![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So Gloria wants to go to the movies all the time. But it gets to where she's seen all the movies she's going to like (or that I can stand). So sometimes I get desperate and I talk myself into taking her to something that's not so great.
"The Black Dahlia" was that kind of mistake. Yeah, it had bad reviews, but a lot of movies have bad reviews so I try to read between the lines as to whether we would like it anyway. Here's what I read: beautiful, slow, good acting, good dialog, stupid, bad timing.
Well, some of my most favoritest times are watching ,ovies with reviews like that. "The Illusionist" had some reviews like that, for example, and I liked it, and come to think of it, contrasting these two movies is exactly what I want to do.
Both of the movies are non-mystery mysteries. "The Black Dahlia" has a more legitimate looking mystery oin the surface because you don't actually know what's up till just before the protegonist figurees it out. Well, you don't know all of what's up, anyway. But while "Yhe Illusionist" telegraphs its ending, according to everybody in the world but me (I was completely not trying to guess what was going to happen and consequently I was surprised, not by the very end but by some stuff that happened close to the end) -- in "The Black Dahlia" it simply doesn't matter any more by the time you get all the information.
What's missing from "The Black Dahlia" is any kind of moral conflict or any kind of struggle. Yeah, there's lots of shouting and killing, but there's no conflict. Not really. Nobody's soul is being fought for, nobody's striving for anything. I suppose that's the point -- everybody just sort of blunders around doing nastier and nastier things, agonizing over nothing in particular and never looking at themselves except in the funhouse mirror.
Am I making it clear that I'm not complaining about the presence of crime and violence and deep nasty irredeemable ick? I'm also not complaining about good not triumphing. I'm complaining about the lack of any dialectic at all. It's all just so pointless by the end of the movie. You don't even care about the next wave of revelations any more because why? Nothing's at stake.
The movie gets to be called "film noir" but it's missing the key characteristic of film noir. I guess a lot of people think that film noir is just wallowing in corruption and decadence, that there's all this hard-boiled and sleazy coolth going on, but that's not it at all.
Film noir properly is highly moral -- I mean it has morality as its subject, not that it glorifies morality. It's about an existential morality that has to create itself from scratch in the absence of clear guidelines, examples, or ethical support. Sometimes the movie is a classical tragedy, and the characters fail to create the existential morality the situation calls for (tonight I cannot think of a proper example), and other times it's a heroic drama when the characters find their way and stake out their morality ("To Have and Have Not," for example). It's not about formulaic ethical rules, but about the struggle to generate informal ones to fit a confusing and threatening world.
"The Black Dahlia" opens as if it were going to be film noir. It has the voice over, the gritty setting, the world-wearingess and skepticism, the tense, uncomfortable characters -- great characters to begin with, though they have collapsed like a month-old jack-o-lantern by the end of the movie. In fact, for the first half of the movie I was blissfully following the convoluted noirish plotty thing it was doing, pleased at the Zoot Suits, the architecture, all the period postwar LA details (home twice removed, I guess, since my folks moved to Northern California before I was even a wish and a promise). But. It doesn't deliver. After the midpoint, the movie becomes that raggedy-ass piece of big paper that somebody ripped off the pad and taped on the blackboards so the class can brainstorm all the icky revelations that they can think of, and all the stupid behaviors and venal decisions and failures they can cram into an hour of movie. As my son says from time to time, "It's full of no reason."
I really meant it about the spoilers
By the time idiot boy shoots the rich pervert lady you're thinking "So what else is her going to shoot?" and you're thinking he should just kill himself and the doe-eyed history graduate too and get everybody off the boards. The goodwill that the movie stores up in the beginning has been spent on stupid plot twists and random cruelty that doesn't matter. Look, allowing violence and violation to be ugly doesn't make it matter. First the people have to matter, and self-righteously parading them around in their underwear so you can say that the characters in the movie who got them to do that are bad is just not it. (it's not anti-it, necessarily, but it's not neceesary or sufficient)
I'm not sure how you make characters and their actions and their fates matter. But I think it has to start with considering them as people and not as toys that can be made to do anything you want them to do. The things people do have to have precedent, and sequence, and consequence. It's not enough to say, near the end of the movie "His sister was murdered when she was fifteen," and have that explain the character's actions.
The moral struggle is the medium for the story, not the message of the story, thank you Marshall McLuhan.In "The Illusionist" there's a moral struggle that has weight and consequence, even though it's clearly meant as an intellectual entertainment only. Here the medium of the story is the policeman's development. The illusionist sets up the field for the struggle to take place. The love scenes are only there in the same function as the pickle and orange slice on the plate when you get a sandwich at Erik's. To round it out, sort of.
Since Bucky (I almoast wrote Bufo, which was my mother's favorite thing to call people whose name she couldn't lodge off her tongue, in third person anyway, in first person she liked Butch)is apparently an entirely hollow man only capable of applying thought to getting his father into a rest home there's no medium in him for a story. Much less any of the pther people, who are all fucking archetypes. Which is, by the way, the telling thing about Steinbeck -- he thought East of Eden was his best book because all the characters were archetypes.
on another front, my friend's daughter is getting married tomorrow and nobody knows what time -- least of all my friend.
