A Screenplay Thought Experiment

If you were going to write an explicitly feminist* movie, what would it look like? Especially in the immediate aftermath of the Isla Vista shootings, how could you present female experience in a visual form, one which might even show a strong woman in adverse circumstances responding in a manner that could be empowering?

You might decide to present gendered experiences broadly, using archetypes rather than specific, individuated characters, so you might decide to draw on fairy tales and myths. That way, you could concentrate on broad patterns rather than specific details.

You might start with adjoining territories to represent the different genders. Men would be represented by a kingdom, ruled by a warrior king in shining armor, surrounded by his generals and army--an image of privilege, hierarchy, and power, with the traditions of oath-taking and honor associated with it.  There would be a castle, there would be armaments, there would be the harnessing of resources to forge the weapons that support the power of the king: forges, smelting ovens, the sweaty and dirty work of provisioning the army.

In contrast, the female realm might be entirely the opposite--in order to highlight the different ways of being. So, lots of nature, beings living in nests in trees rather than stone castles, for example. There would be interactions with nature, maybe (to pursue the mythic themes) represented by magical creatures: water creatures, things that live in the air, sentient plants, things like that. Maybe even a land that had no fixed governmental system? Cooperative co-existence even.

Then you would have to bring the two into conflict, right? Because there is no story if there is no conflict, and "the battle of the sexes" is a handy metaphor.** So you might send the king and his army to conquer the adjoining kingdom, which has the advantage of being an exciting visual that will help get your movie green lit. It deepens the dichotomy--the men invade, the women defend.

[This part of the screenplay says "war, war, war; stabbity stab stab; fairies defend, king gets defeated and mortally wounded." Next scene, king's death bed.]

When women refuse, men escalate.  Although he is dying, the king passes the battle down to the next generation, offering his crown and his daughter to the man who kills the fairy who defeated him. But you don't want a repeat of this particular battle set-piece, plus, there are more strategies possible, so you make the next guy more subtle, yet creepier. So why not a roofie and a rape.

Well, not exactly "a roofie and a rape," because who's going to make that movie? Fortunately, fairy tales have a vocabulary, so you can make it a "magical potion" and "bringing back an identifiable body part." Then, when the fairy wakes up, she can get mad and avenge herself, setting up another battle set piece.

But, a single woman who complains of her treatment at the hands of a man isn't going to be supported. The  bros will close ranks and she's going to be told it was her fault. So she has to do something sneaky to get her revenge--and since she's a fairy she can use magic against him, or against someone close to him so he has to watch and suffer.

But it's going to turn out that this doesn't make the fairy feel better at all, as an time passes and her revenge grinds on, she has a change of heart, and finds her ability to forgive --for her own happiness. Because forgiving is something you do for yourself, not for the person you forgive. You do it because it's tiring to carry around all that anger and fury. Like the monk who carried a girl across a river: he set her down at the other side of the river, but you are still carrying her miles later. So, for the fairy's own peace of mind, she has to outgrow the need for revenge.

So let's write the scenes that show the fairy as she calms herself, and does indeed outgrow the need for revenge. [The first draft of this screenplay says "How does she do this? What does she do? Fill this part in later."] These are intercut with scenes of the kingdom falling into chaos in response. In the end, the women's mode of being--forgiveness, moving on. The family members used as weapons to get to the man--see them as people in their own right, not stop using them as if they are mere accessories to the man who raped you.

Of course, there will have to be a couple more fight sequences, this is a Hollywood screenplay after all, but then have the man cause his own destruction from his paranoid response, and let fairyland return to it's organic balance.

But who is going to want to see this movie? It needs a hook, right? So the screenwriter looks around for a property that already has cultural capital, has a built in audience, can be positioned as a sequel or a franchise.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Maleficent.

____
*For a given value of "feminist."

**And also, because you are angry perhaps. About what? Just pick one.

Once On This Island--Death Wins, You Guys! Open Your Eyes!

Saw my younger daughter's production of Once On This Island over the weekend, and guys--how does storytelling get this bad? It's a gloss on Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, but set on land with added Haitian/vodoun flavor. The music is catchy, the lyrics less so, the plot--uff da!

Shall we? First, I think we can all assume we know the basic plot of Little Mermaid, so now just make it on an island. Instead of living in the sea and looking up onto land, Our Heroine Ti Moune is a lowly peasant looking up the socio-economic ladder to a wealthy boy-man. Instead of a boat, she sees him in a car. As when the boat sinks, the car crashes in a storm and she saves the wealthy son of the island, Daniel. She goes to him, only to find that while he's happy to keep her in his room (where she makes him "rise like yeast" and she "heals" him), he's going to marry the socially appropriate woman he has been betrothed to since childhood. When offered her former life back if she kills the boy, she can't bring herself to plunge the dagger and dies instead. She gains an afterlife of sorts, as a tree.

When Andersen did it, it was a romance deeply enmeshed with questions of soul and salvation. The mermaids had no immortal soul, and turned into foam on the shore when they died. By becoming human, The Mermaid (did she even have a name?) could earn a soul, but she died before then. Instead, she became a spirit of the air, living in a sort of purgatory of good works, with the promise of earning her way to salvation. This is complicated stuff.

Ti Moune sees a boy in a fast car and falls in "love."

Oh, but wait! He's unconscious for days, and she watches over him, never eating or sleeping. So again, what about him is lovable? Is it the drool seeping from the corner of his mouth? The way he has to be cleaned up after, since he's unconscious and can't use a bedpan? Because that doesn't sound all that attractive to me. Unless she likes the power differential, where he's essential a baby or a doll, with no agency of his own? The more I try to figure out what there is that makes this "love" the more disturbing the story becomes.

Oh, but there is a Broadway Explanation! See, there are gods who rule this island, and Erzulie, the Goddess of Love, has intervened. She has (arguably) caused Ti Moune to fall in love, and then she makes Daniel fall in love--for a given value of "love." Because Ti Moune knows nothing about Daniel and doesn't get a chance to, because "unconscious" and Daniel doesn't love her enough to marry her. Okay.

