Sunday, February 24, 2013

What it means for Hollywood if Argo wins

UPDATE (2/25): And it did win! Hollywood is really in love with itself.

In a moment of pre-Oscar jitters, I thought it apt to discuss what I think Hollywood means if it chooses Argo as Best Picture tonight. Yes, there are eight other films in the running, four of which I've seen, so I can't be a decisive predictor of the outcome. Lincoln will probably sweep, and Beasts of the Southern Wild and Silver Linings Playbook will probably be overlooked somehow, but if Argo wins, it sends a particularly strong signal to Hollywood and the movie-making corners of the world. Here's why:

Remember in 2010 when the conventional, Academy-schmoozing The King's Speech beat out the more progressive, innovative films like The Social Network, Black Swan and The Kids Are All Right for the top prize? It was because the Academy responsible for doling out the award, with an average voter age of 62, loves that kind of sappy underdog story about the bravery and selflessness of the world's elite. Especially when it's got those grand cinematic contents like the threat of war and a man overcoming obstacles for the good of others.

If Argo wins, it means that Hollywood has similarly patted itself on the back.

The true hero of Ben Affleck's hostage thriller is Hollywood itself. Affleck's character Tony Mendez, despite working for the CIA, owes more to the movie-making business for his mission's success than his own moves. He uses the finely tuned motion picture system that will support and promote even a "bullshit fake movie" modeled after Star Wars to get his hostages out of Iran, so we can argue that this vision of Hollywood is quite self-congratulatory. Especially since this "based on a true" story is now a movie.

You could argue that Argo is not self-congratulatory with regards to its production system, but rather aware of its self-indulgence, because the entire operation relies on Hollywood's ability to produce bad films, and on its disregard for politics--why the hell would anyone in their right mind enter a pre-revolutionary territory to make a silly scifi movie? This can be a meta-commentary on Hollywood's selfish moneymaking interests at the expense of political sensitivity and awareness.

I think, however, that the thriller form of Argo sends the message that Hollywood advocates for its own importance over politics. The opening sets the tone as a political thriller with a prelude that gives a quick history of the Shah and the coup situation in Tehran in 1979--so we start off feeling as though we will get a film steeped in negotiations and political tension. But this is not the case; instead, the story focuses on using a movie cover to relieve six foreign service workers from the Canadian Embassy instead of the 60 more that were held hostage, under real danger, in the embassy itself. It only cuts back periodically to the embassy and its hostages, while it uses a lot of screen time following Mendez as he sets up the operation in L.A., and then follows him to Tehran. The film is surely a thrilling nail biter as we watch him carry it out, and we even get a car/airplane chase at the end--a typical action wowzer that reminds us again that this is a Hollywood thriller. Of course we worry for those six Americans, but I can't help but feel as though the whole thing is indicative of the fact that Hollywood champions the paradoxically apolitical and yet nationalist stories that make itself look good. In other words, Hollywood's version of history tends to honor Hollywood over history itself. It uses its own version of events, with a layer of aesthetics and storytelling, which actually presents a version of itself more than any true, active involvement in what really happened. The same thing goes for Zero Dark Thirty, a highly contested runner for Best Picture this year, which presents the events in a compelling way but refuses to take political sides.

Finally, it's interesting to note that America doesn't take credit for their CIA involvement in the operation, giving the spotlight over to Canada. But yet the light shines on Hollywood, both within the diegesis of Argo's America of 1980 and the production system that created the 2012 film.  So, while political imperialism may have been quieted in this instance, cultural imperialism still stands. Simply put, the movies rule.

So if Argo wins, the Academy is applauding its own production system once again (which it essentially does every year), but this time with particular self-importance.

Monday, February 18, 2013

Girls Against Boys?

Uh oh.


So I've been reading a lot lately about how millenials are in a "post-dating" world. There's Hanna Rosin's polemic book The End of Men. There are the women at The Gaggle who encourage opening up your eyes to the men you never considered. There are the depressingly spot-on Atlantic and New York Times articles condemning hookup culture, texting, and online dating. There are the Acculturated symposium articles that ask "Can Men Be Men Again?" The (horrible horror) film above, Girls Against Boys, seems to be an extreme prediction of a result of this current battle of the sexes. So, in a departure from my usual film-focused posts (which nevertheless owes a lot to Girls) I'd like to weigh in with my take on "post dating."

Of particular importance here is the fact that I don't date a lot. This is both a conscious and subconscious decision. The simplest explanation is that living in Denmark as a non-Dane, I may be scaring off potential interests because they worry that I'll leave the country (which I did, once, after a French boyfriend broke it off for precisely this reason), so neither of us tries from the start.  But the second-simplest explanation is that it's too hard.

