The novel begins with Japanese high-society celebrating the accomplishments of Toshiko Tomura. These celebrations initially seem warm and heart-felt but it soon becomes evident that while Japan’s cultural elites are proud of Tomura’s native talent, they are also wary of it. The problem is that, while the novel begins with Toshiko Tomura enjoying all of the success associated with writing a commercially successful and critically acclaimed first novel, her recent success follows hot on the heels of similar successes in the worlds of acting and graphic design. In other words, Toshiko Tomura has tried her hand at a number of different artistic disciplines and has mastered them all before the age of thirty. When seen through the eyes of people who have devoted their entire lives to a single artistic discipline such talent is not merely enviable, it is downright terrifying. Nobody should be able to enter a film and master it immediately and absolutely nobody should be able to re-invent themselves so thoroughly and so successfully.

Sensing a potential scandal and the chance to suck up to Japanese high-society, a sleazy investigative reporter named Aokusa begins to follow Tomura around. Once Aokusa latches on to Tomura, it is not long before he has fallen in love with her and, once he has fallen in love with her, it is not long before he has become obsessed with understanding what makes her tick. After stumbling across what it is that Tomura does when in the privacy of her own home, Aukusa blackmails the writer into telling him her story.

The story that Tomura tells is structured as a series of flashbacks to earlier periods in her life. Each flashback follows the same pattern: A naïve Tomura enters a particular field and latches onto the most talented and well-respected practitioner of that particular art form. Before long, the target of Tomura’s affections is head-over-heels in love with her and Tomura is rapidly acquiring all of their skills. Then, just as the victim readies what will be their greatest work of art, Tomura emerges from their shadow and beats them to the punch by publishing a work that is absolutely identical to the work the victim was planning despite it having been created by Tomura. Obsessed with feelings of betrayal, the victim then destroys themselves either through an ill-conceived act of vengeance or by attempting to get their own work published thereby inviting everyone to see them as little more than a vulgar plagiarist.

Initially, Tezuka uses the journalist to explore the idea that Tomura is nothing more than a play-actor who owes her success to a form of highly evolved pre-emptive plagiarism. However, once Tomura leaves the relative safety of the art world for careers in politics, terrorism, crime and high-finance it rapidly becomes clear that she is doing far more than simply beating her teachers to the punch. However, what it is that she actually does remains something of a mystery as, despite featuring on nearly every single page of the novel, Tomura cannot really be said to be the book’s protagonist. Indeed, the plot of The Book of Human Insects is built around a series of contests between Tomura and the unsympathetic, misogynistic but highly skilled men who attempt to both possess and understand her. However, while Tezuka makes sure that Tomura’s true nature remains frustratingly out of reach, her unsympathetic male opponents are so easy to read that it is almost impossible not to wind up empathising with them. After all, like us, they are fallible humans trying to make sense of a character who is never anything less than alien.

By expecting us to empathise with a bunch of villainous misogynists, Tezuka is casting a critical eye over the nature of human relationships. Indeed, the title of The Book of Human Insects invites us to look upon the novel’s characters as a set of biological specimens, some of which are easier to identify than others. For example, when Tomura ties herself to an ambitious executive, we quickly join Tomura in recognising the man’s obsession with high-stakes gambling and his tendency to see all of life’s challenges in precisely those terms. Like all of the male characters, this executive is relatively easy to understand because, though his desires are hateful, ugly and misogynistic, they are at least recognisably human. By making these unpleasant characters easy to understand and emphasising the similarities between their desire to pigeon-hole Tomura and our desire to understand her, Tezuka places us in the position of unpleasant reactionaries who would rob something of its potential by seeking to render it comprehensible. The idea that Tomura might somehow be harmed by becoming comprehensible is what lies behind the anguished scene where she rebels against categorisation on the grounds that she is still a larva, something in the process of becoming.

Though Tezuka never provides us with any definitive answers as to what Tomura’s final form might be, he does raise two interesting possibilities:

Firstly, Tezuka raises the possibility that Tomura’s capacity for re-invention might mask some inner essence that has either remained hidden from view or been overlooked amidst all of the re-inventions. If correct, this theory would suggest that Tomura’s constant re-invention is nothing more than a process of trial-and-error whereby Tomura tries on different identities before choosing the correct one.

Secondly, Tezuka also raises the possibility that Tomura’s true nature might very well be that of perpetual change and re-invention. If correct, this theory would account for why it is that we find it easier to empathise with the hideous men who litter Tomura’s life rather than Tomura herself. Indeed, much like Tomura’s men, we are creatures with fixed natures and to gaze upon the mercurial and the protean is to gaze on something that is as hideous and alien as it is alluring.

At the beginning of this essay I referred to the character of Tomura as being “Mr Ripley-like”. This is a reference to the character of Tom Ripley who appears in a series of novels by Patricia Highsmith as well as the films Purple Noon (1960), The American Friend (1977), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Ripley’s Game (2002) and Ripley Under Ground (2005). The similarities between Ripley’s capacity for imitation and Tomura’s capacity for radical re-invention and psychological absorption are what lie behind my suggestion that The Book of Human Insects might be read as a psychological thriller. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of a psychological thriller is the presence of a mystery grounded in human psychology. At its most crude, this mystery can take the form of an FBI agent who pieces together a psychotic delusion in order to trap a serial killer as in Thomas Harris’s early Hannibal Lecter novels or, at its most sophisticated, Barbara Vine’s exploration of why a prim and moralistic woman would stoop to murder in A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986).

The Book of Human Insects can be read as a psychological thriller and its depth and pacing ensure that it works brilliantly when seen as such. However, a more rewarding interpretation of this manga is to take it as a critique of post-War Japanese society.

