"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
Just as the black bars in the poster "blocks our view" of all the information in the poster (all the visual elements) so we as a culture/society are having all the elements of the information about the state of the country blocked from our view, especially as it relates to the economy, which Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) symbolizes like so many of the leading men in recent films (more on this next week in Hollywood Scorecard #2). But Cross is also being "erased" by his own government basically because of the files which Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) passed onto Pam Landy at the end of The Bourne Ultimatum and the government trying to protect itself.
There is only one reason the film is getting reviews like, "Enjoyable but disappointing," and that's because it's anti-socialist and liberal reviewers don't like that one bit. I hate to do this, but this post, regrettably, will probably seemed very unorganized, because it is. The vastness of the story line and its points (and everything I would like to cover) makes it exceedingly difficult to be coherent, but I promise to do my best, and hope you will bear with me. This was the very first trailer released for Tony Gilroy's The Bourne Legacy; not all the dialogue in the trailer takes place in the actual film, and it's not necessarily in this order, and it occurs only as a flashback:
Why is the overall "style" of the trailer--with the black bars coming in and out of the picture, covering the image partially, then going out again--important? Two reasons. One, it's a form of "censorship" we are familiar with (black bars over exposed body parts, for example) and two, it's a method of "erasure," of removing something, and in a film about nine secret agents being killed (read, "erased") by their own country, that's an important statement. Why would the film use this device now? Next week I will be posting Hollywood Scorecard #2 and comparing the method in The Bourne Legacy to The Dark Knight Rises, but for now, suffice to say the film wants audience members to understand that it understands that information and even people are being "censored" and "erased" from our country by the current government. This is partially where the film takes on so much complexity, because five years after the Matt Damon mega-hit The Bourne Ultimatum, we live in a totally different country, and The Bourne Legacy is literally going back and re-interpreting what happened in the "old USA" by what has happened in "today's USA" (and more on this in just a moment).
On one hand, this is the "light at the end of the tunnel"; in this scene in the film, Cross is fully enhanced, so the highlighting of this scene as one of the main film posters particularly stands out as being important: when Cross is fully enhanced, that will be the light at the end of our tunnel, too, as a country. The tall, narrow walls emphasize Cross' choice: this is between a rock and a hard spot, but Cross chose to get down into that position (he jumped down to where we see him in this image from above) and those tall narrow walls accentuate that there is no escape from this predicament, but to go towards the light, which he does. Even though there might be questions of free will at different times, Cross chose to become a part of the program and he has made his own choices along the way; the theme of free will is an important one because it establishes the identity of the individual as separate from a mob or horde, and Cross--even though he's part of the Treadstone Program and is continually likened to Jason Bourne--is his own man.
We have to remember, The Bourne Legacy is being released today and taking place now even as it is converging with The Bourne Ultimatum of 2007. At about :20 into the trailer above, please stop it and take a good look--through the censoring bars--at how Kenneth Keitsom looks in this shot. We have no idea how he got into this state (even in the film) but the right-side of his face is "pock marked" with blood, his hair is balding (it's imperative to know that he's wearing a plastic "net" atop his head) and his left eye is filled with blood and swelling shut. Why are these details important? It symbolizes the state of the economy. The right-side blood marks look like disease, and the blood in the eye means something like our judgment and ability to discern has been impaired by suffering.
She's not creating something, she's manipulating it. The film has to walk a tight wire to make a point yet keep the audience sympathetic to Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz). Socialism is basically the government of animals and that's why George Orwell's parody Animal Farm succeeds to this day in bringing out the true nature of what it is to live in a socialist "experiment." The doctors in the lab experiment on the agents like lab rats, and this has devastating consequences to them. One lab tech, Dr. Fiote, is given the okay to do a experiment by Shearing and then the next time we see him, he shoots everyone in the lab except Shearing (with whom it's suspected he's in love). While Shearing thinks he took some of the behavioral modification drugs, we are also led to the possibility that he was turned by Byer to kill the doctors so there wouldn't be any leaks about the failed Black Ops programs, but there's no evidence in the film to support either presupposition. Rather, because he starts treating the agents like animals, he starts treating everyone like an animal to be exterminated at his will; he doesn't let Shearing live, he tries to kill her, but he's wounded by a cop and then kills himself. Animals breed animals. In a socialist government which has no respect for human life and individual dignity, everyone starts treating everyone that way, which is the reason why Aaron Cross is so human and tries to desperately to connect with others at every chance, to fight that socialist influence. Experiments as socialist experiments and the non-reality of their schedules the pills used as "leashes" to hold them back, just like the plane in The Dark Knight Rises. Two keys to understanding who Marta Shearing is: first, she does the work she does for the sake of the science and, two, her house. Like the references to the Nazi war crimes in Cowboys and Aliens, science for science's sake is the trap of a socialist government that has no respect for its people and abandons all morality. The house which Shearing lives in, an abandoned fixer-up in derelict condition, symbolizes the soul (houses house the body the way the body houses the soul) and its run-down condition illustrates how she herself has "bought into" socialism to "fix it up" the way many are fashionably becoming socialists today with the idea that they will apply the lessons of capitalism to socialism and make it better so it will work this time (that's not why the government is doing it, just mis-led lay voter sheep).
Because the head is the "governing function," it controls the rest of the body, Kenneth's head symbolizes what the government has done to him (and hair symbolizes/reveals our thoughts and thinking/reveals our state of mind) which is covered by the plastic net as a metaphor for the "social net" the Obama administration using in its economic policies and the "propaganda" of what the government says it's doing when it's really doing something else. (Of course, the re-make for the anti-communist film Red Dawn being shown as a trailer before The Bourne Legacy certainly creates a context for the film as well).
Cross willingly taking the greater risk of going over the mountain meant he lost his pills but he arrived two days faster. Not seeing the Outcome agent in the tree? That prefigures that Cross won't see the Larx agent coming to get him or that the government will turn on him. Why do they put their "chems" in the little box they do? Because it looks like a sardine can which is exactly what human beings are to a socialist government (remember what happens at the end of The Chernobyl Diaries?). The pills he has to take, one blue and one green, symbolize collectively wisdom and hope, but the scientists have weaned the agents off the green pills (hope in the government) although they still have to take the blue ones to "leash them" so they can't get out of control. In the wilderness, Cross wears a red jacket, possibly denoting that he is a "communist" (red and black are the colors of the international socialist movement) but it's more likely that red is what he wears because red is the color of love (one is willing to die/shed your blood for the one you love) and so Cross' love for himself as a person and for others will help him fight socialism (the bad red).
How can we be definite that the film wants to make an anti-socialist statement? As always, there is always more than one way to read any work of art, but if someone wanted to make this an anti-capitalist film, these are facts of the narrative negatively reflecting socialism which they would have to deal with to prove their point. First, Keitsom says that he lived in a "state home" in Reno, Nevada (I haven't been able to determine if it's a veterans' hospital, psychiatric ward, mentally ill institution; if you are from the area and know, please drop me a line!) and granted, while there are "state homes" in a capitalist country, this has to be taken as a socialist run "state home" because we also find out that when Keitsom was in the army fighting in Iraq, his recruiter had to "fill his quota" for new recruits and that's how Keitsom got recruited for being in the Outcome program (I think Cross suggests that his IQ before he entered the program wouldn't have qualified him for it and from the lack of intelligence he displays when he has his flashback about not wanting to go back to the state home in Reno testifies to that).
