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The Weather Underground (2002)
Remarkable Analysis of the Dark Side of the 60's Radicalism
The Weather Underground succeeds where no German film dealing with this period has. German political violence shared themes, lifestyles, illusions and ideals with those of the Weathermen. Groups like the Rote Armee Fraktion however crossed over into leading a violent and murderous uprising against the post-war German state and social order. German society would have all the more reason to revisit this period to gain historical insight and hindsight. The recent high profile attempt at this, Baader-Meinhof Complex, is regrettably shallow and embarrassing. Taking a good look at this film would be a step in the right direction.
Green and Siegel, despite their obvious sympathy for the material, do not try and finish the narrative of their protagonists. The film allows each of the figures to represent as much of their story as they can relate to. From the intact and defiant self-understanding of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, to the confusion of Brian Flanagan, or the horrific outcome for former SDS luminary, David Gilbert, whose earliest scheduled release from prison is in 2056. There is no doubt that the Weather Underground failed to relate to the political reality of the period. They were instrumentalized by agent provocateurs from COINTELPRO, fragmented and distorted the SDS, and are part of the global discreditation that political radicalism of the period is subjected to. Their emancipatory narcissism serves as a lesson for the inadequacy of bourgeois subjectivity to actually bridge the gap into some form of normative or justice alterity. Their individual liberation meant exploring the limits of their subjectivity, drugs, violence, sex as a never ending hysteria of self-aggrandization. As much as the unbroken characteristic of some of the figure rings true, there is something out of joint about it. It is as if they never learned that their path produced so much suffering because it was not about the people for whom they held themselves out to represent. This becomes painfully clear in the footage where the Black Panthers, who were reeling under the full force of their leaders being serially murdered by law enforcement agents, rejected the Weathermen's violence and political superficiality.
At the same time, we are invited to understand the depth of their motivation and their willingness to sacrifice. Additionally, the film takes pains to take up to an important task. It represents the contradictions of the historical moment that made such subjective distortions inevitable. Green and Siegel succeed in bringing us into the deep tragedy that the Weathermen stand for, a society so failed that self-immolation appeared for some to be the only method of self-recognition. It is the portrayal of a lose-lose situation that marks the impoverishment of the concept of the emancipatory into the present.
Shutter Island (2010)
Hall of Endless Mirrors and Little Else
Scorcese at 67. Obviously it needs to be full, luxurious, and each moment complete. No part of the film should disappoint, or elude the control or presence of the auteur. In consequence, each scene is carefully played out to satisfy the intent of the director, while he remains motionless. Although Shutter Island uses the dependable trope of cherchez la femme, a more appropriate focus would be the search for the réalisiteur. This is not to be confused with a lack of directing. The film is so over-directed that it ceases to be just that. And the film unwittingly deconstructs this very theme.
Leonardo DiCaprio, plays Teddy Daniels, a United States marshal taking a ferry ride out to the island to investigate the disappearance of a patient in 1952. Like gangs of New York, the production design cannot be outdone, and thus lacks the spark of imaginative interpretation. There is no leap of faith required to believe in the environment created. What it makes up for in authority of voice, it loses for being lifeless and imperial. Like the experience of a theme park, every character we meet is to be no more and no less than we expect. No character should break out because it cannot conform to the role.
We watch DiCaprio playing the role of a man on a search in a flawlessly constructed historical über-reality. At no point do we stop seeing DiCaprio playing this role, and being the actor he is, we go along with it. At no moment do we actually feel like the constructed environment is anything but that. The film unfolds with increasing use of overly mannered genre fragments from thrillers and horror films, including a sound track that gives the literal interpretation of the visual dimension an updated definition. This only gets past us because we are in a fascinating theme park with a mesmerizing tour guide. All this schtick is supposed to provide the emotional aesthetic for DiCaprio's descent into the revelation of his insanity.
But this does not reveal anything about Scorcese, DiCaprio, the period so meticulously reproduced, or any one of the particular grand themes the film nods towards. This is particularly telling in the scenes set in the liberation of Dachau. The portrayal is heavily sanitized. The piles of bodies, in civilian clothes, not starved, and covered in snow. On the one hand one could applaud the unwillingness to engage in "KZ pornography", yet these images deprive the victims of the horrors they endured. They are not permitted the death they experienced, because it would obviously disrupt Scorcese's meticulously framed indulgence. The film viewer shares the same fate as DiCaprio, as he struggles to find any meaning in all of this .
DiCaprio's "decision" at the end of the movie to retain his madness, at the expense of a lobotomy, underscores this. He sacrifices his ability, and the burden, to adjudicate ambivalence and substance in order to formally assert his right to illusion. And by analogy, Scorcese affirms his own right to indulge his parallel reality, independent of what substance it may have for anyone involved. The problem is that, unlike Taxi Driver, he is not a (young) creator in search of himself in the periphery of society's failure. Shutter Island unwittingly serves as an example of how a film exemplifies the evisceration of once insightful creative indulgence, made possible only by the legacy of former successes.
The film is Scorcese's largest grossing movie. This success does little more than underscore the fact that it has no real intended audience. It is a Martin Scorcese film that exhausts itself in being that. The film carries us forward in the unfolding of an exquisitely crafted conceit that is entirely harmless and ultimately meaningless. This apotheosis of form is at the core of imperial entitlement. Through it Scorcese exercises his power and agency. But this proof is only of particular interest to Scorcese and the stakeholders around him. There is no place at the table for uncontrollable elements like substance or real pain.
