"Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned." William Butler Yeats
The 1980 film The Elephant Man won 7 Oscars, including Best Actor for John Hurt (John Merrick), Best Director for David Lynch, and Best Picture. The question is: why would this film be made in 1980, and why would it receive so many awards? The physical body of John Merrick symbolizes the wounds and tumors of England itself in its building of Empire and industrialization; yet, in the film, actress and socialite Mrs. Kendal (Anne Bancroft) also tells him, "You are Romeo," and he is called "A son of England" by Queen Victoria. The Elephant Man acts as a testimony of Great Britain recognizing itself and its history at a critical time when choices needed to be made and the lessons of its ancient history needed to be remembered.
Winner of 7 Oscars, The Elephant Man of 1980.
The opening of the film provides us with the filmmaker's explanation of how John Merrick came to be the way he was: his mother was in her fourth month of pregnancy when she encountered a wild elephant in an un-chartered African Isle. This scenario, of course, doesn't resemble Joseph Merrick at all, and is entirely fabricated, and it is precisely for this reason that it is so valuable in understanding the psychological relationship between the Elephant Man and England: his mother is England herself, and what on earth should England be doing in Africa? England engaged in the "great game" of European powers in the Scramble for Africa, the attempt to gain as much land and control over the continent as possible. "Africa" is the wild elephant which deforms the children of England, and it was England herself who brought on the attack.
1913 map of Africa. Land claimed by the British appears in pink.
What is so telling about the Elephant Man being a "product" of the union of England and Africa is the steamers and pipes, the noises of "industrialization" when the film draws us into John Merrick's world, because the vast production powers of Great Britain were the logistical necessity of claiming African lands. In the opening credits of the film, a melancholic carnival song plays as the names are credited, suggesting the happiness of England in this time, the amusement and leisure which resulted in the accumulation of wealth; there is a close-up on a photograph of a beautiful woman, the mother of Merrick; then the sounds of a factory in the background as part of a "flashback" of the elephants encountering her and knocking her over. The theory of maternal impression is symbolically incorporated here: strong psychological or physical events effecting the mother also effects the unborn child and, if that "mother" is England, the child would be that generation living with the results of being a part of an imperialist empire. (Video of the Opening Credits and First Part of The Elephant Man here).
Circa 1889, Joseph Merrick, the real "Elephant Man."
As defined by the Dictionary of Human Geography, Imperialism is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationship, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." That has a very bitter taste to our common understanding of freedom and political systems today, doesn't it? It did at the time, too. Great Britain had ended up with, what art and cultural critic Simon Schama calls "the Wrong Empire": while the motivations of England were to extend to all countries the liberties and freedoms, the enlightenment and material wealth England herself had gained, instead, imperialism produced unequal relationships and that state of existence worst of all, "slavery."
The late Anne Bancroft as actress Mrs. Kendal in The Elephant Man. In the film, she makes a gift of her picture and a copy of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The gift of the picture helps John Merrick transcend his role as a freak in a traveling circus to a performer, like herself, elevating his status from a kind of vaudeville to theater. The "transformation" is complete when they "perform" Romeo and Juliet and she tells him, "You are Romeo," and that should be understood in the wider sense: John Merrick is the embodiment of the deep, refined soul which all Englishmen should live up to.
The situation is rather like the Elephant Man himself, in the reading of the article by Mrs. Kendal when in her dressing room: while he is hideously deformed, he is intelligent and his mind is even "refined." The motivations of the leaders in both government and industry were "refined," but the physical results were deformed and tumour-ous, and the Africans were not the only ones to suffer, so, too, did Britons. As an act of consideration, Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) forbids mirrors to be placed in John's room so not seeing himself will help him to forget how deformed he is. However, this absence of mirrors for him turns him into a mirror for each portion of London society in which they see themselves and how they behave.
John Merrick seized by a group of the lower class wanting to see him, courtesy of the night porter (seen wearing the hat in the right side of the frame). The "pouring out of alcohol" on John symbolizes the increase in alcoholism at the time among the lower classes who failed to reap benefits from Empire and instead ended up living in horrible conditions with no hope of material, emotional or psychological escape from poverty.
The night porter of London Hospital (Michael Elphick) takes money of some bar patrons to see the Elephant Man and, to "get a rise" up out of John Merrick, the night porter cruelly holds up a mirror to John so he can see himself and, consequently, scream, which pleases those who have assembled to see him. The act of showing him the mirror makes him "reflect" on what he is, but it's the lower classes who have gathered that are "seeing themselves" in the Elephant Man, because the deformity he bears is their own: they treat him the way the middle and upper classes treat them, with mockery and contempt. Whereas John Merrick is a source of self-hatred for the lower-class, the upper-class attempts to show him compassion, and it is here that royalty demonstrates genuine royal sentiments of the human spirit: Queen Victoria herself, the "Mother" of the Empire, writes a letter on his behalf urging the London Hospital board to provide for this "most unfortunate son of England," as an act of Christian charity, and the letter is delivered by Alexandra, Princess of Wales, who even attends the theater and sits next to John Merrick during the performance.
John Merrick in his permanent room at the London Hospital. On his fireplace mantel are arranged photographs of those who have come to visit him, the social elite of London society.
