The Pinocchio Theory

Anton Corbijn’s Control, about the life and death of Ian Curtis, the singer for Joy Division, is a film that is fully worthy of its subject. Control is beautiful and bleak, affectively compelling because of (rather than in spite of) its reticence and downbeat everydayness. It’s shot in a high-contrast black and white, which effectively conveys — even as it also aestheticizes and beautifies — the bleakness of its 1970s-working-class (or should I say, lower middle class?) settings. The performances, especially those of Sam Riley as Curtis, and the always-great Samantha Morton as his long-suffering wife Deborah, are utterly compelling in their understatedness. There is no psychologizing here; we only see Curtis from the outside, and are given no clues as to his motivations. This even remains the case when we get voiceovers of his poetry, or at one point even of his internal monologue (as a bandmate attempts, unsuccessfully, of course, to relieve his torment through hypnosis).

But I need to be more specific about this. There’s a certain international-art-film style that works to convey a sense of desolation through the rigorous avoidance of any interiority. These films are shot mostly in long shots and long takes, with a camera that either remains entirely still, or moves slowly, in order to continually but discreetly reframe. The acting is generally low-affect, or entirely affectless; the plot is sufficiently elliptical, oblique, and estranging, as to prevent us from assigning any motivations, or even emotional qualities, to the characters. There are great films in this style (like the works of Bela Tarr, which make us feel like we are seeing the world in an entirely new way), as well as a lot of less successful ones that come across as strained, pretentious, and desperately arty (I’d prefer not to finger any specific bad examples; anyone who watches lots of international art films will have their own sense of this).

Now, what’s great and surprising about Control is that it does not fit into this paradigm at all, even though it shares some of its superficial characteristics. The film’s reticence doesn’t come from distance or an objectifying tendency. In fact, for all its visual austerity, Control is quite an intimate film; it often expresses its characters’ moods with closeups, shot/reverse shot setups, and other conventions of more straighforward narrative cinema. What this means is that Control doesn’t in the least distance us from Ian Curtis; rather, it reveals reticence and distance as Ian Curtis’ own inner experience of himself. We are unable to parse his inner emotional life, only to the extent, and exactly to the extent, that he is unable to parse it himself. Curtis, as portrayed by Riley, is sufficiently out of touch with his own emotions that he even experiences depression only, as it were, at second hand. He seems both vulnerable and soulful, and even a bit annoyingly sorry for himself: but these qualities are also always muffled, as if they were not quite there, or as if Curtis couldn’t understand these sides of himself either. Portraying Curtis in this way makes for a film that is quite melancholy, but that cannot be accused of miserablism, or of kitchen-sink depressive naturalism.

In addition to the compellingly low-key acting, the film stands out by its visual stylization. Corbijn edits anti-dramatically and anti-climactically; that is, he shows us the lead-up to, and the aftermath, of emotionally important moments and turning-points, but often does not show us those moments themselves. There’s never a sense of climax or explosion; in that respect, the film is intriguingly anti-melodramatic. The exceptions to this are Curtis’ epileptic seizures, which are shown to us at uncomfortable length; and also the many performance scenes. Riley entirely captures what I imagine to have been Curtis’ on-stage charisma (as he killed himself shortly before what would have been the band’s first tour of the United States, I never got the chance to see him live). He stands stock-still as the band begins to play, breaks into jerky motions that are not quite dance moves, then grabs the mic with a sort of controlled avidity and intones (rather than shouts) the songs’ lyrics.

