The Lady in the Water: Storytelling and Hope

The Lady in the Water is a complex and sophisticated story about stories and storytelling. The pre-credits sequence is a primitive oral tale, complemented with cave-painting-like animation, detailing the allegory at the heart of the film: humans live by stories and die by war. A long time ago, the story tells us, sea nymphs inspired humans with stories; one day humans left the sea side to go conquering and fighting in the mainland, gradually losing all contact with the sea nymphs. War is the opposite of storytelling, the state of non-communication, where we cease listening except to our own voices and seek to destroy when we hear the Other. In modern society, as Shyamalan seems to see it, we're perpetually in a state of war, because we don't listen to one another's stories nearly enough.

So begins the film's story with the arrival of a sea nymph, named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), sent amongst humankind to inspire them once again. The water in which she lives is not the rolling sea, but the swimming pool at an apartment block. The people she is to inspire are not senators and poets, but ordinary residents of the apartment block. She isn't quite sure why she's there herself; all she knows is that once her mission is done, she'll be swept away by a giant eagle. Fortunately she's able to enlist the help of the block's super, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), a meek, kind, somewhat defeated-by-life sort of man. As he tries to help her, he grows to know all the residents of the block much better, looking within them for their cosmic significance in the "grand story" of Story. Some of them prove important, some not so much; but they all become involved in Story's life and hold together as a unit in their mutual dedication to helping Story fulfill her destiny.

The epic tale Story herself brings into the lives of these people isn't itself so important. The main plot, about gathering the right people together to hold back the "Scrunts" (dogs made of grass that try to eat Story) and summon the eagle, is almost throw-away epic fantasy. This central story exists to unite the denizens of the building. Of course, all the characters must believe in the importance of Story's story--and it is indeed important within the narrative--for its chief effect to occur: the realization that everyone's story is important and interconnected with everyone else's to form a greater, cosmic story. The epic story is present, on the allegorical level, as a stand-in for cosmic destiny. Story's inspiration, ostensibly to inspire a man (played by Shyamalan himself) to finish his political manifesto, is most importantly the unseen effect on everyone, inspiring them to listen to and engage with one another.

As Shyamalan constructs the film, with its sequential investigations of individual apartments and the variations on theme he develops (for instance, the obsession of several tenants with language and communication), the influence of Rear Window is undeniable. In an age of homage, however, Shyamalan surprisingly rebukes Rear Window for its distance from others, its lack of sharing, its idly curious interest in the lives of others. At the same time, Rear Window at least shows the innate interest we have in the stories of others. The protagonist of that film, Jeff, does save a woman from suicide and uncover a murder, after all. Lady in the Water, however, is Rear Window from the inside. There's no Jeff watching from a cold distance, spying comfortably; we don't get to watch from a distance. Shyamalan's camera sweeps us through the corridors and up the stairs in an early sequence, as Heep leads a tenant to his new apartment, passing other tenants and being brushed by their lives along the way--the man who works out only half of his body, the woman with the cats who has a door mat for every day of the week, and so on. Heep replaces Rear Window's Jeff and is easily a superior human being. Heep gets involved in these people's lives, superficially at first and, with the presence of Story, in depth.

Everything about human life is a story. Serious philosophers have advanced the theory that what makes us human more than anything else is our storytelling abilities, our construction of narratives. Our very personalities, they tell us, are self-narratives. We relate to one another by our stories about ourselves, about each other; through our collective stories, myths and histories, bedtime stories, fairytales, or even idle gossip. We have stories about our country that tell us what it stands for, stories from religion, stories about our family. There's no sense in which we're starved for stories, but there is a sense in which we're deprived of someone to listen to our stories. One tenant calls Heep to her apartment to fix the plumbing only to send him away when her husband reveals it was fixed in the morning. She must have known. But while Heep is in her apartment, she's able to tell him some (rather over-informative) stories about her husband's bathroom activities as we gradually dolly backward to the bathroom. She called Heep because she needed to tell a story and he's always around to listen.

Heep's knowledge of his tenants is, however, superficial when we begin. He introduces the cat lady to the new tenant (a film critic), suggesting they'll get along. During the next tour through the block, trying to locate the writer Story is to inspire, we find out Heep was right and the critic learned she once wrote a book. Heep hadn't known. This story of the cat lady's life just never came up. Looking for the writer leads Heep to discover the rich albeit ordinary lives of the people in the block. Once he finds the writer, he has to find a "symbolist," a "healer" and a "guild", so he again tours the block, finding out more about these people, becoming surprised with the depths of their lives. A poignant scene gives us Heep's own backstory, a story nobody in the building is supposed to know. The film continually shows us that everyone has stories that are important. Most important of all is perhaps the bedtime story a Korean tenant knows, revealing piecemeal the legend of the sea nymph. The more this tenant tells bits of the story, the more she warms to the Westerner and becomes willing to reveal more.

Not only do people have stories, but most of the people in the block, and Shyamalan himself, are obsessed in some way with communication and language. The Korean tenant, for instance, is unable to speak English. She must communicate, somewhat reluctantly to begin with, through her daughter Young-Soon. This slows the scenes down, but gives them a poignancy and allows us to focus on the power of communication to cross language and culture. One scene has Heep passing a cellphone back and forth with Young-Soon's mother so Young-Soon can translate between them. There is a man who is a master of crossword puzzles. A group of slackers try to invent a viral term ("blim-blam," as it happens) with moderate success. Story herself, not permitted to speak of her world, is introduced to oblique ways of communicating, such as touching her ear to say 'Yes.'

