The Haunting of Hill House ep. 8 - Death Drive

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Witness Marks

Hugh tells Steve about witness marks-- the evidence that repairs have been done to the inner machinations of a clock. They are "the story of the piece." If you can read the scars, you can understand the entire history of that clock. If you can't, it just looks like damage.

Steve of all people needs to hear this the most, since his defense mechanism is to take everything at face value. His avoidance impulses are titanic. He even got a secret vasectomy! Of course this torpedoed his relationship, how could it have gone any other way? But he prefers a torpedo to vulnerability. He clenches up to avoid passing on his family's sickness. "There's something wrong with our goddamn brains." He wants his blood line to die but he isn't strong enough to admit it.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 7 - Phallocentrism

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Eulogy

The episode after "Two Storms" was inevitably going to scale back. You can't blame a show for peaking at the peak. We return to our 'monster of the week' format with a Dad-centric episode. In a way, we are relieved to fall back into the familiar narrative shape, and the prominence of his perspective last episode makes it feel as if we ought to get to know him better.

Can't they just talk to their Dad? Now Hugh (Timothy Hutton) approaches each of them in such a kind, open way. Stubborn, but gentle. The siblings' disgusted rebuffs of him may read as cruel from the outside, but the show is eager to contextualize. They cannot just talk to their Dad. Because he couldn't just talk to them.

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.