Here's To The Little Guy In Big Action Films: A Tribute To The Losers

Tom Wood as Private Nash in Under Siege

I want to give short tribute to the little guy in big films, action films to be exact; the extra, the side character, the nervous bloke who you just know isn't gonna make it through the film.  You all know whom I'm talking about, so let's take some time to think about their story.  For all the accolades it's received, watching The Hurt Locker (2008) reminded me more of Hollywood action movies (erm...because it is, I'm looking at the DVD cover right now and emblazoned across the top is 'FROM THE DIRECTOR OF POINT BREAK'.  Need I say more?) than any serious study of warfare's damaging psychological effects, and I'd like to take the time to mention, with a dash of seriousness and a good helping of whimsy, one of it's scenes.

What really demonstrated the action facet of the film to me was the sequence where the EOD unit come across a gaggle of British mercenaries.  Apart from the highlighting a hilarious stateside point of view of the English as greedy and stupid (not that we aren't, we most definitely are but...'kettle' 'black' 'pot' 'calling', there must be something I can do with those words...?) the scene fixed itself into my head for another reason.  It really shines a light on how people are ear-marked for death in Hollywood action films; namely demonstrating any sign of weakness.  There must be a whole host of extra's over the years who've been dispatched in various ways for playing nameless characters who's penchant for being below average at their job means they'll be 'assuming room temperature' preeetty soon; the sort of guys who would get a bad bi-monthly appraisal if they lived to actually attend one.  In this one scene from The Hurt Locker a rather large bloke is immediately singled out as 'The Wrench Man' because he threw his wrench at someone and consequently this is the reason why the Brits don't have a wrench to fix their car.  He is mocked ('You know you can shoot people here, you don't have to use a wrench!'), and then shown to be rather useless at using the wrench the US troopers subsequently supply him with, something his curt boss has no time for ('What's the problem with the wrench?  Come on!'), sounding like an impatient market trader.  Then as The Wrench Man fetches a bigger wrench he is mercilessly shot in the back; his large body thuds to the ground.  Thus is the catalyst for the ensuing firefight with faceless Al-Qaeda villians.  And we see it coming from a mile off: the long ponderous silences, the seemingly pointless focusing on poor, unaware Wrench Man shuffling to and fro between truck and tank, but most of all because the film draws attention to how lame he is at his job.  How much better would I be in this situation?  Not much, I'm sure.

It happens again (or should I say previously) in the Steven Seagal vehicle Under Seige (1992) (a far superior film to The Hurt Locker for it's lack of pretension).  Now if anyone was ever earmarked for a bullet to the head it's Private Nash.  Okay so at least he get's a name, but look at this guy!  As soon as the oversized Commander Krill impels him to guard the imprisoned Casey Ryback he's gulping down his adam's apple like a wide-eyed cartoon character.  How did this pitiful guy ever get in the army?  Which cruel bastard let him in?  He should have been turned away at the recruitment door: 'Go to work in a library son, you'll help America better that way.'  He maintains guard over Seagal's Chef-cum-Navy Seal-cum-strange flippy/wavy knife expert, who Krill has imprisoned in the kitchen's walk-in freezer and charged Nash with watching over him.  But it's clear Nash is bringing a new meaning to the word 'naive', oblivious as he is to the fact that Commander Krill is the 'psychopath', not Ryback.  Private Nash probably doesn't even know what to do in a kitchen, let alone use a rifle.  No, seriously, he doesn't, he manages to burn Ryback's pies by ignoring his pleas of 'Get ma pies out the over!'  After this pie burning incident has clearly demonstrated Nash's incapacity to perform any basic act or have faith in the right people, it's only a short while before he's lifeless in a mahogany coffin draped with the stars and stripes while his mother sobs: 'Why didn't he become a librarian?  He such a quiet boy, he had such a love of books!'

And I think this is clearly where the problem lies: these guys are in the wrong jobs, (Nash by the way is shot in the back of the head by two of Commander Krill's merciless mercenaries).  There is no question about it; where was the genuine, good quality career advice when they needed it?  I mean, take Wrench Man in The Hurt Locker, was someone going to tell him he should get some sort of qualification in engineering before he becomes a full-blown mercenary in Afghanistan?  At least get a Saturday job in a  garage!  And Private Nash, did nothing click in your head when doing press-ups at boot camp, adam's apple boinging up and down, with a man screaming into your face something about being 'lower that a worm!' and 'more useless than a balloon filled with shit!', and you thinking 'IhatethisIhatethisIhatethis', and wishing you were snuggled up with a dog-eared copy of 'To Kill A Mockingbird' rather than a cold gun every night?

