This begins a multi-part series on magic and movies. Does magic really exist? If so, what is its definition and who are its practitioners?
The digital reproduction above comes close to being, itself, a kind of magic spell by depicting the famous encounter between Circe the sorceress and Ulysses, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey. The painter’s treatment of his subject is an example of the kind of visual tour de force that storytelling artists were able to draw on and enchant motion picture audiences with as soon as they were invented.
This type of painting makes use of our imaginations the same way as movies do, which is to prompt us to fill in essential information that is left out of view. In order to help his audience fill in the missing story with strictly visual cues, a pictorial storyteller must exercise complete control over the frame. The same goes with a magic spell or enchantment.
Whether attempted by a painter, filmmaker, magician or any other artist, a well-performed trick keeps our reasoning brain busy while it plays with our subconscious. Film appears to defy nature’s laws by shaping the action at 24 frames per second. Magicians can swap sets and props to string together a series of illusory events. Painters have only a single canvas with which to cast their spell, but we can study it for as long as we wish.
The convenience of being able to freeze the action in painting will give me an opportunity to read into every detail of Waterhouse’s interpretation of Homer and see if we can dodge Circe’s trap.
To be effective a spell or enchantment must be worked out in intricate detail. In “Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses,” we see a gorgeous woman garbed in silvery gauze, seated on some kind of throne. Sunlight accentuates her left breast–a rosy nipple peeks out over the sharply slanted whisper of her gown. On a totemic footstool, her naked toes bathe in the sunbeam with her breast. On the floor to her left is an intoxicated swine–one of Ulysses companions that drank from Circe’s cup. A wary Ulysses, which you will detect in the circular glass that comprises Circe’s backrest, stands before the sorceress. He appears behind her in the mirror, like he is bowing to her breast.
Her face tilts back in a wily, come-hither gaze while she raises the potion in her right hand and steadies a long wand over her head with her left. Gold-cupped incense fumes waft up from lower right toward the raised-cup in the upper left. Her forty-five degree neckline ups this rapport. The painter invites us to notice how these details combine to stupefy Circe’s subject with multi-sensual assault.
Supported on the backs of roaring lions, each with a serpent coiled around its neck, the painter poises the sorceress, literally, between the man and his reflection. She reigns there on her altar, capturing his eye, her ready cup and rod held high. Classic columns fill in the glass, interspersed with shards of Aegean sky.
Circe’s leonine throne recalls the wild cats Ulysses encountered outside, wandering her domain. They were strangely tame and approachable, having been drugged by this demonic dame. So the painter manages to articulate the essential mark of a good magician, who begins weaving his or her spell even before the audience has entered the dark. Let us not overlook the profusion of purple flowers tumbled down from the diabolic shadows. No doubt this is the wicked herb. It looks so fragrant and appealing.
I have left out, until now, the erotic charge of the image. It portrays a naked woman most desirably and represents a clear case of high-class smut. Sexually stimulating paintings, for the past 500 years, have been socially accepted in the west. Why? Their ability to arouse and enchant is highly prized. If you wore the fashions of The Guilded Age, long before porn went pop, this picture could put you in touch with your passion, provoking potent and inspired thoughts.
Even today, if your imagination is given to flights, you might readily put yourself in this scene with a keen thirst for her drink and the aftertaste of regret. For it is quite intentionally the same moment when you will be close enough to appraise her exquisite skin, navel, knees, hips. Voila! Are we swine yet?
The circular censor and tiled rings repeat the cup and mirror in shape and theme. Graduating circles emblemize the enclenching cinch of Circe’s ingenious scheme. Notice too the stoop that raises her above the rabble has a radial indent, to impress upon us one more way that we are ensnared already by her intent.
Now she may be imposing her illusion on you and me, but Ulysses was warned about Circe’s treachery. He has drugged himself to resist her with the Holy Moly. Holy Moly! To this day, when we see something unexplainable, those two words are sometimes exclaimed. It stems from ancient superstition, invoking the antidote with which Ulysses foiled Circe’s aims.
With that in mind, there is a peculiar detail in the upper right corner–a very important feature of the painting–that slice of light above the sorceress’s left hand. Why that shape in that position? It appears most distractingly strong up there in the darkest zone of the composition and makes her hand look deformed, projecting from it like a dagger or a talon.