Sometimes I'm full of rage, like these murderous women, that post-feminism has rendered men lazy, unambitious and averse to commitment. Unfulfilling past experiences with "the casual thing" tell me I don't want that anymore, but how do we get out of the cycle when casual sex is everywhere and endorsed? So my anger brews until I (wrongly) peg all men in sight as commitment-phobes without getting to know them.

Sometimes I think it's us girls' fault for putting up with casual sex. Some argue that casual sex empowers women; I think that in a society with more highly educated women than men, we're really just scared that if we stick up for our right to monogamy, we'll scare the boys away because they can chase easier tail. Plus, casual sex is awful and awkward. The insidiousness of hookup options leaves the mature women partnerless.

Sometimes I'm complacent, more interested in my comfy bed with its comforter that hugs me just right, and that doesn't snore. Reading a book on a Saturday night often feels much more fulfilling than braving the sticky floors of bars, only to have unwelcome men barge their way into my (great) conversations with my friends.

Sometimes I simply have no idea where to meet men. In my daily life I'm surrounded by students (I can feel my mom repeating, "they're too young, Kate!") and, worse, startup entrepreneurs. And with a job, a master's program, intensive Danish courses, and an active social life, all my time for new activities is taken up.

Sometimes I pity the men who've missed out on the encouragement and support that my fellow female generation has reaped. Masculinity is confusing these days; how are boys supposed to learn how to be men if Bruce Willis's guns and hipster jeans are the only guiding symbols?

But most of all, I don't date because I am an emerging adult. I have a lot of things to work on, for myself. I genuinely feel as though I do not really know who I am yet. I would argue that most of my peers agree. We're in the midst of deciding careers, lifestyles, worldviews, and finances for ourselves, and this is more than a full-time job. Therefore, none of us can possibly know what we want in a relationship, and what we have to offer the other person.

So I guess I wish that the media would quit ringing the alarm bells about millenial dating, because it's making a pressure-filled situation even more stressful. Could we instead focus on the fact that emerging adults need help and guidance too, much like teenagers and new parents? At this age, I'd much rather be asked the question "how would you describe yourself" than, for example, "what do you do for a living?" The latter implies a fixed identity, while the former hints at the truth - that we have the capacity to decide who we are and who we become. And that we are ever-changing.

Friday, February 15, 2013

This is why I love Girls.

Note: I am currently writing my masters thesis at the University of Copenhagen on the realism in HBO's Girls. What follows is the first of probably many musings on the series as I attempt to work my way around its complexity. Bear with me. 





This is why I love Girls. 

Hannah tells Adam: "I don't even want a boyfriend. I just want someone who wants to hang out all the time, and thinks I'm the best person in the world, and wants to have sex with only me." 

The fluidity, weirdness, and unsteadiness of the romantic relationships in the series epitomize the confusion we girls/women have in our mid-twenties. No one wants to commit but they want intimacy anyways, the sex is disappointing, and self-doubt and insecurity may prevent us from realizing who is truly good for us at this age. 

Gone are the late teen years, when everything felt like an angst-y yet somehow carefree, monumental game. Now, pressure to "figure out who you are" comes internally, as if we're bursting from the seams, because we're sick of being unsure. So we try on personalities to see if they stick. Hannah, an aspiring writer who talks about writing much more than she writes, does everything for The Story, accumulating experiences and tough skin. Jessa is "unsmoteable" when it comes to sex but can't get the rest of her life in order, and Marnie thinks she knows who she is until she dumps Charlie and loses her job, at which point she's not so sure. 

I don't just love Girls because of self-identification; it's not just because I see parts of myself in the female characters. Because doesn't every narrative strive for some type of sympathy or empathy? What I love about Girls is its ability to show the commonplace, un-showable awkwardness of life for people in their twenties. 

Especially the awkwardness of sex. No one seems to know how to have great sex at this age - and Girls shows just how true this is. From the first episode, awkward sexuality rears its head: Adam, Hannah's casual fling, commands her to lie on her stomach, hold her legs up behind her, and stay there while he grabs lube - and he'll "consider" getting a condom. Then he proceeds to have sex with her in that clearly uncomfortable position on the couch, while she talks her way through her discomfort, and Adam tells her to play the quiet game. Clearly, sex and communication are both murky waters here. 

