thedigestedfilm

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Colonization and Family in “Timbuktu” (2014)

Innocence is madeillicit in the gaze of the guilty man. To forbid but practice exposes the fragile authority of anenforcer.  When an aggressor imposeslimitations and does not judge himself against them, he is theuninvited and dangerous hypocrite.  Failure to himself adapt to his own message adds to the colonial message’s corruption, as this noncompliance by the enforcer mocks the purpose of forcing othersto comply.  “Timbuktu” shows the irony of subjugation and non-adoption by the subjugators: their presence is a pestilence that identifies and defines sin in fluctuations. The fist of Sharia law is a confusing punisher, as it decrees acts as haram but its agents participate in them. (Football is banned, but the jihadist’s water-cooler talk is about the Champions League.)  Even while we see humor in their corrupt logic, the jihadist’s plan is suffocating: they conquer through the erasure of culture.  The film’s first act of violence is to destroy the art, the icons, of the culture they are oppressing.  Like a parent hiding a cigarette from a child, the message lampoons its dangerous enforcer, but the colonialist is the perpetual, evil threat. 

Like the fate of Kino, Juana and Coyotito in Steinbeck’s “The Pearl,” familial peace cannot survive the colonial chomp in “Timbuktu.” The stalled song of the community and the destruction of a family is the jihadist’s sickening victory against culture. “Tire it; don’t kill it,” or: erase the culture to control it. To the extremists, an imam says he wages a jihad against himself, for his moral development, but the imam’s wisdom fails to impact the colonizers in the film. The imam’s sincerity is frighteningly dismissed and in “Timbuktu:” we see the fog of colonization dampen, damage, and will they eventually destroy a culture? 

“Tire it; don’t kill it;” the town’s new lords taunt from the back of a Toyota as they hunt, and will ultimately overpower, a gazelle.  The gazelle’s defeat is not shown, nor is another death that represents the choke-hold of the extremist to the community. A family on the fringe is not remote enough to escape the danger of those that enter waving a black-and-white credo.  Toya’s death is the film’s absent final act: what future does a loving family have when the colonialist arrives?

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Passion in "The Secret in Their Eyes" (2009)

“The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.” - Requiem for a Nun

A haunted life is a paused life.  The world moves, but the man in crisis does not change.  His irrationality makes a marionette where the world sees a man.  An individual can cage others in a plot manufactured to attend his single perversion. Sandoval speaks the film’s thesis: “one can change everything… but there’s one thing he can’t change.  He can’t change his passion.”  A man who cannot master his passion becomes destructive.  Unalterable, the tempest ravages where the monster in man is released.  Lives rot and stall because obsession unlocks a dark chaos that our civilized state wishes to remove us from.  The haunted passion freezes life’s potentiality: as the protagonist, Benjamin, looks back, he forwards himself towards awareness.  What he does is purposeful, unlike the antagonist, whose impulsive actions are odd causes of stagnation, siphoning more control over the controlled antagonist and keeping him inert.  An evil person imprisoned in the vendetta of his passion is responsible for the cancer he creates.  Where amnesia is absent and memory permanent, desperation rises and the problem for one becomes the cellulite and decay of many- investigator Benjamin and the widowed Ricardo suffer the effects of the antagonist’s demons.  The demons of one influence the others.  Even if dormant by the busy distractions of our life, a passion always pulses, always stresses one into its service.  Benjamin, wonders how a man moves on from crisis, but a man does not.  If crisis has become passion, or if passion was always a crisis, man will not move on.  We are historians of our flawed memories.  Pregnant pauses bring pain: the pauses are moments where eyes speak a truth because the only safe expression is the one our eyes betray.  Each moment is life recorded and whether we publish our desires or hide them, our memories are the evidentiary sighs of what we have wanted.  Some move on, some forget but silence, omission, does not mean recovery.  Distance does not mean absence.  “Don’t think anymore” becomes the advice of the dedicated, but all the dedicated can do is think, calculate, obsess. 

