Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

This is and isn't a good movie. It's well made (looks good) and interesting, but it seems kind of evil. I think it also just fails on its own terms in some (but not all) ways. You expect Tarantino to be ironic, but his films have been fun in the past. This one seems more just contemptuous of just about everyone and everything, including Tarantino himself (a cheesy scene from a movie within the movie is reminiscent of the ending of Inglourious Basterds), but that doesn't "make it OK". It's especially contemptuous of Bruce Lee (the only person of color with a significant part in the film) and of women. (Also of Hollywood actors--Leonardo DiCaprio plays a drunk (Rick Dalton) with a speech impediment who cries when things go badly--and of hippies. Dalton's disability is mocked, but only by himself. So that's all right.) The hero, on the other hand, (Cliff Booth) is a white working class man who killed his wife and insults Bruce Lee.

The misogyny here isn't just something you might think you detect and then worry about ("Is it OK to like a film made by a bad person?"). It spoils the movie, since parts of it seem to rely on the audience's sharing this attitude. The death of Booth's wife is all but shown in a flashback in which she is drunkenly berating Booth on a boat while he drunkenly holds a harpoon-gun pointing in her direction. Did he fire on purpose? We can't be sure, and we don't see the shot. But the whole point of the scene seems to be to laugh at, or otherwise delight in, the imminent painful death of this woman whom we are shown from behind wearing a bikini. Another, longer scene, has Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie) going to a theater to see a film she is in and the audience's reaction. The scene is pointless unless we are expected to enjoy seeing this woman taking pleasure in her success while, unbeknownst to her, the Manson family is planning to murder her later. Sexy women about to be murdered are apparently for Tarantino what getting into a nice mess was for Laurel and Hardy. Specifically, sexy women holding forth or basking in success. (I'm using "sexy" here not to express my feelings but as shorthand for "young woman in a bikini with the camera zoomed in on one of her buttocks" and "famously beautiful young woman in a mini skirt".)

If you too like sneering at women, hippies, and Chinese people then you might enjoy all this, but a few times I think the movie just plain fails. Early on, a car door opens and piles of cigarette ends fall out. Ho ho! How much are these guys smoking?! I'm pretty sure this joke has been made before. Maybe that's more irony that I'm just failing to enjoy. But in the big fight at the end of the movie, three main sights stand out: where Booth's dog bites the male intruder, what the injured woman's face looks like, and what Dalton does to the intruder in the swimming pool. The last of these is presumably not meant to be much of a surprise, but the other two, I think, are. But what the dog does is what dogs do in John Wick: Chapter 3, and what the injured woman's face looks like is much the same as one or two of the injured faces in Midsommar. So it looks like Tarantino has been beaten to the punch with his shock tactics here.

Having said all this, I mainly care about what a film looks like and whether it has any philosophical or thought-provoking content. This one is very nicely filmed and has made me think. It's just that it has mostly made me think about how nasty it all is.           

Midsommar

I think 'Midsommar' might be my favorite movie of the year so far. 'Us' is the other one that comes to mind. And I'm not even all that into horror movies. So what's so good about it?

The cinematography is great (not that I'm an expert, but I think that what a film looks like matters to me more than it does to many other people). There are also a couple of Wittgensteinian points and a couple of political ones in its favor.

First, Wittgenstein. The movie involves a bunch of the kind of rites that Frazer writes about, and so that are familiar to anyone who's read the Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (this link goes to a book about Wittgenstein's remarks, not the remarks themselves, but the book appears to be both free and interesting). Secondly, one thing that the community featured in the movie do is to mimic emotions expressed by individuals. For instance, if you start crying then you might find yourself surrounded by others who all (pretend to) cry with you, even matching your particular sobs and sighs. I think this would feel like mockery, even it is isn't intended to be, but perhaps it would be comforting. The idea seems to be to reduce feelings of separation from others, which could be wonderfully communal or suffocatingly anti-individualist. I don't think Wittgenstein talks about this, but anything to do with expression of emotion and the role of others in this aspect of life is at least vaguely Wittgensteinian.

Second, politics. To the extent that we want to be able to have our own feelings and to be individuals, the movie is anti-mob and pro-liberalism. This makes it timely. The film also provides a reminder that white people are every bit as primitive or savage as anyone ever has been. Yes, it's fiction, but what we see is close enough to real things (things even more horrific than Morris Dancers and maypoles) that this doesn't matter. And, relatedly, it provides a reminder that communities' being isolated is not always a great thing.

Manohla Dargis liked it less than I did. She notes that the characters are not very well developed (which is true, except for the central character, but I'm not sure it matters) and suggests that there's an anti-women bias in the film. Here's her concluding paragraph:

Unlike Kubrick or Peele, though, Aster [the director] isn’t interested in psychological complexities that can make a character’s terminal fate meaningful and turn directorial virtuosity into vision. Despite all the time he lavishes on Dani and Christian’s relationship, which is drawn along stereotypical gendered lines (consuming female need that becomes devouring), the couple remains instructively uninteresting. That’s the case despite Pugh. She works hard to make Dani into more than a walking wound, but again and again, the character betrays both her common sense and your faith, all so the women can dance, the men howl and the maypole can hook up with ye old vagina dentata.    