Curtis’ dancing/singing style, as expressed through Riley’s body language, is also the visual style of the film as a whole. Corbijn is famous as a still photographer (in fact, his photos of the actual Curtis, back in 1979/1980, did a lot to cement Curtis’ image, and to give a face to the stifled depressiveness and anguish of he music); so it is perhaps not surprising that Control’s luminous black-and-white often takes on the aura, and arranged beauty, of arty still photography. (Indeed, it is often a stock complaint about either still photographers, or cinematographers, turned filmmakers, that they present images that are merely pretty, without being cinematically compelling. Further discussion of this will have to await Rosalind Galt‘s forthcoming theorization of the problem of the “pretty” in film). But again, part of the brilliance and power of Control lies precisely in the way that it is organized around the play of stillness and motion (much as Curtis’ performance style, at least as portrayed by Riley, is organized around such a play). Many shots begin by looking like stills; we have to wait several seconds before a body or head in frame moves a bit (when Riley or Morton open their eyes, or light a cigarette, or whatever). The life of the film is a matter of these moments of stillness and motion, and of the discontinuous transitions between them. The film has a lot of empty time in it: Curtis is just lying in bed, smoking, or sitting on the sofa with a whiskey bottle, watching the telly. Minimal motions sometimes disrupt or modulate this stillness, and beyond that there are all sorts of degrees of motion in-frame, up to the spasmodic motions of the epileptic attacks. Also, although there are lots of shots of people in cars (the band going to a gig, etc.), there’s never really a sense of getting anywhere. We are always either in-between or back at the starting point. No matter how popular Joy Division becomes, the film never gives us any sense of (either literal or metaphorical) arrival. Control is a film that leaves us with a lot to ponder, but very little to say; and this inconclusiveness, applied to the fatality of Curtis’ tragically short life- and career-trajectory, is precisely what the film means, and how it makes us feel (or at least, how it made me feel).

David Cronenberg’s latest, Eastern Promises, is a powerful movie, better than nearly anything else (David Lynch aside) being made in the English-speaking world these days. But even though it had a powerful impact, I felt blank afterwards thinking about what could be said about it. This has something to do with Cronenberg’s tightness and closure: like many of his more recent films, Eastern Promises is so tightly organized, and so perfectly self-enclosed, that it doesn’t leave the viewer with any wriggle room. But also, Eastern Promises seems less interesting, somehow, than Cronenberg’s previous excursion into the crime/gangster genre, A History of Violence.

This is partly the result of the films’ respective directions of focus. Where A History of Violence focused on both American genre assumptions and on American society more generally, with Cronenberg the Canadian able to view the USA both from inside and from outside, Eastern Promises entirely displaces its focus onto a group of exoticized Others (Russian gangsters in London). There is no inside perspective, and hence no inside critique, but only an outward one. This has the advantage of presenting Masculinity as something bizarre, ritualized, and coded (rather as being in any way “natural”); but it has the disadvantage of not reflecting back upon the film’s primary (American, and more generally, Western) audience. This is made all the stranger, or more estranging, by the curious fact that all the major Russian characters are played by non-Russian actors: they are, respectively, Danish-American (Viggo Mortensen), French (Vincent Cassel), German (Armin Mueller-Stahl), and Polish (Jerzy Skloimowski). Cronenberg masters an amazing combination of visceral grippingness and radical estrangement; I think this is a brilliant combination, but I also can’t help feeling that, in Eastern Promises, the result is just too icily perfect, or too closed.

Kim has already discussed in brilliant detail how Eastern Promises is yet another Cronenberg excursion into the visceral dimensions of masculinity. The rituals of the Russian gangsters are all about male embodiment, and the way that masculine anguish and masculine recognition alike are grounded in the flesh. Tis is reflected in everything from the fight and murder scenes, which do not dwell on the violence, but are direct and abrupt enough as not to be for the squeamish, to the full-body tattoos that are the gangsters’ signifiers of power, status, and belonging. They are incised visibly in the flesh because every aspect of power — from Armin Mueller-Stahl’z vicious avuncularity to Vincent Cassell’s dissoluteness to Viggo Mortensen’s impassive more-than-cool — has to be enacted and embodied, in order to be effective.

On the other hand, the one important female character, played by Naomi Watts, is entirely marginalized. Despite the fact that she is a kind of surrogate for the viewer, and that her investigations — stumbling unexpectedly upon a dangerous underworld that has existed in proximity to her, but unseen and unfelt, all this time– are what lead us into the heart of the film — despite all this, she nonetheless doesn’t really enter into the affect of the story at all. The sexual attractiveness of Viggo Mortensen isn’t really channeled through her sensibility at all; and her curiosity about her Russian father’s past, and her urgings toward motherhood, are the most conventionalized (and therefore least reworked, least energized) aspects of the pregiven genre that Cronenberg is otherwise so energetically reworking.