September 2 1945 did not only bring the end of the Second World War, it also saw the end of an Imperialist phase of Japanese history that began with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Aside from overturning the last Shogun of Japan’s Edo period, the Meiji Restoration also attempted to catapult Japan onto the global stage by having the historically isolationist country assume a more imperialistic and expansionistic attitude towards the outside world. As well as modernising Japan’s industrial infrastructure and massively expanding its military capacity, the oligarchs of the Meiji government promoted a form of cultural chauvinism so intense that it would eventually lead Japan to feel a degree of kinship with the Fascist powers of Europe. When Japanese foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri, they were not just closing the books on the Empire of Japan, they were also calling time on a sense of national identity that stretched all the way back to the days of the Samurai.

As well as unprecedented levels of economic growth and a deluge of democratic and liberal reforms to the Japanese state, the American occupation of Japan also brought a profound sense of cultural confusion: If Japan could not fulfil its destiny by becoming one of the world’s great Imperial powers then what was to become of it? As people and institutions struggled to re-invent themselves, their growing identity crisis found a voice in what is now seen as one of the great golden ages of cinematic history. If you want to see a culture struggling to come to terms with foreign influences then look no further than the grubby Americanisation of Japan’s underworld as depicted in films such as Shohei Imamura’s Pigs & Battleships (1961) and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame (1956). Similarly, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) feature a sad acceptance of the inevitability of change while his Late Autumn (1960) transforms that sadness into optimism as that-which-once-was is gently replaced by that-which-will-be.

Manga itself can also be seen as a by-product of Japan’s post-War identity crisis as while we may now think of manga and anime as being quintessentially Japanese, the ‘Big Eye’ style that Tezuka pioneered is actually based upon American cartoon characters such as Betty Boop and Disney’s Bambi. Sensing a tension between manga’s Japanese character and the fact that its roots are in the popular culture of an invading power, Tezuka created The Book of Human Insects in order to address his nation’s identity crisis. This identity crisis would have been obvious to Tezuka who, born in 1928, would have seen an entire generation of Japanese people grow up and reach their prime in the shadow of American occupation. However, while previous generations of young Japanese people could find comfort in the history and values of a Japanese Empire that stretched all the way back to the feudal era, the post-War generation found themselves trapped between the discredited values of their parents and the decidedly alien (and occasionally oppressive) teachings of American liberal democracy. The sense of identity crisis engendered by the remodelling of Japanese institutions begged the question as to whether Japan was still Japanese.

The character of Toshiko Tomura is Tezuka’s attempt to determine the real essence of 1970s Japanese culture. Indeed, much like the economically resurgent Japan of the Cold War, Tomura makes her way in the world by absorbing the skills of others to the point where her expertise surpasses theirs. Tomura’s ability to systematically surpass the skills of her masters represents the fact that post-War Japan was a much more effective liberal capitalist democracy than America whose economy struggled until the deregulations of the 1980s. However, while 1970s Japan enjoyed both immense cultural vitality and explosive economic growth, its success appeared hollow to those elements who felt that liberal democracy was not the Japanese way.  By exploring the possibility that Tomura might have a hidden inner character or that her true nature might very well be that of constant re-invention, Tezuka is raising the possibility that Japan too might possess a nature founded on principles of constant change and re-invention.

The metaphorical nature of The Book of Human Insects is also evident from Tezuka’s style of art. Those used to the more uniform Big Eye style of contemporary manga might fall into the trap of seeing Tezuka’s artwork as primitive or overly cartoonish. However, look beyond the rubber-legged foreground characters and you will find not only extraordinarily detailed and ‘realistic’ backdrops but a capacity to change modes of composition to denote the manga equivalent of dream sequences and moments of heightened reality. Consider, for example, Tezuka’s use of traditional cartoon iconography in this seduction:

As well as the pinpoint realism of this attempt to locate the action:

And compare them to the twisted realism of Tezuka’s attempt to capture the essence of jazz in visual form:

Consider these three very different series of images together and you will get a taste of Tezuka’s artistic sophistication and his tendency to lapse into more and more ‘cartoonish’ styles to denote either heightened reality or increasing unreality.

By populating his novel with images of cartoonish characters in realistic landscapes, Tezuka is underlining their metaphorical nature. These characters, Tezuka seems to be suggesting, are not real… they are simply attempts to force ideas into a human form and project them onto the real world. By ensuring that the ‘real’ elements of his artwork are Japanese while the design of the ‘unreal’ characters is grounded in the aesthetics of American popular culture, Tezuka is forcing us to confront the identity crisis that looms over Toshiko Tamura as a character, manga as a form and Japan as a society. Every panel and every word of The Book of Human Insects cries out with a desperate need for a fixed sense of identity and a legitimate place in the world. The unease we feel upon being confronted by the character of Tomura is the same unease we feel when confronted by anything postmodern. Much like the men in Tomura’s life, we work hard at fitting ourselves into neatly ordered boxes and Tomura’s protean nature serves as an eerie and unwelcome reminder of how arbitrary and artificial those boxes can be. The truth is that we are all like Toshiko Tomura but she appears alien because she is willing to accept that there is no real Toshiko Tomura, there is only the boundless possibility of what Toshiko Tomura can become.

THE ZONE

Incorrectly marketed as the world’s first work of erotic 3D cinema, Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy is a film that never quite manages to achieve the levels of inspired oddness that make for a decent cult following. Instead, the film has a few nice moments (including an intersexual vampire lifting cartwheels with her 8 foot-long prehensile penis) that ultimately wind up getting lost amidst a lot of puerile sniggering and some deeply unpleasant misogynistic sadism.

