Thelma and Louise: Visual Intentions and Cinematic Approaches in the Female Road Film

By Nina Gibb, Edited by Lucia Perfetti and Bea Heard

Ridley Scott’s 1991 feminist road film Thelma and Louise uniquely explores female freedom through the mode of a traditionally male genre. Often criticized for being an anti-male film, Thelma and Louise takes the traditional male gaze and turns it on its head, repurposing the common perspective of women as the sexual object and flipping the power dynamic between the sexes. By analyzing scenes throughout the film that depict the changing nature of Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise’s (Susan Sarandon) agency, and using Laura Mulveys’s theory of the ‘male gaze,’ we can see the progression of their freedom as they inevitably escape their lives and the gendered space they exist within, ultimately choosing freedom and reinventing their ending rather than giving in to the patriarchal phallocentric power running after them. Using everything from panned shots to close-ups, the film creates a deeper insight into the depictions of female agency through its cinematic techniques, underscoring the narrative of empowerment and challenging traditional hegemonic codes of gender and sexuality of the female character. 

From the beginning of the film, Thelma and Louise are framed through their confinement in their lives, slowly breaking the seal of the heteronormative structure of the patriarchal system as the film progresses. Louise works her job at the dinner, confined to her entanglements with Jimmy (Michael Madsen), and Thelma is caught in her manipulative and controlling relationship with her husband Darryl (Christopher McDonald). They possess little power in their day-to-day lives, each seeking to escape and resist phallocentric power and spectatorship. Starting out on the road, the film inverts “point for point the formula of the classic road movie or buddy comedy,” such as those present in Easy Rider and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, and explores the emotional dynamic between two female characters as the core of the narrative (Eraso 11). They seek an escape from their lives, banding together to find a new sense of freedom, and the moment their lives are put at risk and they seize control of their bodies, the narrative of the film shifts, transforming them into outlaws. The radical act of challenging the politics of the female body and fighting for their agency positions Thelma and Louise as a new road film, stepping away from the void left by the male road film and creating a new cinematic language of empowerment. 

As Thelma and Louise begin their road trip, their first stop is the local bar. This full scene presents a unique case of highlighting and critiquing the male gaze. Upon entering the bar, the camera invokes a wide pan as it follows the two protagonists, highlighting the staring men beside them. They stand almost as statues, with nothing moving but their eyes, vested with power. Mulvey, who coined the term ‘male gaze’ notes the “fixation into perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Tom’s, whose only satisfaction can come from watching,” a reality that is highlighted in this scene (Mulvey 9). The men find pleasure in looking at the women and watching them go, a moment the film will juxtapose as later as Thelma comments on watching JD go. By showing all the men looking at the two women, and holding their fleeting looks through the shot, the camera highlights the position of the “woman as [the] image, [and] man as bearer of the look” (Mulvey 7). Using a split between the “active/male and passive/female,” (Mulvey 10) and separating the female characters as the image, we have the chance to identify with the film's criticism of male desire and scopophilia that eventually leads to its tone of empowerment. Although the film is led by a male director, this first step helps reimagine mainstream feminist cinema through a subversion of the gaze.

While in the bar, Thelma is approached by Harlan. He repeatedly makes passes at her, and she eventually follows him out onto the dance floor. Wearing a white dress, symbolizing her purity and naivete, Thelma becomes a victim of the spectatorship that will transform itself into seduction and betrayal. She “mimics [his] relation to language” when following him across the dancefloor, and the shots of them dancing highlight the power dynamic between them. Harlan holds Thelma by her neck, beer in hand, a shot that looks as though he is ready to strangle her. We see more of his face than hers, his drunken haze juxtaposed with her innocent demeanor (Eraso 3). The shot of them dancing is off-center on the screen, warning us of his malicious intent. He takes Thelma outside, and what follows is the drive of the film. Harlan attempts to sexually assault Thelma, a scene so disturbing one forgets the structure of filmic language. Following his attempted sexual assault, we find Louise defending her partner. She pulls out a gun to stop him and shoots him when he mocks her. The murder of the male in this case “can be understood in terms of empowerment and subjectification from a postfeminist perspective” (Lecroft 43). This becomes the first step to piecing together the freedom they lacked, the very freedom that was morbidly oozing out of their partners and the few men in their lives. By embarking on their journey, and denying the overpowering male domination in their lives, they begin to take pleasure in resistance, pleasure in “saying no” (hooks 5). 

Prior to Thelma and Louise and the emerging feminist films that followed, several films of the late 60s and early 70s began to introduce female heroines, particularly in the road genre. Though they did not quite match up with the deep harrowed exploration of the complexities of character as male heroes usual of cinema, they still pushed forward the female film agenda and paved the way for the popularity and significance of films like Thelma and Louise. Films such as Rain People (1969), Wanda (1970), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1972), and Bonnie and

Clyde (1967) first ushered in more representation of the female character and the equal quest for independence and freedom. Feminist film Wanda (1970) pushed back against the traditional image of the American wife and mother, though Wanda was still an appendage to the criminal she accompanied. It was not until Thelma and Louise in 1991 that the genre of women on the road would become more widely represented through empowered exploration. Six years earlier, Desert Hearts (1985) would notably create a female-centered narrative surrounding the road film, and usher in the exploration seen in Thelma and Louise, but its lesbian context would draw significant controversy and halt its timely significance. The quest for freedom in female characters through the road film would ultimately come much later than that of men. The success of Thelma and Louise ushered in a new perspective of women inhabiting male spaces and a new manifestation of female power in cinema. 

Thelma and Louise also presents skewed depictions of male characters, invoking a new female gaze and portraying the reality of the grotesque male ego, such as Harlan’s aggressive sexual violence. JD’s character, famously one of Brad Pitt’s earliest on-screen appearances, presents a new objectification of the male form, one previously preserved for women. JD represents Thelma’s newfound sexual freedom and discovery of pure lust. The shots of him portray his figure in a similar way cinema has been known to portray the female character as a sex object and soul of male desire. When speaking about the male gaze, Mulvey notes the “to be-looked-at-ness” of women on-screen, focusing purely on the body through the eyes of men (Mulvey 7). Thelma and Louise distorts this male gaze and objectification of the human form by using characters such as JD to create a new female gaze, where the male is looked at by the female, lacking the aggressive sexual violence attached to the male gaze. When Thelma and Louise arrive at a motel after picking up hitchhiker JD, Thelma watches him walk off into the distance, telling Louise “I love watching him go” (1:07:10) Walking under a bridge casting a shadow over his body, the shot of him in the distance highlights the silhouette of his body, flipping the sexual objectification towards the usual perpetrator of such sexualization. This rejection of the phallocentric gaze creates a new invention of a cinematic gynocentric gaze.

In the final scene of Thelma and Louise, the two protagonists face a crossroads: surrender to the suffocation of male power or pave a new path forward. With the line of male officers behind them, they decide to drive forward, into the unknown that lies within the vast canyon, bursting through the last of the barrier. They reclaim a sense of power by continuing forward rather than accepting the fate that has been decided for them. The final freeze frame of their car flying over the edge of the canyon immortalizes their freedom. As they drive off, and their polaroid flies off, that is the last visual signal we get that they are finally free of their past selves, no longer the same people they were when we first started our journey with them on-screen. As Thelma articulates to Louise,

“Something has changed inside me, and I couldn’t go back, I couldn’t. I feel awake, wide awake. I don’t remember feeling this awake. Everything looks different. Do you feel that too?”  (1:47:40)

This “denial of the regressive stereotypes qualifying women as unable to achieve freedom of mobility,” (Eraso 66) combined with the self-discovery of the power and agency to take charge of their own lives, creates the significance of representation through the evolution of female characters. 

While the final kiss has been deconstructed by scholars and viewers for its queer and lesbian connotations or hidden meanings, the personalities of the characters—Thelma as the “unempowered castrated woman” and Louise as the “all powerful phallic”—deepens the meaning between their relationship, not the supposed lesbian desire between them (Eraso 5). The way Thelma gradually transforms into a powerful force similar to Louise speaks more to the intimacy of their dynamic and the way their journey creates a vacuum of empowering experience that creates these transformations. Lynda Hart’s paper on “Impossible Spaces in Thelma and Louise” tackles the lesbian themes in the film leading up to the final scene, but her notion of lesbianism as the “‘aporia’ of the narrative” disvalues the underlying theme of empowerment and emancipation from male (17). She attaches the narrative of the film to be a “placeholder for the reproduction of male desire,” with its queer themes underscoring this, but the overlapping themes of female independence and subtle queerness act in direct opposition to this desire (7). While she makes a strong point for their criminal status being a product of their partnership and attempt to “escape from the masculine circuit of desire,” she still dilutes their reclaim of power to a symptom of masculine power (12). Instead, the film uses the pairing of a female partnership to achieve independence outside of this sphere. The film “makes the link between lesbian desire and crime utterly explicit, restore the male as the sole target of violence, escape punishment, and get to drive off into the sunset together” (Letort 42). Thelma and Louise ultimately performs and restores the lost female gaze and lack of female power we have historically seen on-screen. Much of this is achieved through carefully curated cinematic techniques highlighting the unequal power dynamics between the sexes, as well as creating a new gaze focusing itself on restoring a lost female power. Though left in the hands of a male director, the film achieves greatness in its depictions of female empowerment and crafts a new cinematic language that will set the tone for coming pictures of the multifaceted female experience.

Works Cited 

Dargis, Manohla. “Thelma and Louise on the Road to Freedom.” Sight & Sound. 1991. https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/thelma-louise-road-freedom

Eraso, Carmen Indurian. “Thelma and Louise: ‘Easy Riders’ in a Male Genre.” Atlantis.  

Hart, Lynda. “Til Death Do Us Part: Impossible Spaces in ‘Thelma and Louise.’” Journal of the History of Sexuality. University of Texas Press. 1994. 

hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze.” 

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 

Thelma and Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. 1991. 

The Visual Aesthetic of Teenage Social Hierarchy

By Jack Miller, Edited by Emma Smith

What comes to mind when you think about Hollywood’s standard representation of the American teen? Maybe it is the sturdy jock, clad in a varsity jacket. Perhaps it’s the popular prom queen, decked out in glinting formal wear. Or possibly it’s the rebel who ditches class, donning dark leather and spiky jewelry. Nearly every Hollywood portrayal of high school teens builds on existing stereotypes to help audiences place characters into distinct social groups. Whether it’s the people they hang out with, the after-school activities they do, or the things they value, high school-aged characters often separate into explicit social titles like “jock” or “nerd.” While these clique-driven categories may seem restrictive, countless films have used them to actually highlight the consequences of social divides. John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985), one of the most rewatched teen films of the 80s, tells the story of five drastically different teens who are forced to serve the same Saturday detention. Each character is a different, easily recognizable archetype that the audience is already familiar with, from jock to nerd to popular girl, rebel and outcast. The grouping of vastly different characters makes more compelling their eventual realization that they have more in common than they thought. Created nearly two decades later, Mean Girls (2004) follows a similar narrative arc as Cady Heron becomes a member of the popular social group, The Plastics. She eventually realizes from the top of the social food chain that the divide between cliques at her high school is causing dissolution and tension. Both The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls utilize dialogue and action to place their characters into specific social hierarchies, but it is the visual aspect of costuming that becomes the most revealing in denoting characters are part of a specific social group. If the “jock” wore a cardigan and glasses or the “nerd” sported a football jersey in these films, their styles would not demonstrate the prominent and visible social divides within high schools that are being highlighted. The outward presentation of characters in The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls helps audiences place individuals within a larger social hierarchy. These films then use their visual presentation of social divisions to eventually expose the fallacies of high school’s hierarchical systems.

Filmmakers may choose to utilize the way a high school-age character acts or talks to associate them with a particular social group, but nothing helps determine where a character feels they belong as much as what clothes they wear to school. Take, for example, a quote that has woven its way into pop culture from Mean Girls. Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried), a member of the most popular group in school, the Plastics, chirps up at the lunch table: “On Wednesdays we wear pink” (11:53). The quote garners its meaning–and tremendous pop culture relevancy–because it makes clothing extend beyond the physical. The act of wearing pink for the Plastics is not the donning of specifically colored clothes but the proud declaration of membership in the most socially revered group at school. It becomes a tradition, a uniform, a broader symbol for their popularity and position atop the high school social food chain. 

The very concept of a high school food chain is reflective of high school’s unique opportunity for interactions between disparate social groups. Creators like Hughes as well as Mean Girls writer Tina Fey and director Mark Waters benefit from this. As Elissa H. Nelson–an expert on 1980s Hollywood and CUNY Bronx Community College associate professor–writes, “as people get older, their regular social associations are with individuals who share similarities . . . In high schools, however, teens can mix with people from a range of social strata, classes, and educational levels.” In very few other real-world environments do individuals witness such a broad range of social experiences happening under one roof. Hollywood seeks to incorporate the uniqueness of the setting into its fictional narratives because it can cast a wide range of compellingly distinct characters. And in a film, unlike real life, costume designers get to control every action and every piece of clothing a particular character wears. This means that each outfit plays a part in representing the social group a character belongs to.

In Mean Girls, Mary Jane Fort, the film’s costume designer, opts for a bold first introduction to the Plastics by choosing to dress them in ultra-stylized gym clothes. Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert) wears her blue P.E. shirt cropped; Karen Smith has somehow found a way to cut off her shirt’s sleeves and turn it into a tank top; and Regina George (Rachel McAdams), the leader of the group, is pointedly wearing a sparkly “R” necklace that pops against the plain shirt fabric (7:27). In a sea of other students who are gearing up to engage in the typical, sweaty athletic activities of a P.E. class, the Plastics immediately stand out as more obsessed with how they present themselves. Mimicking how popular individuals are noticed by others in real world high schools simply by their recognizable appearance, Waters aims to steer the audience’s attention to the Plastics and their wardrobe by keeping the camera’s focus on them. It’s as if their distinctive outfits demand to be given priority in the frame’s composition, mirroring the way fashionable outfits stand out against more common attire. Rather than capturing Regina’s introduction like most other scenes in the movie, she is filmed in slow motion as she is carried like royalty and then set down by a group of five boys. The change in frame rate highlights her bright necklace and clean, poised appearance. Fort has taken a giant leap to suspend reality in conjunction with the manufactured slowness of the scene: Would Regina not want to safeguard her necklace in a gym locker? Would a P.E. teacher allow their students to cut the fabric of the required class uniform? How does Karen’s shirt-turned-tank top look so perfect–did she cut out those sleeves with scissors on her own? All these questions are ignored for the sake of highlighting the Plastics’ social status. They turn their gym outfits, which are usually baggy and meant for performance, into chic representations of who they are. Their unique, carefully presented style choices denote a desire to stand out and be seen as fashionable and popular. 

In stark contrast to the Plastics’ outfits, which scream stylized and trendy, the less popular and more rebellious Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) is dressed in a baggy top that boldly reads “RUBBISH” when she introduces herself to main character Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan). While the large block letters draw attention, it is unclear what exactly Janis is trying to say through her fashion choice–is she declaring that the reader of her shirt is rubbish? That she sees herself as such? Fort’s decision to introduce Janis with a loud but ambiguous style helps juxtapose her social grouping with that of the Plastics. While the Plastics turn their gym uniforms into conventionally appealing outfits, Janis opts to make hers a more undecipherable statement. The Plastics desire to be understood as popular through clothing that is tight and trendy; Janis doesn’t desire to be understood at all. This paints her as a rebellious character from the moment the audience meets her.

The Breakfast Club similarly depends on how the costume designer, Marilyn Vance, dresses the teen characters to emphasize distinct parts of their personalities. Though the audience eventually confirms the characters’ social standings through dialogue, by only looking at them in the opening minutes they can start to piece together where their interests and social loyalties lie. Claire (Molly Ringwald), for example, is dressed in a brown leather jacket and matching gloves as she sits waiting for the others in detention to enter the library. On its own, the outfit isn’t necessarily a clue as to what group she belongs to. But when other students start coming in, the outfit stands out as more trendy and upscale than the others, painting her as someone highly concerned with appearance–a member of more popular social standing. 

Brian (Anthony Michael Hall), meanwhile, enters with khakis and a sweater, clothes that are more formal than the typical high school student and markedly preppy. This correlates with his interests in academics and the tendency for his peers to view him as a “nerd.” John Bender (Judd Nelson) comes strutting in wearing a thick coat, a red scarf draped over his shoulders and black sunglasses covering his face. The act of wearing sunglasses indoors marks Bender as out of line with social norms and traditions. Bender also dons fingerless gloves and stocky boots, completing an outfit that showcases his desire for social rebellion rather than conformity. These three specific characters serve as examples for how presentation through dress immediately associates each individual with a particular social clique.

