The Road: Quest for Sugar Bombs

The world of 2009’s The Road is by definition one without meaning: an unspecified cataclysm has radically altered the earth, leaving is sunless and all but lifeless.  Plants and the lifeforms directly dependent on them are long dead; the more adaptable end of the food chain has dwindled to a few brutal survivors consuming the last scraps of nourishment, (primarily, each other).

Humanity, as individuals and a species, is over.  The father and son that move furtively through this world – hoping for a semblance of normality to be found on the coast – often encounter the bodies of those who, like the boy’s mother, have chosen suicide over a brief existence snuffed out by starvation or roving gangs of cannibal rapists.

And yet this very bleakness creates lives of portentous significance, as if meaning had not been removed but distilled and grown omnipresent.  It’s a world that will leave obsessive players of Fallout 3 with a constant sense of déjà vu and, perhaps, a more profound depression.  By way of a inspiration-source grandfather paradox, the film feels like a serious business version of the game because Fallout 3’s distinctive aesthetic is extensively cribbed from the Cormac McCarthy novel the film is based on.

Many of the father’s choices, particularly when to press on exploring in the face of clear warnings, are agonising after months of leisure time spent in the Capitol Wasteland.  Skulls on poles? Inbred cannibals!  Well preserved antebellum house? Andale cannibals! Ruined church? Giant green mutant cannibals! And put out that fire before the raiders and feral ghouls are fighting to keep your slaughtered corpse as a nutritious trophy!

But – obviously – there’s no handy stashes of ammo and instant Salisbury Steaks, no safe havens, no stimpacks.  The Capitol Wasteland is a veritable land of milk and honey, compared to the road these two are on.  The two settings do, however, seem to have a very similar karma engine, the weight of moral choices composited by an all-seeing, objective force.

Much like the same year’s A Serious Man, the characters – and audience – have two contextualising options.  1) God exists and is testing them to extremes even Job could not imagine, and they will be quickly punished for succumbing to sin or despair.  Or, 2) There is no god, no punishment, and thus no meaning to their suffering, only empty chance – a more terrifying prospect than being subject to a vengeful god.

This continues a theme from another Cormac McCarthy-based film, No Country For Old Men, in which the callousness of fate is embodied in the single-minded contract killer Anton Chigurh.  It’s an identity he consciously embodies, chancing the lives of most he comes in contact with on a coin toss, which his victim must call.  This is an iron-clad principle, to him, that he is less a person than an instrument of morality – after all, the accumulation of many small choices made good or evil actions their habit, and evil (spanning a very broad spectrum of profound and petty impulses) is what brought them into contact with him.  The only explanation he offers is to one victim, a cocky hired gun who fails to carry off a hit on Chigurh: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

The father is a survivalist – one who had stockpiled several years’ worth of non-perishables and whose first impulse, noting a fiery riot in the small hours, was to begin filling every sink and tub with tap water – who follows the rules that will allow him to keep putting one foot in front of the other.  Keep moving.  Search every cranny for nutrition.  Avoid all other humans.

He does, however, allow a space for a larger meaning, for and because of the son born soon after the cataclysm.  Of the boy, he says, “the child is my warrant and if he is not the word of God, then God never spoke.”  He tells the boy stories from the old world of courage and justice, when he isn’t walking his son through the proper way to commit suicide with one of their two remaining bullets, when the time comes.  Later, when the father has hardened past what little morality he once possessed, he calls the boy not the word but his god – a totem rather than person.

Through this fraught childhood, the son begins to grow into something part Messiah, part masthead of the first – and perhaps only – generation of this new world, and just a smidgen of an ordinary pre-adolescent, needing to detach from the suffocating love of his parent in order to become his own person.  Never knowing plenty, his impulse is to share their limited supplies with the few not immediately murderous individuals they meet, potentially turning them to allies and the human company he desperately craves.  He is quickly more in tune with the new order than his father, picking up subtle signals – like the categorised pile of worn clothes in the Andale house of cannibals – that his father misses entirely in his dreaming of the old society.  For instance, in a nearly wordless scene, his father finds possibly the last can of Coca-Cola in existence and tells his son to have it as a treat.  The son tries to hide his revulsion at the strange liquid and insists the father have it.  No, children love soda, drink it and let me enjoy watching you enjoy it, his father’s fragile joy insists back.  It’s uncomfortably obvious they are living in the same world less and less.

The narrative of their course through the new wilderness may be an indictment of human nature and the lawless chaos underlying existence.  Or it may be a world in which its God, with a peculiar deity’s-eye view, has shown the mercy of removing all distractions so that humanity may clearly perceive its will and be judged on their responses.  Efficiently, immoral choices bring sinners into contact with each other (a sort of Anton Chigurh à deux) to mutually enact punishments.  Father and son are twice cornered among cannibals, and twice escape through coincidences bordering on divine intervention.  They nearly die of starvation, but stumble onto a huge cache of food in a hidden fallout shelter.  Suddenly, they are the richest people in the wasteland.

Here is where the father and son’s paths begin to metaphysically diverge.  The son wants to give thanks, to express his gratitude somehow to the people who left the food behind.  He also wants his father to stay out of what little privacy he has, after the father roots through his pockets and lays out his treasures – one of which is an arrowhead, something that catches the father’s attention.  Perhaps he is sadly mulling over happier apocalyptic scenarios he’d prepared for, once in which western humans could have re-learned the old skills.  But there are no more animals to hunt, no more living wood to make into bows…

They hear searching noises above their hideaway, and the boy wants to meet them, to see if they really could have something so mystical as a dog with them.  The father (sensibly) refuses, and decides they need to move in immediately.  Unfortunately, he decides to move on with as much of the supplies inside the shelter as they can stuff onto a cart, making them a slow-moving, indefensible target.  He has been abandoning the markers of good memories – a picture, his wedding ring – and trying to fully move into the new world, but without that old identity he is little better than the cannibals they flee.

The only possible strategy, both logistically and morally, is the eat their fill and leave, taking only what they can carry.  Both of their previous escapes hinged on speed, abandoning baggage of supplies and memories.  It’s like a tougher version of the Israelites’ manna from heaven during their 40 years in another wasteland, raising a generation of fighters untainted by the mental servitude of slavery and unquestioningly following the will of a very involved god.  Instead of maggots infesting their hoarded sustenance, the two are set upon by thieves and killers.  Two dying men are put in their path, offering opportunities to divest themselves of their dangerous hoard while acting in defiance of the immoral bleakness surrounding.  The father refuses, while the son is agonised with a need to do that right thing.

The first, an old man, offers something like a lesson.  When the father speaks of what it would be like to be the last man on earth, the old man responds only, “How would he know?”  A man’s awareness of the world is limited to his own skull at the best of times, and often not even that.  The worst atrocities and tragedies in this film come from characters who feel they have grasped the scope of the universe – everything is dying and no behaviour will be punished or stopped by some authority – and so they commit suicide or cannibalise their neighbours.

This is the only sort of world in which moral decisions truly matter,  one in which a person must continually chose between foolhardy generosity or faith solely for the benefit of a theoretical immortal soul (and seemingly being rewarded for such with a few more days’ existence) and one’s life.  No one will come after them who might offer the shoeless old man a spare pair of boots like the pair hanging off the back of their wagon, for instance.  Unlike the beggar on a busy city street who might inspire a guilty twinge, the father and son are his only chance.  The stakes are unimaginably high, but at least the moral choices are clear.

