Trump and Turning Off the Lovely Spectacle

'That's horrifying' Hillary Clinton said in the third and final debate against Donald Trump, which, like the other debates and the popular vote, she handily won. I remarked at the time that was the line of the debate and the line of the interminable 2016 presidential election which provided an endless loop of grotesquerie. With the election of Donald Trump, that loop has now been extended for another four years, and I am disturbed, distraught, and yet remain perversely fascinated.

Plato described the simultaneous revulsion and fascination with death and destruction as 'the lovely spectacle'. In contemporary parlance, it's the proverbial car crash we can't help but crane our necks to glimpse. Historical examples abound including the popularity of blood sports and public executions. George Carlin skewered the tendency in his bit about a theoretical reality show broadcasting particularly sadistic forms of capital punishment,"Good, clean, wholesome family entertainment. The kids'll love it! The kids'll love it!"

The corporate mainstream media which I define as network television news and 24-hour cable news trafficks in this compulsion to not turn away from the ugly and terrifying which seems hard-wired and immutable in human nature. For these large media conglomerates, chaos means eyeballs means advertisers means profits. Chaos, therefore, is in their financial interest. Cooperation, unity, peace, and substantive policy debate just don't make good television by comparison.

The 'media' did not single-handedly cause Trump's victory, but he is undoubtedly their creation. With The Apprentice, NBC fashioned a tycoon who represented the paragon of entrepreneurial know-how out of a sleazy socialite and business failure. The news networks later fashioned a statesman and political leader in a democratic contest out of a belligerent racist, pseudo-populist, and clown fascist. And they made lots of money doing it. Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS said last February about Trump:

 "'[he] may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS'...Moonves called the campaign for president a "circus" full of "bomb throwing," and he hopes it continues. "Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun.

Blaming 'the media' may seem a fruitless abstraction during a time where activism and advocacy require on-the-ground practical organizing not armchair dissertations. Nevertheless, the same set of incentives that produced Trump remain and are infinitely more problematic now that Trump will be taking power, and they must be dealt with. Trump's capacity to wreak havoc will produce the same influx of disaster, eyeballs, and cash that make corporate media CEOs like Les Moonves salivate - just on a significantly more catastrophic scale.

The misaligned incentives of the media are also so much bigger than Trump. They implicate our capacity as citizens to respond effectively to terrorism, global warming, and war regardless of who is in the White House.

I wonder when or if we will develop the maturity as a society to turn off the snuff film in which we watch our very own body politic - indeed our planet - get defiled? How do we reform our political system when we are addicted to the image of our own destruction?

Supporting non-profit media as a public good is important. If public media were to supplant corporate media it would probably solve much of the problem. While predominantly an issue of collective action, media reform requires some deep introspection too.

Why, when something bad happens, do so many of us instinctively turn to CNN and the likes of Wolf Blitzer?  Why do we find it normal that cable news networks are on in airports? What is the cost-benefit analysis when talented, insightful commentators like Chris Hayes and Van Jones lend credibility to these corrupt institutions?

I fear that until the day we can truly fight together collectively for non-profit media that is not incentivized by profits derived from advertiser cash, the media will not only fail to stop but actively encourage those natural and man-made disasters which generate arresting imagery. Until we can 'turn your head away from the screen/it will tell you nothing' (as Jeff Buckley put it) or simply to 'shut your eyes, Marion!' (as Indiana Jones put it in Raiders to the Lost Ark) , I fear humankind will continue to be titillated by the image of (and thus made complicit in) its own destruction.

Captain Fantastic

An emotionally intelligent but often dimwitted celebration of left-wing ideals, Captain Fantastic (2016) is a veritable pinata for hippie punchers. Its loving, unironic portrayal of various groan-worthy past-times associated with liberalism such as drum circle singalongs, public nudity, and gushing about Noam Chomsky managed to redden the cheeks of even this self-identified leftist. I shudder to think of the paroxysms of derision anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders might unleash in response to this movie.

However, the occasional gaucheness of Captain Fantastic's passionately leftist point of view is less of a flaw and more of a reflection of our woefully depoliticized American culture. With the mainstream news media promoting false equivalency on every issue from the reality of man-made climate change to the Clinton vs. Trump presidential contest, we have been conditioned to respond to anything with an explicitly stated opinion as 'biased,' ignoring both objective evidence in support of certain political conclusions (e.g. the reality of climate change) as well as the plethora of bogus biases already embedded in so many political and economic institutions (e.g. bipartisanship is virtuous; economic growth is always desirable; meritocracy is real).

