California Films: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
The Times of Harvey Milk
Chinatown
3 Women
Irreconcilable Differences
Sideways
Safe
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Boogie Nights
Sponsored
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A veteran blogger, he previously worked for Yahoo! in various news writing and editing roles. He was also the editor of \u003ca>EconomyBeat.org\u003c/a>, which documented user-generated content about the financial crisis and recession. Jon is also a playwright whose work has been produced in San Francisco, New York, Italy, and around the U.S. He has written about film for his own blog and studied film at Boston University. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College.","userNicename":"jon-brooks","type":"guest-author","nickname":""}],"slug":"california-films-sweet-sweetbacks-baadasssss-song","title":"California Films: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song","publishDate":1396875653,"format":"aside","headTitle":"California Films: Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":433,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10134584\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/04/sweetbackposter.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/04/sweetbackposter.jpg\" alt=\"Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song\" width=\"500\" height=\"746\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10134584\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/04/sweetbackposter.jpg 500w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/04/sweetbackposter-400x596.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/04/sweetbackposter-201x300.jpg 201w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>In this occasional series, Jon Brooks looks at films that illustrate different aspects of California culture.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Melvin Van Peebles said he made \u003ci>Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song\u003c/i>, released in 1971, because he didn’t much care for the way movies portrayed African Americans. When asked later by an interviewer to name some of the films he took issue with, he said, “About every damn thing that had a black person in it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So while it’s a long way from \u003ca href=\"https://www.google.com/search?q=hattie%20+mcdaniel\">Hattie McDaniel\u003c/a> to \u003ca href=\"https://www.google.com/search?q=sidney+poitier\">Sidney Poitier\u003c/a>, it may be an even more distant journey from Poitier to Van Peebles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The title of \u003ci>Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song\u003c/i> alone is enough to give pause. The repetition in front, the extra vowel and prolonged sibilance near the rear — suspicion arises that such an affront to the tradition of concise movie titling can only be a juvenile ploy for attention. Things don’t get any more routine once the film starts. A series of shots showing five black women facing the camera is presented with an asymmetrical, vexing syntax: closeup, cut to closeup, pan to closeup, cut to two-shot. The women stare at something but don’t appear to be looking at the same fixed point, another visual pebble in the shoe. In conjunction with the whirring on the soundtrack, it all feels spacey and disorienting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eventually we see what — or who– holds the women’s attention: a ragged, filthy black boy, his skull marked by bald patches where ringworm has set in. Voraciously, he shovels food into his mouth. Quick freeze frame and cut to a black man, emerging from an underpass, running toward the camera. An epigraph appears on-screen, for some reason in English and French: “Sire, these lines are not a homage to brutality that the artist has invented, but a hymn from the mouth of reality.” That’s a “traditional prologue of the dark ages,” we are told.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> We hear a train, then a siren. Fade. Another on-screen message: “This film is dedicated to all the brothers and sisters who had enough of the Man” (no period).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back to the boy. No dialogue, but we hear the exaggerated clang of dishes. Now the boy is carrying towels; a woman beckons him to her room. She takes her clothes off, then undresses him. Some sort of industrial machinery on the soundtrack. She pulls the boy, maybe all of 12, on top of her. “Move!” she chides. A gospel song on the soundtrack. The boy dutifully humps the woman, who is brought to orgasm. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!” we hear sung. “F—,” the woman moans. “You got a sweet, sweet back.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Freeze frame. Big red letters in cartoonish font cover the screen: “Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song.” Jazz-funk music over credits:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"margin-right: 20px;margin-left: 20px\">Starring\u003cbr>\nTHE BLACK COMMUNITY\u003cbr>\nand\u003cbr>\nBRER SOUL.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rD1OzJVoWY\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’re five minutes in and, uh, just what the hell is going on here? Imagine the disorientation, before \u003ca href=\"http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2011/04/blaxploitation_films_40_years_after_sweet_sweetbacks_baadasssss_song.html\">blaxploitation\u003c/a> took hold, from all those black faces on-screen, alone. (Tyler Perry, Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, Samuel Jackson were all just gleams in Hollywood’s eye.) The rest of the film is a political bomb thrown at the movie establishment, and at the “technological colonization of the white aesthetic,” as Van Peebles put it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The boy who lays down with the prostitute (played by Van Peebles’ son Mario) in one freakishly effective cut arises a man. He now earns his keep as a sexual performer in a hard-core burlesque show for mixed-race audiences. Sweetback, as played by Van Peebles, does not derive even an iota of sexual satisfaction from the erotic encounters we see. When the show’s emcee, a fey black man in fairy godmother costume, invites audience members to have sex with Sweetback, a white woman is eager. But the brothel owner shakes his head — not in front of the white cops who have wandered in. “The offer’s only open to … sisters,” the emcee adds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time of the film’s release, at least one black group was critical: “Van Peebles pictures sexual freakishness as an essential and unmistakable part of black reality and history, a total distortion and gross affront to black people.” But some black Americans undoubtedly related to the total lack of agency experienced by the character. Objectified, fetishized, Sweetback is such a complete cipher that his employer hands him over to the cops to serve as a fake suspect in a murder. While taking Sweetback to the station, the policemen arrest a young black radical and work him over. For a time Sweetback impassively observes the brutality. But he eventually comes to the radical’s defense, attacking the cops. From then on he roams L.A. as a fugitive. We frequently see him literally on the run, and not necessarily from an immediate pursuer, so that his flight becomes the central metaphor of the film, an almost mythological task. Between these desperate flights, the rest of the film happens: Sweetback has various encounters as the police continue their search, and he winds up in the desert with LAPD canines hot on his trail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Van Peebles recounted a story from the movie’s opening in Atlanta, sitting next to an elderly black woman who mumbled, “Oh Lord, let him die in the desert, don’t let them kill him.” He said about the incident: “It was beyond any thought that someone would defy a white authority and live.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings up the film’s most explosive component: the overt racism and brutality against blacks on display by the LAPD, an \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Police_Department#Misconduct\">issue that has plagued the department and the community it polices\u003c/a> for decades. We see white police fire a gun next to a black man’s ear; the police commissioner spits out a “nigger” then apologizes to his black officers: “I didn’t mean any offense by that word.” In a case of mistaken identity, cops brutally beat a black man in bed with a white woman. “That’s not him,” one of them realizes. “So what?” says the other.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not exactly crossover material. While \u003ci>Sweetback\u003c/i> is often credited with ushering in the \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaxploitation\">blaxploitation genre\u003c/a>, it has a much rawer quality than those subsequent 1970s films. And as far as style goes, well, call it impressionistic, call it off-the-wall, or call it a travesty, even. I’ve seen it four times and I still have a hard time figuring out what’s going on. Some audiences weaned on traditional film grammar will find it utterly inaccessible, and you can’t always determine what is a piece of experimental brilliance and what is simply a mistake. If the film has any stylistic antecedents, they’re the films of the French New Wave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though he’d directed two other features, Van Peebles began his career with no training. He made \u003ci>Sweetback\u003c/i> with a non-union, multi-ethnic crew, half of whom had never seen a camera before, according to the director. They shot guerilla-style, working 20-hour days for almost three weeks. Things went helter skelter on the set. Crew members were arrested. A real gun wound up in the prop box. The film uses mostly amateur actors (including Van Peebles as Sweetback, his stoicism logical and effective, but just as likely due to lack of ability), and the dialogue often feels improvised or uneasily remembered. Dubbed lines, color filters, cross-cut sequences disjointed by an inconsistent soundtrack, repeated shots, freeze frames, double exposures, barely visible lighting — all on display.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even the music at times disintegrates into a shambles. But it’s also the music that frequently compels us to keep watching, and the film actually might be intolerable without it. Written by Van Peebles and recorded by newcomers Earth, Wind and Fire, the jazz-funk score is an all-time great. While you can often lose the narrative thread of \u003ci>Sweetback\u003c/i>, the music married to frequently striking visuals provides some sublimely lyrical moments, a poetic soul-on-fire feeling evoking the metamorphosis of degradation into resilience. It’s probably as apt an anthem as any for the roiling rebellion of that era.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Contrary to the Atlanta woman’s fatalism regarding cinematic rebellion by black people, Sweetback manages to escape his pursuers, and the film ends with another on-screen message: “Watch out… a Bad Assss nigger is coming back to collect some dues.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We never did get to see that payment — Van Peebles did not make the sequels he’d intended. So those who craved cinematic catharsis in the form of black retribution against the white power structure had to wait until a \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/movies/quentin-tarantinos-django-unchained-stars-jamie-foxx.html?_r=0\">white director offered it up \u003c/a> 40 years later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before \u003ci>Sweetback\u003c/i>, Van Peebles had once looked forward to completing a three-picture deal with Columbia, but he’d quarreled with the studio over the ending to \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watermelon_Man_%28film%29\">\u003ci>Watermelon Man\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, a film about a bigoted white man who one day wakes up black. Van Peebles said he sunk “every penny I had” into \u003ci>Sweetback\u003c/i>, completing it with no studio money and a production-saving $50,000 loan from — of all people — Bill Cosby. His studio career over, he turned to the theater, music, and other endeavors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not every critic took to \u003ci>Sweetback\u003c/i>, as you may imagine. Vincent Canby of the \u003ci>New York Times\u003c/i> \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?%20res=9801E2D71F3BE73ABC4153DFB366838A669EDE\">reviewed it\u003c/a> like this: \u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"margin-right: 20px;margin-left: 20px\">“The movie is the story of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Flight, accompanied by lots of soundtrack song, a journey made eventually intolerable not only by the hardships and the duplicity (of even white counter-culturalists like the Hells Angels), but by the simplistic sensationalism of the treatment and the eye-disorienting visual style that substitutes film school technical complexities (such as the superimposition of double, triple and quadruple images) for dramatic content. Instead of dramatizing injustice, Van Peebles merchandizes it. With the exception of perhaps a dozen scenes, the movie is composed almost entirely of the sort of fancy montages with which television (is) the goal. Still to be found are a director and a choreographer to guide a cast of about 25.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I think of this in-your-face look at institutional racism along the lines of Henry Miller’s definition of his own \u003ci>Tropic of Cancer\u003c/i>: “This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty …” Indeed, some things in this movie only John Waters could love: a man on a toilet moving his bowels and wiping himself, a man biting into a raw lizard, a dead dog drowned under water. It all adds up to the sense of being privvy to a perversity usually kept under wraps, and one uniquely disconnected from the American Dream.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, it must be noted, black audiences ate it up. As told by Van Peebles, he could only open the film in two theaters, one in Atlanta and one in Detroit. In Detroit, only three people came to the first show and none to the second. But for the third, the Black Panthers showed up in force and eventually the lines went around the block as word spread. The film did by some accounts $15 million at the box office on a budget of $500,000, partly because of heavy promotion by the Panthers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No him, no me,” Dizzy Gillespie once said of Louis Armstrong. In the continuum of African American cinema, \u003ci>Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song\u003c/i> is at the forefront.\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Melvin Van Peebles' 1971 film introduced the blaxploitation genre by vigorously challenging film history and form.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705049150,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":25,"wordCount":2049},"headData":{"title":"California Films: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song | KQED","description":"Melvin Van Peebles' 1971 film introduced the blaxploitation genre by vigorously challenging film history and form.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"California Films: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song","datePublished":"2014-04-07T13:00:53.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T08:45:50.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sticky":false,"path":"/arts/10134583/california-films-sweet-sweetbacks-baadasssss-song","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10134584\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/04/sweetbackposter.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/04/sweetbackposter.jpg\" alt=\"Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song\" width=\"500\" height=\"746\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10134584\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/04/sweetbackposter.jpg 500w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/04/sweetbackposter-400x596.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/04/sweetbackposter-201x300.jpg 201w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>In this occasional series, Jon Brooks looks at films that illustrate different aspects of California culture.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Melvin Van Peebles said he made \u003ci>Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song\u003c/i>, released in 1971, because he didn’t much care for the way movies portrayed African Americans. When asked later by an interviewer to name some of the films he took issue with, he said, “About every damn thing that had a black person in it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So while it’s a long way from \u003ca href=\"https://www.google.com/search?q=hattie%20+mcdaniel\">Hattie McDaniel\u003c/a> to \u003ca href=\"https://www.google.com/search?q=sidney+poitier\">Sidney Poitier\u003c/a>, it may be an even more distant journey from Poitier to Van Peebles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The title of \u003ci>Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song\u003c/i> alone is enough to give pause. The repetition in front, the extra vowel and prolonged sibilance near the rear — suspicion arises that such an affront to the tradition of concise movie titling can only be a juvenile ploy for attention. Things don’t get any more routine once the film starts. A series of shots showing five black women facing the camera is presented with an asymmetrical, vexing syntax: closeup, cut to closeup, pan to closeup, cut to two-shot. The women stare at something but don’t appear to be looking at the same fixed point, another visual pebble in the shoe. In conjunction with the whirring on the soundtrack, it all feels spacey and disorienting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eventually we see what — or who– holds the women’s attention: a ragged, filthy black boy, his skull marked by bald patches where ringworm has set in. Voraciously, he shovels food into his mouth. Quick freeze frame and cut to a black man, emerging from an underpass, running toward the camera. An epigraph appears on-screen, for some reason in English and French: “Sire, these lines are not a homage to brutality that the artist has invented, but a hymn from the mouth of reality.” That’s a “traditional prologue of the dark ages,” we are told.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> We hear a train, then a siren. Fade. Another on-screen message: “This film is dedicated to all the brothers and sisters who had enough of the Man” (no period).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back to the boy. No dialogue, but we hear the exaggerated clang of dishes. Now the boy is carrying towels; a woman beckons him to her room. She takes her clothes off, then undresses him. Some sort of industrial machinery on the soundtrack. She pulls the boy, maybe all of 12, on top of her. “Move!” she chides. A gospel song on the soundtrack. The boy dutifully humps the woman, who is brought to orgasm. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!” we hear sung. “F—,” the woman moans. “You got a sweet, sweet back.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Freeze frame. Big red letters in cartoonish font cover the screen: “Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song.” Jazz-funk music over credits:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"margin-right: 20px;margin-left: 20px\">Starring\u003cbr>\nTHE BLACK COMMUNITY\u003cbr>\nand\u003cbr>\nBRER SOUL.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/0rD1OzJVoWY'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/0rD1OzJVoWY'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>We’re five minutes in and, uh, just what the hell is going on here? Imagine the disorientation, before \u003ca href=\"http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2011/04/blaxploitation_films_40_years_after_sweet_sweetbacks_baadasssss_song.html\">blaxploitation\u003c/a> took hold, from all those black faces on-screen, alone. (Tyler Perry, Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, Samuel Jackson were all just gleams in Hollywood’s eye.) The rest of the film is a political bomb thrown at the movie establishment, and at the “technological colonization of the white aesthetic,” as Van Peebles put it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The boy who lays down with the prostitute (played by Van Peebles’ son Mario) in one freakishly effective cut arises a man. He now earns his keep as a sexual performer in a hard-core burlesque show for mixed-race audiences. Sweetback, as played by Van Peebles, does not derive even an iota of sexual satisfaction from the erotic encounters we see. When the show’s emcee, a fey black man in fairy godmother costume, invites audience members to have sex with Sweetback, a white woman is eager. But the brothel owner shakes his head — not in front of the white cops who have wandered in. “The offer’s only open to … sisters,” the emcee adds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time of the film’s release, at least one black group was critical: “Van Peebles pictures sexual freakishness as an essential and unmistakable part of black reality and history, a total distortion and gross affront to black people.” But some black Americans undoubtedly related to the total lack of agency experienced by the character. Objectified, fetishized, Sweetback is such a complete cipher that his employer hands him over to the cops to serve as a fake suspect in a murder. While taking Sweetback to the station, the policemen arrest a young black radical and work him over. For a time Sweetback impassively observes the brutality. But he eventually comes to the radical’s defense, attacking the cops. From then on he roams L.A. as a fugitive. We frequently see him literally on the run, and not necessarily from an immediate pursuer, so that his flight becomes the central metaphor of the film, an almost mythological task. Between these desperate flights, the rest of the film happens: Sweetback has various encounters as the police continue their search, and he winds up in the desert with LAPD canines hot on his trail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Van Peebles recounted a story from the movie’s opening in Atlanta, sitting next to an elderly black woman who mumbled, “Oh Lord, let him die in the desert, don’t let them kill him.” He said about the incident: “It was beyond any thought that someone would defy a white authority and live.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings up the film’s most explosive component: the overt racism and brutality against blacks on display by the LAPD, an \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Police_Department#Misconduct\">issue that has plagued the department and the community it polices\u003c/a> for decades. We see white police fire a gun next to a black man’s ear; the police commissioner spits out a “nigger” then apologizes to his black officers: “I didn’t mean any offense by that word.” In a case of mistaken identity, cops brutally beat a black man in bed with a white woman. “That’s not him,” one of them realizes. “So what?” says the other.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not exactly crossover material. While \u003ci>Sweetback\u003c/i> is often credited with ushering in the \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaxploitation\">blaxploitation genre\u003c/a>, it has a much rawer quality than those subsequent 1970s films. And as far as style goes, well, call it impressionistic, call it off-the-wall, or call it a travesty, even. I’ve seen it four times and I still have a hard time figuring out what’s going on. Some audiences weaned on traditional film grammar will find it utterly inaccessible, and you can’t always determine what is a piece of experimental brilliance and what is simply a mistake. If the film has any stylistic antecedents, they’re the films of the French New Wave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though he’d directed two other features, Van Peebles began his career with no training. He made \u003ci>Sweetback\u003c/i> with a non-union, multi-ethnic crew, half of whom had never seen a camera before, according to the director. They shot guerilla-style, working 20-hour days for almost three weeks. Things went helter skelter on the set. Crew members were arrested. A real gun wound up in the prop box. The film uses mostly amateur actors (including Van Peebles as Sweetback, his stoicism logical and effective, but just as likely due to lack of ability), and the dialogue often feels improvised or uneasily remembered. Dubbed lines, color filters, cross-cut sequences disjointed by an inconsistent soundtrack, repeated shots, freeze frames, double exposures, barely visible lighting — all on display.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even the music at times disintegrates into a shambles. But it’s also the music that frequently compels us to keep watching, and the film actually might be intolerable without it. Written by Van Peebles and recorded by newcomers Earth, Wind and Fire, the jazz-funk score is an all-time great. While you can often lose the narrative thread of \u003ci>Sweetback\u003c/i>, the music married to frequently striking visuals provides some sublimely lyrical moments, a poetic soul-on-fire feeling evoking the metamorphosis of degradation into resilience. It’s probably as apt an anthem as any for the roiling rebellion of that era.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Contrary to the Atlanta woman’s fatalism regarding cinematic rebellion by black people, Sweetback manages to escape his pursuers, and the film ends with another on-screen message: “Watch out… a Bad Assss nigger is coming back to collect some dues.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We never did get to see that payment — Van Peebles did not make the sequels he’d intended. So those who craved cinematic catharsis in the form of black retribution against the white power structure had to wait until a \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/movies/quentin-tarantinos-django-unchained-stars-jamie-foxx.html?_r=0\">white director offered it up \u003c/a> 40 years later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before \u003ci>Sweetback\u003c/i>, Van Peebles had once looked forward to completing a three-picture deal with Columbia, but he’d quarreled with the studio over the ending to \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watermelon_Man_%28film%29\">\u003ci>Watermelon Man\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, a film about a bigoted white man who one day wakes up black. Van Peebles said he sunk “every penny I had” into \u003ci>Sweetback\u003c/i>, completing it with no studio money and a production-saving $50,000 loan from — of all people — Bill Cosby. His studio career over, he turned to the theater, music, and other endeavors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not every critic took to \u003ci>Sweetback\u003c/i>, as you may imagine. Vincent Canby of the \u003ci>New York Times\u003c/i> \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?%20res=9801E2D71F3BE73ABC4153DFB366838A669EDE\">reviewed it\u003c/a> like this: \u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"margin-right: 20px;margin-left: 20px\">“The movie is the story of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Flight, accompanied by lots of soundtrack song, a journey made eventually intolerable not only by the hardships and the duplicity (of even white counter-culturalists like the Hells Angels), but by the simplistic sensationalism of the treatment and the eye-disorienting visual style that substitutes film school technical complexities (such as the superimposition of double, triple and quadruple images) for dramatic content. Instead of dramatizing injustice, Van Peebles merchandizes it. With the exception of perhaps a dozen scenes, the movie is composed almost entirely of the sort of fancy montages with which television (is) the goal. Still to be found are a director and a choreographer to guide a cast of about 25.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I think of this in-your-face look at institutional racism along the lines of Henry Miller’s definition of his own \u003ci>Tropic of Cancer\u003c/i>: “This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty …” Indeed, some things in this movie only John Waters could love: a man on a toilet moving his bowels and wiping himself, a man biting into a raw lizard, a dead dog drowned under water. It all adds up to the sense of being privvy to a perversity usually kept under wraps, and one uniquely disconnected from the American Dream.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, it must be noted, black audiences ate it up. As told by Van Peebles, he could only open the film in two theaters, one in Atlanta and one in Detroit. In Detroit, only three people came to the first show and none to the second. But for the third, the Black Panthers showed up in force and eventually the lines went around the block as word spread. The film did by some accounts $15 million at the box office on a budget of $500,000, partly because of heavy promotion by the Panthers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No him, no me,” Dizzy Gillespie once said of Louis Armstrong. In the continuum of African American cinema, \u003ci>Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song\u003c/i> is at the forefront.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/10134583/california-films-sweet-sweetbacks-baadasssss-song","authors":["128436"],"series":["arts_433"],"categories":["arts_74"],"tags":["arts_977"],"featImg":"arts_10134586","label":"arts_433"},"arts_128579":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_128579","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"128579","score":null,"sort":[1395579642000]},"guestAuthors":[{"ID":"128436","displayName":"Jon Brooks","firstName":"Jon","lastName":"Brooks","userLogin":"jon-brooks","userEmail":"jbrooks@kqed.org","linkedAccount":"jbrooks","website":"","description":"Jon Brooks is a KQED News online editor and writer for KQED's daily news blog, \u003ci>News Fix\u003c/i>. A veteran blogger, he previously worked for Yahoo! in various news writing and editing roles. He was also the editor of \u003ca>EconomyBeat.org\u003c/a>, which documented user-generated content about the financial crisis and recession. Jon is also a playwright whose work has been produced in San Francisco, New York, Italy, and around the U.S. He has written about film for his own blog and studied film at Boston University. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College.","userNicename":"jon-brooks","type":"guest-author","nickname":""}],"slug":"california-films-the-times-of-harvey-milk","title":"The Times of Harvey Milk","publishDate":1395579642,"format":"standard","headTitle":"The Times of Harvey Milk | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":433,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>\u003ci>In this occasional series, Jon Brooks looks at films that illustrate some unique aspect of California culture.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Francisco, 1977. After failing to win political office three times, a gay man from the Castro district wins a seat on the city’s Board of Supervisors, where he accomplishes small things, like mitigating the dog poop problem in the parks, and big ones, like passing legislation to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians. Now a recognized voice for gay civil rights, he takes on a particularly mean-spirited proposition from an Orange County \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Briggs_%28politician%20%29\">state senator\u003c/a>, banning anyone engaged in “public homosexual conduct” from working in schools. While ahead in the polls initially, the measure loses by a landslide, in no small part due to the political abilities of the San Francisco pol.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Three days later, he is dead, along with the city’s mayor, the victims of a double assassination. The perpetrator: an unhinged colleague on the Board, a clean-cut, straight white male, a fellow political neophyte-turned-arch-enemy who had abruptly resigned his office. But he wanted his old job back, unleashing his rage at the two people who he thought stood in his way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After killing the mayor, “he had special bullets for his next task,” wrote Randy Shilts, in his book, \u003ca href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=HN89LOWz6YEC&pg=PA268&dq=%22dan%20+white%22+%22I+have+something+to+do+first%22+feinstein&hl=en&sa=X&ei=gBMNU8m-%20OYj1oATc0IL4AQ&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22dan%20white%22%20%22I%20%20have%20something%20to%20do%20first%22%20feinstein&f=false\">\u003ci>The Mayor of Castro Street\u003c/i>\u003c/a>. “(T)he hollow-headed dum-dum bullets that explode on impact, ripping a hole into the victim two or three times the size of the slug itself. (He) slipped the five bullets into the revolver’s chamber, stepped out a side door, and dashed toward the other side of City Hall where the supervisors’ offices were.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A female colleague, a future U.S. senator, called to the murderer. He told her, “I have something to do first.” After luring our hero into his office, he shot him with all five bullets, the last two to the head.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Police quickly apprehend the assailant and he stands trial for murder — an open and shut case. But when the prosecution plays the confession in court, jury members wipe away tears. The verdict: voluntary manslaughter. Gays riot in the streets. The murderer serves five — count ’em five — years and is then released. Two years later, he commits suicide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You know this tale by now. You can fill in the names — Harvey Milk, Dan White, George Moscone, Dianne Feinstein — without much effort. It’s a terrific plot, really, and if it were only fictional, we could leave it at that. But when you see the documentary \u003ci>The Times of Harvey Milk\u003c/i>, the spellbinding nature of the narrative plays second fiddle to the rage, shock, despair, and, ultimately, hope it evokes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I first saw the film a couple of years after its 1984 release, when I’d never before heard the words “gay” and “civil rights” in the same sentence. Back then, the F-slur fazed me hardly at all; in the schoolyard, it had been almost de rigueur to seize on the slur when you wanted to casually demean someone for anything suspect: a pink shirt, say; or the wrong kind of sneakers. \u003ci>The Times of Harvey Milk\u003c/i> slapped me into another reality, one where an entire class of people struggled for fundamental rights. As a young man, I had been unable to make the connection between those schoolyard taunts and basic human dignity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/Jet-Ubwk5l8\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So I consider \u003ca href=\"http://www.tellingpictures.com/about/#rob\">Rob Epstein\u003c/a>‘s movie, winner of the Academy Award for best documentary, one of the more important events in my personal development as a human being. It still stands as a testament to how certain films can act as an antidote to the brutal dismissal of fellow humans. In telling Milk’s story, the filmmakers unerringly curate the wealth of available historical material, drawing on media news reports, photos, newspapers, and interviews. They also make use of wonderful footage of what was then called the Gay Freedom Day Parade, and more from Milk’s district, with the time-defying Castro Theatre looking like the same architectural gateway to the neighborhood it does today. Harvey Fierstein fills in the gaps with narration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film has an as-it-happened quality — you’ll hear a tape recording Milk made (below) to be played in the event of his assassination; a police transmission the night of the murders that “Harvey Milk and the mayor are supposed to be DOA;” footage of White being led away in handcuffs, and his tearful confession to police; plus an incredible interview with White’s wife in which she calmly asserts there’s “something for us good that can come out of this.” And most notably, the film opens with then-San Francisco Supervisor Dianne Feinstein, looking like she might faint, announcing Moscone and Milk have been shot dead, followed by pandemonium. “The suspect,” she continues, pausing slightly in disbelief, “is Supervisor Dan White.” Finally, we see a covered corpse wheeled out of City Hall. San Francisco politician Tom Ammiano, a schoolteacher and Milk associate at the time, breaks into tears describing his arrival at the scene just as the bodies were removed. (“I never knew Harvey had such big feet,” he recalls thinking.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/CVb9nt8huMY\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other Milk cohorts give powerful testimonials as well, both at the time of events and in retrospect. During the violence that erupted after the Dan White verdict, Supervisor Harry Britt, Milk’s successor, lambastes the jury: “They were saying that the spirit of Dan White, with all of its pettiness, all of its meanness, all of its violence right below the surface is okay.” There is a beautiful sequence showing the reaction by the LGBT community to news of the assassination: thousands of \u003ca href=\"http://thecastro.net/milk/candlemarch.html\">people marching silently through San Francisco holding candles\u003c/a>. Says San Francisco State professor Sally Miller Gearhart: “It was one of the most eloquent expressions of a community response to violence I’ve ever seen.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some critics have faulted the filmmakers for creating a hagiography. And if you want to fault the documentary for taking liberties, it does \u003ca href=\"http://www.snopes.com/legal/twinkie.asp\">erroneously promulgate the idea that White’s lawyers employed the “Twinkie defense,”\u003c/a> the notion that eating too much junk food contributed to his “\u003ca href=\"http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/diminished_capacity\">diminished capacity\u003c/a>.” But that Milk took a giant leap in the nation’s slow and still-evolving march toward LGBT equality is indisputable. Says his campaign manager, Anne Kronenberg, in a clip deleted from the final cut, “It doesn’t really matter how accurate or honest the legend about Harvey is. We have something to hold onto as a community.” Says another interviewee: “Before Harvey Milk there was never anyone who was openly gay who any of us could look up to or have as a role model. You grew up, isolated and alone in your own little community, being the thing that everybody didn’t want to be, and was the worst thing you could be, according to your peers in the church and the society and your parents.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://youtu.be/lshSKKAyRsA\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So While Sean Penn makes for a fine Harvey Milk in \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1013753/\">Gus Van Sant’s biopic\u003c/a>, even that gifted an actor can’t project the same power and presence of the person he mimics. It’s quite something to hear this piece of Milk rhetoric, cadence and message perfectly pitched to work the crowd:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family, you must tell your relatives, you must tell your friends, if indeed they are your friends, you must tell your neighbors, you must tell the people you work with, you must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize that we are indeed their children — that we are indeed everywhere — every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all. And once you do, you will feel so much better.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>The Times of Harvey Milk\u003c/i> is a fascinating and enormously moving look at a man and a movement, and at an important era in both San Francisco and LGBT history. It also serves as a reminder of just how far the cause of LGBT rights has come. For instance, a TV news reporter blithely prefaces a question to Milk with, “Some straights are concerned maybe the gays are taking over San Francisco.” At a KQED debate over Proposition 6, with Milk and Gearhart facing off against State Senator Briggs, Briggs claims the banishment of gay teachers would cut down on child molestation. Milk informs him the data shows no correlation between that category of crime and sexual orientation. Briggs insists: “We should cut out the homosexual group” to lessen the odds. This prompts Milk to laugh; he is genuinely amused at the man’s tortured math in the service of bigotry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That blend of common sense and personality during Milk’s just 11-month tenure as an elected official won over many doubters. Jim Elliot, a union leader at the time, acknowledges his homophobia before meeting Milk, whom he calls a “great man” in the film. In the alternate ending, included on the DVD, Elliot describes his reaction when his own daughter came out to him as a lesbian. “She started to cry, my wife is crying, and the world had come to an end. I said, well, so what? Nothing to cry about. You’re gay, you’re gay. That’s it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If we learn from history,” Harvey Milk said, “the struggles goes on, and eventually, we will win.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_128587\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 804px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/03/current_1371_268.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-128587\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/03/current_1371_268.jpg\" alt=\"harvey milk\" width=\"804\" height=\"453\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/03/current_1371_268.jpg 804w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/03/current_1371_268-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/03/current_1371_268-300x169.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 804px) 100vw, 804px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: \u003ca href=\"http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1789-harvey-s-enduring-legacy\">The Criterion Collection\u003c/a> \u003ccite>(crieterion collection)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"\u003ci>The Times of Harvey Milk\u003c/i> is a fascinating and enormously moving look at a man and a movement, and at an important era in both San Francisco and LGBT history.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705049217,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":20,"wordCount":1678},"headData":{"title":"The Times of Harvey Milk | KQED","description":"The Times of Harvey Milk is a fascinating and enormously moving look at a man and a movement, and at an important era in both San Francisco and LGBT history.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"The Times of Harvey Milk","datePublished":"2014-03-23T13:00:42.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T08:46:57.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sticky":false,"excludeFromSiteSearch":"Include","articleAge":"0","path":"/arts/128579/california-films-the-times-of-harvey-milk","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ci>In this occasional series, Jon Brooks looks at films that illustrate some unique aspect of California culture.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Francisco, 1977. After failing to win political office three times, a gay man from the Castro district wins a seat on the city’s Board of Supervisors, where he accomplishes small things, like mitigating the dog poop problem in the parks, and big ones, like passing legislation to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians. Now a recognized voice for gay civil rights, he takes on a particularly mean-spirited proposition from an Orange County \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Briggs_%28politician%20%29\">state senator\u003c/a>, banning anyone engaged in “public homosexual conduct” from working in schools. While ahead in the polls initially, the measure loses by a landslide, in no small part due to the political abilities of the San Francisco pol.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Three days later, he is dead, along with the city’s mayor, the victims of a double assassination. The perpetrator: an unhinged colleague on the Board, a clean-cut, straight white male, a fellow political neophyte-turned-arch-enemy who had abruptly resigned his office. But he wanted his old job back, unleashing his rage at the two people who he thought stood in his way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After killing the mayor, “he had special bullets for his next task,” wrote Randy Shilts, in his book, \u003ca href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=HN89LOWz6YEC&pg=PA268&dq=%22dan%20+white%22+%22I+have+something+to+do+first%22+feinstein&hl=en&sa=X&ei=gBMNU8m-%20OYj1oATc0IL4AQ&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22dan%20white%22%20%22I%20%20have%20something%20to%20do%20first%22%20feinstein&f=false\">\u003ci>The Mayor of Castro Street\u003c/i>\u003c/a>. “(T)he hollow-headed dum-dum bullets that explode on impact, ripping a hole into the victim two or three times the size of the slug itself. (He) slipped the five bullets into the revolver’s chamber, stepped out a side door, and dashed toward the other side of City Hall where the supervisors’ offices were.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A female colleague, a future U.S. senator, called to the murderer. He told her, “I have something to do first.” After luring our hero into his office, he shot him with all five bullets, the last two to the head.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Police quickly apprehend the assailant and he stands trial for murder — an open and shut case. But when the prosecution plays the confession in court, jury members wipe away tears. The verdict: voluntary manslaughter. Gays riot in the streets. The murderer serves five — count ’em five — years and is then released. Two years later, he commits suicide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You know this tale by now. You can fill in the names — Harvey Milk, Dan White, George Moscone, Dianne Feinstein — without much effort. It’s a terrific plot, really, and if it were only fictional, we could leave it at that. But when you see the documentary \u003ci>The Times of Harvey Milk\u003c/i>, the spellbinding nature of the narrative plays second fiddle to the rage, shock, despair, and, ultimately, hope it evokes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I first saw the film a couple of years after its 1984 release, when I’d never before heard the words “gay” and “civil rights” in the same sentence. Back then, the F-slur fazed me hardly at all; in the schoolyard, it had been almost de rigueur to seize on the slur when you wanted to casually demean someone for anything suspect: a pink shirt, say; or the wrong kind of sneakers. \u003ci>The Times of Harvey Milk\u003c/i> slapped me into another reality, one where an entire class of people struggled for fundamental rights. As a young man, I had been unable to make the connection between those schoolyard taunts and basic human dignity.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/Jet-Ubwk5l8'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/Jet-Ubwk5l8'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>So I consider \u003ca href=\"http://www.tellingpictures.com/about/#rob\">Rob Epstein\u003c/a>‘s movie, winner of the Academy Award for best documentary, one of the more important events in my personal development as a human being. It still stands as a testament to how certain films can act as an antidote to the brutal dismissal of fellow humans. In telling Milk’s story, the filmmakers unerringly curate the wealth of available historical material, drawing on media news reports, photos, newspapers, and interviews. They also make use of wonderful footage of what was then called the Gay Freedom Day Parade, and more from Milk’s district, with the time-defying Castro Theatre looking like the same architectural gateway to the neighborhood it does today. Harvey Fierstein fills in the gaps with narration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film has an as-it-happened quality — you’ll hear a tape recording Milk made (below) to be played in the event of his assassination; a police transmission the night of the murders that “Harvey Milk and the mayor are supposed to be DOA;” footage of White being led away in handcuffs, and his tearful confession to police; plus an incredible interview with White’s wife in which she calmly asserts there’s “something for us good that can come out of this.” And most notably, the film opens with then-San Francisco Supervisor Dianne Feinstein, looking like she might faint, announcing Moscone and Milk have been shot dead, followed by pandemonium. “The suspect,” she continues, pausing slightly in disbelief, “is Supervisor Dan White.” Finally, we see a covered corpse wheeled out of City Hall. San Francisco politician Tom Ammiano, a schoolteacher and Milk associate at the time, breaks into tears describing his arrival at the scene just as the bodies were removed. (“I never knew Harvey had such big feet,” he recalls thinking.)\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/CVb9nt8huMY'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/CVb9nt8huMY'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Other Milk cohorts give powerful testimonials as well, both at the time of events and in retrospect. During the violence that erupted after the Dan White verdict, Supervisor Harry Britt, Milk’s successor, lambastes the jury: “They were saying that the spirit of Dan White, with all of its pettiness, all of its meanness, all of its violence right below the surface is okay.” There is a beautiful sequence showing the reaction by the LGBT community to news of the assassination: thousands of \u003ca href=\"http://thecastro.net/milk/candlemarch.html\">people marching silently through San Francisco holding candles\u003c/a>. Says San Francisco State professor Sally Miller Gearhart: “It was one of the most eloquent expressions of a community response to violence I’ve ever seen.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some critics have faulted the filmmakers for creating a hagiography. And if you want to fault the documentary for taking liberties, it does \u003ca href=\"http://www.snopes.com/legal/twinkie.asp\">erroneously promulgate the idea that White’s lawyers employed the “Twinkie defense,”\u003c/a> the notion that eating too much junk food contributed to his “\u003ca href=\"http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/diminished_capacity\">diminished capacity\u003c/a>.” But that Milk took a giant leap in the nation’s slow and still-evolving march toward LGBT equality is indisputable. Says his campaign manager, Anne Kronenberg, in a clip deleted from the final cut, “It doesn’t really matter how accurate or honest the legend about Harvey is. We have something to hold onto as a community.” Says another interviewee: “Before Harvey Milk there was never anyone who was openly gay who any of us could look up to or have as a role model. You grew up, isolated and alone in your own little community, being the thing that everybody didn’t want to be, and was the worst thing you could be, according to your peers in the church and the society and your parents.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/lshSKKAyRsA'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/lshSKKAyRsA'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>So While Sean Penn makes for a fine Harvey Milk in \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1013753/\">Gus Van Sant’s biopic\u003c/a>, even that gifted an actor can’t project the same power and presence of the person he mimics. It’s quite something to hear this piece of Milk rhetoric, cadence and message perfectly pitched to work the crowd:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family, you must tell your relatives, you must tell your friends, if indeed they are your friends, you must tell your neighbors, you must tell the people you work with, you must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize that we are indeed their children — that we are indeed everywhere — every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all. And once you do, you will feel so much better.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>The Times of Harvey Milk\u003c/i> is a fascinating and enormously moving look at a man and a movement, and at an important era in both San Francisco and LGBT history. It also serves as a reminder of just how far the cause of LGBT rights has come. For instance, a TV news reporter blithely prefaces a question to Milk with, “Some straights are concerned maybe the gays are taking over San Francisco.” At a KQED debate over Proposition 6, with Milk and Gearhart facing off against State Senator Briggs, Briggs claims the banishment of gay teachers would cut down on child molestation. Milk informs him the data shows no correlation between that category of crime and sexual orientation. Briggs insists: “We should cut out the homosexual group” to lessen the odds. This prompts Milk to laugh; he is genuinely amused at the man’s tortured math in the service of bigotry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That blend of common sense and personality during Milk’s just 11-month tenure as an elected official won over many doubters. Jim Elliot, a union leader at the time, acknowledges his homophobia before meeting Milk, whom he calls a “great man” in the film. In the alternate ending, included on the DVD, Elliot describes his reaction when his own daughter came out to him as a lesbian. “She started to cry, my wife is crying, and the world had come to an end. I said, well, so what? Nothing to cry about. You’re gay, you’re gay. That’s it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If we learn from history,” Harvey Milk said, “the struggles goes on, and eventually, we will win.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_128587\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 804px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/03/current_1371_268.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-128587\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/03/current_1371_268.jpg\" alt=\"harvey milk\" width=\"804\" height=\"453\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/03/current_1371_268.jpg 804w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/03/current_1371_268-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/03/current_1371_268-300x169.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 804px) 100vw, 804px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: \u003ca href=\"http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1789-harvey-s-enduring-legacy\">The Criterion Collection\u003c/a> \u003ccite>(crieterion collection)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/128579/california-films-the-times-of-harvey-milk","authors":["128436"],"series":["arts_433"],"categories":["arts_74"],"featImg":"arts_128585","label":"arts_433"},"arts_127102":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_127102","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"127102","score":null,"sort":[1381876381000]},"guestAuthors":[{"ID":"128436","displayName":"Jon Brooks","firstName":"Jon","lastName":"Brooks","userLogin":"jon-brooks","userEmail":"jbrooks@kqed.org","linkedAccount":"jbrooks","website":"","description":"Jon Brooks is a KQED News online editor and writer for KQED's daily news blog, \u003ci>News Fix\u003c/i>. A veteran blogger, he previously worked for Yahoo! in various news writing and editing roles. He was also the editor of \u003ca>EconomyBeat.org\u003c/a>, which documented user-generated content about the financial crisis and recession. Jon is also a playwright whose work has been produced in San Francisco, New York, Italy, and around the U.S. He has written about film for his own blog and studied film at Boston University. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College.","userNicename":"jon-brooks","type":"guest-author","nickname":""}],"slug":"california_films_chinatown","title":"Chinatown","publishDate":1381876381,"format":"standard","headTitle":"Chinatown | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":433,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>“Forget it Jake; it’s Chinatown.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Has another American film ever wrapped itself up so neatly in one last line? While the coda never attained the mythological status of “Rosebud,” it’s at least as worthy of rumination. Who hasn’t, after all, been caught in circumstances where the game is rigged, you can’t win for losing, and only the good die young — at least metaphorically? Where personal depravity festers into institutional corruption? Though the \u003ca href=\"http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/los-angeles/los-angeles-aqueduct-there-it-is-take-it.html\">historicity of the film is at best vague\u003c/a>, the message is anything but: that the needs of the many are always subordinate to the solipsism of the rich and powerful, and those who stand in their way are going to get plowed under. Or at least wind up with a sliced nostril.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SPakQ7hH6I&w=480&h=270]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So director Roman Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne’s 1974 film offers us all the trappings of classic film noir — but in color. The plot: J.J. “Jake” Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is an ex-cop and current private eye in 1937 drought-stricken L.A. who gets lured into a case ostensibly concerning marital infidelity. The plot then thickens — or dampens, rather — revealing a conspiracy involving water and where it goes. As he navigates his way through an array of self-interested liars, Gittes, naturally, plunges into a rabbit hole of intrigue, greed and corruption. There is also a murder, a crooked ex-sheriff, thugs, benighted cops, and a beautiful woman (Faye Dunaway), along with a jazzy music score and gorgeous cinematography evoking a romantic past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this is no ordinary noir. In this \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hollywood\">New Hollywood\u003c/a>, era, comforting genres got turned on their heads, and revisionist films like \u003ci>Bonnie and Clyde\u003c/i>, \u003ci>McCabe and Mrs. Miller\u003c/i>, and The Long Goodbye subverted old tropes while exploding audience expectations. The precipitating event in Chinatown — a dissembling woman hiringa private dick — echoes Brigid O’Shaugnessy working Sam Spade at the start of \u003ci>The Maltese Falcon\u003c/i>, that archetypal noir. But where Bogart’s Spade kept turning the tables on the rogues gallery attempting to ensnare him, Gittes is a man who makes a habit of arriving a day late and a dollar short. The fact that he can handle himself belies the fact that his idealism makes him ill-suited for the business. And can you imagine Bogart or Mitchum indulging in the kind of ingenuous delight Nicholson displays in his eagerness to tell a dirty joke? Or that any of the image peddlers in the heyday of noir would have signed off on their leading man walking around for a good chunk of the film with his nose covered by a large bandage?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/chinatownnose.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, Faye Dunaway’s Evelyn Mulwray lies and evades, following the classic femme fatale script. She’s too sexy to ignore but too dangerous to trust, right up to the denouement, when…. bam! We find out that the mystery woman Gittes has been chasing is in fact Evelyn’s own daughter by her father (John Huston). One can only imagine how audiences responded in 1974, when incest was not a topic of talk shows and self-help books. Here, the repressed emotions and transgressed taboos that classic Hollywood excelled at subversively communicating under the stricture of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93301189\">Production Code\u003c/a> are brought out of the two-toned noir shadows and thrown into colorful stark relief, and the audience gets the same rough education as Gittes. “My father and I … understand?” Evelyn asks him, disgust suffusing her voice, after Gittes has slapped the truth out of her. “Or is it too tough for you?” That’s a question for us, as well. Do we, like Gittes, have the stomach for anything stronger than subtext in our on-screen fantasies? Where the femme fatale is not the root of original sin, but a broken victim?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/chinatown2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/chinatown4.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/chinatown7.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The ending, which Polanski had to fight for, is one of the bleakest in American cinema. When Huston’s Noah Cross drags his daughter/granddaughter away, the failure of our detective hero is complete, and we know that history will repeat in Cross’ perverse sexuality and in his successful financial scheming. If Gittes has solved any mystery, it’s only that in the face of powerful forces you don’t understand, it’s better to do “as little as possible,” as they used to say on his old Chinatown beat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What else makes the movie great? The rich sepia-toned cinematography lends a parched but beautiful look to a story with a backdrop of drought. The atmosphere is grim; everyone’s suspicious, wary, or cranky. And the acting is out of this world. Nicholson’s Gittes is another in an extraordinary run of indelible performances over a six-year period (\u003ci>Five Easy Pieces\u003c/i>, \u003ci>Carnal Knowledge\u003c/i>, \u003ci>The King of Marvin Gardens\u003c/i>, \u003ci>The Last Detail\u003c/i>, and \u003ci>One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest\u003c/i>). Dunaway may go him one better; in a star turn of supreme intelligence, her fragility comes into focus only after her horrifying secret is revealed. At one point she stumbles over the words “my father,” looking blankly into the distance, the familial term seeming to confound all reason. Later, while naked, she covers herself up at his mention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/chinatown8.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With good reason. “I don’t blame myself,” the robber baron and pedophile says about the sexual abuse of his daughter. “Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of \u003ci>anything\u003c/i>.” John Huston as Noah Cross lends the type of megalomania that can only come from personal experience. Yet something comical stirs amid the monstrousness — he’s a ruffian who has terrorized his way into high society but can barely conceal his pirate’s heart. At the end, when he is shot point blank, he naturally suffers only a flesh wound. A mere bullet, it seems, cannot defeat such an embodiment of avarice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because this is \u003ci>Chinatown\u003c/i>.\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Director Roman Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne's 1974 film offers us all the trappings of classic film noir -- but in color and with a \"New Hollywood\" spin that turns old genre conventions on their heads.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705049649,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":true,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":17,"wordCount":1043},"headData":{"title":"Chinatown | KQED","description":"Director Roman Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne's 1974 film offers us all the trappings of classic film noir -- but in color and with a "New Hollywood" spin that turns old genre conventions on their heads.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"Chinatown","datePublished":"2013-10-15T22:33:01.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T08:54:09.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sourceUrl":"http://www.kqed.org/arts/category/movies/","sticky":false,"path":"/arts/127102/california_films_chinatown","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>“Forget it Jake; it’s Chinatown.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Has another American film ever wrapped itself up so neatly in one last line? While the coda never attained the mythological status of “Rosebud,” it’s at least as worthy of rumination. Who hasn’t, after all, been caught in circumstances where the game is rigged, you can’t win for losing, and only the good die young — at least metaphorically? Where personal depravity festers into institutional corruption? Though the \u003ca href=\"http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/los-angeles/los-angeles-aqueduct-there-it-is-take-it.html\">historicity of the film is at best vague\u003c/a>, the message is anything but: that the needs of the many are always subordinate to the solipsism of the rich and powerful, and those who stand in their way are going to get plowed under. Or at least wind up with a sliced nostril.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/8SPakQ7hH6I'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/8SPakQ7hH6I'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So director Roman Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne’s 1974 film offers us all the trappings of classic film noir — but in color. The plot: J.J. “Jake” Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is an ex-cop and current private eye in 1937 drought-stricken L.A. who gets lured into a case ostensibly concerning marital infidelity. The plot then thickens — or dampens, rather — revealing a conspiracy involving water and where it goes. As he navigates his way through an array of self-interested liars, Gittes, naturally, plunges into a rabbit hole of intrigue, greed and corruption. There is also a murder, a crooked ex-sheriff, thugs, benighted cops, and a beautiful woman (Faye Dunaway), along with a jazzy music score and gorgeous cinematography evoking a romantic past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this is no ordinary noir. In this \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hollywood\">New Hollywood\u003c/a>, era, comforting genres got turned on their heads, and revisionist films like \u003ci>Bonnie and Clyde\u003c/i>, \u003ci>McCabe and Mrs. Miller\u003c/i>, and The Long Goodbye subverted old tropes while exploding audience expectations. The precipitating event in Chinatown — a dissembling woman hiringa private dick — echoes Brigid O’Shaugnessy working Sam Spade at the start of \u003ci>The Maltese Falcon\u003c/i>, that archetypal noir. But where Bogart’s Spade kept turning the tables on the rogues gallery attempting to ensnare him, Gittes is a man who makes a habit of arriving a day late and a dollar short. The fact that he can handle himself belies the fact that his idealism makes him ill-suited for the business. And can you imagine Bogart or Mitchum indulging in the kind of ingenuous delight Nicholson displays in his eagerness to tell a dirty joke? Or that any of the image peddlers in the heyday of noir would have signed off on their leading man walking around for a good chunk of the film with his nose covered by a large bandage?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/chinatownnose.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, Faye Dunaway’s Evelyn Mulwray lies and evades, following the classic femme fatale script. She’s too sexy to ignore but too dangerous to trust, right up to the denouement, when…. bam! We find out that the mystery woman Gittes has been chasing is in fact Evelyn’s own daughter by her father (John Huston). One can only imagine how audiences responded in 1974, when incest was not a topic of talk shows and self-help books. Here, the repressed emotions and transgressed taboos that classic Hollywood excelled at subversively communicating under the stricture of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93301189\">Production Code\u003c/a> are brought out of the two-toned noir shadows and thrown into colorful stark relief, and the audience gets the same rough education as Gittes. “My father and I … understand?” Evelyn asks him, disgust suffusing her voice, after Gittes has slapped the truth out of her. “Or is it too tough for you?” That’s a question for us, as well. Do we, like Gittes, have the stomach for anything stronger than subtext in our on-screen fantasies? Where the femme fatale is not the root of original sin, but a broken victim?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/chinatown2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/chinatown4.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/chinatown7.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The ending, which Polanski had to fight for, is one of the bleakest in American cinema. When Huston’s Noah Cross drags his daughter/granddaughter away, the failure of our detective hero is complete, and we know that history will repeat in Cross’ perverse sexuality and in his successful financial scheming. If Gittes has solved any mystery, it’s only that in the face of powerful forces you don’t understand, it’s better to do “as little as possible,” as they used to say on his old Chinatown beat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What else makes the movie great? The rich sepia-toned cinematography lends a parched but beautiful look to a story with a backdrop of drought. The atmosphere is grim; everyone’s suspicious, wary, or cranky. And the acting is out of this world. Nicholson’s Gittes is another in an extraordinary run of indelible performances over a six-year period (\u003ci>Five Easy Pieces\u003c/i>, \u003ci>Carnal Knowledge\u003c/i>, \u003ci>The King of Marvin Gardens\u003c/i>, \u003ci>The Last Detail\u003c/i>, and \u003ci>One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest\u003c/i>). Dunaway may go him one better; in a star turn of supreme intelligence, her fragility comes into focus only after her horrifying secret is revealed. At one point she stumbles over the words “my father,” looking blankly into the distance, the familial term seeming to confound all reason. Later, while naked, she covers herself up at his mention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/chinatown8.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With good reason. “I don’t blame myself,” the robber baron and pedophile says about the sexual abuse of his daughter. “Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of \u003ci>anything\u003c/i>.” John Huston as Noah Cross lends the type of megalomania that can only come from personal experience. Yet something comical stirs amid the monstrousness — he’s a ruffian who has terrorized his way into high society but can barely conceal his pirate’s heart. At the end, when he is shot point blank, he naturally suffers only a flesh wound. A mere bullet, it seems, cannot defeat such an embodiment of avarice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because this is \u003ci>Chinatown\u003c/i>.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/127102/california_films_chinatown","authors":["128436"],"series":["arts_433"],"categories":["arts_74"],"tags":["arts_977"],"featImg":"arts_10127102","label":"arts_433"},"arts_121397":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_121397","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"121397","score":null,"sort":[1369815606000]},"guestAuthors":[{"ID":"128436","displayName":"Jon Brooks","firstName":"Jon","lastName":"Brooks","userLogin":"jon-brooks","userEmail":"jbrooks@kqed.org","linkedAccount":"jbrooks","website":"","description":"Jon Brooks is a KQED News online editor and writer for KQED's daily news blog, \u003ci>News Fix\u003c/i>. A veteran blogger, he previously worked for Yahoo! in various news writing and editing roles. He was also the editor of \u003ca>EconomyBeat.org\u003c/a>, which documented user-generated content about the financial crisis and recession. Jon is also a playwright whose work has been produced in San Francisco, New York, Italy, and around the U.S. He has written about film for his own blog and studied film at Boston University. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College.","userNicename":"jon-brooks","type":"guest-author","nickname":""}],"slug":"california_films_3_women","title":"3 Women","publishDate":1369815606,"format":"standard","headTitle":"3 Women | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":433,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>To call \u003ci>3 Women\u003c/i> merely haunting is to do it an injustice, because it’s really one of the most brilliantly creepy films ever made. Director Robert Altman always claimed the picture originated in a dream, and you have to take him at his word — the film has the mark of nightmare upon it, weaving all the metaphorical potentialities of the Palm Springs, California desert into a miasma of menace and death. Though nothing wholly unrealistic occurs, the movie resonates as something supernatural; in this, Altman’s film is the precursor to Todd Haynes’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/movies/article.jsp?essid=116990\">\u003ci>Safe\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, another horror movie fashioned out of everyday living.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The plot involves the relationship between Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), newly arrived in Palm Springs, and Millie Lammoureux (Shelley Duvall), who has been assigned to train her at the geriatric health spa they work at. Pinky, for mysterious reasons, takes an obsessive shine to Millie, whose chirpy mundanity and feckless attempts at sophistication make her a pariah to all other humans. The two become roommates, and Pinky takes her fascination to a new level, reading Millie’s diary, transcribing her social security number, and engaging in other behavior right out of \u003ci>The Stalker’s Handbook\u003c/i>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One night Millie brings home Edgar, the husband of the film’s Third Woman, Willie (Janice Rule), a pregnant and all-but-silent artist who paints half-simian, half-human creatures as pool murals. When Pinky objects to Millie’s tryst, Millie lashes out, spurring Pinky to take a high dive from the apartment complex landing into the pool. She then goes into a coma, and in a nod to Ingmar Bergman’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/persona/\">\u003ci>Persona\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, awakens to the thought that she’s actually Millie, assuming herformer idol’s identity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But where Millie only aspired to a kind of winning loucheness, Pinky emerges from her slumber as a natural, stealing the attentions of Edgar and the clique of disdainful neighbors who have so overtly shunned Millie. But when Edgar seeks Pinky’s company the night Willie is giving birth, Millie sends Pinky for help as she attempts to midwife the baby. Pinky never goes for the doctor, however, and the infant is stillborn. The three women then appear to have some sort of psychotic break; when next we see them, they have coalesced into a quasi three-generational family, playing the roles of mother, daughter, and grandmother. Absent from the arrangement is Edgar, who, we are told,has been killed in a shooting “accident.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a heavy enough plot, but what makes \u003ci>3 Women\u003c/i> so truly disturbing Is its primal, elemental aesthetic. In the rawness of the characters’ psyches, in the dreamlike atmosphere created by shooting through mirrors, fish tanks, and water; in the arresting motif of posturing, bellicose animal-human hybrids that almost functions like a visual Greek chorus; in the flute solos that seem to emanate from another time and place, the film burrows under your skin, implanting an unshakable sense of isolation. Adding to the feeling of vulnerability are various depictions of human physicality as degradative, from the opening spa shots of decrepit limbs bathed in the hazy desert light to the portrayal of a sexual embrace as not carnal but animalistic, almost instinctual. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the film’s most consistently negative focus is on another basic human need: food. Shelley Duvall, said Altman, was allowed to write much of her character’s dialogue, and she chose to give Millie a penchant for mass-produced foodlike substances, as Michael Pollan might call them. “I’m famous for my dinner parties,” Millie brags, before unpacking a smorgasbord of processed edibles. From canned tamales to Pringles to “bananas dipped in chocolate rolled in Rice Krispies,” Millie is a great promoter of the corporate-cookbook lifestyle. Extolling the virtues of tuna melts, she says “They’re easy, they only take about 15 minutes to make.” And when Pinky stains her dress with one of Millie’s supermarket-bought shrimp cocktails, there’s an unappetizing conflation of blood and food, and a suggestion that all organic processes have been transformed into something harmful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Millie’s lack of nutrition awareness is just the tip of the iceberg lettuce. In her, we see a wellspring of diminished American aspirations, a life lived out of mass-circulation magazines, and the treatment of their prescriptions as inside information rather than lowest-common-denominator fodder. “Oh good, the Neiman Marcus catalogue,” Millie says when opening her mailbox. For someone who is consistently ignored, it must be a comfort to be taken notice of, if only as a consumer. “You know the Breck girl?” she says to yet another unreceptive audience. “Well they’re having a contest to find a new one and I’m going to send my picture in.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If one can see past the satire of Millie’s clinging to whatever’s on offer by the mass culture, her extreme isolation becomes the stuff of nightmares, Shelley Duvall, with her gawky physiology and plain looks, was one of the more exotic female presences in 1970s cinema. Duvall was not a trained actress, and it shows in her performance, which won the best actress award at Cannes. One might ask: are her spacey expressions and flat intonation indications of complete confusion in interpreting the text? Or, has she captured some precise quality of lonely eccentricity? An ordinariness so paradoxically extreme as to seem garish? When, like the grand-finale Norma Desmond, she descends the stairs at her apartment complex, regaled in a hooded bright yellow bathrobe, one understands the poignancy of bad taste — the desperate longing for notice, and a looking for love in all the wrong places saying all the wrong things wearing all the wrong clothes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Years later, Millie might be diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. But here Altman sees in her not so much a mental disorder as a sociological barrenness, a human expression of the arid desert locale. Despite the various strands of advice for practical contemporary living she has picked up, she is unable to knit them into a coherent life, and her lack of originality has left her easy prey for both marketers and strutting, vacuous vultures like Edgar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But if Millie is a hapless navigator of life, Pinky is as yet too raw and unformed to be viewed as completely hopeless. She first appears in the film sporting the sensibility of a child, blowing bubbles in her Coke, adding salt to her beer, burping. She’s a blank slate, which is perhaps why she views Millie with unjaded eyes. “She just seems like she does everything right,” Pinky gushes. Like the twins who work with them at the spa, the two are connected, sharing the same real first name and place of origin (Texas). The film is full of such doublings — reflections, simulacra, a general theme of inadequate substitution. In this environment, the West itself no longer seems vital. Where the concept of Dodge City may have once connoted a certain amount of romance, here it’s been relegated to the name of a dive bar owned by Edgar, with a defunct miniature golf course and a fake rattlesnake. Edgar himself was once a stunt double for Hugh O’Brian in the old Wyatt Earp TV show, his claim to whatever authentic virtues that particular history once held now twice removed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, in the person of Edgar, \u003ci>3 Women\u003c/i> is Altman’s strongest indictment against the male sex. Altman is not known as a director with a feminist sensibility, but look closely at his work and it’s not hard to find a critique, from a distance, of male balefulness and puerility. Think of the juvenile antics of the two leads in \u003ci>California Split\u003c/i>, unconsciously homoerotic and exclusive of the need for feminine relationships, their emptiness masked by engagement in games and competition. The critic Richard Corliss, in his obituary of Altman, addresses \u003ci>MASH\u003c/i>, the director’s most commercial success, and one which has often been criticized as sexist:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For some viewers, \u003ci>MASH\u003c/i> was an exercise less in Olympian misanthropy than in leering misogyny, especially in its twitting of the prim Hot Lips Houlihan as a secret sexpot worthy of being exposed before the entire company as she took a shower. The curtain falls, Hot Lips is revealed naked, the medics applaud at their practical joke and feminism takes a nasty hit. (I could name one young bride who, after storming out of a screening room at the end of that shower scene, literally went home to her mother, telling her husband, “I don’t want to live with someone who thinks \u003ci>that\u003c/i> is funny.”)”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet, what I have always found most memorable about the scene is its direct aftermath, when Sally Kellerman as a humiliated Hot Lips heads straight to the camp commander’s tent. “This isn’t a hospital, it’s an insane asylum!” she sobs, threatening to resign. But the colonel, who is in bed with a nurse, couldn’t care less, and tells her to go ahead and quit. One might ask: With whom does Altman’s heart really lie in that particular moment? And in the football-game finale, when Kellerman’s character has been reduced to that of an inane cheerleader, an intentional statement seems to be on the table about the effect on a woman who wielded authority, no matter how priggish, by the film’s leering, sniggering wolf pack. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>3 Women\u003c/i> is much more overt in its disdain for masculine values. Here, Altman sees men as brutes, sexual opportunists, or both. The cops who hang out at Edgar’s bar, faceless behind their helmets, are shown several times riding dirt bikes, full of sound and fury in the manner of swarming insects, expending their male energy in purposeless circles. The other male group activity we see is target shooting, and again it reads like an expression of sheer aggression and little else. Edgar himself is a drunken, boorish caricature of machismo, hiding behind dark sunglasses and a cowboy hat; he is the analogue of the ranting creature with the huge phallus on display in his wife?s mural. Edgar and Willie, for their part, exchange one accusatory look but nary a word in the entire film, and perhaps the movie?s most surrealistic element is the fact that they actually once chose to wed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arid landscape, severe personal isolation, a sterile culture, enervating male aggression… in such a milieu, the stillbirth that comes at the film?s climax seems the logical conclusion. The real horror of that moment, though, comes in Willie?s cooing and clinging to the dead baby, and her complete blindness to its lack of life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If there?s anything optimistic for viewers to hang their hat on in this grim event, perhaps it?s the perfectly reasonable reaction of Millie, which is sheer hysteria. While she is portrayed as a ridiculous figure in the film?s first half, as things begin to unravel and she is beset by escalating strangeness, she seems to awaken from her own metaphorical coma, finding her voice and a previously suppressed humanity. The psychic rupture of the three women in the final scene represents a rebellion against an array of devitalizing forces, and through its oddness one can choose to interpret it as a lone sign of hope in this otherwise devastating masterwork. \u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Robert Altman's 1977 film \u003ci>3 Women\u003c/i> is a darkly menacing tale of friendship, identity, and emotional dependence starring Sissy Spacek, Shelley Duvall, and Janice Rule.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705049948,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":18,"wordCount":1961},"headData":{"title":"3 Women | KQED","description":"Robert Altman's 1977 film 3 Women is a darkly menacing tale of friendship, identity, and emotional dependence starring Sissy Spacek, Shelley Duvall, and Janice Rule.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"3 Women","datePublished":"2013-05-29T08:20:06.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T08:59:08.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sourceUrl":"http://www.kqed.org/arts/category/movies/","sticky":false,"path":"/arts/121397/california_films_3_women","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>To call \u003ci>3 Women\u003c/i> merely haunting is to do it an injustice, because it’s really one of the most brilliantly creepy films ever made. Director Robert Altman always claimed the picture originated in a dream, and you have to take him at his word — the film has the mark of nightmare upon it, weaving all the metaphorical potentialities of the Palm Springs, California desert into a miasma of menace and death. Though nothing wholly unrealistic occurs, the movie resonates as something supernatural; in this, Altman’s film is the precursor to Todd Haynes’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/movies/article.jsp?essid=116990\">\u003ci>Safe\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, another horror movie fashioned out of everyday living.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The plot involves the relationship between Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), newly arrived in Palm Springs, and Millie Lammoureux (Shelley Duvall), who has been assigned to train her at the geriatric health spa they work at. Pinky, for mysterious reasons, takes an obsessive shine to Millie, whose chirpy mundanity and feckless attempts at sophistication make her a pariah to all other humans. The two become roommates, and Pinky takes her fascination to a new level, reading Millie’s diary, transcribing her social security number, and engaging in other behavior right out of \u003ci>The Stalker’s Handbook\u003c/i>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One night Millie brings home Edgar, the husband of the film’s Third Woman, Willie (Janice Rule), a pregnant and all-but-silent artist who paints half-simian, half-human creatures as pool murals. When Pinky objects to Millie’s tryst, Millie lashes out, spurring Pinky to take a high dive from the apartment complex landing into the pool. She then goes into a coma, and in a nod to Ingmar Bergman’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/persona/\">\u003ci>Persona\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, awakens to the thought that she’s actually Millie, assuming herformer idol’s identity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But where Millie only aspired to a kind of winning loucheness, Pinky emerges from her slumber as a natural, stealing the attentions of Edgar and the clique of disdainful neighbors who have so overtly shunned Millie. But when Edgar seeks Pinky’s company the night Willie is giving birth, Millie sends Pinky for help as she attempts to midwife the baby. Pinky never goes for the doctor, however, and the infant is stillborn. The three women then appear to have some sort of psychotic break; when next we see them, they have coalesced into a quasi three-generational family, playing the roles of mother, daughter, and grandmother. Absent from the arrangement is Edgar, who, we are told,has been killed in a shooting “accident.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a heavy enough plot, but what makes \u003ci>3 Women\u003c/i> so truly disturbing Is its primal, elemental aesthetic. In the rawness of the characters’ psyches, in the dreamlike atmosphere created by shooting through mirrors, fish tanks, and water; in the arresting motif of posturing, bellicose animal-human hybrids that almost functions like a visual Greek chorus; in the flute solos that seem to emanate from another time and place, the film burrows under your skin, implanting an unshakable sense of isolation. Adding to the feeling of vulnerability are various depictions of human physicality as degradative, from the opening spa shots of decrepit limbs bathed in the hazy desert light to the portrayal of a sexual embrace as not carnal but animalistic, almost instinctual. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the film’s most consistently negative focus is on another basic human need: food. Shelley Duvall, said Altman, was allowed to write much of her character’s dialogue, and she chose to give Millie a penchant for mass-produced foodlike substances, as Michael Pollan might call them. “I’m famous for my dinner parties,” Millie brags, before unpacking a smorgasbord of processed edibles. From canned tamales to Pringles to “bananas dipped in chocolate rolled in Rice Krispies,” Millie is a great promoter of the corporate-cookbook lifestyle. Extolling the virtues of tuna melts, she says “They’re easy, they only take about 15 minutes to make.” And when Pinky stains her dress with one of Millie’s supermarket-bought shrimp cocktails, there’s an unappetizing conflation of blood and food, and a suggestion that all organic processes have been transformed into something harmful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Millie’s lack of nutrition awareness is just the tip of the iceberg lettuce. In her, we see a wellspring of diminished American aspirations, a life lived out of mass-circulation magazines, and the treatment of their prescriptions as inside information rather than lowest-common-denominator fodder. “Oh good, the Neiman Marcus catalogue,” Millie says when opening her mailbox. For someone who is consistently ignored, it must be a comfort to be taken notice of, if only as a consumer. “You know the Breck girl?” she says to yet another unreceptive audience. “Well they’re having a contest to find a new one and I’m going to send my picture in.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If one can see past the satire of Millie’s clinging to whatever’s on offer by the mass culture, her extreme isolation becomes the stuff of nightmares, Shelley Duvall, with her gawky physiology and plain looks, was one of the more exotic female presences in 1970s cinema. Duvall was not a trained actress, and it shows in her performance, which won the best actress award at Cannes. One might ask: are her spacey expressions and flat intonation indications of complete confusion in interpreting the text? Or, has she captured some precise quality of lonely eccentricity? An ordinariness so paradoxically extreme as to seem garish? When, like the grand-finale Norma Desmond, she descends the stairs at her apartment complex, regaled in a hooded bright yellow bathrobe, one understands the poignancy of bad taste — the desperate longing for notice, and a looking for love in all the wrong places saying all the wrong things wearing all the wrong clothes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Years later, Millie might be diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. But here Altman sees in her not so much a mental disorder as a sociological barrenness, a human expression of the arid desert locale. Despite the various strands of advice for practical contemporary living she has picked up, she is unable to knit them into a coherent life, and her lack of originality has left her easy prey for both marketers and strutting, vacuous vultures like Edgar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But if Millie is a hapless navigator of life, Pinky is as yet too raw and unformed to be viewed as completely hopeless. She first appears in the film sporting the sensibility of a child, blowing bubbles in her Coke, adding salt to her beer, burping. She’s a blank slate, which is perhaps why she views Millie with unjaded eyes. “She just seems like she does everything right,” Pinky gushes. Like the twins who work with them at the spa, the two are connected, sharing the same real first name and place of origin (Texas). The film is full of such doublings — reflections, simulacra, a general theme of inadequate substitution. In this environment, the West itself no longer seems vital. Where the concept of Dodge City may have once connoted a certain amount of romance, here it’s been relegated to the name of a dive bar owned by Edgar, with a defunct miniature golf course and a fake rattlesnake. Edgar himself was once a stunt double for Hugh O’Brian in the old Wyatt Earp TV show, his claim to whatever authentic virtues that particular history once held now twice removed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, in the person of Edgar, \u003ci>3 Women\u003c/i> is Altman’s strongest indictment against the male sex. Altman is not known as a director with a feminist sensibility, but look closely at his work and it’s not hard to find a critique, from a distance, of male balefulness and puerility. Think of the juvenile antics of the two leads in \u003ci>California Split\u003c/i>, unconsciously homoerotic and exclusive of the need for feminine relationships, their emptiness masked by engagement in games and competition. The critic Richard Corliss, in his obituary of Altman, addresses \u003ci>MASH\u003c/i>, the director’s most commercial success, and one which has often been criticized as sexist:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For some viewers, \u003ci>MASH\u003c/i> was an exercise less in Olympian misanthropy than in leering misogyny, especially in its twitting of the prim Hot Lips Houlihan as a secret sexpot worthy of being exposed before the entire company as she took a shower. The curtain falls, Hot Lips is revealed naked, the medics applaud at their practical joke and feminism takes a nasty hit. (I could name one young bride who, after storming out of a screening room at the end of that shower scene, literally went home to her mother, telling her husband, “I don’t want to live with someone who thinks \u003ci>that\u003c/i> is funny.”)”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet, what I have always found most memorable about the scene is its direct aftermath, when Sally Kellerman as a humiliated Hot Lips heads straight to the camp commander’s tent. “This isn’t a hospital, it’s an insane asylum!” she sobs, threatening to resign. But the colonel, who is in bed with a nurse, couldn’t care less, and tells her to go ahead and quit. One might ask: With whom does Altman’s heart really lie in that particular moment? And in the football-game finale, when Kellerman’s character has been reduced to that of an inane cheerleader, an intentional statement seems to be on the table about the effect on a woman who wielded authority, no matter how priggish, by the film’s leering, sniggering wolf pack. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>3 Women\u003c/i> is much more overt in its disdain for masculine values. Here, Altman sees men as brutes, sexual opportunists, or both. The cops who hang out at Edgar’s bar, faceless behind their helmets, are shown several times riding dirt bikes, full of sound and fury in the manner of swarming insects, expending their male energy in purposeless circles. The other male group activity we see is target shooting, and again it reads like an expression of sheer aggression and little else. Edgar himself is a drunken, boorish caricature of machismo, hiding behind dark sunglasses and a cowboy hat; he is the analogue of the ranting creature with the huge phallus on display in his wife?s mural. Edgar and Willie, for their part, exchange one accusatory look but nary a word in the entire film, and perhaps the movie?s most surrealistic element is the fact that they actually once chose to wed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arid landscape, severe personal isolation, a sterile culture, enervating male aggression… in such a milieu, the stillbirth that comes at the film?s climax seems the logical conclusion. The real horror of that moment, though, comes in Willie?s cooing and clinging to the dead baby, and her complete blindness to its lack of life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If there?s anything optimistic for viewers to hang their hat on in this grim event, perhaps it?s the perfectly reasonable reaction of Millie, which is sheer hysteria. While she is portrayed as a ridiculous figure in the film?s first half, as things begin to unravel and she is beset by escalating strangeness, she seems to awaken from her own metaphorical coma, finding her voice and a previously suppressed humanity. The psychic rupture of the three women in the final scene represents a rebellion against an array of devitalizing forces, and through its oddness one can choose to interpret it as a lone sign of hope in this otherwise devastating masterwork. \u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/121397/california_films_3_women","authors":["128436"],"series":["arts_433"],"categories":["arts_74"],"featImg":"arts_10121397","label":"arts_433"},"arts_119427":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_119427","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"119427","score":null,"sort":[1365964272000]},"guestAuthors":[{"ID":"128436","displayName":"Jon Brooks","firstName":"Jon","lastName":"Brooks","userLogin":"jon-brooks","userEmail":"jbrooks@kqed.org","linkedAccount":"jbrooks","website":"","description":"Jon Brooks is a KQED News online editor and writer for KQED's daily news blog, \u003ci>News Fix\u003c/i>. A veteran blogger, he previously worked for Yahoo! in various news writing and editing roles. He was also the editor of \u003ca>EconomyBeat.org\u003c/a>, which documented user-generated content about the financial crisis and recession. Jon is also a playwright whose work has been produced in San Francisco, New York, Italy, and around the U.S. He has written about film for his own blog and studied film at Boston University. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College.","userNicename":"jon-brooks","type":"guest-author","nickname":""}],"slug":"california_films_irreconcilable_differences","title":"Irreconcilable Differences","publishDate":1365964272,"format":"standard","headTitle":"Irreconcilable Differences | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":433,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>The 1984 comedy-drama \u003ci>Irreconcilable Differences\u003c/i> doesn’t exactly represent state-of-the-art filmmaking; it sometimes tilts from stinging psychological insight to sitcom-style yuks,the acting is occasionally flat, the heart-tugging transparent. The film is, one might say, stalkedby the shadow of mediocrity. IMDB users, to take one chunk of audience, agree, giving themovie a \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087482/\">cumulative rating of 5.6\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And yet, I can’t help but view the film as some sort of emotional masterpiece. Over the last25 years, I’ve seen the thing like eight times, forcing a succession of significant others to watchalong and pretend how fabulous they think it is. Certain movies, it would seem, just get underyour skin, so that something in their DNA works on your own. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, I am going to make the case that even if a majority of moviegoers don’t experience themovie on a cellular level, it’s nonetheless an overlooked gem, or at the very least the best romcom in which two of the genre’s leading practitioners, \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0583600/\">Nancy Meyers\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000106/\">Drew Barrymore\u003c/a>, have participated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film has two main themes going on: movie culture and dysfunctional families. Both havebeen fat, frequent targets on screen, but it’s their intertwining here that makes for such acompelling narrative and carves out a unique niche among grander indictments of Hollywoodlike \u003ci>Sunset Boulevard\u003c/i> and \u003ci>The Player\u003c/i>. The story is esoteric in that its victim, theonly child of two industry egos, suffers in the rarefied world of high-stakes moviemaking, yet the story is familiar enough to anyone who’s had a run-in with their local narcissist and wondered what it’s like to be his kid. The psychological intelligence with which the husband and wife director-writer team of Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers imbued the project is considerable, and even though there are moments of high satire to lessen the sting, the result is one of the most truthful, specific, and chilling portraits of bad parenting ever put on screen. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/04/14/diff5.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The movie’s start is inauspicious. The silly introduction of a serious premise has little Casey(nine-year-old Drew Barrymore in a \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew_Barrymore#Rebellious_era\">too-close-for-comfort role\u003c/a>) suing her Hollywoodparents for divorce. Modest giggles brought on by the kid’s plucky precociousness amid themedia circus ensue. But rather quickly, the film takes a nice turn when her father takes the standand states that he has a PhD thesis in cinema on the “semiological analysis of the sexualovertones in the early films of \u003ca href=\"http://www.lubitsch.com/\">Ernst Lubitsch\u003c/a>.” It’sprecisely at that point you get the feeling you may actually be in for something more substantialthan advertised. The clunky framing device of the trial then gives way to essentially a longflashback, in which we witness the story of a nice, likable couple seduced by Hollywood andtransformed into self-involved monsters, in full view of their only child. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ryan O’Neal gives a believable performance as Albert Brodsky, a film-scholar-turned-directorwith a story arc awfully similar to that of director \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bogdanovich\">Peter Bogdanovich\u003c/a>. Brodsky is hitchhiking his way to California and a teaching position at UCLA, when in the middle of a driving rainstorm, he’s picked up by Lucy (Shelley Long) en route to meet up with her fiancé. Long, in mid-\u003ci>Cheers\u003c/i> form, is the analog to Bogdanovich’s ex-wife, the screenwriter and production designer \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Platt\">Polly Platt\u003c/a>. The hypotenuse in that triangle, actress Cybill Shepherd, is represented here by a young Sharon Stone, with perhaps a dollop of centerfold-turned-actress \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Stratten\">Dorothy Stratten\u003c/a> thrown in. (Years later, (\u003ca href=\"http://www.nypost.com/p/blogs/movies/item_OAQaQFfGbEoBqdMIF6H6JN#axzz2PMbVPJ4d\">Bogdanovich called the film\u003c/a> “terrible” and “totally biased against me and Cybill.”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Albert and Lucy drive cross-country, they start out bickering. But in a nice romanticsequence — Lucy reading Albert her unpublished children’s book, dancing in the lounge of aroadside motel, dissolving into mutual tears while watching a Spanish-language version of\u003ci>An Affair to Remember\u003c/i> — they fall in love. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Marriage and a child follow. But a big time producer named David Kessler (SamWanamaker), impressed by Albert’s encyclopedic knowledge of film, takes him under his wingas a consultant. After experiencing a large dose of Hollywood shallowness at one of his parties, a prophetic Lucy says, “I don’t want to turn into these people.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eventually Kessler gives Albert a chance to write and direct. While Albert’s discussing hisfirst script with Lucy, she off-handedly improves one of the scenes, and he convinces her to cowrite the film, which becomes a huge hit. But while searching for an ingénue for their follow-up project, he impetuously hires a beautiful but wild woman named Blake Chandler (Stone), whom he found working as a waitress at a hot dog stand. She moves in with the couple for round-the-clock coaching, Albert falls in love with her, and just like that he and Lucy are divorced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/04/14/diff3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two then engage in a topsy-turvy battle of wills and careers, as Albert moves ontodirectorial stardom while Lucy falls into obscurity, her contribution to their movies completelyoverlooked. She makes a comeback, however, with a fictionalized tell-all book about theirmarriage, just as Albert’s career hits the skids. But no matter which one’s on top, their daughter is put in the middle, taking the brunt of their mutual recriminations. As the psychic wounds take apalpable toll on Casey, the film becomes a searing portrait of parental neglect, as well as adepiction of a codependent in the making. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The night that Lucy discovers her husband’s affair, she grabs Casey and they drive off, butinstead of comforting her daughter, she breaks down in a self-indulgent panic. Later, shecontinually bashes Albert in front of Casey, while at the same time pumping her for informationabout Blake. Meanwhile, over at Albert’s Hollywood mansion, his slavish devotion to his newwife leaves no room for his daughter. Finally, Casey is reduced to ping-ponging between them,forced to bear vicious messages from one to the other. Some of the exchanges between Caseyand her parents are particularly depressing:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Albert: What do you think of your old man? Be honest.\u003cbr>Casey: Daddy you know for a long time you didn’t talk to me so much because you werealways so busy. And now it’s like you want me to be your best friend or something. It’s notfair.\u003cbr>Albert: Fair? You want to talk about fair? Two Academy Award nominations, look at me. Ican’t get arrested.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are many affecting scenes in the film, both comedic and dramatic. A highlight is thesequence in which Albert attempts to shoot \u003ci>Atlanta\u003c/i>, a musical version of \u003ci>Gone Withthe Wind\u003c/i>, a self-financed vanity project for Blake, destined to flop in the grand style of\u003ci>Heaven’s Gate\u003c/i> in part because of Albert’s Stanley Kubrick-level obsessiveness. Beforeshooting his version of the famous scene in which the camera cranes up from Scarlett O’Hara toreveal hundreds of dead and wounded soldiers lying in rows, Albert laments they don’t haveenough flies. He then fixates on the dress color of an extra somewhere deep in the background as his assistant warns him that the sun’s about to go down. Finally, a coke-snorting Blake emerges from her trailer in full diva mode, ready to sing the lyrics she herself wrote: “This… civil war… ain’t gonna get… me down… I’m moving my act… To a brand new town!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But she yells “cut!” before the scene ends, putting an end to the day’s shooting and pushing the already over-budget film further into the red. “Collect the flies!” yells the A.D.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a great take on how a bad idea is made worse on-screen. (See Bogdanovich’s \u003ci>At Long Last Love\u003c/i> forthe real-life parallel.) But the true impact of \u003ci>Irreconcilable Differences\u003c/i> lies not in its close-to-the-bone take down of Hollywood excess, but in the finely observed psychological moments: Lucy compulsively giving notes to Blake on her performance while Albert languorously lights theyoung beauty’s cigarette, tipping off his wife to the affair with just that one gesture. Or Lucybeckoning her staff — a pair of standard Hollywood flunkies — to giddily inform them that herbook has gone to number one, then insisting on telling the housekeeping staff as well. When thecook seems puzzled, just the slightest hint of loneliness and shame flashes across Long’sface; she’s on top of the world, but has no one to share it with. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/04/14/diff4.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film winds to a close with Albert and Lucy, on either side of their daughter, literallypulling her arms in opposite directions during one of their vicious fights. The flashback ends andwe’re back in the courtroom, where Casey takes the stand to sum up her view of what we havejust seen:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think if you have a child, you should treat that child like a human being and not like a pet. Not like you treat your dog or something. You know, when you have a dog sometimes you forget he’s there, and then when you get lonely suddenly you remember him, and you remember how cute he is and stuff, and you kiss him a lot, but then the next day when you’re busy again you don’t notice him.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Irreconcilable Differences\u003c/i> is an insider’s view of the perils of Hollywood success andthe neediness that drives certain types of the industry’s personalities. But what makes the filmmore than just a knowing castigation is the real element of tragedy, not only in the emotionalabuse of a child, but in the disintegration of a deeply sympathetic romantic partnership. Over theyears, I have come to interpret the downfall of Albert and Lucy’s relationship differently. Thecorrupting influence of Hollywood — that’s there. But one wonders if the seeds of failurepredated the characters’ success, existing from the start in Albert’s total immersion in movies. “Isee in you exactly what Jimmy Stewart saw in Jean Arthur,” he tells Lucy when they are fallingin love, one of several instances in which he cites a film to explain his psychological state. Forsomeone whose main frame of reference is pictures, perhaps it’s only a matter of time before real life wilts under the weight of cinema-driven projections. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After all, those wildest-dreams-come-true can instill a deep vanity. The flip side, however, isthe self-loathing that emerges as they start to crumble, and an inability to nurture anything butyour own success. “Do you love me a lot?” Lucy stops reveling over her invitation to appear on\u003ci>The Tonight Show\u003c/i> to ask her daughter. In Hollywood, the film suggests, maybe that’s the only real question on anyone’s mind. \u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Movie culture and a dysfunctional family make for an emotional masterpiece based in real-life Hollywood relationships, starring Ryan O'Neal, Shelley Long, Sharon Stone, an a precocious nine-year-old named Drew Barrymore.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705050053,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":24,"wordCount":1867},"headData":{"title":"Irreconcilable Differences | KQED","description":"Movie culture and a dysfunctional family make for an emotional masterpiece based in real-life Hollywood relationships, starring Ryan O'Neal, Shelley Long, Sharon Stone, an a precocious nine-year-old named Drew Barrymore.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"Irreconcilable Differences","datePublished":"2013-04-14T18:31:12.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T09:00:53.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sourceUrl":"http://www.kqed.org/arts/category/movies/","sticky":false,"path":"/arts/119427/california_films_irreconcilable_differences","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The 1984 comedy-drama \u003ci>Irreconcilable Differences\u003c/i> doesn’t exactly represent state-of-the-art filmmaking; it sometimes tilts from stinging psychological insight to sitcom-style yuks,the acting is occasionally flat, the heart-tugging transparent. The film is, one might say, stalkedby the shadow of mediocrity. IMDB users, to take one chunk of audience, agree, giving themovie a \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087482/\">cumulative rating of 5.6\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And yet, I can’t help but view the film as some sort of emotional masterpiece. Over the last25 years, I’ve seen the thing like eight times, forcing a succession of significant others to watchalong and pretend how fabulous they think it is. Certain movies, it would seem, just get underyour skin, so that something in their DNA works on your own. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, I am going to make the case that even if a majority of moviegoers don’t experience themovie on a cellular level, it’s nonetheless an overlooked gem, or at the very least the best romcom in which two of the genre’s leading practitioners, \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0583600/\">Nancy Meyers\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000106/\">Drew Barrymore\u003c/a>, have participated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film has two main themes going on: movie culture and dysfunctional families. Both havebeen fat, frequent targets on screen, but it’s their intertwining here that makes for such acompelling narrative and carves out a unique niche among grander indictments of Hollywoodlike \u003ci>Sunset Boulevard\u003c/i> and \u003ci>The Player\u003c/i>. The story is esoteric in that its victim, theonly child of two industry egos, suffers in the rarefied world of high-stakes moviemaking, yet the story is familiar enough to anyone who’s had a run-in with their local narcissist and wondered what it’s like to be his kid. The psychological intelligence with which the husband and wife director-writer team of Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers imbued the project is considerable, and even though there are moments of high satire to lessen the sting, the result is one of the most truthful, specific, and chilling portraits of bad parenting ever put on screen. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/04/14/diff5.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The movie’s start is inauspicious. The silly introduction of a serious premise has little Casey(nine-year-old Drew Barrymore in a \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew_Barrymore#Rebellious_era\">too-close-for-comfort role\u003c/a>) suing her Hollywoodparents for divorce. Modest giggles brought on by the kid’s plucky precociousness amid themedia circus ensue. But rather quickly, the film takes a nice turn when her father takes the standand states that he has a PhD thesis in cinema on the “semiological analysis of the sexualovertones in the early films of \u003ca href=\"http://www.lubitsch.com/\">Ernst Lubitsch\u003c/a>.” It’sprecisely at that point you get the feeling you may actually be in for something more substantialthan advertised. The clunky framing device of the trial then gives way to essentially a longflashback, in which we witness the story of a nice, likable couple seduced by Hollywood andtransformed into self-involved monsters, in full view of their only child. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ryan O’Neal gives a believable performance as Albert Brodsky, a film-scholar-turned-directorwith a story arc awfully similar to that of director \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bogdanovich\">Peter Bogdanovich\u003c/a>. Brodsky is hitchhiking his way to California and a teaching position at UCLA, when in the middle of a driving rainstorm, he’s picked up by Lucy (Shelley Long) en route to meet up with her fiancé. Long, in mid-\u003ci>Cheers\u003c/i> form, is the analog to Bogdanovich’s ex-wife, the screenwriter and production designer \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Platt\">Polly Platt\u003c/a>. The hypotenuse in that triangle, actress Cybill Shepherd, is represented here by a young Sharon Stone, with perhaps a dollop of centerfold-turned-actress \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Stratten\">Dorothy Stratten\u003c/a> thrown in. (Years later, (\u003ca href=\"http://www.nypost.com/p/blogs/movies/item_OAQaQFfGbEoBqdMIF6H6JN#axzz2PMbVPJ4d\">Bogdanovich called the film\u003c/a> “terrible” and “totally biased against me and Cybill.”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Albert and Lucy drive cross-country, they start out bickering. But in a nice romanticsequence — Lucy reading Albert her unpublished children’s book, dancing in the lounge of aroadside motel, dissolving into mutual tears while watching a Spanish-language version of\u003ci>An Affair to Remember\u003c/i> — they fall in love. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Marriage and a child follow. But a big time producer named David Kessler (SamWanamaker), impressed by Albert’s encyclopedic knowledge of film, takes him under his wingas a consultant. After experiencing a large dose of Hollywood shallowness at one of his parties, a prophetic Lucy says, “I don’t want to turn into these people.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eventually Kessler gives Albert a chance to write and direct. While Albert’s discussing hisfirst script with Lucy, she off-handedly improves one of the scenes, and he convinces her to cowrite the film, which becomes a huge hit. But while searching for an ingénue for their follow-up project, he impetuously hires a beautiful but wild woman named Blake Chandler (Stone), whom he found working as a waitress at a hot dog stand. She moves in with the couple for round-the-clock coaching, Albert falls in love with her, and just like that he and Lucy are divorced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/04/14/diff3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two then engage in a topsy-turvy battle of wills and careers, as Albert moves ontodirectorial stardom while Lucy falls into obscurity, her contribution to their movies completelyoverlooked. She makes a comeback, however, with a fictionalized tell-all book about theirmarriage, just as Albert’s career hits the skids. But no matter which one’s on top, their daughter is put in the middle, taking the brunt of their mutual recriminations. As the psychic wounds take apalpable toll on Casey, the film becomes a searing portrait of parental neglect, as well as adepiction of a codependent in the making. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The night that Lucy discovers her husband’s affair, she grabs Casey and they drive off, butinstead of comforting her daughter, she breaks down in a self-indulgent panic. Later, shecontinually bashes Albert in front of Casey, while at the same time pumping her for informationabout Blake. Meanwhile, over at Albert’s Hollywood mansion, his slavish devotion to his newwife leaves no room for his daughter. Finally, Casey is reduced to ping-ponging between them,forced to bear vicious messages from one to the other. Some of the exchanges between Caseyand her parents are particularly depressing:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Albert: What do you think of your old man? Be honest.\u003cbr>Casey: Daddy you know for a long time you didn’t talk to me so much because you werealways so busy. And now it’s like you want me to be your best friend or something. It’s notfair.\u003cbr>Albert: Fair? You want to talk about fair? Two Academy Award nominations, look at me. Ican’t get arrested.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are many affecting scenes in the film, both comedic and dramatic. A highlight is thesequence in which Albert attempts to shoot \u003ci>Atlanta\u003c/i>, a musical version of \u003ci>Gone Withthe Wind\u003c/i>, a self-financed vanity project for Blake, destined to flop in the grand style of\u003ci>Heaven’s Gate\u003c/i> in part because of Albert’s Stanley Kubrick-level obsessiveness. Beforeshooting his version of the famous scene in which the camera cranes up from Scarlett O’Hara toreveal hundreds of dead and wounded soldiers lying in rows, Albert laments they don’t haveenough flies. He then fixates on the dress color of an extra somewhere deep in the background as his assistant warns him that the sun’s about to go down. Finally, a coke-snorting Blake emerges from her trailer in full diva mode, ready to sing the lyrics she herself wrote: “This… civil war… ain’t gonna get… me down… I’m moving my act… To a brand new town!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But she yells “cut!” before the scene ends, putting an end to the day’s shooting and pushing the already over-budget film further into the red. “Collect the flies!” yells the A.D.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a great take on how a bad idea is made worse on-screen. (See Bogdanovich’s \u003ci>At Long Last Love\u003c/i> forthe real-life parallel.) But the true impact of \u003ci>Irreconcilable Differences\u003c/i> lies not in its close-to-the-bone take down of Hollywood excess, but in the finely observed psychological moments: Lucy compulsively giving notes to Blake on her performance while Albert languorously lights theyoung beauty’s cigarette, tipping off his wife to the affair with just that one gesture. Or Lucybeckoning her staff — a pair of standard Hollywood flunkies — to giddily inform them that herbook has gone to number one, then insisting on telling the housekeeping staff as well. When thecook seems puzzled, just the slightest hint of loneliness and shame flashes across Long’sface; she’s on top of the world, but has no one to share it with. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/04/14/diff4.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film winds to a close with Albert and Lucy, on either side of their daughter, literallypulling her arms in opposite directions during one of their vicious fights. The flashback ends andwe’re back in the courtroom, where Casey takes the stand to sum up her view of what we havejust seen:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think if you have a child, you should treat that child like a human being and not like a pet. Not like you treat your dog or something. You know, when you have a dog sometimes you forget he’s there, and then when you get lonely suddenly you remember him, and you remember how cute he is and stuff, and you kiss him a lot, but then the next day when you’re busy again you don’t notice him.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Irreconcilable Differences\u003c/i> is an insider’s view of the perils of Hollywood success andthe neediness that drives certain types of the industry’s personalities. But what makes the filmmore than just a knowing castigation is the real element of tragedy, not only in the emotionalabuse of a child, but in the disintegration of a deeply sympathetic romantic partnership. Over theyears, I have come to interpret the downfall of Albert and Lucy’s relationship differently. Thecorrupting influence of Hollywood — that’s there. But one wonders if the seeds of failurepredated the characters’ success, existing from the start in Albert’s total immersion in movies. “Isee in you exactly what Jimmy Stewart saw in Jean Arthur,” he tells Lucy when they are fallingin love, one of several instances in which he cites a film to explain his psychological state. Forsomeone whose main frame of reference is pictures, perhaps it’s only a matter of time before real life wilts under the weight of cinema-driven projections. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After all, those wildest-dreams-come-true can instill a deep vanity. The flip side, however, isthe self-loathing that emerges as they start to crumble, and an inability to nurture anything butyour own success. “Do you love me a lot?” Lucy stops reveling over her invitation to appear on\u003ci>The Tonight Show\u003c/i> to ask her daughter. In Hollywood, the film suggests, maybe that’s the only real question on anyone’s mind. \u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/119427/california_films_irreconcilable_differences","authors":["128436"],"series":["arts_433"],"categories":["arts_74"],"featImg":"arts_10119427","label":"arts_433"},"arts_117553":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_117553","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"117553","score":null,"sort":[1362807876000]},"guestAuthors":[{"ID":"128436","displayName":"Jon Brooks","firstName":"Jon","lastName":"Brooks","userLogin":"jon-brooks","userEmail":"jbrooks@kqed.org","linkedAccount":"jbrooks","website":"","description":"Jon Brooks is a KQED News online editor and writer for KQED's daily news blog, \u003ci>News Fix\u003c/i>. A veteran blogger, he previously worked for Yahoo! in various news writing and editing roles. He was also the editor of \u003ca>EconomyBeat.org\u003c/a>, which documented user-generated content about the financial crisis and recession. Jon is also a playwright whose work has been produced in San Francisco, New York, Italy, and around the U.S. He has written about film for his own blog and studied film at Boston University. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College.","userNicename":"jon-brooks","type":"guest-author","nickname":""}],"slug":"california_films_sideways","title":"Sideways","publishDate":1362807876,"format":"standard","headTitle":"Sideways | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":433,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>In 2004, amid the latest \u003ci>Harry Potter\u003c/i>, \u003ci>Shrek\u003c/i>, and \u003ci>Spider-Man\u003c/i>, themoviegoing public was shocked to discover they could actually see an American filmmade for grownups. In an era of widespread pandering to the child-in-us-all, criticslauded Alexander Payne’s comedy-drama \u003ci>Sideways\u003c/i> for its adult themes andcharacters. As the \u003ca href=\"http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2004/10/24/life-isa-cabernet.html\">critic David Ansen put it\u003c/a>, “…Sideways stays resolutely life-size.And that, in this age of hype and hyperventilation, may be the most radical thing aboutit.” In addition to the financial achievement of grossing $110 million worldwide on aproduction budget of $16 million, \u003ci>Sideways\u003c/i> has to be one of the best films evermade about wine; those who have seen it are probably doomed to hear the echo ofPaul Giamatti’s \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideways#Impact_on_wine_industry\">brief tirade against Merlot\u003c/a> whenever they consider that varietal on a menu.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film was Payne’s third in an escalating triptych of delving into middle-aged maleangst. In his dryly satirical semi-cult fave \u003ci>Election\u003c/i>, the main character wascomically and blissfully unaware of his extreme American ordinariness, and his descentinto loserdom barely chipped away at an unrelenting optimism bordering on delusion.\u003ci>About Schmidt\u003c/i>, a low-key star vehicle for Jack Nicholson, upped the self-awarenesslevel a notch, as the lifelong folly of a superannuated executive’s life slowlyseeped into his — and the audience’s — consciousness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/03/08/sideways1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in \u003ci>Sideways\u003c/i>, Paul Giamatti, playing a guy who looks like Paul Giamatti, isalready in full-blown rueful mode when the film begins. The movie tracks a one-weekvacation in which his character, Miles, heads to the wine country of Santa Ynez Valley,in Santa Barbara County, with his pal Jack (Thomas Haden Church) on the eve ofJack’s wedding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Miles is a junior high school English teacher, divorced three years and still pining for hisex. He’s also a talented but failed novelist, dependent on anti-depressants, and anabuser of wine. Jack is an actor who hit his peak as a regular on a soap opera but hasnow been relegated to commercials (“mostly nationals”). The two, of course, areopposites: Jack is a puerile loose cannon who effuses frequent bursts of cockeyedoptimism; Miles over-thinks everything and projects only doom. Jack is shallow, Miles anintellectual. Jack is confidently oversexed; Miles looks like he’d rather be anywhere elsewhen the lights are low. Jack is getting into a marriage he seems to not really want;Miles is out of one he still wants to be in. In short, Jack’s all id, Miles depressed superego. For Miles, the long-planned trip is a chance to school his buddy on the one thinghe’s still got a confident purchase on: wine. Jack, on the other hand, despite (or due to)his imminent nuptials, has the sole goal of getting laid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/03/08/sideways7.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So that’s where the fun begins, as they used to say in sitcom promos. But despite someuproarious high jinks, the action really lies in the nuances of the characters’ interactionswith each other, as well as their different approaches to all things, big and small. Jack,for his part, is an inveterate bullshitter, the kind of guy whose magnetism will carry youalong to places you wouldn’t have normally dared — until you finally realize you’re inway over your head. Among several comically horrific plot points are Jack’s immediateinsinuation into the life of Stephanie (Sandra Oh), a woman he picks up on the trip.Within a day, he’s advanced the relationship to the stage of calling her, quite sincerely,”honey,” while she refers to him as Uncle Jack when he puts her daughter to bed. (Ohhas a fabulous scene in which she physically attacks him like a cartoon whirlwind afternews of his impending marriage leaks out.) \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All I know is that I’m an actor,” Jack says to Miles, explaining his thoughts aboutaborting his wedding in favor of this new relationship. “All I have is my instinct. You’reasking me to go against it… She smells different, she tastes different, she f***sdifferent.” This is both hilarious and horrifying: hilarious to hear a 40-something man saythose words as if he’s just hit upon an undiscovered truth; horrifying to hear such a thinrationalization for a form of semi-sociopathic behavior.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/03/08/sideways4.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Miles, on the other hand, is all head. Payne paints his portrait in a few quick strokesearly on: reading on the toilet, ordering a spinach croissant with coffee, doing the Timescrossword while driving. But he’s also right on the border of being a prig. (He hits peakpretentiousness through use of the word “absolument.”) He’s also the kind of wine snoball but a true enophile would rather not hear from. “There’s the faintest soupcon ofasparagus and there’s just a flutter of like a nutty edam cheese,” he pronounces afterdipping his nose deep into a glass of red.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet, when meeting up with the soulful waitress Maya (Virginia Madsen), Miles’spersonality blooms. Suddenly he is downright cogent, even poetic. A fellow winecognoscente, she asks him about his deep affinity for Pinot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/03/08/sideways2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early,” he replies, speaking of the grape. “It’snot a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and even when it’sneglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention…and only the most patient andnurturing of growers can do it, really only somebody who really takes the time tounderstand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression. And then it’sflavors are just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He has, of course, just described the best version of himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Sideways\u003c/i> is one of those films that moves seamlessly from humor to existentialdesolation without stumbling over bathos. There’s an uproariously funny scene, forexample, of Jack giving chase to Miles, scrambling precariously down a steep hill whilestealing swigs from a wine bottle after he’s learned his ex-wife is getting remarried. Theflip side of that comedy: Paul Giamatti’s face as a portrait of poorly suppressed,crumbling despair when his ex tells him at Jack’s wedding that she’s pregnant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/03/08/sideways3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s that poignancy brought to the character by Giamatti that pushes the film beyond thebounds of its comedic structure. Filled with self-loathing, Miles is always a hair triggeraway from what looks to be a total collapse. In one of the more memorably downbeatsequences I’ve seen on film, Miles and Jack pay a surprise trip to Miles’s mother on herbirthday. Only it becomes clear that he has made the detour in order to raid her secretstash of money so he can pay for the trip. As he does, he catches a glimpse of photosof himself, representing better days. He then sees his reflection in a mirror, where he isconfronted with just who he has become. That’s powerful enough, but Payne smoothlylayers on a related scene. The theft complete, Miles returns downstairs to find hismother in conversation with Jack, cooing over some inane commercials he’s appearedin. Coming right after Miles’s self-humiliation, it’s a nice connective moment betweentwo types of middle-aged defeat. Because if Miles reeks with the stench of unfulfilledpromise, Jack has a whiff of it himself. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, even given this kind of character depth, the film may have played out as merely anentertaining clash of opposites if not for Payne’s ability to thoroughly capture theemotional texture of certain moments and psychological states: the conviviality of analcohol-infused dinner; the tension of a first date eased by the sudden surprise ofconnection; the pain of missing the moment for a first kiss; and the loneliness of beingabandoned by a buddy. In this last sequence, Payne gives us a series of quick solitaryshots: Miles cutting his toenails, grading papers in a pool, calling voicemail devoid ofmessages, eating alone — small moments, still lifes, almost, adding up to a portrait ofbleakness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/03/08/sideways9.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In another standout scene, in which Miles “drunk dials” his ex-wife, shots ofhim thinking about making the call are intercut with the actual event, amplifying thetension between conception and execution of a truly bad idea. Here, the drunkenagitation of Miles’s state is captured with tight closeups shifting in and out of focus, as ifthe camera itself is half-drunk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Near the finish, the film cuts its comedy cord completely and goes to an even darkerplace. At the end of his tether, Miles surreptitiously steals sips from the pride of his winecollection while eating alone at a fast food restaurant. He was saving this particularbottle for a special occasion, and its premature opening represents the death of allhope. But the movie doesn’t end there. Like every vintage wine, Miles may yet have hismoment to peak. The last scene is open-ended, and with characters as rich as these,whatever happened next might have made a fine sequel.\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Alexander Payne's \u003ci>Sideways\u003c/i>, a life-sized film about middle-aged male angst, unmet ambitions, richly drawn characters, and, of course, wine.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705050121,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":23,"wordCount":1537},"headData":{"title":"Sideways | KQED","description":"Alexander Payne's Sideways, a life-sized film about middle-aged male angst, unmet ambitions, richly drawn characters, and, of course, wine.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"Sideways","datePublished":"2013-03-09T05:44:36.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T09:02:01.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sourceUrl":"http://www.kqed.org/arts/category/movies/","sticky":false,"path":"/arts/117553/california_films_sideways","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In 2004, amid the latest \u003ci>Harry Potter\u003c/i>, \u003ci>Shrek\u003c/i>, and \u003ci>Spider-Man\u003c/i>, themoviegoing public was shocked to discover they could actually see an American filmmade for grownups. In an era of widespread pandering to the child-in-us-all, criticslauded Alexander Payne’s comedy-drama \u003ci>Sideways\u003c/i> for its adult themes andcharacters. As the \u003ca href=\"http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2004/10/24/life-isa-cabernet.html\">critic David Ansen put it\u003c/a>, “…Sideways stays resolutely life-size.And that, in this age of hype and hyperventilation, may be the most radical thing aboutit.” In addition to the financial achievement of grossing $110 million worldwide on aproduction budget of $16 million, \u003ci>Sideways\u003c/i> has to be one of the best films evermade about wine; those who have seen it are probably doomed to hear the echo ofPaul Giamatti’s \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideways#Impact_on_wine_industry\">brief tirade against Merlot\u003c/a> whenever they consider that varietal on a menu.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film was Payne’s third in an escalating triptych of delving into middle-aged maleangst. In his dryly satirical semi-cult fave \u003ci>Election\u003c/i>, the main character wascomically and blissfully unaware of his extreme American ordinariness, and his descentinto loserdom barely chipped away at an unrelenting optimism bordering on delusion.\u003ci>About Schmidt\u003c/i>, a low-key star vehicle for Jack Nicholson, upped the self-awarenesslevel a notch, as the lifelong folly of a superannuated executive’s life slowlyseeped into his — and the audience’s — consciousness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/03/08/sideways1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in \u003ci>Sideways\u003c/i>, Paul Giamatti, playing a guy who looks like Paul Giamatti, isalready in full-blown rueful mode when the film begins. The movie tracks a one-weekvacation in which his character, Miles, heads to the wine country of Santa Ynez Valley,in Santa Barbara County, with his pal Jack (Thomas Haden Church) on the eve ofJack’s wedding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Miles is a junior high school English teacher, divorced three years and still pining for hisex. He’s also a talented but failed novelist, dependent on anti-depressants, and anabuser of wine. Jack is an actor who hit his peak as a regular on a soap opera but hasnow been relegated to commercials (“mostly nationals”). The two, of course, areopposites: Jack is a puerile loose cannon who effuses frequent bursts of cockeyedoptimism; Miles over-thinks everything and projects only doom. Jack is shallow, Miles anintellectual. Jack is confidently oversexed; Miles looks like he’d rather be anywhere elsewhen the lights are low. Jack is getting into a marriage he seems to not really want;Miles is out of one he still wants to be in. In short, Jack’s all id, Miles depressed superego. For Miles, the long-planned trip is a chance to school his buddy on the one thinghe’s still got a confident purchase on: wine. Jack, on the other hand, despite (or due to)his imminent nuptials, has the sole goal of getting laid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/03/08/sideways7.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So that’s where the fun begins, as they used to say in sitcom promos. But despite someuproarious high jinks, the action really lies in the nuances of the characters’ interactionswith each other, as well as their different approaches to all things, big and small. Jack,for his part, is an inveterate bullshitter, the kind of guy whose magnetism will carry youalong to places you wouldn’t have normally dared — until you finally realize you’re inway over your head. Among several comically horrific plot points are Jack’s immediateinsinuation into the life of Stephanie (Sandra Oh), a woman he picks up on the trip.Within a day, he’s advanced the relationship to the stage of calling her, quite sincerely,”honey,” while she refers to him as Uncle Jack when he puts her daughter to bed. (Ohhas a fabulous scene in which she physically attacks him like a cartoon whirlwind afternews of his impending marriage leaks out.) \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All I know is that I’m an actor,” Jack says to Miles, explaining his thoughts aboutaborting his wedding in favor of this new relationship. “All I have is my instinct. You’reasking me to go against it… She smells different, she tastes different, she f***sdifferent.” This is both hilarious and horrifying: hilarious to hear a 40-something man saythose words as if he’s just hit upon an undiscovered truth; horrifying to hear such a thinrationalization for a form of semi-sociopathic behavior.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/03/08/sideways4.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Miles, on the other hand, is all head. Payne paints his portrait in a few quick strokesearly on: reading on the toilet, ordering a spinach croissant with coffee, doing the Timescrossword while driving. But he’s also right on the border of being a prig. (He hits peakpretentiousness through use of the word “absolument.”) He’s also the kind of wine snoball but a true enophile would rather not hear from. “There’s the faintest soupcon ofasparagus and there’s just a flutter of like a nutty edam cheese,” he pronounces afterdipping his nose deep into a glass of red.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet, when meeting up with the soulful waitress Maya (Virginia Madsen), Miles’spersonality blooms. Suddenly he is downright cogent, even poetic. A fellow winecognoscente, she asks him about his deep affinity for Pinot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/03/08/sideways2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early,” he replies, speaking of the grape. “It’snot a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and even when it’sneglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention…and only the most patient andnurturing of growers can do it, really only somebody who really takes the time tounderstand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression. And then it’sflavors are just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He has, of course, just described the best version of himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Sideways\u003c/i> is one of those films that moves seamlessly from humor to existentialdesolation without stumbling over bathos. There’s an uproariously funny scene, forexample, of Jack giving chase to Miles, scrambling precariously down a steep hill whilestealing swigs from a wine bottle after he’s learned his ex-wife is getting remarried. Theflip side of that comedy: Paul Giamatti’s face as a portrait of poorly suppressed,crumbling despair when his ex tells him at Jack’s wedding that she’s pregnant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/03/08/sideways3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s that poignancy brought to the character by Giamatti that pushes the film beyond thebounds of its comedic structure. Filled with self-loathing, Miles is always a hair triggeraway from what looks to be a total collapse. In one of the more memorably downbeatsequences I’ve seen on film, Miles and Jack pay a surprise trip to Miles’s mother on herbirthday. Only it becomes clear that he has made the detour in order to raid her secretstash of money so he can pay for the trip. As he does, he catches a glimpse of photosof himself, representing better days. He then sees his reflection in a mirror, where he isconfronted with just who he has become. That’s powerful enough, but Payne smoothlylayers on a related scene. The theft complete, Miles returns downstairs to find hismother in conversation with Jack, cooing over some inane commercials he’s appearedin. Coming right after Miles’s self-humiliation, it’s a nice connective moment betweentwo types of middle-aged defeat. Because if Miles reeks with the stench of unfulfilledpromise, Jack has a whiff of it himself. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, even given this kind of character depth, the film may have played out as merely anentertaining clash of opposites if not for Payne’s ability to thoroughly capture theemotional texture of certain moments and psychological states: the conviviality of analcohol-infused dinner; the tension of a first date eased by the sudden surprise ofconnection; the pain of missing the moment for a first kiss; and the loneliness of beingabandoned by a buddy. In this last sequence, Payne gives us a series of quick solitaryshots: Miles cutting his toenails, grading papers in a pool, calling voicemail devoid ofmessages, eating alone — small moments, still lifes, almost, adding up to a portrait ofbleakness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/03/08/sideways9.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In another standout scene, in which Miles “drunk dials” his ex-wife, shots ofhim thinking about making the call are intercut with the actual event, amplifying thetension between conception and execution of a truly bad idea. Here, the drunkenagitation of Miles’s state is captured with tight closeups shifting in and out of focus, as ifthe camera itself is half-drunk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Near the finish, the film cuts its comedy cord completely and goes to an even darkerplace. At the end of his tether, Miles surreptitiously steals sips from the pride of his winecollection while eating alone at a fast food restaurant. He was saving this particularbottle for a special occasion, and its premature opening represents the death of allhope. But the movie doesn’t end there. Like every vintage wine, Miles may yet have hismoment to peak. The last scene is open-ended, and with characters as rich as these,whatever happened next might have made a fine sequel.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/117553/california_films_sideways","authors":["128436"],"series":["arts_433"],"categories":["arts_74"],"featImg":"arts_10117553","label":"arts_433"},"arts_116990":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_116990","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"116990","score":null,"sort":[1361868478000]},"guestAuthors":[{"ID":"128436","displayName":"Jon Brooks","firstName":"Jon","lastName":"Brooks","userLogin":"jon-brooks","userEmail":"jbrooks@kqed.org","linkedAccount":"jbrooks","website":"","description":"Jon Brooks is a KQED News online editor and writer for KQED's daily news blog, \u003ci>News Fix\u003c/i>. A veteran blogger, he previously worked for Yahoo! in various news writing and editing roles. He was also the editor of \u003ca>EconomyBeat.org\u003c/a>, which documented user-generated content about the financial crisis and recession. Jon is also a playwright whose work has been produced in San Francisco, New York, Italy, and around the U.S. He has written about film for his own blog and studied film at Boston University. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College.","userNicename":"jon-brooks","type":"guest-author","nickname":""}],"slug":"california_films_safe","title":"Safe","publishDate":1361868478,"format":"standard","headTitle":"Safe | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":433,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>\u003ci>Safe\u003c/i> opens with a point-of-view drive up a San Fernando Valley road at dusk,the street lamps looming like ritualistic torches, unwelcoming mansions on either sideforming a gauntlet of initiation into some sort of emotional or even societal decline. Asthe car rolls into a gated community, composer Ed Tomney’s score is pregnant withforeboding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That pitch-perfectly disturbing tone never lets up. I’ve been trying to convince friends foryears that Todd Haynes’ 1995 film is one of the great American films, but watching itcan be a difficult, perplexing experience. Few, however, would deny that in its slow,methodical building of tension and the creeping terror it instills, the movie rivals apowerhouse horror vehicle like \u003ci>Rosemary’s Baby\u003c/i>. In \u003ci>Safe\u003c/i>, however, themonster is so omnipresent, it’s barely identifiable. In fact, after this moody masterpiecehas wormed its way into your head for a couple of hours, you’re not quite sure exactlywhat it is that’s planted within you — the kind of anxiety and fear normally evoked byclinging nightmares.