the storytelling in severance season two so far is reminding me somewhat of farscape season three. both use a scifi conceit to literally split characters into different selves, and thereby explore their competing desires, particularly with regards to romance, and selfhood by extension.

(spoilers for both)

in farscape season three the protagonist is split into two equal selves. one of the john crichtons is able to resolve two seasons of romantic tension, and be in a happy relationship with his alien love interest. meanwhile the other john, bereft of love, obsessively attempts to perfect the technology that will take him home to earth. metaphorically, it’s a conflict between two versions of home, or selfhood. a self that is familiar, versus one that is alien. john yearns for a version of himself that can have it all: earth and aeryn, past and future, known and unknown. but the myth that underlies the season is icarus, and the folktale is the dog with with two bones. one of the johns does seem like he will get it all, and will even be healed of the scifi-metaphor for pain and trauma that haunts his brain—the neural chip harvey. but it turns out that this perfect resolution is impossible. the john that tries to have it all dies; the john that remains as the show’s main character is the john that has nothing. it turns out that it is not possible to simultaneously change and not change. “you can’t go home again,” essentially. if john is to truly move forward, according to the show, he must confront the reality of loss that is inherent to becoming something new, regardless of whether that new thing involves beauty and wonder (love) or something terrible (pain).

similarly in severance season two so far you have one version of mark who has spiraled downwards without love. and who, as of the most recent episode (2x03 “who is alive?”), is willing to risk himself to get that past love back. this is contrasted with a version of mark who “has everything.” he is not shattered by grief, he has a new love interest, he still has some innocence. like the johns, one mark is obsessively fixated on a former state, and one is able to narratively advance. but the fact that the story of how good the more innocent version of mark has it comes from lumon (“the mark i’ve come to know at lumon is happy”) emphasizes how much it is, indeed, a story. that version has also experienced loss, and suffering, and his existence is, of course, literal corporate slavery. it potentially foreshadows that now that one mark is attempting to “have everything” to an even greater degree, by stitching together his separate selves, that something will go wrong. like farscape with icarus, there are two myths suggested by the show so far: the orpheus and eurydice myth, which doesn’t bode well, and the persephone myth, which could go in a number of directions.

both shows use the season’s credit sequence to express the idea of self-conflict. in farscape, the narration over the season three credits is split into two echoing voices, and its description of the show’s premise becomes divided and confused. instead of john saying he’s “just trying to find a way home”, and to meanwhile “share the wonders i’ve seen” as he does in the credits for seasons one and two, john in the season three narration wonders if he wonder if he should “open the door” to earth, or leave it shut. he starts asking questions: “are you ready?”, “or should i stay?” he starts describing the things he’s seen as both “nightmares” and “wonders”. similarly the credits for season two of severance are full of duality and conflict. there is imagery of gemma on one side, and helly on another. the women flicker and run in opposite directions. meanwhile the two marks simultaneously work together and seem at odds. sometimes one mark pulls and carries the other. but instead of the season two credits ending with the two marks merging, as they do in the first season credits, one mark now attempts to crawl its way out of the other.

in general, both shows seem to use the idea of pain, grief, or trauma as a kind of psychological splitting point. and use romantic love to make the longing and loss (the positive and negative) involved in change more visceral. in mark’s case, the metaphor is pretty literal and immediate—the starting premise of the show is that he has split himself into two consciences because of grief for his wife. in john’s case, the metaphor takes a bit longer to develop. he changes in increasingly dark ways over the course of the first two seasons, and only by season three is it time to physically split him in order to explore the implications of those changes. this difference makes sense based on the type of story that each show is derived from. severance is more of a modern gothic tale, exploring the consequences of repression in an eerie atmosphere. farscape on the other hand, is more of a modern odyssey or wizard of oz, a mythological tale of displacement and change.

i don’t have predictions on specific developments in severance, but i’m interested to see where it goes with the metaphorical framework it’s set up so far. like farscape, it could easily end in a dog with two bones sort of way—by trying to have two contradictory things, mark loses both. and perhaps that will be a necessary nadir on the path to some ultimate stage of resolution. regardless, it’s nice to see a new scifi show making use of the genre’s ability for metaphor in a way that doesn’t (yet) feel boring or underdeveloped, whatever it chooses to do with it.

This post will be an explanation of how I went about translating the 1999 performance of Sławomir Mrożek’s Tango without a personal knowledge of Polish—at the time I started, anyway—as well as a discussion of the translation philosophy I found myself adopting. For more context on the project and the play, see my original post [link]. This post contains spoilers for the play, though not immense ones. It’s fun to see the play blind, but you can read this without watching it.

Put simply, my approach was to use a variety of sources—both human and machine—in order to understand the “literal” meaning of the original text. From there, I would then hunt down more nuanced and idiomatic meaning. And finally, compose my own version. Scene by scene, here’s how it went:

1. Play the scene on youtube with the automatic transcription turned on and compare it against the script. One round comparing the Polish automatic transcription against the Polish script. One round comparing the automatically translated transcription against an automatically translated copy of the script. This gave me a basic idea of what was being said and if it differed from the script. The automatic transcription is far from perfect though. I would catch any more subtle differences as I worked, and as part of the editing process.

2. Run the scene’s corresponding pages through both Google Translate and DeepL. I tried a few different machine translation sites, but those two were the most reliable. They tended to have usefully different but similarly (in)accurate translations. That said, using any more than two had quickly diminishing returns, so I stuck with just those.

3. Compare the automatic translations against the two existing book translations. These are: the 1968 translation by Ralph Manheim and Teresa Dzieduscycka and the other 1968 translation by Nicholas Bethell and Tom Stoppard. Look for discrepancies. Look for idioms. Look for tone.

4. If any confusion arises, research. This meant a lot of googling of Polish grammar and idioms. I was lucky that, having studied a few other languages in the past, I had a sense of what threads to pull on. I’d watched a bunch of other Polish media recently, and read a lot of Russian literature (Russian and Polish are both Slavic etc), and that all helped point me in the right direction too. Since I didn’t know any native speakers, and didn’t have the money to pay one to be on-call, then if all other forms of research failed, I’d ask ChatGPT questions. It was useful for getting me unstuck, though limited in that I couldn’t trust its accuracy. If, at the end of this process, I was still unsure about something, I flagged it to have a human editor check later.

I wasn’t just researching basic meaning of course, I was also researching tone. What words sound familiar, crass, formal, academic, or simply strange? This is a play in which characters say a lot of strange things, and it was important to keep track of whether something sounded strange to me because it was supposed to be strange, or simply because I didn’t understand it.

I was also researching literary context. In Act III, for example, Artur insults his uncle Eugeniusz by calling him “you whitened/whitewashed corpse.” There were many possible translations of this. The Manheim translation translated it as “you whited skeleton” and the Bethell translated it as “you whited sepulchre.” I at first considered translating it as “you bleached pile of bones”, as I thought that might be the intended image, or “you bloodless corpse” if the important part of the image was not just one of death, but of lacking vigor specifically. However, neither insult seemed quite right because all of the other insults in Artur’s list emphasize Eugeniusz’s falseness and hypocrisy. In addition to a “whitened corpse”, he calls Eugeniusz a “stuffed nothing”, an “artificial organism” and a “rotting prosthesis.” Not having a Christian background, I didn’t realize at first that this was a probable Biblical reference. Research, however, pointed me to the scene in which Jesus insults the Pharisees by calling them hypocrites.

From the King James Bible: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but are within full of dead men’s bones and of all uncleanness.” [link]

I then checked whether a Polish bible that predated Tango also used a version of “pobielany” for “whited” or “whitewashed.” This was the case. 

