Macbeth (1971, Roman Polanski)

Roman Polanski’s Scotland never beholds daylight, wavering between forbidding shades of dusk and dawn, its verdant earth buckling under torrents of frigid rain and stampeding horses. The grimness of the landscape correlates to the director’s rendering of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a bellicose adaptation that is hermetic in both senses of the word, as engrossed in the intangible elements of the occult as it is enthralled by the isolation fostered by a paranoid mind. The dialogue and decor maintain a certain authenticity, capturing the verve of Shakespeare’s blank verse and the cavernous recesses of Macbeth’s chamber, but the ghastly visual components are purely Polanski’s, fashioning a feverish and phantasmagorical nightmare out of unbridled avarice and the burden of guilt.

Facets of the supernatural permeate Polanski’s film and he wisely employs Shakespeare’s coven of witches as the instrument for his macabre catalog of symbols. The opening sequence finds the trio of necromancers clawing at the sand beneath a ruby sky, burying a noose, dagger and severed arm in the wet beach, their emblems of malice obscured by a coat of heavy fog. The unseen battle that rages amidst this dense smog is clamorous, leaving behind only brutalized flesh, thoroughly unmasked by the unforgiving camera eye. As two victors, Macbeth (Jon Finch) and Banquo (Martin Shaw), trot past the clairvoyants, they are treated to a labyrinthine prophecy, discerning from the string of riddles and menacing cackles that Macbeth shall rise through the ranks to the Kingdom of Scotland.

The soundtrack enters the thoughts of Macbeth, reproducing the whisper of his internal monologue, the union of fear and elation moving from the annals of his mind to his lips as they curl into a smile. Despite his military prowess and obvious intelligence, he is crippled by anxiety, his musings circling him like a buzzard as he succumbs to “black and deep desires” and plots his predecessor's execution. A dagger hangs before our assassin like an apparition, guiding him to the King’s bedside through sharp musical cues and a glowing orb of light. As he straddles the resting monarch, he plunges the sharpened blade into his torso, severing the jugular vein and sending his crown and a stream of warm blood onto the floor below, spied only by the rich flicker of a wood fireplace.

Interiors are lit by flame or a rosy, artificial glow, creating an insular, unearthly atmosphere, one capable of transforming a king into a cutthroat by the shadows of its faint illumination. The photography bears a comparable soft focus on the fringes of each shot, lending images an illusory quality, unreliable and hazy like the deliberations of Macbeth’s poisoned mind. The ascension to the throne illustrates this subjectivity, adorning the new king in white robes as beams of sunlight sparkle through the end of his sceptre, bathing him in blinding light like the resurrected Christ. On the other hand, the drifting, mobile camera never mimics the potentate’s anxiety, trailing him like a passive observer until it springs forth to accompany one of his sensory hallucinations, manifesting his shame through levitating spectres and a dizzying procession of mirrors.

Polanski utilizes primary colors to represent guilt and fear, drenching Macbeth’s restless body in the sanguine light that pours through his bedroom window, paralleling his bloody reign. The deep blues of twilight also carry metaphorical heft, washing over the fallen Banquo as his corpse floats in a shallow pool of water, echoing the cold distance of a king willing to slay his most loyal subject. The spell conjured by this evocative shading and frenzied violence is amplified by the high-pitched squeal of Third Ear Band’s avant-garde improvisations, eliciting panic through blurts of oboe and shredded violin strings.

Far more concerned with fabricating a mood than accurately representing text, Polanski focuses on the physical expression of rage in the final act, typifying his artistic vision by linking internal torment to external aggression. His Macbeth exhibits a measured pace, but builds to an unbearable tension, marrying a lesson in humility to a study in existential dread and mortal cruelty.

Macbeth (Columbia Pictures, 1971)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by William Shakespeare (play), Roman Polanski (screenplay) and Kenneth Tynan (screenplay)
Photographed by Gil Taylor

Romeo + Juliet (1996, Baz Luhrmann)

Contrary to the ascription on the theatrical one-sheet, Romeo + Juliet is more a product of Baz Luhrmann’s artistic sensibilities than William Shakespeare’s, transposing the Elizabethan English of “The Bard” onto the sun-damaged surf of a crumbling California, emphasizing the melodiousness of the text through expeditious editing and intentionally gaudy set dressing. Luhrmann’s flamboyant physicality and spectrum of color is almost brutish in its creative license, employing the civil unrest of the Los Angeles riots and epidemic of gang violence as a point of reference for the rivalry between the Montague and Capulet families, masking a glorification of silver-plated weaponry beneath the guise of social activism. The visuals do bear a certain allure, capturing the vividness of Mexican Folk Art and mystique of religious iconography, but every passage of beauty is smothered beneath a heavy-handed mélange of sight and sound, bewildering the viewer through its disarray and lack of restraint.

The film opens in fierce montage, cycling through its cast of characters by way of magazine cover and newscast, utilizing the anchor as a replacement for Shakespeare’s Chorus, reinforcing the script through large print intertitles. We enter the narrative at a gas station, the camera rapidly shifting from the boot heels to gun butts of a pair of rival gangs, each clamoring for respect through the brandishing of firearms and the pomp of the plainly anachronistic dialogue. The exaggerated appearances of the characters and abrupt camera zooms are cartoonish, imparting levity onto Verona Beach’s criminal element through shocks of neon hair and customized lowriders, each glossed in coats of color better suited for a scoop of sorbet.

Christian imagery is prevalent, as it was in Shakespeare’s work, characterized by extensive overhead shots of al fresco statues, many inspired by Christ the Redeemer or functioning as reminder of the crucifixion. Luhrmann intends to parallel the suffering of the Christian messiah to the eponymous lovers, a lofty goal that he nearly accomplishes through directorial bombast and the superb application of rousing music, both classic and contemporary. The integration of diegetic and nondiegetic sound is rather exhilarating, transforming the masquerade ball at the Capulet’s mansion from stuffy social affair to choreographed chorus line, accelerating the footage to emphasize the feverish twirling of the performers.

Scenes of revelry also sport a certain sexual ambiguity, one that feels rather prescient considering our current cultural debate on the politics of gender and identity, especially when bookended by passages of brutality. Luhrmann’s juxtaposition of the ravishing and savage is compelling, particularly within the construct of a mainstream adaptation, but Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers was far more subversive and had yet to fade from memory, its confidence fostering a cogent marriage of romance and media satire. Romeo + Juliet isn’t as neatly threaded, stumbling beneath an editorial incongruity that confuses rather than captivates, trammeling the impact of the photographic majesty.

The solemnity of the ironic conclusion survives unscathed, boasting a magical, illusory quality in the kaleidoscopic color and soft candlelight that illuminate the couple’s altar-bound coffin. As Liebestod pervades the soundtrack and the camera slowly scans the tomb from overhead, we see a flashback of the couple embracing underwater, sharing an impassioned kiss. It’s a subtle denouement to an otherwise garish and impetuous work, one plagued by a reckless abandon that confuses excess and technical prowess for transcendence.

Romeo + Juliet (20th Century Fox, 1996)
Directed by Baz Luhrmann
Written by William Shakespeare (play), Craig Pearce (screenplay) and Baz Luhrmann (screenplay)
Photographed by Donald M. McAlpine

Carol (2015, Todd Haynes)

Carol is a sentimental picture that occupies a pragmatic world. Sequences traverse memory and images capture color and space with a rapturous affection for detail, working to negate the restrictiveness and desperation that defined the cultural climate of the 1950s. It’s a highly subjective work, reflecting the infatuations of its director like it indulges those of the characters, lighting the streets of New York City with a warm, painterly glow, adding a certain filmic resonance to the tribulations of its ill-omened couple. Yet, it’s this decorum that makes Carol so hard to latch onto, creating a separation between the handsomeness of the imagery and the emotional center of the story, manifesting a passivity that makes it easy to discern between homage and the real thing.

We open on Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) and Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) sharing what appears to be their final meal, the former holding back tears and the latter sternly resisting emotional impulse. Carol places her palm on Therese’s (pronounced “TA-REZ”) shoulder as she steps away from the table, the camera capturing her apprehension as she takes leave, revealing the intimacy of touch that will recur throughout the film. As Therese stares through the fogged glass of a yellow taxi cab, replaying the exchange in her mind, she remembers bits of their relationship in flashback, drifting through the past to the first time their eyes met and Carol touched the top of her hand.

The pair converged at Frankenberg’s department store, beholding each other through a sea of clamoring shoppers, sharing a moment despite the surging holiday rush. Director Todd Haynes embellishes their crush with ephemera, filling the screen with pastel tones, baby dolls and train sets, signifiers that isolate the story to a bygone era, despite the modernity of the subject matter. The trance-like narrative pace, which drifts between the present and an idealized past, matches the sexual attraction stoked by this chance meeting, insinuating a passion beneath the surface that doesn’t necessarily mirror the context of their conversation.

Politically, the nature of their discussion and forthcoming affair acts as an intersection of two different classes of people, one that not only smashes sexual barriers, but the boundaries defined by social status. Carol’s wealth and the confidence in her voice convey a certain prestige, reinforced by the fur coat draped over her shoulders and air of aloofness. Standing in stark contrast, Therese is indecisive and reserved, so eager to please that she adopts Carol’s attributes as they share their first meal, but elusive enough to have been “flung out of space.”

Both occupy their own figurative prisons, Therese trapped beneath her boyfriend’s expectations and Carol ensnared by a jealous husband and the opinions of high society. Gossip and disapproving glances still function as the scarlet letter in Todd Haynes’ body of work and he not only brings Carol’s love affair before the court of public opinion, but integrates her divorce from Harge (Kyle Chandler) and the subsequent custody battle into the climax of the story. He also reiterates the covetous insecurities of his male characters from previous films, upping the ante by fashioning unapproachable, oafish bores out of his jilted beaus. These perceptions could be a component of Therese’s selective memory, but the ill-defined masculine roles feel shallow in comparison to the chemistry of the leads, creating villains instead of three-dimensional humans.

That said, Carol and Therese share countless revelatory moments, nearly enough to wash away inconsistencies and the lack of narrative drive. The most evocative is their jaunt from the city to rural New Jersey, expressed only through image and echoes of forgotten words. Ed Lachman’s shot selection reveals intimacy through the movement of Carol’s lips and Therese’s watchful eye, intoxicating the viewer as the camera pores over the ruffles of Carol’s coat and the gentle tapping of her fingers on the radio receiver. The overexposure of the images symbolizes an existential impermanence, displaying the passage of time through these faded escapades as they slowly evaporate from Therese’s memory.

