directed by Terry Gilliam
screenplay by Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown

Criterion #51.

This is an old favorite that I’ve seen many times and endorse. I am mostly going to muse about the ending. Spoilers.

Gilliam says it’s a happy ending, which on the face of it is passive-aggressive sophistry. (“That’s right, if you felt as put-upon as I do, you’d think this is happy! Think of that! Just imagine how bad I must feel!”) On the other hand, he’s not wrong that Sam’s escape is legitimate on the movie’s terms. The movie’s two dreams — left (bureaucratic cog) and right (winged hero) — are equal and parallel. Forget the logistics of “Sam going to sleep and dreaming,” which the audience knows is just a mechanical device. Brazil is a diptych, a tapestry with two panels. The tension throughout is: how will these two dreams coexist? The ending is simply that Sam chooses the right and the camera chooses the left.

But cameras are privileged, in movies, so the slap-in-the-face punchline feels like a decisive vote for self-pity on Gilliam’s part, after 2 hours of a movie that sure seemed to be voting for exuberant creativity. His Munchhausen ends the same way… except then it doesn’t. Brazil really does end this way, but that’s not where its heart lives. Gilliam’s bitterness is always ambivalent, which can make it all the less sympathetic. If you know better, why don’t you know better? Underneath his giggling victim act, he’s actually an extrovert Romantic. He’s no shrinking Emily Dickinson, holed up with his notebooks and worry. Look at this big crazy movie! How can the guy who made this end by telling me that real life consists of being shackled and tortured in the 9th circle of hell? The answer is that he doesn’t really mean it, he’s just venting. Which is a frustrating place to end.

It’s the same as what I said about The Lord of the Flies — we can get a kick out of defeatism because we don’t actually believe it. It’s just spookhouse make-believe, Halloween. But Lord of the Flies is very single-mindedly Halloween, whereas Brazil taken as a whole is a full Mad Magazine’s worth of cranky glee, a wild grabbag. The final needle-jab of sarcasm is delightful as a single beat, but it isn’t necessarily the ending, and it’s claiming to be necessary. It’s supposed to be hard and angry and poignant. But couldn’t this all just as well have ended with the fold-in?

Maybe I’m giving the ending too much weight. But I’m not alone, since this is what Gilliam and the studio execs came to grief over. The bonus material relating to the fights with Universal fascinated me this time around, because I was shocked to find that the executives now sound pretty sympathetic to me. Wrong, but sympathetic. Underneath the battle of business is a battle of psychologies: Gilliam identifying fiercely with his ending of ghoulish self-pity, addicted to his own petty resentments; the executives unable to conceive of ghoulish self-pity as entertainment because their resentments are not petty: because for them this isn’t Halloween, it’s real. Brazil is a nightmare they cannot afford to have; it’s truly too close to home. For Gilliam it’s a nightmare he can afford to entertain, but that his bitterness refuses to allow anyone else to avoid. Both positions are defensive and nobody benefits from either of them. But Gilliam at least made a movie.

The 3rd disc of this 3-disc set is the outlandishly choppy “happy ending” studio edit. Gilliam’s movie of good faith hope that ends in bad faith defeatism is grotesquely forced to conform to Sid Sheinberg’s emotional outlook of unchallenged bad faith hope. This is the function of the standard Hollywood narrative: selling ourselves something we don’t actually believe deep down but are pleased to imagine that we believe because it seems to fit the bill. The real Brazil is something Gilliam really believes, topped off with something he is pleased to imagine he believes, perversely, because it’s such a downer.

But the good faith resolution — the real moral of the story — is, I think, there under the surface already. Sam’s escape would be a happy ending, if only the camera could be gotten to agree about its validity, or at least be agnostic. The studio’s request that Gilliam bring in clouds behind Sam in the final shot, which can be seen in the Universal version, is philosophically apt. But on the Criterion director’s cut, Gilliam reverted to the original shot: the credits roll over the torture chamber, unrelieved. Gilliam’s commentary track musings at this point exactly capture the knife-edge of his ambivalence. He seems to find himself saying, to his own surprise, that he thinks the clouds are great, that they are the correct ending… and then, apparently feeling self-conscious about contradicting his own choice, rationalizes by saying that he didn’t include them in this cut because one doesn’t need to see them: one feels what they signify even when they aren’t there. But in the very act of needing to talk this out, he seems to recognize that one doesn’t necessarily feel them. Only his ideal viewer will feel them.

Like all self-pity, his functions as a test: Are you the right kind of person? Will you be able to feel my real vulnerable emotion that I am expressing as its spiteful opposite? Can you tell that when I’m hopeless I’m actually hopeful? Gilliam doesn’t trust anyone who can’t tell. Except when he does.

Anyway, the passive-aggressive ending could very easily be purified if after the nasty reveal, we returned to Sam’s reality, with him triumphant and free. Why not?

The two dreams of the movie are one dream, to us. The movie tells us to embrace illusions and also to reject illusions. It loves fantasy and fears it. Is it good or bad to be lost in a hall of mirrors? Is it good or bad that life is an illusion? The correct dream answer is: both, always. In this respect, most of Brazil is right on the money: irreconcilably ambivalent. Like all the best movies, its narrative impulses eat each other and cancel out and meld and run wild, while its feelings roll ever onward. That’s art I can get inside. It’s only when this movie tries to get specific and say something that I resist it.

This was Criterion’s first really mega-super-deluxe-o set, with three discs, a fancy slipcase, a new director’s cut, and lots and lots of bonus stuff. It is, not coincidentally, also the very first DVD I ever bought. (I believe). At Tower Records in 1998. It marks the end of Criterion’s first phase of DVDs, design-wise, about which an entire tedious post to come — and thus it marks the end of my first phase of this project. I’ve watched 51 of these babies! Time to celebrate; stay tuned. It feels fitting that this last one is the one that’s been on my shelf, wherever I’ve lived, for the past 16 years.

Because the image on the old 1998 disc is “non-anamorphic” and Criterion’s later releases of the same set were much higher resolution, I figured I’d get the Blu-ray from Netflix to watch the main feature. But when it arrived it turned out not to be the Criterion edition but the Universal edition, with the original theatrical cut. So I watched that first, and then the director’s cut right after. No offense to Terry or to Criterion but the Universal version is a better movie. It’s tighter and flows better. The colors of the transfer are nicer, too, I think. But the Criterion bonus stuff is top-class. Nowadays they probably wouldn’t lean on “press forward to advance through these screens of text” quite so heavily, but for 1998 it’s excellent. Gilliam’s commentary is solid, the commentary on the crazy studio version is pretty astute, the two little documentaries are both good.

I particularly enjoy the relaxed video interview with the late Michael Kamen, the composer. This is a rewarding score that I admire. It’s thrillingly shameless — after all, how would restraint possibly serve this movie? It’s a big orchestra slopping all over the place and wrapping all the oversaturated fantasy in oversaturated musical fantasy to match. Much of the score is derived from squeezing the title song through Richard Strauss, but it’s really gloriously all over the map. Kamen is ready to savor every little thing, just like Gilliam, and it’s that willingness to really pursue self-amusement all the way to its limits that I find magnetic. I used to listen to this soundtrack album a lot in high school. It’s bizarrely put together and doesn’t make a lot of sense as a listening experience; yet at the same time, maybe for that reason, it is even more transporting than most soundtracks. It is another world, a weirdly two-dimensional one, on its own terms.

