A Rebuttal to Scott Tobias’ review of Let the Right One In

Scott Tobias of the Onion AV Club has written a piece on the film version of Let the Right One In as an installment in the site’s entertaining series The New Cult Canon.

Mr. Tobias, however, wrongly allows his love of horrporn films to warp his chances at an objective viewing of the movie.  Yes, Let the Right One In is going to be disappointing if you’re expecting Hostel.  Tobias writes:

It’s an arch, “classy” piece of work, something critics who regularly turn their noses up at the likes of Takashi Miike, Rob Zombie, and Eli Roth can recommend as an antidote. And while there’s plenty of grisly mayhem on display, director Tomas Alfredson isn’t inclined to goose the audience with big shocks or nerve-jangling suspense sequences; he keeps his distance, as if he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty. At best, the film could be called “creepy,” but even that’s a stretch, because it mistakes general moodiness for something more sinister and disturbing.

Tobias’ use of the term “goose” is telling.  He’s the type of person who sees blood on a movie box (like the person who sees boobs on a movie box) and then expects to be “goosed” in a very particular and hamfisted way.

Sure, Tobias can respect those films for what they do, but why would you expect every film in the genre to do the SAME EXACT THING?  That’s not being a critic, that’s being a fanboy.  The next time he reviews a film, I think he should leave his Hostel II button at home.  To judge a film unfavorably against the films of Eli Roth (Eli-fucking-Roth???) is mind-boggling.

Tobias decries the “frustrating” ambiguities in the film.  Yeah, it really is too bad when a film alludes to mysterious elements in character and plot, without beating you over the head with puzzle piece answers.  The ambiguities in Let the Right One In are intentional, I can assure you, and they allow the viewer to fill in the blanks, or heaven-forbid, re-watch the movie in order to intuit suggestions and clues.  It must have been hard on Mr. Tobias to have to think about plot and characters and stuff, as opposed to receiving a nicely wrapped and lobotomy-level simplistic concept like “American tourists are kidnapped and tortured underneath a European hostel.  The end.”  Ambiguity is a bad thing in film?  Since when?  Are we to disregard the films of Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg and David Lynch?

I get the sense that Mr. Tobias has defended the horrporn genre one too many times and it has made him bitter.  Perhaps he has heard too much about the subtleties of Let the Right One In and was determined to point out its flaws even before he watched it.  To admit its brilliance would mean turning his back on his life’s work.

What do you think?  Am I being overly-defensive?  I mean, I’ve enjoyed Rob Zombie’s films for various reasons, but I would never compare The Devil’s Rejects or Hourse of 1000 Corpses to a movie like Let the Right One In.  Yes, they come from the same rack at the video store, but they are going for entirely different things.  Sometimes “general moodiness”  is preferable in a film to simply being “goosed”, even when the film involves bloodthirsty vampires.

The Best Films of 2009: A KuddelSaus Retrospective Exclusive (4 – 6)

6.                                  AN EDUCATION

Despite griping a bit about the ending of An Education in my original review, the film is nonetheless a solid number 6 on my list.  The movie rides heavily upon the shoulders of Carey Mulligan’s performance as the young British schoolgirl, Jenny (who receives the titular “education”), and luckily for all involved, she is spectacular.  If I were giving out acting awards, I’d give her one for best actress of the year.

An Education is based on the experiences of British journalist Lynn Barber who, as a 16 year old, falls in love with a creepy man (Peter Sarsgaard) almost twice her age.  This creepy man, named David, is full of promises and schmooze, winning over the heart of the young girl as well as the approval of her over-controlling parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour).  This man builds his career and his sexual exploits upon deception and he embodies the darker sides of a world that young Jenny is only just coming to terms with.  While the ending is a bit of a sell-out, exactly because it seems to pretend that the evil in the world is gone once the creepy man is out of the picture, the bulk of the film deals with the naivete and ideals of a young woman who chooses, in David, an alternative to the future that she is being forced into everyday by her parents.

The set design is great and the cinematography even better; London (and Paris for a bit) are beautifully rendered and enlivened with plenty of 1960s period detail.  The script is sharp, although contains a few too many jokes.  These jokes are a bit confusing for a film that wants certain of its aspects to be taken dead seriously and certain others to come across as light and champagne bubbly; which is an odd tonality for a film dealing with what many would consider pedophilia.  These tonal irregularities are acceptable to me, for they ring true of the experiences of teenagerdom: life for many teenagers alternates between the glum seriousness and buoyant humor, and there is often no three-ways about it.  Although some of the notes in this film ring strangely off, there are enough true moments for me to consider it the 6th best film of the year.

As faithful readers of my blog can attest, I am a big fan of the bildungsroman (coming-of-age tale), especially those novels and films out there that deal with the theoretical trauma that initially separates the child from the familial sphere.  Often, this trauma is followed by a “big bad wolf” type character that swoops in at a vulnerable point in the child’s development and usurps the guiding role of the parents.  In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield spends the novel searching for this surrogate parent, eventually finding one in his pedophilic teacher.  In Let the Right One In, this character is the young vampire, Ellie.  In An Education, Peter Sarsgaard’s character isn’t far off from a pedophilic teacher nor, for that matter, a vampire.  Instead of subsisting off of blood, however, David subsists on the trust and naivete of those around him.  While Ellie is ultimately a positive force (you can argue this, obviously) in Oskar’s life, Jenny learns that there are some vampires out there that you simply can not trust.