In other words, it’s all about the men. I entirely agree with Kim’s suggestions as to how Eastern Promises reworks (under the guise of gangster fiction) Cronenberg’s body obsessions in his earlier work like Videodrome (which of course is as much about ritualized masculinity, and its dismembering or “castration” when James Wood’s belly turns into a VCR-cum-vaginal-slit). But what I miss in Eastern Promises is the sense I get from Scanners and Videodrome and The Fly of something crazily transformative — the metamorphoses of the flesh. My friend William Beard (the author of a massive and very smart and detailed book about Cronenberg) sees those earlier films as being basically about masculine angst, and unreservedly horrified at the loss of male power, virility, and authority. But I think that those earlier films are also deeply hilarious in some way that (obviously without being sappily new-agey and upbeat) nonetheless points to the “joy of becoming” even amidst the horrors of self-destruction (to paraphrase Nietzsche a bit).

And this has something to do with the fact that these earlier films are also directly about “new media” and new technologies, in ways that Cronenberg’s more recent films are not. I mean, James Woods’ orifice is not simply a vagina; it is a VCR as well. And this is related to the way that, as Woods is told in the course of the film, the forces fighting over the Videodrome technology — the corporate fascists at Spectacular Optical and the new-age social activists led Bianca O’Blivion and her late father, the McLuhanoid Brian O’Blivion — are political,in ways that he, Woods, is not. Because communications media, and expressive media, are directly political in their own right. This is a much broader sense of the “new flesh,” and of politics, than the mere power struggles (who’s going to be the boss? what role will the governments play?) that are the ultimate background to the masculine rituals of Eastern Promises.

This larger sense of a technology that is also a politics, and the consequent intimations of transformation — not of something better, let alone utopian, but at least of some dynamism of becoming — is missing in nearly all of Cronenberg’s more recent films. Which is why films like Spider (and also, alas, even the Burroughs and Ballard adaptations) really do seem to me to be just about masculine angst and dissolution. Which is why I felt bummed and depressed about them, despite their masterfulness and tragic intensity. To a certain extent, by making himself into a formally more powerful and contained director, by transcending or giving up the sloppiness and (even) exploitativeness of his earlier films, Cronenberg in effect undermined his films’ very significance. The recent films are aesthetically superior to the earlier ones (taking “aesthetically” in a narrowly formalist sense), but there is something sterile about them: their fascination is too narrowly focused, too contained. A History of Violence represented something of a change of direction, and, I thought, a substantial reinvigoration. But Eastern Promises, despite being the same genre as A History of Violence, somehow doesn’t seem anywhere near as fresh or as thoughtful (or affectful). This is all relative, of course: I only find Cronenberg at fault because I expect so much more of him. I am holding him to higher standards than I do most other contemporary filmmakers. But a lot more needs to be said than I managed to say in the past (when I wrote academically about him) about the allure of techno-metamorphosis in Cronenberg’s earlier films, and why this is neither a geeky utopia nor mere masculinist backlash, but something orthogonal to the categories we are stuck in when we discuss either masculinity or media. I don’t know if I will ever manage to get back to this. But I think there are still things to discover in Cronenberg’s earlier horror films that I don’t see being taken up in his more recent work — nor in any work in the horror genre that I have come across recently.

I found David Fincher’s Zodiac to be compelling and absorbing. Though, interestingly, the reasons I liked the movie are not far from the reasons Kim hated it. Zodiac is so cool and detached as to be almost hysterical, as well as creepy, in its insistence upon objectivity (both in terms of its point of view, and in terms of its excessive care in making supposedly “authentic” re-creations of 1970s decors).

How does the film work? Despite what I might have expected from the director of Seven, Zodiac is not interested at all in the inner motivations of the serial killer, nor even in the spectacle of gore that his acts created. Even the murders we see on-screen are oblique and deadpan; we have little sympathy for the victims, but also no sense of identification or complicity with the masked killer — the Zodiac killer is no Michael Myers. The movie has no shock effects, and no unplumbed depths. What you see is what you get, without any residue of mystery or suggestiveness or (even) danger. This is a world that is cooly and carefully visualized, and that doesn’t seem to have anything lurking in the shadows, anything beyond the literal givenness of what is visualized. This makes Zodiac almost the exact polar opposite of, say, Dario Argento’s films, with their baroque flourishes and arcane visual conceptions.

