#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 Glance: The Imitation Game

#WhatThomWatched Glance*: 

The Imitation Game

(Morten Tyldum, 2014; In theaters/Disc release details not yet announced)

Recommended for: People interested in cryptography, and/or World War II, and/or British biopics — and/or Benedict Cumberbatch.)

Although there have been a couple high-profile movie treatments of seminal cryptographer and father of the modern computer Alan Turing (most notably Breaking the Code from 1996, with Derek Jacobi as Turing, and based on the same source material), The Imitation Game is really the first attempt to fully address both Turing’s contributions to World War II and his illicit life as a gay man in 1940’s England. Benedict Cumberbatch excels at portraying Turing’s social awkwardness and preternatural intelligence alike; there are also excellent roles for his real-life codebreaking team at Bletchley Park including Keira Knightley as a mathematician determined to operate outside the societal restraints imposed on women. It’s handsomely produced, intelligently written, and well-paced, but beyond being a simple prestige picture it also shows a very specific and shameful example of historical intolerance for homosexuality, in a clear and straightforward way.

Reminds me of:

Other well-made British-cast British-subject biopics — though I don’t usually get into “standard” biopics over the new-school versions from directors like Michael Winterbottom, who seem determined to upend conventions (cf. his depictions of Tony Wilson in 24 Hour Party People, or Mariane and Daniel Pearl in A Mighty Heart). This one has a few of the trite, old melodrama beats and is not terribly faithful to the historical Turing. But I was still impressed at the larger statement it was able to make about Turing’s sexual preference and the way his work could stand in more than one metaphorical way for his personhood and his struggles. I’m pleased to read about scholarship which indicates that his actual life may not have been nearly as abject as what we see here, but at the same time Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore have made creative choices which allow Turing to represent much more than just himself; after all, as we learn from a post-film credit, 49,000 other people in Britain were also convicted of gross indecency. The Turing Test is a powerful metaphor for the coded lives these men and women had to lead.

As it happens, in my ongoing (and slow) quest to read everything by Neal Stephenson, I’d recently finished his excellent Cryptonomicon from 1999. This semi-historical novel includes several real Bletchley Park (and rival) codebreakers, among them a far cheerier rendition of Turing. Stephenson also goes light years beyond the complications presented in this film; the final stage of Imitation Game, where the disinformation campaigns begin to kick into gear, is the starting point of the book which (in addition to loads more guns, sex, and haiku) has a much higher level of complexity. For anyone primarily interested in the cryptography problems of advanced warfare, I recommend Stephenson.

But then — the guilt!

As effective as it may be, the movie's still not the accurate story of what happened or what Turing or the Bletchley Park crew did. Showing “science” (or any higher-order creativity) on-screen in ways that audiences respond to is really hard. But as viewers, we should continue to push filmmakers and other artists to do the work and turn these concepts into forms that we can experience and understand. The movie that somehow manages to embody the actual innovative leaps of a Turing (or an Einstein, or a Van Gogh, or a Mozart) and make an audience feel them will be a marvel. (I put this in the BTTG section because I can't readily think of a successful example. Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev is the best parallel I can come up with; in that case a book somehow fully embodies and passes on to the reader the experience of painting, in three incredible pages. I haven’t seen Ed Harris’s Pollock — maybe that captures a similar creative moment in cinematic form? Well, if a movie example comes to me, I won't cheat and edit out my admissions here — I'll post it below in the comments. Feel free to contribute your own!)

Pitch:

Knightley and Cumberbatch's scene together where she denounces his clumsy attempts to push her away is an impressive one — she’s doing a lot of emotional work with a small set of lines.

*For movies and shows which are current — in theaters or streaming — I'm posting a short, less-spoilery take on #WhatThomWatched (and generally only when something really strikes me as worth passing on). These shorter essays are labeled Glance.

<< Into the Woods (Glance) (-) Lost Highway >>

#WTW Glance: Into the Woods

#WhatThomWatched Glance*: 

Into the Woods

(Rob Marshall, 2014; In theaters/Disc release announced for 24 March 2015, Disney Studios)

Recommended for: Those enamored (or potentially enamored) of Sondheim (but not so enamored that a neutered version of one of his greatest works will bother them) . . . .

Fairy tale deconstruction has probably been around as long as the fairy tales themselves. The Washington Post just reviewed new fairy tale books which include the first two entries in a Princeton reprint series called “Oddly Modern Fairy Tales” originally published in the 1920’s and 30’s; these are two of many examples of post-modern takes on the Mother Goose versions from the 1700’s, and they’re coming on a hundred years old themselves. After Disney did The Three Little Pigs mostly straight in 1933 (winning the animated short Oscar and adding “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” to the lexicon), Warners responded with parody versions: 1943’s Pigs in a Polka, 1953’s The Three Little Pups, 1957’s The Three Little Bops and so on; the trend continued through Jay Ward and Bill Scott (television’s Fractured Fairy Tales), writers like William Steig (Shrek) or Jon Scieszka (The Stinky Cheese Man), and even Disney parodying themselves (in 2007’s Enchanted). These examples are all more or less satirical of the form.

