Riley Stern Rehashes His Own Narrative Shortcomings in his Third Feature Dual
Written by Margaret Rasberry January 26th, 2022
A protagonist is training to survive portending doom, they are outliers, cast aside as part of the fringes of society, they engage in martial arts training to better themselves with mentors who intended to desensitize them to the fraught prospect of death, and they both are confronted with a dead dog to construct incendiary motivations to commit further violence for self-preservation. If this sounds quite familiar to you, it is because all of these facets are found in Riley Stern’s previous film ‘The Art of Self-Defense’, the film that caused quite a stir during it’s premiere at SXSW 2019, for it’s satirical darkly comedic deconstruction of toxic masculinity. ‘The Art of Self-Defense’ also struggled to truly define what it wanted to convey to the audience. Is violence inherently wrong or the ways we utilize violence to achieve our ends? This question also pervades in his latest film Dual, and much like ‘The Art of Self-Defense’ I could not tell you what Riley Stearns wants us to take in as the arguments are only vaguely reflected on in favor of making toothless droll dialogue for mean spirited laughs.
Karen Gillian (in a career best performance) plays Sara, a woman who is diagnosed with a terminal illness. The audience is never privy to what the illness is nor does the film want us to expand our curiosity to figure out why. The coughing of copious amounts of blood on her pillow seem to indicate a lung disease, but the film only conveys to Sara and the audience that there is nothing to be done for her terminal illness, as stated by the unnamed Doctor (June Hyde). Is Sterns making a pointed jab at the healthcare industry and the sterile coldness of the medical profession? Who’s to say, but this coldness leads to Sara to embark on the process of Replacement, where people who are struck by a terminal illness can decide to have themselves cloned (humorously only using a spit sample to create the clone, the Replacement industry in this film is run with the same logic as Theranos). Sara 2, the clone of Sara, is cloned as a full adult and a blank slate the original is meant to imprint their own personality onto, but eventually begins to form a more amenable personality that Sara’s boyfriend Peter (Beulah Koale) and her mother (Maija Paunio) comes to eventually appreciate even more than her. The film never divulges this and we are just as appalled at this turn of events like Sara, but because Sterns has not conveyed these elements in the first place, the scene becomes farcical and illogical to our willing suspension of disbelief. The film only begins to take focus almost half-way through when the main impetus is revealed. The Doctor reveals to Sara that her terminal illness has miraculously disappeared and that according to the law, neither an original nor her double can live while the other survives, and because of inherent rights given to clones in recent legislation, the double can declare a duel to preserve their very existence. Sara’s loved ones decided to callously put their full support behind her double, leading Sara to turn to military fanatic Trent (Aaron Paul) to train her for the upcoming duel, and his idiosyncratic training methods elucidating on death and violence will force Sara to confront her own inner self and if she is wholly capable of ending the life of another and if her clone is a whole human.
The characters are two thinly written for this brilliant concept to wholly shine through on screen, which is a shame because it is apparent how much Sterns constructed this sci-fi world, crafting a portending sense of doom for Sara by framing her with harsh lighting that reveals the light lines on Gillian’s face, and grey color grading that evokes general disquiet and when Sara begins training to survive and finds the aspiration to live she is framed in smoother lighting and with golden hues to reflect her new sense of purpose. These are commendable facets but overall falls flat when Sterns needs to commit to his main focus, and with all these facets competing for our focus the film overall ends up signifying scattered ideas that Sterns struggles to adapt into a wholly cohesive film.
With Nanny, Nikyatu Jusu presents a more haunting depiction of the American Dream. Her feature debut nods to Ousmane Sembène’s seminal Black Girl while distilling the trials her parents, immigrants from Sierra Leone, endured as Jusu grew up in Atlanta—a mix of domestic drama and frightening images to make us fellow outsiders in a suffocatingly insular world.
Anna Diop propels the film with her star-making performance as Aisha, a Manhattan-based undocumented Senegalese immigrant working towards her version of the American Dream by procuring enough money to provide travel for her son Lamine (Jahleel Kamera), who she was forced to leave behind. She is hired as the nanny for wealthy upper-class couple Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector), who conspicuously pay her under the counter to care for their daughter Rose (Rose Decker). Yet this seemingly innocuous arrangement becomes abusive as Amy and Adam indulge in microaggressions and condescending patterns of abuse upon Aisha, eventually culminating in financial exploitation of her services.
Monaghan gives an incisive turn as the quintessential “white feminist” who conjectures that every woman’s life is like hers, sans regard to the Black experience or inherent privileges being born white has given her. Adam is distinguished by his dissonant disinterest in the suffering of oppressed groups, the film conveying his occupation as an international photographer who chronicles racism and oppression without regard to the subjects he depicts. Is this casual indifference a form of coping with the atrocities he sees committed? Or does Adam care more about documenting these harrowing events for posterity? Jusu provides no answer and Nanny is all the more chilling as a result—an indifference that rightfully disturbs Aisha.
Something’s disquieting the moment Aisha enters their Manhattan apartment. She begins suffering increasingly disturbing nightmares involving drowning and water; Jusu may be evoking the drowning of incalculable Africans forced to America, as well as West African folklore-inspired horrors (from Anansi to Mami Wata) in the film’s more viscerally horrific scenes. Each sequence is framed in claustrophobic close-up, subjecting the audience to the same disquieting tension Aisha experiences.
Jusu also expands on Aisha’s trials living alone in New York, in particular her solidarity with other Black women struggling to financially survive. A tender rapport with her lover Malik (Sinqua Walls), Nanny’s one relationship of levity, helps convey a rich, textured life—a corrective to the oft-simplified portraits of Black women we often see in American cinema. Nanny is also one of the most gorgeously shot films in recent memory, cinematographer Rina Yang conjuring terrors under the surface in immensely vivid ways as fantastical torment begins to seep into everyday life.
This reliance on atmosphere and tension to create palpable terror may not sit well with some viewers. Nanny inundating with horror and violence is what clarifies it as a truly distressing experience. Jusu doesn’t want to grant her audience respite with quick, cheap scares, but wholly envelop them in a perpetual nightmare underlining true horrors of the American Dream. With Diop’s affecting performance guiding us through the oppressive darkness of dashed desires, Jusu more than succeeds.
