Oh, and there’s these, from a while ago. To be sure, while I might not have the highest opinion of the man himself, Peter Weller is a pitch-perfect rendition of Frank Miller’s growly, morose Batman. Just a post-script I thought was relevant.
You can find them here, if you’re so inclined.
So, okay. Yeah, stuff happened. Shit went down in the pound, and shit. My life is one of constant flux, and order out of chaos. But, here I am, again. Like the gnat in your ear that lays eggs in the canal, reminding you that armchair film-critics with long-winded opinions about movies won’t go away. We can never really die, because we are immortal, and part of the neo-spiritual ephemera created by cyberspace.
So, alright. To start off, here’s a list of films that will be receiving some type of review in the very near future, as I stretch my finger-bones again and get back into the mood of things. These are some of my favorite films, for one reason or another, that I’ve seen in the long span of time that I’ve been gone – the reasons for which are many, but they primarily involve women, money and some variation on those two themes. More on that later, if there’s interest.
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn) – Such a visceral piece of cinema. It really is the only film I can think of in recent memory where the term “hallucinogenic” can actually be applied without not meaning anything. A punch to the gut, a throwback to those economically paced car chase films of the seventies, a minimalist representation of the Man-With-No-Name archetype (or, one who tries his best to be that archetype, despite all appeals to sanity and the contrary that the film makes along the road), a dream on film that slowly, almost imperceptibly shifts into a nightmare. Violence bursting in at the edges, and then crashing through, unannounced and unwanted, but unavoidable – and for the main character, inevitable. Enough has been said about this already, but I’m going to give it a shot. I’m saving all of my creative genius-juice up for it, however. I have an extra testicle that I keep it in, that this film made me drop.
The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius) – It’s a film that’s entirely reliant on its gimmick, but it’s also a joy to watch. Yes, it’s story is as old as cinema, but that’s kind of the point – it’s a framework for experimentation and a tribute to, not just silent cinema, but cinema in general. It’s simplistically plotted, almost to a fault, but the emotions ring true. Also, very few have made note of the implicit element of parody in the film, and I want to write something about that.
Tree of Life (Terrance Malick) – Probably Malick’s most divisive movie, and that’s saying a lot. It’s a three hour tone poem about man’s place in the scheme of the universe, about the relationship between the micro and the macro – hefty things to attempt in any medium, but if there was any filmmaker who could take those bold, and yet vague, ambitions and turn them into something beautiful, it’s Malick.
The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan) – I’m probably going to come out on the opposite side of history on this one, when all is said and done. After the second film, it is kind of a let-down. There are too many unnecessary elements to what could’ve been one of the most bold proclamations of cinematic spectacle, and Batman, put on screen in the last decade – why the nuclear bomb subplot when the revolutionary narrative angle was more than enough, and was more thematically interesting? Why the last minute reveal about JGL’s character? – but, for all that, there are moments of real brilliance interspersed throughout that make it a worthy successor to its predecessor. It is bold and ambitious, and I applaud and feel more forgiving of a film like this that genuinely shoots for the stars and misses by this much than one that aims true for the cement.
The Avengers (Joss Whedon) – There’s not really much to write about this other than, “Dude, Captain America! Iron Man! Hulk! Together! On Screen! So awesome! And they’re fighting! So awesome! Sooooo awesome!” Which, to be fair, is essentially the reaction it was trying to garner, and it succeeds with aplomb, although Whedon’s style and personality could do to shine through a little more. Very fun stuff.
Captain America (Joe Johnson) – A study in how not to structure an origin story, and also how to make superheroes really, really boring. I’m not even one of those guys who has a problem with Captain America from a political standpoint – in fact, I think he was used perfectly in The Avengers – but, good god. This was maddening.
Thor (Kenneth Branagh) – Grand, Shakespearean opulence was never done so well as when Kenneth Branagh made it his own. Falls into narrative narcolepsy once Thor hits Earth, but every bit on Asgard is inspired, over the top, and sometimes appreciatively goofy. Tom Hiddleston as Loki is inspired casting. More on this later.
The Master (P.T. Anderson) – I’ve yet to see it – a problem which will be remedied shortly.
Cabin In The Woods (Drew Goddard) – Probably one of the more interesting films to come out of the “post-modern” school of thought since Scream. It also seemed like, near the end, that the film took a lot of inspiration from the SCP creepypasta series that have made the rounds of the internet since their inception some years back. It also has probably one of the moments I’ve laughed the hardest at in a movie, this year – it involves a motorcycle and a holographic wall. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about.
Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg) – Worst movie I’ve seen this year. That sounds hyperbolic, but it really isn’t. This was just terrible. It’s like a parody of the kind of movie that a nihilistic philosophy major in college would write – or, of a David Cronenberg movie, really. It’s just so monotonous, and with such a long-winded tonal drawl that it feels almost like it was intentional (and maybe it was). The only moment the film really came alive for me was a brief, three second shot near the end when Pattinson’s character swaggers down a dark alley, half-crazed with a gun in his hand. That moment had the kind of by-the-cajones feel that I expected the entire movie to have – not to make a judgment on the film based on prior expectation or anything, but it probably would’ve been for the best.
