What We Talk About When We Talk About STAR WARS

You come around sounding 1972

You did nothing new with 1972

Where's the smile you?

Where's the black and blue

(“Entertain”/Sleater-Kinney)

George Lucas did not rape my childhood.

Let’s get that out of the way first of all. Would that he possessed such interdimensional powers as to transcend the boundaries of time and space in order to molest all that encompassed my formative years. And I’ve never held my youth so close to my chest as to allow a scenario in which Lucas could come along and snatch it away like so much day old candy.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

On May 25^th, 1983, my mom pulled me out of school early so that we could venture to the General Cinemas Great Western Twin. As a child, it was one of my favorite places to see a movie, a single screener that had been split in half, but which still possessed the sprawling, high-ceilinged lobby so common to ‘60s and ‘70s theaters. I still have fond memories of those tall, thin windows in the foyer, which let in just enough natural daytime light to endow the earth-toned interior design with a golden hue, a visual palate that perfectly complemented the warm fragrance of popcorn wafting through the air. Or maybe I’m juxtaposing these images with my memory of the dear, departed Drexel North….but more on that Proustian detour on another day, in another essay.

The reason for our afternoon sojourn, of course, was to see Return of the Jedi, which at the time was about the hottest ticket around for a 6 year-old, let alone the general movie-going population. It’s strange thinking back to those days, and to the massive influence that the Star Wars franchise held over an entire generation of young people (I was just on the tail end of that influence.) I know that I saw the first film in a theater, probably in one of its reissues, and I definitely saw it a few times on television. And I have confirmation that our family saw The Empire Strikes Back theatrically. More importantly, I knew the mythos backwards and forwards. It was hard not to when I owned so many of the action figures, the coloring books, the die cast collectible figures, the records that featured long snatches of the dialogue, etc.

But even though the marketing force was strong in my head, I still have a hard time cultivating solid memories of seeing those first two films in person. Which makes the trip to see Jedi so interesting: because I knew the storylines so well that my recall of the five times we saw this entry in theaters is still vivid. And how couldn’t it be? When you’re an impressionable, imaginative 6 year-old, the fate of carbon-frozen Han Solo and the prospect of Luke Skywalker garbed in black (a pretty badass notion for any young male) and hellbent on revenge can hold a powerful sway over all sections of your consciousness. No matter the specifics of a young person’s recollections, the Star Wars universe was so heavily draped over ours as to form a secret parallel existence, one which you always felt and could just barely see if you looked in the right direction…or if the flickering projector light caught your eye in between frames.

It’s also odd thinking back to that General Cinemas Twin because reading the scattered online writings about its existence (I’ve never found any pictures) gives me the distinct impression that it was a decidedly non-spectacular venue, positively cookie cutter according to several sources. And despite my childhood enthusiasm for Jedi and all things Star Wars, when I saw that third film again some 19 years later…it was okay. All those criticisms that even the long-time fans had for it? Yeah, most of them held true.

And that was perfectly fine. I didn’t mind. Star Wars would always hold a special place in forming the person I became, but I was also comfortable leaving it alone as a trilogy of films that came to have a major impact on its era. Although I always found the concept of a sequel to Jedi to be marginally interesting, I never harbored a deep, all-consuming desire for a new film to come along and renew my faith in cinema, life, righteous fury, and the ability of a legion of furry bear warriors to topple an empire. So when Lucas announced the filming of the now-infamous prequels, and when I saw that first theatrical trailer for The Phantom Menace (in front of, appropriately enough, The Corrupter) my reaction was just about the definition of agnostic. And I know full well that, in many ways, I was the exception.

To talk about Star Wars: The Force Awakens is of course, to talk about the undying phenomenon that George Lucas wrought and the fandom that still surrounds it.  I’m a firm believer that when you boil it all down, a film can usually be separated from the sociological conditions surrounding it. To tip my hat to Bret Easton Ellis, aesthetics and ideology don’t always have to intermingle. But the relentless fervor that has surrounded the Star Wars universe since 1977 makes the proposition of this new film, this entry that (as the throng dutifully recites) finally honors what is considered to be sacred about those previous texts, a case study for how sometimes the work and the context are one in the same. And for the sleek, seductive power of our collective memory palace can serve as both haven and trap (sez Admiral Ackbar.)

I know quite a few people who uttered that infamous line about Lucas raping their childhood when The Phantom Menace made its bow in 1999. I wasn’t even that interested in seeing it; after all, who really wanted to watch three prequels to a story that had already filled in many of those narrative blanks? Although Star Wars would always occupy a cozy space in my past, I had since discovered the claustrophobic space terror of Alien and the wondrous noir nightmare of Blade Runner. These were films which spoke to my evolving sensibilities, which built on the childhood foundations that Star Wars had helped to construct. Han Solo would always be one cool mofo, but Rick Deckard was a complex, prickly, almost impenetrable cipher of a hero…which was a lot more interesting a concept to contemplate as an adult. And if I wanted to gaze back into my cinematic past, 2001: A Space Odyssey proved to be a far richer formative experience to mull over. Seeing the last half of that film on television as an 8 year-old blew my mind, opening up neural pathways that I might not have understood at the time, but which I knew would expand my view of existence for a lifetime to come.

