Friday, August 25, 2017

Wonder Woman, Logan, and Chiasm

I have had this in the hopper for a bit and just today was looking at my list of draft posts while looking away from a particularly dense contemporary media studies theory piece, and I thought I can afford an hour off to finish this so it's out there at same time as the film.

So, the two best movies to come out of the phenomenon of all the flurry of comic-book super heroes actually came out in the past year. I'm not not necessarily knocking on all of the Avengers and main X-Men and all the rest. Some bits of those I liked (Spiderman Homecoming was particularly good) and some I was "meh." But the two films that rise to another class are Logan and Wonder Woman. And the latter is really the only one to have done it while actually staying within the genre. As I have written elsewhere, Logan is really a western. I'll be restating below some of what I wrote in that other post (comparing Logan with Mad Max: Fury Road) when I get to discussing chiastic possibilities (possibilities: I don't think either of them has the full-blown and extensive use that Rowling has in Harry Potter).

Wonder Woman

First, though, since I have already done some reading of Logan in the other post, I am going to open this one now by singing the praises of Wonder Woman. Wow ... Wonder Woman (and/or Antiope / Robin Wright) could probably kick my ass, and I would just be laying there on the ground a bloody mess going "could you do that again? not that I want the pain, but it's worth how completely cool it looked." It was pretty kick-ass, and kick-ass pretty.

But in all seriousness, the character was really well done. Gadot is perfect for it. She somehow carries off a naivete-without-insecurity aspect really well (including the earnestness in the beginning of the film), as well as the wounded incredulity at the failure of killing "Ares" but the coming back to try to at least do something. I can't can't explain it because it's one of those intangibles, but if you have seen that little clip online of Gadot between takes waiting and she kind of dances in a circle standing in the same place, nothing super energetic, just passing time between takes and joking around a little bit with people around, you get how her personality worked really well for the character.

Steve Trevor: The character was well set up in the previews. Chris Pine has been established as dry wit by his work as Kirk in the Star Trek reboot films, and it was well broadcast that this character was going to be a similar type of wit and they delivered on it ... the chemistry between that wit (which involves a bit of woundedness and a bit of guilty feeling) and her naivete/earnestness was excellently done.

But they took him beyond that. That scene at the end is really good, the look on his face of nervousness and sadness but also resolution and peace as he closes his eyes and fires back over his shoulder is beyond gripping. He is a character with regrets and pain, but those are some of the base for his dry wit and make it something beyond merely comedic, and he is committed to doing what he can. And the way it connects for her is amazing: It is in losing the man/love that she realizes its worth as a reason (the possibility of love, both romantic and self-sacrificial) to fight against the lie of Ares, or against despair etc. And the feminine affection carries through to the end: her reply to Wayne is "thank you for bringing him back to me."

I thought progression was done really well. She progresses, as I said, from naivete to experience, but not from clueless or insecure simpleton to jaded worldly-wise. I don't think she is ever tempted to being cynical in a sarcastic "jaded but still involved" way. Her temptation is to despair and abandonment. And, as I said, the other major theme is romantic love, and that is what keeps her from despair: not just the encounter in the village with him, but also losing him when he sacrifices himself out of charity ... but it's also not just the self-sacrifice, as if that now eclipses the romantic ... the romantic is really a part of it.

I should put in a note here because of the major female question: I can't put my finger on it, and probably even less because I am a male with a male brain, but there is something that is distinctly feminine in her way of doing all this. A man has a harder time pulling off the naivete-without-insecurity bit. We males tend to stumble around making clarifications like Steve Trevor, trying to pin down exactly what we "mean" in some unitary meaning: you either know or you're naive. Women seem, at least to me, to be better able to get their heads around an idea not having all the info and so maybe not having access to understanding everything going on but also having some kind of intuition that helps you. It's more than obvious on the page for her that he would be the one with the more experiential knowledge about sex, so why is he the one stumbling around stammering trying to clarify while she is the one who has no abashedness addressing the fact that he would not like the books because of the conclusion about about whether men are necessary for pleasure but doing it with an air of admission of "you wouldn't like it; I obviously can't agree or disagree because I'm a virgin, but I imagine I'll either agree or disagree when that changes" but without any feeling of stammering around about it as he does about his experience. Women handle that sort of thing better. Women can go "ooooooh, a baby!" at the same time as being a kick-ass warrior princess, whereas we men feel the need to be one or the other, to be wearing one hat or the other. It's not a "good" versus "bad" difference, and when it's healthy, men and women work together, but it's also usually (so it seems to me) the woman knowingly being accommodating, usually because she finds her male peacock's strutting of his colors so adorable, which she of course doesn't say because, to us men, we should be anything but "adorable" (in healthy situations, men are kind of cognizant when the woman feels the need to step in and suggest a corrective and willing to listen ... like Sol said in Darren Arnofsky's Pi: "No! the key is the wife! listen to your wife! sometimes you need to take a bath!").