Nanny premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.
Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power Elucidates the Male Gaze in Penetrating Fashion for the Modern Age
Written by Margaret Rasberry January 23rd, 2022
When Laura Mulvey published her seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in 1973, it was an enlightening and unnerving moment in the history of film scholarship and the first official theoretical framework of analyzing cinema through a feminist perspective, with essential additions from other frequenatly neglected groups such as people of color, and queer scholars, but much like most dialectic interpretations of art, the analyzation of how a cis gendered white male power structures frame female subjects in their visual texts has been mostly relegated to the film scholars, professors, students, and philosophers, while virtually unknown for most film goers. While many film watchers have heard of the term “The Male Gaze” very few could answer how the gaze is utilized by Directors and Cinematographers to objectify mostly female subjects for audience scopophilia, and this is what director Nina Menkes wants to rectify in her elucidating yet slightly hyperbolic documentary Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power.
Nina Menkes, a director of narrative features herself, expands upon her erudite presentation Sex and Power, The Visual Language of Cinema into a fluid documentary about the history of the male gaze in cinema and its pervasion into the collective conscious and unconscious and its startlingly effects on our collective culture. Nina Menkes, utilizes clips of films from 1896-2021 to convey the framework of which the gaze is achieved, from the placement of the subject and object, with the subject invariably being male while the object the subject is gazing upon being female, the framing of the image, the lighting all culminate to making the female actress into a object of lust with no agency or autonomy to call their own. Menkes presents these facets of how the image is created in a comprehensible way that can be easily understood by the average film attendee and is certain to indelibly change the way many of them engage with the cinematic image. Menkes also posits how female directors are not immune from participating in the gaze themselves as a form of unconscious visualisation that has been imprinted in many filmmakers, and in scholarship posited by Mary Ann Doane in her own theories on the female spectator.
Nina Menkes assembles a vast array of female directors, female film scholars, actresses and queer perspectives to further convey her objective to slightly mixed results. It is apparent that Menkes is much more comfortable extrapolating the white cis-female perspective on this theory to the detriment of argument. This does not invalidate the argument, and when perspectives from a person of color or queer person their points of observations shine through in its poignancy.
Menkes further connects the objectification of women onscreen to the lack of opportunities for female filmmakers in Hollywood and the sexual predation of female and non-binary individuals struggling to make it. Though hyperbolic at times, the urgency of the message is conveyed with palpable clarity. Actor Charlyne Yi points out in the film, “There’s a joke that if you got rid of all the sexual predators in Hollywood, you would have to rebuild Hollywood from scratch because there wouldn’t be anyone left. Well, why can’t we rebuild?” Menkes wants to rebuild the structures of how films are produced and how audiences engage with cinema and if the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house, maybe it is time to get a whole new set of tools.
The Worst Person in the World Examines Millennial Ennui with Cathartic Sincerity
Written by Margaret Rasberry on January 22nd, 2022
Joachim Trier’s films have always concerned themselves with the existential trappings of everyday existence, his characters so vividly realised that they become easily identifiable with ourselves, our own personhood, how we fall in love, how we perceive memories as reflections of ourselves and The Worst Person in the World is the apotheosis of these themes that Joachim Trier has masterfully conveyed throughout his vast career. The result is arguably his most beautifully crafted film to date, and the greatest performance of 2021 for the film’s star Renate Reinsve.
A bildungsroman chronicling four years in the life of twenty-nine year old Julie (Rensve), a young woman in Oslo who is characterised as insatiably curious for love and knowledge, which the film conveys by having her indecisive nature pronounced by her reticence in finalising a major and her indecision on a career pathway, and her most pertinent relationship with the controversial graphic novelist Aksel (played by Trier mainstay Anders Danielsen Lie), a man over a decade older than her. This age gap begins to unmask Julie’s hidden fears about her personhood as well as relatable anxieties that perpetuate millennial ennui, a relatable fear many viewers are bound to emphasise with and propelled by Rensve’s strikingly sympathetic turn as Julie, a part that is strenuous to pull off. Rensve acts so tenderly approachable, that even in Julie’s worst actions, the audience can still end up emphasising and engaging with her every movement. Rensve is a dominating screen presence in a tour de force performance that will be celebrated for years to come.
The film’s cinematography by Kaspar Tuxen (Riders of Justice) must also be lauded, framing the subjects of film with such reverence that the audience cannot help but be spellbound by the scene and lit with realistic lighting that the film evokes the photographic imagery of Chris Marker’s own oeuvre, an exuberant choice that creates reflective quality to the picture that permeates throughout the film. The most indelible scene of Julie running down the downtown Oslo while everything is frozen is one scene that begs for the cinematic experience to wholly appreciate for its palpable kinetic energy reverberating from the screen.
The Worst Person in the World is a magnificent culmination of Joachim Trier’s informally titled “Oslo Trilogy” and one of the best pictures of the year by any measure. In a world where millions of young people are struggling to cope with uncertainty and portending dread of what the future entails, movies like The Worst Person in the World arrive to convey sincere hope and cathartic empathy for a brighter future.
Scream Fails to Recapture the Terror of the Original, but is a Frightfully Fun Return
Written by Margaret Rasberry January 21st, 2022
“Do you Like Scary Movies?” the indelibly creepy synthesized voice asked Casey, played in a career revitalizing role by Drew Barrymore in the opening scene of the original Scream (1996) that has become embedded in the cultural zeitgeist of modern horror relaunched the Slasher genre with a caveat. No one in the audience would accept the genre’s common trappings such as the final girl, the inherent racism, misogyny, and lack of self awareness anymore.The genre would need to become meta; deconstruction, inverting, and subverting while also making frequent conversations about the genre of horror itself and audience response. Scream was the postmodern response to a frequently denigrated genre, and it’s cultural impact can be seen in its many sequels, helmed by maverick horror icon Wes Craven all the way into the 2010s. Who else would be more appropriate to relaunch the stagnant franchise than the creative minds behind the 2019 surprise horror hit Ready or Not directors Matt Bettineli-Olpin, Tyler Gillet, and screenwriter Guy Busick.
