Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind perfectly captures the fear and the fascination that the unknown holds for humanity. The film focuses on the utility worker Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), who's sent out into a remote country area to investigate a rash of mysterious power outages and instead comes into close contact with inexplicable sights that seemingly could only be alien ships. From that point on, Roy becomes obsessed with what he saw and felt, obsessed with getting answers, some explanation for his bizarre experience. The film is about the possibility of alien life coming to Earth, but more than that it's about the larger search for meaning, for understanding, the desire to make some sense of life, the universe and everything.

Spielberg is well-suited to capturing the mingled wonder, fear and confusion that characterize the film's complex mix of emotions and tones. Although Spielberg opens with a scene in which the French scientist Lacombe (Francois Truffaut) tracks the signs of the aliens' arrival on Earth, and returns to Lacombe at intervals throughout the film, the real substance of this movie is the effect of such unusual events on ordinary people. When Roy first encounters the alien ships, he's driving along on a deserted, pitch-black country road, lost and struggling with maps to try to find out where he is. Behind him, a set of lights pulls up in the window behind his head, and he gestures for them to pass by; they do, as a car impatiently goes around his truck. The next time some lights pull up behind him, Roy similarly waves them on and returns to his maps, so that only the audience sees that the lights go up, revealing a distinctly un-car-like shape hovering behind Roy. Spielberg's visual playfulness makes moments like this even more potent: witty, awe-inspiring, surreal and yet also somehow ordinary, the extraordinary seeping into the prosaic without warning, upturning all expectations and altering even one's basic presumptions about the way things work.

Roy's experience is indirect — mailboxes vibrate, all the metal in his truck is pulled momentarily up into the air by an electromagnetic force, and a bright light shines down on him, burning his face as he cranes his neck out of the truck's window to bask in its blistering beauty — but he'll soon see even more startling sights. Spielberg's presentation of the alien spacecraft is just as casually awesome, showing these hovering ships surrounded by halos of light, speeding down highways in convoys, turning whimsical circles in the air, trailed by a small ball of red light that seems to be scurrying to keep up with the larger ships. The imagery is spectacular but also grounded, suggesting that there's some kind of order and purpose to the ships' configurations and actions, even if it's a purpose that's obscure to those who witness these events.


Roy, along with fellow witness Jillian (Melinda Dillon), begins to get visions of a mountain that seems to have some importance to the aliens, but his family, especially his wife Ronnie (Teri Garr), is unsympathetic to his increasing obsession. Roy loses his job and begins spending his nights with fellow obsessives and curiosity-seekers, hoping to see something again, to get some confirmation that he wasn't just crazy. Nevertheless, there's more than a little humor in Spielberg's portrayal of Roy, who totally loses touch with ordinary day-to-day life in the aftermath of his "close encounter." At one point, Roy, finally having a clear vision of the mountain image he's been trying to capture, begins gathering plants and dirt and bricks from his yard, throwing them through the window into his house, as his distraught wife tries to stop him. He's oblivious, so caught up in his own excitement that he can't understand why no one else shares his thirst for answers. Later, after he's constructed a massive sculpture of the mountain in his living room, he looks out the window, his face covered in clay and grime, the mountain towering over his shoulder, and looks around at the beautiful sunny day outside. His wife and kids are gone, and his neighbors are playing and enjoying the day, puttering around in their gardens and playing with their children, and the contrast between inside the house and outside emphasizes the total disconnection that Roy feels. He's seen something he doesn't understand, and now he only wants, or needs, to know more, to make sense of it all.

At other times, Spielberg plays this confrontation between humanity and the aliens as a horror movie, as when the ships surround Jillian's house. She struggles to close everything off, to keep the aliens out, and Spielberg shoots the sequence as horror, emphasizing Jillian's fear, even while her son Barry is as excited and curious as Roy is. The boy opens the front door as his mother desperately struggles to close off the house, and outside the open field around their home has been transformed into a glowing orange landscape, alien and strange, infused with the light of the ships hovering above. In another shot, Spielberg shoots down a chimney as Jillian fumbles around inside, trying to close the flue; the point-of-view shot suggests that an alien is scurrying down the chimney towards her as her hand blindly flails about for the lever. Perhaps the most chilling image, though, is the shot of screws turning themselves, rising out of a floor grating and falling out to loosen the grate.

The film does such a good job of evoking complicated, contradictory emotions about the aliens that the ending, in which Spielberg finally reveals the aliens as a benevolent presence (one even smiles at Lacombe), can only be a disappointment. The film is about the unknown, about mystery and awe and the struggle to understand, and the final confrontation between the humans and the aliens preserves this sense of wonder and uncertainty right up until the moment when the aliens are revealed as the typical large-headed humanoid creatures that we've so often imagined them to be in popular representations. When the humans try to communicate with the aliens by using a musical language — not fully understanding what's being said except that some kind of back-and-forth communication is happening — that's beautiful and mysterious. The aliens, in their rubber costumes, obviously fake even when they're shot through a haze of light obviously intended to maintain some distance and mystery, are a bit of a letdown in comparison to the unsettling, wondrous effects that came before. Still, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a powerful, deeply affecting film that shares its protagonist's sense of gape-mouthed fascination with the prospect of life beyond Earth.

Inception

Christopher Nolan's Inception is a purposefully twisty film, a film that prides itself on its elaborate structure — a structure that exists on the meta-level of the narrative as well as constantly asserting itself within the film itself. Mirroring the film's plot about sci-fi thieves who enter people's dreams to steal (or plant) crucial bits of information, Nolan weaves through one layer of dreams/narrative after another, constantly sending his characters leaping from one false reality to another, and thrusting the audience through similarly discombobulating shifts. And yet, for all these dreams and dreams within dreams, and maybe dreams within dreams within dreams, the film telegraphs its supposedly most important revelations well ahead of time, and in the end all of its intricate structures and flashy surfaces seem designed to disguise the rather conventional story being told at its center.

Early on, after the dizzying, action-packed opening sequence, it becomes clear that Inception is at heart a heist picture. The ace dream "extractor" Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are hired to do a seemingly impossible job for the businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe): to plant an idea in the head of Saito's corporate rival, Fischer (Cillian Murphy). To do so, of course, Cobb and Arthur will need to gather a team, which triggers the obligatory extended sequence in which the pair goes around gathering together their fellow conspirators, including the "architect" Ariadne (Ellen Page), who will build the dreams, and the forger Eames (Tom Hardy), who will pose in other identities within the dreams. Once this team is assembled, the dream extractors enter the mind of Fischer, enacting an elaborate plan that involves putting the businessman to "sleep" multiple times, moving from one dream to another within his sleeping mind, constructing multiple layers of reality where the various characters are sleeping, dreaming within a dream, all while their "real" bodies are sleeping on a 747 bound for Los Angeles.

The bulk of the film is taken up by this complex web of dreams within dreams, and Nolan stages it all as an unrelenting action race against time. You see, Fischer had had training to protect against extraction, which means that his subconscious is "militarized," and that means that people are constantly shooting at the heroes. And if they die in the dream, they'll go into limbo, even though under normal circumstances they'd just wake up when "killed" in a dream. And... well, there's a lot more, but that's a big part of the problem. The film is awash in complex concepts and reversals, in intricate rules and exceptions to those rules. Mostly, though, it all just plays out as a big, thudding, deafening action extravaganza, like the wildest physics-defying action sequences from The Matrix stretched out to feature-length (kind of like The Matrix's sequels, come to think of it). When the extractors arrive in a dream layer that is, for some inexplicable reason, set in a snowy wilderness with a heavily defended fortress at the center, it seems less like a movie than a video game, maybe a level of a Call of Duty shoot-em-up. That's what the various dream layers start to feel like after a while, like levels in a game — and when you get right down to it, while it's lots of fun to play a video game, no one really likes watching someone else play a video game. Nolan is playing a very big, very expensive, very complicated video game here, and it's exhausting to watch him play it through to the last level.


All of Nolan's blaring action set pieces and dream levels would perhaps be more bearable if one sensed there was something of substance to be found by navigating this maze. But, much as in The Prestige, Nolan's last attempt at a "personal" interlude in between Batman films, all of the film's narrative shenanigans don't really add up to anything in the end. It seems like a superficial attempt to dazzle with complexity for its own sake, despite a conceit that's tailor-made for such narrative pyrotechnics. Comparing Inception or The Prestige to Nolan's breakthrough second film, Memento, it's obvious that what's really missing is a deeper emotional connection to the film's structural gimmicks. The reverse-time structure of Memento, so often wrongly derided as a shallow gimmick, was actually a clever and substantial way of reflecting not only the character's short-term memory loss, but the resulting disconnect between his morality, his actions, and his reasons for those actions. Cause and effect were reversed and disassociated for that film's protagonist, and the film's structure reflected that.