Also, the gods have a bet that Love can conquer Death. So the whole car accident thing is a set up so the two meet and they can test which is stronger. It's like a Immortal version of arm wrestling?

So "love" here is "seeing a guy in a car" then "cleaning his butt"? To be fair, there is a short duet they sing before he goes back to his big mansion. She decides she needs to go with him, saying "he is in my blood and I am in his." Not sure why she's so sure of this, as most of the time, he's been UNCONSCIOUS.  Maybe she's invented blood transfusions?

Anyway, she is convinced that if she goes to him, he will marry her (why?) and she leaves. As a grumpy old soul with a cold dead heart, I look at this and I see "oh! She's young, so she is stupid." But the play doesn't really back this up, and it doesn't ever ask her to stop and see if she is making good choices. In fact, the play barrels on, encouraging her to chase this boy (but--if he was really interested, he could come to her. He knows where she lives!) to the degree that the Earth Goddess actually leads her to him, while the trees and frogs and breezes etc. sing along. Very lovely musically, but seriously messed up. She is making a bad decision for herself, and nothing in the play really acknowledges it.

Once in the Hotel Beauxhommes, she finds Daniel, and he doesn't remember her. At all. In fact, he threatens to call security on her. "But, I'm the one who made you well," she says. "The gods sent me to you!" Yeah, well, maybe they did, or maybe they didn't, but Daniel has a beautiful young woman throwing herself at him. A peasant, in fact, so not even a "real" person--not someone he has any responsibility to, because of class and/or racial lines. In fact, there is a history of his ancestors who came to the island and took their pleasure from the women who served them, before going back to France, leaving the mixed race offspring trapped on the island. So--we don't think this is marriage plot still, do we? Why does Ti Moune?

(Because she is young and stupid--even if nobody on stage really knows that.)

Then comes the slut shaming. "What does he want with a woman like THAT" is a song, in which the gossips make demeaning sexual innuendoes about how she is "healing"him. Daniel's father makes a short cameo, sympathizing that he understands the appeal of a peasant girl, but making clear that Daniel will be expected to do the right things when the time comes--which is not going to be marrying Ti Moune. Obviously.

Well, so far not so good. We have sexual opportunism, we have slut shaming of Ti Moune (not so much of Daniel, because the Double Standard is alive and well and living On This Island), and we have major social barriers between them that Daniel understands and that Ti Moune apparently does not. But--there might be hope, right? I mean, perhaps they are like Romeo and Juliet, who stand together against the artificial barriers placed against them, and by their example change the social mores. That could happen, and that would be a way for this play to comment on the deeply misogynistic and classist assumptions and critique them.

Or, there could be this "love" song instead. Daniel wraps his arms around Ti Moune and sings this:

Some girls take hours to paint every perfect nailFragrant as flowers, all powdered and prim and pale.But you are as wild as that wind-blown tree,As dark and as deep as the midnight sea.While they're busy dressing, you lie here, warm and bold.Some girls you picture, some you hold.

Some girls take courses at all the best schools in FranceRiding their horses and learning their modern dance.They're clever and cultured and worldly wise.But you see the world through a child's wide eyes.Their dreams are grand ones, you want what's just in reach.Some girls you learn from, some you teach.

You are not small talk or shiny carsOr mirrors or French cologne.You are the river, the moon, the stars.You're no one else I've known.

Some girls take pleasure in buying a fine trousseau,Counting each treasure and tying each tiny bow.They fold up their futures with perfumed handsWhile you face the future with no demands.Some girls expect things others think nothing of.Some girls you marry, some you love.

It's creepy! I mean, it's completely entitled and spells out that Daniel doesn't see Ti Moune as a real person--he likes her for all the demands that she doesn't make, the dreams she doesn't have. This is almost a form of grooming--she's not like those other girls, with their demands to be taken seriously, to be educated and to have their own interests and needs. No! Ti Moune just exists, with none of her own wants, just to fill Daniel's sexual needs!

This song would be bad enough if it were presented as a dilemma song, where Daniel was really considering the choice between the two women, trying to understand his own mind. But as a song presented as a love song, actually song to Ti Moune, it's a series of red flags that if the girl had even an ounce of critical concern for herself, she would at least catch on. She's not the "some girl" that you marry--that's going to be someone else.

But no, Ti Moune gets blind-sided when she is finally let out of Daniel's room and introduced to his fiancee. To the play's credit, the fiancee does scold Daniel for leaving the situation unexplained to Ti Moune--she's not a bitch, and she's genuinely sorry for the circumstances, but she is the fiancee, and what Ti Moune is, well there isn't really a word for it, is there. (Mistress. Lover. Concubine. These are choices.)

What should Ti Moune do now? Well, for a play written in 1990, shouldn't she do something proactive? Expressive of her personhood, her right to be treated with dignity, acknowledging her agency in her own life?

No, what happens is the demon of death shows up, and tells her that she will have to die unless she kills Daniel. (Yes, this was set up earlier, where Ti Moune offered her soul to the demon in order to spare Daniel, and now he is coming to collect the debt.) This is sort of the moment when love and death are tested--I guess? Death points out that Daniel has betrayed her, so why should she die for him? If she kills the love she had for him--literally, by taking the knife and killing Daniel--she can have her old life back, as if she had never loved at all.

In the Andersen story, the mermaids sisters come and offer her the chance to return to the sea. Killing the prince will turn her legs back into a fish tail, she will have her 300 year lifespan back, and she won't die when the sun rises. She's got big stakes here.

By contrast, Ti Moune kills Daniel and--she goes back to being a peasant? This is the offer? Contrary to what the play says, this isn't the choice between love and death--it's the choice between being a murderer and being a martyr. Ti Moune is confronted with a choice between a violent and criminal act, or dying for love. There's not really an opposition of emotional states here. I think Death has mischaracterized the win condition for himself. It's more like he's shooting the moon in hearts--he could win on points, but he's decided not to.

So, Ti Moune doesn't kill Daniel, but gets thrown out of the Hotel and plants herself by the locked gates for the next two weeks. The point of this is? It's like she's doing the Nice Guy™ thing, where if she's just around long enough, he will reward her. Does the play really expect that he is going to ditch his fiancé? Does the audience expect Ti Moune will get anything but the Madame Butterfly treatment? Now it's just humiliating for the poor girl, a humiliation which is driven home by Daniel and his new bride coming to the gates to pass out coins as for good luck.