When Sondheim and his collaborator James Levine created Into the Woods in 1986, they were going for something more than parody or pastiche. When they weave the storylines and material from several fairy tales together, they are honoring the form. They take domestic and childhood themes — family, both finding and losing it; children obeying or disobeying or breaking away; what “happy ever after” would actually imply — and express them for adults, in a sophisticated way. There’s certainly ironic humor — for example, as the narrator matter-of-factly describes the birds which peck Cinderella’s mean stepsisters’ eyes out — but the events are as serious and consequential as anything in Andrew Lang's Fairy Book versions. The result was a celebrated musical which has won awards in several productions.

As a movie translation, Marshall's Into the Woods is solid (but: see below). The cast is uniformly excellent; the sets (with exteriors filmed in England, naturally) are tactile and gorgeous; and as pointed out elsewhere (I noticed it first in Jesse Hassenger’s A.V. Club review) Sondheim's fluid lines force the takes to flow in-camera for long strokes, with none of the staccato cutting that plagues other recent movie musicals (most relevantly, Marshall’s own Nine and Chicago).

Reminds me of:

I’m a Sondheim fan and I have been fortunate enough to see some of his masterworks in excellent productions — I caught Assassins in Indianapolis in 1993 which (if my memory serves me) was one of the early regional productions in which Sondheim introduced “Something Just Broke”; and Sunday in the Park with George at the Goodman Theater in 1987, where we were proud to consider that we were watching the show mere yards from the actual Seurat "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" hanging at the Art Institute of Chicago — but I’ve never seen Woods performed. Compromised or not (whoops; spoilers; again, see below), the music is wonderful and the old “You leave the theater with no tunes you can hum” complaint about modern composition is belied by the fact that I caught myself belting out “Into the woods!”, compulsively, days later. (Uh, not that I had much follow-up.)

But then, the guilt!

So, finally, here’s the rub — and the issue which has had Woods fans up a tree about this screen adaptation: A thespian friend of mine, one who was in a production of Into the Woods, has clued me into the differences between the original musical and the movie, starting with the fact that the character he played on stage was cut completely. I had already told him that I loved the music and was generally impressed with the book — but that a few second-act unresolved storylines had bothered me; without any hints from him, I had zeroed in on some of the missing dark bits (live characters that should have been dead, dead ones that should have been . . . . less pleasantly dead). The original show’s parts all lock together as a Sondheim show’s parts will do — meaning that sunny, whimsical themes from a first act are repeated as tragedy in the second; here, we have most of the setup and not quite all of the punchline. The stage version also benefits from a Narrator character who engages the audience more directly (as an actor on stage tends to do), and who transitions into an important figure in the stories proper; this entire interplay vanishes from the film. And while a large-screen, literal image can be gorgeous, there are many ways in which a live staging, dependent on innuendo and unseen things, is more visceral: paradoxically, the Disney version suffers where it shows (even a hint) of, say, a giantess (which could only be imagined on stage), and suffers again when it whitewashes the second-act fates of some characters by failing to show their true ends on screen.

On top of that, the most cursory investigation into the original creation and production of the show makes it clear that it was very much a reaction to its time — specifically, to the AIDS crisis which was at its peak in 1986 when the show opened. Actors in early productions were doubled between the first and second act in roles that connected and commented on each other; for example, the Wolf (whose part is over early in the show) comes back as Cinderella’s Prince, drawing a comparison between the beast's and the man’s treatment of women. Child characters (Little Red Riding Hood, Jack) who are played by age-appropriate child actors in the movie were played by adults in most productions, freeing the show to explore much more explicit themes of carnality and sexual threat. This doesn’t mean that a whole-family Disneyfied version of the same material is worthless, but it’s certainly constrained.

And while I’m piling on . . . . Yes, I loved every line of (retained) music and thought the actors did an honorable job — and yet by the end I had to admit to myself that the overall two hours were . . . not particularly exciting. It’s partially my temperament: I’m not terribly interested in seeing “movie stars” take on Broadway roles. Bob Fosse’s Cabaret is still my gold standard for a modern (i.e. post Rodgers-and-Hammerstein) movie adaptation of a stage musical — which largely works, of course, because the songs are naturalistically placed within the context of the stage-within-the-movie, just as songs are placed within performance contexts in his later All That Jazz.

Pitch:

Maybe I'm just still attuned to bratty little girls after #WTW 8's Alice, but I was particularly taken by Lilla Crawford's Little Red Riding Hood and her song I Know Things Now. (Viewing this with the AIDS crisis context in mind renders it that much more effective.)

*For movies and shows which are current — in theaters or streaming — I'm posting a short, less-spoilery take on #WhatThomWatched (and generally only when something really strikes me as worth passing on). These shorter essays are labeled Glance.

