Where the Stress Falls

Ken Burns, Jack Johnson, and Race in America

When I teach modern U.S. history, I find that students will wonder occasionally why American history courses invariably involve sustained discussions about race. The question is fair, actually, particularly when posed by international students who originate from places with entirely separate histories, where racial issues are sometimes different both in degree and kind. Race, as I usually explain, has been a peculiar problem in the United States; for generations, U.S. society in general and authorities from the local to the national level went to exceedingly great lengths, and with sustained malice, to deprive a significant portion of the U.S. population of their civil and political rights and to keep them physically separated from the majority. This deprivation, and all of the specious assumptions on which it was based, was particularly tragic because it betrayed the fundamental principles of American democracy and the centuries-old belief in natural rights and liberties. The young preacher-turned-activist who arrived in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956, in the aftermath of Rosa Parks' arrest, understood this betrayal; he declared it his aim to realize those democratic ideals, and when he stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 and addressed an audience of a quarter million, he talked not only about his dream for his children but about his admiration for the U.S. constitution, a beautiful document soiled only by his country's inability to keep its own basic promises.

The story of Jack Johnson, the first African-American boxer to win the heavyweight title, is in many respects a microcosm of this larger dilemma of race within a democratic society, and Ken Burns' documentary about Johnson, Unforgivable Blackness (which I recently watched for the first time), is a fairly illuminating look at the connection between the life and the history. Johnson was born in 1878, just one year after Reconstruction had ended and the Republican party, which previously rectified some of the lingering racial abuses in America, struck a deal that traded the South for the White House. As Burns makes clear, Johnson grew up when life for freed blacks drastically worsened: they were denied the vote in the south; incidents of lynching increased; the federal supreme court sanctioned segregation; the ideology of Jim Crow prevailed. The last thing white Americans wanted to see in this era was a black man asserting his physical power, beating up a white man, and then smiling about it, as Johnson often did; to them, this represented the world turned upside down. Any victories by Johnson in the ring would send the wrong signal, give unbridled hope to African-Americans; a writer in The New York Times feared that "if the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misrepresent his victory as justifying claims to much more than physical equality with their white neighbors."

Johnson's first major victory came in 1908 against Tommy Burns, a man whose mouth carried more power than his fists ever did. Burns taunted Johnson in the ring and hurled racial epithets at him. Johnson responded not only by beating Burns, literally, but by holding him up, prolonging the fight to punish him further, all the while smiling intently at the crowd and trading verbal jabs with them. The footage of the fight, which Ken Burns uses in his documentary, clearly displays Johnson's physical and social bravado and the audience's animosity towards him. Johnson was fighting Tommy Burns and the United States at the same time.

Burns makes no mistake about the powerful racial overtones of Johnson's career. Most whites hated the boxer because he had come to dominate a sport traditionally dominated by white fighters, and they were so taken aback by his success and fortune that they engaged in the most tiresome of racial clichés: Johnson was an "animal"; entire cross-sections of the country prayed for a "white hope" to rescue the title from the "beast" who had stolen it; when Johnson won, commentators often made excuses for his victories, instead of simply praising his superiority in the ring; a foreign reporter blatantly wrote that Johnson "displays all the gross and overbearing insolence which makes what we call the buck nigger insufferable." Burns identifies in Johnson a fierce independence of spirit, interprets it as the essence of the man. Johnson angered others, but didn't care. He dated, then married, white women and flaunted his wealth by wearing tailored suits and driving custom cars. Even some blacks saw him as a threat; he was either too profligate or, to Booker T. Washington, he undermined African-Americans' opportunities for economic advancement because he fed white prejudice instead of rising above it (or giving in to it). As a filmmaker, Burns understands the drama inherent in Johnson's life and in America's history. Combining images and text, he carefully and incrementally builds suspense towards the two turning points in Johnson's career, namely, his defeat in 1910 of "the great white hope," Jim Jeffries, the heavyweight champion who previously had retired undefeated, and Johnson's own defeat at the hands of Jess Willard, a fighter who stood over Johnson by at least six inches and who was ten years his junior. Johnson's victory over Jeffries had all the drama one can expect in sports but carried with it all the pains of American racism. Riots erupted across the country as white citizens and local authorities fought with blacks who had come out to the streets of numerous American cities to celebrate Johnson's victory. At least Jeffries, who had previously refused not only to fight Johnson, but any black fighter, finally displayed an ounce of modesty and decorum; Johnson, he admitted, was "better than I ever was."

