MORNING GLORY

Daybreak, gentlemen! The daily five-ay-em pitch-meeting of the self. Rachel McAdams plays a 28-year-old aspiring morning-show producer hired to revitalize the sinking program on which Annie Hall daily demeans herself. The clincher, at the job interview: “I know a shitload more about news than someone whose daddy paid them to smoke bongs and talk semiotics at Harvard!” Come on, everyone knows semioticians prefer blunts. Is she just trying to get us not to read the shot that has her eating her lunch-salad from its little plastic clamshell while sitting next to the Gertrude Stein statue in Bryant Park? I mean, I only went to state school but the significance seems clear: language nibbles, rabbit-like, or laps, lover-like, at the event, it is not what is new but what is news, the for-some-reason plural (=hyperactive) nature of our encounter with the present, by which I mean that each morning we apply to our only face, or in McAdams’s case her really cute legs, the cold razor of the now, and that razor has not one, not two, not three, but four merciless blades.

And whose face has been there, who growls when aroused? She forces Harrison Ford (Extraordinary Measures) to co-anchor the show, and in return he tells her she has “father issues” and “repellent moxie,” and makes an uncalled-for crack about her bangs. Does he suspect she’s a replicant (she is, after all, a Plastic)? You’re watching t.v. and a wasp lands on your arm. He’s mad he’s not getting to do the serious television news. Huh?

You see what I’m getting at? Patrick Wilson tells her to meet him after work for drinks at “Schiller’s on Madison Avenue.” And then a little later we see the exterior shot of Schiller’s—the lemondrop-yellow “LIQUOR BAR” sign—which is of course on the Lower East Side. And why try to get away with that? Or rather, since they know they won’t, what’s the ploy? I love the mother, who at the beginning of the film tells McAdams that her career dream, by this point in her life (28!), is getting “embarrassing”—“I just want you to stop before we get to heartbreaking.” Raise your hand if you’ve ever done one of those Working Girl commutes, Carly Simon surging in your mind. Raise your hand if you’ve ever done one of those last-reel runs across New York towards the thing you really want. Or were you just running to catch a film? Actual conversation’s tail-end, overheard on the ticket line: Young woman: “So why are you doing it?” Young man: “Because you only live once.” So what if you run all the way over to Madison Avenue, only to find that Schiller’s isn’t there? Oh God, what the hell am I doing with my life?

UNSTOPPABLE

The only true genre—train movie—The General, Runaway Train, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. And The Train, with Burt Lancaster, in which the flower of French art is loaded onto train cars by the Nazis and Burt has to stop it leaving France until the Allies arrive to save the day. All the while asking, are these paintings and stuff worth losing lives? With the implied, more pressing question, is anybody’s life worth as much as these artworks? “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was always really about the aura of persons more than paintings. I caught Burt on TCM the other night, this time in The Swimmer, based on Cheever’s overwrought story of a man crossing the suburban landscape of his corruption and failure by going from pool to neighbor’s pool. Interrogating his soul along the way, or having it flayed for him by everyone he encounters. Swimming pools—shimmering, silvery rectangles, placed at intervals, into which he plunges in succession. Still a little ways to go.

If Train 777 leaves Fuller yard in northern Pennsylvania at 6 am, and travels south at 70 mph, then how long before it etc. Set rolling unmanned, by every mischance, the behemoth surges to its fate, or it’s better to say, brings fate like so much hazardous cargo to where it’s preordained. Rust red, steel gray, blue-collar blue, swing-state dun. So what’s unstoppable? The climate-change those coal cars evoke? Or Chris Pine’s temper—he’s got a restraining order keeping him from his wife. Or is it the working-man’s will of Denzel (The Book of Eli)? He’s just been laid-off—our ruin, too, rolls merrily along. I remember one night Aaron and I were totally baked, and he swayed over to ask me what was clearly going to be a big question: “Dude, do you think Whitman was smart?” Jeez, admit you’re turned on by power and people will forever question your brains. Chill out, dude, and relax, Eliot, and back off, Sontag. I’m sorry it’s too late to give Susan Sontag a big, reassuring hug.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS (PART 1)

