Monthly Archives: December 2013

Joyce on propaganda and porn — part one: 12 Years a Slave

12-Years-A-Slave-Trailer

“ – The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Not that Joyce had a problem with pornography or didacticism.  They might be “improper,” but they are still “art.”

When it came to porn, he was no prude. Not only did he write filthy love letters to his wife Nora, but in 1933 his masterpiece Ulysses was arraigned in a New York Southern District Federal Court (United States v. One Book Called Ulysses) before Judge John Munro Woolsey on charges of obscenity (in a landmark decision, Woolsey, an enlightened jurist and not a bad literary critic, explained why the book wasn’t pornographic.)

And as for didacticism, you can’t get much more didactic than does Stephen Dedalus in the multi-page discourse on Thomistic aesthetics quoted in part above.

Therefore it  is a qualification and not a condemnation to say that, by the above definition, 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s adaptation of a 1852 memoir by Solomon Northup, a free man kidnapped and sold to slave owners, and Blue Is the Warmest Color, a chronicle of a lesbian love affair directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, fall into the category of  “improper art.”

But for many people, they pass for masterpieces. Both films have swept awards from just about every critics society and are en route to likely triumphs at the Academy Awards. What can Joyce offer to counter such an overwhelming movement to canonize these pictures as masterpieces?

Let’s take the case of 12 Years a Slave. In it, the mind is not “arrested and raised above desire and loathing.” Quite the opposite. Nor is it that its intention. It is a didactic screed, a potent piece of propaganda, powerfully belaboring the message that the institution of slavery was an abomination, a debasement not only of the enslaved but also of those who enslaved them. And as such it succeeds with brutal, manipulative effectiveness.

For myself, by the end of the first hour, with over eight years as a slave still to go, after repeated whippings and cruelties and humiliations, I was fully convinced that slavery was a terrible thing, as I had been before I saw the movie. Ante-bellum slave traders, morally degenerate Southern plantation owners, pitiful liberal milksops who regarded the system with distaste while profiting from it, seeming sympathizers who prove to be  inevitably treacherous, and sadistic white trash overseers like the guy played by Paul Dano

12-years-a-slave-movie-wallpaper-dano use

(who, though a talented actor, has unfortunately been typecast as loathsome characters of one sort or another), were all, without question , horrible human beings

Truth be told, I wanted to kill them. Exterminate the brutes!” Trouble is, those people have been dead for over a century. So it’s pointless, and inconsequential, to hate them, because they no longer exist.

On the other hand, their legacy obviously endures. But here again I don’t think the film will make much of an impact when it comes to the racism and injustice that prevails to the present day.

Those who already feel guilt and shame and anger about these things will feel the same way.  But those who might actually learn something from the movie — say, Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, noted among other things for declaring that black folks were better off singing in the cotton fields before thy got all uppity with that Civil Rights stuff; or Robertson’s politically opportunistic enablers such as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz — well,  you won’t find them lining up at the Cineplex to buy tickets to  see 12 Years a Slave.

But for those who do see the movie,although it won’t change their opinions, it might make them feel better about themselves. It offers scapegoats to take the blame for all the bad stuff we feel guilty about. Michael Fassbender’s psychopathic plantation owner is a perfect example:

gogo demon

now there’s someone you love to loathe. Forget that those who owned slaves back then included such enlightened American heroes as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. That just makes things too complicated. It’s much more clarifying to pretend that they were all wicked and beyond the pale. This tactic is the essence of that sinister offshoot of didacticism, propaganda: create a demonic “other” who will take on our sins and serve as a despised projection of our guilt and rage,

In his “Contrarian View” of 12 Years a Slave posted on the Artsfuse website, Gerald Peary suggests that Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) might, in fact, offer a more effective and legitimate approach to resolving such conflicted feelings. At first glance, this notion seems absurd, if not blasphemous: how can Tarantino’s absurdly violent, wish fulfillment fantasy be considered in the same context as McQueen’s earnest depiction of an actual historical nightmare?

Well, for a couple of reasons. For one, the hero of Django is not a passive victim rescued by the kindness of a white stranger

gogo 12 years jesus saving

(a carpenter, no less – and note the cruciform framework in the background in this still from the film). That may well have been what really happened, but Northup’s actual revenge, the writing of the book on which the film is based, and his subsequent activism on behalf of the abolitionist cause, is mentioned only as an afterward.

