The Watchmen vs. The Women

Disclaimer: this review is considerably less focused on The Watchmen than it is on the vividly unspectacular The Women. I suppose, since everyone's talking about The Watchmen, this choice largely has to do with how contrarian-cool I am.

The Watchmen has been called "controversial," but I argue that in comparison to Diane English's romantic comedy The Women, Alan Moore's vision of civilization and its post-human future is a little been-there-done-that. That's right: The Women is a more ambitious movie. How's that for controversial statements? Let me first say that although The Watchmen is limited as a book/movie of ideas, it's a fantastic character piece. In both the graphic novel and its pretty-fucking-satisfying-to-fans film version, it's poetry in limping motion. They're superhumans that are more like all-too-humans, pockmarked with flaws that get complicated, rather than covered, by their costumes. Reluctantly, often abusively, they take up their hero mantles like specters, able to save lives, but not their own beautifully wounded souls. Although it often comes off as deliberate, excessive, and deliberately excessive, it remains ruthlessly truthful, scathingly triumphant and just generally moving. And, inevitably, a patriarchal text, the few weak female roles eclipsed by dudes who hold all the big political and human naturey cards. Despite that, I raced to see it and it's presence in my life turned out to be exactly the inverse of The Women's which, in its pseudo-conceptual prohibition of any male specimen entering it's hallowed estrogenical frames, seemed to be vying for some kind of monolithic chick flick status. It's creative story is also the opposite of The Watchmen's: it's a boring play very loosely adapted into some painfully dull cinema.

Rewind a few months to my viewing of The Women to which I was, well, a little less eager. Let's just say that my girlfriend at the time somehow managed to unhandcuff me from the toilet and pull the stitches out of my eyelids. By the time the chlorophorm lifted I was in the theater flanked by popcorn and twizzlers (I was so mad, she knows I like glosettes), expecting a useless string of stuff happening that shows how kooky it is to be a lady. The movie turned out to be more than that. It wasn't the fact that it's actually based on a stageplay by Clare Boothe Luce written in 1936 that was "modernized" for the screen, which means, of course, incorporating some courageously bad pantomime of Sex and the City. It wasn't the "razor sharp!!" dialogue or "insight into life and love!!" that made me realize that this movie wasn't just an exploit. It was in the fleeting aerial shots, easily played off as transitional grace notes ("we're in a city, which means the story has a lot of momentum, right!"), that elevated the film's ambitions beyond just an exploit to mythology-in-the-making.

Despite its refusal of a visual male presence, the plot still orbits around their off-camera deeds, which pull the narrative around like dramatic dark matter - cheating, not appreciating their witty, soulful female companions and, occasionally, casting spells of true love that the ladies later poeticize to each other. The Women is not a movie. It is a cybernetic ova with galvanized cell(uloid) walls. It is a divining rod designed by Prada as a summer accessory, stabbing madly through the skyless urban lunacy for a vision of what it means to be a lady. Not just a lady, but one whose womanhood is constantly undergoing the Manhattan field test, the most unforgivingly commercialized scenario of the modern world. It was then that I realized that one of my favorite things about Manhattan is that it's one big vagina. Enter the aerial shots: they focus not on the phallic structural hallmarks of the city's masculine industrial legacy, but the presence of central park and its unruly crevacious presence within an architectural metastasis. Like the aftermath of a terrorist attack from Captain Planet. It is here that Manhattan is rendered vaginal, its spiritual interior being the park, the realm of the film's ingenue who runs its committee. It is here we are afforded a glimpse of the city's mythological heartbeat in which the sentinels of its last bastion of natural history are, crucially, the daughters of Eve.

