MIB
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 Posted: Wed Aug 28, 2002 6:30 pm Post subject: Look Out Below: At the Movies, Subtext Plays a Summer Role |
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From \'Signs\' to \'XXX,\' Films Take a Cue From Predecessors
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 18, 2002; Page G01
What lies beneath?
Not \"What Lies Beneath,\" a somewhat mediocre summer thriller of two years ago, with Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer. No, what lies beneath? Beneath the movies.
What lies beneath is subtext. It\'s frequently more interesting than text.
Subtext is that idea under the surface that holds it all together. It\'s the movie\'s argument, its agenda, in many cases its reason to be. It\'s the idea of a character, what he stands for, how he develops and what that means. It\'s everything that isn\'t covered in the dialogue or the explosions, but that you somehow feel.
Text is story. Text is event, performances, special effects. Subtext is ideas. It\'s motifs, suggestions, visual implications, subtle comparisons. It\'s motives, it\'s psychology, it\'s the unconscious. Text is talking; subtext is showing.
Is this brainwashing? Hardly. It\'s just the way stories work, in the sense that the author is telling of events that he constructs consciously, but those events are being shaped by his unconscious, so there are expressions of his values and beliefs in them. And usually only an idiot misses the point when it bonks you on the head as happens in the typical American summer movie. But maybe not this year: We find ourselves in a summer unusually rich in unexpected subtexts, movies that seem to be about one thing but are really about something else.
It\'s hardly shocking, and I don\'t mean this to be any big exposé. The last thing I exposed was my stomach at the beach in 1986, and never again. Too much subtext! And in the movies, subtext isn\'t even new. It\'s been around forever.
You can look at three fabulous Bogey flicks from the \'40s and see it most clearly. \"Casablanca,\" \"To Have and Have Not\" and \"Key Largo\" are set oceans apart in wildly differing political and geographical situations, are directed by three different, vivid directors, are completely unrelated, have different contexts, and are exactly the same. That is, they feel the same, because the subtexts are the same.
The first two films follow an arc that is psychological but, at least metaphorically (and politically) had direct application to the \'40s. You know that thing they had then? What was that thing called? Ah, yes: the Second World War. All three films are calls to arms. They begin with the figure of the Isolated Man: He\'s been desolated by falling in love, then being abandoned; he\'s become hard and cynical, and he plays the game of war and politics simply for laughs or profit. In one, he\'s a saloonkeeper; in the second, he\'s a fishing boat captain; in the third, he\'s an ex-Army officer, essentially shattered by the war, unable to feel love again.
In each case he meets a woman: maybe it\'s the same woman who ruined his life, maybe it\'s a new woman. In any event, she stirs in him feelings he thought he didn\'t have, and, now awakened (unstated: \"and returned to sexual potency\"; it was the \'40s and such things were left unsaid) he finds it in himself to face formidable odds, act heroically, defeat an evil plot, kill a particularly noxious specimen of pure rank evil, and rejoin civilization. In the last two films he gets the girl; in the first, most famously, he gives her up because where he\'s going, she can\'t go, and what\'s he\'s got to do, she can\'t be any part of.
When Howard Hawks essentially remade Michael Curtiz\'s \"Casablanca\" two years later, it was set on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, where Steve (not Rick) is a down-on-his-luck fisherman, completely apolitical. Nothing matters to him except an old drunk (Walter Brennan).
He becomes enmeshed in French internal politics -- Vichy vs. Free France, today a forgotten struggle -- when he is asked to smuggle someone into Martinique, then out of Martinique. His initial answer: No way, Pierre. But in the meantime, he meets her, and her name is Marie. It is his love for Marie that drives him back toward commitment. Is she the wife of a French patriot? No, although weirdly enough, there is a beautiful wife of a French patriot in the movie (played by Dolores Moran), and possibly she had a bigger role in the script than in the film, where she\'s all but ignored. And why is this lovely creature ignored? Simple. Hawks saw the chemistry between Bogart and the ingenue in the role of Marie, nicknamed Slim, and let the camera record history in the making: Her name was Lauren Bacall.
So the political subtext of the film was diminished considerably. What dominates the film is another subtext, about the power of sexually provocative young women to rescue grumpy middle-aged men from the doldrums and make them tough and young again. That this corresponded with what was going on in real life (Bogart fell in love with his co-star and dumped his wife instantly for her) only helped. And so Bacall became a star and stayed one for years.
By the time John Huston made \"Key Largo\" in 1948, the war was long over, yet again it is at the center of the story. In fact, again it had to have been chosen to recall the character arc of \"Casablanca\" and the Bogart-Bacall magic of \"To Have and Have Not.\" The story is a relic from before the war. Again he\'s the Isolated Man; she\'s the Girl.
