Total Recall, the Cultural Superego, and a Nation in Denial

Continuing a series of somewhat light blogs, I have a few things to say about the 2012 movie Total Recall, a reimagining of the 1990 film of the same name, itself based on the Philip K. Dick story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.”

The basic premise of the movie is that memories can be artificially inserted into the human mind. Douglas Quaid (played by Colin Farrell) goes to a company named Rekall to spice up his humdrum existence as a common factory worker by gaining memories of being a double agent. Something goes wrong, however, and he finds himself caught in the center of a struggle between the only two inhabitable places left on Earth after chemical welfare has ravaged the planet: the United Federation of Britain (UFB) and the Colony (Australia).

Most of what I heard about the film when it came out was negative, but I can’t see what’s wrong with it. Sure it’s pulp, but it’s pulp done well. What stood out most to me--besides the hilarious and brutal crotch smack Kate Beckinsale delivers to Colin Farrell’s face (video)--is the socio-political drama.

It’s a cliché one, to be sure. The richer UFB exploits the poor Colony for cheap labor, and the UFB’s chancellor colludes with a manufacturer of robotic soldiers for a full-scale invasion of the Colony. Class warfare coupled with a military-industrial complex--an old story we are familiar with in works of fiction since at least World War II.

What amazes me is that while anyone saturated in Hollywood can easily identify the villainous forces in these movies, a great number of those same people leap to the defense of the government, the military, and giant corporations when they behave similarly in real life, and they are eager to attack those who resist those forces.

We are all familiar with the scene at the end of the movie when a document or video or voice-recording is uploaded to the internet, broadcast on television, or simply revealed to a room full of people, providing proof of the dastardly deeds of those in power and setting off a firestorm among the people. The movie usually ends there, with the certainty that the mighty and corrupt will fall and justice will be served. Audiences of all stripes are moved by this.

In real life, however, the people can barely stir themselves off the couch even when provided with hundreds of thousands of pieces of damning evidence--such as through WikiLeaks. We now live in an age when everyone knows that the military-industrial complex exists, that corporations buy votes in Congress, that the government is spying on us, that our leaders take us to war on false pretenses, that we hold innocent men prisoner and torture them for years without trial or even pressing charges, and that our soldiers gun down civilians. None of that is a radical accusation--everyone knows these things are fact.

When it comes to the NSA scandal, no one questions the authenticity of the documents leaked by Tony Snowden, no one questions the veracity of Glenn Greenwald’s reporting for the The Guardian. Yet many Americans think Snowden did the wrong thing in blowing the whistle. We all know our government is committing the crime, but some look for excuses to sweep it under the rug.

I suppose I shouldn’t be amazed at this. Psychoanalysis would suggest that repression is at work. Toward the end of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud touches upon what he calls the cultural superego--prevailing mores in civilization. America’s cultural superego insists that America the Beautiful does not do such things as unleash airstrikes on Reuters reporters, yet we all know it does. Threatened, some egos cave, and the truth is squelched.

The objection will immediately be raised that fiction and reality are two separate things. I agree. Only the crimes committed in reality are often much worse--and all too often we care less than we do when they’re committed in fiction.

A Casual Review of the Todd La Torre-fronted Queensryche’s Debut Album

The latest Queensryche release, self-titled, is by one of two bands currently operating under the band’s name. This Queensryche is composed of all the band’s recent members except vocalist Geoff Tate, whom the band replaced with Todd La Torre. The other Queensryche is Geoff Tate and whomever he chooses to work with. I haven’t listened to the Tate Queensryche’s first album, Frequency Unknown, but my expectations for the La Torre Queensryche’s first album weren’t disappointed.

The early releases “Redemption,” “Where Dreams Go to Die” and “Fallout” all immediately suggested the Queensryche fan’s Queensryche circa Empire (1990): heavy, melodic, lots of twin guitar riffs, tightly structured and radio-friendly. I was pleased to find that the other songs on the album were even better, immediately likable, lyrical, and always quintessentially Queensryche. Clearly, the drama of the past year has not taken anything away from this Queensryche other than Geoff Tate.