In contrast, Django is no victim: he’s a juggernaut of vengeance who kills white people.

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Lots of them.

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“Am I alone (perhaps),” Peary asks, “in preferring, as a screen hero, Jamie Foxx’s rowdy, impolitic Django to [Chiwetol] Ejiofor’s impeccably behaved Northup?”

And if not the fictional character Django, why not another historical figure? Why not, as Peary suggests, someone like Nat Turner? Why has no movie been made about this leader of a bloody, failed slave uprising in Virginia in 1831?

Like Northop, Turner also wrote a book about his ordeal – as told to his lawyer Thomas Ruffin Gray

gogo nat turner

– and it was fictionalized by William Styron in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. Perhaps that story is too complex, too hard to compartmentalize into facile categories of good and evil. Too tragic.

And while we’re on the subject, is it wrong to prefer a complex, comprehensible, even seductive villain as opposed to the cartoon monsters in 12 Years?  Someone like the malevolent plantation owner played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django, a diabolical villain with a certain joie de vivre, a nihilistic charm, someone who arouses not just loathing, but also terror, awe, even pity?

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But to do so is to invite the condemnation of those who think that such reprobates should not be depicted as in any way remotely human like ourselves, but only as alien and demonic. They see any attempt to comprehend these fiends as an endorsement of the evil they have perpetrated.

That’s what Kathryn Bigelow learned to her regret when she depicted the CIA agents who inflicted grotesque, almost unwatchable torture on naked, chained and masked victims in her film Zero Dark Thirty (2012) .  Other than that, however, they seemed kind of normal. They worried about their jobs, told jokes, were nice to their friends, and believed in the validity of what they were doing. Bigelow defended her non-didactic approach to this complex and ambiguous evil by insisting that depiction was not endorsement. To no avail.

More recently, Martin Scorsese has faced similar heat for his The Wolf of Wall Street. Some condemn it for glorifying the excesses of a generation of narcissistic sociopaths who lived an exotic (if tasteless) Satyricon-like life while destroying the economy and millions of lives. But Scorsese is attempting something more insidious than flat out condemnation; instead, he seduces the viewer into the attractions of a forbidden, alluring life style, itself a hallucinogenic version of the American Dream, in order to show that evil comes not from the pathology of a few, but from the sickness of a culture.

For these admirable intentions, as was the case with Bigelow, Scorsese can kiss his Oscar chances goodbye.

It may be some consolation to him and Bigelow and Tarantino that they are fulfilling James Joyce’s definition of “proper art.” They seek to elevate the soul to a level of aesthetic contemplation that induces a profound perception of good and evil and of human fate.

It is the essence of tragedy, as Stephen Dedalus points out in another of his aesthetic musings in Portrait of the Artist. Referring to the familiar Aristotlean formula that tragedy arouses pity and terror in order to produce in the audience a catharsis of those emotions, he adds:

“Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have…

“Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.”

Pity and terror might not be as easy to take as an invigorating dose of desire or loathing. But in the long run they are more rewarding, and enduring.

NEXT: part two: pornography and Blue Is the Warmest Color

Boston Society of Film Critics 2013

We are now in the Carver Ballroom in the Revere Hotel. There is a Christmas tree in the corner, and a conference table with some twenty odd film critics gathered around it eating muffins and drinking coffee.
The atmosphere is electric! This is so exciting!
Our first crisis: will we need more chairs?
To be continued…
Yes!
A bunch of business stuff. When will we meet next year. I say, let’s enjoy this year while we can and let next year take care of itself. As they say in “Dead Poets’ Society,” “Carpe Diem!”
I keep this to myself.
This a very long conference table. I can’t hear what people on the other end are saying.
Damn. I forgot to bring my dues.
Recording someone’s proxy votes, I put down “12 Years Asleep.” Got to pull it together!
This business stuff can take a while…
From the President: “We’re not at the vote yet.”
Now we are, kind of.
commendation for Midnight Film Series at the Coolidge Corner passes unanimously! Congratulations, guys!
Five minute break and the real voting begins!
BEST USE OF MUSIC!
Countless repetition of the names of the movies voted for: this is what we live for.
I am starting to realize that I am the only person who saw “I Used to Be Darker.”
OUR FIRST WINNER:
FOR BEST USE OF MUSIC
Inside Llewyn Davis
runners-up:
Nebraska
Wolf of Wall Street