There is no real main title to speak of, and the end title is, of all things, a kind of nod to Black Orpheus, completely uncharacteristic of the rest of the score. So our selection is the signature cue, the one everyone remembers, the one you probably know as “Wall-E preview”: “The Office,” which Kamen says was inspired by Leroy Anderson’s “The Typewriter,” but obviously there’s a lot more going on here.

I don’t know if the marimba + electric guitar combo is original to Kamen or is lifted from some Esquivel arrangement or something, but it’s a stroke of orchestrational brilliance. More fundamentally, it is film-composerly brilliance to have recognized that in the vamp of “Brazil” was the potential to tease out this rising tide that would convey yearning and irony and hopelessness and inanity. The subtle poignancy of this cue encapsulates everything that Terry Gilliam is saying in the movie, and Kamen figured out how to say it efficiently and simply, all within the pre-existing song he was obligated to use. I spent many an hour as a teenager contemplating this cue and considering what it would feel like to have the aesthetic and emotional insight to realize that you could write this cue and it would work. That’s composing. I aspired to that and still do. Your track 51.

directed by Federico Fellini
story and screenplay by Federico Fellini and Tonino Guerro
opera texts by Andrea Zanzotto

Criterion #50. And the Ship Sails On.

You know he’s a big deal when this is one of his minor films.

Fellini’s late work seems to be generally thought of rather dimly, at least outside Italy. (“Late work” here means everything after Amarcord, which chronologically speaking is the entire second half of his career.) Several of the films seem to be completely unavailable on DVD. From my internet reading I don’t get the sense that there’s any very good critical reason for the neglect other than inertia of neglect.

It doesn’t surprise me that once things begin to be unfamous, reflexive skepticism would keep them that way. Like I said ages ago, “art” in the abstract tends to be assumed to be mediocre. If you just look at the list of an artist’s complete output — an artist you know nothing about — you may well feel some tickle of an inclination to think “how nice for him that he kept himself busy; a shame it’s all (probably) the same, all (probably) kind of blah.”

People tend to assume that their cultural exposure has been governed by an invisible hand of taste, and that if they haven’t heard of something, it’s probably not as good as the things they’ve heard of. This is the artgoer’s equivalent of “if you’re poor you must be lazy.” But it’s human nature. We ought to aspire to do better than to just run with it, though.

In E la nave va there are some aristocrats and artists on a luxurious ship. Various scenes play out. It all seems to be a dream. Everything is gently, sweetly unreal. One of the characters says he’s a journalist and seems to be our tour guide. There is an air of foreboding and also of quiet happiness. Eventually there is a sort of cataclysm and it ends.

That’s it!

There is some hint throughout, especially toward the end, that this is a socio-political Allegory of The Death of The 19th Century. That’s well and good, but it’s hardly a skeleton key to the movie; it’s just one of many layers on Fellini’s onion of subconsciousness. The feeling that this may all be some kind of metaphor or a critique is just another emotional thread in the dream fabric. (Critics who seize a movie like this by the allegory and then try to shake it into submission are just dreaming their own agitated sort of dream.) The archetypes of the 19th century and the looming significance of World War I are all crammed on this luxury liner together not as comments on a historical reality but simply as ingredients sloshing around in a certain part of the present-day imagination. At least of the imagination of a certain Italian filmmaker. And of mine too, because I too have seen A Night at the Opera.

I lay watching this in a very soft state of mind and found it thoroughly congenial. My only complaints would be that 1) it all ran a bit long, and 2) when the political material began to be more prominent toward the end I started to get the unfortunate impression that I was supposed to be watching more rationally and analytically. In retrospect I’m confident that impression was false, but I do think there’s something a little dramaturgically imbalanced in the second half. Though that’s also the nature of dreams. That was probably just a first-time thought that would not present itself on repeat viewings.

I will not recount the contents because it’s a movie to be mused over rather than worked out and explained. Here for flavor is one scene: everyone stands around in the kitchen and watches intently while the “deepest bass in the world” does his trick of singing a note so low that it makes a chicken fall asleep. It makes the narrator fall down unconscious too, but they quickly pick him up and he’s fine and in good spirits.

This is, I guess, “surrealism,” but the official “surrealists” sort of stole that term for the flavor of their dreams. That Salvador Dali stuff always feels a little off to the icky side, for me. Fellini’s dreams are more like mine. Like my good ones anyway.

Here’s a quote from the director, vindicating my approach toward this movie. I didn’t find this until afterward:

I would like to have billboards placed on the cinema doors with the following wording: “There is nothing more than what you’ll see.” Or: “Don’t make any efforts to see what is behind, or you’ll run the risk of not being able to see what is in front of you.”

It’s a show. It’s a poetic auteurist show, not one that follows a set recipe, but its freestyling will be more or less familiar from your subconscious, if you let it be.

Signor Fellini is a very great artist, I say, for being able to draw such well-modulated dreaminess out of the great messy world of production reality: set-building and actor-wrangling and crew-direction and blah and blah blah. It is rare that so elaborate a production is put to so ethereal an end, or at least rare that the ethereal note survives the physicality of the production. In the movie there is a stinking rhinoceros on board the ship, representing (perhaps) the fantastic in the real and the real in the fantastic. At the end our narrator rows away with it, planning to live off its milk.

The artifice is part of the texture of the film: everything looks intentionally fake, in a pleasantly disorienting way, and our attention is repeatedly called to the deep strangeness in the very fact that this dream is so physical and real and made out of people and stuff at work in a studio. At the very end he goes all out and pulls back to show the studio and the lights the mechanism rocking the fake deck and the camera and the crew and, his face hidden by the camera, himself. But even over this the dreamy music continues to play. Even if I was wrong to say it about Nights of Cabiria, I know I’m right here: the spirit is simply that movies are dreams, life is a dream, we’re all on the ship and the ship sails on.

The flavor is sort of like Terry Gilliam meets Proust.

Or maybe David Lynch. And there’s some Chaplin and Marx Brothers thrown in. Plus at times it feels like you’re watching a movie about the Titanic. And/or an opera.

Pina Bausch is in it, not dancing. Barbara Jefford is in it, whom I was able to place (before the movie ended!) as Molly Bloom from the Ulysses movie. Odd that I quoted her in the last entry. The main narrator guy is played by Freddie Jones, who is apparently the father of Toby Jones.

One of the characters has clearly been intentionally made to resemble this painting.

I went online to read stuff people said about this movie but anyone who has anything to say other than that it’s underrated and a lovely piece of art seems mostly wrong to me. And I don’t want anyone to take away the half-asleep magic sympathy I felt for this movie so I stopped reading. Once I’ve posted this I probably won’t be able to help myself but read some more, though. I would watch this again someday.

Several of the lead actors are English-speaking only and had to be dubbed into Italian. The dubbing is very loose throughout, which serves to increase the dreamy effect and wasn’t a problem for me. But apparently (according to scattered comments online) the so-called “English dub” of the movie, as shown back in 1984 in the UK and apparently later on cable a few times, included the original audio in the actors’ real voices, and those who have seen it consider it the preferred version of the film. Criterion does not include this and I’m not sure it’s available anywhere. Criterion doesn’t include much of anything. Interestingly, since this release, they haven’t ventured to extend their catalog to include any of the other “obscure” Fellini items, even though this seems like ripe territory for “rediscovery.” Certainly for “repackaging.”