However, The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls are not only applauded for their clear portrayals of the social divides perpetuated within high schools. They are films that eventually topple the notions of these social hierarchies. In Hughes’ 1985 work, the five characters engage in open and honest dialogue about the pressures they face to conform to expectations. A contumacious social rebel like Bender and a straight A student like Brian really aren’t so different from each other, the group realizes. Though Bender’s parents are harsh and physically violent, Brian’s parents are demanding in a different way, hounding him over his grades. At the outset of The Breakfast Club, there was not only a theoretical divide between the stereotypical nerd and rebel characters but a tangible one too. Khakis and a sweater present Brian as put together, classy, and maybe a little bit unpopular. Bender’s choice of wearing sunglasses inside and his grungy fingerless gloves suggests his rebellious spirit. Perhaps Vance’s choices were made to emphasize the broader moral of Hughes’ work. The teens realize that assuming values based on social presentation can become dangerous. As American film scholar Timothy Shary writes in Teen Movies: A Century of American Youth, “One day of honest conversation has exposed the fallacies of facades they’ve erected to cope with their doubts, and the film ultimately suggests that all teens (and adults) could be unified in alleviating their collective angst if only they would abandon their fixation on assumed identities” (70). In some ways, the audience has not been primed for this conclusion. The five people who walked into the library at the start of the day looked so different from each other that it seemed impossible they would grow past their differences. The clothing they wore likely symbolized years of membership on a particular level of the social hierarchy. But within a day, they are able to relinquish those memberships, which were really just “fallacies of facades.” Social divisions are not real or tangible beyond external expressions. What keeps Bender from wearing khakis is a psychological mindset. What keeps Brian from wearing sunglasses inside is the same social-clique driven lie. Indeed, as his voiceover at the end so clearly claims, “we were brainwashed” (3:32). But if clothing items can be used to divide, so too can they be used to unify. Bryan does eventually wear Bender’s glasses inside (56:06). As the teens learn more about each other, the rules about what they can and can’t wear and who they can and can't be grow to become less fixed. External expression becomes a collective effort rather than a divisive one.

Similarly, in Mean Girls, the social hierarchy is broken through an external object. Even though Cady has won Spring Fling queen, she decides to share the crown awarded for the title (1:28:42). While the scene is iconic because of Cady’s rebellious gesture, the use of a fashion object being broken works to impart a greater level of symbolism onto the scene. The crown is the result of Cady’s popularity and is as sparkly and noticeable as the Plastics are in the high school. But just like the Plastics, it is flimsy and, well . . . literally made of plastic. When it is broken and Cady tosses it to people of all social statuses and rungs of the teen social hierarchy, there is a physical demonstration of the film’s message that popularity comes at a cost. In this way, external markers of expression become more than aesthetic–they become symbolic of societal barriers being broken. 

Many dismiss teen films as simple and stereotypical portrayals of high school life. To put it more harshly, Frances Smith writes in Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Gender, Genre and Identity that “Part of the critical dismissal of the genre’s aesthetic and narrative concerns can be traced to the teen movie’s frequent designation as ‘trash’” (2). However, from a more in-depth look at how the use of wardrobe impacts symbolic representations of the social hierarchy overlaid onto students’ lives at school, there are clear visual intentions at play in the work of filmmakers like Hughes and writers like Tina Fey. Costume designers such as Mary Jane Fort and Marilyn Vance aim to outfit characters with styles that emphasize these intentions. Whether it is pink on Wednesdays, sharing sunglasses during a Saturday detention, or splitting a plastic crown into many pieces, the clothing characters wear and the objects they carry matter.

Works Cited 

Nelson, Elizabeth H. The Breakfast Club: Youth Identity and Generational Conflict in the 

Golden Age of Teen Film. Routledge, 2019.

Shary, Timothy. Teen Movies: A Century of American Youth. 2nd ed, Columbia University 

Press, 2023. 

Smith F. Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Gender, Genre and Identity. 1st ed., 

Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

The Monstrous Human: A Comparison Between the Pale Man and Xenomorph

By Colin Kerekes, Edited by Duncan Geissler and Ella Kilbourne

Introduction 

Guillermo Del Toro has long been considered an auteur of horror and fantasy cinema. His artistry is interwoven with concepts of spirituality, magical realism, and monsters, having had an affinity towards creature creation from youth (Morehead 2015). The two most memorable movie monsters to him are the Gill-Man (Ricou Browning) from Jack Arnold’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), which would later inspire the creature in his critically acclaimed The Shape of Water (2017), and the Xenomorph (Bolaji Badejo) from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). In focusing on the latter, Del Toro felt an attraction and appreciation for the Xenomorph, namely due to its technical aspects. He describes being impressed by the fact that though the creature was played by a man in a suit, the construction of the costume acted to conceal these human features, breaking “every rule about how to shoot a man in a suit” (Del Toro 2013).  In other words, it seems the design of the monster made the body a transformative vessel, blending a humanoid structure with the physicality and visual details of an otherworldly creature. 

There is a duality to Del Toro’s relationship with monsters. He views them as inherently beyond human comprehension, yet at the same time he recognizes a presence of monstrosity in humans. In an interview with NPR, Del Toro described this distinction, explaining that “monsters in fantasy are one side of the road and the other monsters, the real ones, the ones we experience in the news and in the stock market are the other side, you know?” (Del Toro 2011). In his seminal work, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), he introduces a slew of grotesque and fascinating monsters, including the highly memorable Pale Man (Doug Jones), a vile, drooping creature with eyes on its hands and a taste for human flesh. However, while these monsters convey elements of horror in the film, the true horrors lie in the human brutality of the cruel fascist dictator, Captain Vidal (Sergi López). 

With the same perspective used for his own work, Del Toro has referenced the true villain in Alien not as the Xenomorph itself, but rather the human corporations behind its havoc. In an interview conducted for the 2018 released television program, James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction, Del Toro states that “the difference [between] human and a monster is the will” (Del Toro 2018). He seems to find an innocence in monsters. More than anything, he feels that the evil of monsters is often a product of animalistic habit, while human evil is calculated. Therefore, I will conduct a comparative analysis between two iconic monsters in cinema, the Pale Man and the Xenomorph, in order to understand how the creators behind these creatures perform a perversion of the human body in order to reveal the evils of humanity. The design elements of both monsters, as well as their narrative functions, leave the viewer to question who the true monster is in each respective film, imparting ideas of monstrous human tendencies including greed, fascism, sexual predation, and corporate materialism. 

The Pale Man 

Pan’s Labyrinth follows the young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero Macías) as she traverses two lands – the harsh landscape of post-civil war Spain and a fantastical realm of mythical creatures which serves as a heightened version of her real-world dangers. In this fantasy world, she must endure three trials in order to earn her rightful place as the Princess Moanna. Concurrently, she must persist beneath the brutal influence of her new stepfather, Captain Vidal. We are introduced to the Pale Man through her second trial, as he sits at the head of a banquet table. As his title suggests, he is pale, hairless, completely still and hunched over. His skin sags and folds onto itself. His thin stature accompanied by loose skin parallels the features of a person who has undergone extreme weight loss. Yet at the same time, he is surrounded by food and shown to consume his victims. 

Gianluca Balla, lecturer in Digital Arts and Game Design at Brunel University London, defines harnessing the uncanny, an inhuman image that mimics that of a human figure, as a key aspect of monster design in media. He explains that for character designers, “knowing how to deform the human anatomy to generate terror in the viewer is essential” (Balla 2023). The Pale Man and Xenomorph are both monsters that have distinctly human features which are distorted to create discomfort in the viewer. David Martí, makeup artist for Guillermo Del Toro, explained that the vision for the Pale Man involves a human figure that is “stick-thin with hanging skin” (Martì 2022). While the monster was initially left as is, Del Toro desired to warp these human elements, opting to remove both his eyes and nose. 

The Pale Man only has nostrils. He has a mouth, but his lips appear almost carved out. He has eyes, yet they are placed in the palms of his hands, and the tips of his fingers are blackened to mimic eyelashes. Essentially, the Pale Man has all the features central to a typical human face, yet they are distorted in some way. It is this distortion of human elements that both makes him a monster and functions to reveal aspects of human corruption and immorality. Del Toro has said himself that “the Pale Man represents all institutional evil feeding on the helpless” (Del Toro 2017). His appearance parallels the degradation of those in power. The way in which his skin droops evokes the impression that he is weighed down by ambitious greed. The way he interacts with his setting suggests aspects of greed in humanity and dictatorship. Gabrielle O’Brein, film critic awarded by the Australian Film Critics Association, understands the “Pale Man's elaborate dinner table” and his positioning at the head of this table to mirror Captain Vidal’s self-serving display of power, as well as the imagery of a “priest [who] happily feeds himself while the Spanish people go hungry” (O’Brein 2016). To be at the head of the table is a sign of leadership. However, the Pale Man’s leadership is indicative of a thirst for might and intimidation. Backlit by a roaring fire, he guards the table of delicacies and asserts dominance over literal and figurative nourishment. While otherwise lying dormant, looking down at the food like it is his domain, the being grows vicious when the starved Ofelia, in a display of disobedience, eats a grape. It appears that the actions of the Pale Man also support this lust for dominance. He is not shown eating any of the food on the table, yet when awakened, he revels in eating the heads of two helpless fairies. Through this, he gains a better sense of control over his body. Feeding off the weak physically and mentally empowers him. 

Jade Patterson, researcher of Languages and Linguistics at University of Melbourne, defines the “fusion of disparate elements [...] as essential features of the grotesque body” as understood through Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Patterson 2018). She continues to describe that these disparate elements are what characterize monsters, particularly literary monsters, as representations of moral fracture in society and the human psyche. They act as “physical mirrors of an inner deformity” (Patterson 2018). Semiotic theory can be applied to these concepts. Semiotics involve the study of signs in visual imagery and how these signs convey social and cultural meanings to the viewer (Scholes 1982). Yulia Sofiani, lecturer of History at Siliwangi University, notes that horror is a genre intertwined with semiotic theory, because it is concerned with making cultural references, as well as manipulating the viewer to an extent (Sofiani 2017). When applying this framework to the Pale Man, his physical abnormalities that distance him from conveying unadulterated humanity make him emblematic of the distortion of mortal values prevalent in the film’s fascism-infused setting. The audience is implied to absorb the monster’s image and apply these signs of corruption in the natural world to their overall interpretation of the monster’s grander thematic purpose. 

In a sense, the Pale Man’s behaviors impersonate Captain Vidal’s. Vidal grows stronger in his fight to protect fascism with each innocent body he violates. For instance, he gains a sick sadistic pleasure in creating physical pain. Early in the film, he rapidly beats the face of a farmer to a bloody pulp who hadn’t even been a viable subject of suspicion. There are numerous scenes throughout the narrative that illustrate Vidal’s merciless torture methods. We can understand these savage acts as a physical assertion of his assumed patriarchal authority. While the Pale Man seems disconnected from Vidal’s narrative role, the elements of his appearance and conduct, in the words of Patterson, fuse to be a manifestation of Vidal’s “inner deformity” (Patterson 2018). This is no more prevalent than in the Pale Man’s blindness. O’Brein continues to analyze that “the monster can only see after inserting his eyes into his hands, reinforcing the senselessness of a blind machine that subverts creativity” (O’Brein 2016). Vidal is that senseless machine. He shoots Ofelia at the end of the film, an embodiment of childlike creativity and compassion, because in his totalitarian perspective, the people must be submissive in mind and action. The Pale Man is a visual representation of this evil. He chooses to see only when he hopes to consume acts of rebellion. Otherwise, he will remain disengaged from those around him, just as a fascist dictator would. 

The Xenomorph 

The Xenomorph in Alien assumes a much more inhuman design, yet it persists in being an amalgamation of disparate parts like the Pale Man – namely, the blending of human sexual organs with that of machinery. Its physique is oftentimes shrouded in darkness. The extraterrestrial beast stands on two legs much like a human would, with humanoid hands and feet webbed at the fingers and toes. Its chest takes the shape of an exposed ribcage. Where it differs from a human silhouette is its elongated head with no eyes, and mechanical tail which slithers behind as it stalks its prey. Barbara Creed, Cinema Studies professor at the University of Melbourne, deciphers the design of the Xenomorph’s head to imitate that of a phallus (Creed 1986). Screenwriter of Alien, Dan O’Bannon, describes that the head’s structure originated with a “human skull.” H.R. Giger, designer of the Xenomorph, sawed the “jawbone off” and extended it “six inches.” O’Bannon elaborates that Giger then “put an extension” on the missing jawbone to create a distortion effect, “attaching other fixtures to it and building a new extension on to the back” (O’Bannon 1997). The creative process here is not so different from Del Toro’s process in designing the Pale Man – taking what is human and progressively distorting these familiar structures to create something strange and foreign. According to the novel Alien Legacies: The Evolution of the Franchise, Giger’s original concept art that inspired the Xenomorph broke “down the binary divisions between body and machine” and “human and non-human”, while exploring human sexuality and sexual acts through abstract creatures (Abrams & Frame 2023).

The Xenomorph in appearance and action conveys themes of sexual assault and corporate abuse. To focus on the first, the Xenomorph is not only visually akin to sexual organs, but also sexually predatory in the way it treats its victims. Alien follows a crew on a futuristic space vessel, the Nostromo, as they are terrorized by a Xenomorph. The Facehugger, an early stage of the Xenomorph’s development, attaches itself onto Kane’s (John Hurt), one of the crew members, face early in the film, orally impregnating him with the embryo of a Xenomorph. This is later understood to be an act of impregnation when the next stage of development, the Chestburster, breaks through Kane’s chest in blood-spurting excess. Both the Facehugger and Chestburster can be acknowledged as signs for sexual organs. The Facehugger is spider-like, yet its surface resembles a human vagina. The Chestburster is snake-like, and in similarity to the adult Xenomorph, is phallic in nature. In interpreting these congruences, the audience is forced to liken these extraterrestrial attacks to deeds of sexual violation. Even though these scenes of horror are undeniably works of science-fiction, they evoke discomfort inherently tied to intrusive human actions. Like how the Pale Man’s consumption is emblematic of exploitative tendencies of human dictators, the Xenomorph’s predatory behaviors mimic human predators. 

The Xenomorph’s appearance is as much tied to the idea of technology and machinery as it is to sexuality. The monster is not necessarily fleshy. Much of its exterior appears solid to the touch. Its teeth are almost metallic, as well as the end of its tail which is sharp like a blade. While we see human elements in its design, we also see images of tools or weapons, a union of materials rather than parts of an organism. It resembles a human body that has been engulfed by fragments of machinery. The true villain of Alien, as regarded by Penny Crofts, Professor of Law at University of Technology Sydney, is the fictional company Weyland Yutani that is “nefariously planning to sacrifice workers in order to capture the alien to study for biological warfare” (Crofts 2021). 

Weyland Yutani is expounded as a mega-company involved in space colonization. Its goal is to create technological weaponry from the alien organisms it harnesses. Machinery ultimately plays a large role in the corruptive nature of Weyland Yutani. For example, film critic Rob Ager explains that the design of the Nostromo is brimming with devices of corporate messaging, like the “data display screens shoved over the head of the crew in the canteen” (Ager 2021). Technology is used in a way to control the thoughts of the crew. The highly technologically advanced ship acts as a cage where the lives of those inhabiting it are considered expendable. Through this evaluation, the bits of machinery that feel nearly ensnaring on the Xenomorph’s body resemble how this human-run corporation exploits and infringes on the wellbeing of its human workers through a focus on technological innovation. Before the Xenomorph is even introduced, we see the creature of the Space Jockey, a corpse on a derelict ship. “The pilot appears uncomfortably fused with technology and industry, possibly against its will, which would make it a slave to the machine” (Ager 2021). These visual signifiers of man-made corruptive technology are present in nearly all of the film’s extraterrestrial figures, not just the Xenomorph, and the viewer must recognize that to truly comprehend the film’s moral disposition. 

Conclusion 

While the Xenomorph is visually divergent to the Pale Man, both condemn aspects of humanity, particularly the aspect of humanity that grants a single person, or groups of persons, unreasonable power over others. Their designers took the familiarity of human anatomy, and mangled it to nightmarish, grotesque proportions, but each film illustrates that there is no greater nightmare than the reality of the evil that humans can inflict upon each other. These monsters serve as a reminder that just as hints of humanity exist in monstrous bodies, the capability for monstrosity is almost inherent in humans. As Guillermo Del Toro put it, the “true monsters in our lives are real, are human” (Del Toro 2011).

