Shutter Island: Dreams and Delusions

            In his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes, “Our dreams prove that to imagine – to dream about things that have not happened – is among mankind’s deepest needs.” (59).  A defining feature of films noir, Marin Scorsese plays with this notion of dreams and the oneiric in Shutter Island in twofold ways: 1) in Teddy Daniels’ (or Andrew Laeddis; I will stick with Teddy for the sake of continuity) sleeping dreams and 2) in Teddy’s waking delusions.  Similarly to other postmodern noirs that provoke a certain self-reflexivity and active participation in their audiences i.e. Fargo and humor and Memento and memory, Shutter Island forces its audience to ignore the underlying truth and see its world through Teddy’s delusions. 

            One way Scorsese engages with the concept of dreams is in the form Teddy Daniel’s sleeping dreams.  Freudianism is another defining characteristic of films noir and Scorsese unabashedly makes reference to this.  The character Dr. Jeremiah Naehring is an obvious allusion to Freud with his hard German accent, round glasses, and propensity to wax psychological by talking about things such as “defense mechanisms.”  Furthermore, Dr. Naehring provides his own riff of dream interpretation as he is pinned against the wall by Teddy: “Did you know that the word ‘trauma’ comes from the Greek for ‘wound’? Hm? And what is the German word for ‘dream’? Traum. Ein Traum. Wounds can create monsters, and you, you are wounded, Marshal.”  As a Freudian mouthpiece, Dr. Naerhing draws our attention to Teddy’s dreams that elucidate his “wounds.”

            Teddy often dreams about the Dachau concentration camp melded with dreams about his wife, his daughter, fire, and water.  Eventually, we learn that these dreams are manifestations of Teddy’s repressed past in which his denial of his wife’s festering insanity lead resulted in her drowning their three children and his subsequent murder of her – the reason why Teddy is in Ashecliffe mental hospital.  This latent truth is reflected by his wife’s perpetual appearance as wet and her warnings against Laeddis.  She is ultimately the symbol of his repression. 

            Teddy also sees his wife and daughter in his waking delusions or hallucinations.  He essentially imagines a reality to remove himself from his trauma, reverberating what Kundera calls one of “mankind’s greatest needs.”  In an analysis of Shutter Island, Vic Holtreman of Screenrant.com points out that “Fire is a symbol of Andrew/Teddy’s insanity.”  To add to that statement, Teddy has issues with light in general; the symbolism of light as representing truth is all too obvious.  Teddy is blinded by light at one point and images of his wife are constantly juxtaposed with fire.  For instance, as Teddy speaks with George Noyce he lights match after match while George is blatantly telling him the truth about the grand role-playing game by saying, “This is a game. All of this is for you. You’re not investigating anything. You’re a fucking rat in a maze. “  Still, he construes this information to be congruent with his fantasy and hallucinates seeing and hearing his wife.  Furthermore, he sees his wife and daughter as the car explodes and fire envelops the two, though they appear unscathed.

            In conclusion, whereas Christopher Nolan manipulates his audience’s memory by complicating the narrative structure of Memento, Martin Scorsese uses dreams and delusions to force his audience into the same confusion as Teddy Daniels in Shutter Island.  While watching the film we carry the same dubiousness about the motivations of Ashcecliffe and its staff as Teddy does.  However, the certainty of the film’s conclusion separates Shutter Island from other postmodern noirs like Fargo and Memento.      

Fargo: What Is Familiar Is Most Unfamiliar

One of film noir’s dominant characteristics is the transmutation of the familiar and comfortable into the wrenching and vulgar.  In Shadow of a Doubt Alfred Hitchcock transforms the lofty “Merry Widow Waltz” into a whirling psychosis.  So too in Blue Velvet David Lynch morphs simple pop songs into odes to insanity.  In this tradition, the Cohen Brothers challenge our accepted notions of normality with their film Fargo.  The audience watches a police officer in her third trimester unravel the grim reality of a debt-ridden, cowardly husband who commissioned the kidnapping of his wife, of which said plan goes horribly wrong and results in multiple murders.  Yet, even though this is such a disturbing plot, the audience can hardly keep from laughing throughout the film.  By making the audience cackle at this morbid depiction of a “true story” (which is as suspect as one of Jerry Lundegaard’s lines) the Cohen Brother’s achieve the task of contorting not just the film’s character’s sanity, but the audience’s emotional stability as well.

