Could Avatar be the beginning of the end for the Bush Doctrine?

The world looks back - a key image from Avatar.

Whenever you think pop cinema is finally dead, it suddenly shows signs of life. One such green shoot is Avatar, James Cameron's first "film" (note the quotes - it's all digital) since his blockbuster-to-end-all-blockbusters, Titanic, a dozen years ago. Like most Americans with a few dollars in their pockets, I caught the movie over the holidays - in 3-D, no less. And I'm here to tell you, in case you've been living under a rock, that yes, Avatar is the first pop phenomenon to deliver on its promises since The Lord of the Rings, and if it doesn't actually surpass the grosses of Titanic, it will certainly reach second place in the global box office sweepstakes.

And if you're holding back from seeing it, change your mind. Yes, the dialogue is weak in spots, the cinematic elements are familiar from other Cameron films, and the plot is cribbed from Dances with Wolves, not to mention Conrad and Melville - although the basic concepts of the movie's predecessors have been updated for our networked age. But the sense of immersion in an imagined world is far greater in this picture than in anything that has come before (even if, perhaps, the digital characters aren't quite as convincing as Gollum was in LOTR), and the storyline is an old one because it's a compelling one. I promise you, for the central hour in which the hero of Avatar learns the ways of the bright-blue Na'vi, and gets acquainted with their exotic world, you will be utterly absorbed in Cameron's vision in a way that's simply primal. Indeed, the pop-cultural concept of "jungle" has probably never gotten the thrilling workout the re-crowned king of the pop world gives it here.

What's most surprising about Avatar, however, is not its technical achievement, but its political edge; this isn't so much Dancing with Wolves as Dancing with Iraq. Indeed, Cameron stealthily seduces the mass audience into complete identification with "the indigenous," as it were, and utterly objectifies the greedy, technological "sky people" (that would be us, the United States of America) trying to rape their world. The director's maneuvers are so smooth, in fact, that the crowd I saw the picture with only awoke to its real-world dimensions late in the game; when one gonzo jarhead growled that he was planning a little "shock and awe" to "fight terror with terror," someone in my row murmured "Ouch!," and there were audible gasps across the theatre.

That moment to me was almost as exciting as the scene with the giant pterodactyl-thingy. It's very heartening to feel pop culture begin to shake off the Cheney-esque chains of The Dark Knight and its ilk. Begone, Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino, and welcome, James Cameron and Peter Jackson! American pop culture (particularly science fiction) has a tradition of openly questioning our prejudices and failures - and boy, have we been failing of late. Luckily, movies like Wall-E and District 9 have begun popping up to show us the error of our ways. What's startling about the Avatar phenomenon is that audiences seem to be perceiving its political argument accurately (how could they miss it), and accepting its critique, albeit with some disgruntlement. Surprisingly, a few supposedly-liberal voices have been most upset by it - the Globe's Ty Burr, for instance, fumed that "Squint at Avatar the wrong way and it starts to look like a training film for jihad - not, I’m guessing, what Cameron had in mind." (The Globe wrung its hands again over the movie's global politics here.)

So we're faced with yet another threat to our way of life - a global blockbuster with a global perspective! Up with this we cannot put.

But is Avatar really a valentine to John Walker Lindh, as the Globe would have it? Or is it simply a wake-up call to the U.S. audience, a demand that we see ourselves as others see us? ("I see you" is one of the movie's central tropes.) However dumb the script of Avatar may sometimes be, and however romanticized its vision of "the indigenous," surely it isn't nearly as dumb and romanticized as our ongoing self-deceptions have been since 9/11. And perhaps (I hope) in that unconscious "Ouch!," I heard what could prove to be the beginning of the end of the Bush Doctrine.

A guide for the perplexed

The actual Coen Brothers - not extras from their latest film.

A Serious Man, the latest film from the Coen Brothers (above), who are perhaps the last Hollywood directors who can get away with anything intellectually challenging on the silver screen, has been met by some viewers with a serious charge: anti-Semitism, or at least (since the Coens are Jewish) "self-hatred." Set among the Jewish denizens of an absurdly moderne Midwestern suburb, the movie is clearly sourced in the Coens' own upbringing (they were raised in an academic family in Minneapolis), and yet, according to The Wall Street Journal, the (Jewish) stereotypes and caricatures in the movie "range from dislikable through despicable, with not a smidgeon of humanity to redeem them." The Village Voice went further, calling the movie "loathsome . . . truly vicious," and linking it to "a rising anti-Semitism" that was "understandable" after the recent battles in Gaza.

