Hayao Miyazaki is, by any reasonable definition of the term, an auteur. He directs, he produces, he writes and his films not only share a certain look but a certain set of themes and visual motifs (airships, bustling port towns, young female protagonists). One of the central themes of Miyazaki’s work since the founding of Studio Ghibli has been the relationship between the technological world of humanity and the magical realm of nature and in particular the encroachment by the former upon the latter. However, while these broad themes pop up in pretty much all of Miyazaki’s films, they do not always possess the same degree of emotional spin.
Category / Science Fiction
REVIEW – The New Barbarians (1982)
Videovista have my review of Enzo G. Castellari’s The New Barbarians, a post-apocalyptic exploitation film made around the same time as his better known and arguably more entertaining Bronx Warriors.
Watching the film I was hit by a wave of raw nostalgia as most of my childhood summers were spent sitting in darkened rooms watching precisely these kinds of films. If it had mutants, a tricked out car and loads of violence in it then chances are that pre-teen Jona would have hunted it down and happily watched it. For all the recent talk of films like Avatar dumbing down cinema, watching The New Barbarians really brought home to me the fact that there was a time when science fiction cinema had teeth. It was weird, surreal, violent and thoroughly disreputable. I can’t help but feel that the mainstreaming of science fiction might well have cost us these kinds of films. Even attempts to recapture the magic such as Neil Marshall’s Doomsday (2008) seem somehow more respectable and tame in comparison.
Also interesting is the film’s blatant homophobia. You simply could not make a film nowadays in which the bad guys are a load of gay men. Indeed, it occurred to me after writing the review that the film suggests that should the extinction of the human race ever become a genuine risk then homosexuality would not simply be a lifestyle, a preference, a predisposition or even a perversion. It would be an act of outright nihilism. But then, is humanity really worth saving? The film’s baddies – the Templars – are effectively an armed wing of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement except rather than seeking to justify themselves using the language of ecology, the Templars speak of vengeance and a need to exact retribution for humanity’s crimes against itself. Which makes little sense but there you go…
Blissfully Yours (2002) – Now Rather Than Later
The last time I wrote about the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, I suggested that his films constituted a challenge to the critic. A reminder, if you will, that as cinematic expression evolves, so too must the tools of the critic. Indeed, most of the critical reaction to the Thai-film-maker’s work has tended to emphasise either the biographical (Weerasethakul is gay and his parents are doctors, facts that have clearly inspired his film-making) or a form of woolly mysticism that attempts to alight upon his films with the same softness and the aloofness that Weerasethakul uses in examining different topics in his films. In other words, Weerasehakul is not a forensic film-maker and so it is okay to speak of his films in non-forensic terms. For my part, the jury is still out on this approach. Especially when you consider that Weerasethakul’s earlier films seem to be quite accessible to standard critical readings.
Indeed, Blissfully Yours (Sud Sanaeha) could easily have been made by a European art house director. It is, after all, a fairly straightforward exploration of the temptation to ignore one’s problems in order to take pleasure in the present. While the film does share many of the images that Weerasethakul would deploy so forcefully in films like Syndromes and a Century and Tropical Malady, it is also a much darker film. A film that seems strangely at odds with the warm-hearted mysticism of Weerasethakul’s later films and the critical reaction to them.
BG 23 – Redefining friendship: Facebook, MMORPGs and Dragon Age Origins
Futurismic have my twenty third (!) Blasphemous Geometries column entitled Redefining Friendship : Facebook, MMORPGs and Dragon Age : Origins. It deals with the capacity for well written computer characters to effectively stand-in for human players in what were once considered group activities and in particular how console RPGs like Dragon Age : Origins seem to be trying to do to MMORPGs what a previous generation of video games did to real-world sports.
Rage (2009) – The Future of Reality is Reality TV
Cinema tends to ask only a narrow spectrum of questions. Questions inspired mostly by writers who themselves are concerned only with asking a narrow spectrum of questions : Who are we? What is happiness? What is freedom? But comparatively few films seek to answer the question of how we (as a species, as a culture and/or as individuals) should deal with the future. Even works of cinematic science fiction tend to shy away from these kinds of questions.