Right from the off, Sex And Zen 3D suffers from translation problems as British culture tends not to cope too well with attempts to combine sex with comedy. While most British people will happily acknowledge the fact that sex – as an activity – can sometimes be very funny, attempts to capture that comedy on screen generally do not fare too well, as ridicule was traditionally one of the means through which matters pertaining to sexuality was repressed. For example, while a case can be made for seeing the Carry On films as agents of social change, one could just as easily say that they helped to reinforce taboos about the human body by presenting sex as a laughing matter. 3D Sex And Zen‘s tendency to move between (rather un-stimulating) eroticism and childish humour is not only unsettling, it is also fiercely reminiscent of the jarring tonal shifts common to the kind of campy Bavarian softcore porn films that were made in the 1960s and 1970s and screened on British cable TV in the early-to-mid 1990s. Sex And Zen 3D ultimately fails as a film because its jokes are unfunny and its erotic content is nothing more than boobies and thrusting bottoms, but the constant shifting between these two registers makes for an experience which, I suspect; would translate better for people from cultures where laughter was not used to drain sex of its power.

I hate to say this but, watching 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy actually made me want to read some Laurel K. Hamilton as while Hamilton writes with all the style and insight of a someone with a pick-axe embedded in their skull, she at least knows how to mine the sweet spot between titillation, repulsion and transgression.

Much like Dick Maas’s anti-clerical Saint, Rare Exports draws much of its humour and all of its horror from confronting children’s stories with the eyes of an adult. As with Maas’s take on the story of Saint Nicholas, Helander’s take on the more familiar story of Santa Claus finds something distinctly unsettling in the idea of an immortal being who hangs around children. Given the gimmicky nature of the subject matter, it would have been easy for Rare Exports to get away with being cheap and shoddy but instead, the project boasted quite a lavish budget that made it all the way to the screen thanks to some wonderful cinematography and a script that knows when to place tongue in cheek and when to allow the surreal horror of Santa Claus to speak for itself:

Rare Exports [repeatedly] toys with the idea of arrested development. Indeed, the head of the multinational corporation that are trying to unearth Santa is a man who dresses and acts in a manner that suggests that adulthood does not necessarily become him. Aside from spending an absolute fortune trying to meet the real Santa, the man also hands out a set of safety precautions in order to prevent his men from being seen as ‘bad boys’. These precautions include statements such as ‘no swearing’ and ‘no drinking’, precisely the kinds of rules that adults apply to their children. By attempting to ensure that his workmen are seen as ‘good boys’, the foreign businessman is effectively trying to envelop them in the same state of arrested development as him.

Regrettably underused, this character is fiercely reminiscent of both the collector character from Toy Story 2 (1999), and Michael Jackson, in that all three give off an image of adulthood that is just far-enough out of alignment to set people’s teeth on edge. Although Rare Exports never delves into the capitalist’s motivations, it is clear that there is something very wrong with a man who would destroy a mountain, risk dozens and lives and spend a fortune in order to meet Santa. The childlike glee displayed by the capitalist when he first encounters the reindeer herders’ old man is beautifully unclean; the way he strokes the old man’s filthy and matter beard speaks of a profoundly broken form of humanity.

Lovely, wrong and distinctly Finnish.

THE ZONE

Between Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) there are no shortage of works that use vampires as a means of engaging with such existentialist themes as loneliness, alienation and self-loathing. Indeed, the rather individualistic idea that people out there are somehow less alive and therefore different to us also features in zombie films like Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland (2009). Beating a critically acclaimed path to this already well-frequented watering hole is Stake Land, a film that combines the post-apocalyptic seriousness of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) with the post-apocalyptic silliness of Kevin Costner’s The Postman (1997) with all the problems this entails:

Though never all that original or overflowing with important things to say, Stake Land could have been an interesting addition to the tradition that uses elements of art house cinema to revitalise tired old horror tropes. Similarly, it could have been a harmless action movie in which a stone-cold badass leads a group of people through a vampire-infested post-apocalyptic landscape. However, by attempting to be both things at once, Stake Land succeeds at being neither. This is a slow, ponderous, underpowered and ludicrously pompous film that comes nowhere close to adding up to the sum of its parts.

Disappointing to say the least.

Then something peculiar happened. The economic forces that once promised universal wealth and happiness suddenly began to cough and stutter as skyscrapers collapsed in downtown New York. Shaken and traumatised, the American people demanded that American blood be avenged ten-fold but the wars this sentiment created produced nothing but trouble. There was no revenge or glory, there was only a bottomless sea of moral ambiguity and America was rapidly running out of beach. Denied the cathartic closure of a ‘good war’, the American people retreated into their dream of cosy consumerism but the events of September 11 were nothing but a grim foreshadowing of the economic collapses to come. September 11 messed up a few buildings but the credit crunch destroyed an entire way of life. Suddenly, the long balmy evening of eternal economic growth was cut short and, for the first time in generations, Americans were less well off than their parents. Not only that but working seemed not to help as millions of Americans worked multiple jobs but still struggled to hang on to their homes. To this day, many Americans spend all day working and yet feed themselves and their families from soup kitchens.

After a series of brutal kicks to the abdomen, the American dream lies bleeding and gasping for breath but when people look around for help or guidance they find a political class that is constitutionally incapable of recognising a problem. With millions unemployed and an entire generation of young people being shovelled onto the scrap heap of history, the American media and political elites seem more worried about the president’s religion and nationality while public discourse has devolved to the point where it amounts to nothing more than a pair of cowardly tribes who shout insults across the battlefield without ever ordering a charge. Something is profoundly wrong with the American way of life and yet neither American politicians nor American journalists seem prepared to acknowledge it. To admit fear and worry would be too un-American and so the people of America hunker down and wait with anxieties unaddressed and uneased.

Jeff Nichols’ psychological thriller Take Shelter is a brave attempt at confronting the fears that grip American society. It is a film about the reality of living scared and the problems that come from failing to address these all-pervasive feelings of dread.

Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) is ostentatiously American. Husband to the beautiful Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and father to the deaf Hannah (Tova Stewart), he lives in a fly-over state where he works construction, goes to church and attends Lions’ Club dinners.  In fact, he’s so American that he has an American flag on his hardhat. Curtis’s life seems to be going pretty well but suddenly he starts to have nightmares.