As a result, most American political movies tend to only make surgically precise arguments they can defend, leaning on existing public consensus towards historical events or figures (e.g. Selma, Good Night Good Luck, Snowden, Spotlight) or filtering social commentary through tightly constructed satire or allegory (e.g. Nightcrawler, Arbitrage). While cogent and convincing as logical argument, this approach also has the effect of cordoning off politics from the realm of the imagination or the heart: from how what it means to love, live, work is vitally intertwined with questions of politics.

Captain Fantastic's assumption that politics is an extension of a fundamental value system rather than a merely historical or policy-oriented abstraction sets it apart from the pack and is European in its nonchalance. While characters certainly discuss politics and, at times, defend their ideas, every frame of the picture takes for granted that the planet is in peril, that consumerism is immoral and soul-deadening, that the current state of public education does not cultivate creativity or critical thinking. Whether or not you agree with these assumptions either grants you or doesn't grant you access to the story.

Thus, Captain Fantastic will surely rub people the wrong way for the wrong reasons either for being too liberal or for being too politicized period. Regardless of these inevitable criticisms, however, the film is marred by a nearly fatal flaw in its portrayal of the title character, Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) as a literal superhero. While the title Captain Fantastic suggests an acknowledgment of the fantastical nature of the character's moral perfection, Ben doesn't appear as an allegorical construct but rather as a character we should more or less take literally. When taken literally, Ben is both an implausible and problematic character.

Though Mortensen brings his trademark charisma and sensitivity to the part, the character is unintentionally creepy in the obsessive dominance he asserts over the emotional and physical lives of his expansive brood. His confluence of characteristics - individualism, all-knowing patriarchal authority, and ubermensch-like physical and intellectual prowess - are also anathema to the film's explicit and implicit feminist, communitarian ideals.

Captain Fantastic features universally terrific performances from its ensemble cast, and its overall approach to interweaving drama and politics is refreshing. However, by portraying its protagonist as a literal superhero, the movie misses an opportunity to tell a more honest and nuanced story about left-wing people and their politics. 

Demon (2015)

SPOILER ALERT

A discombobulated mishmash of horror, folklore, morality play and zany wedding comedy, Demon (2015) attempts to investigate evil within the human soul and the sins of the past a la The Shining. However, unlike Stanley Kubrick's 1980 classic from which it wantonly steals, Demon lacks recognizable humans, an analytically rigorous interpretation of history, and control of tone. It was directed by the Polish director, Marcin Wrona who committed suicide upon its release, a fact that I did not know as I was watching the film and am fairly sure would not have changed my viewing experience if I had.

Demon begins promisingly enough with widely framed, deliberate compositions depicting a variety of Polish landscapes intruded upon by creaking, violent machinery. A Caterpillar excavator repeatedly foregrounds the frame, and this bit of construction equipment is Demon's symbolic linchpin and arguably its most interesting character. These largely wordless introductory sequences play on tensions between nature and humankind's technological proxies, and come as close to evocative imagery as the movie can be said to get.

The story concerns Piotr (Itay Tiran), a Londoner who has come to the backwoods of Poland to marry his Polish fiancée, Zenata (Agnieszka Zulewska). Handsome and sporting a Cristiano Ronaldo-style Eurotrash haircut and fashion sense, Piotr, like all of the characters of this film, is someone about whom we know and learn nothing.

The inciting incident is Piotr's discovery of a human skeleton on the grounds where his wedding is to take place. In tandem with this discovery, Piotr begins regularly seeing (or is he hallucinating?) ghosts, and the film falls into a grating two-step formula: jump scares depicting Pior's visions / reaction shots of Piotr sweating profusely in a state of confusion and horror - all while the soundtrack pumps out Penderecki. 

Full disclosure: I find the appearance and sudden disappearance of ghosts and the question of whether or not the protagonist is actually seeing them or is merely hallucinating (because face it, they always are really seeing them so why waste precious screen time devoted to the question) to be one of the most boring, perfunctory clichés of horror cinema and the basis for a whole sub-genre of CGI-laden gothic schlock typically involving the ghosts of dead children that I wish would go away. That is not to say it can't be done well (The Others, Devil's Backbone, Don't Look Now are great movies) but the central conceit is simply not scary to me and must be imbued with an undercurrent of emotional violence, social commentary, or technical bravado to sustain my interest - all of which Demon lacks. 

