Receptacle Series
Repulsion - Internality Complex
A young woman, Carole, is left home alone when her sister goes on holiday to face personal inner turmoil, realised.
This is an undeniable classic. Whether you want to call it a horror film or not, it has one of the eeriest atmospheres, some of the strongest sense of direction, pacing and surreal meaning in all of cinema. To get into this meaning, it's easiest to follow along with the narrative as this film is essentially a culmination of events and feelings that cause Carole to break down entirely. In other words, we, like the film, will build up to a climactic idea of why Carole is the way she is. This of course means SPOILERS. If you haven't seen this film, what's wrong with you? Go see it. If you have, well, let's get going. So, we'll start as the film does, with the beginning. The film opens with drums reminiscent of an old movie monster movie, something like King Kong, a simple BOM-BOM, BOM-BOM. This is layered over the crucial image of...
... Carole's eye. This isn't just a haunting image, but the key visual metaphor of the movie. This is all about bodies as a medium between which the outside world interacts with the inner one. Most poignantly, this is a film about how what Carole sees being irrevocably controlled and contorted by memory. With the added monster movie-esque sound track over this metaphor it's clear that something ominous lies within her, that something is going to break out. But, with a pull away, we realise that Carole is at work, and that she's a beautician. This is very interesting for quite a few reasons. Firstly, beauty is all about judgement, about looking at something that's probably imperfect and then trying to fix it. What this means is that Carole wipes mush and slathers paint on old people all day. This job seems to suite Carole as she's clearly very analytical. We later on find out that she has some form of OCD, OCPD or hypochondria. To be fixated with things being 'perfect' in this regard would allow her to fix things, paint nails, push back cuticles, present someone as she'd like to see them as a beautician. This would be a great job, if Carole didn't detest imperfections such as cracks (a very important image we'll come back to later). All this means that she gets to soothe her OCD, but must endure a hypochondriac's nightmare of being around uncleanliness and people. The most important thing about Carole's work though are the people. Most descriptions of this film will describe Carole as androphobic which means she's afraid of men. This is true to a certain extent, but doesn't make complete sense. She's repelled by men as the title suggests, but still has a muted fascination or attraction. This means that being in the beauty parlor all day ensure that she's constantly around women, so she doesn't have to endure the stress of being around men. However, there's a but. And this 'but' is that she makes herself and others beautiful, but that inevitably draws the attention of men. This is her opening and most enduring conflict. It's the image of the eye and the implimence of her work place. She walks a thin line between comfort, discomfort and horror with her convoluted relationship with men and cleanliness. This keeps her in a place that allows her to make the unclean and unkempt better and keeps her away from men, but only momentarily. It's this conflict that stagnates Carole's life. This is why she's often in a trance around others. She's both physically and mentally stuck between the outside world and internal one. Her body and mind seem to be working against her.
It's taking these images at hand that we can move on to a key idea of the film: food. Food is quite simply a tangible object that traverses the distance between the outside and inside worlds of a person (literally). The major importance of food though is that it's a sensory extreme in the opposite direction to eye sight. Taste is the last sensory barrier between you and your environment. You can hear and see things coming from miles away. You can smell things from quite the distance too. These are peripheral senses and so primary, but not really personal. If we stay with smell we can see why. The closer things get, the stronger their smell becomes. This is why it's an important social cue. If you stink, people will keep their distance. But, if you smell nice, you draw people in. Now, with the jump to touch things get even more personal. There are extremely strict social rules for touching. You may shake someone's hand, possibly hug them, possibly kiss them on the cheek if you're not well acquainted, but are meeting (say for the first time). Other than that, physical contact is quite rare between strangers in most places. We save that for friends and loved ones. Take this a step further and you come to the sense of taste, and the mouth. Yeah, this is where things get awkward. Putting your mouth on people is not something we're very adventurous about, especially beyond the lips. This all makes clear the stark difference, in social terms, between the eyes and mouth. Eyes are, in a certain sense, for everyone. The mouth, very few. It's in this regard that you can see food and eating as a strangely sensual thing. Especially with others. Maybe it gives reason as to why cooking for others, giving them food or even going to restaurants together is something inherent to dating. Nonetheless, when you apply this to Repulsion, Carole and this image...
... you get a clear juxtaposition with the previous eye. It's with this that you can recognise Carole's true repulsion is not exactly men, but things getting inside her. As awkward as it sounds, it's true. This will become all the clearer later on. But, before getting to that, it's best we move with the narrative and welcome a few character introductions.
It's with Carole's sister, Helen, that we can dive deeper into social behaviours as touched on before. Carole's sister is the only person she feels comfortable with, she's the only family she seems to have. Combine this with Carole's job, the fact that she only seems kind of comfortable around women, but then throw a boyfriend into the mix and you're bound to run into conflict. Primarily, the sister and boyfriend relationship is an interaction for the film that is in spite of Carole. The boyfriend not only takes Helen away from her, but does so in the most repellent way (to Carole). The question then raised here is of why Carole doesn't just live on her own. The answer is never made explicit, but is implied to be another contradiction of her character. She can't stand people, but needs affection - something only people can supply. It's for this reason that we can recognise that Carole isn't androphobic - she entertains the idea of a boyfriend. Colin and his intentions with Carole are another relationship in spite of her. (I think it's fair to assume all are). But, we can't get into this just yet. To wrap up the film's introduction, it's best to bring together what we've been over with the rabbit. Helen prepares to cook this for herself, boyfriend and sister. This is a social scene that, despite being uncomfortable for Carole, is bearable. However, the boyfriend negates this by taking Helen out himself. Moreover, he marks his place in her home with the razor and tooth brush (in Carole's cup - another reference to the mouth). And to round this off, he sleeps with Helen - quite audibly so. This is everything Carole cannot take, but it's all rounded off with a nice euphemism: 'the minister of health found eels coming from his sink'. A fake news item with sexual implimence that also makes you cringe in disgust. I mean...
The last thing to touch on before moving into the film's second act is the church bells that ring night and day. The nuns that live across the way from Carole are an image of abstinence and purity. We can assume that through Carole's eyes living with only women and not having to interact with many people would be more than satisfactory. The bells are then a reminder of this religious idea of purity and also marriage. The latter is important as Helen's boyfriend is cheating on his wife to be with her. This would sully Carole's view of her, again convoluting the relationship. Now, I can find no reason as to why the nuns or campanologists of the church would ring the bell at midnight. The only grounded reason I could find through a bit of Googling is that they might be practicing. Beyond tangible reasoning, the bells ring at night as a reminder to Carole, Helen and Michael (the boyfriend) that what is going on is wrong. But, again, this is made fun of with Michael suggesting he nuns having a party when the bell is ringing at night. This lets us see a pattern. All of Carole's major conflicts are revised through comedic quips that cite an 'us vs them' idea. It's the extramarital relationship in face of the church, Carole's sexuality in face of her apprehension toward men and Carole's anti-social behaviors and OCPD in face of the need for affection. What has been resoundingly set up here is an external world vs an internal world. Specifically, from Carole's perspective we're talking about things trying to get inside her. trying to pass a personal barrier in metaphorical and physical terms. It's through the first act that we can clearly see this set up to her characters. We understand that she perceives many external forces from food to customers to church bells as a threat.
It should now be transparent what sets Carole into a downward spiral and why. It's the old woman in the cosmetics chair talking to Carole's friend about men.To paraphrase, she says that they are like children. You are to treat them as if you don't give a damn about them as that's what they want. They want to be spanked but then given sweets. This is a culmination of Carole's conflicts considering she just refused to kiss Colin the previous day. She thinks he sees her as playing hard to get - and that that's what he wants. There seems to be no way she can communicate her actual apprehension without leading him on. With her sister gone she is also alone. She's also with an old crone with shit on her face, her lips specifically, who also wants something to eat.
This is freaking Carole the fuck out! Men, food, unsanitary mouths, control is everything Carole can't deal with. And so, she retreats. She goes home, welcoming act 2.
Carol comes home to three things. There's the money, the rabbit and the ringing phone. The money is representative of financial security, of Carole's home with her sister essentially. The rabbit is a symbol of her relationship (and it's rotting). And the phone, yeah, I know, a trope...
... but why? Why is the phone the scariest thing to ring at night, when it's dark and you're alone? Well, there's two things. The fist comes back to senses. If sounds are peripheral sensual cues, then they imply something is coming. And what device better translate that idea than a phone? It takes a distant voice and puts it right up to your ear, leaving you completely unaware as to where it originates from. But, more than this, the phone is a social cue. For Carole it would imply a social exchange is about to be had, whether it's with Colin, the apartment manager, whoever, she probably doesn't look forward to it. This is all payed off when the interaction with the apartment manager does occur - and it doesn't go well.
Now, returning to the rabbit, it's important to echo a previous comment in reference to the outbreak of myxomatosis, as disease that is highly infectious and wiped out approximately 99% of the rabbits in England in the 1950s. Myxomatosis isn't a threat to humans, but serves as a nice metaphor toward the rabbit as a symbol of social interaction (a meal). Carole probably questions if it's diseased, refuses to cook it, but in doing so lets it rot. The same may be said for how she treats her friends and possible boyfriend. She keeps them distant, running the risk of sullying the relationship - and all because she falsely assumed it was infectious. Her conflict is thus a problem of self, of how she perceives the world and her self. In other words:
She assumes that the world around her is twisted, but it turns out that it's really her view of it that is distorted.
It's having gone over all of this that we return to the image of the nuns after Carole smells Michael's vest. This is another reference to both men and senses in juxtaposition to purity. This is rounded off with the image of the old woman across the way with her dog. This is an idea of loneliness and isolation that tempts Carole, but, as smelling Michael's vest implies, Carole's curiosity is growing. And it's for that reason that the scene ends with a crack forming in the wall. What this makes clear is that we are moving int o a different narrative realm. The house is now explicitly representative of Carole herself. It's sanctity becomes her sanctity, it's destruction becomes her destruction. The effects of the old woman's yammerings on Carole are the triggering of multiple fears and indulgences. She is becoming more curious of men as her fear of what they can do intensifies. Moreover, the idea of loneliness, purity through religion and cleanliness go awry. And this is all because Carole's mind is being laced over reality, blinding her to rationality.
Now, it's after picking apart the house itself that we'll be able too fast track through the film. What we simply have to realise is the importance of the numerous trinkets lining the shelves and cupboards of the house. They are seemingly all memorabilia from her childhood. The most important of these items would be the picture:
This is the crux of the film. It's the family Carole has left behind. What we end on is a zoom in...
... that clearly shows some kind of fear or disdain in Carole directed toward what we can assume to be her father. This is implied to be the source of all her fear of men. But, this is not what the final image, the last zoom in captures. We can understand this with the opening 30 mins alone. It's over the course of the remaining narrative that we see the complexity of Carole's condition. This then leaves two things to break down. There's Carole's violent fantasies and then there's the murders. These are intrinsically linked as reactions to one another that call back to the catalysing statement of control given by...
In short, the man that attacks her at night is Carole allowing someone to take complete control and the two murders are her reclaiming that control. She denies sexual advances and responds with violence. Before getting into this, this idea is probably the film's greatest critique. It paints female sexuality as an insistent need to be dominated, a demonised and scary concept even to the woman herself. There are more relevant critiques such as the sounds design (especially dialogue) but we'll stick with this one. This critique is connected to the fact that a man made this film, and that that man is Roman Polanski. So, yeah. But, looking beyond that, I would say that the poignancy of this film comes not with seeing Carole as a woman, as all women, but as a hyperbolised character who cannot get a grip on her perception of the external world in respect to self. Seeing her as this archetypal hypochondriac brings about the core philosophy of the film. It's all about the inner-self being a product of memory and the body being a protective bubble. Again, internal worlds and external worlds. You see this realised best with the murders and the contradictions inherent within them. The first with Colin being left in the bath is clear. It's the repugnancy of men (in Carole's perception) meeting an idea of cleanliness. This scene is supposed to be Collin's chance to be the hero. Something equivalent to the end of Hitch, or any romantic comedy where the guy just won't give up.
This doesn't work with Carole though because she's dealing with the power balance of a relationship. As is implied with the final image, Carole may be the victim of sexual abuse - and as a child. This would seriously convolute the love of a father with, dominance, sexuality and confusion. This gives reason for this:
She has no healthy idea of love and affection. Her killing Micheal is an attempt towards both ending what she feels is an inherently violent act, but also wash her hands (literally) with him. With the murder of the apartment manager, we get a call back to the very beginning with Michael's straight razor. She uses a symbol of external maintenance (link to her being a beautician) an image bound to men and uses it to both destroy a life and save herself. The contradiction in this is bound to the end with Michael carrying Carole out of the home - an apparent hero. This is all in emphasis of Carole's distorted image of the world. It's hard to say if Michael is a nice guy in this film, but maybe he's the only person Helen can be with. If she sustained any abuse like Carole, or experienced a family breaking up, it gives reasoning as to why she'd only find comfort in a destructive relationship.
The core takeaway from the surreal sequences is that the film eventually flips on itself. Not only does Carole withdraw completely from socialising with women, not only does she, as a hypochondriac, end up living in her own filth, but her internal world is put external. The house becomes her anxieties. It cracks, hands break through the walls, it's never a safe place, somewhere men are always trying to invade, church bells ringing on the outside, help too distant. And of course memory is framed for all to see. This leaves Carole a shell of a person, a zombie. All that's left to identify her character is this single image:
A memory. She struggles with so much over the course of the film and for untold reasons. We can infer that food represents social acts, that she is afraid of men, that she has OCD, but for what purpose? What is the message of the film under these circumstances? It hasn't got one, nothing with concrete evidence. The meaning of this film all comes down to an inherently human idea of self. Who are we, but the genes that organised our bodies, the experiences that molded our minds? If we are a product of the external world, of external forces, why are we almost never completely understood by it, by the world around us? We a product of extremities but are neglected by them. left trapped in a cage of self. And that's it, we are trapped. We are vessels of memory, forced to behave by our coded biases, the only sense that manages the internal and external, voiceless...
... perception an idea never truly under our control.
All in all, Repulsion is a film about insurmountable conflicts that drill away inside us. It's about a sensory disconnect. It gives us so much that means nothing without truly walking in Carole's shoes, without truly knowing her memories. Something we never get to do, and something impossible to do in life.
Poltergeist - The T.V People Are Coming For Your Kids!
Ghosts reach out to a family through their television set, eventually ensnaring one of their children.
This is one of my favourite horror films of all time. Not only is it a perfect narrative with rich subtext, but it has great characterisation, pacing and is heartwarmingly comedic. That's a strange thing to say about a horror film, but it's true. The best way to describe this film is to say it's a family horror movie. It has the veneer of an Exorcist, The Shining or even more recent films such as the Conjuring or Paranormal Activity, but the heart of something like E.T, Hook or Close Encounters. And that's more than understandable because Spielberg of course produced this film, and it's in no way surprising that the man who made Jaws had something to do with this. But, to take a step back a moment, it's quite obvious that this film is a heavy influence on the cinema of today. (Again, Spielberg and Jaws anyone?). It perfectly set the tone for the current state of horror. What's fashionable in horror today is the paranormal.
There's a tonne more I, and I'm sure you, can mention here, but the link between these films and Poltergeist isn't simply ghosts. Ghosts are popular because they allow cheap filmmaking. There isn't a monster you have design, build, create on a computer. But, more than this, they allow two things. They allow deep commentary and great characterisation. Mama is an ok example of the former with a narrative around memory and death being constructed to comment on ownership and children. The The Babadook, however, is a brilliant example of commentary - something I'll have to talk about sometime soon. As for characterisation... well... you don't get many horror films with good characterisation. Nonetheless, you can see a half-assed attempted of this with Paranormal Activity. The formula and emotional structuring of the films in the series mimics that seen in Poltergeist. They start with meeting the family, trying to be relatable, implying strange happenings that escalate, often dissipating before rising for a final act. This is a general formula of many genre films though. Where we see the specific influence of Poltergeist is through the emotional structuring. It's the use of families and children in horror films. Family is a huge theme in almost all of Spielberg's films. This is where the root of his comedy is found and is where the film's heart lies. This is what Kubrick couldn't do with The Shining, just like Friedkin couldn't with The Exorcist, Carpenter with Halloween. However, horror films use family, or they use teens to suggest fragility (not weakness, but something to be lost - stakes) and a sense of identification through characterisation. Poltergeist is a perfect example of how to do this. It doesn't have the atmosphere or tension of any films just mentioned, but because the characters are all so strong it doesn't really need to. We care enough about them to have even minimal danger naturally mushroom into tension. This is why Poltergeist is not only one of my favourite films, but an important horror, if not directly to the genre, definitely to anyone watching movies wanting to learning something. It teaches us all a way of having art also be something entertaining, emotionally investing. And I think that's what film is about - and what makes cinema the greatest and most accessible art form. It's entertainment coupled with higher art.