This new Scream follows the similar trajectory of the original but with a twist. The original main trio Sydney Presscott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) and Dewey Riley (David Arquette) are back, but much like the reboots of other franchises are sideline in favor of the new cast headed by Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera), a young woman forced to return to her hometown of Woodsboro after her sister Tara (Jenna Ortega, and a burgeoning scream queen in the making) is attacked by the sinister Ghostface, the first attack from the movie’s iconic villain since Scream 4 in 2011, and in metatextual fashion is referenced in the film itself by Tara’s teenage group of friends filling out the requisite teenage cast/victims the series is well-known for. The film should receive credit for having the most diverse Scream cast yet seen in a genre that has frequently maligned people of color and queer characters, a fact the sequels have noted.
Busick, Bettineli-Olpin, and Gillet imbue the script with the necessary frightfully tense atmosphere coincided with the metatextual humor while also conveying vital messages about the cultural zeitgeist, but there are times when watching that one feels the film becomes almost too self-indulgent in evoking the original that it feels more like a pastiche instead of an original work that can stand on its own merits and that is where the film is lacking in self-awareness and becomes a mixed-bag overall. A frightfully good time for many, and an exhausting return to Woodsboro for others.
Belle (2021) Weaves an Enchanting Humanist Fable In the Metaverse
Written by Margaret Rasberry January 21st, 2022
*This review contains slight spoilers*
The internet has given us the illusion of closeness; never before have we been able to connect with people and renowned figures through our social media, that often the face one presents online is not the one they wear in life. This salient contradiction has pervaded several of director Mamoru Hosodo’s films, starting with his debut Digimon: The Movie (2000) and wholly reaches the apotheosis with his enchanting retelling of Beauty and the Beast in Belle.
Belle conveys a virtual world entitled “U” where everyone can be anyone, and anyone can remake themselves, and the world were protagonist Suzu (charmingly voiced by first time voice actors and singers Kaho Nakamura and Kylie McNeil in the dub) reinvents herself as an overnight J-Pop virtual singer, and assisted by her hypercompetent best friend Hiro (Rira Ikuta/Jessica DiCicco) and develops parasocial relationships with billions of followers in the world of U. Suzu is propelled by the traumatic death of her mother years ago to find an escape from her bereavement through singing catchy pop tunes for billionaires of fans, while still remaining surprisingly, if a little unbelievably humble throughout. The arrival of the beast of this retelling, referred as “The Dragon” (Takeru Satoh/Paul Castro Jr.), inspires Suzu to develop an empathetic rapport with him and his invisible plight.
The world of U is suffused with gorgeous architecture and visual splendor evoking the Disney renaissance films of the 1990s in anime form. While Hosada’s animation contemporary Hayao Miyazaki has shunned Disney animation as artificially lifeless, Hosodo delicately crafts an engaging homage that feels wholly new. Belle also boasts one of the best soundtracks of the year infused with frenetic pop music and delicate arias that makes the heart soar with hope and love.
Hosodo has transcended the original fairy tales limitations to create an emphatically affective humanistic fable that evokes hope for the inherent goodness of humanity. If we are bound behind our computer screenings for the foreseeable future, Belle conveys hope that the connections we create in the virtual world can be just as vital as the ones we create in the real world.
*Massive Spoilers for “Once Upon a Time …in Hollywood” and “The Irishman”
In recent years, many reports and critiques have been published bemoaning the lack of female representation and dialogue in recent cinema and cinema ostensibly aimed towards female audiences. And why not? Living in the epoch of MeToo has generated further scrutiny towards lauded filmmakers and the films they produce now than ever before and the lack of roles and dialogue for the female stars is being noticed and rightfully criticized. But what if the lack of female dialogue is not only valid for the interpretation of the film, but also an essential fixture of the picture? To convey this, I will write about the main female performances from two of the most acclaimed films this year, “Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood” by Quentin Tarantino and “The Irishman” by Martin Scorsese.
Massive spoilers ahead.
Earlier this year at the Cannes Press Conference, Quentin Tarantino caused a bit of a stir over his new film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” when a female reporter from The New York Times questioned his decision to give Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate considerably less dialogue compared to her male counterparts. Tarantino replied with a sardonic, “I reject your hypothesis”. Robbie, the consummate professional, swooped in to save face. “I think the moments that I got onscreen came an opportunity to honor Sharon (Tate)…” said Robbie. “I think the tragedy ultimately was the loss of innocence and to show those really wonderful sides of her I think could’ve been adequately done without speaking”.
Although Tarantino had purported to strongly disagree with the reporter’s question, he must have felt there was some truth to her query as eventually he slightlyedited the film for theatrical release, adding two extra minutes of Robbie’s Tate. Which in this writers view did little to dispel how little of an impact her character made in the film. Her lack of dialogue was one of the most pertinent reasons why I found her character sorely superficial compared to her male co-stars.
In the film, Tate is introduced as Rick Dalton’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) neighbor, and ostensibly a stepping stone to his former Hollywood glory by virtue of being married to the hottest movie director at the time, Roman Polanski. The only viewpoints the film give us into Tate’s life are her friends, including ex Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), the narrator (Kurt Russel), and Rick Dalton himself. We learn from these figures that she is trying to break into acting herself to have people see her as more than just a pretty face. She wants people to know she’s cordial and her ‘type’ is a man who looks like a twelve-year-old boy. In a pivotal scene, Tate decides to go to the local cinema to view her new film “The Wrecking Crew” with the audience unaware that one of the stars is present. Tate laughs uproariously with the captivated audience when her character Freya Carlson (played by the real Sharon Tate) pratfalls over suitcases in front of Dean Martin’s Matt Helm. This emotionally personable moment from Tate is unfortunately lessened by Tarantino’s infamous foot fetish as Tate’s bare feet are on full display in the frame, and thus ostensibly objectifying her, which is egregious in its poor taste as Tarantino sexualized a tragic real-life figure, whom wanted to be conveyed as more than just a pretty face and body.
To add salt to the wound, Tate is relegated to the background until near the end of the film, in which Tarantino tactfully sets up the inevitable massacre that would horrify the nation, but then subverts the forgone conclusion by having the Manson family members attack Rick Dalton’s house next door, with Dalton and his noted badass stunt double Cliff Booth making quick and bloody brutal work of them in the most violent part of the film. Tate, alive and well, talks to Dalton and invites him, literally and figuratively, into her home and back into the higher echelons of Hollywood. Tate serves as little more than window dressing and a plot device for Dalton’s return in the Hollywood fold and her lack of dialogue further postulates this reading.
