Acephalous

On ideological incoherence in Iron Man.

I feel vindicated by the revelation that Iron Man went into production without a shooting script, if only because now I know the reason Robert Downey Jr. had so few quality lines is that he and director Jon Favreau were making up the dialogue as they went along.  This approach works when you can endlessly re-shoot uninspired or botched takes on the cheap, i.e. when you're not filming a $200 million film on someone else's dime.  Favreau delivered all that could be expected working under such constraints: a serviceable plot that relies heavily on the many charms of its actors and the explosiveness of its explosions.  The lack of a shooting script accounts for the ideological incoherence of the film Spencer Ackerman noted shortly after its release.  It is difficult for any film to have a singular vision in an age of studio-groomed auteurs and homogenizing test audiences, so one in which there is no script is bound to wander off the message it never had.  No matter how much attention Downey Jr. and Favreau paid to the lines to be delivered on a given day, they had no written substrate on which to base their improvisations.  There are no lines that resonate outside the immediate moment in the film because no one sat down and labored over the text in the manner required to create such resonance.  

In short, the ideological incoherence of Iron Man can be attributed to the material conditions of its production.  The same cannot be said of The Dark Knight.  Its ideological incoherence is a function of its script ... as I will discuss at some length in a forthcoming post in which I demonstrate that the film is all about dogs.

By request: my visual rhetoric course

As requested in the comments to my last post and via a couple of emails, here's a general outline of the course I teach on visual rhetoric. (If you find it interesting or just want to give me money, the book I'm co-writing with my course director should be available early next summer.) I'm more than happy to debate the merits of teaching rhetoric and argument through popular culture or the validity of any of the particular readings I put forward; however, keep in mind that those readings are presented in the classroom and, as such, are designed to be arguable instead of definitive. I want them to argue with particular statements because I'm teaching them how to argue, so there are moments (particularly in the readings of the films) that I'm deliberately wrong. Those moments will likely be obvious to you, but you're not an 18-year-old undergraduate on the short end of an institutional power imbalance who's afraid that, should they contradict me, they will fail the class, lose their scholarship and spend their days toiling away in the service industries.

That said, here are links to the analytic portion of the course:

1. I introduce them to the idea of the overdetermined image, because nothing is accidental in an Alan Moore script.*
2.  Nor, for that matter, is anything accidental when it costs $80,000 per second to film it, which is why we then discuss how Christopher Nolan turns Batman into classic horror monster in Batman Begins. The point here is get them fluent in the language of film, so that they might make arguments about how directors manipulate the camera in order to appeal to the audience. (We also discuss what is and isn't in the diegetic space, e.g. music, which is heard by the audience but not the characters.)
3. Then it's on to The Dark Knight. That link goes to a reading of the interrogation scene; this one leads you to a similarly thorough analysis dedicated to proving the controversial thesis that Batman is really fast—because demonstrating that even the simplest of claims require evidence and careful argument to be taken seriously is the point of the course.
4. Now that they're relatively fluent in the language of film, we try to prove something a little more complex; namely, that Superman Returns is very much about 9/11. First, I take them back to September morning; then we analyze the action sequence that's about planes slamming into NYC landmarks, lest they think I'm reading too much into the anxieties the film taps into.
5. Now that they're comfortable with film, I get them to apply that knowledge to comics via the comic that's about the conventions of comics and is therefore utterly unfilmable, Watchmen. I begin by reminding them of the overdetermined nature of the image, then we discuss panel transitions and word-picture relation, move on layout and narrative flow, then I try to prove what I stated in the second sentence about Watchmen being a meta-comic. My argument's deliberately argumentative, because Dr. Manhattan can also function as a figure of the reader as well the author, but that's an argument I want to have. From there, it's onto the unfilmable film itself.
6. Now that they can break film and comics into their constituent parts, I re-orient them in an explicitly rhetorical direction. We talk about the rhetorical situation, which is, of course, a triangle. (For the record: that silliness is me teaching myself to manipulate images in Photoshop for my book on teaching visual rhetoric.) Then we situate the rhetorical context in the historical context via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.
7. From there on out, it's all about the writing.  I teach them about paragraph burgers, which, while silly, is the single most effective means I've found to teach paragraph structure. Students intuitively understand that you don't call a pickle with and a piece of a cheese a "hamburger." For the remainder of the quarter, we use the tools from the beginning of the course to make sophisticated arguments about the rhetorical stakes of what they'd otherwise dismiss as pop culture ephemera. 

*I've never written up my notes on getting them to think about structure via punchlines, which begins, not surprisingly, here with The Killing Joke. The gist of it is that jokes don’t work if you only provide the punchline, which is my way of introducing them to the notion of process: this shot in a film or panel in a comic or argument in an essay only works as a punchline if the joke's been properly set up. Basically, I try to get them to think about argument in terms they intuitively understand.