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What makes the film so frightening? A synopsis would seem to provide few clues. CarolWhite (Julianne Moore), a San Fernando Valley housewife in a well-heeled, cloisteredcommunity circa 1987, spends her days decorating and errand-hopping until shedevelops an intolerable sensitivity to airborne toxic substances and householdchemicals. Her condition worsens, and after several attacks, a seizure that sends her tothe hospital, and the failure of her doctor to find any physical cause, she stumbles ontothe concept of \u003ca href=\"https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&tab=ww#hl=en&sugexp=les%3B&gs_rn=2&gs_ri=hp&tok=COX9ZCUT77nbDoZY6piIeQ&cp=16&gs_id=ek&xhr=t&q=environmental+illness\">environmental illness\u003c/a>, meeting others who have become”chemically sensitive.” She decides to enroll in a program designed to treat this self-diagnosedcondition, a rural, chemical-free retreat called Wrenwood that is run by acharismatic author with HIV. There, she hopes to get “clear” and reduce her “load” oftoxic chemicals, in the parlance of the community. While in the program, however, hercondition worsens, and she takes to a “safe” house, a small, barren igloo designed tokeep all harmful substances at bay. The film then ends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While this plot might merit little more than a movie-of-the-week logline, Haynes’technique imbues even the smallest event with an element of dread. Carol’s first bigcrisis is actually non-chemical — an enormous couch is delivered, but it’s the wrongcolor: black. Amid the surrounding antiseptic decor, it sits like a poisonous harbinger ofwhat’s to come and a symbol of Carol’s estrangement from her surroundings. Thatsense of alienation, we soon learn, is a constant presence, seeping through in thedirector’s blocking and shot selection. Distance, disconnection, and depersonalizationare part and parcel of the movie’s style, which owes much to Stanley Kubrick, perhapsless to Robert Altman (see \u003ci>3 Women\u003c/i>), and even Ingmar Bergman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This dehumanization is partly achieved by giving architecture and interiors primacy overpeople. In an early long shot of Carol and her husband, Greg (Xander Berkeley),Haynes drops them into a small space in the frame, where they are dwarfed by theirhome and the surrounding landscape. Later, a wide-angle shot of a friend’s houseseems to swallow Carol up as she approaches. Long shots, overhead shots, shots withlots of headroom between Carol and the top of the frame — they all serve to minimizeher personhood. In one set-up, she is shot at the edge of the frame and at the samelevel as the furniture, like just another object in a house that already looks entirelyunlived-in. This head-on look imagines the room as a tasteless dollhouse. The only realorganic tinge to the decor is lent by a pair of off-putting, egg-shaped lamps that couldhave wandered off a David Cronenberg set, and are all the more creepy for lookingmore animate than the lone human in the frame.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carol’s connection to people is as tenuous as her connection to her surroundings. Haynesmaximizes the space between her and other individuals, creating a literal distancebetween them. People talk to each other from far away or even from different rooms,which we sometimes see separated by a wall. Twice we see Carol talking to men — herhusband and a potential love interest that never materializes (James LeGros) — whenthe speakers have their backs to each other. In the case of her husband, the shot isreflected in a mirror, a double distancing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If face-to-face communication is scarce in \u003ci>Safe\u003c/i>, actual physical contact is evenrarer. And when it does occur, it’s conspicuous for its oddity. At the very start of the filmwe see Carol and her husband having sex, shot from overheard. As he pumps away ather, she evinces a tolerant-at-best look, as if abiding an animal or small child engagedin a reflexive compulsion. Later, after a business dinner during which she has fallenasleep, her husband puts his arm around her as they walk, but it looks hopelesslyawkward as they lurch forward with a zombie-like gait.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes10.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We don’t really own our own lives,” someone says during a locker room conversation atthe gym. True enough, here. Joyless sex, a stepson whom she doesn’t get along with,the wrong couch — all those are nothing compared to the estrangement Carol feels fromherself. “That’s fine. He’s fine. They’re fine,” Carol reports on family life to her motherover the phone. There is so much papering over — with no facility for naming what’s wrong, shebecomes a cipher, taking on an increasingly pallid, rag doll mien as the filmprogresses. At night she wanders alone in her garden, where earlier she was seentending to dying flowers. Adrift, vigorless, in possession of nothing truly her own, Carol,uncomfortable in her own skin, is someone who barely casts a shadow. In one shot, shecloses a mirrored bathroom door and her image is completely wiped out across thescreen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You do not sweat,” a fellow gym patron observes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Southern California Dystopia\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are reasons provided for this self-nullification, but Haynes almost neverforegrounds them, instead knitting them into the fabric of the film. Though he portraysaffluent, Reagan-era Southern California as a kind of soul-sucking dystopia with anomnipresent patriarchy, it is seen entirely through Carol’s perspective and is thusnormalized.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Who told you to go to this?” Greg asks Carol after she attends an informational sessionon environmental illness, without even a nod to the possibility of autonomy. Greg, who isplayed by Berkeley as a kind of brutish, oddly robotic man-child, is the kind ofguy you could see going on a rampage out of repressed rage. Other sexist slights arebaked into Carol’s experience. One of Greg’s colleagues tells a crude joke centeredaround a woman’s anatomy; her own medical doctor, in the middle of recommending apsychiatrist, hands the referral to Greg instead of to her; that psychiatrist sits behind alarge wooden desk, both physically inaccessible and emotionally remote as he leansback in his chair interrogating Carol, fully exposed on a small couch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes5.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This mix of male entitlement, dismissiveness, and condescension is mostly embeddedin scenes with more overt story purposes. Therefore the effect, unlike, say, in \u003ci>MadMen\u003c/i>, isn’t didactic, but rather a true reflection of how the ebbing of female powermight play out in this kind of closed cultural system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Haynes spreads more of these scenes-from-the-’80s throughout, using a technique ofmisdirection to create an almost unconscious not-quite-right effect. A typical encounter:At the dinner table, Carol’s stepson, Rory, reads a school report he wrote about “blackand Latino gangs,” filled with racist assumptions and white-fear fantasies. The viewer,though, might easily overlook the content of what’s being said, because not only does itplay as secondary to a conversation between Carol and Greg, but the scene and theattitudes of all the participants are completely familiar if not iconic: a kid proudly rattlingoff something he wrote while his parents half-listen, then offer obligatory, perfunctorypraise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s like looking closely at a Norman Rockwell and discovering it was actually painted byFrancis Bacon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Toxicity\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The core motif, though, is toxicity, of both the body and soul. The film is lit in hazy/pukeytones that lend an unhealthy glow to everything. One signature shot shows rowsand rows of cars moving slowly down the 405, headlights flaring in the polluted dusk,haunting music punctuating a sense of extreme isolation and environmentaldegradation. It’s an indelible image, one that might have been conceived by T.S. Eliot:masses of people shut into their cars, herded toward some dismal destination. Thefeeling conveyed here is that something has gone dreadfully wrong, something nowineluctable, unappeasable, final.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that’s just the first half! What makes \u003ci>Safe\u003c/i> so doubly insidious is the way itsubverts audience expectations and perceptions in Act II, when Carol takes upresidence at Wrenwood to purge the toxins her system can no longer handle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes14.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Haynes says on the DVD commentary that audiences have often mistaken his intentionas debunking \u003ca href=\"https://www.google.com/search?q=multiple+chemical+sensitivity\">chemical sensitivity\u003c/a>, which has been controversial as a diagnosisbecause it contends that someone can become sick from exposure to substances atlevels that medical science considers safe. But I would say a close reading of the filmshows him to be cagey on this score, in that a physical condition doubles as metaphor\u003ci>and\u003c/i> real-world consequence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meaning: a social toxicity is loose in the culture, just as a chemical toxicity is loose in the air.Thus, the film several times marries Carol’s hypersensitivity to chemicals with the denialof her own psychology. In one scene, for instance, her husband hugs her the morningafter a fight over her sexual disinclination to him, only to have her throw up. He has justapplied deodorant as well as hair gel and spray. But is she allergic to those substancesor to Greg himself? This is reprised later, at the retreat, when Greg attempts to embraceher and she pulls away, repulsed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think it might be your cologne,” she says.\u003cbr>“I’m not wearing cologne,” he replies.\u003cbr>“Maybe in your shirt.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It seems unlikely, but Haynes isn’t tipping his hand. Likewise, is it the actual exhaust ofthe trucks in front of her that triggers Carol’s choking fit, or the talk-radio discussion ofRonald Reagan’s religion she’s been listening to? Is it something in the air at a friend’sbaby shower that causes her seizure? Or the cold efficiency of the event, the emptinessand conventional talk that go hand-in-hand with the ritual?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes12.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What we know — and what the film seems to say — is that it’s much easier to latch ontoan environmental cause than to examine a life. When Carol’s doctor, after her seizure,frustratedly implies she’s a head case, her husband asks her, “What would cause you toactually bleed?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The chemicals,” she says, in the childish tone of any scapegoater reducing all theworld’s ills to one word. In this way, the film seems to wander around that nebulousintersection where real physical ailments meet psychosomatic tendencies and quackery,where an allergy doctor who diagnoses a genuine reaction also counsels a patient onthe phone to “continue the red-fruit diet.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this second half, too, Haynes uses audience presumptions to dissemble thesignificance of what’s being said behind the familiarity of a conversational attitude.Carol’s first experience with the subculture of chemically sensitive people comes duringa discussion among a group of women who complain about the lack of legitimacy theircondition has been granted by traditional medicine. Says one in defense of the reality ofthe disease:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“How does a ten-year-old say it’s psychosomatic? How does he make his eyes swellshut? Why would he want to do that? He can’t go into Chunky Cheese anymore. Hecan’t go into showbiz. Why would he do that to himself?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes11.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She has, of course, answered her own question, and also espoused the centralmetaphorical principle of the film: that physical illness is a concomitant of a disease ofthe soul. But because the woman is so self-assured and because a more conventionalstory structure would demand at this point a transition to a second-half resolution, mostaudiences will skip over the meaning of that dialogue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Wrenwood scenes further confuse things by mixing in self-help shibboleths withwhat turn out to be the harmful tenets of something akin to a cult. Yet the film may lull certain audiences into a state of acceptance, the same way it does its maincharacter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At her arrival, for example, Carol is welcomed by two women, officials of the center, onea warm and effusive earth-mother type who is the very opposite of the repressed,conventional individuals Carol is used to, and the other an African American woman –another antonym in her world. The latter tells her that Peter Dunning, the center’sdirector, is a “chemically sensitive person with AIDS, so his perspective is incrediblyvast.” That revelation stands out in marked contrast to the earlier shame displayed by afriend who couldn’t bring herself to say the name of that disease aloud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes15.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So… a gay man unabashed by a condition that at the time stoked much fear; a blackwoman; an emotionally open female who provides Carol with the film’s first healthyphysical contact; a chemical-free haven for suffering individuals — the signs all point to acorrection of her previous situation. This subversive game continues at orientation,where Dunning preaches several seemingly progressive psychological principles.”We’ve left the judgmental behind, and the shaming condition that kept us locked up inall the pain,” he says to the group. He cites “multiculturalism” and “environmentalism” aspositive things happening in the world. He is self-deprecating. And he also inoculateshis followers against the true nature of the center by communicating it as a joke. “Closeyour eyes…” he starts a guided meditation, “and pass your valuables to the front.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In group therapy, Dunning focuses on maintaining a positive attitude. As applied here,however, this is a dictate, not a principle. The solace he’s offering is edgy andconfrontational, but one again has to listen closely to what’s being said to cut throughthe poses that Haynes foregrounds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Why did you become sick?” he asks one woman.\u003cbr>“Because I hated myself,” she says, without much conviction because she is parroting aprecept. After someone in the community commits suicide, Dunning bitterly instructs thegroup, “Let’s throw away every negative, self destructive thought we might have andlook around ourselves with love…” But he finishes it with, “I tried to teach him this.” Inanother session, a woman insinuates she was a victim of incest, and he tells her shebecame sick because she did not forgive her abuser.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes16.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is group therapy in hell, because not all of it is nonsensical, and the egotism isinterspersed with some truths. But Dunning’s the kind of a guy who will ask you aquestion and then interrupt with the answer; the kind of guy who will hold court at dinnerregaling his female acolytes with the intricate details of an inspirational dream he justhad. His treatment, a mix of new age bromides, wishful thinking, and personal hostility,is the crowning toxic brew of the entire film.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Later, when Carol’s husband visits, he points to a mansion on the hill and says: “whosehouse is that?”\u003cbr>“It’s Peter’s,” says Carol.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That moment slips by like so many others — uncommented on by the film yet thereto gnaw at your perceptions. The true horror in \u003ci>Safe\u003c/i> is that Carol has left oneoppressive system only to immerse herself in another that masquerades as the healingpower of love. In this environment, where the victims are blamed for their own illness,she worsens. She is forced to tote around an oxygen tank, becomes ever more pallidand thin, and develops an expanding sore on her forehead. She goes into furtherisolation, taking to the small igloo built and formerly occupied by the man who hascommitted suicide. The film ends with her looking in a mirror and saying to herreflection, “I love you.” Many have called this final scene ambiguous, but I think it’spretty clear that this is where Carol is going to die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes18.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Todd Haynes' 1995 film 'Safe' is a Southern California nightmare about the toxicity loose in the air as well as the culture.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705050144,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":47,"wordCount":2791},"headData":{"title":"Safe | KQED","description":"Todd Haynes' 1995 film 'Safe' is a Southern California nightmare about the toxicity loose in the air as well as the culture.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"Safe","datePublished":"2013-02-26T08:47:58.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T09:02:24.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sourceUrl":"http://www.kqed.org/arts/category/movies/","sticky":false,"path":"/arts/116990/california_films_safe","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ci>Safe\u003c/i> opens with a point-of-view drive up a San Fernando Valley road at dusk,the street lamps looming like ritualistic torches, unwelcoming mansions on either sideforming a gauntlet of initiation into some sort of emotional or even societal decline. Asthe car rolls into a gated community, composer Ed Tomney’s score is pregnant withforeboding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That pitch-perfectly disturbing tone never lets up. I’ve been trying to convince friends foryears that Todd Haynes’ 1995 film is one of the great American films, but watching itcan be a difficult, perplexing experience. Few, however, would deny that in its slow,methodical building of tension and the creeping terror it instills, the movie rivals apowerhouse horror vehicle like \u003ci>Rosemary’s Baby\u003c/i>. In \u003ci>Safe\u003c/i>, however, themonster is so omnipresent, it’s barely identifiable. In fact, after this moody masterpiecehas wormed its way into your head for a couple of hours, you’re not quite sure exactlywhat it is that’s planted within you — the kind of anxiety and fear normally evoked byclinging nightmares.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What makes the film so frightening? A synopsis would seem to provide few clues. CarolWhite (Julianne Moore), a San Fernando Valley housewife in a well-heeled, cloisteredcommunity circa 1987, spends her days decorating and errand-hopping until shedevelops an intolerable sensitivity to airborne toxic substances and householdchemicals. Her condition worsens, and after several attacks, a seizure that sends her tothe hospital, and the failure of her doctor to find any physical cause, she stumbles ontothe concept of \u003ca href=\"https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&tab=ww#hl=en&sugexp=les%3B&gs_rn=2&gs_ri=hp&tok=COX9ZCUT77nbDoZY6piIeQ&cp=16&gs_id=ek&xhr=t&q=environmental+illness\">environmental illness\u003c/a>, meeting others who have become”chemically sensitive.” She decides to enroll in a program designed to treat this self-diagnosedcondition, a rural, chemical-free retreat called Wrenwood that is run by acharismatic author with HIV. There, she hopes to get “clear” and reduce her “load” oftoxic chemicals, in the parlance of the community. While in the program, however, hercondition worsens, and she takes to a “safe” house, a small, barren igloo designed tokeep all harmful substances at bay. The film then ends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While this plot might merit little more than a movie-of-the-week logline, Haynes’technique imbues even the smallest event with an element of dread. Carol’s first bigcrisis is actually non-chemical — an enormous couch is delivered, but it’s the wrongcolor: black. Amid the surrounding antiseptic decor, it sits like a poisonous harbinger ofwhat’s to come and a symbol of Carol’s estrangement from her surroundings. Thatsense of alienation, we soon learn, is a constant presence, seeping through in thedirector’s blocking and shot selection. Distance, disconnection, and depersonalizationare part and parcel of the movie’s style, which owes much to Stanley Kubrick, perhapsless to Robert Altman (see \u003ci>3 Women\u003c/i>), and even Ingmar Bergman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This dehumanization is partly achieved by giving architecture and interiors primacy overpeople. In an early long shot of Carol and her husband, Greg (Xander Berkeley),Haynes drops them into a small space in the frame, where they are dwarfed by theirhome and the surrounding landscape. Later, a wide-angle shot of a friend’s houseseems to swallow Carol up as she approaches. Long shots, overhead shots, shots withlots of headroom between Carol and the top of the frame — they all serve to minimizeher personhood. In one set-up, she is shot at the edge of the frame and at the samelevel as the furniture, like just another object in a house that already looks entirelyunlived-in. This head-on look imagines the room as a tasteless dollhouse. The only realorganic tinge to the decor is lent by a pair of off-putting, egg-shaped lamps that couldhave wandered off a David Cronenberg set, and are all the more creepy for lookingmore animate than the lone human in the frame.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carol’s connection to people is as tenuous as her connection to her surroundings. Haynesmaximizes the space between her and other individuals, creating a literal distancebetween them. People talk to each other from far away or even from different rooms,which we sometimes see separated by a wall. Twice we see Carol talking to men — herhusband and a potential love interest that never materializes (James LeGros) — whenthe speakers have their backs to each other. In the case of her husband, the shot isreflected in a mirror, a double distancing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If face-to-face communication is scarce in \u003ci>Safe\u003c/i>, actual physical contact is evenrarer. And when it does occur, it’s conspicuous for its oddity. At the very start of the filmwe see Carol and her husband having sex, shot from overheard. As he pumps away ather, she evinces a tolerant-at-best look, as if abiding an animal or small child engagedin a reflexive compulsion. Later, after a business dinner during which she has fallenasleep, her husband puts his arm around her as they walk, but it looks hopelesslyawkward as they lurch forward with a zombie-like gait.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes10.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We don’t really own our own lives,” someone says during a locker room conversation atthe gym. True enough, here. Joyless sex, a stepson whom she doesn’t get along with,the wrong couch — all those are nothing compared to the estrangement Carol feels fromherself. “That’s fine. He’s fine. They’re fine,” Carol reports on family life to her motherover the phone. There is so much papering over — with no facility for naming what’s wrong, shebecomes a cipher, taking on an increasingly pallid, rag doll mien as the filmprogresses. At night she wanders alone in her garden, where earlier she was seentending to dying flowers. Adrift, vigorless, in possession of nothing truly her own, Carol,uncomfortable in her own skin, is someone who barely casts a shadow. In one shot, shecloses a mirrored bathroom door and her image is completely wiped out across thescreen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You do not sweat,” a fellow gym patron observes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Southern California Dystopia\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are reasons provided for this self-nullification, but Haynes almost neverforegrounds them, instead knitting them into the fabric of the film. Though he portraysaffluent, Reagan-era Southern California as a kind of soul-sucking dystopia with anomnipresent patriarchy, it is seen entirely through Carol’s perspective and is thusnormalized.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Who told you to go to this?” Greg asks Carol after she attends an informational sessionon environmental illness, without even a nod to the possibility of autonomy. Greg, who isplayed by Berkeley as a kind of brutish, oddly robotic man-child, is the kind ofguy you could see going on a rampage out of repressed rage. Other sexist slights arebaked into Carol’s experience. One of Greg’s colleagues tells a crude joke centeredaround a woman’s anatomy; her own medical doctor, in the middle of recommending apsychiatrist, hands the referral to Greg instead of to her; that psychiatrist sits behind alarge wooden desk, both physically inaccessible and emotionally remote as he leansback in his chair interrogating Carol, fully exposed on a small couch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes5.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This mix of male entitlement, dismissiveness, and condescension is mostly embeddedin scenes with more overt story purposes. Therefore the effect, unlike, say, in \u003ci>MadMen\u003c/i>, isn’t didactic, but rather a true reflection of how the ebbing of female powermight play out in this kind of closed cultural system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Haynes spreads more of these scenes-from-the-’80s throughout, using a technique ofmisdirection to create an almost unconscious not-quite-right effect. A typical encounter:At the dinner table, Carol’s stepson, Rory, reads a school report he wrote about “blackand Latino gangs,” filled with racist assumptions and white-fear fantasies. The viewer,though, might easily overlook the content of what’s being said, because not only does itplay as secondary to a conversation between Carol and Greg, but the scene and theattitudes of all the participants are completely familiar if not iconic: a kid proudly rattlingoff something he wrote while his parents half-listen, then offer obligatory, perfunctorypraise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s like looking closely at a Norman Rockwell and discovering it was actually painted byFrancis Bacon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Toxicity\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The core motif, though, is toxicity, of both the body and soul. The film is lit in hazy/pukeytones that lend an unhealthy glow to everything. One signature shot shows rowsand rows of cars moving slowly down the 405, headlights flaring in the polluted dusk,haunting music punctuating a sense of extreme isolation and environmentaldegradation. It’s an indelible image, one that might have been conceived by T.S. Eliot:masses of people shut into their cars, herded toward some dismal destination. Thefeeling conveyed here is that something has gone dreadfully wrong, something nowineluctable, unappeasable, final.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that’s just the first half! What makes \u003ci>Safe\u003c/i> so doubly insidious is the way itsubverts audience expectations and perceptions in Act II, when Carol takes upresidence at Wrenwood to purge the toxins her system can no longer handle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes14.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Haynes says on the DVD commentary that audiences have often mistaken his intentionas debunking \u003ca href=\"https://www.google.com/search?q=multiple+chemical+sensitivity\">chemical sensitivity\u003c/a>, which has been controversial as a diagnosisbecause it contends that someone can become sick from exposure to substances atlevels that medical science considers safe. But I would say a close reading of the filmshows him to be cagey on this score, in that a physical condition doubles as metaphor\u003ci>and\u003c/i> real-world consequence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meaning: a social toxicity is loose in the culture, just as a chemical toxicity is loose in the air.Thus, the film several times marries Carol’s hypersensitivity to chemicals with the denialof her own psychology. In one scene, for instance, her husband hugs her the morningafter a fight over her sexual disinclination to him, only to have her throw up. He has justapplied deodorant as well as hair gel and spray. But is she allergic to those substancesor to Greg himself? This is reprised later, at the retreat, when Greg attempts to embraceher and she pulls away, repulsed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think it might be your cologne,” she says.