Project Android and the Involuntary Santa Claus: A Superficially Off-Topic Prelude to The Cabin in the Woods

[This essay—part personal storytelling, part appreciation of a Mad Men episode—was first presented on October 1, 2012, as an introduction to Drew Goddard's 2011 film, The Cabin in the Woods. Posed an experiment in "ultra-spoiler-free" writing, the essay introduces the themes of the film without any direct reference to its story. Indeed, this piece makes no mention of The Cabin in the Woods at all.]

I'm sorry, I always forget that nobody wants to think they're a type.

—Faye Miller, Mad Men Season Four, Episode 2: "Christmas Comes But Once a Year"

Nightmare the First: A Sinister Experiment

When I was a child, I occasionally contemplated the possibility that other human beings were evil robots. I can’t say at what age this idea took hold of me, because I frankly can’t remember with any precision. Nor can I say exactly when the notion finally diminished from an unlikely-but-still-conceivable scenario to a mere silly fantasy that I had once entertained. Indeed, I'll concede that a mischievous sliver of my mind still ruminates on the evil robot hypothesis, if only as a dime-store thought experiment. Like a Rubik’s Cube, it's good for thirty seconds of exasperating self-amusement before it is inevitably cast aside.

The idea was fairly impressive in its sinister complexity, perhaps too elaborate to have sprung from the imagination of a child without some manner of outside influence. But if there was a specific inspiration for the sinister scenario I imagined—some work of fiction, say, or the words of a particularly perverse adult—I have long ago forgotten it. The idea itself, meanwhile, is stubbornly resistant to the erosions of memory, and I can recall it to this day with tremendous clarity.

This is how my child-mind postulated it: What if, beneath their apparently human skin, everyone around me were nothing more than steel pistons and electrified circuitry? If the construction of these androids were of high enough quality, if the illusion were sufficiently skillful, how would I be able to tell the difference between a real human and a false one? What if everyone only seems to be going about their routine, but is, in actuality, following a cold-hearted program? What would the purpose of that program be, one might reasonably ask? Why to trick me, of course. To deceive me into living out the role of a normal Midwestern white male, to follow a path that had been predetermined by a bevy of malevolent researchers hidden somewhere just out of sight.

It’s notable that this robot-suspicion extended not only to deserving targets of childhood scorn, such as the strict teacher or the playground bully, but to everyone whom I encountered on a daily basis. Everyone: The girl for whom I harbored a desperate crush, the learning disabled boy in the back of the class, the clerk at the corner convenience store, the bus driver, my little brother, even, yes—horror of horrors—my own parents. Absolutely every individual was an accessory to this conspiracy, which I at some point mentally labeled Project Android.

That this secret suspicion was unbiased in its application seems the clearest indication that it was not born of petty resentments, but of pre-adolescent alienation, as well as a fairly sophisticated recognition of the limits of my own knowledge. Sophisticated for a grade-schooler, at any rate. For even the most cursory follow-up questions revealed the flimsiness of the whole notion. Why would such vast effort and financial resources be brought to bear in order to deceive an ordinary if bookwormish boy from South St. Louis? Who would fund such a diabolical yet profoundly pointless experiment? Who were the hidden, presumably white-coated chess-masters who were nudging me this way and that with their cybernetic creations? What exactly was the point of tricking a child into doing the things he very likely would have done anyway, had he been surrounded by flesh-and-blood parents, teachers, and schoolmates?

Ah, but that was the fiendish genius of it all: Because the experiment was perfectly seamless, there was no way to determine which of my own behaviors and thoughts were normal and which were the result of robotic manipulation. That Project Android permitted such ever-deeper rabbit holes of paranoia was not a bug, but a feature. It permitted me a way to pass the time as I endured the weekly school chapel or lay in bed at night waiting for sleep. However, it doesn’t speak much of my creativity or sense of self-importance that this scenario never led to more fantastic conclusions. Why would manipulating a child into a relatively banal existence be so vital to the experiment’s creators? Was I special in some way, perhaps a superhuman being who had to be kept docile? A cluster of extraordinary potentiality who must be never allowed to blossom to his true purpose?