The sense of the interconnectedness of these people and their stories is fostered by the film's unusual style. Shyamalan frequently has the background or even the foreground blurred, while activity takes place on another plane. This was used and perhaps abused in Sergio Martino films back in the '70s. Shyamalan uses it more artfully. A butterfly lands on a woman's shoulder in the foreground; Heep is blurred in the background. The image seems to tell us the butterfly is connected to the woman. We learn later (a mild spoiler, I'm afraid), that the butterfly is connected to Heep. In another sequence, Young-Soon tells Heep more of the sea nymph legend, her head blurred in the foreground while Heep is focused. However, we learn Young-Soon has importance in the sea nymph legend herself. These set-ups are of course intentional, revealing our ignorance of the interconnectedness of stories, the blurred and fuzzy as much a part of the story as what is sharp and in focus. We're all connected without knowing it and we're unaware of our own significance. Stories told in some scenes return in later scenes; a phrase uttered once can be casually re-used; seemingly throw-away information becomes important later. The apartment block, like the world, is a web deeply interconnected through communication. As the film progresses in this way, fewer blurs occur.

The film might strike some as the height of contrivance. What are the odds, for instance, of someone knowing the legend of the sea nymph just where a sea nymph shows up? There are reasons for this sort of contrivance. For one, the apartment block is clearly intended as a microcosm. Moreover, Shyamalan displays a strong sense of destiny throughout the film. Story is able to reveal the future of different people, how many children they'll have, when they'll do, and so forth. This apartment block is thus a sort of chosen place for the fulfillment of Story's destiny. One also just has to accept the fantasy elements for the sake of the beautiful message they contribute; if we were less cynical, we might see past the contrivance and just enjoy what it reveals about communication and the need to talk to the people around us. Sometimes the stories we need really are just under our noses.

Another moment of some contrivance is the presence of the film critic. He's a man who has dedicated his life to studying stories, albeit in the cinematic medium. Shyamalan depicts him as a man who watches films as a job. He's weary of stories. He doesn't believe in the possibility of a new story. He is perhaps more monstrous than the scrunts, because he can't even see the importance in stories any longer. When Heep seeks his help in figuring out Story's legend, the film critic gives horrible advice and puts Story in danger. This seems like a cheap jab at film critics. In the context of the film, there's nothing cheap about the jab. If someone puts a lot of time, effort, and heart into putting a story out there, how awful is it for a critic to tell that someone her story isn't good enough, isn't important, to tell others that this story isn't worth their attention? In a film about the value of stories, a man who makes a living judging the value of the stories of others is truly a monster.

We live in a cynical age. Shyamalan hardly seems to fit this cynical age. His films have always been so hopeful. The Sixth Sense trusts in the power of communication to reach beyond the grave. Signs trusts in the power of people to hold together in the face of an assault. Compare Signs to a Romero film and one sees how radical Shyamalan's optimism is; Romero's pessimism is more in line with our times. In The Lady in the Water, Shyamalan challenges our credulity when he has his apartment block, almost without question, unite to help a sea nymph get rescued by a giant eagle; but this is consistant with his optimism. Shyamalan really believes in the power of communication to reach others, really believes in the power of stories to affect people and change the world for the better. The Lady in the Water is a fantastically hopeful film and in that hope is so full of beauty. I can be cynical myself, but Shyamalan broke me down. His hopefulness is, as I hope I've demonstrated, not composed of manipulative and glib cliche, but is based upon a sophisticated view of the human spirit.

Where I can't get behind Shyamalan, however, is his view of destiny. The ancient legend that can be followed precisely as instructions to help Story complete her mission, Story's ability to read the future: All of this shows us a world of stories that are already written. Story can read the future of the wrter because his story is already written. A discussion on whether destiny and freewill are compatible--a subject which occupied Voltaire most of his life--is far beyond the scope of this review. Yet, despite the hopeful message of the film, the notion that I'm not writing my story, but it has already been written for me, is uncomfortable. But this is a problem of philosophy; not a quarrel with the film itself.

Where I might quarrel with the film is the arbitrary nature of the fantasy story. Since Young-Soon's mother gives the story piecemeal, the effect is, in some sense, of making the story up as they go along. Perhaps that's the effect Shyamalan desired, the sense of crafting one's own story, making one's own destiny. If that's so, the rules that are created as they go along and the need for everything to be "right" so that destiny is fulfilled contradicts this. Whenever something is supposed to work and doesn't, a new portion of the legend is happily uncovered and they can go on. The most arbitrary invention is the guardian tree-monkeys who are supposed to punish offending scrunts, but take their precious time. They're also supposed to destroy whomever sees them, but they neglect that as well. Perhaps Shyamalan wanted to depict the trial-and-error sort of progress we all go through in discovering our individual destinies, taking new paths when old ones stop working. This theme doesn't receive much reenforcement from the rest of the film, however.

