The Talkies: Moody Blues
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES by James Bowman Moody Blues Adult culture today is forever reveling in punk fantasies. A negative review of The Matrix that I wrote for The American Spectator website elicited more...
...On the one hand, readers complained that I had taken too seriously what was, after all, only entertainment...
...Stephen Hunter wrote in the Washington Post that its "incredible energy and stylizations" were a compendium of "what the movies are becoming," put forward "with the brilJAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...To her it seems merely perverse to be interested in someone who can be of no use to you...
...The Dreamlife of Angels is playing as I write only in New York and Los Angeles, but TAS readers should join in a general clamor to have it released nationwide...
...In a way I had, too...
...The line seems to stretch out to the crack of doom...
...Therefore, critics love being able to praise a comic book fantasy as a work of artistic genius...
...When she takes up with the rich playboy, Chris (Gregoire Colin), it soon becomes obvious that it will end disastrously...
...For Zonca, human reality is symbolized by individuality, and the ability to treat others as individuals...
...And that cannot be done by law but only by criticism, based on some standard more rigorous than that of Hollywood...
...No doubt, this bargain basement, machine-wrought resurrection is merely to establish his messianic bona fides, but he is still the messiah of fantasy-land, come to lead us into "a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries...
...Both are adolescent pseudo-profundities, and youth culture is shot through with them—presumably because pseudo-profundities are all that most youths can assimilate...
...After some hesitation she begins to write in the diary herself...
...The moralists, I believe, have got it exactly backwards...
...When Janet Maslin of the New York Times found it merely "imaginative" and "stylish," that paper published a heavy-duty think-piece by Edward Rothstein, who opined that "the film, despite its kung fu gestures and classical allusions, is a restatement of the hacker myth, retaining and celebrating its almost utopian hopes....The hacker myth is so powerful it is difficult to resist...
...Like the young themselves, they are romantic, sentimental, idealistic, lonely, doubting, sometimes violent, and nearly always self-pitying...
...These fantasies do not cause rampages like that of Harris and Klebold, but they do interfere with the natural mechanisms by which society inhibits them, by introducing children to adult realities...
...IT'S A DAMN MOVIE...
...The American Spectator • June 1999 65...
...This is a truth which, unlike the pseudo-profundities of adolescence, is hard won for all of us, if it is won at all...
...It tells the story of Isa (Elodie Bouchez) and Marie (Natacha Regnier) who are sharing an apartment in the industrial town of Lille...
...Three weeks after it opened and perhaps rather to the embarrassment of some of those who had praised the film so highly, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of Littleton, Colorado, having concealed a number of lethal firearms under their trenchcoats just as Keanu Reeves had done in The Matrix, shot and killed a dozen of their high school classmates and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves...
...She quarrels bitterly with Isa when the latter tries to persuade her that Chris doesn't really care for her and that she ought to take more of an interest in Sandrine: "This girl's almost dead...
...77 are of varying degrees of badness...
...It's enough to make you wish they might never have to learn the terrible truth that, however high-brow they may sound, neither "challenging current perceptions of reality" nor "relating Zen Buddhism to quantum physics" has any recognizable meaning whatever...
...Only a Frenchman, perhaps, could take a story about two 21-year-old girls and give it not so much as a trace of this flattery, but that is what Erick Zonca has done in the Movie of the Month...
...I doubt if many of those who saw The Matrix could remember the next day why Keanu got his guns, which were conjured up for him in an instant, cartoon fashion, merely by wishing for them...
...Go to the dead girl, then," she taunts her...
...Marie is much less warm and friendly than Isa and rather preoccupied with her romantic life, though hints of psychic damage do not presage good things for her in that department...
...liance and zip of the pioneer spirit...
...a world where anything is possible"—in short, a world that does not and never can exist...
...Isa, by contrast, takes an immediate interest in the people in whose house she is living—perhaps because she was intermittently homeless, carrying her possessions around in an enormous backpack, before she met Marie...
...Heavy...
...It is almost as if Marie conspires with Chris to cause the maximum unhappiness for herself, so low are her expectations on her own behalf...
...Like Chris, the jerk, Marie is utterly self-absorbed...
...Like the guy who spelled out F-I-C-T-I-O-N for me, they presumably thought it just good clean fun...
...What is necessary is not that you take the violence out of the fantasy but that you take the fantasy out of the violence...
...But all of them flatter the immature mind by taking it far more seriously than it deserves...
...one or two are almost good...
...Of course, lots of teenagers are interested in challenging current perceptions of reality, but they usually forget all that when reality steps up, slaps them in the face and says, "Get a job...
...shouted the punctuation of one irate reader...
...A negative review of The Matrix that I wrote for The American Spectator website elicited more protests than any review I have written since my criticism of Saving Private Ryan...
...On the other hand, some people were upset that I had failed to appreciate the film's metaphorical, or allegorical, commentary on the human condition—and so had presumably not taken it seriously enough...
