Sunday, March 13, 2016

10 Cloverfield Lane

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the threat isn’t real. That’s the theme of this film. 
The point is made by our visceral experience as much as by any analysis. The film is one fright, dread, shock, surprise, after another. We’re so exhausted at the end that we feel the emotional draining the Greeks expected of their tragedies — catharsis. We leave “calm of mind, all passion spent.” We feel the validation of paranoia as much as we read it in the film.
The reality of fear makes this a very contemporary work. The US election is propelled by fear and its exploiters. So are the major flashpoints in world politics. 
Hence the main characters. Howard is a brilliant technician, up on science and construction, but madly driven by conspiracy theory and survivalism. On his sanity we go back and forth. Is his fear justified or is he inventing the apocalypse in order to control his two captives?
Michelle is the particularly contemporary hero: a newly independent woman who grows into asserting herself. In the opening scene she leaves her boyfriend Ben. The car crash ends her independence. When she awakens after the accident she — and we — expect her sexual enslavement. Is this Son of Room?
Instead she serves Howard's need for a daughter figure. For all his powers Howard is a figure of impotence, averse to sexuality. In their word-guessing game he only thinks of Michelle as a girl or a princess, not a woman. Unlike the earlier captive, the girl Howard abducted and finally killed, Michelle survives by turning Howard’s vat of acid against him. Later, when she fights off and destroys the vagina dentata monster from outer space, Michelle assumes the power and authority of the Sigourney Weaver heroine of Alien.
The fusion of earthly danger and sci-fi is especially significant here. When Michelle first breathes the safe outside air after her escape we share her relief — and her sense that she had been duped by Howard and his mad paranoia. For all his savvy he is a control freak and a lunatic. 
The extra-terrestrial’s attack proves Howard’s mad theory was right after all. He’s still a control freak, conspiracy theorist and brilliant madman. But he’s defeated by the resourceful and newly assertive woman, who is the true hero for our times.
When Michelle and Emmett recall their regrets they both reveal their failure to have acted when they needed to. Emmett chickened out of going off to college on his track scholarship, resigning himself to a small life within a 40-mile radius. Michelle still feels guilty for not having interceded when she saw a man bully his little daughter (as her father had abused her). Seeing Howard kill Emmett hardens Michelle’s resolve not to fail to act this time. 
Howard says he regrets nothing because he says he has done everything he wanted to. That denies his failure to have turned a captive girl into a daughter. But he has built that bunker and his fantasy proved right. Taken together, the trio represent the two good people who having once failed to act surrendered the field to evil — and they won’t do that now.  
Michelle escapes and kills Howard, then blows up the alien. But for all her new found courage, strength and resourcefulness, her last decision poses a conundrum. On the radio she hears a call for survivors to come help out at the hospitals in Baton Rouge. Instead of heading there, though, she turns left toward Houston. Is she reverting to her earlier instinct not to get involved in others’ suffering or is she instead heading off to her new independence, to fight the invaders on her own?
That’s something to debate when we’ve recovered from this film’s emotional and frightful ride.    

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Mustang

A street scene at the end of Mustang catches the central theme. As the two girls approach their former teacher’s Istanbul flat they walk between two signs. On the left is some Turkish graffiti, on the right a store sign in English: “Objects of Desire.” That catches the five sisters’ dilemma: they are caught between Turkey’s post-secular culture, which Erdogan has returned to harsh Islam, and the West’s open sexuality that the earlier modernization had brought into Turkey. Both define women by gender alone.
The five orphaned sisters live with their indulgent grandmother and abusive uncle. When a neighbour complains about the girls’ wild (but innocent) play with boys from their school the sisters are virtually imprisoned to protect their “honour.” Their home is turned into “a marriage factory.” Women come in to train them to be traditional wives. i.e., submissive homemakers.
The sisters’ career follows a pattern of arranged marriage. The oldest gets to marry the boy she loves. The second submits to a loveless marriage, in which her hymen survives the defloration. The third kills herself rather than submitting. The fourth rebels on her wedding night and — led by the youngest, who has the unbroken spirit of the mustang — escapes to Istanbul and the modern woman’s independence.
In their village the men have all the power. To confirm the patriarchy’s total control the uncle has been sodomizing at least two of the nieces he ostensibly protects. Male violence spoils the football game too, so that the next game is played to an arena full of women. The women may agree to a marital match but only the men can command it. When the men shoot their pistols into the air at a wedding it’s a macho strut. The unbroken hymen contradicts the pretence to male potency.
      Two men prove exceptions. The teacher lives with a man who obviously respects her intelligence and career. The truck-driver similarly appreciates the young girl who calls for his help, teaching her to drive and rescuing her. Men as well as women can resist being reduced by male authority.
      Against this institutionalized power Turkish woman director Deniz Erguven posits an implicit sisterhood. Even after the grandmother has raged at the sisters’ behaviour she defends them against her son’s anger. Still, she confiscates the computers and cell phones that presumably she has allowed them to by modern. The older women collaborate to prevent the men’s discovering that the girls have escaped to attend the football game. In Istanbul the girl asking a local woman for directions calls her “Big sister,” presumably a familiar colloquialism.
      The exuberance and camaraderie of the five sisters is a model for a radical, interdependent sisterhood. This French-German-Turkish production addresses the religious suppression of women not just in Turkey but in the Middle East, indeed everywhere but Israel. Of course the problem rages well beyond that region.   

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

As Kim’s faithful doctor/translator warns her, the adventurer’s adrenalin rush can be very addictive. You keep needing another fix. 
That’s the film’s central theme. What makes this film important is how that point works on the national political level as well as on the personal. 
The personal level is obvious. Kim (Tina Fey) is a TV news writer who risks a three-month assignment to report on camera from the Afghanistan war. Hooked by the thrills she grows increasingly foolhardy. In a domestic parallel, her lover back home starts sleeping around and. blames her for being absent.
Kim’s translator soon quits rather than risk widowing his new wife. The other journalists and cameramen experience the same rush that compels them to stay. Their every danger and thrill leave them craving another, bigger one. Their addiction drives them to betray each other, however close they may have drawn.
Only when Kim realizes that mortal danger has become her new normalcy — and sees its controlling, distracting effect on her Scottish lover — does she fly back to America. There she takes a high profile posting in NYC or Washington. There the drama is domesticated.
That dynamic also plays out on Kim’s network. The news department has a woman boss but she reads its needs the same way a swaggering man would. The network needs new stories, new locations, to hook the jaded audience. 
The key point is that a nation can also get hooked on war. The film is cross between MASH and Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex. 
Billy Bob Thornton plays a worldly marine officer who leaps at Kim’s plan for a filmed rescue of a kidnapped Scot (her lover, as it happens). The commander has practical considerations in mind — he needs a spectacular success to bolster his budget. But the thrill is the real draw. Like the politicos at home, the commander and Kim stay safely on base while the troops go out to risk their lives.    Kim’s visit to an interviewee who had both legs blown off underlines the human costs of the nation’s military glory.
In the context of the US presidential election, the film conveys the Democrat party’s reluctance to get America embroiled in yet another distant war, especially where the culture is so different as to be incomprehensible and the adventure of unlikely success. The producers include Fey and Lorne Michaels, also of Saturday Night Live. 
If Trump, Cruze and Rubio could think about what the film is saying they would be mightily offended. As is, they might well enjoy it. Except for the profane language, which Cruze and Rubio would loudly object to — and Trump would trump.