Failure for thee, but not for me.

Remember when An American Carol inspired conservatives to shout that its inevitable success would prove that Americans wanted patriotic films that mock liberals more than dour, realistic films about the realities on the ground in Iraq? I certainly do. "[I]t'll change everything," said one of its stars, Kelsey Grammer. Reiterating a prediction she made two weeks earlier, someone named Erin said "An American Carol will be a success at the box office, because the American people are sick of the Damons and Afflecks."

And succeed it did: after a concerted effort by the conservative media to let the market's invisible hand work its magic, An American Carol took it in $3,656,000 in its first weekend, and was declared a success because it barely grossed more than Religulous despite being screened in a mere 1,137 more theaters nationwide.  Using the same standards by which An American Carol was deemed a success, John Nolte gloats that Americans voted with their wallets and declared Michael Moore's new film a failure:

[T]he biggest disappointment of the weekend is Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (Overture). After a $57K per theatre average on 4 screens last weekend, the picture broke to a wider 962 locations with terrible results. The "documentary" only sold an estimated $1.3M in tickets to start the weekend, and it will finish at about $3.9M for a PTA of less than $4,000. That soft opening will almost certainly make Capitalism Moore’s weakest-grossing movie since 2002’s Bowling for Columbine ($21.5M domestic gross).

Did I say the same standards?  Because this chart I carved by hand from the finest quality HTML would seem to indicate otherwise:

Title	Gross	Theaters	Avg.
An American Carol	$3.656M	1,639	$2,231
Capitalism: A Love Story	$4.850M	962	$5,042

I suppose numbers also have a liberal bias?

Thankfully, Netflix says I'm only 23 percent similar . . .

. . . to the person who claims the Pang Brother's 2006 film Re-Cycle is "THE most EMO movie EVER" as if that were a good thing. The film, though, is THE most SOMETHING movie EVER, but I'm not sure what. The list could include:

• THE most BIZARRE film about the unintended consequences of writer's block EVER
• THE most IMPRESSIVE film by twin brothers who, according to Wikipedia, "are in a relationship and rumored to be engaged" EVER
• THE most LIKELY FIRST film to equate throwing away a sheet of paper with aborting a fetus EVER
• THE most UNNECESSARILY SUBTITLED film EVER
• THE most OSTENSIBLY APOLITICAL Asian horror film to take its cues from the American conservative movement EVER

As I said: THE most SOMETHING movie EVER. I'll start with the minor complaints and work my way forward:

THE most IMPRESSIVE film by twin brothers who, according to Wikipedia, "are in a relationship and rumored to be engaged" EVER

Either those two are a little too close, or Wikipedia entries sometimes need editing.

THE most UNNECESSARILY SUBTITLED film EVER

Unless you're being intentionally thick, as Scott McCloud is in the (center) panel from DESTROY!!! below, there is absolutely no reason for subtitles to be duo-specific:

If I can see that the aborted fetus of the protagonist, Tsui Ting-Yin, is screaming and hear its banshee-keening, there is no need to have a subtitle inform me that [TSUI TING-YIN'S ABORTED FETUS IS TELLING ITS WOULD-HAVE-BEEN MOTHER HOW IT FEELS ABOUT BEING ABORTED VIA A HIGH-PITCHED SHRIEK THAT WILL LIKELY CAUSE TINNITUS]. To prove this point, I will continue reviewing the movie in the manner of its subtitles.

THE most BIZARRE film about the unintended consequences of writer's block EVER

 

THE most LIKELY FIRST film to equate throwing away a sheet of paper with aborting a fetus EVER

&

THE most OSTENSIBLY APOLITICAL Asian horror film to take its cues from the American conservative movement EVER

 

Superior adaptations of inferior novels (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

Reviewing a film based on a book you haven’t read is always a dicey proposition—you likely missed or misread the winks and nods aimed at the readers surrounding you—but I think an exception can be made in the case of a film that works because you haven’t read the source material.  So I begin with an admission: I can’t read the Harry Potter novels.  I got through 100 pages of the first three and stopped once I realized that they are, on the whole, terrible; and that when they rise to the level of unsubtle Dickensian grotesquerie (minus the wit), they’re merely awful.  But I mostly enjoy the films, which dispense the requisite infodumps in digestable bits and—by virtue of being films—relieve J.K. Rowling of the burden of pretending to be Mervyn Peake. 

The best of them is Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but that has more to do with having Cuarón at helm than the quality of the source material, as his filmography consists of superior treatments of the same narratives at play in Rowling’s novels: a tale set in a strict boarding house during a period of great struggle (A Little Princess), about an orphan with an unknown destiny and mysterious benefactors (Great Expectations) who comes of age sexually (Y Tu Mama Tambien) as the fate of the human race is being decided (Children of Men).  But even with Cuarón behind camera, the film felt forced—as if the removal of Rowling’s expository indulgence required a labor so great, evidence of it clung to the film like slight stains in the pits of an otherwise smart shirt.

