If this situation wasn’t currently tenable, something had to break and it was my attentiveness to this blog. Since beginning my PhD work last fall my time has become even more slim, my attention placed under even more duress. But I persisted in loving film and engaging with it. So, what to do?

Thankfully, I came across a site that would allow me to log my film watching, and to review and rate each film. The constraints f the site provided me more solid boundaries to write within, so I could more easily jot down some thoughts without making myself feel like I needed to generate anything more or less than a sketch. This site is Letterboxd. Should you, for any reason, feel inclined to keep up on what I have been watching  or are curious about what I may think about these things, you can find my page here. Given more time I’d like to compile my Letterboxd blurbs and deposit them here, but that time hasn’t yet emerged.

In any case, thanks for reading (or just hitting the blog for the images posted of the films). The site will remain active, as I’d like to keep access to what I’ve written open to myself. Hopefully when I am able to find a better work/pleasure balance in my life, I’ll begin writing posts here again. Until then, find me here:

The period of time surrounding a large election, and the ensuing open discussion of political values, has a way of illuminating a clearer picture of the spirit of a time and place than is usually apprehended. Much of the fantasy and illusion that facilitates the consistent functioning of every day life enters into an area where it becomes negotiable. Having just experienced an American election wherein one party was painted by the other as holding onto beliefs, regarding gender roles especially, of the long past 1950s, it is perhaps an ideal time to revisit a film such as Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life.

School teacher Ed Avery, James Mason, works full-time and has taken up a second part-time job as a cab dispatcher to help make ends meet. He hides this second job from his wife Lou, Barbara Rush, who has given up her job to maintain their home and care for their son Richie. Ed, however, is increasingly plagued by bouts of debilitating pain that he also hides from his friends and family until collapsing and blacking out one night following a game of cards with friends. A trip to the hospital and a battery of tests conclude that Ed’s condition is terminally degenerative, but can be treated with the help of a new experimental drug, cortisone. After an early and successful trial period, Ed is sent home to return to his family and his job. Shortly thereafter, following a brief honeymoon period where he drifts into a manic moment, the pills begin to alter Ed’s behaviour: he becomes more outspoken and critical, aggressive even, and this movement increases in proportion to his reliance on the pill. This psychotic break spirals down and further away from his family, culminating in an attempt to reenact the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.

Superficially a film about the destructive potential of substance abuse, Bigger Than Life smuggles much broader critiques under its traditional clothing. Ed’s medical condition at the film’s outset is quite obviously not an accidental development, but rather an acute symptom of the pressure of his daily life. In an economic position where he is positioned such that he feels he must provide for the family, while being inadequately remunerated for his work as a teacher, Ed’s burden is the weight of the privilege and responsibility accorded to him by a patriarchal and restrictive society. The development of the “psychosis” that results from his treatment is not a derangement of the mind but an openness to honestly critique his situation, free from the veil of politeness or convention. The depression and alteration that follow Ed’s taking the cortisone pills represents a manifestation of Ed’s ability to articulate the real; it is Ed’s direct access to the real and his insistence on enunciating it that qualify his transgression against the social order. Ed represents a critique of the conservative nature of his society and the alarm expressed by his wife and friends at his transformation is not rooted in the change in his disposition, but rather in how his change reveals the artifice implicit in the maintenance of their genial lives.

Ray’s frequent visual employment of the mirror, and reflections, further articulates the film’s intention to make apparent the artificial nature of socially constructed selves. After Ed has returned home from the hospital, Lou shatters a bathroom mirror in an argument, visually expressing the moment that the character’s perception of her husband has been similarly shattered. When the family goes to an upscale dress store, Lou’s reflection plays prominently in the frame as the focus around which Ray blocks his characters: the reflected Lou sits centre frame, bracketed by Ed and Lou’s actual self and further orbited by the store’s shop girls. The centrality of the reflection, rather than the real, is expressed visually. This relationship between reflection and real emerges multiple times throughout the film, each instance demonstrating the contingent nature of subject construction, such as when Richie attempts to hide the cortisone pills from his father, only to be caught. The viewer is not given an image of the actual Ed glaring incriminatingly at his son, but rather the reflection of Ed, which speaks to Richie’s inability to perceive his father as separate from the artificial father role he functions in – the illusion supersedes the real for Richie.

It is through Ed’s obsessive focus on his son that the film articulates another of its subtle critiques. Consistently shown in red – whether jackets or shirts – whenever he is on screen, Richie is made to occupy the position of the object that is most apparent. In his “psychotic” episode, Ed compulsively circles around his role as a teacher in better preparing the children for the real world, specifically his son. He takes it upon himself to function as the fashioner of Richie’s manhood, whether by hounding him until he can complete a math problem or pressing him to play football beyond its being enjoyable to the boy. Ed’s seeks to transmit his own experience, engineering a victory as a substitute football player in his long past high school years, onto his son. The patriarchal structure of society is enacted through this relationship and follow through to its logical ends. Ed seeks to better prepare his son for the world, but through this process comes to the understanding that this social structure leads the child to resent its elder. The destination of a social structure predicated on masculine competition is a place wherein the law of the father is rejected as it is simultaneously reenacted by the son. It is this revelation, of the inadequacy of the structure, that leads Ed toward his final manic act of filicide; the only way for Richie to escape the grip of the patriarchy is to be radically removed from it.

