"Truth, Illusions, what's the difference?"
-George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
I'm tired of people being proud of not being afraid. I'm not talking about the fear of public speaking, or of heights, but one the most basic fears we have as social human beings is that one day, we'll be found out. Somebody, somewhere will discover what lies beneath the personas we put on day to day. We need to put on a persona because our inner lives are so convoluted and corrupt that it needs to be hidden away, and we do this by creating a public image, much like presidential candidates and actors do. As people not in the public eye, however, we are not stuck in one public image, but instead we shift from one character to the next. Around my employers, or my students I behave one way, but around my friends or my family I might behave entirely differently. Each person will come to know me as a certain person, but none will see me exactly the same as the next, because I behave differently around all of them. This could be interpreted as being creepy, but really it's just the nature of being friendly and empathetic. The series of personas we put on forces us to consider which one is the "real" one. Which persona is Joe qua Joe? This question is at the heart of the movie/play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," and yes, it scares me.
The story focuses on the witty and cruel banter between George and Martha, a husband and wife who both love and hate each other. They take turns attacking each other in what seems to be their weakest points. After a dinner party they invite over a newlywed couple and immediately begin to argue in front of them. They play extravagant roles for this couple, and the newlyweds, like the viewer, can never seem to figure out if George and Martha are in love or if they hate one another. This question, it turns out, is meaningless. Martha strongly comes onto her young attractive guest, while George berates his wife in every manner possible. We all come to understand eventually that this is just one of the many "games" the happy couple plays. For each game they play, George and Martha put on a certain face. In some games George plays the role of the offender, in others the offended. Neither persona suits them better than the other, and they switch back and forth seamlessly between the two. As the evening wears on, it starts to become clear that their terrible behavior is not, as it first appears, out of cruelty, but rather, it is a final effort to distract each other. They spend so much of their lives focusing on their spouse, who they love and hate, because so long as they focus on this other, they can avoid dealing with their own self who they fear and loathe more than anything else.
This is what a "distraction" is. So long as we have a persona which we can build up, and so long as we have an 'other' to compare our personas to, we can pretend that the illusions of our personae are real and we hope that the persona is more "real" than the horrific being that we know lurks in the depths of our mind. In Who's Afriad of Virginia Woolf the most disturbing thing, is realizing this, and seeing how cruel George and Martha are willing to be just to avoid facing themselves. When we learn that the very foundation of their relationship is an illusion, though it shouldn't come as a surprise, it does reveal just how far they are willing to go to avoid looking at themselves in earnest. And when that illusion is destroyed in public, as happens in the movie, the couple is left by themselves. The young man comes to see through so many layers of the couple that each layer is just another level of illusion built up to protect the vulnerable sadness, and evil beneath. What's worse is that he sees himself in this pair. That even if he pretends to be better than them he is merely playing a part. Putting up another illusion to be inevitably peeled away. When all the layers are gone, who knows what horrible being remains. Before the end credits we are left with these harrowing lines:
George: "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (sung to the tune of Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf)
Martha: I am.
And she should be.
P. S. If you're wondering about the title, the question of perception and personae is the central theme of "To the Lighthouse," but I'm convinced that the treatment of the subject is even darker in this play than it is in Woolf's book. Maybe the play isn't "darker," just a little more French.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Sophie's Choice and Meryl Streep
Sophie's choice is a movie that, when considering watching it for the first time, is daunting. If you know anything about the book or movie I would expect it to seem daunting for these three reasons: 1.) It's almost 3 hours long. 2.) It seems like it's one of those stuffy dramas that only uptight fancy-boy filmgoers will enjoy (I'm not implying homosexuality here, just the artsy types, you know, those types), and 3.) It's a real bummer of a film. While I cannot deny that the length of the film is quite long, the other claims(which of course I just made up. Take that straw man!), were negated by what happened when I actually watched the film.