The father passes his personal moral horizon when he punishes a thief who stripped them of all their worldly goods (making the exact mistake the father did, allowing them to catch up), but left the boy unharmed.  He steals more unneeded wealth, every stitch of clothes, and leaves him to die of exposure.  The son passes this test, eventually convincing his father (too late) to return the clothes, and even leaves some food as well.  Soon after, they find a live beetle – a sign that, as the old man said, they didn’t truly know life would never return to earth – and the father is fatally wounded by an arrow.  Suddenly, the arrowhead his son carried hadn’t been a cruel reminder but a fair warning of the end of the path he’d set foot on.

His murderer is punished as well for taking potshots at those unfortunate enough to pass underneath, killed by a wild flare the father shot into his window.  This narrative’s god is very efficient.  Even the cannibals, for all they are currently well fed, aren’t really so well off.  They will also die horribly, sooner rather than later, either at the hands of their hungry compatriots or of some postapocalyptic Creuzfelt-Jakob disease.

After his father’s slow death, the son encounters an armed veteran on the shore and, following his father’s rules, initially holds him back at gunpoint.  The veteran and his family are both somewhat creepy and too good to be true, but the son chooses to trust that they want him to join their group.  If there is a god, the boy is being rewarded for his faith with temporary safety and the “good people” he and his father came to the coast hoping to find.  If this world is only meaningless chaos, the boy was raped and/or eaten soon after the fade to black.

It all depends on the road you want to follow.

the lone ranger and tonto fistfight on Pandora: Avatar

Avatar is an extremely pretty and well-meaning film that suffers from the same core problem that plagued Drag Me To Hell, another mostly enjoyable 2009 film: both were written in the early/mid-90s, a different cultural epoch for both the horror and fantasy genres.  Drag Me To Hell was somewhat disappointing because the marketing:

had me ready for a fierce woman battling the forces of darkness for possession of her soul when the main character was, in fact, maybe 3% fierce at most.  And that was only to battle mud and a gross but inanimate opponent.  The remaining 97%, she was pathetically likable and personality-free, hiring others to fight and die on her behalf.  Around Army of Darkness’s release, it would have been enough to have a non-Final Girl female protagonist, but in the post-Whedon era, that’s retrograde and (worse) dull.

Avatar immediately suffers from plot and thematic parallels to environmental films of the previous decade (Dances With Wolves, Ferngully: The Last Rainforst, Pocahontas) that didn’t age well, or weren’t fine cinema (or aimed at adults) to begin with.  These films were rooted in a less sophisticated conception of post-imperialist theory, little more than a generational update on cowboys and indians that allowed little white boys to join the bows and arrows brigade (as the leader, as was appropriate to their majority status).  This genre illuminated the inhumane actions of historical oppressors and modern land developers while leaving the oppressed as voiceless and objectified as Rudyard Kipling’s Gunga Din.

The script has been somewhat updated from its original form to become a heavy-handed allegory for the last several years of US and UK military action.  I agree with Miles Antwiler that this is a very valid massage that shouldn’t be dismissed solely out of cynicism, but here the execution is mis-aimed and even childish, refusing to risk losing audience sympathy in any small aspect.  The planet Pandora and the Na’vi living on it are initially presented as pants-crappingly terrifying to a large settlement of hardened former-Marine mercenaries, but the only evidence of their deadly nature is a few ineffective arrows stuck in a futuristic Hummer’s tires.

In this allegory, the Na’vi represent real people in occupied areas who’ve resorted to guerilla tactics, blurring the line between combatants and civilians for the uniformed soldiers charged with pacifying those areas.  Unfortunately, James Cameron is unwilling to bring any level of subtlety to the simplistic morality at play or challenge the audience by having the Na’vi assault even valid military targets on screen, let alone exploiting vulnerable civilian areas with terrifying, showy attacks designed to drive the humans off-planet.  This is an insult to all oppressed people, whose cultures are twisted by the dirty, dehumanizing tactics required to resist an overwhelming force.  That is the unique tragedy of occupation.  The Na’vi suffer massive loss of life and significant habitat destruction, but this could be caused by fires, floods, earthquakes, etc – disasters a mystical culture “living in harmony with nature” would be expected to encounter from time to time.  Occupied nations suffer this destruction along with the wholesale loss or perversion of a cultural identity, whether their citizens capitulate or resist.

Na’vi culture is somehow unstained by many years of humanity’s strip-mining and attempted infiltration, a miraculously preserved playland that welcomes and seduces interlopers who should by all rights be shot on sight and have their bodies left in some horrible state as a message to others.  (Corporal Sully is spared exactly this fate by godly intervention; there’s no mention if the scientists who had previously spent enough time with the tribe to learn their language and make lifelong friendships had a similar divine dispensation.)

That culture is visually stunning and fulfils every wish a daydreaming suburban white boy could have, but dull, far more suited to a children’s direct-to-video cartoon.  There’s no ideological flaws to add depth and personality to the people as a whole, nothing that individuals can rail against and thus create their own character arc separate from that of the outsiders observing them.  One interesting possibility avoided is the question raised by the Na’vi’s uniform physical perfection – where are the weak or disabled natives?  Nature, which the Na’vi are so in tune with, is a great lover of congenital oddities and offers many misadventures that can permanently injure even those who don’t regularly plummet several hundred metres for lols.  Is there a 300-esque Spartan cliff with generations of rejected infant corpses at the foot of it?  Even a much more palatable scenario, such as the obvious fetishism of athletic ability verging on a fascistic requirement, could have made for an interesting knot when Sully’s real-body disability was revealed.

There is one interesting, even nuanced allegory running through the film, illuminating the human (and possibly filmmakers’) neurotic mass psyche.  The avatars referenced in the title – genetically engineered hybrid bodies remotely inhabited by humans – are only the tip of the body-horror iceberg.  The bad military humans also (literally) step into bigger, stronger versions of their ordinary bodies, mechanical exoskeletons that stand, move, and fight just as a meat-body would.

These robotic extensions don’t even provide a faster or more stable method of locomotion or even come with a jet-pack for independent short flights.  They even use the same weapons as human soldiers, large handguns and combat knives.  Their ridiculous, redundant design is highlighted when the hoo-rah Colonel Quaritch conspicuously meets with the newest recruit while bench-pressing a gigantic load, warns the recruit that any physical softness will get a person killed on Pandora, and then immediately hops into a protective exoskeleton that will face the dangerous world for him.

Even the supermodel natives of Pandora aren’t satisfied with their ubermensch physicality, using an organic USB connector to hijack the bodies of larger creatures.  The only individual in the film truly pushing his own body to its physical limits, refusing assistance, is the injured marine who’s lost the use of his legs.  Even he gives up this effort as soon as he’s able to sometimes inhabit a fully functional body.  Eventually he abandons his broken, neglected body entirely, his mystical transfer into the better, non-disabled abomination of corporate science symbolising his rejection of tarnished humanity and birth as a truly whole spirit.  Ideologically, it’s pretty gross, taken on face value.

On a deeper level, though, it could be only species-wide self-disgust and childish rage against the generational slowness of evolution; humans want to be physically more from the bones out and lack the creativity to fully utilise technology for anything but destruction and the extension of what already exists.  This conceptual thread is particularly appealing because the solution it offers is not to retreat intosopophoric Na’vi connectivity, as they suffer the same neurosis.  It’s the sole dissonant note in the final triumphant chorus.

Running Man, minus the dignity

Gamer is a terrible movie.

It’s also a strangely written movie, one that goes out of its way to insult its assumed target audience, portraying gaming enthusiasts in lazy shorthand: either spoiled ADHD-addled teenagers or grotesquely obese shut-in perverts.  Who would immediately get the reference to a game changing mod (as opposed to a cheat), or the sight gag of soldiers purchasing upgrades from blank-faced merchants mid-battlefield, but those who spend much of their leisure time gaming?

