Tom's Poetic Travels and Other Odysseys

Film Review: Up in the Air

(Spoiler Alert!)

The Oscars are Sunday night. One of the nominated films for Best Picture is Up in the Air. Also nominated were the actors George Clooney (lead), Vera Famiga (supporting), and Anna Kendrick (supporting). The film's director Jason Reitman is also nominated. He directed Thank You for Not Smoking and the brash Juno. Not a bad collection for such a young filmmaker.

I found this movie intriguing because it works well on two levels: the literal and the metaphorical. First, let's talk about the literal side of the film. 

I read mixed reviews on this film. I could understand why. Ryan Bingham (Clooney) flies from one city to the next, firing people due to layoffs. Timing wise, with this economy, it's probably quite painful for some to watch these firings and layoffs. But nobody is better at it than Bingham. Like the boatman who ferries the dead across the River Styx in Hades, he escorts the fired across the finish line. This he does with charm, grace, and patience. He genuinely listens to those he is firing. He is tender. He is firm. He stays on task. The outcome, however, is always the same. His habits of travel are nailed down - which line to enter for airport screening to prevent delays and squeezing out every frequent flyer mile. In my eyes, it is a tragedy that his "home" is a pitiful one bedroom apartment barren of any personal mementos. His true home is the road belonging to the archetypal road warrior.

But he runs into trouble when his company decides to ground him to try out a new way of firing people - online, over the web, with webcams. It could save a ton of dough after all. A young college graduate, Natalie, is the cause of Bingham's current situation, having pitched this idea to their boss. He takes her on the road with him, so that she can get a feel for how this works. She is of course a pathetic road rookie, but he shows her the ropes, starting with tossing out her pillow from the 50 pound wheelie that needs to be checked. Checked baggage - a big no no on the road. And in true Clooney fashion, Bingham is simultaneously an ass and a charming nice guy with that gravelly voice and handsome face.

Bingham meets his doppelganger in fellow road warrior Alex and the two hit it off, arranging to meet in certain cities based on their intersecting schedules. The archetypal road warrior, now with company on the road, seems to be changing, softening. Being in relationship moves him out of that "Up in the Air" posturing - makes his life messy. Natalie's boyfriend dumps her while she's on the road and Bingham must deal with - ugh - emotions. He brings Alex with him to a family wedding that he dreads attending alone. There, he somehow talks the groom into marrying his niece when the young man gets cold feet, to the great appreciation of Bingham's sister. Everything is going well. He's liking Alex with no commitment. He's developing a mentor's fondness for Natalie. Then he makes the fatal error of going off his standard course of behavior and makes a spontaneous visit to see Alex at her home in Chicago. Let's just say it doesn't turn out well for him.

Now, onto metaphor. As a metaphor, Bingham represents a part of the human mind. Well, at least mine, but I'm sure others too. Having been burned more than once by emotional upheaval or the ending of relationships, there is that temptation - nay - that NEED to turn in and lick the wounds. To gain some degree of control, in just the way that we see Bingham on screen. Organize, be consistent, be efficient - even inside chaos. By doing so, the out of control spiral seems less out of control. That structure is a way to contain the painful craziness of separating or of being in relationship. The risk is always stepping out of that shell to see what else the world has to offer. Bingham represents a part that chooses to stay aloof from the rest of the world. And amazingly, and sadly too, modern culture provides plenty of opportunity to support that feeling of separation from others. Our culture is crazy efficient, for better or worse.

Bingham as the archetypal road warrior is a beautiful rendition of metaphor. The edges of the archetypal image start to blur with Natalie and Alex in Bingham's life. His naive visit to Alex's home is an archetypal mistake - stepping out of the air and onto solid ground - and he pays for it. Having been turned away, he ends up finally getting what the archetype is supposed to get - his special frequent flyer card and a visit from the lead pilot for the airline - up in the air of course, in first class. Can't help but think this is like a visit with God, the archetype having returned to the fold. This fits the lyrics of a song in the film, The Prodigal Son's coming home.

