recents: notes

The total logged hours move away as any clear sense of days escapes. These days could fill two separate films -- one ridiculously comedic, the other, unrelenting; severe. Both would be accurate. 

 At the beginning of Shame, the overhead shot is of Fassbender's character in bed, hand over lower abdomen, on his back in a turquoise sheeted set. Breathing so loudly it promotes a recalculation of looking. He gets up and he is in the 28th street 1 train station. The sound design is staccato ticks, clockwise, or how a traffic light sounds. Colors are subdued. Shots break up rather quickly, but that is not to say a lot of time has elapsed because it hasn't. He goes from bed to bed.  Or perhaps he remains at home and has romantic guest to romantic guest coming to his bed. Whichever is true, it doesn't matter.  Pacing, in films with comedic bents, doesn't equate with narrative movement.   Another way to say this is it doesn't mean that more things occur or more time passed just because things feel quicker. Melancholic is a register, not an adjective or film style. Both absurdity and tragedy encompass the same amount of time and space but remain varied; because of tenor. I recently saw Meatballs 3. Here the laughs are based on a tone that a group onscreen and one off accepts: bawdiness, male hormonal fears and fantasies, and sexual images of women as rewards.  Agreeing to these terms, those of us watching get to enter inside a privileged place where fun is had, sexual desires are not judged and are not too serious, and the unthinkable can be achieved -- a virgin nerd gets laid with a babe.  Scenarios do not follow realism, and what takes a teen a summer to surmise elapses in under two hours. Time is something to keep up with, faster than the humor. This movie was comedic, in a ridiculous way. 

 I recently saw The Tribe. (Plemya), 2014. Typical of 1990s Eastern European Bleak Tales, but artful and transgressive, if not transparent in its appeal to the abyss. This turns out to be another film concerning teens and their hormones and identity, but here identity is explicit as a key to narrative. The exclusivity of their club is twofold: deafness and also membership in a gang/ private circle of thugs, what have you. The privilege of entering is the doom of not hearing and the blindness of not seeing that the need to belong condemns one here to loss of self. A different sort of community, and one matching in pace, yet events take longer and words linger more before either are fully formed. I recently saw The Worst Person in the World.  The enclosure here is a spectator's nightmare of overly determined narrative choices that parade as the opposite. The exclusivity of the tough gang within the world of The Tribe finds its backwards reflection in the world of this smug female protagonist. Her life choices invent her circumstances; devoid of any other influence, she exists in a vacuum, not unlike the one the girl in The Tribe's pregnancy died in. 

  Summer of Soul, another recent watch, tracks the expansion of a community no longer so enclosed. The only two movies capable of conveying optimism were Meatballs 3 and Summer of Soul. Both look forward to success by way of community. Summer connects a larger community within new york city by way of rallied pride and expression through art. Unlike Worst Person..., the endless combination of people and influences converge and create harmony; visually and aurally. The community of camp and oddball bonding within Meatballs 3 is what we are denied in The Tribe.  Meatballs' nerds peacefully accompany babes and bros. The virgins get laid; the desired is achievable; the journey benign. The Tribe and Worst Person both incorporate subjects who make subjectively poor choices about other people. That is to say that their choices are depicted as direct links to subsequent miseries.

CONTRA BAND: Bad Dads

Parents juggle many responsibilities, but they hold a singular purpose -- keep their child alive.

 A spate of pandemic movie releases feature a new paternal archetype -- the Male Nihilist.

 Recent films such as Don't Breathe 2, Wrath of Man, Annette, The Card Counter, and Cry Macho are rife with crappy dads. These guys seem conflicted in their motivations:  one to destroy(vengeance) and one to preserve (the child).  The trend began, for me, with Wrath of Man, depicting brutal consequence (his son is murdered) by a marathon of  subsequent homicide. Statham kills with machine like precision, and on the scale of a subway train worth of victims. Its hard to reconcile the parallel (or cheap psychological excuse) of mass casualties with actual parental pain and despair.   Yet there is an emotional heft to these doomed father figures; whether its Wrath's physical cruelty  or the final brutal act of Annette, they test a viewer's compassion to understand pain inflicted in a perversion of parental love.    Modern politics, though not overtly,  color the polarized father/ child characters who will ultimately grow closer together.  These films share the concept of The Father character doubling as one side of America (the old guard/Republican) and The Child as the other (the new Millennials/Woke Democrats.)  An older generation refuses to eschew their ways while the newer generation  exists to effectively cancel the older one.   There are things to tear up at in Don't Breathe 2. 

