Beat It, Essay: Why Should I Try To Resist?

Happy March, everybody! I didn't post nearly as much as I was hoping too in February, largely because of my commitments at The Backlot and the crushing burden that is my final semester of schoolwork. Believe you me, I have a devastating avalanche of reviews I'm preparing for you, it's just hard to write blog posts when you're already writing papers and articles all day. The human brain can only take so much, the Brennan brain even less so. I am a fragile puppy dog who needs his beauty sleep.

Anyway, lucky for me, I have chosen a major which allows my schoolwork to double as content, so please enjoy my latest essay, which I wrote for my Classical Film Theory class!

The Prompt

Choose two of the four theorists you've read so far and explain what you think their assessment would be of Under the Skin.

Early film theorists developed the rules and philosophies of cinema in a time when the art was in its formative stages. The black and white, silent works that occupied the minds of many theorists are a thing of the past, and cinema has developed beyond the scope of their opinions on the nascent technology. However, their philosophies on the nature of storytelling and the artistic qualities of film remain essential in the discussion of modern cinema, especially when applied to fringe genre or experimental films that push the envelope, like Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin.

Although not every facet of their writings may apply today, theorists like Béla Balázs and Hugo Münsterberg would have had a lot to say about the state of 21st century filmmaking, and it’s important to use their theories as a sounding board for narrative and aesthetic criticism of current films that challenge the nature of the craft. While Balázs and Münsterberg would have undoubtedly mixed opinions about a film like Under the Skin, portions of their theories work in tandem to prove that, despite its radical nature, the film taps into the inherent qualities of the art and harnesses the potential of cinema to create a unique, outsider perspective on humanity.

Hugo Münsterberg in particular would have severe doubts about Under the Skin from the very beginning. Aside from the fact that he considers color and sound to be superfluous because they don’t activate a new level of the mind, his tendency toward realism would bias him against the film’s more experimental moments. Because the film is so distinctly non-narrative, comprised largely of improvised conversations displayed in no particular order, he would have qualms about the film’s value, considering his opposition to arbitrary choices driving a narrative and his predilection for films that tell a clear-cut story.

However, this view ignores the central tenet of his theory; that a movie is made in the mind of its spectator, mirroring mental events – or emotions - as it overcomes and organizes the outside world. In fact, in his work The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, he clearly states that, “To picture emotions must be the central aim of the photoplay.” (48) Far more than any narrative or structural considerations, Under the Skin excels at curating emotion. Although the central character is an impassive observer travelling through the messy human world, the deliberate muting of emotions that should be manifestly present (and would be in any other narrative) incites heightened emotion in the viewing audience.

The best example of this concept in practice is the scene on the beach, in which a dog, a woman, and her husband all drown in quick succession, leaving behind a crying baby on a rocky Scottish beach. The alien protagonist observes these events from the sidelines, but it forms barely a background hum in her perceptions, as her focus is on a lonely diver whom she intends to ensnare. The backgrounding of this evocative, life-altering event gives it muted importance in the narrative, but creates shrill alarm bells in the minds of the audience. They perceive this occurrence as brutal and powerful, but the scene’s conscious removal of emotion creates discord within the viewer, heightening their distressed reaction to a fever pitch.

Münsterberg’s own words lend credence to his potential support of this method of storytelling: “The photoplay tells us a human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely attention, memory, imagination, and emotion… [These events] reach complete isolation from the practical world through the perfect unity of plot and pictorial appearance.” (74, 82) If there’s one thing that can be said about Under the Skin, it is that it successfully isolates itself from any aspect of the real world, through its eccentric small town Scotland setting, its ice cold protagonist, and its challenging, experimental visual schema.

Under the Skin’s violence, eroticism, realism of setting and dialogue, and lack of causality likewise find a friend within his theoretical works, although its ambiguity doesn’t allow the film to come full circle and satisfy the energies it creates in the audience. This is purposeful on the part of the filmmakers, intending to leave the audience with a lasting, indelible sense of unease, but Münsterberg would not have been pleased. He may have never fully supported the film because its ambiguous narrative and thematic structure clashes with his fervent belief in filmic unity, although it does satisfy his prime concern of depicting the inner emotional workings of the mind rather than simply representing real events.

Balázs, on the other hand, would have an almost entirely opposite reaction. The fundamentals of his theory perfectly mesh with the film, but his esteem would be undone by opinions located at the fringes of his work. He would adore the film as an adaptation of an inferior literary work transformed into a work of high cinema, and appreciate its delicate use of its material to draw attention to unnoticed details of the human experience.

Its close-ups take on the perspective of an alien presence, watching the minute interactions of human beings as if they were entirely unknown, especially in the scenes where the woman is driving around the streets closely observing the male passersby, eventually shifting to the females as she comes into her own identity. This perspective is key to Balázs theory on close-ups, which he explained in his Theory of the Film by saying, “The close-up shows your shadow on the wall with which you have lived all your life and which you scarcely knew.” (55)

The soundscape, in which sounds are either muffled through the van’s glass as if it’s driving underwater or speech is shrill and garbled, powerfully attacking the senses but not transmitting meaning, also acts as a sonic close-up. One particularly memorable moment is when the woman is swept up in a crowd of women heading to a dance club. Their happy chatter is rendered unrecognizable by a sort of aural blurring effect that renders the recognizable, pleasant sounds as harsh and unfamiliar. 

This is a concept that would have delighted Balázs immensely, considering that he was one of the only early theorists to welcome to presence of sound in film. In fact, he wrote fervently on this topic, saying, “Only when the sound film will have resolved noise into its elements, segregated individual, intimate voices, and made them speak to us separately in vocal, acoustic close-up; when these isolated detail-sounds will be collated again in purposeful order by sound montage, then will the sound film have become a new art.” (198-199)

The sound design, use of close-ups, and presence in an outlying genre would have made Under the Skin a film of incredible interest to Balázs, but the stricter tenets of his philosophy jar against the experimental, ambiguous nature of the film. While he believed that distortion and transformation of reality was necessary because “only by means of unaccustomed and unexpected method produced by striking set-ups can old, familiar and therefore never seen things hit our eye with new impressions,” (93) he also believed that this distortion should function to advance and support a structured, orderly plot.

