Secret Test!: A SERIOUS MAN (2009)

NOTE: As always, please see A Serious Man before proceeding.

"As long as I learn I will make mistakes
What do I want? What do I need?
Why do I want it? What's in it for me?
It's the imagery of technology
Is what you get is what you see
Don't worry your mind
When you give it your best
One two one two this is just a test"
- Beastie Boys, "Just a Test"

A barrage of questions, then: Why is this happening? What does it mean? What are the rules? How do I behave properly? What choices are available? Which options should I take? And they culminate, really, in the one central mystery: What the fuck is going on?

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, looking and acting like an ideal live-action Opus the penguin) stands on his suburban roof under slate skies and adjusts the television aerial. Signals from the aether flow into the antenna, and the man hears garbled, incomprehensible messages from the heavens. Something is coming through, and he will continue to adjust the apparatus, strain to listen and see. The mystery of existence continues, and all Larry can get in reply is blurry broadcasts of F Troop.

Negative Theology

Like a Lenny Bruce retelling of a lost Ingmar Bergman script for The Book of Job: The Movie, A Serious Man is both nightclub sick joke style riff on Jewish identity crisis in postwar suburbia and a humane and silver-filigreed parable about the reasons and methods by which we derive spiritual and philosophical nourishment through hermeneutic process; it is about the relative value of lessons relayed by allegory, of the midrash of all things, from Torah to F Troop, Surrealistic Pillow to dreams, physics to kook literature, weather patterns to collections agency calls.

Myriad troubles compounding troubles begin swarming Larry until one day, without warning, his life is falling down around him. His protesting refrain is: "I didn't do anything!/ I haven't done anything!/ What did I do?" When his wife (Sari Lennick) demands a divorce, he asks what he did, and she tells him "You haven't 'done' anything. I haven't 'done' anything." When his impending tenure is threatened by anonymous letters to the board, he can think of no reason they should have been written. When harassed by the Columbia Record Club, which he did not join, he yelps "I didn't ask for Santana Abraxas!... I haven't done anything!" The indignities and calamities come swirling up from nowhere Larry can perceive, and his only conclusion can be that God is doing this to him. Or not.

And indeed, Larry is a good man, in the best way he knows how. He is intelligent and gentle, sensitive and responsible and unassuming. What he is not is demonstrative, confrontational, brash and headstrong, those qualities that pass for heroism in contemporary protagonists. He prides himself as a rational man, a fine thing for a physics professor to be. But his rigid framing of a cause-and-effect universe makes him indignant about lack of apparent cause when his wife and her boyfriend, the sympathy-oozing, pious Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed) kick him out of his own home to live at the Jolly Roger Motel. As a teacher, Larry is accustomed to the use of stories to illustrate complex ideas. He explains as much to Korean student Clive (David Kang), who insists he understands the Schrödinger's Cat paradox; Larry counters that the "cat" is just a device for communicating a mathematical idea, and the math is the lesson. "They're like fables. To give you a picture... The math is how it really works." But as Clive tries to simultaneously bribe the professor for a passing grade and/or blackmail him for accepting the bribe (or perhaps does neither, the unmarked face of the envelope a blank screen of possibility), he seems to have grasped "dead cat" after all. Though he is familiar with the uncertainty principle and quantum superposition, Larry cannot see through the torment to apply chaos theory to his own situation (to be fair, it being the late '60s/early '70s, he'd have to be keeping ahead of the curve on his physics publications reading). The rational man is caught in a tangle; he uses the rhetorical technique, but does not do well when left to divine the lesson beneath the many signs, signals and allegories offered him. "I mean, even I don't understand the dead cat," he gasps to Clive.

The story being bent through the lens of Larry's perspective, the motivations of others are largely veiled, their intersections with Larry effectively blindsiding him. There are three exceptions, in sections of the film which swap perspective. The second most frequent point of view offered is Larry's son, Danny (Aaron Wolf), budding stoner and F Troop enthusiast who drowns out Hebrew school lessons with his transistor radio blaring Jefferson Airplane's secret message through his headphones. The Gopnik story proper begins here, inside Danny's ear canal, pulling outward into the light as "Somebody to Love" roars in the darkness, the film's leitmotif of alienation and thirst for simple salvation.

In the only other Minnesota moment entirely outside Larry's perspective, Sy Ableman drives to the golf course (even when no one is around, he drips self-satisfaction). Intercut synchronous car accidents befall both men, as Larry screams in impotent rage at the bicycling Clive and bangs up his auto, and Sy grows impatient waiting for a left-hand turn and is killed. Though (surprisingly) no one offers Larry the cold comfort that "it could've been you!," the value and meaninglessness of the sentiment that things could be worse is illustrated. Danny's life is not without problems — his aggravations include a harpy older sister, he owes his pot dealer twenty bucks, and dude, F Troop is coming in fuzzy — but he's not as bad off as his dad. And Larry does not quite recognize it, but his life is not so shambolic as his own destitute brother Arthur's (lovable gargoyle Richard Kind).

An extreme magnification of Larry, Arthur is crashing on his brother's couch, plagued by a cyst in constant need of draining, can neither hold a job nor appears to want one. That Arthur may be suffering serious psychological dysfunction becomes an increasingly likely possibility as he asks Larry's professional opinion of The Mentaculus, which he identifies as "a probability map," a Theory of Everything of his own devising. When Larry examines the little notebook, the pages roar with the white noise of madness, scribbles and equations cover every surface in mandalas of incomprehensible mathematics. Larry cannot make heads or tails of the Mentaculus. We might guess that it makes no sense, but Arthur's "system" apparently "works" as intended, and he applies it to winning at back room card games. And still, Arthur is hounded by police for gambling and solicitation and sodomy in seedy bars. Arthur understands the math and it solves none of his problems. The possibility exists that understanding the math has prompted Arthur's mental snap. While the Mentaculus appears to perfectly outline probabilities of limited stochastic systems like card games, perhaps Arthur does not think to apply its output to his personal life, or perhaps its wisdom holds no bearing when contemplating the nature of God.

Whether plagued by profoundly connected events or a designless swarm of fluke locusts, Larry cannot say. But even the shaggiest of shaggy dog stories has a structure, and the fundament of mathematical chaos is not disorder, but ungraspably complex determinist systems that can only look like pandemonium to the unaided eye. Larry may be haunted by a void of meaning, or by a surplus.

Maimonides tells us that the only statements we can make about the nature of God are statements of negation: all we may affirm is what God is not.

At the Mixer with Rambam and Rabad I: Of Advisors and Stories

Arthur does come closest to telling Larry what he may need to hear, wailing in the night at a hotel poolside freak out: "Look at everything Hashem has given you! And what do I get?! I get fucking shit!" Larry can't hear it, counters: "Arthur. What do I have? I live at the Jolly Roger."

In attempt to resolve his crisis of meaning, Larry visits three rabbis. Junior Rabbi Scott (Simon Helberg, nerve-wracked and befuddled, as if he can't believe he's a holy man) proposes that Larry has lost his perspective, and advises looking at the world with refreshed vision. Rabbi Scott is sympathetic but his empathy is stunted, and his illustration ends and begins with the temple parking lot: "... imagine yourself a visitor, somebody who isn't familiar with these autos and such. Somebody still with a capacity for wonder. Someone with a fresh... perspective. That's what it is, Larry!... Because with the right perspective you can see Hashem, you know, reaching into the world!" Larry already believes that one potential of his situation is God's presence, the other is God's non-presence, and the difference is stacking up as a narrow one. The first rabbi's advice is sound, but he does not adequately connect the dots to Larry's circumstance for the idea to get through. "Just look at that parking lot."

To put his divorce proceedings in order, Larry consults his lawyer, Don Milgram (Adam Arkin). The principles of Judaic faith and practice are philosophically framed in legalistic terms, and Larry's trips to his lawyers are conferences with moral advisors as much as those with the rabbis. Though he visits Milgram to sort out the divorce and clarify a property line issue, Jewish law — Halakhah, the path on which one walks — informs all of Larry's choices. He sees the possibility and feels the weight of every day as a series of choices, large and small, to greet seriously or ignore. Should he grant a do-over "secret test," as Clive requests? Should the family wait for Arthur to finish in the bathroom before eating dinner? Should he pay for Sy's funeral?

A gruff, monosyllabic gentile neighbor (Peter Breitmayer) begins asserting ownership of what Larry believes to be part of the Gopnik yard. Mr. Brandt asserts that the property line ends at the poplar tree. Larry doesn't, apparently, but has no counter-evidence. On neighboring, possibly overlapping territory, a blurred boundry becomes matter of interpretation, one the self-assured gentile is going to win by default. Both satirizing the degree to which these suburban Jews have and have not become integrated, and addressing Larry's concern that he is correctly interpreting the law, the matter of the Gopnik yard is never resolved: the property lawyer (Michael Lerner) up and dies before Larry's eyes without uttering a word of his strategy.

And so to the second rabbi, Nachtner (hilarious character actor superpower George Wyner), who provides two critical lessons, one in comic council with Larry and one while presiding over Sy Ableman's funeral. To Larry, Nachtner relates the half-joke half-object lesson story of The Goy's Teeth, revealed as the rabbi's one-size-fits-all anecdote for any occasion. In brief, a dentist finds the words "Help Me" engraved? grown? into a patient's lower incisors. The riddle haunts the doctor, no answers are forthcoming, and he eventually stops worrying about it and finds peace. Larry stares and gapes, aghast at what he takes to be a shaggy dog story. Though he strains to hear the essence the advice, the rabbi refuses to elaborate.

Nachtner's timing is off and Larry isn't communicating his needs. Gopnik is seeking comfort and the rabbi provides an intellectual explanation to a theological question. The answer is sound — God neither provides nor owes any explanations — but the advice is misplaced. It is not what Larry wants to hear, so he does not.

