Show Don't Tell: A Rule That Isn't Right Even Though It Works

The received wisdom for writing in general is show don’t tell. Even with essays, it is much more convincing to show your work rather than hand out aphorisms (although an argument can be made for a well crafted aphorism). I’ve been interacting more than ever with this truism as I dive back into one of my first writing loves: the screenplay. 

There, the showing rather than telling has a practical dimension, as a screenplay is the means to shooting a film, and if the story does not work through the action and dialogue alone, it isn’t going to work. There is an additional corollary to this rule in screenwriting regarding dialogue. Optimally, it is said, dialogue should not do the work of the story. The images should do that. Dialogue, then, is freed up to do its own thing. The principle, and the terrible filmmaking that arises from ignoring it, really comes to life whenever you watch a movie where one character’s dialogue is relegated to exposition.

It goes something like this:

Character A: As you know, we are siblings, but dad’s death was hard on the family. And we’ve never been the same since.

It is even worse in science fiction, where dialogue is forced to do all kinds of gymnastics. In Gravity (2013), for example, much of the first act’s dialogue is spent telling trained astronauts the basics of spaceflight. [1]

From Louis Malle’s My Dinner With Andre (1981)

How “Show Don’t Tell” Works In Principle

So as I’ve been getting reacquainted with the screenplay as a form, I’ve also been consuming much of this kind of advice on dialogue. The idea is to talk as little as you need to and move the story ahead as much as you can with action. With little argument, the mind can construct many examples and reasons why this rule is a wise one to follow. By freeing up the dialogue, the story comes alive on its own, and dialogue can come in over that core story as a free floating element, able to characterize and contextualize rather than bear the burden of telling the story.

Of course, no fascistic application of any principle of craft is advised. But this one has a lot going for it.

Yet as I was redigesting this idea in an effort to get back into a screenwriter’s fighting trim, I rewatched the original Scenes from a Marriage (1973) by Ingmar Bergman. [2] The five part mini-series is made up almost entirely of simple scenes, many of them very long scenes, where people (mostly two people) talk to each other. It is an incredible work, one of my favorites of Bergman, and rather than feeling bogged down or tired, Scenes... is thrilling. The close examination of a marriage, predominantly by being a fly-on-the-wall in their key discussions, achieves the highest of dramatic heights.

So then, how does that work? How can one principle be so compelling and yet be unable to explain such a classic of film? And as this got me to thinking, I realized that Scenes… is far from the only film that appears to succeed while diametrically opposing this attitude toward dialogue — it isn’t even the only Bergman film that does this. (For a non-Bergman example, take Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981), a nearly two hour film almost entirely composed of one sit down conversation.) Even Andrei Tarkovsky’s legendary Stalker (1979), which has long periods without dialogue (or much action), many of the greatest insights come from conversation.

One can say that in art, rules are important to learn so that you can learn how to break them, and this is simply an example of a master breaking a rule.[3] While that might be a helpful way of thinking about it, breaking the rule seems to still work, and so what are we really getting at here? 

The real question is this: how do you break “show don’t tell” effectively?

From Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973)

But You Have to “Tell” the Story

Well, I have an idea. Scenes… involves a marriage (obviously), and a marriage is a long term intimate relationship where many of the key moments in the relationship itself are embedded in what the partners tell each other in major conversations. That is, sometimes the dialogue is the action itself. The dialogue is a core element of how these people are relating. 

Many marriages and romantic relationships in general have only a few key components: conversation, sex and divvying up the bills. While you can add in children to the mix, if any are in the picture, these are really just topics of conversation if we only focus on the marital relationship itself.

The purest way to express a marriage dissolving on celluloid is through conversation and sex. In other words, talking is the action for most of this story.

It’s a similar for Stalker, where the information coming in through conversation is a major part of the film. We don’t know what to rely on for the rules or the history of the mysterious Zone or its supposedly wish-granting room. A lot of critical information is only told to us, rather than shown, and often the rules of the Zone are spoken by a character and then later violated in action, proving the character wrong. That reinforces the unreliability, the sense of hearsay, rumor, tall-tales, and truth  all mixed together. This unknowability of the truth is a major theme in the film. So again, the talking is the action that the story is about.

That seems satisfactory.

But even after coming up with this explanation, “show don’t tell” kept bothering me. I couldn’t put it to bed. And so it was on my mind as I continued to watch movies. And I noticed something even stranger.

Perhaps the most unforgivable violation of “show don’t tell” is having a story rely heavily on voice over narration.

Yet I contend that two of the greatest films of all time used it extensively — especially in their most iconic, deliciously masterful sequences.

Tell and Show

I am of course referring to the narrated montages in Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) and the opening sequence of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).

Casino is particularly flagrant as it falls in and out of voice over all the time. The mafiosi even trade off narration duties a bit, overlaying perspectives. Take the introduction to the gambling industry right after the classic opening scene and credits: 

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We get characterization, oral storytelling, tantalizing hints at a rise-and-fall tragedy, expressionistic pairing of images and narration, and the salacious details of the casino business model.

It comes right out and just says everything. It is more tell than show, as the images really say nothing on their own, they only illustrate what is being said. Plus, it is voiceover narration, seen as the faux pas par excellence among the screenwriting gurus who write all the books with titles like Write a Screenplay in 2 Weeks and How to Make Millions Screenwriting.

The success of this sequence in particular and the film in general gives the lie to the whole “Show Don’t Tell” truism.

Similarly, The Fellowship of the Ring brings us in with an elaborate world building montage for five full minutes. It is the classic speculative fiction no-no of an info dump. And in a three hour movie, it isn’t like they don’t have time for slower world building (in fact, they do a lot of that as well). You could say that the movie simply wouldn’t work without this catch up, and a genius like Jackson knows how to do it without you throwing a fit, but the trouble goes beyond that.

The introductory exposition is incredible. It builds scale (in both time and space), gives the audience (even those uninitiated to the books) a sufficient first look at Tolkein’s Middle Earth, and sets up the stakes that will last for the entire trilogy (the extended edition runs a staggering 11 hours and 22 minutes).

Again, what is incontrovertible is proven to be oh-so controvertible.

I think in both cases, though, something is going on that we forget about with film. Yes it is visual, but it is aural, too. And oral storytelling is the original human artform. Here, the images support the audio the same way the score usually supports the images.

It’s still film, but the primacy of image and sound are inverted from the norm.

One wonders if this isn’t a form that could continue to be pushed further, by more filmmakers creating more films that are essentially campfire stories backed by tremendous imagery and music, only occasionally dropping into scene.

Why not?

Many documentaries essentially do this already. The work of Errol Morris is particularly instructive here. His films, especially works like The Thing Blue Line (1988), blend the storytelling of the interview subjects with bare recreations of the events as described. Along with the incredible strings scored by the one and only Philip Glass, these elements bolster and highlight the narrator’s voice—not the other way around. This all no doubt sounds familiar, as it is the most common form of documentary filmmaking today.

The set of every major Hollywood film from 2009 on.

The True Cost of Showing

So why does any of this really matter? Especially given that “Show Don’t Tell” in filmmaking is borrowed from the world of literature, we should expect it to fit awkwardly at times. That it works as often as it does might even recommend it.

But this rule and others like it point to a deeper problem in today’s film industry. It is a symptom of something that has virtually eliminated the possibility of high quality, big budget Hollywood productions.

Rules like “Show Don’t Tell” are guidelines that give studio executives the ability to grade a script and an edit of a film. Connected to this are the plot beats, story structure, and a number of other artificial grading sticks.

Let’s look at a blockbuster superhero movie franchise from a few decades ago to see why these grading sticks are so aggressively in place now.

Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) was a cultural phenomenon. It was expensive for the time but made up for it by being wildly successful at the box office. In the film, Burton gives us a view of the Caped Crusader with a lot of the director’s trademark style mixed in.

After its success, Warner Brothers green lit the sequel in an effort to print money. In Batman Returns (1992), we see Burton really letting us have it. While the original was a balance between the director’s touch and the needs of standard blockbuster fare, the sequel was far more Burtonesque.

