Film directing over the decades has been a very involved art. When one looks back at the progression from the earlier soviet-style films…

Haha. Just kidding. Please don’t shoot yourself.

This post is actually about Miller’s Crossing. Specifically how, in my view at least, it did by far the best job of bringing out Ned and Madvig’s relationship to one another. Granted, this isn’t a particularly bold assertion to make given that the only other film in the unit that really attempted this was Heisler’s The Glass Key, and that film was working under the restraint of the Hayes Code. So really the focus here is going to be more on what I feel the Coen Brother’s did right as opposed to how I think Heisler dropped the ball.

Perhaps my biggest gripe character-wise about the film The Glass Key was the way in which it portrayed Ned and Madvig. Ned is shown to be some superman-like figure with no real weaknesses. The audience is left wondering why Ned even bothers to put up with his friend and boss. With Madvig it is just the opposite. The audience is left wondering how on earth this meathead was ever able to rise to his current position.

This flies in the face of how I read Ned and Madvig. From my reading, Ned came across as both a very talented and very flawed character. This is made clear to the reader in the part of the book where Ned goes to New York in order to collect his gambling winnings. Smart and well connected, he has little tracking down the guy who owes him his money. But when Ned confronts the man, he gets punched in the stomach, vomits, and then stumbles away.

Clearly Ned is not very adept when it comes to violent confrontation.

The Coen brothers do an excellent job of communicating this in the scene where Casper tries to buy Tom off in the warehouse. After Casper storms off, Tom is left alone in the room with Frankie, a slack-jawed bruiser with a curiously short tie. There is an undeniably child-like quality about him in this scene. Even though, to judge from Casper’s words, Tom is clearly in danger, the audience feels more inclined to laugh than to fear for Tom’s safety.

While Tom looms quite large in his frame, Frankie is framed so as to appear comically small. This impression is intensified by the support beams in the background. They get smaller as they head in Tom’s direction, and larger as they approach Frankie. They also serve to frame each character, as they intersect with the ceiling beams in such a way that they appear to be a line of boxes.

Awkwardness pervades the scene. There is no music. Just the sound of rain on the roof and what sounds like drops of water landing in a pot. Tom sits in his chair, visibly perplexed about his current situation. Frankie walks back toward the coat hanger, takes off his coat and hat, and then rolls up his sleeves. In the distance we hear the sound of a train, as if to signify the juggernaut that will be steaming Tom’s way. Frankie begins to walk toward Tom. Tom signals for him to stop, and Frankie complies. Tom calmly takes off his coat and folds it. As he goes to set it down he reaches for the chair and hits Frankie in the face with it. While Tom has clearly damaged his foe, Frankie appears to have been hurt more emotionally than anything else. He walks out of the room, leaving Tom alone and confused.

It’s worth taking a moment and considering some of the things at play here. The Coen brothers’ knowledge of Genre convention works masterfully in this scene. It is comical because of the manner in which it manipulates genre conventions. We laugh because the big bruiser isn’t supposed to leave the room with hurt feelings in order to seek reinforcements. “Genre films can exploit the automatic conventions of response for the purposes of pulling the rug out from under their viewers.” (Braudy, 667)

This scene also does an excellent job of capturing Ned’s gangster side. Tom isn’t a particularly skilled fighter, but he’s willing to do brutal and dishonorable things in order to prevail. While his opponent clearly has a sense of decency, Tom has no problem seizing on the situation in order to gain the advantage, in this instance, by hitting his opponent with a chair. “The Gangster’s pre-eminence lies in the suggestion that he may at any moment lose control; his strength is not in being able to shoot, faster or straighter than others, but in being more willing to shoot.”(Warshow, 705)

Then there is the “Death and Danny Boy” scene where Leo’s talents really shine. In stark contrast to Tom’s handling of a violent situation, Leo seems quite at home. It in this regard he is far truer to the Hammett’s Madvig than Heisler’s cheesy paperman-puncher.

