That “The Hurt Locker” Is the Best Film of the Year
January 27, 2010
That Monsieur Hammerskjold and I disagree about the relative merit of “The Hurt Locker” is no secret to…well, the two of us. But his underestimation of this film in such a public forum leaves me with no choice but to defend its honor. No, this was not a planned “point-counter-point” on our part. This is merely an argument 1) on behalf of the best film of the year and 2) that it is much better than “Point Break”.
Dash’s points are well taken. Mrs. Bigelow’s films pursue a similar aesthetic in service of a similar question. She is interested in the adrenaline junkie, the ultra-modern adventurer who seeks thrills for his own sake. The gendered language is purposeful here because Bigelow foucses on a central myth of the American male: rugged, individualistic, glory-seeking despite the odds and a hostile environment. However, it is only with “The Hurt Locker” that she has made something truly salient.
Again, I agree with Dash that “Point Break” is better than is usually thought, though our reasons are quite different. I read that movie as a subtle yet substantial critique of one aspect of American culture through one particulr incarnation of the myth of the American male just mentioned. To watch legitimate celebrities (Swayze and Reeves) wax pseudo-philosophical and seek faux-enlightenment at the barrel of a gun is a clever, pithy (hat-tip Dash) and ultimately withering critique of the American west coast. The movie shows how southern California co-opts and corrupts legitimate spiritual traditions and how even those who purport to reject its plastic, disposable version of consumer capitalism are co-opted by it. Utah, from America’s interior (and frontier at that!) is also co-opted by it. (The fact that he is an FBI agent is extremely interesting given the disproportionate number of Mormons who enthusiastically serve in that particular agency). Though on its surface American culture (and in this film Bigelow has her guns aimed at Hollywood) appears inane and insane, it is also built upon violence.
However, “Point Break” is limited by its gimmicky conceit. Read the rest of this entry »
That “The Hurt Locker” Is Only Marginally Better than “Point Break”
January 27, 2010
That “The Hurt Locker” is only marginally better than “Point Break” is a fact that becomes clearer on repeat viewings of both films. 
This is not a knock against “The Hurt Locker,” the Best Picture contender for which Kathryn Bigelow is justifiably considered the favorite to win Best Director; rather, consider it a vote of confidence in “Point Break,” a cult film most famous for having bank robbers don rubber masks of ex-presidents (Patrick Swayze’s Reagan is particularly chilling).
The theme of both movies is “to thine own self be true.” Jeremy Renner’s character in “The Hurt Locker” needs to arrive at a greater understanding of his self in order to be at peace, never mind the social consequences, and both Reeves’ Johnny Utah and Swayze’s Bodhi (short, of course, for Bodhisattva) need to reach their inner selves in order to find enlightenment. Reeves’ search for his self is expressed on film via his love for Lori Petty’s Tyler. The two are made to look nearly identical, and the romance shifts from an expression of Utah’s narcissism to an embrace of a totally different persona. Meanwhile, Bodhi’s spirituality is increasingly contrasted with his destructive actions.
The presidents masks, then, are not just rejections of consumerism and pithy critiques of politics, but invitations to look below the beautiful exteriors. Bodhi lives up to the symbolism of his name, though perhaps not in the ways we expect. Meanwhile, Keanu Reeves wears no mask while undercover. He hides in plain sight, behind his old identity. Like Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker”, he rejects the mask or giant protective suit. Theirs is a sort of open-key encryption. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday’s Coffee
January 26, 2010
is it also Today’s? I wake up confronted by a ghost in my coffee pot. It holds the open promise of yesterday and its failure. For it is not all consumed. Shall I throw it out? Let it fill the sink, and let me pretend again that today I will write my thank you notes. Today, I shall call my senator and tell them to pass a climate change bill. Today, I will eat yesterday’s salad, and not tomorrow. Will this new pot of coffee be wholly consumed? Or will it stare at me again tomorrow, bleary eyed in the kitchen, as I stumble for the grinder?
William Hurt: On the Edge of Postmodernism
January 26, 2010
By a reasonably objective metric (academy award nominations), William Hurt 
ranks as one of the greatest film actors of all-time (he has four) and yet he makes no appearance on the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Stars. On its own, this would be a triviality; many great actors fail to achieve mass consciousness. Perhaps I’m betraying my age, but has anyone ever gone to a movie just to experience the raw animal magnetism of Albert Finney? But, as we’ve mentioned many times, William Hurt owned the 1980s, starring in several of the decade’s biggest commercial and creative successes.
I thought about this the other day while watching Damages season 2 on DVD. There’s a scene where William Hurt’s character takes a polygraph. Hurt’s character is exactly the type of role for which he’s remembered: handsome without being charming, and cold without appearing calculating; uncertainty surrounds him. And Hurt is an expert at maximizing uncertainty. Watching him take the polygraph, you’re sure that he’s managed to pass the test while lying. When it comes back inconclusive, you’re almost surprised. Is he not as devious as I thought, or could he be telling the truth? There may only be a 5% chance that he’s telling the truth, but Hurt makes you consider it. In this way, he’s a great foil to Glenn Close whose skill is smiling as she stabs a knife in your back. She’s good at convincing other characters that she’s being honest, but not so good at staying a step ahead of viewers. Only the show’s jumbling of chronology allows those possibilities to slip in.
