Man Bites Dog

I had a bit of trouble watching this film, and unfortunately, my only reason was technical. My internet sputtered and died about twenty minutes from the end of it, following the film's main motif of sputtering death. I have a problem with the Netflix classification of all genres of film made outside the country as "Foreign." When I think "Foreign," I think artsy, cultural, and tragic. In many ways, Man Bites Dog (or more appropriately, C'est Arrivé a Chez Vous) has elements of art, culture, and tragedy, considering it's shot documentary-style long before that became the hip thing to do for action movies. The premise is that a documentary film crew, having decided to film the life of a serial killer, gradually gets pulled into the murders themselves, but I would argue, they were more than willing participants from the beginning.

After watching this film, I'm reminded of a story my television instructor told the class during Sophomore year of high school, how when she worked at a local news station, there was an incident of a child drowning in the river. She recounted that the cameras arrived on scene and began thrusting their microphones into the face of the mother who was weeping over the body of her child. It was too much for her, and she recalled her crew. The crew featured in Man Bites Dog takes this kind of inhumanity a whole step further. They smile and congratulate the killer, Benoit, for his kills, and when one of their own goes down, they pick up his gear and keep filming. There is no love here. There is no humanity. That which is seen on the camera, even if it's happening inches away, is unreal and therefore entertaining.

I came into this film with a bias toward a very different serial killer, Dexter, who has a code of punishing much worse offenders who have slipped through the clutches of the law. I could attempt to understand a film crew being sympathetic toward someone with a code like that, but Benoit Patard is no Dexter Morgan. He kills for the pleasure of it and for the money. He is creative in his killings, rewatching them like a football coach reviews plays to see how he could improve it. What's especially shocking is how careless he is, murdering in public places in broad daylight, yelling, shooting, and making a scene. Yet, because he has a television crew following him everywhere, all the people he meets and murders trust him completely, letting him into their homes, letting him lead them away. He kills lots of people, elderly and children included, but the crew just keeps on following him, no matter how much he insults or berates them, doing everything he asks with big, goofy grins on their faces. It is the effect of stardom, of losing oneself in one's craft.

While I did wonder about the pervasive lack of suspicion or police presence, even the idea that a serial killer would want the kind of liability a film crew would present, my greater wonder came from what Man Bites Dog had to say about the rest of us. Do the horrible murders we witness affect us? Maybe, maybe not. Would they affect us more if we were there filming? Is life slowly becoming indistinguishable from the lens, or is there hope that if we should find ourselves witnessing real atrocity, that we would feel, question, resist? At what point do we go from being apathetic to condoning the actions we see on the tube, if not externally, then internally? Do we need violence to hold our attention anymore?

In terms of watchability, this was not as gruesome as I half expected, considering the last French crime film I started to watch (and did not get past five minutes) was Irreversible. Benoit started as a charming, humorous person, then decayed very quickly, really bringing the viewer's awareness to the ugliness that is now so ubiquitously entertaining. I have to give it four stars for innovation, entertainment, and the provocation of thought. It's worth a look.

Dr. Strangelove

As a huge Peter Sellers fan, I came into this movie with high expectations. I grew up on the Pink Panther movies, and even to this day, they continue to prompt uproarious laughter. The man was a genius, and combined with the genius of Stanley Kubrick, I figured the genius would be overflowing, the laughs unstoppable. In short, there was a lot of genius, and plenty of tongue-in-cheek content, but almost no laughs at all.

Make no mistake, the acting was brilliant. I had to do a triple take to realize that Sellers was playing all three main characters, a set of performances pulled off so well as to rightfully deserve the nods of the Academy, especially as the president, whose straightforward approach contrasted heavily with Sellers' more flamboyant roles (see A Shot in the Dark or Murder by Death), yet was actually one of the funniest in the film. Nonetheless, considering his mad, titular character only showed up in two scenes, I felt a lot like I did watching the original Pink Panther, the first in the Clouseau series, a bit bored and let down.

Humor aside, the brilliance of the film resides in its critique of the military chain of command, especially the question of what happens when a link in that chain gets rusty. The theme also appears in another of Kubrick's more famous works, Paths of Glory, which deals with the need for a scapegoat and the inability of the lower echelons to prevent their superiors from executing innocent men. These themes serve as reminders that joining the military is not a foolproof path to glory, as the scenes of Americans following orders to shoot other Americans demonstrate.

All in all, in terms of whether I would watch Dr. Strangelove again, I have to give it three stars. It dragged at times, and I was underwhelmed by the brand of humor, which may have been too consistently subtle for my taste or perhaps, dated.

Watchmen

In pondering Watchmen, I think I will have the same problem as the directors in adapting Alan Moore's masterpiece to the screen: there is so much to talk about that it simply cannot fit. I entered it with the bias that Moore refused to be affiliated with the film, that the film was long and at times, boring. Nonetheless, it is a fragment of the world of superheroes that must be explored if one is to show any sophistication in the subject, because sophistication, or more appropriately, reflection, is the essence of the Watchmen.

