If anything, the Zemeckis-work Cast Away is about how one event can make your whole life turn out just as it would've otherwise, and how even during times of anomaly the important things in life are the ones you expected. It's about everything you already know about maroonings, or think you do, and about how what think you know is basically as good as what you really know anyway. In any case it's not about anything you didn't know or couldn't have guessed, and though there are moments when you're called upon to think about something you've never seen before, don't worry, because they putty over those spots with prefab digitized visualizations. It's really quite restful.

Generated primarily from the point of view and for the benefit of various brands and products, this is a dramedy of objects, shot on location on and around scenic Tom Hanks. The action begins when the FedEx Association of Packages sets out to bring a Chuck Noland (Hanks) from his docking station (Helen Hunt), to a distant location for some package-purpose. The plan begins well enough, but in transit the airplane who's carrying the Chuck suffers an unscheduled and fatal rupture, collapsing before it can tell the Association what has happened. A valiant life raft is able to retrieve the Chuck and carry it to a small storage island nearby but is grievously wounded in the process. Surviving members of the Association straggle ashore and organize an effort to protect and serve their cargo. This supporting cast includes Teknalite, Reebok, and an uncredited pair of ice skates, as well as a number of uncredited native rocks and sticks, but the outstanding performance of Wilson Volleyball as the Team Leader might change the way you think about sports equipment, or maybe about leaders, or teams. Something.

The main problem is that they forgot to make the movie part—to show someone's idea of...Man In Isolation maybe, or Reunions After Long Absences. Anyone's idea of anything might have made a movie of it. They did get the man-prop onto the island, and they got it off again, and they framed that idyll in a romantical frame-story, but they forgot to make any of it matter—it barely even happens. Apparently Robert Zemeckis has no thoughts at all about humans in groups or in isolation—what happens to us in one state or the other, whether either is better for us, whether there's anything to be known about either state at all. It is a sweet commercial of hope for all the SUV survivalists who have always suspected that they'd be able to take care of themselves if they had to, dude, but apart from that there's apparently nothing inherently interesting about being either in the world or out of it.

The picture's defining failure-flag comes halfway through. Hanks has arrived on the little island and, as you've seen in the famous scene from the ads, made fire. He's begun his first efforts at establishing a way to live there and is just getting more or less adjusted when there's a fade to black. After the break we're presented with the words "FOUR YEARS LATER" and all of a sudden it's four years later, so he begins to prepare his escape. Small wonder, since apparently in fifteen hundred days of deprivation and solitude not one single thing has happened that was so interesting you might put it in a movie about being marooned on an island.

Or has it? While building the raft he means to escape on Hanks gets into an argument with the volleyball and ALLUDES to some Dark Event that happened once... Later on, while talking to a human person he REVEALS that in fact that event was an attempted suicide! But Zemeckis feels that a protagonist's actual suicide attempt and the thoughts and events surrounding it can't match the significance of the surprise and wonder we might feel at hearing about it afterwards: "So that's what that was about with Wilson! He tried to kill himself? Now I get it!" It's as though Zemeckis is purposely designing this show for the people who mutter running commentaries and conversations with the screen through the whole length of a movie; he keeps them fed with bite-sized mystifications to keep their attention from wandering.

He has to do that if there's going to be any structure, because this alleged movie is actually a two-and-a-half-hour compilation episode of your favorite scenes from this movie, each with its own extra-special effect inside for a crunchy, juicy crunch. Hardly anything matters beyond the famous scene it appears in. On at least five occasions Chuck sustains some kind of significant injury, but none of them has any sort of consequences once it's finished—like a cartoon, Chuck can be injured but never damaged, so each wound is never more than another owie. The various gashings are vividly depicted so you gasp in sympathy when they happen, but once that buzz is past they're dismissed. Ooh! Owie!

Not that he should have gotten a mortal infection from every coral

nick—for a movie that makes a big show of being about the physical world it's wildly fantastic, so we can't be picky about the realism—but as a rule the things you specifically show or describe in your work should be the things you mean for it to be about, not the things it's not about. "Aboutness" can be a tricky thing, but for instance, if you show a character playing with a gun in one scene it should probably be fired later on. Not necessarily, but probably. And if you show a character playing with guns in five different scenes but nobody ever shoots one, you're going to need some kind of reason—explicit or not—for either the absence of shots or the presence of guns. Otherwise they can only be either a) distracting or b) a distraction, which is to say an extra-special effect. Guns that won't be fired should generally be left out of dramas because we feel guns are extra-ordinary; buildings, on the other hand, are ordinary, so you can show and even feature any number of buildings in a movie without it seeming strange if the characters never use them. Open wounds are extra-ordinary, and especially so when the nearest medic is four years away since everyone knows you could get a mortal infection from every coral nick. They should be applied sparingly if you're not going to make your movie be about them, and injuries that turn out not to be serious don't matter by definition; they should be left out to make room for the stuff we can't assume.

