Posts Tagged meta
New York New York
I just arrived back in Melbourne after spending a few weeks in New York, recovering from our premiere of EXIT at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal. I feel like I haven’t been absorbing much popular culture: some reading, a couple of films, and hours marvelling at America’s pharmaceutical advertising on TV.
(Why are epic lists of awful side effects paired with actors smiling silently down the camera? It makes them look like they really, really want you to develop suicidal thoughts. Like they just they can’t wait for your liver to fail.)
Anyway, I was amazed to hear the receipt printers in New York cabs make a sound exactly like the Smoke Monster from Lost. When I mentioned this I was told the opposite was true: the Smoke Monster’s sound was sourced from NYC taxis.
New York is popular culture.
Australia has always been in an odd cultural position. With such a small population, relatively speaking, it’s always been cheaper to import media than to make it ourselves. A recent Screen Australia report says this is only going to get worse in the near future.
Given the choice, we seemed to pride ourselves on preferring classier British fare. Until recently, the most generic British crime drama was somehow considered more highly than the best American one. We’ll fight to the death for David Brent over Michael Scott in The Office. Our newsreaders, for years, had mostly British accents to give them a suitable sense of authority.
My childhood, though, was composed almost entirely of American cartoons, and sitcoms, and comic books. I never cared about seeing Australian stories on screen – no doubt part to a hefty dose of cultural cringe.
When I was young, I remember making jokes about Spider-Man’s abilities to always find something to swing from, any time of the day or night. Maybe there was a plane overhead! Or a blimp! Or a low flying (but sturdy) bird! Young Martyn wasn’t a particularly funny kid, admittedly, and seeing New York firsthand only proved that he was dead wrong, too.
Scott Bukatman explains why in his essay ‘The Boys in the Hoods: A Song of the Urban Superhero’. “Let me propose,” he writes, “that American superheroes encapsulated and embodied the same utopian aspirations of modernity as the cities themselves.” And, later: “The superhero city is founded on the relationship between grids and grace. The city becomes a place of grace by licensing the multitude of fantasies that thrived against the ‘constraining’ ground of the grid.”
Spider-Man only makes sense once you’ve seen his city. Superman might be “the mighty newspaper”, but as Spidey says in Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men #1: “I am New York.”
Now visiting New York makes me feel like I’m starring in a kid-friendly remake of Ringu and I’ve climbed inside the TV . And sure, the puppets might be people and the soundtrack by the Ramones, but staying in the East Village is like living on Sesame Street.
I’m never comfortable travelling. I subscribe to William Gibson’s theory of jetlag from the opening pages of Pattern Recognition: that it’s side effect of your soul, lost in the slipstream behind you, yet to catch up with your body. And I’m still stuck on how passports are faintly ridiculous, too. Little books of paper and cloth, stamped with actual stamps. Wielding one is like wearing a monocle or a pocketwatch on a chain.
But all my years spent in the middle of New York’s mythology – even from half a world away – makes visiting it a strange sort of homecoming.
I’m Still Here: Schrödinger’s Phoenix
I knew I was getting old when I got bored of metafictional games.
Case in point: I’m Still Here. Casey Affleck’s new film about his friend Joaquin Phoenix has been gestating for years – apparently, from even before Phoenix made news worldwide by announcing during a red carpet interview that he was quitting acting to pursue a career in hip hop.
It shows candid footage of the consequences of this decision: ugly early gigs, desperate attempts to work with a nonplussed Sean Combs, and endless scenes of Phoenix screaming abuse at his entourage. Drugs, girls, madness. You know: the usual.
Over nearly two hours, I’m Still Here reveals that its subject is A) a sucky rapper and B) a horrible human being.
Or is he? As I’m sure you know, almost all the buzz around the movie is of the ‘is it true or not?’ variety. Is this all a hoax? Phoenix gets angry when journalists suggest as much during the film, because the question implies his life is “a joke”.
Let’s take him at his word for a minute. What if this is an honest documentary? Well – in the words of one internet commentator featured in the film – it would be a sad story if Phoenix “wasn’t such an asshole”.
