The Personal Versus The Impersonal

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—What makes a film personal or impersonal? Or is there really such a thing?

I've been kicking this question around in my mind in part after film critic Vadim Rizov posted this evisceration of the criterion of "personal" and "impersonal" in assessing Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island over at IFC's Independent Eye blog a few weeks ago on the eve of that film's release. In responding to some of the early reviews of the film that accused the film of being "impersonal," Rizov notes:

It's telling that the most popular Scorsese films remain, after all these years, "Mean Streets," "Raging Bull" and "Goodfellas" -- the Italian-American trifecta, with "Taxi Driver" more respected than loved. That's because mooky violence is an easier sell than, say, Edith Wharton or the temptations of Christ. And, armed with the information that Scorsese was an asthmatic child in a neighborhood full of belligerent Italian-American males, it's easy to correlate his greatest successes with "personal filmmaking."

The logic of this argument seems to be that "personal" films correspond to biographical information.... This is why you see people refracting Polanski's entire career through his time hiding in the Warsaw ghetto and his exile to Europe, and why Soderbergh haters always claim he's making "cold," "technical" experiments. He didn't give them any meaningful biographical information! The jerk!

You did not see this kind of nonsensical criterion being raised 20 or 30 years ago, which speaks to the increasing luridness of full-disclosure writing permeating every last field, the blogospheric assumption of the importance of the "personal" that's surely going to keep trickling down. And it's careless thinking. You think "Mean Streets" is personal and "The Aviator" isn't? Try again: "Mean Streets" is fantasy wish-fulfillment to make up for a sickly childhood, while "The Aviator" is a swooning love letter to the medium that dominates Scorsese's life. I just made a "personal" argument. Are you convinced yet?

As you can see, Rizov was directly addressing critics who he believed based their charges of "personal" and "impersonal" on what they knew about the filmmaker's own life. For me, however, he raises some broader questions on what makes a film feel either deeply personal or deeply impersonal to a viewer—and perhaps whether that should even matter in assessing a given film.

Now, I happen to think that Shutter Island, far from being just a genre exercise, is in fact an impassioned expression of something deep within Scorsese's being. But, as I tried to articulate in my review on this blog, I don't feel this way because I presume to have a deep knowledge of Scorsese's past history that might help illuminate what might have driven him to make his latest film. Mostly, I'm basing this on the sheer visceral intensity of the expressionistic horror imagery he wrings from the material; the dream sequences and flashbacks strike me as too haunted and mournful for its visual extravagance to register as merely pro forma. To put it in layman's terms: it feels like Scorsese is really into it—and that feeling thus translates to me as deeply personal.

But then, that begs the question: personal for whom? The director, or just you? Obviously, my opinion that Shutter Island is a work of tortured personal expression is not one that is universally shared; as an example, Rizov cites a takedown of the film by Elbert Ventura at the online magazine Slate in which Ventura calls the film "silly and impersonal." I wouldn't want to put words in Mr. Ventura's mouth, but maybe that just really means that he couldn't get into it, that maybe he found himself feeling emotionally detached from the whole thing, and then figured that that detachment was Scorsese's fault.

Is it possible that there really is no such a thing as a personal or impersonal film? Well...perhaps I wouldn't go that far in calling for a ban on such labels in film criticism altogether. (Heck, I went so far as to damn Scorsese's The Departed as "impersonal," if only for the feeling I got that Scorsese had told this story before, and with far less detachment than I felt watching this latest iteration. So I won't pretend that I'm above all that.) Maybe there are such things, but that's entirely dependent on how a certain viewer feels a certain film rather than on any "objective" measure such as biographical history. Because surely every film a director makes has a certain measure of personal investment to it, even if its simply a matter of making a script play as functionally as possible on a movie screen.

And yet, there's no denying that some of the best films ever made are celebrated in part because there is a palpable intelligence guiding the material, a sense that a filmmaker is telling this particular story, exploring these particular characters or throwing up these specific images for a compelling reason.

That kind of compelling reason is something I dearly missed in Jacques Audiard's widely praised A Prophet (2009), which, after a strong opening half hour, basically devolves into a generally unremarkable prison-survival saga, with a blank cipher of a lead character who never seems to exude much in the way of inner life. What makes its first 30 minutes so strong compared to the rest is the measure of moral suspense Audiard injects into the proceedings. In trying to make good with a ruthless Corsican mob kingpin named César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), an imprisoned French Arab named Malik (Tahar Rahim) reluctantly decides to kill an informant for him, leading to a sequence that is as brutally messy a movie killing as, say, that brilliantly agonizing murder scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (1966) or, more recently, a similarly excruciating killing in Ang Lee's (highly underrated) Lust, Caution (2007). Has something snapped in Malik as far as his moral compass is concerned? Unfortunately, the rest of A Prophet seems to barely acknowledge that question, disappointingly letting that hovering morality slip away as the rest of his story drags on and on, seemingly losing a sense of purpose with every new development. Notwithstanding a handful of nifty suspense setpieces, by the end of the film, it's difficult to get a handle on why Audiard felt he needed to tell this particular story.