In many ways, Take Shelter is an extended riff on Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) where the onset of madness was explored by creating a degree of ambiguity around the images seen on screen. Polanski recreated the fractured mind in cinematic form by continuously shifting between the world of facts and the world of his protagonist’s delusions. While some delusions were obviously false (as in the case of the wall that erupts with hands), others were a good deal more real (as in the case of the man who breaks into her apartment and tries to rape her). What made this ambiguity so unsettling was the fact that it served to place the audience in a similar position to the film’s protagonist in that they could no longer tell where reality ended and delusion began. Take Shelter pursues a similar line of attack by blurring the boundaries of Curtis’s nightmares.

Curtis’s dreams invariably begin with scenes of mundane domesticity. Because these early moments are so normal, the boundary between dream and reality is blurred and it is only when the dream begins to spiral off into fantastical imagery that we can safely identify what we see on screen as the content of Curtis’s dreams. However, having presented the world of dreams as similar to the world of the real at the opening of his dream sequences, Nichols then reverses the trick by allowing the world of dreams to bleed back into the world of facts at the end of the sequences. He does this by ending every dream with the image of Curtis experiencing a seizure. While these images unambiguously situate us back in the real world, the seizures are so upsetting to watch that they effectively carry the tension and unpleasantness of the dream world back into the real world. With the horror of nightmares refusing to dissipate even in the light of day, Curtis finds himself increasingly convinced that, as in his dreams, the cosy domesticity of his real life could erupt into horror at any minute.

Take Shelter further complicates the techniques deployed in Repulsion by presenting Curtis’s problem as a blurring of the boundaries not between reality and delusion but between mundane reality, fantastical reality and the possibility that he is actually following his mother’s path into schizophrenia. Thus Curtis finds himself trapped between the need to get a hold of himself, the need to seek psychiatric help and the need to dig an enormous fallout shelter in order to protect his family.

Nichols further complicates matters by presenting Curtis’s fears as pointedly metaphorical. There’s a wonderful scene where Curtis visits his bank manager in order to apply for the unsecured loan that will allow him to build a fallout shelter in his back yard. Far from eager to take Curtis’s business, the bank manager reminds him that these are not good times to go into debt and that he will have to re-mortgage his house in order to pay for the construction of the shelter. Thus Curtis’s fears become self-fulfilling as the encroaching terror of the credit crunch forces Curtis to dangerously over-extend himself, thereby making his fears more likely to come true. The sense that Curtis is opening up a world of economic woe is then paid off in a scene where Jessica Chastain’s Sam learns the extent of Curtis’s folly and channels all of her rage, fear and disappointment into a single resounding slap. Take Shelter is not just a film about American attempts to cope with fear, it is also an attempt to demonstrate how a culture of fear can effectively re-shape reality to the point where your greatest fears really can come true.

In Take Shelter, Jeff Nichols has created a film that takes the uncannily ambiguous ontology of films like Repulsion and takes the ambiguity to the next level. Indeed, watching Take Shelter one is never clear of where one’s focus should sit. The film works equally well as a horror film, a family drama, a postmodern head-fuck and an elaborate political allegory and much of the narrative revolves around Nichols attempts to move between all of these ontological registers in a distinctly disorienting fashion. The ending of the film is particularly striking in this respect as Nichols guides us through at least three separate endings designed to repeatedly pull to rug from beneath any attempt to pin down not only where reality ends and dreams begin but also how we should apprehend the film. By the time the credits roll, the only thing that is certain is that something is heading towards the family and that reason, retreat, escape and delusion are all equally valid and equally flawed reactions to what is effectively the end of the world. Take Shelter captures the spirit of madness and fear by presenting us with a cinematic world that defies easy analysis in terms of truth, fiction, delusion and metaphor.  When nothing is neither true nor false, how can one decide how to act? The answer is that we cannot and this is the state that America is currently in.

THE ZONE

There is something decidedly odd about the fact that Empire of Passion netted Oshima an award for best director at Cannes. Indeed, while the film is wonderfully atmospheric and elegantly composed, it is ultimately nothing more than a genre piece in which an adulterous couple are hounded into madness by what they perceive to be an avenging spirit.  In my review, I suggest that the award may well have been given out not for Empire of Passion but for In The Realm of The Senses, the hugely controversial and sexually graphic film that Oshima made prior to this one.

Such trifles aside, Empire of Passion remains a hugely compelling exploration of the mechanics of desire, self-censure and social oppression. Indeed, one of the most striking things about this ghost story is that the ghost never actually cries out for vengeance. In fact, all the ghost wants to do is continue to work as a rickshaw driver. Rather than coming from the ghost, the couple’s slide into madness is caused by their refusal to accept what it is that they have done and why it is that they did it:

Empire Of Passion lends itself beautifully to a Freudian interpretation because it articulates not only the individual’s reticence to accept their hidden desires but also the problem of living as a person who does accept that they have certain needs and desires. Indeed, while Seki and Toyoji seem genuinely horrified by the intensity of the desire that their tryst unlocks, the real meat of the film lies in the characters’ refusal to own up to those desires and incorporate them into their personalities.

A thoroughly excellent film

THE ZONE

Based upon Charles Perrault’s fable Bluebeard, Secret Behind the Door explores the process through which a couple get to know each other.  After a whirlwind romance, Bennett’s character marries Redgrave’s secretive and intense architect.  After a rudely interrupted honeymoon, Bennett’s character arrives at the architect’s home and finds him sharing it with two other women and a son from a previous marriage. As in the fable, Bennett’s character begins poking around in her husband’s background until she discovers something sinister.

