ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (Scorsese 74): [3.5]

For most of my young life, a lot of my exposure to movies took place in the house I grew up in. Or if not there, then places nearby. Friends' houses, movie theaters, the occasional movie night with extended family. I did a lot of my own searching, but I also counted on other people to expose me to movies I wouldn't have sought out otherwise. For some reason, I don't recall relying much on my mom for that, even though she and I enjoy quite a lot of movies together now. It seemed always to be my dad, a cinephile in his own hyper-specific male way, who was there to sit through some of his old favorites with me as I tested my boundaries. And father-son time can be a hard thing to conjure out of thin air, so there's not much easier for a working dad than taking a seat nearby on the couch. I was on the brink of young adulthood as my cinephilia began, introverted enough to need long hours at home but restless enough to crave adventure and stimulation. Sadly, the adult world was just as confusing to me as the hallucinatory realm of childhood. Movies were always my safe path to a happier and more perfect world than the one I knew, so I sublimated my wanderlust into moving images, with my dad as a mostly silent chaperone. Together we watched all the usual suspects, and I was the eager siphon, vicariously experiencing a world I'd only just begun to imagine.

Despite being imaginary, the world of cinema is no less real than the living world around us, and for people constituted like me, it can perhaps be even more real than real. I can't say for certain what draws my dad to movies, but judging by his strangely expansive collection, something about them speaks to him more deeply than most other areas of life. He must know the excitement and awe I feel when watching a movie I don't yet know I'll love. Maybe that's an experience he hoped to facilitate by sharing his favorites with me, many of which are established film classics? Well, who can say. We're not the most communicative of people. A sense of shared appreciation is our language, something ironed out over long years of adaptive cohabitation. And as much as I'm beginning to loathe the spans of silence I've learned to accept in my personal life, there's a narcotizing comfort in sitting down for a movie with my dad, he as eager as I am for a new awakening through cinema. In the absence of an ability to speak meaningfully of what goes on inside us, we live through art, even if only in the most circumscribed and stereotypic ways (hello, hundredth THE THING rewatch). It's in our DNA.

Like many young American men, I was impressed by the Martin Scorsese films my dad had experienced firsthand in his youth. To this day, images and memories from GOODFELLAS, RAGING BULL, and THE DEPARTED float around spectrally in my cinematic imagination. CAPE FEAR and THE WOLF OF WALL STREET are recent favorites, both possessing a furious energy I find thrilling. Then there's the endearing HUGO, technically masterful and tenderly emotional. I still would like to see such oddities as THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and KUNDUN, and I'd like to rewatch TAXI DRIVER and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST now that I feel more equipped to appreciate them. Overall, though, the Martin Scorsese days are mostly over. And of course I'll still make the trek to see SILENCE and whichever new films of his catch my eye. I just hope I'm not blowing any minds to propose that Scorsese has grown old, and that he's said just about all he has to say. He knew his world well, but his world isn't mine. He's not going anywhere, so I can see him whenever I want. But he won't be coming with me. It's time for me to take what I've learned from him and move on.

ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE opens with a subversion so sincere. The stylized Technicolor prologue, reminiscent of THE WIZARD OF OZ, belies the ugliness in its young protagonist's life. She'll escape this congealed studio lot fantasy, but its beauty and squalor will stay with her all through adulthood. Looking back, she remembers the loves of her youth and seeks the path to return her to that intensity of feeling. It's a fondness we all experience in one way or another, though for Alice and Scorsese, it found its highest expression in classical Hollywood cinema. Sometimes I wonder where the fondness for those old films went, as we hardly see it anymore in modern movies of any kind, musicals or otherwise. Then I remember it's none other than Scorsese who made NEW YORK, NEW YORK, passionately defending the form well past its decline. Grandiosity suits him well, and not just in his stories of male megalomania. It's mad love that Scorsese seeks to portray in all his films, whatever the object of that love may be (a few notable ones: self, woman, brotherhood, spirituality, times gone by, color, city, music, film itself). The ugly jump cuts and apathetic handheld camerawork of TV comedy is about the farthest thing from Scorsese's evocative widescreen wonderlands. While ALICE borders on the mundane more than most of Scorsese's filmography, its drab scenery only serves to strike a greater contrast with Alice's rich interior world.