As I say, there's no sense in which we're deprived of stories. Books and movies come out faster than we can ever consume them. On blogs, on reality TV, on call-in radio stories are constantly being told. The realization that our stories are all important and interconnected, the ability to listen to the stories of others and see their importance, is what we're missing. One can never have too many stories or know too many people. The Lady in the Water reminds us to be more open to the stories of others and to love stories, to be less cynical about the stories we hear, including its own story: I found it to be a deeply moving film.

Giallo (2009) - 2/4

There is considerable presumption in titling a film, even a film directed by Dario Argento, Giallo. The giallo film is, of course, a highly-influential subgenre of horror-thriller that flourished in the '70s thanks primarily to Argento, as well as Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino, and, the maestro, Mario Bava. For Argento, after making giallo films for nearly four decades, to make a film called Giallo is tantamount to promising us a total summary of his career thus far, a summa of the whole subgenre, from The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) to Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005). Giallo does not keep that promise.

Giallo concerns a killer, known as "Giallo," who kills for abstract sexual gratification. A hideous, troll-like man, he targets women whom he could never bed and traps them in his taxi cab. As a proxy for real sex he tortures and kills the women. One of the women is a model who happens to be using her cell phone when kidnapped. Her sister Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) thus has a lead and works closely with the maverick inspector Enzo (Adrien Brody), whose mother was murdered before his eyes as a child. The film is a straight-forward police procedural of trying to find the killer and save the girl.

Giallo, alas, is not written by experts, but by casual fans whose previous works have all been CGI monster movies for the Syfy channel. Had the film been scripted by Argento himself, it may have attained some sublimity. Sean Keller and Jim Agnew, however, only understand the superficial conventions of the giallo film: sadism to women, an opera (referencing Opera (1987)), a taxi (referencing Suspiria (1977)), and the man-woman detective team (referencing Profondo Rosso (1975), amongst others). Imagine a Hitchcock tribute film consisting primarily in close-ups of keys. This is indeed a link to Hitchcock, but a very superficial one. Similarly, Keller's and Agnew's grasp of the essence of the giallo film is superficial.

The essence of a giallo film, more than anything else, is grounded in amateur detective work. From The Girl Who Knew Too Much onward, the police are scarcely a presence in solving the crime in a giallo. The police proceed by a rational methodology, much like the viewer weened on Sherlock Holmes stories, that proves ineffectual. The protagonists are nearly always individuals who are by chance privy to a sliver of information they can't fathom. (That, incidentally, is an important trope left out of the Agnew-Keller screenplay.) Like the symbolism of a novel, one must reach the end before the significance becomes clear. The detective process is thus not one of deduction, as in Sherlock Holmes stories, but one of hermeneutics, interpreting material as one interprets a poem; the amateur detective uses lateral thinking, following instinct, personal inclination, and sometimes ideas that are entirely inexplicable. The masterpiece of hermeneutic detective work is Argento's own Profondo Rosso. In that film, Marcus Daly first remembers a lullaby he hears during an attempt on his life; he is then informed that the lullaby was written of in a book of local legends; he then tracks the book down and finds a picture of a house inside; he then inquires from a florist about the plants in the photo so he can locate the house, even though he has no idea if the house is significant. After finding the house, we realize he's actually stumbled into the site of a murder we witnessed in the film's prologue and on it goes until he does indeed stumble upon the killer. Marcus's detective work is not a process of deduction. He couldn't logically draw any links between the moves he makes. Yet, he finds the killer while the detectives eat sandwiches and shrug their shoulders. That is the essence of the giallo.

Starting with The Card Player (2004), Argento started to evade this giallo convention into flat-out police procedural. I would go so far as to argue The Card Player is not a giallo at all, but that's a discussion for another essay. Giallo continues the style of The Card Player, following a detective, Enzo. Enzo claims to not play by the book, yet his investigative procedures are basically logical, tracking evidence and waiting for lab results. The only unorthodox feature in his method is how he treats the criminals. Basically, he kills them. I'll come back to that later. Enzo does get an assistant in Linda, the sister of the killer's latest victim. While she aids in the investigation, her discoveries too are purely logical. She deduces from the last words of a victim, "yellow," that the killer probably has a liver disease. That makes too much sense for a giallo. So one of the most fundamental aspects of the giallo tradition is absent. The investigation in Giallo is not a hermeneutic effort, but a deductive one.

Complementing the amateur detective work is the audience involvement in the investigative work. Ordinarily the killer kills for a motive of sexual perversion so convoluted as to be virtually un-guessable, such as the gender confusion in Four Flies on Grey Velvet. That the amateur detective manages to figure out who the killer is comes as something of a shock. And yet, when the motive is itself illogical, how could anything but an illogical investigation uncover it? The method of investigation ideally suits the object of investigation; the form fits the content. One might even go so far as to say the elegant murder set pieces that occupy a traditional giallo (also absent from Giallo) are works of art that demand not investigation but interpretation to solve. The consequence, at any rate, is that we never know more than the protagonist. In fact, as the protagonist's leaps of "logic" can be difficult to follow, we often know less. Discovering who the killer is and why the killer has been killing all along is one of the singular pleasures of the giallo tradition, sometimes outstripping the coda of Psycho (1960) in sheer over-explanation.

