Good Things Come....Malick and love and love lost

It took almost 10 years, but Terrence Malick has eclipsed the fractured promised reaches of  The New  World.  To the Wonder feels fully realized, without moments of incoherency pepperng the exciting sequences of The New World. It is a story of romantic love as essential and necessary as the Gospel. Is it really so long to wait 8 or 9 years for a great film? It is, but that is because  I feel as though I'd been waiting forever.  And what is To the Wonder about? It's actually about waiting....(wait for it) ...for a sense of personal happiness and true freedom.  It is also about how time can both shove and pin us down. 
Malick's movie is the best film I nearly never saw last year.

  As cinephiles the first half  of our lives are marked waiting to see certain films.  A pickle gone by the wayside now, post internet.  In my preteens and teens it was Malick, Truffaut, Warhol, Godard, Franco, Resnais, Ferrara, Scorsese and Ashby.  In my twenties it was Rivette, Ruiz, Hou Hsaio Hsien, Zulawski and a zillion other films not defined by their filmmakers; my scope widened considerably.  It goes further than waiting for certain films. Movie lovers covet the unseen, the wait for the golden chalice; their Out 1, Last Movie or Hardly Working.  People who love and seek out movies and prints (singular movie experiences) are people looking  to fulfill a promise less reachable in our personal lives.
  The eventual theatrical opening of The Thin Red Line was a major event. I was barely alive that year, yet I managed to see it opening day in Washington, D.C.   I saw it at the historic Uptown.  This one was more of a stunner to me.   It was more difficult to nail down and explain.  It was the first Malick I saw which began to match his hype.  It demanded repeated viewings and was experimenting with something new.  And it was, in moments, ecstatic.

I loved The New World. Seeing it in the front row of Union Square  was a top experience of 2005.
The mythic Malick movie  you wait for had finally arrived: poetic storytelling and technique finally married with the content of the story..about newness and narrative of the formation of  a physical place into a theoretical one.  
Tree of Life seemed more magazine fashion editorial than a movie. I couldn't permeate the gloss.
So I frittered away awhile before sitting down for To the Wonder.  His particular sound design no longer confused; it persuasively cohered.    Shortcuts, also used in earlier pictures like Tree,  pare down storytelling in choppy visual supercuts that border jumpcuts for the speed in which they run through events. We are watching a love story in leaps and bounds,  all in the opening moments.  We understand, even without the subtitles translating the French.

 

The film opens with the
arrival of a lifetime of want and of not having.  It is the first Malick scene in which I recognize the person in the frame...a starved person; here is the meal I dream of.  And by the movie's end, the same woman looks back and recognizes me as the shadow of a human she has become.  Do I know anything about these characters backgrounds or if they'd ever had love before? No. What we experience in this opening is ..the end.   A woman has reached her penultimate happiness. She spins through life.  Everything is beautiful, everything and everyone is connected. She is in love. She is radiant and she beams outwards to others.

It is just about halfway through the film when she is, in some ways, replaced and cast aside.  She stops spinning through the frames. Her voiceover tells us she is lost, and she is walking around alone, not knowing where to go but to go home and collapse.
She tries to kill herself. She returns to him.  Her voiceover remarks that it is only the Weak who never take a stand (by ending a relationship I presume.) Her world turns dark and her spirit is in crisis.



We get used to waiting for things that never come.
We then attain things, decades of knowing they'd never come, and then, without surprise, we just lose them forever.







How could her lover not see how earth and soul shattering the withdrawal of his romantic love would be? Her love for him was devotional, religious, and eternal.
It sounds pious to say, but when the Priest showed up I could see that this is the OTHER side of falling in love onscreen. The love she experienced was Holy. Without that miracle she is equivalent spiritually to  the junkie, the criminal and the laborer who need Bardem's Priest.  She is alive but she is an empty shell; nothing is inside of her.  She is "in between"; she is without love.  It is the wait...IT IS THE WAIT that is the other storyline. The one that crisscrosses as the French bride falls in and out of her rapture. She is back in Paris. She is alone on the subway. She no longer dances to transport herself from place to place. She walks with her head down, and she stares unhappily on the Metro.