From the Gdańsk Bible: “Biada wam, nauczeni w Piśmie i Faryzeuszowie obłudni! iżeście podobni grobom pobielanym, które się zdadzą z wierzchu być cudne, ale wewnątrz pełne są kości umarłych i wszelakiej nieczystości.” [link]

The reference seemed highly plausible, especially considering Poland’s Christian culture, and Artur’s obvious Christ-like savior complex throughout Act III. So either “whited” or “whitewashed”—both are used in different English versions—seemed the word to use. I landed on “whitewashed corpse” as the total phrase. I didn’t like Manheim’s “skeleton” as skeletons are already white; what is gained by whitewashing one? And I didn’t like Bethell’s “sepulchre” either, as it makes the Biblical reference more direct than it is in the original. The idea of a fleshy corpse painted over with whitewash is exactly as grotesque as Mrożek’s original is. By keeping the word “corpse” I kept that image, and by using the more modern “whitewash” I kept the Biblical reference while being more evocative to a modern audience.

5. Examine the Polish original for style. Is there rhyme or repetition? Is there a phrase or word choice in Act I that gets echoed in Act III? If so, try to replicate. For example, in Act I Artur complains that Grandma Eugenia “przekracza granice”, or “crosses boundaries”. Later in Act III, Stomil declares that “there’s a limit”, to which Artur replies, basically: “Limits can be overcome. Didn’t you teach me that?”. Both exchanges use the word “granice” for a limit or boundary. All four of my sources varied in what word they used for “granice” during those two scenes. However, I decided that since the original uses just one word, I should as well. This would ensure that the connections between the scenes were as obvious—and reflective of the original—as possible. Since the word “line” is the most flexible, that’s what I used. Thus the dialogue became:

ARTUR: Grandma crossed the line.
ELEONORA: What line?
ARTUR: She knows what she did.

and

STOMIL: Then I forbid you! There’s a line.
ARTUR: Lines can be crossed. Didn’t you teach me that?

6. Examine the line delivery in the video. Do the actors put emphasis in a certain place? Is there a long pause in the middle of a phrase? If so, arrange the sentence to reflect that delivery if at all possible. For example, towards the end of the play, Edek warns the family that they don’t need to worry about him taking over as long as they obey him. Most of the four sources put the concept of obedience at the end of the sentence, like so:

Bethell & Stoppard:

EDEK: I like a laugh, a bit of fun. Only I’ve got to have obedience.

Manheim & Dzieduscycka:

EDEK: I like a joke, like a good time. But get this: There’s got to be order.

Google Translate:

EDEK: I can joke and I like to have fun. There must only be obedience.

DeepL put it at the beginning, but it looked unnatural:

EDEK: And I can joke, and have fun I like. Only obedience must be.

However, the Polish original is closest to “Only obedience must be” and the actor that plays Edek delivers the line with a long, sinister pause between “Only obedience…” and “…must be.” Therefore, I wanted a phrase that started with the concept of “obedience” and ended with the concept of “must be”, but in a way that sounded more natural than what DeepL managed. Which is how I landed on:

EDEK: I like a joke. I like a good time. But obedience…is mandatory.

Speaking of style, I also decided to start both the “joke” and “good time” sentences with “I like” in order to give a sense of insistent repetition that exists in the original, even though the original doesn’t repeat “I like”. The original, as you can see from the DeepL version, starts each phrase with “And”, but that construct sounds weird in English in context. I also used “a joke” rather than “a laugh” or some other word because, as the automatic translations indicate, the word Edek uses (“pożartować”) contains the word for joke (“zarty”). And the play used the word “zarty” before when talking about how “The joke is over” and “[Stomil] has been joking for 50 years.”

(This is also a good example of why two different machine translations were useful. The Google Translate version of the line is a smoother translation. But the awkwardness of the DeepL version helped me understand the structure of the original. Meanwhile the human translations didn’t provide extra meaning, but did validate the accuracy of the machine translation, and gave me some stylistic ideas. Using “obedience is mandatory” came at the cost of using language that ideally would have been more casual—“I’ve got”/“There’s got”—as Edek tends to speak in a less refined way. In this case, it was a good stylistic idea, but one which I couldn’t use.)

On the other hand, sometimes I decided that arranging a sentence in a certain way wasn’t worth it. For example, in Act I, Eugeniusz petulantly snitches to Artur that “Edek ate the sugar.” However, the line as delivered in Polish is more like “The sugar was eaten by…Edek!” Because of this delivery, I considered translating it as “The sugar was because of…Edek!” But even though that sounded slightly more natural than “was eaten by”, it just didn’t look as petulantly funny as “Edek ate the sugar.” I decided that since the word “Edek” was recognizable, a viewer would be able to figure out how the line was delivered regardless of how I translated it. Therefore I kept the translation as “Edek ate the sugar” in order to convey the spirit of the underlying text, while trusting that the performance would speak for itself.

7. Once I’d given my translation my best-faith attempt, I paid an editor who spoke both languages to correct my Polish transcript and give feedback on my work (many many thanks to Maja Walczak). She helped me catch some subtle things I wouldn’t have caught on my own. For example, during the scene in which Edek is reading out his “principles” I had originally translated it as follows:

EDEK: Here it is. “I love you…and you’re asleep.”
ALA: Anything else?
EDEK: “It depends on the situation.”
ALA: Oh come on, just read.
EDEK: I was reading. That’s a principle.

“It depends on the situation” is an approximate translation of the Polish, which is “Zależy jak leży.” Without context, I assumed that the humor in the line just came from the fact that it was a bland, dismissive phrase that Ala wouldn’t recognize as a principle. That on its own is fairly funny, but not uproariously so. So I was surprised when the editor explained that this was actually a very well-known, very quotable exchange that people would reference and laugh about. She explained that the memorability comes from the fact that “Zależy jak leży” is short, simple, and most importantly—rhymes. I felt silly afterwards for not noticing that it rhymed. This turned out to be a clear case of how turning to existing translations for help rather than relying on personal fluency could lead my astray, because neither of the existing translations rhymed that line. Here’s what they had.

Bethell & Stoppard:

EDEK: Here we are. “My love is dead to the world.”
ALA: What else?
EDEK: No comment.
ALA: Stop messing about—read.
EDEK: I was reading—that’s a principle.

Manheim & Dzieduscycka:

EDEK: Here it is! “I love you, and you’re sound asleep.”
ALA: That’s all?
EDEK: “You made your bed, now lie in it.”
ALA: Oh, come on, Eddie. Read.
EDDIE: I did read. That’s a principle.

As you can see, both translations seemed to choose generically dismissive phrases, with no rhymes. The Manheim translation takes a stab at wit by using an idiom, which makes sense since—from what I could find—“Zależy jak leży” is also an idiom. But since I couldn’t think of an English idiom that meant “It depends”, I stuck with a version of the phrase “It depends” as that is a genuinely common English expression.” However, after the editor made her comment, I no longer felt beholden to such literalness. I ended up changing it to:

EDEK: Here it is. “I love you…and you’re asleep.”
ALA: Anything else?
EDEK: “Not today, go away.”
ALA: Oh come on, just read.
EDEK: I was reading. That’s a principle.

This new version manages to contain a short, funny rhyme that still conveys dismissiveness. And that made it a translation that felt truer to the spirit of the original, and that would ideally create more of the effect that the original creates in its target audience. Who know if it’s actually funnier or more quotable. But it was funnier to me.

