Whenever I cover the topic of abortion in my ethics classes, I go to great pains to stress to my students the value of a dispassionate inquiry on the subject. I discourage use of values charged, question begging language of “pro-choice” and “pro-life” and encourage more descriptive language of “pro-abortion rights” or “anti-abortion rights” as a way to stress that even though the issue of abortion is in many way a question of competing priorities of the values of choice and life in this one area, nonetheless in the larger scheme of things people on both sides of the issue do believe in rights to life and rights to choice in general. The issue of abortion is morally about abortion and politically about abortion rights, not life itself or choice itself. That said, resolving the political and legal issue of abortion for many who are morally opposed to abortion but legally supportive of rights to abortion, the conflict really does come down to a decision about what priorities must dominate in a free society—-life in all cases or life in most cases but sometimes choice in the hard cases. And so while it is less divisive and less partisan to gut our language of discussion of value loaded words wherever possible, this is just one of the ways in which the attempt to be objective by trying to find a values neutral or non-partisan language in which to speak proves limited and possibly even distortive of the complexity of the issue at hand. It is deceptive to whitewash the fact that values are conflicting.
Nonetheless, my effort in my class discussions is to try to discipline my students to clarify their understanding of the facts and of the actual value choices at hand systematically, one aspect of the issue at a time, in order to clarify where the rightness or the wrongness, the permissibility or the impermissibility, or the advisibility or the inadvisibility of abortion lie exactly. I want them to figure out as specifically as they can where they think the lines need to be drawn and to work that out both morally and, separately, politically. I also stress so much objectivity because I want my students to practice fairness towards the multiple sides of morally contestable matters and I want them to be able to hear and understand each other and the differing philosophers we read in studying the issue. And I’m extremely proud of nearly all of my students I have had these class discussions with for displaying incredible openmindedness and even temperedness with such volatile matters. I know my own thoughts on the issue have deepened from those thoughtful and probing discussions we’ve had together.
Lake of Fire is quite an admirable film for going a further step towards effective illumination of the issue of abortion by not banning the heat and volatile passions that most of us feel when confronted with various aspects of the issues related to abortion. Nietzsche stresses repeatedly and profoundly the importance of finding the truth best not through greater and greater extents of dispassionate thinking but through the ability to feel through more and more affects. Correlately, he stresses that the truth is not to be understood from the right perspective but from through the ability to multiple perspectives, from seeing through a thousand eyes and gaining a fuller picture that way. On these terms, I think Tony Kaye’s film about abortion is an enriching experience worth having. Kaye represents a number of ways of seeing, a number of ways of feeling and through uncensored documentary imagery offers the viewer the chance to see a thousand striking images and feel struck by a thousand emotions. What I appreciate is that for all the vitriol and passion of many of the participants in the film, that feeling of fairness and perspective undergirds the film under Kaye’s direction and editing and I think manages the sort of enrichening of dialogue I would aim at through detachment.
A key virtue of the film too is that among the viewpoints represented are some of the “detached,” philosophical ones usually given short schrift (if any schrift at all) in the public debate. That said, the film does have some limitations that could have easily been remedied within the seemingly endless 154 minute runtime. For one thing, the informedly philosophical discussions could be more frequent and more involved than some of the multiplications of extremist voices and I think some of the issues of broader political nature that distract from the strict ethics of the practice might not be allowed to dominate so much of the screentime. A lot of valuable, helpful, possibly crucial philosophical and legal distinctions are conspicuously absent. Most egregiously absent are non-religiously based (or unexclusively religiously based) arguments against abortion, more thorough treatments of pro-abortion rights positions that concede the humanity of the unborn such as Judith Jarvis Thomson’s very famous “unconscious violinist” argument, the constitutional controversies involved in appealing to “penumbras,” etc., etc.
That said, while ultimately incomplete, the film does an eye opening and laudable job in general of bringing home the urgency of the political context to the evaluation of the morality of abortion but to the morality of those involved in the debate. There is a strong temptation for me, as a fetishizer of detachment, to want to only address the morality of abortion in a vacuum separated from the contingent political practices associated with the debate since those are theoretically periphery to the relative rightness or wrongness of the practice in abstraction. This film brought home to me some of the arbitrariness of drawing neat lines between abortion in abstraction and abortion in concrete political contexts. As much as being able to abstract the practice or aspects of the practice from surrounding context helps to simplify the issue in theory, it also obscures the interrelated consequences of one’s ethical and political decisions given actual conditions.
I felt like everyone was treated rather fairly. I don’t know how the hardline partisans would feel, whether they would all feel like they were treated fairly or whether they would feel like their side was caricatured worse than the other. I think the visual documentation of actual abortions made a strong visual, visceral case against the practice while the detailed documentation of the extent of theocratic and vigilante tendencies of members of the anti-abortion movement made a strong case against casting one’s lot with such authoritarian scoundrels. I think also the extensive discussion of the consequences of abortions performed illegally brought to life viscerally the real dangers of “coathanger” abortions and most of the philosophers included served to make a powerful case about the moral ambiguity and open door for tolerance of choice in the law with respect to abortion.
