Chuck Klosterman on Film and Television

by Chuck Klosterman

  Within the circuits of my mind, the moments in The Empire Strikes Back I most adore are whenever Yoda gives his little Vince Lombardi speeches, often explaining that—in life—there is no inherent value to effort. “Do, or do not,” says the greenish Muggsy Bogues. “There is no try.” And that’s an inspiring sentiment. It’s the kind of logic that drives the world. But in my heart of hearts, the part of the film I can’t shake is when Luke Skywalker and Han Solo are riding around Hoth on tauntans, which are (for all practical purposes) bipedal space horses. When things get rough, Han Solo cuts open the belly of a tauntan and stuffs Luke inside the carcass; he saves him from a raging blizzard by encasing him in a cocoon of guts. I assume we’re supposed to find this clever and disgusting (or maybe even inventive and heroic). But I just know I’d rather be inside the belly of the beast.

  1. I know nobody uses the term Generation X anymore, and I know all the people it supposedly describes supposedly hate the supposed designation. But I like it. It’s simply the easiest way to categorize a genre of people who were born between 1965 and 1977 and therefore share a similar cultural experience. It’s not pejorative or complimentary; it’s factual. I’m a “Gen Xer,” okay? And I buy shit marketed to “Gen Xers.” And I use air quotes when I talk, and I sigh a lot, and I own a Human League cassette. Get over it.

  2. Case in point: When Episode I—The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, all the adults who waited in line for seventy-two hours to buy opening-night tickets were profoundly upset at the inclusion of Jar Jar Binks. “He’s annoying,” they said. Well, how annoying would R2D2 have seemed if you hadn’t been in the third fucking grade? Viewed objectively, R2D2 is like a dwarf holding a Simon.

  The Awe-Inspiring Beauty of Tom Cruise’s Shattered, Troll-like Face

  Last night I awoke at 3:30 A.M. with a piercing pain in my abdomen, certain I had been infected by some sort of Peruvian parasite that was gnawing away at my small intestine. It felt like the Neptunes had remixed my digestive tract, severely pumping up the bass. Now, the details of my illness will not be discussed here, as they are unappetizing. However, there was one upside to this tragedy: I was forced to spend several hours in my bathroom reading old issues of Entertainment Weekly, which inadvertently recalibrated my perception of existence.

  As a rule, I do not read film reviews of movies I have not seen. Honestly, I’ve never quite understood why anyone would want to be informed about the supposed value of a film before they actually experience it. Somewhat paradoxically, I used to earn my living reviewing films, and it always made me angry when people at dinner parties would try to make conversation by asking if they should (or shouldn’t) see a specific film; I never wanted to affect the choices those people made. When writing reviews, I actively avoided anything that could be perceived as an attempt at persuasion. Moreover, I never liked explaining the plot of a movie, nor did I think it was remotely interesting to comment on the quality of the acting or the innovation of the special effects.

  Perhaps this is why many people did not appreciate my film reviews.

  However, the one thing I did like discussing was the “idea” of a given film, assuming it actually had one. This is also why I prefer reading film reviews of movies I’ve already seen; I’m always more interested in seeing if what I philosophically absorbed from a motion picture was conventional or atypical, and that can usually be deduced from what details the critic focuses on in his or her piece. This was particularly true on the morning of my cataclysmic tummy ache, when I stumbled across EW’s January 4, 2002, review of Vanilla Sky.

  I am keenly aware that I am the only person in America who thought Vanilla Sky was a decent movie. This was made utterly lucid just forty-five seconds after it ended: As I walked out of the theater during the closing credits, other members of the audience actually seemed angry at what they had just experienced (in the parking lot outside the theater, I overheard one guy tell his girlfriend he was going to beat her for making him watch this picture!). Over the next few days, everything I heard about Vanilla Sky was about how it was nothing but a vanity project for Tom Cruise and that the story didn’t make any sense; the overwhelming consensus was that this was an overlong, underthought abomination. This being the case, I was not surprised to see EW’s Owen Gleiberman give Vanilla Sky a grade of D+. His take seemed in-step with most of North America. However, I found myself perturbed with one specific phrase in O.G.’s review:

  The way that the film has been edited, none of the fake-outs and reversals have any weight; the more that they pile up, the less we hold on to any of them. We’re left with a cracked hall of mirrors taped together by a What is reality? cryogenics plot and scored to [director] Cameron Crowe’s record collection.

