Hollywood Satire

I really liked Hollywood Shuffle as someone who is moving to L.A with the intent to break into making films not as an actor but from a production standpoint, I really understood Bobby's trepidation. I think the film did a great job of illustrating the issues that Hollywood films sometimes use as tropes especially the matter of race and satire. The reading makes several good points on how satire is a double edged weapon that both points up the absurdity of an outsiders prejudice but also casts a light on the insiders as well. What came to mind immediately was the Chapelle Show and the moral jam Dave Chapelle found himself in, in the mid 00's. Dave halted the show because he felt he couldn't tell if he was enforcing or dismantling racial stereotypes with his satire. I think satire is tough thing because it is audience dependent, take for example Spinal Tap a total satire of heavy metal but not everyone caught on immediately thinking Reiner just followed around a crap band.

Hollywood Shuffle is interesting because it's satire is two fold. We are aware of the film we are watching there is no dip into subjective time, the movie is very filmic with it's jarring asides to dreams and fantasies. We see things as Bobby would, and in my opinion it helps the film overall, the film points out the absurdity of black stereotypes not only in film but in reality. But we are really watching two movies, Hollywood Shuffle and the Blaxploitation film Bobby is cast in. It is here on two "screens" that the satire gels. The film reveals it's mechanisms to us in the studio and Bobby sees that it's all illusory bullshit. What caught my eye was the scene in the studio when Bobby watches the two white actors mid scene. His expression is not one of jealousy but of pity, he is seeing that maybe it's not all it's cracked up to be, that those other actors are suckers.

The reading asks about true representation of the black experience. I think there is a simple answer in terms of the Hollywood film. No one is represented in a true way, these films for the most part are not concerned with exploring the human experience but elevating it to hyperbole, Hollywood seeks to embellish for dramatic effect. Hollywood is out for money and if that means stereotyping they will do it all day every day. Is this right? No it's not but it puts asses in seats and that's what is insidious about mainstream movie, they simply do not care and the average movie goer loves it. For example and I know this is a dead horse but Transformers 2, Skids and Mudflap are two smaller Autobots who besides being annoying ( like the rest of the movie) are incredibly racist characters. The bots speak incomprehensibly fast jive and behave like wannabe thugs.

Hollywood Shuffle is a great movie and an enlightening one if you are smart enough to catch on. Does it solve the problems with how Hollywood uses it's images in terms of African Americans? No but it does shed light on issues like racial typecasting. In terms of it's ending I think it's a sad ending, Bobby loses his dream, perhaps he could have broken away from stereotypical roles had stayed but instead hel oses his dream and could very well go postal.

The Nam

I really liked Platoon. I had only ever seen pieces of it on T.V and I like Oliver Stone. However my favorite Vietnam War movie is definitely Apocalypse Now, Platoon like the reading says is closer to the reality of war. I love the Coppola film but it is a stylized impressionistic work, I think Apocalypse Now is how people of my generation see the Vietnam War. A war characterized by madness and claustrophobia paired with drugs and brutality.

I didn't know that stone himself was a Vietnam Vet but now it makes total sense. I agree with the reading's analysis of how Stone portrayed insane moral conundrums like the village scene. Vietnam was a terrible demonstration of the military's inability to deal with an insurgent force that was highly organized, uniformless soldiers moving within civilian populaces made identification of the enemy impossible. The panic and stress that Stone conveys in that scene is amazing and could only be drawn from real life experience. Stone was unafraid to show soldiers covered in bugs and snakes, he painted an accurate depiction of life in the jungle.

It was fun having never seen the opening of the film to see Willem Defoe paired with Christ imagery. Seeing Elias carrying his M60 like a cross all back lit was really weird. I remember shouting out "Christ imagery!" and for once I was right. The juxtaposition of Defoe and Berenger was really interesting. Berenger was a brutal barbarian akin to someone Kurtz from Apocalypse Now would've recruited. He had the "will" to win the war, through any means necessary. Defoe however was still guided by a kinder code of conduct, that probably saved his soul but not him.

Between Apocalypse Now and Platoon there seems to be a common theme of the primal warrior, chest pounding,trophy taking and drugs. This always interested me, it seems like admission of war's nature as the reading calls it "The ultimate male romance." Much like how Marlowe in Heart of Darkness goes into the jungle and sees human nature in nature and how Kurtz embraces it the soldiers of Vietnam war films remind me of unwilling children put into a place where anything goes and like Bunny says "you only gotta worry about dying..." It's interesting how the atmosphere of the jungle brings out images of primordial living and dying. Vietnam movies feel like a war was being fought out of time, set in a savage landscape unhindered by human contact but fought with high tech weapons, it borders on science fiction.