So, Ti Moune dies. Before we tally up the win/loss results for the gods, let's look at the lyrics of the penultimate song:

And the gods began to cry- tears of compassion for the orphan, Ti Moune, Who proved that love could withstand the storm, cross the earth, and survive even in the face of death.

Erzulie took her by the handAnd led her to the seaWhere Agwe wrapped her in a waveAnd laid her to her restAnd Papa Ge was gentleAs he carried her to shoreAnd Asaka accepted herAnd held her to her breast.

Regardless of what is happening on stage, the words tell us that the Goddess of Love basically takes Ti Moune to go drown herself. Love hands her over to Death. Love has her kill herself, because that's a victory for love? No, a victory for love would have been for her to go on living, instead of seeking oblivion from the pain of thwarted love. What the play shows us (as opposed to telling us) is that it is better to die from heartbreak, and by dying, you prove the strength of your love.

Again--Love and Death are not in opposition--they reinforce each other. Love is so strong that it invites Death, Death is preferable to Love unrequited. I call shenanigans on the lyrics that "Ti Moune proved" anything like what the plays says she proved. In fact, it's just the same tired trope of an exotic girl deemed to be socially inappropriate to marry (but not to sleep with) so she dies.

But because we are in theory more enlightened than the Victorians, we are going to claim that her death changed things! Not just the "girl who dies for the man she loves" but that her death broke the racial/class divide between the peasants and the Grands Hommes. How does this happen? Well, the dead Ti Moune gets turned into a tree (yeah, I know) that breaks the gates of the Hotel Beauxhommes so it cannot be closed.

Well, maybe that's a start, but what about the wildly unequal distribution of wealth? The peasants are still going to be the ones laboring in the fields, right? The existence of a tree and a broken gate isn't going to accomplish any wealth redistribution or land reform, doesn't compel the Grands Hommes to give up their cars or champagne necessarily. The capital of the island isn't suddenly held in common as an anarcho-syndicalist commune.

The lyrics tell us this:

And one day as Daniel's young son sat in the shade of the treeHe noticed a beautiful young peasant girl high in the branchesLooking out at the world
And the spirit of Ti Moune touched their heartsAnd set them free to love.

But--but--but--"love" was not the problem. The Grands Hommes were "free" to "love" the peasant women, and had done so for generations. The problem was social conventions, family alliances, religious and cultural isolation, economic disparities, which little boys playing under trees aren't dismantling, no matter how upbeat the music is.

And really, Haiti remains a desperately poor island, with poverty remaining intractable for generations. Wealth remains concentrated in the hands of the very very few, while the majority of the population remains essentially peasants. Telling the story of Ti Moune doesn't challenge the fundamental causes of economic mismanagement, and seems to actually reinforce the idea that human effort is futile in the face of the whims of uncontrollable supernatural forces. But with a lovely samba beat!

The moral of the story is not that Love Conquers All--the real moral of the story is that humanity is mere meat puppets to the gods, and we all die anyway. But we are welcome to delude ourselves about that by singing in a major key.

The End.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a review

Did this movie make sense? Or were the holes really as big as they seemed to me.

I will admit upfront that I am not versed in the Marvel Comics Universe. Actually, I never really read comics because--as a word person--they only lasted about 6 minutes. I blew through them for the dialog, and the pictures might as well have been white space. So I don't have the background knowledge that might have been obvious if I read the source material.

That said, I have seen all of the current Avengers-adjacent movies, dating back to the first RDJ Iron Man, so I'm not completely ignorant. I am also a sentient being who lives in 21st Century America, so I do know about superheroes.

But this one? So much going on, and so much plot, which is never quite explained in a way that makes any sense to me. Some of this is probably going to be nitpicking, but some of these failures go to the whole premise of the movie.

1. What was the deal with that ship that was attacked by French mercenaries?

Many/most/all action movies start with an action set-piece, establishing relationships between characters and setting the plot into motion. In this case, Captain America and Black Widow are rescuing SHIELD hostages from a SHIELD ship which is cruising around the Malaysian seas. There is one officer, the bald, ethnically ambiguous "Jason Sitwell" (if he's an officer, why doesn't he have a title?) and some number of unnamed people. The French mercenaries stalk around, screaming threats that the killings are going to start in two minutes. None of the SHIELD employees makes any effort to free themselves, distract the mercenaries, scuttle the ship, anything. They all sit quietly--even the alleged "officer" Sitwell--hoping not to get picked as the first hostage to be killed.

Meanwhile, the head mercenary is allegedly trying to contact SHIELD to negotiate a ransom. But the offices are closed for the night? He's getting a busy signal?  Perhaps his call has been transferred to the night messaging service, which will take down his number and pass on the information in the morning?

I guess we are supposed to recognize that "Officer" Sitwell is a shady character, because he doesn't do anything to protect the people he presumably is leading. He does mutter under his breath a lot, though.

Cap and his team arrive, pick off the mercenaries, rescue the the hostages, and are about to get away when Black Widow fails to make rendezvous. She is busy downloading a bunch of data from the ship, "it's always a good idea to back up your hard drive" which leaves an opening for some more shooting and jumping through windows.

So--what the hell was that all about? Why does SHIELD even have a ship that cruises around the Malaysian peninsula anyway? What data does it have that doesn't exist elsewhere, and how did it get it?   What is this MacGuffin anyway?

Then, given what we know by the end of the movie, perhaps it was a Hydra run ship? So the Good Guy SHIELD faction thought it was fishy and staged the whole thing as a way to get to the data? That's the only thing that makes any sense to me, and I'm not sure it does make sense. but if the ship had information that was hidden from regular SHIELD access, and Nick Fury figured that out, then HE was the one who hired the mercenaries, AND he is the one who sent in Cap to "rescue" those hostages, BECAUSE the whole thing was an elaborate scheme to get Black Widow onto that ship to make copies of the data--then that should be much more clearly spelled out. Because it goes to the whole premise of the movie: that you don't know who you can trust.

