Viral Lows: KIMI and the Spread

"KIMI: Mute TV.  Play "Oxytocin."  "KIMI: Max Volume."
-Angela's commands to her personal Kimi

"RUN!  RUN!" 

-Angela's neighbor's commands to Angela

2022. It's late pandemic. New films premiere online. A movie streams exclusive to HBO MAX; its plot points fold back on the conditions in which its distributed. Its focus is a nexus of internet implications: malevolent tech, benevolent tech, web-bred isolation, and pandemic isolation. Information spreads faster than ever. The coronavirus continues to infect. The movie is Kimi (2022, Soderbergh.)

(Internet) Issue 1: WEB 2 to WEB 3: Partial ownership, Decentralization Fiction, Surveillance, Societal Pause. Corporate Control (Brad)

Seattle, 2021.

Stilled exterior shots hone in on a pretty nice suburban home. We spy: lawn, cement, front stairs, and, by the door, a newspaper.  Shots are bridged with the voice of its resident. We find him mid-interview on a television program. Circle lighting himself, top dressed, is Brad, a Senior Rep for Big Tech outfit The Amygdala Corp.  Connecting live from his basement, the scene is bringing prime Pause. Society's time out stands in parallel to a  so similar and as sickening. We step inside, the world of Kimi is a compact, knotted circuit. A circuitry of plots; crimes, trauma, romances that the film will allow us to spy: Rear Window style. 

The set up previews the plot ahead: surveillance, fears of being detected. Shot duration is brief with neatly composed frames as Brad's basement and the TV studio are intercut. Though straight forward in information, the style intimates surfaces purposely anesthetized. A foundation for a more elliptical editing style to come. Brad's appearance has the quality of a spied domesticity as well as a mediated work presentation. He discusses the uniqueness with which Amygdala's new big seller -- the Kimi, will operate. A smart home tool à la Alexa or Google Home, it's privy to direct commands and, well... everything. Kimi sees and hears all from its owners, the benign and the secrets. Brad, not ironically, hails Kimis as uniquely efficient. Efficiency attributed to oversight of the company always improving the match (and recognition) of command to response. Accuracy in understanding is a selling point of the Kimi: the company structure of the Amygdala Corp is built around clarity. A claim giving the buyer the semblance of relationship; ownership of their own Kimi.

Later on, we'll learn this benefit hinges on company surveillance. But the smart home tools are lauded as being owned individually; an application of Web 3. The lie of Web 3:  those who opt in could be sole owners of their data. AWS (Amazon Web Services) defines Web 3 and infers its Alexa (Kimi is modeled after) belongs to this application. AWS discusses Web 3's on the AWS web page: 

   "Web 3.0 aims to create more interconnections between diverse technologies, so data flows between different platforms without intermediaries. Interoperability makes data portable so users can seamlessly switch between services while maintaining their preferences, profiles, and settings." 

Moments after Brad's interview he takes a call establishing his leadership and financial stake in Amygdala. It's implied he wields the power to annihilate those threatening his stakes. Can he usurp its tech to obscure or own information? Is Kimi a product of Web 2 or Web 3?  Like the pandemic's pause, like an off-beat, the smart home sits on the last rung of Web 2. The blockchain is not yet here. 

 

(Internet) Issue 2: Deception, Surveillance, Hiding in Plain Sight; to find out/to be found out.  (Angela, a Jew)

Angela Childs' desk is neat, yet busy. She works, at home, and like Brad, for the Amygdala corp. Screens, modems, and editing apps to manage her streams.  It is adorned with a purell bottle she frequently accesses. Her streams are unrealized commands borne of disconnects between a Kimi and their owner. Angela (played by Zoe Kravitz) surveils and corrects volumes of them. As often as we see her check a stream, we see her sanitize.  Her aquiline hands indicate ritualism as they pulse in mannered extensions and near touches; allowing time to pass and Purell to absorb.  She keeps eyes on (fixing Kimi errors) and keeps danger out (germs and people.) An oft-employed Soderbergh style defines the initial sequence surrounding Brad and the Amygdala intro. Typically speaking, a style almost elliptical in edits, atmosphere of industry, of dehydrated emotional spheres. Though Angela lives in an impressively large converted loft. The filmmaking style pivots as we move through it. Swooping camera movements scan the space, a fluidity coupled with an unexpected Vertigo motif in the movie's score. Her home decor reads ascetic techno nest; furnished with machinery and sanctuary.

It turns out that Angela is agoraphobic and germaphobic. With scant evidence of the existence of a personal life,  her social distance amplifies an emotional distance.