In sum, I think both sides make visceral visual cases. It may be unique to my temperment but I found the visceral case against abortion stronger but the abstract case in favor of abortion rights far stronger. The degree to which that is a function of the relative humanity and largeness of perspective of the advocates for abortion rights compared to the authoritarian, theocratic zeal of the proponents of restriction of abortion rights is hard to gauge.
Overall, there is much to learn and many, many important things to see and feel in this film even for those of us who have already learned, seen, and felt a great deal about the topic already. Abortion is an issue that I feel epitomizes Nietzsche’s intuition about the necessity of multiplying the eyes, the angles, and affects with which one looks at something if one is to truly understand it. This film is a far cry from a final word on the issue. But it is an effective and valuable aid in multiplying one’s perspectives and one’s feelings.
Sometimes people disagree about what makes for a horror film. As far as I’m concerned, the definitive feature of the genre is that it deals with frightening transgressions of nature and of morality. Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth is horror that situates itself purely in terms of this defining characteristic. The horror is not in the surprises, as the film offers few ultimately, and it’s not in traditional scares. The horror is all in the transgression promised in the premise. The trailer below will cue you in to the premise sufficiently enough that I need not waste words or risk spoilers by going into it myself.
Teeth is pitch black horror comedy. The tone of the film borders on cartoonish at times and its funny moments are almost always its absolutely grotesque ones. The gore is not frequent or gratuitous but it is as transgressively scandalous and perverse as promised. I am not at all one to watch horror films to see gore for gore’s sake. Yet the horror genre at its best provides incredible opportunities for shrewd commentaries and visceral meditations on all sorts of themes and in service of such themes, I am probably as interested in gore as the most gratuitous gorehound. And Teeth delivers thematically with a fascinating synthesis of narratives and myths related to sexuality—ancient myths, Freudian myths, contemporary evangelical Christian purity myths, female empowerment myths, evolutionary stories, and familiar rape narratives are all interwoven with each other in a remarkably coherent and, to me, intellectually stimulating way. I had a good time sifting through the ways that these disparate and sometimes competing narratives found so many elemental features in eerily common with each other and how they also fundamentally diverged and created fundamental contrasts by the end.
Fundamentally, what becomes so interesting with this particular horror film is the way it throws into question what is nature and what is transgression? Is puberty’s sexual awakening the end of the age of purity or is it the return to nature lost to trauma and repression until that point? Are these teeth a transgression of nature or are they an evolutionary gift for adaptation? Is female empowerment itself an overturning of nature or an adaptation for advancement of women (and the species itself)? Do our traditional myths put us at odds with nature and is the point of the film to affirm the more modern stories of physical, personal, and social evolution as vehicles towards a strengthened nature that overturns the patriarchy, dogmatism, and religious fundamentalism that traditionally have claimed to be true to nature but have only functioned through a fundamentally anti-natural tyranny, as Nietzsche would argue?
So, all in all, Teeth is a horror film in the most elemental way, manifoldly transgressively playing off primal fears, gallows humor, and vengeance fantasies in order to give life to and put in tension some of the most enduring and some of the newest myths and narratives that our culture uses to cope with, understand, and control the primal forces of sexual desire.
As to form, the acting is uneven and the pacing is a little overly drawn out frequently. And the music stands out very well. Robert Miller’s score is excitingly evocative of Danny Elfman, in particular the Beetlejuice score in places. In other words, the score knows how to do dark, wry horror comedy. And fitting the primal themes, the score also heavily relies on more tribal elements to a fitting effect.
B+
Your Friends and Neighbors
Neil LaBute’s film Your Friends and Neighbors is pretty much what I expected and desired from the director of In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things, The Wicker Man, and Nurse Betty: It’s a film in which irredeemably cruel, selfish, and sexually despairing narcissists rip themselves and each other apart. Unlike Teeth, which plays on mythic horrors and familiar narratives in exploring humanity’s uneasy relationship with sex, Your Friends and Neighbors is one of a seemingly endless line of films that drags sex down from the realm of ideals and myths and through the vulgar bedrooms of your idiosyncratically twisted friends and neighbors. The more serious films I watch, the more it becomes clear that cinema from all over the world has been for decades now chronicling sexual dysfunction and shades of particularity of experience in a nearly encyclopedic fashion.
And Your Friends and Neighbors is a fascinating watch if you’re of the temperament to enjoy unvarnished exposure of human weakness, narcissism, aggressiveness, and passive aggressiveness, and if you’d like to add to your mental catalogue of nuances of idiosyncratic sexual despair. I enjoy a great deal such films that plumb unpleasant truths and dissect in detail human cruelty, despair, and power dialectics with some dark humor. So I loved this film.
The performances were also uniformly superb. Ben Stiller vanishes into his serious role astonishingly well, Jason Patric’s portrayal of possibly the most repulsively thoroughly sketched mysoginist I’ve ever seen on screen is perfectly sickening. And Catherine Keener has a scene towards the end of the film that just blew me away. I never understood all the hubbub around her performance in Capote, but she deserved an Oscar either for 1998’s Your Friends and Neighbors or 1999’s Being John Malkovich, both for vivid portrayals of icy narcissists , callously indifferent to the attention of her admirers.