But it's more than that, as the film then poses a contradiction: why are our women, charged as the guardians of our city's organic atrium, obsessed with the plasticity of shopping and vanity? Well, first submit to the fact central park is also artificial, existing by design and not necessity, maintained not by nature-lovers, but bored upper class socialites. Central Park, therefore, serves as a decent metaphor for postmodern femininity - potentially artificial but an essential earthly anchor to the concrete fever dream that is urban life. Two eras now stand side by side: the old male era of anabolic industry and the new female era of design, commerce and information. Information? Why yes, who after all pushes more knowledge than a gossip queen with a blackberry? The modern urban environment has, in general, acquired a predominantly female temperament: within their information orgy they lay out the tenets of desire, relationships, success, family, etc, all negotiated while they shop, eat and groom - habits the city has gone to great lengths to cater to. They are the gatekeepers and they know who you're fucking.

Fortunately the main characters of The Women are situated as, relatively speaking, "progressively" minded: scoffing at facelifts, rejecting the mass-distribution and/or the puerile hollowing of their fashion products. Though they'll still flip their shit over a handbag. Then again, what's nymphhood without a little frivolity? What's a tribe without fetishes? And what better, more primal, way to pay tribute to their tools of epistemelogical dominance than a lavish womb for their little darling blackberry familiars to rest?

So, yes, The Watchmen more directly addresses the "fate of humanity," but it's battleground is phallic, all nukes and cigars and guns and manufacturing moguls roosted on the scalps of high-rises. The Women proposes something far more revolutionary: a yannic future. Sadly, unlike The Watchmen (which for the most part kicked ass), it's just not a very good movie. The drama and humor resort to "rambunctiousness!" to keep the audience from slipping into a catatonic state of boredom, the character's relationships maintain a stultifying amount of simplicity, as does the rest of the film's (potential) subject matters, letting the layers flake off, leaving only cliches of "true love" to stand on. I think the director got scared. That one flash of our feminine fate and English retreated to the doctrines of classical romcoms for comfort. But why fear a future less masculine? Don't tell me you really are afraid of gentlemen becoming a remember-when. Apparently, if we squeeze out the dudes, women would have nothing to talk about anymore.

Post-script:

I think there's a connection between Manhattan the city and the somewhat androgynous (minus the omnipresent penis, I suppose) Dr. Manhattan character in The Watchmen. Maybe Manhattan, as a city, is a hermaphrodite. It's intergenderal, its two organs competing for the alpha role. Which one will prevail?

Synechdoche, New York Review

Disclaimer: contrary to what seems to be common form, this article contains no exigesis about the use of the word “synecdoche” in the film’s title (or my use of the word “exigesis”). Although that’s what everyone wants to talk about (just like, say, Clinton’s bombing of Monica Lewinski's dress rather than his bombing of various prefectly good countries) it’s just an unusual word, the dictionary’s full of them, so y’know…deal with it.

I assume that, if you’re reading this, you’re somewhat into Charlie Kaufman AKA: the Radiohead of film AKA: that one virtuosically unique thing you rest your laurels of taste on. Chances are he’s your favorite screenwriter, but tell me this: who’s your second favorite screenwriter? Ha! Of course, I take my accusations no further since it can only be good that Kaufman has aroused an appreciation for the raw creative energy behind the concept of a film, which for him, somehow glimmers through mechanized steps one-through-god-knows-how-

many of the filmmaking process, never allowing us to forget about the ecstatic guru scribe channeling cinematic gospel before even one laid brick of the mise en scene. This time Kaufman is there, trowel and mortar, for every stage of the giant sensory cathedral that is Synecdoche, New York and after a couple decades of succumbing to the legislative committee of someone else’s camera he, frankly, blows his creative wad like an early pubescent finally penetrating the panty-barrier. But, goodness, what a wad, showering the cavacious grey where often creeps my complacency as a viewer. “Fuck me,” I thought, “this movie’s alive.” Albeit agonizingly so, opened up on the operating table, writhing unanaesthetized. An assault of exposed nerves carefully wired by a master pyrotechnician of the telencephalon. Neurons are lit up on both sides of the screen with Kaufman pulling switches at atomically-timed moments, the weaver of big and terrifying thoughts.