2001 is a key point of comparison, because Star Wars stands as its mirror image in the canon. Kubrick’s vision of outer space gleams with a pristine beauty, an almost sterile sheen that makes HAL’s crackup almost a defiant strike against staid perfection. The much-lauded appeal of Lucas’s vision was in giving his space odyssey a lived-in feel (a concept that Alien developed even further two years later), imbuing the proceedings with a working class appeal that definitely aided its connection with a mass audience. Say what you will about his subsequent career, but with the original trilogy he took a lifetime of influences both high and low art (from classic serials to Kurosawa) and blended them into a filmic mixture of great pop art, a cinematic time machine about a futuristic past that in some small way introduced generations to a dramatic history that they might not otherwise have glommed onto. But for as much as 2001 and Star Wars both center around a mystery, the latter film’s Force is an enigma that’s easily handled. The philosophical questions posed by Kubrick and Clarke are something quite more slippery.

I was reminded quite a bit of Kubrick and effects wizard Douglas Trumbull’s handling of their vision of space while watching The Force Awakens. The irony of Lucas’s wild success with his space opera is that it gave him the clout to make the prequels, films that were so in thrall to the siren song of technology that they often resembled the stereotypical image that many have of 2001: beautifully sterile in a manner so calculated as to drain the emotion and fire out of the fictional world it represents. J.J. Abrams can be a somewhat problematic, inconsistent director, but this new film finds him excelling in crafting a world that feels just the opposite of sterile, a fully realized stage environment on which his characters play out their dramas (he achieved similar success in the Spielbergian Super 8.) As Lev Grossman accurately notes in a recent Time profile of the film, this is a world in which the ships are encrusted with dirt and wear, in which the costumes are those of people who have lived in them for some time. And Abrams’s dedication to practical effects work not only aids in making Force Awakens feel like a direct continuation of the original trilogy’s Lucasfilm house style, but also makes it a remarkably tactile experience in a modern blockbuster landscape that is so heavily reliant on the tricky CGI dream machine. It makes the numerous flight action sequences a thrilling counterpoint to the ground-based activity. But as fun as these scenes are, they also lack the distinct sense of awe and grandeur that 2001 so ably captured, and which Interstellar recently replicated (yeah, I’m beating the old dead horse of awe again….I’ll probably be having that subject inscribed on my gravestone some day.)

I’m not sure how much Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and Michael Arndt intended it in their screenplay, but this tactile, weathered aesthetic also bleeds into the main narrative threads, constructing a thematic undercurrent that crafts a meta-commentary on the resurrection of the series itself. The presence of Jakku as a giant junkyard for an AT-AT, a Star Destroyer, and the Millenium Falcon among others, obviously serves as a metaphor for the elephant graveyard of ideas that has been the resting place of the franchise for ten years (more if you side with the prequel critics). And much of the plot focuses on the revival of the Force as a real, tactile concept; it takes the gravitas of Harrison Ford/Han Solo (because really, at this point are they even separate characters?) to convince Rey and Finn that even a cynic like him eventually learned that the transcendental magic of this belief was true, that the legends were more than stories.

And in a film that was specifically pre-sold as a return to a theoretical concept of what was right about the series, Rey, Finn, Kylo Ren and others end up serving as stand-ins for the fan culture that has env)eloped this filmic mythos. Kylo, in particular, literally worships the crumbled helmet of Darth Vader like the biggest cosplay fanboy in the universe. Sure, he also happens to be Vadar’s grandson, but the care with which he assembles his persona in tribute to his dead ancestor mirrors the fetishistic delight and dedication that so much of the Star Wars fandom has applied to it. Indeed, Vader couldn’t quite kill Han, Luke, or Leia, but Kylo can do him one better in his Vader 2.0 costume (which, granted, is also a nice inversion of Luke defeating his father in Jedi.)

All of this meta-commentary, intentional or not, also brings up the matter of the devotion to fan service that Abrams promised from the outset, a promise that has already met with some critical derision. The main beats of the plot echo those of the first Star Wars almost to a tee, which poses the question of how much of this tactic serves as thematic observation on history’s cyclical nature and how much as salve to the fans left disenfranchised by the prequels. It also poses the question of the nature of said fandom in general. I admire the verve with which some of my friends pursue their deep passions for Star Wars culture in all its forms (the conventions, the massive product tie-ins, the side stories and franchises), but I also sometimes feel like this fanbase in particular is one of the most retrograde in popular culture. That feeling of satisfaction I had upon Jedi’s conclusion has lasted with me through adulthood. I understand that those films were of another time, that Star Wars was a breath of pulpy, yet fresh air in a static science fiction world and a late-‘70s, post-Watergate culture in search of a Manichean moral clarity. The rabid desire amongst some of the fans to recapture that feeling, to do it the (ahem) right way again sometimes evokes the image of millions of Jay Gatsbys reaching out to the green Jedi light across the bay. But you can’t relive the past, old sports.

