Literary Bodies: Strong, Anemic, and Malignant

This post is more generally theoretical on literary issues as such, rather than any focus on a particular work or author, and it connects with my strand of using the human body as an allegory, particularly for narratives built on a base chiasm/ring structure, such as here and here. But it does arise from encounter with discussion of a particular film, and so there is naturally some dwelling on that film, but not really in specific details.

The present discussion begins, though, with the movie Mad Max: Fury Road, and what it concerns is what I spoke of as a body "walking down the street" well or not and the key clarification that you can have works that are complete and living bodies (complete skeletal, muscular, and surface structures) but not have them all be of equal value because there can be qualitative differences: healthy versus sickly, strong bodies doing good things versus strong bodies geared towards doing evil things, etc.

So, as I said, the story of this post begins with Fury Road. I went to this film expecting to like it at least to the level at which I have a soft spot for, say, Underworld and Resident Evil, and maybe even more depending on how well it performed. I like Hardy and Theron and even the kid (always forget his name, but he plays Hank/Beast in the XMen reboots) and I like the original Mad Max films (Thunderdome is a bit too overdone, but Road Warrior is a classic, as is the original, although very different for today's audience, with its 1970s horror screechy violins and all) ... but I walked out of the theater going "meh' and feeling a little sleepy. Such is life. I walked into the theater expecting Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them to be fun but not much more and walked out thinking it was awesome ... such is life. I'll probably at least netflix Underworld: Blood Wars when it comes out on video, but I'm not feeling the same draw to rewatch Fury Road. Part of it is probably something in personal taste, but some of it is also a feeling of objective quality versus lack of it etc., and people can disagree with me or not.

This post isn't going to be listing arguments using specific details of Fury Road, or even really a  formal argument against the film. Rather, the situation of being asked my opinion of the film again recently led me to think more on my analogy of the human body for literature. So, as I said, my initial watching of the film left me totally flat. Then recently it has come up as a topic in a certain circle in which the view of the film is more akin to that of the critics, akin to that of Rotten Tomatoes, for instance, which gives Fury Road 97% ... indeed, if one looks at the record of critical accolades listed someplace like the wikipedia article for the film, it seems more like the second coming has happened than that a film has been made.

Obviously, I encountered no similar need to change my undies upon exiting the theater, which makes it a bit, um, awkward at points, especially when it's a younger, more generally innocent and less "adult" asshole, viewer who is asking "don't you think it's a great film?" (especially when it's a younger Christian who might feel the need to be seen to "be able" to appreciate the critical attitude towards some films that are on the grittier end but not overpoweringly sexually gratuitous, to be seen to be doing such appreciation as a way to counter the accusation that the religious commitment hinders artistic sensibility, young Christian viewers/thinkers who might feel the need to have films on which they have agreed with the critical response to offset places where they have disagreed with the critical response because of sexual content and therefor maybe could use some "no, I'm not a prude" points, or whatever the very understandable motivation might be ... and of course, I have to say that it could be that the motivation is legitimate insight and that I am clueless and a bit off kilter; obviously I don't think that is the case, but I have to admit the possibility ... but at the same time, even doing that really doesn't help these kinds of situations because it leaves one in the same awkward place because what people want is not for you to admit you might be a nutter; what people want you to do is to demonstrate that you're NOT a nutter and that you ARE on their side of a debate).

ANYWAY, to get on with the advertised content of this post, the main point, so to speak. That point has to do with some of the evidence that was offered in a recent conversation for the greatness of Fury Road, and it's material of the type that should be pertinent for my thing of stories as bodies because it is about structure: one of the two young guys was arguing that Fury Road follows a hero journey plot, which is, of course, a kind of structure, so it should fit with my liking of plot structures as bones etc.

At this point in that conversation, the biggest project for me was to avoid saying "so what?" because the neutral technical meaning of that question really did fit my thoughts (whether what was being argued would change my reaction to the film even if it was demonstrably true) BUT the usual tone implied ("who give a fuck what you think?) was NOT what I was thinking. What my thoughts were was that I am sure there is some type of structuring in the film; given the amount of study done by at least some screen-writers, I assume that they use technical plot structures that have a long-standing tradition behind them. But I think there is more to a good story than just the plot structure, no matter how ancient and attested it be or how well it can be demonstrated that this particular plot structure is what this particular story is based on, just as there is more to a body than the skeleton and more to the issue than simply demonstrating that this body is a bird body because it clearly has a bird skeleton etc. It is even possible to look at an example of a skeleton and see malformations in it: it's clearly a bird skeleton, but also clearly one with problems that make it fall short on a qualitative scale.

What this situation is similar to for me is the situation of the Cormoran Strike novels written by J.K. Rowling under the pen name Rober Galbraith. The same basic thing happened: I heard about the first book and that it was her; I read it hoping to like it; My read of the first novel left me with no desire to read further books in the series when I heard that they were being written. The place where I heard that they were being written was Dr John Granger's site, where it was also related that there was a set number of seven books, meaning a distinct literary project, not something open-ended and meandering, and the idea was being run up the flagpole that the series could be chiastic/ring, and then that the first book clearly was ring composition. I've actually communicated with Dr Granger on chiasm/ring in Harry Potter and Fantastic beasts and it's something I am very into, and I trust Dr Granger's erudition and competency (far beyond my own) in analyzing this: If he says Cuckoo's Calling is definitely employing ring composition, I believe him. But that doesn't change my reaction to reading it or give me incentive to read any of the following books: I found the characters and dialogue extremely thin at best ("pleasy, pleasy, pleasy" is very cheesy, cheesy, cheesy .... and ... "that's not my leg but it's helping" ... seriously?).