This seems unfair to me. Dani (the central character) worries early on that she will seem too needy to her boyfriend Christian, but it becomes clear that she is right to be worried and is not bothering him unjustifiably. I'm also not sure what to make of Dargis' suggestion that characters, including Dani, behave stupidly. One does seem annoying in an implausibly constant way, but any mistakes I can think of that people make in the film all seem likely enough to me. And the usual horror movie question, Why don't they just leave?, doesn't apply here. Dargis' final reference to vagina dentata is also a bit mystifying. Sex does not appear to be any more dangerous than any other activity, and women no more dangerous than men, in the community portrayed here.

If you want a review that reflects my view more closely than Dargis' does, try this.

The dense, glittering stream of reality

Perhaps the most philosophical film of last year was Happy as Lazarro, in which the title character is reminiscent in some ways of both Socrates and Christ, and in which vaguely Marxy questions are raised about politico-economic systems and people's lives within them. (To be less obscure: when a group of peasants are moved overnight from a feudal society into a contemporary capitalist one they still end up broke and with very little opportunity to improve their lives. Does this reveal their lack of grit, initiative, etc. or show that the system is to blame? Or, since this is a work of fiction, does it show nothing at all?) But I would like to think of Zama as philosophical too. The best review I've found of it is this one in The New York Review of Books. It's here that the director, Lucrecia Martel's, desire "to film not Don Diego [Zama]’s hallucinations or his distorted perception of the world, but the dense, glittering stream of reality he moves through: the experience that precedes the interior monologue" is described. Also worth reading, though, is Glen Kenny's review, which notes that the film ends "on a scene of verdant nature not entirely stained by humanity." 

The dense, glittering stream of reality through which Zama moves is not only the horrible and absurd colonialism that most reviews focus on but also the verdant and magical natural world, with its llamas, tall grasses, and strangely attired human inhabitants. Zama is mostly talked about in the reviews I've read as an absurd figure living a frustrated and ridiculous life that he deserves because his sins are "of his own making." There is something to this, of course (why would so many critics say it otherwise?, and aren't everyone's sins of their own making?), but he can also be seen, it seems to me, as a kind of everyman. He is described as mediocre, which suggests averageness, and as characterized by "thwarted dignity and unrequited desires, [and] his bewildered attempts to grasp the logic of his predicament and exercise some sort of control." Otherwise known as the human condition, as Geoff Dyer might say.

There is a real danger that I'm projecting (I certainly tend to think "human world bad, natural world good"), but it seems to me that Zama contrasts the violent, mediocre, cruel, and tedious worlds that people make for themselves with the almost literally incredible larger world of beauty and strangeness around us. Zama waits for a transfer to another post that never comes, but the switch he really needs to make is of a different kind.

Searching for Zama led me to Scipio Africanus, which features a recreation of the Battle of Zama. This is literally fascist propaganda (made in Italy in 1937), but it seems tame in comparison with a movie like 300. It's been a while since I saw that film, and I don't plan to watch it again just to get my facts straight, but as I recall 300 pits a bunch of manly British actors playing Spartans against a bizarre coalition of brown and Asian types (didn't some of them look Samurai-ish?), led by a queer Xerxes. My point is not to bash an old movie but to note that the racism, nationalism, and lust for war (or glory) in Scipio Africanus is no worse than we are used to seeing in movies, and in some cases significantly weaker than what can easily be found in contemporary culture. Whether this causes fascism is probably debatable, but it can't be good.                  

Westworld

I don't think I'm giving too much away if I say that the HBO series Westworld raises ethical questions about artificial intelligence. The series is set in an amusement park where people can live out fantasies of the Wild West, fantasies that to a striking extent involve murder and rape. But no one actually gets murdered, because the characters that populate the world are (very lifelike) robots. They feel no real pain, despite appearances to the contrary, and can be repaired relatively easily. And the customers are paying high prices for the privilege, so what could they have to feel guilty about?

I assume no one believes Jesus' idea that committing a sin in one's heart is just as bad as committing it in the flesh, but is also seems about as clear as can be that much of what Westworld's clients are paying to do is very bad (even though it is, in a sense, not really done in the flesh). Standard ethical theories seem incapable of handling this fact. Or, if not incapable, not at all well positioned to do so plausibly or simply. The problem is similar to the well known one about Kantian ethics and mistreatment of animals: if ethics is all about respect for reason and the creatures that embody it, then (why) is tormenting animals wrong? The Kantian answer is that it is bad because it makes tormenting people more likely, but this is fairly plainly inadequate. A dying man could spend his last moments torturing bunnies and do nothing unethical at all on this view. 

Shooting at (robots that look and behave just like) people for fun is cruel. Perhaps part of why cruelty is bad has to do with its effects in the world, but, as Kant saw, bad will is bad on its own, regardless of whether it turns out to have bad consequences or not in any particular instance. It seems to me that Westworld therefore shows that consequentialism and textbook Kantianism are wrong, or incomplete, as moral theories. I'm sure others see it differently though.

On a related note, in Avengers: Infinity War the baddie is a consequentialist and the goodies "don't trade lives" (cf. Kant and Romans 3:8). I usually don't like science fiction-inspired philosophy, partly because it's usually metaphysics or epistemology (which are not my thing) and partly because it so often seems to be wrapped up in concerns about what is cool (also not my thing). But Westworld, which also raises metaphysical questions, seems to me to demonstrate something important about ethics that is rarely shown.