Edward Norton playing Eric Byer, the head of the heads who decides that all the agents have to be killed. His role in the film perfectly illustrates what happens in a socialist government: the government does whatever it wants because there is no one there to oversee it. In a capitalist economy, corporations and individuals do bad things, but the government is there to enforce laws and maintain the social contract (regulating when necessary) but in a socialist government, there is no one there to stop/correct/oversee what the government does because the government is self-controlling, there are no "free elections" for the people to put in party members of their choice and so government kills and aborts at will. This is apparent with the Larx agent, that Turso (Stacy Keach) gets angry about having been an idea that was on the drawing board and up and running without him knowing about it and Byer coolly turns to him and says, "Consider yourself informed." That's a socialist government at work, no checks and balances anywhere.
Why are the "quotas" important? Because that's how a "command economy" (socialist) works, the government deciding quotas regardless of the reality of the need or demand for something (the government might decide to make only 10,000 rolls of toilet paper, for example, but also make 10,000 pieces of glass that no one has any need of, whereas twenty times the number of toilet paper rolls are needed). So not only does The Bourne Legacy show us the very worst illustrations of socialism, but also the prevalence of injustice.
The dark blue Cross wears in this scene communicates to the audience that he's depressed, which isn't difficult to tell because of the conversation he has with the other Outcome agent, but it's consistent with the way his clothes reveal more about his state of mind then perhaps he himself does. I am still working all the details out, but the opening "training sequence" with Cross in Alaska is a "chaos map" of the larger events that are going to be taking place in the film if we know how to read them (this was also done in Melancholia with Kirsten Dunst). Cross lying flat down in water invokes our memory of both how Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) was found floating in water (for not doing an assassination the way Cross doesn't want to do immoral things for Byer) and how the end of The Bourne Ultimatum happened. Water is a two-way symbol and can either refer to the sacrament of Baptism and the cleansing of sins, or to sexual intercourse and the cleansing of lust. Because nothing physical happens between Shearing and Cross, and because Cross is retrieving something from the bottom of this natural pool, I think it's safest to say that it refers to a soul cleansing and the "package" is what he's obtained from deep within himself (depths often invoke self/inner meditation). This probably refers to the four days that Cross "fell off the grid" and why he was sent to Alaska, but what he learned about himself in the process. When Cross gets to the cabin, he talks to the other agent about the wolves tracking him, and how wolves don't track people (this might be a reference to The Gray with Liam Neeson). We can say with confidence that the wolves symbolize other CIA agents and Byer's team of researchers because in a clip that didn't make it into the film, Cross, talking on the phone says, "You should have left me alone," just as he says to the wolf that he sets up in a trap and snares, infecting with the tracking device that he himself had been wearing. The female moose Cross sees being brought down by a pack of wolves foreshadows how Shearing will be attacked by the CIA agents in her house. The incredible jump he makes across the mountain, from one side to other, correlates to the jump across the rooftop after he gets viraled off the blue chems (that clip is below) and the climbing up the sheer face of the mountain, in between those rocks is how carefully he and Shearing make their way to Manila to get the meds. I want to say that Cross going back to the cabin after he's blown up the drone (the drone foreshadows the inhuman Larx agent that will chase him) and seeing all the blue and green chems dissolved in the snow, is his realization that Shearing doesn't have any chems at her house or the lab, and his hopes are "dissolved" likewise. The film is too well constructed for those all those actions not to be invested with meaning, but I have only seen it once and after thinking on it a bit more, I am sure I will be able to figure out the rest of the intended message.
We know, at the end of The Bourne Ultimatum, that what Pam Landy was doing was right in publicizing those documents and exposing the corruption in the Black Ops programs of the CIA. What The Bourne Legacy does is re-interpret the ending for what is happening in our world today: Pam Landy is accused of treason, not the ones who are actually guilty being accused of treason and there is a great monologue regarding Landy's guilt and her not doing what's in the best interest of the country, when in fact, it's her superiors who have committed the treason.
Obamacare, anyone?
What about Cross' body? How does performance enhancement play into the story? It's actually confusing, because the body being so enhanced makes me think of a well-oiled, lean capitalist business "working at peak performance," however, I think the film makers are actually invoking an old lesson that we knew in 1985 but have forgotten: Rocky IV was about the American Rocky going up against the Soviet, artificially enhanced body of Drago the communist at the height of the Cold War, and Drago's trainers emphasizing only the performance of Drago's body whereas Rocky trains his body and his mind/soul; it's not enough to be able to hit hard, but to think and reason, to have soul and love (for the dead Apollo) behind what you are doing as well as the differences (in the computer tracking) of Drago's physical performance and the "invisible hand" guiding Rocky in his training of where he knows he is weak and needs improvement:
The scientists in The Bourne Legacy use only periodic check-ups and blood tests to see how the agents are doing and have no relationship with them whatsoever or knowledge of what it is they do in the field (Cross even makes fun of Shearing for her thinking that they can just call a time out to send off their blood work because the lab needs it, and this is how inefficiently socialist governments run). Now, in light of this, the "number 5" conversation between Cross and Shearing makes even more sense than previously:
There is always a conflict in art, especially literature and film, between the hero's ability to be good and fight evil or himself/herself being tainted by evil tendencies; is Cross telling Shearing to lie about her name and what they are doing? As mentioned previously, I don't think this is a lie at all, rather, like a "chaos map," it gives us another perspective on a deeper reality of the film. "June Monroe" has "lost her wallet." How many of us have "lost our wallets" the last four years? It's not just that our financial worth has plummeted and the cost of living skyrocketed, but Dr. Shearing has lost her livelihood because she was a part of the Operation Outcome which was terminated. So in its way, it's not a lie at all, and that's how the unconscious works. The most important part, however, is that Aaron Cross is "Number 5," merely stats and data records, because, again, that's exactly how socialist governments and programs work (Obamacare). Where else have we seen blood work being done? The Hunger Games, when there is the drawing for the Games and Katniss and Primrose have their blood drawn to be registered. Why does he choose the name "June Monroe?" Because he finds her very attractive, like "Marilyn Monroe," (remember when she was examining him and she mentioned the cameras on them) but Cross also knows that she's a good person, and he has a kind of "angelic" understanding of her (we can't say he has any other positive females in his life) so this maternal interaction--as she takes care of him in a sense in being his doctor--leads him to identifying her with "June Cleaver," of Leave It To Beaver, the All-American Mother.
Cross has just been given the blue chem "live virus" to wean him off so he will be permanently enhanced and not have to worry about "chemming up" anymore. Earlier, when he was viraled out of the green chems, he got a "mystery flu" that nearly killed him; this symbolizes the false hope (the green pills he was viraled off of) of the government bail outs of the auto industry, wall street, Fannie and Freddie, the trillions of dollars in economic stimulus the government fed into the economy that nearly killed it instead of making it better, and the way the government artificially held back economic recovery (as The Dark Knight Rises suggests) because a weaker economy is easier to control. The Bourne Legacy reminds us, just as Cross gets really ill in being viraled off the blue chems so the economy will get sick in being viraled off the artificial support of the government, but if it's not, it will be forever leashed to it and never be free to grow.
