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The Conspiracy Code Conspiracy

Jim Emerson

Sir Ian McKellen Explains It All For You in “The Da Vinci Code.”

As a species, we humans are designed to connect the dots. But so many of our problems and mistakes arise from: 1) not knowing (due to misunderstanding or lack of information) where, exactly, the dots are; 2) not knowing what they signify; and 3) misattributing conscious intention to some hidden force behind the nature and placement of those dots.

I’m alternately amused and bothered by responses I’ve seen to “United 93” and “The Da Vinci Code” that claim to know, one way or another, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the events of 9/11, the history of the bible, the historical validity of Christianity and the existence of a monotheistic deity. (I have to pause here, just to laugh at that last sentence.)

The biggest conspiracy theory yet invented by mankind is “Intelligent Design,” the idea that everything that currently exists was destined to “turn out” the way it is right now because a supernatural intelligence (conspiring, apparently, with itself) made it happen deliberately. No room for chance or coincidence or (shudder) evolution in that fixed, closed-world view. But the only reason a concept as preposterous as Intelligent Design can continue to exist is because there are still so many things we don’t know about the development of life on this planet (or any other). That’s why Intelligent Design is also known as “God in the Gaps.” Anything that’s unclear or can’t yet be explained? Just plug “God” into the equation and voila! — it’s complete! Conspiracies about 9/11 or Christianity are, in principle, exactly the same: Just fill in the gaps in what is known with a top-secret cabal guiding everything behind the scenes, and suddenly it all makes sense. I guess that’s why they say a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon (or mud puddle)

Jim Emerson

View image “Nobody wants to jump in the mud puddle with her.” (Enlarge to see the Creature’s mysterious adam’s apple.)

Elizabeth Edwards says this in a Salon interview:

Ignoring the fact that she exists doesn’t make her go away. If it did, you wouldn’t hear me utter her name. So I think maybe the better thing to do is simply confront people like her. Are you going to stop them? Under no circumstances will you stop them. But maybe you empower other people to stand up, and maybe that has an effect. When I travel, so many older people thank me for what I did. Because the vile kind of way [she] thinks and talks, that was not ever part of the public discourse until recently. […]

And later on, I talked to somebody, not an advisor — I really don’t have anybody advising me — and not someone in the campaign. She’d been in a previous campaign, and she said, “Oh, I wouldn’t have done that. I think that you put yourself at risk, subject to criticism unnecessarily.” I understand the advice — if you were advising somebody you might say that — but that exact attitude is what protects somebody like [her]. Nobody wants to jump in the mud puddle with her.

Gosh, I wonder what Edwards could be talking about…?

The snatch and how to grab it

Jim Emerson

“As a sequence is being cut, the cutter should know where a particular setup most effectively presents the information needed for that particular part of the scene. In other words, he will stay with the shot as long as that shot is the one which best delivers the required information and cut to another shot only when the new cut will better serve the purposes of the scene, whether because the size is more effective, the composition is more suitable, or the interpretation is superior…. In short, as long as the scene is playing at its best in the selected angle, leave it alone!”

— veteran Hollywood director Edward Dmytryk (“Murder, My Sweet,” “Crossfire,” “The Caine Mutiny”), On Film Editing (1984)

Steven Boone at Big Media Vandalism says he gave up on film criticism (for the fourth or fifth time) this year:

I quit film criticism because somebody has banished the shot from mainstream commercial cinema.

The shot, man.

That unit of film composition which lends film its cumulative power and structural integrity.

In place of the shot, like a leaky sandbag in place of a brick, somebody put… Well, what to call it, this fragment of film that has more in common with a spontaneous cutaway during Monday Night Football than with the ruminative, kinetic moving image discovered by Kuleshov, Porter, Griffith, et al? I once jokingly called it a gotcha-fragment, but that doesn’t quite get it. The word for “shot” in the new century shall be…

Snatch.

‘First, I’d like to thank Xenu…”

Jim Emerson

“… the evil galactic warlord who made all of this possible.”

“Trapped in the Closet” — the infamous 2005 “South Park” episode that miraculously combined elements of Scientology, the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, the Second Coming, L. Ron Hubbard, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, R. Kelly, Xenu and Stan — has been nominated for an Emmy Award, even though it’s been banned from showing in the UK, and from re-airing in the United States, reportedly due to pressure from Tom Cruise and/or Scientology, two of the most unpredictable litigious forces on the planet Earth.

The episode is nominated for Outstanding Animated Program (for Programming Less Than One Hour). So, Comedy Central (and Viacom), are you going to allow this acclaimed episode to be seen (again), outside of Canada and Turkey?

