★ Boys Don't Cry

You probably know Hilary Swank in relation to Million Dollar Baby, a really good movie directed by the great Clint Eastwood....Well, I saw her long before that in a shocking independent movie Boys Don't Cry, where she is, as always, EXCELLENT!
So, here's some thinking about this moderately filmed motion picture and my fascination about the creation of meaning through specific compositions in certain scenes....





Many view films focusing solely on the bare action of the story. They focus on what they see in the action and do not pay much attention to the various and numerous techniques that directors use to create meaning. Thus, there is much criticism among viewers, for example, that adaptations from novels can never be as ‘accurate’ and as true to the atmosphere of a story as a novel can be. Disagreeing with the observation mentioned, I’ve noticed that transforming meaning of a word or a sentence into a moving picture is everything but an easy task. A picture cannot express meaning with words because it conveys meaning with icons instead of words. But it can still say (express) more than a thousand words.
(Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena)

In this short text, I will focus on the technical part of the film analysis and how meaning is conveyed through certain techniques that are used in the film. The theme of transsexual is conveyed not only through the story but even more so through the specific camera work, such as flashbacks and the super fast photography, but also slow motion photography and freezing of the frame. Through these, the specific meaning and in addition, symbolism is created.

Boys Don’t Cry is about a transsexual, Brandon Teena, who suffers from an identity crisis because she is a he in a female body, which is beyond the tolerance and understanding of the community. The camera work conveys the troubles and suffrage of Brandon Teena wonderfully, because each technique conveys his mental state and also how the themes of transsexual and homosexuality are treated. The viewer can for example get a clear picture of the dilemma in Brandon - a male spirit captured in a female body – through the fast driving scenes and super fast photography of the scenery. The director also uses Biblical symbolism of the crucifixion of Jesus when Brandon’s identity is violently exposed to show the humiliation of the moment.

The meaning created with the camera work is discussed through five scenes

About the construction of meaning in Boys Don't Cry:

The following scenes (which I mention further ahead in this post) awoke the most interest for the analysis of the special techniques that the director is using especially because by using special effects and techniques and specific compositions, the director is trying to convey specific meaning. Through these we can also see how the themes are treated. As can be seen, homosexuality as well as transsexual is seen as something alien and unacceptable by the society. Thus, Brandon is an outcast who has to move from town to town every time he gets into trouble whenever his identity is discovered.

First scene: Landscape and time

The film is mostly set in landscape, on roads, in deserted places and sometimes inside a house. Most of the film, however, is set in Falls City, which is depicted in a way that implies otherworldliness. This ‘otherworldliness’ is not ‘dreamy’ or fairy-tale like but rather rough and real. The Falls City community are poor, alcoholics and very conservative but nonetheless, the atmosphere that the director creates with the distortion of lights and time through super fast transition from day to night and vice versa; with the numerous images of factories and smoke and metal gives the setting a kind of ‘space’, surreal impression. All of these elements serve to present a community of dreamers and aliens. They live in their own world and get drunk. In addition, most of the film happens through the night, which also gives it a dreamy, unreal kind of feel. (c.f. Pidduck, 102)

Second scene: Brandon’s state of mind communicated through scenes of fast driving

Pierce, the director also used the frame of the road movie to make a sort of entertainment of these real events. Brandon is always on his way to somewhere, and his speedy state of mind is communicated through scenes of driving fast, almost floating, and in landscapes shot in time-lapse photography streaked with the light of passing cars. He is an icon, an outsider whose choices are understood as the backdrop of the Midwest, where the story is set. However, it is important to notice that Pierce only used the frame of the road movie, not its real essence. (c.f. Aaron, 96) Namely, the road movie is about mobility and being able to escape, which Brandon doesn’t. He stays and gets killed. By using the frame of a road movie and then ending Boys Don’t Cry unlike a road movie, Pierce wanted to shock the audience. She offers entertainment of the road and then slaps the viewer in the face because there is no freedom or escape into the freedom for Brandon.

