So Why This Movie?

These Twisted Words

2012-02-27T09:18:00.002-08:00

Eyes Wide Shut is simultaneously Stanley Kubrick’s most verbal and least articulate film (“I don’t even know what we’re arguing about here!”), which may go a long way toward explaining the bemused frustration with which many greeted the director’s last stand. To paraphrase Talking Heads, these people talk a lot, but they never seem to say anything. Misunderstandings pile up, declarations are continually repeated back to the speaker, confessions are agonizingly drawn out, and honesty is professed while covered up with lies. In familiar terms of communication and identification, the movie is an utter failure: hapless protagonist Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) remains largely impenetrable even as we catch vivid glimpses of his desires and fears, and all of the film’s many extended dialogue scenes seem geared more towards deceit and distraction than imparting information or establishing character. Yet Kubrick always had loftier goals than making the audience relate to the people onscreen, and his last film was hardly the first of his to deconstruct its own dialogue (Dr. Strangelove was full of idiots talking past each other).

Indeed, perhaps Kubrick’s most jarring strategy as an artist, nowhere better exemplified than in Eyes Wide Shut, is his denial of dialogue’s imprimatur of authenticity and truth. Words are the least reliable element of his films, the arena of pretension and pettiness, where all the dark conspiracies and failures of identity that haunt his films are covered up or wished/washed away. Still, that doesn’t mean that Kubrick’s words are meaningless. Without a hint of naturalism in his storytelling or visual palette, Kubrick is free to wield dialogue like any other element of Eyes Wide Shut’s dense, stylized mise-en-scène. Just as the film’s cavernous sets and vivid colors seem horribly alive, so do its words possess weight well beyond their speaker’s intentions, and one way to get at those hidden meanings is to pluck individual drops from the film’s stream of words and examine them with eyes wide open. Here are some attempts at doing so:

“I’ll never understand why you walked away.”
“Really? It’s a good feeling, I do it a lot.”

This is, to my mind, Bill Harford’s first step into hell. In a film full of rich abstraction, Nick Nightingale stands out as a sturdy and instantly familiar archetype: the crooked friend who gets the blinkered protagonist into trouble. Both men are ultimately defined by their careers, as emphasized by their reunion at Victor’s party; the fact that Bill is a doctor and Nick is not is discussed as though they are members of different species. (Remember why Bill is even at this party: “This is what you get for making house calls,” of the dubious type he performs for Victor upstairs.) Bill, the sturdy careerist who got through med school, will nevertheless spend a lot of time walking away over the course of this film, away from his wife, yet also away from temptation, finding himself more and more alone on a journey that seems to be heading toward self-abnegation rather than sexual fulfillment. By contrast, Nick seems fully independent, readily admitting that his band sucks, easily leaving his wife and kids to go on the road (whereas Bill can barely cope with walking down the street), yet equally defined by his piano playing as Bill is by medicine. “You gotta go where the work is,” Nick says, and is happy to be blindfolded for it. He’s used to playing for an audience, where nothing is for real and anything you glimpse when the blindfold slips is as inconsequential as images on the silver screen. Bill’s work requires him to face the ugly mornings-after, as represented by physical decay, and his nocturnal “walk” increasingly turns on the queasy fallout when idealized images become opaque realities. By the end of the film, though, the buddies’ roles are bitterly reversed; Bill is allowed by Victor and his masked colleagues to walk away, back to his eerily perfect life with his wife and daughter in the shopping mall. Nick is walked away, most likely (as with Mandy) to an apparent suicide, door locked from the inside. Nick is left with death, Bill with sex (see “Fuck” below).

“Look at me. Look at me. Look at me…”

Since Bill Harford is such a blank-faced cipher in a long tradition of Kubrick protagonists (see especially Barry Lyndon and Full Metal Jacket), it’s tempting to look anywhere but him. That’s a good instinct; as Tim Kreider points out in his exhaustive and excellent essay on the film, Kubrick’s visual strategies are geared around objects (paintings, clothing, masks) and physical environments (apartments, corridors, doorways). Yet Bill is still worth paying attention to precisely because he does such a poor job reckoning with atmosphere. Like Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet, Bill is an affably unremarkable pleasure-seeker who stumbles into a complex, nefarious web of abuse and deceit that he’s utterly unprepared to navigate, and Kubrick somehow squeezes dramatic tension out of his ostensible hero’s hesitance, timidity, and lack of imagination. With his handsomely frozen mug staring back from all the film’s many mirrors, Bill never seems to realize (until it’s far too late) that the film he’s in has been one long, slow shredding of his picture-perfect identity, as man, husband, friend, lover, and doctor. His “look at me” mantra, an attempt to bring a drug-hazed Mandy back to her bitter reality, is also (as Kubrick indicates with a pointed cut from Mandy’s face to Bill’s) an unconscious revelation of his unthinking ego, which has a hell of a shock coming to it over the next 48 hours. Bill tries on various masks (literal and figurative) throughout the film, adapting his persona as the situation demands before abandoning ship out of convenience or fear, but faces like Cruise’s only retain their power because we, as an audience, choose to "look." Whether we or he sees only an alluring naked body, or instead the moral quandary it represents, is a choice of conscience, even if we make it unconsciously; as the film’s title indicates, neither the sexually confused protagonist nor the eternally horny audience ever gets it quite right.  

“Are you looking forward to Christmas? Does it hurt?”

I wrote a thing about Christmas in Eyes Wide Shut because I love this thing Bill Blakemore wrote about The Shining, which is probably the most notorious of the many Intense Theories that Kubrick’s filmmaking seems to provoke (see: 2001, entirety of). Blakemore argues that The Shining offers a visual, conceptual, and narrative framework that ties the film’s cabin-fever parable into cycles and histories of slaughter, particularly that of the Native Americans by the invading Europeans. I buy it: Kubrick’s stories, regardless of their specific subject matter, always circle back to the insidious social controls of ritual and history. This dominant big picture can be giddily macroscopic (2001) or horribly intimate (The Shining itself), but the characters are never able to escape the cannibalistic pattern, dwarfed by the director’s massive sets, ironically trapped by their own desires, actions, and words, and ultimately flinching away from the broader implications of their own visceral instincts. That repressive denial is a key element in Kubrick’s intricate designs, re-emerging to suck the protagonist back in just as they begin to perceive “how deep the rabbit hole goes,” in the words of The Matrix (released the same summer as Eyes Wide Shut). In Kubrick’s hands, the sex drive is inextricably tied up with sociology, economics, identity politics, and the constant deception that Sandor Szavost (simultaneously the film’s sleaziest and most honest character) says is an absolute necessity in the confounding, all-consuming ritual that we call marriage. Christmas as practiced by the Harfords is equally corrupt, and while Bill’s revelation above is unintentional, it’s in keeping with the rest of the film, in which ritual desires lead to disease, dissolution, and death. It may all be “staged” as Victor claims, but the consequences can’t be celebrated (or fucked) away.

“If for no other reason than she’s afraid of what I might find.”

As with the “walk away” exchange above, this line is dropped innocuously into a drawn-out, wandering conversation (the epic bedroom confrontation between the Harfords), but immediately changes the terms of engagement, one of the pointed slips in the film’s suspiciously gorgeous façade. Alice immediately turns the conversation away from the terrible news Bill has to deliver to some of his patients and toward his fantasies about them (and vice versa), and the tension of sexual desire against the body’s mortality is one that informs the entire film. Death waits around every corner of Eyes Wide Shut, always emerging to interrupt the film’s most ostensibly erotic moments: Mandy suffers a near-death experience behind the scenes of the Zieglers’ sexual-tension-saturated party, Lou Nathanson’s death interrupts the marital spat in question, the sacrifice ritual/ritual sacrifice brings the orgy to a screeching halt, Bill learns about Domino’s HIV test results just as he’s attempting to seduce her roommate, Nick Nightingale’s rough abduction is relayed by a hotel clerk attempting to seduce Bill, and Bill’s film-long quest for an available female body ends in a morgue, Mandy’s body laid out on a slab, going nowhere. He leans in close, pauses, and pulls back. It’s crawlingly intimate proof of a point Kubrick made much earlier, cross-cutting voyeuristic pillow shots of Nicole Kidman with Dr. Cruise attending to all sorts of worse-off bodies. Kubrick always linked ardor with murder, from Dr. Strangelove’s inaugural military-phalluses to Jack Torrance’s brief dalliance with a corpse in The Shining, but he had never before made the connection so horribly clear. Any hint of sensuality in the orgy sequence is nullified by the horrifying masks worn by the revelers, kinetic eroticism betrayed by the grim stasis of ego-death.

“Do you think we should talk about money?”

Among contemporary filmmakers, the Coen brothers seem to be working more in Kubrick’s visual and thematic realm than anyone this side of Spielberg. Money is a constant yet mercurial presence in Joel and Ethan’s films, from William H. Macy’s increasingly outlandish upping of the ante in Fargo to the nonexistent ransom money in The Big Lebowski (for a kidnapping that turns out not to have happened) to the pure signifier of doom that is found riches in No Country for Old Men. Kubrick, for his part, had made sharp asides about class and money in previous films (particularly in Barry Lyndon’s caste rise-and-fall and The Shining’s creepy internal power structure: “You have always been the caretaker.”) But he had never before brought up the subject as frequently as in Eyes Wide Shut, where the flash of a dollar bill seems to solve a lot of problems. The film doesn’t explicitly take aim at the root of all evil, and maybe that’s the point: money rules even, especially, when it’s a background force. Take, for example, the wealth gap between Doctor Bill and prostitute Domino, represented visually in the stark difference in their respective apartments’ sizes, as well as in Bill’s obvious discomfort with that fact and Domino’s reluctance to take the money he so casually hands her for sex they didn’t have. Indeed, Bill spends most of the film quite happy with what money can buy, only desperately retreating to the (supposedly) more heartwarming hearth and home when his constant wallet-flashing fails him against the super-super-rich at the Somerton orgy (“those people arrived in limos, and you showed up in a taxi.”) Yet family is as insidiously interwoven with money as sex. Note that the film’s suspiciously self-deceptive ending takes place in a shopping mall, as the Harfords’ daughter runs around picking her own Christmas presents, and also that the film’s first line is “Honey, have you seen my wallet?”

“Hey man, I just play the piano.”