For whatever reason, it was seen as a failure (although it made back its budget easily). Was this “failure” because Burton had more creative freedom (the kind of thing directors used to earn when their films made a lot of money)? Possibly. Whether that made it less successful we can’t really know, but the difference in creative freedom is certainly a noticeable difference between the two.

So if you are a studio mogul looking to write your next big check to a filmmaker, maybe you think twice about giving it to a director who takes risk. And if you want to use a risk taking director anyway for the name recognition, send studio representatives to handcuff them every step of the way.

Fast forward 30 years, and the process of making major Hollywood films (especially superhero movies) has been honed to such a degree that no filmmaker is making really good, interesting big budget films. On the other hand, they also aren’t making really terrible films that completely fall apart. Everyone is make mediocre to fine big budget spectacles.

Now, you might like some of these movies, but compare them to the philosophically complex Robocop (1987) or the visionary Jurassic Park (1993). Those films are both great popcorn movies and great works of art.

In short, studios have made movies much less likely to fail, but the same techniques that do that also eliminate the risk-taking required to make transcendent masterpieces. (Check out my “Scripts for the Ruling Class” for more on this and related points.)

“Show Don’t Tell” didn’t cause big movies to go bad, but it contributes to a view of art that lacks the risk-taking it needs to thrive. Yes, that means more movies will be ruined by telling rather than showing, but that’s the risk it takes to make Casino.

Notes

[1] Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014) are the same movie to me. They came out one year apart and are a part of this budding genre I’d like to call sentiment-in-space. So much of big, commercial filmmaking is about creating a gestalt, an imprint of a film in your head that is more like a movie poster come to life, rather than any actual storytelling breakthrough or insight into the human condition. They can, and sometimes do, do that, but they’re special function, I believe, is this imprint. And these two movies, at least for this viewer, leave the exact same imprint.

[2] At some point, the HBO remake will need to be given some thought. I watched it and loved it, but I couldn’t help feeling that the connection to Bergman’s masterpiece was a hindrance rather than a benefit. The acting, however, was commendable in the extreme. While Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson are superlative, the new duo of Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac met the challenge.

[3] “You have to learn the rules to know how to break them,” is my least favorite cliche in arts education. It is simply wrong. What educators can teach are guidelines that control quality, but they cannot express the entire possible combination of creative decisions that might lead to a great film. It should be something like, “You have to learn the rules to start making things that aren’t half bad. Then, you’ll have experience enough to take the kinds of risk that lead to the kind of aesthetic discoveries that make great art great.” That is, unfortunately, a much worse aphorism.

I Will Follow: Binging Gilmore Girls in Lockdown

Binging a television show during quarantine is a subtle art. The show’s characters need to have an interesting enough life to keep you engaged and give you an escape from your current predicament. While they and their situation must be interesting, it can’t be too exotic, interesting, or enviable, otherwise you risk rendering too palpable the difference between the television show and your life stuck at home.

Those guidelines will keep you within a range of television shows that are comforting, but you need one more crucial filter to find a bingeable show while stuck in your home. That is, the show must have stakes high enough to build tension but not so high that you burn out your attention with one or two episodes.

Only a few shows available on the major streaming services thread this needle. Of those, I have recently been watching through, Gilmore Girls might be the best of the group.

The Girls of Gilmore

Before beginning an analysis of why it is perhaps the best, readily available binge TV, let’s get a synopsis out of the way. How does it work? Why does it work?

Gilmore is essentially a wish fulfillment fantasy of a near perfect mother-daughter relationship. The two main characters Lorelai and Rory are a symbiotic dyad, as much best friends as parent and child. Their bond is deep and good natured and genuinely loving. That bond alone wouldn’t make for great storytelling, so it is contrasted with the mother-daughter relationship between Lorelai and her mother Emily, a cold and controlling woman obsessed with the expectations and mores of high society.

That is all to say that the majority of the show is an examination of intra-female communication. There are boyfriends, potential boyfriends, fathers, and male townies who populate the show as well, but the major characters and connections are all female.

That female-based generational drama is further exacerbated through a class dynamic that runs through the show. Lorelai left the world of her wealthy parents, but daughter Rory — being a privately educated, Ivy League bound teenager — has no need to rebel against her grandparents. That closing of the loop (the granddaughter bridging the family schism between the grandmother and mother) causes conflict and context for much of the show.

The class elements make for smooth going. The problems are by and large non-problems. An entire episode is devoted to Rory’s struggle over which college to attend: Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Lorelai’s origin story is one of a brave rich girl deciding not to be rich. While one could wax Marxian about the ideological effects of encouraging people to sympathize with the bourgeoisie, one can’t say it makes the show bad binging fodder. Returning to the earlier point of not-too-high-but-not-too-low stakes, rich people’s non-trauma based family drama is perfect to hit that note.

After all, we all have families, so we can sympathize with not getting along with our uptight mother or trying to support your well meaning teen through the hard times of adolescence. But the absence of real life-or-death consequences keeps the lid on dangers that might blow out our attention.

Brand New Nostalgia

Gilmore evokes a unique form of nostalgia at this moment. The show was never much of a ratings smash, but it did very well for the second-tier broadcast network the WB (for the show’s last season, the WB reshuffled into the CW). That means most of us weren’t watching it weekly on its first run.

That being said, Gilmore was sent into syndication in 2004, after its third season. And so it became part of the general background noise of daytime and early evening TV in the nearly two decades since.

Gilmore’s mixture of nostalgic familiarity pairs nicely with its season long (and longer) arcs, which most viewers have never examined. So there is this strange feeling when watching the show — it has the comfort of nostalgia with the shimmering newness of something you’ve never seen.

And beyond that strange pairing, the nostalgia it deals in is the latest kind: nostalgia for the naughties.

Ending a relatively brief ten years ago, the naughties are unmined nostalgic territory and are still a ways off from the much upheld 30 year nostalgia cycle. That means Gilmore doesn’t lay in that fatigued pile of the over-sampled, over-referenced pop culture group of the current nostalgia trend (today it seems to be sliding from the eighties to the nineties).

The nostalgia doesn’t end there. As a show focused on the milestones of childhood and parenting, the content is built out of the things everyone can find something to be nostalgic about. To go one step further, the show is set in the sleepy New England town Stars Hollow. Stars Hollow sprouted from the mind of show creator Amy Sherman-Palladino when she visited a similarly sleepy Connecticut town and experienced such overwhelming nostalgia that she pitched the show entirely on the setting. This show is an onion of nostalgic layers, and that onion-like quality is the only reason it makes me cry.

Smart and Funny, but not Overly So

Gilmore is notable for the cracking wise protagonists who chatter incessantly in bubbly repartee in a whimsical small town filled with other clever talking, unbelievably good looking people. At its worst, the characters appear like narcissists who are psychopathically entertaining themselves by running spontaneous monologues. But that is at its worst. For the most part, it hums along with relative ease — just enough references and kind-of-funny-jokes to keep your ears leaning in.

Much like the level of stakes mentioned earlier, dialogue that is frequently hilarious and razor sharp would not be bingeable. It would be satiating. Great TV rides the line between fulfilling and vapid, compelling and boring. It’s middle seat viewing: you’re not laid back as you fall asleep or sitting on the edge. Neither is sustainable.

So it must be noted here, this is not an insult to the show. I’m not saying that it isn’t as smart or funny as the writers think it is. I’m saying that the writers were working on a television show, and that requires a certain kind of writing.

What We Binge

As I continue to watch copious amounts of Gilmore, I ask myself what it is I’m consuming. Why is it so comforting, especially now when in lockdown?

Of course, a major component is the simulation of social connection, of living a life. Without the regular activities that define us, we sit at home drowning in an ego that has nothing to boost it, comfort it, confirm it. It is a feeling of coming apart. While yogis and gurus have long taught us to transcend the ego, no one said that we should dive into the practice of its annihilation without any warning or preparation.

And so, we need to do something to give us a feeling of social reality.