So, whilst what is entertaining about this film is obvious to anyone who's seen it, the 'higher art', its intricacies, subtext, metaphors and so on present within, can go unnoticed. To get started, this film is about parental responsibility in respect to T.V. It's core philosophy comes with an idea of intelligence and imagination. Before getting into the film's narrative, it's important to pick out peripheral writers' devices. These are elements of a film meant to explain or present a narrative in a way that is somewhat tangential to its core. If you look at The Matrix, a film about free will, destiny and technology, you can exemplify this type of element best with the romance. Yes, there is some relevancy to Trinity loving Neo, with emotions and blah-blah-blah giving reason for free will, but, it's just another one of these moves:
Cute, aphoristic, but, meh. The same kinda goes for the action in The Matrix. It's just not really necessary to discussing the core themes, but, at the same, not damaging at all to the film itself. With Poltergeist these elements are in the Indian burial ground jargon and ghost hunting. Both are a trope of the film, a way of socially affirming moral ideas tantamount to love in Interstellar. With the Indian burial grounds, it's simply saying: desecrating graves is bad, don't do it. But, not an awful lot more than that. There is a smidgen of something more though, and it's a reference with...
... no, not just smoking... ahem... plants, but ancient wisdom or simply the past. This is a segue into a core idea of the film. However, because what's the fun in writing a fluid essay? A quick interjection. This box:
And the one in Diane's hands...
... quite similar, no? They're not the same one, but possibly had the same use. Why this is relevant comes to the scene where Carol's bird dies and she says the box smells bad ("Tweety doesn't like that smell, put a flower with 'em"). Maybe it still smells of weed??? Which is a underhand joke, but quite brilliant. This plays into something we can come to later, but, back on track we get. Ancient wisdom and ancient burial grounds. It's implied that the ghosts attack the Freeling household because it's situated on a burial ground. That's our tangible, easy-fix way into showing freaky things, real skeletons and paranormal terror. But, juxtapose this with the fact that they come out of the T.V and you get a lot of questions you can only grip with metaphorical analysis. Paranormal electrical excitations and different spheres of consciousness only perceivable through gadgets, wires and meters is not at all scientific, leaving the insinuation that T.V could be capable of being a portal of sorts as nothing more than fantasy and a writers' convenience. However, take a step back and juxtapose the new with the old, modern technology with ancient custom, and you quite simply get an allegorical means of reflecting on the society of today. The opening scene makes this most clear. We start with the American national anthem, symbols of national heroism, pride and honour and then Steve passed out in his armchair. The American dream, no? Further this with the football game on T.V and the anarchy around that, and, yeah, American dream.
This all means that the shown attitude towards T.V aren't really the best human attributes. We like (we liked) to sit in front of a box and bathe in mediocre and meaningless entertainment for no other reason than to fill time. The obvious question to the zombified family, programmed by television, to the slob binge watching all the Netflix, just all of it, is: is there not something better you could be doing? The answer is yes. Of course. This is more important with kids. Playing outside, getting exercise, learning about the world and so on are all things you don't really do that well sat in front of T.V. The progression of technology has undeniably made us all smarter, but how much can you really learn from a late night show, Jimmy Fallon interviewing the cast of The Avengers? Ehhh... not much. T.V is primarily about consumption. Yes, you can learn the fundamentals of baking, how various points systems work, a plethora off oddly specific factoids from T.V, but we learn these things almost as a side-effect of waiting for a lava cake to ooze, that 17th tier to topple, a car to crash, a guy break a leg, someone to die, develop brain damage, points be racked up, a geek say smart things you can't fathom.
The relevancy of this to Poltergeist is quite simple. Parents and teachers should teach children, not T.V. Now, bring back the weed. No, I haven't got something incredibly profound to say, but this...
... isn't a very mature image. The parents, whilst not very naive, aren't incredibly grown up in this film. We can come back to the dead bird to see this. Just before she's caught dangling the dead canary over the toilet bowl Diane asks why it couldn't have died during a school day. This is obviously so she wouldn't have to have the discussion on death with her kid. This is understandable as she is young, and death is a tough subject, but the implimence is that Diane would prefer Carol live in an imaginary world, one where you make up the rules, where death isn't always a thing, let alone something that matters that much. This kind of sounds like the world of T.V, no? You could say I'm reaching here, but is death and television not something that has already been established as the two driving forces of the film? The metaphor of ghosts coming out of the T.V can then be translated to the idea that television does feed the mind, not healthy stuff, junk food. It only does this however, because it wants to consume us. The media industry as a whole is much like a farmer, us a bunch of pigs or chickens. It feeds us and feeds us and feeds us, then takes us for all we've got in the slaughter house. The thing is though, the slaughter house is merely the monthly cable bill. Consumerism begets consumerism - it's the capitalist cycle we live in. The only way out of this is to turn off the T.V, get rid of the Netflix account, throw it all out of you must...
... and live with the truth, in the real world for just a little while. This is why death and family are so important to this film's narrative message. It's essentially all about a family growing together. Not only do the parents mature, but so do the children. And that there is the film's end taken care of, it's not just a lasting joke, but the lesson given. How this message is translated though is very important - and is done in two simple ways. Staying with death and ghosts, both light and wind are used to metaphorically discuss character growth. It's the white light that represents both death and T.V in this film which makes the bird's passing all the more poignant. Despite almost immediately asking for a goldfish after the 'service' Carol might have been left with an existential question of life and her inevitable end. This could mark her journey toward adulthood. The other children alike are on this journey too with the Dana being on the phone all time, possibly to boyfriends. and Robbie trying to get over personal fears of the dark and freaky toys. All children are in pivotal stages of their lives leaving Diane and Steve with a huge weight on their shoulders. They don't want to lose their children to the television set. Essentially, they don't want T.V to take over their jobs as parents. So, light is many things in this regard, but it's primarily death and knowledge. Death is a narrative preset that, as said, allows us to have ghosts and skeletons. But, enlightenment is the crux of this film. It all comes down to a minute event of a dead pet being buried in an ex-pot-box. It's surreal, quite funny, but that's the core physical conflict of this film. So, with the two parents trying to steer their children away from the light at the end of the tunnel that is T.V, a cold wind blows. Wind of course represents change, giving solid evidence toward this film being about maturity, turning this iconic scene...
... into an image of the house enduring a storm of adolescence, puberty and parental anxiety. Wind, light and death and that's the film in a nutshell. There's more details to be found in the film though, but I'll leave them up to you. The main takeaway in the end though has got to be that this isn't a film completely against media, T.V and the modern way of living.
This all comes back to the very top of the essay and why this is a great film. Yes, it's entertaining, but it also has something to say in an intellectual and interesting way. In this respect, the film can't be condemning media, T.V and even cinema completely because it understands the importance of entertainment. Just like with film, learning shouldn't be a task, it should be fun. The same goes for parenting and life. Moderation is key. It's not letting T.V consume you, not letting the intellectual side of media be a by-product of the glam, absurdity, sex and violence. Let it consume you and you just might end up tearing yourself apart...
Full Metal Jacket - The Jungian Thing
A story in two parts, following Private Joker Davis through basic training into the Vietnam war.
There's many ways to watch this film, and dependant on the looking glass you choose, this film can be many things. If you want to see a war film, well, you're not going to really get one with Full Metal Jacket. The first 40 mins will be thrilling and then with the second half there will be a tonal drop off where the pacing goes a little awry and the film loses its gravitas. On the other hand, if you choose to see this film as a soldier's story, not a strict war film, then it becomes something a lot more. Upon release this film was compared to the likes of Apocalypse Now and Platoon - and critically didn't fair that well all across the board. That's because these are two immense war films. Apocalypse Now has an expanse, it's a thematic sound-stage that amplifies character struggles and internal conflicts through action. (Click here for more on it). Platoon on the other hand is all about the experience of war. It puts you in the shit and tears you apart with the struggles of its characters. Full Metal Jacket distinguishes itself from these two behemoths by not playing them at their own game. It takes one step further into the soul of the soldier. These films really support each other when you see them like this. Apocalypse Now is about a wider philosophy of humanity, Platoon is about the emotions of a soldier and his interactions with war, leaving Full Metal Jacket to be about an acute philosophy of self under the pressure of that wider idea of humanity. So, to get into this philosophical milieu we're going to need to cover a bit of psychodynamic psychology. As the title suggests we'll be looking at Jungian terminology here. Don't worry, there's no need to get too deep into things. Like Freud, Jung's psychological theory is very philosophical, meaning, not very scientific. But, to dismiss both works on the grounds that they're unscientific would be wrong as they have clear benefits and uses. This is hopefully what we'll find out with Full Metal Jacket. Psychodynamics gives people tools of assessment, and the two tools Jung supplies with his all important 'thing' is all to do with the duality of man. This means that there's two sides to us. There's the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. Freudian theory suggests that people's minds are comprised of things we do control and can monitor and things we can't. This is quite simply the conscious and unconscious. Jung makes the further distinction to explain why we do irrational things. We do them for ourselves, for personal gain, or we do things for others, for the group. Furthermore, there's things unique to us personally and there's things we all do - all unconsciously. Taking this idea into Full Metal Jacket is the best way to watch this film, not really as a movie but an art piece, and that's what we're going to do now.
The easiest way to then do this is to walk through the film. So, it's the beginning we start with Johnnie Wright's Hello Vietnam. It's this song alone that serves as the only true and traditional character building in this film. It suggests that characters have a past, that they are leaving loved ones behind for obligation. The lyrics:
Kiss, me goodbye and write me while I'm gone
Good bye, my sweetheart, Hello Viet, nam.
America has heard the bugle, call
And you know it involves us, one an all
I don't suppose that war will ever end
There's fighting that will break us up a gain.
Good bye, my darling, Hello Viet nam
A hill to take, a battle to be won
Kiss me goodbye and write me while I'm gone
Good bye, my sweetheart, Hello Viet nam.
A ship is waiting for us at the dock
America has trouble to be stopped
We must stop Communism in that land
Or freedom will start slipping through our hands.
I hope and pray someday the world will learn
That fires we don't put out, will bigger burn
We must save freedom now, at any cost
Or someday, our own freedom will be lost.
Kiss me goodbye and write me while I'm gone
Good bye, my sweetheart, Hello Viet, nam.
This is a very pro-war song. It implies that sacrifice is necessary, that the freedom of the masses holds weight over the plight of the individual. It does, however, have an underlying sense of paranoia, that 'we must stop Communism in that land or freedom will start slipping through our hands'. As a concept, it's hard to say whether this fear or paranoia is healthy, productive, beneficial or not. But, what is clear here is that a collectively unconscious idea of freedom is essential. In the film, it's implied that this idea is about to consume the soldiers. This is simply done through simple juxtaposition...
Cutting the hair off of the soldiers is a fundamental way of taking away personality. It does this by making everyone look the same and taking away personal choice. So, with the intro to the film, we're told that maybe Joker had a girlfriend, a life beyond the army, but that he is willingly stripping that away from himself. We then move to one of my favourite scenes of all time.
I don't want to delve too deep into this scene as I'm saving that for a later post. But, there are a few key ideas that we need to take forward from this segment. The first is that the soldiers are going to be systematised, stripped apart, and built back up again - they know this. They are later told they're not going to be made into robots, but killers, killing machines. It's this scene that makes you beg the difference between a robot and a machine, furthermore, a soldier and a communist. Semantically, the two are different, but essentially they are the same thing - depersonalised shells that feed a common cause. So, the core idea of this film, and of basic training as a whole, is that there's an indefinable contradiction hidden somewhere within. The next main take away from the opening scene is that Joker joined the marine corp to kill. It's this statement that confirms what the opening implies. Joker has been consumed by a concept, he's committed to a collectively unconscious idea of protecting the masses' freedom. It's exactly this that already has you questioning the film, that has you questioning whether it's right to be pro or anti-war, and to what degree. We all know that violence is bad, but sometimes necessary. This means we need soldiers and military. But, on top of this, very few of us would volunteer to become a soldier and fight. So, what makes the question of pro and anti-war so hard is that most of are made to feel pretty shitty by it. The average civilian wants to be protected, but isn't willing to do it themselves, and so is appreciative of soldiers despite not really understanding them and what it takes to be them. This is at large the collective unconscious surrounding war, violence and the military. We need it, but don't make me join. This idea is at the core of Joker's character and is encapsulated by the theme of fear. However, this doesn't come into play in the first half of the film. We have to wait for that.
So, staying with basic training, I think it's important to notice just how immersive this segment is. It does this by polarising itself against what comes before and after it. It doesn't give characters back stories which seals you into the moment of the film and it is stylistically and tonally a million miles away from the jump into Vietnam. The best way I can explain this is by appealing to all of those who have watched this film through to the end and tried to think about the beginning again. It's practically a completely different film. Hartman and Pyle are distant ideas, as is this image:
Thinking of the soldiers as bald, stripped and weak is near impossibly after almost an hour of this:
Kubrick ensures this with framing and colour composition. The pallet throughout the first half of this film is grey, white, beige - always bland. The framing is also always regimented, Kubrick always shooting from a distance, ensuring the voidal emptiness of each setting is captured perfectly. On the other hand, out in the open during the second half the frame is almost always crowded. Kubrick only allows space to seep into the top of his frame which only acts as a means of forcing the eye down toward characters. The pallet is also bland here, but with earthy hues, greens, browns, muted blacks. This all gives the impression that we are in a completely different world and atmosphere. It's hostile, tense and you don't want to be lost in it, whereas back on base it's hostile tense, and despite the space, you're trapped under someone else's control.
This control is implemented by Hartman onto the soldiers through psychological contortion. It's by creating a new collective unconscious that Hartman converts his soft boys into men and then into killing machines. This is best understood with two recurrent ideas. The first is the gun, it's the Rifleman's Creed. This is the Rifleman's Creed:
This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My rifle is my best friend. It is my life.
I must master it as I must master my life.
Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless.
I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me.
I will...
Before God, I swear this creed. My rifle and myself are the defenders of my country.
We are the masters of our enemy.
We are the saviors of my life.
So be it, until there is no enemy, but peace. Amen.
This is an abridged version of current creed, but captures the fundamental concept. The one thing that is important that is cut out of this version is:
My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life.
This is the core idea and guiding force of basic training. It teaches the men that they represent a cause and that that cause is war or the sake of peace. This cause is murder and they are to become it, they are to become their gun. There is a key distinction between the gun becoming them and them becoming the gun. The creed states that the gun is supposed to become human. But, what the film shows is that they are to become the gun, they are to become the killing machine. This is the essential element of depersonalisation throughout basic training, and is also the contradiction inherent to the experience that is the ultimate undoing of certain character (but we'll come to that later). This is all reinforced by Hartman's second means of psychological contortion. Hartman is obsessed with...
... dick and balls. The pun in this scene is connected to the Rifleman's Creed:
This is my rifle, this is my gun.
This is for fighting, this is for fun.
It implies that the men have two destructive tools. Their rifle and their dick, aptly named, their gun. Now, if we flash forward to the end, we see the insinuation of this pun.
When his rifle fails on him, Joker reaches for his gun, but fails to use it. Mix this with the constant reference to sex, Alabama black snakes, fucking sisters and having balls you have the phenomena of shit talking down to a T. It's fun, but ineffectual. To pretend it is, is a lie and very dangerous. This is why Hartman beats it into their heads that they are gay, that they like to suck dick, fuck men in the ass - and all without the common decency to give them a reach around. His intention here is to beat the men into the ground, taking away an aspect of their nature, telling them that their personally unconscious impulses are bullshit. This means of humbling his men fails in a certain respect (in respect to the end and Joker) just like it does with Pyle. Hartman wants to break him down to build him again. Before getting to that though, it's best to recognise the moment Joker is broken into.
It's this scene. Having denied belief in the Virgin Mary, Joker is beaten, but sticks to what he believes. He does not let Hartman control his personal unconscious - his belief system. Now, this may seem like Joker, not Hartman, is the victor of the situation. But, what Hartman picks up on guts. Guts is enough. It's the fact that Joker's starting to grow beyond the control of him. This is purpose of the training. It's not to change a soldier's personally unconscious way of thinking completely, but their collective way of thinking and interpreting the world. As mentioned before, a generally collective means of thinking around war would be that it's wrong to kill and that battle is terrifying. That's why we're not all soldiers. Thus, all Hartman has to do is convince his men to commit to the philosophy that was is intrinsically imperative to freedom is violence - action. Again, their rifles must become themselves, they must become their rifles.