\u003cbr>“I’m not wearing cologne,” he replies.\u003cbr>“Maybe in your shirt.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It seems unlikely, but Haynes isn’t tipping his hand. Likewise, is it the actual exhaust ofthe trucks in front of her that triggers Carol’s choking fit, or the talk-radio discussion ofRonald Reagan’s religion she’s been listening to? Is it something in the air at a friend’sbaby shower that causes her seizure? Or the cold efficiency of the event, the emptinessand conventional talk that go hand-in-hand with the ritual?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes12.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What we know — and what the film seems to say — is that it’s much easier to latch ontoan environmental cause than to examine a life. When Carol’s doctor, after her seizure,frustratedly implies she’s a head case, her husband asks her, “What would cause you toactually bleed?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The chemicals,” she says, in the childish tone of any scapegoater reducing all theworld’s ills to one word. In this way, the film seems to wander around that nebulousintersection where real physical ailments meet psychosomatic tendencies and quackery,where an allergy doctor who diagnoses a genuine reaction also counsels a patient onthe phone to “continue the red-fruit diet.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this second half, too, Haynes uses audience presumptions to dissemble thesignificance of what’s being said behind the familiarity of a conversational attitude.Carol’s first experience with the subculture of chemically sensitive people comes duringa discussion among a group of women who complain about the lack of legitimacy theircondition has been granted by traditional medicine. Says one in defense of the reality ofthe disease:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“How does a ten-year-old say it’s psychosomatic? How does he make his eyes swellshut? Why would he want to do that? He can’t go into Chunky Cheese anymore. Hecan’t go into showbiz. Why would he do that to himself?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes11.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She has, of course, answered her own question, and also espoused the centralmetaphorical principle of the film: that physical illness is a concomitant of a disease ofthe soul. But because the woman is so self-assured and because a more conventionalstory structure would demand at this point a transition to a second-half resolution, mostaudiences will skip over the meaning of that dialogue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Wrenwood scenes further confuse things by mixing in self-help shibboleths withwhat turn out to be the harmful tenets of something akin to a cult. Yet the film may lull certain audiences into a state of acceptance, the same way it does its maincharacter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At her arrival, for example, Carol is welcomed by two women, officials of the center, onea warm and effusive earth-mother type who is the very opposite of the repressed,conventional individuals Carol is used to, and the other an African American woman –another antonym in her world. The latter tells her that Peter Dunning, the center’sdirector, is a “chemically sensitive person with AIDS, so his perspective is incrediblyvast.” That revelation stands out in marked contrast to the earlier shame displayed by afriend who couldn’t bring herself to say the name of that disease aloud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes15.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So… a gay man unabashed by a condition that at the time stoked much fear; a blackwoman; an emotionally open female who provides Carol with the film’s first healthyphysical contact; a chemical-free haven for suffering individuals — the signs all point to acorrection of her previous situation. This subversive game continues at orientation,where Dunning preaches several seemingly progressive psychological principles.”We’ve left the judgmental behind, and the shaming condition that kept us locked up inall the pain,” he says to the group. He cites “multiculturalism” and “environmentalism” aspositive things happening in the world. He is self-deprecating. And he also inoculateshis followers against the true nature of the center by communicating it as a joke. “Closeyour eyes…” he starts a guided meditation, “and pass your valuables to the front.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In group therapy, Dunning focuses on maintaining a positive attitude. As applied here,however, this is a dictate, not a principle. The solace he’s offering is edgy andconfrontational, but one again has to listen closely to what’s being said to cut throughthe poses that Haynes foregrounds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Why did you become sick?” he asks one woman.\u003cbr>“Because I hated myself,” she says, without much conviction because she is parroting aprecept. After someone in the community commits suicide, Dunning bitterly instructs thegroup, “Let’s throw away every negative, self destructive thought we might have andlook around ourselves with love…” But he finishes it with, “I tried to teach him this.” Inanother session, a woman insinuates she was a victim of incest, and he tells her shebecame sick because she did not forgive her abuser.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes16.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is group therapy in hell, because not all of it is nonsensical, and the egotism isinterspersed with some truths. But Dunning’s the kind of a guy who will ask you aquestion and then interrupt with the answer; the kind of guy who will hold court at dinnerregaling his female acolytes with the intricate details of an inspirational dream he justhad. His treatment, a mix of new age bromides, wishful thinking, and personal hostility,is the crowning toxic brew of the entire film.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Later, when Carol’s husband visits, he points to a mansion on the hill and says: “whosehouse is that?”\u003cbr>“It’s Peter’s,” says Carol.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That moment slips by like so many others — uncommented on by the film yet thereto gnaw at your perceptions. The true horror in \u003ci>Safe\u003c/i> is that Carol has left oneoppressive system only to immerse herself in another that masquerades as the healingpower of love. In this environment, where the victims are blamed for their own illness,she worsens. She is forced to tote around an oxygen tank, becomes ever more pallidand thin, and develops an expanding sore on her forehead. She goes into furtherisolation, taking to the small igloo built and formerly occupied by the man who hascommitted suicide. The film ends with her looking in a mirror and saying to herreflection, “I love you.” Many have called this final scene ambiguous, but I think it’spretty clear that this is where Carol is going to die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2013/02/26/safehaynes18.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/116990/california_films_safe","authors":["128436"],"series":["arts_433"],"categories":["arts_74"],"featImg":"arts_10116990","label":"arts_433"},"arts_113823":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_113823","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"113823","score":null,"sort":[1357176341000]},"guestAuthors":[{"ID":"128436","displayName":"Jon Brooks","firstName":"Jon","lastName":"Brooks","userLogin":"jon-brooks","userEmail":"jbrooks@kqed.org","linkedAccount":"jbrooks","website":"","description":"Jon Brooks is a KQED News online editor and writer for KQED's daily news blog, \u003ci>News Fix\u003c/i>. A veteran blogger, he previously worked for Yahoo! in various news writing and editing roles. He was also the editor of \u003ca>EconomyBeat.org\u003c/a>, which documented user-generated content about the financial crisis and recession. Jon is also a playwright whose work has been produced in San Francisco, New York, Italy, and around the U.S. He has written about film for his own blog and studied film at Boston University. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College.","userNicename":"jon-brooks","type":"guest-author","nickname":""}],"slug":"california_films_who_framed_roger_rabbit","title":"Who Framed Roger Rabbit","publishDate":1357176341,"format":"standard","headTitle":"Who Framed Roger Rabbit | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":433,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>As a mixed live action/animated tour de force and a technical marvel, \u003ci>Who Framed Roger Rabbit\u003c/i> holds an entrenched spot in the pantheon of movie originality. But it’s the unflinchingly allegorical elements of Roger Zemeckis’ 1988 film that claim the most interest. Beneath the well-crafted jokes and cartoon high spirits, the film gnaws at the nostalgia felt for an Old Hollywood that so blithely manifested deep American racial disparities, and it does so while featuring cameos by the likes of Yosemite Sam and Tweety. It doesn’t get more subversive than that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story’s ingenious conceit is that human-created cartoons, including some of the most recognizable characters in the animated species, coexist with Homo sapiens — off-screen and three-dimensionally, that is. These “toons,” as they’re called, make up a kind of movie-industry underclass that is exploited for profit-making laughs. That’s a pretty audacious motif in a work ostensibly for children, and when you add the superimposition onto the crowded thematic canvas of a top-notch spoof on film noir, you’ve got a movie working overtime in the ideas department.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film starts with a feint, immersing the viewer in a traditional-looking though unfamiliar cartoon, styled somewhere between Warner Bros’ \u003ci>Merrie Melodies\u003c/i> and MGM’s \u003ci>Tom and Jerry\u003c/i>. This one’s a vehicle for a character named Roger Rabbit; the plot: Roger trying to save his infant charge, Baby Herman, from all manner of household dangers, and, like all good animated masochists, taking the brunt of the fun. When, in the middle of the mayhem, a refrigerator falls on Roger and a circle of fish instead of the obligatory stars surround his head, we hear…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Cut!” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s from the director, off-screen, and it’s followed by a pullback reveal of what we’ve actually been watching: the action on a Hollywood movie set, circa 1947. We soon learn that the toons are not as they appear. Baby Herman, for instance, chomps on a cigar, has a thing for younger (or is that older?) human women, and talks like a middle-aged Brooklyn cab driver. “For crying out loud, Roger, how many times do we have to do this damn scene!” he bellows, stalking off the set.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I can give you stars!” Roger protests, hitting himself on the head with a spontaneously appearing frying pan, which produces, unfruitfully, bells then butterflies. The director calls lunch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/rogerrabbit1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And thus are we introduced to this alternate reality, where cartoon rules apply, at least for cartoons. In this world, when Dumbo appears flying around the movie lot, a studio head explains, “I got him on loan from Disney.” In this world, when you order a scotch on the rocks in a toon bar, you’d better add “and I mean with ice!” lest your waiter take you literally. And in this world, when a toon’s wife is cheating on you by “playing pattycake” with another man, that description is not a euphemism. One of the most compelling elements of \u003ci>Roger Rabbit\u003c/i> is that no joke is wasted; each adds another layer to our understanding of the emotional life of the animated folk and their complex relationship with humans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That sort of efficiency permeates the script, which has private eye Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), a boozer whose career turned sour after his brother was done in by a piano-dropping toon, becoming embroiled in a murder mystery involving the rabbit, a will, and an insidious corporate conspiracy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/rogerrabbit2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Classic film tropes abound, each with its own sillified twist punctuated by snappy dialogue. The animated femme fatale Jessica Rabbit, a member of the rodentia family by marriage only, \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy5THitqPBw\">calls to mind\u003c/a> a slower-burning Rita Hayworth in \u003ci>Gilda\u003c/i>. Built — or rather drawn — to mesmerize men into a sex daze, she pleads her innocence to Eddie with the highly quotable: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAnNvnViJpo&w=480&h=360]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Casablanca\u003c/i>, \u003ci>The Maltese Falcon\u003c/i>, \u003ci>Vertigo\u003c/i>, and especially \u003ci>Chinatown\u003c/i> — \u003ci>Roger Rabbit\u003c/i> borrows from them all. There’s even a great bit of economical storytelling lifted from \u003ci>Rear Window\u003c/i>, in which we’re brought up to speed on Eddie’s entire history solely through photographs and newspaper clips.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The technical virtuosity is even more impressive. As director Zemeckis recently \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2012/12/01/166258733/fresh-air-weekend-robert-zemeckis-%20and-ken-tucker\">explained on \u003ci>Fresh Air\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, the animators devised a process that endowed each cel with the same lighting as in the corresponding live-action scene. The film also breaks a longstanding rule of hybrid human-cartoon projects by allowing the camera to roam. In films like \u003ci>Mary Poppins\u003c/i>, Zemeckis said, the recording device was always static “because it would be so difficult to draw different changes of perspective as the camera moves.” But he shot the film “like I would any live action movie. And the animators actually found that it worked better by having the camera moving. That they were able to actually give more life to the cartoon characters and have them feel like they’re more integrated into the actual two-dimensional set.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/rogerrabbit5.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That visual integration of man and toon functions as a jarring counterpoint to their respective places in the movie’s fictional society. It’s an audacious stroke that the very word “toon,” whenever mouthed, sounds just shy of a racial slur. When the film’s villain, Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), makes the ominous pronouncement that “a human has been murdered by a toon,” it doesn’t take much to imagine him subbing in the letter c for the beginning consonant of that last word.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s more than a little sense here that toons occupy the same socioeconomic position, and are viewed with the same potently racist mixture of fascination, paternalism, and fear, as African Americans in the real-life period portrayed. It’s possible, in fact, to fault the film for playing a bit too fast and loose with that substitution, to the point where it’s willing to trade on those stereotypes without necessarily shattering them. For instance, toons are playful, joyous and good box office, but they’re also mercurial, anarchic, and physically dangerous; after all, they enjoy the more forgiving laws of physics that apply within the animated world. The toons even live in their own walled-off area, Toon Town, though if a human wants to take a walk on the wild side, he can mix with them at an underground nightclub where top stars like Donald and Daffy Duck moonlight as performers. (Perhaps the biggest transgressive thrill in this milieu: animated \u003ci>inter-studio\u003c/i> mingling.) The toons, in fact, pack the repressed power of an underclass, and if they were ever released from their servitude as manufactured entertainment, there’s no telling what they might do. (The story even presses the analogy to real-world otherness by using genocide as a plot point. How do you like that in your \u003ca href=\"http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?%20id=whoframedrogerrabbit.htm\">top-grossing\u003c/a> animated films?)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H9f8qUrF6w&w=480&h=360]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The denouement provides the movie’s final alternate-universe thrill. It turns out Judge Doom has been buying up land and L.A.’s mass transit system, which he intends to dismantle, because he wants to build a freeway. What’s that? Eddie wants to know. Here’s Doom’s explanation, delivered by Christopher Lloyd with all due visionary megalomania: \u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"margin-left: 20px;margin-right: 20px\">“Eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena… I see a place where people get on and off the freeway, on and off, off and on, all day, all night. Soon where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations, motels, restaurants that sell rapidly prepared food, tire salons, automobile dealerships, and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My god it’ll be beautiful.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/rogerrabbit4.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This revelation has its roots in what some have claimed to be a \u003ca href=\"http://%20en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy\">real car company conspiracy\u003c/a>, paving the way, literally, for the autocentric dystopia that many find L.A. to be today. In the film however, the plot is foiled, and the finale trots out dozens of cartoon familiars sending our heroes off into a dazzlingly luminescent animated landscape, and serenaded with the Toon Town anthem: “\u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8pFJGYTygg\">Smile, darn ya smile\u003c/a>, you know this great world is a good world after all…”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s an ending so self-consciously slaphappy, even in an animated feature, as to seem almost perverse. So what is it I always feel here? Ruefulness? In its saccharine cinematic wrap-up to unresolved real-world problems, \u003ci>Who Framed Roger Rabbit\u003c/i> seems to both pine for the innocence of our celluloid dreams while also pointing them out as the jejune artifices they truly are. That’s a neat trick.\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"A cartoon about race, class and the making of L.A.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705050252,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":true,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":24,"wordCount":1537},"headData":{"title":"Who Framed Roger Rabbit | KQED","description":"A cartoon about race, class and the making of L.A.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"Who Framed Roger Rabbit","datePublished":"2013-01-03T01:25:41.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T09:04:12.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sourceUrl":"http://www.kqed.org/arts/category/movies/","sticky":false,"path":"/arts/113823/california_films_who_framed_roger_rabbit","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>As a mixed live action/animated tour de force and a technical marvel, \u003ci>Who Framed Roger Rabbit\u003c/i> holds an entrenched spot in the pantheon of movie originality. But it’s the unflinchingly allegorical elements of Roger Zemeckis’ 1988 film that claim the most interest. Beneath the well-crafted jokes and cartoon high spirits, the film gnaws at the nostalgia felt for an Old Hollywood that so blithely manifested deep American racial disparities, and it does so while featuring cameos by the likes of Yosemite Sam and Tweety. It doesn’t get more subversive than that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story’s ingenious conceit is that human-created cartoons, including some of the most recognizable characters in the animated species, coexist with Homo sapiens — off-screen and three-dimensionally, that is. These “toons,” as they’re called, make up a kind of movie-industry underclass that is exploited for profit-making laughs. That’s a pretty audacious motif in a work ostensibly for children, and when you add the superimposition onto the crowded thematic canvas of a top-notch spoof on film noir, you’ve got a movie working overtime in the ideas department.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film starts with a feint, immersing the viewer in a traditional-looking though unfamiliar cartoon, styled somewhere between Warner Bros’ \u003ci>Merrie Melodies\u003c/i> and MGM’s \u003ci>Tom and Jerry\u003c/i>. This one’s a vehicle for a character named Roger Rabbit; the plot: Roger trying to save his infant charge, Baby Herman, from all manner of household dangers, and, like all good animated masochists, taking the brunt of the fun. When, in the middle of the mayhem, a refrigerator falls on Roger and a circle of fish instead of the obligatory stars surround his head, we hear…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Cut!” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s from the director, off-screen, and it’s followed by a pullback reveal of what we’ve actually been watching: the action on a Hollywood movie set, circa 1947. We soon learn that the toons are not as they appear. Baby Herman, for instance, chomps on a cigar, has a thing for younger (or is that older?) human women, and talks like a middle-aged Brooklyn cab driver. “For crying out loud, Roger, how many times do we have to do this damn scene!” he bellows, stalking off the set.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I can give you stars!” Roger protests, hitting himself on the head with a spontaneously appearing frying pan, which produces, unfruitfully, bells then butterflies. The director calls lunch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/rogerrabbit1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And thus are we introduced to this alternate reality, where cartoon rules apply, at least for cartoons. In this world, when Dumbo appears flying around the movie lot, a studio head explains, “I got him on loan from Disney.” In this world, when you order a scotch on the rocks in a toon bar, you’d better add “and I mean with ice!” lest your waiter take you literally. And in this world, when a toon’s wife is cheating on you by “playing pattycake” with another man, that description is not a euphemism. One of the most compelling elements of \u003ci>Roger Rabbit\u003c/i> is that no joke is wasted; each adds another layer to our understanding of the emotional life of the animated folk and their complex relationship with humans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That sort of efficiency permeates the script, which has private eye Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), a boozer whose career turned sour after his brother was done in by a piano-dropping toon, becoming embroiled in a murder mystery involving the rabbit, a will, and an insidious corporate conspiracy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/rogerrabbit2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Classic film tropes abound, each with its own sillified twist punctuated by snappy dialogue. The animated femme fatale Jessica Rabbit, a member of the rodentia family by marriage only, \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy5THitqPBw\">calls to mind\u003c/a> a slower-burning Rita Hayworth in \u003ci>Gilda\u003c/i>. Built — or rather drawn — to mesmerize men into a sex daze, she pleads her innocence to Eddie with the highly quotable: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/XAnNvnViJpo'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/XAnNvnViJpo'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Casablanca\u003c/i>, \u003ci>The Maltese Falcon\u003c/i>, \u003ci>Vertigo\u003c/i>, and especially \u003ci>Chinatown\u003c/i> — \u003ci>Roger Rabbit\u003c/i> borrows from them all. There’s even a great bit of economical storytelling lifted from \u003ci>Rear Window\u003c/i>, in which we’re brought up to speed on Eddie’s entire history solely through photographs and newspaper clips.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The technical virtuosity is even more impressive. As director Zemeckis recently \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2012/12/01/166258733/fresh-air-weekend-robert-zemeckis-%20and-ken-tucker\">explained on \u003ci>Fresh Air\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, the animators devised a process that endowed each cel with the same lighting as in the corresponding live-action scene. The film also breaks a longstanding rule of hybrid human-cartoon projects by allowing the camera to roam. In films like \u003ci>Mary Poppins\u003c/i>, Zemeckis said, the recording device was always static “because it would be so difficult to draw different changes of perspective as the camera moves.” But he shot the film “like I would any live action movie. And the animators actually found that it worked better by having the camera moving. That they were able to actually give more life to the cartoon characters and have them feel like they’re more integrated into the actual two-dimensional set.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/rogerrabbit5.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That visual integration of man and toon functions as a jarring counterpoint to their respective places in the movie’s fictional society. It’s an audacious stroke that the very word “toon,” whenever mouthed, sounds just shy of a racial slur. When the film’s villain, Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), makes the ominous pronouncement that “a human has been murdered by a toon,” it doesn’t take much to imagine him subbing in the letter c for the beginning consonant of that last word.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s more than a little sense here that toons occupy the same socioeconomic position, and are viewed with the same potently racist mixture of fascination, paternalism, and fear, as African Americans in the real-life period portrayed. It’s possible, in fact, to fault the film for playing a bit too fast and loose with that substitution, to the point where it’s willing to trade on those stereotypes without necessarily shattering them. For instance, toons are playful, joyous and good box office, but they’re also mercurial, anarchic, and physically dangerous; after all, they enjoy the more forgiving laws of physics that apply within the animated world. The toons even live in their own walled-off area, Toon Town, though if a human wants to take a walk on the wild side, he can mix with them at an underground nightclub where top stars like Donald and Daffy Duck moonlight as performers. (Perhaps the biggest transgressive thrill in this milieu: animated \u003ci>inter-studio\u003c/i> mingling.) The toons, in fact, pack the repressed power of an underclass, and if they were ever released from their servitude as manufactured entertainment, there’s no telling what they might do. (The story even presses the analogy to real-world otherness by using genocide as a plot point. How do you like that in your \u003ca href=\"http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?%20id=whoframedrogerrabbit.htm\">top-grossing\u003c/a> animated films?)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/6H9f8qUrF6w'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/6H9f8qUrF6w'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The denouement provides the movie’s final alternate-universe thrill. It turns out Judge Doom has been buying up land and L.A.’s mass transit system, which he intends to dismantle, because he wants to build a freeway. What’s that? Eddie wants to know. Here’s Doom’s explanation, delivered by Christopher Lloyd with all due visionary megalomania: \u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"margin-left: 20px;margin-right: 20px\">“Eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena… I see a place where people get on and off the freeway, on and off, off and on, all day, all night. Soon where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations, motels, restaurants that sell rapidly prepared food, tire salons, automobile dealerships, and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My god it’ll be beautiful.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/rogerrabbit4.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This revelation has its roots in what some have claimed to be a \u003ca href=\"http://%20en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy\">real car company conspiracy\u003c/a>, paving the way, literally, for the autocentric dystopia that many find L.A. to be today. In the film however, the plot is foiled, and the finale trots out dozens of cartoon familiars sending our heroes off into a dazzlingly luminescent animated landscape, and serenaded with the Toon Town anthem: “\u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8pFJGYTygg\">Smile, darn ya smile\u003c/a>, you know this great world is a good world after all…”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s an ending so self-consciously slaphappy, even in an animated feature, as to seem almost perverse. So what is it I always feel here? Ruefulness? In its saccharine cinematic wrap-up to unresolved real-world problems, \u003ci>Who Framed Roger Rabbit\u003c/i> seems to both pine for the innocence of our celluloid dreams while also pointing them out as the jejune artifices they truly are. That’s a neat trick.