All kinds of weirdnesses are loose in this one: The play, by Maxwell Anderson, was written in 1940 and in it, the hero was a disillusioned vet of the Spanish Civil War. The struggle he was rejoining was against fascism. But by 1948, fascism was in smoldering ruins all across Europe, so in this case the subtext of the film is inappropriate to the times. To make things more twisted yet, as a climax, Huston borrowed the boat-set gunfight from Hemingway\'s novel \"To Have and Have Not,\" which Hawks had dumped (along with most of the rest of the novel) when he was making his film of it. So by this go-round, everything is scrambled except, once again, the magic of Bogart and Bacall, and the power of Robinson, which still drive the piece.
Yet in this same run of \'40s pictures, there\'s yet another Bogie-Bacall that could never be mentioned with the first three. That\'s because its subtext is completely different, though it\'s really no more different from them in plot and setting than they are from each other. Of course it\'s the fabulous \"The Big Sleep,\" with Bogart as Raymond Chandler\'s Philip Marlowe and Bacall as Vivian. But there\'s no fallen-idealist-restored arc to the film; in fact the secret of Marlowe, and what makes him so attractive to us, is that he still is a believer, has always been a believer, and under his cynical ways, is essentially a noble knight on a crusade. In fact, if there\'s any rescue, it\'s inverted: it\'s his idealism that rescues her from a life of debauchery and chaos.
Now it is true that you can go way over the top in deciphering subtext, particularly when politics enters the equation. Liberals, who think that Rich White Bastards run the movie companies, see encomiums to conformism and materialism everywhere. Conservatives, who think that Wiggy Femi-Nazi Tree-Huggers run the movie companies, see seductions into the counterculture or the anti-culture or the unculture everywhere.
Well, we\'ll let those two camps battle it out among themselves and try not to slip on the blood upon the floor. But as I said, this is a season rich in subtexts, only one of them political. That one is the dreary sub movie -- it sank so fast, someone must have left the hatch open -- \"K-19: The Widowmaker,\" which was nothing less than an attempt by a bunch of foggy-minded fools to reinvent the Cold War as a tragic folly on the scale of World War I and to suggest that the wonderful Russian navy saved us all from nuclear annihilation.
The film simply did not accept, as so many American movies since 1945 have, the centrality of the concept: Communism bad, Democracy good. Okay, that\'s fine. It tried to sell that message on the open market and the open market responded thus: Ker-sploosh. That\'s the sound of \"K-19\" being flushed down the toilet of voracious, market-driven capitalism.
But other subtexts are more social. There\'s a series of secret-agent movies, \"The Bourne Identity,\" \"The Sum of All Fears\" and finally \"XXX.\" Their subtext, universally: Move over, old guys.
All three movies to some degree -- and \"XXX\" and \"Sum of All Fears\" to a greater extent -- are trying to celebrate the passing of one generation and the coming of another. In other words, it\'s a contest: Who wants to be the new Clint?
This is great work if you can get it, but returns still aren\'t in. Though \"XXX\" did $46 million in its opening weekend at the box office and seemed to herald the coming of the Vin Diesel era and the end of the Clint era (Eastwood\'s \"Blood Work,\" opening the same weekend, finished far down in the box-office take), let\'s wait to proclaim winners till Diesel puts together a string of hits and enters mainstream consciousness as did Clint or Arnold or Bruce or any of those other fellows who now, with their tum-tums and graying temples, look pretty silly running up stairs and machine-gunning bad guys.
But the champion movie of the subtext is \"Signs.\" It begins with the title. \"Signs,\" you think -- ah yes, the signs would be the weird shapes flattened into the world\'s cornfields, which the movie insists are landing beacons for UFOs. But that\'s only one aspect, and the least interesting aspect, of the title. The \"Signs,\" as writer-director M. Night Shyamalan truly intends the title to suggest, are signs not only that God exists but that He is paying close attention. Close attention.
That is what is so audacious about the subtext of \"Signs\": It is an argument in favor of God\'s engagement in the world, down to the micro-level. It is the most profoundly spiritual-minded picture to come out of Hollywood since, I suppose, \"The Next Voice You Hear,\" that \'50s cornball thing where God got on the radio. In fact it\'s almost a remake: in \"Signs\" God is on the radio again, though in a different way. And, as I argue this I will spill the film\'s plot secrets on the floor in a big wet puddle. MAJOR SPOILER ALERT HEREBY ISSUED.
The movie opens with a look through a window at the world. We see reality -- but we don\'t. There are subtle modulations in the image through the imperfections in the glass, convincing us that what we are seeing -- it turns out to be a man\'s view out the window toward the swing set where his children play -- is occluded somehow.
