If your mind works anything like mine, at some point during Luc Besson’s Dracula—which is, let’s just get it out of the way, a sumptuous visual feast inspired in equal parts by John Boorman’s Excalibur, Tom Tykwer’s Perfume, and Disney fairy tales—you may find yourself asking: why are we asked to identify with this bloodthirsty creature? Is it actually good and noble to be an undead hematophagous thing, spreading a curse across Eurasia like a dark blot of ink? Should we aspire to be evil legends like this beautiful medieval knight-turned-cryptid fiend?
I think Besson is saying: yes, go for it. Which—without recounting the history of the man here—is not altogether surprising.
And, you know, come to think of it, Dracula and Iron Man and Film Directors have much in common. Iron Man and Dracula are solitary geniuses. Both toil in dark, secret lairs, where they manufacture mysterious and invincible technologies. Iron Man makes a suit of miraculous alloys, rocket-powered shoes, a futuristic computer familiar. Dracula produces mad familiars, enchanted gargoyles, armies of animal allies. Film Directors also like to imagine themselves as genius auteurs. Both Iron Man and Dracula have an inexhaustible supply of money. We see Dracula’s gargoyle minions stacking his dining hall with riches here, and the hellish fiend simply does not care. Film Directors, I like to think, are much the same.
It’s no wonder, then, that we are asked to see Dracula as some sort of hero. In the same way we are asked to see the rogue billionaire Tony Stark as a hero, and we are encouraged to look upon the definitely-not-a-sex-criminal Film Director (all of them, that is) as a singular genius, too.
Another thing you might think about, if you’re like me, is how each generation of films seems to ask us to identify ever more closely with Dracula and other horrifying things. The Count was always steeped in gothic romance, it is true, but it is only since the End of History in the 1990s that we have been asked to properly empathize with the beast as a modern man—to consider his point-of-view and find in it something worthwhile. This is a creature who sinks his teeth into the flesh of the living and either drains their life or damns them to an eternity of dark and vile urges. That the creature also happens to be in love with the memory of a woman who died in the 15th century seems beside the point. Doesn’t it?
Is it because the industry is peopled with monstrous men like Harvey Weinstein, Steve Bannon, and Jeffrey Epstein that we are encouraged to look upon seducing and drinking the blood of nubile young women, plunging cold steel into the hard bodies of young men, or murdering a convent full of nuns as kinda fun things you might want to do on a Friday night? Is it because we are ruled by an unstoppable gang of cheapjack thugs and bone-crunching weirdos that our movie villains refuse to stay dead? Again and again they die. Again and again they come back. Nothing changes. They want more.
Besson, at least, brings Dracula to an end in this film. When Christoph Waltz’s steel spike breaks the fiend’s cold, dead heart, his cursed ashes rise toward the brilliant light of salvation like a murmuration of swallows. Here’s one very bad man, at least, who goes straight to heaven. So that’s something.
(Edit: I’m not the only one thinking about the literal monsters running things. Here’s a blog post about the vampires of Silicon Valley I found linked on Hacker News the morning after I published this review. -CBC)
If you watch The Secret Agent at an AMC theater or similar megaplex, the odds are good that you will be forced to sit through a few commercials before the film starts. For me, before the lights went down, there was a new ad from Coca-Cola–not the ubiquitous “movie magic” couple dancing, drag-racing, and kissing through the streets, but a new one valorizing the history of bottles as though these tubes of glass have some emotional valence–and then another one, from Amazon, about a young, single Asian woman who lives alone learning how to cook ramen for herself by ordering a range of bullshit cooking accessories from Prime.
You watch these ads and they are lonely. It’s just humans, humans who are meant to live, work, and think together, standing instead alone, powerless to resist a gleaming world of products. The Products dance around our solitary heads. They assault our senses with lens flare, booming audio, bright colors, and all the other cinematic sleights of hand needed to turn a bottle of soda pop or a new slotted spoon into a life-changing, identity-affirming, spiritual revelation. We need other people to do that, and we all know it, so this–this noisy insistence that consumer products and the consumer product-driven life are beautiful and meaningful–feels bad. It feels wrong.
And then the movie starts. On the surface, it’s “about” Wagner Moura’s character fighting for his life against powerful forces that seek to silence him. Beneath that, it’s “about” the lawlessness of Brazil during the dictatorship and the vibrant resilience that percolated in the boiling kettle of that brutal state. Blah blah blah. Reflect on those Coca-Cola and Amazon ads and the film opens up a little more. This is a movie about what happens when the hand that performs the cute illusions in all of the commercials grows weary of your resistance, curls itself into a fist, and slams itself into your bleeding mouth.
Mendonça Filho wants us to think about Jaws. We come back to it again and again–in posters, drawings, a shark-tooth necklace wrapped around a villain’s throat. You may make of it what you will, but I think the shark here is the lurking danger–of death squads, brutally corrupt and murderous police, plotting executives, clutching politicians–constantly churning the water beneath our feet as we struggle to stay afloat. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the shark roared to the surface and pulled many thousands of Brazilians down into the depths, where they would never return. During that same period, the same shark terrorized the rest of Latin America, along with Southeast Asia, most of Africa, the Middle East, and other places in the world where people dared to challenge the beauty and justice of Products.
Walter Salles’ beautifully-executed I’m Still Here, from 2024,covers much of the same territory as this film, but Salles seems to think we live in a time of truth and reconciliation. Watch Bacurau, Mendonça Filho’s 2019 work (which is, I think, a better film than The Secret Agent), and you will see that the shark, the evil hunter, is still alive and well in Brazil.
