I know we’ve been here before…but I just saw Eclipse!  Last time, I wrote about the books.  Now let me indulge in the movie world.

I went with a girlfriend to see Eclipse at D.C.’s Uptown Theater this week; we resignedly raised the average age a good decade.  I have to say the producers/directors/screenwriter have nailed the movies.  (I know people complained about New Moon, but how can you expect Edward to be on screen when he spends the book away from Forks?  And I like watching people feeling lovelorn.)

The movies are fiercely stylized, which is the only way to tell such fantastical and romantic stories of vampires and werewolves.  It’s a delightfully choreographed dance that unfolds and resolves itself.  The screenwriter is a genius: she somehow communicates hundreds of pages of critical information.  Although I can’t believe that non-readers would pick up on all the nuances without the book as background.

The screen is a lush visual feast from the mountains and forests to the magical meadow where we start (and end?) each film.  I could never quite visualize the Cullen’s home in the books, but I love its representation and the way in which it adds an extra layer of differentiation between Edward and Jacob: contrasting the middle class, modernist, cultured home of the Cullens with the blue collar, down to earth, homes on the reservation.

The computer-animated wolves are a challenge, but at this point I’m used to them. However, I was horrified that Victoria is now played by Bryce Dallas Howard instead of Rachelle Lefevre.

Rachelle (top) kicked ass on screen and Bryce has no power!  She looks scared!  Thankfully she has little screen time, but it was a major casting error.

The center of the movie is appropriately the delicious rivalry between Edward and Jacob that reaches new heights in Eclipse!

Team Jacob has much to be proud of…Taylor Lautner looked even hotter than last time around and he gets all the wisecracks.  Team Edward must have thrilled at Robert Pattinson’s anger and his romanticism and the ring!

At the end, we were sated and yet hungry for more.  Not least, the human/vampire sex that awaits us in book four.  And knowing of our appetites, the producers are generously spinning out the finale into two movies.  I’m game.

These two posts I wrote were clever. One was clever by being funny and gimmicky. The second was clever by positing a theory about moving through urban spaces and memory and all that. While I was writing each of these posts, I was also, because I love multi-procrastinating, watching The Five Obstructions, which I think might be responsible for my having deleted both of these posts.

I knew going in what the idea was, as you might even without having seen it. It was sort of a “thing.” Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has somehow gotten his own favorite filmmaker Jørgen Leth to agree to remake his 1967 short film The Perfect Human according to five sets of rules, to be determined at whim by von Trier in the process of their conversations. The idea seems to be a sort of murder-your-darlings fantasy on von Trier’s part—the darling itself belonging both to Leth, who made it, and von Trier, who idolized it.

I won’t get into the particular obstructions here, but they range from the technical (no single edit may be longer than 12 frames) to the subjective (it must be filmed in the “worst place in the world”). Each time, Leth is terrified by the “diabolical” restrictions put on his style, and each time, he nevertheless ends up creating a little masterpiece, each with the same cool, clean aesthetic of his original film. He proves again and again that the artist is simply himself, and cannot be another. Von Trier gets frustrated and says that he wants to see Leth like a tortoise on his back, flailing, and that the next one should be crap. It’s OK to make crap. And it’s never crap. Leth cannot let himself make crap.

In the end, von Trier seems to admit that the experiment failed. The aesthetic obstructions don’t upend the artist. They inspire him. In trying to offer him impossible tasks, von Trier is merely giving him material. This is something that should not be new to anyone who writes, of course.

The more interesting aspect of the film, to me, was the therapeutic relationship that develops between Leth and von Trier. Leth resents, then flouts, then craves, then avidly applies himself to the obstructions, seeing the freedom in submitting to the will of a lesser filmmaker. Von Trier sees his own vanity and belligerence reflected back at him in the films, and seems hardly able to appreciate their accomplishment. Each thinks so intensely about their own desires of the other that they can’t actually see what the other is doing until the end.

It made me wonder if I have not been obstructed enough recently—commanded to do, but commanded not to do. It’s a tantalizing scenario, and one that is highly productive. I am tired of my own wiles.

- “You sack of wine!” Whoa! I’d heard Troy was bad, but this clip was positively bad-tastic!

- I enjoyed being reminded how ludicrously poor the acting was in the Star Wars prequels. Just what kind of accent is Hayden Christensen attempting here?

- Seeing Tom Hanks do a snippet of Forrest Gump now is just painful. And I was not a hater when the movie came out.

- “Cheese and crackers!” M. Night Shyamalan is such a hack.

- So… much… Schwarzenegger.

- I REALLY want to see Battlefield Earth now. Could it possibly be… the worst movie ever made? Anyone want to join for a viewing?

Click here to view the embedded video.

My capsule review: surprisingly beautiful, stressful for this acrophobe to watch, utterly predictable in terms of plot and character, with terrible dialogue (and really, “unobtainium”?) and the expected racism.

SPOILER ALERT: Further half-baked thoughts ahead.

I’m not an expert on talking about the expected racism, but basically Avatar is a much less sophisticated version of Dances with Wolves: a white man encounters the mysterious beauty of the unspoiled Native people and becomes one of them — but he’s special enough that only he can save the natives from the genocidal onslaught of the other white men.**

People like SEK can explicate the structure of Avatar‘s racism better than I can, but a first pass finds racism not just in the idea that the white ex-Marine Sully (Sam Worthington) has “what it takes” to lead the N’avi in a way that none of their thousands of skilled and wise warrior/hunters do, but also in the portrayal of the N’avi as noble savages, perfectly in tune with the ecosystem and, literally, the world-spirit of Pandora.