For some, the loss of Tate is a gain. Many longtime fans have been turned off by the group’s releases in the years since Promised Land (1994), the increasing control of Tate over the band, and a sound that hasn’t evolved so much as gone through mood swings. Dedicated to Chaos (2011)--with its funk, sax appeal and sometimes embarrassingly bad lyrics--was such a wild swing in weird directions that many would hesitate to call it Queensryche.

While I’ve had initial qualms with many Queensryche full-length studio albums, I’ve come to love almost all of those same albums. While they aren’t fan favorites, I consider Operation Mindcrime II (2006) and American Soldier (2009) to represent a Silver Age of sorts for Queensryche after they spent Q2K (1999) and Tribe (2003) finding their groove again, and I quickly realized that the unexpected sound of even Dedicated to Chaos is one I enjoy--once I learned which tracks to skip. Nonetheless, as a friend said after the release of Dedicated to Chaos, with a title like that, you expect some cool-ass heavy, and take the album or leave it, cool-ass heavy it is not.

The La Torre-fronted Queensryche has declared from the start that they intend to base the new Queensryche sound on the old Queensryche sound (Queensryche EP through Empire), and the new release has clearly been designed to sound as much like core Queensryche as possible, even with an appearance by Pamela Moore (Sister Mary from Operation Mindcrime I, II) and production by James “Jimbo” Barton (Operation Mindcrime, Empire, Promised Land). It rocks from start to finish and, simply put, is the Queensryche album many have been waiting for.

Still, it is also new. Scott Rockenfield sounds to have picked up some new moves, or at least a new spirit, spending much of the album pounding out staccato, tribal tattoos with an intensity that reminds me less of recent album performances than it does his concert drum solo. He also appears to have found some new drums. A favorite of mine sounds like a fine-tuned tin pail sounding from the distant corner of an aircraft hangar.

And then there’s Todd La Torre, who is, let’s face it, the make-or-break element of the new album. Longtime fans can be forgiven if they simply can’t accept a Queensryche without Geoff Tate, but La Torre is a competent replacement. He may not be as operatic and theatrical as Tate, but he does have the chops to pull off the soaring melodies, he contributed to the album’s impressive songwriting, and in interviews he comes off as a genuinely great guy.

At some point a judge will decide which Queensryche gets to keep the name, but whatever the outcome, I will be looking forward to this group’s further efforts under any name.

The Devil May Very Well Have Put Dinosaurs Here

One of my favorite musical comebacks in recent years was made by Alice in Chains, with Black Gives Way to Blue in 2009. I was sufficiently moved to blog about it at the time (on a MySpace page I can no longer access), and my enjoyment of the album has only grown in the years since. Thus, I have been eagerly awaiting a new release, and The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here does not disappoint.

Musically, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here grinds along to almost 70 minutes in inimitable AIC style: plenty of dissonance, sludgy guitars, thoughtful lyrics and healthy doses of acoustic chill and melancholy. The new AIC never comes screaming and kicking at you the way early releases like Facelift and Dirt did, but the band has mastered a polish that was inchoate before. Much more could be said about that, but it’s the album title I want to focus on.

The first thing I thought when I heard the title The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here was that according to the logic of common Christian apologetics, the Devil might very well have done just that. I’m referring to the cosmological argument for the existence of God, according to which everything is cause and effect, and since the chain could not go back to infinity, there must have been a First Cause, a Prime Mover, that got the whole shebang going.

Theologians have known for some time now that the argument doesn’t bear scrutiny, but that doesn’t stop Christian, Muslim and Jewish apologists from purveying its poor logic anyway. One of the biggest problems is that even if it proved the existence of a First Cause--and it doesn’t by a long shot, for reasons I won’t go into here--it would not tell us anything at all about what that First Cause was like. It wouldn’t tell us that the First Cause was good, still engaging with the world, or did things like send his son to earth to suffer and die for our sins. In other words, the First Cause could just as well be the Devil--and as Creator, put dinosaurs here.

The songwriters more likely had in mind the belief to which some fundamentalist types of Christian subscribe according to which the Devil put dinosaur fossils in the soil in order to deceive people about the true nature of God’s creation. They believe, according to a literalist interpretation of certain passages in the Bible, that God created the Earth less than 10,000 years ago. Since dinosaur fossils date many millions of years back, the Devil, the great Deceiver, must have put them there and made them look older than the Earth really is.