Works Cited 

Ager, Rob, director. ALIEN - the Corporate Monster (Film Analysis by Rob Ager). Collative Learning, 20 Apr. 2021, https://youtu.be/_7fn-QRVqe4?feature=shared. Accessed 2023. 

Abrams, Nathan, and Gregory Frame. Alien Legacies the Evolution of the Franchise. Oxford University Press, 2023. 

Balla, Gianluca. “Adapting visual references in concept art for films and video games in Design Uncanny Monsters.” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, vol. 16, no. 1, 2023, pp. 133–145, https://doi.org/10.1386/jafp_00093_1. 

Creed, Barbara. “18. ‘horror and the monstrous-feminine: An imaginary abjection.’” Feminist Film Theory, 1999, pp. 251–266, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474473224-028. 

Crofts, Penny. Aliens: Legal Conceptions of the Corporate Invasion, 2021, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1535685X.2020.1862521. 

Del Toro, Guillermo, director. Pan’s Labyrinth . Warner Bros Entertainment Inc., 2007.

Gross, Edward. “Death of a Maiden .” Hrgiger.Com, 1997, hrgiger.com/alien4a.htm. 

"Guillermo Del Toro's 'Eternal' Monster Obsession." Talk of the Nation NPR, 2011. ProQuest, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/other-sources/guillerm o-del-toros-eternal-monster-obsession/docview/900859345/se-2. 

James, Emily St. “In Our New Feature, Guillermo Del Toro Takes Us through His Biggest Firsts.” The A.V. Club, 21 Nov. 2023.

Morehead, John W., and Doug Jones. The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo Del Toro: Critical Essays. McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2015. 

Martí, David. “How Iconic Movie Monster ‘the Pale Man’ Was Created.” Literary Hub, 25 Sep. 2022, lithub.com/how-iconic-movie-monster-the-pale-man-was-created/. 

O'Brien, Gabrielle. "Liminal vision: transformation and renewal in Pan's Labyrinth." Screen Education, no. 83, Oct. 2016, pp. 110+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A467335932/AONE?u=googlescholar&sid=bookmark-AO NE&xid=c4536afa.

Patterson, Jade. “Unspeakable monsters: Grotesque bodies and discourse in Victor Hugo’s notre-dame de paris and l’homme qui rit.” Australian Journal of French Studies, vol. 55, no. 2, 2018, pp. 122–137, https://doi.org/10.3828/ajfs.2018.13. 

Robinson, Christopher L., 'The Progeny of H. R. Giger', in Nathan Abrams, and Gregory Frame (eds), Alien Legacies: The Evolution of the Franchise (New York, 2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Mar. 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197556023.003.0004 .

Scholes, Robert. Semiotics and Interpretation. Yale University Press, 1983.

Scott, Ridley, director. Alien. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1979. 

Zaimar, Yulia Sofiani. “Semiotic Analysis of Valak and Lorraine in ‘The Conjuring 2’ Movie.” Scope : Journal of English Language Teaching, vol. 1, no. 02, 2018, p. 219, https://doi.org/10.30998/scope.v1i02.1112.

Home, Sweet Home: Evolution of Home through Shared Memory in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and Happy Together

By Rhea Mehta, Edited By Alexis Lopez, Alison Church

As Zakir Khan proclaims in Tathastu, “When it comes to home, whether you leave it willingly or not, when you do, you never part ways easily. Like a fabric that is overstretched, you get torn away from it. And the loose threads will remain unbound forever. You’ll wear those wounds on your back forever, reminding you of being uprooted” (Khan 41:06-41:26). Although far more beautiful in Urdu, Khan’s message elegantly describes the delicate relationship between migration and home. The shared sentiment of any person who has been exiled, has had to flee, or has simply left a place, is the need to return home. But for those who have never seen it, what is home? In Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014), Iran is reimagined through the eyes of a generation that has little to no memory of it. Instead of trying to depict Iran in its most true, historical form, Amirpour morphs time and space to embody the characteristics of Iran that exist in the shared cultural memory of the diaspora. Alternatively, in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997), home is a low-hanging fruit, a clear memory that is crucial in guiding Fai back to Hong Kong. But Hong Kong’s own identity is fractured by its constant transitory nature. Wong Kar-wai shapes time and space to construct a temporary home, embodying the same transitionary qualities that Hong Kong represents. Both films construct the concept of home through memory, whether it be shared or individual, and connect feelings of nostalgia and belonging by emphasizing spaces of isolation and loneliness. By analyzing the scenes where the main characters find home, we can understand what home is and where it can be found.

In A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Amipour constructs a fictional Iran, melding together a shared perception of what Iran was and the American sensibility she grew up in to create a fictional reality. At its core, the film tries to mirror something it has never seen before. As Wiese explores in “Female Desire and Feminist Rage: Ana Lily Amirpour's Reworking of the Vampire Motif in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” the mirror imagery is distorted due to the fictional, and even fantastical, nature of the setting and “the conditions of exile” which are “characterized by the fact that people can no longer visit their homeland in order to form a picture of the social reality there. Thus, the designed mirror image lacks the original in front of the mirror, just as the Iranians in exile lack Iran” (Wiese 10). Amipour tries to allude to images of Iran by using visual motifs such as ornaments, television programs, and shared practices like cosmetic surgery and using Farsi as the language of the film (Wiese 10). The way that Amirpour tries to make the USA feel like Iran is significant, as it stems from information that is shared between generations through stories and memories. It is by linking vivid memories passed down through the diaspora that Amirpour creates a space in between America and Iran: a space that looks like a suburban town in America, but through ornamentation and manipulation, carries the weighted memories of the Iranian diaspora. 

What, then, is home? If the space Amirpour has constructed is neither Iran nor America, what can be defined as home? The answer to this question lies within the scene in which the unnamed vampire, henceforth referred to as the girl, invites Arash, the protagonist, to her house. In the short five minute scene, the audience watches the girl guide a dazed Arash into her room. She rids herself of her chador, essentially removing her superhero cape, and lays herself bare for him. With every opportunity to kill him, she instead chooses to lay her head on his chest, swaying to the American music that plays from her record player while the disco ball bounces light off of the many posters in her room. The music playing in the background is Death by White Lies, which repeats the phrase, “Fear’s got a hold of me.” This is significant as it plays into the audience’s preconceptions that she will bite and kill him, almost foreshadowing it. Yet, the girl is afraid for a different reason: she has become used to bad, violent men, but is now faced, for the first time, with a good man who does not provoke her feminist rage. Moreover, Arash is dressed as a vampire, his costume reflecting the girl’s true identity. This shared trait, though it may only be momentary, allows the girl to feel emotionally closer to him. Furthermore, the use of lighting in this scene, which comes from behind the girl, illuminates Arash’s side profile and, when he looks up, his neck, which is particularly interesting. It seduces the audience with a promise of violence but supplants a delicate moment of acceptance. The setting is idyllic, the music is ‘romantic,’ and she is content. This is her home. This moment is vital within the narrative of the film because it seals the authentic relationship the girl desires– this is one of the only moments where the girl feels at home (Wiese 11). As seen in this scene, Amirpour crafts the idea of home through relationships, emphasizing those in which the girl is empowered in the dynamic structure, as she is with Arash and other characters like Atti. Amirpour places such emphasis on relationships more than she does space and time to define the lens through which she perceives home. 

Alternatively, Fai in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together is obsessed with the physical place of home. Dictated in the past tense through his memories, the film chronicles his longing to return to Hong Kong from Argentina. Yet Hong Kong is not a foreign concept to Kar-Wai, or Fai, unlike Iran is to Amirpour. It is a space known well, a space that Fai believes is home. However, as the movie progresses, Kar-Wai goes on to deconstruct space. He adds a transient quality to the spaces that exist outside of Fai’s apartment, framing this singular spot as only a temporary home. This is shown through the cinematography: when they are in the apartment, the camera is not shaky or hand-held as it was previously, but has transitioned to a stable, calm presence. Fai is also bolder, arguing and talking more, expressing emotions that burst forth in moments of comfort. But Kar-Wai introduces Chang, who transforms their dynamic. While in the kitchen, the camera movement slows down, allowing Chang and Fai to create an intimate space within a place usually not considered home. Therefore, although Happy Together seems to chase a safe space, home is actually defined by the relationships. 

Through these relationships, Fai creates his own sense of home, the connection standing in for the physical location he pursues. As Kar-Wai explains, “[T]his film is not merely about two men, but about human relations, human communication and the means of maintaining it” (Siegel 279). I would argue, however, that this film is actually about three men. While Po-Wing allows Fai to understand why space is transient, with their toxic relationship and toxic sensibilities, Chang allows him to feel comfortable with another person. The emphasis on relationships and the transient nature of space is demonstrated in the scene where Fai stops at a shop in Taiwan that is owned by Chang’s family. It is in this moment that Fai understands what home is and to what extent his relationship with Chang has influenced his life. Beginning with a shaky handheld camera guiding the audience to watch an array of local restaurants with flashy neon signs, Chang is drawn into a warmly lit and bustling establishment. The camera is framed from the perspective of someone in the stall, perhaps alluding to Chang’s presence in the scene. The people working in the restaurant, Chang’s family, immediately welcome Fai in, and as he watches them scamper around, he is filled with a sense of warmth. The handheld camera movement gives the scene a feeling that is akin to a home video. In the moment where he stands by the phone, the camera frames him as an intruder in the space just as a spout of steam arises from the food. Waiting on the woman who is getting him water, supposed to be Chang’s mother, he is framed by amber lighting and soft steam, which creates a sense of warmth for the first time in the film. The blurry focus and warm lighting also suggest that even though he may not be in Hong Kong yet, this small shop in Taiwan has the same sense of belonging and home he is chasing after. At that moment, the voice-over recounts how lucky Chang is to have a place to return to. But what Fai fails to understand is that it is not the place that matters, but the people. This moment is one of the few in the film where Fai doesn’t seem alone. 

However, the importance of relationships is not the same between the two movies. This is because unlike A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Kar-Wai’s film does not deal with exile as much as it deals with displacement. As Marc Siegel explores in “The Intimate Spaces of Wong Kar-wai,” Happy Together doesn't paint a portrait of Buenos Aires; instead, “it uses certain Argentine spaces in order to localize Hong Kong concerns and perceptions” (Siegel 278). Argentina is never considered home, even when formations of a safe space emerge within it. Kar-Wai even confirms this, stating that “[I]t's more like I'm remaking Hong Kong in Buenos Aires” (Siegel 278). Kar-Wai does this by scattering transient spaces like bars, fast-food joints, and other small locations around the film (Siegel 278). These spaces are not only parallels to Kar-Wai’s other films but also reflections of the transitioning nature of Hong Kong itself (Siegel 278). Here, Kar-Wai used his personal memories of things he related to, which held allusions to Hong Kong to create a world that mirrored one he intimately knew. 

In conclusion, both A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and Happy Together explore displacement and belonging: two key worries of the diaspora. They contextualize the concept of home through space and relationships, allowing for a thorough realization of what or whom home could be. It also traces how being far away from home emphasizes relationships and a shared culture of memory in order to keep the diaspora alive. Although each film deals with a different degree of separation between place and recreation, through thematic and stylistic choices, both filmmakers sketch portraits of their memories in new spaces, reimagining what home would look like in another world.

Works Cited 

Wiese, Doro. “Female Desire and Feminist Rage: Ana Lily Amirpour’s Reworking of the Vampire Motif in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” [Sic] - a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, No. 2., 12, 2022, https://doi.org/10.15291/sic/2.12.lc.3. 

Siegel, Marc. “The Intimate Spaces of Wong Kar-Wai.” At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, edited by Esther C. M. Yau, NED-New edition, University of Minnesota Press, 2001, pp. 277–94. JSTOR, 

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv5g1.17. Accessed 9 May 2023. 

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour. Perfs. Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Mozhan Marnò. Film. VICE Films, 2014. 

Happy Together. Dir. Wong Kar-wai. Perfs. Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. Film. Golden Harvest Company, 1997. 

Tathatsu. Dir. Zakir Khan. Perfs. Zakhir Khan. Online Stand-up Comedy Show. Amazon Prime, 2022. 

https://www.amazon.com/Tathastu-Zakir-Khan/dp/B0B8QTZSDM/ref=sr_1_1?keywords= %22Tathastu%22&qid=1683525810&s=instant-video&sr=1-1

Atrangi Re: A Reflection on India’s Distorted Struggles or a Mismatched Band-Aid?

By Rhea Mehta, Edited by Vera Wang and Ben Glickman

A girl on the run. The streets of a small town in rural Bihar painted with rain. A bustling train station littered with an onslaught of broken glass bottles. This is how the Hindi-language film Atrangi Re (2021) begins. What ensues is a twisted love story rooted in a complicated depiction of mental illness, cultural and religious differences, and toxic love set to the beat of a toe-tapping soundtrack. The director, Aanand L. Rai, tries to have a new take on the traditional love triangle, and to his credit, there is little boredom throughout the two-and-a-half-hour movie. The film utilizes similar tropes that Hindi cinema has employed for years, emphasizing shock rather than clean exposition. Yet, even though this film stumbles through its messy conclusions about the subjects it is dealing with, it captures a portrait of where Indian society lies with these issues, and explores a nuanced message on where to go next. Atrangi Re, emerging at a transformative time for Indian cinema, captures and tackles these different social and cultural shifts through its choice to use mental illness as a framing narrative device, delving into the state of regional and religious tensions in India through casting and cinematography, and how all of this impacts the state of the modern musical in Bollywood. 

Atrangi Re captures a colorful love story, to say the least. It follows the story of Rinku (Sara Ali Khan), a young girl plagued by the trauma of losing her parents and being beaten down by her torturous family, who view her as nothing more than vermin. She is forcefully married to Vishu (Dhanush), a Tamil man who will be engaged to someone else in a matter of days. On the train back to Delhi, Rinku and Vishu realize neither of them wants to be in this marriage. Rinku reveals she is in love with Sajjad Ali Khan (Akshay Kumar), a Muslim man with whom she has tried to elope many times before, though her attempts have always been foiled. Their divorce is the easiest solution until Rinku’s quiet teasing becomes a drug, and suddenly, everything changes. When Vishu brings Rinku to his engagement in Tamil Nadu, the tug-of-war begins between Vishu’s duty to Mandy (Dimple Hayathi), his almost fiancee, and his growing feelings for Rinku. When Mandy finds out about his marriage through a YouTube video, Vishu defends Rinku against the vile comments Mandy’s family slings at her, consolidating his choice in choosing Rinku over Mandy. After returning to Delhi, Vishu delivers a heart-wrenching monologue to Rinku about his feelings in Tamil. 

Vishu’s love confession marks a shift, in not only the movie but also the representation of South Indians within Hindi language cinema. He delivers the climax of the first act, a dramatic love confession, in his native Tamil. While this might not be revolutionary to some, Bollywood has had a previously hard time expanding its borders. Hindi-language cinema, known in the mainstream as “Bollywood,” has largely been insulated for a long time. It has primarily given a platform to North Indian stories and artists, emphasizing the fair, attractive Hindu as the ideal. It also goes so far as to stereotype actors from other parts of India, especially South India, as unruly, violent or unable to speak English fluently, causing even more division and animosity within the regional cinemas. And yet, recently, Bollywood has changed its tune. Fuelled by the rise of pan-India movies, such as Baahubali: The Beginning, a 2015 Telugu language film that is the highest-grossing film in Indian history, and RRR (2022), India’s first homegrown Oscar winner, Bollywood is now forced to look to the South– to what many consider is the future of Indian cinema. The film industry of South India, which consists of Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam language cinemas- colloquially known as Tollywood- is quickly becoming one of the largest industries in the world and many actors are now crossing between industries, including Dhanush, who plays Vishu (Saran 28). Yet, while previous movies have addressed this cultural dichotomy poorly, Atrangi Re handles the divide with care, threading the difference between Vishu and Rinku’s cultures. To have a Tamil star deliver a dramatic monologue in Tamil without subtitles in a big Hindi musical and have a primarily Hindi-speaking crowd reacting so emotionally to the words breaks a big roadblock in the creation of diverse Indian cinema. Moreover, to see a speechless Rinku grasp what he means without knowing the exact words proves that sentiment lies within the actor, not the language, thereby, explores larger, genuine diversity within Hindi cinema without the pretension or overdramatization of it. Their differing cultures are presented as parts of their identities instead of as caricatured portrayals or reasons why the two cannot be together. This inclusion of Tamil on screen, along with the unfiltered appreciation Vishu has for his culture, and the correct casting of a South Indian actor is blazing the right path towards a more diverse and inclusive form of storytelling. 

