The Fargo Five: Too Fargo Too Friendly

Fargo Season 5 started this week, and I'm going to give you a thematic summary if you wonder why people like this Coen brother dark crime comedy so much. (Because each season is a separate narrative, there isn't much plot or character to catch up on, though some redditors will definitely become obsessed with the few world-building connections between seasons.) I'm not going to make effort to avoid spoilers, so if you really care about those, go watch the series now.

"In A World" full of meta post titles

 

After enjoying Vengeance (written, directed, and starring BJ Novak) and Don Jon (written, directed, and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt) so much, I decided to look up other one shot films W/D/S the same person.

Which is how I ran across Lake Bell's "In a World" about a woman breaking into the world of professional voice acting. 

It was okay. Is this a secret gem that breaks down its own genre and come to a new understanding of authenticity like the other two movies I mentioned? No. Is it a fun comedy for killing an afternoon, yeah let's go with that.

But it's so simple that I am really surprised to find how badly people interpret it. By people I mean "reviews on letterboxed" or wherever else I can google them. Even of the reviews that liked it, there are only two main things people can agree on:

"This film has a strong feminist message, showing that women should believe in themselves and acquire power in every ways in life."

and 

What's up with the side plot about her sister's marriage? It doesn't connect to anything?

Which are complete misreadings of a very basic film!

Let's start with the cast. People praise how star studded this is for an indie film, but it's a bunch of comedians (mainly from Bell's sitcom "Children's Hospital.) Rob Courdy, Tig Notaro, Nick Offerman, Ken Marino, Sy Abelman. Who are great, but we should recognize it as the sort of dying breed it is: throw a bunch of comedians together and they them have fun. Sure this was made in 2013, but it's a distinctly 90's genre that lost ground to MCU blockbusters because they don't make money anymore. It's not going to be 21st century progressive feminist, it's going to be 90's "PCU" ideology as defined by the late kontextmaschine.

The climax involved the activists protesting the big frat party (tagline: “Everyone Gets Laid”), but then realizing “holy shit, we’re against drinking, sex, parties, freedom, and fun, we’re the bad guys” and giving up and chilling out and hooking up with the frat members.

(This is not an endorsement or criticism of either ideology (Anyone who reads this blog knows I am more materialist than either.) It's an analysis of what the movie is.)

Now you say, "Blue, you're overreading this again. What is the evidence this comedy movie actually has that pointed an ideological perspective?"

Because the first scene (after the nostalgic Don LaFontaine retrospective) is:

Dymitry Martin: She sounds like a [r-word] pirate, so the studio is paying to have her work with a coach. And I thought of you. Sorry, I never use the word "[r-word]" in a derogatory way. I hate people who do that. Sorry, if you have a cousin or a friend who's [r-word], I didn't mean it that way. So, sorry about that.

Lake Bell: It's fine. I'll come in today.

(Lake Bell sets up her recording equipment and beings practicing her voiceovers.)

Lake Bell (deep voice): In a world... where one woman, must teach another woman... not to sound [r-word.]

This was made in 2013! They're making jokes about how sensitive liberals are neurotic about saying certain words, while down to earth working still-living-with-parents class just makes knowing jokes about it. The value of confidence over insecurity how others see you.

So even though the movie is about one woman breaking through in a male dominated industry (full of people assuming that audiences and executives aren't ready for female voiceovers,) it's going to be from a 90's "colorblind" perspective rather than a 2010's "identity solidarity" perspective.

Which leads us to the climax, not only when Bell wins the competition for voicing the Hunger Games parody quadrilogy "Amazon Girls" against her father and his protege/her fuckboy, she runs into executive Geena Davis who explains why she won.

Carol, let me level with you. Sure, you have perfect tone and a strong sound that's a fitting choice for the genre. But I'm using you for a bigger purpose. This pseudo-feminist fantasy tween chick-lit bullshit is a devolution of the female mission. It's cancerous to the intelligence of young women. You got this job because whether the general public chooses to acknowledge it or not, voice over matters. Everyone in the world watches movie trailers. Everyone in the world sees commercials on television. Or they hear them on the radio. And that is power!

Look, this quadrilogy is going to make billions of dollars and your voice is going to be the one to inspire every girl who hears it. And that's why I chose you. Not because you were the best for the job. Because frankly, you weren't.