Surprisingly, human-volleyball relations get the same superficial treatment. With the blood from his gashed palm Chuck makes a stylish face for Wilson and the two become fast friends and seem to have many long discussions—by four-years-later time they're bickering just like an old couple. Chuck and Wilson spend a lot of time together, and, like Hal in 2001, Wilson is the better-looking, so we all get pretty attached to him.

So when Wilson eventually meets his doom—by falling off the raft—and Chuck can't save him, it's understandable, however disordered, for Chuck to have a ululating fit of lamentations. Crazy, yes, but you know what he means; that made-up relationship is really the best part of the movie, being nearly the only thing that does persist from one scene to another. Chuck's brief anguish shows that something has mattered. There's a little bit of an idea there—people need people! No, it's not much, but it's something. But the end of that conniption is the last we ever hear of Wilson—the most important relationship Chuck had for the entire period the show is concerned with, but as soon as he meets his end, pop, he's forgotten.

If they want us to go along with Chuck's attachment to the ball to the extent that we're expected not just to accept but to feel his grief, then due respect needs to be paid to it—not to the ball necessarily, though that is one option, but absolutely to that late attachment and the grief, which is depicted as being as real as any you would feel for a non-imaginary friend. If it doesn't matter enough to return to, why was it there to begin with?

Sweetheart Kelly gets the same treatment once she recurs. When Chuck gets back after his blank four years he learns that she, reasonably enough, has married someone else after all. Naturally their reunion is a big stressor for the both of them, but after a little frantic grappling and mutual hysteria they sensibly agree that she has to stay with her husband and her children. But that's okay, because as quick as you can put your hankie down, in just the scene after next he's going to meet another attractive and interesting woman and everything will be just fine. In the end it's all good for ol' Even Steven.

The reason the things and events in this show don't endure beyond their specific famous scenes is that they can't, because they're the wrong things. Remember your first year algebra and consider factoring: when solving something like 2x + 6y = 8, the first thing you'll do is factor out a two all around and solve the lighter-weight x + 3y = 4 instead; that extra factor of two can be expected from one term to the next, so it contributes nothing to the solution and you can throw it away. What Zemeckis has done is to throw out the variables and keep the factor, so all he has to say is two, two, equals two.

He even has a visual convention—or tic, really—which is intruded repeatedly to emphasize his attraction to the obvious, a sort of pivot-pan. The camera zooms in on Hanks from one side and then swings about 160 degrees around to his other side, so you get to see what's behind him to the left and what's behind him to the right, in case a single angle wasn't going to satisfy you. Practically it's there to give the impression of excitement and motion where there's only torpor and stasis, but it's also the opposite of mise en scène: by swooping past everything around the central figure it declares our lack of interest in all except that obvious figure; call it mise en spin.

All that's obvious in the story gets extreme detail—if someone has been stranded then obviously there was a wreck of some kind, so Zemeckis shows the plane crash in harrowing detail. If the story is about a survivor then someone must have survived, so the escape from the wreck is shown in thrilling detail. It's natural that the eventual reunion with the fiancee will be kind of charged, so that reunion is shown in bodice-ripping detail, and it's only reasonable that she should stay with her husband, so the deciding is covered in weepy detail.

But it's personal and not obvious that Chuck should try to hang himself, so that part is left out; the way for Chuck and Kelly to relate to each other from this point forward is unclear, so that part is left out. All consequences of anything, such as an injury, are contingent, so all those parts are left out too, because those things are too hard, and this movie is about two and two, which both are two. Oh, make it two and a half.

January 17, 2001

A review of a movie, by its nature, can't fail. No matter whom it's by and what it's about the review is going to reveal some true information to you about the experience that a person had when they saw a movie and about the way they saw it. Bad reviews feed you stars and thumbs to which you can apply the Consumer Calculus and determine how good a culture-consumptive experience can be had with the thing, but even they have to be written from a perspective and reveal something of the mind of a person. Because of that any review, good or bad, by any reviewer, good or bad, might lead me to go see a movie that I'd otherwise have skipped just so I can see what it means for a reviewer to have thought that thing.