Interesting parallels exist between Johnson and artists who similarly embodied his independence. In 1970, Miles Davis took the experiments he had already been making with electric music and acoustic jazz to an even greater fusion of the two genres with A Tribute to Jack Johnson, his progressive soundtrack to filmmaker William Cayton's documentary on the boxer. Miles did not want simply to alter jazz by filtering its improvisational qualities through the repetitious structures of rock 'n' roll; he wanted, as he put it, to make rock 'n' roll more "black." Jazz, a form of music that, like rock, had originated within black culture, could allow him to do this. Miles was inveterately forward-looking, his music, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, amorphous, maximal, simultaneously transgressive and transcendent. Even now, nearly forty years later, it sounds progressive, particularly when contrasted with Wynton Marsalis' heavily traditional soundtrack for Burns' documentary. I suppose Marsalis' soundtrack is fitting. As a filmmaker, Burns travels within a very traditional medium; he uses the requisite images, original footage, letters and sources read aloud by professional actors, interviews with writers and historians, the strictly chronological framework found in numerous documentaries. But for all of his proficiency, I can't help but wonder if Burns might have made the form of his story as free-form as his subject's life, as forward looking as Miles' music; I can't help but wonder what someone like Todd Haynes, whose biopic of Bob Dylan, I'm Not There, filtered the singer's life through varied, occasionally abstract enactments, could make of a subject like Jack Johnson. The traditions that have dominated the narrative structures of modern documentaries cast long, burdensome shadows. Miles certainly wanted to free himself of traditions when he cast his album; most of all, Johnson himself believed in refuting long-standing American conventions.

Those traditions of race relations deeply informed the responses of boxing audiences, the press, and the general public; they had very similar effects on the U.S. government. Until the giant Jess Willard appeared, no white man could defeat Jack Johnson. The U.S. government, fearing Johnson's notoriety, banned fight films to keep footage of his victories from the American public. Ultimately, the U.S. government found that Johnson's private life was the only way to contain him, to keep him "in place", as so many of his white contemporaries wanted. Some of Johnson's lovers had been prostitutes, and they traveled with him across state lines to his fights. The U.S. government, under the Mann Act, which prohibited the trafficking of "white slaves," retroactively charged Johnson and sentenced him to prison. But, like so much in Johnson's life, the imprisonment was on his own terms; he served only after having fled custody to live abroad in Europe and returning when he felt it was time to do so. Irene Pineau, Johnson's widow, aptly summarized the man's spirit upon his death, from an auto accident, in 1946. "I loved him because of his courage," she said. "He faced the world unafraid."

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Cross-posted at Filmwell.

Appreciating Coraline

Henry Selick's Coraline certainly has some of the hallmarks of the American children's story: a child, feeling neglected by her parents, voluntarily gets lost in an alternate world; over time and through experience, she learns the virtues of resourcefulness and self-reliance; friendship is invaluable, as is one's imagination; and the list goes on. But Selick's film is far more than a run-of-the-mill children's story and, instead, is something in the realm of cinematic experiment and modern parable. Selick's resurrection of the painstaking process of stop-motion animation distances it from an industry dominated by CGI while it simultaneously wows anyone sensitive to the discipline and artistry of this old-fashioned form of animation. His groundbreaking use of 3D has a similar effect; the multiple dimensions here are immersive, not sensationalist, and so Selick's film transcends those earlier experiments in 3D that served up the occasional gotcha moments to audiences at suburban multiplexes in decades past. In the process, the film provides something fairly close to what 3D ideally should be. The stereoscopic 3D process transforms entire environments within the film, from the interiors of Coraline's new home, to the landscape of her imaginary, alternate world, so that the 3D is not an effect but a method. I went into the film with relatively modest expectations about its visuals; my references were films such as (ahem) Jaws 3-D and, most recently, Robert Zemekis' The Polar Express. Coraline flattens them completely. In purely visual terms, this film advances the medium, even as it borrows time-worn methods of motion and presentation (its stop-motion animation is more fluid than that in classics such as King Kong and Jason and the Argonauts or recent efforts such as Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit).  But the film's ultimate pull lies in its central fairy-tale ideas.  Coraline's drab home  (gray and brown, muted and flat) results from the lack of visceral and emotional color in the daily, routine life of her family, and in its place, she discovers an alternate world as initially enticing as any might be, one abounding in color, laughter, attention, sweets, friendships, circus acts, dancing mice (alternate worlds, whether dreamed up by children or adults, are almost always imaginary forms of wish fulfillment). But Selick complicates matters by maintaining the traditional fairy-tale elements of mystery and terror, stockpiling horrors within this alternate universe: odd creatures, buttons for eyes, insect robots, and other feats and fears of the imagination. Yet, as Coraline finds out, these terrors contain within them more challenging and lasting ones, including pain, separation, loss, and even mortality. Selick neither belabors nor passes on the life lessons here, and makes Coraline something akin to a parable about the impossibility of perfection or of a world that caters entirely to one's wishes and hopes. Happiness, it seems, is always conditional and tempered. These ideas, which might seem relatively simple, place this film in the vein of mythologies, fairy tales, Greek tragedies, science fiction, of books by L. Frank Baum or Lewis Carroll, and, though it might be too early to say, I wouldn't be surprised if Coraline eventually stood alongside all of these as a cultural, and not merely a visual, achievement.