It is the wait for the new great drug, for the new 12 step fellowship to save your life and rebuild your spirit, for that one person in the world who finally came along to your best friend and one true love and then leave you forever.  This is what Malick's film explains. The wait is worth it, win or lose.The wait for that next great film to give you life as a cinephile.

No Measure for Projection

reposting from 2011 ..keeping Toback alive.

I could not tell you how often one gets inspired by watching an episode of Intervention.   Regardless, I recently  had this happen to me. The episode seemed like 2 to 3 chapters out of an awesome Vollmann I'd only half read, losing track of it three months ago. And both the television show and the book were now causing me to make further connections with 2 of my most recent movie revisitations.

The episode was titled " Latisha ', and getting inside her world for 60 minutes broke my heart. Her crack addiction kept her worldview obscured by a cheery veil, elevating her self image to 'Queen of the streets' in the fabulous ghetto of her diseased existence. The episode broke the mold of A + E 'reality' drama. The producers and director actually filmed with two lenses; one a lens of clarity, the moments of intoxication and cocaine psychosis embarrassingly clear. The second lens used was that of Latisha's own self protective or rather self projective denial. A sort of denial that is, mostly by the nature of both the disease of addiction and the nature of crack cocaine, narcissisticly destructive; self perpetuating by delusions of self importance.
This projection colored my sense of Latisha's experience of her world. It allowed me the escapism of her highly stimulated thought process and the momentary joy of her imaginary relationships.


I'd recently been chipping away at William T. Vollmann's :" The Royal Family", a sprawling dissection of genealogy and stratum of San Francisco pimps , whores, and the Unicorn of this particular zoo, the elusive "Queen of the Whores", aka "Africa."
Vollmann's male protag is haunted and degenerate. He is a noirish detective by way of a Proustian sad sack, dropped into a transgressive, insular world of fucked up folk. He is one half romantically haunted by a dead lover and one half digging progressively deeper into the mud of the royal whoredom; eventually projecting his obsessions on a whore who Judy Bartons herself into his deceased love.

How did anything strike beyond the obvious remembrance of the cool novel I'd failed in finishing?
What this television episode and this post modern novel share is a quality that also appears in films, though usually sweatier and involving pacing or the cover up of something like a heist or a murder.
This distorted self projection and fucked up self will is something of a germ. Infecting the host it leads to secondary diseases, such as compulsive behavior and addiction, be it gambling, alcohol, drugs, what have you. In films, lucky for us, it also results in projecting a world of their own diseased thinking's creation, one that is entertaining while illuminating, as well as insane, colorful and full of constant heart pounding danger.
I'm thinking of the sweat on Nomi Malone's face in SHOWGIRLS. She is three different things and they are also one and the same: victim or pursuant of Capitalism, a dancer who is a wannabee star, and an Addict. Not a surprise when in the film's fourth quarter she is revealed as an ex junkie, and we see her come alive when she does blow.
Her sweaty forehead and bugged out 'star' eyes are demonic and bothered, a distinct image yet mere mutation on the aloof vacancy in James Caan's eyes in THE GAMBLER. Any interiority ironically revealed through voiceover and the occasional sound bridge.
Both figures drawn here are playing the losing card. How can Nomi ever gain status and respect without stealing them? And how can a human being, as Ivy League as he may be, ever beat the Numbers?
In a classroom scene, Caan's collegiate professor speaks in a Psych or Philosophy class about intangibles such as Desire and Will. Things that , for Caan's alter ego of nighttime degenerate gambler find reflected only the simplest materialist games. The only expressions of emotive power and psychology in the film are those of people in Caan's world..those gangsters affected by the hustler's life and the family members distraught by Caan's risk and loss. Caan, meanwhile, remains a blank mirrored screen, and antithetical to a Nomi Malone, his own wild inner process is laid bare only by the measure of how others respond to his madness.
The film illuminates his disease by showing him as leading almost two entirely different lives. His battle is built around shame and a destructive belief of self grandeur, each fueling the other.
These filmed losers are lovers and their hatred of self and desperation to be loved is made visible in neon gemmed manicures, headdresses, coke nails, maternal robberies, and Atlantic City betting benders.