But my statements towards his genius remain proactive: he’s a genius if he tops himself post-this-thing, this total existential finale of a movie. Has Kaufman finally reached a saturation point, everything henceforth seeming dialed back, trifling? He’s a genius if he knows he can top this. He’s cool if he doesn’t care. Of course, neither are likely the case since he’s the most notoriously “where-do-I-go-from-here?”-prone writers of our generation (i.e. his characters suffer from it in like every other one of his fucking movies). Knowing full well the ramifications of this total self-evacuation that is Synechdoche, it’s either a monolithic creative risk or a necessary bowel-cleansing whence he’ll retire from all this hyper-reflexive meta-narrative shit. Sorry, but I root for the latter because, honestly, I get it Charlie…you’re clever.

My first expectation of Synecdoche was that in yet another tortured stupor of writer’s block he once again said: “fuck it, I’ll just do another film about the fluidity of self. Cuz what theme is easier to twist into a labyrinth that’ll make the kids go ‘whoa’ than identity?” But it’s not all tight conceptual braids and narrative parlor tricks. Synecdoche’s unflinchingly all over the place. And like pathagonist Caden Cotard’s own impossibly fertile pool of resources (how much IS a MacArthur grant worth nowadays?), one needs their own constant hail of reinforcements in the general upper cerebral area to keep up with Kaufman’s blistering rate of stakes-raising. I’m talking hyper-Masonic stages of enlightenment here, ruthlessly exploding the [insert maddening philosophical angle here] problems of the narrate/live/repeat loops of artistic life.

This all gets a little hard to follow over the sound of heads audibly bursting in the theatre (note: scientifically indistinguishable from the sound of incredulous laughter). There were also real emotive sounds, which suggest Synecdoche is equally funny and soulful enough to keep it from atomizing into meta-to-the-power-of-infinity-times-a-thousand tedium. Cotard’s loss of self remains genuine and moving even (I should say, especially) as he gets increasingly absorbed into the folds of an ur-world where every outrageous creative suggestion is embraced. But only a Kaufman identity-spiral could leave a character wandering the post-apocalyptic streets of his own mise-en-universe monstrosity receiving life commands via headset by someone playing him-as-director, telling him how to feel, how to dream, the deepest human yearnings piped in like source code (just watch the film).

It’s easy to call this whole to-do surreal, but don’t stop there. Yes some of the film’s un-reality is contorted by only the basest anxious spitfires of his psyche (fear of death, sexuality, homosexuality…). But the subterranean animal parts of the mind are just one ride at the Kaufman carnival. Just as Cotard’s New-York-filled warehouse becomes just a building “prop” in a grander New-York-filled warehouse, the surreal aspects are just the center of a magically real Babushka doll. It’s the Kaufman house of mirrors, telescoping from surrealism to the magical realism and then back again. Loops of reflexivity, hilariously dizzying. The “big” themes, the ones that all of the Daliesque anxieties are really just a foil for, are the province of magical realism: using the “impossible” (rather than just the surrealist “uncanny”) to explore the dimensions of the possible. Everything spins so far off the axis of actual lived life (even cinematic life, which is already plastic enough), that the film once again teeters on the possibility of becoming a game of seeing how virtuosically a virtuoso of narrative can play with form.

One of Kaufman’s many writerly talents is his ability to satirize, well, anything. Getting outside of it, twisting it around until it perforates itself with wounds just like his fleet of masochistic characters. A death in Cotard’s family happens, but does it weigh sincerely on the film’s thrust or is it just fuel for a schadenfreudal laugh (i.e. the “saddest deathbed speech the doctors ever heard”…just watch the film), a scarcely-seismic dramatic murmur meant more to feed his own self-indulgent obsession with the polychromatic spectrum of tragedy (disease, dissolution of families, shattered romance, regret, disappointing loved ones, death in general)? Does it all mean something? Thus bubbles up the thesis of Cotard’s creative drive: is all of this suffering just irrational, impossible to understand? After all, nothing bad seems to happen to him for any tangible reason (starting with his wife leaving him…just cuz), casting him into a creative furnace, fueled by the needlessly unfortunate nebula of life stuff that surrounds him every single day.

