Posts Tagged metaphor
The Coen Brothers: When It Makes Sense
Verna: What’re you chewin’ over?
Tom: Dream I had once. I was walkin’ in the woods, I don’t know why. Wind came up and blew me hat off.
Verna: And you chased it, right? You ran and ran, finally caught up to it and you picked it up. But it wasn’t a hat anymore and it changed into something else, something wonderful.
Tom: No, it stayed a hat and no, I didn’t chase it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasin’ his hat.
In Miller’s Crossing, a hat is just a hat. And Tom (Gabriel Byrne) is convinced it’s pure stupidity to think it could mean anything more. In the two decades since, the films of the Coen Brothers have been accused of being similarly pointless, heartless, only composed of empty pastiche and clever dialogue.
This feeling somehow bubbled to the surface as the Coens embarked on what I like to call their ‘Trilogy of Meaninglessness’. (It might sound better with an exclamation point.) First there was the Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country for Old Men. It’s so bleak the hero is killed off-screen, barely as an afterthought, and its villain’s only morality comes with the flip of a coin.
Then the Coens made the spy farce Burn After Reading: a flurry of pointless schemes and sudden violence, adding up to nothing much at all. A running joke throughout the film comes in reports on its characters delivered to J.K. Simmons’ bewildered CIA agent. Finally, all he can think to say is: “Report back to me when it makes sense.”
In 2009, the Coens released A Serious Man. Its tragic hero, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), tries to understand why terrible things happen as his life falls apart around him. He’s told that it’s wrong to even ask the question; God owes him no explanations. “Why does he make us feel the questions,” Larry pleads, “if he’s not going to give us any answers?” Larry’s son, Danny, thinks he’s receiving answers from a famously wise rabbi, but they turn out to be the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody To Love’.
It’s all there is; it’s better than nothing.
Today sees the release of the latest film by the Coens, True Grit. While it’s full of the same deadpan comedy and love of language that characterises their work, it’s undeniably a more traditional kind of movie. I swear I could almost feel the Coens’ relief as they wrapped themselves up in the conventions of the classical western. It’s provides a world where there’s right, and there’s wrong, and justice can be found at the end of a gun.
Early in True Grit, 14-year-old Mattie Ross (astonishingly portrayed by Hailee Steinfeld) is picking out a horse. Mattie asks the stable boy what kind of treats the horse likes. He replies, bemused, that she’s a horse. She likes apples.
There’s nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat; okay, fine. But you can’t deny that horses like apples. There’s comfort – and maybe meaning – in that.
This Is Not A Gun
When I heard about the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, I was reading Bruce Sterling’s novel Distraction. It’s about American politics in the year 2044 and – despite being written back in the Stone Age of 1988 – often reads as eerily prophetic.
Early on in the novel, a political agent is targeted by a “homicidal lunatic”. Why? Because his enemies have software that automatically generates hate-mongering messages about him and forwards them to those who’ll be most influenced:
“That’s spam from a junk mailbot. I’ve seen some junkbots that are pretty sophisticated, they can generate a halfway decent ad spiel. But that stuff is pure chain-mail ware. It can’t even punctuate!”
“Well, your core-target violent paranoiac, he might not notice the misspellings.”
There’s no need for Manchurian Candidates in Distraction; you just bombard those “core-targets” with the right messages and wait for someone to snap and pull the trigger. Is this the sci-fi version of illustrating a map of your political opponents with gun targets, or telling your supporters to reload instead of retreating?
I don’t really have anything coherent to add to the sea of what’s already been said about the possible links between violent rhetoric and violent action. I do think it’s both fascinating and awful, though, that the shooter was also obsessed with the cause-and-effect of language. As Bob Rehak wrote: “I think some virus of language did finally get to Loughner; I think words ate him alive.”
In Australia’s last federal election, the media’s weapon of choice was a knife. When Julia Gillard replaced her predecessor Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, we were told over and over again that Rudd had been “knifed” by Gillard. Every appearance, every press conference, journalists wailed about Rudd’s knifing. Eventually you had to wonder if the metaphor had escaped them. Maybe they honestly thought he’d been stabbed, literally if not fatally. Why else would they be so determined to use the word, again and again? They must’ve been wondering why the police didn’t take their panicked phone calls!
Keith Olbermann called for the end of gun metaphors in politics, and many subsequently pointed out that violent political metaphor is nothing new. Sports are the same. One team winning, one team losing? That’s just not interesting enough. A quick google search for “football” plus “demolished” or “obliterated” or “destroyed” shows how many teams apparently disintegrated upon loss, never to play again.
(Don’t even get me started on “I’d hit that” as a substitute for “I’d like to have sex with her”, or the casual “George Lucas raped my childhood!” school of internet commentary.)
Perhaps I’m too cynical even for politics – man, that’s a depressing thought, isn’t it? – but I don’t think politicians honestly want their opponents dead. It’s almost sadder than that. I think it’s just the desperate hyperbole of those who think their audiences are drifting away.
We compare elections to sporting matches. We compare sporting matches to all-out war. Do veterans flinch to hear their horrifying experiences described in the same terms we use for teams of men running a ball back and forth across a field for an afternoon?
I can’t seem to make myself watch the videos left by the Arizona shooter, but I’m haunted after reading this statement: “All humans are in need of sleep. Jared Loughner is a human. Hence, Jared Loughner is in need of sleep.”
A man using words to try to convince himself he’s a human being.
The Walking Dead: Zombie Pathos
One: the pilot episode of The Walking Dead might be the best thing Frank Darbont has ever done.