In part, this is because the focus of Zodiac is upon the investigation of the crimes, rather than upon the crimes themselves. It belongs, more or less, to the genre of the “police procedural.” This genre is a popular one in American culture today, as witness the success of TV shows like Lae and Order and (in a more specialized sense) CSI. The focus is on the investigators, rather than the perpetrator, and we see the effects of the investigation upon the investigators’ personal lives. Yet even this formula is skewed in Fincher’s treatment — since the (real-life) case is never neatly wound up in the way it is on TV. We end with the identification of the probable killer, but he is never brought to justice, and even this identification remains twisted up in the maze of false inferences and ambiguous clues and mistaken identifications out of which it emerges.

The narrative of Zodiac is quite literally linear, since it starts with the first Zodiac murder, and then moves doggedly forward in time, without any flashbacks or interludes from subjective POVs or pauses to contemplate the significance of one event or another. One scene follows another, with no blackouts or other ways of emphasizing the cuts; we are only informed of time passing by small titles that appear at the bottom of the screen. The exact same transition marks “an hour later” and “eight months later”; the passage of time is thereby weirdly homogenized. The unsettling result is that sequence (the order in which things happen) seems to have nothing to do with duration and time passing (how long it takes for an event to happen, and how long we have to wait between one event and the next).

Of course, this skewing of ‘real time’ in order to construct a more exciting or engaging ‘narrative time’ is a feature of the overwhelming majority of narrative films; but Fincher pushes it so far, and does it so understatedly, and at such great length (the film is something like 2 hours 40 minutes long), that the effect is entirely uncanny. The movie seems affected with a time disorder malady, a sort of dyschronia. This is all the more the case in that, for the first two thirds of the film at least, the movie switches its focus among characters almost as capriciously as it jumps forward at irregular intervals. In terms of both temporality and point of view, the movie at once revels in absolute disjunctions and disparities, and yet at the same time smooths these all out into a stylistic uniformity. The result, for the viewer, is a kind of stupefied absorption, but one that cannot crystallize or coalesce into any sort of “identification.”

Towards the end of the film, there is in fact one “time-passing” montage of the sort that usually orients us in other narrative films. But even this has no subjective center: rather, we see a rapid animation of the San Francisco skyline changing as the Transamerica Pyramid goes up. And, in the last third of the film, the splitting among multiple investigative subjects is reduced, as most of the concerned parties just give up on the case, and Jake Gyllenhaal is the only one who continues obsessively searching for the identity of the killer. But even here, the results are far from straightforward. Just as, in the earlier portions of the film, the various cops and newspapermen investigating the Zodiac killings never coalesces into a group the way they do in the TV procedurals, so, in the latter portion, the actions of the single protagonist to remain active do not fuse into any stable point of reference. The narrative is simply too choppy and gap-ridden for this to happen.

For instance, Gyllenhaal has a blind date with Chloe Sevigny: it is awkward and embarrassing, as the two don’t hit it off at all, there is no chemistry between them, etc.; and even this devoles into a even worse date from hell when Gyllenhaal drags Sevigny off into his Zodiac investigations. The next time we see Sevigny, however, she is married to Gyllenhaal and they have had a baby. The time after that, she is worried by his continuing obsession with Zodiac — it is both potentially dangerous, and somethng that gets in the way of family life. So she eventually takes the kids and walks out on him (all this conveyed off-screen). Everything here is off-kilter, and by design: the point being, that Gyllenhaal doesn’t have any sort of intelligible private life, but has been completely consumed by his obsession.