Also, the aesthetic is an odd choice – in the ersatz Sim world, the clothing, leisure and clubbing set-ups are straight out of Spice World, far more a late-90s hedonistic look than the current scenester gestalt:

Sims 1 didn’t even come out until 2000, and the franchise-defining Sims 2 in 2004 even had an H&M expansion pack, completing the neo-80s modern look of the game. The plotless carnage of the avatar-assisted gameplay is also far more 90s-influenced than the current generation of games, which now more often than not include complex storylines and karmic morality choices.  The hysterical Fake-Violence-Makes-Real-Psychopaths controversy that fuels this ‘sploitation movie belongs to another time, a quaint past that includes Marilyn Manson and a careful hedonism peeking out under the childhood boogieman of AIDS.  Video games want to be your Jiminy Cricket now, putting players through the negative consequences of fun, fun wholesale slaughter.

And yet, it often catches the youthful Web 2.0 drift eerily well, particularly in the cheapness of thrills, the naïve perception that flashing some of your amateur skin is something both expected and hugely valuable.  In fact, the 90s aesthetic would have been a pleasantly nostalgic redeeming feature of this shallow and mean-spirited movie if the Millennial generation’s pre-fab jadedness hadn’t been grafted onto it.

Well, there was a bizarre Michael C Hall dance number.  It’s got that going for it.

All in all: it’s always much more fun to play video games than watch someone else play them.  If nothing else, this movie has left me half-tempted to reinstall Sims 2 (and track down Autonomous Causal Romance mod, of course), but I’m halfway through Bioshock…Mr Bubbles, are you there?

Gonna fly now, or not: Rocky (I)

It’s difficult to hear the name ‘Rocky’ and not picture cheesy training montages and patriotically homoerotic boxing clinches, with the grimacing visage of Reagan forever looming over the spectacle.  They were the Sunday-afternoon staples of an 80s childhood, famous lines interspersed with commercials urging parents to Buy American every fifteen minutes.  They were live-action cartoons for grownups who needed a little pro-USA comfort as the junk-bond moguls…er, I mean Commies…gobbled up and excreted the small companies that offered Middle American providers stable, lifelong employment.  Until recently, I’d never seen and entire Rocky movie in one sitting, and that was Rocky 4, the most painfully jingoistic of the bunch.

But before Rocky became an unironic Real American Hero in the 80s, he was born in a small guerrilla-style film of the same name that was firmly rooted in the gloomy American Dream Denied tradition of 70s cinema.  There’s a triumphant sports story in Rocky, and its name is Apollo Creed – a member of the oppressed minority group throughout United States history who’s risen through brains, ability, and sheer guts to the pinnacle of success.  In his triumphant career high, he claims the nation’s bicentennial for himself, staging a show fight on New Years’ Day and entering as the embodiment of America in stars-and-stripes shorts and a George Washington wig, throwing money to the mostly white spectators.  And he’s cheered for this, accepted as the new king signifier of the country that’s a bare generation away from regular lynchings of other black men who got above their allowed station.  Apollo Creed is at the forefront of the nation’s new ascendant force – and how painful it is now to see that confidence, before the crack epidemic and mass exodus of semi-skilled jobs to come all but gutted the civil rights advancements of those decades!

But this isn’t Creed’s movie.  As fleshed out as he is, given limited screen time, and clearly the traditional A-story, the narrative focuses on the B-thread, the ethnic white population painfully transitioning from the disappearing ‘working class’ identity to simply ‘poor.’  Rocky, a never-was prizefighter eking out a living as a loan shark’s muscle, clings to the lowest rung of this strata, sharing that humiliating space with the painfully shy pet shop clerk on whom he nurses an inarticulate crush.  They also share the crippling disadvantage of minimal self-awareness, unable to effectively shield themselves against and with the continual stream of insults each neighbour neurotically spews in a social scene as bleak as the post-industrial waste it resides in.

Far from the caricatures of the sequels, these characters are sensitively observed, all struggling under the same basic character arc – the need to keep up a reputation, usually when everything else is lost – but in individual ways.  Rocky provides the film’s thesis in a rambling stream-of-consciousness lecture to a neighbourhood girl.  He doesn’t speak of her potential for a happy future or successful career if she doesn’t waste her youth committing misdemeanours on the mean streets; all she can hope for is to not be remembered as a whore, or a bum.  Once safely deposited on her doorstep, she blows him off: ‘Screw you, creep-o!’

True connection, or even basic politeness, is impossible in a shifting cultural scene with no wholly respectable positions to occupy.  Nearby people are only comparisons to measure oneself against and a target to lower the bar on that competition.  The loan shark’s out-of-shape driver compulsively berates the muscle-bound prizefighter from behind the shield of their boss; the boss humiliates Rocky for not breaking a debtor’s thumbs because not carrying out threats hurts a loan shark’s reputation, calling Rocky an idiot for offering a reasonable explanation: if he ruined the labourer’s hands, he’d be laid off, and unable to earn the money to pay him back.  The shark takes a hit from an inhaler mid-rant, the show of weakness inspiring an angrier finish as cover.  Rocky’s humiliated again in the gym, losing his locker for being, as the owner announces to the young fighters surrounding them, a bum who’s wasted his talent as hired muscle.  In fact, no one has a civil word for Rocky; perhaps his longing for the clerk comes from the fact that she only freezes when he attempts conversation.

The breakthrough in Rocky’s inertia comes from two completely external sources haphazardly shoring up their own implied worth.  He gets a date with Adrian because her brother Paulie, who hopes Rocky will set him up as muscle with the loan shark and liberate him from the drudgery of the meat-packing plant, wants to do him a favour while making his sister a little less visibly weird.  It’s assumed she’s a virgin, a safe reputation in a world that’s yet to hear of that Sexual Revolution craic, but that means she’s also a dried-up spinster, a dangerous stereotype in any culture.  (Later, unable to admit his jealousy at her unexpected happiness and confidence, he rejects her as ‘busted,’ a theoretically ruined reputation rather than potentially the contented spouse of a suddenly successful local boy.)

At the same time, Rocky is plucked from obscurity by the media-savvy Creed solely for his nickname, the ‘Italian Stallion.’  Creed’s opponent in his career-crowning show bout has dropped out, and he knows he needs a white boy in the ring with him, ideally one with a clear ethnic identity.  If he fought one of the boxers in his class, who are all black, he risked his big event being rejected by the majority of working-class fans, but given someone they could identify with who had a golden-ticket shot at the title, Creed knew the fans would love him more than ever.

Rocky, pathetically, is keenly aware that both of these are set-ups most likely doomed to failure, and attempts to duck out of each.  He’s shepherded back into line, and begins to go through the motions, dully anticipating humiliating failure.  First, with Adrian, he stumbles through the least smooth first date committed to film, culminating in a problematic seduction scene.  To the script’s credit, it knows this is a horrible situation and neither character is coming off well, but it’s the only, shamefully inadequate, script their culture gives two people to come together.  I experienced this myself many times, growing up 80 miles west of Philly – the guy is expected to push, wheedle, guilt, and subtly threaten the girl to come inside, to sit close, to kiss, to submit to sex; the woman, if she is worth anything, is to appeasingly resist with all her might, but not escape.

(What a difference a generation makes; I was able to leave, to drive or walk home on my own with confidence the fella could – and would – slander me in retaliation, and no one would give a damn.)

Both characters look ill as Rocky bars her way out and announces he’s going to kiss her, and she doesn’t have to kiss him back if she doesn’t want it (it probably didn’t hurt that Talia Shire was fighting the flu as they filmed the scene).  Then, relief, they are suddenly both on the same passionate page, breaking through mutual incomprehension!  But the spectre of how horribly wrong it would have gone if they weren’t lingers through their new relationship even as Adrian begins to flourish under the genuine affection.

