I'm with Rich--Hamlet 2 is really, really, really good. He's saving his take for the DVD, but here's mine. (I'll go light on the spoilers, but I am going to talk about plot points. This shouldn't be too big of a problem, but come back after you've seen it, if you'd rather.)
If you want to know what Hamlet 2 is about, just check the structure. Sure, it's got a standard overall arc, which the movie itself makes fun of with Mr. Marsch's (the drama teacher and main character, played by Steve Coogan) repeated references to inspirational-teacher flicks like Mr. Holland's Opus, Dead Poets Society, and Dangerous Minds. Yes, there's a setup, a period of trouble, and then a successful resolution. But how does it resolve? After what amounts to a really long build-up, we get to see the performance of the titular play--and that's it. After the performance, there's a brief (and fantastic) epilogue, but it's only a couple minutes long. The thing the movie was leading up to was not the resolution of various emotional and character arcs--the kids don't learn any lessons, and Marschz's romantic interest exists purely as a gag--but the actual performance of the play itself. What matters is not the journey the characters went through, but the journey the play itself went through. The movie, in other words, is about the unpredictable and ignoble nature of the creative process.
As any critic can tell you, creative types are rarely what we want them to be. Sure, every once in a while there's a David Byrne who's as culturally literate, thoughtful, and intentional as we critics are (or, at least, like to think of ourselves as being). In the main, though, artists, writers, and musicians are the kind of people who we'd be embarassed to know if they weren't geniuses. They're boorish, dickish, passive-aggressive, fickle, emotionally stunted, alcoholic, abusive, and/or pathetic. They have an extremely difficult time maintaining healthy relationships, with any friendships or marriages characterized by neediness, selfishness, leechiness, and sulking. They are, in short, losers--jobless wrecks of humanity who are so pathetic that you can't engage them in a conversation without feeling kinda guilty that you're a normal, together person. Worst of all, at least from the critic's standpoint, they are generally incapable of talking about their creations, either coming up with simplistic explanations revolving around their own personal issues or refusing to explain them at all.
And this is exactly what Marschz is for almost the entire movie--in fact, that's where the humor comes from. He has to roller-skate everywhere because of a past DUI, and he's not very good at roller-skating. When he breaks his sobriety, he ends up pantsless on a couch in the middle of a field. After getting him to wear a caftan so that his testicles are at room temperature, his wife leaves him with their roomate, who it turns out is the one who actually impregnated her. Marschz says it himself: "My life is a parody of a tragedy." And yet, after a life as a loser, his last-ditch effort succeeds wildly. In the world of the film, whether or not we think so, his play is a masterpiece both creatively and commercially. How does he do this?
The movie's explanation, in a memorable line, is this: "It doesn't matter if you have talent as long as you have enthusiasm." This is a funny little epigraph for the current generation, but it's also true. Marschz has enthusiasm in spades, and it's that enthusiasm that allows the play to be a success. His enthusiasm draws talented people to him, and this pathetic loser is at the center of a group of very successful people: a great actor, a great lighting designer, great security guys, a great lawyer. And when they all work together and deploy their talents in service of Marschz's enthusiasm, they produce something that is well and truly moving.
What's funny about this is that the creative process depicted in the rest of the movie gives no indication that this will be the case. A sequal to Hamlet is, as many people point out over the course of the film, a horrible idea, and Marschz has given no indication at any point that he's a good enough writer or director to make up for that questionable decision. And at no point does he suddenly develop a full artistic sensibility, complete with taste, thematic complexity, and nuance. It works because he pours all those loser qualities out in such a charming way that, when surrounded with an aura of success and competence, it seems to glow with meaning. None of which, it becomes clear, he actually intended. When one character argues with her mother that "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" is intended as a critique of celebrity, Marschz interjects, "That's an oversimplification." The Christians who come to the foot of the stage to protest change their minds when they come up with their own interpretation, that "Jesus kicks the devil's ass!" All the while, the play, in which Marschz is simply working out his own issues with his father, continues on its merry way, oblivious to the storms of meaning being kicked up on its periphery. That, indeed, is why it works. Because people are able to pin their own meaning to it, it speaks to them on a personal level. Marschz's "parody of a tragedy" life is ultimately so knowable that it forges a multitude of connections with otherwise disperate identities. The restraint that taste imposes is generally crucial. When absent, it is almost always embarassing and cringe-inducing. But sometimes--when surrounded by talent--tastelessness allows for such an openness that beauty can rush through.
