#WTW: Living in Oblivion

(It’s a #WhatThomWatched milestone: 10! plus 5 Glances...)

Living in Oblivion

(Tom DiCillo, 1995; Sony Picture Classics disc)

Writer/director DiCillo won a well-deserved screenwriting award at Sundance with a knowing insider script that sought to satirize the pretensions and travails of its contemporary independent film movement. It contains three distinct sections structured around dreams; the first is a frazzled director’s anxiety dream about trying to complete a scene in his film; the second is his star actress’s dream about filming a different scene; and the third is a real-life attempt to shoot yet another scene — of course, a dream sequence. As each segment develops it presents additional obstacles to the filmmakers: the usual host of technical glitches with sound, cameras, lights, or blocking; low-budget problems like a poorly run craft services table or a lack of qualified personnel to run a smoke machine; the varying level of commitment of the actors between multiple takes; a preening actor who wants to educate the director; or a half-baked scene that the director has trouble helping his actors realize.

Does the movie satirize “indie films” inherently, through its form (beyond its clearly satirical plot points and characterizations)? The obvious first example (and the reason this question surfaces to begin with): The film begins in an inky, grain-filled black-and-white, as if it’s laboring under a microbudget (and looking like a murky version of the Jim Jarmusch movies on which DiCillo got his start as a cinematographer, such as Stranger in Paradise). Even after the reveal that the movie proper will be in color, it continues to use black-and-white in a playful way: the first segment’s film-within-a-film is in color; the second segment is color while its film-within-a-film is (pretentiously) black-and-white, and in the final “real” segment the colors of the dream-sequence set are highly saturated. The second clear example is Oblivion’s use of the extended dream sequences, eventually mocking the overuse of such sequences in “stupid” (read: indie) movies to try and bring an edge or an unearned sense of mystery and meaning to an ultimately ridiculous set of events and images; Peter Dinklage’s famous rant about the use of dwarfs to indicate “weirdness” can easily be extrapolated to indict these kinds of movies in general.

Finally, DiCillo uses well-established indie actors and has them play to type, evoking other then-contemporary movies and roles; Steve Buscemi (as the director) freaks out and goes on a hilariously profane rant, James Le Gros (as the lead actor) is an ultimately vacant pretty-boy, Dermont Mulroney (as the cinematographer) is brooding and self-serious, and so on. Yet these typed scenes more often than not turn out to be in the other character’s dreams, and the actual performances are subtle upon reflection. The movie depicts the pressures of low-budget indie filmmaking as a nightmare out of Kafka, and yet in the end the efforts of a set of artists result in a single sublime finished scene, better than anyone could have planned, and a feeling of satisfaction after a day’s work and promise for the next. Even that wide-eyed excitement itself might be intended as a bit of self-parody — after living through unrealized dreams and another hard day of disappointments and compromises, the cast and crew gets just enough of an uplift to drag them on to the next day of work. The closing “thirty seconds of silence” to “record room ambience” seems, at first, like a gimmick or a forced conceit (reminding us to consider each character’s point of view). Yet when the time ends and no issues have popped up to spoil the recording, and everyone seems genuinely gratified, it feels moving and meaningful.

Reminds me of:

Any number of other movies feature a film-within-the-film and behind-the-camera footage documenting multiple takes of the same scene, such as Boogie Nights or The Stunt Man . . . . but here, the repeated takes of that two-actor conversation in the first segment strongly recall the great Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (directed by William Greaves). In that head-bending mind-game from 1968, Greaves plays a director of a fictitious movie who is shooting some test footage in Central Park, and we see two actors rehearsing the same scene over and over again, with variants (not to mention conversations among crew members and other actors, just as in Oblivion).

The vain actor with no self-awareness played by Le Gros is said to be modeled on someone DiCillo had worked with in the past. He’s a vicious dead ringer for early Brad Pitt, who had starred in DiCillo’s previous film Johnny Suede. But DiCillo has gone on record denying that Le Gros’s “Chad Palimino” is parodying Pitt; he even claims that the part was supposed to be played by Pitt himself but that he was committed to Legends of the Fall instead. So as a public service experiment, I urge you to watch the second segment of Oblivion and not think of Pitt. Good luck!

But then — the guilt!