Inception is lacking in that kind of depth. Nolan's love of structural puzzles seems to have consumed him, to the extent that the gimmicks now drive the film, rather than allowing the narrative structure to be defined by the story's themes and characters. Cobb is driven by his relationship with his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), and their children, who he's been estranged from. His fixation on Mal and his desperation to get back to his children are his major motivating forces and, more or less, his only character traits. But there's no depth to these emotional foundations. The film slowly metes out pieces of information about Cobb's past with Mal, using this relationship as material for "twists" that are so broadly telegraphed they're never even the least bit surprising. What should be the film's emotional core winds up being used for shallow suspense, and it fails even at that. Mal is never fleshed out enough as a character to make her anything more than a plot device, despite Cotillard's best efforts to make the character interesting. That's typical of the film as a whole: the performances are fine and even effective, but the characters are largely non-entities, hurtling through the film's claptrap constructions without pausing to take a break. The characterization is so thin that it's refreshing when the actors do even something small to enliven their generally functional parts, like Ariadne's little satisfied smirk after Arthur uses a tired movie trick to steal a kiss. Any little scrap of emotion, anything that feels the least bit real, is to be cherished in a movie this empty.

Within this oft-dazzling but ultimately insubstantial film, there are powerful moments, most of them early on, when the film's grandiose dream imagery still feels relatively fresh. Too often, Nolan signifies the unlimited imaginative potential of dreams by, well, blowing lots of things up, but there's no denying that certain sequences are viscerally thrilling, like the scene where Ariadne first explores the dream world, changing its architecture around her, creating steps to walk up and using mirrors to craft whole new landscapes. Nolan doesn't move much beyond this visually, though. His film's vision of dreams is surprisingly staid and unimaginative, rooted more in other movies — the weightless kickboxing cribbed from The Matrix, the crumbling dystopian cities of countless sci-fi movies, the frenetic action movie chase scenes of James Bond or Jason Bourne — than in a real feel for dream logic or the surreal imagery of our minds. For a film about dreaming and reality, Nolan is dreaming surprisingly small, content to deliver predictable heist movie beats dressed up in a flashy surface that he presumably hopes will be mistaken for the substance missing from the film.

Minority Report

[This is a contribution to the Steven Spielberg Blogathon, hosted by Icebox Movies and Medfly Quarantine, running from December 18-28.]

It is fitting, and much remarked-upon, that for a film about seeing the future, eyes and vision are incredibly important to Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. The film literalizes the idea of seeing the future, removes the concept from the realm of the metaphysical and places it into the context of a gritty forensic police thriller. The future world it imagines, by way of Philip K. Dick, is one in which a trio of powerful precogs — savants with awesome mental abilities — are harnessed by the police department to prevent violent crimes before they happen. The precogs see — literally see — murders that are going to happen in the future, and their visions are harnessed through computers into video records that can then be played back, manipulated, and enhanced, their details thoroughly dissected by the precrime investigator John Anderton (Tom Cruise).

The business of cop shows, the sifting through of evidence and unearthing of clues, is translated into this futuristic milieu as Anderton analyzes these videos in order to discover the soon-to-occur murder's location and actors. Spielberg stages the introductory scene of Anderton leading an investigation as though the detective was conducting a symphony, using a complex computer system that responds to his every movement. He waves his hands and video fragments dash across the screen. Segments are looped and repeated, details are zoomed in on and snatches of sound are amplified, and every nuance of the video becomes a potential clue pointing towards the scene of the future crime. Detective work becomes a process of looking deeply and intently, examining the image — in other words, the detective becomes a figure analogous to a film editor, or perhaps a film critic, an analyzer of images, fitting together the bits and pieces of a scene in a way that makes sense and reveals the meaning of the scene.

The film's literalization of seeing the future is so potent because it's a metaphor or a model for the cinema, but even more poignantly it's compared to home movies. Anderton spends his days looking into the future, but his nights are spent immersed in the past, in home movie recordings of his young son, who disappeared and is presumed dead. We never say that we are seeing the past in the same way as we talk about seeing the future, but when we look at home movies or a photo album, we are in fact seeing the past, visually engaging with memories. When Anderton pulls up the footage of his son playing on the beach, selecting it from a larger collection like a connoisseur, he engages with it in much the same way as he does with the precogs' visions of the future: looping and rewinding, revisiting key passages as though hoping to extract some meaning, some tangible clue, from these images of his laughing, energetic son. It places Anderton's work in heartrending relief, as an effort to find the truth in these video images of the future, the truth that eludes and mystifies him when trying to make sense of the loss of his son through video records of the past.


The directive to look, to see deeply, is also central to the character of Agatha (Samantha Morton), the most powerful of the precogs. Agatha wants a witness, wants someone to look closely at a particular vision of hers, a vision of a crime that has long been thought "solved," the murder prevented before it happened. Agatha's quest becomes linked to Anderton's when Anderton sees himself in one of the precogs' visions, and sees his own name come up as the next would-be murderer for the police to apprehend. Anderton is forced to go on the run, eventually joined by Agatha, who he liberates from her weird imprisonment in the tanks that house the precogs and make them look like exhibits at an aquarium, an aspect of the whole precog system that everyone seems, curiously, morally blind to until Anderton rips Agatha out of this housing and is forced to confront her humanity.

That moral blindness is another form of seeing and not seeing, the motif that Spielberg seems fascinated with here. Is it really possible that this future society is so indifferent to the humanity of the precogs that a system where these people are permanantly chained, physically and mentally, to a computer system that channels their visions, is not only accepted but is soon to be unveiled on a larger scale? Before Anderton goes on the run, he and his fellow cops make some nods to the moral and philosophical dilemmas at the root of precrime — how do you arrest someone for a crime that hasn't actually occurred? — but they easily shake off the deeper doubts of FBI agent Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), dismissing his concerns as inconsequential whining. In (broad) contemporary political terms, Witwer is the bleeding-heart liberal concerned with rights and morality, while the rest of society seems poised to side with the law-and-order conservatives who view the sacrifice of these abstract values and ideals as secondary to the gains of preventing murders. Spielberg never taps too deeply into this subcurrent of the story, but it's there nevertheless, teasing just below the surface.

Instead, there's a lot more fun with eyes and seeing. Anderton, grieving for his son, buys his drugs from an eyeless man whose hollow, empty sockets unseeingly bore into the center of the suffering Anderton. Later, he goes on the run but his eyes identify him wherever he goes. In this future society, eyescans are so routine that even advertisements scattered around on billboards scan the eyes of passersby in order to target spoken ads at individuals. As a result, wherever Anderton goes, his name is being shouted out amidst cheery slogans; Big Brother sees him everywhere because big companies see him everywhere. There's something to be said here, probably, about the reversal of the usual couch potato dynamic of consumers staring at ads. Now the ads stare back, and get personal, the logical outgrowths of online ad targeting and spyware. Spielberg, again, doesn't really go there, just leaves it as intriguing loose thread. For him, the eyescans are a plot device, necessary to give Anderton an obstacle to overcome.


This problem results in the ingenious sequence where Anderton goes to a disreputable doctor who gives him an eye transplant, which in this society where eyes are the windows not only to the soul but to one's entire person, is the equivalent of a new name and a new identity. Spielberg stages a brilliant sequence where the blind and blindfolded Anderton, who has to shield his eyes for some time after the surgery, is forced to hide from an army of spider-like miniature police robots. Spielberg's camera follows the robots on their skittering journey through the dilapidated building where Anderton is hiding, the camera seeming to creep through walls, finally arriving at the room where Anderton tries to slow his pulse and hide his breathing by submerging himself in cold water, before being forced to reveal his new eyes for the robots to scan.

All of this is set-up and preparation for the film's best gag, the slapstick chase sequence between Anderton and his own eye, a slippery connection to his past identity that he finally holds onto by the barest thread. Literally. This sense of humor — black, grisly, sometimes positively naughty as in Anderton and Agatha's visit to a virtual reality sin palace — enlivens the film, as does Spielberg's predictably fluid action staging. Minority Report is tense and visceral, balancing man-on-the-run suspense with bursts of action and those moments of piquant humor that give this dark film a surprisingly playful sensibility.

The finale drives home the film's multiple takes on seeing — to see the future, to see the truth, and not always at the same time or in the same sense — while first imprisoning Anderton in a way that mirrors the fates of the precogs at the beginning of the film, then unleashing him for the climax. Spielberg, as always, can't resist tying things up for the finale, resolving the darker undercurrents of the film in a tidy denouement where the bad guy is caught, the precog program ended, and everything set right. The rest of the film raises unsettling propositions about justice and morality: that justice could miscarry; that the illusion of moral certitude is just that, an illusion; that predicting the future can be the same as creating it, as Anderton is, paradoxically, set on the path to murder by the prediction that he would commit a murder. The film's ending tiredly suggests a more benign justice that will, eventually, win out in the end, but the torturous, unlikely machinations required to reach this happy ending only wind up enforcing the limitations of justice and law. Spielberg, no matter how hard he tries, can't erase the disquieting implications of his own film, and Minority Report is all the richer for this final lingering tension.