Michel Gondry’s masterpiece The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, following Charlie Kaufman’s masterpiece script, is one of the most top to bottom brilliant achievements in film I have ever seen.
Taken as a science fiction film, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ranks as a model for the genre. The film takes a fascinating concept—the ability to erase one’s painful memories—and rather than using it only as a pretext for exploring its other thematic concerns, the film explores the fascinating what if incredibly thoroughly, exploring the technological ins and outs of the procedure and, much more importantly, exploring in depth the direct psychological implications for those who would undergo the procedure. We see the effects of such a procedure both through the perspectives of one character as the procedure is unfolding and another character who is dealing with the effects several days after having received the procedure. The film also roots itself in, incorporates, and brings to life a wide range of scientific insights into dream psychology, keeping a wildly surreal and fantastic dream storyline feeling simultaneously realistic.
The film also explores a huge host of insights into memory and perspective. As we learn about Joel’s life through his dreams and watch as he actively shapes his memories and watch them change and emphasize various things right before our eyes. We hear the Clementine of his dream world inauspiciously say things that echo what we know to be his own thoughts about her or those of other characters rather than exactly her own words or perspectives—-the subtlest of reminders that the Clementine we’re seeing in his dream is not actually the real Clementine. There is a fascinating interplay of memory and dream creation as the Clementine we experience in the dream world is a mixture of idealization, villainization, authentic memory and new dream actor.
Looked at in terms of narrative structure, the film is a masterpiece of coherent, non-linear chronology. Like a great Tarantino film, we see various sequences not in the order off their occurence but rather in the order best for their experiential and narrative value. The film jumps back and forth in time and then, tells a relationship in reverse, capturing the feelings and frustrations of an end of a relationship in which everything looks just terrible and there’s little conscious awareness of how things fell apart as only the end is fresh in the mind.
The journey backwards through Joel and Clem’s relationship in his mind gives a great journey through a relationship with the romantic beginnings being the climax of a long relationship instead of simply the ignorant infatuated starting point that is lost as time goes on. By the time we reach the beginning of their relationship in his dream, we see characters who have traversed a whole relationship of ups and downs and who have traversed the trip back through it in the dream world and have all this connection. And we see them reenacting in dream form their initial meeting in such a way that retains its freshness and romance and wonder of two people meeting for the first time while commenting on what’s ahead. It’s an amazing combination of perspectives loaded into one scene before yet another time jump forward in time outside of the dream world.
(Don’t watch if you’ve not seen the film)
What makes the narrative structure so staggering and amazing is that it manages to play tricks on you, not letting you know exactly what’s going on for a solid half an hour into the film—-not even making clear when you have entered the dream world until Joel himself becomes aware of it despite confusing and bizarre scene transitions that precede the awareness—-but then sorts itself out and becomes completely intelligible. The film, without resorting to talky explanations, manages to utterly confuse and disorient for experiential effect and then to explain itself in such a way that having had the disorienting experience you can follow things out the rest of the way and not stay lost for the sake of the writer’s ego. The structure is disorienting when that’s best for the experience and then clear and masterfully ordered and balanced so that the surreality does not lose the audience or dwarf the emotional narrative that is of the primary importance.
And let’s not forget the narrative structure of the story running outside of Joel’s head that keeps returning the film to reality and giving a parallel commentary on the same themes running in the dream world. It also gives information insightful for interpreting the meanings and inspirations of Joel’s dreams. Even the subplot, involving the wonderfully underrated performances of Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, and Mark Ruffalo, wonderfully leads to a narratively perfect and poignant heartbreaking twist. Dunst is perfect as the young woman with a crush on her boss, while screwing around with Ruffalo. Wilkinson perfectly plays an ostensibly caring and level headed doctor with questionable ethics and disappointingly passive justification for them. Elijah Wood also gives one of his best performances as a clueless, unscrupulous loser exploiting illicitly gained information to get a woman way out of his league. It’s hysterical to listen to his pathetic cliches as he refers to his brand new “girlfriend” as “the old lady” and tells her on her answering machine that he “loves her so much.” He’s written as a scathingly comic and pathetic satirical character.
He’s one of many great comedic elements not to be lost in the film, including a great comic variation on the classic existentialist anxiety of seeing God as an “absentee landlord” as Joel cries out to the heavens in his dream, “Is there anybody out there? Can anybody hear me?!” and we cut to those responsible for him dancing stoned in their underwear on his bed to goofy music. It’s God as absentee partiers. While not an overall comedy, the script is sprinkled with great one liners, great irony, black comedy, sight gags, romantic silliness, and scenes that are simultaneously eerie and funny.
Of course, though, as good as these performances and characters are, it’s not their movie—-Kate Winslet was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Clementine Kruczynski with her mixture of impetuous free-spiritedness, anxious vulnerability, hot temper, alcoholism, and earnest openness. She is written and performed to be so authentically, realistically charming and so authentically, realistically flawed that the romance around which this high concept science fiction film actually revolves works. Winslet is amazing, exuding magnetism, energy, geeky hipsterness, and yearning insecurity.