But an even greater tragedy is that Wrench Man and Nash probably weren't even that awful; I'm sure Nash worked hard in training, he looks in tip top physical shape, he probably had a mean aim when hunting deer back home with Pa (whom I suspect pushed him into the armed forces against his will), and The Wrench Man follows his bosses orders diligently, trying to do the best he can.  But they can't handle the pressure, because, I'll say it again, they're in the wrong jobs!

I feel bad for these guys because I think they're a bit like me really, or, to put it another way, I'm a bit like them.  If I was in their situation, trying to unscrew bolts in a war zone or standing guard while oblivious to the hostile takeover going on around me, I would most probably be a goner fairly sharpish. So I'm sick of rooting for a film's main character.  Whether he be the underdog or the loser or the unlikely hero.  And I'm sick of rooting for the villian as well, the bad guy you love to hate, or the anti-hero.  Why can't we root for the side character's in an action film?  Why can't we learn a little bit more of their story?  This is a tribute to those poor guys whose sole purpose in the film is to die, who in their one scene unknowingly display their inherent weakness as a herald for almost immediate death.  Their demise is short and brutal and merely a catalyst for a fight to take place.  Let's pay homage to those guys.  Because in reality, in a film like The Hurt Locker or Under Siege, these are the ones I can relate to, these butter fingers, these foolish clumsy people clearly in the wrong profession, clunking about, fumbling and getting things wrong, paying for it with a bullet to the head, I'm happy to say that that is me.  Men of honour: nervous, sweaty, clumsy, frail, unimaginative, foolish, dim, fidgety men of honour, I salute you.  Cue bugle.

Aforementioned bugle

North American Structuralism, The 'Big Screen', and How Sometimes A Corridor Is All You Need

Like the first time I ate haggis, I was nervous walking into the BFI to watch a night of North American Structural Film from the 1960's.  Nervous of the foreign density which awaited me, but eager to experience the transcendantal (yeah I've found haggis transcendental...and what?) nature of works by people such as Michael Snow and Paul Sharits.  But let's stave off a discussion about the similarities between avant garde film and Haggis until another day and have a little discussion about cinema (I'll do most of the talking thanks), we'll get to the avant garde film in a bit...

The Thin Red Line

The amount of times people have said to me 'You've gotta see it on the big screen!!  You've gotta see it at the cinema!' about a newly released film, is a lot more than I've eaten haggis, sadly (sorry).  Not withstanding the obvious benefits of seeing a film in a space specifically reserved for the very act of watching, this urging, or at least the reasoning for this urging, has always seemed to me rather diminutive, for various reasons.  For one, it undermines the film in question's strengths by tying it irrevocably to the cinema screen as the exclusive place where the film's true potential can be understood.  Most of my favourite films, films that have burned themselves through my retina and branded their very conceit and being into the intricate, spongy matter of my brain, I watched either in my bed or on a sofa.  In a house.  On a rather normal sized screen.  And some of these films fucking blew my mind.  Some of these films haunted me for days, weeks, months, years, they still do, that's why they're my favourite films.  I watched Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998) four times in one week after it brought out the obsessive in me shortly after my first screening (at home).  And it's three hours long.  It's possibly my favourite film, and I've never seen it at the cinema.

Eraserhead

Another thing about the 'You have to see it at the cinema, you absolutely have to, you can't see it anywhere else!' comment (or goading, as I like to call it.  One smarmy ignoramus from my school once told me that I couldn't watch The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) anywhere else other than Leicester Square Odeon) is that it suggests that you can either view a film at the cinema or 'anywhere else', and every location contained within 'anywhere else' will basically amount to the same experience.   Well surely that's nonsense?  The environment we watch a film in greatly affects our experience of the film and also possibly our opinion of it.  The first time I watched David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) I was sitting on a uncomfortable wooden chair with a very rigid back, in my friend Guy's parent's very minimal, modern living room.  This physical discomfort was exacerbated by my being very tired and it being very late.  This situation made watching an already gruelling film into an even more demanding experience, heightening every skin crawling and tortuous moment in that bizarre and disturbing movie.  It was brilliant!  But when Eraserhead rears it's head, or should I say misshapen haircut, in conversation, do I say 'Oooh, you've got to see it in my friend Guy's minimal lounge on one of those really uncomfortable chairs with the really straight back!  And get up real early that morning, maybe go for a few runs that day as well.  It's the only way to take in the mise-en-scene properly!' ?  No, I do not.  Maybe I should...