Third scene: The sex scene with the flashback

In this scene, vision, knowledge and narration is transferred to Lana. The viewer gets a close up of her face while she receives oral stimulation. Here, her expression as well as music rise in intensity and climax with a cut to a low-angle point of view shot of moving lights that resolve into streetlights seen from a car. Next, there is a great match cut to Lana’s open mouth, sitting in a car and partying with her friends. A slow motion shot conveys her sexual euphoria with Brandon into an image of pleasure in her female friends’ company.

Then we see her on a bed, conversing with her friends, narrating her sexual encounter. As she talks about it, we get Lana’s subjective flashback to her sexual encounter with Brandon. The camera cuts from a tight overhead shot of all three girls on the bed to an overhead close-up of just Lana. From a shot from Lana’s optical point of view we see Brandon’s cleavage. This implies that she knows his true identity without ever uttering a word about it to Brandon himself or her friends. Obviously, through the flashback and the close-ups of her face and her view being different from what she tells her friends, her treatment and thus acceptance of cross-dressing and homosexuality is implied. By not revealing Brandon’s true identity it is also implied that the rest of the community would not accept it. (c.f. Aaron, 95)

Fourth scene: The spinning roundabout scene with Candice framed between Lana’s legs

Another scene that implies that Lana knows about Brandon’s true identity and a scene that also treats Lana herself homosexually is when Candace discovers Brandon’s true identity and comes to tell Lana about it. Lana is high spinning on a roundabout on her back, just as she is in the sexual act before with Brandon when she told him she was in a trance. The composition here is repeated when Candace comes and is framed centrally between Lana’s open legs. This not only implies that Lana is exposed as having a woman in that position, but also that Candace is homosexually represented. (c.f. Aaron, 95)

Fifth scene: The disclosure scene

In the scene where Brandon’s true identity is revealed, the film shifts to gritty, claustrophobic interiors captured in tight, edgy, hand-held camerawork. This is the climatic scene o the film because this sequence gives the final statement on the separation of gender from anatomy when John wants to specify Brandon’s identity, but Lana responds to “look at your little boyfriend” with “leave him alone! (and not ‘her’ as the disclosure of Brandon’s genitals reveals)”. (c.f. Aaron, 94)This response is stressed and then the frame almost freezes and a fantasy sequence begins when Brandon stands in the bathroom with an arm over the shoulders of Tom and John on either side of him. This scene is marked with two still shots, like snapshots – first Tom, John and Brandon are frozen, motionless in a medium shot. Then there is a cut to a reverse shot with Lana and her mother, and Brandon dissociated, sort of removed, watching himself in the bathroom uncovered. With these slow moving shots and the fantasy element of Brandon observing what is happening to him, the terrible humiliation that he is feeling is marked. In addition, there is an obvious resemblance to the crucifixion of Christ. (c.f. Aaron, 94)Brandon not fully dressed, with apart on John’s and Tom’s shoulders convicted of a crime that is not even a crime but something that John and Tom do not understand and do not tolerate because of their own ignorance.

Brandon’s passing as a male fails in this moment and there is no point of return. (c.f. Pidduck, 100)

Sixth scene:The rape scene

From the previous almost surreal break in the film, as Brandon’s identity is revealed, the film switches into flashback to portray the rape. Here, Brandon is violated as a self identified male forced by John and Tom into sexual submission as a woman, and through the brutal police interrogation. The rape scene is basically a flashback while Brandon is at the police station, answering questions about the rape. We get the rape scene from the victim’s point of view. Tom and John take him to a deserted factory. An extremely long shot in slow motion distances us from the action as John picks up Brandon and throws him into the back seat. There we see four brutal close-ups of Tom’s rape. Camera here holds a shot on Brandon’s bruised face in profile, his shoulders torn and racked with brutal motion from behind – thus, the viewer is asked to experience the rape from the victim’s point of view. (c.f. Pidduck, 101)

My final thoughts about the movie:

Boy’s Don’t Cry is a true story of a girl whose identity was male. She was killed trying to pass as the opposite sex. The story is too sad and terrible to be turned into an entertainment piece, but in the telling of the story, the director managed to use techniques that convey meaning on a higher level from that of pure entertainment. The techniques used are artistic and make the story not only that (= artistic), but also almost educational in the sense that the transsexual and homosexual phobia is criticized and proven to be amoral. By using the techniques that Pierce did, the meaning conveyed through the use of camerawork does justice to the terrible story even though it was turned into an entertainment form.