The story demands that the audience look at the grander picture, which explains the nearly three-hour run time and the seemingly endless exposition. I enjoyed the character development, the stories that gave us depth without forcing us into thrills and spills. I enjoyed Dr. Manhattan's existential battles (Is anything really worth saving?). My enjoyment lasted until around midpoint, where the script woke up and realized it hadn't given us a plot to follow. It was a slice of life script for superheroes, which, in the end, wasn't satisfying. There were great moments, to be sure: Rorschach's stint in prison, the flashbacks to the awfulness of the Comedian, and Dr. Manhattan's fortress on Mars.

However, as befitting Ozymandias, the smartest man in the world, the film was 90% intellect and 10% the filmmakers trying to fill the rest of the space. That ninety percent encompasses how much the question of why humanity should be saved was actually answered. The ten percent encompasses the swiftly fading elegance of the last half. In short, when we cut to the many screens of news coverage with no tears, no reactions, just a sea of calm, practical faces, when the final scene is of a bored newspaper company only worried about finding new material, I was left to wonder whether anyone truly believed that the death of millions of people would be a calamity. The Silk Spectre's circular argument on the matter (humanity should be saved because millions of people will die) did not help.

Despite my quarrels with the balance of intellect versus heart in the film, I thoroughly enjoyed a good portion of it. It presented superheroes stripped down and (minus Dr. Manhattan) without the distractions of high-powered battles. The conclusion reminds us that we humans now make our own gods, and they, in the form of atomic energy, keep us from tearing each other apart on the greater scale. If only this film could affect us as significantly on the smaller scale, it would be a masterpiece of cinema to rival the masterpiece of graphic literature. For now, three stars.

A Single Man (The Screenplay)

I'm going to abandon technical analysis for a moment and talk about how I'm feeling. Yeah. Whoa. Reading A Single Man left me feeling sad and sentimental. How did it do that? I couldn't see any of the characters' faces. I couldn't hear their voices or their sniffles as they cried. How, then, were these written words able to produce such distinct emotions without these visible and audible stimuli? There is much to be learned from an Oscar-nominated screenplay.

We'll start with the basics. Lost love is universally relatable, whether directly or vicariously, and the death of a loved one is the epitome of this sort of loss. In this case, we enter the grieving process of a man, George, who has recently lost his partner of 16 years, Jim, to a car accident. We get this through flashbacks played in reverse from Jim's death to their first meeting, the increasing happiness of the memories a parallel to George's own improving mood, but this parallel is irrelevant here. It is the contrast of the happiness of these flashbacks to the quiet, somber world that George now inhabits that stirs the emotion inside as we realize the extent of what George has lost. Through this contrast, the reader cannot help but reflect on or speculate about one's own losses. Relating = feeling.

While loss of love can be experienced oneself or through others, the pain of alienation is something that attacks the very core of the social animal. Right off the bat, George gets a call from Jim's cousin, with news about the car accident and the upcoming funeral. The loss hurts, but the reiteration that the funeral is for "family only," is a much sharper sting. Throughout the story, George reflects on how he and Jim were invisible, cut off from the increasingly savage world embodied by his beastly neighbors. He teaches a class that does not care, watches a world of mediocrity sprouting around him, feels so out of place and out of touch. The drowning motif, while a bit heavy-handed, is fitting. It is only when he befriends his student, Kenny, that he is allowed to surface.

Finally, George's doom touches our hearts. We know from the beginning that he will ultimately die: he buys bullets for a gun, withdraws his possessions from the bank, and leaves his will out on the table for someone to find. We envision someone whose heart has been deeply cracked, who lacks the means or the understanding to repair it. Our sadness comes from seeing how his attempts have failed and how he has slipped into complete isolation and anonymity. It is when we trip in the pursuit of happiness that we fall into the character's sadness.

Through this wave of melancholy, we catch breaths of air in the memories and the happy moments. George recollects in his final words that he has "lived [his] life on these moments" even though they fade. Yet, it is his acknowledgment that everything must fade that ultimately sets him free. He is able to look at what has been and what can be. He can acknowledge that there may be more moments to anticipate. He has a few friends and at least one who understands him. It is a quiet way to end, satisfying without yelling or sobbing but a quiet gasp.

Metropolis

I'm not going to lie. It's really difficult for me to get into German expressionism, especially after a long day at the beach. When Metropolis opened with the disclaimer that large chunks of the film had been lost to the ages, I was afraid this was going to be one erratic, haphazard two hours of movie. There were two things that I felt specifically kept it from becoming so: the artistry and the performances. While I enjoyed parts of the score, there were times where even it became a bit too repetitive; therefore, I'll keep my focus on the other two.

The city design of Metropolis, though largely limited to artists' sketches and miniatures, encompassed a grandeur, the likes of which modern civilization has yet to attain. The comparison of the city to the Tower of Babel was a tight fit. The buildings towered above the streets below, each one seeking to outdo its neighbor in height and diameter. No space was spared between them and walkways connected them; in all actuality, in this world, there was no reason for any human to set foot outdoors at all, which lent itself to the closed-minded world of the characters.