Even that is heavily retconned, based on the fact that Robert Redford (in a comic book movie? Obviously, he's going to be the Bad Guy!) tells Cap that Fury is the one who hired the mercenaries, thus setting up Cap's dilemma. As such, it had to be true that Fury set up the situation, because otherwise, it just looks like a smooth dude in a suit doing what government officials always do in these kind of stories--try to make achieve their evil ends by making the Good Guys look bad.

So I think there was supposed to be a double twist there, but because it was so badly explained, it didn't look twisty at all. Robert Redford shows up in a comic book movie, wearing an expensive suit and handling glamorous technology, as the "Secretary" of some unnamed department, and he talks smack about Nick Fury. Nick Fury! The guy who has been behind the entire assemblage of Avengers; who has lost an eye in the service of Goodness; who is Samuel L. Jackson--and this movie thinks we are going to suspect him of doing nefarious Bad Guy Stuff? I don't think so!

2. Who is in charge here?

Redford's unnamed department raises questions as well. He's part of a "World Security Council"--but who is that? They clearly are not part of a single world government, since they talk about "national waters" and threats to their individual countries. But where does SHIELD get all this money to build all these incredibly huge helicarriers, to train all these quasi-military troops? I could kind of understand it if they were a strictly American operation, but the determinedly international nature of the "Council" makes it seem like it's like a U.N. force? Again--where does all this money for all this equipment come from? And how does this version of SHIELD line up with Tony Stark's ethical refusal to continue to sell arms?

At the end, when Black Widow is being grilled by blowhards in some kind of committee hearing, it's not a Congressional hearing (which is what it looked like it should be) because there was a huge logo on the wall that said "Department of Defense." But that was not a court martial--it was definitely people posturing in front of cameras. So who is in charge of SHIELD anyway? Given how much money they obviously have for technology and weaponry, somebody is going to have to have oversight to make sure the money is not wasted, at least.

3. Who ARE these SHIELD employees anyway?

Okay, so HYDRA has infiltrated SHIELD. . .somehow. And turned people who thought they were working for an organization that kept people safe from Bad Guys, into people who would impersonate DC cops, use automatic weapons in the street, against their own boss, without question? Not one of those guys ever even questioned why they were using SWAT tactics against Nick Fury? In the middle of civilian DC???

Not one guy ever said "hey? Let's not attack him when he's inside his armored SUV on a public throughway. We know where this guy lives. We know where his office is. We know where he buys his suits, eats his lunch, takes his mom out for Mother's Day. Maybe we could be just a little less conspicuous about this?"

Nobody says "Wait, why are we attacking Captain Freaking America inside our work elevator?" Did anybody--anybody at all ever ask about "if we are the good guys, why are we trying to kill the symbol of our nation?" I can kind of understand why a guy like Robert Redford's character would be interested in preemptively killing identifiable bad guys--the whole Insight program just makes his job a whole lot easier, with a lot less paper work to boot. Sure--he can see that this is a way to clear that pesky in box, permanently. He's removed from the situation. He can sit back and pretend that the people he identified as "problems" (including Fury and Cap) just "go away" on his orders. So clean, so bloodless.

And then, there are the thugs who actually have to execute the orders. All the people who. . .acquired. . .the fake DC police cars and uniforms, the ones who pulled out the huge guns and the tripod for the battering ram, the ones who shot through city buses to try to hit the fleeing Fury, the ones who conducted the high speed chase through the streets--none of them ever once pulled a punch, thought better of maybe not incurring civilian casualties? Nope. Total ruthlessness.

So where did these guys come from? These are not people who were recruited after the aliens attacked New York, or thought they could help battle a power mad Loki. Because those people would have Fury's back. Those people would not just accept Pierce's order to murder their own people.

4. Teaser, or proof HYDRA is still evil?

Once the algorithm is loaded onto the helicarriers, a bunch of targets show up. They flicker by fast, but they are all on the eastern coast of the US. I saw the name of the President (Marvel version) show up as a target, and apparently "Tony Stark" was there as well. So--does this just prove that the "evidence" of future crimes is just wrong? Or are we going to see a criminal President in future movies?

This matters, because if the algorithm is wrong, or HYDRA is really just plotting to get into power, then the whole ethical question of preemptive strikes goes away. Pierce tries to sell the Council on the idea that Project Insight can prevent obvious evil by doing away with the criminals before the crime happens. If such a thing were possible, it is at least a compelling ethical dilemma. But if the whole system targets innocent people, then there is no dilemma, there is just killing and a huge power grab.

Which leads me to the next point.

5. What is all this "data" you think you have?

Natasha Romanoff downloads a bunch of "data" from the ship in the first set piece. What "data" was there? Who collected it, what was it used for, why was it being stored on a ship anyway? Later, in a stand-off with Pierce, he tries to talk her out of publishing the "data" because it will be damaging to her reputation as well. But what is it?  Oh, never mind, it's a much a MacGuffin as the "Tesseract" and "Aether" were in other Marvel movies.

But the big plot hole here is the problem of the "Zola Algorithm." Somehow, this guy seems to have dumped his brain into a bunch of computers which are housed in a secret underground bunker in an abandoned military base. From there--somebody (who?) has patched a USB port and presumably an internet connection (is this even possible? I doubt it) so Zola can data mine the world's digital trails to pick out which 20 million are security threats. (We have to also hand wave the possibility that there may be "threats" by people who are not on social media--hello Afghanistan!)

Apparently, nobody tested the algorithm? They just uploaded it onto weaponized helicarriers and accepted that whoever was named was worth killing? But. . .but. . .but--surely there were some big money donors (those helicarriers are hella-expensive!) and cronies and HYDRA leaders whose names WOULD have come up. Kind of awkward if the algorithm identifies somebody on the helicarrier itself and shoots into the body of the aircraft! Or reveals somebody's divided loyalties, right there, out in the open.

There is no way even an Alexander Pierce would authorize the uploading of an untested algorithm. That would require (among other things) absolute trust in Zola. And there is famously no honor among thieves. That program would have been vetted for political reasons, as well as routinely beta tested for bugs. Which again increases the number of people who would have had to be aware of the program, thus increasing the number of places it would have been challenged or leaked.

