[Note: This post contains spoilers. It expands on my original review of Silence, which appeared at St. Louis Magazine on January 11, 2017. Updates 2/1/17.]

One of the telltale marks of a great religious film is that it can move even the faithless. Any work about spiritual matters is clearly doing something right when it resonates with viewers who normally don’t have much use for the adjective “spiritual.” The brilliance of Joel and Ethan Coen’s black comedy A Serious Man, for example, lies in how its droll approach to misfortune entices viewers to adopt the protagonist’s theistic worldview and wrestle with the insoluble problem of evil. Martin Scorsese’s masterful new feature, Silence, is another such film. Its captivating character is an especially striking achievement, given that it is such a relentlessly bleak work, and that its plot deals with the finer points of a moral transgression—apostasy—that by definition has no significance for the godless. Silence is at bottom, a film about uncertainty. It is a work that positively chatters with propositions, suppositions, stipulations, and prevarications—and questions, endless questions. The title signifies not just a mute deity, but the void that humanity fills with its own cacophony of ideas.

The film’s events take place in mid-17th-century Japan, a time when the Tokugawa shogunate, fed up with Spanish and Portuguese mischief perpetrated under the veil of missionary work, successfully trampled the formally thriving Japanese Christendom into to a quailing, secretive remnant. In all the world, Japan is arguably the state most hostile, both officially and de facto, to the spread of Christianity. It is into this repressive realm that Portuguese Jesuit priests Father Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) are determined to venture. Their primary objective is to learn the fate of their former mentor, Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who is rumored to have fallen into the clutches of the shogunate and apostatized under pain of torture. Rodrigues and Garupe are sanguine about both Ferreira’s fate and the opportunity to minister to a subjugated community of Christians, but their superior (Ciarán Hinds) has a far more pessimistic view of their prospects, declaring that they will be the last Jesuit missionaries he ever sends to Japan. The viewer has reason to be skeptical as well, given that the film’s prologue depicts Japanese soldiers methodically scalding a visibly broken Ferreira and his allies with sprinkles of caustic, boiling water from a volcanic spring.

The bulk of Silence is divisible into two phases. In the first, Rodrigues and Garupe travel to Japan’s southernmost islands and bear witness to the appalling plight of the nation’s few remaining Kirishitan, as Japanese histories have dubbed these early Catholic converts. In the second, Rodrigues is captured by the local metsuke, a sort of internal security official, and subjected to horrible physical and psychological torments intended to compel him to deny Christ. That’s pretty much the extent of the plot, and although Scorsese gives some scenes the tone of a white-knuckle tale of suspense and survival, the fact remains that much of Silence consists of a heck of a lot of waiting and talking. Moreover, the film’s conversations are frequently long, circular arguments about theology and morality, between parties with differing native languages. Even for a historical drama about Jesuit missionaries, this is solemn, unhurried stuff.

That gravity turns out to be exactly why Silence is so effective at its primary ambition: creating an earnest rumination on conscience, grounded in a theistic framework and given weight by the bloody tangibility of its characters’ situation. The film is decisively a story about Rodrigues and his faith. The principal role of the other characters within the context of that story is to present opposing viewpoints and examples. This is not to say that those characters are thinly drawn or lack agency. For example, the metsuke, Inoue Masashige (Issey Ogata), whom the Jesuits call “the Inquisitor,” is the closest thing Rodrigues has a nemesis. The screenplay by Scorsese and Jay Cocks take pains to ensure that the viewer understands the rationale for Inoue’s pogroms, as well as his frustration with Rodrigues’ obstinacy, without ever losing sight of the metsuke’s unforgiving cruelty. In the end, however, Silence is not about whether Rodriguez wins and Ioune loses, or vice-versa, or about whether they achieve some kind of accord. The film is foremost concerned with the conflict that rages in Rodrigues’ heart, and specifically with the question as to whether he should choose apostasy or death.

(While the lisping, hobbling Inoue is perhaps the most exaggerated figure in the film, he is also one of the few characters based on a historical person, and a fascinating one to boot. The real Inoue Masashige was a high-ranking Tokugawa official who was apparently quasi-open about his homosexuality. He is thought to have perhaps parlayed a romantic relationship with the shogun into advantageous connections and a prosperous civil service career.)

Building a feature around a man’s spiritual tribulations is not new territory for Scorsese, of course. One of the director’s most renowned early films, Mean Streets, is a gritty little crime drama about small-time hoods, shot through with a potent, jittery atmosphere of tragedy. Underneath the film’s genre elements and gratifyingly lean plot, however, lies the deeper tale of ambitious bagman Charlie’s (Harvey Keitel) struggle to reconcile his criminal life with his Catholic faith, and in particular to discern how God wants him to express his devotion.

The more obvious direct antecedent to Silence, however, is the strange, haunting The Last Temptation of Christ, a film unfortunately plagued by a grueling production and blinkered denouncements from the prelates of the Culture Wars. The work itself, however, is an endlessly fascinating imagining of Jesus of Nazareth’s (Willem Dafoe) struggle to acknowledge his identity and fulfill God’s will in the world, even when that will seems obscure or monstrous. Like Scorsese’s latest, Last Temptation is a film suffused with agony, both physical and spiritual, with the former often giving sweat-slicked, trembling expression to the latter. Dafoe’s wild, intensely physical performance portrays Jesus as a man whose seems perpetually on the verge of erupting, bodily: from guilt, panic, rage, and sheer frustration.

However, Last Temptation unfolds in a reality where the supernatural is, if mysterious, at least palpably present. Ghastly omens appear, Lazarus rises from the dead, and Satan visits in the form of a talking serpent, lion, and pillar of fire. Silence has no such miracles. The film’s sole heavenly vision occurs when Rodrigues sees his own reflection in a puddle transform into Christ’s visage, echoing a painting that has engrossed him since childhood. (Notably, that painting is El Greco’s The Veil of St. Veronica, a work that depicts the saint displaying the cloth that blotted Jesus’ face on the way to the crucifixion, capturing a miraculous impression of the Messiah’s face. Rodrigues’ personal visual conception of the divine is therefore an image of an image, underlining his seeming separation from God.) In the context of the rest of the film, this vision is easily characterized as a hunger- and exhaustion-induced hallucination, but it’s no coincidence that this also feels one of the few missteps that Scorsese makes. Most conspicuously, it diminishes the uncanny impact when Rodrigues later hears (or imagines) Christ’s gentle voice at the threshold of his inevitable apostasy.

The dissimilarity between the designs of the two films is also instructive. The Last Temptation unfolds primarily in a a dusty, desolate hinterland, its sunbaked landscapes all sand and craggy stone. It feels almost post-human, in the manner of El Topo. Yet the film simmers with an unmistakable atmosphere of Near Eastern mysticism, owing in part to its grubby, subdued approach to the miraculous, and in part to Peter Gabriel’s landmark score, which fuses electronic and traditional sounds to creates an expectant, almost ritual mood. No such heightened sensibility clings to Silence, which presents a historical “wretched realism” that contrasts with Last Temptation’s magical realism. Scorsese has created ambitious, scrupulously designed historical dramas before—most saliently The Age of Innocence, Kundun, and Gangs of New York—but none of those prior works has the same shambolic, effortlessly authentic look that Silence exhibits.

The Japan that Silence depicts is one of elegant wooden architecture and stunning natural loveliness: pounding ocean surf, gray-green subtropical forests, and impossibly dense white mists. (In reality, the film was shot in Taiwan.) However, it is also a land of starvation, pestilence, and massacre. Silence is simultaneously enamored with its setting’s beauty and yet resolved to portray that setting in all its grimy, feudal awfulness. One of the first images in the film sets the tone. Within a profuse curtain of fog, a dim silhouette emerges, which gradually resolves into a humanoid figure standing sentry near a pair of mounted, severed heads.

The world that Rodrigues and Garupe enter is a grim one, to put it mildly. Echoing recent films as diverse as The Revenant and Hard to Be a God, Scorsese’s film is thoroughly filthy, coated in a slathering of sweat, dirt, shit, blood, and God knows what else. The malnourished, perpetually terrified Japanese peasants dwell in tiny, leaky huts of mud and thatch. Local samurai lords and government officials roam the countryside like merciless devils, taking what they please and meting out rewards and penalties as needed. This includes inflicting collective punishments on entire villages, intended to goad the weak-willed into informing on fellow lawbreakers. In one faintly surreal sequence, Rodrigues returns to a hamlet that he recently visited, only to find the settlement now a ghost town populated solely by hordes of stray cats.

Silence’s vivid portrayal of the violence and oppression in 17th-century Japan has a deeper significance than historical verisimilitude. The misery of the Japanese commoners’ existence is shocking to Rodrigues and Garupe. Portugal itself might be a hearty purveyor of violence and oppression—see: Brazil, Colonization of—but the Jesuits in Silence seem to have no personal frame of reference for the level of repression that the Kirishitan face. Rodrigues and Garupe are the clerics of a majority, state-endorsed religion, and beneficiaries of the comparative stability afforded by early modern Europe’s absolute monarchies and burgeoning mercantilism. They have never had any need for whispered prayers and hidden crucifixes. Their faith has been, in a word, an easy faith, soft and untested.

Observing the forbidding everyday realities of Japanese Christendom firsthand, the Jesuits are confronted with a problem beyond the logistical challenge of ministering to the faithful in secrecy. Their dilemma is also spiritual. On the one hand, they are awestruck at the endurance of the Kirishitan’s faith in the face of subjugation. The fire that the priests see in the souls of their newfound flock fortifies their own resolve and missionary zeal. The Japanese laity’s hunger for the essentials of Catholic spiritual life—confession, Communion, baptism, pastoral comfort—is so intense that Rodrigues admits it slightly unnerves him. The Kirishitan crave even the smallest physical signifiers of faith, and when Rodrigues runs out of crucifixes and medals to distribute, he breaks apart his rosary and hands out individual beads, each one cradled like a holy relic by the recipient.

Underneath the priests’ marveling, however, is a rumbling of doubt. They cannot understand why God would permit His faithful—particularly faithful that exhibit such ardor—to suffer so terribly. It seems not merely unjust, but cruel, as does the silence they receive in response to their prayers. Garupe grows exasperated with the clandestine and seemingly futile nature of the work, but it is Rodrigues who seems more deeply vexed by the terrible conditions that they have witnessed. When the wrath of the local daimyo eventually descends on the village that has been providing them with sanctuary, the priests are forced to split up. Rodrigues wanders the wilderness in a state of mounting, feverish agitation, allowing impious doubts to pry their way into his thoughts: Is He listening? Is He even there? Am I just praying to myself? His physical weakness and disordered frame of mind make him easy prey for military patrols, and he is soon captured and imprisoned.

It is inaccurate to assert that this is where Silence “really begins”—chiefly because everything in the film’s first half is presented with such breathtaking attention to detail—but it is clear that its more complex thematic aims don’t surface until Rodrigues is in the grasp of the metsuke. The questions that haunt the priest up to that point are fundamental, particularly for a man of the cloth, but they aren’t that different from the theodicy paradoxes confronted by many believers (or, at least, many monotheistic believers), in good times and bad. Violence, disaster, disease, poverty, and even everyday problems can trigger a spiritual crisis in the faithful, prompting the eternal query, “Why does God allow such things to happen?” One hardly needs to be immersed among poor religious minorities during the Edo Period to arrive at such a watershed.

Rather, what Silence’s setting presents are conditions where the believer’s faith is tested on a bloodier and yet more esoteric level. Rodigues and the Kirishitan are urged to renounce their religion under duress, up to an including the threat of death. This shifts the nature of the underlying question from an accusation directed at God (“Why is this happening?”), to an appeal for moral guidance about the supplicant’s own actions (“What should I do?”). For the non-believer, it seems a trivially easy decision: One should say whatever one is obliged to say to stop the pain and save one’s own life. For Rodrigues, however, the dilemma is profound, and not only because the Church regards apostasy as a particularly profane sin. The plight of the Kirishitan that he has witnessed has raised the stakes, so to speak. If the priest cannot, in this time and place and among these people, remain steadfast in his faith, then of what use is his faith? To renounce Christ in these circumstances—when the very existence of the Church in this far-flung land teeters on oblivion’s edge—would undermine the very essence of what it is to be a Christian presbyter.