It is through distance that Angela seems to find control. She also finds control through her work. In discerning Kimi errors in the execution of owner commands, Angela utilizes her emotional tools -cautiousness and fear of people- to excel at her job. She observes, she detects and amplifies as she evaluates barely audible sounds and images initially obscured.

She stays in shape, intentionally works out rigorously and compulsively in an on the nose scene with a Pelaton and 'Oxytocin' playing (via her command to Kimi). Angela is terrified of being outside. She's ill at ease with any non-virtual encounters arising with other people.

There is a negation of  her humanity. She is neurotic and fearful but also transactional. She accesses virtual or cordoned off relationships (will only zoom with her dentist though a tooth is infected; Face-times her mom and her therapist, calls in flirty favors with a colleague who has fuller access, and she only lets her lover come inside briefly; ripping the sheets off to sanitize moments after coming. She hides her face and scurries away from others on the street. Her actions are so obtrusive in a normalized (even a pandemic normal) social context that the camera speeds up when she scurries and moves through public space. She runs and hides in an exaggerated style wedded to machine like music; a broken computer.  It as is if she can beat the grid; it’s one she knows so well. Soderbergh films her furtive frightened moves in a register that is nearly comic. It is no accident her beauty is hidden, her hair cut short and died an unnatural bright blue. She is in disguise because she must survive. She keeps her head down, her face covered. She refuses eye contact. 

As if she is not deserving of human connection or social existence. It’s as if she is sub-human.
Like she is a Jew.

Angela learns she's endangered by some inside her company. Higher ups who have a stake in keeping the evidence drowned out. She evades recognition. She has a goal and it is to report a crime; maybe a murder. For its victim to be seen and heard. The skittish Angela starts to evolve. A steely will shows a driven Angela hankering down to edit, separate audio tracks, beg for favors from a boozed up Russian  colleague.  There is aural evidence of a woman being attacked, but it is under the radar; it must be studied.Angela is emboldened by the experience. A dramatic event is presented to her where she has a moral choice. She chooses justice over fear. She risks exposing herself; the thing that seemed to source her referred to traumas. She must adapt or die.

 

Hints of  Polanski-styled Jewish paranoia (a person in trouble; remaining imperceptible/ undercover) figure widely in Kimi.

Like a sub species, a germ, there is viral spread and viral load: coronavirus particulates, data//information leakage and an abstraction: the Jewish people and perceived destroyer of races; the ones pulling the strings.

The company is Amygdala Corp. The company is named for a part of the brain. 

Amygdala as “the brain” is satisfyingly reflective, The literal head — a rebuke of the decentralized new web, a “smart” home, accidental slip that indicates the product ( the lie calls it assistant) is in control of the consumer.

In the brain, this small structure regulates emotional stability. It is notable for its key role mental in social anxieties and phobias such as agoraphobia and social anxiety, i.e. the distrust of others.

Its afflictions are countered by the chemical oxytocin. Like in much of the film, there is a double truth here. The fear that the amygdala produces can also save one's life. The neurotic history of Angela, can, if she rises to the challenge, shift from defect to asset. Something in her history haunts her, something unspecified. When a therapist prods she quickly shuts down her computer to evade the woman. The pivot point of her emotional process is when she succeeds in tying a mysterious overheard bit of audio (overheard by a Kimi; observed only by Angela) to the visuals of a real crime. The 'film' is made. As she watches, it watches back at her, and she unleashes a sudden cry of recognition. The moment connects this past event she uncovers to unlocking her older past pain. It converges in the present. Soderbergh gives the moment a modern Hitchockian presentation. Smoky sheer technicolor shades over a bumpy collage stand with a restrained outline of a Hermann-esque moment in Martinez's score.  After this point in the movie, Angela becomes bolder and her goals and commitment to to her being able to use this connection with this incident to protecting the part of herself she could not protect in the past.

Angela had it in her along.  Hyperawareness, a talent for evasion and generalized suspicion of everybody; these were the bricks that built her survival.  Ultimately repurposed to facilitate her entry back into the world: they enable her to serve a purpose larger than her fears. Catapulted into action, she moves to reveal harm done to another. She fights against it instead of running from it. The brain's production of  fear can improve intuition, and thus protective reaction to threats. Angela slips in and out of notice; concealing her identity. She listens in on streams and reposes commands to the Kimis, as if she is the brain, she is the one secretly pulling the strings, being the brain, an elder of Zion.

The actor Zoe Kravitz (at least based on quotes in the press) identifies as a Jewish woman. Steven Soderbergh, the director is an unbrandable filmmaker slipping in and out of genres; flexible in scope and style. As far reaching in styles as he is surreptitious in his authorship ( doubling under a pseudonym as cinematographer and an additional pseudonym as the editor). 

