The Haunting of Hill House ep. 6 - Scopophilia

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Two Storms

We don't want what we see-- we see what we want. Freud used the term scopophilia to describe the resolution of arbitrary data inputs into the sense of sight. We immediately pick out our crush in a crowded room, we gloss over mess despite looking straight at it, we find Waldo. You could consider it the act of deriving pleasure from what you're looking at, but really it's the opposite. Desire dictates the shape of the world.

Cinematography is gaze incarnate. An unmotivated image will feel empty no matter how nominally beautiful. When "Hill House" was first released, the mediasphere was abuzz with discussion about episode 6. No surprise there-- what Flanagan has achieved here is a technical marvel. Yet the truly impressive thing isn't that he pulled off an episode comprised of jaw-dropping continuous shots, it's that he pulled it off without sacrificing dramatic clarity. To go one step further, this particular story feels like it couldn't have been told any other way.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 5 - Memento Mori

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The Bent Neck Lady

We've seen Luke's side of the story: him and Nelly against the world. Nobody listens, nobody understands, nobody can see what they see. But at least they have each other.

Episode 5 treads similar ground to Episode 4: a spirit-sensitive twin bereft of their support system struggles to keep their head afloat in the onslaught of pain that is life. This could have felt redundant, but Flanagan and co. are wise to orient this episode around a key difference... these twins are not equally yoked. They may have been once, but the house and their history have come between them. Luke's coping mechanism leaves no room for his sister, as we see in a heartbreaking scene of Luke pathetically bullying Nelly into buying him heroin on the way to rehab. This is a betrayal of the highest order. It is also a harder and better scene than Luke's struggles with substance abuse in his own episode. Maybe it hurts more seeing addiction through the eyes of a loved one.

Best of the 2010s: Top Ten

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Art is Revolutionary. It can entertain, explain, obtain, and remain, but the most lasting experiences come with some pain. Stories are breakages. Why break if not to build something better from the wreckage?

Electric arcs follow characters who strive. Often they strive against the flow, as when a preacher does his small part to fight climate catastrophe, or when a boy comes of age in a world that wants to erase him, or when a worker refuses to perpetuate the oppressive cycles they are born into. Art has a Revolutionary quality; this may be its most crucial quality of all.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 4 - Compulsion

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The Twin Thing

At the end of the last piece I mentioned the motif of a tertiary character telling a ghost story every episode. Oral storytelling is the preferred medium of ghost stories, after all. Specters can be inherited, and words are their DNA.

This time the story comes from a military veteran. He recalls gouging his own eyes out on an acid trip because of a charred Iranian girl whose corpse he encountered while overseas. She was all he could see. The eyelessness of the corpse he couldn't forget demanded the eyelessness of the body he cannot escape. Luke is the audience for this story, and the setting is an AA meeting. Why this particular tale from this particular person? The symbolism doubles up when child Luke explains the way he protects his family with little green army men. You have to count them out, a lot, and you have to keep doing it, and you have to believe it will work. Adult Luke is like a disabled veteran, cast off by society, whose PTSD and abandonment issues result in debilitating drug use.

Much like the teller of the ghost story, Luke's problem is that he sees too much. His follow-up problem is that nobody believes him about what he sees. When he was young he was dismissed as an innocent kid. Now that he's older he's dismissed as a cynical junkie. He just can't win.

DON'T LOOK UP: Dope Impact

Director: Adam McKay
Writers: Adam McKay, David Sirota
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande
Runtime: 138 mins.
2021

Dr. Strangelove, Sorry to Bother You, Melancholia: the much better apocalyptic satires that I was reminded of during this film. Do the Right Thing, Catch-22, First Reformed. I found solace in dwelling on the sharpness of these stories, their visual splendor, their human insights, and their gall. Don't Look Up has none of that. This is a Netflix film, which means it is algorithmically gestated to remind us of other, better movies. A thin veneer of style stretched over a boomer facebook screed about how kids are too much in their phones to Get Out the Vote. This is not satire, it is a lecture.