That idea of a "parody of a tragedy" points toward the play's ultimate character arc. Marschz's idea for a sequel to Hamlet is to have Hamlet travel back in time in order to stop all the tragedy from happening, ending it not with a bloodbath but with a marriage. He has, in short, turned a tragedy into a comedy. In the process, Marschz does the same thing to his life. But that doesn't happen through him becoming a better person--he does not change at all. What changes is the play. Hamlet starts as sadness and dissolusion and becomes happiness and connectedness. In our traditional understanding of art, that itself should be a tragedy: a great work of meaningful-core should be ruined by the inclusion of happiness. That it's not is an argument for comedy itself--and a pretty powerful one, I might add. Don't get me wrong: this is a deserved cult classic in the making, and there are a lot of hilarious testicle jokes that I was a bit Shue about. But it's also a really smart and, I think, important piece of art.
1) Kronos Quartet - Marquee Moon 2) David Byrne - Glass Concrete and Stone 3)Tangoterje - Diamonds Dub 4) Mazzy Star - Fade Into You 5) Blur - This is a Low 6) Boris - Farewell 7) Glenn Branca - Lesson No. 1 8) LCD Soundsystem - Great Release 9) Scott Walker - Such A Small Love 10) Nina Nastasia - Ocean 11) Carla Bozulich - Medley: Time Of The Preacher, Blue Rock Montana, Red Headed Stranger 12) Dirty Three - Sue's Last Ride
(click on any song to start it streaming)
In my entry about John Luther Adams and hugeness from a while back, I didn't give a whole lot of musical examples of what I was talking about, so here's a muxtape that does the job fairly well. I'll talk about these a little bit later, but now I want to approach the subject using another example--a visual one.
This is a scene from HayaoMiyazaki'sSpirited Away:
In this sequence, the main character, Sen, is traveling on a train from one end of the spirit realm to the other, from a city to the country. Her companions are three former villains that she has converted into friends: a spirit called No-Face who almost destroyed the bathhouse where she worked, a giant baby who tried to kill her (now transformed into a tiny but rotund cat), and the witch Yubaba's henchmen (transformed into a small bird, which carries the cat around). In terms of pacing, it's a significant break in the film. Previously, Sen has been going almost every minute, either working or collapsing from exhaustion, in a very urban environment populated by many people in a small space working frantically. Now, she simply sits, nearly wordless, for around two minutes, as we watch the train travel through the landscape. The lack of words signals pretty clearly that we're going to see an animator's showcase, and Miyazaki delivers with a perfect evocation of hugeness.
The subject has already come up in the film. Sen's clients at the bathhouse are larger-than-human scale, not only physically, but because they are incarnations of various natural phenomenons (rivers, turnips) that are much vaster than anything in our direct experience. The bathhouse, too, is so huge that we never get a clear picture of its layout; Sen seems to be constantly finding new rooms. And the plot itself is a kind of hugeness, with Sen pursuing not a single goal, but a series of goals suddenly thrust upon her, all under a rules system that she never really understands.
Two of these aspects are represented in the train sequence. The train travels on top of a body of water whose edges we never see, and the distance covered is so large that night falls over the course of the trip. But what's really interesting here is that she passes through a kind of city of ghosts, or maybe even an echo of a real city, as small signs of a recognizable reality are visible just at the edge of the tracks, even though beyond is only more water. Neon signs fly by the train's windows, disconnected from any building but still very real; as on a real train journey, we might wonder what's going on in the areas we're not disembarking. Shadow people wait at a train crossing, and a real house sits on a small island. This sense of whole stories being missed, unusual for a work of fiction, is most explicitly brought up when the train pulls away from a platform. Shadow people get off the train, and stream into an exit, but a shadow girl watches the train leave, seeming somehow dismayed. Was she waiting for someone on the train? Who is she? For that matter, what is she? Is she a spirit, a real person, or what?
Many have commented about the great feeling you get in a city of being alone in a crowd, but it's also true that even when you're alone, there's this almost physical knowledge of all the people just out of view, the people in the buildings you're walking between, even if there's no one on the street, and this is a lovely feeling. This is the effect fog emulates; it takes a crowd and divides it into cells that know how many other cells there are in close proximity, but have no sightlines into them.
This is the feeling being evoked here. Traveling through suburban and rural areas you feel, rightly or wrongly, that you have a pretty good idea going on with the people you pass. But cities are so dense and so heterogeneous that, even when you're alone, you can look up at offices and apartment buildings and get a sense that there must be a thousand things going on there that you can't even guess at--stories being told, lives being lived, activities taking place that you've never even heard of. This density of unknowingness is a kind of hugeness to me, because it is essentially unknowable: too many people, not enough time. The crowd becomes a mystery, as perplexing in its individuation as bugs or stars.
