THE FINE ART DINER

Safe House & Death In Art

2012-02-23T18:17:00.072-06:00

Safe House, starring Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds is a cross between The Bourne Identity and Training Day: Reynolds (Matt Weston) gives a great performance, with lots of emotional highs and lows, but never too much, emotional, but balanced, while Mr. Washington (Tobin Frost) is in top form, as usual. What is rewarding about the film are all the golden nuggets hidden, hither and thither, which rewards the viewer with a greater understanding of the stakes for both characters and the psychological conversions.

For example, when Matt is in a high-speed chase, and Tobin breaks out into the back seat from the trunk of the car, Tobin uses his handcuffs to try and strangle Matt; well, that's common sense, you might say, of course he's going to do that, but given Tobin's understanding of psychology holding Matt's neck with the handcuffs symbolizes how Matt is "yoked" to the CIA and whatever they tell him to believe.

Ryan Reynolds as Matt Weston, a low-level CIA employee wanting to get "into the filed" and out of the safe house he operates. When Tobin Frost, the highly prized asset the CIA has been trying to track for years, is suddenly on his way to Matt's safe house, it's the most action he's ever seen. The safe house is attacked, everyone killed, and Matt has to get Tobin out of there, knowing that someone on the inside, in the CIA, betrayed them and told the attackers where they could get Tobin.

"You crushed my windpipe," Matt tells Tobin, and symbolically, we could look at that as a favor: breathing symbolizes what it is that we take in, and Tobin, crushing it, isn't allowing Matt to "take in" the lies his superiors are feeding him. When Tobin has escaped Matt, and threatens to kill him with a bullet to the head, firing instead at the brick wall, it explodes Matt's ear drum; why? Because this whole time Tobin, just like Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, has been telling Matt what's going to happen and why, so it blocks out, symbolically, everything else the heads at the CIA tell Matt so all he hears is, "You've done a fine job, we'll take it from here," because the audience has had their ear drum exploded as well and that's all we hear. When we hear those words, just like Matt, we hear nothing else, because Tobin has programmed us to listen for those words as a clue of who not to trust and verification of Tobin's own psychological powers.

This is a great shot because, of course, the one in the driver's seat is the one driving, the one "steering" the relationship, and the one in the back seat is out of control. There is also the element of the rear view mirror (there are great uses made of reflections and glass throughout the film for all the characters): Tobin talking to Matt is also Tobin remembering himself as he was when he first started, so when Tobin tells Matt that "I only kill professionals," meaning that Matt isn't a professional so that's why Tobin isn't going to kill him, it also means (as I will elaborate upon below) that Matt isn't what Tobin is: a rogue murderer guilty of espionage and maybe a lot of other rotten stuff.

As I mentioned, there is a lot of violence in the film, but it's in a way that it materializes the inner-struggles of the characters, which in turn symbolizes the inner struggles of all these countries who are dealing with corruption in their intelligence offices. Towards the end, when Matt has successfully gotten Tobin to a safe house to await extraction, he has a brutal fight with the safe house keeper, Keller who is a killer. Keller stabs Matt with a large shard of glass in his stomach, symbolizing how "reflecting" upon the events, and "digesting" what has happened, has wounded Matt's ability to trust.

What is it that sets off the whole chain of events? Tobin obtains a file of all the crooked intelligence officers in the world, and one of them, pictured above, is not happy about being on Tobin's laundry list and will do anything to kill Tobin and delete the list, which is exactly the kind of behavior which landed them on the list to begin with.

This wound has an interesting effect, the kind of effect that can only happen in art: he becomes stronger because of it. The last person in the world that should be set up to kill Matt is Keller, but that's exactly who tries to do Matt in. Although it looks like Matt could die from this wound--I certainly didn't expect to see him alive in the next scene--it's only after this wound that Matt is trusted by Tobin with what is in the file that Tobin is carrying. It's not so much that Matt can take this kind of injury that makes him worthy of Tobin's trust, it's that this wound heals previous wounds that was keeping Matt from applying his wisdom and own insight into human nature so he can finish this assignment.

David Barlow has a "low" "bar." Played by Brendan Gleeson, Barlow is Matt's mentor in the CIA and trying to get him a better posting and is even keeping the rest of the CIA from taking action against Matt for "going rogue" with Tobin because Matt's not following orders. When they meet last, Matt knows Barlow's name is on the list and Matt has become world-wise enough to know that Tobin is right about him.

But let's talk about Tobin.
When Tobin ditches Matt and gets to a hotel room, before he goes to get the forged papers, he shaves, cuts his hair and removes the file he injected into his stomach. This tells us that, besides just changing his identity so he won't be so easy to recognize, he's also changing his attitude: shaving of hair means a shedding of the animal instincts and passions, so Tobin is "reflecting more" (he's looking in the mirror while shaving) and going to try to behave differently so he doesn't become like the men on the laundry list he's been caring inside of him (like Matt being stabbed with the shard of glass and digesting everything that has happened to him).

It's rather ironic that the person who will give Tobin a false identity is also the only person who knows the real Tobin. Previously, in the soccer stadium, Tobin wore a security outfit, and that's pretty accurate, because Tobin is only dressing up to be in the security business, he's too corrupt to be able to administer justice fairly.

When Tobin first gets shot, he's in a green room, and the green wall is a sign of decay, because it's while Tobin is going down the stairs (a digression) that he gets shot: this is the moment we know that Tobin isn't going to make it through the rest of the film, because he is no better than the guys he's bringing to justice. But we see this again when Tobin actually dies. Earlier in the film, Carlos the document forger, calls Tobin "The black Dorian Gray," and, Dorian Gray, of course, is from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, a young man who sells his soul to commit all kinds of sin, but a portrait takes on the weight of the sin leaving Dorian to continue looking young, until he meets his portrait.

Just before he's fatally shot.

This is what the film does really well: when David Barlow comes out, his face half-blown off by a car explosion (which lets us know that his "mask of innocence" has been blown) this is the moment when "the black Dorian Gray" meets his portrait, because Barlow's shot is fatal. When Tobin slumps down against the wall, he tells Matt, "Be better than me," blood dribbles out of his mouth and he dies, we know that blood coming out of his mouth is the price for all the lies that he has told because he keeps telling Matt that you learn to lie automatically as if the lies were really the truth, and that's why Tobin dies: he's too bad to enforce justice, he's not strong enough to withstand the shot. There is a ray of hope, though, because the walls are yellow where he dies, suggesting that Matt was a good influence and Tobin had an interior repentance.

Regrettably, Matt doesn't take Tobin's advice.
While Matt successfully exposes the corrupt heads of intelligence organizations around the world, he lies to the CIA chief Harlan Whitford that Tobin never mentioned a file to him, so Matt's telling lies exactly as Tobin predicted he would. The meaning of Safe House, then is that we are all the house, and the truth has to be safe within us or the truth doesn't actually exist anywhere. If we, like the CIA, "aren't interested in the truth anymore," than we ourselves are not safe houses and can't expect that of anyone else. When Matt goes to Paris to meet up with his girlfriend, Ana, the last shot of Matt suggest Mission Impossible, and the barriers of lies and mistrust that would always come between them will make Matt nothing more than a shadow because he has all ready started to tell the lies.

More Trailers

2012-02-23T11:01:00.000-06:00

I really try to keep things organized, however, I have found even more trailers than what I posted Ash Wednesday and, instead of just tacking onto that post, decided to make a separate one. If you are looking forward to The Avengers, you may enjoy watching the road to making The Avengers and behind the scenes clips.

I am not going to say a whole lot about these clips because I have just seen Chronicle and Safe House, so in addition to getting up the posts for Ghost Rider 2 and This Means War, I have a lot on my plate that I am wanting to dish out to you. Also, in getting my research ready for The Raven, I am trying to figure out what to read before hand; I have seen, in the trailer, the cover for Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Raven; I am expecting the film to reference The Cask of Amontillado although I have not seen a clear indication of it in the trailer. I have, however, not the slightest idea which of his stories is about a person being shoved up the chimney; if anyone knows other works the film is going to invoke, please leave a comment or drop me an email, it would really cut down on my research time. I will be going over all these works so that, going in, we will be the informed viewers.
Yet another end of the world film, 4:44 Last Day On Earth is being released in Argentina on June 14:

The Woman In the Fifth was released in France last November, and I don't know if it has a US/UK release date or not, but it at least might make a good movie night at home if not:

Dark Tide does not have a release date at this point, but the synopsis is interesting: "A professional diver tutor Brady returns to deep waters after nine years following an almost fatal encounter with a great white shark, bringing a happy couple Kate and Jeff. However, before they know it they discover that the nightmare from the deep is still lurking in the deep, more carnivorous and hungry than ever." Because of the symbolism of sharks, this could easily translate to the economy and the American dream, but, as always, we won't know until we watch it:

Position Among the Stars is the final edition of a trilogy documentaries about the poor in the Philippines and follows a poor, elderly Christian woman; just watch this:

I have gathered some information that libraries are showing all three, so if you are unable to get it, check your local branch. On a somewhat similar vein, Hadewijch, about a young girl who is not allowed to become a nun, joins a Muslim group; the film explores the difference between faith and fanatics (I don't think this is something I would normally watch myself, so if you have seen it, let us know what you think):

And after all that serious stuff, here's a trailer that pretty much describes one of my typical days, Ice Age 4 Continental Drift set for a June release:

In the Cold Light of Day is set for an April 6 release; what we always need to remember about artistic depictions of father-son relationships, is that it's usually the "founding father" that is being represented, and the son is the younger generation, either validating the older generation or overthrowing it:

Guy Pearce's newest film, Lockout, loosely based on the 1981 Kurt Russell thriller Escape From New York City, and also set for an April release date, gives us some similar threads that we are going to find in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, with the escaped convicts, and like Man on a Ledge, gives us a wrongly convicted man:

I am not saying that this will be a good film, but it may highlight some of the messages that we are seeing in other films. Finally, besides the Oscars being this Sunday, out on DVD this week is Martha Marcy May Marlene, J. Edgar, Tower Heist and London Boulevard, all of which I have reviewed on this blog with the exception of London Boulevard, which I will now have to watch because it features the star of the new 300 sequel, Battle of Artemisia. I am going to be getting posts up continually this weekend to get caught up on all that I have seen this week, so keep checking back!

Christian Economics & The Secret World of Arrietty

2012-02-22T16:27:00.000-06:00

The Secret World of Arrietty, while based on familiar childhood tales and fantasies, is very much an adult film, as is often the case. While I predicted films of 2012 would be about class-warfare, I didn't imagine that such a simple but wholesome view of a capitalist society would present itself with so much dignity and grace, yet The Secret World of Arrietty does just that.

What are the factors leading to an economic interpretation of this film? Primarily it's the presence of "little people" throughout films this year which allows an economic status to be associated with them, e.g., Mirror, Mirror shows Snow White commanding an army of "little warriors," and Jack the Giant Killer shows Jack being the "little person" in the land of giants, and amongst the giant cyclops, Perseus is a little person in Wrath of the Titans; there is also the dwarfs who form Snow White's army in Snow White and the Huntsman and, of course, the Hobbits in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. The "little people," then, can be understood as the smallest in society, those who are not the economic giants ruling a capitalist society.
So, in 2012, size matters.

This is a doll's house made for the little people, the Borrowers. It was specifically made for them, the furniture hand-crafted by an English furniture maker and everything works perfectly. When Arrietty's father takes her on her first borrowing, and through this house, he tells her that it's not for them, it's a doll's house, and Borrowers are not toys. Shawn decides to take the custom made kitchen and give it as a gift to the Borrowers; by this time, however, they have decided that they need to move and will not take any of the items Shawn has given them. Why? This plays an important role in understanding the "exchange" that takes place in economics and, specifically, Christianity. At this point, Shawn doesn't understand what a "borrower" is because he hasn't been re-paid for what they have borrowed from him, so to Shawn, he is freely giving them something but he doesn't understand the "exchange rate" that will prompt Arrietty to give him her gift.

But what does a Christian economics mean?
Many may instantly think of G.K. Chesterton's Distributionism, which defends private ownership of property but is against really big corporations keeping the means of production all to itself (it's known as a "third way" between socialism and capitalism). But that's not what I am talking about, and I don't think it's even the conversation needed right now, especially as we are about to get snow-balled with class-warfare films. Rather, The Secret World of Arrietty provides us with a reminder of what it is that the poorest of the poor contribute to our society and not just what it costs to maintain them. This is a clip explaining what "borrowers" are:

I'm sure you're saying, that's nice, but what does this have to do with a Christian economics?
In every work of art, there's an element I call the "God factor," and it's whether or not the universe the artwork creates includes God or not; The Secret World of Arrietty provides two important clues that, in a world where there are people the size of leaves, so, too, there is God. First, the mother prays to God and asks that He protect Arrietty and her father when they go on their borrowing; secondly, the mother's name is Homily, which is what a sermon is called that provides instruction. Arrietty itself is a German form of the name Harriet and means "home ruler," so we have The Secret World of Arrietty existing within the same world that God as we know Him also exists.

Hair symbolizes our thoughts, so for Arrietty pulling her hair back in her clip means that she is disciplining how she thinks, specifically, about humans; that's why it is such a precious gift she gives to Shawn when she leaves, it's not the clip itself, rather, that she no longer "constrains" her thoughts on how humans are, but her thoughts have been freed by the friendship they have shared.

In both the Book of Job and the Gospels, we are provided with an understanding of why there are poor people amongst us: the poor, and those who are in need, bring out the best in us. When, like Job, we see someone in need, and we use the blessings that God has given us to alleviate their sufferings and wants, we are fulfilling Christ's command to "Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect" because then we are loving perfectly, as God loves us. All of us, at some point in time, are in need of something, including love, grace, salvation, forgiveness for our sins, a friend, food, money, clothes, shelter; they are called "borrowers" because they take what they need, and then they return it. Similarly, God gives us blessings on the understanding that we will give Him glory for it in some way: we borrow grace, for example, to pray for someone who will not pray for themselves; we borrow the financial blessings God gives us to pass onto the Church and those in need because He first gave to us in our need. Not returning these things means that we are not borrowers, but thieves.

Shawn is the main character, apart from Arrietty who has come to this house to rest before an important heart operation that he is certain will fail and result in his death. His parents, due to their divorce and the demands of their careers, cannot be there to take care of him so his Aunt Jessica is looking after him. Shawn's parents' neglect of him dehumanizes Shawn whereas Arrietty's parents' care and concern for her validates and verifies Arrietty's humanity; by caring for and protecting Arrietty and her family, Shawn reclaims his humanity because when we recognize the humanity in others, our own humanity comes out, and when we treat others like animals or sub-humans, we lose our humanity. When we do unto others as we would want done unto us, we are the ones who benefit the most.

What is it that the Borrowers return?
It's Arrietty who gives Shawn something more valuable than anything in the world: the will to fight his illness and get better. Before meeting Arrietty, Shawn seemed resigned to death that would result from the failure of his heart surgery either immediately or soon after wards. Arrietty, by her example, gives Shawn hope, and there is no price that can be put on that. But The Secret World of Arrietty gives us a choice: we can look at them as borrowers, that they do serve a useful role in society, or we can look at them as thieves, as Hara the maid does in this clip:

My relatives are found of quoting the Bible verse that "Those who do not work shall not eat," and using that as a basis for their economic and tax programs; we know from the the Desert Fathers that it was the "work of salvation," and the work of the soul that would bring the food of spiritual consolation and wisdom, it had nothing to do with the way society was supposed to create it's social programs.

The cat Nina and Arrietty as she is leaving to find her new home. The reason the mother always thinks the cat ate her husband is because she thinks the cat doesn't realize their humanity (the cat, in this instance, is a symbol of the fat cats, the wealthy) and they will swallow up everything they can get. As the film progresses, and Arrietty increasingly shows fearlessness, it's because she's more confident in her being, her importance, her place in the universe.

It's not just that Jesus Christ chose to be poor Himself, but the way great people have chose to respond to the poor and validate their dignity and needs: what would the world be like without Mother Theresa? Without St. Francis of Assisi? St. Vincent de Paul? St. Thomas Aquinas is my patron saint, and when I converted, one of the first prayers I learned was when St. Thomas asked God to give him the grace to share with others what God had given to him, and the humility to ask others to share with him what he needed, and I try to remember that everyday.

Spiller, another borrower the family meets. We can say that there is an economic basis to borrowing because just as the family has borrowed, so now they are wanting to share with Spiller to have him for tea and dinner. One might say, how is sugar and cookies essential for survival? Because we all need a bit of the "sweet life" in order to survive and remember that we are humans, not beasts of burden. In a very innocent way, The Secret World of Arrietty is very much a romance between Shawn and Arrietty that reflects their different "class standing," her being from a "lower class" and he being from the upper class. When Arrietty's family leaves, Arrietty's affections seem to move to Spiller next, who--being something of a wild man of the forest--would be on a "lower" economic status than herself, but he still shares with her the berries and his knowledge to get them to safety. We all have something to give, and we all have something we need.

In conclusion, The Secret World Of Arrietty provides us with a unique understanding of what it means to live with others, but also challenges us as to who will "rule our home": either we will be dominated by the thought that the poor are thieves or that they are borrowers who play a special, though mysterious, role in society. When Shawn first sees Arrietty, she drops the sugar cube that her mother requested they bring back; why? When we see someone who is homeless or obviously in need, and our eyes meet their eyes, our souls meets their soul, and either we acknowledge them or we dismiss them, and being used to being dismissed and dehumanized, the borrowers have lost that sweetness from life, their dignity that we all need to survive. Albert Einstein said, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts," and when it comes to our fellow humans, we must remember that there is not a single person who does not count.
(Below is the closing song and video you might enjoy):

A Blessed Ash Wednesday & Film News

2012-02-22T11:11:00.001-06:00

Ash Wednesday, 1881, Falat Julian Popielec.

A most blessed Ash Wednesday to all of you, and, for those not participating in the ceremony of ashes, please pray for us who are entering into a state of penance, prayer and fasting, that we will be faithful to our vows and the Lord will bless us with grace during this time.
There has been a lot of new film news coming out, so I just want to keep you in the know with these tidbits and a few new trailers I have found.

James Bond with beard, first production still released from newest Bond Skyfall set--at this time--for release in October. What does this tell us about Bond? We know that men's facial hair can mean two things: first, a digression into the animal appetites (especially a beard because it draws attention to the mouth which is symbolic of the appetites) because shaving is a sign of the civilized, so not shaving is a sign of the uncivilized (I am speaking in purely artistic terms here, guys). But the other possible meaning is the exact opposite: a sign of growing spirituality and introversion/interiorism. Because the growing of a beard can mean the renunciation of the world, rather than the succumbing to it (think of St. John the Baptist, do you think he shaved?), Bond "letting his hair down," so to speak, may be going deeper into himself. While Skyfall has nothing to do with Casino Royale or Quantum of Solace, this would be a good time for the British super-hero to do some soul-searching.

"It struck me that it is still possible to make a big, glamourous, fabulous, escapist movie and still say something about the world we're living in" says Sam Mendes, newest director of James Bond's Skyfall set for release in October; well, that's what I have been saying all along and I am anxiously awaiting the first trailers to be released! The only other pictures besides the one above released so far thus is Bond sitting on the edge of a swimming pool and M (Judi Dench) in her office with cameramen behind her.

Pablo Picasso (left) and Antonio Banderas (right).

Antonio Banderas is set to play fellow-Spaniard Pablo Picasso in a new film called 33 Days about the emotional turmoil while painting the enormous canvas Guernica. Banderas is also starring in Black Gold about warring Arabs trying to get control over a strip of desert with large oil reserves beneath. Filming for the anticipated Paradise Lost, based on the John Milton poem, and spear-headed by Bradley Cooper, is dead; reasons sited is that the war between heaven and hell would have been too expensive to film... on the other hand, there is a sequel being made to the Spartan film 300 called 300: Battle of Artemisia starring Jamie Blackley (London Boulevard, Snow White and the Huntsman).

Cherlize Theron in Snow White and the Huntsman

Here are a few trailers I have picked up since the last posting on upcoming films, including Damsels In Distress: "A trio of girls set out to change the male-dominated environment of the Seven Oaks college campus, and to rescue their fellow students from depression, grunge and low standards of every kind." It's set for an April release in New Zealand.

Set for release June 22, Seeking a freind For the End of the World gives us another end-of-the-world scenario based on a meteor. After his wife leaves him in a panic, he goes after an old sweetheart inadvertently aided by a neighbor who messes up his plans:

Another end-of-the-world trailer is for Ridley Scott's Prometheus set for a June release; I just don't trust Ridley Scott, and the limited information from the trailer makes me dis-trust him even more, but he has done a nice job of incorporating noise (as an artistic medium) into the trailer along with the static (something is being said that we are not going to be able to hear or understand).

I am working to get posts up for The Secret World of Arrietty, Ghost Rider 2 and This Means War. Have a blessed day!

The Vow & Obamacare

2012-02-21T10:27:00.000-06:00

I had really high hopes for The Vow, but they was quickly dashed: it is, in short, a political platform for President Obama's re-election. It takes place in Chicago, where he is from. After Paige's memory loss (Rachel McAdams) she tells Leo (Channing Tatum) that she doesn't even know who the President is and he tells her that it's Obama; she replies, "The Senator?" and he tells her that she voted for him. When it's obvious that Paige is not falling back in love with Leo after the "crash," which should be understood as the economic crash of 2008, Bill Thornton (Sam Neill), Paige's father, tells Leo that he should get a divorce from her: since they didn't have health care (read: Obamacare) he's now drowning in debt and he can't save their marriage.

