I’ve been watching a lot of romantic comedies recently. By “a lot,” I mean “all of them.” Everything from “A” (Adam’s Rib) to “Z” (Zack and Miri Make a Porno). Technically, I started even before “A,” with 10 Things I Hate About You and 27 Dresses. And just in time for Valentine’s Day, I’ve edited together some of the most awww-inducing moments in Hollywood history.

In the 40 Inspirational Speeches montage, those speeches weren’t actually the climaxes of their films. They were what got the characters fired up to take on the opposing army/rival team/preppy frat house. But in a romantic comedy, the big speech is the main event. You have two people who clearly love each other (that much was obvious from the poster). But for some reason, one of them is taking that job in Hong Kong and/or getting back together with Chad (curse you, preppy frat house!). There’s only one thing to do: run across town, show up panting in the nick of time, and pour your heart out. I find it comforting that even in this age of 3D CGI madness, the denouement of a romantic comedy is almost always a big block of dialogue.

You might even say that these climactic speeches are the whole point of a romantic comedy. We want to see someone bridge that gap between “it will never work” and “happily ever after,” armed only with the power of words. And the way you cross that chasm is by not caring if you fall. You have to lose your cool, drop your guard, and swing for the fences. It’s interesting that there’s often an element of public humiliation to these declarations. In Keeping the Faith, Ben Stiller has to woo Jenna Elfman via speakerphone, with her whole office listening. In Hitch, Will Smith stops Eva Mendes from leaving town by jumping in front of her car. In Made of Honor, Patrick Duffy actually interrupts the girl’s wedding to another man, and does his whole “I’ve loved you forever” monologue right there in the church (he is eventually punched). In Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise arrives home to find his living room full of strange women, but he barely hesitates. “If this is where it has to happen,” he says, “then this is where it has to happen.” And that is exactly the point. These men don’t give speeches like this because it comes naturally to them. They do it because love has left them no other choice.

These people are not just expressing love, they are putting themselves at risk. And it’s that combination of what they say and what it took to say it that lifts us up where we belong.

THE RULES: Characters must be speaking directly to their beloved (no talking to a third party), no actor can speak more than once (but some people did appear more than once), no TV shows (even though Spike had an amazing speech in the finale of Buffy).

NUMBER OF CLIPS I STARTED WITH: 285

CATEGORIES I ORGANIZED THEM INTO: Basic I Love You, Compliments, How I Feel, Forever, Random

CLIP MY GIRLFRIEND REALLY WANTED ME TO INCLUDE THAT I HAD TO CUT: Singles. “You… belong… with… ME!”

CLIP I REALLY WANTED TO INCLUDE THAT I HAD TO CUT: Conan the Barbarian. “If I were dead and you were still fighting for life, I’d come back from the darkness, back from the pit of hell to fight at your side.”

EDIT I’M PROUDEST OF: In The Notebook, the two characters are standing right at the edges of the frame. The problem is that I had to cut out the edges of the frame to crop the clip to 16:9. So I used my After Effects kung fu to actually remove the MIDDLE of the frame. See?

Before.

After.

ORIGINAL FINAL CLIP: The Simpsons. Marge: “Best kiss of my life.” Homer: “Best kiss of your life so far!”

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The idea of someone using dreams to affect our waking life is a terrifying thought. We are most vulnerable when we’re sleeping, at risk both from being attacked by other people as well as from nightmares. On the other hand, there are also advantages to our subconscious having the chance to express itself. It allows our dreams to become places stripped of limitations. While the closest we can get to controlling our minds while we dream is through lucid dreaming, two films imagine settings where people can control their dreams to create new worlds.

The first is the recent blockbuster success Inception (2010), directed by Christopher Nolan. In a near future where people can share dreams and impact each other’s thoughts through them, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a master extractor. Through dreams, he can both withdraw information from his subjects, as well as insert a thought into their minds – a process called “inception.” Hired to enter the mind of a major CEO’s son and plant the idea to break up his father’s company, Cobb assembles a team of people to help carry out the mission. At the same time, he battles his own demons and guilt, trying to keep his uncontrollable subconscious projections from endangering himself and his teammates.

The second film is Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep (2006). It follows the story of Stéphane Miroux (Gael García Bernal), a Mexican who moves to France after his father dies. An artist with a tenuous grasp of the French language, his mother lured him to the country by lying about the dead end job she’d lined up for him. He suffers from a lack of creativity in his life until he meets his neighbor across the hall, Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a composer who gets his juices flowing. However, he has a hard time connecting with her because of vivid and trippy dreams that encroach on his waking life and give him a warped sense of reality.

These two films each deal with dreams in very different manners. For one thing, they’re categorized in different genres. Inception is undoubtedly science fiction, featuring realistic technology that allows movement within other people’s minds. There’s mention of it being used to train soldiers in the army, since they can kill each other during combat exercises and then wake up. As such, the film is very grounded in what feels real and people losing sight of reality, causing the viewer to constantly keep track of what is real and what is fake. Sleep, on the other hand, is a film grounded in the present day. It may have long fanciful sequences of psychedelic proportions, but it is still contemporary fiction, with nothing unrealistic actually happening outside of Stéphane’s own mind. And although he does invents a one-second time machine and he puts a mechanism into a stuffed horse to make it gallop, they seem like fanciful imaginings he’s convinced Stéphanie to play along with.

Now, there is no question that Inception outclasses Sleep in terms of overall star quality. Gondry’s ammo consists of a good-looking French actor and cars made out of toilet paper rolls. Nolan has the actors, the action and the complex plot. His work is sleek and sexy and it never questions itself, always knowing where it’s headed. In contrast, The Science of Sleep is a bit of a mess. There’s hardly any plot at all, the action of the film amounting to Stéphane wanting to be with Stéphanie and a few convoluted reasons why that can’t be. The visuals themselves are harsher, taking place in small apartments and oppressive basements, when they aren’t blaring neon colors and volcanoes from within Stéphane’s subconscious.

However dissimilar these two films are, though, they both share a common law: that dreams can be controlled. They are not meaningless entities independent of us; rather, they are intrinsically linked to our thoughts and beliefs and can be exploited as such.

In Inception, dreams can be controlled by a person outside of yourself. The architect designs the dream and can allow others into it. As long as the details of the dream are as close to reality as possible, the architect has free reign in his subject’s mind. The complexity increases when the interlopers fall asleep within the dream, waking up in another dream level closer to the subject’s core subconscious. The exception to this is that when Cobb reaches that last level of pure subconscious, he and his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) stay down there and build cities together for years, their own architects, suspending reality for so long that Mal forgets they’re dreaming at all.

In Gondry’s film, Stéphane creates a new reality in his dreams as well. The people of his reality are all there, but in kinder, sycophantic forms. When a claymation volcano destroys the world, they beg Stéphane to rebuild it. He does, from the ground up, the construction shown through stop motion leveling of the ground to the building of skyscrapers. His time machine really works, sending a river flowing backward, and the mechanized horse is life-sized and can carry him and Stéphanie on its back.

The films also differ on how dreams affect reality. For Nolan’s characters, any effects are exclusively in their minds. Mal commits suicide because she’s convinced she’s still dreaming and needs to wake up. Robert (Cillian Murphy), the CEO’s son, changes his mind about his father’s inheritance because the team was successful in playing on his emotions. On the other hand, Gondry’s Stéphane deals with changes to his physical situation. In his sleep, he writes Stéphanie a letter and slips it under her door. He dreams that his feet are frozen in the ice of a ski slope and wakes up to discover his feet actually iced over, resting in the freezer of a mini-fridge somehow stationed at the foot of his bed.

The problems begin when the dreams get out of hand and control is taken away from the controller. In Inception, Cobb can’t know the layout of the dreams because then his subconscious projection of Mal will know, too, and she’ll act independently to keep him with her. In Sleep, Stéphane sleepwalks and does things in his real life while he’s asleep, eventually escalating to the point where he accidentally asks the real Stéphanie to marry him. He thinks he’s still dreaming and talking to her doppelgänger, but he has in fact already woken up and now faces her, having freaked her out beyond repair.

