SCORPIO RISING: Death Drive

This review was requested by Marcus Michelen. Many thanks to Marcus for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Kenneth Anger
Writer: Ernest D. Glucksman
Cast: Bruce Byron, Ernie Allo, Frank Carifi, Steve Crandell, Johnny Dods
Runtime: 28 mins.
1963

Scorpio Rising is an experimental short film about gay Nazi bikers. There is no plot to speak of beyond whatever you can glean from a series of circumstances and impressions: a motorcycle race, an orgy, some sort of occult ritual. But first, the longest scene in the film, a relatively tranquil sequence of men working in their garages.

The shooting style in Scorpio Rising is impressionistic. I mean that in two senses of the word. The first is that the filming and editing tell their story not through temporal cause and effect like most narrative film, but by cobbling together isolated gestures and images in order to create a general impression of an environment. We don't even see our first face for a while, as the camera instead frames bodies, hands at work, tools, machinery, decoration. The effect is immersive, as if we have just wandered into a garage ourselves and are being hit with the sights and smells all at once. But I am also fascinated by the way it disappears its characters into their environment, cancelling their subjectivity and subsuming them in the ideology of their symbolic world. Director Kenneth Anger operationalizes this as an intentional commentary about the communities these men inhabit, and the way they can get lost in their mystique.

I also use impressionistic in the original sense of the word: an artistic movement heavily focused on representing the dynamic qualities of light. From the jump, Anger's lighting design* does as much to shape the space as the physical objects. The camera eagerly laps up every gleam of light that bounces off the sleek metal bodies of these fetish object vehicles. When the film turns darker and more chaotic, the lighting slips into expressionism: framing bodies with an eerie glowing halo, carving out sharp gestures from darkness, or bathing figures in flashing shocks of primary colors.

*I'm assuming the lighting design is Anger's, since he acted as cinematographer as well, and there is no credited lighting designer

BABE & OKJA: Men Are Pigs

This critical comparison of Babe and Okja was commissioned by Alexis Howland. Many thanks to Alexis for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Babe - a 1995 film directed by Chris Noonan and produced by the great George Miller about a pig who grows up in an uncommon arrangement and learns that she may have an unprecedented skill that challenges norms surrounding a pig's role on the farm.

Okja - a 2017 Netflix film by now Oscar winner Bong Joon-ho about a girl named Mija who tries to save her dear friend, a genetically engineered superpig, after the corporation who created it comes to collect.


PIGGY PROLOGUE

Pigs are fat, sweaty, and stupid. That's why we use their name as an insult for slobs. We weaponize 'pig' as a denigrating term against that most hated of genders, men, and that most hated of professions, police officer. Pigs are just about only good for the delicious meat that gets stripped from their bones. Right?

Turns out pigs are not fat; they are naturally lean when not overfed by humans. Pigs are not sweaty; they are incapable of sweating, which is why they wallow in mud to cool down. And pigs are not stupid; they are smarter than any other domesticated animal, with more training potential than even cats and dogs.

The discrepancy between the reality of pigs and our cultural consciousness of them is enormous, and it speaks to the power of culture to warp reality itself. We keep dogs and cats as pets and friends, so it is imperative that we think less of pigs as we slaughter them by the billions (!) annually. All of this appears to us to be the natural order of things, but that natural order is manufactured.

Babe and Okja are movies about pigs who are trying not to get eaten. Both films encourage us to look past common sense to find empathy for those who need it, even across species. But they are coming at this message from inverse orientations. This piece compares the humanist individualist ideology of Babe to the post-humanist communitarian ideology of Okja. The lives of animals is one of the great philosophical problems of our age, and these two films represent very different ways of looking at one aspect-- the mass killing of pigs.

FAT ALBERT: Hey Cubed

This review was requested by Angela Bey. Many thanks to Angela for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Joel Zwick
Writers: Bill Cosby, Charles Kipps
Cast: Kenan Thompson, Kyla Pratt, Dania Ramirez, Shedrack Anderson III, Aaron Frazier, Marques Houston, Alphonso McAuley, Keith Robinson, Jermaine Williams
Runtime: 93 mins.
2004

I want to get the meat of this review out of the way efficiently so I can spend time in some more abstract speculation that has been plaguing me since my viewing of Fat Albert.