(Speaking of Criterion and its releases: hey, this is the 50th that I’ve watched! I’m going to do a little pointless celebrating of my grand achievement here, but not until after the 51st, for a dumb reason that I’ll explain when I get there.)

The music was done by one Gianfranco Plenizio (Nino Rota died in 1979). It’s almost entirely arrangements of familiar classical music (and a couple of “folk” items that I assume are at least partially traditional). The showpieces are two opera scenes, at the beginning and end of the voyage, sung by everyone on board, with new lyrics (including the title) set to bits of Verdi. But I couldn’t choose those because there are interfering sound effects and also I’m trying to avoid songs. The end credits are just Signor Plenizio playing “Clair de lune” with some odd editing, but it’s his own simple and dreamy take on it, and gives the flavor of the movie. So even though it’s not original music — in the strictest sense there is essentially none in the movie — this is what we’re going with. Track 50.

directed by Federico Fellini
screenplay by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli
additional dialogue by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Criterion #49. Nights of Cabiria.

This has all the hallmarks of “great film” status (“Great film” in the snooty international Cahiers du Film Studies sense, not the Academy Awards montage “Oh, Toto! Attaboy Clarence! I’m the king of the world! You’re a wizard, Harry!” sense):

1) auteurism, this being Fellini’s own script for a movie showcasing his wife, plus did I mention “Fellini”
2) intra-cinematic reference (to e.g. Charlie Chaplin)
3) meta-cinematic reference (a movie star and a magic show figure in Cabiria’s adventures)
4) opportunity to say “breaks the fourth wall”
5) black-and-white
6) not American
7) slow pace
8) centrist approach to satisfy partisans of naturalism (unglamorous people and places + an impression of unmanaged humanity) and romanticism (touches of magic realism + fabulist contrivances in the plotting)
9) already established as a “great film”
10) (is good)

I may sound cynical about this, but I’m not. I enjoyed the movie and wouldn’t want to strip it of its fame at all. I do sometimes want to strip halls of fame of their fame, though. And their halls.

Advocates of relatively marginalized art are usually too preoccupied by their marginalization to think straight. They want to do the public culture a service by trying to return good and worthwhile things to the light — as well they might, seeing as how much of what’s in the light at any given time is terrible. But they tend to go about it naively and ineffectually. They wish everyone else shared their tastes, but they don’t actually believe in manipulating people to bring that about — so they devote themselves to building shrines and halls of fame, and then polishing them brighter and brighter, rather than simply buying advertising space and insinuating themselves into people’s regular lives, which might actually do some good. Shrines and halls of fame are essentially defensive.

The people at The Criterion Collection, however — to their immense credit — actually do something quite genuinely constructive to rehabilitating great films with their Trojan Horse approach. They package! package! package! until their vacantly sexy product can attract the design-lust of the living, and then lo and behold some people are, they know not why, watching Nights of Cabiria again. Or, equally, something else. Obviously Trojan Horseplay places great responsibility on the curator. And thus by extension on the viewer. I could go on about Criterion and packaging and authenticity and my mixed feelings. Someday I will but it won’t be for a while.

Nights of Cabiria is about a good soul and whether she will be able to find kindness in the world. It is exactly a Charlie Chaplin movie, except that Chaplin was a very pure egomaniac and did not differentiate between the world being saved and the world learning to love him sufficiently. Fellini tries to work outside such illusions. Both this movie and nearly every Chaplin movie pose the same sentimental question: “Will this person be loved sufficiently?” But the philosophical extension of the question is different in the two cases. Chaplin egomaniacally implies that his film is asking “will the world ever be good and pure?” Fellini’s generalization is the more reasonable “will any person ever be loved sufficiently?” He is a less complete egomaniac and has at least some inkling that his audience is made up of individuals with their own problems.

This may sound dubiously psychoanalytic of me, but it’s explicitly what the second half of the movie is about. The pivot of the plot (such as it is) is that in a moment of spooky transcendence, Cabiria — outwardly already a lovable Little Tramp figure — is magically made to reveal her true purity and simplicity of soul in its complete nakedness. And after this moment of uncannily intense vulnerability, the audience is held in suspense about it for a very long time: has this been a good or a bad thing?

Well, to spoil the famous ending — I’m going to try not to be specific, but if you haven’t seen it you might want to do that rather than read this and the next paragraph — it is, of course, a mixed bag. The question left poignantly open at the end is how much the proportions of that mix matter.

The strength of art is to draw compelling philosophical equations where the rational mind would refuse them, and this is where the film earns its greatness, in my book. Fellini’s ultimate cinematic proposal is that there is a sense in which the proportions of pain and joy simply do not matter. There is kindness in life, and that is good; there is cruelty in life and that is bad. And he can put his finger on the bad side of the scale as heavily as he wants, and it is still in some sense balanced. In the art-sense of the film we feel the truth of this point of view, and the tears it draws are, I think, tears of recognition. Then the lights are immediately turned back on so that we can’t argue against any optimism but our own, because Fellini has already removed himself. This is a very sophisticated manipulation of the audience and a very generous one.

Incidentally: I want to be clear that my calling Chaplin a “very pure egomaniac” is not intended as a criticism. I think his movies (at least the famous Little Tramp ones — I haven’t seen any of the more transparently self-indulgent later ones) are wonderful as gifts to the ego in everyone, the part that says “I am pure, and all my problems arise from the world being impure.” As far as it goes, this is true and healthy and the movies let us experience the joy of that. The difficulty comes when we stop watching intuitively and emotionally, and start thinking critically about the man behind the curtain, as it were, the real guy wearing the fake moustache. Then we might realize that we aren’t so sure we like his self-aggrandizing manipulations. But that’s the fall from grace. In actuality we did like the manipulations. They are not harmful to us until we observe them.

A few minutes ago, I intended for this train of thought to stop at several further stations that I had in mind, but my mental slate just got wiped and one of those end-of-the-line barriers got set up. And something I’m learning is that straining to recall thoughts that have untimely vanished is about the most destructive thing I can do to my flow, so let’s just go on to the next thing.

(“Untimely” as adverb: some dictionaries say “archaic” but OED, and more surprisingly, Merriam-Webster, do not. Take that, readers.)

During viewing I thought: “perhaps the title Nights of Cabiria is meant to suggest that the successive episodes are her different dreams, reflecting and embodying her various fears and hopes and ambivalences, as real dreams do.” In part I thought this because I wasn’t yet clear on what level of realism vs. clown-show I was seeing. Later on, when I had grown comfortable with the style of the movie, I no longer needed this conceit to get me through, but it still worked. And afterward it still does. Maybe it only does because all movies are like dreams, or all art is like dreams, or all life is like dreams. But maybe it specifically does because Fellini had that in mind at some level, though I can’t find that documented anywhere. Anyway I’m putting it out there.

Nights of Cabiria seemed to me to be one of those works by male artists that says “women (my wife/girlfriend especially) and their souls and feelings are so wonderful and deep, which is to say that my eye for women and my awareness that they have souls and feelings is wonderful and deep, are you getting this, ladies? Check out my massive throbbing sensitivity to what you really are.” As Molly Bloom says: “yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is”. She says this because a man made her say it, in the course of his very flashy attempt to demonstrate that he could understand or feel what a woman is better than anyone.