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Mystery in "Twin Falls Idaho" (1999)

Compassion twists curiosity and we mistake observation for participation. When their every moment is a physical partnership, the brothers in “Twin Falls Idaho” are literal life-forces.  Like notes in a song, the conjoined are dependent on the other: the stronger the strain in the composition, the more responsibility is tacked to that piece of the music.  Brothers living a fractured and perpetual harmony: the womb’s mystery is their reality.  They are curiosities because they appear vulnerable, they appear incomplete.  To the world, the Falls’ irregularity incites their exploitation, as the unexpected in them seems, to everyone else, to desire a solution. Mystery silences; the mystery is more interesting than the individuals.  The movie wonders if we want to be unsettled: in the Falls’ brothers return home, they challenge their exotic draw.  The brothers are private but life as a mystery leads to a revealing; after Francis’ death, Blake says what the brothers wanted was to not be treated as a curiosity that should desire its freedom.  They didn’t want to be treated like they are damaged.  Blake and Francis inherit a stage with their body; their shared center becomes every room’s center, something that won’t be ignored. Will Blake work without Francis?  Could one live without the other: would one want to?  The connection between Francis and Blake surpasses biology: it is a connection born of a shared history, a shared rejection and stigmatization (first by their mother and then as carnival oddities).  Their togetherness was a problem for the world; without Francis, Blake’s new life must reconcile a profound loss, an amputation of a person and not a part.  

Discomfort forms when the world believes it has been betrayed by nature, but where the world places stigma, the world does not always cheapen.  Life is a negotiation of the private and the public: the difficulty for Blake and Francis is the world experiences their connection and cannot fathom their comfort.  As everyone else wonders what’s it like to never be alone, an audience builds around the brothers.  What is a leeching curiosity for others is a rejected spectacle by Blake and Francis.

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Decay in "Mood Indigo" (2014)

We never dismiss time.  Decay is guaranteed- every magical and every ordinary thing stops.  Tragedy occurs when you expect a comedy; "Mood Indigo" gives us an broken end to an anxious movie.  Visual poetry becomes corrupted into the heartache of a decayed poem.  The dissatisfied man wants and the gluttonous man focuses on the absent rather than the present.  Consumption and obsession twine, the addictive personality is separated, almost repulsively, by anything disassociated from intake: everything declines.  “Mood Indigo’s” curved world suffers because whimsy does not escape time’s certain boundary.  Romance, the desired condition of the young, becomes a limit: there are those in love and those out of love.  Love is satisfaction and dissatisfaction; the film’s center is marriage but before it occurs and after it occurs, there is division.  Marriage a literal race and the period after overwhelms and splits nature, it rains on one side of the scene and is sunlit on the other.  This instability is the delight and life of love, but also directs love’s breaking.  Even the happiest moments must submit.  Chick's character draws finality and destruction by carnate philosophy: the character ingests texts into a twisted and unbroken union.  “Til death do us part” is the devotion and reality of Chick and Parte and the absent ceremony of their pairing shows the disjointing of the romantic and inventive Colin.  Colin’s life shrinks and becomes absence, as Chick’s obsession with Parte is fatal: it will result in the death of Chick’s four co-workers, Parte, Alise, and Chick.  Is the obsession also responsible for Chloe’s illness and Colin's decline?  Chloe and Colin compliment each other – their engagement coincides with Colin giving Chick the money that will tragically feed the Parte obsession and guarantees the already failing relationship of Alise and Chick.  We don’t abandon people (or ideals) when we should and our world can darken as a result.  The film’s tragedy is of a world of possibility graying, where everything musical and flavorful recedes into a claustrophobic fate.  The world fades: decay of space, color, health, setting and person.  Things are sucked into each other: Gouffe disappears, Nicolas ages, Chloe weakens, lovers separate.  The stages of decay crush and drown, but through art the tale is told.  For the film, Chloe's voice in through her pictures, translated into word by the film's circular chorus of typewriters.  As brightness is now absence, the lovers split, and everything in their experience altered.