Fat Albert is a mid-2000s film that brings the iconic 70's cartoon to live action. The adaptation of cartoon to live action happens quite literally: When Doris (Kyla Pratt) gets home after a hard day at school and sheds a tear onto the TV remote while she's watching reruns of Fat Albert, a portal opens up that allows Fat Albert (Kenan Thompson) and his squad to travel through the screen into our reality. Mr. Albert is dead set on helping Doris with her problems, one of which becomes dealing with this group of oversized characters until she can get them back into their program when it runs again at 2:30pm tomorrow.

IT'S ALIVE: Awry in a Manger

This review is the first in a Larry Cohen retrospective commissioned by Nate Biagiotti. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon. All other film reviews in this retrospective can be found here.

Director: Larry Cohen
Writer: Larry Cohen
Cast: John Ryan, Sharon Farrell, Andrew Duggan, Guy Stockwell, James Dixon
Runtime: 91 mins.
1974

After a lightly avant garde credit sequence with stentorian music over a menagerie of sweeping flashlights, It's Alive drops us into the shoes of Frank (John P. Ryan) and Lenore (Sharon Farrell) who wake in the night to discover that their baby is on its way. Absent are the excited histrionics we expect from such a moment. Frank and Lenore lackadaisically get out of bed, walk around the house a bit, calmly discuss the situation, pick out outfits, and playfully wake up their first son Chris-- all while Lenore's labor pains are increasing. The dissonance between the urgent situation and the casual atmosphere is enhanced by the sound design and editing. The score has disappeared completely, and ancillary noise is cranked up in the sound mix so that we are suffused with every footstep and rustle of fabric. The effect is one of moving through the dumb stillness of an hour too early to be called morning, aware that every noise you make will dominate the space.

We don't get the feeling that something is wrong, exactly, but that all the edges of human experience are shaved off. The family treats the birth of a child like they would the washing of dishes. The bland evenness of white suburban life is uniquely resistant to the shaggy tumults of a life lived; even trauma is subsumed into this all-encompassing sense of normalcy. Frank upholds this delusion when his son asks him about the dangers of death in childbirth. "That sort of thing used to happen, but doesn't anymore."

No surprise that the bulk of It's Alive's runtime will be dedicated to the dismantling of that sense of normalcy, and the ways that it rushes to reassert itself. You see, there is quite a complication in the birth of Frank and Lenore's new child: it is a mutant that immediately kills an entire delivery room's worth of medical professionals, then escapes into the air vents. Frank and Lenore spend the rest of the film reeling from the emotional fallout of losing their baby in this inexplicable way, as well as the social fallout of being the parents of a freak monstrosity. Meanwhile, the baby wreaks havoc out in the world as it seeks something safe and familiar.

INSIDE MAN: MOST WANTED - Least Needed

This review was requested by Don Rebel. Many thanks to Don for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: M.J. Bassett
Writer: Brian Brightly
Cast: Aml Ameen, Rhea Seehorn, Roxanne McKee, Akshay Kumar
Runtime: 105 mins.
2019

The most charmingly stupid gesture in all of Inside Man: Most Wanted is setting the first scene during World War II. The literal connection is clear-- this is a hostage situation movie, and the thieves are trying to steal Nazi Gold from the New York Federal Reserve. The very same Nazi Gold from the opening scene. As for why we had to flash back 80 years to see the origin story of the Nazi Gold, well, I can only really think of one reason. The artists wanted to give us a little extra helping of action at the top. After the following scene's heist, the vast majority of the rest of the film is characters talking on the phone, then frustratedly slamming their headsets down.