Why did the artist paint that? Why there? What are we looking at? He fails to completely conceal some background behind a large curtain or tapestry which subtly dilutes the illusion of Circe’s magic trap.
We can escape the fate of Ulysses friends, through this brilliant detail, in which the set is left slightly open for us to see, so that we don’t fall victim to Circe’s spell. Ulysses sees through her deception and anyone who finds this antidote in the painting can too and avoid becoming plump, languid and jowly with a snout and a squiggly tale. That little up thrust dagger of light becomes our counter-spell.
Needless to say, this is superb pictorial storytelling. It took more than 800 words for me to briefly make plain the narrative evident in one single pass over Waterhouse’s exquisite frame. We will have to leave it now in order to take Homer’s allegory to it’s logical extreme, but we’ll take it up again in a subseqeunt part of this series in which we introduce the first magician of motion pictures, Georges Jean Méliés.
To conclude the tale, when Ulysses leans over to sip the potion, Circe taps him with her wand and is shocked when he does not go porcine. Since he can resist Circe, her yearning for Ulysses grows. Swine are turned back into soldiers. Circe now moves to Ulysses’ tune. His men stay on her island with him for a year, eating, drinking, and nursing their wounds.
By the end of the stay they are such good friends Circe sends her lover to seek council from the ghost of the prophet Teirisias in the underworld. She wants Ulysses to avoid certain pitfalls that await him on his way home.
When I recalled this episode of the Odyssey and decided to explore it as an allegory for connecting motion pictures to magic acts, I had forgotten about the Holy Moly. It ends up providing the perfect metaphor for how movies themselves are the antidote to the many spells of our modern day.
Nyat Nyat and Boo Hoo. Let us name those iconic twins. He is groaning, she is giggling–flip sides of the same clam. If comedy’s mutable, tragedy’s irrefutable. One forecasts fickle fates. The other portends bitter ends–an artificial beginning vs. an artificial end. It’s not just about the gag, but which way it jabs. Tragedy’s not about death, but the agony of defeat. Storytellers manipulate comedy and tragedy to perform an ongoing autopsy on culture. We talk about comedy and tragedy as different things, but “truth” is the subject, a singular reality that we pry apart for clues.
If I am late on this post, it is because of the philosophical essay “Laughter: On the Meaning of the Comic,” by Henri Bergson. Until I read Bergson’s essay, I was content with a lame explanation that comedy achieves itself through surprise. Now that seems very broad and obvious, not to mention imprecise. Bergson defines comedy as a perceived encroachment of anything inhuman or mechanical imposed on the human. This sounded not very funny to me when I first heard it, but what I think the philosopher means to say is comedy plays against our common sense.
According to the essayist, any mechanization of man’s words, thoughts, behaviors or appearance is humorous to us. To give some straightforward examples, consider how stuttering, repetition, nervous ticks, outlandish looks, rigidly staged rituals or excessively flamboyant flexibility all become instant capital for the comic. It is Bergson’s keenest notion that laughter is a form of social correction. We laugh to expose and straighten-out the out of step.
Preoccupation is another thing we laugh at. Automatic Man provides endless amusement. All we need is to see some day-dreamer stub his toe and we go bug eyed, become something of a machine ourselves, a bellows, gasping and snorting, far funnier to look at than the fool himself. He’s jumping up and down holding his foot. We’re doubled-over shitting bricks.
It is remarkable how laughter is so instantly conspiratorial and connection building. A good laugh flourishes like rhubarb, communes with infectious ease, leaves behind a pleasing after breeze. We owe much to comedy for delivering us from tragedy.
At the same time, good jokes can be funny as well as tragic. I’ll give it a try.
Compared to losing my Mother, my left macula was nothing. It did not love me unconditionally.
Do you ever have to beat back a grin when a friend confides some personal pain they’re in? Bergson says we are not evil. It’s nothing personal. We trip back into a psychic stronghold to preserve ourselves from harm. If we feel like laughing at another’s bad luck, maybe it is so we can forget our own for an instant.
So, the impulse to laugh is a part of our survival brain. Our ancestors cried for a few hundred millennia before they ever uttered actual words, and they laughed too, for much longer, to express what the spoken word has recently been trying. In fact, language is the direct descendant of laughing and crying.
