Walter Mitty: Why it shouldn't work and why it does

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

This is not a movie that should have worked, and looking at Rotten Tomatoes, many of the critics did not think it did (though 3/4 of the viewers liked it).  It's not a great film.  12 Years a Slave was a great film...which I nonetheless hated, coming away from it from feeling empty and manipulated.  In contrast, I was deeply moved by Walter Mitty, profoundly more so than that other, Important Film. I came out of Walter Mitty feeling a genuine sense of uplift and wellness, which, though it didn't really track with the content, was actually there.

The film is loosely based on a wisp of a story by James Thurber (which, despite being an undergrad English Major, and despite "Walter Mitty" being a cultural shorthand for a big-dreaming little-man, I never read until today).  The movie begins with Walter Mitty, a "negatives assets" worker (there are two in his department) at LIFE Magazine, on the day it has been acquired and is being turned into an online-only product.  The usual corporate white-collared goons come in from the head office to execute the unfit (they all, inexplicably, have beards), with the lead, Ted Hendricks, being played by Adam Scott (who I loved in Tell Me You Love Me). That's happening as Mitty has been smitten by Cheryl Melhoff (Kristin Wiig), who is a recent divorcee, and newly employed at LIFE.  As the film opens, Mitty is trying to "wink" her through eHarmony, and is being shut down by the site for not having done enough with his life.  Whence he meets Todd, the helpful customer service rep who befriends Walter and acts as an appreciative fan through the film.

The plot pivots around the missing "negative 25", sent to Walter for the last cover of LIFE by the famous and maverick photographer, Sean O'Connell.  Cheryl plants the seed to go seek out O'Connell (played by a beautifully scruffy Sean Penn), which he does, with a trip to Iceland and then Afghanistan.  He returns, settles scores with Hendricks, and gets the girl.

It shouldn't work, at all.

So how does it work?  Well, let me lay out the ways I don't think it works.

Number one:  Ben Stiller is not the right actor to play Thurber's Walter.  You look in his face and it's not that of a beaten down everyman.  The vacuity of Derek Zoolander insouciant mug is gone. There's depth, history, strength, and self-awareness.  He's not broken and he knows what is going on in the world around him, and what people are, and (essentially) how to engage them.  He daydreams, true, but they are not the pathetic compensations of a man who is at heart a coward. That's not Walter's heart, which is clear from very early on in the film.  He's not looking out at the world through a fog of failure and weakness.  There's already a strength and perceptiveness in him from the beginning.  Therefore he's not a believable Walter Mitty, as Thurber portrayed him.

Secondly, the setup:  Small man discovers his Bigness by facing and overcoming trials of strength and courage, and winning the girl.  Well, in a sense that's the Hero's Journey, so that's OK, as a structure, but dangerously trite.  If it was done more straight, with earnestness on the part of the film, it would have been treacly awfulness.

Third, the Other Places and Other People as Route to Awakening.  That could have also been painfully done.  Really painfully.  I tend to avoid these film premises, so nothing comes to mind immediately as an example.  But the thought of the Wise Native makes me start gagging like a cat with a hair ball.  (Please don't go all Avatar, either.  In that film, it's the half-breed that saves the natives.)

But with all that, why does it work and how does it work?

I think Stiller's goal is essentially to present the feeling of the state of self-integration as a tone. It's that state which Mitty solidifies through facing himself, via following through with his quest. Stiller doesn't seem to care to present a map of the way there, in its details.  Unlike, perhaps, some 60's story of travel to India to find enlightenment, Stiller is not saying, "Here's how you have to do it."  He doesn't care about presenting a "credible" portrait of the journey that Mitty is on.  He's not bound to Mitty as the Thurber or the quest structure would seem to define the character.  Mitty, once moving (which, I'd argue, is from the moment he pushes Cheryl's "wink" button), is real, engaged, with depth, and with a power of his choices.  He doesn't waffle when he chooses.  Even in the bar, in Iceland, deciding not to go with the drunken helicopter pilot is not a craven choice.  It's actually quite rational and understandable not to go over a frozen body of water with a man you just met, who will likely pass out at the control of a several ton machine suspended off a whirligig.  That scene does not match with a character who is supposed to be a weak, ineffectual, daydreamy man.  His choice to go is not, then, overcoming cowardice, but rather, embracing audaciousness and chance.  That's very different.

Mitty's journey is not so much a depiction of transformation, as of coming out of pause mode (begun as a kind of shock reaction to his father dying when he was young).

So, if Stiller is not presenting a real depiction of transformation, or a map to courage and change, then why has he not failed?  If he uses cliched structures and plot devices, why does the movie not feel hackneyed and unearned?

Because, again, I don't think that's his intention.  The secondary characters--Cheryl, the helicopter pilot, Hernando the other negative assets guy, Todd at eHarmony, even Bearded Corporate Lackey--are too full and have too many moments that point to (even if not fleshed out) inner lives, which are not pre-programmed by the film's overt conventions.  There's too much interiority to these characters, who should, if the external structures (of quest, transformation, seeking-the-girl) be shells or ciphers, organized around Mitty.  But they're not.

Instead, the film gives a series of events, characters, and locations which are all tonally consistent. The beautiful mountains of Afghanistan, the starkly sumptuous Iceland and the rugged space of Greenland;  the quirky foreigners and sailors;  the fighting of a shark without totally freaking out; skate boarding down a scary-steep road;  outrunning a volcano.  They are all underlay by a tone, like a subliminal musical drone that colors all the overt notes, which, although those notes may adhere to a certain "melodic" structure, are fundamentally changed by the foundational harmonic, being the integration of the self with itself.

