Wednesday Talkie: Before Sunrise

I think the film noir well is getting pretty dry so I thought I'd switch to another genre. Talkie, of course, originally meant a movie with synchronized sound. But no one ever called them "soundies"! Very quickly, the early sound pictures became feasts of talk.

In a sense, this is trivial. Nothing should be less surprising that human beings would respond to an art form that included talk. It is similarly unsurprising that one of the very first things people did after the invention of photography was to take pictures of naked women. Talk is as fundamental to human beings as the winning photographs in a competition featuring Aubade lingerie. Everybody responds to this, even the people who claim they hate the stuff.

Okay, but what specifically do I mean by "talkie"? Well, this line from Wikipedia accidentally captures all the elements:

A Summer's Tale (1996) has most of the elements of a typical Rohmer film: no soundtrack music, no closeups, a seaside resort, long conversations between beautiful young people (who are middle class and educated) and discussions involving the characters' interests from songwriting to ethnology.

Some elaboration:

1. There are talkies with soundtrack music, most infamously Paris, Texas, but I think that movie proves the point. The soundtrack is beautiful but it doesn't fit. It would have been a much better music without it.
2. These movies use self-conscious cinematic techniques in a minimal way for exactly the same reason they use minimal soundtrack music. Everything important has to be accomplished with talk. They are the opposite of the artfilm style. If you really like the movies I call talkies, you're probably underwhelmed by Citizen Kane.
3. These things need a beautiful setting but they also need a setting where people are thrown together in unusual ways. People summering at the seashore, people escaping the war in Casablanca, people arriving at a country house unaware who the other guests will be, travelers meeting on a train.
4. Beautiful young people is another way of saying these movies depend absolutely on the possibility of sex and love. My Dinner With André* is not a talkie even though it consists of almost nothing but talk.
5. These are movies about starting conversations with people you don't know. The only way you can do this is by discussing stuff and hoping they like the stuff you talk about.

And then there is the big question, what do people do when they talk? I can't answer that but most people can understand why the idea of "just being able to talk" is so seductive. I think most people will remember, assuming they are not still living it, that moment of adolescence when they thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to just cut past the bullshit and really talk to one another." People usually think this when they get a crush on someone and wish they didn't have to live with the uncertainty. They want to go straight  past the conventions and say something like, "I really like you, any chance we could get to know one another?"

Except, not really. The problem with saying something like that is that the girl might say, "Get away creep?" Or, if you are a girl, the guy might laugh at you and then text his girlfriend saying, "Guess who just offered herself to me?"

The talkie is a genre because a series of artificial elements all fit together in a way that feels comfortable and natural even though it isn't like real life. Just as we willing surrender our disbelief and cheerfully prepare to go along for the ride when the cowboy rides out into the frame, so too when the man or woman in a transitory setting strikes up a conversation. The unusual location means that you can have conversations you wouldn't normally have. The lack of or minimal soundtrack and cinematic techniques means that the thing to be accomplished has to succeed or fail by means of conversation. The lack of existing social ties between the principals means that the conversation has to take off in quirky ways. (And this is the major stumbling point for people who hate the genre.)

A digression, sometimes Apple is sooo stupid. The latest version of iTunes won't let you do screen captures from movies you are watching.

Anyway, I got started on this because I rented Before Sunrise, a movie that came out the year I was married so I didn't see it for the simple reason that I did not need any outside help with romance. Two people meet on a train and talk. Trains are good. Trains are the opiate of college-educated white people. Trains make very little sense in the modern world but we love them. Cities all over North America are headed for bankruptcy because college educated white people want them to have light rail transit systems that don't even begin to make sense.

Our hero and heroine don't just meet on a train, they keep getting getting on trains and streetcars all through the movie.

But let's back up. These movies work a little like porn. You've daydreamed about sex right? In your daydream, the sex always happens. That makes it very different from real life. Look, you could be sitting in a café and thinking about having sex with that person right over there and thinking it would be really nice but you only do this because you are reasonably confident that life won't call your bluff. If she or he walked over and said, "This might sound strange, but I really want to have sex with you," you'd most likely balk.

Those social conventions and all that seemingly endless manœuvering that has to happen before you can begin to really talk that just seemed like "bullshit" when we were adolescents is actually really important. Take it away and we get really nervous and with good reason.

Everyone whose ever gotten on a train alone has looked at other passengers and thought about striking up a conversation with them. But no matter how much you want it, you wouldn't do it if it moved too quickly. You have no idea who this person is and they might be a crashing bore or crazy or creepy or be married or ...

There is a fantasy element here.

One of the things that makes possible is the Nabokov gambit. I refer here to an incredible (literally) moment in Lolita where the protagonist is about to exposed only the woman who might expose him is hit and killed by a car just in time to save him. This should be a moment of complete narrative failure causing us to close the book and think, "I'll read some trashy murder mystery instead". And you might actually do that. That is exactly what I did the first time I tried to read Lolita.