As the movie unfolds, however, it becomes more and more difficult to believe that what you’re seeing is true. And if I’m Still Here isn’t a true story, then what is it? It’s an elaborate, juvenile prank cooked up between friends to poke fun at the media. It’s not boring, exactly; it’s just empty. An astonishing amount of work for little effect.
In essence, it’s the story of an pretentious, self-obsessed actor who becomes a bad rapper. That sounds like a David Spade movie, right? (It would’ve been funnier if it was.)
Only the metafictional element, the mirrors-within-mirrors, the “oooh, are they playing a prank on Hollywood or is Joaquin just a loon?” that gives I’m Still Here any meaning at all. I think that’s why I found myself holding onto the idea that maybe, against all evidence, what I was watching could’ve been true.
It’s like Schrödinger’s Cat. A cat that’s alive isn’t much of a story, and neither is a cat that’s dead. It’s only fascinating before you open the box and the cat’s both alive and dead at once.
(I apologise for invoking the poor animal. It gets trotted out so often it must wish the waveform would just collapse and give it a 50% chance of welcome death.)
The best critique of the movie is embedded right in the middle of the movie itself: Phoenix’s infamous appearance on Letterman that unwittingly kickstarted I’m Still Here’s publicity campaign. Confronted with Phoenix’s bizarre appearance and behaviour, Letterman cracks jokes and tries not to roll his eyes.
Inception’s Dream Architecture
Sorry, Batman. Inception is probably Christopher Nolan’s best film.
So I’m especially pleased that it’s a success, both critically and at the early box office – because any time a non-franchise, non-remake, non-adapted blockbuster does well, it’s good for cinema in general. Weirdly, though, I’ve seen half a dozen reviews who take exception to one thing in particular: that Inception’s dream worlds don’t feel like dreams.
There’s a collection of these dream descriptions here: “curiously pedestrian”, “too literal-minded”, or reducing the human subconscious to “a routine action movie”.
Because dreams are, like, crazy! Why didn’t Nolan include a scene of my high school that also wasn’t my high school, you know? Or a clown, who’s just kind of there? Dude!
Inception features “dream architects”, deliberately constructing their own mental mazes, so it should be obvious these aren’t your usual, organic dreams. Inception’s characters project themselves inside them, or see their unconscious minds rushing in to fill their hypothetical spaces. It’s all more Wachowski than Freud, and Nolan has very little interest in the “Hey! Look! A backwards dancing dwarf!” non sequiturian style used by filmmakers like David Lynch to emulate dreaming on screen.
We barely even see the machine that allows them to network their dreams together – and why should we? What do we need to know other than when they press the button? And travelling between dream-states doesn’t come with swirling CGI tunnels like Avatar’s shifting consciousnesses. Nolan lets regular editing do all the work.
Over at IO9, Annalee Newitz says Inception will “change the way you watch movies”. Well, maybe. Maybe not. But she is dead right to suggest that Inception’s special effects sequences are “as much about how you stage an action scene as they are about the scenes themselves”.
For example: when dream-thief Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) asks his dream-victim Fischer (Cillian Murphy) why he can’t remember how they got here – how their scene actually began – it works as a quick flash of dream-illogic. But it also works much more powerfully as a reminder of how movies are edited. After all, we didn’t see the beginning of this scene, either. Like Buston Keaton in his masterpiece Sherlock Jr., we are all trapped between the edits, stitching the moments together as best we can.
Christopher Nolan has always been more of an architect than a storyteller, and sometimes that’s hurt his films. The Prestige, for instance, suffered from his determination to keep the three-act structure of a magic trick – because it meant leaving the big ta daaa! reveal until long after the audience had already guessed it. It benefited, however, from David Bowie playing Nikola Tesla, which is empirically awesome. See?
This time, Nolan’s obsession with structural puzzles don’t interfere with Inception’s story. They are its story. No matter what ambiguous concepts are whizzing around a scene, they’re in the service of one thing: action. Big, old-fashioned action. In fact, it contains numerous jaw-dropping action scenes – hardly “routine” – all constructed with real weight and gravity – and they cut through the film’s more pretentious moments like a hot bullet through butter.
That’s what makes this a more than worthy sequel to The Matrix – just ten years later than expected.