Summer Movies

In order of interest.

1. The Hangover – All movies set in Vegas are inevitably an advertisement for tourism. A place where men can be made unconscious about their conscious desire.

2. Star Trek – The series reboot: a mechanism that allows for a franchise to disavow its own history through a form of self-prescribed amnesia. That is to say, if the defeat of a past menace (the Cold War) was merely a fantasy, then the imagination of that victory will be forcibly suppressed in order for new conflicts (the Great Recession) to be creatively won over.

3. Inglourious Basterds – If the movie presents itself as a fable (Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France...) and all fables are morality tales, then the film is deeply amoral – yet knowingly so: a movie made for the pleasure of an audience watching an alliance killing Nazis while also featuring within it a movie audience of Nazis taking pleasure in the killing of an alliance.

4. The Hurt Locker – The exploding psychotherapist: like Freud on the Irish – the war in Iraq is impervious to analysis.

5. I Love You, Man – The gay brother who understands men better than men.

6. Terminator Salvation – After 25 years, 3 films and a tv series: all loops must be closed.

7. Funny People – Stand-up comedy as hegemony: Adam Sandler as archaeology of Seth Rogen's future.

8. Moon – A literary certainty: all encounters between doppelgängers must escalate into a fight. Also, future lunar exploration will be monopolized by korean corporations.

9. Public Enemies – Michael Mann following the Alfred Hitchcock adage: if the making of a film is analogous to the perfect crime, then a heist film is cinema-par-excellence.

10. District 9 – Annoyingly explicit Apartheid allegory does nothing but signal its lack of metaphor. More strikingly, the disappearance of subtext is the film's text.

11. Wolverine – The unchanging canadian landscape.

Spider-Man 3

Notwithstanding the traditional comic book dictum that mutations are almost always the by-product of military/industrial catastrophe; a trope that embodies, quite literally, the imagined fallout of Cold War nuclear paranoia. That is unless, of course, these transformations originate from outer space; a vague and nebulous region from where the repressed inscrutably returns — here in sticky, gooey, indistinguishable form. Or rather, a black, amorphous, and (go-figure) oil-like substance through which the pleasures of darkness can be channeled — like any contemporary hipster — into monochromatic clothing, a dangerous affinity for soul music, and quasi-ridiculous emo-boy-band-haircuts.

Dreamgirls

The general subtext of Dreamgirls — which, let's face it, has forever existed as the predominant subtext of art and culture in general — is of the double-bind that exists perpetually/repeatedly/unendingly between art and commodity. To paraphrase Dan Graham: It's Show Business and not Show Family. This thematic, of course, is as classic as the songs the movie represents. Except here, the general omnipresence of the subject — of sixties black pop reconstituted as an eighties musical and now repackaged as a double-ohs movie vehicle — exemplifies the manifold ways in which culture industry will, once again, repurpose artistic material as new forms of capital. Then again, it is the persistence of the subject-as-capital and how its art-as-commodity moralizing is played out in the movie that proves most interesting. That is to say: how the geographic/economic shift from Motown-to-Broadway-to-Hollywood is creatively made simultaneous with the skepticism the movie expresses towards black cultural ownership, as opposed to white corporatism (whose covert, sophisticated impetus allows us to think about the whole enterprise in the first place).

Casino Royale

While the sui generis formulae of James Bond movies represents itself through constant renewal — via rotations in leading men, colorific shifts in landscape, vertiginous innovations in technology, and the turnstile flow of femme fatales and psychedelic villians — despite these changes, and notwithstanding the terms of a culture industry that demands if not artsy progress then industrial progression; it is — after 53 years, 21 movies, and 6 exemplars — at least interesting to note how the stable image of Bond, as imperious, inviolable and invulnerable, has moved from the nonaligned and pulp to the more-and-more formalized.

