The Play's the Thing: Clouds of Sils Maria

[Updated 11/19/15.]

It's tempting to regard French filmmaker Olivier Assayas' latest feature, the numinous Clouds of Sils Maria, primarily as an exhibition for the talents of its lead actresses, Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart, and to a lesser extent for the film's artful, multi-layered screenplay, penned as usual by Assayas himself. Although it arguably fits Clouds, that dreadful descriptor, “actor's movie,” has always seemed like a bit of a backhanded compliment, hinting that a film's direction is blandly functional or devoid of stylistic imprint. This is not a critique that one can seriously level at Assayas' latest work, which illustrates the director's mature command of the mise-en-scène, as well as a few of his curious signature flourishes. (In particular, Clouds is a showcase for the Assayasian abrupt fade to black, concluding scenes a beat earlier than a more formulaic editing approach might suggest.) Still, Clouds is ultimately a film in which the actresses—and it is overwhelmingly, fundamentally a story about women—take center stage. Rather that crowding them with formal floridness, Assayas gives his performers the space to uncover the endless, twisting corridors that snake through his dialog.

Set primarily in the breathtaking, crystalline landscape of the Swiss Alps, the film focuses on the travails of Maria Enders (Binoche), a renowned French actress of stage and screen. When the viewer first meets Maria and her harried yet resourceful American assistant Valentine (Stewart), the pair are bound for Zürich, where the actress is scheduled to accept an award on behalf of Swiss playwright Wilhelm Melchior, a long-time friend of Maria's and now a virtual recluse. It was Wilhelm's lesbian romantic tragedy Maloja Snake that first catapulted Maria to international fame: When she was just 18 years old, Maria famously portrayed Sigrid, the tale's brazen young office assistant, first on the stage and then in a film adaptation. In the play, the character of Sigrid seduces and then discards the company's middle-aged president, Helena, eventually driving the older woman to an apparent suicide.

Unfortunately, while en route to the awards ceremony, Maria and Val receive word that Wilhelm has died. The subsequent celebration of the playwright's work thus takes on a funereal tone, and Maria's slim enthusiasm for the whole affair slips into grief-fueled doubt. Nonetheless, the actress puts on her red carpet smile and endures the proceedings, despite the distraction of her ongoing divorce and the hovering presence of a despised ex-lover (Hanns Zischler). The post-awards dinner providers her with some face time with celebrated theater director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), who has been courting Maria to star in a new production of Maloja Snake, this time in the role of Helena. For the new Sigrid, Klaus confirms that he has been seeking Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz), a volatile American film actress who is presently straddling the line between It Girl and D-list punch line. Maria had previously been cool to the notion of revisiting the play, but after discussing the project with Klaus she is more receptive.

The aforementioned events essentially constitute an extended prologue: The bulk of the film unfolds some weeks later, as Maria and Val arrive at Wilhelm's hideaway in east Switzerland, near the village of Sils Maria. Overwhelmed by the memories that permeate the place, the playwright's widow Rosa (Angela Winkler) vacates the house and hands the keys to Maria so that the actress can rehearse in peace for her upcoming role in the revival of Maloja Snake. During the subsequent weeks, Maria and Val run lines amid the placid alpine surroundings, at least partly under the theory that the place Wilhelm chose as his sanctuary from the outside world might provide some inspiration. Besides rehearsing the play, the women wander the misty mountain trails, swim in the frigid lakes, and make infrequent forays into the nearby village. On one occasion, they meet with Maria's co-star Jo-Ann and her novelist boyfriend (Johnny Flynn) at a posh local hotel. Having seen the American actress in a dreadful superhero film and perused her tabloid exploits online, Maria is disarmed by Jo-Ann's poise and magnanimity. (“Of course you liked them,” Val snarks at her employer with a grin, “They spent the whole night flattering you.”)

Such detours aside, however, the lengthy middle section of Clouds functions as a sort of cabin fever drama, one focused on the mounting strain that the situation puts on Maria and Val's ambiguous bond. Val's lack of theatrical training notwithstanding, she dutifully plays the part of Sigrid to Maria's Helena, rehearsing the play's emotionally fraught scenes over and over. Although Val is loyal and accommodating, she doesn't keep her opinions to herself, freely offering Maria criticism and even insight into the subtleties of the play. Meanwhile, the older woman grows increasingly frustrated with the role of Helena, a character she finds pathetic and alienating. Both women smoke relentlessly to relieve the tension; the frustrated search for a misplaced package of cigarettes becomes a recurring motif. When not rehearsing, the pair discuss the play's meaning and the motives of its characters, with occasional digressions into related matters, such as the ups and downs of Jo-Ann's career, or the artistic worth of Hollywood blockbusters. In this way, the play and everything adjacent to it begin to consume Maria and Val, stirring up discomfiting undercurrents and revealing fissures in their ostensibly professional relationship.

The contrasts between the lead actresses and their performances are an essential aspect of Clouds. Binoche has gravitated toward a distinct type of character since reaching middle age, but it's a consistently engaging one: the outspoken, put-upon, slightly frazzled professional woman who nonetheless harbors profound self-doubt. (The quintessential Binoche moment is one in which she hurriedly juggles multiple tasks while pleading with pursed lips into a cell phone, “No, no, no, no!,” inevitably at some self-important male listener.) Maria is yet another version of this same ur-woman, whose incarnations have previously appeared in films such as Caché, Flight of the Red Balloon, Summer Hours, Certified Copy, and the otherwise forgettable Elles. Binoche is characteristically ferocious in the role, which highlights how distinct her style is from Stewart's. The younger actress' approach is casual and almost detached, befitting a character who has subsumed her will to the ego of a larger-than-life celebrity. Yet Stewart portrays Val as a woman who is self-aware and comfortable in her own skin in a manner that Maria could never hope to be. While some of Val's Maloja Snake line readings have a tossed-off slackness—befitting a non-actor who is just trying to get through them—at crucial moments she delivers them with matter-of-fact bluntness, and the effect is like a wet towel snapping Maria on the nose.

What's most impressive about Clouds is how Assayas and his performers create multiple levels of conflict within the narratively simple scenario of “Maria and Val rehearse a play." At the proximate level, there is the play-within-the-film drama of the Helena and Sigrid's passionate affair and their inevitable, blistering breakup. The viewer is only permitted scattered glimpses of this story, and Assayas pointedly never shows any scenes in Klaus' final production of Maloja Snake, but the broad strokes are apparent. Despite the straightforward outline—girl meets girl, girl loses girl, girl kills herself—everyone in Clouds seems to have a different interpretation of the play, with each individual perceiving a novel pattern of culpability and weakness in the main characters.

At the same time, Maria's grappling with her role functions as a drama about the actress' discomfort with aging, loneliness, and death. Early in the film, Maria insists that she is Sigrid, and that she has always been Sigrid, ever since the play's original premiere. That fact that middle-aged Maria continues to identify with a character she portrayed as an adolescent reveals a vain denial of time's passage, as does her inability to relate to a more vulnerable older character. Her reaction is pitiable but also wholly understandable. The margins of Clouds are scrawled with the particular indignities faced by actresses as they age, from cruel verdicts of sexual undesirability to wholesale exile from the sort of leading roles that are routinely bestowed on their male peers. Moreover, Wilhelm's death—actually a suicide, as Rosa reveals solely to Maria—has quite naturally nudged the actress into a morbid frame of mind. At one point Maria observes that the performer that first created the role of Helena perished in a car accident not long after the original film was complete. Maria brings up this fact in order to brush it off as a source of superstitious fear, but it's clear that her mortality is weighing on her as much as professional and romantic obsolescence.