5.                             INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

To criticize Quentin Tarantino because he puts more effort into his individual scenes than he does into the movie as a whole is tantamount to criticizing Alice Munro for writing short story collections as opposed to novels.  Who gives a shit if the outcome is brilliant?  I rank Tarantino amongst the short list of contemporary masters because he does one thing and one thing only: make Tarantino films.  The originality of Tarantino’s vision and execution is a major factor in Inglourious Basterds becoming one of the most fun movie-going experiences I had in 2009.

Cartoonish excess, sweat-invoking tension and childish gags come heavily into play in Tarantino’s take on the World War II revenge picture.  Sort of like Spielberg’s Munich but with a sense of humor, a group of renegade American Jews (led by the very Anglo LT. Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt) tramples through the woods of war-torn Europe with one goal in mind: the accumulation of Nazi scalps.  In his own trademarked way, Tarantino is once again able to appropriate old B-movie techniques and themes, breathe new life into them, and then keep the film in that rare territory where one can be completely taken with a set-up while simultaneously finding it absurd and unbelievable.

One of the best scenes in the film, and one of the best scenes in any movie in 2009, takes place in an underground German tavern.  In this scene, several of the Basterds are undercover and attempting to rendezvous with their double-agent German actress friend, Bridget von Hammersmark.  Tarantino builds the tension brilliantly as the Basterds’ cover gets blown centimeter by tortuous centimeter.   This scene, unlike many others, does not veer into absurdity but instead maintains a firm grasp on realism; however, the manipulation on the part of the director in building the scene is comedic.  We are able to laugh at the set-up as we are taken with it.

This is to me is what makes Inglourious Basterds in particular and Quentin Tarantino in general so brilliant: he is perhaps the greatest comedy director working today.  Tarantino films are incredibly well-thought out, almost always involve excellent performances and are built on such cinematic touchstones as character development, plot detail and action; not a claim that many comedies of the last 15 years can make.  I never seem to laugh harder at what’s on the screen than during a Tarantino film — Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill Vols 1 & 2, Deathproof are comedies of the highest order, and Inglourious Basterds may be the best of them all.  Okay, it’s not better than Pulp Fiction, but number 2 on that list isn’t bad at all.

PS: On Sunday, Inglourious Basterds won the top prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards: the award for best performance by a cast.  Well deserved, you basterds.  Well deserved.

4.                                  THE INFORMANT!

The Informant!, like movie #6 on this list, receives a large amount of its oomph from its lead.  Both An Education and The Informant! rely upon an engaging and realistic performance from their central characters, for if either Matt Damon or Carey Mulligan were anything less than fantastic, their respective films would simply not work.  Luckily for Steven Soderbergh, Matt Damon sticks the landing with his portrayal of the sweaty, ticcy and against-all-odds Mark Whitacre.

The Informant! follows the misadventures of a corporate executive as he attempts to rid himself of certain problems via a sure-to-fail strategy of shoveling on more problems.  While Mark Whitacre paints himself into a corner, the audience, like the characters surrounding Mark, attempt to discover what it is, exactly, that makes this man tick.  As previously discussed on this blog, good ol’ American hubris is a large part of the equation.  Another part, and the part that makes Mark an endearing character, is an incessant (American?) optimism that keeps Mark going with whispers something to the effect of, “It’s going to work out.  It always has for you, and it always will,” and, “You’re the smartest man in the room.  You will always outsmart those around you.  You have a PhD from Cornell for chrissakes!”

The audience attempts to figure out how to feel about Mark and his strategory and receives an assist from a clever on-going inner monologue wherein Mark mutters to himself about anything and everything, with a notable preoccupation with the animal kingdom and the various survival mechanisms it features.  Mark sees himself as a survivor in a dog-eat-dog world, except that it never occurs to Mark that his idea of survival is everyone else’s idea of egregious greed and conspicuous consumption.  There is never enough for this man, but then again, he belongs to a subspecies of human that does not quit eating when it is full.  Mark is a product of his environment, and his environment happens to breed frumpy men who swindle the average citizen while simultaneously embezzling from their own corporation.  Most animals eat when they’re hungry and rest when they’re not.  Corporate suits, like viruses, keep going just because they can.  To hell with anything else.

The Informant! allows us to gaze into the mind of a maniac and at the same time lets us peek beneath the hood of malevolent corporate procedure.  The international price-fixing scandal would be, as they say, unbelievable if it were not true.  The general public would probably have never been aware of the misdeeds of ADM were it not for the rogue maneuvering of their golden boy.  In this sense Mark Whitacre is an unassuming hero, who is partially redeemed for he is not quite as evil as the system that meant to breed him as one of their own.

This, however, is far from a bland diatribe against corporate culture.  By highlighting the comical aspects of Mark’s situation and personality, The Informant! keeps the mood light and breezy, with help from its jazzy score.  By laughing at an insanely depressing situation, the film manages to keep its satirical teeth sharp instead of reveling in a high-handed position that has sunk many a lesser film by boring the audience with bland moral soap-boxing.