Is this all necessarily a bad thing? Probably not. After all, we’re talking about a space opera that has brought multiple generations together in ways that should be a welcome development in our increasingly fractured culture. The TLDR version of this essay would state that yeah, I enjoyed The Force Awakens. Once Han and Chewie enter the fray, I had about ten minutes where I thought that it was outstanding, before some of the creakiness and predictability took over. Star Wars established a band of reluctant heroes fighting against an established, veteran evil; The Force Awakens plays in the same speculative field, but the rookie heroes are opposed by what amounts to a rookie villain leading a splinter force of the Empire. This film needed Ford, Fisher, and Hamill to pass the torch to the newbies, but at times this gambit feels like what would happen if Obi-Wan Kenobi was cloned and took over the first film. There’s also the wildly evolving nature of the Hollywood star system in play; even as relative unknowns in 1977, those leads carried a gravitas borne out of their background in that decade’s artistic milieu. Try as they might, it’s hard for Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Adam Driver to capture that same feeling in an era in which stars have lost their mythical, distanced status.

But hey, maybe that’s the point. Maybe after all of the hype, and discussion, and debate over the legacy of this sci-fi franchise, this is a Star Wars tailored for the Millenial fans who, much like the young’uns in Force Awakens, heard their ancestors speak in hushed tones about the magic they experienced back in 1977, or 1980, or 1983. Maybe the main purpose of this film is to prove that the magic can still be conjured, even if it’s more a simulacrum of something that, in its original form, is long gone. For better and/or for worse, Star Wars beats us on against the current, bearing us back ceaselessly into a galaxy and a society far, far, away.   

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: How RESERVOIR DOGS Gave Birth to the Quentin Tarantino Mythos

The story of Quentin Tarantino is also the story of the life and death of the American independent film scene of the early ‘90s. If at times Tarantino seemed to spring forth from a rich, self-created mythology (lower class Tennessee boy turned self-taught auteur savant), he also, inadvertently or not, came to embody a near-mythological figure in that milieu, simultaneously a savior and bringer of annihilation. His wild success helped to transform Miramax Films from an indie stalwart into a box office juggernaut (maybe it was the Weinstein’s collective id from which the QT mythos sprung; as Bob and Harvey noted in a recent New York Times interview, he’s definitely the convergence point of their two sensibilities). Yet it also paved the way for its acquisition by Disney, a corporate assimilation that soon occurred with the other major art film distributors until there was nothing left of those purveyors of mid to low-budget films. Indie film’s first true rock star director, the guy who made the art house a new hangout for aspiring hipster cineastes and would-be cool kids, and who served as a precursor for the DIY culture that has both enabled career freedom and been used as a cudgel to cripple job security, upped the ante for success so much that the film scene from which he was spawned would never fully recover.  

And that split diopter nature is telling, because most matters of the QT legend tend to cleave audiences and critics down the middle. As he hitched his star to the old school ballyhoo machine that was the Weinstein brothers reign, he bridged the gap between the art house and the grindhouse. Yet his success spawned a phalanx of much lesser imitators, and threatened to turn him into (as Jane Hamsher predicted in Killer Instinct, her memoir of co-producing Natural Born Killers) “the George Gobel of directors, famous for being famous.” Tarantino’s unabashed love for self-promotion often hasn’t helped his case, although among modern directors, only Martin Scorsese has used the celebrity bully pulpit more effectively to evangelize for the universal, democratic power and value of the cinema.

And, of course, there’s the matter of authorship and originality that has dogged Tarantino throughout his career. Perhaps no other contemporary director of his stature has aroused such conflicted thoughts on the matter. Filmmaker and critic Mike White provided what seemed to be the most damning indictment early on with “Who Do You Think You’re Fooling”, his meticulous takedown of Reservoir Dogs as direct ripoff of Ringo Lam’s City on Fire. Entire websites have been devoted to cataloguing the references to other films in his canon; the result of plowing through some of these lists can be a bit depressing. Former writing partner Roger Avary, with whom he won the Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for Pulp Fiction, endured such a contentious fight for authorship of that film that he swore off working with Tarantino for fear that he would too freely appropriate his ideas.

But maybe QT has been ahead of the curve all along (see Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence.”) In a 21^st century culture where the electronic information flood threatens to drown us all, how do we discern where our influences end and our original creations begin? The former English teacher in me wants to inveigh against plagiarism at every step, but the arts are sticky territory where being too dogmatic about such matters ignores the limitations of the form. Is it really possible to create original rock music some fifty plus years into a form that ripped off rhythm and blues postures in the first place? And even though film is still a relatively young art form, it has a long history of recycling and renewing itself for a new generation. He might not have the decades long critical veneration of the French New Wave (one of his admitted inspirations), but it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump from QT’s cinematic melting pot to Godard’s noir riffs or Chabrol’s Hithcockian stylings. To me, he’s always been somewhat of a filmic DJ, gifted with the ability to combine and remix previously created materials into a heady brew that is both entirely reverential to the source and still wholly of its own.