The first way in which the Cohen Brother’s invite the audience to laugh is through the setting, specifically Minneapolis, Brainerd, and Fargo, but more generally the American Midwest.  By highlighting the characters’ “Minnesota Nice” accents almost every line of the movie sounds perky and genuine.  However, in a way similar to Alan Pakula’s Klute, the audience is confronted with a disparity in the visual and aural.  Fargo’s visual experience is one where we see a man’s face mutilated by a shot from a revolver, a man jamming axed human body parts into a wood chipper, a police officer shot through the top of the head which sprays blood all over another character, and sever other gory and gruesome deaths, all of which are made even more dismal by the isolating whiteness surrounding them.  Still, at the same time we hear chipper voices remark that Steve Bushemi’s character is “funny looking in a general sort of way” and that “There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day” – the quintessential quaint moral of the story.

Secondly, the Cohen Brother’s also depart from our expectations of a film noir by playing with our understanding of character roles.  Instead of a weak-male protagonist, we have a weak-male antagonist, who is surrounded by an abundance of other inadequate and inept male characters.  Conversely, the film’s protagonist is the lone investigator, rogue-copesque Marge Gunderson.  Marge’s difference from traditional film noir character types is amplified by the fact that she is pregnant (females are never motherly in film noir) and also by the subservient and impotent males who make up the rest of the film.  Marge is profoundly likeable as she is a sweet, brilliant detective who always handles sensitive situations with the right amount of touch and handles serious situations with a heavy hand.  Again, this is the Cohen Brother’s way of removing the audience from their anticipated comfort even in a film genre this is inherently uncomfortable.

Ultimately, Fargo is so effective in its endeavor to corrupt its audience because it not only allows the audience to laugh at such a disturbing story, but it invites them to laugh.  At first glance, Fargo seems to be a comedic depiction of a tragic story which is artful in itself.  However, it is the second glance where one realizes what he or she was just convinced of laughing at for an hour and thirty-eight minutes that is truly unsettling.

Blue Velvet: The Disturbing Marriage of Sex and Violence

David Lynch throws his audience into a polarizing, absurd world by hyper stylizing classical noir themes and techniques.  Specifically, in Blue Velvet, Lynch highlights the classical noir themes of sex and violence to produce an utterly jarring watching experience.  Lynch also juxtaposes the ‘normal’, suburban world with the urban realm where anything, no matter how twisted or perverse, can happen.

We are introduced to Jeffery Beaumont as a naïve college student who has returned home to visit his father in the hospital.  After stumbling upon a human ear in a field, Jeffery cannot help but attempt to sate his desire for mystery and secrecy.  In order to do so, Jeffery leaves his suburban sanctuary and enters Dorothy Vallens’ apartment, the symbol of urbanity.  Here, the innocent Jeffery is discovered hiding in the closet as he tries to learn more about the whereabouts of the earless man.  Immediately, Lynch introduces his motif of sex and violence as Dorothy threatens Jeffery with a knife and begins to have sex with him.  However, Frank, who furthers this disturbing relationship of sex and violence, interrupts this encounter.

Frank embodies the marriage of sex and violence; his sex is violent and his violence is sexual.  He beats Dorothy as he rapes her and he puts on lipstick and kisses Jeffery as he beats him.  He even remarks that a love letter from him is a bullet from his gun and that “You receive a love letter from [him], and you’re fucked forever!”  Important to note, Frank’s presence progressively corrupts Jeffery.

As Jeffery has sex with Dorothy, he punches her in the face in the same way as Frank.  He later reflects and cries about this clear similarity, which is later confirmed by Frank.  Before Frank beats Jeffery, he states, “You’re like me.”  It is at this point when the audience is forced to confront the fractured innocence of Jeffery and perhaps themselves as they have taken the same journey.

Nevertheless, we are somewhat consoled at the closing of the film.  Jeffery kills Frank and is in a happy relationship with Sandy.  Also, Dorothy joyfully plays with her son in a park, another symbol of the freeing from the urban setting.  What separates Blue Velvet from other films noir is that even after its relatively positive ending the audience is still left uncomfortable with a lingering memory of what past haunts this future.  Even though Blue Velvet is similar to Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, in that the violent, licentious urbanite corrupts the innocent suburbanite, there is a striking difference between the audience’s feelings at their respective conclusions.  It is the complete marriage of sex and violence that produces this festering doubt and nausea in Blue Velvet, which essentially separates it from classical noir perspectives on the relationship of sex and violence.   

