Prisoners and the Moral Path to Reciprocity

by Christopher Barr

Prisoners is about two little girls that go missing and the search to return them safely back home.  Hugh Jackman plays the father of one of the girls that takes his desire to get his daughter back to a very violent and extreme level.  Jake Gyllenhaal plays a detective assigned to the case.  He brings a suspect in, Alex Jones (Info Wars’s Alex Jones will surely see this use of his name as some sort of government conspiracy to associate his name with a perverted idiot) then has to let him go due to lack of evidence.  Jackman kidnaps Jones and brings him to an abandon apartment building and because he lacked information in his respective cognitive mapping, he resorts to violence and begins to brutally torture Jones until he reveals the whereabouts of the two little girls, Jackman is certain he knows.  Jackman enlists help of the other little girl’s father, Terrance Howard, to hold Jones while Jackman bashes his face in.  It’s clear that Howard’s character is the far more conflicted one of the two.  Howard doesn’t think that violence is the answer.

The film explores the notion of violence, faith and how far is one willing to go to get a loved one free from harm.  The how-far-are-you-willing-to-go was explored throughout the TV show 24, with Jack Bauer performing very violent acts on people he believed would get him closer to stopping the bomb or the assassination or the spread of the virus, or god forbid Kim Bauer is conveniently kidnapped again.

I think most people would act to help save a loved one.  How they would act would likely depend on it happening.  To me what was more important in this film was aside from the obvious, faith and the good book was used to justify acts of violence onto other human beings.

Religion has been used over many a millennia to help motive and exact violence, or it’s been used to help explain to the ignorant how atrocities come about in the first place.  Like in the case of vampires, ghouls and werewolves are but a few mythological creatures that were used in the dark ages to explain horrific crimes on people.  These creatures back then were something people actually believed in, sure today they’ve been glamoured up and put up on the silver screen, but back in the day they scared people into believing they were the ones responsible for stealing babies out of Romanian villages, only to slaughter them.  Then there’s the lunacy of Vlad the Impaler who tortured and murdered in the thousands, having his soldiers impale his many victims on top of pointed logs while he had lunch out in the field watching.   

Bram Stoker and history soon deified Vlad Dracula into the shadowy minds of millions.  People just couldn’t believe that human beings can be monsters, and I don’t mean the fictional kind, but just a man acting under his own volition, without any help from mystical things that aren’t actually there.  The Son of Sam, David Berkowitz blamed his killing spree on an evil demon dog giving him his orders.  There’s a good chance he was under a CIA program called MK-Ultra making him do it or that he simply had a screw loose.   

Religion over many years and civilizations fought to take control over our sensory perception of the world we are placed into.  By controlling our only tool we use to interact with that world, language.  Religion has become the answer to all the questions about the known universe and the creatures that reside on our blue planet.  That primitive way of thinking about the world still holds a binding grip on the majority of people in all countries.   

Religion and morality are not bound together; Religion is an ideological system of control that belongs exclusively to the symbolic order, where all is defined through language.  Morality is about how one interacts with the actual world with these symbolic rules.  One adopts a code of ethics to live by and navigate life through.  Immanuel Kant developed a central philosophical concept in his deontological moral philosophy called the Categorical Imperative.  This universal law suggests that there are certain objective ethical rules in the world, so there is a duty by the individual to recognize that and to act with reverence.

We should not treat others as if they are tools, this is the problem with what Jackman’s character in Prisoners did to Alex Jones.  By using Jones as a means to an end, he broke the fundamental principle of Kantian morality.  But religion was conveniently there to help fulfill his need to execute an eye for an eye code of justice.  Understandably Jackman was desperate, who wouldn’t be.  But to use religion to help fuel his need for a greater good was morally weak, as he mildly struggled with his actions.  That’s not to say what he did was entirely wrong, his bulldozer approach could have been less obvious but he wanted his daughter back.  The problem is how he morally justified it to himself rather than just doing it.  His reasons for capturing Jones were understandable to a degree.  The girls disappeared by his camper van and he was caught fleeing from the police, smells guilty to me.

Spoiler Alert!