When we do say this to each other ('You've got to see it on the big screen') it's often about major, Hollywood-type films.  These films are more universal and have a wider audience, have general release, etc etc etc, so it's not surprising.  What's funny is these films generally have tightly planned plots, beautiful faces and swelling music.  Surely films as manipulative as these can be viewed almost anywhere?  So geared as they are to grabbing the audience with every element in a way the audience can easily settle into.  You're generic plot based film is made for the sofa...

N:O:T:H:I:N:G

Well, I've rambled a fair bit there, possibly it's time to completely denounce my argument of the previous four paragraphs.  The four film's showing at 'Purity: North American Structural Film' screening at the BFI on 7th March, put in good stead the argument of those people who berate me with 'You have to see it on the big screen!', although I'm not entirely sure they had these 1960's exercises in formalist potency in mind.  First up was Paul Sharits' N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968) and at 36 mins it was the most intimidating of the films.  As the lady who introduced the films (I forget her name but she was very good) noted, it is pointless to try and describe these films, but I will give you a rough idea.  N:O:T:H:I:N:G pounded at me for half an hour, flashing and strobing different coloured frames at me with hints of images in between and the ocasional ruthless interjections of musique concrete.  As I watched, the changing rhythm's in the pacing of the flashing hypnotised me, echoing music.  I could say more, but instead I'll just quote Sharits: 'The film will not 'mean' something it will 'mean', in a very concrete way, nothing'.  So why waste words?

Film in which there appear sprocket holes, edge lettering, dirt particles, etc

Second up was George Landow's Film in which there appear sprocket holes, edge lettering, dirt particles, etc (1965).  We look at an almost still image (it's a few frames looped) of a young woman.  It is actually an image that film processing labs used to calibrate the colours when developing material, but Landow was interested in the bits of the film process which were normally cut out.  Hence we get this image, topped with all the hair, dirt and specs that would normally be cleaned off a reel before it is printed, as well as a very conspicuous cut where the loop is made.  Through this we start to look at the very material of film itself, and although this is almost a still image, the activity demonstrated by the dirt and purposeful flaws on the celluloid create a jittery, shifting, dirty hive of activity on the screen.

Serene Velocity

Okay lastly was a Michael Snow film called Standard Time (1967) which I liked, buuuut what I really want to talk about was the third film, Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity (1970).  Wow.  Ostensibly a shot of an empty basement corridor in a university, this 23 minute film subsumed me into the BIG SCREEN.  Perhaps this is the sort of film that I will grab people and yell at them 'You have to see it at the cinema!! You have to see it on the big screen!' about.  By rapidly cutting between different focal lengths, Gehr took me out of my cinema seat and into an ever moving, almost kaleidoscopic filmscape.  Because of the natural depth of the corridor, I felt like I could jump into the screen, at other times I felt like the corridor was jumping out at me.  Because of the rapidity of motion the corridor is abstracted into various patterns of symmetry made by the different elements of the location: the horizontal lines of the overhead lights and the strip of white that these lights make on the floor, the straight lines that shoot out at you, these being where the floor meets the walls and the walls meet the ceiling, these are just some.  This hallway image, abstracted by simple cutting, completely dominated me in a weird ritual that felt like it was sucking me in then spitting me out.  For a shot of an empty corridor it was one of the most alive, exhilarating film's I've seen in a while; full of activity and expressing, for me, a heightened love for two of the very basic elements of film itself: zooming and cutting.  Because of the speed of the cuts my mind started to interact with the images on a visual level, I created movements in my head, merged patterns on top of the patterns that already existed; Serene Velocity was a beautiful, exuberant adventure and seeing it at the cinema was to experience a complete domination of my visual and mental state.

So, as usual, I'm left rather befuddled as to where I stand on a subject.  All I know is that I bloody love all sorts of films.  And I can watch them in most places.  Till next time...

The Gritty Workforce of Sci-fi in Moon & Alien

A ponderous Sam Rockwell in Moon
Separating Moon (2009) and the films it pays homage to such as Alien(1979), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) and Solaris (1972), is the presentation of a gritty realism where space and the universe beyond earth is not purely a camp battleground where lycra-clad warriors engage in mortal combat with masked super-villains. This gritty realism is best shown in the jobs and work carried out by the central characters occupying these films. All these characters are workers of some kind doing mundane, contractual jobs. The underlining message from the filmmaker’s is: Given the speed in which technology is advancing, in the future, normal people will be working in space and not for adventure or to save the universe but to work.

