Blame it on Fidel (2006)

This was a smart film. It is French, but that is not the reason it is smart. It is smart because the main point of the film comes only in a few seconds toward the end of the film when the viewer, after having been drawn through the narrative of Anna, a little 9-year old girl who is rebelling against her bourgeois-turned-bohemian parents, gets a glimpse of what Anna’s parents have been trying to “show” her all along: true solidarity.

Anna walks up to her father, after he has found out about some political happenings that did not go their way:  he is staring out the window, contemplative; she slowly walks up to him and reaches out to hold his hand. It is at this moment that the viewer sees real solidarity happening. Clearly, Anna cannot know what group solidarity means until she can accomplish the first hurdle of being understanding and compassionate toward just one person. This, after her parents have dragged her through the emotional ringer by completely shocking her sense of sensibility when it comes to thrusting her into a world of revolutionaries, communist sympathizers, and an end to her bourgeois lifestyle.

The film closes, a bit cliche, with her walking amongst the “public school” kids, intermixing.

This film shows us that though we may struggle against change, if we can learn on our own to show true compassion for one, we are more likely to show it naturally for more-than-one; rather than being forced to for some idealism we can’t even comprehend.  Hmm….

Let the Right One In (2008)

Sometimes I don’t quite know what to say about a film. The old tendency is to say: “It was good. I liked it.” And be done with it.  But that’s not enough. That’s never enough. Sometimes I don’t have much to say until I start writing. That’s the beauty of this blog: the process of writing brings out so much more in terms of the analytical process that goes into digesting a film after-the-fact. 

It was good. I liked it. I’m not sure exactly what I liked about it other than it tugs on the viewer’s heartstrings and makes the viewer identify with the female protagonist’s point of view, although she is the most violent and least ethical characters in the film. Now, I wrote just now that she was the least ethical. Well, yes, she is because she kills people and sucks their blood. But she is also the MOST ethical in the film because of how she selflessly takes care of her friend. You get the same feeling when watching The Lives of Others.  You don’t want to identify with the Stasi spy but you are pulled into it because he is both sides of the same coin: Good and Bad; therefore, balanced. Same thing with this movie: you identify with her because she, like Kenny Rogers, knows when to hold ‘em….

The young girl, approximately age 12, is a vampire. Her name is Eli. The visual effects were sufficient for the film, and not over the top, and a few times the viewer is treated to a glimpse of Eli’s real age (maybe in her 60s). So the poor thing has been a vampire for probably almost 50 years. But, she’s stuck as a little girl (it’s hard not to think of Interview with a Vampire). That’s one of the things that makes you feel for her: the fact that she is mentally mature but not physically. The psychological toll that is being taken is probably excruciating. Perhaps that is why her companion at the beginning of the film is out doing the dirty work for her. The viewer can only guess who this person is: an old friend from her childhood, a brother, or someone else? But he’s old (in his 60s).  We’ll come back to this in a bit because clearly Eli needs someone to help her live.

Eli’s neighbor is Oscar and he’s a bit of a dweeb who doesn’t know how to stand up for himself so he gets beaten up a lot by the same old bullies. Eventually, Eli takes on the role of protectress and as the film closes, the viewer sees that Oscar and Eli are staying together. 

Because Eli helped Oscar with the bullies–I won’t reveal what happened but suffice it to say they won’t be bothering anyone else–Oscar clearly feels he owes her a major debt of gratitude.  And on the train in the last scene of the film, Oscar is sitting there tapping on a box (inside of which is Eli) using the morse code they started using earlier in the film.  While Eli protected Oscar in the only way she could, now Oscar is doing the same for her: by taking care of her. Is this love, or just friendship?  Is Oscar going to become the old man who was her companion earlier in the film?  Because he did some pretty gruesome things for Eli.

The film is both sad and happy: it’s good that Oscar didn’t have bullies anymore and that he finally had someone who loved him enough to help him. But it’s bad that in order for him to be free from his bullies, people had to die and now he may have signed away his life and freedom to take care of a perpetually-young 12-yr old vampire.  It’s good for Eli because she has someone to stay with and to take care of her.  But overall, their present and future reality is pretty grim because their relationship is founded on a mutual need for death.

But the other problem is that Oscar never learned to stick up for himself. He let someone else do it for him.  This is a problem in today’s world: we always try to rely on external things to justify or cope with incidents in our lives. But applying a vampire-salve on the wound of your bully problem is not going to fix your own mind and its ability to cope.  No, it’s not. It’s only going to mask the problem.  And another problem is that instead of trying to resolve the problem by having adults intervene with the bullying situation, Oscar opened up the stage for some murder most foul. This makes you think of other incidents when bullying went really wrong…Columbine, for instance. Those boys took lives because they were picked on, either because the adults didn’t care or because they didn’t feel confident enough to seek help from adults. 

So maybe this film is about the failure of adults to protect kids. 

The viewer, of course, has no idea how Eli became a vampire but clearly she was just a kid and someone wasn’t doing their job taking care of her.

