Fractured, Skewed, Ironic, Moronic Morality
The Lovely Bones, The White Ribbon, Gamer (2009)
Morality in movies is more than occasionally evaded by writers and paying audiences (particularly younger audiences) for fear of seeming out of date and prudish – but it is important, as so many people, whether they care to admit it or not, get their appearances and many behaviors and views from movies and the rapidly all consuming monster known as mass-media in general. But, before, we go further; let’s assure that we’re all on the same page. I don’t by reflex equate bloodshed with immorality or sex of the un-missionary sort with immorality or questionable empathies with immorality. Immorality in the movies is usually something less obvious and more insidious, a devotion to cliché and plot so intense it dwarves basic human common sense. Sex and the City, the TV show, was an occasionally amusing occasionally tedious romantic comedy about money/status’ confusion of gender roles – it kept its heroines in perspective without judging them. Sex and the City, the movie, on the other hand, was a bloated, pandering catastrophe in which we’re invited to sympathize with the star’s money-negotiation of her marriage as somehow symbolic of a deeper, true affection. Like many romantic comedies, the Sex movie was immoral – distorting and perverting need in the mindless pursuit of the usual plot. It is one of the worst American movies I’ve seen in years.
The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the bestselling Alice Sebold novel, has an even worse thoughtless stench. The book was a metaphor for disconnection – a young girl divorced from her own body following a brutal attack. Dead, the young girl watches as her family splinters and recovers, from a neverland of her own creation, one that she can not leave until she’s made peace. Jackson’s movie, nearly incoherent if you haven’t read the book, concerns a chase for a bloated serial killer by SNL-style caricatures (most of the performances are embarrassing); it is also, predictably, more concerned with a show-off in-between fantasy world than a family dimension of any conviction. Jackson has a number of neat effects (particularly a giant armada of ships-in-a-bottle) that have nothing to do with anything.
The Lovely Bones is more than a bad movie though; Sebold has direct experience with some of her book’s harshest elements, you feel her walking a tight-rope over a landmine. Jackson sees the rape and murder of a young girl as a kiddie-empowerment fantasy – the tragedy freeing the girl to tralalala amongst the clouds while the family eventually heals by solving the murder (in the movie inexplicably) and having a bubble fight with boozy Susan Sarandon as the grandma.
Before we leave this picture, I would like to address a get-out-of-jail card that a few Lovely Bones admirers are using to excuse its problems: yes, I’ve read the book. And, no, I’m not one of those ninnies who go to the movies for books on tape. The Lovely Bones is, if anything, worse if you haven’t read it. Exposure to the book has little effect on a deal-breaking problem: Jackson is a now privileged wiz-kid who, here, treats appalling violation as a thrill ride joke. Exposure to the book has little effect on the fact that no scene has been thought out in any way other than the visual (one example, and there are dozens, has bad guys rolling a safe across the distance of a football field in the mud to drop it in a sinkhole, it would cheat Jackson of a montage if they drove directly to the sinkhole). The Lovely Bones is the worst movie by a talented director in years, it’s gross.
There are few things less shocking than deliberate, desperate, calculating provocation; and, while Jackson’s picture accidentally infuriated me, Michael Haneke’s most recent testament to inhumanity, The White Ribbon, just bored me. Haneke will never change his or your mind, you either got on board with him a few decades ago and thrill to each new reveling of purposefully kinda-banal cruelty, or you checked a couple out, discovered you got it, and moved on.
I will give Haneke this: The White Ribbon is consistent and not as hypocritical as usual. Funny Games (both versions) decried movie violence as excuse to deliver movie violence. White Ribbon, about a small early 1900s German village in turmoil over a series of random nasty pranks, leaves everything off-screen. The picture, shot in color but de-saturated to give it a more ghostly black and white, has an overbearing, withheld, impotent severity that is at once effectively claustrophobic and intensely stupid. Haneke’s technique is so exactly what middle-class filmgoers claim to hate and fear about “art movies” that you wonder if a larger subversion is actually afoot.