Although Cotard’s endless means of exploration are “magical,” his approach is shrewdly verite. The metaphysical, the enigmatic, the phenomenal, things that loosen the jaw in wonder, all must be contained in quotidian life-stagings, MRI-ed through an endlessly prying lens of realism. Each one of his actors get a premise and the discrete mathematics of reality are left to rut in futile hope of revealing their extraterrestrial formulas. Small wonder is Cotard’s fascination with Death of a Salesman. Its moral is classic, eternal, timeless: Americans make bad decisions, deliberately trampling on a “good life”…and no one knows why for fuck sake!

Ultimately, my opinion of Synecdoche remains a dialectical one. I thought it was brilliant and masturbatory, but also brilliantly masturbatory. Was it everything I wanted or nothing really at all, just a wayward stab at some celestial truth? And perhaps that’s why it’s great: it took me dancing on the heads of small, organically-realized approaches to cinema (i.e. The Visitor, which is a great film), dancing in all the chaos between worlds. Skillfully, Synecdoche begins small, almost maddeningly so, only to blow things to meteoric dust, animating a world no thought they needed to know about. They do. The dialectics, AKA: the conceptual collision, of the very big to the very small is a violent Who’s-Afraid-of-Virginia-Woolf-esque domestic storm. A marriage made only to supernova. Everyday, creatively or not, this battle rages in all of us. And in an age where no level of artistic provocation can really startle, Charlie Kaufman ambushes the viewer with a wholly unexpected angle of cinematic progressiveness: getting away with being cerebral.

Saw V Review

I wrote this because I wanted something to feel like I'm better/smarter than and a misguided horror movie drunk on its own success that I got dragged to was the most convenient choice. I think if I was strapped to a crazy-Saw-machine my message from Jigsaw (or one of his fucking Manson Family of surrogates) would sound something like, "Stefan, you take cheap shots at films that are already obviously bad to make up for your own haunting fears of artistic inferiority..."

Gosh everyone just wants to be an evil genius' dark pupil nowadays. Apparently even the most basic of dirges can inspire the will to orchestrate the elaborate deaths of other shady characters. And they're such quick studies. The precision engineering required (demanding expertise in, I dunno, metallurgy, electronics and advanced physics for these Hi-Fi Morton's-Fork gymnasiums to perform as resolutely as they have...every time...without a single glitch) is no longer just the province of Jigsaw and his decades of mechanical experience, but can be mastered in a matter of days with his, like, Infernal Devices For Dummies crash course. It's D.I.Y. Evil Geniousness! Now anyone can play – even the less cerebral, charismatic and generally interesting characters like Hoffman and that Amanda girl. (Of course who knows how long Hoffman was honing his craft as the Saw franchise's stock-in-trade involves not letting the viewer know when, chronologically, certain sequences are occurring so that later they can, like, blow your mind with revelations that certain things happened before/after others or maybe even...whoa...at the same time!)

But if only such regard was lent to the intricacies of human psychology. Although Jigsaw claims that the most enlightened path to clarity and salvation is being strapped to a large machine that wants to hurt you (his method is now referred to in textbooks as “Shlock Therapy”), then please first consider what percentage of these subjects have actually survived the Jigsaw/Hoffman/Amanda Rehabilitation Center. (Hint: It's even less than the latest film's Rotten Tomatoes rating). And yet Jigsaw seems to think the character's inevitable failures are moral ones. Those ignorant fools, not heeding the geniousy wisdom of their insane, sadistic captor who is submitting them to dehumanizingly morbid dilemmas. Hmmmm maybe his subjects fail to exact Mensa-like logistics skills and oceans of human empathy because they're put in opaque, high pressure situations with no previous warning and no way out. Yes, if you dangle a room full of strangers over impending death with a claustrophic deficit of information and...well...options for survival then, yes, they might act irrationally in the name of self-preservation. What another earth-shaking Saw-series revelation: the dark side of humanity can in fact be unlocked through ruthless physical and mental torment.

