Exit Through The Gift Shop

Boy, 2010 really was the high-water mark for the documentary/mockumentary/hoax ambiguity, wasn't it? Between Catfish and I'm Still Here and this, it seems like the best way to make a doc was to make it meta and question not just itself but the viability of the medium. The documentary genre has seemed muddied up by a confusion of facts versus truth (or worse, factoids and opinions and soundbytes versus truth), and if we've hit a point where we can bust that journo-evangelistic style wide open, I'm all for it. But whether or not it's the genuine article, that's not what Exit Through The Gift Shop is aimed at.

Exit busts wide open a different pet issue of mine: the disparity between art, artists, and the art scene. It posits that there are those who make art, that there are those who call themselves artists, and that there are those who land on the art scene, and is shows us really clearly that we are wrong to assume a natural crossover between any of the categories. At first the film was gripping and engaging, but when Banksy turned everything upside down -- when he disappeared behind the camera and Thierry took the role of underground sensation -- the film suddenly felt like some kind of personal-artistic-integrity agitprop, and I found myself more and more aggravated by the bland, voiceless shit "Mr. Brainwash" was selling the world.

Someone (Shephard Fairey, maybe? or actually I think it was Banksy himself) pointed out rightly that Mr. Brainwash is the 21st Century Andy Warhol. He has a team of artists mass-producing his half-baked ideas, which are basically just juxtapositions of recycled pop-cultural iconography. The difference then is that the 20th Century Andy Warhol was semi-knowingly making a statement about the nature of scenes, fame, celebrity, and popularity, and he was selling the idea that he could sell art as much as the art itself; and the 21st Century equivalent, the post-postmodern, the post-information-age, post-meta Mr. Brainwash, seems to be exploiting the now-commonplace abusably tenuous nature of scenes, fame, celebrity, and popularity.

All art scenes are full of half-assed, idea-less recyclers in love with themselves or just desperate for a scene. And whether or not the film has been scripted for our benefit or caught and cleverly cut to tell the story it does, it still does a wonderful job of not just exposing that, and deriding it, but steering (mostly) clear of a holier-than-thou attitude about it. The line between what Mr. Brainwash did on the streets and what Shephard Fairey did is largely a matter of who got there first and who made the bigger splash doing so. Fairey seems infinitely more aware of his position and of his statement-of-purpose, but there's some fuzzy area in there, and it's hard to know for sure if Thierry Guetta is being edited to make a point or if he's truly a moron. The line between MBW's art show and Banksy's LA art show again seems to come down to a matter of awareness and who got there first with regards to controlling and riding one's own hype. Again, it's hard to say for sure editing doesn't play a part here, as we linger on the selling-a-hollow-man aspects of Brainwash's promotion but emphasize the successful celebration that was Banksy's show. (The two shows are demonstrably very different; but how different is difficult to know.)

Mr. Brainwash is every bad artist, aping what he's seen and skipping from art fan to would-be art giant without taking the time to hone and develop, and the film does seem to vilify that attitude (which I happen to agree with). What it doesn't touch on, probably smartly, is the nature of artistic voice, intent, or talent. Fairey and Banksy seem to have things to say, and (lesser artists?) Invader and Swoop and Borf and most the others have at least the distinction and singularity of style. The film doesn't try to tell you why what works works. It just shows you that the fact that it works doesn't necessarily mean shit. Art scenes and art critics are capricious mobs, racing each other to the next big thing. That kind of desperate fickleness leads to a throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks mentality, the opposite of a steady, discerning eye. In other words, it's not very surprising that someone like Bush or Linkin Park might become huge rock stars, and it's not very surprising that someone like Mr. Brainwash might sell a million dollars worth of street-art knockoffs. At least a couple of other, "more real" artists like Shephard Fairey and Banksy can help us laugh at it while they exploit it, right?