But there’s another side to the racial politics of both Dances with Wolves and Avatar. In both films, we end up hating the white Americans. They’re fucking loathsome. And sure, we white Americans in the audience manage to dissociate ourselves from the white Americans on screen by identifying with the race-traitor hero, so we avoid taking full moral responsibility for the genocide we’re witnessing.

But here’s where Avatar‘s relative lack of sophistication actually made things kind of interesting. In Dances with Wolves, the U.S. Army is the Army of the 19th century, full of racists with bizarre facial hair who are colorably not us, modern sophisticates that we are. (Okay, I’ll speak for myself here.)*** But in Avatar, the “Company” that Sully and Sigourney Weaver’s Dr. Augustine**** work for is, basically, a company that any of us might work for. Giovanni Ribisi’s loathsome boss is a boss that any of us might have — or become, given the right incentives. In fact, although some Company workers and soldiers use racist epithets to refer to the N’avi, the film makes absolutely clear that what’s driving the genocide isn’t the logic of racism, but the logic of an imperialist capitalism directly analogous to our current world-system. The N’avi are to be killed because quarterly profits and shareholder value demand it.

James Cameron has staged a movie about the Native American genocide but cast the contemporary U.S. capitalist empire in the bad guy’s role. So it was quite a, how you say, frisson on Christmas evening to be sitting in a huge theater in the heart of the imperial capital listening to the audience cheer the victory of the Native Americans over General Petraeus and the U.S. Marines. No wonder conservatives aren’t happy with the movie — although the linked article, and most conservative commentary I’ve seen is a bit obtuse about what’s so challenging about it. Avatar suggests nothing less than the radical moral rot and ultimate self-destruction of the capitalist system — and James Cameron has made it look so awesome that audiences are cheering, a billion dollars’ worth. Like the space marine said to the alien, “Cosmic, man.”

———-
*What, you don’t know this one? I think it’s Cole Porter.

**It’s a key feature of Avatar that, in a head-smackingly obvious way, the blue N’avi are meant to be closely analogous to Native Americans, despite a few other “tribal” characteristics — African, perhaps Asian, and some Tolkienesque Wood Elf — thrown in.

***I’m trying to be wary of interpellating my reading audience.

****I wish more had been made in the film of the complicity of “pure” science in the colonial/genocidal project — but that’s expecting way too much.

Whether it’s the desire to find a home among former friends from the war (which results in failure in the first movie, when Rambo discovers that the last surviving member of his team has died of cancer after arriving home), or the effort to bring others home (the other three movies), each movie seems to argue that there is an urgent need for Rambo to find a place for himself.  Home is endlessly elusive.  Either, it lies on the other side of the barbed-wire fences and mine fields, with hundreds of angry men and deadly machines in the way.  Or, it lies in the midst of it, in the center of the firefight, at the epicenter of the destruction.   Which is it?  Movie after movie, Rambo finds himself shifting back and forth, constructing a new life only to have it destroyed.  Friends die.  Potential love interests die.  Newly found allies die.  Caves and boats get blown up.  In Rambo’s world, everything he touches is abruptly made impermanent, on the verge of annihilation.

For Rambo, sometimes home is merely the past, those memories we cannot escape, mistakes we can’t erase.  Sometimes it lies in the future, in the unknown.  Rambo is at home in the dark, in the water, in the grimy mud walls, in the caves, jungles, and forgotten places of the world.  Sometimes home is where we can’t be, but would be if there were some way to break free of the shackles that keep us here.  For all his successful combat exploits and hair-rising escapes, Rambo remains a prisoner of war — one with no clue as to how to make his own way home.

Which oddly enough is a little like me this year.  Not so much the part about being a prisoner of war, but rather the bit about being stuck without a clear way home.  Thanks to the Canadian Passport Office rejecting my passport renewal (photographer forgot to date the photograph), I too am stuck in a foreign land, with miles of barbed wire fence and guard dogs between me and home.  If it weren’t for the polar bears… I’d risk it.

Still, I’m grateful for good friends who have offered me a place at their table for Christmas festivities.  Perhaps if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Rambo, it’s that no matter how many times “home” gets taken from you,  you have to keep trying to build a new one, and you can’t forget what remains of the ones you’ve left behind.  For Rambo home seems always in the midst of conflict and destruction.  For me, home is hidden in the maelstrom of words I write or would write, and buried in the chaotic memory of stories told, poems read, voices that I struggle to recall even as they fade, year after year.

I recall one night, long ago when I was a child.  My father was driving us back on a winter’s night from visiting a farming family we knew in northern Saskatchewan.  It was Christmas Eve.  We stopped at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, and looked up at the dark clear skies full of stars in their millions.  It was cold and very silent and perfect.  We were far far away from home, and yet felt so close to each other and to a world we could not see.  What is home?  Perhaps it’s wherever we long to return to, no matter how hard the road.

Here’s a poem for those like me and Rambo, who won’t be home this Christmas:

Counting Winters in Los Angeles

I no longer mark what falls in passing,
iron stones blazing through the night sky,
leaves turning dry in the autumn breeze,
or old men curled around fires
watching yesterday’s news offered up
as ashes to the dark.

Hiding in the concrete-celled city,
my head is full of another country’s snow,
a loose wind blowing through my room
at night, when I cannot sleep
and lie to myself in dreams
I’ve committed to memory.

I am a stranger to the city that burns
with too much neon. Each night
I wind my sun-burnt car
through towers of glass and steel,
listen to the radiant hum of static,
the muted signal of an invisible sun,
the slow ticking questions keeping time.

What winter will take me home
down an ice-covered road
past the grey boarded shacks,
beyond the bending river’s spine,
then plant me low
beneath the white-haired trees?

What wind will wrap itself
around my waist, and lower me down
to sleep and distant rain?