13 Tzameti (2005)

I’m guessing that for most people 13 Tzameti is “that movie with the Russian roulette circle of doom,” but Russian roulette is in fact its least interesting and clumsiest element. Perhaps less offensive than The Deer Hunter for not bringing a neocolonial war into the picture (yet lacking Christopher Walken), 13 Tzameti replaces the Vietnam metaphor with an emptier one: life is Russian roulette. The film could’ve made this more specific—immigrant life (our protagonist, Sébastien, has emigrated to France from Georgia) or life in contemporary capitalism (the money used to bet on the fates of the men involved seems to be American dollars)—but any hint of biting critique fades when we consider the fact that Sébastien chanced upon this illegal, deadly gambling ring that involves an indeterminate group of mixed races and classes anyways.

But really it’s the film’s low-key prelude that merits our attention. In this part of the film, Sébastien repairs the roof of a house by the Mediterranean Sea, both involved in the lives of the couple within and distant from it. Most of what he knows about them he gleans from listening through orifices in the architecture, a literal kind of eavesdropping that violates boundaries between public and private, interior and exterior. This violation a voyeurism via disrepair, it suggests that First-World infrastructure is merely crumbling façade and that the West’s repressed—the exploited populations of faraway and faceless strangers—can never be forever locked away, with flimsy walls or other forms of absurdity.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

The Wolf of Wall Street is the unofficial sequel to Super Fly, which ends on an image of the antenna top of a New York skyscraper against a garish blue sky. The implication of this ending is that the promise of economic prosperity is a heroin needle wielded by the rich against the poor: addictive, dangerous, blinding, and ultimately empty. But the shot also implies that the ones in the top of that skyscraper, the wealthiest of all, get to experience the biggest and most euphoric high of all, the high of limitless money spent freely and without repercussion.

It’s just this sort of high that allows Jordan Belfort & Co. to abuse substances so fearlessly and attractively, running and giggling through suburban streets after smoking crack. It’s a funny scene, as are the many others in this film that show us a bunch of puerile white men getting away with all sorts of twisted shit. Perhaps this is the movie’s point, to demonstrate how it is that executives and CEOs are able to successfully swindle and with a smile—that is, through branding themselves as partiers with hearts of gold, writing $25,000 checks to the Kimmy Beltzers of the world. Or perhaps The Wolf of Wall Street rather mindlessly performs the same trick, getting us to laugh so hard that we barely notice that the only black characters are hired help or that the police make sure the camera gets shut the fuck off when they make an arrest.

Tangled (2010)

 

Of all the questions Tangled (2010) raises, perhaps the most important is this: “Can a frying pan be a lethal weapon?” The film offers a resolute ‘no’; reality, a decided ‘yes’ (cf.https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160218/west-ridge/two-more-charged-with-murdering-w-ridge-man-with-frying-pan-at-party; http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/feb/01/son-tells-police-he-killed-mother-with-frying-pan-/). This is interesting, considering that Rapunzel, whose name her true love manages to never say for the duration of the movie (does he know it?), brutalizes Flynn/Eugene with it—multiple times—when they first meet. The film further enforces this ‘no’ by, in the end, replacing the swords of the castle guards with frying pans—because “crime in the kingdom disappeared almost overnight.”

It’s as if Tangled is trying its hardest to convince us that frying pans, though versatile, are completely safe. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would suggest that the film actually tells the story of how its two directors covered up a brutal frying pan murder. Or, more to the point, that Rapunzel, out of guilt for killing Flynn with a frying pan, concocts a story that blames her adoptive mother for Flynn’s death, the mother whom Rapunzel already hates for having stolen her from her real family and locking her into a life of only semi-luxury.

And it’s Flynn’s death that is Tangled’s core truth—it’s the death of the man who gingerly examined his once-injured hand as he walked away from the fire. It hardly matters that, against its fictional world’s logic in which hair heals (not tears), the film reverses it. The white man Flynn is no longer breathing.