It is with us, as well. That shark is the id of Coca-Cola and Amazon and all the others.
I watched this at the Capri Theater, an 85-year old movie house in Montgomery, Alabama that is positioned, for fund-raising purposes, as a sort of community arts organization. Montgomery is a town with two private Christian colleges and dozens (hundreds?) of churches the students at those colleges aspire to lead, so local arts organizations have a desperately straight line to toe. They can neither challenge the audience with dangerous art or disappoint the arts community with trash cinema. It’s no wonder, then, that they routinely program nonthreatening Masterpiece Theatre fare like this for the benefit of those who write the checks.
The Choral is a technically competent exposition of small-town English charm from the good times before the colonials turned on the metropole and everything went bad. Sure, some of the boys are off losing their arms in Flanders, but the little choral society at the heart of the film gets on with it in style and somehow ends up better than they started, transformed from a troupe of sleepy passion play performers led by a doughy middle-class pianist into an avant-garde operatic society led by a capital-A Artist named Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes)* who shapes Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius into an impassioned anti-war opera. It’s unfortunate that Hytner lavishes more attention on an awkward handjob scene between local girl Bella Holmes (Emily Fairn) and maimed veteran/tenor Clyde (Jacob Dudman) than the significant artistic process which must have unfolded to make this transition happen, but films about the artistic process rarely succeed.
Neither does this film succeed. Not anti-war, anti-class, pro-history, or pro-art, it simply moves from beat to beat, from one implied sexual tension to another, until the performance finally happens and the credits roll. I left the cinema feeling nothing about the war, about Yorkshire in the last century, Elgar, or Bach, or beautiful little British people, or the mill in their beautiful little British town, or anything at all.
Kudos to the Capri Theater for bringing more people out to see this on a Friday night than I have seen at any screening at the local AMC megaplexes in recent months. PBS knows something the art snobs don’t understand, but Capri gets it. Downton Abbey and The Choral and all the other costume pabulum that British taxpayer funds can throw at the screen have absolutely nothing to say – and that’s what people want. Cheerio.
* There is a chicken restaurant in my part of the South called Guthries, where you can get a box of chicken tenders, seasoned french fries, coleslaw, and garlic toast. Most people forego the slaw in favor of double fries, but not me. We–that is, me and at least two friends–call these things “Gut Boxes.” So, unfortunately, every time someone spoke to “Dr. Guthrie,” visions of Gut Boxes danced through my head like golden-brown sugarplums. The viewer brings to the film what they will.
In a more just world, some might argue that Kinds of Kindness is a masterpiece. It is a strong expression of the surrealist impulse, skillfully joined to the antique traditions of medieval art, and combined with Hollywood’s realist aesthetic by visual and textual threads so thin at times that they may as well be the result of a magic spell, or so obvious, at other times, that they compel the viewer to delight, disgust, or some exciting combination of the two. It is a remarkable film. Too bad, then, that this dazzling work is twisted into sad, disappointing shapes by the scalp-numbing banality of the Hollywood bankrollers and the professional creative class they’ve cultivated to reliably convert money into more money. Instead of a masterwork of surrealist cinema, Kinds of Kindness offers a masterclass in the contradictions of capital. What a shame.
First there is the merchandising. About three days after I watched Kinds of Kindness, I began to see the ads on Facebook. The first one that caught my eye was a plastic model of a severed thumb suspended from a keychain—$28 before shipping costs–floating atop an image of the movie’s logo. I tapped the image of the severed thumb keychain and found other oddball ephemera from the film at the link. A water bottle labeled “Contaminated” glows in the dark and costs $24. A sweatshirt—$80 before shipping–features the film’s logo on the front breast and the words “Take life from my hands” on the back. A glow-in-the-dark T-shirt—$42–reads “Contaminated” on the front. Whoever designed this merchandise had one idea they simply cannot not give up. Maybe some vertical marketing intern at Searchlight Pictures fed the script into a chatbot and asked it to produce ideas for obscure merchandise. Maybe these are the best examples of the insane tchotchkes the video cards at the data center could dream up.
The letters scroll quickly across the advert like trains going endlessly nowhere in opposite directions
This merch should not exist. Imagine, for a moment, that you could buy a Salvador Dali clock, or a Rene Magritte tote bag. Oh, wait, you can buy those things? That doesn’t make them any less fucking stupid than the merch associated with this film. What irritates me is that all of this, and all of us, are so utterly predictable. People often think Facebook and other data brokers tailor adverts to users by spying on them. Did Facebook know, from other data on my phone, that I had seen the movie? Maybe! But it is also all-too-sadly plausible that Facebook’s advertising placement algorithm can wager that I am the type of person who would like this movie, and who would like pointless and overpriced movie-themed merchandise. It’s not a bad bet for the algorithm to make.
Kinds of Kindness, with its 165-minute runtime, its playful subversion of power relations, and its careful deployment of colors, costumes, locations, and shots for maximum ironic affect, seems to want me to believe it is above this banality. It isn’t. It’s down in the shit with the rest of us pigs.