On another level, and a bit unexpectedly, the erotic obsession that Helena feels towards Sigrid serves as a proxy for Maria's convoluted feelings bout Val. The intense scenes that they rehearse together gradually become thick with deeper meaning, often conveying emotions that neither woman seems able to confront in other contexts. Maria's dependency on Val is not just that of an overwhelmed celebrity who needs assistance in navigating photo shoots and press tours. Val represents a portal to a generation that Maria simultaneously disregards, disdains, and envies, as much for its youth as for its tastes and affinities. It is Val who gives her employer the lowdown on the celebrity gossip about Jo-Ann, and Val who keeps up with banalities outside the glamorous bubble of Maria's personal affairs. When Val leaves one night to visit a man in a neighboring village, Maria doesn't seem to know what to do with herself, wandering the house aimlessly just as Wilhelm's widow Rosa might have. There is also a subtle but potent sensual component to the women's interactions. Neither Binoche or Stewart overplay it, but it is there, in the way that the women sit and stand in relation to each other, in the touches that occur from living in such close proximity, and in the giggly flirting that seems to emerge once they've had a few drinks. When the pair take a dip in a freezing lake, Maria sheds all of her clothing, while Val leaves on her underwear, a detail that reflects their nationalities but also says much about their perceptions of (and hopes for) the relationship.

As if all these emotional nooks and crannies weren't enough, there is another, metatextual layer to Clouds' drama. It's no accident that Binoche is playing a character whose biography resembles her own in many respects, nor that Jo-Ann—the ingenue-turned-scandal-magnet whose acting abilities are widely questioned—bears some similarity to a younger Stewart. Indeed, much of the dialog in Clouds concerning performance and celebrity has a particular resonance in light of the actresses who are delivering it. Val often finds herself arguing in favor of the culture of contemporary pop entertainment, in light of Maria's vociferous scorn for everything Hollywood. When Maria snorts derisively at big-budget features about werewolves or mutants, it's all too easy to imagine it as a catty, elitist swipe at Stewart's own filmography. When Val advocates for Jo-Ann's point-blank, modernist acting style and for the virtues of her rough-edged public persona in a sea of Hollywood phoniness, it's tantalizing to imagine that Stewart is defending herself against critics and cultural tongue cluckers. While this meta dimension to the film is unmistakable, Assayas refrains from presenting it with the sort of arch knowingness that might have eventually rendered it insufferable. Instead, it glides over the surface of the drama, providing another level of substance but never threatening to overwhelm the story.

As one might surmise, Clouds of Sils Maria is an incredibly dense work of drama, in which every line seems to have a double, triple, or even quadruple meaning. There is even a bit of reflexiveness to be found in the film's script. An argument over the ambiguity of Helena's fate at the conclusion of Maloja Snake foreshadows Clouds' most conspicuous mystery: Late in the film, a character abruptly vanishes from the story, similar to the sudden evaporation of Rita in Mulholland Drive. While there are mundane if eccentric reasons that this disappearance may have occurred, the event has a weird-fiction uncanniness that's hard to shake, particularly given that it corresponds to the appearance of the Maloja Snake referenced in Wilhelm's play: a rare atmospheric phenomenon in which low clouds drift in meandering coils through the high alpine valleys near Sils Maria.

Despite its myriad dramatic strata, Clouds consistently retains a powerful sense of humane immediacy, in that the tale of Maria and Val never gets lost in a snarl of too-clever-by-half curlicues. This, ultimately, is the film's standout achievement: its elegant conjuration of an almost literary-like complexity of meaning within a relatively straightforward, character-driven drama. It's the film's unflinching lead performances and Assayas' terrifically fecund script that enable Clouds to work so effectively in this respect.

A Thousand Words: The Salt of the Earth

[Updated 5/16/15.]

A documentary about a photographer faces a novel challenge, one that emerges from the filmmaker's understandable desire to convey the artistic merit of their subject's work. A director who gushingly foregrounds the aesthetic beauty or political import of an artist’s images may unwittingly neglect the potential of their own medium, and thereby reduce the film to a glorified slideshow. On the other hand, swamping otherwise outstanding photos in a surfeit of flashy cinema does a disservice to the individual who created those images, and can result in a film that feels more impressed with itself than with the photographer. Many documentarians strike a balance between these unwelcome extremes by shifting their focus elsewhere. In Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, for example, Ben Shapiro shrewdly directs his attention to the elaborate process by which the titular photographer crafts his mesmerizing tableaus. In Finding Vivian Meier, meanwhile, co-directors John Maloof and Charlie Siskel zero in on the irresistible mystery of their subject's secret life as a street photographer, as well as her confounding personality.

For The Salt of the Earth, director Wim Wenders' love letter to Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, the method is a more classically biographical one, at least on the surface level. The film uses Salgado's life as its narrative backbone, linking together pivotal events and artistic phases to create the story of an still-unfolding creative journey. To that end, the photographer’s arresting black-and-white images function as a kind of visual log of his professional and personal evolution. This approach is highlighted by scenes in which Wenders and Salgado pore over photos while the latter reminisces about particular projects, in the same manner that other people might page through family albums of faded Kodak prints and Polaroids. Not incidentally, Wenders' co-director on The Salt of the Earth is the photographer's son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. In part, the younger Salgado regards the documentary as a means to witness his father's world up close, and thereby familiarize himself with the man who was often absent for long stretches of his childhood. [For the sake of clarity, this post will hereafter refer to the Salgados by their first names.]

Wenders and Juliano’s strategy proves remarkably effective and elegant. On the one hand, the photos are undeniably the visual centerpiece of the film. If The Salt of the Earth does nothing else, it serves as an absorbing introduction to the sheer power of Sebastião's work, which captures subjects as diverse as industrial laborers, refugee camps, obscure cultures, war-torn landscapes, and pristine natural beauty. Through both talking-head monologues and voiceover narration, the photographer provides enlightening context and memorable details about individual shots. Some of the first photos presented in the film are the artists' renowned images of Brazil's open-pit Serra Pelada gold mine, where tens of thousands of miners dug by hand in the hopes of striking the mother lode. The imagery of the countless muddy terraces and swarming bodies is instantly riveting, but it would be much the same on the pages of a coffee table book. What makes The Salt of the Earth's presentation distinctive is Sebastião's vivid verbal description of his original reaction to the mine, which he compares to the great construction enterprises of antiquity, such as the Pyramids at Giza.

Meanwhile, the photos also function as observation windows into Sebastião's story, which the directors plainly find just as fascinating as the images he captured. Indeed, the arc of the artist’s life is a straightforward but captivating one. Abandoning a promising career as an economist in 1973, Sebastião turned to photography, first on assignment for news organizations and then as a documentary artist. He developed ambitious long-term projects with his wife Lélia, bringing his camera to unseen and forgotten corners of world and then publishing the resulting photos in impressively hefty volumes such as Workers and Migrations. However, the years spent documenting starvation, disease, and death in misery epicenters such as the Balkans and central Africa took their toll on Sebastião’s psychological vigor, driving him to disillusionment. (The Rwandan genocide and the multiple refugee crises that followed in its wake seem to have been particular breaking points for the photographer.)

Fortunately, Sebastião appears to have found a spiritual balm in his own backyard, quite literally. After years in self-imposed exile, the photographer and his wife returned to Brazil in the 1990s to take over the desiccated remains of the Salgado family cattle ranch. Faced with uncontrolled erosion and a dusty landscape that in no way resembled the lush domain of Sebastião’s childhood, Lélia hit upon a simple but radical notion: Why not just replant the subtropical forest that once grew on the Salgados’ doorstep? The resulting program of environmental restoration, Instituto Terra, not only succeeded in returning the region into a more natural and sustainable state, but also appears to have re-invigorated Sebastião’s artistic purpose. His subsequent project, Genesis, documented the planet’s most Edenic natural locales, and functioned as a sort of visual riposte to the industrial and post-colonial ugliness of the photographer’s earlier work.

Apart from his personal fondness for the photographer’s images, Wenders clearly regards Sebastião’s life as an admirable one. The Salt of the Earth practically glows with esteem for the artist’s physical and political fearlessness, and nods with understanding as Sebastião describes the anguish of bearing witness to so much human suffering. Lingering on the photographer’s late-career immersion in environmental activism isn’t just a matter of factual accuracy: The new direction rescues the viewer from the hopelessness of all the preceding images of dead-eyed exiles and fly-dotted corpses, much as it saved Sebastião himself. It ultimately proves to be a humane stratagem, and one that Wenders and Juliano apply in a manner that evinces integrity. Rather than glibly tossing aside the darkness that Sebastião has documented, the directors integrate it with the light, depicting both woe and wonder as parts of the same continuum. Sebastião's own words underline this stance, for while he speaks contemptuously of humanity’s boundless capacity for evil, he also acknowledges that our species is an integral part of the natural world.

