MOVIE DIARY 2023: I HAVE TO GO OUT GIVING A BIG FUCK YOU TO THE PEOPLE WHO DID THIS TO ME.
Ok yes, after a week off, we are back! This week will be a double post week, and to kick things off I’ve got two brand new special guests joining me, world famous cartoonist Katie Skelly and South Philly Microcinema organizer and programmer Lily H-A! This is the first MOVIE DIARY appearance for both Katie and Lily, and I’m so excited to welcome them to the MOVIE DIARY 2023 lineup!
Joker (2019) - dir. Todd Phillips
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: KATIE SKELLY
Jokerfication is a process by which irony becomes internalized to the degree of expectation. It’s throwing your hands up and saying, “Fuck it, why would anything ever go right? Ha ha” to the world.
For example, nothing could be more Jokerfied than the recent introduction of the Twitter Blue service. Prior to 2020, verified accounts held a captive audience and certain, albeit slippery, distinction. Now, a bluecheck signifies a rube who’s out eight bucks to the genius whose cars explode. It’s a twisting, turning ouroboros of a joke where different user experiences can hop on and off, and can see undulating unto the future. It’s a laugh we can all share together.
Joker (2019) doesn’t work on any level quite this novel and complex. Maybe our collective imagination couldn’t stretch that far yet. We hadn’t been dropped in the hall of mirrors of hygiene theater and essential work. We hadn’t become the culture that would join voices across the aisle to collectively tell the selected cast of Wonder Woman, singing an acappella “Imagine” to us, to shut the fuck up. In short, we didn’t know what we were in for in the next calendar year.
Which wasn’t to say we were without fear and paranoia. The same bluechecks who would become displaced on their favorite app in three years told us they wouldn’t be seeing Joker, thank you very much. There were credible threats of violence at screenings. There were bad men out there who would become emboldened by its nihilism. The sentiment solidified when video from a Venice screening leaked one of the film’s most damning scenes, where Joaquin Phoenix’s voice booms as he declares himself a mentally ill loner abandoned by society, and then shoots a grandfatherly Robert DeNiro point blank in the head.
But Jokerfication isn’t purely nihilistic, nor is it strictly violent. It requires a certain narrative irony to truly function, otherwise it would be just like any other garden variety American cruelty. Afterall, the Joker isn’t just a killer. The Joker holds jobs. He’s been a dentist. An entrepreneur. A U.N. Ambassador to Iran. And of course, a clown. The Joker is a character so delicious and shifty in the collective imagination, so easy to slide into any storyline, that it’s hard to even point to a singular origin story that everyone can agree on. He’s also a notorious liar who will say anything about his past because it ultimately doesn’t matter. And so Joker takes on the unwieldy task of reverse-engineering one of the most irony-poisoned characters in fiction.
And the film really takes its time doing so. First, Arthur Fleck has to play the world’s most pathetic clown for hire. He gets beaten with his own busking sign. By kids! In the mean streets of the Boogie Down Bronx/Gotham! He’s harassed and harangued at work. Arthur is skinny and his body is messed up. We must acknowledge his physical reality because he’s constantly framed contorting like a Chris Cunningham creature. He has an involuntary tic – laughter – which he omits with the pitch of a kookaburra. Next we must acknowledge his mental reality, which is as a desperately lonely adult living with a homebound, delusional mother who keeps squawking about this Thomas Wayne fellow. This stood out to me the most as the new Joker was photosynthesizing inside his host Arthur: he isn’t a liar. Sure, he has some delusions of grandeur about his ability as a standup comedian, and hallucinates some things (which end up being the weakest, least convincing scenes of the film). But he is ultimately a truthful character. His attachment to reality is a bit too sympathetic.
Reality has a way of interfering with superhero films like this. The Dark Knight (2008), a film from a franchise utterly devoid of pizzazz, presents the Joker as a crusty but cunning psychopath in a purple suit. Fine. But you expect me to believe a clown man has the city in tatters when he’s up against the iteration of Batman with the hugest hard-on for hyper surveillance and military contracts? Batman would just order a drone strike on Joker, and c’est fin. Superhero and supervillain stories need a world that isn’t ours. We need to first establish an environment that can house characters this big without it cracking its own lens.