Another example: At one point, Artur insults Ala, who has just cheated on him, by calling her “Ty kuro!” This translates literally as “You hen,” which is not something insulting, so I was a bit confused as to what it meant. The Manheim translation translated it as “You goose” while the Bethell translated it as “You whore.” Since the context and the actor’s intonation indicated he was giving a serious insult, I also chose at first to translate it as “You whore!” But the editor explained that “kuro” sounds a lot like an actually insulting word, “kurwo”, which can at times be translated as “whore.” The point of that line, therefore, is that he’s trying to insult Ala but can’t actually make himself say the insulting word—he is impotent and abstracted even in that moment. So I changed my translation to “You wh-horse!” This kept the idea that he was almost using the word “whore” but actually using an innocuous word for an animal.

*

When I started this project, I really wasn’t sure how much the translation would feel like “mine”. I assumed there was a good chance it would end up as some patchwork Frankenstein’s monster of my various sources, and if so, I intended to credit it as such. But as the process went on, I felt more and more ownership and authorship regarding my choices. This feeling increased as I came to understand the Polish better in my own right. It also increased the more I realized that I was bringing my own particular philosophy to bear when I made decisions.

I found myself thinking a lot about what matters in a translation of filmed dialogue, and how it differs from a text that is meant to be read or performed. As in all translation, movie translation requires making a tradeoff between loyalty and lyricism. As in all translation, one also has to decide how much of the character of the original language to preserve—the Polishness, Spanishness, Hindiness, etc—or to transmute into some cultural approximation in the target language. Different mediums also come along with different constraints. In the case of poetry, one might be constrained by rhyme or meter. In the case of drama, one might be constrained by whether or not a line will sound natural coming out of an actor’s mouth.

I noticed that there were choices I thought made sense for the script translations of Tango, but not for a filmed translation. For instance, both the Manheim and Bethell translations anglicize character names and remove diminutives. This is an understandable decision to make when translating a play that takes place in a neutral and ambiguous setting like Tango does. While there is a lot that is spiritually and contextually Polish about Tango, the specifics are not obviously Polish the way they are in something like Wesele (“The Wedding”). Wesele is another very famous Polish play, which is clearly set in the Poland of 1900 and is dense with Polish cultural references. Understandably, the English translation of Wesele by Noel Clark does not anglicize character names. But because Tango generalizes well, one may as well lean into that when composing a script that is meant to be performed by English-speaking actors for an English-speaking audience. If I was composing my own book version, I would strongly consider doing the same.

But filmed dialogue has not been generalized. The actors are delivering lines that are structured in a Polish way. They are saying Polish names and using Polish diminutives. An audience will be able to hear those names. And so, I tried to structure my translations in a way that would make use of what the actors were saying, and what an audience would be able to hear. I decided to leave in the Polish names and their diminutives—Artek, Arturek, Alunia, Edziu, etc. My experience from reading English translations of Russian novels is that while diminutives are a little confusing at first, one quickly gets used to it. Similarly, being familiar with Spanish, I couldn’t imagine English subtitles for something in Spanish turning say, “Pepito” into “Pepe” or “little Pepe.” It wouldn’t sound right. I figured I’d challenge people to understand at least one aspect of the actual Polish.

I placed a high priority on elucidating the acting. When translating dialogue for a dub, one wants the text to fit well with the film actor’s face (or animated character’s face), but half of the acting ends up being given to the voice actor doing the dub. The voice actor will elucidate the translation and film acting in their own way. But in the case of subtitles, the original actor is still doing all of the acting. They’re adding particular tones to particular words, and reacting in certain ways to the words that other characters say. Therefore, it was important to me to preserve as much of the nuance of those choices as possible. So I made an effort to translate everything the characters say—not to generalize at any point. It mattered to me to even translate filler words, since someone who doesn’t speak the language has no way of knowing if something that sounds like “uh” or “um” is actually an “uh” or “um” or a legitimate word. As I mentioned earlier, I also made an effort to structure sentences in English in a way that matched the Polish structure whenever possible. I put periods and commas where the actors paused, not just based on what might look correct on a page. If a Polish word sounded like an English word and meant the same thing, I tried to keep that word, and put it in the same place in the English sentence. Good acting will always speak for itself to some extent, and this performance is full of good acting. But it’s also a missed opportunity, even an insult, to not help clarify the choices that acting is made of—especially when it’s good.

In general, I was excited by how well subtitling a (good) performance of a play in its original language could provide access to the original spirit of that play. A different sort of access than reading or seeing a performance of the existing English translations. In a book translation of a script, it’s easy to justify taking liberties with the text. After all, some phrasings just sound better in English, right? And then once actors perform that text with its liberties, it’s another round in the game of telephone. When I first decided to make some subtitles for this Tango, I didn’t intend to translate it myself. I bought the Manheim translation, and figured I would just copy and paste it into subtitles, note the authorship at the beginning and end, and call it day. But it became immediately apparent that the translation would never work for subtitles, because the sentences were not arranged in a Polish way, were shorter or longer than in the Polish, and even occasionally cut, added, or mutated entire phrases from the original. The translation had mostly not changed the overall meaning of anything, but it didn’t match what was being performed in Polish. By virtue of needing (or choosing) to be loyal to the text as performed, I found myself being careful and precise in way in a way I wouldn’t necessarily have been otherwise. There was no room for wordiness, because the line deliveries didn’t allow it. I couldn’t add or delete things out of poetic license, because it would have been confusing when combined with what was on screen. Instead, I had to make things sound natural and poetic within the constraint of how long and in what way an actor was speaking.

The result, I think, is that it’s much clearer why this is considered a good play in its original context. You can read the existing English translations and understand just fine what the play is about. But there is a certain flab around that meaning. The script translations lose some of the joy in the biting precision of Mrożek’s wordplay, and the urgency and momentum of the dialogue. A performance in the original preserves that clarity, and a translation of a performance is (ideally) more likely to preserve that clarity along with it. This principle can be extended to various other aspects of the original, not just wordplay. Preserving diminutives, for example, adds shades to the way the characters interact that would be otherwise missing in an English performance.

In practice, of course, published translations tend to be executed with more care than subtitles. It’s rare that anyone in the English-speaking world talks about the translations of movies or TV shows, let alone filmed plays, with the same literary attention that is given to novels or poetry. I’ve long thought this was a mistake, as filmed dialogue can be as rich with meaning as any other kind of artistic use of language. If someone would publish a new translation of the book of a play, why not a new translation of a performance of it? Or of a movie? They all contain literary intent. And now that I’ve put my money where my mouth is, this seems even more obviously true than it did before. We’re missing out on experiencing art in new ways—both the original art, and the art of translation—by not treated filmed dialogue with the literary seriousness it deserves.

Happy to share a project I’ve been working on for the last few months. Around July, I happened upon a TV staging of the Polish play Tango by Sławomir Mrożek. Written in 1964, Tango is a classic of the mid-century Theater of the Absurd, as well as Polish avant-garde drama. It’s a highly famous play in Poland—a staple of high school curricula—but less well-known in the anglosphere these days. I enjoyed the staging a lot, and because it had no English subtitles, I thought I’d try to make some myself. This was a particularly fun project given that, as far as I know, the play hasn’t had a new English translation since 1968 [1]. I’ll use another post to talk a bit more about the translation process and the philosophy of translation that I found myself adopting—particularly how it differed from the philosophy I might have adopted if I was translating the play in book form, rather than a performance of it.

But for the moment, the long and short is that you can now watch Tango with my English translation on Youtube here. If you have a VPN (or are located in Poland), you can also watch on the Polish TVN website in better quality using a subtitle extension like Movie Subtitles or Substital. All subtitle files can be downloaded here.