Some related links:

Over at Daily Plastic, a consideration of the experience of the film's 3D environment.

An article from the Los Angeles Times about the film's stop-motion techniques.

David Bordwell writes about depth cues and perspective in Coraline.

Language and Silence

Next to The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels might be Preston Sturges's most widely known film; personally, I count it as my favorite among his work, in large part because it seamlessly unites several films, or threads, in one: a hilarious comedy about making movies, a satire about Hollywood's incessant emphasis on lowbrow entertainment, a critique of the bloated thought that would dismiss entertainment outright, and a commentary on hope amidst destitution. In the middle of the Great Depression and the Second World War, John Sullivan (Joel McCrea), a film director whose claim to fame includes such throwaway features as Ants in Your Pants of 1939, decides he wants to make films about "the suffering of humanity," and so he leaves his swanky upper-class settings to hit the road as a hobo and get in touch with the common man. Along the way, he meets Veronica Lake's sultry would-be actress, and the comedy ensues. As with other features, Sturges jammed Sullivan's Travels with extended sequences of witty, back-and-forth dialog, with vibrant, volleyed exchanges between McCrea and Lake and between the two and various minor characters. The film's first half focuses on Sullivan's antics, on his efforts to elude the studio lackeys who trail him, and on his hapless journeys across the country with Lake in tow. She's disguised as a young man, which obviously doesn't work; "you look about as much like a boy as Mae West", Sullivan tells her. Interestingly, though, just as Sullivan wants to make a film with social meaning, Sullivan's Travels becomes exactly that, a darker, less buoyant, more serious work, and the abrupt tonal shift evolves into a surprising, but effective, extended moment of verbal silence: a mournful, dialog-free montage of migrant workers sleeping in a shelter, attending a fire-and-brimstone sermon at a church, and eating in a soup kitchen. For a film structured so tightly around spoken dialog, Sturges's decision to abandon words altogether during the film's most earnest and socially significant moment is an exercise in real eloquence, as well as an act embodying Sullivan's belief in the redemptive and educational possibilities of cinema.  Silence is not so much a lack of language here, but a language in its own right.

Still, I have to hand it to Sturges; the dialog is the main treat:

Mixtures

In September, I posted a note saying that I would return to blogging soon, and then before I knew it more than a month passed. It's now late November. In addition to the responsibilities that arrive with a new academic year, there have been new professional challenges, along with a seemingly innocuous foot injury that turned into a prolonged ordeal involving an infection, surgery, tissue removal, and a skin graft. In the long run, all will be well, but I've learned that walking around barefoot in the house can be dangerous, that physicians sometimes provide wrong and ultimately harmful treatments, and that universities, and the world in general, are simply not made to accommodate people who harbor any sort of physical impairment or disability. My sympathy for those who live with permanent disabilities has certainly increased.

Early into recovery, I had to remain in bed with my foot elevated. Netflix saved the day. I caught up with a handful of films, and here are my thoughts about three of them.