This genre is of course generally associated with Woody Allen… but I personally think of Steve Martin as its most embarrassing practitioner, with screenplay after book after play showcasing his sensitive understanding of the real literature-worthy feelings of women who, y’know, happen to be his type. Am I the only person who thought of this as horribly transparently no more than the output of an ingrained denialist compulsion to convert idle sex fantasies about hot girls into “real” “consideration” of their “particular inner lives”? I mean, look at the damn cover! And of course Steve Martin played the “guy in the me-Steve-Martin role in this sex fantasy” in the movie. (I admit, I didn’t read it or see the movie. I did read one of his later books. As I recall it too had a hot girl with a lot of inner sadness in it.)

I’m not saying that the thought “hey, I’m objectifying that person, but I don’t want to be like that: let me try to think more fully and empathetically about them” can’t ever yield fruit. I’m also not saying that the thought “hey, I’m objectifying that person and I love what I’m seeing and I’m going to write it down as art” is problematic. But I do squirm at the bad faith of “I agree that objectifying someone is insufficient but don’t worry, this can’t possibly be objectification because it has feelings in it. Look where I say that ‘she sighed with loneliness when men would ogle her long, toned legs.’ Look where I say that ‘her tasteful miniskirt kept riding up uncomfortably over her girlish, too-skinny thighs!'” If we’re reading about people as people and not people as bodies, why the obsession with appearances?

Though Steve Martin has walked the walk, in that particular respect, by descending into some kind of sad facelift spiral, so what do I know.

I guess all I’m really saying is that “depth” can also be an object, “sincerity” can be a fashion, and “sensitivity” can be a ploy. I would never hurt you, girl. (Aw shit you’ve just been v=dQw4w9WgXcQ‎’ed!) And I get uncomfortable during “Girlfriends: so full of human depth!” movies because some part of me feels like I’m being very slowly v=dQw4w9WgXcQ‎’ed.

Related: I have always been very nervous about attempting to write fiction about fictional people — and not just the hot ones — because I fear that all my “imaginative empathy” will just sound like Steve Martin’s writing: like someone who desperately needs to believe that he is sensitive, far more than he actually is sensitive. What causes that effect? Overthinking, and if you’re asking about it, it’s already too late. Damn! Try again later.

ANYWAY, let’s go back to Woody Allen, who like I said is a more common point of reference for the “dig me digging my girlfriend” genre. Maybe I’ve just got Woody Allen on the brain because Nicholas Kristof recently ran this provocative piece asking everyone what their favorite Woody Allen movie is — it’s been a while but I think mine may still be Love and Death. Thanks, New York Times, this was fun! — but Nights of Cabiria seemed to me like the ideal “why my girlfriend is cool” movie Woody has been trying to make for years. When I saw Amarcord I also got a strong sense of the extent of Woody’s debt to Fellini. Confirmed: it is a large extent.

In Fellini’s defense on this count, if a defense is needed: what Giulietta Masina is doing here is real performance, not just a kind of relaxed self-exposure a la Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (which, to be clear, I like). But, as some pretentious clowning instructor (or for that matter Charlie Chaplin) might say: the essence of clowning is truth — real, if stylized, self-exposure — and of course what charms and endears us about Cabiria is her aura of humanity and spirit, not her specific “persona,” and that cannot be falsified out of whole cloth. (I know it is theoretically a big deal that this is a movie about a prostitute, but she’s only as much a prostitute as The Little Tramp is homeless, which is to say only slightly more than Donald Duck is a duck.) It is a movie meant to win Giulietta Masina awards for being lovably wonderful, as it did.

Again the train hits a barrier and wonders where it could possibly have been going. I swear it was somewhere else. But look at that beautiful expanse of uninhabited snow out there, with no tracks to be seen. Let’s get out of here.

Nino Rota is really very very good at what he does. His thing might seem limited and repetitive — if you listen to a “Best of Nino Rota’s Movie Music” album you might well feel that you’re just listening to a single cohesive album — but is actually exquisitely nuanced. The Amarcord theme and the Notti di Cabiria theme may sound like very similarly catchy little sentimental tunes in basically the same popular style, but if they swapped movies they wouldn’t work at all. The poignancy of one is not the same as the poignancy of the other: it’s a slightly different station at a slightly different volume at a slightly different time of day. In both cases the whole meaning of the film depends on the music, and he manages to get it exactly right.

Having on a few occasions been in or near the trenches when such musical choices are being hammered out, I know that this aspect of dramatic composing, getting the meaning exactly exactly right, is the subtlest and most important. John Williams used to say in interviews that the hardest part was getting the little motives on which the whole score was based to be exactly what they needed to be as signifiers, and that in more than one instance he had to work through many tens of almost-identical variants of the same few notes, trying to sniff out the right one. (Having them go on to be megafamous was surely vindicating. I think in the confidence of old age he may no longer spend quite as long as he might.) Nino Rota clearly had a special knack where he could get the dimension of meaning just right, and then execute it with such nonchalance that it would sound genuinely effortless, like it might just be a pre-existing track. I don’t know if he had to work at it or if it just came to him.

At the very end of this film, when the orchestra emerges in full force to bring down the curtain, we can’t help but notice that the score has known exactly what it was doing all along and has earned the feeling we’re feeling. It’s a very smart score that turns what might otherwise seem like a small and erratic movie into something cohesive and strong and moving. Here are the main titles: Track 49. (The themes that are “popular” here later appear arranged as “classical”; the themes that are “classical” here later appear arranged as “popular”.)

directed by Marcel Camus
screenplay by Jacques Viot
inspired by the play Orfeu da Conceição by Vinicius de Moraes (1954)
adaptation and dialogue by Jacques Viot and Marcel Camus

Criterion #48: Black Orpheus. In Portuguese, shot in Brazil, directed and produced by Frenchmen and considered a French film.

If you don’t know what this is, you can go to the Criterion site and press play to watch the preview. It gives a good sense.

I think the aspect of “blogging” that is most artificial to me — and accordingly the least fluid element of my writing — is form. Thoughts are not the same thing as a cohesive essay. In grooming the former to pass as the latter (like Henry Higgins), I feel that I am wasting my time and mental energy on fakery. Fakery ought not to be any part of this. If I wrote in drafts, on a second pass I would no doubt be inspired to impose some form of my own invention, but I really want to do these in one shot. That’s the nature of the exercise. And in one shot I’m not going to be thinking formally, because, as I said, thinking isn’t inherently formal. Mine isn’t, anyway.

Furthermore I’m a bit skeptical about the ideal of the “cohesive whole”; I think it’s overemphasized generally. I’m going to make an effort to remain more authentic to my inner parataxis. (Yeah that’s right, parataxis.)

I make and fail this pledge pretty regularly.

On occasion here I have criticized works of art for not living up to an idealistic standard: that they should aim to be of spiritual/emotional/psychological benefit to their audience. This movie decidedly meets the standard. It is joyous and vibrant and celebrates life as being full of color and feeling.

Everything else about it is secondary. The mythological scheme that’s supposed to impart epic significance is actually completely gratuitous. Color and light and music already impart all the epic significance needed; that’s how movies work. (Color and light and music plus the freedom to stare at people’s faces with impunity.) In fact, in every respect other than vibrancy, this movie is pretty flimsy stuff. But that’s no criticism at all.