Sound and Fury (2000)
An Escher Drawing as Film
Two brothers, one deaf (Peter Artinian) and one hearing (Chris Artinian), have deaf children and struggle with the question of getting cochlear implants for them. Whereas Chris is entirely for the procedure, Peter and his wife, Nita (also deaf), have great difficulties accepting what they feel would separate their daughter from them. The film's setting is a solidly middle class community on Long Island.
The profound contradictions between Peter's affirmation of his deaf identity, and his having proved that independent of it, he is a "success", and his desire to impose his sense of community on his young daughter is strangely compelling. Peter's intensity regarding his daughter comes across as narcissistic and disingenuous. Nita's manipulation of the child in one of the final scenes goes a long way to alienate the audience.
But Aronson succeeds in making both sides of the family appear ambivalent. The presence of all at the annual deaf convention leads to heated debates about the destruction of community that the technology will bring. These debates also throw into relief the projection that the hearing have about deafness as handicap. Emotionally, the deaf community is portrayed as having constituted itself as a self-protective, parallel society. There is strength in their otherness, as they are distinct and do not want to overcome this.
By being biologically modified they become part of the greater capitalist narrative of success or failure, independent of what makes them different. This is a loss, and Peter is the most sensitive to this, despite how impossible it is for him to articulate it in the film. The irony is that the esoteric part of his experience has also cut him off from the ability to evolve to a point in his thinking that would transcend his limitations. The film is much less about the limitations of deafness per se, but rather on the long terms emotional impacts of alterity, self-imposed or otherwise. Being other took all of Peter's strength and is fulcrum of the choices he has made. It also provides for him the chance to depend on others who have made the same unwilling sacrifices.
With his alterity removed, he is no longer a hero. His sacrifices perhaps fleeting and unnecessary. It is here that the frailty and ambivalence of self-importance is portrayed. With no counter-factual otherness to bind him to others, the perceived poetry that was his suffering, will be silenced. For Peter, this is a form of being born again deaf in another dimension. But all of this does not create meaning for a little girl who has no intrinsic standing in this pathos. If she can belong, she no does need to be the measure of another (in)justice. No one makes that clearer to Peter than his hearing mother, father, and brother.
Aronson's intense scrutiny of the ambivalence of otherness is fascinating because of just how much detail it leaves in place. We can feel the right answer, but are somehow left with an unresolved and unsettling feeling of being perpetrators. By believing in the right of the normal to assert itself, we assert it in ways that implicitly negatively impact others. Aronson's film does not help us resolve this tension, and that is at the core of the films poignancy.
Carrier (2008)
End of the American Dream in a Miniature
Chermayeff's 10 part series documents the Nimitz deployment from May to November 2005. The USS Nimitz is the paradigmatic symbol of US superpower status, costing more than 4.5 Billion Dollars to build (there are 10 such carriers in the class).
3,200 men and women live on the ship during a six month deployment. The ship's crew is predominantly in their 20's. The majority of them have left failed, disturbed, and alienated conditions to join the Navy for a better life. The recruitment dovetails squarely with the failure of US civil society. The Navy's regimented and autonomy-disabling culture is paired with an ideology of perfect performance and spotless adherence to codes of conduct. The sheer aesthetic and sensual mastery necessary to produce split-second cooperation between the hundreds of specialists needed to keep this technological genius functioning is surreal. Even the slightest error anywhere in the system could mean failure, disgrace, injury or death.
And yet one cannot avoid the fact that this intensity and immediacy is anchored by the failures that brought them there. (The class of officers and airmen work as hard, but their path is often so different that I will exclude them here). The voiding of their expectation to decide what values their efforts are applied to is a necessary pre-requisite for their perfect functioning. The military industrial complex has collected untold wealth from the machines that the crew operate. The purpose of the machines is to be determined by that complex together with whatever political irrationality is currently being reproduced by and through it. The wealth is created by depriving each of these individuals of adequate public goods, creating the basis for their voluntary functionalization. Whatever they actually are permitted to earn is garnished as part of this circle implicating them.
In the sum, the crew find themselves, replete with their human needs for recognition, belonging, and desire for sacrifice, on "Old Salt". Once there, they grow up socialized into a grand identification with their own substantive evacuation. They become great Americans, displaying truly virtuous characteristics, yet having been never allowed to decide what outcome these sacrifices and efforts are applied to. The pain and ambivalence of facing the failures of the civil society around them are superbly blocked by immediacy and physicality.
Carrier embodies a society that has downloaded (privatized) economic and societal failure onto its underclass. The ideology of self-loathing and violence that marks the backgrounds of the crew are sublated and put at the disposal of the very forces that have wounded them. They are all disparate members of an empire whose purpose is its own reproduction. Their sensual perfection marks the moment where they actually become one with themselves in that alienation. The Hegelian moment is unavoidable. By not-being they are reproducing the empire, which is more than they could ever be alone. It is however missing the crucial dialectical pole of having the freedom in consciousness and context to decide when the relinquishment of that subjective moment is just. Chermayeff's film captures this subtly but effectively. The film's aesthetics don't turn away from the tremendous power and majesty of the end product, while taking the time to explore the lives of simple crew members. It's this juxtaposition which exposes the Nimitz as the symbolic centerpiece of American societal oligarchy.