written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

Criterion Collection #11.

i.e. The Seventh Seal. As you can plainly see above. Why, one must ask, was the Criterion edition made from a version of the film where the original title cards had been replaced with English ones? That doesn’t seem right.

I feel much as I did about the Rilke. This is a thing of beauty but not redemptive. It does end on a vague mystical note of redemption, but that’s hard to swallow, I’m afraid, after this movie about the implacable reality of death and the desperate, hopeless illusions we use to try to fight it off. The meaning of life, I think it tells me, is to go on living, try to be good, eat strawberries, enjoy yourself, and help other people if you can. That’s all well and good. But that’s just in the negative space: the movie is principally about the struggle against death, and the answer is: you will lose.

I KNOW, MAN. I’d like to place a request for more cute babies and less horror-of-nothingness-while-being-burned-at-the-stake in my art, please.

I am not asking for the right to bury my head in any sand. I am already fairly dedicated to the elimination of sand; I don’t need some movie dustbusting on me.

Really: I am not espousing escapism over relevance and substance. I want relevance and substance. In fact what I am saying is, to me, in keeping with the philosophy that art has a social obligation. What you put in your art is what you are putting into society. So why fatalism? Why try to lower that temperature when it’s already freezing cold out there?

Fear of death is not a social ill, a cause that can benefit from public airing, Dickens-style. It is simply the essence of human sadness. You can choose that as your subject but who’s going to want to watch that? People starved for candor, I guess. I for one am not starved for candor on this subject.

But who is, truly? Who out there can learn from this movie? Nobody is going to recognize themselves in the flagellants or the witch-burners and realize their error. Nobody is going to be surprised that, yes, man is mortal. Isn’t it a little self-congratulatory for us to say that this movie is profound because we’ve imagined it inspiring philosophical epiphanies in some flimsy straw men? What about me? Where’s my epiphany, Ingmar? We’re all of us that knight in the movie, fighting the good fight. Well, guess what-all he gets out of it.

YES. I KNOW, DUDE. And so does Ingmar, at this point.

I guess art like this serves not as a lesson or even a statement, but as a conversation-starter, which I realize is a ridiculous coffee-table term for what I mean. Casting this material into poetry and film and placing it in front of people gives them a way in on it if they need one, and gives them cues to explore it. I’ve just been there already. Haven’t most people?

Or: a movie like this is meant to be a comfort because it is a commiseration. If you look out your window and see this, fear not, for you are not alone. But I don’t buy that justification. I the individual say, “I am afraid of death.” A comforting, commiserating work of art would say “We all are. But that’s why you at least don’t need to feel alone.” This movie, on the other hand, says, “Afraid of death, eh? Here’s a story about a man who was afraid of death. He died, of course.”

I must acknowledge that the film, because it is thoughtful, makes space to address some of what I’m saying here. The film was inspired by a real medieval painting on a church wall, and within the film we actually see the cynical squire (representing me) asking the painter (representing Ingmar Bergman) why he paints death and disease on the wall instead of nicer things. Here’s his answer. You tell me whether or not this is satisfying:

1: Why all this daubing?
2: To remind people of death.
1: That won’t make them any happier.
2: Why make them happy? Why not scare them?
1: Then they won’t look at your picture.
2: Yes, they will. A skull is more interesting than a naked woman.
1: If you scare them…
2: They’ll think.
1: …then they think.
2. And are still more scared.
1: And fall into the arms of the priests.
2: That’s not my business.
1: You’re only painting your picture.
2: I paint life as it is. Then folk can do as they like.
1: That makes people angry.
2: Then I paint something funny. A man must live. At least till the plague takes him.
1: The plague. Ugh!

That’s fine as dialogue, but I want my artist to be coming from somewhere higher than that.

The painting that inspired Bergman was relevant to him but also quaint. But this movie is not quaint to me, so it needs more than a quaint justification.

And perhaps that’s my problem – I was reluctant to see it as quaint. Even though in nearly every respect other than subject matter it makes clear that it is something small, gentle and homey. Maybe the problem is simply that I am personally too afraid of death to savor this movie, which was never meant to be felt to the bone; just held in the hands and tasted like a piece of bread.

This was a lovely poem on the subject, rich and humane and satisfying to look at. But it’s a downer, and, being very much with it and feeling it insisting that I look annihilation in the eye, I kept having to ask why.

I’m writing this very raw as I think it. A couple of hours interval after the above I have this to say: I would have felt it was more wholesome if it hadn’t reached the ending. The conception of the knight, forever questing and resisting, and his squire, doing his cynical best to remain engaged with earthier things, was rich and gave me food for thought because it was about ways of living; ways of contending with the knowledge of death. If the film had ended while they were still alive, the moral to take away would have been about life. But the end of a film is the answer to a film. A story that begins is already teasing us with the question of how it will end; a closed narrative is at least as much about where it is going as it is about what happens on the way. A story about a man who wants not to die, but in the end dies, is not a story about living. Whereas the stories of our actual lives are indeed stories about living.

You can say: “The movie is exactly like life, in that the point is not where it’s going, because that’s a foregone conclusion; the point is what happens on the way there,” but if you say that, I disagree. Because what happens on the way there? Some scenes and vignettes relating obliquely to the question of the meaning of life and the inevitability of death. The drive of the film, the mechanism that makes it go, is simply a drive toward death, with the brakes on to no avail, as scenery goes by. I need to see life as more than that.