Eyes Wide Shut is, among many other things, a cross-section of the relationship between client and servant: the amount of service-industry transactions of various kinds, all of which seem to create or violate some sort of intimacy, is astonishing when you’re looking for it. So many of the initial scenes and conversations, increasingly unpredictable as they are (Eyes Wide Shut moves between Strangelovian situational irony and Shining-esque visual abstraction with breathtaking ease), are predicated on or literally about this type of relationship. Bill has to learn the babysitter’s name twice and bribes Milich and his cabbie without a second thought--in the latter case, he even tears a hundred-dollar bill in half with a smile. Yet Victor Ziegler treats Bill as a servant (and forced confidant) in turn; Bill is thus again professionally linked to Nick, whose blindfolded piano performance at the orgy represents the same willful denial that allows Bill to help cover up Ziegler’s abuse of Mandy, and later her mysterious death. This odyssey of cowardice and willful amnesia is enabled by all the various transactions Bill manipulates towards his increasingly evanescent and ill-defined goals. Process, not outcome, is Kubrick’s focus throughout Eyes Wide Shut (foreplay over orgasm, if you will). Bill loses his mask, but Milich happily charges him for it, just as Bill will later make up his straying (as symbolized by that same mask on his pillow) to his family by taking them shopping; Milich, for his part, transforms from defender of justice to obsequious craven when the men molesting his daughter “come to another arrangement.” Every relationship seems to shift, reverse, and transform; yet the specter of master and slave is a constant, from the boardroom to the bedroom.

“Can’t you see I am trying to sell my costumer!”

Along with Sandor Szavost, the Nathansons, and the maître’d at the Sonata Cafe, costume store owner Milich links Eyes Wide Shut’s screenplay back to its Eastern European origins (as the Viennese novella Dream Story). As such, his English is just imperfect enough to give us this gem of a Freudian slip. Eyes Wide Shut, as mentioned, is full to bursting with conversations about money, each one revealing a little more not only about Doctor Bill (get it?), but about the society through which he’s wandering. Bill bribes his way into Milich’s store after hours in order to gain access to the Somerton orgy, cutting off all personal conversation in favor of a quick transaction. Yet Kubrick still hints at what Bill is actually paying for here, as Milich’s underage daughter is caught nude with two of his associates just as the sale begins. The next day, in the cold light of morning, Milich proves as willing to sell his daughter as his customer. Bill makes a pitiful attempt to care, but as Milich says, Bill himself is as sold as the mask, the cloak, or the girl; his life bought and paid for by Victor and his associates, Bill is forced to detach his identity and potential moral concern from his life’s myriad purchases. Again, death is the only customer that’s always right: Milich tries to get Bill to diagnose his balding head, but while Bill dodges the question on (again) the basis of profession, he’s more likely avoiding the obvious answer. You’re losing your hair because the body fails, no matter how much sex you have or how much money you spend. The camera closes in on Milich’s daughter as her father offers Bill “anything at all…it needn’t be a costume,” but like the mannequins decorating the shop, she is a costume, an anonymous escape valve like the masked women at the orgy, a momentary distraction from the “deception” of marriage, the ugliness of wealth, and the certainty of death.

"Those were not just ordinary people...If I told you their names, I don't think you'd sleep so well."

Power occupies a central place in all of Kubrick’s films, always defining the tension at the core of the increasingly nebulous dramas. The director, however, never takes the intense power structures that define his films for granted. Whether military hierarchies (Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket) or the evolutionary drive itself (2001), the dominant forces are deconstructed and reassembled in strange, unsettling ways, reaching a hypnotic peak in his late-career masterpieces The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut. The latter film, then, is at least partially about sex as a force, as a source (or lack) of power, and occasionally as a weapon, rather than as an erotic charge transmitted from person to person, or for that matter, from screen to audience. Yet there’s also some decidedly non-sexy forces at work here: corruption, selfishness, ignorance, blindness. Eyes Wide Shut is a constant ballet of people using other people, for urges and motivations opaque even to them. As with the deranged would-be novelist in The Shining or the out-of-his-depth impostor in Barry Lyndon, perhaps the most painful lesson Bill has to learn is that for all his money and beauty, he is ultimately powerless. He cannot save Mandy, Domino, Nick, or Milich’s daughter, no more than he can break past Victor’s obfuscating wall of denial and distraction in that crucial late-film scene around the blood-red pool table. Ultimately, Victor refuses to tell Bill (or the audience) anything: who the masked revelers were, what really happened to Mandy and Nick, what will happen to the good doctor if he refuses to abandon his “inquiries.” Mystery reasserts itself, as eternally resurrected as the sex drive. Consummation here offers no relief, wrapped up in more questions instead of answers. Power cloaks itself, and wears a mask.

“Fuck.”

Even with Dr. Strangelove as Exhibit A, Stanley Kubrick never received proper credit for his sense of humor. Admittedly, his gargantuan visuals and lofty themes tend to steal the show, and his wicked streak, like that of the Coens, may be too stacked against his characters for more empathetic viewers to stomach. But Eyes Wide Shut’s one-word ending is well past “I was cured, all right” (A Clockwork Orange). This is pitch-black humor, a pure strike at the heart of genre, the cherry on top of an exhaustive, film-long process of self-deconstruction. Eyes Wide Shut opens on a casual, ignominious reveal of what was supposed to be the film’s tantalizing carrot: Nicole Kidman’s naked body. So goes the film, which seems throughout to be perfectly aware of its audience and eager to play with our expectations about what an “erotic thriller” is supposed to be, or more relevantly, what it’s supposed to do. As mentioned above, death keeps interrupting the film’s hard-ons, linking the body to both its momentary delights and ultimate failure. Someone’s always watching, whether the silent audience at Bill’s disrobing or the medical aide Kubrick cuts to as Bill tries for a private moment with Mandy’s corpse, and that sense of surveillance seems less paranoid when Bill realizes he’s being followed. The narrative eats itself alive, imparting crucial information secondhand, methodically dissecting night’s thrills in the harsh light of morning, complicating every potentially erotic encounter with lies, shocks, failures, and distances. The Harfords, like the audience, are left with vapor trails, memories of last night’s vivid dreamscapes haunting the pristine everyday. How to handle all this confusion, this moral decay caught up in desire? "Fuck." (Or, alternatively, "Fuck it.") Sex as power, sex as truth, sex as lie, sex as transaction, but above all, sex as distraction, a refuge from unpleasant truths and questions without answer, an intimate union nevertheless permeated by external forces, in the moment and an escape from the moment, life-affirming and death-predicting, real and "staged," eyes wide shut.

The Past Was Yours, But The Future's Mine

2012-02-20T06:14:00.000-08:00

Having finished this (which took me forever, trying to find enough synonyms for "gorgeous" for Days of Heaven and "bizarre" for Eraserhead), I want to jump forward to contemporary Hollywood, which people can't seem to bemoan enough. It's hard to disagree that the quality of your average popcorn flick has declined dramatically over the course of the last fifteen years or so--glancing over what's playing at my local multiplex, it's harder and harder to find anything that looks remotely worthy of a $10 investment. (And that's without the aforementioned popcorn.) But if the standard, even enjoyably bad, major motion picture has become unwatchably shoddy and brainless, the genuinely great movies have retained their power. I actually think they've improved: wisdom comes from standing on the shoulders of giants, and that great leap forward in the 1970s has had dramatic ripple effects in American film over the successive decades, even if we haven't had quite the same in-your-face, defiantly generational renewal of the art that the likes of Jaws and Taxi Driver represented. Instead, we've seen micro-movements come and go, leaving behind indelible impressions of time and place; as a nation, we've only gotten more acute at capturing something of our spirit and our struggles on screen. Auterism, the director-focused prism that transformed American cinema in the late '60s and through the '70s, has shifted in character from Lucas and Spielberg with their obsessive model design to the more detached, observational styles of Todd Haynes and the Coen brothers and the communal, open-minded essay-films of Spike Lee and Richard Linklater. If the studios have generally entrenched themselves in broad banality, America's finest filmmakers have responded by tunneling into more individual concerns with greater depth, no longer trying to conquer the world so much as examine and plunge into specific pieces of the puzzle.

"Postmodern" is a word that gets thrown around a lot in discussions of the best of modern American cinema, but the kaleidoscopic, genre-melting approach of many of the films below isn't a shallow intellectual prank. These movies are interested in things (a breath of fresh air when so many pictures seem to care about nothing but reaching their own end), and they're interested in investigating and representing those things in as many ways as possible. Truth is a fragmented, many-splendored thing; as Michael Koresky perceptively states here, the definition of the real has always been the defining ontological and philosophical pursuit of cinema, from Bazin to The Blair Witch Project. The late 1990s and the early 2000s saw a renaissance of this kind of restless, inclusive work in American film, driven as much by refugees from the old Golden Age (Spielberg, Malick, De Palma) as by the younger talents mentioned above. That there wasn't much of a broad-based movement sweeping these films into collective prominence makes these works all the braver, raging against a light that isn't dying in the least, but is increasingly struggling to get people to really look at what it's shining on. If there's one thread connecting these disparate films of the modern Golden Age, it's this focus on really seeing what we're seeing, understanding the implications of these images and willing to actively focus on our involvement as spectators with those implications and those images. They resensitize us, rather than assuming that bludgeoning spectacle satisfies all human urges: we should still feel the weight of every glance, every gesture, every event on screen, and it does my cinephilic heart good every time I return to these new classics. (Restricted to one per director, unfortunately leaving out such worthies as Bamboozled, Minority Report and The Sixth Sense.)

1. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, Warner Bros, 2001)

Lambasting Spielberg, as so many have done, as a pandering sentimentalist ignores the fact that emotions are not tame creatures, nor simple tools. The tears E.T. inspires are genuine and powerful, and should be considered not only an artistic achievement but a philosophical statement. The titular alien's return to life is not a manipulative deus ex machina, but an act of supreme faith, less in any particular deity than in the restorative power of cinema and art in general, as well as in the audience's ability and willingness to follow the director in his search for the ultimate purity of the heart. By the dawn of the new millennium, he'd tested that faith in the fires of the Holocaust, slavery, and D-Day, and won. Yet the moral victories of Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan still seem too easy, too tame, too simple; what is really at stake in these movies? What does Spielberg really risk in his deployment of collective history and the emotional catharsis he reaches? It was in his next project, Stanley Kubrick's inheritance, his greatest and most misunderstood work, that Spielberg truly put his legacy to the test, and in the process gave us the most emotionally fraught, ethically devastating, and philosophically ambitious American film of the young century thus far. Science fiction cinema, even at its most ponderous, almost always panders to contemporary ideas of the cool, which makes A.I.'s utter lack of concern with style all the more impressive, paying more visual attention to opaqueness and fragility. As I argued about Radiohead here, Spielberg is less concerned with how the future will change us than how it will not: how our massive technological advancements will reveal how small we are, and how frail and insubstantial are the guiding myths of the sort Spielberg had been pillaging up through Ryan. This didn't stop people from making fun of the ending, missing the melancholy falseness of little David's rapture; he got what he wanted, but it's nothing but a fleeting image, a momentary respite from mortality. So Spielberg, in Kubrick's name, gives us his 2001: a requiem for humanity, obsessed with who we've been and what we'll leave behind. The myths are finally put to the test, and they finally fail, but they're still as sadly immortal as a robot child in "the place where dreams are born."

2. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, Warner Bros, 1999)

But to step back to Kubrick...all of the master's films are wrapped up in questions of power and responsibility, tracing the insidious control of institutions and social rituals while implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) asking how the individual is to negotiate, physically, philosophically and morally, with these larger frameworks. This complex relationship, and the ambiguous conclusions that result, is front and center in celebrated mid-career works like Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange, but by his later films, these movements of oppression, corruption, struggle and surrender are increasingly disconnected from concrete institutions, or even tangible actions. Instead, the patriarchy is diffused into the atmosphere, an element of mise-en-scene and elaborate narrative structure more than plot twists (which remain ambiguous) and character motivations (practically opaque). If it's difficult to define the central tension, the core struggle, in Eyes Wide Shut, it's because the enemy is a claustrophobic force of will; as the title indicates, this makes it all the harder to see. It also places even more emphasis and weight on the individual search for truth and redemption, and what makes Eyes Wide Shut such a wrenching, devastating film for all its slow detachment is how utterly incapable its hapless protagonist, Tom Cruise's Bill Harford, is of making sense of his nocturnal journey or doing anything about the casual abuses of power he witnesses (and comes to embody himself). Nights teach hard lessons, but they seem to vanish like vapor in the morning air. Sex is a tantalizing carrot throughout, just as it was in Dr. Strangelove and The Shining, but Kubrick willfully keeps his protagonist and his audience alike from reaching orgasm: a phone rings, a servant steps in, a sacrifice is made in Bill's place. The shocked, uncertain place these movements reach in the audience mind is what Kubrick is after: far from the supposedly taboo blood-and-boobs-bludgeoning of something like Hostel, Kubrick's shock is an uncanny, watchful place, hazy and reflective like the endless mirrored surfaces covering the director's final film. The questions provoked are as difficult to define as the answers; like 2001 (which I can't seem to stop referencing), the experience of it is all.

3. The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 20th Century Fox, 1998)

The same year as Saving Private Ryan saw Terrence Malick return from his beloved wilds with his own take on war and the individual, seemingly born whole from that absorbing moment in Spielberg's film when the sound of rain falling on leaves morphs into the steady rat-a-tat of gunfire. "What's war in the heart of nature?" Jim Caviziel dreamily muses at the film's magisterial opening, as an alligator lazily slips beneath the water. Malick's war is both searingly visceral and quietly contemplative, pushing its myriad characters to the breaking point even as it frames their inner struggles with a strange, loving calm. I used the word "kaleidoscopic" above: The Thin Red Line is practically Joycean in its uncanny channeling of collective consciousness. C Company has a living, breathing identity all its own, and the individual soldiers are leaves to a tree. Their murmured voiceovers and flashes of memory merge into one poetic stream, a fractal of awareness and dreams. Malick's WWII has less to do with America and Japan than it does with the island of Guadalcanal, the film's true protagonist: overflowing with natural beauty in every frame, it contrasts severely with the impressionistic explosions and occasional brutal act of violence that the warriors bring to play. Fear, ambition, homesickness, and surrender are conveyed as if natural forces, surging and receding, taking our lives with them. The film is one long, slow unspooling of a thesis Sean Penn's quietly despairing sergeant reveals early on: "In this world, a man alone is nothing." Any other director would've turned that sentence into pure chest-beating nihilism, but Malick sees revelation, contentment, and even joy in that surrender of the piece to the whole. Character after character are shot as though fragments of the divine, living examples of the unknowable pattern of nature: internally chaotic, but collectively sublime. As with his follow-up The New World, Malick pointedly frames his story of restless (white) foreigners within images of rooted (non-white) natives, but the director's major thrust isn't political, or even historical. Like the wind rippling through the palms and high grass, The Thin Red Line reveals all such lines between us as thin things, evanescent and puny, awaiting full breakdown in the shellshocked crucible of war. That release can be painful, even fatal, but Malick has yet to falter in his reach for the transcendent, and even humanity's worst war is forgiven us in the shadow of a glorious tree.

4. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, Universal Pictures, 2001)

Eleven years on, it's hard to believe that the initial reaction to Lynch's definitive wave of the freak-flag centered on how "difficult" and "confusing" the film was, obsessing over gleaning some readily comprehensible pattern from the dazzling hyperlinked quilt of characters, forces, colors, murders, tensions, transformations, and dreams that make up the film. Lynch has never wielded the building blocks of narrative more expertly, constantly hinting at an all-encompassing answer just before gleefully jumping down another rabbit hole; transcendence, not coherence, is his goal. Our search for information is mirrored by Betty's own, along with the growing fear that some awful revelation is waiting behind the curtain: "He's the one who's doing it," one character realizes early on, uncovering some infernal Creator behind his nightmares. The string-puller is Lynch, of course, yet as the film proceeds, one gets a sense of responsibility deferred, some horrible guilt being hastily covered up in a stream of smiling faces and brightly lit palm trees. Hollywood eats its young, but first it makes them mad: Naomi Watts' true transformation from darling to diva comes not when Lynch's infamous blue box devours the film whole, but earlier, when Betty unleashes her mesmerizing acting ability in a meta-audition that drags her aggressive unconscious into the light. Director as malevolent dreamer, actress as murderous liar, both culpable for this lunatic cautionary tale, and every shot at redemption comes with a caveat. Betty and Rita, both amnesiacs in their own way, come together in Lynch's most passionately realized romance, only to be immediately reminded that it is all a recording, a tape, an illusion: they're living in a movie, after all, and the lights must eventually come up.What begins in the realm of endless possibility, a fever dream encompassing dozens of characters and scenarios, ends in Silencio, all storylines converged on a broken woman lost in the mirror-hall of her own delusion. By the follow-up (and spiritual sequel) Inland Empire, Lynch would next leave film behind entirely, giving us the digital Finnegans Wake to Mulholland's Ulysses, and so Mulholland increasingly feels like Lynch's farewell note to the medium, spiked with both rapture and horror, the last fluttering REM movements before we wake to a new world.

5. 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 2002)

Since the mid-1990s, America has been paying less and less attention to Spike Lee; this does us wrong as much as him, as his art has only improved with age. Do the Right Thing was his furious, brilliant line in the sand, and his work since zooms in on various residents of his national-microcosm New York neighborhood. These individual stories, grains of sand, inevitably explode outwards in all directions, seeming to swallow the world whole in their passionate quest for meaning, truth, justice, peace. Bamboozled unleashed the director's passion and rancor at their most unfiltered (and therefore exhilarating), but by the follow-up, Lee could no longer hide the strain, to the film's benefit. Few artists have ever produced a more emotionally wrenching tribute to middle-age exhaustion than 25th Hour, a passionate cry for help from a dog-tired city unsure of who it's been and what it will become. 9/11 hangs like a half-remembered nightmare over the story, whether dominating the view from a penthouse apartment adjacent to Ground Zero or quietly decorating a neighborhood bar in the form of a tribute to firemen lost. Indeed, one could tease an allegory of Bush's belligerently confused America out of this story of aggressive yet impotent men taking out their heartbreak on the world (and each other), but Lee's approach is always more collage than portrait. Witness Edward Norton's explosive direct address, which cuts deeper and more savagely than Do the Right Thing's similar roll-call of racist thoughts aired: Norton spews hate on the whole cast of Noo Yawk characters, from turbaned cab drivers to the "Gordon Gekko wannabes" rightfully under siege today, yet Lee is himself paying tribute to a city he impulsively loves even as he bitterly deconstructs its eternally chaotic melting pot. Norton's (self) hatred is the rotting nightmare, but Lee ends on a wistful dream: as the venerable Brian Cox drives Norton to prison, he envisions an entire Americana life for his doomed son, complete with small town, loving family, and a made-good second shot. But as those closing shots of Norton's swollen, bloody face indicate, 25th Hour is a more mature Fight Club: no longer able to outsource his despairing rebellion to an unreal Brad Pitt, Norton (like his director, his city and his country) is left alone to lick his wounds, as beaten but alive as the dog he saves at the film's beginning, 9/10 forever gone and exile in wait.

6. Femme Fatale (Brian de Palma, Warner Bros, 2002)

The divine comedy to Mulholland Drive's tragedy, Femme Fatale's utter refusal to take its glorious, endlessly self-referencing loop-de-loop of deception, doppelgangers and dreams seriously does not mean the film itself should not be taken very seriously. This is the usual rule with Brian de Palma, whose giddy obsessions with blood and breasts has never dulled his innate understanding of the medium, nor his ability to bend it to whatever ends he damn well feels like. By the new millennium, his style had passed through decadent and baroque, right through to sublime. Femme Fatale is a gorgeous hall of mirrors--misted glass and overflowing water provide the backdrop for a set of objects in motion, animate and otherwise, that are never what they seem even as they burst off the screen with such stunning physicality. I don't want to play spoiler, and simply recounting the plot would be the furthest thing from the point, so I'll just fixate on two scenes that capture the whole in all its shivery glory. The first is one of De Palma's classic split-screens, establishing and shattering space, piling as much pure Event on as possible, but this one's self-aware: a paparazzo (Antonio Banderas) snaps a shot of the titular femme (Rebecca Romijn), and as she ducks into church, gets mistaken for another woman, and runs for it, he busies himself uploading, printing and preparing his photo, the relentless forward motion of the film captured briefly, to be maintained and admired. This is De Palma's own image-making in action, his heroine's identity in constant flux even as she is memorialized in an instant. Of course, that's about as detached as the director gets. Later on, as the mutual seduction between the characters reaches its peak, Romijn offers a French stranger a striptease as Banderas jealously watches from outside. The camera ogles her body even as she teasingly refuses all of her audiences (including us) consummation; the Frenchman leaps at her to make the image real, but Banderas rushes to the attack, and their shadows dance on the wall like Plato's cave as Romijn laughs, giddy like her director with the casual ease of her power. It's horniness-as-philosophy, a film utterly seduced by itself even as it hangs back with a wry smile, constantly mocking its own hard-on. Thank Lucifer for dirty old men.