Bluebeard is perhaps better known in its native France than it is in the Anglo-Saxon world. One reason for this is that it is one of those stories that paints women as a race of incessant and toxic meddlers whose refusal to follow simple male instructions result in the destruction of everything.  Think of Else to Lohengrin. Think of Eve to Adam. Because of the story’s misogynistic roots, generations of feminist authors have been quick to reclaim the role of interfering spouse and cast it in a more positive and transformative light such as the one that bathes Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte’s novel. Neither misogynistic nor feminist, Lang’s adaptation of Silvia Richards’ screenplay presents Bennett’s character as a wonderfully ambiguous figure who ‘fixes’ her husband for reasons all of her own. However, while the characters are engaging and the plot is fascinating, what really grabbed me was Lang’s decision to use a voice over as the primary means of communicating inner states:

Watching Secret Beyond The Door and noticing Lang’s tendency to simply pause the action and linger on his actor’s faces while their voiceovers are delivered, I was struck by how little has changed in the way that directors communicate interiority. Indeed, while directors of Lang’s generation paused so that voiceovers can be delivered, contemporary directors simply pause and allow audiences to fill in their own voiceovers. Doubtless many art house films could be transformed by using these little pauses and gazings into the middle distance to deliver short voiceovers in which characters speak directly to the audience. Clearly the basic grammar of cinema has not evolved that much since the days of Lang, it is just that nowadays art house directors tend to outsource exposition to audience speculation.

Secret Behind the Door is a flawed gem and its arrival on region-free DVD is long overdue. This is a must for anyone who enjoys psychological thrillers and an absolute necessity for anyone who loves Fritz Lang’s film noirs.

Futurismic

Following on from some of my thoughts on Deus Ex: Human Revolutions, the column argues that rather than trying to downplay virtual death by re-packaging it as with Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia‘s talk of death-as-flawed-memory, video game designers ought to follow From Software in embracing the cataclysmic number of deaths that feature in their games. Indeed, what makes Demon’s Souls such a fascinating game is its relentless downbeat tone and its recognition of the fact that characters will die and players will give up in disgust. Clearly, if Demon’s Souls had been a film, it would have been directed by Ingmar Bergman. The column also draws the reader’s attention to Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon, a book all about the psychological impact of experiencing a futile death over and over again…

Nowhere is the need for unpleasantness greater than in video gaming’s attitude to death.  What was once a means of rationing the time people spent hogging a particular arcade machine has now ossified into a set of linguistic tics that are now completely disconnected from both their real-world and in-game significances. Video games ask us to die over and over again but rather than acknowledging this fact, many game designers seek to minimise the impact of these sacrifices by explaining them away as lapses in memory. By trivialising death, game designers have not only cheapened the lives of our characters, they have also deprived themselves of one of the most powerful thematic motifs in all of art and literature.

Games like Demon’s Souls recognise that they are dealing in death and this recognition is genuinely disconcerting. Like death itself, Demon’s Souls is utterly indifferent to both our presence in the game and our attempts at engaging with it. Demon’s Souls is a game of misery tempered by frustration, and its unapologetic recognition of this fact is what makes it both different and great. While I appreciate Walker’s point, I cannot help but feel that he is looking at the problem in entirely the wrong way: Let us not repackage death, but rather celebrate it as the core of the video game experience.

Having spent a good deal of time playing carefully-packaged AAA-rated titles for this column, one of the continuing joys of Demon’s Souls remains its complete indifference to my presence.  Forty hours in and I’m still not completely clear on how many basic aspects of the game actually work. One of the game’s major mechanics involves shifting between different forms and you begin to pick up magical items helping with that transition a long time before you actually realise what it means. Similarly, it took me about 20 hours to realise that the game had a magic system. In a video game culture full of shallow joys and craven player-pandering, there is something truly wonderful in From Software’s complete indifference to whether or not we ever get the hang of the game.

The common thread binding these three films together is their unapologetic devotion to the grammar of film. Indeed, rather than relying upon such theatrical devices as three act structures or novelistic devices such as expositionary dialogue, Don’t Look Now, Driver and I Am Love tell their stories using mostly pictures and sounds. Don’t Look Now is particularly cinematic as Roeg uses cinematic grammar for force us into the head of Donald Sutherland’s reluctant psychic: Sutherland’s character is assailed by images and sounds that he struggles to comprehend and Roeg shares these fragments with us, placing us next to Sutherland’s character. Struggling to comprehend:

The opening scene of Don’t Look Now introduces us to a series of memorable images that Roeg returns to throughout the film. Everywhere the Baxters go, they encounter water, red hoods and shards of light. As people trained in the basic grammar of art house cinema, we know how to recognise recurring motifs and know that we are supposed to treat them as clues to the film’s hidden subtext. However, rather than allowing these clues to sit in the mind of the audience, Roeg uses the possibility of psychic powers to drag these clues into the foreground of the film.

Suddenly, those motifs and images that are normally just hints at hidden artistic meaning become evidence of hidden patterns in the life of John Baxter. Baxter’s hostility to the sisters betrays a deeper hostility to the idea that he too may be psychic and that the recurring images that plague his life might be evidence of future unpleasantness. Baxter foresaw the death of his daughter and now he sees signs that point to his own death. Everywhere he turns, Baxter is haunted by water, shards of light and the colour red. Everywhere he turns, Baxter sees proof that he too will soon be dead.

To suggest that John Baxter may be psychic is, somewhat predictably, to do Roeg a disservice as talk of mediums and psychic powers inevitably conjures up images of third eyes and supernatural powers. However, much of the power of Don’t Look Now resides in the fact that Baxter’s psychic gift is only a slight exaggeration of that very human addiction to pattern recognition, an addiction that forces the audience to hunt for subtexts and clues in Roeg’s repeated use of water, shards of light and the colour red. Indeed, Don’t Look Now is a deeply unsettling film as it forces the audience into the same position as the film’s protagonist: just like John Baxter, we know that something is coming; we know that it is not going to be good but we are powerless to avoid it. The audience are powerless to avoid it because Don’t Look Now is a film. John Baxter is powerless to avoid it because his life is like a film; it is pre-scripted with a beginning, middle and an inevitably grizzly end.

Don’t Look Now is not just a film of towering cinematic brilliance it is also, in its own way, a film about the process of taking a series of disconnected images and forcing them into a cohesive and comprehensible whole.

