Film and the Love Affair we have at the Movies

by Christopher Barr

 

What is it about films that we love so much?  I have a slew of films that are my favorites, many belong to the understood list of great films and some are my little love affairs that others may not agree with. 

Star Wars was the earliest that I can remember as a child.  I’m sure there might have been some lame afterschool special that hit all the emoto-notes of my under developed disposition.  But as an adult looking back, I see Star Wars as the start.  I don’t mean the start of film critique, I mean noticing film as something really special.  Stars Wars in my stage in life opened up a world with such detail, that my little open mind was blown away by it.

Now I am very much aware of the impact the 1970’s cinema had on culture as a whole, but as a child just growing up at that time, I had no idea.  That’s why the 80’s were so important.  The 80’s birthed a form of cinema that was relatable and fun.  I think of films like Back To The Future and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as a huge part of my childhood film experience.  The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi, of course were tent pole events in my movie experience as a kid.

I think film impacts us on our varying levels of development.  The Goonies and E.T, Weird Science and The Lost Boys are but a few that held me down as the great moments in existence.  That’s bold I know, but they affected me, they changed me.  Growing up, we have loads of ups downs and what have you, but we hopefully learn and add to our current understanding of the world and our place in that world.  

Goodfellas came out in 1990, but I was still too young to totally grip the impact that film had on me just a few years later.  In that respect, it was Goodfellas that introduced me to the films of Martin Scorsese, along with the birth of the independent films and Quentin Tarantino.  The early 90’s is when I started to get film on an intellectual level.  I was growing up and was beginning to understand this medium as being more than ‘it’s just a movie’.  I saw it as being a poetic window into the human psyche and the plight of modern society, along with all the fun and joy it brought me and still brings me.

Pulp Fiction was the iceberg that hit me with a massive blow that thankfully I have never recovered from.  I, at that stage of film understanding, couldn’t quite get what I was watching.  I knew instantly that I loved it but I wasn’t sure why.  So thankfully at that stage I was a curious person, so I set out to understand why.  I studied the source of this genius…..screenwriting.

To get film I started studying the blue print, so I read all of Tarantino’s screenplays and many others.  Also enrolling in film school and studying the art of filmmaking, camera angles and the depth of field.  I wanted to learn it all. 

So with that education and an understanding into human behavior, I set out to understand film beyond the sum of its parts and tried to read the filmmaker and dissect what was being communicated.  This led me to the works of filmmakers David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick and many other filmmakers that dared to artistically and intellectually test their audiences.

With Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven along with Oliver Stone’s JFK came a shift in film for me.  These films severed the beloved but silliness 80’s films held over me.  I will always be grateful to have grown up during the 80’s but maturity was inevitable and I ended up being the right age for the early 90’s shift in cinematic direction.

When 1995 happened I was elevated to a new realm of filmmaking understanding.  The most impactful, Se7en with a close second being the Usual Suspects, films that transformed me from the kid that got screenwriting to the man that understood film.  I eagerly waited for the next great film, reading everything I could on filmmakers and screenwriters.

Fight Club and American Beauty happened at the end of the 90’s.  The Truman Show and The Big Lebowski happened.  The Matrix did as well.  This point I was beginning to realize that hope was alive and well but it had no real ground to bind itself to.  This notion was confirmed with the years that followed.

What is it about film that we love so much as I previously asked?  Sure the escapist value is obvious but what else is it?  We learn and continue to learn.  Film is not film.  Film is more than that, as things are more than the words that represent them.  Film is the defining moments we all experience, but also they are enjoyable and educational. In spite of the fiction, film provides an amount of fact that is often overlooked as being just a movie.  For me though, film will always be that poetic window into the lives and hearts of other people.  Films will always add to what my experience on this planet is.  I’m going to stop writing this now because I’m heading out and going to the movies.   And buying popcorn…..with extra butter.