Thus the slow, half-century shift from the brusque Sean Connery to the anal-retentive Pierce Brosnan, and now an abrupt turn towards the pale, anodyne personification of Daniel Craig, who, compared with the previous versions, embodies a more aberrant cinematic image of Bond that is nonetheless closer to Ian Fleming's literary original. Described by Fleming in the first novel as "a neutral figure – an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a Government Department", it is formally prescriptive that Craig look like a man who is fated to have his testicles ritualistically whipped with a carpet beater. And so it is the surprising appearance/grotesquerie of this scene in Casino Royale that irreverently upends the imperial image of Bond while making this contemporary version such an anachronism. Usually, the pro forma narrative of Bond movies is that its hero, an avatar of male sophistication and infallible Brit resolve, merely faces the threat of physical danger without suffering the consequences of actual physical pain. This empty threat, of course, plays itself out in the films as a resolution that is entirely image-conscious: the form-and-content product of a highly structured design that aligns an elegantly embodied archetype of stoic, arch perfection with its similarly minded methodical conception. Or rather: No style with imperfection. No pleasure with the mess of pain!

This impetus towards the high and formal — with the image of perfection as its objective — is, as Rodney Graham amusingly reveals, perfectly neurotic; and as an appropriately illogical artistic exercise, his sculpture/book/poster Casino Royale – Sculpture de Voyage (1990) burlesquely interpellates the testicle-beating scene of Fleming's novel as a visceral abstraction submitted within the square geometries of one of Donald Judd's specific objects. And so it is Graham's absurd conflation of emasculating torture with the rigorous features of minimal art that makes a mind-blowing point of leveling the distinctions between the corporeal with the material while simultaneously gesturing to blind the twin templates of male mastery (the high modernism of spy films and minimalism) by imposing them on top of each other and undermining their supposed autonomy in a weird, byzantine form of genre-specific vandalism. Therein lies the suggestion — that from the perspective of industrial production, the surfeit of perfection has the potential to generate its own latent forms of disorder. Or rather: More style with imperfection. More pleasure with the mess of pain!

Borat

While neverminding the discourse between what's faux/real and improvised/staged, the moviefilm that is Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan doesn't generate as much interest in what the mockumentary tells us about ordinary America as much as the loose plot that structures its telling tells us about American narrative. So goes the story of Borat Sagdiyev, a foreign journalist who arrives in New York and — like Horatio Alger, Jack Kerouac and Navin Johnson — gradually makes his way westward in a travelogue that, while attempting to make a spectacle of the subject of ordinary America, effects, in an oddly more revealing-about-America way, the more awkward drama of his self-becoming.

This drama is, of course, consummated in the scene at the suburban mega-church; a scenario in which our hero becomes culturally/socially (if not formally) American by accepting Jesus as his savior and converting (body and soul) to Christianity. The narrative of how one's subjectivity can be left up for grabs and how that identity can attain rough parity through the potential of spiritual renewal is forever classic. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe a century-and-a-half before him, Sacha Baron Cohen makes intractably connected the possibility that Borat can become simultaneously "American" and self-aware through the rigors of Christian piety. Uncle Tom's Cabin remains a historical example-par-excellence of a popular fiction that ventures to articulate the bonds between American freedom and Christian faith: with the book acting as a covert ideological vehicle for Stowe to express modern mainstream evangelism while politically contending for not only the abolition of slavery but also for women's suffrage. Therein resides the more serious humour of Borat, and the ironic turn that arises from a character who confuses those same civil freedoms as a license to ill. With the US and A idealized not so much as a nation of liberty as it is a fantasized site for antisocial, libidinal behaviour, Borat travesties the more-or-less worst potential of total freedom through the vulgar sentiments of racism and misogyny; a canny surfeit, that all the while comically diminishes (in typical covert fashion) the altruistic ambitions behind cultural learnings.


* En Vague had a peculiar experience watching Borat in the middle of the Netherlands. Not just for the odd opportunity of communally pausing for an intermission in the middle of the screening, but also for the delirious way in which the intertitles for the movie appeared in Kazakh, then English, and then Dutch. Language as infinite regress!

Jackass Number 2

As Freud suggests: (a) sublimation is always imperfect; and (b) it takes two to trauma.* Self-subcribed in the first-person-singular/plural: Jackass, in both title and persona, perfectly announces the idiot-savant identity of men who have no place in the official order of things. So goes the skate-video-as-tv-show-as-movie, making comically omnipresent the low bathos of pop culture, stripped of its comforting slickness and formal appeal, only to be re-glorified through a series of mini-spectacles structured around the scatological (i.e.: horse semen drinking, beer butt-chugging, ass-branding). To paraphrase Georges Bataille's critical hypothesizations of l'informe: what kind of idiot would dress his penis up like a mouse and feed it to a snake? Well here's proof that idiot exists.

