Inside Llewyn Davis

I have been reading a lot of reviews of the latest Coen Brothers film, Inside Llewyn Davis, which I recently saw myself. And I think everyone has it wrong.

Here are the interpretations I've seen:

1. The Coens are positing that nihilism may be the true nature of the world: everything is chaos.

2. Davis is a failed artist facing the tough decision to change his career.

3. Davis is feckless, irresponsible, and self-destructive.

First, let's clear the field:

1. One element of the film is definitely non-chaotic, and it is the one most crucial element: the music. Perhaps everything other than art is chaos.

2. Davis is based on Dave Van Ronk. The discouragements he faces are largely discouragements faced by Van Ronk himself in his autobiography. And Dave Van Ronk was a successful, not a failed, artist. The discouragements he faced are no worse than the discouragements most artists go through, even the very best. Moreover, we hear Davis for ourselves in the movie: he is quite good.

3. Feckless? Davis shows unusual concern throughout the movie over the welfare of a cat, even when the cat he has charge of is an anonymous stray. Although it turns out she has had sex with a variety of men, any one of whom might be the father, it is the impoverished Davis who takes responsibility and arranges and pays for his girl friend's abortion. He loses his temper a few times; but in a way that seems, in the circumstances as presented, natural and forgivable.

The original.

Interpretations two and three, I fear, are generated by the sadly common human tendency to blame anyone who is obviously suffering for their own predicament. Inside Llewyn Davis is certainly, as everyone agrees, a depressing movie.

But here's what it is really all about: the movie presents the world as it really is experienced by the typical artist, or anyone of an artistic temperament. Hence the title, “Inside Llewyn Davis”: you are seeing the world as the generic artist of the title sees it, from inside his head. And, as Keats once warned, there is no romance there: “the poet is the most unpoetical thing in existence.”

This is not just about how hard it is, objectively, to make a living in the arts. It is about the same for “successful” artists, like Van Ronk or the Coens. To resort to a common idiom, to the artist, life in the streets is like herding cats. Nothing outside of art ever works as it is supposed to. Nobody else ever seems to get the art. Notably, every time Davis performs a song, it is followed by some obvious letdown. Bud Grossman sees no money in it; his father, seemingly unaware, just soils himself; Davis gets called out after his encore and beaten up in the alley. Nobody hears the music he hears.

If that is depressing—well, there is a reason why almost all good artists are depressives.

And these reviews confirm the general truth: nobody seems to get Llewyn Davis.

Movies: Some Personal Favourites

This is a list of movies that have struck me as especially worthwhile. I do not claim this to be a list of the best movies of all time. After all, I haven't seen everything, and I find it too boring to put titles here that virtually everyone acknowledges are great, unless they really did strongly move me personally. My hope is instead that I may turn someone on to a really good movie they had overlooked.

And to remind myself that film really can be art. These days, with what is coming out of Hollywood, it is hard to remember.

• O Brother, Where Art Thou? Nobody does Americana better than the Coens. Best soundtrack ever.
• Fargo. Saw it in Korea with subtitles.
• The Big Lebowski. The Coens' take on the modern West. Nice ferret. Liked it so much I had to read the screenplay.
• The Princess Bride. Everybody loves it now, which is disappointing. There was a time I thought I was the only one who knew.

• Pennies from Heaven. This may be my favourite movie of all time. Saying anything would be a spoiler.
• The Birds. Disliked it first time. Now I think it is Hitchcock's best. Best part is the scene outside the school with the children singing inside. Why is it so ominous? The best thing about The Birds as a whole is that nothing is explained.
• The Grave of the Fireflies.Shows why I think animation is the pinnacle of film as art. 
• Howl's Moving Castle. Hang the story. I love it as pure visual art. 

• O What a Lovely War! Best thing, of course, is the soundtrack. I'm a sucker for musicals. The more multi the media the better.
• No Country for Old Men. I'm a little reluctant to include it, because everyone thinks so. Still, I think it might be the definitive picture of the soul of America in film.
• Gettysburg. My candidate for the best war movie ever. Accurate historical reenactment.
• True Grit (Cohen Bros.). Can't get it out of my mind. Single-handedly revives the Western as a living genre. Cinematography rules.

• The Magnificent Ambersons. Overshadowed by Citizan Kane, but I like it better personally. An American epic.
• Culloden. My candidate for best documentary ever. Often imitated since, mever matched.
• Paths of Glory. Not the best war movie ever; the best courtroom drama.
• O Lucky Man! When I saw this at twenty, I thought it explained the universe. I love coming of age films.