Like it or not (or maybe that should read like him or not) Tarantino has become an institution, both domestically and abroad, one of the enduring filmmakers of the last 25 years. And he’s managed to outlast many of his contemporaries and flash in the pan wunderkinds, continuing to create films that cross pollinate lurid thrills and an infectious love of language. So as he prepares to unleash The Hateful Eight (an old school 70mm epic that doubles as an intimate chamber piece), it’s intriguing to look back at his peripatetic career, and at how all of us got to this point.

For as shocking as it was upon its release, the first things that strikes you upon watching Reservoir Dogs today is how classical, how almost reserved it is. Of course, budgetary matters dictated much of that relative reserve (as they also did with Pulp Fiction); before Harvey Keitel intervened as a co-producer and star, Tarantino’s original concept, borne out of years of failed stabs at a career, was to shoot the film in 16mm for $10,000. But can you imagine Reservoir Dogs as anything other than the extended theatrical piece that it is? As with most first time directors, QT pours a lifetime of influences into his script, influences that still permeate his writing to this day. Boil down his subsequent films to their essentials and you’ll find many of the themes that fueled the dramatic fire of his debut feature: loyalty, violence as an almost genetic imprint, professionalism and the failure to maintain it.

And that deep, conflicted, pulsating sense of masculinity. Which is not to say that Tarantino hasn’t always had a strong feminist streak in him as well. His work with Uma Thurman and Pam Grier has yielded some of the most memorable, nuanced alpha females of the modern canon. But the often hyper-masculine drive and the distinctly male code of honor has coursed through all of his work. Yet again, that critical split comes into play: this long-term obsession has been viewed both as an auteur’s preoccupation and a continual retrograde wallowing in juvenilia. It could also be observed that the aforementioned Mr. Scorsese has trod this territory throughout much of his career as well. But despite his working class Queens roots, Marty has always worshipped at the altar of the European film masters, keeping his appreciation for B-films at a slight distance, which has endowed even his most guy-centric films with a sheen of class. Despite his early fandom of Godard and other foreign filmmakers, QT’s deep love of junk culture and the trash aesthetic has shaped his métier like no other, while simultaneously cursing him with the whiff of cultural disdain. One man’s trash, another man’s treasure, etc. etc. etc.

Reservoir Dogs plays around with masculinity and its various permutations in ways that defy much of the critical opprobrium often wielded against Tarantino. Yes, there are bursts of intense anger, frustration expressed through Smith and Wesson 659s brandished as if samurai swords (another nod to QT’s film fan roots.) Indeed, the central arguments in the film invariably end up with these angry, angry, men sticking those most phallic of objects in each other’s faces. But these Freudian conflicts reflect many aspects of the masculine impulse. And they cut both ways: like most of Tarantino’s films, the violence is both thrilling and horrifying.  Messers Pink, Blonde, and White threatening each other with gats is both invocation of enduring archetypes of male coolness and critique of the oft-futile nature of said archetypes (all this metaphorical dick waving ultimately delays any real solution to the quagmire in which the crew is stuck.) In one of the film’s key flashbacks, there’s humor to be found in the gay-baiting banter and homoerotic wrestling between Nice Guy Eddie and Vic Vega (the cartoonishly masculine elephant tusks which bracket Joe Cabot are a nice touch as well), but viewed in retrospect there’s more than a hint that the scene also subtly reveals the damage that prison has wrought upon Vic’s tough guy psyche. He may have been a loyal soldier to Joe and Eddie, but the psychopath who turns the diamond heist into a murder spree and then tortures Officer Marvin Nash is a different beast altogether, almost suggestive of an unveiling of the casual misogyny and sadism at the heart of characters played by Madsen ancestors Lee Marvin, Ralph Meeker, etc. At the film’s conclusion, Joe laments that he didn’t trust his gut in evaluating Mr. Orange, but the blind spot he really ignores involves his old protégé and the havoc that lies inside him.

Of course, he’s not the only major character whose loyalty creates a fatal blind spot. Harvey Keitel’s Mr. White, the seeming epicenter of professional cool, ends up dooming the crew’s whole enterprise with his misplaced affection for Tim Roth’s Mr. Orange. He also provides the hyper-masculine Dogs milieu with a relationship steeped in a very feminine emotionality. To paraphrase Mr. Blonde, there’s a lot of barking amongst these dogs, so the moments in which White and Orange slowly form their bond in the second-half flashbacks are a nice counterpoint, a relative quiet amidst the shouting and violence. One of my favorite moments in the film, perhaps in all of Tarantino’s oeuvre, comes early in the plot, when Keitel cradles the critically wounded Roth on the ramp of the mortuary/warehouse in which the bulk of the action takes place. As Roth whimpers at the prospects of his encroaching death and the possible revelation of his true identity, Keitel (in intimate close-up) softly runs a comb through his hair. It’s such a poignant moment, a subtle display of tenderness that would be completely out of place in the aggressive conversations and arguments that form the majority of this very male crew’s interactions. And it lends a profound gravitas to the film’s concluding moments, in which Roth confesses his ruse to the exsanguinated Keitel, whose teary-eyed sense of betrayal leads to his murder of his betrayer, an act imbued with the qualities of both a mercy killing and an act of retribution for the violation of the code of loyalty. Once again, Tarantino cuts it both ways: it’s hard to tell where the former motivation ends and the latter begins (an ambiguity that is further emboldened by the unheard words that Keitel whispers into Roth’s ear right before he shoot him.)