In terms of the theme of romantic love: a male asks "so are we talking romantic/erotic love here or heroic/virtue/self-sacrifice love?" and a woman answers "yes."

One final thing: the "band of misfits" element was awesomely endearing. The "his people are the ones who did it to my people" and Sammie the actor who winds up a soldier and Charlie with his PTS ... those are the things of the other love that drives the film. Set off against German fascist ideology is understanding and acceptance of each other's foibles and backgrounds. That's part of the reason why the picture being the unifying thread is so important: the picture is her with the band of misfits, and it's taken at the center of the film, and it is a defining moment for her.

And so, one more final final thing (before the chiasm material): I think it was a great choice to start with WWI. A lot of times it gets eclipsed by WWII, but it was the first of horror on that level and it's trauma was immeasurable. I have written before on here about the book A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War as the description of the effect of WWI on Tolkien and Lewis, but it had an impact as well in WWII having an even more devastating effect in Europe at the time than many of us realize at this far out from both. Dorothy Sayers supposedly stopped writing Lord Peter Wimsey because of WWII because what Wimsey represented to her, especially with his PTS, was England/Europe after WWI. They came out scarred, but they also got on with life and were going to learn from the lesson and not let this happen again ... and then it did. I think that demoralizing effect was one of the biggest invisible but real weapons Hitler had in almost conquering Europe. And it began with WWI.

And, while WWII had the nightmare terror of the air raids on London, the fear of the Luftwaffe, WWI had the horror of the gas. I believe that there is a special layer of hell reserved for those who develop weaponized neurotoxins and intentionally put another person's body through that kind of torture.

Also, if the rumors are true that there is a second movie planned for WWII, I think that it is a great structure for a character in the universe, but I think that if they make another after that, it should be out beyond the present of the DC extended Batman-led Justice League and make it the final in a trilogy, rather than say, doing Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraq, ISIS, etc in a serial style. I think trilogies are far more distinctive and preferable.

Chiasm

So, I didn't go into the theater looking to pin down chiasm. I take the opening approach usually of Mary Douglas either in the intro of her book on ring composition (Thinking in Circles), but I think in the intro to her Jacob's Tears because it has to do with biblical material, of needing to check oneself from reading things like this into every story or work of art. To quote Sol from Arnofsky's Pi again: if you think 216 digits is the key to the universe, you will naturally start to see 216 everywhere ... 216 stairs in your apartment building, 216 steps from your door to the bus stop. When beginning whichever book it is, she is looking at examining ring composition in the book of Numbers and notes, in her own defense against the legitimate concern of eisogesis, that she tied out the book of Leviticus to another composition structure altogether. So, going into Wonder Woman I didn't go in looking for chiasm/ring. And as will be seen below, I think Logan definitely has a key central scene, but I don't think it has the opening and closing corresponding elements or the matching intervening elements to call it a ring or chiasm.

Even once I started to think about chiasm and realize that it fit, I was cautious. Basically, things like this should not be approached with a naive "traditional" understanding, which really does not go back past the recent rise of our modern scientific approach to authorial intention. The question is not "did the author intend this when writing this?" The question is whether it fits. If you can fit the story elements into the structure without torturing them, then it is an example of that structure device. It may be unintentional, or maybe the author knows it by another name with slightly different parameters. Maybe it is other things in addition. But it is still that. So, my method is more "trying it on for size and seeing if it fits." And Wonder Woman seemed to fit surprisingly well when I tried it on.

