There’s a bit in The Anatomy of Melancholy about the “madness” common to critics, artists, and philosophers, and by extension anyone who remains so lost in thought or creative action that they’re rarely actually fully present in life. “Is not he mad that draws lines with Archimedes, whilst his house is ransacked and his city besieged, when the whole world is in combustion, or we whilst our souls are in danger … to spend our time in toys, idle questions, and things of no worth?” And then author Robert Burton jumps straight into describing a similar sort of madness: “That lovers are mad, I think no man will deny. To love and be wise, Jupiter himself cannot intend both at once.”
Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, is impeccably acted, inventively designed, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and often devastatingly sad. It was also still such a mystery to me after two viewings that I found it hard to trust my own vocabulary to describe what the experience of watching it is actually like. But Burton, rambling on 400 years before the fact, seems to nail it, or at least part of it: a life where the madness of creativity and the madness of love/lust are constantly exchanged for one another, to the point where pleasure from either is unattainable. But it’s also about the fear of death, the impossibility of romance in the absence of longing, the instinct to project our desires on to others and to seek answers about ourselves in mirror images. In other words, as theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) says of his own life’s work, “It’s about everything.”
Andrew Sarris may be one of the most influential American film critics, but here’s a claim, located within his recent review of In Search of a Midnight Kiss, that may not hold up to some of his better-remembered theories: “Even when we confront 40-year-old virgins of either gender, movies refuse to show them compensating for the lack of a sexual partner. There is lasting shame involved in this spectacle.”
Not to ever, ever profess superiority over Sarris, but I’ve nonetheless compiled today’s list as a way of proving the man wrong. There are actually tons and tons of masturbation scenes found in non-porn movies, from the low brow to the high brow, from as indirect as the boy wizard playing with his wand under the covers in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkabanto as direct as the non-simulated masturbation in Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs and John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus(which would probably feature my #1 pick, from the sound of it, if I ever bothered to see it).
The following 10 films are some of the most memorable masturbation scenes, excluding any movies that might be considered examples of, in Sarris’ words, “the fringe exploitation genres” (I’ve even gone so far as to leave out mainstream horror like The Exorcist, considering it’s crucifix masturbation is far from the self-pleasuring moments Sarris is clearly interested in). Oh, and I’ve attempted to chart these films artistically from lowbrow to high.
Over at the AMC blog SciFi Scanner, there’s a post about the accuracy of Jason Bourne’s condition in the Bourne movies. At the World Science Festival, held last weekend in NYC, there was a panel titled The Brain and Bourne: Neuroscience in the Bourne Trilogy that featured Bourne Identity director Doug Liman and psychiatrist and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi. And according to Tononi, the sort of amnesia that Bourne suffers from, which includes the ability to retain certain skills despite an overall loss of memory, is rare but does exist.
Interesting, but does it really matter? Nobody making the Bourne movies seems to have known its accuracy, and they probably didn’t care. And neither do most moviegoers. Amnesia is simply a good plot device for movies, and oftentimes they’re more about something else than the condition, accurate or not. So, here’s a list of some of my favorite movies with amnesia at its forefront, plus the respective reasons for my not caring if they are realistic or not.
The Bourne Identity(plus The Bourne Supremacyand The Bourne Ultimatum) - Because I’m not rating these in order, I’ll begin with the one already mentioned. Jason Bourne’s amnesia is, of course, a good excuse for a thrilling story, but to me it’s also a metaphor for U.S. intelligence post-Cold War and certainly post-9/11, showing us how, despite efforts to forget or disconnect from foreign policy decisions and/or controversial operations of the past, certain things, people, relationships (etc.) may come back to bite us on the ass. …Read more
In case you haven’t been following the promotions for Gondry’s latest post-modern surrealist fantasy film and have no idea what “sweded” is, it refers to the cheaply produced remakes of Hollywood movies that Jack Black and Mos Def’s video clerk characters create in Be Kind Rewind in order to restock their store’s rental library after they accidentally erase all the originals. OK, that was a long sentence, and is probably confusing if you’re not at all familiar with this movie. So, check out the real trailer here, and acquaint yourself. (Then check out Karina’s November clip-of-the-day post about “sweded” trailers and posters and her early January BlogNosh post about fan-made “sweded” trailers.)
Yesterday BoingBoing pointed to an article on The Psychologist Online by Huw Green that argues that David Lynch’s work, particularly Inland Empire, is an accurate depiction of what it’s like for someone with a psychotic illness to encounter reality.
I immediately thought of last week’s episode of FilmCouch, in which I used Lynch, a new documentary about the filmmaker, as a point of entry to talk about his recent work. I compared Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire to recent films penned by Charlie Kaufman, namely Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I argued that Lynch’s films are far more effective due to the fact he, unlike Kaufman, refuses to provide the viewer with the necessary tools to keep track of the breaks in narrative convention.
Green’s article points out nearly the same thing (without the comparison to Kaufman). Measuring Lynch’s effect on the viewer, Green says:
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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