The Departed [2006] by Martin Scorsese

I don't understand how there can be near-unanimous acclaim for this film. Is it because Martin Scorsese and his renowned cast can do no wrong? Who can question the work of three-time Academy Award winning actor and legend Jack Nicholson? He is one of the best actors of his generation and of course when his fellow actors were promoting the film they all spoken about how much of a privilege it was to work with him. Is it difficult to notice that he can't actually act anymore; that he merely caricatures himself? Maybe he destroyed himself with playing The Joker in Batman (1989) for which he was given a percentage of the profits and made about $60 million dollars for one of the worst performances from a great actor in the history of cinema. His performance in The Departed was barely more restrained than The Joker. His performance is like a cartoon and utterly unconvincing as a real human being, despite being surrounded by grounded, effective performances. This makes sense discovering that he was given free-reign on set to improvise and ham it up, his director trusting that he is still a great artist, or simply too afraid to question him. Despite Scorsese's definite competence, Nicholson is unrestrained and detrimental.

12 Years a Slave [2013] by Steve McQueen

Violence without insight

The film's brutal and noble depiction of American slavery being unjust seemingly makes the film impervious to criticism. I happen to agree that slavery is an abomination, but I don't think that is a question being discussed in America or the world at the moment. As far as I know, it is a question that has been answered already. But the Academy can't help but pat themselves on the back because they have, for the first time, given their Best Picture award to a film written and directed by black filmmakers. Instead of feeling proud, I may instead wonder why they haven't been giving awards to filmmakers of diversity all these years. I suppose they are an American institution and they focus on American films and films that engage with the American sensibility. In this case they have chosen to acknowledge an issue which has largely been sorted in the American cultural mind.

I suppose it is a long process rewriting history to include the stories of the marginalised. This is a process that needs to happen, and for many people this is a process that needs to happen in large-scale accessible films that will be seen by many. Thus the film has its place.

However, the film doesn't offer any depth into the situation. There is no insight achieved into how this could happen, what toxic ideologies justified this culture on a political or a personal level. There was no attempt to place this man's experience into any large context at all. It was merely a depiction of the nobility of waiting for justice. For 12 years he worked as a slave and barely dared confront the legal injustice of his situation, let alone the moral injustice of it. He nobly waited for 12 years and eventually justice was done and he was able to return home to his family.

Titles at the end of the film not only tell us that the kidnappers were not brought to justice, but that the protagonist's salvation was extremely anomalous. Most free black people sold into slavery illegally were never freed. But that is not an inspiring story of overcoming adversity. That is a more accurate rewriting of American history to include the stories of marginalised, but not one that reinforces American values of waiting for things to get better, waiting for justice to have an opportunity to be done.

The violence of this film did not offer us a rewarding and insightful commentary on the grotesque cultural and political landscape of America that allowed slavery to flourish for so long.

Man of Steel [2013] by Zack Synder

I grew up with the Superman movies of 1978-1983. I may feel differently about them if I watched them now, but at the time they were gospels for a secular age, epic stories of good news in which we are saved from death by a superior being from space. 

Were these films really better than Zack Snyder's noisy and ridiculous Man of Steel? There was perhaps some charm in the characters, particularly Christopher Reeve's awkward Clark Kent. But there was one element that rendered those films transcendent, and that was the music of John Williams. Regardless of the artistic integrity of his compositions, his music has an undeniable power to lift a movie into a mythical realm that we humans find ourselves swept up into. One of Williams's techniques is the theme song, introduced at the beginning, woven delicately through the bulk of the film and then exploding upon the viewer in the exciting climax. It not only accelerates the urgency of the film's climax, but it brings the heart. Everything that is important to protect in the world is projected onto that music, and when we hear it thundering at the climax, at that crucial moment, in our hearts we know it will be okay. The careers of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas could not have happened without John Williams. He is the master of manipulation.

Man of Steel is said to be the Superman story of our age, of the 21^st century, our time of utmost scepticism and cynicism. In Zack Snyder’s film the score is indistinguishable from the sound effects and I could sum it up in one word, noise.