There are products associated with the film, and then there is the film as product. I watched Kinds of Kindness at an AMC Theater, where they screened the film last Tuesday in one of the smaller rooms, way in the back of the building past the MacGuffins Bar and the second bathrooms. There was me and my date and about ten other people in clusters of two and three scattered around the upper part of the room, decadently reclining in plush red faux leather seats where we dropped popcorn between the cushions while the film worked its magic on the screen. This experience happens in a material context we should not ignore. My AMC Theater is the only part of the old Tallahassee Mall that still feels like a shopping mall, carved like a holy relic of the 1990s from the claustrophobic maze of state government offices that used to be Bath & Body Works, Old Navy, and Aeropostale. This, or something very much like it, is how most Americans who see the film in a theater will watch it. They will be reclined in a seat they selected from an app, nestled deep within a massive multiscreen complex attached to a shopping center or mall. Almost everyone else will watch it on their couch at home, scrolling occasionally through feeds on their phone while their streaming device decodes an insanely long string of ones and zeroes into moving images on the screen.
Is it possible to experience transcendent art in a space like this? Those of us who saw the film in Tallahassee’s AMC 24 last Tuesday sat through a thirty-minute block of trailers and three advertisements for Coca-Cola which informed us to stay quiet and embrace cinematic enchantment following the introductory messages. At home, IMDB or Amazon beckon; emails, texts, and information feeds demand attention. Is any of this capable of leading the viewer to communion with the unconscious?
Let’s take off our materialist philosopher costumes and put on our hipster art-critic glasses.
Get past the advertising, the merchandising, and the distraction, and you will find in Kinds of Kindness an alluring, beautifully-rendered, sometimes disturbing, darkly comic triptych of interconnected short films featuring the same cast in different roles. The first tale features a man longing to be free of the total influence exercised upon him by his all-powerful employer and mentor. The second tale is focused on a police officer who questions the identity of his wife when she is rescued from a prolonged ordeal marooned on a desert island. The third featurette follows a woman from a sex-and-water cult seeking a spiritual leader who can heal the living and raise the dead. Each tale is interleaved with the others through visual and verbal cues, unified by a common style and a shared set of preoccupations. These generic unifying elements offer us a glimpse at the film’s beating heart.
First, style. The film is a triptych because it really wants to be a painting. Look at the painterly strokes throughout: the long focus on lips locked in a kiss, the lingering gaze on food, the absurd decor and serenely sinister landscapes. Lanthimos is clearly inspired by surrealism, but this is not a surrealist painting. Instead, Lanthimos approaches the subjects here with a medieval sensibility. The tales end on ironic notes, like vignettes in the Decameron or The Canterbury Tales.The first tale details the fall from grace and dark redemption of a wicked king’s favored knight. Maybe you’ve read something like it in a medieval fantasy. The second tale toys with themes developed in The Return of Martin Guerre, a 16th-century case of assumed identity. The third tale, with Emma Stone’s renunciation of her family and Jesse Plemons’ ascetic wardrobe, recalls monks and pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem.
What this film wants to be, then, is a medieval panorama, a Hieronymous Bosch allegory of absurd delights and tantalizing terrors doing their work under the discursive cover of moral instruction. However, the goals of this surrealist triptych and the medieval work it emulates diverge at the most basic level. Both triptychs and motion pictures are made for public display. The medieval tryptich turns the lens outward from the self, instructing the viewer in the many ways of the world and urging them to seek salvation through Righteous Action and Righteous Belief. Similarly, a Hollywood movie urges viewers to examine themselves by watching others. Absent the Church, however, or the personal and social imperatives of modernity which followed the Reformation, the instruction ends there. The lens points inward at the self. What you should do with the knowledge is up to you.1
So far we have peered at Kinds of Kindness through two interpretive lenses: surrealism and medievalism. Together, these constitute a dialectic worth exploring. Medieval art was dedicated to active contextualization: placing things in a narrative of meaning; breaking situations down to constituent parts or lessons; instructing and enriching the viewer. Figures point to where we should focus our attention. Beams of light shine down from heaven on meaningful people, places, and things. Surrealism is the antithesis of this contextual ideal. Surreal artists attack narrative and context at the root by refusing to grant them any supremacy. Nothing follows from anything; anything follows from everything. Thereby, the dual existence and non-existence of all things is revealed.
Why surrealism, though? In a seminal 1936 essay, the polymath physician, hermeticist, and surrealist writer Pierre Mabille argued that surrealism is interested in what he called the “unconscious of forgetting.” Separate from the indidivual and the “visceral unconscious” of social norms, the unconscious of forgetting is a sort of natural history shaping the self and society, from which ideas form like “islands which emerge from the ocean of forgetting…. They are the natural and normal protrusion of lands elaborated slowly by the ages and the corpses.” The unconscious of forgetting is not the self, and not the set of unconscious rules guiding our behavior, but something older, an often inchoate thing slithering deep in the recesses of human minds. This theoretical construct—the idea that dark and true things writhe deep in the recesses of culture and the psyche—unifies the three tales in the film. Without it they are just three short films.
Kinds of Kindness achieves neither the contextual ideal of medieval art nor the unsettling of oppressive norms by illuminating the unconscious through surrealism. Instead, the film attempts achieve these goals by serving up the empty calories of postmodern irony and self-absorption, sex and spectacle. These are its preoccupations. Go watch the movie and think about the scene where Margaret Qualley plays the little Casio keyboard. Think about John McEnroe’s broken tennis racket, the group sex film in the second tale, Emma Stone’s dancing, the masturbation scene on the beach. Think about the long, close, painterly zoom on the juice being squeezed from the orange, the eggs frying, or Willem Dafoe’s lips locked on Emma Stone’s face. Each of these leaves an indelible mark, but rather than informing or unsettling they are irritating, tantalizing, like riding the edge of an amazing orgasm but never falling into it.
