HAROLD AND MAUDE and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Who doesn’t love a Manic Pixie Dream Girl? You know, that incredibly attractive, inspired and lively young woman who’s inexplicably but incredibly attracted to a dull, depressed male protagonist? She’s so cute, right? But in like, a totally nonsexual, awkward, supplementary kind of way.

I’ve loved a couple of them, myself. Garden State and Almost Famous, maybe the most common examples of the MPDG, are two of my favorite movies. I also recently saw Harold and Maude, which is arguably a simple variation on the trope; but also, arguably, not. 

Maude (Ruth Gordon) clearly introduces deep meaning (not to mention sexuality) into Harold’s (Bud Cort) boring and, literally, lifeless existence. You could certainly argue that the whole point of her character is to take care of her man, and once she does that, she no longer has a reason to live. You could also, and rightly so, point out that it makes no sense for her spend her last week on Earth with this boring little boy. Wouldn’t a more realistic, more liberated, and less male-dependent woman want to hang with her friends in her last few days of life? But I think these characters are more complicated than that, and the film certainly has more to say than some reiterated message about finding inspiration in the mundane. While Harold and Maude’s relationship could have easily unfolded along this conventional plotline, the actors’ brilliant performances saved this film from becoming a just-another-romantic-comedy.

First of all, Maude is old. She turns eighty towards the end of the film, and while we never learn Harold’s age, he basically looks like a kid. The 60+ year difference between the two characterizes their relationship as at least somewhat unorthodox from the get-go, even when the actors seem to be performing in traditional gender roles. Part of the Manic Pixie Lady’s whole deal is how adorable she is, usually without even noticing her own sexuality – but Maude not only is a-typically beautiful, but she is also acutely aware of how attractive she is to Harold. So even when she is at her most used, her most femininely-secondary to her male counterpart, she still represents a protestation against the typical women depicted in these kinds of relationships.

This dynamic is particularly apparent when the two sleep together for the first time, a sex scene that tastefully substitutes the actual dirty deed with bubbles and fireworks and sunlight, all in true Manic Pixie Dream Girl form. Instead, the actors portray their characters’ activity post-copulation. Bud Cord is sitting upright in bed, awake, alert, and blowing bubbles. Through this movement, which reflects the brilliant firework display that directly precedes this shot, Cort emphasizes Harold’s active role in the relationship, as well as the male active role in sex. Maude herself is sleeping in this scene; Ruth Gordon does not stir at all, juxtaposing Cort’s movements and emphasizing the passive role that most women play in the traditional romantic comedy relationship. Because Gordon takes on such a “feminine” role while Cort simultaneously becomes the active agent in their relationship, this scene proves that Maude, despite her age, is still able to fulfill Harold’s conventional sexual desires as competently as she fulfills his emotional ones. By presenting so unorthodox a couple in such traditional masculine and feminine roles, the actors challenge conventional conceptions of beauty, sexuality, and attraction – a key part of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl’s whole deal.

The film goes on, in my opinion, to break down the MPDG trope in a second, very different way, this time by addressing these conventional gendered power dynamics themselves. On the night of Maude’s 80^th birthday, Harold surprises her with a private celebration and, though he never actually goes through with it, a plan to propose to her. At the outset of the scene, Cort is again the active performer: he removes her blindfold, leads her in dancing, and even reaches across the screen to remove a tablecloth with a large flourish, allowing his body and his movements to completely dominate the shot. He also kisses her, all while she stands very still and stays relatively quiet throughout the scene. Finally, he hints at his marriage proposal. This is the ultimate example of his activity and her passivity, as he decided to marry her, assumed her consent, and announced it to his mother as a fact – all without informing Maude herself of his plan. At this pivotal moment, however, Gordon tells him (quite kindly) that she took pills to kill herself and will be dead by the end of the day. With this announcement, Cort immediately stops moving. In fact, he seems frozen, an abrupt transition symbolic of the realization that he is not, in fact, the only active partner in the couple, and that Gordon, quite untraditionally, has an agency of her own.