While there is an attempt to expand upon the story and the world by fully incorporating the destruction of Krypton and bringing its spiralling failed technocracy down to threaten Earth, the film spends most of its 143 minutes in noisy destruction that can barely even be called violence and that I would call silly if it wasn't so humourless. Sometimes statistics can be helpful, and it would be a sufficient film review if someone performed the simple but laborious task of calculating the percentage of the film's running time depicting a few almost invincible beings punching each other, banging into each other and just generally smashing their own and each other's bodies into as much human infrastructure as possible, resulting in the spectacularly banal destruction of first Smallville and its familiar chain stores and then New York and its skyscrapers. Things get smashed and crumble into dust. If that's your thing, you've found the right movie.

This type of violence cannot be considered dangerous or irresponsible, it is simply senseless and tedious. It is like an incoherent fascist ballet of utter abstraction, with bodies flying, falling and colliding. I suppose some people like this type of audio-visual stimulation. I can only assume they find it exciting, though I'm not sure what's exciting about it when there is no sense of coherent danger. It is noise. It is as gratuitous as any porn film. If it is the Superman film for our age, it is because, short of the character and plot sophistication of a Christopher Nolan film, it is more noise than you have ever experienced before, and in faster succession, and for longer; more smashes, more bangs, more whacks. A more appropriate comparison than The Dark Knight films would be the Batman TV series of the 1960s with its “Crash!” “Boff!” “Bang!” fight scenes. Those words are replaced by extremely complex computer graphics, but the experience is ultimately the same. Like any good porn film, the scenario that justifies the action is quickly swept aside for prolonged sequences of bodies pounding against each other.

Regarding the plot, Krypton was destroyed by inept committees, but the film adamantly rejects fascism. The military coup led by General Zod understandably wants to save the people of Krypton at any cost, even the genocidal colonisation of Earth. The benevolent line of Jor-El and Kal-El (Clark Kent) prefer instead to preserve truth, justice and the American way, by fighting fascist-inspired colonisation with the support of huge amounts of ammunition courtesy of the American government. And the Americans keep firing their guns, even though their enemies are totally impervious to them. Having justified the prolonged sequences of noisy destruction, the second objective of the plot is to create the hope and desire for a sequel, and you can bet $250,000,000 there is a sequel.

Is popular cinema trying to communicate with us?

Part One - Fight Club, the anti-anti-establishment film

Is popular cinema trying to communicate with us? Or is it just entertainment? What does Hollywood have to say? Have the lunatics taken over the asylum? Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters had too much fun, they unleashed LSD on America, bascially invented rave culture and provoked cultural transformation wherever their famous Further bus would take them. (This is all wittily captured in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.)

“The soul is innocent and immortal it should not die ungodly in an armed madhouse,” said Allen Ginsberg in his 1955 howl against the encroaching walls of the asylum. The San Francisco Police, and then Customs, tried to have his poem banned in 1957, declaring it “obscene”. Ten years later in the same city, after Kesey's crew ushered in the “summer of love” in 1967, it was too much. The Authorities laid down a new law they made up against the neuro-chemical exploration of the human mind.

In 1975 Kesey's novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was finally made into a film. Jack Nicholson plays McMurphy, the Average American Hero who ends up in prison because he likes to “fight and fuck too much”. He gets himself transferred into a mental hospital because he thinks it will be easier than the work farm. He enters a locked ward for white men with black attendants mopping the floor, sexless nurses tightly bound in their white smocks like nuns' habits, presided over by the white male elite in their distant offices. In the ward with the “mentally ill” white men is a huge Native American man who everyone assumes is deaf and dumb and not worth speaking to.
 

The dynamics of the ward are soon clear. Nurse Ratched is the blank-faced humourless dominatrix nun who cannot be crossed. She has her routine, her drugs and her calming music to make sure no man shows any inappropriate signs of life. When McMurphy reacts to this fascist scene the way any hot-blooded American male would, Nurse Ratched is forced to play her authority: the electroshock and lobotomy she has at her disposal for troublemakers.

Strength is rewarded with punishment. Confidence is shameful. If you fight you only give them permission to crush you. Strength is only appropriate for escaping at the right moment, no half measures, do or die. The Indian who appears to be deaf and dumb has been holding his strength in check. He picks his moment and he throws the heavy marble basin through the window and escapes for Canada. He has always had the strength, while the rest of them need the asylum, they depend on it, they depend on their weakness.