The central event of the plot, such as it is, doesn’t make philosophical sense. The knight saves the young family by distracting Death at the moment that they flee. This, we are led to understand, is the “one meaningful act” he hoped to make. But what can this act possibly represent? Doing good for others, obviously, but if that’s all we were to understand, shouldn’t the knight have, say, saved the witch’s life instead of just walked away and let her burn? Done some social good in the face of the crazed medieval culture of cruelty? Seemingly, the act of knocking over the chess pieces to buy the happy family some time to sneak away from death is supposed to represent something more specific than mere “good,” but in fact it can’t really represent anything. One’s chess game with Death is a completely personal affair, and Death’s attention is everywhere at once. Misdirecting Death so that someone else can sneak away simply makes no sense. If the Death of this film is the Black Death, the plague, there’s no saving another by getting the disease yourself. So what has the knight actually done, with his one meaningful act? It seems like a phony moment of drama, one that requires us to reduce the visual metaphor to a literal fantasy.

Which, incidentally, is how I very much wanted to watch this movie when it was shown in high school. A guy playing chess against Death is cool, right? But I ended up frustrated by the movie because it absolutely refuses to be watched as a ghost story.

Really, what it needs is to be seen as both at once. We must be thinking of “man vs. death” and also of a knight from a fairy tale up against a spook in a cape. It is allegory, but not pure enough allegory to actually watch as allegory. And it certainly can’t be watched as a story. It wants interpretation on levels that shift constantly. I find that very difficult. Perhaps a movie like this needs to be watched even more than the three times I gave it before one gets good at playing along with it. Well, that’s a lot to ask.

Commentary by Peter Cowie was smart and pleasant enough for what it was.

Soundtrack by Erik Nordgren – no, never released or rerecorded – is, like the film, rather theatrical in approach. Mostly made up of very short cues for transitions. The only longer pieces were heavily sound-effected up, so here’s the 24-second Main Title. Dies Irae!

directed by Nicolas Roeg
screenplay by Edward Bond
after the novel by James Vance Marshall (pseud. for Donald G. Payne) (1959, originally published as The Children)

Criterion Collection #10.

A montage set to blissful music that cuts directly from a naked teenage girl to the fat bubbling up through the skin of a roasting lizard would be strong stuff even if it didn’t really mean it. But this movie really means it. This movie is strong stuff.

Yes, this movie is a noble-savage, return-to-Eden, industrial-civilization-makes-us-crazy type of movie. If you are of the mind that nobody selling anything of the sort should be given credence, you might not have patience for it. I am very much cynical about fantasies of reversion, and feel an instinctive defensiveness on behalf of industrial civilization when its values are snidely impugned. It’s easy to knock industrial civilization when you’re just sitting around with a beer – i.e. when you don’t really mean it – and that irritates me. But like I said, this movie really means it. It is not a hippie fantasy, nor does it actually espouse any kind of revolutionary shift in human behavior – it knows that’s impossible. It simply expresses a deep nostalgia for, and awareness of – or nostalgia for awareness of – man’s actual place in the violent, indifferent order of the cosmos. I can get behind that. And the movie put me behind it.

Several times I thought of the Camus I’ve read (The Stranger and The Plague) – the method was to make absurd anything that wasn’t “the truth,” simply by reminding us of the truth. Here, “the truth” was a sort of “living desert” nature documentary footage, which is heightened yet understated. Just like nature itself. It includes some unnerving stuff – like, yes, an incredible swarm of maggots devouring a carcass – and then other stuff that is simply handled so well that it becomes unnerving. Everything on the screen is either decaying, devouring, or defending itself.

Actually, to get back to the comment about nostalgia, I see the movie as being built on the tug of opposed nostalgias, or at least constructed so that you are able to sympathize with either pull, according to your personal inclination. The girl (who is the real protagonist of the movie) is never so enamored of the state of nature that she considers giving up civilization, but once she gets home, she’s no longer satisfied there either. The Aborigine boy who represents the state of nature is ruined by his desire, but inability, to connect with this girl, who I take to represent, in relation to him, the allure of a world ordered by man. The tragedy in the movie is not that modern man isn’t primitive anymore; it’s that the two ways of being cannot understand each other or strike any lasting compromise. In Roger Ebert’s essay, included in the box, he says that he sees the film as being about the failure of communication, which I suppose I agree with, but principally in terms of honest communication between the modern and the primitive within the soul of mankind. The girl comes off as reasonably sensitive and reasonably intelligent, but ultimately too reliant on standard proprieties to comprehend “the truth”; this is modern man. My comment about wanting to warn the people in A Night to Remember that they were being much too British, in light of nature’s indifference to their deaths, was here more or less the point of the movie.

That this essentially philosophical material works at all is a testament to craftsmanship; all the moreso that it works rather well. I have very great respect for Nicolas Roeg for pulling this off. Having this movie described to you would be absolutely and completely unlike watching it. That is a sign that poetry and craft are crucial to a work. It’s not always necessarily a compliment. In this case it’s a compliment.

The only Nicolas Roeg movie I’d seen prior to this was The Witches. I’m now very interested, if a bit nervous, to see his other movies.

The photography is lovely.

Many critics, I see, have talked about the mysterious aura about the film, but none of them have addressed something so I want to come out and say it. I think the specific casting of Jenny Agutter has a lot to do with the distinctive atmosphere. Her prettiness is of a particular type that is somehow reminiscent of the girls one is interested in at a distance in middle school. She doesn’t look at all glamorous, nor does she look ordinary; she is blankly, tentatively pretty. Also, the actress herself has clearly and remarkably been caught on film at exactly the moment of life being portrayed: newly aware of the potential to be a grown-up but not sure what to think of it. I see that some people have criticized the movie for leering at her, but I think that’s an important part of what’s at work. Lots of guys on the internet are not at all shy about expressing their lust for young Jenny Agutter, but they all seem to think it’s something they’re sneaking in under the table, and that maybe Nicolas Roeg was too. None of them seem to recognize that the tension of deciding whether you ought to think of her as a hot girl or not is an important (and presumably intentional) part of the movie. For me, a good part of the success of the film had to do with its ability, through her, to bring back memories of a certain time of life, a time at which the question of what it meant to be a person was vitally open. This may only be work for men. Though I would think that women could recognize themselves in her tentative self-possession, and be brought back to the same set of memories. Any thoughts, women who’ve seen Walkabout?