Yeah, let’s blame it on the adults.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

I’m blown away by this film. It is the best Herzog film I’ve seen yet. The pace is perfect. The story is profound. The characters are well presented.

What struck me as I was watching this film was Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual. (I’ve noted this also in my post on Slumdog Millionnaire) This comes out most profoundly in the scene when Kaspar is sitting down with the Professor and the maid and the Professor asks him the most ridiculous Logic question of all time: the one about if you’re approaching a crossroads and to the left is the Village of Liars, and to the right is the Village of Truth-Tellers, and a person approaches you, what question do you ask him/her in order to determine which Village he/she comes from because your ultimate goal is to get to the Village of Truth-Tellers.  Personally, like the maid in the film, I could not answer this question of “Logic.”  And she does well to defend Kaspar’s unreadiness to answer such a question, and she even admits that she could not answer it.  The Professor’s answer still doesn’t make sense to me and it probably never will. In fact, I’ve forgotten the answer but it involved a double negative.  And, anytime a Professor shows up in a film like this, it’s obvious the critique is on academia (sorry my academic readers…which is all of you! ) This sentiment is also resonated in places like The Simpsons: have you ever noticed how many times they make fun of graduate students?!)  Kaspar said he had another answer, and that was to ask the traveler whether he/she was a tree frog.  If the person was from the Village of Liars, the traveler would answer “yes” and if the traveler was from the Village of Truth-Tellers, the answer would be “no.”  Then it would be obvious which was from the Village of Truth-Tellers. This makes absolute sense, and based on the progression of Kaspar’s “intellect” from the beginning up until this point in the film, it shows an amazing capacity for organic logic.  But, of course, the Professor said he couldn’t accept that answer because it was all description and no logic.  Of course, neither Kaspar nor the maid could say much in retaliation so they both just sat there.  How often do we just sit there in the face of blatant closedmindedness?

The point is that one need not an academic background to be intelligent or intellectual or logical. Hence, Gramsci’s organic intellectual.  But the irony there is that an academic formulated this theory. So does that automatically invalidate the existence of the organic intellectual? What would Benjamin say?

Herzog presents such an amazing perspective on family and culture in this film. Every time you turn around, he is presenting a critique of some aspect of life. The most blatant is the (un)education and treatment of children by their parents. There are other true stories in history of “wild” children who were kept locked up or out with the dogs for their entire lives. I’ve seen TV specials on this, and films like Slingblade at least fictionally document the ramifications of such treatment. And in the news within the past year there was the report of the Australian (or was it Austrian?)  father who kept his 40-yr old daughter in the basement where he forced her to live and bear his incestuous children.  We do the most awful things to ourselves. It’s very much like Ursula LeGuin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” about a Utopian town that hides a dirty secret: they’re imprisoning a child in a dirty cellar to take the allegorical brunt of their happiness.  This short story is a perfect parallel for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

The saddest part, of course, is that this is based on a true story. But that’s what Herzog does best: take the real and add elements of fiction to make it sublime.  Herzog has taken the legend and history of Kaspar Hauser and added elements that make it not just a presentation of Kaspar’s story, but also a presentation of society’s ills. Though, in defense of the town and those who took over Kaspar’s care, a great deal of effort and help was given to him (in the film), which reflects very positively on the “it takes a village” theory.

No one knows why Kaspar’s original caretaker (presumably his father???) kept him locked up but it is nonetheless profound that Herzog has this same “father” come back and kill Kaspar in the end. What is Herzog telling us with this?  The Village is there to support; the father is there to subvert? 

I think he’s telling us that people do beastly and ghastly things to their children, and sometimes they try to wipe them off the face of the earth in order to assuage their own guilt.   Oooh. Powerful stuff. Of course, it’s not just about that.

But more than just a presentation of parenting-gone-wrong, Herzog is clearly showing us the perversity behind our own understandings of culture, class, spectacle, intellect, and human relations. The scenes where the Side Show has Kaspar as one of the 4 Riddles, and where the British Lord is parading Kaspar around for his aristocratic guests,  are both meant to be disgustingly perverse in an Elephant Man sort of way.  Though I did love the British Lord’s character: high & tight pants showing off his accouterments, overly effeminate, and a bit Ichabod Crane in figure.  Classic! 

Then again, he is presenting the Village’s helpfulness as something in opposition to the parental role.

I liked that Herzog presented Kaspar as someone who was pure. Pure like an infant who knows absolutely nothing about the world. The scene in which Kaspar writes a letter to the Count about how he cried for a long time after he had sowed his name in seeds and then someone had trampled it, was touching and pure.  Kaspar was also presented as someone who was naturally inquisitive and logical. The scene in which he tried to convey his understanding of outside from inside when he was taken to the town’s prison tower that he had been in for 2 months, showed Kaspar’s own budding capacity for perspective and logic: he tried to explain how from the inside when he looked left and right and front and back he saw the brick of the cell, but when he was outside he looked back and saw the brick, but when he looked left right and forward he saw the town…this was something he had realized on his own, and it’s something we all take for granted as an everyday thing, and not as a victory of intellect like it was for Kaspar. 