Meanwhile, other critics may have liked the film, but seem perplexed by it. "Can art come from jadedness?" the Boston Globe's articulately vapid Ty Burr wondered (apropos of nothing, as the film hardly feels jaded), before labeling the movie "Jewish Bergman" (!), and deciding that for the Coens, God is either "absent, absent-minded, or mad as hell." Well, maybe. Yet in his review Burr glosses over - indeed, in effect ignores - what many have noted about the film, and what gives it its structure - its parallels with the Book of Job.

We first meet the movie's lead, one Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, below) as he's having a physical, but soon learn more about his moral constitution; like Job, he's self-effacing but righteous - "a serious man," in his own words: a hard-working professor and family man who loves his kids and is loyal to his wife (except maybe in his dreams). Nevertheless, circumstance or fate or what-have-you begins to load Larry's back with misfortune: his wife decides to leave him for an unctuous neighbor; his bid for tenure is in jeopardy; he smashes up his car; his kids are secretly stealing from him; a student is bribing him to change his failing grade; and his sad-sack brother, who has been sleeping on the couch for months, is sinking into something like paranoid psychosis, all while obsessing over a grand scheme of probability.


Michael Stuhlbarg as the Coen's Serious Man.

Funny enough, probability is on Larry's mind, too, back at the university, where he has to explain to uncomprehending students Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. It means "we can never know what's going on," he tells them (which of course isn't true; the Uncertainty Principle tells us quite a bit about what's going on; but never mind), and that lack of true knowledge of the universe has begun to haunt him. He desperately seeks out spiritual guidance from the rabbis at his synagogue, but each encounter is more frustrating than the last. And the Lord continues to smite him.

It's odd that the poor mensch doesn't think of the Book of Job, or that none of his rabbis mention it to him (of course maybe that would have made everything too meta even for the Coens). Then again, at least one blogger has claimed that A Serious Man has "almost nothing to do with the Book of Job," so maybe I and many other viewers are finding parallels where there aren't any. Still, the movie is built around the religious question of affliction, features the advice of three rabbis (Job is advised by three "friendly accusers"), and concludes with the sudden appearance of a tornado (God reveals himself to Job from a whirlwind). And it does include a proxy for Job's plague of boils (Larry's brother is constantly draining a sebaceous cyst), and it opens, like the Old Testament book, with a cunning stratagem from the Devil himself. So it does seem that if the Coens didn't have Job in mind, then there's more cultural coincidence going on here than you could swing a dead cat at. (Or a live one, if like Larry you have to lecture on Schrödinger's famous feline.)

But back to that opening cameo from the Devil. People often forget that in the Bible, it's Satan, not Yahweh, who is tormenting Job (all God does is play along, as a kind of bet on Job's spiritual mettle). Thus the Coens open their latter-day parable with a potent fable from the shtetl, in which a seemingly innocuous old rabbi (the lovable Fyvush Finkel) turns up at the door of a poor couple on a dark winter's night. The husband's impulse is to invite him in; the wife, however, is certain he's a dybbuk, literally a dead man walking, re-animated by a demon. She even stabs him to make her point; but the Coens leave a shred of doubt trailing after the wounded rabbi as he staggers out - as well as a lingering sense that perhaps the rabbis counseling poor Larry in his modern Midwestern shtetl are themselves somehow demonic (particularly the one with a weird, Twilight-Zone-style tale of Hebrew script embedded in goyim teeth).


The Coens on the "set" of the Midwest shtetl moderne they found for their film.

So while A Serious Man may reflect the Book of Job, it doesn't quite mirror it; there's little sense that Job's various confidantes are emissaries of "the enemy," for instance. But perhaps it's in the very differences between source and film that we may find the key, as it were, to the Coen's scripture - and there are two digressions from the film's Old Testament source that all but cry out for exegesis. So here goes nothing. (Warning: serious spoilers ahead!)