“I’ll take a small popcorn.” “Would you like to make that a medium for just fifty cents more?” The origin of surplus—which is to say, jouissance—is bound up in this extortion, the way that what threatens to disappear is exactly what cannot be refused. As the poet said, nature is a language, can’t you read? The world wants hearing in the ear of you, it winks your eye. Don’t you agree that to call an orgasm a “little death” only perpetuates the fiction of its singularity, and thus simple exchangeability in the marketplace of satisfactions? As if it doesn’t have parts: the spotting of it, like seeing a man on horseback from miles off, the presentiment, like the one that signals a flock of birds to all take flight at once, the clarion-call of inevitability, the point of no return, like boarding the subway with a half-eaten apple, the rearing-up, like Secretariat, the flex, the break, like a cable snapping free of a tentpole in a gale, the rolling palpitation, like a python swallowing a pig, but speeded-up and in reverse, the final tugging loose, the ontological crisis typified by that question of questions, “Did you come?”, the primal grasp typified by that childish gesture of looking for just a little bit more jelly at the bottom of the jar, and a rush of thought returning like a dam breaking upon an unsuspecting town an hour after lunchtime. Thought replacing the grunts, as endearments will replace the thought. What’s that neat spell she does? “Obliviate.”

I read somewhere that this popular media platform for children was dreamt up by a homeless English lady. People in the audience are dressed in costumes and talking a bunch, as are the people on the screen, which is disconcerting as the film itself is disconcerting, meaning it has an avant-garde quality, meaning I have no idea what the fuck is going on. But I’ve never been more moved, both by and through the awesome. At the same time, it’s basically another internet fable: there’s a world inside this one, right, where one makes things happen by incanting words, where newspapers boast videos instead of photos, where teenagers learn to use their “wands” or “bottomless purses.” And where, isn’t it true, one fights with slithering death by testing one’s own tolerance for impermanence, for the part of life (all of it) that can be neither held nor even sniffed. Death’s avatar has no nose but a snout. I wonder who The Quibbler has published? That Luna is something else. And how have the principals fared? Radcliffe’s gone ratty, Grint broad, Watson hard. Why oh why must England age? Helena Bonham Carter, remember Room With a View, when he makes that question mark out of the leftover veg on his plate and tilts it up for her to spy?

THE NEXT THREE DAYS

It sure looks like what happens here is that Elizabeth Banks is convicted for a murder she didn’t commit and that when all legal options run out, with a few years gone by and her child slipping away from her and no conjugal visits allowed and a life sentence stretched out ahead of her, her husband Russell Crowe (Robin Hood) decides to bust her out of the Pittsburgh prison and initiates a series of complicated preparations that involve crafting a big Beautiful Mind-style wall chart and procuring fake passports and busting up a meth lab to steal a bag of cash and teaching himself to break into a car with a youtube how-to and using apps and finally carrying out the plan in a tense, no-room-for-error dance in which the breathless pair switch clothes and vehicles and on an impossibly tight schedule try to evade the law, grab their kid, and make it to the airport one step ahead of being put on the no-fly list and escape to a tropical haven and be free forever.

But of course, there is no prison. The need for cash, the bank-robbing fantasies, putting the house on the market, the elaborate plans and calendars and maps, the GPS, the apps, the packing-up to go, the close shaves and slices of luck, the running to make train and plane—this is a straight-up tale of everyday American parenthood. Prison=being busy as fuck. That’s why the turning point is when they realize, mid-escape, that they may be obliged to leave their kid behind, and she suddenly tries to jump free of their speeding car, and he pulls over and with the clock thundering away they sit by the side of the road together, in perfect stillness, for the first time, thinking why are we doing this if we’re missing the whole point. And then when they go back to get him what’s the biggest mistake Crowe’s made? He misread the children’s birthday-party invite, it’s not at the house but at the zoo. And the greatest moment: Crowe recovers their son at last and the mother gets out of the car to embrace him and he sees her and reels in her pure blonde immanence. How I sob!…I don’t care, let ‘em look.