So here’s the key track from John Barry’s score, the central montage described above, which happens to be the only piece of music without dialogue over it in the film. The end credits track is essentially the same material, anyway. This track (called “Back to Nature” on the soundtrack LP) does have sound effects, I’m afraid, and to give you the album version would be to break my pattern of using rips directly from the film, so you have to live with the sounds of kangaroos being clubbed to death and lizards being impaled. I think the foley work in this film was fantastic and evocative, so it’s fitting that you should get a little of it here.

Without the movie, this piece of music falls easily into a certain category of 70s pseudo-classical silky Hollywood lovey-dovey junk, and doesn’t seem to have a lot going for it. But once the images have been seen, the music seems to soak up their conceptual essence; I’ve come to really like it. It’s like tunes I hear in dreams but then can’t successfully recreate, because the point wasn’t the music itself, it was the strangeness that infused it. The dreamy, spacey feel of the music in a lot of “normal” 70s movies – music that is, to me, often unintentionally unnerving and thus a little icky – here finds its philosophical match. This time, for once, the sounds of otherworldly rapture aren’t supposed to be comfortable or easy to take; their sleazy frictionless quality becomes part of the effect rather than just tacky period ambiance.

The whole film, I suppose, is similarly an honest, intellectually whole incarnation of 70s flakiness. I felt myself drawn inside a feeling that was familiar but usually easy to dismiss as having been an intellectual/aesthetic fad. Perhaps this movie was the source and I have only known the imitators; perhaps every muddled, superficial fashion of a period stems from a charismatic source that will age better than its offspring. Perhaps something becomes “dated” in inverse proportion to how intellectually whole it is. The culture of every age has its characteristic points of philosophical laziness; the objects that age poorly are those that obliviously embrace that laziness, which becomes glaring and obvious when the philosophical wind changes. But thoughtful work will survive no matter how of its time it seems. The great novels of the 19th century are still going strong despite being so 19th-century, whereas the advertisements, the jokes, the pulp of the 19th century all seem irredeemably quaint.

This movie was very 70s but it was not quaint.

I think I respond well to things that seem have had their own thoughts, but not to things that seem to simply be relaying received thoughts. Even if they’re the same thoughts.

The essentially sympathetic thing in art is the having of ideas, not ideas themselves.

Things that I feel obligated to mention to maintain consistency with other entries:
1. The commentary (Nicolas Roeg and Jenny Agutter, separately) is well worth hearing even if it’s not consistently interesting, for exposure to the two personalities, both of which are very much part of the film itself.
2. A soundtrack was released on LP but never yet reissued on CD.

Having drawn a connection to A Night to Remember, I’m inspired to note the recurring themes in the Criterion Collection thus far. A little look back at the first ten selections.

Grand Illusion, A Night to Remember, and Walkabout are all about disillusionment with civilization’s received wisdom; about the ways that we make an ASS out of U and MANKIND. They all practice, as I said, some form of Camus-style absurdism.

Amarcord and The 400 Blows are both about childhood, psychological coming-of-age, and the memory thereof. If you want to psychoanalyze, Beauty and the Beast is sort of a failed version of the same, complete with a spitefully phony “maturation” at the end, to complete the impression that the whole thing took place in the imagination of a spoiled child. At any rate, it’s sort of an insincere exhibit B in the “memories of childhood” category.

Seven Samurai, The Killer, and Hard Boiled were all about morality, about codes, compromises, and the ethical ambitions and struggles of individuals in relation to groups. But these issues were deeply deeply stylized. I personally feel pretty cynical about the simple way that the phenomenon of “morality” is often depicted – up to and including the noir attitude that a less-than-black-and-white “morality” is something really grim and mature. The fact that all the movies here selling that line were actually about, you know, exciting fights and stuff, feeds my cynicism. They were also all Asian, so, as I said a few entries ago, who knows.

If you want to stand even further back, all three of the thematic groupings above could be characterized as being about a loss of innocence/loss of faith. In pretty much all of the movies thus far, I could identify a loss of faith at play.* And that’s the ur-story of the 20th century, right? You know, I hate it when cultural critics talk this way, but I’ve worked myself up to it and I can see what they’re saying. Or, in this case, what I’m saying.

Of course, there is one odd man out here that I’ve been avoiding. The Lady Vanishes is really and truly about a Lady Vanishing. Not coincidentally, it is probably the only one of these movies I would have liked as a kid.

I.E. PRIOR TO MY LOSS OF FAITH.

No, just kidding.

Er, I guess.

* In Beauty and the Beast, it takes place in kitschy retrograde.

That was supposed to be the end of this entry except it occurs to me now, later, that The Lady Vanishes actually fits rather well into the “don’t be so sure, civilized man!” category, considering its rather explicit message that foolish British complacency is oblivious to nasty realities. Its characters, traveling through political danger zones in the seeming safety of their luxurious train, need to be seriously shaken before they see that they are not immune to the outer world, and in the end find themselves holed up in the compromised train, fighting for their lives. It has lots in common with A Night to Remember. I missed that when I did the round-up above, I guess, because I would have understood it as a kid, free of “meanings.”

directed by John Woo
story by John Woo
screenplay by Barry Wong

Criterion Collection #9: Hard-Boiled. Or Hard Boiled without the hyphen. Depends who you ask.