Through all Larry hears is an irrelevant, anticlimactic joke, the Goy's Teeth is, in essence, a story about unknowable mystery, its presence and purpose in our lives. In the story, Sussman the dentist guesses at a moral — should he help others? Nachtner neither confirms nor denises: couldn't hurt. There is a disconnect between this conclusion and the questions. Helping people is an action to take in this world, a way to conduct oneself which, sure, couldn't hurt. It has not much to do with the nature of God or the question Sussman and Gopnik share with Job:

If this is sign, what does it mean?,
and: Why me?

The Goy's Teeth is linked to Schrödinger's Cat and the invented folktale prologue to Larry's story. In that miniature Yiddish comedy sketch of A Serious Man, a man and wife are visited one dark and snowy eve by a Torah scholar (Fyvush Finkle) who may (or may not) be a dead man inhabited by a dybbuk. Surely not, chuckles the rational husband. Obviously so, says his deadly serious wife, and stabs the guest in the heart. But Schrödinger's dybbuk shuffles off into the night, wounded and insulted. Doomed or saved or maybe neither, the couple never learns. The snow falls on the just and unjust.

At Ableman's funeral, Rabbi Nachtner gives a stirring and warm hesped in honor of the deceased and to guide the bereaved. He explains the Jewish concept of the afterlife, L'olam Ha-Ba, the World to Come. "It is not a geographic place like Canada..." (pause for laughter), it is not about a reward of riches and physical comforts, not entirely analogous to a Christian concept of an individual dividend Heaven. Nachtner outlines at length what the afterlife is not, and offers that L'olam Ha-Ba "is in the soul of this community which nurtured Sy Ableman and to which Sy Ableman now returns."

As for the third rabbi, Marshak refuses to see Larry at all. The old man devotes his time only to religious study and briefly advising the new Bar Mitzvahs. As Larry moves up the chain of wisdom, the advice becomes more succinct and cuts to the heart of the matter, while the comfort grows slim. Marshak does allow conference with Danny Gopnik, who triumphs through his Torah reading while righteously stoned. The ancient man stares across his empty desk, quotes Jefferson Airplane and advises Danny: "Be a good boy."

Perhaps the most concise version of these esteemed commentators is Clive Park's father. As Larry protests that either Clive is bribing him or not, and he cannot be blackmailed for a bribe he isn't accepting, Mr. Park's zen reply: "Please. Accept mystery."

Job Didn't Ask for Santana Abraxas: Five-Minute Exegesis

Joel and Ethan Coen tend to favor noir and screwball comedy, genres which may be played as farce or thriller, and that take as their base the dogpiling of misery and accident onto hapless protagonists. In its way, A Serious Man is a small primer on how to read the moral philosophy of the entire Coen oeuvre. We should not mistake a portrait of an absurdist universe for nihilism. The only self-identified nihilists the Coens have placed onscreen are in The Big Lebowski, and they are dismissed as buffoons, if slightly more dangerous than the rest of a cast of buffoons.

The real point of The Goy's Teeth, Nachtner simply hands to Larry. Eventually, these nagging questions will go away, in the face of small, everyday happiness, or at least the business of living life while cosmic mystery roars in the background. The point of Rabbi Scott's advice is similarly to marvel at what portion of the universe one does understand, and to tend personal relationships and behavior in that context. Marshak to Larry: following this line of questioning ends with a life of devoted, serious Torah study, and furthermore, when you get to the top of the chain, you may find deafening silence.

In a dream — the only Coen films with no dream sequences are Fargo and Burn After Reading — Larry tells his class that the Uncertainty Principle "proves we can never really know what's going on. So it shouldn't bother you, not knowing what's going on." While it sounds good and ominous, the Uncertainty Principle does not quite say that. Sy Ableman appears and says that he does know what's going on. Though in this anxiety dream, Ableman is overstating the case, this unshaken confidence is part of why Nachtner had deemed Sy "a serious man." And they debate. Larry goggles that mathematics is proof, and the principle applies. Sy says that what happens in the afterlife, the cosmic balance of justice, is not the issue, and Larry need concern himself with present life. He says that "mathematics is the art of the possible." Otto von Bismarck said that was politics, of course: "... the attainable, the art of the next-best." Sy is talking about a place where the math cannot go.

A Simple Man opens with an epigram from Rabbi Shlomo Itzchaki, vital and most influential Tanakh and Talmud commentator: "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you." Rashi was writing on Deuteronomy, instructing that we trust in God's plan and not strain to predict the unseeable future. Larry is not too far off in evaluating this — and The Goy's Teeth, and the Example of the Parking Lot, and Marshak's silence, and Mr. Park's koan — as "it shouldn't bother you, not knowing what's going on." It can only cause us further consternation to be ordered stop there, though, because that is a pitiless interpretation. On the other hand, one is not sure who told Larry Gopnik that Judaism involved easy answers.

So to Job.

The Book of Job shares a structure roughly in common with A Serious Man. As protagonist, a good man by most standards, a man of some prosperity, a man of solid faith, and a man to whom atrocious things happen in unceasing barrage. He kvetches and questions why, but maintains that he did not do anything to merit the treatment. At the end, a whirlwind, out of which appears a voice both frightening and soothing. In Job, God does answer. In A Serious Man, the voice is Grace Slick's.

There is a key difference between the horrors that befall Job and those experienced by Larry Gopnik. Job is bedeviled by Acts of God. Until the grand finale, Larry's problems are the result of the behaviors of other people, or his interaction with other people. The reverse implication of Deuteronomy 18:13 and Rashi's note is that while God should be received wholeheartedly, other people may be suspect. So be a good boy. You will be responsible for this on the midterm.

The climax in which God responds to Job contains one of history's most burning, beautiful and profound answers to the problem of evil and the myriad uncertainties that come part and parcel with being a living human. No hero of these books speaks to God the way Job does without being rebuked. Few of them are given such visions — and be sure, God's defense/questioning of Job is so vivid that Job sees the words from the storm.

God answers the charges against him by pummeling Job with a series of questions. "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?..." That is just the beginning, as God provides a stirring account of the marvel of creation. God holds forth on the perfect system of the natural world in such poetic fashion that it sounds like even God is impressed with the intricacy of ecosystem and solar system. God speaks of a vast planet and a vastness in which it whirls, physical and abstract: "Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?" God plumbs the symbol-myths of human imagination: would you tangle with Behemoth, go fishing for Leviathan?

A number of points are being made and woven together in awesome rhetorical display. The universe's design is too complex for the human eye to take in at once, and what looks like hellish disorder is part of an incomprehensible system. For some of this, we may devise maths and sciences for prediction and explanation. There are those places where the math cannot reach, the place where position and momentum may be known at once, where the cat is alive and dead, we call those "God". Most vitally, the human beast lives in an amoral, unsympathetic world that is crammed with wonders, and any system of moral judgment, any divination of meaning belongs to the peculiar needs and inventions of the human mind. God's justice is not man's justice. Nature needs no justice or meaning: it is its own law and purpose.

These are majestic ideas and uncomfortable ones. Job retracts his accusations and embraces the freedom of being a creature of dust and ashes. This is not about milk and honey. Accept mystery? Good luck with that, though you don't have much choice. Here is what Larry has that Arthur does not: "You've got a family. You've got a job." As Marge Gunderson said, "There's more to life than a little bit of money, don't you know that? And here you are. And it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it." God answers Job by explaining exactly why he will get no answers: not only are the questions ill-formed, but the answer is immeasurably vast and all around him. Popular shorthand would have it that God "tests" Job, but the game is always stacked — God's playing with a Mentaculus in his back pocket and knows the outcome. Job suffers torment and vision so that we will have this story, this poem, this song about man's yearning. So you have it, I have it, Larry Gopnik has it. This is a far cry from "it shouldn't bother you, not knowing what's going on."

We need these stories, because it is hard to just remember the math parts of the lesson during the test. "...[T]hey're illustrative. They're like, fables, say, to help give you a picture. An imperfect model." One can even walk away from a story about persistent inscrutability, only to be frustrated by how life makes no sense. The vision God gives Job is powerful enough to affect the man's spiritual refinement, but it too is an imperfect model, the totality being an infinity that cannot be squashed into language. Believing he can master the math and evacuate all secrets, Larry does not hear the voice. As Dick Dutton of Columbia Record Club says, "we can't make you listen to the records, sir."

Danny listens to the records, and stepping out of Marshak's office, onto the path of the serious man, he faces down the Whirlwind. The awesome, fearful black chaos of a tornado — or does it just look like chaos to us? — rips through darkening skies, the Airplane jangles and bellows. In the moment of pain and fear, philosophical and theological argument dissolve into abstracts and human yearning takes over. You want to know why it picked you? If you're being tested? Want to know what it means? Want answers? Or... don't you want somebody to love?

In a universe lacking in inherent, built-in meaning, our task is to forge our own meaning. A Serious Man is the world as a terrible, beautiful parking lot. Just look at that parking lot!

For Bravery: Das Unheimliche and INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

ACHTUNG!: You are not stepping into a movie review. Readers proceeding beyond this point should have already seen Inglourious Basterds, expect no plot summary, and require no protective gear for the RAMPANT, CONSTANT SPOILERS AHEAD

* * * * *
In 1941, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon decided that the cover of Captain America #1 would be Cap coldcocking Adolf Hitler. Like so many Golden Age comics luminaries, Kirby was Jewish. Joe Simon is Jewish. They wanted to see Hitler's face smashed in. And if not, they correctly guessed that their audience wanted to see the Nazi leader cracked in the mouth.

A plot strand in the tapestry of Inglourious Basterds directly concerns the exploits of a mini-platoon of Jewish-American soldiers on a secret mission through the European Theater of Operations: to cause as much havoc as possible behind enemy lines by brutally murdering and desecrating the corpses of as many German soldiers as possible. All its stories eventually converge in a blazing, startling, shrieking climax of Nazi-immolating carnage.