RIP Howard Zinn

Historian Howard Zinn has also passed away.  While this blog hasn’t ventured overtly into the political terrain, it is worth noting that while Salinger is remembered primarily for his agoraphobic withdrawal from society, Zinn is renowned for the political battles on which he built his career.   Zinn cared deeply for the common person and his most well-known work, A People’s History of the United States, an historical work that gave the narrative of America back to the common man and woman, instigated the political awakening of many an American undergrad (including this humble blogger).

The world is lesser without Zinn, but his work, and its ramifications, will last for quite a while.

Here’s a link to the Boston Globe’s obituary of Zinn.

RIP J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger, iconographic American author best known for his novel The Catcher in the Rye and his story collections 9 Stories and Franny and Zooey, has died at age 91.

Salinger’s body of work speaks for itself, but he is perhaps best-known nowadays for his stringently reclusive ways.  How he lived and his frame of mind over the last half-century can only be speculated about, but I like to think of Salinger as the grown-up version of Holden Caulfield.  Fed up with all the phoniness in the world, he simply packed it up and headed for the hills.

The New York Times has a comprehensive obit here.

The Best Films of 2009: A KuddelSaus Retrospective Exclusive (7 – 8)

And so we continue our look back on the year in film that was 2009. (Films 9 and 10 in this series can be found here.) I didn’t intend to drag this out so long, but a trip across the continent will do that to you.  I visited NYC resident Rebecca Sullivan of Reblogged fame.  And yes, she’s just as charming in person.

Without further delay, here are movies 8 and 7:

8.                                     PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

With a gimmicky film such as Paranormal Activity, there’s always a chance that the law of diminishing returns will come into play with each subsequent viewing.  Once the gimmick is experienced once, there is no reason to revisit an essentially deflated enterprise.  For instance, nobody watches the Blair Witch Project anymore, a movie that pretty much became unwatchable after the first viewing.  While Paranormal Activity has been widely compared to Blair Witch because of their shared home-video gimmick and their similarly microscopic budgets compared to their similarly astronomical profit to investment ratios (Blair Witch is #2 all-time on return on investment to Paranormal Activity’s #1), it is my contention that Paranormal Activity will have a much longer shelf-life than Blair Witch.  Paranormal Activity is a much tighter film than Blair Witch, both conceptually and editing-wise.  PA features a scarier antagonist, a more impacting dénouement and, most importantly for the nerds at Kuddelsaus, more interesting thematic implications than its cheapy horror predecessor.

Paranormal Activity derives a lot of its terror from the horrid vulnerability one experiences when someone or something decides to make a crime scene of one’s home sweet home.  The 2007 movie The Strangers, in which a masked couple decide, for reasons unknown, to target a young couple staying in a remote cabin, did this very well.  While the mayhem in the Blair Witch Project took place in some woods, where scary shit is supposed to happen, Paranormal Activity features mayhem within the allegedly-sanctified space of a couple’s home.  And, unlike The Strangers, this is not a mere sadistic mortal (granted, The Strangers featured some very disturbed mortals), but a demon, which does not only infiltrate through the sacred barriers which separate inside the home from outside, but also the barriers separating inside one’s body from outside.  Preceding Paranormal Activity, there have been many films which have used a supernatural invasion of one’s home/body to cull gasps, some notable examples being such previously blogged about films as The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and The Others.  Like these other films, the Paranormal Activity demon does not stop until every nook and cranny has been desecrated somehow.  That’ s just what demons and/or malevolent ghosts do.

Notably, Paranormal Activity never leaves the space of the home.  The previously cited films all utilize a claustrophobic atmosphere as a means of amping up feelings of helplessness and despair, but all of them provide relief to these closed-in domestic spaces with excursions, sometimes only brief ones, into spaces surrounding the home, whether it be the grounds of the manor or New York City.  In Paranormal Activity, we don’t leave.  We are cursed to remain in the home, even when the couple gets a well-deserved night out toward the middle of the film.  As viewers, we become unwilling homebodies along with a demonic presence.  With the only option of escape being to flee the theatre,  I witnessed several people do just that on both occasions that I watched the movie.

Editor’s Note: For my original movie review of Paranormal Activity, please click here.

7.                                     SUMMER HOURS (L’heure d’été)

Summer Hours, a film by Olivier Assayas, begins and ends with scenes focused upon the free-wheeling behavior of children.  The final scene is a doozy and the most beautifully shot scene in an altogether beautiful film.   In between these bookends, we have a film filled with the lives of adults negotiating a much-less free-wheeling world.  The lives of 3 adult siblings are central here, as they come together in the wake of the death of their mother.  Big decisions must be made regarding her estate, which includes a mansion located on the French countryside just outside of Paris – a home that is filled with expensive family heirlooms as well as the memories of 3 intertwined childhoods that seem very far away.

Complicating factors is the globalized nature of this family’s contemporary existence.  Adrienne, played by Juliette Binoche, is a designer living in NYC and recently engaged to an American.  She will be moving to Colorado and possibly never returning to France.  Jérémie, played by Jérémie Renier, is an executive who works for the Puma shoe company and resides in China with his family for the unforeseeable future.  Jérémie’s children speak Chinese and are in love with American culture; the ties between these children and their French parents’ cultural roots have been severed, for good or ill.

