Funny Ha Ha

A man, "Swanson," reclines in a chair eating cookies and drinking whiskey. A male nurse attends to his unconscious father. "You ever have to reset a prolapsed anus?" Swanson says calmly. No response. "Do you even know what that is? You ever have to deal with that? A prolapsed anus? They teach you that in nurse school? You and the ladies get that lesson?" Swanson continues to probe. The nurse remains silent. "Anus and Andy? Nothing? Famous anus cookies? Nothing?" The nurse walks out of the room. 

This is Rick Alverson's 2012 film, The Comedy. Interminable filthy jokes, slabs of racist/fascist provocation, much golden-hued slo-mo footage of beery, jiggling male bodies.  Swanson,  played with terrifying deadpan venom by Tim Heidecker, insults his friends and family; he humiliates cab drivers, landscapers and other working class folks. It's really horrible.

You may decide that in the past decade you've gotten your fill of poisonous behavior from affluent white men. You may feel that even depicting such behavior is redundant or that it takes part in the same impunity that continues to enable such men. 90 minutes of acute discomfort might not be for you. I get it. 

But for me, The Comedy  has come to feel prescient. It anticipates both the moral decadence and, possibly more insightfully, the deep sadness of our current moment. At the time of its release, many--those who didn't walk out of the theater, anyway--took The Comedy as a critique of Williamsburg hipsterdom. Others understood it as a feature-length version of of the cringe-comedy genre as purveyed by folks like Neil Hamburger and Heidecker himself in The Tim and Eric Awesome Show, the Adult Swim series that made him famous. The Comedy does these things. But it also identifies and predicts a mode of language with which we have become painfully familiar. The discursive world it depicts has come to seem like an elaboration of the one that we have all, mostly against our will, come to inhabit. 

All of this resonated with me on first viewing, even if I struggled to articulate just what was happening. What was readily apparent is that there is a wound at the film's heart, a wound that, to his credit, Alverson refers to only obliquely. Swanson's wealthy father is dying; his mother is absent. Swanson's brother lives in a mental hospital. We sense something badly broken with this family; bitterness and estrangement seem to be the rule. Swanson has exiled himself to a small sailboat in the East River and has dedicated his life to numb, idle hedonism. It seems clear that Swanson's wasted life (wasted in both senses of the term) is the product of some deep grief, a grief that the film's visual style--the long, silent takes, the scenes' slow unfolding, the waning evening light--evokes beautifully. Alverson puts this sense of grief  into tension with the awful things we see Swanson do, which produces a feeling of gradually unfolding catastrophe, a slow, terrible revelation. 

Let's talk first about what exactly makes watching this film so uncomfortable. Here's Merve Emre in The Los Angeles Review of Books on The Comedy's "queasy" anti-comedic sensibility:

Formally speaking, the humor on display in The Comedy is classic travesty: humor that operates by constructing a debased or grotesque likeness of the subject at hand. But as the prolapsed anus monologue makes clear, it’s travesty that wears out its welcome. A joke is offered and laughter elicited, but instead of moving on to the next joke like a good stand-up comedian would, Alverson’s characters beat their material into the ground. They stutter, halt, and repeat the same scatological or sexual premise with such one-sided determination that the metaphysical fabric of the joke begins to unravel into a series of critical questions. Why does this count as a joke? Why is it funny? Why was it ever funny? 

What makes the film even more painful is that the "jokes"--they are barely jokes--take place not within the winking, pastiched context of The Tim and Eric Awesome Show nor the explicitly performative setting of a comedy club, but within the conventions of cinematic realism and cinema-verite. The audience for these jokes is the other characters in the film: the weary nurse caring for Swanson's  dad, Swanson's sad sister-in-law, dudes in a Bed-Stuy bar, some unfortunate cab drivers and everybody else on whom Swanson sets his sights. They are not sequestered behind the fourth wall and they are not in on the joke. Imagine The Tim and Eric Awesome Show's parodic venom and disgust extended into real time and placed within what scans to the viewer as reality. Queasy is definitely the word.

The typical contemporary reading of  The Comedy--as a roasting of early aughts hipsterdom and the associated ironic attitude--is made easy by the fact that Swanson and his pals are indeed aging, bored Williamsburg hipsters, grown alcoholic and fat by at least a decade of drugs and Pabst and artful shiftlessness. But, especially in retrospect, it feels like their hipsterhood is a smokescreen and that the mode of discourse in question here is something more (or, as it happens, less) than irony. 

Ironic speech or behavior gestures at its opposite--as in, to take an example from a previous decade, wearing a trucker hat or sporting a mullet to show that you are not, in fact, among the class of people who would authentically wear a trucker hat or sport a mullet. There are indeed moments in The Comedy in which the characters speak ironically, particularly when Swanson and his friends are drunkenly performing for one another. But more often, Swanson is up to something else. More often, Swanson uses speech not to indicate a particular meaning opposite his words' face-value content but simply to provoke. He adopts personae and indulges in riffs with the sole purpose of creating confrontation. Thus: the prolapsed anus discourse; a Hitler apologia with a credulous young woman at a party; racist patter with the Black guys at the bar; misogynistic insults lobbed at various women. Swanson pushes every interaction to the point of abrasion. When a conversation partner refuses to react, as when the nurse leaves the room, a wave of contempt passes over Swanson's face.

Without question, Swanson makes use of the tools of irony in order to create these performances. It is telling that he frequently either adopts the persona of a working person or singles out working people for his provocations.  Among the film's ugliest moments is when a drunk Swanson offers a cab driver, Raj, $400 to drive his a cab for 20 minutes. Swanson knows that Raj can't afford to refuse. He also knows that, by accepting, Raj is putting his livelihood in jeopardy. Swanson exploits this knowledge to it's fullest, terrifying Raj by brazenly careening through the city. It is here that the question of hipsterdom seems most germane. Swanson's economic privilege allows him a dilettante's distance on the world of work.  It frees him from the necessity of earnestly owning a particular working identity and allows him to adopt identities at his leisure.  Swanson's life is empty and meaningless and so he enjoys dabbling in the sense of purpose work bestows. He is free of (or alienated from) any particular identity and so he assumes identities at will. In addition to his cab-driving stunt, he poses as a landscaper, a store-owner and a dishwasher. But in positioning himself away from these many identities and beliefs, Swanson signals that he actually has no stable place to stand. With his endless negations, he finally negates the possibility of an identity of his own.  

Language functions for Swanson in the same way. What for others is a necessary tool for negotiating daily life and for creating and maintaining relationships, is for him a luxury good.  As with his dalliances with work, his speech is a symbol of his leisure, of the freedom from commitment granted him by his privilege. And he flaunts this freedom by engaging in speech that is so knowingly perverse, so evidently calculated and performed that we feel he cannot possibly mean what he says. As Emre observes, the humor in The Comedy constructs "debased or grotesque" likenesses of its subjects. When it comes to Swanson's  language, "debased" and "grotesque" are definitely the words. 

Now, all of our speech is an ad hoc construction, a mixture of performance, manipulation, aspiration and much more. But our social world depends on a level of trust that, in some authentic way, we "mean" what we say, or try our best to. With his almost total unwillingness to engage in sincere, conventional speech, Swanson breaks that trust. His speech is intended specifically to nullify language's relational capacity.  It is not that it has no content or is itself meaningless; his performances would have none of their astringent power if they were not deeply meaningful to us, if only in their repulsiveness. But this only signals that Swanson means to use language as a tool for severing the possibility of relationship.  His language unravels itself. This is more poisonous than gibberish, deeper and more radical than irony. This is a travesty of expressive language, much as the whiskey, beer and cookies he ingests (you never seem him eat or drink anything else) are a travesty of nourishing food.