In the Old Testament, Job's final advisor is "Elihu," who rebukes the claims of the three "friendly accusers" - i.e., that in a just universe, all affliction must be punishment for wrongdoing. Elihu's argument is that suffering is beyond our critique; it may exist to guard us from a moral fall, or even from further, greater suffering - but at bottom, its meaning is unknowable, just as we cannot have a full understanding of God's true nature or purpose. Rather pointedly, when Yahweh himself finally appears, he rebukes Job's friendly accusers but lets Elihu's arguments pass unremarked.

A key difference between Elihu and Job's three friends, however, is his age, and I think the Coens seize on this detail. Elihu begins his argument by apologizing for his youth: "I am young in years, and you are old," he explains (in William Blake's engraving, at left), "and that is why I was fearful, not daring to tell you what I know." Thus it's no surprise that the Coens begin to focus on Larry's young son Danny, who staggers through his bar mitzvah stoned, and is addicted to F Troop and the Jefferson Airplane. Through a complicated plot maneuver, when Danny receives his "bar mitzvah greeting" from the ancient rabbi who has pointedly refused to advise his father, his advice turns out to be a quote from an Airplane song, "Somebody to Love":

When the truth is found to be lies
and all the joy within you dies
don't you want somebody to love?
Don't you need somebody to love?

Obviously, the Coens have found an analogue for Elihu's arguments in the blandishments of pop - an amplified shrug before the mysteries of a mad universe, mixed with an all-too-human wail for love. This is witty enough, and after all, despite his cannabis-induced haze, Danny has gotten through his bar mitzvah and become a member of the nation of Israel.

And for a few, brief moments, his father's fortunes seem to improve.

But then the Coens take their last, and biggest, detour from the Old Testament. In what almost counts as an epilogue, Larry, unlike Job, finally does something unrighteous. Something wrong. Knowing, the film implies, that an envelope of money left by his failing student could be his way out of crippling legal costs, Larry changes the grade of said student from F to C (actually, in a typical Coen grace note, to C-).

And Yahweh's vengeance is swift. Within moments, a call comes from the doctor's office we saw way back at the beginning of the film: Larry's X-rays have come back from the lab, and things don't look good. At once we sense actual Job-level torments are now in store for poor Larry - only this time as punishment, not test.

Meanwhile Danny is about to face his own moment of truth, as a tornado much like the divine whirlwind in Job (at right, again from Blake) descends on his schoolyard. By his side is his junior-high pot pusher. Apparently they, not Job, are the ones destined to hear the new Revelation. But before we can hear it, whatever it may be, the film abruptly ends.

Job has gone down; and God, apparently, has decided to speak to Elihu, i.e. Danny, i.e. the Coens, instead. (Hence, perhaps, the success which followed for them, much like the renewal of prosperity that came for Job.) This final twist is, therefore, both a gesture of literally cosmic arrogance and a decided rejection of the faith in which the Coens were raised - and yet its cadence, which by all means should be triumphant, seems dark and tinged with regret; the whirlwind roars toward Danny with furious, nihilistic menace, and as it approaches, his pusher stares into his eyes with an expression that has no expression. Is God concealed within this whirlwind, or is the voice of the whirlwind essentially the voice of nothing, of nothingness? The Coens don't tell us; all they give us over the credits is the voice of Grace Slick. Maybe she's the new God.

So the brothers seem to feel no triumph in their triumph, as it were. But the question lingers: can a film be this critical of Judaism - indeed even reject Judaism - and yet not be anti-Semitic? I'd argue "yes," but I can understand the reactions of those who argue "no." The Coens do push the long-standing in-jokes about Jewish looks and tics from so many Jewish entertainers to a new, awful extreme; sometimes their camera simply stops to stare at a craggy proboscis or a drooping eyelid with a weird sense of fascination filtered through several levels of irony. How are we to take what amounts, in a way, to a cinematic Jewish tic? And are we perhaps supposed to equate all the plain looks and saggy skin on display as some sort of metaphor for the fallen, demonic state of Judaism itself?