On the other side of the spectrum we have Anna Paquins’ performance as Margaret “Peggy” Sheeran, the aloof daughter of the titular Irishman himself Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a mafia enforcer, in Martin Scorsese’s newest crime epic “The Irishman”. Scorsese and Paquin have Her cool distance and lack of dialogue towards her father serve an emotional contrast to her cultivated relationship with her father’s close associate, Union Leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), a man she ostensibly sees as a far superior paternal figure in her life than her own father. After the Mafia family enlists Frank to kill Hoffa, he finds his return to his family home terse as the family watches the news informing the nation of Hoffa’s disappearance, including Peggy (Paquin). When she finally does speak it is only six words of dialogue, but in those six words she conveys the most palpably raw judgement on Frank and his lifestyle as a mafia enforcer, demanding why he has not called Hoffa’s wife Josephine Hoffa (Welker White). Frank’s delayed response to her searing question conveys what she fears; that her father killed Hoffa, and thus irrevocably severs any remnant of their fractured relationship to shreds. An action which the film conveys as being all for naught in the end.
In these two recent releases, I believe we must look beyond how much dialogue female characters in films are given, but also what is said and left unsaid, in our arguments to truly ascribe a female character as well-written in cinema and to what purpose the character serves to the narrative structure.
Margaret “Molly” Rasberry is a freelance writer of Film/Pop Culture.
Animals heralds a new cult classic for the burn out generation
Sundance 2019 Review
Independent; 109 min.
Director: Sophie Hyde
Written by Margaret Rasberry
Holliday Grainger and Alia Shawkat appear in Animals by Sophie Hyde, an official selection of the Premieres program at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Tamara Hardman.
When does a woman cease to be able to party, hang out, have casual no strings attached sex, and drugs? When does she relinquish a part of herself to become a ‘model’ citizen and reproduce for societal welfare? These are the main queries that Sophie Hyde wants you to inquire about while watching her rollicking feature, Animals, and for the most part she succeeds in her endeavor. This film is destined to become a female Withnail and I for the new generation of burn outs.
The film conveys the trajectory of Laura (Holliday Grainger) a 30 year old Irish burn out, struggling to write her novel she has been working on for ten years in present day Dublin. A running gag of the film is when she is asked how far she has gotten into her decade long endeavor she acknowledges that she has written only ten pages. Her book begins with a spider, trapped in it’s own spun web and then it eventually escapes, but then Laura’s writing block settles in, and we are given many scenes conveying this palpable tension of overcoming this endeavor. Animal imagery pervades the film and makes a constructive metaphor for the characters and humanity in general. Laura does not know if her book will be finished and if so what happens after she escapes this web of her own making? The film does not provide easy answers and leaves the audience with more questions than answers.
Her adoration of art leads her to two seperate loves, one with the pianist Jim, (Fra Fee), whom becomes her eventual lover, and her best friend Tyler, (in a breakout performance by Alia Shawkat), her roommate and her chosen family, whose influence leads her to follow a more chaotic yet exhilarating life. Shawkat does not put on an Irish accent, mystifying her origins and only giving the audience passive glimpses of her troubled home life. The film does not take the easy route of making Tyler a bad influence; she is an ardent connoisseur of art and literature, which makes her a perfect match with the artistically driven Laura,spouting famous quotes and holding perspicacious conversations that even Laura struggles to comprehend at times. The cast is rounded up by Lauren’s sister Jean, (Amy Molloy), whom used to party and drink with the two until her eventual marriage and pregnancy ceased her party girl activities, but eventually proves that the spark has not wholly left her and published poet Marty (Dermot Murphy), who seems put together, but is eventually revealed to be just as much a burnout as the two leads, whom Laura admires to disastrous results.
It seems that women have to stop partying, and having any sort of fun at a certain age, while men continue to party well beyond middle age, and this film is an raw riposte to that very notion. The clock must seemingly strike midnight for women, or else her carriage will become a rotten pumpkin, the world around us seems to have ingrained into generations of women. Tyler brings light in Laura’s world with drugs and alcohol and the film does not wholly condemn her for this and as she metaphorically raises her middle finger at these norms, the audience can only raise their finger in solidarity with her.
While a less intellectually made film would have designated Tyler as an immoral influence, with Jim being the moral center that Laura must choose, the film does not let itself fall into that trap and is all the better for it. The film revels in the comedic screw ups that inevitably occur with intoxication and heavily conveys the burned out feeling of striving to become an adult in this unforgiving world without losing your sense of self and is all the better for it. I don’t believe that Sophie Hyde wholly capitulated her themes in this film, but she made a remarkable effort that people will connect with and discover for years to come. Just make sure to uncork a bottle of chilled white wine while watching.
Paradise Hills makes a sumptuous, yet, dull affair
Sundance 2019 Review
95 minutes
Director: Alice Waddington
Written by Margaret Rasberry
Paradise Hills will be a resplendent feast to the eye, but beneath the sumptuous, albeit at times gauzy exterior, the interior of the story remains flat and disjointed. The film begins with the character of Uma, (Emma Roberts), on her wedding day, wearing a dazzling wedding gown, singing to a rapturous audience. We soon discover that this event, behind the veneer of ostentatious fashion, lurks a sinister undercurrent, as her groom seemingly attempts to assault her in bed. The film cuts to black and we are drawn back to months earlier, in which she awakens in a barren room, in a singular bed, with gaudy flowery wallpaper. This fairy tale imagery will pervade the film. She has been sent to the titular boarding facility, Paradise Hills, run by the obviously evil The Duchess (Milla Jovovich), designed to presumably weed out non-compliance in young women in the upper echelons of this dystopian society. The film defines the world as a system of the uppers (of which most of the cast is) and lowers based on financials. Uma is sent there by her mother for refusing to marry this man named Son, of whom she claims is responsible for her father’s death, of which we are given very little prove of this. Son is also the provider of the few laughs this film gives its audience, with Awkwafina playing an unusually dour performance. Uma wants to be together with a lower named Markus (Jeremy Irvine), an insignificant character to the plot you would probably be right to think he was crushed into the wrong part of the puzzle just to give a lackluster facsimile of a complete picture. Uma is joined by stereotypical depictions of non-compliance in women with Chloe (Danielle Macdonald), an upper whom is sent to the facility to make her lose weight, although she knows she is already beautiful, which the film will engrain into your head, Yu (Awkwafina), a Chinese girl who was originally a lower, but sent to the facility to weed out her propensity of being moody and presumably her gaudy headphones, which the film takes to be a personality trait instead of just an aesthetic feature of the costume. The final girl she meets is Amarna (Eiza Gonzalez), a pop star of this world, who is presumably sent to the facility for alcohol issues, but in actuality because she disagreed with her male coworkers and was sent to the facility for this non-compliance.