There's another characteristic which would be easy for us to overlook: Cross' physical capabilities and mental problem solving. Before seeing the film, I noted that the differences between "play" and "game" would be important, and a clip such as this clearly demonstrates Cross' ability to be more creative with what is at hand than his "socialist" rival, the Larx agent:
In American films, heroes have unlimited free will, i.e., when Aaron Cross wills to jump an impossible length that the average person couldn't, they make it; when they will that they will know the exact spot a bad guy will cross so they can shoot them through a closed door, it works (trust me, it wouldn't work for me). But in the context the film creates, this isn't about the superhero aura (like Iron Man, for example), rather, how capitalism forces us to be more creative (like Rocky's training style in the clip above) and socialism relies on science. Why does this happen? Creativity is a part of our intellect, which is a part of our soul and our individuality; socialism can't exist if there is individuality, it holds that are all equal and there is no soul (hence, we are all animals). The whole character of Aaron Cross, all his emotions and feelings and struggles, are purposefully and skillfully woven together to manifest an anti-socialist statement.
Aaron knows you can't enhance the body without enhancing the soul and providing for the soul. He knows intuitively that he has to balance his superior physical capabilities with a steady emotional life and he knows it so well that's how he knows the Outcome agent at the cabin "fell in love" and ended up being put on the sidelines, because that's what would happen to himself. Cross mentions to the other agent that he "fell off the grid for four days," but we never get an exact reason why. I think it's possible, at least, that after Byer tells Cross what a "sin eater" is, and Cross has to get his wounded leg stitched up, that's when Cross "escapes" and does some soul searching, prompting the CIA to send him to the Alaskan training ground as a "slap on the wrist" for dropping out of sight, but this is only a suggestion.
Later in The Bourne Legacy, after they have decided to go to the Philippines to "viral out" Cross' body off the blue chems, Shearing asks Cross why his physical enhancement is so important to him and he responds that it's not but he knows the misery he will go through being weaned off the chems and what it will do to him (death). The trip to the Philippines illustrates this because of the Philippines have transferred their economic approach from the time of the dictator Marcos to the market economy that is starting to grow there, hence, the call for America to undo the "dictatorship" of Obama and wean ourselves off the "chems" (the artificial enhancements/safety nets of the government) and go back to a capitalist state.
Cross has been viraled off the blue chems and is suffering the illness of the live virus; he's so sick, he thinks he's going to die and he gives Shearing last minute instructions on how to take care of herself, but he gets better and overcomes the illness to reap the benefits of his enhancement to save them both.
Quickly going back to the differences between Rocky and Drago in Rocky IV, we can see the emphasis on body vs body and mind also in Cross and Byer: Cross wants to do what is right and Byer wants to do what he thinks is right, the problem is, as discussed above, when there is a socialist government, there is no one to tell the government what it can't and shouldn't do, hence there are "sin eaters":
As this begins, please note that Byer wears dark sunglasses just as the robotic Larx agent will do later; the eyes are the windows of the soul, and Byer "blacking out" his soul in this scene means that he's blacking out the reality of what is taking place and just seeing what he wants to, namely, that sin can be eaten and forgotten, not that it has permanent effects on individuals and society (the phrase "wearing blinders" also is applicable). Cross' hand, at :08 seconds, is bandaged, because hands/arms symbolize our strength, that his is bandaged means his strength has been weakened by this whole "sinful" incident. To demonstrate this (and this came across better at the theater on the big screen) please notice how "dirty" Cross is, with all the dirt stuck on his face and mixing with the sweat. Why is this important?
Here, in the final chase scene, we see Cross wearing dark glasses just as I am accusing Byer and the Larx agent of wearing glasses (and the Larx agent is wearing dark glasses in this very scene); what, if any, is the difference? In the "sin eating" clip above, there is a play on whose eyes are being opened (Cross') and whose eyes are being closed to reality (Byer's even though he takes off the glasses); in the chase scene pictured above, the Larx agent is the last option for the CIA to take out Cross and he's the agent that doesn't have the "emotional complications" of Cross, he lacks empathy and doesn't have "moral hang-ups" the way Cross does. Larx, then, is a great example of the perfect "socialist" machine ready to do the government's bidding in any affair, regardless of how sordid, and the dark glasses he wears (covering his eyes, the windows of the soul) lets us know that his soul is dead (black is the color of death) and he's dead to his own will and pain (he gets shot several times after crashing into a vegetable stand--because he is a vegetable--then gets up and chases Cross more). Cross wears black glasses because he, too is dead in that he's not taking this chase "personally," because that's what capitalists do ("it's just business") like we learned in Moneyball when Peter (Jonah Hill) had to trade one of the players. What capitalists consider "death," (the Larx agent) is life to socialists and what socialists consider life is "death" to capitalists.
When the CIA decides--at Byer's insistence--to kill all their Outcome agents, they bleed from the face; why? The face is the seat of our identity, our face distinguishes us from others more than any other of our features (remember, please, The Skin I Live In); the blood coming from their face communicates to the audience how the life in Outcome has taken their life just as the dirt on Cross' face in the scene above demonstrates how his work for Byer is "soiling" his identity.
In Total Recall, the "vehicle" of capitalism was called The Fall, and in this "fall" between two walls, we can see a correlation because Cross is just now experiencing his full viral enhancement. I will discuss this further next week in Hollywood Scorecard #2, but for now, we can see how two different films utilize the same device to communicate different concepts although both of them are pro-capitalist.
Byer is typical of socialism in another way that has been demonstrated in films lately: thinking the patient is dead. Several people, in the beginning of the film, voice their concern over Byer's decision to kill all the agents but Byer insists the whole thing be wiped out, just like Obama talking about the big mess and problems he inherited from Bush; Obama is talking about what capitalists talk about in terms of interest rates and the stock market, Obama is talking about the mess of the capitalist framework in general that he inherited and how the whole thing has to go in order to get America "well" according to socialist standards.
Why does Cross re-name her June Monroe? I speculated earlier that it might be due to June Cleaver and Marilyn Monroe, and I am going to stick with that. June Cleaver was the caring, loving and dutiful mother and wife that was an icon and role model and Marilyn Monroe, the orphan with nothing, worked her way up the ladder to success and fame (let's not talk about what she allowed to happen to her though, those were bad moral decisions). The point being, Cross asks her in the exam room about his condition and she reminds him they are on camera and he replies, "Is that the reason why you always look so good?" and she tells him to count back from one hundred. This reference to looking good on camera not only reminds us of the blond bombshell's film career, but that he's attracted to her and needs to bond with her. Shearing asks Cross later if he knew June Monroe and he replies, "Not anymore," and while the meaning is ambiguous, symbolically it probably refers to the greater identity of America as being both the June Cleaver role-model for the world (moral and familial) as well as the place of outstanding success and fame (Monroe) and that part of America has died but it's up to Shearing to "be" that from now on, which she does in abandoning her socialist values and killing the Larx agent (more on that just below).
This is part of the reason why it has to be Marta Shearing who kills Larx, the symbol of the socialist police (in the final chase scene, Larx uses both cop cars and motorcycles to chase Cross and Shearing showing how he's a fake enforcer of the law). Cross has been shot but the Larx agent is still chasing them; Shearing pushing the Larx agent's bike away from them, causing it to crash into a pillar is her pushing socialism away from herself and choosing the "pillars" of society in its place (like Cross and another pillar of society, justice; remember, pillars play a big role in The Dark Knight Rises wherein catwoman has to kill Bane because what Bane symbolizes is what she would have become).
So what about the ending? As I said, the final "viraling out" of Aaron Cross in the Philippines is probably because of the transition the Philippine economy is making from the previous dictatorship of Marcos. As they sail away from the mainland, we see the man who helped Shearing and Cross wearing a gold watch Aaron stole from the shop keeper at the lab where he was viraled out. Did Cross steal the watch? No. The factory where the live viruss manufactured is America's solution to ourselves "viraling out" of the economic betrayal in which we have found ourselves. The watchman is like Cross in an important way so the factory watchman from whom Cross takes the watch is really a double for himself.