Jim Carrey as Joel Barish completely loses himself in the role. I’m a huge Jim Carrey fan and I don’t even think of him when I think of this, my favorite movie. I just think of Joel Barish, a man subdued, introspectively thoughtful, and pessimistic, desperately fighting his dreams to keep his memories. His dramatic prowess betters even that which he showed in his superb performances in The Truman Show and Man on the Moon.
As a romance the film is one of my favorites. Carrey and Winslet have a special chemistry as a genuine pair of opposites attracting. Normally films with opposites attracting play off of less particularly and skillfully drawn characters. This film is like a romance within a character study within a sci fi movie. The romance is incredibly real. The dialogue doesn’t sound written by some geniusly witty playwright—-the flirting is not witty and snappy but awkward and earnest, the acrimonious arguments are raw, the lovers’ affirmations of each other are sweet in their banal sincerity. They capture perfectly the powerful chemistry that leads to explosions rather than peace. They’re people who can’t let go of each other even as much as they drive each other crazy to be together. Not since Sam and Diane have I seen authentic portrayal of lovers who are together out of a visceral need for each other, completely in defiance of their thorough personality clash.
The romance is explored then from an innovative number of angles—-we see a sequence of their meeting and flirting awkwardly SPOILERSPOILERSPOILER
though, we do not know at the time that this is not really their first meeting END OF SPOILEREND OF SPOILEREND OF SPOILER
, we see the major events of their relationship in reverse, and we see them take the journey together of fighting the erasure process, following them as a team that we root for, establishing them as people who get along, work together, care about the relationship, and, so, a couple we want to see “make it.”
HEAVY SPOILER SECTION
HEAVY SPOILER SECTION
In the end, the film gives a completely unique paradox, [spoiler]people who, in their immediate experience feel like they have just met and yet, subconsciously feel completely bound to one another, and they are given tapes in which, in their own words they hear exactly how they miserably they will feel towards each other. Two characters, in the throes of both infatuation and the bonds that take years to create, are given information about how much they would hate each other and need to choose whether or not to go forward or to get out and not risk ruining everything again. This creates a fascinating and unique variation on the whole romance genre. It infuses knowledge from the end of a relationship into the euphoria of the beginning and asks whether the characters will respond prudently or romantically. It also serves as a beautiful metaphor of the romantic challenge of monogamy with the need to make decisions ever anew to start it all over with ever increased knowledge of what’s ahead.
In the end, the question is whether or not Joel and Clementine will make it, whether they can learn from mistakes having erased them. They embody a paradox of human nature in which moving on from mistakes means being able to forget them and not be trapped in the past (Nietzsche’s real meaning in the quote misused in the movie) while at the same time, we need our memories as warnings to keep us from rehearsing the same mistakes all over again. Can Clementine and Joel benefit from the immediate forgetfulness of their mistakes that repairs their feelings towards one another? Or will forgetting their mistakes only doom them to repeat them again? The metaphor for, and commentary on, our own struggles to both put the past behind us with optimism and to learn how not to repeat it, is simply perfect. And all is left ambiguous, with no easy answers on silver platters, just a great conversation starter.
END OF HEAVY SPOILER SECTION
END OF HEAVY SPOILER SECTION
The romance is also beautifully evolved in numerous nonverbal ways as these characters connect not through words but through play and through sharing intimate memories. In the dream, their journey to Joel’s childhood is one of the most romantic sequences I’ve ever seen. One sequence oscillates between ugliness and comedy, and romantic poignancy as we see Clementine and Joel as little kids together sharing an ugly, traumatizing moment from his childhood. The vision of a romantic couple who met as adults sharing the intimacy of being able to be kids together, to be able to know each other in ages that they didn’t get to have together in actuality, is as romantic a picture as I’ve ever seen. The way she supports him in that scene, the way the music tracks the scene, the way she cheers him up through playfulness and the scene transitions back to their adult playfulness—-one of the ways they actually played out their child selves with each other as adults—-it’s all so brilliant and heartbreakingly beautiful. And the fun, playful moments of their playing as adults that end with Clementine vanishing—-sucking you into the romance of their enjoyment and then pulling it away hauntingly and suddenly, a reminder of the ominous threat to their relationship.
And on the subject of the scene transitions—-this film is the best edited film I’ve ever seen. The transitions through the dream world are so fluid. Constantly scenes transition with several props or people staying the same and the settings transforming around them, objects vanish from rooms, a car falls out of the sky, hallways connect radically different rooms, the background objects of the world blur and vanish as memory loses them. Changes in lighting, changes in foci, changes in the way the sound connects to the image, film reels played backwards, film reels sped up—-the number of inventive “in-camera” tricks used to create a dream world out of real world elements instead of animation are amazing and endlessly exciting. It is believable but surreal as a result. The lo-fi special effects are simply as good as they get. The dream world is made to feel like the real world, as it feels when you’re dreaming, while exploring all the incoherency and surreality of what dreams are like. Unlike Gondry’s Science of Sleep that for portions makes the dream world patently false with claymation, here he makes it both as real and surreal as it really is.