Seconds

John Frankenheimer's Seconds is a strange, unsettling film that concerns itself with a primal desire: the fantasy of starting over, getting a second chance to do what one wants in one's life, to take on a new identity. However, the film only slowly reveals that this is its true subject. For much of its first act, its purpose is slipperier and harder to divine. The opening minutes of the film, after the trippy opening credits in which various facial features are warped and doubled, are dialogue-free and inscrutable, following an older man, Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph), through a train station where he receives a mysterious message. Frankenheimer employs intentionally destabilizing and self-consciously off-kilter camera angles that infuse a sense of mystery and suspense to these otherwise prosaic scenes. The camera reels drunkenly, and tracks fluidly in pursuit of men who seem to be floating above the ground rather than walking. At other times, the camera seems to be skittering along the ground from the point of view of a subway rat, darting beneath the legs of the crowd. This camera trickery creates a sense of mystery throughout the opening sequences, but not necessarily the right kind of mystery: one is left wondering why the camera is careening around so bizarrely, and what these dizzying perspectives could possibly mean.

Unfortunately, these are questions that Frankenheimer is never able to answer, but there's still something unsettlingly compelling about his showy aesthetics. Throughout the opening sequences, as Arthur gets mysterious calls from a supposedly dead friend and gets sucked into conversations with a strange underground company offering unsavory services, the film slips easily from reality to dreamlike states. At one point, Arthur, drugged and dazed, has a frightening dream of sexually assaulting a young woman, as the room warps and twists around him, perspective lines stretching like taffy until he seems to be trapped within a Daliesque landscape. When he wakes up, though, he only encounters some equally surreal, equally baffling touches, like an elevator that seems to be missing its call buttons and an inexplicable room full of silent men who steadfastly refuse to answer his questions.


The film doesn't quite settle down after this, but it does at least cohere into a plot whose contours can be grasped, at least broadly, and whose themes resonate with anyone who has ever regretted a choice or had ambitions that weren't fulfilled. Arthur, it seems, has been contacted by a company that offers middle-aged men a second chance at youth, and therefore at life: a new, younger face, a new life, a new career, a life without responsibilities or ties. Arthur undergoes surgery and awakes as Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), a painter who is already established in his career thanks to the company that performed the procedure. The company pitches it to Tony in an irresistible way: he doesn't have to prove himself, doesn't have to go through the hard, potentially dream-killing work of apprenticeship or early struggles. He is reborn into a fully established life, as a modestly successful painter with a nice flat in Miami, free to develop his skills — he'd always wanted to be a painter and now he was, at least in theory, free to be one.

The film's themes are compelling, and in several key scenes Frankenheimer probes these themes in emotionally resonant ways. The film's best scene is undoubtedly the one in which Tony returns to visit his old wife, Emily (Frances Reid), who believes Arthur to be dead. Posing as a friend of Arthur's, Tony asks Emily about her dead husband, and learns that she viewed her husband as something of a mystery, a blank and remote man who never opened up, who never emotionally connected to anyone around him, instead pouring himself into empty pursuits that she sensed didn't even mean anything to him. It is a devastating moment, and Frankenheimer shoots the scene with Emily in the background, facing a mirror and her husband's portrait on the mantel, while in the foreground Tony looks towards the camera, his eyes haunted by the realization of how badly he'd wasted his previous life, how completely he'd missed the point.


The film is at its best in moments like this, moments where Tony comes face to face with his wasted life, with the troubling question of what he could do differently when given a second chance. Equally affecting is Tony's reunion with his old friend Charlie (Murray Evans), who had also undergone the process, and like Tony had failed to really make a go of his second life. The two men meet and talk wistfully about what they'll do when offered a third chance, a third life and a third identity. This time, they say, they'll get it right, this time they'll be able to keep their priorities straight. There's something so poignant about the idea that even two chances aren't enough, that life is so difficult to navigate for these men that they've squandered their opportunities not just once but twice. It's a potent commentary on how difficult it can be to determine what one wants out of life, and it's especially moving when Charlie is called for what he believes to be his second operation, his third chance. There are tears in his eyes and a smile on his face as he looks at his friend, and walks off to be remade yet again, to finally get it right this time around. This moment becomes even more emotionally devastating when considered against the ending's recontextualization of what's actually going on in the waiting room where Charlie and Tony are reunited.

This is the core of Frankenheimer's film, but there's something unbalanced in the execution, perhaps because the film was compromised by studio interference, preventing Frankenheimer from completely communicating his vision. But the film as it exists now squanders too much time on oddball detours like the whole subplot involving Nora (Salome Jens), an exaggerated hippie "free spirit" who Tony meets in his new life, and who engages in such self-consciously arty behaviors as yelling at the ocean and attending a bacchanalian orgy complete with pan pipes and naked hippies. The orgy sequence, lengthy and raucous and over-the-top, is seemingly a frenzied attempt at demonstrating the empty indulgences and pleasures that Tony had been missing in his staid former life as Arthur, but it's overlong to make its point, and increasingly it's just grating, like so much involving Nora. In fact, the film too often seems to be meandering along like this, offering up strange diversions and sidetracks rather than cutting to the heart of the matter. What should be subplots or individual scenes at best wind up consuming the film for whole stretches of time, overshadowing the more compelling ideas that dance around the periphery.

Whether it's because of studio tinkering or Frankenheimer's simple inability to stay focused on his story's essence, Seconds remains a flawed but, at least sporadically, quite powerful film. Much of its power is certainly attributable to Rock Hudson's turn as the young, remade Tony. He occasionally goes over the top, as with everything else in this film, particularly in an exaggerated and loud drunk scene. More often, though, he delivers a nuanced, understated performance, suggesting with his sad eyes and pensive expressions the turmoil of a man who finds that even two chances aren't enough to achieve the life he wants — and that, in fact, the problem is perhaps that he doesn't really have any idea what he does want. It's this feeling of perpetual dissatisfaction and confusion that drives Seconds, even during those stretches when it threatens to go off the rails into self-consciously "arty" indulgence.

World on a Wire

World on a Wire is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's mind-bending sci-fi epic, a two-part, over three-hour examination of the nature of reality, thought and perception. Based on Daniel Galouye's sci-fi novel Simulacron 3, the film is concerned with the creation of simulated computer worlds, populated with synthetic, programmed beings unaware that they're living in a virtual reality rather than a tangible flesh-and-blood world. Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) is appointed to become the technical director for this "simulacron" computer system after the project's previous administrator seemingly has a mental breakdown before dying in an accident. Almost immediately, however, Stiller is subjected to tremendous pressures and odd incidents relating to the computer and the company he's working for. There's some kind of industrial intrigue going on — the company's director, Siskins (Karl Heinz Vosgerau) wants to use the computer to benefit his corporate friends — and bizarre events make Stiller doubt his own sanity. A man (Ivan Desny) tries to tell Stiller about the strange circumstances of his predecessor's death, only to disappear into thin air — and soon enough, no one even remembers that this man ever existed. Stiller experiences other strange visions, and is beset by crippling headaches almost constantly, quickly developing a paranoid outlook that encompasses nearly every moment of his day and everyone he meets.

It's obvious enough where all of this is heading, even before Fassbinder explicitly states the twist in the final scene of the first part. Yet the film's careful study of the layers of reality remains engrossing, because Fassbinder's visual mastery is at its highest level here. There is little in the plot to justify the film's length, and the characters are, for the most part, doll-like ciphers prone to staring emptily into space, posing within Fassbinder's meticulously arranged compositions, caught in frames of mirrors, remaining static as the camera turns circles around them. Fassbinder underlines the film's central theme of perception by continually distorting and reflecting his images, emphasizing how what we see is dependent on the angle from which we're looking. In the film's opening scenes, Stiller's predecessor Vollmer (Adrian Hoven) accosts two government representatives, asking them to look at themselves in a handheld mirror and describe what they see. They are not really themselves, he says, they are just images, images imagined by other people. Even beyond the film's sci-fi premise, this idea resonates: each person is the culmination of images created and maintained in the minds of others, and what we see when we look in the mirror is not necessarily what others see when they look at us.