Under the Skin has no truly recognizable plot structure to speak of, existing only in moments of human life glimpsed from behind a pane of glass or moments of human death and despair in the dark, terrible void of the woman’s lair. The plot, insofar as there is one, is languorous and obtuse, refusing to adhere to recognizable structures. And many moments, especially the colorful kaleidoscopic view following the first victim’s consumption and the lengthy opening scene in which a series of syllables is spoken over the image of an eye, have very little concrete narrative value whatsoever.

Balázs would object to this very much, having said that “distortion… must always be distortion of something. If that something is no longer present in the picture then the meaning and significance of the distortion is also gone.” (102) He would consider moments this experimental to be a “degenerative phenomenon of bourgeois art… like visions seen with closed eyes.” (108, 179) 

Although this inhuman style of filmmaking deliberately and effectively displays humanity through a cold and unusual lens, the style is just far too unnatural for either Balázs or Münsterberg to truly be capable of appreciating. But despite their potential ardent dislike for Under the Skin, their theories support the film’s validity as a piece of cinematic art in many startling and timeless ways. Although cinema technology has advanced far beyond the scope of their imagination, their central tenets continue to hold true throughout the ages, because even as the materials of film advance, the ancient techniques of storytelling and evocation of emotion remain eternal.

Word Count: 1613

Works Cited

Balázs, Béla. Theory of the Film; (character and Growth of a New Art). Trans. Edith Bone. London: Dobson, 1952. Print.

Münsterberg, Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. New York: D. Appleton, 1916. Print.

Beat It, Essay: The Comeback Of The Comeback

Like I said before, finals are a killer. And once I vanquish them, a veritable waterfall of terrific content is going to cascade over you all. But luckily for me, some of my work can double as blog posts, seeing as how I'm required to write insightful and analytical essays. Which is pretty much what I do every day over here. Anyway! Here's my newest essay for my Broadcasting class, exploring HBO's terrific show The Comeback.

The Prompt

Analyze one television show from the post-classical network period of modern television in order to illustrate how the show reflects the social, cultural, industrial, and historical moment of its production.

 The Comeback of The Comeback: False Reality and the Duplicity of Celebrity

Ever since the inception of the pay cable network HBO, the company has sought to air counterprogramming to traditional network TV. During its early years in the 1970’s, this meant airing programs like first-run movies, sporting events, and comedy specials to counterbalance the traditional television styles and genres of the classical network system. However, after competition began to increase, HBO shifted from a utility brand to an identity brand and began producing its own programming. These original television shows took the format of traditional genres like the sitcom or the hour-long drama, but continued the spirit of counterprogramming, typically using their recognizable style to comment on and satirize the state of current network television.

Shows like The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm tossed vicious barbs in the direction of late night talk shows and sitcoms, but 2005’s The Comeback is perhaps one of HBO’s most acerbic and biting programs, using its first season and its currently airing second season to take jabs at the rise of reality television. The Comeback wickedly satirizes the artifice of early reality programs and – in turn – the manipulation of image employed by celebrities both toward the public and themselves, using the arc of an aging sitcom actress’ journey to depict the changing tides of popular media.

From its very first episode, The Comeback sets its sights on the new Renaissance of reality TV, a genre that rose to prominence with 2000’s Survivor and 1999’s Big Brother. These shows were inexpensive and widely popular, depicting real people and actual events, but viewed through a cleverly edited lens to create heightened drama (Hilmes 398). The Comeback, presented as the raw footage of a reality show starring Valerie Cherish – played by Lisa Kudrow of Friends fame – an aging sitcom star who is looking to get back into the limelight, immediately presents an argument against the reality of “reality.” By blurring the lines between reality and fiction with its realistic presentation and a character mirroring Kudrow’s own career, The Comeback cleverly highlights the artifice of the shows it imitates (Williamson 109).

By presenting the unedited footage of what will eventually become a reality program, The Comeback depicts just how boring and ordinary Valerie Cherish’s life proves to be. She has petty arguments with her husband, goes shopping for linens, and has muted, human responses to even the good things in her life. In fact, in the first episode – “The Comeback” - Jane, the show’s producer, asks Valerie to play up her reaction to getting a part in the sitcom Room and Bored, saying “I just think that your reality can be more excited.”

This strategic manipulation of Valerie’s true self is the only way to have the show be exciting and get heard above the noise of its dozens of peers. In the episode “Valerie Demands Dignity,” Charla, another reality show star, astutely tells Valerie that “This is reality TV! You have to make it happen!” Although Valerie never reaches true understanding of this fact, the producers and editors of her show create something out of nothing, transforming Valerie’s quiet, unexceptional life into a dramatic roller coaster of a narrative. By presenting the show to us in this particular “behind-the-scenes” format, HBO and the creators of The Comeback thoroughly deride the unreality of reality programmers and those who are foolhardy enough to star in them.

In addition to depicting the artificiality of the program itself, The Comeback indicts the false face of its very own central figure. Valerie Cherish, though the apparent protagonist of both The Comeback and “The Comeback,” the reality show-within-a-show, is a deeply flawed, emotionally stunted woman who seeks to control every visible aspect of her life. Years of living in the spotlight have warped her mentality, causing the face she shows to the cameras and her true face to collide. She has built an artificial world for herself, shielding herself from the messiness of life behind a false, cheery personality.

The persona that Valerie Cherish displays is not her reality, but rather the expression of who she dearly wants to be. Her false self is determined, optimistic, and generous. She bakes cookies for the writers, gives gifts to the cast, and personally thanks everyone involved in creating the show. In the episode “Valerie Stands Up for Aunt Sassy,” she even states that “I’m the one who buys gifts for all the crew. That’s who I am.”

Valerie insists that her expressed personality is a reflection of her true self, but the reality TV camera reveals the chinks in her armor. Under close scrutiny, it becomes apparent that nearly every single aspect of her personality is specifically gauged to address one selfish need or another. She bakes cookies for the writers so she will get a storyline to herself and gives gifts to the cast because she wants to be well-liked. The camera lingers over her initial reluctance to perform any open-hearted task and captures the precise moments that her genial mask is affixed over her true face.