  The phrase I take issue with is the prototypically snarky “What is reality?” remark, which strikes me as a profoundly misguided criticism. That particular question is precisely why I think Vanilla Sky was one of the more worthwhile movies I’ve seen in the past ten years, along with Memento, Mulholland Drive, Waking Life, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, The Matrix, Donnie Darko, eXistenZ, and a scant handful of other films, all of which tangentially ask the only relevant question available for contemporary filmmakers: “What is reality?” It’s insane of Gleiberman to suggest that posing this query could somehow be a justification for hating Vanilla Sky. It might be the only valid reason for loving it.

  By now, almost everyone seems to agree that the number of transcendent mass-consumer films shrinks almost every year, almost to the point of their nonexistence. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone suggest otherwise. Granted, there remains a preponderance of low-budget, deeply interesting movies that never play outside of major U.S. cities; Todd Solondz’s twisted troika of Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, and Storytelling is an obvious example, as are mildly subversive minor films like Pi and Ghost World. P. T. Anderson and Wes Anderson make great films that get press and flirt with commerce. However, the idea of making a sophisticated movie that could be brilliant and commercially massive is almost unthinkable, and that schism is relatively new. In the early seventies, The Godfather films made tons of money, won bushels of Academy Awards, and—most notably—were anecdotally regarded as damn-near perfect by every non-Italian tier of society, both intellectually and emotionally. They succeed in every dimension. That could never happen today; interesting movies rarely earn money, and Oscar-winning movies are rarely better than good. Titanic was the highest-grossing film of all time and the 1998 winner for Best Picture, so you’d think that might be an exception—but I’ve never met an intelligent person who honestly loved it. Titanic might have been the least watchable movie of the 1990s, because it was so obviously designed for audiences who don’t really like movies (in fact, that was the key to its success). At this point, winning an Oscar is almost like winning a Grammy.

  I realize citing the first two Godfather films is something of a cheap argument, since those two pictures are the pinnacle of the cinematic art form. But even if we discount Francis Ford Coppola’s entire body of work, it’s impossible to deny that the chances of seeing an über-fantastic film in a conventional movie house are growing maddeningly rare, which wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t long ago that movies like Cool Hand Luke or The Last Picture Show or Nashville would show up everywhere, and everyone would see them collectively, and everybody would have their consciousness shaken at the same time and in the same way. That never happens anymore (Pulp Fiction was arguably the last instance). This is mostly due to the structure of the Hollywood system; especially in the early 1970s, everybody was consumed with the auteur concept, which gave directors the ability to completely (and autonomously) construct a movie’s vision; for roughly a decade, film was a director’s medium. Today, film is a producer’s medium (the only director with complete control over his product is George Lucas, and he elects to make kids’ movies). Producers want to develop movies they can refer to as “high concept,” which—somewhat ironically—is industry slang for “no concept”:
It describes a movie where the human element is secondary to an episodic collection of action sequences. It’s “conceptual” because there is no emphasis on details. Capitalistically, those projects work very well; they can be constructed as “vehicles” for particular celebrities, which is the only thing most audiences care about, anyway. In a weird way, film studios are almost requiring movies to be bad, because they tend to be more efficient.