The encounter with Sean O'Connell is the keystone of this.  O'Connell should be the Wise Man on the Mountain.  He's a man of the Old Ways (he still shoots on film, is geographically enigmatic, and is unconcerned with money), who Mitty, literally stumbles over on top of a mountain, laying in wait to photograph the rare snow leopard (referencing Peter Mathiasson's book, The Snow Leopard, about a quest for enlightenment symbolized by the leopard).  The potential for rank kitsch is breathtaking.  Yet O'Connell is played, and directed, as an actual man, with his own particular interior that is not beholden to the external trappings of the character, but who is real, spontaneous, and wise in his way, without being a cloying prick about it.  He does not represent what should be striven for.  Rather, he's another of the film's elaborations on the felt quality of a state.

So, that's all why The Secret Life of Walter Mitty works, because it's not about what it looks like it's about.  Rather, it's a series and collection of "carrier melodies," that allow for that underlying drone to be communicated, the tone of the state of self-integration, of an interior self that matches an exterior self.  The trappings are not the point.  The beautiful scenery and the foreigners in foreign lands are not the point.  The point is to have two hours of exposure to a state, which is your state, which is what the felt-sense of that integration is.  That's why it works.

"What's wrong with Norman?"--Star Trek Into Darkness, and the deep shadow of the Fan Boi

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

There is something seriously wrong with J.J.Abrams. I don't know him personally. He probably does not have bodies buried under his swimming pool, presumably.

But judging from his films, something didn't really work when his DNA sequencing was going on. Perhaps then his mother broke down and had just that one cigarette at a delicate RNA transcription moment. Or perhaps the damage came later, maybe that “little” head bump on the coffee table wasn't as simple as it seemed. Or, perhaps the early grade school teasing affected him like that one ray of light that strikes the skin at just the right moment and angle to start the process of a skin cancer. Whatever it was, there's something deeply wrong with J.J.

"Human emotions.  Hmm.  Interesting."

This what what Heather and I concluded as we turned to each other, the credits rolling on “Star Trek: Into Darkness,” his second Star Trek film, which we saw on its opening day. It's certainly not that it's a technically flawed film, as far as filmmaking goes. You can see that there was fabulously talented technicians behind this production; as an “film object,” it's about as good as it gets for a genre popcorn film. The CG work is top notch, flawless. The acting is not Olivier's Lear, but it's clean and you can feel for the characters. They seem to care about stuff, and have defined characters and role specificity. You know why they do what they do, because they are drawn consistently and with bold outlines.

So that's not the problem.

The problem is that Abrams makes films and TV which are soulless. (The exception is Mission Impossible 3, which seemed less under his control than Tom Cruise's, so that doesn't count.) There's something broken about his understanding of humanness. It seems like what emotion is in Star Trek--Into Darkness is the product of hiring actors who can actually evoke emotion, rather than Abrams' understanding and direction of emotion. Perhaps that's to his credit, that he hires decent actors. But I imagine a directing scene going, “Kirk is upset here. Go.” And then Chris Pine goes through a complex translation process in order to create a decent approximation of what Kirk is feeling, drawn from his own life and understanding of the series, and of a broader appreciation of human life. But not from Abrams' direction. I wonder if there's an “emotional augmentation committee” that the actors form to support each other, while publicly they nod and um and pretend that Abrams is actually communicating what to feel.

Abrams shows the shadowy underbelly of the fanboi, the devotee of (in this case) genre films. When one spends so much time in one sub-universe, I suppose that could arrive at profound, focused insights. But that requires reflection. What Abrams seems to exhibit it the other side, where one loses track of the larger universe, and starts to confuse the one for the other.

For instance, how desire for specific narrative, neurological, and visual impact overrules the integrity of the characters: Kahn (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) is supposed to be a super soldier, genetically bred to be “superior,” and certainly a kick-ass fighter. Taking that he's a Nazi at heart, out for genetic purification, he actually is a poor tactician. He gets a Starfleet officer to blow himself up (I'll get to that fuckwit in a second) in order to convene a meeting of all the upperlings in Starfleet, and then attacks them with what's essentially a machine gun mounted to a helicopter. It makes for pretty breaking glass and light effects, and drama around Kirk's surrogate father dying, but is almost willfully aggressive in ignoring the actual rules of the world that Abrams is working in. Kahn, if he were the Kahn depicted, would either have hunted down the main perpetrator directly, or, having gotten them together in the same room, nuked it (or some equivalent). It's a stupidly plotted assassination attempt for one who the movie puts up as a super-warrior. Jesus, I'm a Buddhist therapist and I could graph out a better attack strategy then that.

Point one in how Abrams seems to be autistic in relation to real humans. Second point: the officer whose daughter is dying in a London hospital (why is she dying in that day and age? They've got super medicine, etc., so what could she possibly be dying of?), who is approached by Khan to blow himself and his co-workers up, in order to save his daughter with a vial of Khan's blood.

I'm not saying people don't do this sort of thing. I just find it wildly evil every time I see it depicted in film, this warped conception of family. In itself it's bad. Very bad. But when it's not contextualized by the film, as, essentially, insanity, then there's an awful and sinister overtone left hanging, in which such behavior is somehow, at some emotional level, viewed as justifiable. “I mean, it's family! Of course people would sacrifice anything for family!”

Bullshit. Heather and I have had this conversation and been straight that given one of these scenarios, where it's kill innocents to save each other, that we let the other die. How could there be any other ethical choice? How does this fellow, who seems pretty conventional, loves his family, decide that his daughter's life is worth dozens of his co-workers (with their families and children, and dogs)? Or that his daughter's life is going to be richer and better when she has a traitorous, emotionally unstable, murderous, and ultimately, abandoning man for a father.

The problem is with the cavalier presentation, which gets the emotional life of humans terribly wrong, all surface and no depth.

The last major example is at the end, where the Dark Enterprise is crashed into Starfleet HQ by Khan. This gazillion ton ship, loaded with weapons—it's a war ship, after all—crashes and slides along San Francisco, obliterating skyscrapers and plowing through human-filled streets, snuffing thousands of lives in a few seconds. (Why it doesn't do more than slide to a stop and spark itself is pretty silly. Are the munitions covered in Super Spongy Foam?)