Klute: Vertigo and Terror

           The success of Alan Pakula’s Klute as a neo-noir is only partially due to its narrative; rather, it is Klute’s cinematography that is so captivating and simultaneously nauseating.  Pakula uses long shots, odd zooms and angles, provocative mise-en-scene, and stark transitions; all of which is topped off by menacing sound effects and a stomach-turning score.  Ultimately, the viewer is left alienated and disturbed predominantly by this efficacious cinematography.

            The viewer immediately has a sense for the direction of this film as the first shot of a festive, populated dinner abruptly transitions to the same room, but now it is empty and only occupied by police interrogators.  Then the credits roll with just the eerie sounds of a surveillance tape, playing what seems to be a sexual encounter, to accompany them.  We then meet the voice on the tape: Bree Daniels.

            Pakula introduces Bree similarly to the way an architect uses marsch(sp?) to fluidly guide the individuals in his or her respective building from large to small and vice versa.  However, Pakula uses extreme depictions of large and small to jar the viewer’s perspective rather than comfortably guide it.  First, we find Bree on the streets of Manhattan dwarfed by skyscrapers and immense columns.  Then, we are thrown into Bree’s claustrophobic, baroquely ornamented apartment.  At this point, Pakula introduces the motif of the obtrusive and visceral ringing telephone of which the only sound heard on the other end is breathing.  The petrifying score plays and the camera dreadfully slowly zooms out while we watch Bree sit terrified and alone in her bed. 

Bree Daniels in her ornate apartment. This specific shot echoes elements of classical film noir with its chiaroscuro contrast.

            On top of these more subtle cinematographic efforts which persistently estrange the viewer are the more violently innovative and impressive shots.  In these shots we usually find Peter Kable as the character in focus.  There are two shots of this ilk that are particularly vertiginous and disorienting.  The first is the shot of Peter Kable on the top floor of the Marine Midland Building in Lower Manhattan.  The camera displays Peter Kable gazing out of his dark window down into the city.  The camera then zooms out slightly and thrusts downward revealing his position on the top floor and the mystifying height of the building which he occupies.  The second vertiginous shot is when Peter Kable takes off in his helicopter.  After John Klute informs Kable that he needs $500 to purchase Jane McKenna’s black book, Kable boards his helicopter and menacingly gazes out of its windows.  It appears that the camera was strapped onto the left ski of the helicopter which produces a dizzying view of lower Manhattan in the background.  It appears that as Peter Kable is progressively unveiled as the voyeur and murderer the shots of him grow more and more obscure and disturbing. 

The Marine Midland Building of which Peter Kable stands atop.

The madman takes flight.

                                           

            It is this combination of subtle, consistent cinematography juxtaposed with robust and alarming shots that provide the fruit of this film.  It also turns out to be very appropriate for the story itself which forces a small town detective into “the sin, the glitter, the wickedness” of monolithic Manhattan. 

Kiss Me Deadly: The Film it Truly Desires to Be

One almost expects a sausage pizza pie to randomly arrive in Kiss Me Deadly.  Frankly, this film desires to be stereotypical soft-core pornography.  Instead of bad acting and pseudo sex Kiss Me Deadly employs bad acting and phony violence.  It captures the conventional critique of Hollywood films that claims countless men and women can be gratuitously slaughtered on screens nationwide but show sex and your film’s rating will quickly be pushed to “R” or even “NC-17.”  Besides the cultural nihilism that Robert Aldrich portrays, he imbues sexual nihilism as well as sadism.

From the beginning of this film the audience is thrown into this haphazard world where fast men have control over loony, scantily clad females.  It almost seems to address its latent desire to be a soft-core porno with the tension that is produced when we see the confident Mike Hammer juxtaposed with the fearful Christine Bailey dressed in nothing but a trench coat.  However, Christine represents a kind of sexual maturity and is peculiarly prescient.  At the only point where the film can be seen as self-referential, Christine and Mike share an interesting exchange:

Christina Bailey: You have only one real lasting love.
Mike Hammer: Now who could that be?
Christina Bailey: You. You’re one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself.  

Christina proves herself to be drastically different from the rest of the women in the film who are sexually magnetized to Mike Hammer and kiss him at first sight.  Her death marks a significant point with respect to the death of certainty and sexual maturity.