HOLY DOLLAR

installment # 1


Twin peaks


Currency watches us, we don't watch it. Its eye holds court on its back side.  Standing tall, it stares back as we cast it out into the world.
If the Pyramid on the dollar can be imitated,  then value is in moral question. Who is a fraud and what is real? Nothing material, neither paper money or gold,  holds the weight of moral fiber. So if we try to see money, here is a wilted bill, a single, foreign eye staring at US, refusing our focus, and multiplying constantly.

Toward Enlightenment; Holy Third Eye

 

And so it is.
One pyramid, one (third) eye, one dollar: , two pyramids =  two dollars, two Sherriff Trumans, two or more Agent Coopers,  =  TWIN PEAKS.

Empty symbols proliferate in the symbolic world of TWIN PEAKS.  The earth beneath it is the solid soil; Northwest America.  Lying in between the symbolic and the ground is the dreamlike construction of creative thought, a story told through an inner search.

Lynchian narratives turn that eye inward, rebuking the materialism of wealth and the holy dollar. Like the zenith of the dollar's pyramid, the third eye is as much a point and as much a foreign singular. It is uncanny in that it is like the others (the other two eyes), yet it is also wholly alien.
This is the eye that surfs the waves of inner reflection, sometimes rolling us along minute ripples for tens of minutes or episodes on end.  Other times a cascade of storming water explodes emotionally or literally (as in an exploding head or corpus.)


"REPRIEVE FROM PAIN."  Move "BEYOND THINKING."  These are two benefits claimed by the official TM (Transcendental Meditation) website. 

Center Eye is The Third Eye

The ecstatic emotion that thundered throughout the original TWIN PEAKS series also defined the film TWIN PEAKS:  FIRE WALK WITH ME.
The lightening storm of connectivity and impetus that is experienced in creative thought comes amidst a long, often otherwise quiet creative journey.
The narrative experience of David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS:  THE RETURN  follows that same course.


"The time has come for you to seek The Path.  Your  soul has set you Face to Face with a Clear Light, and you are now about to experience it in its Reality, wherein all things are like the Void and Cloudless Sky."  -- Agent Cooper, TWIN PEAKS. Original Series, Season 2.

Third Eye Blind

David Lynch's narratives  primarily trace the reactions to things that happen.
The reasons and causality are poetically tracked, abstract elements of sound and and of sight coexist with threads of sitcom normality.  My experience of TWIN PEAKS the series , TWIN PEAKS:  FIRE WALK WITH ME the film, and TWIN PEAKS:  THE RETURN series , is melodrama meeting the meditative mind.
In TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME we track Laura's increasingly desperate search for reprieve from the pain that is occurring in her life.

The psychic pain of her father raping her instigates a road of building ecstasy:  the ecstasy of seeking sexual partners, the ecstasy of ego (being the beautiful girl on campus), the ecstasy of cocaine ingestion, and the ecstasy of sobbing in sudden sober moments when something is scary and threatening you.

Cinema of Pure Capitalism- Making Everyone into a Winner or Loser

In Pure Capitalism there can only be losers and winners. The Cinema of 2016 encapsulated this extremism.  The powerful or adored win, the others lose. Losers in the Cinema of 2016 fought hard and scrappily against their oppression/demons (CHRISTINE, I, DANIEL BLAKE, WHITE GIRL) but to little or zero avail.

CHRISTINE
(loser)

       

WHITE GIRL
(loser)

I, DANIEL BLAKE
(loser)

ELLE
(winner)

Some films featured both winning and losing protagonists, highlighting the power or success one envied in the other.

DIVINES
(loser-winner-loser)

DIVINES

LA LA LAND
Stone's character starts out as the loser, but by the end her fame eclipses the brief level of success of Ryan Gosling, and  her love for him wanes.

LA LA LAND
Gosling's character does not seek fame, but money as a means to an end. The $ Machine mocks his goals, and he is ultimately punished for his love of another person and his love of music over money.

NERVE
(winner)

NERVE
(loser)