Silence, then, is in part a film about martyrdom and its ethics, and in this the film shares some affinities with Steve McQueen’s excellent Hunger, a fictionalized depiction of the 1981 IRA prison hunger strike. However, whereas the Irish Republican inmates voluntarily subject their own flesh to a slow-motion violence, Rodrigues has violence unwillingly inflicted upon him by his captors. His martyrdom lies in his refusal to halt this torture, which he can do at any time merely by placing his foot momentarily on a fumi-e, a carved stone image of Christ created specifically for demonstrations of apostasy. The ease with which the pain could be ended makes the temptation especially harrowing. It’s just a little step. What’s the harm?

Exacerbating the situation is the fact that the cunning metsuke knows exactly how to apply pressure to a shepherd: threaten his flock. Accordingly, the lay Kirishitan imprisoned with Rodrigues suffer far more than him at the figurative hands of the Inquisitor. (Ioune himself never stoops to lay a finger on the captives, a neat little detail, given the perceived uncleanliness of torture in the Japanese socio-economic order.) In one of the film’s most shattering scenes, Rodrigues pleads with a group of Kirishitan as they are being slowly bled to death, urging them to apostatize and thereby end their agony. A collaborator then reveals that that the victims have already willingly renounced Christ, over and over. They are being tortured until he, Rodrigues, renounces. The perfect horror of this stratagem is almost too much for the priest to bear.

Rodrigues’ captors erode his resolve with an incessant, disorienting flurry of ridicule, flattery, and patronizing counsel. Ioune even attempts to piteously absolve the priest of responsibility, maintaining that the cultural character of Japan is uniquely unfit for the message of the Gospels. “It’s not your fault,” he soothes, “You were defeated by the swamp of Japan.” Rodrigues, however, sees this as the doublespeak of tyranny. If Christianity is floundering in Japan, it is because of the very repressions that Ioune and his ilk have implemented. The priests steels himself by reminding himself that Jesus endured far worse pain, and that following Christ’s example is the least he can do on behalf of the Kirishitan. Then one of his interlocutors reminds Rodrigues that to compare one’s self to Christ is an unspeakable act of vanity. And so the priest goes, round and round, beleaguered by the obscurity of the righteous path.

Meanwhile, Rodrigues is astonished by the Christians that surround him, many of whom seem to possess a strength of will that echoes the ancient saints. “Why are you so calm?!” the priest demands of fellow captives, his voice halfway between livid and flabbergasted, betraying shame at his own terror. Bound to a cross erected on a rocky shore amid the surf, one Kirishitan survives for four days as the crashing waves pummel him ceaselessly. He perishes singing a hymn, leaving Rodrigues anguished and amazed.

Silence’s most fascinating character by a substantial margin is Kochijiro (Yōsuke Kubozuka), a wild-eyed Japanese drunk who guides the Jesuits from Macau to his homeland early in the film. A reviled apostate, he treads on the fumi-e without hesitation and spits on the cross for good measure, but still regards himself as a Christian. He later sells out his fellow Kirishitan to the metsuke, and eventually betrays even Rodrigues for 300 silver coins—the shogunate’s advertised bounty for a Catholic priest. (This Judas-style perfidy is but one of the film’s many faintly sardonic allusions to the Gospel stories.) Kochijiro in due course evolves into a borderline farcical character, returning to Rodrigues to confess his treachery time and again, and then betraying the Christians time and again. He is consumed with remorse, but seems to have no notion that absolution demands at least a good faith effort at reformation. Stuck in an endless cycle of duplicity and guilt, he undermines the practices of Catholic life through absurd repetition, and thereby drains them of meaning. He haunts Rodrigues, who sees in him a theological enigma: If such a person can call himself Christian with a clear conscience, what does it mean to be a Christian?

Kochijiro’s presence directs the viewer’s attention to a deeper level, beyond the physical and spiritual suffering that dominate the film’s foreground. One could justly regard Silence as film primarily about the narrow matter of Catholic apostasy, and it would be an outstanding film if it were just that. However, such an assessment does a disservice to the richer philosophical questions roiling just beneath the surface of the film, ponderings about human conscience and the limitations of knowledge.

If he only wished to make a historical drama about Christian persecution, Scorsese could have chosen any number of other settings, including the early apostolic period. The specificity of Silence’s time and place is vital. As a Jesuit, Rodrigues arrives in Japan steeped in the intellectual context of the nascent Western Enlightenment, when a new conception of human liberty was being articulated by contemporary philosophers such as John Locke and Baruch Spinoza. (Interestingly, although Dutch by birth, Spinoza was of Sephardic Jewish and Portuguese origin, his ancestors having fled the Portuguese Inquisition, which was propelled overwhelmingly by anti-Semitism. One of the fiercest critics of that Inquisition was the Jesuit philosopher and missionary António Vieria. Connections upon connections...) The world into which Rodrigues tumbles is as far removed from Western proto-liberalism as one could imagine. Japan’s distinctive hybridization of an animistic Shinto worldview with Buddhist religious and philosophical traditions mark it as truly confounding territory for the likes of a European Jesuit. The priest’s circumstances are, in a sense, ideally suited to a grisly discourse on freedom of thought.

Beyond the theological arcana of its central dramatic conflict—To apostatize or not to apostatize?—Silence is concerned with the unassailable and unknowable character of the human mind. While freedom to practice one’s religion can be curtailed by an oppressive government, the freedom to believe is a trickier beast. Given that no one can ever truly know for certain what is concealed in another person’s heart, there is no way to reliably verify if apostasy and conversion are fraudulent. Indeed, this vexing constraint is precisely what drove the Portuguese Inquisition. Its leaders were suspicious that the kingdom’s tens of thousands of Jewish converts to Catholicism were faking their newfound devotion. The shogunate’s agents can torture Rodrigues until he howls all manner of sacrilege, but they cannot peer into his mind and spot-check to see if he has truly abandoned God.

The paranoia that such uncertainty breeds in the oppressor is illustrated in the film’s coda. Once Rodrigues steps on the fumi-e, he is released and treated relatively well, but the shogunate never abandons its distrust entirely. Bestowed with an executed man’s house, complete with Japanese wife and child, the now-fallen priest is obliged to submit an annual written renouncement of Christianity, and he and his retainers are watched carefully. The shogunate has “won” in the sense that Rodrigues has forsaken his faith and does all that is asked of him for the rest of his life, but his hosts can never be absolutely sure of their victory. The film’s final shot, revealing a minuscule wooden crucifix that Rodrigues’ widow has surreptitiously tucked into the dead man’s hand prior to his cremation, suggests that their suspicion was justified. Conversion at the point of a sword, after all, would seem to rob the concept of conversion of all its meaning. This is reflected in the contemporary understanding of physical coercion’s poisonous effect on the captor-prisoner dynamic; what one might call the pragmatist’s critique of torture. To inflict pain on a prisoner as a means of interrogation or compulsion is to forever mark the captor as an enemy.

One of Silence’s most striking and unexpected aspects is the ease with which its layers of meaning—theological, cultural, political, psychological—are peeled away, revealing the metaphysical disquiet that lurks at its core. With remarkable subtlety, Scorsese has in some respects smuggled a story that transcends religion into an intensely religious film. Its agitations concern the fundamental problems of categories, concepts, and the self. If a person asserts they are no longer a believer and lives as if are no longer a believer, in what sense, if any, can they be considered a believer? If belief is locked away forever in a secret place, if it ceases to have any concrete effect one’s life, can it be said to exist at all? What does one even mean by words such as “belief” and “believer”?

While such abstract matters might seem relatively academic when considered alongside the prospect of personal damnation or the torturer's cruelties, they are the foundational questions of the human experience. Indeed, Silence’s presentation of the Japanese state’ brutality signals the film’s interest in such profound topics. The torture and execution methods that the Japanese authorities inflict on their captives are not dependent on the baroque instruments of pain associated in the imagination with the royal jailers and religious inquisitions of Renaissance Europe. The shogunate’s weapons are simple and elemental: fire, water, blood. Such primeval tools of coercion reflect the potentially impenetrable questions of being that flit just beyond the periphery of Rodrigues’ spiritual torment.

This metaphysical dimension to the film’s thematic topography is most apparent when a pre-apostasy Rodrigues comes face to face with his former teacher, Ferreira. It is a meeting that is extensively foreshadowed in the film, but when the moment finally arrives, Rodrigues is taken aback by the extent of Ferreira’s transformation into a Japanese man in every sense but birthplace. The former Jesuit contends that the Christianity practiced by the Japanese is not actually Christianity at all, but a folk religion with Christian trappings, the accumulated result of countless errors and modifications. Humans, after all, routinely mistranslate, misconstrue, and misremember, particularly when there is no clerical oversight to maintain orthodoxy. What Rodrigues means when he says “God” is not what a Kirishitan understands when they hear “God.” The hundreds of thousands of Christian converts that Rodrigues believes once existed during the faith’s 16th-century heyday are, Ferreira contends, essentially a fiction.

(Neeson’s performance in this small role is a thing of wonder, not the least because Ferreira’s demeanor evolves in a counter-intuitive way over the course of the conversation. He starts out awkward, almost embarrassed, and gradually becomes more strident and unyielding as he parries Rodrigues’ objections to his apostasy. A different species of religious film would conclude with Rodrigues the rhetorical victor, having shown the elder, humbled Ferreira the error of his ways.)

Ferreira’s criticisms expose the universal uncertainty that characterizes the human condition. If two parties cannot even agree what words mean, how can one presume to busy themselves about the business of the soul? There is even a meta-textual aspect to Ferreira’s words, a critique directed at Silence itself. Scorsese’s feature is an adaptation of the Japanese historical novel of the same name by acclaimed Catholic writer Shūsaku Endō. (The book was also previously adapted into a 1971 Japanese film by director Masahiro Shinoda, which almost certainly influenced the famously cinephilic Scorsese). Thus, Silence is a 2016 English-language American cinematic adaptation of a 1966 Japanese-language novel about the expression of a Western religion of Bronze Age Near Eastern origin in 17th-century Japan. The mind fairly boggles at the potential mutations inherent in such an epic, multi-lingual transmission.

Indeed, there are numerous ways in which Silence is muddied in a cerebrally gratifying way by its status as a modern story being told for a modern audience. One can discern a potential existentialist reading of the film, for example, in which a silent God is functionally indistinguishable from an absent God. Rodrigues’ plight can then be regarded as that of a man who is “condemned to be free,” in the Sartrean sense, wherein he and he alone is wholly responsible for his actions. What’s more, freedom of thought as it is understood in the classical liberal sense is thrown into question in a contemporary world of pharmacological alteration and the shrewd psychological manipulations of advertising and propaganda. All of this is to say that while Silence is a magnificent work when approached solely as a Catholic film about overwhelmingly Catholic spiritual concerns, it becomes infinitely richer when one gives its multitude of potential meanings and readings sufficient space to breathe.

PostedJanuary 18, 2017

AuthorAndrew Wyatt

CategoriesDiary

[Updated 2/1/17.]

There is a moment early in the 2003 vampires vs. werewolves actioner Underworld when the film enthusiastically lunges over the line that separates enjoyable pop nonsense from outright cinematic refuse. Vampire huntress Selene (Kate Beckinsale) discovers that her werewolf foes—”Lycans" in the franchise’s graceless mythological lingo—have engineered an undead-slaying bullet infused with ultraviolet light. This is a monumentally stupid notion on multiple levels, but what’s truly unforgivable is that the film depicts these bullets as glowing with a muted purple light. This suggests that director Len Wiseman and writer Danny McBride not only thought the viewer would accept the ludicrous concept of “light bullets” without batting an eye, but also assumed that said viewers were too stupid to know that ultraviolet light is invisible, and not literally violet. Such brazen contempt for the audience is sort of hideously magnificent, even by the standards of 21st-century multiplex fare.