This pretense of Jigsaw's dilemmas as “morality experiments” (rather than, say, pressure cookers of animal fear) not only drains the character of his sinister mystique, but reveals him as not-quite-geniousy-enough to realize his own hypocrisy: i.e. things are not experiments if you know already know what's going to happen (“hmmm, yes, it seems that, once again, when human beings have their lives threatened, they will panic and make rash rather than clever and charitable decisions”). After all, these are situations designed to summon the basest instincts in people so that they kill each other. It's like putting two fighting fish in a bowl and calling yourself a marine biologist.

As well-documented as my hate for Wolf Creek and Hostel are, I can now only admire their forthcoming nature. They at least don't pretend like they're about something more than watching people get eviscerated. And although they're movies I want to put in a torture machine that cuts 90% of the footage due to its boring and meaningless nature, I have a different re-edit in mind for Saw. I won't take a single thing out (not even the deluge of unnecessary shot repetitions of something scary or gory or a character being like “whoa!”). I'll just put all of the events in chronological order. I promise you it will put the “sad” back into “sadistic.” It will be my own Douglas Gordon homage. All that veils this film's aesthetic are the “surprise” revelations of a human motive behind its endless pageant of torture sequences (which, by the way, are not improving in stakes, cleverness, intensity, creativity, or even perversity). So relieved are we that the flailing electrical wires of discontinuity have been mended that we don't acknowledge how feebly the “moral” animus of the film's villains are stitched in. Anything to justify the gore I guess.

The thing with Saw is that, for a horror film, it has a very effective basic gore-delivery formula: rather than having the bad guy do all the maiming, why not force the characters to do it to themselves. What's more horrifying than that, really? Well I'll tell you: a half-assed writer. The pointless narrative contortions are more vulgar than any mangling of the body that Jigsaw can conjure. And the continual Shakespearean downfalls (a more suitable illustration probably being “lateral crunchings”) of the protagonists (by the way a Saw protagonist = whoever has not yet been spectactularly killed) persist without the vital components, i.e. actual fucking characters. They're not complex enough to have tragic flaws or really any semblance of a human feature that justifies their failure. But apparently everyone has to die. Gotta get bums in those seats, rusty as the torture-machine-variety have to be, traditionally speaking.

Real elevation of stakes began in Saw four where the complex-mechanism-aestheti

c began to be applied to a greater narrative. In Saw 5 this device is just as counter-productive as ever. Rather than making the story more intricate, it simply magnifies its hollowness, baring its spookily-rust-stained gears. You see normally, if a character wants to do the right thing, what would thwart them is an inherent wrong thing in their methods, motives, desires, etc. Saw's pathos mechanisms are literally such: a series of pulleys and triggers that create a needlessly adversarial causality. The narrative Morality isn't thwarted by its own built-in inadequacies, it's thwarted by a big steel version of the Mousetrap boardgame (or those things that were popular circa late 80's early 90's in Honey I Shrunk The Kids or Goonies that made toast or granted people entry to your front yard). After all, it is all a game...and I'm bored. The Saw series is, narratively, guerilla tactics for the sake of it. And the result is cheap, feeling not as though the victims were soldiers of the thriller genre, but unfortunate children chasing their balls across the street. And it's getting tedious, its over-the-topness as clunky and insultingly deliberate as my closing sentence will be. Sorry, but all the frenetic editing and relentless sensory assaults of spectral audio eeriness amidst one oxidation-rashed post-industrial dungeon after another is not going to save this septology from its own infernal self-mutilation.