Now, I understand that lots of Manic Pixie Dream Girls die, robbing their partners’ of the enjoyment of their bodies, but leaving their spontaneity behind -- perhaps as a final metaphor for these women's desexualization. Cancer is one thing, however (and I'm thinking, like, A Walk to Remember, here) – suicide is another. Despite claims that Maude is just another Manic Pixie Dream Girl, albeit unexpectedly so, her final actions and control over her own death give her a freedom, at least in my eyes, that traditional female love interests simply do not have.

So, it's hard to discuss this without talking about how Harold and Maude is essentially a film about tackling authoritarianism. I do not believe that this movie, and particularly the actors in it, presents Maude as dominant over Harold in any way. Instead, the film seems to be challenging the idea that a relationship requires one active and one passive agent at all. Both main actors demonstrate these claims through their performances, toppling traditional power dynamics and introducing an alternative, anti-war and anti-authority paradigm of love. 

Interpreting Violence in DJANGO UNCHAINED

Within the first ten minutes of Django Unchained, German dentist / bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz is already killing slave owners and freeing a group of freshly-purchased African American men. The slaves, in possession of a rifle courtesy of Dr. Schultz, shoot one of their owners – and wow, they must have hit an artery or something because fake blood is suddenly gushing out the wa-zoo. I was just a little startled by this embellishment, but what was even more surprising was the ripple of laughter that swept through the theater where I saw the movie.

Was the moment supposed to be comical? I have never actually seen anyone get shot before, but this particular murder seemed hyperbolized to the extreme. Blood was flying around like water from a sprinkler at a five-year-old’s birthday party. It wasn’t exactly necessary, but there was no denying that it was a little funny. As the people sitting around me laughed at the ridiculousness of this asshole slave driver’s death, I couldn’t help but wonder: what the heck is the point of all this?

Well to begin with: Django Unchained is not a movie about moral ambiguity. There are good guys and bad guys, the people that we’re rooting for and the people we’re rooting against – and it's never unclear where to draw the line.

At the same time, however, there are obvious parallels between Django and the obnoxious slave owners he’s up against – mainly that they’re all killers. More than that, they seem to share an enjoyment of the act of murder. It’s not like Dr. Schultz ever blinks an eye before he shoots someone, and Django gets plenty of satisfaction from killing the evil Brittle brothers; similar, I believe, to Calvin Candie's mirth when he lets a pack of wild dogs tear apart a runaway slave. Our protagonists' lust for revenge killing is perhaps most astonishing when Dr. Schultz spontaneously shoots Candie and, in doing so, completely destroys any chance that Django and his wife Broomhilda can walk away from Candie-land free and unscathed – an opportunity they had spent the entirety of the film thus far trying to achieve. The doctor's explanation (before Calvin's cronies promptly kill him): "I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself." In Schultz's defense, Candie was being a huge dick. But is that a good enough reason to kill a man? Not really. The doctor simply could not exercise the self restraint required to not murder the guy. He could not do it to save his own life. He could not even do it for the long sought-after happiness of his new best friend Django. Instead, he killed Calvin Candie because he wanted to kill Calvin Candie. This German doctor and his free-bird sidekick may be more justified than the white southerners around them, but they do enjoy what they do.

It comes down to a matter of perspective. As I perceived it, there are two types of violence in Django: the at least somewhat justified and often humorous bloodshed perpetrated by bounty hunter Dr. Schultz and his accidental apprentice, Django; and the sadistic carnage that Calvin Candie, along with other white slave owners, inflict on their black property. As an audience, we laugh when Django shoots Candie’s southern-bell sister. With a hysteric cry she goes flying through the air, as if she’s being sucked into an unseen vortex in the next room, completely defying the laws of physics. We cringe when Candie himself forces one mandango fighting-machine to gauge out the eyes of another, just for a simple afternoon of private entertainment. Then we laugh again when Django shoots Samuel L. Jackson in the kneecaps, and subsequently blows him up. Quentin Tarantino encourages this behavior when he places the satirically victorious deaths of the “bad guys” up against the gut-wrenching, eye-covering torture of our heroes throughout the film, purposefully creating a painful juxtaposition.

