The Silence of the Lambs
Jonathan Demme, 1991
Prior Contact: I saw this in the theater on its original release with a girlfriend of the moment. I recall thinking it was a well-made movie. I also remember pretending to find it more scary than it really was, for purposes of huddling closer to my date.
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I once went to a movie theater and saw three straight previews for movies about serial killers. This got me thinking about the overrepresentation of psychopaths in our literature. Novelists and directors love the multiple murderer because he comes with built-in suspense: he must be caught before he claims another victim! Also, he is obviously pretty messed up, so it's just plausible that he might try to mess with the heads of the investigator, leaving strange codes or sending cryptic messages for the detective and the reader or watcher to puzzle out.
But while serial killers do exist, I am happy to report that they are extremely rare, and I've come to find their abundance in the world of movies kind of obnoxious. It promotes the idea that there are all sorts of people out there who will kill you, a total stranger, just because they're crazy, and that's scary stuff. It makes you a little more suspicious and a little more cautious, and makes the world of your fellow human beings a little more terrifying than it needs to be.
As the genre goes, though, Silence of the Lambs is suburbly crafted. Its music, sets, and pacing are all immaculate. And it of course creates the very vivid character of Hannibal Lector, whose name you and I remember, and the fairly vivid character of the FBI agent played by Jodie Foster, Clarise something. Both acting performances are terrific.
[spoilers start around here]
Clarise is an unusually believeable and well-realized character, but it's Hannibal the Cannibal who dominates the popular imagination. Well, he's a cannibal. He is larger than life. Honestly, on a second watching, he's probably a little TOO larger than life. His ability to manipulate others is unrealistically superhuman, and his escape from an over-the-top level of physical confinement combines the mad skillz of Houdini with the sheer strength of The Hulk, not to mention Martha Stewart's penchant for planning ahead and Wynton Marsalis' knack for improvisation. Also, the luck of five angels. Which is to say, he's not a very realistic character. He's more of a cartoon demon, a deeply ugly yet strangely jolly notion of what the most dangerous possible human being could be. If he wasn't so spooky, we'd notice that he's preposterous.
Speaking of preposterous, the climax scene is kind of silly too. After much crashing around in the killer's vast basement -- really, he's got enough room for a modest subterranian town down there -- the bad guy hangs out and watches Clarise through night vision goggles as she staggers about, blind and helpless. Then he follows around for awhile until he makes enough noise that she can figure out where he is, and plug him. The first time you see this, the sheer suspense keeps you from thinking too hard about it. The second time, it's no different from those adventure movies where the hero charges unscathed into machine gun fire. The successful ending is less satisfying because we know that in something more resembling the real world the hero, or Clarise, would be one seriously dead duck.
Plot: A young FBI cadet is sent to solicit a jailed serial killer's advice on how to catch another serial killer (did somebody just say "preposterous"?). They develop a combatitive relationship with strange overtones of mutual respect, yadda yadda yadda. Eventually, serial killer #1 escapes and serial killer #2 gets plugged by the FBI agent, who finds him through her smarts, pluck, hard work, and extraordinary blind luck (she knocks on his front door while looking for someone else). The movie ends with an annoying minor character about to be tortured and killed, which we are encouraged to find amusing.
Visuals: Very nicely filmed. There's a famous scene that cuts back and forth between the interior and exterior of a house, except eventually we understand that they are two different houses. This is generally considered a clever trick; personally, I find it a little annoying.
Dialog: It's a great script. Pretty much every line does double or even triple duty of advancing the plot, developing the character, and/or keeping the impeccable pacing right on track.
Prognosis: It's scary, it's gory. It's more an exquisitely crafted entertainment than it is a meaningful work of art. If you like you a good police procedural, you might love it. But it's not really a must-see.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
The Great Movies: "The Silence of the Lambs"
Monday, December 28, 2009
The Reading List: "Louis Riel"
Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography
by Chester Brown
I am strongly drawn to histories in cartoon form, but almost always a little disappointed by them. The problem is that the leading work in the genre -- Larry Gonick's many-volumed Cartoon History of the Universe -- is so outrageously good that it is hard for anyone else to compete. Gonick's books are treasures, and I would never wish them away, but the field of non-fiction cartooning might be a little more healthy if its pioneer hadn't set the bar quite so high.