The cops are great, reconstructing what happened: “This guy’s a teacher?” says the detective, of Crowe. And his partner: “At a community college.” Hey, what the fuck? That means he’s detail-oriented and dogged and can perform when it’s called for, and man, that’s saying a lot.

SKYLINE

Never underestimate the overdetermined—in the first reel, the Brooklyn artist visits his homeboy in L.A., the latter now a super-successful special effects expert set up in an opulent condo whose tackiness is only constructed to render the appeal of its creature-comforts more explicit. And so when the alien motherships (really, spellcheck?) descend and shine a blue light that hypnotizes all who look at it and draws them into the sky of their needfulness, of course it’s our Brooklyn guy who finds himself rapt, you don’t need a degree in semiotics from Harvard (see Morning Glory) to recognize that the blue light is the allure of the movie business itself, slurping up all the bagel-fed, Gorilla-juiced talent—so why resist? We’re not, we’re just waiting for the call, we’re not holding onto any pride or integrity here. Though by the same token I’m pro-slumming, that supposedly ghoulish act of fraudulent identification down the social ladder that every intellectual is supposed to deplore. Because what else besides erotic curiosity is going to make you shrug off your privilege? The privilege of loving everything.

But the motherships start sucking up thousands of people, and we see the bodies falling upwards, and automatically think, “reverse WTC” until one character actually says, “It’s like the goddamn rapture”—oh, duh—but a rapture of another sort. Because it comes out that the smaller soldier robots that fly out of the big ships each house, and use, a human brain and spinal cord, which explains the whole harvest. The fact that this is our fantasy—the true melding—is only confirmed by the way in which, at the end of all the chasing around, the hero and his girl don’t even escape as we expect but are sucked up, too, and his brain ripped free, and he becomes a robot-monster. I meant to say spoiler alert.

And then, the blue light is the light of the projector. Which makes the venetian blinds that our characters use for protection (and which, Foucault reminds us, Bentham hangs in the central tower of the Panopticon) the implied curtain that parts upon the stroke of the feature presentation. But this technology, for all its recent digital preening, was never really that robot/computer kind. The problem with cyborgs is that they’re expected to work all the time. Whereas the movies and the poor t.v. were always about a whole species taking a well-earned rest. It’s finally happened—the movies seem antique. One wishes to stay just a little while longer in the comfort of their semi-dark.

FOR COLORED GIRLS

Theater-envy, the other night, at the Beacon, baroque palace whose filigreed sunburst and pendulous omphalos focus attention through astrological channels back across which they may travel to planes of elevated awareness—hey, look! On the ceiling, two enormous nets bulging with balloons, and the airy realization: later, those are going to fall! On us! Amy and I got really high around the corner, we talk about productivity at the bar, applications we like, user-friendly web-design templates, and she: “How did we work before all this? At a snail’s pace?” I suppose—so how fast can we work? Fellow lab rats, we’ll soon find out. My paranoia boils down to one unanswerable question: Can everyone see what I’m thinking just by glancing at my face?

My second Tyler Perry production. A slice of life, in which a dance teacher is violently date-raped while her young student with big dreams becomes pregnant and is forced to get a back-alley abortion from alcoholic demon Macy Gray, because she was refused the money to do otherwise by slutty sister Thandie Newton who lives across the hall from a woman whose alcoholic, abusive war-vet husband not only dangles but drops their two small children from a fifth-story window onto the Harlem concrete below, an event witnessed by the wife’s boss, tough-as-nails magazine editor Janet Jackson, whose own partner is not only revealed to be on the down-low (“the pool-boy in the Hamptons, my driver, the guy at the opera the other night…”) but has now infected Janet with HIV. Can it have been lost on her, the echo of the image? For Michael, too, once got in a lot of trouble dandling a child from a high balcony. Her cat-mask the relic of those bygone vatic choreographies. We needn’t fear drama, or heed the voice in the back of the mind that whispers like a quivering child, asking, when oh when will those balloons be released at last? They come down bombs, or babies, or stars, or lotus blossoms. That lotus-strewn island no one can remember. The sirens go by in the street. I hope my wife waited up.