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In the real world, money might not be the root of all evil, but in David Mamet's Redbelt (2008), it festers as the source of nearly every instance of corruption and conflict. Swirling around the film's characters are unpaid bills, lawyers' fees, pensions, insurance problems, loan sharks, prize money for martial arts fights, advertising, promotions, and a host of other financial issues. Redbelt is largely a mixed genre exercise; Mamet's modern fight film borrows from the samurai epic, the Western, the Hollywood action film, and the studio melodrama, although its central tenet is anything but mixed or cloudy. "It's all about authenticity," as a critical character remarks, and the most authentic, and therefore the most challenged, individual is Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a jujitsu instructor who, like the Western gunman or the Japanese warrior, places his principles above all else and must stand alone in a hopelessly corrupt world. Ejiofor, in characteristic fashion, brings a powerful center of gravity to this role and gives Terry an admirable, if sometimes misguided, sense of conviction. His performance is certainly noteworthy, but the prize ultimately goes to Mamet; his dialogue has much of its usual rhythm, its repeated phrases, and its emphatic beats. His characters' story-lines, which initially seem unrelated, come crashing together on a fateful evening in Terry's dojo, and then the plot careens towards its inevitable conclusion, which, while unfinished and anti-climactic, does fulfill the film's basic generic elements.

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These days I'm primarily interested in international cinema, but when I was younger I watched a significant number of classic American movies, and I often did so at two or three in the morning when films from the 1930s and 1940s would appear on syndicated television. I had a strong affinity for director Josef von Sternberg's work with Marlene Dietrich. I hadn't seen von Sternberg's Morocco (1930), however, in over a decade, and revisiting it (gazing past my elevated foot at the screen) I was impressed by how placid the camera is but how visually alive the frames are. I'm not sure if "baroque" is the best term for von Sternberg's visuals, but he decorates many of his frames with a busy mix of human figures and everyday objects and uses static shots of corridors and aisle-ways to add perspective and depth. Von Sternberg and his cinematographers, Lee Garmes and Lucien Ballard, do pan and zoom occasionally, and when von Sternberg cuts, he sometimes breaks continuity rules. But the overall style is remarkably calm. The film's final image is probably its most striking; Dietrich begins crossing the Moroccan desert, barefoot, following Gary Cooper, who's departing with the French foreign legion. Here, von Sternberg strangely mixes, perhaps even confuses, the film's sexual politics. Dietrich's Amy Jolly is independent, unmarried, thoroughly distrustful of men, and, in one of the film's more famous night-club scenes, is androgynous, appearing in a man's tuxedo. Yet, she remains entirely beholden to Cooper's Tom Brown, willing to leave everything behind to follow him across the African landscape. I personally found the final act to be discontinuous with the rest of the film, but I can't fault von Sternberg for such a remarkable closing shot.

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Speaking of Africa, Sidney Pollack's elongated, quiet epic, Out of Africa (1985), contains a mixture of a different sort, that between the lives of indigenous Africans and the supposedly "civilizing" and opportunistic British imperialism that, in the years before and during the First World War, carved up the African continent in a rapacious, competitive bid for profit and prestige. Out of Africa is primarily a romance, with the Danish writer Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep), a.k.a. Isak Dinesen, negotiating her love for the adventurer Denys Finch-Hatton (Robert Redford, sans Finch-Hatton's British accent), who insists on his personal independence. The romance simmers at a painfully slow burn, which I suspect bothers some viewers, although I found the glacial pace at times to be very affecting, particularly when it culminates in Blixen's recitation of an A. E. Houseman poem in her final, parting words to Finch-Hatton.

But after watching this film, like Morocco, for the first time in years, I'm struck most of all by the film's treatment of colonialism. I suppose that, twenty years ago, Hollywood had a preference for stories of upper-class Europeans who believed in the beneficence of colonialism, or at least in the romanticism of living and adventuring abroad. Now that preference has turned into a form of "liberal guilt." Pollack does make some attempt, however slight, to address the impact of the British living in Kenya. Despite her own use of accosted land, Blixen tries to help the Kikuyu who work for her by educating them (albeit in an English manner) and by trying to ensure a future for them once she leaves; Finch-Hatton, being more conscientious, warns that such paternalism carries its own dangers. He also expresses his admiration for the Maasai, who, according to him, live only in the moment. "They're the only ones who don't care about us. And that will finish them." I suppose that his admission implies at least some recognition that even those wary of the dangers of colonialism are also a part of them, simply by being foreigners living off the land and resources of a country not their own. Still, Out of Africa doesn't explore this much at all (doesn't, as one writer put it, fully consider how Blixen's and Finch-Hatton's "presence might be part of the problem"), but as a cinematic experience I'm not entirely sure this is a drawback for the film. Blixen had a life, an affair, and written accounts of both, and as subject matter for a film, they're certainly legitimate sources, even if the treatment of colonialism isn't sophisticated enough to provide a more realistic picture. Out of Africa ultimately needs to stand or fall on its romance, which, though gradual and piecemeal, carries with it a sense of displacement and tragedy.