For this is a movie about the Bang at the end of the world, a massive meteor that nobody seems to want to take seriously. Our guides on this journey of misanthropy are PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio). Their quest takes us from the observatory, to the White House, to yammering daytime talk shows, to oblivion. As they try to spread the word that the Earth has six months to live, the airwaves crowd them out with news of celebrity gossip and political scandal.

This is the kind of movie that thinks the height of comedy is revealing that the president of the United States (Meryl Streep) has sexted her vagina to somebody. This is the kind of movie that still thinks jokes about diet culture are cutting edge. This is the kind of movie that interrupts televised celebrity drama with a placeholder character who intones that their phone just automatically bought that celebrity's new single, and oh would you look at that, it did it again.

THE MATRIX: RESURRECTIONS - Wake Up

Director: Lana Wachowski
Writers: Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, Aleksander Hemon
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jonathan Groff, Jessica Henwick, Neil Patrick Harris, Jada Pinkett Smith
Runtime: 148 mins.
2021

The Matrix is what so much art strives for and so little accomplishes: iconic. The Wachowski sisters blended gun-fu, Hong Kong-style wirework, existentialist philosophy, anticapitalist realism, sci-fi apocalyptica, trans allegory, seething cynicism, and bleeding heart sentimentality into a tight package. The film's sickly green cyberpunk visual aesthetic dominated our collective imagination for years.

No surprise that The Matrix: Resurrections is worse in every way. The narrative is chunky and rambling. The 'real world' political stakes are unclear about what exactly has shifted for machine/human relations in the last 60 years. The recasting of Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) features a decent performance hemmed in by lackluster writing, and the recasting of Agent Smith features decent writing hemmed in by a lackluster performance (Jonathan Groff tries to play up the smarm, but Hugo Weaving he is not). The city of Io feels like an empty knockoff of Zion. The script's technobabble combines with imperfect sound mixing to create a dizzying array of garbled phrases. Worst of all, the action is shoddy. You could chalk this up to an aging cast (Keanu spends much of the movie doing CGI hand blasts rather than kung-fu), but even the young actors' combat is edited to hell. Besides, Keanu certainly seems capable of skilled and beautiful action choreography right over there in the John Wick franchise.

Yet we must evaluate art on its own merits, rather than compare it to a checklist of our expectations. The Matrix: Resurrections is a poor Matrix sequel, because it focuses on being an unexpectedly rich Matrix reboot.

The Matrix fandom has spent the last week griping about their unfulfilled checklists. The real kicker is that Lana Wachowski (directing this franchise entry without her sister) has made a film that shares their affection and even many of their critiques. It also has the gall to suggest that perhaps this anger is entitled, misplaced. Wachowski has made an anti-reboot reboot, one that respects the legacy of this story while also showing how it can be twisted into something ugly. Resurrections is furious about the ways stories get corrupted and co-opted. "That's what the Matrix does," says Bugs (Jessica Henwick), Neo's enthusiastic young guide. "It weaponizes every idea. Every dream. Everything that's important to us."

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 3 - Transference

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Touch

The elder Crane siblings, least affected by the supernatural, are committed to the idea that they can control their environment. The two youngest siblings are forced to be more reactive. They do not shape the world around them, they are shaped. Theo, a consummate middle child, exists between these two paths. She is sensitive, stricken by the world around her, yet still she strives to exert control over her thoughts, feelings, experiences. She has the power and the burden of touch.

The opening stinger sees Theo sleeping peacefully while a pallid arm wraps around her. She assumes it's Nelly, but when she flips around there is no one to be seen. "Whose hand was I holding?" she asks.