This review is based upon the Blu-ray special edition that was released in summer 2011.  Billed as a “Special Edition”, this Blu-ray release is pretty much indistinguishable from the 2006 DVD “Special Edition” release.  The extras are exactly the same.  According to the sticker on the cover of the box, the colour restoration was supervised by Roeg himself but, while there is no denying that the colours are crisp and the pictures are clean, I genuinely struggle to tell the difference between this and the DVD special edition. This begs the question as to the purpose and future of Blu-ray releases.

The UK benefits from a growing second hand market for DVDs that has the effect that DVDs lose most of their value within a few weeks of release. In fact, if you are paying full price for a DVD that is more than a week old then you are nothing more than a sucker.  Though Blu-ray has not yet supplanted DVD, the market for Blu-ray disks is pretty much the same as that for DVDs only with Blu-ray discs starting and remaining ever so slightly more expensive. The reason for this is that, UK consumers have largely accepted the idea that Blu-ray is a meaningful step up from DVD. Using this perception, Blu-ray distributors are re-releasing older films hoping that those of us with Blu-ray players (i.e. people who own a PS3) will replace our old DVDs with more expensive and ‘better quality’ Blu-ray editions. However, despite Blu-ray being touted as better quality, it is notable that hardly any Blu-ray releases come with any more extras than their equivalent DVD release. In short, the only difference between Blu-ray and DVD is that Blu-ray discs support HD playback meaning that if you do not possess an HD screen then there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for buying a film on Blu-ray. I bought the special edition DVD of Don’t Look Now when it was originally released and, despite clearly adoring the film, I cannot think why you would choose to replace the DVD with a Blu-ray.

The fate of Blu-ray is made all the more tenuous by changes in the US market.  In the US, the online video streaming service Netflix has not just popularised watching films online it has pretty much killed both DVD and Blu-ray stone dead with the latter-most nails in physical media’s coffin being provided by iTunes and the video-on-demand capacities of cable TV, Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. Blu-ray was only ever supposed to be a stopgap measure between the latter days of DVD and the early days on online streaming that might allow technology companies to sell one final generation of media players before everyone started watching stuff through their home computer. This gap in the market has now effectively closed in the US and the UK is not that far behind.

Despite chaotically shuffling between business models in a way that has seen its share price plunge, Netflix recently announced that it is planning on bringing its subscription-based video-on-demand service to the UK. In short, Blu-ray is history in the US and the same will soon be true in the UK. If Netflix and Lovefilm do not kill UK DVD sales then Amazon, iTunes and cable TV will.

Of course, physical copies of films will continue to retain some value as people will always to want to ‘own’ the films they love rather than simply retain the capacity to access them online.  Similarly, AV nuts who invested small fortunes in home cinema installations will probably not be the first in line to start watching films on their laptops. I mention this not because I have anything in particular against either Blu-ray or DVD (I own loads myself) but simply as a warning: In a year’s time, Blu-rays and DVDs will be just as worthless as CDs meaning that you will be able to buy films like Don’t Look Now on Blu-ray for next to nothing.  So, instead of splashing out on one great Blu-ray, either save your money and stick with the DVD or wait a year and buy five films for the price of one. And thus the wheel doth turn…

Almost certainly not… but you never know.

Aside from confounding search engines and the countless websites that survive by publishing idle film industry gossip, the title of this post does actually have a point. Namely that I see a number of similarities between the films of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and the latest iteration in the Paranormal Activity series directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost.  In short, these cameras are all about forcing us to dwell on that which we do not see.

Cinema (and art in general) works by taking the cognitive skills and biases that we use to make sense of the real world and putting them to work on a man-made artefact. For example, when a film projector runs hundreds of images of an arm past our eyes, our brain will take all of these images and link them together to create an impression of smooth movement. Thus, our brain’s capacity to link together isolated pictures allows us to see coherent movement instead of isolated stills. Similarly, when we see someone’s lips moving on screen and we hear a human voice, we tend to assume that the words we hear are coming from the person whose lips are moving. In short, the medium of film is reliant upon a collection of tricks and illusions that transform disconnected images and sounds into something that is fundamentally human: a story.

Nor does film’s use of cognitive skills and biases end with the basic ability to make audiences perceive a coherent series of events.  Our tendency to take isolated events and link them together also accounts for the emergence of narrative. Consider the following:

1. We see a handsome young farmer marrying a pretty young milkmaid.
2. We see the milkmaid being murdered by a black knight.
3. We see the young farmer setting off to kill the black knight.

In real life, events tend not to fall into easy cause-and-effect relationships but because our brain tends to look for these sorts of relationship as it helps us to navigate our way through the world, we cannot help but infer cause and effect between these three images: The young farmer is setting off to kill the black knight because he wants to avenge the killing of his wife. Our brain links the images together and our knowledge of culture (as well as this type of story) prompts us to formulate an explanation as to why the farmer should want to kill the black knight.

However, while this process of jumping to (more or less credible) conclusions is pretty much fundamental to the way in which humans apprehend the world and each other, the process is not philosophically stable. As David Hume pointed out in An Enquiry Regarding Human Understanding (1772) about the process of one billiard ball striking another and causing it to move off in another direction:

The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it. Motion in the second billiard ball is a quite distinct event from the motion in the first. Nor is there anything in the one to suggest the smallest hint of the other.

Given that our minds cannot directly perceive cause-and-effect, humanity was forced to develop a set of protocols through which various potential causes might be investigated as possible sources of a particular effect.  We generally refer to these protocols as the scientific method. However, because the worlds depicted in film are ultimately nothing more than fictions subsisting in the mind thanks to our brain’s capacity for generating false positives, it is easy for directors to play with cause and effect by drawing attention to these cognitive biases and subverting them for greater effect.  One of the directors who is most adept at unpacking cinematic conceits is the Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami.