Depictions of sexuality are just as poetic, seen only through arched backs and shoulders and heard through trembling breaths and passionate whispers. Lachman’s range as a photographer is impressive, manufacturing a hypnotic rhythm that permeates the progression of shots, often superseding the narrative. The twilight footage is the most sensual, transposing the passion of our lovers onto the environment, inspiring awe through plumes of white smoke coating a pink sky. A tracking shot of bumper-to-bumper congestion even elicits comparisons to Raoul Coutard’s traffic-jam sequence from Weekend, though Lachman prefers the sheen of chromatic motor cars over the politics of style and technique.

The tone diverges from the visual palette, stressing a lonely introspection that Rooney Mara’s performance and the gentle piano keys on the soundtrack masterfully embody. Mara is chameleonic, morphing into her character and never giving the appearance of affectation or insincerity. Aside from her complexity, Carol coasts on a beautiful surface devoid of flesh and blood. The meticulous design and evocation of the period are impeccable, but the film builds to a muted crescendo, one that may open up on multiple viewings, but makes for a middling first impression.

Carol (The Weinstein Company, 2015)
Directed by Todd Haynes
Written by Patricia Highsmith (novel) and Phyllis Nagy (screenplay)
Photographed by Edward Lachman

Far From Heaven (2002, Todd Haynes)

Modeled after the Douglas Sirk melodramas, right down to the font of the title card and cymbal crescendos on the soundtrack, Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven is a merger between the gloss of “Old Hollywood” and the penetrating, intimate nature of his own genre deconstructions, devout in its adherence to style, but renegade in its refusal to obscure repression and discrimination. Sirk concealed his message beneath rigorous technique and a grandiose outpouring of emotion, but Haynes manages to temper the histrionics to reveal the injustices swept under the rug, recontextualizing the suburban utopia as fascist society.

At first glance, the Whitakers appear to be the perfect American family, boasting the wealth, beauty and etiquette that embodies an idealized vision of the mid-20th Century bourgeoisie. Cathy (Julianne Moore) is a housewife and Ladies Auxiliary member, more concerned with “civic causes” than her fellow socialites, but equally absorbed in the car pools, art openings and soirées that occupy the daily dance card. Her husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid) is an advertising man, charming and jovial on the surface, but harboring a clandestine existence after business hours, hidden beneath a mountain of lies and a worsening dependence on hard liquor. The revelation concealed behind Frank’s office door is nearly impossible to fathom, lifting the veil of complacency from Cathy’s eyes and outing Frank as a homosexual. He stutters as he tries to explain his efforts to suppress the urges, but he’s stifled by the mores of the time, preferring to protect his job and family instead of risk ostracization.

Gin-soaked from an evening of hobnobbing and intent on proving his masculinity, Frank ventures to get intimate with Cathy, breaking down when he can’t arouse himself for the endeavor. As tempers flare and the string section mounts, Frank strikes his wife, leaving a sizable bruise on her forehead that acts as a physical manifestation of systemic oppression. Cathy hides the wound beneath a lock of her hair, secretly sobbing over her dissolving marriage in the shrubbery that wraps around her residence, sheltered from plain view. Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert), her African-American gardener and acquaintance, notices her melancholy state and offers sympathetic words, his placid demeanor inspiring the reserved Cathy to join him on a countryside excursion. Isolated from their social circles by miles of forest, the pair develop a natural chemistry despite their racial and economic differences, recognizing that through confiding and vulnerability, that which is dissimilar is “no longer really outside.”

Sharing cocktails and a slow dance, the couple never muster the courage to kiss, daring only to embrace during their brief respite from reality. Unbeknownst to the ill-fated lovers, black patrons and white passersby have already set the rumor mill churning, inspiring speculation strong enough to fall into Frank’s lap, forcing Cathy to fire her trusted confidante in the name of “reputation.” Ironically, Frank would abandon his wife months later for a younger beau, taking a chance on love despite the risks, an option that would be unreasonable for Raymond and Cathy. Left alone and teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, our protagonist cries as she straddles their twin beds, the location of a passionless marriage that will act as a symbolic ball and chain for the rest of her existence. The only pleasure afforded to a “homemaker” in 1957 is one last farewell to her shamed sweetheart as his train passes, the lavender scarf swaddled over her head acting as the sole reminder of their fleeting moment of happiness.

Perfectly replicating Technicolor film processing, every image in Far From Heaven is a vista, sporting deep greens and fiery autumnal leaves, traveling by way of fluid crane shot from the tops of the trees to the front porches of stunning colonial homes. Body language and dialogue befit the period as well, but distinctions are made between the affectations of polite discussion and the reality that seeps out behind closed doors, saving bitter words and uninhibited passion for the shadows of back alley bars and the isolation of the forest.

The two divergent worlds rarely intermingle, overlapping only for a drunken outburst or contemptuous stare, involuntarily exposing the tension bubbling beneath the surface. Cathy and Raymond briefly venture beyond this invisible barrier, finding companionship outside of the restrictions of class, race and marital vow. Todd Haynes suggests that even their failed efforts at subversion are authentic in a society dictated by fear and ignorance, using their flirtation as a harbinger of the Civil Rights Movement and a weapon against the mystique of the “American Dream.”

Far From Heaven (Focus Features, 2002)
Written and Directed by Todd Haynes
Photographed by Edward Lachman

Safe (1995, Todd Haynes)

The magnetism of Todd Haynes’ Safe stems from its ability to deceive, a willingness to lure in through hypnotic, steady motion and quickly detach by shifting focus and negating its initial instincts. What begins as a paralyzing examination of a deteriorating human body gradually morphs into a condemnation of the cure instead of the disease, exposing the self-help movement as a malady of the mind that advocates dissociation over self-actualization.

Filming the San Fernando Valley from a distance, capturing the enormity of wealth with clinical focus, Safe observes Carol White (Julianne Moore) with a detached stillness, symbolizing her malaise through cold, symmetrical photography and stabbing bursts of steely, isolated synthesizer. Never uttering a word above a whisper and passive to the point of torpid, Carol only springs to life in defense of her upholstery, clinging desperately to the one aspect of domesticity under her control. Sex has even lost its cathartic power for Carol, signified by the metaphorical snare she occupies beneath her husband as he writhes atop her inert frame.

Carol’s internal suffering begins to externalize itself through discomfort and debility, the camera surveying her sallow skin and paretic limbs as she struggles to hoist a glass of milk to her lips. Her infrequent excursions out-of-doors are even interrupted by this ambiguous ailment, propelling her into frenzied coughing bouts as she inhales exhaust from passing dump trucks. The cause of her enervate state remains a mystery until Carol happens upon an infomercial regarding deep ecology, a movement that stresses “spiritual awareness” in an increasingly toxic environment. Through the guidance of the advertorial and the suggestions of a friend, Carol adopts an all-fruit diet, desperate to cleanse “the body of all toxins” and recapture her youthful glow.

Diverting from her usual routine, Carol opts for a “perm” at the hair salon, seeking physical reinvention to match the modifications made to her regimen. As the chemical relaxer is poured over her scalp, irrigating through the channels of damp hair, sound effects simulate the bubbling and gurgling of a mad scientist’s lab, demonstrating Carol’s newfound paranoia through non-diegetic sound. The horror of Carol’s mind finally leaps forth from her body in a stream of blood, trickling slowly from her nostril and over her pale, peach skin.

Aerosol usage in the boudoir continues to exacerbate her condition, compelling her to vomit after embracing her hairspray-soaked husband, who has grown weary of her lack of sexual desire and inability to keep up appearances. Friends even gossip about her worsening psoriasis and lack of participation at aerobics, treating a panic attack at a baby shower as a cause for embarrassment instead of concern. The isolation that had festered inside has materialized on the surface, paralleling her affliction, forcing her to seek approval elsewhere, drawing her closer to the culture of self-guided improvement advertised on television and gymnasium message boards.

“Environmental illness” is the disease preached by these holistic seminars, stressing the corrosiveness of synthetic materials in food, air, water and habitat, persuading attendees to “create an oasis” in their homes free from toxic infiltration. The influence of charismatic speakers and ideological branding seems to make Carol’s symptoms more severe, resulting in seizures, labored breathing and seclusion from the outside world, all at the behest of amelioration. The last stop on Carol’s downward spiral into solitude is Wrenwood, an idyllic facility that harbors the environmentally ill and emphasizes a complete avoidance of actuality. The impact and charm of the group’s leader, who has beaten AIDS through the power of positive thinking, commandeers Carol’s free will just like the chemicals overwhelmed her body, inspiring her to adopt the behavior and physiological infirmity of the most severe and reclusive patients. Sleeping in an igloo and breathing with the assistance of an oxygen tank, Carol revels in the acceptance of her fellow victims and believes she’s on the path to recovery, but doesn’t recognize that she’s exchanged the bondage of marriage for a prison of the mind.

Safe never belabors the true nature of Carol’s “illness,” suggesting instead that society’s fear of disease allows the sick to be marginalized and manipulated, birthing the false prophecy of self-improvement. By breaking the film into contrasting segments, one that exploits the body and one that exploits the mind, Todd Haynes satirizes modern medicine, exposing the fear that fuels an industry of “doctors” and the desire for approval that drives an industry of “healers.”

Safe (Sony Pictures Classics, 1995)
Written and Directed by Todd Haynes
Photographed by Alex Nepomniaschy

Titanic (1997, James Cameron)

As off-putting as the pageantry surrounding Titanic was during its initial theatrical release, characterized by an omnipresent hit single and staggering financial success, none of the facile hype sullied the content of the film, standing in direct contrast to the marketing melodrama through artful grace and a measure of restraint. Its romantic temperament does ascend to operatic apexes and the monumental setpiece is milked for its emotional resonance, but moments of catharsis are well-balanced with tranquility, imparted through color-tinted, deep-blue photography and hypnotic, cherubic intonations on the soundtrack. The finished product is ethereal, even reserved, achieving intimacy despite the magnitude of James Cameron’s vision and the devastation of the majestic ocean liner’s plunge into the glacial water.