Simultaneously, the reality camera reveals the grim artificiality of her personality and the stark truth of her average life. This multi-layered approach taken by The Comeback highlights both the flaws in the making of reality television and those of the people who desperately wish to be seen on them. In combination with one another, both elements negate all potential for true “reality,” as The Comeback points out, making it the most spirited reversal of television tropes on the HBO counterprogramming lineup.

In addition to its startlingly up-front indictment of reality programming, The Comeback’s multi-layered satire has a thriving undercurrent depicting the fall of the sitcom in the face of the new wave of reality TV. The figure of Valerie Cherish, a former sitcom darling who is rapidly aging out of the industry, represents this transition (Poster 162). She attempts to run her show “with dignity” and manipulate her image in the manner of a 90’s sitcom, constantly butting heads with the young producer who knows that dignity is exactly what current audiences will not want to see.

The Comeback ceaselessly seeks new ways to highlight the age gap between Valerie and her young co-stars. She tries to get one of them to do the robot onstage, sings a series of songs none of them have ever heard of, and is constantly faced with ire from the writers, who provide dialogue for her character that ages her even further, making her seem like an ancient, sexless grandmother. As Valerie herself says in “Valerie Relaxes in Palm Springs,” “That’s Hollywood for you. Anyone over 22 – mandatory hip replacement.”

Valerie’s struggle quite obviously mirrors the waning popularity of the traditional sitcom format. In the mid-2000’s, in response to the rise of “quality television” like Lost and Mad Men, sitcoms had already begun shifting to a more elegant and refined single-camera format, losing the laugh track along the way. The multi-camera, live audience world that Valerie once knew and ruled was now being viewed as a symbol of tacky excess. The old sitcoms were now seen as something to be derided and dumped from the schedule, as evidenced by the network’s manhandling of Room and Bored. The producers frequently interfered by adding new crowd-pleasing elements and – in one key moment – shutting down the entire production to retool during the middle of its very first season in response to low ratings.

In the new world of television where reality is king, the industry has no place for traditional formats or entertainment veterans. The popular stars of the age weren’t even celebrities at all, merely real people with big personalities who arrived on the national stage practically overnight. This world is the one in which Valerie Cherish – and her supposed comeback – languish. Her age and her refusal to bend the morals of her rigidly artificial personality set her apart from the oncoming generation.

Without The Comeback, she has nothing, but she desperately clings to the old-format Room and Bored, viewing that as her true return to the spotlight. But, as her director wisely states in “Valerie Bonds with the Cast,” “Why are you worrying about [Room and Bored]? This is not your show. [The Comeback]’s your show. This show is the car that takes you to that show.” Valerie never truly realizes the truth of this statement, as she is so focused on clinging so desperately to the television that she knows. But through clever editing and a series of dramatic challenges, The Comeback is a success, inadvertently providing her with the very success she thought she was going to achieve through her traditional means.

To Valerie Cherish and to HBO, The Comeback is many things. It’s a shattering portrayal of the duplicity of reality TV and the realities of celebrity as well as a tragic tale of an outdated model of entertainment slowly drowning beneath the currents of a new format. The Comeback is also counterprogramming at its finest, stripping away the veneers of TV’s tropes and genres to take a good look at the life and lies pulsing underneath. Although HBO would shortly thereafter send The Comeback to an early grave, the show remains one of its most important and astute criticisms of today’s entertainment environment, using its tragic central figure to track the changing trends and attitudes of modern media for the first – and certainly best – time.

Word Count: 1677
Works Cited
Hilmes, Michele. Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States. 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2007. 397-399. Print.
Poster, Mark. "Swan's Way: Care of Self in the Hyperreal." Configurations 15.2 (2007): 151-75. Print.
Williamson, Lisa. “Challenging Sitcom Conventions: From The Larry Sanders Show to The Comeback.” It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era. Ed. Marc Leverette, Brian L. Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley. New York, NY: Routledge, 2008. 108-122. Print.

Beat It, Essay: Munster? I Hardly Know 'Er!

Hello everybody! It's that time of year again! The cogs of the Starbucks brand grind merrily along, lubricated by the tears of students preparing to face their midterms. As a film student I rarely get tested so for me, that means a rapid-fire barrage of projects and essays, which are arguably more challenging. I, for one, had fun, and would like to present you with my most recent essay on one of television's most unforgettable families - The Munsters!

The Prompt

Analyze one television show from the early or classical network periods of television in order to illustrate how the show reflects the social, cultural, industrial, and historical moment of its production.

 The Monstrous Other – The Munsters and Suburban Racism in the 1960’s

Since the very beginnings of broadcasting, the sitcom has been ever-present. Because of the familial nature of the genre, sitcoms have always been an avenue for female stars, of which there was a massive flux in the years leading up to the development to television as we know it. These women would play the matriarchs of “typical” suburban middle class white families, nurturing and kind, sometimes ambitious but always merrily sustaining her place - in the home, raising her kids and supporting her husband while he brings home the bacon. According to author Lynn Spigel, this depiction of home life in 1950’s sitcoms represented a “consensus ideology, promising practical benefits like security and stability to people who had witnessed the shocks and social dislocations of the previous two decades (Make Room for TV 2).”

However, due to the country’s economic turmoil (requiring women to take jobs outside the home) and large immigrant population (many American families were non-white and working class, especially in the cities), the media’s reflection of the “average” American family was largely fanciful. Although the standards and practices of television in the 1960’s were still largely conservative, by the middle of the decade, the television climate began to change. First came the hillbilly hurricane, a glut of shows depicting clashes between urban and rural families), which was soon followed by the advent of  “fantastic sitcoms,” which used “magical, alien, prehistoric, or ghoulish spin[s] on the American family” to combat and lightly satirize this idealistic perspective (Hilmes 222).

Perhaps the most incisive of these early satires (including Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Addams Family) is The Munsters, in which the titular family is comprised of variations on classic Universal monsters. Taking great influence from gothic horror, Herman the patriarch is a Frankensteinian creation, and his wife Lily, son Eddie, and father-in-law are vampires. Only Marilyn, their blonde and beautiful adopted niece, looks anything like the typical member of a sitcom family.