And Joker… kind of does this! This world is so grim that even Arthur’s social worker dips due to budget cuts. He doesn’t even get the old “you’re gonna have to talk to somebody if you want your checks, sweetie.” She’s just out. Man! His mother is convinced he’s Thomas Wayne’s illegitimate son, making him half-brother to Bruce but with zero of the wealth. He’s on the lam for the triple homicide of three of Wayne’s nastiest employees whom he blasted on the subway. He’s been going on dates with his own imagination and not his cute, understanding neighbor. And late night television host Murray Franklin has a “viral” clip of Arthur bombing on stage that his audience is eating up every night. I’ve become Jokerfied over much less. Come on. Let’s get nuts.
The transformation into the Joker starts with an insanely cruel scene where Arthur, shirtless and freshly coated with white clown paint, stabs and pummels his old clown coworker Randall (the character actor god Glenn Fleshler) for trying to retrieve the .38 Arthur used in the subway murders. The scene really lets Joaquin sparkle as both a threat and a very silly man. Feeling so invigorated by this, Arthur completes his Joker uniform (love) and takes to the infamous steps to dance to the most cursed song of all time. It has taken us ninety whole minutes to get to this place and we have maybe 20 precious more to go.
But it’s a delight watching Joaquin absolutely hoofing it through the city streets, booking it with the same fervor as Freddie Quell through the fields at daybreak. He’s shimmying and dancing out of the subway, he’s pulling focus on the Murray Franklin show. And soon he’s hoisted by a loyal mob of clowns onto the top of a cop car to give them all a big smile. We don’t see Arthur’s capture, and a la American Psycho don’t have a clear picture of what was real. But we do know that we’re leaving him in Arkham. And just like that – cut to his half-brother Bruce alone in an alley standing over his slain parents. Tell me I’m Jokerfied for loving that. You’re right.
I for one look forward to a post-2020 Joker sequel. I think Gaga will be perfect. I do wonder if we’ll be subject to the same hand wringing but I suspect not; I think the landscape by which we connect with each other will have shifted again before its release. The success of Joker is in itself a sort of Jokerfied thing: not only did the bizarre moral crusade against it fail, it won Joaquin an Oscar, which he used to discuss the ins and outs of cow insemination via factory farming. The joke was on milk drinkers all along. That’s Life.
Katie Skelly is an LA-based cartoonist and co-host of the Thick Lines Podcast. Find her at katieskellycomics.com.
It Follows (2014) - dir. David Robert Mitchell
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: LILY H-A
I actually am kind of a wiener about scary movies, but I’m reading this really amazing book with a reading group I’m in, called Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form, by Sianne Ngai, and one of the chapters is devoted in large part to an analysis of this movie, so I wanted to watch it before I read the chapter. Because I am a wiener, I did have to watch it in a small little window on my scorching hot laptop. I also did still get very very scared, for the record. But what a cool movie! I can’t shut up about it!
I’ll summarize the premise (or gimmick) of the movie briefly (spoilers ahead) - Jay, a college student, has sex with Hugh, a guy she’s been dating. Immediately afterward, he straps her to a wheelchair in an abandoned psychiatric hospital (which they were parked by to have sex - very goth), and explains he’s passed on a curse to her: a malign entity, taking a variety of human forms, will pursue her and try to kill her from now on. She can pass the curse on to someone else by having sex with them, but if they die, it goes back to Jay, and if Jay dies, back to Hugh, and so forth. He explains he’s educating her about the curse to her to “help” her - but really so she has a better shot at keeping it away from him. Jay spends the rest of the film trying to survive It, the Follower, by various means, with the support of a crew consisting of her sister Kelly, Kelly’s friends Yara and Paul, and her horny neighbor Greg.
While a lot of other things in the film are left ambiguous*, the rules of the curse are laid out in crystal clear dialogue. The sort of pyramid scheme nature of the curse is really the main thing about it - not so much that it’s passed on by sex specifically (it’s certainly not - or not mainly - an STD metaphor, as one might expect). A central theme of the movie, displacement and deferral, is established early on as Jay and Hugh (pre-curse transfer) play a game on a date where they look around and choose a person they’d like to trade places with. The camera follows their gazes around the movie theater as they consider their choice. Later in the movie, after Jay has been given the curse, the camera again often seems to be searching for someone that she can trade places with by transferring her fate.