As Emre indicates, these travesties unravel themselves through sheer, determined repetition. And when we take a look, these intertwined themes of travesty and unraveling, or decay, show up throughout the film. Toward the film's middle, Swanson's artfully shiftless crew gather in a park to play wiffle ball. But the game devolves into drunken nonsense. They hit each other with the bat; they chase each other on their bikes; they drink: it's a travesty. Accompanying this scene is William Basinski's "Disintegration Loop 1.1," an analog tape composition in which a short section of pastoral music is looped repeatedly over the course of an hour, the sound gradually decaying with every repetition until it falls into white noise. In its original form, the music is set to a video of the smoking lower Manhattan skyline, shot from Basinski's Brooklyn rooftop during the last hour of daylight on September 11th, 2001. The piece is incredibly beautiful, but the video never allows us to forget that "Disintegration Loop" bears witness to a catastrophe. That the softball game is backdropped by the Manhattan skyline refers both to Basinski's video and to the very catastrophe it represents.

More catastrophic decay: In his dying father's house, Swanson paces an empty swimming pool making wordless faux-operatic vocalizations which reverberate back toward him in a hollow echo. Here, Swanson achieves an intentional emptiness that he seems to have been striving for throughout the film. His voice's only content is its own sonic aura. Later, Swanson and his pals unleash a derisive chant of "We want some hip hip hop!" (and then, "You gonna get-ta no no tip!") on a taxi driver unlucky enough to have a broken radio. Their voices are forceful and rhythmic, more like music than speech. The words begin to distort and lose their shape, devolving toward pure, cruel sound.

Finally: Swanson encounters a young waitress at his restaurant (we never learn her name), who agrees to play along with his provocations. He brings her back to his boat, where they share a kind of knowing meta-seduction. Suddenly, she falls into epileptic seizure.  Her body convulses; its gestural and emotional content violently sheer away; all that remains is mute visceral affect. Swanson looks on without expression. In this scene, and in the scenes above, we approach a kind of limit moment of perception and experience, in which the structures of communication vested in speech and physical gesture--the very things that make meaning possible--seem to have all but melted away. 

When I first saw this film, back in 2012, I struggled to come up with an analogy for Swanson's mode of being. The film is called The Comedy, and there is no question that the structure and ethics of comedic performance are among it's primary themes. But, I thought, the film's closest cousin is probably advertising, with its collage of free-floating referents and gestures, nuggets of sentiment loosed from their historicity and repurposed for the sake of emotional manipulation. It's worth remembering here that The Tim and Eric Awesome Show most often adopts the structures and aesthetics of advertising--along with cable access programming and other televisual filler--as the formal context for its scathing, hyperactive parodies. But even advertising urges us toward the common language of consumerism, exploitive and pernicious though it may be. Swanson's performances are even more desperate and grotesque than that. They willfully fray the social fabric. They point at alienation itself. 

While Swanson's language may reflect a freedom from historical and cultural commitment, the film--and, it seems, Swanson himself--understand the violence at the heart of that supposed luxury. Listen to the long speech he makes to his sister-in law, Liza, in an exaggerated southern gentleman's drawl. They are outside of his father's mansion waiting for the old man to die. Just to warn you, this is really terrible:

Oh Liza, Liza, them slaves be workin' hahd out heuh. Dyin' out there in the thousands. In the sun. Just keelin' over from the heat. From the heat-uh. C'mon nah. Ain't it good, ain't it raht to see them die? How hahd they wuhk fo' this famileh? Papa used them skin for makin' nice furnitchuh. He tans 'em out there, makes a nice...that couch you're on in there is all slave meat. Slave skin. As it should be, lawd bless 'em. Slave penis and vagina. C'mon that's funny. I know you think that's funny. You ain't--your sense o' humor ain't died. Its a good crop o' slaves we have this year id'nit? Real nice. A nice bunch. Ah got to know 'em personally. Some of 'em ah know all by their first name! 

He pauses for a second and then resumes, more haltingly.

Old man be dead by now, I 'spect. He ain't breathin' too good. I 'spect he won't...he won't shine too kindly on our famileh. He got one son out there on a boat. He got one up there in the loony bin, married to some whore...who, who rubs her...who rubs shit on her vagina. Some whore that...you the kinda whore that, you the kinda whore that swallows cum...you are my only cum swallowin' sistuh-in-law. I appreciate it. Cum swallowuh: That's a proud thing to be in this famileh. 

The first thing we understand about this is the obvious: the extreme violence, racism and ugliness, the will to alienate his listener as completely as possible. But there is also a shade of deep self-laceration. We do not know how the old man has acquired the wealth to pay for his son's shiftlessness, but Swanson makes us understand, quite graphically, the disgust that he attaches to it. His privilege is paid for in blood money. His perversity is an inheritance that he cannot escape. This speech suggests, I think, that the ultimate target of his nihilism is himself. Grief lurks around the edges of his speech; it seeps through the cracks when Swanson's words fail him. But it is a grief he cannot allow himself to experience.

He pauses again. In a soft, unaffected voice he asks, "So how long...how long do you think they're gonna keep him up in there? So are they weaning him off the stuff or how does that work? What's the process?" Liza has been pacing back and forth, wearily absorbing it all. She says: "Are you really asking that?" He replies by making a joke about conjugal visits.


*       *       *

Alverson takes pains to show us Swanson's sadness, his isolation and self-hatred. But the film never exonerates him. We sympathize with his suffering but we are never allowed to forget how nasty he really is. Think, here, of the waitress's physical anguish and the unmoved look on Swanson's face as he watches her seize. If he has a capacity for sympathy, he has effectively disguised it under a thick coating of boredom and caprice. His voice might echo beautifully in an empty swimming pool, but this decay is no ecstasy. 

Here in 2023, after Gamergate and Trump and the Alt Right and the capitol invasion we have a much more precise frame for Swanson's style of communication: Swanson was a troll before that term gained wide cultural currency. Many (but not all) comedians have long hid behind the argument that if a joke is funny, it must express some truth, even if that truth is dark or shameful. For this reason, the argument goes, all genuinely funny comedy serves the interest of truth-telling and is therefore socially necessary.  The internet has exploited to the fullest, most damaging extent possible, the ambiguity and license inherent in that point-of-view. These days, I think many of us know to ask the question: Funny to who? True to who? What ideology is this "truth" reinforcing? That disabled reporter over there sure is pathetic. That woman is a nasty slut. Black people are so stupid and they talk like this. I'm kidding but it's true. You can tell because people are laughing.  I said earlier that Swanson's leaves himself without a stable identity. But the film makes the terminal point of this unraveling quite clear. We understand better now, the way that the repeated travesty of language, the decay of its relational capacity, resolves in an ideology of cruelty. Swanson may not "mean" what he says but that distortion and inversion of meaning is itself definitive of fascist discourse. For a long time, maybe forever, we've been nurturing forms of sadism, allowing them to circulate throughout our culture. We laugh or we avert our eyes or we admire ourselves for our unabashed honesty.  

In the film's final scenes, Swanson walks the streets, rides the subway, bikes to the beach, alone. His friends are nowhere to be found. He looks brutally depressed. The film's final image, of Swanson playing in the surf with a nameless child, only underscores the loneliness of his life. We wonder: If this venom, this pain and anger, is the product of some soul-deep brokenness, what is our wound?   

All Shook Down

The hardest, most essential part of depicting Elvis on film is finding a living human being to play Elvis Presley. In Austin Butler, Baz Lurhman has his man, an actor who could credibly draw screams of wanton desire, not to mention bras and undies, from a throng of teenage girls, who could compel a segregationist moral panic simply with the movement of his hips. But who could also slay a Vegas crowd with plodding--though somehow still electrifying--kung-fu moves while wearing a massive, bedazzled jumpsuit, who could make you almost forget the chintzy venue, the pounds of bloat, the extremely gone look in the eye, who can usher you through kitsch to something closer to nirvana through the sheer force of his rock-and-roll kingliness.