6. Winter Soldier, where have you been all my life?

According to several reviews I have read, the Winter Soldier is "Soviet trained"--presumably this is from the comics canon. But it raises some problems for a movie franchise that is set in the present/near future. Namely--there is no longer a "Soviet" bad guy, which is increasingly problematic the farther away we get from 1991, the date of the formal dissolution of the USSR. Scarlett Johannson --I mean, "Black Widow" would have been 7, far too young to have been KGB.

But let's assume we can also retcon an underground KGB that simply went underground, and while not officially KGB, was effectively so and that's who trained Natasha Romanoff. And Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier. How did Alexander Pierce get his hands on him? Where has he been being kept, and how did all that mind-wiping equipment get transported to the US, where he could be deployed? I'm absolutely not understanding how this guy gets from where he "died" in 1944 to where he's recognizing Steve Rogers while punching him out on a helicarrier. Is Winter Soldier part of HYDRA? Is he part of top secret SHIELD? Where has he been--physically--for the intervening 70 years? If he was a Soviet answer to Cap, what happened to him after 1991?

Yeah, I know. Just relax, it's only a movie.

Sure, but it's a movie that aspires to a bit more than just blowing things up. The script does take on questions of drone warfare, domestic surveillance, the costs of war, and the lost values of mid-Century America. I am asking for the mechanics of the plot to be explained, because unless they are explained, this is just a boxing match between two essentially invincible characters, and that's not something I would bother to go see. 

The Grand Budapest Hotel, a Review

Charming. Delightful. And possibly more than that.

Synopsis: a nested series of framing devices move us from the present day back to the fall and winter of 1932, in a fictional country of Zubrowka in what appears to be eastern Europe. The eponymous hotel sits atop a mountain like a giant pink pastry, reached (via stop motion animation, it appears) by a tram that itself is built like a series of steps to accommodate the extreme angle of the mountain.

The interior of the hotel is gorgeous as well:

In 1932, the hotel is run to exacting standards by M. Gustave H (Ralph Finnes), a man with fanatical devotion to detail and a willingness to provide sexual comfort to the wealthy elderly ladies who come to the hotel precisely for M. Gustave.

Prominently featured is Madame D (Tilda Swinton) with a bouffant swirl of white hair perched like a Dairy Queen ice cream atop her head.

 Her devotion and reliance on M. Gustave is quickly sketched, and then suddenly, she is dead. Gustave takes newly hired Lobby Boy Zero (Tony Revolori, one of the few actors not already hugely famous) to her estate and arrives at the reading of the will. Madame D has left him a priceless painting, and her grasping son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) accuses Gustave of murdering her.

Imprisoned and awaiting trial, Gustave continues to bring his full personality to the job of wheeling a "meal cart" to the cells, offering the mush as if it were a carte de patisseries. He endears himself to a group of four men who are plotting their escape. Gustave manages to obtain "digging tools"--the most delicate and ridiculous looking tiny items--by having them smuggled inside the pastries made by Zero's fiancée, Agatha (Saorise Ronan).

One Great Escape later, Gustave and Zero are pursued by the ruthlessly murderous Jopling (Willem DeFoe) who leaves a trail of bodies in his wake. Upon their return to the GBH, they see it is being converted to military use by the the fictive ZZ, the proto-Nazis of this movie.

 No surprise, Dmitri is apparently a high ranking member. (And Owen Wilson cameos as the Quisling concierge.)

After Dmitri and Gustave accuse each other of murdering Madame D, a second will comes to light (to be executed only in the event of Madame D's murder) which leaves her enormous fortune to Gustave, including the Grand Budapest Hotel. Gustave has a few years to enjoy his new wealth...

 ...before being shot by the military. Agatha dies a couple of years later of the "Prussian Grippe" with her infant son. The hotel remains open, but becomes drearily "updated" with plastic chairs and wood paneling in 1968.

The story of the hotel, told by "Author" becomes a classic in the country, and the Author's headstone is a pilgrimage site, where people hang their hotel keys in homage.

The plot, of course, is in some ways an excuse for the extravagant visuals, which are themselves meticulously planned. Each of the three time periods (present day, 1968, and 1932) are shot in a different aspect ratio as one way of conveying the passage of years. And even a non-visually adept view like I am began to giggle at Anderson's resolute insistence on framing everything symmetrically. Forget any "rule of thirds"--everything was placed as close to the exact center of the frame as possible.

On the surface, then, it's a comedy murder/caper film, gorgeously staged and highly stylized. In some ways, The Grand Budapest Hotel nails the tone that Muppets Most Wanted tried and failed to achieve. Cartoon villains, stylized violence with some real emotional power (what happens to Jeff Goldblum's character is surprisingly upsetting), and a stylized visual vocabulary constructed in large part via forced perspective--all in service to a story with some heart constructed around an unlikely protagonist: a green felt frog or a sexually ambiguous concierge.

Except--Nazis? Sure, technically, they are "Zig Zags," their logo two lightning bolts forming the letters, and they are brutish, violent, but ultimately easily vanquished.  Still--it seems like the presence of even ersatz Nazis would be a serious tonal misfire.* Can comedy Nazis even exist?

Which brings me to the humanity at the core of this highly artificial work. M. Gustave is a clown in a circus created by Wes Anderson, but he is also a man of fundamental values. He embodies hard work, attention to detail, treating everyone around him with respect and dignity. Over and over again (and almost always played for laughs) he treats others weight deep respect, regardless of their situation. Madame D, while incredibly elderly and ridiculous looking, is mocked as an object of sexual desire by everyone except M. Gustave. His performance of fine dining that he brings to the job of passing out prison gruel creates a bond between him and the giant inmate. The gracious way M. Gustave offers the mush--"it needs a bit of salt" he says, seasoning the bowl and then handing it over to the physically intimidating man--embodies the values of hospitality and graciousness. It is paid back to him when the giant's cellmate spots the jail break and tries to raise an alarm. The giant silences the man, and allows Gustave to escape.

