JUPITER ASCENDING

JUPITER ASCENDING feels like the Wachowskis remade THE MATRIX in space for the Young Adult Market. Especially for girls. This is not a bad thing. It's just a thing. Not my kind of thing, necessarily, but I don't mind that I saw it. It's bright and shiny, with some fantastically intricate chase sequences, state-of-the-art special effects, the whole gleaming shebang. Watch it on a big screen, if you do. Just don't expect anything radically new, unless you happen to be a pre-teen under ten. It could rock you a little, considering.

In a recent interview with Hitfix.com, the Wachowskis raised a very good point that illustrates their ambition in regards to this film. Aside from sequels and remakes and prequels and video-game and novel adaptations, why hasn't there been, other than AVATAR, any original world-building in American cinema? 9-11, rhat's why, according to these two sibling writer-directors. People want what's familiar, and it takes a whole lot of mental energy to invest in something cinematic that's novel and ntricate.

It's a notion I hadn't thought of before, and I almost buy it, but I don't think JUPITER ASCENDING necessarily is that 'new thing' that we need. Mostly because, as slickly entertaining and eye-popping as it is, it also feels like a highlight-reel or medley of SF hits of the past. You have a crew right out of STAR TREK, and cityscapes and creatures cribbed from THE PHANTOM MENACE, and plot twists that harken to THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and British-accented space-officials from the deck of the Death Star, and intergalactic family dynamics that echo feuds found in Marvel's THOR films, and a central story of an unsuspecting heroine's awakening to her own dynamic importance that feels like it's lifted right out of the heart of THE MATRIX. (Also made by the Wachowskis.) So what we get is not necessarily something new in the leat; in fact, it's familiar enough to feel pretty safe.

Yet, perhaps I'm being too harsh. Similar to THE HUNGER GAMES, this could be a benign gateway drug for young girls just getting into SF. It might serve to instigate discussion of the genre's brighter lights. The Eighties, after all, gave us TRON and THE LAST STARFIGHTER, and FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR and STAR WARS, and probably a dozen other films I"m forgetting that featured young males in the lead diligently derring-do. All of these recent SF/Fantasy films navigating a teenage heroine at the centre of the narratives who must wield great responsibility to unearth their trule role is kind of a twist on a tradtionally male realm of enchantment. That they're nothing new for us all doesn't necessarily mean there's nothing new in them for some.

JUPITER ASCENDING has a scale and ambition, visually, that makes it worth watching, with amiable performancess (and the requistie great-baddie scene-chewing), and there's some intriguing notions of Earth history in connection to other-worldly black-markets that make the story unfold with varying degrees of suspense and amusement. For a science-fiction fan above the age of, say, twenty-two, there's probably not much here other than its effects that will cause you to geek out in astonished glee, but for a girl who's just starting to like exactly this kind of stuff, it might make her chatter all the way home in the backseat of the car as she looks up at the moon that races right alongside her night's ride.

CHINESE COOKING: A MORALITY CHECK

For my Japanese-language study, I'll sometimes purposely choose a non-fiction book that looks kind of kooky. The one I'm currently meandering my through now at my own erratic, not-quite-understanding-much-of-anything pace, has a title that roughly translates as: "Why Is That The Chinese And Koreans Have No Heart?" There's a glut in the market recently of books attempting to explain why China  is so angry at Japan, and why Korea is furious with Japan, and why both of those countries know nothing about recent history, and why the whole 'comfort women' -- i.e. 'sex slaves' -- issue is truly a red herring, and this book that I'm reading  is one of those type of strange deals. And, not unexpectedly, it's all kinds of odd.

I think the Japanese language itelf, and the way that it's assembled into readable, understandable, fundamentally narrative forms, allows for a lot more digressions and side-routes than English permits. You're supposed to be a little vague, and somewhat off-kilter, leaving the reader to infer what real point is being made. The result, however, usually in non-fiction books, is that you can find yourself early on in the text traveling down some pretty funky back-raods.

For some reason or other this particular author, a sprightly seventy-nine year old by the name of Hideak Kaze, has decided that one of his opening chapters should be utilized to point out the moral deficiencies of the Chinese by way of their food. Yes, that's right -- their fucking food. I'm neither an expert in cooking or the Japanese language, but his arguments seem to imply that the way the food is prepared is proof of their moral weakeness. 'As one would expect,' he writes, 'the difference between the Japanese and Chinese culture in food is also because of the difference in their spiritual cultures.' He goes on to point out that just as their food is heavy and gaudy in its preparation and taste, so, too, are the people rather loud-mouthed and obvious in their everyday conversations.