Up until that point, Stéphane’s dreams defied the rules of Nolan’s world: he, as well as the audience, always knew when he was dreaming. The people of Inception are constantly worrying about being able to tell the difference, knowing from Mal’s example how easy it is to make a mistake. They have personalized totems to inform them whether or not they’re dreaming or waking. When Stéphane confuses his dreams with reality, he seems to be falling into a situation such as the world described in Inception, but in less of an absolute: we get a gnawing sensation that Stéphane could be going mad, dreams infiltrating his reality rather than him being in one or the other. And yet, the end of Sleep seems to say that this is okay; that the only place Stéphane can find happiness is actually in his dreams, riding a stuffed horse with Stéphanie. And, some would say, that’s how Inception ends as well.
The difference between Stéphane- and Cobb’s situations is that Stéphane is yearning to share his dreams with someone while Cobb would optimally be working alone. Stéphane latches on to Stéphanie when he thinks they share a common brainwave in hopes that they can share their creativity with each other and shape new worlds together. On the other hand, Cobb wishes he could do everything alone. Unfortunately, his subconscious keeps getting in the way with Mal trying to trap him in his dreams, so he brings someone else in to be the architect in an attempt to get around those issues.

What these two films most agree on is that everyone has the capacity to be happy on a subconscious level, even though that goal may be unrealistic. While Nolan’s approach is to have a character trying to distract himself from the tragedy and hopelessness surrounding him, content to turn away from his truth-telling totem at the last moment as long as he has his children with him at last, Gondry focuses on a character whose intense, artistic personality forced him to pursue his heart’s desire with wild abandon. Stéphane’s mistake in Sleep is that he thinks he somehow communicated his sleep-written note to Stéphanie, when in reality she actually read it before he got it back. Unfortunately, he think this makes them soul mates and so he relentlessly chases after her until at last he has to admit they cannot be together.

The fact of the matter is that Nolan treats dreams as a plot device. Aside from the beautiful scene when the city folds in on itself in Cobb’s subconscious and the floating fight scenes in the second level of Robert’s subconscious, Nolan never really takes pleasure in the possibilities of dream life. The action sequences dominate the film, with the dream motif serving as a set of rules to follow. Gondry, on the other hand, plots with overemotional, very French indie dramatics that then explode onto the screen in technicolor. Stéphane is an especially hard character to relate to, since he starts out as an adorably subpar multilingual but then slowly progresses to become unreasonable and alienating.

The lasting feeling is that Nolan may have taken the risk with his budget, but Gondry seems to be the one to push the envelope on the subject matter. However, even though both films agree that their characters need to confront their loss of control and accept it, they are still allowed to turn away from reality and find peace elsewhere. While it is problematic for the larger picture, it is nonetheless a beautiful place to leave them, existing equally for the audience as it does for them.

Alisa Ungar-Sargon is a developing writer currently based in Chicago, IL. When she’s not hunched over a laptop or eating cupcakes, you can find her driving along Lake Michigan and brainstorming new ways to sound clever.

[Do the protagonists of Inception and Science of Sleep accept their loss of control? Or have they retreated into a reality of their own making? Sound off in the comments! - Ed.]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USxhXb5VC5E

…and are at least familiar with the broad outline of the plot of the original stage musical:

Set in LA’s infamous Sunset Strip in 1987, Rock of Ages tells the story of Drew, a boy from South Detroit, and Sherrie, a small-town girl, both in LA to chase their dreams of making it big and falling in love. Rock of Ages takes you back to the times of big bands with big egos playing big guitar solos and sporting even bigger hair!

But you may not be aware of a major change in the plot: in the stage version (which I saw recently), the owners of the Bourbon Room rock club face off against greedy real estate developers who want to bulldoze the seedy Sunset Strip and replace it with “clean living.” As you can see in the trailer, these developers are replaced by a pack of Bible-thumping prudes who oppose the “sex, hateful music, and sex” of the Bourbon Lounge as epitomized by rock god Stacee Jaxx.

Lord, have mercy! What’s going on here? Why the change in villains, and pray tell me, what does it mean?

We Built This City on Rock and Roll

First, let’s unpack the conflict of the stage musical a little more. Is it a simple story of corporate greed run amok, similar to what we saw in The Muppets? Is it a simple story of the downtrodden 99% rising up against the 1%, similar to what we saw in Newsies? It’s actually neither. It’s really about the importance of urban planning.

We built this city on eminent domain seizures

No, seriously. Allow me to explain. In the brief synopsis above, I left out a couple of important details: 1) the developers are German and 2) they effectively bribe the mayor of Los Angeles to gain approval for their project and the eminent domain property seizures that spell doom for the Bourbon Room. As far as I know, their portrayal as Germans isn’t connected to any specific historical threat of German real estate developers (if they were going for an existential overseas threat from the 80′s, the Japanese would have been a more appropriate choice). Instead, it’s done to accentuate their “other-ness”: they’re not of the community and have no interest in understanding its values. They bring their predisposed ideas about what’s best for people (and what will make them rich). As for the significance of including the bribing of the mayor and the eminent domain property seizures in the stage show, they show how the political process that’s meant to protect local communities from bulldozers has been corrupted and circumvented by moneyed interests.

Imperious developers ignore local contexts, use their money to influence political support for their plans and steamroll opposition, and destroy unique local communities. I could go on all day about this, but instead, I’ll point you to the Wikipedia articles on Le Corbusier and Robert Moses and leave it at that.

Le Corbusier did not build his cities on rock and roll.

Back to what the Rock of Ages stage version is about: it’s about the importance of urban planning on a more micro level, but on a more macro level, it’s about the ability of hegemonic forces like deep-pocketed corporations and governments to squelch the artistic expression of unique local culture and replace it with stifling homogeneity under the guise of “economic development.”

So why exactly was all of this discarded for the movie version?

Sister Christian, Overtime Has Come

Based on the trailer, the movie tells a simpler story than the one I outlined above. Bible-thumping prudes hate rock ‘n’ roll. They don’t want people to party, to get laid, to play awesome rock music, or otherwise have a good time. These culture warriors have roots in the Tipper Gore-instigated Senate hearings on the subject matter of pop music, which led to the awesome sight of Dee Snider testifying before Congress:

He's not gonna take it...

Twenty years prior, Christian groups were burning Beatles records:

...no! He ain't gonna take it!

And on top of this cultural legacy of conservative opposition to the content of pop music, we have our current conservative culture warriors who generally oppose sex and having a good time:

...he's not gonna take it, anymore!

These are all good reasons for making the villain of Rock of Ages a Bible-thumping prude, but they don’t give us a reason for making the villain a Bible-thumping prude at the expense of the greedy developers and the message on cultural homogenization brought on by poor urban planning and corporate/government greed.

Perhaps the filmmakers thought that the culture war story would be more relatable and appealing to a 2012 audience than that of the greedy developers. The culture war has a more specific set of symbols, institutions, and leaders than the more amorphous concept of “greedy developers” and will therefore resonate more with viewers.

I mostly buy this justification, but I also can’t help but consider a more cynical motive: in becoming a major motion picture, Rock of Ages is now part of the “movie industry,” which is one of those corporate hegemonic forces that spreads stifling cultural homogeneity. When the moviemakers realized that this was at odds with the central conflict of the stage version, they rewrote the nature of the villain in a way that both removed this conflict and setup the movie industry as being on the same side of the scrappy Bourbon Room owners. Sure, Hollywood may be an agent of cultural homogeneity, but at least they want you to have sex and rock out. You know who wants to prevent you from having sex and rocking out? The Bible-thumping prudes.

Any Way You Want It

We’ll have to wait until June to see how exactly this new story gets told in the movie version, but until then, we can debate the finer points of urban planning, the culture wars, the hegemonic forces of stifling cultural homogenization, and monster guitar riffs.

So what do you think? Is the stage version really about bad development policies? Will the movie’s culture war theme resonate more with the audience than German real estate developers? And most importantly, why are we still taking it, when Twisted Sister said almost twenty years ago that we are most definitely not going to take it anymore?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q16_LDI-tsU

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If you Google Working Girl, you’ll discover that it’s described as a “romantic comedy” and “an inspiring tale”. If you watch it, you’ll probably think of Tess McGill’s story as “feel good”. If you spend a weekend, like I did, thinking critically about why Katherine Parker is painted as a venomous villainess and why Kevin Spacey and Oliver Platt’s characters get away with pressuring women into prostitution, then you start to look at the film as a disturbing glimpse into the double standard that permeates business culture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv-0mmVnxPA

The lesson of the film isn’t that women can succeed in a man’s world by working together; the lesson is that women have to destroy each other to ensure only middling success.

Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) is the heroine of Working Girl and Katherine Parker (Sigourney Weaver) is clearly painted as the villain, but upon further inspection the morality of both characters and their actions falls under suspicion. Katherine steals one good idea from Tess, but Tess steals Katherine’s entire life. She moves into Katherine’s home and into her office at work. Tess goes through Katherine’s home office, medicine cabinet and closet, taking whatever she likes. Tess even steals Katherine’s lover. Granted, Jack Trainer is a grown man who can choose whom he loves for himself. However, it should be noted that Katherine stole one idea from Tess’s brain and Tess stole Katherine’s entire identity. Katherine certainly deserved some kind of comeuppance. Plagiarism is most definitely both a legal and moral offense, but Tess’s revenge goes beyond even an eye for an eye. It’s an entire body for an eye.

It is fun to watch Katherine get her comeuppance, but Katherine is the only character in the entire movie who actually gets any payback. The men in Working Girl get away with complete moral bankruptcy. In fact, they are typically rewarded for their terrible behavior. Kevin Spacey snorts cocaine and sexually harasses Tess, but he gets to keep his job. Oliver Platt pimps Tess out and only suffers the fleeting shame of being a mid-day punchline. Even Tess’s horrible boyfriend, as played by Alec Baldwin with his trademark smarm, gets rewarded for being an asshole. She walks in on him cheating on her and by the end of the movie, they’ve become friends They both are advancing in their careers and Baldwin’s character gets to date the woman he cheated on Tess with. Finally Harrison Ford’s Jack Trainer gets to be a sleazebag and the romantic hero.

When we first meet Jack Trainer, we believe that he is going to date rape Tess. The fact that he doesn’t—that he takes her home with him, undresses her and lets her sleep in his bed—is supposed to be proof of his moral compunction. This is after he liquors her up, refuses to tell her his name and pretty much makes it clear that his only interest in her is physical. It’s supposed to be a compliment when he says, “You’re the first woman I’ve seen in one of these damn things that dresses like a woman, not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman.”

There is definitely something to be said for the fact that much of Katherine and Tess’s individual power comes from their ability to be a woman. Both use sex(uality) to finesse their way into meetings and alliances. Jack’s comments and both Katherine and Tess’s behavior illustrates that women are not equals in the business world. If they were, they could be seen not as sexual objects, but intellects.

Even the title of the film is rife with tension. Maybe it wasn’t as controversial in the 1980′s, but nowadays the use of the word “girl” to describe a grown woman is a huge source of contention. Is the word “girl” truly demeaning, or is it threatening? There’s a moment when Katherine and Tess meet where an unspoken power battle takes place over the issue of their ages. The much more successful, sophisticated and urbane Katherine is slightly younger than Tess. Tess sheepishly (and Melanie Griffith did deserve an Academy Award nomination for the wide spectrum of conflicting emotions Tess’s face reveals in this scene) admits that she has never worked for anyone younger before, nor for anyone female. “Is that going to be a problem?” Katherine asks as she only half suppresses a grin. Tess’s answer is no, but it winds up being a huge problem.

Why? Because youth in a woman often equals desirability which in turn equals power.

Note how ogrish she looks in this shot: rings under her eyes, hulking shoulders (due to the coat) and a threatening metal claw.

It’s kind of terrifying to consider the fact that there are probably many women in business today who grew up inspired by Working Girl. It’s the All About Eve of the business world. However, All About Eve delivers a far more unflinching look at the issues that women face when pursuing power. It’s clear at the end of All About Eve that Eve Harrington is going to be overthrown by Daphne and that the rest of the cast of characters finally sees Eve’s machinations for what they are. The ending of Working Girl is far more confusing. Do Jack and Trask see Tess as someone who is just as conniving as Katherine (or any man in the industry)? Is Katherine supposed to get any kind of sympathy from the audience? Is Tess even aware that she’s setting herself up to be ruined by her assistant?

When we first meet Tess’s assistant, she has brazenly taken over Tess’s office, using it for her own personal phone calls. There’s also a bit of attitude when she asks, “What do you expect from me?” Tess tries to finally be the better person—or boss, in this case. She says they are equals (which they most certainly are not in the professional sense of the word) and that Tess pretty much won’t be expecting much from her new assistant. Tess is essentially setting herself up to be pushed aside by her own assistant, the same way Katherine was by her. The cycle is going to continue.

In Working Girl, women are pitted against other women, but that’s not the biggest tragedy. The tragedy is that the men are still exploiting the women mentally, emotionally and sexually without recourse. Katherine, Tess and the other female characters (including an HR director played by Olympia Dukakis) seem to accept that they can never change the fact that men can do anything in the world of Working Girl and get away with it, because for men there are no rules. As Katherine smoothly tells Tess, “Never burn bridges. Today’s junior prick, tomorrow’s senior partner!” The reason that the men can get away with all of their misdeeds is because the men never blow the whistle on each other. The only people who get in trouble are women. The reason for that is unlike men, the women don’t support each other. Working Girl not only illustrates this practice, but presents it as a success story.

What makes Working Girl such a compelling piece of anti-feminist propaganda is its witty writing, brilliant performances and unflinching realism. It’s not farcical like the earlier feminist revenge comedy, Nine to Five, nor is it fantastical like later feminist empowerment flick Legally Blonde. Tess seems more like a real woman because she is more realistic than Dolly Parton’s Doralee Rhodes or Reese Witherspoon’s Elle Woods. She wears sneakers on the street and sweats when she has to push around dim sum. I’m not going to lie: it is a good movie. I liked it. Which is the problem. Women shouldn’t watch a film about how they can’t ever beat the system and think it was “fun”. It should be terrifying.

Ultimately, the message of Working Girl isn’t that with hard work you can beat the odds. The message of Working Girl is that women can advance in a man’s world if they throw other women under the bus.

[What say you, Overthinkers? Does Working Girl's cat-eat-cat message ruin the fun? Or can you still enjoy a movie even if it's a little bit regressive? Sound off in the comments!]

Meghan O’Keefe is a stand-up comic and writer living in New York. When she’s not guesting for Overthinking It, she writes for HelloGiggles, The Hairpin, Splitsider and The Apiary.

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Along with the distinction between creation and re-creation comes a value judgement, or at least an implied one. Ask any writer, they will tell you they are smarter than any actor. And they will be right:  actors are dumb. I kid, I kid! But I’m not the only person making the joke. Consider the characters on Friends. Chandler, the writer, is of average intelligence (as is Monica, the chef). And Joey, the actor? And Phoebe, the musician?

The distinction between the creative and the re-creative artist in the popular imagination is the distinction between mind and body, the distinction between spirit and flesh. Creative art is brain work. Motor skills are not required. (Except for basically all the visual arts. Look, I’m not pretending any of this actually makes sense.) Re-creative art, however much thought goes into it, is partially about having quick fingers, or the ability to cry on cue, or elegantly turned calves. It’s part practiced skill, part genetic lottery ticket. It never rises to the level of inspiration. Interestingly enough, within classical music circles (which is already a re-creative culture), this same stigmatization of the body attaches to singers. Consider the old gag, “Where is a tenor’s resonance? In the hole where his brain should be.” Or consider fictional composer-singer relationships like the Phantom and Christine in Phantom of the Opera. Christine is good and the Phantom bad, to be sure — but which of them is smarter? Which is weak, which is strong? Which active, which passive?

The distinction between creative and re-creative art is quite often mapped onto gender, too.

And it is in this context that I suggest we watch the trailer to Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming thriller, Haywire.

A few things are worth commenting on here, but of these by far the most interesting is the leading lady, Gina Carano, seen below hurting someone quite badly. Or, depending on your priorities, quite well.

Carano is not an actress. She’s had bit parts here and there, perhaps most notably in Red Alert 3 and the direct to video Ring Girls, but nothing that screams “give me a star vehicle!” She’s primarily famous for being an MMA fighter, and hot. The bulk of the fame comes from her looks, in fact. You have to wade through two pages of cheesecake on Google image search before you actually get a picture of her fighting someone. But as a fighter, she is no slouch, having racked up a 12-1-1 record in kickboxing and a 7-1 in MMA over a three year professional career. You can see clips of her fights on YouTube, and although MMA is notoriously hard for laypersons to follow, she certainly seems to be kicking butt. That’s the gimmick, then, with Haywire. Watch people get beat up by a real badass pretending to be a fake badass. It’s classic stunt casting. Rowdy Roddy Piper would be proud.

This makes it all the more interesting that the trailer makes no reference to Carano’s fight career. Rather, it tries to sell Haywire as a straight-up action film. Some of the marketing even downplays Soderbergh’s involvement! Check out this poster, which tries to avoid contaminating your fond memories of Ocean’s Eleven with your less than fond memories of Solaris.