The film employs a number of over-the-top horror clichés that are at odds with its high-minded neo-Kubrick pretensions. These include nonstop thunderstorms, ominous nosebleeds, and interrupted sex replete with bouncing titties straight out of an 80's slasher flick. Wrona's choices here don't suggest campiness or pastiche so much as a sincere if dunderheaded attempt at conjuring menace. The problem is, none of the characters have defined personalities, and as such, it's difficult to find them vulnerable or their situation dangerous. 

The movie takes on the tone of black comedy and allegorical folk tale when the story's focus shifts to the wedding festivities. At this point, the story follows Piotr gradually succumbing to the titular demon (or "dybbuk" in the parlance of Jewish folklore) possession while still attempting to partake in the typical wedding pageantry: speeches, dancing, drinking, bouquet-throwing. It's this tension between Piotr losing his proverbial shit and the increasingly drunken revelry of the wedding that supplies the film with the majority of its unfulfilled potential as farce.

The father of the bride, Zygmunt is arguably the antagonist and the movie's chief vessel for comic relief. Already skeptical of Piotr whom he barely knows, he is more preoccupied with saving face and keeping the wedding guests drunk as opposed to addressing the demon possession unraveling before his very eyes. While theoretically funny, this incongruity plays out as something of a perpetual, lumbering punchline. The problem, again, is one of characterization or lack thereof. The ethnic tensions between Zygmunt and Piotr, a Jewish foreigner would seemingly underlie Zygmunt's comic levels of hostility towards the latter but remain curiously underdeveloped and limited to linguistic misunderstandings.

In general, the script's reductive characterizations have the habit of rendering all of the characters' actions somehow repetitive and schematic. Wrona's clumsy blocking also constricts physical comedy and makes the actors work extremely hard to bear precious little expressive fruit, which is especially apparent during a pivotal shirtless dance/possession scene that is referenced in the film's poster art.

During this scene as well as others, the wedding guests move together as one, amorphous and featureless unit in graceless, symmetrical clumps. Consequently, there is no sense at any time that this is a real wedding composed of real individuals. Also, despite that its setting is a party with dancing and music, Demon has zero scenes of visual or musical momentum or rhythm. 

As unscary, unfunny, and visually inert as Demon is, it is even less successful as a morality play. The wedding is populated by symbolic characters called the Doctor, the Priest, and the Professor. These highly constructed characters speak in enigmatic, meandering monologues about the abstractions they represent: science=hypocrisy; mysticism=honesty; remembrance=salvation. To call their conversations dialogue would be misleading; imagine Dogville as scripted by a precocious high school student.

When it is finally time for the Professor who speaks Yiddish to explain, by the most expository means possible, the true identity of the demon, the film's Holocaust allegory about never burying the past goes from painfully on-the-nose to self-defeating. The film's 'never forget' message is undermined by refusing to allow its symbolic vessel for the traumas of the past say her piece. Rather, Demon filters her pain through the Professor, who is more of a comically broad stereotype than a human being whose lived experiences we might be able to empathize with.

What's more, the demon is a superficial, aggrieved teenage specter out of the worst kind of paranormal Hollywood gothic schlock. While I've admitted my bias against ghost-children-movies, there are countless examples of more imaginatively conceived characters of this sort: for example, Santi, the dead boy in Devil's Backbone or Mischa Barton's Munchausen syndrome-by-proxy victim in Sixth Sense. The denouement with its poor characterization of the demon destroys whatever potential Demon had to be a horror-inflected companion piece to Ida, Paweł Pawlikowski thoughtful Polish Holocaust remembrance story which also has a buried skeleton as a central metaphor.

As for the film's risible lifting of the 'you've always been the caretaker' photo from The Shining? For shame. Luckily, the film ends on the subject it knows best: the Caterpillar excavator. Ultimately, the excavator's awkward, jerky movements achieve a dubious harmony with the film's thematic and visual gracelessness that make its final appearance a fitting coda.

Casino Jack and the United States of Money

Casino Jack and the United States of Money (2010) is another irresistible and vital exploration of institutional corruption from America's premiere cinematic muckraker and heroic progressive voice, Alex Gibney. However, unlike his best work, the documentary remains oblique in both its inquiry of corrupt characters and the institutions they infect and are infected by.