And this is what typifies an archetypal image. There is a somewhat defined set of characteristics and radius of experience around the image and that is why they are archetypal. Bingham is no longer the archetypal image of road warrior in his attempt to enter Alex's home. The archetypal image of king is no longer king if he's a tyrant. The archetypal image of leader is shattered when the President has an affair with an intern. 

I don't believe that the film's message is that it is too risky to step out into the world because it will inevitably lead to heartbreak. I think it is more about giving significant face time to a part of psyche, an archetypal part that looks like Bingham's road warrior, that struggles with the complications of emotions and relationships. And that part, always there, works well in certain situations, and not others, reminding me of the need for empathy of the many inner parts of self.

There Will Be Blood Film Review

Spoiler Alert!

The mysteries of There Will Be Blood are wrapped up in the sinister music; the horror of filthy men, coated in crude oil, killed by the unsafe rigors of oil exploration; a man beaten to death by a bowling pin; and the sad and tragic figures in the characters of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). A few of my friends called this movie “weird.” Rightly so.

The haunting music combines with a sometimes forlorn landscape to mirror the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey; in that film, apes grunt and scowl at one another in an odd silence broken by shrill music. There Will Be Blood opens similarly, with a man searching a hand dug mine shaft for silver, only to break his leg in a fall when a step in his crude ladder snaps, plunging him to the depths. This man is Daniel Plainview, who limps through much of the rest of the film on this poorly healed wound. And in these opening scenes, we see the maturation of technology in oil exploration, just as technology marches forward in 2001.

A few scenes later, Plainview, now exploring for oil, is the fortunate, uninjured one, up to his waist in crude oil, slopping this black gold into metal buckets, when the winch and pulley system snaps at the top of the well, crashing timbers down into the hole, killing Plainview’s hired help. The dead man’s son, just a toddler, becomes Daniel’s quietly observant adopted son, H.W. Plainview. H.W. turns out to be a handy companion when hustling people to drill on their land in the California oil rush in the early 20th century.

There Will Be Blood is a movie to be struggled with. What is attractive about the movie are the aesthetics of landscape, Plainview’s rugged individualism, the clash of Plainview and Eli Sunday, the outstanding performances by Day-Lewis and Dano, and the demise of Plainview and Sunday. The movie is also difficult to watch, as I winced at and despised the greed, malevolence, violence, fear, and scarcity in the film. In my attempts to work through some of this, I have thought about some themes expressed in the film. For example, Eli Sunday’s representation of an old tradition of proselytizing, emphasizing sin and sinner, searching for souls to save, wheeling out the personal charisma. Plainview, on the other hand, represents the heroic individual striking out on his own, searching for some breakthrough and meaning in a bleak economy. Eli and Plainview’s repeated clashes strike at the heart of an age-old conflict between the individual and religion. Their conflict also represents a clash between traditional conservatism and exploration of new territories of meaning.

Two interesting images intersect and overlap in this film, that of blood and oil. Blood is often mentioned in Eli’s church services. It pools under Eli’s head after he is killed by Plainview and splatters the camera when H.W.’s father is killed by a fallen timber. Oil, of course, also threads through many scenes. Men stand in the bottom of wells with black oil up to their waist, handkerchiefs tied over their mouths while they dip lowered buckets into the black crude. Oil seeps from the ground on the Sunday property and oil spurts up through derricks, between the wooden timbers, when a strike is made.

This overlap of blood and oil makes implicit this relationship between the earth’s “blood,” if you will, and human blood. This connection between blood and oil implies an association: heart to earth. Does the extraction of oil from the earth mean that we also are extracting blood from the human? Does the lessening of blood in the body mean something about disconnection from heart (community), weakening connections between one another, breaching relationships? The representation of Plainview as a cold businessman and Eli’s questionable motives in saving souls suggest a disconnection from values of community and human connection. In a sense, they both have some sort of salvation to sell, and both of these forms of salvation tear at the fabric of a possible wider connection in the community that could happen by honoring its diversity instead.

