Fragment 2.37

I move now in randomly arranged glitches because I'm convinced that this prime being, this pitiless cunt, this hissing maw of a universe has figured me out.  Every place I occupy is freeze-framing into place with a predestined smirk so I try to not think and end up in unnecessary spaces, invading someone else's time-space continuum.  I exited the mall from one entrance and drove a three-quarter mile to another entrance where I got out and stopped to ask a pigeon for directions.  I only vaguely expected an answer, wondering if maybe the universe would do so to signal that it was playing along, but the pigeon blinked at me and kept pecking, eventually bored with my insinuations.  Going inside again was not expected and I can breathe, I can feel the world getting confused, unable to follow in the wake of this self-generated entropy.

It's about staying away from routines now because the dangerous thoughts, the recklessness and the impromptu flights of imagination find you in the routine.  The memories vivisect your brain and you find yourself staring at a green light with the honking not even registering.  It helps that you drive an official car but society has a short fuse these days and in the end it doesn't care and the not caring doesn't matter.  The streets have faded names and even those names are forgotten.

There are moments of sheer terror when the clicking catches me, when I'm where I'm supposed to be at the appointed time, and I'm jolted with the realization of the beautiful irrelevance of it all, the algorithm of this atom connected to that atom until handing over a credit card or sitting on the sofa or walking to the mailbox become an ordinariness that glides by like driftwood, pulled along by a force greater than ourselves and we only think we have some control over it.  We've been brainwashed all our lives.  But the strictures are locked into place until the choices are cut off; you can no longer pull back that card or burn that sofa or walk past that mailbox.  Decisions have signposts and even the way you ignore them follows a familiar process because the mind latches on to the familiar when it's scared.  There is plenty of scared to go around.

How many times did you hear the disembodied murmurs, the snatches of conversation, the tinkling of glasses, the scraping of chairs, the music pushing against you, the smoke lingering in traces, the cursing, the feigned coolness, the buffalo wings only warm not hot, the stagger to the bathroom, the staring at the tiles?  How long did the embrace last before it was withdrawn, how real was the expression, how empty were the words?  Did they lie?  Didn't you know?

Time is a fluid commodity that speaks its own language and every struggle to keep up only makes it waste away faster.  What is faster, what is slower?  In the deep reaches of interstellar travel there are no gravitational orbits around a particular sun, no more heliocentric ticking, you float unmoored and the best description of time is not a clock but deterioration, the universe still finding you even way out there, still dismantling you atom by atom, planting charges in the fissures until you get bad news from a doctor's visit, or from being hurled suddenly into a windshield after hitting a tree and then you stop but the rest of the moments continue without you.  You left an impact but you didn't leave an impact.  You existed but you didn't.  Think about it too much and it will drive you mad.

What matters now are the connections, the lives touched, the laughs expressed, the quiet moments of joy that only you will ever feel.  They matter because they were sense impressions and sensing is a permanent currency.  We worry about digitally accumulated money as if we're taking the wealth with us, or taking the debt with us.  When the firing sequence is perfected along your lifeline, it won't matter.  We let the talking heads connive us into talking about freedom as if we were ever really free.  Why, you must be free, you just bought a new HDTV.  Who lives in what country, who dies where and were they happy or bored or terrified or clueless?  Politics gets nothing done, lives are lost because of bad luck or bad geography.  You're you and you will only ever get to be you, there is no one else, there are no stand-ins, there are no rescues.

Look outside.  Look inside.  There you are.

Cosmopolis; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Non Sequiturs

About a quarter of the way through Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco, released way back in 1998 and centered on the social politics of a group of budding twenty-somethings in the throes of success, you come to realize that the characters are much more intelligent than they should be, much more articulate than they should be, and much wiser than their years in the astute observations they pronounce.  Yet the oblique plot in that movie stands out because Stillman's script gives the characters an inertia to move through their narratives with a sense of purpose, reaching a somewhat conclusive transcendence, a heightened consciousness that the next day is the first day of the rest of their lives.  Call The Last Days of Disco a thinking person's The Breakfast Club, if you will, or the movie that St. Elmo's Fire wishes it could have been if its characters hadn't languished on superficialities.  Disco's protagonists were also more or less obsessed with superficial questions, to be sure, but at least they spoke more artfully of it and allowed a transformation to occur.