The franchise has been reliably awful since that moment, albeit in a mind-numbingly consistent way. Underworld: Blood Wars is the fifth installment in this inexplicably durable series, and it continues the traditions established by its 2003 progenitor: ridiculous yet curiously boring action sequences; shallow, unlikable non-characters; a murky, blue and gunmetal palette; and a general ineptness that breeds narrative confusion and yawning logical chasms. There’s nothing to recommend about Blood Wars specifically, as all the Underworld films are basically the same, and they are all tedious crap.

The series’ worst offense has always been to so thoroughly squander a premise that has a certain pulpy promise: pitting classic Universal monsters against one another in a supernatural Hatfield-McCoy conflict. It’s not an inherently terrible idea, but like Twilight, Underworld is reluctant to truly embrace its underlying genre tropes with lusty enthusiasm, preferring an Our Vampires/Werewolves Are Different approach that paradoxically ends up feeling banal and lethargic. Underworld’s slant on these familiar creatures is particularly insipid. Its bloodsuckers are sub-Matrix badasses in vinyl catsuits and leather trenchcoats; little more than Eurotrash models who eschew their fangs and undead powers for assault weapons. The Lycans, meanwhile, are not cursed wretches but grimy hooligans who transform into mangy, hulking man-beasts. Presented with an opportunity to create something original with their gaudy conceit, Wiseman and McBride opt for the wearisome sight of black-clad gunmen pumping rounds into computer-generated monsters.

Like many late-model entries in undernourished franchises, Blood Wars is annoyingly demanding of its viewers, requiring an encyclopedic knowledge of the prior four films to make sense of what the hell its going on. Given that the Underworld films’ primary raison d'être is to gawk as Beckinsale slaughters werewolves and vampires alike while leaping around in tight outfits, director Anna Foerster is curiously devoted to the series' leaden mythology and convoluted cavalcade of double- and triple-crosses. Despite this, continuity with prior chapters is not exactly a high priority in Blood Wars, to put it mildly. At the beginning of the film, Selene and her bland, handsome vampire ally David (Theo James) have apparently forgotten all about the search for Selene's hybrid Lycan-vampire lover Michael, a search that seemed quite urgent in the preceding film, Underworld: Awakening. Selene is running from the vampire Elders who want her exterminated for alleged crimes against their race, and from the Lycans who want access to her super-special blood for Reasons. Given that it is an Underworld film, Blood Wars naturally introduces new, unmemorable characters, including yet another swaggering werewolf villain, Marius (Tobias Menzies), and yet another scheming, power-hungry vampire Elder, Semira (Lara Pulver), who is of course attempting to play both sides against each other.

Selene and Michael’s daughter Eve, who has been hidden away in a secret sanctuary that even Selene herself does not know, is a crucial component of the plot somehow. Yet she never appears except in flashbacks, and the characters never get around to actually finding her. Consistent with the rest of the series, Blood Wars has a muddled story with vague but apparently world-shaking stakes. This is directly at odds with the crudity of the film’s preferred mode of spectacle: vampires and werewolves ripping the ever loving shit out of each other. If the Underworld series had the decency to just be a gritty survival-horror saga about Selene’s struggle to stay (un)alive in the middle of an endless war, the violence might be more resonant, and the films might be marginally redeemable. Instead, Foerster, like her predecessors, asks that the viewer invest themselves in a dismal, byzantine story involving mutating viruses, necromantic rituals, hidden birthrights, and other derivative claptrap.

This results in an embarrassing narrative thud whenever the film draws back the curtain on a "shocking" reveal. The desired effect is far too dependent intimate familiarity with the Underworld series, which is not the sort of fandom that anyone should admit to out loud. Instead of gasps, Blood Wars’ twists elicit awkward coughs. Unsurprisingly, there are abundant plot holes and continuity errors, some of them so profoundly stupid that they stop the film dead in its tracks. (A favorite: Immediately after the film makes a big fuss out of the vampires locking down the elaborate security system in their Gothic Revival stronghold, David inexplicably strolls in through the front door.) The logic of time and space are thrown to the wind, as characters seemingly traverse globe-spanning distances to remote locales in a few hours. Any attempt to read the film—or its preceding chapters—as some sort of allegory for the conflict between the decadent haves (vampires) and the grubby have-nots (werewolves) gives the filmmakers too much credit. In light of the extent to which Blood Wars in particular privileges the viewpoint of the vampires and their nebulous “blood purity” obsession, perhaps that’s for the best.

It's a fairly terrible film from top to bottom, where even the attempts to create something fresh and visually interesting within the series’ oppressive style end up looking silly. When Selene and David visit an arctic vampire fortress, they find a coven of pacifistic, albino bloodsuckers who swath themselves in fur-lined white robes rather than the black garb of their southern kin. Instead of creating a striking contrast with the franchise’s usual look, this design evokes elves from a chintzier alternate universe version of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien films, to laughable effect. (Jackson at least made his elves seem like capable, deadly warriors; when Blood Wars’ snow vampires don armor and take up swords, they look like the wobbly extras in some Nordic high school production of Camelot.) The only cast or crew member who seems to be enjoying themselves is costume designer Bojana Nikitovic, who plainly poured her energy into creating a dozen or so outré outfits for Pulver, all of them distinctive despite being uniformly black.

The hybridization of classic movie monsters with contemporary action cinema doesn't necessarily have to turn out this horribly, of course. Even at its nadir, the Blade series still has its comic banter and charismatic asshole characters to fall back on. Stephen Sommers’ steampunk mashup Van Helsing might be pop rubbish, but it’s also a guilty pleasure whose hammy acting, dumb quips, glaring anachronisms, and general sub-Hammer silliness are integral to its appeal. Hell, even the soporific, fun-starved Twilight series managed to sneak one or two original concepts into its crypto-Mormon mythology. Other media have mined similar territory successfully. White Wolf Game Studio made a name for itself in the tabletop role-playing game field in the 1990s with its fertile, complex conception of a shadowy modern world populated by vampires, werewolves, and other monsters. (Indeed, White Wolf sued and settled with the original Underworld’s producers and distributors over the, ahem, striking similarities between their games and the film.)

Ultimately, the fatal flaw of Underworld as a series is its cheerless obstinacy. The financial success of the 2003 film etched its aggressively dull formula in stone, and the producers have stuck to that formula for fourteen years now. Any hope of dislodging the franchise from its rut and creating something entertaining—let alone artful—from the raw materials has likely long vanished into the gloom. Given Beckinsale’s superb performance in last year’s Love and Friendship, one can only hope that she survives the apparently endless parasitic feedings that Underworld will demand of her.

PostedJanuary 11, 2017

AuthorAndrew Wyatt

CategoriesDiary

I've been writing about film for just over nine years now, and writing in a professional capacity for just over six. When I started this site in November of 2007, I had no notion that I would still be grappling with cinema through the written word nearly a decade later, or that I would eventually be paid to do so. Roughly in the summer of 2007, however, before I had even started trying to write about film, I knew that I wanted to become more cinematically literate, as a sort of personal development goal. To that end, I started watching films with greater frequency than I ever had before at that point in my life. I started going to the theater a few times a week, instead of once every two or three weeks. I started devouring DVDs obsessively using the (then new) movies-by-mail service Netflix. I started taking more risks in terms of the types of films I was willing to pay to see, and I started filling in the conspicuous voids in my cinematic literacy.

One effect of this obsessive consumption was that by the time the end of 2007 approached, something new had happened. For the first time in my life, I felt that I could put together a respectable list of the "Best" films of the year, since I had actually seen (what seemed at the time to be) a healthy chunk of the year's wide and limited releases. List-making is always fun, of course, and the exercise of assembling that Best of 2007 inventory in turned motivated me to maintain my zealous film consumption habits in 2008. And now here it is, 2016, and I've written nine such year-end best lists (plus one that will be published soon), not to mention countless reviews, essays, interviews, listicles, and other miscellanea on the subject of film.

It seems like an appropriate moment to pause and reflect on the past ten years in cinema. It's also an opportunity to compile a different kind of inventory. While I strive to ensure that the feature films on my Best of the Year lists reflect artistic excellence in all its myriad forms, not every film that makes the cut ends up sticking prominently in my memory for years. Nor does every "Best" film inspire the sort of passion that prompts multiple re-visitations. Conversely, some films sneak up on me, becoming vital personal touchstones only in retrospect, sometimes despite the fact that they were regarded without much enthusiasm when I first assessed them in my annual review.

It is with that in mind that I present my Personal Cinematic Canon: 50 films from the past ten years that have emerged as key works in my ever-evolving appreciation of contemporary cinema. Some of these are stone-cold masterpieces by any estimation. Some are fascinating but flawed conversation pieces. Some are amusing larks that nonetheless engender fanboy devotion. Some are esoteric, some are audacious, and some are frivolous, but they have all left a profound impression on me personally. All of these films are essential viewing in my house, and all are films I have fervently evangelized about to others. If you know me personally, these are the films you're tired of hearing about. They are not necessarily great films (though many are), but rather the films that define the last ten years of my cinematic life.

I followed just two rules when assembling this canon: 1) I had to choose exactly five films from each year spanning 2007 to 2016; and 2) I could not choose more than one film by any single director (or animation studio).

PostedDecember 12, 2016

AuthorAndrew Wyatt

CategoriesEssays

[Note: This post contains major spoilers. Updated 12/12/16.]

Put me on a pedestal and I'll only disappoint you
Tell me I'm exceptional, I promise to exploit you
Give me all your money, and I'll make some origami, honey
I think you're a joke, but I don't find you very funny

—Courtney Barnett, "Pedestrian at Best"

Writer-director Tom Ford’s bracing sophomore feature Nocturnal Animals is an absorbing, often difficult work. This is not to say that it is challenging to parse the film’s plot. In truth, not much actually happens in the primary narrative, which unfolds indolently over a few days within the chic confines of Los Angeles’ contemporary art scene. The bulk of Animals’ “action,” as it were, takes place within the mind of its haunted protagonist, gallery director Susan Morrow (Amy Adams). With the exception of a couple of clumsily conveyed plot points and a devastating wallop of a question mark at the end, the film is simple enough to follow. What fascinates and repulses about Ford’s tale is its emotional landscape, which is revealed as a rancid mire of dissolution, treachery, and revenge. Animals is not an easy film to love, but it’s devilishly easy to be swept along by its venomous currents. At its conclusion, the viewer, dazed and gasping for breath, is compelled to wrestle with the film’s pessimistic and unforgiving outlook. It is the sort of feature that veritably demands a reaction, but not necessarily a straightforward one.

The keystone of Nocturnal Animals’ cinematic potency is its tripartite structure. Susan’s present-day life (here dubbed Story A, for convenience) is a rarefied affair, characterized by champagne-splashed exhibit openings, witty tastemaker friends, and all the trappings of fashionable luxury, down to her Sferra linens and Cartier clock. Like most of cinema’s Poor Little Rich Girls, however, she is deeply unhappy. Appearances notwithstanding, she and her alpha-male executive husband Hutton (Armie Hammer) are nearly broke. Their marriage is in its cold, barely twitching stages, and their exchanges are limited to tense pleasantries and obvious dishonesties. Just as Hutton is jetting back to New York for a long weekend of negotiations—and a bit of infidelity—Susan receives a package from her first husband, Edward Sheffield, a writer to whom she was married briefly in graduate school. In this parcel is a galley proof of Edward’s latest novel, titled Nocturnal Animals. Enclosed is a brief note, in which Edward entreats her to read the book and offer her thoughts, perhaps over dinner while he is in L.A. The novel is, to Susan’s plain surprise, dedicated to her.