Louis Riel is the biography of a Canadian populist, rebel, and, arguably, nut-job who was involved in two local conflicts during Canada's late 18th Century expansion onto the prairies. He led working-class, French-speaking, Metis inhabitants of the prairie provinces in their struggles against the great powers of the Canadian government and the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Students of westward expansion anywhere in the Americas will not be suprised to learn that minorities and those who opposed the expansion of capitalism and its attendant systems, here as elsewhere, end up with a fairly raw deal.
Brown's treatment of this history attempts a factual, relatively "literal" retelling, and makes no particular effort to be funny. Me, I'm old-fashioned -- I prefer comics that are, you know, comic, so as a matter of taste Louis Riel is not especially my cup of tea. I can attest that it is well-drawn in a style reminiscent of Tintin, albeit in stark black and white. As far as I can tell it is quite well researched. The incidents in question illustrate some of the real concerns and conflicts of "The West," which is nice; Western history has been so buried under more than a century's worth of competing mythologies that any glimpse at actual documented incidents is always full of surprises. Learning about the expansionist phase of Canadian history, furthermore, is a good exercise for those United Statesians who always imagine a halo floating up there above the Maple Leaf.
This particular work of "comix history" did not ~wow~ me, especially, but it illustrates the strength of the form: in a short evening, I went from total ignorance of a historical episode to having a comfortable layman's understanding of what happened and why it was significant. Thanks, Chester Brown! I salute Louis Riel as a successful effort in an important and underdeveloped genre. I would love to see many, many more books like this one.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
It's Boxing Day!
February 25th, 1964: Underdog Cassius Clay defeats world heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in Miami Beach, Florida.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Merry Christmas!
December 25
From the Inlaws5000 family collection of vintage postcards.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The Wednesday Quiz 1:4 -- European Monarchs
The Wednesday Quiz is a test of knowledge and intuition. Looking up answers or asking your buddy is bad, bad, bad. Questions about the rules are answered here.
Is this an accurate description of a real European monarch?
Are the descriptions of these European kings and queens accurate? Or did I just make them up, salting them liberally with misinformation? In point of fact, there are six true ones and four false ones -- use your knowledge, intuition, and sense of the plausible to figure out which is which.
1. Æthelred the Unready of England, 978-1016 – Attacked repeatedly by Danish Vikings, he found out that paying large tributes tends to buy peace only on a temporary basis. After his downfall, England was ruled by Danish kings for three decades.
2. Beatrix of the Netherlands – Queen since 1980, Beatrix retains more power than most modern European monarchs, enjoying a considerable voice in her country's foreign policy. (She is also a member of the Bilderburg Group, which like the Trilateral Commission is thought by some to secretly run the world.) Earlier this year, eight people died when a would-be assassin plowed into a parade in an attempt to kill her.
3. Catherine the Great of Russia – Under Catherine's reign, Russia was dragged kicking and screaming into the Eighteenth Century. Although unable to do much for the serfs, she managed to improve public administration and stimulate some political and economic modernization. She also crushed rebellion without remorse. Her personal life was quite something – she enjoyed her boyfriends, and had plenty of them – but the one thing that everybody thinks they know about her is, rather obviously really, ridiculous. She died of a stroke.
4. Charlemagne – Considered Charles I of Germany, Charles I of France, and Charles I of the Holy Roman Empire, Charlemagne conquered Italy and much of Central and Western Europe in the Eighth Century. Under his reign, Europe experienced a revival of art, literature, and learning, partially recovering some of the knowledge that had been lost after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
5. Charles II of Spain – Everybody knows that Ferdinand and Isabella financed the voyages of Columbus, but it was their son Charles II who comprehended that new wealth from the New World discoveries could be used to create a Spanish world empire. With a keen intelligence and not a little ruthlessness, he created a united kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula and gained effective control of Denmark, southern Italy, and Egypt.
