Satire, Adaptation, and My Dumb Mistakes

One of the challenges in talking about critical analysis of films and the ideological content they display, is how people view satire. You may argue that Jurassic Park or the Star Wars Prequels are satire, and your interlocutors will grumble. After all, we know what satire is - it's loud and outrageous. It's Gilbert and Sullivan or the "Scary Movie" franchise. In real "satire", every line is comical and non-believable, and it has as much understatedness as the Something Awful Political Cartoon Thread.

I know this attitude is wrong, but I can lazily fall into, and why I flopped on watching a "serious" movie: John Le Carre's "The Looking Glass War."

Check out that grim poster and that IMDB page. It's a dry espionage thriller. And all the European talking heads giving dry dialogue give no other impression than that these players are somewhat unpleasant, and rather slow. Hey though, at least it has a young Anthony Hopkins.

Now unfortunately, watching this movie now is tricky. You've got two options. You can buy a DVD off Amazon and wait for it to arrive, or for whatever reason, sketchy warez sites are happy to provide.

For the latter, follow this link or ask Google, it works fine, but make sure your anti-malware is up to date and for gods sake don't click on any ads.

As you see, the plot is so difficult for us to follow (well, for me anyway), that it's challenging to be critical enough about what we do understand of the characters to see it all as satire.

In particular what is up with this scene at 15 minutes in.



















Two of the officers go to a rundown apartment building, trying to find someone, but all they see is a little girl speaking through a mail slot. She tells them her mummy is at work, she's left home alone to take care of herself, and her dad has gone on an aeroplane to get money. It's very surreal, and didn't advance any plot I could understand.

***

So then I read the book. Which has a great, bitter introduction by Le Carre.

So yeah, actually reading the book with this spelled out for me, it is goddamned hilarious. It's still very dry and bureaucratic, but I can understand that the fact that everything they are saying and doing seem out of place or misguided is the bloody point. I have the all important context.

Take the hallway scene I mentioned before. Leclerc, the department chief, is permanently lost in sentimentality about the heroism of World War 2. He pushed one of his non-combat desk clerks to fly into Soviet allied territory to retrieve some photographs (of a military facility that turns out not to be there), and thinks he's launched the next Normandy invasion. Leclerc isn't some loud Teddy-Roosevelt caricature though; he's sad, a little noble, a little foppish, and muted enough to be respectable. When he finds out his "agent" has died, he begins reminiscing about all the times he had to tell wives and girlfriends and mothers that pilots under his command in WW2 had died.

This terrible confrontation is the core of Leclerc's identity. He'd like a prouder department and all the perks that come with it, sure, but they really only serve to remind him of the emotional duty he once carried. He even slips up and gives his agent an alias that was the name of his favorite pilot who died on a mission. It's weird to think "his desire is to tell women their husband/boyfriend is dead and he can't tell them why because it's classified", but that moment has become such a mawkish touchstone that yeah, it can become a fetish for the right identity.

American movies are no better:

And now, after twenty years of sleepiness, Leclerc gets to do it again. An agent died in the field, and in the wee hours he must immediately rush and tell his wife in person. He is too understated for gleefulness, so it's hard to see his eagerness, but off he goes in the middle of the night.

Except it's not a beautifully lit farmhouse, with a domestic woman waiting at home on her man. The man in this case has drunk most of the money away, and certainly wasn't paid enough by the department in the first place, so he lives in a shithole with the rest of the underclass, and his wife is off making ends meet while his six year old child sits home listening to the radio. And Leclerc can only relive this glory moment by trying to explain it through a mail slot to a young girl and her doll. (It doesn't even have the dignity of being classified; of course the terribly trained "spy" told his family right away.)

This scene is bizarre, and hilarious in its absurdity. After reading it on the page, you immediately want to actually see this, in all of its gory detail, because of just how surreal the imagery is. There is no way flat text can capture the perfection of this anti-climax.

Right. This was the movie I just saw. I couldn't understand the scene then, but once I did, I immediately needed it realized in full technicolor. That really explains the entire tragedy of the movie: it lacks the necessary context, but is full of the superficial viscera that makes it real.

***

Now, I hate to fall back on "see, the author said so." If the author's words were the sole truth with regard to their work, then we could just read the foreword and be done with the hassle of reading the whole book itself. But in this case they taught me that yes, even very dry things with somber characters and no laugh track, are written to skewer the foibles of those misguided fools. We've got to look at their actions ourselves, and determine what this says about the universe of the story.