Having recognised Joker's new found guts, Hartman assigns Pyle under his command. This is the beginning of Pyle's end, and it's because Hartman is not attacking his collective unconscious any more. He can't get through to him the importance of the corp, the idea of brotherhood the same way he would other men. So, instead he allows the corp to 'persuade' of what is right and what is wrong. That's why this...
... is what breaks Pyle. Kubrick tell us this. This moment only happens because Pyle leaves his footlocker unlocked. The footlocker is metaphorically Pyle. It being unlocked is not a good sign - it's weakness. Inside Hartman finds the symbolic weakness of Pyle's character. It's good food. Pyle most probably so fat because he enjoys eating - it's where he find happiness. The same goes for the rest of the men but with sex. This is why Hartman attacks them on this basis, the men bounce back though, still obsessed with dick and pussy until the very end. Pyle doesn't have the capacity for this. He's broken into and stripped of all personal character. Further this with the corp raining down on him a shit storm of soap blocks and you can see how both his personal and collective unconscious is being conditioned against himself. He's being taught that he should hate himself and that he's simply not good enough. This would be ok, if he had conditions by which he could otherwise be accepted (like the other men with their bravado). They have their guns and they have brotherhood. Pyle has his gun, but no brotherhood. He's an unprogrammed killing machine. This fault brought about by a misguided method of conditioning has him destroy his creator...
... and then hit self-destruct...
It's in this that we can understand the term Full Metal Jacket. It's in reference to the loaded clip in a gun, but remembering that the rifle is metaphorically the soldier we can see Pyle as his gun - which explains why he says the Rifleman's Creed before blowing himself and Hartman away. Pyle almost wears his gun, a Jacket, and for it to be full of metal suggests he is nowhere to be found. That he is empty, a shell, and that that shell nothing more than a symbol of violence.
It's here that we get an abrupt jump to Vietnam, a jump that practically disregards the most powerful scene of the movie. Because this is a story told from the perspective of Joker this is completely understandable. He puts the memory of the training camp and Pyle at such a distance from himself that it might as well not exist (repression). He did the same thing in the beginning of the film with his life as a civilian. What remains though is dick and balls, personal unconsciousness, id immersed impulse - which is exactly why you then immediately get the infamous 'sucky, sucky' and 'me so horny'. The proceeding movement through the remainder of the narrative is a conglomeration of contradictory scenes. This is best seen through the night of the Tet offensive. It proceeds constant and flagrant shit talking by all men about 1000 yard stares, John Wayne and the illusive shit. The only words when the bombs start falling and the gooks start raining down on them though are I'm not ready for this, and Amen. This happens time and time again in escalating circumstances that eventually take us to the very end. But, before jumping to that, we have to make clear the driving theme of the second half of the film. Fear. Fear is not a bad thing. Fear is tantamount to intelligence in many circumstances, it's simply knowing when not to put yourself in danger. The only reason why fear isn't law though is because sometimes you have to fight. But, looking at the context of Joker's war and the serious doubt of the general public regarding it, it'd be hard to not hold onto fear as law when fighting the Viet Cong soldiers. This is why Joker doesn't join general infantry, but is assigned to journalism and war correspondence. This job keeps him out of the shit, and introduces us to a very important figure:
Lockhart knows the shit and he didn't like it, 'too dangerous'. It's then fair to infer that this character is simply a more experienced version of Joker. With the end of the film, Joker having killed the young girl, it's easy to see him crawling back to the office and keeping his head down and dick between his legs until the war is over. That's if he makes it through the remaining battle around the Perfume River.
The reason why fear is so important to the latter half of the film is because life, living and surviving basically comes down to stupidity and brains replacing just guts. Most importantly the psychological battle is now completely dependant on unconsciousness. Fear is intrinsic to human nature, and so is a very important tool. In circumstances such as battle, fear is an important factor. Pure fearlessness probably isn't a good sign. It can make you feel invincible, but will block rational thought. And stress is probably one of the best drugs for speeding up, streamlining the brain, forcing you to rely on your unconscious reflexes whilst making higher and pragmatic decisions. Stress otherwise known as fear. This is not to say that fear can't kill you. Fear can lead to hesitance, can lead to frivolity, which'll kill you quick. There must be a balance is the point. And it's with the ending that Joker considers himself fearless, which for him means stupid. For the likes of an Animal Mother on the other hand, well, it's in the shit and under fire that he supposedly becomes one of the finest human beings. The lasting take away is then that Joker has devolved as a character - or at least tells us he has. He, in short, looses the strength of he had in this moment:
The final thing to look at before the ending will be the general collective unconsciousness of a soldier in face of his personal unconsciousness. We see general unconsciousness in battle with the need to survive and kill, but near the end with the interviews a small piece of the soldier's personal opinion is presented. What's interesting about this is that the political facts of the Vietnam war are never said explicitly, neither is the true emotional experience of soldiers shown. We see aftermaths and snippets of bravado - all acts. Truth is much better presented by Apocalypse Now and Platoon, What the interviews demonstrate though is that, to this film, the personal and varied opinions of people have more weight than the facts. Through this we begin to see a kind of zeitgeist, a specific and nuanced set of collectively unconscious ideals. With the soldiers we are then seeing a phenomena of behaviour that is not really a generally collective unconsciousness. This is because it's not exactly normal for the average person to want to kill people - even for the sake of freedom and the possible risk of losing it all. Taking this into the final battle where Joker loses the last of his friends and ends up killing a young girl, he's soon forced to recognise that his personal unconsciousness has slowly been taken over. He has become a Metal Jacket. He has no true personality, maybe all that remains of it is a distant echo of childhood - which is why he and the men sing the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse theme. This is the final sombre realisation of character in this film. Everyone devolves or dies. Everyone who tries to do the right thing, remain positive or tries to be intelligent, dies. Anyone who shows compassion is shot down or attacked - and all so everyone embodies a contorted collective unconsciousness. The duality of man is broken down by the end of this film. War has a monopoly over these boys.
The message of Full Metal Jacket then becomes obvious. It's about consciousness, not unconsciousness and it comes back to Jung, Freud and psychology. The first step of solving a problem is always recognising that you have one. Why is this? It's all to do with consciousness. You need to have a conscious grip on what could be a unconscious driving force - the problem. When you're admitted to therapy, it could be CBT, free association or even dream analysis, you're taught how to monitor what you feel and how to deal with it, how to break it down and know what is effecting your unconscious state and how that is effecting your behaviour. What then seems to be most important is simple self-awareness. This is the key to a myriad, maybe even a lot, of psychological issues. It's knowing how to deal with yourself (yes, sometimes with the aid of drugs). But, to then deal with yourself you have to have some kind of idea of who you are and how you got there. You mustn't be the product of someone else - something alien you don't understand - like a marine corp, or worse, war.
The final thing to pull apart is then the difference between killers and robots. Robots don't know they're conscious. A killer does. This is why collectivism, being a soldier or joining the army is not a bad thing. You can be apart of the system without becoming it. The system often wants to consume you. What Full Metal Jacket argues is that you simply can't let it do that, and that your strongest defense is psychology, it's ultimately knowing who you are and what that Jungian thing is.
Psycho - Marriage And How Not To Do It: Him And Her In Two Parts
After stealing $40,000 Marion Crane runs out of town where rain drives her into the Bates Motel.
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There's many ways to watch Psycho. Firstly, you can try the perspective of an audience member looking for 1 hour and 45 mins of entertainment - of suspense, horror and mystery. Secondly, you can look at this film from a technical perspective, analysing Hitchcock's developed style and philosophy of cinema in action. Thirdly, you can again look at the technicalities of this film, but from the writer's perspective. This is my favourite way to look at a film as, for me, it's the most rewarding perspective to take. You get the experience of entertainment, a hidden kind, as well as a lesson or interesting debate simply by choosing to see implied greater depth. This is what I want to do with Psycho today - to look at this great lesson in direction, this intriguing thrill ride and pick apart the allegory. Now, the underlying story of Psycho is of marriage - a pretty bad one. This is a film about two dysfunctional interpretations of a to-be married life. In short, Marion looks for security in all the wrong places and Norman... well, he can't find a woman better than his mother. The climax of these two conflicting ideas is rather sudden...
... which leaves us with a film of two parts. The first section that sticks to Marion's perspective is all about putting yourself in danger, leaving the latter half with Norman to be about a contorted view of women and social exchange.
The opening with Sam and Marion in the motel room is what plants the seed for everything to come. After having 'spent lunch together' the two dance around an idea of commitment. This all comes about through the buzz word respectability. Marion, in short, wants a normal relationship, an engagement and then marriage with Sam. He is, however, reluctant because, firstly, he's been married before and secondly, has very little money. This establishes two important facts. The first is that Sam is still paying his father's debt. For anyone who's seen the film recently or knows it very well, you'd be able to make the first link to Norman here. Norman's father died when he was 5 leaving him and his mother alone. The metaphorical debt Norman was laboured with was of affection, the fact that a son is no substitute for a lover. This is what caused Norman to snap and is used to imply that the two (Sam and Norman) share common traits. These traits are to do with the perception of affection and commitment. To go a step further on these themes we simply have to look at the fact that Sam still pays alimony for a wife he clearly doesn't like. His fear of commitment may be grounded in his childhood (like Norman) but accentuated by this recent past. This leaves Marion making the compromise that 'she'll lick the stamps'. She chooses to take on Sam's personal luggage. This luggage is primarily monetary. Sam doesn't have the money to marry, get a better home for themselves and so on. Marion takes that onto her shoulders - something that'll carry through to a fast approaching moment. The lead up to Marion stealing the $40,000 is plagued with talk of being married and getting married, both by her co-worker and the rich customer, Tom Cassidy. The importance of Tom is found in the idea that you can buy unhappiness off. He suggests to her that with money, life is easier. We've touched on this subject before with The Matrix, but what this concept boils down to is context of self and situation. Can we make the things around us better? But, more importantly, the way we interpret them more productively? Apply this question to Marion and we see that the way she wants to buy off unhappiness is to secure a home for herself and Sam so he'll hopefully commit to her. But, it's when she starts to question what exactly she's doing that things start to go awry.
The way in which Marion's anxiety and situation is best revealed and then poked at is with the scene where she exchanges her car. Her own car and the one she trades it in for are both displaced euphemisms. They represent Sam and his choice of women (as well as a more general idea of choice). Sam seems to have jumped from a wife to a girlfriend without recovering, without being able to commit to someone again. This is evident in the way he only wants to be around her for a certain ease of access. The response to Marion's high pressuring, both in the car lot and with Sam, is crucial to her growing anxiety. This is because rash choices are always indicative of a mistake to be made. Just like Marion renting a new car is something you might want to slow down a little for, maybe take a test ride, so should be Sam moving into a relationship with Marion and Marion with him (no intended euphemism, well, maybe - but, the test should also be of each other characters). The overall purpose of this scene is to build suspense, to have Marion question herself and the way in which she makes choices in life.
So, as a result, with Marion back on the road her anxious thoughts concerning being caught with the money swell. But, because the money and subsequent anxieties are all connected to Sam and her future with him, it's fair to infer that she's having doubts concerning their relationship also. These doubts are made clear with the pathetic fallacy - the rain. Marion's view of her future, of the road ahead of her, is obscured. The only light ahead of her now reads: Bates Motel. Vacancy. The neon sign is, for Marion, enlightenment. Whether it's of paranoia, or sudden realisation, the Bates Motel makes clear to her the dangers of the road she wants to travel down.
It's at this point where we see the exchanging of the baton from Marion's perspective to Norman's. This exchange though is very ambiguous and has had me stumped for quite a while. As has been implied already Norman's situation and perspective are similar to Sam's. Both seem to have problems with women, but Sam's is in no way as serious as Norman's. I have tried to find more strong links between their characters to maybe suggest that they are the same person, but can't agree to this with any confidence. What I think may be possible though is that this narrative might just be under the complete control of Marion. By this I mean that we see everything from her perspective. So, whilst Norman and Sam aren't the same person, Marion may be hyperbolising his character to express her anxiety captured in this part of the film. In other words, to her, Norman represents Sam. This all suggests that Marion doesn't die, and her body isn't discovered in the end of the film, but that she decided the relationship between herself and Sam is going anywhere and that it dead in the water - or would it be swamp? Either way, this would transform the whole narrative of Psycho into a pure extended metaphor. But, the fault with seeing the film in this way is the task of having to assign so much meaning to so many extraneous characters. I've tried watching the film a few times over with this in mind, but haven't yet got a clear image of what everyone could be representing, which leaves me questioning the validity of the idea. However, what I think is valid and self-evident is the theme of marriage throughout this film. When you apply this to the two main characters you get our narrative of how not to approach marriage in two parts. And what this is all centred on is an idea of freedom. This is symbolised with Marion's last name, Crane, and Norman's stuffed birds - all symbols of freedom.
This all turns the most poignant and immersive scene in the film, that is simply Norman and Marion talking, into the all important no man's land. This is a no man's land of conflicting metaphors. For Marion the birds and the freedom they represent are a positive idea - it's what ultimately has her decide to return the money. For Norman, freedom is an unattainable goal, moreover, in other people this scares him. We'll start with Marion. It's sitting with Norman, a clear mummy's boy, that she realises that for her to be with Sam will simply mean she becomes his mother figure. She'll pay his alimony, work the harder job, and probably still have to be the classical 50s housewife at the same time. And, whilst that sounds like a pretty shitty deal, there's a small detail she's skipped over. The money she wants to use to give herself and her possibly non-committal boyfriend is stolen. The freedom the money gives her is actually her own personal trap. And that's why she leaves early in the morning - to get out of a personal trap back home. However, before she gets the chance to leave, she is of course murdered.
The irony and implication of this shot is that Marion's means of freedom (the money) remains. It's her initial trap, her relationship with Sam, that metaphorically...
,,, destroys her. It's that which she thought she wanted and could handle that was the true conflict all along. This is why this image:
The zoom out from the eye is incredibly important. It implies that she maybe saw this coming, or that it was the last thing that she'd expect - Norman, a hyperbolised representation of Sam, killing her. To side with the former, that the image of her eye implies she saw this coming, is to suggest that Norman is a strict and purposeful representation of Sam and that we see the rest of the film from a dead woman's perspective. To side with the latter, that Norman killing her was the last thing she'd expect, it's implied that the trap she got herself into with Sam/Norman was too strong. This marks a futile maybe even pessimistic perspective of marriage or future relationships in Marion. Through allegory it's suggested that Marion's anxiety or her own personal flaws (choice in boyfriends) is what consumes her. She destroys herself in a certain sense.
Now, jumping back to conversational scene we can shift into the second part of the film as seen through Norman's eyes. It's Norman's perspective of birds and freedom that set up the negative male perspective of marriage in this film. And it's from this point that it's probably best to see the first section of this film as a negative female perspective - the second, male. This will simply help to widen the allegory and clarify the narrative message. So, if birds are a symbol of freedom, for Norman to stuff them implies he wants to control and ground others. We're not talking exclusively about others here, but Norman himself. Like Marion, he has his own personal traps. And it's the reduction of marriage to a trap that is the main fault of both ends here. Marion can't be tied down to the wrong person, and Norman (like Sam) can't find the right person to be trapped with. For Norman, his mother is the only female he can bind himself to. And it's in the end of the film that we figure out that he does this out of guilt. His mother only comes through his personality as a repression of the memory of him killing her and her lover. Love to Norman is then nothing more than a plug over a deep hole in his persona. It's implied that he, the mother side of him, kills women because of this. He destroys what he can't control in other words - this is why he doesn't like women and strays from relationships. Norman can't replace the hole in his persona taken up by his mother without exposing himself as a monster. It's here that you can see the fundamentals of a recurrent character in modern cinema:
Both Scorsese and Nolan have taken Hitchcock's theme of marriage in hand with the psychological crime thriller and used it to explore this idea of traps, of refusing to see yourself as a monster. In fact, there's a plethora of male characters that the Bates archetype has been built from and revised by:
I could give a million more examples, but all of these characters, like Norman, are driven by a conflicted idea of love (or lack thereof) that they allow to consume themselves. This is an interesting idea to me as the reverse to this kind of characters is:
It's these men that fight, that risk everything they have, for the memory of a loved one, for the safety of someone they hold dear, or to simply stand triumphant and shout: 'Adrian, I did it'. What this all says is that under the theme of marriage there's two key male archetypes. There's the Bates archetype and the Rocky archetype. When you juxtapose these two types of character you can recognise a huge swath of films as romances. When you usually think of romance, you think of Pretty Woman, The Before Trilogy, Titanic, Breakfast At Tiffany's, Casablanca. The likes of Man On Fire, Rocky, Die Hard, Taxi Driver or even Psycho don't come into this picture. Granted, some of these films are tragic, but, what's the most famous romance of all time? Romeo And Juliet anyone? The point I'm trying to make here is that there's two reactions to the idea of romance. There's the male-centred idea of tangible romance, of actions and reactions. On the other hand there's an intangible idea of female-centred romance based on non-verbal cues and emotions. The best way to clearly convey this idea is to look at where the final or solidified 'I love you' comes in the film. With tangible, action/reaction romances the 'I love you' comes early on. These are, almost paradoxically, manly romances. Look at the examples given. It's romance that comes before the fight in Unforgiven and Rocky. With Man Of Fire, the relationship between Creasy and Pita has to be developed before the action can take place. Even in Die Hard John is going to New York to visit an ex-wife and family. The relationship is present beforehand. The stereotypical romances, however, end on the solidified 'I love you'. Just look at examples given: Pretty Woman, Breakfast At Tiffany's, Titanic, Casablanca. The first two end with a kiss. The second two don't end too well for the main male protagonist, but the female lead learns her lesson in romance with the final act. Now, bring into the equation the Bates archetype and we can see them as characters unwillingly forced into the latter stereotypical romances much like Pretty Woman, Breakfast At Tiffany's, Titanic and Casablanca. Bruce Wayne, Travis Bickle, Norman Bates, Guido Anselmi and so on are tasked with finding romance in their narratives. This is only ever used to reveal incapacity though. It's used to reveal a monster within them.