The tendency when talking about art these days is to talk about its social significance, its expression of issues of identity or power relations or cultural conflicts. This happens everywhere, whether in the academy or among critics or just people talking. Is a movie too violent? Is an album fake? Does a TV show present negative portrayals of women? Does media attention to celebrities send the wrong message? That's fine, but it causes us to overlook perhaps the oldest purpose of art: to give some expression to our experience of the unknowable. Music, especially instrumental music, is perfect for this, because it is almost never literal. It's always abstract, and when it "means" something, it's because it's expressed a particular feeling or idea without actually saying anything about that particular feeling or idea. This is a pretty incredible thing. How does that happen? Why does that happen? Why do some things do it better than others?
Don't worry, I'm not going to get all fucking spiritual here. But if God is shorthand for "we don't know, but it's pretty impressive," then it's no accident that so many religions use music as part of their worship. Music can express that sentiment better than anything. And that's why musical expressions of hugeness are so affecting, I think. When a hundred-plus piece orchestra plays together, it's a model of that mammoth complexity that we look at with awe--urban populations and the vast variety of insects and the distance to the moon. And it's not a possibility being much explored these days, either in music or in the writing about it. This is not to say that it's never done, of course. In terms of writing, Said the Gramophone has been doing it for five years now, and doing it really well. Sean, Dan, and Jordan write about music not (just) in terms of how it sounds but in terms of how it makes them feel and what images it evokes. But as Sean and I have discussed on many occasions, the STG aesthetic is slightly different than what I'm talking about. I may be misreading him, but his interests seem more in small beauty, the wonder of the everyday. I like that. But that's not what we're talking about here.
To get at that, let me return to the train scene. The thing I haven't talked about are the two small things, the bird and the cat. They are, to use the Japanese term that I think would be appropriate here, kawaii--cute and innocent. They're funny, with their jumping and sleeping. But don't let the humor fool you. Without smallness, hugeness is meaningless. We need something to place it against as a comparison. Hugeness on its own seems fake, like an airbrushed drawing of mountains on the side of a van. Even hugeness accompanied by an expression of awe doesn't help us grasp it. But put against something cute, something innocent, something that accepts the unknown for what it is because there is so much else unknown in a kawaii life--then we, as viewers and listeners, feel like we have some sort of control over that hugeness, some understanding of the mystery. If a single composer can understand that feeling enough to write it down, if a conductor or performer can grasp it enough to draw it out in sound, then maybe we, too, can handle it. We turn to music not for a depiction of the unknown, because we can experience that any time we like. We turn to music for an ordering of the unknown, an abstract explanation of vastness beyond our comprehension. The low end rumbles and one hundred people slowly build up a roar, controlled precisely by a person with a small stick. On a giant screen, one hundred people have worked for months to create a sequence that takes our breath away. That order rubs off and stays with us. And it's not just limited to that. Let me leave you with one more self-quote:
The OC is important as social history because of its compact evocation of the decade it helped soundtrack, but important as art in the same way opera is: ridiculous in its scope and occasionally breathtaking in its beauty.
Maybe I only find this indescribably hilarious because I've been reading economics theory and then watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but here's a paragraph from a story about a pro-intelligent design movie that's narrated/hosted by Ben Stein:
On a blog on the “Expelled” Web site, one writer praised Mr. Stein as “a public-intellectual-freedom-fighter” who was taking on “a tough topic with a bit of humor.” Others rejected the film’s arguments as “stupid,” “fallacious” or “moronic,” or described intelligent design as the equivalent of suggesting that the markets moved “at the whim of a monetary fairy.”
Hee hee, rationality's a bitch!
Anyway, just for fun, here's an alternate reading of Ferris Bueller. The "normal" interpretation is that Ferris is a fun guy who's got it all figured out, and the oppositional interpretation is that Ferris is a condescending, smug jerk who's expressing troubling anti-intelletual tendencies and sealing the fate of his generation just before the 1987 stock market crash. But I think the real key to the movie is in what the English teacher is saying just before the nurse comes in to get Ferris' girlfriend: "irony." There's a remarkably complex irony going on in the movie's view of Ferris. Take, for instance, his initial monologue:
I do have a test today. that wasn't bullshit. It's on European socialism. I mean, really, what's the point? I'm not European. I don't plan on being European. So who cares if they're socialists? They could be fascist anarchists. It still doesn't change the fact that I don't own a car. Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter. -Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself.