Titanic’s frame story opens in present-day aboard a research submarine, its team of intrepid explorers surveying the wreckage of “The Ship of Dreams,” probing the depths for sunken treasure. As “Duncan,” their robotic excavator, inspects the shell of the submerged monolith, a safe is discovered peeking out from beneath a sodden doorframe, surmised to be the final resting place of “The Heart of the Ocean” diamond necklace. To the crew’s dismay, the strongbox is severely water-damaged, containing nothing more than ravaged documents and a nude sketch of survivor Rose Calvert (Gloria Stuart), donning the missing sapphire around her rosy neck. Seeking guidance in their search, the crew invites the spry centenarian on board to review their findings, regaling her with details of their underwater adventures and a computer-generated rendering of the great craft splitting and sinking to the seabed. Rose is wounded by the objectivity of the image, referring to it as a “forensic analysis,” one sapped of the human struggle waged against insurmountable odds. As she recounts her personal story of embarking across the Atlantic, we see her face reflected in the footage of the ghost ship, her skin bathed in the turquoise glow of the ocean floor as if preserved by the frigid salt water.

As we’re transported back in time with her evocative words, the tone follows suit, sliding into an old-fashioned narrative that parallels the vessel in sprawl, marked by the striking mass of characters waiting to board the ship and the astounding reconstruction of the RMS Titanic preparing to set sail. We see a teenaged Rose (Kate Winslet) slinking out of her candy red Rambler, wearing a capeline hat bedecked with a bow, stately in her regal appearance and “well brought up,” but trapped in a world of her mother’s design. Her polar opposite is the scrappy Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a transient who won his ticket in a hand of cards and is just crafty enough to hoodwink the staff into letting him board without the prerequisite lice check.

Rose is first-class and Jack is trapped in steerage, two star-crossed lovers that perfectly embody Cameron’s passion for contrast, highlighted in the divergent worlds of the Titanic; one cool, clean and refined, the other fiery like the pits of hell and dusted in a layer of coal. Distinctions are also made between old and new money, classic and contemporary art (Picasso gets a mention) and live-action and CGI, a hybrid of concrete and abstract that lends a certain realism to sequences impossible to recreate by hand. “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” (Kathy Bates) is also a study in opposites, acting as go-between for rich and poor passengers, marrying wealth with frank conversation, and defending Rose during a misguided debate on phallocentrism during diplomatic dinner discussion.

Rose’s fiancé, Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), is particularly critical of his future wife’s outspoken nature, overpowering our protagonist like he’s breaking a horse, restricting her reading material and snatching the cigarette from her contemptuous lips during supper. Overwhelmed by the demands of her beau and the vapidity of polite society, Rose stands “at a great precipice,” contemplating suicide as she precariously hangs over the upper deck, observing the steely surf below. As she climbs the rungs and prepares to dismount, the lovestruck Jack intervenes, having admired the girl from afar, distracting from her despondency by beguiling with an ice fishing story from his childhood, one that would foreshadow his own demise.

Much is made of “what’s suitable” in Rose’s world, but it quickly becomes apparent that the confrontational nature of Jack’s honesty and the knowledge he’s accrued through experience best affluent passivity, though it’s debatable as to whether or not the mechanics of spitting are representative of a fulfilling existence. Unlike the commandeering Cal, Jack agrees to meet the smitten Rose halfway, dolling up in a tuxedo for their dinner date and modifying his roguish behavior through keen observation. Yet, his bohemian roots show a bit during the first course, as the placement and volume of silverware and surplus of condescension wage war against his plain-spoken sincerity.

Cameron sticks with this study in disparity, detailing the pleasures of both classes in direct succession, forcing Rose to carouse with those at the lowest berth following dinner, a new experience that she thoroughly adapts to through hearty drink and acrobatic dancing. Despite this newfound vigor and tolerance, the survival of Rose’s wealth hinges on the marriage to Hockley, trapping her in a prison of refinement just as she has begun to discover the pleasures of the flesh. Crestfallen, the stoic Rose decides to fall on her sword, regardless of Jack’s promise to love her unconditionally and promote her independence.

Coincidentally, mechanical problems parallel these bouts of domestic turmoil. Despite the ship’s inability to turn, the powers that be choose to fire the last boilers for publicity, a grave error that will eventually send this maiden voyage careening into a towering iceberg. The mass of frozen water emerges just as Rose musters the courage to abandon her sycophantic family and elope with Jack, the crash acting as ironic confirmation of their eternal bond.

Beholding the water as it surges through the damaged hull is shocking, despite prior knowledge of the Titanic’s fate, and tension continues to mount as mechanics rush to slide beneath the closing doors as liquid rapidly fills the undercarriage of the boat. As patrons prepare to evacuate and the frantic meet a tragic end, the film begins to verge on the absolute, replacing narrative with a symphony of sound and motion. The once massive and airy space becomes claustrophobic as ocean permeates the sleeping quarters and Rose rushes through knee-high water to locate her incarcerated love, captured in a ruse orchestrated by the covetous Cal. There’s a sad, delicate beauty to the image of the stately liner sinking as strings play. Natural sound slowly fades as the ship’s quartet occupies the soundtrack, showing private moments of select travelers lost in thought; the captain and architect realizing their culpability and an elderly couple awaiting the inevitable, clutching each other as sea foam springs onto their bed sheets.

Cameron manages to represent the less contemplative passengers with equal aplomb, encapsulating the frenzy and chaos of the class structure in the face of uncertainty. While the wealthy cling to ritual even in death, the poor wrestle against the gates padlocked between each floor, struggling against the “order” that restrained them both in life and death. As the ship opens like a mouth, ingesting its passengers, those floundering for survival in the piercing climes of the ocean scale their fellow casualties, holding each other beneath the surface as they cling to their remaining breaths.

Capturing the overpowering rush of the sea and creaking of the dying vessel, Titanic’s sound design crackles with life, reproducing natural sound in an unnatural environment through creative use of stereo and credible foley work. James Horner’s score is just as rousing, boasting a sense of adventure and sentimentality that is essential to a film of this enormity. Though the dialogue teeters toward the overwrought and the lead performances are stagy, Cameron would rather represent nostalgia for a period of the time than actuality, favoring the grandiose sweep of emotion over the dreariness of substance. His instincts are right most of the time, but fleshing out his insinuations on the corruption of class and gender may have added a layer of nuance to complement the viscera of his imagery.

Russell Carpenter’s photography is certainly the boldest aspect of this melancholic adventure, enchanting and accurate in its representation of reflection, both in light dancing on the rippling water and monitors casting a glow on the arches and lines of the human face. Slow-motion is also employed to depict the beauty of simple gestures, swaying gracefully with the flow of Rose’s dress as she dashes across the deck or adding psychological weight to the rush of escaping passengers. Though it runs well beyond three hours, it’s lithe and necessitates the ambitions of its astonishing and poignant second half. Titanic is unapologetically emotional, but if you relieve yourself of the burden of irony and immerse yourself in the mood, you’ll be spellbound.

Titanic (Paramount Pictures, 1997)
Written and Directed by James Cameron
Photographed by Russell Carpenter

Juno (2007, Jason Reitman)

A waggish modernization of the After School Special, replete with teen pregnancy and the fallout of a failed marriage, Juno is self-consciously cool to the point of being glib, so beguiled by its own dialogue that it neglects to develop genuine relationships between its pubescent protagonists. Channelling adolescent angst through snide superficiality may be an effective method for depicting immaturity, but pomp is a poor substitute for depth and Juno’s youthful ensemble never complements the sincerity of the narrative, favoring ingenuity over emotional authenticity.

Acting as screenwriter Diablo Cody’s mouthpiece, Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) breathes life into a stock scenario through her sardonic sense of humor, playfully conveying contempt for peer and parent alike through acerbic barb or arcane pop-culture allusion. The curtness and levity of her speech, littered with a constant stream of antiquated jargon, may function as a defense mechanism, obscuring the sorrow of her mother’s absence and the unexamined disconnect between herself and her preschool-aged sister.

We open on Juno with child, the product of a platonic sexual voyage shared with bandmate Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), a track star who has yet to determine if he’s part of the in-crowd or a misfit of Juno’s caliber. Bleeker is certain of one thing, however, languishing over his erotic conquest as he lies beneath his bedsheets, clutching her cotton panties in his fist like some hormonal devotion ritual. Nocturnal pining aside, the dynamics of Bleeker and Juno’s relationship are ill-defined, leaving the audience to conjure the building blocks of a friendship without any prologue to the pregnancy. The pair doesn’t even engage in a passionate discourse until well into Juno’s third trimester, scuffling over the jilted Bleeker’s parent-approved prom date and Juno’s fear of commitment. One saving grace to a juvenile conflict is Bleeker’s callow reaction to Juno’s distance, an honest depiction of youthful selfishness that ignores Juno’s predicament, despite the fact that she bears the brunt of their intimacy in her distended belly.

Months prior to this coy exchange with Bleeker, Juno had intended to play her pregnancy close to the vest, venturing alone in search of a teen-friendly clinic to “procure a hasty abortion.” Hiding behind a cavalier pose, Juno sought termination with poise and resolve, only to be affronted by the ineffectual ministrations of the staff and the chattering of loitering patients in a grubby waiting room. As she made her swift escape, the impassioned words of a lone protester permeated her thoughts, the queer notion of a fetus with fingernails transforming a night of misadventure into a genuine human being. Avoiding pro-life proselytizing without insulting religious devotion is a fine line to walk, but Cody manages to compose a delicate scenelet, motivating her naive counterpart toward adoption instead of the extremes of zealotry or abortion.

Realizing how “ill-equipped” she is to perform the tasks of a caregiver, Juno seeks out prospective parents in the Pennysaver, nominating a wide-eyed couple that has an excess of financial wealth, but little in the way of communication skills. The mother-to-be, Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), quietly hides the sadness of failed pregnancies beneath a mask of civility, quivering at the mere mention of infertility. Her husband, Mark (Jason Bateman), feigns interest in the adoption, but his ambitions are trapped in a spare-bedroom recording studio that houses the ghosts of his teenage dreams. As an also-ran in the 1990’s grunge-rock revolution, Mark’s band once opened for The Melvins, an experience he uses to draw himself closer to Juno, finding her snotty behavior and thrift-store fashion sense as signs of a more suitable mate, despite her immaturity. Common ground shared through splatter cinema and proto-punk inspires a clandestine bond, forcing Vanessa further down the depression spiral and driving a wedge between the expectant couple, imparting a much needed dose of reality that parallels the ignorance of youth and uncertainty of adulthood. The most rewarding aspect of this mounting conflict is Jennifer Garner’s soul-baring performance, a study in repressed misery that blossoms into hope as the kicks in Juno’s stomach reverberate onto Vanessa’s fingertips. The wellspring of emotion expressed solely through pointed glance and extended palm all but wash away the cloying modishness and pretense of Mark and Juno’s “intellectual” connection, constructing a tender passage that belongs in a far more intuitive film.