What this all suggests is that in popular cinema the man in the woman's position of a romance turns the film into a horror or a take on a psychological crime or mystery. Added to this, the woman put in the position of a male romance (Die Hard, Rocky, Man On Fire) also turns the film into a horror or a take on a psychological crime or mystery. Norman is tasked with getting along with a woman, and as representative of Sam, he's tasked with living under her wing almost. Rose in Titanic could handle this, so could Vivian in Pretty Woman. Not Norman though. Moreover, Marion steals money and keeps from danger to ensure a chance of romance. Rocky could do this, so could John McClane. What's going on here? Well, the wider answer could be that role reversals aren't that acceptable by the standards of society. This is probably true to a certain extent. Is that good or bad? A talk for another time. In terms of cinematics, however, what this seems to be about is fear and traps - that which Psycho is inherently about. Personal traps are the product of fear that is allowed to consume. For Norman it's fear of memory, Marion, fear of being wrong, Travis Bickle, fear that the world will never be a better place, Bruce Wayne, fear that evil will consume all, Henry Spencer, fear of fatherhood, Patrick Bateman, fear of being ignored. And it's this element of fear that these characters are either subjected to or try to fight against. It's for those reasons that their films are often crimes, horrors of have elements of action. When we come back to the key archetype of this class of film, Norman, we can understand the overarching philosophy of these broken romances - and it's all connected to Hitchcock's idea of marriage. Marriage seems to be about knowing yourself well enough so you don't screw up someone else's life. It's not letting bias and memory dictate how your present perception functions. Unfortunately, with films like Shutter Island, Memento and Psycho where the Bates archetype is strongest, the best characters can manage is to convince themselves that they are not the monster...
And it's in this that an anti-romance almost becomes a romance. In the end, Psycho, like many other films is simply about self-awareness for the purpose of social-awareness - those around you. For both Marion and Norman it'd be knowing the traps they put themselves in and have to get out of that'd allow them to better cope in life and with relationships.
Melanie Daniels follows romance to a small beach town about to be attacked by huge flocks of birds.
This is not a good film. It most definitely hasn't aged that well, but, that doesn't really matter. It was crap to begin with. My primary argument on this is that it's utter nonsense, moreover, the acting is mediocre, characterisation flat, plot more than disinteresting and the logic... wow... the logic. But, most of all, this film is in no way horrifying - not to me. I don't want to rip into this film though for it does have some redeeming qualities. Its bat-shit-crazy narrative and insane character motivations (to run into flocks of somehow killer birds) is driven by a singular metaphor. The birds are in fact Hitchcock's way of presenting the social atmosphere of the town and relationships between characters. The birds of course start as a humorous euphemism with the love birds, but become violent when the plot moves into Bodega Bay. It's here where sea gulls, crows and sparrows attack - even the chickens are a bit off. This all comes down to the relationship between Melanie and Mitch. Mitch seems to be some kind of player who has mummy and daddy issues. This should be ringing many alarm bells - especially if you've read my post on Psycho. (Links in the end). Hitchcock uses birds in the same way he does with Norman and Marion in that they represent a possible relationship. In Psycho the relationships in question are between Norman and women as well as Marion and Sam. With The Birds it's between Mitch, his family and Melanie. In short, Mitch's family are in a slight upheaval with his father having died, leaving his mother needing a trustworthy son and his sister a role model. The women he then chooses to bring around have a huge effect on his family's dynamic. Moreover, the conflict between Melanie and Mitch's family permeates throughout the whole town - it being small and gossip being capable of devastating the family. This results in the birds attacking - an expression of said hostility. You see this clearly with every scene revealing character, such as Mitch's and Melanie's back stories, proceeding an attack. Moreover, every time their relationship progresses, the birds grow violent. This ultimately plunges the town into chaos and puts many in danger. This somewhat abbreviated explanation of what the birds are then allows you to recognise the question posed to both Mitch and Melanie who are at fault (metaphorically) for the bird attacks. The question posed to them is whether they want to stick around town and make this film a horror/tragedy much like Romeo And Juliet meets Psycho (but with birds replacing knives) or leave for the sake of preserving a healthy family circle. And it's with the end of the film that all the characters learn to trust and respect one another, so they can leave the town with the ex-girlfriends and painful history to start again.
It's by comparing Psycho to The Birds that you get a nice juxtaposition of how to overcome memory and convoluted social ties to move forward in life - not get stuck.
The infamous surrealist short from Dalí and Buñuel.
Unbeknownst to any of my viewers, I've wanted to talk about this film for a long time, and have even tried once or twice. I've wanted to write about An Andalusian Dog because seeing it for the first time was a formative cinematic experience for me as a writer. But, when I've tried to talk about the film on the blog before, I wanted to discuss all of its minute details, explaining what each moment could mean, or what they mean to me. This, however, never panned out because this is a filmic experience, and in itself, a film, that is almost opposed to that philosophy. It's in my writings that Un Chien Andalou has inspired ambiguity, inspired imagery that may be imbued with implimence, but not concrete, equative meaning. And it's surrealism, that which Buñuel and Dalí portray, that attempts to reveal the Freudian subconscious through sensory and emotive cinema. The according philosophy of surrealist film is then of irrationality, is of a nature you cannot nomothetically pull apart and explain. It's then this philosophy that is opposed to what I've wanted to, and in large part do, on this blog - explain movies. What Un Chien Andalou instead represents and teaches anyone interested in cinema is the fundamental idea of fantasy and imagination inherent to the art form. I've talked about this subject of fantasy before with posts like those on The Matrix, but fantasy is an extension of the human imagination that isn't satisfied. Tarkovsky says is best with:
His point here is not really that the world is imperfect and that it should be better. His point encompasses the artist in respect to perspective. We create art because we see the world as imperfect, we look around at cities, at oceans, the sky, space beyond, technology before our faces, under our fingers and we look through organic devices attached to incomprehensibly complex structurings, chemicals, pathways and interactions yet we still want more, we think this is not good enough, or, at the least could be better. I daren't critique this kind of thinking because it is inherently human and to deny drive, to deny need and want, to deny curiosity, would be to lie. Instead, what I'm trying to demonstrate, as I think Tarkovsky may be, is that we project the ill-design in us onto the world. It's drive, need, want, curiosity that both gave us electricity and medicine, but also war, greed, suffering in ourselves and put upon others. If we didn't have the human ingenuity and agitation, we would be a bunch of mindless hippies in love with the universe at best, but a horde of animals, in tune with nature, but completely unaware of our existence in all probability. The world, to the hippie and horde, would be perfect - and only because their internal schematics saw it as such. So, Tarkovsky's point and mine is that art comes from imperfection. Take that a step further as we just have and we can recognise art as coming from need, drive, want, curiosity; from an irrational human essence, something broken within us. How this irrationality has been most accessibly explained is with Freud and his theory of the unconscious mind. Whether its with complexes that have us want to sleep with our mother, or play with our faeces, Freud sees breaks in the wirings of the human mind that express themselves without our say-so, or know-so. This expression is fantasy, dreams and buried associations of memory and emotion. When you look at the world, especially of art, through the Freudian looking-glass you fall down a postmodern rabbit hole where meaning is so fruitful it's almost negligible, no one idea much more helpful, nor valid, than another. To clarify, it's best we turn to our film at hand, An Andalusian Dog.
Un Chien Andalou is comprised of images and happenings that are somewhat related, with the stitching of juxtaposition having to be of our own design. The audience decides what, for example, a moon has to do with an eye in other words, but, the stitching never shows itself and never explains itself. The design of this film is then meant to imitate a dream - the human subconsciousness. The question then raised by this is: why are we watching the film? This question may not be obvious at first, but considering this film as a dream, Buñuel's or Dalí's, and that a dream is a personal story only a dreamer can understand, well, what hopes to we have of comprehending what Un Chien Andalou talks about? The answer to this draws our existential magnifying glass back from human internals and subconsciousness, to the possibilities of a collective consciousness. Dreams are memories interacting with perception and experience. They are our own biases playing against 'reality' creating out own personal shades of reality that we perceive and live in. To what degree are our own lives and realities comparable to the next man's? There of course isn't a solid answer to this, but I can offer my opinion. I see humans fundamentally as machines. We are sacks of flesh, hormones, networks of arteries, veins, capillaries, axons, dendrons, neurotransmitters, muscle, water, bile, saliva, blood and urine. This is true for all humans - this is true for a lot of life forms. And this fundamental orchestration of organs, flesh and bone prepares us for reality in a similar way. This is what draws us together. What's deeper and more profound is that across all life, there is an inherent quantum connection - and it comes from the atoms we are all made of. By their own rules we strive to understand, atoms and their quantum parts exist in paradigm, rule and pattern - just as the macroscopic world. This means that whilst we all live in a reality dictated by the gravity keeping us on this orb of molten, semi-molten and solid rock, metal and dirt, we also live in a world dictated by the duality of the photon, entangled particles, relativity, supposed dark matter and spacetime. We cannot feel or perceive some of these forces and laws in our everyday, but they guide how we live intrinsically, and in ways we couldn't imagine. This means that the catastrophe of just switching off gravity is, relative to human life, just as poignant as just switching off dark matter, or the speed of light. That all then suggests that there are laws, paradigms, patterns and rules around us that dictate perceived reality that bind us together. We all live with atoms and under the influence of gravity and so, in a certain respect, we all live in the same world.
It's then consciousness, or the mind that can experience, that begins to separate us, that induces the debate of nature and nurture. Nature is all that we've discussed, from our biology to the physical law of the universe. Nurture is the ill-designed and irrational breaks in our minds interacting with nature or reality. The result of experience nurturing our existence is then fundamentally a journey toward understanding. Experience is seeing the world. Living is not dying - and that's what our bodies want - not to die. So, the job of the mind is experiencing the world in a way that won't result in the body dying or coming to harm - understanding, learning, growing (away from danger and stupidity). This is exactly where need, want, drive and curiosity comes from. Need is survival - we all feel we need to live, no question about it. Want is requiring standards of living - of having life, but wanting a good one. Drive is the fuel that keeps the fires of 'want' burning - it's working for a living, for more money, food, a better life. Curiosity is the road from wanting to having, it's wishing you could live forever and in a perpetually bettering state, but then deciding to go out into the world and find the means, stumble upon penicillin, create the atom bomb. What the crucial takeaway from this, from the difference between nature and nurture is, comes to an idea of acceptance. Nature is accepted reality. Nurture is envisioned reality. Nurture has a veil pulled over your eyes, and the seed planted in your brain that says this could be better. What humans then live in is tantamount to a tug of war. We live lives bound by gravity and Einstein's relativity. We knows this and, in certain respects, feel it. We accept that 'reality' is a thing. But, we also have questions, we have dreams that can, and may well eventually be projected onto reality, changing it forever. Humans, with our ill-design are then in a conscious forefront between the construction and the acceptance of reality. Understanding this, you see the truth of our disconnect and connect. It's nature that connects, and nurture that separates. But, the tug of war is in progress. We aren't the horde, we aren't the hippie, we aren't telekinetically connected in peace and unification either. This is what Un Chien Andalou stands for by trying to project a dream, to have individuals who have not lived in the mind of Dalí or Buñuel have their own shade of comprehension over their art, life, work and unconsciousness.
So, we come back to the question: why watch the film? The answer is that we are testing the boundaries of nurture and nature, we are testing if and how we compare to others. This test holds no answers though, the test is more like a gateway. The gateway is toward numbness, occupation and, quite simply, entertainment. We cannot know exactly how someone else perceives An Andalusian Dog because we can't feel as they do, we cannot experience the cogs of their mind (as dictated both by nature, being human, but also a human that has led a different life) spinning as they perceive it - in the same respect we couldn't feel or experience Dalí or Buñuel's thought process as they created this film. What does happen when we discuss or watch this film with others, however, is a projected idea of connection. We can get a rough feeling of what Dalí, Buñuel's, a friend's unconsciousness is like through watching. It's the allusion art constructs that then allows people to communicate in ways other than simply talking or interacting. It's then art that starts to fill in the gaps of the ill-designed mind. It's because people perceive life with their eyes and with a partly/largely unconscious mind that film exists, that that surrealist philosophy of cinema exists. We cannot say what is attempted to be said with Un Chien Andalou with a speech, with a book, with a play, with music or dance and that is precious because humans want to understand through any avenue we can. The avenue of cinema is projected fantasy, most purely, through surrealist film. But, if Gene Kelly has a red-purple-blue glowing emotion in his chest he wants to share, he sings in the rain and we get to feel something in the realm of what he may have felt. If Scorsese, De Niro, Schrader feel a putrid, yellow-brown-black disconnect in their gut, they can ask "you talkin' to me?" and that question may burn in our abdomen too. If Stallone feels itching aggravation, pressure that must be pushed against, a pull that must be met, he may translate that from Philadelphian streets, through montage, to a ring and a shaken 'Adrian, I did it!' straight to the visceral poundings in our chests. That is fantasy, that is cinema, and that is the dream of the broken mind searching for understanding in a world it refuses to entirely accept.
Through and through, what Un Chien Andalou means is a question not answered with explanation, but exploration. You feel what An Andalusian Dog means to you, and you then hope, think or glance toward an idea of that feeling aligning with and in others. That is the biggest take away of this film - it's the essence of art and of cinema as an art form. It is the communication of the irrational, the hidden and the insurmountable. It is the journey that conjures emotions, that occupies the mind, that momentarily fills gaps.
I've covered this film before, but as it's such an expansive artistic labyrinth of themes and ideas, I've decided to cover it again, this time in long form, and with chance provided by the Receptacle Series.
The fundamental philosophy of 2001 is found in the singular image of the monolith.
In fact, it's the monolith that represents the most crushing existential question anyone can ask themselves. Where does this all come from? The answer for billions of people and for thousands of years has been, God, in many shapes, forms and interpretations. It's God that gave life, God that decides, God that is in control, that at least set this all up. The most obvious question we've all then asked is, if God created us, who created God? This is a question that has plagued many philosophical minds, with answers sometimes in referral to absolute power, infinite existence, essence and many other abstract thoughts. Another answer to the question, where does it all come from?, is scientific, is usually the big bang. About 13.7 billion years ago, something happened which led to our universe exploding from a point infinitely small and infinitely dense. As anyone who's sat in a science class could tell you, something doesn't come from nothing, energy and matter are not destroyed nor created - never completely. They simply change forms. So, like with the idea of God, we can turn to the big bang with many questions, like: where did it come from? What caused it? What was there beforehand? Answers to such questions are abstract, and for me, almost impossible to comprehend. The hardest concept for me (as I presume is the same with many people) to actually see and come to terms with is the concept of there actually being nothing before the big bang. The implication of this is that with the big bang came the birth of space and time. That means there is no where and no when for us to question when it comes to the precursing environment to the big bang. In sometimes accompanying addition to this idea comes other explanations to 'the before' of the big bang. Other explanations pertain to our universe expanding and contracting infinitely, meaning that the big bang was just the point of a new beginning for our universe. What came before the big bang would then be this universe, in a different form, milliseconds from collapsing in on itself. Another explanation to what came before the big bang comes with a multiverse theory. In this theory, universes are born in an interuniversal space, maybe from other universes, maybe from their deaths, maybe from contact amongst blobs of universes. What would trouble anyone with the concept of energy conservation at hand, of something not being able to come from nothing, would then be their capacity to ask: what if you zoom out? The exact same question may be asked with the theory of God, of multiverses and of our own universe expanding and contracting.