The movie was not the slow paced melodrama I expected, but rather an lively coming of age tale about love, loving life and, what always follows, death. That description makes this movie sound like Garden State, and it is surely not Garden State. Had the plot been conceived today, it would be easy to take it as a rebuttal to the traditional indie flick. Rather than starting with a character who is bored with life and looking to die, early in the movie Sophie and her lover seem to be happy and in love. Rather than learning to love and live, the characters in Sophie's Choice learn that these things are exactly what they can no longer do. Perhaps now I'm describing the difference between a comedy and a tragedy, but there are three main characters in Sophie's Choice, and even while two of its characters hurtle toward an unhappy end, the third is coming into his adulthood, and it is through his lens that we view the entire story. If his story is the main one, then maybe Sophie's choice is more like an indie flick, and perhaps has the most in common with the birth mother of all indies, Harold and Maude. Both movies interweave their dramatic stories with laughter, and there is so much joy in parts of each that when the tragic parts are revealed, the sadness that comes with them is felt more deeply.
The performances as well as the story quickly earn goodwill towards the characters, and that goodwill is used to add weight to Sophie's story of her time in a concentration camp. What, perhaps stupidly, I didn't see until the end, was that each of the moments both in the past and present was a series of choices made by each of the characters sending them down their different paths. Each of these choices, whether they are the seemingly insignificant ones of moving into a pink apartment, or the large ones of choosing which child you love more, affect us in ways we cannot predict. For Sophie and Nathan, her lover, they have, by some combination of fate and choice, been led to such a place that they cannot bear to remember themselves. The cheeriness they have at the beginning is not what we are originally led to believe. Their cheer is a mixture of drugs, alcohol and most importantly, their over emotional, over dramatic love for each other. Every fight, every fuck is a chance for them to forget the choices they made which brought them to every moment.
It's terrifying to ponder that we constantly make these choices, and slowly our destinies are written out. Each choice is made by what we believe to be the best decision, but oftentimes it is not. Sophie, as she is waiting outside of Auschwitz is harassed by a German officer. She remains silent, and so he walks away. As he is leaving, she thinks she sees an opportunity for her to be freed, so she calls out to him in an attempt to charm him. What the sadistic officer gives her is not a chance to live, but rather a choice between sacrificing one child or the other. Colloquially, Sophie's Choice refers to the second decision she has to make. It means an impossible choice that must be made. What, perhaps it should refer to is the decision to call back the officer. It was not entirely bad luck and ill fate that made her choose between her children, but that moment when she called back the officer, that put her in that position. It's a sad fact that each day we stumble through thousands of choices, and each day we hope they work out in our favor. Still, no matter how well thought through a choice is, it always might end up being a poor decision which causes you to walk right into an impossible choice.
But what separates this movie from perhaps any other film is how much weight falls upon Meryl Streep, and how well she handles it. There have been many great performances in the history of movies. Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia comes to mind first, but I don't think I've ever seen a movie where my opinion of it would change so much without the addition of a single actor. Lawrence of Arabia might not be as good of a movie without Peter O'Toole, but I think I would still enjoy watching it. I'm almost certain that without Meryl Streep, Sophie's Choice would whither and die. Her accent and difficulties speaking English seem perfectly natural, as does every emotion she feels throughout the film, and she goes through an extensive range of emotions. Her expressions allow us to understand why she loves a sometimes abusive schizophrenic man, and take us past the dialogue into understanding each of the decisions she makes that lead her to her fate.
Acting is a thing that a movie can harness in a way no other medium can. In plays it is impossible for an actor to pull off a perfect performance, but because of the ability to shoot and re-shoot scenes of a movie, the meticulousness of the actors and directors can come through in a way unlike any other format. Silent movies perhaps prove this more than any other. Look at Buster Keaton's facial expressions during any of his movies. He has a determined, strong expression which dares anyone, or anything to get between him and his goal. The expression tells us more about the character than any of the brief dialogue. Pulling that off in a play isn't possible. A play requires exaggerated gestures because the audience is further away than in film. In this post and the last, i suppose what I've been driving at is that cameras in film allow for an intimacy with the actors and the characters that cannot be replicated by a play. I'm not attempting to say that movies are superior than plays, but I am trying to explain how movies are able to explore humanity in ways that plays cannot, and explain to myself what I am even looking for in a movie that would make me call it great.