This material -- the adventures of Captain America and the Inglourious Basterds alike -- in its simplest reading taps a nearly universal vein of desire to see modern history's designated greatest villains met with violent pretend retribution. Arguments to the contrary are probably futile. We never see the Basterds or Shosanna Dreyfus behave or react to the world in any particular way reflective of the Jewish experience, but their ethnicity is fuel for the plot engines and bolsters the righteousness of the murders and mutilations that serve as the only twisted justice of the Inglourious Basterds universe. Whether the world Jewish community does or should savor this with any relish is likewise up for grabs.

Whether there is ever such a thing as an uncomplicated, cathartic and healthy revenge fantasy is an eternal mystery.

Inglourious Basterds crams into a punishingly short 153 minutes nearly every family, genus and species of narrative possible in the order of World War II films. All that is noticeably missing are hand-wringing Holocaust melodrama and the large-scale battle epic -- in other words, the predominant subgenres still being made in our era. But they are there too. Both are hover over Basterds in subverted, negated spirit, conspicuous in their absence (the home front drama is accounted for in a particularly wonderful and, sadly, deleted scene, three minutes of backstory on the trademark baseball bat of one Donny Donowitz). The battalion of misfits adventure tale ("men-on-a-mission" says Tarantino: The Dirty Dozen, The Dam Busters, and yes, Inglorious Bastards), to stories of artists engaged in ideological resistance fighting (The Last Metro, To Be or Not to Be, Cabaret), every kind of WWII movie is there in turn or at once. Some stake a claim to major plot points and concrete screen time like the espionage thrillers (Foreign Correspondent, Notorious) that inform the spygames of the La Louisiane sequence...

Some WWII-themed subgenres merely flash by in an off-hand visual or verbal reference, but some infect/inform/form the very heart of the film without speaking their name. A comic horror insert shot reveals Josef Goebbels banging his translator, and the majority of "Chapter Five" drips with decadent Third Reich taste in arts and decoration, as Goebbels commandeers Dreyfus' theater for a film premiere. From the wincingly confused purpose of cheapjack sexploitation films like Love Camp 7 to their arthouse grandfather in Visconti's The Damned to (maybe most of all?) Tinto Brass' line-straddling, conundrum Salon Kitty, the least reputable strain of WWII drama holds its own peculiar power, and Tarantino wields it handily in his own war epic. The unique gift of Nazisploitation is the efficacy of a perverse moral bewilderment. The chromosomal anomaly of Nazisploitation films slowly mutates the genetic makeup of Inglorious Basterds, warping its form into a great mad, startling beast. As Inglourious Bastards' final chapter escalates, its plot convergences become inevitable as surely as they become unpredictable, as it makes definitive, unashamed break with historical record -- the movie will not hide in an imaginary unspoken pocket of history -- and it erupts with a black, irrational tone of hysteria and hallucination.

With Jonathan Rosenbaum accusing the film of being tantamount to Holocaust revisionism and other critics rendered helpless with inarticulate rage, difficult questions are posed: why do these strong reactions from detractors proceed from a viewing experience entirely alien to those who admire the film? The semi-approving assert that a kind of shallowness and movie-headed retardation of vision are the core and limit of Tarantino's purpose.

The gripe springs eternal:

"Those who like this film do so because it doesn't seem to have anything to say and renders the cinematic experience as pure play. Those who dislike it dislike it for the very same reasons, seeing the deliberate cool superficiality of Pulp Fiction as a symptom of the empty post-modernity of our age."

"Like the allusions in the film, Pulp Fiction itself is either a film you get or you don't. Some people luxuriate in its meaninglessness, some people find its meaninglessness to be the symptom if not the origin of major social ills, others find a meaningfulness in a message of redemption"
-Dana Polan, BFI Modern Classics: Pulp Fiction

With nearly sixty years of fiction devoted to how very much Nazis have it coming, why single out Tarantino's film? If it is because his stories crackle with aestheticized kick and poppy frisson, what do the same critics make of Basterds-inspiring tough guy fantasia The Dirty Dozen itself? Certainly it is just as difficult to argue the moral rectitude of The Great Escape, to say nothing of a sitting duck like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. Jim Emerson makes the agreeable but problematic comparison to Warner Bros. cartoons about Bugs Bunny tormenting Axis powers with Brooklynite pluck -- implication being, if it is all a cartoon, not to take it seriously... even while he takes the movie pretty seriously. It's the reading method of the Dana Polan BFI volume above: "Those who like this film do so because it doesn't seem to have anything to say and renders the cinematic experience as pure play." This hardly accounts for any viewers deeply moved in the heart or powerfully stimulated in the head by Basterds (or Pulp-- I guess, given Polan's two options, we don't exist or are mentally unsound?), but also ignores that the men of Termite Terrace were living through the historical moment. They worked out their own concerns through their art form and were tasked too with boosting homefront and battlefield morale. Little entertainments can shoulder big responsibilities.

Why pick on Tarantino? is a good question indeed, when after six features the complaints hardly waver. On one hand, Tarantino invites it, on the other hand, clasped with the first, the critical establishment has a stubborn unwillingness to budge. The paradigm is set as to What to Do with Quentin Tarantino and has hardly been revised.

Top dirty names to call Quentin Tarantino: Nostalgia Hound, Magpie, Trainspotter, Sadist... Cinephile.
This, although his view of cultural history is neither as blinkered and sentimental as Spielberg at his most nostalgic or cynical as Spielberg at his grumpiest. Tarantino's bricolage is nowhere near as pervasive, disruptive and dizzying as Joe Dante's -- indeed Dante's major theme is the hollow, brain-numbing echo chamber of disposable culture bouncing off itself, while Tarantino's is, simply, not. We all speak daily, openly and actively about popular culture and our experience with it. Many of us do so more than Tarantino characters. Why should Movie People be deprived of a cultural frame of reference? In Basterds it is particularly fun to watch the scope of direct dialogue references narrow with a 1941/45 cut-off point, even if a joke about Lilian Harvey is greeted in packed theaters with exactly one laugh. In-jokery is, of course, free to associate across time at whim, and name-dropping Emmanuelle, and the real world Hugo Stiglitz and Antonio Margheriti tints the picture gently, it indicates the company Inglourious Basterds wants to keep, names its secret gods.

And there it is again, again, that perpetual bugbear, The Violence. So why single out this filmmaker, who's made nothing so bloodthirsty as Rambo III or City of the Dead? He courts it. Asks for it. Engages when provoked, and seems to argue back on film. An apologist would, after Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, make the realistic case that the violence of those films is substantially less graphic than its liminally felt impact -- a strong case in point of the filmmaker's prowess (and the Psycho Shower Scene Argument) -- only to be greeted by the 1-2 punch replies of the relatively bloodless Jackie Brown and unmatched mayhem of Kill Bill - Vol. 1. The critic's hand is forced. Either deal with Tarantino seriously or be doomed to rehash the same complaints endlessly.

That the living tissue of his cinema is a successful graft of 10,000 movie donors should be particularly appealing to film critics, who more than any of us live with perpetual projector bulb tan and a Geneva Drive tattoo over the heart. What Tarantino does by crafting the fabric of cinema history into fully wearable new garments is not dissimilar to the life's work of Brian De Palma and Jean-Luc Godard. Tarantino is less black-hearted than De Palma, less politicized than Godard, less schematic than either. To single him out for ridicule as a filmmaker with film itself as a ruling thematic concern is bizarre. Most of Generation X's directors don't even have ruling thematic concerns.

Tarantino is not without his authorial tics. He punctuates suspense with hyperfocused extreme close-ups of food, feet, arcane detail, peers out of car trunks incessantly, frames characters in doorways and crams metatextual declaration into dialogue. But his technique possesses no faddishness. In an age where most directors flatten their visual field magazine cover thin and alternate between big head TV close-ups and impotent camera flailing, Tarantino composes for the entire frame, constructs screen geography by holding shots as long as possible and, in Basterds in particular, uses deep focus to impart as much information as possible in a shot. Take some time with the scene in which Zoller pesters Shosanna in a cafe. She just wants to smoke, sip coffee and read, but the soldier tries his damnedest to chat her up, fending off her rebukes and disruptions from ardent fans, then recognizes the opportunity to impress the girl with his celebrity. Tarantino places Shosanna by the storefront window and keeps everything mostly in focus from the woman in the foreground to the buildings across the street. Sidewalk pedestrians recognizing Zoller are fully visible as they move from exterior to interior space, and several interlocking stories are being told at once.

Inglourious Basterds luxurates in the pleasures and pains of the movies and meditates on film as a force shaping our lives, interior identities and human history. That second clause is the writer-director's great step forward in his sixth feature, though his concerns have not changed, they are articulated with emphatic force in Basterds. The breadth and depth of reference is impressive by its own right, but less canny filmmakes pull similar, less encyclopedic stunts all the time: naïve accumulation of a hundred years of film cliché may also cause the sensation of a thousand films overlapping on one screen.

A headspace is established for the film: that we are in Movieland, in Movie History where Movie People operate on Movie Rules. This is not the same as saying the film operates with weightless unreality, that situations are not serious in any way. Inglorious Basterds then does a service to all war films -- indeed, all films -- from the earnest propaganda documentary modes of Why We Fight to the studio-slick entertainments of Casablanca. All movies are movies. That Tarantino is not embarrassed to say so does not make his films shallow exceptions to any rule or inherently frivolous, but exceptionally honest, generous, grateful for the cinema, grateful to be of the cinema. The notion does not strip art of importance but return it in kind, separates art from the stifling, impossible, dishonest illusion that its function is/should be/can be to duplicate reality. And of all words in the above that should be bracketed by a good post-modernist's set of quotation marks, it is "reality." When we're at the movies, regardless of how naturalistic the performers or fantastical the scenario, every movie is equally unreal. And every movie is real in and of itself.