Off screen we hear a struggle going on. As the camera pans away from the flowing curtains we see a man lying in a growing pool of blood. We see the slain man’s cigarette begin to set the newspaper he was reading aflame. His assailant opens the door for another man, who hands him a machine gun. The scene cuts to Leo. He smells the smoke from the newly-started fire. The camera cuts to the legs of the two gunmen as they walk up the steps, their guns hanging at their sides. Leo calmly puts out his cigar and grabs his pistol. He slips under his bed just as the gunmen enter his room.

After killing one and forcing the other to retreat into another room. Leo grabs the downed gunman’s weapon and makes his way across the hallway. He drops his gun out the window and jumps out of the burning house, almost as if he’d done it a hundred times before. Upon landing he grabs his machine gun and waits for the second gunman to show himself. After a pumping an obscene amount of rounds into the intruder (fun fact: Thompson submachine guns can carry 100-round drums), Leo then shifts his attention to a car that careens onto the screen, spraying machinegun fire at him.

Wearing his slippers and smoking jacket, he calmly walks down the street firing at the car until it finally crashes into a tree and bursts into flames. All the while the song Danny Boy is playing; its soothing melody a juxtaposition of the carnage playing out on screen. Leo, his gun still smoking, appears to be satisfied with his handiwork. He takes out his cigar and puts it back in his mouth.

This is where Leo is more like a cowboy of the old west. “By the time we see him, he is already “there”: he can ride a horse faultlessly, keep his countenance in the face of death, and draw his gun a little faster and shoot it a littler straighter anyone he is likely to meet…With the Westerner, it is a crucial point of honor not to “do it first”; his gun remains in its holster until the moment of combat.” (Warshow, 705) He didn’t seek out gunmen from a rival gang in order to kill them. It was only when he was set upon by them that he killed them. And in contrast with Tom, he is clearly a very capable gunfighter.

What’s more, he has a moral transparency that extends beyond his confidence in Tom. This is clear in the scene following the attack. Tom advises him on the smart play: “You lay back, you give Bernie up, you let Casper think he’s made is point. Then you wait for him to show a weakness.” Against Tom’s better judgment, Leo lets his enemies know exactly where he stands. This is also what sets him apart from his rival crime boss Casper. Casper sent his men without warning to sneak into Leo’s home and kill him. On the other hand, if Leo is going to war against a rival, his rival knows it.

So, what did my classmates think of the film? Well, the purveyor of Garbo’s Lesbian Interlude agreed with me that Madvig got the short shrift of it in Heisler’s The Glass Key. She then asks:

I was wondering if this was a directorial choice by the Coen brothers or if it was simply a matter of acting styles changing since the 1940s, evolving more into the subtleties of character (the influence of Method acting, and so forth).

It is a good question. Frankly I’ve been so wrapped up in the convention of film being a product of the director’s vision that I didn’t even consider that there might be other forces at play in Miller’s Crossing. Now that I think about it, some of what I’ve described may have been a result of choices made on the actor’s part. It’s one of those situations where it is difficult to discern some clear-cut line of demarcation between directorial influence and the actor’s art. This became apparent to me while reading the warehouse scene in the screenplay.

Originally, after being turned down, Casper is supposed to slowly tear up the check, and visibly saddened; tell Tom that he doesn’t like being given the high hat. In the film however, Casper is more angry than sad, and he delivers the line about the high hat as he is storming out of the room.

Ultimately, I think it was a directorial choice. At least in so far as, if the director really doesn’t want something in the film, it won’t be in there. Hammet doesn’t really go into detail concerning how Madvig rose to power. I think that the Coen brothers were more or less filling in the blanks left by the book. Personally, I think they were spot on in portraying Leo as relatively sophisticated and an extremely capable killer.

Next up we have Mal writing on her blog And why not? It worked in Blazing Saddles! In one of her rare, non Errol Morris-obsessed moments, she raises the issue of Ned’s fallibility:

It became fairly clear that Ned Beaumont was not much like Sherlock, and I think that might be one of the reasons I found the book to be so interesting… I don’t ever think I had that feeling in the back of my mind that Ned Beaumont would definitely solve the crime. His gambling addiction, coupled with a few other characteristics I witnessed about him, always left me with a slight sense of “wow, maybe he won’t be able to do it.”