Like a dream, the film follows an emotional thread around Joel’s mind, switching between times and places and events with a perfect emulation of the dream world’s logic. The visual flourishes are too many to enumerate or list with any justice but they are spectacular. This is the only film outside of a Star Wars or Spider-Man film that I went to the theater six times to see and each time I got more out of it and found new things to marvel at visually. It was simply that mesmerizing. It captures the feel of so many things—-that feeling as a kid of riding in the back seat of a car at night, tired from a long day at a family gathering and watching the street lights and store lights fly by with the memories of the day and the week, etc. zooming by—even that life experience is captured.
And the climax of his dream, a house crumbling around him, the seashore running up under his feet, the wind howling—-the fantastic of a dream, the thematic and emotional resonance of depicting what he’s feeling (the collapse of a relationship, the overwhelming of the tide of circumstance) in symbolic form, the dialogue expressing regret and longing, despair and nostalgia. It’s the end of the relationship through a revisit of the first meeting.
And the musical scoring by Jon Brion is brilliantly resonant. The emotions are underscored perfectly, the zaniness is matched with zany music that’s not obnoxious but perfectly pitched to the scenes. The main themes are haunting and beautiful. Even the erasures of memories are signaled through great musical cues. The movie is unimaginable without its thoroughly unique and perfectly attuned musical signatures. And it’s all not much more than maybe 30 minutes of musical writing, a lot of which repeats but it feels just right rather than like a cop out. The repetition of musical cues signals parallel times, emotions, themes being explored. It serves as a thematic aid more than just an underscore for scenes.
And finally the cinematography is wonderful. Grainy and dark (at Gondry’s insistence over that of the cinematographer herself) when it needs to be, the bright room with Clementine going crazy at the end, there’s just so much thought into the look of so many scenes.
And the credits don’t happen until 17 minutes into the film and Beck’s melancholy cover for the closing credits ends the film with a perfect musical finish, seamlessly fitting with the musical and narrative themes of the entire film. On a personal note, as a native Long Islander, I love the comfortable familiarity of the unmistakable interiors of the Long Island Railroad train cars and seeing them immortalized in an all-time masterpiece like this.
Bah, I can write all these paragraphs and still leave so much out. Oh well, that should suffice to at least give an idea as to why this is my favorite movie of all time. Just watch the this video of the film to a Bob Dylan song I love:
Best film of 2006, in my opinion. Just a stunning film. I was in love with it early on and then it took fascinating turn after fascinating turn and just became deeper and deeper.
It’s a truly sublime, sensual film that manages to communicate the power of scent through its medium’s power of visual imagery, through an incredibly seductive engagement in sensuality.
The film is a wonderful meditation on contingency and the pained desire for eternal possession of what is only contingent and passing and fleeting. It’s a film about the rise of beauty and love out of the muck and filth and violence of the filthiest modes of life.
It is the greatest screen portrayal of a super villain I have ever ever seen. It is a truly great and unconventional seriel killer film that manages not just to explore the narcissism, sociopathy, possessiveness, and desire for consumption that drives the seriel killer’s pathology, but also to make the viewer feel it by making the purity and intensity and aesthetic drive of the villain relatable in a perverse way; making the viewer forget the monstrous detachment from humanity is an abberation—the way the monster himself has let himself let his desire overwhelm any social feeling.
It is a visionary portrait of evil, of demagoguery, of genius, of beauty, of power, and of love.
It is a legend that plays like 18th Century science fiction.
And in a few scenes, it gives a fascinating portrait of what Nietzsche characterized as the Dionysian/Apollinian dynamic but I shall not elaborate here out of spoiler concerns. Perhaps in another post for those who’ve seen the film already.
I just loved it. I couldn’t get over it when I got out of it, my head was swimming.
One of the reasons that great art means so much to us is because we find ourselves reflected and expressed in it, even when it is other people’s creations. For a long while now, I have figured out the formula to really understanding my mind and my heart for anyone interested. If you can understand Friedrich Nietzsche, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the New York Mets, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, you’ll have as good a window into my soul as any I myself could create. I have already resolved that if I ever find a woman whose heart beats to these things the way mine does, I’d might as well just go ahead and propose right off.
And so, it was a big, huge deal for me to see the most important and comprehensive documentary of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ unbelievable career. So, obviously, what follows will be the review from a total fan. Dismiss it on that basis if you will, but I honestly think you’ll be missing out on an important recommendation for film and music lovers alike.
Review upcoming in a series of short posts.
The Music, Not “Behind” It
The first thing worth praising about this amazing documentary is that it’s about the men and the music. It’s not about lurid details, it’s not a manipulation of material to tell an artificial story of rise to glory, burn out, redemption, and new beginnings. Tom’s story is filled with highs and lows that could be generically forced into this boilerplate, formulaic mythos in terms of which VH1 manages to characterize every freaking rock band. But refreshingly, Bogdanovich doesn’t reduce these great artists’ story into a childish and convenient morality tale. These are real lives. There are ups and downs, periods of euphoria and those of despair, friends made and friends lost, and that’s it. No overplaying sentiment or drawing morals needed.
While I liked Walk The Line, for example, very much, I didn’t like the way it told such an incomplete story of such a great artist’s life. I know that he liked to see his life as a Christian redemption story like was made in the film. But it did a disservice to the richness of a great man’s life to skip those 30 years after he married June and overcame his addictions. I found it degrading in a way to say the only thing worth really focusing on was his addicted period. Many, many people get addicted. The tiniest handful get to be Johnny Cash. Show some more of what it was to be Johnny Cash.
