Gender uncertainty and air space castration (Notes on Burlesque)

*** Warning: The following gives away sections of the film's ending. But to be honest, if you're watching Burlesque for narrative ingenuity you're likely to come away disappointed ***

The rather safe notion that burlesque dancing is sexy without being sexual is largely borne out in the intermittently entertaining Cher/Christina Aguilera diva musical, Burlesque. What is most interesting about the film is its almost complete denial of straight male libido. The film pushes the idea of women controlling their own sexuality to literal conclusions, to the point at which it hardly becomes sexual at all. The Burlesque Lounge that provides most of the film with its setting is notable for being an almost exclusively straight female/gay male area, where any whiff of male-female desire is summarily expunged. This isn’t a Strip Club, as the camp-as-Christmas doorman (Alan Cummings, who else?) makes clear; “The only Pole you’ll find in here is Natasha the shot girl.”

The will they/won’t they heterosexual coupling that provides the film its (limited) narrative interest is between Ali (Aguilera) and Jack (Cam Gigandet). Ali abandons her clearly delineated ‘dead-end’ life (Iowa, waitressing job, dead mother) for a new beginning in L.A. First port of call is Tess’ (Cher) sunset strip nightclub, where Jack, the bowler hat and eyeliner wearing barman, stands her a drink. Ali watches the dancers from the bar “Who does a girl have to flirt with to get from here to up there?” she asks. “Is this you flirting?” responds Jack. “With someone wearing more eyeliner then me..?"

From the first instance Jack’s gender identity is all over the shop. He and Ali form a bond and she accepts an invitation to crash at his place. It is only later, with the mention of a fiancée, that Ali realises Jack’s true predilections (although some doubt remains). As the film continues, Jack’s heterosexuality starts to reassert itself (a regressive flipside to the more exciting gender reversals in the Hawksian comedy) but the effect is to make him almost sex-neutral. The eventual love scene between the pair is played almost exclusively for laughs (and the shot of Jack’s rather sporting buttocks is the closest the film comes to prurience).

Whilst Jack’s heterosexuality is essentially neutered by his feminised appearance, the aberrant desires of the film’s other significant straight male, Marcus, are dealt with in more metaphorically  aggressive fashion. Marcus is a property developer with his sights set on both Ali (whom he attempts to procure with a pair of jewel encrusted shoes) and the Burlesque Lounge (which is more a matter for hard cash). At the films conclusion we learn that his deal for the club is motivated by a wish to build a towering condo block with the best view of sunset strip. Outside, L.A is littered with phalluses: Ali’s introduction to the city is illustrated by her glaring up at the numerous intimidating structures; inside it’s a different story (remember: No Poles*). When Ali learns that Marcus’ intention is to destroy the feminine lounge to erect a monument to manhood, she schemes to scupper his plans (and in so doing rejects his dangerous masculinity for the more dispassionate charms of Jack). Through some rather complicated dealings about construction rights and the purchasing of air space, Marcus is finally (and invisibly) castrated, and the club can continue.

But whilst the film can be seen as progressive for its reclamation of erotic dance from the grubby palms of the heterosexual male, this denial ultimately leads to sexless frustration. Amongst the dancers themselves any hint of liberated sexuality is scorned. The insult of choice here is “slut”, one mostly reserved for booze-prone Nikki, the former headline act who, it is inferred, had no qualms about opening her legs to get where she wanted. (Choice line from Cher to her ex-protégé: “I’ve held back your hair whilst you vomited everything up... except your memories.”) It’s no surprise then that the one real moment of unity among the girls comes when one of them gets married. Writer/director Steve Antin’s (who, a quick IMBD search tells me, played one of the rapists in The Accused) attempt to show Burlesque as a safe form of sexy results in a film unlikely to get a rise from anyone. It’s Showgirls for tweenies.

* A statement somewhat problematised when later on Ali dances with erm..a pole. 

Boys in the Shower (Weird Science and Elephant)

It was Hitchcock, of course, who first identified the shower as a perversely contradictory site of security and vulnerability. The slasher film, in nod to the master, has made homage almost mandatory, and turned the location into one as iconographic as the saloon in the western. (A reasonably thorough look at shower scenes in the films of Brian De Palma is here.)


The other genre to buy wholesale into the shower scene has been the teen movie. In these films (and I’m thinking of John Hughes defined 80s period and beyond) the shower can be a site of both stimulation and dread; the twin poles represented by Porky’s and Carrie respectively. Plenty of savvy filmmakers have productively tapped into the crippling body neurosis that tends to mark our adolescent years by exploiting the fear of communal showing, but it is interesting to note how often initial sexual experiences (fantasised or otherwise) seem to take place in this unsanctified space.