I think she’s exactly right about this. As I wrote earlier, I really took issue with the character of Ned as portrayed in the Film The Glass Key. Far from being the heavy drinking compulsive gambler presented in the novel, he seemed to have a Sherlock Holmes quality about him, with Madvig filling in for the role of his simple-minded Watson.

Next up we have the hat. To be honest, one of the most frustrating things for me when watching a film is when I recognize that the directors are trying to bring something to my attention and yet I am unable to figure out what that something might be. That was the case with the hat in Miller’s Crossing. While I was watching I knew the hat was important, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out its significance. Fortunately, Kathleen and Dan come to the rescue.

Kathleen points out that that the hat is, in part, homage Miller’s Crossing’s source material:

I loved the little things the Coen brothers seemed to be doing to tip their hat (literally and figuratively) to Hammett’s Glass Key. Besides “The Hat” being a simile to the dream, in the book the importance of Taylor’s hat was found throughout. Ned used Opal and the hat to get money owed to him from gambling and Taylor’s hat (or the lack thereof) was instrumental in Ned’s discovery of Taylor’s killer.

Along the same lines, Dan writes:

I saw the hat as an homage to the Glass Key. Through Tom’s dream about the hat the Coen brother’s are showing Tom’s attitude’s similarity to the attitude of Ned in the Glass Key.

But he goes further, explaining the hat’s significance within the film itself:

Throughout the beginning of the movie Tom is looking to recover his hat, and ends up getting it from Verna, so in some ways she can be seen as the one possible meaning of the hat. Using Verna as the hat we can correlate Tom’s eventual killing of Bernie as his letting the hat go. Until the moment he actually kills Bernie it is still possible for Tom to be with Verna. In the end Tom gives up everything and this defeatist attitude is exemplified in his refusal to go after the hat in his dream… In a way Tom is saying that it is foolish for a man to try to better himself, or even retain what he has earned.

I’d say that’s a solid interpretation. It’s certainly far more in depth than anything I’ve been able to muster.

To be honest I wasn’t really sure about the blog format for a film study class. But it has proven quite useful when it comes to considering multiple interpretations of a single work of art. Plus its pretty fun to look back over my posts and be watch how my thoughts progressed as I learned more about film throughout the summer session.

Today’s discussion on soulmates and the nature of love in class today reminded me of an AP story I’d read about a two neolithic skeletions unearthed a few months ago:

Archaeologists have unearthed two skeletons from the Neolithic period locked in a tender embrace and buried outside Mantua, just 25 miles south of Verona, the romantic city where Shakespeare set the star-crossed tale of Romeo and Juliet.

Buried between 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, the prehistoric lovers are believed to have been a man and a woman and are thought to have died young, as their teeth were found intact, said Elena Menotti, the archaeologist who led the dig.

Alongside the couple, archaeologists found flint tools, including arrowheads and a knife, Menotti said.

Although the Mantua pair strike a rare and touching pose, archaeologists have found prehistoric burials in which the dead hold hands or have other contact, said Luca Bondioli, an anthropologist at Rome’s National Prehistoric and Ethnographic Museum.

Of course, the nature of love and whether or not soulmates exist is something each person has to decide on his/her own. For my part, I doubt that the couple, likely dying from their arrow and knife wounds, sought each other out just so that they might be able to die next to the person they thought to be “pretty good” or “sufficient.”

The picture reminds me of a passage from The Firmament of Time. I read it a few years ago and it has stuck with me ever since. In it, Loren Eisley describes an evolutionary attribute seemingly unique to humanity:

And looking so, across the centuries and the millennia, toward the animal men of the past, one can see a faint light, like a patch of sunlight moving over the dark shadows on a forest floor… In its coming man had no part. It merely came, that curious light, and man, the animal, sought to be something that no animal had been before. Cruel he might be, vengeful he might be, but there had entered into his nature a curious wistful gentleness and courage. It seemed to have little to do with survival, for such men died over and over. They did not value life compared to what they saw in each other — that strange inner light which has come from no man knows where, and which was not made by us… Even as we try to deny the light, we know that what we are without it remains meaningless.

