The Talkies: Life After Real Life
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES by James Bowman Life After Real Life R eal life ain't what it used to be. What, after all, does most of life consist of but movies or the generic "entertainment" equivalent? Nearly...
...S omething of the same thinking may be behind another cinematic use of the samurai legend in our Movie of the Month, the delightful Mifune by Soren Kragh-Jacobsen...
...It would be very hard indeed to understand what in the world he could mean by these words—does he hope to be shot or screwed or both?— if we did not instantly realize that he is talking not about real guns and real naked women but about fictional images of same, and that Miss Peet is to him, as she is to us, the latter rather than the former...
...and return to Copenhagen and his life as a corporate high-flier, just married to the boss's daughter, Claire (Sofie Grabol...
...Kragh-Jacobsen encourages us in this point of view by making Kresten in real life anything but heroic...
...In the course of re-thinking his life, Kresten is divorced by Claire, fired by his father-in-law, and beaten up, first by a sinister neighbor and some would-be clients of Liva's and then by Liva's girlfriends, who think him a rapist...
...Liva as "Linda," another of his comic-book heroes...
...The movies—even when not, like The Truman Show or EdTV, specifically about living in the media world— reflect this media-reality back to us by their continual representation of hollow men and women, people who are recognizably movie people rather than real people, or "real" only with the kind of garish, movie-reality that American moviedom confers in exchange for the humanity it takes away...
...But among the independent and foreign films that one may browse if one is lucky enough to live in a major metropolitan area, it is still possible occasionally to see a thoughtful and sometimes painful working-through of the dilemmas created by the decline of real life...
...If so, real life shows signs of becoming as morally and spiritually empty as the movies...
...You caught us peeping out from behind the veil of illusion...
...His only friend is a Haitian ice cream truck driver called Raymond (Isaach De Bankole...
...But again and again we find that Rud knows things others don't know...
...Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach is Hollywood's idea of innocent youth, a displaced WoodJAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement stock-era hippie with no inward life who lives only for pleasure, or the next high...
...But this abdication of reality, unlike Hollywood's, can be a way of putting reality into perspective...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on TAS Online at www.spectator.org...
...Look at the characters in The Beach or Boiler Room or The Whole Nine Yards...
...Are there such characters in real life...
...True, the two latter films offer perfunctory moral cautions about the worlds they represent—the idyll of sun and sex and drugs cannot last...
...Ghost Dog and his victims, friends, and employers are really as unreal as the characters in The Whole Nine Yards...
...All are media constructs, cobbled together out of odds and ends of TV commercials, sitcoms, music videos, classic movies, journalistic stereotypes, and other bits of popular culture...
...Now you just all kinds of fine, ain't you...
...What is life but entertainment...
...Nobody in any of these movies is a recognizable human being —at least insofar as it is still possible for us to recognize a human being...
...Its static and often symbolic tableaux pass before our eyes as in a dream ("It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream," says the Book of the Samurai...
...This is the language of the eighteenth century Japanese text called Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai which Ghost Dog reads and quotes from constantly as his holy scriptures...
...Perhaps there are...
...It is only one of the witty and funny and concise ways that the film makes its point, namely that moral and spiritual seriousness of any kind in the world today is almost necessarily (a) ancient, (b) lonely, (c) embattled, and (d) ridiculous...
...She squeals with delight at the prospect of his teaching her the assassin's trade...
...It's all a big joke—though, to my taste at least, not a very funny one anymore...
...He's Kresten...
...Only a cretin like Rud could go on believing in him as any kind of reality, 4nd Mr...
...In one of my favorite bits of the film, Ghost Dog comes upon a couple of surly backwoodsmen who have just illegally killed a bear...
...Kresten in a comically impromptu get-up acts out Mifune's heroic role, but he is also Rud's and the film's hero —and ours too—just for sticking it out on the farm...
...This it turns out is because, to Rud, Kresten is the comic-book or movie hero which, to Kresten himself as to us, has now become a joke...
...Thus when Rud answers Bjarke's question, "Who the heck is Mifune...
...Bruce Willis's character in The Whole Nine Yards is an off-the-shelf movie hit-man to whom Amanda Peet's is a groupie...
...Forest Whitaker plays this character, known only as Ghost Dog, a fat black guy without the gym-sculpted physique of Michael Clarke Duncan, living on a rooftop in some anonymous urban slum with only his pet pigeons as companions...
...If the allegedly real world itself has so largely ceased to have any moral or spiritual expectations of its youth, why should movie youth be any different...
...Nearly all our time not spent working or sleeping is spent in the company of the media and its products, whether in the form of the newspaper or the car radio or CD player as we commute, Muzak as we shop, TV as we eat dinner, or the virtual reality of cyberspace pursued in our leisure time...
...04 James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JamesBowman@home.com...
...In ancient cultures bears were considered equal to people," he tells them...