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What Work Does in "Yves Saint Laurent" (2014)

Fashion evolves and so does love.  Attachment and style are complimentary – there are dated pieces we hold onto because we might wear them again and there are pieces that we know we have to remove because we’ll never have need of them again.  Relationships are affected by the creative habit because work defines the artist.  The designer branches out but the designer’s essentials appear in every collection; he will go back to what he personally and esthetically needs.  No amount of radicalization will eliminate his classic and earliest voice; an inventor changes but there is no distance between him and what he makes. Without a product, the creative person fails.  Functionality demonstrates genius; the timeline of a relationship can be an artist’s inelegant masterpiece.  A designer lives in seasons: everything in his life must be aware of division.  Chasing ideals processes people into muse or demon, the celebrated and the rejected; the strained life of the creator emerges in the created and designer will turn his back on his past, only to re-find it.  Beauty is betrayed, in art and love, when decadence is disguised as elegance- the weight of an icon invites pained pleasure.  Celebrity’s glamour is in its extremes and voyeurism can romanticize decline.  As the artist’s relationships change, new eras grow: Yves Saint Laurent’s journey is marked by art emerging after separation, after his relationships endure change (from childhood home, Dior’s mentorship, his friendship with Victorie and the distance that grows between him and Pierre).  What is constant in Yves’ life is the work: as Yves replaces shyness with boldness, confidence with destructive indulgence, work continues to find an artist even in his most complicated years.  Work can escape the artist but the artist cannot escape work: breaks feed panic and creativity.  The loyalty that the designer has given to his vocation confirms itself in the moving beauty of the end’s elegantly chaotic final runaway show: this is not the film’s last image, but it is the last living image of the artist it celebrates.  Triumphant humility reconnect the mythologized designer to his driven youth; his service to beauty enables and challenges him to find himself in the creation of himself.  Creativity can return us to what we’ve always loved.      

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The Wanderer in "Inside Llewyn Davis" (2013)

An artist’s vision is both his gift and enemy: what he sees, many desire but few understand the sacrifices involved in a craft.  Even if he is surrounded by similar pursuants, the imagination can isolate the unyielding person in his stubbornness.  Art is flexible- it finds a medium and can destroy and surpass it, but if the creative person cannot bend where needed, one is stuck.  An inspired voyager needs an anchor, he needs confidence, or risks obscurity.  Talent is communal: the outsider uses it to connect the world and his construction.  Danger for the artist is in making recognition for what he creates his sole need, but recognition is also his way of communicating to the same world he backs away from.  Expression can become a choke where it should be a breath if the artist cannot also be a pragmatist.

Artists can be emptied to the point of a bleeding; their designs have fed others.  A flawed audience, the Gorfeins, gently request that the creator sing for his supper.  The lashing out that follows is the frustrated voice of every stunted talent.  After a partnership with a fifty percent suicide rate, the processed recording and Llewyn Davis survive.  Llewyn’s voyage is from duo to independent: he continues to follow a course that has already failed.  A hardened dreamer imprisons himself as he both identifies with his dream and is troubled by it.  Jean tells him, “You don’t want to go anywhere and that’s why the same shit’s gonna keep happening to you, because you want it to:” failure can become its own sickening, cyclical process.  Prometheus moves and stays, the disappointed visionary strains himself out of a future, his life becomes a creative and repeated act of his mistakes, plugging the artist into mediocrity.  Beaten in every sense by his impotent success, Prometheus protests.  He contributes to destroying his vision in not accepting opportunities to achieve it: Llewyn opts out of royalties on a recording not just because he needs the money, but the song is acquiescence.  He ignores the compromise of participating in the song by not accepting the total fruits of it; his audition with Grossman is failed as an independent, but Grossman gives him a chance in a trio.  Llewyn rejects because the offer, and ultimately the man for making it, is gross: it should not be ignored that the actor who played Salieri, an artist frustrated by his inadequacies in “Amadeus,” now plays a man offering artistic compromise. Groups, however, are over for Llewyn after his partner’s death: he repeats the mistake of a failed band by not participating in its formation, he aborts it.  A dream is deferred by the lie of the romanticized struggle and the disconnected artist left to wonder how he got there, unaware that it was by his own hand.  An outsider who gets there by a fallen dream will not find a way out of failure. 