辣 = laat = hot/cruel
手 = sau = hand
[辣手 = ruthless]
神 = san = god
探 = taam = detective

Laat sau san taam = “Ruthless Supercop” – though you’ll frequently see this given as “Hot-Handed God of Cops” which is really silly. According to wikipedia, the title is intentionally identical to the first part of the Chinese title of Dirty Harry, 辣手神探夺命枪, which they give as the asyntactic “Hot-Handed God of Cops Killer Gun.” Better would be “Ruthless Supercop’s Deadly Gun,” I guess. Or, if you prefer, “Dirty Harry.”

Immediately it is clear that this film is superior to The Killer. That’s not the general opinion but it’s mine. I can enjoy this movie much more easily than The Killer because it never lets up enough to have to get anything right. It doesn’t have to know anything about anything – that’s the downfall of movies like this. Your challenge, Mr. Woo, is to fill your allotted 90 minutes with only things you care about. Those include: jumping back in slow motion with a gun in each hand. Those do not include: people. In The Killer, not nearly enough screen time was spastic. Here we come closer.

Both of these movies remind me of the movies I would make with the family video camera when I was about 13: absolutely every shot is an obligation to be awesome. Woo never fails to reveal the epic intensity of, say, walking down a hallway. The moviemaking reminds me of my imagination at an even younger age, when I was always straining to find ways that mundane moments could seem loaded and thrilling – and then lazily settling for whatever presented itself. I would become fixated on some silly little kinetic event I could rig up – like a paper cup falling off a table – and then would imagine it invested with hugely suspenseful significance. When this cup falls off the table, a man is going to die, and he’s watching as it rolls closer and closer… oh no! oh no! there it goes NOOOO! IN SLOW MOTION!!!! NOOOOO!!!!

Or even just turning the pages of a book, if I slowed it down enough and gave it imaginary foreboding in my mind, could start to seem like something out of some kind of intense, Hitchcockian movie. Oh my god when he gets to the next page a guy’s going to die NOOOOO!

Well, that very scene happens in Hard Boiled. And it’s everything a fourth-grader would want it to be.

But this is not actually good enough. It might sound like I’m saying John Woo has stayed true to a childlike exuberance. I’m not saying that. I’m saying it seems like a fourth-grader made this movie. I don’t see any reason why John Woo couldn’t maintain those enthusiasms yet have the discrimination of an adult, the self-discipline to admit that, actually, a paper cup falling off a table just isn’t really cool.

Okay, enough of this sort of talk. It sounds like I don’t get it. But no, I really do. I get it. The movie is trash cinema and its admirers love it that way. It’s a “flick.” It’s fun because it’s all secondhand – or, really, threehundredthhand – and it’s been made by and for people who are just there for junk food served hot; your way, right away. These action scenes weren’t made to reflect the human condition; they were made to top other action scenes from other movies. Like when every opera had to have a revenge aria and a love aria and a ballet because that was just what was expected; the audience has flopped itself down at the great cultural diner and ordered “the usual.” The movie isn’t trying to impress us with artistry or ingredients; it just wants us to say “holy moley look how many fries they piled on there this time! Goddamn I love fries.” The quality of the food is beside the point – I mean, I guess it’s fine here, but we don’t really notice anymore. We just like this place for the atmosphere, and because everybody knows our name.

So all I can say is: this Chinese diner is crazy. They put the pickle IN the soup, and the burger came with TEN patties.

Or, slightly to the side of that silly metaphor: Watching these movies has been like heeding the word-of-mouth hype about a fast-food burger place, off the beaten path, that you absolutely have to try. You finally go and… yeah, maybe that’s better than other fast-food burgers. Or… maybe it isn’t. Hard to tell because it’s just a fast-food burger. Now you have to run back through your memory to remember who those people were gave you this recommendation. It was… oh yeah, The Criterion Collection. Well, everybody’s entitled. But will The Criterion Collection take my recommendations of, say, old Commodore 64 games? Probably not.

I would be remiss, though, if I did not concede that there are a really tremendous number of fries on there. You will not want for fries. The body count in this movie is incredible. Stuff blows up and people get shot with heartfelt fourth-grade inventiveness that never ever wavers. The entire second half of the movie, in a sense, is a single Die Hard-like sequence of escalating blow-up-itude. It does not let itself down. And a movie really living up to its own standards, whatever they are, can in itself be a satisfying thing.

Well, wow, now I’ve listened to the commentary track and I’m not sure I get it after all. I mean, I’m still sure, but I had to have a crisis of conscience first. These guys do not agree with what I said above. Or, wait, do they?

No question it’s an interesting listen. We have auteur John Woo himself, producer Terence Chang, critic Dave Kehr (now of the New York Times), and last but not least, Roger Avary, the guy who co-wrote Pulp Fiction and directed The Rules of Attraction and Killing Zoe – here, recorded in 1993, representing the Quentin Tarantino video store clerk contingent at the height of its relevance.

The commentary track is sort of like Being There. John Woo sounds very much like a guy who might make this movie, saying stuff like “I had Tequila shoot this tiny target from across the room so that at the end, when he shoots the bad guy through the eye, it’s credible,” and Chang corroborates the impression that the shoot mostly consisted of discussions about how much explosive to use and where to put it. Surrounding them, though, you have on the one hand Dave Kehr comparing Woo to Orson Welles and talking about the thematic depth and subtlety of his work, and in the other corner you have the geeknik, Roger Avary, excitedly noting how exhilaratingly confusing and secondhand the movie is, and declaring that such is the wave of the future.

I just invented “geeknik.”