The entire enterprise of the book is so obviously racist and bizarre right from the get-go, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that a chapter on food turns into an investigation of morals, but I think the fact that I actually laughed out loud at a few of his ideas has to do with a larger issue, a deeper one, the notion that it's very easy in Asia, even expected, to group people completely together by dint of their homeland.

In Canada, or America, or England, we're used to multi-cultrualism, and while ethnic groups themselves are acknowledged to have their own special quirks, there's still an overarching nationalism that (in theory) tends to link us all up. In Asia, nationality is directly tied (for the most part) to ethnicity -- meaning, you can pull out your brush and paint in broad strokes about an entire country's people as representative not only of the state, but of their own intrinsic bloodline.

For it's blood that matters over here, the liquid origins of one's self. (I just about shit my pants the first time I went to get a video-card  in Japan when, on the application form, they asked me for my blood type. When I told them I didn't know, this resulted in a few confused minutes of bewildered consultation between staff, before the manager agreed I could still become a member.) You can diss an entire culture's cooking, and, by doing so, you're slamming not only the state as a force, but all the people within who make up its ever bleeding heart. Blood rules in Asia.

I can't imagine a pseudo-academic book designed for popular consumption in the West entitled: "Why The French And Germans Have No Heart' -- especially if, like this writer, you studied at Yale and Columbia Universities, and worked for the Encylopedia Britanica Corporation! -- but perhaps there's an underlying assumption in Japan that everyone (meaning non-Japanese) is truly different, so a writer can get away with such xenophobic intentions. Or maybe this book issimply more on the far-right fringe of nuttiness than I'm willing to admit.

I don't know. I do know that I'm curious to see where this book goes from here. If Hideaki Kaze firmly believes in his wizened old age that a country's cooking is truly a source of its spiritual acumen, I can only imagine what other bizarre suppositions he's waiting to expose in the next two hundred pages when it comes to Korea. The notion of the 'other' will always take us to places extreme in ourselves.

Atom Egoyan's THE CAPTIVE

 Atom Egoyan's recent movie THE CAPTIVE makes him feel even more like himself. It got shredded and mocked by the critics last year during its premiere at Cannes, yet, for me, the film is in its own way a throwback to Egoyan's triumphant run of the Nineties, where movies like THE ADJUSTER and EXOTICA illustrated what an unusual sensibility he can bring to the Canadian screen. Of his past decade-and-a-half of movies, the only ones I haven't seen are ARATAT or ADORATION, but I'm probably pretty safe in saying that, with THE CAPTIVE, snooty-Cannes-critics aside, he seems more in tune with his own peculiar obsessions than we've seen in some time.

There is nothing particularly original about a story involving the disappearance or death of a child -- indeed, this is the third time that Egoyan's dealt with this topic, after THE SWEET HEREAFTER and last year's DEVIL'S KNOT -- but there's a brew going on here that feels suitably off-kilter and tart, a nicely aesthetic confusion for one's touchy palate. Somebody should, if they haven't already, write a Master' thesis about 'detachment' and 'abstraction' in the films of Egoyan (and his Canadian-cinema older brother, David Cronenberg), because there's a distancing to his stuff that, when it works, only adds to the notions of unsettlement that he's continually trying to provoke.

In brief, this movie is a domestic drama, overlapped with a police procedural, then seasoned with whatever the fuck Egoyan's always going on about regarding our voyeuristic impulses -- a favourite obsession of his, one whose inclusion here feels odd and distracting, yet hey, that's the pont. (I think.) Like in Cronenberg's films, there's an abiding weirdness at work that you can never quite figure out. The acting and pacing sometimes seems off, but you can't put your finger on why; the dialogue, as spoken, is either stilted or spot-on; the story either too vague, or perpetually right on the button. Egoyan's either always not trying enough, or simply too hard, and often both efforts emerge at the same time. It's hard to make sense of what he wants us to think.

As it should be. This is the proper combination for him, this uncertain mixture of tones. It makes it impossible to discern if the movie is exactly working, per se, but more and more as I age I don't want a movie to work -- I want it to breathe. Sometimes those gasps of breath might be muted, even suffocated, and at other times they might emerge as a rough sort of bark, but it's that uneasy exhaltation of air that his films at their best bring that makes me sit up straight.

There's much to admire in some of his more 'mainstream' films, but I like Egoyan best when you're never quite sure if he knows just what the hell he's up to. You can almost feel him trying stuff out, artistically, searching for the proper tone, sometimes even in the same scene. There's a moment three-quarters of the way through THE CAPTIVE that seems like it would be a definite game-changer, narratively-speaking, in terms of where the plot has to go -- but nothing comes of it. Never mentioned again. I don't know if a subsequent scene was left out of the final edit, or if Egoyan never intended to follow-up on those implications. Its omission was a real head-scratcher for me, but then I just thought: "Well, it's Egoyan -- he's funny that way."