In the opening scene of Hughes’ Weird Science, the two geeks, Gary and Wyatt, watch a female gymnastics class from the sidelines. “Do you know what I’d like to do?” asks Gary, almost rhetorically. “Shower with them” Wyatt responds breathlessly, letting the word roll about in his mouth and mix with his saliva. True to their word, when the two boys create their ideal submissive woman it is the first thing they make her do. The iconic scene of Kelly leBrock lathering her naked body as the boys look on ends with a visual punch line. As their creation exits we see the boys in their sodden pants and trainers, the inspective gaze of their computer generated offspring being too much to bear.

As the film continues so does the linking of showers and sex. Gary and Wyatt hole themselves up in the bathroom as a house party rages downstairs. When their twin desired objects, Deb and Hilly, enter the room, the boys again find refuge in their favourite spot. Later, when Deb and Hilly bump into Lisa she offers the less mature girls some advice: “If you get the chance... shower with them. I did. It’s a mindscrambler...ohhhh...hurts so good.”


In the teenage imagination, the shower is the first port of call for libidinal imaginings. The scenes of Gary and Wyatt in the shower together find an echo in Gus Van Sant’s far darker examination of adolescent frustration, Elephant. Here hormonal urges reach expression in a high school massacre, but not before Van Sant’s two outsiders, Alex and Eric, have had their own shower scene. Van Sant seems to prick at liberal consciousness by having his two killers kiss. The scene is knowingly and frustratingly ambiguous. Perhaps we should see the shower as the only space where the two feel safe enough to express homosexual feelings, or perhaps we should view the kiss merely as the only possible outlet for any physical connection, homosexual or otherwise: “I’ve never kissed anyone before. Have you?” asks Eric.


Whilst in Hughes’ film the shower is a site for lust and voyeurism, Van Sant sees it a place for sad, sexless sexuality. In his later film Paranoid Park, the young skateboarder guilty of a gruesome accidental killing finds the shower as the only place the vent his deep sense of remorse.

The scene ends with the boy (another Alex) slowly sinking to the floor much like Janet Leigh in Hitchcock’s infamous scene (and Anne Heche in Van Sant’s own remake). She had paid the ultimate price for her transgression, but Alex can only wish for death.

Alan Rudolph and Moral Relativity (Notes on Equinox and Mortal Thoughts)

Habitually situated somewhere between farce and melodrama, Alan Rudolph’s eccentric comedies often take aim at sexual politics in a manner that can be provocative and unsettling. In the occasionally successful Equinox (available in its entirety on You Tube), Mathew Modine plays separated at birth twins Freddie and Henry: ambitious gangster and everyman mechanic, whose paths eventually cross in duly dramatic fashion. The film is puzzling even by Rudolph’s standards: full of blind alleys, non-sequiturs and other such dot dot dots. But the final picture that emerges is surprisingly troubling for what it does say, rather than for what it doesn’t.

The capital-T Theme (as signalled by the title) is the balance between light and dark, good and bad; the nice and the nasty. The film’s primary achievement however is in signalling each twins own personal moral equilibrium (their inner equinox, if you will) most successfully conveyed in Henry, the nice guy mechanic. At first we meet a character crippled by self consciousness, and seemingly petrified of women. His best friend attempts to get him to meet his sister, but Henry is reluctant to go. At home, Rosie (Marisia Tomai), an attractive but mouthy young prostitute neighbour begs him to look after her crying infant, and when she rewards him with a kiss he pretty much collapses in shock.

But as the film continues we start to know a different character. When Rosie returns and bestows him more than a kiss, Henry feels emboldened enough to violently confront her aggressive pimp. Rosie is of a classic Rudolph type – the melancholic woman who uses sex as self medication. “I like men. I like the feel of their bodies” she says, echoing similar comments by Eve in Choose Me. Henry’s new found aggression directly leads to Rosie’s death. At first he seems to acknowledge the consequences of his surprising behaviour, but rather than examining this guilt Rudolph chooses to switch focus to another odd-romance, now between Henry and his friend’s sister, Beverly.