Paige symbolizes voters who "wedded" themselves to the Obama Administration but then lost the memory of why they voted for him. The Vow suggests that, just as Paige slowly starts to put her life back together the same way she did before the accident, so she would also vote for Obama again and the country should be like Paige, realizing that just as Paige's family tried to capitalize on her accident to get her back with them, so Republicans are trying to capitalize on Obama's failures as a president to get voters back with them: just as Paige belongs with Leo, so voters belong with Obama. Obama, like Leo, is trying to get that love back that has been lost through, what he might call "accidents" but what Republicans call, "incompetence." Personally, I am in no way a supporter of Obama, but The Vow is reaching out to anyone who might have "accidentally" lost their love for him and he now wants another four years to make them fall back in love with him.

Blight Of Nature: Underworld Awakening

2012-02-20T12:40:00.000-06:00

It would really be great if the aesthetic and cool factor of the Underworld franchise could be harnessed for characters who actually care about humans instead of just feeding off them. Alas, the problem with Underworld: Awakening is the same as with all previous editions of the story: we are asked to identify with a hero who hates us.

Selene almost always has weapons and that illusion of power is very appealing to people who do not constantly make an investment of faith and leave their lives up to God. I will not hesitate to confess that I wish I could take an axe and storm Congress like the Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer trailer, but the kind of power and action Selene takes in the Underworld series is not the kind of action that Christians are called to take, so the element of power and control vampires seemingly have undermines the most basic tenants of Christian faith when we are called to pray and have faith in God and leave vengeance to him (and granted, other films do this as well, GI Joe Retaliation will do this, for example, but there is a difference, a very fine line between sitting back and doing nothing and being a willing instrument of God's grace and taking power into your own hands and the later is what Underworld and like films do and why Christians have to be vigilant about them).

So, why should we care?
I'm not, by any means, saying, go out and see this film so you can expose yourself to it and feel the eroding in your soul; but Hollywood invested $70 million dollars to make this film, and it hasn't even grossed $60 million worldwide (which is the good news, maybe they will stop making them). That's an enormous amount of money to invest in a venture but, given the success of films such as Twilight and TV shows like Being Human, why wouldn't Hollywood producers think they could make money off this?

This is a great shot because it really provides the information that we need about this heroine with whom we are asked to sympathize with and identify. Please note her hair: hair is symbolic of the thoughts, it visualizes how our thoughts are holding together and taking shape; her hair is separating (the separate strands by her face that have been gelled to hold them together and apart from the rest of her hair), which is exactly how she thinks. Throughout the entire series, Selene makes up the rules as she goes along, she has no guiding principles and nothing is sacred to her, her thoughts are as separate and disparate as her hairstyle.

Why does American society so easily become entranced with vampires?
Because vampires have a threefold ingredient list making them appealing to younger people and people who have no spiritual grounding in their lives: first, their is usually some element of glamor; secondly, they appear to have power and, thirdly, vampires manage to find a dark place in a person's soul and bring that out, making the audience member think that they have vampire tendencies because sometimes they feel like outcasts or lonely (I did some posts on vampires last October and this post will build upon those; please see For the Dead Travel Fast: Dracula, The Undead: Nosferatu, The Children Of the Night: Dracula 1931, False Light: Interview With the Vampire).

Kate Beckinsale is a very beautiful woman, and has been named some men's magazine's most desirable woman in the world before and her beauty contributes to the aesthetic and glamor of the vampire (just as Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas and Brad Pitt contributed their good looks to the aesthetic in Interview With the Vampire). The different elements of Selene's outfit gives us a better understanding of how un-connected her thoughts and beliefs are. She wears a corset, military style boots and a black S & M leather body suit. While the corset is meant to emphasize her femininity, or at least her sex appeal, her boots are meant to show that she has a masculine will (feet symbolize the will) and in Selene's case, we know that she's "a warrior" because that is her reputation and legacy, which usually belongs to a man. Lastly, her body suit, tight and slick, puts her in a sexually dominating position above males. In short, Selene is a Frankenstein monster of a vampire and so is her code of conduct which Thomas (Charles Dance), the leader of a coven of vampires, points out.

We have to remember: a vampire is a vampire is a vampire.
Symbolically, a vampire drinks the blood of humans, because those humans have failed to drink the blood of Christ and find for themselves eternal life in the Light of God. Instead, these films will show the damned souls as living a comfortable life, usually in a large castle or manor house, and with great wealth wearing cool clothes, drinking blood from expensive crystal glasses and they are always beautiful and eternally young. Even when the "vampire self" comes out in Underworld, it retains that semblance of beauty and power and makes the damned life desirable.

Please note her eyes, which, beside a slight elongation of the canine teeth, are the only indications that the vampire self is taking over. Why are vampires always beautiful? We could say it's an extension of the deadly sin of vanity: because they were so beautiful physically, they didn't care how they looked spiritually, and hence they were open to becoming evil because their main priority was to stay looking beautiful, not gain eternal life. What Underworld does differently than say, Van Helsing, is that in Van Helsingthe thin veil of glamor is torn asunder and we see them how they really are: demons from hell.

Vampires appear to be powerful.
I do not deny that evil has power (it most certainly does) something I will discuss at length in my next posting on Ghost Rider, but there is a strong difference between the power--as in the type of power of Good and the Soul that is devoid of evil that we find in Mary and the saints--and earthly that its use not only corrupts but leads to damnation (because you are use to using it to protect yourself and get what you want, so you completely depend on it and do everything you have to to keep it as if it were life itself). In Underworld, Selene can jump, fight, shoot guns, run fast, but what's the point, really? In an isolated context, this seems like cool stuff, but when compared to the soul's loss of grace, it is nothing, but that is never brought out.

The child of Selene and Michael, a hybrid vampire-werewolf, Eve. The fight for her really comes down to a power struggle in the film because Eve is supposed to be the most powerful of them all.

Lastly, vampires exhibit human characteristics which "feed on" the dark places within our souls to forge a bond with them so we start to identify with them and ultimately, want to become like them, they become role models. Vampires are demons, and that is all there is to it hence, they no more exhibit human characteristics than the heavenly angels who watch over us because both sets of angels are pure spirit that have nothing earthly about them. Selene, very much, is an evil Christ figure, the kind of Christ figure that Judas Iscariot wanted: God who would come down and fight, with swords and guns, our political and personal battles and make us rulers over the earthly world. These are people who reject the Good Shepherd, the Crucified One, the Eucharist and when we allow ourselves to be tempted by these visions of power, so do we.

In the closing lines, which are included in the trailer above, Selene prophecies that not only will the vampires survive in the world, but reclaim the world back from humans. Riding like a parasite upon a weak and tragic love story that would be familiar to humans, Underworld and other vampire films package anti-Christian practices and temptations to lure us away from our faith and the difficult path of eternal life. The problem is, all too often it works. If we know the aesthetic and the techniques, we can show others--especially our children--why these films are full of poison that must be rejected by Christians. It's not enough to say, "Don't watch that because I told you," by articulating the strategies of these films, we will teach others to recognize the forbidden fruit, the sugar-coating they put on evil, and why it means only death for us.

What I Saw This Weekend

2012-02-20T09:57:00.000-06:00

I got in three films this weekend: Underworld: Awakening, which was released a while ago, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance which came out this weekend and also released this weekend, This Means War. Once upon a time, I thought that critics were paid to say that a film was good regardless of how bad it was; now, I know from empirical evidence, that you can judge the amount of morality in a film by how much critics hate it. While Underworld Awakening was exactly what I was expecting, Ghost Rider was better than what I thought it would be, but very much like Underworld; This Means War, however, was much better than what I was expecting (I just don't like rom-coms) and it's because of the morality that critics don't like it. I will be getting those posts up asap and tweeting them when they are up!

Why does this shot of Selene (Kate Becksindale) say everything we need to know about her?

Promiscuity & Gender in the 1950s: The Thing From Another World

2012-02-17T16:33:00.000-06:00

Howard Hawks' 1951 Sci-Fi essential The Thing From Another World contains what is probably the most important dialogue trapped in celluloid during the 1950s between Nikki Nicholson (Margaret Sheridan) and Captain Patrick Hendry (Kenneth Tobey). Using his sophisticated trademark techniques, (the uncredited director) Hawks gives us an alien, "The Thing" (James Arness) who is a psychoanalytic projection for two characters, Pat Hendry and scientist Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) providing Sci-Fi fans with a unique and high-stakes battle between dominant forms of masculinity; Nikki, however, aptly shows us the feminine gender crossing over into the masculine, numerous times and the consequences for not only women but men as well.

What I believe to be the most important conversation in film of the 1950s between Pat Hendry and Nikki Nicholson:
Pat: That was a dirty trick you played.
Nikki: Now, Pat, don't lose your temper.
Pat: Why did you do it? Just tell me why.
Nikki: Well, your legs aren't very pretty.
Pat: You didn't have to write a note and put it on my chest. Plenty of people got up before I did.
Nikki: I'm sorry, Pat.

The scene wherein this conversation takes place.

Pat: Six people read it before I woke up. Now the whole Air Force is laughing at me.
Nikki: Not so loud. They'll hear.
Pat: They probably all ready heard. The only place it hasn't been is on a billboard.
Nikki: Oh, I didn't know you had such a nasty temper. Now, Pat, just be careful. Now take it easy. Now wait a minute. We had a lot of fun when you were up here. Then when you asked me down to Anchorage, you deliberately fed me a lot of--
Pat: Tell me something, did you really drink all those drinks?
Nikki: Hm-mm.
Pat: You didn't throw any away? Not a one?
Nikki: No.
Pat: Holy cat. I thought I was good. And another thing, why did you leave? When I woke up in the morning you were gone."
Nikki: "I told you I had to take that cargo plane back here."

This title card is done well: the light coming through the darkness to form the words is like certain images in the film coming through the darkness of plot and history to reveal to us who is the thing and where this other world is.

Captain Hendry and Nikki have had a sexual affair without being married, and everyone in the Air Force knows about it. "When I woke up you were gone," clearly indicates that they spent the night together, after both being heavily intoxicated. To say the least, this kind of expose in the 1950s--why it might have become common place in practice--was still scandalous to mention so abruptly in film, but it is this exact moment that gives birth to the whole rest of the film. To know someone in the Biblical sense (to have sexual relations with them) without knowing them ("My," Nikki says to Pat, "you have a nasty temper" because she's just now finding this out, that is, coming to know him) is to create a Frankenstein monster of them, choosing what you know and don't know about them, and that is why The Thing, when finally destroyed and shriveled up into nothing, is electrocuted like Frankenstein's monster.

The opening shot of the film, the Officers' club in Anchorage. It's interesting because when we first meet Pat Hendry, he's playing cards, poker, specifically, and the comment is made, "Everyone knows you can't fool the captain unless you're a woman" and Pat ends up winning that hand; when he meets with Nikki, however, he says, "That was a dirty trick you played," and the correlation between playing cards and playing a trick shows us what his friends were thinking about.

When you are watching the film, the first style-defining characteristic to sit it apart from other films is the dialogue: Hawks doesn't hesitate to have several people talking at once, over each other, interrupting, and this is an employment of noise (just like Steven Soderbergh in Contagion and Christopher Nolan in the upcoming Dark Knight Rises). There are several people talking, for example, during the opening card game in the officers' club, and that reflects how we, the viewers will be listening to the film: we won't hear everything that is being said because we will get distracted or not understand what is trying to be communicated. But, with several viewings and careful attention, we can, like gold miners, separate everything out and find the golden nuggets.

The group has found a flying saucer and groups around the ice-enclosed shape to distinguish its boundaries. However, what is really "alien" about this shape is that it's a source of life: it's shaped, with the tail, just like male sperm. What's the purpose? The "passenger" from this "sperm shaped craft," was thrown out, meaning that the purpose, nature and gift that a man's sperm is has been separated from his very self and destroyed because he looks at it merely as an aspect of the sexual instead of the vehicle of life. When a man denies the importance of his sperm, i.e., he gets separated from it like the passenger and the craft, he becomes a vegetable just like The Thing because he forgets his spiritual calling and the great dignity of his physical body.

As I said, The Thing is a psychological projection for two characters in the film, Pat Hendry and Dr. Carrington, because both men, while seemingly different, actually exhibit similar characteristics, but the battle of The Thing gives us an idea about their qualities and values. The Thing is a walking vegetable able to regenerate itself and it lives on blood. Its purpose is to make more of itself.

When they first meet The Thing face to face in the greenhouse. The greenhouse could be a polar symbol for the Garden of Eden, since mention is made of keeping it locked up because the Eskimos like to steal the strawberries (the stolen fruit in Eden). This is likened to Pat stealing sexual favors from Nikki although they are not married. As in Them! when it's Dr. Patricia Medford who first sees the giant ants, so we know to correlate the ants as a symbol for her, in The Thing From Another World it's Captain Pat Hendry who sees it so we know to correlate The Thing with him.

The qualities Pat and The Thing share is self-dehumanization. Pat's illicit affair with Nikki not only dehumanizes himself--because he has failed to treat his own body with respect (which includes getting really drunk)--but he has dehumanized himself before the entire Air Force by his behavior which they all know about. Pat wanting to have a sexual relationship with Nikki, but not a committed sexual relationship, is the prominent feature Pat shares with The Thing because it is by our committed relationships that our own humanity is not only expressed, but perfected. Without a doubt, this is a theme in the film because the day The Thing lands is November 1, All Saints' Day and the day Pat arrives at the pole is All Souls' Day November 2. Scott the newspaper man (Douglas Spencer) mentions two Biblical references: the parting of the Red Sea by Moses and Noah's Ark.

When Pat tries to get the door closed on The Thing, he gets its arm stuck in the door. It's in the dog attack that the arm is completely torn off. Symbolically, for both Pat and Dr. Carrington, the dogs attacking are (for Pat) his authority being attacked by the scientist who disagree with him and so undermine his strength as a Captain and for Dr. Carrington, his authority as a Nobel Prize winner is undermined by Pat not allowing him to examine The Thing.

The landing of the craft on All Saints' Day acts as the collision between the spiritual and earthly realms, the natural and the supernatural, reminding us that we are all called to be great saints and the story contained within the film is going to show us how to avoid becoming a vegetable instead. The reason Scott mentions the parting of the Red Sea in conjunction with the space craft discovery is because every man is called upon by God to be like Moses and Noah, to serve the Lord and thereby save the world, not be monsters and aliens who destroy it by their immoral behavior. The parting of the Red Sea was God leading his people from the bondage of sin to be his own (foreshadowing Christ leading us by the Crucifixion).

The Thing bound by ice. It actually looks like a child, still in the mother's womb, but because we know this monster is a projection of Pat, we could say that because Nikki is being an "unnatural woman," so she has an unnatural womb, and by failing in her femininity she fails to help Pat be the man he was called to be. So instead of the womb being a warm place, it is ice cold because there is the lack of the warmth of love just the heat of lust.

Then, Scott mentions in his closing news cast that, just as Noah saved the world from the flood by the ark, so they have saved humanity by the arc of electricity. Why did God destroy the world and only leave Noah to survive? Because of the flood of sinfulness into the world caused by mankind. The electricity that was used in Frankenstein to give the creature life is used in The Thing From Another World to take false life so genuine life can thrive.
What does that mean?

There is another interesting dimension connecting Pat to The Thing: his arms. When he and Nikki are talking about her visit to Anchorage, she says that his arms were like an octopuses' because they were all over her. The Thing has his arm torn off and is studied by the doctors and realized to be vegetable, not animal. This relates to Pat because instead of using his arms to defend Nikki and love her (genuinely) he abused his strength (again) to fuel his appetites instead of using the impetus of his emotions, his attraction to Nikki, to start a deep and meaningful relationship with her (which he attempts throughout the rest of the film).

"False life" is a standard of living according to the world, the idea of "living it up," and doing what you want to, going with your appetites; "genuine life" is a life lived according to the spirit, not the flesh, and by acknowledging the spirit, we acknowledge the needs of the spirit: God, prayer, the sacraments and abstaining from sin which destroys grace within us and our very identity (because God is our creator, not Satan, God wants us to fulfill our destiny and the potential of our soul, whereas Satan wants to ruin and destroy our identity just as his was destroyed when he revolted against God). This brings us to how The Thing is also a projection of Dr. Carrington. He says: "Knowledge is more important than life," and elsewhere, " We've only one excuse for existing. To think. To find out. To learn. . . . nothing counts except our thinking. We've thought our way into nature, we've split the atom," and then Eddie says, "That sure made the world happy, didn't it?" which references, again, the atomic bomb.

Carrington trying to "make friends" with The Thing.

Carrington, by denying the spiritual aspect of man's existence (we live for God and eternal salvation, not just to think) is also making man into a vegetable the same way that Pat is making himself into a vegetable by not having a meaningful relationship with Nikki. The Thing From Another World, then, is a man who is neither spiritual nor emotional, and exists in a world that is very much what the earth is becoming as the number of people continues to increase who exhibit these characteristics. Of The Thing's "seed pod reproduction" (as opposed to sexual reproduction), Dr. Carrington says, "No pain or pleasure as we know it. No emotions, no heart. Our superior, our superior in every way." And that is false, because our emotions are a gift from God (they can be a curse when we fail to use them appropriately or develop them into maturity) but our emotions are one of the ways that God guides us through life. Carrington, surely an atheist by the way he talks, wants humans who have no emotions, no pleasure, no pain, no relationships: vegetables.

The pods that Carrington grew from samples taken from The Thing's hand that was chewed off by the dogs. He planted them and gave them plasma to grow them and the scientists can listen to them breathing with a stethoscope: "Almost like the wail of a newborn child that is hungry." If The Thing is like Carrington and Pat, how are they trying to reproduce themselves? Pat is reproducing himself by everyone in the Air Force knowing what he has done and so they will start to behave just as he does. Carrington makes more scientists like himself because he gets the others to disobey Pat's order and they try to get The Thing when it returns to the greenhouse (another aspect of the Forbidden Fruit).

So this is the big question: why blood?
It doesn't really make sense for a vegetable to live off blood, does it? But the dog that is drained, and then the two scientists hung up in the greenhouse rafters as in a slaughterhouse, gives us a progression of the appetites. As we become more dehumanized, so we dehumanize others; as we become holy, so we treat others with greater respect. The dog that is locked away in the box and drained of blood is Nikki, because both she and Pat were giving into their appetites and acting like animals; the blood symbolizes life itself, and because--just like in the iconography of vampires--we lose our life if we are not drinking the Blood of Christ and our blood is drank instead by those who wish our death (whether monsters or other people wanting to use us to satisfy their appetites). The two scientists show Carrington's appetite to destroy other scientists so he can have all the glory of this new discovery (which is living giving to him the way the sexual act is life giving to Pat) and the scientists giving in because they don't know any better.

The idea of The Thing re-generating its life is the same as Pat wanting to "start all over again" with Nikki, that is, grow a new relationship. Just as The Thing is bound in ice, so Pat is bound with a rope. Just as the warm blanket melts the ice on The Thing, so Nikki's affections and confession about how much she likes him warms Pat and frees him from otherwise being gentlemanly with a more feminine woman.

The last important item: Nikki.
Remember, just as Them! opens in the New Mexico desert, so The Thing From Another World opens in a desert of ice and snow but instead of being frigid, Nikki's red hot (like Nikki says towards the end, before The Thing is dead, "If I start burning up again who will put out the fire?"). Why does Nikki return from her time in Anchorage on a cargo ship? Because she is cargo and her repeated bad behavior has dehumanized her to the point that she has lost her femininity and is no more spiritually advanced than a vegetable herself. But Nikki's bad behavior isn't as much a focal point of concern for The Thing From Another World as the men's bad behavior is: she can out drink a man, let everyone in the military know she's slept with Pat Hendry, take a hit on the chin, and propose marriage, but male promiscuity and scientific arrogance are the forces at work in 1951 threatening to turn the world into "another planet" full of people "completely alien" to what we are used to thinking of as human. (But we shouldn't forget how Nikki feminizes Pat by saying, "Your legs aren't very pretty").

When Nikki reads Dr. Carrington's notes to Pat, before they set out to find the crash site, she reads, "Such deviation (12 degrees) possible only if a disturbing force equivalent to 20,00 tons of steel or iron ore had become part of the earth at about a 50 mile radius." What does this mean to the story? From our discussion on The Monolith Monsters, we know how sin is translated into hardness of heart, so the immense crashing comes from/is related to the 12 degrees of the compass being off. The directions being messed up, being unable to find where you are going, is what happens when sin is committed, because then one wants to keep going in a path (think of drug addiction) that will let you hold onto the sin but you can't go towards your goal (God, remember, this is All Saints' Day) and keep living in a state of sin. The immense amount of steel is the film's attempt at conveying to its audience how serious sin is and its consequences, like the flood during Noah's time, our personal behavior is to the rest of the world and humanity.