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Survival in "Calvary" (2014)

Every generation sees itself as an improvement of the old.  Aging is decay and youth is a ripening: the young will challenge the old.  Youth’s purpose is to filter the past and distinguish themselves from their predecessors.  Adoption or disposal of the past preserves culture.  Friction interprets what will remain contemporary and what the young will drop as obsolete.  As the divide among age groups measures itself, functional roles in a community face revision.  Disillusionment occurs during this editing because it is unknown what will drop and what will remain.  Those unready for change will suffer what has been lost.  “Calvary” examines the impact of anxiety on the young who have been damaged by the old generation: an Ireland that faces the future requests answers from its Catholic past.  When the giants that were at the center of a culture have failed, what will allow them to stay?  Infancy ends and challenges that could have once been profane are now the encouraged pub talk.  Emptiness is romanticized and organization vilified: confessions are made by the impenitent to a priest that continues to believe in both the power of his role and the role of the church.  One character says “memories fade: that’s what’s terrible about them,” but “Calvary” shows, even in its title, that as a personal or as a public history, memory is eternal.  History is weaponized against those who once shaped history: a painting becomes a price tag and the past is pissed on.  When the film’s climax occurs, it is no accident that a child is present and in the middle of interpreting the world because innocence, as inexperience or guiltlessness, is always targeted.  Religion forms the context of the movie and betrayal is its center.  Crisis of faith is not a personal struggle where religion once governed: it is a communal crisis. Anxiety is a literal cannibal facing its old custodian, testing the relationship of the virtuous as it meets the corrupt it couldn’t save.  Can a group siphoned into cliché by those cynical of its past survive the next age? We don’t find an answer in the cynic: we find it in the believer. 

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly | Sergio Leone | 1966

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Creativity in "Transformers: Age of Extinction" (2014)

Awareness will invite paranoia.  Observation leads to discussion: when attuned to one’s existence, one will fear a stronger creature that shares consciousness.  A newt will never create a bomb or and an ant-hill won’t rival the Sistine Chapel: we do not fear life, even if it highly organized, if it does not have the capacity to control us.  The world’s history understands subjugation; civilizations are squashed in the name of progress.  Worlds shatter if the perceived (or proclaimed) ruler faces jurisdiction by a new superior.  The “Transformers” series comfortably places sovereign might into a reluctant but congenial guest.  Superpowers, it argues, can be judicious.  In balancing the emerged protector and the home-team as protected, a childlike relationship forms.  Autobots protect humanity because their leader sees our potentiality.  Like the anxious father acquiescing to his daughter’s independence, Optimus Prime accepts humans while still struggling with their dependence and problematic rejection of him.  No longer the unchecked masters of our world, the humans, cognizant of their unbalancing supremacy, inherit skepticism.  They distance themselves from their Autobots in a mixture of caution and awe and those villain emerges when one seeks to understand the new superiors only to reestablish human superiority.  This greed risks tainting how we view ourselves; the film gives us a less-awe inspiring, but still dominant, mascot.  The audience cheers for Bumble Bee because he charismatically reminds them of their on-screen parallels.  Sensitive, fiery and loyal: we aspire to share Bumble Bee’s passion and we never forget that he is on our / their side.  “Transformers” reminds us of the literal cages we submit ourselves (and those we can unethically dominate) in the hopes of advancement and consumerism.  The designer that creates the film's conflict has both a poster of Albert Einstein and a series of pictures of himself in the style of Steve Jobs; “Transformers” asks the viewer what are the consequences when creativity becomes a set of chains?      

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Breaking the Waves | Lars von Trier | 1996

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The Rascal in "Los Tres Huastecos" (1948)

Societies embrace rascals, as escape and leadership are partnered in the rascal.  By integrating into a culture, a prankster serves the community he challenges.  His is a middle ground between self-interest and cultural responsibility; in tolerating the rascal, a culture defines the villain based on what the prankster can do.  Destruction is the villain’s trade, while play governs the rascal.  Through charisma and creativity, the rascal becomes Huasteca’s crowning achievement, while the villain is rejected.

Cuco is the film’s clown and center.  With wit, clown navigates each rung of the city’s hierarchy by both knowing how different members should be treated and then actually acting in a way that serves him first.  Culture happens because of Cuco; his deficient musical ability provides a comedic cloud opposite the musical genius around him.  By messing up, he brightens the stage for the talented.  Chicanery is an avenue and a pardon.  To bend the rules, Cuco must know them.  We forgive and even love Cuco for stealing from the church’s till, because we know that he knows he shouldn’t do it.  This introspective ballet endears the rascal, as his mistakes can become his improvements.