And along these lines, this documentary of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers covers the private addictions of the band, even when they lead to death, and the infamous conflicts that led Stan Lynch to leave the band, without sensationalizing anything. As Benmont Tench, the amazing keys man of The Heartbreakers mentions in the documentary (and I paraphrase), it used to be that you were interested in learning an artist’s take on the world, now it’s who they’re sleeping with.
This film is about the artists’ takes on the world and about the most important thing about them, the incredible music they have ceaselessly produced for 30 years of rarely paralleled commitment to musical integrity and consistent production.
A Whole Life and Career on Film
It’s been reported that Bogdanovich went through over 300 hours of footage in putting together this film, and that was after countless more hours of available footage were whittled down for him by archivists who categorized the material.
I have numerous dvds and videos of live Tom Petty concerts, documentaries, collections of Tom’s videos and those of the Travelling Wilburys. I pretty much have everything released and many things that only appeared on TV. And I’ve seen my fair share of what’s on youtube, etc. And I have to say that there is a remarkable representation of the available footage. A truly judicious and admirable sampling of what’s there. A couple really sweet moments were when they found little moments that were favorites of mine and included them. It’s not exhaustive of course by any means at all. There are of course many omissions. But overall, this is an incredible 4 hour distillation of what one finds through amassing a larger collection.
There’s Ron Blair’s prescient 1993 joke about being scheduled to rejoin the band in 2001 long before Howie Epstein’s tragic death in 2002 led to his actual return. There’s wonderful footage of The Travelling Wilburys writing rehearsing, recording. Any fan of the Beatles, Roy Orbison, or Bob Dylan just can’t miss this stuff. (At least youtube it people!!) There’s Stan’s last performance with the band in a living room, playing Mary Jane’s Last Dance, the last song he recorded before leaving the band for good. And, as they say “much much more.”
But, beyond just reproducing previously released footage from prior documentaries and live concerts, Bogdanovich was able to incorporate an incredible amount of home video footage and stills of numerous moments along their way to the top, including plenty of material Tom and the band reportedly didn’t really know about before this project. It’s as thorough a capturing of every phase of an artist’s entire life on film as you could manage.
Scoring a Story in Songs
It’s greatly satisfying how close to completely Bogdanovich represents the scope and power of Petty’s music without ever deviating from the primary task of telling the story of his life. Few songs recur as Bogdanovich shows 1:30 minute clips of most songs almost always linking closely the music and live performances of a given time to the images of that time. And often, there are extremely happy coordinations between song lyric and the storyline. So the pauses to watch Tom and the gang perform at a given period of life don’t interrupt the storyline so much as often comment on it artistically, through lyrics. There are just beautiful and ingenious combinations of emotions and musical expressions of them that all follow a great chronological progression.
And while the full breadth and depth of Tom’s incredible catalogue is inexhaustible in under 4 hours, so many songs that really deserved representation got it.
The only sad snub (though an expected one) was any incorporation of the wonderful music Tom put on the soundtrack of She’s the One. I love that album and was sad to see it omitted entirely. Long After Dark got an odd sort of snubbing too. As has been chronicled before, Jimmy Iovine’s insistence that Tom not include the wonderful songs “Keeping Me Alive” and “Trailer” on the album was the symbolic creative difference that represents the rift between Tom and Jimmy that had grown by the time they finished that record, which had been their third together. Tom bashes the album often as one where he had gotten stagnant. I really love the album but understand his thought process. Anyway, ironically, the song here to represent the album is the song omitted from the album, “Keeping Me Alive” and then an explanation from both Tom and Jimmy about how such a great song didn’t make the cut. As wonderful as “Keeping Me Alive” was and as big a treat as it was to see the band perform it, the songs “Deliver Me,” “Straight Into Darkness,” “Change of Heart,” and “Magnolia” are too special to me to see them all snubbed.
Echo gets limited exposure too but they do a wonderful job of demonstrating Howie’s contribution to the band with that album and Benmont has a wonderful moment reflecting on Howie and what he meant to the band and his contribution even during his most heroin ruined time with the band. Bogdanovich here and elsewhere does a marvelous job of highlighting a piece of the music to say something about what makes it work in a way that makes it completely obvious to the listening viewer.
There are also subtle touches like the way that after the opening performance from 2006, you never see Scott Thurston until he is introduced in the story. Watching, I perked up and thought, “Hey, there’s Scott” unassumingly in just a third of the screen when the camera pulls back. And then, sure enough, he’s introduced. It’s a suble but welcome touch the way Bogdanovich keeps the story so basically chronological, capturing the sense of how things unfold through time rather than lumping the images and music of a life together in a deceptive whole.
A Story About Integrity
I always wanted the documentary to be named I Won’t Back Down but can respect the choice to frame it as Runnin’ Down A Dream, a less combative and more upbeat, classic American framing for a band that Bogdanovich has claimed epitomizes the American Dream.