Desperately straining for cool points, Diablo Cody favors cultural cache over verisimilitude, prostituting the work of singular artists like H.G. Lewis and Sonic Youth in hopes that some of their well-deserved hipness will rub off. Soundtrack selections also function as signification of taste instead of visual accompaniment, repurposing the sneakily sarcastic odes of Belle and Sebastian into montage music for characters that don’t match their wit or eloquence. Unlike Stuart Murdoch’s effortless poetics, Diablo Cody’s dialogue feels like dialogue, ringing hollow when forced into real-world scenarios. Slang terminology can sing when peppered into sentences rich with real, dictionary-defined words, but language constructed solely of patois is just stoner psycho-babble.

The linguistic games do, however, bind the adolescent characters to childhood, wisely providing contrast between the adult responsibilities that accompany Juno’s maiden pregnancy and her jejune mindset. A late-blooming maturity also befits the lead character, allowing her to embrace a fondness for Bleeker without succumbing to his will or losing herself in the emotional merger. The pair even shares a heartfelt moment of reconciliation that avoids melodrama, revealing the emphasis that Bleeker places on appearing cool, a facade that goes unnoticed by his betrothed. Juno works best when it takes Bleeker’s advice and champions vulnerability, faltering only when it buys into affectation and wallows in its own verbosity.

Juno (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2007)
Directed by Jason Reitman
Written by Diablo Cody
Photographed by Eric Steelberg

Psycho (1998, Gus Van Sant)

Profit and hubris are the only logical explanations for Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot retread of Psycho, a rigorous exercise in homage that suffocates under the weight of its source of inspiration. Van Sant attempts to add his signature to “The Master’s” canvas, injecting subliminal stock footage and contemporizing sexual mores, but his supplements are nothing more than extraneous hokum, pallid attempts at the psychosexual that wilt when held against Alfred Hitchcock’s subtle insinuations. The finished product lacks the verve of Hitchcock’s pacing, the formality of his characterizations and starkness of his modest, black-and-white photography, settling instead for a game of compare and contrast that functions only to separate the viewer from the narrative. By attempting to channel the essence of Hitchcock’s genius, Van Sant has sapped the lifeblood from Psycho, leaving the audience to desperately search for the ghost of suspense within a barren forgery.

Remnants of tension can be found lurking in Bernard Herrmann’s score and Saul Bass’ title design, key elements wisely pilfered from the original for the opening credits, apropos of nothing more than their preeminence. The addition of color photography, notable in Anne Heche’s pink business suit and lime green slip, is a nice diversion from the otherwise rigid compliance with the archetype, though it functions as a pleasant distraction instead of organic element. The once-risque opening sequence also benefits from a dash of modernity, presenting frank sexuality in the faint moans and bare flesh that occupy the intimate moments of Marion Crane (Heche) and her hardware-peddling beau, Sam Loomis (Viggo Mortensen). Regrettably, the sweat-soaked sheets and passionate whispers don’t pair well with Joseph Stefano’s buttoned-up dialogue. In 1960, his words were full of insinuation, obscuring their latent eroticism just beneath Ms. Crane’s pointed brassiere. When transported to the 1990s, Stefano’s exchanges feel stiff and artificial, developing into affectation in an environment free of the partition between fantasy and the naked, human form.

Anne Heche’s reading of Marion Crane feels just as lifeless and contrived, operating based on the nuances of Janet Leigh’s iconic lead performance instead of the actual motivations of her character. Van Sant, possibly in reaction to Heche’s indecipherable emoting, placed the lion’s share of the responsibility on cinematographer Christopher Doyle, having him shoot Heche at a low angle during the automobile sequence, creating a clammy, cramped air space that parallels the character’s mounting stress level. Doyle’s eye is the only unequivocal success for Psycho’s B Team, manifesting a claustrophobic environment that imparts anxiety despite the middling performances and lack of narrative drive.

Sadly, Van Sant doesn’t utilize Doyle during the film’s many verbal exchanges, focusing instead on the performers, who falter when forced into established roles. The introduction of Norman Bates and the dialogue-driven dinner sequence that fleshes out his psyche are comprised of nothing but empty gesturing, each word hanging in the air like stale smoke as Vince Vaughn wavers between curious facial tick and melodramatic wailing. Vaughn even attempts to convey menace in his interpretation of Bates, plastering a sinister smile on Norman’s face that betrays the character’s persona. Van Sant buys into this adulteration, allowing Norman to masturbate as he peers at Marion’s nude physique, unnecessarily revealing deeper conflict and playing his antagonist’s hand far too early in the feature.

The modifications to character motivation and mise en scéne don’t end there. A keen eye will detect a diamond-patterned shower curtain, interspersed shots of storm clouds and deeper entry wounds during the infamous shower scene, additions that were intended to revamp a moment of cinematic ubiquity, but end up draining the tension from George Tomasini’s initial sequencing of shots. Avoiding contemporary irony when re-creating an emblematic setpiece is certainly admirable, but all prospects of retaining the zeitgeist are dashed by the addition of pseudo-intellectual inserts, heightened violence and the presence of a canary yellow Walkman. Even more perplexing are the details Van Sant refuses to alter, particularly operator-assisted phone calls and dated fashion sensibilities (i.e. Viggo Mortensen’s cowboy get-up), elements that reek of anachronism at the turn of the 20th Century. It’s hard to determine if Gus Van Sant is having fun with these contradictions or if he was so overwhelmed mirroring the construct of Alfred Hitchcock’s massive achievement that he didn't have time to rectify the inclusion of personal elements. Either way, his vain attempts at faithful adaptation smack of desperation and narcissism, proving once and for all that the general article is always more valuable than a carbon copy.

Psycho (Universal Pictures, 1998)
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Written by Robert Bloch (novel) and Joseph Stefano (screenplay)
Photographed by Christopher Doyle

Thundercrack! (1975, Curt McDowell)

Pornography in the internet era is an extension of guilt and prejudice, wholly dependent on the shame of the viewer and shaming of the participant. High-angle shots in modern erotica assume a superiority over the performers, placing the viewer at a vantage point to conquer and deface the object of their lust, subconsciously punishing the porn star for the inhibitions of the audience. The Oxford English Dictionary wisely notes the lack of artistic catharsis, aligning it to the “erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional…,” capturing the dehumanizing and impersonal nature of an inert form of cinematic enterprise, one bent on negating the essence of sexual expression.

Thundercrack! is incompatible with this contemporary definition of pornography, stressing a consensual, liberated form of exhibition that disposes of orientation and aggression, favoring flamboyant theatricality over brute force. Operating under the guise of parody, this convivial, libidinous sideshow trades in shock and sensuality as it rifles through technique and mood, crafting an inventive and singular world that is facetious without being derogatory and carnal without being exploitative.

A lurid melodrama of the highest order, Thundercrack! carries shades of Gone with the Wind’s fallen majesty, jokingly swapping the grace of Scarlett O’Hara for the sweat-stained drunkenness of Gert Hammond (Marion Eaton). Performing a melancholy monologue in her filthy kitchen, howling to rival the thunder and lightning booming outside of her window, Gert bemoans the loss of her husband and rambles incoherently at the ceiling above, clenching three fingers of bourbon like it was a banister safeguarding her body from slumping onto the linoleum tile.

The decor of her crumbling estate, christened “Prairie Blossom,” resembles a museum of American kitsch, each wall lined with pickled vegetables, sun-bleached children’s toys and tattered pages of vivid pornography. The black and white photography captures this solitary prison in soft focus, generating both alluring beauty and revolting horror from images of neglect and the ravages of time, revealing multitudes from the seams and wrinkles on Gert’s exhausted face.

Overjoyed and perplexed by a knock at the door, Mrs. Hammond scurries to the powder room to draw on her eyebrows and puke up the excess alcohol in her stomach, accidentally dropping her wig into the brown liquid hovering in the toilet bowl. As she embarrassedly straightens the hairpiece in the mirror, struggling to maintain composure, the tone veers from black comedy to fever dream, transitorily painting a horrifying portrait of alcoholism and the crippling mania brought on by isolation.

Seeking shelter from the storm and desperately in need of dry clothing, Gert’s guests arrive with baggage in tow, suffering the indignities of sexual confusion. Screenwriter George Kuchar crafts each character’s backstory to build to a juvenile punchline, all of which are shockingly frank and devilishly humorous. His most amusing blue bits rehash cacti masturbation and spontaneously combustible girdles, all read at a stoned, ironic distance or bellowed in deliberately hammy affectation.

The most uproarious of Kuchar’s “malfunctioning circuits” is his own character, Bing, a high-strung animal tamer with a sweet spot for his “biped” stage partner. Ashamed of his forbidden desires, he hysterically recounts an evening of cross-species copulation to his fellow travelers, each memory illustrated through shots of garish circus ephemera and the eldritch whistle of a calliope. As he reaches his boiling point, detailing the apex of his passionate exchange with the primate, the shot transitions to a close-up of the object of his affection performing manual stimulation, captured in jawdroppingly explicit detail.

Kuchar’s sick sense of humor and Curt McDowell’s leering photography are enamored by the potency of their concoction of sex and aberrance, but beneath the surface lies a healthy attitude towards erotic experimentation, one that attributes a transformative power to indulgence and acceptance. The disrobing sequence in Gert’s “absent” son’s boudoir gives each character space to relieve themselves of social inhibition, providing time to test the waters with penis pumps, blow-up dolls and a variety of synthetic phalluses. As each one of her guests removes their metaphorical masks, Gert observes them through pinholes in a portrait of George Washington, the camera angle replicating the pillars of light and watchful eye of Norman Bates in Psycho. The visual motivation isn’t to make Mrs. Hammond an outsider, despite the skeletons residing in her closet, but welcome her as a participant, utilizing her voyeuristic gaze to mirror the lustful eye of the viewing audience.

