The X-Files: I Want to Believe (Chris Carter, 2008)

Micmacs à tire-larigot (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009)

The politics are, as they say, "admirable," but this is really little more than an '80s-style "save the store" ensemble comedy prettied up with aesthetic quirks and topical references. If only Jeunet wasn't so insistent on billing this as a "satire" (of what, exactly?) and would just admit that what he's really made is a farce, and not a bad one -- out of all of his films (and I include the Caro collaborations here), this is the one least suffocated by its production design, though his trademark combination of humanist sentiment and one-dimensional characterization is as misguided as ever. It is possible to make a serious statement about the military-industrial complex in a film where the main character drives around in Tempo Hanseat, but Jeunet lacks the moral / intellectual rigor to match his over-detailed sets, and the stuff about arms dealing seems less like a genuine stance and more like a passing fancy, a cause du jour. Decency triumphs, we all clap at the end and nothing changes, because the politics are not those of the real world -- they're merely part of Jeunet's hermetically-sealed universe -- and it's hard to fathom how any of his silly business could provide models, solutions, etc. (in contrast to the silly business of Lewis, Tati, Chaplin, Tashlin, Taurog, et al.)

Viktor Bout, photographed in 2009 by Sukree Sukplang (Reuteurs)

It all comes together in the end / The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski, 2010)

Against the Day

A few short notes about The International:

1. The character names, like something from Made in USA, are taken from literature and cinema: Salinger, Whitman, Wexler. The Italian is named Umberto Calvini (would Calvino have been too obvious?).

2. Clive Owen, Sisyphean as always, plays a man who hunts a conspiracy only to discover that there isn't one. What he at first believes to be a plot is in fact simply the mechanism of the world. He might as well fight the day. Naomi Watts is there to echo his words and explain them. When the explanations are no longer needed, she disappears from the film.

3. The International is something of an unfinished film. It was finished once, as a thriller, but it didn't test well, so the studio had Tom Tykwer re-shoot scenes to make it an action movie. So he have one full film and a fraction of another.


4. The film is not paranoid. It's not like a Pakula movie. Pakula's paranoia is born out of hope and disappointment. He's not a man who believes the world is sinister, but is worried that it could be. Tykwer and screenwriter Eric Singer don't have as much faith. The International is made by people who believe they know how the world works. The end credits sequence, the most essential in recent memory (and this is at a time when the end credits have taken on the role of "exit music"), confirms this: we see the events of the film unfold as they would in newspapers -- just the sort of stuff that would get a paragraph or two in the business pages of a major daily.

5. I admire its accusatory clarity. There's a clarity to the images (crisp, in Burberry and Alexander Wang colors, with the establishing shots photographed in 70mm -- Tykwer has said he'd have shot the whole film in the format if he could've afforded it) and to the ideas. Nothing is ambiguous about the plot -- the politics, the countries, are all very specific. Israel is Israel, Iran is Iran, the banks are the banks, Italy is Italy, the Red Brigades are the Red Brigades.


6. The world seen contre-jour appears to have a division between light and dark. But when you walk out into the sunlight and can see everything equally, the division disappears. (And what does the old Communist say when Owen interrogates him? "The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense," or something along those lines, sense always being a question of contrasts. Evil's easy to spot when it lurks in the shadows.)

Thoughts on Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger's hand and foot prints at Grauman's Chinese Theater
(from Wikipedia)

We're far removed from Arnold Schwarzenegger now. He's changed addresses, moved from the lobby poster to the political ad, from the movie theater to television news. Sure, a part of the old Schwarzenegger--the 1980s Schwarzenegger--remains on DVDs and the occasional midnight revival, but he's married to his politics now, and we can't separate the two (let alone divorce them) in our memories.

The last twenty years have infected the image of Schwarzenegger in the same way they've infected the songs of Michael Jackson. Schwarzenegger and Jackson stood out on the cultural landscape of the 1980s, so effortlessly alien. No one moved or talked quite like them. There had never been pop stars or film stars so devoid of pathos or motivation. Schwarzenegger would turn as though there were hydraulics hidden beneath his muscles; when you saw a photograph of him or Jackson, it seemed as though their bodies had been custom-built for the frame.

Schwarzenegger was not dispassionate; he simply made passion irrelevant. He approached every line of dialogue--the sarcastic quips provided by the screenwriters--with an astounding indifference. He was never human, never a feeling--he was always a sound and an image, and we never wondered what secret feelings might motivate him, but instead imagined ourselves as machines. Why have love when we could have love scenes? Why have hate when we could have a punch, a pistol shot, a well-worded put down? He made dispassion into a force, transforming inertness into inertia. He replaced acting with actions. Van Damme had an ace's cockiness, Stallone had Jerry Lewis's earnestness, Bronson had weathered distance, but Schwarzenegger would emit vaudeville puns like radio signals, as though he had a transmitter in place of vocal chords. His mouth was a slit in his face. He showed you that there was nothing human about the human body. You take the context away from a hand, a pair of shoulders, a head and it's no different from a chair, a window, a wall.

Watching his films forces me to question myself. History has a funny way of turning our interests against us. The 2003 California gubernatorial recall is an ugly but inseparable footnote to Commando and Red Heat. "Am I playing into the hands of Schwarzenegger the politician?" I think. The "man of action," the "thing that needs to be done" that exists outside of context or emotions, is the fallacy that serves as the basis of reactionary politics. The dream of the action film lead to the reality of a conservative America.

Did the dream fail? Or was it always waiting to betray us? I have a doubt, like a cough in the back of my throat: is fascination a surrender? Is interest an approval?