This, too, is absent in Giallo. We're shown the killer around the middle of the film, before Enzo and Linda find him; and when they discover who he is even by name, we can only shrug. He's just a guy. There are no red herrings--a fundamental feature of giallo films, especially Sergio Martino gialli--leading us to think it may be one of several familiar characters. Even The Card Player featured this trope. Giallo does not. The killer is a man named Flavio Volpe ("Blond Fox"). This is not a spoiler, as you will never meet him except as the killer. And his motive is uncharacteristically simple: He's ugly and gets his sexual gratification from torturing girls. The sexual perversion trope is indeed present, but highly simplified in comparison to Argento's earlier pictures, such as the baroque Trauma (1993).

All of this discussion is to say that Giallo is not a summa giallica; it may not even be a giallo. This wouldn't be significant were the film not obviously representing itself as the ultimate giallo, or, what the screenwriters themselves called a "kitchen sink giallo," were the film not superficially attempting to be a summary of giallo tropes. That does not, of course, mean the film is necessarily a failure. Even if it isn't a giallo, it can still be a good crime-thriller. But it isn't that either.

Enzo is a frankly charmless detective, very far removed from David Hemming's Marcus Daly in Profondo Rosso. Brody, himself a very charming screen presence, struggles to make Enzo appealing with minimal success. The notoriously wooden Emmanuelle Seigner, moreover, is fiercely arborial thanks to her vapid character. This leaves the twisted Giallo to amuse us and he actually does, with broken English lines like, "No move or you blind" and the general glee with which he sets about torture. He's seen reading a pornographic comic at one point. A knowledgable friend informs me the comic is a Final Fantasy 7 comic depicting one of the main characters sexually engaged with a dog. So he masturbates to cartoon bestiality as well as pictures of the tortured women. What a guy. He's a grotesque portrait of slacker/doper culture, inhaling aerosol and masturbating all day. Unfortunately, we spend much more time with Linda and Enzo than we do with Giallo.

The film's strongest point is in drawing a link between Enzo and Giallo. Both characters have suffered trauma and both characters have turned to violence in response. Enzo, as mentioned, witnessed his mother's murder. We see this in a beautiful flashback. Giallo also gets a frankly implausible flashback to his in utero existence, where his heroine-abusing mother ruined his life from the start. Giallo mutilates women, perhaps as revenge on his mother and perhaps out of sheer resentment. Enzo plays maverick detective. Once he finds a killer, he kills him. He never explicitly says so, but the film strongly implies this is what he does and that the chief employs him for cases that require this maverick behaviour. He's a police assassin and his current target is Giallo. This creates the narrative's sole moment of moral complexity: If Enzo kills Giallo, they may never find the girls he's kidnapped. Satisfying his bloodlust would therefore be as selfish an act as Giallo's self-gratification.

The film's weakest point is in the near absence of female content. One of the most curious stylistic choices of the film, and one that's repeated too often to be unintentional, is having helpless women yelling out repetitive insults at men from the background. Men dominate and women are helpless and irritating voices of outrage, chastising them from the background or from out of frame. Rather than have any emotional effect, these moments are annoying. One of the victims yells at the killer, as he goes about his business, that he's ugly and he's sick. She yells this a good two dozen times, mostly from out of frame. A later rhyming scene has Linda yelling at Enzo from the background for far too long. I can see what Argento and the writers were trying to achieve. For one, they again link Enzo and Giallo. They also represent women as a damaging influence from behind--the background and offscreen serving as a metaphor for the past, haunting both Enzo and Giallo. But the effect is just to make the only women in the film with any significant screentime extremely annoying. They are shrill voices, banshees, assaulting from out of frame or out of focus. An interesting but ultimately flawed stylistic choice that poisons the few glimmers of femininity in the film.

Despite the multitude of flaws, Argento's visual style pulls one along so that the film never quite becomes boring. Occasionally it insults, occasionally annoys, but never bores. Nevertheless, one hopes Argento either return to writing his own screenplays, or find much better screenwriters in the future. Argento's style just couldn't save the film from a hopeless and misguided screenplay, or, to be fair with the blame, his own peculiar artistic choices.

Torso: A Masterpiece of Misogyny

Perhaps my former Catholic background has made me distrustful of the psychoanalytic feminism employed by Mulvey and most feminists since; perhaps, however, my experience as a man is sufficient. Mulvey and many subsequent feminists have argued that women in films are sexual spectacles, objectified by the male gaze. This, they claim, demeans women as pure object and empowers men (or rather, allows men to remain safely in power). Life experience as a man readily contradicts this conclusion. When a woman is an object of sexual objectification for one's gaze, she's in power. If I lust over her, especially if she doesn't lust over me, she has considerable leverage over me. She's in a position of dominance, able to make requests of me I can't make of her.

When the woman is a very attractive woman, a woman whom many men find attractive, she has even more power. She may choose any of the many men for herself; but only one man (or a few men, as she wishes) will be chosen by her. Note the passive voice. She chooses; the man is chosen. She is active and he is passive. He can't make himself chosen. He can only try to appeal to her tastes so she chooses him. The highly-abstract, nebulous notions of male gaze and objectification seem, in such an instance, ridiculously academic in the face of lived experience. So the men are 'objectifying' her sexually. Humans are objects; being a sexual one is not necessarily a weakness. In fact, as we see in lived experience, it's usually a strength. The 'objectification' gives the 'objectified' female power over the males. She is the object of adoration. Her commands will be met with obedience if only to become the object of her adoration. The males seek to be sexually objectified by her.