In 1975 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave its top five awards to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. These days, it seems they give their top awards to films that reinforce America in her greatness, 2013's Argo being the perfect example. Hollywood tells America who they are and Hollywood keeps the myth of “America the Great” in the minds of the whole world. Hollywood speaks America into existence. It is as if America is just an image projected onto a screen, and if you place your hand in the light the image disappears.

Hollywood has an endless array of comedies and romances in which the cultural norms, heterosexual monogamy above all else, are never questioned. There is also an endless supply of military violence-porn; war, horror, thriller, crime and action. All with the fundamental dichotomy of good guys/bad guys, criminals/police, terrorists/superheroes, communists/Americans. Those who resent authority, those who question the culture into which they were born, those who feel a vague discomfort at the paradigmatic universe America gives them, are taken into consideration. Fight Club is their masterpiece. It is the democracy of entertainment.

Fight Club has gained a reputation as a cult classic over the 15 years since its release and a narrow spectrum of cinephiles consider it one of the greatest films ever made, currently number ten on IMDb's top 250 films, as voted by users of the website.

The film appears, in its first act and in its publicity, to offer a social commentary on modern urban life and consumerism. I suppose this is rare in American media and entertainment for those who watch television and attend the multiplexes and would never consider watching a “foreign” film. Who would notice subtleties, who would notice quietly contrary commentaries when since birth we have been bombarded with a ceaseless and ever-increasing exposure to simulated stimulation. Perhaps Fight Club is a revelation for a generation of men who feel weak, inconsequential slaves to advertising and the nesting instinct.

Brad Pitt plays Tyler Durden, the ripped self-assured guru of the film, spouting philosophy without self-consciousness or self-reflection. “You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank.” When the two main characters first meet, Brad Pitt pities Edward Norton for being “clever”. He then blows up his apartment, full of all his carefully chosen furniture, and thus liberates him from consumerism.

It seems to me that the success of this film, its persistent cult appeal, lies in this rejection of consumerism and the cynical and nihilistic attitude that goes with it.

The city is bleak and desolate, as are the lives of its inhabitants. There are no opportunities, there is no hope, there is no wider environmental or cultural context. For the audience of this film, trapped inescapably in the cities, the jobs, the lives they inhabit, this critique must seem like a god-send, an acknowledgement from the media-entertainment god, so central to their lives, that their feelings are legitimate. That the film offers no alternative is significant. It is imperative in this nihilistic context to not present an object of hope, not a happy ending. “Losing all hope was freedom.” The film takes us to this point successfully, but no further.

Compare a Swedish film made four years later, Lilya 4-Ever, set in an equally desolate and hopeless city, “somewhere in what used to be the Soviet Union”. It is about a 16-year-old girl abandoned by her mother, forced into a squalid flat and finding herself with no support, no hope and no options but prostitution.

The film is as relentlessly bleak as Fight Club and as stylistically effective, but while Fight Club tries to maintain its cool detachment throughout, Lilya 4-Ever takes the risk of offering a hope beyond philosophy and beyond organisation. As Lilya's life deteriorates, the film zeroes in on a tiny hope. An outcast 11-year-old boy who lives nearby becomes the only friend in Lilya's world and together they dream of another world. When they each die they become angels with white wings. Their fantasy world is both pathetic and intensely moving. The film makes no secret of the fact that their Heaven is totally culturally-bound. There is a framed picture of angels that Lilya carefully packs and unpacks throughout the film, and when they finally achieve their transcendence after death, Heaven is a rooftop and they look out over the apartment blocks and cars, the dew and cold wind, and say, “Now the whole world is yours.” They play basketball on this rooftop in eternity and there is no one to puncture their basketball or rape them. It is pathetic, but it is beautiful and sad.

There is no spiritual transcendence in Fight Club. It starts off utterly meaningless and only reveals more meaninglessness from there. The answer is fighting. Women become irrelevant. “We're a generation raised by women. I wonder if another woman is the answer we really need.” The men get together in dark basements to fight, specifically to punch and smash each others' faces and heads until blood comes out. This is grotesquely intimate and it is liberating. It gives these otherwise weak men the confidence to bring aggression into their submissive lives. This is a controversial concept, and considering most commentary on the film focusses only on the first half, this is what people talk about.