Then there's Charlie's coddling love for Marnie, who finds it suffocating. She wants a real man instead, maybe like Booth Jonathan, who gets her so hot that she goes and masturbates in the office of the art gallery where she works. This, by itself, has made a lot of people uncomfortable, because we're apparently not supposed to see female sexuality displayed in this manner on tv. But in Season 2, episode 3, it gets more uncomfortable in a different way: Booth's dominating masculinity is laughable as he straddles her on his hipster bed. She can't help but burst out laughing when it's over - all that bravado came to this terrible sex?  For Shoshanna, it's her virginity that takes center stage, and stamps her like a pariah (she wants to be so much more than her inexperience, but she exudes it). For Jessa, sex with multiple partners is linked to her wandering - she's good at superficial encounters, but she needs guidance in the rest of her life. 

This terrible sex (which also features Lena Dunham's bravery of showing her very normal, not supermodel naked body), has so much honesty that it feels true and also absurd. And that's why it's funny. It's not quite the Cringe Comedy epitomized by Ricky Gervais and The Office, because we're not laughing at the characters' own social ineptitude, flaws, or lack of self-awareness. The girls of Girls have all of those things, but the comedy doesn't target them. It's an "I've been there" comedy that is deeply sympathetic and honest about how hard it is to make sense of it all, inside and outside the bedroom.

This awkwardness of sexual encounters is the most acute example of what makes this series progressive. In the evolution of sex on screen, we've moved from censorship and ellipses to gratuitous sexuality and the fantasy of the sex symbol. But even in the quality drama currently on cable, sex is rarely honest. Too often it's a plot device or a time for gazing. Rarely does it show a less-than-perfect body. But in Girls it fills the characters with honesty, because it capitalizes on insecurities, miscommunications, and messy expectations--therefore showing just how human they are. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, sex presents these women as an extension of their personalities, desires, and big questions. This works quite well for the show's realism, because what other place is more honest than the bedroom? Yet in a setting that film and television usually marks as matters of "private life," in Girls the striving for intimacy (and often not achieving it) is an exposure technique that takes young women's private lives into the public sphere. This is because sex is sex, but it also becomes a metaphor for the uncertainty of the young female mind, with all the pressures, hangups, misgivings, signals, and overwhelming everythingness of being a 24-year-old woman. So thanks, Lena Dunham, for showing the world what it's like to be us, inside-out. 

Monday, February 4, 2013

LOTR and Torben Grodal



Somewhere buried in the hours of extended features in the Lord of the Rings box set, director Peter Jackson says that he hopes his films will inspire 9-year-old boys to become filmmakers, just as he was inspired at that age by the original King Kong (no wonder he went on to remake it).

Well, I may not be 9 or a boy, but The Lord of the Rings was the one film that made me think seriously about working in film. My sister and best friend and I have watched LOTR hundreds of times. We crack up at Pippin’s “second breakfast? Elevensies?” inquiry, and love turning to each other and saying “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you!” And ever since my 14-year-old self marveled at the “how” of the scale models of Helm’s Deep and Andy Serkis’s motion-capture suit, I have wanted to know the “why” of films. Now, at least for this trilogy, I have an answer.

Last week, the University of Copenhagen celebrated Professor Torben Grodal’s 70th birthday with a hyggelig symposium (in typical academic fashion). David Bordwell gave a pitch perfect presentation on mystery in 1940s Hollywood in his honor, and fellow Danish colleagues critiqued some of Grodal’s most influential articles. As a major player in cognitive and evolutionary film theory, Torben has published 3 or 4 articles consistently, each year, since 1968. Talk about prolific.

One of these recent articles, called “Tapping into Our Tribal Heritage: The Lord of the Rings and Brain Evolution” (available here) is especially resonant for me, because it proclaims that The Lord of the Rings film trilogy is basically the best thing ever (at least for evolutionary film theorists). He argues that the trilogy activates and uses the seven major emotional systems as its narrative and emotional core: the anger-aggression system, the fear system, the sexual lust system, the care-and-bonding system, the panic system, the play system, and the seeking system.

At its most powerful center is fear – in the form of a huge eye, Sauron. In the face of that evil eye comes an epic narrative about male bonding, adventure, heroism, fear, reward, and fantasy. Grodal writes, “a central motor of the fascination of the trilogy is that it evokes basic mammalian emotional systems which produce strong interest in salient scenes.” I think he’s right; it’s a combination of fascination and emotion that raises our experience to something innate and instinctual. We care deeply about the characters, while we simultaneously admire them for being braver than we could ever be.

So, again, cinema leaves its mark on me. It’s great to know that there’s a reason why I don’t get sick of LOTR after the 356th viewing!