Wonder Woman Chiasm

They actually did this really creatively for connection with the DC extended universe thing: the main thing that ties this film to the surrounding DC material, which at this point is Batman vs. Superman, is the picture, and the picture is the main thing that ties the Wonder Woman film together. It bookends the film in her looking at it and interacting with Wayne, but it is also the dead center.

I'm actually going to go ahead and get this posted without doing huge exposition, but I have provided the structure below and tried to do so using wording that best captures the elements that are key. Actually, my hope is that the structure does it even better than if I started into my usual rambling on the points.


A: The Picture: Paradise: Peace presumed
     B: False Hope (Ares may never return?), meeting a man, and a watch
          C: Village Saved (walking among soldiers after)
               D: The Picture: Dancing in the Village and Romantic Love, Tableau
          C': Village Lost (walking among the ruins after)
     B': False Hope (Ares beaten?), losing a man, and gaining a watch
A': The Picture: The Real World: Love and a Resolution to Fight for It


The only thing I will say about this here is that the central scene  of dancing in the village square, in addition to be a visually well done tableau scene, centers around the question she asks of what people do when they are not making war. What is "living" beyond war, what do people do when at peace? And that's where they fall in love. And, in light of what I said above above about him stammering around while she is the one unabashed, here is the only place (that I can recall) that she feels a little of the bashfulness.

Wonder Woman Addendum:
I watched the movie again in second run theater (making number 5 so far in the theater), and I noticed a couple more things.

(1) The band of misfits theme has a connection with the "should we hope or despair" theme in screen presence at the crucial moment when Diana chooses to believe/hope. The thing that she looks over and sees when she is in the battle with Ares (I think while she is actually bound up in the tank treads) is the three of them (minus Trevor because he has gone to the plane) pinned down and out of ammo. The huddle-up they go into as they wait for the advancing German soldiers with whom they have been exchanging fire is, I would argue, a pose reminiscent of praying together, a quasi-martyr pose, but also a brotherhood of being together "here at the end of all things," to borrow Frodo's lines.

(2) Something struck me about Dr Poison in the scene when WW is thinking of crushing her with the tank. Maru is set off against Diana but also paired with her as woman-to-be-used, in the masculine mentality of Ares. I have to wait til the video comes out, but I'm pretty sure there is something in his speech to her that he fed them hopes they couldn't live up to to try to get them into a war to end all wars  because he wasn't strong enough to pull an all out attack on them on his own, until she came: he wants to use her as weapon against humanity as Ludendorff wanted to use Maru as weapon against the Allies. Maru being paired isn't as good as getting a more full backstory, but it does make her more prominent as a female character than I had originally thought, which is cool.

(3) Gun: The centrality of the relation of the romance theme to the war theme and the "life in peacetime versus life in wartime" is seen in the fact that, in that central scene, Steve Trevor takes off his gun to dance, and he makes a point of stating doing so: "probably better without the gun."

(4) Watch and Tableau: So that leads to that central scene and something I noticed that both is part of the chiastic structuring and shows good use of a classic trope. I was already calling that scene a "tableau," but more in a looses sense. A tableau is a particular type of scene going back in stage history at least as far as medieval cycle and Passion plays. The main example that comes to mind is from the Passion play called Veronica's Veil, which a parish on Pius St down on the South Side slopes in Pittsburgh used to produce every year throughout Lent, and in which the actual Crucifixion is a tableau: the lights rise on the Christ on the Cross, usually there is somebody offstage with something for making thunder sound (at Pius St, it was 2x10s or 2x12s on some type of metal scaffold bars above and out of sight, with guys slamming and banging the boards on scaffold), and the lighting is flickered to produce lightning effect, and then the lights go down.

Technically, a tableau, as far as I understand it, is all but a still shot, and its impact actually relies on the "all but" quality. A photograph is completely still, and it is supposed to be. What make a tableau effective is that it is in the midst of something that is moving action, whether stage or film, something minimal that it is not completely still: there is ongoing movement that is all the more accented for being action that is not plot progression. Sometimes when a tableau is used in film, there is music: another example that comes to mind is the widening out shot of the scene of the double date in the Chinese restaurant in Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King with Perry singing the "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" song. As I say, I was originally saying that the whole sequence with all the dialogue in this crux scene in Wonder Woman is sort of tableau-like amidst the action of the film, but I noticed on this viewing that they do actually have an actual technical tableau shot in it, shot from high up looking down on the village square, with the snow falling and Charlie singing and playing heard inside the open door and the people swaying dancing, including Diana and Steve ... that was the point where I thought that, in addition to all the other awesome aspects I have talked about, this film has beauty, a distinct aesthetic to it.