Anyway, Dave Kehr, who seems perfectly intelligent, gave me pause. His conviction that these movies were deeply accomplished and genuinely significant – Criterion Collection-worthy, even – made me stop and reconsider my attitude. Was I being a boor and missing the boat? Was there really some kind of humanism in this? I just couldn’t see my way to it. I mean, just look! Look at the movie you’re talking about! Eventually Kehr says something that put my mind at ease: he talks about the eye-opening thrill, for American audiences, of seeing such well-worn themes and archetypes being used sincerely and “not as kitsch” – being embraced and utilized without any kind of ironic remove. Well, no question these movies are very, very sincere. But that’s exactly what real kitsch is. Manufactured camp is, no question, a depressing cultural phenomenon; let us please not conflate it with genuine camp, which is sincere and clueless. Kehr’s point seemed to be that the ridiculous sentimentality of these movies is actually redeemed and given new life because it is unafraid and heartfelt. But that’s just the slippery sincerity slope talking – you can have that same experience if you stare too long at a Hummel. There’s a sand trap there in your heart; beware! In general, though, I believe that Kehr’s real mistake was confusing impact with quality, stimulation with value. As many contemporary museum artists do. Maybe some people are comfortable with equating those things, but I stand firmly against that thinking.

Meanwhile, Roger Avary makes the whole Tarantino attitude seem shallow and confused (and also implicitly endorses my comments about The Killer) when he says that he enjoys these Hong Kong films because they are so blatantly derivative of Western cinema cliches… and that he is drawn to the blatantly derivative because his generation was born into a culture surrounded by prior culture… and that he and his ilk are therefore inclined to create cinema defined by its references and relations to existing cinema. But this is a superficial parallel drawn between two cultures with very different problems. America is coughing its way through soul-stifling inundation with its own accumulated cultural pile-up – anxiety of influence on a massive scale. Hong Kong, on the other hand, is using this stuff in a totally different socio-psychological way: it wants to be famous and lucky, like the West, and thereby save itself. The movies in question are aspirationally derivative, because the East is naively trying to remake itself in the West’s image, but better. Quentin and Roger’s movies, on the other hand, are willfully derivative, because of America’s cultural suffocation, where exponential garden-variety provincial cultural inbreeding has given way to inbreeding chic. In 90s California, fetishistic navel-gazing is IN. 1991 Hong Kong, I feel certain, knows no such phenomenon.

I guess I will concede the basic point being made by these admirers of the movie, which is that when you watch it, you are impressed by its spirit and energy. But that can mean so many things. I was impressed with it as one is impressed with a child who wears a Power Rangers costume, with mask, out to dinner. “How peculiar it must be to be you!” you think. “If you weren’t like this, I would never get to see this crazy thing I’m seeing.” Is that really enough? That’s the appeal of “outsider art,” but this isn’t outsider art – this is a product of mass culture for a mass audience. But mass culture can get pretty crazy. I would show this movie at a party.

And that reminds me of one last comment I wanted to make. These two movies were the sort of thing that other kids somehow saw. Kids who were less attentively parented than I. But occasionally those things crept in anyway, at sleepovers and other unchaperoned parties. To me these movies were evocative of middle school sleepovers, of my fleeting encounters with the world of things that people who thought I was lame thought were cool. Things that made me feel morally itchy. I have a friend who told me that when she was younger, her parents were not opposed to her seeing sex or violence per se, but that they attempted to protect her from movies with “a seedy worldview.” Yes.

At heart, these movies do not actually have a truly seedy worldview, but they very much want to, which makes them perfect fare for kids who are looking to get a sense of worldliness from something forbidden. Somewhere online I found a comment, surely (hopefully) from a seventh-grader, to the effect that Hard Boiled is way more hardcore and awesome than other action movies because there is so much spurting blood and so many innocent bystanders get killed. To the movie’s way of thinking – and Dave Kehr’s, I guess – that’s actually what makes it so sad. But the movie is in profound agreement with the kids at the sleepover party that it is also hardcore, and so it is well suited to them.

These days, it seems like whenever I see an anonymous bad guy get riddled with bullets and flop over, some kind of prudish widower in my soul perversely insists that I think about his life up to that point, his relatives, his individual personality, the fact that he probably didn’t expect that would be the last day of his life, etc. etc. (This is the same smug parade-raining jerk who makes me look everywhere but at the trick when watching magicians. Dammit.) So I sort of imagined that my younger self would have been horrified and upset by these movies. But Star Wars is full of guys getting casually killed and flopping over, and I cheerfully watched those movies over and over as a kid. So this might not have bothered me as much as I imagine, in retrospect, that it would have. In any case, I was never at this particular sleepover. By 1993 I guess I was too old.

The Criterion disc (long out of print, but I obtained!) also contains previews for all of John Woo’s other Hong Kong films, going back to 1973. Watching the evolution of this particular brand of junk over two decades is fascinating and amusing, and certainly provides plenty of grist for the conversation about the developmental status of Asian cultural identity. And some funny subtitle translations.

Music for Hard Boiled is by jazz composer Michael Gibbs and is wonderfully typical of a genre action movie from the late eighties/early nineties. I can’t help but smile at stuff like this. I’m giving you the end titles, which is a reuse of music from earlier in the movie – a track referred to on the soundtrack album as “Red Car Boogie,” because it accompanies the first appearance of Tony Leung as he drives a red car, indicating that he is a hotshot. As for the “boogie” part – well, you can hear for yourself! Boogie on, 1992!

written and directed by John Woo

Yes, this is Criterion Collection #8.

Okay, I’m going to get this right.

