Distant Relatives: Blade Runner and Moon

Robert here w/ Distant Relatives, exploring the connections between one classic and one contemporary film. A warning today, there are SPOILERS AHEAD for anyone who'd like to go into Moon with as little ruined as possible

When technology gets advanced enough to make suitable replacements for humans, we're going to use them as our slaves. Right now we view the technologically sub-human as means to our needs, and why shouldn't we? We've yet to create anything sentient. But when we do, and I'm more and more convinced that it's a "when" not an "if" (in all fairness this convincing mostly has to do with people showing off their smart phones to me, but still... progress) whether we'll be filled with empathy toward our creations is not likely a given. The android and the clone aren't exactly the same thing, but they often serve the same purpose in science fiction. They're human stand-ins, whose genuine humanity is questionable. In some stories they're not advanced enough to raise the inevitable moral questions, or they're often comic relief, or exist in futures where they've already attained full equality. But frequently they are shown as created with the intent of doing the will of their creators... us. Such tales from the point of view of humans often involve apathetic individuals coming to sympathize with them. Tales from the point of view of the clone and/or replicant can provide more dramatic introspection. In terms of point of view, both of our films today feature a little from column A and a little from column B.

 

At the beginning of Moon, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) believes himself to be another in a long line of employees of Lunar Industries, coming to the end of his three-year-stint on the moon, looking forward with great anticipation to going home and working on mending his relationship with his wife. He's almost got it right. He is, in fact, one in a long line of clones implanted with memories, under the mistaken belief that he is the real Sam Bell, when in fact the life and wife he believes are waiting for him back on Earth have long since changed. Oh, and it's not his three-year employment contract coming to an end, it's his three-year lifespan. Blade Runner follows Deckard (Harrison Ford) a retired police officer who specialized in tracking down and "retiring" (if you don't know what that means, guess) replicants, or bioengineered humans. Deckard is brought in to find a collection of escaped replicants whose short life-spans are coming to an end, and in the process encounters more advanced replicants unaware even of their in-humanness.

 
Here we have the two most central issues to the human copies of Blade Runner and Moon. The first is lifespan. Dissatisfied humans don't get the opportunity to confront their creator (whoever or whatever that may be). And most world religions try to foster an attitude of thankfulness not anger. No such option from the replicants of Blade Runner who, like the Sam clones of moon are questioning and attempting to comprehend their mortality. In both cases, hell hath no fury like a human copy with the desire to survive. It's the ultimate motivator, much to the detriment of their human creators and it's the central motivation that fuels both stories. The second issue to these characters is the extent which was taken to keep them from understanding their true nature. Anyone whose ever had even the slightest element of their identity revealed to them as false knows that it's a monumental shock. Imagine the entire essence of your identity being a lie, that it was engineered that way intentionally, so you could be used. It's easy to root for the Sam clones and not surprising that even the intense brutal mug of Blade Runner baddie Roy Batty (Ruter Hauer) has become synonymous with that of the sympathetic villain.

And what of our heroes? In Moon, Sam begins under the belief that he's an original human and slowly comes to accept that he is a clone. We see the story through both the eyes of a human and a clone. And interestingly enough through the eyes of someone who still depends on a lesser sentient servant. Sam's computer Gertie waits on his every need. Perhaps he's not advanced enough to know otherwise. As for Blade Runner's Deckard, he also give us the point of view of both a human and a replicant, since his identity is eternally in question. Whether you believe he's human (like Harrison Ford) or a replicant (like Ridley Scott) is likely to color how you react to the film around him. But whether he's hunting down his own kind or not, it's difficult to cheer for him.

What does it mean to be human? The ultimate question asked by these two films, and ultimately unanswered, though ultimately we see more of ourselves in our copies than ourselves. It's not exactly a message but a meaningful ponderance from two films who suggest that man's long history of inhumanity will maintain itself well into the future.

 

Other Cinematic Relatives: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1992), A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), Never Let Me Go (2010), Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

Distant Relatives: 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Tree of Life

Robert here w/ Distant Relatives, exploring the connections between one classic and one contemporary film.