L'enfance Nue (Naked Childhood)

All I really knew about this film going in was that it had insight into a child's troubled upbringing and was kin in spirit to The 400 Blows. At first I was disappointed in the story's lax tone and pacing. It's not that I want every film to be tightly crafted and efficient machines, but I didn't really feel like the style was really doing much here. We stay outside François's head as he continues to be a menace to whoever cares for him, and I think the obtuseness of that, the lack of understanding beyond that of an observer that you have with François, is what made the observational, realist tone came across dry and slow, rather than patient and meditative. Plus, for all the slow advancements (kicked out of a nicer home, François is shuffled off onto an older couple, the Thierrys, who even before they've had to deal with him you can tell are going to put up with his aberrant behavior and love him nonetheless, not because he's special but because they are) it doesn't seem like the kid is learning much. He still has outbursts of violence, vandalism, and theft, and he remains stoic and pensive throughout. Sure, he likes the elderly Nana, and he had a grudging brotherly relationship with Raoul his older foster-brother, but these relationships didn't transform him so much as momentarily distract him from being a menace. Not that they should, mind you; I liked that he wasn't some quick-fixed case of "boy just needs a little love and he becomes an angel," but it still left you with a sense of treading narrative water for a bit.

But I have to admit, in the last twenty minutes, when (SPOILER) Nana dies and François returns to his undistracted hooliganism, even causing a bad car crash by throwing rocks from an overpass, I felt a little more affinity for him. In retrospect, he had changed as the story advanced, but it was so slowly and so patiently that I hadn't registered it entirely. (Plus, full disclosure: I started this film late one night and finished it eight hours later the next morning.) By then the tone and pacing had become familiar to me, the naturalism of what I assume had to be non-actors playing close approximations of themselves (Grandpa looks at the camera about once every fifteen minutes: it's adorable) had been laid down well enough that the very understated drama, most of it offscreen, drove the story forward nicely. There's no big catharsis here, no massive tragedy or uplifting emotional victory. François pays for his actions by being kept under observation for the rest of the year, and his elderly family actually miss the little trouble-maker.

From the agency where he's being kept, François writes them a letter promising to be good so they will let him see them during Christmas, and that's that. He's on a delicate road to being a better kid but he's not fixed. The damage he's done is not undone. Life is messy and you have to be patient with kids who don't understand any better than you do why they do things. (One great, telling sequence was when the director of the orphanage/adoption agency asks older Raoul why he ran away from home. Raoul answers, "Because I didn't do my essay." It feels like a perfectly accurate and honest way of how a kid views things. Small motives. The director pushes, clearly wondering if the timing of his runaway and François's removal from the home is less than coincidental, but Raoul just shrugs. He has nothing to add. He saw a teacher and was embarrassed about his essay. The bigger motives of unrest at home, or confusion over missing a troublesome foster-brother, don't even enter his mind. Just that essay.)

So obviously I came around. I can't say I was in love with it, but I definitely respect it, and see why Criterion would preserve and distribute it. And in the end, maybe it did give me a little bit of insight into the messy way a kid's mind works. It's been a while since I've been one, and I was never quite that angry (though I had my days), but we've all been there, and it's nice to be reminded from time to time what it was like. Messy and terrifying and basically flying blind.

Enter the Void *

Everything below is spoiler heavy. You should know that.

I shouldn't be surprised that a Gaspar Noé film is more interesting as provocative art than it is as dramatic entertainment. The experience of the movie is at times exhausting, overstimulating to the point of discomfort, and tedious in its obsessively circular narrative and thematic directness. The aerial floating and shaky POV camerawork leave one dizzy (hardly by mistake). Each shot is bursting with oversaturation, and any time something can strobe, it does strobe. Being behind the protagonist's head or spending fifteen minutes at a time roving and blinking in their as-literal-as-possible POV made me anxious and eager to move to the safer ground of third-person cameras that don't rotate, float, distort, or stare straight down at everything from an impossible, dizzying height. But of course, that's the point of it all, isn't it? I'm supposed to feel my nerves jangled, my safety net removed. I'm supposed to get antsy and agitated. That's why it's provocative.