Now to the pint about bodies that I have been beating around the bush in getting to: I think you can have stories that are complete bodies but of different qualities. You can have Aragorn's body, well proportioned and strong, or the body of Legolas, slender and graceful and strong  and like poetry in motion ... or you can have the body of Gollum, emaciated and stringy with skin and muscles hanging off bones although effective even for killing, or the body of Benji from Faulkner's Sound and the Fury, a thirty-three year old gelding looking at himself in a mirror standing naked and cruciform wailing senselessly at the sight of the scars of his castration. Or you you could have the body of an Uruk Hai, definitely strong but definitely not graceful or beautiful, or you could have ... well, you get the picture.

I'm not sure what kind of body I would call Fury Road or the Cormoran Strike series, except that I wouldn't call either an Aragorn or a Legolas or an Eowyn or a Faramir, or even a Sam or Frodo or Merry or Pippin. The Strike novels I might be more inclined to call a Benji body (Faulkner's sickly and senseless castrated Christ of the anemic post-bellum southern version of Christianity), but it's harder to discern with Fury Road because some of the action sequences are rather too pumped up to call it a Benji (one of the raves is the action-packed, amazing action sequences thing) ... maybe if you were able to seriously and unnaturally engorge the muscles on the Benji body with steroids to the point they have all but broken the bones with their weight ... maybe that, but not sure.

Who knows, maybe I need to watch Fury Road again. I'll probably netflix it at some point (even though I have to say that my only motive in doing so is not expected pleasure, as it will be when I netflix Underworld: Blood Wars, but rather simply "covering bases" of having "given it enough of a chance"), but my honest reaction the first time, before I knew I was supposed to cream my jeans over it as the new messiah of film kind of thing, was "oh well, at least I didn't pay New York prices and it got me out of the house for a bit and it wasn't painful the way something like reading the Davinci Code was."


As a final thought: a Hagrid Body or a Madam Maxime rules because it's just so bigger than life, as Harry thinks it "too big to be allowed" ... but it is allowed, and it's just all there in blaring real life, able to move like fire when it needs to, like Hagrid describes Maxime against the giants, but solid and heavy enough to take a beating from Grawp when it needs to.

(and a Jacob Kowalski body rules if for no other reason than that it punched Gnarlack ... but he also has that good-natured-but-not-dumb walk of a member of the expeditionary forces).

Music in Fantastic Beasts

The idea popped into my head last night about how music was used in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them when something triggered a memory of that nice 1920s jazzy bit that recurs in the film, the most notable place being when Kowalksi "wakes up" on the sidewalk in the rain and it's sort of "back to the hustle and bustle" (and now, speaking of musical triggers, I am going to have a version of Prince's "Purple Rain" running through my head for days that is "obliviation rain" instead).

Music really wasn't as much of an element in the Harry Potter books because it was not the kind of thing with a soundtrack ... books usually aren't, of course. You had the book 6 Christmas concert on the wireless by Celistina Warbeck,  and you had the Weird Sisters play the Yule Ball, and while I like the latter because I think what JKR heard and put on the page would remind me of a certain strain of Tom Waits's (while the ghostly musical saws in book 2 might remind me of other strains of Waits), their music was never a central thing  (and in my opinion, with what they did with "wizard kids are cool too" with the pop-punk/pop-goth thing in the movie ... yeah whatever, they might as well not have put anything in).

I do think JKR likes music as magical but that she sees it as a deeper form of magic that is simply beyond the scope of the type of work she is writing. When Dumbledore, at the start of term feast one year, personally directs the last few lines of Fred and George's  funeral dirge version of the school song and then says something to the effect of "ah, music, a magic deeper than anything we do here," that's a sort of lighthearted mention of it. A more serious allusion is that Snape's incantation in healing Draco from Harry's use of the sectum sempra spell in book 6 is almost like a song.

But, in Harry Potter, even those elements are just occasional, and a book is not something in which you really experience a soundtrack or musical quality. And the score of the movies was all orchestral with no real soundtrack (unless you count the "weird sisters" crap in movie 4, which, as I said, you shouldn't). In Fantastic beasts, while that jazzy bit is not a distinct isolated song, especially not with lyrics, as it is used in the film, I would still say that it has a much stronger and more unique presence than any of the music in the Harry Potter series of films.

I think this is because, in Harry Potter, the score always matched the action and the emotion incited in the audience by the action, as is the usual function in action and drama. But in Fantastic Beasts, that jazzy bit hooks to the setting itself ... the New York City street in the 1920s. Sound and music are powerful things in how they hook in to the psyche, and I think they did a wonderful job of using it to give a distinctive and gripping feel to the street. As I said, especially with the re-intro of it after the obliviation rain, it's "back to the bustle and the hustle."