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More to come ...

Blue

Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights arrived in local theaters like a vague apparition: the lukewarm advanced word didn't quell in any way my desire to see the film, but it made me lower my expectations, which is difficult to do, given my appreciation for Wong's work. The resulting experience was definitely mixed. Wong's dialog sounded occasionally campy and somewhat stilted; the metaphors for transition seemed a bit too neat and standard (trains, doorways, keys that unlock doors); the acting seemed to lay somewhere between the purposeful artificiality of a stage production and the spontaneity of an unscripted film. I have to admit that I'm not a fan of Natalie Portman's approach to character, in this film or in others, although her wayward sassiness here is a relatively nice complement to Norah Jones' somewhat flat, perhaps even lethargic, performance (I'm borrowing the term "flat" from a source I can't recall at the moment; I'm also wondering if the flatness is intentional, a sort of verbal and physical manifestation of the emotional drubbing her character receives). But, these caveats aside, I found My Blueberry Nights to be a somewhat beautiful, poignant film. Wong's adeptness at creating visual mood, his characteristic use of color and compression, framing and close-up, inform this film thoroughly, and he appropriately mirrors the varied landscapes and settings of his new-found territory (the United States) in different spaces, from the cramped quarters of small cafes and seedy bars, to the wide-open Nevada desert. In addition, I don't think anyone has ever photographed Rachel Weisz more beautifully. Whether she's half-drunk or enraged or in a saddened stupor, or reclaiming remnants of her dignity in her character's own limited way, Wong's camera truly flatters her. Most of all, Wong's first English-language film carries, with admittedly somewhat less efficacy than his previous work, that visceral, chest-tightening sense of the bittersweetness of change, that burning compulsion, from which everyone in this film "suffers", to hold on to a past that cannot be reclaimed while trying anxiously to understand the present and the future. Wong surveys this experience in the lives of his characters, all of whom have had, or have, people departing from their lives. He surveys it in the simple, complementary shots of an apartment at once occupied, then vacant. And he surveys it in the all-too-brief moment (that's the point, of course) in which Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power) appears, like a pleasant flash, as Jude Law's ex-girlfriend, in the midst of yet another transition, preparing for yet another departure. The film's melodrama, its patness, limit the film's potential; even the scene with Law and Marshall contains those repeated references to time-worn symbols of locks and doors. But, at least in their essence, moments like these keep the film in line with some of Wong's other work, not only thematically, but visually: he shoots Law and Marshall from the other side of a cafe window, a physical marker in certain ways of the division these individuals long to rectify.

Riffing

Over at Errata, Rob Davis has posted his latest film discussion podcast with J. Robert Parks, and the two discuss, among other things, Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. I formed and expressed my own thoughts about the film just after seeing it, but I'm still working through it -- and the ensuing Errata discussion has given me much food for thought.  One thing that came to mind is how the multiple references in I'm Not There are not simply references, but implicit comments on the very act of filmmaking.  Darren (Long Pauses) has compelling remarks about the post-modern aspects of the film; Rob about Haynes' methods.  I highly recommend downloading Rob's podcast and giving it a good listen.

I'm looking forward to the film's release on DVD so I can revisit it again.  (As I mentioned in my comments at Errata, I saw I'm Not There in one of the worst second-run theaters in California.  The screen actually slanted to the left; the projection did not fit the screen properly; I could hear the audio from adjacent screenings; and the room was so dark my friends and I had real difficulty finding our seats.  The environment was directly proportional to the $2 admission fee.  Still, good times.)

I'll be back soon with some new posts.