The break from reality that provides the central concept of The Munsters allows the show to poke fun at many cultural and suburban conventions indirectly without igniting fervor in the censors (Spigel, “Fantastic Family” 205-235), the most prominent of these undertones being the unsavory race relations of modern suburbia. Many of the issues the Munsters face in their day-to-day lives stem from the refusal of their neighbors (and society at large) to accept the differences in their customs, attitudes, and especially appearances, a struggle many non-white families faced during the tail end of the Civil Rights movement.

In fact, in an early episode – “My Fair Munster” – a neighbor remarks that “this was such a nice neighborhood until they moved in,” quite obviously drawing a parallel between the Munsters and racial minorities. The Munsters stand in for the unknown Other, merely trying to live their lives while constantly being on the receiving end of societal attacks. These offensives can be subtle, like Marilyn’s boyfriend’s elegant parents rejecting her when they meet her “weirdo” family in “Munster Masquerade.” In spite of her all-American demeanor, these bourgeois sophisticates can’t look past the surface level shocks provided by her monstrous-looking, yet well-meaning and polite family.

And it doesn’t end there. Some of the challenges the Munsters face can be quite harsh, including Herman almost being attacked and arrested for “terrorizing” a park during his nightly strolls in “A Walk on the Mild Side” and narrowly avoiding being murdered by fraudulent film producers hoping to collect his insurance policy in “Movie Star Munster.” Though the plots are fanciful and unrealistic, the Munsters and minority families are united by the universal scorn they unwittingly receive, as well as the instant fear and suspicion incited in society merely by the color of their skin. Whether it be brown or black or green, American suburbia yearns to scrub out any color that isn’t pure, glittering, “traditional” white.

An additional satirical dimension directly related to this societal attitude is that of class. Typically, suburban and especially urban minorities were viewed by the middle and upper class white families as a sort of lower caste - the working class, uncultured poor. Many immigrant families were penniless thanks to an unforgiving system, but even those minorities that could afford to move into the suburbs and live the “ideal” life were automatically downgraded in esteem thanks to the color of their skin.

The Munsters responds to this societal discord with fervor, depicting nearly every single authority figure in the town as either a bumbling buffoon or a conservative bigot. From the inept and crude gas company man in “Pike’s Pique” to the clownish doctors in “Rock a Bye Munster” and “Low-Cal Munster,” those who typically perform “superior” duties are viciously skewered by the show’s piercing satire. 

On the other hand, the other minorities which society at large also looked down upon tended to sympathize with the plight of the Munsters. Whether it be a group of hippies inviting the Munsters to sing along with them in “Far Out Munster,” a gypsy man overlooking Lily’s appearance to hire her for a job reading palms in “Herman’s Rival,” or teenagers welcoming Herman’s strange look and offbeat musical style, putting him on the top of the charts in “Will Success Spoil Herman Munster?,” the family always finds friends in societally “low” places. 

Because The Munsters utilizes the Other family as its focal point and puts society on the outside, it exposes the animosity and stupidity of white culture at the time, painting them as the “bad guys” in a way that a more straightforward race relations television show could not possibly have portrayed with impunity (Hunzer 4).

In fact, this normalization of the Other is perhaps the single most important cultural impact of The Munsters and its fantastic sitcom counterparts. Although the Munsters may look strange, have bizarre customs (Lucy and Ricky weren’t exactly sleeping in coffins), and eat strange foods (lizard casserole and vulture egg omelets are some of Lily’s beloved recipes), they’re no different from any sitcom family.

They have a kind and loving mother, a bumbling father who worries about paying the bills, two kids, and a dog. In fact, in the episode “Family Portrait,” computer demographic analysis places them on a magazine cover as the “American Average Family of the Year.” They never seek to cause trouble, merely to live out their idyllic lives in peace and happiness. The trouble they do face is always brought to them from outside, from those who can’t see past their fear of the surface level repellence of the Other to understand the warmth and kindness inside the Munsters.

Audiences immediately understand how wonderful the Munsters truly are because the stories are told from their perspective. The subtleties of the discussion of race mechanics and bigotry in modern America that pulses beneath the show are recognized almost subliminally through the vantage point of this hilarious bunch. Again, this satirical intent could never have been accomplished through directly portraying a minority family. Thanks to the inherent racism of suburban, middle-class viewing audiences, ratings would have plummeted, rendering the show an abject failure.

But by allowing the viewers an access point through the wildly popular and well-understood medium of classic monsters, The Munsters brought its social commentary to the mainstream, becoming a massive success. In fact, the show was the 18th highest rated television program in the 1964-1965 season, alongside such similarly satirical programming as The Beverly Hillbillies, Bewitched, The Andy Griffith Show, and Petticoat Junction. 

Together with these types of programs, The Munsters began to pave the way for a new style of media and a new way of telling stories. Television as we know it couldn’t have been possible without the contributions of this show and many others during the massive tide change of the 1960’s as minority classes struggled to break into a culture primed to ignore and even despise them. Although American media and culture still has a long way to go to be truly accepting and diverse, without the brave and subtle efforts of the showrunners during the transitory period of the 1960’s, we as a nation may very well have been set back several years, maybe even decades.

The prominence of the television sitcom allowed positive messages to be spread to the American populace through subtle, almost counter-intuitive channels, utilizing a format that promoted conservative values and middle class consumerism to further the efforts of hundreds of varied communities struggling to earn a name for themselves. The Munsters and the fantastic sitcoms of this period are often overlooked in modern academia, but their massive influence speaks volumes by itself. The gentle satire of shows like The Munsters paved the way for much more proactive movements, all through the simplicity of the most traditional unit of all – the American family.

 

Works Cited

Hilmes, Michele. Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States. 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2007. 222-223. Print.

Hunzer, Kathleen. "Move over Cleavers, the Munsters Are in Town: Redefining the American Family and the Marginalized Other." Constructions of the Human Conference: Space, Time, and Culture. Lehigh University. 1-5. Web. 1 Oct. 2014.

Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1992. 2. Print.