DiCillo had a run of movies in the 1990’s but I don’t think I’ve seen any other ones — the aforementioned Johnny Suede, Box of Moon Light, The Real Blonde and so on. He’s still around as a television director of shows like Law & Order or Chicago Fire, but I feel like I should have supported him more as a feature director back when I loved Living in Oblivion so much. There was a definite window in which these kinds of films thrived; see Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures for a thorough discussion. Part of why Oblivion worked so well for us then is that we were watching so many indie films; this felt like a special secret joke for us insiders who were already watching actors like Buscemi in movie after movie (this was the first time I’d ever seen Catherine Keener who then showed up in many other places, like a second Parker Posey; Mulroney, Kevin Corrigan, and Le Gros were familiar faces as well).

I try to be as catholic in my watching choices as I can be — pulling film and television from anywhere and any era — but I can’t escape the fact that my early days of falling in love with movies (and having the time to pursue them) were marked by that 1990’s surge of independent filmmaking. At that time, when Sundance and Slamdance sought out the new talents and New Line, Miramax, October and others fought to distribute them, Oblivion was a comment on and a tribute to the movement. There was a comfortable rhythm to these movies, reliable patterns (albeit self-styled as quirky patterns), and I and my friends sought them out at college screenings, the couple of arty theaters still in town, or the back corner of the last non-Blockbuster video store. It took a few years to admit it to ourselves, but a healthy percentage of these movies were dreadful. For every Quentin Tarantino there were ten Tarantino-esque imitations; for every Hal Hartley or Whit Stillman or Steven Soderberg there was a rookie filmmaker with half of their insight and none of their restraint. So it’s great to revisit a movie like Living in Oblivion, but I’ll understand if it’s lost a lot of its resonance today. The masterpieces of the indie era will continue to live on, but the dregs — and along with them some of DiCillo’s targets — have mercifully washed away.

Pitch:

This was Dinklage’s first film and it’s easy to see why he became such a popular performer; he’s completely appealing and funny as hell. The sight of his Tito popping out of the “dream doorway” and trudging around Keener — while, as Buscemi directs him to, “laughing” — is hysterical.

<< Lost Highway (-) I Walked With a Zombie >>

#WTW: Lost Highway

(#WhatThomWatched number nine, number nine....)

Lost Highway

(David Lynch, 1997; Universal Studios disc)

A David Lynch movie is immune to spoilers, because anything anyone can say about it can’t really spoil the experience of watching it, preferably in the dark, alone with one’s own self-doubt. A viewer’s mind naturally organizes the images and events in a movie in an effort to understand “what really happened”; fascinatingly, in Lost Highway “what really happened” doesn’t really work out any differently even when choosing between two wildly different takes: Perhaps the movie’s events are supernatural, and a character (Bill Pullman as Fred Madison) physically morphs into a second human being (Balthazar Getty as Pete Dayton) — or, at the other extreme, Pullman is the only actual protagonist, and the second act is entirely within his own mind as he refuses to face the reality of what he’s done . . . . In either case, part of the genius of Lynch’s construction is that either interpretation fully works, not to mention interim interpretations, and there’s satisfaction to be derived from any of them. The eerie touches and the surrealist imagery (cabins that explode backwards, a demonic character that can be in many places at once), if taken literally, create a grim and evocative horror piece; but if those bits are put aside as merely internal window-dressing, and the various clues are seen as fractured memories and versions of events in Pullman’s life, a puzzle version of the same raw material emerges. And Lynch choosing to credit that demon as ”Mystery Man” seems to make the idea that he is presenting a mystery to be solved (or at least to hypothesize over) explicit.

So, Lynch uses Pullman and Getty to show us two versions of a man — Fred/Pete — matched to two wildly divergent interpretations of a woman, both played by Patricia Arquette: Fred’s wife Renee, and Pete’s lover Alice. If we treat Arquette’s extremes as representational of Fred/Pete’s uncomprehending view of her, we can imagine a real Renee/Alice who is actually in the middle — a person with a bit of a sordid past which Fred/Pete has blown so out of proportion in his mind that he becomes unhinged. Or perhaps Renee/Alice is simply the mild-mannered Renee version, and a psychotic Fred has invented the Alice version out of whole cloth in his mind (along with a matching Pete version of himself) in order to justify a horrific murder. Also doubled, and somehow connected to Renee/Alice’s past (which is either Renee’s one-time mistake or Alice’s pervasive and hidden evil side), is the brutal character played by Robert Loggia and called Dick Laurent in Fred’s world and Mr. Eddy in Pete’s; he is a bad man in either of Fred’s interpretations of Renee/Alice (either victimizing her or in cahoots with her). If Renee is an innocent, then nothing that happens in the Alice (second) story is necessarily real; Fred has invented Pete to reinvent himself as the victim: younger, weaker (though perversely more sexually potent), a naïf who is goggle-eyed by the violence of Mr. Eddy and his goons. (Does the “lost highway” represent a road, however twisted, which connects these events into a logical narrative, or would do so if it could be followed?)

