural attitudes and problems, be it The Searchers with its will to reflect on itself in 1956, Peckinpah’s nihilistic orgies of violence through the Vietnam years, Penn’s Left-Handed Gun and Little Big Man and The Missouri Breaks, Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, and finally another great misperceived flop, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate.  The Lone Ranger‘s masked man halts trains with the words “Constitution” and “Liberty” emblazoned on them, when the owners of those trains perpetuate corruption and genocide while exploiting and taking advantage of the meek. The hero is a figure well suited for the Anonymous Era of neuromancing activist hackers standing up to the gangsterism of the modern day economic and foreign policies, when Whistle Blowers are criminalized before people think about why the whistle was blown to begin with.

That leaves an unsettling feeling with The Lone Ranger, tying its reflection of our modern world to the one lost by the Native Americans, much more accustomed to the injustices of a monstrously obtuse conqueror than we are. In both scenarios, technology brings the world under a greedy thumb, the Iron Horse of rail in the 19th century and the World Wide Web of the present.

There’s still much that remains troubling about it all, however. I can understand the offense many will take with Depp’s portrayal of Tonto, and how they would brush off his words about how he wants to inspire young men on reservations. But Depp, for whatever reason, was bent on making this film. He’s always had a thing for outsiders, and one might well consider his friendship with Marlon Brando, one of the Hollywood stars most vocal about the depiction of Native Americans in film. We may also remember his role in Jim Jarmusch’s Acid Western Dead Man (1995), a picture incredibly sensitive about Native Americans.  It’s often forgotten that Depp also portrayed a Native American in his little seen directorial debut The Brave (co-starring Brando), about a man who agrees to be tortured and killed for a snuff film production so that his family can have a better life. The story is an unsubtle metaphor for Hollywood’s history with indigenous people, and I wonder if Depp believed Tonto would be a friendlier variation on that same theme, smuggled into the amiable confines of a Walt Disney production. There’s even a moment in The Brave when one of the central character’s threatening “employers” says with menace, “See you in the movies, Tonto.”

The result is something too long, sure, but most Westerns are. The Lone Ranger at times may grapple with the elements that sicken me about movies, but most of its set pieces are terrific meldings of stunts and effects work, with a fine sense of clarity absent from its peers. Its longishness also reminded me of how this film isn’t afraid to breathe and take its time at moments, quieting down and recalibrating momentum.  Hammer, whose career is quite possibly in detrimental turnaround because of this picture, is perfect with his comic timing and clueless demeanor, beginning with a sight-gag involving a child’s doll on a train that, for whatever reason, had me stitches long after it had passed, and concluding with the confusion over his title and catchphrase.  Prescient of its failure as I think it was, I believe The Lone Ranger had no ambitions to be a franchise kick-starter.  Depp and company make the satire and melancholy of genocide and expansion palpable.

Even so, like Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate the fault lies in its carelessness with money. I work to justify The Lone Ranger on its surprisingly rewarding aesthetic and thematic grounds, and am overjoyed by its offbeat “wrongness” within tired summer movie expectations–I think a lot of what I acclaim in the film is what rubs other people the wrong way. As Andrew O’Hehir observes, had this been a less expensive film, and I honestly believe it could have been, it may have been warmly received as an eccentric and subversive summer oddity. But its production and distribution is representative of reckless waste and hubris on the part of, if not its artistic contributors, the clueless studio businessmen making the high stake deals. Unfortunately, the artists will probably be the ones punished.

I’m not saying no executives will be fired. But Disney and other studios will likely be gearing up more $200+ million escapist events, working hard to sand-out the eccentricities that betray the audience’s anticipated back-beat rhythm, rather than a smaller-scale mid-level adventure that doesn’t have to make more than half a billion dollars.  Maybe that’s what the final image of the suited Tonto walking into the unfriendly terrain will denote for us, regarding the movies.  That frontier, with its unmastered edges, is almost extinct.  Even if Tonto and the Ranger succeed in their adventure, the film’s bookends make clear how their legend has also been conquered, squandered, bought and sold, and flattened. Time is a recurring theme in the film, and while the norm is to make it so that a story may continue forever and be a studio’s bi-annual ATM machine, The Lone Ranger wonders about races, ideals, genres, and aesthetic models on the downside of the tyrannical clock.

There are already some viewers who have noted the unique joys of Lone Ranger.  Like Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar, both unfairly condemned because of the money spent on them, there very well may be some kind of cult audience who will come to appreciate what Verbinski and Depp have done, problematic aspects and all.  Yet I’m not so sure if where the movies are headed will be conducive to the library of retrospect that home video and repertory movie house programs have granted.  Serialized television, streaming, and event movie production accentuates the importance of right now over rediscovering yesterday. But I can’t be sure. The fate of a motion picture seems determined hours after its release (if not before: Guillermo del Toro’s gorgeous sci-fi monster vs. robots extravaganza Pacific Rim and the Jeff Bridges vehicle RIPD have already been prophesied to bomb: meaning three consecutive weeks of Hollywood disasters).  Over the weekend I was arguing with someone who (drunkenly and fanatically) stressed the artistic quality of videogames as opposed to what insignificant “film nerds” and “critics who don’t mean shit” (he was referring to both A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis at The New York Times) wrote about and spent time adulating. He stressed that written history didn’t matter, as if it was put together by an Illuminati-like cabal of ignorant elitists. What mattered was how people responded to something upon impact. And I think his side is winning.