In a word: No. In my young mind, the deception was the motive, and so Project Android was my crude version of Descartes’ Evil Demon, a malicious, omnipotent entity that manipulates the thinker’s perceptions because it can. Which often feels like the point of modern philosophy: Providing a credible academic framework for the insomniac musings of an elementary school student.

Nightmare the Second: A Very Uncomfortable Christmas Party

A couple of years ago, I found myself ruminating on Project Android for the first time in what seems like ages. This revisitation of a ludicrous childhood fantasy was prompted by, of all things, an episode of Matthew Weiner’s television drama Mad Men, which is set in a Madison Avenue ad agency in the 1960s. The episode in question is the second of the show’s fourth season, entitled “Christmas Comes But Once a Year,” and is, as one might deduce, a Holiday Episode.

As with any installment of Mad Men, quite a bit happens in the space of the episode’s forty-five minutes. The office of fledgling agency Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce scrambles to organize a deliberately “wild” Christmas party for the benefit of their most valued client, the president of Lucky Strike Tobacco, Lee Garner, Jr. (Darren Pettie). Copywriting wunderkind Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) weighs whether to concede to her boyfriend’s whining regarding their stalled physical intimacy. Dr. Faye Miller (Cara Buono), a consulting psychologist who studies consumer behavior, introduces her work to SCDP and receives a doubtful reception from creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm). Don himself spends an unhealthy chunk of the episode drinking to excess and brooding about his first post-divorce Christmas. This leads to a downward spiral that culminates in an ill-advised couch-screw with his capable yet naive assistant Allison (Alexa Alemanni), after which he heartlessly tosses the woman aside.

The episode is admittedly one of the lesser lights in a strong season of a phenomenal show, but it is memorable for exploring one of Mad Men’s most significant themes in a quite forceful and characteristically multi-pronged manner. That theme is pointedly expressed in Dr. Miller’s pithy summary of her work: “It all comes down to what I want versus what’s expected of me.” The struggle between the desires of the true self—if there is such a thing—and the demands of others is one of the foremost preoccupations of Mad Men. And it’s a theme that strangely summoned memories of Project Android when I first viewed the “Christmas” episode in 2010.

If there is an adult, non-fantastical version of the manipulative robot anxiety, it is the fear that one’s real identity will be swamped by the expectations and demands of external parties. The self-conscious dread of contemporary life is that there are no thoughts or actions which are free from the influence of others. At every turn are currents that pull us to and fro: the command of the authority figure; the approval of the parent; the request of the lover; the preference of the taste-maker; the dictate of the advertisement that shrieks CRAVE and CONSUME. Where, one can justly ask, does my true self begin? Where is the real me amid all the roles I am asked to play, all the identities I am required to assume? This is the nightmarish reality that is repeatedly insisted upon throughout Mad Men: We are playing out a complex script that is being inked in real-time by a committee of writers.

This reality is embodied in a scene in “Christmas” that is among the most absurdly unsettling in the entire run of the show. Roger Sterling (John Slattery), the silver-haired tomcat who is both a founding partner of SCDP and its head of accounts, is urged to don the office Santa suit by prize client Lee. Never mind that the acerbic, sharp-dressed Roger is perhaps the most ill-suited member of the agency to play the Jolly Old Elf. In the space of about thirty seconds, Lee’s joking request gradually and remorselessly evolves into a domineering command. Roger, who is irreverent to a fault but loathes being told what to do, slowly realizes that Lee is dead serious. To Roger's dawning horror, the future of the agency at that moment depends on him playing a dancing monkey for the amusement of this contemptuous creep.

The fact that this extremely uncomfortable situation is thrust upon Roger is less terrifying than the punchline: He of course, does put on the Santa suit, because he believes that refusal is not an option, given the agency's precarious financial position. The result is a sight as oddly horrific as any slasher film massacre: A dapper late-middle-aged man sweating and grimacing beneath a crimson suit and white polyester beard, forced to pose for photos as his employees take turns sitting awkwardly on his lap, all the while straining out pained bellows of “Ho Ho Ho!”