Who is Baby Annette? An index of Henry McHenry's desperation to wipe clean his sordid past. The same motive is crucial in DB 2 and Schrader's The Card Counter; to erase the murderous sins of the Dad and rise like a Phoenix (the actual name of the daughter in DB 2).  William Tell (Oscar Isaac in The Card Counter) ties himself to young Cirk (Tye Sheridan) as a mentor/ protector.   Tell's culpability lay in engagement in torture at Abu Ghraib; serving a beast.  Finally abandoning his armed forces past to become a disengaged poker player, he is reinvigorated as another beast, an avenging angel, along with the wronged Tye. The  point driven home in Annette:  a wooden doll-child doubling as a construction of parents' projected wants onto the world. 

Wrath of Dad

These films showcase the old guard (old men) making a case for their legacy within the confines of a troubled society; we idle in stasis as we watch screens and wait for our devastated existence to fix itself.  The (re)animation of these old men is perfectly suited within the action film genre. The weight and force of corporeality is the good that bludgeons bad.  Politics are Kill or be Killed. I feel these are the movies we need in this moment.  In this era of lockdowns, edicts and disallowed casual contact -- brute force interrupts and reconnects us to  primal instincts.  Its a post pandemic , post PC catharsis.  In Annette, more figurative catharsis is reached because Driver's dad character (Henry McHenry)  is the bad guy , but he drives the bad out of himself as his love literally animates the wooden progeny (a marionette whose strings he pulls)  into a real, independent  baby girl.  Annette, more self conscious about the father as artist and vice versa -  has a Dad as an artist who lost his way.  His impulses to create resulted in comedy stardom, but his act is a joke because he phones it in, cringe-worthy schtick and exhalations.  Repurposing his creative impulses he brings about a new mammoth success -- an earth shattering love affair where one must obliterate the other to keep creating.

destructive artists

 All these men share an unflagging impulse to protect their child no matter the cost (of life), some of them (Don't Breathe 2's old man and Henry McHenry) may even use the impulse to protect their child as a reason to enact violent revenge fantasies.  Part of the attraction of these films is a pulp brutality existing alongside a quieter melancholic tale of the loving,  misunderstood Father.      

The trend diverges into a group of less literal Fathers; men manifesting themselves as Father-Like figures; inserting a weight and rationale onto vengeful, unleashed behavior.  Schrader's The Card Counter features a Dad and Kid dynamic where a protagonist inserts himself as a Father Figure, avenging a child's injustice.  DB 2 does the same. In Eastwood's Cry Macho the octogenarian 'fathers' a pre teen out of a deranged yet narratively deemed necessary way for the two males to literally and figurally save one another.  Card Counter's Issac doles out revenge while the film eyes him and his motives with a more dispassionate angst.  DB 2 employs more genre movie archetypes and narrative movement. The Old Blind Man is a brutal kidnapper turned Father Figure. He is animated by  internal rage; it both devolves AND evolves into psychopathic protective love.  These two films, more than any other I've mentioned, employ poetic license to veer truly off the rails. The incoherent tenor of Schrader's art film echoes the incoherent gutter screams of the C level revenge action flick DB 2.  Two dudes with a God Complex; one Calvinist and one more openly batshit crazy. Two of a kind.