The Western prejudice is that a man pursues and a woman acquiesces. Her process, we're to believe, is passive. She says 'Yes,' and nothing more. The man does the rest. However, in reality the woman tempts and the men acquiesce to the temptation of the woman. What makes western heroes like Django such powerful examples to men is that they aren't manipulated by feminine wiles. Usually the women lust after them and they can choose the woman they want. The other men in the film, weaker men, are more like the men we encounter in real life: they see attractive women and can't help but look, can't help but mention to their friends large tits and a nice ass; they are overpowered by the sexual desire they feel for the woman but can only hope, with a hope that depends upon that woman's whim, to realize. Men who aren't very self-conscious or introspective react in this way instinctively. More meditative men, intellectual men, are more guarded and feel manipulated by attractive women. They recognize that to give in to objectifying her is to submit to her.

This honest interpretation of male-female interaction is the central dynamic of Torso (1973), a misogynistic splatter-giallo. The misogyny of Torso is so pronounced one could not mistake it for a bubbling forth of subconscious attitudes; the treatment of women in the film is too consistant and too hyperbolic to be accidental. The film intentionally displays women as sex objects and it intentionally presents men as imbeciles readily captivated by these objects. Nearly every man in Torso is a sleazy, libidinous creep and nearly every woman is sexy and sexually dominating. This, I will argue, is done for a purpose.

[Note: In what follows I will be discussing the motives of the killer. I will not, however, reveal his identity, though some red herrings will be spoiled.]

The film concerns a maniac who begins killing and mutilating attractive, sexually active women on a Roman campus. When the maniac was a child, a young girl requested his brother fetch a doll from a cliff-edge on condition she flash him her panties. His brother agreed, fell, died; and he was traumatized. The event formed his attitudes toward women. If they are sex objects, they are "dolls" and therefore without significance as human beings. In fact, not only are they dolls, but they're dangerous and impure dolls that deserve destruction. The doll becomes a symbol of female sexual power, its eyes staring blankly in the flashbacks as his brother unsuccessfully reaches for it. The maniac has kept this attitude repressed and has lived a normal life. Then two college girls sleep with him, take pictures, and blackmail him. This is the first scene in the film. During coitus he punches out a doll's eyes, indicating some return to potency and normalcy: he's not the object of their gaze, but they're the object of his. He is the Mulveyan Male. When he's blackmailed, he realizes he wasn't in power at all; rather, he was trapped. That moment sparks his subconscious misogyny. These attractive women used their sexuality to manipulate him and to potentialy destroy him, just as a girl destroyed his brother with her sexuality. He made the mistake of "reaching for the doll." He won't reach for it any longer: he will destroy it.

The first two victims of the film are the women who try to blackmail the killer. (What's somewhat perplexing is that the second blackmailer doesn't go to the police after her co-conspirator is murdered. She is, at least, shown to be on drugs.) He catches the first victim in the middle of a sexual encounter with her boyfriend. The second victim he catches prostituting herself to two bikers at a free-love party. Again, he targets them when they're sexual objects, overpowering men with their sexuality. The second victim is especially powerful, walking out on her johns after they try to unzip her jeans.

The killer strangles and mutilates the girls, his mutilations becoming more gruesome with each victim. He fondles then cuts open the torso of the first victim. He fondles, pokes out the eyes, and cuts open the second victim. The Italian title of the film, The Bodies Showed Traces of Carnal Violence, also suggests he rapes the bodies. As in Riccardo Freda's The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock (1962), the killer can only have true sexual dominance over women when they're dead, when they're doll-like corpses. Torso and The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock were, in fact, written by the same screenwriter, Ernesto Gastaldi, a prolific screenwriter in Italian horror and, as we see, an auteur. Where Gastaldi's Dr. Hitchcock is a man with a fetish and strong sexual insecurity, the killer of Torso is more of a man-on-a-mission, targeting what he deems a social flaw represented by attractive and sexually active women.

Gastaldi and Martino give some credence to the killer's social philosophy. Throughout the film men are depicted as easily conquered by female attractiveness. A scarf salesman falls to his knees, pretending to check his stock, just to get a glance up the second victim's skirt. A girl, Daniela, is ogled by her uncle from a crack in the door. Stefano pursues Daniela for years, even to the point of enrolling in the university's faculty of fine arts just to be near her. Most impressively, however, is a scene in homage to L'Avventura (1960). In L'Avventura, all the men of a small town stare at Lea Massari as though they'd never seen a woman before. In Torso, Daniela and her friends are sent by her uncle to a country villa to relax; their arrival in the nearby small town brings out all the town's men to stare with lust. The girls remain perched atop their vehicle, long legs stretched out, seemingly oblivious of the attention they're drawing. They couldn't, of course, be oblivious; they're just accustomed to having that power. The camera allies us not with the girls but with the men of the town, panning over the long legs and ogling the statuesque beauties. A later scene shows a milkman physically frozen to the spot when he brings milk to the villa and finds the girls sunbathing naked. Significantly, he is freed from his unusual plight by Jane (Suzy Kendall), the film's protagonist and the only girl wearing clothes. Jane doesn't sexually dominate men, though she easily could if she so desired. The same milkman is later heard giving his friends an enumeration of the girls' parts, "Eight legs, eight tits, four asses." Men are, in Torso, totally overpowered by women. Men are no match for female sexuality.