Written by Tina Puksic (class seminar paper)

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest – the book and the film

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is perhaps the best-known anti-authority book in history (cf. http://www.sparknotes.com/film/cuckoo/context.html). So is the film directed by Milos Forman. Already in the beginning, it can be argued that the film is even more radical in its anti-authority views than the book, because in the book the story is narrated by a mentally sick narrator, Chief. We get the whole story through him. So, automatically, we get a sort of unreliable point of view. Nevertheless, Chief’s identity changes in the end and he becomes more than just an ‘unreliable’ narrator. He is seeing everything in the institution; he is pulling back and gets more perspective. Maybe he is seeing the existential truth of the situation. Yet, one could argue that the whole manipulation of the authority is only an ‘unreal’ result of Chief’s hallucinations. Milos Forman, unlike Kesey, approaches the story in a much more radical way. The story in the film is not narrated from Chief’s point of view. Keeping the spirit and the bottom-line message of the book but giving a more objective look on the manipulation of the Combine, it is more radical in its criticism to the totalitarian system of the society, because we do not have a hallucinating narrator, but a more reliable and objective observer – the camera. The story is not told from Chief’s perspective, but rather from a more objective camera. In addition, Chief doesn’t even seem to be hallucinating in the film. He seems to be a character who observes silently with wisdom, constructing a plan in his mind of how to get away from the manipulation of the Combine. He seems to be removed from the rest of the group until McMurphy fuels his passiveness into action. In other words, Chief is flying over the Cuckoo’s nest, and not into it.

However, as stated above, other than a few differences in the way the story is told, the film follows the spirit and the message of the book faithfully, although as I argue above, the anti-authority approach is conveyed more radically in the film. Seen from the Chief’s eyes in the book, we might doubt the evil manipulation of the Nurse Ratched and put forth questions whether she might be more sympathetic in reality. In the film there is no doubt about her suppressing manipulation.

Hallucinations or subjectivity in the book or the real picture in the film, when it comes to Nurse Ratched, we know that she represents the Combine and that she exerts her power in covert ways. She masks her manipulation so that the patients in the mental institution do not see it. With this masked manipulation, she retains power over them. There are many ways in which she can maintain power in the institution, but mostly with repression. She represses any kind of weakening of her power by the patients. Even if it is something totally innocent she perceives it as breaking of rules and she acts to regain that power even if she hurts the patient. That happens for example when Bibbit gets the opportunity to be with a girl and his damaged soul seems to vanish as if it was never there. The Nurse represses his improvement and his happiness the next morning by threatening him to tell all about it to his mother, which paralyzes Bibbit to such a large degree that Nurses threat resulted in Bibbit’s suicide.

She also blinds her victim’s eyes with strategies such as ‘divide and conquer’. First she rewards those who note any weaknesses or behaviors of their colleagues; then she points out the first weakness, and just sits back and watches as the patients start to attack each other. (cf. http://www.sparknotes.com/film/cuckoo/context.html) That’s what blinds them from seeing what she is really doing. When her manipulation is revealed, as when Mr. Martini insists on getting the cigarettes back and doesn’t let her get away with her manipulation, she wants to divert the attention to another patient and when even that does not work; her manipulation grows into violent force. Patients, who refuse the manipulation, are brain washed, smacked down by the authority and destroyed. In addition, she makes them believe that they are mad, and the power of madness prevents them from seeing how dependant they are.