7. Waking Life (Richard Linklater, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2001)

When the cinematic histories of this era are written, may Richard Linklater be recognized, not as a stolid craftsman or a generational flag-planter, but as a master, as essential a voice as American cinema has ever seen. Ironically, it's his own art that stands in the way of such recognition: his focus on community, his ability to plant, grow and sustain bonds among the wandering groups of curious souls that make up his films, his devotion to an inclusive philosophy that, in itself, becomes a staggering philosophical statement. He may dull his own auterist gleam by taking on genre projects, but it's always remarkable how much humanist fervor he gleans from such potentially neutral material (Before Sunrise, Dazed and Confused, School of Rock). Waking Life, then, is his definitive play for individual recognition, a gorgeous, shape-shifting testament to the powers of communication and imagination. The resurrection of characters and scenarios from older films of his (especially Slacker) would seem to indicate that we're wandering through the dream-bound corners of the director's own mind, but the brilliantly mobile animation emphasizes the possibility wrapped up in every scenario, and the intuitive, free-floating approach Linklater takes to his Rolodex of material. The film's primal scene remains "The Holy Moment," a passionate discussion of Bazin's religious approach to the cinema: every event on screen is a moment of God's creation captured, and Linklater revels in his ability to capture even animated unreality with the same spiritual tug. As the film's boundless energy indicates, Linklater was on something of a creative roll at the turn of the century, completing another film that same year. Tape, shot on grimy video, concerns itself with objectivity, constriction and barriers (across space, time, and people). Consider them duelling philosophical statements from Linklater: Tape is the bitter waking reality, but in Waking Life's collective (and thereby eternal) dream, there is no handrail, as the breathtaking bookend images indicate: the only choice is to let go, and drift.

8. Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, Focus Features, 2002)

With his fourth feature, wunderkind Todd Haynes broke the code: Far From Heaven is a fervently deconstructive, intellectually committed statement that stops the heart and sparks tears from everyone it touches. It's detached and visceral, personal and collective; even as it keeps a respectful distance from its protagonist (Julianne Moore, resplendent, brilliant) and the environment through which she moves, it burns with such empathy that it leaves me gasping, every time. Its claustrophobic frames, bursting with overripe color, betray the utter unreality of the too-perfect '50s pattern, which makes the breaks in the wall all the more important: the unexpected flash of a camera shutter, a flask pulled out of a desk, a bruise that can't quite be covered up. With the perspective of time, the points Haynes makes about gender and sexuality, race and perception, are immediately familiar. Yet even as the director provides distant perspective, his drama emphasizes the unfamiliar and the new, breaking points and times of intense change. The overly gorgeous world, shot with alacrity by Edward Lachman, seems to dominate every frame, but Moore is caught up in the beauty of a Miro painting. Her new gardener/soul mate (Dennis Haysbert) comments that abstract art "picked up where religious art left off," pointing us toward some divine revelation by way of lines, colors, and shapes. Moore's Cathy Whitaker is charged by her director with finding her way to that revelation in spite of the lines, colors, and shapes bracketing her in; it's her struggle toward what seems to us, with the benefit of time, so obvious is the source of the movie's heartbreak. Haynes, himself gay, commits himself utterly to Cathy's story (an act of intense artistic empathy) rather than that of her newly out-of-the-closet husband (Dennis Quaid), yet he pays tribute to the latter's struggle in the opposite fashion. As Quaid follows another man up a set of cinema stairs, Lachman's camera hangs back. Like any good 1950s movie, Far From Heaven leaves a lot to the imagination, but Haynes' reticence is philosophical; he respects the man's privacy, leaving him to his new world while Cathy stands alone at the end (imperiled/empowered), waiting for her train to come in.

9. Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan, Touchstone Pictures, 2000)

My quixotic quest to redeem the savaged reputation of my beloved Night Shy is centered on The Village, a staggering masterpiece I've defended as such once or twice. I wouldn't be so committed to the cause, however, if he only had the one trick up his sleeve, and I'm astonished that this questioning, disturbing follow-up to the seismic The Sixth Sense has vanished so quickly from our collective memory. The decade since has seen a glut of superhero films, many eager to be seen as dark meditations on society, etc. without actually doing the heavy lifting: merely adding a layer of grit to your film's visual palette, or killing off all your secondary characters in increasingly sadistic fashion, does nothing to elevate your work to the level of philosophy or social statement. Unbreakable is the real thing, situating its superhero in the real, recognizable world and building the tension gradually, geared less around explosions than slow-burn revelations. Take, for example, the scene in which Bruce Willis' recalcitrant security guard decides to directly test his seemingly limitless strength. Night Shy patiently watches, camera unblinking, as our hero adds weight after weight to his workout bar, eventually adding on some cans of paint as well. Without any fast-cut montages or pump-up soundtrack, the scene becomes a quiet miracle, the possibility of infinity revealing itself before our eyes, mirrored in the astonished expression on his son's face. It's practically Bazinian, focused firmly on physicality and the potential of the non-enhanced flesh, harking back to an incredible early shot in which Willis comes to in a hospital, untouched by a train crash, as a body heaves blood and gives out in the foreground. Equally tactile, and even more spiritually resonant, is the film's central sequence: decked out in his signature poncho, Willis walks into a train station and slowly stretches out his hands. Smiling people brush by, and he catches the briefest glimpse of horrors they've committed. The furthest thing from misanthropy, this sequence emphasizes the true, terribly cinematic burden of the superhero: to bear witness, to see the ugliness beneath the surface, hidden in the corners of our collective soul. As the director's stunning-as-usual finale indicates, the guardians of good and evil may be powerful, but they may also be less free than any of us.

10. The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Coen, Working Title Films, 1998)

Take another hit and reflect: The Big Lebowski isn't so much a stoner movie as it is a stoned movie, indulgent and operating only by its own internal compass, but impossibly generous and immediately absorbed in everything and everyone it touches. "Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women, man," The Dude mutters at one point, inadvertently touching on one of the central totems of the Coens' exceptional career: they treat objects with fervent reverence, resulting in films defined by the menacing powers of space and physicality (Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, No Country for Old Men) and/or their characters' fetishes and obsessions, mirroring the brothers' own (Barton Fink, Fargo, A Serious Man). These films condemn and trap their protagonists in increasingly grim, calcified worlds, denying them that which they unconsciously seek, and so the brothers get regularly tagged as misanthropes. Yet nihilism "must be exhausting," and like Linklater's Dazed and Confused, another perpetually pot-hazed classic suffused with and elevated by the director's loving humanism, The Big Lebowski is all about the rueful affection sprawled out in every frame. The bemused attention paid to every character and scenario is almost parental. The Dude's keep-the-dream-alive slackerdom and Walter's purist nostalgia for Vietnam (and Judaism, and his ex-wife), contrasted with the pompous Mr. Lebowski and the constant background allusions to the first Gulf War, create a collage of generational warriors utterly, hilariously unable to communicate. Conversations build up, slip sideways, explode, fall apart. The goofy conspiracy at the film's center turns out to be full of fakes: the girl was never kidnapped, the money was never there, Lebowskis are endlessly confused for one another. So in the end, there's nothing to "learn" here, just an endless array of textures to surf. Roger Deakins films a bowling alley like it's the Vatican for a rent-shirking, White Russian-guzzling StonerPope. I've heard Lebowski compared to the Grail myth, yet the detritus of American pop culture (porn, cowboys, performance art, Branded, the fuckin' Eagles) that the film so lovingly curates speaks to an audience right at home in a state of perpetual decline, epitomized by the Dude, our anti-establishment Jesus (whom nobody fucks with). And He doth abide: rugs are pissed on, cars stolen and set on fire, money gained and lost, but fuck it, Dude. We'll all float on all right.

Good Will Toward None

2012-02-05T13:29:00.000-08:00

Eyes Wide Shut provokes many questions, few of them explicitly answered; perhaps the one that first comes to mind is “what’s with all the Christmas?” Idiosyncratic visual patterns, motifs, and doubles abound in Kubrick’s last (and perhaps best) film, but none more blatantly than the trees, tinsel, and harshly glowing lights than dominate nearly all of the movie’s claustrophobic interior spaces, from labyrinthine apartments to tightly packed cafes. It’s worth noting that Dream Story, the Arthur Schwitzler novella from which Kubrick borrowed the tale, makes no mention of the holiday. (It’s also worth noting that Eyes Wide Shut was actually released in summer, that same season as The Matrix and The Phantom Menace.) As The Shining demonstrated, Kubrick likes to call attention to where his interpretation of an adapted story differs drastically from that of the original author, and this obvious motif in a film built on repetition seems to demand attention. Why such merriness?

The immediate impact of Christmas in Eyes Wide Shut is the same as that of the colored wallpapers, the expensive artwork, the winding hallways, and the countless mirrors and other reflective surfaces: every place ends up looking alike, much as events, conversations and even characters seem to blur together over the course of the film. Eyes Wide Shut, even more than your average Kubrick project, places constant emphasis on environment, and frame after frame is defined by the contours of a room or a hallway. The effect is a subtle but constant constriction, a sense that space (and time, to escape) is closing in. The Shining was ultimately expansive (if also terrifying, and maze-shaped) in its possibilities, but Eyes Wide Shut feels more like a trap. As far as Tom Cruise’s Doctor Bill Harford wanders, he nevertheless seems to stay in place, eternally stumbling through awkward, too-close conversations, stalking sex through tomblike hallways like a man already dead, fingertips only brushing up against a different world. There’s always another cab, always another door to be opened for him, another problem to be paved over with the flash of a (doctor) bill; it’s always Christmas.

Also, colors. Frequent colors among Eyes Wide Shut’s cascade of holiday lights are red and blue, colors Kubrick emphasizes all over the place. The film’s grandest interiors (the Harford apartment, the Ziegler hall, and the Somerton mansion) are bedecked in red curtains and rouge-hued artwork, while the light shining in from the nebulous outside is almost always a piercing, eye-catching blue. The intensity of the colors, along with the prowling camerawork, dreamy cutting, and cavernous sets, give the lie to the popular notion that Eyes Wide Shut failed due to lack of visceral pull in the filmmaking, marking the film down as a cold, curveless exercise. One of the many great ironies in Eyes Wide Shut is that virtually every encounter except the sexual ones comes vividly to life, if not quite in the manner expected of most thrillers (or, indeed, most dramas). Following the director’s emphasis on self-contained environment is a script built around standalone scenes and set pieces: each new place brings with it a new variation on the theme (including the visual ones mentioned above), and so a complex picture is formed from bright, shiny colors.