The film tries to create a love triangle between Uma, Markus, and Amarana, but it is so clumsily written it hits you with the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face and feels unearned as a result. The film suffers for these set pieces Alice Waddington places in the film, which leads to the eventual twist of the film, which I dare not spoil here, although I found it just as unwarranted as most of the emotional set pieces here. In an hour and thirty-five minutes, there is not enough time to wholly engage with all the characters and themes of female empowerment against set patriarchal norms the film wants to address, and instead of whittling the characters or themes down, Waddington instead shoves them all into the overflowing chalice with dull and uninspired results. Waddington has the keen eye for visual splendor, but her characters and themes need to be rewritten for any of us to wholly care about the message she wants to convey.
D+
Paradise Hills premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It is now available on VOD.
How does one give a voice to the voiceless? A voice that can easily be taken away through insurmountable forces most of the population of the United States cannot seemingly fathom. The control of the body taken away from another force almost biopolitical in a twisted form. And when the fear of being silenced or replaced was felt by much of the population, the country voted into the presidential office a man, who’s very sense of temporality evoked a sense of a by-gone epoch, based around the Reagan presidency. Who could have thought that a film, in which a black man’s visit to his white girlfriend’s family, a deliberate homage to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, could evoke such passionate fear of that coming true in such a shattering and satirical way.Jordan Peele, the writer and director of the film Get Out (2017), was a noted fan of the horror genre, as can be seen through televisual evidence in his sketch comedy show Key & Peele (2012-2015), and the obvious postmodern nostalgic aesthetic inherently in the film in question beyond a brief discussion of a horror film that have also evoked a fear of losing a voice or personhood, or how one can can plausibly imply a Lacanian mirror image for Jordan Peele’s own life with the main character of Chris Washington, or create an argument based on Focault’s thesis on Power and Control with regards to Biopower and Biopolitics. This paper is a discussion about how the narrative creates an affect for the spectator through the film and the temporal and spatiality of the present culture we are currently living in continues to affected by the actions of previous and current generations; in this case for the African-American population.
My primary source for this paper will be Patrick Colm Hogan’s book, Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Patrick Colm Hogan is a professor whose main focus is on literary theory, including the affective science of literature and world literature. This may be a bit different from the studies of post-cinematic affect of other scholars, but his main focus is that emotional triggers are crucial for affect to exist. He argues that “the distinctive aspects of stores are to a great extent the product of emotion systems” that that plays the most vital role in structuring a narrative. His main focus is how aspects of certain scenes or moments in the medium create emotional triggers for the reader. His book also explores how temporality and spatiality create affect for the reader or spectator. His focus is based on how the structure of stories and even the definition of constituents of stores are inseparable from passion for plots itself. Although he mentions cognitive science as a focus for emotional thought, his main focus is on the affect and not the psychology behind it. His works main focus is for the edification of emotion and narratology, how genres and universal prototypes come in the research, and lastly on ideology. On Ideology he states, “I follow Raymond Geuss and others in distinguishing a descriptive and a pejorative sense of the term. It refers to a guiding set of ideas”. I will use his work to explain how affect is formed in Get Out through these concepts that Hogan exposited on in his book.
Next I will use the work of Alford A. Young Jr’s sociological work, Are Black men doomed?A recently published work in the Debating Race series of books Young focuses on the current predicament of the average black male in America as well as how these perceptions came to be. Young’s main focus in his book is to further the study of the sociological field pertaining to race, and ethnicity, particularly with a focus on low income urban based African-American studies. He states in his preface, “The problems that Black men face seemingly cover vast terrain. They exist in employment, education, physical, and mental health and well-being, fatherhood, and family relations, incarceration, surveillance, and detention at the hands of legal authorities, and in the myriad challenges and threats to their ability to construct a positive social identity and self-concept”. I will use his research to develop the cultural sphere from a temporality sphere. Our past, present, and future is important to how we comprehend references and events occuring in Get Out as analogous to current and past events in America. The data from this text will help to convey the fear that millions of black men and women face living in America with startling numbers.
Another text I will use to further my argument is what can be considered one of the ‘Holy Grail’ texts about African-American depiction in American Cinema, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks by Donald Bogle. This book is a pertinent work about the history of how African-Americans are perceived through the hollywood lens from the beginnings of cinema with The Birth of a Nation(1915), all the way to the 1970s. Bogle in his dissertation, focuses on how many films throughout history have created or provoked racist stereotypes of African-Americans. This book will look at how these unflattering portrayals create an affect that Peele means to evoke in his film. Peele was well-aware of the depictions of African-Americans in cinema as can be seen in a skit from Key & Peele entitled “Dad’s Hollywood Secrets”, and I will convey how he utilized the memories of these depictions to evoke the pain of nostalgia to the spectator in a few characters seen in the film, and how Peele subverts the expectations of these offensive archetypes.