The main cast of the movie is entirely white, as are the forms the Follower takes, but (and) race seemed to me to be a central preoccupation of the movie. (The recurring swimming pool set pieces were a gesture at this, I thought.) Most of the film’s action takes place in a white suburb of Detroit. Black people are only on screen a few times, mostly viewed through windows as the characters tour through neighborhoods that have fared worse than theirs from deindustrialization. The characters verbally address race only once, and indirectly, as they discuss childhood parental injunctions against crossing south of Eight Mile (while they are crossing south of Eight Mile to find a swimming pool to throw stuff into and shoot at). The way race haunts the movie is linked with its themes about displacement of risk onto others; that this happens across racial lines is visible in the Detroit landscapes of the film. It struck me too that when the Follower isn’t taking the forms of people the victim knows, it takes the form of others made abject - an elderly person in a hospital gown, an abused woman, or generally someone disheveled and out of place - as race certainly isn’t the only organizing principle for how risk and harm are displaced from some people to others in our society. But one key thing about the curse is that the risk can be passed on and deferred, but not forgotten, and not forever - chickens famously come home to roost.
Sianne Ngai’s reading of the film, relatedly, focuses on the curse as a representation of finance, credit, and debt - which also uses the Detroit setting to great effect. I won’t try to fully summarize Ngai’s arguments here, though I’ve certainly borrowed from them, because she’s one of the biggest geniuses in the world and I am not going to do a good job. So I guess just consider this a very strong endorsement of the book - Theory of the Gimmick is insanely cool, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Something that’s kind of unique about the movie among horror films is the absolute failure of the gang to defeat the entity, or even really give it a good try. Earlier in the movie, they make some gestures at figuring out the origins of the curse, and only make it as far as tracking down Hugh - actually a kid named Jeff (who was slumming it in an abandoned house when he passed the curse to Jay, but who they ultimately trace to his mom’s McMansion). Jeff tells them he got it from an anonymous one-night stand, and offers up one, self-evidently stupid suggestion: “Just sleep with someone else and tell them to do the same thing. Maybe it’ll never come back.” Then, at almost the very end of the movie (after Jay taking Jeff’s approach results in Greg’s death) the gang tries something I’d call a “one weird trick” strategy to kill the Follower - luring it into a pool in order to electrocute it. It’s set up as the climactic scene of the film, one that might be expected to end in the entity’s defeat and catharsis for the group. But it’s not clear why they thought this might work, and in fact, it doesn’t at all. Not just in a “leaving room for a possible sequel” way - they’ve failed.
It seems to me a more promising strategy would have been to continue to trace the curse to its origins, to understand it in order to defeat it for good. Having tried very little in that regard, and failing the “one weird trick” approach, by the end Jay and Paul have coupled up and seemingly resigned themselves to passing the curse on to others they see as disposable (Paul drives by some sex workers, gazing at them meaningfully) and living a haunted life in the suburbs. As Ngai points out (citing the great Melinda Cooper) family formation is one of the classic “tricks” promoted by the US state as a life preserver among neoliberalism’s wreckage. It doesn’t seem promising.
Almost everything I’ve read about the movie has pointed to the way that its time period is kept intentionally vague with a mishmash of signifiers, giving it a dreamlike quality. And I might argue that the fact that the characters are unmoored from history is part of what makes them unable to truly reckon with the curse as a social problem or defeat it. However, one possible takeaway: Unlike the hapless characters of the movie, those of us with our feet planted in history have been given our own “weird trick” by the great Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which we can use to understand the curses we’ve been given and thus dismantle them - it’s called dialectical materialism. :)
OK, last thing, I have to talk about the shell phone (pictured above) - what Ngai calls a “gimmick en abyme, whose aesthetic intensity is as great as its narrative irrelevance”. As part of their strategy to unsettle and keep the film’s timeframe unclear, the filmmakers ended up creating an incredibly beguiling fake consumer object - a pink clamshell shaped e-reader, on which Yara is reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot throughout the movie. I was instantly obsessed with this thing and googled it as soon as it appeared, and learned that I was not alone. In fact it seems to be a recurring subject of viral tweets, a la conversation pits. Everyone wants the shell phone. What is the appeal? For me I think it’s partly that I fucking hate my smartphone and yearn for it to be replaced with a stupider device that I can only read novels on, and partly that I grew up playing with Polly Pockets. In any case, I would love to have this item. I think it would really turn things around for me.
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*This was something I also really loved about the movie. It seems like whenever you watch a movie now they have clearly gotten notes on it that say, basically, “Your audience is stupid. Please spell this out.” It hurts!
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Lily H-A lives in Philadelphia and among other things, is part of a nascent microcinema collective probably called something like the South Philly Autonomous Cinema (they haven’t really decided yet) - you can follow them on twitter and Instagram for upcoming screenings!
How To Blow Up A Pipeline (2023) - dir. Daniel Goldhaber
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
FBI DON’T READ THIS!