Riddick: Alien vs. Aliens and the death of Ripley

by Christopher Barr

Riddick is about a man left for dead on a sun-scorched, alien-beast infested planet.  Left by a war-lording empire called Necromongers, Riddick, the title character, must fight for survival to regain his strength in order to go home to the planet, Furya.  Bounty hunters soon learn of Riddick’s location and come to collect the wanted mass murdering convict, only to fall victim to an adversary they should not have underestimated.  Aside from Riddick being a threat to them, a swarm of half scorpion, half psycho dino-beasts come in the dark rain to kill everyone, including Riddick.  The men now join forces to fight off an even worse enemy, an enemy that doesn’t negotiate or barter for freedom.  The movie is also about the objectification of women while man struggles with his own existence.

Riddick is two movies; the first half (my favorite half) is like the film Alien (1979) in the sense of it being more quiet and about a man (in Alien’s case a woman) using his wits and skills to overcome a vicious adversary.  The second half is more like the movie Aliens (1986), where blasting machine guns and pulsating biceps are the fueling force.  Men with massive weapons shooting at anything that moves, while they compete with each other for alpha male status, which clearly belongs to the titular Riddick.

The movie is the third installment of a trilogy; the first being the most satisfying of the three, Pitch Black, the middle movie being the weakest, The Chronicles of Riddick.  All three movies explore a character that, in spite of all odds, survives, not because of chance or luck but because of choice, by being skillfully better than whatever or whomever is hunting him.  Riddick is a complex guy because in many ways he’s not relatable, he’s a mass murdering, hateful, nihilist of a person, a man we presume would snap our neck sooner than look at us.  Or is he?  Is he a man that’s just been misunderstood?  A man that, if left alone, could live a fulfilling existence without the use of his innate sense of violence, but is he not just an animal, when backed into a corner, comes out fighting with blades and fists? 

Nietzsche spoke of such a man, a man that dares to be more than the sum of all his parts, a man that strives to be the Superman and leaves the banal, trite existence of being an ordinary man behind him.  Maybe that’s not quite what motivates Riddick, but never the less, he strives to survive in the face of enemies that would dispatch hell on earth for most of us.  I think Nietzsche would agree that his version of the Superman would see the world with a new set of eyes.  As in the case of Riddick, he sees into the abyss with a set of eyes that allows him to see in the dark.  He doesn’t see the world the way everyone else does, he sees it more clear and bright.  

Riddick fought his Jungian Shadow and for the most part, beat it.  He is unafraid of the Real, that place beyond the symbolic world.  I think the symbolic world is the one he sees as being off in some way.  But yet at the end of the movie it is the symbolic order that beats out the atavistic Real, saving Riddick from being overcome by it.  It’s almost as if Riddick, in the Freudian sense, is fighting to get back to the womb, a place that lacks symbolization, but in the end he is dragged back in.  A plight, Freud knew himself; a person couldn’t entirely overcome.    

Pitch Black was a love letter to Alien and Aliens, respectively.  The protagonist was a woman and remained so to her untimely, yet heroic demise.   (I say ‘remained so’ because a lot of heroines in action movies seem to play men with guns rather than remain as they are, women) She allowed the madman within Riddick to see in her, a person that cares for him, and a person who wants him to live in spite of all his misdeeds.  Unfortunately when Riddick finally can see that, she is gone, snatched into the dark of night by one of the fiendish creatures that brought them together in the first place. 

Sadly I find these movies portray women from good, to bad, to worse, in that order.  In Riddick, women are mere objects, an alien dog in the movie is held with a higher regard.  What Pitch Black was well aware of, was that Ripley in the Alien movies was a strong and resilient woman, not a man in woman’s clothing.  In Riddick, like too many Hollywood movies, women are objects for men to do whatever they want with.  When one of the two bounty hunter ships land to capture Riddick, a female prisoner is released to make room for him.  During her incarceration, it is eluded to that she was there to meet whatever sexual needs the husky men on board desired.  Upon being released, she runs away from the ship only to be shot in the back and discarded.  This was a person that likely would have died on that planet, yet her captors felt it might be a good idea to kill her themselves, presumably for the fun of it.