I can't really put the the core of this "street thing" into words, but I would also compare it to the way that, for instance, not with music but with other elements, Chaim Potok managed to give you the smell and the feel on the skin (often sweaty summer stickiness) of the Brooklyn streets. Beyond that, maybe the best I could do to describe what I am talking about is to put my own musical tag on the New York I know from eight years living there recently, and that would be Balkan Beat Box, whom I saw four or five times at Webster Hall on 11th St between 3rd and 4th aves (just south of Union Square): a mix of Mid-Eastern/Eastern Euro world beat with electronica and hyped up dance elements ... and a lead singer who pretty much owned the stage (they adapted one of their songs to basically keep chant "jump" as their opener, and I swear you could feel the floor shake).

My main point in all this has been just to say I think the film makers (whoever was responsible for that music being chosen etc) have included music in a cool way that actually fleshes out the material physical setting of the story, not just the action and emotion of it. I'm excited to see what they choose for Paris in whichever of the upcoming films is supposed to be set there. I'd love to see the skin on the elements of the 5-film chiasm be textured with a different musical feel for a succession of cities.

"Jo Logic":

A Little Bit of Larger Theoretical Consideration

Actually, that bit about the Weird Sisters above and this whole thing kind of brings to mind a broader point of JKR's artistry, and that is, to quote a Tom Wait's title, "that feel": the way she creates a feel, a texture. The way she described the band in Goblet of Fire from just an account of the instruments being brought on stage and a few musical types mentioned (waltz etc) and mentioning how people were dancing (Fred and Alicia so energetically, Hagrid and Maxime cutting a wide swath etc) gave a distinct impression of feel with minimal elaboration. Personally, for me, the Weird Sisters are totally Tom Wait's bohemian mix of jazz instrumentation and structure with sonic experimentation (as well as some of his earlier straight up raspy jazz) ... for some reason, it just seems to me that the Weird Sisters would be down with phrases like "pawnshop marimba" and titles like "Swordfish Trombone"(and the bass, percussion, and marimba of the latter are definitely Weird Sisters material ... and, seriously, to what other kind of music could Mad Eye Moody dance?).

I would put this under what Steve Vander Ark discussed in his 2006 talk at Lumos as "Jo Logic." The first half of his talk, "Wizard Logic," was pretty amazing, but that is another discussion. What he means by "Jo Logic" is her ability to describe and give a feel for something. He showed a map he drew of the Hogwarts grounds he drew early on from her descriptions and then the map she actually released, and they were pretty much identical, and this was possible (he argued) because of her power of description in the books themselves.

He had also tracked out, he was pretty sure, the location of Hogsmeade station. By this, he meant that he figured there was someplace that she had been or seen that had given her the idea and the feel for the Hogsmeade/Hogwarts area. So, he applied some actual logic and research skill to it (like figuring it would be one of the side lines of the rail system, maybe even defunct, rather than one of the main lines, and basing a few other search criteria on a few text details) and found Rannoch Station, the stop for Rannoch Moor on a sideline (it may be a terminus, I'm not sure). He showed a picture of Rannoch Station and one of Hogsmeade station from the first movie, and they are practically identical. There was a neat bit too about how the placard warning visitors of the dangers of deceptively shifting scenery on the nearby moor itself sounds a lot like the feel of Hogwarts castle with the shifting architecture described in the first book (some stairways that led someplace different on Thursdays, doors that are really walls and walls that are actually doors, etc.)

The point of all that is not that this is some new evidence that proves some theory or other. The point is artistry. It's very likely that she visited Rannoch at some point (it's in Scotland) and that it stuck in her mind as the texture she wanted for Hogsmeade, but the point is that she was able to carry it through in descriptions (if not Rannoch, there is still probably some real place she visited that gripped her imagination texture-wise and that she was able to carry through texture-wise in her books).

Just as with the map of the grounds, she carries through on the realism of detail in such a way that an interpreter (be it Vander Ark drawing a map or Chris Columbus setting a stage for the station) can construct something very close to what was in JRK's head (as likely in the similarity between a real world train station and an independent film adaptation of a fictional train station, or nigh-on-proven by the similarity of Vander Ark's map to Rowling's own).

And this is what I think of the little jazzy piece in Fantastic Beasts: it adds texture in a way that is similar to JKR's own prowess for conveying texture in written works. Even though my experience of midtown and other sections of town are recent and not 1920s, that jazzy bit still makes me able to smell that hotdog Tina's eating when we meet her and the classic NYC pretzel sold from a lot of the same carts.

Collateral Beauty (2016 film): Are they real? (review)

WARNING: THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW, BIG ONES

Foreword

I’ve not experienced the death of a child, let alone of my own child. I did however, experience the death of my father from cancer in 2006, a brief but very brutal four-month ride from diagnosis to death, and something struck me at that time. When Mary meets Simeon in the Temple when they bring Jesus as an infant (Luke 2), Simeon states that her heart too will be pierced by a sword. I remember thinking at the time of my father’s death that that sword was beauty. I almost hesitate to use the word because it has become so trivialized and de-clawed, turned into a sentiment on a Hallmark card. Real deep beauty is violent, brutal, and merciless. It is other things as well; it can give hope. But it is also brutal.