NEXT:
BEST EDITING (In Honor of Karen Schmeer)
Round one: no winner
Round two: A WINNER!
Rush
runner-up
Wolf of Wall Street

NEXT:
CINEMATOGRAPHY
round one: no winner
round two: a winner!
Emmanuel Lubezki for GRAVITY
runner-up: The Grandmaster

NEXT: NEW FILMMAKER (In Honor of David Brudnoy)
round one: no winner
round two: A WINNER:
Ryan Kugler, “Fruitvale Station
runner up Joshua Oppenheimer, Act of Killing

As reward for a rapid progress: PIZZA! Made specially for BSFC by the chef at the REvere Hotel
Thanks Revere Hotel!

BACK to work.
Next is Best Animation.
Inkoo Kang of the Village Voice is reading a statement questioning the morality of Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Wind Rises” because it glorifies the inventor of a weapon used to commit atrocities, and whitewashes history and vindicates war criminals. (My apologies to Inkoo for this rough paraphrasing of an eloquent statement.)

I am tempted to defer voting. But the argument reminds me of the criticism of “Zero Dark Thirty.” I mumbled something to this effect, saying that depiction is not advocacy (as Bigelow said) and that Miyazaki is putting the burden of moral determination on the viewer.
Four members are abstaining.
I am not.

ROUND ONE
no winner
ROUND TWO:
A WINNER
The Wind Rises
RUNNER UP
Frozen

NEXT: Documentary
This might take a while since there are a million great docs this year.
Though Ty Burr suggests we vote for “Salinger” for worst documentary.

Round One
no winner
Round Two:
no winner
Round Three:[no proxies]
A WINNER!
Act of Killing
RUNNER-UP:
Blackfish

NEXT: Screenplay
Round One:
no winner
Round Two:
no winner
Round Three: [no proxies]
No winner
Round Four
No Winner
Round Five
We have a dilemma because “Wolf of Wall Street” is one of the high vote-getters, in a virtual tie with “Enough Said,” but neither are winners, and because of a late press screening date for Wolf not everyone has seen it and some of those who haven’t seen it are abstaining.
A show of hands voting between those two films results in A WINNER
Nicole Holofcener for “Enough Said.”
Runner Up: “Wolf of Wall Street”

Next: BEST ENSEMBLE
First Round:
no winner
Second Round:
no winner

[Some testy exchanges among those who disagree about Meryl Streep’s performance in “Osage.” Some say Best Actress, some want to give her our annual Anne Bancroft Award for Overacting.]

Third Round:
A winner!
Nebraska
Runner Up:
12 Years a Slave

FIVE MINUTE BREAK

NEXT:
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
First Round:
no winner
Second Round:
A WINNER!
June Squibb, “Nebraska”
Runner-Up:
Lupita Nyong’o, “12 Years a Slave”

NEXT:
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
round one
nope
round two
[Question raised: Is James Gandolfini in “Enough Said” a supporting role? No answer.]
no winner
[Apparently Gandolfini is being considered by most for supporting actor]
round three
no winner
round four will be a run-off between the top three
And so he is: James Gandolfini wins
RUNNER UP:
tie
Barkhad Abdi for Captain Philips
Jared Leto Dallas Buyers

NEXT
BEST ACTRESS:
and, in the blink of an eye, on the first ballot, it goes to Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine

NEXT
BEST ACTOR
round one
no decision
round two
A WINNER
Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12Years a Slave
RUNNER UP
Leonardo DiCaprio, Wolf of Wall Street

NEXT
BEST DIRECTOR
round one
no winner
round two
no winner
round three
no winner
round four
a run-off between Scorsese, McQueen, and Coens
WINNER: Steve McQueen “12 Years a Slave”
runner-up Scorsese
[More grumbling about the late screening of “Wolf of Wall Street..”]

NEXT
BEST PICTURE
round one
nada
round two
A WINNER
“12 Years a Slave”
runner-up
“Wolf of Wall Street”
[more grumbling re: late “Wolf” screening]

NEXT
BEST FOREIGN FILM
[some wag commented that “Wolf of Wall Street” will probably finish second in this category, too]
round one
no winner
round two
no winner
round three
A WINNER:
Wadjda
runner-up
Blue is the Warmest Color

That’s all!
And just over five hours!
Until next time….