Counterculture · Essays · Writers & Critics
On the Road to the Ninth Circle of Hell: Easy Rider Merges Lanes with Dante’s Inferno and Faust
How Easy Rider laid the groundwork for Wild Hogs
Category: Essays
The Annihilative Evils of the Polka Tremblante: Fragments on Rhetoric, Naiveté, and Inevitable Helixes
“Leontev’s rhetoric, though overblown, might strike a chord in those who lament the replacement of honest, inspired amateurism with the interchangeable bodies of the trousered professional class. But wait . . . the polka tremblante?”
The Tortoise and the Hare: My Dinner with Andre
“For the performer, the movie offers an even more metaphysical quandary: how do you play yourself? ‘The thing that drove me nuts,’ Andre explained, ‘is that I’m playing a character based on me. So then the question is, who am I? And which Andre?'”
Bergman’s Women: The Representation of Patriarchy and Class in Persona (1967) and Cries and Whispers (1972)
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy”
“Filled with Ritual”: Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited
“[B]ecause the story is filled with ritual and religion, we were always going into temples. I was particularly obsessed with participating in any religious ceremonies I could get involved with.” — Wes Anderson, on the making of The Darjeeling Limited
Exit Through the Gift Shop: Cavemen to the Right
“Are we watching a faux-documentary within an entertainment vehicle? One suspects only Banksy knows. And he’s too busy painting to tell us.”
Religious Allegory and Cultural Discomfort in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky: And Why Larry Crowne Is One of the Best Films of 2011
“You can laugh while Rome is burning, but believe you me, Poppy, it is burning, and if you don’t wake up, then you will be burnt to a cinder . . . I mean, look around you. What do you see? Do you see a policy of bringing happiness to people?” — Scott in Happy-Go-Lucky
Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
When We Dream, Do We Accumulate Capital? On Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010)
“Nolan is making evident, both through form and narrative, his criticism of the sweeping radicalization of cinematic work that has privileged the technological wonder of the movies over formulations of innovative and complex narratives that deal with human existence.”
The Perverse Privilege of Degradation: American Politics in the Age of Assimilation
A Final Statement of the Obvious
Between the Idea and the Reality the Shadow Falls
So please mind the gap
Pseudo-Innocence and Encased Fantasies: Inside the Unconscious of the National Rifle Association
“I like this exhibit . . . it’s very familiar.”
La Pianiste: Michael Haneke’s Aesthetic of Disavowal
“At no point are Erika’s fantasies visualized, and so the spectator’s reference points are the same as Erika’s — the extremes of hardcore pornography and the austerity of bourgeois Vienna.”
Going to Alaska: Vision Quests, Quasi-Indians, and Great Escapes on the Last Frontier
“He said he might not survive, and ended with the ritual declaration: ‘I now walk into the wild.’ Civilization had ‘poisoned’ him, but the best of civilization gave him words to describe both what he was fleeing, and what he intended to embrace.”
Bodies Politic/Body Politics: The Political and the Personal in Contemporary Film Essays
“Your body is a microcosm of all existence.” — Death: A Love Story
Young Ones and Swan Songs: Luis Bunuel in Mexico, Bela Tarr in Edinburgh
“Attempts to create interesting projects of any sort despite our limitations can sometimes touch us more deeply than slick illusions that — literally by design — hide a lot of skill and effort, yet, in so doing, also hide something of the crazy courage it takes just to be human.”
Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
Green Lantern: The Allegory of Fear & Will Unfolded
“Facing fear and not concoctions of fear serving the needs of our own resident guardians of wealth and power is a far different enterprise than joining the enthusiasts of self-empowerments’ call “to just wish it.”
Still Hungover: Todd Phillips and Rape Culture
“There is no excuse for what others have called the “bro-magnon” film The Hangover, which unapologetically and even aggressively defends the model of masculinity that poo-poos date rape as some feminazi invention to further harass those poor, horny, entitled men.”
Eating Cinema: The Frozen Dessert as Audiovisual Synaesthesia
“But we can imagine infinite other, less stodgy flavors: a Saragossa Manuscript of Neapolitan layers within layers within layers; a Cannibal Holocaust of pure cherry surrounding a chunky mystery surprise; a Seventh Seal of precious white vanilla lost in an ominous ocean of midnight chocolate.”
Darkening the Image of American Wealth and Power: Unstoppable and The Lincoln Lawyer
“How do you get a “Headstart” program going that isn’t about implanting early entrepreneurial ambitions in toddlers but one that gets a head start on that sort of brain ownership? More difficult: How do you develop a resistance to such ownership by the surround we are born into without falling into the illusions of an individual will-to-power?”
Crime · Essays · Historical & Epic
A Propaganda Opportunity Shot Down: The Changing Image of the FBI Agent in G-Men (1935) and I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951)
“Putting aside whatever doubts the FBI had about its image in these films, the two films represent one of the many fascinating permutations of the gangster film in the studio era, with the heroic FBI agent acting in a manner befitting an upstanding American, yet able to shift gears and punch out a gangster.”
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