We’ve all been there, right? One thing’s for sure: Traill knows how to portray loss, keeping the camera tight and close on Bruce’s grimaces, and even on Bubba’s stoic scowl (just before the eyebrow twitch). There’s a stunning shot of Black after he receives Electra’s goodbye note. (She sends it from her iPad, and just by iMessage, not even the guts for FaceTime!) As the camera draws back, the living room grows around him, swallowing him up like a paunchier, hairier, and smaller Jonah in the belly of the whale.
But he scrabbles his way out. After all, he’s supposed to save her, right? Soon he’s swinging by her house, “crossing paths” at the grocery store, and even popping up at all her dates—or, as Trent calls them, “sessions.” (“How does he keep finding you?” Trent asks. Hah! Remember Electra’s iPad? Thank God for GPS. It’s the greatest. Am I right, or what?) Anyway, Bruce calls her some names and bellows outside her window in the middle of the night. The police get involved. This kind of romantic diligence used to be rewarded. (Think Benjamin Braddock courting Elaine Robinson in The Graduate.)
They can call it stalking if they want, but the intentions are good.
As Electra slips through Bruce’s stubby fingers, there’s this throbbing background music. What is that? I thought. Some kind of drum? Or a bagpipe? The joke was on me: it was me, blubbering. Who did I feel more sorry for? Bruce, destined to be a lone-wolf hero? Or Electra, condemned to a life of bourgeois numbness, the horror of which she remained blind to? No doubt about it: her loss outstripped his by a mile.
The drama is heightened by a catchy cameo by Shaquille O’Neal (yes, very tall, but developing a bit of a belly—he’s just human, after all) and a powerful role by Judy Greer (Amy), who tries to mediate between her two best friends and who, if you replay sections of the DVD over and over, clearly shows a bit of a thing for Bruce that she’s too shy to express.
Some movies just resonate with their age; they pulse with a generation. No sooner had I finished than I pressed play again, and right after the second viewing I drained my last Bud (Lite, so the gut’s not from that) and got on the Internet to order a copy for a certain special someone I know, whose name starts with “M,” who lives really close by, who probably still reads my column, and who I think will find Saving Electra pretty damn relevant. Yes indeedy. Pretty goddamn relevant.
Everyone should see this movie. God knows why it’s only on DVD. But order it. Express shipping. Then sit your fat hairy ass down and click play. Have a beer. It’s not too late. Get busy Saving Miranda.
Directed by Lars von Trier. Starring: six cats who look like Jesus, Jennifer Lawrence, and Tyler Perry.
It’s not as if we weren’t warned. When it premiered last spring at the SXSW Film Festival, critics touted Six Cats Who Look Like Jesus as the film that would finally change moviegoing—and indeed our experience as humans on this planet—for good.
“We got it all wrong before,” wrote an in-retrospect fairly desperate-sounding Manohla Darghis for the New York Times. “We were wrong about everything. But…how could we have known?”
The problem with writing a review of Six Cats Who Look Like Jesus is that there’s no precedent for it. There’s actually never been a movie like this before—in fact, I’m not even sure if you can call it a movie. Does forty-five minutes of GIFs repurposed from nineties sitcoms, 2000s romantic comedies, and the Beyoncé Superbowl half-time show count as a plot? Does it even matter?
The other major difficulty with trying to review Six Cats Who Look Like Jesus is that you, as a human being on the Internet, already know everything there is to know about it. Its YouTube channel alone has seven billion fans, making it statistically impossible for you not to be one of them. And, even if you’re somehow not one, you’ve read the most recent angry think piece about it published on the Awl which, as of this writing, has been shared by over ten million readers. Which is to say that, with every tweet, click and post, we allowed this project to come into being. We did this. All of us. Six Cats Who Look Like Jesus is all of our faults.
Brought to you by the team of venture capitalists responsible for Groupon, Six Cats Who Look Like Jesus stars a selection of six cats, one of whom does actually look quite a lot like Jesus. Aside from that, it consists primarily of Vines starring a Sausalito teen who looks like Justin Bieber running his fingers through his hair. Viewers are encouraged to like and comment on each six-second vignette in real time.* The film also breaks every two minutes so viewers can tweet, text, and post movie theater selfies. A social media intern known only as @MCKENNA1996 crowdsources a new ending at each screening, so that, depending on the number of retweets, likes, favorites, and @replies, Six Cats Who Look Like Jesus culminates with either A) a wedding between two attractive white people, B) a Macklemore concert, or C) a livestream of Jennifer Lawrence on her laptop at a Beverly Hills Coffee Bean cycling between checking her Gmail, updating Facebook, and sub-tweeting Emma Stone.
Though the cast features dozens of teenagers famous on Instagram for no discernible reason, the real star of this movie is you. In fact, there are no credits. Six Cats Who Look Like Jesus ends when a tiny pinpoint of green light switches on at the very top of the screen. The camera turns on the audience, reflecting back to it a picture of itself, steady and unwavering. The light remains on, presumably recording even as the audience gets up and leaves. It may still be recording. I haven’t been able to turn my cell phone camera off since the screening, and neither has anyone I know.
With a first weekend haul of over $9 billion, Six Cats Who Look Like Jesus is the highest-grossing film of all time. Meanwhile, the soundtrack has sold more than every other CD put out this year combined. Featuring new singles by Taylor Swift, Rita Ora, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, and Iggy Azalea, each song appears to have been specially engineered to distract from the fact that, due to the spontaneous complete melting of the ice caps, we’re all being forced to forage for food—
Listen.
We could fight this, you know.