Similarly, the mix of high and low is what allows him to enter into the escape plan. He appears at the visitors' station with his face beaten up. He reports that "Pinky" got the worst of the fight, "and actually now we are quite dear friends." Later, he shares his Mendl's pastry with Pinky and the cell mates, using "the throat slitter"--a fairly disturbing switchblade--to divide the dessert. He brings the imperative of running a hotel--welcoming everyone who crosses the threshold--to prison life, and the respect he grants is repaid to him.

And in a world descending into brutality--the ZZ--it is these small graces that make living possible. Literally, when the favors M. Gustave does are repaid, but also to save the world from becoming merely horrific. It is the small pastries, the proper manicure, the spritz of the signature cologne "L'Air de Panache" that provide the means for continuing in the face of destruction. These gestures stand for the larger virtues--loyalty, honesty, humanity. These are not small things.

The trailer does give a taste of what the whole movie is like. I recommend it!

____________

*Speaking of tonal misfires:

In what may be a signature gobsmacking move, Vogue.com offers a slide show of characters from the film, followed with sourcing for a similar look. For M. Gustave, they chose his prison wear--as if that is a look one would want to emulate--and the total cost of the purchasable version is in the vicinity of $2000. Because of course! Who doesn't want to drop two grand to look like a Middle European convict? (Or, more disturbingly, like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas--a concentration camp inmate?)

Rochas striped silk trousers, $1,073

matchesfashion.com

The Elder Statesman monster seed cap, $500

farfetch.com

The Row Amautio top, $990

lagarconne.com

Escadrille striped seersucker espadrilles, $125

modaoperandi.com

And, to be pedantic--M. Gustave doesn't wear espadrilles. He very obviously wears wooden sabots. Do your research!

_________

Some boring context and disclaimers.

I have seen several Wes Anderson movies, and I see some common threads, but I can't say I have any systematic understanding of his work. Grand Budapest Hotel has what appears to be some stop motion animation that feels like it grew out of Fantastic Mr. Fox, but I saw that movie so very many years ago, and at the time watched it as a movie to see with my kids rather than as a "Wes Anderson film" so I have certainly missed lots about what was going on there.

Similarly, The Royal Tennanbaums was my introduction to his work; I saw that even longer ago. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou I have only seen parts of, and thought of as a Bill Murray movie. Probably the closest I have come to watching a Wes Anderson movie as a Wes Anderson movie was seeing Moonrise Kingdom when it first came out. This is how I approached GBH.


My thoughts here are also influenced by the conversation lead by Dana Stevens on the Slate Spoiler Special podcast, which started scratching at the larger meaning behind the movie. Stevens was disappointed by this film, because she felt that Anderson failed to connect with the emotional content of the subject he was playing with. My understanding of her point is that he failed to acknowledge the import of the killings and brutality. To her mind, the movie failed. I don't agree, although I think I understand why she felt the way she did.  I think Anderson is actually saying something, but the message (such as it is) is embedded in the exquisite production design. Looking for meaning and emotional power is to kind of miss the point of this movie.

There is a tendency for critics to address the object under review as if the critical assessment is objective, and the missed connections and the flaws exist in the movie (or book, or whatever). The participants in the Spoiler Special make statements like "the movie failed to connect with the emotion." My experience was very different--I felt that the emotion was there, but was deliberately underplayed. Which leads me to believe that the movie and the watcher attempt to meet somewhere in the middle, between the director's intention and the watcher's expectations and readiness. When the two fail to connect, it is a missed communication--what the director was trying to say and what the audience understood of the message may not line up. It is not the "fault" of either party, it is the random nature of human attempts at connection.

So while I may fall into some habits of "the movie did this" or "the director did that," what I am trying to do is to communicate what my experience of the movie was. I may well have gotten it wrong. I may well be so entirely idiosyncratic that I am not a fair measure of whether anyone else will enjoy what I saw. I can say that I believe that Wes Anderson is both seriously playful, and playfully serious, and that there is more than mere surface decoration to this movie. The surface beauty of the film might well have been enough for me--but there is more than that to be had.

I Got My 'Batches and Cookies

Because Lizzo predicted this?

Time to make some Cumberbatches of cookies? Anyone?

(You can buy them from here.)

And Lizzo here:

Separated At Birth--Make This Happen Edition

Hello, have you met Your Captain America?

Yes, that is Chris Evans. Looking like a younger, but equally soulful Bill Nighy.

Now I want a movie in which they play son and father, or perhaps the same character at different ages.

Somebody make that happen for me, mmmkay? Thankx.

Things I Am Eating Even Though I Am "Not Hungry."

• The last 6 1/2 Triscuit crackers. The bottom of the box has come unglued, as if it is recycling itself.
• The last two ounces of fat free pretzel twists.
• The salt in the bottom of the fat free pretzel twists bag, after I lick my finger so the salt sticks.
• Quite a few Tostios Hint of Lime chips, because they were probably getting stale.
• Baby carrots because there are no more SnakCarbs (™) around anymore, because I ate them all.

True Detective--The Internet Response and What I Wanted

I predicted a lot of disappointed reviews of the finale (like my own), and to be honest, I was surprised by how gentle the disappointment was. In those reviews which were of the "disappointed" variety--there were plenty I found early on that were entirely satisfied by the series.

Even the disappointed reviews were surprisingly shouted down in the comments--Dustin Rowles on Pajiba, Alyssa Rosenberg on the Washington Post and Linda Holmes on Monkey See/NPR have a fair number of commenters calling them wrong, misguided, or fundamentally stupid. 

So--people liked the series. I guess that shouldn't be surprising, because the series was a stylish serving of comfort entertainment. People like Rowles, Rosenberg (who I find to be extremely insightful and intelligent generally) and Holmes (who I want to have as my new best friend) were disappointed, I think because like me, they saw the series promise to be more than it turned out to be.

Here's the thing--there are plenty of entertainment options which revel in the presentation of unspeakable acts perpetrated on women. Naked women, beautiful corpses, exploited children, ritual posing, and sexual objectification are everywhere in our culture. This series did plenty of that--creepy sexual murder scene, nekkid gorgeous females, spooky music, in-bred yokels as the bad guys/monsters that get decisively defeated via gun violence, some buddy repartee and a happy ending where the good guys win. Add in a substantial portion of Rust Cohle intoning pretentious philosophy, and we have a horror-film lite--all the gruesome, none of the gore, with premium cable levels of nudity. It's almost by the numbers.