...Criticizing comic book fantasy as comic book fantasy is a bit like uttering an ethnic slur among the liberal-minded to whom all artistic genres are equal...
...Like Chris, she cannot escape from the gravity of herself in order to encounter the full reality of other people...
...Take the "violence" out and fantasy may do as it will...
...In real life, violence tends to have horrible and permanent consequences...
...That's all you care about: cadavers...
...It used to be one of the primary aims of adult culture to drag kids through this "moody" phase and into a just and mature appreciation of the shallowness of its pseudo-profundities...
...His film ends with the camera searching the faces of Isa's new co-workers in a computer cable factory—women whose existences are otherwise defined by their generic, uniform quality—with Isa's eye for their humanity...
...You should be glad to be alive, and you run after this jerk...
...It takes a rare ability to say no to the importunities of maturity until well into your thirties, like the Wachowskis, who told Weinraub that among the "synthesis of ideas" that went into the making of their movie was "making mythology relevant in a modern context, relating quantum physics to Zen Buddhism, investigating your own life...
...Even our sternest moralists had nothing to say against fantasy per se...
...Reality, we are told, is just software...
...The apartment belongs to a woman and her daughter who were badly injured in a car accident...
...The hacker is our savior...
...But Marie's self-absorption, unlike Chris's, is hellish and despairing and it is impossible not to feel excruciatingly her self-lacerations as she is left alone in the apartment of "the dead girl" —the more so as the example of Isa's goodness is always there in front of her, though she seems incapable of profiting by it...
...It is so dominant it is almost impossible to dissect...
...Deep stuff...
...But they all will have remembered the "brazenly chic high-style" with which he wielded them...
...She knows no more about them and cares to know no more...
...esides The Matrix, the list of teen movies I set out last month has now been augmented by Go, Never Been Kissed, eXistenZ, SLC Punk!, Idle Hands, and Election...
...in The Matrix, the character with whom we are meant to identify ourselves can levitate himself, dodge bullets, freeze, or catch them in mid-air, and when at length he is killed, it is a comparatively simple matter to re-animate him...
...These 44 As violence becomes more 'realistic' it becomes more detached from any moral context...
...For as movie violence has become more physically "graphic" and thus allegedly "realistic" it has simultaneously become more dramatically unrealistic and detached from any moral context...
...They pass through her life as insubstantial, dream presences, occupying her life the way she occupies Sandrine's apartment...
...It is also one of the defining truths of adulthood: the very antithesis of the self-pity and self-importance (two aspects of the same phenomenon) that childish fantasies like The Matrix help to sustain among youths who too seldom see anything else...
...F.I.C.T.I.O.N...
...David Denby wrote in the New Yorker of The Matrix's "brazenly chic high style — blackon-black, airborne, spasmodic...
...The critiques ran along two, seemingly opposite tracks...
...Bernard Weinraub, who also writes about movies for the Times, interviewed the Wachowski brothers, Andy and Larry, who wrote and directed the picture, and learned that, not surprisingly, they had been fascinated since they were teenagers "with ideas that challenge current perceptions of reality...
...She soon finds out that the mother died not long after the accident and the daughter, called Sandrine, still lies in a coma...
...James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JVBowman@compuserve.com...
...But although I may have missed the wit and style that were obvious to my brother critics, the tone of the complaints against me made it sound more as if I had committed a social faux pas...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS website—www.spectator.org...
...Instead of pooh-poohing the callowness of comic-book fantasy or self-pitying pop songs (say, the Smashing Pumpkins's "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness"), they review them in the New York Times and make their authors think of themselves as serious artistes...
...Marie, through her mother, has got the job of house-sitting it while, as she thinks, the owners are in a coma somewhere...
...64 June 1999 The American Spectator I do not...
...But now adult culture is in the hands of those who invented current youth culture and who never want to let go of it...
...The "dreamlife" of the title is in a way Marie's...
...Isa takes to visiting Sandrine in the hospital and reading Sandrine's schoolgirl diary, sometimes to Sandrine herself as a way of coaxing her back to consciousness...
...All the predictable arguments about gun control and violence on TV and in video games were made ad nauseam, but no one seems to have raised any objection to the popular culture's more insidious encouragements to kids to inhabit this fantasy world, or thought that their inhabiting it was likely to impair their ability to tell fantasy from reality...
...it allows them to show how broad-minded they are...
...Hollywood's critical standard is that what's good is what induces 4-year-old boys to part with $7 or $8 out of their overgenerous allowances, and the boys' own standard does not value highly representations of the reality they are so largely shielded from...
...Even if we are not turning our children into Harrises and Klebolds without knowing it, we are certainly doing them no favors by letting them spend their formative years (as they used to be called) steeped in an almost constant flow of "entertainment" which does not consider the distinction between reality and fantasy, or truth and falsehood, to be of any great moment...
Vol. 32 • June 1999 • No. 6