But if you don't do that, Nabokov has got you. When you hit that moment that is too too much but decide to go on anyway, you commit yourself. You agree to actively make efforts to make this work.

This is how women agree to help with their own seduction. It's why actually asking her on a date or asking her to come up to your room afterwards is so imprtant. At neither stage does she agree to sex but she does make it a little bit harder to back out.

The moment in this movie is when the guy who has been talking to the girl on the train comes back to her and asks her to get off and spend time with him in Vienna. It's not credible and couldn't not be credible in a million years but if you go along with it you are committed to making the story work.

Ironically, because there is so much willful fantasy with a certain porn-like quality in talkies, it is very important they have no sex scenes. There can be sex but portraying it destroys the thing because the movie is about anticipation.

The other thing about these movies is that they are more sensitive to spoilers than any other genre. There are certain details that would ruin it forever. So I won't. Before Sunset isn't great but it's pretty darn good.


* I think I will have to cover My Dinner With André at some point, though, because understanding why that film fails goes a long way to explaining what it takes to succeed.

She said she'd never been in trouble or even in town ...

I've never known a woman who didn't hate this song. Pop this on the sound system and the woman with you will give you a look chillier than liquid nitrogen.

I understand completely. If I were a woman I'd hate it too.

But the thing is, I love it. I even lived it back in 1990* and not only never regretted it, have come to see it as the single smartest thing I ever did in my life.





* Just so there is no misunderstanding, the younger girl in question was older than twenty at the time.

Another image: What is it selling?

Here is an ad that popped up on a site I was reading this morning:

My first thought was, "If she is one of the dangers then I, for one, welcome our new female overlords".

The more profound question is, "Why use an image of a sexually aroused woman to get men to watch a video about something that is supposedly a threat to them?" It's not just that she is hot. The primary thing is that that expression screams surrender. If your dinner companion looks at you like that, you both know that she is yours for the taking.

That, by the way, is what the video the ad links to is selling: Buy our testosterone-boosting products and you can nail girls like her. That's a bit of a letdown isn't it?

She's faking the look. The giveaway is that her pupils are tiny and not dilated as they would be if she were really sexually aroused. That and the clearly visible evidence that everything about her is fake—her hair is dyed, her foundation is on as thick as Marcel Marceau's, and so forth.

There is another level of fakery at work here. That picture suggests that  she is in some sort of newsroom reporting. You think that maybe she is the one who will narrate the video. She isn't.

The people who put together this picture really know their stuff. The only thing they got wrong was her pupils . If you looked at that mouth and didn't have the same predatory thought I did, then you aren't a man. Notice also the beautiful match between her wide-open eyes and "eye-opening video". That's important because that is the real selling point. It's not about them opening your eyes—it's about you opening her eyes and other things big and wide.

The thing is this: the impulses that would lead us to click on this video are exactly the things that make us weak and malleable. She isn't really for sale and we are just a suckers for bait and switch. How could surrendering to those impulses make us stronger?

(Here's are a few rude questions: Do you spend a lot of time looking at pictures like that but very little time figuring out how to make the woman you actually desire in real life  look at you like that? Do you feel safer looking at that expression in a picture where you know that she isn't actually looking back at you? Are you maybe intimidated by the thought of actually living the experience of having a woman looking at you like that because of the expectation of performance from you she might have?)

Here's another thought, women can easily dress and make themselves up to project sexual arousal. It's easy to see why they do it: most of the time sexual status is a more valuable to women than actual sex. But why would it be in your interest to pursue a woman who is very good at faking sexual arousal? And if you turn on your critical thinking apparatus, you can look around the classroom, office and coffeeshop and quickly ascertain which women are more practiced at projecting sexual arousal.

As I've said before, you wouldn't want a woman who never does this. Women who never consciously use the tricks available to them to raise their sexual staus probably don't like or have weird hang ups about sex. That said, the other end of the bell curve is just as reliable an indicator that a woman's sexual response is not healthy. I take it that sex matters to you and not just as pleasure but as a shared pleasure that brings you and the woman you love closer as a couple? Why then would you be interested in a woman who is really good at using her body to lie about the thing you treasure? You want a woman who actually does surrender when she outwardly signals surrender.

It's easy to see what your first response to that picture would be would be and why it would be. But even a tiny bit of critical thinking should tell you that the thing inside the cereal box isn't going to be as big and shiny as the picture of it on the outside of the cereal box.

A little light culture: Jeremy Irons reads Brideshead

It has taken me months to get this one up. While driving to and from our vacation destination last September, the Lemon Girl and I listened to an audiobook of Jeremy Irons reading Brideshead Revisited. I cannot recommend this one too highly.

One caveat, Irons puts a slightly different interpretation on the characters than the famous TV series. That's a good thing because it is slightly different and significantly better. Irons obviously really gets the book and obviously really loves it. Listening to his version will increase your enjoyment of this magnificent book.