His own identity enriches this reading of identity in Kimi. His work pivots from classic Hollywood caper series to experimental to immersive to bleak comedy. And so the director is often mistaken for something he is not. Not just a hired Hollywood hand, and not solely an independent or experimental (see Mosaic) filmmaker.  Looking at his exploration of  paranoia, many Polanski style tropes, and the Jewishness within the subject of King of Hill, The Good German, and Polanski docs, Steven Soderbergh may be mistaken for being Jewish. He is not.

Internet(ish) Issues 3: The Girlfriend Experience, King of the Hill, Polanski, and Marx

King of the Hill (1993, Soderbergh). Aaron in hiding.

The Girlfriend Experience (2009, Soderbergh.) Chelsea makes money.

Soderbergh's output inventories series of elliptical figures, soft powers, tech threats and some market discussions. (Only The Girlfriend Experience also points back to concerns of virtuality.)

Edmund Wilson, in To the Finland Station (1940), described Marx's theories and writings in  Das Kapital as syllogisms —illuminating an orchestra of movement where the commodities drive movement and actions ( causalities). They have “their own laws of movement; …revolve in their own orbits like electrons”. Kimi employs a similar conversation in which to illuminate the network of tech and finance. The metal of the actual Kimi:  mug sized pyramid with an LED light, is emblematic of "goods". It's a concrete object around which money can attach and modulate others' monetary motivations. It works by recording audio and video and creating a relation to the owner's desire. The videocamera does this too. A Kimi films, it traps subjects in the light. In sex, lies and videotape the camera does the same; metal machine intruding on relationships. It is a product of consumer aspiration (blockchain! brain!) which encompasses both  thesis and antithesis as enumerated by Marx. It's that intrinsic deceptiveness, the slippery character (is it the privatized solution or the medium of big brother? Is it the fetish commodity or the decentralized community?) making it equally capable of societal good and societal harm.

Soderbergh movies often concern: the financial market (The Informant!, TGE), ominous internet (Kimi, sex, lies..), isolation /persecution (TGE, King of the Hill, Kafka, sex, lies...) and capers/conspiracies are often present.  Spy thriller style meted out care of mumblecore aesthetics, along with spare decor and dialogue. Main characters battle accusal of crimes, suffer because they lack money, uncover a conspiracy, or hide for survival. The aforementioned battles are all frequent tropes and concerns in the films of Roman Polanski. In movies such as Rosemary Baby (from a novel by Ira Levin containing many more explicit mentions of Jewishness), The Tenant, Frantic, to The Ghost Writer, Polanski 's protagonists are hunted, chased, and persecuted. They must discover that their own partner or their own government or their own apartment building is conspiring against them. To excuse anxieties and pure neurosis; to refuse ones own paranoia tinted fears is revealed as a fatal flaw. They must acknowledge and explore the fear in order to survive. In the final act of Soderbergh's Kimi, it is revealed that Angela's life hinges on the very same.  Her ability to hide and remain closed off to people now must be employed to detect the enemy yet remain undetected. It is a Jewish quality in that it can be needed for a Jew to survive. Similarly, it is hard not to see the role that hiding out and not being revealed (for one's Jewishness) in Polanski's own life (from the ghetto in WW2 Poland) has informed his artistic work in film. Soderbergh's King of the Hill contains one of the first filmed appearances of Adrien Brody. He plays a character who teaches the impoverished hero (Aaron Kurlander, possibly also a Jewish character) how to hide. Brody's character Lester is an endearing small-time criminal helping (semi) abandoned 12 year old Aaron get out and about of his shantytown motel room without the motel workers discovery. If they get a chance, they will padlock the room and steal all its belongings; his parents were not able to pay the bill. It is strongly suggested Lester is good at hiding because he has always had to. There is one comment by a street cop who questions A on Lester's whereabouts. "Where's that Yid you hang out with hiding out?? Lester....oh yeah, Silverstone. Lester Silverstone." Nine years later Brody won the Academy Award for Best Lead Actor in a film, in Roman Polanski's The Pianist. Portraying Wladysaw Szpilman, a pianist who must first hide he is a Jew, and then must hide that he exists at all; in a bombed out home to survive the Warsaw Ghetto, survive the Shoah.  Perhaps Roman and Steven watch each other's films. They make pictures dominated by those who must hide.

Soderbergh served as Executive Producer on two (favorable to Roman) Roman Polanski documentaries: Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008), and Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out (2012.) He even legally petitioned for Roman to be freed from his decades old legal persecution as well.