The Fight Club is a support group for men, primates trapped in an industrial world. It is homosocial and it is consensual. “How much do you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?” It is self-expression and it is rejection of women. It distinguishes being a man, bloody fighting, with being the type of man that women want them to be, docile, domesticated. “Self-improvement is masturbation. Now self-destruction...” That you are insignificant is a given. That you learn to accept it is the journey of the film. Destroy yourself because you are already shit.

While Lilya 4-Ever shows where the protagonist has made poor choices with catastrophic consequences, Fight Club presents an inevitability to the trajectory of the plot and the deterioration of the character.

The film tries to have it every way at the same time. It begins as a social commentary, becomes a love story between Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, and then concludes as a thriller. The film negates itself spectacularly on every level. Consensual violence is the solution to consumerism but apparently the inevitable consequence of liberation and enlightenment is civil disobedience as destruction of property. The initial anti-consumerism theme so central to the film's cult status is subsequently forgotten.

The central love-affair of Pitt and Norton, with the homoerotic fighting, is undermined by the “twist” that the two characters are actually the same person. While this is a surprise the first time you see the film, it mostly fits in subsequent viewings. The only problem is that it negates the central relationship of the film. Presumably it would be too uncomfortable for such an audience to accept this homoerotic love story without the twist, and without the presence of Helena Bonham Carter's character, who Pitt is fucking and therefore Norton is also fucking. The relationship is explicitly functional and affectionless, mostly an annoying distraction for the characters, but a necessary assertion of essential heterosexuality.

The men, liberated from wage-slavery and advertising, emerge into an environment in which, “Sooner or later, we all became what Tyler wanted us to be.” They divorce themselves from all self-will and self-expression by repeating Tyler's rules in unison and executing his commands without reflection. Tyler Durden, guru of liberation, moulds these liberated men into an army of conformity and nihilism for the purpose of destruction of property.

There is one tiny clue to the real twist of the film. The real twist is not that Pitt and Norton are the same person but that the film shifts into thriller and proceeds to feverishly negate everything that came before. The clue is in the narration: “It's called a change-over. The movie goes on and nobody has any idea.” By this time you are involved, you have been sutured, and the thriller tone takes over and excites you all the way to the end, so you don't have to think about what's going on.

Norton realises that he is Tyler Durden and that he is responsible for this army of mindless destroyers. Based on the anti-consumerism theme there is a questionable validity to therefore destroying credit card companies to erase debt without causing loss of human life. It is, however, negated by the protagonist trying desperately to stop the progress of what he's already started. That he is basically as insane as it is possible to be somehow justifies his contradictory behaviour and allows the audience the necessity of rooting for him throughout the climax, trying to stop the explosions.

In an ultimate act of compounded negation the protagonist shoots himself in the mouth, both killing himself (Pitt) and not killing himself (Norton). He is reunited with his heterosexual lover, as if he had not been dismissive of her throughout the whole film, and together, holding hands, they observe the destruction of the credit card buildings, which he failed to stop, as a moment of beauty.
 

Fight Club represents the admirable tactic of American consumerism to provide a special flavour for every fringe group, leading to the phenomenon of a market for “Destroy Capitalism” t-shirts. Those who question the validity of their culture, yet are trapped inside it, will be attracted to this film, buy the DVD and watch the DVD extras. It first criticises society, then it establishes a false dichotomy that remains the basic assumption of the film; between consumerism and violence. In case it accidentally offers a truly transformative philosophy it proceeds to negate and undermine everything it has offered. In order to love this film, it seems fans have ignored the second half of it. There are reports of Fight Clubs being established around America as a result of the film, but not of anti-corporate guerilla operations or people becoming entirely deranged and destroying everything they touch.

Is cinema truly a potentially transformative art form? Does advertising really work? Is Fight Club, as some apologists for civilisation claim, “irresponsible”? It appears to be a sophisticated tool for diffusing subversive thought. It is difficult to ascertain how much of this is intentional.

It is not irrelevant that the film was commissioned and funded by Twentieth Century Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch, and so remains fundamentally a corporate artefact.