Though Kierostami’s career spans five decades during which he has attracted numerous cinematic prizes and sufficient glowing critical praise to blot out the stars at midnight, his techniques are still largely unfamiliar to the non-art house crowd and so, before talking about Paranormal Activity 4 I will discuss a couple of his more recent films in order to establish a baseline for comparison:

Firstly, Shirin (2008) is a film that is famously composed mostly of women’s faces.  Set in an Iranian cinema, the film documents the emotional journeys undertaken by a number of different women as they sit and watch a film based upon a work of Persian poetry. Though we never actually see what happens on the cinema screen, we hear (or rather read) the words of the poem and see the effect they have upon the audience: Some women cry, some women laugh and some women just look monumentally bored. By refusing to show us the images on screen and what we might normally think of as the cause of these emotional reactions, Kiarostami is inviting us to speculate about that which we are not allowed to see.  As the faces flick by, we muse both upon the potential images on screen and upon the potential causes of the differences in the women’s reactions:

Why do some women look bored while others weep? Presumably because they arrived to see the film while in different moods.

What caused those different moods? The details of those women’s lives.

Thus, by showing us nothing more than a bunch of women watching a film, Kiarostami has made us speculate about what it means to be a woman in modern-day Iran. In fact, one could even go so far as to say that the film is all about that which Kiarostami pointedly refuses to show us: life outside of the cinema.

Secondly, Certified Copy (2010) is a much less obviously deconstructive piece of filmmaking set in a picturesque Italian town. The film’s tone is set when a woman meets up with an author and proceeds to grill him on the content of his book. While the author responds in a manner that is nothing short of reasonable, the woman’s questioning becomes more and more aggressive as though the level tone itself is somehow inflammatory. The woman’s over-reaction to a disagreement about the history of art is so extreme that we cannot help but wonder whether these two people might not share some past that remains hidden from us. As the film progresses, Kiarostami introduces the idea that the pair are actually a married couple but this revelation is introduced in such a way as to suggest that this new-found married status might be some game that the couple are playing and the more we learn about the couple, the deeper the mystery grows. This is a relationship that makes little obvious sense and while there may be some fantastical or psychological context that explains the couple’s bizarre actions, Kiarostami never lets us in on the joke. Again, by refusing to show us something, Kiarostami is forcing us to attend to it.  Kiarostami further highlights the relationship between audience and subject matter by having his couple tour a scenic village without ever showing us any of the things worth seeing.  We know that there is an ancient golden tree, but we do not see it. We know that there is a beautiful statue, but we do not see that either.

While these two recent films may highlight some of his more attempts at deconstructing cinematic spaces and lines of perceived cause-and-effect, Kiarostami’s playful attitude towards the basic grammar of cinema is present in all of his more recent films.  For a master class in non-traditional approaches to depicting space in film, consider one of the opening sequences in Taste of Cherry (1997) where Kiarostami shows us a particular area by having his character drive around with the camera pointing at the side of his face.  Paying careful attention, it is possible to work out how the various things we see out the window relate to each other but by eschewing standard camera moves and viewpoints, Kiarostami forces us to think about what we see on screen and, more importantly, that which we do not see.

One of the first rules in making a horror film is that a monster ceases to be frightening the second you put it on screen. A brilliant example of this is Victor Salva’s much derided and hugely derivative monster picture Jeepers Creepers (2001).  As long as Salva’s Creeper remains the unseen driver of a sinister truck or a looming presence capable of attacking at any moment, the film retains its capacity to scare. However, the second Salva reveals the Creeper in an attack on a police station, the film’s capacity to frighten us dissipates like a fart in the breeze.

Though this rule may have been formulated at a time of small budgets and limited effects technology, it continues to hold true even in an age of photorealistic CGI. The fact still remains that nothing is as terrifying as that which you cannot see. Good horror directors build their reputations on their capacity to trigger fight-or-flight responses and tweak our cognitive biases till our palms sweat and our hearts race. Horror is all about making us afraid of something as harmless as a flickering series of still images projected onto a screen.

One exception that proves the rule is Bong Joon-Ho’s monster movie The Host (2006). Bong announces his attention of moving beyond genre expectations by refusing to hide his monster. In fact, he has his mutant tadpole attack a campsite in full view of the camera. By stripping the monster of secrets, Bong diverts our attention away from the monster and towards the dysfunctional family that has decided to hunt it. Bong refuses to flesh out his characters or their relationships and so invites us to speculate about them and their significance as the family prepare for a war they are ill equipped to fight. By subverting the rules of the genre and showing us his monster, Bong is making it clear: The Host is not about a mutant tadpole attacking Korea.

Oren Peli’s ultra low-budget Paranormal Activity (2007) may function as a human drama but its real artistic mettle lies in its use of the power of suggestion to terrorise audiences. Lacking the budget for even basic practical effects, Peli’s story of a couple that are attacked by a demon pointedly never reveals its antagonist. All we ever see are doors opening, doors slamming shut and people screaming. When Paramount Pictures picked up the film, the film’s new producers (including Stephen Spielberg) made a number of changes before releasing the film onto the global market. Aside from some alternate endings and the use of more traditional horror movie sound effects, the film now featured a number of CGI effects-shots designed to heighten the film’s visual impact. While there is no doubting that these additions helped the film to reach a wider audience, they also served to lessen the film’s stark cinematic power. By relying purely on the power of suggestion and inviting our brains to focus upon that which we do not see, Peli produced a film that was nothing short of terrifying.

Fast forward a few years and the producers of what is now the Paranormal Activity series recruit Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, two directors riding high on the wave of success and controversy generated by their social media film Catfish (2010). Much like Tod Williams’ Paranormal Activity 2 (2010), Paranormal Activity 3 is a prequel set prior to the events of the original Paranormal Activity. However, where Paranormal Activity 2 rewound the clock only a few months, Paranormal Activity 3 takes us all the way back to the 1980s to recount the tale of a wedding videographer and the strange goings-on that he manages to catch on camera.

