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.

HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH - Shapeless

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Director: Tommy Lee Wallace
Writer: Tommy Lee Wallace
Cast: Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin, Dan O'Herlihy
Runtime: 98 mins.
1982

The opening sequence of Tommy Lee Wallace's Halloween III is auspicious enough. A bedraggled man flees from unknown pursuers into a junkyard. His peril is punctuated by a barbed synthetic score composed by Alan Howarth and John Carpenter himself. (The score, one of the finest aspects of the film, is the only creative contribution of series progenitor Carpenter.) Then the first death happens. A besuited villain gets crushed by a slow rolling car; his body goes herkyjerk for a second, then limp. It's an embarrassingly awkward moment, foreshadowing many more fun special effects to come that are framed in such a way as to suck that fun right out.

To be fair, subsequent plot developments recontextualize the stiltedness of that death, but not in a way that improves things.

You see, the fleeing man's attending doctor and attending daughter can't shake the sense that something is very wrong after he gets his skull crushed while sedated in a hospital bed. They team up to navigate a hapless concoction of a plot that more or less goes as follows... in an Irish company town (?) there exists the Silver Shamrock factory, a producer of children's Halloween masks. Head of company Conal Cochran has made it his ghoul* to sell as many masks as possible, which are hugely popular despite being offered in only three varieties: Pumpkin, Skeleton, and Witch (??). The twist is, these masks are equipped with an electronic chip (???) that shoots lasers into children's heads (????) when triggered by a special Halloween night advertisement that apparently kids are really excited about watching (?????). This laser beam turns the maskwearer's insides into poisonous snakes and bugs (??????). Conal has accomplished this by stealing one of the Stonehenge stones (???????) and using its power to bolster ancient druidic and planetary alignment energies (????????). He does all this with the help of a small army of human-passing automatons, which he just sort of had already (?????????).

*This was actually a typo but it seemed fitting.

Best of the 2010s: 11 - 20

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Red: the color of passion, the color of blood, the color of lust, the color of bloodlust. Sex is always intertwined with death, as love is only meaningful if it cannot endure forever. Students of Christianity might disagree, but damn if the Greek pantheon of gods weren't dissatisfied with their eternal bonds of marriage.

I digress... as far as the visible spectrum, you can't make a much bolder statement in cinema than splashing the screen with red. Unless you're Dario Argento, these moments of red are best as emphasis, a carving out of a passionate event. Red can be a shade of lipstick, a sea of blood, or even meaningful in its greyscale absence. Breakthroughs of ardor in these films tend to be powerful nexuses, a way to escape the bonds of oppression or banality-- if only for a time.

Best of the 2010s: 21 - 30

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Film often gets singled out as the most subjective art form. Dialogue and narration reveal a character's thoughts. Cinematography unlocks their aesthetic and the impact of environment. Close up shots of skilled performers access microgestural, repressive, and unconscious functions that aren't so easy to put into words. Editing sets the rhythm and music drags us through the emotional complexity of the moment. Given that all these tools so powerfully engender empathy for the subjects at hand, cinema is in a unique position to teach us about oppression. How does it work, why does it work, and what does it do to its victims?

Oppression is an abstract and flexible concept that can take many forms. Structural oppression manifests differently for race, gender, sexuality, ability, age, species. These ten films feature struggles amongst those categories, sometimes multiple at a time. Forging that bond of empathy helps us understand the oft invisible machinations of oppressive forces, and perhaps more importantly, it helps us learn how to fight back.

Best of the 2010s: 31 - 40

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Not every arc features steady growth that culminates in transcendence. Not every narrative is shaped like a peak. Great works of art strive to push forward forever into newness, though it is important to examine the ways our lives morph in cycles.

Repetition. Iteration. The myth of eternal return. Cycles can be plot contrivances that force us to recognize patterns, cycles can be thematic recurrences that weave a tapestry of grander truth, cycles can be an exploration of the neverending cascade of trauma. They can be the drag of a cigarette or the thrill of an encore. What's important to understand is that no two cycles are the same, for a repeated gesture takes on new meaning every time it manifests.

THE SUICIDE SQUAD: Gunn's Gambit

Director: James Gunn
Writer: James Gunn
Cast: Idris Elba, Margot Robbie, John Cena, Daniela Melchior, David Dastmalchian, Joel Kinnaman, Sylvester Stallone, Viola Davis, Alice Braga, Peter Capaldi, Julio Cesar Ruiz, Jai Courtney, Pete Davidson, Nathan Fillion, Jennifer Holland, Michael Rooker, Sean Gunn, Flula Borg, Steve Agee, Mayling Ng, Taika Waititi
Runtime: 132 mins.
2021

In 2014 Disney released James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy, which reminded everyone that superhero movies are supposed to be fun. The film was a smash hit and the smash caused ripples.