Image courtesy Cosmopolisthefilm.com

Not so in David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, which is not identical to the aforementioned film in either subject matter or plot.  The characters of Cosmopolis are immersed in their self-involved, hopelessly hyper-aware, almost private language clamoring for attention such that it quickly outpaces and puts off the audience, leaving everyone to wonder (1) just what the fuck are the characters talking about, and (2) why should we care?  That never happened in Disco; no viewer was left behind.

Almost as if Cronenberg senses the audience's waning inattention, a periodic sex scene is thrown into the visuals of Cosmopolis to remind us that the pseudo-intertextual material is grounded in the visceral, the literal push and pull which connects us all to each other.  But I tended to see the sex scenes for what they were: visual wavetops in an otherwise inert and ultimately unsatisfying movie that loitered backstage, too self-absorbed with how best to deliver its lines and ending up missing its cue to walk onstage, so that by the time it does, no one is interested enough to notice or care for the message.

And the movie does have a message, but it is wrapped around the axle of its convoluted speech-making and characters' overly intricated declarations.  Make no mistake, the dialogue looks compelling in print, but when you roll out the full phonetics of it aloud, it doesn't quite taste like chicken anymore.

The few action scenes feel air-dropped in the middle of lengthy dialogue like visual rescue packages intended to allow the audience to survive into the next act.  For example, roughly at the middle of the movie, Pattinson's Eric Packer commits an act of extreme violence out of what appears to be nothing more than idle curiosity.  Later, he abandons his high-tech stretch limousine and wanders the streets at night like a common criminal brandishing a gun, and even has a brief shootout.  We are meant to feel that this is a person in mental slippage who is slowly realizing that he has lost it all, but we don't empathize with him one bit because the narrative ground game didn't prep us for those scenes.

Robert Pattinson in the polar opposite mood of his role in Cosmopolis...(image courtesy Gage Skidmore: Wikimedia Commons CCA:SA 2.0)

I had high hopes for enjoying this movie.  After all, the film's source material is Don DeLillo's insightful but short novel of the same name.  I watched the movie recently, but I had read the book years ago, and it was interesting to see how much of the book I remembered when the visual translation gave me, at times, a jarring shakedown of my intellectual curiosity.  The lesson here for writers and directors is that lifting whole extracts from the book and slapping them onto a screenplay do not preserve the profundity of the ideas they attempt to present and dramatize.

Even a line written brilliantly in the book can be bungled in the locution of the spoken word -- and in Cosmopolis, nearly every character is a CrossFit instructor for the English language, making all those poor nouns and verbs twist through prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses with the grace of a roller-coaster ride.  In fact, one of the few characters who appears to be able to maneuver the dialogue in an effective manner is Eric Packer's bodyguard, played by the excellent and underused veteran actor, Kevin Durand, delivering his lines with a pitch-perfect precision.  The other standout actor is Paul Giamatti, who does not act a scene so much as consume it and give it a holistic dimensionality in an as-told-by-Giamatti vibe.

David Cronenberg looking Cronenberg-ish.  (Image courtesy of Alan Langford: Wikimedia Commons: CCA:SA 2.0)

These adaptational hurdles are not Cronenberg's fault; at least, not entirely.  DeLillo's novel, like many of his others, offer a thematic mediation on the nature of consumption and disposal -- it's among his most popular dynamic, and it surfaces perhaps even more pointedly in the book compared to his previous title, Underworld, where the political realm had an equally viable role to fulfill and its sheer size qualified it to pass inspection as a Tom Clancy tome, at least back when Clancy was in his research-as-orgasm-as-novel heyday.  Perhaps Cronenberg wanted to transmit the author's message in its pure and unchanged form; perhaps he felt the rawness of the text would be preserved in spoken form; but some vital pieces went missing on the way to the editing room.