Summer Hours uses the situation of these siblings as a microcosm through which to explore the changing global landscape and the ways that established cultures are falling by the wayside to make room for the dominant and overwhelmingly American global culture.  The third sibling, Frédéric (Charles Berling),  is the only one remaining in France as well as the only one attempting to hold on to any sense of heritage, whether cultural or familial.  By holding on to the family home, he believes that some aspect of the past, and the way things perhaps used to be, might be preserved for posterity.  But even his own children are not interested in what he wishes to preserve.  They have their own perspectives, and their own 21^st Century values, through which they take in the world around them.  A musty house and some paintings from long ago do not factor in.  Further challenging Frédéric’s acceptance of his changing life are the post-mortem secrets that emerge which scuff-up the memory and perceived identity of the deceased –  a person that once seemed like a solid, tucked-away and labeled entity.

Memories, culture and identity are not stagnant bodies.  They twist and morph constantly and are never the same each time one attempts to access them.  These elements don’t always appear the way they used to, or at least the way one thinks they used to, and while this can be an uncomfortable aspect of life for many, there are no better agents out there to deal with this reality than children.  The older we get, the more we look to the past as an anchor.  In Summer Hours we learn that the anchors we make up and strive for in life are illusory and there is ever only the current, carrying us through.

The Best Films of 2009: A KuddelSaus Retrospective Exclusive (9 – 10)

Being the original blog that we are, we came up with an idea over here at KuddelSaus to run through a list of our favorite films of 2009.  If things go well, I’m hoping that other blogs/magazines/film critics will pick up on this concept and compile their own top-10 2009 film retrospectives.  We’ll see.

Keep in mind that we’re not paid movie critics at KuddelSaus, so we haven’t seen all of the movies that were released in the last calendar year.  We have non-film writing jobs and responsibilities and stuff.  You know how it is.

In any case, on we go with slots 10 and 9!

10.                                 THE HANGOVER

For those film viewers out there with a sense of social conscience (a good thing), the Hangover may have rubbed you the wrong way with its he-man women-hating worldview and general sociopathic fratboy ethos.  If that didn’t do it, then the gay-sounding Asian man as a central villain, with an exaggerated Chinese accent that could easily qualify him for a minstrel show, might have pushed you over the edge.

However, these aspects of the film are what I believe qualify it as what is known as a “dark comedy”.  The Hangover presents a misanthropic vision of the world, wherein men are hateful, irresponsible, sex-crazed man-children, and women are nagging spite mongers, ditzy strippers, or utterly bland and irrelevant brides-to-be.  The thing is, you’re not supposed to like these characters.  These are characters portraying horrible human traits and stereotypes as a means of furthering comedic scenarios.  Like it or not, pleasant, socially-aware and happy people are simply not funny.  At all.  I think at some point, we have to trust our audience as being with it enough to know that what they are seeing is not actually somebody’s idea of reality, but an intentionally obscured reality, tilted and stretched in various ways so that people and situations seem more funny.

The main characters are douche bags, and part of the fun is watching them get what they deserve.  They are tasered, attacked by a tiger, punched by Mike Tyson, involved in various auto accidents, and jumped by Chinese gangsters, among other forms of torture.  They have the time of their lives during their friend’s bachelor party, but do not remember any of it, which is a fitting tribute to binge-drinking and the fantasy surrounding Vegas.

For me, what makes the Hangover a great comedy, and what lands it here on my list, is that it is consistently funny throughout.  There are very few attempts at humor that illicit groans.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I didn’t care for the wild animal waking up in the car whilst the characters are driving, but we’ll forgive them that.  This movie seems like a nice maturing moment for the recent trend of American comedies, which are improv-heavy and feature as many scenes falling flat as scenes that are legitimately funny.  The Hangover has a very good script, which does include moments of improv, but doesn’t have the piecemeal and half-assed feel of, say, many of the Adam McKay/Will Farrell movies.  The audience is invited to piece together the events comprising Doug’s bachelor party along with our fuzzy-brained heroes, and there is as much enjoyment derived here from the story as there is from moments of off-the-cuff riffing (mostly courtesy of Mr. Galifianakis).

9.                                  TYSON

In 1986, having just turned 20, Mike Tyson was the most famous and feared athlete on the planet after he became the youngest boxer ever to claim the heavyweight crown.  Fast-forward 23 years, and he is a pudgy, face-tattooed shadow of his former self, with his most recent knockout victim being Zach Galifianakis in the previously mentioned film.  (Incidentally, Mike Tyson’s inclusion in The Hangover is a nice testament to the intimidating status that this man once held.  For white suburban kids of my generation, you would not be having a truly nightmarish night in Vegas unless Mike Tyson showed up.  Mike Tyson and Freddy Krueger were probably the most feared entities on the recess playground of my youth.  And Freddy Krueger is fictitious).

James Toback’s 2009 documentary, Tyson, analyzes this remarkable fall-from-grace, and in a novel manner: through the thoughts and words of the man himself: “Iron” Mike Tyson.  Mr. Tyson gives us his thoughts and ideas regarding his life, from his lightning-quick rise to glory, to his stint in jail for rape charges, to his famous cannibalization of Evander Holyfield, to his current life as the father of many children.  (By the way, I watched the Holyfield-Tyson II fight live on pay-per-view at a friend-of-my-parents’ house when I was 15 years-old.  It was clear that Holyfield was intentionally and repeatedly head-butting Tyson as a means of getting Tyson’s head to bleed.  The ref was not calling it, despite Tyson’s many pleadings.  While I’m not saying Tyson should have bitten the guy’s ear off, Holyfield did have a dirty strategy from the get-go and should be not be considered 100% innocent in this incident.  I’m just sayin’.  Surprisingly, in Tyson, Iron Mike has nothing but nice things to say about Holyfield.)