This is essentially a smaller version of what Abrams did in the first Star Trek movie, when he ate the whole planet of Vulcan. There's a beautifully rendered depiction of mass carnage that does not have the effects it should have on the film's characters, and by virtue of that, is asserting that we also should not have a reaction. “It's just a movie! It's all make believe,” I imagine him and his writers saying.

The wrongness here is not that it's not fiction, but the lack of responsibility Abrams takes for how his fiction plays in the very real human nervous system and its memory of trauma and vulnerability to, say, empathy. Abrams both gets to express and manipulate the trauma, without taking responsibility for the effects. He's making films in the context of a brutal last 100 years, with actual real fascists running around spouting, and killing on the basis of, ethnic cleansing philosophies. There really have been buildings demolished in a flick of a switch, in the arcing of a plane, and thousands have died. This really all is in the nervous systems of his audience, and to implicitly assert that it's just fiction, not real, is something dark and twisted, if not borderline abusive.

Which is not to make the case for the “sensitive self,” that mind which claims the right to guard against pain by insisting everyone else move really carefully. It's saying that one has a responsibility to playing by the rules, both the ones one sets up in their fictional world (why doesn't either the Klingon world or Earth have fucking planetary defenses, or at least monitoring satellites?!), and the rules of the human psyche and body. If you push a button, you can't then deny that you pushed that button, or that the other should not have the proscribed reaction. To use the iconography of recent human trauma and then deny the effect is a big problem, which all the gee-wiz fan boi geekdom cannot, and should not be allowed to, cover over.

We Bought a Zoo: Imagine your heart in a Chinese handcuff finger cuff

Click here for trailer.

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

So, a somewhat grey San Francisco summer day, and perhaps that seeped into our collective souls.  So we did what we often do on days like this:  order a pizza.  And you gotta do something while waiting for pizza, so, since also our collective libidos were similarly muted, we did what most American couples do:  "Wanna watch a movie?"

We chose pretty quickly, in what is that usually a painful process of movie selection, and settled on "We Bought a Zoo."  I thought Heather would go for "Man on a Ledge," being it has her heartthrob Sam Worthington as lead.  Who knows;  she's a complex, deep, rich, and at times capricious mind.  You learn to roll with it.

The trailer made it look like a tear-duct squeezing heart yanker, which doesn't usually draw me.  But something in this one, plus a "I thought it would suck but it really didn't" review from a friend made me pull it from the all-movies list and she bit.

Tear jerker would be a mild way of categorizing the film.  I was on the verge of tears for the whole two hours, and then wracked with sobs through the whole credits.  Now, I cried at the end of "Armageddon," so I admit to being a softie.  But you'd have to have had all your mirror neurons destroyed by the mirror neuron equivalent of an EMP bomb to not shed a tear for this one.  There's a recent widower, a young boy, a cherubic 7 year old girl, Scarlet Johanssan looking sweet and awkward and totally not sucking actress-wise, a found family (in the sense of "found art," beauty made out of random bits of detritus), and a lot of rare animals who, if not for our hero, would be euthanized.

Plus, the sound track, by an artist named Jonsi (with a few songs by Cat Stephens and others), is ethereal and seems to be tailor made to evoke both sadness and uplift.  The Icelandic band Sigur Ros (here's a sample) has a track on the movie, and if you listen to their music, you'll see what I mean.  It's oddly the right choice, both manipulative and true, giving you the experience of Benjamin's (Matt Damon's character) grief and his hope.

But beyond that, the film is so moving beyond its Hollywood schlock trappings because it actually gets into something true about human experience and grief and inevitable loss, of the simultaneity of joy and connection and loss and sadness.  That's why I, as they say, lost my shit at the end of the movie.  Sitting next to the love of my life, what was authentic that was magnified by the film was the truth that one day, either Heather or me are going to be in Benjamin's position.  There's no getting around that, and there's no contradiction with the joy of this human life.  That's what the film essentially presents, and with a rather surprising truthfulness, that life is neither joy nor sorrow, but both, inextricably and astoundingly intertwined.

Savages: Curiously Bloodless

Click here for trailer.

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

Oliver Stone:  he's one of these master craftsmen, like the Coen Brothers, David Cronenberg, Ripley Scott, who can't produce a bad film, technically speaking, but also can't seem to see into the depths of the stories that they are telling.  All the story is there, the technical elements of making a film, the characters are interesting enough, and the plot promising.  Yet there's a bloodless quality in a film that should be much more bloody.  There's a lack of viscera in a film that should be fundamentally visceral.  But what is offered is a somewhat ugly but surface take on violence and cruelty and vicious business.  It's almost a pastiche of gangster/cartel film moments and building blocks, strung together in the prescribed way, but without...what...maybe embodying it?  Something's missing.

The setup is pretty simple:  two high school friends go into business selling extremely potent marijuana, the result of Ben's talent with botany.  Chon is the muscle for the duo, providing the occasional corrective measures when the genteel world of Laguna Beach grass business gets messy.  They apparently go along for 6 years like this, till an aggressive Mexican drug cartel, beset by business problems south of the border, begins attempts at hostile takeovers north of the border.  Chon and Ben's business comes in their sights and they're given an offer they can't refuse.  Which they refuse.  And then their shared girlfriend, O (shortened from Ophelia), is kidnapped for leverage, and the two work to get her back.  And there's a corrupt DEA agent played by John Travolta.  And Penelope Cruz plays the ruthless cartel head, who runs much of her business by Skype.  She comes north to visit her daughter, who is ashamed of her mother, and lite mayhem ensues.  And then the nominal good guys win and the nominal bad woman loses, but the creepy enforcer (Benecio de Tores) takes over the cartel with the creepy politician, and the DEA agent protects the boys and gets credit for busting Cruz.  With a strange fantasy ending before the real ending.

So, that's pretty straightforward.  Yet I couldn't really give a shit.  About the drama, the characters, the cartel chieftain who had suffered losses of her sons and husband, the DEA agent whose family is threatened, etc.  Not that they weren't potentially sympathetic characters, or that the story isn't potentially rich with both human drama and political/cultural commentary, but simply that none of that was in the film.  