How we answer that question, I think, depends on whether we feel, like Ty Burr, that the Coens are "cold." It's worth noting, however, that Burr describes them as being as cold as Stanley Kubrick, which in effect immediately dismantles the argument. Kubrick was hardly cold, and the insistence that he was by the fading generation of Paulettes who are still trying to undermine his reputation may count as the longest-running gag in American cinematic criticism (only the joke is on the public). Of course Kubrick was merely contemplative, not cold - although certainly he saw the universe as cold, and famously held back from satisfying the egoism of the average movie viewer. To Ty Burr, of course, that's unthinkable - and he resents the moral judgment it implies (richly deserved as that judgment may be).

Perhaps the Coens are a bit like that, then - they may be, as Burr snickers, "Stanley Kubrick's grandchildren," just not in the pejorative way he intends. They, like the divine Stanley, do stand at least one step away from the imagery they conjure, and thus they dodge the claim that they intend the grotesquerie of their characters as moral statement. Perhaps in their attitude toward their native milieu they're more like Fellini than Kubrick - and of course we hardly think of Fellini as anti-Catholic. Which isn't to say the Coens' imagery is on the level of Kubrick's or Fellini's, but here, as in No Country for Old Men, the Brothers C get at something like Kubrick's sense of submerged metaphor. And like Kubrick, their tales are suffused with melancholy, I think, beneath their carefully designed pop surfaces. Certainly much of A Serious Man plays like a long, belated valentine to their father. It's just not a valentine to their faith.

No Country for Grown Men, or Is There a Cure for Ty Burr (Part II)?

Okay, this is a minor thing - but like many minor things, it hints at a much larger assumption moving beneath the surface of our cultural life. In a recent post on his "blog" (and I use the term advisedly) over at the Globe, movie critic Ty Burr wrote a paean to The Clean House (currently at the New Rep; I didn't much like the play, but you'd be hard pressed to find a better production). Burr's main point was that Clean House shifts in its focus and tone over the course of its two acts in a way that movies (at least today) almost never do.

In the old days, of course, things at the movie house were (a little) different - The Wizard of Oz makes one bizarre leap after another, The Bridge on the River Kwai heads down an unexpected road after its first act, and Psycho and The Birds basically implode and start over halfway through (indeed all these films morph quite a bit more than The Clean House, but never mind). This may, come to think of it, be due to the fact that classic movies are far more closely tied to the theatre than movie critics like to admit. Oz is in many ways a series of vaudevilles, Casablanca is a barely-opened-out stage play, and what is Citizen Kane's "deep focus" but an attempt to reproduce on film the atmosphere of the stage? Even today the open-mindedness of the theatre persists onscreen, but only at the arthouse - right now, Michael Haneke's Funny Games, for example, is twisting before its audience's eyes from torture porn into straight-on torture, without the porn (and most of Haneke's films are equally open-ended).

But Burr's point is nonetheless well taken, and one might imagine hints at an awareness on his part that generally he's reviewing hackwork - except for this telling, highly irritating aside:

I have to admit I'm fairly sour on the Boston area theater scene -- 20 years in New York followed by two subscription seasons at The Huntington that just about put me into a coma will do that.

To which I can only say - are you f-ing kidding? I just tried to find a new movie to watch this weekend. My options included College Road Trip, Drillbit Taylor, 10,000 B.C., Horton Hears a Who and Never Back Down - out-and-out junk that would never find its way onto a local stage. Okay, I know what you're saying - what about the Kendall? Even there the pickings were slim - In Bruges I had heard was overrated, and I just wasn't up for The Counterfeiters, yet another ironic WWII genre piece. (My friends and I settled on No Country for Old Men.)

So I had to wonder - Ty Burr was almost sent into a coma by two years of Boston theatre, while my eyes are glazing over just scanning the ads for what amounts to his daily diet? I mean really - seeing Hollywood product at something like Burr's rate would destroy my soul in short order, and I think would do about the same thing to just about anyone of any real sensitivity. It would be like eating the equivalent of a cultural Big Mac every single day - you'd wind up in the hospital, like that guy from Supersize Me. Indeed, Burr tries to limit his exposure to the toxic extremes of his own medium as much as possible - he hews closely to the Kendall calendar too, but is still sometimes stuck with "critiquing" the likes of 10,000 B.C. Me, I count myself lucky to have escaped from that kind of "entertainment" entirely, via the fact that I happen to be a writer whom hundreds of people want to read - without that, I'd never be able to afford my cultural calendar, and I'd be stuck at the multiplex many a Saturday night, just like everybody else, weighing the relative "virtues" of the latest chick flick versus Spiderman 7.

