I LEARNED IT AT THE MOVIES

What IS "motivation" anyway?

2012-01-29T07:53:00.000-08:00

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? - the cuckoo clock. ~Graham Greene & Orson Wells, in the film, The Third Man (1949)

The narrator of The Third Man is telling us that Adversity can propel people--motivate them--to push back against circumstances that are destructive, or even just uncomfortable and disappointing. Yet what drives some people to push back and strive for better and others to give up? We can't expect to be Michelangelos or Leonardos. But who wants to be a doormat?

People tend to feel controlled by their environment: their job, their finances, their "significant others." Without intending to do so, they even assume that they are victims of circumstance and adopt a passive attitude (Ok, back up and drive over me again).

One step in the right direction is to take control of one's own spirit. I watched a light-hearted moment at the supermarket the other day. An agile young guy, shopping, was practicing a breakdance move in the empty aisle. He still had to go through the chore of grocery shopping, but he was making the work his own. Bravo! Encore!

Polansky and Paranoia

2011-12-01T11:51:00.001-08:00

Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer needs to be experienced as a piece of art in its own right. But the story is also haunted by the ghosts of Roman Polanski.

Until the very end of the film, Polanski closely followed the story line of the novel by Robert Harris, who also collaborated with him on the screenplay. Piers Brosnan, who wonderfully plays the role of the former prime minister here, pointedly models his character after the hapless Tony Blair, who was widely seen as a lapdog for President Bush and the American military intelligence establishment. But the film story here has the former prime minister exiled as an indicted war criminal, just as Polanski himself has been in exile since he left the US in 1977 to avoid sentencing in the sexual abuse case.

Polansky has studied paranoia and corruption continuously in his work, and these have been perpetual themes in his own life as well. In Repulsion with Catherine Deneuvre, we see paranoia from the outside—literally—

as hands embedded in the walls reach out to grab her. In The Tenant, Polanski himself plays the paranoid protagonist who becomes obsessed with the tragedy of the woman who had his apartment before him. In those films, we as members of the audience, are outside the paranoid process looking in at the disintegration of the main character under the weight of dread and delusion.

In Chinatown and in The Ghost Writer, we are not watching from outside; we are inside the paranoid process, looking helplessly at a world of corruption that we, like the main characters, have no power to address. The bad guys win in these films!

And Who are the good guys anyway?

When Polansky was arrested in 1977, he was recorded in the police report as being completely bewildered. What had he done? He didn’t see it coming. In that circumstance, he was insufficiently paranoid, oblivious to danger. But as the court process continued and the press exploded with stories about the scandal, friends describe Polanski as losing his bearings and ranting about people out to get him. This sounds paranoid, and yet members of the press acknowledged at the time that there was a mutual loathing between them and their subject. The judge in the case also was making openly inflammatory statements about Polanski—that he should be “put away forever.” When a paranoid fantasy turns out to be true, is it still “paranoid”? The concept of “paranoia” implies some degree of delusion. In Chinatown and here in The Ghost Writer, innocence is presented as delusion, and paranoia is affirmed by corrupt reality.

In the Ghost Writer too we see an apparently naïve young man walking in to an assignment that doesn’t feel right, seemingly unaware of danger. We share his naïve point of view as he

One of his biographers, Christopher Sandford, takes a facetious inventory of Polansky’s films:

“Two satanic-cult pictures, psychological thrillers, faithful adaptations of Shakespeare and Dickens, a costume melodrama, matinee swashbuckling, Hitchcockian suspense, Thirties noir, excursions in absurdism and soft porn, [and] a deranged Dracula spoof “(p. 6)

This description may be entertaining, but it doesn’t do justice to the power of Polanski’s films.

Elizabeth Olsen teaches us about PTSD

2011-11-10T06:07:00.000-08:00

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a subtle and insidious movie. If you ever wondered about Post Traumatic Stress, Elizabeth Olsen as Martha gives us a very authentic depiction. When she first calls her sister on a pay phone, she is confused, fragmented, disoriented, in a state of dread. In a series of increasingly disturbing flashbacks, we come to understand why she is so disturbed. John Hawkes of Winter's Bone (2010) uses words of love as poisonous weapons to keep the members of his cult in their place. Whether Martha makes a final break or not is a question you will have to try to answer when you have seen the movie.