And then Lake Bell looks sad and conflicted.

I haven't found a single review that mentions this speech. We are supposed to feel sad and kind of dirty for her, that this character who was trying to become good enough that she could escape identity politics, only won because of them. (And there's definitely ways they could have written that same message to be inspiring. The writer, who is Lake Bell, chose to make it cynical instead.)

I'm not going to say this movie is a 100% consistent diatribe in favor of 90's PCU politics - it has some pretty complicated family dynamics, including a mother who maybe committed suicide - but that is the core of the morality. So when Bell's character attacks SoCal girls for having too much vocal fry[1], it should be understood as consistent with the morality instead of some bizarre mistake in being a good ally (the latter of which, several reviewers bring up.)

So, the meta-analyst might think, this movie is about "who tells your story", and why the identity of voiceovers is not a neutral choice? Eh, not really. I mean that's a very interesting perspective to build a movie on (Birds of Prey for instance does this well), but it's just not what this movie did. Bell does not emphasize the over part of voiceover, but rather the voice.

Because this movie, actually has a lot of interesting things to say about voices! Bell's character's other job is voice coach and her real obsession is recording as many accents as she can find from people she meets. 

 

Which is where the sister's marriage sideplot comes in! Bell asks her sister to record an interview with a guy with a sexy Irish brogue to get his accent, and she gets seduced by him. But her husband hears the recording and it destroys him. (His scene of leaving her is actually really moving, and much more dramatic and subtle that you'd expect from fucking Rob Courdry.) Rob then says he wish he had some way to understand her, in a bubble removed from the nervousness of real interaction and its demands. So Bell asks her despairing sister what she feels, it's very sweet, records it, and gets the tape to Rob. He accepts her back, yadda yadda. But the point is that all of this plot from beginning to end was about the power of voice.

*****

From a later interview, not endorsed but giving insights into her ideology https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/lake-bell-finds-voice-world-13673/  :

Less controversial is what Bell refers to as the “pandemic” of young women speaking in a baby voice (something memorably skewered in an episode of “30 Rock”). Though Carol practically demands that a young woman stop squeak speaking in “In a World...,” Bell refrains from chastising women on the street.

“I was here earlier,” she says, sipping lemonade in a Brooklyn café after a photo shoot, “and there was a girl who walked in, and I knew she was going to have the voice. She looked lovely, but there was something in her body language where I just knew I was dealing with a live one. And sure enough, she spoke like a 12-year-old girl.” Bell attributes some of the voice’s popularity to the rise of reality TV shows, where women eagerly participate in their own objectification and speak in baby voices to be more feminine and desirable, and bemoans the lack of voices that she grew up considering sexy.

“When I grew up, to be sexual and to be profoundly feminine you would sound like Lauren Bacall or Faye Dunaway. Lauren Bacall was fucking sexy, and she had a normal, big-girl voice,” Bell says. “Sexy baby is an affectation. It’s a dialect. It’s something you put on.”

Money$$$: AKA Vaguely Wading into the Scorsese Debate

Time is a flat circle, and Dr. Manhattan repeats that it is 2023 and Martin Scorsese is dismissing superhero films and Twitter is full of passionate defending the MCU and attacking Scorsese or defending Scorsese and attacking the MCU.

Nothing ever changes. It's still Twitter, not even X.

Here's the thing I don't get though: since when is Martin fucking Scorsese the aesthete who looks down on genre films?

The man's career is built on mob violence, cocaine, and naked prostitutes. That's what his movies are, at least weighted by how much money they made. Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, the Irishman. Three hours of "a working class man is seduced by a world of crime, claws his way up with ambition and bravo, lives a very high life, gets hubris, comes crashing down with federal investigations." Some variations, but that's the basic arc over and over.

I'm not saying they are bad. The set pieces are entertaining, if repetitive. And he is superlative at filming these. But if you're judging movies just by what genre they are in, comic books are comic books and superheroes aren't much more populist than mafia.

(Sure, Last Temptation is something else but that's half a century ago. Silence is something else but no one even watched that. You're all still talking about Wolf of Wall Street and he won the Oscar for Departed.)

***

So I decided to actually watch Wolf of Wall Street for the first time. (I could say between the DCEU and Scorsese, only one of them has asked Margot Robbie to pose naked, but that's unfair, because she's really one of the more human parts of Wolf.)