There is an important dichotomy of display and masking upon which the film's values build: when John Merrick is displayed as the Elephant Man, the stage and voice of Bytes (Freddie Jones) creates an objective distance of safety to view the deformed body. When John Merrick is exhibited for the surgeons of London, he is again viewed in dis-passionate terms of objectivity. Head nurse Mrs. Mothershead (Wendy Hiller) complains that the visits from high-society puts him on display again, and the attendance at the theater could be another act of displaying John Merrick, not to use him as a freak, rather, a sign of righteousness and a sign of compassion. But there is also the mask which John wears, covering himself, the way the name "Elephant Man" covers up his real name, his real identity. The mask is its own kind of awfulness, its own deformity, covering up another deformity, his body, but the act of covering up is like calling the impoverished lower-class "industrialization," and enslavement and subjugation as Imperial and Empire. A mask always covers something, and in The Elephant Man, it covers the real deformities of England, the poor and lower-classes, and those conquered by Great Britain, their identities as free humans taken away and political identities of "subjects" bestowed upon them.
Portrayal of John Merrick wearing the mask of the Elephant Man.
"I am not an animal, I am a man!" is quite a defiant cry. While the name "Merrick" means "confident and dignified," within the context of this film, it takes on an even greater "class" connotation: I am not an animal of animal passions and animal comforts; I am not an animal uninterested in my fellow man; I am not an animal without emotional and psychological needs; this is the cry of the generation and not the cry of one, isolated and deformed human being. It was an important claim to make in 1980, because the next year, Quest For Fire would be released, suggesting that, indeed, we are nothing but animals (I will be posting on this film at a later date, it's too important to ignore).
To view image in greater detail, simply click on it and it will open in another window. Manchester from Kersal Moor by William Wyld, 1857, just a few years before the birth of Joseph Merrick. Such a painting depicting the physical changes the Industrial Revolution spawned upon the landscape of Manchester graphically invokes the deformed body of the Elephant Man: the enormous factories with all their pollution shows us today how the fast-paced growth of urban centers "marred" the great beauty of the English landscape and people.
John Merrick leaves the audience with an artistic demonstration that he is not an animal, in the spire of a cathedral he views from his window (the window is a symbol of inner-reflection and meditation), he uses his imagination to construct a cathedral of great beauty that, indeed, testifies to his being a child of God and the inherent dignity each human being has, including those under the rule of a foreign government, the British Empire. In this very real sense of injustice, the life of John Merrick clearly teaches us that we are no more or less the way we treat others, and an enormous Empire treating people as animals is itself an animal of hideous proportions. The British Empire learned this lesson, and learned it well.
The real-life cathedral constructed by Joseph Merrick at London Hospital.
If we can see the wounds of England's empire building in the form of John Merrick, we must also see the wisdom and concern of England's reforming leadership in the generosity and compassion of Dr. Treves: "What was it all for? Why did I do it?" and his self-awareness in both recognizing mistakes and steering towards a "self-correction" and, it is for this reason, that the British Empire has survived and continues to thrive, and will do so: it corrects itself. Just as Treves is a "physician" for John Merrick and helping Victorian society understand what happened to him and to themselves, so the film The Elephant Man is medicine for the world in 1980, showing us where we came from so we can take the medicine of self-reflection and avoid repeating history and the consequences of enslaving people and ourselves under certain words and certain liberties that, when un-masked, reveals the truth deformed.
Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Frederick Treves, the surgeon of rescues John Merrick.
The entire film of The Elephant Man is available for viewing at this link:
This was one of the videos that made people say, "I want my MTV."
The song’s title, Take On Me, needs only one word added for its true meaning to be understood by the listener: YourTake On Me.
It’s the fundamental problem underlying all of our relationships, isn’t it? The way you see me—only a sketch of my true self—instead of the way I really am; the way I see Rudolph Valentino (a Hollywood heart throb), instead of the way he really is (his insecurities, anxieties, hopes, needs and fears). Like the artist at the drawing table, we sketch in the details of all the people in our lives, and leave a lot of blank space, and are treated the same by others in our own turn. A-Ha's 1985 hit Take On Me lyrically and visually sought to make us aware of what we do and how we do it; further, it sought to counter a very dangerous attitude and song released by another popular video just a year earlier, Duran Duran's Hungary Like the Wolf.
Actress Bunty Bailing was lead singer Morten Harket's real-life girlfriend at the time of the video. The still frame artfully illustrates how unbalanced relationships can be, with one part not contributing enough of their deeper self as the other.
Take On Me starts out with a race which is really in no way different than the great chariot race in the 1959 epic Ben-Hur: we are always racing against something, someone or ourselves, and sometimes, all three at once. What adds an important dimension are all the items which are backwards in the video: the milk sign in the diner window (it's backwards inside the diner and when we are outside the diner looking in), the numbers on the racers helmets (a backward "13"), the speedometer and the funnel that has "Fuel" written backwards: looking at everything in the video as a "mirror-image," we approach the race backwards and because we ourselves are backwards, we probably aren't running in the right direction. In Take On Me, the motorcycles replace the chariot, and the obvious industrialization of the motorcycles reminds us how we become like the machines we invent to do our work for us: Why is this chariot race important? How does this relate to a pop rock band's love song?