When Cross told Shearing her name was "June Monroe," he also said he name was James; his middle name is really James in the film, but James is also the name of the corporate gate keeper at the science lab where Shearing works, creating a dual role for Cross as himself being the gate keeper, not for the "science for science's sake" company, rather, for the capitalist way the company works and operates, so when he takes the watch, the watch symbolizes time and the gold something valuable, so it's the "valuable lessons from history" that Cross takes with him when he has "viraled out" of his dependence on the chems. This is the same watch he gives (in payment) to the boat owner they sail on in the end.
The name of the ship they sail on is Sabrina, probably invoking the film with Audrey Hepburn and William Holden about class mobility. What's important is how it symbolizes the"ship of state" and they are their own captains, charting their own course, not being told what to do by the government. That the captain wears the gold watch means that the "valuable lessons of history" is it's better to man your own boat than let the government do it for you.
While the world of The Bourne Ultimatum might appear more exciting, with a greater world stage and the high stakes of justice and treason in the balance, that was a world that Bourne film makers are telling us no longer exists: Pam Landy, the innocent CIA officer trying to bring corruption to transparency and accountability, has become the victim of corruption, and whereas, in 2007, audiences could finish the film with total trust that the machinery of government still protected the innocent and prosecuted the guilty, in The Bourne Legacy, film makers have made an incredible re-interpretation of their own faith and hope to show us how the blackest change has come over the country to the point that Aaron Cross can't fight for justice, only for persopnal survival, just like most of us today.
The "leap of faith," or, as Total Recall might call it, "the fall." Please note the expanse between the buildings which Aaron Cross jumps (as he did in the beginning of the film from one mountain ledge to another). This "gap" has been explored in the pro-socialist films Ice Age 4, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter and Dark Shadows, as well as the pro-capitalist films Total Recall and The Dark Knight Rises. It's a simple device, yet effective: the leaving behind of the old and the leap of faith to something new; in terms of the pro-capitalist films, it's more about an "escape from," as we will discuss in Hollywood Scorecard #2 this week.
The film, based on a "chaos universe" and not a socialist's preferred Darwinist universe, strives to show audiences the devastation government intervention and policies cause us, not only economically, but personally as well. As in The Amazing Spider Man, both films seek to "find the formula" for decay rates and viraling out so there is no dependency but both heroes can still do what they need to do (e pluribus unum). The question is, are we brave enough to "viral out" and save ourselves?
Eat Your Art Out,
The Fine Art Diner
I love Jeremy Renner, in fact, I would even say I prefer him far more than Matt Damon in the Jason Bourne series! I thought he was absolutely perfect for the role and did a fabulous job! If you go and see the film, and I can highly recommend that you do so (no foul language [I don't remember any, anyway], no sex scenes--not even a kiss!--and no nudity! Thank you!) the opening sequences with Aaron Cross in the wilderness is a chaos road map for what will happen later in the film, in other words, he's being chased by wolves in the beginning because he will be chased by "wolves" later! That's all for now, have a bit of research I want to do, but very impressed and wish I could watch it again! P.S.--if there is anyone living in Reno, could you maybe drop me a line? Kenneth Kitsem (Jeremy Renner) mentions he was living in a state home in Reno, Irwin, or Erwin, or Erowynn? If you know of a mental hospital, veterans' home, or anything at all like that in Reno, could you kindly let me know? I am running into a dead end on that!
Welcome to the home of the brave...
The newest Chris Hemsworth film, a re-make of the 1984 Patrick Swayze action film Red Dawn and I am thrilled to see this! Back then, it was the communists we were so afraid of, now, we're afraid of the communists in our own government.
And I just found this trailer for Sacrifice which came out in 2010, but appears to just now be getting around to Western audiences. It's possible that the reason for that is the Chinese film is highly subversive of the Communist Revolution which took place about a hundred years ago. If I get a chance, I will definitely be watching this!
To me, this is the last big picture of a big summer of blockbusters and heated films. Trust me, I will be heartbroken if this is anti-capitalist, and it very well could be. The official plot summary is: "In the wake of Jason Bourne's dismemberment of Operation Blackbriar, the CIA decides to dispose of their other black ops programs, which includes the termination of their field agents. However, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), an agent from Operation Outcome, escapes from being executed and, with the help of an Outcome scientist (Rachel Weisz), sets out to expose the crimes of his superiors." Why is this film important? It's about government corruption; which government? Since it's going back to the same timeline as The Bourne Ultimatum, it's possible that it will be a anti-Bush administration film, which is not a big deal, but the film is really about today, and recasting what was going on then, I am speculating, could be showing us why, in the poster above, Aaron Cross is "stuck between a rock and a hard spot," with two walls closing in on him. A hero isn't a hero unless the audience can identify with his plight and virtues, so if the film is to be successful, it will have to relate the struggle of Aaron Cross to what we the audience experience in our day to day lives.
These are two clips for tomorrow's release of The Bourne Legacy starring Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz, which I am highly anticipating. This is only a conversation, but a most revealing conversation:
What happens in this clip?
A lie in a film is a very interesting device, because the audience usually knows it's a lie (I'm referring to the change in names and relationship between the two Aaron invents). In the clip above, I don't think it's a lie at all, rather, a interpretative re-telling of what is actually happening to them. Who is the most famous "June" we know? It's June Cleaver from Leave It to Beaver, which might give us an idea as to how virtuous and innocent Aaron is thinking the doctor is; Monroe has two possibilities. First, President James Monroe who created the famous Monroe Doctrine regarding American foreign policy which presidents have long followed. This is possible, but I don't think it's probable. I think, rather, it's a fourth reference in this film season to Marilyn Monroe (My Week With Marilyn was the first, then Magic Mike with Channing Tatum dressing as Marilyn from the Seven Year Itch and then Lori mentioning the Seven Year Itch in Total Recall). I can't go any further with it at this moment without greater context, but that's one of the things I will be looking for.
Part of the understanding of who Aaron Cross is will be how he "fights," and whether he "plays" or goes by traditional rules of fighting (i.e., does he just throw punches or does he think of creative ways in a fight to get an edge and advantage over his opponent?). Another point is how Aaron moves, for example, when he's going up walls, he rather looks like Spider Man, who also has had a genetic modification performed on him so he's faster and stronger, like Aaron.
The next important detail is that "June Monroe" has "lost her wallet." How many of us have lost our wallets the last four years? It's not just that our financial worth has plummeted and the cost of living skyrocketed, but Dr. Marta Shearing (Weisz) has lost her livelihood because she was a part of the Operation Outcome which was terminated. So in its way, it's not a lie at all, and that's how the unconscious works. The most important part, however, is that Aaron Cross is "Number 5." Where else have we seen blood work being done? The Hunger Games, when there is the drawing for the Games and Katniss and Primrose have their blood drawn to be registered. But what is this exchange really about?
Is this how your doctor visits are going to be under Obamacare? One of the on-going battles of the last year has been that between a "Darwinist" or chaotic universe, and with The Bourne Legacy taking us to a series of events simultaneously happening (with the Matt Damon Jason Bourne character) and the events from those previous films being the "triggering" mechanisms setting the extermination of Aaron Cross into play, I think we have a chaotic universe at the foundation of this narrative.
You know I am Republican, and Catholic, and I hate Obamacare. In the conversation above, that kind of impersonal and dispassionate "relationship" between the doctor and her patient is,... a dispassionate and impersonal relationship, and it appears it is to Aaron as well because he has counted and remembers the exact number of times they have met. The juxtaposition between the extremely personal (remembering that he has seen her 13 times in four years) and the very impersonal (number "5") suggests a comparison between the face of capitalism and socialism.
