We’ve talked about the “important” movies we just can’t see and the “under-popular” films we wish more people loved, and now I’m wondering… why do we like what we like? Loathe what we loathe? Where is our taste coming from?
I know taste is influenced by all sorts of things—age, economics, family, etc.—but wherever it comes from, it ends up guiding us through hundreds of choices a day. Last week, for instance, I bought the new Pussycat Dolls single (God help me), and I can analyze what I like about it–decent pop lyrics, interesting beat, nice vocal stuff at the end—but the next question is… why do I like those things?
After the jump, I’m going to try a little experiment. I’ll pick a movie I really enjoy, and I’ll try to pinpoint why I react to it the way I do. After that, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the same basic premise. Where are your tastes coming from?
(And next week, we can do the same thing for something we don’t like.)
I really like … Magnolia
Oooh! I really like Magnolia! For some of you, those will be fighting words.
I know this movie divides people, but it’s one of my all-time favorites. One reason is its artificiality. The rain of frogs, the Biblical references on the edges of the screen, the scene where every character simultaneously sings the same Aimee Mann song: It thrills me.
But I’m not affected by the presence of artificiality per se. Musicals are contrived by their nature, as are high-concept comedies about Jim Carrey enlarging Jennifer Aniston’s breasts: The mere appearance of a song or a supernatural sight gag isn’t that exciting.
For me, the jolt is in magical realism, in the moment when something otherworldly tears through the skin of an otherwise normal universe. There are obviously tons of books that use this technique, and I like them, too (Speaking of which: please read these short stories and this novel. Thank you.) But there’s something about seeing the impossible wriggle its way into a plain old kitchen or office building that pushes all my buttons.
And again, I’m not talking about sci-fi, where the supernatural element is the focus of the story. I’m talking about movies that could almost have conventional narratives, except that a few people have psychic powers (like in Eve’s Bayou) or that people’s memories keep getting erased (like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.) In movies like that, I’d argue, the stories are very obviously about human relationships, and the unrealistic conceits are there to deepen our understanding of what’s familiar.
Magnolia has an exhilarating take on that idea. We learn from the stylized opening scene, telling about three strange coincidences in human history, that the film has been built on a foundation of impossibility. But that works in two ways: The filmmaking techniques tell us the movie won’t always be literal, but the stories themselves, presented as events that actually happened, remind us that you don’t always need magical realism to find something magical in the world.
That’s the balance struck for the next three hours: “Believable” plotlines unfold, about people dealing with death and love and forgiveness and what have you, and they are filled with “believeable” coincidences. We see how characters’ lives intersect in hundreds of quotidian ways.
And sure, that’s a familiar conceit, but what makes Magnolia interesting is how it pairs these believable coincidences with supernatural phenomena like a plague of frogs.
Also? There are clues tucked in the background that the plague is coming–people holding signs that reference the “plague of frogs” Bible verse, for instance. That’s like the film itself leaning forward past the “real world” on screen and telling us a secret. It’s telling us that something major is coming, and we ought to get ready.
And good lord, y’all, I’m excited just writing about this because the cumulative effect of the realistic coincidences and the otherworldly events is a buzzing sense of meaning. In Magnolia, there is always something bigger happening that the individual characters can’t see. As audience members, we get to take in everyone’s stories and understand that they are touched by a force that’s bigger than they are. We have a certain wisdom that lets us appreciate their situation better than they do.
Yet even we don’t know exactly what the bigger force is. We don’t know what brings the frogs; we just know they’re falling from the sky.
The movie’s refusal to explicitly define the purpose of its symbols is one of its best qualities. It’s not about explaining the patterns in life; it’s about insisting that the patterns are there. It doesn’t matter that we don’t quite know what everything means–it just matters that we appreciate there’s something awesome at work.
And that’s why magical realism–especially the magical realism I can see–gets me every time: I’m not a religious person, but I do believe there are systems at work in the world. Therefore, works of art that can show me even a glimpse of a cosmic plan speak directly to my understanding of life. To me, they seem exquisitely true.