There and Not There

On a purely conceptual level, Todd Haynes' I'm Not There is exactly what the biopic genre needed: a non-literal, non-chronological interpretation of a man's career, art, and life, all sifted through the varied angles of  a prism, filtered into abstraction. No one in the film utters Dylan's name, and Haynes never assumes Dylan's life to be a single entity. At once, in the late 1950s, Dylan is an eleven-year-old boy; at another time, he is a folk singer who later converts to Christianity and preaches the word of God; yet at another, he is an actor playing the singer in a film. He is also a narrating poet named Arthur Rimbaud, a nineteenth-century outlaw named Billy the Kid, and, in the film's most noted performance (by Cate Blanchett), a rock star hooked on drugs in 1960s London. Such a figurative interpretation of Dylan might seem to conflate too much imagination with reality and therefore might veer too far from an easily identifiable truth about the man; but, then, I like to think that the biopic needs such imagination and that Haynes' approach, given his subject, is in some ways as truthful as can be. Musicians riff on things, pure and simple, as Haynes does here on Dylan, on the representations of Dylan in American culture, even on American culture and history itself (the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement receive particular attention, and just as most Americans experienced it: on television, as a constant image). Haynes also riffs on other films, referencing them in the respectful, practical manner in which rock and folk musicians borrow from their predecessors. Blanchett dangles in the air, a rope attached to her ankle, much like Mastroianni did in Fellini's 8 1/2. Charlotte Gainsbourg, surprisingly good as an actress (and the beneficiary of Edward Lachman's cool-temperature cinematography), echoes Chantal Goya from Godard's Masculin Feminin, even speaks some of that film's lines. One of my favorite moments in I'm Not There is a very brief "Godardian" sequence that introduces Dylan's loud, alienating conversion to electric music; Blanchett and other band members walk on stage and fire machine guns straight at the audience and the camera -- the kind of joke that could have easily fit into Masculin Feminin, A Woman Is a Woman, or Band of Outsiders.

I've read (though, unfortunately, I can't quite recall the source) that I'm Not There, while about Dylan, is simultaneously a more general film about how a person's life is the sum total of multiple lives, of varied experiences, phases, efforts, and failures. The film's allusions to 8 1/2 are telling in this respect because, like Fellini's film, Haynes' is partly about patterns of self-definition, especially in contrast to the public's own definitions of artists and celebrities. In this respect, Blanchett's scenes convey a resonant sense of struggle. In addition to alienating fans, friends, and lovers while also reinventing himself, Blanchett's Jude Quinn must jostle with a British journalist's interrogations and then suffer his subsequent animadversions on Quinn's music and personality. This sense of struggle seems to lie at the heart of each phase of the film: the juvenile delinquent who sings songs about the Depression, Billy the Kid's difficulties with anonymity and publicity, Jack Rollins' shifting religious identities and his changing relationship to his musical past, the actor Robbie Clark, whose marriage gradually dissolves in the early 1970s (I think the film is at its most poignant here). Taken together, these strains turn Haynes' film into an experiment, a cacophony of melodies, a meandering improvisation; the film comes across as a deliberate deconstruction of both the subject's life and of the forms of biographical filmmaking. Periods and perspectives simply coalesce through free association, while, visually, Haynes makes use of a variety of film stocks and color palettes, each carefully chosen to suit a particular phase of Dylan's life. At the same time, these strains -- and Haynes' methods -- nicely make I'm Not There a decidedly pluralistic film. This pluralism is part of the film's inventiveness; whereas a conventional documentary or biopic might provide multiple, external perspectives on a life (though to some degree, Haynes does this too, though even these are representations), the perspectives in I'm Not There arrive from the inside and then filter out. Most of all, this pluralism give the film its verisimilitude, provide the there in I'm Not There: Dylan, Dylan and America, and, most of all, the fragility and the varied formations of personality.

Revisiting Blade Runner

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner has achieved such legendary status over the past twenty-five years that cinephiles run the risk of taking for granted its place in the canon of science-fiction films; and I suspect that the same elevated status gives its detractors all the more reason to question its merits. I'm not in a position to pass ultimate judgment on Blade Runner, but I can attest to its potential to ingratiate itself into one's life. When I was very young, I could neither decipher the film's meanings nor feel entertained or moved by it, but by the time I reached college, Scott's film had become something of a rite of passage. I had extended conversations with friends about the film's ideas, discussions about its Nietzschean themes in a philosophy course, and on occasion I sat through multiple viewings with roommates, hunched as we were over a small television set, dinners in hand, dissecting and debating the film into the evening. Wordsworth once warned that we murder something when we dissect it, but taking something apart had rarely seemed so rewarding, had rarely brought a subject so fully to life.