That's why this is not a movie review: its subject is the Disney product called Bicentennial Man, and I have come to tell you that there is no way to see it—it's perspective-free. The world is full of movies and shows on the TV that are unwatchable but this is my first experience with the Unseeable. Bicentennial Man is a hole two hours long and thirty-five millimeters wide in the space-time continuum, and when I say that PLEASE do NOT get intrigued into going and seeing the stupid thing—you'll be sorry if you do, vaguely. It's not even bad enough to warrant avoiding; just forget you ever saw me here. Two irretrievable hours of my life have been not wasted but anulled. It's as though I had been temporarily dead that afternoon. I couldn't bear it if you died because of something I said. 

Bicentennial Man has some jokes, but no comedy; it's a little sad sometimes but has no drama. Some things change; nothing develops. There isn't a climax. There's a resolution at the end which is not preceded by a crisis that required it. A goal is set and eventually achieved, without opposition. There are no characters who are alive at both the beginning and the end of the movie. For a little while there's a dog. It made the top ten at the box office, but hovers around the bottom. It's PG, but has some slightly inappropriate language and mild depiction of juvenile situations. It features Robin Williams. 

See? All absences and nons! To describe this cinecipher any further I'll have to lamely resort to the use of a prop: Disney's own Pinocchio, to which I was taken when I was maybe six. I hardly remember it at all; if I did, the comparisons I'm about to draw would probably strike me as forced. You know how Pinocchio goes—lonely old toymaker Geppetto wants a son, so the Good Fairy comes and brings the puppet Pinocchio to life for him. Geppetto is very happy and Pinocchio runs off—he wants to be a Real Boy and gets the idea he should get some real-world experience. He first experiences a bad crowd and then experiences being swallowed by a whale, inside which he meets up with Geppetto again. They exit the whale and go home together, whereupon the Good Fairy comes back and changes the experienced puppet from animated wood into Real Boy material. 

Well that all makes sense. If you want something you have to earn it; your first impulse may not be the best decision; always listen to the cricket; never trust a Bohemian; mind the whales, but perhaps your Dad's in there; having worked for something you want, you'll get it. It's not how I understand things but it is a sort of internally consistent view of the world and many people have the idea it's good for their kids to hear this stuff without cease.
The story of Bicentennial Manis similar, only simplified: no whales, no bad crowds, and no experience. An extremely wealthy family wants an au pair, so they buy a robot. They're very happy with it and it stays with them for years and years until the kids are grown, whereupon it journeys out into the world to find others like itself. Years pass. It doesn't find any. More years pass. It still doesn't find any. There are no others like it. It comes home. Years pass. It builds itself a Real Boy body and asks Congress to declare it a human, but Congress won't. Years pass. It asks the World Council to declare it a human, and they do. It dies.

Hm. If you want something you have to ask the Government for it; local authorities may be reactionary so always go to the Feds, who are more likely to give you what you want even if it is too late. You'd never do anything wrong so just follow your heart. Nobody's going to hurt you. You were adopted AND you were an accident. 

Now...I mean...I'm as Disney-phobic as the next guy, but Pinocchio I can take—its sweetness-and-light, Davey and Goliath-brand morality strikes me as considerably more salubrious than whatever this is going on here. That old-Disney model may be oversimplified, paternalistic, disingenuous and a good set-up for teen-age disillusionment, but it also has some integrity, isn't completely incorrect and is well-intentioned. Bicentennial Man's "message" doesn't even make SENSE—it isn't intentioned AT ALL; no claim is made; nobody's opinion is presented. It's the message you get if you grab a fistful of Hallmark cards from the "Thinking of You" bin, shuffle them and deal a hand: Congratulations on your promotion, get well soon and Happy Thanksgiving! We've moved! You're my favorite Grandmother, and I'm sorry your dog died. The movie actually feels a lot like that and maybe this is exactly why—it's Deal a Feel. They started the Production Machine running and all went off to the wrap party, and the intern who was supposed to keep an eye on it broke his sunglasses and had to go home.