When Mike Tyson was 15 years-old, he was not watching pay-per-view boxing matches at his parents’ friends house.  Having been arrested 38 times by the age of 13, Tyson was being trained at age 15 by his beloved manager Cus D’Amato after Tyson’s natural talent was discovered in the gym of the Tryon School for Boys in Johnstown, NY.  In the doc, Tyson has this to say of his early days as a street fighter:

In a fight, in the streets, not like the ring, it has to be almost to the death because you never know. If you don’t knock them out cold or you don’t beat him half to death, he’ll go home and come back with a gun or come back with a friend with a gun, or gang of people. Normally a fight on the street is deadly.

In Tyson, the viewer gets the story of Tyson’s early life as a stickup boy to his transformation into pure boxing machine; and what the POV from the man himself provides is something that many don’t have when discussing or considering Mike Tyson: context.

One of the more interesting aspects of Toback’s documentary is the inclusion of archive footage of Mike Tyson news coverage.  This provides an enlightening look into the media’s handling of this man, who was often treated with a sneering mixture of both fear and ridicule.  He was possibly the most famous African-American alive in the late 80s not named Michael Jackson, and it is clear that this raw, ripped and uncouth street kid was very difficult for the news media to interpolate.  The media and the general public were unsympathetic to this brash kid, because they were scared of him.   They were scared of his physical power, they were scared of his race and they were scared of his origins.  What we learn from the unsparingly honest ex-boxer in this documentary is that Tyson was also scared.  Of course he was: he may have been the most famous and intimidating adolescent on earth in 1986, but he was still an adolescent.  Tyson is able to imbue the boxer with a human essence, which is no small feat for a man that is seen by many as an inhuman monster; granted, sometimes fairly, but most often not.

It’s easy to write Mike Tyson off as a maniac, because of what of the way he’s acted and the things he has said, but this film at least provides some background and depth through which to judge one of the most iconic personalities of the 2oth century.

Stay tuned: films 8 – 1 to come!

Adolescence Sucks: Lessons Learned and Unlearned in John Ajvide Lindquist’s Let the Right One In (the book, not the movie)

Editor’s note: While this post is primarily concerned with John Ajvide Lindquist’s novel, click here for a previous post in which I wrote a few words on Tomas Alfredson’s film adaptation. Only if you’re interested, of course.

John Ajvide Lindquist begins his 2004 novel Let the Right One In with:

Blackeberg.  It makes you think of coconut-frosted cookies, maybe drugs.  “A respectable life.”  You think subway station, suburb.  Probably nothing else comes to mind.  People must live there, just like they do in other places.  That was why it was built, after all, so that people have a place to live.  (1)

And, as anybody familiar with the novel or the 2007 film adaptation of the same name can attest, this is a place where people die as well.  Bloody, horrible, supernatural deaths abound in both the movie and the film, but this story is not solely regarding blood-drenched mayhem.  This story is about the suburbs, adolescence and the forgotten people existing on the fringes of a boxy, boxed-in, seemingly-clean cut planned community – the drunks, the working-class, the kids.  Oh yeah, and the vampires too.

As with the best Gothic literature, Let the Right One In turns the spotlight over to the pain and sadness of everyday life and imbues it with a physical, material presence.  In this case, the material/physical presence comes in form of a vampire.  Actually, several vampires.  The film version is excellent, but the novel, as only novels can, really stretches out and breathes life into the supporting characters and themes that are presented but often not dwelled upon in the movie.  The movie does include most of the supporting characters and themes, deftly alluding to the back-story and detail included in the novel, but reading the novel is essential if you’re a fan of the story portrayed in the film.  In Tomas Alfredson’s film version, most of the screen time is devoted to the perverted love triangle of Oskar, Eli and Håkan, the pedophile.  (While the film only alludes to the perverted relationship between Eli and Håkan, the book does not hem and haw over Håkan’s illegal preoccupations.)  Lindquist’s book, along with the bullied Oskar and completely marginalized Eli, gives the pain of divorced suburban parents/children, unemployed alcoholics, love-burned adults past their prime, and closeted adults a visceral, gripping and titillating material form: the vampire; the not-dead-but-not-living, human-but-not-human creature that must feast on the life of others in order to survive.

The character of Eli takes this theme of liminal existence to a wonderful extreme.  On top of the typical aspects of vampire borderlife, Eli is neither child nor adult, neither boy nor girl, neither good nor bad.  She is an enigma, and becomes a perfect conduit through which young Oskar can learn many of the lessons that all young people must grapple with, but in Oskar’s case, these lessons come in one clawed and fell swoop.  Oskar learns that life is a series of gray areas (and a various shades of gray Swedish suburb at winter is the perfect setting for him to do so).  The dichotomies that many adults present to children are not feasible in the real world – they are only feasible in the fairy tales and morally platitudinous stories that children read and have read to them in order to “learn” how they might one day transform into a healthy, functional adult.  As with the best literature featuring young adults, the adolescent period is portrayed in this novel as a growth stint when children must unlearn what they had been told by well-meaning adults.  It is a gray-area in itself; the point when the outside world begins to permeate the domestic childhood realm like a black mist, eventually surrounding the protected child and carrying him or her out the window, never to return.

