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Locked Inside the Kubrick Cult

Armond White — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:45:36 +0000

Room 237 lets nerds shine

Following the IFC Center’s very canny “The Films of Stanley Kubrick” series, comes the documentary Room 237 which sums up the Stanley Kubrick cult. Comprised of theories spoken by five different Kubrick nerds over an assemblage of movie clips and diagrams by director Rodney Ascher, Room 237 pretends to dissect Kubrick’s 1980 movie The Shining. Ascher’s film—a true mockumentary if ever there was one—is named after the Overlook Hotel suite where little Danny sees Kubrick’s most disturbing visions due to his gift for “shining.” Every nerd wants to shine.
But Room 237 is an even more disturbing vision of post-cinephilia asininity. The theories proposed by the five unseen nerds and elaborated by Ascher, (whose fondness for eccentricity suggests Escher), are not just wildly different from each other, they demonstrate a current style of cinematic illiteracy that has replaced critical thinking.

Actually an embarrassment to the highbrow Kubrick, Room 237 shows that the Kubrick cult consists of that breed who like to think they think. However, the hypotheses presented, (and seemingly validated by use of actual—pirated?—Kubrick clips), resist rationality.

I’ve long realized that Kubrick’s stature among film geeks certified a paradigm shift from the Hitchcock era when the legendary master of suspense—and of montage—inspired a different, popular breed of film enthusiast than Kubrick whose esoteric, post-WWII misanthropy fed recent generations of kiddie nihilists who, considering themselves especially smart, responded to his stiff (non-sensual, thus anti-Hitchcockian) compositions. (They’re now the Fincher/Nolan kids.) Recall Kubrick’s tracking shots from Paths of Glory and Lolita to Full Metal Jacket that were more deterministic than Max Ophuls who tracked to observe transitory life while Kubrick’s steadicam tracks bore down and confined life’s possibilities. No Kubrick film exemplified this determinism like The Shining, a horror movie about existential claustrophobia that seems angled to mean much more. But whatever it is exactly, (and that fastidious Stephen King adaptation is surprisingly, unexpectedly sloppy), brings the Kubrick cult of Room 237 to weird ecstasies of obsessive overthinking.

Watching Room 237 you can’t avoid the problem of contemporary film criticism shallowness. Unlike Wim Wenders’ Room 666, a celebration of cinephilia where a range of filmmakers discussed their inspirations at the Cannes film festival, Room 237 is strictly concerned with the fantasies produced by nerds’ uneducated responses to the Kubrick myth and the irrationality of The Shining.

Fans seem unable to recognize the film’s failings and so try to make virtues of its mistakes. “Kubrick often in many of his movies would end them with a puzzle so he’d force you to go out of his movies saying ‘What was that about?’” So says one zealot who responds to cinema the way a child reacts to a video game, trusting that a manufacturer cares about his response.

Another nerd says “[Kubrick] is like a megabrain for the planet who is boiling down, with all of this extensive research, all of these patterns of our world and giving them back to us in this dream of a movie.”

Sorry to say but this inanity redounds to the global reach of Roger Ebert’s TV reviewing. Room 237 doesn’t raise one’s appreciation of The Shining (cue laff track), instead, it confuses response. It features reenactments of Kubrick placing a Calumet baking powder canister, paranoid shots from All the President’s Men, shots of Tom Cruise cruising in Eyes Wide Shut and, for seriousness, there are even purloined images from Schindler’s List to justify the suggestion that Kubrick was actually expounding upon timeless examples of genocide. It is Ebert’s pretense of “criticism” that moves these nerds to insist that The Shining must be important because it is more than just a horror movie. Their theories concentrate on gaffes and continuity errors which is exactly the sort of “criticism” that Ebert made available to couch potato cineastes.

One enthusiast claims “Its contradictions pile up in your subconscience.” Another recidivist viewer claims “When you see things over and over again their meanings change for you…He’s playing with your acceptance of visual information and also your ignorance of visual information.” This is hero-worship, not analysis. Another nerd says “We are dealing with a guy who has a 200 IQ.”