Every action and decision we make, is a race: we are racing against our appetites, our ambitions, our morals and our values. The competition we race against? Culture, our demons, and others who want to bring us down. The race is easily won, some days, and easily lost on others, but the prize is our immortal soul, and why, after winning the race in the comic book, the lead singer is ready to "bring her into his world," because he won the race against what he was fighting.
Take on Me release single; side B was Love is Reason.
In the video, “the girl,” sits in a diner and has coffee; in art, a character eating/drinking relates that they are, or are not, "taking something in," making it a part of themselves by symbolically digesting it in meditation. She’s supposed to “eat up,” or take in what is about to happen, so it becomes a part of her and sustains her on the spiritual journey she’s about to take for the sake of their relationship.
She reads a comic book and that invokes the old saying, “I can read you like a book,” and this signifies the problems of most relationships: you think you already know who they are, or what they are, and this is your take on them that doesn't go deeper than what you can "read" about them on the surface of their being, and this is the real definition of Persona, which is not just the "social mask" we all wear, but the help we give to others to keep that social mask a part of our being, and, the attitudes of others forcing us to keep the mask on, leading us further and further from our deepest selves that, at some point, will have to be rediscovered.
Album cover with Harket "half-drawn" like his persona in the video.
The most important scene in this video is his hand extending out from the book and her taking it. The hand is symbolic of strength, and that's why it's such an important gesture, it's his strength reaching out to her inviting her into his deepest vulnerability; and she accepts the invitation to cross the threshold of safety into his world where the real him can be found, and it might not be the part that attracted her to begin with. But here's the catch: the real her shows up in this "part comic" world because the mirror is two-way: when we help someone to reflect deeper upon themselves, we, too, are gaining wisdom from that experience, which shows the real us and what we are made of.
A-Ha in concert, Germany, 2005.
The second part of the refrain, “Take me on,” is quite literal: your real you should take on the realme," because we can't go on in any other way if we don't. "Say after me, 'It's so much better to be safe than sorry,'" is a dare: if it's safer to leave me than for us to go deeper into ourselves, each other, and this relationship, I want to hear you say that and not just quietly pick up and leave. “I’ll be gone,” is nothing less than the ultimatum of the relationship: if you don’t take me on, and get to know the real me, I will fade into nothingness and our relationship will be ended.
Lead singer Morten Harket in Cologne, 2005.
The waitress in the diner represents a part of the girl in a number of ways: a lot of women feel like they are “waiting on” their guy to grow up, reach the emotional depth in their relationship that she’s at, figure out what she’s been trying to say all this time, etc. Most importantly, the waitress thinks there is an unpaid bill and in anger throws away what was left, taking it to be trash. How often do women—and let’s be honest—think that in the account book of the relationship he has left something “unpaid,” or the tally doesn’t add up? The waitress throwing the book in the trash represents their relationship and means that the girl is willing to “throw it all away” because she thinks he hasn’t paid his dues or sacrificed as much for the relationship as she has.
REM lead singer Michael Stipe in Glastonbury. Their hit song, Crush With Eyeliner is discussed below, but in this photo, Stipe graphically shows us how counter-productive a "social mask" can be: we think wearing one makes us more acceptable, but it really distorts us in very unattractive ways.
Her finding herself in the trashcan is an incredible symbol: if she “trashes” him and their relationship, she’s trashed herself; we are (in our deepest being) only as good as we treat other people. It’s only by smoothing things out between them, (represented by her returning home and smoothing out the pages of the book) that they will be able to stay together by overcoming their differences. But that’s not the only important symbol in this moment: she’s gone home. A woman’s home expresses her true, inner self, just like the "comic book world of the race track" expresses where he is in his spiritual race. She knows he's in trouble because his "race" that he won in the beginning, has to be won all over again. But now, because of her and her help, the deeper relationship they have established, it's a different race. When he holds up the wrench, it symbolizes that he has the "tools" he needs to die to himself, that is, to let his own persona of himself ("ego" might be appropriate here if we are careful in how we use the word) so that he can be the man he wants to be and the man she needs him to be. What's imperative is, that wrench was being held by one of the racers in the beginning of the video, and whereas before she entered into him, the wrench was threatening and could be used against him, now, he's in control because he's not afraid to "have a wrench thrown into" their relationship, and that wrench is the sign of his individuation.
Monster, by REM, released 1994. Most music critics note the divergence in style from two previous albums the band made, but the lyrics seem to hold the greatest treasures: the battle from one song to the next of "how to invent myself," and let everyone else know that "I'm invented, too, yea." The social and individual consequences are deeply put "into play" in the videos for the album.
Single cover for Crush With Eyeliner.There are only two "halves" of people here: the first half of a person is the girl looking off, and she's only "half" present because her eyes looking off refuses to acknowledge our presence, she is escaping us. The other person on the right side, literally half cut off, could be Stipe in drag for all we know, and that's why this cover "fits" the whole theme and mood of Monster: like the flashbulb catching its own reflection in the space between the two people above, we are highlighting something that can't be captured, the elusive persona.