Oskar has the ideal mentor in Eli – a 12 year-old who has been alive for over 200 years.  She’s seen it all, and while she must murder humans in order to exist, she is still a 12 year-old.  A terrifying, demonic 12 year-old.  As far as first girlfriends go, Eli has to be a son’s mother’s worst nightmare.  Maneater indeed.  But Eli isn’t the scariest monster in the story.  In a world of pedophile’s, alcoholics and evil children preying upon each other every day at recess, Eli becomes a hero.  She is morally flawed, yes – but only if you believe in the stories featuring pat notions of good vs. evil and right vs. wrong that were read to you when you were a child.

Christmas and Violence, American-style, in The Laughing Policeman (Den skrattande polisen)

2 weeks after a double-decker busload of people is gunned down on a Stockholm street in November 1968, the consumer pulse of the metropolis does not skip a beat.  On page 101 of The Laughing Policeman, we get this deliciously noir-ish description of Christmas shoppers continuing forth, even as the specter of death hangs about the city:

The consumer society and its harassed citizens had other things to think of.  Although it was over a month to Christmas, the advertising orgy had begun and the buying hysteria spread as swiftly and ruthlessly as the Black Death along the festooned shopping streets.  The epidemic swept all before it and there was no escape.  It ate its way into houses and apartments, poisoning and breaking down everything and everyone in its path.  Children were already howling from exhaustion and fathers of families were plunged into debt until their next vacation.  The gigantic legalized confidence trick claimed victims everywhere.  The hospitals had a boom in cardiac infractions, nervous breakdowns and burst stomach ulcers.

The police stations downtown had frequent visits from the outriders of the great family festival, in the shape of Santa Clauses who were dragged blind drunk out of doorways and public urinals.  At Mariatorget two exhausted patrolmen dropped a drunken Father Christmas in the gutter when they tried to get him into a taxi.  (101)

From the pens of married authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahllöö, Christmas in Sweden does not resemble quite the winter wonderland that I would have imagined.  In fact, the above version of the Christmas holiday rush seems more on par with a holiday scene from my birth nation, the place that invented the modern consumer Hellscape, crippling credit card debt, and the drunken Santa Claus.

This being the case, in The Laughing Policeman, an excellent work of crime fiction that I would easily mention in the same breath with the works of Cain, Hammett and Chandler, American consumerism is not the biggest fish to fry.   Sjöwall and Wahllöö paint a picture of Stockholm as a city under siege by that most invasive and troublesome of American exports: violence.  Published in 1968, The Laughing Policeman can be read as a vision of the global ripple effects of American corruption and violence as fictionalized so deftly by the above trio of crime writers in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s.  According to Cain, Hammett and Chandler, there was something rotten abrewing in the Land of the Free in the 20th Century, and according to Sjöwall and Wahllöö, whatever it was had a passport.

The novel opens with a fully-armed squadron of policemen attempting to break up a Vietnam War protest on the steps of the American Embassy in Stockholm.  The police presence is so great that the rest of Stockholm is left unguarded.  It is in this space of time that an unknown assailant unloads an automatic weapon – later discovered to be American-issued – on 9 people on a double-decker bus.  The crime, the bloodiest in Swedish history, sends shockwaves throughout the country.  The Stockholm police force is caught completely off-guard, leading them to turn to American research in order to decide how to proceed forth with an investigation.  “We have no Swedish precedents,” one of the detectives notes, “…unless we go back as far as the Nordlund massacre on the steamer Prins Carl.  So [our investigators have] had to base their research on American surveys that have been made during the last few decades” (92).

What follows is a pleasurably cynical back-and-forth between these beleaguered Swedes, as they discuss their surprising case and those bloody Americans who have been dealing with instances of this nature for years:

“Unlike us, the American psychologists have no lack of material to work on.  The compendium here mentions the Boston strangler; Speck, who murdered eight nurses in Chicago; Whitman, who killed sixteen persons from a tower and wounded many more; Unruh, who rushed out onto a street in New Jersey and shot thirteen people dead in twelve minutes, and one or two more whom you’ve probably read about before.”

He riffled through the compendium.

“Mass murders seem to be an American specialty,” Gunvald Larsson said.

“Yes,” Melander agreed.  “And the compendium gives some plausible theories as to why it is so.”

“The glorification of violence,” said Kollberg.  “The career-centered society.  The sale of firearms by mail order.  The ruthless war in Vietnam”.

Melander sucked his pipe to get it burning and nodded.

“Among other things,” he said.

“I read somewhere that out of every thousand Americans, once or two are potential mass murderers,” Kollberg said.  “Though don’t ask me how they arrived at that conclusion.”