It's not exactly the secret of the cinematic year that Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Terrence Malick's Tree of Life are two films of a similar kind. Indeed as Tree of Life hype grew to its crescendo this past spring and reviews started hitting the web it seemed like almost a requirement for writers to reference the 1968 science fiction classic. There were, I think, three reasons for this. First, which we'll get to shortly, that the two films do indeed have much in common in terms of theme and narrative. Second that both are epic length stories that many cinephiles consider high-water marks in the medium, and finally the involvement of Douglas Trumbull whose special effects work helped realize 2001: A Space Odyssey. When it was announced that he'd be working on The Tree of Life and creating sequences of a cosmic nature, the inexorable relationship between these two movies seemed predestined, and no one had even seen the Malick film yet. But with all the hooting about space and science fiction and experimental narrative and Trumble effects, the connection between 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Tree of Life now feels more like a solid fact to state and less like a flexible area to explore. So let's explore it.
 
Questions about the meaning of life, ponderances about the origin of the world and wonderment about how it all connects isn't a new or even unusal theme in moviedom. But most of the time, in fact almost all of the time, filmmakers feel the need to create an onscreen surrogate for both themselves and the audience to ask these questions. So most films about the meaning of life involve a solitary figure, a writer or an artist or a chess-playing knight meandering about wondering out loud what it all means. In movies about the meaning of life, it is the goal of the protagonist to find the meaning of life. Not so in The Tree of Life and 2001. While characters do ponder big mysteries, it's the narrative itself that takes us to the origins of creation. And to be clear, I'm using the term "origins of creation" pretty loosely here applying it to both the big bang for The Tree of Life and the early evolution of man for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Events past, much like stars in the sky, seem to be much farther from us and closer to one another than truth would have it. But in each film, the point is the same, that the events that will make up the significant dramatic conflict in the picture mean very little without cosmic context.

 
This context involves where we've been, where we are, and where we're going, scientifically & religiously speaking. The purpose of showing both the grandeur of the universe and the primal nature of man's past is to suggest our smallness and the smallness of the characters in these films. To them, their lives and their conflicts are the encompass of their universe. But in the scope of history, they are miniscule. Malick and Kubrick do this by creating worlds that at first seem dissimilar but upon further investigation are very alike. If there's any consistent criticism of Stanley Kubrick it's that he is a "cold" director, caring less for his humans than for his technique. 2001: A Space Odyssey plays into the hands of this criticism, featuring stoic human characters and providing our only emotional payoff from the mind of a machine. This seems in great contrast to Malick's film about the daily life, fears, loves and feelings of a family. But Malick's filmography has always presented us with the image of a harmonious world invaded by human violence, apathy, and destruction. The present set segments of The Tree of Life (the ones featuring Sean Penn that have been criticized as a somewhat pointless framing device) show us a world constructed, or is that destructed, by modern technology, and are as cold and austere as anything found in a Kubrick film.

But neither director holds as much ill-will toward the human race as you may suspect. Both films ultimately take us to our unknown future, whether that be the future of one man or all of humanity is, in both cases, ambiguous at best. Interpretations of the "star child" into which astronaut Dave Bowman turns at the end of 2001 are varied and range from the suggestion of alien manipulation to natural evolution to spiritual rebirth. Kubrick's film's finale may generally be considered more atheistic than Malick's but even the then pope (John Paul II, quite the film buff) was said to be a fan and considered the film one of great spirituality. This spirituality is how most people have viewed The Tree of Life's final sequence which presents us with a "heaven" that doesn't exactly adhere to any specific religion's interpretation of such a place, but still seems to present man's ultimate destination as one of great peace, community and beauty. In addition to this, both films seem to view mankind's journey to this ultimate destination as one essentially intertwined with the act of creation and the relationship between the creator and the created, whether it be ape and tool, parent and child, scientist and AI, god and man, and may I add, filmmaker and film. The message seems to be that it is creation that give us meaning, and advances us from insignificantly miniscule and suffering to, ultimately, a state of grace.