  However, there’s also a second reason we see fewer important adult films in the twenty-first century, and this one is nobody’s fault. Culturally, there’s an important cinematic difference between 1973 and 2003—and it has to do with the purpose movies serve. In the past, film validated social evolution. Look at Jack Nicholson: From 1969 to 1975, Nicholson portrayed an amazing array of characters—this was the stretch where he made Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, The Last Detail, The King of Marvin Gardens, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It might be the strongest half decade any actor ever had (or at least the strongest five-year jag since the fall of the studio system). And what’s most compelling is that all the people he played during that run were vaguely unified by a singular quality. For a long time, I could never put my finger on what that was. I finally figured it out when I came across a late-eighties profile on Nicholson in The New York Times Magazine: “I like to play people who haven’t existed yet,” Jack said. “A future something.”

  Nicholson was particularly adroit at embodying those future somethings, but he was not alone. This was what good movies did during that period—they were visions of a present tense that was just around the corner. When people talk about the seventies as a Golden Era, they tend to talk about cinematic techniques and artistic risks. What they should be discussing is sociology. The filmmaking process is slow and expensive, so movies are always the last idiom to respond to social evolution; the finest films from the seventies were really just the manifestation of how art and life had changed in the sixties. After a generation of being entertained by an illusion of simplicity and the clarity of good vs. evil, a film like Five Easy Pieces offered the kind of psychological complexity people were suddenly relating to in a very personal way. What people like Nicholson were doing was introducing audiences to the new American reality: counterculture as the dominant culture.

  Unfortunately, that kind of introduction can’t happen in 2003. It can’t happen because reality is more transient and less concrete. It’s more difficult for a film to define and validate the current of popular culture, because that once linear current has been splintered; it’s become a cracked Volvo windshield, spider-webbing itself in a manner that’s generally predictable but specifically chaotic (in other words, we all sort of know where the national ethos is going, but never exactly how or exactly why or exactly when). Cinematically, this creates a problem. Traditional character models like “The Everyman” and “The Antihero” and “The Wrongly Accused” are no longer useful, because nobody can agree on what those designations are supposed to mean anymore (in Christopher Nolan’s Memento, all three of those labels could simultaneously be applied to the same person). Modern movies can no longer introduce impending realities; they can’t even explain the ones we currently have. Consequently, there’s only one important question a culturally significant film can still ask: What is reality?

  I’ll concede that Vanilla Sky poses that question a little too literally at times, inasmuch as I vaguely recall one scene where Tom Cruise is riding in an elevator and someone looks at him and literally asks, “What is reality?” The cryogenics subplot is also a tad silly, since it sometimes seems like an infomercial for Scientology and/or an homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall. But fuck it—I’m not going to overcompensate and list a bunch of criticisms about a movie I honestly liked, and I did like Vanilla Sky. And what I liked was the way it presented the idea of objectivity vs. perception, which is ultimately what the “What is reality” quandary comes down to. In Vanilla Sky, Cruise plays a dashing magazine publisher. He likes to casually bang Cameron Diaz, but he falls in love with the less attainable Penelope Cruz (it is a credit to Cruz that she makes this situation seem plausible; Penelope is so cute in this film that I found myself siding with Cruise and thinking, “Why the hell would anyone want to have sex with a repulsive hosebag like Cameron Diaz?”). When Diaz figures out that Cruise has been unfaithful, she goes bonkers and tries to kill them both by driving a car off a bridge. She dies, but Cruise escapes—with a horribly disfigured face. Despite his grotesque appearance, he still pursues a satisfying relationship with Cruz and intends to repair his mangled grill through a series of plastic surgeries. Against all odds, his life (and his face) improves. But then it turns out that the diabolical Diaz is still alive… or maybe not… maybe she and Cruz are actually the same person… or maybe neither exists, because this is all a fantasy. Frankly, whatever answer Crowe wanted us to deduce is irrelevant. What matters is that Cruise ultimately has to decide between a fake world that feels real and a real world that feels like torture.