“Market research,” Gunvald Larsson said. “It’s another American specialty.  They go around from house to house asking people if they could imagine themselves committing a mass murder.  Two in a thousand say, ‘Oh yes, that would be nice.’” (92-93)

Having visited the Swedish Army Museum (Armémuseum) in Stockholm last summer, I know that this is a country where violence was not simply introduced in the 1960s via American global influence.  For centuries, Sweden was a war hungry nation, hellbent on military expansion and conquest.  However, what The Laughing Policeman documents is a new era, with the USA as the epicenter, of modern warfare, consumerism and industrial malaise.  As with every great work of noir fiction, The Laughing Policeman takes the reader beyond the veil of a modern world, exposing the vile creatures who thrive wonderfully in the modern urban setting and with whom we can admit, if we’re honest, we all share a bit of complicity.  But honesty doesn’t play well in the modern city, and for the detectives who must spend their days peering into the nastiness, the truth of things is no laughing matter — although the occasional cynical wisecrack, as a means of keeping things at arms length, never hurt anybody.

Sociopathic Mammals in The Informant!

Matt Damon’s Mark Whitacre, corporate exectutive turned whistleblower, spends much of The Informant! with an inner narrative voice over churning on and on.  This narrative is composed of rapid-fire thoughts and observations that are usually only indirectly related to the actual events occurring in his life.  On several occasions, Whitacre’s voice over involves his thoughts on the survival adaptations of animals in the wild.  In one memorable thought digression, Whitacre pontificates on the polar bear habit of covering its nose while stalking a seal, which he notes is an ingenious technique for the black nose is the only part of their body that would give them away against a pure white background.  Whitacre wonders, “How do polar bears know their noses are black? Did they look in the water one day, see their reflection and say, ‘Man, I’d be invisible if it wasn’t for that thing.’”

Whitacre’s musings on animals and their survival mechanisms at first seems like nothing more than a smattering of non sequiturs from the mind of an overly-stimulated executive.  But after the 3rd or 4th animal reference, it becomes clear that Mark is fixated upon the animal kingdom for a reason.  The various manifestations of a will-to-persist, innate to all creatures, that Mark muses over, are important to him because these survival adaptations might provide insight into his position on one side of a self-constructed barricade, gazing glassy-eyed at rest of the world on the other.  By about the ¾ mark of the film, Mark finds himself in this unenviable position after he has turned on 1) the food-buying public by helping to fix prices for years, 2) the company to which he had initially sold his soul, and 3) the FBI who Mark had turned to for protection against the company whose hand he had bitten with hundreds of hours of taped conversation and video footage documenting corporate malfeasance.

Mark Whitacre, in Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, is a member of a certain unsavory subspecies of the class Mammalia.  You know the one.  The Corportus Sociopathicus species that boasts such infamous specimen as Bernie Madoff, Kenneth Lay and Patrick Bateman.  These creatures look like humans and talk like humans, and their actions might, every once in a while, betray their close relation to actual humans; but these aren’t humans.  These are creatures who, while once human, have become corrupted and mutated by a system that rewards corruption.  The blood beats through their hearts not for simple perpetuation, but for perpetual acquisition; with each beat, a little demented voice rings through their rotten skulls, “More…More…More…More…”  In The Informant!, one notes that this subspecies of human seems to be developing its own set of physical characteristics by which our future anthropologists may be able to distinguish them from their human neighbors.  As in the picture above this post, these creatures are a little pudgier, a little pastier and confront the world with just a little more nervousness behind their eyes.  Like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings trilogy, these little devils navigate through life with blinders on, caring for naught but the next opportunity, the next scam, or, as Marc Whitacre terms it when staring down at a bathroom stall floor at a group of ants swarming over a piece of candy, the next “big break”.

The Informant! isn’t a doom and gloom picture, however.  With a whimsical and bouncy jazz score accompanying Mark Whitacre as he digs himself deeper and deeper, the movie maintains a breezy tonality even as it condemns the American corporate system that allows people like Mark Whitacre to wake up each morning, eat the ol’ Frosted Flakes, comb the ol’ moustache, and then head out to the ol’ office for a day of screwing over every food consumer in the world.  And that’s exactly where The Informant! places the blame: not on the individual, Mark Whitacre, but on the system that begot him.  Whitacre is a man with mental problems who just happened to reach a state of paranoia that compelled him to become the highest-ranking whistle blower in American corporate history.  Mark Whitacre, like all animals on this planet, from polar bear to ant, is a product of his environment.  He, like all the Dick Cheney’s and Donald Rumsfeld’s of the world, didn’t invent the system that allowed him to thrive.  He simply acted in ways that resulted in reward — just like the ants on the candy and the polar bear covering its nose.

With Matt Damon’s winning performance, and the light humor and jazzy music, Mark Whitacre is depicted as a bumbling Midwestern bad-decision-making dork.  Yes, he’s a product of his environment, and yes the system is fixed, but at some point, it seems, the Mark Whitacres of the world need to be held accountable for their actions.  Mark Whitacre, like Kenneth Lay, is a product of the system, but his actions and the actions of those around him are not accidental.  Matt Damon’s portrayal of Whitacre kept reminding of me of another bumbling bad decision-maker who was quite powerful for a time.  As with Whitacre, it’s much easier to write George W. Bush off as a gee-shucks moron; we make jokes at his expense, laugh about the constant malapropisms and giggle at his appearance.  At the end of the day, however, there is a deep-seated evil that is much easier to ignore when one has silly things like grammatically incorrect sentences to focus upon.  Mark Whitacre is a horrible person who thrived, for a time, in a horrible system.  Don’t let his vague resemblance to Matt Damon, the folksy accent, or the cutesy jazz music that follows his every step fool you.  He’s just covering his nose so you don’t notice his teeth.