If Carano isn’t really an action star, neither is Soderbergh really an action director. He makes some very successful films, but he also makes weird ones, and does weird stuff with non-actors in particular. Typically he intersperses his avant-garde work with polished Hollywood fare that pays the bills and convinces the producers to keep hiring him. For every Ocean’s Eleven, there’s a Bubble. For every Contagion, there’s a The Good German. The presence of bankable stars is not necessarily a decisive factor. The Good German rode George Clooney and Cate Blanchett to a twenty-five million dollar loss at the box office. There’s a lot of famous names up there on the poster. We still don’t know what kind of Soderbergh film Haywire will turn out to be.

However, given that the film was shot in 2010, and probably wouldn’t be released even in 2012 if Michael Fassbender hadn’t turned into the hottest thing since toast in the interim… we could probably guess.

What does all this have to do with acting vs. directing? And with stunt casting? Well, most people who are paying attention will immediately peg Haywire as a sort of companion piece to Soderbergh’s art house exploitation experiment The Girlfriend Experience, which provided a non-fornicating leading role to the porn star Sasha Grey. The Girlfriend Experience tries to sell itself as a frothy, naughty movie. (Gaaagh, that tagline. So lame.) It’s actually a chilly, cerebral, vaguely boring one (although the boredom shouldn’t be thought of as a defect in this case), with Important Ideas about the commoditization of love, friendship, art, and — somewhat surprisingly — religion.

It’s also kind of a prank on the audience. Sasha Grey takes her clothes off in the film. Not very much, but she does. This is likely the reason many people end up watching the film. Why else cast a porn star? Other people who watched The Girlfriend Experience were curious about whether or not Grey could act. She does act in the film, although again, not very much. Between the nudity tourists on the one hand and the outsider-art tourists on the other, we can probably account for the film’s entire audience. Both camps got what they paid for. But both were thoroughly snookered.

Think about it. If you want to see Sasha Grey naked, why would you go to a mainstream movie? If you’re reading this, you have access to the internet, which means you have that power to see Sasha Grey naked AT ALL TIMES. Want to see her act? The internet can do that for you too. You can even see her act with her clothes on, if you’re willing to put in a bit more effort. The only reason to see The Girlfriend Experience in one of the typical mainstream cinema venues (i.e. a movie theater, a Netflix disc) is to glaze your voyeurism with a thin but expensive veneer of respectability. It just seems so much classier that way, right? Why, it’s almost exactly like paying a high-end prostitute to go out to dinner with you before you bang. Take that, audience.

And Haywire is probably going to be something similar. If you wanted to see Gina Carano hurt somebody, you could have watched that happen live ringside. But that’s not what you want, not if you’re like most of America. Rather, you want an action movie. Violence at a remove, and in a glossy package that you don’t have to feel weird about consuming. I’ll call it now:  Haywire will be too glossy and too removed. Critics will say that it’s all surface, no substance. They’ll praise the cinematography, but complain you never get a sense of who this character is beneath the surface. And that will be exactly what Soderbergh was going for.

So much for what these films say about their audience. Now let’s consider what they say about Soderbergh. Like I mentioned, he seems to have a particular affinity for non-actors. This is maybe an aesthetic choice:  the man loves his affectless line readings, I guess. But there also seems to be something borderline ideological about it. Why Grey and Carano, in particular? Why give star vehicles to a professional f___er and a professional fighter, in particular, and not a fireman or a fishmonger? And why both women? (It’s worth noting that Soderbergh’s next film, which is set in the world of male stripping, does not seem to feature any actual male strippers.) I suspect that at some level, Soderbergh is trying to distance himself from the re-creative, bodily side of filmmaking as much as he possibly can. An actor or actress is still a creative artist to the degree that they create the illusion that they are someone they actually aren’t. For Grey and Carano, in their first careers, that was never the case. Porn stars and cage fighters are professional bodies in a way that most performers are not — ballet is a better analogy for what they do, actually, than either acting or music. When a choreographer is inspired by a principal dancer, we say that the ballet was “created on” the dancer. Grey and Carano do not star in these films, rather, the films were created on them. Soderbergh needs them to be only bodies. They were hired not as actresses but as muses, as raw material on which the director could work his creative will, a will that is intellectual, artistically reputable, and in its own artsy way, kind of macho. And possibly kind of gross. The question, really, is whether Soderbergh gets this final level of the joke.

Another question is whether he bothered to fill Carano in on it. I’m only guessing, of course, but if I’m right, his artistic vision depends on making her look as vacant and affectless as possible. It’s not that I think he’s being mean or unfair to her, exactly. At the end of the day, she’s getting a starring vehicle. If all goes smoothly, it could be her ticket to a life of fame, fortune, and not-getting-punched-in-the-face that MMA could never offer her. If she does well, and the movie does well, she’s got it made. If she ends up coming across as vacant and affectless, well… first of all, that’s not even necessarily a deal breaker in today’s Hollywood, and second, if she turns out to be a bad actress that’s hardly Soderbergh’s fault. She might end up looking bad. But plenty of people would take that chance. They line up to take it every day.

If it goes badly, though, well… let’s hope she stays philosophical about it. Or else Soderbergh may find himself wishing that he’d stuck to screwing with porn stars.

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Am I talking about the Occupy Wall Street movement…

…or the plot of the Disney musical Newsies?

I’m not the first to point out the connections between Newsies and the Occupy Wall Street movement. As the stage adaptation prepares to occupy a Broadway theater in March 2012, media observers have pointed out the parallels and even asked the show’s producers if there’s anything to it, but they have shrugged it off as mere coincidence. They’re largely right to do so, since the musical has been in the works years before occupations and the 99% were part of the national discourse.

But Newsies has the odd distinction of being one of the few movies about large scale social justice protest movements set in New York City, and as such, it’s begging for people to look for the parallels between it and OWS. For the most part, those parallels break down once you get past the broad plot summary, but the differences between the strike as depicted in Newsies and the OWS movement can lead to some insights on both.

“Even though we ain’t got hats or badges / we’re a union just by saying so…”

Newsies is not ambiguous at all about its positive stance on labor unions. Early in the film, newsboy leader David Jacobs laments that his father was fired from his job after his injury because he had no union to protect his position. Later, as the newsboys make their final push against Joseph Pulizter, they enlist thousand of other young workers across the city to walk off their jobs in solidarity with them. Even though all those young workers may not have been unionized, or even organized in any sense of the word, their work stoppage was nothing short of an organized labor action, a strike, and as the film tells it, the strike eventually led to legislation that curtailed the abusive child labor practices of the day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dw9GJKTrqg

Occupy Wall Street, however, is not a labor movement or organization of workers in any sense of the word. The movement’s ambiguous, all-encompassing “99%” nature means that it’s not defined by a common occupation or opposition to a specific employer. Unions came to OWS after the movement had gained steam and were not part of its early organization or successes. And some within the movement view labor unions as part of an ineffectual “institutional left” that will ultimately harm more than hurt the movement’s progress.

So why does this matter? It’s a perfect illustration of how the role of the labor union in the United States has vastly changed in the 100 years between the events of Newsies and OWS. Or for that matter, the twenty years between the release of Newsies and OWS. Unions, once the standard bearers of progressive movements and staples of American middle class life, have seen their membership roles steadily decline since their peaks in the 1950′s. More importantly, their members are often vilified as the unfireable, overpaid, unproductive teachers, factory workers, and civil servants who are preventing our nation from remaining competitive with India and China.

In other words, the Newsies story of labor unions representing the 99% and triumphing over the 1% is not likely to have resonance with the Occupy Wall Street movement and its members, most of whom have probably never been in a union in their lives and hardly see themselves as “striking” against anyone.

“The newsies were a ragged army, without a leader. Until one day, that all changed.”

“Leader” being the operative word in the above quote from the beginning of Newsies. Both the film and historical accounts of the 1899 newsboys strike place great importance on the union’s leader. In the movie, Jack Kelly is clearly the catalyst for action and the unifier of an otherwise un-unifiable group. And he’s also the target of Joseph Pulitzer, who tries to buy out Jack and demoralize the movement with the site of the co-opted leader-turned-shill.

OWS on the other hand, is famous for its consensus-based decision making and its lack of public leadership. Behind the scenes, the movement has an identifiable “cadre of prime movers,” but publicly, no single person goes on the talk show circuit representing OWS. More importantly, no single person meets with Barack Obama, union leaders, Jay-Z, or any of the parade of people accused of trying to co-opt OWS to serve their own purposes.

Pulitzer has no Jack to buy off. Or, as Jesse Jackson more pointedly observed, “there’s nobody to assassinate.”