Truly a reference to Frankenstein, so we can understand how things have changed as a result of scientists developing the atomic bomb (just as Frankenstein was a scientist) and how we need to get back on the "true path" (note, please, the walk way upon which The Thins is standing; the path we are to take gives our soul life and, simultaneously, robs sin of its power over us).

The Thing From Another World is an essential film to see because of its documenting of what was happening to us as a result of the dropping of the atomic bomb and our experiences which forced us into World War II and changed us as individuals and as a country. The changing social norms were disrupting sexuality and relationships, practically rotting us from the inside out, and the changes was working in conjunction with science, trying to guide us into a new kind of dehumanization that film makers such as those for The Thing From Another World were seeking out religion and art (Frankenstein) to guide us in a different direction. As with other films of the era, The Thing From Another World uses a code of symbols in which to communicate with the audience, but symbols that still speak to us, warning us to "watch the skies," and commands of the Lord who lives there, so we won't become aliens to ourselves and those we love.

And the Beasts Shall Reign Over the Earth: Them! Finding the Political Other Within

2012-02-16T17:39:00.000-06:00

Gordon Douglas' 1954 Sci-Fi thriller Them! about giant mutant ants birthed from radiation resulting from atomic testing in New Mexico has withstood the test of time (it has a 100% approval rating from critics at Rotten Tomatoes). One of the reasons is that, politically, it has always been thought that Them! was about the Soviets, the Communists who were waiting to take over the world and end our capitalist way of life. To be fair to that interpretation, ants are usually associated with workers, and the proletariat, upon which the communist system is based, can clearly by symbolized by the worker ants. My thesis, however, is that we were more interested in ourselves after World War II than we were in those who were across the ocean, behind the "Iron Curtain" and far from being about the Soviets and communists, these films, including Them!, are about us.

The recurring motif of nuclear radiation throughout science fiction films of the decade is, more than anything, a reminder of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the films, therefore, can be seen as expressions of intense guilt and fear that culminates in Steven Spielberg's Jaws (which I shall be posting shortly); for example, Dr. Medford (Edmund Gwenn) specifically states in the film that in 1945 the very first atomic test was performed in that general area, White Sands, so that testifies to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings being on the minds of the film makers, and the "lingering radiation from the first atomic bomb" causing the giant ants, not later tests

Original theatrical lobby card for Them!

In the trailer above, the advertisement says, "Even civilization itself, threatened with annihilation because in one moment in history-making violence" referencing the atomic bomb (this post builds upon my previous posts The Second Original Sin: Art In the Atomic Age, The Decade Of Turmoil: Film In the 1950s, Love In the Sonic Age: Attack Of the 50-Foot Woman, One Of Us Has To Die: The Incredible Shrinking Man and the Sexual Revolution of the 1950s and The Salt Of the Earth: The Monolith Monsters). The key to understanding, and undermining the communist interpretation, of Them! is sugar. The ants being after sugar symbolizes "the sweet life" which is a part of the capitalist mentality, not the communist. It is the average person, in pursuit of la dolce vita, the sweet life, that becomes dehumanized and brings this "nameless horror" of losing their human identity upon themselves and everyone else.

The first image in the film and the only color. There really is no reason that it should be in red and blue, with a faint outlining of white, unless the film makers specifically wanted to invoke the colors of the American flag, thereby clearly establishing that the film is about Americans, not Soviets. At one point, during the secret press conferences about the ants, a news reporter asks, "Has the Cold War just gotten hot?" and the answer is obviously no.

When Them! opens, it's in the desert, and a desert (whether sand or ice or rock) is always a sign of the soul: a soul without grace and a landscape that cannot sustain life. This is the reason why these giant ants have been able to live and mutate in the desert, no one is there, that is, no one has been tending to the soul, like the ants, everyone has been after "sugar," the good things in life, and not the spiritual things. Why is it Dr. Medford who is able to solve the mystery and answer the riddle of the footprint that no one else can identify? When he is meeting with the generals, after they have found the nest, Dr. Medford is at the water cooler, taking a long, deep drink of water (water is a symbol of grace); this is a favorite commentary device of directors like Alfred Hitchcock, because it shows the character "taking in grace" to prepare and sustain them on the upcoming journey.

The little girl from the opening sequence. She's very similar to little Ginny from The Monolith Monsters and David from Invaders From Mars.

Who is the little girl?
It might be easier to say who she is not. She is not the doll she carries. Children are important characters in the Sci-Fi genre because they symbolize the future and also because children are innocent, they haven't committed the same sins and believe the same lies that adults do. The reason why this little girl escapes "Them" is because she is still alive and can recognize when something isn't right. Her family was on vacation and her father, mother and sibling were eaten by the ants; by evidence of the doll's head and her torn robe Sergent Ben Peterson (James Whitmore) discovers, we know she hid in a small cubby hole, symbolic of returning to the womb, the ultimate place of safety (or it was before abortion and Roe vs. Wade). The doll's head cracked really under scores the damage the girl herself has undergone.
But what exactly happened?

Another definite linking Them! makes to humans is in the demonstration of strength and power. Towards the end, when Ben is trying to save the two little Lodge boys, he will be in a tunnel and have to bend back the bars in order for him to get out to get to them and for them to get to safety. Like the ant in the film strip moving the pebble, and the damage done to the house trailer and Gramps' store, so Ben will use his strength to push out the metal bars.

Before we can answer that, we need to know the nature of ants.
In the film strip presentation by Dr. Medford, he describes how "ants are savage, ruthless and courageous fighters.. . . Ants are the only creatures on Earth other than man who make war. They campaign. They are chronic aggressors. They make slave laborers of the captives they don't kill.. . . Even the most minute of them have an instinct and talent for industry, social organization and savagery that makes man look feeble by comparison." In listing off these characteristics, Dr. Medford is not describing the ants, rather, the characteristics of humans, Americans, that Them! wants to talk about and the consequences it is having on society. Thomas Lodge, a man we never see in the film, only his covered corpse, is the key to linking the ants and the humans.

Dr. Medford and Mrs. Lodge (right) whose two sons are stuck inside the ant's Los Angeles nest. It's from her that, as audience members, we can deduce what Them! is trying to tell us. The 700 miles of tunnels underneath Los Angeles is comparable to the model nest being shown in diagram form by Dr. Medford and links humans to the aunts in just another way.

Thomas Lodge worked a job on Sunday and would take the kids, Jerry and Mike, out for a few hours Sunday morning to play and have fun before he had to go to his other job. Because his working was not only taking him away from his family, but taking him away from Church as well, the man had no strength in him (both his arms were ripped off, arms symbolize strength). Thomas Lodge is attacked by the ants because he is an ant, all he does is work, and all that working was causing him to lose his humanity and turn into an ant, an animal. The boys are able to escape, literally, because they see how much all their father's work is costing (not earning) and they don't want to become like that themselves. Now we can talk about the little girl.

Throughout the film, there is the "speaking of cross-purposes" amounting to silence like the little girl's. When the autopsy report on Gramps comes in, they want "the plain verb" and when Pat tells Bob that her father is one of the world's greatest myrmecologist, Bob says, "Why can't we all speak English?" The same thing happens in the helicopter when Dr. Medford is trying to talk on the radio to Pat and Ben insists on the rules, Dr. H. Medford doesn't understand why he has to do it that way. The film is full of little instances such as this, making it a great film.

Her family being on an extended vacation, probably because her father had put in so much work that the FBI had to compensate him, but that wasn't enough. At some point, the family that no longer recognized each other fell apart, and only the little girl was able to see and survive her family's inner trauma and struggle. The sugar was taken from the trailer because "sugar" was what they had been after. Similarly, Gramps in his store had the sugar robbed from him. We know from the head of police that Gramps didn't have an enemy in the world, but he was crushed and there was enough formic acid in him to kill 20 men. That's what happens in real life, the sugar we are after and desire--in whatever form--becomes acid within us, poison and it destroys us. What's interesting about when Gramps is found, is when Ed Blackburn sees the sugar turned-over, there are little black ants all throughout it; the little ants we see mean that Gramps had "little ambitions," but they controlled him instead of him controlling them.

When the little girl is in the hospital, and Dr. Medford has her to smell the formic acid, she screams hysterically and yells, "Them! Them!" because her mother or her father probably "spit acid" at the other in conversation, they got into a fight (because they have been apart for so long) and when her parents started fighting, she realized that they were no longer her family, her family had become total strangers to her, her family had become them, they who have no names or faces, and that's why she ran from them.

So why does Ed Blackburn die?
There is something we know about Ed Blackburn and that is, he's a crack shot, he can hit anything he can see, but, from the way we find out that he is in fact dead, is the ant at the nest chomping on his rib cage, which, in fact, means that Ed Blackburn is "hollow." It doesn't mean that he wasn't a good guy, it just means that he was an ant, too, because he did his job but there wasn't anything to which he had given himself, nothing that made him a deeper person. Therefore, knowing that Ed was a crack shot ends up being the only thing that we know about Ed because there is nothing else to know (and that's why, pictured below, his body can be identified by the gun). He didn't spend his life making a family (we never hear about his widow) or any other projects that would have been meaningful (not that being a cop and public servant, always in the line of danger, giving your life for others, isn't worthy and meaningful, however, he didn't do anything for himself--versus his public service--that made his life meaningful).

So why does Ben Peterson die?
He's such a great guy, he cares so much for the kids, he's heroic and brave, caring and compassionate, why does he die? We could argue that it is just a theatrical device, meant to upset the audience and pull on the emotions, however, if we juxtapose this scene against the upcoming scene when Bob is trapped with several ants, we know it's not an accident or a device. The ant that gets Ben sneaks up, after Ben has taken off his flame-throwing weapon, and gets him right in the middle. How is Ben an ant? He's a workaholic like Ed. He wasn't as bad as Ed, that's how he was able to survive so long and ward off so many of the attacks, but just as the police chief said, don't fold up on us later when we need you, this is the moment that, bitten in half, Ben folds up in half because he hasn't been taking care of himself and living outside of his job. (An observation Ben has made is that both the trailer and Gramps' store was pushed out, not caved in, and when he's pulling on the bars in the tunnel to get to Mike and Jerry, he's pushing the bars out a way from himself).

Definitely the saddest moment of the film and it was good that they did it so that, when we think of those we know and love, we can warn them to take better care of themselves, and help them, so that they don't end up the same way, folded. It's odd because, in place of a wedding ring, Ben has a small bandage on his ring finger, suggesting perhaps that he might be a widower who threw himself into his work after his wife's death, or he had been unlucky in love previously, but something had hurt him to where he would not get married and he never overcame it.

Since we know why characters in the film die, why does Robert "Bob" Graham (James Arness) live? In pursuing Pat (Dr. Patricia Medford played by Joan Weldon) he's pursuing something that will be meaningful in life. Unlike his counter part in the FBI Mr. Ellinson, the little girl's father, Bob is trying to balance his life. He jokes about "getting a fever real quick" if Pat is the kind of doctor who takes care of sick people, but the truth is, it is precisely because he is healthy that he can pursue her. The problem is with Pat: since Dr. Patricia Medford is the first one to see the ant she is the queen ant.

Up to this point (pictured above) we have heard them and people have died, but the audience hasn't actually seen "them." Usually, the monster/alien appearing to the first person is either the psychoanalytic double of the main person or the fear threatening the hero's existence, in this case, the ant above symbolizes Pat as the queen ant and her relationship with Bob can be traced throughout the film just as the flight of the queen ants can be traced.

Lobby card for Them! Please note the goggles they wear during the sand storm when Drs. Medford go to visit the camp site. When they first get there, Dr. Medford has to be told by Ben to put his goggles on, then he doesn't get them on correctly, and Ben has to straighten them for him. In the film strip presentation, Dr. Medford says, "Ants don't see well at all," and they can only locate things with the antennae. Dr. Medford not seeing well (he usually wears glasses) and then not being able to get the goggles on, is one of the ways the film makers connects us to them, and shows the audience that it's not them we should be afraid of but ourselves.

To begin with, when we first see Pat, she gets stuck in the airplane between the ground and the inside of the passenger bay and we only see her legs. Legs symbolize the will, so we can deduce, upon first seeing her, that Pat is stuck between the man-made world (a male dominated world of science) of the airplane and the natural world of the ground (the traditional roles of women). Because it's her skirt that is caught, that tells us about her problems with her self-identity because clothes offer us information about how we perceive ourselves and want others to perceive us, and Pat has a problem between being a woman and a scientist. Additionally, she doesn't want any help getting "unstuck" and this will be a problem in the rest of the film.

Just before Pat sees the ant for the first time, she and Bob have an exchange when Bob gets upset about how Dr. H. Medford is treating them and Pat defends her father. Pat then goes to look for another print on her own, then seeing the giant ant coming after her. It's fairly typical that, when seeing the monster/alien for the first time in films of this period, that the main character falls, symbolically meaning that they either have a weak will or they have committed some "sin," whether actual or social or psychological to cause them to be in a spiritually/emotionally weakened state.

There is another problem that Pat has: her father.
Dr. Harold Medford oscillates between calling his daughter "Doctor" and "Pat," confounding her problem. When Bob gets upset that Dr. H. Medford is keeping him in the dark, Pat says, "If the 'Doctor' bothers you just call me Pat." Every time something like this happens with Pat and Bob, an ant will have to be killed, because it symbolizes how something "comes between them." Pat is torn between being a scientist, a very good scientist, and "laying eggs and making a nest," the way a woman's instinct takes over at one point or another.

"We may be witnesses to a Biblical prophecy come true. 'And there shall be destruction and darkness come upon creation. And the Beasts shall reign over the earth." What does this mean? The "beasts" being referred to is humans who feed only their appetites and not their soul. When a person's soul is neglected, they cease to exist as children of God and degenerate into being animals which is what the film is warning us against.

If I am correct, and Pat can be taken as the "queen ant" in the film, then she must have a mating flight, and that would be shown here, in this scene when Pat and Robert are flying in the helicopter and locate the nest. But there were two queens that escaped, weren't there? The second wedding flight is when Pat and Robert go to talk to Mr. Crotty (Fess Parker who played American frontier hero Davy Crockett; if we want to be picky, we can say that the "arrival flight" into New Mexico is the mating flight for the established nest they first go into).

The helicopter they are in is the black thing just above the ant.

Let's talk a moment about two important weapons used in the film: bazookas and flame-throwers.
While both weapons were used as early as World War I, there was far wider use and dependency upon them in World War II; the bazookas were used against German tanks and the flame throwers (very flexible and adaptable to a number of conditions, including trench warfare) were primarily used in the Battle of the Pacific and the jungle warfare encountered on the islands. What's important about the presence of these weapons is the distance it created between the one shooting them and the victim, causing, just like in Them! for marines and soldiers using the weapons in World War II to become "exterminators" of human life, to treat enemies, not like people, but bugs, pests and rodents; this dehumanizing psychology American soldiers adapted in order to make it through the war and win is part of what is being targeted as the slow dehumanization process in the spiritual death of the country.

According to our research in The Incredible Shrinking Man, the Pacific Ocean became a site for films that linked up with the hardships fought in the Battle of the Pacific so we should not be surprised that one of the queen ants lays a nest in a boat in the Pacific.

The most important part of Pat's and Bob's relationship is after Ben has died and they are searching for the nest, Bob goes first and there is an avalanche, separating him from the rest of the group. He's attacked by several large ants and is nearly overcome; his gun jams but he manages to stay alive until the others break through to save him. It's not so much that it's Pat being put in her place, rather, that Bob has been put back in his, that he is on the front line, where he wants to be, doing his job and defending his country that his self-respect calls for him to do.

The ants getting 40 tons of sugar from this freight car seemingly proves my thesis: because the night guard hasn't missed any work, but also hasn't taken any bribes or done anything crooked, he doesn't get killed by the aunts because he's not after the sweet life for himself; he does his job and he does his job well, but his job doesn't own him.

When Pat gets to Bob's side after he has survived the ants, she doesn't say a word, but sees that his right arm has been hurt. The right arm, of course, means strength, so he hasn't come out unscathed, but he has survived, and he will be stronger for it. That he has learned to wait before burning the ants shows that he has learned respect for Pat and her knowledge, but her going to his side means that she is ready to find her own, permanent nest.

Them! shows us a society that is deteriorating, from the opening lines about a man "drinking his breakfast," to the alcoholics permanently in the ward at the hospital, to the woman speeding 60 mph after spending the night with a married man, to the loony bin that Mr. Crotty is locked up in, Them! details mounting faults within American society, and the major culprit is the pursuit of the sweet life. Like the Westerns that we will be examining shortly, films in the 1950s were exploring the potential evils and pitfalls of capitalism, they never suggest that we should not be a capitalist society, but the harms that we must individually and collectively look out for and becoming mindless ants, just working all the time, and losing our human identity, is the greatest of them.

Leonard Nimoy in an early, uncredited role.

Upcoming Films & Why They Are Important

2012-02-14T17:32:00.001-06:00

Happy Valentine's Day!

It really is important, the films that are coming out, not just because so much money is spent in making films, but because we spend so much money watching films, even for those who don't go to the theater, even if you only have basic cable, these films end up there at some point in their life and you spend a part of your life watching them. But films are also time capsules, social documents of anthropological importance that measures our values (or lack of values) and our fears. Having said that, let's start (the trailer and discussion for Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer can be found here).

The Dictator is set to be released May 11.

We really have to consider this as a serious film.
The tagline reads: "The heroic story of a dictator who risks his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed." Why is The Dictator important? In the old days of the Soviet Union, we had clearly defined and politically correct (or at least acceptable) villains, political "others" that we could explore our own identity against in art; today, we really don't have that ready-made villain we can all unite against. What The Dictator is giving us by surpassing politically correct barbed wire alerts is an understanding of how we understand Middle East dictators to be and why we... don't like them.

I didn't say it wasn't painful, I just said it's going to be important, and why? Because of this impeccable film, Act Of Valor being released next weekend starring real-live active duty Navy SEALS.

What do the two films have in common?
American fear.
The Dictator isn't going to be pulling any punches, especially since it's invoking the 1940 Charlie Chaplain classic The Great Dictator about Adolf Hitler. For example, the "dictator" says, "Ah, America, the birthplace of AIDS," which of course refers to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome which genetic research indicates was born in west-central Africa, not the United States, although it was the Center for Disease Control that recognized the virus first in 1981. The Dictator will be playing off of both why they--jihadists--hate us and why we fear them. Act Of Valor will work with our fears and the confidence that we should have in our exemplary military forces.

Everyone knows I am a huge fan of Mr. Tom Hardy; what is important about This Means War is the invoking of Fight Club and a re-establishment of masculinity and men's rights in the mating ritual.What Tuck and Foster are doing in This Means War is fighting over mating rights, a long-established right and tradition for men that was made ridiculous by the Feminists movement and the notion that a woman's right to decide who she will mate with is more important than a man's worth. That's probably why Feminists never end up with the really good guys.
I've talked about The Hunger Games, being released March 23, before, but let's take one more look at it:

What if this were really a new and different way of examining the American Idols, the America's Got Talent, the Fame Game in Hollywood and Reality TV Star? Given the death of Whitney Houston this week, the deaths of Amy Winehouse, Heath Ledger, River Phonenix, Jim Belushi, Michael Jackson, and countless others, when someone becomes famous in the United States, it's like we're sending them on a death mission, into an arena where "We just want a good show," but very few--if any--will survive. What are the "hunger games," and what do American's "hunger" for? Fame. Fortune. Glory. I have not read the books, and have only seen the trailers, but, as I mentioned last fall, this film will say far more about us as a culture than it will about some distant, far-off science fiction land. Which brings us to this one:

For those of us who lived through the 80s we won't know if we should laugh or hide our heads in shame. BUT, that's not the point, the point is, fame became an industry in the 1980s and it focused on music and we are living with the consequences of it today (whether that will come through in The Hunger Games is just a hunch and could be entirely unfounded). Rock of Ages will obviously set up a stage that will battle between religion and fame as a religion (or, music as a religion, if you prefer that), but that will be a serious undertone, but knowing what we know about history, we also know that religion doesn't win. On the same note of fame, but of a different kind, we go from Tom Cruise to Robert De Niro:

There's quite a bit going on in this trailer. Mark Twain and J.D. Salinger were interesting choices for the two "classic" American writers named. Does he mean they were the best American writers, or just that their writing communicates something that is particularly classic about America and the American experience, in a way other America writers have not? "My father has been manifested as an absence," is a great line, also a deeply philosophical one, because there is a strong dichotomy between presence and absence; there is another strong dichotomy between speaking and writing. Jacques Derrida has said that Western civilization prefers speaking to writing because speaking means presence, whereas writing means absence; so for Jonathan (Robert De Niro) to be a writer but always absent is in keeping to his character. Being Flynn opens March 2, and among these tensions, I will also be looking for any possible references to the founding fathers; I don't know that this will be a very "class conscious" film as I am expecting to see in other films throughout this year, but his constant run-ins with the police and that they find each other in a homeless shelter may surprise me.

Opening March 9, A Thousand Words might be the kind of film a lot of us need to see. Granted, it's in the same vein as many films, such as Liar, Liar, but who is to say that's a bad thing, especially when no one goes to church anymore? In a world full of "idle talk," where we are likely talking just to be talking, saying anything regardless of whether it has value, the premise of the film is a welcomed spiritual reminder of how our speech, what we say and how we say it, forms an intricate and paramount aspect of our identity and our character.
Coming March 9 is Silent House and I just don't know if I will be able to watch this, it just looks too scary for me!

