Saturday, October 16, 2004

Halloween, John Carpenter's high point

As Halloween, the holiday, approaches, it's time to think about one of the best all-time low-budget horror movies ever made. The greatness of this simple movie has been obscured by workmanlike sequels followed by pathetic sequels followed by slick sequels, followed by, well, burn-out.
With Halloween, the link between low-budget and authenticity in a certain style of horror movie was made explicit. The link had already been established by movies such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Night of the Living Dead, but Halloween got the message through to a wider audience, with less drama. It was more real, more creepy, and somehow more pertinent to your life.
Halloween is done with long, slow takes, many of which interpose something wrong with scenes of the town in which nothing could possibly be wrong, not really. The actual "bad-guy" may not exist, but everything else in the movie does. It's our own backyard, and the low-budget style of the movie serves to reinforce that sense. This is probably the kind of movie that any director can only make once in his or her career.

Sunday, October 10, 2004

It's just a puppet, isn't it?

I saw Team America: World Police yesterday, at a preview. Now, I can’t say if this is a good movie or not. It is very much a creature of its makers, so if you like South Park, you’ll probably love this. What’s interesting, though, is that this movie is about puppets. You’d think this is the opposite of authenticity, but in fact the filmmakers achieve exactly that.
There is a theory of drama which holds that the actor should always remind the audience that he is acting. He is presenting the material, but also standing aside and pointing at it. This theory, developed by old-fashioned communists who were concerned with dissembling the ideological superstructure that kept the ruling class on top, has been picked up in various forms of comedy. The political baggage was dropped, and laughs are the only goal.
You wouldn’t think you could do that with puppets. After all, puppets exist only to perform the narrative. If they do not fully act, what do you have? A pile of wood? Parker and Stone’s puppets seem constantly to reflect on the fact that they are puppets. One may be about to exit dramatically, then will realize he must do that bouncy marionette walk. Or the martial artist prepares to do battle, but is limited to exaggerated puppet moves. A character reaches out to put her hand on another’s chest, but finds that the strings won’t let her. Several times a puppet will go to some human-sized place, where his puppet size is obvious.
The outcome of all this is that we feel we can see the soul of the puppet, trapped in the woodenly acting body. It’s sort of like watching Eric Roberts of William Shatner really trying to act. You know it isn’t quite working, but you can see them trying so hard, you want it to.
In this way, we are tricked into giving authenticity to bad-acting wooden puppets. Not for the acting itself, but for the man or woman behind the actor. Even though there isn’t one. In contrast, we still have no sympathy for the woodenly acted characters of Sky Captain. Whatever happened to them, or didn’t, we can’t find time to care. Nothing happened anywhere except in a computer. At least in Team America, they burned up some real puppets.

Saturday, October 02, 2004

Sports: Realism or Entertainment? Or both?

Sports, a form of entertainment, is “Real” in the sense that the outcome is not known at the beginning. Usually. It is also “Real” to the participants, who are innovative and aggressive within a well-defined set of rules, shared with the audience. Such rules are, at best, adequate to keep everyone playing until the end of the game, saving the long arguments until later. If you play ball at 17th and P, you’ll find the rules don’t quite make that happen.

There are interpreters of the rules, and judges who decide what facts actually happened. Over time, sport has evolved the philosophy that if the interpreters and fact-judgers are at least attempting to be objective, the harm of the occasional bad call is just part of the price of doing business. Hopefully, over time, it all equals out. Thus, when the Redskins lost, ignobly, to the Cowboys, there was a lot of talk about the two flagrantly bad calls. But nobody is suing anyone to overturn the result.

Now, Men’s Gymnastics appears to be a different ball of wax-like substance. First, there is no real head to head competition. Everything is judged and scored and compared. You have a series of individual performances rated, then stacked against each other. How much interaction is there between the competitors? Supposedly there is some kind of strategy decision, but still.

Then, you find out the judging is somewhat arbitrary. Scores start higher or lower and judges save their best scores for their favorites. The better known you are, the more you get the benefit of the doubt. This happens in other sports too, of course. There’s traveling, then there’s Michael Jordan taking his apparently legal steps.

Now we find that, though the outcome is supposed to be mathematical, the award itself is given at the end, in spite of any math errors. Only then to be taken outside to a court of law. Sports don’t end up in a court of law. Players may. Owners do, labor negotiations may end up there. But the sport itself, the judging and the outcome, should all be contained within the sport. That’s what makes it a real self-contained universe. If, in retrospect, the math is more important than the described outcome at the event’s completion, you have something else. Not really a sport.