Touchstone will tell you Bicentennial Man is about "reflections on what it means to be human," only they forgot to put anything in it that says either what "human" might be or what it might mean to be that (or not)—just so much reflecting. When it does finally consider tackling this theme what it comes up with is precisely the non-answer: what the robot seeks is to be declared a human. Is it a human? No. Can it be one? No. Not any way at all? Not any way at all—it's a robot, and even if it's just like a human it's still a robot. But Good Attitude wins the day and eventually that World Council agrees to give up the outmoded idea of "definition" and say that the robot is a human.

Now in the movie's own terms, to the extent that it risks having any, the robot is rilly an' trooly "human" and I don't have any problem with that. Trouble is, that's the wrong question for the issue—what they mean to be asking is, is the robot a person. We're humans; robots are not. When the saucer men come to live among us to such an extent that there get to be legal issues about it they'll have to be declared persons—individuals bearing rights and responsibilities—but can't be declared humans—homo sapiens. Today's Disney can't be bothered with paying enough attention to what they're saying to get ONE WORD RIGHT. In the movie the fleshist white congressman even specifically raises the exact points that mean the robot is not a human: it doesn't come from our genepool, has no relatives living or dead, and however humanlike its mind seems it has developed by other means than how ours do. But the Robbie-hugging, distinction-eschewing World Council, represented of course by a wise old black woman, isn't worried about that reality and generously disregards it in favor of a momentous fiction. The apparent suggestion is that we could've handled that tedious civil rights business a lot more simply if instead of trying to say that we all get the same rights regardless of pigmentation—getting into all sorts of difficulties with that complicated "same" and "regardless" stuff—we had simply declared that from now on all black people are white. I guess we still could. Write your congressman.

The last few years have seen a lot of movies of a creepy "Reality Isn't Real" genre— The Matrix, The Truman Show, and Pleasantville have been the biggest and plainest; their common claim is that the world that bugs you is a trick and you just have to riddle your way out of it. Bicentennial Man achieves a new irreality by covering a span of two hundred years during which no events in the world have any influence on you: reality may or may not be real but mainly it's irrelevant. What's certain is that you for sure aren't real and any fairy that says you are is lying. Wish upon that star.

February 2, 2000

Early this summer movie enthusiasts of my acquaintance spent some weeks in amicable dispute over the relative merits of Armageddon and Deep Impact. I lost track of how the tallies went; I don't think it got to the point where folks were taking sides championing one against the other--mainly the discussion remained a level-headed consideration of the particular strengths leading to the respective successes. I think Deep Impact was felt to have better character development, while Armageddon was gifted with superior special effects, particularly the exceedingly loud soundtrack, which was found to help you get into the story more. The camera work was better in Deep Impact, but Armageddon's comedy was deft. Nobody liked Bruce Willis. I couldn't participate.

It's not that I think the enthusiasts are wrong and that I want to be polite about the difference of opinion--that sort of difficulty is trivial, requiring nothing more than a cooperative spirit and a little friendly dissimulation. The trouble here is that the propositions offered, even the whole topic, perfectly fail to correspond to anything in my mental landscape. If you were to ask me I'd say that there is no comedy without wit; that special effects obviate camera work; that you can have Bruce Willis in a movie or you can have characters, not both. Most of all, a thing isn't a movie (or a tale, lie, anecdote or action) unless it was created and realized with semantic intention--this is really no more than the scientific requirement that a hypothesis be falsifiable. If I approach you with a story to tell it must be for one of two reasons: Either I want to tell you a story or I want to do something else, like distract you while my beautiful assistant here picks your pocket (thank you, Mavis). If my telling comes from the latter motive then I'm not really telling you a story, am I? What I'm after in that case is not to share some ideas with you which mean something to me, but to deliver a pattern of sounds which will elicit from you the behavior I desire; the content of the latter can be anything at all that doesn't interfere with the effect. 

So in terms of believed information conveyed these apparent movies are existentially not there at all. The disjointed little bits of intentional muscle the things possibly could contain are richly smothered by the disjointed bits of ulterior fat; without the semantic intent no choice was involved in their assembly, and the seeming activity of filmmaking was thus without effect. What was displayed in theaters near you was not movies but certain side-effects of a large-scale fleecing project. From the get-go, therefore, there's nothing here to talk about. Nobody meant for there to be any characters, so there can be no development; nobody cared about doing anything funny--they simply wanted ticket purchasers to laugh. (Do note that there is such a thing as accidental art, an important category in which the merit of a piece can far surpass its original conception. For a work to develop this characteristic, however, requires a secondary reception, substantially removed in time or context from its original point of emergence; here I'm only concerned with primary receptions.) 