Other Cinematic Relatives: Such is the uniqueness of these two films, no other were immediately apparent to me. I'll let you fill in your suggestions in the comments.

Distant Relatives: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Assassination of Jesse James

Robert here w/ Distant Relatives, exploring the connections between one classic and one contemporary film.

What is it about the American West that endures? No other specific time and place has been so ubiquitous in film that it's spurred its own genre. There's no genre for colonial films, or films about the depression. There's no genre for medieval movies or ancient Egypt. The closest we come are "period films" (more of a general catagorization than a genre), epics (a designation that depends on more than mere setting) and war movies (narrowly limited depending on the war, but so many wars to choose from) but none of them have the same lure as the Western. America being as young as it is, was founded during a time of general civility. Yes it was born out of Revolution, but the civilization itself was defined by men in suits and manners and polite society. We had no knights on crusades, no mythical quests, no wild lawless wilderness to tame... except when we did, out in the West. And thus, the Western has become the defining genre of American Mythology. Our two films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford are about a time when what was known as "The West" was dying and thus in order to endure had to be mythologized. Both feature the symbolic death of a figure who represents the times. And both start with the arrival of an outsider.
 
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is less about James (Brad Pitt) and more about Bob Ford (Casey Afflect), a young man who grew up on tall tales of the legendary outlaw Jesse James and now finds himself part of the man's much diminished gang. Call him the original fanboy, obsessed with a reality and an excitement that cannot possibly exist outside of his own imagination. Ford learns that James, despite being well over the hill crime-wise is still quite dangerous and out of fear and paranoia becomes the man who shoots James dead (no spoiler needed I hope) and comes to play a new part in the legend he believed in when he was young. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance follows James Stewart as Ransom Stoddard, who arrives in Shinbone a town being menaced by the outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Stodden befriends a local (John Wayne), falls for the woman he's courting and eventually sets up residence in the town determined to help nurture it into the union through representative democracy but not until an inevitable showdown with Valance, in which, as legend came to have it, the ernest amateur Stodden prevailed over the evil gunslinger.

 

Stylistically these films couldn't be more different. Jesse James with its langorous pacing and expressive Roger Deakins' cinematography draws comparisons to Terrence Malick. Liberty Valance was one of the most workmanly crafted films from great workman director John Ford. This was no The Searchers with its sweeping vistas and color photography. Valance was shot on sound stages and most of the action takes place indoors or within the confines of city limits. Structurally they're more similar. Our outsiders enter into the waning days of an already mythologized west and find that the reality is not what they've been lead to believe, take action to affect that reality and get lost again in the myth. About this process, both films are deeply cynical. And where better to start finding this cynisism than in their titles. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a "wink wink" reference to the central mystery of the film and the fact the man who "shot" Liberty Valance is not most likely the man who actually shot Liberty Valance. The Jesse James title is even more incisive, inserting loaded terms like "assassination" and "coward" into it's otherwise expository explanation of the entire plot.
 
From there it gets worse. Jesse James postulates as Bob Ford learns that the west wasn't filled with adventures, just rampages and Liberty Valance suggests that the time's celebrated heroics were really acts of desperation. Our "heroes" (in the heaviest of quotes) suffer not only from the lawlessness and chaos around them but from the world's determination not to believe anything but the mythologized old west they've come to love. In Liberty Valance, after the old west and it's human embodiment dies, all that's left is an emasculated old public official, not much more useful than the world he came into. In Jesse James, after the death of Jesse and subsequently the west, all that's left is the reviled Ford, celebrated because he's reviled and then reviled more because he's celebrated. A murderer of a murderer more despised than the man he killed because the man he killed represented something exciting and romantic. What Ford represents is the banal truth, which people will refuse to believe at any cost. Similarly Stodden's vanquisihing of Liberty Valance is a great story, the truth of which couldn't matter less. "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," declares a newspaperman to him at the end of the film.