Today, BTW, marks Day 120-Something of “South Park” Held Hostage in America, and spineless Viacom is beginning to resemble the presidency of Jimmy Carter in its final days.

The color of blood: A study in scarlet

Jim Emerson

The color of blood: a study in scarlet

View image Bright, thick, almost waxy blood: Brian DePalma’s “Sisters” (1973).

View image Thinner, but still alarmingly bright: Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” (1994).

“Yellow… is the color of caution.”

— Opal from the BBC (Geraldine Chaplin) in Robert Altman’s “Nashville”

Red is the color of alarm. Perhaps because it is the color of blood. Over the years, that color has changed, along with our taste in blood. In movies, I mean. What was once alarmingly “realistic” now looks either stylized (if it’s a good movie) or fakey (if it’s not so good). When Neil Sedaka and Elton John sang about “Bad Blood” in 1975, maybe that’s what they really had in mind (because, after all, who knows what “Doo-ron, doo-ron, dit-dit-dit-di ron-ron” was supposed to mean? Apart from the reference to the Crystals).

Near-black: The Coens’ “No Country for Old Men” (2007).

Before the late ’70s, blood was generally (and, remember, these are generalizations — there are certainly exceptions) bright red and opaque, like nail polish or latex paint. It was often compared to ketchup, which in many cases it was. Since then, our taste for blood runs darker, anywhere from ruby red to almost black. It’s a bit more transparent than it used to be, and appears somewhat shinier and stickier — perhaps because, as we now know, the effects folks have supposedly hit upon the magic formula for photogenic blood made from Karo corn syrup (in some cases the high fructose variety, the same ingredient used in… almost everything that doesn’t use a low-cal sweetener). The shade changes with the lighting, the thickness (a smear or a puddle?), and the surface on which it is splashed. The blood splashed on Samuel L. Jackson’s Jheri Curled hair naturally appears darker than the blood all over the upholstery of the back seat, or the blood splooshed on the back window as daylight streams through it.

(Red Alert: Possible bloody spoiler text and images ahead for “Heroes” [Season One], “There Will Be Blood,” “Deep Red,” “The Conversation”…)

Theaters try to compete with living rooms

Jim Emerson

View image If only the “theatrical experience” could be as good as your living room…

An architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times reviews the new Landmark multiplex at the Westside Pavilion:

… [It is] designed to compete directly with your living room — with your sofa, your flat screen and your ability to pause, rewind, turn on the lights or just give up on the movie idea altogether and switch over to “The Daily Show.”

As if to acknowledge how tough it’s becoming to drag people out of their houses for a night at the movies, with home-theater technology getting better and traffic getting worse, the Landmark includes a number of domestic architectural touches. The most striking are three “Living Room” theaters on the top floor that hold between 30 and 50 people each. They include sofas and side tables as well as overstuffed love seats and ottomans by the high-end French furniture company Ligne Roset. […]

All of the Landmark’s larger auditoriums are pleasingly steep and feature extra-wide seats with cup holders that will accommodate your Chardonnay as well as a Big Gulp-sized soda. They are served by top-of-the-line Sony digital projectors, which construction crews were moving carefully into place last week.

But those rooms offer a variation on an architectural experience we all know well: the big movie auditorium with cushy seats and teeth-rattling sound. What’s new at the Landmark, at least for a first-run theater, are those Living Rooms — not just for their furniture but for what they reveal about the industry’s attitude toward architectural space in a digital era. […]

This time around Hollywood is openly admitting the extent to which the public now associates the movie-watching experience with the comforts of home.

Well, why should a theater be less comfortable or less aesthetically satisfying than your average big-screen TV home set-up? This kind of thing has been done for years (the beanbags or sofas and ottomans in the front row and such), but what I’ll be interested in seeing is whether cozy 30- to 50-seat auditoria can bring in enough revenue to justify building them.

9/11: The Movie

Jim Emerson

The power of images: A conscious attempt was made to answer the indelible destructive images of 9/11/2001 with a healing one in this Ground Zero memorial that was seen all over the world via the media (and could actually be seen by satellites from space).