But would I call it "impersonal"? Probably not. Obviously, Audiard felt a desire to make a movie about this character in these situations in the manner that he did; I have my doubts as to how successfully he has been able to convey those intentions in his filmmaking, but nevertheless...well, hey, the movie exists, doesn't it?

In the opening moments of Alice in Wonderland (2010), director Tim Burton provides us with some clues as to why he decided to revisit and update Lewis Carroll's famously surreal universe. This grown-up Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is now a frustrated young adult living in a boringly proper environment, on the verge of being forced to marry into a life that doesn't appeal to her one bit. That feeling of restlessness is, I imagine, something Burton understands deeply, based on a passing familiarity with the exaggeratedly grotesque style and thematic substance of some of his previous work (films like Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Ed Wood (1994), both about misunderstood outsiders, pops immediately to mind). But, of course, that is only a guess on my part. In any case, it's a feeling that I know all too well: As someone who still feels, every once in a while, like I'm merely doing the bidding of my own mother, I can somewhat relate to Burton's Alice.

This sets the stage for a venture through Wonderland—or, rather, "Underland," as Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton sneakily call it—that is meant to play as a journey of actualization for this burgeoning feminist Alice. It's, alas, a journey that is less than bursting with the sense of wonder than one might expect from this director and this material; Burton's Wonderland is, disappointingly, too mundane and dour-looking to dazzle on any level other than the prettily pictorial (the 3-D effects don't add very much to the table, either). Woolverton's script does reassert that feminist angle at the end, though in a fairly risible manner (who knew Lewis Carroll's Alice was a genius about creating trade routes to China?).

Nevertheless, the film isn't without its moments of visual brilliance, and some of the actors—most memorably Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen—manage to inject some life into the material. And whether or not you respond ecstatically or indifferently to Burton's reimagining of this time-honored material, it's still evident that this enthusiastically imaginative filmmaker has something he wants to express, even if one might not feel he has brought his usual inspired A-game to the project. It's no less "personal" than A Prophet...

...or The Ghost Writer (2010). Roman Polanski's latest film (an adaptation of a novel by Robert Harris) provides the most interesting of these three cases regarding personal versus impersonal films: Is it merely a light thriller, or does that lightness mask something deeper?

The first thing to be said about this film is that it's consistently engrossing and beautifully crafted. The film's central mystery never really carries the doom-laden life-or-death feeling of, say, Chinatown (1974) or The Ninth Gate (1999); instead, Polanski seems to mostly be taking pleasure in his own mastery, filling his film with a wealth of idiosyncratic visual and literary touches that lend its relatively humdrum plot a welcome off-kilter quality that makes it considerably more gripping than it might have been in less confident hands.

But even if The Ghost Writer has a feeling of low stakes compared to other films of its type, does that make it a less deeply personal effort than, say, more overtly serious films like, say, The Pianist (2002)?

In his review of the film, Slant Magazine's Ed Gonzalez suggests some ways in which The Ghost Writer ties into Polanski's own personal traumas:

...the struggle of McGregor's character is hauntingly reflective of Polanski's lifelong traumas, from his surviving the Holocaust to, well, his surviving the murder of Sharon Tate and their unborn child. Holed up inside Adam's island manse, subjected to all sorts of security checks, his every behavior scrutinized, McGregor's ghost writer becomes not unlike, yes, a ghost. His is a particularly nerve-jangling existential crisis, and it's one that...could not have been conceived by anyone other than a man that has moved throughout life from one prison to next, many of his own construction.

Of course, this is perhaps the kind of biographical correlation Rizov rails against in his IFC post, and certainly not every viewer will necessarily bring that kind of knowledge into the film. I would certainly say that it's not absolutely necessary to have Polanski's troubled history in mind in order to enjoy it. Nevertheless, looking at the film itself and at some of the films Polanski has made in the past, one can sense in The Ghost Writer hints of a consistent personal vision—in other words, an auteurist perspective.