I wasn't sure what I'd just seen, or why it was there in the first place, but on a deeper filmic and philosophical level, his films have always been obsessed with the nature of observation itself. Why do we watch what we do? What do we get out of it? What happens when we're not watching?

This film is filled with people looking at screens, or through windows or windshields, watching cars coming or going, or else they're simply studying each other, trying to suss out intentions, The cumulative effect kind of got to me near the end, and I had a curious sensation I haven't had in some time while watching a film; I started to get uncomfortable with me as a viewer (and person?) watching them do all this watching. I don't know if Egoyan had this effect in mind, but he sure put in mine.

Another aspect of the film that I loved (which is admittedly personal), was that it was great to see Canada play itself, to see Niagara Falls and Ontario feature so prominently as a character, the winter weather a part of the narrative turf of the story. Rarely do Canadians get to see their own stuff on the screen, and to see this familiar terrain of my youth paired with Egoyan's own creepy aesthetic provided a welcome frission that augmented its creep. Add in a crew of prominent Canadain actors -- Ryan Reynolds, Scott Speedman, and Egoyan stalwart Bruce Greenwood -- and the movie itself felt more 'Canadian' as a result.

Is there truly anything 'Canadian' about THE CAPTIVE? I would say yes, in that its entry-point into an ostensibly 'thriller' narrative is subdued in comparison to what a mainstream American approach would look like. Egoyan gives us perpetually-jovial Ryan Reyolds, but saps him of all the pretty-boy charm and flippant jokes that he's made his whole career out of; he upends any suspense by interjecting scenes designed soley to set up moods of discontent -- in the characters, and probably the viewers, too. There are gobs of emotion scattered throughout the movie, but everybody's trying to suppress, to not reveal their own passions, and for mild-mannered Canucks, what's more Canadian than that?

Again, I don't know if the film 'works, and I can sort of get why nobody at Cannes gave it much of a go, it being at times subdued and lurid, over-the-top and plain dull, an amalgamation of pseudo-European arthouse ambitions with genre-picture suspense, but Egoyan's films have always included, at their core, a dispassionate and clinical vibe that seems to examine humans with a reserved mode of detachment, and it's this emotional disconnect that's often going on that paradoxically drew me in here. (This film is about how we end up watching each other, and why, for what means, and because no character truly allows anybody else in, why should I as the viewer receive a free pass? ) Even when the characters are full of quiet rage and despair, we're somehow not emotionally allowed to truly synch up with their pain, as if as a director Egoyan's always saying 'just wait'.

THE CAPTIVE awkwardly, yet doggedly, builds on the previous themes of Egoyan, and to what end I'm not sure, but the very last shot of the film ended up moving me just a bit,,unexpectedly so, and I wondered why, exactly, and if it was even supposed to be meant as sentimental, or was I just reading it wrong. As the screen cut to black, leaving me with those lingering questions, I eventually mentally shrugged, thinking: "Hey, it's Egoyan." It was good to think that thought, and mean it. It's been awhile.

THE GARDEN OF EVENING MISTS by Tan Twan Eng

Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng's novel THE GARDEN OF EVENING MISTS is as delicate and comfortingly elegaic as its tile, even as it deals with the most terrifying and lingering elements of nationality and memory, war and forgiveness. Narrated by a recently retired female judge, a strong-willed Malay of Chinese descent, the book has the kind of warmth and generosity, openness and tenderness that often seemingly emerges from only women writers, and so I was a little stunned, after finishing, to discover that the author was, in fact, a man. (Go figure.) There's this kind of traditionally feminine spirit he's tapped, a feeling of forgiveness, that bleeds through the whole book, and an approach to detail that illuminates its grand and troubled themes.

Tormented by aphasia, a neurological condition which means that one can sometimes no longer make sense of alphabetical letters on the page, the narrator commits to put pen to pater while she still can, remebering in detail her disturbing years as a teen -- a time that was spent in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, after which she struck up an unlikely friendship (are there any other kinds?) with a Japanese gardener who stayed in Malaysia past the end of the war, and who also, long ago, had worked in the gardens of the Emperor of Japan. What follows is a narrative that painfully tries to explore how we can forgive and forget -- which makes it sound maudlin and mediocre, the stuff of a thousand clunkly memoris, but the subtle grace of the prosem and the soul-killing pain of these events, combine in an artistic elixir that soothes as it stings.