Two examples spring to mind immediately, one with blue and the other with red. The intense, extended argument/confession session early on in the Harfords’ bedroom would be comparable to Cassavetes, except that Kubrick never makes much of an attempt to humanize (or even dignify) his central couple or their petty, wandering feud. In that regard, the better comparison might be Contempt, with the lamp in this case being the bathroom. Kubrick provides an intense bathroom sequence in each of his films, and Eyes Wide Shut (like Psycho, Twentynine Palms and Pulp Fiction) develops its own special relationship to the sanctum. Throughout the pot-hazed argument, the bedroom is enveloped in blazing red; Cruise practically blends in with the wallpaper. Yet the bathroom visible over his shoulder is a cold, unmistakable blue (see above), and the one aspect of the previous evening the self-obsessed couple doesn’t dissect is the unconscious woman Bill revived…in the bathroom, hidden away from the pretense and pageantry that Bill and Alice are now using as rhetorical ammunition. The fatal downfall of that other woman, a former beauty queen nicknamed Mandy, runs underneath the film’s petty drama of jealousy and betrayal, a constant reminder of the human consequences of all these games. Just as Milich’s daughter is molested in the back room and Mandy is later said to have died in a room “locked from the inside,” the crimes of Eyes Wide Shut are sexually stunted actions, abuse hidden behind longing and frustration.

The other conversation is just between boys, as Bill meets up with med-school buddy Nick Nightingale at the Sonata Cafe. As with every conversation in Eyes Wide Shut, there are plenty of ironies, misunderstandings, and slow-burn revelations to keep the audience busy, but the real story is being told visually. As Bill talks his old friend into helping him sneak into the Somerton orgy (a prank which may or may not end up costing Nick his life), they lean in close over the table, the candle casting harsh and strange lights on their faces. Their adolescent excitement is refracted as savage hunger, almost bestial; so many of the intentionally slow, almost medically detached dialogue scenes in Eyes Wide Shut communicate a great deal through the actors’ faces. Bill uses Nick to get into Somerton, where everyone is masked--identity itself, which Bill buttresses desperately throughout the film (“Just so you know I really am a doctor…”), stands still for desire and power. The ritualistic framework of the orgy and sacrifice at Somerton would seem to fit in with the Christmas motif as well, but notice that Victor Ziegler explicitly calls these movements out as phony, “staged.” He’s attempting to claim innocence in Mandy’s death, but he’s also unknowingly exposing the rot at the heart of all of the film’s endless rituals, observances, traditions, transactions, and blindly maintained habits. Whether these repetitions have to do with money, marriage or murder, they are all “staged.”

Bill wanders through conversations with stock lines and doofus comebacks (most notably asking a prostitute what she recommends in bed), driven to lie and cheat by the desires of the moment, without ever stepping back to ask the why of it all. The orgy sequence can be read as a blunt reframing of the film’s inaugural ball, in which the champagne-haze of idle flirtation covered up the base, acquisitive nature of all the movements and relationships involved. What is that sophisticated, cultured party but a doling out of sexual favors among anonymous empty suits? The rituals are empty, existing only for themselves, in need of a good sharp shock. Eyes Wide Shut’s final scene, after so much shock to the foundation, pitilessly surveys those routines snapping right back: our central couple wanders in a daze through a shopping mall, completing the agreed-upon celebration of Christmas, and the movie ends when the couple finally finds a meaningless habit they can agree on: “Fuck.” The film’s title says it all: we can wander easily through a gorgeous, eye-candy life, but soaking that all in requires us to ignore the messy, complicated things lurking in the corners. Christmas is a shiny, dancing bauble; like the film’s many abbreviated sexual encounters, it can only provide momentary respite. Another revealing line, as Doctor Bill handles a young patient: “Looking forward to Christmas? Does it hurt?”

Getting Radiohead Wrong

2012-01-25T06:00:00.000-08:00

I'm currently spending a lot of time waiting around; classes have begun and I'm on a strange, frenetic schedule that leaves me in limbo several hours a day. Thankfully, this allows me to plow through the lion's share of my reading before I get home, but it also leaves me plenty of time alone with my headphones, which is why I'm taking a break from writing about movies to write about music instead. And when I'm spending my early mornings and late afternoons sitting in dingy computer labs, surrounded by alienating architecture and people hurrying frantically with distressed looks on their faces, my thoughts (and iPod wheel) turn naturally to Radiohead's OK Computer, as the album seems to be set in exactly such surroundings.

Yet I wouldn't say that these songs are necessarily about these places. It's precisely those themes constantly ascribed to the band--technology, modernism, the innate alienation of our present/future/present-day futurism--that seem to me rather overblown and actually a more background aspect of the band's music than a central obsession. It's fair to say at this point that Radiohead is, if not the most popular band in the world, probably the most respected; they were supposed to be the next U2, and then briefly the next Talking Heads (from whom Thom Yorke & Co. ripped their band's name), but have now ended up being something more like my generation's Beatles. (See here.) A lot of the adulation they receive from critical and music-obsessive circles revolve around the band's seemingly epochal, modern-apocalypse qualities, and never more so than when it comes to OK Computer:

" 'Fitter Happier' encapsulates everything that Thom Yorke is raging against on this album: computers, conformity, fascism, emotional emptiness, pragmatism over idealism, and the cruelty of modern life." (cokemachineglow, here)

" 'Paranoid Android' told the future. When the song came out as the most unlikely of lead singles, the Internet consisted largely of AOL mailers and chatrooms, but Thom Yorke saw where things were heading. Now, 'unborn chicken voices' is a pretty solid descriptor of the daily web discourse, and 'the yuppies networking,' well, that speaks for itself. The voice software in the background haltingly pleading 'I may be paranoid, but no android' becomes a little less true and more desperate with each passing year. Please, could you stop the noise?" (Pitchfork, here)

"We used to let it roll over us, used to go back down to roll it up, and then we used to let it roll over us again: used to? Industrialization and departmentalization has alienated man from the basis of life in the form of Evian water bottles, but we want 'no alarms and no surprises,' so we remind ourselves that there's nothing we can do but to fall into a deep sleep, a deep hole that separates us more from the people around us. Our own identities are products that we buy at clothing and record stores, completely estranged from us, but apparently, there's nothing we can do, so we lull ourselves to sleep to cut us off from the very senses that keep us awake, hoping for 'no alarms,' and 'no surprises.' " (Treblezine, here)

Frankly, this is all pretty much bullshit. Yes, it's difficult to listen to Radiohead for long without noticing modern technological life as a motif, but that's all: it's a signifier, a mood-context, not the central character. Listening to OK Computer makes it perfectly clear that the band is both more and less ambitious than Brent DiCrescenzo would have it: "OK Computer simply is the anxious, self-important, uncertain, technologically overwhelmed 1990s." That's absurd; the basic sentiments of "Electioneering," "Karma Police," "Climbing Up the Walls," and especially "Exit Music (For A Film)" could have sprung from any decade of the 20th century, and the music is an amalgam of prog, glam, and pop ballad stylings rooted as much in the '70s as the '90s. The "film" in question in that last song is Baz Luhrmann's Leo vehicle Romeo + Juliet, a movie to which I'd prescribe Ritalin if I could: it's spazzy and hyperactive, and difficult to watch for any length of time without wishing it could just calm the fuck down for a second. Luhrmann's update of Shakespeare is insanely giddy in its adoption of modern-day textures, but again, that's all--textures, gauze filters, a brave-new-world layer on top of some very old problems. With OK Computer, Radiohead essentially pulled the same trick, only while R+J's inane delirium undercuts the hopeless tragedy of the story, Radiohead's tech-savvy wallpaper serves as a reminder to take futurism less seriously, not more. For all that the band's lyrics and (even more so) music evoke overloaded planes crashing, gleaming monorails zooming past decaying cities, and toxic chemicals leeching into our homes and brains, the emotions that these images signify are timeless, just as the band's music is at once otherworldly and instantly familiar.

OK Computer isn't really about paranoid androids and the dreadful dawn of the Internet; it's about anxiety, alienation, delusion, rage, and despair, and we'd be as blind as any of the album's weary protagonists to think that the late '90s had any sort of monopoly on these feelings. Modernism can make for a powerful language to express these sentiments, but as context, metaphor, and (at worst) symptom, never as the cause of all this confusion and heartache. Technology isn't the enemy, but nor is it a reliable ally: if I had to come up with a thesis statement for OK Computer, it wouldn't be "The future is killing us" so much as "The future can't save us." It's not that everything is changed, it's that nothing has changed, at least as far as the individual psyche and soul is concerned.

"Fitter Happier" is not aging well, but it would be outright unlistenable if Radiohead were using that iMac voice to sulkily rage against the machine. Listening to it again, what strikes me is how politely neutral, how horrifyingly nonjudgmental that robo-voice sounds as it rattles through a laundry list of cubicle-ready mantras. After all, the titular Computer isn't coming up with these words--the band is feeding the beast, and all it can do is obediently repeat. So much science fiction is geared around the horror of our machines adopting our sentience, but Radiohead seems more afraid of the opposite outcome: that our machines are simply a stainless-steel mirror, serving efficiently to expose our own ugliness and weakness. Again, they're context, architecture, style, setting: the "eyes in the cupboard" in "Climbing Up the Walls" may well refer to intrusive cameras, but the horror is that those eyes are being "shut," not opened. See no evil. For all its decidedly secular material, OK Computer is a thoroughly religious work--the end of nearly every song finds the band straining upward and outward for some sort of redemption, but finding only vapor trails, a series of beeps, a cheerfully empty chime. We are the future, and the enemy is us.

Two more curmudgeonly assertions, to hammer the point home. One: for all their lofty conceptual posturing, oddly unsettling arrangements, and artistically restless skin-shedding, Radiohead is pop, goddamnit. They may have become the darling of indie kids worldwide, but again, the Beatles made strange noises in the studio and released albums with obtuse concepts and confounding instrumentation, and were never any the less pop for it. OK Computer and Kid A were released on a major label that made a lot of money off this supposedly anti-cash cash cow, and Yorke never felt the need to punish himself for this the way fellow '90s prodigy Kurt Cobain did. OK Computer is overflowing with gigantic choruses ("Airbag," "Subterranean Homesick Alien"), catchy riffs ("Karma Police," "Lucky"), big sticky percussion ("Paranoid Android," "Climbing Up the Walls"), and spindly little melodies that refuse to leave your head ("Let Down," "The Tourist"). This is rock music, and big, self-important rock music to boot, but it is pop music too, and the Boomer rockists that embraced Radiohead as the Last Hope Of Our Rock And Roll (What With The Kids And Their Hippity-Hop And Keyboard Music) need to continue their decade-long, post-Kid A process of sitting the fuck down and shutting the fuck up. (Sorry, this is a thing of mine, about the Boomers, and their musical tastes, and how much they suck and need to die and take the '60s with them. Ask Bob Dylan, he will almost certainly agree.)