Consider its main character, and note that he is never actually given a name. Instead, this nameless writer, who reluctantly agrees to ghostwrite the memoirs of an under-fire British government official, lives up to the film's title by hovering on the sidelines of the corruption he gradually uncovers. He's a relative nobody who gets caught up in political intrigue the depths of which even he can't quite believe. In that sense, he's a spiritual successor of Chinatown's Jake Gittes, the gumshoe who eventually uncovered corruption both political and, most devastatingly of all, personal. In that film, Polanski, taking his cues from the film noirs of the 1940s and '50s, treated Gittes's dawning realizations with a bleak solemnity that The Ghost Writer doesn't try to replicate. That lack of solemnity, however, doesn't quite obscure a palpable cynicism about human nature at its heart—a cynicism confirmed by the abruptness of its absurdist ending, in which all the paranoia with which Polanski so expertly infuses this seemingly low-stakes mystery comes rearing its head with an image that acts as a distorting mirror to a shot much earlier in the film. You could say it's the ending of Chinatown played lighter—but that doesn't make it less shocking.

Point is: The Ghost Writer may seem impersonal on its surface, but one can certainly dig for personal meaning if one bothers to look. As with most critical yardsticks, then, "personal" and "impersonal" are criteria that can't be objectively measured; it all comes down whether you sense deep involvement in the filmmaking or not. Or maybe, it really all just comes down to whether you enjoy the experience of a particular film or not. Because, at the end of the day, is that not essentially how we all base our judgments of a given work of art? All other critical analysis, whether based on biographical info or not, is basically justifications for said enjoyment.

Or so I think. What say you all, dear readers?

It's All About Text and Subtext

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—

Shutter Island (2010; Dir.: Martin Scorsese)

[PROBABLE SPOILERS AHEAD]

1. Apparently I am one of the few on Earth who didn't guess the film's big climactic plot twist within the first 15 minutes of the movie or so. Whether that makes me an extremely naive and gullible movie viewer is something I'll leave that up to you, dear readers, to decide. But I figured I might as well put it out there, to provide one reason as to why Martin Scorsese's latest film worked wonders for me. Also, I have not read the Dennis Lehane book on which this film is based (Laeta Kalogridis adapted it).

2. I think one of the main reasons I've been having trouble writing a coherent review of Shutter Island—why I am resorting to this point structure—is that the film is so much a visceral experience, with Scorsese putting all his cinephilia and masterly technique at the service of astonishingly vivid evocations of foreboding doom and, in some the extravagant dream sequences, deep personal sadness and grief. I could try to describe it, but no amount of words can quite do justice to the feelings the film inspires. And, of course, merely describing my own impressions wouldn't necessarily convince the film's many detractors. If I feel the heat of Scorsese's absolute commitment to this material, and someone else doesn't, then, really, what can be said? If you don't feel it, you just don't feel it. I felt it, big time.

3. One thing I feel I can effectively articulate: that Big Twist everyone's talking about in this film? Far from being an M. Night Shymalan-ish narrative trick, I think it's an absolutely necessary storytelling maneuver for the full impact of the film's vision of troubled humanity to register. And I think it works in context because it genuinely deepens our understanding of the dark psychological forces at work in this picture; its final scene, in one telling line of dialogue, pushes that understanding even further.

4. In some of his previous films, Scorsese has often explored the ways flawed male characters handle the violent animal inside them. Sometimes, like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), they struggle to bottle up their anger before it explodes; others, like, Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980), try to find some kind of absolution for the violence they commit in their daily lives. Still others, like the amoral mobsters in Goodfellas (1990), get off on their violent whims until they get caught—and even after they pay a significant price for the destruction their violence causes, they can't help but want to continue to do it anyway.

Shutter Island continues this theme, though in a way that is arguably more mournful in tone than any of those films. At the center of it is a man who has become so disturbed by the violence he has both witnessed and committed that he has essentially tried to dissociate himself from personal responsibility by reimagining himself as a U.S. federal marshal in a blatantly exaggerated riff on 1950s Universal haunted-house horror films. Not that you're supposed to know the nature of his psychosis right off the bat; Kalogridis's script—taking its cue from Lehane's book, by all accounts—plays this as a late-inning revelation rather than letting us in on this character's mental imbalance from the very beginning. Would the film have been more effective if we in the audience had known from the start? I wouldn't know for sure; that's not the movie Scorsese has delivered. And of course, it's not like the film ever takes place in a grimly realistic world to begin with. From its Murnau-like opening shot—of a boat materializing from a mist, almost like out of thin air—onward, it's evident that something is askew in this environment, something deeper than merely the crazies on Shutter Island. As with any great film, its opening teaches you how to watch it.