Nonetheless, Tom’s integrity is as defining a feature as anything. Through reading and seeing tons of stuff about Tom’s various legal battles with corrupt music companies, the story had never been articulated so clearly in its details as here. Tom isn’t heroized out of proportion but the facts speak for themselves. He fought for the rights to his own music against unjust record contracts and then he fought for fair prices for his fans when he refused to let them raise the price of records by starting with his own. Later on we see an incredible piece of candid footage in which Tom stands up for his musical influence and long time friend The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn by insisting that the execs and producers trying to get him to record commercialistic crap go to hell. He insists that McGuinn is a great artist deserving better and goes to the mat when McGuinn himself was willing not to fight for his own integrity.
These sorts of moments are consistent throughout Tom’s entire career. The next evidence of selling out I see from the man will be the first.
The Interview Subjects
They could have interviewed more people, that’s for sure. But I doubt it would have made the documentary much better. What’s important is that they have plenty of interview footage with the people who matter most, the band members themselves who tell the story themselves. It was an elegant and appreciated choice to forego narration. In addition to the band though there are some wonderful commentators on the bands history including the five most important producers of their career, Denny Cordell, Jimmy Iovine, Dave Stewart, Jeff Lynne, and Rick Rubin. You get a wonderful sense from the narrative of the significance that each producer brought to Tom’s career. Each producer represents extremely specific developments in his music and his career and it’s nice to see their views sufficiently represented.
And a special touch for me was to see Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder, replete with great footage of their respective famous performances with the band. In 1994, no non-Christian bands besides Metallica and “Weird Al” meant any more to me than Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam. So it was really sweet to me to hear Grohl and Vedder express what Tom means to them.
Also a neat little treat is to see Johnny Depp who famously was in Petty’s Into The Great Wide Open video in 1991. Tim Burton’s my favorite director, his and my favorite living actor is obviously Mr. Depp. It’s nice to also tightly connect that dot over to Tom Petty. It reinforces the sense to me that there is a consistency to my sensibility that even the artists I admire share among themselves. I really dig that. Though of course I can’t take that too far—-Petty loves westerns immensely and I hate them. But Petty encapsulates everything great about westerns and old school country music. That is country music before it became what Petty characterizes its present form as—-bad rock bands with a fiddle.
The biggest surprise though was the wonderful, passionate, insightful commentary from, of all people, an MTV executive. He reappears periodically throughout the documentary and some of his thoughts were just great.
I laughed, I cried
Tom’s trademark droll sense of humor that conistently comprises a good bit of what makes his lyrics so remarkable also comes through in interviews. And Bogdanovich’s droll editing gives the whole film Tom’s sense of humor. Comedy is about timing and so is editing and Bogdanovich edits some good laughs into the proceedings.
You probably won’t cry because Tom and his songs probably don’t mean to you what they mean to me. But three or four times, I really teared up. And not at the moments you’d guess even. Just certain songs and certain moments in their story that struck me as especially special. The presentation of the great song “The Waiting” was just so celebratory that it made me surprisingly emotional, for example. Again, as I said before, this film does so much tribute to the music.
Don’t Do Me Like That
There are a few problems worth noting. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers live are a whole different, equally special thing to what they are on records. The film shows ample live footage but doesn’t really show enough of the musical innovation that they bring to live interpretations of their songs. Also, there’s not an adequate demonstration of how much their live shows incorporate an unbelievable range of covers that express their bottomless knowledge of their forerunners from rock and roll artists to bluegrass artists to country artists to surf rock artists to psychedelics, etc. Even a ten minute montage of this would have sufficed to highlight more explicitly their range. And additionally, their classic live reinterpretation of “Don’t Come Around Here No More” that was a huge highlight of their late ’80s/early ’90s shows deserved some attention.
The film relied in the end (literally, at the end of the film) too heavily on the 2006 Gainesville homecoming concert. That tour is extremely special to me as it was the first tour I saw the band live and the tour that sparked an all-consuming obsession with collecting every live performance, video, studio release, etc. that I could get my hands on. But even as important as it is to me, it’s too much attention on one concert here at the end when some more time could have been spent on some other aspects of their concerts from along the way.
What makes this choice especially unfortunate is that the movie is sold with that full Gainesville concert as another disc in the boxset. So, it’s redundant to include so much of it in the film at the expense of other vital pieces of that 300+ hours worth of material that was available.
Ultimately it’s not a big deal to me as I own more than I could have ever ask by way of live recordings and videos from the band anyway. But it would have been nice for the official record to give a more representative look at what the band offers by way of transformation of their own songs and by way of infectious tribute to their forerunners live.
The Bonus CD!
Okay, finally getting around to checking out the bonus CD. I stress again, I have somewhere over 90 discs of live music. But I don’t have any of this. They did a bang up job of finding neat rare live recordings. Two that are particularly special are a cover an awesomely old school country song “Lost Highway” which they perform in a rehearsal in the film but which I have never heard them do live otherwise and “Honey Bee” from the Saturday Night Live with Dave Grohl playing a mean set of drums.
I love the intros to the versions of “Breakdown” and “Fooled Again” here as they are unique (and again, I’ve heard plenty of versions)
The sound quality on all these live recordings is just spectacular, something one is not quite used to when trading in bootlegs The “Keeping Me Alive” here is especially sweet as previously I’d only heard the studio version on Playback, the collection of greatest hits and rarities, and the one really rough bootleg available of it. I love that bootleg to death but this is a super-sweet, high quality version of it. And I might have never heard so good a live take of “Shadow of a Doubt.” These are really great recordings.