Rosenbaum's complaint, once he deigned to (sort of) elaborate, seems (?) to be that Basterds makes the Holocaust "less real". Putting aside that it is not a Holocaust film (nary a concentration or extermination camp is seen or mentioned), and that the purpose of the film may not be to deepen an audience's understand of historical fact -- and do note, those are large, potentially crucial blocks to "set aside" -- the opposite may be true, even if Bastards is read as puerile revenge fantasy. The film does not establish Hitler's Final Solution in any exposition, and depicts persecution of occupied Europe's Jews mainly to set up Shosanna's plight. Basterds requires foreknowledge of history, presumes an audience understands facts of the Holocaust. The rage of its characters, the machinations of the plot, the purpose that fuels the film's passions all operate on the assumption of an audience for whom the the Holocaust and a war against fascist, antisemitic enemies are very real, and that a basic set of feelings are shared on the subject.

There are stories of violent revenge, retribution and score-settling, professional and private, in all Tarantino's features as a director, and most of his screenwriting. One of the basic reasons we go to the movies is their bottomless capacity for wish fulfillment fantasy. It is a shade of escapism, or perhaps vice versa. These wishes and their cinematic granting may be base, cathartic, pathetic, unarticulated, mysterious or unhealthy. The movies provide a potentially powerful and relatively safe arena for working it out.

One of the fascinating things about The Parent Trap, for example, is its bizarrely naked fulfillment of a fantasy harbored by children of divorce, that Mom and Dad will reconcile -- that they can be forced to reconcile. When given some thought, surely no one would want their own children clinging to the desperate, futile hope, wallowing in the stunted, immature understanding of relationships, or the practicing the conniving and cruel schemes of Sharon and Susan to reunite their parents. And yet adults made the film. It is irresistibly sunny and extremely incorrect at the same time, with no hope for the faithless to say it is charmless or unfunny or the faithful to untangle it.

Genre cinema's most basic scenarios all run on this principle, a chance to experience the romantic comedy courtship ideal, to explore and adventure beyond one's backyard, to be a cowboy, a fireman, an astronaut. But it's always more complicated than that, and where there's tension, things get interesting. Horror films are particularly good at this: genre theorists are constantly telling us that we attend to identify with a murderer or monster, to sate some primal bloodlust, to vent some dark steam pushing against our interior walls. Even more basic, though, deeper, stranger and unsayable, we are afraid and exhilarated because we identify with the victims. We get to watch ourselves killed, over and over, to die a thousand make-believe deaths that we may understand our own.

A principle pleasure of Tarantino's films is the shape of their stories ( and say, then, if we speak of "content" or its "form"? The form of a movie is its content). His wooly-souled tales are electrifyng because truly anything can happen and we're aware that the storyteller holds no fear of Going There. Anywhere -- to the pawnshop basement, into Mia Wallace's heart, or to loop back into its own first scene. Pulp Fiction's scheme is that each sequence will end up 1000 miles fom where it began. Reservoir Dogs and (the original screenplay for) True Romance rupture the tail end of each sequence with sudden violence and/or surprise revelation, carefully parcelling out information by jumbling chronology. Jackie Brown is a series of games in which characters outsmart one another, cards held against chest so the audience cannot know who will win each match or if it will end in a flagrant foul. Kill Bill, Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds are structured as strings of conflict with nearly self-evident resolution, giving off an unbearable heat of suspense because we know they will end but cannot tell when.

Basterds is specifically a series of interrogation scenes. It is practically a field guide to variations on human conversation as interrogation: police questioning (Landa and LePedite), meet-cute flirting (Zoller and Dreyfus), job interview (Goebbels and Dreyfus --> Dreyfus and Landa), briefing (Churchill, Fenech and Hicox), debriefing (Hitler and Butz).

In the structural tour-de-force second Chapter, "Inglourious Basterds", Tarantino loads all his storytelling guns. In nested scenes of characters telling stories to one another, the chronology gradually burrows at least four layers deep, then claws back through to the other side. Hitler meets with Pvt. Butz --> who recounts his platoon's encounter with the Basterds --> which pauses for the backstory of Hugo Stiglitz --> which begins with a newspaper photo of the thirteen Gestapo he killed --> which leads to mini-vignettes highlighting the killings and Stiglitz's Basterd recruitment - at which point we are four levels down. The film is artfully, breathlessly driven to distraction by the infinite possibilities of story itself. The chronology then collapses back into position, all efforts focusing for impact as Butz raises his cap to reveal his swastika scarification. Then, a signature flourish: how'd Tarantino get so good at this? Same way as Aldo Raine. "Practice!"

All of Tarantino's films have been about the way identity is little but accumulation of stories about ourselves: the stories we tell about (and to) ourselves, the stories we tell about each other, the stories the world tells about us, the stories that are us. Reservoir Dogs is about scumbags and weasels playing at being men of honor and lions. Natural Born Killers and True Romance play out as mirrored halves (and were, in long ago drafts, likely retrograde counterpoints). In True Romance Clarence and Alabama bluff their way into legend, pretend to be Bonnie and Clyde until it comes true, while in Natural Born Killers Mickey and Mallory abandon all civilization for primal violent impulse, and marvel as the media inflates their atrocities into the American myth of individual freedom and integrity; the same thing happens to both couples, but inside-out. You can't help but end up a story. Jackie Brown is endless circles of everyone duping one other, which, naturally, involves nigh constant subterfuge and reading of other players' strategies. In Kill Bill everyone truly is the badass world-shaking giant they appear to be, but also rifle through indices of identity until they find the person they need to be. Vol. 1 establishes their legends, Vol. 2 deconstructs them, the vital layer being that the story The Bride tells herself of a mission of revenge melts away to reveal the story of Beatrix Kiddo's rebirth and redemption. Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds alike reconfigure and take hard looks at the purpose and meaning of exploitation film iconography. And in Pulp Fiction everyone is telling stories all the time, projecting and revealing themselves, bulding the world with talk, rumor, joke and anecdote, their constant chatter a meticulous network of meaning.

Espionage and fugitive drama being Inglourious Basterds' orders of the day, everyone is lying, acting, or hiding something, every character both themselves and a story about themselves. It is a film very much about mythmaking and performance. In the schematic marvel of the La Louisiane sequence, multiple layers of playacting converge and quarrel as a frivolous bar game variant on What's My Line? endangers the deadly serious acting of undercover agents impersonating German officers attempting to rendezvous with a double agent -- herself an actress and the scene's fulcrum of teetering make-believe.

Even Aldo Raine and his Basterds, who cannot abide that Nazis may escape anonymous into history and make it their mission to brand the living enemy and desecrate the dead, in their primary function as a guerilla terror unit are spreading a story. The Basterds constitute a bogeyman legend to ripple through the psyche of the German ranks. Until conscripted into Operation Kino, their usefulness as a story is understood to be larger than the mayhem they could cause by hand. Meanwhile, "Jew Hunter" Hans Landa's tactics include two powerful weapons which do most of the work for him: the reputation which precedes him, and the air of confidence that implies he already knows your secrets. These are sharpened and on display even when in non-detective mode, as when discussing theatre security issues with a petrified Shosanna.

Landa and Raine both open their major introductory dialogues by asking the interviewee what they know about the dangerous reputations of the interrogators. This paralleling gives a good indication of what Tarantino is up to at the heart of his vengeance stories.

There are only two setpieces in Inglourious Basterds focused on the violent destruction of Nazis, and both are complicated, designed to be more felt on a phenomenal level than understood intellectually. Because here it is: What Inglourious Basterds does spectacularly well is imbue its adrenalized violence with a feeling that is utterly weird. It is uncanny. Something feels panicked and wrong and it is difficult to pinpoint what or why. Tarantino's last two films periodically shifted into similar discordant tones, and such sustained irrational dread is only matched onscreen by Dario Argento's heyday run of films from 1975-1985 and David Lynch whenever he feels like working.

In the first of these setpieces, the Basterds question then beat to death one Sgt. Rachtman. It is giddy and sweat-beaded as a suspense sequence, for the same reasons as the needle-to-the-heart climax of "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife": a dire situation played as slapstick sick joke, a surrogate audience laughing themselves queasy with anticipation, a poised weapon completely apropos as metaphor for the physical sensation of the scene itself. The scene is inherently conflicting, but in the key exchange, Sgt. Donowitz demands of Rachtman: "How'd you get that medal on your chest? Killing Jews?" And the answer: "Bravery." And when Rachtman's head caves in, we know he had this one virtue at least, and that he died wearing a Nazi uniform. Brett: "I'm sorry things got so fucked between us and Mr. Wallace." Mr. Pink: "I'm acting like a professional!" Sgt. Werner Rachtman: "Bravery." Bang. Bang. Bang.

Chapter Five - "Revenge of the Giant Face" grows increasingly unsettling as it shifts into the Salon Kitty-styled décor of Shosanna's violated movie palace, but the sensation that something is off begins earlier, as David Bowie's "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" throbs and laments over a Suiting Up montage in which the weapons are film reels and the warpaint and uniform are the gowns and makeup required for a movie premier. The bold musical selection is proving to be a sore spot with some viewers, but even those who admire the audacity of the loud intrusion of a 1982 goth-glam track into the audio space of a period film might consider that a) by this point either Basterds has one in its grip or does not, and b) the Bowie track is not any more or less anachronistic than the repurposed Morricone cues that score the rest of the film. Or more "fair" or "correct" than the Billy Preston music, or any of the music, for that matter -- little to none of the score is authentic in period, instrumentation or style.

An omniscient, or at least very informed narrator provides expositional assistance once in awhile. In a neat trick straight out of Suspiria, that narrator is never identified, and eventually disappears altogether (Argento's version is even scarier: his narrator only speaks once and provides no particularly useful information). Innocuous (and cool, because it's Samuel L. Jackson's voice) while on the soundtrack, but ultimately ominous, because at any point in the film we may remember that extra-dimensional layer, that voice from inside-outside the Story, and realize we have been completely abandoned.