It's... not good?

I mean the writing. The cinematography is great, especially for the big set pieces that zoom through a crowded trading floor, or he lingers the camera for far too long to catch the humor and surrealism of being high as fuck.

But the film is like 50% by runtime, dudes doing cocaine and hookers at obscene parties. DiCaprio's arc is "hustles his way up, really loves money and drugs, gets arrogant, gets pursued by the feds, crashes." It's the same damn arc as always, and no, I do not think "what if a stockbroker really liked being rich but was betrayed by his wife who was sick of his crimes" captures the nuances of the human spirit.

Jonah Hill and Jon Bernathal are really funny at least. But it's funny, not touching or revealing.

(I betray myself by pointing out that DiCaprio's real undoing is not desire for money, but twice his genuine love for Stratton-Oakmont. But do I think that is what the director was really trying to investigate?)

The silliest nit to pick is that Wolf... doesn't even say anything about the world of money. Sure it's accurate about the boiler rooms of high pressure sales people trying to push bad stocks onto dumb money, but that's a very tiny slice of financial activity. Even the few times Leo is about to explain an IPO, he lampshades it by saying we don't care about that stuff and just saying "we're gonna make a lot of money!" Everything is a zero-sum game and there's nothing but predatory instinct. This is the world of the Social and Symbolic, and the Real is non-existent.

Quick, who's your favorite female Scorsese character that isn't a victimized housewife turned into plaster saint? I'm sure you thought of one eventually, but it took a bit didn't it?

***

To compare it, I just watched Margin Call, the fictionalized account of a nameless i-bank over 24 hours starting the 2008 crash. It's very theatre-like or writerly, usually two talking head chewing scenery at each other, and half the scenes look like they were shot for television (especially any in an elevator or at a bar.) 

But the writing is a better story, by orders of magnitude. Yes, there are the sharks to whom all of finance is a social game to move blame onto the other guy before you catch it. But they actually have to deal with the Real sometimes, like when someone's model shows all of their mortgage backed securities are about to crash and take their overly-leveraged company with them. You see the canniest minds pivoting from the world of taking credit (and shifting blame) to responding to the world changing under their feet... and then back into the social games the second they've found their footing.

You see a man lay off 80% of his floor one morning, care less about them than his dog's tumor, and yet later sincerely grapple with the moral code of being a salesman, telling his billionaire boss to fuck off on a matter of principle. You see Paul Bettany explain how easy it is for people who earn seven figures a year to spend it all without realizing, and so be unable to give up their job no matter awful it gets.

(You may be appalled at them, but have you ever considered explaining where all your income goes to a family that earns 1/10th what you do?)

... the feminine representation isn't much better, to be fair. Demi Moore's executive is social conniver left holding the back, and that's all we get of women besides a brief snippet from Mary McDonnell. But the movie ain't perfect. It still has a lot less nipples than Wolf.

It's very weird to see Tumblr arguing about sex scenes in movies, as if every boob we've seen on screen was from an intimate coming together of emotional catharsis. And not just a fourth chance to say "look at how many hookers DiCaprio's character hired for company events." We get it, and this is the high priest of cinema? Like yeah, maybe we can have a few less of those scenes.

Sex, Violence, and the Obligation of Real Depictions

Content warning: This post is going to be pretty explicit about portrayals about first violence, and later sex, in four movies. It will probably be unpleasant. You are forewarned.

Spoilers for: Inside Man, American Animals, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Megan is Missing.

This post was written in reaction to the choking of Jordan Neely on a subway in New York, some four months late. The event was a rich text with many interpreters and I had nothing to add then I thought could be useful. It was a tragedy, both in the moment and in the preconditions leading up to it. Now maybe I'll say some things, about movies.

***

I recently watched the Spike Lee movie "Inside Man" starring Denzel Washington and Clive Owen. It's a clever thriller about robbers who take a bank hostage, and along the way we discover who the real criminals are - the founder who started the bank with Nazi gold stolen from Jewish victims. 

The con is that Clive and friends take thirty customers and employees of the bank hostage, to break into the founder's deposit box and expose his secrets, and manage to escape by blending into the hostages when they let them go (and not having any money on them when they are leaving.) This "dissolving into the people" is a powerful metaphor about the way revolutionaries should act.