I know some will claim this is snobbery - but isn't that claim in itself a form of reverse snobbery? Indeed, I've all but given up trying to convince a lot of folks that I really like Shakespeare and Mozart - they're just too deep in denial. I'd only point out that it's hard to square their claims of snobbery with the fact that when real culture is presented at low prices, or for free - like the summer opera and Shakespeare programs on the Common, or the Met broadcasts at local cinemas - the public turns out in droves. They're hungry for the real thing - they by and large simply can't afford it!

Indeed, just indulge me in a little thought experiment - imagine, for a moment, that the tickets to local theatre productions - like The Clean House, The Tempest, or Some Men - were $10, and that Drillbit Taylor and 10,000 B.C. cost $50. Which do you think would be the hot tickets? And something tells me Ty Burr's blog would suddenly reverse itself - all at once, no doubt, the moviehouses would be full of catatonia-inducing sludge, while the theatres would be chock-a-block with lively, popular entertainment.

So don't fall for Burr's brand of flattering double talk - it's obviously false on its face. And ignore the silly adjuncts to his arguments, too - such as the old canard that those of us who frequent high culture do so only because "it's supposed to be good for you." Because you know what? It is good for you. You do become a deeper, more sensitive, more open person the more you're exposed to high culture. I don't see why that's considered uncool, or some kind of debit; the effect of the opposite claim is rather like hearing a smoker sneer at you, "Oh, the only reason you don't smoke is that it's healthier," or listening to someone snort, "Oh, you just eat fresh produce because it's good for you," as they wolf down an extra-large order of fries. I mean, what can you say? Except, of course, "Uh-huh; that's right!"

So my advice is to skip 10,000 B.C., College Road Trip, and Horton Hears a Who, and use the $30 you've saved to buy a half-price ticket at Bostix to Some Men or The Tempest, or even The Clean House or Shining City. You'll have a better time - and you'll be a better person, too.

Is there a cure for Ty Burr?

Getting cranky at Zabriskie Point!

After apparently reading my earlier post, "Never trust anyone under thirty," Ty Burr (at left) picks up the gauntlet on his Globe-blog (Something of an oxymoron, no? Aren't blogs supposed to be an alternative to, rather than a brand-extension of, dead-tree journalism?) with the following:

. . . ex-Globie Thomas Garvey takes my own Sunday piece on Bergman and Antonioni to task on his HubReview blog for not insisting on their greatness strongly enough and for cutting the MySpace generation slack for not knowing their movie history (or worse, not caring to know). He makes some excellent points, but his dismissal of a younger generation's tastes is awfully broad, bordering on plain cranky.

I just came from talking to a classroom full of Harvard journalism students, none of them hardcore cineastes and none of whom had heard of Bergman before last week's obituaries. This is ignorance, as Garvey says, but it's not willful: They're 20. They're still finding things out. This is how they find things out, especially when you're talking about a filmmaker who hadn't released a new theatrical film during their lifetime. It's worth noting that Bergman has been at the top of the IMDb Starmeter -- meaning he's the most searched person on the site -- for a week now. But, yeah, Zac Efron is #2.

Garvey's trashing of current film -- "Trust me, little intern - you can skip ALL that shit - Grindhouse, The Darjeeling Limited, The Host/D-Games, Once - none of them are really worth your time" -- is just obnoxious, even if you agree with him. Tom, these are the movies, or movies like them, that speak to a kid, just as "Persona" once spoke to you and still does. Maybe that's a horrible thing, maybe the standards of serious cinema have fallen precipitously, but you'll never get a college junior from Point A to point B by being a hardliner. You sound like Bosley Crowther upon being presented with "Bonnie and Clyde," unwilling to concede meaning where you see none. (Of course, I could regularly be accused of the same. I hated "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," which one normally sane critic likened to Bunuel. Let us together shriek as one, Mr. Garvey). Still, is there a movie made in the last 15 years of which you approve?