Killer Joe (William Friedkin) – Just a lot of fun. Especially for a Dallas local, like myself. So much unfortunate familiarity, so much sight-spotting. I don’t want to encapsulate this film too much as I am going to write up something larger on it pretty soon, but I really loved how Friedkin and Letts were able to use the charming, clean-cut “Matthew McConaughey” persona that he’s built up for himself over the years and stretch it just a little bit to the left into something genuinely terrifying. Inspired casting choice.
Chronicle (Josh Trank) – It’s AKIRA: The Movie. There, I said it. That being said, however, it was also really enjoyable and intriguingly done, although the handheld camera framework is kind of unnecessary at the start of it and only becomes moreso as the film progresses. As AKIRA movies go, this looks like the only one we’re going to get, and it’s a perfectly fine rendition thereof.
Detention (Joseph Kahn) – I loved this movie. Tons of fun. More to come on this one. Too much for a few sentences worth.
Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson) – My brother and I have always said that one of the reasons that Wes Anderson’s recent films have failed to have any effect on us is that they’re essentially children’s films with adult characters, and while that’s something you can do with some very real and interesting success, it’s not something he can pull off quite so well anymore. Here, he makes a genuine children’s film, a fable about young love and individuality filtered through the pastels of adolescence, with ideas about burgeoning sexual identity and finding one’s place, and with his candy-colored visual aesthetic it just fits so well that it’s really, probably, one of my favorite films of this last year. Very affecting, and moving, and the end is one of the few to have me clapping at the end of it – the other being one that’s two spots down.
Prometheus (Ridley Scott) – I fell asleep during this, initially. After his first two films, Ridley Scott has developed for himself a really droney style that kind of acts as a go-to narcotic for me. There’s a lot of pseudo-philosophical ideas about Creation, and the concept of god, and how our place in the grand scheme might not be what we at all expect, and that’s all fine and potentially interesting, but they’re grafting it onto the framework of a series that has never been that before – and you say, Henry, it’s not an Alien film, it’s just in the same universe! And, you’d be right. But now it’s a piece of the mythology. It’s part of Ridley Scott’s personal canon for his original film, and it’s unecessary. The Alien films are slasher movies, or haunted house movies more like, in space. I mean, that’s it. And, as it stands, there’s not really a lot of room left for innovation. Interesting ideas struggle to breathe in this, suffocated by Lindelof’s need to please the fans. Set-pieces are anti-climactic and dumb. The whole film looks fakey and grey in that boring sepia color-correction scheme that seems to be the industry standard, now.
Safety Not Guaranteed (Colin Trevorrow) – And, this is the second one. This is just a beautiful movie, near the top of my list for the year, and not at all the piece of hipsterism promised by both its ad campaign or the presence of Aubrey Plaza. This had both myself and the girl I went with in tears of joy and excitement by the end of it, and that’s saying quite a lot. More to come on this, later on. I don’t want to blow my wad on it too much.
Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev) – Another film I haven’t yet seen, but intend to. It looks brilliantly moody, from the trailer.
John Carter (Andrew Stanton) – It’s very pretty to look at, and occasionally exciting, but there’s a reason this movie failed, and his name is Taylor Kitsch. He is wood. More on that later.
The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc Webb) – I liked this a lot initially, but the more I thought about it, the worse my opinion of it became. There’s a lack of necessity that’s felt throughout the whole film, and it just reverberates so loudly in the changes they decided to make, just for the sake of it, without any regard to emotional or narrative consistency. I’m not a huge stickler for films sticking so close to their source material that they can’t breathe as works on their own, but guys – there’s a reason the Uncle Ben arc works so well. It kind of needs to be there, and in a much larger way than how it was presented. It has barely any impact at all. That said, I did enjoy the character arc they gave Peter Parker, in this – his gradual move away from vigilantism into genuine heroism, and his understanding of his place within the makeup of the city, and his relationship with Gwen – and the action sequences, which are far more “Spider-Manny” than anything Raimi ever accomplished. But really, to get Spider-Man better than Raimi did, and thus grant this film any reason to exist at all, this film needed a really dark, kinky streak of Jay-Z or Mos Def, or any of those New York rap luminaries, in its hairline. Alas, Marc Webb, your name held so much hope.
The Intouchables (Olivier Nakache & Eric Toledano) – This year’s “inspiring foreign film” is, surprisingly, genuinely inspiring, and a lot less trite than I thought it would be. Directed with no great thought toward mis-en-scene, the real gem of the movie is the relationship at the core of it, which is portrayed beautifully. I don’t understand why they made the caretaker black, though. I mean, if it were a fictional film, I could understand it, but. . .he was a real guy. And, he was white. He is very good in the role, though. Don’t misunderstand. I’m just curious.