The same cannot be said of the latest film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in which the narrative excess of the novels becomes a matter of allusion over excision.  The result?  The first film in the series to have the effect the novels are wrongly purported to: it presents an unnerving and captivating account of a world and moment the audience can't fully fathom.  The confusion was compelling: I was drawn into situations whose meaning escaped me, but whose significance was clear, and so I spent the entire film intellectually engaged.  In the previous films, all the guns belonged to Chekov, and you appreciated the arrangement of the firing squad or you didn’t—but in either case, you knew which guns would be fired because the overwhelmed screenwriter removed anything that might be mistaken for a decoy. 

The earlier films never alluded; they either explicated at length or vehemently pointed at the mystery the movie would explain.  In The Half-Blood Prince, David Yates includes scenes whose importance is not established by the mere fact of their inclusion.  The narrative wanders, forcing the audience to debate which of the various elements will ultimately be meaningful.  Will it be the stroking and stoking of Ron’s ego?  The development of Harry and Hermoine’s increasingly complex friendship?  The pangs of conscience Draco Malfoy felt upon murdering a bird?  Or will it be one of the many other expertly-acted, deftly-directed scenes in which, for the first time, everyone not named Alan Rickman seemed comfortable in their character’s skin?  The narrative ambiguity, coupled with a pace that allowed scenes to develop such that motivations were intimated rather than immediately revealed, resulted in a film that was strikingly adult in weight and complexity, to which American critics responded by saying:

Boooooooooring.

And:

A giant two-and-a-half-hour YAAAWN.

And:

This movie went on and on and on and on and on.

Not only did all of those sentences appear in a single review, they appeared in three consecutive sentences:

Boooooooooring. A giant two-and-a-half-hour YAAAWN. This movie went on and on and on and on and on.

Granted, that was Debbie Schlussel, who time and again has proven her intelligence to be inversely proportional to her estimation of it.  But she’s not alone.  Rex Reed, the very bellwether of popular American opinion on film, thinks that

the sixth and worst installment is two and a half hours of paralyzing tedium, featuring another colossal waste of British talent and a plot a real witch couldn’t find with a crystal ball. The kids at Hogwarts no longer have any relevance. They have never heard of iPods, cell phones or the Internet.

He complains about the gorgeous, subdued cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel, who previously worked with the notoriously muted Jean-Pierre Jeunet on visually uninspired films like Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, and is the second untalented cinematographer in a row David Yates has chosen to work alongside—the first being Slawomir Idziak, a Polish hack so dumb his director, Krzysztof Kieslowski, had to name his films after the color of the desired palette lest Idziak murk them up.  I daresay that anyone who complains about the cinematography of The Half-Blood Prince knows nothing about the medium he or she is paid to write about in, say, the Wall Street Journal:

[The film] may suffer by comparison to visual memories of the first film, which wasn’t all that wonderful but teemed with wondrous images.

The film was so dull and so visually unstimulating that, at the New York Times, Manohla Dargis forgot how families work, writing:

The chosen one, Harry has been commissioned to destroy the too-little-seen evildoer Voldemort, a sluglike ghoul usually played by Ralph Fiennes (alas, seen only briefly this time out) and here played, in his early embodied form as Tom Riddle, by the excellent young actors Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Frank Dillane. There must be a factory where the British mint their acting royalty: Hero, who plays the dark lord as a spectrally pale, creepy child of 11, is Ralph Fiennes’s nephew[.]

Ms. Dargis, if I may, you answered your question about this hypothetical actor factory in the previous sentence.  It’s called “the Fiennes family,” and its existence has been known about for the better part of two decades.  It seems that when confronted with anything resembling complexity, the popular American critical establishment falls asleep—by which I mean, they reveal themselves to be whatever it is one becomes after spending a lifetime trying to catch up to the lowest common denominator.

If I were a more generous person, I’d note that the reason these critics were bored by the film was because they knew what would happened—it being the plot of the only book they read that year—and wanted the film to get on with it already.  Dargis as much as admits exactly that: “[T]he lag time between the final books and the movies has drained much of the urgency from this screen adaptation, which, far more than any of the previous films, comes across as an afterthought.” This impatience with development is a symptom of a collective addiction to novelty in American culture, one which results not only the unwillingness to glory in a studied presentation of the end of adolescence, but in the elevation of incurious, anti-intellectual populists like Sarah Palin to national prominence.  Meanwhile, across the pond . . .

(x-posted.)

Researching the competition; or, why other books about visual rhetoric & composition demonstrate the necessity of one like mine.