"The Black Dahlia" was that kind of mistake. Yeah, it had bad reviews, but a lot of movies have bad reviews so I try to read between the lines as to whether we would like it anyway. Here's what I read: beautiful, slow, good acting, good dialog, stupid, bad timing.
Well, some of my most favoritest times are watching ,ovies with reviews like that. "The Illusionist" had some reviews like that, for example, and I liked it, and come to think of it, contrasting these two movies is exactly what I want to do.
Both of the movies are non-mystery mysteries. "The Black Dahlia" has a more legitimate looking mystery oin the surface because you don't actually know what's up till just before the protegonist figurees it out. Well, you don't know all of what's up, anyway. But while "Yhe Illusionist" telegraphs its ending, according to everybody in the world but me (I was completely not trying to guess what was going to happen and consequently I was surprised, not by the very end but by some stuff that happened close to the end) -- in "The Black Dahlia" it simply doesn't matter any more by the time you get all the information.
What's missing from "The Black Dahlia" is any kind of moral conflict or any kind of struggle. Yeah, there's lots of shouting and killing, but there's no conflict. Not really. Nobody's soul is being fought for, nobody's striving for anything. I suppose that's the point -- everybody just sort of blunders around doing nastier and nastier things, agonizing over nothing in particular and never looking at themselves except in the funhouse mirror.
Am I making it clear that I'm not complaining about the presence of crime and violence and deep nasty irredeemable ick? I'm also not complaining about good not triumphing. I'm complaining about the lack of any dialectic at all. It's all just so pointless by the end of the movie. You don't even care about the next wave of revelations any more because why? Nothing's at stake.
The movie gets to be called "film noir" but it's missing the key characteristic of film noir. I guess a lot of people think that film noir is just wallowing in corruption and decadence, that there's all this hard-boiled and sleazy coolth going on, but that's not it at all.
Film noir properly is highly moral -- I mean it has morality as its subject, not that it glorifies morality. It's about an existential morality that has to create itself from scratch in the absence of clear guidelines, examples, or ethical support. Sometimes the movie is a classical tragedy, and the characters fail to create the existential morality the situation calls for (tonight I cannot think of a proper example), and other times it's a heroic drama when the characters find their way and stake out their morality ("To Have and Have Not," for example). It's not about formulaic ethical rules, but about the struggle to generate informal ones to fit a confusing and threatening world.
"The Black Dahlia" opens as if it were going to be film noir. It has the voice over, the gritty setting, the world-wearingess and skepticism, the tense, uncomfortable characters -- great characters to begin with, though they have collapsed like a month-old jack-o-lantern by the end of the movie. In fact, for the first half of the movie I was blissfully following the convoluted noirish plotty thing it was doing, pleased at the Zoot Suits, the architecture, all the period postwar LA details (home twice removed, I guess, since my folks moved to Northern California before I was even a wish and a promise). But. It doesn't deliver. After the midpoint, the movie becomes that raggedy-ass piece of big paper that somebody ripped off the pad and taped on the blackboards so the class can brainstorm all the icky revelations that they can think of, and all the stupid behaviors and venal decisions and failures they can cram into an hour of movie. As my son says from time to time, "It's full of no reason."
I really meant it about the spoilers
By the time idiot boy shoots the rich pervert lady you're thinking "So what else is her going to shoot?" and you're thinking he should just kill himself and the doe-eyed history graduate too and get everybody off the boards. The goodwill that the movie stores up in the beginning has been spent on stupid plot twists and random cruelty that doesn't matter. Look, allowing violence and violation to be ugly doesn't make it matter. First the people have to matter, and self-righteously parading them around in their underwear so you can say that the characters in the movie who got them to do that are bad is just not it. (it's not anti-it, necessarily, but it's not neceesary or sufficient)
I'm not sure how you make characters and their actions and their fates matter. But I think it has to start with considering them as people and not as toys that can be made to do anything you want them to do. The things people do have to have precedent, and sequence, and consequence. It's not enough to say, near the end of the movie "His sister was murdered when she was fifteen," and have that explain the character's actions.
The moral struggle is the medium for the story, not the message of the story, thank you Marshall McLuhan.In "The Illusionist" there's a moral struggle that has weight and consequence, even though it's clearly meant as an intellectual entertainment only. Here the medium of the story is the policeman's development. The illusionist sets up the field for the struggle to take place. The love scenes are only there in the same function as the pickle and orange slice on the plate when you get a sandwich at Erik's. To round it out, sort of.
Since Bucky (I almoast wrote Bufo, which was my mother's favorite thing to call people whose name she couldn't lodge off her tongue, in third person anyway, in first person she liked Butch)is apparently an entirely hollow man only capable of applying thought to getting his father into a rest home there's no medium in him for a story. Much less any of the pther people, who are all fucking archetypes. Which is, by the way, the telling thing about Steinbeck -- he thought East of Eden was his best book because all the characters were archetypes.
on another front, my friend's daughter is getting married tomorrow and nobody knows what time -- least of all my friend.