Screencap captured from Youtube. Jordan Peele playing a typical role an African-American played in the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Before I fully dive into this topic, I will bring up one very important postmodern element of the film. It is undeniable that Jordan Peele was heavily influenced by the film The Stepford Wives (1975). I do agree with the article, “Jordan Peele’s Get Out is a Racist Version of Stepford Wives” partly. I do believe that Get Outs main inspiration was that film, but I also believe both films are so wholly different in their intentions that to write a full paper comparing the two would be laughable but an interesting endeavor to undertake. I will also use this article to explain basic plot details and what they represent. The Armitage family, Rose, Jeremy, Missy, and Dean played respectively by Allison Williams, Caleb Landry Jones, Catherine Keener, and Bradley Whitford, represent the liberal family that seems to convey a sense of being in the moral high ground for their lack of condensation towards African-Americans, which can be seen in films such as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) with the Atticus Finch character. Their seeming hospitality to Chris Washington, played by Daniel Kuulaya, creates this front to help underscore their true intentions to sell his body for use as a vessel, a new form of slavery, to create profit and longevity for themselves. Their accruement of these black victims are based primarily on liberal conceptions of black people.
While The Stepford Wives used robots as a form of creating a conceptual conservative housewife in response to female civil rights actions taking place, the order of the Coagula’s goal is to not kill Black people to silence them but to entrap them into the Sunken Place, watching helplessly as their bodies are controlled and manipulated by a White person. It is also interesting to note that the film, unlike many films that include narratives where Black people are societaly put down upon or enslaved, there is usually one good token White person, probably to mitigate the implications of perceived reverse racism by White spectators, but the film has none. Nevertheless this did not dampen the film’s popularity as it went on to receive Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars the following year. This is interesting to note as I will go on to explain how affect is created by social and historical context the film evokes is predominantly controlled or manipulated by privileged, primarily white spectators. In The Stepford Wives, women who are inferior to their husbands are seen as more desirable, but for Get Out, the Black people who are perceived by the White people to be superior are the ones picked for the procedure and to lose their agency as a result. To quote one of the members of the order, “Black is in fashion”.
Get Out crafts an absolutelychilling opening scene that starts off with minor character Andre Hayworth, played by Lakeith Stanfield, traversing through a middle class suburb, described by him as “A creepy ass suburb..it’s like a fucking hedge maze out here”. The camera follows Andre in a dolly tracking shot as he is stalked by a white sports car. The lack of a cut creates tension with little respite for the suspense to follow. Peele keeps the camera focused on Andre, and when his point of view is directed towards the car after parking, the tension is intensified and the music from the car, playing the old Run Rabbit, Run which evokes hunting, which was originally at a low volume peaks as the presumed driver of the vehicle comes out from offscreen and assaults Andre. His face is covered, dehumanizing the figure, as he chokes Andre to unconsciousness, finally dragging his body into his trunk. The film finally cuts to a long shot of the assailant putting Andre into his trunk as diegetic song from the car lowers again, bringing the emotional tension down in the scene. The scenes first cut only occurs after two minutes, creating a disquiet feeling in the opening minutes for the spectator.
Astute horror viewers may recognize an opening scene like this evoking films such as Jaws and Halloween, in which a creature or serial killer claims their first victim. The general assessment of that opening scene would be to convey to the audience how the killer responds and what his usual victims are. Another facet of the scene that spurs an emotional trigger would be that missing Black men is a common occurrence in the culture at large. “ In 2015 The New York Times published an article indicating that more than 1.5 million Black men in the US were missing”. Although the article Young took for the data disregards abductions in the scenario, the article is based more around the removal of men from residential communities and workplaces, much like the seemingly affluent suburb Andre is abducted in. The ratio is further defined by Young his book as he writes that “17 missing Black men for every 100 Black women….among White Americans there is only one missing man for every 100 women” This is one of the ways Peele uses cultural knowledge to create affect beyond just simple terror of the kidnapping itself. Andre’s kidnapping may only be regarded as an act delinquency or a seemingly incorrigible action that is ignored by the proper authorities.
The aspects of the scene will create a spatiality that will encoded emotional triggers for the audience. “Certain features of the world and of our own bodily experiences are encoded almost immediately as emotional triggers. In some cases this is due to innate sensitivities-perhaps most crucially, innate sensitivities to the expressive outcomes of emotion. The point holds with particular force for attachment figures”. For the opening scene, we isolate a few factors in regard to this, Andre, the man in black, and the white car. Because we form a sort of attachment to these factors are emotions are triggered when they reappear again in the film. Andre, now going by the name Logan, appear at the party scene, hosted by the parents of Chris’s white girlfriend Rose. Our emotional trigger is wholly realized when we see Andre clean shaven, with an unnerving smile on his face, and conveying unease to Chris’s attempt at conversation, particularly when Chris confronts him and says “It’s good to see another brother around here”, a typical African-American male colloquialism. His manner of speaking also because an emotional trigger for the audience as we had heard him speak before in the opening scene with an informal way of speaking. “I’m sorry where are my manners? Logan, Logan King. Chris was just telling me that he felt more comfortable with my being here”. The speech patterns Andre coneys in the scene are too formal for the character we saw at the beginning, particularly in regards to his age. Chris feels disquiet from the situation as well and thus takes a picture from his phone, the flash emanated creates an effect that seemingly brings Andre back, his disjointed screaming of “GET OUT!”, coupled with his nosebleed creates a chilling image that seems to cause the hairs on the back of our necks to stand.
Chris faces Andre (now controlled by Logan) at the Armitage’s party. Photo courtesy of IMDB.
The other two important factors of the opening scene in which the spectator gains a form of attachment to as previously stated is the man in black with his face covered and the white sports car. It will be revealed later in the film that Jeremy is the one who was the assailant and his face was covered by a knights helmet; that can be considered a symbol of Eurocentrism. The car comes into the film again when Chris is about to be led into the final entrapment and the emotional realization creates affect now that the audience, but not Chris, is aware that Jeremy kidnapped Andre in the beginning of the film and we as a result feel tension as we feel that Andre’s fate will befall Chris as well.
The effect that Logan evokes through Andre is also palpably seen in the two seemingly subservient characters in the film, Walter and Georgina. They are introduced in the film as the previous caretakers of the Armitage’s grandparents and when they passed, Dean Armitage, the patriarch of the family states, “Well-to-do white family; black servants…We hired them a few years ago to help care for my parents; they became a part of the family. Couldn’t bare to let them go”. The ‘Them’ in the statement turns out to be his parents and Georgina and Walter are actually the grandparents in control of Black people that Rose had seduced and brought to her father to be used as bodies for her grandparents. The effect that is also evoked from Georgina and Walter is not just the effect of having a person, one from a previous generation, in control of their bodies, but also a historical one that harkens back to how Black people were portrayed in cinema.