Their violence is swift and effective - they pretend to hurt some compatriots, so the other thirty are cowed into place. They let an old man who is having an attack of some sort go. Their guns only have blanks. They may hold these people against their will overnight, but no one really dies and the cops themselves seem to cause more pain and damage.

It's what we imagine our use of violence would be like. Righteous, and inflicting no more harm than we intended, and no more than they deserved. (The most annoying thing about the movie is just how smug Clive is about his ridiculously complicated plan that went off without a hitch.)

A very slickly made movie, and I hated it.

***

Around then I also watched "American Animals", the biopic about four real college kids who realized their library held several books worth over twelve million dollars, and had no more security than any other suburban state university library. They make a plan to steal and fence the books, it goes horribly wrong, and they all end up in jail.

It has an extremely meta directing style, intercutting interviews with the actual kids (grown up and out of jail now), and scenes of these relatively famous actors pretending to be them as they hatch their scheme (Evan Peters and Barry Keoghan fan club shoutout.) Sometimes we'll get a scene with one character played by the actor and the other played by the real person. Some scenes will be repeated three or four times as they can't agree on the details in their memory. There are scenes that are hypotheticals, and other ones that look real but later we question whether they happened at all.

The movie is pathetic. We get one incredibly slick scene of how they think the heist will go - upbeat music playing, tazing the librarian on watch into unconsciousness with a surprise twist of the wrist, tossing the books perfectly onto their blanket - and then we see how the heist actually went. These kids were terrified of doing actual violence to a person. They put it off to the last second, full of sweat and anxiety. They learn tazing isn't trivial and they only knock down the librarian and scare her, causing her to piss herself. It's just terrible and awful all around, and made me sick watching it. They spend terrified minutes looking for keys, they fuck up getting any of the books but one, they accidentally give their real phone number to their appraiser, and they go into hiding knowing they will be caught. There's nothing they can do but wait for the hammer to drop, and it does.

Even though the acting and the writing and oh god the pacing was so much worse than Inside Man, I loved it.

It was the most realistic depiction of violence I had ever seen. Not something grand and unholy, a tool of the gods. No it was sordid and cowardly and chaotic. It was "all too human."

Violence is chaotic. Once we have started using it, we can't control what happens as a result of it, but we are still responsible. There is no way a team of bank robbers could hold thirty people over night and stage a chaotic release without anyone sustaining harm. In Inside Man, we don't see the scared mother worried she won't get home to her kids or her mother in time. We don't see the assault victim suffer panic attacks as they are retraumatized. We don't see someone who is terrified into senselessness asking over and over again what's going on. We don't see any of the human reaction that could go wrong at all.

I don't doubt that Neely's assailant thought he was using righteous violence, to contain a situation he felt was out of hand. The point is, that any choke hold has a chance of killing someone. 

If you start violence, you have opened the gateway to chaos. It will not go how you think it will. Sometimes you have to pull the trigger anyway, but if your only excuse is "I have the perfect plan where nothing will go wrong", then you are setting yourself up for failure.

***

More recently, I watched the moral panic sensation "Megan is Missing." MiM is a found footage movie about two 14-year-old girls who get kidnapped, violated, and killed. It feels designed to stoke fears of how dangerous the internet is and who you could meet over it. It recently went viral on teen tiktok, and created a counter-outrage by people disgusted at how prurient this movie is.

MiM feels very amateur, and the plot is the simplest and bleakest plot I've ever seen (The plot is two girls meet a guy online, get kidnapped sequentially by him, don't escape, they die, the end.) And yet it has a power in its acting and understanding that is rare in media. It shows a mastery of tension using backgrounds or foreground objects that we dread something is going to happen with, as we wait and wait.

These girls aren't unaware that men want them in unseemly ways. They are very aware, and mock the transparent desires of men. They use cynicism to be above it all. But underneath that they have an insecure need for affection and belonging that convinces them to go along with whatever a sketchy male in their life proposes, telling themselves that if they look unimpressed and resign they are retaining their independence. There is a monologue where one teen even breaks down and describes all of this to her friend, and it is incredibly moving.

(The movie also has a complicated relationship with authenticity. It is based on a story of a drifter kidnapping a 14 year old girl from a sleepover and her body was found the next day. In this version there are two girls, they look well above 14 and participate in a very mature lifestyle, they meet a man over the internet, and after a series of exchanges he just grabs them in broad daylight, and holds them in a prison for weeks.)

