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Odyssey of a face

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Sure, the movie was fine, but I couldn’t buy Zendaya as Athena. Every time she popped onscreen, I thought, Hey, there’s Spiderman’s girlfriend again. I didn’t really have this problem with the other actors. I believed Matt Damon as Odysseus. He was stoic and brooding and exuded a type of weathered concrete utilitariness, a certain Jason Bourne-ness, rather than any kind of wiliness, but I wasn’t constantly pulled out of the fictional dream by his face. Same with Anne Hathaway. Briefly I was aware that she was the actress Anne Hathaway, but after that momentary interruption I was back in the dream. The only other character that stuck out in the same celebrity-distracting way was Charlize Theron as Calypso, which mostly just made me giggle. I leaned over to my trusty movie companion and said, dude ain’t going back home. 

I don’t really care about the interpretive freedoms that Nolan took with the film. What else was he supposed to do? It’s a movie based on an ancient oral poem from over 2,000 years ago that at some point was written down. Adapt away. I do think that in this adaptation he gave it a very contemporary, PTSD, war-fable spin. And I do think that it can be mapped a little too neatly onto contemporary world historical events, if that’s your interpretive bag. I don’t really care about the casting. I do think Nolan is up to interesting moves there, though I would have to sit through all that rumbling and screaming again to get a better angle on it. 

But I’m often curious how certain actors are believable as different characters while some actors are always themselves, and then further how some actors are always celebrities. So De Niro might be an example of the first one, or Meryl Streep, someone who convincingly becomes different characters in different movies even though we can step back and say yes that’s the same human being in those different roles. And an example of the second might be Tom Cruise, who I find persuasive but who is always relentlessly Tom Cruise, with all of those beautiful teeth. (Can you imagine going through life being that handsome? It would be spiritually deforming. Or great fun. Or both.) An example of the final category might be someone like The Rock. He is always The Rock no matter what. He’s never going to be anything convincingly but The Rock. 

But Zendaya and Theron aren’t like that, are they? I mean, I’ve only seen Zendaya in the Spiderman movies, but I find her persuasive in those. I realize she’s been in lots of other stuff and that she’s married to Spiderman, but I haven’t seen any of it. I haven’t seen that HBO show about the wayward teens. Hey, I’m a middle-aged dad. I can only handle so much intensity. 

I don’t think it’s her skill level as an actor or her ambient stock price of celebrity. I think it’s because she didn’t have enough to do in the movie. She didn’t have enough to say. Athena appears every now and then as Odysseus’s conscience, and she says some various Yoda-like stuff, and she makes that frowning forehead-face that she does so well, but she doesn’t ever become a character. She doesn’t do anything interesting. One of the details of Greek myths I always loved growing up is how the gods behaved like people. But Zendaya’s Athena is a flatly christian, beneficent advice-giver. A burning bush would have had more active screen presence. But that’s not an acting problem. That’s a writing problem. That’s an adaptation problem. That’s a Christopher Nolan problem. Maybe my spectrum of celebrity is wrong, and any actor could become someone else in my imagination with words enough and time. I can forget who they are if they’re given something interesting to say and do. Even The Rock could morph into Hercules and clean the stables of my mind.

Likewise with Theron as Calypso, who is motivationally ambiguous as a character. Does she want him to stay? Does she want him to remember? Does she want to him to keep hanging, maybe throw something on the grill for later? I think this confusion comes from how many bits are conflated within the Calypso character here: the Calypso character who Odysseus shacks up with for several years on his way home; the Lotus-Eating chapter where Odysseus’s men eat the fruit and forget everything and generally turn into college sophomores; and the staying with Nausicaä and her family, where he regales them with his adventures and is adored and has the chance to ditch Ithaca and its complications and start anew with the young, attentive, moon-eyed Nausicaä. 

I think here again I would have forgotten who was portraying Calypso if she’d had more to say. Instead she just cathects around the beachfront looking ravishing and pensive, dressed like an outdoor bar at a beach-themed chain restaurant. These two childless middle-agers should settle into a first class condo together. If Nolan had wanted to make that Calypso role interesting and dramatically potent he would have made some key changes. Calypso would have been much younger, bordering on inappropriate (trapped on an island with drugs and Sydney Sweeney?), or at some point in their should-he-stay-or-go debates, their three kids could have come out of the wigwam to ask about dinner (trapped on an island with a Pack-N-Play and Jennifer Lawrence?). No, this is not in the Odyssey, but then there’s a lot in this movie that isn’t in the Odyssey and the real question is how to make it dramatically coherent and relevant for us here today. I get the whole “we did terrible stuff to Troy” regret fable part, but what is Calypso bringing to the table to keep him there? What game is she slinging? Please let me witness some game. He stays there because he can’t remember, and he can’t remember because he doesn’t want to remember, because he is ashamed and horrified by what they did to Troy even though it was his idea, and they won because of his cleverness. The hero as self-hating schemer. But this is a contemporary and sexless spin on the poem, which really seems to be about how hard it is to stay faithful while out on the road. All these adventures and scrapes are exit ramps onto other modes of living, other situationships, other women. A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one, etc. 