5. The first time Scorsese presents us with a flashback to the main character's memory of liberating survivors at Dachau and gunning down Nazis in cold blood, I admit, I thought of the "exploitation" criticism fleetingly. And yet, at no point does Scorsese diminish the horror of the Holocaust by evoking the Holocaust so explicitly; instead, it feels, especially in hindsight, like a perfectly valid injection of real-world horror into one man's extremely cinematic delusions. He doesn't, however, dwell on those horrors either, preferring to explore it strictly through the main character's pained recollections. It's not meant to make a direct statement on the Holocaust. Because, I mean, really, what else is there to say about the Holocaust that hasn't already been said? Surely we all realize by now that the Holocaust was a human atrocity of stunning proportions. What matters is that, as ever in Scorsese's world, there are no clear distinctions made between heroes and villains—not even when there are Nazis involved.

6. Scorsese's passion for the cinema is well known by now, both in his films and in public; you can sense that passion in Shutter Island with the delight he takes in recreating classic horror-movie tropes. The pleasures throughout much of the film, many critics would probably agree, are primarily visual, with cinematographer Robert Richardson and production designer Dante Ferretti doing some of their most expressive work in bringing Scorsese's ominous visions to chilling life. It's telling, then, that, when Shutter Island finally reveals its Big Twist, it does so in the most prosaic manner possible—as if Scorsese was shaking the character, and, by extension us in the audience, out of his nightmare, forcing us to confront the cold, hard, gleaming truth of his situation. By the last scene—filmed in broad daylight, by contrast to the relentlessly but voluptuously gray doom-and-gloom that had enveloped the prison island—Scorsese suggests, through visual terms, that his character has finally confronted his fears. He making a decision about the course of his life that only seems like a continuation of his madness at first, but which is in fact completely rational—and more thought-provoking because of it.

None of these visual choices strike me as merely artisanal or impersonal in the least...which leads me to wonder: Could Scorsese be making a stealth statement about the cinema here? At his best, he has used cinema as a means of exorcising his own demons, going all the way back to that famous image of Harvey Keitel tempting fate by holding his hands above church flames in Mean Streets (1973): one of his most direct expressions of Catholic guilt. That's basically what the main character of Shutter Island is trying to do by mentally splitting himself into two. But is it exorcism or merely escape? Perhaps Scorsese is subtly confessing to us all that not even using the cinema of his childhood as his means of expression is enough to confront his own demons. Perhaps cinema simply isn't enough for anyone, really.

Am I reading too much into it? As The New Yorker's Richard Brody has pointed out, the title does have the word "shutter" in it...

7. Shutter Island is smashingly effective as a psychological horror genre piece, but I can't say it's necessarily a movie that unsettles me in some long-lasting way. (Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse (2001) was perhaps the last horror picture to inspire that kind of reaction in me, and I introduced myself to that one four or five years ago.) I don't hold that against Scorsese or the movie he's made, however; perhaps I just don't get frightened that easily these days. Nevertheless, I feel that there are despairing depths to this film that are worth taking seriously, not dismissed as merely a supposedly once-great filmmaker straining to find an entry point in genre hackwork. Scorsese's images are too full of tortured conviction for me to agree with that view. I hope, through this disjointed review, I've provided some talking points for further discussion of a film that I think is the richest new release I've seen so far this year.

***

 

 

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965; Dir.: Russ Meyer)

Here's a much older film that's just as rich in subtext than Shutter Island, albeit in a more unabashedly trashy surface. Russ Meyer's 1965 exploitation classic indulges in the male gaze at the beginning, only to gradually subvert it as the film bounces along ebulliently in its chronicle of violence, depravity and reversed gender roles.

The three strippers at the center of the mayhem are dominated by angry dominatrix Varla (Tura Satana), spilling boobs and all; the other two (played by Haji and Lori Williams) show, er, more nuanced brands of feminism, to put it lightly. After Varla kills a man (Ray Barlow) out of frustration and kidnaps his girlfriend (Susan Bernard), they all hide out in a secluded ranch owned by a lecherous wheelchair-bound old man (Stuart Lancaster) and his two sons, one a macho archetype par excellence (Dennis Busch) and a more sensitive type (Paul Trinka). All sorts of sexual power games ensue, climaxing with the image of Varla trying to ram her car into the silent macho son: a richly suggestive moment of female sexual domination.

Surely Quentin Tarantino had this, among many other trash classics, in mind when he deconstructed the chicks-hit-the-road genre in Death Proof (2007), which also climaxed with a violent image of women asserting their dominance over a fallen icon of male virility.

