White Trash Baroque

Paul Dano plays a man with developmental disabilities in Prisoners, a thriller that came out this fall, and at first look the performance seems like prototypical caricature.  Silent, blank-faced and pathetic, Dano's Alex Jones skulks through his scenes as a predator who does not seem to understand his own debauched status, or sins.  He just is what he is:  pure nameless feeble-minded evil.  But the movie, and Dano, do not allow us a lot of comfort in our judgment of Alex as that sort of freak.  In fact, by the end of the movie, no one is exactly who they and we think they are, and yet nothing really has changed. 

Ostensibly, the movie is about two little girls being abducted on Thanksgiving in a suburban working-class neighborhood in Pennsylvania.  There's a rainy, grim fairy-tale focus from the start, and the director, Denis Villeneuve, has a beautiful fetish for grit and pallor.  The center of his focus is a beaten-up RV that seems to absorb the two girls.  Next up is the frantic chase to find them, headed by Jake Gyllenhaal as a police detective who is enjoying a solitary Thanksgiving feast at a local Chinese restaurant when he gets the call.  The drab world Prisoners depicts has a sort of an inner-growl to it, as Villeneuve fills the screen with busted walls, rotten wood, and lots and lots of rain.  Hugh Jackson, as one of the dads, carries the movie as his emotions transform from horror and grief into torture and sadism.  It turns out the main suspect is Dano's Alex, that no-good weirdo from down the street who once he is arrested doesn't even have enough sense to answer polygraph questions to the point they can measure the depths of his deception.  According to the detective, Alex has the "IQ of a 10 year old."  This lack of intelligence and morals only increases Jackman's father's anger and eventually he kidnaps Alex and tortures him in an abandoned apartment. 

The paralleling of intelligence with morals is a toxic leftover of course of old-school early 20th Century eugenics and phrenology, and the movie depends on that paradigm in order to place Alex in the context of plot and atmosphere, but somehow Dano's diligent dedication to the part renders Alex's identity as something more than just genetics gone "horribly and predictably wrong" (that's a quote from Henry H. Goddard's 1912 eugenics masterpiece, The Kallikak Family: a Study in the Heredity of Feeble-mindedness).  Alex through the course of the movie's wrenching, white-trash-baroque plot becomes a sort of anti-hero that isn't heroic but has somehow survived a secret holocaust horribly scathed and yet supernaturally real. 

Dano does not escape the stereotype as much as he bores through it.  His face is both Joan-of-Arc-spiritual and stilted, silent-movie delirious.  He seems to drift through the interstices of thought and place, a ghost that isn't involved in his own story and yet has to live through it, without any resources or access to relief.  Somehow Dano makes that helplessness and hopelessness into a sort of mantra that we can hook into, without turning Alex Jones into a demon or an angel or a "normal guy" underneath it all. 

Alex Jones is what he is, somehow, and I don't really know what that is outside of being human.  Dano gives us a human being that has none of the constraints and controls of the usual movie performance.  He's making performance-art inside the chilly, horror-movie contexts of Prisoners.  And it's a total compliment to Villeneuve that the movie's moral compass is more of a spider-web than a navigational tool.  The whole piece seems to take its marching orders from Dano's blank, beautiful, unnerving face.

The Artist Is Annoying

 

 

So Bill and I were bored last night, channel-surfing, and finally decided on this documentary on HBO called Marina Abramovic:  The Artist Is Present, about "the grandmother of performance art" and her recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  What an experience 14 minutes of this thing was.  We could only take 14 minutes though.  It was like a parody from the get-go, and as I watched I kept laughing at every move this thing made:  the pretentious, pseudo-Phillip-Glass music, the long close-ups of the artist herself with her side-swept braid hanging over her left shoulder like a beautiful snake waiting to whisper to you, and of course the always fun back-story of how performance art was in response to painting blah blah and blah. 

 

The interviews, especially with Abramovic herself and the curators and critics chosen to speak because they love her, had the starchy self-important self-indulgence of a really good Christopher Guest blow-out, except of course nobody was joking around.  14 minutes in, when the doc follows the artist to her backwoods compound and she is making vegetable soup for some of her followers, I kept thinking this just has to be a joke.  But then no:  the followers get off the Greyhound outside her country estate, walk onto the grounds, take off their clothes and have a fun little group-baptism, in the artist's pond.  One follower says into the camera:  "I've never thought about life in this way before."  Or something like that. 

