On the fear of conformity

Recently A WRINKLE OF TIME was on in the background. There's a sequence in the film where the main characters end up in a cul-de-sac where every house has a child in front who are bouncing balls at the same time. We then see all the children, and all are of different races with different haircuts. At this moment the film fails because it tries to paint a portrait of multicultural assimilation, and it at once says too little and not enough. It's a hopeful portrait of terribleness that doesn't work because we've taken way too many steps forward and too many steps back from the 1950's version of the American dream for it to be inclusive.

If our culture, if America were different, there might be a case for this fear of multicultural assimilation, and hopefully things will change so much in the next thirty years that this portrait will feel right (spoiler alert: it won't). But in a post 9/11, Post-Trump American landscape, this is a patently ridiculous thing to show/fear. America is nowhere near the point where it is accepting of different cultures and races for a myriad of reasons, to cite one obvious recent example: a Jewish temple got shot up because conservatives have portrayed George Soros as a boogeyman. Republicans have so stoked the fear of the other that White Nationalism has become the bedrock of their beliefs.

Alas, the fear of suburban complacency doesn't exist any more as no one accidentally becomes a Republican. No one can fear accidentally turning into a pod person or Stepford wife in America at this point in history. The fear of complacency is non-existent because the American Dream no longer exists.

These days, going to college guarantees you nothing but debt if you are lower or middle class. On top of which the middle class is an endangered species. Many adults would sell their soul if it gave them a home, a partner, and children that they could afford to the point they wouldn't have to worry about taking care of braces or a wrecked car. I know too many people who have good jobs that are working second jobs because they have to make ends meet. Most people live in debt.We've gone from an economy that supports a single breadwinner to an economy where to have two children both parents tend to need to work, and where having a full time job is no guarantee you can afford room and board. If the previous appeal of Conservatism was that it was the party that taxed you less, that doesn't matter when taxes aren't the reason why you can barely afford things and it isn't easy to get by. Republicans have ruined selling out, because there's no one to sell out to.

But, perhaps just as importantly, the fear of becoming a pod person, the fear of falling in line with more conservative elements in our culture is gone because to be a modern Republican you have to embrace racism, sexism and the fear of the other to the extent that it's a feature, not a bug. You can't pretend that it's a cultural thing, or a belief system argument. Trump and his administration is actively pursuing policies for the benefit of no one but racists. They don't want people to be tolerant of viewpoints they don't accept while also being offended that their intolerance is not as tolerated as those minorities they look to oppress.

It's not that people are being converted - this is nothing you can fall into accidentally at this point - it's that people's truths are being revealed. We reached the end of They Live, Nada has destroyed the cloaking device, and a good chunk of the population is cool with being led by aliens who obviously don't have their best interests in mind.

I say this, but I also look at James Woods on twitter, who's been called to arms because of the California fires, and it's obvious he's a terrible person who found his humanity when he saw something that might change his life/day/people he knows. The problem with other-ing to point that modern Republicans are at these days is that it's effective only when you have no practical experiences, and can be destroyed if that person is capable of accepting truths. It's easy to hate things you don't know. It's harder when you live and work and are surrounded by people who are just like you, who want similar things as you, but maybe look a little different. To be a modern Republican is either to be rich and selfish or dumb and hateful. Racism is inherently stupid, and racism has become a core tenant of modern Republicanism, so that party is now for stupid people, by stupid people, and the feedback loop of Trump and Fox News is getting dumber and louder.

They forgot the carrot for people who are comfortable with racism as long as it's not front and center. They forgot to provide for their true Scotsmen because it's the end of this hustle so they are just pillaging what they can. The white picket fence is no longer a realistic dream, it's no longer a dream, period. Good job, Republicans, you ruined the myth that you're whole fucking ideology is based around.

THE TREE OF LIFE

Today, Terrence Malick's fifth film hits DVD and Blu-ray through Criterion in both the film's theatrical and extended cut. Has Terrence Malick's Plame d'Or winning film been on the wane since its release in 2011? What has changed that fifty additional minutes of a Terrence Malick film are not treated with the hushed whispers of a quest for the holy grail? And the answer to the question"what changed" is (close to literally) everything.

I am 42. For more than half my life, Terrence Malick had only directed two movies. He returned to movies in 1998 with The Thin Red Line, and it would take another seven years for his follow up, 2005's The New World. It took only six years later to get The Tree of Life. And since 2011, what's happen in seven years? Three feature length films already on home video, a documentary, and another film that may yet be released this year. In thirty two years Malick made his first four features. In seven he made his second four. And though The Tree of Life topped a lot of year end lists and won prizes, Malick is one of those artists that people describe as pretentious even when they like his work. Add to that, the next three films - To The Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song - were not exactly wide releases that got little critical or commercial support. Yes, there are still Malick cheerleaders, but that leads to the other big sea change.

Sure, we may get a New York Times review of this release, but The Dissolve is no more. The AV Club currently has no review. Blu-ray review sites have already put up their pieces, and it's hard to imagine a lot of local newspapers running a review, outside of maybe a home video corner-type mention. There is no primary film critics any more as there is no national platform that doesn't extend to all critics. There is no Roger Ebert, and though Criterion is respected as a curator of the canon, there are no more video stores, so the only people who are going to watch this are people who want to buy it and people who go to libraries. I spent a long time writing for Collider, and they probably would have covered the film if I was still writing Blu-ray reviews, but they are on the hustle, they wrote a story about Avengers being sorted at Hogwarts because they knew it was a cute stupid story that people would share. The internet tends to share stuff like that over - say - three thousand word articles on the analysis of L'Argent, to make a not entirely inaccurate false equivalency.