Of course this is just my view. Not opinion, mind you, because the principles of judgment I've cited are structural parts of my world-apprehending apparatus and operate automatically and prior to the emotional investment that gives one an opinion; they are among my mental rods and cones. If in some other system than mine there is any appreciable merit to these movies, the kind that gives you leverage to pry open a piece of the world and understand it, then I am no more able to detect that than I am the ultraviolet wavelengths that stimulate a honeybee's eye. And as no amount of argument can induce me to see ultraviolet reflections, neither will any amount of jollying cause me to have any concern for these pictures but to avoid them. Not, God forbid, that every picture you go to should make you into some kind of a Better Person, or that we should never come out of a theater without having Learned Something. Actually after a really good movie you might find you know less than you did before. What's to be avoided are those emissions that putty over the wrinkles in your cerebral cortex and clog your spiritual arteries with individually-wrapped slices of processed American cheese-food morality. 

Which is not to say you can't find nice things there if you are under the impression that you can. Many moviegoers can see patterns in those carcinogenic frequencies, and logically enough are not apt to understand how these features--a bracing thrill-ride; reminders of the importance of teamwork and, conversely, individualism; good value for your entertainment dollar--could be missed; in fact they'll be disinclined to believe it possible. You must be duller than expected, or lying, or most likely just being difficult with your tired old intellectual-elitist disdain for anything that's not Great Literature, and go on back to Berkeley why doncha. 

Or feelings to that effect. But honestly--it's not like that. Not on good days it isn't. Thing is, you may lead me to grope blindly at your ultraviolet action-adventure elephant but all I'll be able to detect is a long tube with a powerful vacuum on one end. "What is this thing?" I'll say, "It sucks. Certainly it's not an animal, like what you'd see in a movie." And then I for my part will be perfectly unable to imagine how you could not perceive that Skidoo enhances your ability to make sense of the world while Chasing Amy tends to gum up that faculty (or destroy it outright), or that the world is a better place because of Heavenly Creatures but every soul has lost something that was exposed to City of Angels. How can you not see THAT? Can you not see me sitting here before you? It's obvious. 

This is not at all the same thing as there being no accounting for taste. There isn't, but taste is why of Preston Sturges's movies I prefer Miracle of Morgan's Creek to Sullivan's Travels, and why my enthusiast friends have a preference for either of two earth vs. the asteroids movies. I also like kale, pork rinds, and stylish beers from the Northwest. This is unaccountable--but discussible. I can tell you I like Morgan's Creek better than Sullivan's Travels because the one is daft where the other is preachy, and you may tell me I've got it backwards or that preachy is actually better. Whatever you unaccountably think, we will already be in agreement on the nature of the objects under discussion; this may not be the case should we begin arguing the merits of Nutrasweet, which you think is not as good an artificial sweetener as saccharine while I think it's a plot more devious than fluoridation. You have a taste for certain sweeteners and I have a taste for industrial biochemical conspiracy; you think me mad and I find you hopelessly naïve; and these tastes of ours are mutually irrelevant and inaccessible. 

There are as many Nutrasweets as there are packets in the world; each of us must find the right one and use as directed. Same goes for everything else. If art doesn't have the same position in your affairs as in mine then the same values can't be applied to works of it, let alone the same valuations. Twice I tried to read Tama Janowitz's A Cannibal in Manhattan, a popular book; twice I flung it across the room around page 40. It wasn't that I thought it was so bad--the thing just pissed me off because it was odious. It doesn't make sense to everybody that fiction might make one angry, because not everybody believes that creative work is an habitation of truth and morality. If you don't then probably what you find there is merely greater or lesser entertainment--if a category means little to you, you are free simply to like or disregard its representatives. Your thing might be urban planning, and how I can get so worked up about a novel just goes to show what sort of nonsense people will get all excited about when they don't have the wit to really appreciate a good zoning plan.

