Nolan’s trauma boys
In the wake of some insightful comments by two smart young women regarding INCEPTION I have started thinking about the entire corpus of Nolan films.
And what an odd group it is.
I deeply disliked MEMENTO, which seemed both unpleasant and pretentious, as well as being needlessly difficult to follow. The tattooing of the male body was a strange, unsexual, un-beautiful visual experience whose meaning, I did not – at the time—understand.
But I loved BATMAN BEGINS. BB does perhaps one of the best jobs ever in contemporary cinema in framing and expressing the experience, performance, and working through of trauma. We get the whole trauma megillah, as it were: the imagery of falling into a dark pit to be attacked by the small dark, biting things that scare us most, the primal scene-esque murder of the parents, and the evil psychiatrist who brings a drug-induced version of the trauma back on just when you least expect it. The film is filled with scary father figures, who bedevil the hero, as though he lived in a hall of mirrors; everywhere he looks, he sees the traumatic loss of the parents, and his fall into the pit somehow re-enacted. And he is continually having to confront and fight in the middle of the traumatic experience. He never has the time and space to recover.
As a PTSD survivor, I can tell you that trauma really does work like this. Trauma triggers are everywhere, and for the trauma survivor, the world is filled with archetypes who reenact over and over again the primal terrors and humiliations which you are desperately trying to overcome. In a way, the trauma survivor is always taking the awful practical test in that scary ninja school in Bhutan, or wherever it is supposed to be from BB. BATMAN BEGINS also presents a compelling version of the difficulties of working-through to traumatic recovery, and the temptation to just reenact, not deal with. Consequently, I appreciated the highlighting of the acting-out portion of traumatic recovery. “I become what I fear,” says Batman at one point. Most trauma survivors do. Because, in a terrible way, trauma is always with us. We must always ask the eternal Batman’s Father question “why do we fall?” And we must always find in ourselves the inner doctor-parent who heals us, and gets us back up on our feet to try again.
DARK KNIGHT fascinated me, primarily because of the performance of the late Heath Ledger. But my goodness, what an odd, almost—but-not-quite drag, performance of masculinity THAT is. But what is being said in that film actually? David Denby may be right when he talks about the film as a disturbing celebration of terror for the purposes of commodification.
He notes “The Dark Knight” has been made in a time of terror, but it’s not fighting terror; it’s embracing and unleashing it—while making sure, with proper calculation, to set up the next installment of the corporate franchise."
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/07/21/080721crci_cinema_denby#ixzz0v1neAgde
So where does all this trauma talk leave us? Taken together, the films display traumatized heroes whose woundedness is marked by the erasure of sexuality, replacing sexual longing/activity with bats, gizmos, whirling tops, machines, and capers. This fact does not make the films less interesting, but it does – and here I think I agree with my female cohorts -- point to their limitation – the ways in which they don’t seem to “know “what it is they are saying. Perhaps this is why BATMAN BEGINS remains my favorite. A story about trauma and masculinity, it knows what the story is about, and it recognizes – in a way the other films don’t – the price of being a person who would heal a wounded world, all the while teetering on the brink of the traumatic abyss.
On Plates
Texasware
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
dreaming
Christopher Nolan’s Life is a Dream
It continues to amaze me how the literature of the past enhances our appreciation of the cultural work of the present, and how the conversation between the contemporary and the historical can shed light on the ways in which we still struggle to understand ourselves, our nature, and our possibility.
Here is a case in point:
In Calderón’s immensely strange Renaissance play, an abused and abusive Prince gains and loses everything he had dreamed of: wealth, power, and revenge. Returned to the terrible dungeon in which he has – unfairly – been forced to spend the majority of his life, Segismundo delivers one of the most haunting monologues of the world theater:
I dream that I am in here
with these chains and prisons burdened
yet I dreamt that I in other,
more fulsome state saw myself.
What is life? A frantic moment,
What is life? But an illusion,
but a shadow, but a fiction,
and the greatest good is small:
for life is all but a dream
and dreams are just that, they're dreams.