Attempts to anticipate dissent:

1. The clients of Westworld don't do anything wrong--you can do what you like to robots, as long as no actual people's rights are violated.  In a way I agree with this. But perhaps that just shows that there is more to ethics than questions about actions and their rightness or wrongness. There is, it seems to me, just something obviously very bad about choosing to have the experience as of shooting a man and seeing him bleed to death, screaming in pain, etc. Perhaps the badness is located more in the heart-mind of the person choosing to behave this way, or in the choice to act this way, than in the act itself, but that there is badness there seems about as plain as it could be.

2. So you're saying it's wrong or bad to play video games that involve shooting, etc.? Not necessarily. But there is something bad about playing a game that focuses on violence and in which the players want the violence to be as realistic as possible. Space Invaders is not like this. Nor is Angry Birds. (Although would the Buddha play either of those games?) No doubt there is a gray area somewhere. Such is life.

Lady Bird

What a great film! I was thinking about trying to write something about it and love and attention and possibly Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, but Vox has beaten me to it. (Spoiler alert: there are no Iris Murdoch references.) Here's the beginning of their review:

The French philosopher Simone Weil wrote often of attention as a kind of spiritual discipline. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” she wrote in her notebooks, an idea she later would continue to develop, eventually concluding that attention “presupposes faith and love.”

In a Q&A following a festival screening of her masterful solo directorial debut Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig quoted Weil, and it’s clear from the film that this spirit of faith, love, generosity, and attention animates the whole endeavor. Lady Bird is a coming-of-age film starring the great Saoirse Ronan as Christine — or “Lady Bird,” as she’s re-christened herself — and it’s as funny, smart, and filled with yearning as its heroine. Lady Bird is an act of attention, and thus love, from Gerwig, not just toward her hometown of Sacramento but also toward girlhood, and toward the feeling of always being on the outside of wherever real life is happening.

Some films seem designed to make you fall in love with one or more of their characters, or the people who play them. Lady Bird is like that, except what you fall in love with is not Saoirse Ronan or the character she plays but growing up itself, or the tenderness of youth and family, the pain of forming as an individual and separating from your parents, and the sweetness of forming as an individual and never separating from your parents. I haven't nearly cried so many times about so many different kinds of thing at any movie I can remember.

Kingsman and politics

Perhaps I was just in the right mood for it, but I loved the first Kingsman movie when I saw it recently. It's fast-paced, stylish*, and funny, a bit like what you might get if Quentin Tarantino directed a James Bond film. [Spoilers from now on.] About half a second later, though, I realized how, shall we say, alt right it is. Let me count the ways:

1. the only major black character is also the major villain
2. his sidekick is played by someone from Africa, and is also the only disabled person in the film
3. the bad guys are extreme environmentalists
4. the good guys are an organization of highly privileged, almost all male, and all white, British people
5. when they realize that their lack of diversity is hurting them, they recruit a member of the white working class  
6. he supports Millwall
7. it ends with a sexist joke 
8. there is almost certainly more that I'm forgetting

Thankfully the sequel, though spoiled by some unconvincing CGI, including the terrible idea of killer robot dogs, is much better from a political point of view. The villain is a woman drug-dealer, so once again just the kind of person that neo-Nazis would hate, the heroes include a good old boy or two from Kentucky, and the main hero is once again our white working class Englishman fighting for the otherwise completely posh British Kingsman organization. Also, the film is banned in Cambodia because of its disrespectful (but not physically damaging) treatment of temples there. And yet:

1. the guy who repeatedly stops a black woman rising within the Kentuckian organization turns out to be a baddy
2. the recreational use of drugs is presented as unwise but innocent
3. a Donald Trump-style President tries, with support from at least one military officer, to "win the war on drugs" by letting the villain kill almost all users of illegal drugs worldwide, which is presented as unambiguously evil and leads to his arrest and removal from office
4. Elton John features as a a comical but also somehow heroic figure (although there is also a questionable joke about him at the end too)  
5. our hero has several close, black friends
6. the woman who was before a prisoner he would not release unless she gave him a kiss (and who went on to offer her body as if it were an object for his pleasure) is now his girlfriend and seems free to decide what she wants to do    

There is some other dubiousness, e.g. Fox News features heavily, but mostly the film does not leave you picking swastikas out of your teeth after watching it. Which is a relief.  

Now they just need to find a way to combine the best of the two. I hope that's possible.

*It's not actually that stylish, but I've seen reviews describing it that way, and I suspect part of the reason I like it is that it looks (relatively) good.

Songs about film directors

Are there any bad ones? These are the best, and only, three I know: "Woody Allen" by Allo Darlin', "What's Yr Take on Cassavetes" by Le Tigre, and "Roman P" by Psychic TV.

The videos aren't very exciting, but the performances are better in these than in the live versions you can watch online. 

Yes, but what have you been watching on TV?

It's been a while since I watched it, but the Swedish show 30 Degrees in February is possibly the best series I've ever seen on TV (it's available on Netflix). It's about various Swedes who go to Thailand (independently of each other) for various reasons. Most of the issues you might expect to be raised come up at one point or another, some more than others, but it's a drama rather than an essay. It's not, for instance, like Downton Abbey, where every time someone picks up a newspaper you know they will make some naive comment about historical events that we can laugh at. It's fairly realistic, in other words.