Well, hose me down and call me cranky! Heavens to Betsy - far be it from me to criticize Harvard journalism students; I will point out, however, that in the past few years I've heard one Harvard grad wonder aloud just when, exactly, William the Conqueror invaded Angleterre ("I'm pretty sure it was 1086, Tom," she concluded with a confident nod), while others have insisted you didn't really have to hear Beethoven in the concert hall (what with today's totally awesome ear buds), and still others informed me that Shakespeare (like Bergman?), had no "relevance" today because of his "obvious racism and sexism." Given this evidence of the best education money can buy, I'm hardly shocked to learn that none of this latest crop of Ivy Leaguers has heard of a film director who hasn't released a theatrical film in their lifetime - I mean, seriously, could anything important have happened prior to their lifetime? "They're still finding things out" about William the Conqueror and things of that nature, okay? Cut them some slack!

Sorry, no. Too much slack is what they have already been cut. Harvard students should at least have HEARD of Ingmar Bergman - or if they haven't, they should have the temerity to shut up and listen when he's mentioned. If it's "obnoxious" to insist on that, so be it. Small price to pay, etc. As for my "trashing of current film," here Burr is being dishonest - I'm only trashing his intern's ideas about current film. In my prior piece, I cited several recent films which belonged, if not in the Bergman/Antonioni pantheon, then certainly in their shadow - the films of Michael Haneke (whose Benny's Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance just came out on DVD), Kyoshi Kurosawa, Abbas Kiarostami, and especially Krzysztof Kieslowski, to name a few. But do you think Burr's Harvard students know these filmmakers either? I'd bet you they don't.

And therein lies the rub. Burr's kids don't know the great filmmakers of today, either - and for him to pretend that the giants of current film are Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson is simply flattery of their immature, self-centered taste. As for his argument that film is just bustin' out all over - strange, then, that our recent crop of great auteurs has seen so little glory, in fact is generally in a constant battle with obscurity. If Burr's forgiving thesis were anywhere near true, wouldn't at least Kieslowski (whose Decalogue - image above - may be the greatest film achievement of the last quarter century) be a name as well known as Bergman's or Antonioni's? But it's not.

So sorry, but I won't be coming to Burr's "Come Dressed as the Hip Soul of Harvard" party. I'll keep sticking to my obnoxious guns - guns which Burr himself, who clearly is no intellectual slouch, has long since set aside. For it's obvious Burr knows better than to imagine Wes Anderson is anywhere near the stature of Bergman or Antonioni - but simply put, his job depends (or at least he thinks it depends) on pretending otherwise.

Never trust anyone under thirty

Viewer and screen in Bergman's Wild Strawberries.

Perhaps the only thing more depressing than the concurrent deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni has been the critical reaction to their passing. Of course by-rote praises were published for their achievements; but there was also a wheedling insistence that they were no longer relevant. In a rambling, unfocused essay in the New York Times, A.O. Scott opined that "the cultural climate that made it possible to hail filmmakers as supreme artists has vanished for good," but he didn't seem to think that was such a bad thing, musing that "The institutions that keep art alive do so at the risk of embalming it." (And I suppose the institutions that embalm art also do so at the risk of keeping it alive!) More tellingly, in an unguarded moment of self-revelation, Scott admitted, "For generations that were not part of the great cinephile vanguard of the ’50s and ’60s, for those of us who grew up in the drab age in between the flourishing of the art houses and the rise of the Criterion Collection, the masterworks of modern cinema had lost their novelty." Ah. So it was novelty that drove Bergman's and Antonioni's reputations - a novelty which inevitably wore off. Even Lionel Trilling, apparently, would concur: "“Time has the effect of seeming to quiet the work of art,” Mr. Trilling observed, “domesticating it and making it into a classic, which is often another way of saying that it is an object of merely habitual regard."

Ugh. Why, oh why, does every middlebrow hack trying to elevate his discourse quote Trilling (at left)?? Perhaps it's because criticism is much, much more likely than art to be 'domesticated' by habitual regard into a cultural commodity. (Still, the poor guy must have spun in his grave so many times by now that he feels like an unassimilated dreidl!)