Of course it is obvious by now that with her style of manipulation, she represents the totalitarian system of the society. Any kind of deviation from the rules results in repression, force and destruction of the opposing. Such is the case with McMurphy, who is opposing control and manipulation. He is not solely a rebel. He is much more than this - a man who loves life and wants to show it to those whose souls are already broken by the Combine. He encourages the patients in the hospital to take risks and to stop submitting themselves to subordination of the Combine; to think for themselves to be responsible for making choices and decisions about their own lives.

McMurphy encourages them to fight the control and totalitarianism of the Combine and he does that with a sense of humor, as when he says: “Which one of you nuts has got any guts?” In opposition with the sneaky rules-loving Combine, both the book and the film present the victims of the society with a bit of humor. So, we have realism mixed with humor. With this technique, the viewer already sympathizes with the victims and on the other hand establishes some sort of hateful feelings towards the Combine, questioning its masked-with-kindness and the ‘good old rules’ manipulation.

McMurphy is sort of a rebel savior in the institution; a character almost larger than life (which doesn’t mean there is no room for criticism for him, but he) does manage to open a window out of the house of manipulation, at least for Chief, who in the end refuses to submit himself to the Combine. On the other hand, Bibbit and McMurphy himself were sacrificed.

McMurphy’s end can be understood as an extremely negative wrap up of the story, or the message. He is destroyed by the Combine in the end, when he is sent to the electroshocks and comes back to the rest of the patients spiritless. A suppression of a protest which carries a very dark and pessimistic message for those who oppose manipulation, because it seems to suggest that opposition to control does not bear any fruit but rather brings to the destruction of the opposing. No matter how damaging for the individual’s soul the Combine, it will always triumph. That seems to be the message at least until Chief kills the now spiritless destroyed one out of mercy and leaves the Combine. He is free. Rebellion and opposition live on (which is a good thing), and yet, the message still cannot be considered positive. The difference between Chief and McMurphy is that Chief did not fight against the Combine. He escaped it. So, the Combine can continue to exert its power because it triumphs over the opposing again. It is interesting that both Kesey and Forman chose a Native American for Chief’s role. I believe their choice must have had a certain function - Chief breaks free, but like the Native Americans in the past could never be free from their ‘Combine’ that took away their freedom and damaged their souls, he can never be free of the Combine in the story, because it is too powerful to fight it and too powerful to escape it.

The identity of the Nurse (the Combine), McMurphy and Chief can be translated across cultures and across time. In this case, it can be culturally specific for the U.S.A., but it also can be transported to anywhere in the world, because the ‘Combine’ exists everywhere. Whether it is multi-national corporations with convincing us we need certain brands in our lives, or the manipulation of politics and church getting us to act in groups, we are manipulated in numerous ways. It comes well masked. Kesey and Forman seem to remind the readers that everyday we are voluntarily giving ourselves to manipulation of the ‘Combine’ and sometimes we don’t even realize it. Not even when a ‘McMurphy’ comes along and refuses to be a part of it. Then, people, blinded by the mask, will believe he is crazy.

Thinking about The Apocalypse Now - Part 2

The main character, the seeker of the insane man Kurtz, Willard, sails up the Nung River with his crew - allegorically speaking, they are going back in time, to the beginning of human existence - the primordial times. As further up the river Willard goes, the wilder and more primitive everything gets. And far from ‘reality’, the soldiers were tempted to be animals and Gods. It is the soldiers of the war that are truly the “wild”, uncivilized people up on the river, not the natives, but the American soldiers in their stations along the river without any control, with their commanders gone, everything totally insane. Now, Willard, following Kurtz up the river, seeing the horror, knows why Kurtz departed the military and went his own way. Running into insane soldiers and officers like Kilgore (Duvall), a surfer-type Lt-Colonel and head of a U.S Army helicopter cavalry, who in the most shocking scene in the movie, the most insane, attacks the Vietnamese village with helicopters only so that the soldiers could surf there – an extremely absurd scene. They attack the village in helicopters, listening to Wagner, playing Gods, deciding who they’re going to kill, and exterminating the children, women and men. Seeing all the horror along the way, Willard begins to doubt the war: “No wander Kurtz put weed up the Command’s ass. The war was being run by a bunch of four-star clowns who were gonna end up giving the whole circus away…The bullshit piles up so fast in Vietnam you need wings to stay above it.” Going up the river, Willard can see “why Kurtz got off the boat, why he split from the whole fucking program “. Willard sees the horror of the Vietnam War and realizes that it is a big lie. We see that Kurtz refused to be a part of lies. He says it in the beginning of the film: “…What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin? They lie. They lie and we have to be merciful…” He proves Willard that ‘they’ lie when he reads him out the Times article describing the Vietnam War as being in order and that the Americans are making progress.

