Acephalous

The perils of Googling on the wall.

In one of my classes yesterday, I was trying to make a point about the use of space in Last Tango in Paris but could not, for the life of me, remember who directed it. Because it maddens me when information's on the tip of my brain, and I can't be able to pay attention to anything until I figure out what I'm just barely not remembering, I walked over the lecturn to quickly Google the film. Unfortunately, I was currently using the lecturn to display images from another film, and this was what popped up:

Ever wondered what's really high on my list of "Things I Never Wanted to Discuss in Class"?

Now you know.

(It's not that I’m averse to discussing rape in class—I do so when I teach Blowup—it’s just that that’s a discussion that needs to be carefully moderated and respectfully handled, i.e.not the sort of thing you want to be surprised by in class.)

 

Just in case you need to bluff your way out of a war.

(This be yet another one of them posts. The direct sequel to this one, in fact.)

In the previous post, we learned that the Doctor can accomplish quite a bit by yelling at things. Admonishment, it could be said, is his only consistent source of power. He has the uncanny ability to be clever at precisely the right moment, and if he lacks the tools required to bring his clever plan to fruition, he possesses an improvisonal knack for making do with whatever's at hands. As a list of powers go, the Doctor fares quite favorably to no known hero—though he could be compared to a Malthussian Lex Luthor. (He did steal the TARDIS, after all.) Point being, by the time the Doctor regenerates into his Matt Smith incarnation, his reputation is such that he can stand on a rooftop, unkempt and in other people's clothes, and stare down the very same spaceship that, moments earlier, was going to incinerate the entire planet. 

Quite the reputation, that is, but what has he done to deserve it? "Been very clever with stuff on multiple occasions" covers it, but inadequately. Unlike Superman, the Doctor possesses no singular power that would require him to face a particular kind of foe in a particular type of manner. He can stand alone against an alien armada precisely because he lacks any clearly defined (or plausible) method of doing so. To quote the man himself in "The Pandorica Opens," in which the Doctor finds himself trapped beneath Stonehenge and the Earth surrounded by an alien armada:

Note how director Toby Haynes monkeys around with the shots in this short sequence. In the first frame, the Doctor is looking out the door, the locked Pandorica behind him, and he looks sheepish not only because of his slumped shoulders and pathetic frown, but because he's being oppressed by the compositional elements of the frame. Amy Pond and River Song flank him, and even though the shot scale is medium close-up—meaning the camera captures him from the waist to the top of his head—Haynes uses an unusually high level of framing, which creates an awkward amount of space between the top of the Doctor's head and the upper limit of the frame. This unusual level of framing makes it so the compositional oppressiveness parallels the narrative—or vice versa, as the relation between the narrative and composition is interdependent in film. In other words, it's as if Haynes squished the Doctor but left the camera in the same position it occupied pre-squishing.

But wait! There is a second frame in which the Doctor has one of his brilliant ideas!

How the great and mighty dress themselves.

(This be another one of them posts.)

Remember that post I wrote at the beginning of the quarter about the first episode of the fifth season of Doctor Who? Of course you don't: it's still in my draft folder. The whole point of that post—which I'll briefly recapitulate here—is that there's something unusual about a man sporting tweed and bowtie playing the cultural equivalent of Superman. Spandex and tights? That's American. But tweed and a bowtie? That's academic, and surely no one wants the weight of the world resting on academic shoulders.

Unless, of course, you're English. In which case it makes perfect sense. So, to begin that post I never posted, here's Superman coming out of the closet and into his own:

Note that Richard Donner's American version of making manifest the hero's heroism involves stripping in public, entering a random office building, and emerging in jammies and a cape. The English version of this scene maps particularly well onto its American equivalent, with the one exception that director Adam Smith attempts to out-America America and film it in the sort of long tracking shot Scorsese favors. I'm only going to show the end of the first (Fig. 1) and the end of the second (Fig. 7) tracking shot, because the reaction shots in between are actually more crucial:

Via a student who, it seems, is happy that I'm teaching "Hush" this quarter:

This is about as much thought as I'm capable of on a Wednesday. I make no apologies. (Except for this one, obviously.)