The look, sound and tone of the film are tightly controlled. There’s plenty of violence and a few jump-scare cuts, but as always Lynch is more interested in making what should be the most innocuous actions, gestures and lines supremely creepy. Robert Blake (as the devil-figure Mystery Man) is terrifying simply by dint of a makeup job that renders his face eerily colorless, and wide-open eyes that never blink. Guns that protrude from off-screen suggest that there’s a faceless menace that threatens the characters from all around, as do the windows and skylights in Fred’s apartment which are nervously examined for signs of forced entry. These themes come together in Blake’s use of a video camera (anachronistic now but more bizarrely off-putting because of that) as a threat both as an implement he wields and in the static-filled videotapes he sends to Pullman and Arquette which voyeuristically show them sleeping. And Lynch is masterful in his use of darkness and vertical barriers that split the screen top to bottom to form claustrophobic pockets; again this happens most often in the apartment, trapping Pullman’s character in light that still fails to fully illuminate him.

Reminds me of:

Given that this is the first film in a loose, thematically connected work that Lynch calls his Hollywood Trilogy, it’s worth asking if this entry says anything in particular about the Valley (or the film business) other than just using it as a setting. There’s no question that Lynch and production designer Patricia Norris capture the dry, washed-out feel of Southern California, and a car chase in the hills that ends in violence shows off the terrain, the Angelenos’ second skin (their automobiles), and the Hollywood sign to boot. Characters and events cover some typical terrain as well: slick parties in nouveau riche decor stuffed with beautiful people, or darker meetings in these same rooms with slimy men and desperate, exploitable actresses. But that’s all surface: Lynch’s two main characters and their dual aspects apiece also say something about acting, about people we pretend to be and whether or not we accept others at face value or suspect that they, too, are hiding their true selves. The Fred/Pete “character” had to be played by two actors, somewhat similar visually (enough to be accepted as one person) but distinct in very clear ways as well (age/potency being the most obvious). The Renee/Alice “character,” in contrast, is played by one actress, possibly lending support to the idea above that her two sides really represent two extreme (and external) views of the same actual person, two warring misinterpretations of the same evidence as parsed by an observer. All of this plays to what happens in Hollywood all the time, the business of the movies, and of how we as audience accept (or not) the characters we see, even to the extreme of burying our own shame and revulsion and projecting our worst selves onto pop culture, both movie roles and the actors themselves. I’m not sure I’ve uncovered anything interesting or true in these guesses, but when I get around to (re)-watching Mulholland Drive and (for the first time) watching Inland Empire, I’ll revisit this exercise and see if there aren’t some similar themes.

Whole transitions between scenes read exactly like snippets of of early avant-garde film experiments, like something from Rien Que Les Heures by Cavalcanti, or Le Retour á la Raison by Man Ray. The enigmatic final few seconds (of Fred driving on the “lost highway”) inspired me to walk through them frame-by-frame, just to see how Lynch had constructed it to invoke maximum unease. Each frame has clearly been carefully composed and selected, and watching it this way only deepened the final mystery for me — it opened up even more questions. This scene and others (such as the torn-away, impressionist frames of the bloody bedroom) are masterpieces of implication, microseconds-long works of art.

It was also hard not to compare the inciting incident of this film — mysterious videotapes, arriving anonymously in the mail, that appear to show surveillance of the characters’ home — with Michael Haneke’s devastating Caché, which begins the same way.

But then — the guilt!

This is a strong role for Arquette, up for awards this season with her decade-spanning role in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Lynch creates a rich and complex dual-extremes-of-Woman character, but of course it’s difficult to watch her be so passively submissive and sexualized as Renee, and then so evilly duplicitous and sexualized as Alice — two pernicious clichés of a male’s sexist view, which of course is exactly the point. Arquette does a phenomenal job but that doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable.

The opening credits — rolling against a rushing highway — are clearly connected to the openings of Ulmer’s Detour and of Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, both dark and perverse films noir that Lynch must be evoking. (This winds up in the BTTG section because, I’m ashamed to admit, I’ve never seen Detour. Kiss Me Deadly, yeah, several times, and I’ll gladly watch it again for a #WTW one of these days, but that doesn’t excuse the other.)  