Most of the other things I might recommend are too obvious to be worth mentioning. I'll mention them anyway: Better Call Saul, Survivor, The Amazing Race, Into the Badlands (despite the appallingly humorless MK), The Handmaid's Tale, The Americans, Anthony Bourdain (the recent episode on Laos was especially good), Brockmire (the funniest TV show I've seen in ages), Gomorrah, etc. Less obvious, as far as I know, are El Marginal and Departures, both on Netflix. El Marginal is about Argentine gangsters and set mostly in a prison. If you like Gomorrah (Italian gangsters) and that kind of thing you should like this. Departures is a travel documentary featuring two twenty-something Canadians (three if you count the cameraman, who sometimes becomes visible). They are no intellectuals--if I had drunk so much that I threw up I would have edited it out of the show; not these guys--but the camerawork is good and they go to some cool places. In the last season, especially, they see people in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea whose way of life is surely not going to survive much longer, for good and bad. (Mostly for bad, I think, but then I'm not one of the women whose culture encourages them to collect scars from being whipped with sticks.)

And a new find: Samurai Gourmet (Netflix). It's sort of a cross between Iron Chef and Ikiru. A man who retires at 60 (is that the norm in Japan?) wonders what to do with himself and ends up enjoying a series of minor culinary adventures and personal growth with help from hallucinations of a samurai. Charming.

More videos

If you liked the video of Cora Diamond's recent lecture you might want to see if there's anything here you've missed:

Russell on Wittgenstein, Sea of Faith documentary on Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein the movie

Cora Diamond speaking at Gregynog in Wales, 2011

Rai Gaita at the same conference

Stephen Mulhall on Wittgenstein (part 1, part 2) and as one of Melvyn Bragg's guests in a program on guilt

Stanley Cavell on "The Wittgensteinian Event" (and more Cavell here)

Lars Hertzberg in conversation with Frederick Stoutland on Georg von Wright and at Gregynog

The best and worst of 2014

This blog has been quiet for a couple of weeks and is likely to stay that way for a couple of weeks more (lots of work, a little flu, lots of traveling), but in the meantime here's something. Looking at other people's lists of the top ten films and albums of the year, not to mention books, I realize that I haven't seen or heard (or read) as many as ten new movies/albums/books this year. So I won't even attempt a top ten, or top five, of anything. What I will do is make some negative comments and then end on a positive note.

The Guardian named Under the Skin the best movie of the year. It's not. People who like it talk about how haunting and visually stunning it is. It is memorable and visually striking. On the other hand, as the Rotten Tomatoes summary hints at ("Its message may prove elusive for some"), the whole thing seems pointless, despite very much appearing to want to have a serious point. The word for this kind of thing, I think, is pretentious. Another sci-fi disappointment was Snowpiercer. This is the kind of movie I really enjoy, just not a very good example of the kind. Maybe my expectations were too high, but any top ten list that includes it goes down in my estimation.

Now for the good news. I've mentioned some albums I've bought this year and I'm sure nobody cares, so I won't review them. But from other top ten lists I've recently discovered (a bit late) The New Pornographers (not really my cup of tea but sometimes very catchy indeed in a good way) and Allo Darlin' (presumably named after this). If I have an album of the year it's their We Come from the Same Place. Pitchfork calls them "bookish," which I suppose is my kind of thing.  

And I haven't seen enough new films to be sure, but my guess is that Locke was the best movie of last year. It's (even) better than Boyhood: a movie for grownups, and visually interesting too.

Rrrecommendations

I watched The Punk Singer a couple of nights ago, which is very good. I watched it just because it sounded intriguing:

Her critics wished she would just shut-up, and her fans hoped she never would. So in 2005, when Hanna stopped shouting, many wondered why. 

What I didn't realize is that Kathleen Hanna, the subject of the film, was the lead singer in Le Tigre, a band I like a lot. This is what happens when you don't have album sleeves to read anymore. She was also a leader in the riot grrl movement. Who knew? Probably everybody except me.

Speaking of music, it had looked as though the soundtrack to this summer was going to be the new albums by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, but now I'm not so sure. The Pains have meh-llowed a bit (the album is good but not as good as their earlier stuff, as we hipsters like to say) and the BJM album is far from being their best work despite claims to the contrary. But you can always turn to the artists your heroes recommend if those heroes themselves don't come through. Kip Berman (of The Pains) recommends Makthaverskan, and their latest album is dark (listen to it too much and you'll get depressed) but good, a bit like a more aggressive version of the Cure fronted by a sweary, younger version of Björk. 

And Anton Newcombe (of the BJM) recommends Les Big Byrd, another Swedish band. Droney but infectious.

Russian films

In case you care about this sort of thing but missed it, Dave Maier has a very useful-looking review of a bunch of Russian movies over at 3 Quarks Daily. And if you like that, see also his previous article on (mostly) Japanese movies.

The unrealistic spirit

Apparently it's Holocaust Memorial Day, so this post I've been working on seems apt.

The Act of Killing (about the brutal suppression of communists and "communists" in Indonesia) is a good film, although not as surreal as some reviews had led me to expect. If you don't read any such reviews, though, I think it would be surreal. The sight of overweight, middle-aged murderers performing a musical about their crimes in drag is weird. The painful reality of memory and evasive fantasy take turns, with fantasy mostly winning out. Its victory is never secure, though, because it's so unbelievable. (Which is related to its badness as art and tempts me to say something about the truth of great art, but I'll resist. Evil people do seem to have terrible taste, though, and I think this must have something to do with an inability to see, or to accept, reality.)