To this end, Fassbinder inventively packs his film with mirrors and distortions. In his melodramas, such devices are stylized routes into character, picked up from Sirk, a way of positioning characters in abstracted relationships to one another, capturing two reactions in the same frame. Here, the perpetual mirroring emphasizes how fragile vision is, how easily it is subjected to distortions. When Stiller goes to see Siskins one afternoon in the latter's office, Siskins has a tremendous glass funnel perched on top of his desk. The curved glass distorts Siskins' face, rendering him at times multi-eyed and blurry, almost insectile, his smirk stretched out so that it seems to stretch across his entire face. It's a subjective image of Stiller's boss, a collection of attributes rather than a coherent image of a face. In the reverse shot, when Fassbinder turns the camera onto Stiller instead, his face is reflected in the shiny surface of the desk, but chopped in half, only his eyes looking out hauntingly as though trapped within this reflective prison, his mouth and the lower half of his face cut off by the desk's edge. The boss is distorted and magnified, his all-seeing eyes multiplied, while the employee is made voiceless and trapped; the mirrors don't lie.

Unless, sometimes, they do. Later Siskins visits the computer lab — with its funhouse mirror walls and clusters of TV screens — to watch a computer doppelganger of himself perform a song-and-dance routine as programmed by Stiller. Fassbinder frames the image so that we see the the TV monitor, and Siskins' warped reflection next to it, and layered on top of this, Siskins' back as he watches the screen. It's a man and, essentially, two false doppelgangers of himself, one computer-created and one a blurred reflection of himself stretched out across the wavy surface of the wall. Still another form of mirroring exists in the scene where Stiller goes to visit his sick secretary Maya (Margrit Carstensen). She is lying down, looking at herself in a mirror to put on lipstick, but because the mirror is two-sided, the side facing the camera actually reflects the offscreen Stiller. One side of the mirror then presumably shows her, while he appears in the other, so that the mirror becomes a link between them, their reflections joined like the image of Janus, two sides of the same head. The mirror divides and distorts, it reveals the truth, it connects people and shatters the illusion of a smooth, tangible reality. When Vollmer dies at the beginning of the film, he is seen through a sheet of cracked glass, as though reality itself has been broken by his departure from it.


Fassbinder makes these examinations of sensation and perception the film's true focal point. The ostensible thriller plot is inert, and the corporate intrigue simply seems irrelevant, to the point that when Stiller finds out the answers to questions relating to the corporate politics, rather than the more metaphysical mysteries he's really interested in, he simply laughs. There is an analogue here for those religious and philosophical ideas that insist that the world is essentially an illusion, or at best a warm-up for the afterlife. If the world is not real, or is only a secondary stage of reality, if the "true" life is on a higher plane of reality, it renders the physicality and events of the world somewhat moot. Once Stiller begins to believe that his world is only an illusion that's secondary to another world, he ceases to care about any of the things had previously occupied his attention: job, friends, love, even life and death itself. Does the world become irrelevant in comparison to the idea of Heaven? This would explain Stiller's "ascent" at the finale of the film.

So Fassbinder makes the whole film one big visual metaphor, his camera moves mapping out Stiller's quest for truth. During a meeting with Siskins and a government official, Stiller wanders around the large space of the office, swinging around on a chair in the foreground, then flinging open a pair of unusual double doors, the kind usually seen between neighboring suites in hotels. Finally, he appears again at the rear of the space, visible only from a distance in a mirror. It's like he's constantly searching, always peeking behind the doors, into closed-off rooms. He does a lot of spinning around in chairs too, like a bored and restless kid, eager to discover something new, or simply a man who wants to see the fullest possible 360-degree view of his surroundings. In one of the film's most playful scenes, Siskins and Stiller conduct an entire conversation while they're both spinning around in their chairs, rendering office politics goofy and funny.

These oddball touches, like a dance club populated with muscular Arab models and topless dancers, give the film its distinctively surreal Fassbinderian aura. It's a weird and disjointed film, perhaps a little repetitive, padded out with multiple scenes of Stiller trying to explain his theories to skeptical listeners. But the characters, flat as they are, make an impact, because Fassbinder has developed such a versatile troupe of actors that even when most of them are just making token cameo appearances (Eddie Constantine as a dapper but sinister businessman; Kurt Raab as Stiller's bald, oafish office rival; El Hedi ben Salem as a quiet, sensitive bodyguard) they are vivid and memorable. This is a fascinating experiment from Fassbinder, transplanting his usual cast and his Sirkian aesthetic strategies into the unfamiliar genre of the sci-fi thriller, with very compelling results.

Charleston Parade/The Little Match Girl

Charleston Parade is a totally bonkers short silent film from Jean Renoir, a nutso little experimental showcase for the animalistic eroticism of his wife, Catherine Hessling. The short is set in the then-distant future of 2028, a time in which, apparently, Europe has descended into apocalyptic disrepair while Africa is ascendant, its people traveling in globe-shaped UFO-like vehicles that hover through the air. Johnny Huggins plays an African explorer visiting the wasteland of Paris in just such a ship, and encountering the local savage Hessling, clad in skimpy shreds of lingerie and leering at him with a frankly lascivious interest. The film's conceit is especially interesting for its era since it more or less reverses the typical depictions of black men and white women in films of the time. Huggins plays in minstrel makeup, his big white lips often the only part of his face that shows up in the low-contrast images, but the film's narrative has the white woman feverishly pursuing the frightened black man for a change. She chases him with abandon and even ties him to a lamppost. The film doesn't exactly overturn stereotypes — Huggins' performance is pure minstrel show slapstick — but it does place them front and center for examination.

None of which should imply that Charleston Parade is a serious work about race, stereotypes, or anything else. It is, more than anything, a deeply goofy, silly film, an opportunity for Hessling to really cut loose and for Renoir to indulge in some of his more playful sensibilities. The depictions of Hessling seducing Huggins by performing a rough, sensual Charleston dance are particularly fun, as Renoir subtly slows the images into a sinuous, snake-like motion as Hessling sways and wiggles, kicking her legs high and leaping into the air like a frog. At the climax, when Hessling and Huggins perform the dance together, the images become frenzied and wild, as Renoir cuts in shots of the dancers' feet as they twirl and encircle each other, their feet bouncing wildly around.

There's also a playful crudeness to many of the effects shots, from the opening model shots of the explorer's aircraft taking off to the inserts of "angels" portrayed as disembodied heads with small wings floating beneath them; Renoir himself appears among the angels at one point, mugging broadly. At one point, Hessling hears a phone ringing, so she draws a phone on the wall in chalk, and when she's finished an actual phone fades into view atop the drawing so she can answer it. Later, when she's preparing to leave, her coat and umbrella sashay along the ground towards her, the coat crawling up to wrap itself around her and the umbrella leaping into her waiting hand. There's an offhand magic to these rough shots that's charming; the same goes for Hessling's playmate, a man in a grotesque ape costume who dances the Charleston along with her and weeps when she's about to leave. These images reveal a spirit of play and weird humor in Renoir that would later manifest itself in his kindred spirit antiheroes like Boudu. Charleston Parade is an oddity from Renoir, but it's a compelling and enjoyable oddity.


The Little Match Girl is another short silent film from Jean Renoir, based on the Hans Christian Anderson fable and starring Renoir's wife Catherine Hessling as a poor match seller named Karen. She is sent out by her family on a cold night to sell matches, but she can't find any business and she suffers in the cold and the snow, assaulted by boys with snowballs, ignored by potential upper-class customers, freezing in the dark as she peers into bright, warm, lively shops and pubs where people laugh and eat and drink. It is a maudlin but nonetheless effective piece of humanist social realism, contrasting the suffering of the poor match girl, who no one cares about, against the security and comfort of those who pass her by in the snowy streets. There is one especially potent shot in which Karen is scrambling around on the ground in front of a restaurant, desperately gathering up her wares after they've been knocked away by the boys who pelted her with snowballs. A policeman arrives and chases the boys away, then walks towards Karen. Renoir remains at ground level with Karen, on all fours in the snow, and behind her the policeman's clean, shiny boots pass by, then stop, not to help Karen, but to talk with the restaurant's owner, who had been hit with one snowball when she briefly came outside to yell at the boys for hitting her windows. The shot is utterly heartbreaking: Karen in despair on the ground, while the figure of authority, his boots in the background of the shot, ignores her to comfort the comparatively uninjured upper-class shop owner.

