Becket (1964)

To see Becket’s weaknesses most clearly, it’s useful to place it next to Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane, released a mere twelve years later. Both are British films about religious martyrdom; both are quite gay, wrapped up in the affection of men for one another. Sebastiane is more overtly gay, as it shows men—is there a single woman in the film?—in the throes of passion and glories quite unabashedly in their naked bodies. But Becket doesn’t shy away from Henry’s desire for Thomas, as is strikingly clear in the scene where Henry compares Thomas to his wife and his mother and finds that both fall short of the affection Thomas has given him.

Yet Becket places “gay” and “religious” on opposite ends of the spectrum: when Thomas becomes archbishop, he gives himself to God, an action that involves the sacrifice of all carnal pleasures—he goes straight. Sebastiane, on the other hand, demonstrates that religious devotion is in fact the gayest thing of all. When Sebastiane refuses Severus’ advances, it’s not because he’s chosen God over flesh; it’s because he’s already sexually devoted to another—no matter that this other is God Himself.

Becket is blind to the fact that religious devotion, at its strongest, manifests itself in great sexual energy and the fulfillment of flesh, not the denial of it. It’s a film with too comfortable an idea of a martyr, fighting for God and his persecuted people instead of giving himself over to some mysterious and holy pleasure.

French Blood (2015)

If there’s an argument to be made about the following shot being an essentially masculine device, French Blood is the film to support it. This is a film that glories in tour-de-force long takes from the back and shoulder muscles of our protagonist, Marco, as well as the violence these muscles threaten. The epitome of this tendency is the shot that sees Marco go into a club, up the stairs, and into the bathroom; wash off his bleeding head wound; get a beer; take in the music of a fascist rock band; and then go back down the stairs to fight off some punks with his friends, only to witness two of his closest friends get brutally and suddenly shot.

Part of the film’s brilliance is to allow such takes to peter out into suffocating stillness as Marco gets older and less obviously fascist. In other words, the shots transform as the film’s definition of Marco’s masculinity transforms from an active, violent one into something non-confrontational yet seething. The film doesn’t trust Marco’s shift to peaceful adulthood and neither should we: when he wields a knife in the film’s final moments, we’re not sure if he’s going to stab one of his former friends, slit an Arab’s throat, or just the dice the carrots sitting rather numbly on the cutting board before him. This is the unpredictability of the present tense in a world that seems so far to have only realized some shining heads and an inked-through patriarchal brutality.

Nana (2011)

Saying that children are innocent is the same as saying that animals are innocent. It’s a generous assessment but ignores that, regardless of environmental influence, both animals and children exist—rightly—in their own blunt, half-formed reveries. Nana confirms this in a rather surprising way: a mother takes her young child out to a cabin in the woods under the pretense of starting a new life there but then promptly commits suicide. The mother is portrayed as unstable from the start (there’s something unsettling in the way she scrawls a note to her father in crayon), but her daughter has an existence that remains strangely separate from her mother’s actions. While most films would see this sort of existence merely as a consequence of her abandonment, Nana suggests that the intense and particular life of the daughter’s mind is not so simply explained away.

This suggestion is largely stylistic, for the film’s favored setup is to have an immobile camera unobtrusively watch the daughter from a distance while she is left to her own devices. Immersed fully in her environment, she seems entirely unaware of the camera’s presence, talking and playing as if the whole world were her self. So when she is left almost entirely alone by her mother’s death (for a time—days? weeks?), it comes not as a shock but as a rather comfortable confirmation that the profane voices in her head are much more real than the insubstantial bodies passing through her line of vision.

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.

Refliction

Computers buzz with melancholy, or so it is said. I was hearing a buzzing then, on the couch. It may have been from my computer, lying on my lap, or it may have been from other, wiser wires.

Some text and images on a screen: numbers, names. I read, Number Enrolled: 18. What happened to the nineteenth? How is it she has wandered away? I heard her speak in class once, saw her curly hair.

Well let’s hope that seat stays empty for her ghost.

I’m tired now because it’s Friday. By then, every hair on my head has hurried to bed. But there’s a bright light in my eyes. It reads, Number Enrolled: 19. An intruder. Six days have passed without him there. He must know his place, so I type away.

There are murmurings among my students, eighteen. I had been silent awhile, first, and I had wondered what to say (for the silence was surprise). Really there’s no need for me to speak. He’s a sophomore and as silent as the rest.

Here, I’ll introduce you to the class. Six feet tall. Skinny. Looks a little like me. Short hair. (But not that short.) Eyes like violets. Speaks and sounds annoyed. Trouble.

I yawn at the screen. It’s Yom Kippur. Or Rosh Hashanah. Either way, there’s a void in the place where discussion should be. Lyrical exercise. His own problem, and let’s hope he stays away.

He joins and looks unsure, but that’s just my reading of it.

A second essay fired my way, and thank the Father with hesitation for that. Yet where’s the physical? I hold no paper in my hand, angrily, late at night. I chum around online until I know it’s here. And here it is: a lab report I’ve now forgotten, talking while I churn my legs.

An attachment mistake.

Well, just get it to me very soon.

They say the truth will come to the bright fluorescent light, but to tarnation if I ever see it. Instead, a forced reintroduction. I’ll tell it like a poem, obscene. His lungs are as dark as the cold side of a pillow. He misses Marlboros and his mom, whose disease eats away where he sucked as a child.

There’s a lump in my throat when I think about it.

It turns out the cubicle is occupied, so we meet amidst grandeur—promises, warnings, handshakes, deadlines. He’s confident. I shrug solidly. Wednesday it is.

He doesn’t return.

He doesn’t leave.

I make enough copies for him with each press, and I feel plastic on my finger. My class is perfect, except that they laugh when I suggest that not everyone has a body. I’ve heard we laugh a lot in there, but I say that’s a generalization, and that’s what we discuss in the heat of the sun. We find sentences that take for granted. Elaine Scarry once wrote that “[b]eauty always takes place in the particular.” My students would probably ask me who that is, and I would probably say that she’s over at Harvard or Princeton somewhere, bringing beauty back to the believers. But that’s not why I trust her. I trust her because she’s on a syllabus for a class that makes me think and draws when she should be writing. When I imagine her in a freshman composition class, I think of that worm or snake with a foot in a shoe and a German hat. Such a statement would confuse my students, and they wouldn’t write it out without a wiggle and smile.

Now take out the smile and count.