Maybe this is supposed to be empowering. The film is, after all, the story of a disenfranchised slave gaining autonomy and kicking butt to save his woman. Maybe when you have to act with such incredible violence to procure your freedom, then that becomes what freedom is. Violence is a foundational part of old spaghetti westerns, a genre known for it’s depiction of a lawless time when cowboys were free as could be to shoot whomever they pleased. Heck, violence might just be a foundational part of most American cinema. America is “home of the free,” but as Django himself points out after Candie feeds a slaves to a pack of hungry dogs, America is home of the violent, too. And Django falls for it: even though violence is what dehumanized him in the first place, his ability to kill eventually becomes an essential part of his own freedom. When we laugh at it, we are reinforcing the idea that in order to be free, one must have the power to violently dehumanize others. 

Don't get me wrong. I loved the film, and I believe it sparked an incredibly important conversation about the significance of violence in our popular culture. I even went back and watched the original Django, directed by Sergio Corbucci in 1966. The really epic song in the opening credits of Django Unchained was originally written for this film. It was actually just as disturbingly violent as Q.T.’s movie – and it even included a shot where one unfortunate soldier’s ear gets cut off... Maybe the inspiration for a famous scene in another Quentin Tarantino film?

CITIZEN KANE, Take 2: Charles Foster Kane and the Human Identity

"'What would you like to have been?'
'Everything you hate.'"

-- Kane and Bernstein, Citizen Kane

It’s so easy to rip Kane a new one (like I just did) – he is cocky even from the beginning of his newspaper career, and he tries to buy women like he buys staff reporters. Giver her a picnic and a couple of dresses, put her in a castle and she’ll love you forever. So much of his behavior is derived from his unfounded ideas about the identities of the people around him, and his total, most likely deliberate, ignorance of their true essence. But who is Kane?

He is obsessed with defining the other, like he defined his wives, defined his readers; but he also attempts to use his power, with almost fanatical dependability, to define himself in the eyes of the other. The opening short film about his life, a kind of obituary news clip that introduces the audience to his story the way most Americans probably knew it, tells us right off the bat, “Never was a private life more public.” Kane is in charge of media outlets throughout the country, putting him in a unique position to control all of the press surrounding his saga as a fortunate inheritor, vehement newscaster, and passionate family man. He defines himself for the world, leaving no room for second impressions. He also replicates these attempts in his private life. He marries Susan Alexander, arguably, because, despite his fame, she has no idea who he is and no preconceived notions about his personhood. His relationship with her is his chance to start with a new woman and a clean slate, an opportunity to make sure she sees him the way he wants to be seen.

Kane’s efforts are largely a failure, and he himself is a victim of the same phenomenon to which he subjects the people around him. He is consistently forced to relinquish power over his own identification, and he is never really given the chance to control the path of his own life – beginning, of course, in his childhood. Much to his displeasure, his mother gives him away to the custody of a bank, an institution known for a tradition of disempowerment. Furthermore, while Kane’s enormous inheritance is largely referenced throughout the film as a positive happenstance, in reality, Kane was powerless to choose whether or not he actually wanted it. In a rare moment where he betrays that he may regret his fortune, he admits, “I always gagged on that silver spoon. You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a very great man.” His financial situation, something he did not choose and perhaps does not even identify himself by, puts Kane in a position to be judged not only by those close to him, but by the entire American populous and beyond. And though he tries to use his money to help these people, thereby ensuring that they see him in a positive light, he is ultimately unable to connect with them in any genuine way. Whatever support he garners for himself at the beginning of his career evaporates when his public image slides downhill, and he can do nothing to stop it.

The press is a powerful symbol of Kane’s inability to shape his own identity. Not even the audience is an exception – and it is important to remember that, while we aren’t reading this story in the paper, we do see almost the entire film through the eyes of a reporter. We don’t know Kane better than anyone else, and our judgments of him are equally as unfounded – with one exception. Welles treats us to what may be the most intimate secret of Kane’s sad life: the significance of his last words.