At around the short's halfway mark, this mix of hard realism with broad sentimentality — the match girl peering wistfully through the frosted windows of a restaurant — gives way to the crude effects and whimsical tone that Renoir also utilized in Charleston Parade. At this point, it would seem, the film becomes a surreal fantasy, a dreamlike imagining as the match girl, freezing in the snow, desperately trying to warm herself with the tiny flickering flames of her matches, instead dreams of happier things. She steps into a giant-sized toy shop, where she wanders among the toys as they come to life: ballet dancers dance, a shaggy stuffed dog balances a ball on its nose, and toy soldiers march in formation. The rough stop-motion animation effects are compelling, but what's really interesting and affecting about this diversion is that Renoir doesn't allow the fantasy to be a complete escape from reality. Although these animations are charming and playful, they are also poignant; as Karen is dancing through gauzy white curtains or juggling, or watching the toy soldiers march, it's impossible to forget that she's actually lying in the snow, alone and forgotten, losing herself in hallucinations brought on by starvation and frostbite.

In that respect, even as the film becomes a fantastical farce on its surface, it retains its edge of despairing realism: Karen has chosen to retreat from reality rather than face it any longer. It is a film above giving up, about losing one's grip on life, and this sobering undercurrent runs through even the most playful moments of the fantasy segment. Towards the end of this sequence, Renoir turns back to darker territory, introducing a toy soldier with a skull and crossbones on his hat and bone ribbing on his jacket. That's right: this film features Death as a toy soldier, pursuing Karen and her protector, another soldier, in a horse chase across the sky. The film's denouement transitions smoothly from the whimsy and escapism of Karen's wistful fantasy into a startlingly poignant depiction of the journey into the afterlife, as the dark soldier, this icon of death, throws Karen's lifeless body across his black mount and rides through the clouds with her. The rough superimpositions of these images lend a quality of eerie minimalism to the fantasy's final moments — culminating in Death, previously a forbidding, villainous figure, tenderly laying Karen down on a cliff edge beside a cross which then morphs into a budding bush. Then, the return from fantasy to the cold harshness of reality in the film's final moments only underscores that even this romantic vision of death is far from reality: the truth is sadder, more pathetic, without the heroic adventure of Karen's dream death. This is a poignant, moving, evocative short from Renoir, the cinema's premier humanist delivering a powerful depiction of how social class dictates life and death.

The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D.

The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. is the new IFC.com web series from comic artist Dash Shaw, representing his first venture into an animated series after establishing himself as one of modern comics' most innovative and unusual formalists. The series, which can be viewed in its entirety for free at the IFC site, consists of four episodes, each roughly two minutes long, applying Shaw's characteristic style — a blend of clean-line cartooning, diagrammatic precision, and stylistic collage — to the animated form. Shaw is an astonishingly precocious young artist, who in the last few years has progressed from the sketchy but intriguing formalism of his short story collection Goddess Head to the fully flowering imagination on display in his 700-page tour-de-force family drama Bottomless Belly Button and, more salient to this film, in the online strip Bodyworld and his sci-fi contributions to the Mome anthology. It's the style of these stories, which exploit Shaw's idiosyncratic use of color overlays, that directly led to the style of The Unclothed Man.

The Unclothed Man, like most of Shaw's work, is concerned first and foremost with ways of visually representing complex and difficult-to-express ideas, with ways of looking at and understanding the world. As in Shaw's very similar Mome stories, the film uses a slim sci-fi premise as a hook to examine an unusual experience and its effect on the human body and mind. Shaw is continually dissecting experiences, stretching out time so that each component of a moment might be studied in depth. In Bodyworld, he portrays the subjectivity of drug experiences and various metaphysical states, while some of his short stories deal with intradimensional travel and overlapping worlds. In Bottomless Belly Button, the anthropomorphized appearance of one character — in a cast otherwise consisting of humans — is a reflection of that character's opinion of himself, his feeling of being an outcast.


In The Unclothed Man, these tropes play out in the way Shaw examines the experience of modeling for an art class while trying to maintain a rigid, unmoving posture. The film's hero is a rebel agent in a future where human-like droids have taken over many routine tasks, including that of modeling for artists. As part of an anti-droid rebel resistance, the hero Rebel X-6 poses as a droid in an art class, shaving himself and taking pills to maintain a stiff, robot-like stasis. The second episode, in which X-6 poses nude for a drawing class, breaks down his experience with a montage of body parts, each one accompanied by pop-up captions describing the sensations coursing through his body, as the art style gracefully shifts between various modes, from charcoal shading to Photoshop-style filters, reflecting the ease with which the future's artistic processes allow artists to mold their computer-generated "drawings."

It's this fluidity that makes The Unclothed Man so dazzling and exciting. Shaw juxtaposes different styles within the frame, allowing his more cartoony characters — like the big-nosed art class instructor, a callback to old-school newspaper comic stereotypes — to clash against the mannequinesque minimalism of his central character or the wavy, giraffe-like curves of the drawing student who takes a special interest in X-6. Similarly, various emotional and physical states interweave in interesting ways, so that a scene that might at first seem to be an objective observation from a distance opens up into an examination of X-6's inner reactions and psychological/physical responses. The second episode closes with "a dream," in which abstract designs swirl and congeal into Freudian psychosexual images, Masonic/conspiratorial symbology, and eventually a maze of cartoon symbols, the building blocks of a drawn language. It's all very self-consciously about representing ideas and emotions through the drawing, through the line and the symbol; the words "a dream" themselves, placed before this sequence, quickly morph into rows of teeth as the boxes surrounding the words form the outline of a mouth.


As far as incident goes, the film's plot is almost inanely simple, and the brief "synopses" included with each episode mock the film's plotless ambling. It's all so much more about the imagery and internal wanderings triggered by the basic situation. In the first episode, we're introduced to Rebel X-6 through one of his missions-in-progress, which plays out in a mix of conventional animation with interludes that mimic old text-based computer games, with blocky computer type scrolling across the screen. The mission apparently consists of the rebel destroying a droid outpost using something called a "black hole mouth," but Shaw introduces high-concept sci-fi accoutrements like this only as an excuse to display some stunning imagery, in this case the rebel spaceman floating through the void, sucking an orbiting satellite into a swirl of color that streams into his mouth like water down a drain hole. Space, in Shaw's conception, looks like a crayoned child's drawing. His sense of color, always strong, is especially vivid at moments like this, when what's actually happening becomes abstracted into blocks of pure color. Later in the episode, Shaw details X-6's preparations for his modeling assignment, particularly his process of shaving: a closeup looks like the diagrammatic inserts in a Schick commercial, showing the blades of a razor plucking hairs from their pores. These micro-processes interest Shaw, who's always examining what's going on with his protagonist at the physiological level, whether it's his struggle not to sweat (droids don't sweat!) or his paranoia about a non-existent pimple that might break his cover.

Other episodes are similarly introspective and devoid of drama. The second episode concerns itself with X-6's subjective experience of posing, the creation of art in the technology-driven 35th Century, and X-6's symbolic dream. In the third episode, X-6 as a model droid unexpectedly forms a connection with an artist, and passes out from the physical strain of modeling. This tirggers another subjective abstraction, as his fainting spell is visualized by Rothko-like color fields blurring and overlapping. He then finds himself in a room that's like a catalogue of 20th Century art, culture, technology and design, the past encroaching upon the future. It seems the artist who's interested in X-6 has a nostalgic tendency, a desire for a connection with the past that's otherwise absent in this obsessively forward-looking culture. Finally, in the fourth episode, mirroring the first, X-6 reveals himself as an anti-droid rebel and once again utilizes his "black hole mouth," sucking in an entire world, blurring everything together as though mixing paints. This time, though, the act of destruction becomes a metaphor for sexuality, for union as mouths and tongues join together into one form, one drawing.


The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. is a fascinating first animated work from one of today's most original and unusual artists. Shaw adapts well from the comics page to the cinematic form. His animation (assisted by Jane Samborski, working from Shaw's drawings) is sometimes stiff and overly static, and some of his "camera" moves are slightly awkward, betraying the fact that Shaw is a newcomer to cinema. He sometimes seems to be still rooted in comics, as his heavy reliance on text suggests; to be fair, though, the text is in nearly every case inventively incorporated into the image, as one more visual element, rather than treated simply as a way to tell the story without dialogue or spoken narration. There's very little spoken dialogue in the film, just a few garbled transmissions from X-6's superiors, but strangely enough one hardly misses it. The low-key soundtrack, by James Lucido, is in any case a perfect complement to Shaw's immersive images.

In other ways, too, Shaw brings to animation the same restless curiosity about form that runs through all his comics work. At one point, conveying movement, he has a character race across the frame, and surrounds him with an arrow-shaped border, blending the kinetic language of film with the static, symbolic language of comics. The arrow, strictly unnecessary to convey motion since the character is actually moving, works instead as a meta intrusion, a reminder of the film's obsession with expressing abstract concepts and subjective experiences visually. At the end of the sequence, as a flying ship crashes to ground, the arrow condenses into a tiny irregular triangle, a slash of visible space within a black void.