As for the play. Tango takes place in a middle-class home of the 1960’s, and the drama centers on the dynamics between three generations of a single family. In Tango’s version of the world, permissiveness has won a complete cultural victory. Victorian traditionalism was overturned by the rebels and artists of the 1920’s, and all social values and conventions have since disappeared. Fed up with his family’s chaotic household, 25-year-old Artur, a member of the youngest generation, longs for his own form of rebellion. But with no conventions left to overthrow, the only rebellion remaining for Artur is rules and traditions. He attempts to instill order and re-impose tradition by force, but (avoiding specifics) it doesn’t go according to plan. In the end, no form of idealism wins in Tango. Not traditionalism, anti-traditionalism, or anti-anti-traditionalism. Instead, idealism ends up hollowed out and puppeted by those who are unscrupulous and willing to use violence to get what they want.

Tango struck me first because it was funny, and witty, and thematically felt startlingly relevant to the present day. This particular performance from 1999 that I’ve chosen to subtitle also struck me for being remarkably well-acted and well-staged. It’s tough to make absurdism feel emotionally genuine enough to have a dramatic effect, instead of descending into shallow pantomime and parody, and this rendition of Tango by director Maciej Englert pulls it off very well. The cast is comprised of some of Poland’s greatest stage actors of that time, and it shows.

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best picture

For the first time in a long time, I watched all of the movies nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars this year. Partly on a whim, partly for a piece I’ve been working on for a while about what is going wrong in contemporary artmarking. I cannot say that the experience made me feel any better or worse about contemporary movies than I already felt, which was pretty bad. But sometimes to write about a hot stove, you gotta put your hand on one. So. The nominees for coldest stove are:

Poor Things. Did not like enough to finish. I always want to like something that is making an effort at originality, strangeness, or style. Unfortunately, the execution of those things in this movie felt somehow dull and thin. Hard to explain how. Maybe the movie’s motif of things mashed together (baby-woman, duck-dog, etc) is representative. People have been mashing things together since griffins, medleys, Avatar the Last Airbender’s animals, Nickelodeon’s Catdog, etc. Thing + thing is elementary-level weird. And while there’s nothing wrong with a simple, or well-worn premise, there is a greater burden on an artist to do something interesting with it, if they go that route. And Poor Things does not. Its themes are obvious and belabored (the difficulty of self-actualization in a world that violently infantilizes you) and do not elevate the premise. There’s a fine line between the archetypal and the hackish, and this movie falls on the wrong side of it. It made me miss Crimes of the Future (2022), a recent Cronenberg that was authentically original and strange, with the execution to match.

Anatomy of a Fall. Solid, but not stunning. The baseline level of what a ‘good’ movie should be. It was written coherently and economically, despite its length. It told a story that drew you along. I wanted to know what happened, which is the least you can ask from storytelling. It had some compelling scenes that required a command of character and drama to write—particularly the big argument scene. The cinematography was not interesting, but it was not annoying either. It did its job. This was not, however, a transcendent movie.

Oppenheimer. Did not like enough to finish. But later forced myself to, just so no one could accuse me of not knowing what I was talking about when I said I disliked it. I felt like I was being pranked. The Marvel idea of what a prestige biopic should be. Like Poor Things, it telegraphed its artsiness and themes and has raked in accolades for its trouble. But obviousness is not the same as goodness and this movie is not good. The imagery is painfully literal. A character mentions something? Cut to a shot of it! No irony or nuance added by such images—just the artistry of a book report. The dialogue pathologically tells instead of shows. It constantly, cutely references things you might have heard of, the kind of desperate audience fellation you see in soulless franchise movies. Which is a particularly jarring choice given the movie’s subject matter. ‘Why didn’t you get Einstein for the Manhattan project’ Strauss asks, as if he’s saying ‘Why didn’t you get Superman for the Avengers?’ If any of this referentiality was an attempt to say something about mythologization, it failed—badly. The movie is stuffed with famous and talented actors, but it might as well not have been, given how fake every word out of their mouths sounded. Every scene felt like it had been written to sound good in a trailer, rather than to tell a damn story. All climax and no cattle.

Barbie. Did not like enough to finish. It had slightly more solidity in its execution than I was afraid it would have, so I will give it that. If people want this to be their entertainment I will let them have it. But if they want this to be their high cinema I will have to kill myself. Barbie being on this list reminds me of the midcentury decades of annual movie musical nominations for Best Picture. Sometimes deservingly. Other times, less so. The Music Man is great, but it’s not better than 8 1/2  or The Great Escape, neither of which were nominated in 1963. Musicals tend to appeal to more popular emotions, which ticket-buyers and award-givers tend to like, and critics tend to dislike. I remember how much Pauline Kael and Joan Didion hated The Sound of Music (which won in 1966), and have to ask myself if in twenty years I’ll think of my reaction to Barbie the same way that I think of those reviews: justified, but perhaps beside the point of other merits. Thing is. Say what you want about musicals, but that genre was alive back then. It was vital. Bursting with creativity. For all Kael’s bile, even she acknowledged that The Sound of Music was “well done for what it is.” [1] Contemporary cinema lacks such vitality, and Barbie is laden with symptoms of the malaise. It repeatedly falls back on references to past aesthetic successes (2001: A Space Odyssey, Singin’ in the Rain, etc) in order to have aesthetic heft. It has a car commercial in the middle. It’s about a toy from 60 years ago and politics from 10 years ago. It tries to wring some energy and meaning from all of that but not enough to cover the stench of death. I’d prefer an old musical any day.

American Fiction. Was okay. It tried to be clever about politics, but ended up being clomping about politics. At the end of the day, it just wasn’t any more interesting than any other ‘intellectual has a mid-life crisis’ story, even with the ‘twist’ of it being from a black American perspective. Even with it being somewhat self-aware of this. But it could have been a worse mid-life crisis story. The cinematography was terrible. It was shot like a sitcom. Much of the dialogue was sitcom-y too. I liked the soundtrack, what I could hear of it. The attempts at style and meta (the characters coming to life, the multiple endings) felt underdeveloped. Mostly because they were only used a couple times. In all, it felt like a first draft of a potentially more interesting movie. 

The Zone of Interest.Wanted to like it more than I did. Unfortunately, you get the point within about five minutes. If you’ve seen the promotional image of the people in the garden, backgrounded by the walls of Auschwitz, then you’ve already seen the movie. Which means that all the rest of the movie ends up feeling like pretentious excess instead of moving elaboration. It seemed very aware of itself as an Important Movie and rested on those laurels, cinematically speaking, in a frustrating way. It reminded me of video art. I felt like I had stepped through a black velvet drape into the side room of a gallery, wondering at what point the video started over. And video art has its place, but it is a different medium. Moreover video art at its best, like a movie at its best, takes only the time it needs to say what it needs to say. 

Past Lives. I’m a human being, and I respond to romance. I appreciate the pathos of sweet yearning and missed chances. And I understand how the romance in this movie is a synecdoche for ambivalent feelings about many kinds of life choices, particularly the choice to be an immigrant and choose one culture over another. The immigrant experience framing literalizes the way any choice can make one foreign to a past version of oneself, or the people one used to know, even if in another sense one is still the same person. So, I appreciate the emotional core of what (I believe) this movie was going for, and do think it succeeded in some respects. And yet…I was very irritated by most of its artistic choices. I found the three principal characters bland and therefore difficult to care about, sketched with only basic traits besides things like Striving and Being In Love. Why care who they’d be in another life if they have no personalities in this one? It’s fine to make characters symbols instead of humans if the symbolic tapestry of a movie is interesting and rich, but the symbolic tapestry of this movie was quite simple and straightforward. Not that that last sentence even matters much, since the movie clearly wanted you to feel for the characters as human beings, not just symbols. Visually, the cinematography was dull and diffuse, with composition that was either boring or as subtle as a hammer to the head.