“Dreams come true / Yes they do, in Santa Fe”

As Belinkie pointed out in a previous article on this site, “Santa Fe” is Jack’s expression of an unrealistic fantasy, a western dream-land that promises prosperity and an escape from the gritty New York life. But behind that fantasy was the reality that America at the turn of the century still had a undeveloped frontier that offered considerable commercial opportunity for anybody willing to move there and tame the wilderness.

This backup plan looms over Jack throughout the movie. Even after he leads the striking newsboys to victory over Pulitzer, he still has Santa Fe as an option, and he strongly considers it before staying New York to get the girl and…keep selling newspapers at pittance wages.

Fast forward to the 21st century. The frontier, the undeveloped land of future prosperity, is no longer in America–it’s in the aforementioned “emerging markets” of India and China. And even to the extent that freedom of movement around America still offers greater exposure to economic opportunity, that too is limited due to the mortgage crisis that has people stuck in homes they can’t sell. In 2010, domestic migration in the United States had dropped to the lowest level since 1947, the first year that the government tracked these rates.

The America of OWS doesn’t have a Santa Fe escape valve. OWS is trapped within the 1%-controlled fishbowl of the United States, and with nowhere else to go, it chooses to agitate for change here.

Conclusion

I highly doubt that the “cadre of prime movers” of the Occupy Wall Street movement are losing sleep searching for the right movies to inspire their cause. And even though it’s not out of bounds for social movements to take their cues from pop culture (e.g., Uncle Tom’s Cabin), I doubt that a Broadway musical that’s based on a 20 year old movie would have much influencing power over OWS, even if their themes were more closely aligned.

But  Newsies is still a small and, dare I say, important part of our collective imagination around social change movements, and probably one of the most popular movie depictions of protest movements in New York City. Given this, and the aforementioned similarities with OWS, it has a valid place in the conversation around OWS, even if the insight it provides on OWS is more the result of its differences with OWS than its similarities.

Although there’s one lesson that I think OWS can draw from Newsies: they should replace the drumming with toe-tapping Disney tunes and choreographed dancing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPud_H94_i4

Now that’s what I call entertainment for the 99%.

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But film as an art form is just over a century old and is just now figuring out its tools. Too many movies rely on the same conventions of the stage – dialogue, emotion, etc. While these are all fine to watch, they don’t take advantage of the unique aspects of film as a medium. The unique strength of film is the camera and microphone. The director forces us to look at the things she wants us to look at for as long as she wants us to look at them. We hear what she wants us to hear, in the sequence she wants us to hear it. Consider the match cut, or the sound cue that interrupts one scene to introduce us to another: two devices that wouldn’t work anywhere but on a screen.

Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a masterclass in the essential elements of film. While it suffers a little from hustling through a deep, ponderous story – it’s one of the few movies I’ve seen in the last year that could benefit from an extra twenty minutes – those moments that it does share with us are jewels. Alfredson succeeds here because he relies on a motif that can only shine in cinema: the gaze.

TTSS is notionally a spy movie, but it challenges our traditional notions of the genre. There are no firefights: a gun is fired only four times in the movie, twice in one scene. There are no martial arts setpieces: only one character throws a punch, and that against a defenseless man. There are no car chases, no bombs defused and most of the seductions happen off camera.

The primary action of TTSS is the gaze.

George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is the master of the gaze. Consider the scene where he debriefs Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy), a burned spy on the run from Istanbul. Tarr fidgets with nervous energy, relieved to tell his story and simultaneously anxious about the pressure he’s under. Smiley, on the other hand, sits perfectly still with his hands folded across his stomach. He drops his gaze upon Tarr and leaves it, like a crushing weight, until he’s squeezed every drop of intelligence out of the man.

This befits Smiley’s reputation as a master interrogator. He’s depicted in the novel, and in the movie, as an expert in ferreting out intelligence. He knows well that adage of old salespeople and negotiators: once the offer is made, the next person to talk loses. The documentarian Errol Morris has found similar things, in the course of making The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War and other movies: give your subject an opening, then shut up, and they’ll fill the silence with the sound of their own voice.

I’ll give you the best example I can think of for why I like my method. [During] my interview with Emily Miller, one of the wacko eyewitnesses in The Thin Blue Line, she volunteered that she had failed to pick out Randall Adams in a police lineup. It wasn’t me saying to her, “Emily Miller, how come you failed to pick out Randall Adams in a police lineup?” Why? Because I didn’t know she failed to do it, because part of the trial record said she had successfully picked him out. When I heard this, not in response to some adversarial question, just her telling me her story, I asked her, “How did you know you failed to pick out Randall Adams?” She said, “I know because the policeman sitting next to me told me I had picked out the wrong person and pointed out the right person so I wouldn’t make that mistake again.”

- Errol Morris, Pitch Magazine

Smiley’s gaze is such an essential aspect of his character that he’s never separate from it, or from the tools that enable it, particularly his bifocals. He almost never takes them off. I’m tempted to say never, but I don’t have the movie in front of me. In any case, there are two times he keeps them on that call attention to them. One is whenever he goes swimming, an image we return to more than once throughout the film. Smiley bobs along, keeping his head above the water in a mincing breaststroke, swimming through a heated public pond with his glasses on. As anyone who’s worn glasses can tell you, this is rather unusual behavior.

The second time is throughout the entire movie and takes a bit of explanation. One of the most famous mannerisms of George Smiley, the fictional character, is cleaning his glasses with the end of his tie. It’s a mild habit, but it’s also a disarming maneuver that puts his subjects at ease: nothing’s more harmless than a man cleaning his glasses. He does this several times throughout the novel TTSS. When filming the BBC miniseries adaptation in 1979, Alec Guinness (who played Smiley) called le Carre’s attention to the fact that Smiley would have to fish his tie out of his vest in order to pull this stunt off. le Carre then integrated this detail into the final Smiley novel, Smiley’s People.

Oldman as Smiley never does this. Again, I’m going off of my limited human recollection here, but I was deliberately looking for the affectation throughout the movie and don’t remember it. And Oldman reviewed the book religiously throughout the production process, by his own account, so the gesture wouldn’t have been lost on him. But he chose not to use it.

In fact, I can only recall one point when we see Smiley with his glasses off: when he wakes up, as if from a disorienting dream, very early in the film. His bifocals lie on the covers next to him (as with swimming, the kind of behavior that most glasses wearers avoid). He is temporarily blind. He is just about to be brought back into the Circus, in the most secret capacity, to see what he has missed all these years.

Throughout the movie, we follow Smiley’s gaze as he uncovers the identity of the traitor at the top of the Circus. We see scenes that give us glimpses of character, but we never see the truth of them until Smiley sees them. For instance, the opening scene is the late night visit between Jim Prideaux and Control in which Prideaux is dispatched to Czechoslovakia. We see some of it – enough to establish the intensity of Control, the confusion of Prideaux – but not all of it. We don’t see Control giving codenames to his circle of advisors until later: after Smiley has found the chess pieces, after Smiley has interviewed Prideaux, after more of the puzzle has been uncovered. We are notionally an omnisicent audience, but our gaze is Smiley’s gaze.

We don’t spend the entire movie with Smiley, of course, but even the scenes from other perspectives are defined by their claustrophobic perspective. Consider the recurring image of a manila folder placed in a secure elevator. It rises through the dull levels of the Circus, the same way Guillam passes from the duty officer’s desk to the briefing rooms on his way to work. It is “Witchcraft,” the intelligence product of source Merlin. Smiley’s charge is to find which member of the Circus is false, but in doing so, he must also uncover whether Witchcraft is false. Information can be a traitor or a double-agent, just as a person can, and so information can be a character. The manila folder is a character, and we get to see the world from its perspective more than once.

Of course, as telling as what we do see are the two crucial elements we don’t see, the permanent blind spots in Smiley’s vision: Karla and Ann. Karla is Smiley’s nemesis, his opposite number in the KGB, a spymaster of legendary ruthlessness and ingenuity. Other people in the movie see him – Smiley interviewed him once; Prideaux was interrogated by him – but we, the audience, can’t. Ann is George Smiley’s wife and his Achilles heel. Her betrayals (we are led to believe there have been more than one) catch the master of intelligence completely off guard. She appears on camera more than once, but never in full focus and always with her face obscured. But she is the only person capable of arousing some genuine emotional response in Smiley – usually shock.