This is the clip is the "sin eater" conversation which will probably prove to be imperative to the film (there are several clips I could post, however, I really don't want to spoil the fun; sometimes it's important to be looking for things before they happen so we have a better contextual relationship with a scene before we get to it):
This is going to be the pivot point of the film (and usually is for most art): is morality relative or absolute? Can morality be compromised for a "greater good" or is a lie a lie a lie and always subject to justice, no matter how innocent? Where else have we seen the idea of "sin" recently? In the newest Skyfall trailer when a message comes up on M's computer screen that says, "Think on your sins." I am terribly excited to see The Bourne Legacy and will be tweeting my immediate reaction to it tomorrow afternoon when I get out of the theater (hopefully I will be able to get up at least a bit of a pre-review for you before getting my full review done so you know what to expect going in!).
Like The Amazing Spider Man, we also see another woman in the lab (Emma Stone's character in Spidey) and the subject is "new life" although not the traditional way women have brought new life into the world in the past, and this may prove to be an issue in the film, but maybe not, it's at least something to look for and be alert to.
Still trying to get to all the reader comments; sorry, taking them in order they were left! If you are wondering what films are still coming out this season, here is a list with the dates: August 10 (this weekend): The Bourne Legacy, The Campaign, Hope Springs, Sparkle August 15: The Odd Life Of Timothy Green August 17: Paranorman, The Expendables 2 August 22: Hit and Run August 24: Premium Rush, The Apparition August 29: Lawless August 31: The Possession. And, speaking of Lawless, here is the second trailer:
What exactly should we be looking for in this film? Presumably, the Bondurant brothers are selling alcohol during Prohibition, so they are giving people what they want at a time the law (the Constitution) prohibits it. We have to remember that alcohol is an appetite, very easy since Tom Hardy played Bane (with the strange mouthpiece) in The Dark Knight Rises and, as the bastion of socialism, "fed" people their appetites so they could get a foothold in Gotham; it's possible that we will see the same sort of set-up in Lawless and these are the issues and points we should be looking for,... but I don't think so. I am thinking that, on August 29 when this is released, it will be another anti-capitalist film because the authorities want a share of the profits and that's going to be a statement how there is no justice in a capitalist society. In a similar vein is Paperboy; a crime has been committed--specifically, the sheriff has been murdered--and if that is symbolic, I don't know what is. I also don't know if I will be able to bring myself to watch it:
Even though this seems off the topic, I don't think the next two are so very much; first, due out in October is The Big Wedding about a long-divorced couple who fake being married for a weekend (because a Catholic views divorce as a sin):
And here is The Bachlorette starring Kirsten Dunst and Rebel Wilson:
Like many of the films we have been seeing, The Big Wedding pits a character between two spouses/loves, in this case, Robert DeNiro's character is between his ex (possibly symbolic of capitalism) and his new life with his new wife Susan Sarandon (socialism?). What's so interesting is the role being played by Catholicism in the film. In The Bacholorette, Becky the bride (Rebel Wilson) used to be called "pig face" in high school by the three women asked to be her bridesmaids; where else have we been seeing pigs? Firstly, in Contagion (remember the pig that ate the bat poop?) and then the pig, being symbolic of the appetites, could easily symbolize capitalism because of greed. The question is, does Regan (Kirsten Dunst, and yes, I think we should be thinking in terms of Ronald and even The Exorcist because Regan was the name of the possessed girl) have eyes for Dale, the groom? The film will probably make us question, what is really desirable in a spouse, and it's possible that Becky symbolizes capitalism while the three "skinny girls" who one might think would be desirable, are really totally undesirable.
Here is another example of a marriage/relationship being torn apart, someone being attracted to someone but being married (as in The Seven Year Itch):
Like Lawless above, Brad Pitt's newest Killing Them Softly, also due out in October, is probably anti-capitalist because of the line, "In America, you're on your own." The mob-sponsored poker game that gets robbed might be a reference to either the way the mob works in the Democrat party through the Unions, or how capitalism is rigged and only certain people are going to get their "winning hand" in capitalism, and it's not the little guys like the robbers in the trailer:
The idea of "killing them softly," might refer to the way socialists see capitalists conducting business. Because Paranormal Activity 3 broke records, they have all ready come out with Paranormal Activity 4:
If Sean Bean is in a film, you know he's going to die (ha ha, just joking, no, I'm not really, he's going to die). In Silent Hill, Sean Bean's character may represent a "founding father" and, of course, his daughter seeing an "alternate reality" might see that as socialism, aka, hell.
Will the film identify that "genuine reality" with socialism or capitalism? We'll have to wait until October to find out! And, with "alternate realities" is another take on the assassination of Ossama Bin Laden:
It's always nice to get validation, and the snippet below validates my reading of not only Ice Age 4 as being a liberal film, but also The Dark Knight Rises as being capitalist. In this scene, Scrat the squirrel, symbolic of those of us chasing after the American Dream, pretends to be Batman:
Again, I will post my initial reactions to The Bourne Legacy via Twitter as I leave the theater tomorrow, then try to get the initial reactions up on the post by the afternoon!
The first ten minutes completely convinced me that Len Wiseman’s Total Recall would be an anti-capitalist film, and the film does that intentionally, because it’s mirroring the deception of appearances so prevalent in our political culture today. The film is, however, wholly capitalist and accuses the Obama administration of dark deeds and plans. Two definite yet small background props alert us to this: a piece of paper and a tin can.
As always, this post contains spoilers! The film begins under the scenario that global chemical warfare has rendered most of the earth uninhabitable, and only “Great Britain” (Europe) and Australia are habitable; workers from Great Britain are transported through the earth’s core to Australia everyday to work in factories, then transported back.The vehicle allowing transportation of workers so rapidly is called “The Fall,” and this is imperative to the film and its political agenda.
The reason I was so easily fooled in the first ten minutes is because the Resistance movement in the film advocates “workers rights” and Carl Hauser (Colin Farrell) is passed over for a promotion at his factory by someone from the outside who is better educated and schooled, which could both be taken as anti-capitalist stances, but that’s the genius of the film: the Resistance fighters are making people realize that socialism doesn’t treat workers fairly and it’s in socialism that workers don’t get to advance, but have to stay on the assembly line all their lives, the real purpose of capitalism is to give workers--not only their rights--but advancement chances and opportunities for self-fulfillment. Even though Dennis (Colin Farrell's other name) has been working overtime and exceeding all his quotas, hard work isn't rewarded in socialism.
The opening sequence which turns out to be a dream. Carl Hauser and Melina (Jessica Biel) are escaping. Melina unplugged Carl from a machine and woke him up, after turning out the power in a state run hospital. Symbolically, these actions alert us to the implied viewers of the film: those who supported/voted for President Obama in 2008 who have been hooked up to the machine of the liberal media. Once the "power" has been turned off his campaign, however, the "Resistance" (capitalism) can help carry out the plans for people to take control again. As Carl and Melina escape, a gunshot goes through both their hands, making it possible for her to identify herself to him later after he's been brainwashed.
The Fall, the transport system, is targeted by the Resistance with their slogans, “Workers deserve equality, The Fall exploits us all,”and that’s why one would believe that it’s a socialist film because those are the platform points of Marxism; Total Recall wants us to recall that workers rights and opportunity is also the platform of capitalism, and the chance to capitalize on your skills, talents and hard work. To really drive this point home, Lori (Kate Beckinsale) later tells Carl, do you really think someone with your background and education could end up with someone like me? Because in socialism, there is no class mobility, there are only two classes: the proletariat (the workers) and the party members (the elite that live better than the workers).