Spigel, Lynn, Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, and Janet Bergstrom. "From Domestic Space to Outer Space: The 1960s Fantastic Family Sit-com." Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1991. 205-235. Print.

Word Count: 1697

Beat It, Essay: Music Of The Night HE Came Home

Phew! I survived the A to Z Challenge! Now we can return to regularly scheduled programming and I can survive finals week without a post every single day. But never fear, I won't forget about posting, I'll just stick to my regular average of one every two days or so until summer begins and my schedule clears up again.

But for now why not check out what's going on in finals week! Here's my final essay for my Music in Film class!

The Prompt

Discuss the role of music in a single film created in 1970 or after.

In 1978, the horror genre saw a great sea change with the release of John Carpenter’s low budget fright flick Halloween. Prior to its innovative approach to the genre, few films (like Jaws or The Exorcist) broke through the mire of pale Psycho knockoffs that had been permeating the market. But this fablistic tale of a purely good babysitter played by Jamie Lee Curtis defending her charges against Michael Myers, a faceless boogeyman, sent a shiver down audience spines, aided in no small part by Carpenter’s self-composed minimalist score.

Three major themes dominate the score for Halloween and all of them serve a unifying purpose – to highlight the nature of Michael Myers’ evil. This is an important endeavor because he is no mere slasher villain. In fact, slasher films didn’t even exist yet in the shape they would after Halloween’s influence. Michael Myers was a signifier of pure unstoppable evil, a force utterly divorced from humanity. The blank white mask he wore helped to signify this, stripping him of any defining features, but the music is what really drove that point home.

The first and most common theme in the film is the Halloween Theme, an unrelenting and shrill synth composition comprised of a ten beat pattern (1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2) repeated endlessly. Accompanied by a series of low tones to create an ominous mood, this theme sets the stage, evoking feelings of an autumnal Illinois night with its repetitive but nostalgic tune and consistent tempo while the more ominous undertones provide another layer; a feeling of being watched by some dark evil lurking in the shadows.

The second theme is Laurie’s theme, the musical cue that ties in most clearly with the fablistic tone of the film. The idea of Halloween is not that it tells a story of a realistic serial killer and his realistic victims, but rather a much grander display of the struggle between good and evil. This is reflected in Laurie’s theme, which opens with a lilting, almost whimsical melody using two alternating high notes to suggest her purity and inherent goodness. However, it doesn’t take long for the low, ominous notes to encroach upon her theme once more. After all, this film is about her battle with pure evil, the nature of which is ubiquitous and unrelenting.

The third theme is the Shape Theme. The Shape is the name given to Michael Myers in the credits and in the script, further dehumanizing him and turning him from sympathetic madman to an instrument of pure evil. His theme provides a similar effect. A large majority of the theme is a single low note repeated in staccato intervals. The harshness of this theme reflects the thought inside Michael Myers’ head and the pure visceral evil that fuels them. Persistent, dark, and terrifying, the focus on one single note of evil provides clues to the killer’s “motive,” implying that he moves with singular purpose to stalk his prey, the sweet young symbol of good whom he happened upon by accident while visiting his old home.

The entire score is composed on a synthesizer because of budget necessity, but sometimes such limitations are all a great artist needs to fully explore the limitations of their craft and create something delightfully new and dazzlingly creative. Because of his lack of an orchestra, John Carpenter was forced to think simpler, creating an immensely complex soundscape out of only a few musical colors and tones. The heavy use of leitmotif in Halloween is derived from this limitation and that, more than anything, is what makes the thematic material drill into the audience’s subconscious.

The music trains audience members to react in certain ways to certain situations, creating a musical atmosphere where the introduction of a single note can change the tone of a scene and keep viewers on their toes. The genius of the music does drive heavily from the cues themselves, but the tone lives and dies on their placement in the film. Carpenter plays the audience like a fiddle, using abrupt shifts to music or silence to create tension and a sense of imbalance.

Carpenter’s Halloween score became legendary more or less immediately with only about six notes dominating a majority of the score and that is what separates the geniuses from you or I. He realized that the tone and cue placement were essential to the horrific qualities of the film and its score more than the compositions themselves. They of course played a big part in the creation of the atmosphere, but Carpenter proved that films don’t need wall-to-wall original music with only a few repeating motifs. An even more jarring and unnerving effect could be created with only a small pool of cues to choose from, driving them into the minds of the viewers like a jackhammer.

Carpenter’s work on the film was so influential that his score was pilfered for years to spice up lesser slasher films like The Boogeyman or He Knows You’re Alone and large quotations of the score were directly incorporated into the finale of Wes Craven’s postmodern masterpiece Scream in the mid-90’s. The Eurodance scene in clubs across the pond would never be the same after this film, nor would be the entire slate of horror films for the next decade and a half. And it didn’t take miles and miles of dutifully composed pages. It didn’t take hundreds of unique instruments played by a herd of professionals. It didn’t take a lush postromantic style. All it took was a Shape.

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Beat It, Essay: W Is For Wes

Today's Blogging From A to Z Challenge post is the one I've been leading up to all month, my essay on the illustrious Nightmare on Elm Street franchise!

The Prompt

A) Compare and contrast A Nightmare on Elm Street and Wes Craven's New Nightmare, the two films that Wes Craven wrote and directed, with the seven that he didn't direct or solely write. Which films work better and why?

B) Why is Freddy such an iconic figure? 

Wes Craven is a director who I hold in such high esteem, I immediately jumped on the chance to write this essay even though I wrote an analysis of his earlier works just one semester ago. Wes Craven is one of the most important living horror filmmakers and the Nightmare franchise is perhaps his greatest legacy.

It all started in 1984 with the release of the immediate classic A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film that took the moribund slasher genre and turned it on its ear, transforming an anemic and formulaic film style into something beautiful and ethereal. This film introduced the villainous Freddy Krueger, a notorious child killer given the power to haunt dreams who seeks revenge on the children of the lynch mob that burned him to death.

As reflected in its title, A Nightmare on Elm Street is about the dark side of suburbia and the family secrets that are hidden away behind closed doors. The children receive comeuppance for the sins of their fathers until one bright and intrepid young woman learns to face her fears head on and address them, taking away their power.