The title of this film interested me from the moment I saw the preview because it is obvious that it is a take off on the phrase “collateral damage.” The clear idea on the surface is that damage is not the only thing that can happen “accidentally,” but I think that there is also a subtextual thing that happens in placing beauty and damage in the same context, that a door is opened for recognizing beauty as also painful.

Intro

I have to admit that this is a film that might be hard for me to review. First of all, it would be hard for me, even if I wanted, to entirely pan any movie in which I got to see NYC scenery I recognize that nobody who hasn’t spent time there will know. For instance, I know he was biking across the Williamsburg bridge (rather than the Brooklyn or the Manhattan or the Queensboro) from the maroon chain link fence because I have ridden that bridge path a number of times.

I know that the film got panned by critics, Rotten Tomatoes giving it 12% and metatcritic 24%, which is going to be the main subject of this intro and gives rise to me noting a potential problem with critics (lack of respect). Sorry, but anybody who equates difficulties with grief processing (Howard) and miserly rancor (Scrooge), as does Emily Yoshida in her review in Vulture by calling it a Christmas Carol remake, simply has no soul (or is trying to bury it).

Rotten Tomatoes said “aims for uplift but collapses in unintentional hilarity.” The thing is, if I had to place real money (of which I have precious little) on it, I would bet that the majority members of the general popular audience interviewed by CinemaScore who gave it an A minus (average) said “I’d give it an A minus because it was great fun and had me rolling in the aisle when they revealed the relationship at the and when he finally said the name.” There may be many areas in which the film can be critiqued as far as execution of its project or pacing or internal consistency on the mechanical level (of which I will look at a couple instances below), and there can even be places where there are real questions as to whether, say, in an individual scene, lines meant as brief humor relief for balance actually overpower the more meaningful lines. But to paint the whole as “collapsing into … hilarity,” especially the climax scene in which Howard (Willis) speaks the name, where there is no question of something initially intended as a humorous relief going wrong, bespeaks at best an insensitivity to, and at worst a concrete disrespect for, suffering of this kind, and I think it is precisely the exposition of suffering of this kind that has endeared audiences to it (A minus is pretty high on a scale of F to A plus), and thus the critical response disrespects the audience.

What this kind of criticism reminds me of is an issue of patient-on-doctor violence in East Asian healthcare systems, which I learned about this past year in copy-editing an edited volume on medical education in East Asia. The problem is one of bedside manner and sensitivity on the personal/psychological level. In medical education in East Asia, there is such a high level of competition and rapid advancement that you have healthcare professionals who are very technically proficient at a very young age but have little experience in actually handling people themselves as persons. And that handling is not something that you can really delegate: when it is the surgeon whose hands will actually be inside your body and handling your vital organs, you will focus on him or her no matter what some administrator tells you about how you’re supposed to be looking to another handler for personal interaction and bedside manner. And if that person who is going to be actually invading your personal space doesn’t have a certain sensitivity, things can get edgy very quickly (the invasion can’t be avoided, and the rewards are often saving your life … but that doesn’t change the fact that, psychologically, it is experienced as an invasion into your body). Obviously, you can’t download a few decades of human interaction into a young physician in a matter of minutes or hours (or even weeks or months) so that they have the sensitivity of a professional who has been practicing for decades, and so one of the proposed solutions is to increase the quantity of liberal arts and humanities material in curriculums as a way to increase sensitivity for human issues, concerns, themes etc, meaning of human persons as wholes, including the emotional, rather than just the technical aspects of biological bodies.

I’m not qualified to assess whether this method is working or could work for that need (decreasing patient-on-doctor violence). My main point in bringing it all up is just to note that I think there is a similarity between that situation and a group of critics who are all too well versed in the technical aspects of film making and maybe even of story-telling but far too insensitive to the fact that it might be the resonances of trying to cope with suffering in the death of a loved one, and even more so of a child, that makes general audiences have a positive encounter with the film.

[Sidenote (for those who have not worked with academic publications as much): “edited volume” means a volume with pieces by various authors that have been compiled by one or more main editors, not the fact that it is copy-edited etc by a functionary like me … in this case, the main editor was the current president of the China Medical Board, an institute founded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1914 (this volume was the third that has been published in connection with the centennial anniversary in 2014). But I never had any contact with him, or even with Indiana University Press, who published the volume; I only ever talked to my project manager at the third-party publishing services provider company through whom I got the contract.]

A Brief Thought on Structure: Community

I liked having the three personifications pair up with the three members of his life who most match them because of their issues so that the film is not entirely about Howard’s individual arc. Their character arcs are intertwined with his, and I think it gives the whole a community aspect.

As soon as I saw that one each of the friends began to deal specifically with one each of the actors, I knew that there would be something specific about the friend that related to the individual personification the actor was hired to play, death, love or time, and that was the moment when I realized the communal aspect and started to get into the film (before that I had not been getting my hopes up because of the reviews).

(Side Note: I thought Norton and Winslet were really good, and I was REALLY happy to see Michael Peña in a substantial character role in a major film because I have always seen him in either very side roles or comedic stuff like Ant Man, and I thought he carried his weight incredibly in Collateral Beauty … and it was a big weight to carry).

The Question of Realism:

an Introductory Example

So, being as my overall thing in this post is going to be the question of whether it matters whether or not the personifications are the real things or just the actors hired, I want to introduce the whole question of “realism” with an instance that it seems to me might be accused of not being realistic.