What do we know?
We know the house is a symbol for the soul, and Sarah and her father being there after not being there for a while, may have a family secret that is causing them to "die" spiritually and psychologically. That the "noise" which first alerts Sarah that something is in the house comes from upstairs could mean that "something is hanging over them," but all this is pure speculation. Why? Last year was a great year for film, and so far it really looks like Silent House is the only one keeping p with the momentum and that means anything is possible with this film. If they are willing to go to the trouble to film it in "real time," who knows what else they have the guts to do and I will just have to make myself sit this.

On a completely different note, I give you Butter: there is a contest in Iowa of who is the best butter sculptor and it comes down to Laura (Jennifer Garner) wife of the former champion, Brooke (Olivia de Wilde) a stripper, Destiny, a disadvantaged little girl, and Laura's step-daughter Kaitlyn (Ashley Green).

This is deadly serious, because this greatly reflects how Americans do things and, like The Dictator, hiding it beneath a veneer of "funny" doesn't dampen the message, if anything, it makes it more potent. What is Iowa known for? The Iowa political primary, and the competition, the "vote casting" discussed in this film is about who we want to "shape and sculpt" this country; no, no, this isn't only about butter, ladies and gentlemen, this is about the fabric of America itself! (Ha ha, just a bit of drama). I said that 2012 was going to be a year of class warfare, and (snicker, snicker) Butter may be bringing it to us as social class warfare. I can hardly wait to see this one.
For these next two films, let's just watch the trailers first:

What does Jeff, Who Lives At Home (March 16) and 21 Jump Street (also March 16) have in common? It takes good adults to make good children, and if we are not good adults, we can't expect our children to be good. That thesis is what is at work in the highly anticipated Detachment (no US release date scheduled yet):

I really disliked the remake of Clash of the Titans, I loved the original, but wouldn't even have made it through the first thirty mnutes but that I was watching it with my dad who has horrible taste in films and he made me watch all of it... however, Wrath of the Titans, with new director and writers, could be a different scenario, and I am hoping it will be:

The "titans" are making their second appearance in less than a year in a major action film (Immortals of last fall) and that could possibly have some genuine spiritual leanings... we'll see. But the cyclops is very much like the giants in Jack the Giant Killer coming out this summer, and at least in the later film, I am expecting the giants to be those in American society who are of "giant stature," i.e., the wealthy to be the target of that film. Will Wrath of the Titans take some valuable lessons from Immortals, or re-do what it did so unsuccessfully in Clash of the Titans? We'll see, but with a new staff, I am willing to give it a try.
This is causing quite a stir: "A horror/thriller centered on the origin of the monsters that are born in childhood and are passed on by the family."

A little more information: "Two children living in different countries are visited nightly by a faceless being who wants to take possession of them." The US release date for this has not been set, but like Jeff, Who Lives At Home and 21 Jump Street, this is a film illustrating for us that traumatic and delicate stage where childhood and adulthood bridge and all the things that go wrong. Without a doubt, this will be a psychoanalytic film and possibly very spiritual.
Did you know that Jason Statham was an Olympic swimmer?

Invoking the famous Alfred Hitchcock film The 39 Steps, one of the greatest British films ever made, it also invokes Daren Aronofsky's Pi, because what we learned in Pi makes us willing to accept that a very very very long number can be more than just a boring long number and it has a useful role in the universe. Why is Statham in the film? The film opens April 27 and that's when we will find out who the corrupt people are that the "safe" combination is protecting the world from.
For some of us, this has all ready happened:

I am sure this doesn't really have anything to do with the White House betraying this country, or trying to sabotage the military and make America helpless and incapable of defending itself against all our debtors who are going to come wanting their money after the downgrading to our credit standing; and I am sure that the White House would never lie to the American people. Surely none of those things are in this film and surely it's not going to be anything politically motivated in any way but just some good, old-fashioned, American military might on display... but hey, I'm game for that right now!
Speaking of the conspiracy-that-isn't, here is another installment in The Bourne Identity series:

Specifically, The Bourne Legacy is coming August 3. Before this comes out, I will be going through the Bourne Identity series because they are highly politically motivated and there is a reason they are dove-tailing this one off that series instead of coming up with a new premise; even just the way that trailer is edited should tell us that something is "being kept hidden" and we aren't going to know everything until we see the film.
Some of the films that are coming out this year I have all ready gone through, but will be preparing us for as needed; for example, before Mirror, Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsnman, we will be going through, not only the original written tales by the Brothers Grimm, but the Disney version as well, since that is what most people are familiar with. Likewise, before the release of The Raven, we will be exploring the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe so that we can sit back in the theater and know that we are the informed audience! Thank you, as always, and stay tuned!

Bad For Business: The Innkeepers

2012-02-13T16:21:00.000-06:00

Ti West has been receiving much praise for his haunted hotel film The Innkeepers starring Sara Paxton as Claire, Pat Healy as Luke and Kelly McGillis of Top Gun fame as an actress-turned-psychic Lea. Like all great films, The Innkeepers can be understood on a number of levels; my primary interest is the political/historical, but before we can get to that, we really need to take a fruitful diversion into the land of psychoanalytic doubles (The Innkeepers opened last weekend in select theaters, but you can view the film on Amazon.com instant videos now; it's really the last five minutes or so that makes the film worthwhile, but it carefully constructs itself so it can deliver a good ending).

Madeline O'Malley is the woman who was jilted by her fiancee on her wedding day so she hung herself in the honeymoon suite of the Yankee Pedlar Inn sometime before the 1860s (I haven't been able to get an exact date yet). Madeline is the psychoanalytic double for Luke because he has a crush on Claire and when, after they have been drinking, Luke tries to tell Claire how he feels about her, Claire abruptly changes the subject, hence, jilting him. When they go down into the basement, and sit in the dark, Claire says that she sees Madeline right behind Luke and she's getting closer to him, then Luke gets up and takes off; Madeline being behind Luke means that they are inhabiting the same plane, or space; that freaks out Luke because he doesn't want to become like Madeline, i.e., a jilted lover. When Madeline "comes after" Claire at the end, Madeline is "mad" and seeks revenge upon Claire for what she did to Luke.

Luke (Pat Healy) and Claire (Sara Paxton) at the front desk of the Yankee Pedlar Inn where a lot of the story takes place. The owner of the Inn is on vacation in Barbados; Luke and Claire just manage the front desk, and Luke is a bit of a nerd and computer tech, kinda. Claire just doesn't seem to have really anything going on for herself and that comes out when Lea Rease-Jones arrives who, according to Claire is really famous. When Lea asks Claire what she's doing with her life, Claire doesn't have an answer and this is important for the rest of the film.

Is there anything else to back this up?
The old man.
He's the last guest to check into the hotel and he insists on going up to the third floor, after it has all ready been stripped of all furniture and linens, to spend the night there. When Claire realizes that she and Lea need to leave the hotel, she runs up to the third floor to tell the old man that she's leaving and finds a letter beginning, "My darling, this is where our life together started," and, looking in the bathroom, she finds the old man, in the bathtub, naked, gashes all over his arms and the tub full of blood. What does this have to do with Luke? Luke and Claire met at the Yankee Pedlar, that's where their life together started. When Clarie hears the piano playing earlier and it terrifies her, she runs up to Luke's room and gets him out of bed. He tells her that she can stay in there with him, but when he turns around and she sees him just in his underwear, she changes her mind. This parallels to the old man's nakedness.

The old man, the last guest, after his suicide. Another dimension to verify the "love angle" between Luke and Claire are the songs used in the film: Let Me Love You, Breaks My Heart, Paper Roses, Cold November, Blood Relations, Become the Night, Light of Your Life, Cherry Tulips and Don't Go (Away).

When Luke and Claire get drunk, Luke starts to pour out his feelings for Claire the way the old man poured out his blood and, just as the old man did it to himself, so Luke does it to himself as well. Importantly, in the picture above, when Clarie sees the old man standing behind her at the top of the stairs, that's where Luke has been standing behind her earlier (pictured below). But when Clarie falls down the stairs and goes deeper into the basement, she turns around, and sees the old man holding his arms out to her just as Luke is holding himself out to her. When Claire locks herself into the wood cellar and there is the banging on the other side of the door, we think it's the old man, but learn a few minutes later that it was Luke, calling to her trying to help her, so this switched identity on the audience (we think it's the old man but it's Luke, but it doesn't matter because they are the same) re-enforces that the old man is another psychoanalytic double for Luke.

Luke will sit that beer can down right there at the top of the stairs. When Claire is there alone, the can will fall down by itself, then she will turn and see the old man standing there and fall down the stairs likewise. There is a scene where Clarie takes out the trash, and this could be analogous to her "dumping" Luke because the bag leaks, the way Luke "leaks" how he feels to Claire. Claire's difficulty in getting the bag into the trash can is her emotional and psychological difficulty in dealing with Luke's confession to her, just as she didn't want to deal with the girl at the coffee shop talking to Claire about her boyfriend; while the audience likes Claire, she's not heroic in any sense of the word.

What about when Clarie is in bed and Madeline is beside her?
This works towards the idea of Madeline identifying herself with "the jilted," because a few scenes earlier, Clarie is jilted by Lea in Lea's room after she makes Claire feel dumb. Clarie, after just being jilted herself, should know better than to jilt Luke, but she does it anyway. When Lea tells Claire (after Lea has brought out the pendulum for the first time) that there are "three of them in the basement" and there "was a terrible mistake," the three of them are Luke, Claire, Madeline and the mistake is Luke's feelings for Claire. Why does Claire jilt Luke? Possibly because of the porn sites that she finds on his laptop, that Clarie doesn't feel his feelings for her are genuine, but when Luke compares Claire to his mother and sister, that shows that his feelings are true and he cares deeply for her. Then why does he leave her there by herself? Maybe it's that Luke's sobering up and realizing he's been jilted when Claire sees Madeline behind him and he needs to revive himself. (If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the comment form at the bottom of this post).

Kelly McGillis as Lea, an actress turned psychic/healer in The Innkeepers. When she first jilts Claire, she later makes up to her and offers to help her. Lea holds a crystal pendulum which swings back and forth when she's communicating with the dead. At one point, Lea tells Claire that the spirits want to live, which hearkens us back to Poltergeist when the same thing was said there, but also because Luke questions Lea at the end about her knowing what was going to happen, we can take this to mean that Luke wants to live by expressing his feelings for Claire instead of pretending that he doesn't have any feelings for her. When Lea warns Claire not to go into the basement, it's a psychoanalytic warning, because in the basement are the lowest of our passions and animal instincts, so when Claire and Luke go in the basement, she's finally realizing how Luke feels about her and so is Luke.

Now, the political and historical reading of The Innkeepers.
We never learn anything about Madeline O'Malley's fiancee, only that he jilted her on their wedding day. Given her Irish name, we should be thinking of the immigrants coming to America in the mid 1800s looking for a new life, just like Madeline looking for a new life with her husband. (After Madeline hung herself, the owners of the inn decided it would be bad for business if anyone found out, so they hid her body for three days in the wood cellar adjacent to the basement and then tried to smuggle her out; the towns people found out and forced the inn to shut down. It wasn't opened again until the 1860s when people started seeing Madeline's ghost roaming the hotel and it has stayed since).

The ghost of Madeline O'Malley as it appears to Claire in the basement. When Claire "tells the story" of Madeline in The Innkeepers, it's to a little boy, and that's important, because that's who we, the audience are supposed to take it:as little children, but it also symbolizes how Claire herself has taken it. It's an interesting juxtaposition, because it combines the oldest modes of story telling--the oral tradition--with the most modern and advanced, the Internet site Luke has built to document the events and instances they have recorded. The story of Madeline O'Malley then is also the story of the Yankee Pedlar Inn and in turn, the story of America. The old man can be taken as the exact opposite of Madeline: he made a living in America but now there is no place for him because, in the game of capitalism, it always has to be the newest and best, not the old, so he can be seen as an old market (an old way of doing life or an old way of doing business) that no longer has any use in the country and he realizes it.

If Madeline, like many immigrants coming to America in the 1880s looking for a new life, symbolizes those who didn't find that new life, if Madeline O'Malley is the opposite of the Statue of Liberty, for example, a ghost of unfulfilled dreams and promises, then the Inn, going out of business after successfully operating for over a century, indicates the troubled economy--the soul of America--and the hauntings of the Yankee Pedlar Inn is the haunting of the American economy of those who can't wed themselves to the American Dream. Importantly, it wasn't until the 1860s, the Civil War in America, when Madeline's ghost started to be seen.

The basement is full of interesting things, specifically, lamps. Symbolically, the lamp should be understood as that which will "illuminate us" and, when Claire and Luke first go into the basement and the main light shorts out, that symbolizes that Claire doesn't have the "lights on" in understanding what it is she is doing.

Two possible references is one, to the slaves who were being freed but, like Madeline, couldn't find a way to earn a living and get a slice of the American pie for themselves, and two, because immigrants, especially the Irish, not being able to find work, would often be hired by the wealthy to fight in the Civil War in their place. Many immigrants then, like Madeline, were being "locked in the woodshed," or locked into the lowest class of American society in the lowest servile jobs and forgotten about. Because this is where Claire dies, and we know that she doesn't have a job to go to after the Inn's final closing, Claire becomes a part of this cycle just like the immigrants and Madeline herself.

A Ghost Story For the Minimum Wage. Minimum wage can be called its own ghost story because those who earn it are there but not really seen to be there, their economic status doesn't earn them any respect from others. It's also for those employers who generally pay their employees minimum wage and as the wage continues to increase, what will happen to their ability to pay their employees, especially when Obama-care takes full effect and they have to pay those expenses in addition to what they are all ready paying. The Innkeepers offers a glimpse at bad capitalism, poorly trained workers and the American Dream over the last century and what has happened to it in the last couple of years.

Now would be a good time to talk about Claire and her character.
Her hair is very short, in the razor blade cut style, which symbolizes her thoughts: she's not a deep thinker, and this comes through in the film. Her fingernails have old polish on them (a very clever character builder device). Usually, fingernails are a sign of pampering by women and to have their nails done is a sign of their upper-class status. In Claire's case, it's obvious she hasn't cared for her nails in a long time, and the chipped polish indicates a lack of concern for her beauty.

Claire in the laundry room doing an EVP recording where she doesn't hear anything.

The only time, in fact, we see Claire concerned about how she looks, is after she has sketched a drawing of Madeline and she asks Luke if he thinks she's prettier than her but as Luke goes on, she loses interest in his answer. This brings us to the hole in Claire's jeans: the legs symbolize our will, so the hole in her jeans means that there is a hole, or something missing, from her will and that could be plain old ambition: she never talks about what she is going to do with her life or even her next job after the closing of the Pedlar. That there is something missing from her will is additionally emphasized by her not wearing socks with her tennis shoes (again, something is missing).

Claire in the banquet room making a recording when she first hears the piano music and woman's voice. It's not in the laundry room where she hears these things, that would be a sign of the lower class, rather, it's in the banquet room which is a sign of upper class status and an event (wedding, funeral, graduation, anniversary, some sort of celebration).

Claire, like the Inn itself, exemplifies bad capitalism: nothing is being done to market it. Claire doesn't appear to have any marketable skills to take her to a new job, and no ambition to get skills, and the owner of the Inn doesn't seem to have any desire to market the haunted aspect of it to draw in business. By the way, it's mentioned at the start that the owner is on vacation in Barbados; who else do we know that is supposed to be in charge but always on vacation? Whoever he is (and Luke does refer to the owner as "him") he prefers seeing the Inn become a parking lot rather than remaining open another century. And that century marker really holds out a valuable business barometer; of course, there are fat and lean times in capitalism, there have to be cycles to it, but this is the first cycle our credit score has been downgraded and consumer confidence about the America Dream seems to be at an all time low.

Luke in the front desk area. Like Claire, Luke doesn't really seem to have any skills either; he can set up a website, but it's not very good and even he knows that but isn't changing it, and his customer service skills are so poor he can't even remember to put towels in the bathrooms. Over his left shoulder, on a piece of white paper, is the note from the owner saying that he's not to be disturbed, if something happens they are to "figure it out."

What about the ending?
The ending is like another famous haunted hotel film: The Shining.
Like Jack (Jack Nicholson), Claire and Luke can't afford to stay in the hotel where they work. At the end of The Innkeepers, when the door to the room where Claire had been staying slams shut and ends the film, two things happens. First the door slams shut, meaning that Claire has been "shut out" of the upper class to which the Inn has historically catered to. We can be confident of this because of a painting in that room, The Blue Boy by English painter Thomas Gainsborough. The Blue Boy represents material wealth and luxury, and that is an aspect of American life that neither Claire nor Madeline will ever get to share in because it is sealed off from them.

A copy of The Blue Boy hangs in Claire's room.

The second thing that happens is: the door slams shut. Just as Claire is locked out of the upper class so she is locked into the lower class, she is sealed into the lower class as in a tomb. Part of the American Dream is not being bound to the class into which you were born, but Americans have economic mobility as a freedom and being born and sealed into a lower class was a terrible curse in many countries early immigrants who came to this country sought to escape for themselves and their children. Has that ended? Instead of being called The Innkeepers, the film could be called The Dream Keepers, but just as the Inn is shutting down, so has the dream seemed to come to an end.

In conclusion, The Innkeepers carefully constructs, with parables and images and mere suggestions, numerous readings and possible understandings of the film, the script providing us layers and layers just like the many staircases in the Inn going up and down. On the political and historical level, it seems to be saying that today, we are being haunted by the mis-leading promises like immigrants in the mid-1800s, and facing a civil war about where the country is headed and whether it can get there (in relation to the Civil War era the film invokes, we should also remember My Week With Marilyn that invokes it, as well as Spielberg's upcoming film Lincoln and Tim Burton's production Abraham Lincoln the Vampire Slayer). A ghost story for the minimum wage is one more in the election year films that we will see examining where we have been, who we are and where we ought to go.

The lock begs the question: what has been locked? Who has been locked out, what have they been locked out from and who locked it? One may also ask if something is being kept safe by being locked up, but given how locks work in the film, I don't think that's where The Innkeepers is trying to lead us.

Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer: Oddity Explained

2012-02-13T10:09:00.003-06:00

Abraham Lincoln, a vampire slayer?
This really, really, really seems to be reaching to the bottom of the barrel, until I saw something on Twitter over the weekend, the bones of the story: as a young man, Lincoln sees the unearthly creatures killing his mother, and so he spends the rest of his life hunting down the blood-suckers. Now the story makes perfect sense! His mother, of course, is the motherland and Abe is saving America from blood-sucking politicians by the strength of his axe, i.e., hard work and honesty, the trademarks of his administration (I would love to go into Congress slinging an axe! Oh, and the cutting off the head, since the head symbolizes the governing function, Lincoln cutting the head off means they are not getting re-elected). The importance of this film is that it's going head-to-head with Hollywood royalty: Steven Spielberg.

Daniel Day Lewis stars as Abraham Lincoln in Spielberg's film Lincoln; first photo of him in make-up that has bee released while he was having lunch.

Spielberg is a Democrat and Lincoln was a conservative Republican, and, again, knowing this is an election year and that Spielberg is a supporter of President Obama, and it was Lincoln's Bible upon which Obama took the oaths to protect the office of the Presidency, regardless of Lincoln's politics, you can be sure it will be a liberal film, so, for those of us who are conservatives, the "wilder" of the two films (Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer) might give us the greater satisfaction. It's at least one more film to look forward to this year.
P.S.--thoroughly enjoyed The Innkeepers and will be getting that post up today!

The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

Arthur Christmas (2011)

Best Documentary

Other Nominees:

Abuelas (2011)

Bobby Yeah (2011)

Best Short Film

WINNER

Pitch Black Heist (2011)

Other Nominees:

Chalk (2010)

Mwansa the Great (2011)

Only Sound Remains (2010)

Two & Two (2011)

The Vow & the Vow of Obedience

2012-02-11T15:28:00.000-06:00

The Vow opens this weekend, and critics are describing it as predictably sweet, but in the first few moments of the trailer above, we see something very serious. Paige (Rachel McAdams) tells Leo (Channing Tatum) that he has to turn the song off, and, mouthing with Meatloaf, he says, "But I won't do that," and then they have the crash. We know from the rest of the trailer that they are married at this point, so when Leo says, "I would do anything for love, but I won't do that," he's saying, "I would fulfill all my vows, but I won't be obedient," and because he has forgotten to be obedient his punishment is that Paige forgets everything.

This is really the sign of great screen writing, since he won't do that small thing, turn off the song, he now has to go and do all those other things that the trailer describes (it's like the sin in the Garden of Eden: because Adam and Eve wouldn't obey the command to not eat the forbidden fruit, the simple command was replaced with the very strict and burdensome Mosaic Law) . The Vow is a much more serious film than first appears and, given that the wedding of 2011 between Prince William and Kate Middleton famously and specifically left out the vow of obedience, we can question, if you aren't willing to be obedient, what good is the rest of it?