What if you zoom out? has us all squeezing our heads, wanting to cry, just hopelessly having to accept that we live in a reality tantamount to the 'chicken and egg' metaphor. This reality seems to infinitely perpetuate with Gods creating Gods, with universes being inside universes, multiverses within multiverses. There is never an end, nor is there a start. This is then ultimately troubling because, to quote my favourite band, "Stay. You don't always know where you stand until you know that you won't run away". It's stood still in ambiguity, in the dark, in perpetuity, that humans fidget, get scared, want to run away. Without knowing where it all starts on a cosmic, theological, universal, multi-universal, level we don't know our place in this world, in time, in the vast breadths of reality. This is why questions of our origin and end haunt us, this is why answers are so eagerly sought out, the truth that we simply don't know so often looked past, so hard to swallow. Kubrick offers no solace to this existential plight with 2001. Instead, it's the monolith, that is implied to have given us a step up in the evolutionary ladder, that almost mirrors theories of a God or the big bang. The monolith with its basic shape, lack of colour, simple looming presence, is what perfectly represents our question of: where does it all come from? The monolith, as presented by Kubrick, may have given us our last huge evolutionary jump, just as it may have provided all those ahead of us and all those before. The monolith may have been responsible for the jump from basic life to complex life, from no life to simple life, from there being nothing in this universe to there being something. It's with Kubrick's monolith though that we still have the What if you zoom out? paradox. But, it's with the rest of his narrative that he makes clear why this existential plight is fruitless, why our origins, our ends and all that perpetuates toward and away from them, are inevitably irrelevant to us, ourselves, as singular brains, minds, selves.
His point comes both with the design of the monolith and the paradigm of characters' behaviours. The monolith being a basic oblong is an extension of the stargate sequence...
This is visual poetry. And what it's saying is WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU... Kubrick has no other way to show the journey Bowman takes. Just like he throws a dazzling display at us here, he shows us simple mundanity with the monolith because it represents incomprehensibility. It's recognising this that we can see the leading force of this film to be the confines of human perception. And it's with that theme that we must then look at the characters of 2001. We start with the intro where we are given Moon-Watcher (the monkey thing), later our other key characters become Heywood (the chairman guy who gives a speech) Bowman (the main astronaut) and of course Hal 9000. What connects and separates these three characters is simply the fact that they are consciously alive. With life they are given the drive to continue living. Moon-Watcher doesn't want to be eaten by predators, Heywood wants to protect and find the monoliths, as does Bowman and as does Hal. What's then clear is that the main bulk of 2001 is a race towards that next big evolutionary step as given by the metaphorical monolith. The monolith, as mentioned, is almost God. It's a force that gives something where there was not much before. Kubrick's use of the monolith is then a very reductive view of the world, and it mimics us and our What if you zoom out? because there is the essential requirement of reason, of an image that explains it all. This is so crucially important as it mirrors the drives shown by characters. They want to survive, they want more. All characters understand there is something attainable that will change the state of their existence and, without any other reason beyond curiosity, maybe fear, they want it. It's often what we refer to as the human condition that explains this contradiction. We want goals, material representations of our time and efforts, when the physical truth of reality is that there is no better, there is no worse, only a transference of energy and matter. Having more money, knowing the truth, where this all comes from, isn't going to do anything to the world, only make you feel better about it (on the largest, truest scales). It's then perception that has us race, want more, that gives us the stargate sequence. What Kubrick's ultimate message here comes down to is a universal disconnect between us and the cosmos.
I touch on this point quite often with the blog, but, without emotions, without conscientiousness, the world would be a much better place to look at, it'd be easier and nobody would be worrying, and all because we fundamentally wouldn't be seeing the world, we wouldn't be interpreting energy, matter and happenings with emotions. The disconnect between ourselves and the universe is then in us, is in our emotions. Why, if we are the product of a bigger picture, would we be created to view it without answers, without the means of being ultimately satisfied? This question is often materialised with a question of God. Why, if God exists, if God created us, wanted us to be, if maybe God loves us, would he have us suffer? I don't think this is a practical question though, nor one we should be asking. Fundamentally, this is a rhetorical question. It asks: why do you believe in this guy if he's such a dick? However, this could be a question asked without ulterior motive. And when you face this question head on you can conjure up answers such as a universal correctness, maybe karma, you may even say that God doesn't in fact love us, or maybe that he's testing us all. I still say this is a question we should ignore. Why? It puts us at the centre of the universe and demands an emotional reading of a reality operating on levels completely different to ourselves on a psychological and emotional basis (if we can assume the universe and reality has either of those basis). Instead, I revert back to the similar, but much more objective take on this question pertaining to disconnect. If you look at certain physical laws around diffusion, osmosis and thermodynamics, you can see the universe wants equilibrium. It wants to spread its energy throughout itself equally and kind of snuff itself out with inert serenity. How do we fit into this paradigm? We have a perception that doesn't align with the universal flow towards serenity. We seem to be a stick in the works with our emotions and disconnect. The only reasoning behind why we then exist may be that we either serve as a way to contaminate the mix of the universe to stop it evening out, or that we are here to speed the progression towards nothingness up. Maybe we're a product of life becoming more and more complex, to the point of understanding the universe enough to give it that kick in the black hole and end it all. On the other hand, maybe that kick in the black hole could allow the universe to start again, or live on? It would then makes sense that if the universe and all its laws are in us that it too wants to live forever. Maybe we are part of an evolutionary line towards the universe being restarted, living perpetually. Maybe the universe is internally trying to hack a system of detriment and a slow death?
It's with this view of the universe that introspection is the only way to understand reality. It's us then assuming we want to live forever, and so the universe must also want this, that gives us our place in the big picture. We are a tool of perpetuity. We are a means to prolonging an end. It's the monolith in 2001 that then represents an intrinsic connection between us and the universe. The monolith is our drive towards living forever meeting the universe's. There's a race between us and A.I (Hal) because there is a sorting process of the universe working out who is the best candidate to evolve towards something that could save the universe's life, to continue its existence on forever. Whilst I think this is the key concept of the movie, and a great way to interpret many of the questions raised so far, we still have the question of what came before all this, and what if you zoom out?
Well, the answer comes right back to perception. It does not matter if there is something beyond the big bang, beyond our universe, beyond God or the multiverse. It doesn't matter because there is a seed within us all that is selfish. That seed does not care about above and beyonds, not truly, it's only concerned with infinite directions away from itself in relation to itself. It only wants to survive. This idea is closely linked to those captured by Un Chien Andalou, and is all to do with the journey. We only fear or are curious of beginnings and ends because we are so in love with the road underneath our feet. We, to varying degrees, all want to live, and maybe forever. If this wasn't true, we'd all kill ourselves without hopes of a heaven, of something better. Because there is a drive within us that wants to simply live on, we can care only about our own worlds, about the things close to us and the things we can effect. If we were given the means of understanding everything that is, what would be the point of existing? Ultimately, you wouldn't see one, and so everything would become nothing. Everything would become inert. A being that fully understood reality would understand so thoroughly what all that was around it was that it'd become numb to it. And, in terms of perception, reality would evaporate. Something would become nothing to a being that could perceive utmost truth. For that nothing, for that meaningless to become something, you'd have to want to see it as such. The way in which this seems to happen is that within your perception is planted a seed, a promise that there is something more worth waiting around to see - some kind of meaning. This drive is life, is why we perceive, why a plant photosynthesises, why a bear catches fish, why a mosquito reproduces, why the universe maybe wants to live on forever - and it's a lie, a ruse. Despite this, it's irrational to want to understand all that is, because, perceptually, we would see everything turn to nothing, we would lose consciousness just like memories fade, the feeling of the clothes on your body dissipates, the rancid smell of your room simply goes away. It's for this exact reasoning that there is the stargate sequence. You don't want to know what all the answers look like. That's just a trick your mind is playing on you to keep you interested in reality, to keep you living, to keep something from falling into nothing. Why? Well, why not? Maybe not all matter gets to perceive reality consciously, maybe we live in a mathematic playground of nothing and something. Some of us get nothing. Some of us get something. Maybe there are varying shades of this something. Nonetheless, ask yourself, would you want to give up your something? Your answer is either, yes. Or, your answer is no because you are curious, and built to want something else even if that something is what you perceive to be nothing - and all for a reprieve.
In the end, you better hope that something comes from something comes from something comes from something... God created God created God created God... a big bang followed a big crunch followed a big bang followed a big crunch followed a big bang... that when presented with a universal zoom button you can forever scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll... because whenever you reach the end, the program shuts down, your eyes close, darkness becomes epitome, something becomes a tree fallen in a pitch forest of nothing.
Jack Torrance takes a job as the caretaker of The Overlook Hotel through isolated winter months, bringing with him his wife and young son.
The Shining is a masterpiece. This is one of my favourite films of all time. This is one of the greatest films ever made. This is the best horror film ever made. But, this is not a flawless, through-and-through, perfect picture. Most importantly, this is not the movie Room 237 paints it out to be...
Room 237 is part interesting, part nonsense, part insanity. Ultimately, it does not reflect a true reading of this film as it presents itself. This is what I want to do today: both demonstrate why this is such a great film, and also what it means with an honest, taken-as-given analysis. Staying with Room 237 a moment, what we have here is a documentary tantamount to bad reality TV. It's intriguing, but in a way you feel probably isn't too good for your mental dexterity. More than this, Room 237 is primarily a collection of poor reviews or looks in on a film. You have obsessive fanatics of this film that zoom waaaaay to far into tiny details which ultimately does nothing more than trivialise Kubrick's ingenuity, talent, craft and artistry, making it not just pretentious to say he's a genius, but almost laughable. Then you also have those who pick up interesting details (like the reference to Native Indians) but cannot demonstrate the purpose of that throughout the narrative. This has always been something that has tugged at the fibres of my filmic pretension and geekness. It's fine to analyse the details of a film, to zoom into scenes, moments, seconds, but, each frame cannot be treated as an individual painting. Each frame must been seen as a segment of a collage. If you wanted to, you could make a claim for this film being racist against blacks or Native Americans because of certain designs on clothing, on the walls, the use of 'nigger' and of killing the only black guy. If you wanted to, you could use this film as evidence for the moon landings being faked by Kubrick (I know). If you wanted to, you could see this movie as being misogynist because of the way Wendy is treated by Jack, how she's given responsibilities in the kitchen and how women are generally the targets of a lot of violence. If you really wanted to, you could see this movie as a whole lot of things, and I suppose that's part of what makes it great: its ambiguity, its flexibility, its resounding accessibility. But, to judge a film you must take into account each scene, each moment, see how they interact and so hear how the film as a whole speaks to you. This is film analysis. It's not making a case for a sneaking suspicion you have, or a scene you thought pushed the mark too far. It's discovery and then the articulation of what you've discovered. It's here that you then make your case. The film provides your agenda, you don't bring it into the movie. That's said, let's get into why this film is so often seen as one of the greats.
I've often had a hard time seeing what people mean when they say a film is a masterpiece or is great. This happens all the time when I look into arts I'm not familiar with (almost all of them). What this says to me is that I just don't get what I'm looking at most of the time. However, I've loved film for a long time, but haven't always been able to see what people mean by great, or even form my own opinion on their view or the film itself. This is simply something you have to develop, meaning seeing greatness is something you have to learn how to do. That sounds stupid and elitist, but that's not what I mean for it to be. What I'm trying to get across is that greatness needs to be pointed out, made clear and precisely demonstrated - something hard to do but also gain access to--largely because 'great' is a word thrown around all to easily (myself being a huge culprit of this). Either way, what makes The Shining great, what makes any film great, is that it both excels in many of its cinematic elements and maintains an irrevocable quality over time and as a cohesive piece of art. 'Cinematic elements' are varied and vast, bringing together a huge skill-set of sometimes hundreds or thousands of people, stretching through numerous art forms. The most obvious elements of cinema though are directing, acting, editing, writing and sound design. A great film excels in all of these elements, but to varying degrees. This is because perfection is not a tangible thing, and the judgment of what is great is ultimately something not determined by a film's many individual parts (something we'll come to in a moment). So, The Shining excels most in the fields of direction, writing and editing. I love the sound design, but it is a little too blatant and emotive at times as well as repetitive. This cheapens the experience as it takes you out of the movie slightly instead of drawing you into the narrative and supporting the meaning of the film. I also love Jack Nicholson's performance, but, it's a little over the top at times, moreover, the acting overall isn't amazing (though very good, great in parts). Again, this cheapens the experience, but it also reduces verisimilitude which will add further detriment to the immersive quality of the film as well as diminish character work. On the note of character work, we're going to have to touch on Stephen King's novel. King has criticised this film quite openly on the basis of bad character work. Firstly, I haven't read the book. Secondly, this is a distinguished piece of work that has since defined itself from the novel, leaving the point of comparison rather useless. Thirdly, for reasons we'll get into later, the characterisation in this film is there to support the narrative. So to get along as quick as possible, let's move onto what's great about The Shining and take a look at direction.
Kubrick's style is something you could write a book about. But, in respect to The Shining, what is so exceptional about it is the regimented framing and fluid movement. The cinematography, blocking (where actors sit, stand, move) and framing work together to produce a beautiful, life-like look that is very open to technical analysis. And it's for this reason that The Shining is a film I can return to time and time again. I love the 'sit down and talk' scenes. These are the scenes that are often said to be the best way to judge a director's worth. If you give a director a huge set-piece, a whole lot of CGI, a magnificent landscape, or even phenomenal actors, what they capture is something that wants to be seen, that in some ways speaks for itself. To understand what I mean you simply have to consider something like the end battle of The Avengers or an action scene from Indiana Jones happening before your eyes, or in a YouTube video. Just seeing aliens, Captain America, Hulk smash or Indiana run from huge boulders, fight atop moving tanks, shoot unsuspecting sword-wielding enemies, is enough, and whilst direction can add a lot to this, there is a strong basis of amazement that leaves a lot of a director's job down to simply not distracting the audience from the imagery. The same goes for a great bit of acting, writing or artwork. You could otherwise just listen to, read or look at these things despite their presentation. When it comes to simple talks at a table good acting is key, but what elevates something like the opening to Pulp Fiction or Inglorious Basterds, the majority of 12 Angry Men or Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, the monologues in There Will Be Blood, the central dramatic set-piece of Fury or Psycho, above a filmed podcast, a YouTube video or a play is direction. What this demonstrates is something I've already touched on a few times and that is the importance of immersion. The individual elements of a film (acting, writing, editing, direction, sound design) are there to ensure you are having a good time, are there to put you in that suspended place just above reality, but below a dream, are there to draw you in and hold your attention. This is a huge qualifying factor of a mediocre, good or great film. They have to entertain or draw you in. With the simple 'talk at a table' scene what you have is a segment of your story that is usually something you need, not really want - it is ultimate something your audience is not often looking to be entertained by. But, Kubrick holds long and (on paper) kind of meh conversations over long stretches with minimal acting and little movement by setting down cinematic poetry. By that I mean to reference what Scorsese calls cinematic language, and this term describes the means by which a camera angle can tell you something in the same respect these typed squiggles do. In other words, during the table scenes Kubrick not only manages to hold our attention, but say an awful lot with the positioning of his camera.
With the last sentence I leave an open end of analysis/explanation as going through scenes frame-by-frame would take a long time in what is already going to be a long essay. Nonetheless, it's the combination of editing and great camera work that truly suck you into the film, but are also the source of a lot of rewatches, rewinds and obsession. That is to say, the camera work in this film demonstrates what cinema is: it is art made accessible, but art that retains the capacity to say a lot. The last thing that makes this movie great is the writing. This encompasses plotting, character work, dialogue, such and so on. You can then break these elements down further to assess them, and whilst the writing of this film isn't flawless, it is great. It's actually the writing of this film that makes it truly great to me as how a screenplay materialises on screen is my favourite thing about movies. But, before moving onto this I must conclude the point of parts and wholes. Elements of a movie can vary in their strength, but the quality of a picture must be judged over time, and with the movie seen as a singular composite of numerous arts. This comes down to what a film is and how we see and/or analyse them. Films, as repeated many times over, are there to entertain and draw us in for an hour or two. It then makes no sense for you to be ignoring or fixating on fractions of the film before judgement. You must see it in full and be paying attention to everything for your view to have any veracity. Moreover, a film explains itself. This is why film analysis is the articulation of what has already been said by a film. The purpose of analysis is to reflect overall meaning that some may miss, but also provide opportunity for the film to flourish in the themes it holds and the questions it asks us. In the end, a great film does a lot - a lot of impressive, astounding, interesting... things. Those things remain, in part, undefined, as a great film (given the needed approach or perspective) makes its own rules and plays by them like no other. The Shining takes the idea of book adaptations, makes its own rules of approach and surpasses the novel. The Shining also mesmerises, captivates, draws in obsessives, fanatics and weirdos. The Shining defines itself as the greatest horror film ever by being unlike any other, by being strictly irreplicable.