The instance in question is that his wife seems not to recognize him and acts as a complete stranger, which could be seen as unrealistic. A particular instance would be that she asks him if he is among the majority percentage of couples who divorce after the loss of a child and then reveals to him that she is. This is material information that they both would have known already, that they got divorced: they would know it because it was precisely each other from whom they had gotten divorced, and so there would be no need to ask or tell. Even if she were trying to “give him some distance” in a normal way, this would seem odd to ask him. And so, this could be criticized as unrealistic.

But immediately at the end of this interchange is where we get the logic for that, if we have ears to hear. She shows him the note that he himself wrote that says something to the effect of “if we could only be strangers again.” First it’s important to explicate what (I think) he was expressing when he originally wrote that note. I think he means that if they were strangers again, there would be a place for them to go with a relationship. But they are not strangers; particularly what they know in each other is the loss of their daughter, and that is painful and, for him, stands in the way of their ongoing relationship.

Now, as for whether it is realistic for her to act as a stranger to him, I think that it is simply her respecting his wishes in that note or her following the cue of that note that maybe there is a way forward if they approach as strangers. I think that when the relationship is revealed, rather than the “meeting as strangers” becoming unrealistic, it actually becomes revealed that her actions all along have been respecting that wish he expressed.

I also think that there is a prevalent misconception in a simplistic idea of knowing other people, a mistakenly assumed dichotomy between people we know and strangers, between knowing those we know and not knowing those we don’t. Married couples who have been married a long time are known to say that, every day, they still find out something they didn’t realize about their spouse. On a more existential level, I have seen longlasting marital love defined as the commitment to, in a certain sense, being willing to wake up every day with a stranger because you are both continually changing in a myriad of small ways (I’m not sure, but I think it may have been in a rebuttal “poem” of sorts to the whole Fifty Shades of Grey thing, one spouse writing to another in the general style of the lines from that book but talking about the choices of sacrifice for the other that define real lasting love rather than the gratuitous erotica content for which that book was known).

I would like to add here one final detail from the performance of Naomie Harris in that climactic scene (and, yes, I have to admit that I have a fondness for her from when she played Tia Dalma in Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3). The line is in when the revelations really begin but you have not fully gotten to the real revelation of their relationship. It is when she tells him, before you know that their lost daughters are the same girl, that she has just been watching a video of her daughter and asks “can I show it to you?” First of all, anybody who can listen to that performance (which I thought was killer on her part; she nailed it: the slight tremor in the voice that is a quiet but intense plea) and have even the most basic recognition of the scene as the climax of the film and still reduce the film as a whole to “hilarity” does not, in my opinion, have a soul.

I want to note, just as exposition of the story-telling art in the film, that there is a progression here. We do not yet know that they were married, but obviously in THAT context, she is asking “can we speak to each other or share things with each other about our daughter.” But when she speaks the line it is only the lead-up to that, and there is a possible meaning, a possible discernable character moment here even in the construct of what the audience has thought to be the case up til now (“strangers”), a character moment that paves the way for the real revelation, so it’s not just another misleading thing or merely a cipher-related thing that has meaning only after the revelation has occurred, when it can mean “please talk to me about OUR daughter.”

The character moment is that, up til now, even within the “we’re strangers” construct, she has been primarily the therapeutic functionary. I’m not saying she has been clinically cold or anything like that, but simply that all of her statements have been for his sake and his processing as they might be for anybody for whom she is doing this service of running the group. But when she asks that question, “can I show it to you,” with that tremble in the voice, she is not asking “can I show you a video of my daughter because I think seeing somebody else share about their child might be helpful for you to share about yours and begin processing the grief.” She is not asking it for HIS sake; she is asking it for HERS. As I said, this works even when she is just playing the role of the counselor type whom he didn’t know before stepping in the door to the meeting, and that leads up to and really sets the stage for the revelation that she is asking him to connect as her husband.

This character moment is that, even as the “stranger” counselor, she is saying that she is stepping beyond her counselor role and asking for something from another person that would mean something for her. Even as a counselor, she is always the one organizing and facilitating for others, and a moment of key character interaction is happening even in that construct when she asks to be able to share a video of her daughter with another person because it would help her. Her performance to me seemed to say, within the “strangers” construct, “I know you have lost a child and that having somebody else share with you about their child might be difficult, but it would really help me.”

My point about artistry is simply that you have a moment that has real character significance in the illusory context (“we could be strangers again”) that is a signpost and set-up for the revelation of the real context.

A Further Gripe

As anybody halfway insightful who is reading this can tell, I have a bit of a gripe with critics who label a film like this as “hilarity.” Beyond the whole possible belittlement of portrayal of grief, there is a further issue for me of a belittling of the presentation of an important psychological principle, and that is the power and necessity of speaking about things.

This is a very powerful and important point. It’s the basis of all talk therapy, whether one-on-one within the “construct” or “frame” with just a therapist or in a support group session. Talking about issues, naming them, is key to processing them emotionally, and it can be very hard. It is the key climax of the film when he can actually speak his daughter’s name and her age and her disease (and, what a performance by Will Smith).

[Sidenote: See my post on the found-footage horror film “As Above So Below” for the “speaking it” theme in another genre and context.)