The Grey: America's Dying Economy & the Politicians' Den

2012-02-10T16:32:00.000-06:00

When it's a frontier, or a wilderness or purely environmental setting, the "trappings" of culture and society have been removed only to show us what is really taking place in the "civilized world," and that is always something very uncivilized. Joe Carnahan's box office hit The Grey is quite good. You may remember that last week, I deduced that it would be about the oil drilling industry trying to survive against "the wolves of Washington," and I wasn't accurate about that; it's bigger than that, it's more inclusive to all Americans, and like Man On A Ledge, has a great message for what it is that we as Americans truly value and should be fighting for.

The Grey has one of those post-credit endings, and I didn't realize that, so left before the final scene that I didn't know was coming (still being sick I was heavily medicated); if you go and see it, don't make the mistake I made.

There are a number of approaches one can take to the film, including an all-time favorite of mine, game theory. As I watched The Grey, I was actually thinking of Moneyball and radical approaches each of the two films were taking in their discussion of the economy, what happened and how it impacted people (please see Moneyball & the Great American Economy) but one can also compare it to the "clean up team" that enters the company in the beginning of Margin Call and "kills" everyone who is no longer needed (please see Deconstructing Volatile Risk: Margin Call). What all three films do well is summarize the trauma and insecurity in the economy and what will have to be done to survive in the meltdown we've been left with.

Ottway (Liam Neeson) in his room during the last night of camp at the drilling factory. He's trying to write a letter to his deceased wife. He will hold onto his letter and take it out to read on the airplane, but decide to throw it away, crumbling it up and putting it in the back of the seat in front of him; before they leave the scene of the crash, he happens to find it and takes it with him. What does the letter mean? Hope. He knows he can't be with his wife again, but he has that hope that his love for her is stronger and greater than her death, and towards the end of the film, when it is Ottway and the alpha male wolf fighting for their survival, that love of his for her will strengthen him to enter that last fight.

The ambiguous character in the film is Ana, Ottway's wife. As you can tell from the trailer, he is with her only in his mind, through flashbacks; almost at the end, we realize that she was dying in a hospital, terminally ill. That's an important point, because she symbolizes America. Because of women's ability to give birth and fulfill a man's hopes and dreams, women--such as the Statue of Liberty--often represent the homeland, the motherland, the land that gave birth to the hero. That Ottway "lost her" but still loves her desperately, is the strength of his hope and our hope that--for those of us who feel our country has become alien to us and our leaders want to rule over us instead of be public servants accountable to the law and Constitution--we can get out country back.
So enter the wolves.

At the scene of the crash.Why does the man bleed to death on the plane after the crash? Ottway telling him, "You're dying," is like telling someone, "You're fired." But that's not enough, that's not all this sad and intimate scene means, as a group of men watch another man die, knowing there is nothing they can do for him. It's Ottway, however, that draws resources from his own experience and gives the dying man what he can, and what Ottway would want someone to say to him if he were the one dying. That's why Ottway is given the leadership role by the others, not because of knowledge of the wolves, or his courage, or survival skills, but because leadership is a quality that comes from within, and leaders have an endless amount of resources upon which they draw and as the man's life slips away from him, Ottway proves that he can sustain life for the group.

There just isn't any other way to understand the airplane crash that happens in the film: the plane busted up into at least two pieces, and a third piece completely missing, and the total ignorance and uselessness of the pilots, means that this crash is the Wall Street Crash of 2008. The suddenness with which it happened and the violence of the jostling and turmoil, the uprooting and disintegration of everything, along with the deaths of 117 people, is a graphic illustration of how the financial irresponsibility of some people impacted those who had no idea it was coming. (It's a film such as Margin Call that really equates getting laid off/fired with death, but it's The Grey that shows you how they die: painfully). It's at the scene of the crash that the wolves start encircling the surviving members of the drill team, and it's easy to understand that as a company that lost a lot in the "economic crash" and is still trying to hang onto what it can, but the scavengers are circling around.

For a lot of people, this crash is a good illustration of what has happened to their lives, businesses, homes and security. The big question is, what is the point of keeping Ottway alive only to die in the wolves' den? Courage is like the ebbing of the tide: courage is easy to recognize when someone is charging a wolf, but it's more difficult to see when someone can't bear to go on living through another night, but they do so anyway, and that's when there is no tide, but when that tide comes back in, it's with the force of the tsunami and it will win whatever fight presents itself. Ottway's courage ebbs away from him the night before the crash so that, when everyone else's courage has ebbed away from them, he will be in control of himself, therefore, in control of the situation.

What is the conflict with the wolves?
We're in their territory.
The wolves are the politicians scavenging off the land and what's left, while the poor 7 man team surviving the wreck is the wounded work force in America still trying to compete despite the "hostile environment" in Washington and around the world (with other failing economies). Another way of understanding the wolves, though not much differently than mentioned above, is that the "pack of wolves" is actually a "PAC of wolves" or a political action committee, trying to get their representative elected to for their interest(s) regardless of anything else.But being in their territory establishes that the fight for companies to survive in the hostile wilderness of this prolonged recession has to be taken to the "den of wolves" in Washington.

Each person in this scene is going to die because, as great stories know, they are each all ready dead. John Diaz (Frank Grillo) is the guy everyone wants to die first because of his selfish sarcasm; when he fatally wounds his knee, falling down the tree to try saving Talget when the wolves are getting him, after Diaz had punched Talget in the nose earlier while Diaz challenged Ottway's leadership, Diaz has overcome his selfishness. After his long and excruciating walk, Diaz isn't surrendering to inevitability and giving up, he's not dismissing the value of his life by insisting that he doesn't have anything worth going back to, this is his best moment. The treacherous obstacles he has overcome to get this far, are the treacherous obstacles within himself he has overcome to get deeper inside his soul, his own genuine self, and that's why, it's at that scene that we find out his first name, and he introduces himself to Hendrick and Ottway. We never learn Ottways first name because we never learn everything about him: some people are just too big for life, and there is so much within him, that all of his resources won't be realized.

This is pretty easy so far, nothing difficult about this interpretation, but what the film does, in the opposite direction of, Moneyball for example, is to show, by process of elimination and priority, what virtues are not going to lead the war on Washington and guarantee our survival. Moneyball showed how to take seemingly worthless skills and make them valuable; The Grey shows us how there is really only one virtue right now that will get this country through these tough times: courage. Ottway is shown in several different instances, the shades of courage he possesses and why that helps him to be stronger than other members of the team. It's the alpha males that have the last battle, only because Ottway has the well of grace within him to realize he can still make a difference, he can still win his fight. Why does he use the alcohol bottles? Taping them to his fingers, his hands as a symbol of his strength, so the empty bottles show that he is "sober," he's not drunk on despair or anger (he's not using "Dutch courage").

Why does Hernandez die? When he's on his watch and playing the video game, he wishes that his son was there; that's a very insincere attitude towards his progeny, and that reveals the "dead spot" in his soul; because Hernandez is basically "pissing on" the importance of his family, he is attacked by the wolf when he's urinating. Why does Flannery die? Flannery falls behind in the line, and that relates to us that Flannery "is behind" in everything going on: i.e., Ottway has to tell Flannery when they are sitting by each other on the plane that he doesn't want to talk to anyone, Flannery couldn't figure that out on his own. Why does Burke die? He can't breathe at the high altitude and freezes to death. Burke can't "rise" (altitude) to the challenges presenting themselves to the men. Whereas it brings out the best in men like Ottway (and even Sherlock Holmes in A Game of Shadows) the distance to which Burke has to reach up to survive is too much for him. Why does Talget die? The zipper hanging onto the tether symbolizes Talget "hanging onto" things in general, even when it "breaks away from him (the tether between the trees snapping). Just like his little girl who comes to "take him" as he dies, he holds onto things instead of letting things go when he needs to. Why does Hendrick die? Hendrick is the most caring of the men, it's not effeminate in him, but he's so caring that it impedes his will (that's why his foot is stuck, the feet symbolize our will) because he is not hard enough (the rocks) but because he is caring he was the one who could make the leap of faith necessary to get to the trees across the river.

Does God answer Ottway's prayer? Yes.
Ottway asks God to do something, and what God does is give OttwayOttway had been tracking the wolves and trying to find it! What's the big deal with that? That's not what Ottway prayed for, he wanted to find shelter or a cabin, but God gave him an answer bigger than his prayer.

Just as the alpha male in the wolf pack is having his leadership challenged in the dark woods, so Diaz challenges Ottway's leadership. The omega wolf coming for Diaz attacks him in the back, because that is basically how Diaz has treated Ottway, undermining him the entire time although Ottway has saved his life. The attack leaves a scar on Diaz that we don't see until he sets down at the end of his road and insists on Ottway going on without him.

When Ottway is at his weakest, he is brought into the moment and place of greatest strength for the alpha wolf. Symbolically, we can only see this as American businesses who have survived the hardships and trials of what this dying economy has thrown at them, and despite all the tests, they have survived, and that gives them the strength to challenge the politicians in their own den, in Washington itself, and to overcome them in their strength when we are at our lowest, and that means this year's election (I could go a bit more into who the alpha wolf male symbolizes, but I won't beat a dead wolf into the ground). Despite the apparent show of strength in his den, the alpha wolf is taken out by the lone human, and it could be argued that the remaining wolves in the pack who finish off Ottway are members of the (now dead) alpha wolf's press team.

We've all ready discussed why he tapes the bottles to his hand, but what about the knife? Someone may say, it's obvious to tape a knife to your hand when you are going to attack a wolf at a full run, but the symbolic importance is that Diaz had attacked Ottway with that knife and Ottway self with more than just a knife,ken has armed himself with more than just a knife,k but also with the trophy of his own alpha status that he earned when he overcame Diaz's challenge and the trials of survival, including successfully defending himself from the wolves and getting into their den.

When the film opens, it's with shots of the factory: it's a job, and no one there wants to be there, at the "end of the world," and it's called that because, in the beginning of this country, America was the "end of the world," and it was for work and the chance of self-improvement that people learned how to survive in this hostile environment. Before Ottway takes on the alpha male, what does he do? He goes through the wallets of all the men unfit for mankind, and what does he find? Not the money or the credit cards, but photographs of families, fathers with their children and loved ones. That's what is most valued by Americans and that's what's at risk in the test of survival with the economy today: the American way of life. The Grey does an excellent job of using noise and silence, and that presence of noise always lets us know that there is something we are not hearing but should be, something we should be listening to but can't hear, and that's probably a warning about the state of the country right now; we need to get past the noise and really hear what is going on.

No one wants a showdown with our nation's leaders, no one wants to have to enter the den of wolves, but the lack of leadership where there should be leadership in abundance has made it necessary. We should prepare ourselves to see a flurry of films like The Grey in the coming months.

The Salt of the Earth: The Monolith Monsters

2012-02-09T16:59:00.000-06:00

John Sherwood's The Monolith Monsters of 1957 is strange only if one doesn't know the language of the Bible: salt, water, rock, are words describing the spiritual state of the soul, and it can be used positively or negatively. Knowing the states of the soul and the parables used to describe it makes The Monolith Monsters a powerful film, describing for Christians the way sin attacks our soul and spreads throughout the world.

Let's begin with a spiritual analysis of salt.
In the Old Testament, at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, God saved Abraham's nephew Lot and his family from His wrath by leading them out of the cities as they were being destroyed by fire and brimstone, on the condition that they would not look back, for surely they would be destroyed if they looked back; Lot's wife, of course, turns as she flees, and was turned into a pillar of salt.

The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by John Martin, 1852.

In Matthew 5:13, Jesus tells us, You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. How do we reconcile the views of what happened to Lot's wife with Jesus' command? Salt is essential to the biological system to have, but even more so in ancient times because it preserved food. When Lot's wife turned around and looked at the city being destroyed, she was preserving in her heart Sodom and all its sinfulness, not that they Lord had delivered them and preserved them from destruction.

The legendary pillar of salt known as Lot's Wife on Mount Sodom, which looks very much like a monolith monster from the film, doesn't it?

On the other hand, when Mary, the Mother of Jesus, left Jerusalem with John the Evangelist, she preserved within her heart the Stations of the Cross, the Divine Sacrifice that had been made by Her Son for the world. Lot's wife was preserving the food of sin, Mary was preserving the food of holiness and righteousness. The wages of sin would have destroyed Lot's wife anyway because she did not know how to live according to the ways of the Lord because she desired only that food that pleased her, not the food she needed to sustain her on her journey to salvation. This is the important role that salt plays in The Monolith Monsters.

The Jordan River, one of two possible sites where Jesus was baptized. By looking at the landscape you can tell how important water is and its presence would not have been taken for granted.

Next, the important role of water.
Sacramentally, it is very easy to understand water: just as water is essential for the body's survival, so the grace that water symbolizes is essential for the survival of the soul. Grace, not only as it comes to us from baptism when our soul is cleansed of Original Sin, but the constant Grace--God's own Life--that we receive in moments of temptation and weakness, is essential to sustain, strengthen and renew our souls. Responding to Grace builds our bond with God; denying Grace distances us from God.

Baptism of Christ, Francesco Alban, 17th Century.

Culturally, water signifies sex.
Spiritually, water-as-grace is life-giving to the soul as culturally, sex is life-giving to the body. Because the sexual experience is equated to a renewal of the senses and the generation of biological life as Grace gives the soul life, water as a sexual symbol can be both positive and destructive.

Yul Brenner as Ramses in The Ten Commandments which was released only one year before The Monolith Monsters came out in 1957.

The last of the important symbols is rock.
When the Lord decides to call the Israelites out from the Land of Egypt, he "hardens Pharaoh's heart," and makes it like stone, but then in the New Testament, Jesus is compared to a rock, that "rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone supporting all the rest," so how do we reconcile these two oppositions? When there is no grace, the heart becomes hard like rock (as in the view of the surrounding desert in the photo of the Baptism site above) but, when the heart is full of Grace, the heart is also fully resolved in all of its endeavors and becomes as stable as a rock: strong and supportive.
Now that we have working definitions of these symbols, we can understand The Monolith Monsters.

Just as he starred in The Incredible Shrinking Man, Grant Williams also stars in The Monolith Monsters which director of TISM Jack Arnold helped to write the screenplay.

The beginning of the film opens with a scientific discussion which was a stylistic tool in the Sci-Fi films of the 1950s: they build up the role of science (because science ended World War II through the Manhattan Project) only to spend the rest of the film presenting a problem that science can't solve. Ben Gilbert (Phil Harvey) drives along the deserted old San Angelo road in the desert of California. He stops the car because it's overheating; we will see this device of the car running out of water employed again in 1963 when Homer Smith (Sidney Poitier) drives up to the convent in Lilies of the Field and will ask for water because his car is thirsty. Meanwhile, Ben gets out to fill the tank with water and grabs a stone to keep his car from rolling back down the hill; as he fills the water tank and water drips down, touching the meteor stones beneath the car.

The road is the road of life, the road of salvation, the San Angelo road, i.e., the "angelic road" that we will discover has been abandoned. Ben making this journey up the dusty desert road has waited too long to give his car (symbolic of his soul) water (grace). When he gets out of the car, he grabs the first thing he can to keep from back sliding in the spiritual life: one of the rocks. In and of themselves, the rocks aren't bad things, but when Ben pours the water into his car, he's waited so long to fill it that he makes a mess and drops some of the water, i.e., he isn't capable of receiving all the grace that his soul needs up on this part of is spiritual journey and he loses some of the grace he needed.

The meaning of this can be understood if we forward a bit to when Ben talks to town newspaperman Martin (Les Tremayne) and talks about making an original discovery. Grace isn't enough to keep Ben going at this point, he wants some worldly excitement the way Martin wants some exciting news to report, and that's the first important lesson of a film of this kind. Whenever somebody dies in a film, it's because they are all ready dead, and the lead-up to their death is to show us why they are dead and cannot, like the hero, go through the steps of conversion necessary to complete their journey.

When Ben gets into "The Office of the Interior" (and we should take that symbolically to be the "interior life" or the life of the spirit), it's hot and he opens a window; the heat is a sign of a spiritual trial, because when impurities are going to be worked out of metal they are subjected to high heat in order to purify them and the same is true of the soul, but instead of cleansing Ben of his impurities, Ben's impurities will be brought out for us to see just before it ruins him.

There is more that Martin doesn't understand than just geology jargon. "The desert is full of things that don't belong. Take the salt flats out there. Used to be an ocean bed. Now that ocean knew the middle of a desert was a pretty silly place for it to be so it just dried up and went away." The salt flats and the mining going on are the "flock of Christ" compared to the "flock" of black rocks Ben finds out on the road. The Christians in the town use that salt to preserve their faith and the salt is there because of the ocean that was there, the ocean of Christ's mercy; later in the film, it will be water filling in this space left by the "dried up ocean" that will save the town and the world from the attack of the monolith monsters.

This isn't staring into the abyss, rather, staring into the mirror of the soul. Dave should be realizing right now that he needs to be converted, because what has happened to his buddy is about to happen to him.

When the storm comes in through the windows, we have a good idea of what has happened because of a side comment made by Martin. Just as in The Incredible Shrinking Man when Louise left the door open and the cat got in to attack Scott, so in The Monolith Monsters, leaving the window open (because earlier in the day it was hot) shows that Ben hasn't been vigilant, rather, like sleeping through too many geology classes in school, Ben wasn't keeping guard for everything that could come in to harm him. In this case, Ben has been working too hard, and that's why it is a clipboard falling over to trigger the chain reaction to start the rocks multiplying (please see Se7en and the Eighth Deadly Sin for a review of the Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman film and the harms of over-working). It's rather surprising to see Ben sleeping there in the office, but that's because his life and work are one, and when the cold blasts of loneliness come into his soul, he doesn't have any counter-balance to off-set the work with the relaxation he needs to rejuvenate.

When Dave Miller (Grant Williams) gets out of his car, he throws away his cigarette. This is one of those great moments of screenwriting and directing when the purpose of the hero is revealed in the first moments of him being introduced to the audience. In order to survive this ordeal, just as he tossed away his cigarette, Dave has to get rid of an appetite he has been hanging onto, specifically, the relationship he is having with Cathy Barrett (Lola Albright).

This is a great shot because it describes for us what caused Ben to die: being caught between work (the area of the geology lab) and between his personal life (where he sleeps) petrified him so he could no longer do either one of them well. The moment Dave touches Ben to try to get him to "wake up," Dave realizes there is no life in him, which is the constant theme running throughout the film.

When we go to the desert and we meet Cathy and Ginny Simpson, it's the conversation that lets us know, through the eyes of the innocent child, what is wrong in the town of San Angelo. Cathy and Dave are having a relationship, specifically a sexual relationship, and they aren't getting married. Today, when more than half of the couples in the United States are cohabiting without being married, this probably doesn't seem like such a big deal, but that is precisely one of the social evils films such as The Monolith Monsters were trying to avoid (and we will see this in the next posting in this series on Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World of 1951).

The desert can invoke two different things: it came be the place where the spiritual athletes of God go to purify themselves of sin and temptation, or it can denote those who have lived a life without grace and their soul is as parched of God's Life giving Grace as the desert is parched of water.

Cathy should be embarrassed when Ginny points out that lizards don't get married, because having sex without the covenant of God binding a man and a woman together puts us on the level of the animals; animals don't get married, so don't act like an animal, Ms. Barrett. Men and women get married because they are God's children, so act that way. "Why don't you and Mr. Miller get married?"and perhaps we find out the reason later: Dave's bad coffee. "The reason for my prolonged bachelorhood," he says, because anyone who drinks that kind of mud can't be easy to live with. But the mud he drinks is symbolic more than anything, because instead of drinking the pure water of grace, he drinks the muddied waters of sin.

What's important about this scene is what is important about all the 1950s Sci-Fi thrillers: what has it done to the children? What is the next generation going to suffer as a result of what we are doing? The black rock that Ginny takes from the "scene of the crime" with Ms. Barrett is symbolic of what is in Ginny's heart: men and women don't have to get married, they can live like the lizards. If Ms. Barrett thinks Mr. Miller is so special, why won't she marry him? We know Dave has asked because we find this out later but we also know from The Incredible Shrinking Man about the increasing independence that women are gaining; Cathy Barrett can provide for herself, and Dave Miller provides that "animal comfort" for when she gets lonely, but just like Louise in TISM, Dave Miller isn't worth the sacrifices Cathy would have to make of Dave sometimes being grumpy, and so it's easier to just live like the lizards.

When Mrs. Simpson tells Ginny to leave that rock outside, she knows exactly what she is talking about: she can see the "dirt" on Ginny's hands and knows that Ginny needs to "wash" before joining the rest of the family. Mrs. Simpson knows that Ginny has been contaminated by what she has brought home, but doesn't realize how powerful it is nor how even she and her husband have been contaminated by it all ready. Ginny dropping the rock (sin) into the water (immersion Baptism) is an oxymoron, because it's Ginny who should be receiving Grace, but that illustrates for us something more startlingly: a "baptism into sin." we normally think of these things with horror films such as House of Dracula but given what happens, the death of her parents and destruction of her home (and her own near-death experience) we cannot underestimate what Ginny "really learned" at school today and it wasn't about irrigation canals.

