Phantom Thread is better than a fart on the head

Chris, great post.

Here's a bit of interaction.

"I don't know if the Reynolds/Alma relationship is healthy or not."

If this were a real life dynamic, it'd be totally f*cked up. As a narrative metaphor, I do believe that the relationship is healthy, especially mutually healthy by the end of the film.

I might be wrong, but right now I'm convinced that Alma is a purely positive character as presented by PTA.

Reynolds is selfish and self-centered. He delights in Alma, but at his worst it is because she serves his interests. When she gets in the way of his petty habits (not his work) and preferences, he will not budge.  Her dinner party is a desperate attempt on her part to force a loving confrontation, one that has him face himself and face her instead of allowing him to turn in on himself, waiting for her to disappear so that he does not have to do any hard emotional work. It IS an ambush. But he's so hard-hearted that he needs an ambush.

It is for HIS good, not hers. From the moment that Alma enters the relationship, she begins to serve Reynolds. She is the true helper fit to be by his side in ruling his slice of dominion. She submits to him. She serves him. She works for him. In one of the best scenes of the movie, she takes up the cause of the House Woodcock in a ferocious public display. She is protecting the honor and name of her beloved, stripping those who would take that name and wear it in vain. She never asks anything of Reynolds that is not the best thing for him. All of her moves increase his happiness, especially the ones that hurt the most.

Brandon wrote, "my personal favorite scene was towards the end where the doctor was checking Reynolds and he darts a batshit look at Alma."

I'm not sure which shot Brandon is referencing, but there is a very late shot of Reynolds smiling crazily at Alma which I think is the one he means; I saw it as Reynolds totally in love with Alma, finally mutually bowing in love to her. She has (forcibly!) demonstrated that he NEEDS to slow down, that he needs to experience love and joy more than he needs success and control.

He's now happily eating his mushrooms bathed in butter and his life could not be better.

So, yes, the film brings up all of the relationship questions that Chris highlights, and I think that it's richer than any of us can grasp right now. It certainly deserves repeat views. I was going to see it again this weekend, but stupid Regal stopped showing it. I'm hoping that it hits the Cinema Saver before disappearing from theaters entirely.

January Recap

The Killing of a Sacred Deer
See post.

A Ghost Story
I felt like I was trapped inside this movie. Does that mean the movie was a success? I hated it.

The Mask of Zorro
It was an absolute blast to watch this with my kids. The only downside is that my boys keep thwacking me with swords now.

The Shape of Water
I hated this film for how safe and cozy it was. Real monsters are monstrous, not misunderstood wet dreams.

Lady Bird
It's a story of a young person acting shitty toward all of her loved ones, then learning life lessons that teach her who is really important in her life. This is the basic plot of every other 80s movie I grew up watching on HBO. It's fine, but really nothing special.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Like Lady Bird, this one also sticks in old tropes, this time the tired asshole dad one. As such, it's mostly disposable as well, but I was carried along by Sandler and Stiller having fun with it.

Daddy's Home
I guess this was me checking in on mainstream comedy. There were some genuinely funny moments, but for me it worked best when it went all-out over-the-top stupid (motorcycle through the house, electric lines), which it only did a handful of times.

Downsizing
Downsizing was mostly frustrating to me. Overall, I liked it. But it lost me completely in the end with a moment that probably didn't bother too many others. The Magical Negro (um, I mean the Virtuous Vietnamese Voman) gives our hero a bible. He says, "but I can't read the words," to which she replies, "the words don't matter, remember ME," to which I coughed bullshit and stopped caring.

Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry
This documentary was mostly frustrating to me. It's too "lyrical" and "lovely" for me. There were all sorts of interesting ways to go with Berry's material. This film went none of them.

Justice League
So bad that I don't even know.

A Charlie Brown Christmas
I watched this again as a palate cleanser and a pick-me-up, I guess.

Finally, Hybrid TV/Movie Club.

Letterboxd includes each Black Mirror episode as a stand-alone movie, so I guess there's some case for that. I've long felt that the lines are blurred. I've always been chasing "motion pictures" wherever they're found and not "films," though I've also made it quite clear that the theater experience is my chief joy in this cinephilia business.  Anyhow, the series is definitely a work of an auteur, Charlie Brooker. Several obsessions recur. I want to like each episode more than I do. There's always an interesting idea, an interesting hook, but it rarely plays out in any meaningful way. I'd pick Serling over Brooker every time.
Episodes watched, ranked:
Nosedive
The Waldo Moment
White Bear
White Christmas
Be Right Back
(I had watched Season 1 last year. This is all Season 2 and into Season 3.)

That's it. No other TV viewing. I watched one episode of Hogan's Heroes, half an episode of Cheers, and some board game YouTube videos.