• High Noon. I saw this in early childhood, and it marked me for life. It demonstrates the full power of the classic unities. Another essential American tale.
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I am told it is better as a play. It's the verbal jousting that makes it.
• Bonnie and Clyde. Saw this three times in rapid succession. The full impact is hard to appreciate now, because it has been imitated by everybody.
• Full Metal Jacket. Powerful war film, great Sixties soundtrack, but perhaps best understood as a film about love.
• Rope. Another great argument for the classic unities. White knuckles all the way.

• Dial M for Murder. And another. A Chinese box.
• Polanski's MacBeth. Best take on Shakespeare ever. None of the usual stuffiness. Nor of the silly trendiness of "modernising." 
• Dog Day Afternoon. Another one that is close to the classic unities. So crazy it could only be true.
• 90 Days. A little NFB film that I expect few have noticed. Innovative and very human.

• Pleasantville. Loved it so much I read the screenplay. An oblique parable of growing up.
• Eyes Wide Shut. Much derided, I think it is Kubrick's final statement. The casting sucks, but the soundtrack is great and the film leaves you with much to think about.
• Lolita (Kubrick). Powerful portrait of guilt. Peter Sellers is transcendent.
• American Pop. I love musicals and I love animation. A history of American music in cartoon. For me, irresistible, even though it's corny as heck.
• The Shining. Wonderful camera work; debut of the steadicam. Kubrick does Hitchcock well.
• The Lion King. Sure, everybody knows it is great, but adults without kids should make a point of watching it too. 

• The Jungle Book (Disney). Relatively overlooked, Disney's last and perhaps his greatest. It kind of explains the Sixties, believe it or not. Great soundtrack, and the model for animation voice work. 
• A Man for All Seasons. This one changed my life philosophy. Robert Bolt should have won a Nobel for Literature.

Alice in Chains

Apparently Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is now breaking all box office records, pulling ahead of even Avatar.

I went to see it with my eight-year-old, and I did not like it any more than Avatar.

Artistically, it is a travesty of the original, like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Sure, it's fair game to adapt what came before—Lewis Carroll did it himself. But the film has many unnecessary errors in detail which just a little care could have corrected, had Tim Burton and his crew cared either for the original work or the intelligence of their audiences. That they were not almost suggests a contempt for both. For example, all characters persistently refer to the dragon-like creature of the famous poem as “the Jabberwocky.” That, sans article, is the name of the poem; the creature, as the poem makes clear, is “the Jabberwock.” What harm in getting it right? Worse, the film even has the Mad Hatter recite the poem---incorrectly. He flubs the reference to the JubJub Bird. This makes no sense at all: the JubJub Bird even appears later in the film, and could have been introduced by this instead of appearing from nowhere. It is pure carelessness, and insulting in assuming no one will either know or care.

But then again, if anyone in the audience had actually read the poem, and the book, the film would automatically be in trouble. They would then know that the film's basic premise is wrong. It is that Alice has been brought back to Wonderland because she is predestined to slay the Jabberwock. Unfortunately, in the poem itself, even though nothing else is clear in it, it is clear that the person who slays the Jabberwock is male. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son.” “Come to my arms, my beamish boy!”

Stupid, ignorant; but then again, what could be more stupid and ignorant than the notion that everything in Wonderland is predestined, planned, controlled? That it all makes sense? This is the worst travesty of all, since it is so completely against the spirit of the original. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland has a plot. A proper Hollywood plot, a battle between good and evil, a heated chase, at least a hint of a love interest, leading up to a climactic fight scene in which the supposed underdog inevitably triumphs at the last minute.

Excuse me; now I think I need to spew.

It is all completely predictable from the outset, and a workmanlike effort is made to fit all the pieces together for character motivations and so forth. This violates the essence of nonsense literature. What made the original Wonderland wonderful was that little matter of wonder: that nothing seemed to make any sense, there was no apparent reason for anything, one could not figure out anybody's motive, and none of the pieces ever quite fit.

All gone.

One moment of horror in the film is when the absurdly long nose of one of the Red Queen's courtiers simply falls off, without explanation, in the middle of a scene. The point, I suppose, is to suggestt that nothing in Wonderland is what it appears; but the immediate effect is to shatter finally and completely the willing suspension of disbelief on which a place like Wonderland utterly depends. Suddenly, one is watching a film, and suddenly all the makeup looks rather cheap and poorly done. And suddenly, one is intensely aware that someone is trying hard to manipulate you.