Thus from the comic philosophy of Bataille to Groucho Marx, who asserted that there's nothing less funny than having a joke explained. Yet it is the super-backasswards pathology of Jackass Number 2 that unambiguously provokes a heightened consciousness towards the political unconscious of the movie. For indeed, Jackass provides the exceptionally rare example of popular culture succeeding on the negative terms of failure — with every scene/stunt scenario invariably organized around the trope of disaster-as-climax, and the film's 35mm cinematic bookends acting as an aesthetic reminder that the purposeful choice of recording the bulk of the movie in cheap video is as low as its formal/social ambitions.

This is, by compos mentis thinking, a beau ideal illustration of Julia Kristeva's formulation of the abject (i.e.: how abnormal behaviour disturbingly reveals the stable norms of a predominant symbolic order). Jackass does a lot to demonstrate Kristeva's theorem by upending not just the myraid categories of social convention, but in the critical disclosure of how impure, libidinous freedom might uncover how backwards those norms really are.

All of which leads to the question of: who's norms? Therein lies an unconscious knowingness, that by adapting an absurdly abject persona, Jackass oddly generates a dismantling of the conventional image of the masculine self (the primary agent of social control) by replacing its domination act with a playhouse of ineptitude and slapstick. By consistently representing various scenarios of failure, and by making a spectacle of broken images as though they are not to be ashamed of but celebrated, the film neutralizes, for a moment at least, an identification with its (a. average, b. white, c. male) archetype as not ascendant and in control, but excessively inable and incompetent. That is to say: we generally have no cultural images condoning the out-of-control incompetence Jackass suggests — though in practice, it may be that our society is out of control.


* Trauma and how it emanates from repetition: the first event apprehended as shock, the second time as catastrophe.

Summer Singles

A left-handed masterpiece, in 2002 Missy Elliott released "Work It", a then/now/and forever classic retro-future hip hop single whose aesthetic circumference is everywhere and whose centre is nowhere. If she indeed led the latter-day/contemporary forces that reivigorated old school, customary styles (i.e.: AAAA ["ah/ya/cha/blah"] rhyme schemes, DJ scratch shuffle, 808 kick) and actively explored the potential of putting "things" — or rather, the "It" in "Work It" as the metonymic standard or known norm of styles — a) down; b) flipping; and then c) reversing it, then Timbaland's likewise radically de-centred production took on the form of a spiral trajectory, elaborating twisting-turning arabesques and spinning constructivist song structures around Borgesian paradoxes of time. The past in reverse as the future: progressive aesthetics in reverse! (1)

Timbaland always played the deliriously accelerating history of hip-hop/R&B, in which he was himself a participant, against the ever-advancing strides of grown-up teenpop, of which Justin Timberlake's "Sexyback" and Nelly Furtado's "Promiscuous" are two exemplary examples. Aside from both songs' too-easy pleasures (a surfeit easily hastened by each performer's over-exuberant savoir-faire), and given the innocuous knowledge of sex-rhythm-romance-and-reason learned from past records (see: "Tearin' Up My Heart" and "Like a Bird"), it's almost necessary to think towards how the image of sexual experience is made commensurate with artistic maturity. For one thing, the subject of sexual/artistic adulthood is as plainly declarative as each tracks title; and as for the song-forms themselves, given the "Work It"-like askance aesthetics embedded in "Sexyback" and "Promiscuous", Timbaland's production for Timberlake and Furtado acts as a signifier for how overt-complicated sonics might embellish not just the convoluted drama of one's sexual awakening, but also, and inevitably, the more simple-and-plain artistic need to be taken more seriously — always classic pop music master trope!