That orgasm is the synthesis of context and consciousness. Setting up this strange dialectic, and then failing to synthesize its urgent questions, leaves the audience hot and bothered.
This failure to synthesize is not limited to Kinds of Kindness however, but in the system which produced it. Orange juicers, Casio keyboards, John McEnroe’s broken tennis racket, muscle cars, the massive spa at the cult mansion in the third tale: these are specific products, commodities if you’re so inclined, and they do hard work in the film. Revisit the key surrealist moments and you’ll find in almost every case a commodity at stage center or very near it.2 This is characteristic Hollywood irony. Billion-dollar studios excel at delivering viewers to these postmodern lacunae, as if by design. Every “artistic” film which makes it through the major Hollywood system in the past few years seems to ask viewers whether meaning is even possible or desirable. To what end? While this feels like the sort of cool detachment which has characterized the American counterculture since the 1950s, the question these films really ask is whether capitalism itself is desirable or undesirable.
Underlining the question with postmodern irony and detachment while partnering with the Walt Disney Company or Mattel Toys, Hollywood ponders on the screen whether anyone could ever truly know the answer to these fundamental questions while on the balance sheet answering in the affirmative again and again. Considering the cosmic formations of capital underwriting these films, and the commercial imperatives they must satisfy to be successful, this question might be better read as a taunt. Is capitalism bad, you ask? You will never know, Disney’s Searchlight Pictures says by bankrolling this dazzling but frustrating work of art, but it sure is good for us.
Kinds of Kindness hasn’t yet turned a profit, but its journey as a commodity is only just beginning. As it makes its way through the world realizing the immenseness of surplus value, it is certain to delight and inflame. It does this by juxtaposing the opposing contextual tendencies of medieval and surrealist art. Instead of synthesizing the dialectic these opposites create, however, it falls back on the forty-year-old playbook of postmodernism to avoid answering their urgent philosophical questions. Those questions remain. Maybe someone working outside of Hollywood can help us answer them.
If postmodernism is, as Fredric Jameson argues, “an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place,” the self and its observations of others through media are the only archives available to the postmodern subject.
Where commodities fail, sex picks up the slack. As the principal interface of consumption, however, the body is a synecdoche of all commodities, and therefore the most important construct in capitalist culture. Capitalism routinely problematizes the body, driving people to consume more: more and better food, more space, more clothing, more makeup, more skincare, more pleasure. As its most psychologically acute pressure point, sex is the most effective way to problematize the body and drive this consumer growth. So when you see a hard nipple on the screen, instead of a sleek SUV, the image merely cuts closer to the bone in its effort to manipulate you.
I’m not going to pretend that this is a good movie. The acting and production are about as good as you might expect from a late-fifties crime/horror/monster/science fiction/action hero film produced in Mexico City and dubbed by a crew in Coral Gables, Florida. It’s bad.
I’m not pretending this bad movie is good, but I’ll make an argument for why you should watch it anyway.
With all of the strikes against it, this is still just about as good as any Roger Corman feature from the era. And it was produced without access to the deep pool of Southern California talent that Corman could skim to make his schlock.
While the Aztec story here shares similarities with Native American fantasies in US films—the Native Princess, the Brave Warrior, forbidden love, and so on—it treats indigenous names, culture, and ideas with sensitivity you won’t see in a film produced north of the Rio Grande.
You won’t see a cast like this in a Hollywood film from the era. Stars Ramón Gay and Luis Aceves Castañeda were Mexican, star Rosita Arenas was born in Venezuela, Crox Alvarado was from Costa Rica.
You’re bound to get a few unintentional laughs. Look at the obvious toy snakes in the snake pit! Come back and here tell me you didn’t laugh when you saw the Angel jump in his little coupe and drive away in his shiny Luchador costume!
Put it all together, and you get a decent little midnight movie to hell you forget the Sunday night blues.
In academia, there is a witticism known as Sayre’s Law, which holds that the intensity of a fight is inversely proportional to its stakes. The lower the stakes, this law claims, the harder the fight. If you’ve spent time in graduate school, you probably recognize Sayre’s Law shaping the action on the screen in Peter Strickland’s absurdist gem. You don’t need to have attended graduate school, though, to recognize that there are few better targets for absurdist satire than the rarefied world of academic art, with its artist residencies churning out C.V. lines for postgrad MFAs and its institutional funders evading taxation by supporting “the arts” instead of social reform. And what better weapons to draw on this numskull assembly than the equally pretentious and inaccessible worlds of culinary criticism and analog audiophilia?
On paper, it sounds preposterous; but Strickland pulls it off, and the result crackles with creative energy. I was delighted, first of all, by the endless visual feast: the vivid palette, the old and new, the staid and the modern, the delightful juxtapositions and unexpected choices. The audio palette, too, is raw and interesting. Strickland understands the judicious use of silence, but the film trembles with possibility when the wah-wahs and reverbs and flanger modulate the mundane reality of boiling water and slicing carrots into something more–in the same way that film modulates vision into something greater and more coherent than reality itself. As the film progresses from scene to stunning scene, the part of you that craves coherence from a story may pout. The part of you that wants a film to reach into your head, however, and twang your cortices like a piano string will be rolling in the aisles.