Casino Jack and the United States of Money compiles exhaustive research detailing the numerous corrupt schemes super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff concocted to pay off Republican lawmakers and grift riches from vulnerable dupes (Indian tribes) and insidious power players (Russian gangsters, Chinese sweatshop owners) alike. And it grasps the big picture of money's toxic influence in politics as the number one threat to American democracy. What it doesn't do is connect these two threads: that is, the granular detail of Abramoff's criminal malice to the big picture of democracy fundamentally corroded by the lobbying power of billionaires and industry.

The film misses several bits of context that could have provided vital connective tissue. For one, it skips over discussing the campaign finance laws that govern the flow of lobbyist cash. Granted, the film was made pre-Citizens United, but this missing thread leaves uncertainty as to how Abramoff's practices were uniquely illegal, and deprives the film of either making the distinction or highlighting the lack-thereof between legal and illegal bribery.

Secondly, Abramoff's political activities are shown as having consequences on a comparatively narrow set of demographics: Asian sweatshop workers and Indian tribes. This, in contrast, to the health care or financial services lobbies, the two largest in the country, whose corrupt influence on policy adversely shape the most vital aspects of every American's life, including, when it comes to health care, literally, life and death. The financial industry get a footnote in relation to the financial crisis but certainly a brief chapter on their role in deregulation throughout the 80's and 90's as well as the role of the health care lobby in stymying single-payer health insurance from Hillarycare to the public option, were warranted in order to better connect the film's specific focus to its big picture analysis.

None of this is to say that Casino Jack and the United States of Money isn't a richly entertaining experience. As only Gibney can do, it's a zesty explosion of ingeniously curated archival footage (Karl Rove as a young College Republican foot soldier alone makes the film a must-see), insightful talking head interviews, kinetically cut re-enactments, a beautifully teased narrative arc, and propulsive music that function as leitmotifs, underscore, and Greek chorus.

The most arresting moment of the film explores the 'Gimme Five!' scheme between Abramoff and top lieutenant Michael Scanlon. The text of the two's now-infamous emails is both vigorously voiced by actors and over-layed on top of a frenetically shot, black and white racquetball game that represents one of Scanlon and Abramoff's matches where they plotted the scheme. The sexualized language of the emails, the sweaty racquetball imagery, and the subsequent footage of the absurdly buff Scanlon cavorting as a lifeguard (a job he inexplicably held even after making millions) on gay beach resort, Rehoboth island - all conspire to create an image of a highly charged, homosocial connection. This is perhaps Gibney's most indelible gift: the ability to create rich layers of subtext in service of human observation as sharply tuned as his political astuteness.

In hindsight, Jack Abramoff was an odious embodiment of the corruption before it became legalized, normalized, and scaled via Citizens United. Analogous to Gibney's prior subject, Enron, Abramoff embodied the essential corrupt characteristics of a subsequent societal crisis (in Enron's case, the financial crisis; in this, our current political crisis) while remaining nevertheless distinct in degree and effect. Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room, Gibney's unmitigated masterpiece, concisely excavates the tumorous subject at hand; Casino Jack United States of Money is arguably more ambitious in exploring the larger cancer but messier, analytically and dramatically.

Clownhouse

Director, Victor Salva wound up serving three years in prison for molesting the 12-year old star of Clownhouse (1989) during the film's production. This criminal backstory of auteur-as-real-life-predator converges with the story itself - about a trio of clowns stalking three young teen boys - to form a kind of post-modern, novelty horror object of peerless perversity. Until the day that Stephen Spielberg comes out of the closet as a Great White Shark or you can stumble upon a Tobe Hooper E-Bay store selling furniture crafted of human flesh, Clownhouse connects the metaphorical monster with its auteur to a degree that has no cinematic corollary of which I'm aware.

Like It and Stand By Me, the scary stuff share as much of the focus as the character-driven coming-of-age elements. Playing the preyed-upon brothers, Nathan Forrest Winters, Brian McHugh, and Sam Rockwell ably spout off Salva's lived-in potty-mouthed dialog and conjure a believably good-natured but ragged brotherly rapport. As the dickish older brother character, Rockwell portends the bravado and restless energy of his adult career. In eliciting such spirited performances, Salva shows genuine affection and curiosity for the young characters and actors, but his lens' gaze is fraught with the abuse he perpetrated offscreen.