Kane mentions “Rosebud” in his most vulnerable moments, when his wife leaves him and again on his own deathbed, as a simple acknowledgement of his powerlessness. It is a throwback to the promises of childhood and a dream in which Kane is the richest man in the world, with the capacity to control whatever he wants. It is also, however, a representation of his own helplessness: even as his mother presents him with this fantasy, she throws her child away, into the hands of an unknown and intimidating guardian, who will have the influence to shape Kane’s identity as he matures. It is also worth noting that “Rosebud” is perhaps the clearest demonstration in the film of Kane’s inability to foster a genuine relationship with any of the people in his life. Despite the apparently extraordinary meaning that this sled holds for Kane, neither Bernstein, nor Leland, nor his ex-wife Alexander knows what he means when he says the simple phrase.

The message, as I interpret it, is this: Only in a dream are people able to define themselves; In reality, they loose this power, and their words and actions are always up for interpretation. Our protagonist is no exception, and that leaves Charles Foster Kane, like his wife, his readers, and the woman with the white parasol, despite his wealth, to be no more or less powerful than anybody else.

Something has been bothering me, so I’d like to finish this post with a question. Who names his sled “Rosebud?” Doesn’t that seem a little seasonally inappropriate? It obviously didn’t occur to any character in the film that when Kane mentioned this springtime blossom, he might be referring to his old winter sled. Thoughts? 

Love and Power: Relationship Dynamics in CITIZEN KANE

“You just want to persuade people that you love them so much that they ought to love you back. You only want love on your own terms. Something to be played your way according to your own rules.”  

-- Jedediah Leland, Citizen Kane

I know, I know, this is quite a film to tackle in my first few posts on a new blog. But I just saw Citizen Kane for the first time last weekend with my family, and I can’t stop trying to figure it out. I have a couple of ideas, so this is the first in a two-post mini-series about the movie – one criticizing Kane, and the other defending him.    

This dialogue, preformed by the character Maurice Bernstein, is a small example of a big message that I got from the film on the recurring motifs of love, power, and identity. Bernstein relates the story about the woman with the white parasol with the implication that he loves her, in some way or another, despite having seen her for only a moment. His subsequent recollections of her image presumably extend beyond the facts of what he saw to include a fantasy woman, with a made-up personality. In his mind, Bernstein created a fictional character out of a glimpse of this person, and in doing so, he acquired complete control over her – she is his because he invented her – and, I will argue, that is the main reason why he derives pleasure from the thought of her.

This is just one interpretation of Bernstein’s story, and I know that it presumes a lot. But I believe it is a valid argument simply because this fantasy, with all the same promises of love and power, repeats itself time and time again throughout the film.

Kane’s own personal relationship, with ‘Singer’ Susan Alexander, around which the plot is centered, is a prime example. This marriage (his second) begins with a number of parallels to Bernstein’s experiences with the Woman-in-White. Kane meets Alexander for one night only, and has no chance to really get to know her. Additionally, Alexander herself arguably “didn’t see [Kane] at all” (to quote Bernstein), because she does not recognize his name and is unaware of his fame. Yet, much like Bernstein’s affection for the woman from the ferry, Kane is instantly in love with Alexander and he leaves his wife to marry her, instead. Because Kane has no way to know what this woman is really like, his newfound relationship with her is based completely on his imagination of her personality. This scenario creates an artificial dynamic in which Kane simultaneously has authority over and is in love with Alexander, because he created her.

Unfortunately, by indulging too fully in this fantasy, Kane eventually runs his very real relationship into the ground. He begins by using his status in the newspaper industry to propel her to fame as an opera singer, importantly because that is what he imagined she wanted. He ignores, however, any sign that she is displeased with the situation, until she attempts to commit suicide. This devastating turn of events forces Kane to realize that he is delusional: Alexander’s action is completely unexpected – that is, it is something Kane’s falsified image of his wife would never do. The incident shows Kane that he may be able to use his power to give his wife fame, but he is wrong, at least, in thinking that that is what she wanted. Furthermore, it also directly disrupts their relationship’s power dynamic by demonstrating, in a most alarming fashion, that Alexander is in complete control of her own body and soul, and she has the ability to choose whether to live or to die.