Compliance

2012 // USA // Craig Zobel // August 22, 2012 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

More often than not, the declaration "Inspired by True Events" serves as a marker that the film in question will, in fact, bear little resemblance to reality. In the case of writer-director Craig Zobel's discomfiting, slow-motion thriller Compliance, however, the resemblance is fairly uncanny, at least as far as narrative features go. Zobel revises the setting from the McDonalds in Kentucky where the events actually took place to a fictional "ChickWich" in Ohio. He also changes the names of the individuals involved, and tweaks a few other details. However, in the main, Compliance is a rigorously faithful depiction of the horrifying events that unfolded at the aforementioned McDonald's in 2004. (Zobel evidently had plenty of source material to work from: The whole incident was captured on security tape, and was later recounted in both criminal and civil trials.) This makes Zobel's feature a sort of film à clef, although unlike the usual examples of the form, the people depicted are not public figures, but the ordinary victims and perpetrators of a bizarre crime. That crime was the final, repulsive flourish on one of the strangest telephone pranks in American history, triggering the capture of alleged perpetrator David R. Stewart.

Compliance introduces all of its principals in the first ten minutes or so: Harried middle-aged restaurant manager Sandra (Ann Dowd), shift supervisor Marti (Ashlie Atkinson), teenaged chicken-slingers Becky (Dreama Walker) and Kevin (Philip Ettinger), and Sandra's fiancé Van (Bill Camp), whose significance to the story only becomes apparent later. The events of the films take place over the course of several hours, on a gray, slushy, but nonetheless busy day at the ChickWich restaurant. One of Zobel's apparent additions to the tale: A freezer left ajar the previous evening has resulted in spoiled food. The mistake prompts Sandra to dress down her employes, although she pointedly does not report it to the corporate higher-ups. This little character detail renders Sandra's subsequent behavior marginally less surprising.

Partway through the day, the restaurant receives a phone call from a man identifying himself only as "Officer Daniels" (Pat Healy). He informs Sandra that Becky has been "under surveillance" and that an unnamed customer has accused her of stealing money. At Daniels' request, Sandra hustles Becky into a combined office and stockroom, and there she forcibly searches the girl's purse and pockets. Becky objects in a disbelieving, panicky sort of way to both the accusations and the search, but ultimately complies out of faint exasperation. ("Let's Just Get This Over With" is revealed as the recurring phrase of the film, either stated out loud or implied by facial expressions and body language.) The initial search turns up no stolen money in Becky's possession, so Daniels suggests—reluctantly, of course—that Sandra perform a strip-search of the girl.

Things... escalate from there, but to reveal more would be to rob Compliance of its potency as a thriller, which relies on the indefinite character of the narrative's trajectory. The viewer is not entirely certain where the film is headed, save that it is almost assuredly to a Bad Place. There are ample opportunities for the whole nightmare to be brought to a halt, and part of the sadistic cunning of Zobel's script is how easily these moments glide by unnoticed, only appearing tauntingly in the rearview mirror. It's a mistake to regard Compliance's characters as though they were the dim-witted slasher film Meat, whose foolish behavior can be unfavorably compared to one's own clear-headed thinking. ("I would never have done that...") Zobel doesn't expend energy tut-tutting the errors in judgment (and outright criminal acts) committed by Sandra and the others, nor is he preoccupied with sneering at "Officer Daniels" in self-righteous disgust. The director plainly discerns the story's potential for eliciting an atmosphere of nauseating moral free-fall, and he devotes himself whole-heartedly to the task of crafting Compliance into an unexpectedly evocative, vérité thriller rather than a Grand Statement on the Human Capacity for Evil. (Heather McIntosh's score, filled with long, wandering passages of bells and strings, assists with this ambition quite splendidly.)

This straightforward approach is both a boon and a curse to Compliance, which is ridiculously engrossing for virtually every minute of its running time, but does little that warrants a second viewing. It is, in essence, a one-trick pony, which is not to say that Zobel's methods aren't worthy of attention. The treatment of Compliance's story as a kind of stranger-than-fiction anecdote staged for maximum effect proves to be a gratifying approach. Zobel manages to strike a capable balance between the absurd and the grave in the film's tone, all without doing disrespect to the real-world flesh-and-blood victims behind the tale.