Not long after seeing this I watched S21, about the torture and mass murder of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The best part of the film is where one of the survivors of the S21 prison, Vann Nath, talks to former prison guards. He objects to their use of words like 'destruction' instead of 'murder' or 'killing', and to their claim that they had no choice about whether to kill prisoners because they would have been killed themselves if they had refused. He does not deny that they would have been killed, but he presents their excuses as a kind of attack on humanity. Humanity requires that we not use de-humanized, evasive words like 'destruction' and that we not think of ourselves as having no choice or responsibility, even when threatened with death. Humanity requires a kind of realism, albeit not the kind of realism that would see a coerced person as indeed having no real choice or responsibility. It isn't realistic to say, "What could I do? My hands were tied," because a person whose hands are tied does not just shrug when forced to kill.

Thinking about what it means to be realistic has led me to think about the meaning and ethics of facing death, and of what Wittgenstein says about this in the Tractatus. Here's 6.4311:

Death is not an event in life. One does not live through death.

If one understands eternity not as an endless period of time but as timelessness, then he who lives in the present lives eternally.

Our life is just as endless as our field of vision is limitless.   

The first sentence there is odd. Death certainly is an event in life, i.e. it happens. But it happens to other people: one does not live through one's own death. That's almost a joke. It's hardly news. So my death is not an event in my life in the sense that within the duration of my life the end of that life does not arrive. That is also a tautology or analytic truth that sounds almost like a bit of comforting Epicurean therapy, but anyone who is comforted by tautologies is surely confused.

The next paragraph sounds like the kind of idea that is standardly labeled 'inspirational,' but again it's just playing with words, isn't it? If one takes 'eternity' to mean timelessness then the present, which is not a measurable period of time, is an eternity. So what? We cannot live our whole lives in the present in this sense any more than Zeno's paradoxes mean that we can never reach the door or catch up with a turtle.

And then the comparison of life with the field of vision: Life as we experience it contains no limits because we do not, cannot, experience a limit to our experience. Again this is a tautology. The limit of my field of vision is not part of the field of vision, not one of the things I can see. Any sense of wisdom, insight, or comfort here seems illusory.

There's also this:

6.431 As too at death the world does not change, but rather stops.

This strikes me as false. The world does not stop when I die. I'm not sure what it would means for the world to stop, actually, and if it's a possibility then it might stop at the same time as I die. Not because I am so crucial to the world but rather because if the world ever stops then I will probably not survive. At my death my world will stop, the world as it appears or exists for me will stop, but that's just to say that I will permanently lose consciousness. And 'death' here presumably means something like 'permanent loss of consciousness.' This is not a hypothesis about immortality. 6.431 seems to say nothing, but it is a comment on 6.43, so what does that say?

6.43 If good or evil willing alters the world, then it can only alter the limits of the world, not the facts; not that which can be expressed through language.

In short, the world must then thereby become an altogether different one. It must, so to speak, wane or wax as a whole.

The world of the happy is a different one than that of the unhappy. 

This doesn't sound like nonsense, or empty speech. How might the world of the happy differ from that of the unhappy? Well, one belongs to the happy and the other does not. Is the former in some sense, or in what sense might it be, larger than the other? Some people do have little minds, lacking imagination or much sense of the reality of other people's lives. Their cares are narrowly concentrated on themselves. These are the kind of people we call small or miserable. This section does not feel like a joke, but its apparent content does seem to evaporate on inspection. The benevolent are happy if by 'happy' we mean 'benevolent', and likewise for the malevolent and unhappiness. Is there more here than that?

Does this tell us or show us anything about the ethics of murder or memory or fantasy? I don't think so. It might show that philosophy cannot tell us what is realistic (or good?). Only reality can do that. Can goodness? So far as it, like evil, is part of reality I think it might.

Hunger

I finally saw a film by Steve McQueen last night: Hunger. Now I know what all the fuss is about. (Spoilers left and right from here on.)

Although I'm not a huge fan of the IRA (who once bombed the railway station via which I commuted to and from school in Manchester every day--luckily for me this was years after I had left both school and the Manchester area), but Bobby Sands comes across as a weird kind of saint in this film. Partly I think this is because of a kind of absence of both time and violence in the beginning of the film, which creates a certain kind of context. A context in which sainthood seems possible. What do I mean? Well, here's the absence I'm talking about. We see a man wash his bloody knuckles before we see him get them bloody, and it's not really clear whether the later scene is a flashback or whether there is just a cycle in his life of violence and cleaning up after violence. This unclarity creates a sense of spinning wheels, like a vehicle stuck in mud or snow, the wheels going round but the overall movement amounting to nothing more than a little move back (flashback?) and a little move forward (no, this is the next day), then back again. We see the same man checking his car for bombs before driving to work, but not finding any. We also see a man clutching some kind of weapon or tool, followed by a wound on another man's head, without seeing the violence between the mere holding of the weapon and the existence of the wound. We see power and suffering, that is, but the violence is only implied. It is ubiquitous, though, this invisible violence.  