Reverence for Kubrick overwhelms any understanding of The Shining. It is symptomatic of today’s celebrity veneration—the flip-side of the feeling of nothingness that makes nerds bow down to the likes of Nolan, Fincher, Soderbergh and Kubrick. So they fantasize about The Shining’s supposed profundity as when one professes, “We all know from postmodern film criticism that the meanings are there whether or not the filmmaker is aware of them.” This is the mess that criticism has come to. Fake erudition causes another to muse, “Why would Kubrick make the movie so complicated? Yeah, why did Joyce write Finnegan’s Wake?” This goofy exchange shows they don’t know the difference between literary and cinematic erudition. These Shining geeks don’t even know the hotel story of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, a truly profound expression of memory and desire.

They ignore the human significance of Jack Nicholson telling his son Danny “I would never hurt you.” In this warped cathexis, the cynical gotcha coincidences carry hidden importance that means more than the clear, apparent behavior and imagery.

The Kubrick cult dispenses with traditional humanist notions of art appreciation. They prize Kubrick for The Shining’s horror movie ugliness, perverting Diane Arbus’s twins, turning an elevator into a bloody diluvium (although as Pauline Kael observed “No one takes an elevator in this movie anyway”). Without any schooling in visual or literary interpretation, the Kubrick cult is left to bizarre fantasizing. One nervously giggles “I’m trapped in this hotel. There’s no escape, there’s like this endless loop.”

So we’re subjected to ideas about Kubrick’s face subliminally photoshopped in clouds, an actor’s erection, a Rodeo poster turned minotaur and a Dopey dwarf decal. Ascher subjects his witnesses to humiliation that’s no better than his unidentified steal from Murnau’s magnificent Faust, where a silly narrator adds Kubrick “found the Holocaust of such evil magnitude that he just couldn’t bring himself to treat it directly.”

When Ascher isn’t holding Kubrick obsession up to ridicule, his presentation yet implies the same credibility the Internet gives fanboys. Like Internet criticism, Room 237 resembles the kind of conspiracy theory mania that kooks used to put on single-spaced mimeographed sheets and pass out on street corners.

The ultimate nerd testimony says “In your own life, your point of view is being altered by your study.” But this isn’t study which means to examine, this is mere obsession. Room 237 is another confirmation of the end of cinephilia.

Battle of the Andersons

Armond White — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 17:18:01 +0000

Resident Evil has fun with 3D, The Master makes fun of religion

Compare the unoriginal use of 3D in Hugo–standard diorama compositions with objects poking out toward the viewer–to Paul W.S. Anderson’s astonishingly lively 3D compositions in Resident Evil: Retribution where heroine Alice (Milla Jovovich) fights the Umbrella Corporation’s viral experiments that produced a plague turning mankind into zombies. Anderson’s images vivify the entire expanse of the wide screen to keep your eyes busy surveying the breadth of action while also pulling your vision inward for an appreciation of depth–and emotion.

My point isn’t to measure Paul W. S. Anderson against Martin Scorsese; that’s too easy–an almost unfair contrast of innovative imagination to uninspired convention. Adventurous Alice embodies modern anxieties (Anderson’s stimulus) as opposed to geeky Hugo who drags us back to the irrelevancies of tired cinephilia (Scorsese‘s desperate recourse). It’s time now to assert Paul W.S. Anderson’s status as one of contemporary cinema’s most thrilling talents. He deserves a clarifying comparison to the fraudulent, annoyingly monickered Paul Thomas Anderson whose film The Master opened the same week as Resident Evil 5.