Eli and Plainview’s bitter endings suggest that their lives were both ruined by their choices to focus solely on these slippery narratives: oil (Plainview) and blood (Eli). Eli’s faith has been unable to protect himself from “sin” and his sinful urges. Plainview’s isolation and the subsequent disowning of his son, are the result of years of his driven fanaticism about oil. Both of these men want something that in a sense is unattainable – Eli is after the blood of the savior and Plainview after the resurrection of oil. Neither reaches these places and are left bereft, bitter, and in the end, only in each other’s pathetic company.

It is also interesting that the three main figures in this film are also names contained in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Elijah (Eli) appears in 1 Kings at the direction of the Lord to straighten out the worshipers of a false prophet named Baal. Elijah invites the worshipers to construct two alters, each with a butchered bull atop of a stack of wood. He then asks the worshipers to see if Baal will light the one stack if they pray to their god. They pray all day and all night without success. The next day Elijah tells them to pour water on the other stack three times and then he invites the true Lord to start this stack on fire. Moments later, the entire stack goes up in flame. The worshipers give up their devotion to Baal and instead place their faith in the Lord. The Lord then directs Elijah to round up the prophets of Baal and kill them. Here we have Eli (Elijah) fulfilling that circumscribed role of cutting off the possibility of connection through diversity. Instead he tears down a community. Ironically, it is Eli at the end of the movie who succumbs to Plainview’s chastising, saying “I am a false prophet and God is a superstition.”

There is an entire book in the Hebrew Bible titled the Book of Daniel. This book combines “the humor of folktale with the mystery of the apocalyptic to create a message of hope and encouragement” (quote from The New Oxford Annotated Bible). I don’t know about hope and encouragement, but Daniel Plainview is a driven man focused on the next discovery at great personal expense (his own personal apocalypse). Plainview is an intense man, but he has a sense of humor about him and friendliness (calculated, true) earlier in the film. Until H.W. is injured in another one of those oil drilling accidents. Ironically, Plainview is disconnected from his son H.W. at the point when his biggest discovery comes in. The young boy is deafened by the explosion and Plainview can no longer connect with him. It is devastating to see Plainview struggle with this loss and to witness his descent into booze and disconnection from those around him. Perhaps this is a stretch between the Hebrew Daniel and the one of the film but one that seems worth considering in more depth.

In the film, Paul is Eli’s twin brother who makes the first connection with Plainview. Paul, in exchange for cash from Plainview, directs him to the Sunday property in Little Boston, where Plainview makes his great discoveries. Paul is a figure in the New Testament and a prophet of Jesus Christ. He wrote two letters to the Corinthians that come after the four gospels. In these letters, he is providing answers to questions (sort of like a FAQ I guess) about Christianity, a newly emerging religion in his time. One sentence reads “Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters,….that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose.” He seems to be a sort of livable intersection between the oilman’s need for discovery (Plainview) to make his life purposeful and the religious tunnel vision of Eli. Paul is the one who manages to leave his family of origin (the Sundays) and to have a few wells of his own that produce some income there in the area of Plainview’s great discovery. Plainview points this out to Eli at the end of the film as Eli is in misery about his own failures. Although mostly offscreen, Paul’s life seems sustainable, lying at some point along the continuum between Eli’s proselytizing and Plainview’s fanaticism for oil.

In another curious irony, we witness a mirror in the two men’s confessions. Plainview is blackmailed into his confession before Eli’s Church of the Third Revelation. He says that he is a sinner and hollers with spit dripping from mouth that he “has abandoned his son.” This abandonment enlivens his rage and grief. This is the one time that Plainview expresses so much unrestrained feeling. Much else of Plainview throughout the movie is so more focused on the business side of life – relating through oil instead of through blood, the heart.

In the movie’s final scene, we bear witness to Eli’s confession that “I am a false prophet and God is a superstition.” Under similar circumstances of blackmail at Plainview’s, Eli expresses a level of truth about his life (as does Plainview about his son) that otherwise remains unexpressed. He too expresses rage and grief through his confessing. His faith is not the be all and end all of his life, but instead he experiences anguish and dissatisfaction in seeing shortcomings of himself as a human and the inability of his faith to shelter him from a filthy tide of “sin.”