Stefano is an interesting case. His obsession with Daniela has lasted for years and she never returns his affection. He is totally under her spell, yet unable to exert any power at all over her. He tries to regain his sexual potency by hiring a prostitute. He finds himself unable to handle the prostitute, however. He realizes that he's paid for her; she hasn't come after him. His masochistic pursuit of Daniela is not relieved. The prostitute consents too willingly. And yet, not willingly enough. He would, perhaps, rather she pay him. When he doesn't touch her, she calls him impotent. He may not literally be impotent; yet psychologically he is. As she begins to mention payment, he becomes angrier, ultimately beating her. Stefano's pursuit of one woman has made him a failure as a man, a psychological eunuch. He beats the prostitute out of frustration. Also out of an attempt to restore his potency. But as Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, sadism, a step beyond sex for domination, is no more successful at regaining power through objectification as sex is. Stefano has been destroyed as a man by his lust for Daniela.

Jane's sexually-adventurous friends (they let men ogle them) are, to the killer, mere dolls. They weren't involved in the blackmail plot. That plot, rather, set the killer off on (what he believes to be) a righteous rampage. When he kills Jane's friends, he doesn't merely cut them open, he cuts them to pieces. Their bodies, the objects of their power over him and men in general, are to be destroyed. Jane alone is spared for literally not being a part of the group--she sprained her ankle and under the influence of medication slept through the murders. She is also metaphorically not a part of the group. As noted above, she doesn't use her attractiveness to dominate men. She dresses conservatively and relates to men, such as her professor, through intelligent discussion. Her professor goes so far as to congratulate her on not being a usual American object, which, in my analysis, amounts to a congratulation on not being sexually overpowering. When the killer discovers Jane was a part of the group, however, he decides that she too is a doll and must be destroyed.

Jane's saviour is, of course, a man. Importantly, he's not just any man: he's the one man in the film who never ogles any women. A very handsome doctor, he is actually the object of female sexual interest. The second victim eyes him as he buys a scarf. Jane and her friends remark on how attractive he is. We also see a female patient pretending to have illnesses, obviously just to spend time with him. He, like Django, James Bond, 'The Blackmailer' from Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970), is sexually attractive enough to have power over women and to not have to submit himself to them. He doesn't have to objectify women. They already give him power by objectifying him. On the conceptual level, Jane can only be saved by a man who has sexual power over women, which is a role only the handsome doctor fills. So the film ends with the pure and non-manipulative Jane walking off with the sexually powerful doctor, much like the end of The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock when Barbara Steele is saved by a handsome, young doctor. These are the perfect man and the perfect woman in Gastaldi's world.

While I claim Gastaldi gives some credence to the killer's philosophy, he doesn't for that reason give credence to the killer's behaviour. There's no question that the killer is just a lunatic. Yet, curiously, the killer is just what feminists like Mulvey think all men are in patriarchal society. In her nebulous, Freudian readings, she sees the objectification of women as just was the killer sees: women become non-persons, dolls. Gastaldi's point is that men don't think this way when they objectify women. Only lunatics do. I don't know for sure if Gastaldi had read any feminist criticism--although it'd be hard to miss it in the '70s--but Torso stands as a sophisticated challenge to their claims, making those claims appear as fictions from the ivory tower.

There's no question that Torso is indeed full of beautiful women, often naked, on display for male viewers to enjoy. That male viewers do enjoy is our being overpowered by Sergio Martino's film. The girls seduce the male viewer, capture us. We gaze at them, like Stefano, unable to obtain them. As objects they dominate us. The film dominates us when we enjoy it for its T&A. Gastaldi's script liberates us by destroying all the beautiful bodies that dominate us on screen, giving men an empowering catharsis and yet honestly presenting men as sexually weak. The film is thus exultantly misogynistic. But it is misogynistic, or rather uses misogyny, for a distinct purpose, a purpose that Gastaldi returns to frequently in his many screenplays, from The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock, through Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, Death Walks on High Heels (1971), and of course Torso. The purpose is to make clear to us the real balance of power in the sexual world. For Gastaldi, men are dominant through violence, women through sex.

Rampage (2009) - 2.5/4

Rampage is the film Uwe Boll's American career has been building toward: as pure an expression of the senseless violence of a video game as one can find in the cinematic medium. After twenty or so minutes of grounding in the life of a young man named Bill Williamson, who is preparing a rampage, we're treated to his non-stop shooting and bombing rampage for the remaining hour of runtime. That hour is bloody and somewhat disturbing, punctuated with moments of wit. That is, essentially, the whole film.

I wonder just how senseless is the violence. The first twenty minutes introduces us to Bill and the two major influences on his life: his parents and his friend Evan. Bill enjoys his American fast food and complains when his fancy coffee doesn't have enough froth. The name Bill Williamson is so fabulously banal it suggests he's the status quo's logical conclusion; it also suggests a relationship to money, as in dollar bills. And indeed his parents represent the status quo as purely as possible. They're decent, organized, American bourgeois; they like arranging dinners and talking about goal-oriented lifestyles, the value of a college education, saving money, and so forth. On the other hand, Evan is a '70s-style left-leaning anarchist, who loathes money, human damage to the environment, overpopulation, yet nevertheless considers himself above fast food. Evan makes politically radical speeches on the internet and, as all politically fringe individuals, is pretty much ignored.