One book that has attempted to answer this question only to produce an intriguingly ambiguous answer is Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular (2007). The book deals with humanity’s attempts to come to terms with not one but three separate Singularites. The Singularity that dominates the bulk of the text allows all humans to not only communicate with all other humans, but also to see what they see. For some, this has resulted in fame and fortune as their lives are interesting enough to result in corporate sponsorship and syndication. Rucker presents the technology as incredibly cool and almost spiritual in its capacity for breaking down the barriers between human consciousnesses. But this does not mean that he shies away from the down-side to this degree of interactivity and access. For example, when a couple are attempting to consumate the physical attraction that has been brewing between them, they suddenly find themselves aware of their friends watching them. This instantly places them on a different footing. They are not merely living their lives, they are performing for an audience. In Rucker’s world, everyone is potentially in the public eye and most people act accordingly. In effect, humanity is plunged into a state of what Sartre called Being-For-Others.
But this is all science fiction right? Couldn’t really happen.
Sally Potter’s Rage suggests that this is happening already.
Where The Wild Things Are (2009) – Lost in Translation… With Muppets
There is a tendency in art house cinema towards the pseudo-intellectual. It is a tendency not merely to tolerate witless navel-gazing, but to actively celebrate it. To elevate its whiny introspection above all other forms of human activity. To revel in its portentous self-indulgence. To confuse its bourgeois posturing with grand tragedy and genuine insight. This tendency is best summed up by the films of Sophia Coppola.
Coppola’s best known film remains the Oscar-winning Lost in Translation (2003). Lost in Translation is a sordid tale of two wealthy Americans coming together in a foreign land and forging a bond of some kind out of their shared alienation despite the differences in age and life-experience. It is not really a film about love. Nor is it a film about cross-cultural alienation. In fact, it is not really a film about very much at all but it does have lots and lots of footage of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson looking vaguely depressed in the middle distance. Coppola’s skill as a director lies not in her understanding of the human condition, but rather her mastery of techniques used in art house cinema to create an aura of depth and thoughtfulness regardless of whether any actual ideas or insights are present in the text of the film itself. Indeed, it is telling that two of Coppola’s other films deal with the emotional lives of people who are effectively children. In the case of Marie Antoinette (2006) we have a film ostensibly about the ennui and alienation felt by a child-like Queen of France and in The Virgin Suicides (1999) we have a film that purports to be about the ennui and alienation felt by actual children.
Behind much of modern American independent cinema is the adult equivalent of a temper tantrum. Grown-ups who throw themselves on the ground and roll around screaming because they do not know what to do with themselves. They do not like their jobs. They do not like their families. They do not like their towns. They do not like their children. But they do enjoy staring wistfully into the middle distance while some pleasingly arcane piece of rock or pop plays over the soundtrack.
In a way, it is surprising that it has taken until 2009 for American film makers to realise the degree of similarity between the existential dramas favoured by certain strains of art house cinema and the simple coming-of-age tales favoured by much of children’s fiction. Wes Anderson – one of the acknowledged kings of middle-brow malaise – capitalised on these similarities by transforming Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (1960) into a tale of mid-life crisis and existential alienation. Spike Jonze continues this trend with Where The Wild Things Are, his adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book of the same name.
The White Ribbon (2009) – The Challenge of Empathy
To understand the films of Michael Haneke, one must first understand his deep ambivalence towards the themes and techniques of genre film-making. In The Time of The Wolf (2003) it was the post-apocalyptic. In Hidden (2005) it was the mystery. In Funny Games (1997) it was the slasher. All of these films would happily fit within the genre canons that inspired them were it not for Haneke’s almost visceral reaction against the cosily self-indulgent safety of genre.
To go and see a genre film is to arrive at the cinema with a certain set of expectations. The purchase of the ticket is a contract : Scare me. Thrill me. Entertain me. Move me. We know what we want and we happily pay to receive it.