Obviously, not all Christians feel the need for such mental gymnastics to preserve their faith. I would guess that AIC count themselves atheists, but it doesn’t take an atheist to deplore the ignorance, money, hate and fear that come with some religious strains such as those of Westboro Baptist Church, which AIC clearly takes aim at in the song after which the album is named:

“The devil put dinosaurs here

Jesus don’t like a queer

The devil put dinosaurs here

No problem with faith, just fear.”

Okay, they’re just rock-and-roll lyrics, but I’ll take a voice raised for the side of Good anywhere I can find it, and I’ll add mine to it.

 

 

Han Solo: Space Cowboy and Total Conformist

I was sitting around thinking about Star Wars the other day and realized that Han Solo is the most conformist of the main characters in the films.

On the surface, Han Solo is a non-conformist character. In A New Hope, he is an outlaw who evades Imperial cruisers while smuggling goods in his ship the Millennium Falcon, ejects his cargo into space when it’s convenient, and cares little for political causes or maidens in distress. He is a misfit who exists in the dark spaces between the law (the Empire) and the opposition (the Rebellion), a space cowboy who follows no code but his own--and that code extends only as far as making some cash and saving his bacon.

Han Solo is also non-conformist at a deeper level. Star Wars is more fantasy than science fiction for the way the drama hinges around mythological and psychological archetypes, as well as dramatic stock characters. Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi are the Wise Old Man, Leia is the Maiden, the droids are the Clown, Luke is the Hero, Vader is the Father, and so forth. Han Solo clearly fits into this conceptual framework as the Renegade, but with one important difference: Harrison Ford portrays him too well. Ford brings so much charisma and swagger, as well as emotional vulnerability, to the role that his archetypal function is threatened by significant tinges of individuality. As performed, he does not conform to George Lucas’s aesthetic order.

Perhaps this is what has made Han Solo a fan favorite for decades, and perhaps the style Harrison Ford brought to the role is what lay behind many fans’ negative reaction to the prequels with all the one-dimensional characters and flat acting: No Han Solo, no Harrison Ford, no personality, no flair.

Then why do I say that Han Solo is the most conformist character in Star Wars?

Because this paragon of non-conformism eventually conforms. By the end of Return of the Jedi, he has joined a cause greater than himself, risked his life for others, fallen in love, and become a general for the Rebel Alliance. He will go on in the novels to become married (with children) and a functionary for the New Republic, the new ruling order. As a character in a work of art, he is all the more conformist for having once been a true rebel.

I have always found the scene at the end of Return of the Jedi when Leia kisses him to be disappointing, because when she kisses him--essentially a marriage at the end of all the comedy on Endor--his fall into conformity is complete. He is no longer the Han Solo we have known and loved. Love and kisses, a steady job, and little progeny may be all right for real people, but not wise-cracking, hot-shot pilots who once made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

It is the diminished Han Solo that we can expect from the upcoming movies, set as they are after Return of the Jedi, but if the rumors are true, at least we will have Harrison Ford to play him.

Toward No Ideology

Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, I’ve been increasingly suspicious of capitalism, and one strain of my reading has been in revolutionary history and leftist strains of thought. Obviously this means engagement with Marxism, and I have developed some sympathy for many of its concerns. So when it comes to ideology, where does this leave me?

Unsatisfied with the dark side of American capitalism, skeptical that alternate forms of capitalism can make a significant change, wary of drastic solutions of an anarchist or communist bent, and still trying to figure out what socialism could mean in an American context, it leaves me a pragmatist seeking any improvement--even a tweak--that can be made at all, and a philosopher willing to keep thinking, to keep looking for a new big answer to social and economic injustices.

Concerned with ideology, I subscribe to none. Dissatisfied with current options, I seek another. There is no reason that the dichotomy drilled into us by the Cold War--no-holds-barred American-style capitalism versus Soviet-style totalitarian communism--should present the only two possible arrangements for society on a national, international or global scale.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite YouTube clips of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek--someone who appears frequently in this blog and who identifies as “some kind of a communist”--in which he says that in light of all the messes in the 20th Century that arose from attempts to implement big solutions, maybe it’s time that, instead of doing something, we sat back and thought for a while:

Sometimes it’s okay just to think and to leave the perfect, big solution for later. Meanwhile, however, smaller actions can be taken for more modest improvements. And in some places of the world, such as those touched by the Arab Spring, imperfect change may be substantial indeed.