The movie was not the slow paced melodrama I expected, but rather an lively coming of age tale about love, loving life and, what always follows, death. That description makes this movie sound like Garden State, and it is surely not Garden State. Had the plot been conceived today, it would be easy to take it as a rebuttal to the traditional indie flick. Rather than starting with a character who is bored with life and looking to die, early in the movie Sophie and her lover seem to be happy and in love. Rather than learning to love and live, the characters in Sophie's Choice learn that these things are exactly what they can no longer do. Perhaps now I'm describing the difference between a comedy and a tragedy, but there are three main characters in Sophie's Choice, and even while two of its characters hurtle toward an unhappy end, the third is coming into his adulthood, and it is through his lens that we view the entire story. If his story is the main one, then maybe Sophie's choice is more like an indie flick, and perhaps has the most in common with the birth mother of all indies, Harold and Maude. Both movies interweave their dramatic stories with laughter, and there is so much joy in parts of each that when the tragic parts are revealed, the sadness that comes with them is felt more deeply.
The performances as well as the story quickly earn goodwill towards the characters, and that goodwill is used to add weight to Sophie's story of her time in a concentration camp. What, perhaps stupidly, I didn't see until the end, was that each of the moments both in the past and present was a series of choices made by each of the characters sending them down their different paths. Each of these choices, whether they are the seemingly insignificant ones of moving into a pink apartment, or the large ones of choosing which child you love more, affect us in ways we cannot predict. For Sophie and Nathan, her lover, they have, by some combination of fate and choice, been led to such a place that they cannot bear to remember themselves. The cheeriness they have at the beginning is not what we are originally led to believe. Their cheer is a mixture of drugs, alcohol and most importantly, their over emotional, over dramatic love for each other. Every fight, every fuck is a chance for them to forget the choices they made which brought them to every moment.
It's terrifying to ponder that we constantly make these choices, and slowly our destinies are written out. Each choice is made by what we believe to be the best decision, but oftentimes it is not. Sophie, as she is waiting outside of Auschwitz is harassed by a German officer. She remains silent, and so he walks away. As he is leaving, she thinks she sees an opportunity for her to be freed, so she calls out to him in an attempt to charm him. What the sadistic officer gives her is not a chance to live, but rather a choice between sacrificing one child or the other. Colloquially, Sophie's Choice refers to the second decision she has to make. It means an impossible choice that must be made. What, perhaps it should refer to is the decision to call back the officer. It was not entirely bad luck and ill fate that made her choose between her children, but that moment when she called back the officer, that put her in that position. It's a sad fact that each day we stumble through thousands of choices, and each day we hope they work out in our favor. Still, no matter how well thought through a choice is, it always might end up being a poor decision which causes you to walk right into an impossible choice.
But what separates this movie from perhaps any other film is how much weight falls upon Meryl Streep, and how well she handles it. There have been many great performances in the history of movies. Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia comes to mind first, but I don't think I've ever seen a movie where my opinion of it would change so much without the addition of a single actor. Lawrence of Arabia might not be as good of a movie without Peter O'Toole, but I think I would still enjoy watching it. I'm almost certain that without Meryl Streep, Sophie's Choice would whither and die. Her accent and difficulties speaking English seem perfectly natural, as does every emotion she feels throughout the film, and she goes through an extensive range of emotions. Her expressions allow us to understand why she loves a sometimes abusive schizophrenic man, and take us past the dialogue into understanding each of the decisions she makes that lead her to her fate.
Acting is a thing that a movie can harness in a way no other medium can. In plays it is impossible for an actor to pull off a perfect performance, but because of the ability to shoot and re-shoot scenes of a movie, the meticulousness of the actors and directors can come through in a way unlike any other format. Silent movies perhaps prove this more than any other. Look at Buster Keaton's facial expressions during any of his movies. He has a determined, strong expression which dares anyone, or anything to get between him and his goal. The expression tells us more about the character than any of the brief dialogue. Pulling that off in a play isn't possible. A play requires exaggerated gestures because the audience is further away than in film. In this post and the last, i suppose what I've been driving at is that cameras in film allow for an intimacy with the actors and the characters that cannot be replicated by a play. I'm not attempting to say that movies are superior than plays, but I am trying to explain how movies are able to explore humanity in ways that plays cannot, and explain to myself what I am even looking for in a movie that would make me call it great.