When demonstrating the importance of historical context, it's considered bad form to get it wrong.  For example:

• Hal Jordan?  Not the first Green Lantern.
• Sinestro?  Doesn't appear in Emerald Dawn.
• Doctor Doom?  Not the ruler of Latvia.
• Wolverine?  Not HIV positive.  (How would that even work?)
• "Raz Alcor"?  Liam Neeson has two names in Batman Begins and neither one of them is that.

Since I'm not sure where to begin with this—I could just as easily complain about shoddy research and methodology as go full nerd—I'll come to a full stop and change the subject.  A student essay addressed an offhand remark I made in class, about Dr. Manhattan being busted by Dateline NBC for sexing up underage woman, and inspired me to produce this:

So I take it the new Sherlock Holmes movie is a parody?

Because, I mean, seriously. Just because. I'm not still off my blogging game here, I don't think, because that's genuinely the very definition of someone getting something obscenely wrong, isn't it? (Unless, of course, it goes gloriously right.  Given this, however, I don't see much chance of that happening.)

Fringe and Star Trek and now it all makes sense.

Two stray lines in the Wired review of Star Trek and my befuddlement at the season finale of Fringe ("There's One More Of Everything") disappeared:

Abrams, with his go-to writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Fringe, Mission: Impossible III), came up with a clever enough solution.  Using the well-worn Star Trek gimmick of time travel, they would establish a new universe for the old characters to play in—while preserving the adventures of Gene Roddenberry’s original series in their own time line.

Orci and Kurtzman wrote Star Trek and the season finale and the season finale of Fringe.  Not only did both feature a Leonard Nimoy cameo, both relied on the same narrative device to introduce him into the plot: contiguous universes and the ability to travel between them.

(Here there be spoilers.)

Brief synopsis: Two Harvard lab partners (John Noble's Walter Bishop and Leonard Nimoy's before-this-episode unseen-but-frequently-mentioned William Bell) experiment on children and give them the ability to locate the weak points between contiguous universes.  They also devise a means of traveling between these universes.  Walter Bishop accidentally kills an assistant and loses his mind.  Couple of decades of institutionalization follow.  His son Peter (Joshua Jackson) eventually coaxes him out of the asylum and into the employ of the FBI.  By this time William Bell has become the CEO of a very successful company called Massive Dynamic.  The Bishops wrestle with events ranging from improbable and impossible.  These events are directly and indirectly connected to Massive Dynamic. 

The season finale revisits a character with the ability to teleport (Jared Harris' chilling David Robert Jones), only now he seems to be able to throw open the barn door between continguous universes.  Looks like this:

As the episode opens he drives a truck through one of those and shoots people.  The Bishops and the FBI track Jones to a lake house they once visited before Walter's institutionalization.  They are told that Walter once lost some precious thing there that is crucial to stopping Jones from popping back and forth between realities.  Walter cannot remember what that is but makes an offhand remark that the last time he and Peter were in that lake house Peter was very sick.  Peter responds, "I don't remember being very sick."  Why not?

Because as we learn when Walter goes to the cemetary Peter died when he was seven years old.  That would be the precious thing Walter lost the last time he went to the lake house.  Then who is the Peter Bishop who hasn't been dead the past quarter century?  Best I can figure, he is a Peter Bishop from a contiguous universe who was kidnapped by Walter sometime after his Peter died.  (Thus answering in the oddest way possible the eternal custodial question of whether you can kidnap your own children.)  How can I be sure? 

Because we finally get a glimpse of another America when the Bishops' FBI liaison Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) is stood up by William Bell.  As she leaves the restaurant where they were supposed to meet she receives a phone call.  She is told to come to the Massive Dynamic building.  She enters the elevator and about halfway up people suddenly appear and disappear because Bell punched the elevator through one of those portals.  She is escorted out of the elevator into an office.  She spots this on his desk:

Obama's still President but what's this about a new White House? Dunham and Bell have a brief conversation before the camera pans through the window to reveal where this meeting is taking place:

I think we know what happened to the old White House now.  The implications of this scenario are as improbable as anything on the show to date: Orci and Kurtzman expect us to believe that a competent Bush administration read the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" memo and acted upon it, thereby postponing the 9/11 attack into the Obama era.  No dice.  I prefer to believe they want us to think that it took awhile to rebuild the White House after it (but not the Twin Towers) was destroyed on 9/11. 

But that's neither here nor there.  What bothers me about the season finale is that it means I watched the same gag be played by the same people twice on the same day. 

"By God, Jim, it's a giant red ball of . . .

. . . phlebotnum." 

That being what Bones would've said had he taken a look at the "red matter" in Spock's ship.  Which is fine because, as Russell Arben Fox notes, the new Star Trek film manifestly works.  I don't share the qualms Timothy Burke and his commenters are expressing over the continuity issues raised by the film, because I care more about quality than continuity.  Moreover, I think what Abrams did there was damn clever. 

