noisewar internetlainen - games, politics, and sarcasm

I'll spare you what you already know about how great the Wall-E movie and how its strong theme is about the ravages of commercialism. I wanted to talk about the secondary theme in Wall-E, the thread of symbolism that enriches what seems like simple story-telling fabric. Forget the "hypocrisy" that one (of the very few) soulless critics pointed out about the commercial viability of the slickly designed cast against the wholesome message. That critic has forgotten his job is to review movies, not corporate greed, unless he'd prefer the movie to NOT have its message and JUST be a vehicle for Disney's marketing.


SPOILERS!!!

No, that's not what interests me. Wall-E is a masterpiece because of the maturity of its symbolism, which Pixar has evolved in this movie to transcend dialogue and plot. Consider Wall-E and EVE's shapes. As if her name wasn't allegorical enough, EVE has the organic oval form of a seed, and with her arms open, a likeness to the green sprout icon on her chest. Her free-spirit and pure colors, her passion, humor, and angers represent the vivacity of life.

Wall-E, on the other hand, is square. He represents functionality. He compresses trash into building blocks, and he is the color and dirtiness of a worker, a "foreign contaminant" to Axiom's ship of leisure. Over his life, he develops curiosity and a yearning for love, but must teach himself their nuances even as he fearfully reaches for EVE's hand.

The two together give us the secondary theme in Wall-E, that life without function is merely survival. The captain realizes this is not what he wants for his people. In this tale, it is life that has forgotten function, and it's no surprise that the functional robots of the ship seem to have more life than its passengers. Therefore, the return to Earth represents the reunion of life and its functional purpose. Like the ship's definition of dance, both movement and rhythm are required.

It makes perfect sense, then, that when EVE revives Wall-E, it wasn't enough for him to be fixed. The damaged Wall-e, reverting back to pure function, is as lifeless as the passengers and their "directive"-less existences. He's a Wall-e, not the Wall-e, until EVE and Wall-e hold hands, joining the two things they represent together. Then he remembers, like the passengers remembering Earth, and becomes whole again. The plant in the boot too represents the union of life and function, but the boot is also a metaphor for Wall-E's travels. Life is found, nurtured, not had, pre-packaged.

This movie knocked my socks off, and it wasn't just the various aspects of storytelling or animation or CGI rendering that did it. In fact, I found several moments to be imperfectly written and directed. Even so, somehow Pixar can give us a predictable story and really have us empathize with things we take for granted, as their movies always do. The metaphor of teaching each other to dance really sells the reference at the film's end, recalling the final line from Wall-e's favorite film Hello Dolly:

"Money is like manure. It's not worth a thing unless it's spread about, encouraging young things to grow."

After reading many reviews of P.T. Anderson's seminal new film There Will Be Blood, I am disappointed to see how much misinterpretation there is. Where the themes of greed, godlessness, capitalism, hatred, and revenge are certainly present, they are peripheral, and recent oil politics have led critics to miss a central theme that ties all those issues together: the loneliness of godhood. I will explain the four different meanings of the film's title to show that that loneliness is what drove anti-hero Daniel Plainview to his tragic end.

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Having never seen his other movies, I still should have realized Robert DeNiro was going to be a perfectionist as a director, as he is as an actor. It's been so long that I had almost forgotten the pleasure of watching a film as nuanced and rich as The Good Shepherd. There wasn't a wasted sequence in the three hours it ran, and the irony didn't escape me that half the theater walked out on a movie whose title implied the blissful masses were the CIA's sheep.

DeNiro's character, based on Gen. "Wild Bill" Donovan, once said that conservatives were those who believed people were flawed, and liberals were those who believed people could be changed. DeNiro's film, particularly in this war, is a daring discussion about the motives, good or wrong, for sacrificing liberties (and how much!) at wartime. Wild Bill, who ruthlessly hired socialists, liberals, and even communists in his intelligence battle, was a viciously pragmatic man, and he defended his men to the end when the OSS was investigated by the McCarthyists. He said "We face an enemy who believes one of his chief weapons is that none but he will employ terror. But we will turn terror against him..."

SPOILERS ALERT!!!

Understanding that man goes a long way towards understanding that the movie is about anti-hero Edward Wilson's misunderstanding of the word "truth" in his passage into the intelligence underworld. There is the patriotic truth, where one's country's ideals take precedence and all harm unknown by its defenders are lies, unknowns, and untruths the CIA needs to unearth. And then there is the truth he found after opening his father's letter, the personal truth upon which families, friends, and ultimately all foundational values, America is built upon. When a man decides, as Edward did, that as a citizen the truth you pursue is predetermined, you "ascend" your family and friends, immediate and national, and cannot trust anyone.

Joseph Palmi: You know, we Italians have our families and the church, the Irish have their homeland, the Jews their tradition, even the n*****s have their music. What do you guys have?

Edward Wilson: We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

For the movie as debate of our times, I don't think I need to wax more on the subject. But the film itself, however you may feel about the polemic, was crafted exquisitely. We didn't see characters make decisions, we saw the consequences. We saw the emotional aftermath. We saw them make the same mistakes, fighting their character arc, and suffering for it. We saw his son walk in his steps, believing and not knowing. We saw the anger as Edward's man Ray Brocco, unable to accept the real truth, unable to admit they were all fooled, bludgeon a man with forced confessions, only to fail. And at the end, we saw how the subtle passing of a dollar could be the surface of another world of deceit and misdirection, and the underworld continues stir.

Moviegoers who walk in expecting a thriller will walk out expecting a refund. The rest will be drawn into the irrevocably frightening backstage that James Jesus Angleton, the original good shepherd that Edward Wilson was based on, called the "wilderness of mirrors."

I've been trying to name the greatest American film-makers of our time, and I've gathered a contemporary list that I still feel is rather sparse. It needs help. For now, I'd choose the Coen Brothers, Clint Eastwood, and David Lynch as the most discerning eyes in dissecting what composes the American dream, our manifest failure, and the reflection of national identity in personal development. Their films embody the seldom appreciated mysticism of the americana, the almost mythic qualities honor and absurdity in what in the blistering speed of social evolution has delegated as common, and thus by extension as simple, perhaps even backwards and irrelevant.

Now there are some others I'd want to add, namely Scorcese, Mann, P.T. Anderson, Mendes, Wes Anderson, Spike Lee, and Solondz, but in the end, what they've mastered is not the soulforming undercurrent that forges the iron of the melting pot itself, but just one shard of that flame. They do it well. As I've commented before, Mann and Anderson create films that are concentrated drops of L.A. in ensembled veracity. Scorcese and Spike underscore the New York we may not have been to but have always known. But. But! They've taught me, shown me, but they haven't understood me better than I do myself. Sincerely, Uncle Sam.

Actually Solondz is the one who got me thinking about it. We plodded through Palindromes last night, and while I must give it credit for a fairly successful disembodiment of the main character, which he accomplished by using several actresses (and one actor) to play, it was ruined with the same judgemental anti-fundamentalist shlockery as I Huckabees. Yes, the movie upholds genre "Experimental," and I really embraced the composite Aviva, a girl who's quest for true love leads her to desire creating her own baby. Be she an Eve or a Mom, her palindromic journey almost left the post of film vehicle to become that ghost of America past I wanted to idolize. And then he ruined it by giving us Mama Sunshine who went from a pre-appearance Baba Yaga to post-appearance pro-life straw-woman. Boring! A supporter of abortionist assassination? Insulting!

Good movie, but it sure pulled the Happiness and Storytelling Solondz out of my choice American film-makers list.