Murder in Triplicate

There's a new trailer for Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's "Murder on the Orient Express." It looks marginally less bad than the last trailer.

But really, this is just a reminder that the David Suchet series production of this was AMAZING. Just go watch that.

Amusingly, it's the most controversial of the classic Suchet series by far, because it's so atypical for the cozy mystery series. But this episode builds off of the fidelity from everyone other episode of the series to make the point "the crime is so sacrilegious that it drives Poirot to towering heights of anger." The difference between this and his attitude in every other episode (and every other production) matters, directly contradicting the ending of the award winning 1974 movie.

Clip from the climactic moment:

If you care about justice, watch the David Suchet episode. It will be interesting to see if this new movie offers anything remotely as passionate.

Video submitted until Youtube takes it down. After that just go pay $2 on Amazon.

Comments

For the first time ever, we have multiple, good comments.

1angelette writes in reply to Fountain Creed Runner

You've really helped me to understand the shortcomings of humanist critiques about the objectification of women in archetypal films. It's more effective, for that goal, to start from the ground up in that kind of movie instead of writing a couple lines about a maiden being a math major, isn't it? 

lol

Yeah, exactly.  If you want more of that, make sure to read my post a while ago on the best character from Hancock, Mary.

For the recent best, most extreme version of archetypical critique of sexism, check out Sucker Punch.

SMG has written a lot on this most controversial Zack Snyder film, in the original thread, and more recently:

Well, exactly: even an idiot can understand that Sucker Punch depicts a triad of imaginary, symbolic and real. And the imaginary fantasy sequences are blatantly ideological fantasies: you have the 'Strong Female Characters' cutting down hordes of faceless drones that stand for a generic totalitarianism. 

These 'propaganda' sequences are the ones that obviously look like 300. But this is not fascist propaganda at all; Sucker Punch's women are creating liberal propaganda. They are multicultural time-travellers from 20XX, wielding present-day spec ops weaponry to fight the failed ideologies of the past. This is exactly Black Widow in the Avengers: inexplicably fighting Egyptian mummies using wire-fu, tasers and dual-wielded handguns. 

Predicting his work on Wonder Woman, Snyder puts these propaganda heroes in a WWI setting weirdly mixed with WWII and Lord Of The Rings fantasy. The message of the propaganda is plainly that WWI was not the result of industrial capitalism, but simply caused by the evil Nazis. Let's get some strong liberal feminists to refight those Nazis, and we'll maintain world peace. 

But again, as you point out, there are two more levels. Beneath the Buffy/Avengers fantasy level, we have the symbolic level - the level of everyday reality where 'Buffy' is actually the actress Sarah Michelle Gellar and 'Black Widow' is actually the actress Scarlett Johannson. On this level, the actresses have some formal freedom, get money, but are still working in a sexist industry - being pressured to fuck director Joss Whedon and so-on. 

Finally, beneath everything, you have 'the desert of the real' from The Matrix, where the capitalist exploitation is laid bare. The heroes 'put on the sunglasses' and are fully aware of the ghouls and their messages. "They Live, We Sleep", etc. 

Sucker Punch is branded sexist because it is not a liberal feminist film. It is not Joss Whedon feminism; it is a left-wing feminist film.

***

 And AG writes in reply to Genre:

It's just the heist genre, stylistically, as applied to a less traditional heist. A systemic heist rather than a MacGuffin object heist.  

Showtime's House of Lies applies the format to management consulting, and not coincidentally resembles a white-collar version of a classic fast-talking con man film. Non-violent Guy Ritchie by way of Steven Soderbergh's Ocean remake, set in a world where the bag of cash is now a number update on a screen. But the pacing, the music montages, the dialogue rhythms, they're all out of the heist genre playbook.

Well you're half right. There is something shared in the quasi-documentary meta-storytelling style of both films, told with sly self-awareness and shock value. However, they are as different as a comedy versus a tragedy. The whole second half of a heist movie is about "it sure looks bad now" when you know the heroes will pull it out in the end, whereas this genre is the mirror opposite: it's too good and you know the crash is gonna be epic. It's a tragedy, one that dominates the entire style of sad narration, but one that tries to educate you "the real villain is systemic corruption."

(Which isn't wrong, and why I appreciate more recommendations.)

@jadagul on tumblr mentioned that 21 (based on the true story "Bringing Down the House") was also this style, and yes, I just forgot to mention it. I watched it for exactly this reason.

(When I say "Based on a True Story", that's the tongue in cheek tone from someone who's a fan of the Coen brothers.)