Where the original Alice was a seemingly inexaustible well of creativity and novelty, this sequel Alice, but for the high-tech visuals, is as conventional as canned tomato soup. There are no new bits of verbal or philosophical cleverness; instead, the film flogs to death a little joke that was a throwaway line in the original Alice, the Mad Hatter's unanswerable riddle “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” He repeats it at least four times in the film, then at last triumphantly announces that it has no answer. The point seems to be to remove all need of thinking from the audience, whereas the original Alice is wonderful for the complex thoughts it provokes.

A decent effort would have managed to come up with four new riddles, at least.

The film also, perversely, insists on forcing out a moral from the White Queen's perfect manifesto of nonsense, “Why sometimes I manage to believe six impossible things before breakfast.” This is actually presented as a profundity, a rule to live by.

It is like listening to a beautiful classic song sung by someone tone deaf. These people have no idea what the nonsense genre is about.

In place of wit or creativity, we are given cheap thrills: people swallowing disgusting Fear Factor brews, the Bandersnatch's eye popping out, the Jabberwock's head bouncing down stairs, even the inevitable 3D spear thrust directly at the audience. Then there is the tasteless, and tastelessly repeated, bit about Alice shedding her clothes each time she changes size, for example. Snort, har, har, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Almost makes you ashamed to be an adult, that the filmmakers think this is going to keep you amused. In the original book, of course, Alice's clothes simply changed size with her. And why not, in Wonderland?

This is slightly more tasteful than it might have been given that Alice in this version is no longer a little girl, but nineteen years old. On the other hand, the age change introduces its own problems. The original Wonderland was, after all, entirely the creation of a seven-year-old's fantasy, and was a stunning insight into the world as experienced by a child. Having Wonderland endure to age nineteen, however, turns a touching childhood reverie into what looks rather more like a case of late adolescent onset paranoid schizophrenia. There's a bit of a problem of taste there too, methinks.

Yeah, go and see it. Just bring toast to throw at the screen.

Avatar--Is It Just Me Who Smells Smoke in this Crowded Theatre?

On urgings by techie friends, I went to see Avatar in IMAX last night. It is on track, I understand, to break the all-time box office record; and has already come out on top in the Critics' Choice Awards.

I thought it was drek. Take away the FX, and all you have is Disney's Pocahontas, without the songs, stretched out to three hours. It was drek in detail: no character ever said anything that was not a cliche. Whole scenes seemed to be taken from other recent movies; the final battle between the hero and the evil colonel in a mechanical suit was taken direct from Iron Man. And plausible? I'm as willing as anyone to suspend disbelief, but how about a few thousand armed with wooden bows and arrows taking out a futuristic fleet of helicopter gunships? How did the Na'vi tribe survive with no children? How does a soul pass through something like a USB port?

I read there is now something of a mental health crisis among those who have recently seen Avatar, and cannot adjust to not living in the “utopian” world of the Na'vis.

This I can understand, in a way, but it also surprised me, because I saw the Na'vis' world, personally, as anything but utopian. Although it is certainly a romanticised and falsified view of hunter-gatherer existence, if that is what it is meant to represent, there are lots of ways in which the movie itself suggests it is not really a utopia at all. First, obviously, the name of this world is “Pandora.” Pandora, in Greek mythology, was created by the gods as a punishment for man, and the most obvious association for most with the name is “Pandora's Box”--from which comes all the evils of life. Colonel Quarich at the start of the movie describes Pandora as worse than hell. If the Na'vi commune happily with some of Pandora's animals, they are also clearly tasty prey to many others; Jake survives the dangerous initiation ritual, but one must assume that most Na'vi are torn to shreds by it on the cusp of adulthood. If they have survived that long. There seems to be a nice level of community solidarity, but one can also apparently be put to death at the tribal leader's whim.

Note that the Na'vi themselves have some of the traditional characteristics of devils: the long, hairless tail, the pointed ears, fangs, a vaguely goatlike nose. To them, the invading humans are the “sky people,” and the association of up with good and down with evil is a strong one in the human consciousness. They are also creatures of the night: Jake's avatar awakes as he goes to sleep in our world, and vice versa. Their god speaks to them not from the sky, but from under ground; their religion is purely materialist. The term “avatar” in turn implies that we humans are gods, from the perspective of the Na'vi.

The Na'vi culture and village is built around a huge tree. Go behind the obvious “tree-hugger” reference, and you see the tree in the centre of Eden. Yes, Eden is a praradise, but the tree in its centre is the forbidden source of all evil; and these Na'vi actually worship the tree. To make the reference clearer, Jake Sully actually is offered and bites into a very big, very juicy fruit at the beginning of the movie, just after he is first transformed into a Na'vi; and the fruit is offered him by a woman, Dr. Grace, who is in charge of the mission and who is primarily responsible for turning him into a Na'vi. Adam, meet Eve.

