I've come to an interesting realization of late: I tend to use pop culture as sort of mood reinforcement. I find this odd, for a simple reason. If I'm feeling low, wouldn't it be best to watch something like The Big Lebowski?
So Sharon's been out of town for most of the last two months, the sole break being about six days back to visit and go to a conference.1 As one might imagine, this is not conducive to good times. I do, however, make all decisions regarding pop culture consumption solely to suit my own interests. My selection of Netflix films for September and October are an odd reflection of things I might not choose to watch with anyone else.
Some of them I have no plans to watch a second time, regards of their quality or impact.2
It does make me think. In particular, about the highly depressing and disturbing things I've been interested in, and how they aren't necessarily making me feel worse. At times, it's quite the opposite - though this is a delayed effect, I find.
I've started compiling a mental list of those unusual bits of entertainment that are both brilliant - well made, formally beautiful, just truly powerful - and shocking and affecting in their subject matter. It's far from complete, but it is, I think, a list of entertainments well worth the time.
I started to think about this after renting and watching Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom. I watched it because I wanted to have seen it, which meant that I would have to see it.3 Matthew Dessem called it "visceral" and meant it. It didn't make me vomit, as I was concerned it might, but simply watching it was an exhausting experience. It made me realize that there were other films that bothered me more, or at least very specific scenes and moments, but there is little that can match Salò in it relentless pummeling of atrocities.
Shortly before watching Salò, I watched Clean, Shaven, which was depressing overall, with simple moments that truly bothered me. That scene in Inglourious Basterds where B.J. Novak's character is scalping a dead Nazi? Hilarious. The scene in this film where the schizophrenic protagonist - from whose head the film seems to spring - shaves in front a mirror he's covered in paper, because he can't handle reflections? Horrific, and I've cut myself shaving so many times it hardly even registers. Even worse is when the sounds in his head become so bad that he's compelled to remove the transmitters he believes were implanted in him. I squirmed on the couch. It was hard to keep focused on the screen.
If you were to tell me that Clean, Shaven is the most accurate portrait of what it's like to be schizophrenic out there, I'll believe it. If there's something even moreso, I'm not sure I can handle it.
There are more conventional films about mental breakdowns, like Insomnia. I watched it the other night. It was pretty much as I remembered. It does make for an interesting comparison to the American remake, directed by Christopher Nolan, especially when you consider the points raised in the Criterion Contraption essay. (Scroll to the bottom for those, specifically.) Those differences between the characters played by Skarsgård and Pacino sum up everything that's gut-wrenching about the original.
If you're looking for gut-wrenching, though, it might be impossible to outdo Kurt Kuenne's Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father.4 It's a documentary, and every painful detail is easily accessible with a brief Google search. The general consensus is that you should go into the film with as little background as possible, to let it sweep you along. Maybe. It's hard to say, because it's firmly in the category of things that can't be unexperienced, and I only know how I saw it.
I started to get choked up in the first minute or two of the film, I think. I don't precisely recall the time, though I do know the moment, the first voice that begins to break. (The man with his young son. It's in the trailer. It's seared into my brain.) Though I've no doubt there's someone out there who won't cry at this film, I - like damn near everyone who's seen it - spent the bulk of its running time with tears in my eyes. Crushing. Harrowing. Touching. Powerful. Raw. Pick your adjective.
There are a variety of summaries out there, all dancing about the details to keep some of the surprise. My version: Filmmaker Kurt Kuenne's best friend, Andrew Bagby, is murdered by an ex-girlfriend, who it turns out is pregnant with his son. Kuenne interviews family, friends, coworkers, and anyone he can find to paint a portrait of a father for a son who'll never meet him. If this were fiction, it would be an astounding picture of the interconnectedness of people around a single person. But it's a true story, and one with surprises that would be pushing the limits of one's suspension of disbelief if it weren't.
Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes is utterly true, raw, and composed of shocking subject matter - autopsy footage - but it's nothing like Dear Zachary. In a way, because of its formal beauty, it's kind of lovely. The emotions it drums up are complex and sometimes at odds, but I actually enjoy it enough to watch it from time to time. There's a strange comfort in it that I can't quite get my head around. It soothes for reasons unknown.
So does Bonnie "Prince" Billy's album, I See a Darkness. (Title track especially. Album version here; powerful Johnny Cash version here.) It's not unlike listening to the Eels album Electro-Shock Blues, particularly Dead of Winter. Or most anything by Arab Strap.
But films tend to strike me more powerfully. Perhaps because they're just a more immersive experience. Sometimes there are scenes that are just a punch in the gut.
The one that always comes back to me is from Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. This bothered me three years ago, when I wrote:
"The Battle of Algiers looks almost like a documentary, which is why the vicious scenes of torture - brief, not bloody, but looking entirely real - turn my stomach. Even more so is the scene, just before the torture, where FLN bombs explode in the bleachers at the horse races, a place filled with wealthy French spectators. An enraged mob converges on a small Algerian boy selling concessions, beating him unconscious until the police lift him out. You don't see any of the explicit violence, as it's hidden by the bodies of the mob, but the scene is so stark and brutal that I find it extremely difficult to watch."Great film. Stomach-churning moment.
There's the moment in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence where Viggo Mortenson's character, Tom Stall, smashes in a thug's face with a glass coffee carafe. And we see the bloody aftermath. Or when Mortenson's character, Nikolai, in Cronenberg's Eastern Promises cuts the fingertips off a murdered man in the process of making the corpse unidentifiable. In fact, Cronenberg's films are a treasure trove for this sort of thing. The scenes of Videodrome in Videodrome. Beverly unveiling his new surgical tools in Dead Ringers. Oh, pretty much all of Crash.
Michael Haneke specializes in this sort of thing. The scene I think of most - though it's just one moment of many - is in Time of the Wolf, when Ben is standing before the bonfire. You can see a snippet of it in the trailer, but it's in context, at the end of the film, that it becomes something that sucks the air from your lungs.
See also: when Frank murders a small boy who hears his name in Once Upon a Time in the West. The abandoned war dead on the beach in The Burmese Harp. The aggregate of moments of Caden losing Olive in Synecdoche, New York. The old shirt, after Jack's murder, in Brokeback Mountain. The story of the mulberry trees in Taste of Cherry.
Antoine Doinel, sitting in the classroom as we see his parents, his teacher, and the principal outside, through the glass, in The 400 Blows. Which isn't as rough as the rest, but Truffaut certainly knew how to play a scene for emotional impact.
And Terry Gilliam knows how to monkey with emotions, too, though he so carefully lightens the moment when it's needed. When selecting an actor to play a government torturer, he picks Michael Palin, who's pretty much the nicest man imaginable. He's almost as charming as William Powell playing Nick Charles in The Thin Man, only not fictional. Johnny Depp plays Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, because there's no way you can't like the man, and it's essential that we love him.5 (Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, anyone?)
He chose Jeff Bridges as the overdosing junkie dad in Tideland, because any role where Jeff Bridges plays a long-in-the-tooth hippie type instantly conjures up thoughts of the Dude. And you can't not like the Dude. (Gilliam readily admits as much.)
And I'm back to The Big Lebowski. I think I'm in a mood to watch it now.
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1And I spent 90% of that time down with H1N-fun.
2Often because of that impact. Of course.
3Mark Twain once remarked something about classics being books that everyone wanted to have read, but no one wanted to read. For years, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare has been sitting on my bookshelf. I doubt that I will ever read it, but I'll be damned if I'm going to get rid of it, or relegate it to a box in the basement.
4Here's the trailer, albeit in crummy YouTube quality. (The website's got it smaller, but in higher quality.) I find it very difficult to watch now, having seen the film, though it's hard to say what its impact was before I knew all of the details.
5See also: Bill Murray in Where the Buffalo Roam. Or, for late-period Murray, in the films of Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch.