Unfortunately, Vishu’s monologue ends abruptly due to Sajjad’s arrival. When Vishu’s friend Madhsudhan (Ashish Verma), known as MS, catches up to Rinku, he realizes that Sajjad is not real, but merely a vivid delusion. This transforms the movie from a simple love story into an almost do-or-die situation, as Vishu and MS race to find a way to ‘save’ Rinku and bring her back. This is when the movie begins losing its grip on a coherent narrative. What follows is a mismatched attempt at addressing mental illness, as Vishu and MS realize that the story she tells about her love story with Sajjad is true and may be the love story of her parents, as the trauma of losing her parents caused her to adopt a savior figure whom she fell in love with. While they never name the illness Rinku suffers, audiences recognize it as a paracosm, or “a prolonged fantasy world developed by children” that may include “definite geography, language, and history” (Konkin 5). Paracosms are usually associated with children creating vast fantasy worlds as forms of escape that rarely intersect with reality, but Atrangi Re tries to explore this through the idea of childhood trauma. Atrangi Re does utilize real science in the construction of its fantasy, with a literature review conducted by Serena Konkin “Between Worlds: Paracosms as Imaginal Liminality in Response to Trauma” on the subject of paracosms identifying that if a child is subject to some form of intense childhood trauma, it might become “paracosmic, returning through a fantasy world to the unbroken self in the original safe and nurturing place” (Konkin 10). Rinku watching her parents burn to death would definitely be classified as a form of intense childhood trauma that could lead to a paracosm. The problem here with the depiction of mental illness lies in the way through which the writer, Himanshu Sharma, adopts it into the script. This form of disorder would not lead to such a seamless interaction between the fantasy and the real world and might cause more drastic responses as the person alternates between the two. Vishu and MS treat Rinku’s illness as an obstacle rather than a diagnosis, disposing of all their years of medical school immediately to favor the narrative that love solves all. 

Sharma realizes the mental and social barriers that people have with mental illness–with the main conceptions being the way through which it hinders love and marriage–shapes it into an actual obstacle, and treats it as such, causing major discrepancies in the way the characters interact with it. The title itself, Atrangi Re, translates to “funnily weird” according to the director, dictating the way through which Rai explores this manifestation of mental illness (HT Entertainment Desk). Rinku’s paracosm is given a space in the real world, and it seems like all but Vishu and MS can recognize that. Sajjad lives, breathes, and interacts with Rinku’s daily life through Rinku, and it feels like Sharma introduces Rinku’s hot-headed, loud behavior as a vehicle to channel Sajjad through. However, Sharma barely fleshes out Sajjad’s character, using him only at specific intervals to create space between Vishu and Rinku, who are already reciprocating love by the film’s intermission. Sharma also poorly frames the use of medicine to overcome illness, choosing to display physical manifestations, like Sajjad getting hurt while shaving or falling out of a tree, as examples of the medicine working instead of the numbness associated with taking most trauma disorder medication. MS also says particularly harmful things such as “She should have been in a museum in France but she is roaming around the streets of Delhi” (1:18:01) and “no one has understood mental disorders to this day” (1:06:21). These sentiments, coming specifically from a person like MS, a doctor of psychiatry, leave a grim taste. 

Moreover, Sharma and Rai sacrifice comprehension in favor of a big spectacle as they save the final revelation, which is when Rinku confronts the trauma of watching her parents burn and realizes she has adopted her dad as her lover. Instead of slowly grappling with this process, the tension is released all at once in a dramatic retelling– a lost opportunity in otherwise seamless storytelling. Sharma also forgoes expanding on the consequences of the fact that Rinku has been in a relationship (albeit an imaginary one) with her father and this is perhaps the most disturbing part of the story. In order to accentuate the drama, there are many gaps in the logic of the screenplay, with Rinku remembering her parents in one scene but not recognizing that her lover and father have the same face. The story also loses coherency when they choose to cast Sara Ali Khan as both Rinku and her mother, making the final revelation even more confusing. The narrative interweaves itself constantly as it tries to normalize the plot twist and realize the consequences of living as and loving someone with mental illness. Yet, it fails to do so in any meaningful way, romanticizing the illness through its rapid dramatization and resolution. 

Moreover, at the core of the trauma lies the state of Hindu-Muslim relations in India. Sajjad is only separated from Rinku’s mother due to his religion, with her family interfering and even getting him imprisoned. This touches a deep note at the center of India’s political strife. The Hindu-Muslim hatred, now at an all-time high due to the leadership of Prime Minister Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (known commonly as “BJP”), has propagated laws and violence against the religious minority since being elected to power in 2014 (Maizland). But the hatred between Muslims and Hindus stretches back to the Partition of India, and for many small towns, the wounds of that time still have not healed. The relationship between Manjari and Sajjad, Rinku’s parents, ends in an honor killing. This is an unfortunately realistic outcome in this kind of situation, and the abuse that Rinku suffers at the hands of her grandmother, including physical beatings and her eventual forced marriage, seems to carry the weight of her parents’ choices. This movie, however, must be applauded for not villainizing the relationship, but rather, taking it one step further and exploring the extent to which incidents like these impact young children. As Rinku grapples with her trauma in the last scene, all of the twisted hatred comes pouring out, serving to highlight the pain of this situation. 

Yet, what saves the twisted plot and the distorted lens of mental illness is Aanand L. Rai’s direction. From the choices in cinematography and color to the use of music within the narration and the depiction of reality, Rai shapes an interesting modern musical. It draws from the conventions of Bollywood musicals before it while engaging with a drastically different story. It uses music and dance as tools of exposition to expand the story rather than one of escapism. It never takes us out of the world, unlike other Bollywood musicals that thrive on expanding the scope of the world beyond physical space, jumping from Mumbai to Switzerland and back in just a few cuts. Moreover, the cinematography is subtle, allowing you to seep into the dusty Bihar, Delhi placed under the weight of expectation and smog, and Chennai, adorned in love. Sprinkled into the films are breathtaking close-ups, focusing on the actor’s eyes, the community, and the hidden feelings of lust and love that emerge from beneath their eyelashes. The color grading of the movie focuses on contrasting the warm and cool hues between the people and the background, centering the four central people in the narrative, and obscuring everyone else. 

Yet, the aspect of the movie that makes it a masterpiece is allowing the audience to gloss over all the twisted paths the script takes is the soundtrack. You have definitely heard of A.R. Rahman, even if you don’t think you have: the Oscar and Grammy-winning music composer of Slumdog Millionaire (2008), A.R. Rahman- a musical genius. His music breathes life into this film and is the heart of what the heart of making things tick on screen. A large part of the movie is underscored by “Rait Zara Si”, a beautifully heart-breaking ballad with a distinct melody that rests in the back of your mind, guiding you to focus on the important elements. As Rai explains in an interview with Forbes India, the reason Rahman’s music clicks is that “it’s not the words or the scene or the structure he is catching, but the feelings. That’s why when you listen to his music, it reaches deep down inside” (Shekhar). “Garda”, a folk song with a stronger influence of percussion than the other songs, is used to underscore more passionate, energetic moments, with its strong presence of drums and dholaks. “Toofan ki Kudi” serves as Rinku’s anthem and the film draws in the feelings of longing and angst through “Tere Rang”, a personal favorite, and “Tumhein Mohabbat Hain”. The film balances the sadness demanded by the script with moments of life through “Chaka Chak” and “Little Little”, two more upbeat, directly engaging songs that have since gone viral in the music industry. Ultimately, the film would not have had such a profound emotional impact if not for the score, which not only helped illuminate what the audience should be feeling but also connected different moments in the film that were similar in theme. 

Atrangi Re does a better, more subtle job of integrating its music and dance sequences than the larger mainstream industry. While musical sequences have been considered as disruptive by some critics, like Satyajit Ray, Kobita Sarkar and Chidananda Dasgupta (Gehlwat and Dudrah 1), the lip-synced song and dance sequences provide the narrative with an easy and spectacular way to bring the inner monologue of a character to the forefront. In “Little Little”, Vishu (in a song sung by the actor himself, which is rare in Indian Cinema) dances out his delirious drunken pleasure of being in love with Rinku, a small escape from the monotony of the failed attempts at curing her. This moment brings forth such joy from Rinku that she kisses him, progressing the plot more in those few minutes than what hours of tension possibly could have. Similarly, in “Chaka Chak”, an item number that was integrated into the film, Vishu’s attraction to Rinku is displayed through his reactions to Rinku’s dancing. It is interesting, however, that Rai chose to place this ‘item number,’ a dance sequence of raunchy movements and risqué lyrics with little relation to the plot line, in a wedding (Saraogi 7). ‘Item numbers’ are usually in movies to attract crowds with their catchy lyrics and tune, pushing engagement for both the film and the soundtrack. They are usually very important due to the heavy links between the film and music industries in India, with the music market being primarily composed of movie soundtracks until recent shifts with Indian artists like Prateek Kuhad coming into the industry. “Chaka Chak”, therefore, is a less fetishized dance number but is a lingering manifestation of Bollywood’s monetization problem, appealing to the sensibilities of the audience through historically proven tricks, like having a beautiful dancer come in for only one number to increase publicity, rather than only through filmmaking. This movie, therefore, takes a twist on the traditional Indian musical. 

The Indian movie experience is a delicate art that has been in the making for decades. In the face of rapid globalization and a cultural foreign invasion in the 1990s, India developed the music and dance sequences that live in modern cultural memory. Moving away from the violent films of the 80s and the social issue-driven films of the Golden Age of Bollywood, Bollywood musicals such as Hum Aapke Hain Kaun and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge found a new formula for success with the family film, swapping fight scenes for increasingly sophisticated and highly choreographed musical sequences (Anjaria 322). Rising from the standard seven songs to ten, twelve, or even fourteen, these movies became jukeboxes for the soundtrack instead of narratives in their own right. Shrinking away from this extreme, musicals now have between five to seven songs, and Atrangi Re, with six songs, is right in the sweet spot. A modern musical in its own right, it refuses to transport the audience to the hills of Switzerland, a surprisingly common theme, and its imaginary dreamlands on large sets. Even though its premise stretches believability, the story never leaves real time, jumping or skipping time like Bollywood musicals of the past are notorious for. Therefore, this reformed musical retains all the continuity of a realistic melodrama but sprinkles in moments of spectacle, making the film simmer as it burns back and forth between realism and fantasy.

This movie is complicated yet simple; a modern musical with little music and a social issue-focused drama that cannot address the topic it has chosen to engage with head-on. Yet, it accomplishes what I consider the greatest thing a movie can do- it delivers an opportunity for discussion. Despite its questionable attempt at tackling mental illness, the discourse that this film generates based on how it tackles mental illness raises important questions about mental health and stigma within our country; additionally, the seamless unity presented between the different cultures of its protagonists offers a challenge to other movies to cross state lines and represent more than one demographic. It tackles many different trends and shifts, releasing a deeply fractured but tightly bound portrait of trauma and love, consolidating a new perspective on past conclusions.

Works Cited 

Anjaria, Ulka. Understanding Bollywood: The Grammar of Hindi Cinema. 2021, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429293726. 

Gehlawat, Ajay, and Rajinder Dudrah. “The Evolution of Song and Dance in Hindi Cinema.” South Asian Popular Culture, vol. 15, no. 2-3, 2 Sept. 2017, pp. 103–108, https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2017.1407547.

HT Entertainment Desk. “Aanand L Rai on Age Gap between Sara, Her Atrangi Re Co-Stars: ‘Watch the Film.’” Hindustan Times, 25 Nov. 2021, 

www.hindustantimes.com/entertainment/bollywood/aanand-l-rai-on-sara-ali-khan-s-age-ga p-with-atrangi-re-co-stars-akshay-kumar-dhanush-we-have-habit-of-judging-people-10163 7810059850.html. 

Maizland, Lindsay. “India’s Muslims: An Increasingly Marginalized Population.” Council on Foreign Relations, 4 July 2022, 

www.cfr.org/backgrounder/india-muslims-marginalized-population-bjp-modi. Saran, Renu. History of Indian Cinema. Diamond Pocket Books, 2012. 

Saraogi, Avantika, "The Bollywood Item Number: From Mujra to Modern Day Ramifications" (2013). Scripps Senior Theses. 215. 

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/215 

Shekhar, Divya J. “A R Rahman: A Sound in the Making.” Forbes India, 6 Jan. 2023, https://www.forbesindia.com/article/showstoppers-202223/a-r-rahman-a-sound-in-the-making/82373/1. 

Rai, Anand L, director. Atrangi Re. Accessed 21 June. 2023. 

https://www.hulu.com/watch/1c94b4b3-2fa1-49b8-9400-14c8bfe369e5

Queer Melodrama: Analyzing the Aesthetics of 1987’s Law of Desire

By Pau Brunet-Fuertes, Edited by Bridget Zhang

When Nicholas Ray combined a colorful, vibrant female melodrama with the  traditionally masculine Western genre when directing Johnny Guitar (1954), he indirectly  opened the imagination of many directors. Pedro Almodóvar was one of them, and he recognized  the potential to combine melodrama with other genres, such as film noir. Law of Desire (1987) is the product of that reimagination of a classic Hollywood genre with a radical sight, resulting in the queer melodrama. Melodramas are considered female territory, a type of cinema that delves into domestic situations with a tint of social conflict, primarily caused by patriarchal constructions. Hollywood has a rich tradition of melodramas and so do other national cinemas such as Mexico, India, and Spain. Because of their iconic weight in popular culture and the exploration of the female universe through drama, music, and aesthetics, melodramas are a particularly rich space for queer filmmakers. Law of Desire tells the story of a filmmaker who gets entangled in a complex homosexual relationship with a devoted admirer, while longing for his lost soulmate and navigating an intricate bond with his transgender sister. The film is a distinct melodrama mixing homosexuals, transgender people, passionate crimes, and “la Virgen de la Macarena”. The final scene of Law of Desire encapsulates all of these melodramatic and queer elements. The scene's complexity relates to the setting, the symbols, and the representations that the three main characters embody in a post-dictatorial country that is beginning to explore a liberal future after years of political and social repression. Almodóvar's cinema is crafted around many visual elements charged with cultural considerations within symbolic orders of gender, sexuality, and desire. In the final scene of Law of Desire, Almodóvar uses allegories and symbols to highlight the film's central theme of a new generation of individuals moving on from Spain's political and social dictatorial past. 

Almodóvar’s aesthetics constantly challenge hegemonic powers by twisting religious iconography and cultural symbology from a queer perspective. Because of the relationship between film language and social context, Law of Desire reaches a complex significance when analyzed as a cinematic apparatus engaged in an oppositional gaze. From a mainstream perspective, cinema has been analyzed by first interpreting the content and then creating a meaning that can be digested easily. Susan Sontag critiques this analytical dynamic in her 1966 book Against Interpretation. She argues, “by reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable [sic]” (Sontag 5). This dominant approach avoids understanding cinema’s form and significance from an ideological perspective, but movies are social agents with the capacity to engage with symbolic meanings and political significance. Jean-Louis Baudry defined cinematographic apparatus as, “[cinematic mechanism] destined to obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary to the dominant ideology: creating a fantasmatization (Note 1) of the subject, it collaborates with a marked efficacy in the maintenance of idealism” (46). While Baudry frames cinema as a mechanism to maintain dominant ideologies, the inverse of this concept is also possible, in which cinema becomes a mechanism against dominant ideologies and symbolic meanings. This framework allows the aesthetic and visual elements of Law of Desire to be analyzed from a queer and deviant perspective.  

The particularity of the final scene of Law of Desire lies in its division into two different locations that are interconnected in time and space through sound and editing. At the beginning of the scene, the police inform Pablo (Eusebio Poncela) that his sister, Tina (Carmen Maura), has been held hostage in her apartment by Antonio (Antonio Banderas), his former lover and passionate fan. When Pablo arrives outside the building, he agrees to go upstairs with the police to free Tina. Almodóvar establishes the connection between the two spaces when Antonio appears on the balcony with Tina while the police are stationed downstairs, pointing lights and guns at him. He demands that Pablo come upstairs alone. At this point in the story, the audience is aware that Antonio experiences his homosexuality secretly, far from the sight of his conservative family. Similarly, Tina and Pablo's gender and sexuality (transgender and homosexual, respectively) also experience a degree of privacy from the exterior world. In both cases, this reality creates a personality split between public and private persona in which these queer individuals need enclosed spaces to experience their freedom. As Marta Saavedra suggests in her essay about Almodóvar’s cinematic world, the director “understands the filmic space as a basic element for the emotional development of his characters” (378). In this last scene of Law of Desire, the filmic space reflects the dualities and dichotomies used by the director as the primary mechanism to create the characters and conflicts developed in the plot. The director establishes the spatial connection between both spaces using cross-cutting and diegetic sound continuity, particularly in the form of dialogue and music.  

