Snapshot thoughts

Dream Boy

I liked it more than I thought I might. I am a dedicated fan of the novelist, Jim Grimsley, but I loathed one of the director’s previous films, Eban and Charley, an apologia for child sexual abuse (not because the character in that film is a teenager, but because he’s clearly mentally unready to make sexual decisions with a teacher). But I admired the way this film was unpolished and simple, awkward even. The obvious flaws of the film are visible—the constant, overbearing score, the obviousness of the costumes (the boy is clearly wearing Urban Outfitters plaid longsleeves)—but it felt to me welcoming, a film made by an intentional amateur, about characters who don’t “fit in” in the same way his film wouldn’t with mainstream filmmaking. The boys are attractive, but not models. The film is independent, but not in the hip way. It may be clumsy, but it’s genuine: You have sympathy for it as you have sympathy for its characters. I admired the way the film showed uneducated, poor, marginalized (and decent) Southerners without shying away from their awkwardness, while at the same time not casting judgment on them for their situation. Too often the hip cinephile middle-class will extend their sensitivity overseas while viewing the poor in their own country as objects of ridicule. The homosexual aspect of the film rings true; it reminded me of my own Canadian prairie childhood, where hushed homosexuality often found itself being expressed during periods of emotional turmoil and in households with strange relationships between parents and children. As for the magic realist finale, I think it was handled more poetically in the novel—the director is too much of a literalist realist to have much talent for poetic license—but it still fit in with the ramshackle setting of the film; churchgoing; uneducated; ghost stories.

Love Object

This is such a devious little thriller I’m amazed it’s not a cult favorite. Its ingenious plot concerns a bizarre love story between a man and his sex doll, until things go awry—at one point the film seems to be going through Hollywood finale clichés, but it has a cynical little twist at the end that makes it just right. I’m surprised I didn’t take offence to the objectification of the man’s female coworker, or the way she’s treated in the end, but I think the tone of comic nastiness strikes just the right balance. Desmond Harrington is beautiful, and the German Expressionist score adds a zany, creepy quality to the picture.

Nomi Song

Klaus Nomi comes off like a character in a Fassbinder movie—beneath his robotic David Bowie-cum-Gary Numan appearance, he’s a tiny, kind, weird little man with a penchant for baking and singing in operatic falsetto. He’s also a tragic figure in hindsight. He was a man out of time; although he was lucky enough to come in the wake of Bowie, and was able to incorporate krautrock and electro futurism into his pop albums, he wasn’t able to really pursue true opera. That’s not exactly a failing, but you wonder if his electro-diva niche would have otherwise been his first choice. He died of AIDS, which seems like an ending too cruel for someone who comes off like a shy, nice emigree who was given happiness by singing and sharing homecooked pies with his friends. But lucky for us his legacy lives on. In my mind he makes a fine pair with Sylvester in operating on the margins of pop, and in many ways anticipating and allowing the more extreme musicians of the past 25 years: Boy George, Antony Hegarty, Baby Dee, etc.

Postcards

Apparently Mark Rappaport had been bored one day and set about Googling his own name, and when he did he came across a forum posting about his films, with various commentators speculating as to what he’s doing now. He replied that he had moved to Paris and is no longer making films, with the suggestion it was final. It’s an understandable decision. He had already been making independent, personal films for over thirty years and that isn’t always easy. He writes about film on a semi-regular basis for Criterion and Rouge, among other places (which, when taken into consideration with his later films that add commentary to Hollywood, could be sustaining as an artistic outlet in and of itself). And while his films were respected in some quarters—and probably considered too amateurish in others—they were generally little-seen. My impression is that with the exception of his GLBT-themed video essays (Rock Hudson’s  Home Movies, The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender, and From the Journals of Jean Seberg) his work remains out of print and may stay that way, as he sometimes took poetic license with intellectual property (borrowing songs without the rights, etc).