At the movie\'s end, the image of the view through the window is repeated exactly. Except that by now that window, with its distortions, has been shattered and what we see is what \"Signs\" maintains is the truth. We see, then, the journey of the movie: from a man\'s unclear view of the universe to his clear view of it. And in Shyamalan\'s view, that\'s a journey toward faith in God.
The movie is about that subtext favorite, the Isolated Man. This is Mel Gibson as Graham Hess, recently resigned minister of unknown Protestant denomination.
Graham is in despair and grief, and the story slowly emerges: He had believed passionately in God and the idea of the universe as a rational, meaningful place, controlled by God\'s wisdom, mercy and justice.
Then a seemingly inexplicable accident claimed his beloved wife.
Colleen (Patricia Kalember) was struck by a careless driver (played by Shyamalan himself -- and consider the meaning in that choice as we probe the subtext) and dies pinned to a tree, her mind evidently working randomly as she spits out words and images in the seconds before passing.
So grievously was she wounded that no one can even understand how she lasted until Graham, summoned by the police, arrived.
But the upshot is that Graham\'s belief is shattered: There is no God, and the universe is a meaningless shambles of coincidence and violence. Death is death; the only thing we can cling to is temporary, life itself. He quits his ministry, retreats with two kids and his loser brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) to a farm. He insists that no one call him \"father\"; when pressed, he dispenses pastoral counsel, but only with great pain showing on his face. He needs a miracle to be saved from this bitterness.
It\'s clear that this subtext -- faith-shattered man\'s journey back to faith -- is far more important to Shyamalan than the text, which is not only rather silly but, more annoying, sloppy. As you all know, They Come.
Who? Well, little green men. From outer space. They\'re hunting us, for unspecified reasons, but it\'s certainly true that Shyamalan hasn\'t invested much energy in conceptualizing them. They\'re pretty pathetic aliens: They can navigate interstellar space and hover invisibly above the world\'s cities, but they can\'t get beyond a locked pantry door. (Graham Hess even makes a joke about this.) They have no weapons except an extremely short-range poison-gas system, so clumsy and inefficient it\'s really no better than a knife. They have very little strength, no fighting ability, no armor. They seem to possess one valuable physical attribute, which is a form of raw speed that gets them out of trouble. They can clearly be stabbed, shot or beaten to death. Really, they\'re not space beings, they\'re green kangaroos.
And I didn\'t mention the most ridiculous thing: that water actually burns them. So, uh, Mr. Shyamalan, why would they invade a planet that is seven-tenths water?
More important: What is the point? The point is, first, that Shyamalan is such a gifted technician that he can actually sell this bushwa while the movie is onscreen. To see it is to believe it is to experience it; he\'s so good with re-creating the experiential reality of the situation, you don\'t notice that it\'s all nonsense.
But to conform to the film\'s argument, it\'s mandatory that the creatures be constructed so that their weaknesses exactly match a warning from God given Graham Hess by his dying wife.
For each statement Colleen uttered, and each of the quirky pathologies of the imperfect family he has been trying to raise, provides a specific bit of advice for dealing with the family\'s most urgent crisis -- an instant when one of the aliens seizes Graham\'s son Morgan (Rory Culkin) and attempts to murder him with that poison vapor.
God cares! God knows! Deciphered, the movie is arguing for a chosen, an elect, in whom God so invests His love that He used the death of Graham\'s wife -- He may have even engineered it -- as the vessel to deliver Graham from an even greater pain, which would have been the death of the son. In fact, God so concentrated on Graham, He more or less forgot about the thousands of others whom the aliens killed without interference. (Presumably some of them were kids with fathers just as sensitive as Graham, but possibly not as handsome.)
Thus is Graham restored to the fold; thus is the occluding window of his bitterness torn down, busted out, so that now he knows the truth, with nothing to screen him from it: God in His infinite wisdom has shown mercy to his servant.
And why aliens? I believe Shyamalan chose aliens for a specific reason. If it were any earthly phenomenon that had threatened the tidy Hess family in its bucolic Bucks County, Pa., paradise -- an earthquake, a house fire, a flood, anything -- then Colleen Hess\'s words could have been dismissed as coincidence. Catastrophes of that sort occur naturally every day of the year.
But a murderous invasion from space? That is the sort of phenomenon that only a supreme being could predict. That He predicted it proves His existence in a way that nothing else could have.
In fights with invaders from space, this movie argues, it\'s best to have God on our side and God\'s love in our pocket. That\'s some subtext!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27054-2002Aug16.html |
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