Actually, for me the value of the Greek overlay flowed the other way; the ecstatic immediacy of the movie’s fabric of music and dance and festivity gave me a new sense of what myth is.

Recently watching Fishing With John and a while ago watching Shock Corridor, I thought about the distinction between private home movies and creative work for public consumption, because in both of those cases that distinction was partially erased, to unusual effect. The spirit of Black Orpheus is also closely related to the spirit of private vacation footage, but in the more familiar mode of travelogue: here are some of the stimulating sights and sounds of X locale.

Perhaps it seems that what mainly distinguishes something like To Catch a Thief from your grandparents’ home movies of their trip to Europe is budget and camera skill, or degree of fiction. But what really makes the difference, I think, is the outlook that governs the photography (and is thus embedded in the film). The thing about To Catch a Thief‘s traveloguing that makes it unlike home movies is not the fiction per se but the fact that its camera’s-eye-view of the Riveria is commercially calculated and thus impersonal. Whereas any home movie is through-and-through an expression of its maker’s particular spontaneous sense of the world.

And this sense of the world is not diametrically opposite to fiction; on the contrary, many people — me and John Lurie included — have, in the act of capturing a stimulating “real” travel experience, been aware that their spirit of present wonder is already closely proximate to fantasy and figured “why not add some fiction to this?” Make-believe seems to have an organic place within that kind of joy-in-where-you-are.

All home movies are already a kind of make-believe, a nourishing kind based in the deep interpenetration of the imagination into one’s happiness. (It sounds like I am doing an impression of Gaston Bachelard, but it just came out that way.)

In fact you could say that vacations, even before you film them, are already a form of narrative fantasy. (Come to think of it I think that was the subject of a pretty good literature lecture I heard in college.) The use of a camera is in this sense just a way of giving perceptible form to the imaginative world in which one is already living. Which sounds to me like a definition of the function of art. So I see this overlap of the private/documentary and public/drama impulses as basically good and healthy.

Black Orpheus is overtly rooted in the joyful self-mythologizing impulse of the tourist, but it also encompasses classical myth. And then within its fictionalized travelogue of Rio’s Carnival (itself already a ritual of fantasy) it includes footage of an apparently real Umbanda ceremony, which, intercut with the actors, is made to serve as part of the fictional mythological story. This stew of reality and fiction was touching and stimulating; it revealed to me that religion, superstition, narrative, myth, exoticism, tourism, and self-image are all part of the same lump of imaginative feeling. And that this lump is none other than the same source that gives meaning to dance and music, a well of feeling with which we are all intimately familiar. (If Bachelard had written a book on travel I imagine he would have expressed this, but better.)

In the Disney conversation about Saludos Amigos, I said — yes that’s right, the authorial voice of these solo entries is the same BROOM who participated in the Disney discussions! — that I was pleased by the idea that a frothy travelogue could serve a propagandist political function. I find the very notion of the government adopting a Good Neighbor Policy heartwarming and politically attractive. It is the most honorable possible mode of leverage for the political manipulation of the public, and a grossly underused one: trying to make people happy about things that it would benefit their government (and the world at large) for them to be happy about.

All such policy is now of course utterly utterly defunct. I suppose presidential campaigns do a little of that sort of propaganda of positivity, but with such transparent ulterior motives and on such a petty scale that in the long term it only increases public cynicism. I’m talking about long-term subtle propaganda campaigns to get Americans to, say, think of the middle east as a fabled land of natural wonders and cultural glories. And of course vice versa, to send Pato Donald over there with a few benign skits to introduce our Iranian friends to the mystique of the Grand Canyon and the Space Needle, or whatever. It’s a piece of the international cultural landscape that is painfully lacking.

Probably Disney (for one) has been approached with this sort of proposal in the last 50 years but said “no way,” because the risk of being seen as government pawns, or even just meddling in foreign policy on their own dime, is far too toxic for the shareholders in this day and age. Understandable.

I bring up politics at all only reluctantly. This film could be taken as a Good Neighborly fantasy (not that the French filmmakers are exactly neighbors to Brazil, but we’re all planetary neighbors, right?), or it could remain just a human fantasy, which is all that is actually captured on the film, and is what a good vacation is. (At least in my mind. Politics are abstractions but the blue of the sky and the good warm air are not.)

But. I bring this up because the DVD (and apparently the discourse at large about this movie) is full of another way of “politicizing” it, which really irks me. Basically the gist is: this is a movie set in the favelas, the slums of Rio, which are in reality no bossa nova love poem but a vast nightmare of poverty and crime and hopelessness. If you saw City of God you can understand that the lyrical vacation fantasy of this movie is to say the least highly inaccurate, even for 1959. The critique writes itself, right? Naturally, this movie is irresponsible, offensive, whitewashes a serious issue, tells unconscionable and condescending lies about Brazil and blackness for the amusement of foreigners, blah blah blah. It is a Song of the South of Rio. (My summary of the criticism; nobody actually says that in so many words.)

Now, to be clear, everyone on the disc who brings up this point of view then dismisses it. The film, they essentially say, is an outsider’s exoticist distortion of Brazil, but a forgivable one, especially in light of what it did to promote real Brazilian music (see below). But I say that even in entertaining the criticism in the first place, we hurt ourselves. This film does not require forgiveness. The impression given by the people in the documentaries and such — essentially all of whom like the movie! — is that liking the movie may be a kind of error, but they have made peace with the error. That makes me mad. Either it’s an error or it’s not, and if it’s not an error, why are you all talking about it?

The critique is senseless to begin with. It is based on a guilt that has no political source and no political end. Of course this movie is a lyrical fantasy. It could not be more explicit about it. That it derives from a tourist’s exoticist raptures does not actually complicate that; all fantasy is exoticism and all rapture is irrational and inexact. Being angry about this is like being angry that back in Nagasaki the fellers do not chew tobaccy and the women do not wicky-wacky woo, because that was always racist and inaccurate and furthermore the fellers and women were all later incinerated and the song is thus in poor taste. The bonus features here keep returning to the angle that “well, yes, but the song remains catchy nonetheless.” There is no nonetheless. The bomb has no bearing on the catchiness, period.

The most hateful thing that politicization does is deny that there is any such thing as politicization. “Everything is already inherently political; it’s for us to come to terms with that.” This is vile sophistry. Nothing is inherently anything. The power to choose one’s perspective is equally the responsibility of those who choose the perspective of pooping at parties.

This perspective requires vigorous defense instead of the implicit free pass it is constantly given, because despite its obvious good intentions, it is truly unclear what good it actually does, whereas it is very clear what ill it does: it puts everyone on a defensive footing about everything. And then that gets put in the bonus materials on my DVDs and brings me down from a state of general dreamy transport into a state of rationalization and qualification.

Here’s my defense of my position: I believe that people naturally do good to one another when they have 1) freedom to choose their actions and 2) a feeling of unthreatened well-being. The scolding guilt of moral obligation can only diminish both of these prerequisites. Going to a happy party makes people more likely to do good afterward; being told “enjoy your party but just don’t forget to keep in mind that you are always, passively or indirectly, the cause of suffering in others, and that the greater your pleasure, the more shameful your sin” only makes that less likely to happen. Plus it’s blatantly untrue. Suffering that occurs simultaneously with pleasure is not caused by it. The starving people in China very truly do not care whether you finish your broccoli. Morality is paratactic, not hypotactic. You heard me! Take that!