                                                                                                                                                                         Its the close of 2021 and the world still feels constipated.  Our pace of life lies halfway between soul crushing and k-hole.  Pandemic stasis clutches on, that last finger of a hand flung off a sliding subway pole, moving nowhere except another potentially hazardous metallic surface.  Chained and unfree for 18 months, a liberation is felt in the shared setting of a movie theater; a public square we'd been locked out of.  The movies discussed allow us, collectively, to feel ENERGIZED and purposeful. Even if it isn't true.   Maybe it's the thrilling rewards of the action drama, especially in this age of inaction and powerlessness.  Maybe it's the meth -  amphetamine (in the plot of DB 2.)   Here, in our new movies, are toxic masculine heroes aplenty, but reclaimed with a renewed moral compass to save us from modern toxicity; from our screens and our frozen pointing fingers. 

death drives, ending lives.

 Smiley Face Killers (2020) has bogeymen.  They have lived inside your thoughts and expectations since you were small.  They lingered; biding time in the corners, outside the light. They will hide in a closet, shadow you on your bike; force you to recall your view in the world as a child-- open to suggestion; independent of thought, yet dependent on others to help protect you.

We wear false faces.  The symmetry of a young jock's visage veils the disruption his bipolar disorder wreaks. Smiley Face Killers points to this mental state and this pandemic time:  We mask and we separate, failing to distinguish ourselves from another.  The scenario  proliferates the confusion of people who lack a simpatico between interior and exterior, indicating psychic crisis.  The voice inside us is suggestive, yet strong, saying now is the time to drown yourself and die.

As the dissonance between one's FACE/MASK and one's interior widens, the crisis grows.  Encompassing a social breakdown, the  Alpha dudes are pulled inward, into their doubts, their psychological weaknesses and into their solitude, away from others.  The new Alphas (this rebel fiend army hunting us just out of sight) are also leaders, but of a dark murderous cult.  The war simultaneously is waging inside a contained single person as well.  It is indicative of a virus.  It is manifested as psychological fracture and mental deterioration.  The movie comments on how what nudged at us in our childhood bedrooms--  (is he under my bed waiting to kill me?  Does a monster live in my closet?  Will I soon be brutally murdered?) grows inside us all the while.  Our dis-ease is progressive and chronic, having caused pathology to our organs as they developed.

As in Cosmatos' Mandy (2017) -- the mask of the face promotes the illusion of containment. The borders of the face of Mandy leak when she is permeated and consumed by a cult leader.  Both films involve the constructed identity of a darkly murderous counter-culture cult as its conduit. But the horror is the reveal of the lack of distinction and autonomy that one human actually has from another.  The lie is that we control our thoughts, our bodies, ourselves.  Our wants can infect and even attract others to overtake us.

Smiley Face Killers is mythical in its fears while specific in its placement and time.  The men of these 1990s placid Cali suburbs are alpha dogs slightly denatured; sensitive men and counter culture grunge movements of the 90s coloring the psychological status of preps and bros.  It is the birth of (portable computer/phone) screens. Timeless terrors are grounded in contemporary social isolation (technical as well as medical.)  Like Mandy, it is a film about a specific year.  Mandy's pointed recall of 1983 is a parallel to Smiley Face Killers' magnification of psychic ills in the 1990s, though its deliberate 2020 release is grounding it in a modern plague.

 Our dis-ease is multiplied and vague. It is pandemic. This disease is both the soil and the dirt along the grave; it breeds mental illness and suspicion and weakens our organs to keep us from noticing we are the target of many.. in turn, our destruction serves the earth and nourishes the few who live in the outlines, once scared children themselves, now vanquishing the monster inside us all, victorious at last.

In the logic of Smiley Face Killers the face is called Galiel.  He must be killed. It is the name of the mask that pretends to be a face. 

GOING NOWHERE: Voyage and Experience in Quarantine

alone in a room; The Girlfriend Experience

CLOSE CONTACT.

Sudden, life-affirming hugs occupy the close of two films I watched early on in the shutdown. 

They tell a desperate truth; we live alone, we die alone, but we can grab onto another person, and we radically embrace our closed path.

Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia),1954, chronicles a married couple close to demise.  Sanders and Bergman are middle-aged and wedded for years. They set out to escape each other, on a trip along Italy's coast.  Scenes vacillate from pitted alienation of the two in a car and the couple roaming in and out of each other's immediate space; always an arm or two apart at cocktail parties. 

Scenes inside the car consist of dead spaces in between conversation, resentful glances and an uncanny way for a couple  to instigate forward motion as the metal confines them.  Time feels thick and air outside the windows teases of freedom.

There is a sudden air of exploration as, once in Italy, they  (primarily she, in solo outings) wander off-road sites; gazing at petrified faces from Pompeii and other victims of history and time.    In the scenes of the couple bickering in crisis there was a lack of truly seeing or hearing one another; every action seemed bent on reactive emotions.  Here, at Pompeii, among tombs of dead, the act of looking stirs a radical shift of consciousness.
The traveling couple meets eyes, but of the dead, not of each other.  The stare disturbs some veneer that separates the face and the heart.  The dead are not just immobile but petrified; frozen at the time in which they entered death. A look of recognition and warning bores through the visiting pair.

The Girlfriend Experience, 2009, details the experience of simulated lifestyle and love that capital can afford.  The experience is of a moment in time; the bubble of the early aughts; a surge about to burst, and performed intimacy, leading to a larger performative experience of personality and love and the confusion regarding which is more material. 

  The looks in The Girlfriend Experience are not quite of shared recognition but of the attempt to perform it, or  the desperate hope to find it. 

Misplaced faith in belief systems is at the crux of Sanders and Bergman's marital crisis. Is monogamy and lifelong love still something to believe in midcentury? Figures and numbers populate the value system of The Girlfriend Experience. "You know how I am about my numbers", which is that she can no longer discern the distinction between real and performed value, between real meaning and pure narrative concoction.  Escort Chelsea (Sasha Grey)'s belief system is comparable to the zodiac, wherein her emotional ties and patterns are reinforced and validated by correlating numbers (numerology meets astrology, described as personology by Chelsea).  Her love ideals and career goals are lofty and seemingly spiritual, yet on both sides her relationships lack an actualization.  There is physical togetherness but the touches are dispassionate; as calculated as the moves of the traders and entrepreneurs she beds.  To Chelsea, numbers and dates hold the potential of connection that seems lacking in her; pupils distilled, gaze slightly askew.  Her eyes sit idle, as if on a separate person.  The unstable value of numbers and signs is  evident here as in the bulk of her clientele; all suffering the financial fallout of 2008-2009.  

 Just as their eyes' immersion into scenes of history shock and free Bergman and Sanders' characters from their inability to connect, the eyes of Chelsea tell a story of disconnect and the consistent attempt to break through into real connection, though her life is also constructed around the work of performing connection when it is not there.

These films testify that all that remains in this world that is real and worthwhile is the moment of sudden expression through physical contact, be it naked skin on skin, or clothed tightly grasped hug, to break through our walls that alienate us from feeling and seeing one another.

Voyage to Italy Finale: Bergman and Sanders embrace at last, in a crowd

TGE 's final performed sex act-  a meaningful near naked embrace of two lonely players

Babylon_4 Mubi: I'm a Legal Alien in London

Frank Rosso's Babylon (1980) is showing February 25 – March 26, 2019 on MUBI in the United Kingdom.

Impressions of Franco Rosso’s Babylon (1980) extend past the boundaries of its 95-minute running time. Like the dub remixes its London characters’ lives revolve around, the movie plays with re-establishing identity and our experience of time. A narrative document of young, working class male Jamaican-British Londoners, Babylon doles out atmospheric city scenes of their place in the community: sons, brothers, boyfriends, small-time crooks, laborers, music lovers and producers. Privileging viewers with immersion into an insulated, under-documented immigrant community, the film provides a window into their daily lives. We are thrown into conversations and situations, intimately experiencing their patois (new subtitles have been provided for this restoration,) their interactions with friends, their constant victimization by a dominantly racist white society, and the massive sound system parties they congregate to. A corrective to the British ignorance and fear of Jamaican immigrants, the film’s emphasis is on the immigrants’ culture (dub and reggae music) as a political and emotional response.