There is an earnest passion at work in The Salt of the Earth, not only for Sebastião’s talents as an artist, but also for the guarded optimism that the photographer has discovered in his later years. The film’s narrative trajectory is crucial in this respect: Sebastião’s tale resembles a descent into an Inferno where every imaginable form of suffering can be cataloged, followed by a much-needed ascent into purifying sunlight. Given the horrors that the photographer has seen, his hopefulness cannot be construed as naïve. Rather, it is a hardened sort of optimism, tested and tempered by fire. This is comfortable territory for Wenders, who often explores the human condition through the lives of extraordinary individuals, particularly artists (Lightning Over Water, Tokyo-Ga, Notebook on Cities and Clothes, Buena Vista Social Club, The Soul of a Man, Pina). In The Salt of the Earth, the filmmaker has the good fortune to work with a subject who is astute, eloquent, and possessed of a singular set of world-spanning experiences.

Nothing Makes Sense: Dissecting the Worst Avengers: Age of Ultron Review in the World

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Updated 11/19/15.]

As a general rule, my approach to criticism is textual. My preference is to engage with films primarily as standalone objects, with some measured acknowledgement of both cinematic history and the broader political and cultural context in which those objects exist. Only very rarely do I address the work of other critics. This constraint serves two purposes. First, it maintains my writing’s focus on its raison d'être—the study of cinema—and thereby prevents it from drifting into the arcane back alleys of meta-criticism. Second, it keeps things professional. Too often, in my experience, critical conversations rapidly degenerate into condescending snark, sophomoric name calling, and spiteful assaults on individuals’ character and motives. Most of the time, I have no interest in getting drawn into such knife fights. This is partly because they are a distraction from genuine analysis, and partly because life is short and unpleasant enough as it is.

The above is presented to emphasize the unusual nature of the this post, which is a direct rebuttal to the work of a fellow critic. The piece in question is British writer Mike McCahill’s brief but scornful review of Avengers: Age of Ultron. This post isn't an attempt to punch down at an obscure blogger: McCahill writes for The Scotsman, The Telegraph, and The Guardian, so he's clearly doing something correctly. I'm not offering a blanket condemnation of the man's work. Nor am I making a sweeping endorsement of the Avengers sequel, a film to which my initial reaction was generally lukewarm. However, McCahill’s review almost perfectly embodies the sort of smug, exasperating, and wrong-headed arguments that have been widely leveled against Age of Ultron, and against superhero action features generally. Moreover, his succinct candor regarding what he finds so repellant about the film makes the piece a convenient specimen for dissection.

The trouble with these Avengers get-togethers, it transpires, is not just that they’re too big to fail, but that they’re almost certainly too big to function as drama. Swallowing up every last character, actor, and dollar, the franchise has thus far manifested itself as the lumbering ne plus ultra of modern movie gigantism …

Straight away, here’s an example of the logical chicanery that McCahill will rely on again and again: the use of a clever turn of phrase to mask a sweeping generalization or transparently false claim. Describing any film as “too big to fail”—apparently on the basis of a mammoth cast and budget—requires that one ignore the numerous box office flops that Hollywood inevitably churns out. This isn’t ancient cinematic history: Even when adjusted for inflation, two of the biggest bombs of all time were released just a couple of years ago: 47 Ronin ($151 million in the hole) and The Lone Ranger (at least $95 million). It's one thing to predict that a summer tentpole film is going to make a lot of money, especially on its opening weekend. In my own review, I observed that “[l]egions of film-goers are going to see Ultron, no matter what its virtues, flaws, or […] ethics as a work of cinema.” It's quite another thing to assert that a mega-budget feature is guaranteed to turn a profit.

“Too big to function as drama” is a murkier concept, given that dramatic success is a subjective matter. However, if one assumes that settled critical consensus can be a quick-and-dirty proxy for such success, neither a big budget nor a big cast would seem to disqualify a film from achieving quality drama. The most expensive inflation-adjusted film productions tend to skew mixed in their critical reception, but high points abound: Titanic ($294 million, 88% on Rotten Tomatoes), Tangled ($281 million, 90%), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ($275 million, 84%), Avatar ($261 million, 83%) Spider-Man 2 ($250 million, 94%), and The Dark Knight Rises ($236 million, 87%). It’s possible that McCahill would characterize all the aforementioned films as dramatic failures, but he doesn’t bother. He just asserts that expensive films can’t function as drama, full stop. And if the drama-defeating gigantism in question refers to an outsized cast, the claim is so flimsy that it can’t withstand a moment’s reflection. (Pulp Fiction? JFK? Magnolia? Do the Right Thing? Nashville? The Thin Red Line?)

The “trouble” with the Avengers films in McCahill’s estimation, then, is that they are big and therefore incapable of flopping at the box office or succeeding as works of dramatic fiction, despite the fact that there are abundant examples of big films doing both. Perhaps Avengers: Age of Ultron is an illustrative exception, but McCahill doesn’t make that case. He simply equates bigness with profit and artistic brokenness.

… [W]hile the Avengers themselves—the hall of superhero fame headed by Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk—remain the safest of bets, covering so many eventualities that their triumph is all but assured.

This sort of forest-for-the-trees kvetching is a warning sign that McCahill’s critiques don’t actually engage with the Avengers films—or, by extension, with the superhero subgenre in general—save in the most offhanded, inattentive manner. His complaint seems to be that because the Avengers boast such a diverse array of super powers, they will always emerge victorious from any crisis, and, as a result, the films have no real stakes. This claim is so misguided regarding how genre films function, it’s hard to know what to make of it.

Sure, if they operated together in perfect harmony and utilized their abilities in seamless coordination, the Avengers could arguably overcome almost any obstacle. They don’t, however. This is because while some of them are godlike, they’re all fallible beings brimming with ego, anger, and fear. This isn’t some incidental stumbling block: It's the ultimate conflict at the heart of the Avengers films! A just-the-facts plot summary of Avengers or Avengers: Age of Ultron would describe Loki’s or Ultron’s schemes for global domination, respectively, and what the team does to foil those plans. Those proximal conflicts, however, don’t really describe the stories that the films are telling, any more than Cries and Whispers can be summed up as “a women dies of cancer”.

The “solo” films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) revolve around internal conflicts: Tony Stark’s blindness to the physical and personal devastation he leaves in his wake; Thor’s puffed-up sense of royal entitlement; Steve Rogers’ confusion when the moral order of his world collapses. The Avengers films, meanwhile, are about a team, and accordingly center on inter-personal conflicts. To say that the group’s triumph is “assured” is to willfully ignore significant chunks of dialog in both films, which repeatedly return to the possible dissolution of the heroes' coalition. (Granted, triumph is assured in the sense that the Good Guys almost always win in Hollywood genre films, but the same could be said of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or any tale of adventure, irrespective of how mighty or feeble the heroes might be.)

None of this is exactly obscure: The main question that hangs over the first Avengers is whether Nick Fury’s crazy-quilt assemblage of soldiers, aliens, and science experiments can actually work, given the personalities and powers involved. Can narcissists like Stark and Thor tolerate the command of a squeaky-clean Boy Scout like Rogers? Can the Hulk’s wrath be controlled in such a way that he does more good than harm? Do elite but human heroes like Natasha and Barton even have a place alongside such gods and monsters? Avengers answered such queries with a tentative “Yes,” but Age of Ultron poses the inevitable follow-up questions: For how long? And to what end?

In pre-release interviews, writer-director Joss Whedon has cited this sequel as the hardest work he's ever done, and you can bet most of that toil went on finding an antagonist capable of making any fight seem fair enough for an audience to reasonably cheer. Here, he's settled on Ultron, which may sound like a brand of dishwasher tablets, but is actually an artificial intelligence (voiced by James Spader) with an army of robots at his disposal.