Lori is an anti-terrorist cop who is “married” to Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell). What really happened is that Carl Hauser (Colin Farrell), the government’s most elite agent, infiltrated the Resistance movement and then turned against the government when he realized what the real situation was (what the Resistance really stood for and the lies the government was feeding him, rather like the resistance movement the Tea Party and the liberal media). Carl was captured and his memory “erased” and he was given a new set of memories, including that he (now Douglas Quaid) had been married to Lori for seven years and they had been childhood sweethearts when in fact, Lori hadn’t known him except for the last six weeks of the story. Kate Beckinsale was a good choice for this role for two reasons: first, her usual roles are those involving fight sequences and she’s really advanced her craft in this area; secondly, we’re used to seeing her as a vampire (the Underworld series) and several shots invoked that image we, the informed viewers of films, have of the actress, especially the last shot of her dead, dressed all in black with blood coming from her face, really seemed to summon that vampire image for the audience and how that vampire is tied to what she works for: socialism. Lori is a great character because of the subtle ways in which she injects doses of socialism into the film: who gets everything they fantasize about, she asks Dennis? "Fantasize" would be a way to understand how socialists see and understand the American Dream, but it's precisely through his dreams that Dennis discovers he's really Carl and the best secret agent in the world.
The Fall; first, why is the government’s primary transport called “the Fall?” It’s a perfect, yet ambiguous play on words, possibly referencing several things at once without any means of pinpointing which exactly. It could refer to the “fall” in the US credit rating being the vehicle driving America towards socialism, or, because The Fall is destroyed by crashing and burning, it might refer to the Wall Street crash of 2008. It could also refer to the "fall" from power which many Americans experienced towards the end of the Bush administration, making it possible for Obama to take office (and this is what I personally think it refers to): there is the fall from the top of the economic ladder, the fall in personal savings, personal worth and assets, etc. Let's remember, there is also a "fall" in Men In Black (when Will Smith's character has to "get really high" and then fall so he can go back into the past) and a dramatic fall in The Avengers when Tony Stark (Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr) falls from outer space back onto the street of New York and is saved by the Hulk.
Carl Hauser starts out wimpy like the Amazing Spider Man, Captain America, Aaron Cross (The Bourne Legacy) and only after his "memory cap" has been popped does he start remembering who he is. Why is this theme recurring so much nowadays? There has been a shift since the 1950s that I will discuss next week, but, in short, these men's bodies and powers are being utilized as symbols for the economy, which has been weak and sluggish, but through circumstances, now becomes super-powerful (the history of film will help us understand this better). Being able to play the piano is the “key” to understanding how, doing what he wanted to do (when he's still wimpy Dennis Quaid he says he wishes he knew how to play the piano and doesn't realize he knows how until he gets back to his old, glamorous apartment and sets down to the piano and starts to play), and not being commanded by the control center government is the “key” of discovering who he is (one of the piano keys is an actual key to unlocking a pre-memory wipe message from himself).
Besides Lori's talk about "fantasizing" about wanting things, and her remarks that the factory worker Dennis Quaid wouldn't have been good enough to get her in real-life, what else establishes the film as socialist? A piece of paper. As Dennis/Carl begins figuring out what has been going on, Carl goes to a bank with a safety deposit box and takes out a Bourne Identity styled briefcase with weapons, passports and money; on one of the bills is a picture of Obama, meaning, the society which Carl Hauser had turned and started fighting against owed its existence to the Obama administration which has "funded" everything the Cohaagan government is now in a position to do. It's a quick reference and takes only a second, but this tell-tale sign, along with the next symbol, makes for a powerful commentary.
Carl Hauser with who used to be his boss, prime minister Cohaagen, who has planted most of the bombs blamed on the Resistance (rather like rioting and looting blamed on the Tea Party) and now plans to launch an invasion of the colony to take that over and bring it under his control as well. He doesn't have to be taken as a symbol of Obama, but he certainly is the fruit borne of the Obama administration. Cohaagen tries stabbing Hauser in the back, only to have Hauser use Cohaagen's own knife to kill him, which is probably what's going to happen in the November elections.
Carl has to go to the "no-zone" where the Resistance leader Matthias (Bill Nighy) hides out, which just happens to be a devastated New York City (we can tell by the ad for Phantom Of the Opera on a bus, which happens to be the second reference this year to the musical, the other being in Oliver Stone's Savages). Of all the repeating motifs in films, perhaps devastation (or threat to) New York City has been the most common, please consider, for example, The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers and Men In Black. Why? As the financial capital of the world, New York City is also the ultimate symbol of capitalism itself, the Big Apple where everyone can take a bite out of the American Dream. For NYC to be destroyed is for the American way of life to be destroyed, and that's clearly the intention of Total Recall if you look carefully on one shelf,...
As Carl waits to go in to see Matthias, on a shelf with some tins of food is a royal blue can with SUCCESS written in gold letters. Yes, that is the ultimate association we are to make with the Resistance (and it's not a coincidence that President Obama gave an anti-success speech not long ago, the "You didn't do that," speech) because success as such doesn't exist in socialism and, as Total Recall wants to make us fully aware of, when success doesn't exist, neither does the human person, in more ways than one. For example, when Dennis/Carl goes looking for Rekall, he talks to a prostitute with three breasts; why? it's not radical capitalism and a marketing game she's entered, she's had her breasts altered because she doesn't exist as a human, she's only an animal whose dignity of the human body doesn't matter. This is part of the "war on women" which Total Recall puts into the political landscape today in order to make women think of what's going to happen to us.
Total Recall invokes a number of films (regrettably, I have not seen the original Total Recall and I am confident there are references to that film, I just wasn’t able to catch them). Memento (leaving messages for one’s self and not being able to remember), Inception (Cobb and Fisher), The Truman Show (second reference this year with The Cabin In the Woods) as well as the vast body of common references shared with films being released now. It's important to keep track because it allows us to catch references we might miss otherwise, as well as validates points we see in one film that we find being made in another film later.
Like so many films, including the socialist films Dark Shadows, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, The Descendants, Savages and Ice Age 4, Total Recall challenges how we remember our history and what the original purpose of the country was. First, there is the repeated idea of who we are in the person of Dennis Quaid/Carl Hauser--who we are as a country (I will be better able to articulate this next week on my Hollywood Scorecard No. 2 I will be posting after I have seen The Bourne Legacy). Secondly, there is the clash and war between two different ways of life symbolized by marriage partners (Dark Shadows, The Descendants). This is the very real and important intellectual battle raging in the country right now of whether or not the US was meant to be a socialist country--and the "founding fathers" hijacked it for their own greedy purposes--or if America was always meant to be a capitalist country from the very start and the founding fathers created a government framework which would facilitate a free market. Total Recall comes definitely on the side of the later.
Jessica Biel as the First Liuetenant to Matthias in the Resistance. Her position, countered against Lori's in the socialist government, adds a more professional dimension to the war on women being battled out between today's two political parties, rather like Jennifer Lopez's character in Ice Age 4. In Total Recall, the two women symbolize the different identities of America, Lori being the "fake wife" and enforcer of the socialist government, while Melina is the natural love of Carl and the fighter in the Resistance/capitalist movement. This is similar to the wife's cheating on her husband in The Descendants, and the two men sharing the O. in Savages, even one of the strippers "sharing" his wife with the Kid in Magic Mike. As in Ice Age 4, part of the core of the political discourse today is what is natural and what is unnatural.