There’s no such connection anywhere else in Rocky’s life.  He’s suddenly got friends, all of whom want a bit of the shine (and payday) he’ll have in the ring with Apollo.  Rocky knows they’d still consider him a worthless bum otherwise, they know he knows, and it’s horribly awkward all around how they suddenly grovel for his stamp of approval on their worth.  Lunk that he is, Rocky can’t even properly reject any of them, and accepts the cut-rate friendship on offer.  By the end of the movie, with a genuine connection to Adrian counterbalancing the sub-par Machiavellian efforts of the others, Rocky is able to forget the embarrassment of being used and claim them as friends who happen to be deeply flawed.  One of the few benefits of the sequels is to show that this attitude has fruit, forging meaningful relationships on both sides.

What the sequels get desperately wrong is that they make winning the climactic fight Rocky’s high point.  In the original, though, Rocky’s triumph is when he loses himself in his training, like Albert Camus’ Sisyphus happily pushing his rock uphill, the overwhelming effort freeing him from the torture of thought.  No longer tormented by the potentially brilliant athletic career now that he’s finally putting his heart into the attempt, Rocky is both joyful and high on endorphins.  Here, he escapes from the paradigm that allows only a few winners and many losers.  Despite the heady hopes of those close to him, he knows he’s terminally outclassed.  With no chance of winning, he can only lose if he doesn’t make Creed work for it.

Through sheer ‘heart’ (a boxing term that seems to mean ‘too desperate and stupid to fall down before permanent brain damage sets in’), Rocky denies Creed a clean victory, losing by points rather than a KO.  Even as the tv cameras clamour for the image and quote that will cement his reputation, he seeks only Adrian, who’s travelled a parallel path of realising she doesn’t have to live down to her brother’s insults when she’d rather be someone’s beloved tomboy in a kicky beret.  Rocky’s won not because he’s beaten Creed, Mr T, or a monosyllabic slab of Russian beef to the mat but because, with his new self-esteem and life partner, his success will be a contented little life with nothing to prove ever again.

At least until the sequels.  Dammit.

Midichlorian-free: The Men Who Stare At Goats

As a kid I was a sucker for the patriotic or counterculture fist-pump, the humanised enemy representative who receives a grand rescue by White America Man, who is raging against the machine of Evil White Men Who Won’t Listen To Humanistic Reason And Probably Smirk A Lot, thus signifying that White America in the audience was ok after all – because they’re certainly represented by the good guy, not the suits, right?  Didn’t our soulful proxy just save the doe-eyed enemy, making us realise we’re really One World, Together?

Unfortunately, I grew out of that happy fuzziness into retching at smug self-effacement and wishing we were following the enemy’s story instead, getting into their head.  And I can’t help but wonder that these portrayals aren’t salt in the wounds of real individuals represented, first abused and then symbolically rescued by the dominant culture attempting to wipe out theirs.  So, based solely on a triumphant rescue scene that liberates starving, tortured, orange jumpsuit-clad Iraqi prisoners to the desert with no supplies, I can’t entirely recommend The Men Who Stare At Goats, despite this being what supposedly happened to journalist Jon Ronson in the course of investigating the US military’s experiments with New Age techniques well after the most credulous hippies had abandoned them.

Aside from this problematic thread, The Men Who Stare At Goats is an often fascinating black comedy exploring a (somewhat true) recent iteration of humanity’s continual need for mythic superhumans, those whose mental and physical abilities breech – just slightly – the limits of human possibility.  It’s satisfying to hear of warriors and sages who can, after years of esoteric study, leap great distances or see beyond the range of their eyes.  This superman defines the human by providing both a clear dividing line and the inspiration to achieve full potential by trying to leap beyond it.

The needful human relationship to myths officially goes skew-wiff, though, when people start believing they’ve achieved magic abilities themselves.

Goats brings together people of two modern eras when Americans en masse felt they’d lost the national narrative and were susceptible to magical thinking, the beginnings of the 1980s and 2000s.  Based on the real-life First Earth Battalion and the Stargate Project, which ultimately only contributed to the psychological warfare tactics of the US military, the film follows a man rocked primarily by divorce and obligatorily by the cultural turmoil following the 2001 terrorist attacks who connects with a former Jedi Warrior / test subject who believes he’s been reactivated.  Like many young adults in September’s immediate aftermath, Bob feels his personal problems should be taking a back seat to those in the larger world he’s suddenly aware of.  Unlike most of them, who attended protests and blogged furiously and ultimately realised that horrific world events went on whether they paid attention or not, Bob went to Kuwait and tried to get imbedded with troops in Iraq.

Instead, he meets Lyn – a name he knows from interviewing a local crazy / former First-Earther who claimed to have psychic abilities – and plunges into two decades of flashbacks detailing a Vietnam War vet’s immersion in post-sixties counterculture and his attempt to forge “Jedi Warriors” out of soldiers.  The soldiers themselves are mostly the typical waifs and strays that drift into military life, looking for connection, discipline, and meaning, and one spoon-bending huckster.  It’s an obvious train wreck waiting to happen, with surprising moments of sweetness along the way.  Bob tags along, unsure whether he’s uncovering a tale of classified governmental insanity or true superhumans, but sure either will establish him as a serious journalist and impress his ex-wife.

There’s a core of sadness running through the dark comedy, and the film itself would fail if it was merely a Dr Strangelove-style satire.  Only the awareness that this is based on real madness, that the potential for paranormal warfare was embraced by two presidents – one enamoured with astrology and the Star Wars movies, the other drawing strength from a mystical evangelic tradition – provides the stranger-than-fiction hilarity.  Underneath the self-delusions, however, are lonely people looking for an explanation that forces some sense onto the randomness of life.  Bill Django, severely wounded by a single foe his troop of green soldiers fail to hit, has the revelation that even trained soldiers, new to the battlefield, will avoid killing another human being.  Revering this ‘gentleness,’ he doesn’t leave the army but instead counter-intuitively seeks to bring it into the military paradigm as a combat advantage.  It’s as if being part of that system is imperative to his identity, even as his values move in direct opposition to the business of killing.

The soldiers brought into the program embrace the warmfuzzy self-actualisation exercises, despite the divergence from their military training.  They also prove to be mentally flexible enough to encompass both the military setting that has given them a recognised niche in life and the silly activities that feel good and garner them praise from authority.  There’s a snake in this doomed garden, of course, the huckster mentioned above who might believe in his own advertised powers but is far better at cynically manipulating his superiors using real-world leverage.  After a series of embarrassments, he stages a coup and pushes the old guard out of the program, which he changes to focus on practical methods of undermining and killing the enemy.

Here lies the film’s most simple and genuine journey – the mildly brainwashed Lyn, leaving the military, is ‘cursed’ by his enemy.  He feels he left himself open to that by impulsively using his powers to kill an innocent being (the stared-at goat of the title), thus perverting the life-affirming philosophies on which his new identity of a Jedi Warrior are based.  Years later, dying of exposure in the Iraqi desert, he’s saved by a goat who leads him first to an oasis, then to rescue.  He repays this implied forgiveness by rescuing a flock of military goats destined for painful experimentation (and, in the process, the tortured prisoners mentioned above, but they are a conceptual afterthought), and is able to face the end of his life in peace, with his mentor at his side.

These are men sifting through their lives for a core, heroic narrative, as evidenced by unironically taking on the identity of fictional space samurai.  They attempt to take the occasional flashes of brilliance that make mundane life interesting or just bearable and force them to become something controllable and permanent.  The constant tease of the movie is whether they’ve managed to do so, in any way, or if their belief that they have supernatural powers merely allows them to sometimes pull off impressive stunts attainable by meat and nerves.  Perhaps Lyn and Bill have, taking the long way, attained a sort of wu wei, accepting that where they are is where they are meant to be at that moment, and accomplish what anyone could without the cloud of pointless anxiety fogging their decisions (instead of a massive dose of psychotomimetics, which apparently fixes all ills).