...it makes a kind of oracular sense for him to say: "He's strong and he never gives up...
...At this they attempt to shoot him, but he shoots them first...
...These he uses to communicate with his bemused Italian gangster employer, called Louie Botticelli (John Tormey), a man who once saved his life and to whom, accordingly, he considers himself a "retainer...
...That's also why the movie is supposed to be funny...
...You know," says the hit-man's accomplice, played by Michael Clarke Duncan, to the comely Miss Peet en deshabille: "I can't think of nothing finer than a fine naked woman holding a gun...
...As a hit-man, Ghost Dog has the usual array of high-tech gadgetry and weaponry at his disposal, but like the series of pointless betrayals and the exaggeratedly calcified stereotypes of Italian mobsters, these reminders of standard gangster-movie fare only serve to highlight the strangeness of the displaced samurai warrior at the center of the film...
...The bear, like the dog, is an animal with which Ghost Dog has been symbolically associated, and he remonstrates with the hunters...
...ollywood, fat and happy, is naturally not disposed to quarrel with this state of affairs, which is one reason why so few Hollywood movies are worth seeing anymore...
...So sue us...
...We know that the deaths caused by this fine naked woman and her boss are no more real than they are, or than any other characters in the film are...
...Made according to the canons of film-making austerity laid down in the Dogma 95 manifesto by Kragh-Jacobsen and his fellow Danes, Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration) and Lars von Trier (The Idiots), this film has a built-in anti-Hollywood bias, as opposed to Jarmusch's self-developed one, and accordingly it seems less labored and more natural...
...the rapacious capitalists will have their comeuppance—but their hearts are really as much with the media stereotypes as is that of The Whole Nine Yards...
...Giovanni Ribisi in Boiler Room takes this favorite trope of boyish vulnerability into the midst of a gang of swaggering young contemporaries who pride themselves on their contempt for everything in life but making money and swiftly becomes one of them...
...The difference is that to Jim Jarmusch the fact is not just a big joke but a cause for regret and longing—and for a celebration of the lonely heroism that holds on to standards when everyone else has abandoned them...
...As one of the men is dying he says, "This ain't no ancient culture here, mister...
...The ending is rather facile in an almost Hollywoodish way, suggesting that tender feelings alone can make an instant family, but even this touch of cinematic unreality cannot spoil that old-fashioned lift of the spirits provided by a movie that can make us believe, at least for a moment, that heroes are not just in the movies...
...The samurai here is the businessman, Kresten Jensen (Anders W. Berthelsen), who plays the part of Toshiro Mifune in The Seven Samurai for the sake of his mentally retarded, comic-book reading brother, Rud (Jesper Asholt), who is inordinately delighted by the performance...
...The Whole Nine Yards, like Boiler Room and The Beach, doesn't even pretend to be anything but a caricature of reality—of actual gangster-dom or Wall Street or youth culture...
...That's the filmmakers' little joke...
...Boiler Room even provides a role for Ben Affleck with no dramatic function whatever save to deliver a couple of rhetorically souped-up, greed-is-good monologues designed to make our flesh creep...
...Gradually, however, his long-abandoned past reasserts itself, along with his love for Rud...
...This is meant to be funny...
...Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai takes up the problem posed—or rather embodied —by The Whole Nine Yards by creating a hit-man so idiosyncratic, so far from the cool, martini-swilling stereotype played by Bruce Willis, that we feel bound It's spent consuming the media's offerings of unreality...
...Neither understands the other, but the moviegoer is privileged to see, with the help of subtitles, a perfect communication between them...
...Out here in the country we have no secrets," says Kresten, but really the only one who knows all the secrets is Rud...
...Raymond speaks to him in French and he speaks to Raymond in English...
...Thus, paradoxically, the very hollowness of the characters in these films is what confers upon them such reality as they possess...
...Oops...
...asks the entertainment culture—and real life has no answer to make...
...Sometimes it is," says Ghost Dog, finishing him off.44 The very hollowness of these characters is what confers upon them such reality as they possess...
...The American Spectator • April 2000 57...
...He also has to take in Liva's bratty little brother, Bjarke (Emil Tarding), who has just been expelled from the private school she was sending him to and who thinks him and Rud "f--king peasants...
...56 April 2000 • The American Spectator to grant him the title to that acre of reality that the latter has willingly vacated...
...Returning to the family farm on his father's death after a decade of pretending he had no family, Kresten can't wait to dispose of the estate and Rud (surely there must be some sort of home that will take him...
...Meanwhile, Rud continues to embarrass him in public while pursuing his obscure interest in crop circles and UFOs and idealizing...
...He hires a housekeeper, Liva (Iben Hjejle) —who, as we know and he does not, is a prostitute on the run from a stalker—and promptly falls in love with her...
...Where is "reality" save in the unreal but comforting media world which (as they used to say about God's grace) prevents us everywhere...
Vol. 33 • April 2000 • No. 3