But what sort of victory is accomplished with the death of Kaspar Hauser?  Are we extinguishing our guilt? Are we reinforcing our closedness to organic logic, or our adherence to notes of cultural respectability? Are we choosing to manipulate the spectacular and pervert the innocent for our own guilty pleasures? Are we extinguishing the other so we won’t be revealed as frauds? Yes, all this and more.

I have defended the Village a little in this but I’d like to end with a major critique.  The final scene of the film is of Kaspar’s autopsy. They take out his brain, examine it, and cut it apart. As the ironically deformed clerk is walking away after documenting the notes of the autopsy, he skips away down the street saying they’ve figured out what was wrong with Kaspar: deformities of the liver and brain.

This brings to mind Francis Bacon’s 4 Idols (all 4: the Marketplace, Theatre, Village and Cave idols would all work in various ways with this situation) or the logical fallacy of cause and effect. Kaspar wasn’t who he was because of deformities of the liver and brain; he was who he was because of NURTURE, or lack thereof.  Herzog ending this way really drives the message home that society overlooks the obvious in order to prove its ridiculous theories about things. We look for false causes for the effects we see. We try to prove theories by shoving things together that we know will prove them, rather than looking objectively at the facts to “see” if they will prove the theory.  Herzog’s Professor of ”logic” is a testament to this.  Bacon’s Idols of the Tribe attest to the sometimes ridiculousness of collective thinking, and that is what Herzog gives us at the end of this film.  He also reminds us of how much dirt we’ve swept under the rug so that we can live in denial of the ugly truth that we live in a dirty house.

This film gets better and better the more I think (and write) about it.

Step Brothers (2008)

This was a really funny film. As I was watching it, it felt very much like Napoleon Dynamite, in the sense that Ferrell & Reilly were portraying characters from what the viewer might consider their own past or from their own former perception of reality as a kid.   They said and did things just like elementary or middle school aged kids, though they were 39 & 40 years old.  It was funny to see them acting out those typical scenes of asking their parents if they could make bunkbeds or open one present on Christmas Eve.  I seem to recall opening up a non-toy present on Christmas Eve when I was a kid, and being just as disappointed (i.e. pitching a major fit, and probably crying!)  because it wasn’t the “hulk hands” sort of a gift that could be played with.  Funny and relatable. 

I suppose these filmmakers were going for invoking a real sense of nostalgia with this film. To be able to act those things out, as 40-year olds, is quite a hearkening back to the old days many people had growing up.  This film was a real Peter Pan moment, I think.  It shows a refusal to truly grow up, the struggle against loss of innocence associated with growing up, and a return to that childish innocence that we were all stripped of when we were expected to shed our childlike ways and don more appropriate adult realties.

It is a thoughtful anachronism, these two characters and their prolonged childhood.  They are out of place in time in many respects, but by the end of the film, their paternal authority figure admits to his own childhood dreams of growing up to be a T-rex.  He says all he ever wanted to be was a T-rex and he would walk around the back yard with his arms tiny, acting like a T-rex.  This reminds me of one of our nephews who, when he was 3′ish, told me he wanted to be a Kitty when he grew up!  And that’s probably one of the sweetest and most innocent things I’ve ever heard in my life.  One day, much later on (he was 4-5′ish), after I had asked him if he still wanted to be a Kitty, he looked at me funny and said “No.” He now wanted to be something more appropriate, like a baseball player.  He didn’t seem to remember wanting to be a Kitty.  But I remembered. I still remember.

I still want to be a Kitty.

I think, as an adult, it is sometimes very desirable to want to retreat back to a time of innocence and exploration.  A time when you could be a kid for real. Now we can only “play” kids because those times have long passed for us.  But we still remember what it was like and we find a lot of humor in it. Obviously.  Maybe that’s why, by the time we’re in our 30s (for some of us, earlier or later), we’re ready for kids of our own:  because we want to re-experience the innocence since we have been coerced into being adults or adult-like for most of our lives.

We watched the racy, extended version of this film and it had some pretty crazy-funny parts.  I loved that in the midst of their anachronistic innocence, they were still very pure: pure of body and mind. The sex scenes with Dale (Reilly) and Alice were, I think, typical of teenage hormones. Alice was repressed, in all senses of the word, and she was merely acting out, like a child, in reaction to her overly-controlling husband.  …calling Dr. Freud!!!!    And Dale didn’t realize what was going on at all the first time they did it in the bathroom. And even by the end, after it had happened a few times with Alice, he calls it “making sex” with her.  There’s something to be said about not tainting your reality with what I think today is an overabundant burden on the idea of sex (knowing about it, wanting it, having it). And the fact that the family didn’t realize, or care, that they were having sex right in front of them (because Dale was helping her with a back spasm….;), shows how little parents tell their kids about sex, or are observant enough to pick up on the flashing red signs that they’re already doing it, literally, under their noses.

I like stupid, potty humor so this film kept me rolling.