To be clear, given their appearance, the fact that they worship the tree, and that Jake bites the apple on first becoming a Na'vi, I think we are to take them as representing, not the first humans, but the tempting devils, of Eden. They do not crawl on their bellies, like snakes—but neither did the snake of Eden, until after the fall and God's curse. He might as well have looked like a Na'vi. In becoming Na'vis, Jake and Dr. Grace are Adam and Eve.

Taken together, the symbolic point of the movie seems to be to tell the Eden story from the devil's perspective. If we only accept that apple, the apple in this case being the lovely imaginary world of the movie itself, and chow down on it hard, we inherit the world of the Na'vi, with all its glow-in-the-dark glamour and freedom from the ugly rules of civilization, that keep us from following our instincts and doing just what we want. All women will then be beautiful, all men strong and brave. Nature will conform to our wishes. There will be no children weighing us down with responsibilities, and we will live forever, in the Great Mother, become as gods.

Sounds good to some, clearly. But, at the same time, the devil is constrained to a certain level of honesty. If you really see Pandora as a paradise, you are not paying very close attention.

I doubt James Cameron himself sees or intends any of this—I gather his own sympathies are with the Na'vi. He has said, "the Na'vi represent something that is our higher selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are." But all inspiration is ultimately from God; the devil must speak truth in spite of himself.

Of course, the movie is also quite harsh on the “sky people” --the communion of saints and angels. They have “destroyed their home planet.” There is nothing green there. They are prepared to kill all the Na'vi for the sake of an incredibly valuable mineral called “unobtainium.” So they too, loo like materialists.

Except that “unobtainium,” traditionally, is the term used by engineers for any ideal substance they would like to have, but cannot get. A substance, in other words, that exists entirely as an idea, but not in the physical world. A pretty good metaphor, when speaking to complete materialists like the Na'vi, for the human soul. And God did indeed, along with his avenging angel Colonel Michael, launch war on the celestial Na'vi for the soul of mankind.

If the soul is indeed of more genuine, absolute value, than all the material pleasures and perils of Pandora, or of this world, then it is just and not selfish for Selfridge to dispossess the Na'vi to obtain it; even if he is not God and did not create it in the first place. If there are more sky people than the total population of Na'vi, clearly quite small, in line to benefit, Selfridge is again justified, by JS Mill's principle of the greatest good to the greatest number. There is a point at which the common good supercedes the right to private property; hence the government right to expropriation when circumstances warrant. Selfish Selfridge is actually not being selfish if this is the case; and it quite probably is, given the movie's own premises. Of course, the mysterious corporation ought to do everything it can to convince the Na'vi to move peacefully before they send in the bulldozers—but the movie demonstrates that Jake and Grace themselves are certain the Na'vi will never agree to a peaceful settlement, and that the corporation knows this. It's all in their video logs.

The movie does what it can to keep you seeing everything from the perspective of the Na'vi, but it does make the moral issue fairly plain. You side with the Na'vi, you are siding with the wrong, merely because they and their world are attractive and they have big soulful eyes.

Sucker.

There's one fried every minute.

High Noon

As I was exercising last night, I rewatched High Noon, probably the first movie I remember from my childhood. I first saw it sometime between the ages of 2 and 8, and it burned some things indelibly into my psyche.

It remains one of the greatest artistic products and purest expressions of American culture.

Most striking is how it conforms to the traditional dramatic unities, as prescribed by Aristotle millennia ago. The movie lasts one hour and 20 minutes; the time covered in the movie lasts one hour and 20 minutes. All around one act and one action: that train rolling in at 12 noon.

One would have imagined these rules for drama really only mattered for the stage, and were about creating the willing suspension of disbelief. In fact, one would expect them to be a bad idea for the screen, because they artificially limit the visuals and so the visual interest. Not so: they apparently matter just as much in a movie. High Noon is not the only classic movie that attends to them: Night of the Living Dead and Twelve Angry Men also come to mind.

It is also of course, true that you can make a great movie, or a great play, without them. Shakespeare proved that.

Nevertheless, High Noon proves that there is some kind of magic here: all else being equal, if you can conform to the three dramatic unities, you are adding the weight of a spiritual sledgehammer to your performance.

As for American culture: if and to the extent that it ever forgets the essential message of High Noon, it has lost its soul.