Ah, those aggressive conversations, though! The hallmark of the Tarantino universe, the hook that has always landed viewers whose jollies aren’t automatically attained through graphic bloodshed. As I mentioned before, QT is clearly a man engaged in a long-term love affair with language (he does like to hear himself talk, after all.) The enduring appeal of his filmography lies in how, like David Mamet on trucker speed, he creates a vernacular and a patois all his own, but given life by his casts. In the right hands (or, more appropriately, mouths), his dialogue rings as a perfectly natural manifestation of these characters’ psyches. I sometimes fantasize of a future QT project devoted solely to Christoph Waltz and Samuel L. Jackson, who are to the director as William H. Macy is to Mamet, holding a discussion in Tarantinoese for two hours, a My Dinner with Andre riddled with bullets. Bodies are dispatched in gruesome fashion throughout the QT canon, but characters often find their true violent power in their words.

This penchant for yakking finds its most memorable expression in Reservoir Dogs’s famous opening diner scene, a masterpiece of concise character building that, in retrospect, serves as an almost elegiac reverie and a pinpoint foreshadowing of the paths these men will tread. So much of the pure enjoyment of Tarantino’s scripted conversations, and a factor that also hooked audiences to him from the beginning, is in how they fill in the blanks left in most other crime and action films, portraying the extended bull sessions that most people have when they’re on their way to and from their jobs. But the beauty of these digressive confabs is how they often establish trenchant character traits. On its surface, this diner scene consists of debates about Madonna’s lyrical intent, the meaning meaning of 70s one hit wonder songs, and the ethics of tipping. Look closer, though, at what each character reveals through this patter. Tarantino’s motormouth Mr. Brown opens the film with his “Like a Virgin” monologue, but that’s about all he has to offer, just as his character will be dispatched in short form (well, he and Eddie Bunker’s Mr. Blue, whose sole contribution to the plot is a few lines of response in this scene before supposedly meeting his demise off screen.) Mr. White’s strident defense of waitresses as underprivileged, beleaguered laborers establishes the somewhat misguided empathy that he will apply to Mr. Orange. Mr. Pink’s principled refusal to tip establishes his own twisted code of honor, professionalism, and self-interest, one which will theoretically keep him alive until film’s end, but which will also keep him around as the heist aftermath descends into chaos (it’s telling that the film’s first flashback is of Pink running away from the cops, the lone wolf looking out for himself, yet inevitably fleeing into a much worse situation, his code dooming him to bounce between dedication to himself and his professional brotherhood.) Laconic tough guy Mr. Blonde jokingly offers to shoot Mr. Pink, and the close-up of him smirking while making a gun with his fingers proves to be haunting on subsequent viewings, the seemingly coolest guy in the room harboring a deep reservoir of chaotic violence. Joe’s gruff fatherly instincts in forcing Pink to tip establishes his level-headedness, but the comedic matter of his absent-minded tour through his address book also prefigures his inability to properly read Orange and Blonde’s worthiness for inclusion in the plan. Eddie’s inability to grasp that Vicki Lawrence is the killer in “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” hints at how he won’t quite be able to read the heist’s pitfalls until it’s too late (and also mirrors his father’s blind spot for Vic.) And Mr. Orange? He blends into the background, supplementing the other conversations but never starting his own, a chameleon in the midst of the authentic criminals.

The oft-imitated camera swirl of this scene is a testimony to one of the relatively unsung heroes in the Tarantinoverse: the late cinematographer Andrzej Sekula, who also shot Pulp Fiction and QT’s segment of Four Rooms. The masterful Robert Richardson has become Tarantino’s cameraman of choice, and his expressionistic, stylized tendencies are a perfect fit for the gradual expansion of a filmography that has grown more epic in scale as it’s progressed. Sekula’s style, though, is very fitting for the more intimate, low-level character dramas of the first two films. In Dogs, he utilizes a handheld style throughout much of the narrative, effectively turning the audience into the ninth member of the crew, peering from afar at White arguing with Blonde in the warehouse bathroom, following Blonde to his car mid-torture scene. The camerawork is subdued, but also reliant on a three-dimensional sense of blocking that further enforces the theatrical qualities of the film. In several instances, characters are framed against a backdrop of three coffins standing upright, a harbinger of doom that they pay little attention to.