Soderbergh confronts the uncertainty of a moment. The specific placement of the plot in a Silicon City and specific moment of the Covid shutdown aptly foreground the transmission of threat and control that governing powers can exert dominance. Kimi confronts the shortcomings and deceptive allure of Web 3. 

In the end, Amygdala Corp's Kimi is a problem the company can't beat. Web 3, people can learn to maximize their own space and commands to override the brain. As the product fulfills its initial false promise, it saves Angela and serves justice once she finds a way to take control of the smart device away from the company's power. The problem can also be the solution. The end of the movie is beautiful. It conjures  perfect resolutions. Hunted and outnumbered victims are saved. Angela conquers all that holds her back, against all odds.  We get to join in the fantasy that survival can be (well, it can be!) achieved at the last possible moment. 

Angela overcomes what paralyses her and transfers it to the currency to survive. She decides to trust her fellow. It's a big leap, and for Jews it is perhaps our biggest current hope and biggest long shot. That we won't have to hide. We won't have to rely only on ourselves. A neighbor will see. They will hear. Bearing witness. They will come to our aid, through their own personal risk, and we will save each other. This is a joyful moment to re-watch Kimi now, as an American; a Jew in the Diaspora.
In the end, the traumatized Jew are saved by being eyed. Not eyed by big brother/ big brother specifically, but by the eyes of a watcher, the eyes of a neighbor (Kevin), the eyes of an ally.

evade

I'm Kevin

EO: vapors of inherited feels

notes, oct 2022 nyff ------------------------- 

Jerzy Skolimowski's newest film, EO, employs six donkeys to play the titular role.  The collectiveness  composing his identity is counter to what follows:  EO is consistently ripped out of places and away from other people and animals.

 People give EO all sorts of things:  a name, unpaid jobs, shackles, food, warm company and romance.  They furnish him injuries a living being can barely sustain.  A sense of connection-- one so mysterious and strong; it may be worth living and dying for. 

Colors are saturated to the breaking point or as grey and white as a frozen forest. Bright red rattles outward. Sounds hammer and shatter; a call of alarm. Distance is crossed but the movie conceals much in the passage of time.  A birthday is remarked upon once, though its unclear if EO has had several or one.

Color, unfamiliar angles and uncertain sound compose a map of insular, sentient experience. The map draws a worldview which is hard for us to see (and feel), because we are used to seeing as people, but here we see as something more. It's a movie felt by a donkey and it tries to express what is outside of language. Implication of familiar feelings ground the movie as inside a mutual history: a shared trauma, an extermination. 

What motivates EO? There is desire to find adulation, a need to flee danger. Its eyes cut through like words:  how they look at us and look to us. EO's movement is mapped in stereo; two tracks, and the movie's conceit is that there is convergence. Geography and population color in our sense of place as narrative action kicks in -- the donkey advances across Europe. One track is Emo EO's love-starved quest; the other track less attached to causality. It may be genetic instinct, earthly curiosity, or a vague urge to run away. The two tracks never meet, and they never can. Can EO be free?  It s an irrational hope, but when  fortune finds EO every so often, the film lets in the possibility. This failure to accept reality may keep us alive.  For a time. 

  If an animal is an ass it is because he thinks he is free, or that he could be. Echoes of Auschwitz, "Arbeit Macht Frei." The tenor and vistas of Skolimowski's movie run in parallel to ecosystems and ruins of WW2 Europe. Alternating scenes of free movement are cut short with scenes of static capture; boarded up animals. Corralled into final moments. Cooked.  EO escapes deep into forests that once hid (and buried) Jewish people.  The timeline is obscured, intensifying the indication of specters.  Matzevah are seen in fleeting shots of EO's run in the forest.  The Shoah intrudes in the world of the present.  A chronicle from the bottom rung of souls. 

EO's slavery crushes us all. One can not un-see or-un hear EO. It serves up a stereographic record of ecstasy and horror. It shows the truth that humans and donkeys share; we strive for significance, and we are reduced to meat. 

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Annie, apart

on L'Evenement (Happening) 2021, Audrey Diwan. 

 Annie stands alone. There is a bustling flow and swirl of students inside Happening's 1960s French collegiate town. Then there is Annie. Separate, captured in more reflective posture; watching more than partaking. She is a school girl, and she describes herself as a woman with a problem.