Obviously, the English title is The Killer. But that’s not literal. This is the Chinese title as it appears in the film (see above):

喋血雙雄

This film was made and set in Hong Kong, so the language is Cantonese (rather than Mandarin) and the characters are “traditional” (rather than “simplified”). Wikipedia tells us that the “pinyin” romanization of the title is “Dié xuè shuāng xióng” but that’s inappropriate for Hong Kong Cantonese, which apparently calls for the “jyutping” system: “Dip hyut soeng hung.” (Actually, the full jyutping rendering includes numbers indicating the pitched “tone” of each word: “dip6 hyut3 soeng1 hung4.”)

喋 = “dip” = flow/chatter
血 = “hyut” = blood
(喋血 = bloodshed/bloodbath)
雙 = “soeng” = pair
雄 = “hung” = male/hero

The internet tells us that this adds up to “Bloodshed of Two Heroes,” though there are also votes for “Two Men Covered in Spattering Blood” and “A Pair of Blood Spattering Heroes.”

I myself would venture something like “The Bloodbath Duo,”* which is lame but at least sounds vaguely like the English title of a movie. Unlike “Two Men Covered in Spattering Blood.” Though if it wasn’t the result of clumsy translation, that would actually be a fantastic and charismatic title; similarly, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind sounds like a confused Chinese import if you have reason to hear it that way.

Now thoughts:

You can say that these slow-mo gun battles are joyful choreography rather than real, vicious gore, and in a sense that’s very true. This is a movie made by and for those who have fetishized movie violence to the point that it has lost most of its intrinsic, mimetic meaning. But I can’t wrap my enthusiasm around that. Numbing fetishization does not free us from meanings, it just diminishes our ability to master them. As non-schlock artists know, stylization is not the same as dehumanization. Dehumanization, in fact, is the cheapest, most insensitive form of stylization.

We are aware, watching this movie, of both its complete indebtedness to, and non-participation in, American culture. It is neither a well-formed American action movie, nor is it a direct imitation of one. Its relation to American film seems to be one of fascination at a distance; the considerable cultural distance at which Hong Kong lies. Individualism, a keystone concept in all American movies, is here emulated, but seems to have been understood only as an aesthetic, a fantasy, rather than as a genuinely felt philosophy or a personal reality. The movie is all about the epic, soulful charisma of the eponymous Killer, but it’s really only about the idea of epic, soulful charisma; the character has no true personal identity at all.

I was aware of the missing human element as a gap – not just in the character but also at the level of showmanship. Where is the “I,” in this movie, either making it or in it? At a subconscious level, I felt this gap as a sense of repression. Here’s where my thoughts begin to take on a naive and potentially racist quality; brace yourselves. The void at the heart of this movie reminded me of my recent experience with Seven Samurai, and suggested a line of thought about East Asian cultures generally; take it or leave it. In these movies, cultures that have not truly embraced the idea of the individual are at play with that idea, because they’ve been told it’s the stuff dreams are made of. But either their dreams are repressed to a greater degree than we know, or these aren’t their actual dreams at all.

The dialogues about the self, in The Killer, are like imitative poems written by enthusiastic aliens. “He looks determined without being ruthless. There’s something heroic about him. He doesn’t look like a killer. He comes across so calm… acts like he has a dream… eyes full of passion,” murmurs the cop to the sketch artist, apparently entranced by the apparently mysterious apparent personality of The Killer, while the synths dig deep into that minor tonic chord looking for love. Is that really the flavor of life, for anyone? It only relates to life via elements misunderstood from other movies.

It’s like Jack Skellington making Christmas. The movie is passionately enamored of the things that it doesn’t comprehend, because they are so fantastically unlikely. What’s this? A man with a dream? Eyes full of passion? How marvelous!

I’ll say it: I find East Asian mindsets very hard to crack and I think it’s because they are genuinely different in how they perceive the self. I still recall my amazement upon seeing Japanese WWII propaganda cartoons wherein the Japanese enthusiastically portrayed THEMSELVES as a ravening horde of identical creatures, led by an individual who served only as a representation of the national spirit. That psychological culture has obviously weakened but it seems to live on in many ways; it has not been truly supplanted by the Western idea of the individual.

In the present movie, viewers are not supposed to identify with The Killer, or his associate, or the cop – they are only supposed to recognize them from other movies. It seems not to be appropriate to identify with characters. Perhaps this is felt as a kind of intense propriety – the inner sensations of an individual are seen as bodily functions that ought not leak out. In theory, this would seem to be contradicted by movies where individuals fight and love and cry, but watching the movie you sense that there is no contradiction at all. These are not individuals, they are MOVIE CHARACTERS, large and fascinating and not like us.

To me, East Asian celebrities seem arbitrary somehow, like they don’t really have their heart in it. Japanese television etc. seems bewilderingly wacky to us because its priorities are so different. I suspect it has gotten so absurd because is not the content of culture but the fact of culture that is important to that audience. The real purpose of such culture is to disseminate the comforting, proud knowledge that one is a member of a society that is full of celebrities and noise and products and bullshit. The people on Japanese TV don’t seem like real people because obviously they’re not and, says Japan, why should they be? The whole notion of “real people” is beside the point – it’s beside any point. It goes without saying that real people are an embarrassing subject – the one truly, painfully shameful subject – and thankfully have no direct role in culture.

We see in Japan (yes yes, I know the movie is from Hong Kong; like I said, this is all irresponsible and racist) a culture of people learning how to be individuals from movies instead of from humans. They are the offspring of the West’s dreams, which the West can hardly recognize. There should be a version of the velveteen rabbit scenario where a kid wishes for his toy to be alive but when it comes to life it has a personality and mind totally and disturbingly alien, the way a toy’s really would be. Is there a story like that?