That torture scene…that infamous torture scene. I’ve seemingly been dancing around it throughout this essay as much as Michael Madsen dances around Kirk Baltz before he moves in for the kill. Some critics point to this scene as ground zero for the sadistic glee they accuse Tarantino of engaging in with much of his screen violence. And his use of Stealer’s Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” (which now brings to mind ear-slicing every time I hear it on the radio) certainly adds a goofy patina onto the stomach-churning tableau featured here. But again, it’s Tarantino cutting both ways, forcing the audience to laugh and cringe at the same time (more on this when we get to Sam Jackson’s first Ezekiel 25:17 spiel next time.) There’s something inherently cool (in a very male way) about stylized violence of this sort. And there’s also a disturbing sexuality to Blonde's enthusiastic mounting of his captive when he slices off his ear (aural pleasure, anyone?) QT tapped into his culture junkie demeanor in using the novelty songs of his youth as ironic counterpoints to the action of his scenes, which also lent an enormous appeal to the 70s obsessed Gen Xers who became enthralled by his films in the early 90s (although as his career progressed, he moved more toward appropriating the soundtrack cues of his youth as musical accompaniment.) His usage of this song in this instance creates a tableau that serves as the awful power at the center of the film, a nexus of pain from which the twin threads of the film spin out.  Before it, we’re lulled into thinking that the conflict we see will be standard heist movie fare. After it, we’re finally exposed to Freddy Newandyke’s backstory/Mr. Orange’s origin story, a tale that will lend retroactive weight to the bickering that we’ve already seen.

(As side note to these proceedings, and one which we’ll explore more extensively in later essays in this series, goes out to the phenomenal work of the great Sally Menke, QT’s editor until her untimely death in 2010. Tarantino often credited her with providing the nurturing, feminine counterbalance that he needed in his films, and her work became almost co-authorial with his. Note here the masterful way in which she intercuts “Stuck in the Middle…” with Sekula’s camerawork in this scene, the lyrics almost serving as beat for beat narration of the gruesome proceedings.)

It can be easy to forget now, but Reservoir Dogs was only a modest hit on the art house circuit in 1992. But the word of mouth that built around it gradually spread. How many times in the year after did I heard about that ear scene? Or about the non-linear, quasi-literary storytelling that this punk kid brought to a low budget crime film? That buzz would build the foundation for what would become Tarantino’s master class, the first fully realized manifestation of all of his cultural obsessions and thematic preoccupations, a series of interconnected tales weaved together in a layered portrayal of the Los Angeles underbelly. In just a few short years after his arrival in the art film world, Pulp Fiction would change the rules of the game forever.      

A Matter of Faith: SPOTLIGHT and the Conspiracy of Silence

People often ask me why I’ve spent so much time in Boston over the years. They usually follow up by asking why I haven’t moved there yet (to which I usually reply “Do you have a high-paying job waiting for me up there?”) And the distinct intimation that I have a clandestine wife and kids stowed away in Harvard Square always hovers in the air as well. For the last sixteen odd years, my serious answer to that first question has largely involved my long-term attendance at the Annual Boston 24-Hour Science Fiction Marathon, a weekend long haven for cinematic junkies held every Presidents’ Day weekend. And since 2004, it’s also included extended summer sojourns that served as escapes from and were financed by my former career as a High School English Teacher.

But the real why’s behind those answers stretch back much farther and burrow much deeper. My love affair with the Commonwealth began on Saturday August 13^th, 1988 while watching the Red Sox lay a 16-4 drubbing on the Detroit Tigers, a win that brought their American League record home winning streak to 25 games. Appropriately enough, that winning streak ended the day after I became a fan, but for one reason or another, even though I had been an Oakland A’s fan before (shudder….man the things that a youthful Mark McGwire fanship can do to a guy), I saw something that day in the Olde Towne Team that completely hooked me.

Maybe that something was the harmonious siren song of past glories and abject despair that emanated from Yawkey Way from 1918 until 2004. Following that haunting song straight into the cliffs of epic collapses and late season choke jobs seemed like somewhat of a badge of honor for an impressionable youth like yours truly, the prospect of groggily repeating the key numbers of Sox lore in the aftermath (“1918, 1946, 1967, 1975, 1978, nineteen….eighty….six….”) akin to passing along secrets of near Kabbalistic import to those landlocked observers who chose not to dip their toes in the mad seas populated by monsters like the Great and Powerful Buckyfuckingdent. As I once noted to a minister friend, I absorbed more Catholic guilt in nine years of Lutheran grade school than in four years of Catholic high school; the profound sense of puritanical suffering inherent in Red Sox fandom merely served as a further conduit to a psychological country I already knew well.

But shame, guilt, and Bill Buckner weren’t the only allure that Red Sox Nation (although we didn’t call it that before the marketing and branding blitz that arrived with the current ownership group) held for me. There was also the deeply embedded sense of tradition. In that most tradition-centric of major American sports, the Red Sox stood out as a historian’s dream. Sure, they were the last team to integrate (the immortal Pumpsie Green and his .246 career batting average), they always seemed to build lackluster teams around transcendent players (Ted, Yaz, Roger, Pedro), and even when they fielded a monster squad they ended up running into an even more formidable opponent (see that ’75 series against the Big Red Machine.) But experiencing these failures smack dab in the middle of the birthplace of America, in a city that refused to abandon its strong melting pot ethos and ethnic enclaves while still clinging to the legacy power of the Boston Brahmins….that backdrop seemed to imbue those epic collapses with a sense of much greater importance. This was the team that rejected the cookie cutter multi-purpose stadiums of the ‘60s and ‘70s in order to maintain the mystique of the “lyric little bandbox of a ballpark” (as Updike famously put it) that is Fenway Park. The clean, classic simplicity of the uniforms also carried a certain timelessness, a continuum along which fans of all generations could plant their flags. They were much better than those damn Yankee pinstripes, which always resembled the conservative suits endemic of the button down, corporate philosophy of the New York dynasty.