One may debate what a film like this “means,” but perhaps there are clues in the symmetries between music and the body and art and medicine. All are shaped by absurd power struggles in Strickland’s film. The artists, played admirably by Fatma Mohamed, Ariane Labed, and Asa Butterfield, strain against the authority of the institutional funder, played impeccably by Gwendoline Christie. Stones, the “dossierge” played by Makis Papadimitriou, strains against the implacable authority of his own intestines, which challenge the pretentious skill of Richard Bremmer’s Dr. Glock. It is a cycle of conflict, as never-ending as the food chain.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is supposed to be about ghosts. Thinking back over the film’s 124 minutes, however, I don’t remember seeing very many of them. If you’ve seen the trailers, you’ve seen most of the spooks in the script. There’s the Gatekeeper, of course. There’s the Keymaster and Gozer the Gozerian. There are the little Stay-Puft men, indistinguishable from Minions in an alternate movie universe. There’s an old miner and a new Slimer. A few more ghosts ramble around here and there, and some old friends return, living and dead.
There may not be very many ghosts on the screen, but Afterlife is a thoroughly haunted picture. Forget about those old Sumerian demigods, though. This reboot is haunted by two insidious specters that Stantz, Winston, Venkman and the kids could never hope to bust: the ghost of the American century and the ghost of science. When you put them together, Afterlife is something more than a comedy-horror reboot. Afterlife is an tragedy mourning the decline of twentieth century liberalism.
The first ghost is the specter of the American century. Like any ghost, it is difficult to pin down. Don’t seek it in the foreground. Look for it instead in the film’s sensibilities, in the aesthetic choices that shape its sets, costumes, vehicles, and props. Those choices outline a ghost of the American century. It is a warm presence, all golden hour and oversaturation, permeating the film. The prevailing kitsch of this ghostly mirage—the corn fields, main streets, drive-in cafes, grain silos, electric guitars, blue jeans, and other heartland mid-century ephemera—susurrates quietly in the background and tilt-shifts the perspective, rendering the town of Summerville and the surrounding landscape in idyllic miniature.
Like the seismic charts hanging on the walls of Summerville, we can trace the epicenter of the American century’s ghost to “Spinners,” the drive-in café in the middle of town. This oversaturated temple to the departed teen culture of the 1950s and 1960s is where Finn Wolfhard’s character, Trevor, finds love and gets a job. “Spinners” seems to occupy the vital center of the town’s social life as well. In the “Spinners” scenes there are people everywhere, drivers and pedestrians mingling in conversation, music blaring, peals of laughter, old people and young, pickup trucks and Subarus. Contrast this with the scene at your local Sonic restaurant, where rolled-up windows on idling vehicles enforce the separation of the patrons into family units. One would be hard-pressed to find the sort of inter-class, open social environment thriving at “Spinners” anywhere in the real America.
The Epicenter of Mourning
Follow the tremors of nostalgia outward from Spinners, and you will find the ghost of the American century everywhere. It drifts around the crumbling grain silos outside of town. It haunts the faded Stay-Puft marshmallow advertisement painted on a downtown wall. It inhabits the beautifully maintained 1978 Ford Ranchero GT owned, inexplicably, by one of the teenagers who works at Spinners. It squeaks in the wheels of junky Radio Flyer wagons in the old field outside of the factory. It acts as a preservative in the old half-eaten Crunch Bar young Spengler pulls from the pocket of her grandfather’s Ghostbusters uniform. See it once; see it everywhere.
Twenty years ago, a ghost of the American century would have looked like a character from a Norman Rockwell painting. All pastiche and cliché, it still would have carried itself with a sort of genteel dignity, a winking self-awareness that connected the living present to the departed past. It was both an aspirational cliché and a self-reflection: a ghost we could all see ourselves becoming someday, if we die righteously. The ghost haunting Summerville, Oklahoma is not as legible. This is a ghost haunting the post-apocalypse. The element of self-reflection is gone. We are encouraged by light, sound, and decay to situate the town somewhere in the past, but it is unclear where in time its development is supposed to have stopped. Is Summerville stuck in the 1950s? The 1980s? It doesn’t matter. Viewers in 2021 can no longer discern the difference between the two. All of it now is the 1900s, a golden era gone.
Nostalgia on the Streets
We have a harder time than ever before seeing ourselves in the old American century, but Afterlife wants us to understand that it was a better time. Rusted silos, sagging rooflines, and burnt-out lights on the marquee signs suggest that the town’s best days are gone. Except for flipping burgers, stocking shelves, or policing, it is unclear what anyone in town does for a living. The mine shut down decades ago. The farm infrastructure is old and unused. Spinners, Walmart, and the state are the only going concerns. This, too, is a manifestation of the American ghost. The signal fades.
The ghost of the American century is a specter of history. The second ghost haunting the town of Summerville is the poltergeist of science. You need not seek this spirit lurking in the background, however. It is there, everywhere, in perfect focus, lavished with thought.
Writers Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman cast these two spirits in opposition to one another. “History is safe,” Paul Rudd—who plays Gary Grooberson, a geologist moonlighting as a summer school teacher to study the seismic anomalies in the area—tells the kids in one scene. “Science is all particle accelerators and hydrogen bombs.” One is boring, in other words; the other is cool. One is quietly dead; the other seems almost alive.