The Limits of Feminism in Queen Christina

I’ve been on a Greta Garbo kick the past year. Grand Hotel was an outstanding film all around, but Camille and Mata Hari left me unmoved. Then just the other night, I watched Queen Christina (1933), based loosely on the life of Queen Christina of Sweden. What interested me most on a first viewing was the film’s handling of feminist themes.

The movie begins in a strong feminist current. Queen Christina, who is given to wearing manly clothes, is a forceful and capable ruler who clearly needs no man, either for counsel or romance. Her court wants her to marry the national war hero Karl Gustav, and the scheming Count Magnus is never far away, but she insists, “I shall die a bachelor!” The only person she truly has an interest in is another woman, the dainty and girlish Countess Ebba Sparre. When she finds out that Ebba has a lover whom she wishes to marry, Christina flies into a jealous rage and heads out into the country with only her footman.

Here, the movie abandons its subversive feminist, bisexual and cross-dressing themes and veers toward conventional territory. Posing as a man while on the road, Christina ends up sharing a room and bed with the Spanish envoy Don Antonio. When it’s time to disrobe, her secret is out and the two fall passionately in love. Later, Christina walks around the room, running her hands over and pressing her face against various objects in order to memorize this glorious place where she found a man. Queen Christina has become a man’s woman.

Just when it seems the film has abandoned its more challenging themes--Christina has abdicated her throne in favor of setting up house with Don Antonio--the unexpected happens. Count Magnus mortally wounds Don Antonio in a duel. Christina arrives on the deck of the ship that was to carry them to Spain only to find her lover gasping out his final breaths. Christina declares the ship will set sail despite his death, and the movie ends with Christina at the bow, looking boldly out across the waves, a content smile upon her lips. Now for the first time in her life, she is truly free of men and ready to make her own destiny.

In its unrelenting ending, Queen Christina succeeds where other texts fail. Watching the 1970 movie of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (starring George C. Scott as Mr. Rochester), it occurred to me that in many of these old tales by women writers, the extraordinary female protagonist who supposedly needs no man often ends by marrying a man of wealth. Apparently, every good woman needs recognition as such by a man of considerable means and, in the movies at least, a man who also happens to have brooding good looks.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is another example. Throughout the whole book, we are told that Elizabeth is intelligent, independent and generally superior to all those frivolous women who only bother their heads with finding a man to marry. But, of course, she ends up marrying Mr. Darcy. In Joe Wright’s 2006 movie, which is otherwise excellent, these two sober heads suddenly, in the final moments of the film, become giggly dipshits!

Queen Christina avoids this betrayal of the ideals at its core.

But there are limits to Queen Christina’s feminism. What are we to make of her penchant for dressing as, and even pretending to be, a man? Is she proving how even a woman should be able to do anything she pleases? Or does she feel that a woman cannot be equal as a woman but only by becoming a man? And what of her obsessive rejection of men early in the film? Can she not realize herself as a woman except through rejection of men? There is an awful lot of man in this formulation of woman.

But perhaps these limitations cannot be avoided. After all, to be human is to be male, female or intersexual, and to exist in matrices of gender identity. The one thing you cannot do is avoid the male/female polarity altogether. Therefore, any feminist message must fall within the broader context of human biology and sexuality.

Finally, we must consider that Queen Christina’s feminism is limited because it is not the whole story--the movie’s stronger push is for individualism. Queen Christina simply wishes, beyond any aspirations of female empowerment, to be herself. Like the historical Queen Christina of Sweden, she refuses to be bound by convention.

Watching Queen Christina, I couldn’t help but feel that this role suited Greta Garbo more than any other I have seen her in--and indeed, the documentary Garbo by Turner Classic Movies draws connections between the themes in Queen Christina and Garbo’s life. Garbo is always so herself that many roles don’t seem to fit her, but she and Christina fit seamlessly, and the result is entertaining and thought-provoking cinema.