2016 rolls around, and competitors Warner Bros. are sitting on a brand new superhero flick called Suicide Squad. Unfortunately, what should have been designed from the ground up as a Fun Movie was instead given to David Ayer, a director known for his grim tone and hypermasculine sensibilities. This Suicide Squad sprung from the Zack Snyderian tradition of morose, overly self-serious stories of tortured heroism that had been the DC model since 2013's Man of Steel, itself a poor facsimile of the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy.

So DC and Warner Bros. had a problem. Their gritty shared universe was crumbling, whereas Guardians just gave Marvel's franchise a shot in the arm. The solution? Marketing, of course. Warner hired trailer editing company Trailer Park to create a Suicide Squad teaser trailer that promised the same team-up fun that audiences loved in Guardians and craved from Batman v. Superman. You may remember the result, a poppy peppy teaser set to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." Although early promo images and a disastrous Joker design put audiences off, this trailer piqued quite a bit of interest.

Which presented another problem: the trailer Warner Bros. released bore no resemblance to David Ayer's somber work-in-progress. So WB did something unprecedented. They hired Trailer Park, the trailer editing company, to re-cut the film itself so that it would more closely resemble their teaser. No cut of this film was going to be good, but the version we got focused on meager glimmers of style at the expense of substance.

Suicide Squad got panned hard, but salvaged quite a bit of money from the Hot Topic crowd. Meanwhile, back at Marvel, James Gunn reprised his success with another Guardians of the Galaxy movie, fully expecting to work on part 3 in a few years. Then, in 2018, Disney fired him from his own franchise.

INSIDE: Mal Content

Director: Bo Burnham
Writer: Bo Burnham
Cast: Bo Burnham
Runtime: 87 mins.
2021

You can tell when a work of screen art is cheaply made. Shot in a warehouse, corners cut on sound and lights, repeated locations, reduced scope. This phenomenon in an otherwise well-produced TV show is called a 'bottle episode,' the result of other more spectacular episodes going overbudget. The funny thing is, these episodes' narrowed scope often emphasize character dynamics and intimate moments, thus creating better television than more souped-up stories.

Bo Burnham quit performing live comedy because he started having panic attacks onstage. After taking years away from the public spotlight to work on himself, he finally felt well enough to book a new comedy tour. Then COVID hit.

Ripped away from his audience as if the punch line of a cruel cosmic joke, Burnham decided to make a bottle special. He wrote, performed, filmed, and edited the entirety of Inside by himself, in one single room. All great artists understand that obstacles lead to greater opportunities, and quarantine becomes something of a dare for Burnham. How do I create something visually and emotionally engaging using the bare minimum? How do I manipulate a single location to fit the jumpy whims of sketch and song? How do I not go insane working on a project alone for months and months and months?

Best of the 2010s: 41 - 50

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Once the Ordeal is completed, what is at the end? Transformation... enlightenment... synthesis... we can umbrella these things under the term Transcendence. Frustrating art often features hours of wheel spinning, static scenarios that offer no real character development. The best art knows that the ending is the conceit, and for good or for ill the characters will not walk away from the ending unchanged.

I choose the term Transcendence in part for its religious connotation. Navigating Fantasy, Self-Destruction, Commitment, and Ordeal can be seen as simple A to B to C plot progression. Yet there is something undefinable, something ethereal, at play in the culmination of any journey. These ten films are stunning examples of stories whose characters who emerge from their trials having exceeded the realm of what they had previously thought possible. Like the characters involved, these works may aid you on your way to another plane of consciousness.

Best of the 2010s: 51 - 60

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The ordeal. What better way to test a hero's commitment than to run them ragged? An ordeal can be mental, physical, or spiritual, but it must reveal a character's interiority. How do they respond to strenuous circumstances? What is their fear response? Do they feel trapped? Determined? Or has a long life of ordeals worn them through?

The form of the ordeal refracts the needs of the protagonists. If a character seeks meaning in life, their ordeal may situate them as a cog in a narrative beyond their control. If a character seeks control, their ordeal may require perfection. If a character seeks perfection their ordeal may require surrender, surrender requires vulnerability, vulnerability requires violence. When a subject and an obstacle strike against each other, an entirely new being is formed.