For instance:  the boys, after robbing the cartel of $3 million (killing 7 cartel employees), then use their wiz-bang financial fixer guy to create a fiction about him being the leak in the organization.  That man is then tortured by de Toro's character, and when he confesses under duress, Ben is told to burn him to death.  Well, that should be high drama, right?  Ben, the Buddhist pot-head and philanthropist, has to enter the gritty underbelly of his own world and participate in an aspect he's outsourced to Chon, and what we see about his inner world is a scene where his face hardens.  That's our peek into his heart, a perfunctory conversion or baptism in violence, and on we go.  It's like the movie is a piece of music in which all the chords are played as single notes.  

Or another example:  when they go to rob the money counting operation in the desert, they bring along three or four other ex-military, and set up an ambush in which they quickly dispatch the "bad guys" (who are probably just low-level flunkies on the illegal analogue to working in a warehouse).  There's some cars exploding, and a scene where two guys walk up the road and shoot some guards.  And one of the money carriers gets shot by Chon (when Ben can't pull the trigger) and blood splashes on Ben's Mexican death mask.  And yet it plays out with a strange kind of either aloofness or detachment.  It had all the elements of something I should and in many other films would emotionally care about, but when it ended and Ben was puking out of the car, I just didn't feel much.  

I wonder if Stone got into the film making and started getting confused about what he was doing there, but contractually couldn't get out of it.  You look at, say, "Natural Born Killers" or "Platoon," or even Michael Mann's "Miami Vice," and you see gut wrenching films (in different ways), but with "Savages," you know the gut is there, you just feel it's kind of empty.  I imagine somewhere into shooting he kind of got distracted, maybe a crisis in his family, and when his minions came to him he'd just wave and nod and say, "Yeah, that's sounds good enough."  What could have been a fun and stylish genre film turns out to be a dull and lust-less exercise.

Battleship: Formula, Weird Sincerity, and Meaty Aliens

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

It's not a good sign for a movie when on its opening night, in one of the largest theaters in San Francisco, it's playing in the half-sized theater, usually where they put either the modest rom-coms, or the films that are in the geriatric phase of their run.  Given that the word is they spent $200 million, and given my soft spot for popcorn films, it feels like seeing the lemonade stand with the hand made sign, and an eager toe-head kid looking up and down the street, hopeful.  I mean, what do you expect--it's lemonade made by a child.

I won't go much into the story, but it's like this:  there's a self-centered protagonist, he has the chance to lead a warship against aliens called in by the liberal scientists, triumphs by banding together with a former enemy, gets the girl, learning something about his own ability and the value of teamwork.  

Formula.  That's what these movies do.  I just scanned through the reviews and the dominant sentiment is that the film is "stupid, crass, and loud."  Wrong.  These films are like Shakespeare productions:  they're not about the text or structure, they're about the elements, framing, and flourishes.  The play, like the formula, is set, and it's the interpretation and engagement with those set structures that makes the fun.  For the smarter directors, they're like the Lars von Trier's film "The Five Obstructions," in which von Trier sets up arbitrary structural constrictions for his fellow director Jergen Leth to re-produce a film Leth had made decades earlier.  (We won't get into what an evil bastard von Trier is...)  The beauty and excitement is in the formal reenactment, not the underlying, mandated form.

Differential development of human value
structures make the use of force a necessary
possibility throughout the spectrum of advancing
integration.  Also, I like explosions.

Weird sincerity.  Heather warned me, "You know, it's going to be an advertisement for the Navy, right?"  She's useful that way, since I had not been aware.  But it doesn't bother me, or didn't with this film, because what it's (lightly) celebrating are qualities that are genuinely laudable.  I don't know if it's aging, where supposedly conservatism displaces, like a fat man settling down into a full bathtub, the liberalism of youth, or if it's the deepening of my post-liberalism, but the military doesn't bother me as much these days.  In fact, I often notice a swelling of affection and appreciation for expressions of military valor that in my 20's would have sent me gagging.  What I do react to is the lack of sincerity as applied to the military--well, actually, anything.  Cynicism and exploitation is the ugliness, not the military per se.

So what we have in Battleship is certainly a "pro-military" film, but not one which is either fetishistic about war or strategically blind to the effects.  The qualities it highlights and gives emotional weight to are those of individual integrity, intra-group cooperation, inter-group cooperation, and love of country (meaning, love of family, really).  It also is sincere about appreciating the sacrifices of former generations, when it brings on the bunch of old codgers to crew the battleship Missouri.  It doesn't get into the complexity of politics, and the politics and economics behind war, because although framed as a military virtue (lightly), "Battleship" emotionally draws forward the valor itself and leaves in the background the complexity of the expression of that valor within a war context.  If one confuses the two--the quality and the formal and contextual expression--you are going to miss the emotional truth being presented. 

And this truth is that:  we humans are deeply, deeply wired to move towards and emphasize social bonding (see "Loneliness:  Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection," by Cacioppo and Patrick), and we tell stories about what is important to us, and to our nervous systems, there's virtually nothing more important than the social.  So in these terms, "Battleship" is, within the popcorn vernacular/formula, another instance of the culture reaffirming to itself the importance of social cohesion, sacrifice, and family.

Heather and I were talking about this point in reference to the system of Spiral Dynamics (as embedded in philosopher Ken Wilber's work), which is a developmental model of human value systems.  In that model, the color blue represents the stage where values circle around conforming to an absolute/higher authority that provides structure and order.  Fundamentalism is an expression, often reactionary and sometimes rancid, of what is an essential element of human development and cultural unfolding.  We need blue values as the structural cohesiveness of a society;  a society without order, isn't. 

And even though on its surface "Battleship" looks like a piece of jingoism, which the U.S.Navy must have been very happy to participate in, it's not essentially a "blue" film.  It's not saying the obedience to a higher authority is the measure of value in a life, even though it embraces sacrifice and protecting one's group.  "Battleship" is what blue-level values look like when taken up by a much more (developmentally speaking) developed mind.  It's not simply propaganda.