The Imperium of Gear
Set aside the question of history for a moment. What is science? “Science is punk rock,” Grooberson says. “Science is a safety pin through the nipple of academia.” Punk rock, like science, is an attitude, a set of beliefs. We learn little of the philosophy of science in Afterlife, however. Instead, the ghost of science in Summerville is made of gear. Egon Spengler’s old workshop overflows with stuff. Ecto-1 is top heavy with racks, hoses, antennae, and other things. Proton packs, goggles, scopes, sensors, containment units, gauges, switches, pedals, buttons, and other bits of equipment surround the characters when they do science. There is no method. There are no hypotheses, no failed assumptions, no notebooks. Characters see a problem; they deploy a tool. The problem is solved. If academia is full of uncertainty, science in Summerville truly is the safety pin in its nipple. There is no uncertainty in the haunted mansion of science.
We do not pierce the veil of science in Summerville, but we are encouraged to see its moral shadow. This, too, is not what the characters claim. Grooberson says: “Science is pure. It’s an absolute. It’s an answer to all the madness.” It was “science,” however, which flowed from Summerville’s vein of selenium through the twisted hypotheses of Ivo Shandor to shape Sigourney Weaver’s apartment building in New York.“Science”—the sciences of mining, smelting, electrical engineering, et cetera—enabled the construction of the building. Science, too, brought the original Ghostbusters together and informed their work. In the Ghostbusters universe, as in real life, science is yin and yang, promise and peril. Afterlife buries the peril in the promise. Where have we seen that before?
A “pure” world without uncertainty was a key promise of the American heyday, too. The brutal efficiency of the marketplace, the genius of its innovators, the inherent righteousness of its existence: these forces had triumphed over fascism, the story went, as surely as they would triumph over communism, cancer, hunger, the colonization of space. Along the way maybe history itself—that incessant dialectic of class warfare—would come to an end. It is an idea worth mourning, perhaps, if you can believe it.
Try as they might, however, the filmmakers cannot separate the ghost of America from the ghost of science. My schoolbooks from the 1900s maintained that these two were symbiotically linked. American greatness flowed from the font of science, they argued, which flowed from the font of greatness, and so on. American power was transcendent, airborne, contemptuous of limits, devastating in its mastery of the natural world. The comfort it enabled was highly engineered.
The ectoplasm of American scientific power paints a different picture. The chronicles of nuclear devastation on Planet Earth, the inexorable decline which renders the memory of the American century in Summerville through a darkening glass, and the persistence of an ancient Sumerian demigod in a mountain just outside of town suggest that history is unsafe, and science is impure. We should not mourn them, but we cannot escape them. Like intrusive thoughts, they color our experience of the world. They refract our understanding, twist our nostalgia in subtle ways. They haunt even our blockbuster film franchises. Our only hope to overcome their decrepit influence is to leave them in the past.
There was a prolonged moment after World War II when the road symbolized for Americans ultimate freedom. These were the years of interstate highways, land yachts, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, teenage hot rodders, drive-in movies and drive-up restaurants. Empowered by all things automotive, the story goes, Americans were footloose and wild. As a result they lived through hard drinking years, fast living, devil may care years. So it goes. From Happy Days to the good-old days long gone in the animated film Cars, we’ve idealized the period to the point of caricature.
Underneath all of this there lurked a menacing darkness. Killers roamed the highways. Cons, pimps, and addicts thrived in the automotive underground. Post-traumatic former GIs, reliving the horrors of Guadalcanal or the Bulge, struggled to hold it together. Women and minorities took the brunt of it. Woe betided those who happened to be both. Automotive freedom ran like a wine dark current beneath this moment, empowering some as thoroughly as it shackled and destroyed others.
A modest but brilliant noir picture emerged from this ambivalent milieu: Ida Lupino’s chilling feature, The Hitch-Hiker. Released in 1953, it is important that this is the only classic noir directed by a woman. It is not the only entrée in the genre to call the free-wheeling postwar world to account, but Lupino’s gaze, executed by cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca and carried out by deft performances on the part of the film’s three stars, is attuned to cruelty and power in a way that her male counterparts did not grasp in their cynicism or machismo.
The premise of the film is straightforward. It was based on the killing spree of Billy Cook, a drifter and small-time hood with a deformed eye who gained notoriety for a 22-day rampage that left six people dead on the road from Missouri to California. In the film, Cook is represented by the character Emmett Myers, ably performed by a dead-eyed William Talman in his best role before moving to the small screen on Perry Mason. We meet Myers mid-spree. His M.O. is to hitch a ride, kill the driver, and steal the car, along with the driver’s wallet, before moving onto the next victim. After another grisly killing, Myers sticks out his thumb and hitches a ride with fishermen Roy Collins, played by Edmond O’Brien, and Gilbert Bowen, played by Frank Lovejoy. These two are old friends enjoying a taste of freedom from their domestic lives on a weekend outing to the Gulf of California when they pick up Myers, who proceeds to lead them at gunpoint on a wild odyssey into Mexico, where he plans to kill them and board a ferry to freedom across the Gulf of California. A taut thriller ensues, driven by stark contrasts, interesting inversions, and powerful frustrations, until Myers runs hard into the arms of justice and the fishermen are delivered from their terrible captivity.
Lupino manages to achieve much in the film’s meagre 71 minute runtime. Most striking to me are the contrasts, both visual and atmospheric, that serve the story. The setting alternates from the hotbox enclosure of Collins’ and Bowen’s car to the wide-open desert spaces through which it is passing. Collins and Bowen are seated in the light up front; Myers is shrouded in darkness in the backseat. Myers is blind in one eye and sharp as a hawk in the other. These contrasts are amplified by inversions, however. Collins is a mechanic and driver. He possesses the most power, therefore, in the most enclosed space. Bowen is the only character who can speak Spanish. Myers holds a gun, then, but Bowen has the power of knowledge when they need to resupply in one of the sleepy Mexican hamlets along the way. Ultimately, the dynamic that emerges between the three characters is a sort of inverted buddy feature. I often found myself wondering whether Bowen and Collins would remain friends when the ordeal was over, or if they would go their separate ways.