Ecoterrorists… hello…
This was maybe one of the most tense movies I’ve seen so far this year. Mostly because as I’ve learned from this movie, blowing up a pipeline necessitates preparing a lot of explosives, and this movie does not shy away from letting you see how dangerous it is to work with homemade explosives. But it’s not just the explosives, it’s everything else too that ratchets up the tension in this movie. It turns out that committing meaningful, organized acts of ecoterrorism is a lot of hard work and there are a lot of moving parts!
The movie follows a group of activists/ecoterrorists who’ve come together from all parts of the country to blow up an oil pipeline in west Texas. We see them preparing the explosives and coming up with their whole strategy to make this happen, but we also get flashbacks of who all these people were before they were set on this path, and what pushed them into this. It’s a wide ranging survey of the very real effects of climate change on actual people. Xochitl’s mother died unexpectedly from a recent surprise heat wave, Theo grew up with Xochitl near a chemical plant and now she’s been diagnosed with Leukemia. Shawn’s been disillusioned by the lack of meaningful impact and results that organizing his college campus has delivered. Dwayne’s farm has been blighted by oil developers and he’s been forced off his land. Michael has been waging a one man protest to shutdown a pipeline on Native lands, and he’s been getting his ass kicked every day. Multicultural people from all walks of life who are pissed off enough about the environment that they’ve been driven to take drastic action. They’re like the Planeteers and their Captain Planet is a homemade bomb.
As a film adaptation, it’s interesting to see this movie stem from Andreas Malm’s polemic of the same name. Malm’s book shows up a couple of times as a prop in the movie, and in one scene a character remarks to another character reading it, “You know, it doesn’t actually tell you how to do it” (referencing the instructional sound of the title). I got kind of hung up on the appearance of the book in the movie, not really because it was a distraction, but more I think because it sort of feels like a comment on the limitations of an incendiary book or movie in effecting the change that it’s calling for. It’s all well and good to write out a call to action, but it’s another thing to take that action, and it’s a whole other thing to get people to join you.
The filmmakers understand this, and the difficulty of this mission is very well expressed in the plot of this movie, but I have to wonder how they (the director, the producers, the actors, the crew, etc.) view their own movie. I’m sure they all got involved because they believe in the cause, they believe in its importance, but they also have to be aware of the limitations, that making a movie about blowing up a pipeline does not equal blowing up a pipeline, and that doing something to “raise awareness” can only get you so far. I think one of the more interesting things about this movie is its self awareness and the underlying tension that it causes on a sort of meta level. How To Blow Up A Pipeline is very critical of the ineffectiveness of navel-gazing awareness projects, and it seems to have a dim view of the smaller, slower actions that many well-intentioned people are taking to do good in their own communities. At one point, Michael derides his mother’s farming and grain preservation projects as “stuff to make white people feel better,” but on some level we have to ask ourselves if this movie is just that— another thing to make white people feel better.
I don’t think that this movie was made to let environmentally conscious/concerned people think that everything that they’re doing is fine and that they’re good and they’re doing their best. I think it has a confrontational tone that aims to make you feel uncomfortable, like you’re not doing enough, and I really appreciated that approach. I think the filmmakers are aware that at the end of the day, this is just a movie, and there’s only so much that a movie can do. The characters themselves have very similar conversations about how effective things like radical environmental policy can be when humanity’s window for meaningful change is rapidly closing. The real impact of something like this movie or any climate-focused media will be measured in the actions it may inspire people to take. There are some parts toward the end that feel like they were lifted from online social justice Instagram infographics, and it can kind of feel nakedly preachy, but I think the preachiness is part of the point. The filmmakers seem to know that they can only take us so far with a movie, so they’re going to give us those sections where characters rattle off real life figures and statistics, they’re going to have the characters talk about how we know who the biggest polluters on the planet are, and they’re going to do it in as grounded a way as possible so that you know that while this is a movie, these are also real problems that we need to face and that we can face if we’re willing to go out there and do what needs to be done. The movie itself is not the endgame, but getting you riled up enough to slash some tires is.
Inland Empire (2006) - dir. David Lynch
I don’t think I even really know how to approach this movie. It feels like the most David Lynch has ever David Lynch-ed. It’s such an overpowering, massive movie, with all of Lynch’s usual motifs and fascinations supercharged to create wave after wave of dread, terror, desperation, and strangeness. It’s so cliched at this point to talk about Lynch’s work as if you were awake in some horrible dream, but it’s true — there are few filmmakers who so accurately capture that feeling and who operate on a very particular wavelength of dream logic.