Following up on my posts about “Wag the Dog”/JonBenet/Iraq & 9/11 and modern propaganda films:

As we approach the fifth anniversary of the atrocities of 9/11, I still think one of the most important yet least explored aspects of the day’s attacks is how they were carefully designed and staged for the cameras. Deadly spectacles that everyone kept saying was “like a movie” actually were directed that way, as a horror/disaster movie with unforgettable psychological impact — because it wasn’t just a movie, it was real. The “terror” in “terrorism” is about spreading fear and panic, and the World Trade Center towers weren’t just chosen because they were symbols of American riches and hubris, but because they were visual symbols that would make for spectacular and terrifying footage. The first plane guaranteed that the second would come as an even greater shock — and would be caught by thousands of cameras. That was the way the perpetrators spread their murderous message: they intended to terrify not just the government but the population. And, initially, they succeeded. (Nobody looked more terrified on that day than Brave President Sir Robin, who bravely ran away, away, for most of the day: “When danger reared its ugly head / He bravely turned his tail and fled…”)

So, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (who called the WTC attacks “the greatest work of art ever” — later changing it to “Lucifer’s greatest work of art”) was pilloried for being insensitive (and he was), while his larger point was ignored.

British artist/provocateur Damien Hirst elaborated a bit more in 2002, but it was still “too soon” for many, who thought his words sounded flip:

“The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually.”No matter what you think of his tone or his timing, I don’t see how one can contest that.

Lawrence Wright’s new book, “The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” explores this in greater detail than any reporting or analysis that has come along so far. A piece in Salon.com cites Osama bin Laden’s role as “director”:

At the heart of Wright’s wide-ranging narrative is America’s arch nemesis. “One can ask whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it,” he says. “The answer is certainly not.” That’s why I’m skeptical that a plot to blow up airliners somewhere in the middle of the Pacific is really the biggest plan out there. It’s missing the visual aspect that is so effective at creating the fear and panic that lead to hysterical, reckless, wasteful, counter-productive and even self-destructive decision-making of the sort we’ve seen since 9/11. Politicians, no matter what their party affiliation (or lack of one), still haven’t come to their senses.

Rehearsing your own prejudices

Jim Emerson

Spent last week in Boulder, CO, participating in the Conference on World Affairs — an event that gloriously celebrates the values and principles outlined in this video. It’s 9 minutes and 40 seconds that, I hope, illustrate the proposition upon which this blog is founded: critical thinking.

(tip: Andrew Sullivan, whose blog I plugged mercilessly)

Hidden horrors: Four spine-tingling DVDs

Jim Emerson

Don’t look now, little girl, but the children of rage (mummy’s rage) are about to get you.

Los Dias de los Muertos begin today, October 31 (aka “Halloween day”) through November 2 (aka All Souls Day — and Tara Mulan Sweeney’s birthday). Time to recycle my appreciation of four critically undervalued horror movies from a few years back: David Cronenberg’s “The Brood,” Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant,” Neil Jordan’s “In Dreams,” and John Carpenter’s “Prince of Darkness” (“The critics were horrified!!!!”):

Critics can be particularly rough on horror pictures. It’s so easy — too easy, sometimes — to make these spook-shows sound risible and preposterous in synopsis, especially once you remove them from the darkness of the theater and examine them them in the harsh light of black and white newsprint (or monitor pixels). But the horror films I like best are not the abundantly bloody shockers critics love to loathe (though George Romero’s extravagantly gory Grand Guignol “Dawn of the Dead” is a treasured favorite), but the ones that are the most atmospheric and creepy — that suggest far more than they depict.

Continue reading here…

30th Anniversary Poll: What’s your favorite Star War(s)?

Jim Emerson

Closed 6/11/07

Finding ‘The Fall’

Jim Emerson

My friend Alley Rutzel was so mesmerized by Tarsem Singh’s “The Fall” (premiered at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, but released in the US only this summer), that she put together this index of breathtaking images and locations from the film. She writes: “Watching this movie was incredibly inspiring (I kept saying “I want to go there, and I want to go there…”) so I made a game of trying to figure out all the filming locations.” She still doesn’t have ’em all, so please take a look and let her know if you can identify them…

Mad Men: Modern Compartmentalization

Jim Emerson

“Mad Men” has always been about compartmentalization: personal and professional, past and present, city and suburbia, accounts and creative… At first I didn’t much like the new, glass and monochrome office spaces, about which silver fox Roger Sterling (John Slattery) remarked: “I feel like with my hair you can’t even see me in here.” Leave it to director Slattery to make the most out of these spaces in one of the finest episodes of the series (and leading contender for my favorite movie of 2010), “The Rejected” (Season 4, Episode 4). I put together this little wordless video essay about doors, windows, mirrors, transoms, hallways, pillars, screens, reflections… and I’m working on a frame-grab photo essay that gets into more detail about the exquisite direction and composition.