<< Alice (Něco z Alenky) (-) The Imitation Game (Glance) >>

#WTW: Alice (Něco z Alenky)

(#WhatThomWatched eight!)

Alice (Něco z Alenky)

(Jan Svankmajer, 1988; English version disc from First Run Features)

Lewis Carroll’s beloved Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are well known, and IMDb lists at least 60 movie adaptations of one or the other, counting shorts and spoofs. So what are the defining parameters of Jan Svankmajer’s version? Alice is portrayed by an actual little girl, Kristýna Kohoutová; she is the only human in the movie. Her voice (Camilla Power in the English language version) narrates the film, and all attributions (“she said”/”said the White Rabbit”) are spoken by her lips in closeup. All of the creatures she meets in Wonderland are dolls (or other anthropomorphized objects), usually stop-motion animated. And in a brilliantly natural choice, Alice herself becomes a doll when she shrinks.

Svankmajer is a Czech surrealist genius. His inspired retelling of Alice does not reproduce much of the specific wordplay in the books, preserving just a few of the puns and none of the poetry; only a handful of the famous characters appear, all from the first book (none from Through the Looking-Glass); Alice’s long and digressive internal monologues are cut; and the most-repeated symbols are Svankmajer additions (desks with drawers with knobs that break off, to pick a notable example). But his is truly a transcendent Alice: she is a child, capturing precisely the stubborn unpleasantness of the literary Alice, and she is caught in a nightmare, or day-dreaming nightmarish things, or a measure of each. There is nothing cute about Alice in Carroll; he pushed any of the Victorian preciousness demanded by the readers of his day off of her and off the thoroughly unlikable creatures she meets and onto himself — consider: the syrupy-sickly-sweet parts of Alice come in the little poems (the Liddel poems) and the prefaces he writes in his own voice, almost as if by pouring all of his sentiment out on the real Liddel sisters (and, in letters, on all the child-fans in his life), he can treat the fictive Alice with cold detachment and (via the Queens, both Red and Of Hearts) cruelty. Svankmajer puts this on screen like no other filmmaker. His Alice, and her predicaments, and her treatment at the hands of Wonderland’s denizens, all channel Carroll.

Reminds me of:

I am very serious about Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll. Early in my DVD-collecting days, I started creating informal D-I-Y sets of related movies, and the first one was an attempt to get every version of Alice released on disc at that time (which wasn’t too terribly hard — I believe there were seven, including the Disney cartoon.) I own multiple editions of the book including the two invaluable Martin Gardner Annotated Alice volumes. This is my favorite movie version. For all that it deviates from the books’ familiar set pieces, it captures Alice — more, it creates a cinematic equivalent — to a degree that more literal visualizations do not.

This is one of those movies that creates the protagonist’s dream world out of a clutter of objects scattered around the “real” world; the next example that comes readily to my mind is another mature-movie-masquerading-as-child-fare, Gilliam’s Time Bandits (in which Kevin’s not-dream can be seen to have been constructed out of toys and images in his room). All of Alice’s Wonderland starts in a dreary, paint-peeling, ruin of a room strewn with Richter Anchor Stone blocks (a 19th-century German building toy which my kids also played with) and a taxidermied rabbit in a glass case; she then plunges into and through and past and out of a series of such rooms, with elements repeated and reused. Some of these items seemed to hail from my own dreams, some from other movies — I realize there is a limited vocabulary of clutter-y objects, but the cases of mounted butterflies instantly conjured another Czech surrealist masterpiece, Vera Chytilová's Daisies (Sedmikrásky).

But then — the guilt!

Alice was Svankmajer’s first feature-length movie after years of critically acclaimed shorts. But it was just a warm-up for several subsequent full-lengths, some also based on classical source material and some just from his own imagination, none of which I’ve seen. It actually takes me some time to work up the guts to experience his nightmarish visions, but I’ve got to seek out these more recent films on disc — especially Lesson Faust, his take on the Faust legend, and Lunacy, about an insane asylum.

I’ve also never even bothered with Tim Burton’s Disney rewrite from 2010, despite being impressed with actress Mia Wasikowska (in movies like Jane Eyre) and (usually) liking a Burton production at least for its visual sense. Correction: I tried to watch it once and turned it off after twenty stultifying minutes. Not a whit of what makes these books so vital had made it to the screen; where Carroll’s obnoxious seven-year-old is the heart of both Alice’s darkly humorous edge and the perfect foil for his nonsense logic, the "grown-up" version makes nonsense of his nonsense. I guess my Alice collection will never be complete . . . . and now that I think about it, I don’t feel guilty in the least.

Pitch:

That rabbit. Glass eyes were never so unnerving. Between this and Donnie Darko, it's a wonder that anyone can keep a pet rabbit in the house and still sleep at night.

<< Shallow Grave (-) Into the Woods (Glance) >>