But that only explains viewing in quarantine. What begins to open up in us is the horror of all the viewing we did before we were confined to our houses. Before the lockdowns, we were already sinking into confinement. We were already feeling the need to reach out to comforting media. Think about it: even when we were free to travel and cavort and socialize in large groups, we were already binging television shows.

In that way, Gilmore is not only a view into the needs of our current life in these extreme circumstances — it is a view into what needs we weren’t fulfilling before.

While other forms of escapist media involve danger, excitement, explosions, violence, and other kinds of far out living, Gilmore provides something else. It provides a cozy experience where turbulence, for the most part, comes in the form of everyday inconvenience and miscommunication. It shows us the dream of a life of general comfort, living in a community we know and love and that knows and loves us, being in a perfect relationship with our child or mother — it’s the idyll of being nice people living nice lives.

The enduring popularity of Gilmore is evidence that these humble fantasies are unrealized in us. That we binged this content even before quarantine points to a profound lack of nurturing in our society. We watch Gilmore because we don’t live in Stars Hollow, because we don’t connect fully to our family, because we don’t know the nice life. The question transforms from asking what comfort Gilmore Girls gives us, to why we need its comfort in the first place.

My Flesh Is Afraid: Watching The Seventh Seal in a Pandemic

“God has sentenced us to punishment. We shall all perish in the black death. You, standing there like gaping cattle, you who sit there in your glutted complacency, do you know that this may be your last hour? Death stands right behind you. I can see how his crown gleams in the sun. His scythe flashes as he raises it above your heads. Which one of you shall he strike first? You there, who stand staring like a goat, will your mouth be twisted into the last unfinished gasp before nightfall? And you, woman, who bloom with life and self-satisfaction, will you pale and become extinguished before the morning dawns? You back there, with your swollen nose and stupid grin, do you have another year left to dirty the earth with your refuse? Do you know, you insensible fools, that you shall die today or tomorrow, or the next day, because all of you have been sentenced? Do you hear what I say? Do you hear the word? You have been sentenced, sentenced! ”

— Monk in a flagellant procession addressing townspeople

I went to the grocery store yesterday in the small town where I live. News of a coming lock down sent people out for supplies in droves. Standing in the crowded aisles swarming with nervous shoppers, too many to maintain their social distancing protocols, I witnessed the fear that I’ve been fighting in myself. For someone outside of the high risk population, I am not afraid of the virus. I am respectful of the things I must do to not spread it myself, but the virus is not likely to kill me. But looking at the empty shelves, overhearing employees whispering about layoffs, seeing the carts overloaded with staple foods, I became afraid.

The response to the pandemic is pandemonium. The people hoard food, and the stock market crashes. Public officials walk out during their live on-air presentations. We receive images from around the world where public spaces are empty. We read projections, the numbers of those who will die. We stay indoors, forgoing social gatherings. Restaurants and bars close. And all large buildings once full with the living are empty and dim — all except the hospitals that brace for the coming waves.

In all of this, we confront not a virus but the horror of death. That little black bird we always shoo away from our thoughts can no longer be scared off our shoulder. Most of us will survive, but our feigned ignorance of death will not.

That awakening drove the panicked into the grocery store. And as I watched them, I joined them. I thought of our basic needs, searching among the half empty shelves for food. And when I returned home, I knew it was time to watch The Seventh Seal again.

The Seventh Seal (1957) dir. Ingmar Bergman — Courtesy Filmgrab

Things as They Are

“I’m only painting things as they are. Everyone else can do as he likes.”

— Painter speaking to the Knight's squire Jöns

The Seventh Seal is Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece. It is, perhaps, the greatest film ever made. It follows the medieval knight Antonius Block who was convinced to go off to fight in the crusades. Ten years later, he returns to his native Sweden only to find it devastated by an ongoing plague. While resting on a rocky shore, Death visits him. After a life without any meaningful act, the Knight challenges Death to a game of chess — it gives him a reprieve, enough time to do one meaningful thing before he leaves.

What follows is a kaleidoscope of humanity, bright with the illumination of plague. We witness the many ways that humans might confront the fact of life and death, confrontations made palpable by the roaming scourge of boils and vomit and swift, agonizing ends.

The Seventh Seal reminds us that plagues rid humanity of any illusions about our time here. Plagues do not change the ultimate forms of existence. They only chant, over and over, what was already true: we were always going to die.

In an early scene, the Knight’s squire Jöns — who deals with the brutality of the battlefield and the black death with humor, drink, and the company of friendly women — follows his lord to a church. There, the Knight contemplates the big questions while Jöns stays back to cavort with the artist painting on the church’s walls.

Jöns looks over the art, noting to its creator that the scenes of dying peasants is depressing. The painter says that it is not the artist’s job to worry about the effect of his art. He merely shows the truth of what is happening. One cannot avoid thinking that such a defense works for the film as a whole, and that here as we talk about plagues during a time of a pandemic, we must remember that it is important to talk about death and allow ourselves to think about it because it is happening. All around us. Yes, of course, it is happening now in the time of a pandemic, but it was always happening.

We are waking up from a long stupor, when death was a private matter suffered inside of houses. Death visited the neighborhood one family at a time. When it knocked on the door across the street, we rationalized it an unlikely tragedy. No reason to worry ourselves with it.

But in a pandemic we are facing this visitor as a collective. Those who are at risk know that they might die very soon. Those who are not at risk know that they might spread death with the shaking of a hand. Just as we were always going to die, we have always been intertwined in the struggle of life.

We take measures now to not spread the illness, doing our part to save others, and others do their part to save us. But we were always doing that. Every time you ate a sandwich or took a shower or drove to the park, you were at every moment silently helped along by the labor of others — those immigrants picking tomatoes in the heat, the bright-vested workers on the roadside fixing the waterlines, the cashier who sells you gas by the gallon.

The artist must show us death so that we remember it. And in remembering it, we might also appreciate life and those who help us live it.

The Seventh Seal (1957) dir. Ingmar Bergman — Courtesy Filmgrab

The Emptiness is a Mirror

“The emptiness is a mirror turned toward my own face. I see myself in it, and I am filled with fear and disgust.”

— The Knight Antonius Block giving confession to Death, disguised as a priest

With death tolls and rumors of supply shortages, we now cannot stop thinking about death. Where once our culture fiercely avoided the topic, it is now the only topic imaginable. What do we see when we stare into it?

We see now that the long secularization of society somehow forgot to weave comfort for the dying. We see now that the youth we celebrate is precious only because it is fleeting. We see now that all the events and activity of public life is reducible to the lonely places we keep our beds. We understand more about our lives now than ever before.

Each character in The Seventh Seal represents a way to handle the anxiety of death, and these coping mechanisms around death are inextricably tied to ways to live. In fact, they are one in the same.

You have the cuckold Plog, who waves his hammer around in empty threats. For him, the performance of masculinity holds the thoughts of death at bay. His wife Lisa seduces the traveling performer Skat, reveling in her power. For her, the performance of femininity calms the thoughts of oblivion.

Mia, the actress, is a loving wife and mother, who takes care of those around her. Jof, the actor, is a loving husband and father, content to revel in his otherworldly visions and outward silliness. The squire Jöns pursues a nihilist’s course of hedonism and sarcastic distance, though he keeps protecting the innocent — belying a more complex machinery at work.

Antonius Block, the Knight, questions everything. When Death himself asks him, “Won’t you ever stop asking questions?” the Knight replies, “No. Never.” He can never stop seeking answers about the existence of God and the secrets behind Death’s shroud. Until the very end, he calls out to God for an answer. The emptiness of a universe with death and no reason for existence is unbearable to him, and yet he faces the horror, he calls out to it.

There is a character who turns from the seminary to looting the dead. There is a girl who materializes the fear of death into her personal lord Satan.

And finally, there is the mute girl, rescued from a rape by Jöns early in the film. The things she has seen in her plague ridden town are so unspeakable that she is rendered unable to speak. Though her actions communicate. When her would-be rapist appears in the forest dying of plague, she tries to offer the man a sip of water. And when Death arrives at the Knight’s castle at the end of the film, she is the only one smiling. She kneels down, as if in prayer, and speaks her only line of the film. “It is finished.”