The film ends anticlimactically, with Bob’s exposé of cruel and unusual prisoner torture and military experimentation receiving only the smallest, pettiest media coverage (that prisoners were forced to listen to Barney the Dinosaur).  Inspired by the First Earth principles, however, Bob vows to soldier on and achieves the trick all others had failed, phasing through an office wall.  Or, retreats into a hallucination of doing so while he actually smacks himself unconscious.  (Why, exactly, must they keep attempting this at work, with witnesses?)  Whether they actually succeed is a moot point; only that the potential they might have becomes a fantasy-sustaining myth for the rest.

He, She, and it: Antichrist

Antichrist is not an enjoyable experience, but it does make a small and permanent place in your brain afterward.  Lars von Trier wrote the script in the middle of a profound depression, and I’d comfortably wager much of the audience response splits between those who’ve gone through depression or intense mourning and those who’ve yet to have the pleasure.

In the interpretation that makes sense to me, much of the film comes down to the struggle between the Lacanian/Zizekian Symbolic and the Real.  The Real in this definition (as least what I’ve grasped of it) is impenetrable, only perceived as chaos.  We experience it as traumatic kernels hiding within the symbolic order – think of a basic life definition, which this film plays with like a feral cat with a dead mouse: Man and Woman.  Individuals with male genitalia are Men, defined by a set of attributes and (more importantly) their lack of another set of attributes that have been assigned to those with female genitalia, who are Women because they lack the male-assigned attributes.

These gendered definitions usually work well enough, as most people don’t encounter many others who don’t make the effort to fit them.  But picture their discomfort and even disgust at meeting a male or female transvestite, or outright horror if they were to learn someone they were close to had been born of the opposite gender or hermaphroditic.  Hello, traumatic kernel.

The general response – the psychologically healthy one, you could argue – to one of these kernels is to either reject them out of hand as something perverse and thus unworthy of attention, or to examine the sense of disquiet and eventually incorporate the disturbing thing into a more complicated definition of life’s essential truths.  Neither approach gets a person closer to the Real, of course, but the Real is made of madness and should be avoided.  That space is left blank on purpose, as the form tells us.

The fact that the laws of physics we experience on Earth seem to be consistent across as much of the universe as we’ve been able to observe convinces me that there’s probably some overarching logic or meaning to the universe (thank you, Carl Sagan).  What that meaning might be, no human has any hope of grasping.  It’s too big, and too impersonal, and frankly as terrifying as it is comforting.  So, for my own sanity, I generally stop at ‘there’s some order out there.’

The film, like nearly all organised religions since a breed of sociopathic prehistoric apes lost some body hair, takes on reproduction and death, two forces in human existence that shred the boundaries between the relatively comfortable Symbolic order and the Real.  It seems that whoever can take those living nightmares and trap them in a logical order will win the big prize, but no one’s claimed it yet.  The Antichrist of the title, a couple’s very young son, escapes from his crib and falls to his death while his parents are distracted with passionate lovemaking, plunging the two of them into intolerable torment.  Sex and Death, Freud’s chocolate and peanut butter, in beautiful slow-motion.

He seeks to escape his grief by focusing on that of his wife.  He’s a medication-hating psychiatrist, the embodiment of order imposed upon the chaos of human experience.  She’s younger and an academic, already half driven mad by her own intense study of witch hunts.  Her grief is mostly insanity, directly staring into the Real, and her guilt doesn’t allow her to contextualise that ugliness back into the Symbolic’s order without some crushing punishment.  She’s probably wise to accept her doctor’s deadening medication, providing the only reprieve possible, but accepts her husband’s judgement that he can fix her with words, instead.

Her state of mind was familiar to me.  When I was a teenager, my only sibling committed suicide.  Already struggling with many of the same issues that drove him to it, I was simultaneously thrust into a terrifying adult world in which anyone can die at any time and suddenly expected to live up to every family expectation in order to make up for his death – my resounding success in every area (and production of grandchildren) would make his suicide, and the inherent rebuke to their parenting, symbolically nullified.

By which I’m saying, people respond to grief with varying levels of insanity, and I believe the way that Death is removed from ordinary life in the modern world, something to be shoved aside and spoken of in hushed, almost ashamed tones, has only made those responses crazier.

He looks for ways to bring her away from the terror of loss and the absence of any mental safety by imposing a Symbolic order, represented by a pyramid of words – at the top will be her true fear, which he will force her to confront, and then, badda bing, she’ll be back in the orderly land with him.  It’s quite likely he’s aware on some level that this is an impossible task, and hopes it’ll be a lifelong quest that keeps him safely in the role of carer, not grieving father.

She confesses her nightmares of their rustic cabin and the woods surrounding it, so he takes her there.  Even as he sees the harshness she justifiably fears (a beautiful deer which turns to reveal a malformed, stillborn fawn still half-trapped inside, a fox consuming itself which informs him that “chaos reigns”), he insists more stridently on his sense of order, seeing her as the chaos she confronts.

In a key moment, she tells him that the acorns constantly raining down on the tin roof make her unbearably sad, because an oak tree only needs one of these in a hundred years to germinate in order to propagate itself.  The abundance of acorns, except for that one in a billion, exist solely to be consumed by other life, by the other ones in a billion that were able to go from potential to actual.  It’s obvious she sees her son, and herself, as those extraneous acorns.  In my experience, the only way to get through this state of mind – which is not inaccurate, just impossible to sustain while retaining sanity – is to stay away from sharp things while looking at the chaos until it loses all meaning, until the inadequate descriptive words allow the Symbolic to mercifully creep up over it.

Her husband, instead, tells her that’s the dumbest thing he’s ever heard, and tries to make her accept nature by walking in the tall grass outside the cabin.  His desperate need to save his shattered wife and unacknowledged bruised ego (after all, as the older and more educated partner, he’s right, she should listen and accept his view) merge into a disastrous effort to force order onto grief, even as he loses his own grip.

Unfortunately, it soon comes out that she had started to lose her sanity several months before their son’s death, in that cabin, confronting the Real more distantly: the hysteria that drove entire communities to torture and murder their own neighbors.  She began with the assertion that it was “gynocide,” the killing of women, the attempt to destroy subversive femininity via the symbolic murder of these real women and leave behind only the cowed and controlled.  In isolation, with only her pre-verbal son and these images for company, her view began to shift – if these men were evil, because humanity is at its dark heart a nasty brutal thing, are not woman, as human beings, equally evil?  In that sense, didn’t those tortured women deserve death, as things equally evil to the men putting them to death?

Thus we get our second example of why it’s a Very Bad Thing to try to contextualise the harsh chaos of the Real into a neat philosophical context.  Logic is just as brutal, in its own way, as nature.

For instance, it might be logical to move from this discussion of the sad but sane-ish chapters to the brutal one Antichrist is infamous for by defining the maiming and murder as the abandonment of the Symbolic order for the immediate physical experience, a closer approximation of the Real.  I’d argue, however, that the torture and murder only go deeper into the Symbolic order, to the depths of the human soul that believe in sacrifice to appease forces beyond their control.

Destroying part, perhaps the best part, of what a person valued was a way to let destructive chaos into the small area of imposed order in the hopes that this would fill some cosmic chaos quota, and leave the rest of the life untouched.  When this impulse provokes more psychopathic impulses, like the torture or ritual murder of a chosen victim, the meaning behind it was more direct, simply an attempt to provoke a reaction from the indifferent beyond by violating the consciously and unconsciously held rules: look what we’ve done, respond to us, even if it’s to fry us all with lightening.  Don’t withhold meaning any longer.