Bug Hunt

                                  (Drone)
I cannot express how much I love the Alien films and their extended universe. Ridley Scott's original masterpiece and Cameron's fantastic follow up put me on the path to becoming a filmmaker myself. I like to think of myself as a hardcore fan of the Xenomorph as one our culture's most reticent movie monsters. I found the discussion on the motivations and gender of the creatures interesting, however the debate on the gender of Xenos is a flawed one. The Xenomorph behaves much in the same manner as the ant, a hive mentality serving that hive's queen. A little background on the morphology of the Xenomorph helps to explain their "gender." Xenomorph's do not follow human ideas of gender, they are insectile and again like ants a drone (pictured above) is the worker and most common of Xenos. Given enough time a drone will evolve into a queen in order to start a hive. A queen is the only Xeno capable of having and using sex organs. By our standards it would be considered female, they are however constructed to be sexual and to evoke uncomfortable notions of sex from their design by H.R. Giger and their method of reproduction being rape. I think it was interesting how we as an audience sought to put these creatures in our terms of gender when in many ways they supersede our terminology.

These things are inconsequential to the Xenomorph however, they have one drive, one instinct and that is to multiply, forcibly. When Ripley enters the egg chamber and the queen wards off it's Praetorians ( egg chamber guards) it does so instinctually not out of any empathy or concern for her young, When the eggs burn it shrieks because it shares a telepathic and pheremonal bond with all of her brood. The Queen is aware of every being in it's domain. Had Ripley not attacked the eggs she would have been allowed to leave the chamber but would be swarmed by warriors and drones, the lesser Xenomorphs would try to capture and cocoon Newt and Ripley for impregnation via facehugger. Xenomorphs do not want to kill they want to capture, they do not eat people or anything for that matter and do not require air, heat or any other basic tenants for life, blowing them out airlocks is a good solution but not always a fatal one.

The Xenomorph is a force of nature, sometimes called "Destroying Angels" or "Black Cancers" they are a balancing force supposedly created by the Engineers who seed life across star systems. When their creations (humans) grow to powerful the Xenomorph is introduced to that society and wipes it out so the Engineers begin again.

However Ripley as a symbol of the Female action hero is undeniably important. Lt. Ellen Ripley is my favorite movie character and for good reason she is awesome. I disagree with the reading's notion that characters like Sarah Connor and Ripley are men in drag or that their ability to fight and defend themselves somehow invalidates their womanhood. Assuming for a moment that these characters were real and found themselves in the positions they do, would any person not fight back or do all they could to prepare for facing down threats to their existence? I don't think being "Badass" invalidates them or makes them facades. I think the issue comes from our preception of what a hero is. I think Ripley acts heroically to save an innocent life from a terrible fate. Regardless of her gender or sex she does whats necessary, no one walks into a Xeno hive armed with "Harsh Language" you go in with big guns. Historically I can understand why Ripley would confuse people. I think she breaks from Rambo in many ways, she feels far more human than the lumbering mush mouthed Rambo, Ripley can solve problems without murdering a bunch of people or using big guns, see Alien. Also I don't read Ripley as a sexualized or exploited character I take her at face value, a hero facing down an implacable natural force. Besides wearing underwear in a few scenes there isn't much in terms of exploitation a far cry from say Transformers 2.


(Subtle)

Ultimately I think these movies are great examples of not only strong female characters but great films in general. People will look at these characters however they like and see what they want to see, I see a human being fighting for survival while trying to save everyone she can from a terrible fate. The eroticism of hardware and violence in Aliens is no stand up fight it's a bug hunt.

A Dark Wilderness

Blue Velvet is the second David Lynch film I have seen, the first being Eraserhead. I really enjoyed Blue Velvet as far as one can say they "enjoyed" a Lynch movie. What I like most about his style and the reading really exemplified this was Lynch's Subverted Eden. I love seeing the skin of suburban American living peeled back to show it's rotten musculature. As a jaded suburbanite, I find this exploration of what happens after dark in our safe neighborhoods fascinating.

The Post-Modernity of the film really shines thorough with it's it's anachronistic setting, a kind of 80's/50's melange. Frank Booth plays a great 1950's high school bully who has hit middle age and fallen down an ether soaked rabbit hole. He reminded me of Biff from Back To The Future or the bully from IT. Lynch plays up the 50's incredibly, the joyriding in big American cars while playing with switchblades and weird lounge jazz. But this isn't the fifties, because how we see the fifties is completely constructed from movies and shows. I couldn't for the life of me give you an accurate representation of life in that decade, it's all been revised by Beaver and Greasers. Lynch is presenting us with a dream of what might have been had the world been like those representations of the 50's in actuality. A world where the Hardy Boys get pulled down into a dirty world of sadomasochism, where representations of idyllic youth screw.

Blue Velvet is a cynical journey into the heart of American repression and greed. Jeffery is a good boy, probably an eagle scout, but he wants to know about the world he can't have. Before we know it Jeffery is playing boy detective in his mind but his body belongs to a dark wilderness. The garden of Eden flips at night into an overgrown jungle, filled with predators and truer human beings that Jeffery must learn to cope with as he is the Pinocchio in the situation.

The film expresses duality through illusion. The reading talks about that art's truth lies in it's illusory nature. I believe Lynch subverts that view by presenting his audience with a paradox. The truth is a lie. Nothing in the film is real, it's all a dream, a reference twisted into a dark psycho sexual reflection. Even the heavy handed opening proclaiming the virtue of America, all I could think about were dispossessed suicidal housewives and Silent Spring. Lynch is playing to our disillusionment with what we are sold as the "chosen people."