Take on Me is an invitation to get to know "the real me" and "the real you," break the social masks and personas and accept the person beneath; but what if that invitation is denied? What if she didn't accept his hand and enter into his world? REM released hit album Monster in 1994 (nearly ten years after Take on Me) and, through a number of songs, battles out the social persona issue, especially in Crush With Eyeliner. In this video, pay special attention to the light (the harsh green light in the opening, the shadows and artificial light, because light is a symbol for truth), who is wearing what clothing items and really listen to these lyrics: the opening cord of the guitar will echo in the hollowness that exists in this song. Why and how does this video "happen?"
The expression on the faces of the young people in the opening clips tells us everything: ennui. The French expression was fully explored in all its psychological shallowness by poet Charles Baudelaire and refers to an invented expression of one's inner boredom with existence and society, worn as an attitude to express social superiority and an alliance with the Decadent Movement in French art and literature. The ennui of the young people in Crush With Eyeliner contrasts sharply with the race in Take On Me, and the contrast is intentional, because when one is about their business, one doesn't have time for boredom, there is an inner-fight and struggle one has to win. Crush With Eyeliner details for listeners the gross defeat awaiting those who fail to engage in the spiritual battles.
Duran Duran's cover for Hungary Like the Wolf. REM also highlights the eyes in Crush With Eyeliner, since the eyes are the windows of the soul, looking into "blank eyes" shows us a blank soul, and the trauma caused by the social mask.
"You know me," is the great quandary which Stipe presents to us: you know the real me that wants to give "you" what "you" want "me" to be because "I" want "you" to "be" what "I" really want "myself" to be and by having "you", "I" become that persona that you possess because your persona is now the only "real" and stable identity in this conversation. The fake me eats the fake you.
It's clear that REM presents a war of the social persona's to us in Monster, because of the social hostility of the hit song, What's the Frequency, Kenneth? and the total breakdown of communication that results when no one is able to communicate with "Kenneth." The features of a persona are translated in the video by the monochromatic lighting, the jerking motions of the camera and the way people are not "completely" within a camera frame, but are partially in and partially out (like the cover for Crush With Eyeliner above):
REM provides us with, not only the features of the social mask, but the victimization of both the wearer of the mask and those around the wearer because a mask presents an "un-leveled" playing field: one person's sincerity is turned against them while a persona intentionally dismisses the human needs of the other, creating a volatile cycle of self-destruction. (It's an absolute crime that I am not going line-by-line with REM's song and video, and maybe I can later like I did with Australian Apocalypse: Men At Work but this will have to do for now). Take On Me is really quite important, because just the year before, Duran Duran released their song Hungry Like the Wolf; (the video below isn't the MTV version released, that video is HERE; however, the lyrics are what's important, and the part about "I am on a hunt down after you," really underlines the dehumanizing nature of the video).
Now we know why Take on Me's girl being in the diner was an important feature of that video: Duran Duran emphasizes the difference between partaking of another person on a spiritual level, and devouring them on the sexual level. The social persona creates distance, between others and the inner self, and when so much distance is created, at some point, the inner self is just lost. The distance remains and the closeness of a relationship can never be achieved, hence, only the kind of predatory existence of Hungary Like the Wolf is possible, because when the persona becomes our reality, we lose our humanity and become animals, a wolf. The consequences of social personas are the dehumanization of everyone; it's one of the greatest social ills to diagnose and combat because of everyone's fear of exposure in the most vulnerable sense of the nightmare.
The "facial" paint emphasizes the reality of the social mask and how the mask becomes glued to our soul to the point we can no longer find what it was the mask was originally protecting.
What is the cure for the social ill of the persona? Sincerity, because when we are sincere, we risk everything, but we also gain in that we haven't grafted onto ourselves that "fake-ness" of insincerity, so by being sincere--we open our self up for the hostility of "Kenneth's" irony--but we prepare ourselves for the deepening relationships Take On Me illustrates, instead of finding ourselves being hunted down only to be devoured and left behind like trash.
There's not a filmmaker or actor who hasn't seen this film.
The movies are to Americans what the Louvre is to the French.
Film is the expression of the American soul, our triumphs, our defeats, our fears and our hopes, our ever-changing moral codes and our never-changing values of who we are and what makes us Americans. Film does all that.
This was one of those I didn't want to see but watch every change I get.
It's not only all-American and patriotic to be knowledgeable about movies, it deepens your enjoyment of films so that when movies are referenced within movies, you are so there with them, you are the implied audience, the informed viewer, and if movies are important to you, being able to talk about movies and why you enjoy them is essential.
Just as a wine connoisseur is someone who has drank a lot of wine, so a film connoisseur is someone who has seen a lot of films. That's the beginning. By virtue of having drank a lot of glasses--including some bad ones--you develop a "taste" for what makes a good one. In film, the more you've seen, the easier it is to recognize the conventions, the breaking of conventions, the homage to great directors who came before, and the opposite: why something doesn't work, why they should not have tried it that way, etc.
When this list first came out in 1998, I had only seen 32 of them; that's not even a decent "F" grade. I made it my mission to see every single film on this list, and it took five years to do it (because it was before online movie watching).
"All About America" in the 1950s.