There may be plenty of room for critique on how well a film did or did not carry through on the project of conveying that in story form, and even whether it was too “on the sleeve” when it should have been more subtle … but “hilarity” is not really the term for any of that.

And, while I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not some whiz analyst of pacing, I would still state that my take is that this section was paced well. As I said above, the plausibility of the “can I show it to you” key character/relationship advancement line even within the “strangers” construct keeps you hooked in without revealing the real thing prematurely. Then her giving him the card again that he wrote starts to tip the viewer off because it seems a bit out of place in the “strangers” construct and makes them ask “that’s odd, why is she showing him that again when she already told him that little bit about her husband writing her that note? Is there some more significance to it?” And this leads directly into the pan around the corner and her starting the video when we find out it was him.

(Of course, I am sure that there are many who saw it coming before that, and probably others who will say that the fact that they didn’t see it coming means that it was too out of place … I am the type who usually doesn’t see such things coming, but it could also be argued that I don’t see them coming because I tend to get hooked into the story more and don’t do as much sitting above it and analyzing and suspecting).

The Three Personifications and Reality

So, the basic set up, as the reader knows if having seen the film (and if the reader hasn’t and they don’t like spoilers, they should stop reading right here), and as I alluded to this above, the film’s hook in for the “see, we didn’t give it all away in the trailer” is that the three personifications of death, love, and time are three actors found by White (Norton), hired by him, Claire (Winslet), and Stan (Peña) to play Death, Time, and Love. From the point we find that out, we’re kind of focused on whether or not Whit, Claire, and Stan will be able to pull off the ploy to do what they need to do with the business deal.

I am going to assert that, as far as anybody in the film knows, they are just actors. This is a different situation from that of the audience. The audience is given solid reason early on to expect that they will not be just the actors. And then the audience gets confirmation near the end of the film. The early solid hint is when Helen Mirren as Brigitte/Death says to Kiera Knightly as Amy/Love “well done, you” in a situation in which only the audience and the three actors can hear it. The confirmation comes when the audience finds out that Mirren was the old lady who talked to Madeleine (Naomie Harris) in the hospital hallway outside of their dying daughter’s room. That confirmation was one of the few times I actually saw something like that coming because Madeleine’s first telling of it was such a marked statement moment (it’s the locus of the title, “collateral beauty”) and you even got a body glimpse of the person but they didn’t show the face.

Some might say that the obviousness of Mirren/Death in Madeliene’s first telling is a weakness, but if it is, I don’t think it is a huge flaw, and this is because of what I see as central under this heading, which I don’t think gets damaged by that flaw, and which is that it is only ever the audience that knows that the actors are more than actors, and that includes Will Smith. He sees them on the bridge in Central Park at the end, but there is no real guarantee that he recognizes them as more than projections OR that he thinks it problematic if they are only projections. They could be a bit like John Nash’s three hallucination characters at the end of Beautiful Mind (Ed Harris, Paul Bettany, and the little girl), and he could be at peace with them as such, just as Nash is with his. By the fact that they are not there when his wife Madeleine looks up and that it could be this is his new vision too (the bridge now with the actors not there), we could even hypothesize not unrealistically that he has seen the last of even the “illusions.”

The Real Deal

I think that Howard is able to manage this all because he has an in on what is a core element in the film: in reality, it doesn’t quite matter whether they are “real” as personifications in the film … because they are real in real life. They are exterior to us, and so they are objective. And they are heavy, very heavy. Love, Time, and Death are very real forces whether the actors in the film are really Love, Time, and Death personified. I thought this was the most creative aspect of the film and the thing that saved it from being simplistic as having personifications of abstracts.

The real thing is that only those who need to see them. I will mention in a moment a possible  weak spot in the mechanics where it is possible that more than just the three friends and Howard see them, but definitely the only people with whom we see them interact in any depth are Howard, Whit, Claire, and Stan. And for each of these people, they are very real things pressing on them. They see them because they need to see them. In reality, they are seeing the real life “versions” of them (their own worries about them) so oppressively that it’s all blurred and they need to see a personification to help focus (whether that be an actual personification of the element or some actor they hired to play a role who also speaks some core truth to them about the issue that they really need to hear in a focused way).

At the end of it all, what I thought was most creative was the fact that the question does not need to be answered as to whether they were “real” or not. The question definitely is answered for the audience in the affirmative. As I said above, it may be answered for Howard in the affirmative, we just can’t tell. But for Whit, Claire, and Stan, it is actually answered in the negative: we never get any indication that they recognize that the actors are anything other than actors.

This is one place where I think there may be some confusion on the part of critics (although, as a reader can guess, if this is so, I think the critics then go beyond simple confusion and assume a magisterial stance in declaring their readings etc). There are things that could be taken as lacking the gravitas befitting personifications of such heavy things, and there’s definitely room to examine and argue about how well certain things were executed or whether they were overdone etc… but not without (at least on my dime) first admitting the possibility that a certain amount of human foible coloring is fitting with keeping Whit, Claire, and Stan from seeing the actors as more than human actors and that keeping them in the dark all the way through might be part of emphasizing that the question isn’t whether it’s really the personifications or just human actors who have tapped into some deep wells of human insight and meaning etc in their acting (like Raffi being able to tell Claire thinks a lot about the baby clock … an insightful person would be able to guess at that one). The point is that, whatever the answer to that question may be, the situations in their lives as instances of each issue are real and the need for dealing with them are real, just as Howard’s need for processing the grief of the death of his daughter is real.

