Anti-Gravitas

"Buddy Cops in Space" wouldn't have been as catchy I suppose...

From A. O. Scott's "Between Heaven and Earth":

The script is, at times, weighed down by some heavy screenwriting clichés. Some are minor, like the fuel gauge that reads full until the glass is tapped, causing the arrow to drop. More cringe-inducing is the tragic back story stapled to Stone, a doctor on her first trip into orbit. We would care about her even without the haunting memory of a dead child, who inspires a maudlin monologue and a flight of orchestral bathos in Steven Price’s otherwise canny and haunting score.

A. O. Scott gave this movie a 5 out of 5, made it a "Critic's Pick," and yet, like many who similarly love and recommend the film, admits that the script is full of "screenwriting clichés" and that we would care about the characters even without their backstories.

What does it mean to like a movie but to essentially prefer to see it on mute?

Many of course compare Gravity to other sci-fi epics such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien, and yet neither of those films are better seen and not heard.  Ripley is a fully fleshed out character who spawned an entire genre of kick-ass female action leads.  Even HAL is a more fleshed out character than Sandra Bullock's Dr. Ryan Stone (who by the way refers to being a medical doctor and yet is found performing "surgery" on the Hubble Space Station for some reason) or George Clooney's Mission Commander Matt Kowalski (who was just one day from retirement, naturally).  Unlike those sci-fi epics, no one will be quoting Gravity, ever.

In fact, there are several times in the film when it seems like there could have been an interesting character moment, and instead the cliché is opted for, almost as if by necessity.  For example, at the moment when Clooney untethers himself from Bullock so that he can float off into the sunset (again, he was just so damn close to retirement!) and so she can survive, why not have Clooney's one-day-from-retirement-cliché go against type and struggle to survive?  Why not have Bullock's rookie-with-a-sob-story-past go against type and untether Clooney to save herself?  In much the same way that it is ridiculous to have a doctor fixing a telescope in space, and to have an astronaut repeatedly explain to a doctor how oxygen and carbon dioxide work, it is ridiculous how cliché that scene was handled (with Kowalski's line about the sunlight in the Ganges pushing the scene from derivative to almost full-on satire of such grizzled veteran sacrifices).

Wiggum would've been a
welcome addition to Gravity

Financial planner: You haven't set aside any plans for the future.  

Wiggum: Well, you know how it is with cops. I'll be shot three days before retirement. In the business, we call it retirony.  

Planner: Well, what if you don't get shot?  

Wiggum: What a terrible thing to say! Oh, look! You made my wife cry!

But what if the cliché is actually the point?  For all of its technical ingenuity and aesthetic grandeur, this movie is still basically an action/adventure movie with cardboard characters moving from one disaster to the next.  Would we enjoy the film as much however if the characters were less cardboard and more real?  Perhaps we have reached a point as consumers of culture that we are desperate not to see compelling and complicated characters overcoming adversity, but rather to see avatars who we can fully invest ourselves into so that we can see ourselves overcoming adversity.  The more bland Clooney and Bullock come across the better: all the more room for your personality to fill the void the boilerplate script left for you.  In much the same way that you might have been staring at the Earth hoping to see your house, or focusing on religious references hoping to pick out your personal belief-system, so too can you make of Stone whatever part of your personality you'd most like to identify with so that you can leave the theater knowing that you too could've made it.

In other words, the most telling line of the movie might have been when Kowalski needled Stone about being named "Ryan," and Stone of course responding that her dad wanted a boy, just as the audience might have been wanting a male hero rather than a female one (the hair cut helps expand the opportunities for identifying with Stone too, as does all the confusion about eye color).

So go see the movie and enjoy watching it, but I have a feeling that your favorite character in the movie might just be you.

The Act of Watching The Act of Killing

From director Joshua Oppenheimer's interview with The Guardian's Henry Barnes:

"If we have any hope of learning how these things happen and thereby preventing them from happening again we have to discard this fantasy that there are monsters out there," says Oppenheimer, "that we just have to be vigilant and lock them up and maybe kill them or put them in camps. 