The opening shots focus on young men (our protagonists Blue and his friends) running through and against hopping London traffic. Lifting stereo elements into trucks in industrialized environs, the men’s labor is seen against an underpopulated abandoned warehouse setting. A cut to opening credits leads into a dancehall club scene; the men we’ve followed in the opening shots are no longer running against or away from the center of the action. A feeling of exhalation colors shots of dancing to the riches their sound system provides. The entire first third of the film has the quality of a low-key celebration.

Like the heavy boxes and stereo supplies that the men struggle to put together in the formation of a sound, their dub music community highlights strength of the masses uniting in common goals. The moment of lifting and moving the heavy boxes that build their sound system demand action and coordination, leading to sweat and strain—“you stand there, you hold this end!”—but it is also a microscopic view into a never before filmed community. Babylon is a both a film about outsiders and one created by outsiders, though that includes an Italian turned Londoner director, a Jewish co-writer (Martin Stellman), and a legendary Barbados-born dub producer. As directed by Franco Rosso, there is a palpable effort to get inside of the experience of Black British immigrants. The question is posed: how is it living as a legal immigrant, for all intents and purposes a legal alien, inside a white society that marginalizes the Black and the immigrant experience?

Rosso was an immigrant to the UK himself. Italian-born and primarily British-bred, Rosso exhibits curiosity and knowingness as he settles into this world. Rosso served as an assistant editor on Ken Loach’s emotive outsider drama Kes (1969), and later worked on documentaries tracking the marginalized criminal population of Britain. Yet despite Rosso’s perceptive direction and the cinematography of Chris Menges (The Mission, The Killing Fields, Comfort and Joy…), it is the original soundtrack by Dennis Bovell, more than any other element, that creates the storyline’s intention and tone.

Blue (Brinsley Forde), our main protagonist, dodges family stress and expectations by finding good times and purpose in the world of dub. Blue and his peers form the underdog sound system group Ital Lion, and Babylon tracks their rivalry with champion Jah Shaka. Beefy (Trevor Laird), one of Blue’s pals, stands out as a frequent butt of his friends’ jokes, but under the surface lies a growing disgust for the unjust treatment he encounters at the hands of whites. As racial tensions slowly intensify in the last third of the film, the dub score becomes more futuristic and haunting.

The enjoyment and collective experience of music is a building block of the film’s structure. Reggae music, rooted in Jamaica, enjoyed a rapt audience in Britain in the 1970s and ‘80s. Associated with Rastafarianism and music of the masses and the oppressed, it also focuses on a rhythm that is on the offbeat, mainly stressing the second and fourth beats. Dub music, often remixing/reproducing reggae songs electronically, involves a producer who alters the beat by way of prolonging, muting or repeating sounds. It revolutionized dance and social gatherings by the way it alters and deepens a soundscape. Dub remixes incorporate electronic sounds, such as phasers and martial tempos to infiltrate the more subdued reggae melody. Reverb, echo and muting are used to swallow up the original sound, creating a cavernous feel.

The dub music flooding the film is both a character and a characterization of our protagonists’ experience. It can be heard soundtracking scenes of their shenanigans, their parties, their London walks and rides, and their workdays. It is only in scenes where the racism of white men (being targeted and chased by whites, called racist names by a white woman who dislikes their music, et cetera) that the music comes to a standstill. In the final scenes of the film, the personal stakes for our characters reach their boiling point, and the dub music increasingly reflects this destructive landscape. Phaser sounds dominate the dancehall, as the Ital Lion crew produce a dominantly electronic and alien soundscape. Just as when a character calls out to “tear it up,” referring to the music, we witness the breakdown and rebuilding in both the immigrant experience and the remixed music. An explosive ending reinforces the film’s portrait of the bifurcated immigrant experience: the sense of identity by belonging to an insulated group, and the concept of being an alien in another world.