Why does gaze matter so much? Because it’s one of the few motifs that works in film better than in any other art form. In a novel, you can describe a protagonist looking at a character, but you can’t convey the gaze as well as you can in a movie. In a painting or a photograph, you can force the audience’s perspective in a particular direction, but you can’t convey the act of gazing as well as you can the content. Only film, with the elements of shot length, focal length, editing and perspective, can turn the gaze into an element of such weight.

The amazing thing about the conspiracy at the heart of TTSS is that it’s not strongly defended. No one needs to dig through ancient tombs or shoot at enemy agents to get it. It’s protected by what Bruce Schneier would call “security through obscurity” – hiding something but putting no barricades in front of it. All it takes is one Russian name, one tampered logbook, and asking the right questions of the right people. All it takes is turning one’s gaze to the right subject and holding it there for as long as you have to.

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‘Twas a long time ago, though not as long as it seems,
in a year we refer to as 1993.
But the story that you are about to be told
has been kept locked away since that time of old …

Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas has been a family favourite for the period between October and December for nearly two decades. The story of Jack, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, and his attempt to commandeer control of Christmas from Santa Claus, the jolly ruler of Christmas Town, has worked its way into the hearts of children and adults alike. The franchise has become a marketing juggernaut, selling apparel, mugs, keychains, and every other product imaginable onto which characters’ faces might be plastered. The story of the film seems straightforward enough: Jack, tired of the monotony of Halloween, stumbles across the existence of Christmas. Jack arranges for “Sandy Claws,” as he refers to Santa, to be kidnapped so that he might take over the holiday for a year. “Consider this a vacation Sandy, a reward. It’s your turn to take it easy,” Jack explains to a protesting Mr. Claws. As a squirming Sandy is dragged away, it is clear that he is not at all pleased with the hijacking of his holiday – or is he? As we will soon uncover, Sandy Claws was not only complacent in his own kidnapping, but knew it was coming before it even occurred.

As the Coots/Gillespie Christmas standard “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town” tells us, Santa “knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you’re awake.” In order to achieve his momentous task of delivering presents to all of the world’s good children in a single evening with any sort of accuracy, Santa needs to have almost godlike omniscience into the activities of the people of Earth. How else would he be able to know which children deserve gifts come Christmas morning? If one accepts the omniscient Santa argument, it must follow that Mr. Claws has full knowledge of Jack’s plan ages before he is kidnapped. Jack certainly makes no attempt to hide his efforts, even replacing the “Days To Halloween” counter in the centre of Halloween Town with one labeled “Days To Christmas.” Sandy has been at the job of “making Christmas,” as Jack puts it, for a long time. Sandy’s modern aspect dates to at least the early 1800s, which means he’s been at it for about two hundred years without a break. Is it so difficult to imagine, then, that when offered the chance at a vacation by another holiday professional such as himself, he would spring at the opportunity?

'Ah, Halloween's finest trick-or-treaters.'

Some might argue that while Sandy Claws does indeed possess the all-knowing powers which are ascribed to him above, his pansophy only applies to the activities of children, and not to those of adults such as Jack Skellington. At this point it is important to examine who exactly Jack sends to kidnap Sandy Claws. Apart from a young corpse boy, Lock, Shock and Barrel are the only children seen to live in Halloween Town. They are the only citizens known to engage in uniquely childlike activities, being the town’s trick-or-treaters. These three are certainly on Sandy’s “naughty” list, as their primary employer is the film’s villain, Oogie Boogie. The moment Jack instructs them to kidnap Christmas Town’s jolly patron, the proverbial cat is let out of the bag. Sandy knows exactly what their plans are, and the fact that these three children were on their way to his home. Indeed, the first time Sandy appears on-screen, he is in the process of double-checking his naughty/nice list, commenting on how there are barely any naughty children this year. Obviously those names that are naughty will stand out even more due to their rarity.

With the information in his possession, Sandy is ready for Lock, Shock and Barrel’s visit. The movie displays them jumping towards him with a large sack, and a cut to black. The next time we see them, they are returning to Halloween Town with Sandy in tow, trapped within the bag. Let us compare, for a moment, the relative sizes of these characters. The trick-or-treaters are diminutive, while Sandy is large both in relative height and girth. Furthermore, Mrs. Claws has just been shown to be in the next room, preparing food for Sandy’s Christmas flight. Surely, she would have heard the scuffle if there had been any true resistance from her husband. The only way that Lock, Shock and Barrel are able to achieve their feat is if Sandy allows them to do so.

When, at the climax of the film, Jack successfully defeats Oogie Boogie and rescues Sandy Claws from his clutches, Sandy puts on a large show of being angry. He fumes about how nothing in Halloween Town makes sense, and how it is a good thing that he’s Santa Claus, because he’s the only one with the ability to set things right. However, he is not angry about being kidnapped. If he is upset at all, more about the disruption of his vacation due to Jack’s poor management of Christmas. His tantrum is revealed to be a façade when, a few minutes later, he flies over Halloween Town, giving it the gift of its first-ever snowfall. Sandy recognizes that despite Jack’s failure to provide him with a restful experience, the attempt was pure, and rewards the Pumpkin King’s efforts.

The final and perhaps strongest piece of evidence comes from the epilogue. The scene, while cut from the film, was included on both the original soundtrack issued by Disney and the 2008 album “Nightmare Revisited,” where Disney collaborated with various popular artists to produce a 15th Anniversary cover album. The closing, as with the opening, is a poem narrated by Sandy Claws, and provides one last look at Jack and Sandy many years after the film’s events. The poem reads as follows:

And finally, everything worked out just fine.
Christmas was saved, though there wasn’t much time.
But after that night, things were never the same–
Each holiday now knew the other one’s name.
And though that one Christmas things got out of hand,
I’m still rather fond of that skeleton man.
So, many years later I thought I’d drop in,
And there was old Jack still looking quite thin,
With four or five skeleton children at hand
Playing strange little tunes in their xylophone band.
And I asked old Jack, “Do you remember the night
When the sky was so dark and the moon shone so bright?
When a million small children pretending to sleep
Nearly didn’t have Christmas at all, so to speak?
And would, if you could, turn that mighty clock back,
To that long, fateful night. Now, think carefully, Jack.
Would you do the whole thing all over again,
Knowing what you know now, knowing what you knew then?”
And he smiled, like the old pumpkin king that I knew,
Then turned and asked softly of me, “Wouldn’t you?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udDDa1aAw_o

Here we see that despite the passage of time, and the fact that their actual contact with one another in the film was exceedingly brief, Jack and Sandy have remained friends, to the point where if they were given the opportunity, they would repeat the events of the film again.

With the evidence lined up as it is, there is almost no other conclusion that can be drawn save that Sandy Claws, in an attempt to take a much-needed vacation from the stress and effort required to manage a holiday as large as Christmas, was a willing participant in his own abduction. He slyly used his foreknowledge of Jack’s plans to escape his duties: he could never take a break on his own, but under the guise of a kidnapping, he could easily skip off for a bit. Read this way, the film becomes a web of deceit and manipulation, where Sandy Claws, the ultimate puppet master, pulls every character’s strings.

Justin Bortnick is a bumbling but good-natured literature-type currently stationed in the American northeast. He spends most of his time lost inside of dusty tomes or writing short creative works. If you find yourself simpatico with his particular brand of weird, you can follow him on Tumblr or Twitter.

[What do you think, Overthinkers? Was Santa Claus shirking his elven duty to the children of the world? Or was he suffering from 'Stockholm Syndrome' in his quick forgiveness of Jack? Sound off in the comments! - Ed.]

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Ghostbusters

Consider the opening scene, set in the New York Public Library. If you saw that on its own, you would have no idea you were watching a comedy. The menace builds slowly as books float through the air when her back is turned. Finally, she sees the index cards. She flees just as they begin to flurry down, the drawers springing open inches behind her. The camera moves with her as she runs desperately through the stacks. She turns the corner, gets hit with a blinding light, screams in horror, and… cue the logo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MT2B-OtrmM

The scene isn’t funny at all. But by capping it with the logo and the jingle, the whole thing is reframed as a commercial. A moment of nail-biting suspense becomes a pitch: “Who ya gonna call?” That’s what the Ghostbusters do—they take horrifying situations and turn them into a profitable small business.

Of course, this is not just the logo of the movie, it’s the logo of the business in the movie. It’s one of the few diagetic logos I can think of. (“Diagesis,” for those of you who didn’t take Intro to Film Studies, refers to something within the world of the movie. When John Cussack holds up a boombox in Say Anything, Peter Gabriel is diagetic.) The only other diagetic movie logo I can think of is Jurassic Park. The logo is slapped on all the trucks at Richard Attenborough’s dino resort. So both these logos are doing more than selling the movie; they are attempts by the characters to sell us something they probably shouldn’t be selling us. In other words, they’re both dangerous lies.