Rather, it implicitly believes in, and presents, a complex and more-or-less integrated set of values in which the individuality of members of a group is not suppressed in the service of the group, but rather in which the self needs are augmentative of, and augmenting to, the strength of the group.  And as part of that, the strength of one group is seen as being dependent on its cooperation with, while respecting the integrity of, other groups (in this case, different nations, represented by the American protagonist and the Japanese antagonist who turns into co-protagonist).  These are, again in Spiral Dynamics terms, orange and green values, being those that focus on individual success (orange) and the equality of individuals and groups (green).  Go look at the Leni Riefenstahl's film of the Nuremberg rally and compare the values side by side with those in Battleship.  This is not jingoism, but rather a contextualizing of those blue values within higher levels of value.

It's in that sense that I can feel the warm flush of post-nationalism in such a film.  Yes, it's the military, and there's huge problems in multiple dimensions with both the American military and militarism in general.  But there's also the truth that, until there's a serum that up-levels all sentient beings to their highest potential--maybe what would happen if everyone watched all of Star Trek while being injected with Ken Wilber's blood--there's going to be divergent value systems, some of which are not going to be interested in resolving conflict through measured rationality, and a willingness to compromise.  To avoid this truth is actually really, really dangerous, and not in the Bush area paranoia sense (the latest version of the commie under the bed phenomenon), but in the observable truth sense.  This is what we have to all deal with;  it's apparently part of the structure of the universe that sentience has to unfold in stages, and until that's changed, we're going to have conflict, and at the "conflict plane" there's going to be choices about how to resolve that conflict which will substantially be determined by value systems.

Thus, like it or not, force must not be taken off the table, at any level.  At higher and higher levels of development, it takes on more and more sophisticated forms, in which the use of force is contextualized by intelligence, discrimination, and love.  But, given the nature of development as expressed in human life, even at the higher levels, as Wilber puts it, "If you run into Hitler in a bar, you whack that boy [i.e., in the mafia sense]."

Meaty!

OK, aliens.  I love-d  the aliens!  They are so meaty!  The science is ridiculous, of course, but that's not the point.  Again, what's going on here is genre:  its work is to interpret and novelly present an existing narrative structure, not create a new wheel.  The "aliens attack" subset of science fiction is tried and true, and it's the how you do it that counts.  It's the costume choices that draw the eye and the "oohhhhs!", not the set dances of the ball.

Here, director Peter Berg (who did the won-der-ful film with The Rock, "The Rundown") chooses something that you don't see often, which is the space alien that you can image having to take a shit.  There's no super-duper-high-tech energy forcy gizmo thingy (well, there is, but you can blow it up!), but rather flesh and blood and (alien) steel, and the aliens have to actually plug machines together!  When do you ever get to see aliens having to do the shit-work of conquest?

There's actually an analogy here with film making.  Have you ever made a film?  I made a 10 minute film with my uber-friend James called "The Norwegian Draftsman," which we shot in one night on a single chip camera, and then spent months editing.  There was one actor (to stretch that word), found props, on-hand equipment, a crew of one, no money, and it took us months to finish (albeit, with other things like jobs and wives soaking up time).  Now, here's a $200 million production, probably five thousand workers all told ("The Lord of the Rings" had something like 25,000 workers throughout the whole production), with vast infrastructural needs and resources, and though the result is a seamless two hours of story telling, the shit-work that has to go on behind it to make it seamless is staggering.  (As a crystalline example of this--though all the making-of material points to this--is the documentary of how a one minute sequence of the last Star Wars movie is made.)  You hear films being compared by directors to going to war, and here you see it, that conquest of another species and planet requires tedious grunt work...like setting up an alternative communication system, using found parts, because some asshole didn't calculate the vectors properly and crashed your own unit into an alien satellite.

Clanky and bangy!

The aliens in "Battleship" have to live in the same meat world that we humans are stuck with (though, apparently, they have faster-than-light technology, because they get here in what seems like a few years, from 20 light years away, but we'll let that go...).  Their ships are these clangy, bangy hulks, whose weaponry is as material as the bullets and rounds on the human navy vessels.  When they shoot at their foes, they fire explosive canisters, not laser beams, and when they lunge and hulk around the ocean, they take time to move from one place to another.  Just like us!  And when they hit the satellite that notified them of our presence (why they can't navigate around an object the size of a semi-truck after flying through the galaxy of space crap, well, we'll let that go, too...), their ship does what it should as a constructed object.  It breaks up into fiery debris and crashes into Hong Kong and elsewhere.

Then the aliens themselves, a humanoid species who does fine on Earth except the sun's a bit bright (their helmets act, essentially, as sunglasses), are fleshy, seemingly have emotions (there's a fist fight between one and our disabled Gulf War veteran), and are vulnerable.  And apparently they're not just out for genocide, but rather are having trouble with their own planet, apparently some destructive war.  Or maybe they conquer worlds, or something.  Whatever.  But the upshot is that they think and have motive.  That's so great!  And my favorite part is them setting up comm station on Oahu, having to schlepp in a bunch of alien tech units, and them connect them together with hoses that can be broken by a rampaging Jeep, and then have to scurry around semi-frantically trying to get them up and going again.

In other words, you can really identify with these guys, and their technology is not just at a similar level to ours, but actually functions on principles and rules that they are subject to.  The comm machine gets fucked up by the natives, and you just have to deal with it.  No near-magic tech here. It's bolts and couplings for these guys.

And that's true at the mental level, too.  This is essentially a scout party, so they're not there to burn everything to the ground (again--read my past reviews--ground combat is a stupid way to destroy a culture of 7 billion beings, so go for the toxic mold, I swear it will work much better) but to gather information to beam back to their folk.  Thus, they are on defensive status, and only destroy and kill in service of their mission.  They're rational, not like the emotionally unbalanced aliens of so many films.