Perhaps I am exaggerating this, because of my general bafflement and incomprehension with regard to the younger generation of actors. But here both Gyllenhaall as the newspaper-cartoonist-turned-investigator, and Mark Ruffalo as the San Francisco detective who does most of the work on the case, appear to me like “men without qualities” — to my jaded senses, there is simply nothing distinguishable or charismatic or even interesting about them, so I don’t quite understand how they became movie stars. (The same is true for me of other actors of their generation, like Ed Norton, for instance, or Keanu Reeves. The brilliance of Norton’s role in Fight Club consists precisely in the contrast between his blankness and the floridity of Brad Pitt). Here, in Zodiac, both Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo seem utterly bland to me even when they become a bit crazed or obsessive — but they are set off against the floridity of (of course) Robert Downey, Jr. as the crime reporter who falls into a spiral of bitter cynicism and alcoholic self-destruction, and (in a more minor, character-actor sort of role) Brian Cox, who does a wonderful, utterly bizarre turn as famous defense attorney Melvin Belli.

In any case, the acting in Zodiac is overwhelmed by Fincher’s cinematography, with its dull colors, relative flatness, ceaselessly panning camera, and exploration of bureaucratic spaces (most notably, the newspaper offices, and various police headquarters). Nothing ever feels quite right, and so even the creepiest and strangest sequences (like one in which the cops search the trailer of their prime suspect, and find it overrun with squirrels, cavorting amidst the assault rifles and porno magazines) don’t seem out of place, but of a piece with the scense set in (always slightly inhuman) “ordinary” spaces. All in all, Fincher’s treatment of space is as expansive as his treatment of time is clipped and understated. But the effect is roughly the same: the exploration, almost as if it were being done by an alien, of a world of surfaces that connect and ramify, but also block one another; yet without anything that we could call a hidden dimesion of depth. (The expectation of depth is even parodied at one point, when Gyllenhaal visits the home of an informant, perhaps a suspect or the friend of a suspect, who runs a movie theater that shows old silent films, and whose archives — one of the rare basements in California — have a kind of Gothic creepiness to them. Gyllenhaal gets paranoid and flees, but it becomes clear to us that the creepy movie man isn’t the Zodiac killer).

The world so described is also a world permeated by media. The murders themselves have less presence in the movie than do the letters that the killer sends to the newspapers. We see the letters themselves, and the ciphers that the killer also sends, in extreme-close up on the screen, or superimposed over other images; much is made in the plot of handwriting analysis, though that turns out to be another dead end. The presence of media is epitomized in a scene where Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo meet at a screening of Dirty Harry (released in 1971, and in fact a fictionalization of the very Zodiac murders that the present film is about). Zodiac is so filled with false or misleading clues, with data that seems significant and turns out not to be, and so on, that from a logical-deduction point of view it can only be frustrating. But the sense that all this welter of evidence makes, is that it is all mediated in some fashion. The killer wants, most of all, to be in the papers; reporters bypass the cops with evidence they have found, and go straight to TV; Gyllenhaal wants to solve the case so that he can write a book about it, which is the only way he sees of justifying his existence; and so on. A particularly apt (and “postmodern”) touch is that Fincher deals not just with the media of Spectacle, but also with little media and dispersed media — records in police archives, TV seen on small screens, etc. — which makes for a link between the time depicted (30 to 40 years ago) and the present moment, of ever more widely dispersed media, in which the film was made.

In all these ways, Zodiac creates a overwhelming, but distanced, sense of flatness, mobility, and creepiness: a kind of low-key affectivity that is as much an expression of our general mediascape as it is of the mind of a serial killer. Gyllenhaal, no less than the killer, is consumed by a cold obsession, one that drives him utterly yet seems altogether dispassionate. And Gyllenhaal’s obsession doesn’t even really seem unique to him, since it emerges out of the “noise” and jumpiness of the multiple POVs of the first two thirds of the movie. In any case, when asked why he is interested, Gyllenhaal can say little more than that he enjoys solving puzzles; he has as litle interest in, or understanding of, his own motivations as does George W. Bush. And Fincher seems to suggest that this shallowness and disinterest is symptomatic of “postmodern” American society in general; it is in this sense that our situation today has its roots, not in the 1960s but in the 1970s, or in that aspect of the 70s that this movie depicts. And, to his credit, Fincher doesn’t portray this situation as one of deprivation or lack; there is no mourning here for lost subjective depths. It is rather the case that Fincher has mapped the stylistics, or the geography if you will, of our contemporary form of subjectivity. This is the situation in which we live right now, the field in which we have to operate. And it’s up to us to do what we can with it.