(If you ain't seen the film but will this is where you should stop reading.)

Because, of course, Jack London sucks harder than many comics, Part II

(My commenters wrote my first response to Bill's post for me.  They nailed it so accurately posting what I'd originally written seems unnecessary.  I'm neither kidding nor, it seems, necessary.  So in the [likely] event of a [hilariously hi-jinxed] tragedy, Acephalous can [and should] live on.)

Let me start with a statement that will annoy everyone: if a close-reading reveals that a work flirts with the formal elements of its genre or genres—whatever they may be—that work should be canonized.  Not that works that fail to engage the formal limitations of their genre are uncanonizable, mind you, but works that succeed both as an example and a critique of a given genre deserve canonization.

But canonization into what? 

In an age of inexpensive and practically limitless storage, the question of canonization need not be hidebound to the idea of preservation.  Within its first month of operation, Google digitized the 99 percent of the Western Canon, and even though some of those works are too recent to be viewed, they'll all eventually be released as copyright expiration rolls forward.  When I began my Mark Twain chapter in late 2005, for example, only the 1894 edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson was available through Google Book Search; by the time I began revising the chapter in the summer of 2008, I could track revisions of the novel over the span of two decades.  Because Twain is culturally significant and canonical, the saturation of Google Books with variant editions of his most important works was inevitable.  

This was not.

When I began working on The Youth of Washington (1904), I had to order it through interlibrary loan.  It took three months to arrive.  Henry Cabot Lodge's George Washington (1889), Paul Ford's The True George Washington (1896), Woodrow Wilson's George Washington (1896), Worthington Chauncey Ford's George Washington (1900) and Norman Hapgood's George Washington: A Biography (1901) trickled in.  Had I held off on writing my chapter until I'd looked over all 140 of the novels of English Colonial or Revolutionary America published between 1895 and 1908, I'd still be waiting for interlibrary loan.  Now all those Washington biographies are available, as are most of the historical novels I wanted to read for deep background. 

Are those novels good?  No.  Do they deserve canonization?  No.  Is it significant that as tensions between Spain and America strained and Americans became uncomfortable with the imperial pretensions of their leader, an appetite for works relating to Revolutionary figures or set in the Revolutionary period become incredibly popular?  Might that not have something important to say about what Americans thought it meant to be American at the time?  Is that not a viable object of study?  Do I not ask a shitload of rhetorical questions when I get polemical? 

For a few of generations, English professors claimed that cultural knowledge was the provenance of the literary (what with perceptiveness being the core feature of literary sensibility).  So when a scholar wanted to know how things stood between America and Europe at a given time, they would not turn to any of the countless travel narratives written by Americans in Europe and Europeans in America, but to the most acutely literary accounts of the current state affairs.  To wit:

The problem with Lucy's account of the canon and cultural knowledge should be obvious: however you define the literary, it is not the same thing as cultural knowledge.  An alternate canon, based on how a text registers and reflects the conventions of its time, is required; a subset of that canon would include texts that fought against their cultural constraints in order to articulate something convention had difficulty accommodating.  No matter what you call those texts, they are the ones deserving of close-reading.  

Note that I slipped from speaking of genres in the first paragraph to cultural conventions in the last.  I did that on purpose.  Genre focuses too intently on what a thing made from words looks like.  ("My novella's a long short story in 10-point Times Roman and a short novel in 14-point New Courier," says the aspiring writer.)  From the get-go, however, these things made from words contained stuff like this.  Texts have always had visual components, and while those components are sometimes abstracts (as with the afore-marbled page), the introduction of visual representations of the world into the textual economy of a novel alerts readers to the presence of a realist ethos.  But remember: 

Verisimilitude is not an end.  It is an always imperfect—because always filtered—means.  What matters is not the presence of supplementary gestures of verisimilitude but the manner in which they interact with the text.  For example, this comic sucks:

The image of Red-Eye (from Jack London's 1906 novel Before Adam) adds nothing to the description provided by the text; in fact, it looks like what a sketch artist would draw if provided the description in the text.  Now compare that to this or this or this or this or this.  Why do I have to justify studying the subject of all those thises but can write about Red-Eye with nary a care?  Is it because Before Adam was written by London?  Because he wrote it a century ago?  Because a quinquagenarian with Ivy credentials stretching four generations back wouldn't feel mortified if caught reading it on the subway?

(x-posted.)

