Musicals

Now that Wonders in the Dark has finished counting down their list of musicals, I am moved to comment. First - that's it's been a treat to follow along, as it came out. A bit intimidating, as well... Not so intimidating that I'm not inspired to offer my own list of favorite musicals.

Or best musicals - or whatever they are. The countdown does tend to stir up questions about genre - they seem to have been deliberately vague about the definition of a musical - though they seem to have reached a consensus on some things. Documentaries and concert films seem to be right out - none on the list (that I can see) - I'm assuming that if they were considered eligible, you'd see Don't Look Back or Stop Making Sense or Gimme Shelter in there somewhere. That's a rule that makes sense, though it's odd that everyone seems to have gone by it on their own.

On the other hand - what about Nashville? O Brother Where Art Thou? or for that matter - how did This is Spinal Tap not make it? I won't credit the possibility that they aren't among the 140 best films with music in them - so they must be passed over for other reasons. And - I suppose it's reasonable enough that they are, they don't exactly present themselves as musicals, not in any traditional sense. (Though what else would Spinal Tap be, anyway?) But what is striking about those films, even more than some others that might fall on the edge of being musicals (from - oh - Pierrot le Fou to To Have and Have Not to some on the list - Blue Angel, say) is how conventionally they fit the genre. How is Nashville not, from start to finish, a backstage musical? O Brother Where Art Thou is an even more complete match - it is a backstage musical, featuring multiple performances in the film; plus more than one musical number that is NOT a performance - the Sirens - the KKK rally - the baptism scene. It also has the tone of old movies - light and breezy (with a hint of seriousness) - though I'd say it draws its tone more from old newspaper comic strips than old movies, there's a lot of overlap. It's not just a musical, it's an old fashioned musical - and on top of that, features some outstanding music, played straight. It's interesting that it's not there - not quite surprising - if I hadn't started thinking about definitions, I might not of considered it myself.... But once you think about it - I don't know how you ignore it.

Anyway - that aside - I can't see much to quarrel with on the list. Though - there are a couple films I don't understand missing it. Namely - Fantasia - that might have been definitional, though other Disney cartoons are on there - it is something of a strange beast, though... The other one - and I'm less inclined to forgive this oversight - is Shall We Dance. Fred and Ginger got lots of love - 3 films (that I remember off the top of my head) - #6 and #11 at that - but surely there should be at least one more. I like the early ones the best - you can see that below... but I can see why someone might prefer Swing Time or Shall We Dance - they are sleeker, the formula has been shined to a sparkle - and formula is not a bad thing at all in films... I would take Shall We Dance over Swing Time, but it's not so much the order as the fact that they are both aces... Though I do think this - that over all, Shall We Dance has the best music of any of the Fred and Ginger films. Overall - nothing, ever, beat Night and Day, as a song - but the Gershwin score, the Gershwin songs (You Can't Take That Away From Me; Let's Call the Whole Thing Off) are just marvelous, and add up to more than the music of any of the others....

Okay - enough. What would I vote for? This could bog down into definitions - and so I am going to offer two versions of this list. First - the expansionary one - this is the best films that I can find a reason to call musicals, ranked as movies:

1. Duck Soup
2. Pierrot Le Fou
3. Nashville
4. Blue Angel
5. Love Me Tonight
6. Top Hat
7. Hard Days Night
8. Night at the Opera
9. Gay Divorcee
10. Golddiggers of 1933
11. Wizard of Oz
12. Horsefeathers
13. O Brother Where Art Thou
14. Thirty Two Short Films About Glen Gould
15. Beijing Bastards
16. This is Spinal Tap
17. Merry Widow
18. West Side Story
19. Under the Roofs of Paris
20. Blond Venus
21. Don't Look Back
22. Forty Second Street
23. An American in Paris
24. Singing in the Rain
25. Red Shoes

And then - ranked as Musicals. For - meeting the genre requirements of a musical; and for the music itself - the dancing - the performances, the way the music is used in the film, as an end to itself. I think this is what I would end up with there:

1. Top Hat
2. Love Me Tonight
3. Gay Divorcee
4. Golddiggers of 1933
5. Hard Days Night
6. Duck Soup
7. Wizard of Oz
8. West Side Story
9. Forty Second Street
10. O Brother Where Art Thou
11. Singin' in the Rain
12. Meet Me in St.Louis
13. An American in Paris
14. Shall We Dance
15. Blond Venus
16. This is Spinal Tap
17. Don't Look Back
18. Merry Widow
19. Under the Roofs of Paris
20. The Red Shoes
21. Fantasia
22. Nashville
23. Gimme Shelter
24. Golddiggers of 1935
25. Cabin in the Sky

Today anyway...

Look.... Look... Look

I have said before, I rather dread October in the blog world - a solid month of horror film posts - blah... It's not that I don't like horror films, I think it might be a certain generic resentment - you don't see whole months devoted to melodramas do you? westerns, screwball comedies, the color blue? I suspect if you did, if ever February were given over the romantic comedies, say, I would soon get tired of that, too... I start here with ritual condemnation because this complaint is particularly disingenuous this year. I am positively steeped in horror related art just now. There is that vampire class - so it's a book and a movie a week about vampires. (Though we seem to have left the horror section behind - doesn't seem to be a lot of horror left by the time you get to Anita Blake or Dead Witch Walking - they seem a lot more Stan Lee than Bram Stoker.) And that aside, I keep watching horror films, and thinking about horror films when I'm watching other kinds. Did I mention that Mark Zuckerberg sometimes seems like a vampire? Who wouldn't think about vampires watching Inside Job? Or Carlos?

Though more directly - I'm certainly attentive to the overlap between vampire stories and other kinds of horror films. Questions of sympathy - watching vampire films and books pick up on the idea of the tragic monster. It's interesting that of the wave of horror classics in the early 30s, at Universal mainly, but elsewhere too, Dracula is probably the least sympathetic to its monster - Dracula is a monster, with some charm, perhaps, but not much in the way of pathos. Compare him to Frankenstein's monster - to the Mummy, or the Invisible Man - or to other studio's horror characters, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They all have their reasons - they are all, in some sense, driven to their evil, and we are made to feel the loss when they go wrong. (And in a couple of them, we are brought very close to seeing them as not evil in the least.) In Dracula, we get that with Renfield - though he's a secondary character - not so much the Count himself. But from the first sequel, it's there, even more overtly than in some of the others - Dracula's Daughter is a sympathetic, self-reflective, guilt ridden vampire who fights her legacy, her nature, her evil nature, her needs. It is a very sad film, full of ironies that you can't quite ignore - the way she keeps begging people for help and no one understands her, no one is willing to help her, and when, inevitably, she acts - they carry on like she has been a demon from hell. This is, in fact, something of a trademark for at least one strand of horror films - it obviously goes back to literary sources, Dr. Faustus or Dr. Jekyll, good men who found that evil was present with them, any number of doppelganger stories and temptation stories and stories of overreaching or too late repentance...



It's interesting in those 30s films. First - those early films seem to have been made for two sets of eyes - like there are two films in one. I mean - most of them are, on the surface, straightforward horror films, with ugly, horrible monsters, doing terrible things to pretty innocents (or not so innocents, but still pretty.) And since films, in those days, played, and then went away, never to be seen again (at least until Henri Langlois came along), this is how they were remembered. But when you see them over and over - you notices how much sympathy most of them show their monsters. Now - after decades of availability on video, DVD, etc. - this probably doesn't come as much of a surprise. But they were always made that way, weren't they? For two audiences - the one that saw them once and twice for the thrills - and the devotees, who would see them over and over and absorb as much of them as they could... And there's another element to this - the more you see these films, the more you notice the complexity of their morality. A film like Bride of Frankenstein (probably the best of the bunch) functions almost as a straightforward bildungsroman - but because the hero is a monster, the film has a surprising amount of leeway in his morality. The monsters have the ability to act out desires that the Hays code forbade - since they are monsters, they will get what's coming to them in the end - but along the way, they can act far more naturally than regular characters could, and the filmmakers usually gave us a chance to sympathize with them. At least, for those who came back, who watched them carefully, for something more than shocks and thrills.