For example -- and this is the only example I'll pull from the book -- listen to this crafted piece of DeLillo's prose:

He felt the street around him, unremitting, people moving past each other in coded moments of gesture and dance. They tried to walk without breaking stride because breaking stride is well-meaning and weak but they were forced sometimes to sidestep and even pause and they almost always averted their eyes.  Eye contact was a delicate matter.  A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.  Who steps aside for whom, who looks or does not look at whom, what level of umbrage does a brush or a touch constitute?  No one wanted to be touched.  There was a pact of untouchability.  Even here, in the huddle of old cultures, tactile and close-woven, with passersby mixed in, and security guards, and shoppers pressed to windows, and wandering fools, people did not touch each other.

Packer at this point was standing on the street for just a moment before retreating into a bookstore to meet his cultured, shrewd, and slightly kooky wife.  So basically, to watch a movie based on Don DeLillo's book is to miss half the sense impressions that move across the printed page.  A director who attempts to distill the work into dialogue and visuals had better use the precision of a surgeon's fine-bladed skill.

Cosmopolis's shortcomings aren't entirely lead actor Robert Pattinson's fault, either; he was tasked with carrying a very difficult and unlikeable character for a majority of the movie through the simple utterance of extended observations as elliptical and incisive as DeLillo's prose.  But his delivery is somewhat off and it sounds often like he's reading the lines off cue cards with that uncertain awkwardness.

As is the case with all adaptations, the challenge was in the presentation, and here I place chief blame on the scriptwriter -- who also happens to be Cronenberg.  This is material that begs for transitional realignment of dialogue, for shortened sentences rendered more pleasing to the mechanics of the human ear, and for imagery and action that does not appear so random and disconnected from the narrative that its effect jars the senses, unless that was the artists' intent.

DeLillo's book has to be set aside for its own criticism, and I'm trying to not conflate the faults of the book with the movie, but when reading the book, you get the impression that idea was king and the vehicle that Packer rode around in was just a, pardon the pun, vehicle for those ideas to be littered in its wake.  The book was different in its readership expectations; you are meant to chase after the detritus and divine meaning from the discarded Styrofoam cups and recyclable carton containers of sushi; you are still on your own, but DeLillo is your spotter, the introspection giving you just enough cerebral momentum to move to the next paragraph.

Don DeLillo looking every bit like the literary author that he is.  (Image courtesy of Thousand Robots: Wikimedia Commons CCA:SA 2.0) 

Maybe it was a matter as simple as length.  DeLillo's reimagination of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy gave readers effective signposts and more approachable prose in Libra.  And his "airborne toxic event" in White Noise rendered an autopsy on the disconnectedness of Americana across generations which was as entertaining as it was academic.

If the book Cosmopolis had flaws in the dramatic arc -- and it has them because DeLillo doesn't like to play to the traditional model of the dramatic arc -- those flaws are magnified in the movie.  Here, Cronenberg did mess with the sequence of events in the book, and it made the film a more impoverished experience as a result.  A slow beginning, an erratic middle, and a confusing ending: this is what the audience experiences.  Who knows what diatribes babbled in the middle of DeLillo's brain when the vision of this work took hold -- or what vision was birthed in Cronenberg's brain, for that matter.

Passages of the book develop an introspective soul that is detached, landing glancing blows at capitalism, technology, and the constant need for wanting more without understanding what more precisely represents.  This wanting escapes even the monetary value that society imposes on everything known to our daily lives.  We recognize this as readers, and even though, as with Disco, we know there are no people alive who talk like that or think with such discordant imagery, we forgive the work because we see the book's soul.