The sexuality on display in Thundercrack! is just as diverse as its desired pool of spectators, liberally shuffling pairings and highlighting straight, gay and outré arrangements. The shot composition employed during these acts is far less concerned with the mechanism of intercourse than expected, indulging in facial expression and exaggerated performance, gesturing the viewer toward a snicker or awestruck grin. The droll sense of humor and childish reverence for pun certainly lend the work a sardonic sensibility, but the artful use of split-screen and double exposure provide a pleasant contrast, one that imparts a humble visual grandeur.

Using this unwieldy mass of contradictions as a strength, Thundercrack! wavers between horror, black comedy and stag film, fabricating a distinct and surreal epic poem from a catalog of erotic phenomena and preposterous dialogue. It’s overlong, repetitive and capital-letter CAMPY, but its sensuality is liberating and thoroughly moral, encapsulating a sexual freedom that stresses positivity and consent.

Thundercrack! (Thomas Brothers Film Studio, 1975)
Photographed and Directed by Curt McDowell
Written by Curt McDowell (story), Mark Ellinger (story) and George Kuchar (screenplay)

Murder by Death (1976, Robert Moore)

The sad irony of Neil Simon’s Murder by Death, a grating and smug exercise in parody, lies in its dogged devotion to stereotype, a comedic mean streak that parallels the material it intends to ridicule, emerging as a wolf in sheep’s clothing more insidious than its points of reference. Constructed of the riddles and red herrings that occupy Agatha Christie’s thrillers, Simon’s script glazes over the predominant themes, making Christie’s flimsy characterizations the butt of the joke and stripping the story of a satisfying payoff, cutting all attempts at mystery off at the knees. The resulting study in tedium is one huge false start, loosely-structured to the point of indifference and so enamored with its own wit that it forgets to disguise racism as satire.

Hosting a “Dinner and a Murder” soiree for his competitors, Lionel Twain (Truman Capote), an eccentric private investigator with a taste for the “macabre” and absent pinky fingers, lures his gumshoe foes from every corner of the globe to his sprawling estate for a night of cocktails and benign recreation. Unbeknownst to his lodgers, the evening’s murder won’t be simulated and the inspector who’s crafty enough to survive the night unscathed and collar the assassin will take home a million dollar purse. Standing in the way of victory are an omnipresent black-gloved prowler, precariously dangling swords, toppling stone gargoyles and a poisoned bottle of red wine, booby traps aimed to knock the jetsetting private dicks off of their respective games. Regrettably, a stockpile of promising setpieces can’t save a film devoid of suspense, bogged down by an endless amount of insubstantial character development and rushed to an inadequate resolution.

Simon’s characters are insignificant enough to be described in a single word, many functioning solely to embody ethnic typecasting or perform pratfalls to match their physical disability. The great Alec Guinness struggles to add shading to his take on a blind butler, but little can be done to rehabilitate a character employed exclusively to roll his eyeballs around in their sockets and ladle out bowls of non-existent soup. His difficulty training the manor’s new chef, who just so happens to be deaf and mute, leads to an endless string of miscommunications, many of which delay the already plodding and dreary storyline.

The film’s most flagrantly distasteful performance belongs to Peter Sellers, who seems to take on his buck-toothed, Changshan-bedecked detective with great aplomb. Prattling endlessly in choppy, faux-philosophical aphorisms, Sellers’ Sidney Wang is a riff on Charlie Chan in more objectionable facepaint, each of his stale jokes sinking like a stone before the resounding blast of a gong on the soundtrack. If this characterization sounds offensive as a member of the audience, imagine how appalling it must have been for the Asian actor employed to play Sellers’ adopted Japanese son.

A startling number of Murder by Death’s bits revolve around ethnic accents and manners of speech, showing a blithe disregard for cultural differences in the name of broad humor. The aforementioned Mr. Wang’s inability to elocute in a non-native language is taken to task on multiple occasions, often resulting in a rather uncomfortable and sophistic lesson in pronouns and prepositions from the host of the party. Though the intention of the gag may have been to shed light on class-based racism, it didn’t direct its punchline at the host’s arrogance, but at the struggle of the embarrassed guest, exploiting his linguistic difficulties in the name of comedy. If conveying an underlying theme or exaggerating to illustrate a social concern, race and heritage can be used as fodder for slapstick, but Neil Simon prostitutes identity in the name of a cheap laugh and every one of his cunning attempts at satire is more gutless than the last.

Murder by Death (Columbia Pictures, 1976)
Directed by Robert Moore
Written by Neil Simon
Photographed by David M. Walsh

Clue (1985, Jonathan Lynn)

Culling inspiration from print, screen and pastime, Clue manages to eke out an engaging ensemble comedy from the skeleton of a board game’s rule book, filling in the gaps with tropes pinched from Ten Little Indians and its umpteen cinematic iterations. The employment of shadowy photography and playful gallows humor conjure warm sentiments, striking a tone to match the secret passages and black-gloved malcontents of a thousand mysteries, but leavening any homicidal inclination with a healthy dose of bungling slapstick and saucy banter. The resulting bricolage is frivolity incarnate, a confection of heaving bosoms, vigorous comic performance and jaunty whodunit.

As grey clouds form overhead and spine-tingling organ complements the deluge of rain, guests begin to trickle into Hill House, an ominous manor tucked away at the farthest reaches of New England. The year is 1954 and our unsuspecting visitors mask their trepidations beneath dinner-party-appropriate attire, ladies in evening gowns and matching broaches, gents donning their finest suits and puffing on fragrant pipe tobacco. The mahogany hues of the drawing room are just as evocative as the fashion and part of Clue’s allure is its attention to period detail and capacity for mimicking the visual texture and mise-en-scene of its forebearers.

Supplied with a pseudonym upon arrival, each plucked from the aforementioned party game, the lodgers take solace in their temporary anonymity, slurping up their bowls of monkey brain soup and apprehensively playing a game of question and answer. Though none of the invitees know their host or why they’ve been summoned for a late supper, all quickly uncover their political affiliations and deduce that they share a collective blackmailer, one well-versed in their sexual dalliances and murderous impulses.

Brandishing a unique armament and harboring criminal intent, the company stews quietly over their “financial liability” while Wadsworth (Tim Curry), the effete butler, reveals their transgressions and unveils their mutual exploiter, the disreputable Mr. Boddy (Lee Ving). Pleading for his life and pointing the finger at Wadsworth as the nefarious orchestrator of the evening’s events, the foolhardy Boddy tries to charm his way out of the crosshairs, but a flick of the lightswitch and discharge of a pistol find the scofflaw lying dead on the parlor’s Persian rug. As the guests deliberate over the identity of the killer and suspicions mount, the narrative gets whipped into a frenzy, shuffling through surprise guests, jumpscares and candle-lit clichés, abandoning coherence in the name of brisk pacing and scads of flimsy wisecracks.

The indulgences of the performers and screenwriters plaster over these lapses in continuity, coasting on a juvenile sensuality and winsome hamminess that knowingly wobbles toward the absurd. Taking a page from the Hammer Films book on sexual stimuli, breasts play a role prominent enough to garner screen credit, pouring out over the fringes of a garment’s bustline, acting as a distraction for partygoer and audience member alike. Making the most of her part as duplicitous femme fatale, the buxom and eager Yvette (Colleen Camp) stuffs herself into an exhibitive French maid outfit, one certainly designed for a woman of a smaller cup size and forthright enough to act as muse for Christopher Lloyd’s salacious Professor Plum. Nearly toppling headfirst into her chest as she lays the place settings and boring holes into her bodice with his eyes in the billiard room, Lloyd’s character flails mercilessly at the whim of Ms. Camp’s physique, drawn to her chest like a moth to a flame, recoiling only at the playful swat of her feather duster.

Tim Curry’s performance as Wadsworth is just as playfully unhinged, panting wildly as he lugs the bedraggled troupe through every salon and library in the mansion, expatiating on his elaborate theories concerning the motivations of the killer(s) and chronology of events. Unfortunately, the reveal provided by this handiwork is of little consequence, considering the presumptuous nature of his detection and the three distinct resolutions incorporated into the film’s home video release. This substitution of vigor for logic certainly makes for a convoluted script, but Clue’s success hinges exclusively on its ear for dialogue and unflagging enthusiasm, a moxie that admirably recreates and lampoons the Old Dark House-style mystery in equal measure.

Clue (Paramount Pictures, 1985)
Directed by Jonathan Lynn
Written by Anthony E. Pratt (board game), Jonathan Lynn (story/screenplay) and John Landis (screenplay)
Photographed by Victor J. Kemper

Almost Famous (2000, Cameron Crowe)

Nostalgia permeates Almost Famous, occupying its every word and image, captured in its meticulous recreation of the language, decor and guitar sound that superficially sums up American culture of the 1970s. It’s an honest picture, one willing to point out the dangers of hero worship, even as it pledges allegiance to the cult of personality. Rock enthusiasts will echo the film’s sentimentalism, but those keen on investigating the corrupt aspects of commercial art may find its sensitivity to celebrity insincere, unwarranted in light of the misogyny and narcissism it supposedly abhors. That said, Almost Famous finds strength in these messy contradictions, mirroring the incompatibility of fan and critic and the indecisiveness of its adolescent protagonist, stuck between a desire for acceptance and journalistic objectivity.

William Miller (Patrick Fugit) is a child prodigy, what his mother calls “predominantly accelerated,” a boy nurtured in philosophical discussion and articulate in speech, but sheltered from popular culture and too prepubertal to connect with his classmates. Given the gift of rock ‘n roll by his recalcitrant sister (“It will set you free,” she claims), William fingers through her vibrant record sleeves, finding the adventure and experience he can’t attain in his prohibitive household nestled within each dust jacket. The obsession builds and maturity finds William aspiring to be a rock writer, sending his school newspaper clippings to Creem Magazine’s Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who gives the upstart an assignment, but urges him to avoid befriending his alluring subjects. Bangs acts as a counterpoint to William’s wide-eyed enthusiasm, eulogizing rock’s death just as William aspires to become one of its mouthpieces, chastising a “commercialization” strikingly similar to the one that his mother rallies against.

Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) is the antithesis of Lester Bangs, acquiring fame by standing adjacent to stardom, using her motto of “We’re here for the music” as a shield to protect from emotional investment. Her celebrity fetishism culminates in a gang of female companions know as “Band-Aids,” devotees that function as muse and paramour to touring rock acts, blossoming into veterans of the road even before they celebrate their 21st birthdays. Penny acts as access for William, literally and figuratively, ushering him backstage while on assignment and introducing him to Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), the handsome guitar virtuoso from Stillwater, a “mid-level” band warming up for Black Sabbath. Though Hammond and the boy quickly develop a rapport, his bandmates are reluctant to chat with a journalist, dubbing critics as “The Enemy.” William’s only way to break the ice is by disarming the group with flattery, a technique that violates one of Bangs’ edicts of music journalism and positions William at his knees before the altar of the “industry of cool.”

Fugit’s performance perfectly embodies the physicality of a precocious teen, his character adopting mannerisms from his idols and incorporating new terminology into his lexicon, temporarily abandoning his original efforts at impartiality. This shift from outside observer to participant is symbolized by pens trickling from the mouth of his messenger bag as he hastily rushes to join Stillwater on tour, an attempt at fraternization that will certainly clash with his recent promotion to Rolling Stone feature writer.

Despite his many attempts at blending in, no bond between artist and fan can obscure the fact that William exposes band insecurities, documenting each in-fight over promotional items and struggle over leadership simply by being present, “taking notes with his eyes.” Russell even allows himself to unravel in William’s presence, revealing his false humility by celebrating with the “real people” of Topeka at a high-school party, moments before dropping a Solo-cup full of liquid acid and proclaiming himself a “Golden God.” Faux-spiritual delusions also afflict Miss Penny Lane, making her “a slave to the groove” through unflagging devotion to the two-timing Russell and adherence to her own half-baked ideology.

William’s mother, Elaine, spoke of a “world of compromised values,” and, though it relates mostly to experimentation with drugs, it fits the compromises beset upon rock ‘n roll culture by male chauvinism. Penny is a victim of Stillwater’s sexual irresponsibility and her subsequent dehumanization and quaalude overdose is a testament to the shortcomings of this glamorized, bacchanalian lifestyle. Almost Famous recognizes the danger in transforming earthbound artists into divine vessels, but can’t shake the urge to mythologize, painting a portrait that wavers between investigation and veneration, dangerously teetering toward hyperbole.

Almost Famous (DreamWorks Pictures, 2000)
Written and Directed by Cameron Crowe
Photographed by John Toll

The Wild Life (1984, Art Linson)

Struggling to muster the enthusiasm that Fast Times at Ridgemont High had in spades, The Wild Life feels like a faded photocopy of Cameron Crowe’s previous screenplay, shedding its candor and authenticity in favor of bad-boy posturing and spurious melodrama. Adolescent sexual dynamics are once again the focal point, as they would be for any developing teenager, but Crowe reigns in the scope of the project, favoring a handful of acquaintances over the broader social institution. Investigating the road to maturity at a microscopic level is a brilliant concept, though restricting the focus does require a certain compositional vividness, detail that The Wild Life’s vapid characters curiously lack. Without this definition, the resulting product is little more than an ineffectual string of break-ups and beer blasts, meandering and insignificant in its lack of conflict and emotional attachment.

Bottle-blonde and rippling with pubescent testosterone, Tommy Drake (Christopher Penn) is Spicoli without the charm or wit, exclusively expressing himself through celebratory headbutts, smashed beer bottles and sexual urges. His ideological counterpoint and unlikely confidant is Bill Conrad (Eric Stoltz), a 19-year-old bowling-alley manager who stows away every paycheck in hopes of acquiring a bachelor pad, the obvious first step on his path to personal independence from parent and girlfriend alike. Their relationship consists of nothing more than vacuous discussion of past classmates and current lovers, a state of torpor that acts as a security blanket from the responsibility lurking around the corner and as contrivance for a writer trying to force his leads into pre-ordained stock characters.

Crowe does add one new wrinkle to the old chestnut of youthful naivety, placing Bill at the mercy of a greedy landlord that coerces him into a larger security deposit, an obstacle that forces the greenhorn to reluctantly take Tommy in as a roommate. Sadly, this stillborn idea is only a vehicle for an obligatory string of noise complaints and trite party sequences, setpieces that would be shamelessly derivative if they weren’t held up against the woefully underwritten female characters.

The sole supporting role of interest belongs to Bill’s brother, Jim (Ilan Mitchell-Smith), a combat-obsessed juvenile delinquent who chain-smokes and tosses M-80s like he’s on a tour of duty, desperately seeking the attention of an absentee father. His obsession with a heroin-addicted Vietnam veteran is a welcome dose of reality, but not one that meshes well with the insubstantiality of the rest of the piece, particularly the absence of other outwardly political themes. Despite its brevity, Randy Quaid’s moment on screen as the aforementioned solder is substantial, but it has no context and functions only as a brief respite from the youthful frivolity.

Otherwise, The Wild Life is stuck spinning its wheels, gaining little narrative momentum over a fruitless 96 minutes, stagnant in its adherence to rules set by a far better film. It’s no fault of the middle-class milieu it ventures to define, depicted in the single-parent households, summer jobs and unattainable dreams that occupy the American identity. The fault lies with the scribe, who has reduced a relatable experience to a succession of worthless banalities and cynically given his dramatis personae little more to dream of than raging keggers and bouncing breasts. By playing to juvenile obsessions, Cameron Crowe paints a bleak future for his myopic protagonists.

The Wild Life (Universal Pictures, 1984)
Directed by Art Linson
Written by Cameron Crowe
Photographed by James Glennon

We'd like to thank Teenage Bedrooms on Screen for the high-res screengrabs!

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982, Amy Heckerling)

There’s a telling moment, roughly halfway through the funny and frank Fast Times at Ridgemont High, where the sexually curious Stacy Hamilton and skittish wallflower Mark “Rat” Ratner share a meal at a tacky, dimly-lit German restaurant. As they struggle through small talk and knockwurst, the camera pans back to reveal that they’re barely tall enough to fit into their comically oversized leather chairs. What seems like a subtle and unnecessary sight gag gradually reveals itself as an astute bit of symbolism. These teens are stuck in a purgatory between childhood and adulthood, too old to depend on their parents, but too young to depend on themselves. Fast Times shows them struggle to see over the edge of the table from those big chairs and we can’t help but empathize and laugh along.

Drawn like moths to a flame, these young people of Ridgemont congregate at the local mall, either taking up summer jobs or loitering in the arcade. The aforementioned Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) shuffles through her shifts as a waitress at an Italian cafeteria, dreaming about going steady with college guys and deliberating over the sexual prowess of male classmates with her experienced (but naive) best friend, Linda (Phoebe Cates).

Admiring Stacy from afar, theater usher “Rat” Ratner (Brian Backer) is so incapable of striking up a conversation that he’s willing to take advice from local ticket scalper and self-proclaimed casanova, Mike Damone (Robert Romanus). When he finally musters the courage to ask her on a date (with Damone’s copy of Zeppelin IV firmly in hand), he forgets his wallet at home, has nary an interesting thing to say and bolts seconds into an already uncomfortable sexual dalliance. Unfortunately for Rat, his cold feet eventually drive Stacy into the arms of the half-interested Damone, culminating in a heartbreaking final act that confronts the worst case scenario of teen sex head on.

A few years older and hardly any wiser, Stacy’s brother, Brad (Judge Reinhold), polishes his beloved car in his spare time and endlessly flips burgers to make the monthly payments. As his Senior Year approaches, he practices a break-up speech planned for his “clingy” girlfriend, who, ironically, wants to jump ship just as bad as he does. Single and newly unemployed, Brad’s left to tread water between the pressures of minimum wage work and an embarrassing poolside slip-up in front of the comely Linda (cue iconic, slow-motion fantasy sequence). Despite these setbacks, Brad manages to find self-sufficiency and extends support to his younger sister when their parents aren’t able to provide it.

Offering comic relief is the oft-shirtless and perpetually stoned Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn), a poster child for the Cali-surfing lifestyle who warbles in a spacey Valley accent and regularly runs afoul of authority, particularly ornery History professor, Mr. Hand (Ray Walston). The exchanges between these polar opposites are the film’s finest moments, resembling some kind of microcosmic cold war between sarcasm and antagonism.

Another key to the film’s success is author Cameron Crowe’s insight into the minutiae of teen culture. Details like the scent of syllabi on the first day of class or the number of students donning the “Pat Benatar Look” are the tiny idiosyncrasies that shape a relatively straightforward script into something profound. His influence even trickles into the soundtrack, which features quintessential cuts from Tom Petty, The Cars and Jackson Browne, and carries the right tone for the age group and time period.

Behind the camera, Amy Heckerling does an admirable job of sapping all eroticism from the intimate scenes, leaving behind only the discomfort and inadequacy most people attribute to early sexual experiences. She also understands the exclusive world teens live in, staging scenes in the lunch rooms, bedrooms and vehicles that occupy the slivers of time between class and moments of parental supervision. We wisely never see the parents of the principal cast, allowing each character to adjust to adult roles on their own. It’s not surprising that Heckerling would have similar success with another era of teens 13-years-later (1995’s Clueless).

Though the change in tone leading up to the final moments can be jarring, repeat viewings reveal a shift that consciously resembles the literal and figurative act of “growing up.” This honesty and willingness to show a loss of innocence boosts Fast Times at Ridgemont High above its sex-crazed, hard-partying brethren, creating an authentic portrait of 80’s teens who were still able to have fun despite the creeping weight of adult responsibility.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Universal Pictures, 1982)
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Written by Cameron Crowe
Photographed by Matthew F. Leonetti

Heaven & Earth (1993, Oliver Stone)

Highly subjective and exceedingly stylish, Oliver Stone’s biographical films have his fingerprints all over them, brazenly defying the anonymity of fact and reshaping history to match his singular, paranoid vision. Heaven & Earth attempts to blend Stone’s directorial flair with the memoirs of Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese peasant who was displaced by the Indochina conflict. Telling the tale in her words and from a distinctly Vietnamese perspective, Stone provides a platform for an underserved community, but he never meshes the feminine voice with his overpowering aesthetic choices, allowing Le Ly’s subtle observations to be overshadowed by intrusive montage and compositional bombast. The resulting collaboration is sprawling to the point of ungainly, a well-intentioned and handsome picture complicated by authorial meddling that teeters on the brink of parody.