But I did it.
There were movies I didn't want to watch, but I did it anyway, and there are movies that I never would have watched had they not been on the list, but I am grateful that I did because I loved them! And there are movies that, even now, I would remove from the list if I had the chance, but my personal taste isn't the point, that's why I wouldn't remove the films or give you my own list of what I THINK a great movie list should be.
Besides, watching these movies is a fabulous group activity.
The perfect movie, and I will prove that to you in my upcoming series on Science Fiction films of the 1950s which will follow the British Imperialism series.
Why this list and not someone else's?
The 1, 500 members of the American Film Institute who voted on the 400 films nominated have seen, been in or worked on all those movies nominated, and these are the cream of the crop, the best of the best, the movies that those who make movies are most proud of. Start out seeing these films, think about them, question them, challenge them, see some more films, bounce them off each other and see how they hold up, then, when you find a great film, you will have a context in which to root it, to compare it to the great films that have come before it and--like someone with a glass of Pinot--you will be able to discuss the narrative, the camera angles, the references and how and why Hitchcock had to come before Tarantino, and Spielberg's debt to David Lean, etc. because you have seen them!
Wow, I love it, and so did Orson Welles.
When you are going over the list, be honest, make sure you have seen the whole film, and not just the highlights or lots and lots of the same scenes over and over again. You should be able to give a plot summary of it to check it off the list. Don't be ashamed of how many you have seen, like I said, I only saw 32 of them.
Once you see it you will find references to Yankee Doodle Dandy everywhere in America.
Lastly, why am I promoting the 1998 list instead of the 2008 list?
Call it honesty. I think the original 1998 film was done without any self-awareness, that people answered honestly without considering what writers would get upset that their favorite films weren't on the lists and more of these have withstood the test of time. But, above all, these are the movies that have made other movies possible, because all films exist and are created within a context, and this list, better than any other, establishes what that context is!
Every filmmaker references Citizen Kane at some point in their career.
The American Film Institute's 1998 List of Top 100 Movies
1. Citizen Kane
2. Casablanca
3. The Godfather
4. Gone With the Wind
5. Lawrence of Arabia
6. The Wizard of Oz
7. The Graduate
8.On the Waterfront
9. Schindler's List
10. Singin' in the Rain
11. It's a Wonderful Life
12. Sunset Boulevard
13. Bridge on the River Kwai
14. Some Like It Hot
15. Star Wars
16. All About Eve
17. African Queen
18. Psycho
19. Chinatown
20. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
21. Grapes of Wrath
22. 2001: A Space Odyssey
23. The Maltese Falcon
24. Raging Bull
25. E.T. The Extra-Terrestial
The standard of a great love story.
26. Dr. Strangelove
27. Bonnie and Clyde
28. Apocalypse Now
29. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
30. Treasure of the Sierra Madre
31. Annie Hall
32. The Godfather, Part II
33. High Noon
34. To Kill a Mockingbird
35. It Happened One Night
36. Midnight Cowboy
37. Best Years of Our Lives
38. Double Indemnity
39. Doctor Zhivago
40. North by Northwest
41. West Side Story
42. Rear Window
43. King Kong
44. Birth of a Nation
45. A Streetcar Named Desire
46. A Clockwork Orange
47. Taxi Driver
48. Jaws
49. Snow White and the Seven Dwarf
50. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
It's not the best western ever made, but it has all the best elements of westerns that are necessary for a film to be classified as a "western."
51. The Philadelphia Story
52. From Here to Eternity
53. Amadeus
54. All Quiet on the Western Front
55. The Sound of Music
56. M*A*S*H
57. The Third Man
58. Fantasia
59. Rebel Without a Cause
60. Raiders of the Lost Ark
61. Vertigo
62. Tootsie
63. Stagecoach
64. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
65. Silence of the Lambs
66. Network
67. The Manchurian Candidate
68. An American in Paris
69. Shane
70. The French Connection
71. Forrest Gump
72. Ben-Hur
73. Wuthering Heights
74. The Gold Rush
The first "talkie" in motion pictures.
75. Dances With Wolves
76. City Lights
77. American Graffiti
78. Rocky
79. The Deer Hunter
80. The Wild Bunch
81. Modern Times
82. Giant
83. Platoon
84. Fargo
85. Duck Soup
86. Mutiny on the Bounty
87. Frankenstein
88. Easy Rider
89. Patton
90. The Jazz Singer
91. My Fair Lady
92. A Place in the Sun
93. The Apartment
94. Goodfellas
95. Pulp Fiction
96. The Searchers
97. Bringing Up Baby
98. Unforgiven
99. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
100. Yankee Doodle Dandy
One of the greatest villains of all times, and a great indicator of what the men of 1935 were doing to the ordinary people during the Great Depression. Mutiny on the Bounty.
You probably want a copy of the list that you can print, don't you? Just Click Here for the List and it will take you to all the AFI top 100 lists that they have put out (the 1998 list is at the very bottom because it was the very first list put out).
My personal favorite movie of all time.