Three films in and the Paranormal Activity series has collected quite a substantial narrative infrastructure with ghosts, demons, witches, spirits and a web of family relationships and history that link the three films together. However, when Peli first introduced the concept of a demon in Paranormal Activity, the concept felt somewhat out of place. The problem is that while such stock phrases and generic beasties as ‘ghosts’ and ‘demons’ may explain what it is that the audience is seeing and help the filmmakers to play with our expectations, they cannot help but feel comparatively empty and bland when compared to the lavish world building and evocative mythology of films such as Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999). However, far from crippling the film, Peli’s stripped back mythology serves to focus our attention on the film’s cinematography.  Because the film’s script cannot answer the audience’s questions, they are forced to look ever deeper into the details of the film.

Paranormal Activity 3 begins with an introductory recycling of the tricks used in the first two films: Doors open and footsteps sound in a manner that makes it clear that something is in the house. However, while the first two films in the series teased and teased, Schulman and Joots leap begin to extemporise within the first twenty minutes when an earthquake rocks the house causing the outline of a demon to be captured in falling dust. This reminds us of the film’s rules of engagement: We never directly see that which scares us, we only see the evidence of its passage.  The dust collected on the outline of the invisible demon is very much like the slamming doors and the echoing footsteps of Paranormal Activity and the bone of emotional contention in the first act of Certified Copy: it is an invitation to speculate about that which the director refuses to let us see.

The greatest moments in Paranormal Activity 3 are those in which Schulman and Joost make the most of their capacity to deny us visual access to the things that we are desperate to see. Using the oscillation mechanism from a household fan, the film’s protagonist rigs up a device that allows his camera to pan between kitchen and dining room and so record twice as much ‘space’ as a camera on a fixed tripod.  The choice of a fan’s oscillation mechanism is far from accidental as it means not only that what the audience sees is determined by simple mechanical algorithm but also that audiences will be familiar with how quickly the camera moves back and forth between two spaces. One of the most common charges levelled at films with peek-a-boo camera work is that the director is actively conspiring to deny us access to something. Think of the way in which Stanley Kubrick worked to keep naughty bits from the orgy scenes in the American R-rated release of Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Roger Ebert’s comparison of such techniques with those used in the credits sequences of the Austin Powers movies and you will know exactly what I mean.  By placing the camera under the control of a familiar oscillating mechanism, Schulman and Joost are making sure that we know exactly when the camera will show the kitchen and exactly how long it will then take to pan back towards the dining room. It is in such mechanical movement that the need to see is most pressing.  In such moments, the camera simply cannot move fast enough. Indeed, it is in the moments when the panning camera is in use that Paranormal Activity 3 is at its strongest.

In one sequence, we see a babysitter doing her homework in the family kitchen. The camera pans to the empty dining room and slowly returns revealing not just the babysitter but also a figure covered with a sheet.  Because this sequence follows a scene in which the babysitter horses about pretending to be a ghost, we imagine that the sheeted figure might be one of the kids but, as the camera starts to pan away, the sheet drops to the floor.  When the camera pans back to the kitchen, we see a speechless babysitter visibly worried by the unexplained presence of a sheet on the floor.  Brilliantly, Schulman and Joost do not show us the babysitter’s immediate reaction but we can guess what it must have been. The directors then repeat this trick towards the end of the film when the mother of the family walks through the house at night.  She walks into the kitchen and fills a glass of water.  We see that the kitchen is filled with kitchen-y stuff.  The camera pans back and forth and we see the mother staring at a kitchen that is suddenly empty.  For a second, it is not obvious what has gone wrong… we know that something has changed while the camera panned towards the dining room but we cannot say what. Then the entire contents of the kitchen falls from the ceiling.

While the Paranormal Activity series may lack the intellectual sophistication evident in the films of Abbas Kiarostami, it strikes me that both sets of films stand united in their capacity to force our attention away from the events on screen to events and contexts that exist outside of the camera’s visual field. By adroitly filming the spaces around the actual paranormal activity, the Paranormal Activity series causes the source of that activity to swell in our minds until even the tiniest and most innocuous of events can seem absolutely terrifying.  Similarly, by filming the characters reactions to the important things in their lives rather than the things themselves, Kiarostami’s Certified Copy and Shirin both force us to speculate about what those things might be.

Clearly, there is something ludicrous about the idea of a great director such as Abbas Kiarostami suddenly deciding, at the age of 71, that his future lies in disposable genre cinema. However, as ridiculous as this idea might be, I feel that there is indeed a profound kinship between the films of Kiarostami and the Paranormal Activity franchise.  Both share an absolute commitment to exploiting and deconstructing the basic grammar of film. To move beyond stock camera tricks and traditional forms of visual exposition to grapple with the ways in which the brain takes unconnected images and sounds and weaves them into a comprehensible whole.

Had Paranormal Activity 3 been as much a rehash of the original as Paranormal Activity 2 then I would never have thought to write this post but the freshness of Schulman and Joost’s approach to the material suggests that the future of the Paranormal Activity franchise may very well lie in more and more experimental uses of sound and light. If the producers of the Paranormal Activity series are curious as to where to go next, I suggest considering directors with a track record in visual experimentation rather than outright genre. What might Gaspar Noe make of a Paranormal Activity 4? What might Alexandr Sokhurov do to refresh the series’ use of continuous camcorder footage? As Werner Herzog’s successful take on the Bad Lieutenant template demonstrated, the walls of the cinematic ghetto have long-since crumbled into dust and many directors with less commercial track records might jump at the chance to reach a wider audience while earning a reasonable wage without the hassle of having to secure funding.

I conclude this piece with an open request to both the producers of the Paranormal Activity series and to the more experimentally inclined directors working in the field today: Talk to each other, Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost have shown that Paranormal Activity can produce true works of cinematic art… why not continue the tradition by pushing the boundaries of visual exposition even further. Be bold, be innovative and be paid… cinematic golden ages were built on much much less.