Death

Finally, just to be clear, and to provide myself a little place to drop in something I really want to drop in, let me reiterate that, despite what I will note in a moment as a potential mechanical weakness, the construct of the film purports a situation in which nobody but the audience knows for sure whether they are the actual personifications or just human actors, and at least the majority of characters in the film believe them to be just the actors (Howard being the only one who even possibly knows that they are the real personifications).

The main thing I want to drop in on that is the note that it is Death that makes that revelation for the audience in both cases that clue the audience in to their “reality”: saying “well done, you” to Amy/Love and talking to Madeleine in the hospital hallway. For Qoheleth in the Hebrew Bible, death is the great leveler and equalizer (all are equal in death, all are “vanity of vanities” in death, rich and poor alike, wise and fool alike), and in this film, as in many other works of art in the Western tradition, death is a revealer.

There are many resonances here even on the contemporary popular level. The most accurate term for these characters would be “anthropomorphisised personifications of a naturalised phenomena,” which comes from Terry Pratchett’s discworld description of, yes, his Death character, who often has some of the deepest things to say and reveal (and with some of the deepest humor … and I thought death suggesting that she herself fill in the role of the other too works as a nice little parallel, whether intended or not, to Pratchett’s Death having to fill in for the Hogfather in the novel of that name). Not only the final episode of Person of Interest but even Heath Ledger’s Joker (with two very different tones) note that death is the revealer of who a person really is: in that moment of death you see who they really are. And as far as Christian tradition, it is at the Cross that the Roman centurion can say “truly, this man was the son of God.”

“We All Die Alone”

But there is a little more in this film that comes from a central role of death as the revealer to the audience that they really are the actual personifications. As I said was important, each of the three friends—Whit, Claire, and Stan—pair up with one and only one of the personifications. More importantly, while it is clear that they can see and hear all of them in group conversations, the bulk of their interaction with their respective personifications is private … you don’t get any scenes of them telling each other what was said by their respective personification (in each of their cases, but especially Stan’s, this would have spilled some major beans).

And this is the “little more” I just mentioned. I’m a huge fan of Jim Butcher’s Dresden files series of novels, and there is one line that struck me harder than maybe any other in all those books, and that is: “We all die alone.”

This is not to be despairing or jaded; it is just a simple fact that when one person is going someplace the other is not following at present, they are alone (however, I believe there is a moral obligation to try, as best we can, not to let anyone die alone … it’s the paradox of it: even though you can’t stop them from dying alone, you have to be there to give what company and love there can be and, for your own part, to suffer your own loneliness in the situation. I took the graveyard shift at the nursing home in my dad’s room during the last several weeks of his life; on the last night he was alive, I had his hand in my face pushing me away as I asked what he wanted me to get while he was having a panic attack that made him jumpy and not wanting the oxygen cannula on, and of course, the decreased oxygen only made the panic worse; and in the morning before I left, I said the Our Father and he said “amen”; that is just life … and death).

As I have said, there is room to ask whether or not the balance of the human personality of the actors (Brigitte, Amy, and Raffi) and the gravitas of the personifications (Death, Love, and Time) are well executed, and definitely room to critique whether or not Mirren’s character as written and performed does justice to the gravitas of all the things I just said about death, but those questions should be asked with respect for the fact that resonances with experiences of these issues, especially death, may be a cause for the popular audience to find the film meaningful (and, I for one thought Knightley’s performance of the “I was there in those things too” line was good).

As related at the outset, Rotten Tomatoes said the film “tries for uplift but collapses in unintentional hilarity.” But the critics are not a magisterium for me as they are for some, and I don’t think I have really any guarantee that what they think would be successful “uplift” would not seem cheap or gaudy to me.

Possible Mechanical Weakness

There may be a problem in the mechanics of “verified only to the audience” in that it would seem to be implied that the private investigator  granny is able to see the actors, which is implied in her actions in being in on the scheme. If the friends said “go observe how things go with our actors and take video when he starts yelling at them” and then she said “um … what actors? He really was just talking to air” … that would be problematic. For that matter too, if anybody other than PI Granny did the actual work on the videos of removing the actors, then those technicians would also have to be able to see the personifications, otherwise you get technicians going “take who out of the video?” and that gets messy.

The difficulty and ambiguity of this is actually addressed, basically admitted, at the very beginning, when the actors ask what the specifications will be and clarify the biggest one as who will be able to see them. Obviously they are talking about situations like the grandson asking PI Granny a question that leads Howard to believe he is seeing something only he sees and the scene with Claire talking to Howard with Time sitting on the table behind them. But I think it also works as a sort of little admission that the mechanics of this whole thing are a bit difficult to pull off, meaning not just for them as characters in the film, but the actual project of the film itself (I knew from the first that I saw the trailer that it was an ambitious project to do well).

But this doesn’t unsettle me too much for three reasons. The first is that these possible viewers are working for the people the personifications want to impact and really see them only to the extent necessary for that gig to work.