This is the first review in which I will venture to critique showrunner Mike Flanagan. His style of connecting dialogue beats with overarching themes can be on the nose. Usually that neatness is a strength, sometimes it goes too far. The scene I just described is visually clear-- Theo's certainty that her sister is behind her, the jarring absence of anyone at all, her consternation at this discovery. Did we really need to make this actor sell the line, "Whose hand was I holding?" like it's an episode of R.L. Stine's Are You Afraid of the Dark? It turns a serviceably spooky moment into a lame zinger.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 2 - Perversion

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Open Casket

Episode 1 of "Hill House" shows us a man who, like so many men before him, sublimates his anxiety about death by claiming ownership over his narrative. Steve makes his family's baggage digestible for the world so that he can elude his own psychic heartburn. Lucky for him this sublimating process involves becoming a best-selling author. We all bear this burden of grappling with our childhood fixations, be they positive or negative. The world pressures us to transform these haunts into something that will make us money. Episode 2 shows us Shirley's trajectory into her own career: funeral home director.

Unlike Steve's impulse to to pin his childhood into the pages of a book like a butterfly, Shirley's primary directive has always been to help. Her nurturing soul is put to the test when she imprints on an abandoned litter of kittens in a shed. There are five kittens, just as there are five siblings. But life is fragile, and it isn't long until one of the kittens wiggles its last.

To navigate her grief, her parents stage a modest funeral. She asks to see the dead creature in the box. After a few heartfelt words, Shirley is alarmed to see the kitten's throat move-- breath? She picks it up to her parents' distress and insists that it's alive actually, it's alive! This fantasy collapses when the kitten's lips part to reveal a large bug working its way out of the esophagus.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 1 - Nachträglichkeit

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Steven Sees a Ghost

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

So begins Shirley Jackson's 1959 gothic horror novel, and so begins Mike Flanagan's 2018 miniseries adaptation. It's a sublime passage, one that struck me immediately upon opening the book. The words "absolute reality" evoke existential angst; the interjection "not sane" is too eager to isolate the sentence subject; what is not said about the house takes on a sinister bearing. Flanagan-- longtime horror film director, first time television showrunner-- is wise to replicate the paragraph in voiceover, despite the show having very little at all to do with the book.

In fact, the context of the passage is uprooted quite violently. What was once the musing of an omniscient narrator becomes a quotable line from a book of schlocky nonfiction written by the nominal protagonist of episode 1. Steven Crane, one of five children to experience a terrifying childhood in Hill House, has grown up to exploit that violence by channeling it into the aforementioned best-selling book (itself called The Haunting of Hill House). This, predictably, drives a wedge between him and the rest of his folks. "I need to help my family," he opines, gesturing towards his wife. "We are your family," his sister responds.

ETERNALS: Live and Let Die

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Director: Chloé Zhao

Writers: Chloé Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo, Kaz Firpo

Cast: Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Kit Harington, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Ma Dong-seok, Harish Patel, Bill Skarsgård

Runtime: 156 mins.

2021

The marketing is sweaty to insist that this is Marvel's Eternals, and with good reason; the 26th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe adapts material less familiar to the general audience than anything that came before. The source for Chloé Zhao's movie is a Jack Kirby experiment in vibrant, phantasmagorical cosmic comic imagery meant to tickle our thirst for the incomprehensible. The movie is incomprehensible in a more pedestrian way. The greatest loss between original and adaptation is the otherworldly imagery, which has been replaced by sunwashed wastelands and underlit forests.

Thank the multiple gods for Arishem, the singular blast of successful imagery in the film. Arishem is a Celestial, an elder god that maintains the glue of the universe. He is a sort of dispatcher for the Eternals, humanoid immortals who occupy developing planets and do battle with the nasty nasty Deviants (which look like tentacle dogs or whatever). Whenever the Eternals are speaking with Arishem, the physical world peels away as if tissue paper, revealing an enormous cherry red being too immense to visualize all at once. Whenever the Eternals aren't speaking with Arishem, they tend to be sitting around doing not much of anything or maybe watching a war happen. Their spokesperson contacts Arishem at semi-random intervals. Eventually, around two hours in, Arishem uses a Powerpoint Presentation to unveil the basic stakes. This is the plot.