These characters show us the many forms we take handling the questions of being. Their depictions are neither endorsements nor condemnations. They simply are. And when we see them flickering on the screen against the night in our self imposed isolation, we see ourselves as we brace against the rising tide of a virus.

It is not the time to turn away. It is not the time to forget. The pandemic is a time to face, to discover what it was we were doing all those years before. It is in this discovery that we might find the threads to guide us until our deaths, whether they be tomorrow from the virus or decades from now.

It is in the middle passage of the film when the Knight has supper with the traveling family of performers: Jof, the fool who can see the truth of things; Mia, the practical mother who cares for others; Mikael, the baby who embodies the eternal rejuvenation of children. The family reveals the blessing that is always there, that is forever in reach, to give birth and propel life forward again. It is our one resistance to death, our only path to forgiveness for our failures — we see death but turn to life and say, “Again.”

In all of his wandering, the Knight finally finds a family for whom a kind act could give meaning. Shepherding them away from the plague infested coast fulfills the promise of the reprieve afforded by the game of chess with Death itself.

They dine on fresh picked strawberries and sup of fresh milk. It is there that the Knight understands that this memory, if only this one, can make a lifetime worthwhile. It is when we are together with the hope of a future generation that we can make sense of the mess and struggle of earthly things. And all the while, in the background of this scene, hangs the mask of a skull twisting gently in the breeze. Death watches over everything, even the simple holiness of a shared meal.

And what does that mean for us who now feel death’s presence at the dinner table? Are we to learn the lesson of the Knight? Should we take care to hold the blessed moments carefully?

Death will come, yes. But only after life. And in life — even in a pandemic — there are things that are sweet. Sweeter, even, than strawberries.

“I shall remember this moment. The silence, the twilight, the bowls of strawberries and milk, your faces in the evening light. Mikael sleeping. Jof with his lyre. I’ll try to remember what we have talked about. I’ll carry this memory between my hands as carefully as if it were a bowl filled to the brim with fresh milk. And it will be an adequate sign — it will be enough for me.”

— The Knight Antonius Block

The Seventh Seal (1957) dir. Ingmar Bergman — Courtesy Filmgrab

The Wells of Horror

The pursuit of understanding the world always turns toward mysteries. But the pursuit of beauty acts as balm for this desire to know. In beauty, the mystery is not pursued in order to break it, it is pursued in order to behold it. Beauty, then, does not try to destroy the mystery to find the truth inside, rather it accepts the mystery itself as the truth. Do not try to solve the riddle, whisper its words and cherish the sounds.

From Benjamin Christenson’s Häxan (1922)

The Terrible Inheritance

Horror utilizes archetype and symbol more than perhaps any other genre. Its stories are ones of fear, and fear, above all other emotions, is precoded by the collective unconscious. We arrive on this earth with vivid fears. Fears of fanged creatures, of howling in the night, of mist, of spiders, of the dead, of darkness. 

We then continue to manufacture new fears out of the stuff of our lives: the traumas we experience and the traumas we witness. Our fears begin with an inheritance and always accrue with the product of our own hard work. But even these fears often maintain direct lines to more ancient predecessors. This is because the traumas that serve as the raw materials to our new fears are only traumas if they realize a fear already there.

And so provoking fear requires the recollection of an archetype already feared. The archetypes are productive inserts for storytelling, borrowed from our shared patterns of fear.

Plato’s world of ideal forms is a world without articles. You don’t come upon a dog, you come upon Dog. You don’t go to a theater, you go to Theater. There are no specifics, only symbols channeling power through a refraction shaped out of the bends and folds that make up the ideal form. These forms are made out of the same mental stuff, bent into their unique shapes — perhaps fear works like this, too.

Our nightmares are the closest guides to thinking this through. How we conjure up the strangest stories leading a path of anxiety to panic to complete and total fright. In the morning, we sometimes wake to find the events of a nightmare certainly strange, but our response is incongruous. A friend of mine recently recounted a recurring dream he had as a child. In the dream, he rises from his bed and goes to the window to see a deer and a dog looking in at him from beyond the glass, their black eyes gleaming. What an interesting response to this image, fear. And yet, the terror always accompanied the dream with each return. The fear itself tells us something of how to read the message of the dream. The stirring beasts beyond the room in the night. Beasts that also stir within us. That call us to some other nature outside of walls and beds and language. The image does not seem frightening to the waking mind, but the image connects the dreamer to the realm of fear, like a key to a forbidden room or a trap door to the undiscovered basement. The fear itself teaches the dreamer that an archetype of fear is speaking.

But a work of horror cannot bring emotion to inform the text. Rather, the text must draw out the emotion. And so, horror cannot add to fear before establishing it. Horror thus calls into being images of an archetype of fear, and can only augment or modify once the link is established.

From Benjamin Christenson’s Häxan (1922)

The Kingdom of Repressed Truth

Horror is an aesthetic pursuit. A work of storytelling. Being an aesthetic pursuit, horror operates around its own conception of beauty — here beauty simply means an aesthetic ordering that is appreciated, be it through paralyzing terror, erotic arousal, gentle gratitude, or any number of states of appreciation. [1] As we have discussed, horror creates this beauty by weaving archetypes of fear throughout the other elements of the text. 

Horror trades in the least touched truths, everything that is refused to be true and yet endures. When we sink our fears below the surface of our thoughts, some die, proving to be temporary phantoms of anxiety and paranoia, trifles that come and go. But not all of these fearful thoughts pass forever. Those that do not drown under the water of our unconscious float to the surface again and again, never leaving, never dying. Horror is made up of the things that survive the drowning.

And so any philosophy of horror must hold this position: take account of the unbearable truths, see what you blind yourself to. What unites all horror is that it attempts this one act, returning these dark truths to us.

Horror is the unsettling rise of known and unknown truths from the dungeons where we keep them. Horror is a philosophy, a metaphysics, a spiritual path that speaks to us about the things we struggle to forget. It is therefore a rigorous path, requiring intellectual courage and spiritual bravery. It is the handling of that which must not be handled. Horror reminds us of that which we collectively agree we do not wish to be reminded of.

This path is all encompassing, because the unrefused truths are not disqualified from it, it is the insistence that both refused and unrefused are held together. These truths are brought together in the vessels of their archetypes. The tension arising from that gathering is the magic of horror.

From Benjamin Christenson’s Häxan (1922)

Notes

[1] Not unlike Nehemas’ conception of beauty as a representation of a lack, only because a lack is also pursued.

The Intoxication of Class: An Analysis of The Devil Wears Prada

The Devil Wears Prada (Dir. David Frankel) is a 2006 comedy/drama of some note. In the world of (the unfortunately named) “chick flick” genre, it stands as a major achievement of the oughties. It is remembered for its defense of fashion culture, Meryl Streep’s performance as a coolly sociopathic magazine mogul, and the archetypal struggle between generations, mothers and daughter, values, and class.

The film should also be recognized for its non-self-congratulatory escape of most chick-flick tropes. It passes the Bechdel test with flying colors and in fact fails the reverse Bechdel (there are no scenes with more than one speaking male character — ever). It is a female dominated movie about a traditionally female world, and thus it is able to side step the patting-yourself-on-the-back-for-having-a-strong-female-character that was prevalent for the second half of the last decade and follows us up to this present day. In a similar vein, it is a film about women where they aren’t shoehorned into acting “masculine” in order to be respected.

But these aren’t the reasons we’ll be diving into the film today, though they are perhaps reasons why the film should be analyzed further. What concerns us here is a major emotional feature of the film: the experience of rising in social class as an intoxicating experience and its connections to the female in our culture.

Hello, it’s the future calling, they want their Bechdel-test-passing script back.

