November 17, 2010 On Film Christopher Sorrentino on ‘Death Wish’ By J. D. Mitchell Charles Bronson plays Paul Kersey in Death Wish (1974). Christopher Sorrentino’s Death Wish is a monograph on the controversial and eponymous 1974 action movie. It stars Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey, an architect turned vigilante after his wife is murdered and his daughter is brutally assaulted in their New York City apartment. The book is the second installment in Soft Skull’s Deep Focus series, which invites contemporary writers to examine important popular films. I recently interviewed Sorrentino about his new book via e-mail. In the 1970s, Hollywood produced a number of superficially political, urban action films. I’m thinking of Dirty Harry, which you discuss at some length in the book, and, of course, blaxploitation cinema. What made you decide to revisit Death Wish in particular? Sean Howe approached me with the idea of writing about a movie that hadn’t been done to death, and we batted around a list of titles and genres ranging from eighties romantic comedies to zombie movies. The most prominent one we talked about was The French Connection. I really don’t like that movie, but it did get us talking about New York on film in the seventies. Among other reasons, Death Wish appealed to me because I’ve always been fascinated by Charles Bronson—since I was a kid. I didn’t have especially high expectations for the film itself, although Death Wish ended up surprising me a lot. When did you first see the film? Oh, probably when I was a teenager. Read More
July 21, 2010 On Film Down the Rabbit Hole By Caleb Crain What’s Christopher Nolan’s new movie Inception about? As a piece of science fiction, Inception sets forth its own laws governing the nature of dreams, and dreams in the movie conform to the movie’s laws, not those uncovered by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. (Spoilers ahead, of course.) There are touches where Nolan’s dreams correspond in nature to those described by Freud and experienced by all people nightly. When, for example, the dream-chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao) has one glass of champagne too many just before going under, the dream extractors who enter his dream find themselves rained upon, thanks to the pressure on the sleeping Yusuf’s bladder. (A dream “with a urinary stimulus may lead [the dreamer] to a foaming stream,” Freud comments, in what might be considered a parallel passage.) Similarly, when the van containing the dreaming Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) swerves, gravity in Arthur’s dream of a hotel shifts sideways. As “the guardians of sleep,” Freud writes, dreams often try to explain away sensations that manage to impinge on the dreamer’s consciousness. In a number of important ways, however, Nolan’s dreams are unlike actual dreams. A real dream, of course, can’t be shared while it is being experienced, though that may be chalked up to the movie’s poetic license. More important, in a real dream, problem-solving is impossible; there are usually jump-cuts far more Godardian than anything attempted by Nolan; spacetime is much more fungible, if not irrelevant; and crucially, there is a wish, or rather, a congeries of wishes, governing the structure of the dream. In Nolan’s movie, the arch dream-thief Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) warns Ariadne (Ellen Page), a young dream architect that he has recruited, never to construct her dreams from personal memories, lest she lose track of the distinction between dreams and reality. In Freud’s understanding, though, dreams are made of nothing but personal memories, and a dreamer always knows that he is dreaming, even though that awareness may not always be a part of the dream. (That sounds more mystifying than it is. Another way to explain it: it’s only because what’s going on in the mind is a dream that the managerial part of consciousness allows something so disorganized to happen at all.) Cobb further warns Ariadne that beneath all the layers of constructed dreams lies what he calls limbo—the raw unconscious—where a person could become lost and spend an eternity. Freud, too, thought of the unconscious as existing at the deepest layer of a person’s mind, and he, too, thought it had an eternal character (“In the unconscious nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten”), but Freud believed that every dreamer dropped into exactly such a limbo nightly. The intricacy of Nolan’s action sequences depends on his notion that dreams within dreams exist on separate physical levels and are structurally fragile ways to go deeper into a person’s mind. Freud, however, considered a dream within a dream to be no more than semantic shorthand. He thought a dream within a dream worked more or less the way a double negative does: To include something in a “dream within a dream” is . . . equivalent to wishing that the thing described as a dream had never happened. In other words, if a particular event is inserted into a dream as a dream by the dream-work itself, this implies the most decided confirmation of the reality of the event—the strongest affirmation of it. Read More
June 16, 2010 On Film Ugly Duckling By Caleb Crain Why Splice isn’t science fiction. Splice, an indie thriller directed by Vincenzo Natali, has been marketed as an updated tale of Frankenstein’s monster. Indeed, in Frankenstein’s tradition, Splice‘s heroic couple, Clive (played by Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), genetically engineer a dangerous creature, whom they name Dren, while in pursuit of knowledge, fame, and patents valuable to the pharmaceutical industry. But the movie isn’t really science fiction. The science, for one thing, isn’t all that edgy or alarming. Splicing human DNA with that of other organisms? Millions of Americans inject themselves daily with human insulin, which is manufactured by mixing human DNA into that of E. coli bacteria, letting the bacteria bloom, and then putting it through a blender. As it happens, human DNA has a lot of nucleotides in common with animal DNA already, so a wanton squirting of animal genes into human genes is unlikely to make a super creature. In fact, humans and roundworms have about the same number of genes, which suggests that more is not more, in the number-of-genes department. How scary is the idea of typing up an organism’s entire genetic code on a computer, manufacturing it from scratch, and bringing it to life? J. Craig Venter announced a couple of weeks ago that he and his research team have done just that. Hope you’ve been able to sleep nights since. As for cloning itself, the sheep Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned, was born in 1996. Bulls, cats, pigs, deer, mice, and goats have followed. By now, dog clones have been around for so long that The New York Times has run a lifestyle article about coping with the disappointment that Fido’s clone only loosely resembles the original. Human cloning is illegal in some states but far from all of them, and the technical challenge is unlikely to remain insurmountable. Three years ago, monkey embryos were cloned well enough to allow the extraction of stem cells, and two years ago, scientists in California persuaded clones of adult human skin cells to progress to early-stage embryos. Once human cloning does become possible, though, there’s little need to worry that it will catch on as a way of making new humans. Cloning, unlike natural reproduction, is neither inexpensive nor recreational. Moreover, it inflicts a fair amount of genetic and epigenetic damage on the progeny who ensue. You might not mind a little damage in a cow that you plan to eat, but few people are likely to want to clone themselves or their loved ones once they understand that the baby will be saddled with birth defects, developmental delays, a compromised immune system, or some combination of the above. The prospect would just be too sad. Sadness brings us to the true subject of Splice: child rearing. Specifically, what’s a two-career couple to do when an episode of hastiness and curiosity leaves them with a squirmy naked mole rat who shows ambiguous signs of a developing intelligence and even sentiment? Feed it sugar and lock it in a plastic crate for as long as possible, of course. But once it begins breaking things, cornering people, and putting words together with Scrabble tiles, then what? The most science-fiction thing about Splice is that it never occurs to Clive and Elsa to provide their unbabysitted spawn with a television. Probably because the movie is so “irredeemably Canadian,” my husband complained. It’s for the same reason, no doubt, that no government agency ever shows up to sweep everything under the rug. Read More