Reconsidered: Midsommar

(What I'd like to do in my Reconsidered posts is take a more in-depth look at films that I think have something to offer beyond the text. A solidly composed horror film is a wonderful thing, but a solidly composed horror film that keeps me thinking about it for days afterward is an even more wonderful thing and a joy forever. I'll be writing with the assumption that the reader is familiar with the basic plot and characters, so needless to say, all kinds of spoilers ahoy.)

Midsommar - like director Ari Aster’s other horror film, Hereditary - is very much a film where there’s more going on than is apparent to the protagonists, with some kind of horrifying revelation coming at the climax. Think Rosemary’s Baby, or more recently, Kill List. They’re the kind of films where everything feels a little strange or off-kilter, but you can’t always put your finger on why until some kind of reveal, which puts everything you’ve just seen into context. It’s a tricky thing to pull off - if you’re too opaque, your revelation feels like it comes out of nowhere and the audience is confused. If you aren’t opaque enough, it’s obvious what’s happening, and you lose the shock of revelation.

So Aster really, really skillfully rides the line, by putting everything you need to understand what’s happening right in front of you, but doing so in such a way that you don’t realize it until it’s all over. This isn’t unique to him, but he’s mastered it in a way that few have. In the case of Midsommar, it’s in service of a story that uses the framework of a fairytale to tell a story of toxic masculinity in at least a couple of different forms - one more obvious than the other.

Reconsidered: Berberian Sound Studio

(What I'd like to do in my Reconsidered posts is take a more in-depth look at films that I think have something to offer beyond the text. A solidly composed horror film is a wonderful thing, but a solidly composed horror film that keeps me thinking about it for days afterward is an even more wonderful thing and a joy forever. I'll be writing with the assumption that the reader is familiar with the basic plot and characters, so needless to say, all kinds of spoilers ahoy.)

This particular reconsideration is sort of an exception. Usually I’m going back and looking at a movie in terms of how particular cinematic or narrative elements impart particular themes or express ideas that might not be immediately apparent. I’m usually looking at subtext. Here, though, the reconsideration is one explicitly of text.

A big part of Berberian Sound Studio is the way that Gilderoy becomes increasingly isolated by language - he doesn't speak Italian, and so for him (and anyone else watching the film who doesn't speak Italian), it's a very alienating experience - we can infer much of what's going on but we can't be for sure. There’s always some ambiguity at the least, and some parts of the film become downright impenetrable. And this is as much a part of the film as anything else - it’s about Gilderoy losing his way, losing himself in this very dysfunctional situation. So in this particular case, it isn’t so much about looking more closely at what’s already there as looking at what we can’t necessarily “see” because language keeps it hidden. So I watched the film again, this time with an English subtitle track that also translated all of the Italian dialogue. What I discovered was that watching the film with subtitles for the Italian didn’t completely change its meaning - it mostly just sharpened what was already there. It did, however, clarify some things, and to a certain extent, being less immersed in the isolating aspect of language highlighted some other ways that sound and silence are used to define Gilderoy’s relationship to the filmmakers.

Reconsidered: Wake In Fright

(What I'd like to do in my Reconsidered posts is take a more in-depth look at films that I think have something to offer beyond the text. A solidly composed horror film is a wonderful thing, but a solidly composed horror film that keeps me thinking about it for days afterward is an even more wonderful thing and a joy forever. I'll be writing with the assumption that the reader is familiar with the basic plot and characters, so needless to say, all kinds of spoilers ahoy.)

Normally I come up with a Reconsidered post as I'm writing something up - thinking about things that wouldn't work in an unspoiled post, but that bear mentioning or closer examination. In this case, the whole idea hit me, months later, all at once out of nowhere.

Well, not quite out of nowhere. Basically, the thought process started with me thinking about a short story (well, the beginnings of a short story) I wrote ages ago about a man who takes a vacation from his middle-management job. He's one of those guys who hasn't grown up yet, still tries to party like he did when he was twenty years younger. He goes to some resort town, and his first night there, he gets so wasted that he blacks out. When he comes to, he's neatly dressed, everything's in its place, and his hotel room smells of bleach. It isn't until he checks his digital camera that he discovers that during the night, he brought a woman back to his room and had sex with her. After which he tortured, murdered, and dismembered her. In his blackout state, he did all of this and cleaned up after himself.