Riddick himself is not exempt from this misogynistic behaviour.  There was a woman that was part of the platoon of men there to capture Riddick.  When captured and bound, Riddick informed all the men that they will meet death very soon by his hand and before his escape, he’ll be going ‘balls deep’ into the female bounty hunter, also mentioning that he liked her toe nail shade because they matched the color of her nipples.  Presumably he was tainting her, but it’s still oddly acceptable to promise to rape a woman in some of these movies.  Like in the case of The Mother Fucker in Kick Ass 2, failing to rape a captured woman because of an erectile dysfunction, while others around him laugh about it.  In a flashback sequence in the first act of Riddick, a number of women are sprawled all over each other naked in bed.  Riddick sits in a king’s chair, all masculine, sporting a crown, lamenting about his current station in life as ruler over these Borg-like Necromongers, while looking over at the women like one would in a buffet line.

Riddick had its moments of beautiful CGI vistas and exciting action scenes.  But I think, not only did the movie drop the ball, the industry has.  With characters like Ripley, now in the distant past, where are all the new female characters going to come from?  Tarantino?  James Cameron?  Ridley Scott?  Joss Whedon?  The personal struggle that Riddick underwent will always exist in movies and other forms of storytelling, man vs. himself, man vs. nature and man vs. animal, but what is left for the fairer sex when all the men in the world are going crazy? 

"Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence.  It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness.  It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music.  There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."  

                                                                                       - Camille Paglia

Modern Cinema and the Death of History

by Christopher Barr

 

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

                     - Søren Kierkegaard

There is a movement in modern day society to erase the past from existence.  A government and corporate alliance to stop people from learning about the past, as usual, people generally think this way of looking at the world is hip and right.  They are ignorant, not even given the chance to know otherwise, of the vast and important history the human race has, in all its ups and downs.

Sure they might have mildly heard of Shakespeare and Plato, do they know anything about them?  Do they know about The Republic and Hamlet, the Odyssey and Ulysses, more importantly, without tooting one’s horn, should they know?  Should the young even know or care about any of this?  It was the German Philosopher, Hegel that said, “The one thing we did learn about history is we didn't learn anything from history.”

 
What it must be like to live a life without any desire to learn about history beyond the years you have spent on this planet. How empty and unfulfilling that must be.  Yet this is modern man and women, a species without a history or a need to know where it all comes from.

This is the genius of modern day propaganda, where they have drained the life force out of people in such a way; they don’t even have the energy to look back.  They are so pressured to look good and consume on a detached level that they themselves are marooned on an island of text messages and tweets and avoiding human connection.  People have become not good at being what it is to be people.

What is human connection if not the death of capitalism?  Peace is something we all want but that is death to capitalism, so is people getting along with people.  It’s unfortunate but we belong to a society addicted to war and hatred because capitalism can only exist within these parameters.  It can’t exist in peace and harmony because within those parameters we don’t need machines manufactured for the killing of other people, or clothes and things to help make insecure people feel secure enough, to seek something that doesn’t actually cost anything.  Love and human connection, these things are free but have been sold to us by greedy corporations to fool us into thinking that will make us happy.
 
The death of history giving birth to hollow consumers, people desiring emptiness by the people they meet.  They desire those that won’t challenge them, but most importantly, won’t remind them of their servitude to the consumer system we are all slaves to.  This is why being young and staying that way are pushed in modern society.  It’s not only good enough to be young, but one must attempt to be that as well.  To be naïve and not knowing equals being young, there are 30 something’s and 40 something’s in arrested development by choice in order to be seen as young and not knowing.  Knowing and awareness means a form of wisdom and that means age.

 

The devastating problem here is; if people continue this line of not knowing and corporations continue to dumb them down in order to get them to buy things they don’t actually need, then we might actually lose Shakespeare and Freud and the poems of T.S. Eliot.  Maybe that’s fitting in this New World Order because all those men along with George Orwell and Aldous Huxley warned us all of a future of control and manipulation.
 