  Cruise chooses the latter, although I’m not sure why. Keanu Reeves makes the same choice in The Matrix, electing to live in a realm that is dismal but genuine. Like Vanilla Sky, the plot of The Matrix hinges on the premise that everything we think we’re experiencing is a computer-generated illusion: In a postapocalyptic world, a band of kung fu terrorists wage war against a society of self-actualized machines who derive their power from human batteries, all of whom unknowingly exist in a virtual universe referred to as “the matrix.” The Matrix would suggest that everything you’re feeling and experiencing is just a collective dream the whole world is sharing; nobody is actually living, but nobody’s aware that they aren’t.

  For Reeves’s character, Neo, choosing to live in the colorless light of hard reality is an easy decision, mostly because The Matrix makes the distinction between those two options very clear: reality may be a difficult brand of freedom, but unreality is nothing more than comfortable slavery. Cruise’s decision in Vanilla Sky is similar, although less sweeping; his choice has more to do with the “credibility” of his happiness (his fake life would be good, but not satisfying). Both men prefer unconditional reality. This is possibly due to the fact that both films are really just sci-fi stories, and science fiction tends to be philosophy for stupid people.1 Every protagonist in a sci-fi story is ultimately a moral creature who does the right thing, often resulting in his own valiant destruction (think Spock in The Wrath of Khan). But what’s intriguing about Keanu and Cruise is that I’m not sure I agree that choosing hard reality is the “right thing.” The Matrix and Vanilla Sky both pose that question—which I appreciate— but their conclusions don’t necessarily make logical (or emotional) sense. And that doesn’t mean these are bad movies; it just forces us to see a different reflection than the director may have intended. It probably makes them more intriguing.

  The reason I think Cruise and Reeves make flawed decisions is because they are not dealing with specific, case-by-case situations. They are dealing with the entire scope of their being, which changes the rules. I would never support the suggestion that ignorance is bliss, but that cliché takes on a totally different meaning when the definition of “ignorance” becomes the same as the definition for “existence.”

  Look at it this way: Let’s assume you’re a married woman, and your husband is having an affair. If this is the only lie in your life, it’s something you need to know. As a singular deceit, it’s a problem, because it invalidates every other truth of your relationship. However, let’s say everyone is lying to you all the time— your husband, your family, your coworkers, total strangers, etc. Let’s assume that no one has ever been honest with you since the day you started kindergarten, and you’ve never suspected a thing. In this scenario, there is absolutely no value to learning the truth about anything; if everyone expresses the same construction of lies, those lies are the truth, or at least a kind of truth. But the operative word in this scenario is everyone. Objective reality is
not situational; it doesn’t evolve along with you. If you were raised as a strict Mormon and converted into an acid-eating Wiccan during college, it would seem like your reality had completely evolved—but the only thing that would be different is your perception of a world that’s still exactly the same. That’s not the situation Cruise and Reeves face in these movies. They are not looking for the true answer to one important question; they are choosing between two unilateral truths that apply to absolutely everything. And all the things we want out of life—pleasure, love, enlightenment, self-actualization, whatever—can be attained within either realm. They both choose the “harder” reality, but only because the men who made The Matrix and Vanilla Sky assume that option is more optimistic. In truth, both options are exactly the same. Living as an immaterial cog in the matrix would be no better or worse than living as a fully-aware human; existing in a cryogenic dreamworld would be no less credible than existing in corporeal Manhattan.

  The dreamworld in Richard Linklater’s staggering Waking Life illustrates this point beautifully, perhaps because that idea is central to its whole intention. Waking Life is an animated film about a guy (voiced by Wiley Wiggins) who finds himself inside a dream he cannot wake from. As the disjointed story progresses, both the character and the audience conclude that Wiggins is actually dead. And what’s cool about Waking Life is that this realization is not the least bit disturbing. Wiggins’s response is a virtual nonreaction, and that’s because he knows he is not merely in a weird situation; he is walking through an alternative reality. Instead of freaking out, he tries to understand how his new surroundings compare to his old ones.