That makes it all the more sadder to come across one of his films, in this case Postcards. It’s a short video narrative (under thirty minutes) conceptually about a couple writing long-distance postcards to one another. Rappaport’s tone is flat and deadpan—the camera is mostly static, the props stylized and dated, the foreground a set with actors, the background a green-screen of giant, exotic postcards. But the actual feel of the film belies the ostensible ironic approach. Rappaport isn’t making jokes at the expense of this couple—he’s not laughing at how they write to each other every few days to exchange thoughts and questions. In his bizarre setting and stylization, which is something like the nostalgia and sadness of Edward Hopper and the color and melodrama of Douglas Sirk, he looks at the situation in a way that forces us to pay attention without getting lost in dramatic theater. And yet the points he’s making are visible on the surface—we see how they write to one another, missing each other, lusting for each other, listening to records and eating alone in diners and sitting at bars crafted with Rappaport’s chintzy set design. And then we hear the word here or there that sparks a reaction in the other, a dissatisfaction with the situation, a hostility brought about by their separation. We listen to their words of dedication as they begin to meet new people, and see how the fantasy and ideal that exists in the letters, and in their minds, is hopelessly at odds with their behavior and the reality of life.

Good Hair

Chris Rock takes an underexamined part of black society and uses it as a subject for one of his latest forays into film. His interactions with other members of the black community relay a camaraderie that’s a pleasure to watch, although his “I’m a reporter” stance—particularly in a trip to India—often goes for the simple joke at the expense of the filmed participant, as was the case with Bill Maher’s Religulous. The social aspect of the subject, the ramifications of black hair—on practicality, on how some black men prefer white women for their looseness of hair, the excessive price, the idea of “wearing oppression” on your head and denying your identity—are well-suited to Rock’s observational humor, though the film is far less extreme than his best stand-up work. It’s a genial, mostly good-natured documentary that suggests topics without fully analyzing them. Al Sharpton’s relative thoughtfulness is often set aside in favor of his sense of humor, which is considerable.

“Ain’t no angel gonna greet me”: “Philadelphia”

Philadelphia served as the mainstream culture’s touchstone for AIDS awareness and sympathy, while at the same time opening itself up for criticisms by the gay community, the far left, and the religious right. That signals that the film was trying to be all things to all people, and that’s true. And while it’s also true that each of those groups’ criticisms were valid—and I’ll discuss them shortly—the film does fit in with Jonathan Demme’s other films, even as it serves as a slight departure from his earlier, more idiosyncratic and less “worthy” work.

The film was made in the wake of The Silence of the Lambs, a film that became surprisingly lauded for what was essentially an adaptation of a trashy pulp novel by Thomas Harris. Prior to that, Demme’s career had been made up of idiosyncratic and sympathetic examinations of goofballs (Melvin and Howard, Something Wild) and smaller, personal projects in documentary (Stop Making Sense, Swimming to Cambodia).After the financial and Oscar  success of Silence, Demme was considered an “important” director, and presumably wanted to maintain that cachet, and Philadelphia offered the chance to direct a film with follow-up awards potential.

Whether or not Demme was that calculated about his career is up for debate—although Philadelphia shows a more “serious” advancement in his filmmaking, insofar as the public may not have taken his more idiosyncratic work seriously, it also shows loyalty to his roots in the casting of Jason Robards, Mary Steenburgen, Ron Vawter, Charles Napier, and even his old producing mentor Roger Corman, as well as following his musical trajectory by culling signature soundtrack pieces by Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young, who he would chronicle in his subsequent documentary Heart of Gold.

Silence had opened Demme up for criticism in the gay community, as some believed that film’s killer, the cross-dressing Buffalo Bill, represented a sterotypical affiliation of homosexuality with psychosis. That accusation may have some merit on dramatic terms—it’s possible a psychotic fag is scarier than just a psychotic—but I’m not convinced that’s what Demme intended. For one, the film was an adaptation; and prior to Philadelphia, Demme had been sitting on a chance to direct a film version of the play Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, a theater piece about the two very different gay men who were similar only in their homosexuality and death from AIDS. The play was created by Ron Vawter, who was gay and had AIDS, and who had starred in Silence and was also cast in Philadelphia, and who was one of the founding members of the Wooster Group, along with Spalding Gray, who was the subject of Demme’s documentary, Swimming to Cambodia.

The criticisms from the left were of Philadelphia‘s apparent sexlessness—Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas’ relationship is relatively chaste—which is about the only thing the left could criticise in a movie that aimed to defend homosexuals while giving its leading protagonist a Spanish boyfriend and a black lawyer. (About the only other major criticism from the left I’ve heard was how the film stereotyped gay men as sex-obsessed, being that Hanks’ character catches AIDS while having sex in a porno theater while cheating on his boyfriend.)