The movie is also gross.

We don't see a lot of sex (and no nakedness beneath underwear), but there are without doubt a few extremely sexual shots. They are graphic and disturbing. There is porn for everything on the internet, so one can't deny the accusation that someone gets off on this (the most common target of the accusation is of course this director.) But like, you'd have to be into pretty hardcore fetish to find those shots hot. They are grimy and dirty and lacking in all humanity for the subject.

The climax of the movie is when the kidnapper has taken the second, more innocent girl, and he drags her out of her cell, bends her over a table, and points her camcorder at just her face. He transparently takes her virginity, and we spend several minutes seeing her face scream in agony, before going into shock and her face becomes slack and unresponsive, all hope having been lost. Incredibly powerful scene.

Maybe someone finds this sexy, but it's not possibly erotic. It's disturbing, and that is what makes reviewers uncomfortable. There is no quasi-romantic kidnapping, where the kidnapper tries to accommodate his victim, and the victim plays along to seduce him. There is just pain and suffering and really it doesn't look like either of them is deriving satisfaction from this.

I can not recommend this fucked up movie enough. The final ten minutes are just a shot of a barrel and dirt, and one of the most powerful endings of any movie.

***

Just yesterday, I watched "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", 2011 by David Fincher. It's extremely well done. My generalization about Fincher is that he tells very creative original stories, but sometimes his adaptations are just like "the book, but now it's on film." That's what it felt like - I could not recommend this or Gone Girl to anyone who had read the book, unless you really like seeing the characters you imagined played by Ben Affleck and Daniel Craig. Whatever.

The movie commits the mortal sin of "nominally being about the sexual exploitation of and violence against women, while taking many opportunities to show these women in the struggle, looking very pretty and well made up, or other sexualized, spruced up women that are very erotic to look at." See like, every Law and Order show about a sex crime.

Contra MiM, at some point our protagonist goth heroine has been assaulted by her lecherous social worker. She is handcuffed in a cross pose to his bed, and we see her spread out symmetrically, completely undressed with a well-curved ass sticking in the air, and picture perfect smooth skin with gothy tattoos on her back. She's upset and she struggles but this is infinitely more "hot" than the filthy shots from MiM. 

She later turns the tables, and has her assaulter handcuffed, fucks him with a dildo, tattoos humiliating words on him, and controls his every life decision there after. She even approaches him to threaten him again and let him know she's watching. And honestly, that looked like a scene from an femdom porn and I think the assaulter is even more satisfied with this form of their relationship.

This isn't the only example. There is more consensual fucking, there are polaroids, and skin tight catsuits. It's a very sexy movie. And none of it makes people uncomfortable like MiM did, and there's a nominally "the woman eventually triumphs" story, so it's accepted as quality cinema. Even though way more men - rapists and innocents both - probably got off on it than MiM.

The smooth story is the false one. If we are demanding ethics from our movies, then we should demand the gross realism instead of the comfortable competent sex and violence. Then maybe some would be heroes won't fantasize about how easy the take down will be for them.

Barbie: You Think That's Pink You're Seeing?

 

The Barbie movie is good and you should see it. It's both entertaining, and a "rich text" that lends itself to many interpretations. Which is to say, good job Greta Gerwig. 

But you've probably already seen it, and want some analysis of whether it is "new breakthrough in feminism or was it problematic and bad?" Okay well I am not going to address that shallow question, but there is a lot to say if you're actually watching the movie (and not just reacting to the projections you bring in.) To discuss that, we'll have to ignore all spoilers. 

Before I go into the dreaded land of the spoiler, here are some other posts about the movie you may want to read. I don't agree with any of them, but they're good starting points for developing your own reading.

SuperMechaGodzilla: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-m-uGEUenHDyXIV9BlEaoimiXEnFhrsz_EhgErXwrZA/edit

Balioc: https://balioc.tumblr.com/post/723746172204941312/eh-i-take-your-point-in-many-contexts-its-an

Wild Hunt on the Goddess Inanna: https://wildhunt.org/2023/07/barbie-is-the-new-inanna.html

and the Schmidtian version of the Heroine's Journey (not about Barbie specifically, but the fit is obvious) https://heroinejourneys.com/heroine-journey-ii/

Onto my own reading: