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film club: modern times, by charlie chaplin
When Film Club last convened, it was to watch (of all things) Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls. Viewed through a certain lens, Showgirls is "about" the way that modern centers of capitalism (Las Vegas and Los Angeles, specifically) seek to transform the human body into a commodity to be consumed. This week we move to Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, a film which is also very interested in the human body, and the transformations that capitalism enacts upon it. Unlike Showgirls, however, Modern Times is not really interested in the body as an object for consumption. What is is interested in, however-- and these are, of course, related --is the body as an agent of production, contemporary industrialized mass production in particular. As the film opens, we're treated to the sight of Chaplin's Tramp working as a bolt-tightener on an assembly line. In this early sequence, the film explores, to great effect, the spectacle of working bodies synchronizing or de-synchronizing with the unvarying industrial pace of the belt. This shot, from late in the sequence, should give you the basic idea: OK, so this is used for grand comic effect, but the underlying point—about the relationship between man and machine—is deadly serious. The machine is unvarying, which means that the component in the industrial production process that needs to be "corrected" is the worker. In effect, the worker needs to become more machine-like. The assembly line ends up warping the Tramp in precisely this way: in these early scenes, he's been so hard-wired to tighten bolts that even when he's not working on the line he continues to automatically seek bolts to tighten, coming to resemble nothing quite so much as a robot run amok. This is fairly prescient, given that the very concept of the robot was only given a name for the first time in 1921 (in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R.), and is presented in film for the first time in 1927, by Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The film grows even more prescient if you consider the Tramp-and-machine system less as an early cinematic example of the robot and more as an early cinematic example of the human-robot hybrid, the cyborg (a concept that wasn't even named until 1960). The film does feature some pretty arresting images of human-machine hybrids, which, divorced from their comedic contexts, border on the nightmarish: Thinking about Modern Times's prescient aspects in this way leads one to consider the possibility that the opening twenty minutes of Modern Times fit squarely within the tradition of the science-fiction dystopia. If that sounds odd, check out some of these shots, which seem, to me, like they could be slotted comfortably into Metropolis, Alphaville, A Clockwork Orange, or Brazil... Oddly, despite all its futuristic trappings, it's worth noting that at the time Modern Times was likely experienced by audiences as something that was engaged in a bit of looking backwards as well as a bit of looking forwards. The Tramp had long been a mainstay of silent cinema, making appearances as early as 1914: by 1936, when Modern Times is released, he's a figure with a twenty-year history. Furthermore, he's a figure largely associated with the silent era, which, by 1936, is definitively over—as sound had debuted in 1927 and been largely embraced by the industry by 1929. Modern Times is not, strictly speaking, a silent film—it utilizes synchronized sound effects, and delivers some lines of dialogue through loudspeakers, radios, and song—but it delivers the majority of its dialogue through intertitles, and is still shot at the silent rate (19 frames per second). These choices are interesting, given that as early as 1931, when Chaplin released City Lights (next week's pick, btw), he was allegedly worrying about whether audiences would still be open to silent films (at least that's what this Wikipedia article says). If the use of silent film conventions might have seemed dated in 1931, then by 1936--nearly a decade into the development of sound film --it must have seemed willfully anachronistic, nostalgic even. By approaching a movie very much about the future with this sort of determined focus backwards, Chaplin makes an interesting point about "the present"—the "modern times" of the film's title. He seems, in essence, to be saying that the present is always the sum total of our memories and experience of the past and our thoughts, feelings, hopes and fears about the future. That is as true today as it was in 1936, and Modern Times, in its best moments, still works to capture that peculiar ambiguity. Labels: capitalism, cyborgs, film club, media commentary
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
film club: showgirls