None of these criticisms accurately reflect what’s good about Demme’s picture: the rightness of his political cause in giving sympathy to AIDS victims, demanding protection from job loss, and trying to remove society’s fear of homosexuals. Demme’s spiritual camerawork is also on full display, the way he has characters look directly into the camera lens (which never seems phony), or his exceedingly poetic use of closeup, as in the film’s best scene, where Hanks leaves Denzel Washington’s lawyer’s office to stand on the street, alone and tearful, as passersby cross the frame.

The film has been criticized for its formulaic structure, a drama that takes place largely in a courtroom, but that setting fits the general unease with the topics at hand, and gives a chance for the actors and the script to re-enact the culture’s misgivings on the subject matter, discussing and debating their feelings. None of this makes it a great work of art—it’s not—but they’re canny decisions to make an effective piece of propaganda, which is what the film is at its best.

Demme’s choice in casting Hanks could provide some room for quibbling—although, remember, at the time he was not the “serious” actor he’s known as today. Why cast Hanks and not someone who was actually gay? Why not cast someone who actually had AIDS? Valid questions, and not just because they demolish the silly idea that good acting is performing as far away from yourself as possible, which results in audiences thinking that casting someone who is what their character is means they’re not really acting.

The fact is that Demme actually did cast someone who was gay and had AIDS—Vawter. But he cast him as one of the lawyers at Hanks’ law firm, the one who seems to offer a degree of compassion for Hanks and embarrassment that his colleagues treated him the way they did. (Vawter’s character also sticks around for Hanks’ ultimate wake at the end of the film.) Rumour says that the studio didn’t want to cast Vawter due to his illness, in that they couldn’t get insurance for him, but when Demme pointed out the inherent hypocrisy of making a film about a man fired because he had AIDS, and then refusing to hire someone to work on that film because he had AIDS, the studio relented. But that may give reason for why Demme couldn’t cast someone like Vawter in the lead, even though he tried to include as many gay and HIV-positive people as he could in peripheral roles. (Incidentally, stories suggest that Demme never got around to filming Vawter’s lauded theater piece, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, despite saying he would, forcing the dying Vawter to find another director before his death in 1994.)

Ultimately Philadelphia remains a highly watchable Hollywood production, a film that serves a political purpose and broke some sociological ground for gays and lesbians. What it’s not is a work of art; there have been a handful of films dealing with AIDS, and only a few of them give new, fresh insights into the disease and its meaning beyond the sort of sympathetic tearjerking that Philadelphia achieves. The film’s most poetic and realistic moments may be the opening images of everyday people going about their lives, Bruce Springsteen’s elegiac, mournful “Streets of Philadelphia” accompanying their movement, a soundtrack to a city and a country  full of ghosts, vanished and gone.

Objectified

Objectified is the second feature documentary by Gary Hutswit (following Helvetica, about the typefont and its implications), who  is developing a strong sense of thematic overlap between his work. He’s also, possibly unwittingly, serving as an example of what’s wrong with our fashion-obsessed culture. His films are sleek and considered; what they lack is any kind of expressive touch. That’s part of the point in two ways: As a documentarian, he doesn’t want to infuse his films with himself (like Michael Moore or Errol Morris might do); and so far, the subject of his films haven’t been people so much as inanimate objects and notions of what design is. But his adherence to  his philosophical approach to design—an Apple-brand minimalism—actually says more than his arm’s-length directorial style might suggest.

In his world there is no joy, no ecstasy; only inexpressive tablets that we project ourselves onto. We understand by watching Objectified that Target is more iherently fashionable than Walmart (but learn nothing of their practices); we see how form and function no longer play a pivotol role in design (with digital instruments, the “look” of them need not suggest what they do). We also see a culture of waste; objects being created only to be thrown away. We see our obsession with being up-to-date rather than maintaining objects that can withstand time.

Hutswit may feel a deep affinity for modern design and the epheremal nature of new technology, but his philosophical understanding of the relationship between humans and objects—setting aside the fact that he actually realizes there is one—is profoundly shallow (and commercial). The essential suggestion the film makes is that we’re surrounded by items we didn’t even realize were designed, and that the designers often intend to create objects so their very design is undetectable. But the education never goes further than that. Why is it that we’re no longer happy with objects that perform a function and last? Why is our culture obsessed with things that are new? Why do we prefer flash to quality? Do our relationships with objects shed light on our relationships with other people? These are the kinds of questions—and criticisms—Hutswit might ask in his next film if he aims to be something more than an implicit fanboy for Apple, Target, and IKEA.