All of which describes the crucial difference that separates "Work It" from "Sexyback" and "Promiscuous". The greater-than-grand achievement of Timbaland's work with Missy is that their art is meant to destabilize the field it arrives into while making that instability just one of many topics. The unhinged conflation of bygone styles and genres within Timbaland/Missy tracks is that it's a conflict meant to shatter and extend the tangents of pop; a desire that stems from a want-and-need to revitalize the standards of a historical past in order to reinvigorate the norms of a contemporary present. Yet the question then becomes what happens when Missy/Timbaland's unruly re-patterning of past conventions becomes the operative new standard/known norm? Both "Sexyback" and "Promiscuous" emanate off this conundrum: each track confuses the act of simply extending a type (or using its producer) with living up to its inherent artistic ambitions. What Missy understands is that the norm — even one inaugurated by her — is something to be always fucked with: formal conventions to be put down, flipped and reversed. One then imagines what a Missy-assisted remix of "Sexyback" would produce: "Sexyback (Forward)"? By association, this principle also suggestively applied to Nelly Furtado might result in "Promiscuous" — spun backwards — sounding like "Like a Virgin" (in reverse).


(1) The pervasive weirdness of the song's back-and-forth narrative also comes in how audio metaphors are used to illustrate the visual — i.e: in the middle of "Work It", after the line "Listen up close while I take you backwards", "Watch the way Missy like to take it backwards" is looped in reverse.

The Devil Wears Prada

We here at En Vague have always had a not-so-guilty bent for movies about the fashion industry (eg: Blow-Up, Zoolander, although not [blah] Prêt-à-Porter); not solely for its extra-picturesque potential (i.e.: über-photogenic figures in ultra-photogenic landscapes), nor for the simple pleasures of sighting en vogue celebrities-as-themselves (Valentino Garavani: the shiniest man on Earth), but also, and more formally, for the very ways in which the fashion-movie genre parenthetically conflates two culture industries.

So comes the strange world of fashion as instrumentalized by mainstream Hollywood, and a process of cultural reification that diverts the esoteric economy of the avant-garde as a capital abstraction used in the production of the popular imaginary — the effect of one industry augmenting its place in the common culture by denying another strange industry its very strangeness. Adorno couture!

In this way The Devil Wears Prada is pure laine standard, although broadened by its also-ran status as a make-over film (or rather, a tautological literalizing of the make-over genre through a field that represents the very means of making-over). None-and-nevertheless, the central tropes of the fashion-movie remain mostly unchallenged, unchanged, and the same, all the while maintaining an expository flash of inspiration that forever reappears with the intermittent scenes involving a gaggle of photographers illuminating their subjects with blinding lights and strobes. An overt-rhetorical spectacle that, in effect, doubles the industrial terms of its production, and makes visibly real the strange logic of strange subjects captured by the light of photographers who are collectively lit by the cinematic apparatus. Or so it goes: a spectacle operating within a spectacle; glamour times glamour; high fashion via mainstream Hollywood; and the vanguard made common.

Thousand Dollar Idea

Prince as Bond villain.

The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift

Situationism leading to a story?

1. Although I own a car, I hate driving.
2. Although I hate driving, I love car-chase movies.
3. Because I hate driving, I walked to see a car-chase movie.
4. Because I walked home from a car-chase movie...

... I got to thinking: shouldn't it be Tokyo Dérive? In 1996, Kristin Ross wrote Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (MIT Press), a scopic-academic-intricate study of the automobile and its accelerating effects on the modernization of post-war French social, capital and cultural life. And not-so-unlike the idle physics of the flaneur (ie: Baudelaire's magic-dynamic wandering, Freud's clinamen, Benjamin's modern tourism, Debord's detournement), The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift, while vernacularizing a fancy street-racing term for what amounts to a controlled skid, also offers up an unpredictable swerve of attention towards not just the psychogeography of Tokyo (as vertically oriented, with cars sidewinding up spiral parkades and down pastoral hills); nor even the too-easy simultaneity of Japan's own modernity with the auto industry; but rather on how the proportions of french theory goes: a) global; and b) commercial.

Thus, from 18th Century Paris to 21st Century Japan, and a meandering line of thought that, by definition of the dérive, comprises the oblique trajectory of "another path". And it is the allotrion of "another path" that declinates the discourse of the flaneur towards the unpredictable vista of international speed-racing. What started with Baudelaire, the inspiration of the city and "the great medley of their interrelations" ambles slowly/progressively/furtively towards TFATF:TD's Hollywood automated view of the city-as-spectacle. In other words, a walk becomes a drive; all the while proving Debord's adage that popular culture will eventually/inevitably/always repurpose theoretical material as latent forms of capital.