The main argument the film conveys that white people want to be black people and take control of them as a vessel is posited in a way by Young as such, “Despite the indictments, rejection, and fear directed towards Black males, many people have desired to get close to them. However, this desire has nothing to do with experiencing intimate connects to these men. Nor does it have to do with developing close friendships with them. Instead the desire to get close to these men reflects a strong societal yearning to peer into their social worlds and explore their everyday lives. It is a voyeuristic enterprise.” This can be seen in the party scene in which multiple White guests and one Japanese guest confront Chris and ask him insulting questions such as one woman asking if the sex is better or the Japanese man even asking, “Do you find that being African-American has more advantages or disadvantages in the modern world”? This of course seems to convey an ignorant and voyeuristic perception in part of the man, this also creates an emotional trigger of discomfort for Chris as he had already suffered through many ignorant interactions in the scene.
The discomforting emotion will eventually evolve into horror as the Japanese man is not just wanting be a voyeur to Chris’s experience, but may have wanted to become Chris himself. “Many of those that want to peer into the lives of these men did not desire to share in their world in any literal sense. These outsiders only wanted to know as much as they could about how these men live, and they acquired this knowledge from a very safe distance”. This leaves the members of party as being ignorant and since the audience has been given time to emotionally attach ourselves to Chris and his social experiences, which further amplifies the discomforting affect of the scene, but also creates a latent feeling of terror when discovering that the members of the Coagula group want to use Chris as a vessel without wholly understanding how Black men live in the current society. This viewing of another racial group is compounded by the limited viewpoint of descent African-American men as postulated by Dean mentioning, “ I would have voted for Obama a third time”, and one couple describing meeting Tiger Woods as their perception is limited to what media was given to them. This also can relate to how American cinema has created an unfortunate side effect of these limited viewpoints throughout history and Peele uses this disadvantage to his own advantage in conveying characters in the film that will eventually blindside the audiences.
Racial prejudice and Cinema are indelibly linked in American history. If you want to study montage and editing techniques, you would have to then study the infamous The Birth of a Nation, filled with repellent imagery of Black men and women such as having them eating watermelon and fried chicken during a session with the state house of representatives, was also the codifier for many editing techniques in film we take for granted today with an unfortunate side effect of enduring the romanticization of the Klu Klux Klan and provoking racial stereotypes. You want to see the first film to synchronize sound with an image instead of dubbing, then you have to settle with seeing Al Jolson in Blackface singing a song entitled “Mammy”, in The Jazz Singer. Even the history of animation is unavoidable as the first cartoons were based on minstrel shows with Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat evoking blackface in their early apparences. Young posits that our assumptions are created through media such as these historically when “Unlike the 1960s, when large numbers of White Americans lived in what is today known as the inner city, the 1980’s notion of the underclass emerged immediately after many White Americans fled the core of many US cities. This meant that increasing numbers of White Americans learned about experiences plight of low-income Black Americans less from personal contact and observation and more from media or publicly disseminated research”. This cultivated ignorance can be seen in the party scene in the previous section. Not only does this connect to how many white spectators have been influenced by these distorted images, but have been influenced by historical cinema depictions of African-Americans in cinema. I posit through the characterizations of Walter and Georgina, relics of a bygone era, in which these characterizations were meant to be non perturbing to white audiences, are now used to perturbe the present day audiences.
Walter, with his silent glares and stout strength at first seems to be a send up of the Brutal Black Buck, a term Bogle coined to describe the black villainous character, first regard in cinema in The Birth of a Nation. Bogle placed them into two different groups: the Black brute and the Black buck. The focus for this characterization will be on the Black buck for Walter. “Bucks are always big, baaddd niggers, oversexed and savage, violent, and frenzied as they lust for white flesh” The perception of the Black buck or the aggressive Black men also has elements from the 1970s Blaxplotation-era cinema. Although these films had finally given many black actors a chance to star in a film, they had the unfortunate side-effect of pushing the image of the aggressive Black man into the public consciousness much like the Black buck did. Although Walter’s first conversation with Chris begins as a result of him running towards him late at night, the music swelling, giving the suspenseful notion that Walter was going to kill Chris. The imagery presented in this scene evoke this character archetype making Walter in the dark looking particularly savage, and animalistic charging towards Chris.
Peele was actually planting this characterization as a payoff for later in the film when it is revealed that Walter is actually the grandfather Armitage. Walter’s running routine also foreshadows that the grandfather has taken control of his body as stated in the beginning when Dean Armitage shows Chris around and stops to admire a picture of his father, in his running gear, practising for the olympic games. The grandfather loses a spot to Jesse Owens and Chris remarks, “Yeah, tough break for your father though”. And Dean replies, “He almost got over it.” Peele is planting the factors in that scene and the resolution comes in with Walter being revealed to be the grandfather who never got over losing a spot to a black man.
Walter’s characterization of evoking the pure black buck also comes into the supposed interest in Rose, that Chris seems to feel slightly jealous of. After apologizing to Chris for fighting him the night before, not only are his vocalizations are too formal for what is considered a normal standard for the average African-American, but also the average person. A man who is a groundskeeper, particularly for an affluent white family in a desolate suburb would probably not sound as educated as Walter seems. “She is lovely isn’t she? One of a kind; a real doggone keeper”, he states in regards to Rose. The spectator can interpret this as Walter having a lust for Rose, which can carry connotations of the Black Buck, and the seeminging fetishization that media has placed on Black men lusting after White women. Although, the audience will later know that this is Walter’s patriarchal protection over his granddaughter, to the audience this evocation of a seemingly predator black man lusting over a white women creates an emotional trigger, one audiences may not even have realized they have or have developed through decades of media consumption. “Where the white women at?” has become more than a cultural joke, but an actual perceived threat by people, even if unconsciously. Bogle expends on this by stating, “Griffith played on the myth of the Negro’s high-powered sexuality, then articulated the great white fear that every black man longs for a white woman. Underlying the fear was the assumption that the white woman was the ultimate in female desirability, herself a symbol of white pride, power, and beauty.” Walters own description of her plays into this perception, and it does not help that the only prominent young female in the film is another servant to the Armitage family, but is actually the grandmother of the family Georgina.