A scene analysis of the 9/11 analogue in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns

Being the fourth in a series.  Earlier installments can be found here:

• Batman Begins (first glimpse of Batman-as-classic-horror-monster at the docks: depth of field, continuity editing, eyeline match)
• The Dark Knight (interrogation scene: focus, lighting, framing, shot selection)
• The Dark Knight (fundraiser scene: camera movement, blocking, mise-en-scene)

If it seems like there's a lot of narrative sans analysis in there, that's because there is.  One assignment for Tuesday is that the students need to select one of the frames I didn't analyze and describe its formal properties (framing, lighting, &c.).  (The moments when I narrate the plot are likely the most compelling for those not interested in Film Theory 101 because I wrote them plenty funny.)  Unlike my earlier posts I skipped a lot of frames.  Why?  Because director Bryan Singer is a loon whose camera only stops panning once in this entire sequence and there are only so many hours in the day/seconds in your attention span. 

We begin with a computer simulation of what's supposed to happen:

 

Singer provides a template his audience can refer to.  (Note that in the simulation the camera is above the plane.  This will be important.)  He pulls the camera back into a close-up on the nice stewardess lady who's explaining in her nice-stewardess-lady voice what's happening in the simulation:

 

This would be a good time to mention that Singer films this scene like the obsessive former film student he is.  The camera never stops moving.  Never.  The only reason this close-up doesn't become a medium close-up is because he cuts to Lois Lane asking a question.  At this point the camera glides slowly and fluidly—not unlike the plane on the simulation—creating a sense of constant motion without any excitement.  Then he cuts to Lois with a workmanlike reverse shot:

 

But it's an odd reverse shot.  Lois meets the stewardess's eye but there's no eyeline match because the stewardess responds to everyone on the plane:

 

Because viewers expect eyeline matches in shot/reverse shot sequences, the stewardess's response feels like a snub.  Singer's violates convention in order to evoke an emotional response from the audience and does so with great efficiency: he doesn't need for Lois to look snubbed or say she feels snubbed because the editing took care of that for him.  He then reverse cuts back to Lois:

 

Who never appears to break eye contact with the stewardess.  Keeping the one-sided match makes Lois seem determined.  With his next cut he reveals something we had no reason to suspect: that this shot sequence has a source in the scene itself.

 

This has a mildly unsettling effect.  Singer tells the audience that he's willing to withhold critical information.  What we see may be focalizing through the needs of a particular character (the network cameraman) or those of the director (Singer himself) or both.  I say "both" because Singer immediately cuts to a point of view shot from the cameraman's perspective as he whip pans from Lois to the stewardess:

Prelude to a scene analysis of Bryan Singer's Superman Returns

(The analysis itself spiraled out of control because Bryan Singer is a lunatic who bobs and weaves and cuts constantly.  More on that tomorrow.)

It goes without saying that Bryan Singer's Superman Returns (2006) is not a very good film.  Or so I thought before hitting up Rotten Tomatoes.  Let me put it this way: I think Superman Returns is a mediocre but interesting film.  If you look at my chart you can probably guess why: the film mines the imagery of 9/11 in order to address the shit mist of uncertainty Americans fumbled through from 9/12 forward.  The Americans in the film had themselves a Superman and the supreme confidence having a Superman entails. 

Then they lost him.  Suddenly and inexplicably. 

Singer wants his audience to imagine what it would be like to wake up one morning and realize that the truly terrible things that never happen here can now happen here.  Not too hard.  I remember staring numbly at video of the first Tower smoking when I saw the nose of the second plane enter the frame:

I was watching the truly terrible things that never happen here happening here and I felt sick.  The sense of security I lost that morning never returned.  No amount of anything will ever bring it back . . . with the possible exception of the arrival of Superman. 

The Americans in the film have learned to live without Superman.  Or so they tell themselves.  Lois Lane wins a Pulitzer for a stiff upper lip of an article entitled "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman" but the article has all the conviction of an empty gesture.  ("I never really loved you either!" says the man whose girlfriend just left him.)  When Clark Kent suddenly reappears after five years of being elsewhere, the audience knows what the Americans in the film don't: they can quiet that nagging nothing in the pit of their guts and breathe a little easier because Superman is back. 

Untangling why actual Americans are happy for their fake brethren is something of a chore, so let me leave it at this: 9/11 so rattled our presumptions that we experience real pleasure at the very thought that someone out there might reclaim some of the gusto they lost that morning even if that someone is an imitation American on a Sydney sound stage.  Whatever the circumstances, the film's most powerful moment was always going to be when Superman reappeared.  But Singer goes one step further and stages this scene in a manner designed to prime our 9/11 pumps without calling attention to what makes us shit the sheets (terrorism generally and Islamic fundamentalism in particular). 

All the props are there—the airplanes, the New York City landmarks, the air traffic controllers—but Singer stripped them of their normal significance so they only horrify secondhandedly.  The scene I'll analyze tomorrow is equivalent to what the man who lost control over his car and slammed into a ditch in December feels when he starts to hydroplane in May.