Beverly (Lara Flynn Boyle) is an equally morose woman who medicates with wine rather than men. We first see her at home, reading Emily Dickinson out loud to herself and receiving silent phone calls from the frustrated Henry. They are finally brought together at a meal with Beverly’s brother. The unease between them is eventually explained as the residue of a previous sexual encounter.  “It was wonderful, Henry” she says, flatly. “I enjoyed it. Didn’t you?” Her face tells a different story. “I forced myself on you, Beverly” Henry confesses, but she wants to downplay the aggression. “You were forceful but you didn’t force yourself on me...entirely.” She looks wounded, but steadies herself. “We laughed, and we touched each other, and we made love. And I felt comfortable...sort of.” The encounter was a month ago, and in the meantime Henry hadn’t called (well, at least he hadn’t called and spoken) Beverly’s sense of rejection, and her own confusion at the events, has clearly led to some kind of depression. “Was I really that horrible?” she asks, turning what sounds like a sexual assault into a failure of her own making. Henry is similarly confused; scared of the sexual aggression that clouds his desire for Beverly. “There’s always this pushing and pulling inside of me. I don’t know what it is, it’s just there. I never know what to do, so I just don’t do anything.”

Strikingly, these two female characters both seem to will themselves into abusive relationships. Rosie shows no sign of wanting to ditch her pimp and Beverly is happy to view Henry’s Jekyll and Hyde routine as a mark of mischannelled affection. Like in Choose Me (where the three female characters all find themselves drawn to a mysterious, and possibly murderous homme fatale) Rudolph’s women are desperate romantics (self deluded or not) masochistically allowing themselves to be subjugated to male authority.

Rudolph’s previous film, Mortal Thoughts, concerns the killing of an abusive male, and two female victims who attempt to cover up the crime. In this film we get no Henry style mea culpa from the two dimensionally horrid James (Bruce Willis). Yet strangely this lack of hand wringing does not stop the film from entering into its own moral grey area. The story is structured around the police interrogation of Cynthia (Demi Moore), best friend of Joyce (Glenne Headly), James’ widow and chief suspect. In contrast to Equinox, this time we actually get to see the sexual assault, but Rudolph leaves it until near the end of the film. James is stabbed by his distressed prey, and eventually bleeds to death. His act of sexual violence is summarily punished, but any Thelma and Louise style justification is negated by a plot twist that appears to frame one of the women as a crafty manipulator, thus turning Willis’ misogynist ogre into some kind of victim.

Whilst both films are most likely minor works in the director’s canon, each is notable for this subversive approach to sexual aggression. Rudolph’s unexpected probing of the liberal consensus regarding non-consensual sex makes for uncomfortable viewing.

The Green Rays and Holy Whores Xmas Quiz 2010

In lieu of anything pointed or interesting to say, I offer a brief and marginally taxing end of term quiz. I hope you've been paying attention. (Most are reasonably simple, a few ever-so-slightly fiendish.)

1. What did Michael Shannon find in a box of Quaker Oats?

2. What does it mean to be "wired in"? (and how can harnessing this make you a multi billionaire?)

3. Where did Denzel Washington's daughters work in Unstoppable?

4. What was the name of the Von Trierish director in The Father of My Children?

5. In which film would you find Rosa Sparks and Iron Maven?

6.  ...and Mimi Le Meaux and Dirty Martini?

7. Why was there an empty seat on the Cannes Jury?

8. What was notable about James Miller's shaving routine in Certified Copy?

9. And what restaurant convention was it that annoyed him so much (which Steve Coogan repeated in The Trip)?

10. Why did a man doing a dodgy Keith Richards impression turn up at a school in Greenwich?

11. What made Johnny Marco pass out in Somewhere?

12. In which film did a well presented seafood starter make an aristocratic lady go all funny? (Some called it Prawnographic.)

13. In which film did Canadian indie band Raised By Swans appear?

14. And what was the name of Dominic Cooper's band in Tamara Drew?

15. Who drank his last Pabst Blue Ribbon?

16. Who departed, after famously telling Jake to forget it?

17. And who made his last visit to a big building with patients?

Reflexive reflectivity? A note.

A few days ago, travelling by coach on the M40 I watched The Wrong Man; laptop balanced on knee, screen tilted upwards, pound-shop headphones struggling to block out the murmurings of the humanity around me. To my surprise, I find this mode of viewing oddly agreeable (which may or may not have something to do with my belief that I am somehow conquering the crushing burden of time by effectively doing two things at once).

In an interview in Film Comment a while ago, Chris Marker spoke about the ‘lightness’ of such viewings:

I've just watched the ballet from An American in Paris on the screen of my iBook, and I very nearly rediscovered the lightness that we felt in London in 1952, when I was there with [Alain] Resnais and [Ghislain] Cloquet during the filming of Statues Also Die, when we started every day by seeing the 10 a.m. show of An American in Paris at a theater in Leicester Square. I thought I'd lost that lightness forever when I saw it on cassette.