Ok, to delve into my favourite aspect of what makes this film great we come to the writing and in turn the meaning of this behemoth. This is a film entirely about destructive familial relations, it is about domestic abuse, child abuse and self-abuse. To see this you have to look straight to the aspects of this movie that are so easily looked past. The central performance of Jack, the constant build to the moment he's smashing down doors with the axe, pushing his face through the whole in the door to taunt 'Here's Johnny!' all detracts from the supernatural foresight of Danny, Hallorann and the ghosts Jack talks to - these are the most important aspects of this movie. That's not even mentioning the final image...
To understand how Jack is somehow in a ball in 1921, you have to understand what The Shining actually is. The Shining is the ability to see things that have happened or may happen that are demonstrated by the film to be a looming threat. This isn't strictly true though as Hallorann tells us. He was able to talk to his Grandmother, for hours on end, when he was a young boy. What's more, he talks to Danny. The Shining is then two things. It's the ability to see danger, but also communicate. To understand why Danny and possibly Hallorann have The Shining you only need to look to these scenes...
It's Jack talking to Lloyd that reveals the central elements of his character. Firstly, he tells the story of his breaking Danny's arm. Secondly, he hints at possible alcoholism with 'the hair of the dog that bit me' and Llyod handing him whiskey. What is implied here is that Jack, despite trying to be a good father, snaps at times. It's his relationship with Wendy that makes this most clear. And it's here we need to come back to character work. Nicholson injects a lot of needed life into a very subtle film. Like in Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick risks seemingly bland, even bad performances for faux interactions between characters to imply satire and an underlying lie.
With Jack and Wendy in the car, in the bedroom or talking on the phone you can sense an utter disconnect masquerading as shitty writing and terrible performances. It's knowing how much hatred for Wendy Jack is hiding that makes these scenes work. What looks like bad acting is bad acting, but on Jack Torrance's behalf, not Jack Nicholson's. Nicholson portrays a miserable husband who feels stuck in a relationship with the unthinkably oblivious Wendy. This is actually the aspect of character work that makes little sense. Wendy is never shown to pick up on Jack's disdain for her (not until it's too late). This may be because she fears Jack (due to his stressed/drunken and possibly violent history) and is putting on as much as of a show for him as he is for her, however, this is hard to find evidence for, leaving ambiguity a downfall in writing. In other words, her character is ultimately left a slightly tangential element of this film left largely unexplored. Nonetheless, the key takeaway from Jack's past and his relationship with his wife is that he is a conflicted, possibly abusive husband and father. Knowing this we can come back to what The Shining actually is. For Danny, The Shining represents an ability to reach out for help. This is made clear in early scenes with him talking in the mirror and with later warnings with the twins - but let's not jump ahead of ourselves. Staying with the opening act, there's an extended cut of this film that includes a small scene with a doctor coming to see Danny (who has been sick) and also one with the doctor talking to Wendy about Jack breaking his arm a few months before hand (something Wendy defends Jack on). This scene brings together the outside world and the inner family circle on the theme of abuse. This also happens with Hallorann interfering - and doesn't end well.
But, what is present in both of these scenes is the idea of Shining. Danny called out for help to Hallorann, but couldn't when alone with his mother or the doctor. The Shining is then a metaphorical means of presenting a child's (person's) ability to call out for help. This implies some interesting things about Hallorann who can also Shine and maybe lived with his Grandmother. It's possible that he had an abusive past, giving reason for his (alleged, but denied) fear of room 237 and why he would have lived with his Grandmother, not his parents. However, we cannot jump to that just yet.
So, Hallorann and Danny obviously have The Shining, but, what went over my head for years was that Jack does too. This isn't the same kind of Shining that Halloran and Danny have as he can't communicate like them, but it is what lets him see ghosts, just as it does Danny. Before delving too deep into that, we also need to recognise something implied about Jack's past. It is possible that his parents abused him, giving reason for his need for seclusion, his incredibly distant facade and ultimately his final break. So, with The Shining we can see that Danny, Jack and Hallorann struggle or have struggled with needing help, but not having a voice to call for it. But, The Shining is not just a means of communicating - as implied with Danny's violent visions and Jack's interactions with a ghostly world. The Shining is also a means of reflection. With Danny and Hallorann this reflection triggers foresight of possible danger. For Jack, we see something different. The best way to see The Shining is under the Freudian interpretation of a dream. Bad dreams or nightmares are a means of a dreamer working through fears. But, dreams are also a means of wish fulfillment. So, for Danny and Hallerann, The Shining provides warning based on their fears and anxieties relating to abuse (like a nightmare). For Jack we see a much more masochistic means of dealing with past trauma. In short, Jack seeing Lloyd is a very dangerous means of Jack accepting his violent side and embracing an abusive childhood/history - some kind of self-destructive wish fulfillment or a means of reversing repression. This is what will eventually explain the last image of the film and open up the true struggles of characters throughout the narrative. To get into Jack's visions we have to recognise what The Outlook Hotel is and so recognise what Jack's role as the caretaker means. As we all know, The Outlook is a fundamental symbol of isolation. And it's the barren seclusion that The Outlook provides that forces the singular families within to the edges of their psyches, sometimes resulting in tragedy.
The Outlook then represents a family home blown up and made to seem looming. What this emphasises Jack's role as caretaker to be resultantly becomes unbearable. In short, his responsibilities, not only for the hotel, but his family force him into deep waters of introspection that have him come out full of hatred. The Outlook Hotel forces deep soul searching, and for the deeply conflicted men at the heads of some of these families, the isolation of self leads to implosion. This then bunches Jack in with Grady, the father who killed the twins - and gives reason why Grady and Jack have an exchange about who is actually the caretaker of the hotel. What this allows us to do is see 'the caretaker' as an archetype. He is a man at the head of a family that is deeply conflicted and profoundly miserable. With Jack we see the conflict in the way he's pulled in two directions, both by his son and wife, but also by his job as the caretaker and aspirations of being a writer. In short, he loves his son and maybe loves writing, he doesn't seem to like the work he's got, or the wife he lives for. His dissonance on who he is to the family grows with him believing he cannot express himself, he cannot live for himself and is wasting his time. We see this in this scene...
... and also in the infamous lines...
The Birds - Marriage And How To Do It?
Melanie Daniels follows romance to a small beach town about to be attacked by huge flocks of birds.
This is not a good film. It most definitely hasn't aged that well, but, that doesn't really matter. It was crap to begin with. My primary argument on this is that it's utter nonsense, moreover, the acting is mediocre, characterisation flat, plot more than disinteresting and the logic... wow... the logic. But, most of all, this film is in no way horrifying - not to me. I don't want to rip into this film though for it does have some redeeming qualities. Its bat-shit-crazy narrative and insane character motivations (to run into flocks of somehow killer birds) is driven by a singular metaphor. The birds are in fact Hitchcock's way of presenting the social atmosphere of the town and relationships between characters. The birds of course start as a humorous euphemism with the love birds, but become violent when the plot moves into Bodega Bay. It's here where sea gulls, crows and sparrows attack - even the chickens are a bit off. This all comes down to the relationship between Melanie and Mitch. Mitch seems to be some kind of player who has mummy and daddy issues. This should be ringing many alarm bells - especially if you've read my post on Psycho. (Links in the end). Hitchcock uses birds in the same way he does with Norman and Marion in that they represent a possible relationship. In Psycho the relationships in question are between Norman and women as well as Marion and Sam. With The Birds it's between Mitch, his family and Melanie. In short, Mitch's family are in a slight upheaval with his father having died, leaving his mother needing a trustworthy son and his sister a role model. The women he then chooses to bring around have a huge effect on his family's dynamic. Moreover, the conflict between Melanie and Mitch's family permeates throughout the whole town - it being small and gossip being capable of devastating the family. This results in the birds attacking - an expression of said hostility. You see this clearly with every scene revealing character, such as Mitch's and Melanie's back stories, proceeding an attack. Moreover, every time their relationship progresses, the birds grow violent. This ultimately plunges the town into chaos and puts many in danger. This somewhat abbreviated explanation of what the birds are then allows you to recognise the question posed to both Mitch and Melanie who are at fault (metaphorically) for the bird attacks. The question posed to them is whether they want to stick around town and make this film a horror/tragedy much like Romeo And Juliet meets Psycho (but with birds replacing knives) or leave for the sake of preserving a healthy family circle. And it's with the end of the film that all the characters learn to trust and respect one another, so they can leave the town with the ex-girlfriends and painful history to start again.
It's by comparing Psycho to The Birds that you get a nice juxtaposition of how to overcome memory and convoluted social ties to move forward in life - not get stuck.
Un Chien Andalou - Meaning, Cinema And The Dream
Unbeknownst to any of my viewers, I've wanted to talk about this film for a long time, and have even tried once or twice. I've wanted to write about An Andalusian Dog because seeing it for the first time was a formative cinematic experience for me as a writer. But, when I've tried to talk about the film on the blog before, I wanted to discuss all of its minute details, explaining what each moment could mean, or what they mean to me. This, however, never panned out because this is a filmic experience, and in itself, a film, that is almost opposed to that philosophy. It's in my writings that Un Chien Andalou has inspired ambiguity, inspired imagery that may be imbued with implimence, but not concrete, equative meaning. And it's surrealism, that which Buñuel and Dalí portray, that attempts to reveal the Freudian subconscious through sensory and emotive cinema. The according philosophy of surrealist film is then of irrationality, is of a nature you cannot nomothetically pull apart and explain. It's then this philosophy that is opposed to what I've wanted to, and in large part do, on this blog - explain movies. What Un Chien Andalou instead represents and teaches anyone interested in cinema is the fundamental idea of fantasy and imagination inherent to the art form. I've talked about this subject of fantasy before with posts like those on The Matrix, but fantasy is an extension of the human imagination that isn't satisfied. Tarkovsky says is best with:
"Some sort of pressure must exist; the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world."
Un Chien Andalou is comprised of images and happenings that are somewhat related, with the stitching of juxtaposition having to be of our own design. The audience decides what, for example, a moon has to do with an eye in other words, but, the stitching never shows itself and never explains itself. The design of this film is then meant to imitate a dream - the human subconsciousness. The question then raised by this is: why are we watching the film? This question may not be obvious at first, but considering this film as a dream, Buñuel's or Dalí's, and that a dream is a personal story only a dreamer can understand, well, what hopes to we have of comprehending what Un Chien Andalou talks about? The answer to this draws our existential magnifying glass back from human internals and subconsciousness, to the possibilities of a collective consciousness. Dreams are memories interacting with perception and experience. They are our own biases playing against 'reality' creating out own personal shades of reality that we perceive and live in. To what degree are our own lives and realities comparable to the next man's? There of course isn't a solid answer to this, but I can offer my opinion. I see humans fundamentally as machines. We are sacks of flesh, hormones, networks of arteries, veins, capillaries, axons, dendrons, neurotransmitters, muscle, water, bile, saliva, blood and urine. This is true for all humans - this is true for a lot of life forms. And this fundamental orchestration of organs, flesh and bone prepares us for reality in a similar way. This is what draws us together. What's deeper and more profound is that across all life, there is an inherent quantum connection - and it comes from the atoms we are all made of. By their own rules we strive to understand, atoms and their quantum parts exist in paradigm, rule and pattern - just as the macroscopic world. This means that whilst we all live in a reality dictated by the gravity keeping us on this orb of molten, semi-molten and solid rock, metal and dirt, we also live in a world dictated by the duality of the photon, entangled particles, relativity, supposed dark matter and spacetime. We cannot feel or perceive some of these forces and laws in our everyday, but they guide how we live intrinsically, and in ways we couldn't imagine. This means that the catastrophe of just switching off gravity is, relative to human life, just as poignant as just switching off dark matter, or the speed of light. That all then suggests that there are laws, paradigms, patterns and rules around us that dictate perceived reality that bind us together. We all live with atoms and under the influence of gravity and so, in a certain respect, we all live in the same world.
It's then consciousness, or the mind that can experience, that begins to separate us, that induces the debate of nature and nurture. Nature is all that we've discussed, from our biology to the physical law of the universe. Nurture is the ill-designed and irrational breaks in our minds interacting with nature or reality. The result of experience nurturing our existence is then fundamentally a journey toward understanding. Experience is seeing the world. Living is not dying - and that's what our bodies want - not to die. So, the job of the mind is experiencing the world in a way that won't result in the body dying or coming to harm - understanding, learning, growing (away from danger and stupidity). This is exactly where need, want, drive and curiosity comes from. Need is survival - we all feel we need to live, no question about it. Want is requiring standards of living - of having life, but wanting a good one. Drive is the fuel that keeps the fires of 'want' burning - it's working for a living, for more money, food, a better life. Curiosity is the road from wanting to having, it's wishing you could live forever and in a perpetually bettering state, but then deciding to go out into the world and find the means, stumble upon penicillin, create the atom bomb. What the crucial takeaway from this, from the difference between nature and nurture is, comes to an idea of acceptance. Nature is accepted reality. Nurture is envisioned reality. Nurture has a veil pulled over your eyes, and the seed planted in your brain that says this could be better. What humans then live in is tantamount to a tug of war. We live lives bound by gravity and Einstein's relativity. We knows this and, in certain respects, feel it. We accept that 'reality' is a thing. But, we also have questions, we have dreams that can, and may well eventually be projected onto reality, changing it forever. Humans, with our ill-design are then in a conscious forefront between the construction and the acceptance of reality. Understanding this, you see the truth of our disconnect and connect. It's nature that connects, and nurture that separates. But, the tug of war is in progress. We aren't the horde, we aren't the hippie, we aren't telekinetically connected in peace and unification either. This is what Un Chien Andalou stands for by trying to project a dream, to have individuals who have not lived in the mind of Dalí or Buñuel have their own shade of comprehension over their art, life, work and unconsciousness.
So, we come back to the question: why watch the film? The answer is that we are testing the boundaries of nurture and nature, we are testing if and how we compare to others. This test holds no answers though, the test is more like a gateway. The gateway is toward numbness, occupation and, quite simply, entertainment. We cannot know exactly how someone else perceives An Andalusian Dog because we can't feel as they do, we cannot experience the cogs of their mind (as dictated both by nature, being human, but also a human that has led a different life) spinning as they perceive it - in the same respect we couldn't feel or experience Dalí or Buñuel's thought process as they created this film. What does happen when we discuss or watch this film with others, however, is a projected idea of connection. We can get a rough feeling of what Dalí, Buñuel's, a friend's unconsciousness is like through watching. It's the allusion art constructs that then allows people to communicate in ways other than simply talking or interacting. It's then art that starts to fill in the gaps of the ill-designed mind. It's because people perceive life with their eyes and with a partly/largely unconscious mind that film exists, that that surrealist philosophy of cinema exists. We cannot say what is attempted to be said with Un Chien Andalou with a speech, with a book, with a play, with music or dance and that is precious because humans want to understand through any avenue we can. The avenue of cinema is projected fantasy, most purely, through surrealist film. But, if Gene Kelly has a red-purple-blue glowing emotion in his chest he wants to share, he sings in the rain and we get to feel something in the realm of what he may have felt. If Scorsese, De Niro, Schrader feel a putrid, yellow-brown-black disconnect in their gut, they can ask "you talkin' to me?" and that question may burn in our abdomen too. If Stallone feels itching aggravation, pressure that must be pushed against, a pull that must be met, he may translate that from Philadelphian streets, through montage, to a ring and a shaken 'Adrian, I did it!' straight to the visceral poundings in our chests. That is fantasy, that is cinema, and that is the dream of the broken mind searching for understanding in a world it refuses to entirely accept.
Through and through, what Un Chien Andalou means is a question not answered with explanation, but exploration. You feel what An Andalusian Dog means to you, and you then hope, think or glance toward an idea of that feeling aligning with and in others. That is the biggest take away of this film - it's the essence of art and of cinema as an art form. It is the communication of the irrational, the hidden and the insurmountable. It is the journey that conjures emotions, that occupies the mind, that momentarily fills gaps.
2001: A Space Odyssey - Something From Something From Something From Something From...
The fundamental philosophy of 2001 is found in the singular image of the monolith.