After sending her domestic staff away for the weekend, Susan settles in to read the book, a redneck gothic revenge thriller set in the deserts of West Texas. This establishes a variation on the “film-within-a-film” (Story B) for Ford’s feature: The viewer experiences Susan’s imaginative conception of the bloody, unsettling novel that Edward has penned. Said story concerns mild-mannered family man Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal), who sets out on a long-haul overnight drive through the desert with his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and teen daughter India (Ellie Bamber). Unfortunately, the family literally runs into a car carrying a trio of vicious, wild-eyed good ol’ boys, who menace the Hastings before eventually forcing them off the road. Led by a cunning, swaggering sadist named Ray Marcus (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the three violently terrorize the family, taking a particular delight in humiliating Tony for his femininity and bourgeois softness.

With a nightmarish inevitably, the family is strong-armed into separate cars and driven out into the desert, where the women are eventually raped and murdered. Tony manages to escape, cowering behind rocks to evade his captors and eventually trekking back to civilization on foot. This sets up the second part of Edward’s novel, in which a shattered Tony allies with composed but steel-willed police lieutenant Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon) in order to track down Ray and his accomplices and bring them to justice. When the unlikely pair’s efforts to achieve this through traditional police work and the criminal courts are stymied, Andes doesn’t have to ask Tony twice if he is amenable to pursuing less legal means in order to exact his revenge.

Susan at one point concedes to a co-worker that she has been musing about Edward for some time, but it is the arrival of his novel and, more significantly, the vexing experience of reading it that truly awakens her long-buried memories of their relationship. Through flashbacks that are presented chronologically, Ford mixes in a third narrative (Story C) concerning the bitter saga of Susan and Edward’s passionate courtship, short-lived marriage, and ugly divorce. Not incidentally, Susan and Edward are childhood acquaintances. Both are expats from the same Texas town, both left home to pursue careers in the arts, and both nursed an adolescent crush on the other. Even less incidentally, Edward, like the fictional Tony, is also played by Jake Gyllenhaal.

Gradually, as Ford reveals fragments of their brief time together, the picture of Susan and Edward’s estrangement slides into sharper focus. It is shown to be a relatively banal split, albeit one with a rather nasty punctuation mark at its conclusion. The things that initially attracted Susan to Edward—his warmth, romanticism, sensitivity, and decency—are the very things that she eventually comes to loathe. This unfolds exactly as predicted by her martini-sipping, rigidly coiffed patrician mother (Laura Linney, hamming it up fabulously in a glorified cameo). Susan gradually grows repulsed with Edward’s oblivious resolve to establish himself as a writer, with his failure to refine his authorial voice, with his puppy-dog need for shallow approval, and most of all with his surrender to a humdrum, middle-class life while he waits for his big break. Having abandoned her own dream to become an artist, Susan sees herself as the hard-working realist who knows when to put away childish things. (She doesn’t admit as much, but she also yearns to be surrounded by beautiful, expensive things, and it becomes clear that Edward will never be able to provide such luxury.) Before long, she falls into bed with Hutton, abruptly ends things with Edward, and, as a final and irreparable act of disunion, secretly terminates the pregnancy that would have resulted in her and Edward’s first child. This does not remain a secret for long.

Meanwhile, Story B barrels towards its grisly conclusion, as Tony and Andes abduct Ray and one of his accomplices, Lou (Karl Glusman), with the aid of sympathetic off-duty police officers. Although determined to execute his family’s slayers, Tony’s nerves get the best of him, resulting in a scuffle that ends with Lou dead and Ray fleeing into the night. The vigilantes split up to find their escaped prisoner, and it is Tony who ultimately stumbles into Ray, following a hunch to the same decrepit shack where his wife and daughter were murdered. Evincing not a shred of remorse, Ray finally confesses to raping and killing them, while spitefully boasting of the pleasure he took from the act. Tony at long last shoots the man dead, but not before Ray gets the jump on him and brutally bludgeons him. Hours later, Tony, limping and half-blind, stumbles out into the morning sunlight, only to accidentally and fatally shoot himself in the stomach.

Finishing Edward’s novel in a rush, Susan makes arrangements via email to meet her ex-husband for a late dinner at a posh restaurant. She fusses over her clothes and makeup—pointedly removing her wedding ring—and arrives before Edward. While she sips whiskey, the appointed time for their meeting comes and goes. She waits for an indeterminate period in anxious silence, looking up expectantly over and over, until the other diners have all departed and the wait staff begin closing up. It is excruciatingly clear that Edward is not coming. Cut to black.

Purely at a formal level, Nocturnal Animals is a delectable work of cinema. Consistent with Ford’s debut feature A Single Man, his new film is visually luscious, particularly in its depiction of the mod elegance that characterizes Story A. Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, a lensman who is prolific but usually more workmanlike than masterful, gives Susan’s refined world an exacting chilliness that invites both envy and repulsion. For Story B, he relies more extensively on restless handheld camera work—reflecting Tony’s fearful circumstances and perpetually teetering psyche—and often bestows the light of the Mojave Desert (subbing for West Texas) with a ghastly jaundiced hue. Abel Korzeniowski’s score is unexpectedly sumptuous and romantic, but also disposed to linger daringly on harsh, murmuring strings for almost unbearable stretches of time in scenes of physical tension. Production designer Shane Valentino and his team exhibit a literate, comprehensive attention to every element of the film’s look, providing each story with its own evocative vocabulary. Valentino has named Red Desert, Paris, Texas, Lost Highway, and Minnie and Moskowitz as key references, and one would be hard-pressed to dispute such choices. Editor Joan Sobel, however, is the crew's clear MPV. Her efforts are superb, and occasionally downright breathtaking, splicing together the three storylines with unerringly placed exhales and eruptions. (One particular three-shot phrase is this writer’s favorite five seconds of cinema in 2016.) Her cuts receive a robust assist from the film’s sound team, who nudge effects ranging from gunshots to trilling crickets such that they trespass across narrative boundaries.

It is ridiculously easy to gush about how striking Nocturnal Animals is visually and aurally, but the film’s essential thrill works at a higher level than pure aesthetics. It rests on the way that Ford successfully maintains three distinct and seemingly incongruent tones, one for each narrative. Story A is a cold, vaguely repellant depiction of the ultra-wealthy extremities of L.A.’s contemporary art world, with all the narcissistic detachment, pretentious absurdity, and inane trend-sniffing that setting implies. Susan’s present-day story isn’t actually much of a story at all, as nothing particularly noteworthy occurs over her long weekend. She catches up on work at the gallery, presides over a board meeting, and lazes around her mind-bogglingly flawless home, a somber, modernist mansion that seems more like a museum than a space where actual human beings eat and sleep. However, the inertness of Story A reveals Ford’s acuity for the way that absorption in a ripping good work of fiction—not to mention wallowing in reminisces and regrets—can crowd out the real world. As she is gripped by the tale of Tony’s appalling tragedy and blistering vengeance, Susan’s daily existence seems to recede. By design, the viewer likewise finds themselves more invested in the second-order fiction of the Hastings murders than with the first-order fiction of Susan and her tribulations—which, as problems of the mind and heart, feel somehow less “real” than Tony’s tale of corporeal violence.

Story B is as dreadful and intimate as Story A is gorgeous and detached: a pulpy tale of sweat, dust, blood, shit, phlegm, and vomit. It unfolds like the worst nightmare of every urbane liberal, in which a pack of braying asshole crackers comes roaring out of the wastes like War Boys under a Confederate flag. Of course, Edward’s book is just a retelling of the ageless American Frontier Story with a shuffling of race and class politics: women are threatened by sexual violence at the hands of savages, and the civilized man is obliged to protect them, or, failing that, perpetrate retribution. It’s a tale as old as The Last of the Mohicans, and so timeless that one of 2016’s best films is constructed on its foundations. Indeed, one of the reasons Story B works so well is that it depicts plausible events within a heightened register that is half pre-colonial ur-parable and half modern Pecos grotesque. The tragedy that befalls Tony and his family is believable in its generalities, but Ford gamely steers the depiction of those events—or, at least, the depiction of Susan’s conception of them—into borderline camp territory. Ray in particular is an almost farcically demonic figure: a violent, sexist, utterly pitiless monster possessing a diabolical shrewdness that belies his trailer park mien.

However, other aspects of Story B work to undercut the notion that Edward’s novel is some sort of blue state horror story about the all-consuming wickedness of poor, white country folk. Lieutenant Andes, with his quiet diligence and slow-boil righteous rage, embodies a native current of uprightness (or at least moral order) in an otherwise perilous and malevolent landscape. Meanwhile, Ford’s generous attentiveness to the physical and cultural minutiae of his Texas setting reveals an affection that could never survive in a more apocalyptic setting of chainsaw massacres. (This writer’s favorite details include the unfussy flourish of Ray swigging Shiner Bock beer, and the fact that the local small-town mall has an attached grocery store.) This isn't a hell on earth but the gritty, neo-noir Texas of cinematic myth, a republic of numerous films, from The Getaway to Blood Simple to Lone Star to the recent Hell or High Water. It is an instantly recognizable world, a lingering modern frontier where life is cheap and mean, but a bit of cowboy integrity still glints through the tarnish. Susan is captivated by this backdrop’s suggestive power, and by Edward’s prose, but crucially, the novel’s setting is not an entirely foreign country to her. She and her ex-husband both hail from Texas originally, after all. Edward is, in part, speaking to Susan through the common idiomatic language of their native state.

The memories that Edward’s novel conjures (Story C) jostle with fiction and the present in Susan’s psyche. These peeks at critical moments in Susan and Edward’s relationship possess an aura of amplified melodrama and pointed symbolism, rather that the sparing realism of, say, Scenes from a Marriage. They represent not necessarily how the relationship actually unfolded, but how Susan remembers it. Her recollection of the couple’s first meet-cute encounter as adults, for example, positively glows with romantic warmth. Adams and Gyllenhaal are supernaturally fresh-faced and palpably smitten, and the backdrop is a perfectly snowy Manhattan. A caustic fight over Edward’s writing and juvenile lack of ambition unfolds in the prosaic, claustrophobic confines of their living room, without of any sense of geographic locale. At the moment when Susan abruptly declares the marriage over, the pair are walking briskly down a nocturnal city sidewalk, perpetually out of step with one another, until Edward is left alone, bathed in a seething red neon glow. When Susan and Hutton are startled by the appearance of Edward as they depart the abortion clinic, he is, fittingly, standing pitifully in a pounding downpour, drenched to the bone.

Even the most blissful of these remembered scenes are tinted by a shadow of personal ruin, as the viewer is perpetually aware that not only is Edward and Susan’s relationship doomed, but the superficially successful life Susan builds after her first marriage eventually dissolves into unhappiness as well. Regret is the overwhelming feeling that characterizes Susan’s remembrances: that she married Edward in the first place, that she wasn’t more giving and patient in their relationship, that she sundered their union so pitilessly, that she discarded Edward in the pursuit of material comforts, that she didn’t heed her mother’s oracular pronouncements, and on and on. Indeed, Susan's contrition is established so emphatically with respect to her abortion in particular—"I'll live to regret this," she mournfully declares immediately after the procedure, "I already regret it."—the film at times starts to feel uncomfortably like it is promoting infantilizing right-wing canards about reproductive choice. (More on that in a bit.)