And so saying, despite the discomfort that comes with it, I can allow it. What makes the film hard to get behind is the story, which I generously (but perhaps not tactfully) referred to as "Gaspar Noé sucking Sigmund Freud's dick." It's all about mother's breast, confused familial sexualities, and spiraling inward, almost literally into and out of one's own navel. It couldn't be any more obvious about its love of Freudian complexes if it tried. They are telegraphed in every relationship in the story. The day before the story begins Oscar's nerdy best friend Victor (Oscar's foil/surrogate mirrored self?) discovers that Oscar has been fucking Victor's mom. Later in the film, we match cut from young Oscar spying on his parents doing it doggy-style to adult Oscar spying on his sister fucking his mentor/friend Alex doggy-style. Basically the story exploits sexual desire with your mother and with your sister every chance it gets. I'm normally a big fan of cleverly used archetypes, even outdated ones, because you can get a lot of dramatic and philosophical mileage out of the same old playing pieces if you do it right. But here, they were just too obvious and too for-their-own-sake for me, and I found myself groaning at the drama. It's... well, a lot of it is dumb.

But not all of it. I want to give some credit where its due here. Follow with me. So the set-up goes, Oscar is mad in love with his sister Linda. (I understand that they are all each other has after losing their parents as children in a brutally depicted car crash, but it's pretty tough to understand why anybody would love someone as emotionally and mentally stunted as Linda. To be fair, Jen nailed it on the head by pointing out: she needs him. Case closed.) So when he dies -- the roundabout result of the drug dealing he did to "save" her by flying her out to Japan -- he does the directly-referenced Tibetan Book of the Dead thing and sticks around as a disembodied floating camera-eye. He obsesses over falling into lights, chases the things he cannot let go of, and vaguely seeks out reincarnation while basically stalking the sister he's in love with. So even before Linda pees on a stick and it turns up positive (in Japanese), I think pretty much everyone in the theater had predicted that his final reincarnation would be as his sister's baby. But the movie anticipates that and subverts it. Oscar tries to become his sister's baby, but we see him spiral out of her bare belly mid-abortion, foiled by her lack of interest in having a child. He even, after roaming around miserably, returns and tries again to enter the aborted fetus, the camera spiraling in and passing through the graphic remains. Oscar did try it, just as we knew he would, but instead of it being an ironic twist, it was a failed attempt, too easy, too obvious. The character wasn't going to get off that easily.

And so the story continues, the drifting becoming even more miserable and exhausting than before, until Linda and Alex are in a cab that does a headlong into a semi-truck, almost exactly like how Linda and Oscar's parents met their demise so many years earlier. From this point on, the disorienting movie becomes even more disorienting, as we drift away from neon Tokyo and into a sort of even-more-neon version of Tokyo, which we recognize as a massive blacklit model Alex's friend had built earlier in the story. It is fantasy Tokyo, with a massive Love Hotel at its center which Oscar had fantasized while high about being able to float into and see all his friends having crazy sex. And so here at the end, we spend a long, long time doing just that. So long, in fact, that I grew tired and bored of all the sexual bodies, whose genitals glowed with tendrils of light. Anyway, after an exhaustive sequence of drifting through rooms, we land on -- guess who -- Linda, alive and well, fucking a man and asking him to come inside her. Now ghost-Oscar can do what he wanted, and he drifts inside, catches a ride in a sea of semen (yep) and when that one spermatozoa pops inside the egg, he is there, reincarnated finally as Linda's precious baby. The last shots are a little moving in their "this must be what being a newborn baby would really seem like" blurriness, but there's something just a little too obvious about the comfort of mother's nipple, and that the wailing and crying doesn't begin until the moment the umbilical is cut and the baby is carried down the hospital corridor. It's as subtle as a sledgehammer.

I want to say it's nice that the story had, under all its layers, a protagonist who wanted something, had obstacles, and found resolution (and I'm totally okay that the resolution came bitterly, in the form of an obvious inward-turning fantasy). But I can't pretend that the movie isn't 137 minutes long, and I can't pretend I didn't use the word "exhausting" or synonyms for it half a dozen times in describing it. Dramatically speaking, it's got two clear choices and a lot of backstory exposition, cleverly (enough) delivered. Dramatically speaking, the pay off isn't worth the investment. But there's something in here, a philosophical and metanarrative message that has slightly higher dividends. Which brings me (appropriately) full circle here. As a story, as drama, as entertainment, Enter The Void feels lacking. But as art, as a challenge from a provocateur to experience things differently and to look at the world with new eyes, as an exploration of big subjects like sex and death and storytelling, Enter The Void is an interesting (if exhausting) experience.

Seen at Cinema 21.