This new level begins as she seems to have turned a corner, begun to reconstruct a sense of life and her place in it that keeps the terror of reality at bay.  He turns spiteful, from lack of control over this breakthrough and from the fear that he’ll now have to face his own grief, and viciously attacks her with words.  This escalates quickly, from forced sexual intercourse (her on him, as many of their sexual encounters have been throughout the grieving process) to torture, to attempted murder and actual murder.  They visit horrors on each other, and hers in particular spiral as each act, so terrible and transgressive it must force a response from the powers that be and end her torment, provokes nothing.  No punishment and thus no meaning falls from the sky or crawls up from the earth.

In the end, all reproductive possibilities brutally destroyed in both, there is only survival.  The final scene, his vision of a crowd of faceless women streaming past him to Eden, has been decried as misogyny, of admittance that she was right, that women are evil and will return to a primal horror that lives in their base souls if men push too close.  Putting aside the question of big-E Evil, I think it’s more interesting that this is his vision, women like his wife who he can not only not save but now not even comprehend simple facial expressions.

He’s a man who’s dedicated his life to penetrating the human psyche, a grief-stricken father who felt confident he could not only understand but fix his wife’s internal workings.  Here, he emerges as a broken person who has walked into and – barely – out of his own and his wife’s hearts of darkness.  The truly crushing realisation: he has gained no understanding of deeper truths, only new grief, and has lost the ordered structure that gave life any meaning at all.

Dollhouse 1.01, Ghost: welcome to the

Eliza Dushku in Dollhouse

Dollhouse 1.01: Ghost

Every new Joss Whedon show will be evaluated first and foremost on its feminist merits, which may be exactly how Whedon likes it. That’s difficult going, however, as feminism has as many different definitions as there are feminists and misogynists. That single question alone could be debated without end without touching any other quality, with tea break to deride Eliza Dushku’s lack of range.

(Which, by the way, is getting so old it’s drawing a pension. I’ve generally agreed with that assessment, but hearing it repeated with every mention of the show has made me re-evaluate its fairness. Why exactly do we condemn young actors, comparing them with those who didn’t get their breakout roles until their thirties with an additional decade of experience behind them? My judgement on the actress is based on only two roles, neither of which particularly interested me as written or called for a range broader than appearing young, inexperienced, and clinging to bravado – exactly what many young actors would be feeling in their first major roles. Give her a chance to do something interesting with a meatier role.)

My particular bias in judging fictional feminist cred is toward equality across individuality, ie male and female characters have an equal shot at characteristics without them being processed through a ‘manly’ or ‘womanly’ scale. Buffy Summers, for instance, has never passed on my criteria (as much as I and was affected enjoyed the show) because he character is built around the shockhorror! of a young woman being physically strong and tasked with the mission to save the world. The times she revelled in her strength or was proud of ability to save people were paltry compared to the moments she worried her strength made her too unfeminine to be attractive (as opposed to the garden-variety teenage insecurities that made her a good audience identification figure). Angel wasn’t the best for non-stereotypical adult women, but Firefly provided three adult women who were comfortable with their balance of skills and femininity. Even the Companion (Fox’s requested ‘hooker with a heart of gold’) drew confidence in uncivilised surroundings from both her charismatic sex appeal and her skill with a sword.

The glimpse of a traditional geisha in the first episode’s teaser heading out on assignment recalls both Inara, Whedon’s most problematic character so far, and the Japanese figure often misidentified in Western culture as a simple prostitute. The question is the same, but amplified: where is the liberation in prettily presented human trafficking?

To partially address this issue: Whedon is expanding on a concept from William Gibson’s technological dystopia, the “meat puppet.” Two of his characters, Molly Millions in Neuromancer and Rikki in Burning Chrome worked as prostitutes to finance their dream enhancements, a specialised subset in which they would be put into a planned trance while they acted out their clients’ pre-programmed orders. Their designer orgasms would be real, but unfelt; the entire process was to occur without their awareness, but unsettling images inevitably began to slip into their dreams…

The narrative doesn’t follow the women into the brothel. Instead, this employment is discovered by the male protagonists, and the focus in on their shock and confusion that someone they see as an individual had been working as someone they consider a non-person. Both women slip out of the men’s lives without resolving their lovers’ uncertainty, and thus out of the story.

In Dollhouse, the workers are the story, and the men who hire them and sleep with them are the ones who leave the narrative. The focus is on the Actives who have had their own personalities removed (and hopefully stored on several back-up servers) and are implanted with the ordered personalities as needed. Much like the artificial humans in Blade Runner (this show certainly has deep sci-fi roots), the central tragedy is that the most intense human experiences are pushed from ordinary lives to non-people, and the memories and character built are flushed away. The losses of the trafficked victims are the focus, not the reactions of those who use them.

In any case, it’s far too soon to make any judgements. The exact nature of the titular Dollhouse and those who run it is still a mystery. Exposition tells us it is extremely illegal and, if discovered, would put all employees in prison for a very long time, but the FBI agent assigned to the trafficking investigation is several credibility rungs below “Spooky” Mulder. The Dollhouse staff exhibit varying levels of commitment and unease with their jobs. One exposits that those in charge feel they are serving a humanitarian purpose, and he pushes them to briefly live up to this with a little risky pro bono work (which is quite profitable in the end). There’s apparently a large enough pool of super-rich folk aware of and willing to work with an extremely illegal service to at least cover the extensive spa overhead. No Blue Sun branding has been in view thus far.

They do something to the Actives to make them so strong, and it looks like it hurts.

The dolls themselves are possibly volunteers, or else coerced. Central character Echo’s obviously among the coerced, by some mysterious means, which may involve a charismatic professor who inspired her to save the world. Her work often involves sex, which, given her programmed state, can be defined as both prostitution and rape. This week’s first client clearly wanted the full meat puppet experience, ordering a three-day weekend of excitement and adventure complete with growing emotional attachment along with his vanilla-kinky bondage workout.

Yet the bulk of the episode was given over to a different job, in which Echo is implanted with the intellectual gifts and physical weaknesses of a crack negotiator. As this character, there’s no nurturing for the male client, no emotional interactions she isn’t being paid for. She only has to be smart and in control. When she does invest, facing down the demon that drove the originator of her borrowed personality to suicide, she saves the day as that professional, being both brave and very good at her job. Then, like a ghost, she is exorcized, and I missed that character.

I hope to see more grown women like that as the show goes on.

Hopefully Fox doesn’t cancel this one before I can decide if I like it or not.

forget the butterflies: Lost Season Five

Daniel Faraday and Jughead

Lost Season 5: Jughead and The Little Prince

It’s almost starting to seem normal to have the A- and B-plots separated by thousands of miles, three years, and uncountable metaphysical planes.

Like a polar bear let loose from its training cage, the action continues to galumph in great strides in both LA and back on the island. The Island 6 are far more compelling than the adventures of the Oceanic 6, although the action in LA will certainly be interesting in retrospect and there are scattered moments of brilliance – particularly the evolution of Sun into corporate shark and vengeful assassin. Ben’s use of human chess pieces is always entertaining as well, especially now that the moves are revealed within the same episode.