Kurtz is a very complicated and a controversial character. On the surface, he is insane, as the commanders already decide in the beginning of the film:

”He took matters into his own hands…Out there with these natives; it must be a temptation to become a God. Because there’s a conflict in every human heart between the rational and irrational…between good and evil and good does not always triumph…Every man has got a breaking point. Even you [Willard] and I and Colonel Kurtz as reached his. And he has obviously gone insane.”

The viewer also decides that Kurtz is crazy and insane. He deserted the military. He is almost an animal, removed from the “civilization” at the mouth of the river, having the role of some kind of a God figure to the natives of Cambodia. He lives in some kind of a cave, surrounded with natives and dead bodies, heads lying all around, himself acting with primordial instincts (as when he brings Chef’s head to Willard’s lap) and being out of touch with morality (when Willard looks through Kurtz’s script after he killed him and finds a note written in red ink: Exterminate them. Exterminate them all). Kurtz befriends the horror. Yes, Kurtz is “on the edge of a straight razor” in a way, but we have to keep in mind that he is a warrior. Warriors kill. They have to. And we also have to keep in mind that as a warrior, that man went back in time to reality because he could not stand the lies of the Vietnam War although he was a soldier decorated with high honors and great achievements in the military. He tells that in the letter to his wife and son:” I am beyond their timid, lying morality, and so I am beyond caring.” He couldn’t stand the insanity and the horror of the people involved in the war. And what he is trying to do now, as is Coppola with the whole movie “The Apocalypse Now”, is to make us look at the truth directly. From this perspective, he is definitely not insane. He went away from the war, back to the beginning.

As I mentioned, Kurtz is a complicated character and quite controversial. We, the viewers can see the absurdity of the war. We can see all the lies. And so does Kurtz. As further up the river we go, the more we see that Kurtz deserts the “civilized world” because he found it so “uncivil.” He removed himself from the corruptness and went to the primordial beginnings. The viewer comes to a point of dilemma concerning the insanity of Kurtz just as Willard himself, going up that river, starts doubting it. That dilemma obviously shows that there is something beyond Kurtz’s insanity and that what ever it is; it is powerful. There is something sane in his insanity. Willard himself feels that and begins to be like Kurtz, but in the end, after he kills Kurtz, he refuses to be like him. He drops the machete and leaves the native temple. The true apocalypse of the insanity takes place as the natives drop their weapons as well. The insanity has come to an end.

The film, demonstrating the insanity of war, suggests that savagery is not so far away. The savages in the movie are, interestingly, not the natives. They are the American soldiers. The darkness can easily refer back. We all have the capacity to do bad stuff, even to become Kurtz.

To me he just seemed to want to remove away from the savagery of America and the war in general into the primordial world where he can rule it without lies. But as I said, there is a lot of controversy in the character of Kurtz. Let’s just say that he is an insane man with sanity. His sanity, the truth he wants us to look at, can be cruel, but that’s the way things are. And he’s got a point about the absurdity of the whole war: “We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders…won’t allow them to write “fuck” on their airplanes…because…it is ‘obscene’!...The horror…The horror.”