There’s enough of a plot to hang these nightmarish feelings on and to give them some context, but I think like all of Lynch’s work, what’s at the forefront is vibes, unsettling and uncanny vibes. Nikki (Laura Dern) is an actor starring in a movie with Devon (Justin Theroux). After the initial rehearsal, their director confesses to them that this movie is actually a remake of an old German movie that had to stop production because the two leads were murdered. Nikki and Devon begin an affair, but Nikki’s possessive and dangerous husband catches on, and then things get kind of difficult to recap. The timeline of events is non linear, Nikki has trouble distinguishing real life from scenes from the movie she’s shooting, and the line between Nikki and the character she plays, Sue, begins to disappear. Fiction becomes reality, reality becomes a dream, and all the while we see bits and pieces connecting the original cursed German movie to the present time, though it’s never directly explained. You never get an explanation, just a feeling that you know to be true, that we’re descending straight into hell, and that’s enough to pull you into the next unsettling and seemingly disconnected scene.
Laura Dern is really incredible in this movie, and it seems like such a demanding role. She spends a lot of this movie wandering around these sinister spaces while someone says some strange, off putting shit to her. She’s got that great quality of looking lost in a world that’s both too big and too small for her, and it feels harrowing to watch her move around in this world. The way some of these locations are shot feels so hostile and uncomfortable, and at some point these places that Nikki finds herself in become a kind of shorthand for signifying a specific type of dread or fear. I love when a movie sort of develops its own vocabulary and I think it’s really cool how this movie uses different sets and places and lighting as a kind of emotional grammar that connects the movie.
Inland Empire definitely feels like Lynch at his most indulgent, but I think the beauty of this movie is that while we don’t receive much in the way of explanation, we can in some way understand what is happening purely through a feeling that Lynch is evoking. I think Lynch is able to achieve this because he’s dealing with some familiar subject matter, and people who have a familiarity with Lynch’s work will be able to recognize his usual motifs, but Laura Dern’s skill at expressing that Lynch-ian disquiet and Lynch’s skill at fostering an unsettling dream-like atmosphere really work well together to create something that feels so strange yet so familiar, those unnameable feelings that you can’t explain but they’re at the tip of your tongue. It’s a long movie too, but in that good immersive sort of way where once you see the credits hit it feels like you’re finally coming up for air.
Your mileage on this will vary depending on how much you enjoy/can tolerate David Lynch’s whole deal (and I’m not saying this in a snobby, “you-don’t-like-it-because-you-don’t-get-it” way! I’m sure plenty of people get it but just don’t like it, and as someone who frequently gets it but just doesn’t like it, I would never begrudge anyone that feeling) but I think with his movies there’s certainly a level of reciprocation to them. The more you give yourself over to them, the more you’re going to get out of them, and much like a dream, even if it’s difficult to explain, you’re still left with some very distinct and unshakeable feelings. I don’t know, man, I’m sorry to sound like the most insufferable guy in the freshman dorm, but it’s an experience, you just gotta experience it.
The third part of the blog
Last night I caught a screening of Rumble In The Bronx (1995) at the New Beverly. I was super excited because that was the first Jackie Chan movie I ever saw, and this was cool because it was the original Hong Kong print of the movie, which I’d never seen before. There were some extra scenes that were definitely not on the cut that ended up on the old VHS tape I watched over and over as a kid, and that was cool to see. I wrote about watching Rumble In The Bronx back on MOVIE DIARY 2018.
I also finished reading The Brothers Karamazov last night. It took me a long time to read (I’m a slow reader, sorry), but I loved it, and I sort of felt like spending so much time on one book really kind of made it feel like a journey for me, in both a good and bad way. Anyway, I loved it, and while I was reading it I was sort of wishing I’d really understood how hard classic Russian Literature goes much sooner in my dumb life. Oh well! Sometimes you come to certified bangers late in life, but the important thing is that you got there, I guess is what I’ll tell myself.
Speaking of classic literature, are you getting in on Fran’s MIDDLEMARCH MAY?? I am unfortunately sitting this one out because I am terrible at reading books on a deadline, but I have been lurking on Fran’s discussion posts to feed my FOMO. If you’re a Middlemarch-head make sure to get in there!
That’s it for today! Make sure to join the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord so we can all hang out more and so that you can have the full MOVIE DIARY 2023 experience (I think last I dipped in we were talking about Dune (2021) and then things shifted to talking about the 4DX theater experience, which then turned into sharing pictures of Tom Cruise— we have fun in there, you’ll like it).
One more big thanks to Katie and Lily for joining me on the blog today! I’ll be back on Thursday with ANOTHER SPECIAL GUEST!