It’s inevitable that Paul Thomas Anderson’s artistic ambitions should be unavoidably juxtaposed to Paul W.S, Anderson’s artistic success. Their differences immediately reveal how a pseudo-serious indie artiste fails the aesthetic and emotional impact of commercial craftsmanship. The Master, a roman a clef about Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and his paradigmatic follower, is a dull, nihilistic and mean-spirited presumption of cultural history whereas the futuristic fantasy of Resident Evil: Retribution turns nihilism into Apocalyptic Pop. This is the classic White elephant vs. Termite art parallel once coined by critic Manny Farber.

Memorably dubbed “P.T.” (as in the huckster-showman P.T. Barnum) by New York Press’ Godfrey Cheshire, Paul Thomas Anderson makes “big” movies that resemble the 1960s studio epics today’s film geeks never experienced–and so become fools for the highly-hyped affectations of a brand-name charlatan. The Master’sopening sequence–an extended pantomime of a WWII sailor’s shameless perversities–presents Freddie Quell’s (Joaquin Pheonix) sexual exhibitionism as if defining his character. Its blatancy is similar to the puritanical bluntless about the porn industry in P.T.’s Boogie Nights. Quell symbolizes the neuroses prone to authoritarian exploitation. Essentially a coming-of-age story, The Master’s bad father figure is cult leader Lancaster Dodd, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman doing the same psychotic mastermind as in Charlie Kaufman’s unbearable Synecdoche, N.Y. There’s a similarity to P.T. and Kaufman’s egotistic conceits. They trade on “smartness” and both directors are incapable of providing an enlightening, entertaining vision.

Resident Evil: Retribution doesn’t sell “big ideas” or “controversy.” It continues the video-game-based series that Paul W.S. Anderson has assayed three previous times, always growing. Anderson’s taste for the kinetic excitement that gaming has in common with cinema inspires him to turn gaming conventions into idealized pop myths. Serious ideas about our entropic destiny are used to confirm humanity’s positive will as embodied by resilient Alice (athletic, emotive Milla fulfills the warrior promise of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley and shows a convincing maternal gentleness in a terrifying domestic tangent). This universal lesson opposes The Master’scynicism in which P.T.’s vague storytelling alludes to notorious religious beliefs then particularizes its “expose” with pessimistic displays of Quell and Dodd’s actorly neuroses. It’s a secularist epic for audiences of the vampire age who don’t believe in religion anyway–there’s no possibility of rebirth or conversion, just suspicions of torture as Dodd manipulates Quell to follow orders and reveal his pain. Yet Alice (in a Wasteland rather than Wonderland) meets cynicism head on and does spectacular battle with it. That used to be the purpose of movies–at least until the indie era permitted disaffected filmmakers to obfuscate moral predicaments with narcissistic indulgence.

Resident Evil: Retribution reworks popular notions of dystopia. While P.T. means to impress critics, Paul W.S. Anderson has fun with 3D and has greater impact. His opening and closing sequences are unforgettable. In the first, Alice’s tragic memory plays in reverse: disaster is shown (equal to the opening of Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch) then remedied with a visionary optimism like Michael Jackson’s Earth Song music video. In the last tableau, her beyond-belief premonition creates a Heironymous Bosch cliffhanger. And throughout the film, Paul W.S. Anderson goes through the structures and levels of game-playing the way epic poets and novelists went through varied events to describe the full tenacity of human experience. Set in the Testing Floor of a Soviet war experiment with soundstage Times and Red Squares, then with a very modern vision of the White House,Resident Evil teases the idea of both movie and gaming fantasy. It puts the modern urge to survive (Faith) in witty context.

If you’re indifferent to Scientology, The Master will seem much ado about hoodoo. Given his trendy aversion to the subject of Faith, P.T. replays his antipathy toward religion same as in There Will Be Blood. He reduces reprobate Quell and charlatan Dodds to Method acting showing-off. Phoenix’s humpback and hare-lipped snarl/smirk recall a DeNiro yokel and Hoffman’s posturing again exposes his script’s grandstanding. The only subtlety is P.T.‘s in-joke reference to Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry, Richard Brooks 1960 film version of Sinclair Lewis’ 1927 novel exploring religious hucksterism. This confirms that P.T. doesn’t just imitate his previous models Altman, Kubrick, Lynch and King Vidor; he‘s also inferior to Brooks. There will be copycatting!