Black female servants are not an unordinary sight in American cinema including in the present day. It is a well-known anecdote that Hattie McDanials, famous for popularizing and perfecting the Mammy archetype won the first academy award for a black performer, playing a slave then later servant to a white family in Gone with the Windand in 2011 and 2013 respectively, the two other black actresses to win best supporting actress were awarded for playing a maid and a slave respectively.
Georgina losing control of the body she’s inhabiting. Photo Courtesy of IMDB.
Although Georgina would not be considered a full fledged Mammy archetype, she fills a cultural role as the Black female servant of the house. The female servant figure flourished during the 1930s ascribed as “But it was the 1930s. The toms, coons, mammies, and bucks were no longer dressed as old-style jesters. Instead they had become respectable domestics”. Hollywood placed the Blacks into the kitchens, the laundry rooms and the pantries. Bogle called the 1930s the genesis of the Age of the Negro Servant. Georgina looks the part, but cannot convey the joie de vivre that the black servant exuded in film. She is first presented in a partial interaction pouring iced tea for Chris, Rose, Dean, and Missy. This scene provides exposition but also plants important factors that will come back to the audience. Missy discovers Chris’s backstory as he saids, “My dad was never really in the picture. My mom passed away when I was 11; She was hit by a car…My aunt raised me, with my cousins. We didn’t have a lot of money or anything but she’s a good person; kept me off the streets. She gave me my first camera”. This is an unfortunate occurrence as Young states, “ By 2012, 55.1% of all Black children, 31.1% of all Hispanic children, and 20.7% of all White children were living in single-parent homes.” The emotion conveyed by the Armitages is sympathy for this which the audience also feel emotionally triggered by. These emotions also help to divert the true process of these questions. Missy would eventually use this information to hypnotize Chris and find a way to bring into complacency into the sunken place and to know if any family of Chris would notice if he disappeared. This would also plant the fact that there was more to his mother’s death then he originally exposed to the Armitages. His mother, as it turned out was hit by a car and survived the initial hit, bleeding out by the side of the road while he was too scared to call the police and just sat there. A bystander effect that caused him enough guilt to want to protect even the possessed Georgina, when he unwittingly hits her with Jeremy’s car, even though he realizes he would be saving the grandmother Armitage instead of the girl herself. The audiences is meant to feel frustration, but if the factors of the hypnotizing session are remembered by the spectator, a bit of comprehension is given to Chris’s action. The hypnotizing scene may be the greatest evocation of affect by the audience and the characters as Chris wide eyed teary terror face has graced many of the covers for the film and advertising.
Georgina is pouring iced tea when they are discussing the party, and slips up as she is pouring Chris’s glass. Missy’s flippant attitude towards her mistake at first makes the audience feel uncomfortable at her disregard towards her domestic servant. Our emotion we feel is irritation at Missy, which hides the underlying tension the scene creates upon later viewing and realizing that Georgina is losing control of her host’s body, and the woman is specifically reacting to the party scene as that is the spot where Chris’s body will be sold in a form of bodily slavery, played out like a present day auction, except with bingo cards instead of a paddle. This scene on a later viewer also gives a new interpretation as Missy is technically calling out her mother-in-law and it is a well known anecdote that mother-in-laws and daughters-in-laws despise it each other. When she seems to evoke that keep your chin up attitude Black servile females created in their films, the smile fall flat, her laughter falters, almost like she is in pain but unable to convey it. Georgina much like Walter, gives Chris credence of an eeriness with his relationship with Rose. However, unlike Walter, who evokes a sense of lust for Rose, Georgina evokes protectiveness and dislike for Chris being with Rose. This at first seems to be a send-up of the servile Black maid who treats her charges like children. This protectiveness over white charges is unfortunately still presented in media such as The Help (2011) and Hattie McDaniel most famously molded this image for her role of Mammy, while Louise Beavers perfected this with her role in Imitation of Life (1934). Georgina, much like Andre and Walter evoke the same eerie way of speaking, like they are from a time long since past. While tears fall from her eyes and smiling she states, “Oh no, no, no, no, no, no…Ain’t you the sweetest thing? Not at all. The Armitages are good to us; they treat us like family”. Of course the line with Georgina’s tears and painful smile give the audience the emotional trigger to shudder or cringe at her plight, but when the reveal comes in that Georgina is being fought by the original host in the inside comes to light, it becomes even more chilling. The Armitages have to be good to them as they are truly family which is punctuated during the climax when Rose is shooting at Chris, muttering “Grandmother” in case there were any doubts left by the audience.
An interesting development I have come across while researching this essay is not only do our cultural perceptions of Black people generate our emotional triggers and inevitably lead us astray when Jordan Peele unveils the metaphorical curtain of the film, but how many people have garnered the theory that Rose Armitage, the seductress who leads Chris into the trap is as much as a victim of the Armitages as the Black people in the film. Allison Williams had to stress to fans during an interview with Seth Meyers when people asked her, “They’d say she was hypnotized right? And I’m like , “No, she’s just evil! How hard is that to accept! We gave you so many ways she’s bad; and they’re still like but maybe she’s a victim? And I will say, that is one hundred percent white people that say that to me”. I bring this up to posit that cultural representations of white females tend to find ways to absolve them, even with no empirical evidence supporting innocence. Bogle would call this a part of the ideal femininity is the white female, considered even today to be frail and the purest of all females. “Here was a classic battle of good and evil, innocence and corruption”. It is interesting to note that although our culture perceptions, based more on emotional triggers than empirical fact condemn Black people for cultural perceptions drawn upon by racist predecessors, but absolves white females. This is stunning to see but unsurprising since our culture still tends to idolize heroic white females while other females of different races are relegated to a side figure or made the villain of the film. Plus no innocent or good women would eat cereal through a straw.
Rose drinking milk while eating dry cereal. Photo courtesy of IMDB.
My research has unfortunately uncovered that we are far from a post-racial society that many people believe we are in. Even if a liberal mindset puts Black people on a pedestal of superiority instead of equality, it is still an inevitable form of racism. Our emotions will still create affect through tension, music, and the senses, but our cultural perceptions will define it even if subconsciously.
Mollywood Reviews 