Eng uses his main character and her Japanese friend as metaphors for what many Asian countries have  had to grapple with since the end of that war -- namely, how do you move on and reconcile the irreconcilable? Issues of war-time forgiveness and inter-nation animosity would have held no interest for me, at all, fifteen years ago, but living in Japan, Cambodia and the Philippines has sort of sensitized (or at the very least interested) me to these kinds of issues.

Japan, China and Korea are swept up in a kind of perpetually antagonistic state of eternal sniping; the idea of 'saving face' is fucking huge in Asia, and no country wants to give in, or even appear that might be doing so. China and Korea have not forgiven Japan for its wartime atrocities; Japan does not seem to educate its young people well about all the shit that went down. All sides, at least in my view, have points worthy of contention. Yes, Japan, in many respects, has done a piss-poor job of reconciling with its war-time imperial ambitions. (However, Japan is also such a group-think environment that those who have done legitimate research into what actually went down are not usually guaranteed the widest of audiences.) Yet China and Korea will not let anything go. Do England and France contine tu shut out Germany due to the sins of the past? No. They've moved ahead. Because what other choice do we have? We're talking about events that occurred almost a century ago. At a certain point, one has to move on.

Yet, inside of these intensely political and national(istic) arguments reside actual people and their tangible pain. THE GARDEN OF EVENING MISTS does a good job of illustrating the complexity of moral capitulation. Can you truly befriend a person from a country who has inflicted such harm? Can we trust what anyone says? What do we owe to our fellow citizens, to strangers, to the past? And what should we give to our own furture?

These are all important, but rather ephemeral topics to establish any real narrative grounding, but Eng creates a portrait of a Malaysia post World War II in which these ideas are populated by real characters in pain. If you know a little bit about the Emperor of Japan, or Japanese gardening, or the Chinese in Malaya, or wartime history, you'll be more than intrigued, but you don't need to know much to get something from this book. There is a steady, even abiding sense of sorrow that percolates through every page and its prose. This can, admittedly, sometimes get a bit tiresome; how many descriptions of mountains and insects and the sun slowly setting does one need to read in a single story?

Then you glance again at the title, at the quiet pulse of place invoked by those simple words, and you realize, or at least I did, that sometimes the way best way to approach the human heart and its endless emotional and historical offshoots is through suggestion itself, a slight sketch here and there.

AMERICAN SNIPER

(slight spoilers below)

Is AMERICAN SNIPER amoral? Immoral? A give-me-a-fucking-break ode to bullshit American military jingoism, or a measured and accurate portrait of a soldier at war? Given all the online hoopla over the thing, and its incredibly successful run at the box-office, I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was hoping it would be a kind of a Rorschach test of a film, letting us observe, then report, on what we think we just saw. That's pretty much what I found, and in the spirit of that approach, I'll let you know what I think, but if the film is doing its job, you should feel something else.

Chris Kyle, Bradley Cooper's character, occupies almost every frame of the film, and it's only through the tight little world of this self that we witness the events of  his life. From a father teaching his son how to hunt, to dinner-table lectures on manhood requirements, to Sunday sermons at church, to outrage over terrorist acts against America glimpsed on cable TV news, to fierce Navy Seal training, quickly followed by the rigors of war punctuated by homefront tension, it's clearly (and solely) Chris Kyle's view of war that we follow, one that we necessarily judge as we must.

There are films that endorse and advocate their particular views of its subjects. (BIRDMAN comes to mind; you do get the tangible sense with that movie that the filmmakers involved do not take the most favorable of views towards the super-hero culture that has transformed cinema.) Is AMERICAN SNIPER one of those flicks? You tell me.

What I saw was a war movie, told from a particularly American point of view, about one man's immersion in the fiercely brutal ways of his duty. We don't see any war protesters, or Iraqi characters independent of the American occupation. There is an Iraqi sniper who is at least as good at his brutal craft as his American counterpart, but we get no sense of his political aims, his homelife, his inner life. All the Iraqis are either targets, or potential ones. This is Chris Kyle's world. We're watching it with him. Feeling it with him. When his wife complains that he's not there for his family, he barely seems to understand what she's getting at; when his soldier-brother in Iraq says to 'fuck this place', Kyle's bewildered reaction illustrates how myopic his sense of the war has truly been. After one of his fellow soldiers expresses futility at the whole point of the war, and after this same soldier's widow, at his funeral, reads a letter he wrote wondering when all this need for 'glory' would end, Kyle doesn't seem to take in what such an emotional protest is about. Or does he? Eventually, he too, tires of war, is ready to go home, does not want to fire at another child who is picking up a weapon of his own. This doesn't stop Kyle from later teaching his own son how to hunt, which, for some viewers, could be proof that all of this violence he's inflicted hasn't meant much at all. Or, for others, it might mean that Kyle is simply carrying on the noble tradition that he's upheld throughout the course of his life, teaching manly virtues via the way of the gun. Yet this is Kyle's story, period. How you regard that depends.