Becoming a film connoisseur is like becoming a wine connoisseur: you have to drink wine, you have to watch movies. The more films you see, the more you will understand what you like and what is important to you; the more good films you see, the better you will understand why bad films are so bad, and that in and of itself is a huge accomplishment. Another dimension of being a connoisseur is seeing all the films within a particular set: all the films your favorite actor has done, all the films a favorite director has done, all the films within a certain genre, etc. I know that focusing on all the films Dustin Hoffman has made led me to some wonderful films.
This was Hitchcock's least favorite film he did.
Once you are done with this list, you will have a better idea of where you want to go to continue your quest for great films; I, personally, went to the films that had won Best Picture at the Oscars; then I went to all the films that had been nominated for Best Picture then I started watching all the films that had gotten the Best Actor and Actress awards (and not all of them are still available). My next list I am going to tackle is the British Film Institute's Top 100 British films (because I love the British, I'm like 85% British myself).
I have also seen all fifty films that Alfred Hitchcock made over his long career, and seeing all the works within a director's or artist's oeuvre, is also a great way to add to your own oeuvre of film.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with lists that you will find on Amazon.com, or Rotten Tomatoes, or Facebook, but if you are going to be a connoisseur, you should respect the knowledge of those in the business, those who have seen the films we have yet to discover, and give them two hours of your time to try and persuade you that, yea, this is a great film and then, others will come to you and ask you for your list of great films.
"No matter what, the truth stays in this room."
To one unfamiliar with Chaos Theory, it might seem like chaos itself; many people are at least familiar with the phrase from Jurassic Park and the mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum): “Nature finds a way.” Chaos theory could be compared to an octopus with various branches of mathematics and science, all working together to create one “monster.” The Debt allows us to utilize several of those arms to understand what is going on, or, at least, to allude to what is going on. Not only are these techniques of chaos theory important to understanding the film (information, noise, redundancy) but for understanding other films (such as Contagion) and our own "information society" in which we live.
You may have thought the title of this post was about Washington D.C.
Three young Jews are on a secret mission to bring Dr. Vogel (Jesper Christiansen) to justice for “medical” crimes committed against Jewish prisoners in concentration camps during World War II: Rachel (Jessica Chastain in 1966 and Helen Mirren in the 1997), David (Sam Worthington in 1966 and Ciaran Hinds in 1997) and Stephan (Marton Csokas in 1966 and Tom Wilkinson in 1997) each contribute to the success of the mission. In the process of capturing Dr. Vogel to take him to stand trial for his crimes, Rachel and David fall in love but Rachel sleeps with Stephan and consequently gets pregnant. The three young Mossad agents (Israeli Secret Service) bring in the doctor, however, their plan at the train station goes wrong because "initial conditions" upon which the group depended do not go according to plan:
The failed plot at the train station reveals the dependency on "initial conditions" and how several little "unplanned" events changed the course of the escape: a man unexpectedly taking a break and noticing something wasn't right, Rachel leaving the group, the tranquilizer in Dr. Vogel's system wearing off sooner than expected, him honking the horn and alerting the guards, David waiting for Rachel, etc. All these items together add up to the Butterfly Effect in chaos theory: the changing of one instance changes everything else. Even if the only "unplanned" event in the train escape plot was that the man took his break, either they would have been noticed and caught or Rachel would have been left behind in East Berlin.
Rachel getting information when someone else enters the office: more chaos.
The reason this is important is because of Stephan's insistence, "No matter what, the truth stays in this room." Given that the train escape was such a catastrophic failure, how can he possibly expect four people (the escaped Dr. Vogel is the fourth) to keep silence about the truth and keep to the same story? Remarkably, it happens for thirty years, but then a crazy man in a Ukranian hospital starts telling everyone he's Dr. Vogel and it spooks Rachel, David and Stephan.
Nazi Dr. Vogel whom the agents must bring to justice.
Since The Debt is a spy thriller, and spies are out for information, the flow of informationis essential (who knows what, what they do with the information and how it is used, how it is conveyed, etc.). The film utilizes sophisticated theories of information within the plot. Information theory is one of the “octopus arms” of Chaos theory yet, the most important information is the information being covered up and aspects of noise, redundancy and performances within performances help us to understand how the identity of an entire country and religion has been radically undermined by the telling of one bit of false information.
Stephan was in a car bomb explosion which put him in a wheelchair, yet there is a far greater symbolism to this: a car is a vehicle, and the "vehicle" propelling Stephan forward in his career was the "bomb" that three young agents captured and killed the infamous surgeon of Birkenau, a lie which now renders him "paralyzed" to be able to do anything about it.
The first skillful employment of information as an aesthetic is the story (which is a narrative, here in the very literal sense) of how the three agents captured Dr. Vogel and then, when Dr. Vogel was trying to escape, Rachel shot him dead. We are given this narrative at the release of Rachel's and Stephan's daughter's new book recording the events leading up to this important moment in Israeli history. Entering into Rachel's flashback, we then get what really happened: she didn't shoot Dr. Vogel, he escaped after beating her up and there was nothing she could do.
In this sequence, too, the car Rachel rides in represents the vehicle propelling her throughout life. She is not the driver, Stephan is (in the lie about killing Dr. Vogel), she's just in the backseat of the "conspiracy" but she's still in on it and reaping the benefits. Her glasses cover her eyes because she doesn't want anyone to know the truth and she doesn't want to "see" the truth anymore, only the lie; her black dress she wears is a mourning dress because they have "buried" the truth.