The film’s screenwriter, Paul Thomas Anderson, was quoted as saying he wanted this film to be like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which “…look[s] at the worst parts of ourselves.” This too might account for the unsettling feeling to the film, this gaze upon the worst. In this, we can look inside ourselves and wonder, which part of me is like Plainview and which is like Eli? Those parts of me certainly do rear their ugly heads at times, in ways subtle and not so subtle. I can only hope that a film such as this, as a work of art, allows these parts of humanity to be expressed and honored in safe and meaningful ways, rather than repressed and allowed to seep into our communities in powerfully destructive ways. Rather than being dogmatic and singularly of focus like Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday, let us relate pragmatically, relationally, and open to the diversity in our communities, to keep open those avenues of connection between the many islands within the world at large. When the earth’s blood is some day exhausted, let us hope that there will still be enough blood left in the heart of humanity to still connect the hearts and minds of men, women, and children.

Copyright 2009 by Tom Flynn

Little Miss Sunshine Movie Review

I watched this last night on DVD. The general story arc is simply a family who road trips to Redondo Beach, California from Albuquerque New Mexico so the 7 year old daughter can participate in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant. The opening scenes are a confusing jumble - the father on stage showing a pyramidal diagram of the 9 steps to success (the following pan shows an audience of less than ten people in a grungy classroom), the grandfather snorting cocaine in a bathroom, the daughter mimicking the facial expressions of the winner of the Miss America pageant on television, a sad man (Frank) at a hospital staring out the window as his sister arrives to take him to her house after he has failed at killing himself.

This family is a confusing jumble too. Uncle Frank is a gay academic who has been scorned by a young lover for a colleague. He has no place to live. His sister Sheryl puts him in with her son Dwayne, who hasn't spoken a word for 9 months, and won't until he's accepted in the Air Force Academy. He is a glum black haired 15 year old whose favorite author is Nietzsche. Grandpa's been kicked out of the retirement home for doing heroin. The father is all about winners and losers, and is trying to ace a big money deal with his 9 step program. Mom "makes dinner" by bringing home a bucket of fried chicken and tossing a couple bags of salad into a salad bowl. And our beauty queen Olive is a little heavy and wears glasses you would see on someone her grandpa's age.

The road trip nearly tips over into disaster several times. The clutch gives out on their yellow vintage VW bus, but the family overcomes this by push starting the van in 3rd gear. There are several funny scenes of each member of the family peeling off from pushing to jump precariously into the van as it rolls out of a parking lot or into a street. Then Olive wakes her parents one morning to tell them that grandpa won't wake up. After the hospital declares him dead, they do something Chevy Chase style to continue their trip. Nothing deters this family from reaching their Eden - the beauty contest. And they are almost stopped at the destination by an aging bouffant former beauty queen who won't register them because they are 3 minutes late. The dad begs on his knees to let them in. Needless to say, they make it.

The movie caps with Olive's dance routine she's learned from Grandpa. Basically, a sanitized striptease to the song The Freak, in stark contrast to the other 7 year olds who are dancing replicas of Barbie. Bouffant wants to stop it, but father interferes with her, as he gets on stage, and after a glance that seems to say, am I really doing this, starts to dance with Olive. Then Dwayne, Uncle Frank, and Sheryl all join in as Olive grins.

Each family member is a either actively or passively "grotesque," that is they are incomplete, unfinished, anathemas to any hero ethic. Ironically, they are pulled to this beauty pageant in the hopes that there could be at least one winner in the family (back to Eden), after all others have failed (during the trip, the son discovers he's color blind and that he'll never be a fighter pilot - that leads him to say his first word in 9 months, a long drawn out fuuuucccckkkkk). The father's tenacity towards winning is what takes the family to California and it turns out to be a valuable contribution. So I don't believe that the movie is suggesting that persistence towards success is altogether bad. But what really turns out to be grotesque is 7 year old girls in their Barbie caricatures as well as the horror of the beauty show crowd and the Barbies with their disgust at a family dancing together on stage.