We could ride out to the desert where the screens are blank as closed eyes and the text alerts can’t reach us. Where the tumblers are full of bourbon and the only things tweeting are the sparrows in the clean morning air. We could start over in a place where you don’t know what your seventh-grade lab partner’s minutes-old infant looks like and I don’t know what my grandmother’s Facebook personality turned out to be.
I’d follow you there.
I’d like that.
A sequel to Six Cats Who Look Like Jesus, tentatively titled Puppies Falling Asleep on Babies, is already in the works and scheduled to be released for free online, in theaters, on your tablets and iPhones, on television, and into your dreams via drone every day for the rest of your life or until the universe implodes in a fiery heat death, whichever comes first.
*Delivered via innovative technology that turns every monitor into a touch screen, Six Cats Who Look Like Jesus features real-time updates from viewers across the world who can log in and, after watching a brief ad—well here, why don’t you watch that brief ad first, and then we’ll tell you? **
**The above is an actual paragraph excerpted from the film’s electronic press release. It’s important to note that I did not click the link because I was afraid to. A colleague of mine did but wasn’t much help, as, immediately after doing so, she resigned from her position as a journalist at this esteemed publication and took her children to “live” with her mom in Fresno for a while…as if that would help anything. But still. You can never be sure. [nervous laugh]. Oh, God. It’s too late already, isn’t it? It was always already too late.
Directed by Neil Labute. Produced by Scott Rudin. Cinematography by John Seale, ASC, ACS. Music by Michael Penn. Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Kate Hudson, and Bud Cort.
Baby on Fire is a movie about a number of things: birth, flames, life, death, scarring, surgery, hospitals, maternity, paternity, and the unexpected consequences of sexual intercourse. I
t is not, however, about many other things: toddlerhood, adolescence, the teenage years, basic healthy life-development paths, growing up, responsible parenting, friendship, redemption, religious fervor, or feats of heroism. It makes use of a style marked by a number of influences: most notably, Christopher Guest and Baz Luhrmann. And yet it opens the doors on new terrain for filmmakers: most notably the very, very hot uterus of a woman named Gwen Mackey.
Gwen has a problem, but she doesn’t know what it is. She knows she’s pregnant, but she can’t imagine why the baby inside her stomach emits such an insanely high level of heat. In the film’s opening scene, she holds her hand over her bulge and remarks to her husband, Jed, “Feel here. The baby is kicking and it’s incredibly hot.” Jed puts his hand on his wife’s stomach. His hand, as promised, becomes incredibly hot. He pulls it away, and—devoted to his wife but, one begins to suspect, marked by a uselessness that might have repercussions once a fireball shoots out from between his wife’s legs and across the room—goes to the kitchen and fills a freezer bag with ice.
He puts the freezer bag on Gwen’s stomach, the ice melts instantly, everything goes to hell, and the baby’s not even born yet.
Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of movies and books in the world that are basically regular domestic dramas except there’s something really weird going on in the family that acts sort of like a supermassive metaphor but also like a plot hook so big that it relieves the author or filmmaker of the responsibility of capturing the true breadth of the dynamics in the family drama he’s put a mask on and called by another name? Have you read The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta? Or The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris? If not, I can tell you what they’re about: families with problems who also have something really weird going on that acts as a sort of conductor for their problems, without which talking things through would be extremely difficult and possibly make for a story plagued by its own sappiness.
Owing to the Guest/Lurhmann dynamic, Baby on Fire sheds new light on the weirdness-on-account-of-fear-of-sappiness genre. Imagine Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby except that, for every music video-style sequence, there’s a middle-aged white guy sitting off to the side talking about how much he hopes Gatsby will defeat Tom Buchanan and win Daisy’s heart, because “if not for that, but for what purpose do parties serve?”
Baby on Fire is a little like that. On the one hand, you’ve got Luhrmann-style fireworks in the form of a baby that’s literally burning while really good music plays. And on the other, you’ve got Guest-style commentary in the form of Gwen and Jed’s total detachment from the very real problem burning away in their nursery. And through it all, yes, Gwen and Jed, with a baby burning in the next room, turning their whole house hot, will encounter domestic issues. What will they do with a baby they cannot hold?
Will their basic morning encounters in the kitchen become more strained? Will Gwen’s flirtation with her tanned but superficial coworker become more salacious? Will Jed sound out the names of therapists in the Yellow Pages, check his online banking to see if he can afford one, and decide over and over again that taking a long, mopey walk down the bike path during which he smiles far too widely at dog walkers does him just as much good? Yes, in Baby on Fire, the domestic issues are still there. But, thanks to the Guest factor, they’re marked by a peculiar self-awareness or possibly extreme anti-self-awareness that, ultimately—baby flames aside—leaves the whole family cold.
“This baby is going to burn itself down,” Gwen says.
“We have encountered a major obstacle to happiness,” Jed says.
“Our domestic issues are their own separate animal,” Gwen says.
“I can’t touch the thing. It hurts too much. Both my arms, and my insides,” Jed says.
“It hurts me that the ultimate object of our affection hurts you,” Gwen says.
“It hurts me that the ultimate object of our affection hurts me and therefore hurts you,” Jed says.
“We are in a closed loop,” Gwen says.
“I wonder if we could just weep,” Jed says.
“I can’t believe a hot baby turned us cold,” Gwen says. “We could call it Parents in Tears,” Jed says.
“I guess we could,” Gwen says.
So that kind of thing goes on for a while, and then, the movie has to end. And it does so with Jed and Gwen turning to ice sculptures while standing within inches of their unnamed burning baby. And the camera zooms in. And you see the heat flames reflecting off the glassy ice.
And you wonder how we got to a point where this was possible.
Critically Acclaimed Page 14