A super group as powerful as the Avengers naturally need a worthy foe, but McCahill's characterization of Ultron's development is just lazy and flat-out ahistorical. It's fine to beg ignorance regarding the minutiae of Marvel's impossibly dense comic mythology, which requires an almost Talmudic rigor to untangle. However, making a blithe assumption that is easily refuted with ten seconds of Googling is just critical malpractice. Ultron did not spring from Joss Whedon's skull like some fully-formed CGI Athena. He's a well-established character who has spent almost five decades antagonizing the Avengers in the pages of Marvel's comics. His origin and characteristics were revised for the MCU, but Whedon didn't have to “toil” to devise him: Ultron is consistently regarded as one of (if not the) most powerful and durable of the Avengers' nemeses. One could cynically argue that this is exact reason Marvel is regarded as such a valuable creative property: It has a ridiculously deep bench of existing characters with detailed histories, providing easy fodder for screenwriters to churn out countless sequels and spinoffs.

It's superheroes versus supercomputer, then; of human interest, there is-little-to-nothing.

Let’s set aside that fact that Ultron's scheme is to wipe out all organic life on Earth through an artificial meteor strike, and the outcome is therefore somewhat significant to ordinary humans, even if they aren’t participating directly in the conflict. This remarkable assertion—that there is “little-to-nothing” of interest in a story with no mundane human principals—would seem to brand significant swaths of the fantasy and science fiction genres as enormous wastes of time. Is McCahill actually contending that a story about non-human vs. non-human conflict is by definition boring? What about when it’s a time-traveling murder-bot opposed by another time-traveling murder-bot? Mermaid vs. sea witch? Cyborg vs. distributed artificial intelligence? Mouse vs. rat? Gelfling vs. Skeksis? Immortal vs. Immortal? Robot worker vs. sentient spaceship? Lion vs. lion? Android vs. his own sense of inadequacy?

This is Genre Storytelling 101: Non-human characters serve as stand-ins for human desires, fears, and anxieties. Perhaps McCahill doesn’t find the struggle in Age of Ultron particularly compelling for reasons that are specific to that film. That’s not what he states, though: He asserts that because the conflict concerns superheroes fighting an artificial intelligence, it is therefore of no interest. At this point, any fantasy or science fiction fan could be excused for giving McCahill’s review the finger and walking away.

This tussle sends more computer-generated masonry flying than ever, which is an achievement of sorts, but the expensive kit and relentless set-pieces mask a playground-level goodies-vs.-baddies runaround.

Age of Ultron is certainly stuffed chock-full of sound and fury, but to characterize its clashes as "playground-level" is off the mark, betraying a distressing negligence towards what is actually presented on screen. Almost all superhero stories begin with a straightforward delineation between the heroes and villains. The villains are doing bad things—usually for reasons that make perfect sense in their own minds—and the heroes are trying to stop them. If this is bothersome to you, you should probably just stop watching action-oriented genre cinema altogether, because these sharp distinctions are an essential starting point for such films.

However, unless the discussion is limited to fare created for toddlers, almost every superhero tale these days grapples at some point with the fact that, costuming aside, it can be difficult to distinguish heroes from villains in a complex world. The heroes themselves inevitably fall victim to doubts about whether they’re doing the right thing for the right reasons, or whether they still want to do the right thing. The point highlighted above stands: Although providing spectacle is one of the functions of superhero tales, fisticuffs and explosions aren’t what such stories are about. Moral fission and self-reflection have been the norm in superhero films for some time, just as they’ve been the norm in superhero comics for decades. Writers aren’t stupid: Leaving things at the smash-bang-zap “playground-level” gets tedious pretty quickly. McCahill is complaining about something that hasn’t been a significant factor since the gee-whiz Golden Age of comics—and arguably not even then, where gray-area vigilante characters like Batman and the Spirit were concerned.

Granted, there’s a problem with Age of Ultron’s action, but it’s one of essence and execution. One of the ever-more-conspicuous weaknesses of the MCU features is their reliance on a bland, pre-fab pacing model that requires a violent climax roughly every fifteen to twenty minutes. Regarding Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron specifically, one of my main objections to these crossover films is that the action sequences, while serviceable, are unimaginative and unworthy of an alleged assemblage of “Earth’s mightiest heroes.” There’s something backwards when the most outrageous stunts and jaw-dropping exploits are unfolding in a film two screens down the hall at the multiplex, a movie in which everyone is human and the villain’s motive is good old-fashioned revenge. If your film's character roster includes Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Vision, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, and Ultron, you damn well better do something extraordinary with your action sequences, something that no other film has done before.

Proper actors are brought in to bolster the beef/cheesecake, yet the two-second appearance of arthouse muse Julie Delpy doing nothing is both a jolting incongruity and a suggestion that all resistance to this behemoth cinema might be futile. They can’t claim the script attracted them: Whedon’s drama is banal, his wisecracks composed of deadening snark.

First of all, on behalf of Scarlet Johansson, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and any other cast members who qualify as beef/cheesecake in McCahill’s estimation: Fuck you. Seriously. “Proper actors”?

I actually agree with McCahill’s assessment of Age of Ultron’s witticisms: The quips are just not as funny as they were in Avengers, and many of them often land with a pained thud that’s wholly uncharacteristic of Whedon’s usual work. Reasonable people can differ on whether the inter-personal Avenger-on-Avenger struggles—or Ultron’s serious daddy issues—are “banal” or not, but at least here McCahill isn’t suggesting that the characters are intrinsically uninteresting just because they’re super-powered.

The sticking point in this passage is the implication that there can’t be any legitimate reason for Julie Delpy’s brief appearance as Black Widow Ops headmistress Madame B other than surrender to the Marvel machine. In Age of Ultron—and in MCU television series Agent Carter, but let’s stick to the film—it’s established that the Black Widow Ops program once educated select Russian girls in the arts of spycraft and assassination, all under the guise of ballet instruction. Sublimation of the girls' individual desires and morals to the program’s rigorous training were paramount, to the point that “graduation” from the project’s Red Room consisted of forced sterilization (the better to avoid future emotional entanglements).

The choice of Delpy for this blink-and-you'll-miss-it role—and recall that a fleeting presence in the MCU is practically a guarantee of future, meatier appearances—evokes intriguing associations based on her prior work. One of Delpy’s most prominent early roles was in Agnieszka Holland’s epic Eastern European WWII drama Europa Europa. In that film, the actress played an ardent Nazi determined to give up her unborn child to the SS’s notorious Lebensborn program, through which it would be raised in a pure Aryan household. More recently, Delpy directed and starred in The Countess, dramatizing the life of Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer Elizabeth Báthory. The film depicts Báthory’s young life as bleak and cruel, culminating in her unintended teen pregnancy, her lover’s gruesome execution, and the vanishing of the child. Later, Báthory develops a delusion that bathing in the blood of virgin girls will give her eternal youth, and to that end commands her retainers to kidnap and murder countless victims.

The relevance of these meta-textual correspondences to the Black Widow Ops program should be obvious, but we needn’t range that far afield. Perhaps something about Delpy’s look just seemed right: a compartmentalized weariness has always seemed to hang on her characters, highlighted by those heavy eyelids and an inevitable snarl of frizzy blonde hair threatening escape. Regardless, why would one assume that there is no artistic rationale for slipping Delpy into a five-second cameo, unless one’s intent is to facilely indict corporate blockbuster filmmaking for… something? Devouring all the “proper” actors, maybe?

By all means claim Age of Ultron as fun, but it looks very much like the kind of fun the suits want you to have—an utterly impersonal, corporate triumph.

This is what’s known as “stating the obvious.” Yes, the experience of watching Age of Ultron is intended to be broadly entertaining, and yes, Marvel and Disney want as many people as possible to watch it, because that will make them truckloads of money via the sale of tickets, DVDs/Blu-rays, merchandise, and so on. And? What does it mean that the film “looks like” capitalist-approved fun? Is there some secret visual signature embedded in the action that betrays it as a corporate diversion? McCahill doesn’t say. Certainly, Age of Ultron is impersonal in the sense that it’s a finely-calibrated corporate product, designed to appeal to as many people as possible, rather than the work of an auteur’s uncompromising vision. This isn’t exactly an original observation. You don’t get critical brownie points for calling attention to the corporate nature of a $280 million film, except perhaps from politically allied readers who lap up such banal statements as if they constituted brave truth-telling.