Butler can do all these things and yet this movie is astonishingly bad and not just in the normal, just-so biopic-y ways. Want to tell the story of Elvis? Build the movie around Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis's lecherous longtime manager. Cast Tom Hanks, put him in a fat suit and facial prosthetics, let him run the show in a Dutch-accented voiceover that is neither Dutch, nor how Colonel Tom actually spoke. In honor of the old sideshow huckster, give the film a portentous mescaline carney vibe. Give us, please, lots of shots of the aged Colonel (spoiler: he's not a real Colonel) wandering empty casino floors in a hospital gown, IV bag in tow. That's how you make a movie about Elvis. 

Luhrman has always been a cornball whose movies tend to date themselves almost instantly. But he also has a feel for intense, vivid romance. I challenge you to look at Leo and Claire making eyes at each other through the fish tank while that Des'ree song plays--two movingly beautiful people visibly stunned to be gazing on one another--and not get all the way up in your feelings. (For the full Baz experience, contrast any scene featuring R  + J with the rest of the movie: the MTV Beach House-style editing, the Benny Hill-style gags, the white dudes screaming Shakespeare in blaccent.) 

We get some of that ecstatic romance in this film whenever Elvis is on stage casting his spell with that. But almost everything else here--Col. Tom's voiceover, the tone-poetic montages, the scary-clown motif (for real)--steps on that magic. The worst part: I know Luhrman has always gone big with anachronistic music choices but how could it possibly be the right idea to bleed Elvis's songs into a hip-hop remix at almost every turn? I get that it might be time to reappraise Elvis's relationship to Black music. He was a truly great blues and gospel singer who came by his influences honestly and had lots of Black fans back in the day. Maybe he actually was tight with B.B. King and Little Richard as this film suggests, I don't know. But the theft racial capitalism pulled off with Elvis as its poster boy was real and no amount of Denzel Curry verses can change that. I mean, the closing credits feature Nardo Wick rapping over "In the Ghetto"--a ludicrously out-of-touch song, basically the Moynihan report in lounge boogie form. That's just the crassest revisionism. And if you want to push the point about the line that runs from big Mama Thornton to Doja Cat, make a movie about Big Mama Thornton, call it "Hound Dog." Black music doesn't need Elvis. Don't name check a blues legend in one scene to give street cred to the epochally famous white rock star. Don't pretend her brief appearance makes the theft any less criminal. 

The film closes with one of Elvis's final shows, just months before his death. The scene segues from Butler's performance into archival footage. Swollen and sweaty, all of 42 but looking prehistoric, Elvis mumbles and staggers to the piano; everyone shifts uncomfortably in their chair. Elvis sips from one of the many Coke cups scattered around and, with a roadie holding the mic in front of his mouth, unleashes an absolutely hair-raising version of "Unchained Melody." He is 'luded to the gills, dying before our eyes. But his voice is massive and gorgeous and his passion is real. That's Elvis for you, the fucking King. It's hard to understand why Luhrman felt the need for the grand guignol expressionism when all you really need is the man himself. 

A Woman Under the Influence

If we accept the idea that, deep down, all American movies are stories of consumerist wish fulfillment, then the rags-to-riches genre could be the great Hollywood meta-narrative, the fantasy that undergirds all the others. These films perform that fundamental Hollywood promise: If we can simply tap into our reserves of indomitable brilliance, we can transcend our daily lives and enter a utopia of romance and wealth and, well, happiness. If this unlikely but lovable hero can beat the odds through sheer grit and charisma, the dream whispers, then so can you. David O. Russell, once an indie idiosyncrat, has lately been taking a tour of the venerable old-Hollywood genres. He's made his sports movie (The Fighter), his rom-com (Silver Linings Playbook) and his prestige picture (American Hustle); it shouldn't surprise us that rags-to-riches is next.

On its face, Joy hews closely to the conventions of the genre. Jennifer Lawrence is a deeply harried divorcee and working mom struggling to hold a dysfunctional family together. Her mother Terry (Virginia Madsen) is an agoraphobic, silk nightgowned diva who spends her time in bed, almost fully absorbed in a "Dynasty"-ish nighttime soap opera. Joy's ex-husband Tony (Edgar Ramirez), an under-employed nightclub singer, lives in her basement, as does her father, a volatile, paternalistic ("colorful" might be the euphemism) Robert de Niro type, played by Robert de Niro. Also in Joy's orbit are Peggy, the resentful half-sister; Trudy, the miserly stepmother (played with majestic, alien witchery by Isabella Rossellini); and children doing their childlike things. This family bickers in the screwballish, hyper-verbal way that we have come to expect from Russell's families. And all of this energy--the complaints, the grievances, the stream of expectation and demand--converges on Joy. She is the only adult in the room, the family's provider, mediator and problem-solver.

We learn in a series of dreamy flashbacks narrated by Joy's grandmother Mimi (Diane Ladd) that Joy was a touched child. She was the valedictorian of her class; she crafted deeply realized imaginary worlds; she had a gift for invention and ingenuity. Nevertheless, Mimi's dreams for Joy never stray too far from the domestic: "You are going to be a smart, strong young woman," she tells the young Joy, "go to school, meet a fine young man, have beautiful children of your own and you're gonna build wonderful things that you do in your room."[sic]

But that dream of domestic ease (it must simply be a dream of wealth--how else could working motherhood come off so pastorally?) has been lost in the struggle to survive. Joy has become  ensnared in the demands of lower-middle-class family life. Her potential seems to have gone unrealized. Unrealized, that is, until, in a burst of inspiration, she invents the miracle mop. Using every ounce of her charisma and moxie, she charms a powerful QVC executive named Neil Walker (played by Bradley Cooper, Lawrence's old foil) into giving her and her mop a shot. Despite her family's poisonously low expectations, despite the burdens of debt and trademark law, despite daunting economies of scale and the ruthlessness of her competitors, not to mention a gnarly case of stage fright, Joy rises to fame and fortune, a trailblazer for other housewife/entrepreneurs after her.

Call it optimism or call it conservatism, but rags-to-riches films have typically displayed a credulous faith in American social mobility. And Joy, on the surface at least, is no different. It is a fable attesting to the transcendent power of entrepreneurial talent. It is a paean to the domestic and an allegory of spiritual-capitalist predestination.

Seems pretty straightforward. But what's strange is that while the the film's last act, in which our hero triumphantly overcomes the odds etc, is essentially a cobbled together mess of deuses-ex-machina and miraculous reversals of fortune, Russell invests the full freight of his cinematic ingenuity in depicting Joy's domestic confinement. He intertwines memory and reality within the same spatial-temporal plane. The camera pans from scenes of Joy's childhood to the present day. The former provides commentary on the latter, pointing out the contrast between her youthful promise and the perpetual crisis that is her adult life. The border between them is fluid, as if to illustrate the ease with which youth slides into adulthood, with which possibilities become foreclosed. And the mania of Joy's life is vintage Russell.  Her house rings with the noise of needy children and bickering grown-ups--as, all the while, Terry lounges queenlike (though utterly dependent on Joy), her soap-operatic fantasy world endlessly streaming from the TV. The space is a little too small and ramshackle for the emotional and physical chaos it contains. These scenes play as comedy but it is comedy that reverberates with anxiety--in this case, the anxiety produced by surfeits of energy and money and time, by the all-too-familiar overwhelm of domestic life.

The whole tableau trembles with a kind of madcap surreality. When Terri's compulsive hair-brushing results in a clogged pipe, Joy brusquely rips a hole in the floor and begins pounding away, water spraying everywhere, even as her family's noise continues unabated. It's as if the architecture of Joy's reality were crumbling away. It's a perfect illustration of what Lauren Berlant calls "crisis ordinariness," that condition of perpetual economic and social precarity so endemic to contemporary everyday life. It is what happens "when the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expectation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to 'have a life' that adjustment seems like an accomplishment."