(Who could be challenging Kate’s custody of the narcoleptic turniphead? Maybe we’ll find out by the end of the season or – oh, it’s Ben. Hmmm. Oh, oh, but his lawyer – what’s that guy’s story, huh? Is he Kelvin’s secret lovechild half-brother, or what? Ah Lost, never really answers it’s true mysteries…)

Still, these moments are rationed throughout the LA plotline, crammed in the spaces between plot gears. The island 6 are encountering nothing but great chunks of interesting backstory, and – in between being attacked and bewildered and nearly dead, which is any given day on the island – developing an almost warm group cohesion. Juliet abandons her self-imposed isolation to stabilise Sawyer’s shaky emotional state; John begins to explain his motivations, and their lack of solid evidence, rather than clinging to his deluded mystical-John Wayne image. Faraday jumps to protect the group – and Charlotte – from gun-toting hardliners with only his wits and scientific background. Sawyer – who 100 or so days ago was an amoral conman preying on fellow survivors – immediately launches a rescue ambush when he sees Faraday at gunpoint, berating John for looking out for his personal interests.

Even Miles asks for help when he admits he’s joined the nosebleed club.

No wonder I spend the LA times wanting to get back to the island, where the group is pulling together and investigating immediate mysteries, instead of going on with Lost’s business as usual – a loose collection of deeply flawed characters continually compromising their few principles, who each may or may not be plotting to kill the rest, with the world possibly at stake and not nearly enough information to make these decisions.

I’ll probably be fascinated by it in a few episodes, but for now…

Lost uses the interesting form of time travel, in which the timeline is resilient. Someone who goes back in time has always been there at that time, and unless they did a thing with a key and a magnetic field no one’s ever quite figured out, they can’t do a thing to change the future. Stomp on all the butterflies you want, kill all four grandparents, rip open the box with the alive-dead cat – none of it can change a thing. You were always there in the past and you always did exactly as you are going to do, as time and space are far too powerful to be inconvenienced by mere paradox.

This form still allows for character pitfalls. For instance, Faraday, confronted by a leaking hydrogen bomb, tells the 1950’s-era Others to simply bury it in cement and forget about it – after all, he knows the island didn’t blow up. His knowledge of the future makes him ignore its limitations. After all, in 2004 the bomb hasn’t gone off, but what about 2005? And what effect could the loose radiation from a shoddy containment job have had on the mysterious power course behind the donkey wheel? And, now that he knows there’s a powerful, if dangerous and unstable, weapon, will Faraday ever be tempted to dig it up to face off some seemingly greater threat?

There are also pitfalls of a bootstrap nature, the undermining of one’s personal (assumed) causality. John Locke is a particular demonstration of this. He grows up feeling there is some destiny he’s meant for that he’s always just failing to grasp. Arriving on a mystical island that heals his spine and gives him an outlet for his aborted Walkabout studies, then joining the locals as their leader, John feels he has finally achieved his true place. He is King of the Others for all of five minutes before he’s sent reeling into the past, given a compass that will somehow prove his identity (an item that seems trapped in its own closed time loop, eternally passing between John and Richard across fifty years). There he tells the (somewhat) younger Richard that he will be their leader in the future, casually giving them his upcoming birthdate and location before disappearing in a flash of light, leaving behind a prophesy. Based on this, the Others attempt to groom young John for leadership from a distance, eventually culminating in his five minutes in charge.

One mystery solved: does John Locke really have a mystical connection to the island? No. Does he have a destiny? Only the one he’s created for himself – always seeking leadership and validation, and always just overshooting it.

Thus, it’s really worrisome to discover that the origin of the ‘Return the O6 to the Island’ world-saver came from our Mr Locke.

Is it too late for him to embrace the advice of his high school guidance councillor and see if Faraday won’t take him on as an apprentice jack-of-all-sciences?

Where are Rose and Bernard, and, if alive, have they joined the nosebleed club as well?

What other sleeping time bombs lie Cthuhlu-like beneath the innocent jungle?

How did Jin not only survive but get caught up in the island’s time warp? Oh, I don’t even care. I’m just happy he made it. There’s nothing like a bitter vengeance arc undercut by the lost object’s inconvenient existence. This could fill the Desmond/Penny gap left by their reunion – lovers whose relationship is defined by absence, with enough remembered sweetness to leave viewers illogically anticipating an unlikely happy ending.

Not to mention – the poor fellow – he finally learns enough English to communicate with the rest of the group, and now is back in the situation of having only one other person who can understand him! And by the time he’s picked up enough French to ask for a drink of water, he’ll be lifted away to another group, probably one that only speaks Norwegian. By next season, he’ll be the island’s official interpreter.

Speaking of sweetness, there is Jin’s new friend: Danielle Rousseau, marooned with her research team. Assuming the actress’ availability, it would have been easy enough to youth-inize Mira Furlan by 16 years with little more than some conditioner and lip gloss. But with the new actress, Melissa Farman, the young Danielle’s softness and vulnerability is painfully obvious – her rounder face and sunless complexion, with a ready smile and unguarded expression. Furlan has been the paranoid and pared-down survivor from her first appearance – both crazy and hot, as I and everyone else with eyes have noted – and it does require the jolt of a different actress to illustrate the character’s change. Somehow this sweet young woman will have the inner strength – or psychotic break – to murder her dangerously ill teammates, give birth unassisted, and survive 16 years of constant warfare with those who know every inch of the Island.

I can’t wait to see how that happens.

men in high castles

Frost/Nixon Interview

Frost/Nixon, 2008

“That poor poor man,” I said once to my wife, with tears in my eyes. “Shut up in the darkness, playing the piano in the night to himself, alone and afraid, knowing what’s to come.” For God’s sake, let us forgive him, finally. But what was done to him and all his men—”all the President’s men,” as it’s put—had to be done. But it is over, and he should be let out into the sunlight again; no creature, no person, should be shut up in darkness forever, in fear. It is not humane.

Philip K Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart in Two Days

Nixon just doesn’t seem so bad any more. Not after the last eight years, and not when he is up against the lightweight avatar of politics’ television-ruled future, trying to convince himself this is a worthy adversary.

Frost/Nixon is an uncomfortable experience. Our “hero” is a placeholder protagonist – the promo materials promise a flawed white knight who stalks, fights, and eventually slays the mighty beast, but it gives us a fluffy chancer who is driven only by a vague entrepreneurial greed and the petulant desire to have his face on telly. The devil himself is a miserable man in poor health who dreads the inactivity of early and ignoble retirement, who would trade anything for a return to the challenge, excitement, and stress of politics.

Is the dichotomy of cultural meta-narrative against the worth of characters purposeful? The infinitely annoying framing device – faux documentary cutscenes, with the actors still playing the roles – continually provide exposition and character motivation that has usually been imparted quite well by the actors (and if it wasn’t, it damn well should’ve been) or blandly trot out the well known myth.

(Seriously, Ron? Either leave it for the audience to learn on wikipedia later or directly stage it in an engaging manner. If all else fails, at least get in the actual people to have the stage, describing their place in history!)

The “interviews” tell us one thing – Nixon ruined America, man! – but the action presents a more complicated story, one that doesn’t exonerate Nixon but does kind of hate Frost-the-cipher and the men who passionately want to pillory the ex-president.

Of the characters presented, Nixon is a much better fit for a hero story: the disgraced and beaten former champion seeking redemption while battling the internal demons that ruined him. He is compelling in a way the other characters aren’t, a self-loathing and charmless intellectual who brutally forced his way into the one field that absolutely requires charm and bulletproof confidence. He’s fixated on his finances – after all, he can hardly count on the high-paying speaking and consulting milk runs an ex-president can usually expect. He envies the happiness and hedonism of his political and cultural enemies desperately, but can’t identify with it. His eyes may linger on the lovely body of Frost’s girl-of-the-moment, but when he tells Frost to marry her, it’s not so he can vicariously keep her nubile charms close but secure his fiscal future: she lives in Monte Carlo, where they pay no income tax.

Most painfully, this Nixon is intensely conscious of his flaws and their permanence. He muses with Frost that perhaps they should have lived each others’ lives: Nixon the brilliant, incisive interviewer and Frost the motivating, emotive politician. This character, though, could never have been happy with a career path that would leave him happy; he needs an outward doomed struggle to mirror his internal self-hatred in order to simply function.