Shosanna and the Basterds blow it up, the pretend reflections of Reich leaders and Nation's Pride, the pretend film within this film, some stories just too evil to be allowed to walk the earth, and this is not an anti-revenge story. Most of the baddies aren't in uniform, but evening wear. They aren't currently ranting and spouting arguments for eugenics and totalitarian politics but screaming in fear and scrambling for their lives. If we desired a horrible, spectacular demise for these villains, this is certainly a horrible, spectacular demise. The climax graphically echos an extermination camp gas chamber but the crucial referent is the finale of Carrie.

The moment Carrie goes PK-A-bomb is a dozen climaxes at once, and De Palma's film multiple orgasms all the way to the credits. In disorienting, crashing waves the outsider's revenge story culminates, a tidal force of cleansing female power washes through, and everything goes completely berserk. Carrie White is transformed, an inhuman avenging angel, out of (self) control and channeling a righteous flame. She is a supernatural wrath straight out of Revelation. And we want to see this, want the dipshits who tormented Carrie to burn, but it is also the film's apex of horror. Carrie's prom sequence is satisfying, scary, brutal, several other adjectives and exhilarating all at once, and those are not incompatible feelings. They don't cancel each other out, and this is a secret to the film's spooky power. No one should walk out of the film feeling guilty or complacent.

A swastika Zoller whittles into his sniper's perch in Nation's Pride rhymes with the Basterds' nickname carved into a rifle butt, and of course, Raine's handiwork across the foreheads of surviving Nazis. These echoes draw disconcerting parallels, connect ideas to be compared, but do not necessarily imply coequals. Continually complicating matters are glimpses of common human experience peeping through holes in Nazi uniforms: the one-word story of Rachtman's Iron Cross, an off-duty soldier celebrating his child's birth, Landa's disarming dorkiness beneath his hard, smooth legend. In the person of Pvt. Zoller, this stinging theme is distilled. He thinks he and Shosanna are in a romantic comedy, plays his role with much charm and confidence. At the Nation's Pride screening then, what is it that makes him flinch, avert his eyes, abandon his seat? Embarrassment at his performance? Pain at the memory of taking hundreds of lives (his explanation)? Pain that it took the power of cinema to make him feel the weight of those deaths; that his favorite art form had turned on him? Or the crushing realization that he is not in the movie he thought he was in? In Zoller's defining moment, he disrupts Shosanna in the projection booth, tries to play romantic lead one last time, is pushed too far, and threatens to assault her. He feels entitled, as occupying force. Human, certainly, and a G.W. Pabst fan to boot, but the equation is unbalanced: he's a human being that has irrevocably chosen to throw in with the Nazi Party. There are, in the end, those things Nazis believed, things they did, which cannot be made up for by doses of charm, frailty and circumstance. Things get complicated, Inglourious Basterds admits, but some of the identities we flicker through stick with us and muck up all the others. And Zoller's a Nazi.

Rachtman and Landa are both indignant that the Basterds do not play by War Rules, that they hold their enemy in contempt. They're right, as far as it goes, and as far their indignation is not coupled with oblivious arrogance. Rachtman is unrepentant to the last, thinks he is going down with dignity and a soldier's honor. Things get complicated, but ultimately, Sgt. Rachtman goes down as a Nazi with his head caved in by a baseball bat.

Landa is so amoral as to edge into anti-moral. During a boast that he does not hate Jews, and is possessed of the amazing ability to "think like a Jew," it may never cross his mind that if he could truly think like a Jew, he would not hunt them down for the Party. It is just part of a story: he's the Jew Hunter. He's a master detective. He's an SS Standartenführer, a multilinguist, a saboteur, a turncoat and a war hero... and oops. One of the stories Landa has chosen to occupy drowns out the others. And as Landa is the last Nazi standing, Lt. Raine has one final piece to sign before the gallery hanging at Nuremberg. In a film about faking it until it's real, about verbal sleight-of-hand, and the ability of a great storyteller to be anyone he or she wants to be, what Aldo Raine has done is decide Hans Landa's story for him.

As Operation Kino bursts into bloom, Inglourious Basterds makes its most startling connection. The association is self-critical and self-congratulatory, it's funny and scary, it's honest and false, it's everything Tarantino's critics hate in his work and everything they see missing, it is the surface and it is the core. Adolf Hitler is at the movies, a violence-saturated piece of propaganda about the romantic legend of a tough guy bringing down an abstracted enemy for the audience's satisfaction. Hitler laughs and rollicks and he gets really into it.

Before anyone could reasonably begin processing what this means, that Tarantino has willingly drawn connection between his imagined audience and a theater full of Nazis, and thereby implicated himself, Sgt. Donowitz steps in, grim triumph, revulsion and deep psychosis spilling out of his eyes, and demolishes Hitler's skull with a machine gun. Pulped. Things are complicated, ethical ideologies are diced, stirred, simmered and in the critical moment, a choice is made. A fantasy of vengeance is not the same as a wish for justice, as moral instruction, as poetic justice, as a prescription for behavior. It may be weird, it may not be the voice of our better angels, but it is a real human impulse. Choose your stories wisely.

The final German Night in Paris is a similar brand of unsettling as Carrie's last stand: the phantasmagoric theater of destruction is presided over by Shosanna's manically laughing giant face. She is made of smoke and light, wreathed in flame, a cinematic godhead. She shapes history. She demolishes history. She is producer, screenwriter, actor, director, editor, distributor, exhibitor, projectionist and projection.

And Shosanna is a film critic. She programs her theater with her heart, sneers at Riefenstahl's politics, counter-programs with Le Courbeau, and cannot abide smears on G.W. Pabst's art even in the face of what she has been through. Because she's from France, and perhaps it is a France of the cinephile imagination, but in her country, they respect directors. In France, things are different. They got the metric system. They wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.

A Troubling of Goldfish: Notes on PONYO ON THE CLIFF BY THE SEA (2008)

Quick-n-dirty first-viewing notes on Hayao Miyazaki's beautiful Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea follow. The film opens in North America on August 14, in English dubbed form. While the Disney-produced dubs of Studio Ghibli films have been relatively respectful, they have frequently suffered from tasteless American stunt casting; anyone who suffered through Billy Crystal in Howl's Moving Castle is likely to agree. The value of the Ghibli vocal track cannot be overstated in this case, as the original beguiling, earnest child performances have been replaced by polished and cornball Kid Disney stars, and one particularly Japanese character type -- the shrieking, androgynous fop -- is filled in and manned-up with Liam Neeson's deep, stern purring. The necessity of dubbing a film intended for small children is acknowledged, but anyone old enough to read subtitles is strongly encouraged to pick up the R2 DVD, rather than wait for the inevitably overpriced Disney disc.

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea rides on waves of matter-of-fact folktale logic, its plot all bargains and deals, loaded choices and mystical, half-explained rules. An overzealous young goldfish falls in love with preschooler Sōsuke, a sea captain's son who names her "Ponyo". Rejecting the name "Brünnhilde" and defying her sorcerer father, Ponyo transforms into a rambunctious human girl by means of magic elixir, a drop of human blood, and sheer force of will.

A contemplative child-view take on Hans Christian Andersen's troubling and haunting "The Little Mermaid", Ponyo plays out against a modern rural backdrop and its focus is not Andersen's fatalistic sexual politics and outsider angst, but animistic Shinto spirituality, the kami-electrified world, and island culture's relationship with the sea. In this fishing community, everyone's lives are tied directly to the ocean, their concerns and fortunes bound up in the swells and storms of the sea. Besides the anthropomorphic creatures passing as goldfish, who are the product of magical union of man and ocean goddess, the sea creatures all behave like fish and much of Ponyo is devoted to the spectacle of great clusters of marine life moving gracefully, impassively through the water. As Ponyo's rebellion against natural order begins manifesting, the town floods and Sōsuke and the fish-girl name, with casual awe, the species of massive Devonian creatures they observe gliding beneath the surface. They are not made pals or villains; they are animals, they are there, they are awesome.

This is Ponyo's simple, reverential strategy and philosophy throughout, an attitude toward simple wonders of man and nature and unfathomable chaos alike. A bowl of ramen takes three minutes to cook. So wait, smell it cooking, consider the process, which is both mundane and cosmic, but in any case takes three minutes. Consider that gifting a mother with a Thermos of soup makes milk for a baby, a convoluted route to calming a grumpy infant, but: that's how it works, that simple, that complicated. We spy the realistic problems of adult lives through Ponyo and Sōsuke's eyes -- Sōsuke's mother, Lisa, fumes about her husband's working all night, Ponyo is likewise snared in her father's obsession with the ocean -- and from this low-to-the-ground vantage these troubles seem bottomless and straightforward at the same time. Everyone is yearning, everyone finds happiness in their simple pleasures, everyone's gaze is cast at the sea.


Ponyo vs. Ham: Cinematic Battle of the Year!
Hayao Miyazaki's pinpointable pet themes are encouraging concerns to begin with, whether the project is pessimistic or sunny: female rebellion and independence, the futile, banal horrors of war, human impact on the environment. Ponyo certainly runs through the checklist, but depicts a universe operating on pushing and pulling forces, vacuums and spillovers, action and reaction. One of the senior center regulars in Lisa's care warns, when Sōsuke introduces her to the little fish in a bucket, that fish with faces always bring tsunamis: those are the rules, laid out in old stories. And the tsunami comes. It's Ponyo who brings the tsunami, of course, she brings it practically on purpose, blasting up from the ocean floor on a water spout; attempting to rejoin Sōsuke, she nearly capsizes his father's boat in the process. Sprinting joyfully along the waves, great crashing gouts of water in the form of massive, grinning fish, Ponyo runs, red hair streaming in the dark breeze. It is an exhilarating sight, the maniacal little girl's screaming laugh, as she gallops in pursuit of Lisa's tiny, careening automobile. They race along an oceanside road, Ponyo chasing her friend, Lisa and Sōsuke attempting to speed to ahead of the weather. The enthusiasm of Ponyo's pursuit could kill them in the process. They race away from each other, they race towards each other. They race on the cliff by the sea.