PTA Ranked

1) There Will Be Blood
2) Phantom Thread
3) The Master
4) Inherent Vice
5) Magnolia
6) Hard Eight
7) Punch-Drunk Love
8) Boogie Nights

a house that does not change is a dead house

"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." - Flannery O'Connor

The days move from good to good, from glory to glory. And they do so by undergoing darkness (sleep, death) before the next day arrives.....
What is important to see is that death and resurrection is never, in Biblical religion, a way of returning to how things used to be. It is not mere resuscitation. The resurrected life is always a transformation of the life before death. Each day of creation was more glorious than the one before. Adam was glorified when he was given a wife. And each new covenant in the bible is more glorious than the one before. This fact stands in opposition to all the "dying and rising" myths of paganism, which only assert the return of an endless cycle, and bring about no change in history. - James B. Jordan
 

Phantom Thread is a masterpiece. There Will Be Blood is the greatest American film of the aughts. Phantom Thread is the greatest American film of the twenty-teens. I think that makes Paul Thomas Anderson our greatest living film director.

I don't know how to write about the film without spoilers. I expect you guys to see the film soon. Read this or don't. I'm not getting into many specifics, but I do riff on what I think is the main theme, which is a minor spoiler. I went in completely blind (except having watched the trailer once whenever it first dropped several months ago) and was happy to do so.

Phantom Thread is a story of a man who breaks out of a cycle, who through a glorious death and resurrection (a series of them, in fact) learns to move from good to good, from glory to glory, whose life is transformed through the experience of death.

When we meet Reynolds, he has disposed of his most recent lover. It is strongly implied and easy to imagine that this incident is yet another in a long line of such. Reynolds is stuck in a pagan "dying and rising" myth. Every time he does the same thing. Every time he gets the same results.

When he meets Alma, there is no reason for us to expect anything except more of the same. Except maybe we do. Because PTA has inserted a framing device into the film that structures the film. The first shot of the film is of Alma, speaking to someone, speaking to us, of what it is like to love this man and be with this man. We suspect that she may be the one to break the cycle.

Reynolds is full of life. He is full of himself. Those who enter his circle as lovers submit themselves to him. Alma instead challenges him. She eventually kills him. Because this is what Reynolds needs. He needs to be emptied of his own life, to lose his self, to learn to live beyond himself. He needs to die to self.

And this is the film's genius. And the film's joy.

The film is slyly funny. Sometimes it's in the dialogue. Sometimes it's in the camera movement ("tracking shots are a question of morality") and/or the way that an actor is placed and moves in the frame.

In the end, we learn with Reynolds that life is fleeting, that we must live memento mori, that we are at our best when we keep death near. When we admit that we are weak. When we know that we are dust.

Some of us are harder hearted than others, insisting on a pretended strength.

May an Alma rise up, loving, kind, to kill us when we won't kill ourselves. Then we might experience New Life. Glory to greater glory, each day more glorious than the one before.

only a gentle yoke, o mediator

Well, I asked for it.

I confess that I wasn't expecting Brandon to pick a Lanthimos film.

It's amusing to me that I enjoyed this one more than Brandon. I still didn't like it, but I didn't hate it the way I hated Dogtooth (a film which I still respect in many ways) or shrug it off as stupid the way I did with the half-watched The Lobster or ignore it altogether like Alps.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Lanthimos immediately caught my attention, not with the beating heart (more on that soon), but with the opening notes over darkness that open the film. Lanthimos had appropriated a "sacred" choral work from the Christian tradition and was using it for his own nefarious purposes. My immediate response was anger and disgust, followed by curiosity--what would Lanthimos do with these very Christian themes of suffering and sacrifice coupled with glory and bliss?

As the apostle Paul puts it, "For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God."

Could it be possible that Yorgos Lanthimos was seriously exploring this "folly"?



Of course, it turns out that the answer is NO. Lanthimos is not so serious. And I can hardly fault him for that. I am sympathetic to what Brandon quotes him as saying. I can't do anything "straight-forward" either. I can't seem to ever be 100% serious about anything. There's always a joke, always an irony, always some wrinkle that queers things; strange-forward. There's always a second and third and fourth level of mental questionings and twistings, the always aware that is crippling. Does this mean that I (along with Yargos) am reduced to gimmick? It feels that way sometimes.

What really strikes me as impressive in Sacred Deer is the direction of the actors. Every line is delivered flat. Every action seems somehow inevitable, even feeling morally neutral because it all rings so loudly of fatalism.