It comes down to what is essentially a religious question. If I am approached in good faith by a religious acquaintance who enthuses to me "Isn't it great how the bread becomes the Body of Christ and helps us towards salvation?" there is no response I can offer that will be simultaneously honest, relevant, and sociable. "Yes, it's great"; "You must be nuts"; "I worship Moloch": None of these will get us anywhere, substantively or socially. To say either yes or no is a lie, since none of the events and entities described exist in my universe--least of all the "us"--so I can't validly affirm or deny them, or assess their greatness with any certainty. They don't exist to me even as the misinterpretation of something I do believe in. On the other hand any attempted demurer I offer must be a rejection--to say "I'm Jewish," or "As a Lutheran I don't believe that that happens," or at worst, "I'm an atheist," point blank refuses the community bond they were honestly offering despite any amount of friendliness I may feel towards them. Certainly they erred in assuming the universality of their creed, but that's exactly the error that does happen, and most especially when a person feels well-disposed towards you. The true answer is "It happens that though I appreciate your faith I'm not religious and can't engage in this discourse; we'll perhaps have better luck with another." Unfortunately the fact that they overuniversally included me (which after all is neighborly) is demonstrative of an underdeveloped facility for anticipating and dealing with other cognitive worlds than their own, and they may not have a way to navigate the disjunction they've just encountered. Those subscribing to the most popular cosmologies will naturally encounter less popular models much less often than alternativists will run into counter-worlds, so it's to be expected that believers in popular concepts like major religions or special effects will nearly always assume your co-enthusiasm. It's not that they're innately hostile to differences of opinion, but when all of a sudden you appear in your guise as the Other they're liable to seize up and not know how to proceed. This will anger some of them; others will get sullen about how you think you're so great; many will be initially baffled but then amused at your quaint and ridiculous ideas, and will joke with you about them for the rest of your life.

As with religion, so also with Star Wars, which according to your own rods and cones is probably either a) a monument of American cinema and the essence of the best our good-guys-win-seriocomic-heroic-cowboy national nature has to offer or b) a juggernaut of American cinema and the stuff false consciousnesses are made of--and note that whichever precept you entertain or entertains you will only be strengthened by last years's rerelease of the thing. Again, these are not matters of varying opinion but of varying truth. If you and I are both Star Wars enthusiasts we may differ in our opinions about it and you might be able, despite my initial resistance, to convince me that actually the Death Star should have been a cube (and please note that no matter who you are you know that it was not one; this itself is part of the problem--but that's for another time), as that would've been more emblematic of thusandsuch. Whether you succeed or not, we will likely both enjoy the disputation as beer follows beer. But if we get our truths from different places, one of us being a Star Wars enthusiast and the other a Star Wars revulsionist, we have the very different and remarkable situation that anything either of us says about the movie will depress the other and lead us both to no other conclusion than "Truly, this here is one sorry jackass." The beer will be as ashes in our mouths, and we will have no more than two. Conversions are possible but very rare, and are necessarily more epiphanic than concensual: You'll never get as substantial a conversion by use of arguments as will be achieved by an internal revelation like "Wait a minute--Yoda is a MUPPET!" 

The generally unnoticed thing is, this gap is far greater in kind and magnitude even than that between a Socialist and a Republocrat; these at least will concur on the objects under consideration, the meaning of "goal," and the fact that their strategies conflict. But if one person watching a movie sees a collection of characters engaged in an interplay of competing interests which achieves the goal of entertainment where the other sees a pastiche of unsupported fols de rol which accomplish the accident of diseducation, contaminating the minds of the young and reinforcing the folly of the previously contaminated, where will the common ground be upon which this hash can be settled? 

There is none. But more than the difference itself, it's the failure to note the nature of the difference that leads to mischief and shattered careers. If your boss or someone you hope to take home tonight says to you "Hey--I just got the video of the new Star Wars release for my birthday! Is that great or what?" the closest thing you've got to a corresponding opinion may be the Hatebath maneuver: "The only reason you like that movie is that you had the sheets and pillowcases when you were twelve." And factually you might be exactly right, but if you express this truth you have failed in two ways: Conversationally you have mistakenly addressed a topic which only appears to be the one they led with, and pragmatically you will soon be fired, or go home alone yet again. 