The most distracting elements in Compliance prove to be those that detract from the film's verisimilitude. To wit: One wishes that the film-makers had cast with an eye towards true newcomers. The presence of familiar indie character actors such as Healy and Atkinson (normally a welcome sight) provides a perpetual reminder that one is witnessing a fiction. Similarly, Walker's movie-star gorgeous face and model-perfect figure seem out of place within the film's greasy, creased Heartland setting. Casting nitpicking aside, Walker in particular gives a remarkable, vital performance, quite apart from the gushing about her "bravery" that any nudity-heavy role inevitably elicits. Her depiction of Becky's utter collapse and, eventually, dead-eyed resignation is the film's most singular, stunning emotional node.

ParaNorman

2012 // USA // Chris Butler and Sam Fell // August 18, 2012 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Cine)

Rather unexpectedly, Henry Selick’s kiddie-goth bedtime story Coraline revealed itself as one of the best feature films of 2009: an unassuming masterpiece bursting with sensory wonders, psychological depth, and pitch-perfect storytelling. The film was an absurdly auspicious feature debut for stop-motion animation studio Laika, and it was perhaps unavoidable that their sophomore effort, the zombies-and-black-magic horror-comedy ParaNorman, would prove to be a lesser work. Nonetheless, Laika’s latest film successfully claws its way out from under the long, skittering shadow of Coraline and reveals itself as a marvelous, PG-gruesome cauldron of delights. Moreover, beneath its giddy vibe of dime-store Halloween scares lies an emotional potency that is positively startling.

Certainly, ParaNorman operates in an entirely different register than Coraline, although like Laika’s previous film, its exquisite design has a magical, immersive character that benefits significantly from the tactile qualities of stop-motion. Where Coraline was a bedtime story streaked with mythic nods and Grimm ghoulishness, ParaNorman is much more aggressively satirical. It is not, however, principally a satire of the horror genre, but of the cheap ugliness of contemporary life in general. Writer and co-director Chris Butler sets his tale in the New England settlement of Blythe Hollow, an unrepentantly tacky little town that is spiritual kin to Springfield of The Simpsons fame. The populace is generally dimwitted and self-absorbed, having long ago elected to make a quick buck off its history of Puritan witch-hanging with a proliferation of burger joints and tchotchke shops.

One would think that grade-schooler Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee), as a zombie movie aficionado, would be at home in a town where the spooky has been rendered banal and kitschy. Alas: Norman possesses a talent for seeing and speaking to ghosts, and while this ability has enabled him to maintain a relationship with his departed grandmother (the marvelous Elaine Stritch), it has alienated him from his living family and peers. His father (Jeff Garlin) and mother (Leslie Mann) react to Norman’s claims of otherworldly socializing with hostility and anxiousness, respectively, while his narcissistic teen sister Courtney (Anna Kendrick) simply sneers and huffs. School, meanwhile, is a gauntlet of ostracism and bullying, the latter perpetrated chiefly by mean-spirited lunk Alvin (Chrispterh Mintz-Plasse). Friends are in short supply, which is perhaps why Norman reacts with bafflement to the genial entreaties of cheerful, rotund schoolmate Neil (Tucker Albrizzi).

Mystery worms its way into Norman’s unhappy routine when his batty, hygiene-challenged uncle Mr. Penderghast (John Goodman) approaches him, offering dire warnings liberally sprinkled with mad cackling. Blythe Hollow, it turns out, is afflicted by an ancient curse that Mr. Penderghast holds at bay through an annual ritual, and it is presently Norman’s turn to take over for his uncle. Naturally, the curse is connected to the town’s legend of the hanged witch, and, naturally, the Real Story is nothing like the sanitized tale presented in the annual school pageant for which Norman and Neil are currently rehearsing. Unfortunately, the under-prepared Norman ends up fumbling his curse-warding duties, and things go pear-shaped awfully fast. Seven remorseless Puritan zombies rise from the grave and lurch towards town, while a storm of crackling black magic begins to gather…