On top of all that is the very act of making a longer cut is no longer special. Sure, you can blame unrated cuts of comedies for this, but this extended version wasn't Criterion and a squad of dedicated restoration experts dedicating themselves to reassembling a director's pruned vision. This was about letting Malick fuck around with all his footage to deliver a longer version. There are no still images for missing sequences, nothing seems to have been lost.

And yet, this is still special. And yet, this is one of the most important cinematic events of the year.

Notes on INFINITY WAR and why JUSTICE LEAGUE is more entertaining (and here be spoilers)

So I just rewatched The Avengers: Infinity War for the second time. I saw it the Thursday night it opened, and have been eyeing it since it hit home video. The problem was I knew what my reaction would likely be (I wasn't a fan when I saw it), and now I can safely say that I find Justice League the more entertaining watch. I will say that I appreciated some of it more than I did theatrically, but I also finished watching the 150 minute movie in about an hour. It's probably because so much of what happens in the movie is pointless spectacle, so I fast forwarded through almost all of the last hour.

Never mind that Thor spends the majority of his screen time trying to get a new hammer after learning in the last film he never needed a hammer in the first place, the problem with the film is that it has so many pieces to put into place for the next movie that it never feels like a film so much as a collection of "things that need to happen." Gamora's death scene goes on for like five minutes and there is only one thing that can happen in this sequence: Gamora has to die for Thanos to get the thing he wants. We know that by the end of the film he'll succeed because that's where the whole thing is going, so the only interesting thing about it is the return of Red Skull because you're surprised they still remembered that character was part of this universe. But there are way too many sequences in the film where what is about to happen has no variables. Of course Peter Quill fucks it up because the heroes can't win at this moment, and it feels like they could have done something with that because he's fighting alongside a DUDE WHO WENT INTO THE FUTURE AND KNOWS WHAT QUILL WILL DO. It's a more interesting movie if they did win at that moment but then still lose. The problem is that in situations like this I don't bemoan the character making a dumb decision, because it feels more like a character being forced to do that because the writers painted themselves into a corner.

Another big problem is that they've established a number of these characters are essentially Gods - if not literally - and so to make it a fair fight, the film hopes we forget that. Vision suddenly can't do shit for no apparent reason other than if he behaved as he has in other movies, the film would end. Hulk usually only gets angrier the more he fights, and it seems the only way to stop him is to make him return to being Banner or possibly choking him out. But here he just loses and it's meant to be a game changer, but it feels like they've made him weaker without justifying the why of it. This continues the trend of the last couple Hulk appearances where they keep trying to make the act of transforming back and forth more volatile for the character, but the problem is that he's Hulk. We came to see him Hulk. And unless this is some meta commentary, "are you not entertained?" shit, Hulk smash. Just as I wouldn't go to a Right Said Fred concert and wonder if they're going to play "I'm Too Sexy," trying to make dramatic hay over if Banner will be able to transform back into the Hulk is a waste of everyone's time.

But that ties into another of big problems with the movie: It's not a movie, it's a half movie. And so Banner doesn't Hulk out in the big fight at the end of this movie, because he's going to have to Hulk out at the end of the next movie (which is actually the end of this movie), and maybe in the next one he'll have learned an important lesson, like that he's always angry. Or maybe they'll kill him. But probably not because - as the film underlines when Thor muses about how Loki's been dead before - it's hard to say that anything that happened in this film counts, and Marvel seems deathly scared of icing off anyone. Removing half the cast is the same as not removing any of them, even if it makes scheduling easier for the next film. It's not just that Black Panther is coming off the most successful Marvel film ever made (at least domestically), it's that you might believe and be emotionally charged by the death of Tony Stark or Winston Duke's M'Baku, but you know when they "kill off" Spider-Man, Black Panther, The Falcon, The Winter Soldier, Dr. Strange, Groot, The Scarlet Witch, etc. that it's just a narrative ruse. Which then opens the door to all the deaths in the film being reversible, which makes the Gamora scene all that more intolerable because it too will likely not count. And to this the marketing and buzz kind of fucked the movie because they said "stakes" and we though "oh, they're finally going to kill either Tony or Steve" but then they didn't in this film and so when they do it for real in the next one, and I have zero doubt we're going to get at least one if not multiple "my contract is over, time to die a hero" moments in the next film, it's going to sting a little because it should have already happened.

This also sets up what will likely be the biggest problem with the next Avengers movie: it's going to spend the whole movie reversing the events of this film. It's going to be a two hour plus movie of getting the survivors and Captain Marvel together in some way to take on Thanos and reverse what he did to save everyone else, and they'll succeed but at a price. There is no way I'm wrong about this. The way this film ends, that's the only movie they can make as a follow up. And it makes Infinity War useless because nothing that happens in it really matters other than locations. The film functions as a trailer for the next movie, as we've seen in these poorly bifurcated narratives.

The funny thing is that Marvel usually avoids these sort of narrative pitfalls, even if their early movies suffered from similar lunkheaded obvious plotting (see for instance: the first Thor, or don't, it's bad). While watching Infinity War this time I thought about how much more entertaining it would be to see the Avengers throw a house party. That would be a better Marvel movie because it would be more in the spirit of what had come before. This was almost like an attempt at a DC movie. And sadly, I would rather watch Justice League. Let me explain...

TO BE CONTINUED