This Nixon defends himself: every other president has done exactly the same things, but (it’s implied) had the savvy to delegate the dirty work. How much of Latin America was covered in Nixon’s fingerprints during his vice-presidency in Eisenhower ‘do-nothing’ era? He not only got caught masterminding the amateurish mess, but couldn’t bring himself to confess or deflect the fallout before this had eclipsed all other political matters in the country, as well as wiping his earlier accomplishments from the nation’s memory.

This is the Nixon that even Philip K Dick, author of VALIS and occasional Nixonian arch-enemy, could feel some compassion for.

His opponent, David Frost, is a man whose main talent in life is knowing what will bring the maximum number of eyes to television sets. He has talk shows in the UK and Australia and once had a third in the US, which he recalls as a fairyland celebrating his specialness. Frost wants to interview Nixon because it will draw a large audience, which would give him the chance to pitch another US show, which would allow him to once again get good tables in exclusive restaurants. He assembles a two-man research team, who are bent on taking down the devil, to provide him with information and strategy – and then ignores them. They pull endless material from obscure archives, pore over the details, and roleplay scenarios, gleefully embodying Nixon’s larger-then-life persona, while Frost chases advertisers and races to the opening of every envelope in LA.

It is difficult to root for this hero. Frost has no great goal, nothing he is burning to prove – when his team asks what he hopes to achieve in the interview, his face is blank with surprise. The thought hadn’t occurred to him; he had Nixon, they’d fill time, and people would watch. The end. He didn’t even review the material his team had painstakingly gathered until the final hours before the last recording session, and even that was only motivated by a shot of Nixon’s poisonous vitality in the form of a midnight drunk dial.

Even this montage is de-motivating for the audience. He’s gambled his career and savings on this one event, and he’s never glanced at the research he commissioned? It’s as if Rocky consisted of a somewhat successful boxer who’d been briefly on top, who spends all the time leading up to final his title fight gorging on KFC and chasing endorsement deals, finally hitting the gym during a break between rounds.

He could have put the slightest bit of effort into this interview, and all 8 hours would have been brilliant.

In many ways, to continue to film’s overt boxing metaphor, the final fight is before the last interview. Nixon, having uneasily accepting the premature praise from his staff at how well he’d managed the interviews, has a few drinks and calls Frost at his hotel room. He may be winning, but it’s against a pitifully overmatched opponent with whom he has no connection. There’s no satisfaction, no real struggle. He convinces himself he’s dealing with a worthy adversary based on a history of succeeding beyond the situations they were born into and because they both want to return to past success – wilfully ignoring the fact that he wants to wield real power again, while Frost just wants the warm glow of the limelight and better party invitations.

At least the call does level the playing field. Frost does his research, allowing Nixon to take a longed-for dive with some dignity.

This last interview session could be seen as the moment Nixon began to move out of the dark. True, he would never hold office again, and he would be forced to fill his time with inane retirement activities. But he did go on to give more interviews, write more books, and was even quietly consulted as an elder politician, allowing him some measure of influence. More importantly, though, it allowed him to take his place in the American pantheon as a timeless personality, like Elvis or his great rival, Kennedy. Years after his death, Nixon (…er, his preserved cranium) became a popular recurring character on Futurama, making a successful grab at the President of Earth slot, a position that suited his Machiavellian schemes.

David Frost reads the Sunday papers on television every week.

Futurama's Earth-President Nixon

an inconstant island – Lost Season Five

Lost Season 5.1 – 2: Because You Left / The Lie

Faith and science continue to tango in issues surrounding the island. We’re given shiny new pseudo-science chewtoys to work on – the “nearly infinite power source,” the survivors bouncing Billy Pilgrim-style through the island’s past, return of the universal bloody nose of time-sickness, the resilience of the timeline that refuses to allow the past to be changed, and the resistance of Desmond to that inertia by virtue of his timey-wimey key-turning specialness – but issues of faith carry the plot.

Faith is one step removed from the island’s miracles; here, characters need their loved ones and enemies to have faith in their unbelievable truths, to save the world, serve their own ends, or just rest their consciences. Ben needs to convince the group that knows he’s a compulsive liar and manipulator to return to their exile – while not breaking his inner imperative to never give a provable reason to support his demands. His poor wee skull would apparently break if he did that. Locke has to accept he is no longer King of the Others and rejoin the group that needs his skills and intuition – and somehow convince them to accept him, yet again.

Hurley, despite his stated intentions to screw over Sayid at the soonest opportunity, continues to be the dependable hero and finds relief in telling his mother the insane-sounding truth of his survival. Hurley, as well as being the audience identification figure and occasional Greek chorus, is often the overlooked centre of the cast and plot. He has a set of morals that it makes him sick to violate, and at the core of these is the simple “don’t hurt people.” The hatred of lying is a newly introduced mental foundation – that is a callback (and more suited) to the first season’s thematic establishment – but it fits with his character. In a twisted, multilayered situation, he follows his rules instead of believing his intended outcome with justify his means. Hurley connects and, to the best of his ability, protects; thus when he is in needs, others pull him through. The rest could do worse than follow his example. Not lead, as leadership is obviously not what he’s skilled or comfortable with – see Juliet and Sawyer, below for the opposite state.

Late and perhaps most interesting: Sun. Sun is playing her own game, connecting with those she will work with and those she plans to use in gaining revenge – but who is the former, and who the latter?

Juliet and Sawyer, the perpetual second-stringers step up to the role of leaders, and so far at least have slightly more success at it then Jack. Sawyer still attacks any situation with blunt force, but he turns that force on the people with information he needs to make even basic decisions that will affect the group’s survival. Juliet, finding herself more or less accepted into the group given their much larger problems than her origin, integrates her insider knowledge of the island with Faraday’s hypotheses and generally pushes the others to think instead of fight. Neither of them is hung up by Jack’s desperate need to prove himself, which helps.

Slate’s Chadwick Matlin posits convincingly that every season of Lost is entirely set up in the first five minutes of a season – otherwise knows as the “What the fuck…?” and “Do we have this on the right channel?” sections. If that holds true this season, we are in for:

Þ Island backstory, particularly in terms of the 1970s-era Dharma initiative. (yay!) Already popping up in the unstuck-in-time daytrips through successive waves of invaders, most recently the WWII-era mercenaries with a limb-chopping hello. More importantly, this paves the way for the return of crazy hot Delenn…er, Mira Furlan.

Þ Mind-breaking pseudo-quantum-theory time-travel shenanigans. (woo hoo! And may I add: God love wikipedia’s very short introductions to things no one will understand without 12 years of higher education!)

Þ Family issues, neglectful daddies, and babies on the island. (Sigh.) As excellent as Pierre Chang – the man of a thousand candle-related aliases – is in cheesy orientation films, I can’t take another emotionally distant father as a grown son’s sole motivation. Really, Whedon’s caught me up on that pretty much for the rest of my life.

o Also, enough cooing over baybees that miraculously lack sniffles and various jungle rashes brought on by reclaimed canvas diapers. Really. Though I do admit to being interested in whether little Miles – can we safely assume that’s little chubby-cheeked Miles in the Dharma bassinet? – was brought to the island or born there, if the toxic pregnancies are a new tropical feature.

Þ Time-sickness and the infinite power that causes it (hmmmm). I was embarrassingly moved by the sickness and resolution of The Constant, and fear continuing to play with the concept will weaken it, a la the Turok-Han vampires of Season 7 Buffy.  But the infinite power that cannot be safely harnessed, that powerful people will continually attempt to harness? Accessed by a donkey wheel? Interesting.