Laughter urges everyone to remain optimistic about the outcome. It is our nature to hold out for a happy ending. If there was a verbal analog to the bodily spasms and convulsions of laughter, it might sound something like, “there then, let that teach’em a lesson.”
If laughter is corrective then tears are instructive. Depressing movies serve up misfortunes considerably harder than our own to digest and dark dramas puts us in touch with all the common character defects. Whether issuing from the real world or the movie reel, common misery confirms our fellowship in the human race. Tears shed by us, under the influence of movies, are no less genuine for having been provoked by fantasy. Sad endings are, no doubt, as popular as they are as a direct result.
Most of us have sought out hundreds of movies and continue to keep watching more, comparing different examples to remind ourselves that what is immensely sad is often profoundly life affirming. Perhaps this has to do with an artificial ending. Since reality is open ended, everything could still turn out for the better in our lives. No matter how bad our misfortunes may appear now, surely the credits will roll soon and the lights will come up.
If we pry further, with Bergson’s help, we may discover that tension and release are the fundamental energies that constitute comedy. Odd or not, it would seem the same with tragedy. Aren’t we talking about catharsis here? Would it follow that there is a little bit of tragedy in comedy and vice-versa? We applaud the movie maker who pilots us back and forth, from one shore to the other, in a single story. With close-ups, long shots, speed changes, mechanical effects and juxtaposition, comedy and tragedy help us embrace life’s most perplexing ambiguities.
Federico Fellini who directed some of the funniest, saddest and most perplexing movies of all time, once wrote, “nothing is sadder than laughter, nothing more beautiful, more magnificent, more uplifting and enriching than the terror of deep despair. I believe that every man, as long as he lives, is a prisoner of this terrible fear within which all prosperity is condemned to founder but which preserves, even in its deepest abyss, that hopeful freedom which makes it possible for him to smile in seemingly hopeless situations.”
In a particularly choice scene from his movie “Fellini’s Roma,”a blustery working class Italian chows down in the piazza with family and friends. He whistles and teases his pouting wife to come downstairs and join the party. One look at him tells me he’s probably given her a good reason to be pissed off. When she arrives beside him at the table he greets her by holding a plump, ripe olive up to her lips. She opens her mouth to receive it. At the last minute he replaces the olive with his thumb.
Fellini’s deceptively simple bit of staging illustrates how comedy and tragedy are integrally entwined. We can’t stop ourselves before we have to burst out laughing. At the same time we hate him, like she does, for his petty, idiotic power play, for taking advantage of her good nature and for god knows what else. “You silly stupid shit,” he says. “You’re the stupid shit,” she replies. “You’re both stupid shits,” says the little sister. Everyone laughs. It may be more funny to us, or more tragic, depending on the mood we’re in that day and how we perceive the consequences.
While we laugh, or shed tears, our native intelligence identifies the consequences which comprise an opportunity for reform. With one single outburst, mad or merry, we identify the perceived errant individual’s failings and avoid them ourselves. “He is so full of himself, I can hardly wait until he gets what’s coming to him.” “Is she really going to stay with him? “She’ll make herself miserable.”
We thank and congratulate Maestro Fellini for this masterstroke of comedy. If only we had more storytellers like him. He had the commitment to make certain we emerge from his fantasies smarter and more sensitized to reality.
Merry Christmas everyone. Happy New Year and thank you for your business!
Nyat Nyat and Boo Hoo. Let us name those iconic twins. He is groaning, she is giggling–flip sides of the same clam. If comedy’s mutable, tragedy’s irrefutable. One forecasts fickle fates. The other portends bitter ends–an artificial beginning vs. an artificial end. It’s not just about the gag, but which way it jabs. Tragedy’s not about death, but the agony of defeat. Storytellers manipulate comedy and tragedy to perform an ongoing autopsy on culture. We talk about comedy and tragedy as different things, but “truth” is the subject, a singular reality that we pry apart for clues.
If I am late on this post, it is because of the philosophical essay “Laughter: On the Meaning of the Comic,” by Henri Bergson. Until I read Bergson’s essay, I was content with a lame explanation that comedy achieves itself through surprise. Now that seems very broad and obvious, not to mention imprecise. Bergson defines comedy as a perceived encroachment of anything inhuman or mechanical imposed on the human. This sounded not very funny to me when I first heard it, but what I think the philosopher means to say is comedy plays against our common sense.