Sociopathic Mammals in The Informant!: A Ranty Prelude

Last weekend I had the opportunity to see The Informant! at the Laurelhurst Theater in Portland, OR.  If you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing a movie at this particular theater, you are missing out.  Your life is passing you by and you are depriving yourself of one of the great attributes of a great city.  The Laurelhurst is infused with rustic charm (a Portland staple) and happens to be one of several Portland theaters in which a moviegoer can enjoy second-run films with the welcome accompaniment of beer and/or wine.  Movie tickets at the Laurelhurst are $3, which is approximately 1/4 of the price one would pay for the same film only 3 weeks prior.   Instead of waiting in line with all of the riffraff for films on opening weekend and paying inordinate amounts of money to watch a movie without beer, why not wait until the same film hits the second-run beer theaters in Portland, and enjoy your anticipated film with friends and a nice buzz?  I’m making way too much sense.

And while I’m giving Portland a shoutout, I’d like to commend the city of my birth for producing respectful moviegoers.  In comparison, and for whatever reason, Vancouver Canada filmgoers seem to arrive to a movie theater carrying a zero-level of reverence underneath their tooks.  For Vancouverites there seems to be a general disregard for what is on the screen and overall lack of respect for the dozens of people surrounding them in a dark theater.  For the record: chatting during a film is never okay.  If words need to pass between you and your filmgoing partner/group, there is a respectful way of doing it.   Listen, you pink-faced sillies: your commentary is not welcome during a film.  Commentary should be reserved for your post-movie trip to the poutine restaurant.  Or for your blog.  Portlanders understand this for some reason.  Vancouver-Canadians do not.

Am I generalizing an entire city?  Yes.  Do I have evidence?  No.  But I do have some theories to explain this subjectively observed phenomenon.

1.) people in Canada are too polite.

This seems counterintuitive, I know, but hear me out.  In America, if you act like an asshole and jabber on through a movie, there is always the slight chance you will be shot.  No matter if it’s Christmas Day, or if your kid is with you– you need to shut up or you might be shot.  In Canada, if you jabber on during a movie, nobody says anything.  Unless I am there to tell you in a condescending voice, like a teacher talking to a 1st grader, “SSSSH!! We’re watching a movie!!!”  I actually did this while watching An Education in Vancouver to a young woman behind me who decided to announce “Awwwkward!” during an awkward scene, thereby puncturing the tense mood that the entire film was working to build.  I’m not saying that this woman, nor anyone, should be shot.  I’m just sayin.

2.) Canadians don’t respect American films

Perhaps it’s a cultural lack of respect for American products.  Many Canadians feel, if not an outright hatred, then at least a lingering distaste for American things.  Probably rightfully so.  But maybe this inability to embrace America and things hailing from there leads Vancouverites to treat the movie theater as their own personal rumpus room.  What adds some weight to this theory, for me, is that one of the only films that I’ve witnessed to hold an entire Vancouver audience rapt, to command the respect of every audience member, and the only film that a Vancouver audience I was a part of decided to be silent for, was Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story.  That’s right, a film that points out for 2 hours why the US and A might not be on the ethical up and up.

3.) Americans are innately more respectful of films/film culture?

Contemporary film culture was born and raised in Canada’s Southern neighbor.  Maybe the Canucks just missed the boat in the film-watching etiquette department because this American custom is innately foriegn to their value matrix.  Perhaps Americans do rude things while participating in hockey matches.  Maybe there’s a Canadian blogger out there decrying Americans and their inability to play hockey without ruining it for everyone else.  If this is the case, perhaps we can sketch up a treaty.

4.) Canadians collectively suffer from sociopathy

Perhaps the pristine, brisk Canadian air affects the brain in heretofore unknown ways.  We all know how Alaskan brains turn out.  Or maybe Universal healthcare makes Canadians a bit too comfy in their long johns.  Maybe they have reached a level of comfort that so goes against the natural discomfort of life that they have lost the edgy uncertainty that has historically kept us mammals in check.  Either way, sociopathy is defined as a disorder marked by antisocial behavior.  If anything is antisocial, then the utter lack of awareness of the feelings, concerns and motivations of the others around you is.  Granted, shooting people at a movie is also sociopathic.  I suppose it comes down to a matter of taste, and only one of these sociopathic manifestations leads to people shutting the fuck up during movies.

In any case, the Portland filmgoers, although they were alcohol-infused, were very considerate.  As I mentioned earlier, the movie at-hand was Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, a film based on a true story about an executive at a corporation called ADM.  I was intending to write about The Informant!, but I got a bit sidetracked.  Thanks for listening.  I feel better now.  I promise I will pursue this film in a couple days once I’ve spent a few days meditating and attempting to come to terms with all forms of life, even those that are determined to taint something that I love.

In the meantime, please listen to the This American Life episode entitled The Fix is In, which inspired the Scott Z. Burns’ screenplay for The Informant! and was based on the Kurt Eichenwald non-fiction account of the Marc Whitacre ADM saga called The Informant (sans exclamation point).  And, as Nerdy Two-Shoes pointed out with my last post, This American Life is a production of PRI, not NPR.  Apologies to the 1 person who gave a shit about the error.