The film was a massive success both because of its elegantly conceived and cunning scare sequences that crossed the line between reality and fantasy and the storyline that resonated with disillusioned teens across the country. There comes a time in every young person's life where they begin to see through the lies that their parents tell them and realize that the world, even the safe, intimate world inside their own home, is not what it seems to be.

The suspicion that develops from this realization is similarly displayed in the film, which derives its horror from the idea that the secret your family is hiding could be potentially dangerous. The traumatic rupturing of that feeling of intimacy inside one's own home is likewise escalated in Nightmare because the teens aren't even protected in the most vulnerable and intimate location - their own heads.

The impact of the original film was enormous as was the box office revenue, so the natural next step was to rush a sequel into production, something New Line did with gusto. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge was a haphazard production, needlessly reshuffling the Freddy mythology with a confusing mixture of winking homoerotic licentiousness and unintentional humor.

Craven returned to course correct the franchise with Dream Warriors, the film that marked the beginning of Nightmare's descent into self parody, the only obvious route for avoiding the sequel pitfall of endlessly repeating the same basic plot line to diminishing returns. Although a different director and screenwriter watered down the material, Freddy attacks his victims using their biggest weakness, forcing them to find the internal strength to overcome them, something which again resonated with the teen audiences and sent the film's profits skyrocketing.

The Dream Master was more of the same, although Freddy had at that point fully converted from shadowy menace to a chuckling prankster. That film survived on the strength of an impressive visual vocabulary and another strong heroine in Lisa Wilcox's Alice Johnson, but its followup, The Dream Child, was an absurd mess that contented itself with sending a slate of paper-thin characters (one of whom is, at one point, literally made of paper) through a series of garish nightmare setpieces while Freddy spouts bland puns like a forlorn James Bond.

After the abject failure of the fifth film, New Line went all in on one final entry, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, which was slightly improved but equally useless and meaningless. After realizing that they had sent their biggest cash cow six feet under, New Line begged Craven to return to the franchise he created. He agreed, but couldn't manage to find a through line to pick up a sequel from, so he was forced to get creative with Wes Craven's New Nightmare.

Although two films would follow New Nightmare, Freddy vs. Jason in 2003 and the remake in 2010, both were too modernized and uniform, the sanitization of the time buffing out the inherent qualities of the franchise into a dull sheen and as such have no impact on the analysis and discussion of A Nightmare on Elm Street as a whole.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare is the only sequel to equal and perhaps even surpass the intelligence and artistry of the original film with its unique discussion of the nature of modern horror movies and the fact that it's set in reality, with the Freddy menace seeking to break from fiction into our dimension. Just like the first film, the parent and child relationship is at the forefront, although this time it is the antithesis as Heather Langenkamp (the actress who played Nancy Thompson, the heroine of A Nightmare on Elm Street) seeks to protect her son from succumbing to the dream demon as he exerts his will on our reality.

A Nightmare on Elm Street and Wes Craven's New Nightmare are the two best films in the entire franchise, and it is no coincidence that they were both written and directed by Mr. Craven. Both want to tell us more about the world and ourselves instead of merely wowing us with outré special effects, and both are bone-chilling, a quality lacking in every single film not under his influence. This is largely due to his writing talent and his understanding of important themes that resonate with viewers of all ages.

But it also stems from his awareness that well-fleshed out characters are what drives horror. Parts 3 through 6 had one-dimensional characters that only had one (or less) character trait apiece, but Craven's heroes and victims are all multi-faceted and utterly real. They may not be all likable, but they are all recognizable as human beings and thus the horrific circumstances they find themselves under have greater impact.

Dylan's attempt to reach God in New Nightmare by jumping off the top of a playground structure could easily have been shallow and silly if included in any of the other films in the franchise, but because Craven is behind the camera, the scene has a real impact because the audience cares deeply for the boy and understands his plight from both Dylan and his mother's perspective. Every character in both films has a recognizable relationship with every other character, making the universe of the films complete and settling the audience into the reality that will soon be rent apart.

These films ultimately work better than their brethren because of this fact as well as Craven's intimate understanding of the abject terror of nightmares. The anemic slate of sequels that bridges the gap between his two masterpieces don't all fare poorly in comparison, but none of them can reach the level of genius achieved by a master working his craft and pushing the boundaries of the genre.

The non-Craven films focus on Freddy as the central figure, whereas his films find their strength in an identifiable and capable female protagonist. The reason they fail to be as effective stems from this mistake. Freddy works best as a villain because his backstory is too simple to make him an adequate protagonist, even as an anti-hero. With no real story to draw from other than "he was evil in life as in death," this forced him into compromising positions, eliciting the clownish behavior which was meant to accentuate his evil but turned him into a pale parody of his old self.

The nominal protagonists and side characters of these films became increasingly insubstantial and bland (even Alice, the great heroine from The Dream Master, became just another cookie-cutter teen in its inept followup), straying far from the original intention of creating characters that held a mirror up to the youth of the day and then put them through the ringer, forcing them to see the dark reality of their protected suburban lives. The franchise became vaudeville, passing the time and managing to be entertaining without the depth and impact of Craven's work, all through one ineffable miscalculation stemming from the fact that the villain was the most obvious character to keep consistent through the endless parade of sequels.

So how did this increasingly cartoonish villain make his way into the pop culture pantheon, becoming a long-lasting icon even today? One key element to his success and that of the franchise was Robert Englund. Aside from being a talented and menacing man, Englund played Krueger consistently, all the way to the end. Englund appeared in every film until the 2010 remake and even starred in the short-lived television show Freddy's Nightmares.

Having Freddy played by the same actor throughout the sequels provided him a leg up when compared to the anonymous herd of stuntmen who would end up playing Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers in rival slasher franchises. Audiences in the 80's wanted familiarity because the world around them was already so uncertain. With the looming threat of nuclear disaster poking a hole in the lives of idyllic suburbanites everywhere and the contradictions of then-president Ronald Reagan posing larger and larger problems, audiences felt a pleasant wave of nostalgia when seeing Freddy again and again, like visiting an old friend.