Anyway - these days, films are a lot more free to spell things out. And back in the day, there were films that laid out what they were doing pretty clearly. For example, the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I am ashamed to admit it, but I had not seen it until this week - needless to say, it was a revelation. The theme - the good man who does evil - is explicit of course; so is the sense of a more complex view of morality and humanity than the Hays code could handle. It's rather shocking what the film does get away with - not just the strip teases and brutality, but a pretty direct statement of Victorian hypocrisy - poor Dr. Jekyll, saintly and brilliant as he is, is going half mad from lust - he begs to be able to marry his sweetheart NOW, but her father refuses - and he, like many a good Victorian gentleman before him, turns to drugs and whores. (More or less at the urging of his respectable pal, too.) The results are all too predictable. It's interesting that this is, in a way, a reversal of the central moral issue of Dracula - there, it's the horrors of female sexuality - here, it's the horrors of male sexuality. Both the horrors that come from acting on it, and those that come from its repression. It's an exaggerated enactment of the classic Victorian hypocrisy.



Though what really gets me about this film is what a a magnificent piece of filmmaking it is. Gorgeous, and endlessly clever - look at that shot of Jekyll (post-Hyde) and his pal, under the picture of the old Queen... paintings, statues, decor are used throughout to similar effect. Rouben Mamoulian was, I won't deny it, as flashy and thrilling a director as any of his peers - and he had some very impressive peers ca. 1931 (Capra, Lang, Sternberg, Lubitsch, Renoir, etc.) He is as skillful as any of them - and probably flashier than most. This film is really a dazzling display - relentless moving camera, sophisticated sound, brilliant and showy editing, state of the art special effects, superb sense of composition, staging, set design, you name it. There's not much like it in Hollywood at the time - with its 180 degree cuts and innovative wipes and dissolves (he loves holding a transition in the middle - wipes (as below), dissolves (Ivy's swinging leg chasing Jekyll and Lanyon through London)).... It's as showy and strange as a Japanese film of the period....



Though I'll end with another general comment on horror films, especially in the 30s - this is one of their other hallmarks. They held onto a lot of the aesthetics of art films, especially German art films, longer than most of Hollywood, and further down the food chain, if you will. A fairly uninspiring production like the Murders of the Rue Morgue still looks great (see below). And at the high end, Dr. Jekyll, or the Whale horror films, they were as good as anything of the time, and worthy successors to the work of Murnau and Lang and company in the 20s.

Uncanny Games

I have to admit up front - I'm not sure if I am going to see the American version of Funny Games or not. I'm sure it will be controversial - Jim Emerson has a bunch of posts up over the last couple days, (starting here and scrolling up), generally focusing on the reactions. Most of the reviews, and the conversation at his blog, talk about the film's take on violence and entertainment - comparing it to torture porn (either for reveling in violence and degradation, or for withholding violence degradation, nudity), sticking with Haneke's claims that the film is about violence and our reaction to violence.

This is strange, to me. I admit, all that is in the film, and it's what Haneke himself harps on (and harped on back in 1997) - but it's not what I saw in the film, when I saw the original. What I saw then was one of the most effective classical horror films I have ever seen. It gave me nightmares: convincing and genuinely disturbing ones - I am not usually unnerved by films, I was by this one. It worked.