Two: the subsequent episodes never quite lived up to the pilot, but remained pretty entertaining.
Three: it’s fascinating to watch how Mad Men-style classiness pops and fizzes when it comes into contact with the staples of cheesy, late-night genre TV.
I was already a fan of Robert Kirkman’s comic book. In fact, it’s about the only zombie narrative that still remotely interests me. I, officially, have zombie burn-out. I flinched when I saw that three of the unproduced screenplays on the annual ‘what’s hot’ blacklist contain zombies, so Hollywood’s obviously betting their popularity will last a few more years yet.
(Imagine dying, right now, and reanimating as a zombie. You stagger up off the ground, holding in your intestines, moaning incoherently… only to find that you’ve missed the zeitgeist and everyone’s moved on to being terrified of other, cooler monsters. You’d be so embarrassed you’d be glad that your higher brain functions were gone.)
I think I’m just tired of cannon fodder. Of zombies – dull as individuals, frightening as crowds – existing only to provide opportunities for what Zombieland called its “Zombie Kill of the Week”. The final battle of Zombieland was set at an amusement park for a reason, right?
Whatever resonant metaphors zombies usually provide seem to have grown stale. I did enjoy Chuck Klosterman’s recent piece in the New York Times, however, where he turns the metaphorical focus onto the audience, pointing out that a “lot of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies.” And, riffing further: “Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have.”
So far, The Walking Dead focuses less on killing and more on character. (Or, less favourably, more on bickering and camping and soap opera.) Despite some hackneyed dialogue and odd pacing, though, there’s one thing I really admire about it.
From the legless woman Rick (Andrew Lincoln) puts down to the once-mother, still scrabbling at the door of her family home on blind instinct – The Walking Dead’s zombies are just so goddamn sad.
Here’s the worst of it: Andrea (Laurie Holden) waits by the corpse of her just-bitten sister, Amy (Emma Bell). She refuses to let anyone dispose of the body. Eventually, her sister ‘wakes up’. Her eyes open. Her limbs twitch. Amy reaches out to Andrea, lost, childlike. We’re all waiting for the horror-movie moment where the reanimated Amy flies into furious action and chomps down on Andrea’s neck, but the moment doesn’t arrive. Instead, Amy claws ineffectually at Andrea’s hair, until Andrea says that she loves her, and then shoots Amy in the head.
It’s not like George Romero’s classic zombies were all opportunities for happy headshots, either. I feel like the satirical subtext of 1978′s Dawn of the Dead has been overstated over the years. The mall-bound undead riding escalators are good for a chuckle, sure, but it’s mostly just awful to see them blindly wandering the aisles. When the living clean out the mall, turning live corpses into dead ones, it’s hardly a victory. And it’s the polar opposite of Zack Snyder’s trigger-happy Dawn of the Dead remake.
The Walking Dead’s zombies stand for something other than contagion or consumerism or unwanted conversations. They’re your mourning; they’re your grief; they’re your old life and loved ones, kept alive by your wish to have them back.
My zombie apocalypse is a total buzz-kill, isn’t it? If it makes you feel better, here’s every zombie kill of The Walking Dead’s first season condensed into little more than a minute of mayhem.
You’re welcome.
Mama’s Got a Squeeze Box
I’ve recently been rewatching the short-lived and fondly remembered teen drama Freaks and Geeks. (If you haven’t, you really should. It’s great.)
In one episode, Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini) is trying to convince her parents to let her go to an upcoming concert by The Who. They decide to listen to one of the band’s albums first to see if they approve and, inevitably, find themselves interpreting the lyrics to Squeeze Box.
“Mama’s got a squeeze box, Daddy never sleeps at night / She goes in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out…”
Her father isn’t impressed: “Just keep those boys away from your accordion!”
It got me thinking, though, about all the ways to secretly describe getting some in song. First some rules, though, because what’s sex talk without rules? (Chaos, that’s what.) If we’re just talking about the sex act itself, then we disqualify other kinds of dirty euphemisms. All those songs that are bragging about a particular body part, for instance.
And we also discount artists who seem happier letting their lyrics stand naked than dressing them in metaphors. Missy Elliott’s Work It? Prince’s Mad Sex? I’m looking at you. I mean, hip-hop seemed to run out of metaphors – and spellcheckers – even before it reached Nelly’s Hot In Herre. “It’s gettin’ hot in here,” he crooned. “So take off all your clothes.”
(That’s just cause and effect, baby.)
What’s left is often A) edible, from 50 Cent’s Candy Shop to Warrant’s Cherry Pie. Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer asked us to “Open up your fruit cage / Where the fruit is as sweet as can be.”
Or B) automotive. R. Kelly – whose Bump and Grind became a part of everyday speech – gave us the unforgettable gift of Ignition. “Girl, please let me stick my key in your ignition”. “Girl, back that thing up so I can wax it, baby.” And Grace Jones’ post-disco classic Pull Up To The Bumper is hilariously dirty: “Pull up to my bumper baby / In your long black limousine / Pull up to my bumper baby / And drive it in between.”
If wikipedia is to be believed, Pull Up To The Bumper was used on a children’s TV channel in 2002, and no one seemed to care. The thinnest metaphorical veil is usually enough to get away with anything. Remember Madonna’s performance at the Haiti telethon? It marked the moment where the whole world seemed convinced that Like A Prayer is actually about, you know, praying.
Once enough time has gone by, you don’t even need to disguise your lyrics. Familiarity turns everything to muzak. I remember hearing Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side playing in my local supermarket. No one heard: “But she never lost her head / Even when she was giving head…”
Everyone heard: “Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo…”