After this beginning there is plenty of visible violence, mostly inside a prison, and mostly involving prisoners and what look like riot police: the few against the many, the unarmed against the armed, the naked against the uniformed, the visibly human against the machine-like, the wild against the controlling. It is hard not to sympathize with the prisoners. Christ's crucifixion with criminals is even brought up at one point, in a conversation between Sands and a priest, so martyrdom is in the air. So is nature, as a childhood trip from the city to the countryside is central to the ending of the film. Sands' hunger strike is presented as a kind of victory for the human spirit despite attempts to suffocate it.

But what kind of victory is it? We aren't given much reason to believe that the IRA's cause is just. Sands asserts that it is, or that he believes it to be. The priest he talks to (there is very little dialogue in the film apart from this conversation) sympathizes, and comments on the evils of "the Brits." But who exactly are the Brits, and what exactly have they done? Their face is the prison guards (who would be Northern Irish Protestants, of course, not people from Britain) and their voice is Margaret Thatcher, whose speeches we hear at times, without ever seeing her. "The Brits" are not really people, in other words, but a government or system, a force. It is clearly not a force for good. Its evil is far more clear in the film than is the goodness of Irish national unity. The attempt to fight an evil system by killing people, though, like the attempt to fight terror or terrorism by killing people, seems badly misguided. Understandable, but misguided.

The film shows us two other ways to fight the power. First is the dirty protest. Prisoners refuse to wear prison uniforms (which mark them as criminals rather than political prisoners) and cover as much of the prison as they can with shit and piss. Some of the smearings look like abstract expressionist art, but mostly I thought of the smell. I don't know how you could live like that and not vomit. Nasty physical reality versus something higher, less concrete, half beautiful, half insane. We oscillate between the mundane and the ideal.

The second way is Sands' hunger strike. He dies (after 66 days), as do nine other hunger strikers. So do some prison guards, who are killed during the strike (there were 16, I think, but this statistic is far harder to find online than the number of hunger strikers). As a result of which the British government gives in, quietly, to the prisoners' demands. These demands, though, mostly concern what clothes the prisoners wear. The clothes have significance--are the IRA prisoners merely criminals or not?--but it's hard to see that it is worth dying or killing over this. Especially, turning to reality outside the film, now that the IRA has more or less died out without having got the united Ireland it wanted. Sands' death was not a battle won on the way to winning the war. The war, although I suppose not quite over, has pretty much been lost. If it is ever won it will be by peaceful means. So it won't be a war that is won. And it isn't clear that it matters whether it is won or not. What seems to matter is violence, human rights, democracy, (etc.) not the locations of borders or the colours of flags. ("Imagine all the people..." Corny, but better than nationalism. And much better than nationalism-inspired terrorism.)  

And yet Sands' starving himself to death does not seem pointless. What matters is not so much what he achieves but that he refuses to give in. And it isn't what he refuses to do (wear these clothes, etc.) that matters, but his refusal to be controlled by a faceless, almost anonymous power ("the Brits"). His methods wouldn't work against any other kind of enemy. They are an assertion of humanity, especially mortality, against an inhuman force. But that sounds too trite. It's a very mysterious kind of act. What's so great about dying? What's so great about shit? It's almost the pointlessness of it all that is the point. If the goal is to achieve something then whoever has the most power wins. One way to beat power is to play a different game, a non-consequentialist game, a game that is played outside the causal nexus. If he wins at all he wins by being human. The reward is to die as a human being.   

Gravity

Gravity is good. I'll try not to spoil it in what follows, but I can't promise anything. Before I saw it I had heard from friends that it was a great spectacle but ultimately empty and that it was really about God. Both are partly right. Whether they are all intended or not (and I suspect that most of them are) the movie points to several things outside itself that help give it meaning.

For one thing there's the title. 'Gravity' means both seriousness and what brings us down to Earth. It's also the force that makes things come together (which might make us think of The Beatles and Primal Scream, but that's probably just me). The movie is a plea for seriousness, for a fantasy-free vision of what matters (especially our planet and life itself) and what we are doing to it (especially through violence and disregard for the environment), and for a sense of international unity. The life-threatening problems faced by astronauts Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are caused by the shooting down of a spy satellite creating a domino effect with other junk in space breaking up and smashing into still more satellites and debris. Hope comes (practically) in the form of the Americans' being able to use Russian and Chinese spacecraft, and (spiritually) in the form of Jesus and the Buddha. We all need to help each other despite national differences, in other words, and a little faith wouldn't hurt.    

Secondly there's Clooney himself, who starred in the re-make of Solaris. Of course Gravity isn't as good as the Tarkovsky original, and the reference to a cover version of one of his films only emphasizes the point. But still, the fact that Clooney is there in space makes you think of Solaris and therefore of both the mysteries of Tarkovsky's film and the inferiority of the Clooney version. The deep and the second-rate, the artistic and the commercial. Like it or not, the film calls these thoughts to mind (unintentionally, I would think, although maybe it's a brave confession that it is all these things).  

Third, Clooney's character is called Kowalsky. So we're in Vanishing Point territory--the individual versus the world (or at least the man), the quest for freedom, "the last American hero." He is heroic and American, but the reference doesn't do much except give the character what little bit of a third dimension he has. (It might make you think of Primal Scream again, but I doubt that's intended.)

Finally, The Smiths. In a moment of despair Bullock's character (Ryan Stone, presumably meant to be as generic a name as could be found) asks someone to "sing me to sleep." (I assume this is a deliberate reference, but who knows?) There is some treatment then of the ethics of giving up, the problem of evil, etc. Against the pain of pointless suffering is weighed the beauty of the Earth. Beauty wins.