I should add that I’m not as moved when artworks equate this “plan” with a particular religious faith. I’m drawn to the sense of mystery, the brief glimpse of a thing I can’t understand, and I find it deflating to quantify that awe with the name of a particular god or text. It’s why I’m so attached to Symbolist literature and Annie Dillard’s book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. They embrace the thrill of the mystery without giving it a definite identity. They let the mystery stay big.
So there you go… that’s a glimpse into my personal taste. My taste has more facets, of course, and even this one could change over time, but for now, it’s the absolute truth.
Yet I’m sure there are things I’ve elided here or left out completely. Or maybe there are parts of what I’m saying that sound contradictory. What do you think? And again, what about you? Where are your tastes coming from? I’ve got an inquiring mind, and I want to know!
13 responses so far ↓
1 Dan Brady // Jan 29, 2009 at 6:20 pm
History Today has a big write up on the origins of taste in their recently released February issue. Less fun than reading your site, but informative nonetheless.
http://www.historytoday.com/MainArticle.aspx?m=33172&amid=30264969
2 Mark Blankenship // Jan 29, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Thanks for this link, Dan. I’m going to read this tonight.
3 stephanie // Jan 29, 2009 at 6:46 pm
i LOOOOVE magnolia. i also saw it as a rental and not in the theatre at first and have always regretted that. incidentally, i also watched Fight Club for the first time the same night i watched Magnolia. My brain imploded and I did not sleep, but good god was that a wonderful night of movie watching.
4 bstewart23 // Jan 29, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Magnolia is my favourite film of all time and I watch it at least bimonthly. Yes, even though he is in it. You will not find a better example of performances skating that fine line between showy and note-perfect, and the direction matches that tightrope act (to mash up a few metaphors).
For me, it’s a movie for the unfaithful about The Soul, enthusiastically depicting its free fall through moments in a handful of lives, without any overbearing religiosity to cheapen its effect.
I might need to watch it again tonight.
5 Collin H // Jan 29, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Speed Racer. I love it. LOVE IT. When I left the theater I felt like I had watched something revolutionary, like Star Wars or The Matrix. I was so incredibly happy I couldn’t express myself coherently to my partner. However, at the same time, I also felt sad because I knew that no one else in the world was going to love this movie as much as I did.
Today’s cinema has developed a certain way of adapting “geek” properties that usually means that they try to weed out and alter anything in the original story that would be deemed too unrealistic for movie audiences. For example, trading in the classic X-Men costumes for black leather. While at the time, looking at these characters in a less fantastic light was new and exciting, it’s become old hat. Predictable. Boring.
Speed Racer defied that method of filmmaking with every fiber of its being.
Rather than try and force Speed Racer into a “realistic” tale about racing and kung fu, it embraced everything about Speed Racer that makes it what it is. The ridiculous concepts, awkward dialogue, scenery chewing villains, stowaway children and monkeys – all of it presented honestly and without irony because that is the world these characters live in. It completely captured the awkwardness and gee-whiz spirit of the original cartoon while simultaneously updating the presentation to express a more modern visual sensibility. It was a perfect marriage of 60′s anime and modern storytelling. That the cast plays it all straight is what makes it all work. If they were winking at the camera at the implausibility of everything, then the honest, heartfelt moments like Pops and Speed’s conversation towards the end of the movie would have lost all weight. In my book, the final lap of the last race is one of the best directed and edited climaxes ever. The voice overs from the past layered over the frantic cuts between the crowd completely losing their shit and the race’s explosive end… no matter how many times I watch it I still get goosebumps.
Speed Racer dared to be a movie that loved and honored all aspects of the source material, both good and bad. I can understand why people don’t like it – its a movie that leaves very little space for a middle ground – but I think it’s one of the most amazing adaptations of a property I’ve ever had the joy to see. It’s a shame that so few people liked what the Wachowski’s did; its doubtful we’ll see an anime adaptation that faithful (and experimental) for a long time.
6 Cap'n Ganch // Jan 29, 2009 at 9:33 pm
I just love the part when Julianne Moore says “Shut the fuck up” a dozen times (differently) to the pharmacist.
7 Lena // Jan 30, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Two things. No, three. One – you are spectacular. I mean it. I sent you a message. I added you to my RSS feed reader. I am in virtual love with your way of thinking.