The [Discrete] Charm of the Bourgeoisie

When the film begins, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is a recent journalism grad who, after diligently chasing down any and all job openings in New York publishing, has finally decided to try her hand at being an administrative assistant to the most powerful person in fashion Miranda Priestly (an odd entry level position, but there it is). This is despite her goals of doing “real” journalism and finding fashion a ditzy girl’s game. At this point, Andy is poor, dating a line cook, hanging out with other friends who hate their j-o-b-s and who early on in the film toast to the notion of “jobs that pay the rent.”

Andy gets the assistance job, obeying every whim of Runway magazine’s leader Priestly (played famously by Meryl Streep). And the whims are, from the beginning, regularly impossible for all but the most intrepid and dedicated assistants. Andy begins her journey wearing the frumpy uniform of Northwestern University smart people who see themselves as above fashion, a uniform she pulls over her porcine size six body. But after a couple of rants about the importance of fashion made in her direction, and after the realization that Priestly will never acknowledge Andy’s successes as long as Andy refuses to respect fashion, the young protagonist dons the Versace and Jimmy Choos to fit into this new role, even working herself down to a size four (which gets her a celebratory toast from Runway’s art director).

This metamorphosis creates the strongest emotional tones in the entire film. Andy emerges confident, sexy, powerful. This is euphoric. Andy, along with the viewers, drink in with delight the shocked look on her coworkers’ faces (who only minutes of runtime earlier were snickering at Andy as a walking, talking faux pas). This new wardrobe prints the ticket for her acceptance into the fashion world. Now she has respect as she runs errands for Priestly that trace through the world of high society, including a “real” journalist who tries to bed the well dressed Andy and even asks her to send him some of her writing. It appears that by shedding her old self who was too focused on “real” journalism to be concerned with petty things like style, she acquires the tool to enter the realm of “real” journalism — that tool being style.

In summary, fashion (the ultimate class signifier) gives her purchase into the chic realms of the culture-generating bourgeoisie.

Meanwhile, hangouts with her old group of friends take on an increasingly bitter tone. They resent her constantly being late due to work, leaving early due to work, not showing up at all to her boyfriend’s birthday party due to work. So for a while the film jumps between the swirling adventure and excitement of the fashionista set to the resentment of the working class who stupidly continue in their proletarian existence without understanding the hard work Andy does.

The climax, of course, is that Priestly’s sociopathy knows no bounds, and when Andy finally confronts this in an extraordinary manner, she abandons Priestly and reconnects to her boyfriend. Thus, she realizes that there are things more important in life, yadda yadda, so on and so forth.

At the end, as she is interviewing for a “real” journalism job (though still dressed to the 9’s, proof not all was for naught), her prospective employer tells her that Priestly faxed a resounding endorsement (not all for naught indeed). Despite everything, the mother figure really did respect daughter though she did not openly admit it, and through the power of the mother, Andy gets what she wanted all along. [1]

The Moral of the Story

The Devil Wears Prada is not about the cruelty of the fashion world and the importance of staying true to who you are. It is about the necessity of the fashion world (including the cruelty of it) and the importance of adjusting who you are to meet its expectations. By impressing the fashion world (mother), doors will open up for you. But that isn’t even the true moral of the story.

Film is an emotionally resonant art. And the emotions it creates stick with you long after the nuts and bolts of the plot and what the plot is “trying to say” dim in the memory of the viewer. The memory of the emotions might fade and simplify, might coalesce around a general feeling, but that simplified feeling imprints. That’s why you remember how exciting Indiana Jones is even though you haven’t watched it since you were eight years old.

For the majority of The Devil Wears Prada, the emotion is one of intoxication felt when entering the realm of high society. While the particulars of the story locate the viewer inside fashion, it is still a move into the world of the bourgeoisie. That is the main emotional impact of the film, and also the promise of the trailer, which focuses entirely on the protagonist’s makeover/ascendancy and the charismatic dictatorship of Priestly (there are maybe two or three seconds devoted otherwise). That is because the draw of the film is entirely in the vicarious glee we viewers feel to witness a commoner like us (albeit a well educated commoner) gain access to the upper echelon of society.

Andy’s newfound powers after her makeover are one expression of the thrill, but consider the love of Priestly’s character. She is cold, demanding, unapologetic. The entire office trembles at the news that Priestly will be arriving early one morning, and they scramble to reshape the space to her exacting preferences. An entire industry watches her face for the smallest tics (raised eyebrow, pursed lips) to determine the trajectories of careers and the trends of the upcoming season. Priestly’s role is not to show the rise to power, it is to show unbridled power long since secured. Viewers love her character because there is nothing quite so intoxicating as imagining yourself with such control over the world around you all while immaculately dressed and quaffed. She shows us who Andy could become if only the pesky little cinematic necessities of having a protagonist “grow” and do the “right thing” didn’t make up the last reel. She is the way we get to eat our cake and stay a size four. Andy takes us from where we are to where we want to be, and while she has to “grow” and give up the pleasures of the life we want, we get that story of keeping the life too, in the form of Miranda Priestly. In one of their final exchanges, Priestly tells Andy that she sees a lot of herself in the young assistant, an implicit promise that if we don’t like the ending, we could imagine ourselves continuing on with the devil and one day filling her Prada.

In this way, the film is a female power fantasy. It’s about the intoxication of class in our society from a female perspective.

Here is where one could insert a rant about neoliberalism and how its subjects are psychically led on through their miserable lives by the empty promise of class mobility. Perhaps. Maybe there is something to that. But I think more than this, there is a deep truth about class being explicated here. Sexiness, power, influence, glamour are not being lied about here (of course there is a class mobility lie here, though Andy is from a prestigious university anyway). These are desirable states, and these are the definitional grounds by which class operates on the level of personal expression (of course, every good little Marxist knows class operates fundamentally around ownership of the means of production, but let’s hold off an analysis of Capital Volume I for a different 2000 word blog post). The Devil Wears Prada offers people who do not have access to those states some spectral whiff of the good life. Furthermore, it does so by giving Andy the most stereotypical female form of ladder climbing: she succeeds as the over-achiever — but one who actually gets somewhere through that form of hard work.

Andy’s character is that same gold star, all A’s, nervous energy fueled female character we’ve seen time and again, but her success as the tenacious secretary builds a bridge over to the opposite form of female success in a patriarchal society: sexual desirability and fashion sense. What if wearing Dolce & Gabana was the homework assignment? What if knowing the history of cerulean blue fabrics was the essay topic? What would a 4.0 grade point average look like in that world?

The original Andy, with her sterling academic record and college paper journalism, is blocked off from a major element of female expression and the female sphere in our society (i.e. fashion). But it is through the very same tenacity and direction that got her one kind of success that she is able to have it all. And what is her reward for conquering both roads to feminine success? Membership in high society.

The Devil Wears Prada is, purposefully or otherwise, about the limitations of female power, the taking of power in ways culturally codified as “feminine”, and about the intoxicating rush of jumping class division and gaining that feminine form of power. While the film may not necessarily critique the limitations of female roles inside of our society nor the class divisions (a division it sends its protagonist magically hurtling over), it does trade in these facts about our society. No, it is not a proletarian feminist film. But in its lack of critique it ends up accidentally saying a lot of what a film with such political goals might, only with inverse values. And, but inverting the values, ends up accidentally revealing a lot more about the dominant ideology than any politically-motivated film could.

---

Notes

[1] It is interesting that, given Priestly’s role as the mother-figure, Andy’s success in college is related to approval from the Father. But for Andy to fully self actualize and thus succeed in “real journalism”, she needs to return to the Mother’s realm of the feminine (fashion) and get approval. Once she has both of these, she can proceed through the door to her “real self” as a “real journalist”.

Scripts for the Ruling Class

I recently made the mistake of reading critical reviews of Ari Aster’s film Midsommar. I’ve written about this movie before, and as you might have gathered from my words about it, I loved it. Some critics did not. And that’s okay. It isn’t imperative that everyone recognize undeniable artistic genius when they see it. What I noticed about these criticisms, however, was something that creeps up constantly in the gargantuan amount of video essays and blog posts about film pumped out every month: using studio expectations of what films need as the yardstick for whether a film is good or bad.