Starting out, I really did not want to like our protagonist, Freder (played by Gustav Fröhlich), whose heavy makeup and hyperbolic reactions to everything contrasted gratingly with his father's more subtle appearance. However, our love interest, Maria (Brigitte Helm) and mad inventor, Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), both managed to outdo Freder in over-the-top expression. However, when she wasn't flailing her arms and crashing blindly into walls, Maria as the robot was a lot of fun to watch. Her bizarre erotic dance, her spiderlike hand gestures, and her sneering glances, all done with a mechanical rhythm, somehow managed to grasp perfectly the image of that which is twisted and evil in the world.

Metropolis comes from the days when a message could be hammered down the throats of the audience without receiving great scorn, but despite its continuous restating of its message, I really enjoyed the analogy of the head and hand needing to meet at the heart; it is an excellent message to take into account when working with dreamers and workers, because compassion and empathy, or at least the attempt at it, are essential to a working society, as demonstrated by the mob of workers racing from their city to destroy the machine that kept them alive, leaving their children to die. Thus, as befits truly classic science fiction, Metropolis leaves us with both a happy ending and a stern warning for the future: side with neither the hand nor the mind exclusively, but walk that delicate line between mobs or else become the problem. I give Metropolis three stars for artistry and the provoking of thought.

What Every Body Is Saying (Chapter 8)

It all comes to a head here in Chapter 8, and no, that wasn't intended to be a pun this time. This section is on detecting deception, and considering the quantity of references to everything that has been discussed thus far in the book, the fact remains that no nonverbal action is a conclusive indicator that someone is lying. Nonverbals indicate comfort or discomfort; it is up to the investigator and his/her carefully selected questions to determine the cause of that discomfort.

Working in loss prevention, I really appreciated Navarro's steps to observing. The key to a successful read is to ease the subject into a feeling of comfort, an observable baseline. This makes any changes presented by future questions more easily observable. This came to mind particularly when I heard at work that the best way to get a confession from someone is not to play the good cop/bad cop intimidation game, but to be empathetic, patient, compassionate and ultimately kill them with kindness. This is something that, if I am to learn how to read people, I have to adopt pronto. I have this inner urge to leap at someone for something I suspect them of doing. This, of course, is pointless, as it is clearly pointed out in this chapter that innocent people can be coerced into confession.

In the end, though, since starting this book ages ago, I have noticed my observations of people are becoming easier. Just the other day, we had a safety seminar, and I was able to watch, as the explanations wore on, the behaviors of discomfort displayed in my coworkers: the arms between the legs, the rocking, the eyes on the exit routes, the checking of the watches. I even caught one of the firemen in the act of genital framing. I wasn't sure whether it was a dominance display (since he was not the one talking, or a subconscious show for the ladies sitting directly across from him. I'm sure it was not his conscious intent, which is why this book has made life so much more fun.

As I continue to practice the observations I learned in this book, I would like to find out how to act on them. For instance, when someone averts his/her eyes or suddenly turns quiet or displays any number of discomfort gestures, I would love to know how to bring them up on the verbal level without turning into an interrogator. I'll keep hunting for such a lesson. In any case, What Every Body Is Saying has been an extraordinary read, easy to follow, moderately easy to start applying, and a fantastic tool for understanding the inner workings of the people around us.

What Every Body Is Saying (Chapter 7)

The face... One of the most variable and perplexing parts of the body. I admit I struggle with reading it, and it can be a great tool for deception. Nonetheless, this chapter gives some useful tips on how to detect those facial behaviors that are not quite as easy to control..

One of the things I did not expect to find out was that averting the eyes doesn't necessarily indicate deception or discomfort. I often used to wonder about this in conversing with my friends who would let their eyes wander here and there, but according to Navarro, this is a sign of comfort, that the person feels no imminent threat from the other sitting across the table. Eye aversion can also be used to clarify a thought. However, it is specified that roving eyes during an interview (and probably on a date) leave a bad first impression. I would also have to argue that eye aversion during an important conversation is exceedingly rude, and it should not be assumed that the other person has understood what was just said.

There is also a lot to be gleaned from the motions of the mouth, the thinning of the lips, the sticking out of the tongue... My favorite was the lip purse, an indicator that a person internally disagrees. Being aware of this may certainly be useful whenever I make a presentation/pitch in the distant future.

Finally, I was fascinated by the observation that wrinkles in old age may indicate the type of life the person has led: laugh lines indicate happiness, whereas a wrinkled forehead can indicate a life of deep discomfort. This really brings to the forefront the ways that one's attitude toward the world can shape one's life and body.

There is a lot more information in this 40-page chapter on how to read the face, much of which ties in with pacifying behaviors and defensive displays already discussed with other body parts. For more information, check out the book.