So going into this week's Film Club pick, Showgirls, I was theorizing that its director, Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, might serve as an analogue to Humbert Humbert (from last week's pick, Lolita). Both Verhoeven and Humbert, it seemed to me, are Europeans who are deeply fascinated with America, specifically America's crass, impulsive, trashy, and shallow aspects—in essence, the aspects of America that are the most distinctly non-European. If you're interested in those aspects of America, there are two places that might prove especially fascinating, and Showgirls not only calls out those places by name, but it bookends itself with them. Here's a still taken from the first shot of the film: ...and here's a still from the final shot of the film, which you can hopefully read at this resolution if you squint: So. If you start to think about Showgirls as something that's a commentary on America rather than a cynical exercise in audience titillation, it begins to become more interesting. Although if you want to do this, it might behoove you to ask: what kind of commentary is it, exactly? Is it a satire? Is it a critique? Certainly there are elements of the film that suggest this. It works, at times, as a cataloging of American grotesquerie and tackiness: And our protag, Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley), is definitely a Dolores-Haze-like bundle of raw impulses and poorly-thought-out gestures. (Sometimes it seems like every encounter in the entire film ends up with her either storming off in a rage or wreaking some kind of violence upon someone.) Inasmuch as she is functioning a stand-in for American values more largely, there's unmistakably some element of critique there. But Verhoeven's critical interest seems to circulate more around the relationship between entertainment (particularly entertainment that features the use of the body) and prostitution. We can see this if we look at how much of the film's narrative energy is spent examining the rivalry between the naive and impulsive Nomi and a more seasoned and worldly-wise showgirl, Cristal (played by Gena Gershon). This rivalry, at least initially, hinges less upon professional jealousy and more upon a difference in world-view: Cristal sees the spectacular display of her own body at a high-end casino (the Stardust) and Nomi's topless dancing at a low-rent club (the Cheetah) as basically different points on the larger continuum of prostitution, whereas Nomi sees dancing as a more noble pursuit, categorically different. In the end, it turns out that Nomi doth protest too much, and the film expends a lot of narrative energy repeatedly complicating or violating the distinction between entertaining-through-one's-body and whoring. Along these lines, it should not surprise us that the character who is perhaps the most effectively satirized in the film is the representative Serious Artist, James. James is a young black dancer who sees dance as a Legitimate Art Form (he trained with Alvin Ailey, we're told), and who naively wants to use Vegas as the forum in which to put on a personal, avant-garde dance piece. In the end, his piece does get its premiere, but ultimately it's little more than a dressed-up version of the same old bump-and-grind: Thought of thusly, the avant-garde or personal elements in James's piece are essentially forms of inefficiency—noise in the channel, slowing down the transmission of what is important (and saleable), namely, erotic content. If Nomi is a whore who won't admit she's a whore, then James is a pimp who doesn't know he's a pimp, making him the least effective and most strongly ironized character in the entire film. So, ultimately, the film is critiquing Vegas as a machine that turns people into commodities, and there is a sharply-pointed implication that LA, the city towards which the film gazes in its final moments, operates in precisely the same way. (It's not hard to imagine Verhoeven thinking of acting as simply another point on the "prostitution" continuum, and (it would follow) locating filmmaking as simply another point on the "pimping" continuum.) The film's reaction to this is not rage, but rather a nearly nihilistic resignation: the fools of the film, the ones being satirized, are James and Nomi, the ones who believe that they're not implicated in this sorry state of affairs. If everyone in Vegas and LA is either a pimp or a whore, the film seems to be saying, then the only wise thing to do is admit it and carry on. If we recall the predictable trajectory of Verhoeven's own pre-Showgirls career, which starts off with him making small art-house films like The Fourth Man (1984) and ends up with him making big-budget Hollywood films like Basic Instinct and Total Recall, it becomes easy to think that maybe Verhoeven had come to think of himself as something of Hollywood' pimp at this point in his career—a line of thought which makes it easy to read Showgirls as a very public way of "admitting it and carrying on." "Admitting it" and "carrying on" might not be the two wisest things to do in the span of a single film, however: although the film is totally willing to give the audience the erotic content that they presumably crave, it asks, in return, that the audience acknowledge Verhoeven as a pimp, Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon as whores, and (it would follow) the audience themselves as willing johns. Many filmgoers understandably might feel discomfited by this bargain, which may go part of the way towards explaining why the film failed at the box office. (There are also other, more obvious reasons, of course, many of which have to do with Showgirls simply not being a very well-made film, but these have been discussed amply elsewhere and don't require recounting here.) Labels: capitalism, media commentary