Two – this is a funny topic – I just did an interview (not the point) where somebody was getting on my case about why I like the things that I said I did – and she really wanted to know, dammit, while I was just spitting out associations. That was a bitch – not b/c I can analyze any live object to death – but b/c it kills the original love. In me, at least, after all, I am a girl.
And three – at some point, in a galaxy far away, I did a field research in psycholinguistics / ethnomusicology, asking Tibetans (in Tibet) to name their first association that they think of when they hear a given word (and I had a long list). The hardest thing was to explain to them WTF I would ask them such a strange thing.
Sorry for a lengthy comment. Got excited. Couldn’t help it. U rule.
8 Laurie // Jan 30, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Put up your dukes! I HAAAAAAAAATED this movie. More than words can express.
Magnolia seemed to me to be more absurdism than magic realism. Absurdist drama makes me want to crawl out of my skin. It doesn’t feel clever or fresh to me, it feels self indulgent. And, boy, did I feel like creator and cast were indulging themselves.
Eek. I’m getting irritated just remembering it.
9 BeRightBack // Jan 30, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Collin: I completely agree about Speed Racer. I like that they kept the 2-Dimensional dynamism, and I really enjoyed how the editing kept the viewer moving laterally, first one way for a few scenes, then back the other for a few scenes. It felt truly, interestingly new while remaining faithful to how the original material is qualitatively different than traditional cinema in a formal sense.
10 Brooke // Feb 1, 2009 at 5:15 am
For me, the movie that I really really like and a movie that continues to open up in every viewing is Lust, Caution. (Despite how hard it is to put in a list. Like, just with puncuation.)
While it doesn’t match up to Ang Lee’s best film, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, it comes damn near close. It captures an epic feeling that a lot of this year’s films have failed to do, even The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which I loved, doesn’t really capture a wide scope like this film does.
On top of that, it’s just one of the most well-made films of recent years, in terms of acting, writing, and visually. Tang Wei was robbed of true critical embrace, which was even more tragic because there was a small group of critics that really liked her.
Those last fifteen or so minutes just gripped me and didn’t let go for days afterwards.
So there’s a movie I really, really like!
11 Michael // Feb 4, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Mark: terrific challenge and beautifully assayed by you. I feel inadequate to the task, but hope I’ll learn something by trying, so:
I want to discuss why I love “Duck Amuck,” a 1953 Merrie Melodies short written by Michael Maltese and directed by Chuck Jones. This one is not my own eccentric, undiscovered love: the Library of Congress recognized it, it ranked #2 in some survey of great Warner Brothers cartoons of all time, and its been much imitated. Nobody who discusses it ever seems to mention Steamboat Bill Jr., the Buster Keaton film that in some ways presages it–but it’s a compelling work of its own. Saw it as a child on television, always remembered it, use it in courses on farce, and infected my young son’s burgeoning sense of humor with it, too.
This is the one where Daffy Duck is subjected to whimsical trial after trial by an animator set on flummoxing him. His world loses all continuity–he begins walking across a farm setting, in character, and find himself in an Alaskan wasteland. He adjusts, and skis into a South Sea Island setting–and sinks in the ocean. Soon all kinds of meta-cartoon jokes are being played on him: the imagined camera moves in and out of a ridiculous level of closeup and longshot; the movie-theater projector that is presumably presenting him goes awry and discombobulated frames lead to two pugnacious Daffies squaring off against each other; the cartoon ends early with familiar music and iris-close, and Daffy screams “No,no!” and tears his way back into view; he prepares to curse out the animator and discovers he has been deprived of his voice (jungle sounds and barnyard sounds disconcertingly emerge instead); his body is erased piecemeal and he becomes a polyglot comic monster with Daffy’s voice and bill. In the end he demands a reckoning. “Who are you? Who is responsible? I demand to know! Show yourself!” and he isn’t allowed to see the answer (it’s Bugs Bunny winking to us, “Ain’t I a stinker?”–a minor letdown ending, but still . . .)
Why do I love this thing? SO many reasons, changing with time.