P.S. I was finally able to see this film, in a startlingly fresh-looking print, at 92Y Tribeca a little over three weeks ago thanks to the film series hosted by the blog Not Coming to a Theater Near You (which also brought Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself to 92Y Tribeca in November last year). That said, it might have been a bit of a mistake to precede the film proper with trailers for some of Meyer's other films (including Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), with its Roger Ebert screenplay). I haven't seen his other work, but Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is, by all accounts, his mildest in terms of raunchiness (no full-frontal breast shot in sight, for one thing). As brilliant as this film was, I also spent much of its running time pining somewhat for the even more over-the-top sexuality suggested in the trailers for, among other films, Mudhoney (1965), Vixen! (1968) and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979). It's as if those trailers were setting up expectations that this particular Meyer film wasn't quite willing to fulfill. That's no, um, "knock" against the film itself, mind you; I'm just being honest, is all.

A Placeholder, With Two Videos

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Someday—someday soon, I hope—I will get around to mounting a defense of Martin Scorsese's latest film, Shutter Island, which I genuinely think is a near-great film, quite possibly his best in over a decade. Certainly, it feels to me like his most deeply personal work in quite a while, with thematic and emotional depths—including links to his past films—that connect with its feverishly expressionistic visuals to move beyond its pulpy psychological-puzzle aspects into something more haunting and thought-provoking. In other words, it's more than just a brain teaser with a big twist; alas, that seems to be the only level at which a lot of the film's strongest detractors seem willing to engage. The dismissiveness of some of those dissenting opinions kinda frustrates me, to be honest...but, hey, if you don't feel it, you don't feel it. All I can do is just shrug my shoulders and try to set forth my reasons for liking it—which I aim to do...someday soon.

In the meantime, I'll direct you all (if you have not yet read these pieces) to Glenn Kenny's review of the film at his blog Some Came Running, Ryan Kelly's at Medfly Quarantine, and Richard Brody's series of posts on the film at his New Yorker blog The Front Row for critiques that strike me as the most perceptive on the matter of Shutter Island. And if any of you would like to try to engage me on the film, please feel free to do so in the comments page of this post, or on Twitter (@kenjfuj). I'll try my best to match up to the reviews above in depth and insight.

***

For now...how about a couple more YouTube videos? I got two for you today.

1. A while back, I finally got around to acquainting myself with late '70s/early '80s American new-wave band Devo's first album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! For the most part, I was pretty bowled over by it, but there's one song on it in particular that I connected with: "Mongoloid," a metaphorical song about how even someone with a major disability can go through life seemingly unnoticed in American society. As someone who every so often feels like an intellectual lightweight masquerading as normally functioning adult (yeah, I'm sometimes deeply insecure; what of it?), the tune resonates, in its own geeky-freaky-totally awesome way.

Here's Mark Mothersbaugh & co. performing it on French television in 1978 (though at a tempo much quicker than the one on the album):

2. It must have been because today was such a nice spring-like day, but "翩翩飛起" (roughly, "Handsomely Flying," as implied by Babelfish), a lovely Taiwanese pop tune from 1985, popped into my head and stayed there. The singer of this tune is 王芷蕾 (Jeanette Wang), who quite possibly had the most sheerly beautiful voice in Taiwanese pop during the 1970s and '80s. If you want to know what an angel might sound like, just listen to her. Seriously.

Or watch this video:



Again: I know only I and a select few others really care about this Asian pop music...but I repeat: it's my blog. I do what I want in this joint, beeyotch! Take from it what you will.

Martin Scorsese: "He Makes the Best F--kin' Films!"

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—In honor of Martin Scorsese's latest film, Shutter Island, coming out in wide release today, here's a video of one band's, er, "tribute" to the filmmaker. (I tip my hat to a fellow co-worker at The Wall Street Journal, who shall remain nameless here, for introducing me to this.)

Ladies and gentlemen, from 1992, King Missile's "Martin Scorsese":



What do you all think: Does this at least somewhat encapsulate the experience of watching at least some of Scorsese's films? (This, by the way, is a censored version of the song; the actual version has about 13 times more uses of the f-word than this video's zero.)

I have not seen Scorsese's latest opus, by the way (I'm not that connected in the film-critic community...yet...). But the wildly mixed reviews I'm seeing for the film are increasing my anticipation. The trailer made it look at least visually dazzling...but then I remember his last film, The Departed (2006), in which Scorsese (to my mind, anyway) slummed big time and won undeserved acclaim, including many Oscars (one for himself), for it. Here's hoping Shutter Island will live up to my (guarded) expectations.