***

And unsurprisingly the Wonder Woman review got several comments, so you might want to go read the discussion over there.

Genre

I'm trying to identify a movie genre that seems a) really obvious and b) I have not heard anyone else describe. If anything I would call them "Lewisian" because they all seem like they come from a book by Michael Lewis.

This is movies that are a recounting of "that time I made a shitload of money unethically exploiting an inefficiency or loophole in the system. We are talking hilarious amount of money for me, a working class joe. This epitomizes how morally bankrupt the system is. Eventually it all came crashing down and I am telling you this from a jail cell."

So, you know, we've got Big Short.

Now I am not referring to the above as plot elements, but rather it's the film-making style that unites this genre. It's got a lot of first person narrating, and "you're not gonna believe this" flashbacks, along with fairly preachy moralizing about how wrong it was that this sort of thing was allowed to go on. There's a lot of montages, and therefore a lot of well known pop-music on the soundtrack to go over these pop montages (usually of excess.)

Compare it to the non-Michael Lewis-based movie "War Dogs."

See? Very similar styles. Or, the upcoming movie "American Made" with Tom Cruise.

Now from purely the style elements, I also count the Lewis movie "Moneyball" among this genre. Obviously it's not about breaking the law, but it is about "exploiting the hell out of an inefficiency, and going from laughingstock to hailed as genius" in a way that allows a lot of these same filmic elements to work.

Fountain Creed Runner

Extremely pithy summary: the Assassin's Creed movie is the story The Fountain wanted to be, but done with the superior film techniques of Blade Runner.

***

Long version: As we've discussed before, there are two approaches to movies that make them truly powerful stories:

• Humanist storytelling: emphasizing the complexity of characterization, the source of their motives, their deep and multifaceted personality. (Logan is a good example of this.)
• Archetypical storytelling: characters aren't really people, so much as masks for mythic concepts. The Star Wars Original Trilogy was extremely good at this.

There are great films in both camps, but usually when popular critics attack a movie it's with the perspective that a movie needs to be more successfully humanist. Such criticism complains that the characters' actions "do not make sense" and are shallow stereotypes, and we need more dialogue and backstory to "flesh them out." Sometimes it would be a good idea - but other times it goes against the entire point.

For instance in Star Wars, Darth Vader is iconic as the dark overlord figure. Finding out that his genes have midichlorians, how his mom died and why it made him angry, and the exact circumstances that he lost track of his son and daughter, just undercut his archetypical appeal. (Which is fine, because in this case the Prequels serve as a satire of the follies of humanism.) That's the problem with most "expanded universe" type world-building and fan-fiction, that it's often applied to stories that don't need it.

This leads you down the dark path where movies like Prometheus and the video-game adaptation Assassin's Creed are criticized for their shallow characterization and emphasis on imagery.

Of course, you could make the exact same complaint about a classic like Blade Runner. It's full of holes! What is the backstory that led to Rick Deckard being the asshole that he is? Why is the "best scientist in the world" sitting at the top of a golden pyramid playing chess with hobos? What sort of life are the replicants running away from? How dare Deckard treat Rachel like an object? And dear god why is there so much time spent looking morosely over the blasted cityscapes of Los Angeles?

Except that's all the point of the movie. It's not "inside" that counts, but the actions you do that make you "human." And it's a very good movie because we understand all these characters immediately - Deckard is the archetype of the bitter detective, Rachel just is the femme fatale even though she never thought she would be (and her rich backstory is just a lie to deceive her,) and Tyrell is playing God.

Which brings us to the unpleasant truth of this post: acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky's attempt at a sci-fi masterpiece The Fountain is just not very good.

The Fountain is an ambitious attempt at mixing together three timelines: one story about a medical scientist who can't accept that his wife is dying, one story about a conquistador searching for the fountain of youth to save his beloved queen from the Spanish Inquisition, and one story about a post-human monk taking a dying tree of life across the galaxy to find renewal (which are united by having the protagonist always played by Hugh Jackman.) The moral at the end is that the search for immortality succeeds, but only in providing a chaotic, destructive/creative jouissance that is far beyond what the explorer was hoping for.

Except everyone talks too damn much. For instance with the conquistador story, we understand the figures of Knight, besieged Queen, and greedy Inquisitor very quickly. But we get scene after scene explaining the Inquisition's intentions and the Queen's desperation when yes we get it already. The first modern day scene with the doctor's lab doesn't come across as Jackman playing god and toying with the very elements of the universe, but much more like Tony Stark in a lab being witty with his subordinates and hoping a banal experiments works. It's all completely unsublime.