Which reminds me of the main two bits missing from this movie: laughter and sex. Perhaps it’s immature of me to want any kind of humor, but I still do. And it’s the most unsexy film I have ever seen. There is one flicker of eros when Antinous makes his “I got you babe” case to Penelope. Of course he quickly ruins the moment by being a dude, but still it’s there, briefly. But there’s no indication of misbehavior or adventure or naughtiness on the part of Odysseus camped out with Calypso. It’s all very dour. It’s all very north England coast. I was cast back to my favorite mythology movie from my childhood, 1981’s Clash of the Titans, with its stop-motion animation robot owl. Goofy as hell and lots of fun. Nolan seems unaware that adapting an ancient text into a movie is inherently ridiculous. I did like how the cyclops eye was sideways but was made anxious by his nudity. I kept worrying we were going to have to witness Polyphemus’s giant cyclops dong. 

The siren song scene is indicative of the overall gestalt of the movie and of Nolan’s aesthetic more broadly. The song that is endlessly alluring just makes him scream his head off, as if he’s being tortured. I understand that it’s torturously tempting but again it’s not particularly cinematically interesting or convincing. It’s all very Abu Ghraib of Nolan, who as we know from the Dark Knight trilogy is above all interested in torture. 

Is Odysseus being tortured by the sound of the song or is torture the song made manifest? Is torture what the song is about? Is it art that both depicts and inflicts pain? As there are no honest anti-war movies because stuff blowing up simply looks too cool, a career-long over-emphasis on the depiction of people inflicting physical pain on one another would seem to indicate an attraction to, rather than of a revulsion from, violent human suffering. This is what life is about, Nolan seems to be saying. We burn each other’s houses. We stab each other’s eyes. We break each other’s backs. There are brief commercials of regret. But stay tuned. 

The audience sits lashed into the stadium seats of the Imax, thrown to the bottom of the well of this one man’s vision, humming along.

One take after another

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Notes on One Battle After Another 

The internet is an interconnected garden of human flourishing, and yet we all end up writing about the same things. Yes, I too have seen that new movie. I think it’s pretty good! I love a movie where stuff go boom. 

And so but yes it’s true the movie has to do with revolution but it is not in itself a revolutionary movie, if we can table for a moment that I don’t know what a revolutionary movie with a $130 million budget would actually look like. Analyzed politically, the movie is quite conservative. It ends with the daughter driving off to Oakland to take part in a political demonstration, sure, but it also ends with the father and the daughter getting iPhones and snuggling into the warm couch of the techno-corporate-state surveillance apparatus, which they had previously avoided out of a justified fear of persecution. And the movie supports and ends with a reunification of the family as the comprehensible unit — as opposed to the man-made revolutionary tribe as the unit. So while revolution runs through the movie as a theme and plot device, the undercurrent is not revolutionary. Perhaps this is similar to why there aren’t any persuasive anti-war movies. There’s something fundamental to the nature of the medium: stuff blowing up looks cool, so even if the subject depicted is human brutality, and even if the characters eloquently rail against such brutality, it still looks badass when shit go boom, and that’s why even our staunchest anti-war films accidentally and inevitably make war seem kind of neat. I feel like this was an idea articulated in Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried. Yes, war is hell, but it’s also paradoxically the most exciting period in your life. There is no either/or, there is only both, always. 

There’s also criticism out there that Perfidia is the most interesting character and when she walks into Mexico at the end of act one, the movie loses much of its mojo, which seems plausible. But also, this criticism springs from the desire for Paul Thomas Anderson to have directed a different type of movie, rather than evaluating the movie he actually created, which is a type of state-power thriller. All that granting the artist his donnée stuff, per Uncle Hank’s timeless advice. The Amazing Adventures of Perfidia Beverly Hills would have been an interesting movie, but an entirely different one. 

That being said, I still thought Anderson did interesting things within the action thriller political drama he trapped himself inside. The chase scene at the end, in particular, was nauseous, by design. Lord knows I’ve seen enough car chases in movies to last eight lifetimes, but I’ve never had to look away because I thought I might hurl my recently scarfed peanut M&Ms. 

I don’t know nearly enough Pynchon to opine about how this movie relates to his novel Vineland, from which this movie is loosely adapted. I thought the plot was fascinating, though I’ve read enough of Pynchon to know that if I cop a paperback I’m probably going to be frustrated. (I’m firmly on Team DeLillo.) But I did find the tone of the movie interestingly non-standard. That is, it was more satirical and absurd than originally perceived. I tried to go into the movie with as little forefronting of knowledge and interpretation as possible. I saw the preview a couple of weeks ago and was provoked and so I went. I couldn’t help but learn some plot-related and source-related details beforehand. Such are the tentacles of the Hollywood promotional apparatus.