There's quite a bit going on beneath ParaNorman's screwball surface, but the film hangs together remarkably well. Butler and co-director Sam Fell mostly keep the broad, dialed-up comedic horror in the foreground. To be sure, the film makes space for moodier, atmospheric scares and more than a few emotionally wrenching moments. However, ParaNorman's diverse elements cohere that much more effectively because the viewer knows that satirical jabs and wacky zombie gags lie waiting in the wings, ready to shamble onscreen at a moment's notice. Ultimately, the film is attuned to the wavelength personified by Norman himself: the fearless kid who adores the freakish and revolting, and holds very little sacred. ParaNorman gets plenty of mileage out supernatural-related humor, but also out of poking fun the rampant stupidity, gluttony, and propensity for violence in American culture. That's a fairly nasty stance for what is theoretically a family film, and the result feels like an uncanny cross between Idiocracy, Beetlejuice, and an Abbott and Costello monster feature.

The film's phenomenal design reflects its cynical bent: every character is a grotesque, even the ones who are theoretically intended to be “attractive,” such as apple-bottomed cheerleader Courtney, and her latest romantic infatuation, Neil's none-too-bright bodybuilding older brother Mitch (Casey Affleck). Equally vital are the environments, which exhibit a remarkable level of detail—Norman's zombie-themed bedroom in particular is a day-glo wonderland of eye-popping minutiae—and establish a dense, amusingly garish substrate for the film's nightmarish events. The filmmakers even manage to work in allusions to classic horror films without being smug and detached about it. (One particular visual nod to Halloween is quite satisfying, and placed at an entirely appropriate moment.)

At times, it becomes glaringly apparent that ParaNorman's narrative is fueled more by momentum and laughs than by dramatic urgency. The exact mortal threat posed by seven wobbly zombies is never quite clarified, and the characters spend a good deal of time fleeing to and fro without any particular plan or destination. (The fact that the film itself lampshades the silliness of its scenario doesn't prevent the relentless running and screaming from dragging in spots.) Like The Simpsons, however, ParaNorman accomplishes the deft feat of being a mildly acidic send-up of, well, everything awful about America, while also making space for earnest emotional beats. Norman's loneliness is palpable without veering into adolescent miserablism, and the risks he eventually takes for a town that barely tolerates him reveal a selflessness and wisdom that is truly heroic.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the film is its message, which is both stridently anti-bullying and critical of fear-based reasoning. Moreover, the film ties these two threads together expertly, illustrating that cruelty in the adult world is rooted in the same cultural and personal fearfulness that drives pint-sized bullies like Alvin. Butler and Fell work this theme in sneakily, seeding the early scenes with lines that at first seem like pablum from an after-school special, but are later revealed as key psychological observations that relate directly to the tale of the witch's curse. ParaNorman's poignancy and the surprising gravity of its lessons are driven home with a stunning reveal that occurs roughly at the beginning of the third act. Nothing in any film in 2012—animated or live-action, kid-friendly or adult-serious—has come close to equalling the affecting gut-punch of that moment, and for that alone, ParaNorman is a welcome treat.

The Dark Knight Rises

2012 // USA - UK // Christopher Nolan // July 27, 2012 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Des Peres 14 Cine)