I always loved it for the skill level: the miraculous comic timing and dynamics of Chuck Jones and Mel Blanc–truly artful. I can’t imagine dissecting a comic sequence the way you’d have to to reproduce it in frame-by-frame animation and have the timing come out as spontaneous as Abbott and Costello at the top of their game, but there is something so utterly perfectly-judged in the timing of each passage,all intensified by beautiful facial drawing and, above all, Mel Blanc’s limitless range of vocal frustration all within Daffy’s distinctive voice–has any cartoon figure EVER gone through exquisitely-calibrated emotional levels like this and stayed in character? The sheer coordinated comedy dynamics of all the elements working together is so perfect it leaves a pang–perfection always does.
And there is the endless unfolding invention: it’s a repeated=gag piece, and you do get a sense of repetition, but to do the same joke over and over in so very many registers, to find yet another way to discombobulate the cartoon itself, feels like a wonderful unfolding abundance, like a picture of the imagination itself. (Yes, I’m getting grandiose–contemplating WHY you like something takes you to large places.) Yet it doesn’t cheat–the comic premise is perfectly disciplined throughout (give or take the ending . . .)
I know that, as a kid, I LOVED being treated as somebody smart, and meta-comedy, acknowledging the conventions of the entertainment (the cartoon backgrounds, the malleability of situation for recurring characters, the artificiality of a pretend camera. of film projection, of sound effects, of the conventional ways cartoon stories begin and end, of the invisibility of the animator himself)–I loved being treated as one who could get those jokes, who was conscious of the form and didn’t worship it, but could watch cartoons kid themselves and get a doubled delight. This has become a HUGE part of wiseass comedy culture ever since.
But I know there’s more . . .
I do recognize Chuck Jones’s own fascination with animation problem the script gave him: what IS a character is no part of him (situation, body, voice) remains constant? How do we know it’s still Daffy? What holds Daffy together when he is literally falling into a series of discombobulated parts? Yet the animators overcome the impossibility handily–and they have every reason to be proud of that. (in grad school we would have talked about this in terms of semiotics.)
But I think for me it ultimately goes to the human IMPLICATIONS of that animator’s problem: at some level, I care about how Daffy, as a character, holds on, when everything is made increasingly unstable. The feeling of a world that goes blank on you, that endlessly pulls the rug out from under your feet, that requires the utmost resistance and resourcefulness and openness to new modes of being in order to find a precarious, contingent survival–why did that appeal to me so much as a kid? (Walter Kerr ties essential Keaton’s comedy to survival in a hostile and absurd universe–much the same.) I think I wanted to know, even then, that when you feel betrayed by the most basic things or conditions, there is some crazy, howling way to fight back, to break the rules in YOUR favor, to bend with the wind and then to blow back in your own insistent roar, even if for the second you sound like a donkey–to insist and survive even if increasingly lost even to yourself, to insist on a reckoning even if you’re never going to get it. Did it have to do with being raised in an abusive household, where the sources and supports of life were also poisoning life, where I felt I was being constantly made over and erased in any individuality I might have had? Did it have to do with a fundamental sense of life/combat instilled in me from god-knows-when (I was not expected to live when born and fought my way back)?
I only know that it’s the combination of extravagant comic skill, imaginative abundance, fully fulfilling a comic premise, combined with the really fundamental struggle in the piece for a character to retain selfhood in an out-of-control existence that makes this piece essential for me: I don’t know if, as Keats said, truth is beauty and beauty truth, but I often think that laughter is truth and truth isn’t funny, and this short cartoon captures this with a level of artistic skill that gives its tough core vision something almost like a redemptive grace.
12 Mark Blankenship // Feb 5, 2009 at 2:01 am
Thanks to everyone who’s leaving such lovely comments here. I’ve learned something about “Speed Racer,” Warner Brothers, and “Magnolia” from what’s being written, and I’ve learned things about many of you. What a reward!
13 Colln H // Feb 9, 2009 at 2:41 am
Michael, I couldn’t agree with you more. Duck Amuck is clearly one of the greatest WB cartoons ever made. Chuck Jones is a god of animation.
Leave a Comment