Bill decides to put Evan's anarchic ideas about overpopulation into effect with his horrendous mass-murder. In some sense, the film is a reductio ad absurdum of fringe political ideals: if the ideas we hear lunatics rant on daytime radio were genuinely put into action, wouldn't it be something like this, only perhaps better-organized? Of course, in nations where political fringe has taken to radical action, we've already seen that reductio and its horrifying consequences. On the other hand, Bill's political leanings are not entirely with his radical friend, as he seems to accept all the usual American goals his parents have inculcated in him. What's frightening about Bill's rampage is, in fact, just how oriented toward this goal all of his actions have been. The rampage is planned and invested in with all the meticulous precision of a middle-class capitalist planning his retirement. Perhaps Boll is pointing out the dangers of American capitalism ("Bill the son of Bill"), or praising it for its ability to get done what others can't. Since we're introduced to Bill mid-boxing and Boll infamously challenged his critics to a boxing match, Boll may well be identifying with Bill. The film doesn't give enough information to be decisively one or the other, but Boll's attitude is mostly contemptuous of American bourgeoisie like Bill's parents and their discourse about goal-oriented life, and of a society run on money and fast food. He's also contemptuous of yappy '70s radicals. Perhaps, however, the confused political discourse is mostly an excuse for senseless violence.

The violence is a little jarring, but not nearly as jarring as it ought to be. I found myself a little in awe of the massacre, which is, after all, purely special effects. Much like in a video game, the massacre is a little horrendous and a little amusing: there are no people, just targets. That is somewhat problematic. Ironically, Bogdanovich's Targets, also about a rampaging gunman, is considerably more powerful for its fewer number of targets. In Rampage, the victims are random individuals. The only victims we know are two service people Bill meets earlier in the film and we only saw their less-than-flattering sides. Bill's killing these innocent people is upsetting on one level (we keep wondering, "Why?") and Bill is clearly an evil bastard; but there's little to engage the emotions. The constant shots of Bill's eyes lead us to identify with him: one coldly watches along with Bill as the body count mounts. Compare to Death Wish, where Bronson vomits after his first kill. Bill doesn't flinch during his rampage. He casually mentions being nauseous at one point, yet we never see that. He drinks, makes cruel smalltalk, even, in the film's funniest scene, strolls through a bingo hall shocked that no-one notices him. The film feels like watching someone playing a video game. Perhaps this is an indictment of us: we hear about a bombing in Iraq that kills fifteen and think, "Oh, only fifteen?" then click the headline that reads, "Kitten Born With Six Toes," instead. The detachment is also a flaw in Boll's basic video game aesthetic.

Another flaw in Boll's aesthetic is his inability to hold a steady shot. There are a few moments where the camera isn't wobbling. Those shots stand out. Perhaps Boll intended those shots to stand out. The bingo hall, for instance, has some steady shots. So do the scenes with Bill's parents. Perhaps Boll is contrasting the kinetic and revolutionary energy of Bill with the lifelessness of bourgeois complacency. This would shed some light on the political significance of the violence, if indeed there is any. There are, however, more visually pleasing ways to make the same point. Orson Welles, for instance, kept the camera moving whenever Othello is on screen in Othello; as Iago wears him down, Othello and the camera gradually move less until we only get still shots of Othello. Boll may have wanted some anxious energy in his film, rather than gracefully gliding cameras and logical cuts. That makes sense and he partially succeeds. The experience is nevertheless unpleasant, the effect distracting and ugly.

Rampage is not a great picture, but it's as good as any picture of this particular aesthetic is ever likely to be. What it sets up in the economical first twenty minutes all pays off as we see the rampage come together under Bill's organization. The titular rampage is itself presented fluidly, brutally, and wittily with smart writing and keen, if flawed, direction. And perhaps the most complimentary thing I can say is that there is a point to it all.

Halloween 2 (2009) - 3/4

Halloween 2 is without a doubt a confused and messy film. There are a few reasons for the mess. For one, Michael's behaviour and motivation is inexplicable unless one has seen the first film. Halloween 2 is more continuation than sequel. Where Halloween's strength is in how Zombie grapples with the influence of John Carpenter and asserts his own interests, Halloween 2 reveals a more confident artist, now over his struggle with Carpenter and taking the material into a grapple with a horror cinema in general. Zombie is, in this film, free to assert his own themes and to be as brutal as he wishes. Halloween 2 is consequently both a much more flamboyant film and a much grittier, bloodier, darker film.