To those critics who argue that Anderson portrays antifa inaccurately, I want to say: this movie is obviously a type of satire. There’s a character named Virgil Throckmorton. The antagonist is named Lockjaw and he sports a rooster-ish, flaccid, grey Mohawk. His racism mingled with repressed interracial lust is, yes, a cliché. One thinks back to American Beauty’s Col. Frank Fitts with his murderously repressed homosexual desire/homophobia for an equivalent filmic character cliché (that still sort of works). It’s too on the nose, but also that’s the point. 

Despite all of this I found Sean Penn’s Lockjaw terrifying, still. Something about the veins in his neck and arms, those dilated highways of rage. There is a constipated regimental stiffness to how Lockjaw walks that is at once absurd, cartoonish, chilling, persuasive. When I watch actors I tend to sort them into persuasive or not. Can I go with them anywhere? Penn is a blunt presence, almost metallically abrasive and not someone I would ever have a beer with, but I believe in him. Also, I find Benicio del Toro utterly convincing in this role and every other role I’ve seen him in. I am able to recognize him — oh, it’s him again — while still utterly believing him as this character. This is opposed to someone like Tom Cruise, who is always so relentlessly Tom Cruise, international man of handsome.

The other satirical component I found ridiculous, but also convincing, was the bit about the Christmas Adventurers, the underground network of white collar white nationalists. The hit man they send out to dispatch the miscegenating Lockjaw is wearing a Lacoste sweater for chrissakes, a detail worthy of American Psycho. He even looks like Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman.

Some people view the film as a commentary on our current situation, but I think this diminishes the film, as well as Film in general. First, it costs too much money and there are too many people involved for a film, any film, to be an editorial or extremely timely political commentary. The film is a vision, not a commentary. We turn everything into takes now, as if art were primarily concerned with telling us how to live. The movie isn’t so didactic, not so clearly explanatory, thank goodness. Sure, it’s eerily timely. Just this week they sent federal troops into Memphis, a mere 200 miles from the Land of Progress. This gesture, like so many current gestures, feels like a troll, a type of real-life shitposting. Yes, the movie deals with current political angst, but the real test will be in perhaps 15 years when one can rewatch Battle and determine if it’s still worthwhile, if its vision is independent and not contingent on the day’s latest horrors.

Finally, I admit that I am sentimental about all the fatherhood stuff in the movie — the haphazard father searching desperately for his endangered daughter. I have no aesthetic distance when these topics come up. When the tracking devices are introduced and explained early in the movie — the separate devices emit a melody when brought into close proximity with one another — I knew that this detail would recur in perfectly appropriate narrative fashion later on, like Chekhov’s pistolero. But despite being thoroughly calloused, I still had to squelch a yelp of emotion by stuffing the remaining M&Ms into my mouth when the DiCaprio father stumbles along the street at the end, his rifle in one hand, his parent tracker in the other. It starts to sing right on time. At that moment the daughter is prone on a dune with pistol raised, demanding the code words. She’s just shot the Lacoste hit man, who could not produce the appropriate code words. Now she’s demanding them from her father, who she sees but no longer trusts without the two-factor authentication of the exchanged code words, taught to her long ago by this very same father and underlined in their importance by the last several days of running from people who want her dead. At this point I had to cover my eyes, terrified she was about to shoot the father. Appropriately he doesn’t say the code words. He just says it’s me your dad until she relents. Because the code words are the currency of the political network, the tribe. There is no currency in the parent-child network. It’s just a gift economy of mutual attention and affection. (These words mean the same thing.) The father-child bond is one of instant, feral recognition, the singing of the devices. The use of those singing trackers was utterly predictable and absolutely devastatingly effective to this humble viewer. Look, I’m only human. They don’t tell you when you become a father that when they hand over your child at the hospital, freshly wiped down from the viscera of entry, that they also implant a device within your abdomen, a tracking device, and that as you move about your world and life whenever you see your child again, the device will burst into song. It doesn’t matter the occasion. Sitting in an idling car, watching bored pre-teens stumble out of the middle school, you’ll be there scanning, thinking subconsciously not my kid, not my kid, not my kid, and then suddenly there they are, and before you can even form the thought tracking device it will start singing in recognition inside you, singing endlessly, everyday until there’s no more breath left to sing — every time they come out of a school, or stomp down the stairs, or throw themselves into the backseat with a grunt, or lurch zombie-like out of a friend’s house after a sleep over, or stand around with their sequined pals before the pre-dance photo-op like so many well-dressed deer, every time you see them the device inside you will sing mine!

Maybe the actual revolution is the day when the tribe doesn’t kill the family.