And the tableau being at the central crux scene connects chiastically. A tableau is sort of pause time. It's not slow motion. All action in it is real time, and that is actually key to the feeling of the pause in time. This connects with the time symbol used, which is the watch. Any time there is a watch or a clock, it symbolizes time in some way. I actually think this makes more sense of the little dick joke, because it is a gag based on confusion/conflation between the genital (romance) and the watch. So, there is the discussion about the watch at the beginning, and then in the chiastic matching element, he gives her the watch as he leaves to sacrifice himself after saying he wishes they had more time and telling her he loves her, and then the watch is with the picture at the end as she writes "thank you for bringing him back to me." The second way that the watch in the elements outside the crux connect with the theme inside the crux is that the kinds of things he states at the beginning when describing the watch, all the tings it tells you when it is time to do, are the peace-time life that he describes again in the central scene in answering Diana's question about what humans do when not making war.

This film is beautifully constructed.

WW Addendum 2:
I have lit on calling the B and B-prime elements "the two men." I finally recalled that whole "Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus" book title that came out however many decades ago reveal how old I am getting. Mars is the Roman version of Ares ... so, masculine and war together. It's fits well with the feminine concerns of the movie, but I don't think it's "feminist" in the sense of being completely down on men because it involves what I call "the other man," Steve Trevor. Interestingly, he is the only of the two men who is there in the central scene ... Ares is conspicuous by his absence, especially when the real man Trevor takes off the gun, taking concrete action to say no to the Ares in himself that all of us men have.

For this one, I would also note that both men (Ares and Trevor) and found and lost and that they happen together: She finds Trevor on the beach precisely because he is fleeing the Germans who are making war, precisely when Ares (war in the form of warring humans) finds the island. And she beats Ares right after she loses Trevor (and is able to do so precisely because of what is shown to her in Trevor's self-sacrifice). The two men enter at the same time and go away at the same time.

I have also been working on a "principle" in my chiasm theories that basically says that a chiasm/ring works best when there is an inner chiasm that has to do with the most basic material level. In Harry Potter, it is the 3-4-5 chiasm of the seven-year curriculum at Hogwarts, and in Fantastic Beasts, it is the collecting-the-beasts chiasm. Those are both substrata below theme. They may also include or relate to theme, but they definitely are also below theme in being the basic building-block material of the story. The concrete setting and structure of HP centers around the seven years of study at Hogwarts. Fantastic Beasts will be a five-installment series that will encapsulate the Grindlewald story, but the material bones of the story in the first movie is that magical creatures get set loose in NYC and have to be re-collected. In Wonder Woman, it is simply the fact that, beneath the themes of feminine versus/loving masculine and the band of misfits etc, the genre of the film is "war movie," and one of the things that makes it work so well as a ring composition is that the chiasm structure is there on that material level: the inner most chiastic elements (what I like to call the bones) are of that basic material nature, losses and wins of ground (and the tactics and offensives used in doing so) in war.

I would also note here that the village saved-celebrated-lost might seem a bit unevenly weighted because of an element I am going to add in here on the "lost" side, which is that it contains an "evil twin" element in the form of the gala at German High Command. This is the war version of the "dance" in the village. It is not just any "high toned and fancy to-do," to quote Captain Jack Sparrow ... it is German High Command ... it is centered on the war apparatus. But the flow is not really that unequally weighted, since I read this as what is known in study of Hebrew poetry as a "ballast variant." The one defining and unique mechanism in biblical Hebrew poetry is parallelism, which often uses elision. So, in "Children are a blessing, the young an everlasting joy" (I know, it's not the best one ever written, but this is sort of on-the-fly), the verb "are" is elided in the second half. But doing this makes for uneven weight in the parallelism, so an extra variant is thrown in as a ballast to even the weight, and since it is variant, unique as an element in the second half with no corresponding element in the first half, it sticks out and is therefore accented (in this case the "everlasting"), so this mechanism allows a way to put emphasis on certain things by putting them in the ballast variant position. In Wonder Woman, the "village lost" has a ballast variant in the form of the gala, which has no pairing in the actual "village saving" but is the evil twin of the "village at peace" dancing at the center. And the structure makes that gala actually pair off against the big fighting scenes in the "village saved" scene because what is elided in the "village lost" scene is any actual attack; you simply know the gas bombing has been deployed, but you don't actually see it happen (this also follows a very ancient mechanism from Greek tragedy in which particularly traumatic events happen off-screen precisely to highlight how traumatic they are). This is a neat little exposition on the war mentality: it uses perversions of peace-time activities like dancing precisely as a cultural weapon, a method for conquesting not just material, but "meaning" in life.