Watching these logo-simple characters (the starred shield, the arm-and-hammer, the not-so-jolly green giant), I wondered whether we weren’t meant to be cheering for the likes of Marvel, Disney, Google, Apple, and Coca-Cola as they boosted their global market share.

It’s hard to imagine a snarky swipe at the superhero genre more fatuous than one directed at the supposed simplicity of the character designs. When superheroes first rose to popularity in comics’ Golden Age, bold and distinctive visual design utilizing primary colors was a virtue from both an aesthetic and technical viewpoint. (Bear in mind that comics were one of the most cheaply produced printed mediums, and therefore every dot of ink mattered.) Moreover, a stark, simple look for a character is a convenient means of orienting the reader in graphic storytelling. As the eye moves from panel to panel, a bright, distinctive costume—say, Superman’s red-and-blue garb with the stylized “S”—serves as a landmark that makes it easier for the brain to interpolate the action that occurs between the static images. (This is elementary stuff; children understand it intuitively, but an adult like McCahill can always turn to Scott McCloud’s celebrated Understanding Comics.)

In part, the art direction of superhero films is a legacy of the genre’s comic roots, but "logo-simplicity" still has a practical purpose in cinema. A brightly-colored costume or distinguishing device—Captain America's shield or Thor’s hammer, for example—is a handy visual marker even in a moving image, particularly amid the chaos of a super-powered throwdown. (This is one reason I’m increasingly annoyed by the cinematic trend of turning boldly-colored heroes into desaturated blobs of gray.) Moreover, the iconographic function of colors and symbols can have a mythic dimension. As is commonly observed, what are superheroes if not the modern era’s gods and goddesses? Hulk is green for the same reason that Krishna is blue: so you know him when you see him. Complaining that Cap’s shield is “logo-simple” is like lodging the same gripe about Zeus’ thunderbolt, or the Christian cross, for that matter. By definition, a symbol should be easily identifiable; ridiculing it for simplicity is just a tautology.

More broadly, I’m not sure what to make of McCahill’s likening of superheroes to America’s mightiest brands. It feels like an anti-corporate or anti-neocolonial non sequitur rather than an insight. Sure, the Avengers themselves are now corporate symbols in some sense, and their dissemination across the globe on T-shirts, backpacks, and Odin-knows-what does make for a striking illustration of American economic and cultural hegemony. However, equating cheers for the on-screen victory of the Avengers with off-screen economic jingoism is incoherent and kind of insulting. Is the implication that anyone entertained by the Avengers’ triumph over Ultron is, in reality, being subconsciously molded into in unthinking booster for the quarterly corporate “win”? McCahill doesn’t connect the two ideas in any substantive way, but that doesn’t stop him from implicitly casting anyone who is thrilled by super-heroic exploits as a guileless consumer drone.

To an extent, this kind of facetious, scripted commentary masquerading as criticism is galling because there probably is a thought-provoking anti-capitalist dissection of Age of Ultron waiting to be made. A deep Marxist analysis of the film would make for a fascinating read, but that’s not what McCahill presents. He’s just taking hackneyed potshots at an Age of Ultron that exists only in his imagination, while hoping that no one will detect the sleight-of-hand. It’s lazy, it’s boring, and it’s irritating. It’s compelled me to mount a defense of a film I wasn’t that enthusiastic about to begin with, a film that suffers in spots from bad screenwriting, tiresome sexism, uninspired action, and unmistakable executive monkeying. Nonetheless, flawed filmmaking is no excuse for downright shitty criticism.

Detective Work: Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

[Note: This post contains very mild spoilers. Updated 11/19/15.]

The image that opens David and Nathan Zellner’s peculiar, hypnotic new feature, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter is distorted and snowy, as though it were recorded on videotape that has since deteriorated. Even through the flurry of tracking errors, however, it's easy to discern the white, all-caps letters on a black background: “THIS IS A TRUE STORY”. Many cinephiles will immediately identify this famous line as the one that introduced Joel and Ethan Coen’s bloody 1996 crime drama cum black comedy Fargo. In Kumiko, a water-damaged VHS copy of the Coens’ film has become an obsession for the eponymous woman (Rinko Kikuchi), a 29-year-old administrative assistant living in Tokyo. Using an antiquated VCR, she scrutinizes every frame of Fargo with the rigor of a forensic analyst. Which raises a question: Does the title card represent Kumiko’s viewpoint, as she crouches in her dark apartment, studying the tape for the 100th time? Or are the Zellners, like the Coens, tweaking the viewer by suggesting that Kumiko is itself a true story, despite its unmistakable aura of fantasy? The answer is likely the same one Kumiko gives when asked whether she is an exchange student or a tourist: “Yes.”

Poor Kumiko shuffles morosely through her life as though deep in a trance. The same dead-eyed slackness attends her as she sits idly at her desk, prepares tea for her boss, and eats her instant noodle meals. Her fellow “office girls” are five or more years her junior, and while they are engrossed with beauty and fashion, Kumiko doesn’t seem to have any interests beyond her dwarf rabbit Bunzo and the aforementioned VHS tape. By day she picks at the holes in her stockings and stares glumly as the world goes by. At night she watches Fargo, over and over and over. Early in the film, she is glimpsed gleaning the cassette from a secret cache in a sea cave, but little is revealed about what led her to such a location, or who placed the tape there and for what purpose. What matters is that Kumiko believes with frightening desperation in the cassette’s significance and in the reality of the events depicted in Fargo.

Specifically, she has faith that a close reading of the film will reveal the location of the nearly $1 million in ransom money that bungling kidnapper Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) buries in the snow near a barbed wire fence. Kumiko pauses the film and traces the spacing between the fence posts, eventually transferring the image via embroidery onto a swatch of fabric. In her mind, that fictional suitcase of bundled bills is a lost New World treasure, and she is like a Spanish conquistador who is fated to unearth and seize it. Setting aside the fictional nature of the film, Kumiko never grapples with the fact that tens of millions of people have seen Fargo, and presumably are therefore also aware of the money. No matter. She insists that the concealed cash is both her discovery and her destiny.

When her boss hands her a corporate credit card to purchase an anniversary gift for his wife, the temptation is too much for Kumiko to resist. Before anyone suspects that something is amiss, she boards a plane bound for the United States, and is soon stepping off the jetway into the Minneapolis airport, a stranger and a strange land. She has only a rudimentary grasp of the English language, no money beyond the pilfered credit card, and a childlike guilelessness that seems more than mere cultural misunderstanding.  Mostly she just points at a single-page map of Minnesota and declares her destination: “Fargo.” This tactic eventually takes her remarkably far. Never mind that Carl actually buried the ransom somewhere between Minneapolis and Brainerd in the film. The word is as much a mystical invocation as a place name, as the Coens themselves recognized. Very little of Fargo’s action takes place in the titular North Dakota city. Rather, it represents a telltale verbal blood spatter, the locale where sad sack Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) exchanged a car for the services of criminals, and thereby sealed his damnation.

The natural query posed by Kumiko is whether a viewer can understand and appreciate the film without having seen Fargo. The answer is a restrained “yes." Certainly, there are several aspects of the former film which hinge on familiarity with the latter, apart from the opening text. The Minnesotans that Kumiko encounters during her quest are mostly cast from the same “aw geez” mold as those that populate the Coens’ feature: decent, diligent folks who take a good-natured interest in strangers. (One can even forgive their provincial cluelessness about Japan, and Asia in general.) In a nod to Fargo’s dogged Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), David Zellner portrays a gentle-hearted county sheriff’s deputy who takes pity on the plainly lost Kumiko and goes above and beyond his duty to aid her. (“I want to help you,” he explains, “I’m just trying to figure out how.”) Kumiko’s Minnesota locales unsurprisingly echo those depicted in the Coens’ film, particularly all the lonely rural highways swathed in windblown snow. Other minor allusions abound, some as subtle as Kumiko’s Lundegaard-esque tendency to turn heel and run when situations go pear-shaped, including one occasion in which she clambers out a window.