Born in an idyllic village of lush, green fields and foggy mountaintops, Le Ly (Hiep Thi Le) is the sixth child in a family of rice farmers, a clan spiritually bound to the land they harvest and pledged to maintaining familial honor. Conflict arises in this romanticized Vietnam through ideological differences, dividing her beloved nation into two separate entities at the behest of wealthy “allies” (France, United States, Japan, China), a rift that inspires the formation of the Viet Cong. As a teen, Le Ly absorbs the nationalistic rhetoric of the VC, pledging herself to the struggle for liberation from foreign influence and holding back tears as her younger brother leaves home to physically carry out this fight for freedom. In his absence, Le Ly is forced to adopt the role of a son, both supporting the VC from the homestead and harvesting crops with her aging parents.

Le Ly sees the natural balance of her village recede with the arrival of American troops, their choppers descending upon rice paddies in a swirl of monsoon rains, intervening in the Vietnam War to disrupt the spread of communism. Much like the French before them, their actual intercession in the political landscape is far from noble, resulting in contamination of the land and debaucherous plundering of the village's resources, transforming the once serene countryside into a hotbed of vice and vulgarity.

Mirroring the fury of conflict in her unconscious mind, Le Ly’s dreams are overwhelmed by strobing lights and visceral imagery, bringing her worst fears of captivity and death to the surface. Her premonitions come to fruition after being captured by the Vietnamese government for sabotaging an ARVN ground attack, a transgression punished by excruciating physical and mental torture. Though she’s electrocuted, beaten, and dipped in honey beside a nest of ravenous fire ants, she refuses to sell out the Viet Cong, being freed from bondage only after her mother donates a wedding dowry to the regime’s war coffers. In a bitterly ironic twist, Le Ly’s freedom leads to further abuse, finding her brutally raped and left for dead in an open grave by the Viet Cong, suspicious that her release from prison is tantamount to a confession. The audience experiences the degradation of violence first hand through the protagonist, her suffering honestly representing war, separated from the supposed glories of combat and conquest.

Moving to Saigon and sustaining herself by dealing drugs and sleeping with American G.I.s, Le Ly temporarily finds salvation in the form of a genteel, but disturbed, American serviceman. Worn down by his sensitivity and kind gestures, she acquiesces to Sergeant Steve Butler’s (Tommy Lee Jones) advances and makes the journey to “The New World,” ignoring the demons that plague the soldier’s dreams. The shift in tone that greets the California sun is jarring, finding the lily white suburbs of the USA as placid as a postcard, occupied by burly gluttons that are as loud and substantial as their refrigerators. Stone’s use of a fish eye lens perfectly represents the scope of the American surplus, placing an astonished Le Ly right in the center of the marketplace, capturing her wide-eyed astonishment at the kaleidoscope of colors in each aisle of the supermarket.

Outside of the grocery store, Le Ly struggles to adjust to the American way of life. Butler is supportive and sympathetic, quickly defending her against bigotry and the flippant remarks of ignorant family members, but his best efforts can’t bridge every cultural gap. As his career aspirations crumble at his feet and his passions turn to strong drink, Steve begins to resent Le Ly’s work ethic, condemning her efforts to open a restaurant and venture into the business world. This change in personality is sharp and unprecedented, never developed through expositional scenes or narrative clarification. The lack of polish is obvious during a solemn scene of dialogue that finds Tommy Lee Jones scrambling to color in his character through histrionic screams and forced emoting, turning what would have been a revelatory moment of confession into a frenzy of chewed scenery.

Sadly, excess isn’t a trait exclusive to the acting talent. Kitarô’s distracting score wavers between sweeping orchestral work and location-appropriate flute, faltering during string sections that are far too sentimental, limiting the impact of honest dialogue and realistic turmoil. Stone’s linguistic choices are just as puzzling, allowing Le Ly to speak English eloquently around her family members, but broken English in discussions with American soldiers. Though this tactic may have been employed to illustrate the frustrations of communication between markedly different languages, Hiep Thi Le’s varying degrees of elocution are insulting and distracting, tarnishing an otherwise stunning performance.

The erratic visual scheme also founders, cluttered with extraneous technique, ranging from unnecessary tilts, use of slow-motion and blunt force symbolism, embodied by constant insertion of shots of orange fire enveloping a pristine, blue sky. That being said, when an idea works, it works brilliantly, particularly the evocative photography and masterful shot composition, which captures the sodden fields of Vietnam with the warmth of a watercolor pastoral. Cinematographer Robert Richardson knows how to strike a mood through ambient lighting, stoking vivid imagery from natural illumination as it seeps through wooden shades, casting shadows in dimly-lit parlors.

Satirical notions that trickle into the second half also foster curiosity, paralleling American intemperance at home to the horrors of occupation, but Oliver Stone never reconciles his politics with his artistic flourishes. Heaven & Earth suffers from symptoms of the disease it chastises, relishing in the ugliness of conflict and stuffing itself on a cornucopia of costly cinematic gimmicks. Left stranded in this overwrought soup is Le Ly’s story of triumph, one nurtured in humbleness and a willingness to rebuild and reflect, standing in direct contrast to the voracity of Oliver Stone’s over-elaborate presentation.

Heaven & Earth (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1993)
Directed by Oliver Stone
Written by Le Ly Hayslip (book), Jay Wurts (book), James Hayslip (book) and Oliver Stone (screenplay)
Photographed by Robert Richardson

Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997, Werner Herzog)

Little Dieter Needs to Fly doesn’t function as a strict documentation of Dieter Dengler, but a loose travelogue, a film that develops the character by giving him room to breathe and explore his emotions. A survivor of a prison camp during the Vietnam War, Dengler is a German-American pilot that revels in his independence, so afraid of being restrained that he adorns his living room with paintings of open doorways, symbols of the personal freedom that alluded him as a detainee in Southeast Asia.

Werner Herzog provides him with a platform to expound upon his feelings and dreams, tangents that avoid the trappings of narrative-based documentaries and mine for a deeper understanding of man’s passion for life and inclination to persevere. His recollections are observed with sensitivity and wonder, reflected in airy visuals and spellbinding montages that elevate one man’s struggle into the poignant and fantastical.

Dieter Dengler knew poverty and fear as a child, living in a destitute section of the Germanic Black Forest that was devastated by the second World War. In order to survive, his mother cooked the wallpaper from their home and fed it to her children, hoping to sustain them on the nutrients trapped in the glue. Memories of hunger hang over his head like a dark cloud and he can only sleep at night knowing that hundreds of pounds of dried goods lie beneath the floorboards of his California home.

Ironically, the war that had left his family impoverished and killed his father also inspired his obsession with flight, a fascination born from the low-flying American fighter jets that laid waste to his idyllic village. Armed with little more than pennies and a survival instinct developed through starvation and a grueling apprenticeship as a blacksmith, Dengler left for America to become a pilot, working his way through college and the Air Force before finding a position in the cockpit by way of the U.S. Navy. Military service meant a career, three square meals and keys to the sky, but Dengler couldn’t come to terms with the barbarity of combat, wrestling with anxiety before each mission over Cambodia at the outset of the Vietnam War. He recalls hovering over the jungle, perplexed by the lay of the land, described by Herzog as “alien and abstract… like a distant, barbaric dream.”

Dengler was shot down during a secret mission over Laos, an experience illustrated as if it occurred outside of time, plumes of heavy fog obscuring his field of vision and radiant light spewing from the plane’s damaged right wing. He awoke moments after the crash on dusty terrain, barely stable enough to retreat into the jungle, surviving for two days in the bush before getting apprehended in a viridescent clearing by Laotian rebels. His captors bound his hands behind his back and made him run through the tropical forest for hours, punishing his attempts at escape by sliding splintered pieces of bamboo beneath the skin of arms and suspending him upside down over a well. His refusal to sign documents condemning American intervention in the Second Indochina War only lead to additional torture, but the memory of his grandfather’s opposition to Hitler sustained him and he continued plotting an escape.

Conditions grew dire when Dieter was turned over to the Viet Cong, a guerilla unit that proved to be more precise, organized and vicious than his Laotian gang of captors. Sharing tight quarters with six other prisoners, Dieter and his fellow inmates were overwhelmed by hunger, dysentery and physical trauma, allowed to stew in a cell of infection and waste and offered rotten meat as their only form of sustenance. Realizing that their days were numbered, Dieter developed a plan to steal the guards’ machine guns during the dinner rush and blast their way out of the camp, a coup that succeeded and sent Dengler and Duane Martin stumbling barefoot into the monsoon-drenched forest. They would never hear from their five co-conspirators again.

Dengler and Martin’s trek from Vietnam to Thailand is unfathomable, finding the pair traversing waterfalls, fighting off leeches and stumbling through thorny patches of thicket with only one tennis shoe as protection from the stoney earth. Dieter still hears echoes of his dead friend’s voice, begging for the shoe as he staggers over the jagged terrain on an infected foot. Dengler eventually had to survive on his own, losing Duane to the machete of a villager that caught him rummaging for food. The isolation proved to be more punishing than the landscape and, at his lowest point, Dengler was left to seek companionship from a bear that patiently awaited his demise.

Dieter’s descriptions of death are breathtaking and he equates the absence of being to the transformative experience of flight and the triumphant nature of his survival. Herzog bathes his visions of eternal rest in surreal imagery, likening his graceful insights to neon jellyfish, floating passively in a translucent tank. The narration is just as hypnotic and poetic as the photography, alternating between Dengler and Herzog and juxtaposing their delicate wordplay over images of war-torn landscapes and stock footage of aerial attack. The bond between the two goes beyond author and subject, striking a fascinating marriage between their attraction to and overwhelming fear of the chaos of the jungle.

Scenes that recreate Dieter’s experiences are the most affecting, finding his attention drifting into memory as the camera captures a mournfulness wash over his face. Early in the film, Herzog asks the humble survivor what it’s like to be considered a hero, to which he exclaims “Only dead people are heroes.” As each experience is relived before the camera, you can see Dieter become overwhelmed by the ghosts of his memories, those dead men metaphorically trapped in the jungle somewhere in his past.

Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1997)
Directed by Werner Herzog
Photographed by Peter Zeitlinger

Dead of Night (1974, Bob Clark)

“You promised you’d come back, Andy. You promised!”