Though Shaw is only just beginning to explore animation, The Unclothed Man already displays evidence of the cartoonist's affinity for animation. Almost as well as his comics, this film expresses Shaw's ongoing desire to look at the world from a slightly askew perspective, to express his fascination with the complexity of people's inner universes. Thus, sci-fi is perhaps the perfect genre for him, even though he's suggested that after this film he's going to abandon sci-fi for at least a while. The form allows him to map his visualizations of inner realities onto various equally stylized outer realities, whether that's the black of space, temporal intersection points, or the distant future. Shaw's first animated film is very much worth viewing for anyone interested in checking out one of modern art's freshest and most consistently challenging new artists. As a bonus, IFC has made available, as "extras," a complete Shaw comic (Look Forward, First Son of Terra Two, from Mome) and several wallpapers (including nice tributes to Gus Van Sant and Guy Maddin). Of course, as welcome as these extra tidbits are, it's the film itself — a probing, emotional examination of what it means to make art and to forge meaningful human interactions — that should be the main draw.

The Box

Although Richard Kelly's third movie The Box has been advertised as an edgy thriller, an attempt for the director to claim some mainstream cred after the lackluster response to his messy, ambitious (and sadly undervalued) Southland Tales, this film merely confirms that Kelly is incapable of making anything as neat and tidy as a conventional thriller. This is both to his credit and his detriment. The Box is a deeply strange and broken movie, seeped in Kelly's Lynchian influence, which is still almost wholly undigested. He skillfully apes the patterns of Lynchian dialogue, the off-kilter conversational rhythms and deadened, eerie silences, and like Lynch's movies, Kelly's seem to take place in some slightly out-of-whack suburban American netherworld. The Box is set in Kelly's alternate reality 1970s Richmond, Virginia, a sleepy satellite to the government NASA, CIA and NSA outlets at Langley and other Washington suburbs. Here, government bureaucrats speak in clipped, enigmatic tones, and scenes play out in the kind of strange in-between state where it's not clear if they're meant to be dramatic or ironic.

In this sitcom suburb, married couple Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) are living out a postcard suburban existence with their young son (Sam Oz Stone). He's a low-level NASA grunt who wants to be an astronaut, and she's an English teacher. Sure, they're struggling, but they're reasonably happy. Then their quiet life with its modest troubles is disrupted by the appearance of Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), a former NASA scientist who lost half his face in a lightning strike and seems to have emerged from the experience mysteriously changed. Now he visits the houses of randomly selected couples, many of them NASA employees, and posits a moral dilemma for them. He gives them a plain wooden box with a big red button on top, and tells them that if they press the button, they will receive a million dollars in cash and someone they don't know will die. It is, quite obviously, a very basic moral quandary, the kind at the heart of many classic science fiction stories, or stuff like The Twilight Zone (which indeed once based an episode on the same Richard Matheson short story that Kelly takes as his source here). It is a moral test: will these ordinary, relatively happy people reveal their constant desire for more, their dissatisfaction with their seemingly contented existences? Moreover, as Arthur asks when wrestling with whether or not to push the button, what does it really mean to "know" another person; the film posits webs of unseen and unimagined connections between unrelated people.

That reference to science fiction isn't offhand, either. After a first half that treats this intriguing premise in a relatively straightforward way, the film increasingly goes off the rails, spiraling into absurdity and loony sci-fi pseudo-philosophy. Much like Kelly's breakthrough debut Donnie Darko, come to think of it. Kelly seems irresistibly drawn to these kinds of metaphysical loops and narrative disjunctions. As the film progresses, it turns from a straightforward moral thriller into something else entirely, and the more Kelly's script tries to explain what's going on here, the more confusing and ridiculous the film becomes. The second half of the film somehow both explains too much and too little, spelling out the ideas — like the fact that the box is a morality test — that should have been left between the lines, while also tangling the plot up in a convoluted muddle. The film is bursting with ideas, both visual and philosophical, and Kelly leaps from one thing to the next without ever quite settling into one mode. The film is at its best when it's simply building suspense and tossing off inspired bits of nonsense left and right, crafting creepy and mysterious images. Kelly builds the film on what initially seem like non sequiturs, like Norma's creepy student (Ian Kahn) who humiliates her in class with a sinister leer. Or the sporadic appearance of people suffering unexplained nosebleeds, which at first seems like just another bizarre Lynchian touch before Kelly folds it into his nutty plot as well. Or the snippet we glimpse of a rather unlikely school play: a performance of Sartre's No Exit, references to which recur throughout the film.

This plot is, as the film goes on, more and more just a series of weird metaphysical flourishes and absurd sequences, with Norma and Arthur going in circles as the weird occurrences pile up. Along the way, Kelly does come up with a number of striking images, like the sequences of Langella's earnestly unsettling Steward presiding over a massive wind tunnel that he's made his base of operations. Elsewhere, Arthur walks into a column of viscous jelly-like fluid and emerges floating above his wife in bed. These moments are best appreciated as outbursts of goofy surrealism, since trying to fit this all together into a coherent whole is headache-inducing and not especially satisfying.

Despite all this, Kelly undoubtedly has real affection for these characters. He shares his idol Lynch's knack for infusing what might've been cardboard archetypes — a chipper middle American working class family straight from sitcom TV — with unexpected emotional depth. There's real feeling in a shot where Arthur sits on the bed, casually placing a present behind him, as his wife dresses in the next room. The scene where he actually gives her this present — a handmade experimental prosthetic to ease the pain on her radiation-deformed foot — would have been maudlin and melodramatic coming from a director without Kelly's precisely calibrated balance between ironic distance and emotional engagement. Kelly manages to make this marriage feel simultaneously like an unreal dream, overblown and kitschy, and also a real relationship. This pays off in the stunning — and stunningly manipulative — finale, which is both blatant tearjerking and a harrowing denouement. As with so many aspects of this film, it's hard to know what to think about this ending, whether the aggravation of its very obvious manipulation is earned by the emotional connection between Norma and Arthur or not.

As a whole, The Box is an uneven and compromised third feature from Kelly, who continues to display a genuinely interesting sensibility without quite making a film that's satisfying or coherent from start to finish. He's still working through his Lynch obsession, and still struggling to get his ideas onto the screen intact. One senses that the film was so much clearer in Kelly's head than it is in practice. Ultimately, it's a failure — certainly a failure in terms of creating a potential box office blockbuster, if that was the aim — but it's an interesting, ambitious failure, and that at least counts for something.

Hollow Man

Hollow Man was the last of Paul Verhoeven's run of Hollywood genre films, made following the lackluster reception of his previous two pictures, Showgirls and Starship Troopers. Both of those box office flops were later reappraised by various audiences as trashy cult/camp successes or genuine masterpieces, but that doesn't seem likely to happen for Hollow Man, which similarly flopped upon release but seems to reveal the director reaching the limits of his interest in making this kind of film within Hollywood. That's a shame, because the film's concept is certainly the kind of thing one would expect Verhoeven to eagerly embrace, to transform into the kind of morally ambiguous, pulpy genre deconstruction/celebration that he does best. Instead, while the film is good — even bracingly potent — in isolated stretches, it's sabotaged at every turn by indifferent scripting, disconnected acting, and one of the most absurd action denouements in Verhoeven's career. The film introduces some interesting concepts, some tantalizing hints of the film Verhoeven at his best could make of this material, and then destroys everything in a raging inferno.

The film is the story of government research scientist Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon), who's leading a project to discover a way to make people invisible. Naturally, once he's perfected the process, or believes he has, he wants to switch from testing the procedure on apes to, in the grand tradition of movie mad scientists, volunteering himself as the first human test subject. It's a heady concept, and Verhoeven hints right from the beginning that the film's going to be about Sebastian exploring his darkest impulses without moral accountability. Even before he turns invisible, Sebastian is kind of a jerk, a brilliant guy who treats his co-workers with barely disguised contempt, particularly the women, with the one exception of his ex-girlfriend Linda (Elisabeth Shue), who he treats just slightly better because he'd like to sleep with her again. He's also a voyeur, habitually spying on a woman who lives across the street from his apartment; she generously feeds his voyeurism by stripping down to her lingerie every night, tantalizing him, before closing the shades to finish undressing. It's obvious, then, what kinds of things Sebastian will want to do once he's invisible. This is a classic pulp premise, the invisible man who primarily uses his gift so he'll get to see lots of naked women.

