A Study in Divergent Car Crashes

For my Unpopular Opinion of the Day, I would like to propose that Star Wars (the whole of it) is bad where films like Barbarella and, slightly more self-consciously, Flash Gordon are good films. Barbarella is genius not because it’s more ridiculous fun than Star Wars (which it is) but because it understands better the role of cinema: not as commodity but as communion. It’s much the same reason that David Cronenberg’s Crash is a masterpiece of thoughtful post-humanism while Paul Haggis’ Crash some 10 years later is basically a polished turd in the shape of an Academy Award. Two car crashes, two wildly divergent results.

It’s hard to over-stress the ways in which the commodification of cinema frustrates me, and yes, I will acknowledge that as a home video collector that might make me at least some level of hypocrite. And yet, I can’t help but feel something slightly different at work when I watch something like Star Wars.

It was an effect pronounced when I recently watched Wonder Woman 1984, a film whose inclusion of “1984” in the title is somehow the most disturbingly Orwellian thing that happened in 2020. Film as commodity isn’t even the right phrase; it’s the commodification of the viewer. We’re reduced to eyeballs on the screen, specifically Scrooge McDuck’s eyeballs when he sees a penny on the ground: that is, big orbs with dollar signs on them.

And yes, in a capitalist system film is literally a consumer product. But some films, especially U.S. films, give the uncanny sensation that I’m actually the product in some gruesome power exchange between forces of which I have no awareness. This is cinematic alienation from my viewing labor. It’s Charlie Chaplin winding through the gears of the giant machine in Modern Times. Star Wars et al give the audience tacit permission to tune out and become the product.

A film like Barbarella, on the other hand, is different, in part because of its visual effects. The glossy sheen of CGI is a recipe for zoning out, whereas practical effects, especially those that resist verisimilitude (deliberately or otherwise) jar viewers out of the stupor of modern cinema. There is something truly tactile about Barbarella, Flash Gordon, and the best parts of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. Barbarella‘s tactility goes beyond its sexualization as a film perhaps best described as an erotic nightmare Radley Metzger might have after watching Forbidden Planet. It’s a deeply conscious piece of science fiction, both in the dueling utopian and dystopian philosophies that are nothing if not very nineteen-sixties and in the way the film undermines the binary between them.

Barbarella is a deeply inquisitive film, not unlike a psychosexual episode of its contemporary, Star Trek; it’s a film that asks you to think, to reach out and commune with it the same way you probably want to reach out and commune with Jane Fonda. So many films would have viewers subdued, like the Great Tyrant sleeping and dreaming in a shiny glass-filled chamber.

I recently watched both the extended Hobbit trilogy and the extended Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the difference between these two Peter Jackson sagas, each set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, set my teeth on edge. It’s not so much that The Hobbit films are a spectacular train wreck; they’re more like a long train ride during which every passenger is slowly poisoned to death while watching a low-quality bootleg of Lord of the Rings.

I was struck not only by the fact that I wept upon the conclusion of The Return of the King where I merely groaned at how the entire final segment of The Battle of the Five Armies was a long-winded way of having Bilbo state aloud what the entire film (films, even) has been built around, which is that Bilbo was friends with Thorin. I’m pretty sure I learned the phrase “show, don’t tell” before I even went to film school, but apparently Peter Jackson, a man who (not undeservedly) received three Oscars for his stewardship of The Lord of the Rings films, never did.

Somehow Peter Jackson seems to be two filmmakers stuck in the same body. I truly don’t know how the same man can create The Lord of the Rings film series and then The Hobbit film series. I guess the sheer power of the former gives him a pass for the clumsiness of the latter, just as I’ll forgive him that shitty King Kong on the strength of Heavenly Creatures.

But then, my point way back there was supposed to be on the way that the two trilogies take vastly different approaches to their subject matter, which, in turn, pertains to how they approach their audience. In a recent piece in Harper’s, Martin Scorsese writes that “the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, ‘content.'” Scorsese’s article, a tribute to Federico Fellini, is worth reading in its entirety for its insight into a filmmaker all too forgotten by an age of hyper-marketable “content”. For Scorsese, Fellini is a defining feature of the landscape of cinema that transcends commodity.

My only criticism of Scorsese’s piece is that he fails to mention my idol, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in a discussion of Italian cinema. Like Fellini (and Scorsese himself), Pasolini is a member of that elite club of directors whose films have been Criterion-ized, but that scarcely does justice to the true legacy of a director whose provocations include the Trilogy of Life, Teorema, and Salò.