Becky Banks has a alternative take on this--she posits the Venn Diagram of Southern Gothic cliche: (Too) Close Family Relationships, Weird Sex, and Malicious Rednecks. Check, check, and check!

Which is really too bad, because it could have been so much more, and it kept seeming to gesture to greater ambitions than a stylish retelling of a story we already know. And that's why it was so disappointing. Not because I'm a spoil-sport feminist who can't watch a show without complaining about the lack of substantial female characters, or because I object to nudity, or because I was waiting for the tentacle-faced Cthulu to make an appearance. No, I am disappointed because the show seemed to promise that it was going to really do something new, and then it resolutely refused to.

I offer exhibit Number 1, Your Honor: Marty Hart's video interview.

While being questioned and taped by the investigating cops Papania and Gilbrough, Marty Hart mentions "The Detective's Curse": the occupational hazard of overlooking what is right under your own nose. He's talking about it in the context of his family--that those kids, that family, that life, was what he was looking for and he couldn't see it in front of him. And that would be poignant enough, right on the surface, especially if we ever saw him understanding what he had done to lose that family, and actually regretting it. (Maybe this is the cause of his sobbing in the finale, when his estranged wife and kids come to visit? I'll entertain the motion.) But by this point, in 2012, while talking to Papania and Gilbrough, he doesn't exhibit much regret at all. Nor do we see any recognition that he had anything to do with the breakup of his family.

Furthermore, the creepy staging of that comment is done in voiceover as the camera pans across the deeply disturbing scenario Audrey has set up with her dolls--a naked barbie doll likes on the rug, surrounded by four standing (and clothed) male dolls, while a fifth one kneels between her legs, his/its hand covering near the belt buckle. It loos like a gang rape at best, the murderous aftermath of gang rape possible. Marty's gaze sweeps across the room, fails to stop at this disturbing scene, and he leaves.

Now that is a provocative set up, and we ate it up like dessert: what exactly is Marty looking at and failing to see? Obviously, he looked right at this set up, he looked right at Audrey's drawings of naked people, he looked right at his goth daughter and her sexual adventuring with boys in cars, and all he could see was his own self-righteousness. Thus were born a thousand internet theories: Audrey has been abused; Audrey was a victim of the cult; Audrey is going to be the next victim. 

It turned out--that we gave the show too much credit for being smart. We thought it was smarter than it was. Because rather than being a profound comment, or an indication of a subtext, Marty only meant exactly what he said--he didn't see the value of his family when it was right under his nose. This is basically what Dorothy says at the end of The Wizard of Oz:

If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with! Is that right?

Surely we can be excused for thinking this show was doing something more than this, right? The 2012 edition of Marty regrets the family life that 1995 Marty took for granted and threw away with his tomcatting, and that's what he means by "The Detective's Curse?" How very. . .conventional. How predictable even. How disappointing, really.

Let's go back and talk about the Woman Issue. Again, here was the series telling us that it was doing something admirable, and then resolutely failing to do so. Rust specifically challenges his CO about a systemic failure to account for missing women and children. When it comes to the horrific snuff video, Rust tells us he refuses to look away. The series tells us that he "stands witness" to disappearances and violence that others conveniently refuse to see. Rust Cohle, seeking justice for the disempowered and the disappeared!

Except--then he doesn't. Or more to the point, the show doesn't. Rust keeps working to solve Dora Lange's murder, which is pretty darn heroic. The lengths he goes to--including returning to his undercover narcotics persona--are excessive and risky, and seem to be the show making the point that Dora at least will not be forgotten.

But then the show goes on and marginalizes and objectifies and uses women and children for shock value without making them anything more than props to the "enlightenment" of the two male leads. Nic Pizzolatto even gave interviews insisting "I am not interested in serial killers" and the point of the series is the character study of the two men. To which I say--then why make it a serial killer story? Why sexualize the series to such a degree if there isn't any narrative point to it? Why make the mystery such a huge, showy, lurid, naked, sexualized, ritualistic, and degraded murder if that isn't the point? Because we won't watch otherwise? Because we won't care about Rust and Marty unless they are investigating the most lurid murder imaginable?

Obviously, not true--we all watched Broadchurch.

I won't go over all the appalling ways women are treated by this story, because I don't think I can do better than Emily Nussbaum did for The New Yorker. I will say that, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you can't have your cake and eat it too--you can't wallow in the objectification of women's bodies and escape criticism for it by proclaiming that your story is "against that!" Because you are using those women's bodies exactly the same way as the objectionable characters do.

Just take a look at the opening credits, for example. Then count how many female characters are represented ("characters" used here to mean "women with names and actual lines of dialogue"). My quick count is--zero. Next, count how many times women's naked body parts are represented, and ask yourself--were those even in this show? The naked buttocks resting lightly against the spiked black high heels? The curve of the naked back and buttocks that visually echoes the slide on the playground it frames? The dark haired topless woman with the neon cross superimposed on her hair? Sure, the woman in the American flag bathing suit does appear in the show, briefly--because she's dancing at a bar where the detectives go to interview someone else entirely.

(I will give props to the writer of the article at that link--Daniel Walters does a very nice job recognizing and articulating how the themes of the series are laid out in the credits. I am particularly fond of the way he describes the images of the detectives: "Most shows could illustrate loneliness with an abandoned landscape containing a solitary man. But here, in these credits, solitary men contain the abandoned landscapes." Well done, sir.) 

Honestly, at this point, I am simply going to take such visuals as warning signs--"This show is not for you." Because Nic Pizzolatto is completely entitled to write what he wants to, and if he wants to write a story that starts off with the sexualized ritual murder of a drugged prostitute and the provocative posing of her naked body, and he wants to further expand on the theme with serial murders and pedophilia snuff porn, he sure can, and I can spare myself and not watch it. It's like how poisonous plants and bugs in the wild are vividly colored, and those colors warn animals not to eat them. Naked female body parts are a good sign I'm not going to want to consume this media.