The steady disintegration of Kane’s relationship climaxes with a scene in a tent at a picnic function, which he supposedly hosts for his wife. She accuses him, however, of giving her only what he wants, and failing to consider her own needs (“the important things”) in the process. In an extraordinary demonstration of power, Kane slaps Alexander across the face. She responds with an expression of hatred and by ordering him not to apologize. What struck me (no pun intended), was that right outside the tent, guests at the picnic are bustling around, singing and socializing. This incredibly stark contrast illustrates the ease with which Kane is able to please his acquaintances, and highlights the fact that it requires much more unselfish consideration of another to please his spouse. Kane does not genuinely know or understand Alexander; he sees her how he wants to see her. This gives him both artificial power over her, as well as artificial love for her; and while he attempts to give her what he thinks she wants, his efforts are just as synthetic as his sentiments. In the end, Kane cannot actually possess Alexander, and she leaves him, toppling his falsified ideas about himself, herself, and their relationship to the ground.

I Love Sarah Jane

If you love zombie movies, I would definitely recommend this short directed by Spencer Susser, the man who directed Hesher, from 2010.

It's running on a lot of the same themes as 28 Days Later, and it's really fantastic. Enjoy!

We are all People, We are all Zombies

Zombies are pretty freaky. Physically, at first glance, they seem to be bloody corpses, but then they walk around like people. They are id-pleasing, brain-slurping monsters, but they look just like your parents (or your kid, depending on the flick). Beyond the realm of the bodily, zombies are also half-human in a much more intangible sense. They are scary because they are so incredibly cruel and destructive, with literally no thought about the significance of their actions. Simultaneously, they are enticing, because zombies do whatever they want to do (and they want to eat you), regardless of the boundaries set by society – and this is exactly what many of the viewers want, too. These creatures exist at the boarder between the human and the inhuman, which just so happens to be the street outside your humble home.

Considering this analysis, I think it’s clear that zombie movies like 28 Days Later (my personal favorite) have the potential to use this trope to highlight all the problems of human nature; to make people question what a zombie is, and am I one? Take the soldiers, for example, led by Major Henry West at an abandoned mansion in the British countryside. These guys are very real people: they’re physically fit, they don’t eat brains, and, above all, they are concerned about the future. As West explains to Jim, the group was lost in despair until he assured them that “women” would come, and they would be able to rebuild civilization. This value seems to create a meaningful distinction between themselves and the zombies, who couldn’t care less about what’s coming up next in humanity’s saga on earth. But ripped of a society to answer to, West and his men shed their human superego and express themselves, well, like zombies: through acts of violent rape and murder.

Even as the movie points out the negative qualities of the human condition, mainly by examining all the impulses that people and zombies share, it simultaneously demonstrates the distinction between these two types of beings. Jim’s character is absolutely critical to this concept. In the film’s incredible climax, with an unforgettably eerie soundtrack, Jim returns to the mansion after the soldiers’ failed attempt to execute him, in order to save Selena and Hannah from their grisly fate. To succeed, he nearly becomes a zombie himself: he moves as quickly and as silently as the monsters do, and in the end, he kills a man in perhaps the most violent and socially-unacceptable way possible – by pushing his eyes up into his brain.  It is difficult to justify Jim’s behavior. He kills so aggressively and so gruesomely, and with such zombie-like impulses, that it’s hard to imagine that a part of him didn’t want to commit the murder. Furthermore, by the end of his rampage, he is covered in blood, giving his body a peculiar half-human, half-corpse aura. In fact, when he is done, not even Selena is sure if he is a man or a monster. Through the blood and gore, however, Jim is driven by an incredibly human instinct: compassion. He has returned to save his friends because he loves them, and this separates him from the zombies that he otherwise resembles. Love makes him human, and he risks his life to rescue these women because without them, his affection-less existence would be as pointless as that of the monsters in the street.

Selena herself articulates this idea exactly, about half way through the film, when she explains, “All the death, all the shit…I was wrong when I said that staying alive is as good as it gets.” She finishes up her revelation (short-and-sweet) with a quick kiss on Jim’s cheek. Each of these characters, from Selena to Jim to Major West, are capable of extreme brutality. Simultaneously, however, they are defined by their efforts to protect the people whom they love, distinguishing them clearly from the packs of thoughtless zombies in the world outside.