All that ballyhoo about The Master being shot in 70mm means nothing in the digital cinema age (too many oppressive home-video close-ups waste technology specifically designed to give tactility to what might be lost in distant scope). Praising this shows ignorance about cinematography. Instead, the smart-about-movies crowd should be looking at Paul W.S. Anderson’s aesthetics. A photo album sequence compositing shots from the previous Resident Evils activates the screen’s fields, planes, and composition quadrants. The story may be a relay of obstacles and levels that test Alice’s intelligence and perseverance (“As I became more powerful, the human race became weaker” she worries) but the film stays lively, the action-narrative relentless. Note: The best visual P.T. can muster is an over-obvious jail-cell scene that puts id and super-ego side-by-side.

Compare that redundant ambiguity to the sequence where Alice confronts her manipulation by the Umbrella Corporation in a factory. The image of her robotic replication surely recalls Spielberg’s A.I. (a summary reference for the Resident Evil series) but it also painfully signifies her political disillusionment–not only that, it inspires her determination to fight on.

The Master’s cynical bombast defines the worst aspects of our anti-religious era; its solemn audacity is unconvincing (a fashion show scored to Ella Fitzgerald and a naked females musical number recalling Eyes Wide Shut are two of the most embarrassingly banal sequences in recent cinema). The fun and fascination of Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil: Retribution proves the work of a true cinema artist; it transforms a genre franchise with visionary newness.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Armond White on Singing in the Rain: The Citizen Kane of Musicals

Armond White — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 15:20:38 +0000

Photo courtesy of City Arts.

The fact that Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s 1952 Singin’ in the Rain was later to inspire art as different from itself and as unignorable as both Michael Jackson’s Black or White music video and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange suggests that maybe, as legend would have it, it really is the greatest movie-musical of all time.

The 60th anniversary release of Singin’ in the Rain (Fathom Events productions sponsors nationwide theatrical screenings tonight and Warners Home Video has issued a bright restoration on DVD and Blu-Ray) brings it to the consciousness of a culture that has forgotten what once were the movie-musical’s most infectious qualities and to a generation that never knew.

Now that the movie-musical is a rarely practiced genre, it’s the perfect moment to appreciate Singin’ in the Rain as the most affectionate and emotionally accurate memoir of Hollywood movie-making. Kelly-Donen satirized showbiz practices on screen and off in its comedy about the historic turning point when sound revolutionized the industry: studio journeymen and former vaudevillians Don and Cosmo (Kelly and Donald O’Connor) transform a boilerplate romantic melodrama The Duelling Cavalier into The Singing Cavalier, foiling the screechy siren Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen’s memorable comic villain) and debuting the ingenue Kathy (the ingenue Debbie Reynolds).

The historicity that has always distinguished Singin’ in the Rain positioned it as the friendliest summation of cinephilia; coming at the mid-20th century point it celebrates the exuberant creativity of filmmaking processes as much as Citizen Kane while also displaying comparable wit–both in the Betty Comden-Adolph Green screenplay and the amazing, non-stop exuberance of its performers. To love the genre is to love this movie; that’s the secret of the centerpiece “The Broadway Melody” number, the ultimate example of what film scholars call mise-en-abyme with surely the most intense coordination of the spectrum in the history of color cinematography.

Working in the movie-musical tradition established by MGM producer Arthur Freed, Kelly-Donen were also able to comment on those standards and advance them: the ingenious combination of flair and spoofing, expertise and experimental panache (in every montage number or single-set song) is like no other movie musical. This is certainly different from the refinement that Vincente Minnelli exhibited the previous year in An American in Paris. Kelly-Donen’s style pivots deceptively on Minnelli’s sophistication the same way Kelly’s athletic dance style differs from Fred Astaire’s.

To read the full review at City Arts click here.