WATCHERS' COUNCIL: Rough Draft - The Original of Buffy

"The pattern of the thing precedes the thing."
-Vladimir Nabokov

Into the Alley

So this blonde girl walks into a dark alley...

That's how it starts, right? It always starts this way.

This girl walks into an alley, and a vampire appears. It menaces her, attacks. She kicks its ass. This blonde girl walks into a dark alley and that's the premise, the inspirational flash that spawns all incarnations and cross-media franchise that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yet somehow it never actually plays out that way. It is not how the TV series opens, nor the original film, nor Joss Whedon's shooting draft of the screenplay. They all begin with variants on the girl menaced, the alley, the monster, the switcheroo.


This girl would not even walk into an alley in the first place.
A mission statement is coded into this imagined scene, the conceptual spark that summarizes Joss Whedon's Buffy concept. The moment actually does play out roughly one hundred million times in the course of BtVS. Over and over, Buffy will combat monsters in dark alleys. Though this beat plays out in a hundred variations, we never hear the main theme. Each time through, we know the turnabout, know the reveal that Buffy is the Vampire Slayer. The dynamic only plays out with the surprise intact once: the first time one reads the title. Buffy... Buffy? THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. Her pattern precedes her.


Arches symbolize the heavens, eternity. Windows= portals, passages. Grids= structure, order. Cheerleaders= hot.
The 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer has all but been receded into those infinitely deep filing cabinets at Wolfram & Hart; absorbed into the tissue of Buffyverse mythos like a vanishing twin, failed and dissolved before birth. Comparisons are bound to favor the experience of the series for dozens of reasons, central among them that only enthusiasts of the television series would make such a comparison in any detail. The lens is warped, and it is nigh impossible to watch the movie (hereafter Buffy the Vampire Slayer) without referencing the television version (hereafter Buffy the Vampire Slayer, no italics). As the BtVS fan is nearly universally in the thrall of the creator's cult of personality, the proceedings may be colored by the very public grumblings of creator and executive producer Joss Whedon.

In interview with IGN, Whedon explains: "...it was right around the time when Revenge of the Bimbos, or Attack of the Killer Bimbos or something – there were a lot of movies coming out that were proto-silly '50s style titles. They were on the video store shelves. I worked at a video store. I would watch them, and I'd be like, 'You know what? This is just another bimbo movie. These women aren't empowered at all. They just made up a funny title.'..." The specific film he is thinking of is probably Assault of the Killer Bimbos (1988), but video stores were awash with pseudo-(and-genuine)-Troma pictures like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988). The way Whedon tells it, the title plays out as a third-gen exploitation movie fan-artist's workbook exercise; like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007), part of the goal is to deliver what other films promised but could/would not fulfill. In Buffy's case, actual empowered-girl turnabout. The title is a throwback —"proto-silly"? I suspect "pseudo-silly" is intended? — to pulp-tradition fantasy that reads as naive, kitschy or campy to modern audiences, regardless of the imagination or sophistication in the actual work.

Buffy aims to reconfigure a tradition that may or may not exist in reality. Conventional wisdom has it that women are persistently victimized in horror movies, that fictional monsters supernatural and human alike prey primarily on women, that the genre itself always sacrifices the blonde girl. It is not exactly true, as some more astute scholars like Carol J. Clover (Men, Women and Chainsaws) and Maitland McDonagh (Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds) have pointed out, horror cinema has a complicated attitude toward gender. But in plainspeak, no statistical studies exist to back up the anecdotal wisdom that female/ feminized victims are the victims of male monsters. It is just one of those things you Know To Be True, despite that Frankenstein's monster and Freddy Kreuger alike have studious interest in doing violence to men, and have been foiled by women who are not particularly masculinized. An equally convincing argument can be built that this most subversive genre has a rich tradition of female protagonists who escape and defeat the demons through specifically female virtues and strengths, a tradition too of the untamed feminine which survives pulsing through subterranean tunnels of folklore and pop culture.

Party Decorations: The Lite Ages

In any case, art and interpretation are not strictly a matter of statistic. These assumptions that an innate misogyny and single-minded viciousness toward women are universal in horror reveal a fairly naive reading of the function of horror genres. Horror's purpose is to horrify; to provide a frightening hyperbolic vision of the Way Things Are, the Way Things Might Be, our real world fears made metaphor, a bleak critique of our species' shortcomings. Thus, horror films from The Wolf Man (1941) to American Psycho (2000), whether as subtext or (with post-modern self-awareness) part of their agenda, examine the outer reaches of brutal male drives by depicting frightening appetites in extremis. If it is upsetting, it is supposed to be. Were it Whedon's project to undermine the gender politics of Gothic horror, we might rightfully ask if it is a useful, necessary or relevant goal. But that is not quite what the screenwriter is up to (thought for another day: a majority of scholarly work agrees that BtVS tends to reject and reenforce Gothic fiction tropes in equal measure).

All genre pieces are multi-genre pieces. It is foolish to insist (in example/strawman argument with which you may be familiar) that Alien is "not science-fiction but horror". It is, of course, science-fiction and horror. Specifically it's Ten Little Indians in the future on a spaceship with a creature-feature beast, and follows the same plot structure as a slasher picture. The relevant question is not "what genre is it 'really'?" but "to which familial genres does the film belong?" and "what cogent argument can be made when viewing the film as a member of a particular genre family?" BtVS, by Whedon's account above, was only partly designed to undermine various horror conventions and assumptions, but belongs to a small family of (supposedly) cheeky, campy post-modern satires of exploitation films. In effort to not simply turn horror tropes on their ear but provide correctives, BtVS inevitably spends more time being a superhero story than a horror story. It is partly a comic horror film, but more to the point, all incarnations of the "Buffy" mythos are superhero stories with Gothic trappings. Interesting, surely, and in this way — whether any embodiment of "Buffy" has adopted ideas from her sisters or not — part of yet another lineage: Doctor Strange (1963), Swamp Thing (1971), Marvel Comics' Werewolf by Night (1972) and Tomb of Dracula (1973), Jack Kirby's The Demon (1972), Blade (1973), Vampire Hunter D (1983), Todd McFarlane's Spawn (1992) all the way to Van Helsing (2004).

This extended sidetrack is relevant because we are at the sensitive spot of the "Buffy" concept's origin. Whedon's screenplay works with a rich stew of blended genres. When approaching and reworking the screenplay (variously in further drafts, preproduction, on the set or in post) Kuzui necessarily made decisions about the attitude and concerns of the piece; that is, with a concept working on so many levels, she had to choose which paths the film would hew to most closely. It is perfectly possible that BtVS could veer into the spirit of magical girl manga, or Elizabethan comedy or supernatural martial arts comedy. Those possibilities are all written into the screenplay, and should we forget the wide genre potentials built into the Buffyverse, Angel starts out as a vampiric noir detective yarn and evolves into Arthurian quest and high fantasy. Kuzui opts to cast BtVS as a very broad comic horror film, farcical cousin to An American Werewolf in London (1981) and Gremlins (1984). This is a perfectly noble tradition in itself and a valid choice, but not the only possibility provided by the script. More pointedly, it is not the direction Whedon would take when revising his concept for the television series.

Whedon has done a fair amount of public grousing about the realization of his screenplay by director Fran Rubel Kuzui. Any number of screenwriters could make similar complaints, of course, and may even release their unsullied screenplays for comparison, but few also have 240 hours of a fleshed-out personalized version of their vision to underline the point. The existence of an alternate take on the concept which — let us just say it — is richer, more ambitious, and frankly superior, tends to shift the authorship over to Whedon. It also puts the writer in position for constant questioning about what went wrong with the movie. The very question implies that Whedon's screenplay is wildly different, indeed better than, more than the film. A quick read confirms a less confused plot and more fully realized mythos were written than play out on screen. A closer study reveals the script is painted impasto-thick with theme and motif which have been excised from the film or survive only with a variation intact, a song with a chorus that arrives only once. These alterations, it must be said, do not serve to streamline the plot, strengthen the narrative backbone, or constrain the running time or budget. So the Whedon sympathizer is prone to speculate that Kuzui did not understand the story she was telling.

A running gag about the school dance's halfhearted environmental theme is entirely lacking in punchline ("What do we do with all these decorations?" "Throw them away!") and its link to Slayer-as-Savior/Protector in the larger scope. The Earth Day jokes in present day link to a Black Plague motif in the History of the Slayer flashback scenes — it's gone, so the link's gone, so the point is, well, it's gone. The relationship between villain and protagonist is muddled to the point of nonsense (more later). Another runner about a coveted yellow leather jacket misses its climax when Buffy is no longer interested in high fashion window shopping, but gazes with desire at a hardware store chainsaw display.

The screenplay begins with a carefully schematized comic action setpiece. In generically dirty Monty Python medieval times Italy, a knight errant enters an inn tended by a disinterested barmaid. A vampire attacks, the knight is helpless, but the barmaid leaps into action. There is a vital element in this sequence which bolsters the intent of the legendary Girl Walks Into an Alley scene: the knight. The clear-cut reversal is written into the scene, and the knight's comparative weakness is crucial in establishing an expectation to subvert. The finished film reworks the scene simply to establish a far-reaching lineage of Slayers, shows one in action, but does not set up the Slayer as a counter-tradition to male heroism. The film never offers a viable decoy male champion, thus cannot illustrate a reversal with any evidence but an imagined audience's presumed sexism. It does set up the Dark Ages Slayer in juxtaposition with Buffy, via sarcastic match cut between a triumpantly hoisted stake and a thrusting pom-pon — effective enough narrative shorthand. Though the shape of the story looks the same, the details pile up or don't pile up and deform the tale's purpose.