The Question of Sanity and Insanity in Coppola’s film “The Apocalypse Now”

The Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and based on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness is a provoking and a powerful film, the power of which lies within all the questions – real brain twisters - which we, the viewers, ask ourselves. I guess that’s why it is difficult to say what the politics of the movie really are. One could say that the title itself calls for some sort of apocalypse, for the end of something, and as we see, it is the end of the insanity and the absurd of not only the Vietnam War, which is the theme of the film, but any war. However, the Apocalypse Now is not merely a simple statement of the Vietnam War; it invites the viewer to the path of insanity and when he comes close to it, it slaps him in the face, leaving him wandering about what ‘insane’ in fact means and if the meaning of it really accounts to the definition. The definition of the word ‘insanity’ in the Webster’s New World dictionary goes:” any form or degree of mental derangement or unsoundness of mind, permanent or temporary, that makes a person incapable of what is regarded legally as normal, rational conduct or judgment: it usually implies a need for hospitalization.« According to this definition the questions that come up in the film are not who is crazy or insane and who isn’t. The film already proves the madness, insanity and corruption of the Vietnam War, but it goes further in demonstrating the result of that insanity and corruption, which, as we see, leads to an apocalypse. The paradoxical question that is central is who the horror of the war made more insane and if we at all have the right to judge Kurtz an insane man and call him a murderer.

Focusing on the aspect of sanity and insanity in Apocalypse now, we see that there is no end to the discussion of the topic. One can come up with a conclusion but there is always a ‘but’ to it. And the reason there is always a ‘but’ to it is because all is relative when we consider the serious philosophical issues of the civilized and uncivilized, the rational and the irrational, the sane and the insane in the context of war. Who created the definitions of these words, who set the rules and who is breaking them? Even if we look at the issues of sanity and insanity from the ‘civilized’ perspective, the answer is relative. The definition says that an insane person is incapable of what is regarded legally as normal, rational conduct or judgment. What happens in a war already isn’t ‘normal’ or ‘rational’, especially not in the Vietnam War. Willard expresses this paradox when he is assigned to exterminate Kurtz, who is charged for killing four South Korean double agents, and because his “actions have become unsound”: “Shit. Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.” As Coppola shows in the film the involvement of America in Vietnam was unnecessary and insane, because the Americans were “fighting for the biggest nothing in history.”

Coppola demonstrates the insanity of the characters through sailing into the darkest orbits of the human psyche (symbolized through Willard sailing up the Nung River to find the king of the hearts of darkness Kurtz), where all the characters in the film seem to be lost in their own mental world, not knowing whether they are animals or God (or both). The whole U.S. conduct throughout the film is seen as insane, excessive, destructive, futile... (cf. Phillips, 439). “Everywhere he goes, Capt. Willard sees signs of drugged stupor, loud, large, yet ineffective, as in the haunting image of the helicopter burning in the tree by the river […]. One meaning: an insane war breeds insane behavior.” (Phillips, 441). American soldiers, without even knowing why and who they are fighting, removed from the commands, ‘lost it’ and quickly began subordinate all around them. They quickly fell under the temptation to take things into their own hands and play Gods. The process of this ‘loss of reality’ and taking things into their own hands is described suitably in the novel Heart of Darkness:

“Going up the river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. […] You lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once – somewhere – far away – in another existence perhaps […] The reality – the reality – I tell you – fades […]” (Conrad, 41-2)

Is bush a comedian or an idiot???Do we have to think twice???

http://24ur.com/naslovnica/ekskluziv/ekspres/20070508_3096983_60013565.php

This is something you would like to see if you are amused by Bush's stupidity and his SPEECH DISABILITIES....He seems to be amused by it himself..maybe you will be, too...It seems that Bushisms (there is even a name for it!!!) have become the target entertainment....

He certainly has become the court jester of the world. Doesn't that make us wonder about the politicians we choose to govern our countries...

In the Name of the ...MOVIES!!!!

I reccommend two Sheridan's movies: In the Name of the Father and My Left Foot!