Bombshells (Blonde)

How was Barbenheimer for you? Who survived this five-hour incongruous double-bill? I finished work and rushed to the cinema to catch Oppenheimer at 5 and then Barbie at 8.50, leaving just enough time for a glugged glass of white wine in between to reverse my aesthetic aerial. My daughter was in another city watching at the same time the same films the other way round, which she told me was the correct order (she is a student of film). 

 

The first thing to say is that to make a comparison between a knowingly ironic take on a girl’s doll’s plastic world and the manic preparations for and detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki does not at first blush look easy. When I was a student a friend and I used to read novels against each other: I read aloud a page of Jane Austen’s Persuasion and she read aloud a page of D. H. Lawrence’s Women In Love and so on. After a while strange kinships and striking disparities insinuated their way into ones brain. This was also a time (I was a young man) when if someone mentioned Barbie I pretended they were referring to Klaus Barbie the Gestapo killer of Lyon. (It didn’t get a laugh then either.) Anyway, here goes.

 

Barbie (Margot Robbie) is living a life of perfection in Barbie Land: she is perfection, each day is wonderful and everyone loves her: ‘today is perfect, just like yesterday and just like tomorrow’. The himbo Ken (Ryan Gosling) wakes each day and waits to be noticed by Barbie. He is purely an objectified, emasculated appendage hanging on for his longed-for, validating gaze. She’s a Barbie girl in a Barbie Land, life is plastic: it’s fantastic. This is a fantasy world where pink goes with everything. However the two travel from this parody Garden of Matriarchal Eden to the real world (also known as: Venice Beach, Los Angeles) where Barbie discovers death, existentialism, tears, pain, anxiety, the condemnation by others, sadness, worthlessness, anger, loneliness and cellulite. Ken discovers – in a human world made for men – self-confidence, admiration, the ego-boost that comes from women’s desire for him, he is amazed at the respect he is being shown, and the importance he feels. He dresses as a cowboy and declares his love for patriarchy. Barbie meanwhile, with the help of others, has to struggle with her existential crisis, the board members of Mattel, the FBI and to combat the growing tendency of male dominance and female submission brought – by the treacherous Ken – back to ruin paradise. Today and yesterday may be perfect in Barbie Land, but tomorrow looks like gender trouble.

 

Oppenheimer also has a double-world structure. The place of (intellectual) perfection is called Los Alamos, New Mexico. Here quantum scientists and theoretical physicists enjoy complete control over their studies, laboratories and experiments, lecture to each other, are bank-rolled by the US government with a billion dollars, raise few ethical questions and have a battery of soldiers to keep everybody else out. J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is living here a perfect life where everybody loves him and spends time congratulating and clapping and lionising him. This is a fantasy world of clever physicists in clover. Today and yesterday may be perfect in Los Alamos-Land, but tomorrow looks like genocide.

 

The world is made of two things: matter (atoms) and language (stories). Christopher Nolan shows us that both can be split. His non-linear story is divided into Fusion (filmed in colour) and Fission (filmed in black and white). And here is where the film – otherwise visually stunning and superbly acted and shot with striking close-ups – falters. He correctly realises that to end a movie that is concerned with the considerable scientific achievement of splitting the atom with the two bombs being dropped on Japanese cities in August 1945 would be – to say the least – an utterly crass climax. So instead this event occurs two hours into the film, leaving the last (black and white) hour for two 1950s governmental hearings in Washington. In the first Oppenheimer is investigated to decide whether his security clearance is to be revoked. In the second a man called Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jnr.) is investigated to decide whether his cabinet appointment as Secretary of Commerce is to be confirmed. Both hearings are given, by Nolan, a simultaneous dramatic filmic crescendo so that an alternative final climax to the movie can be reached. This has the absurd (artistic) effect of making the dropping of two nuclear bombs the subject matter for negligible findings of two minor governmental tribunals.

 

The protagonists of Oppenheimer are earnest self-regarding men, with a high degree of portentous self-interest, being treated with great importance by the screenwriter, fighting hard in the drama on behalf of their ego, vanity and reputation. The two one-dimensional female characters Kitty Puening and Jean Tatlock played – excellently – by Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh are adjuncts of their man, living for him and for his regard of them. This is exactly the attitude – in reverse – that Barbie is satirising and seeking to combat. Barbie and Ken confront awkward ethical questions about self, death, change, growth, free will, relationships to others, body-image and imperfection. Oppenheimer has little ethical content and instead has men exchanging facts and making strident assertions of finality loudly at each other in stuffy rooms.

 

One word about the music. Nolan’s soundtrack is obtrusive with the goal of eliciting emotion from the audience. Greta Gerwig’s tongue-in-cheek, punk-ethos, exuberant, wacky, slick soundtrack – put together with Mark Ronson – includes Ice Spice, Nicky Minaj, Billie Eilish, Pink Pantheress, Khalid, Sam Smith and Dua Lipa, and is an ironic, mad-cap, clever counter-point to the ideas in her film. There is a late false step in Barbie as a well-meaning, hyperbolic speech from Gloria (America Ferrera) tells not shows, and the storyline gets a little lost.