But that aside - the story, the structure of the film, was, I thought, an almost paradigmatic horror film, a classical monster picture like Frankenstein or Dracula. Those great monster pictures, and horror more generally, are driven - maybe even defined - by the idea that our fears, whether of isolation, sex, growing up, death, etc., can be given a form and let loose on the world to torment us in real time. Maybe even more precise than that: that what we fear inside ourselves can take form outside ourselves and come to get us. And this is almost always acted out in the home and the family: something inside the home is incorporated as an alien being that invades the home. It's usually acted out literally, like here - the monster invades the home, the house itself; as well as symbolically - the monster disrupts the family. And - again - almost always through monster that is both a Double and Other: both part of us, like us, our mirror image, an image of a child, parent, etc. - and something alien, other, completely stripped of its normal human form.

It's a structure present in most of the great horror films: Frankenstein (a surrogate and monstrous child, who complicates a marriage, invading a home on the wedding night, etc. [that detail may be in the book, not the film - though the monster certainly invades the home in both the whale Frankensteins] ); Dracula (who replaces Harker, who certainly represents sexuality, desire and so on, who has to be invited in, but when he gets in makes the most of it - violating the integrity of our bodies and minds, another dominant theme in these films); it's there in many of the Val Lewton films - Cat People (the fear of sex releasing a monster); I Walked With a Zombie (the whole plot - the afflicted household, the relationship with the voodoo outside,the way the voodoo is brought in to the house, etc.); even in later films like Isle of the Dead - which does not have a literal family, but it does have a literal house - it posits the threat as something inside: the disease or the vorvolaka - who is, significantly, linked to Karloff's dead wife; plenty of angst about bodily integrity, losing control of our selves as well, in that one); Bava's horror films tend to work this way - Karloff's Wurdalak is paradigmatic - something from the home that becomes it's own double, and returns, becoming, simultaneously, part of the home and an invader of the home.) Eraserhead is another paradigmatic film (the child, the formation of the home, which immediately proves monstrous and destructive.) Rosemary's Baby. There aren't many that don't fit. It persists down to the present, though other kinds of horror have appeared as well: zombie films are not so easy to assimilate to this scheme: but Audition, Doppelganger, The Tale of Two Sisters all fit well enough. So, for that matter do Benny's Video, Cache, as well as Funny Games.

Because Funny Games fits the pattern almost perfectly. Its monsters, Peter and Paul, are unheimlich, as the Austrians might say. They come from inside the home, they are incarnated outside the home, as Others - as embodiments of fears, and then they invade the home, to violate its security, and the bodies and minds of the family. They are, socially, part of the same milieu as the family - same social class, same way of acting: this might have been even more obvious in the original version, with Arno Frisch and Ulrich Muhe playing criminal and father, as they did in Benny's Video. (Though I hadn't seen the earlier film at the time, and Funny Games was plenty effective.) But aside from that - they are also, quite clearly, products of that central fact of the modern home - the television.

That's worth a comment - the role technology plays in contemporary versions of these films. Children, sex, aging, death, the classic sources of the horror, have been augmented by technology, ubiquitous, domestic technology - televisions, telephones (Bava again, in Black Sunday!), computers, as well as things like toys, etc. Familiar technology, that turns against us. Which we get here. Its not the first time horror film monsters stepped out of the television - Cronenberg is fond of the idea; Poltergeist played with the idea; The Ring (and it's 8 million variations), of course. But it's quite rigorous here, and it's not like Haneke is subtle about it - the remote control scene is the most famous scene in the film.

I will, I think, let it got for now. Like I said - I don't know if I am going to see it or not. The first one was quite enough, thank you. But I do think the conversation about it, at least what I have seen has been ignoring the ways this film is an almost perfectly classical horror film. Comparisons to Saw and Hostel are evasions. And questions about whether people will see it as exploitation or critique of exploitation are evasions. I admit that Haneke has pumped up these aspects of the film - I'm not sure why: maybe to emphasize its disruptiveness, rather than its classicism. Maybe just to distinguish it from the rest of his career, because these themes - the disruption of the family, often from within; the specific role of technology as a kind of disease that destroys the home - are pervasive in his work. This one too - what's different is its treatment of violence... Maybe. Either way - it seems to me that Funny Games is less about violence as such than about the monsters that emerge from within our homes to destroy our homes...