Yeah, creepy, ooohhhhhh, whatever. My problem at the time was that I couldn't figure out why he did it, how he did it, or how to get him out of that room. More recently, I'd watched a pretty disturbing documentary on the drug scopolamine, and it gave me some ideas of things I could do to flesh out the story.

Still awake? Cool. So that whole thing got me thinking about my fondness for this sort of story - somebody loses a fair amount of time, and by the end of their journey to figure out what happened, they're an entirely different person from the one they were. Bonus points if the person has to discover this through some record of what happened while they were out. David Lynch's Lost Highway plays with this idea, and is one of my favorite movies. A big chunk of Srpski Film's second act is Milos discovering what he's done by looking through tapes of Vukmir's raw footage. So that got me thinking about Wake In Fright.

In Wake In Fright, John Grant goes on a bender in a small Australian Outback mining town on his way to Sydney to see his girlfriend, and the bender takes him to some low, awful places. It's a classic piece of Australian cinema, and a nice restored version of it is getting a limited release in the U.S. In mentioning this, I point out that although Wake In Fright sort of belongs to the same family of stories as Deliverance or Straw Dogs, it's more nightmarish and surreal than either of those films. And that's when the light bulb went off.

What if the events of Wake In Fright didn't actually happen?

As I think about it, the majority of the movie could very well be a nightmare that Grant has while sleeping off a blackout alcohol bender that never took him further than the bar in Tiboonda. This interpretation also suggests that Grant is probably a closeted gay man in pretty deep denial.

Reconsidered: The Village

Okay, M. Night Shyamalan has gotten a bad rep. He came out of the gate strong (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable) and then went right the fuck off the rails. That said, I don't think it's entirely his fault. Being "that guy with the twist endings" (and why didn't John Carpenter get tagged with that? His endings are usually twists, and usually awesome) meant his movies weren't going to be watched as movies so much as exercises in how to get to a twist ending. Once you're that guy, there's no way your movies are going to get a fair shake.

I am going to go to bat for The Village.

It gets a lot of flak for being "obvious", but it wouldn't have if it hadn't been directed by Shyamalan. It's a spooky period piece, about a mysterious village plagued by equally mysterious monsters. But if you go in looking for the twist, for the catch, then you're going to throw the story and the setting and the mood aside and turn it into some kind of fucked-up narrative equivalent of "Where's Waldo?" It's like watching Psycho solely to spot Hitchcock's cameo - it's not watching a film, it's gimmick-hunting and screw that. The Village is beautifully shot, atmospheric, and tense. And the "twist" isn't just a gimmick - it's an integral part of the movie's underlying theme.

Reconsidered: Srpski Film

(What I'd like to do in my Reconsidered posts is take a more in-depth look at films that I think have something to offer beyond the text. A solidly composed horror film is a wonderful thing, but a solidly composed horror film that keeps me thinking about it for days afterward is an even more wonderful thing and a joy forever. I'll be writing with the assumption that the reader is familiar with the basic plot and characters, so needless to say, all kinds of spoilers ahoy.)

I am aware that I'm about to go to bat for one of the most divisive films in recent memory.

Very few who have seen Srpski Film (A Serbian Film) have come away from it without being convinced that it's either a powerful, uncompromising piece of allegory or a morally bankrupt exploitation film. There are also the people who claim they found it tedious, boring, or even funny, that it really wasn't that shocking. At best, I'd argue that they didn't attend to and invest in the narrative, or are presenting a front to keep people from knowing how upset they were. At worst, they're dead inside. Seriously, as dark as my sense of humor is capable of being, I don't want to meet the person who found this movie funny.

I am aware that I'm about to attempt to defend the indefensible.

This movie is never going to see a commercial release in the United States. It hasn't seen a wide DVD release yet - according to Amazon, the only copies available are Region 2 discs, and those have been censored. It's not available yet on Netflix, and I'll be surprised if it ever is. Horrible, horrible ideas and images are presented in this movie. This movie is the embodiment of "they're not actually going to show that, are they?" in film, and yes they do. Every time. This is the movie I cannot un-see. If enjoying horror movies is enough to have others think you a deviant, then just sitting through this (even absent enjoyment) would, by the same logic, be enough to get you arrested.

Nevertheless, I contend that Srpski Film is not exploitation. It is a powerful piece of art, made with a priori artistic intent.