 

Just as there's no other genre quite like the Western, no other genre is quite so fond of deconstructing itself. We're almost to the point where the de-mythologizing of the Old West has circled back and become part of the myth again. But in all of cinema history, few Westerns are as self aware, self-referential, and self-contained as these two stories about infamous legends, and the men who killed them.
 
Other Cinematic Relatives: My Darling Clementine (1946), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1968), Three Amigos! (1986), Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

Distant Relatives: The Pawnbroker and A Single Man

Robert here w/ Distant Relatives, exploring the connections between one classic and one contemporary film.

Dead spouses are great dramatic devices. They can give your lead character an extra dose of pain and pathos and add some emotional heft to a bland plot, some sympathy to a distant character, or in the case of a good-old-fashioned revenge movie, incite the action. At its most banal, the dead lover is an obvious cliche. But occasionally it can sweep us up into the protagonist's psyche, force us to ask their same questions about our lives and loves. Those questions, pondered and feared by anyone whose ever been in love: "What if this person died, suddenly, tragically, unexpectedly?" "What if I weren't there to save them, help them, comfort them?" "What if their death were no more to me than a vanishing act. One day here, the next gone... no farewell, no funeral." "What would become of them?" "What would become of me?" These are worst case scenarios to be sure, and we repress the thoughts by telling ourselves that such occurrences are rare (I imagine the exact same thing that anyone whose ever experienced it told themselves too). We watch movies about people who've had such experiences not out of morose voyeurism but out of a desire to understand a state of being that we hope never to be in but realize we easily could.
 
Our two films today follow men who are mourning the death of a companion and who are, to use a cliched phrase, dead inside themselves. The Pawnbroker tells the story of Holocaust survivor Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger), a man who lost his family and now lives surrounded by the dirt and corruption of New York City. At roughly the same time, on the other end of the continent, George Falconer (Colin Firth) is barely coping with the death of his partner Jim. George, the subject of A Single Man lives among the sunny skies and bright colors of 1960's Los Angeles. The environments of George and Sol, while polar opposites serve the same dramatic purpose, to highlight their state of mind. Sol's is representative. George's is sadly ironic. Added to this is more than a hit of expressionist style, the gritty choppy manic pacing of The Pawnbroker contrasted with the color boosting and desaturated highs and lows of A Single Man.

Both George and Sol have similar supporting characters in their lives. There are two to whom I'd like to draw your attention. They, in turn, represent George and Sol's impossible futures and unattainable pasts. To George, his friend Charlie's (Julianne Moore) propositions of a move back to England and a quaint straight existence are both impossible and offensive. And for Sol, the advances and attempted comforts of a neighborly Social Worker are something he has no intention of dignifying. Both paint pictures of a future that neither man wants to partake in, yet they only serve to emphasize the pain of the present. As for the past, it shows up in the form of two young potential proteges. For George that man is Kenny, a student who is fascinated by him and a bit flirtatious. For Sol it's his shop assistant Jesus, whose desire to learn the business he continually ignores or rebuffs. Both of these young men possess not necessarily much optimism or intelligence but a youthful exuberance, an almost recklessness that neither Sol nor George have present in them anymore. While George engages with Kenny in a way that Sol does not with Jesus, it may be because George has given up on life and planned a suicide while Sol has decided to go on being a living ghost.
 
Ultimately these films don't have any particularly encouraging messages for the man whose loved and lost. George and Sol float through their existence, flashing back to the moments that have defined them, whether they were present or not. Both men are presented opportunities to feel again, and though they resist and resist, they eventually give in tho their humanness in different but equally tragic ways. For Sol it is a new sadness too deep to ignore, for George a fleeting optimism, quickly snuffed out. Both men are outsiders in worlds that should be embracing them and comforting them, but instead are shunning and fearing them. Both men may have to work too hard to heal. But messages about learning to love again and letting people in aren't the point. The point is to get into the minds of these men and understand what makes them work, how their sorrows manifest, how their lives have become irreparably changed. These films give us insights into the inner workings of men on a precipice none of us ever hope to be. Neither film promises much jubilation but both deliver plenty of humanity.