Friday, September 26, 2008
film club XXIII: adaptation
Adaptation (2002) is ostensibly a film adaptation of New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean's 2000 piece of nonfiction, The Orchid Thief. But it's really about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's struggle to translate the book into a film. The film brings Kaufman in as a character, and spends a good portion of its run-time dramatizing his confusion, hesitation, distraction, and doubt; as such, it's one of the most memorable, and I would say accurate, depictions of the creative process ever brought to the screen. Kaufman—at least the character Kaufman, as we see him in the film—struggles with a handful of distinct challenges in the adaptation process. One of them is that Orlean's book doesn't have a strong narrative arc, and furthermore, being highly meditative and reflective, the book doesn't have a lot of material in it that translates well to a visual medium. (The end product uses a lot of voice-over, and explicitly debates the merits and drawbacks of voice-over at more than one point in the film.) Another problem is that Kaufman seems to have varying additional agendas for his screenplay that go beyond merely wanting to adapt the book successfully. He repeatedly says that he wants the finished film to be a genreless film "about flowers," that will have the end effect of showing audiences how "amazing" flowers are. ("Are they amazing?" Kaufman's fictional agent asks him at one point, to which the fictional Kaufman responds, despairingly, "I don't know.") In addition to that, Kaufman wants the screenplay to be a work of realism. The desire for a truly realistic fiction, one that shrugs off the various artifices of fiction in favor of the "real stuff" of life has been an obsession of experimental writers for well over a century—it's clearly articulated as early as Zola—but it's no less a grail today than it ever was. (I'm not immune to the pull: nearly all of my own fiction written over the last ten years has been organized around this impulse.) Kaufman declares, early on in the film, that he doesn't want to write something "artificially plot-driven," without "sex or guns or car chases or characters learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like one another or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end." And this raises yet another problem, namely, the demands of commercialism. The hypothetical adaptation that the fictional Kaufman proposes (within the space of the actual adaptation) sometimes sounds amazing (I, for one, might go to see a genreless movie about flowers) but also runs the risk of being an enormous mess, and looming constantly in the background is the threat of not only creative failure but also commercial failure. The danger that Kaufman might be taken off the project or that the project itself might entirely fail is never really stated outright, but it's underlined constantly by the inclusion of Kaufman's fictional twin brother, "Donald," who is crashing with Charlie and writing a screenplay of his own. Donald's screenplay is for an unbelievably trite thriller called The Three. Trite, yes, yet also seemingly far more bankable, and towards the end of the film Charlie elicits Donald's help to finish the Adaptation screenplay, and the entire narrative lurches nauseously towards a passably commercial finale. There's some very sharp satire embedded here about the kinds of stories that a massive capitalist industry like the film industry is willing to invest in telling. Ultimately, Kaufman seems to want to celebrate the power in the creative process: writers, after all, have a literally infinite number of ways to tell a story. At one point, Kaufman makes a decision that the film needs to incorporate a history of life on earth, and, indeed, the finished film dutifully provides this as a montage: And yet this near-omnipotence is held endlessly in check, not only by the accompanying neurosis and crippling self-doubt, but also by the strictures of capitalism, the existence of a "professionally skeptical" financing system that determines which stories get told (or at the very least produced, or distributed). In its sharp-eyed analysis of this point, the film has a real tragic dimension to accompany its comic moments and metafictional playfulness. Next week we continue with reflections on the art of adaptation with Skunkcabbage's pick, The Hours. His write-up on Adaptation is here. Labels: capitalism, media commentary, narrative, writing
Saturday, March 08, 2008
cosmopolis