However, beyond connecting Fargo’s slightly exaggerated upper Midwestern setting to the same territory that is navigated by Kumiko, most of these links function merely as passing winks to Coen aficionados. Ultimately, Kumiko is a very different sort of film than Fargo. The Coens, as is their wont, craft a tale that is an homage to—and simultaneously a subversion of—crime and detective fiction tropes, ultimately in the service of expansive observations about the absurdity of human behavior. The Zellners, meanwhile, stage Kumiko as a grim, anxious Hero’s Journey, albeit one in which the quest is delusional nonsense. It’s not unlike The Fisher King in this respect, but there the resemblance ends. In Terry Gilliam’s film, mentally troubled Holy Grail seeker Parry pulls disgraced radio shock jock Jack into his Arthurian fantasy, and both men ultimately find something akin to redemption in the quest, its unreality notwithstanding. Kumiko, meanwhile, trudges towards her make-believe treasure in solitude. Good Samaritans come and go during the journey, but no one truly understands her endeavors. The mission is hers alone to endure, and the prize hers alone to claim. As she declares defiantly to her scolding, grandchild-obsessed mother over the phone, she is doing “very, very important work.”

At the surface level, Kumiko works as an unhurried yet nerve-wracking adventure tale in which the heroine’s quest perpetually stands upon the edge of a knife, to borrow Tolkien’s memorable phrasing. There is an unbearable tension inherent in watching Kumiko plod forward through the wintery prairie landscape. She is continuously and perilously exposed, both physically—she is woefully underdressed for the bone-cracking Minnesota wind—and in the sense that as an oddly naïve outsider, she makes easy prey for hucksters and predators. (There don't seem to be many of these creatures in Minnesota, but everyone it the state surely isn't a nice, friendly Lutheran.) As in Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, monetary shortfalls become a fiendish source of sour-gut apprehension. It’s easy to share Kumiko’s icy plunge into panic when a hotel clerk observes that her stolen credit card has been declined, or when a taxi drivers points expectantly at a meter displaying a sum she cannot possibly pay.

Lurking at the periphery of every scene, however, is the nagging awareness that Kumiko has no hope of locating a treasure that does not exist. Accordingly, the empathy that her successes and misfortunes engender in the viewer always carries an unpleasant bitterness, a growing sensation that Something Bad is going to happen when Kumiko’s fantasy runs headlong into reality. This mutates the film into a sort of slow-motion horror story, which is enhanced by the Zellners' and cinematographer Sean Porter’s flair for bestowing the most banal Midwestern locations with an uncanny atmosphere that feels a bit J-horror in character. The film’s soundtrack by indie electronica group the Octopus Project also contributes to this unsettling aura. Much of the group’s work possesses a plastic, bubbly quality, but in Kumiko their sound veers towards the melancholy, with drones, squeals, and wails providing a dose of otherworldliness.

It’s challenging to shake the impression the one of the film’s primary aims is to make the viewer exceedingly uncomfortable, not only with the immediate events shown on screen, but with the entire scenario. Kumiko is, at bottom, the story of a woman who gives up her life for a lie. If the Coens are philosophers, the Zellners here assume the role of psychologists, implicitly inquiring of the viewer: “Do these events upset you? And, if so, why do you think that is?” Kumiko herself functions as a Rorschach test, if only because the film provides few glimpses of her interior life beyond her Fargo-focused monomania. She makes decisions impulsively, exhibits no ability to make long-term plans, and seems to lack an adult’s understanding of the world. (Reproaching her for tearing the Minnesota map from an atlas in a Tokyo library, a security guard wonders, “Why didn’t you just get it off the Internet?”) Is she mildly autistic? Or perhaps mentally ill? Or just a fuck-up?

Although it’s easy to attribute Kumiko’s tribulations to her own foolishness, or to simply conclude that she must be deeply disturbed, the film’s stance towards its heroine is more ambiguous, even sympathetic. In the early Tokyo scenes, the Zellners take pains to show how unappealing the prospect of a “normal” life might be for a young Japanese woman. The pressures to conform to a mainstream, feminine, heteronormative existence surround Kumiko, like a flock of pestering birds. Her boss chides her for her dour demeanor (i.e., not smiling enough), before bluntly asking if she is a lesbian. The other office girls are fixated on their gossip and primping, and ultimately on finding husbands. Kumiko's own mother nags her about her non-existent love life, reminding her daughter that time is running out to land a man, drop out of the workforce, and start siring children. Reluctantly meeting up with an old schoolmate, Kumiko stares into the eyes of the woman’s toddler son and sees something alien and frightening. Given this assault of repellent expectations, escape into a fantasy where she is a fearless explorer of distant lands seems like a preferable alternative.

One can envision a lesser film that holds up Kumiko as an admirable individual and proffers a saccharine, vacuous message about following one’s dreams at all costs. The Zellners’ film strives for something far more ambitious and complex than a paean to quirky individuality. By portraying their protagonist as an erratic, dyspeptic figure and her goal as a ludicrous misapprehension, the filmmakers reframe the story as a sobering moral conundrum. Is it right for a person to put themselves in peril for the sake of a falsehood that they believe to be true? And, perhaps more significantly, what are the obligations of others with respect to that person? Although Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter doesn’t answer these questions, it achieves something singular simply by posing them. That it also happens to be a visually arresting and narratively absorbing film makes it all the more remarkable.

Alternate Realities: Merchants of Doubt

[Note: Updated 11/19/15.]

There’s a striking demographic truth observable in Robert Kenner’s documentary Merchants of Doubt, one that neatly encapsulates the confounding imbalance at the heart of the anthropogenic climate change debate. The film depicts several global warming “skeptic” events, typically hosted by conservo-libertarian think tanks such as the Koch-funded Heartland Institute. These conferences appear to be attended by an overwhelmingly older, white, and male set—the Fox News fringe, in other words. In one memorable shot, Kenner captures a half-full ballroom where a dour, elderly conferencegoer sits alone. He could be a crank physicist, an apologist media hack, or perhaps just an activist citizen whose contempt for government runs bone-deep. Regardless, the image speaks to the Wonderland character of the climate wars. On one side are thousands of climate scientists and incalculable pages of research, along with dozens of international scientific organizations. On the other are a relative handful of dissemblers and true believers. The former are mostly shills backed by corporate fossil fuel dollars, while the latter are primarily tribally-motivated consumers of right-wing propaganda. As Kenner and his collaborators implicitly and rhetorically ask, how does a such a face off between unevenly matched worldviews constitute a “debate” at all?

Like Kenner’s previous documentary feature, Food, Inc., Merchants of Doubt is progressive agitprop of modest ambitions. The ideal viewer is someone who thinks of climate change as a problem and knows that some sort of controversy exists about it, but it isn’t clear on the details. The film won’t convince any hardcore deniers of the overwhelming evidence for global warming driven by greenhouse gas pollution. Indeed, Kenner and political historian Naomi Oreskes—whose book with Erik M. Conway inspired the film—spend very little of Merchants’ 96 minutes making the case for anthropogenic climate change, per se. As the film points out, almost every peer-reviewed paper on climate science already accepts the phenomenon as a given, and establishing its reality would be akin to laying out the evidence for gravitation or evolution. (Oh, wait ...) Instead, Merchants devotes the bulk of its attention to scrutinizing the professional denialists themselves. In particular, the film establishes their common history as mouthpieces for Big Tobacco, Big Chemical, and other corporate sectors known for their less-than-stellar record of truthfulness regarding threats to public health.