Ray deftly employs the colour red against a largely nondescript background palette to link the areas of patriarchal influence through the course of the film. In addition to Richie’s red jacket, the edge of the bible that Ed feverishly reads from during the film’s climax is likewise red. Here the word of the father is explicitly linked to the religious tradition, itself quite obviously a patriarchal establishment. Even during his return to the classroom, Ed comes across a young boy whose painting is entirely black save for the figure of a man who seems to be spewing red from his mouth. The boy informs Ed that the painting is of a man who is “just MAD at his mother.” One need not be Freud to apprehend the tangle of psychological and social baggage implicit in that one statement. Even Ed’s entering into and exiting from the real, and the exposing of the structural inadequacies of society, are marked by red lights. As he is first being evaluated, Ed drinks barium and is x-rayed in a room that is lit by red, and later, when he “recovers” from his “psychosis,” the doctors turn off the small red light outside his hospital room. The red lights here effectively signal the way that Ed will cease his engagement with the illusions around him; when the red light is off, the illusion has been restored.

That Lou is dressed in orange for the film’s climax is also of interest. Orange as a colour is contingent on red for its existence, specifically the mixing of red and yellow. Red has been established as a visual signal of the patriarchy in the film and yellow may represent both cowardice and lightness or hope. Lou’s dress then becomes either a representation of the patriarchy’s disdain for the female, or the feminine as means of moving beyond the patriarchal grasp. Not coincidentally, when awaking from the sleep following his mania, Ed asks the doctor first to “turn out the sun,” implying that he would like the yellow light to be removed from his vision. This statement functions more deeply beyond the confused speaking of a drugged man, but gestures toward Ed’s return from the light of knowledge, his return into the cave of ignorance in Plato’s famous Cave analogy, in which the sun represents the truth of knowing. If Rebel Without A Cause is any indication, we can be sure Ray was aware of Plato.

The film’s ending assumes an entirely different tone when reading the film in this manner. Ostensibly a “happy” ending with the family reunited following the crisis, the actuality of the film is much more bleak. Ed’s return from his cortisone-initiated engagement with the real represents a re-establishment of the artificial, of the problematic status quo, and either the crippling fear or complete ignorance of what lies behind it. Inverting the superficial motion of the plot, Ed’s transformation under cortisone is not a psychotic break, but the intervention of the real. The film’s saccharine ending, then, depressingly illustrates the return of the inescapable psychosis of delusion that Ed was able to break from momentarily. Bigger Than Life is less a celebration of the ability of the individual to overcome addiction than a witheringly subtle jab at the fantasy of normality. The film’s title refers not to the disproportionate sense of self expressed by Ed during his break, but rather the oppressively inescapable scale of the illusions we weave to comfort ourselves.

Written by Michael R. Perry, Christopher Landon, and Tom Pabst
Directed by Tod Williams
Starring Sprague Grayden, Brian Boland, Molly Ephraim, and Katie Featherston

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)

Written by Christopher Landon
Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Starring Lauren Bittner, Christopher Nicholas Smith, Chloe Csengery, and Jessica Tyler Brown

There’s a certain potency to the formula of the Paranormal Activity films. They have a way of simultaneously engaging the implicit voyeurism of the medium – compounded, no less, by the film’s being framed as personal home recorded video – while reprimanding this impulse in the audience by manipulating their expectations for violence.

The inherent exclusionary purview of the security camera, in Paranormal Activity 2, and home camcorder setup, in Paranormal Activity 3, borrows liberally from The Blair Witch’s innovative exploitation of the limits imposed by a found footage premise when grafted onto a horror film structure. It is axiomatic that tension and suspense are largely generated by that which is left out of the frame – think of Jaws or Halloween where the antagonist is withheld until the film’s last third. Framing a film as a found artifact, then, makes explicit the visual limitation of a single camera. Through this limitation of perspective, the viewer is made more sensitive to developments occurring off camera; the imagined horror is always more effective than the actual, just as the suspense generated through the anticipation of something horrific is exponentially more visceral than the horrible thing itself.

It is precisely this framing device that hamstrings the films, however. By arranging their “documented” happenings into conveniently narrative ninety minute parcels, the Paranormal Activity films call attention to the contingent nature of their plots. Where the spectre of the demon haunting the family is eerily invisible to the camera, the intentionality behind the film’s existence in their current forms in their realities are also problematically absent. It is unclear who has compiled the massive amount of footage from which these events are excised and arranged. Who has taken the great pains to so carefully structure the haunting of the sisters such that it follows dramatic and cinematic conventions of development while clearly engaging with an explicit manipulation of the viewer’s expectations in service of suspense? Intertitles are provided to contextualize to an extent, such as, “The Fourteenth Night”, or to tantalize the viewer toward a sequel, “Katie’s location is still unknown”. There is no indication that this compilation of footage has been arranged by the police, however, or a relative, or, indeed, how the tapes came into their current editor’s possession at all.