Thesis: Chinatown is the product of a wager*

1972:

"Hey, Polanski!  Bet you can't shoot a noir film entirely during the day somewhere it never rains!"

"Bet you I can!"

1974:

"Damn it!  Who knew there were so many Chinese in Chinatown?  You win this time!"

---

*And am I the only person who didn't know that the planned third sequel to Chinatown—titled Cloverleaf and about the expansion of the Los Angeles Freeway—was imported whole-cloth into Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Batman as a Monster in a Classic Horror Film (Batman Begins)

(Someone sent me an email asking if I thought Nolan had shot Batman like a monster in a horror film in the fundraiser scene.  I replied that I had not.  But when I taught Batman Begins last quarter I taught it as a horror film.  What follows are lightly-redacted notes for that class.  It may read a little staccato.)

Christopher Nolan spends the first ninety-three minutes of Batman Begins denying his audience what they paid to experience: the vicarious thrill of costumed vigilantism.  The film opens with a violent tease (Wayne beating back multiple attackers in a Bhutanese prison) before settling into an almost leisurely sequence of expository flashbacks.  That Nolan sustains any narrative tension while recapitulating the most famous origin story in comic history testifies to the talent that made Memento more than the sum of its gimmicks.  He pushes the narrative forward on three fronts: from his childhood to the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne; from their death to his imprisonment in Bhutan; and from his release from prison forward (the narrative present).  Setting the narrative pace so slow ensures that the first glimpse of Wayne in full regalia will bring the catharsis.  Or would have had Nolan's direction not transformed Batman into a monster.

Little bit more on teaching The Dark Knight

What's the point of cataloging film and comic conventions in a composition course?  Students should leave my class knowing that the mechanics of a film or comic reveal the intentions of the mechanic.  Am I doing an end-around theoretical objections to authorial intent?  I certainly am—because I want to instill in my roomful of future rhetors that they need to pay attention to the effect their prose will have on their audience.  I want to slow down the process whereby they make claims, and the best way to do that is to explain the joke.  Consider the fundraiser scene in The Dark Knight.  I start shortly before the Joker puts the knife to Dawes' throat.

Lesson Planning 101: How to teach film responsibly in a composition class (The Dark Knight)

Lest you think I'm publishing a long introduction-to-film-studies-type scene analysis for no reason, I had a few English people ask me how I taught film after I posted my syllabus last quarter.  So I thought as long as I'm doing it anyway, I might could help a few folk out.  I'm not an expert in film theory, so if you're looking for something along those lines, I suggest you head over to yonder blog and consult its illustrious roll.  But if you want a workmanlike approach to teaching basic film vocabulary in a composition class, you could do worse.  (Albeit not much.)

Because I'm one of those cultural studies loons who believe that popular means culturally significant, the film I'm teaching is The Dark Knight.  The scene I've tasked my students to analyze begins 1 hour and 24 minutes into the film.  My lesson plan begins after the break:

It's always already been the end of epic film.

Whether he knows it or not—and "he" being Adam Kotsko, I'll bet he knows it—this Weblog post is less about the formal fit between epic and the television serial than the relation of film to the episodic form.  I know that sounds backwards—what with MOVIES! being PRESENTED! on SCREENS! the SIZE! of WYOMING!—but the compounded facts of run time and the modern American attention span necessitate we consider film the proper realm of the self-contained episode.  Even films which promise sequels announce their completion in terms of whatever -ology they embrace. 

Films should be about something in the original, locative sense of the word.  They should surround some subject matter, be "on every side" "wholly or partially," as per the OED.  They should be self-contained.  Not that they shouldn't be sweeping—you can frame Guernica or a sublimely panoramic view of the Hudson River and slap it on a gallery wall without robbing them of sweep—but they should recognize their formal limitations.  Films can only intimate narrative epicness.  They can't achieve it. 

"But!"

"But But But!" 

Try me.  Start listing epic films and I'll start listing films with grandiose tableaux.  The Lord of the Rings?  Shot in that sewer of New Zealand.  Blade Runner?  The Lord himself envies Ridley Scott's matte painters.  With film we confuse the formal qualities of narrative epic for the GIANT! SCALE! presented by the movie screen.  Cases in point: Iron Man and The Dark Knight. 

Both were hailed as epic upon release, and yet both are far superior films on the small screen.  Before you ask: I do remember what I wrote about The Dark Knight on IMAX, and inasmuch as it relates the experience of watching an obscenely high-quality image projected on the side of an eight-story building, I stand by it.  Watching the film on a small screen—one on which a bug of a Batman glides between five-inch tall skyscrapers while Heath Ledger's Joker licks human-sized lips and establishes human-sized eye-contact—it's impossible to deny that this supposedly epic performance is better suited to the televisual medium.  (This goes doubly for Iron Man, which barely passes for "good" on the big screen but shines when we connect with Robert Downey Jr. as a human actor in corporate world.)