When I was in college, Isaac Stern came to speak and take questions at some event or other, and was audience-asked why there are now so many classical musicians of East Asian descent. He answered by saying that a century ago there were many Jewish classical musicians – because, he thought, the culture of classical music presented itself to Jews as a way “out of the ghetto” – and that he thought something similar was in effect for East Asians and Asian-Americans today; that classical music offered them a way out of the “cultural ghetto” of their ossified thousand-year-old traditional cultures. This answer immediately created a stir in the audience and provoked several indignant responses. I’m told that later in his visit, Isaac Stern was unambiguously unpleasant to several Asian musicians, so perhaps there was more in the air at that moment than I knew. But I wasn’t sure then how offensive that answer was, and I seem to be disseminating a variant of it now. Phenomena like the undeniable affinity of contemporary Asian cultures for classical music would seem to justify some kind of generalizations of this sort – the question is getting the generalizations right, and I doubt that I have since I’m pretty much just making it all up. But I believe there is, at least, some grain of truth in this: that Asian cultures have a distinctly different impression of the self from ours, descended from their historically different impression of the self, and perpetuate it subtly, through small behavioral cues that are not quickly subsumed by general assimilation, internationally or as immigrants; which accordingly creates a slightly different relationship to work, to the external world as a whole, and at least partially accounts for large cultural phenomena like the absurdity of Japanese TV and Hong Kong action movies, or the widespread East Asian enthusiasm for classical music.

Maybe even that’s offensive too but at this point I’m not sure why it would be. Offended parties, by all means please show up in the comments and set me straight.

Anyway, for all that I’m saying they don’t know from “the self” over there in East Asia, I’m surely there is in fact plenty of contemporary Chinese (and Japanese, and Korean, etc.) literature and film that is articulate and sincere and astute about it, and might open a window for me, but I haven’t gotten there yet. A glance down the list suggests that I might not get there through Criterion, either. Right now I’m just watching this silly shoot-em-up movie.

Film-buff multiculturalists are generally either nerds (who feel reassured and comforted by fetishistic, enthusiastic-alien abstract manipulation of social reality) or scholars (who are occupationally prone toward evaluating things in the abstract rather than feeling them – and thus tend toward the same lack of direct engagement) and so it is not a surprise to me that twisted-mirror fetish-variants of Hollywood fare are the Asian cinema most enthusiastically imported to the US. I don’t really have any sense of what “high,” “literary” “intellectual” culture from the East looks like.

Also, in this movie, when he takes the girl to the hospital, the sign says “Scared Heart Hospital.” Those crazy Chinese!

So, I didn’t really talk about this movie at all. Probably the most offensive thing about all the presumption above, in fact, is that it takes The Killer as its starting point. But stay tuned because the next selection is another John Woo bullet-fest starring Chow Yun-Fat and I stay much more on topic in that entry.

This Criterion disc is long out of print and rare, and though I did manage to find a rip of the movie itself, I couldn’t get my hands on the disc as a whole, so I didn’t get to experience the commentary or anything else. Hence no image of the disc menu above.

Music here is by Lowell Lo, a Hong Kong composer/actor who apparently owns a synthesizer almost as good as mine. No official soundtrack release. Here’s the main title; cue it up, release the doves, and look like you have a dream.

Apologies, again, that I dared think these things. I deleted the ugliest stuff. Open minds and open hearts, people! Not scared hearts! Let’s talk.

* I’ve now (later) found several sites that suggest “Bloodshed Brothers,” which is pretty good.

directed by Roy Ward Baker
screenplay by Eric Ambler
based on the book by Walter Lord (1955)

Criterion Collection #7.

Not a film of any grand distinction, but gripping and effective all the same. The real life events are rich and upsetting, and all the film has to do is stay out of the way, which it does. The direction and acting are “restrained” and straightforward in the British style, but the resulting blandness here happens to be an asset – unintentionally, I suspect. The theme is man vs. death; we watch as the black water rises slowly, knowing that all these people are doomed, yet they irrepressibly go on being silly humans, chattering about propriety and nobility and inconvenience and on and on. So long as they can cling to their little ideas, they do. And so does the movie itself, seeming like a nice dull British movie about nice dull British people – which made the sense of impending horror that much more accessible to me. The audience instinct to shout “don’t go in there!” here manifests itself as “Don’t be the type of mild-mannered people who are in mild-mannered movies like this! You’re entirely unprepared for the elemental forces that are about to kill you!” That happens also to be the essence of our fascination with the story of the Titanic, I think, so this movie works out to be quite involving.

Part of me subconsciously was holding out hope that the passengers would be saved. When I caught myself feeling it, I was amused and surprised at myself, but there was no denying the feeling. I guess part of that is human nature, faced with any tragic story, whether or not it’s historically true. But I think here it particularly had to do with the blandness of the filmmaking. Since the movie never seemed to have an emotional agenda for me, it always seemed possible that the story and I might get to sneak away intact. James Cameron’s Titanic, by contrast, is so heavy on its agenda of epic-ness – the soundtrack always reminding us that “you are watching a grand tragedy!” – that it is impossible to hold out hope that anything other than a grand tragedy will happen. That movie was praised (by Roger Ebert, at least) for opening with a quick rundown of the historical course of events, to map out the story structure. But there is a huge difference between knowing externally to the film that the ship will sink, and knowing it within the film itself. Cameron (and Ebert, and everyone else) might have thought that starting a movie about the Titanic by telling us that it sank was just telling us what we already know, but it’s different to be told that your movie self knows it, too.

