There is a shift once she returns to Vienna, from girl Lisa to woman Lisa, that is marked by the look. Girl Lisa is constantly gazing, almost invisible. She she’s peeking in windows and hiding in staircases, and the camera really follows her eye. Her perspective is overwhelming. But woman Lisa is constantly, aggressively visible. She actually works as a model in a dress shop; it’s during this time when Stefan finally looks back. But of course he doesn’t really see her. He just sees a pretty girl who’s making it easy for him.
"I am generally on guard against the demonization of sentimentality because I think that it’s usually sexist, but the sentimentality of well-meaning white dudes is a bigger danger. Because the sentimentality of well-meaning white dudes seems to invariably involve paternalism. And charging in with guns"
— Pop Culture and Feelings is generally a pro-sentimentality blog, but this whole Kony thing shows the danger of feelings + privilege.
"The thing is, I remember being 19 and 20 and having crushes on these older (though not that much older) dudes who seemed so smart and so cool and so knowing, and I was into them not so much because I was super-attracted to them but because I wanted to be like them. And when you’re 20, desires tend to get mixed up together."
"But pulling this kind of switch with Banderas – an actor who more often is too much or too passionate for the characters he’s playing – really pays off. He’s a great villain: cool, tastefully dressed, with a beautiful, tasteful home. He’s got all this surface and we never really come to understand what’s underneath. Even in the flashbacks that “explain” the trauma he’s been through, we still don’t see a lot of warm emotion, and his wife was still unhappy with him. This is where I think it shifts to horror for Almodóvar: melodrama’s a genre that explains everything, it’s all about naming and stating and revelation. Horror’s always got something fundamentally inexplicable about it – there’s always a nagging “why” at the centre, a sense that there’s really no rational explanation for the events that we’re seeing. Whereas the appeal of melodrama derives from the sense that there is an order to the seemingly chaotic universe, the appeal of horror comes from a fleeting acknowledgement that there really isn’t."
I started to write a little mini-thing about The Skin I Live In for my movie log, and then it exploded into 1,400 words, and I still barely talk directly about anything that happens in it.
"The whole film is supposed to be this kind of removed allegory. Like, per wikipedia, Pasolini intended the scene where a crying, naked girl is forced to eat shit as a commentary on junk food. But how seriously are we supposed to take this? Yes, we certainly can understand the metaphor Pasolini is driving at when we see fascists treating shit like a delicacy, but we have also just watched an intensely, intentionally cruel scene of a girl being forced to eat shit. For me, the visceral impact of that has a life of its own: I can’t think of it as just allegory."
"Everyone who praises Arrested Development talks about its intelligence and complexity. The show really requires of you that you watch every episode; bits keep paying off for weeks, even years. What’s appealing about this isn’t just that the jokes are funny, it’s that you feel smart for noticing something that you didn’t notice before. This is pleasurable because it’s flattering."
Movie log type post! Four weeks of movies. (I have been busy! Mostly drinking.) Bridesmaids, Tree of Life, Boom!, Dangerous Liaisons, Black Book, and Kaboom. I talk about the death of cinema and call for more Paul Verhoeven.
"This week I caught up on Twilight. I actually had a lot of feelings about the first one, but neither of the sequels hit me as hard, probably because all the convoluted plot got in the way of staring longingly and teenage lust. I also saw two other movies that don’t have anything do to with Twilight. I put those first because probably anyone who cares about the Twlight movies has formed opinions about them by now."
New weekly movies post at Pop Culture and Feelings. I address my feelings about the very weird combination of *Spring Breakdown*, *Swing Time*, and *Mysterious Skin.*
It took so long to get up this week because I spent a bunch of time trying to deal with *Mysterious Skin*, because oh my god I don’t cope well with thinking about people doing this stuff to kids, and it manages to be fairly graphic without actually staging this stuff because child actors. It’s sometimes hard to write about movies that visceral. Here’s the best bit I came up with:
The opening credits are over this blurry, colourful movement that is soon revealed to be falling Froot Loops. The Froot Loops are falling onto eight-year-old Neil’s face, shown in contextless close-up. His expression is ecstatic, but he winces slightly every time one of them lands on his face, like he’s forcing himself to enjoy it. You realize later on what it means – it is a stylized version of the first time Neil’s abused, and a pretty good visual metaphor for everything that he does after. It’s just right for the way the movie deals with it all: striking and aesthetic but deeply unsettling.