 
Other Cinematic Relatives: Veritgo (1958), Last Tango in Paris (1973), About Schmidt (2002), Up (2009)

Distant Relatives: The Apartment and Sideways

Robert here w/ Distant Relatives, exploring the connections between one classic and one contemporary film.

Nice Guys Who Don't Finish At All

Consider the Romantic Comedy as made for men. In this day and age, the genre is so associated with being poor in quality and aiming only for a female demographic, you could easily forget that they used to make 'em good and with male protagonists. Of course, Hollywood making movies by men for men shouldn't be a surprise. And even today, most romantic comedies made to appeal to women are made by men (which is one small part of why they're so bad). That said, the male hero of a Romantic Comedy is quite different from the male hero of any other kind of movie. "Nebbish" is the word that comes to mind. Possibly also "schmuck." Both 1960's The Apartment and 2004's Sideways subscribe to this setup. Both Jack Lemmon's C.C. Baxter and Paul Giamatti's Miles are serious sad sacks, and both films play hard with the "nice guy finishes last" dilemma painting our heroes as upstanding men smeared merely by the actions of their peers, those cads who would seek to give all men a bad name. But the reality in both cases isn't as simple, and these films know it.

 

As The Apartment opens, C.C. Baxter is one of many nameless office clerks. But what sets him apart is a sly deal he's cut for himself. By lending out his apartment for the affairs and liaisons of his superiors, he's set himself up to ascend the corporate ladder with ease. The rub comes when he discovers that Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) the adorable lift operator for whom he pines has been regularly visiting his apartment with his boss, cad of cads, Mr. Sheldrake. In Sideways, Miles too is one of the nameless lonely who trips through life toward increasingly vanishing dreams. He's a writer but not quite fit for success. He's a wine connosieur but not quite enough to be a pro. When his friend Jack suggests he open a wine store, he scoffs. When Jack compliments his writing, he shrugs it off. By comparison, Jack isn't particularly talented in anything other than picking up women which he does... lots. Jack and Miles head for California wine country on a two-man Bachelor Party for Jack where Jack anticipates and finds plenty of tail. Miles, not anticipating it, finds Maya (Virginia Madsen), perhaps his perfect woman.

Turning a Blind Eye to the Not-So-Nice Guy

So what happens to our nice guys? Does C.C. Baxter steal Miss Kubelik away from Sheldrake? Does Miles woo Maya without complications from Jack? First they must overcome a truth of themselves that the women in their lives are sure to discover, and that we the audience slowly come to realize after their charming patheticness wears off. These two nice guys aren't all that nice, not really. Oh they're not terrible people or anything. Theirs are sins of omission. Heck, theirs are lives of omission. Miles and Baxter don't do anything bad because they don't do anything, period. If they seem like nice guys it's often only by comparison. Under the looming shadow of Jack and Sheldrake, Miles and Baxter seem perfectly gentlemanly, but they are really enablers of the behaviors of the men whose lives they seem to eye with jealousy. Not that they want to lie to and betray women. They'd just prefer to not finish last. But they've given up the race, conceded victory to the cheaters and stopped caring about who gets used up on the way to the finish line.

 

With both of these films ending on an ambiguous note, it can't definitively be said that these are stories of the guys who get the girl. More accurately perhaps, these are stories of guys who, with the help of the women they want, come to understand and overcome their own timid failings. They realize that their inaction is in fact approval of all the action being gotten around them. In what may be a telling difference of expectations after forty-four years of cinema, Baxter is asked by his film to make major alterations to his life and abandon his sly apartment deal. Miles isn't expected to overtly reject Jack or any element of his life, just to understand, and to make a choice. Whether the choices these men make eventually finish them ahead (or at least not last) in the race of life is unknown. But at least they come to learn the difference between being a good person who fails and being an ambivalent person who fails to try.

 

Other Cinematic Relatives: Cyrano de Bergerac (1950/1990), The Graduate (1968), Broadcast News (1987), The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005)