“Grim, grisly and downright sickening, Midsommar is a feel-bad horror film about suicide, mercy killings, insanity, graphic nudity, religious hysteria, and the kind of grotesque imagery that exists for no other reason than shock value. Director Ari Aster’s delusional fantasy films contain enough imagination for today’s pretentious critics to label him a ‘visionary,’ but not enough substance or ideas for the real world to regard him as an artist of true and lasting value...

This film seems endless, with all of the horror restricted to beginning and end sequences...”

— Rex Reed for The Observer, who thinks a discussion on the psychological and social implications of a post-Enlightenment society aren't substantive enough for a film. Also, horror must have the gruesome shocks coming on schedule.

[Note: I’m not going to address how many critics completely misread the pagan community Hårga in Misdommar. That is another discussion altogether, and my previous writing on the film (linked at the beginning and appearing directly below this post) covers enough of the topic that going into audience reception of Hårga would retread too much to make it worth anyone’s time.]

Edward Hopper’s New York Movie (1939)

The Producer’s Voice in Our Heads

Anyone who has written a screenplay, and therefore sought out advice on how its done, knows how cynical a market it is. Almost all screenplays purchased and produced in the United States adhere to a uniform plot structure, with each plot point appearing on or near the same page in each script. Protagonists encounter a call to action, refuse it, become convinced, reach a midpoint where there is no turning back, hit a wall and decide they can’t reach their goal, are forced to return to their journey, and make a final push in the climax. Protagonists need to have agency and must develop. All major plot twists need proper set-ups. Etcetera, etcetera, so on and so on.

Many of these story features work well most of the time. That’s why this structure has become industry standard in Hollywood: if a screenplay fits into that mold, it will work as a story.

Of course, the problem of demanding this strict format industry-wide has clear implications. Slowly, films produced move more and more into a center line, and most films become simple reskins of the same story. This is all bad and terrible and what not, but that’s not what we are concerned with here. What I’m even more concerned with is how this is generating a language inside of the viewers themselves that limits their ability to see films that decide to work in a different way.

When these rigid expectations are broken, middle brow viewers who are half-trained in this notion of film believe those breaks to be mistakes rather than choices. The consumption of criticism that is built around these studio expectations ends up constituting the filter by which the consumers of this criticism begin to process films. It is a case of viewers who are both too well and not well enough educated in the discourse.

From Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979)

The Cost of the Profit-Driven Discourse

Going forward, the depth of this mistake might be hard to see. But considered against works from the past, we see how quickly these concepts break down. Take for instance, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, one of the greatest films ever made (and a film I will likely write about in the future). Almost all of the decisions characters make in the film that have any real impact or consequence happen before the beginning of the film, with a small number of exceptions. Large swaths of runtime are devoted to situating the viewer in the mysterious Zone or the future Russia. Pipes dripping water, a train rumbling, people smoking outside a bar, water running over abandoned items both sacred and profane. Time is devoted to putting the viewer in a place. No, nothing is happening. There is no character development going on. There is no conflict. There are only compelling images that relate the world and reflect the truth of ours.

That isn’t a flaw. It isn’t that Tarkovsky didn’t know what he was doing. It isn’t that they wanted to stretch a thirty page script into a three hour movie. This tonal decision does not fit into Hollywood’s strictures of what a film needs to be doing, but it leads to a film far greater than just about anything Hollywood can achieve using its current system.

Akira Kurosawa on the set of Ran (1985)

Perversity Into Maturity

And this seems almost naive to write about, but a strange phenomenon is occurring alongside and in tandem with the one described above where a cynical outlook on how a screenplay ought to function according to film producers is now considered the adult one. The over-correction against romantic notions of art as an intuitive process that flows from the muse through the artist and into the world has reached an apex where any defense of intuition and non-systematic filmmaking is seen as childish, naive, not serious. It is seen as somehow shrewd to know that a film needs these certain elements, that a film couldn’t be good without them, that their lack can only exist as a flaw and not a feature.

The truth on the other side is that filmmaking is a unique art form in that it often requires huge sums of money and large groups of people to accomplish, and therefore it is not reasonable to expect all of those resources to go into a project that relies on trusting an individual’s artistic vision. Here opens a side argument for the artistic productivity of state funded film programs with missions focused on cultural production and not high returns, but for our purposes here it is to elucidate just what inside this line of thinking is true, because that truth gives the mindset power. But when carefully looked over it is clear that the purpose of these rigid guidelines is a pecuniary one rather than an aesthetic one.

Of course, everyone is allowed to like what they like, and if you prefer films that stick to this Hollywood style, that is A-OK. But it is this reverse use of the style that is troubling. To see people being trained to dismiss films solely on the basis that they break from this style is a part of a continuing devolution and middlebrowing of our culture. And sure, something like character agency can help you identify why you aren’t connecting to a story, but to seek it out as an item on a checklist and docking points whenever a film leaves it unchecked is the exact perversity outlined above.

I Want That Horror: Ari Aster's Midsommar

[Spoilers, spoilers, my god the spoilers!]

The Promise

Several years ago, Beyond the Black Rainbow waylaid me with its exacting eye for evoking nostalgia and dictating pace. Panos Cosmatos outperformed on his feature length debut, and while the film was imperfect, the imperfections did not appear to live inside the essence of the film but rather somewhere in the translation between mind, set, and editing bay. And so, won over by Cosmatos’ vision, I waited eagerly for his next film.

I waited eight years.

Cosmatos returned with Mandy, which was certainly worth the wait, but in that time I’d lost the thread.

When I saw Ari Aster’s debut feature Hereditary last year, it seemed a similar promise was made to the audience. Aster’s work was magnificent: detail oriented, restrained, brutal, intelligent, and stylish. But I withheld my optimism, having learned from Cosmatos that waiting with bated breath for too long leads to suffocation.

Less than a year later, while I was sitting in the theater for Jordan Peele’s Us, the Midsommar trailer rolled before my eyes. Aster’s second film would be about a pagan cult, and knowing what I knew about his abilities from Hereditary, Midsommar seemed a possible contender for my favorite horror movie of all time.

Going into the movie last weekend, I believed it would be a brightly colored horror tale in the spiritual vein of Wicker Man. I was very wrong.

I found, instead, an uncompromising vision of utopia.

When commenting on Midsommar, Aster called the film “perverse wish fulfillment.” He was referring to Dani’s (the protagonist’s) inclusion into a collective, power over her emotionally absent boyfriend, and discovery of meaning. [1] But it is also wish fulfillment for those exhausted by the rational, Enlightenment, neoliberal order. The commune in Midsommar is aggressively in the opposite direction: group oriented, intuitive, and warm. And while the visiting Americans find their customs and rituals terrifying, I found them appropriate. Life is violent, pain and suffering are real, and while our current order needs us to not dwell so much on that and get on with our shopping, the commune of Hårga integrates these realities into a system of living that solves so many existential and psychological problems we suffer today.

Below I’ve pulled a few features of the commune that strike me as particularly satisfying.

Magic & Ritual

Hereditary’s command of an occult cosmology was perhaps the best ever committed to cinema. The film never fully confronted whether the strange phenomena were in the origin of characters’ psychosis or actual magic. And while buying into the magic still made for a compelling allegory for mental illness running through generations of a family, the story was itself a well crafted horror about a neopagan cult, and at that level it managed to reveal the beliefs and activities of the cult only in the details the protagonist was likely to encounter. Despite only glimpsing slivers of the whole, the viewer had a sense that there were guiding rules to the universe of the magic, that while we never get to read the tomes that the cult adhered to, there were such tomes to be read.

That is all to say that Hereditary was a masterpiece of restraint. It never overstepped, never dropped into exposition, never overexposed. Instead, the trust a viewer places in the film is constantly validated, and as it is validated it deepens, and yet again that deepened trust is validated further. Each time is like a step deeper down into the basement, where you find that while you cannot see everything, you know there is something that could be seen, if only you had a flashlight.