In the three brothers, we have the three portraits the rascal.  Rascals let us in, even by abrupt discovery of their plots.  We are allowed to participate with them, even if we laugh at them.  Maritona and Victor’s courtship is a delight for the town, it spices Huasteca’s life.  They serenade each other; even in an insult, they produce the poetical.  Their love invites the town to witness it; they are united before they even drive off together at the film’s end.  In them, we see that the rascal is not an isolated outsider.

Lorenzo is nearly a villain because he wants to reject Huasteca.  The town confuses him for El Coyote because he does not correct them; he inspires a fearful portrait because it keeps everyone away.  Who he really is, an indulgent and negligent father, keeps him from isolation.  His daughter is also a rascal, crying when she does not kill him after attempting to shoot him.  After his wife’s death, they are pair of open wounds that are at risk of going septic. Lorenzo’s criminal stigma leans him further toward villainy than his brothers, but he escapes it. Lorenzo both promotes the myth of a brooding tough guy and sings for the bar patrons: he brings flavor to the city. 

The brothers inspire each other and Juan de Dios’s religious position makes his the most complex mischiefs.  He is the first brother to employ a disguise and adopt the identity of another brother; Juan de Dios can extend outside of himself and confuse others in the pursuit of goodness. He is imaginative and righteous; he can be shocked and he can shock.  By taking Cuco’s instrument and being meant to end its cacophony, Juan insteads heightens it into artistry.  While remaining custodian of the town’s sacred, Juan de Dios maintains his impishness.  He shines when he sings and misbehaves.   

Brother follows brother: El Guero sings the audience no songs, he creates a challenge that endangers Huasteca.  In his defeat, three rascals prove indispensable to each other and their village.        

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Reflection During Crisis in "Wild Strawberries" (1957)

Man is tasked with reflection.  His life is limit and freedom, condition and rebellion.  It is in forgiveness that man can give the damaged family a reset key.  Forgiveness does not eliminate, but its position of concession and humility returns both the man and the family to the oddly limited and free moment of birth. We must remember in order to forgive.  A family’s history is its verdict. Generation inherits the ability to improve or degrade their assigned history.  Our participation in a shared calendar can occur as an absence.  The matriarch of the Borg family testifies to the cold history the Borgs have adopted.  Removal and silence are answers; even inaction is a response. 

We fear intuition: Isak Borg’s first dream, after his confession of loneliness and disappointment, explains the direction of his life.  He answers the funeral in his dream in acceptance of quest. The chessboard he hesitates to engage in his study, but the one which attracts his attention, symbolizes how man must react to circumstances of chance and choice.  We become our habits, and for Isak to ignore his dreams would keep him and the family static.  The film’s message is in the professor’s acceptance of quest.  The degree he will receive is not only a mark of his accomplishments, but a call to correct.  Isak Borg and Marianne Borg are called to each other because the message the universe has for them as individuals also influences the Borg family.  The set of hitchhikers they collect provide their two possibilities.  Young Sara’s set showcases sweet frivolity and cold confusion.  The debate of God versus science concedes in a disrupted fight between two love rivals; this unfinished contest is a mirror of Sara’s ambiguous attachment to the rivals.  In the end, she tells Isak it is he she loves: the conflicts we seek or those that see us as their centers can lead us to acts of grace.  Sara's admission occurred after chance meeting but would not occur without Isak’s decision to accept her. They meet after he revisits the Sara of his youth's disappointment, the Sara who rejected his love. Accepting Sara, Isak surpasses time; she is his connection to his youth and a hope for the Borg family. 

Bitterness is cancerous; in a marriage, it metastasizes negative possibility into unhappy reality.  Existence is exhaustion for those who will not evaluate themselves.  The second couple that joins Isak and Marianne create a cancer of their marriage, as it is rooted in the failure of self-reflection.  They are cut from Isak and Marianne’s journey; to keep them in the car would derail the Borg quest.  Their meeting is a derailment, the consequence of a crash.  This poisoned couple is a parallel for the Borg marriages: the present Borgs accept the encounter as an invitation to self-forgiveness.  To ignore our emotionality, including our rages and our disappointments, is to submit to the grave.  Marianne must reflect on the lowest point of her marriage and the potential disruption of it if she is to recreate it.  Isak must replay the humiliations of his life, the reasons for his coldness, if he is to be released from them.  This uneasy journey resets the familial clock; the family will not limit itself to the cold and faceless future that Mother Brog’s faceless ancestral watch inspires.  Sara, Isak and Marianne have formed their own bond, their own family and they have given the future Borg in Marianne’s womb a clearer, but not necessarily clean, slate.   