"In calling someone a bad guy I reassure myself that I'm good. I elevate myself. I call it the 'Star Wars morality'. And unfortunately it underpins most of the stories we tell." [...]

"I care about him," [Oppenheimer] says. "It's hard to call our relationship a friendship. I was trying to expose a regime of impunity on behalf of a community of survivors, while Anwar was trying to run away from his pain, to build up a cinematic psychic scar tissue around his trauma. I may not exactly like him, but I have love for him as another human being."

To say that The Act of Killing is "disturbing," is of course an understatement, but what precisely is so disturbing about it?

Getting ready for their closeup...

From one perspective, what is so disturbing is the celebrity status that Anwar Congo and the rest of his "movie theater gangsters" have received for their murdering, torturing, and destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of "communists" in Indonesia almost 50 years ago.  To see Congo and his friends not behind bars but walking through cheering crowds and being interviewed on national television is almost as horrifying as watching them gleefully describe and reenact their crimes for "history," for Oppenheimer, and for us.

From another perspective, what is so disturbing is the role that the audience (Oppenheimer directly, the rest of us indirectly) play in these reenactments.  As A. O. Scott writes:

Who is directing who?

Some queasiness may linger at the thought of a Western filmmaker indulging the creative whims of mass murderers, exploiting both their guilelessness and the suffering of Indonesians who remain voiceless and invisible here. But this discomfort is an important indicator of just how complicated, how perverse, the cinematic pursuit of truth can be. This is not a movie that lets go of you easily.

Oppenheimer is right to argue that Congo and the rest of his friends and associates are not "monsters," and that to indulge in the "fantasy" of their monstrosity is to "reassure myself that I'm good."  But is this the argument of The Act of Killing?

The Act of Killing focuses, not on the structural causes of the purge, not on the role that the West played in supporting the purge (passively or actively), but on a handful of the individuals who perpetrated the purge.  These individuals discuss with Oppenheimer (who never appears onscreen, thus never allowing us to see how he responded to what was unfolding before his eyes) their love of American movies, the inspiration they drew from the violence of these movies, and how important it is and was to them that "gangster" means "free man."  As they move from discussion of movies to making one of their own it becomes apparent that, though they are now old men, these individuals nevertheless remain their teenage selves, teenage selves who still need to show off.  Given cameras, a crew, and a captive audience, their reenactments quickly escalate from displaying torture techniques to burning down a village.  As they construct scene after scene of interrogation, torture, and devastation—of each other and of whoever they can get to "volunteer," like children reenacting movie scenes as they leave the theater—the line between "play torture" and "actual torture" gets less and less clear and we become more and more riveted.

But are we riveted because we're hoping that the true depravity of their acts will finally become clear to them as they move from torturer to tortured, or are we riveted because with each wire noose they put around the neck of an "actor" we are forced to fear that we have paid tickets, not to a documentary, but to a snuff film?  Perhaps the answer is irrelevant.  For what catharsis and pornography have in common—from the perspective of the audience—is waiting for the "money shot," whether the final outburst be emotional or erotic.  Congo and Oppenheimer provide us with tease after tease until climax is reached in the end, but should this climax leave us feeling satisfied that even someone who confesses to have killed 1000 people with his bare hands is still capable of an empathetic revelation, or should it leave us feeling frustrated in the discovery that it is we, the audience, who have been reenacting what happened 50 years ago, reenacting the West's enabling of the conversion of ordinary thugs into extraordinary war criminals?

Oppenheimer has surely provided us with a truly thought-provoking documentary.  I only wish the thoughts provoked were closer to what he said in his aforementioned Guardian interview, rather than to what Anwar's friend Ady said in one of his many justificatory statements: "'War crimes' are defined by the winner."  And given Ady's readiness to be brought before The Hague, we should perhaps further be wondering whether The International Court of Justice, much like this documentary, would not merely provide Anwar, Ady, and the rest of them with yet another stage to act out their teenage fantasies upon.  Yet the ICJ, unlike this documentary, might lead to Truth and Reconciliation, rather than to John Waters-inspired musical numbers and forcing the children of the purged to relive the horrors of their parents in the hopes of making one or two retired torturers cry.