There's another reference the film makes: Marilyn Monroe's 1955 comedy The Seven Year Itch. Lori makes the comment, after Dennis/Carl realizes he isn't really married to Lori, about him having the "seven year itch," and in Magic Mike, Channing Tatum wears Monroe's iconic dress from the film. These two decidedly capitalist films invoking the same film draws our attention to a underground discourse: like The Seven Year Itch, American voters got upset with the policies of the Bush Administration and have "had a fling" but there really wasn't a fling afterall, just the illusion of one; as the dutiful husband runs off after his family and to be reunited with his wife in the end (instead of pursuing a no-future romance with Marilyn Monroe) so, too, the American voter will go back to the rightful and genuine marriage America made: capitalism.
The socialist city of the future.
One of the Resistance's political slogans in the film, "wake up to the truth," can be applied to all of us, fallen asleep in the easy American way of life, and now--if we haven't all ready been woken up by the "fall" of our economic personal power--films such as Total Recall, The Avengers, Men In Black and The Dark Knight Rises are certainly trying to awaken us to realize the consequences of the current polticial dissension in the atmosphere. The implied viewers of the film, those audience members the film particularly wants to address, are those who voted for Obama in 2008 who are now being called upon to be “double agents” in the real sense of the word.
Dear Readers,
Since early Friday, the internet has been down and completely beyond my control; I am terribly sorry, especially since I saw Total Recall early Friday and hoped to get the post up (should have it up this evening!). In short, Total Recall was totally capitalist and very savvy in its arguments against socialism; it was far better than I anticipated and I am very impressed with its message as well as the sophisticated literary tools it used to communicate it! Not having the internet up also means that I haven't been able to get to a swarm of reader comments and I deeply apologize, as it seems I am always behind on that.
Thank you for your patience and I should have at least Total Recall up by tonight!
Mr. Daniel Craig wants to insure there is never, ever a Bond that can compare to him; ladies and gentlemen,the newest trailer for Skyfall, due out in November: Total Recall opens this weekend, and there is a new trailer for it; the synopsis runs thusly:
As the nation states Euromerica and New Shanghai vie for supremacy, a factory worker begins to suspect that he's a spy, though he is unaware which side of the fight he's on.
The part about life not working out the way you wanted it to is probably another reference to the socialist attack on the American Dream.Why would socialists keep telling us the American Dream is a lie? Because they want to destabilize what Americans see as our history and our past, vs what we just want to believe about America and ourselves. Because the film primarily confronts the faculty of memory, "destabilization" will play a key role in the events of the film. Our memories are faulty, and the longer we hold a memory, the less and less reliable that memory becomes; then there is the task of articulating that memory (it may seem our memory is perfectly preserved in our mind, but once we have to tell someone about it, huge gaps widen between what is in our mind and what we are trying to communicate). Now, it's possible that--since we will be identifying with the factory worker Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell)--we will be shown how we are being attacked by socialism and the film will portray how socialism is trying to re-write our memories of what America has been about and what our lives mean.
This is probably just concept art which will not appear in the film at all, however, it is interesting to consider it. The man on the moon; where else have we seen this? Men In Black III, so it's possible that the US winning the Space Race against the communist Soviet Union will appear in another film this year or, like MIB3, Total Recall doesn't want us to forget our past and who we are as a nation, but it's up for grabs until we see the film.
For real, die-hard film fans,...
This is quite a day in film history. Cinema publication Sight & Sound, perhaps the most esteemed film publication in the world, has counted all the votes for updating their decade list of greatest films and the long-time champ, Orson Welles with Citizen Kane at the number 1 slot, has today been replaced by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.
846 film critics were called upon to choose the 50 greatest films (listed below) and, separately, 358 directors were asked to submit list of 10 greatest films (listed below). The question is, how many of them have you seen? (Personally, I am shocked that Roshomon is so low on the list). Granted,we have not done Hitchcock yet on this site (as I have mentioned before, I have this fantasy of doing all 50 of his films in chronological order, and I won't do any of them until I get my fantasy). But Vertigo is by far Alfred Hitchcock's most Catholic film so that's a real shocker that it would be the new darling of film experts.
Sight & Sound The Critics’ Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time
1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
3. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
4. La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939)
5. Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
7. The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927)
10. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
11. Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
12. L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
13. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
14. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
15. Late Spring (Ozu Yasujiro, 1949)
16. Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
17. Seven Samurai (Kurosawa Akira, 1954)
17. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
19. Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974)
19. Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1951)
I am grateful that Ice Age 4: Continental Drift has a mere 39% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes; it doesn't help too much because, just having seen it this afternoon, I thoroughly enjoyed the film, laughing out loud several times. However,... it was definitely a pro-Obama, leftist, liberal film and the reasons why it is so deeply saddens my heart, truly. It was fortuitous that I just got my post up for The Socialist Utopia: Journey 2 The Mysterious Island for both films employ the mythic island of Atlantis (well, archaeology aside, a generally considered mythic island) but arrive at radially different conclusions! Both films utilize chaos theory, the image of a bridge and a society collapsing (including storms), such as we have seen in too many to name films so far thus this movie-going-election-year season.
Sadly, this poster says it all. Captain Gut, the ape on the left, is a pirate captain and Manny, the hero, is trying to get back to his family, separated by catastrophic land shifts and stranded on a piece of ice. Please note the gold tooth of Gut: the mouth symbolizes the appetites and the gold indicates an appetite for wealth and booty. Captain Gut, as an ape, can also be taken to symbolize Darwinism, which we have had many occasions to discuss this film season (more on that below). Gut vows revenge on Manny because Manny took Gut's ship and lost all Gut's booty, which is how socialists see Republicans from whom Obama took the "ship of state" and the Republican wealth when the markets failed, only nasty pirate Republicans suffered and it was justice that they did so (according to the film).
The film really could have gone either way up to about the last quarter of the film; what cinched it as a liberal film? The pirate captain, Gut, started abusing his pirate crew, the tell-tale sign of socialist vocabulary in today's films (please consider Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter and Dark Shadows). That's the only characteristic tying the Republicans/conservatives to the villainous side in the film, but to an audience, that "brutality" sufficiently stresses that employers are bad and pirates at heart. A herd is much better because everyone is "equal" and no one bosses you around; you can be as big of a loser as Sid and still be an important hero.
But it doesn't stop there.
This is Sid and the sloth in the water, in the purple fungus stain, is Sid's Granny. It's interesting how Sid and Granny were re-united. Sid's family that abandoned him when he was little made a trip to see Sid and ditch "dead-weight Granny" on him so they could make a fast get-away from the oncoming disaster in their sled with no steering wheel. Important point: Granny doesn't have any teeth. Granny symbolizes history because of her age, and since the "herd" are socialists, the "family" which abandoned Sid is the liberal view of Republicans who have abandoned the aged/history and want nothing to do with anyone "undesirable" including the Sids of the world (linking, in a way, the Republicans to Nazis). The vehicle of the Republicans is the out-of-control log they use as a sled. Granny not having any teeth until the end of the film (when Sid makes her an artificial set) is rather literal, "history doesn't have any teeth" until the socialists give history teeth. What gives Granny her teeth, symbolically? The whale, Precious. The whale is there because the liberals believe they have a monopoly on environmental protection, and Precious can save the herd because the herd (the socialists) saved Precious from the Republicans just seeing whales as "precious" resources and hunting them to extinction. The truth is, that even the film recognizes, is that "Granny" (as symbolic of history) hasn't had a bath in a decade and needs to be "cleaned up." The image above shows the foulness coming off history, supposedly how Republicans have mis-led Americans into thinking that America has always been a capitalist nation, when in fact--according to Ice Age, The Descendants, Dark Shadows and Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter--America was really going to be socialist. So, cleaning Granny, as pictured above, is also "reclaiming history" that socialists believe belongs to them.