Every film is an artifice. Artificial. Constructed. Not natural. One strength of this film is that it lays that artifice completely bare. We never get "lost in the narrative" the same way we might with a great pop film because we are always aware that the narrative is completely in control of the narrator. It is in this anti-realism that Lanthimos is most successfully close to his ancient Greek fathers. Bresson is often brought up for his use of actors-as-models. Lanthimos' intended expression is different than Bresson, but the method seems to be similar. By stripping his actors of personality and emotional affect, Lanthimos does achieve something not quite the same but close to the effect of a mask, which of course it was always common for actors to wear on a stage. Actors should be masked. The stage should be fantastic and not realist. It is only us moderns who fail to understand this.

You will guide your models according to your rules, with them letting you act in them, and you letting them act in you. -Robert Bresson

Back to the "heart" of the film. As I've already mentioned, the film opens in darkness accompanied by the sounds and words of "Christ hovering on the cross," bringing to mind a crucified king ruling mysteriously from this position, revealing in this bizarre action the central truth of all creation.

We're immediately given a "hovering" shot, a top-down view of a beating heart. The perspective we are given is godlike, both observing life but also so clearly exhibiting a power over life and death.

The next shot is of a doctor disrobing, literally removing the robes of his office. In this shot, coupled with the last, we understand that the role of doctor is a priestly role. When the doctor is acting in his liturgical role (performing his service) he is given a trust and holds a responsibility. He is a minister of life and death.

This disrobing is practically just a shot of a surgeon finished with his surgery, but because of this film being what it is, freighted with symbols, the shot also carries much more resonance. The film begins with a "priest" who has in some sense been "defrocked." He is no longer qualified for the office.

The next scene involves this doctor and another talking about wristwatches. The camera distances itself. Our defrocked doctor talks of buying a new watch. He has been wearing the same watch for many years, operating under the same time. He now feels that he needs a new watch, a new time. It is highly significant then that this new time does not represent his own change. As soon as he purchases this new watch (establishing a new time), he hands it over to the young boy Martin, clearly indicating that it is now Martin's time, that what will now happen proceeds from Martin and is under the control of Martin.

Let's do a silly bit of namesplaining.

Steven - crown, garland

Martin - of Mars, warlike

Anna - gracious, full of grace

Then the generic diminuatives of Kim and Bob, probably meaning:

Kim - precious

Bob - bright fame

The family surname Murphy = sea-warrior or sea-battler, establishing them as Irish, yes (and therefore connecting them to a world of folk spirits and magic commonplace), but also suggesting the turbulence of the specific combat they are engaged in in the film, never sure, always shifting like the sea.

Now, I don't want to make too much of the names, but surely they are no accident and are not random. Martin being Mars being Ares being pretty much a male counterpart to Artemis makes sense. Besides Artemis' sacred deer, the snake was sacred to her as it was to Ares.

Steven, the medical professional operates under the symbol of the upraised snake, a symbol he profanes when he dares to operate as priest of his guild while under the influence of strange spirits.

Brandon makes light of the doctor's drinking. But depending on the temple cult, being drunk on the job is a death penalty offense. Even stripping the priest aspect of the job that I have been stressing, we should all agree that a surgeon performing a procedure after having a couple of drinks (I imagine double bourbon in this case, and that "a couple" is most likely the understatement of a chronic abuser) is a form of criminally negligent homicide.

In the film, Steven's guilt is established. And yet he is never repentant. He makes excuses about his drinking behavior and puts the blame off on another (a simple accident of nature, the possible misjudment of his co-worker). He never once takes responsibility. He insists that his crown is still in place.

Martin insists on responsibility. But he insists on mediation, a sacrificial substitute. That just as Steven has killed someone special to Martin (I think that the father-killing is secondary to the betrayal of the medical office; that's my current read of the film), so Mars insists on the killing of something special to Steven.

At no point does Steven offer up himself. It doesn't even seem to cross his mind. He first fights against the idea of killing one of his family, but he finally gives in. Skipping over a lot, in the end an acceptable sacrifice to atone for his sin has been made and he can resume his life unstained.

There are some Christian themes in this, but what is remarkable is how ruggedly, insistently Hellenistic the film is. To whatever extent an audience rejects this film, it rejects Greek philosophy and Greek religion, and it does so because of the Morning of Christ's Nativity. The Killing of a Sacred Deer turns out to be a Christmas movie after all. Huh.

https://youtu.be/E8Ot-KPVZVE

Back to the artifice. Lanthimos introduces an element of dread, this terrible fatalism which comes from the capricious will of the gods. A god (Martin, whodathunk?) is offended and a human must bow before the will of this god. Resistance is futile. The will of the god will be achieved regardless.

As dread events begin in the film, we want to call bullshit. Screw you, Lanthimos. The guy has a choice. Something can be done. Fight it. Fight. THIS IS ALL ONLY HAPPENING JUSTBECAUSE YOU SAY IT IS, NOT BECAUSE IT IS NATURAL. IT IS BULLSHIT. IT IS A BETRAYAL OF OUR EXPECTATIONS. STOP IT.