And just who is Alice, anyhow? Other than Ellen Burstyn, that is, giving a virtuosic performance. There are heavy hints that she's a survivor of childhood and domestic abuse, a caged bird who gets a second lease on life when her husband dies in an accident. He is the quintessentially Scorsesean man, brooding and angry but not without moments of tenderness. Shortly after his passing, Alice leaves with her young son to follow a long-forgotten dream of becoming a singer. She sings and plays piano well, so why not? Unfortunately, for a single mother in the 1970s, the world is not so welcoming. She finds herself frequently unemployed, working for less than she deserves, and entangled in a destructive affair with a young Harvey Keitel. When Kris Kristofferson finally comes along offering old-fashioned masculine strength, it clashes with the newfound freedom Alice has grown to enjoy, even as she secretly yearns for such paternalism. Compared to the toxic but numbing sameness of her married life, self-determination comes with some nasty thorns. All the while, her son Tommy (oddball Alfred Lutter) aches for stability and acceptance. His mother's new life is a draining change the two of them aren't sure they can endure forever.

According to my dad, this is a chick flick. Strip away the element of derogatory judgment that implies, and I'd have to agree. This is very much a movie for women. It was developed by Ellen Burstyn at the height of second wave feminism and released during that tumultuous time in American gender relations. I almost wonder if my mom saw it all those years ago, or what she'd think of it now. There's an empathy for women in this film that's borderline extinct in American movies, despite a brief 70s resurgence. To watch it is to almost reimagine from scratch what an American movie can be. My dad, for his part, remarked that this is the kind of movie he wouldn't have watched at a younger age. He noted the familiar Scorsese kineticism, but he was surprised to see it in the story of a housewife's emancipation. I understand, because it is surprising to see Scorsese so passionately and skillfully depicting the life of a woman, and it is the kind of movie that gender policing keeps young men away from. This is as much a gap in our ongoing Scorsese retrospective as it is a gap in our own lives spent away from women. But where my dad has mostly kept up his phallocentric ways, I watch this movie having spent the last decade surrounded by women and their lives, emotions, beliefs. So we come at this movie from opposite angles, and from different lives. This is our nexus, a revered male auteur's detour into the wider world of women.

If it seems ironic that I'm mentioning my dad so much in relation to a film so wonderfully gynocentric, it's because that's the strange history I bring with me to any film we watch together. With my dad in the room, I'm made to ponder my own gender identity in relation to the film, to him, and to the child I was when he was more fully my parent. An adult relationship to a parent is weird in many ways, even in the reverie of movie watching. He was surprisingly talkative when we watched ALICE, and that's because it set off a series of flashbacks he wasn't expecting. The late-film turn towards Alice's diner job revealed to him that this movie is the basis for the TV sitcom "Alice." He was stunned, having enjoyed that show for the many years it was on TV (and it seems, incidentally, that the more feminized medium of cable TV plays on different expectations in him than auteurist masculinism). My dad excitedly informed me that Vic Tayback was the same Mel from TV, but that everyone else was played by someone different. He remembered the characters, though, and I'm amused to imagine how that affected his experience of the latter half of the film. He was also insistent that the character of Audrey was played by a brother of Jodie Foster, which I thought too. We were cartoonishly dumbfounded to discover it was, in fact, Jodie Foster herself (the DVD skipped, so we may have missed any contextualizing gender information).