Given all of this, it's hard not to see Joy's appearances on QVC, like Terry's soap opera, as simply another mediated dream. Joy stands on a rotating soundstage outfitted to project a fantasy of order, cleanliness and domestic beauty. She is selling a mop, but the floor is already sparkling and spotless. There are no screaming kids, no holes in the floor. It is silent, save for the pacifying muzak and the music of Joy's deep, Long Island rasp. Sure, Joy rejects the costume department's glamorizing outfits in favor of her own uniform of a button-down blouse and slacks. But this only contributes to the fantasy of earthy comfort. How easy life could be in this kitchen with this mop! The charm and luxury it could provide!  The divergence of this fantasy from Joy's home life seems to reveal it as another false promise, just another ode to consumption and female domestic labor. That Joy is attempting to realize her dream of the good life from within the conditions of her own confinement, that she is doubling down on a fantasy that has already proven bankrupt, is an irony that the film passes over in silence.

This irony is made darker and more salient by the speed and violence with which Joy's entrepreneurial dream comes crashing down around her. In the film's most savage scene, Joy's family confronts her with the news that, despite her mop's success, bad legal advice has made bankruptcy inevitable. "It's my fault," says her father. "I gave her the confidence to think that she was more than just an unemployed housewife selling plastic kitchen stuff to other unemployed housewives on a junk cable channel...It was my mistake to make me think that she was more than she was." The moment seems to refute the possibility of class mobility and economic hope and even the very idea of a woman aspiring to more than domestic servitude. With her father, her lawyers, and the now-ghoulish Trudy looming over her, Joy signs her business away. She turns to her young daughter and calmly rebukes her for holding fast to Mimi's fantasy. "The world does not give you opportunities," she says. "It destroys your opportunities. And it breaks your heart."

Which makes the film's final act even stranger and more unbelievable. In a stirring research montage (fundamental elements include: protagonist in glasses gasping epiphanically over a crucial document), Joy discovers a fraud perpetrated by one of her creditors. She flies to Dallas to confront him, unleashes a torrent of wit and emerges victorious, contract in hand, her capitalist destiny restored. Flash forward to a quick montage of Joy as the scion of an empire, shrewdly cutting deals, luxuriating in that realized dream of wealthy, tranquil domesticity and doling out opportunities to other harried moms with good ideas. Roll credits.

Suffice it to say, this smacks of narrative desperation. The sudden, frankly incredible stroke of fortune only reveals the story's basic unbelievability. Because Joy's situation is impossible. And in its impossibility, it powerfully depicts the forces arrayed against a working woman's hope for economic advancement--forces of time and space and economy and patriarchal expectation. Only a kind of genius, a woman touched with almost supernatural (or cinematic) gifts of ingenuity, charisma and verbal dexterity could possibly overcome these odds. The fact that the story is based on the life of an actual, living person does not make this observation any less true. Indeed, in the magic of the ending, the film almost acknowledges the preposterousness of the story it wants to tell: the story of the virtuous, self-made woman, the benevolent meritocrat.

In many ways, American Hustle is another telling of this very story. Like Joy, it depicts the way in which survival on capitalism's margins requires ingenious verbal performance and a kind of fantastical self-reinvention. But in American Hustle that self-reinvention becomes outright self-deception. In that version of the story, those margins are morally chaotic; navigating them entails a massive compromise of personal integrity. American Hustle seemed to be indicting capitalism for its inherent tendency toward corruption and moral distortion. In this light, Joy's story of virtuous self-advancement seems all the more naive. Despite the two films' similarities, Joy seems exactly like the kind of yarn that American Hustle was created to repudiate.

"Why," Berlant wonders, "do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies--say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work--when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost abounds?" Joy presents that very evidence and yet is unable to resist the fantasy's allure. The film redoubles its investment in a failed economy and in a vision of domestic enchantment demonstrably alien from anything resembling real life. Indeed, Russell's own work has put the lie to this very fantasy. One wonders: Why is he telling this story?

Infinite Justice

Is there a filmmaker alive as adept as Quentin Tarantino at simultaneously delivering pleasure and befuddlement? His virtuosic narrative ability is matched by his willingness to rip the viewer out of their trance with abrupt tone shifts and genre reversals. His worship of cinema history encompasses masterpieces like Stagecoach and Band of Outsiders as well as B-List curiosities like Zorro's Fighting Heroes and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. His fluency in the aesthetics of cinematic violence produces work that is all at once horrifying and beautiful, hilarious and revolting.

And then there is the chutzpah. Isn't it absurd and offensive on its face to even propose the idea of a Samurai revenge treatment of Schindler's List, or a blaxploitation/spaghetti western retelling of Twelve Years a Slave? Our relationship with aestheticized violence is troubled enough as it is; how are we supposed to feel about it in the context of American slavery or the Holocaust? Are we really willing to see these movies as serious engagements with history? And if we don't, are they not just the crassest kind of exploitation? If its a joke, its a pretty profane one. If its art, its fucking bewildering.

The strangeness is heightened by the fact that both of the films referenced above, Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained, toggle between scenes of horrifying, not-at-all beautiful or funny violence and scenes of spectacular, cartoonish violence. Tarantino's claim to pop-postmodernism is well established and it is nowhere more evident than in his tendency to switch genres without warning within the same film, to segue from art-house character drama to old Hollywood blockbuster, to exploitation flick and back again. It's a technique that he put to thrilling use in the Kill Bill movies and that is significantly more jarring in his history films. After being asked to endure two hours of beatings, whippings and other depictions of antebellum hell, for instance, it is truly strange to see Jaimie Foxx transform into RoboCop and begin mowing down plantation henchmen.

There are a lot of problems at work here: the celebration of violence as a form of historical justice; the cavalier ventriloquism of a white man speaking for oppressed others; the profligate n-bombs; not to mention Tarantino's breezy, dismissive attitude about all of the above. But as his penchant for grand pastiche suggests, Tarantino is a master of meta-cinematic narrative. These films are more than simple homages to trash cinema. Take, for instance, Inglorious Basterds. Yes, we are asked to swallow a counterfactual revenge fantasy in which a platoon of Jewish soldiers mercilessly slaughters German soldiers and in which Hitler dies in a hail of bullets and fire. But that final scene takes place in a movie theater. The all-Nazi audience breathlessly applauds a violent propaganda film about a heroic German soldier, a film that looks suspiciously like the American B war movies that are Inglorious Basterds' aesthetic ancestors. And consider that those cheering Nazis die when the film stock that is the movie's very physical substance is set ablaze, engulfing the theater in flames. When Brad Pitt carves a swastika in Christoph Walz's forehead, are meant to cheer the act of comeuppance? Or reflect on the possibility that, in their lust for revenge, the Americans have become inhuman torturers? Or both? Or consider that in Django, a film whose last act is a riot of cartoonish violence, we watch a room full of Southern gents pay money to see two black men pound each other to death. Yes, the violence is cathartic and spectacular. But in both films our own spectatorship, our own consumption of violent spectacle, is a primary text.

The Hateful Eight is no different. Kurt Russell plays John Ruth, a bounty-hunter attempting to transport a spectacularly foul-mouthed prisoner named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Red Rock, Wyoming where she will, presumably, be hanged. On the way, the two encounter a black union officer and fellow bounty-hunter named Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) as well as a former rebel named Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who claims to be the new sheriff of Red Rock. Both men hitch a ride in Ruth's carriage. Waylaid by a blizzard, they hole up in Minnie's Haberdashery, a barroom, inn and general store. To their surprise, Minnie is nowhere to be found. In her place are four shady figures: an Englishman named Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth) who claims to be Red Rock's hangman; an aging, terminally racist Confederate general/war criminal (Bruce Dern); Bob, the Mexican stable-hand (Demien Bichir); and Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), a cowboy who whiles away the time by scribbling in his diary.  The cabin quickly becomes a crucible for simmering antagonisms: Union and Confederate, lawman and outlaw, white and black. Where is Millie? Who has designs on poaching Daisy from Ruth and claiming her $10,000 bounty? Who is lying? Who is telling the truth? Who will crack first?

Almost as quickly, a rather obvious metaphor begins to take shape. As tensions between Warren, Ruth, and the two Confederates mount, Mobray proposes dividing the cabin into two halves, North and South, Union and reb. We seem to be setting the scene for a re-staging of the Civil War. But things begin to unravel. The characters form unpredictable alliances. They assume new identities and discard what would seem to be their most essential political commitments. As Richard Brody points out in his astute essay on the film, "The Hateful Eight turns the stagecoach into a stage, the saloon into a stage, and the occupants into performers telling tales that serve their purposes, such as they are." Every identity is a performance. No story, no artifact is quite what it seems.

The combination of high stakes, constricted space and imperfect information creates a thick, escalating tension. The Hateful Eight is almost a film-length extension of the Mexican standoff, that longtime Tarantino staple. But this suspense is only a catalyst for another jarring genre transformation. Because the last third of The Hateful Eight is a total bloodbath. What was a tense drawing room mystery suddenly becomes a splatterfest. Characters vomit buckets of blood. Limbs are severed. Heads, chests, testicles explode. There is shrieking and carnage; it is totally insane.

The brutally tense first two hours seemed to be leading us toward some great cataclysm on the scale of the Civil War itself. And the last act is indeed cataclysmic, only not in the way that the film has prepared us for. It is silly and excessive, a gross-out rather than a horror, more Evil Dead  than Apocalypse Now. It's too much of what we want, like washing down a fine, six-course tasting menu with a gallon of McDonald's milkshake. In its camp and slapstick elements, it is almost a parody of the narrative payoff we have been expecting--less like tragedy, more like farce.

It feels a bit as if, in subjecting the Civil War, the so-called "second American revolution," to such low-born treatment, Tarantino is profaning hallowed ground. But let's remember: The Civil War was pretty profane itself. Maybe the war was too catastrophically surreal--picture, you know, rivers running with blood, acres of meadow filled with bloated, teenaged American corpses--to ever be adequately represented on-screen, at least in the typically reverent way. Maybe The Hateful Eight is suggesting that our political ideals and our national identity, are founded on a violence so extreme--from the Native American genocide through slavery and the Civil War--that it renders our high toned rhetoric of justice, democracy and virtue absurd. Maybe it takes a burlesque to depict such absurdity with any degree of truthfulness.

The fact that all of the characters' ideological commitments and sectional allegiances fall away in the face of that overwhelming violence--to the point that Mannix, the lost cause warrior, and Warren, the black Union officer, end up allied against the Domergue gang--is, to me, a claim that violence is our most salient national characteristic, the ideology that trumps all others. This is why I'm not convinced by the argument that that Mannix and Warren's alliance is an argument for racial solidarity. The movie is called "the hateful eight," after all. Even Warren, the character we are asked to identify with most strongly, whose vengeance against the Confederacy is one of the film's primary texts, is a mass murderer and a sadist who once marched a naked man for hours through the cold and snow, sexually assaulted him in exchange for a blanket...and then didn't give him the blanket.

And while the viewer gets the satisfaction of seeing the Confederate mercenary of Warren's story forced into abjection and of seeing Daisy bloodied and hanged, Mobray, the putative hangman, has already told us everything we need to know about such satisfaction. "Now the good part about frontier justice is it's very thirst quenching. The bad part is its apt to be wrong as right." 

We begin to feel, as Mannix and Warren chortle, bleeding to death in a house full of mangled corpses, Daisy swinging above them with Ruth's severed arm dangling from her wrist, that this is, let's say, a pyrrhic victory. Doesn't their laughter and their satisfaction feel a little hollow, a little grotesque? It is hard to accept the premise that justice has been done. Here it's worth considering the second part of Mobray's line on frontier justice. Under the rule of law, he says, "the man who pulls the lever that breaks your neck will be a dispassionate man. And that dispassion is the very essence of justice." When we recall that this proclamation on the nature of justice is offered by a murderer impersonating an officer of the law, it's easy to smell the irony. Doesn't this lead the viewer to suspect that, in this film's world at least, idealized talk of justice is inherently deceptive, merely a rationalization of violence? Taken together with the final scene, the line begs the question: How different, really, are the hangman and the vigilante? Are Ruth and Mannix and Warren really in any position to administer justice? After all of the shifts in identity, the unravelling of stories, the hedging of allegiances, we're left with the possibility that the only meaningful social fact is violence itself. If The Hateful Eight is Tarantino's answer to Eric Garner and Michael Brown, it is in this way: The film ultimately questions the idea that justice is even possible, that the law is anything but a cover for rapacity, that there is any kind of ideology or politics that rises above the level of simple murder.

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But there's a problem here and that problem is Daisy. Jennifer Jason Leigh has, as Slate's Dana Stevens has said, "an excessive outsider-ish quality, a solitary, feral energy." And in the The Hateful Eight, that surplus of subliminal, witchy charisma becomes fully, outlandishly realized. Leigh's Daisy is a racist, foul-mouthed, rotten-toothed maniac. And by the end of the movie, she is a shrieking, bloody wraith. The performance is somehow both mysterious and over-the-top, both comedic and terrifying. There is something deeply human about Daisy's pain. She is battered and bloodied, chained to her captor and then to a dead man. Each new wound raises the pitch of her histrionics and expands scope of her fury. The courage and force of the performance, the ability to depict physical suffering as a kind of mania...well, it's just awe-inspiring.

Warren, Ruth and Mannix (and Tarantino himself, the unmoved mover of The Hateful Eight's universe) heap unconscionable levels of violence on Daisy. What's more, in the tradition of the exploitation films whose aesthetic Tarantino is mining here, the violence is explicitly gendered: Every violent act against Daisy is accompanied by one of the male characters calling her a bitch. What's maybe even more troubling is that these moments are structured as comedy. When Ruth elbows Daisy in the face, the audience (at least when I saw the film) let out a shocked laugh, as they did when Warren punches her so hard that she flies out of the stagecoach. As they did when Mannix shoots her in the foot.

When violence arises suddenly out of long periods of stasis and talk, as it does so often in Tarantino's films, it reveals itself as a punchline; it takes advantage of the same relationship of expectation and surprise that structures comedy. We are unable to fathom what has happened and our response, as in so much camp horror, is to laugh or scream or both. We are led to laugh at Daisy's pain or to thrill at it or to recoil from it. Maybe we feel shame at our own laughter and our own cathartic pleasure; maybe we feel disgust at the sadism on display. I obviously cannot speak for every audience member's emotional experience. But as a lover of cinema and a committed suspender of disbelief, but one who is maybe a little bit soft when it comes to violence and who also feels, you know, sympathy for the suffering of other human beings, I felt all of these things.

This brings us into a puzzled relationship with Daisy's fate. Because, on the one hand, the film seems to be suggesting that the standards of justice justifying her execution are deeply degraded. On the other hand, she's the bad guy. She's a murderer, a Confederate sympathizer and a terrible racist. It's in the service of her rescue that the movie's most heinous crimes--the murder of Minnie, Sweet Dave and the rest--are committed. The film's narrative structure pushes us to desire that Warren, the film's hero, bring her to (frontier) justice.

Furthermore, we can't ignore the fact that, despite Leigh's transcendent performance, Daisy's humanity is not rewarded. The historical wrong of gendered violence--and the specific, narrative fact of the violence done against Daisy's body--gains no redress. And despite the irony of the film's ending, despite the affective complexity of the violence done against her, Tarantino still delivers that narrative satisfaction at Daisy's expense. I mean, the audience is supposed to enjoy this movie; if it weren't, we'd be talking about Funny Games and not about a spaghetti western gorefest. Tarantino thinks that cinematic violence is cool and he wants the viewer to think it's cool too. Can he really be delivering pleasure with such skill while also undoing the premise of that pleasure? Can he actually be as smitten as he is with cinematic violence and also profess to be "on the side of the murdered"?

Tarantino's first love is the aesthetic utopia of American cinema. His imagination is nourished on it; it is his primary language. Although he ironizes legal justice and even the naivete of a cinematic morality in which evil is punished and heroism prevails, he never quite escapes that world's symbolic economy or its complex of desire and catharsis. It is within this realm, in which blood functions as moral currency, that he levels his critique of American politics and plays out his desire for justice. Tarantino wants to have it both ways. He wants us to take his political critique seriously, while still viewing the violence as a purely aesthetic element, a tool for delivering cinematic pleasure. But if we take the social message seriously, as I believe we should, then we have to take the violence against Daisy seriously too. Because while Tarantino has crafted an aptly nihilistic parable about the violence and injustice suffered by African-Americans at the hands of American power, he has done so at the expense of leaving another old yarn intact: the one in which female bodies absorb the brunt of our need for catharsis. Only in this realm--a realm, I might add, typically willed into being by white dudes like Tarantino--could Daisy's punishment makes sense, could the torture of another human being ever deliver moral satisfaction. Tarantino may have unraveled the fantasies of American political idealism, but we have Jennifer Jason Leigh to thank for unraveling Tarantino's own fantasy. Because in her drawls and wails, in her charismatic presence, Leigh's Daisy exposes her own humanity. In so doing, she transcends the moral logic of violent cinematic escapism and reveals the sadism at its heart.

Finis Terrae

Finis Terrae, the title of Jean Epstein's 1929 "narrative documentary," is the Latin translation of "Finistere," the farthest west part of Brittany, a remote swath of land jutting out into the Celtic Sea. It means "end of the earth" or "land's end." Taken most literally it refers to Finistere's place as the last shred of France before land gives way to ocean. So Finistere is an actual place, but when we imagine "the ends of the Earth," we conjure places only accessible to the imagination, places that almost cannot be found. Even more radically, the title evokes not just remoteness but apocalypse, not just the end of the earth but the end of the world, that threshold space between the world and what lies beyond, the final encounter between humans and earth.

The inhabitants of Finistere were ideal subjects for such a meditation. When Epstein encountered them, they seemed, to him at least, far removed from modernity, living a culture and economy that brought them face-too-face with the natural world. The film centers on a four men who camp out on the uninhabited island of Bannec and harvest seaweed, which they then burn to ash and sell on the mainland. It is lonely, arduous work. Fresh water is scarce. The island, itself little more than a pile of rock, is surrounded by dangerous reefs and rough seas. Amid the rocks, the burning, smoke-spewing mounds of kelp and the makeshift hovels the men construct for shelter, the place feels either pre-or post-historic. The kelp farmers seem either like relics of our most primitive economies or survivors of some millennial catastrophe, scavenger's of the Earth's meager remains.

The film's plot is little more than a reenactment of the hazards of life in Finistere: Jean-Marie loses his knife; he accuses his friend Ambroise of stealing it; Ambroise injures his thumb in the argument; he becomes sick and unable to work; the men wonder what is to be done.  But the real "plot" here is the relationship between human bodies and the physical world around them. The film is essentially a collage, a rhythmic interplay between images of the human body--hands, arms and, especially, faces--and shots of the natural world, of white water crashing on rocks, of sun reflecting off of waves, of earth meeting sea meeting grey sky. Epstein was among the first filmmakers to grasp cinema's corporeal possibilities, its ability to situate bodies in physical spaces, to capture dynamic, expressive movement, to explore human affect in fine-grained detail. Finis Terrae is rough around the edges. It keels between melodrama and the open-ended banality of the home movie. It's action meanders aimlessly; its camera work unsteady and jarring. But it is an unsteadiness born of exploration. Epstein is willing to allow events to unfold unpredictably, to plumb the depths of a shot without knowing the result. And this exploration results in a dynamism, a real, original beauty, a world being born before our eyes.

Finis Terrae is somehow neither a straight narrative melodrama, nor a simple aesthetic meditation. It deterritorializes both genres, leaving viewers in a state of suspension, a kind of non-expectation. The most basic source of this effect is an inconsistent temporality. While the pace of action is almost painfully slow, the editing scheme is erratic. Sometimes Epstein toggles quickly between faces and seascapes. Sometimes he lingers on shots of non-action longer than is comfortable for the viewer; sometimes he cuts away from actions before they are complete. And sometimes, without warning, the film drops into slow-motion. A wave crashes, a man laughs and narrative action suddenly evaporates. We are suspended in the affective moment; we absorb all of the moving image's emotional and perceptual possibilities. The pathos of slow motion has become a cliche, but here it still feels radical, as if the fabric of temporal and narrative convention have ruptured. We are suspended in a state of temporal uncertainty, sometimes frustrated and bored, sometimes lost in the expressive eternity of the cinematic moment. It's like a dream.

Epstein frustrates our expectations in another way too. Crucially, all of the the cast members of Finis Terrae are non-professional actors, members of the Ile d'Ouessant community. And Epstein's script and stage-directions were famously bare-bones. ("You are angry with your friend. Action!") As with Robert Bresson's films, we are witness to a strange paradox. Professional actors use artificial techniques to create the illusion of emotional naturalism. They create performances that read to the viewer as authentic reactions to the film's narrative and emotional situation. Non-actors react more "naturally" of course--which is to say, without the artifice of professional technique. But the situation they are reacting to is that of being filmed, of performance itself. As we all know, that reaction produces an affect that feels stilted and emotionally unnatural. The Bretons, very few of whom had ever even seen a film, produce genuinely strange performances. They look at the camera and freeze in stiff, unnatural poses. They gesture wildly and vamp like models. Conventional acting of the era was broad and gestural. Actors created large, well-defined pantomimes of emotion. The villagers' acting is just as broad, but much looser and less circumscribed. They emotions they express bleed into one another and transcend the scene's narrative constraints.

As film historian Christoph Wall-Romano says, the actors here are conveying affects, not emotions. I take this to mean that they express modes of being that are both prior to and are also wilder and more diffuse than emotion. When Jean-Marie is angry at Ambroise, he rants and raves. His gesticulations are exaggerated and erratic. It is almost a burlesque of anger. But also: Even as he berates Ambroise, he steals a glance at the camera and flashes a bemused half-smile. The actors convey the hardships of life, for sure: anger, weariness, sadness, pain. But under it all is a kind of pleasure, a subtle amusement at the act of performance itself, at self-consciously making one's body into an instrument of expression.

There are many analogies that we could use to describe these actors' presence on camera. In their intense emotionalism, their almost monumental presence they are masquelike or even statuesque. But this isn't quite right. Because while the faces and bodies on the screen are estranged from ordinary expression, they are also humanly animated--by movement, by facial feature, by their simple, ecstatic aliveness. In this combination of totemic otherness and human animation, they are uniquely cinematic objects.

What is remarkable here--in the men on the wasted island, in the women in black, surrounded by monolithic rocks, staring out at the sea--is the juxtaposition of these human actors with the world around. What at first seems like simple contrast--the actors' "unnatural" pantomimes superimposed on the "natural" world, their expressiveness up against the world's silence --becomes much less simple the closer we look. Epstein famously said that the camera grants "a semblance of life to the objects it defines." The broken bottle bears the emotional weight of a friendship in crisis. The found knife carries in it the guilt of Jean-Marie's mistreatment of Ambroise. Even the rocks and sea evoke the weariness and fragility of human life at the end of the Earth. In Epstein's hands, the camera has the power to capture an almost spiritual expressiveness from humans and non-human objects alike. It is as if Epstein has discovered a common mode of being, a common affective language, for both objects and humans. The camera transfigures everything it sets its gaze on, absorbs everything into the  realm of the cinematic.

The boundaries here are porous--between animate and inanimate; between cinematic time and lived time; between performance and non-performance; between the film and the world.  The human actors are enmeshed in the world. The waves and rocks and smoke and broken glass and characters suffuse one another with their affective presence. This mutual enmeshing produces not a coherent whole, but a fluid, multivalent, affective flesh. And just as humans and environment envelope and penetrate one another, we viewers are suffused by that very flesh--which is the film itself.  The film's disruptions of temporality, of narrative expectation, of visual continuity and of emotional realism--even its boredom and banality--all serve to unsettle our habits of perception, to guide us into this new corporeo-cinematic order. What seemed at first like an apocalypse, like some ultimate encounter, is actually the beginning of cinema.

Near the end of the film, Jean-Marie realizes that he has falsely accused Ambroise and attempts to sail his ailing friend back to Ouessant for medical attention. Simultaneously, a rescue party has launched from Ouessant to save the men on Bannec. It is a dangerous voyage through thick fog and rough seas; it seems impossible that the two boats could find each other. In one way, the scene illustrates the precarity of life in Finistere. Ambroise's survival hangs in the balance. The two boats are all alone, enveloped in fog, at the mercy of the elements, drifting off the end of the Earth. Miraculously, the boats meet and the boys are brought home to safety. There is hope here. That fog and water and human beings are part of the same system of expression and intelligibility. That we are at home in the world. That we may navigate the wild, dark sea.

Bloody and Chrome

The plot of Mad Max: Fury Road (directed, as were all of the previous three films, by George Miller) is refreshingly simple. The setting is a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland. Immortan Joe is a ghoulish, Vader-esque warlord who hoards water, food and beautiful women of birthing age in a mountain stronghold called the Citadel. Like most such strongmen, he rules through a combination of charisma, economic power and a quasi-religious cult of extreme violence. Joe charges Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron),  one of his most trusted cadres, with leading a convoy to replenish supplies at the aptly named Gas Town and Bullet Farm. Instead, Furiosa smuggles Joe's harem in the belly of her big rig in a mad bid for freedom. On the way, they pick up Max (Tom Hardy), the Road Warrior himself, also recently escaped from Joe's clutches. A mind-blowingly violent car chase ensues.

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Action movies are supposed to be fun but they almost never are.  In my experience, they manage to be at once overstimulating to the point of panic, obscenely cavalier with human life and also deadly boring. So it's no small compliment to say that the carnage and speed and noise and visual density of Mad Max: Fury Road truly is an incredible thrill. Be prepared, though:  this movie aims for all-out perceptual saturation. Light-drenched widescreen panoramas of desert and sky give way to frantic camera swoops and zooms. Extreme closeups of colossal, heaving machinery and manic human faces flutter by almost in collage. There are huge, kaleidoscopic mosaics filled to the brim with visual detail. And the design aesthetic is...so choice. The nearest description might be an armed, post-apocalyptic, death metal demolition derby: monster trucks and muscle cars, all souped-up, armored and seriously weaponized but decayed and shambolic, held together with spare parts and found objects--skulls, spears, tank treads--covered in rust and oil and desert sand. It's like a medieval, carsploitation, sci-fi western. And if that sounds steampunk to you, it is--but in the gnarliest, most psychedelic way possible.

Did I mention the Doof Wagon, a flatbed loaded with Marshall stacks, a fleet of tyco drummers, and, suspended by cables above it all, a blind guitarist shredding on a flamethrowing double-necked guitar? That's real. (While we're on the subject of the Doof Wagon, this movie features some of the most spectacular character names you will ever hear. Imperator Furiosa? Toast the Knowing? Rictus Erectus? A thousand times yes.) And the humans are just as frankensteinian as the machines. They're like sacks of dusty bones, like prehistoric dirt creatures, clad in leather and rusty iron, often grotesquely scarred or deformed, sporting mechanized limbs, packing serious heat. From the cars to the weapons, from the goth accessories to the human bodies themselves to the speed of everything, Fury Road tends toward total audio-visual excess. It is mind-blowing and campy and terrifying and hilarious. It beggars description. Certain passages of this movie felt, to me, like something close to pure cinematic pleasure.

Of course this pleasure comes at a high price. The film overwhelms the viewer's sensorium, but it also overwhelms the human bodies within the film itself--by maiming, by cyborgification, by disease. This is practically a convention of the genre. But the violence here is extreme and total and it poisons every aspect of life. In this world there is almost no trust or human companionship. Violence mediates every human relationship; it backs every interaction like a currency. The beginning of Max and Furiosa's partnership is a game of mutual mistrust; almost every move they make is a hedge against treachery. Even language is badly decayed, boiled down almost entirely to sheer utility or violent exhortation. Max himself communicates mainly in a series of grunts and refuses to even utter his own name.  When Nux, one of Immortan Joe's army of "war boys" who has stowed away on Furiosa's rig, casually refers to a tree as "that thing," it's a funny acknowledgement not just of the obliterated natural world, but also of that world's severely restricted possibilities--for language, for imagination, for human life of any kind.

Unlike most movies of its kind, Fury Road actually seems to understand the devaluation of human life implied by violence on this scale. And it illustrates it in typically spectacular ways. The war boys are hairless and painted white. They are anonymous, born to live and quickly die in thrall to violence and power. Before they hurl themselves into certain death--and a ticket to Valhalla--they spray chrome paint on their mouths and scream "WITNESS ME!" It is pure insanity. After his capture by Joe's henchmen, Max becomes a "bloodbag," a human IV bag used to funnel healthy blood into sick war boys. Women work as milk-pumping machines or sex slaves. And the people living in the shadow of the Citadel are essentially abject human dust living at Immortan Joe's mercy. Also: One of Joe's henchmen sports an embalmed baby's head as an amulet.  Despite the aesthetic thrill, this may be the least appealing post-apocalyptic desert-scape of all time. As the film goes on, the horror of it all becomes harder to ignore.

We're even forced to consider the lives of the war boys, the kinds of faceless storm troopers that are dispensed with, casually and in great number, in so many violent movies. After he comes aboard Furiosa's truck, we actually come to know and to sympathize with Nux. We get to see him as a human person with feelings and desires. It's a lot harder to see other war boys blown to bits when we know they're capable of, say, love or regret or nostalgia. And, significantly, we  come to understand the nature of Nux's worship of Immortan Joe. It turns out that the violence and spectacle serve the same purpose for Nux as it does for the viewer. Just to perform as crazed warriors, they must achieve an ecstasy that short-circuits their deliberative minds and overwhelms their natural-born empathy. They truly are a benighted bunch, indoctrinated from childhood in an ethos of total violence, fed myths of an eternal reward in exchange for their self-sacrificial zeal. They, like us, are meant to be enthralled by the terrible beauty of it all; of course the optics are going to be spectacular. There's a parable on the fascistic perils of spectatorship for you.

Now, the self awareness at work here only extends so far. For as much as Fury Road has allowed itself to be hyped as a "feminist" action film, Immortan Joe's runaway brides look suspiciously as if they've just escaped from an Aerosmith video. They may be rebelling against the Citadel's particular form of sexual control, but they're still objects, if not of Joe's affections than of the hetero male viewer's eye. (Which is not to say that Charlize Theron's performance as Furiosa is anything but devastating.) And, in the end, the film still proffers a rather well-worn narrative of redemption through violence, a violence that rights political wrongs and offers personal salvation to go along with its narrative resolution. And that resolution here is fairly thin. We're supposed to believe that something transformational has happened simply because one impressively costumed, water-hoarding caudillo has been toppled? I don't buy it. The evil at play here is too deep-seated and sinister, the ecological and spiritual wounds too deep. This is still a desert hellscape of warlord capitalism. We still have Gas Town and the Bullet Farm. This world is fucked.

But there is another moment in the film that offers a more convincing utopian possibility. As the action wears on, Max and Furiosa repeatedly exchange brazen life-saving feats. Their fates increasingly intertwine. Belatedly they come to trust one another. Near the end of the film, Furiosa sustains a life threatening wound and begins to bleed to death. Max puts an IV line from his arm into hers, allowing his blood to flow into her veins. "Max," he says, "my name is Max. That's my name." Like everything in Fury Road, the moment passes instantly. But the rhyme with the Max's time as a bloodbag is unmistakable. Immortan Joe's colony treated Max's body as just another natural resource to be plundered. But when Max commingles his blood with Furiosa's and finally speaks his name, it is an act of real brother-and-sisterhood. It's a genuinely communal moment, practically a marriage, that most optimistic of human institutions. In this world, that qualifies as a miracle.

Welcome to the Machine

Christopher Nolan's dark horse not-quite masterpiece The Prestige is a movie about magicians. But the magic that The Prestige explores most profoundly is the alchemy inherent to our experience of cinema: the way the eye can transform flickering light into an illusion of reality; the way we are enticed into investing our bodies and our emotions into blatant artifice. Not coincidentally, The Prestige describes a turn-of-the-century cultural moment in which science began to replace the supernatural and the religious as the site of our magical imagination. Fossils become light. Humans walk on the moon. Machines speak. Says Hugh Jackman's voiceover: "We want...to be fooled."

But science's greatest magical aspiration might also be nature's most impossible feat of alchemy: the creation of consciousness out of nothing more than matter and energy. These overlapping phenomena--the magic of human consciousness and the messianic desire to synthesize it--are the subjects of Alex Garland's Ex-Machina. Nathan, played by Oscar Isaac with the perfect blend of charm and menace, is the reclusive founder of a Google-like technology company called BlueBook. He invites a young, low-level BlueBook programmer named Caleb to his home, a hyper-modern enclave nestled to the point of invisibility within a vast, mountainous wilderness. It's a beautiful, but distinctly unwelcoming place. Much of the house is underground and windowless. There are key cards that restrict access to certain mysterious rooms. There are random, late-night power outages that automatically lock all the doors. Setting a place this enclosed and suffocating within a location of such openness, produces a strange claustrophobia. (Extremely remote places can, of course, produce a claustrophobia all their own. No one can here you scream, etc.)

We soon learn that Nathan has secretly been building an AI robot; it is Caleb's role to test the machine, named Ava, for consciousness. The test, known as "The Turing Test," is this: Can a computer fool a human into believing he or she is talking to another human? Nathan, ever the provocateur, ups the ante. Can Caleb be fooled into believing he is talking to a human--or at least a perfect simulation of a human consciousness--when he already knows he is talking to a computer? This is the magic trick that Nathan performs for Caleb and that Ex-Machina performs for its audience. Nathan's house is a kind of black-box theater in which the trick plays out in plain sight. Will Caleb come to believe that Ava is human? Will we?

Every magic trick has its distractions, the filagrees and gestures that divert us from the real sleight-of-hand. In this particular trick--and this comparison is directly raised in the film by Nathan himself--the diversion is what you might call "the magician's assistant." Simply put, these robots are all beautiful young women. The revelation late in the film--and this is is a spoiler, as is probably everything hereafter--that Ava's particular beauty and demure personality have been specifically designed to fit Caleb's deepest desires (not to mention, I'm guessing, that of a significant portion of the film's audience) is, upon reflection, not really a revelation at all. It is one of Hollywood's oldest tricks. Put a beautiful woman on screen and you will hold our (assumed to be male, hetero) gazes. In fact, we will be hard pressed to notice anything else.

Ava is the robot we get to know and the only one with anything like a fully formed personality. But there are plenty of other women in this movie. We discover late in the film that Ava is merely the latest generation of AI babes; the rest have been deactivated. Their eerily inert unclothed bodies are stored in a cabinet in Nathan's inner quarters. One shudders to think of the young actress reading the casting descriptions. Yet another role calling for a "astonishingly beautiful" young woman to stand around naked and silent; a piece of erotic visual furniture. Indeed the real test here might be the one performed on the audience by the character known as Kyoko. She is Nathan's, yup, astonishingly beautiful Japanese servant, sexual and otherwise. She caters to Nathan's every whim; she sits around half-dressed; she unflinchingly absorbs Nathan's temper tantrums. And she never speaks. "Don't bother trying to talk to her," Nathan says, "she doesn't speak a word of English."

Here's the thing. The viewer--this particular viewer anyway--doesn't know until late in the film whether she is a human or an AI.  Has she simply been programmed for mute, Geisha-like subservience? Or has she been programmed in the larger sense that Nathan describes in the film, programmed by biology and culture, or maybe by a sadistic male captor? It is revealing of our expectations for female representation in cinema that this character could plausibly be taken for a human being.

Ava is trapped in the same house, in the same hermetically sealed world as Kyoko. But (at least as far as we can see), she has a far greater intellectual, social and verbal capacity. She puts these tools to great use. Alicia Vikander's performance as Ava is totally captivating. Her movements and expressions are somehow both robotic and also recognizably human. She performs all the appropriate social signals and facial inflections, but they are subtly stilted; we can sense the synthetic processing behind each expression. And yet, she charms Caleb and she charms us. The tension between her desire--for freedom, for companionship--and the severe limitations of her world produces a tangible, human frisson. Ava feels real. We see her wires and circuits but when she puts on a wig and a dress, there she is: a real girl.

But this is, of course, a magic trick, though not the one we were expecting. Like Gone Girl, Ex-Machina resurrects a type as old as Western lit: the scheming, beautiful woman who flirts and seduces, who makes use of the entire array of feminine wiles to achieve an ambition. Both films explore the idea of femininity--most specifically, female heterosexual desirability--as a kind of manipulative performance, a stand-in for "authentic" expression. (In my opinion, Ex-Machina does this much more intelligently and thoroughly.) Given the emotional deception and cold violence performed by both female leads, this performance comes off as almost a form of sociopathy.

But this is a normed sociopathy. In both films, classically feminine seduction and deception are the women's only means of escape from terrifying, claustrophobic, male-orchestrated worlds.  Indeed, this is precisely Nathan's real test of Ava's assimilation of human consciousness: Could she make use of her desirability, the only avenue to power granted her by her "culture," to achieve her liberation? (Ava's culture being the massive database of search engine analytics that Nathan uses as her software, plus the heavily circumscribed world that he has created for her.) Nathan's hermetically sealed science experiment is a simulacrum-in-miniature of how feminine performance is produced. So the question of Ava's affective authenticity is something of a red herring. The visible circuitry and the robotic gestures that signal her artificiality are a slight-of-hand. The real question is: How authentic, how "natural," is any gendered performance?

Ex-Machina's final reversal--it's prestige, in the parlance--is a pretty fascinating trick indeed. For most of the film, we are allowed to adopt Caleb's perspective as our own without a second thought, to fall under the cinematic spell of straight male desire. It is a familiar way of viewing and we succumb to it easily. It is fairly amazing, then, when our sympathies, and even our embodied perspective, begin to shift from Caleb to Ava. She stands in front of Nathan's cabinet of horrors, staring at the inert, battered bodies of her predecessors. She peels their synthetic skin and layers it over her exposed robotic innards. She literally wears the skin of other women, absorbing their bodies into her own. There is something eminently familiar about this, the cobbling together of a wearable skin, a skin fit to be gazed upon---the fabrication of visible self that could pass as human.

The longer we spend in Nathan's house--a place of almost messianic technological ambition hidden within a sublime wilderness--and the more we get to know Ava, the more we can feel the slippage between what we know about what is human and what is not, what is nature and what is technology, what is organic and what is synthetic. This slippage is surely a major element of the disquiet that pervades the entire film. But the final act's sudden reversal of fortunes upsets our confidence in even those compromised binaries.  Hidden within our working conception of nature is the idea that the way things are is the way they have been ordained to be--ordained by physical laws or by some transcendent creator. "Nature" is often merely an excuse to follow the cognitive path of least resistence, to fall into automatic habits of seeing. It's easy to believe in Ava's pliability and sexual availability. We're used to seeing women, on-screen and elsewhere, as barely more than objects of male desire. Nathan believes he has hacked human consciousness or nudged it, God-like, to its next evolutionary stage. But all he has ultimately done is reproduced some of our our culture's most ingrained assumptions. The "nature" that Ex-Machina undermines is the assumption that these beliefs are based in some organic reality, that they are, well, natural.