The idea of earth-bound monotonous jobs being transferred into space lends an air of bleakness and, at times, dread to films such as Moon and Alien. In the past, and particularly in America, space and the moon were presented to the public as exciting places of the unknown, full of adventure. The early sci-fi films of the 50’s would show all-American heroes in huge garish spacesuits taking on seemingly invincible adversaries on exotic looking planets littered with craters and cliffs. Space and the universe were not meant to be places of work where the mundane daily grind was simply transferred from earth as a means of making money for mysterious ‘companies’ and all due to the relentless march of technology and the desire for profit.

The crew of Alien's Nostromo
The crew of Alien’s Nostromo and Moon’s Sam Bell are workers, pure and simple. These workers have signed contracts back on earth for greedy unnamed companies that exist purely for profit and to satisfy, as Sam states, their ‘shareholders and investors’. Like all of us, Nostromo’s crew and Sam Bell need to work. Sam Bell sends back the vital fuel, helium-3, using repetitive skills he has learned through training. Alien’s crew operate a haulage ship carrying vast amounts of mineral ore back to earth, a task not drastically different from haulage truckers on our roads today. These are normal people doing average, even boring jobs. Any of the fantasy and attractiveness of space alluded to in early sci-fi films, books and comics is removed as audiences are given the grim reality check and ultimate reminder that, no matter where you are, some things don’t change- a job is a job.

It is when uncertainty and terror are added to such deep-space monotony that a palpable sense of fear emerges. In the case of Alien, this terror and dread is overt and constant while in Moon it is subtle and sporadic but always lurking beneath the surface. It is not discussed often enough that fear and horror can effectively be evoked via the sense of depression that occurs through experiencing moments of bleakness and futility. So much of the genuinely frightening moments in film have occurred within such circumstances and surroundings that are drab, depressing and without hope. Candyman (1992), for instance, was set, uniquely, within the grey and poverty stricken urban nightmare of the Cabrini Green housing projects in Chicago rather than a castle bathed in fog or a haunted house. The horror of Candyman’s basic story was heightened by the palpably real and natural settings in which it took place. In Cabrini Green, people with nothing are terrorised. This was an innovative departure from the characters and settings in which so many horror films had been set in the years before.

The no-thrills interior of the Nostromo in Alien
Alien’s Nostromo contains no glitzy or attractive design and colour schemes and is the haulage truck of the spaceship world. In the future those people that once drove coal and cargo up and down the motorways will haul mineral ore through space and such blue-collar, basic work is reflected in the design of the spaceships. The ship is dark, cold and depressing, a place of work, certainly not a spectacle. When the alien is let loose on the Nostromo, the chaos and murder that ensues is all the more terrifying for the bluntly real and seemingly authentic environment its takes place in. In this respect,Moon is no different to Alien. As Sam loses his mind aboard his ship while carrying out a mind bogglingly long 3 year solo contract, the prospect of the loss of his sanity in what is merely a future representation of the modern office, is a frightening one. It reminds us that the idea of losing our minds and of slowly losing control may not necessarily occur in the world of the unknown or the mythical but in our offices at the mercy of unsympathetic companies who just don’t care.

The Landscape IS The Story: Background As Foreground In Winter's Bone and Meek's Cutoff

Meek's Cutoff

Rather than a protagonist or plot, can the physical setting of a film be the main driving force of a movie?  Can this scrutiny of buildings, trees, cracks in the ground, weathered faces and specific accents, climate and colour; can these things lie at the heart of a film?  Be the reason for it's existence?  Rather than a character's journey or a complex plot?  Two films released in recent times embody this: Debra Granik's Winter's Bone (2010) and Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff (2011).  Both films engender such a palpable sense of place, their setting seems to envelope their main protagonists.  Interestingly, both films tell their stories through the eyes of female protagonists and are directed by women, but both are coarse, harsh films set in coarse, harsh environments, settings perhaps more associated (in the film world) with the male psyche than the female.  It's also interesting to note that after seeing both films for the first time, although impressed by the power and atmosphere of their mise-en-scene, I felt slightly underwhelmed, felt that their plots never quite reached a climax; I seemed to be waiting for something that never quite happened.  And yet for months after the films played round in my head, haunting me.

The locality in which Winter's Bone takes place got it's hooks into me almost immediately: Granik's adaptation of Daniel Woodrell's novel is set in the Missouri Ozark mountains, depicting a highly rural, highly impoverished area where methamphetamine dealing and addiction is rife.