And the Sox were the most literary team in all of baseball, maybe even in all of sports! To a kid who always read at an advanced level and was a voracious consumer of literature of all stripes, this was a familiar language. Baseball writers were more likely to quote Samuel Johnson and Ernest Hemingway than their more workmanlike peers, and the Sox drew erudite scribes to them like no other team. Esteemed mainstream authors loved to write about them (see that aforementioned Updike piece, a chronicle of Ted Williams’s last home game.) After all, this was a team steeped in pathos and tragedy, doomed to a Fitzgeraldian purgatory of stretching out their arms toward the green light of an always unreachable championship…or at least they were fertile ground on which authors could plant the seeds of such a mythos. At times, it became hard to discern the difference. It’s much more romantic of a notion to believe that your team is fated to Sisyphean torture than to admit that alienating minority players for decades, lowballing star players, and employing a Cro-Magnon team building philosophy that only zoomed into present day reality in 2002 is the reason that no championship banners were raised in the Fens for 86 years.

I’ve been talking a lot about the Red Sox, and some of you are probably wondering when I’m going to get around to the film that this essay is supposed to center around. But the Sox are Boston, and everything attractive about them has also been why I’ve loved the city for so long. It’s hyper-traditional like few other modern American metropolises, yet the collegiate atmosphere lends it a sense of ever-renewing progressivism and intellectual heft. Visiting Boston always feels mentally stimulating, even as it always remains familiar on many levels. And I love that, because (to steal the Kierkegaard quote used to great effect in Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter) life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

This fall has seen a cinematic referendum of sorts on Boston’s long-standing romance with tradition, and on the dark side of that affair. Scott Cooper’s Black Mass presents a scathing examination of Whitey Bulger’s South Boston criminal empire, much of which was enabled by fellow Southie boy and FBI agent John Connolly and the blind eye he turned to the carnage around him. In The Departed, Jack Nicholson’s Bulger surrogate carries a wild charisma which papers over many of his sins, but Johnny Depp’s steely-eyed Whitey is a monstrous ethical vacuum, the rascally kid from the down the street turned murderous sociopath. Black Mass may be a biopic of a criminal life, but its larger portrait is one of the system (both formalized and complicit) that enabled one man to maintain his empire for decades. In one of the film’s most chilling scenes, Whitey’s State Senator brother Billy preaches the good gospel of community and tradition at the St. Patrick’s Day parade, his speech ultimately serving as voiceover for the images of his brother looming on the sidewalk, graft and murder hiding in plain sight, protected by a conspiracy of silence that owes as much to Boston’s insular history as it does to a shotgun and a bribe.

That conspiracy is writ large in Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, albeit in service to a more devastating crime that knows no romanticism in the popular consciousness. Outside of his nascent directing career, McCarthy is best known to many as a character actor extraordinaire. One of his signature roles has been that of Baltimore Sun serial fabricator Scott Templeton in the final season of The Wire, so it’s both deliciously ironic and wholly appropriate that his latest directorial effort is a paean to the power of old school, traditional journalism (and to the art of getting it right, as they say) and how, in the form of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigation team, it blew apart the long term sexual abuse cover-up by the Catholic Diocese in Boston.

This time of year brings out award bait films like wolves stalking their prey, so it’s natural to look at a SERIOUS ISSUES offering like Spotlight with some measure of skepticism. Dramatic recreations of well-known historical events often become rote exercises in repetition, but what McCarthy and his team achieve here is altogether compelling and absorbing, a slow burn thriller whose awful power eventually envelops the viewer, no matter the previous knowledge they might have of the case’s finer details.

Much of that power is derived from the murderer’s row of a cast that McCarthy has assembled. Mark Ruffalo shines as the dogged, mildly obsessive Mike Rezendes, whose idealistic determination proves to be the heart and soul of Spotlight’s efforts to expose the church’s crimes. Ruffalo’s charm has always laid in his everyman demeanor; he’s handsome enough to flirt with leading man credibility, but an audience never imagines him jetting off to an Italian villa in his spare time ala George Clooney. And he’s used this sly charm to great effect, whether in big budget fare like The Avengers or in the slew of indies in which he essays genial hipsters with wit and grace. The nearest corollary to his work in Spotlight is his turn as Dave Toschi in David Fincher’s Zodiac, another lonely man consumed by a labyrinthine investigation. In both, he submerges his charm beneath a schlubby veneer, but he ends up being one of the most likeable, compassionate characters on the screen. He lends Rezendes a childlike vulnerability tempered by a righteous rage that explodes in a climactic scene in which he cuts through Globe politics and protocol to remind his colleagues that “they (the church) did this to kids”; that everyman quality allows him to serve as audience surrogate, and the effect here is devastating.