Nocturnal Animals' final, unresolved scene is a smarting hoax that preys on the viewer's expectations, but, more significantly, it strikingly illuminates the way that the film’s three storylines fit together. Tony's condemnation of Ray's evil deeds echoes in the silence as Susan waits in vain for a reconciliation: "Nobody gets away with what you did. Nobody." Edward hasn’t forgotten about the meeting he arranged with Susan, and he hasn’t been waylaid by exigent circumstances. He has stood her up, deliberately and callously. It is his middle finger to her, a vengeance of the most off-handed and therefore contemptuous sort. By sending Susan his book—which he knows is a page-turner that will be critically and commercially successful—Edward provides the first component of a trap, and Susan builds the rest of it out of her own guilt and discontent. He knows that she will devour the novel eagerly, and that she will want to reconnect, possibly with a spark of hope that something could be mended or even rekindled between them. He crushes that hope by doing… nothing.

Crucially, the Edward of Story A never actually appears on screen. He is only seen through Susan’s memories in Story C, and as the face that she projects onto Tony in Story B. This underscores the fact that although Nocturnal Animals is, in a sense, the tale of Edward’s revenge, it is not proximally about Edward. It concerns Susan, and her struggle to cope with the wrong turns that she believes she has made in the course of her life. Regardless of how selfishly she acted in her first marriage, or how much the viewer is bidden to relish Edward’s understated retribution, Ford elicits sympathy for Susan by maintaining a soulful, humanizing focus on her. Even when the film lingers on the events of Edward’s novel for an extended period, it repeatedly cuts back to her, reclined on a couch or in bed, galley proof in hand, as if to remind the viewer that she is also experiencing the anxiety and agony that Story B conjures. It might be tempting to snort at the emotional distress of a whinging, privileged woman like Susan, but Ford repeatedly reinforces the universality of her regrets. “Do you ever feel like your life has turned into something you never intended?,” she inquires rhetorically of an assistant (Zawe Ashton), echoing a sentiment that almost everyone over 30 has felt at one time or another. For all its melancholy and viciousness, Nocturnal Animals is in part a heady homage to the insight and perspective that good fiction can stimulate with respect to one’s own life.

Indeed, this is one of Nocturnal Animals’ primary interests: the role that both the creation and consumption of art plays in the understanding of the self. Critically, Ford concedes that art can be a ridiculous, trashy spectacle, its barons and bishops far removed from the workaday "real world" of more pressing concerns in which the masses are obliged to live. Susan acknowledges this when discussing the successful exhibition that she has just opened, featuring a video installation of nude, obese women cavorting in kitschy patriotic regalia. "It's junk. Total junk, " she declares in disgusted exasperation. Animals partly immunizes itself from categorization as a “pretty people with problems” picture by openly acknowledging the cozy loftiness of the world that Susan inhabits. At a dinner party early in the film, her friend Carlos (Michael Sheen, resplendent in a lavender blazer) exhibits a self-effacing awareness of their mutual privilege when he gently chastises her: "Oh, Susan. Enjoy the absurdity of our world. It's a lot less painful. And believe me, our world is a lot less painful than the real world."

Nonetheless, recognizing that art is decadent and classist by nature is emphatically not the same as advancing that it is pointless. Nocturnal Animals pulls off a striking thematic balancing act by simultaneously keeping aloft two superficially dissonant ideas: that art is a fatuous luxury, and that it can also be tremendously meaningful, particularly at a personal level. Virtually all of the conflicts in Stories A and C are related directly or indirectly to acts of artistic creation and consumption, and Story B is itself a work of art in which Susan is immersed for the bulk of the film. Animals asserts that art’s real power lies in the experiences that both the artist and observer bring to it. Its truths are emergent, not intrinsic. In flashback, Susan censures Edward’s early work as too blinkered and self-absorbed. “You should write about something other than yourself,” she advises. Her point is not groundless—Is there anything more clichéd than young male writers who write about young male writers?—but she permits her bitterness about her own admitted creative deficiency to blind her to the obvious. Namely, that all creators are beholden to their own subjective experiences, and the works they create will necessarily reflect those experiences.

Susan is submerged in the complementary phenomenon of audience-centered meaning as Edward’s novel begin to affect her in a profound manner. This is not limited to the way the book triggers her to revisit her past actions, but also includes her empathy and identification with Tony—and by extension Edward, via the spooky action at a distance of the author-reader relationship. (Edward, of course, is counting on this reaction in order to render his big Fuck You all the more hurtful.) Ford intersperses Susan’s journey through the novel with scenes from Story A in order to illustrate how experiencing art also colors the way that one sees the rest of the world. Abruptly, Susan becomes aware of works in her home and in the gallery that she has presumably seen countless times, but which freshly ensnare her attention once juxtaposed with Tony’s story: a rearing hoofed animal pierced by numerous arrows, like some taxidermist's riff on St. Sebastian; a photograph of man in a misty field, grinning despite the fact that a compatriot has a rifle aimed squarely at him; and a stark painting that simply spells out “REVENGE” in white block letters on a black background, a work that Susan does not even remember purchasing. (Subtlety is not a part of Ford’s arsenal.) Susan’s entire outlook seems to shift as she devours Edward's novel, not just in her assessment of her own history, but in her present-day judgments. In her gallery board meeting, she has a sudden change of heart about firing an employee. Her reasoning is practically a direct indictment of her past self for tossing Edward aside: “We hired her, we should support her. [...] Sometimes it's not a good idea to make such a big change.”

Edward’s book was, one assumes, not written solely to hurt Susan. He has been striving to become a successful writer his entire adult life, after all. Nocturnal Animals the novel is both a realization and a rejection of Susan’s long-ago criticism that Edward needs to write about experiences other than his own. On the one hand, Tony’s story is far removed from Edward’s own life. The author had his heart broken and his family preemptively voided, but he has never faced violence or trauma at a level approaching that which his protagonist endures. To anyone other than Susan, the novel’s blood-drenched potboiler style is unlikely to be mistaken for the author's cathartic navel-gazing.

However, there are unmistakable fragments of Edward and his life in the book, beginning with its setting in the novelist’s native Texas, which signifies scrutiny of the essential self. (Critically, Ford, like Susan and Edward, is originally a child of the Southwest, having grown up in the suburbs of Texas and New Mexico before finding his way to the commanding heights of the fashion world at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent.) Paralleling Tony, Edward loses his wife and child, at least metaphorically, and he is similarly hollowed out by a poisonous concoction of sorrow, guilt, and anger. Tony’s perception of his failures—his weakness, cowardice, and indecisiveness—echo Edward’s own shortcomings in his marriage, at least as they were acidly expressed by Susan. Edward’s selection of a genre and milieu where masculinity is asserted through physical strength, intimidation, and violence is no accident. To an extent, Nocturnal Animals the novel is Edward’s attempt to grapple with his alleged deficiencies of manhood, and with the question of whether it is even desirable to correct such failings. By addressing the evergreen problem of vengeance’s futility within a familiar mythic Western framework, Edward is attacking the stickier, politically-charged question of what it means to be a man in the real world. Susan’s criticisms of a younger Edward are echoed discreetly in Andes’ doubtful, backhanded statements to Tony (“It's my understanding that these boys didn’t have any guns...”), and crassly in Ray’s emasculating taunts.

Laura Hastings is even, like Susan, a pale, strikingly attractive redhead. Likewise, India Hastings bears some resemblance to Susan and Hutton’s college-aged daughter (India Menuez), briefly glimpsed in some far-flung locale in the early morning embrace of a lover. (Susan is so shaken by the discovery of Laura and India’s bodies in the novel that she spontaneously calls her adult child, giving Ford a reason to work in an unnervingly gorgeous visual echo.) It is conceivable that such physical similarities are the conjurations of Susan’s mind rather than a product of Edward’s descriptive prose. In which case, it suggests less about Edward’s intentions than about Susan’s subconscious perception of the novel’s personal dimensions.

This underlines the notion that it is Susan, not Edward, who is perched at the film’s center. While not exactly an unreliable narrator in the conventional sense, all that occurs in Stories B and C is filtered through her viewpoint. The crushing rejection she experiences at the film’s conclusion owes its power to the discipline of Ford’s storytelling, and to Adams’ scrupulous, pitiful performance. Susan permits herself vulnerability, becoming receptive to the psychological heft of Edward’s novel, to her remorseful recollections, and to her ephemeral anticipation of a reunion—only to have it all revealed as a sad, small joke. Edward’s actions are not part of some grand Shakespearean scheme of bloody vengeance, but rather the signs of insouciant disdain. The indifference that he exhibits in reconnecting with Susan demonstrates that while he still nurses a grudge over being emotionally manhandled and abandoned, it is a small, restrained sort of bitterness. It compels him to send Susan a parcel, exchange a couple of emails, and flout a scheduled get-together, but nothing more. There’s something particularly cruel about this sort of marginal attention, recalling Elie Weisel’s aphorism that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. A similar sentiment is expressed by Mad Men’s Don Draper in the Season 5 episode “Dark Shadows,” when he responds to an affronted copywriter’s pitying insult, “I feel bad for you” with the quietly ruthless, “I don’t think about you at all.” Edward clearly still thinks about Susan, but he certainly isn’t concerned about her. She's been packed away in some dim, musty subbasement of his heart and left to rot.

How one regards Edward’s scornful treatment of his ex-wife—and his assessment of her past sins—may depend to some extent on the value one places on closure and forgiveness. Such currencies are a staple of emotional self-help stratagems of both religious and secular species, but their significance can be overstated. As feminist writer and STI stigma activist Ella Dawson explains in a vital essay, “You Don’t Need to Forgive People Who Hurt You”:

There is a case to be made for letting go of what has happened to you in order to become who you are supposed to be. But I need to make the opposite case, in the interest of balance […] You do not need to forgive people who have been abusive to you. You do not need to rise above them, or make peace with them, or even pity them. […] Healing is about what is best for you. That might be forgiveness. But it might be moving to a new city, or writing a book, or calling him a human trashfire over drinks with your new best friends.

Dawson’s piece emphasizes the sexist social pressure on women to forgive the men who have wronged them, but her broader point about the fallacy of forgiveness’ intrinsic value is salient. The viewer is never privy to Edward’s first-hand views, but there are complementary truths about forgiveness that Susan might derive from his rough dismissal. One is never owed forgiveness, no matter how intensely one regrets one’s actions or wishes to make amends. One is never entitled to a second chance, or an opportunity to achieve closure. It’s not merely that some messes can’t be cleaned up. Sometimes the whole goddamn building surrounding the mess has to be bulldozed, even if the view from that one window was really lovely at a certain time of year.

There is plenty in Nocturnal Animals that invites quibbles. While Adams and Gyllenhaal are credible as both starry-eyed grad students and fortysomething parents, the notion that 30-year-old Armie Hammer could be the father of an 18-year-old daughter (at the youngest) is ridiculous to the point of distraction. The one downright tonally discordant section of the Animals is a mid-film sequence at Susan’s gallery, which includes both a glaringly miscalculated use of horror elements and a lazy tweaking of the art world’s image obsession. When Susan glimpses the leering face of Ray on an assistant’s smartphone, it’s a cheap jump-scare, but also a potential signal that the film is heading towards a Repulsion-like disintegration of sanity or reality. Yet Ford never revisits such funhouse methods again, which leaves the moment looking like a gaudy orphan. More trivial but less forgivable is a cheap shot at a botox-deformed gallery employee. Ford, as a product of both Houston and Milan, generally sticks the tricky landing of simultaneously adoring and satirizing both red state grit and high culture glamour. However, the gag in question just comes off as puerile snickering, and not the reflection of Susan’s own stunted self-awareness that was likely intended.