I DREAM MYSELF ALIVE: MANDY's Giving Tree

**Notes on Mandy (2018)**

1985.

 A-Ha invites the world to hear synth songs composed of elements medieval, picaresque and fantastic.  The songs constitute their 1985 album, Hunting High and Low.  One song in particular is constructed in a melodramatic register but also serves up popular appeal, and it is titled "I Dream Myself Alive."

"I Dream Myself Alive.
You can't deny.
There's something dark against the light.
All I can say,
It doesn't have to be this way."

The song is immersive, conducting a specific world, as the band does cohesively throughout the album.  Beyond being music, playing it evokes a subjectivity; an enclosure; a world of feeling.
As does the movie Mandy.

1983.

Mandy.  Panos Cosmatos, 2018.

The synth sounds (composed by Johann Johannsson) haunt and bounce; reverberating the space they live in, like glass.  Sometimes notes collect en masse, droning; suggesting inevitability.
Red Miller (Nicholas Cage) dreams himself into an unreal reality.  He inhabits a holy space of his own creation.  He works in the earth and  the earth returns his effort and gives shelter.  Love is a private inner world he and his lover Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough) sustain by maintaining its borders.  She illustrates; figurally and scenically aligned with the fantastical imagery of the Metal bands she sports on her shirts.  Their story is romantic yet conscious about its interiority; hiding inside, being separated from some greater world.  The elements coloring the story are oversaturated primaries, deep space in forestry environs, mythologic marital love, and the fantastic.

Early scenes:  Red cuts trees for work. The trees his chainsaw cleaves in two prefigure the cleaving of oneness into twoness that occurs in dramatic graphic imagery as the movie gets in motion.
When Red returns home to Mandy at the end of his work day, their domestic sphere evokes a modern treehouse, with visible lumber and the sense of being a safe space within a natural organism.

"Handke wrote, 'The people left the grave quickly.  Standing beside it, I looked up at the motionless trees:  for the first time it seemed to me that nature really was merciless.  So these were the facts!  The forest spoke for itself.'  That was beautiful, ...Handke did not lie...I was lying.  Why? When I looked at a tree, I saw that it was blind and arbitrary, an entity that had come into being and would die, and which in the meantime was growing."
-- p 177 My Struggle, Book 6 -Karl Ove Knausgaard.

TITLE CARD:  Shadow Mountains 1983 A.D.

Images track the Sacred as well as the Profane.  The couple's womblike home counters the vastness of the wooded spaces as well as the heterogenous intentions outside of their own.

Mandy is the main character through which we experience a sense of anxiety of outside threats.  The look in her eyes as she works in the shop, her awareness of another's gaze upon her; both a male in a car and another female, in person. Women are not holy to Mandy, and her modernness is sensed in her own agency by working for herself and knowing enough to be as untrusting of a woman than she may be a man.

Murmured in the background is an Unseen Voice of the Televisual: The voice of President Ronald Reagan, announcing, triumphantly, the spiritual awakening of America.

ENTER: THE BOGEYMEN.

Distinctions are as blurry as the image of Mandy's face when it falls under the subjective, longing  gaze of "Psycho Jesus Freak" Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache.)

Vision counters sound.  The sound is rhetorical, and vision slowly states that what we know is moving into past tense. The definition of Mandy vs the definition of the evil sister is blurred because our view; our perspective is blurred. We watch Mandy walk home and we breathe in a dreamlike sense of her:  romantic and elemental in the forest.  The form of her silhouette is liquefied as she and the forest bleed into each other.  Is this a fairytale princess; the viewfinder owned by adoring husband Red?  Or is this the view of Mandy from the car window of murderous deviant Jeremiah Sand?

THE TREE OF LIFE VS THE BOGEYMAN.
PERCEPTION IS FLUID.