Jumping forward, we see Ginny having to be placed in an iron lung, all too familiar to people in the 1950s because of earlier epidemics of Polio which effected entire towns. This image is incredibly important because so many families were directly effected by polio, especially when it was discovered that it was fecal matter entering into the drinking water of communities that was the source of infection (Dave's "drinking mud" fits in nicely here). When Ginny drops that black meteor in the water, and then she's in the iron lung, the disruptive and wide-spread damaging effects of what is happening in the film would have had a more immediate impact on film audiences in the '50s more so than today: sin spreads as fast as polio and is as dangerous.

This is where the "science build-up" I spoke of in the beginning gets undermined by the film, and is, again, a typical technique of the era.

When they drive out to the Simpson farm, it's so hard for Cathy to find Ginny that she passes her by, and then she has to peer into the darkness to see her, contrast this with the brightness of the day and how close they were sitting during the field trip (pictured above). This great directing technique demonstrates the shock children all over the country were slowly going into at the ways their lives were changing (we will see the exact same thing happen in Them! and Invaders From Mars in upcoming posts). When Ginny is in the doctor's office and he notes that her temperature is "sub-normal," we will reference this when we discuss The Blob, but it lets us know that, just like her teacher Ms. Barrett, Ginny is becoming cold-hearted, because it doesn't matter that Cathy thinks Dave "is special," the lesson Ginny learned is not to let Dave know he's special, and that's cold.

Mr. & Mrs. Simpson petrified. Note, please, how they are lying side by side but in different directions. This shows how Cathy's and Dave's relationship is effecting married couples, because sexual relations was an impetus for getting married, being able to have sexual relations without marriage is a plague to those who sacrifice for the sake of their marriages. What's the point of getting married, then? And this position we find them in illustrates for us what some people address as "bed death" in marriage, when husband and wife stop having sex because they are growing apart (lying beside one another and yet worlds apart). The Monolith Monsters puts forth that the monolith monsters are Cathy and Dave, a nice couple that no one would suspect of bringing devastation onto their town, but who are because of the way they are behaving and refusing to conform to social norms for their good, the good of society and the good of the children.

It's not enough to know that Ginny, and everyone, needs salt, the "salt of faith"; they also need the grace of baptism and the day-to-day grace that sustains us in our journey. Whenever the rocks start multiplying because of the water, that's a sign of the multiplication of sin (specifically, sexual sins, like Sodom pictured above) and the growing of those sins details for us how easy it is for one sin to spread and the destruction it causes, not only to the sinner's soul, but all those with whom the sinner comes into contact and influences by their sin.

It's lifeless, and when we realize, we each individually realize for our self how sin destroys life within us, that is the moment of our real and genuine conversion.

The Monolith Monsters is an incredible example of utilizing the language of the Bible to instruct about its lessons using the methods of the day; it was a better film in the 1950s, much more appreciated, but when we understand its effectiveness and the truth it communicates, it opens up another means of instruction for us. Like Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments the year before, The Monolith Monsters shows us how we can either have hearts of stone that God can write His commandments upon, so that we may live, or we can be the stone statues like Lot's nameless wife and condemn others to share our fate.

One Of Us Has To Die: The Incredible Shrinking Man & the Sexual Revolution Of the 1950s

2012-02-08T16:28:00.000-06:00

Jack Arnold’s 1957 Sci-Fi thriller The Incredible Shrinking Man (which has been preserved in the National Film Registry) is important because it provides us insight into what was really happening in the 1950s Sci-Fi genre of film and literature: whereas film makers such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas hold that the films were about Communism, the political “other” of America in the 1950s, TISM smashes that concept and provides a different thesis that the Sci-Fi films were about Americans, not Communists, and the monsters and aliens dominating the genre in the 1950s, those who had grown so enormous, merely illustrates how, because of the guilt of launching two nuclear attacks against Japan, we had become small and lost our humanity, we had become alien to ourselves, and the Sci-Fi genre was a mass catharsis of our guilt more deadly to our psyches than radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (this posting builds upon The Second Original Sin: Art In the Atomic Age, The Decade Of Turmoil: Film In the1950s and Love In the Sonic Age: Attack Of the 50-Foot Woman).

The obvious rebuttal is, but Lucas and Spielberg were alive in the 1950s and you weren't, so wouldn't they have a better clue about what their movies meant to their generation? And that would be an excellent rebuttal, however, there are two important points to undermine that position: first, we can never really see something pertaining to ourselves accurately because we are a part of it, in this case the films, and the films are a part of us; secondly, the understanding about the aliens and monsters being about the Communists isn't supported by any other genre of film. For example, Westerns were the dominating television show during the 1950s, but there isn't an accurate or feasible way of introducing interpretations of Communists into the Westerns; there is the same case with film noir and even the major dramas throughout the 1950s. (I will be making other posts to demonstrate how the thesis I am proposing is supported by other genres, but I am starting with the Sci-Fi genre first). If the "Communist thesis" was viable to interpret the Sci-Fi genre, we would see traces of it being explored in other genres as well.

The central conflict for Scott Carey (Grant Williams) is with the giant spider. The death struggle with the spider is repeated with different symbols throughout the film; if we can understand this scene, we can understand the film. (Jack Arnold is a prominent director in the Sci-Fi genre of the '50s, and two years before TISM, he did Tarantula using the same spider for TISM as in Tarantula. The giant spider symbol could easily be a reference to J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings, the third best-selling novel of all time. Within the third book, The Two Towers, Frodo Baggins is poisoned by a large spider named Shelob who may be the inspiration for both Tarantula and TISM. The Lord of the Rings was being widely published between 1954-5, so it's conceivable the writers and film makers had come across it).

I am quoting extensively from Scott's monologue after the basement floor has flooded and he's all washed up, realizing that he's probably not going to be found or rescued. By taking it out of context, (which I usually don't like to do) the phrases and depth of desperation in Scott's thought processes come through; as you read, please, if you will, imagine that the "spider" is really his wife, Lou (and I will discuss her at length below).

This exact scene doesn't happen in the film, so that's why it's interesting that it has become so famous. But even though this scene doesn't actually take place, all the elements of this shot are present at the same time in the film and aides us, the viewers, in understanding what is trying to be done: the feminine spider (like Scott's wife Lou who sews a dress, the spider weaves, linking it to the world and space of the feminine) is up against Scott who is now significantly smaller than the spider and has only the needle, also a feminine symbol, which has been appropriated as a male/phallic symbol.

(The video for this scene is immediately below, but this is the lead up monologue): I still had my weapons. With these bits of metal I was a man again. If I was to die, it would not be as a helpless insect in the jaws of the spider monster. A strange calm possessed me. I thought more clearly than I had ever thought before, as if my mind were bathed in a brilliant light. I recognized that part of my illness was rooted in hunger, and I remembered the food on the shelf. The cake threaded with the spider web. I no longer felt hatred for the spider. Like myself, it struggled blindly for the means to live. If I was to fight it, if I was to win the food, then it must be now, while strength remained, while I was still of sufficient size to scale the wall. It was not decision that drove me to the crate, but reflex, as instinctive as the spider’s. My legs trembled, not with fear, but with weakness, and yet somehow I found a giant strength, urging me to the death-struggle. My enemy seemed immortal. More than a spider. It was every unknown terror in the world, every fear fused into one hideous, night-black horror. Still, whatever else had happened, my brain was a man’s brain, my intelligence still a man’s intelligence. . . . One of us had to die.

"Impaling the spider with my hook," is a definite sexual reference, and the fluids oozing from the spider's body and getting all over Scott after he has pierced the spider with his sword is symbolic of the "exchange" which takes place in the sexual act and has perhaps never been better explored than in this sequence. "One of us has to die," one of us has to be dominant and the other has to accept submission and let their "will to rule" and their "will to dominate," die. Note the clothes Scott wears in this sequence; like Nancy after she has grown 50 feet in Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, Scott's costume seems to hearken back to the caveman era, and examines the "primitive arrangement" between men and women which gave rise to society. The scissors do a good job of illustrating that "exchange."

Normally, the scissors would be a female instrument, to aid in the making of clothes for example, but scissors would not be possible without the metal used to make them and the metal is a masculine object. That's why Scott re-appropriates the needle as his sword and a bent straight pin as a hook, to reclaim them as masculine objects. (It probably would have been easier for Scott to get a wooden splinter to use as a spear to throw at the spider or adapt as a bow for arrows to shoot it with, that way, his risk would be minimized, but minimizing risk isn't the purpose of this conquest scene). The pins and the metallic scissors is Scott reminding Lou what he has given to their marriage, the exchange which has taken place from the beginning of time, and her end of the deal, what she has to give in exchange for what she is getting.

The scissors being used to drag down the spider doesn't work, and that's probably because it's the idea of "severing the umbilical cord," (the hook is the sexual act, the thread is the cord and the scissors the means of cutting the cord) the appeal to the female spider (Lou, Scott's wife) that she should be loving to Scott because a woman like her gave birth to Scott, and women want to (generally) have children; Scott and Lou do not have children although they have been married 6 years so killing Lou's will to dominate because he gave her children (think of Mrs. Doubtfire here) isn't applicable. Here's where the clever idea of "exchange" is introduced (and yes, this has Marxist reekings, but it's just too interesting to pass up).

Scott is in front of the cake, the spider on the web, crawling down, and then there is a basket there in the upper-right corner of the shot. The basket, again, re-enforces the space of the feminine not only because it is "weaved" as the spider weaves the web we see, but because women generally use baskets to carry things in (think of Little Red Riding Hood) because a woman carries a child until term, likening her womb to a basket. There is another element of the feminine here: the cake, specifically, the angel food cake. It's not only feminine because it's a cake that was probably baked by Lou and that we saw her eating earlier in the film while she was sewing, but because it is nutrition.

It's not a mere technique of thrills and chills that the food, the cake, can only be gotten by the death of the spider: the cake is nourishment. Specifically, the cake is an angel food cake, and anyone who has made angel food knows that it takes about a dozen eggs to make (so it's nearly all protein); the eggs make it a specifically feminine food because eggs are associated with life which is associated with women. But because it is protein, it will sustain man and the protein his muscles need so he can do his part in the partnership between a man and a woman. But a man needs more than just physical nourishment, he requires food for his emotions and soul, and that is up to a woman to provide as well by means of her love and her willingness to care for him. So, the image above, of the spider guarding over the angel food cake, illustrates for us the dichotomy of woman: the spider symbolizes her will to dominate her husband while the cake symbolizes her ability to care for him; in order to get the "angel" out of his wife to care for him, he has to have a means of destroying the spider within her (really the most famous spider of all is the latrodectus hesperus or black widow who kills her mate; for more on the divided nature of woman, please see The Medusa Within: Clash Of the Titans).

Publicity still for The Incredible Shrinking Man, reading: "Louise Carey takes her husband in hand." The next year, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman would make this a reality when Nancy picks up erring husband Harry and squeezes him. The hands, of course, symbolize strength, so women in the 1950s were beginning to use their strength to dominate their husbands in ways that had not previously been done, specifically, the "liberation" of women from the home during World War II when women went to work in factories and got used to making decisions that, previously, their husbands were making; but this is the catch, even for women (such as Louise Carey above) that might not have worked during the war, other women that were influencing her had. Just because it didn't effect every household, some women seeing single mothers, widowed by the war, were dis-illusioned by the seeming independence and freedom of those women and grew to resent the sacrifices inherent in a marriage. If women saw women being able to provide for themselves that which men had always provided as a part of the marriage contract, then women were increasingly willingly to forgo marriage in exchange for independence and freedom.

How can I support all this?
Fans of the film will say, and rightly so, that Lou never exhibits that kind of behavior towards, Scott, that it's the exact opposite, she is loving and refuses to leave him. However, all we really need to do is watch the opening dialogue between the two of them and we see a far darker woman, a modern woman and not a wife. (Below is the first part of the film, please, if you haven't seen it before, just take a moment to watch the first part).

The film begins with a shoreline and waves lapping upon it; there is a shot of the water and the sky, then a “drop shot” to a boat in the ocean (Jack Arnold would go onto direct Gilligan's Island, so linking the Minnow from Gilligan's Island to the boat in TISM is absolutely feasible). The two shots remind us of “the natural world” and the natural world order of humans being above the animals. Next, we see the boat in the middle of the ocean—the shoreline has disappeared—and we hear our narrator’s voice: “The strange, almost unbelievable story of Robert Scott Carey began on a very ordinary summer day. I know this story better than anyone, because I am Robert Scott Carey.”

The title card showing the radiation cloud/mist which Scott encounters and leaves that strange glitter all over his chest. Just as the cloud is in the title cards, so it is throughout the entire film. In fact, we could say that the cushion which Lou takes from between the two of them on the boat deck to put behind her back, that "thing" which comes between them, is the cloud, and the cloud of unknowing is directly what causes him to shrink.

I could write an entire post about these two lines, so detailed and intricate is the ramifications and the consequence of this being said in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and in the 1950’s. Several great films of this era were situated in the Pacific/Asia: From Here To Eternity, Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (the surrealist artist Luis Bunuel), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Mister Roberts, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, Around the World in 80 Days, The King and I, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Sayonara, Heaven Knows Mr. Allison, South Pacific, On the Beach and Operation Petticoat, not to mention all the films that take place on or around the water, such as The Old Man and the Sea, Suddenly, Last Summer, An Affair to Remember and Big Country (Gregory Peck's character is always likening Texas' vastness to the vastness of the ocean with which he is familiar) so, The Incredible Shrinking Man is situating itself, just within these two opening shots, in a very definite sphere, the natural order and the “new order” created by the way World War II ended.

Whereas Scott references the marriage between them, Lou calls Scott, "my friend," and seems to dissolve the marriage bond, especially when she says, "I'm on vacation, too," and this is the part that starts making Scott into a pest, instead of the man she married and supposedly loves.

Let us first of all consider his name: Robert Scott Carey. His last name, “Carey,” is feminine, “Carrie,” and invokes the film made just a few years earlier in 1952, Carrie, based on Theodor Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie, about a woman who lives with numerous men and brings each of them to ruin as she advances in society to become an actress (her designation “sister” is not religious, rather, reminds the reader of her role as a sibling to another woman, or, in broader terms, a social sister to all women, something like the relationship of Eve and Lillith).

Carrie of 1952 starring Eddie Albert, Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones was nominated for Best Costumes (Edith Head) and Best Art Direction; additionally, Sir Laurence Olivier received a BAFTA nomination for his performance, so it was a well-known film during the early 1950's. Carrie well-illustrates the new kind of woman discussed above, and both Albert's and Olivier's character demonstrate (in varying degrees) Harry from Attack of the 50-Foot Woman.

This is important because, throughout the 1950s, we see the masculinization of women (Them! for example, has the audience see the leading actress, Pat, stuck getting out of an airplane the first time we see her; her top half is in the plane and her feet on the ground, so she’s stuck between the natural world and the man-made world and throughout the film, she struggles between them) and the feminization of men. Robert’s last name “Carey” creates the same situation for him as was being depicted for many women in the science fiction films of this decade. Similarly, Robert’s wife Louise goes by “Lou” throughout the film, bringing out the masculine in her nature. This is further developed when a woman also 36 inches tall from a carnival comes to talk to Scott at a coffee shop and she tells him that her name is Clarice Bruce.

Clarice Bruce and Scott Carey having coffee. Her femininity is deceiving because while she seems like the "angel food cake" of the female world, it was, for example, Clarice who made the first move to come and sit with Scott; even though Clarice tells Scott that he is taller than her, at the park (a symbol of the Garden of Eden) Scott realizes he's shrinking again when he's standing in front of her, showing Scott that even with a small woman he's small.

The second important point about these opening lines is that he wants to establish his authority as the author of the story and the one who knows most about what has happened. It’s an “almost” unbelievable story, and yet there is the element that allows us to believe it, and by the end we will believe it, every scene of it. It is his(story) not her story, and as Scott (like most men in the 1950s) increasingly looses his identity, his-story is what he will retain and his own ability to meditate upon his being, his thoughts and reflections are his, not given to him by his wife with whom he has to bargain for a drink.

Seeing the cloud, about which, he can do nothing. We can also take the cloud to be that which is "hiding his wife" from him; there's this woman beside him, but where did the woman who loved him go to? Between every man and woman there is a cloud of not knowing, a cloud of uncertainty (this is also a famous spiritual phrase which I am not invoking in this context).

As we focus in on the boat and see Scott and Lou, she makes a small but significant gesture: she takes a pillow/cushion that is between them and puts it behind her back. They are reclining against the boat’s windshield. A boat is a vehicle and, as vehicles typically symbolize the Holy Spirit (who guides us and takes us where we need to go in life to fulfill our destiny) a boat is particularly linked to the Holy Spirit because a boat travels on water (the sacrament of Baptism and symbol of Grace) but boats figure largely in the story of Jesus: sleeping on the boat during the storm, Peter and his brother were on a boat when Jesus called them, “Follow me and I will make you a fisher of men,” the disciples were on a boat when they saw Jesus walking on the water, then they were on a boat again when they saw Jesus on the shore (after the Resurrection) and Peter walked on the water to get to Jesus.

When Scott goes to the doctor's the first time to have himself checked out, the doctor asks how often he has had physicals and Scott responds for the draft board and life insurance purposes; these would (psychologically and emotionally) establish a man's height for him because being able to serve his country in war and provide for his family at his death are both ways that men prove their worth to themselves and others so both those examples was a time when Scott felt that he did "measure up" to expectations of him.

So, within the first few seconds of the film, we have the water and the cultural references to the Battle of the Pacific during World War II (a fact further emphasized by Robert mentioning sailing to the Philippines, where a large part of the War in the Pacific took place), the boat and the windshield (glass always symbolizes reflection) and the cushion that has been between them has now been put behind Lou is “supporting her” in what she does next; the meaning of the conversation about to take place is being “blocked” by both Scott and Louise, so the conversation which takes place, the vehicle of the rest of the story, is not going to be meditated upon by either of them, they are turning their backs to it and blocking it out.

Will you please pass the salt? It's right there, get it yourself. The importance of salt, specifically, will be discussed in my next post on Salt of the Earth: The Monolith Monsters, but right now, we can easily link Mr. Smith (Brad Pitt) wanting his wife to get him the salt to Scott Carey wanting his wife to get him a beer; both men face the same giant obstacles: their wives' indifference to their needs. Some conflicts just never get resolved.

What is the conversation?
It’s funny how things don’t change very much. It’s very similar to Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, when John asks Jane to pass the salt and she never does. In The Incredible Shrinking Man, we know they are on vacation and Scott says, “I’m thirsty,” which references Christ’s thirst upon the cross, but what’s really important is that Scott then says, “Louise, I think we should get married.” Granted, every time someone mentions being thirsty in art/film/literature doesn’t reference Christ on the cross, however, Christ’s “work on the cross” is juxtaposed against them being on “vacation” and Scott asking Louise to marry him (the Crucifixion was Christ wedding Himself to the Church) all combines to make a stronger reference feasible. When Louise responds that they have been married 6 years, we know from St. Augustine that 6 is the number of imperfection (the earth was created in 6 days, but not perfectly the fullness of salvation history had not been realized) so it’s not the 7 year itch being referenced, for example, but that something—like the cushion—has come between them to make their marriage imperfect (the number 6 is significant because Scott doesn’t start shrinking until 6 months have passed and Scott is over 6 feet tall regularly).

Lou isn't very supportive. She tries to sacrifice and be strong for Scott when he's getting the really bad news, but if she had been more attuned to his needs at the beginning of the film, Scott wouldn't have started shrinking to begin with. But there is another uncanny similarity between TISM and Mr. & Mrs. Smith: women's bad cooking. In TISM, Scott references the "cooking around her," in relation to him loosing weight, and John Smith tells Jane what a lousy cook she is and she replies that she never cooked a meal in her life.

At this point, Scott realizes he has to bargain with his wife, so he makes a deal with her that if she will get him a beer, he’ll get dinner. As in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, it’s not labor, rather a labor of love that is requested. When I am at my mother’s, for instance, we can’t keep her in her chair, she’s waiting on us hand and foot, because she loves us and wants us to be comfortable and have all our needs; Lou is not concerned with her husband’s needs, she is concerned with her own comfort. It’s not that it’s the “woman’s place” to get the menfolks’ beer (Scott will call her a wench in a few seconds, specifically to emphasize that his desire for a beer is not just putting Lou "in her place," but because he wants to know that she cares for him) but because women are created from spirit, it's women’s unique characteristic and inherent sensibility to love and anticipate love’s needs. When one is quick to anticipate the needs of their loved ones, the beloved knows they are loved and that's what Scott wants to know, that Louise loves him.

This scene is later in the film, but after Scott finds out that he is definitely shrinking, Scott and Lou go out to the car and Lou asks if he wants her to drive; no, he says. That should be taken symbolically, because Scott still hopes that he can remain "in the driver's seat" of their relationship (as Honey Parker referenced in Attack Of the 50-Foot Woman). Scott also tells Lou that she doesn't have to stay married to him and Lou denies that. While she intends to stay, she's not really telling Scott the things he needs to hear, "to make him feel big again" to make him feel like a man.

Later on, it's by Scott’s business suit not fitting him that he realizes he's shrinking, and this means he doesn’t “measure up” to his job, whether that is at work or at home (his job of being a husband; it could also be that, because the boat they borrowed was Scott's brother's boat, Lou feels like he isn't successful, or at least not as successful as his brother who owns the business that Scott only works at). Lou suggesting that he is just loosing weight isn’t the compliment for a man that it would be for a woman, so Scott retaliates with a complaint about her cooking. He then asks her to pick up a “bathroom scale,” and a “scale” is significant because it’s a unit of measurement and he wants to know objectively how he measures up.