 

In the end Ken weeps and Barbie meets her maker. In Oppenheimer Nolan neither dramatises, nor asks any questions about, those who because of the Manhattan Project met their’s. Give me serious bubblegum comedy over trivial and earnest hubris every time. Five hours of a Friday evening well spent.

 

Barbie is artistically and philosophically the better film.

 

 

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang the forgotten Bond film?

Dry martinis, bikini-clad girls and post-war espionage seem oceans away from Me Ol’ Bamboo, Caractacus Potts and the child catcher. But if we peer past the Richard M. and Richard B. Sherman songs, and the perky choreography, can the case be made that Dick Van Dyke was 007?

Ian Fleming wrote his children’s story during a late sequence of Bond novels – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963), You Only Live Twice (1964), Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car (1965), The Man With the Golden Gun (1965) and Octopussy (1966) – before he died in 1966. Cubby Broccoli and Harry Sultzman purchased the rights to Fleming’s literary works in 1961 and set up Eon Productions to make the films. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was filmed in 1967 by the same Bond team from Eon at Pinewood Studies and released through United Artists. It was given the full Bond treatment: the director Ken Hughes had directed Casino Royal; the screenwriter Roald Dahl had written the script for You Only Live Twice; Ken Adams the designer of the car Chitty, was the designer of Dr No’s headquarters; Vic Armstorng was the stuntman for both Sean Connery and Dick Van Dyke; Richard Maibaum developed the script (after Dahl) as he was to do for a dozen Bond films.

Carnival or Lent?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Fight Between Carnival and Lent in 1559. A busy panoramic scene, the main action takes place in the foreground of a town square. The picture broadly breaks into two halves (imagine a vertical line running top to bottom). Just left of centre is the personification of Carnival corpulent in red trousers on a barrel brandishing a pig’s head skewered on a spit. Just right of centre is the personification of Lent gaunt and lean on a blue chair blue holding a paddle with two fish. They appear to be engaging in a joust.

On Borat

Members of a group or nation become trapped within their own cultural worldview unless they find a way to transcend their own discourse. But it is fiendishly difficult to be both inside a situation and transcend it. Satire is an attempt to enable those locked into group-think to step outside themselves and imagine how their culture looks from a distanced vantage point. This is comedy that finds detachment from a subject and provides a viewpoint as if from the outside. Satire tricks us into seeing familiar things as if for the first time. It is a means by which a culture from the inside gets outside its own perspective.

Step forward Borat.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

During the Covid-19 lockdown my family each evening has been watching a film together. Last week included One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), inspiring me to re-read the novel it was based on, published in 1962, and led to this blogpost.

One flew east, one flew west, One flew over the cuckoo’s nest

Cuckoos have a practice of laying an egg in another bird’s nest. The newly hatched cuckoo chick throws out the other eggs and live chicks and by this act of displacement asserts power and control. Cuckoo’s nest is slang for the madhouse, and female genitalia.

Cold Comfort Farm

Flora Poste, the heroine of Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932), is a bright, flippant, unsentimental, bossy, manipulative, brisk young woman who descends upon a nest of her rustic cousins at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex. The Starkadders are unkempt, amorous, ebullient, uneducated, temperamental wild, poetical, beautiful, territorial, and brutish. They say things like:

Joker (2019)

 

Warning: This post contains spoilers about the film

 

Smile though your heart is aching,

Smile even though it’s breaking,

When there are clouds in the sky, you’ll get by

If you smile through your fear and sorrow

Smile and maybe tomorrow

You’ll see the sun come shining through,

Woman in the Dunes

In the 1964 film Woman in the Dunes a man spends seven years trapped in a sand pit. That summary and the film’s running time of two hours and twenty minutes may put some viewers off, but that would be a mistake. This is a beautiful film with a mesmerising minimalist soundtrack, directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, that became a Japanese New Wave classic. Andrei Tarkovsky included it in his list of the best ten films ever made. Like Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel the premise may be balmy, but the consequences that flow from it takes us to the heart of what it means to be human.

On Samuel Beckett

Hamm: The whole thing is comical, I grant you that.

Beckett’s play Endgame (1957) has no story, no plot development, is set in an depleted world of four characters confined to a room with two small windows out of which, because they are too high, it is impossible to see. Hamm is blind, paralytic, cannot stand and in constant physical pain. Nagg and Nell have no legs and are confined to dustbins; they indicate a desire to kiss and touch each other (they are married) but their bins are too far apart for that. Clov can walk and so is keeping the others alive but he is unable to sit down. Even the toy dog lacks a leg. The only dramatic tension comes from Hamm’s insistence that Clov leave him alone while making his exit impossible, and Clov’s repeated failed attempts to leave Hamm. Hamm provides Clov’s food and shelter and Clov stands in for Hamm’s legs and eyesight, but each is antagonistic. They are locked together by an adversarial dependence.

On P. G. Wodehouse

In P. G. Wodehouse’s comic world language is king. He delights with a verbal abundance of fantastical specificity. Take some of his fluid, hyperbolic similes:

She looked like a tomato struggling for self expression.
He withered like an electric fan.
He wilted like a salted snail.
She looked like an aunt who had just bitten into a bad oyster.
He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into mud.
He looked like a sheep with a secret sorrow.