And yet by convention some response is required. Some response is required. I've been after this grail for some time now and must confess myself as much at a loss for useful gambits as ever. What I have got though is a little stratagem that may at least keep such situations from spiraling out of control. First, borrowing from Soviet military tactics, you must determine what category of situation it is that you find yourself in. This information may be found in the nature of your immediate reaction. Given the opportunity to help someone watch their Star Wars commemorative release video, if what you're about to say next is "I think it's terrible how they mucked it all up with the new footage," well and good. What you are experiencing is merely a difference of taste and you may feel free to have it out in whatever manner best suits your personal lifestyle choices. Enjoy the show. If, however, you're about to say "What are you, some kind of idiot??" you should judge that you have encountered a denominational conflict and must proceed with caution. It is a borderline case if what occurs to you is a snappy comeback of some kind; in this event you'll have to evaluate your proposed retort. If it's snappier and more delicious than your average you should probably disengage--note that between the honest poles of uncritical enthusiast and overwrought acolyte lies the insupportable position of the asshole, arch and knowing: movie-school graduates, MFAs, twenty-three-year-olds and other paraphiles, delicate bullies who will scoff even in your face if the piece that pleases you is on their Pope's list of the "sub-moronic." Asked what they do like they'll strain themselves to produce only examples you can be expected not to have heard of, and to muddy what little clarity you've got. Like the dissimulators who emit footage or pages because it suits their other purpose, the knowledge of the knowers is not for sharing but for wielding: They don't care to know, they want only that you should not. They are disingenuous; don't speak to them. We concern ourselves only with the incompatible honesties of simple enjoyment or principled ardor.

If it does seem that caution is called for, then your next move should be to create a diversion. "Look over there!" may be just fine but probably won't work more than once per interlocutor. One that may be more reliable as well as reusable is, for example, "Well it sounds like you sure enjoyed it!" Or didn't, as the case may be; it doesn't matter how they feel so long as you can get their own wool pulled back over their eyes. The urgent goal at this point is to remove yourself and your views from the field of consideration; replacing yourself with your amiable opponent and encouraging them to talk about their own incorrect analysis will win you extra friendliness points, which may be strategically useful--though tactically the purpose will be as well served by developing a sudden nosebleed (which of course in some of these situations may be exactly what happens). 

After this you're on your own. I, at this point, am most likely to smile blankly for a while and as long as they keep talking there usually isn't a problem; you can probably do better than that. At any rate what follows should be no worse than any other cocktail party and probably nothing bad will happen. If you're up to it you might try the merest sublethal bit of evangelizing of your own principles, but strictly offhand, and with no evident end in mind. Most important to remember is that whatever your point may be in this discussion, it cannot be made.

This article originally appeared in Hermenaut 14, 1998.

We don't expect much from the Action/Adventure aisle.

It's not that violence precludes sense—even a pretty splattery horror movie can be more good or less and give you something to think about or not. I think the limiting factor is that while a horror movie can, but needn't, be about various dreadful ways to die, the kind of Action/Adventure picture which was invented and apparently perfected in the Eighties pretty much does have to be about jumping and shooting and yelling, and any political/criminal/romantical pretext can do no more than give the jumping shooters something to yell about. The motivation for multiple gruesome murders can itself be Horrible but all the necessary details of a political situation can only detract from Action, so the less said about it the better. Action/Adventure is the perfect genre for us these days because it must always and only be about means, never about goals or reasons.

So given that it's an empty form in the first place it would be senseless to criticize a picture like John Frankenheimer's Reindeer Games for its violations of sense or physics—you may as well say it doesn't have enough dance numbers. Nevertheless, you can still say that even an Action/Adventure picture goes too far in its pursuit of senselessness when it goes to work erasing the distinction between possible and impossible, happened and didn't, sense and nonsense. 

The distinction eraser most favored by those responsible for Reindeer Games is the plot twist, a device movie fabricators have gotten so enthusiastic about and made so generic that lately it's disorienting to see a movie with a plot that only goes in one direction. The natural habitat of the plot twist is the screwball comedy, where it serves the necessary purpose of letting the characters smack their foreheads periodically and say "Holy Moses!" It has a long history of appearing in other sorts of stories too, such as the thriller, but in those genres it's traditionally been used more sparingly than nowadays—partly from a sense of taste and restraint which no longer exists and also because in these cases it's usually there to introduce a significant new element or premise, which is something you can't do every ten minutes: in The Third Man Harry Lime isn't dead; in Vertigo Kim Novak is both those girls.

The current plague of twists has probably fallen upon us because for the past fifteen or twenty years movie makers like the Coen brothers have been twisting up everything they've put their hands to. This coincides with the invention of the modern Action/Adventure picture, and so after the straight-line possibilities natural to that genre had been (quickly) exhausted it probably seemed like a good idea to complexify the things by liberal use of the twist as a special effect. One good twist deserves another and now we find ourselves at Reindeer Games, where in a topological anomaly the plot is composed entirely of its own twists. That turns out not to be nearly as interesting as it sounds.