When Scott runs out into the night and encounters a carnival on the midway, it references two important events. The first is the Battle of Midway, in the Pacific and the second important point is the great film by Tod Browning Freaks (1932).The Battle of Midway was a major US Navy victory in World War II, which takes us back to the beginning of the film with Scott's reference to the Philippines and Scott referencing his Navy draft registration with the doctor. While the Battle of Midway should be a victorious reference, it's more about suffering in this context and the the kind of battle that Scott is waging inside himself at this time. The reference to Freaks lets us know how Scott is being poisoned (as Hans is poisoned in Freaks) and feels himself being mocked and stared at everywhere he goes, that there is no place for him just as there is no place for those who are Freaks in society.

The "big woman" (Cleopatra) and the little man (Hans) from Tod Browning's great drama Freaks of 1932. Jack Arnold would have known this film (everyone in the film world has seen it) and when Scott wanders into the "freak show" this is specifically what Arnold wants his viewers to think of and the ruin brought on so many people by the conflict in size between the leading characters in Freaks. Hans' little girl friend Freida (also a dwarf) tells Hans that even though he's in love with Cleopatra, to her, Hans is a plaything, but to Freida, he is a man. This is a great and necessary way of understanding the relationship of Scott Carey and Clarice Bruce.

Scott’s “relationship” with Clarice is what Feminists would call a perfect example of masculine relativity, that is, men only feel like men when there is a woman beneath them. In order for men to feel masculine, they have to be subjugating women. This isn't the point TISM is making: Clarice can still see Scott as a man, whereas Lou sees Scott as a pest and nuisance. This is the point that not only TISM is trying to make, but most of the dramas and and film noirs of the 1950s are trying to make as well: after World War II, men needed women to love them and help with the healing of the emotional and psychological wounds they sustained after the war, but instead, they realized that they came home and had a new war to fight with the women they loved because the women no longer loved them.

Publicity still for The Incredible Shrinking Man.

That lack of love is what causes Scott to shrink, just as a woman's love builds a man up and makes him feel big because he feels important. We know this is accurate because, after Scott has killed the spider (the ultimate symbol of "threatening female sexuality" in the film) he continues to shrink. If conquest was all Scott needed, then by the film's own standards he would no longer be shrinking, it would be stopped.

When we next see Scott, he’s in a doll’s house. The relationship of “dolls” to the 1950s shouldn’t be underestimated, for example, it’s identification with a doll that they hope to find a lost sister in The Searchers of just two years before and Marlon Brando starred in Guys and Dolls in 1955. In Hitchcock’s 1950 thriller Stage Fright, it’s with a blood-stained doll that a murderer is psychologically cornered. And, predictably, the little girl in Them! carries a doll with her when the policemen find her and wild Helen even has a doll in The Helen Keller Story (the next year, the deputy will call Honey Parker a "real doll" in Attack of the 50-Foot Woman).
What’s the point?

The move into the doll's house is really the last straw because a house, a home, shelter, is what a man most wants to provide for his wife and family, and now that Louise has to provide him with a doll's house is the sign that Scott knows his lack of a job and ability to earn an income has made him a woman, no longer a man because, in spite of his biological sex, by society's standards of what makes "a man a man," Scott "doesn't measure up."

We have a tendency to project human feelings onto dolls, to pretend that they are human, but they are not; for Scott, living in a doll’s house, he is the recipient of human emotions but he is no longer human (rather, thinks of himself as being human) that’s why he starts acting so tyrannical, to be a tyrant is to lose one’s humanity because you lose your grip on reality (Nero was a great tyrant who watched Rome burn because he lost the sense to realize how catastrophic it was). Scott reflects to himself that, as he becomes smaller, he becomes “more monstrous in my domination of Louise” but it's not because he's growing smaller, but because Louise is being more dominating in making decisions (such as getting an unlisted number, she never consulted Scott about it) and so there is a subtle, but very real power struggle going on between them.
The next scene tells us why.

A house can be a symbol for a soul, so that Scott is now living in a doll's house shows that his soul has become feminine and toy-like.

The famous "cat face in the door of the doll's house" lets us know that Scott believes Louise is having an affair. “Heaven only knows how she managed to get through those weeks,” but he knows, too. A cat is always associated with female sexuality and a window means self-reflection or, because the eyes are the windows of the soul and windows are the eyes of a house, a window can refer to something that is seen and intuited. As Louise prepares to leave, she leaves the door open and that’s when the cat comes in, but that gesture symbolizes that “she’s open” to a liaison (as in When Harry Met Sally and Harry spits the grape “seed” on the closed window, meaning, that Sally is “closed” to receiving his seed, please see Fate vs Chance: When Harry Met Sally).

Scott lying on the couch suddenly “scratches” the surface of the truth as Butch the cat "scratches the door" of the doll house: Louise is cheating on him. (Cats are always associated with female sexuality, so for the cat to be named “Butch” means that female sexuality is going to “butcher” Scott, just as, in Pulp Fiction, Bruce Willis’ character Butch “butchers” a man in the boxing ring; the name "Butch" for the cat also, like Scott “Carey,” “Lou,” and Clarice Bruce, mixes the gender identity). Scott opening the door to see the giant cat symbolizes two things: the overwhelming truth that Louise is cheating on him and the loss of domination of the natural order. As the opening shot of the film suggests, there is a natural order, the ocean meeting the shoreline, and man was made to dominate that world, but now, as often been commented upon, he can’t even dominate the household cat, that is, his own wife.

When Scott is backing up and the cat reaches into the house and scratches his back, that’s indicative of how Louise has “stabbed him in the back” but, do you think Scott told Louise about meeting Clarice? When we are depressed, we tend to think wild things and this is what is happening to Scott, Louise is not having an affair, but Scott feels so helpless, he can't even say the words to himself, he can only think of them in abstract images. Scott, being hard on himself for acting "monstrous" to Lou, then imagines a way that Lou would be "monstrous " to him (to absolve himself of being tyrannical to her) and that's where the monstrous cat, literally comes in.

Before the cat comes in through Scott’s doll house door, he thinks, “Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow the doctors will save me,” and this would be a good time to discuss his doctors. Anyone who has read my post on The Bright Autumn Moon: The Wolf Man knows what I am going to say about Scott's primary doctor, Dr. Silver: the word “silver" sounds like the Hebrew word for “word” so silver is the Word in Christianity, hence, the Physician Scott is in need of, just like the Wolf Man, is the Word of God. As Scott lies upon the couch in the doll house scene, we must think of another doctor, Sigmund Freud, who used a couch in psychoanalysis; so, Scott lying upon the couch in this scene means that we are to assume the guise of Freud and understand the cat chasing and striking Scott as Freud would understand it, sexually.

Now that the cat is trying to get in through the back of the house, we can see how it’s “taking over” his thoughts, the way an idea seizes upon us and then we are overwhelmed by it. Scott running out through the front door indicates that he has “made a run for it” in their marriage and that, even as he needs Lou most now, he has also disconnected himself from her emotionally because he’s “made a break for it.” When the cat faces him and Scott decides to pull down the lamp on the cat, the cat scratches Scott, ripping his shirt apart. This bearing of Scott’s chest takes us back to the beginning of the film when Scott’s chest was also bear then, correlating to the cloud of radiation which caused this whole mess: not knowing whether or not he can trust Lou has again come between them and caused him to grow so small, that everyone will now assume he's dead. Now we can piece together why it was the “insecticide” that triggered the diminution of Scott Carey: insecticides kill “pests,” and Scott is realizing, as he runs the grocery errand for Louise, that he is a pest, and this makes Scott start to “feel small” so he becomes small.

Before Scott makes it to the lamp, he’s running, and the cat’s paw reaches around from behind him and scratches him in the face; this symbolizes how Scott has “lost face” as a result of Lou’s affair, just one more thing to make Scott feel small. Pulling the lamp down on the cat means a confrontation with Lou that he’s “illuminated” about what’s going on. When Scott makes a run to the top of the basement, the basement symbolizes our most primal instincts, our most base and animalistic self (he’s looking down at the staircase, indicating a “digression”); his fight with the cat is actually symbolic of a conversion, because when Lou returns home just as she said she would, carrying a package, Scott realizes he was wrong about the affair, and trying to keep the cat out is trying to keep the thought of Lou’s infidelity out of his mind (please feel free to insert your own experience here, if you have had doubts about a friend’s loyalty or your spouse’s, if you have had doubts about someone that were founded but proved false, trying to “close out” those aggressive thoughts is extremely difficult). Scott being pushed into the dirty crate indicates for us both the fall he has taken (because he believed Lou had “fallen” sexually by cheating on him, he now takes the fall he accused her of) and he’s in with the dirty rags indicates Scott’s willingness to demote Lou to a “dirty woman” so he has to take on the filth he threw onto her in his accusation of her adultery.

The floor of the cellar indicates that he's "fallen" as low as he can.

As Scott surveys the cellar floor, he says, “ No desert-island castaway ever faced so bleak a prospect.” comparing it to Robinson Crusoe which had been made just three years before (lead actor Dan O'Herlihy was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor, so it was a well-known film and available through Netflix). As Scott begins looking for food, he says, "I was driven by hunger and also the horrible thought that without nourishment the shrinking process was quickening.” The nourishment a man needs, of course, is the love of his wife, and without that nourishment, he feels small and insignificant, he shrinks to nothing. This is the part of the story that is almost unbelievable, the vulnerability of a man and his need for his wife’s love. Of course men take it for granted, but this graphic story also relays to us the striking necessity of what happens when he’s denied that love.

When Scott begins his trial of survival in the cellar, we should take it as the drastic turning back of the clock on mankind, the 50,000 years B.C., when man was a tiny creature in the world of giant creatures bent on his destruction. The encounter with the mousetrap illustrates this for us. When we see a scene in any film where it’s like, “Come on, you have to be kidding me, spring the trap first, then go for the cheese, even the mice in my house know to do that! Don’t throw your hook away, use it to span the distance of the box, that stick isn’t going to hold!” we should not be concerned with inserting common sense, rather, quizzing ourselves as to why the scene has been written as it has, and then we realize it's because Scott, and all men, are starting all over from the beginning (the leap he has to take over the box, for instance, is the leap of faith).

For those who have read my post The Exorcist: Absent Fathers, you may--like me--be thinking about St. Joseph and the mousetrap, its relationship to this scene here and, if you scroll down the page at A Better Mousetrap, if provides some wonderful theological discussion on the spiritual nature of a mousetrap, specifically how it relates to St. Joseph. That Scott is using a nail to try and spring the trap may relate to the nails of the carpenter, Christ and His Crucifixion. We can't be sure, however, it is important that, for the first time in the film (at the end) Scott specifically mentions God and the mystical workings of the universe, so Scott's being and his relationship to God are on his mind, so it's obviously on the film makers' minds as well. Why is the cheese lost? The cheese is food for a pest, a mouse, not a man, who needs the love and care of his wife, symbolized by the cake as spiritual nourishment.

The flooding of the cellar by the hot water heater is quite interesting because, again, the heater was a masculine object, a sign of man's inventiveness and his ability to overcome the elements to make himself comfortable and assure his survival. Now, it's an instrument of his destruction (it destroyed his shelter, the match box). But what is it that Scott uses to float himself? A pencil. It not only references the writing of the book that Scott was working on earlier in the film when he was big enough to hold a pencil, but the presence of the pencil as a life-saving device makes us question its relationship to the flood and we could deduce that this is supposed to invoke Noah's Flood (the flood) and its recording in the Bible (the pencil as an instrument of a scribe); another likely reference is to the story (the pencil) of Robinson Crusoe (who was shipwrecked but whose story is recorded in writing).

Scott hanging onto a pencil amidst the water flooded from the water heater. The foot you see is Scott's brother's who is helping Louise get packed to leave the house. Scott floating on the pencil reminds us of watching him write earlier in the film a "book" and how, we can suppose, he wasn't able to finish because he got so small he couldn't hold the pencil any longer. Another way of looking at it, however, is that he was still too big to write what really needed to be written, what the world really needed to hear, and it isn't until he becomes "the smallest of the small" that he understands enough to tell the world what it needs to hear.

At the end of the film, when Scott has shrunk as far as we will see him go, he mentions "God's silver tapestry," and that phrase, "silver tapestry," doesn't make sense unless we understand the reference to "silver" and Scott's doctor, Dr. Silver, discussed above.

Looking out the screen at a bird to whom Scott offers a morsel of the cake before the big battle with the spider. Why doesn't the bird take the cake? Because that's not the food the bird wants. Birds symbolize the Holy Spirit, and we can be assured that this is an accurate deduction because the other side of the screen, in the grass, is where Scott will mention, for the first time in the film, his relationship to God. So the bird there is God's presence, waiting for him to "be small enough," in spiritual terms, to come over to His Side because God doesn't want to take food from Scott, God wants to give Scott the Food that eternally satisfies.

When Scott crawls through the screening to step onto the grass, he has "passed through" the screen just as, in the beginning, he passed through the cloud of radiation (and he is talking about the radiation bursts in this scene), but he has also passed through the screening as he has passed through that "great unknown" that was coming in-between Lou and Scott when they were on the boat (a screen as a partition that separates or hides something). In this sense, we can say that Scott Carey is a hero because he has experienced that conversion necessary for a hero to complete their journey.

The flooding of the basement floor and Scott hangs by a nail at the foot of the stairs (lower left corner) desperately calling out to Louise whose feet we see on the bottom step, but she doesn't hear Scott. This is a great set-up because Scott is "beneath Louise" at this point in their relationship. What Scott really needs is to be flooded with the "warmth of her love" not flooded by the hot water heater.

When Scott realizes "there is no zero with God," he's realizing that, in terms of worldliness he is zero, but he has finally arrived at that blessed state of "emptiness" that, in spiritual terms, means fullness: he is empty of himself but full of God. This provides us with the important role that spirituality plays in a man's self-identity and relationship to God. When man knows God, man knows himself, and when he knows himself, he will be the man he needs to be to his wife, children and society; when a man has failed to know God, he has failed in all his roles and relationships. Until a man acknowledges that God is bigger than himself, he is a small man, indeed.

"Not suitable for children."

Marie Antoinette & Ted Kennedy: Man On A Ledge

2012-02-07T19:09:00.000-06:00

The tagline is, "You can only push an innocent man so far."
As we start out, we get some great views of New York City, reminding us of similar shots in this summer's upcoming The Avengers as aliens attack New York City; we're also reminded of what's missing from the shots, the World Trade Center, and how that was attacked, but we are also reminded of a much more recent attack in New York City, and if the similar shots of the Big Apple doesn't invoke the memory for us, the name of the company does: Lehman Brothers.

Asger Leth's Man On a Ledge strategically employs several well planted references to the financial crisis which started in New York City in 2008, but also reminds us of how similar acts of injustice have been committed in the past: the monarch diamond worth $40 million dollars reminds us of French Queen Marie Antoinette; Chappaquiddick, where the diamond was supposedly stolen, reminds us of Ted Kennedy's leaving the scene of an "injury" without notifying authorities and then the millions which David Englander (Ed Harris) lost because of Lehmann Brothers dishonorable conduct in the market meltdown of 2008 is the motivation for setting up Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington). Also, constantly in the busy, dramatic background, is another character lurking larger than life: Teddy Roosevelt.

Nick Cassidy on the ledge of The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.

Man On A Ledge isn't an Occupy Wall Street film, but one can't ignore the serious attempt it makes to analyze the world-wide situation now and who is suffering for it. We have to start with the real point of the film, the ultimate aspect needing to be examined and the means by which Nick gets out of prison so he can escape: the death of his father. Frank Cassidy (Bill Saddler) is more than just Nick's biological father: he's symbolic of the founding fathers of this country and why they came to this country and why they established the government they did, to be a land of opportunity and equality, not a land for the opportunistic who would feed upon the other people. This is why Man On A Ledge chooses The Roosevelt Hotel as the site of Nick's "retrial," a retrial by the standards of Americans, not the corrupt buying justice for themselves.

Jamie Bell plays Nick's brother Joey Cassidy. Unlike Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the Cassidy brothers are trying to prove innocence rather than make a theft for personal gain, like Ocean's Eleven.

American President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt is most famous for busting up the corrupt "Boss Tweed Ring" by activating citizens votes against them and and for the "Square Deal" he felt all Americans to be entitled to: "conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection^. Thus, it aimed at helping middle class citizens and involved attacking plutocracy and bad trusts while at the same time protecting business from the most extreme demands of organized labor.” Man On A Ledge aptly frames David Englander as the plutarch ruling over the police force which is the same situation Teddy Roosevelt was cleaning up before he became President.

Elizabeth Banks as Lydia Mercer; Nick specifically asked for her to be his "negotiator" because several months later, an ex-cop was going to jump off a bridge and she was trying to talk him out of it and she failed to save him. Nick wants her because she trusts her instincts but also because Mercer can show Merc(y). Just as Mercer wears layers of clothing, there are layers to her and her personality

Man On A Ledge is loosely based on 14 Hours of 1951 (Grace Kelly's first film and the film that inspired Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo). Those who have seen 14 Hours recognize some of the shots but what's so interesting about this connection is the differences between Nick Cassidy's character and Robert Cosick (Robert Basehart): Robert suffers from psychological problems widespread throughout American society in the 1950's and Cassidy, in many ways, reflects an injustice done to low-middle and even lower-upper income Americans: "How far would you go to take down the man who took everything from you?" If people didn't loose everything in 2008, they might have by now, or be on the verge of doing so.

Ed Harris as David Englander, who talks about how his father, an immigrant, was a jeweler and that's why he bought the Monarch diamond, in memory of his father. Some other commentators have noted how "alarmingly thin" Ed Harris appears in the film, but I believe that is intentional for David Englander: the "fat cats" on Wall Street aren't so fat anymore and these lean times have effected even them.

There is an even more interesting connection to to Marie Antoinette than just the diamond being named the Monarch to trigger our thought as to what monarch is most associated with a diamond; after the fraudulent purchase of the diamond necklace the queen supposedly bought, it was broken up into pieces and sold which is what Englander tells the courts he believes Cassidy did with his Monarch diamond. What the affair of the diamond necklace did in France with Marie Antoinette was to push the French population over the edge, being fed up with the luxury and wasteful spending of the monarchy until the peasantry finally started the French Revolution.
Is Man On A Ledge calling for a revolution?

Kyra Sedgwick as Suzie Morales. Note the red coat she's wearing? Since red is the color of the appetites, we know she's "hungry" for a story, which is pretty stereotypical of the people in the news industry, but what is interesting, she things she's getting all the news and she's several beats behind everyone else.

It depends upon what you consider "injustice" to be.
According to Nick, he was moonlighting as a body-guard (probably because he wasn't making enough as a cop) to David Englander and escorting him and the Monarch diamond to Chappaquiddick near Martha's Vineyard. In the legends of political history, the "Chappaquiddick incident," as it came to be known, involved a car wreck into a tidal channel and the drowning/suffocating of Mary Jo Kopechne caused a national scandal. Who was driving the car? Senator Ted Kennedy, who was only charged with leaving an accident after causing injury although Miss Kopechne survived in an air bubble in the car for at least two hours after the wreck which is why her autopsy revealed she suffocated rather than drowned. This is considered to be the reason Teddy Kennedy couldn't become like Teddy Roosevelt and run for president: since Kennedy couldn't take justice for himself, he couldn't implement it to others.

The bad partner: Mike Ackermannn who framed Nick. This is a good lesson for us all, when we choose to "look out for ourselves,"we end up only hanging ourselves as Mike does when it's discovered he was helping David Englander. In the beginning of the film, he comes to see Nick in jail and tells Nick that he's getting married and Nick responds, "Who's the lucky guy?" and Mike laughs, but this foreshadows that Nick unconsciously knows his former partner is now "wedded" to a new partner, David Engalnder.

One last point before we close: Dante.
Englander has two cops in ski masks take out Nick Cassidy when Nick's supposedly stealing the diamond and one is Nick's former partner Mike Ackerman (Anthony Mackie) and the other is cop Dante Marcus (Titus Welliver, pictured below). In Dante's epic poem Inferno, in the inner ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, those who have committed violence against God are sentenced: the homosexuals for committing violence against nature and the usurers, those who make money. Usurers are unnaturally using money to make more money as homosexuals use a man's body in the sexual act as if the man were a woman. When, in jail, Nick teases Mike about getting married to another man, and that there is "no kissing," he's sublimely understanding how David Englander has used his former partner to commit injustice, but also the real nature of Englander's crime to make his money make him even more money, sealing the Monarch diamond to get a check for $40 million from Lloyd's of London.

Ackerman on the left and Dante Marcus on the right, seated.

The Monarch diamond, then, symbolizes America itself, that it's not the resources to be exploited, or the money to be made in this country that makes America valuable, rather, what makes America a priceless treasure is that we know, just as our immigrant ancestors knew, that we would be able to get a fair trail, regardless of how rich or how poor we are, and no one is above the law. These two inalienable rights and expectations is what makes each of us "monarchs" and holders of the world's most valuable gem, American citizenship. When someone doesn't get a fair trail, or someone who is above the law doesn't have to pay the consequences for their actions, that great treasure loses some of its worth each time, and it's not just America's credit rating that has been downgraded lately, but the value of citizenship itself because of those getting away with the crimes they have committed.