Monday, February 8, 2010
The Greatness of Movies
For some time now I've been watching as many of the greatest movies ever made as I can. Years ago I became interested in reading film criticism, mostly off of the A.V. Club website, and then in Roger Ebert's film reviews. He is famous for writing scathing reviews of hackneyed movies, but more interestingly, he writes about movies from a pop philosophical perspective. Many of his reviews reach beyond what we might think of as film criticism and act as stand alone essays. An example is this one of Synecdoche, NY, which is a baffling movie when first watched, but on repeat viewings becomes one of the best movies I've ever seen. I purposively say "best" rather than favorite. Without his review ( http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081105/REVIEWS/811059995 ) I think I might never have gone back to watch it a second time, but his writing made the movie sound so appealing, I had to see it again. Like Ebert, I'm not done with it, and will watch it again (.
His ongoing project is to review many of his old favorites in the "Great Movies" section of the Chicago Times Website, and oftentimes his reviews will make me work harder to understand why these movies is so revered. Like the AFI, I do feel like there is a bias towards older films, and even after trying to enjoy some of these movies I still found them quite boring and pointless. Still, because of this list, and because of these reviews, and have stumbled upon some movies which have expanded what I even thought possible to do with a movie.
This is the first of hopefully many posts in which I record, and process my thoughts about cinema (using the words cinema and film instead of movies is how to make yourself sound smart!), and explain why film can be not just entertaining, but as rewarding as reading a great book, or going to the opera, or watching a play. So here we go.
To make movies a valid art form there needs to be a specific reason as to why a story needs to be told using a camera rather than any other method. I imagine that the early plays were popular because they were able to do something that traditional storytelling was not, which was to provide a living embodiment of a character with which the audience could empathize with more immediately. A character is no longer something in the imagination, but has taken a physical form and can speak to the audience directly, or interact with his fellow characters. The empathy of the viewer becomes more engaged as the emotions and pains of the actor are more real than in story form. There may be other advantages to using the form of a play over story, but it seems that the main one is to draw out the emotions of the audience even more than stories.
I feel that the above paragraph doesn't even come close to doing justice to the topic, and perhaps I'll explain more later. For now, it'll have to do.
Movies, then it seems, have to be able to express something, or bring some preexisting aspect of storytelling to the foreground that can't be done as well in plays, poems, stories or novels. While thinking about this, I again stumbled across the Hitchcock movie "Notorious," and it revealed to me a small portion of how movies can do something unique among storytelling formats (I'll talk more directly about Notorious in a different post). As silly as it sounds, my revelation about movies was this: they use a camera to make them. The wonderful invention of the camera let's the viewer quite literally see what a character sees. It allows the director to focus in on tiny details, and microscopic reactions in the faces of characters without dwelling on any of them. In a novel, when a detail is pointed out it can throw off the rhythm of the story, while in a movie, if a camera lovingly flickers over a key being passed off between two people while maintaining the action at a constant pace. When a glimmer of a smile passes across an actor's face oftentimes the viewer won't even be sure he saw it. Or as an example, near the end of the movie, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," while Spencer Tracy (who in real life was ill and dying) was giving a final, long speech about love and race and everything, in the back of the shot his wife, played by Katherine Hepburn, begins to well up. The light glistens off each tear as she stands silently in the background, not even in focus. In a movie i found otherwise unaffecting, seeing those tears in her eyes overwhelmed. The beauty of that shot could go unnoticed because of its subtlety. Later, Robert Osborne (The guy who hosts most TCM things) informed me that those tears were not planned, but actually Katherine Hepburn realizing she was witnessing perhaps the last time anyone would ever see Spencer Tracy acting. That fact made it even more interesting to me that I found the shot so incredible.
These little moments, which continually I find to be the most affecting parts of movies, are one reason why movies do something no other genre can do. It might not seem like much, but never before movies, were actors able to bring so much to a story without drawing attention to themselves. These powerful moments, lurking in the background of great movies are something that cannot be replicated. Plays might try, but think about this. In the movie Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are dead, Gary Oldman (whichever he was), throughout, was discovering the laws of physics through accident, and when he did so it was briefly acknowledged by the camera and then passed over. This wasn't part of the script for the play on which the movie was based. If, even in a play a director tried to accomplish this, it would require that he draw attention to that behavior. Because of the virtues of movies, however, Stoppard was able to show us this display (which is the most memorable part of the movie for me). It's often been quoted to me from somewhere, that there's no such thing as subtlety in filmmaking. I think that's wrong, and that subtlety tends to exist in films in a way that it cannot exist anywhere else.