Here, Marker is clearly pointing to the much evident superiority of image (and sound) between DVD and tape. But perhaps we could choose to see the somewhat deviant activity of watching a film on an iBook as an equivalent to the pleasingly deviant feeling one gets from going to the cinema in the morning (good luck finding a paying cinema in L. Square or anywhere else that opens before lunchtime nowadays).

But that’s not what I want to talk about. What really struck me watching The Wrong Man was the effect of my laptop screen’s reflection. Throughout watching the film I was constantly aware of my own image being superimposed with that of the action. Now perhaps this is simply ugly narcissism on my own part, but it occurred to me that such a dual image could impact the viewing experience quite a profound manner. I was, in effect, watching a simultaneous map of my own responses: an experience which was both disorientating and oddly apt (especially when watching a film about identity, doublings and facial similarity such as The Wrong Man).  I have attempted to recreate the effect in the far from perfect environment of my Homerton bedroom (apologises to anyone who might be eating).

      

Whilst a default reaction might be to see such reflections as further evidence of the deficient nature of non-cinema viewing, would it be too perverse to celebrate such an enforced self-reflexivity? It brought to mind the paintings of Francis Bacon, always displayed behind reflective glass so that the observer is forced to be confronted with their own image within the darkness of the canvas. Such a compulsory interactivity is integral to Bacon’s works, and a key reason why reproductions of his paintings lack impact.

Now as Douglas Sirk so neatly stressed in that famous shot of Joan Fontaine in All That Heaven Allows, the reflective fixed screen can be used as a smart metaphor for our submissive entrapment. But what if this engagement becomes more active?

The Kids are All Right (shame about the rest)

There's so much to like about Lisa Cholodenko’s lesbian family drama, The Kids are All Right: the nuanced performances and unpredictable characterisations, the sight of Mark Ruffalo guiltily eying up Julianne Moore’s green thong, the happily matter-of-fact treatment of non-linear sexuality; and equally  so much to irritate in Mike Leigh’s Another Year: the characters who never seem to stop moving their faces, the stage school monologues, the ploddingly predictable story arc. But in one very important area Leigh seems to get things emphatically right, whilst Cholodenko’s gets it ...well, if not wrong, then certainly muddled.

Whilst both films begin from a very similar starting point, focusing on contented, quote-unquote ordinary families, the various struggles of marriage and parenthood, and the humorous encroachment of middle-class alcoholism (although the sheer quantities of wine consumed in the two films surely says something about what constitutes problem drinking on each side of the pond); both films eventually revolve around a foreign element, Ruffalo’s sperm doning Paul in The Kids are All Right, and Mary, the lonely, but mostly chipper friend of NHS councillor Gerri in Another Year.  And it is in the treatment of this third-party that the two films diverge.

Interestingly, both are also outsiders academically, with Annette Benning’s Nic mocking Paul (the college drop-out) for his anti-intellectual comments, and Mary’s much evident shame at only graduating from a secretarial college. Both, more importantly, bring with them an unwanted element of sexuality. Paul’s requited desire for Moore’s Jules, and Mary’s confused yearning for her friend’s 30 year old son, Joe, threaten to unbalance, or even destroy, the tightly guarded family unit. Both Paul and Mary are ostracised, either through a mixture of humiliation and pity, shut out entirely from their adopted families. The difference being that Leigh clearly implores his audience to empathise with the rejected Mary, whereas Cholodenko chooses instead to celebrate an image of the family reunited.

Whilst in The Kids are All Right, Paul gets to act on his deviant wish (seducing, with little effort, the married lesbian Jules), Mary’s desires remains thoroughly conceptual, even unspoken; a fact that makes her punishment all the more unpalatable and strange. In Another Year, the extra-familial outsider is seen as very much the victim, whereas Paul’s untroubled and mostly unthinking move onto Nic’s territory allows us to forgive the family for cutting him out. As a result we find ourselves being asked to side with the oppressors rather than the oppressed.

 Maybe we could choose to view Cholodenko’s apparent conservatism as knowing provocation - placing the comfortably off, charming, white heterosexual in the role of ‘other’, but there is something pretty galling about the treatment of Paul, a character who does little wrong apart from act on his desires (his treatment of his casual lover/fuck buddy is questionable perhaps, but not objectively bad).