The movie lacked such a soul, however.

Giamatti's character may have inadvertently become the most prophetic in how the film would generally be received.  He emotes at times to the scripted point of self-caricature, exclaiming, "All those people...how did they get to be who they are?"  This is actually a powerful question that can propel the most successful stories to a satisfying conclusion, but the images, the dialogue, the building of scene upon scene, they all have to work in concert to achieve a satisfactory answer -- or, at least in our minds, make an attempt, since some presentations of these answers are never answered, and in the non-answer lies the answer.  (Wow, I've been watching this movie way too long myself, apparently).

Near the end of the movie, Giamatti's character, Benno Levin, implores to Pattinson's Eric Packer that he is frustrated because all the people who he observes around him "lay helpless in a system that makes no sense to me."

Two notable things occur in that quasi-showdown scene: the dramatic underlayment is that Benno represents DeLillo's outrage over modern consumerism and he voices it to Packer, who is a walking embodiment of hyperacquisitive capitalism, the very golem who was both created by and feeds off such consumerist gluttony.

But the next layer is that Benno also becomes the audience's reaction to Cronenberg's visual think-piece, the sense that we have come along -- literally -- for a ride, and now we are stuck at the end, still not quite sure what it is all supposed to mean.  This latter effect had to have been entirely unintended.

Despite the talented cast and the rich source material, I don't think a movie can commit any greater sin.

The Force Awakens with ADHD (Spoilers)

There's a scene in Rocky where Sylvester Stallone's titular character wanders around the huge venue of an arena on the eve of the big fight.  There is minimal dialogue, and after Rocky goes home, he talks to Adrian about his lack of confidence and his doubts in facing the champion, Apollo Creed.

The scenes are introspective, devoid of any dramatic musical stab to accentuate to the audience that this should be considered important, thought-provoking shit -- just in case the audience happened to be comprised of unfocused, inattentive dullards.  Because there's nudging them along and then there's yanking them from room to room, and director John G. Avildsen knew the difference as he helmed the 1976 Oscar-winning treatment of Stallone's original script.



Captain Phasma, we hardly knew ye (source: Richard Eriksson, Wikimedia Commons CC:BY:2.0)

That's probably my biggest problem with The Force Awakens.  It's this hyperactive kid who won't sit still or shut up long enough to let you enjoy the scenery.  And the audience gets thrown into a roller-coaster ride that has bumps along the way, reminding them that the track was hastily built.

I saw Star Wars when I was just seven years old and it blew my imagination away.  In later interpretations it was described -- and derided -- as space opera, and while the father of that subgenre, Jack Williamson, did not live to see this latest film, the entire phenomenon is both loved and hated for the indelible mark it has left across generations of fans.  I'm one of those fans who grew up and had kids of their own, and it was great for all of us to go to the midnight release and see new life breathed into the franchise.

But my generation also grew up in a crazy arc of narrative maturity, from the campy but beautifully photographed Raiders of the Lost Ark to the raw, immersive brutality of Reservoir Dogs and the gritty comic-book realism of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy.  We watched as an entire era of VHS and DVD rentals at Blockbuster came and went out the door on Chapter 11 filings.  Star Wars was a movie from a different, simpler, and hokier time; even the late Sir Alec Guinness -- Obi-Wan Kenobi himself -- lamented once in an interview with David Letterman that he "didn't think much of the dialogue."

So this new entry into the Star Wars canon arrives in an era of the jaded mindset, of lightning-quick reviews in social media dismissive of maudlin acting and eschewing contrived settings, of every nuance and line of dialogue distilled and examined by novice and professional alike.  It carries the burdensome weight of expectant vindication after most people agreed George Lucas nearly banished the whole thing to late-night talk-show punchline fodder with the execrable second trilogy (The Phantom Menace; Attack of the Clones; Revenge of the Sith).  So how did it do in the hands of director J. J. Abrams, the one who had already successfully relaunched the Star Trek franchise a few years ago?