El espinazo del diablo (The Devil's Backbone)

So here's the thing. I'm of the controversial opinion that Pan's Labyrinth isn't a terribly good movie. I'm of the opinion that it's very, very pretty, but the characters are one-dimensional plot-devices, and the story rendered from their drama is more cartoon than fantasy-horror. I have called it on more than one occasion "a flashier, inferior version of The Devil's Backbone," which is only partly fair and yet speaks volumes about where I stand on both. In all honesty, I kind of feel like Guillermo del Toro is the Mexican George Lucas -- in that his best work is underfunded and going against the grain, when he is challenged by either logistical and financial obstacles or the dramatic ones that come from adapting someone else's work. Given every toy in the toybox and carte blanche to create what he wants, the results become an effects house's wet dream and a dramatist's... well, "nightmare" is putting it a little strong. Suffice it to say it's frustrating as a writer to watch any film where it's abundantly, painfully clear that the director doesn't care about the story or the characters, just so long as whatever's going on is really cool.

Anyway, diatribe aside I feel vindicated in rewatching The Devil's Backbone because it's very, very good, and it's very, very strong in character-driven action. In fact, although it's clearly a ghost story with horror elements, the movie is so character driven that it doesn't feel like a horror film at all, it just feels like straight drama with some spooky-ish ghost stuff. As the characters develop into their roles and relationships, as Jacinto becomes an outed villain and the boys are left (basically) to defend themselves, the story just takes on the arc and tone of any old drama story. People's pasts haunt them; people's weaknesses must be overcome; people's fears must be faced head-on. Undead or no, this isn't a story about supernatural things. It's a story about these kids. This is an object lesson for me, no question. This is a lesson I cannot ignore.

And here's another lesson I cannot ignore: The Devil's Backbone isn't light on theme, by any means (and oh man I love love love that unexploded bomb in the courtyard of the orphanage; just the most poetic and wonderful motherfucking elephant-in-the-room ever, reminding the viewer about the world outside as well as the world inside these characters -- speaking on so many unspoken levels at once: it's perfect). But it's also not very complicated, thematically. At a certain point in the story I began to feel a little liberated from my self-imposed burden of "figuring out what my story is about" on some deeper level, because I realize I've always known, basically, but I kept looking for something more, or bigger, or bolder, to say or do with it. Now listen, I know me, and by the time the words go to the page, and by the time I am on the third or fourth draft especially, I may have come full circle on the theme thing and found complicated things my film is saying. But that's fine! I still need to remember, now at least, to relax that hold and worry more about the characters and the drama. (When I say theme I don't mean any dialectic message or brow-beating pretentious agenda; John August calls it the story's "DNA," something that makes every scene of every film feel like it belongs inside that film and no other, something that makes the film its own living thing, maybe. Call it what you will, I use "theme" as an easier to conceive handle for the idea of my story's DNA.) A story with no theme (or "DNA") is, in my mind, no good at all, a waste of everyone's time and effort. If it means nothing, says nothing, is about nothing, and has no connective meaning then it shouldn't exist. It's chewing on styrofoam for nutrients. But many, many good stories have light, breezy themes (or DNA), and focus instead on the drama. And The Devil's Backbone isn't even that breezy: it's just not wearing its "theme" on its sleeve, and it's better for it. My poorly-made point is, I know I'm already far enough down that road that I should just let go, write it out, and look back over it with an eye for "finding the DNA" and extracting it, expanding it, manifesting it. My poorly-made point is, about halfway through watching this I felt kind of elated about the state of affairs w.r.t. my script and its "thematic voice." That's not the most important part, so stop worrying about it.

Yeah, this isn't even a ramble... it's more of a jumble. Anyway, three thoughts: 1, Del Toro's carte blanche works (Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy II come to mind) are so much weaker than his boxed-in, forced-to-be-creative work (like The Devil's Backbone or, honestly? the first Hellboy); and 2, character-driven stories are basically just dramas, which is liberating to realize (I'm reminded of the great genre stories ranging from Ghostbusters to 28 Days Later to Back to the Future to, hell, Galaxy Quest: they all play out basically as character-driven dramas by act three); and then 3, theme is crucial but a hint of a theme is enough seed to start growing, so stop stressin' and just start.