After reading this you might ask, “Well, what about Song of the South then? Are you really okay with that?” To which I say, testily, “I don’t understand the question.” Am I okay with the movie having been made? Sure. Am I okay with people being so offended by it that they wanted it taken out of circulation? Sure. Am I okay with the distributor complying? Sure. But: am I also okay with people not being offended by it? Yes. I am okay with myself not being offended by it. If it weren’t so boring I might even enjoy it. (Song of the South, that is. Black Orpheus I did enjoy.)

What I am not okay with is people being not okay with me not being offended by it. I don’t think their claim that such censure serves a philanthropic purpose holds any water. This is the thrust of my argument.

However, my being “not okay” with censorious zeal is only another spiritual hurdle for me to go over (or is it under?). The more okay with such people I can be, the better my life will feel. I’m in the process of inching under.

In brief: Intolerance of error is not equivalent to, nor nearly as valuable as, love of truth. The former is frequently counterproductive, the latter never.

This movie was made with real love of a form of truth. Any “errors” bob harmlessly in the wake of that forward impulse.

Furthermore I declare that: Marcel Camus is neither the same person as, nor any documented relation to, Albert Camus.

Boy, I really didn’t say much about Orfeu negro but it just worked out that way. I’m allowed.

It’s pretty like a postcard. Haven’t you ever wanted to live and love in a postcard? Well, I have.

It’s actually remarkably like a live-action version of one of the Disney good neighbor movies. Which is the sequence where the buildings all dance along? (I think it’s “Os Quindins de Yayá”.) That spirit is exactly captured in the opening scenes here.

It also goes on a bit. As a kid I would have found it terrifically dull and disingenuous. I would have felt that I was being pandered to with supposed “beautiful people” and their supposed “beautiful story,” just another bout of flaccid cultural fawning, all endless dance sequences and no real bones to it. But I am old and mellow enough now to know that not all dullness is an error and not all faux-naivete is hypocritical or pandering. The goodwill and good color carried me happily through.

Hey, don’t blame me, I’m just a guitar.

I had intended to link to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s infamous Carnival in Rio video somewhere in this entry as a joke, but I just watched the clip (for the first time in years) and it made me feel so uncomfortable that I can’t in good conscience impose that on you.

The music is the glory of the movie. The best bonus feature is two guys who know what they’re talking about explaining what bossa nova is and isn’t, where things stood when this movie came out, and tracing Jobim and Gilberto’s path through this movie’s soundtrack and beyond. I wish that feature had been longer. The worst bonus feature is a full-length French documentary where they go to Rio “in search of” the movie today, with nothing particular to say and a lot of boring footage to say it in, cut together very badly. I’ll admit that as I type this I still haven’t watched the last 20 minutes of it, but I promise will before I click “publish”!

Anyway, the music is almost constant in one form or another, and is overtly the soul of what the movie has to offer. The atmosphere of the middle section of the movie almost exactly the same as that of bossa nova: i.e. waking in a warm breezy beach house. There is also some genial raucousness for scenes of the eager crowds, and of course a couple of more intimate mellow-voiced love songs. It’s all buoyant and evocative; it’s no surprise that the soundtrack was a big seller and sparked the bossa nova craze.

There is a main title song (Jobim’s “A felicidade”) but there are sound effects all over it. Then in the middle there’s “Manhã de Carnaval” by Luis Bonfá, which is generally thought of as the breakout hit from the score and accordingly gets called simply “Black Orpheus” on a lot of jazz albums. But if you’ve seen the movie you’ll probably agree that the selection has to be the wonderful finale, the “Samba de Orfeu,” also by Bonfá. The ecstatic poignancy of the ending, with the children’s voices, has been widely imitated and for good reason. It’s not quite the same without the visual but it’s still very charming. Track 48.

Okay, I watched the rest of that pointless documentary. If I’d been the Criterion producer I would have tried to extract only the brief bits of interviews with the original cast and crew, which are probably no more than 10 minutes. Seeing the guy who played Orfeu in 2005, bald and overweight but still with a great smile, is obviously a desirable bonus feature. (He has since died.) I wonder if they tried to do that and the filmmakers said “we will only give you permission to include the film intact.” Because as a whole it’s really not up to snuff, certainly not up to 88 minutes of snuff.

directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg
written by Nikolaj Frobenius and Erik Skjoldbjærg

Criterion #47.

This is a Norwegian movie but unfortunately I don’t get to play with Google Translate because it’s already called Insomnia (instead of, say, Søvnløshet, thanks Google Translate!). Probably this was done with an eye to the international market. Perhaps it’s also a case of the Diabolique effect, where a foreign-y name makes something feel even more dangerous and fantastico.

The movie takes the standard setup of moral-slippage noir (i.e. the detective/hero himself does very bad things) and gives it a nice jangly quality by associating it with sleep deprivation (which he suffers under the endless daylight above the Arctic Circle). In most such movies, alcohol or drugs serve the same function, but this is better: insomnia is ostensibly involuntary, a form of natural friction against the world, and thus makes it harder for the audience to blame the protagonist for his plight. We are denied any easy way to stop identifying with his increasingly dissociative immorality, and are forced to slog through it all with him, queasily. That form of guilty queasiness is the point of this subgenre. Of course, just seeing any movie where the protagonist breaks the moral code is already automatically queasy, but for the distinctly rancid flavor of noir, the film must be clear that its point of view is not clucking disapproval; it can’t afford to be because there are even worse monsters out there. As there are in this movie.

You can say something about how setting “noir” in excessive light rather than excessive shadow is some kind of provocative inversion, and I don’t doubt that that was part of the conception of the script, but speaking as an audience member, that feels a little pat and overstated to me. I never insisted on those shadows; people just kept putting them there. There have been fatalistic movies with bright lighting for years. The thing to note here is not that “noir means black but this movie is not black!!!” but rather that the beauty-slash-insinuating-hostility of the far north has been cleverly made to serve an alienating role just as well as the beauty-slash-insinuating-hostility of the city. There’s a version of this movie to be made in every setting. And I will want to see it! I generally like any movie that finds a way to reveal how scary and unwelcoming some particular locale already is. The suburbs, the forest, the desert, the hospital, the ruins, the library, whatever.

(Twin Peaks takes nearly the same premise and the same characters and the same setting — you will think of it while watching this — but then uses all the implicit emotional leverage to go no place in particular. Which is part of its charm: it has all the pieces in place to show us that the world is terrifying and hostile, but like real dreams, instead it shows us all our different feelings: scary, stupid, confused, and soothing, all muddled together. This movie, by contrast, goes on a murder investigation in the north with a real single-minded purpose. The character’s mind is drifting but the movie is wide awake.)

Mr. Skjoldbjærg understands how all his genre concepts are supposed to work and has everything pretty well in hand. I would say that’s what I enjoyed most here: the sense that someone intelligent had thought through all the stuff under the surface that makes these movies go, and that I could just focus on what was there. (I recently rewatched Blood Simple, with which this has a couple of secondary genre features in common, and felt the same way: its greatest strength is that it knows why it’s doing these things.) What’s there in Insomnia is sometimes a little ordinary or a little stilted, but fundamentally it’s reliable.