The ghosts in Ghostbusters are a world away from the Casperish cartoon we see in that red circle. They are scary things that can potentially destroy the world, and it’s not entirely clear whether our heroes can stop them. When they are summoned to the Sedgewick Hotel, the Ghostbusters try and act like this is a routine walk in the park. In fact, they nearly destroy the place and light a cleaning woman on fire. “Why worry?” says Ray. “Each one of us is carrying an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back.” The whole thing is insane, and they know it, and the cutesy logo is overcompensating. Similarly, the Jurassic Park logo presents the T-Rex as a skeleton, not as an animal with instincts and volition. It encourages us to think of the Park’s dinosaurs as exhibits in a fancy museum. But the actual dinosaurs are incredibly fast and powerful, and refuse to behave like exhibits. Those sharp teeth on the logo become horrible premonitions. So while in Ghostbusters, the boys eventually live up to the promise of their logo, in Jurassic Park it becomes a ironic mark of hubris.

The Ghostbusters logo tells you about the movie and about the characters who supposedly created it. It’s an incredibly clever symbol. I’m sorry to say, however, that the Ghostbusters 2 logo is a complete mess. It’s no longer diagetic–instead, it’s a parody of the logo of a fictional business, which is a lot of abstraction for a comedy. And why is the ghost happy? Hasn’t he been busted? Then again, it looks like he’s breaking out of the circle, with one foot already on the ground. Is that the movie’s way of building the stakes–presenting us with a ghost who is fighting back against his own busting? In any case, this ghost still looks harmless, even friendly, so I can’t say I’m worried about whether the red circle can hold it. Honestly, I’m really not sure what we’re supposed to learn from this logo, besides that it’s the second Ghostbusters movie. At least that much is clear. From the two fingers.

If I were redesigning the Ghostbusters 2 logo, I’d keep the scared/surprised-looking ghost from the first movie with one of these variations:

1. Put a second crossbar on the circle, sloping the other way, so there’s a big X over the ghost.
2. Put two crossbars running straight up and down, like bars on a jail cell. The ghost can be clinging to them pitifully.
3. Keep the same solo crossbar, but this time the ghost has two heads.

In all three of these cases, you lose the diagetic aspect of the logo (the logo the Ghostbusters actually use doesn’t change between movies). But you’d at least keep the messaging of the logo consistent, while tweaking it to give the second film its own visual identity. If they ever do Ghostbusters 3, hopefully they’ll wipe the smile right off that thing’s face. Busting makes me feel good. Not ghosts.

UPDATE, 11:30 am: So as Erik points out in the comments, I made an error in the previous paragraph. The Ghostbuster 2 logo DOES appear diagetically, as a sort of triumphant “we’re back” logo. But this just confuses me more. The Ghostbusters are equating THEMSELVES with the ghost in the logo! You know what this reminds me of? All those bbq restaurants that have smiling pigs or cows out front. It’s always seemed weird and morbid to me. I mean, an exterminator would never have a friendly smiling rat on its truck. Maybe a malevolent, leering rat, but not a cutesy one.

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[T]he worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object… the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own.”

Karl Marx, “Estranged Labor,”
Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844

This week, recent hit movie The Muppets faced pointed accusations of left-wing anti-corporate child brainwashing on FOX News for its villainous depiction of oil baron and antagonist Tex Richman (played by a gloriously snarling, hilarious Chris Cooper).

According to Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center (a pro-free-market media analysis organization that claims 501c(3) tax exempt status as an educational non-profit), Hollywood has been indoctrinating children for years in left-wing anti-corporatism. In his report on The Muppets, Gainor lists such child-friendly fare as Syriana, There Will be Blood, The Day After Tomorrow and The Matrix alongside Captain Planet and the Planeteers and Nickelodeon’s environmental community service initiative, The Big Green Help (his list, not mine), as examples of Hollywood’s mission to brainwash children into disregarding the social good performed by the oil industry.

This is ridiculous, of course. The Muppets are not leftists by any contemporary definition of the word. The Muppets is not about the oil industry, and There Will Be Blood should not be shown to children.

No, the Muppets are philosophical Marxists, who look past the trivial disagreements among our current ruling classes and institutions to the enduring spirit of humanity, which, left free of exploitation, might transcend the alienation it experiences in relation to its own work in modern society.

Of course, it is not so much a political message as a philosophical message, and you do not have to come to the same conclusions Marx does about the necessary action in the present day in order to recognize his insights, especially relating to how work changes people and the challenges it creates for us as human beings.

The Muppets addresses alienation in many forms: alienation of the individual from society, alienation of the subjective self from the expected and understood role of the individual, alienation of the self from the other, alienation of the self from knowledge of itself, and Gonzo, to name a few. But it is also concerned with economic alienation – the alienation of the worker from the product of his or her work, and the effect that has on the worker’s sense of self and social relationships.

Are you a man, or are you a Muppet? Who are the Muppets, and who are the Muppet masters? Rise up, you have nothing to lose but that guy’s hand up your AFTER THE JUMP –

The Pundits, the Dreamers and Me

Andrea Tanteros, who hosts The Five, the show that replaced The Glenn Beck Show on FOX News, decried in The Muppets what she sees as inappropriate and growing influence of the political left on the young, through the Jim Henson Studios and The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS):

It is brainwashing in its most obvious form. I just wish liberals would leave little kids alone. Why does there have to be some sort of political message? I thought Sesame Street is supposed to be about sharing and being nice to people, but over the years, they’ve gotten more liberal.”

Andrea Tanteros

"Witch hunt! WIIIITCH HUUUNT!!!" - Animal, Communist

There are a whole bunch of reasons to take issue with this reading of the story (and I’m focusing here on the literary and philosophical interpretation of the piece, because this is not a politics site) — most obviously, the Muppets in The Muppets are entrepreneurs running a small business, and they’re hardly political leftists. Kermit lives in a mansion bought with the money he made from the Muppet shows and movies of the 70s-90s. Gonzo is the CEO of a plumbing corporation. Piggy is the plus-size editor for French Vogue. Kermit and Piggy even regret their failed marriage and wish they had taken their shot at a traditional family. Fozzie sells his skills freelance and works at a casino. The primary reason The Muppet Show is brought back to the stage and screen in the movie is to make a profit, and their goal in the film is to raise enough money to buy back the studio and the land on it in line with an existing business contract that gives them the explicit opportunity to do so. Hardly enough to write their ticket to McCarthyville.

Yes, the telethon is a charitable endeavor, but Kermit provides value to his customers, and he makes his case straight-faced to network execs, not in the grimy basement publishing rooms of Pravda. The movie shows the value of hard work, effective teams, putting the right talent in the right roles, and experienced, prudent, balanced management that knows when to take risks and when to resist reinventing what already works. You could probably make yourself a lot of cynical money writing It’s Not Easy Being Team: The Rainbow Connection in Start-Ups. In The Muppets, when the revolution shows up, it comes with a check to pay its mortgage.

Meanwhile, Tex Richman’s opposition to the Muppets is hardly market-driven. He seeks to manipulate the legal system, defrauding senior citizens, making false promises in his business deals, and when the competitiveness and value of the Muppet Show is going to win out, he resorts to underhanded tactics, violence, and destruction of private property to maintain his hegemony. He’s hardly a model business leader, and he’s very against market competition. So it’s pretty obvious the FOX report was blustery, empty sensationalism, which is fine. If I thought TV news were ever worth watching, I would not have seen The Chronicles of Riddick nearly as many times as I have (after all, they new episodes every night, and whole channels that play news all day). I didn’t come here to diss FOX News, and I certainly didn’t come here to bash political conservatives.

But I did come to correct Andrea Tanteros on one thing, The Muppets sure aren’t becoming more liberal. While the Muppets have chased market solutions to their financial woes since a decade before I was born, at the heart of their characterizations and stories has always been the question of what this work does to who we are — to our characters and to our spirits. Like many works of philosophy and most Muppet stories that are any good, The Muppets is about alienation: specifically, the sort of alienation you endure when you work to somebody else’s profit rather than your own.

The Muppets have always addressed the tension between the American Dream and the damage it does, and how people can transcend the alienation they face as workers in a capitalist society through a combination of being true to themselves and being open and generous to others. In Marx’s writing, these ideas are deeply involved with one another.

The Species-being

It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.

Similarly, in degrading spontaneous, free activity to a means, estranged labor makes man’s species-life a means to his physical existence.”