Also, thanks to those same societal issues, Nightmare's themes about dark secrets and hidden dangers in even the most perfect-seeming households were something that the teens of the day could relate to with great acuity. Having a horror film that truly understood their woes from a man with his fair share of family skeletons in the closet gave them relief like no other and the lessening of terror elements as the franchise went along helped comfort viewers even more as the nation entered its next period of transition.

Another enormous benefit to the popularity of Mr. Fred Krueger was his status as an inhabitant of the dream world. The concept that makes him most terrifying is that escape is an impossibility. If Jason is chasing you, you can possibly run faster than his loping gait and escape to Australia. If the Blob is coming, you can freeze it with fire extinguishers. But if Freddy wants to kill you, he doesn't have to move a muscle.

Our nightmares might all be different, but we have one thing in common - sleep. Sleep is where we are most vulnerable and the dream world is a mysterious realm over which we have no control. We all must enter that stage of life with defenses lowered.

Sleep is Freddy's domain, a mysterious dimension that your body forces you to return to no matter how hard you might try to fight it. If you stay awake too long, you die. If you fall asleep, you're murdered. And the longer you're awake, the less mental and physical agility you will have when it finally comes time to face your attacker.

Even more problematic are the adults in the film, the people who unwittingly released this monster into the nightmares of their offspring. Their skewed perceptions of the entire affair have them believe that sleep is the one thing their children need to take them out of the stress-filled and harrowing state they are in, and sometimes the measures they take in order to protect their children are exactly what lead them to their inevitable demise.

Freddy is no mere slasher villain. He is an anthropomorphic representation of our primal fears. First and foremost is the fear of where we go when we're asleep. The world of our dreams is something we will perhaps never understand, a phantasmagoria of shadows and half-glimpsed images from deep within our subconscious that preys on our innermost thoughts and fears.

Freddy has access to this closed off part of ourselves, something we barely even register is there. It is mysterious and lurking and for him to have access is for him to invade our most intimate structures, more intimate than our bedrooms or even our bodies. Freddy can manipulate the worlds inside of us that we can never understand, and as such he is the ultimate boogeyman. He is not merely a creature of the darkness, but a creature of the darkness within ourselves.

Freddy exposes the evil hiding behind every curtain not only by being an example of that evil in his life, but also by exploiting the evil of those we trust most and using it to gain access to our innermost fears. His use of claws represents the primal nature of his existence. Back at the dawn of humankind, one of the most basic and primal fears was death at the hands of a wild creature, its sharp claws tearing our soft flesh apart. Freddy and his claws come from this place deep within, the very essential foundation of fear itself.

The wicked glee with which he wields his blades comes from a place of pure evil, no matter how clownish he becomes. That is what makes him such an effective horror villain, and that is why he is permanently glued to modern pop culture, an entity that - like it or not - is driven by what we fear, whether it is in an attempt to escape it, embrace it, or empower ourselves against it.

Even in its darkest, most disappointing depths, the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise exposes the fear and calamity that threatens to crumble our carefully structured and largely imaginary suburban society. Human history is full of darkness and our feeble attempts at hiding that fact to protect our children dooms them even further, something Freddy (and his creator, Wes Craven) knows all too well.
Word Count: 2339

Beat It, Essay: The Book Of The Dead

So, it turns out that even though I'm the TA for the Horror Class this semester, I still have to do all the work and write the essays. What a relief! I was worried I would have to do them recreationally!

All kidding aside, I really do love this class. Because it's just another excuse to write about horror movies, something I'm clinically addicted to. Anyhow, the first one is due on Monday, so here we go. This is what the onslaught of Evil Dead reviews this week was building up to. Prepare yourselves!

The Prompt

Compare and contrast Army of Darkness (1992) with The Evil Dead (1981), Evil Dead 2 (1987), and Evil Dead (2013). Cite elements in common and discuss how the undead are portrayed in each.

Very few people have had more influence on the modern horror genre than Sam Raimi, the idiosyncratic and deranged auteur behind the Evil Dead franchise. Each successive movie has brought something new to the discussion and, in a nigh on impossible chain of events considering the current state of film studios, Raimi has had a personal hand in each of the films, directing all three of the main franchise and producing the 2013 remake.

Raimi's immense dedication to the beloved cult franchise has resulted in some of the most perversely unique and phenomenally innovative horror films in modern cinema. From his days as a fresh-faced auteur with something to prove to his tenure as a grizzled genre veteran, his lunatic vision has fueled the delight and nightmares of generations of audiences, starting all the way back in 1981 with the infinitesimally low-budget production The Evil Dead.

The story of The Evil Dead is a simple one, almost like something you would hear around a campfire. Five paper thin characters (two men, three women) spend Spring Break holed up in an abandoned cabin in the woods and accidentally unleash a horde of angry Candarian demons from an ancient book known as the Naturom Demonto. As the spirits begin to possess the flesh of the living, so begins a long and harrowing journey for perennial hero Ashley J. Williams.

The original film is utterly unique, breaking open the craft of cinema and turning it inside out. Although it is more or less a straightforward horror film in terms of genre (and an incredibly tense one at that), the campy excesses of the gore sequences, the zany twirling and zooming of the camera, and the boisterously overproduced sound design all work in tandem to create an heightened reality entirely separate from our own. Camp and terror freely intermingle as the fleshy melodrama plays out.

The isolation of the cabin suits this tone well, creating a feeling of distinct separation from the "real world." This inventive approach brings the genre into the new decade, actively combatting the serial nihilism of 70's horror. Films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Last House on the Left, and the grindhouse holdouts of the early 70's were grubby and bleak, whereas Raimi's undead tale has a keen awareness of its own excesses and a sense of "Look what I can do!" glee throughout the proceedings.

The film's portrayal of the undead follows along much the same lines. The undead (which, it can be argued, are technically Candarian demons, but it does not do one well to try to impose rules upon a Evil Dead movie) could easily kill Ash if they had a mind to. In fact, three of them spend a large portion of the second and third acts in the same room as him. But the fact that they are content to play with their captive like a cat with a mouse is reflective of the director's approach to the film and the concept of cinema in general.