This may not be enough for some people. What about the families of the one hundred and fifty people he killed? Don't they deserve a voice? Haven't their deaths earned a response to this one-sided look at that terrible war? They certainly have. Yet this film is about that man. About what war does to an American who finds notions of virtue and honor in military endeavours. You could ask, and maybe rightly so: Who gives a shit about the oh-poor-me, maudlin inner moaning of a man who ruthlessly kills for a living? And by merely depicting such an experience, giving it a visual voice, does it not automatically imply sympathy with his cause?

I'm not so sure. We are observing here. If you view the American military and its adjuncts as a noble, even spiritual effort to protect and safeguard the citizens it claims to represent, this movie, from first scene to last, could be read as a realistic look at exactly what it takes to become what a soldier is supposed to embody. There are emotional side-effects to the process, yet a dignity still endures. However, if you think the whole military-industrial complex that's insinuated its way into American life is a dehumanizing brainwash of a farce that enlists people with low-education and minimal awareness of the complexity of international events, well, that's all on display here. Every scene shows us how this particularly American military male is gradually grown and dismantled; each development in the story can be read as cowardly and pathetic, or heroic and ennobling, depending on what you, as a viewer, bring to its artifice.

It's interesting that the film bookends itself with the main character's attempts at portraying cowboys. Chris Kyle admittedly couldn't cut it as a real one, as we watch him in the beginning getting thrown off a bucking bronco at a rodeo, so he joins the military as another way to man up. In his final scene of the film, he mockingly pretends to be an old-time cowboy with his wife at their home, complete with a fake-sherrif's badge and Old West style six-shooter. Begging the question: Does anything ever change, in the character or the country? In the character of the country? Clint Eastwood, the filmmaker, formerly Clint Eastwood, the quintessential cowboy, now showing us an American male who can never let that part of himself go, no matter what hell he's been through? What's Eastwood, the director of such thoughtful war dramas as FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS and LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA, trying to say here about the nature of his countrymen? This John-Wayne-bravado, embodied by Kyle, is either the best of American might and virtue, or a stunted kind of sick growth. That this playful, inherently adolescent cowboy-trait in him continues to endure at the end of the film, just as it was present at the very beginning, can be read as Eastwood insisting that no real lessons have been learned in the least, or else it could also be viewed as a steadfastly moral kind of courage maintained and extended. Cooper's portrayal gives us the man as he is, and we have to have the honesty bring to this film our own selves as we are.

Again, I think you can be both conservative or liberal (or a bit of a mixture of both), and come away from this film either very impressed or appalled, with multiple reasons to back up your point of view. It has the complexity of moral art to me. Everybody's watching the same movie, but the subject of war, and Americans at war, allows us to enter into the confines of this narrative with our own emotional and political baggage.

By even deigning to show the emotional conflicts of an American soldier, isn't one trivializing his multitude of murders? By depicting his domestic disturbances, isn't Eastwood simply dramatizing a reality that's ignorant of the real damage that's been done due to the actions of this man and his family that we're watching suffer? That each scene carries with it these inbuilt contradictions allows a portrait of a man to be painted that enables the viewer to decide for himself what tints and hues to acknowledge.

There's a dramatic clarity to each scene that paradoxically enables ambiguity to puff up. I believed Bradley Cooper was macho and heartfelt and suffering and prideful. I don't necessarily think those feelings are warranted or noble, admirable or proper for the real man he's portraying, but, as a viewer, one can observe and understand a character's experience without deeming it 'moral' or 'right'. There's a deceptively generous latitude to this whole movie's ambiguity-by-sheer-observation aesthetic that I feel has been overlooked by all sides in their rush to proclaim political loyalties.

This idea is never more present than in the final moments of the film, where reality intrudes into this dramatic narrative. The end-credit sequences features what looks like home-video footage of real-life events, and one could argue that it's the ultimate example of flag-waving American nonsense, hero-worship of a moron of a man who did nothing but kill. (And kill, and kill, and kill, and kill, and kill.) The celebratory glorification of a maniac who destroyed hundreds of non-American lives. You're entitled to that view. Hell, I might even agree with most of it. Yet I watched that final sequence, and I mostly thought to myself: "Yes, this sure is how some Americans tend to celebrate their fallen soldiers." It is what it is. (And this sudden reversion to the more primitive feel of video footage allows the audience to subtly see once again how the concept of 'heroism' is sneakily transmitted and transformed by by televisual means.)