I’ve deliberately left out huge, important chunks of the episode that don’t take place in the office — but had to include Pete’s magnificent shrug (with mirror, bar, decorative screen, and the unseen room down the hall), to contrast his apartment with his office, and the small framed mirror with the wall-sized observation mirror at work. The episode is mostly about Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) and Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) going in different directions, discovering new ways to open or close doors between their work and personal lives, contrasted with Don Draper (Jon Hamm), who begins the episode chain-smoking and drinking during a four-way phone call, his office a tangled web of coiled cords. Notice all the cross-sight-lines communication going on (horizontal, vertical, diagonal) — people watching other people, exchanging glances or sight-unseen, through various frames in their separate compartments — culminating in Don’s seduced-and-ignored secretary Allison (Alexa Alemanni) staring the wrong way through the two-way mirror and looking Don right in the eye, unsettling him by seeing him for who he really is.

Both Pete and Peggy find themselves banging their heads against work surfaces in frustration/resignation, but the episode gives them a moment of grace, through glass doors in the reception area, in a brief, wordless coda I’ve included almost in its entirety. Peggy is leaving for lunch with some of her new boho friends; Pete is standing around with some suits (“new” clients, including his father-in-law), waiting for Don so they can have a business lunch. (BTW, I couldn’t squeeze it in, but the shot of Pete knocking his forehead against the post in his office is followed by a shot of Peggy getting into the elevator — much like the last shot here — in which she first meets the LIFE photo editor who introduces her to the Village crowd who come by to get her at the end.) Man, what a terrific movie this is!

How do you solve a problem like the Oscars?

Jim Emerson

Academy Award-winning Cher in her “serious actress” Oscar ensemble.

Almost every year for the last 20 or so I’ve had to think seriously about that question. I mean, what is there to write about the Oscars that hasn’t already been done? I had a great time with my recent piece for MSN Movies (“Your Oscar speech: How not to blow it”), but I was fully aware I wasn’t the first (or even, probably, the 1,000th) to write something similar in approach.

So, let’s recap the angles: We can look at it as a horserace [check] and place bets on the odds [check]; as an election or popularity contest [check]; as a poker game [check — I did that for MSN one year, with each nominee holding a “hand” based on previous awards-season honors]; as the “Gay Super Bowl” [check]; as a fashion show [check]; as Hollywood’s version of “American Idol” [check]…

Some people would probably like watching the Academy Awards broadcast better if all the nominees gave speeches and the winner was decided by who gave the best one. (Maybe Academy members could call 900 numbers to vote for their favorites or there could be an Academy-approved panel of judges: say, Halle Berry, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Roger Moore.) I find the speeches to be generally excruciating. (But, then, I thought the best Oscars ever was the Allan “Can’t Stop the Music” Carr-produced one with Rob Lowe and Snow White because it was so astoundingly grotesque that I laughed so hard I cried. The Academy has tried to deep-six all evidence of that one, and Disney even threatened to sue over the use of Snow White. C’mon, YouTube!)

Here’s another idea: A former resident of Mexico wrote to me with the following proposal:

In Older Mexican Award Shows, the recipient of the award was not allowed to speak. Each nominee was presented along with a few seconds of their song (or movie clip) and then the winner was named. The winner would walk on stage, accept the award, wave or blow kisses at the audience and then walk off stage. It was fantastic.

The newer Mexican award shows are becoming more “Americanized” now unfortunately. Most now allow the winners to speak which just makes me long for the good old days. So I say Don’t Let Them Speak. We don’t care who you have to thank, who allowed this moment to happen, how much you love God, or how inspiring your parents were. All we care about is that you won…. And what you’re wearing. But that’s it!I kinda like that. They could stretch out the Red Carpet Walk of Shame if they want, or even require that the major nominees do interviews afterwards, with Rosie O’Donnell or Dr. Phil or Chris Matthews. Sort of like the publicity clauses in actors’ contracts that stipulate they must do a certain amount of promotion in exchange for their salary on a given film: If you want an award, you’re going to have to submit to a sit-down with Brit Hume or someone similarly slimy and daft (and, preferably, as humorless).

And if they need to make the show itself longer (to sell commercial time), they could make “In Memoriam” last ten minutes or so (more clips!) and do even bigger, more vapid and elaborate musical numbers — not for the best songs, but for ALL the top nominees!

The Oscars are about the show. It’s entertainment, loosely defined. Nominees, it is not about you. It’s about we, the millions (not billions) who watch the satellite-cast on TV and have parties with our friends and laugh and cry and sigh and gasp and ridicule. (If we don’t have to work.) That’s the only approach that matters.

Yes, but is it art?

Jim Emerson

The phrase above was the name I gave to the arts section I edited at the University of Washington Daily. I thought (and still think) it was funny, while it also satirizes the central conceit of writing about culture, whether it’s “high culture” or “popular culture.” (If I made a Venn diagram of those categories they would significantly overlap.) I still have a rubber stamp that says, “This is not art.” I got it about 30 years ago. Sometimes I like to get it out and stamp it on things because I think it is absolutely hilarious — both as a comment on art and a comment on criticism. I laugh and laugh, even if it’s only on the inside.