When I watched this, as it turned out, I wasn’t quite in that playful mood where one can really relish rancidity, but it was done well enough that I wasn’t put off it. I can always make good use of the clean whites and simple self-assurances of European thrillers. This felt a little like some imported TV a la “The Killing.” Good bleak fun, if a little emotionally cool, and sometimes that cool is as pleasant for me as it obviously is for Europeans.

I think that’s about all there is to say. It’s a 1997 neo-noir crime movie with some mild arthouse crossover potential because it’s foreign and its touches of personality feel distinctly un-Hollywood. But they’re just touches. This is the kind of secretly-completely-commercial movie arthouse cinemas make their money off of.

Hey speaking of Hollywood, how would you like to see this movie done right, if you know what I mean. I mean AMERICAN for crying out loud, 2002-style! Where instead of Stellan Skarsgård we get, say, Al Pacino (it’s still only 2002 so don’t worry, he promises he will do at least 5% of the necessary work to differentiate the character from “Al Pacino”); and as the other cop, obviously America’s 2002 platonic semi-sweetheart Hilary Swank; and as the creep, get this: Robin Williams! His agent’s been telling him he’s got an image problem from all that saccharine and needs to play some villain roles ASAP. And the guy who did Memento can direct, since that was sort of the American equivalent movie. Except now this will be the American equivalent movie. It will be so equivalent that it will be called Insomnia (2002). And it will be exactly the same. Except in Alaska. And except that where the original felt like it had a certain hungry-young-director’s-original-idea fire behind it, this will feel like it has some rising-young-director-trying-to-live-up-to-expectations-with-a-bigger-budget can’t-afford-to-risk-a-fire behind it.

I saw it at the time, not really taking in that it was a remake. It made a middle-of-the-road impression and then I forgot pretty much everything about it other than the title’s premise.

Skjoldbjærg, upon seeing what had been done to his movie, was apparently surprised at how literal a remake it was. He made a public statement about being grateful that it had been done so conscientiously, but I have to wonder if he wasn’t actually disappointed. For this they had to make it again?

After watching the original I watched a few clips of the remake on youtube. Comparing this (link will surely be taken down soon! turn on English subtitles) to this made me reflect on all the needless fat and indulgence of the American standard practice, at least of this era. They write lines that might be said, they get coverage of what they might need to see, and then they edit it (particularly badly in this case). All the technical craft (yes, sure, even of the acting) is admirable in itself, and yet why? Why is anyone doing this? In the Scandinavian original I get the sense that the creatives and the crew may not be quite as expert but I have no doubt that they have a real clear sense of purpose, logic, rationale, meaning. By comparison there is something psychologically masked and avoidant about the Americans, both in front of and behind the camera. Our priorities are more profoundly compromised.

Music is by Geir Jenssen. Who? Oh, sorry, you surely know him as ambient electronica artist Biosphere (redirected from Geir Jenssen). He lays down some of that signature Biosphere sound, which I guess is sort of like underwater dial tones. And underwater heartbeats. Generally the score is quiet synthetic soundscaping, just at the very edge of what one would consider music rather than sound design. It’s effective and appropriate to the tone, but also kind of arty in its subtle way, and is one of the things that helps keep the movie feeling European enough for the arthouse.

Our selection has to be the end credits, the only place where the score really goes for it and has an ordinary beat, like humans use. Some listeners might feel that this track kind of puts the Euro thing over the top, but don’t worry, by the time you hear this the movie is already over. Actually I think it’s pretty good for what it is; the icky disco of it feels about right for the sleep-deprived moral moonscape where things end. Track 47. Warning: this begins with the trunk slamming shut.

directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel
screenplay by James Ashmore Creelman
from the story by Richard Connell

Criterion #46. Moving right along.

Check out this list of the Top Ten Most Dangerous Games Ever: you won’t believe what’s at number one!

We all already know the deal with the story. The deal with the movie is that it is a companion piece to King Kong, made by some of the same people with some of the same actors on some of the same sets at some of the same time. But this came out first, as of course it had to, seeing as it’s much dinkier.

This is like a 63-minute pulp cover illustration. Hold on to that dagger and that woman in tattered clothes! Keep holding on! Just a little longer!

Why is there a woman in a brutal man-on-man story like The Most Dangerous Game? I think you know why. The funny thing is that they easily get away with it. I was struck by how readily any scenario could be converted into a sex fantasy. “It’s Moby Dick… but there’s this girl there…”

Fay Wray is in full “can’t-help-it-I’m-just-drawn-this-way” Marilyn Monroe mode here, faux-cluelessly offering herself up in ways that seemingly have nothing to do with the Thrilling Tales business going on around her. But the movie knows what’s really going on, and it’s a little skeevy. Count Zoloft doesn’t just want to hunt the most dangerous game; he wants to hunt the most dangerous game, AND THEN AFTER HE HAS KILLED, “LOVE,” which is why Fay has to flee into the jungle alongside Joel McCrea and get her dress all wet oops.

The classic heartwarming image of a nubile beauty being carried off to be raped by a muscular beast appears here on the wicked Count’s tapestry (+ shock chord from Max Steiner!) as well as carved into his door-knocker, see title screen above. The same image at its most iconic and extreme of course forms the centerpiece of King Kong, wherein the logistics of rape per se have been transcended, in pursuit of whatever is really driving Merian C. Cooper and friends.

(Personally, my one gripe about King Kong has always been that the ape-to-girl size ratio ought to have been just a little bigger. I suspect that my kindred spirits Messrs. Cooper and Schoedsack were secretly of the same mind. Hopefully if they ever remake it again, this time there will be a scene toward the end where the ape eats a magic berry that makes him get four or five times larger, and at the same time the girl goes through a miniaturizing ray. In the interest of promoting discussion of this and related matters I have purchased the domain www.apetogirlratioforums.net, where a respectful community of like-minded enthusiasts can share speculative fiction and Photoshop work. Message me for an invite.)

Okay, I’ll be honest: I’m not really skeeved at all. This is all perfectly cozy stuff. It’s actually sort of heartwarming to me that something as nakedly pervy as King Kong is an international treasure without a smidge of shame associated with it. Pulp fantasies of virility like those on show here never really threaten me; I picture a confused Norman Rockwell kid with glasses thumbing through a comic book, eyes wide. I guess I could picture Nazis but I don’t and really why should I? If you’re female, your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Anyway I’m not interested in doing a real analysis of the ideas of masculinity or post-colonialism or Americanness or sex or whatever here. I only am interested in being goofy and meeting my quota of one (1) entry on this movie. So far so good.

This movie reminds me of the world of my grandfather. I remember, once when I was 8 or so, hearing my grandfather make reference to Mighty Joe Young — thereby teaching me that there was more than one giant gorilla movie — and in that moment being struck that he came from, and still mentally lived in, a world that was just irredeemably grandfathery, the same world from whence came the endless stacks of National Geographics that used to be ubiquitous under coffee tables the world over. “Mighty Joe Young,” seriously? And “Gunga Din”? Why did everything “exciting” have to sound so cornily stupid and pseudo-ethnic back then, and why couldn’t people like him hear how it sounded? But that sincere dedication to adventure-corn was also heartening, the way all grandparental things eventually are. I ended up permanently borrowing “Kon Tiki” and “Aku Aku” from his bookshelf, recognizing that such a world might actually be a nice place to spend some mental time. And so, at several removes, the problematic legacy of Rudyard Kipling lives on. Like I said, I’m not interested in coming up with a cogent critique here; just making some personal associations.