In fact, it's the monolith that represents the most crushing existential question anyone can ask themselves. Where does this all come from? The answer for billions of people and for thousands of years has been, God, in many shapes, forms and interpretations. It's God that gave life, God that decides, God that is in control, that at least set this all up. The most obvious question we've all then asked is, if God created us, who created God? This is a question that has plagued many philosophical minds, with answers sometimes in referral to absolute power, infinite existence, essence and many other abstract thoughts. Another answer to the question, where does it all come from?, is scientific, is usually the big bang. About 13.7 billion years ago, something happened which led to our universe exploding from a point infinitely small and infinitely dense. As anyone who's sat in a science class could tell you, something doesn't come from nothing, energy and matter are not destroyed nor created - never completely. They simply change forms. So, like with the idea of God, we can turn to the big bang with many questions, like: where did it come from? What caused it? What was there beforehand? Answers to such questions are abstract, and for me, almost impossible to comprehend. The hardest concept for me (as I presume is the same with many people) to actually see and come to terms with is the concept of there actually being nothing before the big bang. The implication of this is that with the big bang came the birth of space and time. That means there is no where and no when for us to question when it comes to the precursing environment to the big bang. In sometimes accompanying addition to this idea comes other explanations to 'the before' of the big bang. Other explanations pertain to our universe expanding and contracting infinitely, meaning that the big bang was just the point of a new beginning for our universe. What came before the big bang would then be this universe, in a different form, milliseconds from collapsing in on itself. Another explanation to what came before the big bang comes with a multiverse theory. In this theory, universes are born in an interuniversal space, maybe from other universes, maybe from their deaths, maybe from contact amongst blobs of universes. What would trouble anyone with the concept of energy conservation at hand, of something not being able to come from nothing, would then be their capacity to ask: what if you zoom out? The exact same question may be asked with the theory of God, of multiverses and of our own universe expanding and contracting.
What if you zoom out? has us all squeezing our heads, wanting to cry, just hopelessly having to accept that we live in a reality tantamount to the 'chicken and egg' metaphor. This reality seems to infinitely perpetuate with Gods creating Gods, with universes being inside universes, multiverses within multiverses. There is never an end, nor is there a start. This is then ultimately troubling because, to quote my favourite band, "Stay. You don't always know where you stand until you know that you won't run away". It's stood still in ambiguity, in the dark, in perpetuity, that humans fidget, get scared, want to run away. Without knowing where it all starts on a cosmic, theological, universal, multi-universal, level we don't know our place in this world, in time, in the vast breadths of reality. This is why questions of our origin and end haunt us, this is why answers are so eagerly sought out, the truth that we simply don't know so often looked past, so hard to swallow. Kubrick offers no solace to this existential plight with 2001. Instead, it's the monolith, that is implied to have given us a step up in the evolutionary ladder, that almost mirrors theories of a God or the big bang. The monolith with its basic shape, lack of colour, simple looming presence, is what perfectly represents our question of: where does it all come from? The monolith, as presented by Kubrick, may have given us our last huge evolutionary jump, just as it may have provided all those ahead of us and all those before. The monolith may have been responsible for the jump from basic life to complex life, from no life to simple life, from there being nothing in this universe to there being something. It's with Kubrick's monolith though that we still have the What if you zoom out? paradox. But, it's with the rest of his narrative that he makes clear why this existential plight is fruitless, why our origins, our ends and all that perpetuates toward and away from them, are inevitably irrelevant to us, ourselves, as singular brains, minds, selves.
His point comes both with the design of the monolith and the paradigm of characters' behaviours. The monolith being a basic oblong is an extension of the stargate sequence...
This is visual poetry. And what it's saying is WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU... Kubrick has no other way to show the journey Bowman takes. Just like he throws a dazzling display at us here, he shows us simple mundanity with the monolith because it represents incomprehensibility. It's recognising this that we can see the leading force of this film to be the confines of human perception. And it's with that theme that we must then look at the characters of 2001. We start with the intro where we are given Moon-Watcher (the monkey thing), later our other key characters become Heywood (the chairman guy who gives a speech) Bowman (the main astronaut) and of course Hal 9000. What connects and separates these three characters is simply the fact that they are consciously alive. With life they are given the drive to continue living. Moon-Watcher doesn't want to be eaten by predators, Heywood wants to protect and find the monoliths, as does Bowman and as does Hal. What's then clear is that the main bulk of 2001 is a race towards that next big evolutionary step as given by the metaphorical monolith. The monolith, as mentioned, is almost God. It's a force that gives something where there was not much before. Kubrick's use of the monolith is then a very reductive view of the world, and it mimics us and our What if you zoom out? because there is the essential requirement of reason, of an image that explains it all. This is so crucially important as it mirrors the drives shown by characters. They want to survive, they want more. All characters understand there is something attainable that will change the state of their existence and, without any other reason beyond curiosity, maybe fear, they want it. It's often what we refer to as the human condition that explains this contradiction. We want goals, material representations of our time and efforts, when the physical truth of reality is that there is no better, there is no worse, only a transference of energy and matter. Having more money, knowing the truth, where this all comes from, isn't going to do anything to the world, only make you feel better about it (on the largest, truest scales). It's then perception that has us race, want more, that gives us the stargate sequence. What Kubrick's ultimate message here comes down to is a universal disconnect between us and the cosmos.
I touch on this point quite often with the blog, but, without emotions, without conscientiousness, the world would be a much better place to look at, it'd be easier and nobody would be worrying, and all because we fundamentally wouldn't be seeing the world, we wouldn't be interpreting energy, matter and happenings with emotions. The disconnect between ourselves and the universe is then in us, is in our emotions. Why, if we are the product of a bigger picture, would we be created to view it without answers, without the means of being ultimately satisfied? This question is often materialised with a question of God. Why, if God exists, if God created us, wanted us to be, if maybe God loves us, would he have us suffer? I don't think this is a practical question though, nor one we should be asking. Fundamentally, this is a rhetorical question. It asks: why do you believe in this guy if he's such a dick? However, this could be a question asked without ulterior motive. And when you face this question head on you can conjure up answers such as a universal correctness, maybe karma, you may even say that God doesn't in fact love us, or maybe that he's testing us all. I still say this is a question we should ignore. Why? It puts us at the centre of the universe and demands an emotional reading of a reality operating on levels completely different to ourselves on a psychological and emotional basis (if we can assume the universe and reality has either of those basis). Instead, I revert back to the similar, but much more objective take on this question pertaining to disconnect. If you look at certain physical laws around diffusion, osmosis and thermodynamics, you can see the universe wants equilibrium. It wants to spread its energy throughout itself equally and kind of snuff itself out with inert serenity. How do we fit into this paradigm? We have a perception that doesn't align with the universal flow towards serenity. We seem to be a stick in the works with our emotions and disconnect. The only reasoning behind why we then exist may be that we either serve as a way to contaminate the mix of the universe to stop it evening out, or that we are here to speed the progression towards nothingness up. Maybe we're a product of life becoming more and more complex, to the point of understanding the universe enough to give it that kick in the black hole and end it all. On the other hand, maybe that kick in the black hole could allow the universe to start again, or live on? It would then makes sense that if the universe and all its laws are in us that it too wants to live forever. Maybe we are part of an evolutionary line towards the universe being restarted, living perpetually. Maybe the universe is internally trying to hack a system of detriment and a slow death?
It's with this view of the universe that introspection is the only way to understand reality. It's us then assuming we want to live forever, and so the universe must also want this, that gives us our place in the big picture. We are a tool of perpetuity. We are a means to prolonging an end. It's the monolith in 2001 that then represents an intrinsic connection between us and the universe. The monolith is our drive towards living forever meeting the universe's. There's a race between us and A.I (Hal) because there is a sorting process of the universe working out who is the best candidate to evolve towards something that could save the universe's life, to continue its existence on forever. Whilst I think this is the key concept of the movie, and a great way to interpret many of the questions raised so far, we still have the question of what came before all this, and what if you zoom out?
Well, the answer comes right back to perception. It does not matter if there is something beyond the big bang, beyond our universe, beyond God or the multiverse. It doesn't matter because there is a seed within us all that is selfish. That seed does not care about above and beyonds, not truly, it's only concerned with infinite directions away from itself in relation to itself. It only wants to survive. This idea is closely linked to those captured by Un Chien Andalou, and is all to do with the journey. We only fear or are curious of beginnings and ends because we are so in love with the road underneath our feet. We, to varying degrees, all want to live, and maybe forever. If this wasn't true, we'd all kill ourselves without hopes of a heaven, of something better. Because there is a drive within us that wants to simply live on, we can care only about our own worlds, about the things close to us and the things we can effect. If we were given the means of understanding everything that is, what would be the point of existing? Ultimately, you wouldn't see one, and so everything would become nothing. Everything would become inert. A being that fully understood reality would understand so thoroughly what all that was around it was that it'd become numb to it. And, in terms of perception, reality would evaporate. Something would become nothing to a being that could perceive utmost truth. For that nothing, for that meaningless to become something, you'd have to want to see it as such. The way in which this seems to happen is that within your perception is planted a seed, a promise that there is something more worth waiting around to see - some kind of meaning. This drive is life, is why we perceive, why a plant photosynthesises, why a bear catches fish, why a mosquito reproduces, why the universe maybe wants to live on forever - and it's a lie, a ruse. Despite this, it's irrational to want to understand all that is, because, perceptually, we would see everything turn to nothing, we would lose consciousness just like memories fade, the feeling of the clothes on your body dissipates, the rancid smell of your room simply goes away. It's for this exact reasoning that there is the stargate sequence. You don't want to know what all the answers look like. That's just a trick your mind is playing on you to keep you interested in reality, to keep you living, to keep something from falling into nothing. Why? Well, why not? Maybe not all matter gets to perceive reality consciously, maybe we live in a mathematic playground of nothing and something. Some of us get nothing. Some of us get something. Maybe there are varying shades of this something. Nonetheless, ask yourself, would you want to give up your something? Your answer is either, yes. Or, your answer is no because you are curious, and built to want something else even if that something is what you perceive to be nothing - and all for a reprieve.
In the end, you better hope that something comes from something comes from something comes from something... God created God created God created God... a big bang followed a big crunch followed a big bang followed a big crunch followed a big bang... that when presented with a universal zoom button you can forever scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll... because whenever you reach the end, the program shuts down, your eyes close, darkness becomes epitome, something becomes a tree fallen in a pitch forest of nothing.
The Shining - Within The Throes Of Abuse, Destruction And Dysfunction
Room 237 is part interesting, part nonsense, part insanity. Ultimately, it does not reflect a true reading of this film as it presents itself. This is what I want to do today: both demonstrate why this is such a great film, and also what it means with an honest, taken-as-given analysis. Staying with Room 237 a moment, what we have here is a documentary tantamount to bad reality TV. It's intriguing, but in a way you feel probably isn't too good for your mental dexterity. More than this, Room 237 is primarily a collection of poor reviews or looks in on a film. You have obsessive fanatics of this film that zoom waaaaay to far into tiny details which ultimately does nothing more than trivialise Kubrick's ingenuity, talent, craft and artistry, making it not just pretentious to say he's a genius, but almost laughable. Then you also have those who pick up interesting details (like the reference to Native Indians) but cannot demonstrate the purpose of that throughout the narrative. This has always been something that has tugged at the fibres of my filmic pretension and geekness. It's fine to analyse the details of a film, to zoom into scenes, moments, seconds, but, each frame cannot be treated as an individual painting. Each frame must been seen as a segment of a collage. If you wanted to, you could make a claim for this film being racist against blacks or Native Americans because of certain designs on clothing, on the walls, the use of 'nigger' and of killing the only black guy. If you wanted to, you could use this film as evidence for the moon landings being faked by Kubrick (I know). If you wanted to, you could see this movie as being misogynist because of the way Wendy is treated by Jack, how she's given responsibilities in the kitchen and how women are generally the targets of a lot of violence. If you really wanted to, you could see this movie as a whole lot of things, and I suppose that's part of what makes it great: its ambiguity, its flexibility, its resounding accessibility. But, to judge a film you must take into account each scene, each moment, see how they interact and so hear how the film as a whole speaks to you. This is film analysis. It's not making a case for a sneaking suspicion you have, or a scene you thought pushed the mark too far. It's discovery and then the articulation of what you've discovered. It's here that you then make your case. The film provides your agenda, you don't bring it into the movie. That's said, let's get into why this film is so often seen as one of the greats.
I've often had a hard time seeing what people mean when they say a film is a masterpiece or is great. This happens all the time when I look into arts I'm not familiar with (almost all of them). What this says to me is that I just don't get what I'm looking at most of the time. However, I've loved film for a long time, but haven't always been able to see what people mean by great, or even form my own opinion on their view or the film itself. This is simply something you have to develop, meaning seeing greatness is something you have to learn how to do. That sounds stupid and elitist, but that's not what I mean for it to be. What I'm trying to get across is that greatness needs to be pointed out, made clear and precisely demonstrated - something hard to do but also gain access to--largely because 'great' is a word thrown around all to easily (myself being a huge culprit of this). Either way, what makes The Shining great, what makes any film great, is that it both excels in many of its cinematic elements and maintains an irrevocable quality over time and as a cohesive piece of art. 'Cinematic elements' are varied and vast, bringing together a huge skill-set of sometimes hundreds or thousands of people, stretching through numerous art forms. The most obvious elements of cinema though are directing, acting, editing, writing and sound design. A great film excels in all of these elements, but to varying degrees. This is because perfection is not a tangible thing, and the judgment of what is great is ultimately something not determined by a film's many individual parts (something we'll come to in a moment). So, The Shining excels most in the fields of direction, writing and editing. I love the sound design, but it is a little too blatant and emotive at times as well as repetitive. This cheapens the experience as it takes you out of the movie slightly instead of drawing you into the narrative and supporting the meaning of the film. I also love Jack Nicholson's performance, but, it's a little over the top at times, moreover, the acting overall isn't amazing (though very good, great in parts). Again, this cheapens the experience, but it also reduces verisimilitude which will add further detriment to the immersive quality of the film as well as diminish character work. On the note of character work, we're going to have to touch on Stephen King's novel. King has criticised this film quite openly on the basis of bad character work. Firstly, I haven't read the book. Secondly, this is a distinguished piece of work that has since defined itself from the novel, leaving the point of comparison rather useless. Thirdly, for reasons we'll get into later, the characterisation in this film is there to support the narrative. So to get along as quick as possible, let's move onto what's great about The Shining and take a look at direction.
Kubrick's style is something you could write a book about. But, in respect to The Shining, what is so exceptional about it is the regimented framing and fluid movement. The cinematography, blocking (where actors sit, stand, move) and framing work together to produce a beautiful, life-like look that is very open to technical analysis. And it's for this reason that The Shining is a film I can return to time and time again. I love the 'sit down and talk' scenes. These are the scenes that are often said to be the best way to judge a director's worth. If you give a director a huge set-piece, a whole lot of CGI, a magnificent landscape, or even phenomenal actors, what they capture is something that wants to be seen, that in some ways speaks for itself. To understand what I mean you simply have to consider something like the end battle of The Avengers or an action scene from Indiana Jones happening before your eyes, or in a YouTube video. Just seeing aliens, Captain America, Hulk smash or Indiana run from huge boulders, fight atop moving tanks, shoot unsuspecting sword-wielding enemies, is enough, and whilst direction can add a lot to this, there is a strong basis of amazement that leaves a lot of a director's job down to simply not distracting the audience from the imagery. The same goes for a great bit of acting, writing or artwork. You could otherwise just listen to, read or look at these things despite their presentation. When it comes to simple talks at a table good acting is key, but what elevates something like the opening to Pulp Fiction or Inglorious Basterds, the majority of 12 Angry Men or Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, the monologues in There Will Be Blood, the central dramatic set-piece of Fury or Psycho, above a filmed podcast, a YouTube video or a play is direction. What this demonstrates is something I've already touched on a few times and that is the importance of immersion. The individual elements of a film (acting, writing, editing, direction, sound design) are there to ensure you are having a good time, are there to put you in that suspended place just above reality, but below a dream, are there to draw you in and hold your attention. This is a huge qualifying factor of a mediocre, good or great film. They have to entertain or draw you in. With the simple 'talk at a table' scene what you have is a segment of your story that is usually something you need, not really want - it is ultimate something your audience is not often looking to be entertained by. But, Kubrick holds long and (on paper) kind of meh conversations over long stretches with minimal acting and little movement by setting down cinematic poetry. By that I mean to reference what Scorsese calls cinematic language, and this term describes the means by which a camera angle can tell you something in the same respect these typed squiggles do. In other words, during the table scenes Kubrick not only manages to hold our attention, but say an awful lot with the positioning of his camera.