But he wasn’t guilty, he was mentally disabled, but the girls got to his place via his camper van so that the real villain of the film could imprison them.  She wanted to do the work of the lord by exposing the sinners, who often hide in ordinary men.  She was using religion to satisfy a much sicker psychological need to hurt other people.  Jackman’s character does get punished for what he did because the religious hold over him didn’t have that good a grip, as it doesn’t with most people, the real guilt for what he did sunk in.  We also don’t see it at the end when Gyllenhaal hears the whistle blowing, it’s almost like the director wants us to know that he survived that pit but he did a horrible immoral thing to another human being, so let’s exit the film without seeing him freed.  I think that was a great idea because giving Jackman the satisfaction of seeing his daughter might have let him off the hook a little bit by the audience.  Because the moral of the story is the ends don’t always justify the means. 

Rock n' Roll Movies and Living in the Past

by Christopher Barr

 

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."  

                                                                    -Aldous Huxley

My favorite rock n’ roll film is Almost Famous (2000).  Cameron Crowe’s film captures a rock essence rarely seen in films about music.  There’s a scene in his film where Billy Crudup’s character, Russell, has a falling out with his band and they are all on a bus travelling down a highway in silence.  Then Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’ breaks the silence and reminds this group and I think the films audience, the magic that music brings to people, how sometimes above all, a great record can save a life.  Music allows us to connect with the world outside of our minds in a profound way.

 

This is Spinal Tap (1984) captured the hilarity and silliness of Rock n’ Roll and where it was heading and A Hard Day’s Night captured the craziness of fame, albeit still considered the greatest film about rock n’ roll, I could also say the same for Don’t Look Back (1967) about the growing popularity of Bob Dylan and his adjustment to fame.  But I would rather focus of films about rock music leaving great biographies like Ray (2004) and Walk the Line (2005) for another article.

 

High Fidelity (2000) is a film I mean to talk about.  It’s a film that celebrates people celebrating great music in the way they live their lives.  These main characters certainly had problems but in spite of all that they still went to church, only that their church was where The Velvet Underground’s ‘Oh, Sweet Nuthin’ and The Vaselines’ ‘Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam’ blasted on speakers.  I love a film that surrounds itself with great music.  One of my favorites isn’t even a film about music is Garden State.  Loved that soundtrack, I loved how Zack Braff used music in his movie to travel and breathe alongside his characters.  Because in life music does that, it is there in our minds nudging us, reminding us about the past and what helps us define our present.

 

School of Rock is up there as one of my favorites.  What I loved about it was Jack Black knew he was right about rock.  He knew that this style of music shook him to his bones and that meant something.  He taught his students the history of Rock with the detail of a microbiologist.

Great rock movies should make those that are new to rock and to those who have left rock behind for day jobs and football games, to fall in love with it.  There is nothing like rock n’ roll and like most creative genesis’, rock was birthed out of oppression.  Rock came from the same place Shakespeare came from as well as Picasso, it came from changing what’s come before, and breaking down social and political barriers to allow a voice in that otherwise would be beat down and discarded.

The birth of Rock n’ roll likely came to be with the merging of African musical tradition and European instrumentation.   Jazz, gospel, folk and Blues-influenced swing brought in a new form of funk that caught the ears of many up and coming singer song writers.  Electronic instruments with offbeat rhythmic tones and relatively simple teen relatable lyrics set rock n’ roll off and running.

With the song “My baby rocks me with a steady roll” giving rock n’ roll it’s title, thanks to a Cleveland disc jockey and Billy Haley’s “Rock around the Clock” in 1955, the teen finally found a relatable form of music that spoke to them personally and the right kind of sex appeal they had for the artists, shake, rattle and rolling it.  Buddy Holly added to this rock fervor but it was to Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis Presley that blow the rockabilly roof of the jailhouse.

Chuck Berry was one of the first black performers to appeal to both white and black teen audiences.  His electric energy on stage with his rhythm and blues sound and his dancing style gave him a sexual prowess that singled him out as understandably one of the greats.  Little Richard was known for his wild and crazy performances and his flamboyant appearance lending his talent to help birth in bands with the likes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.   Elvis Presley was the rock n’ roll king, hands down and he made girls faint.  Also he brought in a unique sound to a very young genre of music.  His style and good looks solidified a form of music that was still learning to get its legs.