And that's about it. It's a nice-looking film, with fun 3-D effects, and a very noticeable soundtrack. It gets loud right at the end, but mostly it sounds like the kind of orchestral sound you get on some Spiritualized songs. Which is kind of appropriate.

Zombies again

David Denby reminds me of my previous speculation about zombies. As he says:

The undead really do keep on coming; they are taking over our bookstores, our movie theatres, our cable channels. Every neighborhood has a zombie or two. Are they what we fear we might become if we let ourselves go—soulless vessels of pure appetite, both ravaged and ravaging? Do they represent our apprehension of what hostility lies behind all those blank faces in the office, at the mall, across the dinner table?

He doesn't have an answer, but neither do I. (I agree with him about "Man of Steel" too.)

If you want other movie recommendations (I know you probably don't), I suggest Stoker and One Night in Mongkok. The first is by Park Chan-wook, the creator of the genre I think of as Korean revenge and a former philosophy major. It is marred by gothic cliches (a girl dresses a bit like Alice, a spider crawls up her leg, etc.) but when I watched it on a plane on my recent travels it was refreshing, even thrilling, to see a film made by someone who was actually thinking about how to take each shot rather than just following the usual script. The second is set in the most densely populated part of Hong Kong (and, in fact, of the planet, if memory serves), is an action/revenge film, and shows the attitude of Hong Kongers towards the mainland Chinese quite nicely. It's a sympathetic treatment in the end, but it's not hard to infer that a certain disdain for the unsophisticated poor (these days often rich) mainlanders is widespread.

Oslo, August 31st

About as cheery as Grave of the Fireflies but very much worth watching is this film by Joachim Trier. At one point the main character, Anders, gives as an example of a typical contemporary magazine article a Schopenhauerian take on Sex and the City. If you've seen it, it's then hard not to think of Alain de Botton's piece on Schopenhauer and nightclubs:

According to de Botton, people who think they are going to nightclubs just to dance, drink, and have fun are actually unconsciously driven by the will to live to seek opportunities for reproduction. The women in Sex and the City are presumably in the same boat. They all seem to want a man in some sense (perhaps just sex, perhaps just a friend (male or female), perhaps a husband, perhaps some other variation on this theme, depending on the character and her mood at the time), but never seem quite sure what it is that they want. The Schopenhauerian view, I take it, is that this quest is all quite pointless but more or less inevitable given our nature. We are driven by forces that we rarely see clearly and that are themselves blind. So we don't know what is going on, what we are chasing, except in vague terms. The underlying, meaningless truth is veiled from us.   

Anders takes a similar kind of view. Married life does not appeal to him, not surprisingly given the view of it that is presented to him. And endless casual relationships seem pointless. So he's stuck. Can art provide a way out? Well, he doesn't have much faith in either journalism or his chances of making it as a journalist. And he doesn't seem to consider other kinds of writing. What about movies? He doesn't try to make one, but if he did I imagine it would be rather like this one, the one about him. It doesn't seem nearly as superficial as the magazine articles he mocks, but it is apt that he might think of it that way. Everything's meaningless when you're in despair. 

That's a bit obscure, so here's another version. In this movie the idea of an essay on how Schopenhauer might regard Sex and the City is presented as a joke, but if you think about what such an essay might say it's actually pretty close to this movie itself. And that is not an indictment of the film but one of the things that makes it so neat.

Life of Pi

No offence, but this has to be the worst movie I've seen in years. People liked the spectacle of it, I think, and perhaps on the big screen it looks great. On the not-so-big screen it all looks fake. And indeed the whole thing struck me a deeply phony. I'm not sure which was more annoying, the smug whimsicality (everyone is either charmingly quirky or inexplicably mean-spirited) or the long stretches of dialogue that consist of a man shouting "Aaaaargh!" at a tiger. The quirkiness and the painfully raw simplicity come together in the central metaphor: a man on a boat with a tiger. The only reason to watch till the end is to see how, or whether, this metaphor develops. I am a sucker for attempts to address the meaning of life, and quite fond of metaphors too. Plus I can't help wondering (although I think the answer is surely No) whether this image is taken from Wittgenstein, who writes in one of his diaries:

Is being alone with oneself--or with God, not like being alone with a wild animal? It can attack you any moment.--But isn't that precisely why you shouldn't run away?! Isn't that, so to speak, what's glorious?! Doesn't it mean: grow fond of this wild animal!--And yet one must ask: Lead us not into temptation! 

So I watched the whole thing. But what does it all mean?