The Hitch-Hiker was a B picture for a reason, however. Its weaknesses are plain. There are holes in the plot big enough to drive the fishermen’s Plymouth through. The opportunities for the captives to overpower Myers and run away are seemingly endless, for example. The plot does nothing with the interesting inversions of power represented by the captives’ advantages in mechanical and linguistic knowledge, either. When Bowen speaks with Mexican characters in the film—all of whom are represented in the round, an unexpected breath of fresh air for the time—the opportunities are as tantalizing as his failure to capitalize on them is frustrating. The outcome is predictable, and the film’s short runtime does not allow Lupino to introduce many curves in the road on the way there.
Despite these flaws, The Hitch-Hiker is a must-see noir thriller. Uncluttered and raw, beautifully shot and intelligently optimistic in the shadow of the dark real-world events that shaped its story, the film captures the ambivalence of a moment in American history rich with opportunity but scarred by violence and despair. Imagine watching it in the bench seat up front of an old Chrysler parked in a darkened lot, soundtrack blaring through a speaker hung on the window. After the movie you drop off the speaker on the way out and drive home laughing about your date’s white knuckles when they clutched your knee at the suspenseful parts. You round a bend in the road, straining to see in the weak headlight beams what might be in the dark pavement ahead, and there is a lonesome man in a dark jacket on the side of the road, thumb stuck out, pointing your way. You keep driving.
Legend has it that Miami Vice was born when the President of NBC, whom I (unfairly and probably incorrectly) like to imagine deep in the throes of a head-spinning fugue state around 11:30 in the morning on day 3 of a coke binge in the summer of 1984, scrawled the words “MTV Cops” on a sheet of paper and pitched it to a producer. We can imagine a similar scenario playing out in 2016 or 2017. Some producer on a flight from Los Angeles to Shenzhen to make a superhero movie pitch jolts awake from a psychedelic jet lag dream, fumbles for his iPhone, head lightly spinning from a single Lime-a-Rita before the flight, and scrawls “The Departed with women” in the Notes app. The Kitchen is born, and I sit down to watch it on a Tuesday night many months later in a suburban multiplex on the edge of the woods in North Florida.
It’s
hard to talk about The Kitchen. I
think all of us gathered in the multiplex on Discount Tuesday this week were
extremely aware of the trail this
movie is trying to blaze. The stars are badasses, alright? They don’t take any
shit. They dominate every man in the film—with the exception of fathers and
Italians—and we all love that. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “this
gangster movie is good, but what if the wiseguys were women?” then this is probably the movie for you. I loved that part
of it. But if you value good films or human life, it probably isn’t the movie
for you. Let’s talk about that.
First,
life and death. Like Stuber, which I
talked about on Discount Tuesday a few weeks ago, The Kitchen kills with impunity. People die in this movie and
nobody really cares. Heads are blown open; dead people are dragged on the
sidewalk; bodies are dismembered and dumped in the Hudson River. Spoiler alert:
Haddish and McCarthy sniffle for a moment when they kill their husbands, but
the audience is discouraged from joining in these brief moments of quiet.
Watching these badass women rampage is just too fun, I guess, for the filmmaker
or the audience to go and turn the killers and the victims into humans. That
would require empathy, right, and who wants to bother with that on Discount
Tuesday in the summertime?
The Kitchen’s failures as an example of filmmaking art follow, in part, from all of this sexy dehumanization. If films are meant to shed some light on the human experience, death should do something. Take the gangster movies that this movie clearly wants to emulate. In The Godfather, benefiting from death makes Michael Corleone into a monster. Each killing in the film’s pivotal seizure-of-power sequence severs him from his humanity and isolates him from his family until, finally, a closing door figuratively seals him within his own personal hell. In Casino, death is a grotesque ritual which so scars the fantasy landscape that the killers operate in the depths of the desert. Death is a reminder of the cruel masters back east, and a consequence of flying too high. Goodfellas treats death like a cruel joke, but the audience clearly understands that Ray Liotta’s character is both hero and heavy. He’s a ghoul.
You may be wondering: what if all of the people who die in The Kitchen are bad guys? Does that make it OK, like Inglourious Basterds or revenge movies? It might, except The Kitchen isn’t about revenge or redemption, and the bad guys aren’t Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. The “heroes” in this film kill the “villains” in order to become the villains. With the exception of one rapist—killed by a male savior/mentor instead of one of the badass women, it’s worth pointing out, as though some villains are still too formidable for women to handle—we don’t know anything about the small-time gangsters who die in this film except that they’re standing in the way of the “heroes” racing to reach rock bottom. There is a moment near the end of the film—in the nadir of the “dark night of the soul” every screenwriting manual will instruct budding artistes to include in the script—when Melissa McCarthy says that she’s built something too great to give up. I was left wondering: does she mean the criminal enterprise the hero-villains built from theft, rackets, blood, and graft; or just the relationships they made along the way?