So, if this is going to be the case, what will it be to live a meaningful life with no past to reflect on and no sense of history?  Does history give us richness to our life or are we left with no lesson at all?  History is absolutely paramount to not only the survival of the mind but that of the species.  To rob the youth of that is a form of abuse that I believe has not yet been documented.  The reason being, the profit that corporations and governments make from this naïve way of thinking and easily controlled way of thinking, is too high for a reverse in discourse to take place.
 
There is an excuse to stay dumb because a lot of us work for the very institutions that oppress our freedom, or we work for companies that are in the oil industry thus turning a blind eye away from the ripping apart and rebuilding of the middle east to fit our own corporate image, in spite of the millions of innocent lives that are lost in the progress of freedom.  We don’t want to hear about babies being nailed to walls but we’re cool about making all that oil money.

 

70’s cinema was about reflection on history and the dangers of not doing anything about it.  Apocalypse Now, All the President’s Men are but a few selection of films that challenged their audiences about doing what was right.  Network ripped apart and exposed multimedia and corporate America for what it really is.  Many others including Taxi Driver and the Conversation spoke of an American decline.  But then the 80's arrived and with it, a decline of alternative thinking right up to the early 90's as a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Desert Storm Invasion of Iraq. Then with the death of the man that was thought to be the poster boy of 'fuck that shit' politics killed himself and then the spread of the Internet.  Power over the minds of the people came back to the capitalists.

 

The late 90’s fought back in cinema, with The Matrix, exposing philosophical notions on the nature of reality, along with the Truman Show and Dark City, American Beauty and Fight Club exposing the fallout of consumer society.  As much as I loved them, I think the X-Men and Gladiator were a big ‘shut up’ to that way of cinematic story telling, leading to a decade and then some of superhero movies.   These movies can be fun, exciting and in some cases revealing, as well as being an escape from the real world that the late 90’s wanted to expose.

Superheroes have a past and some, like the horror film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, are very much a part of the time of their inception.  Now these origins are reworked into modern times to make them relevant in a time with no history.  The odd thing about superheroes is they weren’t relevant in their time.  They were allegories, which were the best thing about them, but they were artificial saviors when God and country seemingly failed.  They were still meaningful in their quest to save the world, now they are hollow and weak for the most part, with the exception of V for Vendetta and the Watchmen.

Now we live in a time of no meaning other than artificial.  Where we see CGI robots cry on screen and we weep with them, as if identifying with their plight even though they are not real.  We live in a time we are scared to death of a past that most of us no nothing about.  We claim to ‘look to the future’, believe ‘that everything happens for a reason’ and that god is looking over us all, but not knowing about what that means.  We live in a bumper sticker thinking society where we all congratulate each other on incites that are empty and flat.

Movies are going to keep churning out Michael Bay vacuous blockbusters and remakes and reboots, that claim to want to recapture a past that’s not past but only present.  We, as easily led consumers, will be told what movie to see or what ideas to think based on the highest level of advertising exposure, but I hope and dream that films like Mud, Before Midnight, the forth coming films Gravity and The Wolf of Wall Street, along with other more challenging yet entertaining films continue to remind us of a past.

We can’t say we just want to live in the now and be knowing.  We can’t just read philosopher Slavoj Zizek without knowing Hegel, Marx, Freud and Lacan, all men dead long before most of us were born.  This notion of not learning from the past is absurd; an attempt at maintaining youth for its own sake is absurd.  The past is absolutely paramount to any level of progress.

“What’s past is prologue.”

From The Tempest by William Shakespeare
 

 

 

We're the Millers and Faking the Family Unit

by Christopher Barr

 

“People do have special relationships with their families, their communities, and their countries.  This is the standard equipment of humanity, and most people, in all of human history, have seen nothing wrong with it.”   - Philosopher Alan Ryan

We’re the Millers is a comedy about a drug dealer who needs to get to Mexico to export a lot of marijuana back into the States.  He comes up with a plan of forming a fake ‘Betty Crocker-type’ family to divert suspicion away from this very illegal operation.  He enlists the help of a stripper to play his wife, a homeless runaway to play his daughter and a nerdy teenage kid in his apartment building, whose actual mother abandoned him, to play his son.  Together, they are the Millers, a nuclear family from the idealism of the 50’s.