It's not without its problems.  Abrams seemed to have been pressed for time to develop backstory, to allow the audience to invest emotionally in many of the newly introduced characters.  After establishing the dry and severe locale where Daisy Ridley's character, Rey, has been marooned for nearly all of her young life, the film suddenly catapults into a dizzying quick-cut of scene after scene at breakneck speed.  Likewise, there is no time for long-time fans to truly savor the return of legacy characters like Han Solo, Chewbacca, General Leia Organa, and so forth.  This is a movie with a checklist agenda to deliver certain elements in the correct firing sequence, and it accomplishes this successfully, for the most part.  But it could have been better.

First, to the critique of characters.  John Boyega's character of Finn, the reluctant stormtrooper-gone-rogue, is too much of a confused cipher to project into our minds as a believable anti-hero.  From the melodramatic opening shot of him seeing a comrade (possibly a lover) die in his arms, to the scenes set on the planet Jakku and Starkiller Base where he alternately tries to cajole, sneak, barter and fight his way to his immediate goals with comic effect, his overall game is tonally inconsistent.  Boyega seemed to be at home delivering comic relief, but I felt the role demanded more gravitas and less Benny Hill.

Nowhere was the contrast in Boyega's vacillating portrayal felt most as when it was interlaced in his scenes with Daisy Ridley, whose delivery was pitch-perfect as Rey: lost, struggling to survive, seasoned in open-desert wiles but interminably hopeful in her ill-fated desperation to reunite with the parents who marooned her in that backwater junk yard of a planet.  Every action and reaction in Ridley's portrayal was nuanced and fitting; every outrage buttressed by an equal mix of anger and fear, the very emotions from which she is expected to veer away if she is to embrace the light side of the Force.  In her honest presentation alone, this next movie trilogy's breakout story holds the most promise.

A close second in the line of good impressions is the ace rebel pilot Poe Dameron played by Oscar Isaac, who doesn't try to be funny and gives the audience a swashbuckler ready with the wisecracking quips in a manner reminiscent of another pilot-smuggler.  Though his screen time is limited, Isaac's character makes the most of it; from the opening gambit of espionage to the too-familiar oh-no-I'm-strapped-into-an-examining-table-and-getting tortured scene, Dameron would have been a much better choice as Rey's partner in rebellion than Finn's Jerry Lewis schtick.



Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim (Source: William Tung via Wikimedia Commons: CC:BY:2.0)

And we come to the character of Kylo Ren as portrayed by Adam Driver.  Poor, misunderstood, whiny Kylo Ren.  In this matter alone, I could say I felt cheated by the movie's marketing campaign -- just as I felt cheated that Captain Phasma, for much of the hyped-up promotions, enters and exits with remarkably little fanfare and absolutely nothing notable in driving the plot -- but the truth is that a budding villain doesn't need to evoke ultimate badassery to be effective.  Especially when dealing with emerging villainy, what a credible antagonist does need are equally believable and sympathetic flaws so that the audience can be carried along in abject horror as we see how each bad decision takes them one level closer to more sinister evil.

Kylo even gets talked down to by punk Imperial officers (a very effective Domnhall Gleeson as General Hux, delivering speeches with a Hitler-like insanity).  And when he can't Jedi-mind-trick his way into Rey's thoughts, Kylo runs up and snivels and whines to this giant Lemony Snicket hologram with the laughable name of Snokes.  In what was probably intended to be a climactic battle that feels more like a disappointment, Kylo quite nearly gets his ass kicked twice: first by no other than that stooge Finn and then by Rey, who summons her inner Jedi in a matter of seconds and nearly vanquishes Kylo.  So this is the heir apparent to Darth Vader?