It goes like this: The guy (Ben Affleck) pretends to be his dead cellmate so he can hook up with the girl (Charlize Theron). Her brother (Gary Sinise) shows up and wants Dead Cellmate to guide the gang through the big heist. The Affleck guy tries to reveal his real identity to no avail, and so pretends to help them instead. Oh, but actually the girl's seeming brother is her boyfriend and they were setting up the dead cellmate together; the Affleck guy pretends not to have discovered this. Many bullets pass; the loot is stolen in such a way that all secondary characters die. Oh, but actually the girl is the dead cellmate's girlfriend and he isn't dead and they were setting up the brother boyfriend, so everyone left except for the Affleck guy is killed somehow and he makes it home in time for Christmas dinner with his family. 

Got it? It doesn't matter. The practical effect of this cavalcade of big switcheroonies is that by the time the last one or two are revealed the reaction you're bound to have is, "Yeah? So what?" The movie has gone through several iterations of lying to you about the state of affairs it's supposed to be representing, for no reason at all except to see the surprised look on your face when it tells you what the REAL real truth is.

The movie throws another major dissignificance before you even get to the theater by the strange trick of having an incorrect title. The use of a phrase like "Reindeer Games" as a movie's title is what in the cultural containment business we call a "reference." The point of making a reference is to suggest that some kind of analogy exists between the phrase or image you've borrowed and the thing to which you've attached it. The movie Reindeer Games doesn't have an analogous or any other relationship to the happy song from which it takes its name: "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is about McCarthyite-type blacklisting and the triumph of the individual over conventional mores; Reindeer Games has a bunch of movie characters screwing each other over just because they're all movie characters. Using the phrase from the song as the title for no reason this way decouples the phrase from its culturally agreed-upon meaning—which in the case of this particular phrase is the only meaning it can have—and substitutes nothing for it. This anti-use of the phrase gets worked into the dialogue about halfway through when Sinise, warning Affleck not to try and pull any fast ones, says "Don't be playing no reindeer games with me!" What—don't have me participate in any recreations from which we're going to exclude someone else? Or did the song mean that Rudolph was never permitted to con the other reindeer?

Finally, it may just be me but I also picked up some significant if less essential desensifications issuing from the cast. Gary Sinise, for example, never unfurrows his brow the whole time—it was as though the whole confabulation were actually a weird dream he was having and he couldn't understand why he had to be so mean. The soft-serv prettiness of Charlize Theron neither confirmed nor denied the feelings or motives of any of her character's three mutually exclusive manifestations. Her last shot—spread-eagled across the flaming hood of a car going over a cliff—doesn't seem like any sort of hard-earned comeuppance; just one more crazy gig that she'll lie her way out of before she hits the bottom. Weirdest was the softer-serv prettiness of Ben Affleck: even if he had only known two facial expressions before he went to prison I'll bet he'd have learned a couple more while he was in there. What really caught me off-guard though was an early scene where Sinise has Affleck on his knees with a gun to his head and is telling him, "Nick, you'd better help us pull this heist or we'll kill you," and Affleck's all, "But I'm Rudy and I can't help you," but Sinise insists, "Well okay Nick, but if you don't help us we're going to kill you." So I, identifying with the protagonist as you're supposed to, was thinking "Jeez—you guys are just nuts. You're being TOTALLY unreasonable AND I can't help you. This is too much trouble. Go ahead and kill me. Shoot me! Shoot me now!" So I was sort of surprised when instead of sensibly giving up this way he chooses a rather tedious path of deception. Affleck doesn't just fail to make me believe in him as some kind of felon—he doesn't even make me believe that he might want to keep living. 

Reindeer Games overflows with things it isn't saying. It never says it's not worth it to keep living—it just makes you feel sleepy and annoyed that you might have to. It never says words and their meanings are slippery and changeable—it just doesn't think to use them to mean anything. It doesn't even say that history exists to be rewritten by those in power—it simply forgets at each instant that anything ever did happen before now, and it would be surprised if you tried to remember. What's to remember? What's to mean? Jump! Shoot! Yell! After a while everything will segue into the Christmas dinner you've been fantasizing about all along. 

April 12, 2000