The fog in this movie is grade-A fog. In a movie like this that’s important. Ditto the foliage. The shot when a rock falls into a chasm (you know, to help you imagine a person falling in) is a grade-A rock-falling-in-a-chasm shot. The heavy door that mysteriously swings open to the mysterious fortress is a grade-A heavy door. There’s a pretty good point-of-view shot of running through the jungle. When the Count says that he will “take care” of his guest, and Fay looks back at him, there’s a wild crane-zoom all the way across the room into his madman face (with whooshing music to match), which is — well, a little bumpy, but the enthusiasm more than makes up for it. When the ship crashes there’s a satisfyingly prolonged explosion. This-all is what we’re here for, and they deliver. That and a girl.

One thing I would have liked… oh forget it. Seriously, forget it. I am perfectly happy with what I got. Service 5, Food 5, Would come again. (I don’t actually have to come again. It’s just nice to be nice on the survey. They work so hard, you know.)

Watching a movie like this is like eating an egg-salad sandwich. I like an egg-salad sandwich sometimes.

(Yes, I know Pee-Wee Herman put a gag about hating egg-salad sandwiches in his second movie. I was offended by it.)

Max Steiner is the egg-salad sandwich of composers. He sure did know how to make any movie sound, and thus feel, like every other movie. That’s undoubtedly a very valuable skill for a studio to have on staff but I’m not sure it’s exactly an artistic skill. If it weren’t for his totally by-the-books score, this would probably seem more overtly like a B-movie with a few fancy effects. With the music it seems like another certified bauble from the bauble factory, one more red ball that came rolling down the line into the machine that drops a cherry on your sundae.

As far as I could tell, there’s really only one theme in the movie, a simple “ominous” motif based on a hunting call that’s played over and over and clearly meant to signify the Count and his dangerous clutches. The most delightful thing about this score and possibly about this movie is that Count Zaroff is — in addition to being a Count, a Russian, a recluse, a refined host, and a madman — a pianist, with a nice grand piano in his fortress. In the final scene of the movie, having returned from (he thinks) killing our hero, with Fay Wray captive in his rooms, we suddenly cut to him in a robe at his piano, having put off rape to first play “Count Zaroff’s theme” in the finest hotel-lobby manner.

As you can hear, that gets cut off by… uh, action. He actually plays a complete arrangement earlier in the movie, but under a dialogue scene. If I were comfortable with including dialogue scenes, I would of course make this our selection.

But, with some reluctance, I think the only proper representative of the score has to be the standard, the main title, which in classic Steiner sandwich style only gives us a few bars of the big theme before settling into some certified bland scene-setting music for the ship on which our story begins (+ nautical bell). The most interesting thing here is the pre-title lead-in, with an onscreen hand grabbing the door knocker by the maiden and giving three good audible knocks, one for each sundae. Track 46. The hand represents the audience, of course, seeking entry to the world of danger. Your wish is granted!

I wrote all that before listening to the commentary because I was afraid that it might put serious thoughts in my head and spoil the spirit of the thing. Now I’ve listened.

Here’s something commentarian Bruce Eder mentions in passing:

The location shooting for The Four Feathers brought Cooper and Schoedsack to Africa. It was while they were shooting that Cooper had become fascinated with a colony of baboons living by a river, and this led him to start looking into stories he’d heard about a group of giant apes. It was an idea that hooked into a story he’d conceived in childhood of a giant ape carrying off a woman. Cooper discovered that the giant apes that he’d heard about were simply very large, not the outsize creatures he’d hoped for.

Italics mine, in accordance with the www.apetogirlratioforums.net style guide.

Basically the commentary is of the historical lore + mild thematic analysis sort, which suits me fine. It reminded me to acknowledge that for every egg salad sandwiches, there was a time before egg salad sandwiches; egg salad sandwiches needed to be invented. I grant everyone involved — screenwriter and composer especially — that this may well be one of the founding egg salad sandwiches of the modern sandwich era. It’s certainly a tighter and more commercial piece of pulp than its much-better-loved contemporary, Dracula, which has a little too much dry yolk, not enough mayo.

As far as the analysis goes, it’s fine: mostly to do with Zaroff’s place in the development of the archetype of the psychopathological villain. My mind still being fixated on the Molly Haskell idea about what forms of self-suppression are being endorsed by movies, I can’t help but see Zaroff’s libidinous and intellectual individuality vs. Rainsford’s all-American blandtastic nonentitude as part of a similarly lamentable scheme. The Merian C. Coopers in the audience, dreaming of their secret inner giant ape, are titillated, and then told no, it’s better to be a cipher in a nice shirt rather than the absolute monster you’d be if you went in that direction, you know the direction I mean. That’s the way to get the girl: be the nobody! It’s the noble thing — the only thing — to do.

Final cranky note: after I write these up I occasionally stop by the reasonably well-linked-to Criterion Contraption blog, where, from 2004 up until a couple years ago (when he sort of let it peter out around #115), a guy was taking this same trip. Roger Ebert wrote him up and he got attention from various other sources, I think including the Criterion website at one point. In this instance I happened to compare notes with him when I got to the horizontal line above, before listening to the commentary. I’ve always thought his take was a little low on personality, with its emphasis on screencaps, but only now has it become clear to me, with no small irritation, that 95% of what he writes is simply regurgitated insight from the auxiliary materials in the package. In this case, I read about this guy’s respect for the complexity of Zaroff’s psychology given the time period, the character’s relevance to future villains with particular reference to The Silence of the Lambs… and then found today that, lo and behold, this is all Bruce Eder’s analysis from the commentary, point for point. So is pretty much everything else in that “blog entry.” And, I realize, so has it been in many of his prior entries that I’ve read. Hey, that’s not cool!

Say what you will about what I write here, I am for sure making it all up.

Why do I give a crap about this guy? Well, yes, obviously in part for hey-what-about-me reasons (he gets hired to write film criticism for Slate now based on this schtick???) about which psychology trust me I don’t need any advice, I’m on it… but also for less embarrassing reasons relating from my ongoing irritation with the attitude of many of the commentaries and the whole apparatus around “talking about movies” in general. Plagiarism is a symptom of extreme anxiety which can be a dangerous contagion. Everyone making these mealy-mouthed commentaries is transparently trying to avoid the giant ape in the room which is why they love movies in the first place and is the really the main thing worth sharing. The problem is it’s often to do with, yes, their weird fetishes, vulnerabilities, whatever. Better to beat around the bush by talking about historical chains of influence, or better still, paraphrase someone else’s bush-beating. Well, I hate that. I want someone to tell me to look right directly at the cleavage, if that’s the point of the movie. That’s the only way to better my experience.

Whatever it may sound like, it is in fact the bravest possible thing when I can volunteer something like: the foliage in this movie is great and gives you a great make-believe-jungly feeling, like Maurice Sendak. That might be pretty weak stuff but I swear this is the direction I have to strive to go (with my machete). So I am pissed that Mr. Criterion Contraption got credit for his plagiarized pseudo-musings not solely because I envy credit, but because I want to live in a world where people aren’t so attracted to the reassurances that anxiety constructs to shield itself. But I’m not and I have to deal with that. I’m dealing with it.

That horizontal line keeps this part of the entry nicely quarantined from the cheery part above.