To some extent, Verhoeven delivers on this premise, having Sebastian immediately abuse his power for sexual thrills. Tellingly, it's not being invisible per se that gets him off, but the ability to do what he wants without being held accountable. His first sexual assault, walking up to a sleeping girl and unbuttoning her blouse, doesn't necessarily require him to be invisible in order to do it. The invisibility comes in handy only when she wakes up, so he can escape literally unseen. Being invisible doesn't so much open up new things for him to do, it merely allows him to do what he already could've done, except now he can do it assured that he won't get caught. The moral dilemma at the story's core, then, is the question of whether morality disappears with the possibility of punishment and accountability: if a man can do what he wants without anyone ever seeing him do it, what will he do? Unfortunately, Verhoeven seems largely uninterested in these questions, or at least uninterested in the possibility of exploring them in this particular movie. Instead, the film rapidly degenerates into a rather typical, if particularly lousy, horror film.

The second half of the film does have some inventive, tense horror sequences, in which Sebastian stalks his fellow scientists after trapping them in the underground bunker where they work. These sequences revolve around the clever back-and-forth as Sebastian tries to maintain his edge of invisibility, while the other scientists attempt to find ways to track him, from spraying him with various substances to using heat and motion sensors. These scenes have the claustrophobic intensity of something like Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World, one obvious touchstone among many similar films where a group of potential victims are trapped in an enclosed, inescapable space with a killer. But as good as these scenes sometimes are as slasher/victim duels, it can't help but be disappointing that Verhoeven abandons his premise's moral concepts for such generic fare. Moreover, the final twenty minutes are an absolutely torturous attempt at a big action finale, in which Sebastian seems miraculously unkillable as explosions fill the underground complex. This ridiculous final battle all takes place in an elevator shaft where the last surviving protagonists, Linda and her scientist boyfriend Matt (Josh Brolin) struggle to escape and fight off the half-materialized Sebastian while an elevator literally bounces up and down the shaft, rocketing around crazily amidst the flames. It's a mess, a halfheartedly assembled compendium of action movie clichés that definitively erases any possibility that the film could have redeemed itself with its conclusion.


The film has other problems, too. One of these is that Sebastian is such a jerk to begin with that his gradual transformation into an even bigger jerk isn't really that interesting or morally complex. This should be a Jeckyll and Hyde story, a story about the dark impulses contained in all men, but in this case it's not exactly shocking when we learn that this sexist asshole is capable of rape, sexual assault and murder once he's invisible. The film's subtexts about male sexual voracity are poorly developed to begin with, limited to a handful of throwaway scenes, like the one where Sebastian's fellow scientist Carter (Greg Grunberg) is caught reading a porn magazine and talking dirty to the pictures. If the script, by Air Force One scribe Andrew W. Marlowe, intends this stuff to be a clever way of showing that all men are pigs, let's just say it doesn't work.

In fact, the script is arguably responsible for much of the film's failure, in that it takes a striking premise and then slowly, methodically, wears away anything that might be interesting about it, replacing it with clichés. The dialogue is almost unrelentingly generic, riddled with awkward phrasing and lines of almost astonishing mundanity. It's the kind of script that sabotages any possibility of meaningful acting, and the cast mostly responds by not really bothering to act. Bacon is a sneering cipher, and then he disappears altogether, spending most of the film unseen, acting from behind a rubber mask or various CGI effects. But even then he's not nearly as bad as Shue's sniveling, characterless Linda, who keeps giving in to steamy moments with her former lover Sebastian and then pulling back at the last moment to show she's a good girl after all. She's cheery and empty, while Brolin's Matt is stoic and empty, and most of the rest of the cast are just warm bodies, biding their time in waiting for the slasher finale. Only Kim Dickens, as the veterinarian Sarah, turns in a decent performance, emanating the low-key bitchy resentment that Verhoeven has always seemed to cherish in his female characters.

On the positive side, the film does make interesting use of its special effects. The CGI used here hasn't dated well, as tends to be the case with CGI, and the effects have a blatant unreality that makes them look cartoony. Even so, there's a real sense of wonder to scenes like the one in which an invisible gorilla rematerializes one layer at a time: first its veins become visible, its neural pathways, its muscles and organs, its skeleton, the layers of skin piling on before finally reaching its hairy exterior. Even with effects that today look substandard, the scene amply captures the sense of magic and awe in this scene. Later, when the effect is reversed for the scene where Sebastian disappears, it's equally powerful and unsettling, an image of the human body peeled away layer by layer, revealing what's inside, making us tick, and then obscuring all of those innards as well.

The film comes alive in moments like this. It comes alive, too, in a scene preceding Sebastian's disappearing act, when, in the hallway leading to the lab, Sebastian tells an astonishingly dirty joke. It involves Superman, a nude sunbathing Wonder Woman, and an invisible man, and it neatly encapsulates the film's anxiety about what men will do when granted power and true freedom from responsibility. It's a joke about what happens when someone can do something without anyone ever knowing, and its twist relies on the fact that while Sebastian is telling the joke, the audience suspects that he's implicitly comparing himself to Superman; after all, he's always joking that he's playing God. But it turns out that he doesn't aspire to be Superman, and despite his patter he doesn't really think he's God either. He just wants to be the invisible man. He aspires to be a man shorn of the moral responsibility that comes with having a face, a tangible presence in the world. This lewd, tasteless joke is one of the film's best, most revelatory moments. It's very tempting to attribute it to Verhoeven; it seems impossible that it could be a product of the same script that is everywhere else so lifeless, humorless, and blind to the ideas and possibilities embedded in this material.

The film is undoubtedly a failure, and it's probably no coincidence that after this Verhoeven finally departed from Hollywood, returning to the Netherlands to make his next feature, the creatively rejuvenating Black Book. Hollow Man, though interesting at times, reveals the limits of Verhoeven's ability to play around within Hollywood genre tropes. He seems constrained by his material, prevented from really taking this story to its naturally lurid, morally inquisitive excesses. And a reined-in, neutered Verhoeven is a director who has had his best tools and resources stripped away from him.

Total Recall

Total Recall was Paul Verhoeven's second movie in Hollywood, following up on the blunt, ultraviolent satire of RoboCop with an even loonier, more abrasive vision of totalitarian control. The film, loosely drawing its inspiration from a Philip K. Dick short story, imagines a future in which Mars has been colonized as a mining colony, producing a metal that is much in demand on Earth. The whole operation is presided over by the power-hungry Cohaagen (Ronny Cox), who maintains an iron grip on Mars by tightly controlling the air supply doled out to the inhabitants of the red planet, who live in specially controlled domes. If they want to live, they'll breath the air Cohaagen supplies — at a price, of course. It's a perfect situation for a would-be tyrant: complete control over people's very lives. His subjects need to bow to him just to survive, and there's no bargaining when it comes to a necessity like air, especially when Cohaagen's the only supplier.

As in RoboCop, Verhoeven is depicting a model for how a future authoritarian state might emerge — seizing control of natural resources, monopolizing the things people need, controlling the media to disperse only the information they want to get out, in this case propaganda about the "terrorist" rebels who resist. Not much information about Mars reaches the outside world, but one man becomes interested in the red planet when he begins obsessively dreaming the same dream over and over again, in which he is walking across the planet in a spacesuit with a mysterious woman. This man is Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and he seems to be perfectly ordinary: he's a construction worker, he's got a pretty wife, Lori (Sharon Stone), and he's never been off Earth. But his dreams persist, and he begins to want a solution to this mystery. He suspects maybe something is up. Of course, the audience knows long before he does that something's up. One of the film's most brilliant maneuvers is casting Schwarzenegger as a secret agent whose mind has been erased and his identity changed to that of an ordinary working man. This is Arnold we're talking about here, with his Bavarian lisp and his bulging, elephantine muscles. He looks absurd as a normal guy. He looks out of place in normal clothes, without a gun in his hand. He looks vaguely ridiculous kissing his wife goodbye as he leaves for work, as though he was a sitcom husband going through his daily routine. Today, he looks absurd too as a politician, but that's another story. The point is, it's obvious from the moment we see him that Douglas is not just some ordinary guy. He looks like a secret agent in disguise, a brawler, and it's no surprise when he's attacked and fluidly demolishes his assailants with a barrage of countermoves.

It turns out that someone's been messing with his mind, and his former self was a government agent working on Mars, an agent who had apparently switched sides to the rebels at some point. This is when the fun really begins. As a satire of totalitarianism, the film has its moments, but Verhoeven doesn't go nearly as far with the ideas as he did in RoboCop. But as a totally crazy, goofy sci-fi action movie, Total Recall is pretty hard to top. The explosive violence and gore of RoboCop is carried over here, and each fight scene is basically a collage of inventive ways of dispatching people, with Arnold in typical action hero mode, racing around, pounding bad guys, and tossing off his usual ludicrous one-liners. (His best, because it's simultaneously the cheesiest and the nastiest, is directed at his faux-wife Lori: "consider this a divorce.") The action scenes are occasionally clumsy, and there are several scenes where it's obvious that stunt actors are simply throwing themselves around to give the impression of a frenetic fight that just isn't actually happening, while in another scene everybody vibrates spastically to make it seem like the ground is shaking. Verhoeven's occasionally awkward with stuff like this, the big epic fight scenes so central to the film, though he also stages much of the violence with panache.