There is more to the Joss Whedon writing voice than grammatically inventive pithy teen slang, but that notorious sort of dialogue is, of course, a BtVS hallmark (the beloved "What's the sitch?" is one of the first lines). As with choice Whedon witticisms in Bryan Singer's X-Men (2000), Kuzui does not seem to comprehend the language layers built into the jokes, or at least doesn't choose takes in which her teen performers really nail the lines. This matters because besides stepping on the toes of comedy, it underlines that the actors have a nigh-impossible task. When granted creative control, Whedon's stories take their world, fantasy rules and characters seriously, providing the jokes a context that is, if not relentlessly sober, at least sincere. Kuzui vacillates between cartoonish comedy and action and comparatively overwrought Gothic horror and melodrama. Whedon's vision is an elegant blend of genres, Kuzui's is schizoid and tonally inconsistent.

In metaseries which retell roughly the same tale across multiple media (M*A*S*H to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to Transformers), we often expect the major motion picture incarnation to represent the "ultimate" version of the story. The scale, budget, compacted running time, and inflated expectations of a movie lend themselves to a version playing out as pop myth writ large. In big screen scope, even intimate character stories like The X-Files, or sparely staged idea-dramas like Star Trek tend to inflate their scenarios into legends, characters into IconGods. We might expect Buffy the Vampire Slayer to play out as the concise, focused, distilled but grandest vision of Buffy Summers' story, and the TV show to be the more textured, detailed but smaller-scaled version. Instead the film is the miniature reenactment, the series the epic. The movie is a rinky-dink thumbnail sketch when compared even to the screenplay. The temptation to consider the film a rough draft for the TV show is too great...

The Chain, Take One

If this is a rough draft, then, we should be able to discern the outlines of the more developed product. The basics of Slayer mythos are here: the Chosen One, the Watcher, the vampires. The general shape of Buffy's arc is in place: resistance to the calling, initiation, lifestyle conflict, despair over choicelessness, the forging of choice in the face of bad faith, finally integration, paradigm busting. The Girl and the Slayer make peace.

The eye starts to rove... are embryonic versions of major BtVS character dynamics present, coiled and waiting to pop? Certainly the shifting father figure/codependent pal relationship between Buffy and Giles is established early in the Buffy/Merrick relationship. Everything being large-writ, designed for one-time use, Giles' stuffiness, British gentility and etc. etc. manifest as Merrick's complete disconnect from the modern world — he is immortal, his soul born repeatedly into new bodies but (plausibility iffy here) social skills never upgraded. Giles is Old World, but Merrick is Really Old World. This "immortal Watcher" device is a nascent version of the way the Council of Watchers stands in for patriarchal tradition in the series. Buffy constantly quarrels with Merrick, but the Giles and Council figures being rolled into one, she never really rebuffs him, never breaks ties as spectacularly as with the Council.

The series' full relationship with the film is complex. Mutant Enemy does not wipe the slate entirely, nor are they shy about making bold alterations. Certain elements work in the tightened elbow room of a feature film, and pushing back the heroine's age from senior to sophomore, jettisoning Buffy's caricatured L.A. socialite mom, and the Slayer's abdominal cramping vamp detection system (a wonderful, perfect, audacious touch) provide space for workable long-term replacements. Simultaneously retaining the Movie-Buffy in continuity allows Mutant Enemy to avoid pedantic restaging of the origin story, and to piggyback on the character arc experienced in the film. Movie-Buffy begins as a true Valley Girl stereotype, mired in privileged L.A. mall culture, at the top of the high school social food chain, and exceptionally mean, catty, shallow and stupid. Her dumbness and cruelty are gradually revealed as a sort of choice. Buffy does not need to be smart or empathetic and these qualities are not valued by her peer group. They won't get her anywhere, so she sees no need to develop them. Simply put, being forced into the position of protector of humanity forces Buffy to examine her own humanity. Though nowhere near as bright or perceptive, Buffy starts her arc in roughly the same place as Cordelia Chase (Cordy is shallow, Movie-Buffy is vapid), and is given a similar social clique/chorus of followers. As the television show is constructed, partially acknowledging that the film's events "happened," Mutant Enemy gets to have it both ways: Cordelia can play foil to Buffy, and Buffy can endure a steeper change in character for those who recall the film.


An Exchange of Butts.
Buffy's major internal conflict is rather solved in the finale, though not nearly as gloriously as on the series, where the battle between The Slayer and The Girl is a series of negotiations and metaphor-charged blowouts. Movie-Buffy does integrate headstrong Modern Gal-ness with the warrior tradition on her own terms, but as it is in shorthand, the transformation is neither so big nor so complex. In her final crisis, Movie-Buffy does arrive at the school dance both stag and attempting to ditch The Slayer: she shows up in a bosom-boosting white dress and sans weapons. Scruff-ball love interest Pike gives her the final nudge, accepting both Buffy and the Vampire Slayer — the boy arrives with a kiss and a bag of stakes. It's not so much that Buffy needs final a final seal of male approval so much as that she is encouraged by Pike's receptivity. This would not be a proper climax for the TV show, where Buffy has varied and complicated relationships with the men in her life, and the narrative space to explore them. Pike, in certain light, bundles Buffy's relationships with key series characters Spike, Xander, Riley, and parts of Angel and Giles into one figure, later exploded out into five men's arcs in full. All these fellows are/become comfortable with a woman fighting at their side, most of them to accept that she is stronger. This is not, of course, all they have to offer Buffy, but it is a vital function of Pike in the film. Pike stands in direct contrast to the rest of the boys and vampire-boys of his peer group who can only objectify the cheerleader.


Butt Exchange: Resolution.
The extremely game Luke Perry plays Pike with bad boy appeal — he's an unkempt slacker (Xander), on the fashion fringe and comfortable with a degree of camp in his DNA (Spike; the rest of the comic rough trade swagger is funneled into/out of Paul Reubens as the vampire Amilyn) and gives good mysterious brood while masking insecurities (Angel) — while also being knocked on his ass a dozen times. Had BtVS more bite (sshh) and Beverly Hills 90210 been a larger cultural force, Perry would deserve some kind of award for cheerfully subverting his own pouty teen hearthtrob image. The movie is not as toothsome, the actor not as funny, but for project selection Perry is rather besting the trick Johnny Depp did with Cry-Baby (1990). The screenwriter and Perry are thwarted, but the actor seems to grasp Whedon's intentions. In the vintage EPK preserved on the DVD, Perry gives the only remarkable soundbite, enthusing that his job in the film is to play damsel in distress. In the film's motivating joke, the reversal and demolition of horror tropes, Perry's assessment dead-on. Best gag example: while vamp fighting, Pike and Buffy end up rolling on the ground, stop, girl on top. Did he save her butt? Did she save his butt? "Well. There was sort of an exchange of butts," concedes Pike. He's got it. They've swapped. To this end, Perry plays Pike's coolness and slack-appeal as genuine and his respect for Buffy straight.


Giles would probably not throw a knife at Buffy's head this early in the relationship.
The film's notion that Slayer and Watcher are eternally reincarnated souls (obviously stricken from the TV record) does not seem to originate with Whedon, for the screenplay describes something aligned with television Buffyverse rules. It is problematic, for the Slayer remembers nothing but dream impressions of past lives, while the Watcher retains everything, self-awareness included. Some of Whedon's conflicts with Donald Sutherland revolve around the star rewriting his own dialogue at whim and in ways the writer believed made no sense. This element of the Watcher backstory is very likely a prime example. This inconsistency in logistics may be read another way. Hypothetically, were the Slayer reincarnated with full knowledge and ability, there would be no need for a Watcher. The film provides no origin myth for the Slayer, but the very inclusion of a male Watcher who wields authority over the Slayer implies that the Powers That Be of this world have rigged the game to keep the Slayer in check. Pity that Whedon cannot enjoy it, for Sutherland's performance as Merrick is the film's best. He makes the hoary wise man stuff natural, the fish out of water material funny. Like Perry, Sutherland has a finger on the pulse of his character, even if he found the mythology uninteresting.

She Kicks Its Ass

In the Universe's carnival, the squirrels wear tutus.
The grandest muddle of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is at the center of the plot, as globetrotting, centuries-old Vampire King Lothos arrives in L.A. to menace the latest Slayer. Kuzui's choice to have Kristy Swanson play all versions of the Slayer gives this element of the story a slight boost, lending the feeling that the whole cast is just reciting the latest verse of a song that never ends. Rutger Hauer looks puffed and tired in Halloween cape, costume jewelry and unflattering mustache, but acts at full bore, as if his dialogue about linked destinies, inexplicable violin playing, and one-sided romantic link to the Slayer make any damn kind of sense.


JOINED?
There will be exploration in the TV mythos of power dynamics which echo through the halls of eternity. But the film offers nothing so elegant as Spike's poetic episode-long monologue on the hunter-beast waltz in "Fool for Love" or Holland Manners' discourse with Angel on Existentialist ethics in an elevator in "Reprise". A best guess is that BtVS is shooting for something like this, and either Whedon aims too high or Kuzui too low. Lothos' forever-task being to confront, confound, and destroy the Slayer, he goes to enormous lengths to throw himself in Buffy's path. He works overtime to orchestrate their face to face meeting, preps to eat her, then changes his mind for no discernible reason. The excuse that "she's not ready" is intriguing, but goes nowhere. Lothos forestalls the conflict until later, again insists they are "joined" (even Buffy doesn't know what to make of this, and with grossed-out face: "Joined?")... and gives utterly baffling speeches in which he fights Buffy with a sword then announces "I could never hurt you... I'm gonna send you to the pits of Hell!" (... Joined?) Again, a guess. Has Lothos been killing Slayers so long that he simply feels obligated? Or gone mad and believes he is fulfilling a cosmic role? Or in communion with greater forces confirming this duty? No telling. Lothos lacks any apparent motivation beyond vaguely indicated pattern of repetition. Rather than potent subtext, this can only read as storytelling contrivance. Metafictionalists from Resnais to Antonioni to De Palma might make this a theme unto itself but... nah, it's just sloppy storytelling.


The Master, Angel and Spike X 2, First Pass. Includes bonus/confused multiple Christ symbols.
In the rearview, Lothos obviously contains the seeds of Season One villain The Master, a vampire cult leader who appears in prophecy and whose presence forces Buffy to fulfill her role in the same (see under: "Prophecy Girl", no less); The Master is locked beneath Sunnydale for a century, as if waiting to synch up with Buffy's stride. Their fates are bound like Lothos and Movie-Buffy's are implied to be "joined." Lothos appears in Buffy's dreams as potential lover. In the film's only eerie sequence, Buffy's vulnerable, nightgown'd dream self leans back in bed, not noticing that she is snuggling into the Vampire King's embrace. Lothos is, then, also proto-Angel, star-aligned lover (metaphorically on film, literally on TV) whose darkness gives Buffy a brutal push into the light and ultimately provides some strength and motivation in breaking the Slayer paradigm. We may see a pinch of Spike, too, in Lothos' otherwise nonsensical obsession with the linked fates of Slayer and Vampire. If Spike called it a dance, then Lothos plays the tune on his fiddle.


Amazon. Jungle. Keen fashion sense.
And there is a Buffy at the center of this whirl, golden, health-glowing Kristy Swanson. Gaspingly funny when deadpanning "What a homeless!" at her first glimpse of Merrick, and affecting when mourning her Watcher's death, Swanson makes a bold and vigorous Buffy. This is Movie-Buffy as written. Of all the inevitable comparisosn, Swanson to Sarah Michelle Gellar is the least fair. Swanson's Buffy has neither Gellar's wrenching vulnerability, petite frame, or sparkly, wiry verve, but she needs none of it: that's TV-Buffy. What Swanson does have is a completely different comic bounce, and in her few opportunities to plumb for tenderness and pathos, she wrings as much out of the scenes as is possible. Here is a genre satire about those blonde sexpots that walk into alleys and are punished for being blonde girls in alleys. The television series will rotate this concept in every possible direction, but for this straightforward inversion of tradition, Swanson is the more intuitively correct Buffy. Had the film gone for the mythic, fated tone of the screenplay — and even in its final, compromised state — Swanson's take makes perfect sense. Athletic, strong-boned, sexed-up and sweaty, she is a goddess-Buffy, idealized and ideal.

Once upon a time, a blonde girl walked into an alley... It always starts this way.

Who Is the Coolest?: Lee Marvin’s Shirttails in BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (1955)

The geography for the stage of Bad Day at Black Rock (1955, set in 1945) is a massive barbell, choked in the middle by the single street of Black Rock, opening at either end into dusty orange desert vistas. John J. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) arrives by ghost train at one end of the street, wanders back and forth to solve a mystery that resides somewhere in the wasteland at the other end. There is a story of the hard, bitter little city, the sins of all one-dozen-or-so residents, and the status of a missing Japanese farmer given the improbable name “Komoko”; this is the narrative meat proper, but the skeleton of Black Rock is filled out -- or picked away and revealed -- as the camera approaches each of these desert lizard-people as mysteries unto themselves. Macreedy is the town’s first visitor in four years, and the locals hate him before he steps into town, eyeing the slowing train with silent panic and confusion. Once they have to interact with him, every conversation is an exercise in concealing data, lying, talking circles around the topic. Getting information out of these people is like pulling teeth, and even the small talk is a particularly harsh enamel scraping.

So this is the shape of the Bad Day, Macreedy pacing and studying the land, everyone engaged in a game of Who Is the Coolest?, until all players crack and all secrets are outed. Each piece of character backstory or nugget of truth about their universe is hard won -- by Macreedy in most rounds, though sometimes he has to give some ground in the short view so an opponent will lower his guard. Who he is and what he wants, being the question actively playing on every set of lips in Black Rock, are the cards Macreedy won’t show until absolutely necessary. The allegorical wireframe about quiet, stoic heroism and insulated communities who poison their own wells is overlaid with the paper-mâché skin of its residents and weather-blasted buildings. The Bad Day is about a lot of things, macro and micro: the interment of Japanese-Americans during the second World War, the Hollywood blacklist, American racism, mob violence, the myth of the American West and various untenable molds of masculinity. The story in whole chews on these thoughts, the scenes are of people chewing on each other. So after a fashion, Bad Day’s scenes are driven by a question which is not “What Happened to Komoko?” but: “Who Is the Coolest?” This death match is determined through the gradual accumulation of curious details, actorly peculiarities; the Bad Day is the process of grit settling into grooves.

Macreedy keeps one -- presumably useless -- arm stiff at his side, fist shoved deep into jacket pocket. Unseasonable black off-the-rack suit adhering to his torso, Macreedy’s sweat soaks through the fabric as he ambles about in the blazing sun; Tracy looks like a baked potato seeping butter through aluminum foil wrapping as he rolls about on a very large grill. He makes some kind of point of remaining uncomfortable in the heat, ordering hot coffee at lunch to accompany a bowl of chili, and later claims he is the kind of man who has “never thought much” about lemonade. In that particular competition, Macreedy wins against a nerve-jangled telegraph operator in just a few moves, and the poor fellow is starry-eyed in terror that he has met a man who has never even thought about lemonade.

Pete Wirth (John Ericson who later teamed up with Anne Francis again for Honey West on TV), the dumbbell hotel clerk seems to want to deny Macreedy a room because he makes a visual rhyme with the “one-armed bandit” slot machine in the corner. In an entrancing bit of business, Tracy opens a fresh pack of cigarettes with one hand. There is dialogue, perhaps it is even plot-related, but the whole picture is suddenly about the tension and marvel of Macreedy popping the wrapper and biting off confetti strips of the inner foil, spitting the paper to the floor.

The back of Lee Marvin’s shirt refuses to stay tucked into his pants throughout the day. He fixes it at least twice, and it flaps around like a lazy flag. It is not really a wonder, since Marvin keeps covertly maneuvering his big log-limbed scarecrow body into contorted positions. Here his angry idiot ranch hand, called Hector, sprawls half-propped-up across Macreedy’s rented bed. James Dean strikes a similar pose in Giant, lazily stretching across the width of the screen, a little house on the horizon appearing to plop into his lap; Hector has climbed inside that building, legs poking out the windows like a cowpoke Alice in Wonderland, as Macreedy studies him, a sedated Bill the lizard. In another interesting shot, Hector leans his elbow against a wall some four feet away from his torso, surely providing more stress on his frame than relief. Hector picks postures for maximum silhouette impact. Hector has the moves and spirit of intimidation down flat, his signature feint being to act weird and simmer with vaguely motivated violence. But he gets flummoxed fast, mainly by Macreedy’s technique of questioning the literal logic of any insinuated threat. Long enough to look like he’s going to bow the hotel bed, boots surely ruining the bedspread, and glowering intently at his burning cigarette, Hector’s materialization in Macreedy’s room is a calculated intrusion of lanky non sequitur. In this match, Hector loses, unable to be more startling than an old man in a bathrobe who refuses to act the least bit surprised.

Meanwhile, Ernest Borgnine as Coley chortles and bounces about like a fleshy rubber ball with a grinning, google-eyed goblin face painted on it. He is giggly with delight over the opportunity to bully anyone, as if he has been deprived of opportunity for years. Macreedy stares at Coley, memorizes his opponent’s malevolent hop-about, until Coley dances to the end of his chain, and lashes out in a vehicular attack on a desert road, and in a perhaps even greater violation, dumps a whole bunch of ketchup all over Macreedy's chili. Macreedy seems to endure the outbursts only to gather facts and figures, place the violence in a diagram of Coley’s attack pattern. Next time the issue is raised, Macreedy swats Coley out of the way like a slow-pitch softball. It's one-armed judo precision against an inept berserker telegraphing his moves.

John J. Macreedy makes his way to the outskirts of Black Rock, to the ruins of Komoko’s farm at Adobe Flats. He paces. He crouches. He studies the depth of a well, the composition of the dirt, the flora of the area. It takes three minutes, and he has sized up the situation. Adobe Flats gives up all the backstory that the citizens will not; the dirt and plants and rocks and holes do not care who is coolest.

“I believe a man is as big as what'll make him mad,” Reno Smith tells Macreedy. The town heavy is Robert Ryan, whose career-long refinement of tough-souled goodies and baddies suppressing a psychotic streak is distilled into this pared-away Big Boss tyrant. Reno holds the town in hand by virtue of a few more IQ points, and at least understands the game they are playing. Do not flinch, do not back away, do not break eye contact first: Who is the Coolest? He is actually “mad” all the time, constantly fuming at flunkies Coley and Hector, and the entire colony of Black Rock. What he really means, though, is that man-size is determined by what makes a fellow completely lose his shit. For Reno, and by his own account, it took Pearl Harbor. So he’s at least as big a man as the entire country. And what’s bigger than that? For Macreedy, it takes the whole of the species’ fears, cowardice, inhumanity and intolerance.

Both men have already erupted in loud preaching, but only one lost an arm fighting for the country; the other incited a mob to murder. Reno gives a flame-eyed speech about desire to protect the Western country he knows, while Macreedy’s righteous rant is truly about personal bravery and individuality, his breaking point breached when the nitwit hotel clerk is too chickenshit to stand up for himself. When these symbolmen finally duke it out, it’s Reno the enraged, irrational, indignant going nuts with a gun, while Macreedy, beleaguered and persecuted, defends himself with methodical Molotov cocktails. All speechifying becomes irrelevant. Everything they mean and stand for is observable in how they fight, defined by their combat in the last round of Who is the Coolest? If Reno is the Big Boss of Black Rock, Macreedy has him beat. He’s bigger than the whole damned town.

Meanwhile, Hector’s shirttails flop out again, and billow in the hot breeze.