Hypocrite is spelled H-A-T-H-A-W-A-Y

For sheer chutzpah, this has to take some sort of prize

"It was obviously an unfortunate incident," she continued. "It kind of made me sad on two accounts. One was that I was very sad that we live in an age when someone takes a picture of another person in a vulnerable moment and rather than delete it--and do the decent thing--sells it. And I’m sorry that we live in a culture that commodifies sexuality of unwilling participants, which brings us back to 'Les Mis,' that's what my character is, she is someone who is forced to sell sex to benefit her child because she has nothing and there's no social safety net.

Here's what you need to do to fully grasp what a great steaming pile of lies that quote is: read this phrase from Ms. Anne Hathaway, "we live in a culture that commodifies sexuality of unwilling participants", then Google "Anne Hathaway" and click on images. Don't go searching for the "wardrobe malfunction" that inspired her to respond this way or the too many other times such things have happened to her. No, look for the shots where everything worked out exactly as she planned. And ask yourself, "Is this woman an "unwilling participant" in the commodification of her sexuality?

If Matt Lauer had even the tiniest bit of professional integrity, he should have hit her with, "Do you seriously expect us to believe that you wore a slinky dress with slits that go way up and no panties, and did not foresee that this might happen? And now you want to get self-righteous and tie it all to the plight of the poor and the welfare state. Stop lying and grow up you shameless exhibitionist. You're not even remotely like a poor woman in the 19th century who had to sell her body to feed her child, you're a spoiled brat who has everything she possibly could dream of and still doesn't have the moral maturity of a five year old."

Manly Thor's Day Special: Male and female he made them

in my family we all fill out a Proust questionnaire every four years and one of my sisters keeps the past years' responses on file. This was the year to do it again and she let us have a peek at our past answers. No, I'm not going to reveal any secrets. But I did notice something rather intriguing regarding these two questions.*

1. The qualities you most admire in a man?
2. The qualities you most admire in a woman?

The thing that struck me is that although the entire extended family has answered the questionnaire twice, no one has ever given the same list of admirable qualities for men and women. One of my nieces, a university student very much inspired by her liberal professors, lamented the fact that she could not give the same list for both but admitted that, no matter how much she tried, there were things she admired in men but could not admire in women and vice versa.

Coincidentally, I was rereading an old article from the New York Times about research into women's sexual arousal patterns. At one point one of the researchers used transsexuals (people who believed themselves to be women trapped in male bodies) as a test group for her studies and a funny thing happened.

These trans women, both those who were heterosexual and those who were homosexual, responded genitally and subjectively in categorical ways. They responded like men.

To put it bluntly, a man can get an operation that will make him look more or less like a woman (very few transsexuals are even close to convincing) but her/his body and your brain will still respond like a man's body and brain. The article continues:

This seemed to point to an inborn system of arousal. Yet it wasn’t hard to argue that cultural lessons had taken permanent hold within these subjects long before their emergence as females could have altered the culture’s influence. “The horrible reality of psychological research,” Chivers said, “is that you can’t pull apart the cultural from the biological.”

That's a terribly roundabout and evasive way of saying, these subjects "responded like men" because they are men. If you were born male, you can entertain the notion that you are really a woman trapped in a man's body and pay huge sums to have your body altered to make it more female looking but the inescapable fact is that you are a man and you will always be a man.

And that makes you different from women. It also changes the way others will see you.

Neither of those conclusions would not have surprised anyone alive any time from the dawn of civilization up until the 1970s.






* Contrary to what you might think, there is so specific list of questions. Not all Proust questionnaires are alike and you are free to make up your own if you wish.

The dark ages

At the very end of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre makes an analogy that even he admits is a little outrageous. I've never thought we were really on the cusp of such a moment and I don't think we are there yet. But I can see how, with just a few more steps down into unsustainable nanny statism, we could get there.

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and the most misleading of such parallels are those drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify with the maintenance of that imperium.

That's a good point but it lacks something. And it lacks something because MacIntyre never quite shook off Marxism and he never grasped that people enter into social arrangements out of self interest. The thing he misses is the important role that taxes and culture played in this turning aside.

It wasn't that taxes were too high in the late Roman empire—although they certainly were too high—but that the government could no longer deliver the protection that people expected in exchange for those taxes. This was felt first on the outer edges of the empire and then more and more towards the centre.

At the same time, the culture was changing. Simple social relations that didn't seem like they were the foundations of Roman society, the way the military was organized for example, were being changed and these changes had far-reaching effects. MacIntyre goes on to say that the people who turned away from the Imperium began constructing new forms of community but that gets things backwards. It was precisely because those new forms of community already had begun to exist that people could turn to them with greater dedication when the empire started to fade.

MacIntyre's analogy is not appropriate at this time because even the most incompetent governments, excluding perhaps Greece, have been able to continue to deliver basic social protection so far. But it's not had to see how it could all start to crumble very quickly. If it did, self-interest would move people to start looking at other social arrangements. To use the over-used cliché, life as we know it would end.

But something would take it's place.