Maestro. Did not like enough to finish. Something strange and wrong about this movie. It attempts to perform aesthetic mimicry with impressive precision—age makeup, accents, period cinematography—but this does not make the movie a better movie. At most it creates spectacle, at worst it creates uncanny valleys. It puts one on the lookout for irregularities, instead of allowing one to disappear into whatever the movie is doing. Something amateurishly pretentious in the execution. And not in the fun, respectable way, like a good student film. (My go-to example for a movie that has an art-school vibe in a pleasant way is The Reflecting Skin). There’s something desperate about it instead. It has the same disease as Oppenheimer, of attempting to do a biopic in a ‘stylish’ way without working on the basics first. Fat Man and Little Boy is a less overtly stylish rendition of the same subject as Oppenheimer, but far more cinematically successful to me, because it understands those basics. I would prefer to see the Fat Man and Little Boy of Leonard Bernstein’s life unless a filmmaker proves that they can do something with style beyond mimicry and flash.

The Holdovers. Did not like enough to finish. It tries to be vintage, but outside of a few moments, it does not succeed either at capturing what was good about the aesthetic it references, or at using the aesthetic in some other interesting way. The cinematography apes the tropes of movies and TV from the story’s time period, but doesn’t have interesting composition in its own right. It lacks the solidity that comes from original seeing. (Contrast with something like Planet Terror, in which joyous pastiche complements the original elements.) The acting is badly directed. Too much actorliness is permitted. Much fakeness in general between the acting, writing, and visual language. If a movie with this same premise was made in the UK in the 60’s or 70’s it would probably be good. As-is the movie just serves to make me sad that the ability to make such movies is apparently lost and can only be hollowly gestured at. That said, the woman who won best supporting actress did a good job. She was the only one who seemed to be actually acting.

Killers of the Flower Moon. The only possible winner. It is not my favorite of Scorsese’s movies, but compared to the rest of the lineup it wins simply by virtue of being a movie at all. How to define ‘being a movie’? Lots of things I could say that Killers of the Flower Moon has and does would also be superficially true of other movies in this cohort. Things like: it tells a story, with developed characters who drive that story. Or: it uses its medium (visuals, sound) to support its story and its themes. The difference comes down to richness, specificity, control, and a je ne sais quois that is beyond me to describe at the moment. Compare the way Killers of the Flower Moon uses a bygone cinematic style (the silent movie) to the way that Maestro and The Holdovers do. Killers of the Flower Moon uses a newsreel in its opening briefly and specifically. The sequence sets the scene historically, and gives you the necessary background with the added panache of confident cuts and music. It’s useful to the story and it’s satisfying to watch. Basics. But the movie doesn’t limit itself to that, because it’s a good movie. The sequence also sets up ideas that will be continuously developed over the course of the movie.* And here’s the kicker—the movie doesn’t linger on this sequence. You get the idea, and it moves on to even more ideas. Also compare this kind of ideating to American Fiction’s. When I said that American Fiction’s moments of style felt underdeveloped, I was thinking of movies like Killers of the Flower Moon, which weave and evolve their stylistic ideas throughout the entire runtime.

*(Visually, it places the Osage within a historical medium that the audience probably does not associate with Native Americans, or the Osage in particular. Which has a couple of different effects. First, it acts as a continuation of the gushing oil from the previous scene. It’s an interruption. A false promise. Seeming belonging and power, but framed all the while by a foreign culture. Meanwhile potentially from the perspective of that culture, it’s an intrusion on ‘their’ medium. And of course, this promise quickly decays into tragedy and death. The energy of the sequence isn’t just for its own sake—it sets up a contrast. But on a second, meta level it establishes the movie’s complicated relationship to media and storytelling. Newsreels, photos, myths, histories, police interviews, and a radio play all occur over the course of the movie. And there’s the movie Killers of the Flower Moon itself. Other people’s frames are contrasted with Mollie’s narration. There’s a repeated tension between communication as a method of knowing others and a method of controlling them—or the narrative of them—which plays out in both history and personal relationships.)

Or here’s another example: When Mollie and Ernest meet and he drives her home for the first time, we see their conversation via the car’s rearview mirrors. This is a bit of cinematic language that has its origins in mystery and paranoia. You see it in things like Hitchcock or The X-Files or film noir. By framing the scene with this convention, the movie turns what is superficially a romantic meet-cute (to quote a friend) into something bubbling with uneasiness and dread. This is not nostalgia—this is just using visuals to create effects. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen anything that uses the convention before, although knowing the pedigree might add to your enjoyment. The watchfulness suggested by the mirrors and Ernest’s cut-off face will still add an ominous effect. It works for the same reason it works in those other things. Like the newsreel, it is a specific and concise stylistic choice, and it results in a scene that is doing more than just one thing.

In general, the common thread I noticed as I watched these nominees, was the tendency to have the ‘idea’ of theme or style, and then stop there. It’s not that the movies had nothing in them. There were ideas, there was use of the medium, there was meaning to extract. There were lots of individually good moments. But they tended to feel singular, or repetitive, or tacked on. Meanwhile contemporary viewers are apparently so impressed by the mere existence of theme or style, that being able to identify it in a movie is enough to convince many that the movie is also good at those things. The problem with this tendency—in both artists and audiences—is that theme and style are not actually some extra, remarkable, inherently rarifying property of art. Theme emerges naturally from a story with any kind of coherence or perspective. And style emerges naturally from any kind of artistic attitude. They are as native as script, or narrative, or character. A movie’s theme and style might not be interesting, just like its story or dialogue might not be interesting, but if the movie is at all decent, they should exist. What makes a movie good or bad, then, is how it executes its component parts—including theme and style—in service of the whole. When theme is well-executed it is well-developed. Contemporary movies, unfortunately, seem to have confused ‘well-developed’ with ‘screamingly obvious.’ A theme does not become well-developed by repetition. It becomes well-developed by iterationand integration. Theme is like a melody. Simply repeating a single melody over and over does not result in the song becoming more interesting or entertaining. It becomes tedious. However, if you modify the melody each time you play it, or diverge from the melody and then return to it, that can get exciting. It results in different angles on the same idea, such that the idea becomes more complex over time, instead of simply louder.

Oppenheimer wasprobably the worst offender in this regard. Just repeat your water drops, crescendoing noise, or a line about ‘destroying the world’, and that’s the same as nuance, right? Split scenes into color and black and white and that’s the same as structure, right? That’s the same as actually conveying a difference between objectivity and interiority (or another dichotomy) via the drama or visual composition contained in the scenes, right? When I watched many of these movies, I kept thinking of a behind-the-scenes story from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The story goes that Joss Whedon was directing Sarah Michelle Gellar in some scene, and when the take was over he told her how great she was, and that he could see right where the music would come in. And Gellar replied that if he was thinking about the music, he clearly wasn’t getting enough from her acting alone. This conversation then supposedly informed Whedon’s approach to “The Body,” a depiction of the immediate aftermath of death that is considered one of the best episodes of television ever made, and which has no non-diegetic music whatsoever. Not to imply that music is necessarily a crutch, or to pretend that “The Body” is lacking in other forms of stylization (it is a very style-ish episode). But more to illustrate the way that it is easy to forget to make the most of all aspects of a medium, particularly the most fundamental ones, once one has gotten used to what a final product is supposed to feel like. 

And that’s why most of these movies don’t feel like movies. They create the gestalt of a movie or a ‘cinematic’ moment—often literally through direct vintage imitation—without a sense of the first principles. Or demonstrating a sense of them, anyway. Who needs AI when the supposedly highest level of human filmmakers are already cannibalistically cargo-culting the medium just fine.