The reason I'm relentless about Radiohead's pop status is that pop music, as a rule, tends to be a uniting force, articulating universal feelings in an ear-catching language and shooting for that sweet spot between timeliness and timelessness. Rockism, on the other hand, is more often a dividing force: mod against rocker, punk against dinosaur, Nirvana against the world, Blur against Oasis, guitar against turntable, and always, always, young against old. For all rock n' roll history is full of proud statement-making, devoted and devotional pop always seemed to me to have the broader perspective. That Radiohead has been embraced as the flagship band of the digital age, while simultaneously praised for going after That Evil Technology (see the pattern here?), should be indication enough that the fervent emotions they arouse in listeners involve something more than generational recognition. The strange but accessible sounds they traffic in are experimental music gone pop, and so Radiohead actually ends up sounding less of its era than, say, Boards of Canada. (Whom I adore.)

Two: OK Computer's protagonists are hideously unreliable, and so little they say should be trusted, or taken literally. Thom Yorke has insisted for years that "I wish it was the sixties/I wish I could be happy" in "The Bends" is a joke, and one aimed squarely at the song's protagonist and by extension Yorke himself. Yorke's twisted sarcasm, irony, and (especially) self-deprecation are in abundant evidence throughout OK Computer, and sharp asides like "Don't get sentimental, it always ends up drivel" and "This is my final fit, my final bellyache" bounce back not onto society, maaaan, but onto the speaker, and the ghosts and delusions climbing up the walls of his skull. For all its reputation as a grand societal lament, OK Computer is a profoundly subjective work. How could anyone listen to "Lucky" or "Subterranean Homesick Alien" and trust what these guys have to say about anything?

Ultimately, the album seems to me to be more about personal insanity than global malady, and the images of modernism and technology that flit by are just leaves caught in a stream of sickness. The lines everyone remembers from "Paranoid Android" are "kicking squealing Gucci little piggy" and "the yuppies networking," but it's worth noting that the song only kicks into crazed metal overdrive when somebody commits the ultimate sin: he forgets the protagonist's name. Identity loss is a recurring theme throughout OK Computer, but it's not that the camera can actually steal your soul. It's that the Matrix cannot tell you who you are. The titular "Airbag," the jets in "Exit Music" and "Let Down," and the "pretty house" and "pretty garden" in "No Surprises" are not menacing creatures. They just aren't your friends, either, and yet most terrifying line on an album full of them is this one: "We are friends 'til we die."

Radiohead is often accused of being cold, unfeeling, and misanthropic, and while there's certainly material to support that claim, OK Computer is above all else an act of supreme empathy, slipping into strangers' skins and glimpsing the world briefly through their eyes. That's why the lyrics so often seem like streams-of-consciousness, jumping from fragment to fragment. Witness the non sequitur "Bring down the government, they don't speak for us" in "No Surprises." Taken on its own, the line's a real head-slapper, didactic and pandering and dumb. But swept up in the song's stream of hopeless, numbed mantras, the line makes sense as a dispatch from a decaying mind, a stray spark of neurons that exists to point out its own feebleness. After all, the next line is hardly revolutionary: "I'll take a quiet life." Look at the album's title. Computers still require us to say "OK" to them; they don't yet determine any course of action on their own. We surrender, ourselves; we surrender ourselves. Jump back an album earlier to find Yorke at his most bitterly honest: "You do it to yourself, you do, and that's what really hurts." Radiohead never lets us off the hook for our own follies, but sympathizes with our sinful hearts anyway. (Again, it's a very religious album.)

Far from being a didactic screed, OK Computer is defined by tensions and confusions, waves rising and receding, some walls collapsing while new ones are erected: in other words, humanity still being humanity even as progress marches forward. Lyrically, the primary struggle is appropriately one of movement and stasis, and the possibilities and pitfalls inherent to both. "Subterranean Homesick Alien" offers the possibility of space travel and sublime perspective, but ultimately abandons its hero to claustrophobic subjectivity, "watch[ing] your feet for cracks in the pavement." The aforementioned "Exit Music" releases its escapist couple into the atmosphere with a defiant, generational cry of "We hope that you choke," but then "Let Down" takes over, a soaring, tearjerking reminder of how easy it is to travel all your days and feel like you haven't moved an inch. That jet ride crashes down in "Lucky," after which our hero finds himself wandering disoriented in suburbia as "The Tourist," never heeding the cries to "slow down." OK Computer doesn't really tell stories, but nor does it ever plunge into full abstraction (that would wait until Kid A). Instead, Yorke strings together various fragments, wandering half-thoughts, and broken mantras into representations of mindsets and partial images, creating more of a collage than a single portrait. "Paranoid Android" is probably the best example of this technique, lurching between pathetic cries for release and snarls of misanthropic rage on a dime's turn, until I end up more afraid of the singer himself than the Orwellian deathscape he's ostensibly describing.

Rarely does Yorke draw concrete conclusions, preferring to leave his protagonists stranded with their hopeless dreams and paranoid fantasies. This sounds cruel, but he usually makes clear that they deserve it: this is an album about human failings and human nature, and technology seems to be more aiding and abetting that nature than actively changing it for the worse. Only "Electioneering" names its target and allows the singer to stand outside it, which is why it remains the album's weakest link (although it does further the theme of moving/standing still: "When I go forward, you go backward, and somewhere we will meet.") "Karma Police" hints at a more dire, all-encompassing foe, but Yorke's perspective seems to switch from plaintiff to prosecutor to victim throughout the trial; as the title and the closing howl of "For a minute there, I lost myself" indicate, the song has more to do with righteous fantasies of judgment and punishment than with their actualization. "We're still on the payroll" is one of the album's many lines that implicate the singer in the inhumane systems he's railing against (see also "the head of state has called for me by name" and the various "I am" mantras in "Climbing Up the Walls"). Interestingly, the rare lines that hit home as anthemic statements of will are the record's most accepting, serene moments, hinting that Radiohead's redemption may hinge more on letting go of delusion than escaping any objective terror. "I'm all right, I'm just uptight," "One day, you'll know where you are," "Hey, man, slow down."

Sonically, the album concerns itself with colliding the organic and the digital head-on, much as Animal Collective's equally generation-defining Merriweather Post Pavilion would do near the end of the subsequent decade. While that album hid the Collective's stock-in-trade fever dreams of isolation and insanity beneath layers of joyful noise, OK Computer's sonics defy the album's miserabilist reputation, bursting at the seams with impossibly creative arrangements and dramatic shifts in dynamics even as Yorke bewails everything and everyone. Those distorted guitars kicking off the album are the very sound of revving engines, that start-and-stop bass a distant, decaying signal; if OK Computer is about computers eating our souls, why do all these machine-sounds sound like the machines are failing? More importantly, if Radiohead hates technology so very much, why are all these sounds so awesome? By Kid A, the band would be chopping and screwing Yorke's distinctive voice, tucking it behind keyboards and under drum loops, but one of Computer's driving tensions is juxtaposing the singer in all his golden-throated glory against all that ferocious full-band noise. The climaxes of "Airbag," "Karma Police," and "Climbing Up the Walls" finds Yorke dissolving into his band's explosive energy; you could cast it as the machines winning, or as a gorgeous sonic synergy. Either way, really: OK Computer stands firm in its refusal to give up its ghosts, even as Yorke's voice is layered and redoubled throughout (see the astonishing production in "Exit Music") to emphasize the sensation that he's speaking from inside the listener's head.

Even as the jazzy arpeggios and white-hot solos of "Paranoid Android" seem to spiral Yorke down to fuzzed-out oblivion, there's simply too much fierce joy there to be denied. Guitarist/genius Johnny Greenwood has always seemed most at home playing around with the white noise underlying (and undercutting) Yorke's ghost-in-the-machine antics; even as the singer decries his world, Greenwood constantly gives him a new one to inhabit, mobile and unpredictable and thrillingly alive. Outside the band, Greenwood is best known for his impossibly suspenseful score for There Will Be Blood, a film that treats the past much as OK Computer treats its present: as raw material used as ballast to elevate and sharpen universal themes, though all epochal trappings fall away the closer the artist gets to individual darkness.

And "individual" is the key word, because if there's one emotion that bleeds through every cut-up lyric and howling guitar wave on OK Computer, it is loneliness. Yorke begins the album "born again" in airbags, neon signs, and a fast German car, and can never find any better company than that. OK Computer's cars, planes, cameras, and computers fail, not as tools but as spiritual idols; they can provide the better life satirized in "Fitter Happier" and "No Surprises," but they can't salvage the heart (full up like a landfill). That heart is broken and bleeding, reaching out in every song, only to be turned away by a world whose definition of "progress" is increasingly suspect. The album is a full-length cry for help. Upon its release, many compared it to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, which made clear by its closing tracks "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse" that its cosmic, psychedelic sweep was contained in the cracked brain of a madman. Radiohead has mined not a little pathos from the journey their art has taken: years after the open wound of "Creep," they abandoned easy identification altogether with the intimidating, steel-wrapped monolith called Kid A. In between lies OK Computer, one of pop's definitive transition albums; caught between grandeur and alienation, empathy and emptiness, it jets off from a world it can't connect with, but can't stop itself from glancing back through the reinforced plastic spaceship window.

Fine, They're Awesome

2012-01-14T15:53:00.000-08:00

The Golden Age, as a concept, pisses me off, even as my wild-eyed-acolyte approach to art would seem to point me in exactly that romantic direction (Midnight in Paris spoke perfectly to my beleaguered little heart). As a proud Millennial, I get especially agitated by the baby boomers’ casual domination of American pop culture, particularly over questions of when that pop culture hit its peak. As this excellent-as-usual Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic points out, Golden Ages in pop music tend to settle during the teenage years of any given generation; cinema tends to hook its claws in a few years later, when twentysomethings have the disposable income to support independent theaters and (more importantly) act all pretentious about it. Yet American cinema, even the scratched-lens underground variety, carries an almost innately populist streak; no matter how much of the best of Europe and Asia we absorb, our national culture always seems to spiral back toward the native Everyman eventually.