Not that I think we should deny that the serial drama is also better served on the small screen.  A solidly written, solidly acted television show can be a better film than most films.  To wit: having finished the first four episodes of the blogosphere's own Leverage, I can't help but wonder what went so terribly wrong with Ocean's Twelve and Thirteen. 

(x-posted about.)

Conservatives rigging another election poll, you know, like whatever and stuff.*

(x-posted)

Conservatives are trying to use the power of internet polldom to convince the American people that Sarah Palin is fit to be President, but I'm not sure:

I mean I'm voting for Not Sure.  That's what you know that I mean, you know?** I mean, shit, I know shit's bad right now.  With all that starving bullshit, and the dust storms, and we running out of french fries and burrito coverings, but there's a solution.  A three-point plan to fix everything:

Number 1: We've got this guy Not Sure.

Number 2: He's got a higher IQ than any man alive.

Number 3: He's going to fix everything—and he's so smart, he's gonna do it all in one week.

Seriously:

VOTE NOT SURE 2008!

(And in that poll too, you know, for whatever and stuff.)

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*Brought to you by Carl's Jr.
**Up yours, Thers!

An American Carol: Funny or Funniest Ever?

(x-posted.)

This weekend witnessed the nationwide release of An American Carol, the new comedy by noted comedic genius, David Zucker.*  The folks at The National Review could hardly contain themselves.  Kathleen Parker wrote “it’s funny—if you like that sort of thing.”  Someone who wrote to Kathryn Jean Lopez “wasn’t disappointed.”

Given how fond conservatives are of extrapolating what Real Americans feel from the box office receipts of recent anti-war films, I wonder what they’ll make of An American Carol’s success.  Here are the films Real Americans voted down with their wallets:

In the Valley of Elah (2007) – $6.8 million.
Redacted (2007) – $.06 million.
The Kingdom (2007) – $47.4 million.
Rendition (2007) – $9.7 million.
Lions for Lambs (2007) – $15 million.
Home of the Brave (2006) – $.04 million.

Bombs, all of them—unlike An American Carol, which raked in an impressive $3.4 million this weekend.  That’s way more than the $4.5 million the film Stop-Loss scored in its opening weekend, a dismal return which had conservatives saying:

People don’t go to theaters to sit through two hours of diatribes and propaganda on their leisure time. They’re not going to spend money on it. Now we have the proof.

People are giving Hollywood pretty clear message on these message films: Do not want. We told them so.

You tell ‘em!  People don’t go to theaters to sit through two hours of diatribes and propaganda!  Except for this fellow, who thought:

That was the best scene in the film and it was way too short.  They missed a huge opportunity to educate there.

What scene would that be?  Only the funniest in the entire film:

Jon Voight at St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City, in the shadow of where the World Trade Center once stood, as George Washington, in a most moving scene, that will have you begging Voight to do a miniseries playing our nation’s first president.

That’s Kathryn Jean Lopez again, and she knows from funny.  This film was so funny, Lopez is

persuaded that names like David Zucker, Steve McEveety, Myrna Sokoloff, Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammar, Robert Davi, and An American Carol star Kevin Farley will one day be recognized as revolutionaries.

Or would have been, were it not for the liberal conspiracy:

I’d love to see American Carol if THE DAMN THEATERS WHERE I LIVE WOULD PLAY THEM.

There is suppression going on . . . The theatre squashed it in the tiniest room and didn’t have many times for it.

Conspiracy!

The blatant attempt to crush the spirit of the GOP is palpable. I see it everywhere, even in the trailers that were chosen to play before the feature.

Conspiracy!

[A] moviegoer who read in the paper that AAC was playing at a Burbank theater. Upon arriving at the theater, there was no movie poster and no title on the marquee. They had to ask if it was playing. They were told it was. There was a sound problem and everyone asked for their money back. Sounds fishy to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if a bit of sabotage is going on.

Con—what?

There’s no irony—and no mystery—in immigrants being very patriotic (and more patriotic and more openly grateful to their country than ‘native-born Americans’).  You appreciate that which you never felt entitled to.

Read some of what Jack London wrote: his English (which he taught himself) was better than most Americans, and he made the most of his opportunity to live and write here.

I don’t know where to—I mean, that last comment is a trenchant indication of the cultural literacy of the people out to defend our culture from radical socialist revolutionaries like Jack London Barack Obama.

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*Frank Gaffney noted that Zucker’s “other credits include Airplane!, The Naked Gun, Scary Movie 3, and assorted sequels.”  When I saw the awful Scary Movie 4, all I could think was how much better the original—Scary Movie 3—was.

RE: RE: Iron Man

Since this isn't an Iron Man blog, I'll restrict my continued kvetching to the comments over here.