Cosmopolis, the new Don DeLillo book, is something of a disappointment. The book's primary set-pieces—an anti-globalism protest, a hip-hop performer's funeral, a rave, and a Spencer Tunick-esque mass gathering of nudes—all feel slightly stale: there is nothing here as inventive as White Noise's Airborne Toxic Event or Most Photographed Barn In America; nothing here as accomplished as Underworld's "super-omniscient" Giants-Dodgers game. That said, there are some interesting thematic threads woven throughout the book. Like DeLillo's last novel, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis permits the appearance of elements which are overtly fantastic. In this novel, the super-natural is embodied by two pieces of image-capturing technology (a surveillance system and a camera-watch), which are so sophisticated that they begin to display events that have not yet occurred. These devices are the most dramatic symbol of one of the book's central thematic concerns: the predictive capabilities of technology. The protagonist, Eric Packer, is an asset manager who has made millions by accurately predicting the inherently unpredictable fluctuations of currencies, with the assistance of sophisticated information-gathering technologies. The book seems to suggest that as these technologies improve, they grow ever-closer to penetrating the veil of the future. Thinking about this reminded me of something that ex-hacker Steve Steinberg mentioned over in the Boing Boing sideblog, which warrants quoting at length here: "[T]o be a hacker in the late 1980s was to know something profound about the nature and degree of connectedness before everyone else ... today, an equally singular and premonitory view is coming into focus at a few of the edgier hedge funds on wall street. [...] we have all heard that companies from Wal-Mart to Cheescake Factory rely on sophisticated data mining to run their business. Every customer is analyzed 43 different ways until They know what you will buy before even you do. Even ignoring the enormous gap between rhetoric and reality, these algorithms are at best myopic. Like the idealized model used in undergraduate physics -- no gravity, no friction -- these companies imagine their business in isolation. But money flows through a network with thousands of significant nodes-- to partners, from customers, away from competitors. The airline industry has come the closest to this kind of holistic analysis, thanks to their penchant for collusion. But right now the only people who really want to see how all the pieces fit together -- to datamine entire industries, economies -- are on wall street. Coincidently, the web has already made many businesses so transparent that an outsider can know almost as much as management. Surely, with enough determination.. a lot of bandwidth, some fast computers... somebody will build the first detailed map.. a topography of money flows.. to see what's next." Labels: book_commentary, capitalism, information, technology
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Tonight Laura and I are going to head over to Quimby's to see Ben Marcus, author of The Age of Wire and String and the new Notable American Women, which I plan on purchasing tonight.
Ben Marcus' website (thanks Geegaw) is set up like the website of a fictional corporation, Marcus Systems Enterprises, with fits in with what I was saying about "intimate bureaucracies" some time ago.
Like Marcus' other work, the website recycles cultural forms and idioms to portray a world which is new, yet somehow oddly familiar. I'm a big fan of Marcus' project, and I find the website entertaining (dig these crazy tests).
But the model of the corporation that Marcus is scavenging from is slightly out-of-date: all stylized silhouettes, space-age geometric forms, and bureaucratic jargon. Not to say that this isn't all well and good. Marcus frequently appropriates forms which have a vaguely archaic feel to them, and this is a part of what gives his work its strange power. But I'd like to see someone (besides Adbusters and ®TMark) appropriate the forms of the contemporary corporation, the corporation newly focused on friendliness and hipness.
Think phone-company imagery. A contemporary corporation no longer represents itself as an anonymous, stylized body. It represents itself as a young Asian girl, a female boxer, four Caucasian friends having fun on the town, and an old black man hugging his granddaughter. Always putting forth the message "we are you, whoever you are." Labels: art, capitalism
Thursday, April 11, 2002
The Library of the University of Pennsylvania is currently hosting an exhibit on the "assemblings" created by mail artists and other networking artists and poets.
The catalog is online as a series of PDFs. The part that caught my interest particularly is this section on "intimate bureaucracies." (901 K)
"Assemblings often use advertising images, mass-media images, and bureaucratic norms and procedures. Instead of a dismissal of modernity for some transcendent escape from the society of spectacles and red-tape tangles, the artists involved pushed those quintessential forms of our bureacratized lives to new interpretations of contemporary and future cultures. ... The tone is indicative of what I call 'intimate bureaucracy': a mobilization of modern forms for other ends." This particularly struck me because for the past ten years or so I have periodically released work under the imprint of "Central Services," a fictional bureaucracy which some readers of this site may dimly recall... Labels: art, capitalism
Saturday, March 02, 2002
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