Other writers have observed that the film is oddly conservative in its depiction of abortion, arguing that the procedure is portrayed as if it were an unspeakable crime against the biological father, or even morally comparable to rape and murder. Ford’s almost offhanded presentation of the plot’s abortion revelation—and his antipathy for its stereotypical iconography—undercuts the notion that the film draws equivalencies between Susan’s termination of her pregnancy on one hand and the fictional deaths of Laura and India on the other. In the end, Susan’s abortion is treated less as an ultimate act of perfidy than as the final nail in the coffin of her relationship with Edward. (It is notable that Susan ends the pregnancy after telling her husband that their marriage is over. At that point, the fate of the embryo is really no longer in Edward's jurisdiction, so to speak.) Still, elsewhere the conception of abortion as a violence that should be prevented by honorable men is hammered with gusto: Just after the clinic flashback in Story C, Tony is depicted repeatedly raging, “I should have stopped it!” in Story B. Moreover, there is something vaguely disagreeable about an openly gay filmmaker depicting abortion as a treacherous act perpetrated by a selfish, shrewish woman. Ford may not have intended a misogynist connotation—and the specificity of his interest in Susan’s subjective experiences is indeed hard to reconcile with hateful aims—but it’s also undeniable that Nocturnal Animals is constructed partly on a hoary anti-woman stereotype, and that it exists within the context of an ugly misogynistic streak in gay male culture.

It is the film’s success as a dazzling, forceful work of cinematic provocation that makes such disconcerting gaffes worthy of attention and evaluation, however. Nocturnal Animals is not merely a superior work to Ford’s polished but comparatively starched A Single Man, but also a deliciously disturbing taste of the director’s emergent talent for combining formal virtuosity with thorny psychological themes. Few other films this year have managed the hat trick of being at once a breathtaking art object, a pulpy guilty pleasure, and a solicitation to think judiciously about one’s one choices and comportment.

PostedDecember 11, 2016

AuthorAndrew Wyatt

CategoriesDiary

[Note: This post contains moderate spoilers. Updated 10/5/16.]

Early in Luca Guadagnino’s luscious Euro-thriller A Bigger Splash, live-wire music producer Harry (Ralph Fiennes) pauses while en route to a restaurant in order to urinate on a Mediterranean hillock, spattering what is evidently an ancient shrine in the process. This prompts an exasperated appeal from documentarian Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts), who is already weary of the other man’s careless, self-absorbed manner: “Come on, that’s a grave.” Harry just dismisses this concern with a shrug, remarking dryly, “Yeah, well, Europe is a grave.” It’s a morbidly amusing observation, but also the non-sequitur of a narcissist who despises being held accountable for his dickish behavior.

There’s a similar moment in Polish writer-director Marcin Wrona’s unnerving and unexpectedly droll Demon. Pitched midway between a ghost story, realist drama, and arch cultural satire, the film tells the story of a bridegroom who is (seemingly) possessed by a restless Jewish spirit on his wedding day. At the heart of the film’s many mysteries is a human skeleton that has recently been exhumed on a little farm owned by the bride’s family—the very property where the matrimonial festivities are being held, in fact. Responding to alarm at the thought of a corpse being unearthed just a stone’s throw from the feasting and dancing, one wedding guest dismissively snorts, “This whole country is built on corpses.”

This moment of cynical pragmatism stands out in a story overwhelmingly populated by characters who preferred coping strategy for anything upsetting is anxious denial. For the realist, there is an undeniable appeal in bluntly confronting the blood-drenched reality of history’s sweep—particularly in Poland, which as historian Timothy Snyder contends, has arguably been victim to more mass murder per capita than any other nation-state in the past century. Ultimately, however, the dismissal of human slaughter as the mere background noise of civilization has the same net effect as outright denial. It permits the cynic to proceed on their current trajectory without having to reckon with history’s ghosts, or, indeed, without having to make any uncomfortable adjustments to their current paradigm at all. Like Harry in A Bigger Splash, the wedding guest in Demon bats away obligations to the dead by invoking death’s ubiquity.

Perhaps inevitably for a Polish film about disinterred bones and Jewish phantoms, Demon is not a subtle work of cinema. It doesn’t so much wear its metaphorical character on its sleeve as announce it with fireworks and orchestral fanfare. Director Wrona forgoes any attempt at understated subtext, and instead focuses on establishing a nerve-wracking atmosphere, and, more strikingly, on showcasing the myriad ways that characters confront the festering realities that are oozing up beneath their feet. While Demon is foremost a roundabout Holocaust Film by way of supernatural and psychological horror tropes, it’s also more generally about the miserably inadequate ways that societies deal with history that they would prefer to forget.

Wrona’s storytelling style is reserved and largely naturalistic, revealing only incidental fragments of the film’s scenario over the course of its opening 20 or so minutes. This makes for an undeniably measured and low-key approach, but also one that is skillfully timed. The director gives the viewer just enough time to sort out who the characters are and what their relationships are to one another, and then proceeds to crank up the supernatural menace. Polish-British engineer Piotr (Israeli actor Itay Tiran) has arrived in the Old Country to marry Zaneta (Agnieszka Zulewska) following a brief, Internet-facilitated courtship. Although Piotr’s Polish is rusty and Zaneta’s wealthy, limping bear of a father (Andrzej Grabowski) broadly disapproves of the wedding’s abruptness, the happy couple are clearly smitten. Moreover, the groom has won over his wife-to-be’s garrulous older brother Jasny (Tomasz Shuchardt), and is already making plans to renovate the rustic farmhouse and barn which Zaneta inherited from her paternal grandparents.

Said farm is also the setting for the wedding reception, and while performing a bit of brush clearing with a borrowed backhoe the day before the nuptials, Piotr accidentally unearths an unmarked grave on the grounds. Visibly shaken and uncertain as to what to do, he ultimately elects to simply re-cover the bones and keep the discovery a secret. The dead don’t take too kindly to this desecration, however, and shortly thereafter Piotr begins hearing phantasmal noises in the drafty farmhouse and catching glimpses of a pale woman shrouded in yellowed lace. This supernatural stalking culminates late that night while a thunderstorm rages, as Piotr is lured out of the house and pulled screaming into the devouring muck of the disturbed grave.

The next day, Zaneta observes that Piotr seems to be acting oddly before, during, and after the wedding ceremony. He certainly doesn’t look well: waxen skin slick with sweat; eyes ringed with dark smudges; recurring nosebleeds; and a coating of fresh dirt that keeps reappearing on his hands, no matter how many times he scrubs them. While the wedding goers dance raucously and obliviously at the reception, hideous wailing and taunting visions of a spectral maiden bedevil Piotr. When he stumbles across an inexplicably open grave at the location where he re-buried the remains the previous day, he is finally compelled to confess his ghastly discovery to Zaneta’s father and brother. Upon returning to the site, however, the group finds nothing, leaving Piotr looking like a stammering Lou Costello, pointing to the spot where a mummy was standing just moments ago.

Before long a frazzled Piotr is begging the bewildered priest (Cezary Kosinki) for confirmation that he is not losing his mind. “Do the dead ever appear to the living?” he pleads, but the blandly officious clergyman doesn’t seem to even understand the question. Owing to the copious vodka that flows at the reception, Piotr’s curious behavior goes unnoticed by most of the wedding guests for a surprisingly long period of time. When his actions take a turn into the overtly bizarre, Zaneta’s frantic family manages to keep the festivities going (and the focus off Piotr) by maintaining a steady supply of alcohol and music. After two separate, shockingly violent seizures on the dance floor that leave Piotr semi-conscious and mumbling in Yiddish, the groom is restrained and confined to the farmhouse’s cellar, the better to keep him away from inquisitive guests. He thereafter insists that he is not Piotr but a young woman named “Hanna,” whom an elderly Jewish schoolteacher (Wlodzimierz Press) identifies as a local beauty that went missing some eight decades ago. The wizened man concludes that Piotr has become the host of a dybbuk, the dislocated soul of a deceased person with the power to possess living individuals.

The mostly distinctive aspect of Demon is how little the film is concerned with resolving the mystery of Hanna’s death and its connection (if any) to Zaneta’s clan. Wrona’s screenplay—co-written with Pawel Maslona and loosely adapted from the Polish play Adherence by Piotr Rowicki—doesn’t present this tale as a puzzle box to be solved by either the characters or the viewer. One is left to infer from scattered details how and why Hanna’s lifeless body went into the ground so many years ago. Tellingly, most of those details are plucked from the memory of the aforementioned schoolteacher, whom the film establishes early on as a distracted, rambling old fellow settling into the earliest stages of dementia. Hanna’s ethnicity and the time frame of her demise point to a Nazi-perpetrated war crime, but suggestions of jealous rage and psychosexual nastiness also snake between the lines. The film’s preference for ambiguity also extents to present-day events. Demon’s final scenes leave numerous unanswered questions, particularly with respect to Piotr’s fate and the incriminating behavior of Jasny’s skeevy friend Ronaldo (Tomadsz Zietek).

Indeed, Wrona’s proximal interest lies not in the dead-Jewish-girl plot—substantial portions of which remain submerged in uncertainty—but in depicting the characters’ reactions when the jagged edges of that plot protrude into their path. While Piotr’s baffled anguish is poignant, Demon treats him as a victim rather than a tragic protagonist, progressively directing its attention more decisively to the people that surround him. As the dybbuk gradually takes hold of Piotr’s mortal flesh, the other characters flail about in desperation, latching onto any stratagem that allows them to keep moving forward without having to acknowledge the ghost in their midst. Zaneta alone responds with feverish concern for Piotr’s well-being, not to mention righteous anger at her father‘s blatantly untruthful denials regarding the corpse buried out back. The bride aside, the film’s characters seem most concerned with keeping the party going and exonerating themselves from any responsibility for Piotr’s doomed situation.

One can detect traces of Demon’s theatrical heritage in the slightly amused way that the film catalogs this outburst of mass denial, one absurd conversation at a time. When Zenata’s father accuses Jasny of bringing home a defective husband for his sister, the bride’s brother practically trips over himself in his haste to walk back his involvement, protesting “I don’t even know the guy that well!” The mother of the bride is less interested in her son-in-law’s welfare than in ferreting out the troublemakers who are spreading rumors among her guests about Jewish demons. The perpetually soused town doctor (Adam Woronowicz) keeps chalking up Piotr’s behavior to wedding day nerves, in between self-righteous and laughably bullshit declarations of his own sobriety. The priest doesn’t even want to get involved, and spends most of the reception politely and unsuccessfully trying to negotiate a ride back to the rectory.

Demon’s most critical eye is reserved for the reactions of Zenata’s father, who blusters frantically through every fresh calamity like a drowning man fussing over whether his necktie is on straight. Faced with the possibility that his only daughter has just married a man who is (at best) severely mentally ill, the old man’s only thought is to exercise damage control on his own reputation. The flop sweat is profuse as he grins cheerily through even the most awkward and disturbing moments, asserting that everything is fine and urging guests to stay and have another drink. This attitude of brazen, unconvincing denial culminates in a surreal sunrise speech, in which he cajoles his exhausted guests to forget everything that happened over the course of the night. “There was no groom. There was no wedding. You were never here.” Like Justine’s marriage in Melancholia, Zenata’s is over before the wedding is even concluded.

Light of touch, Demon is not. One could scarce devise a more on-the-nose metaphor for Polish discomfort with its lingering national scars than a nervous, hobbling Pole pleading with his fellows to forget about the ghost of a murdered Jew. Other allegorical angles abound, however. Unquestionably, the alternately flustered, ashamed, and furious responses to Piotr’s erratic conduct echoes the way that families and societies of all sorts react to mental illness, as if it were a deformity to be hidden behind closed doors and never mentioned in polite company. Slender but unmistakable threads of xenophobia run through the characters’ attitudes towards Piotr, whose facility with English and life spent outside the homeland mark him as culturally suspect in more provincial Polish eyes. Moreover, the film hints that Piotr is himself perhaps a secular Jew, most memorably when he breaks his wedding wine glass with a stomp instead of tossing it to the ground in the Polish Catholic fashion. The dybbuk’s selection of Piotr as its vessel is thus not arbitrary. The humiliation that Zenata’s family feels for his behavior is as much about their discomfort with Jewishness (or non-Polishness) marrying into their lineage as it is about national wartime sins.