It was fun to talk our way through a movie experience together. I pointed out at one point that Ellen Burstyn looked a lot like my middle sister's piano teacher, which my dad was eager to share with the rest of the family. He was more animated than I'm used to, and I think I can see that as him trying to be more open than he's been for most of his life. It's a good development, and I hope it keeps up, but I won't be around to watch it continue. Because I've just told my dad I'll be moving in with my girlfriend soon, and he's given it his blessing. And I just told my little brother, who sighed and lied about being "a little sad," but told the truth when he said he was happy for me, and for my girlfriend. And soon I'll tell my middle sister, whose best friend will soon be living in this house with her. And then I'll tell my littlest sister, who will live in my room once I've left. My room of twenty years or more, my home for most of my life. It's too small for me now, and we only just replaced the bunk bed I've had for all that time. But it will always be my room in my heart, and I'll remember it as it was. It's right next door to the room my oldest sister always lived in, one she's unlikely to return to either. She's moved on now, and soon I will be too, and then only the second generation of our family will be left in this house, with my dad at the center of it all once again. And as my oldest sister and I converge, diverge, and converge again over the spans of our lives, we'll live in this house in our minds, the house we knew best, and we'll walk through it together in ways our parents have long ceased to with each other. We'll remember where we spent our youngest years, and we'll remind each other of who we were, and how nothing seems to have turned out the way we expected. We'll grow old alongside each other the way our parents won't, and we'll make the trips back to see our parents wherever they end up in their last few decades. And I'll see my dad and remember all the sad times, the bad times, the long and hard times of never knowing what to do or say.

But I'll also remember the good times, when words fell away and we let down our guards long enough to make this house a home. I'll remember the games and the toys, the puzzles and the stuffed animals, the spaghetti and the baked potatoes. And I'll remember the movies, the ones that eased us into sharing a space together, however briefly. I'll look back on ALICE and others, filtering them through what I know about my dad and myself. So even as I remember the man who didn't know what came next after the kids grew up, I'll remember the days when I thought he knew, when it seemed like only a few more movies stood between me and adulthood. Because it's here, adulthood, now more than ever. And I've certainly watched a few more movies. And I'll certainly watch a few more still. But for now, ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE. Alice has somewhere else to live. Somewhere else to be. Something else to find.

(photo credit: en.wikipedia.org)

ON THE SILVER GLOBE (Żuławski 87): [N/A]

An incomplete post for an incomplete movie. Different kind of writing for a different kind of movie. I think i can say what I want, because I am what I am. Because I am what i am. I can say anything. I don't need a chorus or verses. Make some money. Blue and silver light in a field of white. That similar hybrid color draped over a beach at the ends of the earth, not our earth, but another's, whoever they may be.

It's not long before we lose our way in Żuławski's extraterrestrial pagan phantasy. Three astronauts leave at some point, there's no Earth worth saving. this is understood to be our life. They arrive and find vast emptiness. does this emptiness bring them to doom? Time comes rushing in like white waves, lives peak and crest and dissolve, children are born and Jerzy is still alive, a society emerges in which he transforms from man to king, divine alien.

the problem with pastiche might be that its makers have minds too small and fragile. an expansive and courageous mind, open beyond limits of selfhood, can cobble something together new and amazing just by virtue of existence, brushing away all faint and obvious pastiche.t hat must be how its always been the synthessi comes from the big artists they make it all new as everything else turns pale and cold, warmth from warm hearts ond brains

My partner and i both have family from Poland, the glum, grim giant of Europe. She knows more than I do of this, but I know the pressure point of Poland and Germany held my forebears. What does it mean for me to be in this relationship, experiencing the art of a land I don't know Who? is Andrzej Żuławski, and what is he to me? What makes me adore this film. How Polish is my adoration?

Marek, Szern, Malachuda, Thomas (the Third, Aza? Arta? Jacek, and others.

(photo credit: en.wikipedia.org)

the only hint this film's of humans is blasts of 70s/80s cockrock a blue globe's extrusion not a silver one's

Philosophy screamed like the bare truth of life, in contrast to the filmic dollops of Europudding spooned into American maws. This is how we speak of our convictions and terrors, at the top of our lungs. I should scream feminism, because the world can't hear me without disruption.  murmurs won't do

Jump cuts from behind your eyes, and the people speaking twitch from word to word, we see them anew but though they are new to us already. seeing them as we do, their planet is ours.