Those transitional periods, however, can be the most fascinating of all, which is why the 1970s are widely agreed upon as the peak of modern (as in, postwar) American filmmaking. All the weird, wild ideas we stole from the French New Wave collided head-on with our national weakness for the meat-and-potatoes pleasures of simple genre storytelling, resulting in an unprecedented wave of creativity and financial success that obliterated boundaries between high and low art to the point where by the '90s, Quentin Tarantino was able to build a terribly '70s-nostalgic career around pretending those barriers had never existed. (Of course, the aforementioned Nouvelle Vague had borrowed a lot of its groundbreaking framework from American popcorn flicks in the first place; anyone who chews out the French for their supposedly elitist snobbery should remember that blunt, direct American artists from Hemingway to Dinosaur Jr. have found ecstatic welcome in Paris. Everyone is fascinated by the unfamiliar.) Much as I disdain such era-bound veneration, and as much as I insist that modern Hollywood has produced at least as many masterpieces as the glory days (post forthcoming, and see also here), I certainly admit that there was something in the air that decade. Still, we shouldn't allow such vibrant, tactile movies to be mummified for the sake of the all-knowing canon; these flicks were designed to cut through the cobwebs moldering on Hollywood's sacred cows, and we should engage with them as still-living works. Here are ten attempts at doing so:

1. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, Universal Pictures, 1975)

For all the automatic respect that its name commands, I still have found difficulty convincing people that Jaws, more than just a great popcorn flick or a fun Saturday night, is one of the definitive masterpieces of American cinema. Indeed, I have the same problem selling Steven Spielberg, not as a master craftsman or beyond-savvy industrialist (though he is certainly both), but as a emotional and philosophical visionary on par with his idol Stanley Kubrick. A.I. Artificial Intelligence made that case clear to those with eyes and hearts wide open, but his first masterpiece cements Spielberg's credentials at a more intimate level, using a cut-off island as an excuse to zoom in on the thoughts, triumphs and fears of the characters he loves so obviously and unabashedly. Jaws opens on a bunch of drunk twentysomethings on a beach, but then one of them gets pulled under shrieking, and the day is left to the middle-aged career man Chief Brody, left alone to negotiate between a bitterly entrenched older generation and a blissfully unaware younger one. All around him, old men and children run and laugh and swim, but he cannot tear his gaze from the water, eyes flicking from a dog with a stick to a couple splashing around to a kid diving in back to...a stick, floating alone in the water. It's indelible images like these that make Jaws so often feel more like Eisenstein than The Poseidon Adventure, but Spielberg isn't after any intellectual point here: he is simply horribly in tune with the fear and tension animating half of his movie's frames, and thankfully equally in the groove with the other half. The latter includes a rare oasis of calm aboard the Orca, as the three main characters swap scars and war stories (though the Chief has none of his own and can only stand back, awkwardly smiling, again caught between generations). Robert Shaw's psychopathic Quint recounts a lethal shark attack on the sinking U.S.S. Indianapolis, the ship that delivered the Hiroshima nuke. "We delivered the bomb," he finishes, and they sit in silence, caught between past and future bloodletting, postwar America dead and gone, an uncertain tomorrow waiting in the waves.

2. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, Paramount Pictures, 1978)

The films of Terrence Malick (five in forty years; his work is the finest testament I know to the art of taking your time) push the powers of descriptive language to their breaking point. Although I've taken more than one shot at capturing his greatest masterpiece to date, The New World (see here and also here), his earlier high-water mark Days of Heaven leaves me with the worst of cliches: you really just have to see the thing, witness the unbound glory of its creation, fall into its hypnotic rhythms, get lost in its tangled grace. I understand why it took Malick twenty years to follow it up: what can stand up to a film that brings to your knees? The vast, tidal emotions (hope, awe, regret, despair) that Malick brings to life are rarely tethered to events or even characters, seeming instead to float along a slow-moving river, fly ecstatically through the open blue skies above a chugging train, hum through a beguiling sea of corn. Like all of Malick's films, the story at Days of Heaven's center is about both the purblind folly and human inevitability of escapism, the eternal desire to start over and the impossibility of ever really doing so. A young couple abandons the city after an act of willful, explosive violence, only to find a more slow-burning version of the same out in the country; they pretend they're siblings, but quiet fires of rage and jealousy overturn both lie and truth. We see all this through Linda Manz's eyes, giving perhaps the all-time great child performance on screen: tough and unsentimental, she's also painfully naive and oddly uncurious about the maelstrom of events swirling around her. So much of the story seems incomplete or viewed from a distance, but the final shot of her wandering alone down a traintrack would seem to confirm that the film is half-memory and half-dream; like The New World, it's a poetic tribute to a dead world, shot through with regret and a deep, aching love. Nature observes our roiling discontents with a quiet, rueful amusement, caught up as it is in its own unknowable conflicts. As with the philosophical soldiers in The Thin Red Line and the spiritually questioning family in The Tree of Life, all we can do is try to balance nature and grace the best we can.

3. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, Paramount Pictures, 1974)

While most of Roman Polanski's films fit familiar categories (horror, mystery, period piece), they never sit as comfortably as those labels would suggest. Chinatown especially hits the genre beats with almost embarrassing perfection; it's clear that Polanski can juggle the basic precepts of framing and lighting, suspense and catharsis, in his sleep. It's what troubles that sleep that transforms also-rans into masterpieces: the hint of ugliness beneath the excitement, emptiness inside the intrigue, real injustice behind manufactured drama. It's too easy to refract Polanski's biography through his movies (a near-universal sin among reviews of his brilliant The Pianist), but suffice to say that the man knows a thing or two about unhappy endings, and Chinatown's capper ranks among the grimmest in cinematic history. What makes that famous curtain fall so cutting and unforgettable is the perfectly crafted free-fall that precedes it: a noir story told in bright daylight, with its savage mysteries appropriately hidden in plain sight. For all that Polanski makes able use of the genre's vividly-drawn archetypes, identity loss is his abiding motif, found not only in the infamous "sister, daughter" scene but also in the property bought with dead peoples' names, the business cards Jake steals, the villain he repeatedly meets in photos before encountering him in person, and the girl whose future will undoubtedly be a sad mirror of her dead mother's. Her monstrous father/grandfather covers her eyes, and I think of Jake cracking the case by finding those glasses at the bottom of a pond; we can see or not see, but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. Polanski's invocation of shady land deals and theft of public water fits right into a paranoid, disillusioned American decade, but Polanski sets his fable in the 1930s for a reason; like The Parallax View (see below), Chinatown is ultimately more concerned with timeless, subjective evil than epochal, objective corruption. The movie's own Water-gate is an empty signifier, like the title itself, the only thing that ever seems to break Jake's smartass smile. It's a token of doom, eternal and unbeatable: the movie's full of sunlight, but the hero slouches off at the end, not into the sunset, but into pitch black.

4. Annie Hall (Woody Allen, United Artists, 1977)

Woody Allen's made a well-earned comeback with the aforementioned Midnight in Paris, just in time to see the romantic comedy, the modern incarnation of which he practically invented, fall completely to pieces. Even naming the titles of the seemingly endless reams of meet-cute garbage makes me gag, and anyway, none of them deserve to be in the same sentence with Annie Hall. See, there, I'm getting all Golden Agey myself; but then, Annie Hall is all about nostalgia, preserving harried, silly, frenetic, beautiful moments in amber and then jumbling them all up, emblazoning Woody's impossibly creative OCD even as time passes him by (Woody on rock music: "Did it achieve total heavy-osity?"). Annie Hall begins with Woody's famous direct address, regaling the audience with his famous depressing jokes about life, but then his shoulders slump and he admits the real source of his creative drive: "Annie and I broke up. " The movie that follows finds him gradually, painstakingly, giving up that white-knuckled grip, and if he can never quite loosen up (who'd want him to?), at least he gets a better sense of what makes him happy. That includes: losing a lobster behind the fridge, near-death-by-horrendous-driving, screwing in a red lightbulb to spice things up in bed, talking about art, obsessing about art, obsessing about sex, obsessing about the Kennedy assassination, obsessing, above all, about death, even as he surrounds himself with many good reasons not to fear the reaper. (He also, of course, loves mocking California. It is easy, bless your astrology-fed hearts.) Perhaps my favorite of this shower of moments comes early on, when Woody breaks off insisting that Annie never stop singing to ask for a first kiss, so they can get it out of the way and digest their food better. It's to his credit as an artist and a human that such twittery registers not as sociopathic, but as unutterably sweet (as well as hilarious): Woody bends proper chronology only in dogged pursuit of some painful dream of honesty. Yet it's that singing that stops the movie in its tracks, in sheer, naked awe of Diane Keaton, lovely and lovable, letting loose all her unbearable honesty. This, after that classic Thanksgiving-narcolepsy story that absolutely refuses to go anywhere: how could a dedicated time-meddler not fall in love with a woman who can stop time dead?

5. Carrie (Brian de Palma, United Artists, 1976)

The notorious style of Brian de Palma was born in that moment in the original Willy Wonka, when the titular joker is calmly watching Augustus Gloop slide slowly up that giant pipe. "The suspense is terrible," Wonka murmurs while munching on his surroundings. "I hope it lasts." Yet no one could say that De Palma is detached from his giddy, overripe orchestrations: nothing succeeds like excess, and De Palma has spent his gloriously filthy career stuffing his sleazy would-be B-movies full of as many stylistic tricks as they can possibly hold. Carrie's dizzying pans, exquisite sound design, brutal shocks, and yes, almost unbearably extended moments of suspense all attest to a master filmmaker at work, but one who cannot bear to step back from his dizzying edifices. He just hopes it lasts. De Palma's innumerable critics have thereby trotted out the "all style, no substance" charge with each successive release. Many of his obsessive cult-fans have fired back that he quite properly doesn't know the difference between the two, but even that is missing the mark, feeding into what Eric Hynes calls out here (as part of an excellent De Palma symposium from the good folks at Reverse Shot) as the "I can't help being me" school of spoon-fed auterism. De Palma certainly does know the difference, and in those cases where the producer-provided "substance" isn't worthy of the title (The Untouchables, Mission to Mars), he goes for broke on the style, salvaging watchability at the least. So it's all the more remarkable that Carrie, which could've easily been a cult classic alone (not that there's anything wrong with that), practically vibrates with empathy. The gym-shower opening is classic surface De Palma, all dreamy atmospherics, crazily athletic camera maneuvers, and (of course) a taste of softcore, but when that blood begins to flow down the titular heroine's thigh, it's disturbing but poetic, mesmerizing but painful, ultimately empowering Carrie even as the scene hovers on the edge of exploitation. So goes the film: De Palma never strays far from his instinctive cruelty, but as with his equally wrenching Blow Out, nor does he flinch from the pitiless aftermath of those cruelties. The material (wacky religious mom, pre-sorority bitches, a dreamy date to the prom) is tawdry, but the emotions quake and surge and burn through the screen. That gotcha ending is a prank, to be sure, but De Palma's dreams linger on long after we jolt awake.

6. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, Columbia Pictures, 1976)

As Hugo, coming in the wake of such cinephilic orgies as The Aviator and Shutter Island, made perfectly clear, Martin Scorsese is utterly lost down the rabbit hole of his own nostalgia. To be fair, it was a generally backwards-glancing year in cinema (The Artist, Super 8, Film Socialisme, Midnight in Paris), but returning to Taxi Driver reminds me exactly how hypnotic and restlessly gorgeous Scorsese's work once was. It's all crawling subjectivity and claustrophobic inner space, a bitter and violent reaction to the cold disappointments of the Outside. Unlike your average Polanski protagonist, Travis Bickle is perfectly capable of stepping outside his apartment, but it's only to create his own mobile shell in his neon-bright taxi. "Mobile" is the key word: like Mean Streets before it and Goodfellas after it, Taxi Driver is always on the move, prowling around every shady corner in "drop dead" era NYC, picking heartrendingly lovely faces out of the crowd, brushing its fingertips against salvation before giving in and returning to the porno theater. Bernard Herrmann's score lends the film a feverish, hallucinatory aura, luring you in with lonesome horns before hitting you with a fiendish, clattering rhythm, as if gritty reality is rapidly melting into the fantasies, desires, and failures that Travis so painstakingly records in his diary. Like the rain-washed lights glimpsed through Travis' windshield, Taxi Driver composes a pointillist portrait of New York, gathering scraps and fragments from every poet, pusher and politician that needs a cab. Yet the picture is confused and heartbreakingly incomplete: like so many of the damaged protagonists of these '70s classics, Travis never learns much. He fitfully tries on various styles, attitudes, and people, unwilling to face the inner emptiness that he can never "organazize." Scorsese obviously has sympathy for this possessed weirdo, but he feels no obligation to stick to his protagonist's point of view: witness the rightfully famous "unmotivated" shot that finds Michael Chapman's camera drifting away from the pathetic sight of Travis being rejected, focusing its sights instead on an empty corridor. This New York is full of such empty spaces, taunting and defining its "walking contradiction" of a hero. Again, this was a rearview-mirror kind of year for the movies, but as Taxi Driver's piercingly ambiguous ending indicates, there's some power left in the ghosts hovering just over your shoulder.

7. Eraserhead (David Lynch, Libra Films, 1977)

With apologies to the great John Waters, David Lynch's instant-classic debut here stands in for all the decade's many weird, wonderful statements in cult cinema. It remains timeless, in large part because for all of Lynch's goofy, surreal humor, it feels less like an extended prank than any cult film I know: Eraserhead is seriously spooky, less because of its grotesqueries than its blank spaces and stubborn mysteries. Its shabby tenements and desolate cityscapes seem practically vibrant when compared to its petty, hysterical residents (that stubborn elevator near the beginning seems more alive than the entire X family), and dreams that begin as harmless escapism take some seriously disturbing turns, until perspective itself gets blurred. As Lynch would all but explicitly ask in Mulholland Drive, if film is a dream, who's the dreamer? The obvious answer would be the director himself, but Eraserhead still feels like a bravely intuitive, unconscious work, containing entire universes at 89 minutes. Like any worthwhile cult icon, the film gladly loses itself down rabbit holes, building up bizarro set pieces with such alacrity that it's easy (and fun) to lose track of the slowly unfolding whole: the lady in the radiator, the sex scene that dissolves into ectoplasmic milk, the most awkward and surreal meet-the-parents dinner ever conceived...all good fun! Yet there's an almost unconscious feel of tragedy to the entire spectacle, of diseases incurable and petty lives stretching on to nothingness. The apocalypse that may or may not consume the whole sick world at the end comes as a relief, but without the misanthropic grandstanding of the likes of Melancholia. Instead, Eraserhead refracts the slow, stubborn decay of the industrial Philadelphia neighborhoods Lynch haunted in the mid-1970s through a giddy array of fantasies, non sequiturs, and brain-searingly strange images. The soundtrack, too, conveys the ghosts of a black-steel world, all oppressive hums and sudden shrieks. Lynch lived in this environment for years, often homeless, painstakingly crafting a brainchild as horrifying and mesmerizing as the film's infamous mutant-baby. The director must have gotten tired, and slipped into a few daydreams of his own; like any great artist, he had the sense to give his mind's trippiest folds tangible life.

8. Nashville (Robert Altman, Paramount Pictures, 1975)

Sound, sound: Nashville hits you in the ears first and foremost. The country music is secondary to the industrial hum in the background, the endlessly overlapping conversations, the burbles and murmurs and roars that add up to a complete picture, leaving the story and visuals to happily flop all over the place. Post-Watergate ennui suffuses the whole project, but no one theme or character can exert control over this oblong collage of a film; it's not even clear that Altman's in charge here. The workhorse director had turned counterculture in recent years (most notably with McCabe & Mrs. Miller), but like Woody Allen, he never quite got comfortable with the revolution, and by the mid-70s, he had a cannier idea than most of where the whole parade was headed. So he gave it one last spectacle, one last closing show--in country music city, no less! (Boomer culture in general would seem to agree: witness The Last Waltz.) Vehicles chime and wheeze, curling their slow, confused way through the city's bizarre architectural hybrids, caught somewhere between the antebellum South and modern Hollywood. Appropriately, Altman's playing around the edges of sound and performance isn't a Godardian bridge-burning (or even a De Palma-style colossal prank) so much as an intuitive, improvisatory channeling of the disparate energies at hand, collaboration as a rage against a dying light. By the end, Nashville is less a story to listen to than a library to browse, peeking around corners, catching shards of conversation and glimpses of bodies in motion. Of course, this aura of lived-in reality is necessarily a fake: Altman's multitrack recording (mixed down to four-track magnetic recording) was a remarkably intricate, not to mention expensive, piece of engineering for a independent film, foreshadowing the obsessive sound design that would soon consume all of Hollywood. (I need only mention Star Wars, and a dozen iconic sounds fill your ears.) Nashville is ultimately an act of journalism, and like all the best journalism, it eventually gets out of its subject's way, basking in all the messy glory. If we must have a Great American Film, let it be this.

9. The Parallax View (Alan Pakula, Paramount Pictures, 1974)

This is it: no way out. There is art that dances around the edges of the abyss, hinting at darkness while assuring the audience that the nightmare can be outfought--or at least outrun. Then there is art that strips away every frill and pretension and dives right into the heart of horror, staring directly into the void, waiting for it to stare back. The Parallax View is one of these; all the evanescent, free-floating unease of Chinatown, Taxi Driver, and Eraserhead streamlined and jet-fueled in a one-way rocket descent into the paranoid heart of hell. Hyperbolic, you say? Then consider yourself lucky to have never witnessed Parallax's harrowing centerpiece, a subliminal slideshow that melts words (LOVE, GOD, COUNTRY, ENEMY) and images (rural farmhouses, cooling pies, Fidel Castro, lynchings) into a sublime, shattering death of the ego. Director Alan Pakula's savage technique is ostensibly aimed at good ol' boy protagonist Joe Frady (Warren Beatty, who else?) whose attempt to infiltrate a shady assassin syndicate goes horribly wrong, but as with Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow the previous year, this time-stopping montage equally attacks the audience, leaving us quivering just past the edge of consciousness. I had considered slotting A Clockwork Orange in somewhere on this list, until I realized that The Parallax View's primal scene--hell, the movie as a whole--cuts far deeper than any Ludovico treatment ever could. So put down your dog-eared copy of Watchmen and get into this whispered refusal to save society from itself, 'cause Rorschach tests are, in their own way, comforting--they grant us some power, even subjective and abstract, over our surroundings. The final moments of The Parallax View grant us no such primacy: the grimly anonymous Commission delivers its official endorsement of see-no-evil society, and vanishes into the air. The Parallax View is the middle child of Pakula's Political Paranoia trilogy (bookended by Klute and All the President's Men), but Watergate proves to be just one snapshot in the director's all-consuming montage. The most telling word that pops up in that aforementioned horrowshow is ME--it's the identity itself, more than the body politic, that Pakula is after, and as the repeated shots of comic-sized Thor indicate, fantasy may always be the self's only refuge from a world out to eat it alive.

10. Halloween (John Carpenter, Compass International Pictures, 1978)

But, y'know, I don't want to end on that note. It may seem perverse to turn to a film like Halloween for comfort. This is, after all, unquestionably one of the scariest films ever made, a 90-minute trap snapping shut whose seismic impact on horror filmmaking is outstripped only by the eternal Psycho. Indeed, Carpenter is very aware of whose shadow he's standing in: Halloween protagonist Jamie Lee Curtis is the daughter of Psycho starlet Janet Leigh, she of the shower and the shrieking strings. That's the level at which Halloween feels like comfort food to me--less a scare machine than a supreme act of craftsmanship, a simultaneously bold and reverent continuation of the cinematic tradition. Like his subsequent horror classics The Fog and The Thing (as with Carpenter's more verb-centric Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape From New York, these titles have no higher ambition than to describe), Halloween is full of such shivery visual delights that fear is constantly supplemented by awe. A light snapping on through a window pane, a sinister tracking shot gliding along a schoolyard fence, a ghostly, bespectacled sheet floating through a doorway...as all these shots (from master cinematographer Dean Cundey, of Jurassic Park fame) indicate, Halloween concerns itself endlessly with barriers and distance, uneasy moments of loneliness and the raw horror of invasion. The sociological concepts so many were eager to unearth still seem beside the point. Where a modern popcorn standard like The Dark Knight bends over backwards to shoehorn some social relevance into its inherently cartoonish villain, John Carpenter keeps his focus on his nightmare's rough, loping movements and obsessive stares, mirrored in the audience's eyes crawling over each sharp-angled, beautifully lit set, waiting for the next cut (whether in film or skin). Carpenter is one of film's great visual navigators, and Halloween is a piece of cartographic poetry, a visual love letter to the suburbs. Yet these tranquil open spaces inevitably begin to close in, and the imperiled teenagers are caught, in a bedroom, in a fogged-up car, and finally in a closet, as a new generation's psycho cuts his way through every last barrier. Carpenter's auterism is always tempered by the familiarity of his generic material, but he can't resist his baroque touches: Halloween's soundtrack is as classic as the film's visuals, eerie and hypnotic and unforgettable. Of course, Carpenter wrote it himself.