What's truly under attack in the film is the American Dream, that belief in "hard work equals success" and the ability to improve your situation in life, equal opportunity and class mobility. Scrat, the little pre-historic squirrel that is so adorable, is the image of any of us who are "chasing our dream," be it big as a mammoth or small as an acorn, and what happens to him undermines the belief and reality in the American Dream.
The adventures of Scrat: he has just landed on an island after being at sea on a little ice berg for a long time and sees a squirrel skeleton pointing. Scrat looks down and finds his beloved nut; after sinking himself to the bottom and enduring the pain and consequences of the pressure of the water atop him, he realizes his nut has been split in two and is lost; but, on the inside of the shell is a map to the greatest of all nut hordes and he follows the map (like a pirates' map and that's important) and eventually ends up in Atlantis where the nut horde is (more on this below).
Part of the American Dream is the belief that, even though you have to "pay your dues" and suffer, endure hardship and sacrifice, you can make it, whatever it is you set your heart on. We saw this explicitly in Rock Of Ages, a rather liberal film still professing that, no matter how bad it gets, keep believing in your dreams because if you've got it, you'll make it. Ice Age, on the other hand, shows Scrat ending up at the island of Atlantis, where the great nut horde is, as well as the great intellectuals who discovered everything, and they live in a Utopian bliss amongst all the nuts they could ever want until Scrat arrives who destroys everything. What does it mean?
The crew of Captain Gut, so, if you are a capitalist/Republican--like I am--you are pictured here, because you take, steal and intimidate to get whatever it is that you have and hold onto to, but there's always someone you are answering to. Please note little Scrat, being held by Captain Gut, dressed in his mythic mermaid costume: that's those of us who don't have anything but hope to get something out of capitalism being "belittled" and humiliated by the Republicans.
We saw Atlantis being utilized in Journey 2 The Mysterious Island for the socialists utopia being promised that everyone is equally rich and well-off and it's an enlightened society that is socialist (but it sinks). Scrat, chasing his dream symbolized by the nut, goes crazy with so many nuts and wants to take the grand nut that holds the island together. The "father Scrat," the all-wise type of ancient philosopher, tells Scrat to rise above his appetites and abstain from the nut, but Scrat can't, and he literally pulls the plug, sinking Atlantis because of his appetites (capitalist greed for ownership and personal property) and loses everything; that sunken island reveals the desert in California, so--because only Democrats and socialists love the environment the film posits--Scrat must be a greedy Republican chasing his dream and destroying the environment because of his selfishness that is destroying the possibility of an enlightened socialist society.
The only other Ice Age in the series I have seen is the previous one, but while watching it, I kept getting bombarded by the "virtues" the film presented of the "non-traditional herd." Why? It symbolizes a gay family. You're right, Manny and Ellie aren't gay, however, by promoting a non-traditional herd, it undermines the structure and values of the traditional family. Don't believe me? Part of the conflict of Ice Age 4 is that Peaches has fallen for another Mammoth, Ethan, but the mole Lewis (pictured above) is the one really "in love" with her. Because Ethan ends up being such a jerk, Peaches realizes that "Lewis" is what's best for her. Great: a mole and a mammoth. And, please don't forget--because the film certainly won't--that she's part possum which is why she sleeps by her tail in trees. It's not a matter of letting people be who they are (which is what the film wants you to think is the issue) rather, it's about letting what is unnatural be natural. Please remember that the word "perverse" literally means upside-down, and there are two upside-down moments in the film. First, when Ellie and Peaches are going to sleep for the night and the mammoths are tying their tails around a tree limb to hang like possums; that is not natural, but the film advances that it's okay because it is who they are. Secondly, when Peaches is with Ethan, they go into a cavern where the trees are growing upside down and it looks, as they say, that they are upside-down. So to be with those like her is nature that is unnatural. The issues aren't about being nice to people regardless of who they are or look like, but about going against nature and calling that natural!
The gist of the film reflects what happens in miniature form to Scrat: Manny getting separated from his family symbolizes all the hardships brought on by the last three or four years, and that--even though their home is gone--they have been led to a new home, a better home, which we see in the mock Statue of Liberty, that the land of socialism is true American liberty because no one has to do anything, the government gives it all to you.
Peaches and Ethan.
Another aspect we have seen in films is the difference between chaotic universes and Darwinist universes (the distinction is important because, while Darwinism rules out the possibility of God, chaos theory does not). As mentioned in a caption above, Captain Gut, as symbolizing the overlord employers and Republicans, also symbolizes a Darwinist universe, a universe of the "survival of the fittest" (as the regrettable phrase goes) but the film wants to drive into your head because you may not be one of the fittest to survive in a Republican world and only the socialist government can take care of you. Why then, in the adventures of Scrat, should the film side with a "chaotic universe" when films such as Men In Black III and The Avengers be positing chaotic universes?
It's not.
Scrat as a mythic mermaid to further enforce how mythic the American Dream is. Beside him is the nut with the "road map to success" in it which the film posits is also mythic.
In the trailer above, please note how ridiculously little it takes to bring catastrophe to the entire world (an adulterated form of the "butterfly effect"). Socialists want you to be afraid of "being out there all alone" because in a Repblican world, you are all on your own, the government isn't there to bail you out or shelter you from bankruptcy or shut down the oil drilling or provide you with healthcare or tell you that you didn't build those roads and your business on your own. So if you are afraid of the world, you had better vote for Obama in November, or Scrat's fate will be your own...
Real women are socialists, so Ice Age 4 wants you to believe.
My grandma would be heart-broken if I told her these things, and--knowing her--she would refuse to believe it. I know there is quite a bit to substantiate in claims such as this and, as always, there is more than one valid interpretation possible for this film or any work of art. However, another anti-capitalist facet of the film is in the opening cartoon of the Simpsons, the Longest Daycare, when Maggie (? the Simpsons little baby?) is taken to the Ayn Rand school of daycare. The sequences clearly illustrates how life is a "concentration camp" for people who aren't gifted. One little baby goes around killing butterflies and Maggie is determined to save one she has found; this is where the film deconstructs itself, because Maggie wants the catipeller to bloom into a butterfly, but after it comes out of its cocoon, she immeidiately helps it to escape; butterflies have to fight their way out of the cocoon, the struggle makes them stronger and able to fly on their own. That's the difference between the socialist and capitalist viewpoints, because a butterfly that hasn't fought its way out isn't a butterfly at all, and just as the opening cartoon perverts the order of nature, so too does Ice Age 4.
Here, in Ms. Rand's own words are her defense of capitlism:
In conclusion, the film was quite funny and well-done; I wish I had seen it in 3-D, but I couldn't afford it. I had to buy gas and groceries so there wasn't any money left. It might be possible to make this a pro-capitalist film, but it would be difficult even for me to swing that one. Why should we be concerned with it? All are is usually subtle, and by knowing what is being communicated--to us and our loved ones and society at large--we can understand arguments in a vocabulary that aren't being articulated otherwise hence, we have the edge and advantage when it comes to defending what we believe and support.