No rating? 4.5, 4.56788654? futility, untenable hierarchies, strained binaries. I begin to suspect there's a world out there beyond ranking films. Graded art. to return to this place implies we've left it, or I sure have, so I mourn my spontaneous creativity and find solace in Żuławski the madman. I pull my punches, not him.

Whatever wrongness a blue globe holds a silver globe might yet show us new life

Science fiction is served well by abstract art, because the convulsing life in ON THE SILVER GLOBE seems to flow unprompted from a group of aliens. inscrutable and spectacularly strange i accept them as undiscovered beings. orgies are no longer orgies expressions of unknown passions in misunderstood bodies. Keep us on edge and we consider more deeply than when these sights are known to us.

faces of mud they're not so clear, fetid stench of blood and fear, the bird men and Men who converge away from earth, life undefined but needing it after all, defintion not so easily ignored

The Żuławski camera roves and dashes, even the exposition he must provide for this 80% of a film fills in the gaps with sprints, his eye and ours eyes racing through anonymous stretches of Poland, always Poland, Poland from which this film radiates its scorching mystery, Poland where Żuławski learned his Żuławski, Żuławski the elder who dreamed of birds and women breeding men, it's all Poland and we are all Poland, if anyone is Polish in the end after all

poesia.

I want to commit to sharing my emotions but the act of sharing is bogged with presuppositions for recipient + giver so what does sharing look like can it look like i want it to, how much sharing is mine, or yours, who shares and why, and how will it sound when something is, at last, shared?

Narrative's not dead, it's just in bad shape in worse hands, it won't save us and we can't fully trust it but we can let it in like a harmless friend from time to time, it may have things to tell us if we have ways to listen, but those ways come from us and we build them in our privacies

make art and feel your love for it, and all who articulate your art affect you but not your art, the art lives and maybe you die, if they decide to kill you, my hope is that made art is a heart's strongest pulse

The tragedy of censorship is not its abstract threat toward all voices but its malevolent gaze upon highly specific voices. The silver globe is dented, damaged, flawed, unfinished, but how many movies are complete, how many were allowed their life, and why was this one not, and why is Żuławski so far from our minds, and when will we know Żuławski, twitter in 2014 did indeed like POSSESSION but how many POSSESSIONs will it take to bring us back to Żuławski, how many worlds hide behind infinite space, where Poland resides and we do not?

i am a reflection of What is in you but you are not a reflection of What is in me

THE RIGHT STUFF (Kaufman 83): [3.5]

Recently, by suggestion of my father, I rewatched Clint Eastwood's FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS. I had viewed it and its companion film LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA shortly after their release and considered the latter a far superior film, humanist and broad-minded where most war films were blinkered and jingoistic. Of course, this easy binary obscures the achievements of films as diverse as THE THIN RED LINE to THE BURMESE HARP when considering what the portrayal of war can look like in film. Furthermore, as I was soon to find out, FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS is as complex and troubling a war film as any the medium has previously seen. Eastwood's film dives staggeringly, heartbreakingly deep into the cost of national myth-making. The soldiers at the center of the film become little more than pawns in a long game of mass-media chess, symbols badly needed for a country unsure of its standing in the world. Each has no choice but to allow their beatification, but the rewards of that acceptance are stratified by race, class, and, of course, hegemonic masculinity. He who fails to suppress his feelings will be chewed up and spit out by a media apparatus all too eager to anoint its newest secular saints.


If Philip Kaufman's 1983 film is less cynical in its examination of Project Mercury's role in galvanizing the Space Race, it is at least appropriately unsure of who, exactly, benefits from such nationalistic chest-thumping. After receiving an earlier draft of the film by screenwriter William Goldman, who was inspired to script the film as a heartwarming palliative to the ugly Iran hostage crisis, Kaufman reportedly sought to de-emphasize the film's focus on "patriotism." What that means is unclear, but we can read a certain amount of intention into Kaufman's insistence on re-inserting Chuck Yeager into the film. Yeager was the first man to break the sound barrier, and his standing as a local hero (note his Western-reminiscent scene on horseback) is what inspired the Mercury pilots to become the world's first astronauts. Tellingly, though, the film closes just as it began, with Yeager on the periphery of Project Mercury, an inspiration only to those in the know. For the Mercury astronauts, Yeager and his friendly rival Scott Crossfield were the heroes of olden times who modeled for them what pioneers of space might look like. For the rest of America, heroism looked like the brave young men on front pages of Life magazine.

So Kaufman too is asking us how we choose our heroes, and who does the deciding. It's probably no coincidence that Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson make appearances in THE RIGHT STUFF, much like FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS featured Harry S. Truman giving his blessing to the central three soldiers. After all, who better than a sitting President to legitimize a national agenda in the hearts and minds of its citizens? Where World War II earned financing through our earnest belief in its moral righteousness, politicians and scientists alike slowly realized the Space Race would also not be won without the publicity that secures its funding. And so Project Mercury becomes the figurehead of a modern manifest destiny, the scrappy underdog nipping at the heels of the Communist menace. A TV show even refers to the astronauts at one point as "our Davids," in battle against the unspoken Goliath overseas. There's been a lot of talk recently about why our space programs have fallen to wayside in recent decades, and the short answer is simply that space travel will never be so mythologically important to the American character as it was in the 50s and 60s. The courageous pioneers, worshiped by media and public alike, encapsulated everything the United States wanted its men to be.

A comparison to Tony Scott's TOP GUN is pertinent here as well. Released a mere three years later, we see echoes of a film William Goldman would have recognized, in which a cocky young American pilot justifies his overconfidence with awe-inspiring aerial prowess. A sentimental, neon-drenched fantasy (not a bad thing, mind you; big Tony Scott fan here), TOP GUN was far less ambivalent about ideological and cinematic wish-fulfillment. Audiences certainly rewarded its brazen endorsement of machismo. THE RIGHT STUFF's box office earnings: $21,192,102; TOP GUN: $356,830,601. You can guess which film has engendered whisperings of a sequel.

Still, at risk again of easy binaries, it would be wrong to say that Kaufman's film doesn't have its fair share of testosterone. Importantly, it is the approach which differs. Perhaps the best way I can describe THE RIGHT STUFF's approach to masculinity is that its men are always given freedom to pontificate and test their strength, but without the consequence-free vacuum most white male American films construct around their characters. Witness the spellbinding moment when the Grissoms realize the military will not honor Gus' finish-line fumble the way it has honored his forebears' resounding successes. Veronica Cartwright gives you the full force of Betty's repressed loneliness finally bursting the dam, and Fred Ward as Gus can do little more than murmur and cry. He's staked his self-esteem on being the homecoming hero, and instead he finds himself having to answer for a long list of failures all at once. He tries to escape, either to a potential mistress or his band of merry gentlemen, but Betty Grissom isn't having it. He will stay, and he will own up to the pain his absence has caused his wife, the disappointment for which the Air Force never prepared them.

Or look at Gordon Cooper, played amiably by Dennis Quaid in one of his best roles (and one which Tom Cruise must have studied closely). Coasting lackadaisically above the earthbound troubles around him, he nevertheless finds himself humbled, even emasculated, by the women around him. First his wife Trudy leaves in a fit of anguish, unable to handle the overwhelming fear of being widowed. Cooper watches with a burning weenie (!) in his hand, grin blown out like a dead lightbulb. In her absence, he invites a nurse charged with collecting his sperm to "join him." He considers his proposition a good-natured bit of flirtation; in 2015, it looks a lot more like sexual harassment. This incident does not go unpunished in the film, however. Cooper is ignominiously banished to a latrine to masturbate alongside fellow astronaut John Glenn (Ed Harris), who cheerfully hums his way through the procedure. Afterward, Cooper re-attempts his seduction, only to be rebuffed by the nurse demanding to see his wife. Cooper tenses up, suddenly aware of the consequences he'd been ignoring. A day later, he watches from afar as the Trudy and the nurse laugh about him in her office. He is equal parts terrified and humiliated, hilariously incapable of maintaining an air of indifference as he waits for the hammer to fall. Instead, Trudy cheerfully rejoins him, reporting that they were only joking lightly at his expense. Relieved and reinflated once more, he sneers "Yeah, she's just one of those women who has a problem with men." Machismo has rarely fallen flatter on its face.