With the last sentence I leave an open end of analysis/explanation as going through scenes frame-by-frame would take a long time in what is already going to be a long essay. Nonetheless, it's the combination of editing and great camera work that truly suck you into the film, but are also the source of a lot of rewatches, rewinds and obsession. That is to say, the camera work in this film demonstrates what cinema is: it is art made accessible, but art that retains the capacity to say a lot. The last thing that makes this movie great is the writing. This encompasses plotting, character work, dialogue, such and so on. You can then break these elements down further to assess them, and whilst the writing of this film isn't flawless, it is great. It's actually the writing of this film that makes it truly great to me as how a screenplay materialises on screen is my favourite thing about movies. But, before moving onto this I must conclude the point of parts and wholes. Elements of a movie can vary in their strength, but the quality of a picture must be judged over time, and with the movie seen as a singular composite of numerous arts. This comes down to what a film is and how we see and/or analyse them. Films, as repeated many times over, are there to entertain and draw us in for an hour or two. It then makes no sense for you to be ignoring or fixating on fractions of the film before judgement. You must see it in full and be paying attention to everything for your view to have any veracity. Moreover, a film explains itself. This is why film analysis is the articulation of what has already been said by a film. The purpose of analysis is to reflect overall meaning that some may miss, but also provide opportunity for the film to flourish in the themes it holds and the questions it asks us. In the end, a great film does a lot - a lot of impressive, astounding, interesting... things. Those things remain, in part, undefined, as a great film (given the needed approach or perspective) makes its own rules and plays by them like no other. The Shining takes the idea of book adaptations, makes its own rules of approach and surpasses the novel. The Shining also mesmerises, captivates, draws in obsessives, fanatics and weirdos. The Shining defines itself as the greatest horror film ever by being unlike any other, by being strictly irreplicable.
Ok, to delve into my favourite aspect of what makes this film great we come to the writing and in turn the meaning of this behemoth. This is a film entirely about destructive familial relations, it is about domestic abuse, child abuse and self-abuse. To see this you have to look straight to the aspects of this movie that are so easily looked past. The central performance of Jack, the constant build to the moment he's smashing down doors with the axe, pushing his face through the whole in the door to taunt 'Here's Johnny!' all detracts from the supernatural foresight of Danny, Hallorann and the ghosts Jack talks to - these are the most important aspects of this movie. That's not even mentioning the final image...
To understand how Jack is somehow in a ball in 1921, you have to understand what The Shining actually is. The Shining is the ability to see things that have happened or may happen that are demonstrated by the film to be a looming threat. This isn't strictly true though as Hallorann tells us. He was able to talk to his Grandmother, for hours on end, when he was a young boy. What's more, he talks to Danny. The Shining is then two things. It's the ability to see danger, but also communicate. To understand why Danny and possibly Hallorann have The Shining you only need to look to these scenes...
It's Jack talking to Lloyd that reveals the central elements of his character. Firstly, he tells the story of his breaking Danny's arm. Secondly, he hints at possible alcoholism with 'the hair of the dog that bit me' and Llyod handing him whiskey. What is implied here is that Jack, despite trying to be a good father, snaps at times. It's his relationship with Wendy that makes this most clear. And it's here we need to come back to character work. Nicholson injects a lot of needed life into a very subtle film. Like in Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick risks seemingly bland, even bad performances for faux interactions between characters to imply satire and an underlying lie.
With Jack and Wendy in the car, in the bedroom or talking on the phone you can sense an utter disconnect masquerading as shitty writing and terrible performances. It's knowing how much hatred for Wendy Jack is hiding that makes these scenes work. What looks like bad acting is bad acting, but on Jack Torrance's behalf, not Jack Nicholson's. Nicholson portrays a miserable husband who feels stuck in a relationship with the unthinkably oblivious Wendy. This is actually the aspect of character work that makes little sense. Wendy is never shown to pick up on Jack's disdain for her (not until it's too late). This may be because she fears Jack (due to his stressed/drunken and possibly violent history) and is putting on as much as of a show for him as he is for her, however, this is hard to find evidence for, leaving ambiguity a downfall in writing. In other words, her character is ultimately left a slightly tangential element of this film left largely unexplored. Nonetheless, the key takeaway from Jack's past and his relationship with his wife is that he is a conflicted, possibly abusive husband and father. Knowing this we can come back to what The Shining actually is. For Danny, The Shining represents an ability to reach out for help. This is made clear in early scenes with him talking in the mirror and with later warnings with the twins - but let's not jump ahead of ourselves. Staying with the opening act, there's an extended cut of this film that includes a small scene with a doctor coming to see Danny (who has been sick) and also one with the doctor talking to Wendy about Jack breaking his arm a few months before hand (something Wendy defends Jack on). This scene brings together the outside world and the inner family circle on the theme of abuse. This also happens with Hallorann interfering - and doesn't end well.
But, what is present in both of these scenes is the idea of Shining. Danny called out for help to Hallorann, but couldn't when alone with his mother or the doctor. The Shining is then a metaphorical means of presenting a child's (person's) ability to call out for help. This implies some interesting things about Hallorann who can also Shine and maybe lived with his Grandmother. It's possible that he had an abusive past, giving reason for his (alleged, but denied) fear of room 237 and why he would have lived with his Grandmother, not his parents. However, we cannot jump to that just yet.
So, Hallorann and Danny obviously have The Shining, but, what went over my head for years was that Jack does too. This isn't the same kind of Shining that Halloran and Danny have as he can't communicate like them, but it is what lets him see ghosts, just as it does Danny. Before delving too deep into that, we also need to recognise something implied about Jack's past. It is possible that his parents abused him, giving reason for his need for seclusion, his incredibly distant facade and ultimately his final break. So, with The Shining we can see that Danny, Jack and Hallorann struggle or have struggled with needing help, but not having a voice to call for it. But, The Shining is not just a means of communicating - as implied with Danny's violent visions and Jack's interactions with a ghostly world. The Shining is also a means of reflection. With Danny and Hallorann this reflection triggers foresight of possible danger. For Jack, we see something different. The best way to see The Shining is under the Freudian interpretation of a dream. Bad dreams or nightmares are a means of a dreamer working through fears. But, dreams are also a means of wish fulfillment. So, for Danny and Hallerann, The Shining provides warning based on their fears and anxieties relating to abuse (like a nightmare). For Jack we see a much more masochistic means of dealing with past trauma. In short, Jack seeing Lloyd is a very dangerous means of Jack accepting his violent side and embracing an abusive childhood/history - some kind of self-destructive wish fulfillment or a means of reversing repression. This is what will eventually explain the last image of the film and open up the true struggles of characters throughout the narrative. To get into Jack's visions we have to recognise what The Outlook Hotel is and so recognise what Jack's role as the caretaker means. As we all know, The Outlook is a fundamental symbol of isolation. And it's the barren seclusion that The Outlook provides that forces the singular families within to the edges of their psyches, sometimes resulting in tragedy.
The Outlook then represents a family home blown up and made to seem looming. What this emphasises Jack's role as caretaker to be resultantly becomes unbearable. In short, his responsibilities, not only for the hotel, but his family force him into deep waters of introspection that have him come out full of hatred. The Outlook Hotel forces deep soul searching, and for the deeply conflicted men at the heads of some of these families, the isolation of self leads to implosion. This then bunches Jack in with Grady, the father who killed the twins - and gives reason why Grady and Jack have an exchange about who is actually the caretaker of the hotel. What this allows us to do is see 'the caretaker' as an archetype. He is a man at the head of a family that is deeply conflicted and profoundly miserable. With Jack we see the conflict in the way he's pulled in two directions, both by his son and wife, but also by his job as the caretaker and aspirations of being a writer. In short, he loves his son and maybe loves writing, he doesn't seem to like the work he's got, or the wife he lives for. His dissonance on who he is to the family grows with him believing he cannot express himself, he cannot live for himself and is wasting his time. We see this in this scene...
... and also in the infamous lines...
It's here that we're moving towards room 237, so we're going to keep a hold on the dull Jack and his lack of play. Instead, understanding Jack as a conflicted man/father/writer/caretaker/husband we can pull apart why the caretaker is an archetype. The caretaker is a man that finds no joy in his life, not as a father, a husband, not in his work, nor in his art. He is isolated with the ones he loves in a world where he feels unappreciated. This is demonstrated to be a very dangerous figure, one apt to explode. The reasoning why comes back to Jack and his version of The Shining. As said, The Shining is a like a dream, for Jack, some kind of wish fulfillment that is ultimately masochistic. Remembering the implimence of Jack possibly being abused as a child combined with the discussed roles of traditional families and responsibility, we can see why he envisions the 1920s across the hotel. He sees Lloyd, Grady and so on because he sees himself as an archetype, a man built in another time. This then explains the last image as being a critique of the traditional nuclear family. Jack sees himself in a time passed, but displaced hugely:
That's why this image is so important - and takes a leaf out of Polanski's book and his masterpiece, Repulsion, with a picture essentially explaining the narrative. Jack is the centre piece if this image, but his central positioning only isolates him. The crowd around, full of couples and smiles, are a faceless mass that seem to engulf his presence. You even see his wave being held down as to suppress and demean his presence as what we can assume to be the caretaker. Seeing the image in this respect allows us to see Jack as the try-hard weirdo that has no friends, that smiles, but is never really happy. He tries to fit in with the masses, tries to conform, but simply does not fit in.
The constant overshadowing idea of Grady and the crime he committed then lay heavy on the archetype of the caretaker as someone who is inevitably going to break. This is why Jack fits into this picture, why he sees ghosts, why he does their bidding. He not only bends to his own fears of hurting his family...
... but the will of apparent inevitability, of the past dictating the future. It's here where the theory of Jack being abused as a child becomes more poignant. Maybe Jack draw to violence comes from an idea of control, of 'correcting' his wife and kid as once Grady did. This idea may come from a traditional, and rather dysfunctional, idea of family, but maybe Jack's personal experience of family life as a child informed this. If his father used violence to lead and look after his family, why wouldn't Jack? If his father abused him and his mother maybe not just physically, but mentally, why wouldn't Jack? What we have here is a question of self-determinism and environmental-determinism. We cannot infer that just because Jack was abused as a kid that he will abuse his wife and kids. In fact, we can see a struggle within him to keep from this, to hold his family together despite him maybe not loving his wife (even like her slightly) anymore. The questions presented by the metaphorical Shining are then all about the world in respect to the individual.
However, we can't delve into these questions right now. Instead, we need to understand what room 237 actually is. Room 237 is ultimately nothing very interesting, at least, nothing that lives up to the weight the name holds. There is no significance of the numbers pertaining to moon landings. There is no actual significance to the physical room - it's just a designated place in the hotel. I've watched the film dozens of times over and never has anything explaining why room 237 is important as a physical place come up. There is the possible chance that this is where Grady and his family stayed, maybe it's where he killed his wife. But, there is no evidence for this, none at all. For this reason we can only assign room 237 the metaphorical meaning the narrative provides. Room 237 is Jack's suppressed thoughts hidden in his temporary family home. What is most interesting about it is not really what goes on inside (we'll get to that though) but what happens around it. Firstly, we have to look at its introduction through Danny who comes to ask Hallorann about it. What should be clear already is that room 237 is a sexual place...
... to juxtapose that with the distance between Jack and Wendy you should understand what this means:
Jack isn't getting any, and even if he is, it's not with a person that excites him, nor is attractive to him. Bring this back to Danny, and you see his fear of the family being split up, of Jack leaving in pursuit of another woman. Bring this theme of sexuality forward a little to Hallarann, we come across more interesting details...
When confronted by room 237, Hallorann denies he fears it. Combine this with his implied abusive past, the fact that he is alone in his bed (a bachelor) with the huge pictures of nude models and you see his confusing relationship with women. He gets along fine with Wendy, implying he does not fear or get nervous around them - just as he says he doesn't room 237. But, he stays away. Why? Well, maybe Hallorann was almost the caretaker archetype (giving reason for his Shining) but never committed to traditional family life as that was not for him. He remains a bachelor for his own sake, and maybe because he doesn't think he'd be a good father. This is the life that Jack maybe should be living: alone in his room by day, typing away, nude pictures hung around for him to muse upon, and then by night, he puts the typewriter away and goes out to sling some dick, get some free love...
Ok, this is not the time or place for an absurd theory, but the link to Easy Rider is an interesting one. Nonetheless, the commentary provided here with Hallorann and Jack is not that all men should be bachelors, just that some aren't suited for family life - Jack being a key example of this. So, getting closer to actually going inside room 237 we get a thematic build culminating with the accusation of Jack abusing Danny...
It's this scene that solidifies the idea of abuse and The Shining being linked because of all the violent and supernatural snowballing that occurs as a result of this scene. Danny claims he is hurt by the woman in room 237. In other words, he foresees Jack wanting to split up with Wendy and find another woman. Him being physically hurt by the woman isn't something we should take seriously though. It only makes sense that Jack was the one that hurt him, as seeing the woman in the bathtub as a metaphor leaves him the only one left to hurt Danny. His manipulation of the family then demonstrates how deeply troubled he is, how he not only pulls the wool over their eyes, but possibly his too. What we now need to ask is why Jack beat Danny upon discovering room 237. Well, maybe he stumbled upon a secret of Jack's, maybe he questioned his intentions, or let loose some kind of anxiety over the state of the family. We cannot know for sure, but what is implied is that some kind of sexual tension has been picked up by those with the capacity for Shining - and it tears them apart. But, assuming Jack did beat Danny, you can see clearly why he'd accuse him of murder, be in a zombie-like state and use The Shining (Tony) to call for help.
It's from that point that all hell breaks loose and the family break apart, Jack being frozen out of the group...
It's having said that that we can quickly touch on the maze. This is a symbol of introspection, of being lost in oneself.
For Wendy and Danny to be able to navigate this well enough, but Jack to be ultimately lost (to freeze to death) in here speak volumes. It demonstrates the resounding struggle he faces as a conflicted father/husband/writer such and so on. But, we still need to conclude what goes on in room 237. It's knowing what this...
... horrific image means, that we'll understand why Jack devolves into a murderer. So, going into room 237 forces him to confront his suppressed or latent sexual desires. However, he sees them decay in his grip, implying that he feels he is too old or too deep into marriage to be a bachelor. This means that he is both stuck with a woman that will rot in his arms (sorry Wendy) and that his desire for a young, beautiful woman has also rotted to nothing over the years of his marriage. This realisation drives Jack over the edge as he sees no meaning in life. He finds no joy in work, he cannot write, he cannot love, and so he decides he wants to snuff all of his problems out.
The final thing to do here is ask why Kubrick has pulled together such a complex subtext and so see the cohesive whole of these many intricate parts. The major elements of this story are of abuse, of tradition, of sexuality and of disconnect. This is what fuels all of the violence and horror and what ultimately makes clear to Wendy why she needs to get away from Jack...
And, yes, this is her realisation that Jack is not sexual attracted to her and...
... ultimately wants to kill her. She sees the violence and the deviance within him, a deviance that maybe implies Jack is gay. This says a lot about Hollorann, Grady and even Danny, and I suppose if you wanted to you could see this film as being about trying to come out of the closet, but not being able to. In fact, it makes a lot of sense if you wanted to see many of the male characters as lying to themselves about their own sexuality. This would explain why Wendy doesn't have The Shining, why she's not a focus of the narrative and her perspective is never really taken seriously. I won't say that this isn't a possibility, just something that doesn't fit that well into the narrative as Jack seems quite enthusiastic about the young nude woman, and quite concentrated on an idea of family and fatherhood. I suppose it's up to you on how you see the end takeaway of this film as about heterosexuality or homosexuality.
Nonetheless, the many elements of this film (sexuality, abuse, tradition, disconnect) are encompassed by one major theme - isolation. The Outlook Hotel is so important as it truly represents a psychological Petri dish that holds specimen the Torrance family for the world to see. It's a metaphor for social moulding and its perceived constriction. It's Jack that sees the world's image of normality projected onto himself who asks: why isn't he happy? He cannot cope with the pressure of responsibility, maybe because he is deeply conflicted on grounds of childhood abuse, or maybe because he is a deeply suppressed homosexual. In the end, he can neither express himself to his family, or through his writing as he cannot channel his anger, his lamentations, his sexuality to someone who he feels can listen. He does not know how to ask for help, and he let's that destroy him. The lasting question of this image...
... is then as much about isolation, as it is self-determinism. Was Jack always doomed to be the broken caretaker archetype, or did he simply doom himself?
In the end, what The Shining is all about is down to you. You have to put yourself in Jack's position as to hear the questions he may be asking himself, to maybe understand how he justifies his heinous outburst. If you find intrigue in this, in the craft of the filmmaking, in the experience of this film, I'm sure you, as I do, will see this film as an undeniable great.
I could never imagine anyone reading through all of these posts as is. If you just have... well, you're beyond the confines of my perceptual eye. How does it feel out there? Either way, a huge thanks for reading - you better have not just scrolled down here and stumbled upon this otherwise... I don't know. Thanks.
I could never imagine anyone reading through all of these posts as is. If you just have... well, you're beyond the confines of my perceptual eye. How does it feel out there? Either way, a huge thanks for reading - you better have not just scrolled down here and stumbled upon this otherwise... I don't know. Thanks.