So, for all those reasons, that's why "Battleship" is not the drek that the reviewers say, and can be enjoyed and appreciated at multiple levels, not out of some prissy academic exegesis that's meant to get the professor's attention for either a good grade or getting laid, but because it's all actually there. Enjoy. 

The Darkest Hour: C'mon, give it up for the B movie!

Click here for trailer.

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

I liked "Skyline" (2010) and I like "The Darkest Hour" (2011), and fuck off if your one of those prigs who doesn't like a good B movie. And these movies are both definitely B movies, without pretension to be otherwise, and are clever uses of small budgets. You don't go to Disneyland expecting the Louvre, and you don't expect funky, cheapie alien invasion flicks to be Masterpiece Theater. Unless you're a dick. Don't be a dick.

The Darkest Hour follows two American friends, two found American girls, a German asshole who steals the boys' website, and a cute Russian chick, through the eradication of human race by bad aliens. It's a formula, and it keeps getting repeated over and over. In "Skyline," you also have a small bunch trying to survive a bunch of invading aliens, holed up in a highrise, which itself is an admirably scrappy way of milking a whole movie out of aliens without having to spend a lot of money (they spent $500,000 on shooting, and $10,000,000 on visual effects). Darkest Hours goes a bit more upscale at $30,000,000 (probably because it was produced by that crazy Russian director of Day Watch, Bekmambetov), and actually shot in 3d, which I don't hate as much as the Cohen Brothers, but really, that would be hard to do. Thank the divinity of your choice that I could watch it in 2d.

Aliens as unintentional solution to
energy crisis?

So. The Darkest Hour has the boys fly into Moscow to pitch a website (or app, maybe?), which gets ripped off by a German kid (Dutch? Czech? Anyway, some European douche bag), presumably their former partner, who they then re-meet up with at a swank Russian disco. They meet up with two American girls (one looking like the sister of Anne Hathaway), and without much ado, the aliens attack. Sorry, the aliens attack! And part of the fun (if you're not a dick) of these movies is to see what kind of aliens they inflict on the human race. Here, the aliens are "wave" creatures, electrical somehow, who walk/fly/float around in inviso-shields and microwave the humans, sometimes directly and sometimes grabbing them with electrical cords and then pulling them into the appropriate microwavable distance. The coolness factor here is in the contortions that the dying do enroute to being powdered. It looks like the wire-work guys and stunt people had a lot of fun whipping through the air, to be CG'ed into glittery powder. ("Skyline" had people getting yanked into the sky, or sucked, vacuum-like, into the sky, and then having their brains litterally extracted. The aliens were litterally after their brains. Their brains! That's fucking funny.)

Ok. Many hip Muscovites get twistilly fried, while our heroes hide in a basement for several days, until emerging into a silent and ash-strewn city. The white ash is PEOPLE! (Soylent Green reference, what what.) They then do what all such heroes have to do, being, they must learn the new rules of the game. This they quickly do, noticing (humans are clever) that the aliens turn on electrical devices, and thus, like a light-stench, announce their presence. For unknown arcane reasons, they can't see through glass. Yeah, I know, but don't be a dick.

European douche bag, redeemed!

My wife and I watched it and tried to guess who gets sacrificed first. Yup, the European douche bag! Stupid and venal probably-German guy goes wandering out with a machine gun, then sacrifices himself in touching redemption for douche baggery, allowing our heroes to escape. Then out they go, find a Russian mad scientist type who informs them on more Rules of Game, and gives them a magic wand to stop the aliens (a gun that shoots microwaves). Mayhem ensues, they flee, find Russian soldiers who have learned how to wound the bastard aliens, then they all go through the subway, we lose a hero, then another hero (oh, wait, that was back with the scientist), onto safety, then rescue mission, then heroic destruction of several aliens, then off on a submarine as news of fighting back comes to them. Hurray, humans!

Today's Tom Sawyer, with mineral theft
in background.

Oh, and we learn that the aliens are here to mine the Earth's mineral resources.

Ok, here's the alien quibbles. And this does not mean that I don't like the movie. If these kind of movies made too much sense, then there would be a very short movie with little tension, because the More Advanced Species would simply drop toxic mold into the atmosphere and go have mohitos until all humans were dead. A little ridiculousness is necessary for conflict, but having them just be butt-fuck stupid, like the water-toxic aliens in Signs, that's just criminal behavior. Don't do that.

So, quibble one, which is the same as in my Avengers review: don't attack a whole species with foot soldiers. If your intention is to wipe out the species, as opposed to strategic political control, it is terribly inefficient to send in individual troopers. Like, hello aliens, there's 7 billion of us! It makes good screen time, but c'mon, if you made the trip all the way from timbuktu star system, didn't you have time to think through your attack plan better?

Quibble two: why does such an advanced species not have walkie talkies? When one of their members is attacked by the Russians, given how many of them we see falling from the sky onto Moscow, why don't they, like, call someone? "[Static radio crackle] This is Gor Formore, soldier ID#45678. I'm getting my ass shot off here by some of these buggers. Could maybe all you local fellow attacking alien comrades, who I know aren't fucking busy because the whole population is floating around like super-zapped popcorn--could you come swarm these bastards before I pop like a zit?" You know, our soldiers invented such strategies, uh, I'm pretty sure back in Egyptian days, so maybe better strategic protocols might be in order.

Quibble three: wouldn't it have been easier extracting Earth's mineral resources somewhere in the Australian outback, instead of all over Moscow and other major cities. I'm pretty sure the molten core/mantle/whatever (Heather said that's what they were after) exists all over and under the crust (our little scab of home...). Seems like that would have precluded some of the angry monkey reactions.

Limited sensors.

Ok, end of alien quibbles. Oh, wait, fourth quibble: again, being all advanced and shit, why haven't they developed better sensors, like ones that can see through glass, or can switch from electromagnetic to (human) visable light spectrums, and beyond that? We're vulnerable fleshy apes, easy to flash-cook, and yet we developed that tech a long time ago. Get with the times, aliens.