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/113823/california_films_who_framed_roger_rabbit","authors":["128436"],"series":["arts_433"],"categories":["arts_74"],"featImg":"arts_10113823","label":"arts_433"},"arts_111660":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_111660","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"111660","score":null,"sort":[1353976757000]},"guestAuthors":[{"ID":"128436","displayName":"Jon Brooks","firstName":"Jon","lastName":"Brooks","userLogin":"jon-brooks","userEmail":"jbrooks@kqed.org","linkedAccount":"jbrooks","website":"","description":"Jon Brooks is a KQED News online editor and writer for KQED's daily news blog, \u003ci>News Fix\u003c/i>. A veteran blogger, he previously worked for Yahoo! in various news writing and editing roles. He was also the editor of \u003ca>EconomyBeat.org\u003c/a>, which documented user-generated content about the financial crisis and recession. Jon is also a playwright whose work has been produced in San Francisco, New York, Italy, and around the U.S. He has written about film for his own blog and studied film at Boston University. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College.","userNicename":"jon-brooks","type":"guest-author","nickname":""}],"slug":"california_films_boogie_nights","title":"Boogie Nights","publishDate":1353976757,"format":"standard","headTitle":"Boogie Nights | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":433,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>The San Fernando Valley has not fared well in the national imagination nor in my own. A native Manhattanite and longtime San Franciscan, I’ve always thought of the place the way chauvinist New Yorkers do New Jersey — – nice place to make fun of, wouldn’t want to live there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even an indigenous San Fernandan like director Paul Thomas Anderson has internalized this Valley view. On the director’s commentary for the DVD of \u003ci>\u003ci>Boogie Nights\u003c/i>\u003c/i>, for instance, Anderson laments that directors are supposed to carry their life experiences into their films, but he’s “from the f***ing Valley.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what’s a young director about to come into his own as a major cinematic voice to do? Anderson turns his experiential lemons into lemonade by presiding over a great American film. \u003ci>Boogie Nights\u003c/i> delves into the world of 1970s-80s pornography, when “San Pornando Valley” became a center of erotic film production, as much known for smut as smog. Using a surfeit of screenwriting and directorial gifts, Anderson’s humanistic sensbility eschews judgment of characters as flawed as you might expect, imbuing them with a vacuity paradoxically complex and a self-delusion touchingly admirable. Two of Anderson’s subsequent works, \u003ci>There Will Be Blood\u003c/i> and \u003ci>The Master\u003c/i>, may have more ambitious themes, but I’m not sure they’re better films.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/bn-group.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An ensemble piece, the movie follows about a dozen people toiling in the porn industry of L.A., on display here in all its sun-dappled, coke-soaked, line-dancing, pool-partying, pre-AIDS glory. That’s the first half, before the 1980s come along to present the bill for all the post-Watergate fun.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The main character, played by Mark Wahlberg, is Eddie Adams, or “Dirk Diggler” on screen. He’s a teenager whose psychic destruction at home is redeemed by an anatomical gift big enough to attract the attention of even — or especially — the porn pros. (The character is based on the real-life John Holmes.) The film has a familiar celebrity-gone-wrong, rags-to-riches-and-back-again structure, but with the added twist of the entire trajectory unfolding within a highly developed porno subculture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/bn-boys.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this golden age of X-rated entertainment, breathless reviews, awards ceremonies, documentary appearances, and box office success confer status and boost egos among the performers. Such trappings also foster a craving for legitimacy and a pretense to craft. When Dirk sweeps the adult film awards to the adulation of his peers, he is earnest in his resolution to “keep rocking and rolling and making better films.” The notion that cinematic quality can flourish alongside big tits and money shots is most faithfully carried by director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), whose soul of an artist must coexist with the aesthetics of a pornographer. Jack is in search of what sounds like the holy grail of thoughtful erotic visual stylists everywhere: making a film in which “after [the audience climaxes], they can’t leave until they find out how the story ends.” Later, when Horner and his cinematographer/editor (Ricky Jay) are looking at the rough cut of a patently ridiculous scene from the lurid action-adventure boy’s fantasy they’ve put to film, Jack says in all sincerity, “This is the best work we’ve ever done…This is the film I want them to remember me by.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/bn-reynolds.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This notion of porno-integrity is also expressed in the film’s central, symbolic conflict: A cinematic purist, Jack is reluctant to make the transition to shooting on video, even in the face of the obvious economic advantages. “I will never make a movie on videotape,” says Jack to a rival porn maven (Philip Baker Hall) pushing for the changeover. “If it looks like shit and it sounds like shit, it’s shit.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that is exactly what is so poignantly terrific about \u003ci>Boogie Nights\u003c/i>. The attempt to sustain a compelling narrative, an artful look, in the midst of the base visual gratification that is really on offer is emblematic of the ethos of Anderson’s entire suite of characters. Broken individuals, born of shattered homes, drug addiction, ditsy thinking and a distinct lack of talent and taste, they nevertheless aspire to writing poetry, making music, opening businesses, painting pictures… with virtually no facility for any of it. There’s a reason these people have wound up in porn, one thinks, but the seeds of dignity survive in the striving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These are complex portraits, achieved by avoiding depictions of obvious victimhood and by granting the characters moments of comic grace. More important, Anderson has downplayed the kind of cynicism you’d think would be an occupational hazard in the industry. One of the film’s most forlorn shots is of Jack, having finally succumbed to marketplace realities, walking through a warehouse full of thousands of videotapes, whatever magic-of-cinema that had previously trickled down to his level now completely used up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That shift to a mass-produced medium is intercut and paralleled with the downward trajectory of the characters’ lives. As the community that Jack’s troupe members have found and the illusion of normalcy they have indulged in falls apart, Philip Baker Hall’s character offers this maxim for the future: “Video tells the truth.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/bn-rollergirl.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And an unflattering truth it is. In that sequence, Jack and his porn starlet “Roller Girl” (“I never take off my skates”), played by Heather Graham, make a video in which they pick up a college student in order to capture on tape the fulfillment of an average Joe’s fantasy. But he turns out to be the same kid who made a disturbingly lewd gesture to Roller Girl in high school. As her pre-porn identity comes rushing back with a vengeance, the kid mauls her while Jack admonishes him to “show some respect.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is Roller Girl,” he says, incredulously. “Make it sexy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it’s not. At that point, the limo they are riding in, the tux Jack is wearing, and the mirage of Roller Girl all dolled up like Marilyn Monroe cannot ward off the true nature of the carnal transactions they have been engaging in. And when the veneer of glamour and high-minded artistry falls away, what are you left with but the same sex-crazed jerk who harassed you in high school? The sequence concludes with a brutal act of violence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Boogie Nights\u003c/i>, its filmmaking both flamboyant and nuanced, seamlessly sustains several such tonal shifts. Right from the dazzling start, Anderson coalesces just the right elements to make his points. The opening Scorsese-esque long take cranes and dollies and pans as it moves from the street into a disco, weaving through the dance floor while introducing us to a small platoon of characters in remarkably economical hits of dialogue. The effect is one of community and group intimacy; only when the camera finally comes to rest on outsider Mark Wahlberg’s sourpuss mug is this feeling of fluidity jarred.That’s just one virtuoso sequence of several, the sum of which may have been considered a triumph of style over story if Anderson weren’t so unerring in his deployment of technique in the service of the latter. He introduces the plot-changing Philip Baker Hall’s character, for instance, by shooting him entering a room from four different angles, each one dissolving into the next. He zooms in on a coke-snorting Julianne Moore (playing porn star “Amber Waves”) as the heartbreaking and purely visual solution to one scene’s mini-mystery: whether a boy telephone caller’s mother is in the house. And he knows to linger on Don Cheadle ordering different varieties of donuts for a full minute, exploiting to the fullest the individual childlike facial expressions the actor marries to each choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/bn-cheadle.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of the standout sequences comprise scenes unified by a soundtrack that consists at various times of period pop songs, original music, and punctuating noises like the metronomic tolling of a bell. This blend of sound and visuals reaches an apex in the penultimate scene, one of the best-directed you or I will ever see on this earth. Riffing off of the real-life \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderland_murders\">Wonderland murders\u003c/a>, it features a hopped-up Alfred Molina in a silver robe and underwear talking crazy to three nearly-as-stoned would-be ripoff artists, while an armed bodyguard scrutinizes the fake drugs they have brought to sell. Throw in an impromptu round of Russian Roulette and a shootout, set it all to the ’80s pop hits “Sister Christian,” “Jessie’s Girl,” and “99 Luftballons,” then complete the filmic concoction by tossing in a young Chinese male intermittently setting off firecrackers, and you’ve got a scene so filled to the brim with tension it’s practically preternatural.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/bn-julianne.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, the acting: Wahlberg has never been better, and Anderson coaxes a fine, modulated performance from Burt Reynolds. But it’s the remarkable Julianne Moore who you can barely take your eyes off of. Sometimes coked out, but mostly numbed by a restraint that conceals a deep despair, she’s as remote as if separated from the world by some sort of cellophane membrane. Meanwhile, John C. Riley as Dirk Diggler’s dim-bulb sidekick, a multifaceted hack, paints every move a burlesque of self-importance. Trust me, you haven’t really lived until you’ve seen a hopelessly off-key Wahlberg laying down godawful vocals to an original rock opus, followed by a reverse shot of Riley grooving to the sound. Take note of unforgettable turns in smaller roles by Robert Ridgely, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Thomas Jane (later of \u003ci>Hung\u003c/i> fame).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film concludes bittersweetly, before the inevitable destructive end that many in the porn business have suffered. The troupe has recoalesced as a makeshift family at Jack Horner’s home, and as what Anderson calls “broken circus music” plays, we get a visual echo of the opening shot in the disco. As the camera comes to rest on Jack standing behind Amber, readying herself in the mirror before a scene, she asks him, “What are you looking at?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The foxiest bitch in the world,” he says, oblivious that this is anything but a compliment. Amber stares sadly on, and we cut to Dirk psyching himself up to perform. It’s only then that we finally get a look at his member (a prosthesis, per Anderson and common sense), which has up till then done admirable service as the film’s MacGuffin. It’s flaccid, and Dirk tries to work himself into fighting shape by invoking his porn personas, the Valley kid he once was forever lost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nineteen seventies porn in the Valley — in lesser hands, \u003ci>Boogie Nights\u003c/i> would have been a joke on a joke … on a joke. But instead it’s a work of art.\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Getting down in the Valley: Paul Thomas Anderson's \u003ci>Boogie Nights\u003c/i> is a minor masterpiece.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705050324,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":27,"wordCount":1905},"headData":{"title":"Boogie Nights | KQED","description":"Getting down in the Valley: Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights is a minor masterpiece.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"Boogie Nights","datePublished":"2012-11-27T00:39:17.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T09:05:24.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sourceUrl":"http://www.kqed.org/arts/category/movies/","sticky":false,"path":"/arts/111660/california_films_boogie_nights","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The San Fernando Valley has not fared well in the national imagination nor in my own. A native Manhattanite and longtime San Franciscan, I’ve always thought of the place the way chauvinist New Yorkers do New Jersey — – nice place to make fun of, wouldn’t want to live there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even an indigenous San Fernandan like director Paul Thomas Anderson has internalized this Valley view. On the director’s commentary for the DVD of \u003ci>\u003ci>Boogie Nights\u003c/i>\u003c/i>, for instance, Anderson laments that directors are supposed to carry their life experiences into their films, but he’s “from the f***ing Valley.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what’s a young director about to come into his own as a major cinematic voice to do? Anderson turns his experiential lemons into lemonade by presiding over a great American film. \u003ci>Boogie Nights\u003c/i> delves into the world of 1970s-80s pornography, when “San Pornando Valley” became a center of erotic film production, as much known for smut as smog. Using a surfeit of screenwriting and directorial gifts, Anderson’s humanistic sensbility eschews judgment of characters as flawed as you might expect, imbuing them with a vacuity paradoxically complex and a self-delusion touchingly admirable. Two of Anderson’s subsequent works, \u003ci>There Will Be Blood\u003c/i> and \u003ci>The Master\u003c/i>, may have more ambitious themes, but I’m not sure they’re better films.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/bn-group.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An ensemble piece, the movie follows about a dozen people toiling in the porn industry of L.A., on display here in all its sun-dappled, coke-soaked, line-dancing, pool-partying, pre-AIDS glory. That’s the first half, before the 1980s come along to present the bill for all the post-Watergate fun.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The main character, played by Mark Wahlberg, is Eddie Adams, or “Dirk Diggler” on screen. He’s a teenager whose psychic destruction at home is redeemed by an anatomical gift big enough to attract the attention of even — or especially — the porn pros. (The character is based on the real-life John Holmes.) The film has a familiar celebrity-gone-wrong, rags-to-riches-and-back-again structure, but with the added twist of the entire trajectory unfolding within a highly developed porno subculture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/bn-boys.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this golden age of X-rated entertainment, breathless reviews, awards ceremonies, documentary appearances, and box office success confer status and boost egos among the performers. Such trappings also foster a craving for legitimacy and a pretense to craft. When Dirk sweeps the adult film awards to the adulation of his peers, he is earnest in his resolution to “keep rocking and rolling and making better films.” The notion that cinematic quality can flourish alongside big tits and money shots is most faithfully carried by director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), whose soul of an artist must coexist with the aesthetics of a pornographer. Jack is in search of what sounds like the holy grail of thoughtful erotic visual stylists everywhere: making a film in which “after [the audience climaxes], they can’t leave until they find out how the story ends.” Later, when Horner and his cinematographer/editor (Ricky Jay) are looking at the rough cut of a patently ridiculous scene from the lurid action-adventure boy’s fantasy they’ve put to film, Jack says in all sincerity, “This is the best work we’ve ever done…This is the film I want them to remember me by.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/bn-reynolds.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This notion of porno-integrity is also expressed in the film’s central, symbolic conflict: A cinematic purist, Jack is reluctant to make the transition to shooting on video, even in the face of the obvious economic advantages. “I will never make a movie on videotape,” says Jack to a rival porn maven (Philip Baker Hall) pushing for the changeover. “If it looks like shit and it sounds like shit, it’s shit.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that is exactly what is so poignantly terrific about \u003ci>Boogie Nights\u003c/i>. The attempt to sustain a compelling narrative, an artful look, in the midst of the base visual gratification that is really on offer is emblematic of the ethos of Anderson’s entire suite of characters. Broken individuals, born of shattered homes, drug addiction, ditsy thinking and a distinct lack of talent and taste, they nevertheless aspire to writing poetry, making music, opening businesses, painting pictures… with virtually no facility for any of it. There’s a reason these people have wound up in porn, one thinks, but the seeds of dignity survive in the striving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These are complex portraits, achieved by avoiding depictions of obvious victimhood and by granting the characters moments of comic grace. More important, Anderson has downplayed the kind of cynicism you’d think would be an occupational hazard in the industry. One of the film’s most forlorn shots is of Jack, having finally succumbed to marketplace realities, walking through a warehouse full of thousands of videotapes, whatever magic-of-cinema that had previously trickled down to his level now completely used up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That shift to a mass-produced medium is intercut and paralleled with the downward trajectory of the characters’ lives. As the community that Jack’s troupe members have found and the illusion of normalcy they have indulged in falls apart, Philip Baker Hall’s character offers this maxim for the future: “Video tells the truth.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/bn-rollergirl.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And an unflattering truth it is. In that sequence, Jack and his porn starlet “Roller Girl” (“I never take off my skates”), played by Heather Graham, make a video in which they pick up a college student in order to capture on tape the fulfillment of an average Joe’s fantasy. But he turns out to be the same kid who made a disturbingly lewd gesture to Roller Girl in high school. As her pre-porn identity comes rushing back with a vengeance, the kid mauls her while Jack admonishes him to “show some respect.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is Roller Girl,” he says, incredulously. “Make it sexy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it’s not. At that point, the limo they are riding in, the tux Jack is wearing, and the mirage of Roller Girl all dolled up like Marilyn Monroe cannot ward off the true nature of the carnal transactions they have been engaging in. And when the veneer of glamour and high-minded artistry falls away, what are you left with but the same sex-crazed jerk who harassed you in high school? The sequence concludes with a brutal act of violence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Boogie Nights\u003c/i>, its filmmaking both flamboyant and nuanced, seamlessly sustains several such tonal shifts. Right from the dazzling start, Anderson coalesces just the right elements to make his points. The opening Scorsese-esque long take cranes and dollies and pans as it moves from the street into a disco, weaving through the dance floor while introducing us to a small platoon of characters in remarkably economical hits of dialogue. The effect is one of community and group intimacy; only when the camera finally comes to rest on outsider Mark Wahlberg’s sourpuss mug is this feeling of fluidity jarred.That’s just one virtuoso sequence of several, the sum of which may have been considered a triumph of style over story if Anderson weren’t so unerring in his deployment of technique in the service of the latter. He introduces the plot-changing Philip Baker Hall’s character, for instance, by shooting him entering a room from four different angles, each one dissolving into the next. He zooms in on a coke-snorting Julianne Moore (playing porn star “Amber Waves”) as the heartbreaking and purely visual solution to one scene’s mini-mystery: whether a boy telephone caller’s mother is in the house. And he knows to linger on Don Cheadle ordering different varieties of donuts for a full minute, exploiting to the fullest the individual childlike facial expressions the actor marries to each choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/bn-cheadle.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of the standout sequences comprise scenes unified by a soundtrack that consists at various times of period pop songs, original music, and punctuating noises like the metronomic tolling of a bell. This blend of sound and visuals reaches an apex in the penultimate scene, one of the best-directed you or I will ever see on this earth. Riffing off of the real-life \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderland_murders\">Wonderland murders\u003c/a>, it features a hopped-up Alfred Molina in a silver robe and underwear talking crazy to three nearly-as-stoned would-be ripoff artists, while an armed bodyguard scrutinizes the fake drugs they have brought to sell. Throw in an impromptu round of Russian Roulette and a shootout, set it all to the ’80s pop hits “Sister Christian,” “Jessie’s Girl,” and “99 Luftballons,” then complete the filmic concoction by tossing in a young Chinese male intermittently setting off firecrackers, and you’ve got a scene so filled to the brim with tension it’s practically preternatural.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/bn-julianne.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, the acting: Wahlberg has never been better, and Anderson coaxes a fine, modulated performance from Burt Reynolds. But it’s the remarkable Julianne Moore who you can barely take your eyes off of. Sometimes coked out, but mostly numbed by a restraint that conceals a deep despair, she’s as remote as if separated from the world by some sort of cellophane membrane. Meanwhile, John C. Riley as Dirk Diggler’s dim-bulb sidekick, a multifaceted hack, paints every move a burlesque of self-importance. Trust me, you haven’t really lived until you’ve seen a hopelessly off-key Wahlberg laying down godawful vocals to an original rock opus, followed by a reverse shot of Riley grooving to the sound. Take note of unforgettable turns in smaller roles by Robert Ridgely, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Thomas Jane (later of \u003ci>Hung\u003c/i> fame).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film concludes bittersweetly, before the inevitable destructive end that many in the porn business have suffered. The troupe has recoalesced as a makeshift family at Jack Horner’s home, and as what Anderson calls “broken circus music” plays, we get a visual echo of the opening shot in the disco. As the camera comes to rest on Jack standing behind Amber, readying herself in the mirror before a scene, she asks him, “What are you looking at?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The foxiest bitch in the world,” he says, oblivious that this is anything but a compliment. Amber stares sadly on, and we cut to Dirk psyching himself up to perform. It’s only then that we finally get a look at his member (a prosthesis, per Anderson and common sense), which has up till then done admirable service as the film’s MacGuffin. It’s flaccid, and Dirk tries to work himself into fighting shape by invoking his porn personas, the Valley kid he once was forever lost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nineteen seventies porn in the Valley — in lesser hands, \u003ci>Boogie Nights\u003c/i> would have been a joke on a joke … on a joke. But instead it’s a work of art.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/111660/california_films_boogie_nights","authors":["128436"],"series":["arts_433"],"categories":["arts_74"],"featImg":"arts_10111660","label":"arts_433"}},"programsReducer":{"possible":{"id":"possible","title":"Possible","info":"Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.","airtime":"SUN 2pm","imageSrc":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Possible-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg","officialWebsiteLink":"https://www.possible.fm/","meta":{"site":"news","source":"Possible"},"link":"/radio/program/possible","subscribe":{"apple":"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/possible/id1677184070","spotify":"https://open.spotify.com/show/730YpdUSNlMyPQwNnyjp4k"}},"1a":{"id":"1a","title":"1A","info":"1A is home to the national conversation. 1A brings on great guests and frames the best debate in ways that make you think, share and engage.","airtime":"MON-THU 11pm-12am","imageSrc":"https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/1a.jpg","officialWebsiteLink":"https://the1a.org/","meta":{"site":"news","source":"npr"},"link":"/radio/program/1a","subscribe":{"npr":"https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/RBrW","apple":"https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=1188724250&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory","tuneIn":"https://tunein.com/radio/1A-p947376/","rss":"https://feeds.npr.org/510316/podcast.xml"}},"all-things-considered":{"id":"all-things-considered","title":"All Things Considered","info":"Every weekday, \u003cem>All Things Considered\u003c/em> hosts Robert Siegel, Audie Cornish, Ari Shapiro, and Kelly McEvers present the program's trademark mix of news, interviews, commentaries, reviews, and offbeat features. 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You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>","imageSrc":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg","imageAlt":"KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn","officialWebsiteLink":"/mindshift/","meta":{"site":"news","source":"kqed","order":"2"},"link":"/podcasts/mindshift","subscribe":{"apple":"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mindshift-podcast/id1078765985","google":"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5","npr":"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/464615685/mind-shift-podcast","stitcher":"https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kqed/stories-teachers-share","spotify":"https://open.spotify.com/show/0MxSpNYZKNprFLCl7eEtyx"}},"morning-edition":{"id":"morning-edition","title":"Morning Edition","info":"\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. 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On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?","imageSrc":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg","imageAlt":"On Our Watch from NPR and KQED","officialWebsiteLink":"/podcasts/onourwatch","meta":{"site":"news","source":"kqed","order":"1"},"link":"/podcasts/onourwatch","subscribe":{"apple":"https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1567098962","google":"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw","npr":"https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/onourwatch","spotify":"https://open.spotify.com/show/0OLWoyizopu6tY1XiuX70x","tuneIn":"https://tunein.com/radio/On-Our-Watch-p1436229/","stitcher":"https://www.stitcher.com/show/on-our-watch","rss":"https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"}},"on-the-media":{"id":"on-the-media","title":"On The Media","info":"Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. 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