[1] “The Sound of Money (The Sound of Music and The Singing Nun).” The Pauline Kael Reader. (This book contains the full text of the original review, rather than the abbreviated review that I linked earlier.) 

Up on my youtube channel, I’ve recently started a new series of analytical commentary tracks for the major episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “Commentary track” is a bit of a misnomer, since there’s editing throughout. But each video will follow along the entire episode nonetheless. Since this is the 25th anniversary of when the first episode aired, it seemed like a nice time to finally share the project here.

It’s a self-indulgent project, but also one I’ve wanted to do for a while. Largely because, despite the fact that Buffy remains widely beloved, and has exerted an incredible amount of influence upon the pop-culture landscape, it doesn’t actually seem to be a very well-understood show. Which is perhaps the reason that its influence has not necessarily been for the best. To me, the core of Buffy is not things like cute dialogue, superpowered characters, or a supernatural premise. It isn’t things like found family or a musical episode. None of that is what makes it good. At least not in and of itself. What makes it good is what makes anything I like good: its ability to consistently and coherently express a complex thematic level via the medium of film.

So whether or not you’ve seen or like the show, if you’ve ever been curious about what is worth taking away from it, and why it’s stuck so persistently in the craw of pop culture–even now–you might find the series of interest. 

This is the long-delayed continuation of my analysis of the intratextual parallels in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Dead Things.” I made some edits and added a section to that first part, so you might want to revisit it before reading the rest. In this half I’ll be discussing: (1) the issues of personhood and self-possession that the parallels to Faith bring up during the alley beating scene, (2) the context being used to frame Buffy turning herself in as a pseudo-suicidal act, (3) how the episode’s takes on identity and romantic love expand on the takes in the earlier seasons, and (4) why this sort of parallelism is interesting and valuable. More discussion of the episode’s themes around moral responsibility, agency, and identity is threaded throughout.

[Warnings: (1) This post assumes knowledge of the episode and show. (2) I discuss pretty much everything that happens in season six, which means there will be references to rape/assault. In addition to all the other unpleasant things that happen that season that one might not want to read about. (3) It’s about 11,000 words long.]

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I talk a big game about liking coherence in art, and it’s probably clear that I have an apophenic tendency to enjoy textual interpretation. And this might lead people to think that I have a preference for carefully planned and plotted art, or that I look down on the messy and improvisational. But this is actually almost the opposite of the case. Not because I don’t really like coherence, but because artistic coherence is something more complicated than planning, and isn’t even necessarily possible to achieve with planning.

The thing about improvisation, is that at its best it’s about finding the choice that feels right. I listen to jazz more than any other kind of music, and one of the reasons I like it so much is the exhilaration of someone landing on a musical idea that simultaneously makes a song feel bigger and more complete. A solo isn’t fun if it’s just a bunch of disconnected ideas (similar to how whimsy isn’t fun if it doesn’t also “work”). It’s fun if it picks up on the things that the other players are doing, or ideas that showed up earlier in the song, and then makes them feel like they go together. Even if they “go together” in the sense of being coherently discordant, eg repeating ideas that don’t work multiple times. If beauty is fit, then the joy of improv is finding fit in unexpected places.

This goes for narrative too. In long-running stories like comics, book series, and TV shows, much is often made about whether certain choices were planned from the beginning. If things were planned, that’s a reason for praise, and if things weren’t planned, that’s a reason for derision, either towards the showrunners or towards people attempting to interpret the work. Say, “This plot point only happened because an actor wanted to leave the show. Therefore it has no meaning to read into.” But making things up as one goes is not what makes a story lose its plot, so to speak. Making things up is only a problem if the things the artist makes up don’t go with what came before.

In Impro, a very excellent book about the craft of improvisation, Keith Johnstone calls this process of making-things-go-with-what-came-before “re-incorporation”:

The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still ‘balance’ it, and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them.

Johnstone is big on the idea that satisfying narrative depends on a sense of structure, and that reincorporation is one of the most important tactics for creating structure. To paraphrase him, a story where a character runs away from a bear, swims across lake, and finds a woman in a cabin on the other side, and “makes passionate love” to her has no structure. It’s just a series of events. Whereas if the bear then knocks the cabin’s door down and the woman cries out that it’s her lover, then suddenly it feels like a story. Because not only has the bear been reincorporated, it has been linked to the woman. From this perspective, if a story has no sense of reincorporation, or new developments don’t make sense with what came before, then it will feel incoherent, no matter how planned out it was.

I also keep thinking about Paul Bouissac’s discussion of gags and narrative in The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning. He explains that what makes a scene funny is not whether it strings a bunch of gags together, but how those gags are organized. To use an example from the book, it’s one thing for a clown to pretend to hurt its thumb, and ask for an audience member to kiss it. It’s another thing for it to keep hurting different parts and then finally hurt its groin and act scandalized at the idea that someone might kiss it. Bouissac calls this sort of repetition “anaphor”:

Anaphor is one of the main tools of textual consistency. In linguistics, it designates the use of pronouns or any other indexical units to refer back to another word or phrase in the text. It links together parts of sentences and bridges the grammatical gaps between clauses, which is a consequence of the linearity of language. In rhetoric, anaphors are repetitions of words or structures that build up the cohesion of discourse and create momentum toward a climax. In multimodal communication, words, gestures, objects, or musical tunes can play the same role by reminding the receiver—that is, the spectator in the case of a performance—of signs and events produced earlier in the act.

One of the things that fascinated me about Farscape as a teenager, was that in contrast to other scifi of the time, it made no pretenses of having been planned—unlike say, Babylon 5. Or even shows like The X-Files, Lost, or Battlestar Galactica that gave you the “feeling” of a plan whether or not they had one, or were capable of following through. Farscape felt incredibly coherent, both in terms of theme and plot, but this coherence came about purely on the strength of the writing’s ability to ideate and then reincorporate. It would take someone’s weird costume idea, like the villain having glowing rods that screw inside his head, and snowball that into a whole storyline where the villain is a half breed of one hot-blooded race and one cold-blooded race, and can only stay alive by thermo-regulating the inside of his brain. And then decide that his vendetta against the hot-blooded race has motivated his obsession with the protagonist since the first season. Yet these twists never feel like “ret-conning” in a pejorative sense, because it all feels narratively and thematically sensible. (Unsurprisingly, making the show was described as “more like improv jazz than plotting out a symphony”).

None of which is to say that I dislike planning or polish, either. Stephen King, as a so-called “discovery” writer, famously writes off the cuff, without outlines. As he puts it in On Writing:

You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere. I won’t try to convince you that I’ve never plotted any more than I’d try to convince you that I’ve never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible. I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can—I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course).

But his best stories feel like whatever bloat might have been generated from this narrative improvisation has then been pared down to what that improvisation was really getting at. And I can’t lie, I get a particular joy from reading or watching something and feeling without a doubt that the artist is in complete control of my experience. It was one of the most gratifying aspects of rewatching The Wire recently: the feeling that the little meanings and foreshadowings I was seeing in each choice were almost certainly intended. Nothing is more satisfying to an apopheniac than feeling like the patterns you see are actually real. And nothing is more annoying than a story that tries to pull some sort of reveal on you (“Dan is gossip girl!” “Angel is Twilight!” “Rey is a Palpatine!”) that doesn’t make any sense because it wasn’t intended from the beginning. Just because those characters existed in the story before, doesn’t make it good reincorporation. So if a story is a story because of structure, then if the choice is between a planned structure and no structure, the former is almost certainly going to be better.