What makes a movie bulletproof?

Jim Emerson

OK, who’s ready to see the new movie about a gastroenterologist named Joe?

One of my favorite tree-based movie critics, Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, explains why you won’t be seeing many reviews of “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” before it opens (Paramount isn’t pre-screening it for critics) and wonders who cares — about the movie or what critics think of it?

Movie critics are put on earth first to alert you to good movies you might otherwise miss, then to cut through the PR fog and consider the actual worth of a given film (depending on what, exactly, it hopes to achieve). With certain types of movie — typically smaller, more ambitious fare attended by people who regularly read reviews — a critic can mean the difference between a successful run and an early DVD release. But blockbusters? In most cases, we’re BBs bouncing off the hide of an elephant….

The color of scent

Jim Emerson

In the few sentences that I’ve posted about Tom Tykwer’s “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” (just blurbs on my Best of 2006 and Double-Bills lists), I mentioned that the movie was a striking feat of “cine-sthesia,” as it were, and that the murders themselves reminded me of Hannibal Lecter’s analysis of Jame Gumb in “Silence of the Lambs”: The killing is incidental. What does he seek? (In this sense it reminded me of Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” too — voyeurism as a form of possession through the senses — sight or smell.) And, of course, Grenouille (the scentless apprentice) kills because he covets. Jame Gumb wants to possess a woman’s skin; Grenouille wants her scent — and, by extension, all women’s scents.

I wonder if one reason I was so enthralled by Tykwer’s film (it’s gotten mixed reviews: a 54 on RottenTomatoes) is that I’m told I have mild synesthesia, where senses bleed together a bit so that, for example (from the American Heritage Dictionary definition of the word), “the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.” That’s very much like what the movie does, with color, shape, texture and sound orchestrated to express odors. But doesn’t everybody experience this to some degree? My sensations have mostly to do with color, shape, texture and brightness. Sounds, particularly music (and to a lesser extent tastes, smells, even tactile feelings), are always accompanied by colors and shapes. Doesn’t everybody know that trumpets are round and red? That violins are long and yellow? That pianos are (generally speaking) ovoid and green? Snare drums are light grey, short and thin and flat, like em-dashes, while cymbals are silvery, shimmery and round-ish but with no distinct edges, like a spray. Those are some of the things I always see in my head when I listen to music. Also: The number two is green, just as surely as the number five is red and seven is blue. (And the funny thing is, that’s true for Roman numerals as well as Arabic ones, though the colors aren’t all as strong.) I don’t know where these associations come from — if I’ve always had them or if I made them when I was a kid.

Do you have these experiences? Care to describe them?

Getting back to my first paragraph, I wanted to refer you to a splendid (and splendidly titled) piece by Stephen Romer in the Times Literary Supplement called “Distilled, bottled, and bewildered” that is a combined discussion of Tykwer’s film, Patrick Süskind’s original 1985 novel, and a book of historical research and analysis of the “olfactory arts” by Richard Stamelman called “Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin.” An excerpt that I thought was exceptionally perceptive (beware of spoilers):

Milestones

Jim Emerson

My semi-trusty Amstrad, circa 1988.

Scanners is only a little over a year old. If I recall correctly, it began on RogerEbert.com shortly before the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival in the fall, then shifted over to the new Sun-Times/Moveable Type publishing platform a few months later in spring, at the beginning of the 2006 Overlooked Film Festival — 254 Moveable Type entries ago. It’s been almost exactly four months since I persuaded the Sun-Times that I really wanted to have Comments enabled, and they became available here for the first time in June. Last week, without my even noticing it, we passed 1,000 comments (almost 1,100 as of today) — and for that, I am extremely grateful to you!

Since June, I’ve instigated the Opening Shots Project — with many contributions from readers (and many still to be published, and many frame-grabs to be grabbed — I haven’t forgotten, I’m just overwhelmed) — and we’ve had some exceptionally terrific and rewarding discussions about “The Descent,” “The Departed,” all kinds of approaches to film criticism, and more other subjects than I can think of right now. Scanners is rapidly evolving into the very thing I hoped it would become, a place where people can have impassioned, intelligent, provocative (and funny) discussions about critical thinking in all its guises — beginning with “moving images” (film and video and TV) and extending in all directions into even the touchiest related (but unavoidable) subjects of sex, business, politics, race, religion, philosophy, mythology and art. How much fun is that?!?!