Traditional reading of that is either yay being anti-isms and right on that you shouldn't worry too much about tests, or just that it's funny. Oppositional reading is that this is a hollow and meaningless opinion driven by and leading to ignorance. But Matthew Broderick delivers it with a little twist, a little, well, irony. You get the sense that he knows he's just repeating hoary old cliches with the isms stuff, and the way he lands on that last line gives it a sense of self-aware false profundity. He's just justifying his desire to take a day off, a desicion he's well aware is the wrong one, with a little speech that doesn't even sound convincing to him. This is whistling past the graveyard. After all, this is a guy who occasionally talks to some sort of imagined audience. If we take Ferris as the narrator, which given his direct-address monologues he basically is, then arguably he's a very unreliable one. He's supposed to be this miracle worker, but all we ever see him actually do is be a negative leader, which is nice and all, but it's hardly the sort of thing that would inspire a town-wide "Save Ferris" campaign. Does that even actually exist? The whole premise of the film is that the three kids are taking a day off from their pressure-filled lives, but there's only one scene in the entire movie where they're actually having fun, and it has nothing to do with Ferris. Think about it: on the Sears Tower they're terrified, at the restaurant they're nervous, at the art gallery they're contemplative, and driving around Cameron is freaking out. The only scene that's any fun is the parade scene, and the only thing Ferris has to do with that is he got up on a float and lip-synched. In fact, it is a startling scene in its nearly pure expression of joy, but it only becomes so as the focus goes away from Ferris and to the crowd, with Cameron and Ferris' girlfriend walking through it. (Another way of looking at this is that the only time Cameron is happy is when Ferris isn't there.) Full credit to John Hughes and/or the city of Chicago, but even when watching the film with a gimlet eye, you can't help but be swept away by the impression that everyone really is having a good time. (The babies and toddlers help, but still.) As the fun grows, Ferris is envealoped by it and gradually disappears.
This is all a long way of saying that Ferris is mainly delusional. The incredible events of the movie don't actually happen, they're just in his inventive little head, and he's employing an entire nonsensical philosophy to justify this to himself and to "us," the imaginary audience that he's playing to, even though in the context of the film we don't atually exist. What's more, a self-awareness of his delusional state (see above) slips out in Broderick's performance just enough to let us know that Ferris is willfully choosing this delusion over the reality of his suburban life.
What exactly is he hiding from, though? Think of the two scenes where we actually hear his parents talk about business. In the scene outside the restaurant where the gang encounters Ferris' dad, the dad is unsucessfully trying to get a client to make an ad buy. In the scene where the mom picks up the sister from the police station, all she can talk about is how she blew a deal. In other words, the Bueller family is failing. It seems petty when Ferris bitches about getting a computer instead of a car, but by the mores of the Chicago suburbs, it's abnormal for Ferris not to get a car. So what's up? The house itself is considerably dumpier than the only other house we see, Cameron's, and all we know about the parents' work lives (and note that both parents have to work) is that they're failures. The dream of the suburbs is crashing down around them; Ferris' talk of college is hollow. There's nowhere for him to go.
If you don't believe me, think about the final chase scene. How does Ferris get home? He runs through the other suburban backyards, from yard to yard, making his way across the whole town, and, minus a swimsuit, that is the plot of John Cheever's "The Swimmer." A suburban man swims his way across the backyards of his friends and neighbors, stopping to have conversations and drinks, but the conversations get progressively more strained, until the ending, when the main character reaches his own house:
The place was dark. Was it so late that they had all gone to bed?...He tried the garage doors to see what cars were in but the doors were locked and rust came off the handles onto his hands...The house was locked, and he thought that the stupid cook or the stupid maid must have locked up until he rememebred that it had been some time since they had employed a maid or a cook. He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.
Of course, when Ferris gets home, the house is not dark (though it is locked--the principal has taken the key under the mat). It is full of parents who love him and a sister that finally decides to help him. But he's a kid, not a working guy; there's a whole system designed to keep him safe, no matter how crazy he gets. It doesn't change the fact that the days of that system are numbered, and Ferris knows it. Why else would he so ostentatiously and self-destructively blow off school? Why else would he have made it so easy for himself to get caught by literally parading down the street in Chicago? It's the 80s version of a punk rock attitude: "no future" with a smug grin on your face.
Looked at this way, the oppositional view is still right, but the reasons are wrong. Ferris isn't a jerk because he's priviledged, he's a jerk because his priviledge is going away, and he's using it while he still can. The film is well aware that he's being an asshole, but it's trying to make us sympathetic towards him still, as films always do, by showing us that he's not just another spoiled rich kid. His future's being taken from him, and being powerless, there's not a damn thing he can do about it but say "fuck it" and blow everything to hell. The grin that's always on Ferris' face is a conscious echo of Reagan's, that smile that persisted whether he was talking about puppies and flowers or nuclear bombs and the starving poor. It's the smile of psychosis, of a loss of emotional affect. It's the swimmer, merrily winding his way through a familiar landscape of priviledge and leisure while everyone around him tries to make him see that it's all over for him. But he does not listen, and in the case of Ferris, he will never listen.