Midsommar was again about a pagan cult, but a cult of a different kind. Instead of a coven of witches operating in secret among us, it is a long running society, isolated in Sweden, allowed to continue its ancient pagan practices into our current day of smartphones and social media (both of which are critical features in the first act before the main characters leave the urban United States for Hårga’s midsommar festival they hold every 90 years). They perform rituals not to take control of occult forces but rather as part of their culture. While there are love spells and other potions, the desired ends are gained within the texture of the community. Psilocybin is taken to “open up” to the influence of nature and the community. Love potions are made and surreptitiously served to prospective lovers along with social pressure and ceremonial sex involving a group of encouraging onlookers ritualistically celebrating the creation of life.

We are shown this relationship between desired change and chemicals outside of the pagan community. The protagonist Dani is prescribed and takes Ativan (lorazepam, a benzodiazapine) to manage the extreme anxiety she feels as a result of the murder-suicide of her sister and parents. This is a person who wants a change to occur (end the anxiety attack) and consumes a drug to create that change (a GABAergic induced calm). But in Hårga, social roles, expectations, ritual, and the use of mind altering drugs create a complex web of meaning and context in the lives of its members, while in our society an expert prescribes pills to mechanistically adjust neurotransmitters, dampening symptoms that render the patient less productive.

Let’s look at another example. When Dani weeps in grief for her family, her emotionally distant boyfriend holds her on the couch but does little else. When she is brought to tears in public, she runs for the bathroom, chokes down her sobs until she regains control of herself and can reemerge in public where extreme emotional outpouring would be shameful. But in Hårga, she weeps when she finds her boyfriend mating with another woman. She tries to flee to a private space (the shared bedroom, now empty and therefore somewhat private), but a group of women join her and weep with her, mimic the contours of her sobs in genuine empathy. The room fills with their unified cries. The tears are not shameful, there is no need to keep them private. The feelings are not something to run from but process, and you never have to process them alone. In Hårga, your pain is not yours to bear, your pain is ours to bear.

By situating the individual inside of the collective, by situating relationships between individuals as a product of collective will, the existential questions of freedom and responsibility that plague our society and fill our psychoanalysis sessions have no oxygen to breathe. There is no need to “cure” issues of isolation, alienation, or meaninglessness. There is no need to “discover yourself”. The psychological lacunae where these arise in our own society simply do not appear in Hårga.

Freedom From the Fear of Death

The turning point in the film for the protagonist and her companions, where they finally peak into the dark side of the Hårga commune, is when they witness the ättestupa ceremony of senicide. At the age of 72, after completing four 18-year cycles of their life (one for every season), elders leap from a precipice to their death. This makes way for new generations and eliminates material burden on their community, but what I saw was something else that was far more important: it transformed the act of death.

In light of ongoing developments in medicine, people in our society live longer and longer lives, with more and more years tacked on at the end of their run filled with brutalizing and humiliating games of needles, pill swapping, and a bed-ridden lifestyle (complete with regular bedpan drama and scheduled sponge baths). This “progress” reduces death to the final failure of trained professionals and the subject in question. Everyday survived is a victory, and every tomorrow is another field of struggle. All of us who’ve witnessed our loved ones follow this wretched path have said more or less the same thing: I don’t want to die that way.

So why do people keep dying that way? Because the only other option is an acceptance and embrace of death. And why do we not choose that? Because death is the greatest conceivable terror.

That there are societies where elders do willingly pass on (the senicidal ättestupa ceremony in Midsommar is based on a number of similar practices in ancient Nordic cultures, precipice and all) suggests that death could be something embraceable, something that isn’t the greatest conceivable terror.

Again, the key is embedding the individual inside of a societal context where the concerns of the individual are maintenance issues for members of the whole. Sprain your ankle? You want to heal, not because you need to go back to work and pursue your career but because there is food to be harvested and the community needs food. That shift in perspective effects every kind of illness, including the ultimate injury: death.

If your focus is not on yourself, if your entire life is not framed with you in the center, then your death is not the end of the world. It isn’t the end of anything. And if your death helps maintain the health and vitality of your community and its part in the balance of the living world, your death is not an injury at all. It is healthy. It is an act of communal hygiene.

Are we too late for this phase shift? Perhaps. Maybe there is already too much individualism embedded in my own psychology to move over to this way of thinking. But do I wish I had this mindset? Do I wish I’d never had this monster of the fear of death allowed inside, to make a home in my heart? What do you wish?

Pagan Dreams

The last point I’ll share here is a constiutive part of all the wonders of the Hårga commune. That is the society’s ability to create meaning and wisdom out of human experience.

As with many human societies, Hårga values intuition, ritual, symbol, dream, and myth as ways to pattern human experience into fractal reflections of the universe itself. And that is, I believe, the greatest loss humanity has suffered with the rise of Enlightenment thinking. The rationalist, scientistic perspective has reduced the world, our home, into a Rube Goldberg designed trammel of Archimedes. A byzantine construction made from trillions of forces and countervailing forces, all organized and pumping along to do nothing in particular. That idea has not only infected many of our philosophers and theologians (if it stayed in the academy it would hardly be worth noting, as an entrenched conviction that life has no meaning is the normal way to respond to spending your life in the academy). No, that idea has integrated itself into the entire fabric of our society.

The ultimate wish fulfillment in Midsommar is the possibility of a community where my own experience appears rich with meaning, is integrated into the fabric of everything that is important and holy. Life in our society has been drained of meaning (hence Dani’s sister decided to commit suicide), and we are told to create our own meaning. That is supposed to be true freedom.

What we find in this “freedom” are not subjects soaring on their own construction of life’s value, but ever rising rates of depression and anxiety, suicide, and opiate addiction. Meaning is not something that one person can create alone. Meaning is socially constructed. And if you want to experience that meaning, you need to visit Hårga.

Citations

[1] http://collider.com/ari-aster-interview-midsommar/

The Collective Wound: Godzilla and the Collective as a Character in Japanese Filmmaking

Gojira (Dir. Ishirō Honda) is not only the first Godzilla film but also one of Japanese film’s first expression of the horror of nuclear warfare. The film began production immediately after the end of US occupation. During the occupation direct references to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasake were censored in Japanese media. [1] But tensions were still high, and Toho Studios pushed for a film that could speak to the tragedy without directly visualizing it. The kaiju monster Godzilla — through character design, plot references to the Lucky Dragon No. 5 disaster, and visual evocation of photojournalism covering the bombings — embodied the collective anxiety and horror without depicting the trauma itself. [2]

Gojira is the source of so much pop culture iconography, but the film’s effect is unexpectedly dark, haunting. This is not a man in a suit play fighting with a giant moth on strings, as one might come to expect from later incarnations. The 1954 Godzilla is more Lovecraft than kitsch.

What we feel at the end of Gojira, as the monster disintegrates at the hands of the Oxygen Destroyer (along with the self-sacrificing scientist who created the weapon), is a membership in the collective who listen via radio to live reports of Godzilla’s death and soon set themselves to piecing their country back together.

This is not a Hollywood moment, where almost all screenplays are written according to a strictly codified sense of what makes an individual grow as an individual. For most Hollywood studios with their bastardized-Joseph-Campbellian rubric, a film works if the viewer feels connected to the hero to such a degree that the hero’s transformation feels like a transformation in the viewer. But for the audience of Gojira, the film works because we come away feeling like a member of that collective who withstood the kaiju and defeated it, and who must now face the reality of so many dead, so much to rebuild.

One could say this is because of a societal difference, that Japanese culture is less individualistic, or that the wound of Hiroshima and Nagasake and the end of the empire was a collective wound. Given the amount of great Japanese cinema focusing on individuals, the latter argument has a stronger pull, but here we are less concerned with why the film is made this way or what cultural factors play into it. Rather, let us look at how the film draws the viewer in as a member of the collective.

To tell the story, Honda relies on seeing the events through several lenses, each viewpoint expressed by a main character. This is a technique we’ve come to expect from mega-disaster blockbusters (just think of the multiple converging hero journeys at the heart of Independence Day or The Day After Tomorrow, both filmed by Roland Emmerich who directed 1998’s US Godzilla). A major benefit of the technique is that it works: watching many people from all places and stations of a society reeling from the central crisis makes that crisis feel big and widespread.