Mary is similarly cast-out in Another Year, when her hostility to the Joe’s new girlfriend unwittingly reveals her desperate longing for the younger man (who hardly did much to temper her advances in the first place). Suddenly the caring couple, Tom and Gerri, are shown in a different light: smug and two-faced, humouring their friend to her face, then mocking her behind her back. At the end of the film Mary is back in the family home, but Leigh isolates her in the frame, muted and shorn of all her earlier ‘bubbly’ characteristics; subjugated and neutered by the forces of middle-class family living (she doesn’t even understand the intricacies of carbon emissions and recycling for godssake!)

Whilst the ending is pure Fassbinder, Leigh has devoted plenty of the previous two hours to gently, and not so gently, mocking this pathetic being (the audience I saw the film with were mostly of the Tom and Gerri-style allotment owning classes, gleefully laughing at Mary’s every faux pas) not something Rainer would ever have allowed. (To be fair to Cholodenko, Paul is never to be pitied or mocked, or at least not any more than any other character). Although it’s hard to see what we should feel for Mary apart from pity (outrage  never really comes into it), at least Leigh makes clear where his sympathies lie. In both films the family unit is finally seen as exclusive, cruel and unforgiving of even the slightest transgression. But in Cholodenko’s vision this is, well...alright.

London Korean Film Festival 2010: The Man From Nowhere and I Saw the Devil

Now in its fifth year, the London Korean Film Festival got underway last weekend in ambitious fashion; presenting two sold out Galas of prime-cuts from the country's pulp mainstream.  The Man From Nowhere and I Saw the Devil may not have broken new ground in terms of theme (a Korean movie about revenge, you say? How novel) but both provided ample gut tossing entertainment for those who like their vengeance served sizzling (bordering on overcooked).

On opening night we were offered Lee Jeong-beom’s second directorial outing, The Man From Nowhere. A slightly creepy set-up featuring the young daughter of a drug addled single mum and her secretive next door neighbour, gives rise to an increasingly barmy narrative involving organ harvesting and the Chinese mafia. Said mysterious man (a floppy haired Won Bin) searches for his cute protégé after she is taken by a criminal gang with designs on her corneas.

What was most fascinating about the experience was the much audible response of the young (and not so young) Korean women in the audience at the sight of Won Bin’s well-worked torso. As Nowhere is, by all reports, the highest grossing film in Korea so far this year, it would seem that they had little difficulty in appealing to a pan-gendered audience in a way that few blood-soaked actioners manage in the West.

I Saw the Devil was certainly the more philosophically rigorous of the two, with director Kim Ji Woon happily citing Nietzsche in his post screening Q and A. And whilst both films bore the mark of Park Chan Wook’s Vengeance trilogy, it was Devil that most satisfyingly continued Park’s questioning approach to life in a moral vacuum. The film plays out like a two hour plus live action episode of Tom and Jerry, imagined by Gaspar Noe. Rookie cop (Lee Byung-Hun) tracks down the maniacal sex killer (Mr Old Boy himself, Choi Min Sik) that did for his fiancée. But instead of polishing him off in one go, our hero chooses to maim and tag his cruel victim, before tracking him cross-country and taking the life out of him one chunk at a time. That plenty of innocent bystanders get sexually assaulted and/or brutally murdered in the interim is neither here nor there to our perversely absorbed protagonist.

Seen back-to-back, I Saw the Devil appears to be some sort of corrective to The Man From Nowhere’s wilful moral relativism. Not that Kim’s film doesn’t happily tap into the same dark recesses of our collective unconscious; and neither does it take its audience to task (Haneke style) for craving ever increasing depravity. Although semi-detached from its twin anti-heroes, the film offers enough extreme pleasures to satisfy the most sinew-greedy genre perverts the world over (and it takes one to know one). I Saw the Devil is beyond good and evil. But it is good.

Endnote

As an addendum to previous posts, and to counter any notion that Korean cinema is exclusively obsessed with bloody revenge, I would like to mention Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry; a personal highlight from last month’s LFF (I saw his previous film, Secret Sunshine at the Korean festival a few years ago). Lee’s film rejects the pleasures of vengeance ingrained in the films above, and instead offers a low key, nuanced and infinitely subtle examination of a Grandmother’s acceptance of moral responsibility for her offspring’s hideous crime (just as hideous as those in Nowhere and Devil), as well as her own gradual mental decline (and nobody gets their eye gouged out). Conceptually daring and brilliantly realised, the film tackles complex philosophical themes in an honest and straight-forward manner that never once comes close to pretention.  Poetry is moving in a way that few films ever are.