DUE DATE

My new friend Stephen’s got style—he stays at the bar while I go to the movie. And when I come out he’s still there, and I rejoin him as if I’d just stepped out for a quick smoke. But then, I’ve had quick smokes that changed my life. And Due Date changed my life. It’s like the Grand Canyon it celebrates—it was just another groove until someone named it, and now, wherever we are, we always feel we are on the side of it from which we desperately need to cross to the other. Addictions are, by definition, out of control.

I love trivia and quirk. But I don’t much care for Zach Galifiniakis’s web-based talk show, Between Two Ferns, in which he and his celebrity buddies wink and smirk at one another, as if it’s all a game. Fooling no one. Because how can Robert Downey Jr. not live for art, since he so clearly does? The absolutely gorgeous way he handles a Blackberry. Blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. The celebrities are gods, and when we see them—I saw Jake Gyllenhaal canoodling with Taylor Swift by the Key Food near Gorilla the day before it was even in Us—it’s like the old myth-time again, when they’d swing down to mingle, and under their darkling eyelids one stole glimpses of sparrow and sickle both.

Galifiniakis heads for “Hollywood” to become a star—the birth the title promises is his, from besotted liar to karma-king. Waking up in roadside America, that washed-out light, feet cold, jeans still unzipped. Seeking sleep, he braces footsoles on the windshield and rubs one out. Driving, exhausted, he gives in to sweet sleep and crashes big. Sipping the coffee brewed, by mistake, from his father’s ashes, and discovering the truth, he sips again. What a response, what pure courage. To be father to yourself!

CONVICTION

Journey: “The movie never ends/it goes on and on and on and on.” Motley Crue: “You know that I’ve seen/too many romantic dreams/up in lights/fallin’ off the silver screen.” Poison: “At the drive-in, in the old man’s Ford/behind the bushes, till I’m screamin’ for more.” Rock pays homage because rock gets it: the movies, like rock, are big, they don’t trade in those bargain-basement feelings like “satisfaction in a job well done” or “belatedness.” Time was one could speed fucking fast down Prospect Park West until one reached the theater/circle, then they put in that bike lane and yeah, sure, but it’s a whole lot harder to get your yellow light on around here.

Swank—not theater five (though it is) but the actress. Funny, I know a little boy named Oscar, I wonder if she’d like to meet him. It’s based on a true story, though I’d make the subtle point that if it were entirely real the Massachusetts accents would, well, they’d just be the way people talk. She puts herself through law school to argue against the verdict laid on brother Sam Rockwell, innocent of murder if not of the youthful trespasses through which they’d together dreamt of escape, not of unpredictable violence and excessive joyous hoots. A father. Where else can you stick ‘em, no one knows what to do with them, what’s a prison for, anyway? The DNA that exonerates him, finally, also damns him, passed on to daughter Mandy, a Leo—watch out.

The impassive face of the Law, struck at, may blink, quick as a shutter over a lens. So how fast can we move? And where hide, on a barren plain that extends to every horizon? The movie ends—reversal, he goes free, hugs daughter, thanks sis, cut to a photo of the actual siblings, statistics about the wrongly convicted. But no mention of what I heard on the radio—that six months later he was struck by a random car and killed. That they don’t tell you this! That we might sense it, instead, and understand we have but thought ourselves unblinking, when we've been too much and too often like children spared.

SAW (3D)

“Commercial cinema is the totalitarian space par excellence.”—Raúl Ruiz

I would’ve been amazing under a regime—totally put-out, totally grumpy, almost never collaborating. Refusing to publish—as a point of honor. Who trusts art, anymore? Not us. It couldn’t stop Bush, he pretended it didn’t exist and poof. But have you heard the audio of the subjects (quite a few, apparently) who resisted in the Milgram experiment? The one guy’s voice, when he tells off the experimenter, has that unmistakable, all-too-familiar note in it: A Problem With Authority. The kind that rises up from the medulla oblongata and in an instant makes your throat go desert-dry.