When I listen to “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan, I listen to this like a lover of the great wines of the world would drink a Bordeaux, Château Pétrus from a glass, allowing it to trickle subtly into their mouth to rest on their pallet, letting it sit for a moment before it sinks to their throat with a melodious taste that resonates and ripples through their very being.   Songs and the music that support them will always come in many flavors, people will always have their tastes.  But there is a recognizable aesthetic to music that is not up for debate.  Like the fine wines, great music earned their stay in the hall of fame.

The Beatles were an English band from Liverpool, forming in 1960.  This little band from across the pond became the most influential band in the rock era.  They Fab Four-ed it from album to album with chasing girls and many TV appearance until the band got serious, as legend has it, a conversation between Bob Dylan and John Lennon led to Dylan going electric and The Beatles speaking out about the war and life.  Steering Rock n’ Roll into a smarter and less teen friendly direction.  Bob Dylan didn’t set out for screaming girls and media attention, he certainly got that but he stuck to his guns by writing songs that is my opinion changed the world.  This man is a poet and a philosopher, one of those gifted individuals that was able to reach a mass amount of people and enlighten them when he himself was being enlightened, showing the world that you can think and love your rock n’ roll at the same time.  Where rock n’ roll was birthed out of complexity in music but simplicity in lyrics, Dylan taught the world to embrace complexity in both.

Wayne’s World for me as a kid was a great platform for rock n’ roll.  It was fun and these two guys loved Queen and like all true rockers, hated authority.   Excellent!  Because that is the true kernel at the center of it all, is authority.  That’s one of the big problems of rock n’ roll, is it has a life span.  The paintings of Van Gogh and the music of Mozart live on through the ages among the young and the old.  Rock n’ roll has yet to enjoy such a vintage in the history of man.  Maybe it’s too young for a place in the savoring minds of the people.  We are currently being paraded with many ‘old bands’ capitalizing on the rebooting of society.  A lot of these geriatric singers are suiting for one last crack at the old days, with new films like Rock of Ages.  A movie that is an embarrassment to actual rock n’ roll that Almost Famous, School of Rock and High Fidelity honored and fought to preserve.  Rock is being recycled and its legacy sold.

 

I entertained the idea of watching Rock of Ages because of Tom Cruise’s hilarious turn in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder.  I ended up watching half the movie because of Tom Cruise’s over the top, Axel Rose/Steve Tyler impersonation, which in some cases was actually funny.  But for the most part the movie was about how out of touch we all are with regards to rock n’ roll, where it’s become a parody to laugh at.  Maybe This is Spinal Tap just knew it was coming but unless it’s underground our it’s Radiohead, the bells seem to be no longer about to rock.

 

We have Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, we have Bob Dylan and The Beatles, we have the history of rock n’ roll alive and well.  The platform is changing, the CD is even dying and rock is not part of the future no more than art is after Jackson Pollack.  So what I think is so great about these films about rock n’ roll isn’t about hope for the future but being thankful for a past that you existed in, where you can press play and sit back in the dark with a beer in your hand and just listen to the rain dropping as The Doors ‘Riders on the Storm’ begins.  Let that past sound marinate in your mind as you enjoy the freedom of being in the present.

Mulholland Drive, Dreams and Defamiliarization

by Christopher Barr

 




“The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.  The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”   - Russian Writer, Viktor Shklovsky

Defamiliarization, coined by Shklovsky,  is when you take a familiar way of looking at something and make it strange or obscure in order to alter your perception of that thing, allowing you to experience that thing in a new way or a new angle.  This helps force the individual to alter their state of formula in spite of themselves.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

“Working over the ideas that occur to patients when they submit to the main rule of psychoanalysis is not our only technical method of discovering the unconscious.  The same purpose is served by two other procedures: the interpretation of patients’ dreams and the exploitation of their faulty and haphazard actions.”    - Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Sigmund  Freud

Freud called the interpretation of dreams the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious, that vast area in the mind, while a wake one doesn’t have direct conscious access to.  He saw content in dreams as a chaotic vivid jumble of thoughts, ideas, wishes, feelings, distorted memories and fears.  By exploring these dreams with a trained mind one might get glimpses into that elusive and forbidden area of the mind.