After Christina’s death, the audience becomes acquainted with the violent and sexy Mike Hammer.  First, come on, the guy’s name is Mike Hammer.  Second, as we get to know Mike we learn that he is a private investigator who essentially breaks up marriages.  During his interrogation at the police station, the camera cuts away from any one particular face in the room and an anonymous voice is heard saying, “He’s a bedroom dick.”  The sexual nature of this label should not be understated.  Lastly, the audience constantly experiences Mike’s sadistic sexual pleasure.  Shortly after kissing the closest female, he typically beats up another man with ease.  He claims to pursue Christina’s case because “She must be connected with somethin’ big,” implying some large amount of money can be found at the end of the trail.  Still, it never does seem to be about the money; rather, Mike seeks the thrill and the potential for violent encounters in which he is at his most potent and virile.  For these reasons, the death of Christine and the quasi-success of Mike Hammer symbolize the pervasiveness of a new male-dominated, violent sexuality.

The Third Man: Post-WWII British Critical Perspectives on America’s International Situation

Carol Reed’s 1949 film, The Third Man, is laden with unnerving commentary on post-WWII international tensions.  Before even watching the film, one already has expectations for xenophobic calamity given the nature of the story – an English director, Reed, with the help of an English screenwriter, Graham Greene, composing a dark film about two peculiar American friends situated in a bombed-out and socially fragmented Vienna.  As soon as the credits roll and Anton Karas’ eerily upbeat zither plays, the audience realizes that Reed and Greene are undoubtedly going to satisfy those expectations.

With a series of establishing shots accompanied by the opening narrator, the audience is visually and aurally informed of black market hagglers, tragically fated amateurs, and international divisions.  Due to the recent misbehavior of the Germans, the narrator states:

Now the city is divided into four zones, you know, each occupied by a power: the American, the British, the Russian and the French. But the centre of the city that’s international policed by an international patrol. One member of each of the four powers. Wonderful! What a hope they had! All strangers to the place and none of them could speak the same language. Except a sort of smattering of German.

Thus, we are thrown into a world in which the locals feel exposed to international eyes, while at the same time, those international eyes are just as watchful of each others’ moves.   Suddenly, he narrator realizes the reason why he was telling this story in the first place.  His seemingly accidental narrative fumble appropriately introduces the equivalently fumbling, aggressively unimportant American, Holly Martins.

Holly Martins represents the American everyman who doesn’t speak any language besides English and is a “hack writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls.”  He is constantly being told by the English Major Calloway to “go home…like a sensible chap” while he simply wants to know the truth about what happened to his old friend Harry Lime.

Harry Lime is the polar opposite of Holly Martins; he is amoral, cunning, and inconspicuous.  Eventually, Major Calloway informs Martins that Lime operated a penicillin dilution racket, which was rather lucrative at the cost of a number of lives.  In the powerful Ferris wheel scene, Lime remarks:

Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.

He then justifies these remarks by claiming that governments do this all of the time and he is merely doing it at the individual level.

This contrast between Lime and Martins presents a dichotomous view of the contemporaneous American situation.  Considering this story is told from a British perspective, the former dominant power of the world, the audience is made to question the new American superpower.  Lime fools the international police, specifically the British, and operates in the sewers beneath Vienna.  He has no regard for human life and is only interested in making money.  He serves as a perfect critique of post-WWII American capitalism.

On the other hand, Martins is a bumbling, naïve American with the life trajectory of a soap bubble.  He writes bad pulp Western novelettes in which the hero always wins.  Yet, he has a sense of morality and hungers for truth.  Ultimately and importantly, he is the one to end Lime’s life, not the British who tirelessly compiled a case against him, not the secretive Russians, and not the Austrians who run around the sewers in their silly uniforms and are easily fooled and eluded.  No, it is the banal American who kills the witty American.  After all is said and done, Martins is embarrassingly left at the cemetery by the Czechoslovakian refugee Anna Schmidt, failing to provide Holly with the type of heroic pulp Western ending he fantasized about all along.

I Understand Uncle Charlie, The Ruinous Wake of Capitalism Makes Me Want to Murder Too

Alfred Hitchcock’s prescient 1943 film, Shadow of a Doubt, uses iconographic and dialogical cues to capture nihilistic notions of urban life and capitalism’s penchant for social decay echoed by historians like Lewis Mumford.  In 1961, Mumford wrote, “…it is plain that never before in human history had such vast masses of people lived in such a savagely deteriorated environment, ugly in form, debased in content.”  Coupled with powerful images of urban degradation, Hitchcock uses the character Charles Oakley, or Uncle Charlie to his family, as a vehicle for his social commentary. 