Point is, it’s not really the process that matters. All creativity is improvisational in a sense, because all creativity involves making things up. What matters is how dedicated an artist is to the integrity of their work. If a writer has carefully planned their whole story out, with every twist and every theme clearly in mind, but can’t adapt if they start writing and find out that something they planned doesn’t actually work, that’s one kind of failure mode. The narrative equivalent of designing a perfect castle and then building it on a swamp. On the other hand, if a writer tries to go with the flow, but can’t reincorporate that flow, then that will be another failure mode. To the extent that I respond to improvisational art, it’s because improvisational art is often more attuned to these questions of whether something is moment-to-moment right. But what matters, above all, is the rightness. That’s what defines coherence. Whether there is a sense in the work that it is oriented around something, and whether the choices contribute to that something.

Watched a documentary on Pauline Kael a couple nights ago. It clarified for me why I always find her reviewing refreshing and frustrating by turns. Refreshing because she doesn’t tend to treat genre or subject matter as something sacred. She will watch many kinds of movies with the same degree of curiosity and judgment. Her instincts about whether a movie is working, or lying, or doing something new are also often very on point.

But she falls prey to the two big things that I think make reviewing a flawed, sometimes maybe even useless endeavor. Especially if the goal is to accurately describe what a work is.

1) An inability, or disinterest, in modeling why artistic choices work or don’t. For instance, at one point in the documentary she complains about artists and critics equating repetition with lyricism, and states that repetition in movies simply annoys her because it feels like belaboring a point that she’s already gotten. But that complaint misses out on an opportunity to explore why people would think that repetition is lyrical, or why an artist would reach for it as a choice. And whether, once you’ve modeled what the goal of repetition actually is, maybe there are good and bad versions. If it were me, I would argue that when repetition is good, it doesn’t actually feel like repetition. It feels like riffing. The artistic impact comes not from reiteration, but from reframing—and if it does feel like reiteration, then it’s probably weak repetition. If I were to make a similar complaint about a movie, I might instead complain that a motif did not add or gain complexity each time it appeared. Or I might complain that an attempt to convey monotony by unchanging repetition did not feel worth it, because I didn’t find the underlying point insightful enough to justify the experience of slog. Whatever my exact argument though, the point is that there would be a curiosity and emphasis on what the artist was trying to accomplish. And a generosity about what they could accomplish. As well as a self-awareness about my own values (like “density” and “coherence”) and the fact that I judge works by those values. Without this sort of meta-level mindset, reviews seem to quickly descend into authoritative subjectivity. Kael was good at viciously panning things, but how can a pan help the artist make better work unless it’s accompanied by some sort of model or rationale? Why would an artist listen to your opinion unless you first prove that you understand what they were trying to do? Without a level that exists outside of the reviewer, a review runs the risk of simply being an exhortation to appeal to that reviewer’s taste.

2) A love of saying things that sound good, regardless of whether they’re actually meaningful. At one point in the documentary, Renata Adler, another writer, attempts a takedown of Kael. But ends up making the exact mistake that Kael does.

RENATA ADLER: [Kael] has, in principle, four things she likes: frissons of horror; physical violence depicted in explicit detail; sex scenes, so long as they have an ingredient of cruelty and involve partners who know each other either casually or under perverse circumstances; and fantasies of invasion by, or subjugation of or by, apes, pods, teens, bodysnatchers, and extraterrestrials.

Compare to Kael’s own style of evisceration. Here’s her on The Sound of Music.

PAULINE KAEL: What is it that makes millions of people buy and like THE SOUND OF MUSIC—a tribute to “freshness” that is so mechanically engineered, so shrewdly calculated that the background music rises, the already soft focus blurs and melts, and, upon the instant, you can hear all those noses blowing in the theatre? […] And the phenomenon at the center of the monetary phenomenon? Julie Andrews, with the clean, scrubbed look and the unyieldingly high spirits; the good sport who makes the best of everything; the girl who’s so unquestionably good that she carries this one dimension like a shield. […] Wasn’t there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn’t want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn’t act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa’s party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage?

Having read both pieces, I think both writers identify something true about their subject (Adler even makes remarks similar to what I’ve already said). But are the pieces useful? Or accurate in a more total sort of way? Kael had particular kinds of movies she loved, it’s true, and tended to be bad at self-criticism about whether her preferences actually indicated any sort of objective reality. But Adler’s criticism of Kael is no more interested in modeling than Kael’s reviews are. It isn’t interested in an evenhanded consideration of what Kael gets right and wrong and why. What unites Adler’s takedown of Kael and Kael’s takedown of The Sound of Music is that they want to be takedowns. They want to be stylistically rollicking reads that create the aesthetic experience of nailing something to a wall. But the thing about wanting too badly to make an argument “aesthetic” is that it becomes tempting to gloss over anything that would ruin the aesthetic flow. Adler devotes a long paragraph to identifying all of Kael’s tics, and the wall of text is certainly rhetorically effective at making you feel like Kael is some sort of dirty-minded one trick pony. But at the end of the day, it’s rhetoric. Not really argument. Similarly, Kael is so delighted to be able to use phrases like “glockenspiel routines”, that it gets in the way of saying anything more considered. Which isn’t to imply that I think the writers don’t actually believe what they’re saying. On the contrary, I think they hold their opinions powerfully and sincerely, and are trying to identify something wrong in their culture by singling out and drilling down on the sins of one thing in particular. But nonetheless, by caring so much about being good bits of writing—and they are good bits of writing; there’s something juicy and relentless about Kael that sticks with you—they end up empty on the level of argument.

These two failure modes highlight the central problem of reviewing, I think. Which is that reviews tend to be three things at once: ekphrasis, analysis and evaluation (which implies some sort of rubric of quality, whether personal, cultural, or “objective”). This is partly understandable, given that art is an abstract, experiential thing and therefore difficult to evaluate or analyze without some degree of ekphrastic description. It if was easy to say what a work was doing, the artist wouldn’t have needed to make art of it in the first place. So it makes sense that the process of making a work legible enough to opine on would have to trade in artistry itself. It makes sense that in order to show an audience what a work feels like, a review would have to poetically reproduce that feeling. Similar to the way that the translator of a poem needs to be a good poet themselves in order to make the meaning and experience of a poem accessible to an audience in a different language.

The problem is that ekphrasis, being expressive, is also necessarily subjective, and not primarily concerned with logic. Which on its own, is perfectly fine. I’ve written a ton of ekphrasis on this blog. I’m pretty pro-ekphrasis. When it’s done right, there isn’t much like a bulls-eye poetic description of a work to make you feel like you get it on a level you didn’t before. But when that sort of writing is also trying to say whether or not a work is “good”, the expressiveness frequently gets in the way. It’s easy to state or promote an opinion expressively. It’s harder to defend an opinion that way. In good faith, anyhow. Which results in all of these reviews that succeed in observing true or true-feeling things about art, and do so in a sometimes deliciously readable way, but don’t leave me with the feeling that the writer has any consistent or defensible take on how art works. I can’t help thinking that I much prefer reading writing about art that keeps its purpose siloed. So either a piece that tries to poetically explain how a work affected them, or an academic work that tries to argue for an interpretation, or something more philosophical that puts forth a theory of what makes things good and bad and explain why a work does or doesn’t live up to that. I don’t want this to be the case. I think writing that can blend those three modes together is some of the best possible writing about art. But the average reviewer is not really up to the task, despite the fact that the review is probably the most common and widely-read type of writing about art.

(None of which is to say that I’m free of sin these regards. One of the reasons I try to keep the tone of this blog casual is because I want to be able to be able to play with these different modes of writing about art. And see where and when and how I can get away with blending them. It’s a practice space.)