What is so artful about the way we learn the truth is the application of redundancy: we see events occurring with one ending, then we are given the exact same information to emphasize truth through quantity (both stories agree on this set of events) and then there is the divergence (for other examples, please see "redundancy" in How To Eat Art). Learning the truth through Rachel's flashback of those events, we ourselves are "flashing back" to the beginning of the movie when we summon our memory to compare the "new narrative" with the older one at the beginning and so, like all Israel and history, we too are being fed a lie and experience first hand what it feels like to receive false information.
Rachel learns about Dr. Vogel through the examination of photos of his victims and the information within his file. While Dr. Vogel is a doctor, who should help alleviate suffering and prolong life, his atrocities as a torturer and executioner graphically illustrates his how "perverse" (upside-down) he is.
There is another element of Chaos theory employed which is worth our attention: performance within performance. A Mandelbrot set is much like Russian Babushka Dolls, it has a large pattern repeated in smaller versions within it. In art, a good example is Shakespeare's play Hamlet: Hamlet has a troupe of actors act out the murder of Hamlet's father by Hamlet's uncle who happens to be in the audience, so it is a play within a play. Another example is in the Christopher Nolan's film Inception: there are dreams within dreams (please see my post Inception: Power, Revenge and Frustrated Staircases).
As Rachel and Stephan are "playing" Beethoven's Fur Elise on the piano, they are also "playing" each other and "playing" to be lovers (neither of them loves the other) and this unexpected affair they have results in their daughter Sarah and them getting married. Rachel represents Israel in its youth as a new country; Stephan symbolically represents Israel's un-wanted "marriage" to the West and their daughter Sarah (the new generation of Jews and Israelis) is a product of the "alliance" and the lie they tell.
In The Debt, Rachel's daughter Sarah is releasing a book detailing how the three agents "brought Dr. Vogel to justice," and Rachel is asked to read a selection from the book. She is reading publicly (a public performance) which shows us how Stephan, David and Rachel told everyone Dr. Vogel was shot and killed by Rachel (another performance because they are performing a lie, presenting false information repeatedly, living out something that did not really happen).There are other performances within performances: Rachel and David fall in love with each other even as their cover story is that they are husband and wife. Further, as husband and wife, Rachel visits Dr. Vogel in his office and Rachel's reason is that she's having problems conceiving.
David and Rachel leaving Dr. Vogel's office. The only time they have physical contact is pretending to be husband and wife after leaving the office when they put up this front by holding hands. David lets go of her hand but she stops and just looks at him. He turns and without a word, takes her hand again. This action blurs the lines between their performance and reality, their jobs and their desires, what they want and what they desire.
Rather than imagine Rachel in Dr. Vogel's examination chair, imagine that it is the new, young country of Israel (remember how much emphasis is placed on how young the three agents are, Israel itself was about that age at the time of this mission), and Israel--as a new, young country with an ancient, noble tradition--was also having problems conceiving of a "modern" identity, a "political" identity, and bringing a Nazi war criminal to justice was the way to "give birth" to a new generation of Jews and Israelites. When Dr. Vogel examines Rachel, he's not looking at her reproductive organs, this Nazi is looking at Israel's reproductive organs, giving an intimate exam to his hated enemy.
Rachel represents Israel, David is tradition and Stephan the alliance with the West.
The name "Rachel" is Hebrew for sheep; "David," of course, refers to the great King of the Jews and their long tradition of honoring him as a forefather; Stephan, on the other hand, means "crown" and actually refers to Christianity, the West (the first Christian martyr was Stephan). If Rachel, who is led like a sheep, is Israel and loves David but sleeps with Stephen who represents the Western Christian countries and has to marry him because of the child they beget together, we suddenly have a very intimate psychological profile of the birth of a country and its political regrets. A good "test" of this is that there are three different people playing the three agents in 1997 from 1966, instead of just taking the young group and aging them (like what they do with Dr. Vogel in 1997, it's the same man just aged). This important detail lets us know that what the agents were and represented in 1966 has totally changed in 1997. Rachel is a scarred woman (Israel's scar), Stephan is paralyzed (the alliance with the West is handicapped) and David is mentally disturbed and suicidal (his suicide in front of the truck decapitates him, symbolizing that King David is not an important role model as a head of state in Israel anymore, and everything King David stands for and represents).
David is Rachel's true love and she is his, and we should understand this in political terms of Israel "being true to itself" and it's needs at maintaining its identity as the Jewish nation, the descendants of King David in both political and ethnic orientation and how the disruption of that line of descent has "scarred" the Israeli identity, just like the scar on Rachel's face.