'There is not one aspect of looking at meth that is mellow or benign: what it does to a human being's body, their faces, their teeth.  Everything about it is so vicious, and so dramatic and so relentless.  There is basically not one bit of solace in that whole depiction of actual reality of it'
-Debora Granik

Ree Dolly and her siblings in Winter's Bone

Granik's highlighting of the visual effects of meth addiction in the above quote is something that's not only visible in the faces of the characters in Winter's Bone but also demonstrates an overall attempt to capture the location as it is in life.  Her comment belies an endeavour to reference a whole strata and way of life in American society that I have never seen portrayed in film before, and it jumped off the screen  and sank into me like a thick illness.  As Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) attempts to find out what has happened to her father, Jessup, a meth cooker for local crime lord Thump Milton (Ronnie Hall), she slips into a world where methamphetamine addicts live on farms, breed horses and play the banjo, where violence is bubbling away just beneath the surface.  As an outsider this unlikely juxtaposition of the rural with the skittish and pugnacious world of drug dealing transfixed me.  So rooted was the film to a distinct place, that once I understood that it was this aspect of the film that had struck up digs in my mind, returning to the film I no longer felt disappointed at it's conclusion, because I saw the landscape, the environment, the world in which the story unfolds, as it's true subject.

Dale Dickey as Merab Milton in Winter's Bone

This of course includes the people: Teardrop (John Hawkes), Ree's uncle, a violent, taciturn meth-addict, we we warm to as the film plays out; Merab (Dale Dickey) the wife of Thump Milton, who warns Ree away from trying to contact Thump, a woman who's face is sometimes that of a stern mother, at other times that of a violent, vicious beast; and Thump himself, barely in the film, but a presence before we've even met him, who looks like an old cowboy, an incongruous vision for a man who is a drug kingpin of sorts.  These people live in log cabins, dilapidated shacks in scrappy woodland, littered with old caravans and burnt out cars; a strange hinterland of mountain wilderness congealed with the dismal detritus of modernity, and for me this is the films most resonant point.

Meek's Cutoff is a gruelling film; dedicated to palpable experience.  Just watch the first ten minutes: three cattle-drawn wagons, slowly move across an expansive flowing river.  The women fill up on water; who knows when they will come across it again?  Not a word is uttered, we just soak up the solemn grind of the process of journeying across the Oregon desert.  Mainly filmed in long shot, this sequence conjures a stark and powerful sense of the dominating landscape and the silent figures moving through this wasteland.  It is a subtly daring tactic to open a film with as it immediately distances us from the characters; in the mid-shots and close ups we do get, faces are turned away from us, and the wide shots allow us to differentiate the figures only by their different outfits.  The travellers are insignificant, they seem at the mercy of the landscape, and indeed they are.

Throughout the film the travellers debate who to place their trust in, their guide Stephen Meek, who has seemingly got them lost, or a Cayuse Indian who they keep captive in the hope he will lead them to water.  But it is really the landscape whom is in charge, who yields only alkaline water that is undrinkable, offers them steep and dangerous inclines to navigate their wagons down, and is made up of a terrain of hard dry ground and barren mountains.  Much of the discussion of whom to trust and which path to take is told in long shot, the men are a distant group of murmuring figures, we barely catch what they are saying, isolating us from the very plot of the film.  It also emulates the view of the women, primarily Emily Thetherow (Michelle Williams), wife to Soloman Tetherow (Will Patton).  Again, like Winter's Bone, Meek's Cutoff subtly highlights the matriarchal aspect of otherwise male dominated worlds (some have called it a Feminist Western, although I wouldn't like to start attaching labels to a film as oblique and purposefully inscrutable as this).

'Insignificant' settlers in Meek's Cutoff

We are constantly reminded of the all encompassing nothingness of the landscape; shots tracking along cracked desert ground, nothing changing; vast wide frames in which the little stream of wagons, cattle, and people walk, from screen right to screen left; a wailing fiddle echoes around the otherwise bare soundtrack, like a lonely ghost, like a strange desert siren.  The minimalism of the narrative (there are maybe two key turns in the whole film) forces us into surrendering to the landscape.  In this way the Oregon desert subsumes not only the characters, but the plot itself, and the viewer.  The notion of unknowing in this film, the settlers inability to decide whether to trust Meek, to trust the Indian, or their weak reassurances that they will find water soon if they keep going, all seem to act as elements of the impenetrable shroud the location blankets everything with, including the film's themes.

In both these films the landscape is the nucleus.  It is the driving force, the core which everything hangs off, the element which determines the films investigative qualities, the main constituent which the characters are there only to help define.  Whether impoverished backwoods or arid, bare desert, the setting dominates everything that steps into it.