Good vs. Evil, or loss of individuation.
Silhouettes have boundaries.  Their outline is what differentiates (for the watcher) the distinction between where the human ends and where the forest they are walking in begins.  Boundaries (like these) bleed in Mandy.  Key here is the distended timeline and sequence of Mandy's capture. But is this point of rupture (and major tonal pivot point in the film) or a nod to the creative process? The doors of perception allow one to enter a possible crisis: permanent loss of self.  They also offer privileged rarity:  pure experience outside of the self.  To bend the mind and amuse at the loss.

Later on, in Knausgaard's book, he struggles with the Why and the How something is art.
A sense of boundary -less ness or selflessness is drawn:
"What does it mean to write?  First of all it is to lose oneself, or one's self.  In that it resembles reading, but ...the loss of the self in writing is in a different way complete, as when snow vanishes into snow...no foreground or background, no top or bottom."
p. 240

TOPICAL BOGEYMEN:
(in 1983)
Under the gothic pop terrain is a deeper reckoning:  reaction to the radical political change of the late 1960s -70s and the freewheeling sexual mores.  The political and cultural reactionaries came back to battle it all with Bogeyman.  Feminism was born and then widely rebuked in 1983; a recall based on the horror of women who do not subordinate to men.
When Mandy is taken by the man who can't escape her gaze; he is the bogeyman not unlike how traditional women saw people like Mandy at that time.  It was dawn in America, and women were pressed to maintain the traditional role. In the sequence depicting her kidnapped encounter, there is a shared recognition between Mandy and Sand; each horrified of the other, faces acidicly dripping into one another.

1) G-DLESS SOVIETS. (Perestroika, doomed attempts to alter a governmental economy. 

An encroaching Red scare echoed in Mandy's apocalyptic red color scheme.
Fear of sexual deviation and the loss of the couple: recent psychic symptoms from 1970s spate of

 2) MANSON TYPE CULT LEADERS.

3) INDEPENDENT WOMEN -- WILL FORSAKE MEN.  Because ERA almost passed..until in 1982 it failed to be ratified by the a few of the total needed number of states.  Anxieties of the job market are exulted by working men facing the end of economic harmony as well as the end of heterosexual dependency.

Writing on the economic crisis of 2008-09, David Leonhardt  reminds us of 1982 as he writes (NYT, Jan 20, 2009):  "Is the economy only a little worse than it was in the last couple recessions, as some have said, and still a long way from the dark days of 1982?"

she exerts agency

Trapped in his Gaze

Are they so different?

enjoyment, but solitary

Desperate to reassert his own agency

Mandy may not be about any one thing, but it recalls a lot of things in the recesses of memory of  Generation X.  The political psychic scars are indelible though not explicit, and the hypnotic distension of allure and immersion  foregrounds the experiential nature of art above narrative.  The epic battle of good and evil that follows is itself foregrounded by the film's slow burn of a start.  Reminding viewers that good and evil are creations people choose, politically or psychically serving the disenfranchised or the obsessed.  Refuting logic by the broken film form that lives at its core, Mandy feels as if its about the intoxication of space and sound; and how aligned it can be with a particular period of time and feeling. All we know for certain is the immersive aspect of life, stunning primary colors, serene or driving sounds  the purest blues in a valley lake, the sound of your lovers' quiet voice.

A STAR IS BORN: IT WANTS TO KILL YOU

A STAR IS BORN operates on highs:  the loudest guitar, the bluest blue, a love most supreme, the most destructive downward turn.   The movie bathes its subjects in blues and reds,  contoured by the presence of shadows (analogue to a spotlight), the colors and shifting lights correlate to the music (alternation of soft ballads' intimacy and louder vocal proclamations of rock), and how it in turns shapes our moods.

The world of A STAR IS BORN is uncluttered; it is essential in style.

Jackson;  Elegant Mess

Jackson Maine is onstage:  Red stadium lights dominate.   The spotlight in the small drag club where Ally first performs reds the entire room.  The ideas behind the color identical, yet the latter set to smaller scale.  The connective ocean flows between the rock star and the waitress. The ocean is alcohol. The series of narrative and visual echoes are filmed as intensifications.

Coming out of the stadium he is driven away and has a chance encounter with Ally (Lady Gaga).  Their resigned eyes reflect one another.