Almodóvar's unique visual world is charged with relevant narrative information, which makes it essential to decoding the melodramatic tension in Law of Desire, especially in the actions done by his characters during the climax of the movie. Cross-cutting and sound editing help unify and create tension by using discontinued spaces connected by sound, music, or dialogue (Bordwell 244). Two examples are the use of the song "Lo Dudo" and the fire. One of the most emphatic moments is when Antonio plays the song "Lo Dudo," and that song becomes a connection between the exterior space where public opinion awaits and the inner space or intimate space of the apartment where desire can exist. Because of Antonio’s secret homosexual desire, his relationship with the exterior (social pressure) and the interior (sexual freedom) of the apartment appear connected through the song, which at the same time speaks to the development of the story. With this song, Almodóvar seems to foreshadow the fatal ending as the lyrics are about a love that was intense and wild, but is now over. While this song could have achieved the same functionality as non-diegetic sound, it is vital to point out that Almodóvar uses it in diegetic form to support the idea that Antonio wants the world to know he loved Pablo, even though it is over because of the social pressure placed on him. 

Furthermore, Almodóvar uses fire as a symbol of the inevitable tragedy pushed by the  external (law, order, conservative society) and the internal (the passion of an impossible love). The aesthetic relationship between love and death through the fire inside the apartment serves as a powerful melodramatic mechanism to finish a love story that is still not easy to showcase in the exterior of the apartment. As José Quiroga points out in his book Law of Desire: A Queer Film Classic, “Almodóvar found a cinematic language that allowed him to represent both aesthetic distance from a sentimental notion of life, and the affective triggers that allow for identification with life” (15). The other fire in the scene is happening outside of the building, in front of the police cars. The presence of fire in both public and private spaces links the two worlds together, symbolizing a society that is changing and still dealing with a traumatic past. This convergence of spaces and dualities created first by diegetic music and later by the two fires is essential to understanding the visual and dramatic complexities of the movie.  

On top of the visual elements mentioned, Almodóvar uses another significant aesthetic element charged with critical semiotic significance throughout the scene: the religious installation. The Virgen de la Macarena is an essential symbol that illustrates a radical understanding of sexual repression and liberation from a queer perspective. The director employs such religious symbols to delve into the complex social conflicts of the film. While religious symbolism can be associated with sexual repression and violence, for instance, the controlling mother and the priest who abused Tina as a child, Almodóvar subverts their meaning to something almost mestizo. As Brígida M. Pastor affirms, "the inversion implies the transgression of a culturally designed model of conduct that is heterosexual and therefore implies the complete negation of that model or norm" (8). The Virgin in Tina's house becomes a positive symbol, a female one whom she and Ada trust for protection and the one that will become an almost mystic observer of Pablo and Antonio's love and tragedy. Almodóvar's use of religious symbology combined with Hollywood iconography aligns with what José Esteban Muñoz coined as the disidentification process. Disidentification is the strategy used by minority groups to manage historical trauma and systemic violence by reassembling how the majority sees and oppresses them (Muñoz 35). In the movie, the Virgin, Saints illustrations, crosses, and candles are detached from a Christian meaning to become protective symbols and objects of worship and inspiration almost equal to posters of old Hollywood actresses (Saavedra 382). The fact that a negative symbol in Pablo and Tina's world becomes positive reflects a queer perspective that reclaims traditional symbols from mainstream and conservative spaces to a more radical one. Through this, queer artists developed a complex analysis of the dichotomy between tradition and queerness, which is vital in the last scene of the movie Law of Desire. 

Consequently, it is essential to understand how Almodóvar creates the scene using  excesses in his narrative language through the combination of melodrama and film noir as well  as the radical use of sexuality, religion, and police force. This use of well-known social norms  and beliefs in an opposite and radical way is essential as part of the queer narrative present in the  film. As Pastor points out in her article, "Almodóvar's insistence on adopting culturally  established roles [police] and attitudes [repression] that are performed through parody and a  stereotypical exaggeration, generates a detachment on the part of his characters in relation to the  cultural reality that surrounds them" (13). The melodramatic scene works thanks to the  extravagant construction and connection between characters and the art direction surrounding them, such as the use of folkloric and religious iconography, music, and passionate love scenes. These symbolic and emotional constructions have a dialectical relationship pointing out the dictatorial society and the new liberal one. In their new present, queer characters are reconstructing their identities within a space that provides new meanings to the conservative world of the past (folkloric and religious elements) and the postmodern reality of the mid-1980s (sexual freedom). 

In conclusion, the final scene of Law of Desire showcases Almodóvar's talent in blending melodrama and film noir aesthetics, exploring a subgenre in which he can employ a radical use of sexuality, religion, and police force. By transgressing established social norms and beliefs, Almodóvar creates a unique queer perspective that not only challenges conventional roles and attitudes, but also generates detachment from the cultural reality surrounding the characters. The scene’s juxtaposition of exterior forces, symbolized by law and order, with the interior spaces, realms of sexual freedom, underscores essential dichotomies inherent in queer cinema. These dichotomies are no longer a subtext since the queer experience does not hide between ideas of representability but lies in representation. Almodóvar's cinematic style aligns with other filmmakers of his time, such as John Waters, Derek Jarman, or Todd Haynes, who similarly explored this radical vision of social conventions and helped to create queer visual representation. The intricacy and elaboration of the visual settings in the movie serve to support its complex characters and their connections to post-dictatorial Spain, highlighting the rich world of gender diversity. Almodóvar's film form, characterized by duality, provides a profound and incisive critique of conservatism in society and explores the contrast between public and private personalities influenced by societal decorum. Finally, the microcosm of the scene in the movie serves as a representation of the larger social issues that Pedro Almodóvar explores in the film such as repression, sexuality, and passion, three elements that are all linked to General Franco’s dictatorial period (1936-1975). Almodóvar's distinct and influential cinematic style has become largely influential worldwide to such an extent that his name has become an adjective, "almodovarian," which refers to this stylization of queer and folkloric Spanish social issues that thanks to him have become universal. 

Notes

1. According to Jean-Louis Baudry, fantasmatization refers to the creation of a visual illusion through images, sounds, and colors.  Baudry affirms that fantasmatization is a method to create visual reality according to ideological ideals that appears to be objective. 

Works Cited 

Almodóvar, Pedro. Law of Desire, feature film, El Deseo/Lauren Films, 1987. Bordwell, David; Thompson, Kristin; “Chapter 6: The Relation of Shot to Shot”. Film Art. An  Introduction. McGraw-Hill Education 12th Edition, 2020. 

Quiroga, Jose. “Introduction : Queer Melodrama.” Law of Desire, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.  University of Minnesota Press, 1999 

Pastor, Brígida M. "Screening Sexual and Gendered Otherness in Almodóvar's Law of Desire  (1987)—The Real 'Sexual Revolution'." Studies in European Cinema, vol. 3, no. 1, 2006,  pp. 7-23. doi:10.1386/seci.3.1.7/1. 

M. Saavedra Llamas and N. Grijalba de la Calle, “The creative cinematographic process at the  service of national identity: Pedro almodÓvar and the promotion of spanish stereotypes,”  Creativity studies, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 369–386, 2020, doi: 10.3846/cs.2020.8563.

Finding Fielder: Reality Television as Self-Examination and Expression

By Quinn Jennings, Edited by Maizy Zenger

Performers usually construct comedic personas to exist inside of a world– with most traditionally on a stage or in a sitcom. These characters function on the reliability of everyday life experiences. For an outsider to examine mundanity and highlight real, complex, complicated people and their stories, genuine connections are key. But how can an audience be convinced of a figure's authenticity? To reconcile this, situational comedy has shifted into meta-irony since the craziest ideas only need an observer, not necessarily an expansive audience, to create a pseudo-reality that allows for experiments that have the freedom to step out of the traditional comedic form and comment on the form itself. 

In his Comedy Central show Nathan For You (2013–2017), creator and star Nathan Fielder positions himself as an outsider and parodies marketing tactics by offering real business owners specific yet outlandish strategies to promote their struggling businesses. While his business school background and intentionally awkward demeanor usually failed to satisfy his subjects, it continually achieved his satirical goals. His unpredictable results set the scene for The Rehearsal (2022–), a documentary series on helping people plan for difficult life events or conversations through a rehearsal with actors and sets that mimicked their real lives, driven by Fielder's interest and expertise in studying human behavior. 

Fielder's gimmicks on Nathan For You depended on a borderline cruel level of interaction with the business owners, so the dynamics that his work satirizes ultimately pose challenges in the making of his shows. Multiple subjects featured in the cringe comedy have spoken about their experiences on the show in a revealing light. Kandiie Tapia, the owner of a house cleaning service that was "helped" by Nathan on the show and a Mexican immigrant openly regrets having her business featured in an episode. While originally she felt honored that the producers wanted to share her story on television, she soon found her experience with Nathan to be a reflection of a harsher reality than the one he was attempting to convey. Tapia recalls Nathan blowing his nose in a tissue and asking her if she would throw it out for him (although no such exchange made it into the episode). In 2022, she told Vulture reporter Lila Shapiro that "it was a power move, [...] like he’s white and I’m a minority and I’m young." Instead of dropping out, she was encouraged to put up with his antics since the show could benefit the business. When the episode aired and Tapia realized it was a comedy, she was so embarrassed she told her family not to watch it. In the same article, Fielder told Shapiro that he was surprised and upset to learn how Tapia felt. His goal is to make himself appear as a "pathetic fool" and provide ordinary people with an experience outside of their day-to-day lives, with the assumption that reality television is a "fairly absurd" thing (Shapiro). Fielder acknowledges the ways in which Nathan For You went about interactions the wrong way; he utilizes The Rehearsal to look deeper into the human psyche and determine why people, including himself, behave in the way they do. Although he works to exercise his empathy muscles, it is essential that Fielder's shows retain the honesty he is able to pull from his subjects. His tactics of prodding, misdirecting, or sitting in excruciating silence subvert people's expectations for how one is supposed to act to be captivating for reality television. 

To further understand the intent and motivation of The Rehearsal, the absurdist experiment of observation by Fielder pictured above, a viewer must examine Fielder's breakout hit: Nathan For You. Fielder made businesses the subject of his satire, many of which were owned by immigrants, and there was often a clear language barrier. At the end of Nathan For You and in later work (such as The Rehearsal and eventually veering into scripted television with The Curse), Fielder began to incorporate critiques of his methods and comedic style as he wished to avoid being perceived as "mean funny." He deploys the 21st-Century reality television aesthetic to critique what is contained and portrayed in the packaging of the genre, subverting the norm of classifying people as simply good or bad. Fielder's work demands suspicion from its viewers, as his television shows dramatize the camera as an apparatus and challenge the idea that it can appropriately and accurately capture reality. 

In 2017, Nathan Fielder released a 90-minute finale to close out Nathan For You. Fielder's depiction in the finale clarifies that he has been performing as the artificial character of Nathan throughout the run of his show, but he leaves the audience questioning his true identity and characterization. Fielder confronts the ethics of reality television and documentary filmmaking when he examines his subjects: an elderly man filled with regret, a woman paid to spend time as a companion, and his own self-reflective and over-confident character of Nathan. His comedy stunts transcend the purpose of creating a spectacle worth laughing at and instead speak to larger themes of self-identity and empathy.

Titled "Finding Frances," the episode broke his methodical format by departing from his deadpan and socially oblivious demeanor. Bill Heath, a 78 year old man who first made his appearance in season two of Fielder's show, approaches Nathan for genuine help. He was previously recruited as an actor to play a celebrity impersonator and go along with Nathan's satirical interaction with a shop owner. Bill confesses that a failed romance from over 50 years ago has haunted him ever since, and he now wants to connect with his old girlfriend, Frances, to inform her of his regret. Troubled by Bill's predicament, Fielder's caricatured version of himself as Nathan offers to use the resources of his show to help reunite them. 

Nathan and Bill embark on a road trip, and as pictured above, Nathan's visible attempts to keep deadpan comedic elements present throughout his emotional journey with Bill serve to please his usual audience who expect work aligning with the premise of the show while simultaneously introducing himself and Bill as multilayered subjects who require one to examine every angle of their personality. This creates a new balance that introduces introspection around his previous episodes. While spending time with Bill, Nathan interjects visual gags from the very beginning. After Bill's introduction of his situation, Nathan has him draw a picture of Frances from memory, which ends up resembling a stick person. Despite the comic absurdity created by the juvenile image and the undercutting of Bill's deep emotionality, Nathan then puts the sketch to use by giving it to random people as a reference for who they are looking for. 

The bits, like the aforementioned stick figure drawing pictured below, start off simplistic and obviously comedic, but they become increasingly more complex as Nathan and Bill gain more information of Frances' whereabouts. Nathan's search follows extensive processes with the help of people he encounters: faking the filming of a blockbuster movie for access to Frances' old high school to attain a copy of her yearbook photo; hiring a man who claims to be a professional age progressionist once it is obtained; having Bill perform Frances' hometown's anthem to try to fit in with the locals and gain information about her. Nathan's involvement of strangers and others he finds reliable in assisting his execution of deadpan comedy follows the traditional model of his television show; he gets a laugh from the audience by placing these people in intentionally awkward situations where an uncomfortable outcome is predictable, yet productive comedically. 

The absurdity of Nathan's actions add upon themselves as his serious, no-nonsense demeanor remains consistent, despite the profoundly immature actions he takes to help a genuine friend. The extended runtime of the finale allows him to explore the moments beyond quick, anxiety-filled interactions. The intentionally ridiculous ideas he presents to the usual business owners on the show accompanied by his combative yet awkward personality conveys his inability to connect with other people through most of the series' episodes. However, the purpose of the narrative arc in "Finding Frances" is to display his growth; Fielder wants the audience to reflect on the reasons they find Nathan For You funny and ensure that they do not take away the wrong message that Nathan's character is one to embody. Instead, he aims to shift the audience's perspective of the self-absorbed and often clueless character by exhibiting a new level of empathy towards Bill in the finale, suggesting that Fielder's character, Nathan, may also be one to empathize with. 

Nathan consciously makes the decision to learn more about Bill's past rather than regarding him as an old man with whom he can riff. As the finale progresses, it becomes increasingly unclear how much of the narrative is staged or exaggerated for cameras yet Fielder continues to successfully demonstrate his show is more complex and authentic than traditional reality television by forcing the audience to question to what extent his gags are scripted. When visiting Bill's niece, Shelly, she reveals that Bill initially lied to Nathan about his career as a celebrity impersonator for a chance to be featured on television. Nathan confronts Bill, who insists it was simply a misunderstanding between the two. Realizing that he is deep into the process of helping Bill and getting closer to finding Frances, Nathan decides to continue the documentary with the knowledge that Bill is likely lying or exaggerating much of his original story. Nathan does not exhaust the viewer with humor; instead, he recognizes when the narrative reaches an emotional and shocking point where he wonders if Bill is motivated to find Frances or even be on television because he is simply "desperate for any human connection" (Fielder). Much of Nathan For You's comedy comes at the expense of his subjects (and himself), but the finale does not punch down toward Bill. Instead, Fielder refuses to follow the same pattern with Bill on a human level, since he has come to understand Bill's struggles with love and regret from the perspective of a friend. Instead of continuing the mocking tactics he utilizes when dealing with businesses, he subverts the trope of awkward cruelty by investing screen time into Bill's search, even if Bill himself may not be a trustworthy source. Nathan places confidence in Bill as a person, making a critical stylistic choice to break form and avoid repeating narrative structure. Nathan's faith in Bill appears genuine, and although his goal may have shifted from mockery, Fielder does not give up on satire, but instead intentionally incorporates his humor to convey his character's ability to evolve. 

By blurring the line between documenting real stories and a planned narrative by inserting absurdity for comedic effect, Fielder's approach proves itself to be revolutionary for its medium. The narrative of Nathan For You is always built on a farce, and its finale "Finding Frances" is no different; however, the subject of parody shifts from business strategies to reality television that advertises itself as completely unscripted. Nathan's actions throughout the run of Nathan For You position Fielder's character as manipulative of the people he encounters. The structure of the previous episodes all involving business crumble under Nathan's human exchanges with Bill in the finale. Fielder writes the finale of his show to expose the harsh nature of his character Nathan in order to critique the audience's previous notion of Nathan as shallow. The audience's questioning of this distinction enables them to appraise the validity of his proposal that the authenticity of a story is subjective to the fallibility of one's own memory and perception, altering the meaning and purpose of documentary filmmaking to tell a story with straightforward facts. 