(The scifi scenes are closer to the pure imagery, but even then rely too much on monologues and turn the whole story more into the internal dialogue of a self-doubting monk, rather than a mystic voyage across space and time.)

They go to so much effort to over-explain what's going on in each timeline specifically, that the rhythm that unites all three timelines is almost completely lost. And even if some fan video explains it for you, you're not really left with any satisfying experience as you watch it yourself. It's not good, because it takes too much of the humanist criticism to heart.

So we have the movie based on the Assassin's Creed videogame franchise, which as far as I can tell, mostly ignores the games and provides very little fan service, and instead tells a very abstract, austere story.

Now that's a very regrettable trailer for a number of reasons, but most amusingly is that it basically provides as much exposition as we get in the entire two hour movie. There is an object of desire that represents freedom and the will to violence. Authority wants to possess this object and thereby destroy both. The protagonist goes on an internal journey to their hereditary past that will reveal the location of this object. There are not elaborate explanations for how this object can "get rid of violence/free-will" and whether it will require submitting all of humankind to genetic therapy or something, or for how the Animus works, it just expects you to accept this Science Fantasy.

Again, the point is that sci-fi and fantasy are relative.
We can all read Lord Of The Rings as alternate-universe Sci-Fi, and the orcs as clones - but that means asking basic questions about, like, where the food comes from if there are no onscreen farms outside Hobbitsville. That stuff doesn't matter in fantasy because, in a fantasy, you don't need food to live. The difference is clearly expressed at the start of Mystery Science Theatre 3000:
"If you're wondering how he eats and breathes (and other science facts), just repeat to yourself: 'it's just a show. I should really just relax.'"
Fantasy begins at the point where you stop wondering. 

-SMG

There are instead a ton of debates between Patriarchal Figure and Athena Figure arguing over the ethical implications of this all. And the actors chosen for this - Jeremy Irons and Marion Cotillard - are the best you could ask for such abstract scene chewing dialogue.

The scenes from the Inquisition time period serve as an effective metaphor for the doomed battle between rebellious violence and authority, and no exposition needs to explain to death why.

Assassin's Creed is a step in the right direction for video game movies but slick action and beautiful visuals are undercut by a hollow hero story. 

-- Ben Kendrick, Screen Rant

No, the slick action, beautiful visuals, and hollowness of the hero are the entire point of the story - right up to the psychedelic ending where the walls of reality between the two timelines start collapsing and every modern day prisoner becomes their past life assassin, complete with cosplay cloak. And there's no attempt at a "scientific explanation" for why the hero suddenly sees all his ancestors appear in the real world and talk to him.

If you read the quotes than its few fans have pulled from the movie, they would usually sound like failed attempts to be Epic in any other franchise, rare peaks above the witty dialogue that are crippled by the self-awareness of the characters. But instead, this dialogue is all there is! Every single line is only intelligible in a grand, metaphorical sense, and is surrounded by silence and statue-esque delivery.

Dr. Sophia Rikkin: Violence is a disease. Like cancer. And like cancer, we hope to control it one day.
Cal Lynch: Violence is what kept me alive.
Dr. Sophia Rikkin: Well technically, you're dead.

or

Dr. Sophia Rikkin: We're not in the business of creating monsters.
Alan Rikkin: We neither created them nor destroyed them. We merely abandoned them to their own inexorable fate.

or

Cal Lynch: You're here to save my soul?
Father Raymond: I understand it's your birthday.
Cal Lynch: Huh... Yeah. The party's just gettin started.

No one talks any other way in this movie.

(Compare this with the dialogue from Blade Runner:

Batty: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die.

or

Tyrell: [Tyrell explains to Roy why he can't extend his lifespan] You were made as well as we could make you.
Batty: But not to last.
Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy. Look at you: you're the Prodigal Son; you're quite a prize!
Batty: I've done... questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraordinary things; revel in your time.
Batty: Nothing the God of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.  )

Everything the Fountain should have done, Assassin's Creed does more effectively. This is how you should talk (and I haven't even gotten into the slow crawls along vistas) in a mythic story uniting multiple historical periods to discover the meaning of life.

I haven't done a very good job yet explaining the AC movie, because it feels like there's so much work to even get people to take movies like these seriously. "Oh hey it's about videogames and critics didn't like it. Why would I waste two hours on this?" Except it's fucking amazing, and they didn't like it because it didn't fall into the videogame ghetto of movies. So go watch it yourself, and form opinions about what it's saying about freedom, violence, and ahistoricity.