Last year I finally got a chance to see Abel Ferrara’s film Pasolini, a film about the final day of the great Italian filmmaker. Pasolini was murdered in 1975 shortly after giving an interview to Furio Colombo in which he spoke perhaps his most famous words, translated into English as “we’re all in danger”. It’s those words I have tattooed on my left arm because I could never get them out of my head. Perhaps it’s my attachment to the director of my favorite film — the ever-controversial Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1976) — that caused my visceral reaction to a film that culminated in his murder, or perhaps it was the film’s assertion that Pasolini’s murder was a simple anti-gay hate crime rather than, as many believe, a politically motivated assassination.

I loved Ferrara’s film in many ways, but something about watching Pasolini’s murder transformed into the ultimate cliché of queer cinema (a cliché that a narrative innovator like Pasolini would likely have resented) hit me harder than I expected. The ending of Ferrara’s film comes across like a film you’d read about in The Celluloid Closet. To say that Pasolini’s death deserved better would be to counter one cliché with another.

Willem Dafoe makes an excellent Pasolini, bringing both a physical likeness and a beautiful, understated humanity very unlike the way he is often typecast (for example, John Oliver once joked that Dafoe would be “the President of Terror”). Dafoe’s turn as Pasolini is perhaps most reminiscent of his role as Sgt. Elias in Platoon decades earlier: a generous, soulful, homoerotic performance that culminates in a brutal death. The bright side of Pasolini’s death in Pasolini is that where Oliver Stone makes Elias’ death in Platoon into perhaps the single most iconic death in the history of cinema, Ferrara does the opposite, making it hardly memorable and thus all the more gut-wrenching that it blends into cinematic history just as Pasolini has, to some extent, faded from filmic memory.

In Teorema, the day-to-day existence of a bourgeois family is disrupted by a mysterious visitor, who seduces the family one-by-one before departing, upending their comfortable routines. The film opens with the suggestion that by divesting a factory to its workers, the owner “blocked all chance of a future workers’ revolution.” The film that ensues is the loosening of the strictures of upper-class existence, a provocation that is representative of Pasolini’s work along various lines of liberation.

Like all of Pasolini’s cinematic tracts, Teorema depends on one’s relationship to the self: as evidenced by Salò, stable identity (a hallmark of modern liberalism) is a luxury of the powerful, and in Teorema, the mysterious visitor forces the wealthy family into the kind of ego obliteration typically reserved for the oppressed classes, working and otherwise. The idea of “content” would rightly have horrified Pasolini, whose films specifically depend on viewers experiencing the same shifting identity as the family in Teorema. In the philosophy of content, viewers have their stable selves constantly reinforced. Even at a minimum, self-reflection is anathema to content, which requires rock-solid viewers to whom corporations can market.

Star Wars changed the world, but probably not for the better. The film series offers up a fanciful universe that is both entertaining and about as shallow as it gets. There is a bleak binary at work in Star Wars, a good vs. evil structure that naturalizes and mythologizes morality in the basest possible way. When Star Wars premiered, one might have said, in the words of Sgt. Elias, “what happened today was just the beginning.” The New Hollywood, which specialized in amorality, had now produced a work that harkened back to the days when villains were always punished and what counted as good was codified and regulated. “The Force” is the Production Code, and moral nuance in popular cinema was doomed in 1977.

When mainstream cinema turns to questions of morality, the answer usually comes back in simplistic terms: there’s evil, there’s good, and for the most part the evil know they’re evil and the good know they’re good (even terrific films, like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, are guilty of this). This both hinges on, and reinforces, the fixed identity of viewers, enabling an utter lack of inquiry. The question of just how much Star Wars‘ black-and-white vision of good and evil — fixed concepts that pertain to naturalized identities — has influenced our current political discourse is more complex than I’m prepared to answer, but it seems worth asking.

Consider instead of Star Wars Oliver Stone’s aforementioned Platoon (1986), a film structured around a seemingly binary conflict between the ultraviolent, jingoistic Sgt. Barnes and the thoughtful, humanistic Sgt. Elias. Like a cartoon devil and angel on the shoulder of Charlie Sheen’s fresh-faced soldier Taylor, the two men are deeply allegorical symbols of good and evil. Barnes and Elias are so allegorical, in fact, that they may as well not exist except in the mind of the film’s central character, and after Elias is killed by Barnes, Taylor is eventually able to get revenge by killing Barnes, compromising the very morals that Elias represents (moments before, Barnes even tells him to “do it”, to shoot him, like a Sith Lord hoping to turn a Jedi over to the Dark Side).

One of the central points of Platoon, in fact, is the inherently compromising nature of war, indeed of life more broadly. Taylor narrates at Platoon‘s conclusion that he considers himself “the child born of those two fathers”, Elias and Barnes. Unlike a Jedi or a Sith, Taylor recognizes both the Light Side and Dark Side of the Force in himself. As Taylor imagines the two men eternally “fighting … for what Rhah called possession of my soul”, the viewer is, like the protagonist, caught in a metaphysical battle without easy resolution.