Is Eastwood glory-worshipping here? Metaphorically (and literally) pumping the music up just a little too much? Giving one final, emotional outlet for gullible observers taken in by this tale to tear up and indulge in rah-rah military overkill? Or is such a scene simply a given, an authentic reality, the final photographing of how his countrymen emotionally react to those soldiers who have fought and died in their names? To not depict it at all would be to omit the real stuff of life. I looked at all of those American flags hung over highway viaducts, and watched oversized pictures of the actual Chris Kyle proudly displayed at his memorial service, and, while I won't speak for you, or how these particular scenes might make you feel, I can tell you what I fundamentally thought, as I did for much of the movie, as I did when figuring out how to approach this character as a man, which was something approaching neutral, something primarily observational, a refrain that sounds something like: In the world according to Chris Kyle, this is most likely what happened.
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PILLOW TALK

Why do we so often want the cool side of the pillow? For sheets and blankets, we request and require nothing but warmth. We simply need to be contained for a few hours in their piled-up abundance of slightly stacked heat. Pillows, however, play by their own rules, and we have somehow all agreed that the pillow is boss. This is bullshit. Why should we let these little sacks continually mess with our heads?

Even on the coldest of winter nights, I will suddenly awaken and try to make sure that the pillow is touching the side of my cheek of with its own coolest face. Something must be going on, physiologically speaking, but I don't speak physiological, so I'm perpetually stumped. Does the cool side of the pillow counterintuitively react with the warm touch of my cheek, which in turn has been heatened and heightened by the protective covering of my sheets?

It makes sense in the summer, in the glory of your gotchies, in the buff of your buffness, to want that cool pillow to give up its chill. But why in the winter? Why do I still demand that silky-smooth coolness?

There have been times in the past few years when I've slept for months on end with nothing more than a glorified bean-bag for a makeshift pillow, and, even though I know I'm asking too much, I still toss that bean-bag thingee over and around and back to its first side while I try to get some non-existent coolness to come up to me. All for nothing.

Do bean-bags not, like, contain the capacity to harbor such cold? Maybe not. I'm no expert on stitching together the stuff of our lives. I just know that pillows -- both as an ideological concept and as a verifiable noun that exists as a thing --  seem to be these softly magical lumps of inert nothingness that nevertheless manage to quietly defy all biological norms. Pillows appear to have entered our universe from this other, alternate, ulterior mode of existence where fluffy collections of feathers have somehow gained the right to mess with our most intimate and tactile sense of our bodies and selves. The right side of my head and the span of my neck nightly longs for and requires their softly cold nudge of communion.  

An Intergalactic Balzacian: George Lucas and THE PHANTOM MENACE

Leave it to the French to stick up for STAR WARS. Specifically, THE PHANTOM MENACE, Even more specifically, Jar Jar Binks -- a character I will continue to vigorously defend, though the heavens fall. In THE PEOPLE VS.GEORGE LUCAS, a documentary that examines what led to the widening gap of appreciation between the filmmaker and his fans, a couple of French cineastes make some very acute observations, ones that counterbalance the widely held view that Monsier Binks is nothing more than a sad joke. What these dudes are really getting at is the interplay of tones that this film allows to bubble up, and it's this constant back-and-forth play between the serious and the silly, the mundane and the mystical, the action and the speechifying, that gives THE PHANTOM MENACE its curious shape and content.

People do tend to forget: THX-1138, AMERICAN GRAFFITTI and the first STAR WARS film all introduced brands of cinema that no one had quite seen before. EPISODE ONE's in-retrospect role as the first story of six is enough of an odd narrative ploy to necessitate a closer look, but it's the film's uneasy balance between the spiritual and the political, the alien and the royal, the upper-class and the grungy world of merchants, that makes this Lucas's own Balzacian world of galactical observation. Just as Honre de Balzac crafted interlocking novels that examined French society in all its various levels of exceptionalism and discrimination, so, too, does THE PHANTOM MENACE serve as the first part of a series of stories that examine how various species of being, whether they be crudely profane or religiously elegant, all somehow contribute to both the enforcement and destruction of an entire mode of life.