According to the essayist, any mechanization of man’s words, thoughts, behaviors or appearance is humorous to us. To give some straightforward examples, consider how stuttering, repetition, nervous ticks, outlandish looks, rigidly staged rituals or excessively flamboyant flexibility all become instant capital for the comic. It is Bergson’s keenest notion that laughter is a form of social correction. We laugh to expose and straighten-out the out of step.
Preoccupation is another thing we laugh at. Automatic Man provides endless amusement. All we need is to see some day-dreamer stub his toe and we go bug eyed, become something of a machine ourselves, a bellows, gasping and snorting, far funnier to look at than the fool himself. He’s jumping up and down holding his foot. We’re doubled-over shitting bricks.
It is remarkable how laughter is so instantly conspiratorial and connection building. A good laugh flourishes like rhubarb, communes with infectious ease, leaves behind a pleasing after breeze. We owe much to comedy for delivering us from tragedy.
At the same time, good jokes can be funny as well as tragic. I’ll give it a try.
Compared to losing my Mother, my left macula was nothing. It did not love me unconditionally.
Do you ever have to beat back a grin when someone in personal pain confides? Bergson says we are not evil. It’s nothing personal. We trip back into a psychic stronghold to preserve ourselves from harm. If we feel like laughing at another’s bad luck, maybe it is so we can forget our own for an instant.
So, the impulse to laugh is a part of our survival brain. Our ancestors cried for a few hundred millennia before we ever uttered actual words, and they laughted too, for much longer than the spoken word has even existed. In fact, language is the direct descendant of laughing and crying.
Laughter urges everyone to remain optimistic about the outcome. It is our nature to hold out for a happy ending. If there was a verbal analog to the bodily spasms and convulsions of laughter, it might sound something like, “there, that ought to teach’em a good lesson.”
If laughter is corrective then tears are instructive. Depressing movies reminds us of tragedies that would be considerably harder to digest than those that confront us personally. Dark drama puts us in touch with all the common character defects. Whether issuing from the real world or the movie reel, misery confirms our fellowship in the human race. Sad endings are no doubt as popular as they are as a result of this reassurance. Laughter and tears shed by us, under the influence of movies, are no less genuine for having been provoked by fantasy.
Most of us have sought out hundreds of movies and continue to keep watching more, comparing different examples to remind us that what is immensely sad is often profoundly life affirming as well. Perhaps this has to do with an artificial ending. Since reality is open ended, everything could still turn out for the better in our lives. No matter how bad our misfortunes may appear now, surely the credits will roll soon and the lights will come up.
If we pry further, with Bergson’s help, we may discover that tension and release are the fundamental energies that constitute comedy. Odd or not, it would seem the same with tragedy. Aren’t we talking about catharsis here? Would it follow that there is a little bit of tragedy in comedy and vice-versa? We applaud the movie maker who pilots us back and forth, from one shore to the other, in a single story. With close-ups, long shots, speed changes, special effects and juxtaposition of images, comedy and tragedy help us embrace life’s most perplexing ambiguities.
Federico Fellini who directed some of the funniest, saddest and most perplexing movies of all time, once wrote, “nothing is sadder than laughter, nothing more beautiful, more magnificent, more uplifting and enriching than the terror of deep despair. I believe that every man, as long as he lives, is a prisoner of this terrible fear within which all prosperity is condemned to founder but which preserves, even in its deepest abyss, that hopeful freedom which makes it possible for him to smile in seemingly hopeless situations.”
In a particularly choice scene from his movie “Fellini’s Roma,”a blustery working class Italian chows down on the piazza with family and friends. He whistles and teases his pouting wife to come downstairs and join the party. One look at him tells me he’s probably given her a good reason to be pissed off. When she arrives beside him at the table he greets her by holding a plump, ripe olive up to her lips. She opens her mouth to receive it. At the last minute he replaces the olive with his finger.