Now quibbles have ended. It's fun, these films, just that. Not highbrow, not sophisticated, but regurgitations of formulas that speak to basic archetypal fears and hopes of humans, much broader and deeper themes than some bio-pic or Emotional Human Drama. These films speak, crudely, loudly, often quite unconsciously, to some of the archetectual sub-structures of the human psyche, and in a way that's not all cluttered up with detailed personalities and relationships. Those simply are not the point. The point is to fill in the mold and let you experience that level of the human mind in a more obvious form.

And I love that. In this setting, the lack of "human detail" actually allows a clearer experience, in this case, of the fear of loss of control and relationship, and then the restoration of control and relationship. Aliens, volcanoes, invading Mongol hordes, viruses, doesn't matter and shouldn't matter to the watcher, because they are just the foils or forms.

So come to these movies in all their B glory, like one of those x-rays that shows a man walking, but only in his skeletal structure. Don't expect him to be all fleshed-up and anxious about upcoming taxes. Leave that to PBS and don't be a dick.

The Avengers: Dumb Aliens, Smart Film

Click here for trailer.

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

Ok, I'm going to get the quibble out of the way before reflecting on what otherwise is a decent and entertaining popcorn movie, with Whedon-esque flourishes.  


Here's my complaint: it's that when the aliens come to invade, they attack the whole world as if laying siege to a village.  Why are alien beings, 1) so aggro, 2) so tactically stupid, and 3) incompetent in doing their research?  First, what's with all the conquest, anyway?  E.T. may have been the liberal's version of a space alien (and frankly, much more my preference, all things considered), but why do the aliens so often just want conquest?  I mean, what do they think comes after conquest?  If you don't exterminate everyone, then you have to rule them, meaning beaurocrats, managing squads of quizlings, battling insurgents, etc.  Which brings us to two:  why so tactically stupid?  Aliens, when they attack, are attacking humans, as a race.  That means 7 billion and counting.  Most with a strain of nationalism that can easily transfer to the species en toto.  And yet the aliens come with what essentially amounts to a conventional army.  They pop out of a portal over New York, with laser thingy weapons, with armored flying worms (tanks), and little "manned" flying skiffs (humvees with guns).  And then they commence to attack, with that, the whole human race.  C'mon, "people," think it through!  Be smarter than your biceps (thingies)!  Do some research (third point):  at least watch the movies.  Even just the ones about New York, because that's the most cinematically destroyed city in America (my wife, caringly, just warned a couple friends of this, as they plan their move to Brooklyn).  But for a cheap subscription to Netflix, they can look over what their brethren have already tried and can quickly see that the frontal assault on a whole species is not very good planning, and does not speak to even cursory background research (I mean, look at "Signs":  can't aliens for whom water is toxic not attack a watery planet?  Wouldn't such stupid creatures have failed the galactic gene-weeding process by now, before reaching Earth?).  
Lesson for future alien attacks:  use a toxic mold.  Cheap to produce, hard to defend against, does not require a gazillion soldiers, and not subject (because alien) to terrestrial sanitation laws.  It's not that hard "people"!

Ok, other than that convention, The Avengers is a fun movie.  Not particularly deep, not revolutionary, not radically innovative.  But enjoyable and with beats in which the director, Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Serenity, Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog), gets to poke his head out from inside the big budget blockbuster cage and go all, "nerd joke!"  Not that it's a particularly processed, Velveeta-like production, and it makes me once again goggle at the effect one human can have on a film that gathers and organizes more resources than the annual civic budgets of many cities.  Because the film throughout has a subtle, but noticeably tone of not-so-Hollywood.  The pacing is a little unusual, not because it doesn't follow the three acts, the buildups and releases, but because it does it like a drummer playing a conventional rock beat, but then dragging just slightly the last measure.  You feel it more than see it, but it's there.  

Loki.

The story is, apparently, old hat to comic geeks, having been originated in the Marvel-verse back in the 60's.  I don't understand comic books, really.  My wife bought all the "graphic novels" of The Walking Dead, after getting turned on by the cable show, and now she reads me them as we're driving and fills in the visuals in her own inimicable style ("And then the one zombie is, like, 'argh!', and Rick is all, 'Pow," and then the woman--which one is that, this new artist sucks?--goes 'ack!'").  I think it's that the discord between the writer and the graphic artists is too jarring for my system, as well as the artwork generally being too histrionic for my tastes.  Frozen panes of scowling, I just can't take that for too long.  Given my reaction, it somehow, inexplicably, is still a popular medium (self-effacing joke, what what!).

Story:  different characters from different lines of comics come together, as organized by the Super CIA organization, SHIELD, to battle super bad Loki, who comes out of the Thor mythos (and the movie from last year or so).  He's made it back from the abyss, allied with the afore castigated aliens (who look a bit like chitanous humans, with some vague S&M overtones, and depersonalized, like they were assembly-lined rather than born--you just can't imagine them being rocked by mother alien, and later, being scared about monsters under the bed and being soothed by their parents.  Maybe that's the point, that these types of aliens are the adult equivalents of Romanian orphanage children, with kind of a species-wide brain damage derived from profoundly poor parenting and a deep misunderstanding of the neurological needs of infants for what in the imagistic realm is experienced as an archetypal Mother.  Because in humans, like the profoundly deprived orphanage children, you see deep disruption in ability to make connection, to see others with empathy, to modulate aggressive impulses through social connection.  As fascists know, you have to start beating the children early, and as all militaries know, non-conformity is dangerous.  If we look at the literature on adult attachment styles...uh...um...but I digress...)