Her value, within our relationship as spectator to subject, is tied up in how her actions double back on our own: she actively looks at others, distanced from her own peers. Annie is not in step with women inside this illustrated universe. She can not refuse her interest in sex, and she can not accept that pregnancy is its irrefutable bi-product. Happening has a self-consciousness in its own title -- it is not only an occurrence but something active; encroaching. There is no distance at which to reflect or exhale. This establishes a viewer/subject inquiry based upon the need for a closer examination of a figure's character.  No longer a top academic contender as she becomes occupied with securing illegal abortion services, the narrative moves Annie into a peripheral figure. Finding an abortionist and evading arrest is the singular goal to attain and obsess over. It remains this way; overtaking the past goal of academic success, until her failed abortion attempts extend to physical consequence. The parallel goal and obsession to escape more injury shifts Annie's life toward a singular tracked forward motion. Each action that does not yet bring her to her goal has a subsequent action and corporeal mis-step, at quickened pace as attempts accumulate with a collapsing temporal possibility of success.

At 23 years old Annie is sexy, and in several sequences where the camera perches near but just behind and to the side of her face, the supple cheekiness of it reminds us her sensuality is bracketed by vestiges of childhood.This romance of Anne's sun kissed figure, dewy face and emotional registers is the camera's effort to equalize the threat of excessive reality intruding on the film's beautiful elements.

Emotional Anthropologist -- movie director Gerard Blain. (written: late 2020)

Stealing a stare at a face; it is a crime supplying particular appeal now. In summer 2018, at NYC’s Metrograph, I watched three prints of movies by Gerard Blain (1930-2000). I was haunted by a persistent, pregnant dread in the eyes of his male subjects. I’d read about the political edge to the Blain movies. Yes, as others have noted, his style and politics (insert hand shots!) indicate Bresson, but I found the movies more anthropological, like Nat Geo specials by way of Jean Rouch, with the psycho-sentimental eye of a weepy dreamer, i.e. Rossellini or Minnelli. The masculine men they track are revealed as suffering from holding back turbulent emotion-- Un Second Souffle (1978)’s Robert Stack, in jogging shorts, competing with young men for an actress a third his age until he is framed indoors, lost in thought repeatedly listening to the same record. Patrick Norbert in Le Rebelle (1980), an urban soldier against the world, but at his core, a big brother to a little girl...The multiple actors portraying the title role in Un Enfant dans la foule (1976), a WW2 orphan among the soldiers who yearns for a mother and father figure to love and protect him. Blain maintains tight control over tone and action. In no short supply, Blain hands us male figures obscuring their powerful feelings, using unshowy, sudden insert shots and stolen glances to give away a wounded soul. With a nature documentary feel, many of his films start with the lead male subject traversing or being carried through physical space: Un Enfant dans la foule, a car ride; POV from a car seat view as a young boy sees dirt roads mark the distance of his capture-from his home to the prison of the boys’ Seminary. Un Second Souffle gives us a woodsy run with an elegiac Robert Stack in command of his environment, yet foreshadowing subsequent runs, bike rides and workouts that are combative in nature with younger men and chaotic urban traffic. Stack’s breath and image are strong, yet pregnant with the possibility of collapse. In Le Rebelle’s opening, an explosive synth pop anthem scored to Pierre’s (Patrick Norbert) motorcycle jag (following his committing a crime) underlines a destructive streak born of boiling emotion and pain. All subjects share an impulse toward flight and forward motion. A scene in Un Second Souffle give us sad Francis (Stack, alone in his den; aging animal in a cage of his own making)staring at his belongings as he plays part of a record he calls “his favorite movement”, one that renders him still, stirring something inside him. La Rebelle’s seething Pierre, another subject as caged animal,is filmed in long quiet scenes in his room. Feeling cornered in by attempts to raise his little sister, he battles a society where he 's set up to lose. Studied in his private setting; reflective and meditative on his bed as he hits play on his cassette player. He stares intently at the cassette as we hear its the song he motorbikes to. Pierre utilises music as a theme song to compel him into forceful action and persistent forward motion. Watching and rewatching more of the Blain directed movies, I see an echo of the pandemic year in how he frames these men as confined by rooms in a house, restricted by family dynamics and norms, boys lacking the sort of love that protects and builds character. The sore subjects seek private release in music or in looking for others to protect. Eyes carry heavy bags, even among the young. The pain of being trapped inside - sometimes a physical space (a seminary/ a time of war) and sometimes trapped within one’s own body (the aging Robert Stack’s Francis, or the small child in a War) these are less polemical than they are a graphic chronology of psychic pain and desire for emotional and corporeal release. In an arresting sequence in Un Enfant dans la Foule, culminating in an arresting shot, a young teenage woman is stripped nude and paraded around in public humiliation as a symbol of shaming Nazi participation. Our young boy protag has a quiet moment to exhibit the parental love that’s eluded him. Framed within a forbidden dynamic; a Nazi girl and French boy, but both children. As she shakes and sobs, the boy leaves the crowd of Allies to silently console her..

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.