While participating in a bowling league, she had to opportunity to observe the way the guys on her team would treat their sons. She weighed in on the matter during an NPR interview:

There is a toughening process boys have to go through [where] emotional expression is beaten or laughed or teased out of them…The only emotion left to them is anger.

I can’t say that’s been my personal experience, but I can see how she might come away with that view. I do think there is truth in the fact that anger is one of the few emotions men can express in public.

Looking around for other writings she has done, I found some excerpts from her book printed in The Guardian. Her observations on how frustrating it was dating women made me smile:

The women I met wanted a man to be confident. They wanted in many ways to defer to him. I could feel that on many dates, the unspoken desire to be held up and led, whether in conversation or even in physical space…

Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colours and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned. This I was in spades, and I always got points for it. But I began to feel very sympathetic toward heterosexual men – the pressure to be a world-bestriding colossus is an immensely heavy burden to bear, and trying to be a sensitive new age guy at the same time is pretty well impossible. Expectation, expectation, expectation was the leitmotif of Ned’s dating life.

This part of the article gave me pause:

The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.

This has bad results, of course, if you’re a human. But not so much if you’re a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That’s why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.

Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.

The human in command of the exercise, however — an Army colonel — blew a fuse.

The colonel ordered the test stopped.

Why? asked Tilden. What’s wrong?

The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.

This test, he charged, was inhumane.

I like to think of myself as a rational individual, especially when it comes to issues concerning national defense. (Article summary: it’s better that only 19 US cities get nuked instead of 20.) In some situations there are no good outcomes; one has to settle for the outcome that is the least bad.

And yet part of me is glad that the colonel stopped the test. Taken by themselves, I think his actions speak well of his compassion and sense of decency. (I find it interesting that it’s the career soldier, and not the scientist, who is compelled by moral outrage to intevene on robot’s behalf.)

It’s only when the robot’s well-being is weighed against the life of a human that the colonel’s actions start take on a different, decidedly less ‘humane’ shape.

-Cal Harberts passed away five years ago. (No word on whether he was buried in a giant, Styrofoam carry-out box.) Dan Harberts, the youngest son, is now the owner and president of the company. He lives with his wife in a house on cemetery grounds. His mom is still alive and devious.

-Only 1 percent of Bubbling Well’s business is private burial. The rest is cremation services.

-Since it was established in 1971, Bubbling Well has cared for the final oversight of almost 11,000 pets

-Having a pet interred there isn’t cheap. On average it costs $570 to bury a small pet there, with a $50 yearly fee to keep it from being exhumed and cremated. According to the article, Bubbling well has yet to do this despite some delinquent balances of 20+ years.

The article didn’t mention what became of Dan’s Brother. Though it’s pretty clear that Dan has become every bit as good of a philosopher salesman as his old man was:

Later Harberts reflects, “People bury people because they have to, but they bury pets because they want to. We’re proof that the relationships between people and their pets are truly special. With people, there are complications and conditions.

“With pets, it’s a pure emotion.”

Meet Ripliee. She’s an android designed to resemble a human. (For some reason the Japanese are obsessed with building realistic android women…) She’s the result of decades of work, yet it was probably immediately apparent to you that there was something unsettling about her.

How were you able to do that? Because she ran afoul of your amygdala-induced Uncanny Valley.

The Uncanny Valley is a hypothesis concerning the way humans respond to non-human objects. Wikipedia describes the relationship as such:

…as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion.

So once an object crosses a certain threshold, humans involuntarily begin to judge it according to a much stricter set of criteria. At this point, the object’s inability to exhibit the subtlest human traits cause the human to regard it as extremely alien, grotesque even.

This phenomenon has implications for the CG movie industry. At a certain point, the more life-like a CG character is, the stranger and more disturbing it will appear to the audience. This was the subject of a paper presented during the Animated Dialogues conference in Austrailia last month.