Kaufman knows his male characters are borderline deluded in their single-minded pursuit. At a picnic early in the film, one wife exclaims to the others "Look at them! It's like they're talking about sports!" The men are outside horsing around, while the wives sit indoors speaking of nightmares and all-encompassing dread. Kaufman is canny enough to position the men at a remove from the everyday lives of American families, because the rarefied air the Mercury pilots figuratively and literally occupy is off-limits to all but a few. It does indeed take superhuman bravery to risk death on a regular basis, and that drives these men to take comfort in old-fashioned masculinity. Decades earlier, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS was just as perceptive in its bittersweet admiration of the pilot life. This isn't an easy job, and the men have to stick together to make it through. Kaufman grants them the outsized confidence needed to survive, but never at the expense of the socially marginal people who fill out rest of their world. Alan Shephard (Scott Glen), the first American in space, enjoys watching and mimicking a racist TV comedy routine in his spare time, but when he finds himself on the verge of incontinence after a test, his position of power over the Latino nurse vanishes. Quite literally too, as he shuffles feebly along to the bathroom with the tall man's hand firmly on his shoulder. Consider, also, John Glenn's defense of his wife Annie (an impressive Mary Jo Deschanel) when Vice President Lyndon Johnson himself is demanding entrance into their home. Glenn defies both NASA and the United States government to protect her from being harassed over her speech impediment, and when he faces repercussions for his act of solidarity, the other astronauts back him up by refusing their services to NASA if Glenn is punished.

By establishing his perspective as a ground-level skeptic, both of national myth and masculine braggadocio, Kaufman allows his film to celebrate this exciting era in American history without glossing over its ugly moments. He sees history in context, and his humility in the face of THE RIGHT STUFF's inherent grandiosity prevents unseemly overreaching. Instead, it's the smaller moments that register. I was stunned by those technicolor tears painted onto John Glenn's helmeted face as he sat in waiting within the Mercury-Atlas 6. What a beautiful reminder of the emotions hidden beneath the astronauts' stoic exteriors. Additionally, Kaufman's hiring of avant-garde filmmaker Jordan Belson as a special effects artist strikes me as fairly ingenious. Along with Belson's recreations of Earth seen from orbit, the impressionistic cloud surfaces and John Glenn's "fireflies" go a long way in communicating to us not just what it looks like, but what it feels like to see the universe from such a perspective. For the billions of us who will never see space the way the Mercury astronauts do, only the awe of seeing beautiful art is comparable.

Philip Kaufman is apparently notorious for creating films considered too lengthy for the filmgoing public, but THE RIGHT STUFF justifies his intensive process. From sharp characterizations to fleeting moments of unearthly beauty, he crafts an enormous mosaic of a truly titanic span of history. The film breathes with a lived-in sense of how landmark moments in human history are surrounded by mundane ones. Life goes on for everyone involved, as Project Mercury was neither the beginning nor the end of their lives. Through hindsight, we can see the lives of these astronauts and the people they knew, so ordinary in most respects, made legendary through the weight of their accomplishments and our recollection of their story. This film knows better than most that glory is brief and life is long, but it is able to acknowledge those seemingly contradictory understandings without trivializing one or the other. That makes THE RIGHT STUFF a very wise film, just as FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS was imbued with the wisdom of an artist who's spent decades negotiating his own legend. For while Project Mercury was a human undertaking like any other, its resonance as a legend comes from our awe in the face of the universe's vastness. History often gives birth to its legends by accident, but it's the people who believe in those tales that immortalize them. Our narratives reflect who we are, because we use them to grasp at what makes us human. This is the story of our first steps toward higher understanding, a necessarily human narrative that, in its telling, catches glimmers of the transcendent.

(photo credit: en.wikipedia.org)