The third (and by all accounts final) of director Christopher Nolan's Batman films pulls off a rather curious feat, one that appears to be novel in the annals of sequel-dom. The Dark Knight Rises manages to enrich the series as a whole, even as its only intermittently successful tonal and thematic preoccupations throw the singular achievements of its direct forebear, The Dark Knight, into sharper relief. To be sure, Rises is pleasingly effective as a sequel, and it carries the ashen aura of its predecessors to appropriately dizzying heights (and depths). The film expands upon the convoluted narrative and absorbing themes presented in the first two films, wrapping up Nolan's grim, mayhem-and-exposition-stuffed trilogy in a quite gratifying manner. Appraised as three chapters in a sprawling seven-plus-hour tale, the Batman films take on an air of queasy grandeur. Together, they comprise an unsettling epic about paralyzing contemporary fears, moral codes both noble and demented, and cramped psyches straining against the fragility of flesh and spirit. Rises also returns the focus to the fundamental story at the saga's heart: that of a haunted vigilante and the city he has taken as his personal charge. In this, Rises resembles Batman Begins a bit more than The Dark Knight. Its primary absorptions are the psychological contours of Bruce Wayne and the phenomenon of the Caped Crusader. Nolan's Batman films, especially Begins, have often observed that the cowl itself is a potent symbol. Rises clarifies and complicates this observation, presenting it as a quandary rather than a strength. The Batman is now bigger than Bruce, and it will outlast him. The fresh conflict posed by Rises is: Can Bruce disentangle himself from this symbol before he makes his exit? And does he even want to?

Unfortunately, restoring the centrality of Bruce Wayne has the effect of rendering Rises a bit more personal and corralled than the blissfully out-of-control The Dark Knight. Admittedly, this is an odd complaint to direct at Rises, a film that features several outlandishly super-villainous plots, not to mention the subjugation of all of central Gotham City under a nuclear-backed, months-long Reign of Terror. However, the first-order appeal of 2008's The Dark Knight is one of mood, a mood established through a brilliant intersection of velocity, atmosphere, and performance. There is something wickedly phosphorescent about Nolan's second Batman film. Its vision of a world gone mad possesses a noxious clarity, assisted in no small part by Heath Ledger's still-mesmerizing portrayal of the Joker. The Dark Knight offers an essential portrait of early twenty-first-century American fear, and its Gotham is partly a “Nightmare Town” plucked from Frank Miller's demented headspace and partly a crumbling Ground Zero where an alien malevolence writes its rambling manifesto in napalm. Perhaps it's unfair to gripe that Rises returns the focus of the story to the character of Bruce Wayne; narratively speaking, such realignment is arguably the sensible and humane thing to do in a Batman trilogy. However, the third film unquestionably feels a bit diminished and even prosaic in the enervating, reflected light of The Dark Knight.

Summarizing the story of Rises in great detail seems patently unnecessary. Suffice to say that it is eight years after the events of the prior film, and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is now a stiff-jointed recluse, having hung up his cowl and permitted the Batman to be vilified as a murderer. Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is nearing retirement, the city's prisons are swelling with convicts, and crime is at an all-time low. Of course, this last fact doesn't appear to account for the nocturnal prowlings of cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), who has set her sights on the baubles of Gotham's One Percent. The threat that is foremost on Bruce's mind, however, is a masked fiend known as Bane (Tom Hardy), a mysterious soldier-of-fortune who has purportedly arrived in Gotham in order to carry out a violent revolution. That upheaval gives lip service to the miseries endured by the roused rabble, but it is directed by Bane's glib cynicism and sociopathic personality. Similar to those of the Joker, Bane's plots are massive, staggeringly crabbed things, demanding a level of planning that strains against the supposed realism of Nolan's series. However, where the Joker veered from one unlikely scheme to the next “like a dog chasing a car,” Bane moves calmly and relentlessly towards a singular goal: the obliteration of Gotham and the Batman, in that order. This establishes Bane as a more opposable and comprehensible nemesis, in that he has a Master Plan that must be discerned and stopped. The question becomes whether the weaker, slower, out-of-practice Bruce is capable of stopping Bane. The horror of Rises is therefore not one of "escalation," as foreshadowed in Begins and demonstrated in The Dark Knight, but of diminishment, of the unstoppable march towards a day when the Batman will be defeated.