The conflict is also mostly one sided. While most films involve an antagonist who interacts with a protagonist — or at least gives the protagonist some way forward — Gojira’s conflict mostly centers around a rampaging kaiju who can’t be stopped. Characters look on in horror or flee for their lives while Godzilla destroys large swaths of various Japanese cities. When the military finally tries a counter-offensive, they are only halfway successful. It is not until scientists collaborate across disciplines and convince the government to back their plan that the protagonists really have much to do. Even then, one has to commit suicide.

What does this passivity look like? Shots of crowds fleeing the rampaging Godzilla. Shot after shot. If we need to raise the stakes for a particular city crushing event, we close in on a weeping mother comforting her crying child as the flames that eat the city around them light their tear-covered faces. Again, these are techniques that are now, some sixty-plus years later, part and parcel of big budget disaster filmmaking.

This cinematic depiction of crowds has a difficult relationship with the medium’s attention to individual protagonists. Master Japanese director Akira Kurosawa is famous for his battle scene depictions of serpentine units of soldiers moving as one through space, as individual characters read the events on the battlefield and react. But a unit of soldiers isn’t quite a crowd. Both are composed of many people who move together with somewhat uniform purpose, yet depicting one should not have the effect as depicting the other. Units of soldiers move together based on commands from a specific, knowable point. When many soldiers act as one, it is a sign of supreme social order. Crowds, however, move together as one during a breakdown of order, as in people fleeing Godzilla.

The end of Do the Right Thing (Dir. Spike Lee) uses a crowd made up of individuals that we have come to know through the events of the film, but once inside a crowd, there is a new tension rising as we see characters moving together, not according to some plan but according to shared experiences, shared frustrations, a shared target. By seeing the crowd coalesce around a common enemy, we see the rise of a new character (the crowd itself) and a sinking away of the individual characters that make it up. This is a very American film with a very similar collective feeling, if only for its climax.

So here we have two examples of groups of people moving together depicted in cinema. Both the well trained unit of soldiers and the mass crowd threatening to riot. But Godzilla films have people fleeing together in the act of escape and mourning together in the wake of a catastrophe. Thus, what a film like Gojira tries to accomplish is a much more complex emotional arc in these crowds, and by keeping with the crowd for a greater portion of screen time, by centering the trauma of Godzilla’s raid on Japan in the collective experience, the film brings us along that same arc as a member of that crowd.

Gojira is a masterpiece on many fronts, but its focus on a collective wound is perhaps its most profound. Given the filmmakers’ inspiration, it seems the most fitting honor.

References

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Japan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daigo_Fukury%C5%AB_Maru

Cannibalizing the Past Pt 1: The Suspiria Remake and the Fertility of Reference

The original Suspiria by Dario Argento is a masterpiece of horror cinema. For myself, watching the movie at eighteen sent me down a path of foreign horror films, then foreign films in general, and so opened the universe of great cinema to me. It played such a pivotal role in my personal aesthetic development that the announcement of a coming remake had me feeling two kinds of ways: incredible interest at how the filmmakers would attempt to take a second bite at the apple, and incredible wariness at just what we could expect. Argento’s Suspiria did not seem to me the kind of film you watch and say, “They could have done better. Someone else should take a shot at it.”

It’s worth mentioning that in the last two decades (the length of my film consciousness) there have been a spat of horror classic remakes that were all either bad (like Alaxendre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes) or, at best, shot-for-shot remakes (like Rob Zombie’s Halloween). The one exception, perhaps, was Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, but that film now has the dubious honor of spawning the zombie over-saturation wave that came ten years later — along with Danny Boyle’s zombie-like 28 Days Later. So all the signs pointed to a Suspiria remake being less than good work.

When I finally watched it, I was happily surprised.

What Luca Guadagnino et al achieved was that most difficult task of reenvisioning without abandoning. The new incarnation takes the bare bones of the source material and creates an entirely different kind of horror experience, while still drawing enough one-to-one echoes to feel like a kindred spirit.

Argento’s film uses a neon baroque sensibility to create a world where the characters, story, and logic function on a dreamlike, “oneiric” level — a literal nightmare. Guadagnino’s film switches out the high saturation for a muted, realist palette evoking a divided Berlin at the center of world history, and he switches out the baroque with the modernist. These two underlying aesthetic guidelines travel throughout the remake, and provide a lens with which to see on what terms the two films function. It also provides a guideline to keep the film on its own terms while borrowing from its source.

Carrying out a revived aesthetic (like mid-century modernism) is always a balancing act. The visual references must drive all the way up to the line before crossing over into pastiche. That is, every reference must function meaningfully, must express, must convey information. To the degree a reference satisfies these needs, it escapes pastiche. To the degree it fails, and exists merely as a reference, it is pastiche. For Guadagnino’s remake, there were thus two horizons where this danger existed: reference to the original film, and reference to the guiding aesthetic of modernism.

Guadagnino himself claims that he hopes to have no style, but his Suspiria undeniably does. It uses the visual language of modernism to describe the unsettling logic contained within the coven of witches, a brooding and dangerous situation inside Cold War Berlin (a different kind of brooding and dangerous situation).

We use style to forget ourselves. To eliminate our viewpoint and merge into a reference structure handed to us by a social network. By engaging the style, we join that network and influence the very substrate we are relying on to be separate from ourselves, but this is of little consequence inside the gestation and creation because you don’t join that conversation until it has already influenced your utterance — by the time people see your film, you’ve already made it.

In this way, Guadagnino used style much like source material, two reference patterns working in tandem. His Suspiria is conceptually elevated then, because it has so many added layers of discussion. It speaks with history, with its predecessor, with the audience — even with witches.

And while this kind of referencing can go very wrong (see the general culture right now as it feeds on both a blockbuster film based on the early 90’s video game Sonic the Hedgehog and a live-action children’s mystery starring a character from a popular 90’s trading card game and anime), when we see it work as it does in Suspiria, we see the potential fertility of cannibalizing the past.

How does his film succeed? For one, the deliberate pacing works to its advantage. With so many masters to serve (and it seems to freely add to this list by engaging in excessive world building both in historical and geographic context as well as the fantastical mythology), the film needs time. And let me tell you, it takes it. The film runs for two hours and thirty-two minutes, which is absolutely gargantuan for a horror film. But this time means that no reference needs to stand without support. This is not a simple recombination of signs. There are multiple characters able to pass the through the world, interact, and build a reality inside of the sets and the story. That pacing is the precise antidote for the problems with a culture that has begun to recombine symbols rather than create new myths. Recombination is interesting but thin, so a culture relying on it to generate itself needs rapid production of new combinations. The more you sit with a reference, the more people think, and so something has to stand behind it if your camera lingers over it.

The second way that the film succeeds is more quaint and old fashioned, but it gives us a clue about a good test for a work that relies on references and is embedded in an entire network of style. That is: does the film work if it weren’t evoking the original? Yes. The Suspiria remake goes it alone enough to prove itself, particularly in areas that are the easiest to exploit for nostalgia, like musical themes and iconic shots. The one sin of nostalgia exploitation the remake commits is using the lead actress from the original (Jessica Harper) for a cameo. But the fact that they resisted using the iconic theme of the original and remaking any of the famous death scenes absolves them if there be any justice in this world.

What I took away from the experience of 2018’s Suspiria was a renewed interest in the zeitgeist-dominating nostalgia spectacles over which so much cultural critics’ ink has been spilled. Sure, I noticed it, even hated it, even used it as a symptom to diagnose a terminal cultural disease embedded in late capitalism. Once I’d seen a nostalgic remake done correctly, it all meant so much more. If it were all bad, it would be inherent, inescapable. But remakes can be done well. Our warm and fuzzy cinematic memories can be used and manipulated for new purposes in a productive, generative way.

That means there is more to the story. Cannibalizing the Past is a series of observations on that story.