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I
don't go to the movies much anymore, alas, because the nearest mall cineplex -- owned by a company named Regal that runs the
place like a self-storage facility -- is a dump with broken seats and teenage
employees who forget to turn out the lights when the movie starts. But the
weekend weather here was sloppy, and this is the movie awards season, and I
wanted to get an idea of what Hollywood thinks America is about these days,
so I hauled my carcass over to see Django
Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty, in that order.
Years
ago I rather admired Tarantino's Pulp Fiction for its rococo
storytelling method and comic expansiveness. The sheer volume of gore and
mayhem strained my suspension of disbelief, but I was charmed by the audacity
-- for instance the scene where a character played by Quentin himself repeats
to the two hit men with a dead body that he's not in the business of
"dead nigger storage," which was in there, I'm sure, just to rub a
lot of sanctimonious minds the wrong way.
Django Unchained is something else: perhaps the
most incoherent movie ever made, but in a way that nicely represents the
culture that it comes out of. For the uninitiated, the movie tells the tale
of a slave named Django ("the D is
silent," actor Jamie Foxx informs another character) rescued from a
slave coffle by a German bounty hunter named Schultz posing as an itinerant
dentist. Together they ride forth to slaughter white people involved in the
slavery business to 1) make a lot of money off bounties, 2) free Django's captive wife Broomhilda,
and 3) enjoy many acts of bloody revenge.
What
you notice right away is that the filmmaker has no sense of American history
or geography. One moment you're in the Sonoran Desert, the next moment the
Montana Rockies. Huh? Of course the line on Tarantino by film savants is that
his weltanschauung is a gleeful composition of movie history pastiche.
That is, his ideas come only from other movies (or television), not from the
so-called real world and the record of goings-on there. So in this case they
are derived from previous movies made by earlier auteurs who
got the details wrong about mid-19th century life. That may be so, but the
difference is that the earlier movie directors, however mis-educated
or befuddled by convention, might have cared about the milieu they attempted
to represent. Tarantino is content to be wildly wrong about just about
everything. Or rather, the details don't matter as long as the fantasy
satisfies portions of the brain where ideas are not processed.
What
interests me about all this is how perfectly Tarantino's mental universe
reflects the current situation in our nation, in particular the infantile
disregard for the facts of life, the self-referential inanity of our culture,
and the complete absence of authenticity in anything. What disturbed me about
the movie was the sense that Tarantino has set the table for race war, like a
jolly arsonist playing with matches and gasoline in a foreclosed house. He
won a Golden Globe award for directing last night.
Zero
Dark Thirty
tells the tale of a CIA unit based in Pakistan and its laborious efforts to
track down Osama bin Laden, perpetrator of the 9/11 airplane attacks on the
USA and other misdeeds. It focuses on the doings of a female American agent,
uncelebrated in the annals of this long, strange "War on Terror,"
who pored over the minutiae of cell phone records for a decade before
locating the messenger who led CIA watchers to bin Laden's hideout in
Abbottabad, where Navy SEALs finally sent him to his eternal reward of feasts
and virgins.
The
movie, directed by Kathryn Bigalow, is a bloodless
recounting of some very grim and bloody business from recent history. The
controversy around it comes from the extensive scenes of "extreme
interrogation" carried out by American officials against captured
jihadists in "dark" locations. Critics have objected to the movie's
lack of a moral position about these brutal activities. Was it right? Was it
wrong? The movie simply asserts that it happened that way. Some politicians
have objected as to whether the depiction of all these matters is correct in
the first place. Nor is the killing of bin Laden treated as an occasion for
fist-pumping histrionics. If anything, the event leaves you with a hollow
feeling and a bad taste for the time we live in. I admired especially - for
the first time in many a movie - the absence of techno-triumphalism involving
computers.
The
contrast between the two movies is extremely interesting to me: Tarantino the
populist, shall we say, reveling in a splatter-film Americana with barely a
tenuous connection to reality, either historical, cultural, or emotional; and
the assiduous Bigalow laying out the very serious
business of capable adults engaging with a world that consistently terrifies
and disappoints. Kathryn Bigalow didn't win an
award for directing at the Golden Globes.
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