Rises develops this thematic thread splendidly, although the film surrounds it with obscurely presented plot points, questionable character actions, and a plethora of science-fiction nonsense that far outdoes anything in the prior films. (In one of the film's more laughable sights, an enormous fusion reactor-turned-doomsday device is tossed around as though it were a medicine ball, with no discernible effect on its ominous countdown.) One wonders why Nolan elected to resurrect the unfortunate Bond-villain wackiness of Begins—recall Ra's al Ghul's ludicrous “microwave water vaporizer” scheme—and meld it with the often confounding, Byzantine plotting of The Dark Knight. Regardless, Rises' story is at its most enthralling when it is focused on Bruce Wayne and his demons, rather than militaristic spectacle. Certainly, there's an adolescent thrill to be gleaned from the sight of Batman's hovercraft dodging heat-seeking missiles between Gotham's skyscrapers, or of thousands of police officers and Bane-loyal zealots clashing man-to-man in the streets within a haze of swirling snow. What truly lingers, however, is the stark drama of Bruce's tribulations in a hellish prison-pit half a world away. Echoing motifs and moments stretching all the way back to the opening scenes of Begins, it is this borderline surreal sequence that exhibits Nolan at his most evocative and persuasive. The sequence cunningly exploits both Bruce Wayne's status as a legendary hero and the thematic groundwork laid by the prior films, creating an emotional crescendo that matches the guttural chant of the prisoners: “Rise... Rise... Rise...”

Beyond the Black Rainbow

2010 // Canada // Panos Cosmatos // July 6, 2012 // Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

[Beyond the Black Rainbow was screened on July 6 and 7, 2012 as a part of Destroy the Brain's monthly Late Nite Grindhouse program, featuring cult and exploitation films from the past and present.]​

Writer-director Panos Cosmatos' oneiric science-fiction feature, Beyond the Black Rainbow, is deeply entrenched in a veritable encyclopedia of genre landmarks, drawing on its antecedents for theme, mood, and evocative production design detail. Particularly evident are the fingerprints of David Cronenberg's late 1970s and early 80s horror films, with all their distinctive markers: the creepy religio-political factions and cult-like self-help movements; the nightmarish "fifteen-minutes-into-the-future" technology, replete with sinister black-box devices that bridge the gap between the analog and digital; the affectless, drawn-out performances; and the pointedly Canadian atmosphere to the art direction. There's a bit of later Cronenberg in Cosmatos' film as well, in that Rainbow calls to mind the druggy disconnectedness and Wonderland randomness of the former director's William S. Burroughs riff, Naked Lunch.

Other apparent forebears abound: Ken Russel's Altered States, Mark L. Lester's Firestarter, and Saul Bass' sole directorial effort, Phase IV. There are also a plethora of stylistic and thematic echoes from the works of Kubrick and Tarkovsky. Heck, even Silent Running gets a visual nod, a jarring reference given that Rainbow is, tonally speaking, worlds apart from Douglas Trumball's eco-futurist parable of a space-faring Garden of Eden. However, the deep cinematic traditions that Cosmotas draws upon are something of a distraction from the task of approaching the film as a trippy, difficult work in its own right. And Rainbow is nothing if not keenly aware of its own unconventional character. The film isn't quite desperate about wallowing in obtuse weirdness, but it is damn determined to be as challenging and impenetrable to the viewer as possible.

The film opens with a promotional film that describes the Arboria Institute, a psychological research center devoted to ensuring the "happiness" of patients through vague technological, pharmacological, and spiritual means. The year is 1983, although it is a menacing, parallel 1983 illuminated by a baleful red LED glow and scored by a relentless electronic drone. The film posits an alternate universe where the late 1970s have simply continued and Reagan-era gaudiness and sentimentalism have yet to arrive. Inasmuch as Rainbow has a plot, it is this: Elena (Eva Allen), a young woman who barely speaks and has ill-defined psychic powers, is being held at the Institute under the "care" of the turtleneck-favoring and obviously sinister Dr. Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers). Why exactly Elena is imprisoned at the Institute and what Dr. Nyle wants from her are unclear, but there is much about Rainbow that is unclear. Suffice to say that stuff happens: Elena is subjected to a series of bizarre interrogations; jump-suited, helmeted guards menace her; she is permitted to psycho-kinetically murder a nurse who snoops through the Institute's files; Dr. Nyle meets with Arboria's elderly founder (Scott Hylands), and has a flashback to his own early days in the man's care; Elena stumbles upon a means to escape; Dr. Nyle has a kind of psychotic breakdown; a pyramidal machine emits light and smoke.