Fellini’s deceptively simple bit of staging illustrates how comedy and tragedy are integrally entwined. We can’t stop ourselves before we have to burst out laughing. At the same time we hate him, like she does, for his petty, idiotic power play, for taking advantage of her good nature and for god knows what else. “You silly stupid shit,” he says. “You’re the stupid shit,” she replies. “You’re both stupid shits,” says the little sister. Everyone laughs. It may be more funny to us, or more tragic, depending on the mood we’re in that day and how we perceive the consequences.
While we laugh, or shed tears, our native intelligence identifies the consequences which comprise an opportunity for learning and reform.
With one single outburst, mad or merry, we identify the perceived errant individual’s failings and avoid them. “He is so full of himself, I can hardly wait until he gets what’s coming to him.” And, “Is she really going to stay with him? She’ll only make herself more miserable.”
We thank and congratulate Maestro Fellini for this masterstroke of comedy. If only we had more storytellers like him. He had the commitment to make certain we emerge from his fantasies smarter and more sensitized to reality.
Merry Christmas everyone. Happy New Year and thank you for your business!
Julia Leigh’s “Sleeping Beauty”, which played in a discreet 9:30 slot on Saturday night at the 12th Annual Santa Fe Film Festival, has already gained a reputation for being erotic, insipid, brave, disappointing, groundbreaking, regressive and a host of other contradictions. It’s no wonder. A young woman consents to being drugged for the purpose of complete submission to the sexual whims of an ultra-rich clientele. At first glance, this plot might appear an invitation to take part in some tawdry voyeurism.
For me, the film was an expose about what infantile fantasies secretly motivate the wealthy, power-obsessed male psyche and how nature, the feminine and all that is beautiful is shamelessly sacrificed to his insatiable appetite.
To my knowledge, the nocturnal Beauty that slumbers in the nucleus of this movie never reveals her motivation for why she is making herself available to the host of parasitic vermin that covet her porcelain complexion and exquisite figure, but there is an important moment near the mid-point of the story that assures us it is not for the money, as we would assume, and that single episode supercharged my interest the character of Lucy.
The scene takes place after a high-end rendezvous when she returns home with an impressive stack of cash which she lays on the coffee table and pauses to gaze at luxuriantly. While hardly taking her eyes off the loot, she opens a small wooden box and takes out what is, presumably, a partially smoked joint, lights it, takes a hit and uses the lighter to burn one of the bills from the top of the stack. This did not come off, for me, as some kind of absurd irony. It takes place at the midpoint of the story precisely because it is meant to upturn all our presumptions about the heroine. It fascinated me and made me want to stick around to see where the story was going.
Lucy works at two dead end jobs, one as a waitress where she is always seen cleaning up at closing time, one as an office temp where she is sequestered in a room full of duplicating machines. She also attends classes at college in which she seems to take absolutely zero interest. On top of this, Lucy regularly submits herself to a perplexing lab experiment where she is required to swallow a latex bladder attached to a hose that makes her wretch and gag while the researcher inflates it in her throat. For this she is paid all of thirty bucks and she continues to show up for this clinical ritual even after she has broken into big time sex games with the super-rich. In addition to all this she persists in soliciting flagrantly licentious liaisons with any vulture that happens to circle her bar stool.
“My vagina is not a temple”, Lucy replies in direct contradiction to the enigmatic Clara, the exquisitely groomed, garbed and gracious pimp, played by Rachael Blake, who pairs Lucy with her prosperous predators. Contrary to what predators in the audience may conclude, this does not make Lucy complicit in her violation. It implies that the dominant male paradigm has perverted the culture and this young woman is so utterly steeped in its brazen sexism that she has never developed the slightest sense of her sexual self-worth.
I’m fairly certain that our disgust at the end of the film was intended by the filmmaker, and possibly some of the negative reviews of “Sleeping Beauty” derive from the inability of those reviewers to separate the harsh emotional resonances at the film’s conclusion from their own conclusions about the film. In saying this I do not mean to criticize the critics. One cannot argue with one’s feelings. Their response is natural and, on one hand, completely understandable, but I kept asking myself during the movie, why is this filmmaker wading into these murky metaphors? She must have anticipated being rewarded by many viewers with resentment and ridicule.
I presume the filmmaker is deliberately courting controversy but if I suspected that she was doing so for her own glory, or simply for the sake of pushing buttons, I would go right along with the skeptics. If I am correct about her intentions, the director’s position is reactionary–calculated to tweak her audience’s moral equilibrium for sure–but it is done so neither as a tease or a joke, so it did not invalidate the movie’s importance for me.