This only seems to cover a tiny portion of why film is great, and I hope to expand on this post in the next.
It's getting late, and I'm getting tired. Good night y'all.
His ongoing project is to review many of his old favorites in the "Great Movies" section of the Chicago Times Website, and oftentimes his reviews will make me work harder to understand why these movies is so revered. Like the AFI, I do feel like there is a bias towards older films, and even after trying to enjoy some of these movies I still found them quite boring and pointless. Still, because of this list, and because of these reviews, and have stumbled upon some movies which have expanded what I even thought possible to do with a movie.
This is the first of hopefully many posts in which I record, and process my thoughts about cinema (using the words cinema and film instead of movies is how to make yourself sound smart!), and explain why film can be not just entertaining, but as rewarding as reading a great book, or going to the opera, or watching a play. So here we go.
To make movies a valid art form there needs to be a specific reason as to why a story needs to be told using a camera rather than any other method. I imagine that the early plays were popular because they were able to do something that traditional storytelling was not, which was to provide a living embodiment of a character with which the audience could empathize with more immediately. A character is no longer something in the imagination, but has taken a physical form and can speak to the audience directly, or interact with his fellow characters. The empathy of the viewer becomes more engaged as the emotions and pains of the actor are more real than in story form. There may be other advantages to using the form of a play over story, but it seems that the main one is to draw out the emotions of the audience even more than stories.
I feel that the above paragraph doesn't even come close to doing justice to the topic, and perhaps I'll explain more later. For now, it'll have to do.
Movies, then it seems, have to be able to express something, or bring some preexisting aspect of storytelling to the foreground that can't be done as well in plays, poems, stories or novels. While thinking about this, I again stumbled across the Hitchcock movie "Notorious," and it revealed to me a small portion of how movies can do something unique among storytelling formats (I'll talk more directly about Notorious in a different post). As silly as it sounds, my revelation about movies was this: they use a camera to make them. The wonderful invention of the camera let's the viewer quite literally see what a character sees. It allows the director to focus in on tiny details, and microscopic reactions in the faces of characters without dwelling on any of them. In a novel, when a detail is pointed out it can throw off the rhythm of the story, while in a movie, if a camera lovingly flickers over a key being passed off between two people while maintaining the action at a constant pace. When a glimmer of a smile passes across an actor's face oftentimes the viewer won't even be sure he saw it. Or as an example, near the end of the movie, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," while Spencer Tracy (who in real life was ill and dying) was giving a final, long speech about love and race and everything, in the back of the shot his wife, played by Katherine Hepburn, begins to well up. The light glistens off each tear as she stands silently in the background, not even in focus. In a movie i found otherwise unaffecting, seeing those tears in her eyes overwhelmed. The beauty of that shot could go unnoticed because of its subtlety. Later, Robert Osborne (The guy who hosts most TCM things) informed me that those tears were not planned, but actually Katherine Hepburn realizing she was witnessing perhaps the last time anyone would ever see Spencer Tracy acting. That fact made it even more interesting to me that I found the shot so incredible.
These little moments, which continually I find to be the most affecting parts of movies, are one reason why movies do something no other genre can do. It might not seem like much, but never before movies, were actors able to bring so much to a story without drawing attention to themselves. These powerful moments, lurking in the background of great movies are something that cannot be replicated. Plays might try, but think about this. In the movie Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are dead, Gary Oldman (whichever he was), throughout, was discovering the laws of physics through accident, and when he did so it was briefly acknowledged by the camera and then passed over. This wasn't part of the script for the play on which the movie was based. If, even in a play a director tried to accomplish this, it would require that he draw attention to that behavior. Because of the virtues of movies, however, Stoppard was able to show us this display (which is the most memorable part of the movie for me). It's often been quoted to me from somewhere, that there's no such thing as subtlety in filmmaking. I think that's wrong, and that subtlety tends to exist in films in a way that it cannot exist anywhere else.
This only seems to cover a tiny portion of why film is great, and I hope to expand on this post in the next.
It's getting late, and I'm getting tired. Good night y'all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)