Seventh film in the famous torture series and, one imagines, by its mind-blowing quality, without however having seen the others, the best. If Buster Keaton had made In the Penal Colony. A string of scenarios—as in old serials, or porn, or the literature of Christian comeuppance—played out by soap stars and Law and Order plaintiffs and a puffy Cary Elwes. A woman quartered by a spike on train rails. A woman who tells lies caught in a trap the key to which is attached by thread to a fishhook in her stomach, and the dude has to pull both key and hook out and if she screams a decibel-meter will advance four spikes into her throat. She screams. Later he must extract two of his own molars to find a lock combination that’s been etched on the teeth in his drugged sleep. His sin: he faked being a survivor. How we wish to be modern, i.e. cut up. And the pun is all too apt: we are split apart by what we “saw,” our complicity of vision means that we, too, are bound for a contraption, and the trap is: this, the 3-D space in which we are, by this spectacle, pierced. Come to think of it, the first time I ever even realized there were three dimensions was when I got that screensaver that ceaselessly builds the pipe, and pipe is the crude, endlessly available, and fundamental technology from which most of the evil stuff in this movie is built. Almost everyone at this Saturday show appears to be on a grim but weirdly giddy date.

MEGAMIND (3D)

“Man has become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent...”—Sigmund Freud

Well-rested, a double feature, a rare popcorn, even—as I mount the stairs I like to stick my face in the bag and let a few salty buds leap onto my tongue. All nine theaters in use, tonight, and a quick calculation finds that this showing of this film’s worth around three grand, not counting concessions. While outside the fall sunset pours bright slag, gilds the architectural details clustered on the roofs of houses, or flares the crowns of trees.

Megamind and Metroman are classic doppelgangers, right down to the initials and the former’s compulsion, upon the latter’s faked death, to re-create him. In the vacuum villain Megamind rules undeterred, occupying city hall with his big brain and big ears and unexpected coloring and his face on a parody of the Shepard Fairey “Change” poster: he’s Obama (but why does Metroman look like Romney?). And what is it to have a “megamind,” in what does such a thing consist? Interestingly: ambition, a taste for theatrics, a facility with technology about whose value, however, both he and we are ambivalent. For his minion—a fish in a bowl—he’s designed an ape-shaped exoskeleton, thereby collapsing into one object all the evolution that precedes the human, with this twist: the fish itself occupies the very position (head, brain, speech) on which evolution’s most intensive processes were supposedly directed. As isn’t the technology Megamind creates precisely an exteriorization of an intelligence which he therefore in and of himself can’t really be said to possess.

The thing about Slavoj Zizek is the way his name, whenever invoked, elicits the spasm of anyone’s hang-up: he’s too serious, not serious enough, too trendy, not trendy enough, etc. And yet, are these not precisely the conundrums upon whose uncomfortable borders he wants to tarry, are these predicaments not our very own? For example, the characteristic genre of our time is not memoir but rather the hand-wringing article that asks of memoir whether it is okay, and what does it say about us, and Are We Allowed? And what kind of fucked-up subjects have we become, who choke on our own life stories even as they compulsively spew forth in the face of their every denial and degradation?

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2

A couple audibly necking, another sharing their moment-to-moment impressions, another coming in—no joke—forty minutes late. It all adds to the slow, chatty build-up of the film, whose every shot is ostensibly either home-video footage or security-camera tape of one big American house in high-foreclosure style. That weird affective content of video—pure boredom, boredom copied over old boredom, something both less and more than just watching the world. As if to say, Oh God, the world. And maybe its secrets are visible, but the rewinding, the tracking to find them, while no less than six cameras multiply time until the inevitable point after which not enough new time remains to possibly review it all.

Great ordinary-looking white people, speaking in the amazing way of the moment, like the wife’s alternating sing-song, scare-quote-framed, or falsetto “black” voice. For this considerable sin a demon wants their toddler, who when poltergeisted from his crib heads right for the stairs and fucks with the basement doorknob, of course. Don’t get me started. Basement where the mother gets dragged, later, to emerge serenely murderous. So what happens down there? They have gorgeous pills you can take, these days.