6. Charles the Bold – At the height of medieval Germany’s military might, Charles IV ruled a territory stretching from southern Sweden to northern Italy, from Kiev to Paris. His nickname stems from his decisive leadership at the 1288 Battle of Avignon, when his disciplined, well-trained troops routed a numerically superior Papal army.
7. Ivan the Terrible – Not "terrible" as in inept but "terrible" as in fearsome, Ivan led an expansion of the Russians from their homeland around Moscow. By the end of his long reign, he ruled over a multiethnic empire that stretched eastward into Siberia; by some estimates, Russia expanded at a rate of around 130 square kilometers a day under his watch.
8. Kaiser Franz Joseph of Germany – Although a largely ceremonial figure who had very little to do with affairs of state, German Kaiser Franz Joseph became a popular scapegoat for the outbreak of World War I. Stripped of his throne by the victorious allies and widely reviled by his own disillusioned countrymen, he committed suicide in 1921, bringing to an end a German royal line that had lasted uninterrupted for more than a thousand years.
9. Louis XIV of France – As railroads and industrialization made radical changes in the fabric of French society, Louis XIV attempted a reactionary program of returning power to the country’s aristocracy. Highly averse to centralized government, his chronic underfunding and downsizing of the French army left the country open to defeat and humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War.
10. Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia – He grew up the subject of political infighting, maybe, between his Christian grandma and his pagan mom. Landing on the Christian side, he led Bohemia to some victories and defeats. After being murdered by his brother, Wenceslaus was canonized as a martyr; he has persisted ever since as an important symbolic figure for the Czech people. There's an old song that lots of people sing about him this time of year.
Submit your answers in the comments.
The L&TM5K Advent Calendar
December 23
Masaccio, Madonna and Child. c. 1426. Tempera on panel, 24.5 x 18 cm. Uffizi, Florence.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
The Great Movies: "Manhattan"
Manhattan
Woody Allen, 1979
Previous Contact: I've seen this one a couple of times before, but it kind of blurs in with all of the other Woody Allen movies. I think I was expecting Annie Hall.
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It's hard to give Manhattan a fair trial. The culture has changed around it in the three decades since it was made, and its dark comedy has become less funny and more unsettling. The obvious case in point: Allen's own character is a 42 year old man dating a 17 year old schoolgirl. In the late 1970s, this by and large seemed amusingly sleezy, a just-acceptible form of rakish bad behavior. By our current mores, it renders the character downright vile, and since the comic content depends on him being a basically sympathetic character, this pretty much kills the movie right in its tracks.
Give the film its due, though. It levelled a social critique on the self-indulgent behavior of a certain class of Americans, and does speak some truth about the ways that people can screw up their lives by inventing pointless romantic entanglements for themselves. At one point, Allen's character, a writer, speaks into a dictophone about:
An idea for a short story about people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these really unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves - because it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable terrifying problems about the universe.Manhattan is that short story, of course, and as an uncomfortable cautionary tale it does retain some power. Too, the movie was part of an ongoing American critique of a status quo organized around male convenience. And, it's this very critique that brought around the changes in our culture that renders Manhattan hard to watch today. To radically oversimplify: Manhattan made its points so well that it made itself almost unwatchable.
Plot: A tight circle of bored and lonely people keep falling in love in various combinations, in order to have somebody to talk to.
Visuals: Impeccably photographed in artsy black and white, with lots of glamour shots of North America's most densely-populated East Coast island.
Dialog: I have an old record of Woody Allen doing stand-up, and he kills. He's really, really good. Once you've heard him in that element, though, you recognize that his movie dialog is almost always a stand-up routine grafted onto a short story. It's not the most natural way for a movie character to speak.
Prognosis: An interesting movie, a well-crafted movie, but not a movie that has stood the test of time. Woody Allen fans and students of gender politics will want to watch it, of course; not especially recommended for anyone else.
The L&TM5K Advent Calendar
December 22
Danish postage stamp, 1940.