It’s impossible to watch this movie without thinking about its moral and historical counterpoint: J.C. Chandor’s 2014 masterwork, A Most Violent Year. That film takes place just three years later and engages the late-seventies underworld this movie glorifies. It has everything this movie has: crooks, a gritty, desaturated New York cityscape, gangsters, a badass woman, even Hasidim. But instead of cruel, half-baked stereotypes, these are real people, living in a real place. Instead of racing to the bottom like the soulless heroines of The Kitchen, Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain struggle to do the right thing in a world that rewards badness. If Donald Trump is the Bizarro Obama, an inverse agent whose entire political program is built on undoing his predecessor’s legacy, The Kitchen is the Bizarro Violent Year. Its nihilism betrays the talents of the performers and craftspeople who brought it to life.
“Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things.” – Bertolt Brecht
What is it that historians do?
On the one hand, they must tell The Truth. This means reading, watching, listening to, tasting, smelling, or touching every bit of evidence they can find, weighing them against each other, and then putting it all together into a faithful account of the past. Which is pretty much what they do. But on the other hand, because they are humans, living in this noisy and contentious world, historians always have some axe to grind. History means something, they maintain. And besides killing readers with boredom, history without meaning would be useless. It would just be a list of things that happened. Everything that ever happened. So historians have to make the past mean something, too. This means throwing some evidence out, maybe pointing at other evidence that might not seem important and saying, “there it is! The Truth!” Figuring out what to keep and what to ignore is a real dilemma. Nobody will agree. This, in short, is the historian’s dilemma: making choices without appearing to make choices. Making claims about today by appearing to make claims about the past.
This is contentious stuff. Most academic historians have long taken postmodern subjectivity for granted, attempting in turn to do the least harm by pulling into their work as much evidence as possible, from as many opposing voices as possible. Their readers, however, are impatient with both the problem and the solution. Most readers tend to see the past as immutable—as a story just waiting to be uncovered—and the documents required to tell that immutable story as mostly self-evident. Rather than complications of interpretation, readers see challenges of comprehension and accessibility. Knowing where to find documents and how to translate their archaic prose is challenging enough, they claim. With this arcane knowledge, historians should have no problem interpreting what they find and telling The Truth. Efforts on the part of academic historians to incorporate alternative sources, to include an abundance of notes, or to challenge their readers with theory are routinely derided. Amazon reviewers often savage academic books for being too detailed, too unsure—too boring—while school boards argue that they are too interesting, too provocative or heterodox for students. What is a historian to do?
It is clear that Director F. Gary Gray and the producers of Straight Outta Compton faced the historian’s dilemma. Compton is a film obsessed with its own history, as though viewers are listening to a deep conversation between Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and their own reflections in the bathroom mirror about where they’ve been and how they got there. Gray offersis an exceptional rendering of those conversations, replete with outstanding performances from a fairly green cast—anchored by Paul Giamatti—and a workmanlike attention to detail.
Too bad it doesn’t have much to say.
Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time—the late 1980s, a time increasingly shrouded in pre-Golden Age mystique—it was rough in the Los Angeles ghetto. A group of young black men were making their way through the hard times, honing their talents (or courting an early grave) in obscurity despite the efforts of the police state to break their will or end their life. One day, the group of young men decided to do something about their obscurity and formed a rap group. It wasn’t very difficult to record a hit single, but it was even easier to find a manager who could sell their talents to a record label after they did. They were immediately successful. A bunch of rock-star stuff happened, the group of young men got into a fight, and then the rap group split up. Two of them were immediately successful after the breakup; one wasn’t. A bunch of other stuff happened. The now-unsuccessful one ended his relationship with the agent and then, right before staging a comeback with the still-successful young men who used to be part of his rap group, succumbed to AIDS. The other young men cry and reflect.
That’s pretty much it. One does not get an honest sense of the struggle involved when obscure young black men build a career out of sheer talent and provocation from the very heart of the American nightworld. Police violence, for example—such a prominent part of the film’s first two acts and in the real-life NWA’s meteoric rise to fame—simply disappears in the third act. Gone. Manager Jerry Heller’s treachery is only vaguely outlined. Less vague, perhaps, are the hints of cultural and social tension between the fairly affluent Heller and the rappers he represents, but not much. Dr. Dre and Ice Cube’s success is not vague at all, however. Both easily sidestep the belligerent malfeasance of entertainment capital: Ice Cube by obliterating obstacles with a baseball bat, Dre by rolling over them with a steam-powered Suge Knight. Eazy-E alone struggles with the system. One-by-one, the fragments of late twentieth-century failure pile on E’s shoulders: friendships broken by bounced checks, a heartbreaking series of moves back toward the underclass, and, finally, the cruel denouement offered by HIV and AIDS. These are Eazy-E’s problems, though, and don’t belong to his friends or the viewer. None but E are complicit in his fall from grace.*
These are tragically missed opportunities. Unfortunately, Straight Outta Compton takes the easy way out of the historian’s dilemma: mere narrative; evidence without meaning. The narrative itself is solid and entertaining, absolutely, but the whole is dissatisfying. By refusing to answer or even pose deeper questions of meaning, the filmmakers leave it up to viewers to formulate their own questions and answers. Is this just another touchstone of American consensus, another tired affirmation that we, too, can be successful if we are talented and hard-working enough to overcome adversity? Perhaps. Or is there something else here, some covert meaning in the filmmakers’ refusal to pose these questions? Maybe that too. Eazy-E is a remarkably tragic figure, after all.
But then again, maybe not. Ultimately, one must ask: what is the argument? I don’t know. Straight Outta Compton doesn’t have the answers.
* And maybe Jerry Heller, but, again, the details are hazy.
C.B. Crenshaw 