(An answer) sung by Ally in the parking lot to Jack:
"Aren't you tried of tryin to fill that void?   Or do you need more?"

They bond in Jackson's boozy exurban stop-over. The two collide and quietly connect.

Prisoners of the Light

Jackson is an addict, he is down, and so naturally, in his back pocket he's got plans.  They're reserved for another day, one not too near, because they are not sure to occur.  But he has an out.  His disease endures, desiring him dead.

The viewers are confronted with Jackson's disease in piecemeal moments; a few clues followed by a slow burn of increasingly cringe-worthy to frightening moments of obliteration. The depiction of Jackson's second affliction, tinnitus, is an echo of his addiction.  To suffer from it is to hear too loudly, or to hear sounds internally that do not exist externally.  The sounds create a singular pain. Jackson's heart and mind are sick with this affliction.  A sonic equivalent to the distorted reality that magnifies his problems; expanding as Ally rises to stardom.  What better way to illustrate the pain in being so sensitive to everything, and by not being able to dull it anymore?

The update provided in Cooper's version of A Star is Born is heightened coverage of Jackson's addiction.  The male psyche is the way in to this dark tunnel, replete with wounds and a soul baring desire for love and comfort. The connection and the love shared between them is believable. They speak of how they feel what they write -- how they shape it into something more; a connective process impregnating them both.  As their connection takes root, stakes are raised; narratively the love and safety Jackson seeks seems answered as he bolsters Ally's problematic self esteem and drive. Visual cues follow the narrative: blues become reds and the music and cuts come quicker.  Melodrama by way of music video:  dynamic cuts make points between the shots, eyes exposed -- pregnant with trauma and missed chances.  Each frame is an intact production. The music serves a heightened emotional intensity.  Addiction is rewarded with not often seen honesty-- it pulls and it lures.  His impulse to obliterate is a beautiful living thing. 

He is sickened by the alteration of Ally's music, a denigration of the Real.  Teams enter:  they surround Ally and re-mold her.  She is driven further from herself.  She is produced and contained, separated from the truth they once had in a parking lot.  Artifice was stripped when her drag club makeup was peeled off her face; a bandage hiding the wound. As fame builds and blinds (with deepening blues and reds, intensified edits), the makeup returns to obscure and entrap. The path is full of fraudulence, more than he will bare.  The answer:  Use.  Escape.

Art Pepper, addicted jazz musician:

"Living without love is like not living at all."

back to the film:
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 Another aspect of Cooper's style that struck me is the idea of the spotlight and how it bears down on someone suffering.  It can illuminate a broken spirit.  Under that light, no one escapes.  Jackson, in graphic relation to the spotlight in each frame, is devastating to the viewer.  His beautiful but broken spirit is clearest (onstage performing or at the Grammys) when he is under its pull. Ally is filmed like an illuminated spirit, expansive in power and emotion in the frames where she is in the spotlight. The film is often dark; using expressive lights via the glare of the overproduced tv segment or the total soul baring exposure of the concert spotlight.  In Cahiers du Cinema, there is a 1970 article by Serge Daney and Jean-Pierre Oudart called "Work, Reading, Pleasure."  Daney speaks of how a film can give us "...the splendour of truth."  He goes on to describe film, in a materialist sense, as a "prisoner of the light."

The end:  She is born; he dies.  He (Jack) has left the earth; surrendered his war with meaninglessness. This is a sad state of affairs, but also: brutal, secret pain has been transformed because of the artist and their craft.  Sorting out the  aftermath, there is a brief scene of his brother (Sam Elliott) and Ally in discussion. The brother riffs on inevitability and work of a songwriter:  He pointedly tells her there are 12 octaves in every song, and every song is always going to keep telling the same 12 notes, in different ways.

It is the same circle that keeps going around and around, and everyone tells the same story, and its only art when someone arranges it this way.

Another dozen--   12 steps that can lead to freedom.

Jackson's brief respite in recovery. Separated from the group.