Undoubtedly, some of the film’s metaphorical intricacies are lost on this American writer. There are hints that Demon is, in part, a broad critique of the Polish absorption with Golden Age fallacies, as evidenced by elderly characters' wistful longing for the Way Things Used to Be. When an old man claims that once upon time "we were all Poles," Wrona also seems to be taking aim at nationalist myths regarding the country's Commonwealth-era glories, as well as its refusal to acknowledge the multi-ethnic character of its historical demographics. (The latter is a pitfall even for video game developers, apparently, as evidenced by the criticism of racial representation in CD Projeckt’s acclaimed Polish fantasy RPG The Wicher 3: Wild Hunt.)

Whatever Demon lacks in subtlety, it compensates for it with its crisply farcical dialog and potent air of gnawing dread. Wrona is focused in his preservation of the film’s magical realism, teasing the viewer with occasional feints in the direction of a CGI unreality that never appears, much to Demon’s benefit. When Piotr arches his back agonizingly in the throes of a dybbuk-induced seizure, for example, his body seems on the cusp of the twisting into a specimen of bone-snapping body horror, but instead it collapses into a flaccid stupor. Wrona evinces a restraint in his horror methods wholly absent from the film’s sledgehammer approach to metaphor. This has the effect of bestowing his little creepshow touches with added chill, such as when a pallid hand under Piotr’s bed presses a dropped ampule of sedative into the doctor’s hand, much to the physician’s mute shock. Borrowing freely from Stanley Kubrick’s features, composers Marcin Macuk and Krzysztof Penderecki fill the film’s soundscape with atonal keening and droning, suggesting a hidden world that is at once sepulchral and satanic. Components of the sound design mutate in deliberately disorienting fashion, as when a piercing wail that initially seems to be in Piotr’s head evolves into the exuberant vocalizations of a singing wedding guest.

Wrona nearly squanders all of his directorial goodwill in one of Demon’s final shots, a cheap Kubrickean homage that just feels shamelessly hackneyed. The scene that precedes that offending shot, however, personifies the filmmaker’s talent for crafting eerie, indelible moments out of otherwise heavy-handed metaphor. As the still-inebriated wedding guests stumble away from the reception in the morning, they climb unsteadily to the top of a misty ridge, running headlong into a funeral procession. The wedding-goers react with glazed indifference, pushing their way through the line of mourners, who seem too stupefied by this encounter to be properly offended. It’s the kind of moment that is thick with potential meaning—political, sociological, and existential—but truly lingers because of the uncanny tone, evocative texture, and bone-dry wit that Wrona imparts to it.

PostedOctober 4, 2016

AuthorAndrew Wyatt

CategoriesDiary

[Note: This post contains major spoilers. Updated 3/17/17.]

A young woman comes to the Big City with dreams of breaking into stardom. Throughout her brief life, she’s been told she has “It”: a singular beauty, an uncommon talent, an aura that turns heads when she glides into a room. The gatekeepers to fame and fortune can also discern her extraordinary value. They tell her she is going places, and make endless promises about the glamorous future that lies before her. She gets her Big Break and, seemingly overnight, she is ushered into a rarefied realm far removed from that of her old life. Her new world has a gangrenous underside, however, and she is gradually corrupted and drained by the unforgiving system like a vampire’s bride. The exhilaration of ascension eventually turns to blind narcissism, and then to panicked cruelty as her trajectory—exploitation, diminishment, replacement—becomes hideously apparent.

It’s a timeless story, perhaps even a clichéd one. The cold-blooded commodification of beauty is such a well-established and exhaustively explored phenomenon that any new iteration of the tale needs to offer something truly distinctive, either aesthetically or thematically, in order to justify its existence. Director Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest feature, the high fashion nightmare The Neon Demon, offers both. Visually and aurally, it’s an utterly fearless work: a lustrous acid trip spattered with indelible images of both unearthly loveliness and midnight-movie ghastliness. What truly makes Refn’s film so forceful and remarkable, however, is that its striking, often disconcerting imagery is utilized to portray a bent variation on a familiar babe-in-the-woods character arc, which is cast as an expression of a pervasive cultural virus. Critically, The Neon Demon is nothing as facile as a mere indictment of the fashion world’s superficiality—although some viewers will doubtlessly regard it as that and nothing more. It is, more meaningfully, a lament for the grotesque deformations inflicted on the human soul by the hunger for the unattainable.

The film’s opening credit sequence functions as an apéritif for the chilly, intense aesthetic that Refn maintains throughout. Bright text materializes and fades over a textured background of mutating fluorescent hues, while Cliff Martinez’ synth-drenched soundtrack layers melodic waves, ambient noise, and tinkling chimes over an urgent electronic beat. (One can immediately discern the ghost of Brian Eno’s late 1970s and early 80s studio albums, among other influences, in Martinez’ excellent score for the film.) As in Refn’s Drive, the exact year in which The Neon Demon unfolds is ambiguous, but from the outset, the film’s style often evokes the sights and sounds of a distinct mode of mass market West Coast 1980s chic. Here the walls are hung with Christopher Nagel prints, the hi-fi stereo blares synthpop and post-punk, and limitless cocaine fuels the late-night revelries. With mocking self-importance, Refn even emblazons the credits with his own retro designer label of sorts: a crest with the initials N.W.F.

The film then introduces Demon’s resident ingénue Jesse (Elle Fanning), a 16-year-old who is freshly arrived in Los Angeles and painfully eager to make a name for herself in the modeling world. With her corn silk tresses, rosy porcelain skin, and vulnerable, almost boyish features, she doesn’t have the look of a typical runway denizen. It’s this novelty that seems to make her so beguiling to the industry figures she encounters, beginning with aspiring photographer Dean (Karl Glusman). Perhaps unwisely, Jesse has connected with him online and agreed to participate in a private photo shoot in order to build her portfolio.

Dean has Jesse made up like a candy-colored doll and then places her in a Grand Guignol tableau, sprawled on a couch with blood spilling from her slit throat. It’s exactly the sort of trite slasher-goth aesthetic that an “edgy” struggling artist might employ, and yet it still unsettles. Refn presents the shoot itself in a Euro-artsy register. Jesse is visually confined and isolated by quadrilaterals, like a messily pinned insect in a shadow box. He also accentuates the atmosphere of menace with shots of Dean prowling in the darkness, throwing hungry looks at his model. In truth, the sequence constitutes a bit of misdirection: Dean is later revealed as the most decent and forthright (perhaps guileless) person Jesse will encounter in Los Angeles, and he even initiates a chaste sort-of-relationship with her.

For Jesse, the more fateful meeting that occurs during the shoot is with Ruby (Jena Malone), a slinky makeup artist. This woman talks the friend-starved model into accompanying her to a late-night party, the sort of hip affair that includes video art installations and an acrobatic shibari performance piece. There Jesse is introduced to fellow models Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee), lanky, cold-blooded blondes who haughtily enumerate their cosmetic surgeries as if they were achievements. In the ladies’ room, away from the deafening dream-pop and fuddling strobe lights, the pair’s veneer of cordiality vanishes the moment that Jesse fails to show them proper deference, and thereafter they dispose of her with a few caustic swipes. Gigi in particular slips in and out of Mean Girl mode with an unnerving ease, in a gauchely hostile echo of Charlotte’s more refined frenemy stance in The Last Days of Disco.

Ultimately, however, the nasty jabs of fellow models amount to so much anxious hot air, a measure of the threat that Jesse represents to the established pecking order of Los Angeles’ fashion world. Evincing unexpected self-awareness and mercenary pragmatism, she confesses to Dean during a date that she has no real talents, but “I’m pretty, and I can make money off of pretty.” Indeed, the people who stand to profit off Jesse’s beauty, such as modeling agent Roberta (Christina Hendricks) and fashion photographer Jack (Demond Harrington), are unfailingly smitten with her effortless, unconventional look. Perhaps due to her youth, Jesse also radiates anxious vulnerability, which only heightens her attraction to disreputable industry elements. In a dreamlike sequence, the aforementioned Jack closes his set for a one-on-one shoot with the plainly petrified Jesse, slathering her nude body with metallic gold paint in a manner that betrays both clinical admiration and nauseating exploitation. (The visual evokes Auric Goldfinger’s gaudy execution methods, and by extension the misogyny-tinted disposability of the myriad Bond Girls.)

In no time at all, Jesse finds herself standing expectantly in front of a casting director and an esteemed designer (an uncredited Alessandro Nivola). Like all the models who have appeared for the audition, she wears only underwear and heels, but whereas the Designer can barely be bothered to glance at most of the women, Jesse’s entrance stops him cold. Refn and Nivola present this encounter absolutely straight, as a rapturous moment for a man steeped in world-weary decadence. Fanning might be unequivocally beautiful, but the filmmaker appreciates that in narrative fiction, mere assertions of greatness—e.g., she’s a genius writer, he’s an exquisite dancer, she’s one of the finest painters in the world—are not sufficient to convey a character’s superlative qualities. It’s Nivola’s splendid slow-motion reaction rather than Fanning’s looks that persuade the viewer that Jesse has “It”. The director stages the scene as though it were a religious experience for the Designer. Like Saul, the scales fall from his eyes as he at least beholds true beauty. (The unspoken, discomfiting subtext is, naturally, that Jesse’s new life can only truly begin when a powerful man acknowledges her appearance.)

Equally significant from a narrative perspective, however, is the reaction of Sarah, who is auditioning for the same show and immediately precedes Jesse in the lineup. Irrespective of the viewer’s distaste for Sarah, it’s hard not to feel twinges of sympathy when one witnesses the slow and total collapse of her confidence when the Designer won’t deign to even look at her. The sight of an au naturel newcomer like Jesse being singled out is too much for Sarah to bear. Jesse later discovers her in the restroom, sobbing before a shattered mirror, her portfolio torn and slashed to shreds. Good-hearted naïf that Jesse is, she tries to offer Sarah reassurance, but to the latter woman, this just feels like contemptuous pity. When Jesse’s palm is accidentally sliced on a mirror shard, the film offers the first unmistakable sign that something more rotten that mere heartless capitalism lurks beneath the surface of this world. Sarah seizes Jesse’s hand and attempts to lap up her blood, as though her rival’s priceless “It” were a molecule that could be consumed and absorbed.

Indeed, there are whispers throughout the film that something is askew, that the world has gone monstrously out of order. Most memorably, Jesse at one point returns to her fleabag extended-stay motel room to discover that an intruder is lurking within. Threatening to call the police, she convinces the abrasive, leering manager Hank (Keanu Reeves) to do something about this unwanted guest. When he and a baseball-bat-wielding crony (Charles Baker) investigate, however, the trespasser is revealed to be a mountain lion that has wandered down from the hills. This slightly surrealistic aside establishes a sensation of perversion and intrusion—the pitiless beast slipping undetected into the civilized world. The menace is only amplified by Refn’s facility at conveying both Los Angeles’ glitz and its seediness, and then allowing the resulting dissonance to grow, cancerously, into something overwhelming. This same approach is on display in Drive, but here the director escalates it to an almost baroque levels: The grime is much thicker and the gleam much more dazzling. Indeed, even the banal spaces of The Neon Demon’s L.A.—the strip mall diners, anonymous alleyways, and cash-only motels—exude a distressing sense of the uncanny, much like the locales of the thematically adjacent Mulholland Drive. In truth, nothing feels familiar in Jesse’s new world, and she seems perpetually menaced by her surroundings, even in the most mundane situations.