Strange, that once again at the end of a horror film an audience member loudly declares, “That was the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” But to call a movie bad is only to say, the means by which it has sought to induce me to feel the feelings I consider valid were in this instance too clumsy and bald, forcing me to admit that those feelings are not in fact real or whole or constant enough to truly buoy me out of this irritating finitude. How fine, then, to know no such disappointments. What stillness, rather, I find here, what fattening in the glow. And when the lights come on I scurry home, a bedbug, which it pleases me to be—that’s Kafka’s trip, not mine—snug and sated and among my kind, invisible to the dimensions that nourish me and myself unconcerned, except in a practical way too straightforward to be called rapacious, with them.

HEREAFTER

Once the usher says “Enjoy your movie” it really is yours, in a way, or at least now it can never be disavowed. Not listening is a kind of listening. But why keep pretending we live in that bygone world that cared how everything would turn out? The only ones who care, as this deeply moving film makes clear, are the whispery backlit dead. The ghosts on the screen. And I tell you who’s up there. So that makes me the medium, i.e. Matt Damon, talented but always trying a bit too hard.

The movie’s riddle: how does a be-khakied, be-cable-knit-sweatered American get to be a British kid’s only hope, and score a hot French lady in the end? Look to the two world-historical events the plot includes: the tsunami and the London subway bombings. And our American knows death, and so gets to be a world citizen. In other words he is the boy from Remember Me, or his spiritual brother, given sufficient depth by our disastrous decade to understand what everyone else has long since learned to expect. Where do the three meet? At an amazing book fair! See, just publish your book with some random press, and good things will undoubtedly happen.

The living plead with our hero for a hint from their beloved lost. And the dead, ever destructive, clamor with the sins for which they wish to be forgiven. When she’s swept up in the tidal wave—the oceanic feeling, exactement ça—the French lady briefly goes where “you can be all things and all at once.” Coughing-up-water take. Beneath the metaphorical porticoes of this metaphorical pavilion one reels and retches, by a sea of images overwhelmed. Up on screen are all possibilities, if we can but die in our seats and sail among them. As for living, our celebrities can do that for us.

RED

Not a repertory screening of the Kieslowski film. I overdid it last night, so just a little chamomile, now, bright and fragrant, both hands on the cup. I still remember when Madeleine brought me a tea, before Alice started, that lovely moment when you’re tripping and a person who’s gone off on a mission for so long you’ve effectively forgotten them returns with the thing! Odysseus has a great time but Penelope’s pleasure has been vastly underestimated, arrival transforms waiting into the harmony all seekers long to find.

“No criticism so sharp as seeing they think you need to be flattered.”—James Richardson. Another wish-fulfiller. RED’s an acronym: “Retired, Extremely Dangerous.” You gotta love those boomers, they won’t quit. Bruce Willis (Cop Out) is the ex-CIA spy to whom the designation applies, “bald, white male, fifties,” he romances Mary-Louise Parker (but it’s chaste, she’s really an estranged-daughter figure) and is forced back into action when revision comes calling. Way back when, “he retired drug lords, terrorists—hell, he toppled governments.” Now, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.” Turns out he’s still got it: “Old man, my ass.” But at the same time, as Parker realizes, “You’re hard on the outside, but gooey on the inside.” At the CIA, “Things have been a lot different since you left.” Oh God, the holidays are coming, get ready for this routine up close.

It’s unclear whether or not the mystery at the heart of the film—what really happened during a botched CIA incursion in Guatemala in the 80s—is in fact a reference to the recently-owned-up-to U.S.-government-sponsored experiments infecting inmates with syphilis, in that nation, in the 1940s. Or was it just a lucky guess? Out in the traffic circle the war memorial—an omnibus tribute, it turns out—has been as if by viagra’s action re-propped. Even elegy, or especially elegy, is just one last chance to get it up.