You must see a film twice to see it for the first time….

Mulholland Drive (2001) is an abstract, surreal piece of masterful cinema.  It’s considered one of the most thought provoking films ever made where pimple faced high schooler’s to Rhodes scholar’s painfully deconstruct the film’s narrative.  The director David Lynch has been often asked in interviews what the film actually means.  Like many artists before him, he says it’s left up to the viewer to decipher, not the artist’s own interpretation of the piece.  The viewer needs to allow the art to wash over their consciousness so it can seep into their sub-conscious and hopefully resonate.  Language can often ruin the essence of abstraction, when one autopsy’s a particular piece of an art form.   

This is why defamiliarization is so important in art because of the problem of desensitization with familiarity.  If an artist is able to keep pushing his art away from meaningful symbolization then the viewers of the art will always keep wondering.  And that’s the key, to keep the flow of wonder alive within us and not to allow complacency to soften our sensory perception of the world outside our minds.

Despite the above mentioned idea of leaving all interpretations up to the viewer, I do believe in the art of film critique, and thus will mildly dive into the interpretation of Mulholland Drive.  I will also warn those who have not seen the film to stop reading any further as I will be revealing many plot details and character analyses.

Using the Freudian iceberg approach, I’ll begin with a look at the surface content of the film, above the water as it were and discuss the protagonist’s ‘pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.’  I use T.S Eliot’s Prufrock line because of the “ungeheures ungeziefer”, the seething and malicious, bottom feeding nature of the depressed, lonely protagonist, who’s found herself lost in a symbolic dark forest in her neurotic mind without being able to find her way out.

The ambitious film is about obsession, jealousy, envy, suicide and murder.  But like all of Lynch’s films, that’s the surface elements to a much deeper psychological meaning.  The real genius of the film is the multi layered aspects of its challenging structure.  But if this maze of a film has a nucleus it’s Diane Selwyn, a druggy, actress wannabe that never made it and her envious obsession over Camilla Rhodes, an actress that did make it.  After a complete breakdown of all of Diane’s hopes and dreams, culminating at a dinner party where Camilla becomes engaged, she hires a hitman to kill Camilla.  When the job is done Diane in her apartment has a complete psychotic breakdown and shoots herself in the head thus ending her misery.  Fade to Black, story over.

The film is also a critique on the Hollywood myth, a place where people go for fame and fortune…

There have been many films over the years that have explored in depth, psychological narratives.  Lynch’s own Blue Velvet (1986) is up there as one of the best and most daring.  Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), also one of my favorites, on the surface was about a man housebound as a result of a broken leg, bored and spying on the people in the building across a courtyard with a big set of binoculars.  But underneath the surface of the story, was it not about a man terrified of committing to a beautiful woman who wanted nothing more then to spend the rest of her life with him?  Weren’t all those people in the various apartments he was eavesdropping on potential versions of a future if he does commit?  A dinner party with family and friends, not so bad, but what about the lonely woman on the bottom floor waiting by the phone for that call from a man that may no longer love her?  But worse, is the man that kills his wife and disposes of her body.  We parade our minds with so many possible outcomes that we chain ourselves from living in the present and letting the chips fall where they may, with all their ups and downs.

Mulholland Drive is one of the most mind bending films ever in the history of cinema.  But it’s likely that mostly everything we see in this film, especially the first half, is all part of a masturbatory fantasy fever dream Diane had before she finally committed suicide ending the film.  (I would also like to note that this is a psychological and philosophical theory, there are many out there that will differ and that is the magic of such a magnificent film.)  In her dream, her fantasy sees Camilla in a car accident on Mulholland Drive while in a limo.  A place at the end of the film, we see Diane exiting a limo and is met by a boastful Camilla.  Camilla in the dream is Rita, a woman without memory, a woman with no identity to get in the way of Betty, the depressed Diane’s image of herself as a young, beautiful actress on the eve of her stardom.  There is two worlds coexisting in Diane’s dream; one is the self-fulfilling fantasy of getting what people always want, fame and recognition.  That’s how Lynch sees the Hollywood dream being sold to the unexpected.  The second is the detective story with Betty and Rita that interferes with the first fantasy, but still fulfilled the fantasy of solving anything that gets in her way and getting the girl.  The reality of our waking life will find its way into dreams when often uninvited.