The film doesn't make much sense, but it's difficult to say whether this is by design or not. Often, Cosmotos seems to be working in an almost avant-garde mode, where narrative is an afterthought and the film occupies itself primarily with conjuring an unsettling mood and creating disturbing, potent images. In this it succeeds, for Rainbow proves to be a legitimately creepy film. It does, however, seem wildly inappropriate to term it a "thriller" when, from a purely objective standpoint, nothing at all happens for long stretches at time. The film's stylings seem designed to be oppressive, creating a haze of nauseating light and sound that echoes the psychological demolition that the Institute is inflicting on Elena. The boundaries between individual days dissolve as Elena awakens again and again in her spotlessly clean white cell to the same spinning Arboria logo on the video monitors. The performances from the two primary actors are pitched to be overtly alienating: Rogers softly moans out his lines, punctuating every word with a long pause, while Allen has exactly one expression of slack terror that she wears throughout the film. They aren't really "acting" in the usual sense, but, then again, Cosmotos doesn't seem to want acting cluttering up his bench project in mood and design.

The overall effect is that of a narcotic trance, where every detail seems significant, but slips away from the viewer with maddening ease. It's a bracingly audacious way to make a film, demanding a staggering tonal discipline that Cosmotos nearly (but not quite) pulls off. However, a film in which lots of nothing happens and the few somethings that do happen are mysterious (or downright opaque)... well, that can be wearisome for any viewer, even a viewer who is accustomed to glacially-paced experimental film. It's not a pleasant experience by any stretch, but pleasure doesn't seem to be Rainbow's aim. It is, in its way, pure cinema, but it is a cold, somewhat aimless cinema. Cosmotos lacks the talent that master surrealist film-makers like Lynch and Jardowsky demonstrate in selecting inexplicable images that seem intuitively, emotionally "correct". Rainbow, in contrast, often feels calculatingly weird, in the most joyless, serious-minded manner possible.

Cosmotos' film eventually collapses, but, surprisingly, it is not due to its unyeilding atmospherics. Rather, it is when Rainbow executes a baffling sprint into slasher-film convention and black comedy camp in its final scenes. This suggests that, oddly enough, it is a lack of dedication to confounding strangeness that ultimately defeats the film, undermining its potential as an enduring acid-trip cult feature.

The Amazing Spider-Man

2012 // USA // Marc Webb // July 2, 2012 // 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Chesterfield Galaxy 14 Cine)

Perhaps the most unkind thing one can observe regarding The Amazing Spider-Man is how much of a struggle it is to say anything notable about it at all. The film is just there, a slick, by-the-numbers recitation of the Spidey origin story in a slightly different key than Sam Raimi's Spider-Man. That 2001 feature remains curiously over-praised to this day, and it's a perverse commentary on Amazing's mediocrity that it will ultimately serve to burnish the earlier film's reputation.

Director Marc Webb's take on the Web-Slinger's tale offers an ill-advised emotional focus on Peter Parker's dead parents, as well as a few superficial changes. Here the romantic prize is Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) instead of Mary Jane Watson, and the webs that sprung from a genetic mutation in 2001 are here high-tech devices of Parker's own invention (as in the original comic tale). In lieu of Tobey Maguire, this outing features Andrew Garfield as Spidey, who at least proves more nuanced and flexible in the role. Overall, however, the tweaks leave such a slight impression that one wonders why the filmmakers bothered with them at all. Amazing distressingly suggests that Marvel and Hollywood have managed to reduce Spidey to a predictable, all-flash product, an ignoble fate for the the crown prince of conflicted, wise-ass adolescent superheroes.

The little moments that entertain in Amazing are mostly of an actorly or technical nature: Garfield and Stone's natural, sweetly awkward courtship, for example, or the eerie way that the scaly visage of the villainous Lizard echoes the face of alter ego Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans). However, the film is so weighed down by triteness and and futile pathos-wringing that it quickly fades from memory after the credits roll. For a film about one of the most recognizable and beloved of modern spandex-clad heroes, such flimsiness is disappointing, to say the least.