Like Diego Rivera’s fresco mural Frozen Assets (1931-1932), Hitchcock begins his film with proletarian imagery in the foreground juxtaposed with symbols of capitalist conquests in the background.  First, the panning camera shows the audience two expansive steel bridges over a desolate river while two shaggy men, seemingly on their lunch break, gape at two technological achievements before them: bridges and factories.  That shot then dissolves into a shot of a mutilated automobile next to a “NO DUMPING ALLOWED” sign in the foreground with a sprawling city in the background.  Progressively, the scope of the shots becomes smaller and smaller – showing a city, then a street, then a window – until it reaches the ruminative Charles Oakley (interestingly, who his maid calls “Mr. Spencer”) in a cadaver-like prone position. 

Opening Scene

Second Scene

Diego Rivera's Frozen Assets

 

Uncle Charlie’s past and future is particularly suggestive of his role as the urban nihilist.  His sister, Emma Newtown, tells her daughter, young Charlie, the story of the childhood incident which dramatically changed Uncle Charlie’s personality: while riding his bicycle, Uncle Charlie was struck by a car.  In this context, the car symbolizes capital expansion, technological advancement, and affluence of which Uncle Charlie’s trauma thenceforth leads him to become the man who claims, “Forty thousand dollars is no joke, not to him, I bet. It’s a joke to me. The whole world’s a joke to me.”  He nostalgically reminisces about how perfect the world was in 1888 and curses his contemporaneous surroundings; ultimately, however, it is his surroundings which curse him.

His death comes by two meaningful symbols: a female and a train.  The train is the great technological symbol of capitalism and, at the time, provided the arteries for the country’s pulsing economic heart.  On the other hand, Charlie Newtown (the symbolism of whose full name should not be overlooked) is the foil and defeater of misogynistic Uncle Charlie.  Sexism though is a topic in this film which should be exclusively discussed at length in another essay.  For the focus and purposes of this essay, I will simply remark that it has significant symbolic meaning.  Her name, however, contains manifold implications.  Her first name is curious for two reasons: of course, it is the same name as her uncle which seems to mean that she is supplanting him to some extent and, also, it is an androgynous name.  Her last name, Newtown, appears to be Hitchcock’s way of foreshadowing the urban flight to the suburbs.  Uncle Charlie’s death marks the end of the end of the urban locus and Charlie Newtown represents America’s social, cultural, and geographic future. 

The Fate of Uncle Charlie

 

There is too little space in this blog for so much meaning in this film.           

Double Indemnity: Masculine Mind Games & Fears of Feminism

The average 1944 moviegoer would most likely have picked up on some of the more overt sexual innuendoes and undertones in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity.  For instance, the audience is made well aware of Walter Neff’s sexual attraction to Phyllis Dietrichson in the main characters’ very first encounter:  Dietrichson stands atop the grand staircase in nothing but a towel and Neff makes thinly veiled, sexually charged comments about her appearance.  However, the contemporary audience is prone to laughter during these situations and some of the more subtle – I think subconscious – sexual motifs that would have been missed in 1944 are more easily recognizable in 2012.  Two examples of these sexual motifs are Walter Neff and Barton Keyes’ phallocentric dynamic as well as female vilification predominantly represented by Phyllis Dietrichson.

Essentially, the relationship between Neff and Keyes is about testosterone driven competition and the attempt to outwit the other, highlighted by abundant phallic symbolism.  Firstly, both characters’ wear exposed, dangling ties throughout the entire movie, which is peculiar for Keyes because he wears his tie outside of his vest.  Secondly, when the two characters smoke, to satisfy their Freudian oral fixations, Neff recurrently provides the match for Keyes’ cigar.  The light is a clear metaphor for knowledge and truth of which Neff holds right under Keyes’ nose; that is, until the final scene.  When Keyes finally learns the truth, the film concludes with Keyes holding the match for Neff’s cigarette.  Even the fact that Keyes smokes a cigar and Neff smokes a cigarette is symbolic – Keyes’ is bigger.  On top of that, the “little man” that speaks to Keyes’ leads him to triumph over Neff.

                  

Another subconscious masculine byproduct in Double Indemnity is, of course, the archetypal femme fatale and female vilification embodied by Phyllis Dietrichson.  The audience meets Dietrichson scantily clad, away from her husband, and, shortly thereafter, plotting to kill her husband for his fortune.  From the outset, Neff isn’t surprised by a woman conniving to off her husband and he claims that he frequently sees cases like this come through his insurance office, suggesting that women can’t be trusted.  Nevertheless, Neff eventually falls prey to her good looks and convincing rhetoric.  Expectedly, Dietrichson eventually betrays Neff and attempts to kill him.  However, the anti-hero survives the shot and turns the gun on Dietrichson.  Masculinity is saved.