Viewing Scott's recent "final cut" of Blade Runner reminded me how much this film offers: an inversion of traditional narrative in its use of wholly sympathetic antagonists, a deliberately intellectual treatise on life, death, freedom, and servitude, a specifically visual experience, a radical vision of a future Los Angeles, and a pastiche of science fiction and film noir. The set design and mise-en-scene still impress. The thick smoke, shadows, and light that surround Deckard and Bryant as they discuss the renegade replicants Deckard is to "retire" make the film seem set simultaneously in 2019 and the 1940s; the Tyrell Corporation office building rises out of the darkened Los Angeles basin in a steel and glass riff on ancient Mayan pyramids. I hadn't forgotten the film's glacial cadences, but they seemed smoother, more elegant, this time around: that ringing chord in Vangelis' score just as the title sequence ends and the wide-angle shot of the L.A. skyline appears, the lights that slowly sift through the windows of Deckard's high-rise apartment, Deckard's late-afternoon flight to the Tyrell Corporation to interrogate Rachael. Even Roy Batty's climactic speech has a qualitative slowness to it. These moments underscore the film's abiding concern with the passage of time and, by relation, with the struggle of individuals (real or artificial, though the boundaries between the two become increasingly fluid) to make sense of experience through the accumulation of memories. This is part of Rachael's problem, to be sure, and the cause of much of the film's existential anxiety.

In his quest to create something "more human than human," Tyrell implanted Rachael with memories of a mother and a brother, of a moment at the age of six when she witnessed the hatching of a spider's egg, of piano lessons and front-yard porches. According to Tyrell, memories protect a replicant like Rachael against the confusions resulting from her limited life experience, but her sense of self dissolves after Deckard's interrogation. "How can it not know what it is?" Deckard asks. How can anyone, and yet who doesn't wonder? Hiding in Deckard's apartment, shunned by Tyrell, Rachael sits, plays piano, and declares she no longer knows if her musical skills belong to her or to Tyrell's niece, whose memories she harbors. Deckard responds with one of the film's truly humanistic lines: "you play beautifully." Roy Batty, the film's most insidious and yet most sympathetic figure, echoes this humanism when he faces his own end by doing something Rachael could not: he triumphantly recounts his own genuine memories, a testimony to the validity of his own life and to his own identity.  The moment is simultaneously heroic and tragic, like the trajectory of these replicants' lives: created originally for pragmatic, economic purposes, they are servants of a form of capitalist progress that prizes the utilitarian in life above all else. Living, for them, therefore becomes more than a matter of incept dates, longevity, or, as Tyrell puts it to Batty like a god to his creation, the "facts of life"; living becomes a form of freedom, even transcendence. So when Deckard shoots Pris, she flails and screams and pounds the floor, not so much because she is in pain, but because she realizes that she has reached finality too soon, that she will be no more. "Accelerated decrepitude," as she put it earlier to J. F. Sebastian. Batty's heroism might lie partly in his rebellious, violent act of destroying his creator, who experimented with sentient life for all the wrong reasons, but it mostly appears in that last moment on the rooftop with Deckard, when Batty, who never realizes the freedom he likely deserves, finally attains a level of humanity both his maker and science long believed to be beyond his reach.

The Meaning of Extinction

A generally derided B-movie such as Resident Evil: Extinction, recently in theaters and then quickly out, is more important than it initially might seem, and as an indicator and an artifact of the culture in which we live, it bears some value. The general consensus in print and on the web is that the film meets no real cinematic standards, and I'd agree, although I'd say its largest flaw isn't poor mechanics but, rather, a lack of urgency; given the film's themes, it should be far more existentially dramatic. I do like its look, however: its consistently beige, earth-toned palette, its modification and conflation of Western and science-fiction set design, its CGI meshing at a memorable point of The Birds and George Romero movies. The latter moment is one of the film's adrenaline-rushing action set-pieces and culminates in the wide-ratio image of a fiery, burnt sky.

I'll admit that my fondness for Milla Jovovich got me into the theater, but my belief in this film's relevance has really evolved from my interest in cultural history, in moving from the kind of functional film criticism that would condemn Extinction as anything but empty popcorn entertainment towards understanding the connection between the film's subject matter and the environment in which its makers live and create. For all of its B-movie and action-horror characteristics, Extinction is almost ideal in this regard; that fiery, burnt sky is appropriate for a film essentially about destructive forces, particularly the kind that have recently preoccupied or plagued the public imagination.