Classic Movies: Three Levels of Experience

For some time now, I’ve noticed that I enjoy recent Hollywood movies less and less. Movies I watch because they are in genres or franchises I love--like The Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus or Skyfall--continue to impress, but other movies usually leave me uninterested. Meanwhile, I’ve been increasingly drawn to classic movies. I eventually realized that this was because the experience of older movies is multilayered in a way that new movies can’t provide.

The most obvious level of experiencing an old movie is the immediate experience based on its content, the way you would experience any movie. You follow the story, identify with characters, marvel at special effects, get swept up in the score, admire the performances, and so on.

One old movie that captivated me recently was Gaslight (1944). The fragile Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman, marries a devilishly tall-dark-and-handsome smoothy and the two move into her childhood home. However, she soon begins--so it would seem--to misplace items, forget appointments, and notice strange phenomena that no one else does, such as the lights dimming. Her husband, increasingly exasperated with her hysteria, suggests she is going crazy. But is she? Isn’t there something suspicious about her husband’s behavior? Isn’t it almost as if he is orchestrating her episodes for some purpose we cannot yet guess?

The movie provides plenty of excitement simply through its content. You are drawn deeper and deeper into Paula’s emotional unraveling, you are engrossed by Bergman’s performance (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress), you come to loathe the villain for his villainy, you wonder if the young detective will figure it all out in time, and you are on the edge of your seat until the denouement. At this level of experience, this old movie provides nothing more than and just as much as a good thriller from recent years.

But we experience the classics on another level that we cannot experience recent movies: From our standpoint today, we experience them as representatives of the past.

One need go no further back than the 1980s--say The Breakfast Club (1985) or Pretty in Pink (1986)--to begin feeling out-of-time, but then to watch Saturday Night Fever (1977) or The Hustler (1961) or The Seven Year Itch (1955) is to feel increasingly as if you are in a foreign land. By the time you reach the 1940s and 30s, you are like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939), only in reverse, moving from Technicolor to a bizarre and magical world of black and white. Watching silent films is like peering at another planet through the grainy and flickering lens of some queer, lighted telescope. Can these people up there on the screen really be members of the same human race I am used to? They look and behave so differently!

Every time I watch The Wizard of Oz, I wonder why no one talks like Judy Garland anymore. Women with that particular accent are common in older movies, but I’ve never heard anyone talk like that in my lifetime. To take another example, I always find it odd in the MGM Marx Brothers’ movies how they’re a weird mish-mash of genres--like vaudeville--with slapstick next to musical numbers next to drama and so on, as if film was viewed as an omniverse of previously existing art forms. In Anatomy of a Murder (1959), the prosecution raises as an example of Laura’s moral laxity how she moves when she plays pinball. Anatomy of a Murder is a gritty movie even today, but how quaint that pinball and how one plays it could be seen as dangerous and sinful! These are all examples of how a movie can stand out for characteristics that have passed into the past.

Seen across the gulf of time, the classics are very strange.

The third level of experience is where it gets really interesting. No longer are we simply experiencing a classic movie for its content, or viewing it as a curious relic from times gone by. Instead, we now see it through the eyes of its contemporaries. We assume, as best we can, the standpoint of movie-goers in the early to mid 20th Century and experience the movie as they would have at the time, as if viewing the past from the past.

A good example is Morocco (1930), which I watched just a couple days ago for the first time. In an early scene, Marlene Dietrich performs in a nightclub. She’s dressed in a men’s tuxedo. The quiet that descends over her audience immediately casts over you the viewer a sense for the gender roles being toyed with. When she flirts with a lady in the audience and even plants one on her lips, its thrilling and shocking today just as it would have been back in 1930 when the movie first screened. It doesn’t matter that I’ve seen James Franco and Sean Penn kiss in Milk (2008) or Scarlett Johansonn and Penelope Cruz kiss in Vicki Cristina Barcelona (2008). By then, the old dominant ideas of gender and sexuality, while still not entirely gone today, had long been played with in the public arena, sometimes to the point of boredom. The scene in Morocco is exciting now because it was exciting then.

This isn’t to say that Hollywood movies today are somehow inferior, only that because they are recent they lack levels of experience that movies acquire after having aged for a while. Next on my list is Notorious (1946). More Ingrid Berman, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I expect it will be engaging on all three levels of experience.