Cash's Hurt: A music video worthy of film comparison.
Ahhh, film. Director Mark Romanek mixes staged footage, old documentary, Hollywood clips and sundry movie excerpts into an emotional impasto for Johnny Cashs music video for "Hurt." There is a conscious use of film as the repository of memory and feelings that seems a perfect expression of the songs mournful nostalgia when, in fact, nostalgia is transcended (if thats the right word) by the way Romaneks collated imagery burrows deep beneath it.
Cashs version of "Hurt," a Nine Inch Nails tune, is merely a stunt: An aged country artist fits his tired, aching feet into stylish Doc Martens. With Cashs basso profundo crackling through songwriter Trent Reznors fashionable gloom ("I hurt myself today/To see if I could feel") something not exactly trustworthy seems to be going onperhaps a repudiation of country-western sincerity. The smartness of Reznors tropes keeps a longtime Cash listener at a distance, disbelieving that the Man in Black has, so late in life, fallen for Trenty self-pity. But the music video itself provides a genuine experience.
Flashing back through Cashs career, Romanek also flashes through our pop livesCashing-in on our memories or resolving newly created interest in the singers past. The "Hurt" video operates as a Johnny Cash cinematheque; a career retrospective that recalls one of those Michael Jackson HIStory-era montages only this time emphasizing the artists personal recoil and regret. Its mighty unsettling when Cash warbles, "You can have it all/My empire of dirt" and Romanek then shows us a lifetimes accumulated trophiesinsubstantial tinsel including a framed gold record. As newcomer Reznor sang the line, "dirt" was dirt. With Cash its a heavy summation of the now-meaningless accolades the music industry and his fans have bestowed. The lyric becomes weighted with doubt as if Cash suspected he had wasted his life and never communicated what it means to feel to millions of people. That, of course, is ridiculous. Just listen to the 1963 "Ring of Fire." Cash, who was always a half-camp figure, occasionally got to the sweet part of hurting that George Jones and Merle Haggard and Conway Twitty could summon while clearing their throats. Distinction came from Cash developing a marketable image and its our share of that Man in Black identity that Romanek activates.
Romaneks tendency toward art pastiche (best-known from videos for Nine Inch Nails "Closer" and Madonnas "Bedtime Story") rarely approaches realism, but this time the texture of real lifethe showbiz ups and downs that Cash has lived and that have been captured on film through the yearsare his subject. Here Romanek is a combination curator, esthete, mortician and visual eulogistmultitask skills that turn out to be extremely humane. In the midst of the videos Cash memorializing, Romanek pulls a heartbreakingly intimate stoke; he shows Cashs wife, singer June Carter standing nearby, quaking with concern like someone who has spent a lot of time making sure a loved-one doesnt stumble. Instantaneously, its a perfect vision of marriagecompanionshipthat asserts the truth of Cashs personal good fortune against all the Reznor-penned pessimism. Soon, theres an obscure shot of a womans portrait in a picture frame that may be one of Junes ancestors from c&ws fabled Carter Family (or Cashs own mother). The mystery reverberates, as do the flashbacks of young June resembling her would-be pop-star daughter, the talented Carlene Carter.
Its all proof that Romanek is such a thorough film archivist that he cant help coming up with visual evidence of life to contrast the songs infatuation with death and ruin. (A weird, incidental detail shows Cash sitting at a banquet table, pouring wine over the victuals. The wasteful gesture aptly conveys imperial decadence, but it goes against the good sense of the best country-and-western living, preferring to epitomize drunken excess.)
In his current Red Hot Chili Peppers video that remakes the pop-art sculpture of Erwin Wurm, and an Audioslave video thats simply intoxicated with the brilliance of pyrotechnics, Romanek has displayed a renewed engagement with the excitement of visual stimuli. Altogether, its a welcome rebirth, because it was no fun watching Romanek in the Kubrick laboratory of One Hour Photo. Though this, Romaneks second feature film, was photographically resplendent, it treated the subject of its protagonists photomania in bizarre terms. (The Robin Williams character responded to childhood abuse by photographing and brutalizing an ideal American familyinterweaving psychotic and sitcom cliches.) If that was Romaneks attempt at joining the feature film mainstream, I want to tell him that hes a better artist when he doesnt doubt his fascination with visual iconography. "Hurt" makes you stop and think because Romanek is unusually sensitive to the heritage of visual art; he can give tradition new meaning, perplexing meaning.
In "Hurt," Romanek uses clips from Cashs feature film debut A Gunfight, also cutting-in dramatization of a crucifixionthe latter footage is in line with Reznors s&m proclivities but it simultaneously pays homage to Cashs old-school Christian symbology. Its predictable stuff, yet it coheres in a way thats far from facile. (Romaneks ideas on regret, suffering and redemption are much more sophisticatedand potentthan the crappy, soulless postmodernism in Todd Haynes Far From Heaven.) Romaneks use of Cash memorabilia as guilty (Christian) Americana recalls the authenticity of Robert Franks epochal photo book The Americans. That means the images in "Hurt" are authenticnot faux Americana like David Finchers travesty of Robert Frank in Don Henleys "The End of the Innocence" video. Romanek allows one to make personal, individual sense of a lifetime of media recording.
At this moment of media changeover, when video is displacing films poignancy and majesty, Romanek has achieved an irrefutable testament. "Hurt" proves that the past century of filmnot digital videohas captured the essence of one mans mortality completely enough to argue against his own three and a half minutes of cynicism. Johnny Cash may be wrong to peddle his own agita, but Romanek provides precious evidence of the mans life; its impact recorded in the lines of his face like the post-atomic flashes of bodies on walls.
Ahhh, film. Ahhh, life.
Hurt Directed by Mark Romanek
Ten
Anyone who keeps up with popular culture cannot really be impressed by Abbas Kiarostamis Ten. Its novelty has already been preempted by HBOs Taxicab Confessionsa periodic program in which a cab driver listens to the outre/sentimental biographies of his/her passengers. All thats phenomenal about Ten is the reality-tv quality of shameless self-display that Kiarostami (when not a potent humanist, a backward third-world esthete) thinks is revelatory. Tens only fascination comes from observing critics leapfrog. Since the films premiere at Cannes 2002 and its local debut last week at Film Forum, theres been a circus of contention as critics attempt to see who can out-praise each other on this movie thats not even a movie. Ten is merely a videotape that presumes to offer the insight we expect from great filmmaking.
Dont get me wrong. Kiarostami can be a great filmmaker, as Where is the Friends Home and Life and Nothing But demonstrate. But Ten makes me want to argue the cult of personality that Kiarostami has engendered against the factwhich any right-minded filmgoer can attestthat the most consistently astonishing filmmaker at work these days is Steven Spielberg, not some Middle Eastern idol of left-liberal guilt. (Cranky letter-writers, calm yourselves. Spielberg is not even my favorite moviemaker. Im just stating unfashionable truth.)
Yes, Hollywood has inured us to everyday life, but Ten fails to make the commonplace amazing. Kiarostamis primary tropea little boy in a passenger seat arguing with his motherwore out my patience. Sure, hes Patriarchy in short pants, but Kiarostami returns to this point as if he discovered patriarchal oppression. (Both The Day I Became a Woman and The Circle are superior.) Critics who claim Ten could not have been made without digital video merely shill for the new technology. I find that the films boosters praise it simply to refute mainstream convention. Problem is, Tens stultifying digital-video look denies audiences the esthetic pleasures and emotional insight that filmmakers might normally reach toward. Thats what Romaneks "Hurt" has in abundance.
Ten Directed by Abbas Kiarostami