Proto-industrialization marked a point in our history with the preceding development of modern industrial economy, established a fully industrial society.  Family structures were formed much earlier by the influence of the theocratic governments and the all-powerful church.  The modern family was to become a financially viable social unit, birthing a new form of family, socially conservative and compliant to a government in the US that was just cleaning up the mess of a second world war.

The post WW2 consensus was keep-your-head-in-the-sand reform.  With the devastation and atrocities led by the Nazi army, the Japanese army along with many others and ending with a one-two atomic punch by the United States, people generally couldn’t handle that much reality, and chose to solidify the family unit and keep the bigger picture out of their homes and their minds.  The government was largely responsible for this shift, with massive propaganda campaigns to help wash away the previous decade’s inhumanities and to fill it with a future of progress, growth and possibility.

By adopting this social idealized view of a utopian future, many unknowingly, gave up their desire for an actual meaningful life.  A life filled with wonder and discovery, a life when pursued might have clashed with conflicting American values, but was more importantly, one worth living.  Unfortunately this wasn’t the case.  Many kept their heads firmly in the sand, after seeing what happens to those that question the capitalistic hold the government and corporations had over the population.  They have money and investments to protect along with religious dogma and conservatism to disseminate.  Resistance of this was met with intolerance, which in turn was met with persecution, in other words, black listing, excommunication from the structure and so called solidarity of modern capitalistic society.  

This was depicted in the 1998 film, Pleasantville, where a brother and sister are magically transported into a 1950’s TV sitcom utopia, a place so pleasant that all social and family values are all clearly defined and came to you in conservative black and white.  The film was about clashing community harmony with individual expression, the problems of ideals in a seemingly perfect world and social intolerance.  The film was also about having a meaningful life filled with purpose at the cost of perfection.   

This struggle between civilizations and the individuals that populate them is not new and will likely never grow old.  The function and structure of a society, by its very nature, must smother all hope and dreams, to maintain predictability while mass producing products while consumer purchasing can be properly forecasted.   Investors and Wall Street brokers map consuming trends as plans of financial attack against other countries and other corporations, for wealth and prosperity, at the expense of the majority of the population forced to live in poverty and struggle for food and work.

The McDonaldization of America has been met with much resistance, in the form of sub-culture rebellions plotting alternative life styles, to covertly crashing the system, as depicted at the end of 1999’s Fight Club.  Terrorism has become more pervasive with many groups around the world fed up with all the greed and squandering the west has enjoyed over the years.  But the campaign continues within the American government and its corporate sponsors to continue with all the greed and like Star Trek’s Borg race of assimilators, America forges on with invading countries to secure more wealth, with a cost of so many lost lives.

What is happening in the homeland while the military invaders move from country to country, dispatching their very own weapons of mass destruction?  What slutty Miley Cyrus is going to do next, what the fashion police after an award show have to say about celebrity dresses and who will win the next Big Brother season extravaganza?  These things matter in a society that has only expressed its wish to sleep.  Mass shootings and false flag attacks on their own people have become a bi-weekly event, mass media manipulation and government propaganda insures obedience while they rape the world and their homeland of the possibility of a meaningful existence without tyranny.

The family unit has stayed strong in all of this, in spite of some of its hypocrisy; it has maintained its hold over those that make up the sum of its parts.  The fake family in We’re the Millers is a throwback to the pleasant times, and the comfort food we still all love and enjoy.  Where the chaos in the world outside our windows will persist, so there’s no reason why someone can’t find a little happiness in their fake drug dealing, excuse me, drug smuggling family, while trying to pursue a little piece of the American Dream.  

"There is absolutely no humor in the Death of the American Dream. I can't get out from under it; we're caving in... Fuck the American Dream. It was always a lie and whoever still believes it deserves whatever they get.... and they will."   -  American journalist and author, Hunter S. Thompson