May as well post these here instead of keeping them private.

The Firm (1989). Directed by Alan Clarke. Good old solid British realism. Pleasantly short and to the point. More movies should be willing to be short, instead of padding with story. Gary Oldman very good.

City of Joy (1992). Directed by Roland Joffé. Some beautiful photography, but dull and stilted storytelling, and erratic in tone. Gave up after 20 minutes. Hideous Kinky had similar ideas and elements but addressed and executed them a thousand times better. I enjoyed Hideous Kinky because it was almost an anti-Eat, Pray, Love: a white woman goes to India to escape Western life and a disappointing partner, but it turns out that the “east” or a more “authentic” and “exotic” life cannot provide any more spiritual insight than any other. Because people are people everywhere, spiritual hypocrites included, and you bring your problems with you wherever you go. Whereas this movie was a more boring “white person seeking enlightenment in India grows up by learning that hardship is real.”

A Dark Song (2016). Directed by Liam Gavin. Had a solidity to it and went some interesting places in a way that is unusual for contemporary horror. But ultimately felt too student-film for me to really like. I wanted more use of visual language to give it thematic focus. Kept comparing it to The Exorcist, which also tackles religiously-flavored horror, but with very tight and thematic visual language. Martyrs too, since that movie also features the long, brutal stripping away of a female character, followed by transcendence, except that whole movie is a commentary on the human yearning for those kinds images and stories. And so you leave it feeling purged of something and somehow…extruded by the work. In that artistic way. Whereas this movie got nowhere near my guts and so it could not provide that sort of transformative experience.

The Little Drummer Girl (1984). Directed by George Roy Hill. Screenplay by Loring Mandel (who also wrote Conspiracy). Based on a Le Carre novel. Starring Diane Keaton. A good movie, though ultimately missing something to really compel me. Some kind of aesthetic oomph. Didn’t help that the romantic connection at the heart of it was too limp to give the movie an emotional center. I most appreciated it on the structural level. The evolution of the story goes through a pleasant number of twists and turns. Despite the fact that the ending is inevitable (the Israelis killing all of the Palestinians), you’re still interested in how it will get there, and hold out some hope that something or someone will be spared.

I’ve been doing short write-ups of movies as I watch them lately, and I realized that the last three I watched were all united by the fact that they seemed like the kind of thing that should have seemed slow, or uneventful, or overdone, yet managed to compel me anyway. So I thought I’d compile them, in the interest of finding similarities.

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Girlfriends (1978). Directed by Claudia Weill. A very good movie. Most impressive for the way it does so much with so little. A good example of how even in a genre that I should find insufferably overdone at this point—the struggling young NYC artist figuring themself out genre—can still be great if the artist has a strong, individual attitude and the guts that come with it. All it really takes for an “ordinary” topic to be interesting is for the artist to know what they want. I loved how unselfconscious it was. There was no sense that it was performing to what some imaginary audience would find cool, which is so often the problem with these sorts of stories (unless it’s something like Girls, which makes performativity its subject matter). This is one of the things that I think allowed all of its seemingly simple scenes to not be boring. Even if simple, the character tension in them was real and important to the writing. Whereas in writing that is looking for approval, the characters become vehicles for that approval instead of actual characters. And if they’re not actual characters, then they lose their ability to generate tension. Because tension is generated by things like “I have a model of what this person wants. When they face a new situation, I feel tense because my model predicts something about how they’ll behave.”

The Apostle (1997). Written and directed by Robert Duvall. One of those movies where it seems like nothing happens and yet you’re absorbed anyways. At least I was. It actually seems like an artistically perfect reaction to have because the point of the protagonist is that he’s a charismatic figure that makes people believe in God, but doesn’t actually have any real spiritual insight. Not unless you go in for his brand of born-again Christianity, anyhow. The movie could have chosen a much more intellectually tempting or palatable version of Christianity, so I think it matters that it focuses on a version that needs emotion and charisma to distract you from the theological emptiness. A version that comes off as nothing but a bunch of repetitions of slogans and platitudes, as if saying things enough times and with enough fervor makes them true. Yet you get to the end of the movie and you realize you’ve watched more than two hours of this religious bombast. It feels like something has happened, even though nothing has. The man is still a murderer, still preaching away. He hasn’t really progressed, even though he probably thinks he has. His “ascension” at the end is into the lights of the police cars rather than the light of heaven. Basically, it feels like there’s this question throughout, echoed by the “empty”-yet-absorbing nature of the narrative itself, about whether meaning created in the mind corresponds to anything real outside of it.

Also: Duvall is incredible in the role. His character is one of those characters that could so easily descend into caricature or pantomime, where the bigness of the deliveries is more about flattering the actor’s ability to be big than portraying a character who talks that way. But Duvall gets it exactly right. Every delivery feels totally embodied and character-driven, which is vital for making the movie feel like a thoughtful exploration of something, instead of something with an opinion it wants you to know. It’s a great example of not-needy acting and movie-making. A caricaturish depiction would let the movie off the hook—would be about giving the audience something obvious to approve of (there’s that issue of approval again). Whereas depicting a person with a huge personality in neutral way forces you to think about them in ways that aren’t simple or easy. The way you’d think about a real person if you had more information about them.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring (2003). Directed by Ki-duk Kim. A very good example of a movie that is both successfully meditative and successfully absorbing. I’m not sure why it succeeds so well on those fronts. It has many many beautiful images, but there are plenty of beautiful dull movies out there. I suspect it’s because first, the seasonal structure of the movie gives it an excuse to change tones and build on itself, which prevents boredom. It puts you in the mood of a puzzle box. Second, and probably more importantly, each section basically plays as a fairy tale, or parable. And fairy tales and parables are a very compressed form of storytelling that play on very basic human truths. Which means that all of the beautiful images and meditative moods have something narratively and philosophically precise to hang on. They’re not there as compensation for the fact that the artist doesn’t actually know what they want or mean. The fairy tale quality is also probably what allows the movie to get away with such obvious symbolism without feeling trite. Because you expect the symbolism in a fairy tale to be obvious. But that obviousness also doesn’t feel annoyingly didactic because the point of a fairy tale is not just to teach, but to convey some sort of truth along with it.

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Setting aside the formal competence of each of these movies, which is definitely a factor in what made them able to keep my interest, I notice they all shared one important quality: they all knew what they wanted. And if an artist knows what they want, then the pace of a movie can be superficially slow, or the content can be superficially empty, or subject matter can seem overdone, and it will feel focused anyway. The artist knowing what they want also seems to go along with not trying to perform to an audience, which also gives the movies focus. A lack of pandering–even subtle, subconscious pandering–means that there’s nothing to pull you out of the narrative spell by reminding you that you’re audience member and an outside world exists. It also means that only the artist is driving the artistic decision-making, instead of both the artist and some model of the audience in the artist’s head, which means there are no conflicting visions to add bloat. Lastly, the thing about performing to audience is that it makes a movie predictable, because the whole point is to anticipate what an audience already knows it wants. But in a slow or overdone genre, predictability of execution (though not necessarily subject matter!) will generate impatience and kill the pace in the water. If you already know how a certain story goes, then the pleasure comes from the artist’s take on it. And if the artist is trying to give an over-familiar take as well as an over-familiar subject, then what is the point? This is why an individual style will make an action movie feel fresh, but a shocking twist will not, necessarily. The individual style derives unpredictably from an artist’s personality, whereas the shocking twist derives predictably, ironically, from a desire to not come off as predictable. Of course, this theory also means that shocking twist is its own form of overdone content that could still feel exciting and new if it came from a confident artistic place.