No doubt Lionel - and Tony - got bored by the classics in the classroom; how could they not? The dimming of their power at the lectern, however, has no connection to their longterm purchase on the soul (as long as it exists, that is). In short, classic status is only a liability to the critic/academic, not to the work itself (as the steady sales of so many classics attest). Of course Tony does hint at this problem, although he can't quite say it aloud: "More than that, the idea that a difficult work had special value — that being challenged was a distinct form of pleasure — enjoyed a prestige, at the time, that is almost unimaginable today. We would rather be teased than troubled, and the measure of artistic sophistication is cleverness rather than seriousness." This is a bit like being sung to sleep by someone who thinks you're already dead, isn't it? But never mind.

In the Boston Globe, (reprinted here) meanwhile, Ty Burr was crooning a similiar tune, if a bit more bluntly: "[After their deaths]The two filmmakers almost seemed relevant again. In truth, they're anything but." At first it's hard to imagine what Burr might mean: they're still relevant to me, for example - but then perhaps the point is that I'm not relevant, because (and I admit it's true) I'm old:

. . . as I put together the Globe obituary . . . one of our department interns — a 20-year-old student who knows her pop history better than most — admitted she had never actually seen any of his movies. After a pause, she confessed she had always confused Ingmar Bergman with Ingrid Bergman, and what did he actually do? The next day was worse: She hadn't heard of Antonioni at all.

Ingrid, Ingmar . . . let's call the whole thing off! And as for Michelangelo Antonispumoni, didn't he paint the Sixteenth Chapel? Gosh, you'd think maybe an arts department intern who'd never heard of either might be fired on the spot, but you'd have thought wrong! Of course not - as Burr assures us, "her only crime is youth" (umm, and ignorance, right?) - and after all, "today's artistic rebel is tomorrow's old fart."


Image as object in Blow-up.

Uh-huh. Never mind about young farts, I suppose. The trouble is, though, that it's hard to see either Bergman or Antonioni as "rebels" - indeed, parsing them in that way already does obeisance to a pop mindset they were generally opposed to (even in Blow-Up and Zabriskie Point, Antonioni deploys his pop soundtrack with a deadpan distance) - and robs them of their true significance. (And needless to say, once you've set up their reputations this way, it's oh so much easier to knock them down.) Essentially, they operated outside the boomer/Woodstock consensus that spawned A.O. Scott and Ty Burr. They had their social concerns, true, and both offered withering critiques of modern life, but what was essential to them was their internality; without a sensitivity to this, their movies can, indeed, seem at times like so much meandering pretentiousness. Of course perhaps that very internality has vanished in the audience - Burr gets closer to saying this outright than Scott does when he ventures that "The ironic detachment that the great post-war directors saw as a symptom of malaise has become the primary way of doing business." Indeed it has, Ty: what Bergman and Antoinioni were warning us we were becoming, our children have indeed become. But saying so might ruffle a few feathers out in Wellesley and Cohasset, mightn't it?

What's perhaps most horrifying about Burr's article is his quick sketch of what "an attuned young moviegoer should attend to": "a new Wes Anderson coming out in the fall and bleeding-edge videos to watch on YouTube, and that Irish rock musical you still haven't seen, not to mention the Korean horror flick — and wait, they've re-edited "Grindhouse" as two separate films for DVD."


Existential questions doggy style in Grindhouse.

Trust me, little intern - you can skip ALL that shit - Grindhouse, The Darjeeling Limited, The Host/D-Games, Once - none of them are really worth your time. In the same 12 hours or so (depending on how much sludge they've packed into Grindhouse 1 & 2), you can see The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, Shame, and L'eclisse, Blow-up, and The Passenger. OR, you can check out the later work of Bergman and Antonioni's true heirs - perhaps Blue or Red, or part of The Decalogue by Kieslowski (whose grave is at left - note the hands framing a shot at the top of the headstone); then you could move on to The Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami); Cure (Kyoshi Kurosawa); and Funny Games (Michael Haneke), or even Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón). You may not have a soul now, but even today, with a little time and effort, you can still get one at the movies.

Night of the Iguana

What I wouldn't give to nibble that . . .

I'm forever intrigued by how stereotypes keep coming back at us in deeper layers of deniability. Much like the aliens in Star Wars - who are barely-disguised "lazy blacks" and "greedy Jews" - gays and lesbians keep popping up in various costumes in arthouse product, from the butthole-lovin' "hillbillies" of Pulp Fiction to Judi Dench's lesbian martinet in the current Notes on a Scandal. Dame Dench's performance is, to be sure, a waspish marvel of control and confidence - much like the real-life performance of her character, "Barbara Covett," who might have popped out of Bunny Lake is Missing, or some other piece of sexual paranoia from the fifties or sixties. This dyke's New Age disguise, however, is that she's repressed, i.e., she's only disguised to herself, which enables the filmmakers to drape their queer villain in a queer kind of pity, even as she circles her prey (the dewy Cate Blanchett, who by the way has never looked more tempting).

Cate and Judi both play teachers at a rowdy working-class school in London; Cate's the free-spirited art teacher ("Sheba Hart", as in "Bathsheba Hart") who wants to nurture the kids' nature; Judi, by way of contrast, is the squat, speckled dragon lady who maintains order with something like Mussolini's alacrity. And if she doesn't quite breathe fire, this reptile at least spits poison - or rather dips her pen in it, to etch in her diary descriptions of her co-workers that you'd think would burn right through the paper.

These voice-overs are both ferociously funny, and, in their inhuman way, nastily accurate; they're the film's best feature (even if they drift off into boring "unreliable narrator" territory - a ploy which never works on the screen the way it does on the page). Covett ("covet," I know - and as for "Bathsheba Hart" - oh, please) has the eye of a surgeon, and the sympathy of a spider; to her, a kid with Down Syndrome is "a court jester," while rough-housing boys are "feral." She takes her scalpel even more skillfully to the boho Bathsheba and her privileged attitudes - although these opening salvos are only a cover for her growing infatuation.


Sheba, however, has her own secrets - she's carrying on an affair with a 15-year-old boy (the highly credible, 17-year-old Andrew Simpson, above). And when Barbara stumbles on Sheba en flagrante, it isn't long before her shock dissolves into the realization that now she has the means to blackmail her love object into a kind of intimacy - which, in the end, amounts to little more than some strokes on the arm and the occasional tearful clinch.

Sheba cooperates with Barbara's blackmail - only to sink back into her pattern of sexual abuse anyway. So she's the villain, right? Wrong! If you thought that, you'd soon be having "creative differences" with Patrick Eyre, the film's director, and Patrick Marber, its scenarist. As the film's tagline puts it so neatly, "One Woman's Mistake is Another's Opportunity," and audiences - and critics - have been only too happy to play along with this rather creative interpretation of its plot. Sweet, sophomoric Sheba, you see, "made a mistake" - it's Barbara who's committing a crime.

Take the Boston Globe's Ty Burr, for example - not someone I took for a homophobe, but check out his review. To him, Notes on a Scandal is a "highbrow suspense freakout" that "sickens your bones." He admits that "some might read (Dench's) character as lesbian caricature" - but oh, not him, even though he then writes: "There are moments of tension to make you crawl up the back of your seat." These turn out to be from a scene in which Barbara breaks down after the death of her cat. It's hardly Saw III.

Somehow Ty's forgotten that it's actually Sheba who destroys her family to blow a 15-year-old boy; to him, in fact, she's "a fool we understand, even as we shrink in disgust." Really? I just shrank in disgust. Many viewers (perhaps less infatuated with Cate Blanchett than Ty) might see Sheba as a far more dangerous predator than Barbara (imagine two men in these roles, playing off a 15-year-old girl). Courtney Love might have made great hay with this part - but instead we have the delectable Cate, a technically brilliant actress who's just too wholesome to ever limn the darkness of this Siouxsie and the Banshees fan who (intriguingly) married a man old enough to be her father. This is the characterization which should be carrying the movie - and which would provide far fresher material than the dusty web Dame Judi weaves (however brilliantly she does it). But if Cate were really to dig into the role (and yes, I'm sure she has the chops), the film's whole M.O. would collapse.

To paraphrase Churchill, then, Notes on a Scandal is an enigma wrapped in a cliché. Too bad audiences aren't seeing it that way.