There are really only two ways to grapple with the history of one's field: to ignore it or to appropriate it. Zombie appropriates. Caroline Williams is cast as a doctor in the hospital scene, referencing an even more over-the-top sequel, Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Margot Kidder's character is named Barbara Collier, referencing her character as Barb in Bob Clark's Black Christmas and her role in DePalma's Sisters, the protagonist of which is named Grace Collier. There's a Frankenstein's monster, a song about Terror Train, a guy dressed as the Vincent Price character from Madhouse Dr. Death, a guy dressed as Teen Wolf, Laurie and her friends dressed like characters, and so forth. Rocky Horror Picture Show. There's considerable bravado in all of this; despite being appreciative tributes, Zombie is clearly calling these light horrors compared to his own brutal vision. For instance, the Frankenstein's monster is attacked mid-coitus and the Teen Wolf mid-urination. Halloween 2 is, however, less anxious about its appropriation than Halloween. The appropriation is equally a celebration of horror history and a way of demolishing its presence in Zombie's creative mind with his monster, the perfect monster, Michael Myers. He even jokingly pokes at Marxist and Freudian readings of horror films, with the old '70s Marxist named Meat getting ridiculed and Loomis's lame Freudian jokes. Hopefully Zombie has at last worked out his anxieties with this picture.

The second reason for the messiness is due to a major theme of the film: self-importance. Nearly every character is entirely absorbed within his or her own problems and interests. A year after Myer's first attack, Dr. Loomis is now a best-selling author, capitalizing on the fame of Michael Myers. He only cares about his book deals, abuses his assistant and makes tasteless jokes about Michael Myers to the agony of those Myers has hurt. Laurie is now a psychological mess, riddled with nightmares and antidepressants. She only cares about her own psychological issues. Michael, now hallucinating about his mother and a white horse as he recovers in a mountain shack, only cares about finding Laurie and assembling his makeshift family. He brutally destroys other families along the way. Even minor characters, like the strip club owner, is shown advertising his strip club by setting up a petting zoo. The film's choppiness derives in large part from the way every character considers his or her issues more important than everyone elses and pursues them self-interestedly. The only exception Zombie allows is the Bracket family. Though Annie Bracket physically suffered more at the hands of Myers than anyone else, she and her father do all they can for Laurie, giving her a home and companionship.

As with the first film, the center of Halloween 2 is really the relationship between Michael and Loomis. Although Michael and Loomis are only in one another's presence for a brief moment in this film, that moment is the true climax. I argued in my review for the first film that Michael's condition worsened as Dr. Loomis refused to leave him return to his mother. Loomis was motivated by his reputation as a hot-shot psychiatrist; he wanted to cure Michael by his own methods in his hospital and get famous for doing so. Michael needed his mom. When Michael's mother died, all hope was lost. Dr. Loomis's cynicism and self-importance is the cause of Michael's condition. Michael's motivation is to reassemble his family in a pristine state at all costs. He is given divine, as it were, command to do so by the ghostly presence of his mother, all in white, and his own child-self from the exact moment of killing his step-father and sister.

So all of Michael's kills involve destroying influences that corrupt his family. His first Haddonfield victims are the denizens of the local strip-club where his mother used to work. This purges his mother's spirit of corruption. He then targets Laurie's new friends, two hipsters, one a party girl and the other a(n implied) lesbian, freeing Laurie. The final victim Michael pursues is his archnemesis, the ultimate barrier to his family and happiness, Dr. Loomis, a moment not unlike the meeting of Harmonica and Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West. Everything both characters do throughout the film leads them together for a final confrontation. Tellingly, the only word Michael speaks in the whole film is to Loomis, at that moment: "Die!" The blood-soaked ending could well be interpreted as a happy one.

Loomis's character is easily the most fascinating presence in Halloween 2. The cynicism and self-importance that were subtle in the first film explode into blistering pomposity in this film. A beautiful scene shows him on a late night talk show, a co-guest with Weird Al Yankovic of all people. As comedians do to anyone taking himself too seriously, Al and the Letterman-influenced host destroy Loomis. The experience of the talk show pushes Loomis into self-questioning and, at last, responsibility for his role in Michael's life and murders. Discovering Michael is still alive offers him an opportunity to vindicate himself; but, perhaps unbeknownst to him, this can only be at the cost of his life.

One aspect of the film that sadly does not work as well as it should have is the presence of Michael's mother and the white horse imagery. For one, Sheri Moon Zombie looks foolish, being asked to stare wide-eyed and blankly off-screen. I can see that Zombie is going for the look of a Russian icon, but it's not working. As for the horse, the film begins with a quote telling us a white horse is "linked to instinct, purity and the drive of the physical body to release powerful and emotional forces, like rage with ensuing chaos and destruction." The horse symbolizes the whole of Michael's rage and drive to restore his family, everything that Loomis took away. Cynicism and self-importance are the cause of rage and violence, in Zombie's vision. The symbol doesn't really add anything, however, and is rather fey for a picture so full of expertly-crafted brutality. The hallucinations, moreover, gradually become shared by Laurie, touching on something the film could have done without, namely, telepathy. Perhaps there is intended psychological realism in the peronsality of a potential victim of a psychopath gradually collapsing into the personality of the psychopath; but the shared hallucinations is beyond psychological realism.

While a flawed picture, Halloween 2 stands as a powerful and disturbingly accurate snapshot of the horrors of our time, not unlike Picasso's Guernica. Halloween was too self-absorbed to depict the world. But Halloween 2 shows us a world doomed to violence and brutality by our own self-importance and cynicism. The rays of hope are found in the generosity and playful warmth of people like the Brackets and in the jokes of comedians like Weird Al Yankovic.