Nathan's capacity to express empathy comes to fruition during the finale through his interactions with Bill and Maci, a prostitute he hires for Bill to rehearse with before he reunites with Frances. Bill is mortified at the suggestion when Nathan explains this idea to him presented in his classic no-nonsense manner, pictured above with a deadpan expression and a professional presentation. In a change of plans, Nathan interviews Maci instead of having her play out a tête-à-tête with Bill. Nathan claims she may be able to give insight into how Frances may react as a woman and further justifies the pivot to this new exercise by adding the detail that his crew already paid her. This absurdity seemingly undermines his newfound empathy. Nathan introduces Maci to the premise of Nathan For You, and she, previously unaware of his comedic background, labels him "mean funny" (Fielder). Nathan appears offended at her take but insists that his approach is simply rooted in "business" (Fielder). The conversation with Maci encourages Fielder to further break free from his television persona and change the audience's interpretation of his character, and to achieve the multidimensional approach he takes with Bill as an effective mode of storytelling, Nathan continues to spend time with Maci to change her idea of him. Now, the episode adds a layer of complexity in terms of Bill trying to win over Frances and Nathan attempting to win over Maci. The balance of pathos and comedy remains as Bill appears sincere and authentic complimented by Nathan being a touch absurd, as his connection to Maci continues under the condition that he continues to pay her for her time. The audience cannot help but gawk at the situation that Nathan has found himself in; he has made a seemingly genuine relationship, but Fielder's detail that Maci may also be simply portraying a character hinders the notion that Nathan can develop as an empathetic person. 

As the episode continues, Nathan becomes increasingly vulnerable with Maci, a sudden and unexpected shift from his usual inexpressive manner honed throughout the four-season series. His sensitivity rises to the surface in these contrived scenarios because there are no true stakes to his relationship with Maci or his character development. Even though Fielder is filming a version of a documentary (somewhere near but not entirely mockumentary), the situation Nathan finds himself in with Maci is built entirely on an artificial, one-sided relationship. Fielder's character begins to connect with another person, but it is still clearly only for the purpose of the television show. Fielder constructs this relationship between Nathan and Maci to reflect his own relationship with Bill; Fielder connects with Bill, but their relationship is driven by the mission of finding Frances, all of which could be created in Bill's mind. As Fielder's storytelling fluctuates between reality and artificial situations, Fielder openly acknowledges his character's blurring of the line that separates reality and entertainment, claiming it’s "hard to tell" the difference between the two when he is with Maci (Fielder). It is unclear if Nathan can truly connect with other people, be it Bill or Maci or anyone else, for any purpose other than staging a performance for the cameras. Fielder intentionally plays on the scripted components of reality media, suggesting that real life will always have insincere moments. As much as Fielder attempts to blend unreality with sincerity in Nathan For You by overwhelming the audience with awkward silences and imperfect interactions, he nonetheless conveys authenticity that points to the inevitable conclusion that there is still truth in artificial stories. The show continues to be entertaining and provocative while Maci motivates Nathan to become a better person even though their interaction is based on monetary value. Nathan chooses to embrace the artificial reality presented to him rather than continue the model he created for himself throughout the run of his show, all while being sincere in his choices. 

Although the finale breaks the show's usual structure, Fielder never truly loses control in "Finding Frances." Fielder's manifold presentation of Bill's journey and the evolution of Fielder's own story involving identity and career compels the audience to reflect on the subjectivity of time and the pain of regret while urging them to consider reframing the goofball character in their own lives. On a filmmaking level, Fielder manipulates the structural rules he set for himself earlier in the series and plays around with the responsibility of a filmmaker to portray authentic stories. Fielder ends "Finding Frances" and his series as a whole in the powerful shot above, by telling the crew to turn off the cameras while he sits with Maci. Fielder closes out Nathan’s character arc by allowing him to embrace his artificial reality and communicates to the audience that his contrived situation can still manage to bring about authentic moments and inspire introspection. A chorus of "Don't be sad / Be glad / Be happy for me" by The Kinnardlys echoes as the credits roll, leaving the viewer as Fielder's final subject of irony. While the audience is unsure if they were just fooled by Fielder's antics or finished viewing a film documenting one man's evolution towards empathy, they can at least be sure it was an authentic, human story. 

In 2023, Fielder took on scripted television–but only in an effort to further illustrate the deception of reality television. The Curse (2023) premiered on Showtime, with a vastly varied reception. Critics embraced the show positively, but many audience ratings disagreed. Despite the negative reviews from some viewers, the show exists as its own niche. Created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, The Curse is an uncomfortable watch that utilizes a satirical twist of the home improvement genre deep into darkness and absurdity. Safdie's unconventional framing focuses on distorting characters and creating frenzied environments. Combining his style with Fielder's caricatured stiff demeanor and fearless social obliviousness curates a viewing experience full of anxiety. The cringe drama and subtle dark comedy certainly alienates some viewers, leaving only an invested and dedicated audience left watching. The show is ambitious in its mobility of style; it does not take away from the commentary made on gentrification, the absurd commodification of marginalized people, or Jewish mysticism; rather, the stylistic choices enhance the irony within the show and the creators' messages. Safdie and Fielder do not allow themselves to be restricted by the objective of appearing intriguing to the masses, permitting more passion to come through in the series. They reward audiences who recognize the themes as ones of social discomfort and appreciate the stylistic choices as conscious. 

Fielder's past catalog of work is almost exclusively a reality and documentary series, all with the same dry humor as The Curse. Safdie is a long-time fan of Fielder. He previously wrote on Nathan For You, stating that a person "obsessed with creating realism" ultimately creates something fake, while a person "obsessed with recreating reality" can create something hilarious. The Curse combines their strengths; it stems from the brain of someone that has worked in reality television and has questioned the morality of their both job and themself. They incorporate the flaws of Fielder's caricature of a businessman into the pitfalls of the main characters. The series interrogates Fielder's own self consciousness and personal flaws when creating entertainment. 

HGTV programming is relatively stiff. The home improvement channel, as it is widely thought of, is ripe for parody, often featuring fairly formulaic, vapid storylines, even by reality television standards. The Curse follows Whitney and Asher Siegel, a mismatched married couple filming their own home renovation television show. The show dares to ask the question: what if the hosts of HGTV shows were blatantly awkward, uncertain, and deceptive in their presentations? Starring Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder as the Siegels and Benny Safdie as Dougie, a producer who sees opportunity in the midst of the couple's anxieties and misfortune, The Curse is an insight into the inner workings of creating reality television and shines a light on the questionable practices of hosts or creators to produce entertainment. The series urges audiences to reflect on the morality of consuming and creating reality television by accentuating distorted realities and their unethical repercussions. Fielder is a co-creator and stars as the titular character who is cursed, pictured below, as he gives and then takes back money from a young Black girl for a camera stunt. Asher can consistently be seen depicted in this way: smiling for the cameras while having ulterior motives to sharpen his own image. He utilizes the series as a self-examination of his own work in reality television; the dramatized consequences of fake reality television serve as a facet of Fielder's atonement for past complicity in the business. 

Whitney and Asher enter the small town of Española, New Mexico with the goal of building "passive" homes that are energy-efficient and eco-friendly. With their construction, they move locals out of their homes and raise rent prices higher than the community can afford, actively gentrifying the neighborhood they are claiming to help. An HGTV crew documents this process as part of the Siegels' reality show, promoting the narrative that the couple is improving Española through their investment in green efforts. The Curse represents HGTV as a network with skewed ethical perception of their hosts, failing to see that they are harming a community on a larger scale. The actions of HGTV and the Siegels are purely performative. The series is sure to implicate the network as a negative life force that propels the power of reality television. By supporting the production of Whitney and Asher's show, the channel of HGTV gives the couple a platform to spread an incomplete message, fueling the exploitation of an underfunded and overlooked community. 

Reality television hosts must possess a certain level of charisma in order to make reality television palatable. Charisma is more natural when rooted in authenticity–hence why the often repetitive and seemingly scripted nature of some reality television shows are stiff. The absurdity of passive homes is highlighted to increase social discomfort and comment on irrational practices in reality television that often go overlooked and accepted as fact. In episode five, a couple tours one of Whitney and Asher's homes and begins to grow uncomfortable when they realize the limitations of owning an eco-friendly home. While sporting visible sweat stains, the couple is told by Whitney that they cannot put in an air conditioning unit since that would taint the carbon footprint of the house, and to cope with the New Mexico summer they should simply not open doors or windows to avoid letting in heat. The couple begins to joke about living in the passive house, comparing it to an $850,000 prison, causing the Siegels to shift uncomfortably. Whitney and Asher build passive homes to benefit the environment as an effort to declare themselves ethically good people while working towards their own personal goals (rebelling against slumlord parents, being seen as good enough for their partner) that are not translated into their HGTV show. Their jobs as television hosts exist in a place of privilege that is unable to understand the true reality of affordable living. They are unable to chuckle their way out of tough and serious questions that challenge the validity and ethics of their work. Fielder is known for his deadpan style; he incorporates the uncomfortable atmospheres from his previous work into the storylines of The Curse with his performance as the socially awkward Asher. He breaks the boundary previously established by his other television shows by portraying the issues with reality television as stretching far behind only the hosts themselves. Reality television holds the power to create illusions, such as the tense environment picture below depicting a clear divide between the crew and subjects, and this power is dangerous when it is held by people in privileged positions. 

The action of reality television often relies on false depictions of reality. In the pilot episode of The Curse, the series opens with Whitney and Asher filming themselves telling a community member, Fernando, that they have gotten him a full-time job at a coffee shop to pay for his mother's cancer treatment. When the environment in the room does not change, as if the camera crew was expecting some kind of karmic applause, Dougie steps in to put water in Fernando's mother's eyes to convey fake tears. What Whitney initially calls a "little TV magic" quickly turns uncomfortable as Dougie then blows menthol in her eyes to make them red. In his role as the producer Dougie, played by Benny Safdie, became aggressive for the visual effect he could capture and the emotional impact he believed would translate on screen. Safdie is widely known for his documentation and gravitational pull towards realism in his own films; he translates these skills and utilizes his reputation as an aid to the truth in The Curse's portrayal of reality television. Fielder makes a statement to say that his work in reality television is created by a team of people, and it does not represent his whole character. The series has an array of unsympathetic, odious characters, but the element of realism treats them with dignity nevertheless by portraying their lives on and off camera. Immediately, the fictionalized HGTV crew sets the tone for the way reality television sets operate. As the team, including the hosts, stand by, they all become complicit in the show's deception.

The Curse depicts deception on multiple levels as Fielder is making a statement about his past work in conjunction with the creators' ideas of reality television as an industry, supported by Safdie's keen eye for realism. The manufactured nature of reality television results in exploitative work environments and jobs that profit from deceiving their audiences. 

Through his previous work in reality television and take on scripted drama, Fielder's stance on the morality of the industry becomes increasingly clear. Considering the individual viewer experience when creating comedy television allows for a level of complexity and care that could not be achieved with the goal of trying to please all audiences or make a mainstream hit. Television is a unique and intimate experience, so series that feel tailored to address viewers in a specific and nuanced way are more likely to form a lasting impact on an audience. With a plethora of content available at their fingertips, audiences have the option to choose what they watch as carefully as what they desire. 

Many will no longer settle for a formulaic sitcom, forcing television creators to innovate their concepts. The combination of audience specificity and television creatives placing their passion in speaking to those varied audiences has made the current age of television more captivating than ever before. Fielder's ability to step back and criticize his own oblivion to empathy in creating entertainment encourages audiences to indulge in the same self-reflection for engaging with his television as viewers. Whether through fiction, pseudo-documentary, or somewhere in between, Fielder wants audiences to see through the obvious and examine the action of performing as oneself. And have a laugh doing it, of course.

Works Cited

The Curse. Created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, Showtime, 2023. 

"Finding Frances." Nathan For You, created by Nathan Fielder and Michael Koman, season 4, episode 8, Comedy Central, 9 Nov. 2017. 

The Kinnardlys. "Be Happy for Me." Singer-Songwriter. Extreme Music Production, 2010. 

Nathan For You. Created by Nathan Fielder, Comedy Central, 2013–2017.

The Rehearsal. Created by Nathan Fielder, HBO, 2022–Present. 

Safdie, Benny. “The Gag of Realism: Nathan For You.” Cinema Scope, 23 June 2020, cinema-scope.com/features/gag-realism-nathan/. 

Shapiro, Lila. “Nathan Fielder Is Out of His Mind (and Inside Yours).” Vulture, Vulture, 5 July 2022, www.vulture.com/article/nathan-fielder-rehearsal-profile.html. 

Film’s Silent Erasure of the Gay Black Man

By Claire Ernandes, Edited by Matthew Chan

Social change has come a long way in regards to race, sexuality and gender. Despite this, the gay black man is still erased in history, media and film: “rendered invisible” (Tongues Untied). This taboo is what Marlon Riggs exposes and deconstructs in his short documentary Tongues Untied (1989), that testifies the gay black man’s experience in the bustling environment of New York City during the AIDS crisis. On top of its empowering subject matter, the film distinguishes itself by repurposing techniques that are not usually associated with documentaries and therefore, revolutionizes and experiments with the genre as a whole. Another rare example of this occurrence is Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016), that uses narrative fiction as a way to immerse the viewer in the realistic experience of a black gay man’s journey from childhood to adulthood in the vibrant atmosphere of Liberty City in Miami. Though these two pieces take place and are produced in vastly different locations, times and climates, both illustrate how film can use intricate cinematic techniques to explore an identity severely underlooked before. One, an experimental documentary, and the other, a truthful work of fiction, these two films are binded in a fascinating way, through their impact on making the black gay male experience universal. 

The analysis of sound showcases how both films delve into the intersectionality of gay black men. Firstly, Marlon Riggs utilizes intermittent silence as an ambivalent embodiment of entrapment and protection. As Essex Hemphill proclaims in his poetry, “silence is a way to grin and bear it, a way not to acknowledge how much my life is discounted each day” (Tongues

2 Untied). Riggs amplifies this by placing the asynchronous sound of a constant repeating heartbeat throughout his film, which carries multiple layers. It undeniably expresses the ominous presence of the AIDS crisis, with a strong and steady rhythm that reminds the viewer how precious health is. On another note, this sound illustrates the basic human need for survival and the pressure gay black men in America face from merely existing. The combination of this binary rhythm with the absence of any other sound, creates an artificial silence that establishes an unsettling atmosphere in what is most normal: a heartbeat. The viewer is plunged into Marlon Riggs’ body and experience and there is an eeriness to this silence that is hostile: “silence is my shield, it crushes, silence is my cloak, it smothers, silence is my sword, it cuts both ways, silence is the deadliest weapon” (Essex Hemphill, Tongues Untied). 

Moreover, Riggs builds a push and pull effect with the audience in a teasing, almost demeaning way. This is what Leah Anderst explores in her article Calling to witness: complicating autobiography and narrative empathy in Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied, that highlights the ambiguous perspective of the director on the authorship of his film, “swinging between revelation and concealment.” Paradoxically, this prolonged silence is used to initiate conversation. The absence of audio is positioned suitably for dramatic moments, triggered by dark questions in which a black gay man considers his own erasure from society: “What future lies in our silence?” (Essex Hemphill, Tongues Untied). Along with making the screen cut to black in these sustained periods of time, Marlon Riggs gives the audience time to pause and think about the content he is presenting. This attributes an interpretative property to his documentary, experimenting with the self-referential aspects of the genre for the viewer, producing a cut-off from an almost inhumane reality. Additionally, it ingeniously ties racial aspects of the subjects’ identity: the black color of their skin, to these brutal moments. Hemphill utters “the beat was my salvation..led me past broken dreams, solitude, fragments of identity, to a new place, a home not of peace [...] but truth, simple, shameless, brazen truth” (Tongues Untied). Thus, this simple heartbeat is an example of how the film uses sound and the absence thereof to remain impactful, being truthful to the gay, black and male experience. The equivalence in Barry Jenkins’ work of this profound silence is the recurring presence of a breeze: “It comes through the hood and everything just stops for a second, cause everyone wanna feel it. Everything just gets quiet […] it’s like all you can hear is your own heartbeat” (Kevin, Moonlight). Presented with the low hum of white noise in the film, the breeze transfigures into a universal pause, even in the obscure environment of the hood. Both sounds are indicative of a temporary freedom, but, in their mysticality they appear sinister. 

Undoubtedly, Moonlight uses sound and the lack thereof as well, to link performance and corporeality to the visualization of the alienation that black gay men face. Indeed, Chiron, the main character in Jenkins’s narrative, is mainly characterized by an expressive silence throughout the course of his life. An example of this is in the first chapter, where Little is pushed to find a hiding place from his bullies. On top of this physical encasement and entrapment, growing synchronous sounds of the other kids throwing debris at his window surge in the audience’s ears while Little covers his own ears as a form of isolation within a confining space. This instance of forced disconnection is illustrated sonically and shows how sound can contribute to the effect of visual performance. When Chiron is brought to the principal in chapter two after breaking his silence through violence, the volume of the principal’s speech gradually reduces until it becomes fully mute, manifesting Chiron’s dissociation from reality.