Several things, I think:

• Near the beginning of the film, the very religious (which in his case seems to be more a matter of having many religions than of being unusually devout) boy Pi (guess whether this quirky name has a quirky origin) is taught a lesson by his anti-religious father. When his father catches Pi holding meat through the bars of a tiger's caged home he shows him how dangerous this is by tying a goat there and making the boy watch as the tiger kills it and drags it through the bars to eat it. He tells Pi and his brother that anything they think they see in an animal's eyes is just a projection. Really, the lesson seems to be, nature is heartless, even cruel. The boy starts reading existentialist literature and feels the world to be disenchanted. So this is part of the point: being stuck on a lifeboat with a tiger is like being in the goat's position. It means having to come to terms with nature, with creation (and hence, in a way, with God), having to learn to live with it, and, in the end, befriending it, as Pi does the tiger named (quirk alert!) Richard Parker.
• I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think that the boat in which the tiger and the young man travel is also like our own earthly vessel, the body. Within it are two competing forces: the person and the wild beast, the ego and the id, the rational part of the soul or inner man and the insatiable monster of appetite. How can the two coexist harmoniously? Well, shouting "Aaaaargh!" a lot apparently helps. God works in mysterious ways.
• At the end of the film Pi tells another version of his voyage in the lifeboat, one in which the various animals (at one point there is a hyena, an orangutan, and a zebra on the boat as well) are replaced by people. He explicitly says that the tiger is him. So, I am the tiger. Each of us is a wild beast, capable of great evil, etc. 
• Finally, now that we have two versions of the story, each consistent with the available evidence, Pi suggests that we choose the version we prefer. He also suggests that belief in God is like this. And he chooses to believe.  

If this has any value I think it might be in showing (at least part of) what Wittgenstein meant when he said, "And yet one must ask: Lead us not into temptation!" If we think of being with God as like being with a wild animal that can attack at any moment, whose presence is glorious precisely because of this danger, and that we must grow fond of, then we need to beware of seeing this as an easy task, and of sentimentalizing God.

The horror, the horror

Why do people enjoy being scared? It surely is not the case that scary movies are not really scary, nor that the pleasure comes from the relief when the fear stops. It seems at least possible that people enjoy scary films for the same kind of reasons that they enjoy sad movies, songs, and stories. And why is that? The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" suggests a kind of answer: "I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me. Yeah." If you're feeling sad you're likely to want to have your feelings articulated, and recognized. Not necessarily shared, that is, but acknowledged as something that people do experience. It's a kind of validation, as well as sympathy. Fear might also need to be articulated and validated. For instance, if it is usually only very vaguely felt, or if attempts to articulate it are quickly censored because they sound crazy or evil. If this is right then popular movies might be very revealing of a society's psychological state. And that sounds plausible anyway.

Last night I watched two horror films: Nosferatu and [REC] 3 Genesis. Both are kind of silly, but in different ways. Nosferatu is, not surprisingly, very dated, and the acting seems terrible. On the other hand, even now the images (some of them, anyway) are powerfully striking and, appropriately, haunting. [REC] 3 (the "rec" is for the letters used to indicate that a camcorder is recording: think The Blair Witch Project) is much more forgettable, and the weakest of the [REC] series, though still, to my mind, worth seeing. When the bride picks up a chainsaw to fight off the zombies you know you are in Japan being catered to by crowd-pleasers.

Nosferatu reminded me of the links between the plague and legends of vampires. It also seems portentous to watch an angry German mob run through a town after a scapegoat. Creepy. But what could the contemporary fascination with zombies mean? Perhaps nothing, of course, but my pet theory is that we are afraid that our own society is being taken over by people who are dead on the inside, and that this internal death is contagious. That we are already succumbing to it. This might be thought of as part of the death of God (freedom and immortality die along with him, and so we become mere things), or as the death of the Overman. The disenchantment of the world means, among other things, the disenchantment of human beings. Free will might be thought of as something like a compliment that we cannot help but pay to each other, but it isn't so hard to deny the compliment to those we don't really interact with (Descartes's hats and coats below in the street, "the they"), and these seem to be increasing in number and influence (see here, for instance). And much the same goes for consciousness. (Doesn't it? I haven't thought this anything like all the way through.)

We can, and perhaps cannot but, have an attitude toward a soul when it comes to people we really live with. But all those others out there, and people we live only virtually with, can't really be treated the same way. What kind of attitude can I have toward someone on the other end of an internet connection? I realize that means most of the people who will read this, i.e. the ones I will never meet, and I don't mean to be rude. But we cannot literally see eye to eye like this, or make any use of facial expression or bodily posture. I can only have an attitude toward you in a limited sense of the word. And what about people who are not themselves even in person, only representatives of some corporate position, say, or speakers of jargon? I am not of the opinion that they have souls, to misquote Wittgenstein. And then Schopenhauer's argument against solipsism comes up: you can't prove that you are fundamentally different from everyone else, but you would have to be crazy to think that you are. This goes two ways. It's a kind of argument against zombies, but also an argument against one's own non-zombie-ness. That is, if they are all zombies, and I must be the same as them, then I must be a zombie too. Just being surrounded by them, even if you are still human, is bad enough. And however incredible that idea might be, it's still scary.

Midway

In the words of Stephen Clark:

[T]his is indeed a (short) film that everyone should see:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=377714522327361

http://midwayfilm.com/

The trailer, to which the second link leads, is less than four minutes long, and is incredible. It's like an exhibition of art photographs, but showing birds killed by garbage. The point, as far as I can tell from such a short preview, is about environmentalism and the need for us to throw less garbage into the sea. But if feels as though the point is somehow (even) bigger than that, as though the birds' dying is a symptom of something else, or a metaphor. Greed, laziness, sloppiness, thoughtlessness, short-term thinking, short-range thinking (here matters, there does not) lead to consequences we don't like. Lead even to what we want least of all, the poisoning of paradise. Even though we might be so dimly aware that this (paradise, unpoisoned) is what we want most of all that we don't even recognize our desire for it. (They are only birds, after all.)