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Sexual Sacrifice in "Nosferatu" (1922 - English subtitles)

Vampires ignore our feces: they produce us into feces, remainders of our animation.  We are prized for what we provide.  This parasitic exchange concedes our wholeness while bridging the predator’s life between abortion and power.  Our vitality endangers us, as it amplifies the predator’s gratification and strength: we are leeched on because we live.  Incompleteness desires completeness and youth, noted by our blood, reverses deficiency.  The predator warps the sexual act when he targets the human, as the parasite magnifies the youth of his prey; a feast results on the blooming by the grayed.  In an act that breaches natural and moral boundaries, the vampire preys as a conditional creature.  Greedy preservation muted by a regulated immortality; immortality decreed to obey rules or risk termination.  Dracula lives inverted, requiring a coffin to allow longevity while remembering his human death.  Soil is life giving, but what arises from the Nosferatu’s soil is a plague.  Rather than crave sun, the interred must avoid it.  Rather than water, the entombed seeks blood.  Vampire sprouts plague and the motivator for his destruction.  Dracula is the enemy of fertility and youth, he is masturbation and sexual exploitation.  Like a pedophile, Dracula’s condition makes him supernaturally superior to the vulnerable. 

A twisted lifecycle permits the monster, and twisting the sexual act ends it.  Nina’s sexual sacrifice follows its own rules, her success depends on her purity and availability: to become a threat, she can pose no threat.  Prior to the attack, she is the sedated child in bed, having gone with her husband (here in a role as father) to watch over her slumber.  Harker dozes in the chair across from Nina, and he is the loving guardian who takes precautions against the victimizer.  Life tailors itself to the presence of the hunter.  To defend, one submits.  Renfield, the count’s human protector, is willful submission.  He is both a victim and groomer of other victims.  Harker is made accessible by Renfield and Harker does not acknowledge the signs of his victimization.  Acknowledging the signs acknowledges the trauma, and Harker cannot confess what he endures. In the letter to Nina, he both downplays his injury and accidentally heightens her susceptibility.  What will be required of Nina exceeds Renfield and Harker’s role – Nina submits her integrity.

“Nosferatu” is a story of odds against purity.  Purity is the absence of taint, it is uncheapened completeness.  Defeating the creature requires the physical and moral degeneration of the pure: Nina is drawn to the vampire because he is forbidden; when she reads “The Book of Vampires,” she stretches herself to power of the forbidden.  The movie is the hunt between the two, and a dual destruction follows.  Theirs is a union, a sexual act in the intimacy of the union’s setting, the penetration and bodily fluid transmitted between the too, the desirability of the victim, the act’s required purity of the female, and the husband’s cuckoldry.  Nina’s sacrifice makes her into a hunter.  She slays in her submission.  The film’s continued use of the stronger feeding on the weak is an arrow to Nina.  She is the film’s Venus fly trap; she is sexual destruction.       

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TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE

this is brilliant. you will watch it. 

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Surrogacy in “The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari” (1920)

Outsiders lead or sway.  Rejection shapes a villain; exclusion finds an aggressor.  For those who question their leaders, realms of independence are coveted: for the unstable, they are disease masked as cure.  Reality becomes immaterial to the volatile when a dream state promises autonomy.  Daydreamers are scorned for excess and celebrated. We romanticize submergence in dreams as a lessening of responsibility, a temporary separation from reality to survive the tedious.  We are expected to bounce back from dreams, or risk rejection from society.  The lunatic finds his creation a reality.  To replace the real with one’s creation is to place the self against society.