Adam Kesher’s the director of the film within the film, within a dream.  The poor guy is run through the ringer.  Crazy mob guys order him to cast the lead actress in his film without his consent.  This obviously irritates him deeply and he storms out only to go home and find his wife in bed with another man.  He then finds out that the production has been shut down on his film and mob guys are after him.  A mysterious cowboy in the desert hills of southern California threatens him with his life, in a very nice and pleasant way, to choose the girl they want in the production.  This is all Diane’s hatred toward the man in her mind stole her girlfriend from her, he is also the man who didn’t cast her in the starring role of his film.  Kesher in Diane’s reality is on top of his game purposing to Camilla.

The reason we don’t see Camilla’s death is because the whole of the film is through Diane’s eyes, awake or dreaming.  It was the blue key in the dream that symbolized the hit on Camilla, because the hitman in junky Diane’s reality at Winkie’s diner told her when the job is done, killing Camilla, the blue key will appear to her.  That’s why after Rita and Betty in Diane’s dream got back from the club Silencio to their place with the newly obtained blue box, which itself symbolized Camilla’s death on the surface and Diane’s symbolic soul and guilt on the inside, Betty disappeared.  I think that is when the fulfilling fantasy failed because the reality of murder seeped in.  Rita looked around the room for Betty, and then unlocked the blue box with the blue key.  The opened blue box falls to the floor and Lynch’s camera enters its void.  Diane’s dream blames Rita for the H.P Lovecraft warning of forbidding knowledge, rationalizing Rita’s death as being her choice.  After all she didn’t have to open the box, she could have just left it.

It’s time to wake up…..

At the director’s dinner party close to the end of the film, a humiliated Diane meets the director’s mother, who sees her with pity and contempt becomes her landlady in her dream, the jovial and wholehearted Coco.  The fat man across the room becomes the espresso hating gangster in her cinematic fantasy dream.  The cowboy at the party in the background she notices becomes the cowboy that threatens Kesher in the dark hills.   Camilla becomes Betty’s dependent, a loving person with a desperate need to know the truth.  A person Betty carries throughout their investigation.

In Diane’s dream the hitman become the pimp.  But the reality is he’s the killer, he’s the one that kills the love of her life as requested and paid for by her.  The conversation at the beginning of the film between two men in Twinkie’s, the same diner Diane make’s her Faustian deal, is an acknowledgement of the reality of her hiring a hitman to kill a person, told in the dream within the dream about a monster at the back of the diner.  A homeless man, seen later holding the blue box, where the repressed reality of the murder resides.

The beginning of the film shows the jitterbug competition that Diane won many years ago and then her head hitting her present day pillow.  Learning that she got the blue key from the hitman, hence validating the assassination. 

Then the two older folks that Betty pleasantly parts with at the airport in the beginning and later appears psychotically chasing her into her bedroom, seemingly causing her to shoot herself in the right temple, were likely representation of her parents or grandparents, symbolizing a time before all of this craziness thus responsible for waking her up from her dream to see if she is okay.  Not to their knowledge they woke up a psychotic person, when reality stormed in, Diane wakes, there are a series of flashbacks, Diane and Camilla on her couch, half naked, and Camilla insisting Diane to stop feeling her up.  Then came the humility, the guilt, the hatred and sorrow of the waking reality.  Too much to bare, Diane kills herself.

I know we live in a world that is addicted to familiarity.  Which in some cases isn’t a bad thing, but with reboots and remakes drawing on familiarity for the sack of growingly passive audiences, we are headed toward a form of predictability that promises to erase our ability to welcome wonder and make it even harder for challenging filmmakers like Lynch to continue to explore Freudian psychoanalysis.  Mulholland Drive is not a pleasant film; it’s a sledgehammer to the face in many ways.  But the meaning of art isn’t bound to pleasantry and joy.  In fact, I would argue that all the great art of the world is, like the film, challenging and harsh.  Diane couldn’t see the bigger picture if she tried and that’s why her narcissistic disposition consumed her.  She failed at getting over herself….


Silencio….