Merchants is therefore a documentary primarily about hucksterism. To drive the point home, the film frames its exposé with snippets of illusionist Jaimy Ian Swiss explaining the principles behind his card tricks. As Swiss articulates, stage magic relies on an unspoken agreement with the audience that the con will be harmless and entertaining. This is not the case with the institutions that peddle uncertainty about health and environmental issues, and seeing the curtain pulled back on such forces makes for an enlightening and somewhat chilling experience. Kenner generally sticks to the "Big Issues" documentary playbook, building his case with a brisk blend of interviews, animation, and stock footage. It’s polished, but formally undistinguished. As with most documentaries where the goal is educational, the film doesn’t demand a second viewing. That said, Merchants skillfully employs its medium to draw lines of connection and create juxtapositions. It’s one thing to state that the same rogue’s gallery of denialists crops up over and over on multiple issues. It’s another to place two cable news clips side by side to show the same shill deriding the lack of evidence connecting smoking to cancer in one instance, and pollution to climate change in another.

The most intriguing question addressed in the film is one of motivation: Why do denialists deny? (And, secondarily, what motivates their audience to accept and hold onto their lies with death-grip fervor?) The obvious answer is, of course, greed, but as Merchants illustrates, most denialists are a more complex species than mere liars for dollars. Physicist and notorious climate skeptic Frederick Singer, for example, is a former Cold War missile scientist, whose objections to environmental regulations appear to be deeply rooted in his anti-communist ideology. When Singer blithely declares that almost all climate scientists are wrong and he is right, it’s hard not to regard his glib, glassy-eyed certainty as a kind of religious (or, ironically, Stalinist) zealotry. More infuriating are pundits like Climate Depot founder Marc Marano, a conservative knife fighter who regards the entire debate as an anti-liberal bloodsport. The cheery Marano rather astonishingly agrees to be interviewed for the film, and he is quite candid about how much “fun” it is to hound climate scientists and obfuscate for polluters on cable news programs.

The film’s most memorable figure, however, is former South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis. A right-wing evangelical and limited government Republican, Inglis is the sort of politician who boasts about his endorsements from the NRA and the National Right to Life Committee. Despite his ideological credentials, however, Inglis had a come-to-Jesus moment on climate change when he was able to meet with scientists investigating ice cores in the Arctic. After his position on global warming shifted from denial to acceptance, however, Inglis was defeated in a landslide by a Tea-Party-backed GOP primary challenger, leaving him dazed and despairing at the direction of American conservatism. Watching Inglis politely and futilely insist, “That’s not true,” as a reactionary radio host rattles off brazenly false talking points is unexpectedly sad. More to the point, it's emblematic of the challenges facing anyone who tries to rise above the denialists’ haze of bullshit.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race: It Follows

[Note: This post contains major spoilers. Updated 11/19/15.]

Pivoting off Noah Berlatsky's 2011 Atlantic essay “What The Thing Loses by Adding Women,” a brief discussion on this writer's social media feed recently tackled the question of whether female sexuality—or, more specifically, male characters' perceptions of and relationships to that sexuality—is an essential element of horror cinema. As Berlatsky observes, even in films where female characters are completely absent, such as John Carpenter's 1982 horror masterpiece, that conspicuous lack establishes a potent subtext. Aside from a handful of features where the male presence is largely asexual—The Devil's Backbone and The Blair Witch Project come to mind as noteworthy examples—male anxiety regarding female sexuality (and maternity) seems to be lurking beneath the surface of many, many horror films.

This is particularly the case in the slasher subgenre, where a murderous, usually male maniac stalks and slays a succession of usually female victims. As Carol J. Clover famously articulated in her seminal 1992 study Men, Women, and Chainsaws, female sexual purity and desire play prominent thematic and even narrative roles in such features. In Wes Craven's meta-slasher Scream, horror aficionado Randy (Jamie Kennedy) points out that the unwritten rules of the subgenre dictate that a teenage character (especially a girl) who has sex will usually be gruesomely murdered shortly thereafter. However, even when the killer's motivation hinges on sexual transgression, as in the Friday the 13th series, the hapless adolescent victims (the “Meat”) are usually unaware of that fact.

Not so in writer-director David Robert Mitchell's new indie horror flick It Follows, in which teen heroine Jay (Maika Monroe) has an inaugural assignation with her new, older flame Hugh (Jake Weary) in the backseat of his car, only to be subsequently chloroformed, tied up, and debriefed. Hugh regretfully explains that he has “given” her something by having sex with her, just as it was given to him. That something is the singular attention of a malevolent shape-shifting entity, which will now follow Jay wherever she goes until It catches her. What exactly will happen to Jay should she fall into Its clutches is initially ambiguous, but it's clearly Not Good. Hugh barely has enough time to give Jay some rudimentary advice for surviving Its pursuit (“Never be in a room with only one exit.”) before It arrives, assuming the form of a nude middle-aged women who walks slowly but deliberately towards them. Hugh then hustles Jay away and unceremoniously dumps her in front her house, underwear-clad and sobbing, in a manner that says, “Good luck. It's your problem now.”

In this way, It Follows takes that which is subtext in most horror features and integrates it directly into the story: sex equals death. What's impressive about Mitchell's film is how this approach results not in a crude, exploitative treatment of adolescent sexuality, but an astonishingly cerebral work of cinema, blending aspects of social realism, teen melodrama, occult horror, and the slasher flick into an experience that is greater than the sum of its parts. To an extent, this is because the film leaves a significant amount of white space where another horror film might have doodled in a convoluted backstory and mythology. It Follows reveals virtually nothing about the origin or nature of its monster. The film simply establishes the Rules and then observes as Jay and her small circle of allies puzzle out how (and if) she can escape Its unnatural and seemingly implacable pursuit.

Even characterization takes a backseat to the film's primary concerns. The characters are not cartoonish, but neither are they particularly well-developed. Blonde, doe-eyed Jay harbors a faintly myopic view of the world, but like most Final Girls she's made of tough stuff. Her no-nonsense little sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) is affectionate, but also aware that she is overshadowed by Jay's age and beauty. Gawky Paul (Keir Gilchrist) is a childhood friend of Jay's, and obviously quite desperately in love with her. Bespectacled Yara's (Olivia Luccardi) main attribute is that she is perpetually snacking while nose-deep in her distinctive pink clamshell e-reader. (Yara functions as a kind boorish yet erudite Greek chorus, offering choice quotes from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot that comment on the film's events.) Later this quartet is joined by Greg (Daniel Zovatto), the older, easy-going guy across the street, who also happens to have a romantic history with Jay. That is as much as the viewer learns about the principals, but more details would be superfluous. By not sweating elaborate character- or world-building, It Follows can invest all its energy in the two essential tasks of all great horror films: scaring the viewer and making them think. 

On both counts, It Follows is a resounding success, being perhaps the first truly frightening and thoughtful American horror feature since 2011's Take Shelter. The galvanic character of the film's terrors stems in part from adherence to a kind of lo-fi magical realism. Whether by choice or necessity (the film's budget was a relatively paltry $2 million) or some combination of both, It Follows is a film that squeezes every ounce of unnerving dread out of seemingly mundane people, objects, and settings. The entity Itself is the personification of this horror-on-a-shoestring philosophy. Like the titular germ-like organism in the aforementioned The Thing, the monster in It Follows has no native form. It apparently cannot speak, but its guises are superficially human. At times these are terrifyingly familiar to Jay (Yara with a bloodied face) and at times they are completely bizarre (a partly unclothed young woman in fake vampire fangs and makeup, urinating obviously down one knee-socked leg). Although It Follows has no elaborate creature effects, it manages to make ordinary figures like an elderly woman in a hospital shift seem physically menacing.

While some jump-scares make an obligatory appearance, It Follows is mainly a horror film of long, agonizing stretches in which the characters (and viewer) are simply waiting for something to happen. It is established early on that the monster moves at a slow, steady walking pace. A victim might buy some time by, say, getting into a car and driving like hell for hours and hours, but It will always catch up. This lends much of the film a sense of weary, sickening anticipation, and reveals the peculiar genius of Mitchell's approach. The viewer will often find themselves nervously scanning the out-of-focus background of each shot, straining to catch the first glimpse of the monster as It mutely plods into view. The natural expectation created by cinematic negative space becomes a canvas which the filmgoer covers with their own anxiety.  The viewer thus experiences, in some small way, the frazzled, heightened state of animal fear in which Jay spends most of the movie's events. In one superlative shot, the film utilizes a glacial 360-plus degree pan from within a windowed hallway to suggest the omni-directional vulnerability of the preoccupied characters. (This is only enhanced by the slightly smeary quality to the film's digital photography, which prevents the viewer from getting a clear glimpse of distant figures while the camera is in motion.)