A mother’s prayer echoes in the mind of a soldier under fire in Vietnam, haunting him as bullets perforate his fatigues and plunge deep into his chest. As he collapses to the ground at half-speed, his body enveloped by an opaque darkness and swirling currents of air, her fervent moans preserve his physical form, beckoning him to make the long journey home.

Dead of Night uses Private Andy Brooks’ death march to startling effect, crafting a chilly metaphor out of his putrescent flesh and ghoulish bloodlust, bringing the horrors of war home to roost and demanding that indifferent American suburbanites reciprocate the extent of his service. The dour pall that hangs over the film makes for unsettling satire, one that exposes the frailty of the nuclear family in response to the dehumanizing aspects of combat.

Functioning as the embodiment of the Rockwellian household, the Brooks clan politely chat at dinner through beaming smiles, sparing a moment for prayer in honor of their absent member. A rap on the front door dashes their amiable tone, captured in the sinking smile of a distraught mother, surmising the identity of the unknown knocker. As the messenger gestures kindly at the patriarch, grasping a certified letter in his right hand, the father clutches the man’s wrist, desperately hoping to delay the inevitable. The maudlin strings that hang over the scene suggest melodrama and cliché, but beneath the score lies a keen sense of direction, one astute enough to linger on the tear-stained faces of the bereaved, churning authenticity out of tired sentimentalism.

The warm lights dim and winding staircases darken as Andy arrives home, coaxed back from the beyond by the nocturnal yearnings of his despondent mother. Altered by his time in the infantry, Andy has grown pale and morose, receding inward despite an outpouring of familial endearment. When his father, in a state of absolute elation, reveals that the Army inaccurately designated the boy as deceased, Andy sardonically replies, “I was,” resulting in a moment of uncomfortable laughter. As the camera pans back through the dining room window, creating a framed portrait of the quartet from the lawn, Andy’s face droops into a scowl, his presence morphing into the rotting core at the center of his parents’ marriage.

The new Andy sits stoically in his bedroom, sarcastically swaying in a clangorous rocking chair, stirring up an awful din intended to antagonize his anxious father. Each creak of his chair symbolizes the prolonged, nagging pain of losing a child, embodied by Dad’s lust for strong drink and Mom’s penchant for paranoid delusions and aggressive outbursts. As Andy scours the streets at night, draining his victims of blood to preserve a decomposing human vessel, his doting parents cover the tracks and enable his addiction, even fabricating a story to deceive inquisitive police. Yet, consumption and cooperation can’t match the steady deterioration of human flesh and Andy is forced to accept his fate, coercing his mother into burying him alive as he claws dirt onto his sodden, maggot-infested remains. The camera cranes over the cemetery plot as sheriffs surround the mother and son in their final embrace, functioning as an ironic military funeral for the undead soldier.

Dead of Night drifts like a dream, carrying disembodied whispers on the score like imagined voices passing in gusts of wind. The soft, elegiac nature of the photography stands in stark contrast to the gruesome appearance of the boy’s decaying body and graphic shots of intravenous blood transfusions, captured in thrifty, but convincing, make-up effects. Hints of black humor wander in through the hominess of the local color, replete with town drunk, sassy diner staff and chatty mailman, quaintly occupying a world of woodgrain wallpaper and earth-toned family sedans. Nevertheless, any goodwill bestowed upon suburban contentment is only intended to spark incongruity, epitomized in the festering sores of Andy Brooks, a truly frightening personification of the barbarity of the Vietnam War.

Dead of Night (Quadrant Films, 1974)
Directed by Bob Clark
Written by Alan Ormsby
Photographed by Jack McGowan

Titicut Follies (1967, Frederick Wiseman)

A penetrating and unflinching examination of rehabilitation and the practice of medicine, Titicut Follies employs fly-on-the-wall filming techniques to expose the inhumane living conditions at Bridgewater State Hospital, a facility intended to treat the criminally insane. The resulting work was so gut-wrenching that the state of Massachusetts barred it from public performance for nearly 22 years, an act of censorship that director Frederick Wiseman claimed was a result of the damning evidence on display and not due to an infringement on patients’ rights.

The irony of the court’s suppression of the film lies in the work’s obvious defense of human rights, depicted through a loose chronology that exposes the absence of meaning and irrelevance of time in a life comprised of torture and indifference. Power is also exposed as a corrupting element, encapsulating the chain of abuse as it descends from physician to guard, finding the incarcerated at the bottom rung to suffer the brunt of structural violence.

Commencing with a hospital talent show and theatrical revue (the “Follies” noted in the title), Wiseman employs footage of the festive event at the outset to act as a symbol of public perception of the institution, one feigning equality and friendship between staff and prisoner. Life off stage is far less harmonious, finding inmates in a constant state of undress and sequestered to filthy sleeping quarters, enduring solitude only through the slivers of light that pass through their barred window. The only treatment or consideration received by patients is through overmedication and salacious psychoanalysis, a battery of questions that consists of masturbatory inquiry and probing the minutiae of sexual identity.

Mental and physical abuse also run rampant at the facility, ranging from bullying to excessive use of restraint. Pestering an inmate about the cleanliness of his cell, guards force an obviously nervous and elderly patient into responding to the same question multiple times, a pattern that leaves the man battering the tile and walls of his chamber until his knuckles are bloodied, desperately searching for a way out. Another ailing detainee is pinned to a gurney by belligerent orderlies and force-fed soup through a tube inserted into his nose. As he gags on the rubber that’s continually being thrust deeper into his esophagus, Wiseman edits in footage of the man’s subsequent embalming, showing the lifeless, ragged texture of his face as it receives one last shave and gets cosmetic cotton balls stuffed into its sunken eye sockets.

Interspersing shots of the before and after functions as the piece’s primary symbol, showing the state’s calculated adherence to protocol in both the life and death of a convict, a passivity that stands in direct contrast to the tenets of treatment. All three of Frederick Wiseman’s earliest works share this common thread, examining the habits and behavior of people in varying degrees of captivity and the ambivalence of those intended to nurture, protect and reintegrate these individuals. Titicut Follies is the saddest of these films, detailing the failures of modern medicine and the pathetic attempts at reform by the American penal system.

Titicut Follies (Zipporah Films, 1967)
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
Photographed by John Marshall

Law and Order (1969, Frederick Wiseman)

Law & Order opens with a series of mugshots strung through a slide projector, each face pallid and drained of color, exhibiting only fear, anger and confusion. The stills depict emotional archetypes, functioning only as “objective” record of a crime, not representation of a person or personality. Frederick Wiseman models the focus of his police-and-thieves documentary on this facelessness, never revealing names or creating characters, merely observing the indifference of a system that oppresses parties on both sides of the thin blue line.

Compiled from snippets of arrests, interrogations and idle chatter, the camera acts as impartial third party to the daily grind of the Kansas City Police Department, magnifying small moments of conflict between civilians and officers into a broader statement on authority and class in America. Filmed with a handheld camera and employing tight shots of furrowed brows and quivering lips, the stark, monochromatic footage organically captures heartbreak in the eyes of every victim and victimizer, often drawing parallels between the two parties through their race, distrust of authority and lack of income.

The palpable tension lingering between the predominantly white force and the black community they “serve and protect” is the result of excessive violent behavior, an extreme response administered to both petulant and compliant suspects. On one hand, the arrest of an aggressive carjacker typifies composed police work and a reasonable amount of physical force, taking into consideration the terroristic threats made by the perpetrator and the erraticness of his conduct. On the other hand, a prostitution sting devolves into a docile suspect being choked into submission by a plainclothes officer, her nightgown falling from her body as she desperately struggles for oxygen against the forearm thrust into her windpipe.

As harrowing as this snapshot is, Wiseman doesn’t want the piece to focus solely on the most appalling example of public service, but fixate on the concept of authority and how it functions in a free society. The arbitrary nature of law and the exclusive right to administer punishment negate ambiguity and individuality, enforcing black-and-white rules that only function to proliferate a class-based system and thwart liberty. Wiseman perceives the civilian and cop as subjugates to “respectful law and order,” indoctrinated into a culture of resignation beneath the chain of privilege that symbolically towers over their heads. His absorbing exposé catalogs the tyranny of this plutocracy, never inserting itself into the field of view or sensationalizing suffering, capturing the insidiousness of oppression through austere observation.

Law and Order (Zipporah Films, 1969)
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
Photographed by Bill Brayne

High School (1968, Frederick Wiseman)

Intended as an uncontaminated snapshot of an institution, Frederick Wiseman’s High School wisely acts as a non-participant, using no narrative, focal point or linear plot line. What it manages to capture is an authentic look at education in America, made all the more powerful because of a lack of specifics, allowing the viewer to relate based on their own experiences.

Wiseman’s films are documentaries in the purest sense; works that catalog moments and occurrences without reaction, maintaining a stoic distance from the people and objects on the screen. The town, school, students and administrators don’t necessarily matter to the intention of the work, instead acting as a reflection of the banal, collective consciousness.

Moments are seemingly edited together at random. Scenes of a hallway between classes will segue into lunchroom discussion, band practice or a parent-teacher conference. The impermanence never feels haphazard, gradually building a theme from seemingly disconnected elements, exhibiting the roles of the student and teacher and how they act as a microcosm for society on a grander scale.

Taking on the role of authority figure, teachers and administrators pass down judgment and punishment under the guise of education. On the receiving end of discipline is the student, who plays the role of subordinate. More like helpless captor than willing participant, students are incapable of expressing themselves as individuals, often lashing out in frustration. While individualism is promoted by authority figures in theory, its practice is rarely rewarded, often resulting in charges of insubordination or further punishment.

Resigned to being sheep, most of the teens spied by Wiseman’s camera seem bored and distant during lectures, blankly staring off into space or slumped over the hard surface of their desks. The only moments of engagement come through a poetry lesson on Simon & Garfunkel and a flight simulation, both of which require active participation, not quiet reverence.  Sadly, lessons of this type are fleeting and most of the day is spent reinforcing conformist ideals about the benefits of being part of the “majority.”

Wiseman seems to think this oppressive experience won’t end the moment these kids grab a diploma and bolt for the exit. They’ll probably have someone telling them to “get on the ball” every day for the rest of their lives, whether that be a college professor, employer or police officer. It’s this helplessness that makes High School such an infuriating and confrontational documentary. Teen angst may be temporary, but subservience and complacency are eternal.

High School (Zipporah Films, 1968)
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
Photographed by Richard Leiterman