Ruffalo and his fellow castmates are greatly abetted by McCarthy and DP Masanobu Takayanagi’s decision to work in a subdued visual style, allowing the performances to stretch out and breathe. Liev Schreiber usually underplays roles to great effect, but his turn here as new Editor in Chief Marty Baron is an outstanding display of internalization. He’s arguably the most mild-mannered character in the film, but in defiance of the charismatic hero archetype, he ends up being the prime mover behind the search for justice. Rachel McAdams has flashed a wide-eyed, youthful innocence in many of her roles, a trait that greatly benefits her work as Sacha Pfeiffer, whose reckoning with her heavily Catholic upbringing slowly builds to a quietly heartbreaking scene in which her deeply religious grandmother first reads the Spotlight expose. And while John Slattery’s Ben Bradlee Jr. begins the film as a spiritual brother to Mad Men’s Roger Sterling, the conflicted and pragmatic motivations that the actor shades the character with lend him a great sense of gravitas and sympathy.

Michael Keaton’s work as Spotlight chief “Robby” Robinson is one of the most intriguing facets of the film. Tim Burton once noted that he cast Keaton as Batman in part because of the look in his eyes, that manic energy that could outclass more physically imposing candidates for the role. And Keaton has excelled over the years playing loose cannons; much of the appeal of his comeback role in Birdman laid in the interior conflict between seething anger and self-control within Riggan Thomson. Which makes his turn in Spotlight such a multi-layered, almost hypnotic performance. While Ruffalo gets the emotional outbursts and nervous tics, Keaton is forced to be the voice of reason, the analytically minded commander of his crew. As a result, even though he’s given less flashy, actorly moments, the quiet intensity in those eyes is still there throughout. When he finally has to put pressure on a longtime lawyer friend to name names, and especially when he realizes that he muffed the handling of key case information while a novice Metro editor years before, the panoply of his subdued emotions is as impressive and moving as what he’s displayed in much showier roles.

The presence of the 9/11 terror attacks three quarters of the way through the film provides a historically accurate speed bump for the Spotlight investigation, but it also serves as a large-scale metaphor for the film’s central message, which is also David Simon’s mission in The Wire: the failure of institutions. As one sexual abuse victim testifies early in the film, so many of his fellow victims came from poor, dysfunctional families that the attention paid to them by the church seemed an oasis in a life of pain. The annihilation of that faith in God’s foot soldiers drives the victims into lives dominated by drug abuse, alcoholism, and deep depression. The world’s nominal force for good is not even strong enough to root out the evil within. In the years following 9/11, the steadily eroding faith in public institutions that gained major momentum at the conclusion of the Nixon years reached peak mode with the revelations of mishandled intelligence, ghost WMDs in Iraq, torture programs in distant lands, cataclysmic malfeasance on Wall Street. And one of the greatest examples of institutional collapse in the midst of all of this era has resided in the journalism world, as the combination of e-commerce and the profit imperative has weakened many a thriving newspaper. The Spotlight team doesn’t unravel the Diocese’s sins without the commitment of time and funds that the Globe was willing to shower upon it. It’s a fact that is often ignored by evangelists of a predominantly freelance journalism world. Twitter might provide greater access to instant communications. Blogs might bestow independent power upon prospective truth-tellers. But neither of these outlets (let alone the “more with less” edict that has swept so many institutions in this country) can provide the investigative depth and heft of a well-supported journalistic endeavor.

There was a time in our country when we regarded The Fourth Estate as a public service, integral to the maintenance of the democracy and the common good. Of course, there was also a time when we regarded the church (whether it be Catholic or Protestant) as a generally infallible presence in the preservation of that same common good. Tradition cuts both ways like that. The Catholic Diocese of Boston might have covered up the actions of pedophilic priests, but in one of the most sad, disturbing scenes of Spotlight, the mother of an abuse victim admits that the greatest pressure on her to keep her mouth shut came not from the clergy, but from her fellow parishioners. A few people in their early 20’s that I know who have seen this film marvel at the concept of the Catholic Church wielding such power over a community, and over the city being dominated by such a clannish cultural imperative. But their experience of Boston is the more multi-cultural, worldly city that exists today, the one whose major sports icons have hailed from the Dominican Republic. Yet under that gleaming, diverse surface, the Ivy League legacies still exist, and gentrification continues to push minorities and the economic majority out of the central hubs of the city. Spotlight serves as a powerful reminder of a time that is not as distant as it might seem, a point that’s hammered home in the pre-credits graphics that list all of the cities worldwide in which Catholic sex abuse scandals have been uncovered in the years after the film’s events. We might live in an era of relentless change, but tradition still wields a powerful siren song, one whose sometimes damaging consequences are often all too easy to ignore.