The trip to the beauty show is a metaphor for the pull that most of us Westerners feel towards a better place that is less confusing, more complete with confidence and winning, a place that could take us out of the everyday challenges of being human. The movie suggests, through Uncle Frank's reflections on Marcel Proust, is that what is memorable are the hard difficult times of life, not so much the happy ones. I sometimes reflect on my own experience as a parent and how much I have grown and learned about myself with the sometimes difficult times in child raising. I'm not sure I would feel as much the complexities of life if I didn't have children.

Lastly, I will say that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and many of their comrades, embrace this sort of 9 step program towards winning. In a country like Iraq with its ethnic and tribal complexities, we seem to be  dealing with a road trip in a VW van across the country with a bunch a complex and complicated people rather than the Beauty Pageant. The use of the words like "winning" and "losing" in Iraq as Bush discusses in his current "surge" can be seen differently when viewed through the lens of what this film suggests.

Pan's Labryinth

I watched this movie yesterday in a theater I expected to be packed because of all the 4 star ratings the movie had received from film critics. I hurried into Lincoln Square theaters after racing to the front of the ATM line and pulling my wife by the hand and tugging her into theater #16. We turned the corner in the stadium style theater, and there were only 10 people in their seats 20 minutes before show time. I was surprised! Well, it was after all an early afternoon matinée on Saturday. It did finally fill to two-thirds capacity when the previews began.

The movie did not disappoint me. However, my wife, as well as our friends who met us there, were not as certain. They were repulsed by the graphic violence that splashed across the screen - a hand mutilated by torture, a man shot in the cheek, the same man stitched up a slice to his cheek with a masochistic flair. They also thought there wasn't enough fantasy and too much reality of the Spanish military fighting off rebel insurgents.

Mythical and psychological themes densely populate this movie. That's what turned me on. For example, I thought it was like seeing Lacan's Real on the screen, that early stage of infantile development that is prior to our introduction to language and symbols. Ofelia, the young girl whose curiosity about a flying walking stick insect turned into fairy, is led into a labyrinth past vegetative covered stone walls. Down and down, until she meets a creaky old faun - part faun, part snag. My movie partners wondered if this was real or just her imagination. I thought she was entering the Real, a part of psyche that we languished in before we gradually became mostly civilized by society's laws and rules.

(Photo Copyrighted by Picturehouse)

Of course, this is the dilemma - is it Real or our imagination? Lacan thought that we are constantly drawn back to this early place in our psyche, before language and the Law, even though the Real seems from our adult perspective to be grotesque, frightening, and full of rules we don't understand. Yet the Real seems oddly familiar and strangely likable. We are repulsed and attracted to it. Like why can't I eat just a couple of grapes, Ofelia thinks? Just because the Faun said not to? She finds out why, after she is nearly grabbed and killed by a creature with eyeballs looking out of his hands.

(Photo Copyrighted by Picturehouse)

I also wondered about the creakiness of the faun, as the sounds were coincidentally similar to the noisy creaks made by the house that Ofelia was living in with her mother and diabolical stepfather. And the creature with eyes in his hands lived in a space behind walls and under floors. As though Ofelia reached into her imagination to make sense of these frightening noises of the strange and dark house. This is Freud's day residue making its way into our dreams. So another interpretative possibility is she was using pieces of her daytime experience to populate the nighttime of her imagination.

(Photo Copyrighted by Picturehouse)

Many interpretations are made possible by this movie, and that is part of what makes it mythic.  To me, the mythic is the invisible skeleton of story, and when storytelling enriches the possibility of more storytelling by people's discussions in trying to understand it, then we, in our extended narratives, become the mythmakers, if you will. I just made that up. I like it. I think the academic term for this outspinning of stories from myth is mythopoesis, an ongoing re-rendering of story and myth.