“The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari” could just as easily be called “Caesare,” as he is the movie’s key.  Surrogacy lessens the outsider’s torment.  Like Alice dozing off in the garden to distance herself from her sister, Caesare arrives to show confined man and restructure man’s confinement.  Our narrator, Francis, is here with a story and the loneliness he experiences he drapes over his narrative.  Giving himself a friend (who will be murdered) and a fiancé (who will remain distant), Francis is powerless at narrating a happy life for himself.  His surrogate, Caesare, warps his condition, but does not escape it.  The film is his fairy tale, the one he tries to convince us (and himself) of.  “Spirits surround us”: is this line, by an older man who sits next to Francis as he narrates (partnered to show Francis’ desire for acceptance and companionship) a part of our narrator’s delusion or excluded from it? Are these spirits or Francis’ awareness of his incredulity?

Dr. Caligari is the demonized surrogate of the caretaker.  Francis fashions a menace; authority is a challenge and authority must be challenged.  The doctor’s place in the delusion is as surrogate of Francis’ institutionalization.  By controlling Caesare, Dr. Calgari exercises rebellion against the larger authority of the state.  Rulers are enemies; control results in hostility because Francis’ outsider status rejects normalcy.  There is no appropriate treatment for Francis until the film’s end; the doctor doesn’t know what’s wrong with him until that point and was unable to treat him.  What Francis has in his story is a reason to distrust and reject his caretaker because the doctor has failed. He will fail his doctor. Francis’ paranoia finds surrogates in the mobs he places within his narrative; the doctors that work with Caligari are the ones that help discover his secrets.  They hunch over his desk and documents, with Francis, they figure out the doctor, surmise his condition in a way that Francis cannot be understood until the film’s end.  This examination of the doctor’s life is one that a patient like Francis would have undergone, invasive and without a hypothesis or success.  Authority and control create a villain; in Caesare, Dr. Caligari succeeds in testing a hypothesis but the man he stands in place of has no hypothesis for Francis.  The test on Caesare (taken from another Caligari) makes Francis’ Dr. Caligari a success, and in the process, of repeating the Monk’s method, the doctor cares for patient, as he both feeds Caesare and guards him.  Caesare’s condition, even with this care, is deplorable because it eliminates Caesare’s will; unchecked participation equates with destruction.  While Caesare is able to betray his authority, when he does not kill Jane, he continues to destroy: in kidnapping the “fiancé”, a mob rails against him to rescue her.  Control is established when Caesare dies: Francis survives his surrogate and his doctor can treat him as he now understands him.  The straight-jacket around Francis (and one that the doctor was also placed in by Francis’ tale) suggests that the controller remains in enmity with the controlled.  Powerless, the fantasist edits. His tale of mobilized unconsciousness is his condemning of mindless control.

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Gray Zones in “Deliver us From Evil” (2014)

Is faith the skeptic’s agitator?  We are conscious of an order that exists in nature.  A culture segregates objects as they find distinguished in nature.  There are two genders, therefore we have two different signs to indicate different restrooms: male apart from female.  But why do we have family restrooms?  Our five senses can give us data; third options emerge when we interpret the data.  We need gray zones. 

War seeks order.  War is disruption that witnesses disruption; every conflict seeks power.  For the faithful and the skeptic, complication occurs because evidence for one is the absence of it for the other.  Religious and civil servants promote order.  In “Deliver Us From Evil,” priest and police must find a middle ground.  The cop says the priest is unlike any he’s met and the priest returns with “I’ve met with a lot of cops and you’re exactly the type.”  In “Mythos,” Joseph Campbell calls the individual who identifies with his job a “stuffed shirt:” the film presents us vocations that have parallel aims and contempt for each other.  They represent a greater good while also serving to minimize threats to the greater good; they share this role with the soldier.  Priest, police and soldier understand good to be order and its reverse, evil, is chaos.  Wars exist on the planes of each. The three have badges and symbols of their order but their operations appear remote.  The priest tells us that evil is divided into primary (unexplainable) and secondary (man made) acts.  The film’s title is part of a prayer and articulates the calls to priest, soldier, cop: they have the potential to save.  In the film, we witness baptism, confession and exorcism (explained by the film as having six stages).  Exorcism is itself a prayer; it is the priest that rescues the fallen soldier and lost cop.  Good will always oppose evil and man is debased by evil.  Lost man is susceptible to primary evil; evil complicates as it influences goodness. 