Karl Marx, “Estranged Labor,”
Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844

Okay, okay, okay, that’s a little tough to grasp. Let’s use a better formulation of it, from The Muppets Take Manhattan.

Peoples is Peoples

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQgfgB-vgT0

This was way back in 1984, when The Muppets, trying to pursue the American Dream by taking their musical, Manhattan Melodies to Broadway, found themselves broke and starving. Kermit asked Pete the diner owner if he could get food for his friends, despite being broke, offering to work it off. Pete responds with a poetic if incoherent statement on the species-being of humanity and the call to push past the restrictions private property and wage conventions place on our notions of ourselves and each other — to not let the things that the capitalist system makes us do to survive take away our deeper sense for the value and recognition we find in each other.

(So much for getting more liberal recently. This was almost 30 years ago. Sheesh.)

It isn’t entirely fair for me to call the Muppets Marxist — it is more that they recognize and create art from difficulties Marx proposed, while instead turning to friendship, compassion and generosity within a capitalist system to soften and attempt to transcend alienation, rather than destroying the system that puts it in place. Imagine a Muppets Take Manhattan where Pete denies Kermit’s request for food, so the Muppets riot, trashing the diner,  carrying off Jennie, and force-feeding poor Pete a Greek omelet, 86 feta, laced with cyanide, before disemboweling and shooting him and all that Rasputin nonsense.

The Muppets are not Marxist-Leninist. The point is to recognize the alienating effects of the capitalist system, to portray reflect them empathetically to connect with the audience, and to move through them through self-ownership, self-actualization and species-actualization that comes from putting on The Muppet Show and related activities.

They are more Promethean figures, looking to offer post-capitalist self-actualization to people who continue to live in a capitalist world.

Moving Right Along.

Kermit the Frog and his fellow Muppet Show performers are usually economic underdogs – scrappy post-Vaudeville journeymen throwing together shows on shoestring budgets while scrambling with shoddy equipment and inadequate staffing, always one blown fuse away from giving everyone their money back. Much of the humor of The Muppet Show and the movie The Muppets, as well as of the Muppets in general, comes from how their essential nature shows through their difficulty. They lack resources and skills that might tend to add value to commercial artistic performances, but having them would subtract (and in the case of newer, shinier post-Elmo Sesame Street, does subtract) from their authenticity and aesthetic value.

This is because the Muppets are not, or at least strive not to be, commodified entertainment. They are difficult, intellectual and very meta, like the similarly Marxist-influenced (but un-Muppetish in other ways) Epic Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. Their relationships and love stories are rarely strictly sentimental and are often mature and bittersweet. The Muppet Show is not a variety show, it is a backstage show about putting on a variety show — you do not get the finished product of the labor of the Muppets as your entertainment to consume — you get a chance to connect with them and move past your own alienation by connecting with them.

The Muppets tend to break up and go into the regular workforce in Muppet movies and shows (as they do in The Muppets), only to discover that living their lives on their own as part of everyday society doesn’t give them the same sort of authentic experience and senses of community that they bring out of each other when they do their own kind of work. This is the Marxist alienation and estrangement of labor that metastasizes and grows to become profound personal alienation and the reduction of the species-self as merely a means in the labor system.

We don’t enjoy the Muppets by enjoying what they perform for us, we enjoy them by sharing their experiences.

So, what does this the end of alienation look like? Well, it is both stridently individualistic and compassionate and collectivist – a lot like folksy America. A lot like a road trip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMR5JVo21wQ

You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Fart Shoes

Wocka Wocka Wocka.

Let’s follow this idea one step further — what is a Muppetish performative act, how is it Marxist-influenced, and how is it different from sentimental or commodified performance art? Our example will be Fozzie Bear’s signature utterance, “Wocka Wocka Wocka” (I always preferred Wakka Wakka, but this is how the Muppet Wiki spells it).

Wakka Wakka Wakka.

In speech act theory, utterances are explained in terms of three levels of meaning:

• The “locutionary” level, which is how they are produced and their definitions, syntax and semantics by their most basic, functional interpretations.
• The “illocutionary” level, which is what the statement ostensibly or intentionally means, or what it does.
• The “perlocutionary” level, which is their effect, whether it is intended or not.

Let’s do a warmup:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz_EnEx9m5g

Iceman tells Maverick “You can be my wingman any time,” and Maverick responds, “Bullshit, you can be mine.”

• Maverick’s locutionary act is the meanings of the word bullshit, and the syntax of how Maverick identifies Iceman and the status of Iceman as his wingman rather than the other way around.
• Maverick’s illocutionary act is the offer of wingmanship, and also an offer of friendship and mutual respect with maintained rivalry.
• Maverick’s perlocutionary act is an acknowledgement and gratification of building homoerotic tension for the two characters and the audience — not by way of sex acts, but by way of growing and exploring themselves through each other.

Get it? Got it? Good.

In this song from The Muppets, “Pictures in my Head”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PJ7NlcdIp4

Consider this joke from Fozzie (who in the song is appearing in a picture frame as Kermit has a montage of memories of his distant friends).

I didn’t do it, I’ve been framed! Wocka Wocka Wocka!”

Fozzie Bear

“Estranged Labor,” Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844 (Wocka Wocka Wocka)

Okay, in the actual joke, not the citation, how does “Wocka Wocka Wocka” function in speech act theory?

• As a locutionary act, Fozzie is uttering an onomatopoetic laugh.
• As an ilocutionary act, Fozzie is  prompting the audience to laugh at his joke.
• As a perlocutionary act, Fozzie is prompting the audience to share laughter with him on the merits of the shared experience of his making the joke.

The one scene in The Muppets that works the least for me is when Jack Black is tied up and Fozzie is telling jokes. The audience doesn’t laugh at Fozzie’s jokes, but they laugh at Jack Black begging them to call the police. They think he thinks the jokes are bad, but really he has been kidnapped.

I don’t like the scene because the point with Fozzie’s jokes was never just that they were bad. They aren’t funny because they are bad. Lots of people tell bad jokes, and they’re not funny.

What’s funny about Fozzie’s jokes is how much Fozzie enjoys telling them. Fozzie loves the jokes he tells, not necessarily on their merits, but because of his simple joy in the act of telling. We as an audience laugh at “Wocka Wocka Wocka” because he is tipping his hand to us that he is just having a blast doing what he is doing — that he loves the feeling of telling corny jokes to people and is a consummate professional at it. We have all felt and recognized the various aspects of that feeling at times — loving to do something despite being terrible at it, maybe even a little bit because we are terrible at it, but yearning more than anything not quite to be good at it, but to find in it a way to connect with others — to find recognition and mutual identification. To traverse our own alienation.

Fozzie owns his work. Oh, he performs it for Kermit, sure, and Kermit makes more money than Fozzie does, as we see in The Muppets when Kermit lives in a mansion and Fozzie lives on a back porch on a Reno alley exposed to the elements. But Fozzie does not feel estranged from the product of his labor, because it is so authentic to him, and it connects him both with himself and with other people.

Marxism may have problems with people having bosses, but Kermit is a boss who gives people opportunities to do things that are authentic to them — in that way he corrects one of the fundamental flaws in 19th century management that led Marx to deem it a lost cause. Add that, a little health insurance, some vacation, a decent night’s sleep, and suddenly the revolution isn’t looking so likely after all.

The Muppet Name

The fact of the story that ties is all up for me is how the Muppet name and intellectual property, even the Muppets’ own likenesses, are bound up in the contract with their ownership of their studio — which represents their ability to work authentically, without feeling alienated from themselves or humanity (obviously they are not human, but “peoples is peoples” as Pete would say). Whenever they go off to work somewhere else, they end up alienated, when they are back at The Muppet Show, they are themselves, and they feel better and more whole. Lose that self-ownership, and the work becomes this alien thing to them — they don’t even recognize themselves.

This is set up in the story against the existential crises of Walter and Gary, which are more personal and less economic, but rhyme somewhat with the problems the Muppets go through in the movie.

And why teach this to children? Because children feel profound alienation and need for belonging. It is part of their social and intellectual development. That is why kids respond to the Muppets, not because of politics. If the political left were so good at its job that it could create things as awesome as the Muppets for strictly political purposes, they would probably be doing quite a bit better in a whole lot of ways right now. But again, that is all beside the point.

Marx believed the only way to eventually break this cycle was for the proletariat to seize the means of production and abolish private property, which by necessity brought about this alienation. The Muppets had a different plan for how to go about it — it had something to do with playing music and lighting lights…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxiu_Ri0saw

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