But that’s reaching; the picture is another Haneke art-genre con job (he even links it to the assassination of the Archduke of Austria at the end in a laughable stretch for broader relevance). A preacher ties his son up for masturbating; a doctor screws his daughter and (in the strongest scene) tells his mistress that she disgusts him. Crops are destroyed; a teacher falls in love only to have that love not-quite-resolved so that the picture can maintain its loaded, chic unpleasantness. The children are (probably) carrying out the crimes, which eventually include a maybe accidental, maybe not, murder as a rebellion against a society of repression and…etc, etc, etc. Nothing has any effect, or real point, because nothing is at stake. Haneke’s cynicism undercuts his point: the pranks have no effect on the village, and they reveal nothing, as everything is already disgusting, and everyone already knows it. It’s all super-obvious surface symbolism already. The White Ribbon, like other Haneke pictures, doesn’t earn its point-of-view: it hates and resents the basic human nature that it doesn’t have the skill, or interest, to properly portray – everyone in the picture is a mannequin of reserved, barely checked savagery without any surprise or variance.
There’s an old parlor game that critics play (and all of the masters have practiced it) in which you denounce big, bloated obvious studio and prestige pictures and pick at hidden meanings in small movies that most people have written off as junk. My brother has accused me of this sport more than once – he insists that I engage in a hip “other” point of view. But bloated studio or prestige pictures (Lovely Bones is the former, White Ribbon the latter) are consistently stupid, lifeless, unsurprising, and demoralizing, they reaffirm the snob notion that movies are a secondary art. Gamer is, indeed, junk, but it’s a junk that prods a couple of interesting nerves partially on purpose and partially by accident. And it is better morally adjusted than Lovely Bones or White Ribbon, or An Education for that matter.
Gamer, written and directed by a team credited as Neveldine/Taylor (Crank, Crank 2) is a couple of promising ideas obscured by a really dumb one. The dumb idea – another future Running Man/Most Dangerous Game knockoff – permits people to ignore everything else. Neveldine/Taylor have grown from tedious to promising: Crank 2 was a remake of Crank that began to tap into a satire of current go-go momentum-for-momentum’s sake force and Gamer covers similar territory: points are scored on mindless techno homogenization/dehumanization. That’s nothing too original, but N/T are refining their fragmented action – which essentially plays as a nightmare version of the aesthetic of a particularly garish Nike commercial or music video, with master shots hidden amongst the noise and quick cuts to give you visual context. Much of the bloodshed in Gamer – which involves soldiers (on death row, of course, a convenient out that needs to be discarded) being controlled by video gamers in combat – has a pulse without compromising a dry sarcasm.
There are two games in Gamer that allow people to control other real people in a heightened setting. Slayers, the soldier combat thing that plays as a modernized, less self-righteous version of the stuff in Gladiator, and Society, which is Sims with real people and the stereotypically druggy-sleazy id/mood familiar to viewers of Crank. Slayers is well staged but the same-old, while Society has potential, you wish that was the full movie. There’s a moment in Gamer that’s chilling: of the tortured chiseled hunk champion of Slayers (Gerard Butler, who doesn’t deserve to be on death row, of course) breaking into Society and finding his wife controlled by a (ridiculously) obese greaseball from somewhere in the internet fairy-world. Butler’s increasing desperation as the grease ball mindlessly parrots the wife’s affection is the stuff of a major contemporary horror picture.
Another scene that conceptually flirts with brilliance: the moment the worlds of Society and Slayers collide as we know they must: with gory shoot outs puncturing (and revealing) the sexual violence of this virtual Island of the Lost Toys, with neon blood splattering in a rave, as others dance on in their self-enclosed bubbles of light. A week later, I can recall these and a few other bits in Gamer with clarity, while the horrors of White Ribbon fade as a session of church I wished I’d skipped.
Hey, remember when usually-dull granite-faced Mile Ventimiglia showed up as a leather-clad pervo avatar named Rick Rape? And then Gerard Butler and his righteous fury broke him in half? That was awesome.
I think GAMER is interesting but flawed – it takes the Neveldine/Taylor aesthetic of more-more-MORE-as-fast-as-possible and attempts to inject it into a self-critiquing narrative (the CRANK films are generally not about anything else other than their, and modern action cinema’s, addiction to propulsion and sensation). The issue, I think, is that N/T aren’t suited to proper narrative. If their characters are one-dimensional, it’s because they exist only to be thrown about here and there by the capricious whims of their addled creators. Fine, I don’t mind that, but A) don’t ask me to actually care about these cardboard constructs, and B) don’t write yourself into a corner that only a shrug and an insulting deus ex machina can extract yourself from.