When the agents have Dr. Vogel hostage (a reversal from the Nazis holding the Jews hostage) surprisingly, it's Dr. Vogel who tells Rachel she's pregnant because she gets morning sickness. It's then Dr. Vogel who tells David that Rachel is pregnant with Stephan's child, which upsets David to no end, causing him to break a vessel of pottery; it's this vessel which Dr. Vogel uses to cut his ropes and slash Rachel in his escape. That vessel is the bloodline of Israel, it is symbolic of a person, and that it is David who breaks it--and David who has no heir, no child to continue his line--is what the Nazi uses to scar and disfigure Israel (Rachel).When Rachel finds Dr. Vogel at the hospital in the Ukraine, a mirror is broken with which Rachel stabs Dr. Vogel, he stabs her with scissors (in-between the shoulder and her heart, and then in her stomach), but she manages to stab a syringe loaded with a lethal injection into his back. It's befitting that this scene takes place in a hospital since this is where Rachel finds healing, and that a Nazi dies in a country where, in 1997, Communism was dying, so that "new life" from the death of the old could be obtained.
David (in 1997) and Rachel. He comes to see her and asks, "What if we could go back?" and she replies, "We can't go back," yet the complex symbolisms allow Rachel to do just that, which she does to "honor David."
The broken mirror is the shattered identity of Rachel (and Israel) when the truth comes out (the truth shatters the illusion of the lie) but she uses that to her advantage. Dr. Vogel, stabbing her between the shoulder and heart, is a graphic illustration of how he used Rachel to come between David (Rachel's heart) and her shoulder/arm (her strength which is the alliance with the West, Stephan). When he stabs her in the stomach with the scissors, that represents an abortion: a doctor with a pair of scissors stabbing a woman cannot be understood in any other terms. It's the abortion of what was "beget" from the fruit of the lie the three young agents told to the world. The injection which Rachel uses to stab Vogel in the back and kill him mirrors the injection he gave her to stimulate her ovarian follicles so she could conceive a child; Dr. Vogel's death is the "injection" of truth Israel needs to conceive a new generation of identity. That it's done "in the back" of Dr. Vogel emphasizes the retrospective (looking back) aspect of Rachel's ability to carry through the mission.
David celebrates his 29th birthday in 1966, so he was born about 1935, when Hitler announced that Germany would re-militarize, against the Versailles treaty. As the symbol of the ancient tradition and identity of the Jewish people--their culture and religion--David's love of Rachel maintains the "ancient" identity with the modern identity Israel has had to take on for its own political survival.
When Stephan persuades Rachel and David to "tell the lie," it's New Year's Eve and you can hear the people outside "counting down to midnight" and the birth of the new year, just as--at that very moment--Rachel agrees to the lie, the "birth of the new Israel" comes in with the new year, because it's an Israel that will have the "trophy" of justice against the war criminals who killed so many Jews and sought to wipe them off the face of the earth.
The three agents hold Dr. Vogel captive, yet they are in so much danger of being discovered in Communist, East Berlin, that the stress and pressure causes them to suffer; additionally, Dr. Vogel behaves like another doctor, Hannibal Lector, from Silence of the Lambs, by waging a "verbal war" upon his captors.
Something which disrupts information flow is noise--think of static on a radio station and how the interference disrupts the signal--noise causes us not to be able to hear the information coming through on the radio. An example within The Debt is when Rachel walks through the airport and the footstep noise is very loud compared to the silence of the airport, so the noise levels have been perverted, turned upside-down (the airport should be filled with noise). The reason a director does this, as in Contagion with director Soderbergh, is to let the audience know that they are not going to hear the message being given to them, there is too much disturbance from noise for us to be able to understand what the film makers want to tell us (please see Contagion: Bats and Pigs for more on noise).
Tom Wilkinson as Stephan, the one who got them to tell the lie, and the one who got Rachel to go back and "take care of it" for them, for Mossd and for Israel.
Just a few incidents worth mentioning: when David combs Rachel’s hair the night before they kidnap Dr. Vogel, it means there are no “entanglements” to their relationship at that point. The next day, however, Rachel will be pregnant with Stephan’s child and she will be entangled with him and unable to get out. In 1997, David walks and puts his coat over his arm, suggesting that he is "covering something up," and when he sees Stephan (Tom Wilkinson) he kills himself. Rachel packs her clothes and tries to get a drawer back into the chest but can't make it fit, just like the "lie" won't fit into reality any longer. In German, "Vogel" means bird; when he escapes, he "flies" from captivity. When the group returns to Tel Aviv and gets off the plane, the plane symbolizes another "bird" but one of man's making--like the lie they are telling. Rachel then goes to the airport and has to board a plane, representing that, despite what she told David about not being able to go back, that's exactly what she's doing.
Sam Worthington as David, who lost his whole family in the Holocaust and makes bringing Dr. Vogel to justice his whole life's pursuit. Not only does he represent the tradition of Israel, but also all those who died as a result of the Nazi war crimes against humanity.
Why would a film about the Israeli identity crisis utilize chaos theory to explain itself? There is order in chaos, there is order in unpredictable systems even as there is chaos in predictable systems. While it seems that events spiraled out of control and were utterly unpredictable, The Debt--with its highly skilled employment of information theory and symbols--provides us with a highly satisfying narrative that presents us with a terrible dilemma of a lie effecting decades of history and millions of people, and yet, a righteous and just ending is still obtained. Despite the betrayal, the lie, the debt, the sorrow and mistakes, there has also been rebirth and healing. Note that in the poster for the film below, Rachel's scar on her right cheek has been healed, and so, too, can Israel.