Understanding the multiple functions that the film’s sound design carries pushes this observation further. Firstly, sound has the role of immersing the viewer in the environment of Liberty City. This is where, in contrast to Riggs’ piece that mainly uses asynchronous sounds to contribute to the stylization of his film, diegetic sounds are used to make the story as credible as possible, such as the blaring sound of the horn of a train in the scene where boys are playing football in the grass. Inserted discontinuously, this blow overlaps with the end of a panning shot of other boys glaring at Little, triggering the next tracking handheld shot of Little running that carries abrupt movement and disrupts the scene. 

This is where sound’s second functionality can also be perceived since, on top of accomplishing a more realistic atmosphere, sound interplays with cinematographic techniques to capture the subjectivity of its performance in its fabricated reality. Similarly to Tongues Untied, this creates a sort of push and pull effect, but here between objective reality and subjective truth and in looser terms, realism and formalism. Yet, the accentuation of Chiron’s reality is associated with a certain dissonance, partially due to the diametric relation between sound and editing. Along with synchronous sounds, underscoring is presented in the scene to almost contradict its visual elements. A harmonious, ballet-like symphony can be heard during that same shot of boys glaring at Little in a threatening way. It seems misplaced here within the context of the scene, a masculine game of football, and shows how out of place Chiron feels, with the overwhelming sonic quality of dissonance to translate his bitter experience. 

   Contrary to its preconceived notions of genre and to the melo declamation in Tongues Untied, Moonlight is not driven by dialogue but by its stylization. An example of this is the fact that Jenkins always incorporates a sort of blurriness one way or another in most of his shots. Whether it be through the rack focus of the lens or actual camera movement, the pacing is shaken up through either handheld or stationary quality. Though this is also partially intended to sophisticate Jenkins’s otherwise long shots, all of these moments amount to Chiron’s distancing from the audience and his unclear perception. With a similar function to Riggs’s heartbeat, the longevity of each shot creates this ambiguous hesitance, but differentiates itself from the fast intervallic pacing in Tongues Untied that consists of overlapping voices and shots. For instance, the first shot of the film takes place for the span of a whole two and a half minutes Though featuring a dialogue between Juan and his drug worker, Jenkins reorients the viewer’s expected way of seeing a conversation take place in a shot-reverse-shot fashion and instead uses a disorienting panning shot that contributes to the realist desire of wanting one’s work to appear untouched, uncut and thus uncomfortable, putting the audience on edge. As a performative documentary, performance is one of the primordial elements in Tongues Untied and appears in a way that diverges from Moonlight. It has the qualities of experimental and personal filmmaking but with a strong emphasis on its impact on the audience. Compared to Jenkins’ film, that fabricates movement in almost every shot by tracking the subject to make its content appear more seamless, Riggs creates movement corporeally. He uses his own body, looking directly into the lens, which emphasizes the relation between the creator and viewer in his film. In other words, Riggs uses performance contrastingly to create space for the abstract in his non-fiction work. Indeed, the body is used as a vessel for identity mainly through dance, such as in the first scene that shows glimpses of him naked in the frame of a medium shot. This can be interpreted in many ways. Riggs uses an expressive medium of art to combat masculinity and change what the word “masculine” denotes, similarly to the football scene in Moonlight. But instead of taking the lens of the subject’s perception, Marlon Riggs’ bare body serves as a canvas for the viewer’s observations. At the same time, dance is also identified ironically as a “ticket to dissimilation” (Marlon Riggs, Tongues Untied) and linked to the exotification of black men. Reduced to his craft, Marlon Riggs conflictingly appears dehumanized and lifted free. The film goes through multiple stages to illustrate these multidimensions of intersectionality. 

Early on, in Tongues Untied, homosexuality is evoked through the focus of the drag queen and the performative element of snapping, that is simultaneously used as an episode of collective experience and a rhythmic sequence to enable movement. The other three layers of the film: race, masculinity and religion, are also exteriorized with the use of pervasive speech through persistent poetic prose as a form of inner-verse: “anger unvented becomes pain, unspoken becomes rage, released becomes violence cha cha cha” (Tongues Untied). Even these words have a corporality to them in their rhythmic pace that embodies this repetitive dance of destructive behavior. This phonetic use of speech and language shows that this film is dominated by sound. The passage from Joseph Beam’s “Brother to Brother: Words From the Heart” is a crucial dialogue that expresses anger, hurt, pain, love and seduction while commenting on the black church and Christianity with its choral chants that, just like the overwhelming use of close-ups of mouths and overlapping voices in the film, ties the intersectional wave of deception towards black gay men. 

Both works deliberately go against what their respective genres insinuate, whether it be a documentary that does not content itself to chronicle statements and B-roll or a work of fiction and drama that is so stylized to the point where it immerses you fully into the reality of its content. Through the complex use of sound and its relation to editing, both amplify visual components to capture the viewer’s attention, though Tongues Untied carries pervasive speech through a persistent poetic monologue and inner verse, whereas Moonlight is characterized by a reduced dialogue that leaves room for its cinematographic stylization. Silence is applied to embody the conflict gay black men face regularly: Should they stay silent and therefore complicit in their erasure to society, or break the silence, untie their tongues and risk the cost of getting cut?

Works Cited 

Anderst, Leah Routledge. 'Calling to witness: complicating autobiography and narrative empathy in Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied', Studies in documentary film, 2019, Vol.13 (1), p.73-89. PDF. 

LeBlanc, Robert. ‘Representing Postmodern Marginality in Three Documentary Films’, CLCWeb : Comparative literature and culture, 2009, Vol.11 (2), p1-10. PDF. 

Moonlight. Directed by Barry Jenkins, distributed by A24, Camera Film. 2016. English; United States; 1h51min. 

Pincheon, Bill Stanford. ‘Invisible Men Made Visible: Review of Tongues Untied’, Black camera: the newsletter of the Black Film Center/Archives, 1991, Vol.6 (1), p.5-6. PDF. p.73-89. PDF. 

Tongues Untied. Directed by Marlon Riggs, distributed by Frameline, California Newsreel, 1989. English; United States; 55 min.

Dead Air, Dead Space: Culpability and Collapse in Landscape Suicide (1986), Grey Gardens (1975), and Pictures of Ghosts (2023)

By Micah Slater, Edited by Avana Wang

Documentary cinema has spent time in alignment with prevailing thought and subversion in equal measure. It has engaged as both dissident and conformist; employing the apparatus as an agent of change, of conservatism, and practically every (nominal) shade in between. Subversive cinemas subsequently frequently employ documentary in service to alternative histories and perspectives. Unfortunately, in order to legitimize these perspectives, these documentaries often reference established documentary norms in terms of form and structure. These norms can be and have been established outside the influence of Hollywood alone. Therefore, it is both of note and of interest when documentaries on subversive subjects make use of subversive forms. This paper poses that the unconventional histories told in Landscape Suicide (1987), Grey Gardens (1975), and Pictures of Ghosts (2023), reject both prevailing social sensibilities and conventional documentary form. They instead labor towards a film language of space itself, where events and narratives are not best told by people, but through the places where they occurred, the air through which they moved. They choose to thread their narratives through the cracks in the foundation, revealing the looming, imminent collapse of space itself.

James Benning’s Landscape Suicide is part of an anthology focused on space, in an oeuvre already thoroughly marked by meditations of the same. California Trilogy (1999–2001), Ten Skies (2004), The United States of America (1975), and Thirteen Lakes (2004), should all in name and release date alone indicate the expanse of Benning’s spatial sensibilities. His work has often been described as among the greatest of slow cinema; despite the term itself being coined only in 2003 (Luca and Jorge 2022). This combination of slowness, of a deliberate lingering and occupation of space, and of the topics chosen here—Cheerleader Bernadette Protti, who stabbed a friend to death over an insult, and Ed Gein, American serial killer—creates a stark contrast to prevailing models of true crime documentary in both its patience and its condemnation. “Anti-true crime, or the truest version of it,” Landscape Suicide is a product both of Benning’s preoccupation with space and of an effort towards a more ethically-concerned alternative to conventional crime documentary narratives, notorious for their voyeuristic lens and exploitative content (Cole). Picturing the conventional American true crime documentary about these people makes Landscape Suicide’s individual impetus towards a spatial language much more apparent. The people Benning selected–an all-American cheerleader and the Butcher of Plainfield—are high-profile cases that have stirred deep emotion in the American consciousness for decades. However, Benning’s ethics regarding these subjects are acutely apparent in all of the scenes where the individuals are not present. Landscape Suicide is not solely weighing space as an auteurist signature; it is being used to mediate (or perhaps even soothe) the strong feelings that conventional true crime seeks to inflame. The landscapes audiences see are all spaces that the subjects have occupied, spaces we feel to occupy as we view them. Though the locations themselves are explicit, in that they are tied to events of national importance, the rows of houses, two-lane roads, and ungroomed vegetation could very well exist in any part of America. Therefore, Benning’s common experience of space is his great middleman. The “rejection of drama, the implementation of long takes, and stationary shots [...] allow audiences to come to their own understanding,” pointing to efforts toward a film language that believes ethics are tied to spacetime itself (Ross 261-62). This spatial language becomes concentrated—more so than in Benning’s visual diaspora—in Grey Gardens.

Upon release of Albert and David Maysles’ Grey Gardens, many critics condemned the film, claiming that “the brothers had exploited two vulnerable and perhaps unstable women” in the interest of direct cinema (Abbot 108). While discourse has proliferated on this topic for decades, Grey Gardens’ titular estate has remained a visual landmark, a space so iconic (or iconoclastic) it nearly supersedes its residents. After all, the Beales themselves were not mentioned in a title until the 2006 sequel The Beales of Grey Gardens. The first film was made when Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, two eccentric socialites, were subject to headlines after the Suffolk County Board of Health cited multiple violations against the property. The film makes Grey Gardens’ otherness even further apparent: opening on a brief conversation about a lost cat, the camera drifts through empty rooms, focusing on chipped paint, broken baseboards, and finally, zeroing in on a gaping hole in a wall into which Whiskers the cat has allegedly disappeared. And, while Little Edie remarks on the policies of East Hampton (“they can get you for wearing red shoes on a Thursday. They can get you for almost anything”), the film cycles through static shots of the village—affluent, well kept homes; ponds, beaches—before ending on a static shot of Grey Gardens: unpainted, run-down, overgrown [00:01:50]. The language of space here is not nearly as much of an assertion as in Landscape Suicide as it is a foundation, both the source of the sensation surrounding the Beales and what we first—and most consistently—are presented with. While the Maysles seem to marvel at the otherness of this space, again raising the discourse of exploitation, no compromises or alternative locations are used. Little and Big Edie are not transported to another place for interviews, the camera never again physically leaves Grey Gardens after the introductory contrast: the lingua franca is the space itself. 

Pictures of Ghosts (2023) is both more conventional and more personal than Landscape Suicide and Grey Gardens together. As the only film that makes primary use of archival footage, its treatise serves as a remembrance of the analog cinemas in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, which were key features of director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s youth and adulthood. He spent both periods in residence in an apartment owned by his mother in Downtown Recife, and after her death, by himself. In fact, the first half of the film centers on this apartment, viewed through the lens of the dozens of amateur, and, eventually, independent films he made there through university. We see decades of change wear away the neighbor's yard; then we see the house devoured by termites. Brick arches go up and walls come down, bedrooms change into media rooms, furniture rearranges and disappears. It’s evident that the apartment, much like Belén Vidals’s theoretical house, has “accumulated a particularly fierce and determined specificity” (Rhodes 86). This is in explicit contrast to the cinemas, which, as victims of the public economy of interest, are presently becoming abstracted—abandoned, transformed into churches and malls, or plainly demolished. Therefore, the footage Mendonça Filho has amassed, in its sheer volume and longevity, is an invaluable resource in the film language he sets forth. Spatial portraits of both locations would be fruitful alone, but forty years of change—especially regarding such a marked decline—transforms the spaces from topics to parts of speech in the type of communication Pictures of Ghosts is aspiring towards. Shots of the same buildings, chronicling apogee, to decline, to shuttering, to decay, crystallize time and its passage. The changes are gradual, but they are drastic, and the cinemas hold those memories diligently. Mendonça Filho is also an interlocutor: in one instance, with the support of footage from three different eras, he notes a plain red external wall of a former cinema palace that used to contain vitrines of posters and memorabilia. It is this kind of rumination—on what used to be, and what is now hidden or remiss—that makes Pictures of Ghosts an extremely compelling (and, due in no small part to its seven-year direct construction and decades of preparation, authorial) tributary to a cinematic language of space. Though subject to time and decay, Recife’s cinema palaces speak for themselves, embodying the spaces—past, present, and future—they occupy.

The documentary form must inherently accommodate space. For decades, documentaries have taken iconic spaces as subjects. However, as these films postulate, spaces are not only passive elements, alike to a stage or venue. Space is a language capable of communicating ethics, character, history, and time. Landscape Suicide circumvents documentary norms by using space to ethically and simultaneously interrogate genres and a subject characterized by polemia and hyperbole. Grey Gardens examines the house as a private and public subject, where space communicates institutionally (and societally) imposed right and wrong ways of being. Pictures of Ghosts sees space in dialogue with time, discussing the changes to downtown Recife, the Brazilian film industry, and the failures of their buildings themselves. These films are all also efforts in preservation. As Paula Rabinowitz has noted, filming an “essentially ephemeral event, a vanishing custom, a disappearing species, a transitory occurrence, is the motivation behind most documentary images” (120). This is true in the cases of many documentaries, but the efforts towards a spatial language in these films augment her argument: it is not just the filmed that is ephemeral, that is in need of preservation, but the act of filming itself. Spaces decay, but they do so in the labor of conveyance. Even the kind of space and the way it is depicted create meaning. 

The spaces of these three films are not only centered as agents of language, but possess a shared discourse on spaces in decay—what happens in order for, and after, a place’s ‘death.’ Landscape Suicide foregrounds the idea of topography itself being capable of murder. Benning is keenly interested in individuals as a born-in parts of the places in which they exist, and in the interconnectivity that arises from this relationship. Therefore, homicide, and especially serial homicide, is the most intimate and violent form of collapse: self-harm against the biblical clay from which we were formed. Landscapes abound; suburban houses and roads stand vacant and anonymous, yet this spatial language encourages the assumption that they are somehow relevant to the crimes that Landscape Suicide centers. An audience is encouraged to imagine how this place, despite its void of delivered context, is somehow liable for murder. Further, they are prompted to consider how these places have been abandoned, due to imprisonment, death, or other intentionally-undetermined exit. In many ways, Benning’s film is a cinema of the rapture. Dead air hangs over once-occupied scenes, landscapes that have caused their own death. A unique kind of rot is represented here: one that is not structural but spiritual, a para-natural abandonment that may one day lead to a collapse that has yet to occur. Perhaps refracted off of the condition of the film’s subjects—prison does not allow for itself nor its subjects to decay—Landscape Suicide sees collapse as a perpetually imminent consequence of the ruin we cause each other. Julian Ross cites Benning with the quote “I couldn’t get a sense of the murder, but the collective guilt still lingers” (271). Where this guilt lingers, out of the abstraction of the crimes themselves, is the locus of blame. For Benning, collapse is the inevitable aftermath. 

Meanwhile, Grey Gardens’ picture of dead space is very nearly an argument in the reverse. Big and Little Edie inherently exist as “victims of and subject to the house in which they live,” as they had two years prior to coming under scrutiny (Rhodes 87). Deterioration is the premise of their lives as they lived them at the time of filming: they are surrounded by the debris of memory, sleeping in piles of papers and photographs, a large portrait of a much younger Big Edie leaned against the wall near the door. Grey Gardens postulates that decay is not a consequence of abandonment, but instead of use: it is its tenured occupation by these two particular women, alone with each other for decades, that has caused the house to rot. It is the containment of these years that amplifies the spatial voice of this film; despite the fact that we are not actually privy to much of it. Despite the house boasting 23 rooms, we only see 5, imbuing the space with “potentiality [...] a kind of imminence” that promises new and unknown forms of collapse (Rhodes 87). The Edies seem very skilled at the compartmentalization required to cut themselves off from society and their squalor from themselves. The Maysles filmed two years after the surprise inspection, and two years after affluent relatives (including niece/cousin Jackie Kennedy Onassis) paid for renovations, including hygiene facilities and running water. The unknown of a prior, more dilapidated space is perpetuated in these unseen rooms. Space is being used to proliferate ideas of worst-case scenarios, made more voyeuristically taboo by how frequently the Edies speak from offscreen, or talk about going to (or having been in) rooms we never see. Little Edie searches for cats in the attic and references a maid’s dining room. Big Edie speaks of her bedroom as “concentrated ground” [01:12:12]. A misuse of the word, as one of the Maysles corrects, but nonetheless resonant with the course of collapse as it has taken throughout the house. The very variety of home that Grey Gardens is, or once was, is diametrically opposed to constant, continuous, concentrated occupation. Many (and at the time of its construction, most) of the houses in East Hampton were vacation homes: temporary residences for socialites affluent enough to shirk loyalty to spatial notions of permanent residence. Space speaks loudly of the ways the Beales have neglected to perform their station. 