But again, the mystery that is William Hurt and his ownership (or: pwnage) of the 1980s. Read the rest of this entry »
Thaw me out when robot wives are cheap and effective
January 25, 2010
The second season of 30 Rock (a perennial favorite of the Yesterday’s Salad staff) ends with Tracy Morgan’s character creating the ultimate distraction: a seamless meld of video games and pornography. The creation of the game is depicted in a pitch-perfect homage to the film Amadeus, with Tracy working frenetically into the night, as his co-worker, Frank, looks on in despair a la the jealous Salieri. When Frank attempts to dissuade Tracy, he explains that it is impossible to create a porn video game because of a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley.
The uncanny valley is a metaphor for how people’s affinity toward computer-generated characters follows a parabolic curve (much like a valley). A computer-generated character that looks nothing like a person, such as an animated car, will not make a viewer feel much of anything. Much as we might be fond of our cars, an animated car is just an object. However, if the computer generated car had great big eyes and a smile, we would have much less trouble relating to it. The more the character looks like a real person, the more alive it seems. Yet, there is a point at which the limitations of the animation start to appear, representing the bottom of the uncanny valley. After this point, as the animators try to make the character look more human, the character becomes progressively more unreal, and we feel much less sympathy (and perhaps, more than a little creeped out).
What this means for a hypothetical sex video game is that any attempt to make the game’s characters realistic enough to be arousing will instead make them incongruous enough to be repulsive. Unless your audience has a fetish for cartoon characters (a small audience in the U.S.), or has a fetish for being repulsed (which may violate the principle of entailment in this situation), this is not great a recipe for commercial viability. Within the context of 30 Rock, this explanation is meant humorously, but it is essentially the prevailing theory for why there aren’t more video games about (or even featuring) sex, while there are plenty of games featuring violence, whether cartoonish or quasi-realistic.
A good example of this theory in practice is found in the game Dragon Age: Origins. Dragon Age is an epic fantasy in the vein of the Lord of the Rings, and tasks the player with defending their kingdom against a horde of demon-like creatures. As anyone familiar with the general setting might expect, there is a fair amount of fighting (against both demon and human alike), and it is decently violent. With fast pacing and fairly realistic graphics, the combat is both dramatic and fun. To the game’s credit, there is a very rich backstory and well-developed characters, and the larger part of the game is spent talking and politicking amongst them. Thanks to quite a bit of cleverly-written dialogue (leavened with some innuendo), this part of the game is even more fun than the combat, and is often moving.
The Varieties of Adult Experience
January 24, 2010
Just the other day I had a conversation with a colleague/friend who has decided to take a leave of absence from his graduate studies. With several “incomplete”s on his transcript and many outstanding papers still due, this very intelligent and talented student has struggled to muster the sense of realism necessary to succeed in this type of work: don’t make your studies too personal or think what you produce needs to be perfect – just get it done and move on. But he hasn’t been able to accept this necessary state of imperfection. This friend explained to me that he simply does not want to accept the responsibilities that he associates with “adulthood”. On the face of it, one could argue that this just yet another example of the retarded and often incomplete maturation of today’s American male (see most popular comedies today and the market to which they speak). Men “settle down” later, if at all, and pursue an American dream that makes less room for creating their own nuclear families. The families that are created are shrinking in size. Maybe there’s nothing interesting or particularly sympathetic about my friend – he just needs to “grow up.”
I’ll reserve judgment on that front in order to make a different point. What’s interesting about my friend, I would like to argue, is that there is a strong correlation between his decisions and his religious predilections. This young man is an advocate for and seeker of mystical experience. He is what we might call a “spiritual seeker.” He meditates and seeks communion with the Godhead. He is drawn to the foundational texts of Hasidism, the revivalist movement of East European Jews that emerged in the 18th century and as a thoroughgoing postmodern (and spritual American) his religious practice is syncretist and experimental: Bhuddist meditation, selective appropriation of Jewish law, readings in feminist and gender-sensitive theology. He wants to live spontaneously, ever open to an expansive existence and never to be stifled by workaday matters.
In her 1911 work Mysticism Evelyn Underhill argued that the fourth stage of the mystic’s experience was something called “the dark night of the soul”. After the ecstatic heights of the mystical union with the Divine the individual returns to a depressed state wherein feelings of isolation and despair are not uncommon. In comparison to the possible heights of revelatory experience, returning to the mundane seems by comparison a lame, if not downright wicked way of going about life. The “real” mode of experience is the religious one and the physical, mediated world of real life is nothing more than a veil of phenomena obscuring the beauty behind it.
My friend has failed to readjust after his re-entrance. Our world is one of imperfection, where duty and need trump the ideal of perfection. Our experience is one of tragedy. Values such as equality and liberty can compete in our political order but no human ordering of power brings complete redemption. Despite our best humanistic instincts and intentions, evil is inherent in the structure of life. No seminar paper, no matter how hard you work on it will be perfect.
Mind you, tragedy is no nihilism. There is a great deal of wisdom and even hope when we recognize that our best laid schemes are no more than that. But the wisdom of tragedy is an inherently adult wisdom. Society needs its mystics, its visionaries, its outliers and outcasts. But it mostly needs those who are willing to curb their own autonomy and embrace life as it is.