Another neat aspect for the pettyphile and the pettynewbie alike
Yeah, it was embarrassing. The eyes got all leaky a few times. Had to get my sleeve up to try to get rid of the evidence and get my composure.
Lars and the Real Girl ends a streak of frustrations for me at the theater [this was written October 28,2007] and was the first film to deeply move me in a theater since the early spring. It was such a beautiful film, filled with indeterminate cartharses. What I found most fascinating and moving about the film is that everything revolves around central metaphors with several different kinds of meaning there for different viewers (or the same viewer) to find resonant.
As is well known the film revolves around a lonely man named Lars (Ryan Gosling) and the sex doll that he is deluded into believing is his actual girlfriend, Bianca. Rather than trying to talk some sense into Lars, his sister-in-law and his brother [played by very sweet Emily Mortimor (Match Point) and Paul Schneider (All The Real Girls)] take the advice of Patricia Clarkson’s doctor character (The Station Agent, All The Real Girls) to play along with Lars’s delusion because he has created this relationship as a means of working through something emotionally. Soon more members of the community are encouraged to play along as part of helping Lars.
Without giving any more specifics away, the result is a moving, understated comedy that explores the role that projections and fictions play in our psychological lives. Lars’s delusion is narratively specific and so on one level is about mental illness and a fable about the healing powers of patience and thoughtful person-specific care. It’s about how helping people involves understanding them and opening yourself up to their reality and how each person’s journey and needs are radically different and inscrutable. There’s a bit of fantasy and idealism in this story, which is why I call it a fable, but there’s nonetheless an admirable hope and suggestion in it too. The film is about the ways that in an ideal world people would work with each other to address their unique needs, even when this involves going way out of their normal way and involves opening themselves up to seeing the world through each other’s unique eyes. It’s a wonderful, optimistic story of openheartedness towards a lonely, confused and conflicted man and his inanimate girlfriend.
But the film goes beyond this surface level at which we can distance ourselves from Lars as just a delusional man. His inanimate girlfriend upon which he projects a whole personality is a symbol for anything any of us might idealize and project our desires or fears into. At least in my case, I totally resonated with this theme of idealization and projection. I know I’ve treated a real live, moving, thinking woman the way that Lars treats an inanimate one—-namely, as a projection of my hopes, dreams, and fears seperate from who she might have herself been. And this isn’t just about women, this is about anyone or anything we turn into an imaginary ideal of goodness or threat or whatever, so that we can find ourselves through that.
Healthiness comes not from alienated relationships to realities in which we only encounter them through the idealizations we create of them. The film doesn’t simply condemn such projections and false idealizations but instead opens us up to their possible therapeutic value. It rather explores how the use of projections and idealizations can be a stepping stone to coming to terms with reality. This is a humane, non-judgmental, and yet nonetheless growth oriented view of psychological projections in which I found a good deal of helpful wisdom and emotional catharsis.
One level on which this metaphor works is in helping us to relate to the meaning of art and fiction for helping us work through things. Lars’s use of narrative and fiction for coming to terms with emotions and problems he can’t articulate is really fascinating and illuminating with respect to the media of art. I found it fascinating throughout the film to think about the fine line between Bianca and the “real people” in the film. They’re all fake. Through our empathetic imaginative engagement with these fake people, into whom we project so much reality, including so many reflections of ourselves—our own fears, hopes, ideals, etc.—-we can therapeutically work through emotions and ideas we might not have prior been able to, or still be able to, articulate verbally and cognitively. Through art we empathetically connect to others and traverse emotional journeys, through projecting ourselves and our experiences into constructed narrative characters. Lars relates to Bianca like we relate to Lars and all the other fictional characters who help us escape reality a little while with the ideal result of coming back to it in the end, now more ready to deal with it.
I’m not even sure these are the only three levels to interpret the film, but I loved the experience of watching the film simultaneously from three such rich and personally meaningful angles.
Beyond the themes, let’s talk aesthetics. Ryan Gosling is a masterful actor. Between The Believer, Half Nelson, and now this film, I could not be any more impressed at his transformative powers and his communicative powers. He’s unbelievable and if he doesn’t get a nomination for an Oscar, there should be a riot.
The movie is also very funny. It’s not frequently funny but there’s not a forced joke. Going in I was a little wary of the premise and not up to seeing forced, obvious humor of an ongoing single joke stretched to 90 minutes. And wisely that’s not what they did. The film focuses on the characters and emotional truth and never pushes Bianca into ludicrous situations only for the sake of gags. The humor comes out of the charm of the situation. A line here and there, a scenario just naturally preposterous. Often a single scene would be on one level hilarious and silly and on the other moving at the same time, with the same aspects. It can all be taken as comedy and all be taken as moving and meaningful. It’s a perfect balance guided by an incredibly nuanced and careful script and perfectly real performances and direction.
A
Quite simply the very best film of 2007 that I’ve seen and I saw a heck of a lot of them.