Pictures of Ghosts uses its spatial language to resist collapse, likely because it has a long-lived and personal stake in the preservation of Recife’s movie theaters. The film is also acutely aware of its inevitability. Neither Landscape Suicide nor Grey Gardens visualize an end to their decay: American prison sentences for murder are synonymous with forever; the Beales will presumably always have relatives to bail them out of eviction. Menonça Filho is surrounded by the imminent demise of the cinemas he loved so dearly, thus the making of Pictures of Ghosts—with its years of footage—while these places are still discernible in the landscape. Mendonça Filho treats the past as a vision of transcendence, acting with a reverence for the unique temporal palaces of cinemas: inside, time stands still, but outside, the winds of time and socio-economic forces chip away at their grandeur. This is particularly emphasized by a remarkably tender interlude in material history where Mendonça Filho grinds to a halt to memorialize a projectionist and a dear friend, who worked in one of the once-many cinemas in Downtown Recife. Aside from the director’s own interjections (including his own voiceover), this is the most human that Pictures of Ghosts identifies itself to be. Cinemas and their magic, at least to modern audiences, have forgone the projectionist for many years. With the proliferation of digital cinema packages (DCPs) and the dwindling need to switch reels during a film, projection—a profession that already intentionally hides itself behind the image—has become personless, automated. It reminds that decay is not merely structural or ideological, but has direct ramifications on concrete modernisms: employment, industry, real estate. A limb of Pictures of Ghosts addresses a time during World War II when one of the once iconic, now defunct theaters was constructed as a UFA cinema, a way for the Nazi party to reach South America with propaganda pictures, and also to benefit financially from Recife’s rich moviegoing culture. This event predates Mendonça Filho, of course, but the history is not being conveyed by him (despite his voiceover). These spaces speak of their own histories, carried forward through time. Marquees here earn their own segment of the film: towering above masses of blurred people, their cinemas mark time in equal measure as they move through it. 

Despite disparate doctrines on what their shared filmic languages actually communicate, Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts raise a shared question: by whom did this occur? What accommodated for these images of decay? Who is truly to blame for these murders? Who allowed the Beales’ living conditions to become so unsafe as to be threatened with eviction? Who took these palaces and tore them down? Who is liable for the death of these places? The indictment is clearly institutional. Throughout a question and answer at AFIFest 2023, Mendonça Filho repeatedly cited one reason for the remaining cinemas’ marginal, but surviving, present condition: state funding and cultural preservation grants. He spoke of cinemas as an endangered species, of the extant few still in Recife as landmarks whose spaces are imbued with narrative. While the spatial filmic language of Pictures of Ghosts allows itself to meditate on theoretical concepts, the utilitarian purpose of the film is extremely clear. Because of this, in many ways, this film is by far the most conventional; and with evidently good reason. Neither of the two aforementioned have courses of action to offer; they do depict problems but are nonetheless without solutions. Interestingly, though, they agree with Pictures of Ghosts in placing blame. Landscape Suicide identifies failures in bureaucratic systems as much as it does in humanity. Collective guilt’ is an accusation towards things that can feel guilt, certainly; but it also speaks towards the judicial verdict. Hinted at with its presentation of public ‘landscapes’ in schools and roads. Grey Gardens, interestingly, finds fault in both the Village of East Hampton and in the distant relatives that merely sent money for minimum repairs and did nothing to ensure the wellness of the Edies, nor the soundness of the house. Spatial language is a particularly effective medium for conversations on negligence: nothing bears accusations of decay like a rotting house, an abandoned building, or an empty street. It is infinitely more possible to defend oneself against a person than an empty room. 

And yet these interpersonal defenses abound. Grey Gardens’ human protagonists insist on their lifestyle; Big Edie “thrives” on the smell of her room (which, if the length of the film is to be considered, is a combination of cat food, urine, food waste, and body odor), and both of the Beales defend their lifestyle vehemently [01:12:08]. Little Edie refers to the Village’s surprise inspection as a “raid” [00:01:51]. Concerns regarding the mental wellness of the two are what sparked much of the film’s initial controversy, but ultimately they are adults who manage a daily life, feed and clothe themselves, and seem, though occasionally cantankerous, ultimately content. An element of resignation colors Pictures of Ghosts as well. For many of these lost cinemas, there is no way to bring them back: the camera meditates on vacant lots where demolition has befallen a theatre; abandoned implements of construction hang like tissue and jut like bone in other half-augmented structures. It’s only natural that these places would not last centuries; the social mode and cinemagoing culture specific to Recife that enabled their renaissance certainly didn’t. Projectionists aren’t expected to live forever; neither is film stock. As intrinsic as time is to space, ephemerality inevitably wins out with decay. For its ideas of shared culpability and shared place, Landscape Suicide occasionally errs to apathy. If we, and all of our loci, are all guilty of every murder, then there is no authority to define or prosecute these crimes. There is no space to hold perpetrators of a crime that is not itself a criminal. 

With a range of concerns, and a wider range of tactics, Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts are all collectively laboring towards an alternative film language, one that centers space as dialogue, as mediator, as lingua franca. Benning’s ethics of duration indict the collective American occupation of land as complicit, our violent crimes a product of our landscape, images of shared guilt echoing through our foundations. Our decay is spiritual, he posits, an internal rot that threatens to erode our structural selves. The harm we do to one another is reflexive; auto-desecration. Grey Gardens speaks in terms of spatial otherness, presenting the Beales in contrast to their neighbors and their estate as defiant of its governing bodies. Space is the mouthpiece of the eponymous house and its turbulent relationship with its occupants, as much as it is their defender. It is what drew the filmmakers to the topic and is what attracts their camera throughout the film. Pictures of Ghosts, in all of its conventional structure, perhaps allows space to speak the loudest. With images spanning a lifetime, these cinemas become familiar, if not trustworthy. They contain iterations of appearance, of use, of structural stability. They accumulate in a demand for continuous support that simultaneously accommodates understanding of the reason for their decline. Documentary cinema’s ability to chronicle environments, locations, landmarks, and even the anonymity of indeterminate places is deeply charged and deeply effective for the thrust of these films. Throughout Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts, silence speaks louder than words, for it is then when space is permitted to speak for itself.

Works Cited

Abbott, Mathew. "Grey Gardens and the Problem of Objectivity." Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience. Berghahn Books, 2021.

Directed by Benning, James. Landscape Suicide, performance by Anonymous , 1987.

Cole, Jake. "Review of Landscape Suicide." , 2022.

Luca, Tiago d., and Nuno B. Jorge. "Introduction: From Slow Cinema to Slow Cinemas." Slow Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Directed by Maysles, Albert, and David Maysles. Grey Gardens, performance by Anonymous . Portrait Films, 1975.

Directed by Mendonça Filho, Kleber. Pictures of Ghosts, performance by Anonymous . CinemaScópio, Produções Ancine, 2023.

Rabinowitz, Paula. "Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory." History and Theory :Studies in the Philosophy of History, vol. 32, no. 2, 1993, pp. 119-137. CrossRef, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2505348, doi:10.2307/2505348.

Rhodes, John D. ""Concentrated Ground": "Grey Gardens" and the Cinema of the Domestic." Framework, vol. 47, no. 1, 2006, pp. 83-105. CrossRef, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41552449, doi:10.1353/frm.2006.0006.

Ross, Julian. "Ethics of the Landscape Shot: Aka Serial Killer and James Benning’s Portraits of Criminals." Slow Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Visibly Invisible: The Digital Ghosts of Personal Shopper (2016)

By Matthew Chan, Edited by Vrinda Das and Zachariah Steele

In Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (2016), Maureen (Kristen Stewart) is caught within a liminal period of her life. As a medium she fruitlessly hopes to communicate with her recently deceased brother’s ghost to gain the closure she needs to leave Paris, however, in her day job as a personal shopper for supermodel Kyra Gellman (Nora Waldstätten) she may as well be a ghost herself. Like many in the gig economy, Maureen’s job is to be discreet, inconspicuous and above all invisible, she is paid to perform the labor that Kyra is too busy for, providing a service that feels frictionless for the consumer. It is perhaps for similar reasons that Maureen is glued to her phone throughout the film, being attracted to the same promise of frictionless convenience digital technology provides through instant access to information and, more nebulously, instant connection to others. It is this exact quality of digital media that Wendy Chun draws attention to in her essay On “Sourcery”, Or Code as Fetish which highlights how the instantaneous nature of real time interaction with digital interfaces obscures our understanding of how computation actually works, as “real time makes it appear as though only outside events—user mouse clicks, streaming video—cause the computer actions,” (Chun 318). It is precisely because of this sense of convenience that we perceive the internet as akin to the spirit world, a seemingly incorporeal void one throws their desires into Moreover, just as Maureen seeks to commune with spirits as a medium, Chun sees code “As a medium, [that] channels the ghost that we imagine runs the machine”. (Chun 310) The collective mystification with code and how it functions is what fuels its fetishization and causes us to perceive the digital as spectral, even if we hold the implicit faith that there is a real person on the other end. What Assayas’ film posits is what if this faith was broken and what if the digital truly became a portal to the unknown, where our understanding of a solid reality was fully suspended and all you were left with was uncertainty.

Throughout the film Maureen is seen communicating with others primarily through her phone, necessitated by her job and the number of clients she needs to juggle, but one that nonetheless makes it so that she is depicted constantly alone, even if we know that there is someone out of frame sending her a text or calling on the other end. The certainty that you are actually communicating with someone through digital technology stems from the nature of real time interactions, which “always points elsewhere—to “real-world” events, to user’s actions”, there is the acknowledgement that direct action and speech instantly translates to another party, (Chun 316). At various points within the film Maureen talks to her estranged boyfriend Gary over Skype, who, even thousands of miles away in Oman, is able to listen and respond to her as if they are in the same room, even if his presence is mediated by a low quality image (17:28). When taken out of context this interaction can seem as otherworldly as Maureen’s interactions with ghosts, as a direct intrusion on one’s immediate reality, collapsing locations and time zones together. Furthermore, without an understanding of how Skype’s code works there is no certain indication that who you are talking to is a real, living person, having an entirely ephemeral presence within your computer screen. What grounds the interaction entirely is, thus, faith in the concept of real time that “whether or not digital images are supposed to be “real,” real time posits the existence of a source—coded or not—that renders our computers transparent,” (Chun 316). A peculiar effect of this faith in real time is how it warps our visual perception of reality. In no way would an image produced on Skype ever fully feel real, between the various visual markers like low image resolution, fickle light processing and lag, but because of the real time’s “quick reactions to user’s inputs,” “grainy moving images have become a marker of the real,” (Chun 316). All of this suggests that despite how spectral digital technology may appear to be, the instant response of real time interactions makes it feel rational and more importantly, tangible. 

However, just as Assayas suggests a rationality to digital communication, he also shows how the introduction of the unknown and the paranormal can just as easily make this faith in real time tenuous and the digital once more spectral. The film’s centerpiece is an extended sequence where Maureen texts an unknown number during a trip to and from London. Maureen receives various invasive messages while passing through the uncanny liminal spaces of train carriages, lounges and security checkpoints, (39:00-52:39). It is implied that she is potentially talking to a ghost while working as a ghost for Kyra. It is important to note that in the scene immediately preceding this one, we see  Maureen definitively have a supernatural encounter with a violent ghost inside her brother's old home. This suggests a shift in mindset, with the direct encounter with the paranormal casting doubt on her perception of her immediate reality(36:53-38:11). Her loss of faith in the visible, as such, extends to a loss of faith in the digital. Chun states that “Real time operating systems create an “abstraction layer” that hides the hardware details of the processor from application software,” and it is the lack of transparency within text messaging systems as to where and how messages are sent that causes the entire interaction to adopt a haunting quality, (Chun 316). Unlike a Skype call there is no direct visual element to texting, with a complete lack of human presence or image, which casts further doubt on the concept of real time. As though Maureen can proceed with the understanding that the act of texting creates an instant intuitive response on her phone there is no longer any certainty that there is a real human being on the opposite end. It is almost as if the messages she receives are being conjured out of thin air. When contextualized through the lens of her supernatural encounter it makes sense that Maureen’s first instinct is to question whether the number is human, texting in quick succession: “R u real?”, “R u alive or dead?”, “Alive or dead??”, “Lewis?”, suggesting that she is finally making contact with the ghost of her brother (41:27). In this instant, without the certainty in a real human presence on the other end, the real time sensation of texting becomes a performative and highly individualized act of communication, it becomes purely “the illusion— the feel or sensation—of liveness, rather than the fact of liveness,” (Chun 316). Maureen is no longer texting with the goal of simulating a conversation with another person but is merely engaged in the act in an effort to see if her conversation is even real. Thus, without an understanding of how the phone's software functions and without faith in real time, the digital device transforms into a seemingly magical object, a way to connect with worlds beyond our own and beyond human sensory experience, whether that of the digital or the paranormal.

As much as we want to believe that there is something spectral about digital technology, what Chun ultimately emphasizes is the more banal reality that the ghostly dimensions of digital interfaces are simply a tradeoff for convenience, a “magical erasure of the gap between source and execution, an erasure of execution itself,” (Chun 312). It is this same reality that Assayas loops back around to by revealing that the ghost in Maureen’s phone was actually Kyra’s boyfriend Ingo, denying the presence of the paranormal. However, the scene in which this is revealed posits two parallel realities, one of the supernatural that Maureen wishes to believe in and one of the tangible reality that more likely occurred. Following Maureen’s return to the hotel room that the unknown number guides her to,  we fade into an eerie tracking shot as the camera moves through the hotels hallways and out the lobby, with an invisible figure triggering sensors that would typically require a human presence, with elevator doors remaining open and the automatic glass doors of the lobby exit sliding open on command, (1:24:35-1:25:19). In effect what we are seeing is what Maureen believed her unknown contact to be, a malevolent spirit moving through our world, but perhaps more appropriately, what we are seeing is a visual representation of how we think digital technologies function. The frictionless nature of real time interaction has all but erased our understanding of computation, to the extent that we perceive there to be invisible forces, like the ones triggering the sliding doors, to be powering our devices. But what Chun and Assayas both point to is the fact that there always is something there. Just as the scene of the invisible figure wraps we are immediately treated to the exact same scene with the camera moving through the hallways and out the lobby, expect this time with Ingo in person triggering the automated sensors. (1:25:20-1:26:22) This is in effect a firm denunciation of the paranormal within the digital, an acknowledgement that even if we do not directly perceive it there is “the constant regeneration, the difference between the textual representation of a program, a compiled program, a program stored on the hard drive, and the program read-in instruction by instruction into the processor” being processed within our devices. There is always a presence, a code or a command causing the doors to slide open, (Chun 318).

Though we may perceive our devices as ephemeral, we need to acknowledge that this is entirely by design -  as a way to emphasize a sense of convenience. It is, thus, no wonder that we believe there to be something haunting about digital devices, just as we believe there is something haunting about the unknown. Perhaps the ultimate tradeoff we make for frictionless, instant connection is that digital communication can still feel frustratingly solitary. Even though we use our devices to communicate with others the act of communication itself is almost entirely done alone. Without a reactive human presence no matter how much you give of yourself emotionally the interaction will always feel ephemeral. It is to the extent that within the experience of digital communication it may not even matter if you are talking to a real person, a ghost or an algorithm, because it is hard to perceive anything directly outside of yourself. As Maureen hauntingly remarks in the film's closing scene “Or is it just me?” (1:40:55). 

Works Cited 

Assayas, Olivier, director. Personal Shopper. CG Cinéma, Vortex Sutra Detailfilm, Sirena Film, Arte France Cinéma, Arte Deutschland/WDR, Canal+, Ciné+, 2016. 

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “On “Sourcery”, Or Code as Fetish.” Configurations, vol. 16, no. 3, 2008, pp. 299-324.