 

The language used is about how performance makes us question civilization, but I didn't question anything about art or civilization watching the 14 minutes I watched.  I just kept laughing.  Not from the outrageousness of Abramovic's stunts (like the artist driving a van around in circles for hours screaming outside a museum, or the artist standing inside the museum naked and brushing her hair saying how she must look beautiful).  I was laughing at how archaic and dumb performance art looks now that it's been codified and registered as art.  And I kept thinking too, about "outsider art" (of course) and how it is right now going through that same codification, that same institutionalization.  Doing shocking things is no longer funny or epiphanous or even silly; it's just an exercise in self expression, which kind of deflates all the bull-shit critics and curators say about Abramovic.  I kept thinking:  who cares?  Watch any stupid reality TV show and you'll get the same fix:  outrageous people doing stupid things, in clothes or not, is what it is.  It doesn't elicit questions, or even interest.  It is now officially background noise.  

 

 

 

We ended up watching Guest's For Your Consideration on DVD, because somehow actual parody is funnier and more relaxing than unintentional parody I guess.  Plus Catherine O'Hara's slam-bang even empathetic skewering of an actress thinking she's on the verge of super stardom somehow reminded me of Abramovic's performance in The Artist Is Present:  flaky, sweet, creepy, and in the end so self-indulgent the fact that the empress has no clothes is not even jarring or upsetting.  It's just the way things are.  No big whoop. 

 

Knock yourself out Marina, right there in middle of the MOMA.  I guess some people might be impressed or nostalgic.  Who knows?

John Hinckley, Jr., Captain America

The other day on the radio the announcer said John Hinckley, Jr., the guy who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981 and was found innocent by reason of insanity, wants more privileges.  Instead of going home to stay with his mother for ten days a month, he wants 24.  The Federal Attorneys in John's hearing on this matter quoted the Secret Service as saying that John is a liar and narcissist.  They said, for example, this summer his mother dropped John off at the movie theater to see Captain America.  But instead of going to the movie, he walked over to the Barnes & Noble and looked at books about presidential assassinations.  Then he went out to a bench, the Secret Service said, and sat down in front of the movie theater, telling his mom when she picked him up that he saw Captain America, and also later that week John went to a gathering with his mother and told friends and neighbors how wonderful Captain America was and how they must see it.

This story is reminiscent of the ridiculousness of a really good Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, but also showcases the tragic banality of real life.  The core of it is John searching out images of his own ghostly fame, that secret stardust the Secret Service will never see.  The unmitigated gall of this insane assassin!  Or is it just human nature?  Puffy-faced, intent on shaping his own weird shady legacy, John is a performance artist in this vignette, using Captain America as his cover and his allusion to bigger and better worlds, and to normalcy itself.  I haven't seen Captain America, but I did catch a preview of it, and it seemed to focus on the transformation of a skinny, heartfelt little guy who gets beefed up by a sci-fi machine in order to fight Nazis.  In the process of transformation a costume appears:  red white and blue with a shield and mask and everything.

Flash on John:  pants that probably don't fit, pit stains, hang-dog yearning.  A sadsack with mental problems looking for love in all the wrong places, dreaming of that one day when he got what he wanted.  All that attention, all that drama.  He still walks the earth like that.  And the Secret Service follows.  There has to be a loneliness like a hot light reaching through his clothes, burning and not burning his skin, like someone is always taking a picture of his heart. 

He doesn't know any better, and yet he's guilty none-the-less.  The subtitle of Captain America is "The First Avenger."  John could have chosen ten or eleven other summer blockbusters at the multiplex as his alibi.  I'm betting that subtitle was what drew him to that initial scheme.   

Love and Hate

Louis CK is a genius because he is pissed off and trying to figure it out, without allowing his rage to become his schtick.  He deals in taboos (chief among them both loving and hating your kids, loving and hating your friends, loving and hating the whole damn world really), but he does not seem like he is conspicuously pushing buttons just to go blue.  His new TV show, Louie, on FX Thursday nights at 10:30, is a revelation.  Low-budget (the network made a deal with him to give him minimal money upfront for each episode promising no network-exec notes), fidgety and full of feeling, Louie feels like a cinema-verite 1970s movie with a long haired Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman sauntering somewhere around in the background.  Louis CK basically plays himself, and in the episode I saw the whole thing was a slice of his weird, boring life done so stylishly drab it felt like art.  Intermingled with the scenes of domestic "bliss" (like his daughter bitching because she doesn't get a Popsicle like his other daughter did, or his middle aged pregnant sister farting in the ER) are bits from his hilarious standup.  Louis CK is the 21st Century Jerry Seinfeld in the standup gigs:  foulmouthed but genuinely interested in real life, finding laughs in banality but also miffed that reality is so stupidly funny and banal.  "Performance art" is one of those pretentious terms we often slap onto whatever seems smugly self-contained and well just plain obtuse.  I'd say Louis CK is a "performance artist"  let out of the constraints of that trope:  he brings new insight into what performance means, while creating a small, sharp TV show that's reinventing what "TV shows" can do and be.