Logan

Anyway, I offer a brief recap here on Logan and structure for two reasosns:

1. Like Mary Douglas, I wish to demonstrate that I am capable of not making chiasm the proverbial Procrustean bed (Procustes made a bed he thought the perfect bed, and so anybody who did not fit it must be deficient in some way, and so if they were too tall for the bed, he cut off their feet, and if they were too short, he stretched them).

2. I find it interesting to group genre films together for comparison, in this case the whole single-character-focused films in this whole new extended comic book universe phenomenon


Logan's Structure:

It basically is more of a straight linear thing, but there are some key things at the center and on the ends. I don't think the bookends function the same way as opening and closing element in even an inclusio/envelope, let alone a chiasm/ring. Or at least, the inclusio would need to be within a larger piece for it to make sense. Although, it does have a wicked little bit of political sense to convey in that regard: it begins with hiding outside the US in Mexico and ends with escaping from the US to Canada ... what happens inside the US is all hell and bullshit ... from drunk, tux-wearing, rich, young, white assholes shouting "USA" going past border raids and drunk, rich-bitch-in-training, party girls flashing the driver who really has no options but to smile in a pretend he's so lucky to be getting to see some rich, young, white titties ... to kill squads, horrific mutant killing machines, and asshole, racist, farm monopolists participating in the death of the one decent family in the midst of all the bullshit.

What "central and opening and closing scene" structure there is is created by the use of religious imagery.

Key center: As I said in the other post, there is a last supper scene at the center of the film (I've measured it timewise, and it is right about dead center). This is the supper with the family on the farm and it represents the central theme question: can you find a home (the sunseeker? Canada?) and what is it supposed to look like if you can? Charles makes it clear ... this is what it looks like. In fact his death is even represented (I think) as a murder of right vision in this regard by his death having a return to delusion. Seeing the Sunseeker boat possibility as a real "family home" was not only delusional (Calliban noted that well), but it sort of sells out what home really is as well. But that is what Charels dies saying, "Sunseeker," and it's what he hooks Logan with right after the meal as the way to get him to agree taking the girl up to N. Dakota, his concession ... then we'll get the Sunseeker. But before that, in his sane moment, he notes how this is what home looks like. And of course, he himself has his moment of despair like Logan's ongoing despair: he doesn't deserve this night of enjoying the wonderful home meal because he destroyed that other home, the one in Westchester.

That's why this particular scene can't be tied to the sacrificial aspect of the Eucharist in a Catholic reading that would make it fully "Last Supper." There is a death connected to the Supper, and Charles is a fine man, but the death itself is not the sacrificial death. There will be one of those by the end, but it is not the death that occurs in connection to the supper. Rather, the supper is "Eucharistic" (but only partially, for the reasons I just said) because it involves a "home" to which one is traveling (or, in this case, on the run to). In Catholic theology, the Eucharist will be the family meal of the true final home, and in this use of the Last Supper trope at the center of Logan, we have a family "home" meal with the main interpretation mouthpiece character (Charles) noting it as central, as the thing they should be looking for after all the running and fighting. And a key thing to notice here is that there is laughter and kidding around and that the child who has known only struggle and pain looks on and begins to be drawn in to the positive emotion, she begins to smile and laugh some too ... she likes it.

Finale: Crucifixion, Deposition, and Pieta/Stabat "Mater." There's not much to say on this one except to note it. It's too clear. Logan makes a self-sacrificial death in which his body is broken on a tree (Crucifixion). Laura cuts him down from the tree (Deposition) and holds his hand (Pieta) as the ending of her witnessing his sacrifice (Stabat "Mater" .. or rather Stabat daughter).