A bigger hurdle to enjoyment (except of the campy variety) is the lame dialogue and inconsistent acting. No one expects a real performance out of Schwarzenegger — the guy's most famous for playing a robot, with good reason — but the rest of the cast mostly seems to be acting down to his level. Cox especially hams it up as the villain Cohaagen, though his theatrical mustache-twirling fits the film's over-the-top B-movie tone well enough. Out of everyone in the cast, only Sharon Stone turns in an actual performance, in the small but crucial part of Lori. Her sexy-bitchy mannerisms and stop-on-a-dime transitions from seductive to icy seem now like a rehearsal for Basic Instinct's Catherine Tramell, and it's obvious why Verhoeven cast her in the part for his next film. As for Total Recall, despite its generic, pulpy dialogue and weak performances, for the most part the film is a visceral action showcase, and that's really all it tries to be. Verhoeven's political subtexts are increasingly overwhelmed by the wildly entertaining surface, which makes it a rare Verhoeven film where, in the battle between surface and subtext that always takes place in his work, the surface wins.


Still, it's a pretty entertaining surface. A lot of the credit has to go to the special effects work of Rob Bottin, who crams the film with inventive plastic and rubber effects. Most of the film's most memorable images are a result of this effects work: the bulging, cartoony eyes of Douglas as he flails about on the surface of Mars, gasping for air; the special robot suit that allows Douglas to disguise himself as a woman; the infamous three-breasted prostitute; the various deformed "freaks" who inhabit Mars' Venustown. These images have a sense of wonder, not because they seem futuristic, because they really don't, but because they're so tangible. They're not realistic by any means — in fact they're grotesque and deliberately exaggerated — but they nevertheless feel real. In that respect, the effects are reminiscent of the equally potent gore and viscera in David Cronenberg's 80s horror films, which seem like an important touchstone here. As in Cronenberg's work, the use of plastic effects rather than CGI grounds the film in a real, lived reality, even if in this case it's an absurd alternate future where three-breasted women and freakish mutants coexist, and where a mask of a woman's face can unfold itself like a flower opening to reveal Schwarzenegger inside.

These images provide much of the film's energy and vitality, particularly when Douglas finally comes face to... uh, faces with the rebel leader Kuato (Marshall Bell), a seemingly ordinary man who's hiding a baby-like tumor under his shirt, growing from his chest. This creature, which has psychic powers and leads the rebel army, is a stunningly grotesque puppet, slimy and very organic-looking. Such striking and memorably horrific images are a big part of the film's enduring appeal. Certainly, the creature and makeup effects have dated a lot better than the crude work done to create the surface of Mars itself; the red planet sometimes looks like an Earth desert tinted red, and sometimes looks like a blatant studio set with a painted backdrop. In a way, though, this artificiality only enhances the film's sense of unreality, as its protagonist tries to untangle his fractured mind. The plot races through multiple reversals and false detours, suggesting at various times that Douglas is delusional, that he's really a secret agent, that he's stuck in a virtual memory simulation gone wrong, that he just needs to swallow a red pill in order to wake up — presumably into The Matrix, which would eventually run with that particular idea. At the very end of the film, Douglas' last line even casually, jokingly suggests that maybe all of this was simply a dream, and he's about to wake up, at which point the sun flares in the distance, whiting out everything.

It's a telling little joke, because ultimately it doesn't really matter what's going on here. All of the material about multiple identities and the mind and memory are essentially red herrings, distracting from the real point. The film could be a paranoid delusion, it could all be happening in Douglas' head, but even if it isn't, it's always clear that the film is a fantasy in somebody's head, that it's unreal and ridiculous from the very beginning. It's Verhoeven's fantasy, basically, in which a capitalist nightmare — a monopoly run amok — is defeated through the efforts of freaks, outcasts and deviants. Verhoeven's touch shows through most clearly in the portrayal of these outcasts, who are both ogled as freaks — including a real dwarf mixed in amongst the makeup-enhanced mutants — and simultaneously treated as the only decent people in the film besides Douglas and his rebel girlfriend Melina (Rachel Ticotin). It's surely no coincidence that the film's rebels dwell in a section of Mars given over to sex clubs and exotic pleasures of all kinds. Even here, in probably Verhoeven's most impersonal film, the evidence of his overblown sensibility is everywhere. The film might be just a silly action movie at heart, but its anything-goes aesthetic propels the action along and gives the film its verve; Verhoeven is never content to simply show an image when he can rub it in the audience's face.

The Monolith Monsters

[This is a contribution to the Spirit Of Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon currently running at Cinema Styles from July 6 to July 12. Greg at Cinema Styles has opened up this week-long event to posts about legendary B-movie maker Ed Wood, as well as any likeminded examples of low-budget sci-fi and horror filmmaking. I'll be following his lead this week with a series of posts about 50s sci-fi.]

They're coming. Slowly, insistently, they're creeping closer, leaving a wake of destruction in their path, an unstoppable force inching towards a desert town, killing and destroying anything that gets in their way. They came from outer space, and once on Earth they're deadly and terrifying. Worse still, they're multiplying at a fantastic rate. They're... a whole bunch of rocks. From outer space. They're made of silicates and they're angry. Okay, not exactly angry, because they have no emotions at all: they're just rocks, after all. That's right, the "monster" in The Monolith Monsters is a rock, a black silicate that landed in the California desert in a meteor. It takes a special kind of sci-fi thriller to eke out all its scares and drama from chemical reactions involving a strange mineral deposit, but despite its inert villain — and the unfulfilled promise of monsters hinted at by the title — The Monolith Monsters manages to provide a few thrills before descending into a deadly dull waiting game.

The rocks in the desert start spreading their destruction whenever they come in contact with water. This kicks off a chemical reaction that causes the rocks to begin expanding and multiplying, sucking off needed chemicals from whatever they come in contact with, whether it's the desert sand, a wooden structure, or living creatures. Director John Sherwood gets as much tension as he can from this set-up, particularly during the early stretches of the film, when it's not quite clear yet what's going on, only that the rocks are reacting to water and that afterward everything is destroyed and people are virtually turned to stone, their bodies petrified and hardened by whatever the rocks are doing to them. It's a creepy premise, and Sherwood gets a lot of mileage out of eerie shots of the rocks sitting in the desert, strewn across the landscape, black and shiny, looking very much out of place in these ordinary settings.

But the film is sabotaged by its own title to some degree. The Monolith Monsters conjures up images of lumbering rock creatures in the classic mold of the Hollywood B-movie creature feature — alien rock monsters unleashed from a meteor to destroy everything they touch. The film's set-up only prolongs this impression, utilizing the usual tropes of the monster movie, with creepy suspense set pieces in which the actual attack happens offscreen, and only the dead bodies and destruction left behind suggest something terrible happening. One suspects, watching this, that Sherwood is doing what these films always did, keeping the monster offscreen for as long as possible, building up to its revelation. But no, the "monster" is just a rock, and the suspense in the film centers around the rocks' inexorable progress towards a tiny desert town after a rainstorm sets off a chain reaction.


Sherwood milks this premise (partially supplied by a story from sci-fi great Jack Arnold) for as much as it's worth, but he can't manage to overcome the fact that his "monster" is a mineral made active by chemical reactions. These rocks aren't a good sci-fi threat for the same reason that a really big avalanche wouldn't be a good one — it's hard to make compelling drama out of the geological research and chemical experimentation that the film's characters engage in to stop the rocks' growth. The resulting film is more of a disaster movie than a sci-fi thriller, and a rather dull disaster movie at that. The bulk of the action centers around geologist Dave Miller (Grant Williams) and his schoolteacher girlfriend Cathy (Lola Albright) as they try to figure out what's going on and how to stop the rocks from multiplying and overtaking the town. They enlist a string of doctors, journalists, police and professors in the task, but nobody in the cast has much more personality or verve than the rocks themselves, and the script is so generic that the characters are barely differentiated from one another.

All in all, The Monolith Monsters is just a big disappointment, a film that offers up little to even talk about, good or bad. There are a few compelling suspense sequences before the nature of the threat is revealed, and then the film becomes a static, anti-dramatic snoozefest. It's faintly hilarious to see Sherwood desperately trying to wring some tension out of the progress of the rocks, but they move so slowly that everyone in town finally has time to pack up all their things and leave before the rocks get even remotely close. Movie monsters are often notoriously slow and ungainly, lumbering after victims who can only be caught by falling multiple times, but this film manages to go even further by positing a sci-fi threat that creeps along so slowly that its potential victims are in the next state before it's even advanced a few feet.