Popular cinema has always been one important means through which we can understand how a culture deals with threats, real or imagined. In the age of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example, films about radioactivity and atomic warfare abounded: Rocketship X-M (1950), Them! (1954), The Day the World Ended (1956), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), and The Damned (1961), among many others. During the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the great dread was Communism, as John Frankenheimer's classic thriller, The Manchurian Candidate (1962), so clearly illustrates. Since then, the terrors have changed, and cinema has adjusted. The Omega Man (1971), Outbreak (1995), and Twelve Monkeys (1995) deal with biological disasters and runaway viruses. Concerns about the pitfalls of genetic engineering and cloning appear in films as diverse as the comedy Multiplicity (1996), the dinosaur story Jurassic Park (1993), the science-fiction films Gattaca (1997) and The Island (2005), even the television series Dark Angel (2000). In 2004, Jonathan Demme's remake of The Manchurian Candidate expressed fear of a new amorphous villain, namely, the multinational corporation. Fernando Meirelles' 2005 film, The Constant Gardner, based on the John le Carre novel, reveals the evildoer as a colossal pharmaceutical company.

Extinction, the third film in a series based on a video game, is particularly emblematic because it combines several of these terrors. The Umbrella Corporation, a faceless, powerful entity specializing in viral and genetic engineering, develops biological weapons and has inadvertently released a viral strain that kills people en masse and then reanimates them, turning them into bloodthirsty zombies who stalk the company's underground laboratories, cities, and, eventually, the entire earth. Umbrella employs various schemes to cover up the disaster, all at the expected human costs. Alice (Jovovich), who battles the company in the first two films, has become a subject for experimentation herself and mutates, developing unwieldy powers (the first indication of her scientific guinea-pig status in the first Resident Evil is finished off nicely in a classic B-movie, genre-specific way, the camera moving back to reveal Alice, having just escaped a lab, clutching a shotgun as she realizes that the virus, and the zombies, have infested her city).

Viruses have certainly been around a while; smallpox, polio, the measles, all preventable with vaccines for the unexposed. But they create fear nevertheless partly because, by their nature and the current limitations of human science, they are actually incurable; anti-viral drugs can slow down a virus' ability to replicate after it has injected DNA into a living host cell, but eradicating the virus entirely from within that cell has so far proved impossible. In addition, since the 1980s, the potentially lethal HIV virus has evolved and spread to large parts of the globe, making viruses in general our generation's radioactivity, or its potential alien invasion. Interestingly enough, over approximately the same number of years, multinational corporations have evolved and spread entirely on their own, while genetic engineering has advanced far enough for researchers and scientists to alter the basic makeup of living beings. No small wonder, then, that generalized fears about corruption, cloning, research and profit at the expense of human life, manipulation and destruction of others have made their way into films; no small wonder that Extinction, pardon the bad pun, exists.

The science in the film is certainly simplified, often erroneous, but that hardly matters. Like many other disaster or horror films (Godzilla, Jurassic Park, 28 Days Later), Extinction is less about science and much more about the apocalyptic imagining of what corrupted science and human failure might entail. Millions are dead or walk the earth as the "living dead," threatening remaining human life. Alice's own mutations continue to grow uncontrollably, giving the virus a hopeless, maddening quality; even though her mutations are more or less physically beneficial, their waywardness and emotional costs make them existentially draining. The arch villain, Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen), a caricature of a mad scientist (deep, earnest British accent and all), disastrously attempts to create clones and find a cure for the evil he and the Umbrella Corporation have unleashed. Like the android Ash in Ridley Scott's Alien, Isaacs embodies the film's implicit, if simplistic, indictment of treacherous, encroaching scientific inquiry and corporate greed, and his own literally monstrous (and perhaps unintentionally comical) transformations bear out the film's condemnations.

In the previous Resident Evil films, characters pursued a potential cure, but Extinction varies this time-worn theme by suggesting that the cure for the viral epidemic lies, of all places, in Alice's own DNA. Given the film's underdeveloped script, it's no surprise that this discovery drops out of the plot like an anvil out of the sky. But the implication lingers with the same kind of echoing thud: the recourse to genetic engineering is more genetic engineering. Horrors might beget new horrors, and whatever Extinction might lack as pure, formal cinema, it is in this representation of common, generalized fears that it finds its place in film history and its lasting value.