The second is that people being able to see a body does not mean that they see what is really going on: they don’t see Death or Love or Time; they see Brigitte or Amy or Raffi (I love some of the stuff Pratchett does along this line with the visualization of Death, particularly when he goes by the name Bill Door as a farmhand while he is fired by the auditors in Reaper Man).

And the third is that, as I have said in my post on “storytime,” material details always break down at some point under the weight of the meaning in stories (kairos always breaks chronos and other material details), it’s just part of what happens in stories that mean anything more than a scientific logbook of events.

Along this line would be the shooting of the subway car argument Howard has with Death: from where the PI Granny is sitting, it would be very difficult to manipulate the video; it would be different than simply removing elements as with the Love and Time videos when the fill in work would be so simple (stable building and street texture) because they have to fill in a good bit of the right side of Howard’s body because, from where PI Granny is sitting, it is blocked from the view of her phone came by Mirren’s actual body.

But these sorts of things are precisely why people talk about the need to “suspend disbelief” in a story. If you want complete material consistency, you’re going to have to read a hard sciences textbook and not a story with characters and a plot that is trying to make a point about human life as human, as something beyond being rocks or minerals or even animals.

That is not to say one should not try to get as much material accuracy as one can. There is a point to going for realism and consistency. Just don’t be expecting to iron out all the bugs and still make a film that is interesting.

Addendum March-ish 2017

I watched this again about a week after it came out on DVD in March 2017 while on my elliptical machine and had a couple extra thoughts.

1. What I said just above about possible mechanical weakness is a red herring; there is no weakness because they get that out of the way right away and I think in a good way as kind of boiler plate. They let us know from the beginning that they are the real personifications (Helen Mirren/Brigitte/Death to Kiera Knightley/Amy/Love: "good job, you!" for getting Whit in the door), and that there is a ground rule: we choose who can see us and who can't. ... And then they move on to the more important things, like how the themes play for this man (and for the Whit, Claire, and Simon ... because, notice, the tactics each actor will employ arises out of coordination or debate with the human counterpart: Love pretty much uses Whit's script whole and Time sticks do his guns against Claire's comments against his "I'm pissed off he's calling me out" tactic). It's a way of saying, "listen, if you're looking for one of these movies where afterward it's the big mystery whether we were the real things or just actors and for which you can have debates about where there were holes in who could see us and who couldn't or little clues hidden about whether we were or were not and that is the great mystery to be solved, we're just going to lay it all out on the table here and get that little modern movie critic's game out of the way: we're the real deal and we get seen or not seen by whomever we choose ... and now we're going to get on to the real shit." Just the way the three actors first ask "well, what are the rules?" and then when the humans are fuddling around a bit, say "ok, we figured that out, we get to choose who will and won't see us depending on what works for our needs ... not onto more important things."

2. Scrooge? It struck me that I need to address this issue of comparison to Christmas Carol a little more squarely because, indeed, he is the one in the beginning who has been seen to be talking about what could be called manipulation of deep human themes for money. My basic thought on this is that this is not necessarily crass materialism but that it does stand in unique danger of worse than crass materialism and that maybe that is why the movie has to happen in the first place. All marketing plays on deep human themes in some way or another, and marketing in general is a necessary part of life. I think the film The Big Kahuna with Kevin Spacey, Danny Devito, and Peter Facinelli (sp?) carries this through very well ... economics is part of life because people have to eat to live and it takes money to have a building and books and well-trained educators for your children. But Howard does stand in a uniquely precarious balance as the one who can recognize the connections, and perhaps that is why he has to feel the pain of death the most brutally so that he can be the real genuine person in handling what are some pretty powerful insights. I don't think this answers all questions or is even the core of the film, but I don't know that anything will answer all questions because it is such a heavy theme. As Michael Pena's character Simon says, "nothing that starts with the death of a 6 year old child is going to feel right," but such deaths happen and there is a point to a piece of art examining the human themes at play in them and here I think they also managed to bring it to bear somewhat on the responsibility demanded of those who wind up wielding the great power of being insightful and capable of acting on their insights in the area of how deep human motivations play out in everyday life acts like product choice. I still don't think it is the same thing as Scrooge's miserlynesss ... actually I think that, were it actualized it a negative direction, it could be much worse, but I don't think it is actualized in that direction, but the need to guard against that and the theme of "with great responsibility comes great power" can definitely be an subpoint that is part of the main points I discussed above.

3. Literary Artistry: I realized that they foreshadow the "if only we could be strangers again" and "ok, I'll play that role" thing with Madeline, Howard's wife. They do it in Whit's (Norton) pitch of the idea to Claire (Winslet) and Simon (Pena), when he describes the tactic his uber driver suggested of "playing along" with his mother's hallucinatory episodes.

Addendum May 23, 2017

A further point of literary structure. All of this is pretty much implicit in what I have said above but it has only recently struck me to put it in a clearer explicit statement. I think the whole is very structured: there is one core center of action, which is Howard and his wife, Madeleine, and he relates to all three personifications, and then you have three satellites (the friends), and they relate one-each. As Howard progresses (eventually speaks his daughter's name and condition and reunites with Madeleine), each friend progresses (Simon admits, first to death and then to his wife, that he is dying, Whit strikes a deal with love that he will fight for his daughter's affections, and Claire admits at least to time, whom she believes to be a human, her fears about not having a child). All very structured.