The most telling event in the story is repeated three times so that we really have a chance to catch on. Every time a date with the latest rich old fart has been set-up, Clara brings him into the room where Lucy slumbers, unconsciousness in bed. “It’s safe here.” Clara assures him. “No one can see you and there is no shame.”
Viola! The power hungry male fantasy is exposed in all its impotent, puerile ingenuity. What is being laid bare in Julia Leigh’s “Sleeping Beauty” is not the divine body of Emily Browning. It is what all those aging rich dudes reach for as their precious power begins fading. It drives them to claw their way to the top and stoop so low to plunder nature, the dreams of humankind and all things precious and beautiful. They do it for this measly, pathetic, artificial gratification–to claim for their over-nourished egos the privilege of possessing, enslaving, and violating the most cherished things on earth in a place where they imagine no one can see them, punish them or interfere in anyway.
I recognize the value of this wake up call, which allows the audience to catch them with their pants down and expose them for what they have really been up to while we sleep.
If my assumptions about this film are correct, Sr. Louis Buñeul would be Ms. Julia Leigh’s patron saint. In these critical times, in which a doctrine of greed and manipulation of the masses has been cooped from the Popes and retro-fitted into the agendas of the corporate elites, perhaps we should all be more open-minded to transgressive cinema like this.
One seemingly petty, little, foolish choice is all it takes for an ideal life to turn into a nightmare. This seems to be the message as we watch publishing magnate David Aames, played by Tom Cruise, loose his million dollar good looks in a shocking car crash staged by his kamikaze lover..
This act one turning point In Cameron Crowe’s 1997 “Vanilla Sky” is especially resonant to the culture that the character David Aames was created to comment on. He’s a billionaire playboy; handsome, smart, riding high in corporate splendor, and full of himself. Just prior to the crash, Aames falls head over heels with, and blatantly steals his best friend’s girl, the enchanting Sophia played by Penelope Cruz. Next morning he is confronted outside Sophia’s apartment by the psychotic former girlfriend Julie, played by Cameron Diaz. He submits to a joy ride with her that ensnares him in a suicide pact.
As his new fate would have it, Julie dies, David does not. He survives, but his face is destroyed. It becomes a scary cross to bear. Watch in dismay as the charismatic wunderkind reverts to awkward, juvenile social traits he once outgrew
The masterful make-up of Aames post-crash face makes Cruise look alternately tragic, comic, frightful and pathetic, but all in sympathetic measure. Unable to abide this, Aames adopts a facial prosthetic that makes him look embarrassed, guilty, resentful and maudlin. Its haunted, plastic pout seems to plead, “how could this be happening to me?”
Good friends try to help Aames with his pride as he slides into identity crisis. An effortlessly hip self-image was Aames’ brand. The winning smile was his logo. Where did it all suddenly go? He’s supposed to be the ace of a magazine empire, where cheated images pervade the pages. How very, very thin are a few layers of skin.
To solve the dilemma of living life with either a deformed or a synthetic face, David Ames has his brain wired to some kind of pre-programmed dream that plays in his head while his body sleeps in cryogenic peace, presumably waiting for a technical breakthrough in reconstructive surgery.
To ensure his dream on ice is nice and hot, Aames contracts with a shady tech company for a digital lover. It is, of course, Sophia, the wise, whimsical dancer he fell in love with before the accident. If the first crucial turning point was when Aames got in Julie’s car, the next one is his choice to go to sleep and dream of love with Sophia rather than face the problem that stopped him in his tracks.
What is the metaphor in that deep freeze we never get a look at in the center of this movie? How often lately have we seen our real life corporate and government leaders behave like leading men; on-screen pushing some fantasy romance with the voter/consumer, off-screen praying secret deals and science will make-up their bets.
This expertly tailored film scenario proceeds with Aames attaining what he never could in real life, true love. Achieving increasingly lucid states, he tries to take over the fantasy and make it real. It only brings more pain as Aames mistakes Sophia for Julie and his embrace tightens like a chain around her in bed, not loving but smothering her to death instead. It’s a dreadful scene to watch and lands the masked Aames into a shadowy prison cell where he pleads his case to a corduroy shrink with perfect pitch played by Kurt Russell.