That a single pair of sisters is so beset by video recording technology in their lives also beggars credulity in a narrative sense. Here is where the films perhaps open themselves up to more speculative gestures, however. The omnipresence of the cameras articulate a pervasive cultural movement toward documentation. With each successively shorter generation of technology the ability for individuals to record their lives increases; what was once prohibitively expensive is now de rigueur thanks to cell phone cameras. What testifies more to this fact than the cornucopia of filtered food available to observe on Instagram? So Katie and Kristi, tellingly without a family name, become more allegorical placeholders than realized characters. Their demon problem transforms from mere terminal supernatural nuisance to instead gesture toward representing the negative potential, in terms of a violent domestic instability, that is parceled along with the invasion of the private sphere by this compulsion to document it. The invisibility of the demon allows it to occupy a space that is at once presence and absence opening its activity to be read as both representative of the domestic impact of act of recording and the violence implicit in the viewer’s voyeuristic desire. Through this reading of the film, the narrative’s conceptual inconsistencies are relocated to a less prominent position and, as such, are minimized in favour of a more generous fable-like function.

Phenomena (1985)

Written by Dario Argento and Franco Ferrini
Directed by Dario Argento
Starring Jennifer Connelly, Donald Pleasence, and Daria Nicolodi

Perhaps surprisingly, Dario Argento’s Phenomena follows a similarly moralistic path. Argento’s quickly film establishes a juxtaposition between the sublime natural beauty of the film’s Swiss setting – it’s picturesque mountain ranges and boreal forests comprise the background of the film’s first shot – with the unnatural act of murder. Tellingly, once the head of the first victim is emancipated from the tyranny of its neckdom it tumbles into a gorgeous waterfall. The movement of the natural world subsumes the activity of its own perversion. This is a theme that the film revisits later in radically reconfigured terms.

Sent to a Swiss all girls private school by her absent actor father, Jennifer Corvino, Jennifer Connelly, arrives in the area as the police renew their attempts to unravel a series of unsolved murders. Jennifer is at once separated from her classmates by her Americanness and the fame of her father that gauzes her to such a degree that her own character is obscured to the girls she encounters. There is also the small matter of her supernatural ability to telepathically connect to, and manipulate, all sorts of insects. That marks her as different as well. The murders escalate as Jennifer successively fails to integrate into the school while befriending John McGregor, Donald Pleasence, an elderly and wheelchair-bound Professor of entomology whose closest companion and ersatz nursemaid is a chimp. The two bond over Jennifer’s resemblance to an aid that McGregor once had who was the first victim of the unidentified murderer and their love of insects. They are also, less explicitly, aligned as outsiders sympathetic to the other’s inability to integrate into larger society due to their physical and mental difference from the norm.

Argento’s singular sense for dramatic lighting is deployed throughout to the film to enhance both Jennifer’s strange dreams that precede her bouts of somnambulism – as if speaking to insects was not sufficient mental differentiation – and the constantly swaying foliage the surrounds the school and town. The soundtrack, too, features the synthetically cool atmospherics of Goblin as well as an occasional galloping Iron Maiden song, each working to heighten the mood of the film while underscoring its points of surreal disconnect.

All this builds toward McGregor devising a way to utilize Jennifer’s talents to track down the location of the killer via the habits of a fly that seeks out decomposing tissue. While her abilities are obviously supernatural, their connection to the natural world is not one of transcendence, but rather a more intimate connection. Jennifer is afforded a means of communicating and engaging with nature that renders her, in effect, more natural than natural, not unnatural. That the film predicates the solution of its central mystery on her gift speaks to this fact; Jennifer’s connection to the natural world is the only means to bridge the gap created by the unnatural intervention of the murderer. It seems only logical, then, that the murderer, when revealed, is presented as a physically deformed being; the perverse act of murder makes itself explicitly apparent on the countenance of its actor. If all this had not been entirely clear to this point, the final act of violence in the film is shockingly primitive (in its literal primate sense) and suggests the 6% genetic difference between chimpanzees and humans in no way includes either the genetic information for revenge of the use of a straight razor.

Phenomena‘s final confrontation occurs on a beach, in that archetypically liminal space between worlds – here between the natural and corrupt – after Jennifer has been submerged in water, cleansed and reborn. The first murder’s association with natural water resurfaces here, the turbulent activity of the waterfall resolved on the shore of a peacefully dark lake. The roles of victim and assailant have been reversed and a seemingly natural order is restored. Despite the narrative disjunctiveness of the film, which should be at least half apparent in the many strange affectations piled onto the character of Jennifer, Argento’s implicit sense for visual storytelling allows the film to carry along some sense of cohesion while its many smaller elements tug along its seams. As problematic as so solidly positing a binary between the natural world and its corruption may be, these concerns are at least moderately assuaged by the drama Argento can infuse his compositions with as they themselves skirt the space between the natural and the hyper-real.