There is a great dichotomy the film sets up: jumping to one's death out of despair, which is what most of the people watching Nick on the ground think he will do, or making a leap of faith for the sake of life, and it's this leap of faith that Mick makes and that we, as Americans, must make for our country, especially at election time.

What we didn't all ready know about Lehmann Brothers, and what they did to the stock market in 2008, the film Margin Call taught us, using some of the same shots of New York City that Man On A Ledge uses, but Nick Cassidy shows us the longer lasting repercussions of what Lehmann did to this country: it doesn't matter what you do as long as you save your own skin (please see Deconstructing Volatile Risk: Margin Call for more). The consequences of that philosophy dominating the capital markets and the costs Americans have had to pay can be likened to Nick Cassidy. "You can only push an innocent man so far," and that implies the corrupt who are doing the pushing. The answer to "how far the innocent can be pushed" will be answered by a plethora of class-conflict films throughout this year, and we will not only find out what our options are in this election year, but why we are going to make the choices that we will. When we realize, at the very end, that the man who has been seemingly helping Nick out throughout the film is in fact his father, that he didn't die, it's the reassurance that the founding fathers haven't died, that they are helping us out today, too.

Queen Victoria, Monkeys & the Catholic Church: The Woman In Black

2012-02-06T20:31:00.001-06:00

I am extremely impressed with James Watkins' The Woman In Black which opened this weekend. . . . Okay, I'm lying, I would have screamed out loud and ran out of the theater had there not been other people there reminding me that it was just a film. As with all great horror stories, it's going to get into your head because it's all ready there. That's the point of ghosts: they are a specific language for dealing with the mind and the specters of ideas lurking in our own dark corners that haunt us in ways we didn't realize.

It's not just "what did they (the children) see" but every single person in the town who chose to ignore what they saw and, just as much, it's what we, the audience see and will admit to seeing or not. This is one of those films that the more you engage with it, the more it will reward you; the less you engage with it, the more dis-satisfied you will be.

After losing his wife during childbirth, Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) is faced with the possibility of losing his position at the law firm if he doesn't finish a new assignment satisfactorily, which involves going into the country to an isolated home of recently deceased Alice Drablow at Eel Marsh House, going through all her documents and trying to establish her last will and testament. What Arthur discovers is that Alice had adopted her nephew, her sister's son, Nathaniel, by having her sister Jennet Humfrye declared mentally unstable to be his mother. Alice and her husband Charles raised the boy, trying to keep Jennet away from him, until an accident caused the boy to drown in the salt marsh surrounding the house. In dismay that they didn't do more to save the boy and left him in the marsh, Jennet hanged herself and haunts, not only Eel Marsh House, but the townspeople as well.

This is the best shot I have thus found of Eel Marsh House surrounded by the salt marsh; this is, I understand, the Nine Lives Causeway, and when the tide comes in, the road is completely impassable, surrounding the island and house on the island, and the cemetery. The coming in of the tide coincides with revelations and discoveries Arthur makes within the house, so the road, the young boy Nathaniel's death on the road, the large cross marking the place where the carriage with him in it sank, are all highly symbolic and full of meaning. Eel, of course, refers to those nasty, long fish that swim in water and are so frightful to look at. As far as I can tell, there was never an actual eel in the film, however, all we need is the mention of it and the unseen eels swimming "beneath the surface of the film" and story line give rise to all kinds of possibilities of interpretations and meanings.

There's an inexhaustible number of approaches to understanding this film, and I will give you two as a sample (I can't wait to see this film again; it will be one that you catch something new every time you see it again!). One way is a kind of reader-response: because Charles and Alice have taken Nathaniel to raise as their own from a mother who was unfit, we could read Charles as being English author Charles Dickens and his wife Alice as being Lewis Carroll's heroine Alice from Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. The story takes place in the 1880-1890s (maybe even the early 1900's) but definitely within the reign of Queen Victoria, and the film could be seen as a commentary on how Dickens, Carroll and society "saw" the trouble of children growing up in the Victorian era and didn't do anything about it. Below is the opening clip of The Woman In Black, and it is disturbing:

It would be easy, just from this clip, to see the little girls themselves as the dolls, smashed by the image of being only dolls, and not future adults, to their parents. It's also possible to see references to the book/film The Virgin Suicides of 1999. When childhood is destroyed at an early age, when children don't go through all the steps of growing up, they die too early.

The three little Fisher girls playing at a tea party in the attic is one link to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, because that is the most famous tea party in English history. This kind of "self-murder" happens throughout the film to children and is inspired by the Woman in Black. Because the first murder we see is through a window (symbolic of reflection) we are perhaps meant to reflect on this one more than more than any of the others, but they are all tragic.

England could be seen as the unfit mother, Jennet, because England wasn't providing a stable future either for poor children living in terrible conditions from which they could not hope to escape (Dickens' stories), nor the rich children could hope for a normal life because they were being forced into a world of bizarre social ritual and expectation based on wealth and status which, in its own way, would lead to just as much unhappiness for them (Lewis Carrol's crazy world of social etiquette presented in Wonderland; please see also, Leisure Hours and Victorian Consumption for more on children during the Victorian Era). But, speaking of Queen Victoria and her era . . .

One of many great shots in the film. Arthur is on his way to the country to start the business of going through Alice's papers. He's sleepy and drowsy, but look at the reflection of his in the train window: sleep is a kind of reflection because it brings dreams which are the ultimate reflection, dreams give us that which we don't want to think about in our waking state; windows are symbolic of reflection/meditation because it affords the chance to "look into ourselves" and the act of reflecting one's image in a mirror or piece of glass is personal meditation because it symbolizes what we are doing interiorly. From this point on, it is possible to understand the rest of the film as Arthur's dream, that he "authors" the whole story of Jennet and Alice, Nathaniel and all the children, because a dream, as Freud tells us, is a wish fulfillment. What wish does Arthur have that is fulfilled if the rest of the film is a dream? To redeem himself with his law firm, to stay the course of solving the mystery at Eel Marsh House, despite the dangers; to give someone back who was lost as he lost someone himself and to be reunited with his wife. We could go on but it's just one of many possible interpretations the films provides for us.

There is a little girl named "Victoria" in the film; when her mother has gone out, she drinks lye, and dies in Arthur's arms. Lye, of course, is used in the manufacturing of soap, but taken by mouth is poisonous; so for the Victorian Era to have "cleaned itself out," as little Victoria did, would have killed it (it built itself upon the labor of slaves and children and couldn't afford to do the right thing because then it would cease to exist; that is one possible, but not very fruitful understanding). Another understanding is, the morality of the Victorians was "strong as lye," and because they were so moral, they killed themselves (while I personally don't agree with this, it's probably the likely understanding).

The benefits and harms of the industrial revolution should also be considered.

There is another little girl, Lucy Bentley (a reference of course to the early Bentley automobile manufacturing in England) and Lucy means "light." Lucy is one of the famous characters from Bram Stoker's Dracula published in the same period as these events are taking place. Arthur Kipps could easily be English author Rudyard Kipling. When Arthur is on the train, he reads a newspaper advertising Spiritualism as endorsed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

A zoetrope which, as Arthur spins it allows us to see monkeys (a constant motif throughout the film) putting their hands over their eyes and then removing them again. What's the point? On the left side, just before the white turns black, there is a ghoulish eye looking back at Arthur, emphasizing, again, the need for sight and even double-sight, that is, deep looking, not just surface scratching.

One more interesting detail: Nathaniel drowns in the marsh in 1882.
What happened in 1882?
We could say, rather, what failed to happen: Roderick Maclean failed to assassinate Queen Victoria (the eighth failed assassination attempt on the Queen's life and the last). I know that sounds awful to say, and that's the purpose of literature, to say things that we can't say out and openly. But let's look at it this way (I rather like Victoria, by the way, so this is just an academic exercise), if the Victorian morality which was pro-sexual restraint and pro-family, but also saw the rise of prostitution and child labor, if that system would have ended in 1882, would unmarried women (such as Jennet who had Nathaniel out of wedlock) been torn apart from their children? In this context, the "woman in black" becomes the widow of Windsor, Queen Victoria, who never stopped mourning for her dead husband ("I'll never let go" the specter in the film says) and whose policies had very definite effects on the future (the children of the townspeople symbolize the future).

The "widow of Windsor" Queen Victoria who wore black all the rest of her days after the death of her husband, Prince Albert. Her she is with John Brown, made famous in our own day by the film, Mrs Brown, starring Judie Dench. Am I being hard on Queen Victoria? I think the influences of the Victorian era are certainly being analyzed culturally right now because the films Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is taking place in the Victorian Era as well as A Dangerous Method about Sigmund Freud so it's on the minds of film makers.

Now a second possible interpretation in a completely different direction.
When Arthur has recovered the body of little Nathaniel from the salt marsh, he lays it out in Nathaniel's old room there in Eel Marsh House, wrapped in a linen shroud with a rosary on top of his little body for his mother, Jennet to "reclaim" as her own son. Other than Samuel Dailey (Ciaran Hinds) making the sign of the cross over himself as they open Jennet's grave to bury Nathaniel with her, this is the only Catholic imagery, however, given the recent Anglican Ordinate, we could view the "Woman in Black" as the Mother Church of Rome taking the children of the Anglican Church back as her own (I am a convert to the Roman Catholic Church myself).

The cemetery at Eel Marsh House, Jennet's grave that Samuel and Arthur are about to open to place Nathaniel's body to rest with his biological mother. After Arthur has opened the Jennet's coffin, Samuel blesses himself, making the Sign of the Cross, but he does it from his right shoulder to his left, which is how the Orthodox Church blesses themselves, not the Roman Church. It's possible that this was a mistake, but I doubt it, Watkins has done a great job with this film, so instead, I think that simple gesture could add another church which broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. Since the Woman in Black also claimed the life of Samuel's little son Nicholas (who would have been raised in the faith of his family, in this case, the Orthodox Church), that could serve as another example of the Roman Catholic Church trying to "take back" the children of other denominations that the Church sees as being its own .

In November of 2009, Pope Benedict XVI issued the Anglicanorum Coetibus for Anglicans wishing to convert to the Roman Catholic Church. We can see an analogy being made to The Woman In Black if we look at history: the separation of England from the Roman Catholic Church being based on Rome as "an unfit spiritual mother" to England due to the refusal of the pope to grant the annulment to Henry VIII for his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and various charges of corruption ending in the establishment of the "sister church", the Church of England. We can also see the analogy of the Roman Church "hanging itself" as Jennet hangs herself in the film by the way the Church issued Bulls calling for the assassination of Elizabeth which (might have) split the two churches even more (okay, who are we kidding, it did split the two churches even more).

Wow, another great shot. Arthur looks out the window as the "specter" looks over his shoulder. Because of all the "reflecting" and stair cases being climbed in the film (the entering into of a higher plane of thought), we could take this as the Anglican Church entering into its own stages of thought on the ordination of women bishops and the roles of homosexuals in the Anglican Church, and the Roman Church is "looking over its shoulder" wanting to influence it or get what it can. In this context, Arthur being a lawyer, the paperwork he goes through will not only pertain to historical documents, but the legal aspects (rather than theological) of the voting that will be taking place on women bishops and homosexuals.

The phrase, "She will never let go," then, in terms of the Roman Catholic Church, can be understood to refer to both Pope Benedict reaching out to establish a communion with Anglicans leaving the Anglican Church and his statement in 2007 (I think that's when it was made) emphasizing the supremacy of Catholic Church over all other denominations, the "mother of all Christians," so to speak. As Arthur goes through papers in Eel Marsh House, he finds numerous pictures and letters between Alice and Jennet, condemning each other to hell and saying that God protects them (implying that he does not protect the other sister). This could be taken as the strained relationship in the past between the two Churches: sisters, but different and both equally certain that God is with them and not the other.

If you like eerie, if you like atmosphere, if you like the mystery, you will probably like The Woman In Black. I think they released this film in February so it will be ready on DVD for Halloween this year, and I know I will be watching it every year, it's that good and spooky.

If Nathaniel is the "stolen child, " the flock (and property) taken by the new Church of England when it formed and separated from Rome, then the "return of the stolen child" could be those who have returned to Rome (remember, a rosary was laid upon the dead child's body). But in the film, there is also the town's children the Woman in Black takes: when children see the Woman in Black, the woman causes them to "hurt themselves" so they die, and the Woman in Black's thesis is, "They took my child, I will take their child." This could be the Anglican Church condemning the efforts of Rome to continue bringing more of its members into the Roman Communion and the violent deaths which the children suffer is obviously a notation on what the Anglican Church thinks will happen to those rejoining Rome (hell).

The writing beneath the writing is what we are invited to look for.

The last point to be made on this potential interpretation are the references to the 1944 Ray Milland ghost story/thriller The Uninvited which also bases its story upon the deception of mistaken birth mothers and can be interpreted as also being about the religious identity of England. The ending credits of The Woman In Black particularly pay homage to The Uninvited because of the use of mist which The Uninvited employed particularly well; Arthur's dead wife is named Stella and the girl the two "mothers" fight over is named Stella in The Uninvited (and it was for this film that the song Stella By Starlight was written). (Okay, one more point: "Jennet" means Jennet, a small Spanish horse, and because Spain has always been Catholic, that re-enforces Jennet as a potential symbol for the Roman Church, and it is also another tie-in to The Uninvited which is a tug-of-war between an English woman and a Spanish woman).

The salt marsh and the cross marking the place where little Nathaniel sunk with a carriage as the tide was coming in. In the background is Samuel with his car, the only one in the county.

The previous two interpretations are just snippets the film offers us as possibilities for understanding. Two of the aspects which I would like to touch upon before closing (for now, after I have had a chance to view the film several more times, I am confident I will be building upon this post) is the way the law is used in the film and the role of the monkeys.

Whenever a house dominates a story such as in this film, it becomes its own character. Usually, a house will be a symbolic of the soul, in this case, it can also symbolize and institution. Is there a dark, gloomy, decrepit institution in England that is killing people? After the 2010 UK student protests, it may be a symbol for the government itself because of the planned caps and cuts in it wanted to implement in education which, symbolically, could be portrayed by the children killing themselves in The Woman In Black (children have to have their education or they suffer, not only social death, but future financial death as well). On the other hand, we can look at it as being a visualization of Arthur Kipps' mind: lots of staircases, locked rooms, dark corners, and closed windows not letting in any light. There are little things, like Arthur has the key, or Arthur doesn't have the key, but these are psychological symbols meant to enrich your engagement of the film by contributing your own thoughts and experience.

Arthur hits upon the idea of reuniting Nathaniel and Jennet as a means of appeasing Jennet because it will be the fulfillment of a debt of justice. It's possible that Alice used the law to have Jennet declared mentally unfit when in fact she was perfectly capable of taking care of her son, . . . then again, its possible that Jennet was, in fact, "off her rocker," and, given the prevalent use of the rocking chair in the film (and that it was jumping "off her rocker" that Jennet hung herself) it's probable that Jennet was insane, i.e., "off her rocker." When the child has been laid to rest with its mother, we, too, feel that Jennet can rest at peace because justice has been fulfilled, right has triumphed,... but it hasn't, at least, not for Jennet. This is a re-writing of the ghost story genre, that justice isn't enough to appease the dead spirit (this is the kind of analysis you find in a show such as Ghost Hunters on TV).

"She'll Never Let Go."

But then, this story is really about Arthur, not Jennet.
Great stories will present the hero with a choice, and they have to chose the superior moral pathway in order to fulfill being a hero. Does Arthur do that? His choice is to either let go of his deceased wife Stella and embrace the child they have together, little Joseph, or, be like Jennet, and never let go of Stella and rob the future from him and his son (the town's children symbolize the future). In his encounters with Jennet, Arthur really encounters himself: he wants to see Stella so badly that he's "hanging onto her" and "going off his rocker" for her thereby hurting himself and Joseph just as Jennet hurt herself.

This actual scene is not in the film (if it were, it would be referencing Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Raven) but the bird is in the film. Arthur goes into one of the rooms and sees an empty nest; at the bottom of the empty nest, on the floor, is the baby bird that fell out of the nest. Arthur goes over, puts the baby back in the nest and then the large black raven pictured above swoops out of (I think) the chimney and practically attacks Arthur. This is a mini-image of the larger film: Jennet is the raven and just as Arthur returns her child to her, she--like the raven--will still attack Arthur regardless of what he has done for her and her child.

I don't really think we should interpret the ending as Arthur and little Joseph die; rather, just as Stella gave her life for her son to live, so now, Arthur, too has given his life so that his son can live, and that joins and binds Arthur and Stella in this act of love in a way that they were not when they were alive. Therefore, we can see The Woman In Black as a positive statement about pro-life and parent's duties to their children, not a child's duty to its parents, but it's also a verification of Arthur as a hero, because he achieved conversion by letting go of Stella and, by so doing, gained her back. Arthur, by realizing how much he does truly love Joseph, also loves Stella in a new way, a deeper way, for her giving her life for little Joseph's life because, entering into it on the merits of his own sacrifice, he has entered into his own wisdom and understanding.

Here's another example of "hanging on": Mrs. Dailey (Janet McTeer) is holding on to the memory of her dead son, but he is also holding onto her by his occasional possession of her which happens twice in the film. It's not just that Nicholas likes to "draw," but draw upon his mother's life as well because she's obviously not mentally stable as a result (like Jennet) of losing her child.

The second iconography issue I would like to discuss before closing is the prevalence of monkeys throughout the film. In the sequence below, Arthur has recovered the body of Nathaniel from the marsh and has laid him in the shroud on the bed in his old room with a rosary atop his body. Please note all the monkeys you will see in this clip (it suddenly breaks off into a commercial so don't be surprised):

In the trailer at the start of the post, there were the three wise monkeys revealed when Arthur opens the shutters upon his arrival inside the house. In The Artist from last year, George has a statue of the three wise monkeys he keeps among his possessions so this is a recurring theme in films as of late (please see BANG! The Artist & the New Agenda In Film). In 1882, the year that Nathaniel drowned in The Woman In Black, another person died in England: Charles Darwin, father of the Theory of Evolution (it is possible to also understand Alice as, instead of being married to "Charles Dickens," being married instead to "Charles Darwin," however, I preferred Dickens in the example above... just because). The prevalence of the monkeys in the film (the three wise monkeys and the monkey toys and it looked like there were "stuffed" monkeys under glass throughout the house) may symbolize two things: what Darwinism did for English society or to object to what we are not, i.e., monkeys.

One reviewer remarked that if you enjoy looking at Daniel Radcliffe, you are bound to enjoy this film, because he's the only thing we see. The point is, we should be seeing ourselves in him. Horror films, really great ghost stories, will always be about us, and what the main character sees or does not want to see within themselves is applicable on the larger scale of society. Scenes such as this, with the "woman's" reflection where his hand is although he doesn't see her, is a great example of how cleverly and clearly Watkins' vision and understanding of this film is and communicates itself throughout the story and the shots.

Because monkeys are so prevalent in the film, we could understand them as symbolizing Arthur's own spiritual struggle which was the "crisis of faith of 1859" when Darwin published Origin of the Species. Not knowing if there was a God or not, Arthur's desire to be re-united with his wife, but also to be a man of reason, could be at conflict. However, while I think that is possible, I think it goes deeper than that, literally, because if The Woman In Black were upholding Darwinism, then where in evolution do ghosts come from? Darwinism teaches only a material world, and ghosts are, by definition, the immaterial. So, because Jennet and the children are all ghosts, the film must be positing that an immaterial world order is at least possible.

Please click on the image to view enlarged details. Because the poster frames events in the film, it invites us to frame events in the film; because the poster highlights Arthur's eye, it invites us to really see what is going on, like Arthur ripping away the wall paper in Nathaniel's room, we are to rip away at the surface of the film to try and find the layers of meaning and messages written beneath.

When I see the three wise monkeys, specifically, though, it is a call to action and to be moral. If we were monkeys, we would not be morally or legally accountable for anything; but because we do have a sense of morality, we have to do something about our morality, and this is where the town's people might enter in. If Jennet were reasonably sane enough to raise Nicholas on her own, and they still stood by and failed to "say anything," "hear her pleas", or "see the injustice" being done, then they are all guilty of taking an innocent woman's child away from her and that could be the role of the monkeys as moral commentary on the town's people.

This is a great image because it shows a troubled man, in the "fog" of life's worries and indecisions, burdened with his "baggage" of what has happened to him, on a path that is besought by danger and the weeds of fear.

As the tides swell over the road of Eel Marsh House and seals it off from the rest of the world, so, too, when life's troubles well up against us, we are sealed off and left with only our soul and whatever lurks within us; either we try, like Arthur, to fulfill justice and do the right thing or, like Jennet, we refuse to forgive and refuse to let go, slowly decaying as we hang ourselves by hanging on and we neither find rest for our self nor give it to anyone else. These are just a few of the angles I picked up on; there are countless others, and all valid and possible, but I hope that--if you have seen the film--you will think about some of these symbols and issues presented to us; if you haven't seen the film, I hope you will consider doing so (but don't take the kids!).