The paper’s authors compared viewer responses to characters from the films Final Fantasy and The Incredibles. Paradoxically, it was found that viewers regarded the cartoonish characters from The Incredibles as “more familiar” than the realistically styled characters from Final Fantasy.

I don’t think anyone doubts that the vast majority of films today feature women as their “primary object of spectacle.” What I do have questions about is the extent to which making films that “entail the full range of transformations as proposed by Freud” would really be something which the average female moviegoer would be particularly interested in.

(Alright, I just spent forty-five minutes trying to type my thoughts on the matter in an objective manner, but I’m not getting anywhere. So I’m just going to come out and write it. My apologies to all in advance…)

Let’s face it: the only thing that pisses off a woman more than being hit on is *not* being hit on. There. I’ve said it. And you ladies reading it know its true. Women, as a group, tend to derive great satisfaction from feeling sought-after, as Sarah’s comments in class today demonstrated. Instead of welcoming the role-reversal of a woman approaching a man, she was pissed that the guys “lacked the balls” to approach her.

Which brings me to another point: women like balls. They like guys who are self-confident and assertive. In my experience, confidence is far more important to them than sensitivity. Not that they don’t want sensitivity in a man. Rather, it’s just that in relationships, they’re more likely to put up with a guy who is overly-confident and lacks sensitivity than a guy who is overly-sensitive and lacks confidence.

So how does this relate to the way women view film? Well it goes a long way towards explaining why the standard Hero-Pursuing-Babe model of filmmaking still prevails to this day. I can’t say for certain, but I imagine that instead of feeling objectified and oppressed in relating to the Babe in the film, on some level women genuinely like the idea of some confident Hero going to extraordinary measures on thier behalf.

On what evidence do I base such an assertion?

Three words: The Princess Bride.

I rest my case.

Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.

Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman’s attention.

Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.

Needless to say, many Second Wave feminists take issue with such assertions, and view Paglia and her ilk as an anti-feminist reactionary wave trying to muddy the waters.

It would be interesting to hear which of the two schools of feminist thought today’s young women tend to agree with most.

Seriously. Watch it.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/rNyi_lYPv1c" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

For those who found it funny, there’s a whole slew of other ones like it here.

What’s interesting about this style of humor is that it is more than just scene after scene of severed limbs and pools of blood. Like most films, they both feature a core-group of characters that the viewer is supposed to care about. Were this not the case, there would be no one (save perhaps the protagonist) with whom the audience could really connect.

In both films, the ability to elicit a humorous response from the violence hinges on the director’s ability to convince the audience that those being killed are utterly devoid of value.

In Yojimbo this is accomplished by depicting the members of both gangs as ruthless thugs. The rank-and-file gang members don’t have families to mourn them. They’re greedy. They kidnap. They kill innocent people. And they seem to have a darn good time in the process.

In Army of Darkness this is accomplished by, well, Zombies. Let’s be honest: nobody likes a Zombie.

It’s nice being the only guy in town with a gun.

There are other similarities as well. Both films take place in a desolate frontier setting. They both pit firearms against traditional melee weapons. They both feature a Lone Wolf protagonist who is compelled, somewhat against his will, to intervene and help the innocent. (In Army of Darkness, the hero is played by Bruce Campbell, the man with the single greatest autobiography title in the history of the written word.) And in both films the opposition is ultimately overcome, allowing the protagonist to head off on his own toward his next ordeal.

One thing I find fascinating is the unintentional manner in which these similarities arose. To my knowledge, Sam Rami wasn’t making a deliberate attempt to invoke Kurosawa’s style. Army of Darkness (like its predecessor Evil Dead II) was in many ways a spoof of zombie slasher genre; the orginial Evil Dead included. To the extent that it featured gore, it was usually done so in the name of increasing a scene’s comedic effect. Yet by placing himself outside of and somewhat in opposition to his genre, a B-movie director comes in many ways to occupy the same space as one of the most revered figures in modern filmmaking.

Pretty cool if you ask me.