But here, chiefly, I blame the script and its failed tip of the hat to the legacy characters we knew from before.  There was no backstory to how Ben Solo traversed to the dark side, how incomplete his transformation may have been, or how unprepared he was for battle.  Was General Organa too busy running a fledgling New Republic to raise her own son?  Was Han Solo too preoccupied with whatever the hell he was doing to pay attention to giving little Ben a proper upbringing?  Did they notice Ben's orientation to the Force early on and argue about whether or not to encourage it?  Had an unknown, stronger dark force already taken root in young Ben by the time Uncle Luke and his Jedi academy came into the picture?  So many opportunities for dramatic development were wasted here.

Even the implied upbringing that we are left to infer from the scant few referential asides of dialogue leave us with a dubious taste in our mouths.  Han Solo was a bad father?  After seeing how loyally and respectfully he treated his Wookiee best friend, Chewbacca?  Leia Organa was a mom who let Ben run off to join some dark-side goth kids on the emo side of the solar system?  This woman, who loved Han Solo so much she risked her own life to break him out of Jabba the Hutt's fortress-lair on Tatooine, just let her own flesh and blood break bad?  Little of this made sense in light of the film's history except to give the story the inertia it needed to check off the next box.

Granted, to fully explore how Ben grew up and got his head all cross-wired the way it was might have taken up a whole other movie.  Still, some foreshadowing of this could have been worked into the film to deepen the meaning behind key moments of drama.  As a result, the most pivotal scene of the film -- Han Solo dying by his own son's hand -- is robbed of the emotional impact it must have been intended to have.  In fact, the return of nearly all of the old faces is marred by an overall sense of being rushed to the next plot point, and it left me feeling that Abrams included them merely as audience-drivers in a movie where he didn't really want them in the first place.  There just isn't any other way to explain their almost dismissive appearances.

Yet if he treated the legacy characters rather poorly and the new characters inconsistently, Abrams was certainly not shy about borrowing story elements in a very modernist reversal-of-fortune arrangement.  Another kid fending for herself in the desert; another, bigger Death Star; another covert operation into a ridiculously-easy-to-break-into New Order venue.  I have to wonder what the next big thing to blow up is going to be in the sequel, and just how poorly designed must be the security systems if they allow a rebel force to land on a planet and known deserters to openly walk through corridors undetected.

One thing should be noted about the story creator, George Lucas, before we toss another tomato in his general direction: he is and always will be a visionary.  Another astute observer actually commented on the imagined worlds he introduced to us in that second trilogy, which had set designers working overtime to take us to new locales and inspired set-pieces.  The story and pacing might have sucked, but the characters were memorable.  We are still talking about Darth Maul, Jango Fett and God help us, Jar Jar Binks.

And sure, you could argue that Abrams was under a lot of pressure to deliver many feats on warring fronts: reward those first fans from 1977 who waited so patiently for the return of Luke, Leia, Han and gang; grant a cathartic release from the psychic pain inflicted upon the children of those first fans with the calumny that was George Lucas's second trilogy; and ushering in the mother of all money-makers to Abrams' new Hollywood paymasters at Disney.  But he's an experienced director who knew these would be choppy seas to sail; if he didn't think he was up to the task, he shouldn't have overpromised.

The real first order (source unknown; I suspect the Internet)

Judging from the sound of box-office records being shattered as I wrote this, Abrams succeeded in the last category.  Maybe that's the only one that really mattered; but more was owed to the legion of fans who wanted to see their favorite characters return with some sense of fealty.  Leia deserved more screen time than just a series of melodramatic scowls and grimaces; Chewie deserved a compelling backstory instead of the continued one-dimensional man Friday; and Han deserved a much better death than the metaphorical and literal act of being pushed off a cliff like some third-tier stock character.  Luke Skywalker himself, for all the prominence of his mentioning, makes what is essentially a non-speaking cameo in this film just based on the screen time.

So bottom line, it was great to see the old characters return, but no, I didn't like the story all that much.  The sequel will reportedly be directed by someone other than J.J. Abrams.  Let's see what changes this way come.