There isn't much more to the plot of IM:MW. Our heroes are federal agent Dr. Brynn Stewart (Rhea Seehorn) and hostage negotiator Remy Darbonne (Aml Ameen), and they speak exclusively to criminal operative Ariella Barash (Roxanne McKee). It's perfectly simple. Brynn and Remy want to get the hostages out without casualties, Ariella is angling for safe passage. At least until the movie starts to reveal secret motivations, master plans, family ties... a bunch of overwrought soap operatics that aren't interesting enough to track.

THE PLATFORM: Panupticon

This review was requested by Brian Kapustik. Many thanks to Brian for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
Writers: David Desola, Pedro Rivero
Cast: Ivan Massagué, Zorion Eguileor, Antonia San Juan, Emilio Buale, Alexandra Masangkay, Zihara Llana
Runtime: 94 mins.
2020

The Platform was, as I understand it, the first breakout streaming hit of quarantine. I take some dark pleasure in knowing that so many folks became quarantined and rushed to watch a political allegory about being trapped, complete with graphic depictions of cannibalism. And a scene where a turd is ejected from an ass directly into a face.

The story of The Platform is almost entirely contained within a peculiarly designed prison. The cells are stacked vertically. Two people to a cell, with a hole in the middle of the floor and ceiling. Every day, the titular Platform descends one floor at a time, loaded with a banquet of delicacies. Greedy for nourishment, those on the upper floors stuff their faces until the titular Platform moves on. By the time the titular Platform gets a few dozen floors down, the food is picked clean. Those on the floors below are left to starve.

BIRTH: Lover Boy

This review was requested by Nate Biagiotti. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Jonathan Glazer
Writers: Jean-Claude Carrière, Milo Addica, Jonathan Glazer
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Cameron Bright, Danny Huston, Lauren Bacall
Runtime: 100 mins.
2004

Birth begins with an intrusion: a voice speaking over the opening production title cards. "Okay, let me say this. Let me say this. If I lost my wife, and the next day a little bird landed on my window sill, looked me right in the eye, and in plain English said, 'Sean, it's me, Anna, I'm back.' What can I say? I guess I'd believe her. Or I'd want to. I'd be stuck with a bird. But other than that, no, I'm a man of science, I just don't believe in that mumbo jumbo. Now that's going to have to be the last question, I need to go running before I head home." From there, a lengthy tracking shot of a man jogging down a snowy path, the camera lurking behind and above him like unseen doom. This is underscored by some absolutely gorgeous strings and woodwinds, the first hint of Alexandre Desplat's stunning compositional work throughout the film.

The man runs until his heart gives way and he quietly collapses beneath an underpass. We cut to a newborn baby, emerging from a pool of water.

The opening five minutes of Birth hand us the blueprint we need to watch the rest. Already the film is teasing out Hegelian dialectics; everything contains its antithesis, and the processes of growth and life are fueled by the irresolute contradictions that tear at us. The man of science finds comfort in mysticism. The healthy act of running brings deadly heart attack. There is laughter at a funeral. Death contains birth.

Adam's Rib: The Tokenization of Women in the Age of Identity Politics

This essay was requested by Carson Rebel. His prompt concerned the new wave of woman empowerment in film--when it is done well and when it is done awkwardly. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

The early days of Hollywood were filled with women in crucial creative roles. In the intervening century, women were muscled out as Hollywood became an aggressively masculine force of cultural production. The twenty-first century has seen a slow shifting in the tides. With the culture of identity politics in full swing, large studios are exploring the profit motives of better representation. The disparity is still large, but mainstream and blockbuster movies are seeing more and more women take center stage. Unfortunately, that shift comes with three significant caveats.

1. The women taking center stage are overwhelmingly able-bodied cis white women.
2. Most women written for mainstream films are either wholly generic, or stuck in a cycle of performative masculinity.
3. This wave of diverse representation onscreen seldom extends to the writers, directors, or producers who are shaping the narratives offscreen.

So it is that most of our contemporary examples of 'strong female characters' onscreen are cynically designed. This piece will explore a range of failures and successes, and expose the shallowness of liberal identity politics that avoid substantial structural commentary.