It is a professional coup for Jesse to have been chosen for the Designer’s latest show, but it is the event itself that proves to be a true turning point, the threshold that divides Middle American innocence from a new communion with something cold and unholy. Gigi is in the show as well, flabbergasted and affronted that Jesse has been given a place of honor in the finale, but the woman’s limp jibes betray the intimidation she plainly feels. Refn’s stylized portrayal of Jesse’s experience on the runway reveal the event as a transformative and profound one. The other models and even the spectators are lost in perfect darkness as radioactive hues of pink, red, and blue seemingly baptize Jesse in light. (Here and elsewhere, Refn’s film echoes Suspiria, the bright colors evoking something unearthly and sinister rather than wondrous.) She is eventually confronted with a neon shape hanging in the void, like a burning glyph written by a divine finger. A triangle divided into four sub-triangles, this mark does not seem to be a mere symbol, but the manifestation—perhaps even the perfectly symmetrical face—of some inhuman entity. The invisible metamorphosis to which it subjects Jesse is a monstrous one: the removal of her guileless, gentle nature and its replacement with callous narcissism. As if to seal this sacrament, Jesse kisses her own reflections within a prism-like structure that has enclosed around her.

The scene that immediately follows illustrates the abrupt shift in Jesse’s demeanor that is triggered by the triangle’s malefic fire. (It is also underlined by a change in Fanning’s body language, from tremulous elation to languid arrogance.) Jesse shows her crypto-boyfriend Dean in through the back door of a restaurant, where a post-show dinner is underway with the Designer, Gigi, and other models. There, the Designer reveals himself as the closest thing in the The Neon Demon to a Satanic figure, although he is truly more of a mouthpiece for the being from Jesse’s hallucinatory runway walk. “Beauty isn’t everything. It’s the only thing,” he pronounces magisterially, clarifying—with barely concealed disdain for Gigi and the show’s other models—that Jesse’s unparalleled natural looks are the pearl of great price in this ethos. Such beauty cannot be attained, only bestowed by the luck of genetics. When poor Dean pushes back against this superficial worldview, Jesse icily tells him to leave if he’s so bothered by such harsh truths. The mise-en-scène in this passage is marvelous stuff: Dean and Jesse sit at separate tables, the former serving as a feeble barrier between the latter and the others characters. (Tellingly, he has to turn uncomfortably in his seat to address the Designer, exposing his back to Jesse’s verbal stabbing.) When Dean crumbles and flees, Jesse is free to slide across the gap and join her new tribe.

Later, a drunk and exhausted Jesse returns to the motel and has an excruciating nightmare in which Hank enters her room and forces her to perform fellatio on a folding pocket knife. (This disturbing dream is one of several warnings, unheeded by Jesse, of the violent threat posed by the frustrated envy and lust of others.) Upon awakening, she hears someone (possibly Hank) force his way into the adjacent room and apparently assault the young woman within. Knowing no one else she can turn to, she reaches out to Ruby, who is house-sitting at a mansion in the hills. The latter woman takes pity on Jesse and offers her the use of a spare bedroom. Tellingly, one shot reveals that this residence features a stuffed and mounted leopard, calling back to the invading panther and hinting that the mansion is a place of animalistic peril.

Indeed, the luxurious residence proves to be no sanctuary from the sexual aggressions of others. Ruby mistakenly assumes that her not-so-secret desire for Jesse is requited, and that her generosity entitles her to the young model’s affections. Vehemently rejected after attempting to force herself on Jesse, Ruby succumbs to a kind of enraged, self-loathing breakdown. During the course of her day job as a funeral home’s cosmetician, she pleasures herself with a female cadaver while fantasizing about her house guest. Jesse, meanwhile, having discovered that she is truly isolated and surrounded by grasping predators, withdraws even further into hard-hearted vanity. (She never dares to reach out to the spurned Dean, who, unbeknownst to Jesse, has paid Hank for the damages inflicted on her room by the mountain lion.) When Ruby finds her wandering by the mansion’s drained pool the following evening, Jesse espouses a matter-of-fact superiority: “I know what I look like... Women would kill to look like this.”

These words prove prescient, for it is at this point that The Neon Demon reveals itself as horror cinema not only in spirit, but in flesh and bone. Ruby, it seems, has invited Gigi and Sarah over to the mansion, and together the three women unleash a violent reckoning on Jesse for the sin of being beautiful and unattainable. Their assault culminates in Jesse’s fall into the empty pool, where she lies fatally broken, staring up at stars that seem to form the unholy triangle of her runway vision. Ruby, Gigi, and Sarah regard their dying victim coolly, watching her dark blood spread on the tile with hungry fascination.

The Neon Demon could very well have concluded with this tragic moment: the innocent unjustly murdered and her green-eyed nemeses triumphant. A dire ending, perhaps, but not one that feels especially rebellious in its depiction of human rapacity and spitefulness. Refn’s feature, however, achieves something far more discomfiting and transgressive by continuing to push the narrative forward. Instead of flickering out with Jesse’s life, the film rolls on, bearing witness as her murderers reap the rewards of their bloody deed—and learn its price.

In the aftermath of Jesse’s death, Gigi and Sarah shower blood and bits of flesh from their bare bodies while Ruby lazes motionless in a bathtub filled with gore, her pale face caked in scarlet. It’s a startling image that evokes numerous horror features (Carrie, The Descent, Trouble Every Day), as well as the baths of virginal blood in which real-world serial killer Elizabeth Báthory purportedly indulged, at least according to folk tradition. As this scene implies and later ones confirm, Ruby and her fellows have plunged beyond mere murder and defilement: They have embraced cannibalism as a means of absorbing Jesse’s youth, beauty, and vitality. The Neon Demon’s third act swerve thus reveals the film as a po-faced, Vanity Fair remix of Antonia Bird’s anthropophagical black comedy Ravenous.

For Ruby—the only member of the murderous trio motivated by romantic resentment—her abominable deeds have in a twisted sense secured Jesse’s eternal proximity, albeit at the possible cost of the makeup artist’s sanity. She is later observed masturbating on a moonlit floor as a distressing quantity of blood gushes from her vagina, and then later still lying placidly in what is apparently Jesse’s unmarked grave. In the case of Gigi and Sarah, the fallout from their actions is much more clearly expressed and far more horrific. While accompanying Gigi during a shoot at a stunning seaside house, Sarah catches the attention of the photographer, Jack—the same man who was once so enraptured by Jesse. Struck by Sarah’s looks, he asks her to substitute for another model. This appears to confirm the notion that the consumption of Jesse’s flesh has bestowed her killers with a portion of her youthful power. Sarah is pleased, and for a moment it seems as though the villains have emerged victorious, the boons of their crime at last emergent.

Then Gigi begins to cough and excuses herself from the photo shoot, to the consternation of the crew. Sarah searches the house for her and discovers Gigi huddled in a small room, gagging and retching. Seemingly hypnotized, Sarah can only watch impotently as Gigi vomits up a partially digested eyeball, its iris still a perfect icy blue. “I need to get her out of me,” Gigi wails, before suddenly and repeatedly stabbing herself in the abdomen with a pair of scissors and slumping over dead. (Partly concealed by designer sunglasses, Sarah’s reaction is almost completely blank, with the exception of a tiny twitch of disgust at the edge of her flawlessly painted lips, a detail that is deliciously performed by Lee.) After considering Gigi’s corpse for a beat, Sarah slowly crouches down, picks up the eyeball, and swallows it, wiping away a tear in the process. She then turns on her heel and returns to the shoot.

It’s a terrifically effective and brazen conclusion, and one in keeping with Refn’s aforementioned tactic of relentlessly pushing forward to observe all the awful consequences of Jesse’s murder. This approach creates a splendidly squirm-provoking pall of doom over the final minutes of The Neon Demon. Each shot and gesture signals what follows, with Refn allowing each terrible expectation to gurgle for a few sour moments before fulfilling it. (“She’s not going to pick up the eyeball, is she? Oh, God, she’s picking it up. Wait, she’s not going to…?”)

Beyond its potency as an almost cheekily sadistic horror sequence, however, the ending brings the film’s thematic ambitions into clear focus. While Refn refrains from painting Sarah, Gigi, and Ruby as overtly sympathetic characters, the film does elicit some sliver of sympathy for them. They might be murderous cannibals, but these women are also systematic victims, as are virtually all the women depicted in The Neon Demon. The muddling of deadly sins in the film’s psychological landscape—envy, pride, greed, lust, and gluttony—is significant. It directs the viewer to a broader and higher vantage point, from which one might gaze downward into the film’s earthly inferno and discern the ubiquitous handiwork of a malevolent power. Not Lucifer, in this instance, but want itself.

The abrupt, atypical end to Jesse’s star-is-born arc—inasmuch as she has an arc at all—might seems narratively perverse, but it’s as much necessary collateral damage as it is mischievous subversion on Refn’s part. Although Jesse is The Neon’s Demon’s protagonist and her initiation into the cult of commercial beauty is the backbone of the story, the bulk of the film’s emotional energy is directed towards her. To be sure, the viewer is witness to Jesse’s terror, ecstasy, and vanity as she is introduced and acclimated to the modeling world’s twisted norms. Yet the film regards her less as a tragic heroine than as a vehicle for the portrayal of a profane emotional process. Namely, a woman’s indoctrination into a misogynistic system of commercialized desire.

Tellingly, almost every other character in the film wants something from Jesse: professionals like the agent, photographer, and Designer see a means to wealth and fame; Dean yearns for the romance and constancy of a girlfriend; Ruby daydreams of passionate sex; Hank wants cash and a fearful “Lolita” he can abuse; and Sarah and Gigi hunger to devour Jesse’s beauty and claim it as their own. The film’s air is thick with heedless, almost manic longing. The Neon Demon highlights the commonalities that run through these various desires, appealing to the viewer’s empathy, at least with respect to its women characters. Humanity, Refn advances, is snared in a fractal of repeating and endlessly fragmenting wants, a triangle subdivided down to the quantum level. Even a cannibal and would-be rapist like Ruby ultimately longs for something quite human—the physical affection of a Special Someone. Like most Americans, she has been tragically encultured to believe that everyone is guaranteed such intimacy.

There is no need for Refn to hammer the point with depictions of the downstream reaches of the fashion industry and all its allied sectors—cosmetics, weight loss, plastic surgery, marketing, and countless others. He trusts that the viewer will hear the fortunes sloshing when he presents a limitless cavalcade of indistinguishable women in their underwear, shuffling and trotting like so many thoroughbreds before the eyes of an influential man. From a rejected model sobbing in a ladies room, one can trace a dotted line through the oligarchic avarice of the owners, designers, and taste-makers, back to the burning itch of want created by a fashion magazine ad. Even the violence-backed sexual cravings of Ruby and Hank resonate with and personify this system, their stomach-turning specificity the mirror image of the impersonal exploitation of the capital-fueled fashion world. (The unseen Lolita in the room next to Jesse’s is another collateral victim, embodying the limitless female dreamers and runaways who never wriggle free from the first sleazy abuser they encounter when they step off the westbound bus.)

One needn’t be a Marxist theorist to observe how this global scheme of monetized want distorts and mutates society, forming a vortex of emotional and physical agony as individuals hand over their dollars in a never-ending search for the unattainable. Mature acceptance of the reality of the human experience—that one can’t always get what one wants, whether beauty, success, wealth, sex, or love—would slow the wheel's turn. Relief from the itch of need can therefore never be permitted to last too long. The Neon Demon bears witness to the direct effects of this cycle on women like Jesse and Sarah, while also echoing it in the dehumanizing revolving door dynamic in which models are used and then replaced like some endlessly renewable resource.

With The Neon Demon, Refn extends the principals of this rotten system to its reductio ad absurdum conclusion. The film’s final scenes portray the deranged behavior that would be permitted—nay, mandated—were all other concerns sublimated to the need to be the youngest, prettiest, thinnest, and most desired. This, ultimately, is why the aura of grisly inevitability that clings to the film’s conclusion is so overpowering. Deep down, one knows intuitively that it isn’t madness for Sarah to pop that regurgitated eyeball in her mouth and swallow, no matter how physically repugnant it might seem. It’s what she has to do in order to attain everything that she wants and to be everything that the world wants. If those are the stakes, is it really a choice at all?

PostedJuly 21, 2016

AuthorAndrew Wyatt

CategoriesDiary