Ok, Loki teams up with these presumably insecurely attached aliens to attack the Earth and become its ruler (and then what, Mr. Man, you want to have to deal with zoning issues?)  So he comes to Earth via the tesseract (super powerful, super high tech blue cube of power energy thingy) that SHIELD has gotten hold of, and promptly shoots a lot of red shirts in the SHIELD mega base, converts the physicist (who was in Thor) and Hawk Eye (Jeremy Renner's super archer character, who, ironically, in style and posturing, is the most super hero-y character even though his main talent is a very good aim, while the demi-God Thor is looser and funnier--my wife is all gaga over Renner, so she gave him a pass, "Because it's Renner!") via his glowy blue sharp pointy stick, and then takes off leaving the base to blow up and collapse on itself.  The growly one-eyed Nick Fury (Samual Jackson) makes it out, as does his lieutenant (cute girl).  The bad guy and unintentionally now-bad minions drive off to fix up the tessaract to create a Big Portal for the poorly parented aliens.  

he love-starved aliens.

Meanwhile, we get reintroduced to the Avengers, who consist of:  Captain America (Chris Evans), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Iron Man (Robert Downy Jr.), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Hawk Eye ("Renner!!!").  I think that's it.  So they all come together onto a flying air craft carrier belonging to SHIELD (which is super cool to watch, and then when you imagine how much that costs, it's a bit of a metaphor for a blockbuster film, utterly outrageous and awesome at the same time), while Loki n' Friends are plotting the end of the world.  Loki manages to get himself captured (by Thor, who fights with Iron Man and Captain America, tres cool), but it's a trap, as Loki is trying to goose David Banner into going all Hulk and destroying the SHIELD ship (I think that's his plan).   But they save the ship, turn Hawk Eye back to the the non-dark side, and have a big fight in New York after the portal is open and the sad-products-of-fascistic-love-deprived aliens come pouring out with their tank-worms.  Iron Man/Tony Stark proves he's not a narcissistic dick by nuking the alien ship out on the other side of the portal, but falls back through before his comrades shut down the tessaract. Order is restored (although it's going to be unfathomably expensive to repair New York, again), and the after-the-credits scene has the whole worn out troupe eating schwarma.


As I said, it's not the structure that makes this film, although that's competently handled by Whedon and his legions of workers (I heard him say in an interview that with a film this big, the studio simply won't let you fail, though I think he meant in a technical sense, as John Carter of Mars turned out to be a black hole in that studio's ledger, although it was actually a wonderful film that should have been very successful, though perhaps they did not sacrifice the right maidens).  What makes the film is the relationships and the repartee, the same thing that makes all of Whedon's productions.  Buffy was seven years of relationship, irony, tragedy, and nerdy intelligence.  The Avengers is moments like when The Hulk and Thor are battling bad guys on the ground, and they reach the triumphant conclusion of the sequence, standing next to each other on rubble surveying their success, the Hulk suddenly punches Thor out of frame.  


Another has Loki, fighting the Hulk in Stark's new all-green tower (thanks to the granola munching Pepper Potts), stopping after getting thrown against a wall, shouting at the Hulk, something like, "Stop!  I'm a God, you are a lesser being," and then getting cut off as the Hulk grabs his feet and smashes him over and over into the floor and leaving him stunned, half submerged in concrete.  These are the little populist flourishes that come out of the essentially modernist sentiments of Whedon, where individuals get to exist very distinctly, but also struggle to build and maintain community and relationship, which they are conflicted about, but recognize they need.  So someone like Loki is held as the antithesis of these modern human values (and dilemmas), and is therefore soundly, and literally (Whedon loves his literalizations of psychology and politics) thrashed.  

Joss Whedon

But Whedon (see the review of Cabin in the Woods) also has his more unconscious, less nerdy, unstudied aspects that inevitably come out in his work, almost like they slip out of the basement and join the party while he's not looking.  One of these is the Sacrifice, which seems to be there in all his work.  In The Avengers, the overcoming of evil requires the death of the old family and the grieving through to a restored family.  Meaning, Agent Colson (Phil to Pepper Potts) gets the big zap from Loki.  In Serenity, it was the pilot and affable sidekick Wash.  In Dr. Horrible, it's Penny the girlfriend.  In Buffy, it's a lot of people over the years.  And it has punch when it comes;  the animating force is not post-modern deconstructionist fun, but rather the depth of the modern mind and its painful attempts to find, and hold onto, community in the face of manifold overwhelming challenges.


Other Whedonesque gut-punches comes in The Avengers in two forms, the 9/11 references and the Nazi references.  We see first responders helping civilians out of destroyed cars, while skyscrapers are destroyed, or ravaged by the flying worm-tanks.  There's not overt carnage shown, but we know what this means, and it's resonant with what we experienced in 9/11 that our minds (my wife says she has no reaction, but she's probably full of shit on this one--just sayin') can fill in, emotionally, the details, and flash on those memories.  OK, at least mine does, and it's a powerful, evocative thread of emotion that gives depth and resonance to what on its surface is one more urban catastrophe sequence.  The design, of course, of the New York battle is beautiful, with all the intelligent craftsmanship that the Hollywood infrastructure can bring, but the emotional power comes from those allusions and half-glances to what has been real, very real tragedy.  

The other eyebrow raising moment is when Loki extracts an eye from a doctor at a fancy pants German ball thingy, and then goes outside in front of the old German structure and tells all the terrified party goers to kneel before him.  One man stands up (Kenneth Tigar, one of a group of wonderful cameos, including Harry Dean Stanton as a security guard), an old German who must have seen the Nazi era, and says no to Loki, knowing that it will be his death.  It's the rebellion of the individual against the tyrannical meglomaniacal impulses of the virus-individual who will not be in community, but rather wishes to absorb community into self.  It's another scene in which the post-modern delights of Whedon drop away and expose, or allow to rise, another, more raw and sincere, aspect of the director and transmits an emotional power that the trappings of the scene don't really lead you to expect.  

As with Cabin in the Woods, these streams and adjacent streams--the super hero movie, the post-modern meta-commentary, and the emotionally raw statements--make what could have been another velvety construction into something much more rich, interesting, and enjoyable.  It's one of the only such films that I can think of which warrants re-watching for the details and the flourishes.  There's quite an intelligence behind what should be simply a colorful cash cow, and blessings on the producers and studios for taking the chance with the punk-nerd equivalent of an auteur.