Haneke is a filmmaker who refuses all such contractual relationships. He uses the methods of genre to engineer not the effects that audiences have been conditioned to expect, but rather something different. Something far more subversive. For example, in both versions of Funny Games, the story of a family’s torture and murder allows the filmmaker to challenge his audience’s desire to watch such atrocities. At one point, Haneke allows one of his characters to escape their fate only for the murderer to pick up a remote control and rewind the film in order to foil the escape. Audiences are to be denied the consolations of genre even if it means that the fourth wall must be shattered in the process. The same is true of Hidden. Haneke apes the mystery so effectively that the audience begins to tie itself in knots, picking over clues scattered throughout the narrative as to the identity of the stalker. However, Haneke refuses to resolve this question, leaving instead the methods, motivations and identity of the stalker unanswered. Soon the question changes from “who is doing this to the character?” to “what has the character done to deserve this?”. The main character begins to pick over his past until he eventually uncovers some terrible secret. A secret that might not have caused the film’s goings on but which could plausibly inspire them. This is the whodunit not as a form of palliative reassurance that no crime will go unpunished. Instead Hidden uses the themes and movements of the mystery genre to imply universal guilt, not only in its characters but in its audience. Are you, the film seems to ask, really innocent?
Das Weisse Band – Eine Deutsche Kindergeschichte sees Haneke return to the same hostile and yet pragmatic relationship with genre themes and images to request of us a leap of empathy and understanding.
Surrogates (2009) – Disconnecting the Internet
It is rare to come across a piece of cinema that actually engages with the internet as a cultural phenomenon. When the net first crept into our lives, films such as Irwin Winkler’s The Net (1995) saw it as a disturbing and demonic presence that seemed poised to erode our freedoms and generally smash our civilisation like Alaric the Visigoth. Even those rare films that tried to accept the internet as fact of our day-to-day lives struggled to achieve anything close to technological verisimilitude. Who remembers the real-time email exchanges in Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (1997)? Or the computer viruses with expensive-looking graphics in Iain Softley’s otherwise charming Hackers (1995)? When Hollywood finally bit the bullet and represented the net in positive terms, it was mainly due to similarities between aspects of online communication and older, more established technologies. This trend is particularly obvious in the work of Nora Ephron whose You’ve Got Mail (1998) remade the great Ernst Lubitsch’s story of anonymous letter-writing The Shop Around The Corner (1940), while her most recent film Julie & Julia (2009) links together the story of Julia Childs writing her first cookbook with a 21st Century woman blogging about cookery. Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates in no way signals the end of Hollywood’s deep ambivalence about the internet, but it does at least know enough about the net for some of its criticisms to hit home.
District 9 (2009) – Stand By For Level 3
Summer 2009 saw the birth of an interesting piece of terminology. Reflecting the success of titles such as Iron Man (2008), Terminator Salvation (2009) and the Transformers series, “robots hitting each other” has become a short-hand way of referring to the kind of shallow and crassly commercial genre film-making that is currently dominating Hollywood release schedules. Films not merely unintelligent but actually hostile to thought. Films designed to eliminate critical distance through the sensorial onslaught of bloated running times packed with explosions, violence and spectacle. Films that are the cinematic equivalent to the US using loud music to drive Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican embassy during the invasion of Panama. Given a cultural climate in which Hollywood is essentially using psychological warfare against its own customers, it is only natural that many of us should yearn for something more. Ever since the first trailers dropped, Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 has presented itself as a summer film with that little something extra : Science fiction that rises above robots hitting each other to become genuinely thought provoking and intelligent. However, the reality of District 9 is that what ideas it has are used up in the first twenty minutes, after which the film collapses into a mire of clumsy metaphors, poorly written characters and the kind of plot you would find only in the most hollow-skulled of video games.
BG 18 – The Iron Cage of Fantasy : World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Fable II
Futurismic have the 18th edition of my Blasphemous Geometries video game column.
It was an interesting column to write as it marks the first piece of sustained thinking I have done on the Fantasy genre in a little while. I was pleased to note that while my politics seem to be drifting leftwards, my attitude towards escapism has mellowed hugely. There was a time when I considered escapism to be a cowardly and childish retreat from the real world, but my views on it have changed markedly.
Ruthless Culture 