One of the French film critics in THE PEOPLE VS.GEORGE LUCAS points out that much of the dislike towards Jar Jar Binks probably revolves around the apparent incongruity of his presence -- what is this goofy, burlesque character doing in the midts of this fantasy space opera? Sure, the argument goes, C-3P0 and R2-D2 were comic relief in the original trilogy, but Jar Jar? Too dumb, too silly, too much. Yet this out-of-placeness is precisely what makes the character's role so important. While ultra-serious Qui-Gon Jinn is conversing with Anakin's mother, discussing all things potentially Jedi, Jar Jar is being a dink; this foolish Gundan seems to do nothing but goof off. The other characters treat him the same way they seem to always treat the droids -- as an annoying afterthought. (Think of the way that young Anakin so casually says goodbye to C-3PO -- a robot he practically CREATED -- when he leaves Tattooine, a shot  in the film that lets us literally view the encounter through C-3PO's eyes, as his master so indifferently takes his fnal leave. For the only time in the entire STAR WARS saga, we see through the droid's eyes, just as in REVENGE OF THE SITH we actually see through Anakin's point of view as Vader's dark mask is implanted.)

Jar Jar's role is that of a subservient goofball, one who provides the comic kick that young children adore, but he's also key to understanding Lucas's thematic intenet when it comes to these films. As another French film critic points out in the documentary, Jar Jar's presence serves to combine the burlesque and the serious in the same narrative flow, a tone and contrast which was not appreciated very much by true fans of STAR WARS. In my mind, it's this very incongruity that highlights the societal critique that Lucas is undertaking.

THE PHANTOM MENACE introduces us to various life forms on different planets, among them: the most distinguished royals and government officials occupying the same territory as the oversized underwater creatures on Naboo; an array of esteemed Jedi Council members in the hallowed halls of Coruscant; Jedi masters and apprentices and junkyard scavengers on Tattooine, in addition to a slave woman and her son borne of a divine birth. This is not one society, but several, each unknowingly interlaced with the other.

We thus have an extremely odd mix of societal strata -- the solemn, suitably stiff exterior of the Jedi and Queen Amidala; the nutty silliness of Jar Jar Binks; the focused discipline of the Master and Padawaan Jedi on their appointed task; the directly exuberant joy of children at play; the scheming scavengers and their practiced deception; the version-one Stormtroopers and their basic mechanical movements, devoid of advanced armor or strategy. This is a film that allows all of these extremely divergent styles of characters to ineract with a kind of controlled abandon. Lucas is exploring a universe in which the political, religious and peasant/serf classes (and their adjacent capitalist ilk) co-exist within the same frame of an SF fantasy epic. That their presence -- embodied by the varying acting styles employed to represent their different economies of expression, from the dry matter-of-factness of the Jedi council, to the rather stoic delivery of the Jedi, to the gee-whiz stylized exclamations from the children of Tattooine, to the exaggerated mannerisms and vocal ranges of the Gundans, all wrapped up in a straight-faced sense of grandeur appropriate to an overblown serial's delusions of thematic grandeur -- makes for an uneasy alliance within the same frame is illustrative of how this universe operates, how it allows such contrasts. We witness the highest and the lowest of the universe, their parallel  stories constantly cross-cutting, while the characters themselves often occupy the same scene of engagement. That these aliens come in different forms of audienceendearment is to be expected; that they embody different thematic and narrative purposes might take a little sorting out.

Much of the criticism directed against THE PHANTOM MENACE has to do with racial stereotyping -- that Jar Jar Binks is a black-slave stereotype, that the junkyard merchant Watto is an Arab (or even Jewish) caricature, that the trade-envoy aliens are Asians in blatantly shoddy disguise. (That last accusation I still can't see for one second, and thus won't address further.)

 One can't deny that Jar Jar is a goofy servant of some kind, or that Watto is unsavory and suspiciously not-to-be-trusted, but rather than see these as emblematic of grotesque caricatures swiped from real life, I view them more like archetypal  representations of familiar storytelling tropes. These (extremely) other-worldly beings come fully equipped with exaggerated features, strange voices, ungainly shaped bodies, but to reach out and apply these distorted physical representatios to real-life racial groups seems, for me, to ignoe key aspects of what the characters embody in the ultimate function of the narrative.

Do Jar Jar's people, the Gundans, resemble African tribesmen? Perhaps, but only partially. Does Watto's voice sound distinctly accented? Yes, but with good reason. These particular examples of aliens repesent characters who lie at the heart of their own worlds, but nevertheless live and are relegated to the societal fringe. It takes the triumph of their final battle to give the Gundans' some above-water recognition, and Watto's role as a junk-dealer (and slave owner) has relegated him to where the buisness is most brisk -- the dusty, seedy markets of backstreet Tattooine. In this univese, whether it be on Naboo or Tattooine, it is the marginalized aliens that, for good or for ill, cause the most ruckus and reform. A critique of modern-Earth cultures, or an examination of science-fictional realms of exclusion?