Credit where credit is due: Mitchell's disciplined control of the film's protracted pacing and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis's exceptional camera work would not be nearly as effective without Michael Perry's anachronistic production design and the film's distinctive, retro-synth score by Disasterpiece (the working moniker of musician Rich Vreeland). Although Tangerine Dream's iconic Thief score is a prominent point of reference for the latter, Disasterpiece's work also evokes a host of late 1970s / early 80s horror films, including Apocalypse Now, The Shining, Scanners, The Fog, and the first A Nightmare on Elm Street. (Panos Cosmatos' Cronenberg-esque 2010 experimental mind-fuck Beyond the Black Rainbow leaps to mind as well.) It Follows' score lends a melancholy aura to even relatively mellow scenes of teenage suburban idleness, but it's the prominent use of relentless metallic droning when the creature appears that injects the film with such an ominous tone. This wall of sound creates an impression of psychic assault, like a satanic migraine lancing straight into the cerebral cortex. The creature that stalks Jay might be a flesh-and-blood predator that can maim and even kill, but it is also an entity born of fear, apparently capable of reading its quarry's mind and adjusting its shape accordingly.

The score's vintage flavor also enhances Perry's stellar design, which places the film in an ambiguous period when electric typewriters, cathode ray tube televisions, and e-ink pocket tablets coexist. The odd contemporary details aside, however, the whole film has a distinctly throwback feel, what with its boxy American cars, nonspecific latish twentieth-century fashions, and a teenage existence where diversions seem limited to games of Parcheesi, midnight creature feature movies, and the occasional clumsy lay. This lends the film a weird, unsettling aura pitched somewhere between the cinematic Americas of Steven Spielberg and David Lynch.

The film's Detroit locations, meanwhile, suggest an environment that is crumbling and forgotten, perhaps even a post-apocalyptic setting. (One could almost believe the decay is staged, if Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's 2011 documentary Detropia hadn't revealed far worse urban rot in the Motor City.) It is a landscape of decrepit row houses overgrown with weeds, ugly public buildings long overdue for upkeep, and half-demolished concrete edifices that wouldn't look out of place in some abandoned corner of post-Soviet Ukraine. Even the suburbs of this environment seem to sag: the houses are dim, smoke-stained spaces full of shabby furniture and cheap, outdated fixtures. This place's economy hasn't just declined; it's packed up and lit out for the Territory. Like the 1970s-80s Yorkshire saga Red Riding, everything about the look and feel of It Follows' setting suggests an earthly purgatory. It brings to mind a line from Zbigniew Herbert's doom-laden “Report From a Besieged City,” a poem also quoted in David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis:

here everybody is losing the sense of time
we were left with the place an attachment to the place
still we keep ruins of temples phantoms of gardens of houses
if we were to lose the ruins we would be left with nothing

Late in the film, the screenplay allows details from the real world to seep into the story, when it is observed that the adolescent characters dwell on the suburban (read: white) side of 8 Mile Road, Detroit's notorious demographic dividing line. Parent-imposed restrictions on their younger wanderings once prevented the kids from venturing across this racial and economic boundary to the nearby Michigan State Fair—which, in one of those unspoken ironies, is now defunct and has been replaced by an unrelated fair in a more distant suburb.

The aforementioned parents rarely appear in It Follows, which shares many themes with the aforementioned A Nightmare on Elm Street: shameful family secrets, generational disconnection, and the irrelevancy and impotence of adults with respect to the dangers their children face. Jay and Kelly's widowed mother (Debbie Williams) is glimpsed only at the film's periphery, her face never entirely visible even when she is roused from her stupor of alcohol and grief. A similar off-handed depiction of parental figures can be observed is Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, a feature that likewise focuses its attention on the mindsets of its adolescent characters. Adhering to the teen viewpoint is entirely fitting, given that It Follows is concerned with the loss of sexual innocence as a psychological experience rather than as just another peril that sets parental hangs wringing. 

Indeed, the prevalence of false parents among the monster's faces—Hugh's mom, Greg's mom, and Jay and Kelly's dad all make an appearance in Its rotating wardrobe of masks—hints that the parents are part of the problem. Given that It often appears naked or in underclothes, there is an element of incestuous ickiness to the creature's menace, perhaps plucked from the Freudian nightmares and longings of its victims, or perhaps based on past incidents of abuse. This incestuous aspect to Its threat is usually only vaguely implied, as when It appears as Jay's deceased father in a grimy undershirt and boxers, and then begins viciously throwing objects at her. Rarely, it becomes quite explicit, as when It assumes the form of Greg's mother—her night robe open to expose her breasts—in order to gain access to his room and savagely assault him. This jarring scene is when the creature's previously indefinite intentions become grotesquely clear: It literally rapes its victims to death.

This mingling of sex and death contains a potent erotic charge, of course, owing in part to the perverse sexuality at play when women are threatened with or subjected to violence on film. The sequence that opens the film—one orthogonal to Jay's story—depicts a teenage girl, Annie (Bailey Spry), fleeing from an unseen assailant down her street in broad daylight, clad only in underwear and high heels. This brings to mind not only the terrorized Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) stumbling naked and sobbing out of the dark in Blue Velvet, but also local news director Nina's (Rene Russo) vivid description of her show's spirit in the recent Nightcrawler: “a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.” Within ten on-screen minutes of Annie's savage murder, Jay not only has sex, but is stripped down to her (virginal pink!) bra and panties, drugged, and bound. This places her in a position of absolute helplessness at the hands of her boyfriend Hugh. (He's not the "real" threat, of course, but the image is still a disturbing one.) One doesn't need a degree in feminist film theory to recognize the linkage between female peril and male arousal. Indeed, the confusion of sex with violence in the male erotic imagination is hardly a new phenomenon. In Yara's reading material of choice, The Idiot, Myshkin's romantic rival and frenemy Rogozhin quite openly discusses both his sexual longing for and his murderous rage towards the “sullied” woman Nastassya, admitting that the two urges are inextricably linked in his obsessed mind.

Such readings also underline one of the film's other primary themes, that of mortality and its link to sexual awakening. Not for nothing is orgasm described as la petit mort: the fleeting sensation of calm transcendence that follows a sexual climax, which provides a kind of existential clarity. Such insight is not available to children, who are ignorant of both sex and their own mortality. In an early scene, Hugh expresses a wish for a return to the blissful ignorance of childhood, when he was not cognizant of either sex or death. Orgasm, and thus sex generally, opens the mind to a secondary loss of innocence, that of mortal awareness. One could identify the entity that follows in the wake of sexual experience as the Grim Reaper, lurking in the background for the rest of a person's life, even in their happiest moments. The inescapable certainty of this specter of death then colors everything, spurring subsequent sex acts as a kind of proverbial whistling past the graveyard.

Needless to say, the monster in It Follows elicits numerous other metaphorical interpretations, from sexually transmitted disease to post-traumatic stress disorder induced by childhood abuse. The frequent references to “passing” or “giving” the creature's curse to a sexual partner favor the former, but It Follows is ultimately a work that operates more clearly as a nightmare scenario than as neat allegory. As with slasher films, it's tempting to indict the film's worldview as anti-sex or at least morally conservative. Granted, the monster's predations have led to a recurring pattern of desperate one-night stands, followed either by gruesome death or another link in a daisy chain of disingenuous sex. If the film has an ethos, however, it is one that favors emotional intimacy and sex positivity. The film's ambiguous ending sees Jay and a freshly deflowered Paul walking hand-in-hand down a suburban street, the couple perhaps being followed by It or perhaps not. Having established that the curse's donor retains their ability to see the normally invisible entity, the recipient has a natural ally, but only if they stick together and watch each other's backs. It therefore becomes apparent that it is not fucking per se that gives the monster strength, but the endless cycle of fucking followed by callous abandonment. Inasmuch as the characters have any hope of defeating It someday, that hope arguably lies in sleeping with as many of their trusted friends as possible.