Despite the film's darker tinges like the brutal forest rape scene and some intense tactile gore, for the most part Raimi wants to play. The simplicity of the story allows him to push the envelope of cinematography, shot composition, editing, performance, effects, and just about every single element that makes a film a film. From a man who spent a decade watching increasingly downtrodden horror films, The Evil Dead provided a shot in the arm to audiences, inoculating them from nihilism and preparing them for the campy explosiveness of a decade that would come to a crux with films like Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Raimi's own Evil Dead 2.

A lot can change in six years, and such was the case with Evil Dead 2. As the decade went on, horror films became increasingly silly and inconsequential, expanding on Raimi's own campy premise with delight but pushing it too far into the realms of fluff. There were still classics of the form around the time of the Evil Dead sequel, but it acts as a course correction for the woebegone majority of horror films in the late 80's. The truly Raimiesque quality of the film is that it does so by amplifying the genre even further, becoming what is essentially a parody of the first film - a perfectly balanced combination of outrageous campy comedy and gross-out gory horror.

Taking a cue (and a Necronomicon) from H. P. Lovecraft, this film explores even deeper and darker themes in terms of horror while simultaneously engaging in slapstick pratfalls and Bruce Campbell mugging, all wrapped up within the loopy and revolutionary aesthetic of the original film. The undead in this film are even more playful and comedic, but the loose rules governing them makes them absolutely manic and unpredictable, highlighting the terror of the film as it gracefully dances upon the line between two disparate genres.

At one point, Ash even becomes a demon himself, exemplifying Raimi's no-holds-barred, over-the-top approach to his own story, a reaction to both the state of the genre and the increasing seriousness of American affairs at that time. This time around, the demons aren't the enemies, merely playthings to distract the audience (and Ash) from the darker activities swirling around the edges of the frame and in the backs of the audience's minds.

Another five years after that genre-bending stone cold masterpiece, Army of Darkness came barreling out of the chute. Raimi knew he wasn't going to be able to replicate the success of his earlier films if he rehashed the same plot for the third time so he lifted out the slapstick elements of Evil Dead 2 and married them onto an effects-driven swords and sandals action flick. This also had the effect of satisfying the censors, who had started tightening the reins on gory horror around 1989.

Army of Darkness ended the original trilogy and, as such, continued to utilize the traditional filmic elements of the franchise as it progressed naturally to a more overtly comedic register. Ash's mugging and physical comedy reach their absolute peak in this film and Campbell's Jim Carreyesque performance tamps down the horror to let the comedy shine. Toning down the gore and horror of the earlier installments in the franchise allowed this concluding film to explore the consequences and results of the previous two, acting as a personal exploration for Raimi as well as a loving sendoff for the series that made him a household name.

In between the always fresh and clever Three Stooges recreations and slapstick vignettes, Army of Darkness spends more time exploring Ash's character than any of the preceding films. After having lost his girlfriend no less than three times and had two sets of friends ripped away by the Deadites, he is left a bruised and scarred survivor, closed off to the world and uncaring about its inhabitants.

Because of this more careful exploration of character, the nature of the demonic menace is quite different. Instead of an intimate selection of prancing demons, he is facing a vast army of the undead led by his own shadowy doppelgänger. As he struggles to overcome his selfishness and learn to care about his fellow human beings enough to save their town, he literally battles the darkness within himself and a skeleton battalion representing each and every corpse he left behind in that cabin, eventually coming out on top, renewed in spirit and more heroic than ever. The perfect ending to a stellar franchise.

Of course by now we have all learned that Hollywood is incapable of leaving well enough alone, so naturally a high budget remake was slated for 2013. Fortunately, the modernization incorporated many of Raimi's classic elements including the hurtling POV camera, the American gothic cabin design, upside down shots and the like. His ever fresh repertoire of film tricks is an essential element at the core of Evil Dead's being.

Evil Dead suffered somewhat from a lack of necessity, but returning the franchise to its roots as a straightforward horror film did it well. Evil Dead is again a harrowing survival tale, this time populated with characters that are fleshed out (save one or two who are merely, shall we say, fleshed apart) and recognizable to any modern audience member.

The introduction of the drug addiction concept to keep the young men and women in the cabin and unaware of the initial horrors that are occurring was nothing less than genius and more than validates the film's reasons for existence, at least in terms of being a well-shot and gory horror movie for the 21st century crowd. And the film does capture some of the energy of the original trilogy, although it is diluted through the tamperings of a big budget studio.

The undead here are merely beings of pure evil, a bane of the overly simplistic remake culture of the late 2000's. Thanks to landmark films of the decade like Saw and Hostel, the demons are more focused on grossing out their prey (and the audience) than psychologically tormenting them, and while the film does succeed in bringing the themes and ideas of The Evil Dead into a modern setting, perhaps that isn't necessarily the best place for them.

Although it is certainly the weakest of the entire franchise, Sam Raimi's limitless abandon in approaching his material (even as producer) sends it across the finish line in fairly good shape. That same indefatigable enthusiasm is what made the Evil Dead films as important and influential as they are today and will remain for many years to come.

Each film uses Raimi and his boundless enthusiasm as the glue that holds them together as well as the unlimited supply of fuel that provides them with the power to explore deeper and deeper aspects of character, society, the horror genre, and cinema itself. The characters of the undead constantly bend, snap, twist, and break, allowing themselves to be the skeleton (pun intended) upon which a fantastic tale of cinematic imagination and intimate inspection of ourselves and the world around us can hang.

Their nature is formless and adaptable, crossing genres, decades, and bodies, all to further the one thing that propels his work - the deep love and respect he has for his craft and for bending the rules to create bigger and better universes. Everything in The Evil Dead comes from a place of joy and giddy childish glee at the sheer act of cinematic creation. This reason, more than any other, is why these films have survived the test of time despite the limitations of their budgets and technology.

They resonate subconsciously with audiences across the globe, all of whom can feel the depth of the creator's passion and his sense of the limitless opportunity of the medium. That, more than consistent story or character or even genre, is what links the individual films of this zeitgeist franchise. You don't need to have the best equipment or actors or makeup around to pour your heart into a story as long as you have the sheer nerve and gusto that Raimi instills upon everything he touches. And Hollywood would do well to recognize that.
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