 It is themtatically telling that the final battle features so-called 'primitive' tribes, like the Gundans, defeating the electronic battle-droids, and that Watto must make a living trading slaves and selling junk to survive on his planet. Any real-world racial similarities to these alien characters, one could argue, might actually have a point, one of cultural commentary  -- that these various planetary societies only allow certain kinds of lifeforms to gain entry and exit to various chambers of power and legislation.(We see that the Jedi Council is comprised of various odd-looking aliens, but the universe is vast, and perhaps it's discrimination of some kind that's kept Blotto in the illicit world where he resides, and forced the Gundans to remain under the sea.)

In EPISODE II, Jar Jar, so instrumental in the final battle of EPISODE I, unknowingly casts the vote which allows Senator Palpatine to take power. The innocents of society, brave in their good intentions, are often abused by the process and exploited by the wicked. I see these filmic depictions of alien servants and illegal money-makers as examples of how various strata of society delegate, abuse or ignore those who might actually have something to add to the culture as a whole. Jar Jar Binks is a hero at the end of the first film, and a dupe by the middle of the second; Watto is a slave-trader who merely fulfills the role that all around him -- including visiting Jedi and merchants -- expect those of his ilk to embody. Do Jar Jar and Blotto hint at real-world racial types? That's debatable, and perhaps worthy of debate. I'm simply arguing: These aliens and their visual broadness identify them most clearly as 'other', and it's this 'otherness' that the so-called 'noble' characters like the Jedi and politicians take note of and dismiss. For me, these widely-sketched beings are less of a 'racial' stereotype, and more of a subtle depiction of 'racism/alienism in action. (Not unlike the droids being excluded from A NEW HOPE's cantina, with nobody else 'normal' around giving much of a shit.)

You can definitely argue that the aliens in the STAR WARS films do, in fact, have some kind of specious relationship to real-world miniorities -- although that's a a charge that I'm not altogether inclined to accept, seeing them as less of an allegorical commentary on current or past racial relations (a la STAR TREK's style of current-times storytelling) and more as an example of how, along with the droids, it is the marginalized groups on various planets in these movies who often have the most wit and facility, and are thus penalized for such skills. The droids, the Ewoks, the Gundans, Watto, the Wookies -- all of these supporting characters ultimately play essential roles in the fate of the universe. The Jedis and royalty constantly overlook the importance of the so-called 'lesser' classes, but the narratives themselves continually look to them to stitch together or unravel the fabric of their times.

It's ironic that the CGI-effect oriented nature of the prequels is often looked on with disdain -- all that glossy sheen on the screen, those too-crisp-and-clear-sparkling worlds.These episodes are designed as the first three films in a story that depict the ultimate disentegration of a carefully orchestrated galacatic reign of Jedi and government; thus, this necessitates a kind of glittering scope that then allows Episodes Four through Six to appear all the more gritty and base. A shining republic will fall, giving to underground rebel hideouts and makeshift battle plans. The prequels illustrate a staticly rigid society, and the visuals reflect that detailed confinement.

As Lucas states in one of the first production meetings featured in the official documentary on THE PHANTOM MENACE, Anakin's final space battle purposefully calls out to A NEW HOPE, its call-back structure like that of a poem -- the first stanza rhyming with the third, and so on. Episode One gives us a look at intersecting societies filled with goofy aliens and dead-serious Chancellors, stoic Jedis and scheming junk-merchants, a motley of 'people' from different worlds endlessly interacting and colliding with each other's intentions. Rather than a botched mess, THE PHANTOM MENACE is, instead, the first carefully orchestrated chapter in a story that establishes all that will fall in the two films to follow.

The last shot of the film obviously parallels that of a A NEW HOPE, with a slave boy and Jedis, royalty and sea creatures, politicians and common folk, all standing as one to enjoy their great communal triumph. This seemingly celebratory moment of rapture is both a) on a broad, galactical level, the first (and final) visual integration of all these disparate societal strata into a single frame, and b) on a personal level, an eerie portrait and foreshadowing of all the main players in the saga, those who will soon enough fiercely love and quarrel and even kill one another, unravelling and destroying forever the fragile bond they've just formed, and this single tableux provides a moment both warmly inclusive and inevitably chilling, an interplanetary society finally coming together for one shining moment before it's brutally dissolved with great force by their own greed and ambition. That's all there in this final shot (and this film), depending on long you look.