In staging the hide-and-go-seek between the brothers and the clowns, Salva proves himself a confident, exuberant analog horror technician and demonstrates the qualities that understandably attracted early patron, Francis Ford Coppola's attention and financial backing. Capturing the heart-in-throat suspense of home invasion classics like Halloween and When a Stranger Calls, Salva earns jump scares by relying as much on exacting framing and clever makeup design as crashing music cues and abrupt cutting. The savvy interplay of light and space as one of the killer clown stalks a character from outside a sliding glass window predates Wes Craven's similarly nail-biting setup during the Drew Barrymore opening sequence from Scream. 

In spite of the R rating, Clownhouse feels decidedly PG-13. The clowns, while sinister, are mostly bogeyman as opposed to agents of sadism inflicting harm against the protagonists. An illogically staged climax deflates much of the film's hard-won tension, and in combination with the overall anodyne approach to violence, a hokey, even Nickelodeon tone predominates the last chapter of the film.  If the clowns preying on young teens can be read as Salva stand-ins, then what to make of the film's retreat into Are You Afraid of the Dark-style cheesiness where nothing feels at stake so much as a bad nightmare? The muting of the clowns' violence then function as Salva reassuring himself, mitigating his own nastiness, and leaving the very worst of his demons un-exorcised and offscreen - where they apparently could and did fester.

The Struggle

Though derided at the time as anachronistic temperance propaganda, D.W. Griffith's Prohibition-era melodrama, The Struggle (1931) survives today as masterful, empathetic, and forward-thinking cinema. 

Telling the story of a genial breadwinner who nearly loses everything to booze, Griffith allows us to understand his protagonist's attraction to alcohol without demonizing or glamorizing it. An early scene set at a raucous speakeasy establishes the movie's overall visual elegance and empathy, as convulsive choreography, fluid blocking, and the actors' nimble physicality take us inside everyman Jimmie’s (Hal Skelly) drunken revelry rather than merely gawk at his shame.

After a brief but taut interlude depicting Jimmie’s gradually slipping sobriety amidst an otherwise tranquil domestic life with his wife and daughter, Griffith stages a harrowing and protracted party scene that is the film’s remarkable centerpiece. Building immense suspense by juxtaposing the gaiety of the partygoers with Jimmie’s impending drunken meltdown, Griffith pays particular attention to his wife's burgeoning horror at the situation and the scene chimes with deep empathy for her and all the innocent bystanders caught in the path of a drunk's tornado. 

Griffith invests each episode in the character’s decline with an expressive balance of specificity and symbolism, never coasting on formula. Griffith renders the character’s dislocation with uncommon poetry in one striking scene where Jimmie gazes out at his estranged daughter's figure through the window, funereal organ music wafting into the now-empty apartment they used to share. Artfully composed but rooted in raw emotion, the scene shows how dependency removes a person from the relationships that make life worth living and instead of muffling, actually amplifies, the yearning for connection. 

The Struggle also eschews any inquiry into Jimmie’s motivation for picking up a drink, portraying alcoholism as an immutable disease instead of a defect with clear-cut external or moral causes. The narrative structure itself, ever-lurching towards the next degrading episode, conveys the inexorable and progressive nature of his addiction with such subtle temporal details as how the characters' apartments decrease in size and adornment as a consequence of their worsening financial health. 

A poignant testament to his deeply personal grasp of the material, Griffith himself succumbed to alcoholism not long after the scathing response to The Struggle – his last film. He spent the rest of his days drinking in isolation, a fate at sad odds with the redemption and renewal he saw possible in Jimmie’s story. 

Sleepaway Camp

Delivering gruesome, sadistic gore and loads of low-budget hand-crafted charm, Sleepaway Camp (1983) is a conflicted look at the hells of adolescent sexuality. On the one hand, the film mines the summer camp setting for all the humiliations it inflicts on youngsters as a matter of course: heterosexist mixers, cabin showers, competitive courtships, rampant bullying, awkward structured outdoor activities. On the other hand, the much-ballyhooed twist ending undoes all that insightful chronicling with an absurdly homophobic and trans-phobic explanation of the central killer's motives. Still, Sleepaway Camp is that most pleasurable of B-movie romps: a dumb movie by smart people. The acting, the camera-work, and the music (including a fabulous analog synth-laden original song "Angela's Theme" by Frankie Vincie) are crafted with an unusual level of detail and commitment even as the obviously nonexistent budget and various plot absurdities disqualify it from mainstream respectability.