A running device in the film is the music of The Doors; apart from separating two spaces, doors are gateways (“break on through to the other side”). They allow the entrance from one side to the next and a doorframe is the gray area where both spaces meet.  The doorframe is gradient and balance.  Manipulation by evil hinders a return to goodness (“streets are uneven when you’re down”).  In recognizing the supernatural as a necessary gray zone, the film navigates chaos and order.   

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Immortality and the Male Artist in "House of Wax" (1953)

“So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”

                                                            -Sonnet 18

Obsession perverts traditional functionality.  The creative act inspires two principles: immortality erases corrosion and immortality provides an abstract guide for creation.  Man is created in God’s image: man creates in man’s image.  Construction distances us from death and is our perpetuation: the artist desires the abstract because the abstract is inaccessible but it is also experienced.  Legacy can echo at the end of a lifespan; a legacy’s first wish is its interpretation and its second wish is legitimization.  We inherit abstract stand-ins that mimic the historical, the immortal.  Anne Boleyn, the one we pass in our histories, experiences rebirth in the fragmented structure of her historical interpretation; the artist and the historian are not separate entities.  Historical relevance in an individual symbolizes a collective inheritance.  History’s manipulated image recreates a life but limits the life.  “House of Wax” frightens us because we participate in historical remembrance; memory, the historical image we experience and then reinvent, is the obsessive’s meat. 

Jarrod begins in the film a purported champion of beauty and authenticity, but it is his authenticity, his creative interpretation that demands equality with his internalized ideal.  Obsessives populate the movie: greed motivates Jarrod’s partner into two destructive acts (arson and murder) and later, Jarrod partners with a compliant drunk and a mute who symbolizes the danger of man’s unchecked physicality.  In his obsessive art, Jarrod’s chase of historical shadows disorients him physically.  One of the first wax figures we see is a woman with a knife held over a man; Jarrod’s is later made impotent by losing the use of his hands.  In the horrors of the wax museum, no longer meant to project beauty but horror, male subjects are spared the indignity of lying on their backs or without their clothes.  A woman, however, is tortured; her red hair is loose as two male torturers stand over her, she is restrained and a white sheet covers her nude figure.  (Sue, Jarrod’s carnate historical interpretation of Marie Antoinette, will find herself in the same publicized nudity and danger.)

Femininity inspires the characters in “House of Wax” into drunkenness.  The figure of a “mother’s love” is placed near the entrance of the House and is the film’s ignored obsession: women are a device and the movie’s centerpiece.  In a pool of history (Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Marie Antoinette, Anne Boleyn), “House of Wax” tellingly promotes motherhood over feminine extravagance.  Joan and Marie are in waxed chiasmus: the virginal Joan, in innocent and penitent white versus the jeweled and tulled fertility of a green and pink Marie.  For a woman to flirt, she acknowledges her sexuality.  The film’s flirt, Kathy, will be transformed into Joan and her reserved counterpart, Sue, will become Marie.  At one point, Kathy asks to be squeezed into her corset; a corset restricts as much as it projects.  A corset is an emphasizer; Jarrod de-emphasized Kathy’s femininity in interpreting her as Joan.  When Sue removes the wig from combined Kathy / Joan, she unmutes Kathy’s sexuality.  Sexuality inherits historical complexity.  Cleopatra is never muted: her sexuality extends to the bare belly and limbs of a nearing Egyptian female statue.  Their femininity does not suffer a corset.  Kathy must advise Sue on men without actually condemning men: with a perspective job in question, Kathy warns, “You know how it is when a fella…,” but she silences the most dangerous part of the sentence.  Sue inherits a creative power that she does not know how to control (Jarrod believes he can).  Sue obsesses over her sexuality as much as Jarrod obsessives over his art.  The film shows woman’s inherited historical burden: as three women watch the wax hula figure, one imagines that she can do the same and is moved away by the others.  At the can-can show, skirts are lifted and sexuality again made entertainment; Sue asks if “nice people” attend these shows because the film will answer the question of how women are suppose to behave with the modest centerpiece of a mother’s love.  The immortality Jarrod wanted to impose on Sue is his interpretation of the feminine echo of history.  His interpretation will survive while his intended artwork does not; it is the inheritance of his fellow man.