Pitch:

There’s so much more here than I can possibly work with in a blog post, not to mention so much that I’m not smart enough to understand. Lynch really isn’t for everyone and this movie is particularly prickly and unpleasant. But his ability to create something that invites interpretation and rewards close viewing makes me grateful for the experience, and kept me mulling over it all for weeks. If you’re similarly inclined, you won’t need a pitch.

<< The Imitation Game (Glance) (-) Living in Oblivion >>

#WTW: Shallow Grave

(#WhatThomWatched seven....)

Shallow Grave

(Danny Boyle, 1994; Criterion spine 616)

The three primary characters in Shallow Grave, the great Danny Boyle’s (and writer John Hodge’s) first theatrical film, are as unlikable as they come; many read Ewan McGregor’s character as having earned some kind of redemption at the end, but the alternative view that each horrible flatmate deserves exactly what he or she gets (or doesn’t get) seems most credible (people may simply be seduced by McGregor’s laughing blue eyes, and who can blame them?) Boyle’s deployment of minimal resources deserves to be studied as an exemplar of how low-budget can be stylish to a fault. The taut 90-minute story is as simple as can be: three young professional friends take in a fourth roomer who immediately turns up dead, leaving a suitcase of cash. How the friends deal with the body, the money, and each other comprises the rest of the film. You fully expect alliances to form and shift, and some players to be more mentally and emotionally capable than others, but the actual paths those shifts take is unpredictable and exciting. Loud, splashy events occur, as both police and a terrifying pair of remorseless killers close in on the money, but it’s equally rewarding to follow the adjusting mental states of the friends when paranoia sets in, visible through their narrowing eyes and behind their tight expressions.

Reminds me of:

Trainspotting, inevitably; that crawling troll doll (first in the overindulgence montage and later in McGregor’s nightmares) seems directly transported to Renton’s drug trips and a similar baby doll. And having recently watched the Mark Cousins documentary series The Story of Film, my antennae were up for the opening “phantom ride” shots; sped-up footage from a camera mounted on a car streaking through Edinburgh, evoking something out-of-control that might be going on behind the staid rows of Scottish flats. It’s a striking touch that doesn’t immediately connect to the following scene — turns out the rider is just a nice boring bloke who is answering an ad for a room — but once we begin to understand the sick game that our three heroes are playing with him (and many other hopefuls), the visual starts to make sense.

Speaking of visual connections — albeit ones that are clearly coincidental and specific to #WTW! — having just posted images for Youth of the Beast, I couldn’t help but notice scenes with Kerry Fox that evoked it, both the tower of champagne glasses and (more viciously) the point of her black shoe threateningly pushing on McGregor’s chest after he’s fallen on the dance floor — of course that move is aggressively seductive in Grave, but the unintended echo left it tasting perverse and violent.

(And to give the final actor in the trio his (geek-out) due: Christopher Eccleston is phenomenal here as an easily damaged milquetoast . . . . and, yes, it had to come out sooner or later — I’m a Doctor Who fan (both old and Nu), and Eccleston is far and above my favorite Doctor of the modern series.)

But also — the guilt!

I don’t like (or get) Slumdog Millionaire, or at least I didn’t when it came out — maybe I’ll give it another chance, someday, but I’ve got several other Boyle films to see first: Millions, his lightly comedic take on a similar found-money setup; or certainly Sunshine, or last year’s Trance.

There’s some controversy among the fans about the ending — not about its quality, but about whether events occur exactly as shown, or if we’re meant to understand that the literal action is an ironic counterpoint to reality. I must report that Boyle’s commentary on the Criterion disk gives a definitive answer and that it’s not the one I would personally prefer. I’m sure this is my (true?) cynical self coming out, but I prefer a worldview where none of these characters gets an out. I might just choose to read my own implications into the final scene even in the face of authorial intent. (Hmmph; between this and the admission about the Ninth Doctor above I may have just lost half my audience — that’s a whole one of you!)

Pitch:

I get creepy-crawly (in the best way) as McGregor climbs up into the unfinished attic space and we see what Eccelston and his efforts have wrought there — I won’t spoil it with a picture. Is it strictly realistic? I don’t think it is, or has to be. To me it’s a perfect example of art direction used to create a film image in service to the story (and to the mental states of its characters) without necessarily being literal. One thing is sure — more movies should pay this much attention to their look.

<< Edge of Tomorrow (Glance) (-) Alice (Něco z Alenky) >>