And yet it never stops. It gets worse. And finally we come to the fated conclusion, the god is satisfied, and life can move on.

The film ends with Bach's St John Passion. And I'm not sure if it's a twisted irony or a desperate prayer. Or most likely both...

O Lord, our lord.

It is an impressive piece of filmmaking. Writing all of this has had me re-evaluating it even further, grudgingly convincing myself that I like this one after all.

Lanthimos reminds me of von Trier. Both are tortured provocateurs trying to communicate with audiences who no longer feel anything. Both are working so obviously in the Shadow of the Cross, haunted and hounded by a violent grace, severe mercies; they try to account for these peculiar glories amid a grimy world, a world that has stripped away all of their tools for doing so-- they work on the edges of an artistic culture which has already given up on meaning, which has no basis for anything. I can only sympathize with their struggles even when they result in cinematic tantrums and childish outbursts of violent creativity, sometimes hurting themselves as they lash out.

Go figure. Happy 2018. Film Club is dead. Long live Film Club.

2016

1. Love & Friendship
2. Paterson
3. Fences
4. The Founder
5. Hacksaw Ridge

Honorable Mention: Doctor Strange

All of these films are not only my favorite from the year, but I believe that each of these represents the best work these respective directors (all of whom I find interesting and worth following) have done in their careers.

Top tens are pretty silly. We all know that. But I've found myself resisting them more the past couple of years.

These five (maybe six) films are the ones from 2016 that I want to re-visit. Maybe it's telling that I haven't re-watched any of them yet (I did fall asleep to partial re-views of The Founder and Doctor Strange).

I'm planning on re-watching Rogue One because I just read a good essay on it which made me re-consider it somewhat (and honestly, we all know that I'm a sucker for this childhood pop franchise that won't let me grow up). But it wasn't and isn't a favorite from the year.

There were a lot of good movies in 2016, including some trashy stuff and some art stuff. I was entertained more in 2016 than I was this year or the year before it. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe not. I'm content with my current discontent.

The thing is that I don't care about the rest of the films from 2016. I don't want to re-watch them. I don't feel like discussing them. Was Nocturnal Animals better than Finding Dory better than The Purge:Election Year? How do I rank them? Why would I? I don't know. I don't care. I saw 53+ films from the year and I can only think of 3 (after looking at a list--otherwise I wouldn't have remembered them at all) that I feel were a complete waste of time: Star Trek Beyond, Neon Demon, and Tarzan, for the record. I couldn't force myself to pay attention to either of the first two and the latter has the distinction of being the only film to make me fall asleep in the middle of the morning.

I guess I'd re-watch any of the films from the year if it meant an opportunity to discuss aspects of them with you guys. But it's been a long time since we've all been "in sync" with our viewing habits. It's been at least as long since we've all committed to faithfully engaging with one another here about films.

I'm actually talking myself into an interest in a renewed attempt at a CR5FC "movie of the month" club. I'd be up for it if you guys are.

2015

2015, Ten,
Five Groups of Two

1. The Force Awakens
2. Entertainment

3. Results
4. Irrational Man

5. Knight of Cups
6. Hateful 8

7. High-Rise
8. Stinking Heaven

9. Ex Machina
10. Crimson Peak


You all know how I feel about The Force Awakens. It succeeded in awakening the child in me. It *entertained* me. Which is why it feels right to pair it with Entertainment, the film that captured my own despair in regards to art and culture. Entertainment apes the forms of the arthouse, making it clear that the cheap and easy entertianments of the masses is not its easy target. It is just as much if not more so a statement against the empty gestures of a spiritually dead aestheticism.

I still love Results, but its faults are starting to wear through for me. Each re-watch, I see a little more clearly how it conforms to our culture of death in little ways. Its center is still an affirmation of love and life, but there are creakings at the seams. Irrational Man, on the other hand, has risen in my memory's estimation. I really do need to re-watch it. Woody Allen is at his most self-critical here, but critics dismiss this one because it features crime and philosophy instead of smarmy sex talk and social silliness.

Knight of Cups and Hateful 8 are two films that I respect and want to love, but don't love. Malick and Tarantino are both Masters, but I'm not sure that I want to follow either one. Malick is too serious, trying to escape it all. Tarantino is too smug in his commitment to wallowing in the trash.

High-Rise and Stinking Heaven both explore what it means to live together. I've forgotten most of what I liked about either one and find myself not caring to defend them now. My Top Ten ends at 6. Or maybe even at 4. The Top 4 are the only ones I would re-watch right now, this very minute.

Ex Machina and Crimson Peak get the end of the list nod because I find myself still impressed with the visual storytelling in each. Even if I had problems with both of them, they both featured compelling worlds fully realized.