Shall we talk about the lack of resolution of the mystery here? Sure, technically, it was solved, in that Dora Lange was (probably) murdered by some combination of Errol Childress and his flunkies, Reggie and Dewall LeDoux. Childress was also probably the perpetrator of the 2012 St. Charles murder as well. But those were not ordinary murders. There were elaborate "paraphiliac maps" with signs of "Satanic worship" and "anti-Christian crimes." They were thick with allegorical references--black stars, Carcosa, the King in Yellow. The very reason these murders are interesting is because they invite our curiosity. Why would somebody do this? Why paint those symbols the body? Why build an elaborate altar? What does it all mean? 

These are not the questioning of hyperactive imaginations. These are the questions the show itself asks. The cops in the CID office speculate as to the Satanic nature of the murder. Reggie LeDoux talks about the black stars right before he is killed. Charlie Lang, Dora's ex-husband describes the spiral brand in LeDoux's back. These aren't just details, they are motifs. And then--the script refuses to explain any of it, other than that Childress is one sick mofo. 

So, HBO and Nic Childress (and Cary Fukunaga), why put all that in if you aren't interested in it and you aren't going to address it? This is not an idle question. If the series was only ever going to be a character study of Rust and Marty, why make the murder such a big showy piece of razzle dazzle? Why not just make it one more murdered prostitute, whose body is just found somewhere mundane. Rust could be obsessed with it for no other reason than it was his daughter's birthday and he was already vulnerable because of it. There could be some detail, some oddity that would link a 2012 murder, and cause Rust to re-investigate the case, purely because it was a way of staying connected with his daughter. It could really have shown us a Rust Cohle whose nihilism truly was a mask, a form of armor to mask the pain of her death, rather than Rust Cohle the badass philosopher whose atheistic anti-humanism slips only at the end of the 8th hour. That would have been a character study.

Matt Zoller Seitz talks about how TD is "about" many different things, including good versus evil. Maybe. But who is "good" in this series? To Pizzolatto's credit, there are no truly "good" characters. However, there are Evil ones. So we get complicated humanity versus Evil--and that robs the Evil of it's believability. Even Erroll Childress had to have some story he told himself about why he killed all those people, and why he was justified in torture, or what he intended to achieve, but we aren't ever privy to it. So that shifts the entire balance of the series--Rust and Marty were men who had a lot of demons, but when it turns out the person they were chasing is himself a demon (in that he has no redeeming qualities) the story flattens out into Good v. Evil.

Rust has a transcendent experience, and finds some hope in a feeling of love from his dead daughter and father. Has he really changed? Doesn't this just show us that all his cynical and nihilistic talk was a serious front he was putting up to avoid feeling the loss of his daughter? Also--spending a decade completely drunk in Alaska--same thing.

How serious was Billy Lee Tuttle's effort to get the Lang murder transferred to his hand-picked task force? We didn't see any real pressure on the 1995 CO to turn it over. In fact, the CO seemed to see it as attractive mainly as a way to save his budget. Do we think that Tuttle took one look at the lead detectives and decided that he didn't need to worry about it. "Eddie's going to be real pleased with these detectives" he says, or something close to that, and if you decide he's being sarcastic, then you can understand why the task force never actually took over--there was no need to.

Did we actually get verification that the Sheriff Childress who shut down the Marie Fontenot case ("Reported in Error") was actually Errol Childress's father--and thus was also the corpse kept bound on the bed in the family estate outbuilding? Was that official misconduct the act of a father covering up his son's misconduct, or did they have a more attenuated relationship? I actually find the idea that this was a twisted case of family covering up for each other in the hopes that they could protect their monstrous offspring much more interesting and complicated than a "rape cult" or "pedophile ring." (To say nothing about the nearly unbelievable report Charlie Lang gave of "some real good killing down south" as if this were a Louisiana version of "The Most Dangerous Game.")

If we had even an instance of seeing complicated family relationships among the Tuttle/Childress clan, the whole Audrey mini-plot ("almost plot") would have resonated more powerfully. Children do unfortunate things, are sometimes sexually inappropriate, and not all parents see the situations clearly, nor do they always react appropriately. Marty's overlooking Audrey's creepy doll display--how different is that from "overlooking" Errol's oeuvre? If the show had made the connection that way--Marty is a small-time version of the Tuttle/Childress parents, protecting their children in unhealthy ways--the story would actually have been creepier, because you could see how small the distance is between the psychopaths and the average people.

I've decided to make it head canon that Maggie got her divorce from Marty, and met a lovely doctor at her work. (We saw Marty accosting her at what appeared to be a hospital after she kicked him out following his affair with the court reporter, so I assume she was at least a nurse.) That big house, the Lillian Bluth wardrobe, and the ostentatious wedding rings she had in 2012 were the signs of how her life improved after Marty. She (and the girls) are better off without him financially, and I have decided that they are also better off emotionally. Dr. Sawyer (head canon!) is maybe an anesthesiologist, who keeps regular hours, makes plenty of money, and has been a terrific stepfather to the girls. So much so that he is the reason they are able to forgive Marty and visit him in the hospital in the last episode.

Odd choice--from 1995 to 2012, Rust gets haggard and scraggly, growing untidy hair and mustache. In the same period, Marty goes bald and gains a substantial beer gut, as well as gets far more furrowed. But Maggie Sawyer--looks exactly the same. I felt this actually served to undermine her character--she hadn't matured in any way, which made her seem oddly insubstantial in the 2012 scenes.

Writer's fatigue? Rust's big revelatory soliloquy, in which he finds cosmic meaning in feeling love from his dead daughter and father is the moment toward which the entire series has been driving, according to Nic Pizzolatto. So does that excuse this? "Beneath the darkness, I felt a further darkness, like a substance." Seriously? Like a substance? Umm, sure--like that's a useful description, dude. I'm sure that's exactly the feeling that would cause a hyper-articulate nihilistic synesthete to entirely change his world view. Because, wow--a substance.

I'm waiting for the YouTube recut, where someone turns all this atmospheric angst into the buddy cop romp that it is at heart. Let me know when that happens.