This dose of therapy enables Aames to open a connection with the corporation that provides his dreams and confirm that the memory of Sophia’s murder is complete artifice. It’s just a technical glitch in the program caused by Aames efforts to gain control of the illusion.
The mask eventually becomes a burden greater than the flaw he is trying to conceal, and it does come off eventually, but not without a piece of his hide. The mask has no power of it’s own. It is a simple law of nature that a hiding place becomes a prison, the consequences of putting off an appointment with destiny. To attempt to live above, or be immune to, or cheat one’s way through always ends up working against you.
With the assistance of a tech support angel our hero eventually thaws out 130 years later. He can feel the weight of his real problems again and the consequences of going to sleep. Forsaking his privileged mindset he’s grateful to leave the fantasy behind for “real life.”
Why did I like this story? Most of us are just as prone to this same character defect. I learned a lot from watching an ego, a mask and a shattered face all try to occupy the same space.
In what ways am I sleepwalking in some illusion? We all seem to keep having to learn the same lesson about this. What else could explain how unbalanced our world feels? And how long will we let business and government leaders play make-believe with the future? Eventually they have to come out from behind their masks of company and committee and face the consequences too. Because, as this film makes so abundantly clear, we’re just putting off the inevitable.
Last month I wrote about an Italian film that was a huge international success. This month I choose one by another Italian that I admire. This film was considered a total disaster critically and financially. It’s about American youth in the 60’s in rebellion against the establishment. At the time, Michaelangelo Antonioni’s ninth film was one of the worst money losers in history. Since then, “Zebriski Point” has been almost universally put down.
The worst part of “Zabrisiki” is its performances, but I think I have seen acting like this one other time, when it was being praised. It was in a performance of “Iphigenia at Aulis” by Euripides; a play that portrays a father ritually sacrificing his daughter to the gods to boost his standing in the Trojan War. Those in the audience who were gushing over the performances were aware the acting technique was antique, but it gave us a pleasure, similar to hearing music played on period instruments.
When I first watched it, I thought Antonioni was sacrificing the darling daughter of America, namely consumerism, to the gods of youth and beauty whom the Greeks called Aphrodite and Adonis. Likewise, I thought Antonioni’s decision to make the actor’s performance seem wooden was a classy homage to the Greek origins of western drama.
I have since read that Antonioni gambled on his lead actors, choosing pretty looking revolutionaries that were amateur actors and he found them very difficult to work with, especially the boy.
Before reading much about it though, I thought Antonioni was also poking fun at American porn films from that time period.
By the 1960’s adult films had evolved from crude roll playing in one reel stag movies, into feature scenarios with badly acted narratives quickly leading to expertly conducted sex scenes. Those brightly lit, fuzzy-edged frames were later labeled “soft-core” after hard-core went mainstream.
The big orgy at “Zebriski Point” was a feast for Antonioni’s detractors. Again, I found the choreography so campy, and put-on that it was a turn off instead of a turn on. Which is exactly what I would expect from Antonioni. He regularly plays against expectations in his films, so I didn’t question it. I presumed it had sprung from the filmmaker’s genius and I laughed with him and enjoyed myself. My laughter turned to awe while the cinematography at the end of the scene made the episode seem, by turns, sublime and transcendental.
In my untutored state, I thought the decision to make the final “Point” of his movie with multi-camera documentary footage of the demolition of an opulent resort home reason enough to make his feature in the first place. It might help you to understand that the story begins in a crowded room where American university students are plotting a revolution.
Symbolically, this finale could be read as Antonioni strapping consumerist society to a bomb and detonating it. He was in America for the first time, shooting in legendary California, the movie Mecca of the world. Here was a deep-thinking outsider making the authorities nervous with his portrayal of alienated American youth. I read that the Feds grew so paranoid and suspicious they tried to run the production into the ground. Would the critics rescue him? Nope.
As a consequence, many people will never see this superbly controlled and photographed event, invented in the late sixties before big explosions in movies had come into vogue. You used to have to watch a two-hour, playfully stylish, and mythical love tragedy to get to these closing fireworks. This scene can be watched as a stand-alone event now. It lasts about five minutes. Watch it full-screen, if possible. Tell me what you think the director had in mind.