(translation: http://copinapitli.blogspot.com/2006/08/segismundos-monologue.html)
At this moment Segismundo faces an impossible choice, worthy of the French Existentialists. Why do right, if it is impossible to know what reality is and if what you do even matters? Segismundo’s answer is do choose to do what he thinks is moral, regardless of whether his experience is real or imagined.
Christopher Nolan’s film INCEPTION takes up these Calderónian questions, and for me the film is at its most effective when it presses this issue of ethics, and shows us characters making increasingly complicated choices– from inside the dreamscape. Fans of Life is A Dream will recognize the traumatized billionaire son who remains determined to penetrate to the secret of the safe – which is in fact his own imagination – and to receive the blessing of an imagined father. These are the topics of Calderón’s play, which also features an indifferent abandoning patriarch, whom the son must somehow forgive in order to become his own person. The Machiavellian corporate mogul who would manipulate the minds of others receives the curse – or is it a gift? – of living the life he dreads. Dreams are instructive – in often terrifying ways. Finally, the problematic hero, a suspected killer (also like Segismundo) must choose whether to descend ever deeper realms of dreaming to rescue his future, himself, and the man who promises to save him.
Does Nolan’s hero win? The end of the film is as ambiguous as Calderón’s play, wherein Segismundo attains the throne and his inheritance, but remains a haunted figure – uncertain, still, whether he dreams or wakes.
Nolan’s contemporary action-packed fantasy in tandem with Calderón’s ethereal drama from Golden Age Spain remind us that fiction provides us with a powerful imaginary tool whereby we confront the fictive quality of our own lives, and the unexpected truths those existences may contain.
It continues to amaze me how the literature of the past enhances our appreciation of the cultural work of the present, and how the conversation between the contemporary and the historical can shed light on the ways in which we still struggle to understand ourselves, our nature, and our possibility.
Here is a case in point:
In Calderón’s immensely strange Renaissance play, an abused and abusive Prince gains and loses everything he had dreamed of: wealth, power, and revenge. Returned to the terrible dungeon in which he has – unfairly – been forced to spend the majority of his life, Segismundo delivers one of the most haunting monologues of the world theater:
I dream that I am in here
with these chains and prisons burdened
yet I dreamt that I in other,
more fulsome state saw myself.
What is life? A frantic moment,
What is life? But an illusion,
but a shadow, but a fiction,
and the greatest good is small:
for life is all but a dream
and dreams are just that, they're dreams.
(translation: http://copinapitli.blogspot.com/2006/08/segismundos-monologue.html)
At this moment Segismundo faces an impossible choice, worthy of the French Existentialists. Why do right, if it is impossible to know what reality is and if what you do even matters? Segismundo’s answer is do choose to do what he thinks is moral, regardless of whether his experience is real or imagined.
Christopher Nolan’s film INCEPTION takes up these Calderónian questions, and for me the film is at its most effective when it presses this issue of ethics, and shows us characters making increasingly complicated choices– from inside the dreamscape. Fans of Life is A Dream will recognize the traumatized billionaire son who remains determined to penetrate to the secret of the safe – which is in fact his own imagination – and to receive the blessing of an imagined father. These are the topics of Calderón’s play, which also features an indifferent abandoning patriarch, whom the son must somehow forgive in order to become his own person. The Machiavellian corporate mogul who would manipulate the minds of others receives the curse – or is it a gift? – of living the life he dreads. Dreams are instructive – in often terrifying ways. Finally, the problematic hero, a suspected killer (also like Segismundo) must choose whether to descend ever deeper realms of dreaming to rescue his future, himself, and the man who promises to save him.
Does Nolan’s hero win? The end of the film is as ambiguous as Calderón’s play, wherein Segismundo attains the throne and his inheritance, but remains a haunted figure – uncertain, still, whether he dreams or wakes.
Nolan’s contemporary action-packed fantasy in tandem with Calderón’s ethereal drama from Golden Age Spain remind us that fiction provides us with a powerful imaginary tool whereby we confront the fictive quality of our own lives, and the unexpected truths those existences may contain.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
REVEVOLUTION
Rev the Evolution
Watching the John Adams HBO special for the second time, I am reminded of reading the book on which the special is based. I am not a lover of biography, and I often find American history boring. But John Adams and Abigail Adams are fascinating figures to me, and I resonate with their passions and ideas.