When we watch a movie we are always role-playing; the phrase “suspension of disbelief” hardly covers it. We are playing a game of make-believe at the movie’s request, constructing a make-believe self who knows only what the movie tells us to know. Of course, we always know more than that, but that’s exactly why we need the puppet self – so that we can negotiate between “we don’t know who the killer is, yet,” and “it’s so totally obvious who the killer is” and hold on to them simultaneously. Most movies are a series of implicit cues to the audience that map out what the “ideal audience member” is thinking. To interpret and follow these cues requires a certain amount of “theory of mind,” but there’s nothing sophisticated about it – generally even dumb people are very good at it. In fact, for many people, it seems like the false mind created on cue is actually nimbler than the real mind behind it. People who laugh heartily at clearly-cued but objectively unfunny jokes are demonstrating not their primitive sense of humor but rather their fine attunement to expectations. Their actual minds hardly enter into it, because they’re not called for. To take an example from the recent news – the people at political rallies who shout out scary stuff with fervor are not, I don’t think, actually expressing their true selves; they are just playing the part that the rally implicitly cues them to play. That may seem inherently ignorant but it’s not – it’s just like going to the movies, and it’s something we all do. But during a movie, all those fake minds are confined to chairs in the dark – bodies are shut down, as in sleep, to prevent us from flailing when we move in a dream – whereas during a political rally, they’re loose in the world and still capable of doing things. And those puppet minds are not to be trusted. That’s what’s scary.

Perhaps the defining distinction of the “art film” is that it attempts to address itself to the real mind and not the puppet. No cues, no agenda, nobody that you’re “supposed to be.” Would-be high-minded people are, after all, the only ones who complain about Hollywood movies being “manipulative.” As I said above, I certainly see the danger of the false self, and can sympathize with the desire to get away from cheap “manipulation.” But we must accept that role-playing is inevitable, with any work of art. An artist has to realize that his audience exists in the future, very possibly after his own death, and that they know things he doesn’t know. To engage with him they may well have to un-know things, and the only way to un-know is to begin afresh with a puppet self, a new mind. The movie that refuses to help its audience build a new mind may think it is abstaining from cheapness and condescension but it is generally just being stubborn and leaving the audience out in the cold. The strength of mind to watch as more than just the puppet is the individual’s responsibility, not the movie’s. From this point of view, refusing to give your audience cues is actually more condescending than manipulating the hell out of them, because it is based on the assumption that they need to be protected from manipulation, that they are too weak in the face of your art. Hollywood movies now, I think, lay on the manipulation as thick as possible because they trust that the audience has built up a substantial immunity to it. I guess in the earlier days of cinema, the audience probably was weaker, in that respect, because they weren’t as practiced. So perhaps there was in fact more of a need for the reserve and lyricism of Jean Renoir, or whoever, in order to leave the audience’s mind whole and able to engage. And perhaps our cultural sea legs are the reason why those sorts of movies aren’t really made anymore. We can all think perfectly straight after four drinks, so no matter how sophisticated a conversation you want to have, there’s no need to skimp on the booze.

That’s a passing thought and I don’t know if I buy it.

Anyway, that was all a digression. My original point was that A Night to Remember is far more emotionally effective than Titanic in regard to the central tragedy because it never tells the puppet about what is going to happen; it leaves that up to your real mind, which allows for a poignant dissonance. In Titanic, even the puppet knows all; the only thing reserved for actual emotional tension is the fate of the fictional romance-novel couple who have been Colorformed on to the historical backdrop.

Hm. Not sure that “puppet mind” stuff will make any sense to anyone but I move on.

The commentary, by two Titanic experts/obsessives (Don Lynch and Ken Marschall, who would go on to advise on Titanic) goes like this: “See those chairs? Those are exactly like the chairs on the Titanic, they really did a fabulous job with that. And see that railing?” etc. Other bonus materials make clear that producer William MacQuitty lavished a remarkable amount of attention on that sort of thing, for the time, so I’m sure he’d be gratified by their remarks. Walter Lord, the author of the original book, is seen too, and comes off as exactly the sort of person who might think that “A Night to Remember” would be an exciting title. I know I read the book in 8th grade but I can’t recall a thing about it; the title and the man behind it give me a hint as to why not. But I think I saw this movie then, too, and didn’t remember it either. I am not as stymied by superficial dullness as I was in 8th grade, I am proud to say.

Music, by William Alwyn, is perfectly decent and appropriate in the standard mold; nothing too assertive. Whenever “angst and struggle” music suddenly flies in to accompany the onboard chaos, it seems a little cheap for a second, and then you adjust. This is, after all, a movie. For track 7 of your album, I offer the Main Titles. Unfortunately, sound effects (of the ship launching) mar the first 30 seconds, but there were no completely unobstructed cues in the whole movie and this was the obvious choice, so you’ll have to live with it. Believe it or not, there are two separate recent rerecordings of this unremarkable main title, both of them, I believe, reconstructed by ear, the original score materials from most British films having been thoughtlessly incinerated. One is rather bad and the other is rather good.

This “watching the Criterion Collection in order” whim seemed doomed at first because it’s so stupid and endless, but I’ve been truly surprised at how much pleasure it’s given me so far. As playlists go, it’s got quality, unfamiliarity, and variety going for it. Scoring cultural literacy points is a bonus built in to many, if not all, of the selections. Overall, it seems more promising to me than my Netflix queue – and I made my Netflix queue, so that’s saying something. So, for the time being, I’m planning to keep it up. My policy solution for undesirable films is that I am perfectly entitled to skip any movie that I think will seriously nauseate me. I do not believe in “ordeals.” Tedium, with the right attitude, evaporates, but disgust is biological. I have my health to think of!

Incidentally, this is the second entry in a row on this site where I’ve opined that “blandness” is an asset to a piece of art. I’m not sure what that says about my current mindset. Something, though.