Adams was passionate on the subject of education, and he envisioned exceptional schools and universities to educate an enlightened populace of free people. Abigail Adams was a feminist, and absolutely abhorred the practice of slavery. Together, as intellectuals, parents, political activists, and – not least – farmers, they provide a stirring example of what women and men should hope for in the United States. They respected the earth because they worked it; they believed in sexual equality and prosperity and safety for all people living in the US.
Earlier today I read a summary of Tea Party politics, and I just shook my head in disbelief at its misguided ideas. Not that I do not understand a politically conservative point of view. My parents were both dedicated Republicans, and my father was extremely politically conservative. A passionate hater of the New Deal and of any form of liberalism, he voted (and so did my mom) for Reagan, Nixon, and Bush Senior. At the same time, my parents were fervently pro-abortion, pro-affirmative action, and pro legalizing drugs as well as prostitution.
At the end of his life, my Republican father got to know the head of Earth Watch, and concluded that we had to reduce our reliance on foreign oil, and adhere to a strict plan of ecology. “Let’s face it,” he said. “The weather is changing. We can’t go on like we are going. We just CAN’T.” And he was appalled by the cost of heath care, and the ways in which the elderly and differently-abled were cast aside by a society, which he said, was governed increasingly “by plain old greed.”
As BP workers come in to work side by side with volunteers still rebuilding from Katrina, it seems very obvious that my Republican parents (one of whom was a devout Christian, the other of whom was a devout Atheist) got what was important in our turn of the century political situation. They were not heroes, like the Adams's, but they shared with the Adams's a certain common sense that I admire and that we could certainly use as we consider our lives as Americans in 2010.
Here’s to revving our evolution, as we turn to the practicalities of helping our people get educated, get healthy, get jobs, get equal treatment and equal opportunity, and get to cultivate, protect, and enjoy the sublime ecosystem of our planet.
Happy 4th of July everyone!
Watching the John Adams HBO special for the second time, I am reminded of reading the book on which the special is based. I am not a lover of biography, and I often find American history boring. But John Adams and Abigail Adams are fascinating figures to me, and I resonate with their passions and ideas.
Adams was passionate on the subject of education, and he envisioned exceptional schools and universities to educate an enlightened populace of free people. Abigail Adams was a feminist, and absolutely abhorred the practice of slavery. Together, as intellectuals, parents, political activists, and – not least – farmers, they provide a stirring example of what women and men should hope for in the United States. They respected the earth because they worked it; they believed in sexual equality and prosperity and safety for all people living in the US.
Earlier today I read a summary of Tea Party politics, and I just shook my head in disbelief at its misguided ideas. Not that I do not understand a politically conservative point of view. My parents were both dedicated Republicans, and my father was extremely politically conservative. A passionate hater of the New Deal and of any form of liberalism, he voted (and so did my mom) for Reagan, Nixon, and Bush Senior. At the same time, my parents were fervently pro-abortion, pro-affirmative action, and pro legalizing drugs as well as prostitution.
At the end of his life, my Republican father got to know the head of Earth Watch, and concluded that we had to reduce our reliance on foreign oil, and adhere to a strict plan of ecology. “Let’s face it,” he said. “The weather is changing. We can’t go on like we are going. We just CAN’T.” And he was appalled by the cost of heath care, and the ways in which the elderly and differently-abled were cast aside by a society, which he said, was governed increasingly “by plain old greed.”
As BP workers come in to work side by side with volunteers still rebuilding from Katrina, it seems very obvious that my Republican parents (one of whom was a devout Christian, the other of whom was a devout Atheist) got what was important in our turn of the century political situation. They were not heroes, like the Adams's, but they shared with the Adams's a certain common sense that I admire and that we could certainly use as we consider our lives as Americans in 2010.
Here’s to revving our evolution, as we turn to the practicalities of helping our people get educated, get healthy, get jobs, get equal treatment and equal opportunity, and get to cultivate, protect, and enjoy the sublime ecosystem of our planet.
Happy 4th of July everyone!
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