Project X (Nima Nourizadeh) – Really quite fun, and harkens back to a time when teenagers still had house parties like this (yes, they did exist, though not to this extent). Not a lot to it once you get past the surface, but it’s shot surprisingly well for something that looks like was conceived over two fortnights. Also genuinely surprised at the scope of the party. It becomes a really visceral action film at the drop of a hat, and in that change, it wins my heart.
Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope (Morgan Spurlock) – It’s a Morgan Spurlock documentary about Comic Con. It’s what you expect. And yet, it’s also very enjoyable, and heartwarming, and oh look, there’s Kevin Smith. I wonder how long it will take until he starts telling everyone about how he worked on the Superman Lives script that one time.
Battleship (Peter Berg) – Two big-budget bombs under his belt only months apart. It’s well deserved. Everything about this film is just so. . .dumb. It has no understanding or even a cursory knowledge of the science its film is concerned with. Every character is a cliche that acts like a wind-up toy set on a predetermined course, and things just start happening for no real reason at all. And seriously Taylor Kitsch, you’re just the worst.
I feel like every time I post here, I should probably remind my readers that I’m still alive. We should hang out more, blog.
I haven’t just been sitting on my laurels in the past two and a half months – a lot of that time has been spent trying once again to make the vast jump from film critic to creator, and I’m reminded of just how true that Douglas Adams quote is about how writing is essentially staring at a blank piece of paper until your forehead starts to bleed. Hopefully, something interesting will come out of it, this time around. And if not, we aim to fail gloriously, and it’ll be an ungainly mess of random shots of feet, and uninhibited pretension of an amount previously unheard of since Troy Duffy himself, and you’ll all be the first to hear about it, either on here or in the obituaries and back pages of the Dallas Morning News.
But in any case, I’ve also been covering the annual Dallas International Film Festival, which this year landed basically right on my front porch. The first round of my reviews are up over at The Moving Arts Film Journal, including the aggressively middling Cinema Six, the disconcerting Compliance, and the beautifully lyrical Faith, Love and Whiskey, which you can find here.
Oh, and because I said I would, I might as well say hi while I’m in the neighborhood to one of the more interesting volunteers that I had the pleasure of meeting and hanging out with in my spare time this year. So – hey, Diana! I see you! 🙂
You all knew there had to be a reason I was a little bit late writing about this one, I’m sure. In any case, here it is – my thoughts on George Miller’s unfairly maligned Happy Feet Two, presented in the fullest critical extension, was just published over at The Moving Arts Film Journal. I’m kind of proud of this piece on a personal level, considering I managed to write it when I was sick with an exacerbated case of the flu, from overwork and copious smoking. Give it a look-see.
Oh, and by the way – I’m back!
😀
Okay, guys. I’m not dead, and I’m not in jail (yet – thanks, Dallas Police Department, you bunch of malicious, overfed schmucks) – truthfully, I’ve been working pretty steadily these last few months, with a full circuit coverage of the Dallas International Film Festival and a few other things over at In Review Online – although, we’ll see if any of that’s ever actually posted. Finger’s crossed, I guess. Otherwise, I’ve also begun my stint in full at The Macguffin Podcast – with two reviews a week and a column, but I’ll keep that under wraps until it’s out on the front page. I’m particularly proud of it, and I think those of you who are, like me, from the implicit Campbellian/Jungian school of thought on storytelling and filmmaking in particular will get a kick out of it.
For now, however – my first review’s up, of Will Canon’s recently released and relatively interesting, grungy little restructuralization of Film Noir, Brotherhood. Which is a film I feel not a little sentimental about, as it was filmed entirely around my hometown of Arlington, Texas. And, watching it soon became a game of, “hey, that’s my old convenience store, and I used to live right by there!,” and so on. In any case, you can find it here.
In a little while, and purely for the blog, I was also thinking of doing some kind of retrospective on the Harry Potter films as they came to an end – I’m a lot younger than I might seem, and that usually surprises a lot of people. I’m only just recently twenty, and for about the past ten years, these films have played a large part in my generation’s shared pop-cultural experience, and mine in particular. Harry Potter’s our thing, and – for better or worse, as the films do have many of the same flaws that mar the books, nee’ Rowling’s small and implicit structural flaws and reliences as a writer – they’ve doubtless left the same kind of mark that Lewis’ Narnia series or whatever you’d like left so many years ago, and in a more immediate fashion. So, I want to take a look at that. Also, I like Harry Potter, and Emma Watson is like so effin’ hawt you guys seriously.
So, that’ll be up soon enough. Anyhow, enjoy!
True Grit seems like the first time the iconic Brothers Coen have delved into real, tried-and-true family filmmaking – and, for a while, it seems like they’ve settled themselves nicely into the old-Hollywood Western genre, adapting their aesthetic and style of implicit, formal irony and careful attention to the cultural idiosyncrasies that define a place and time to a style of Western that seems like it was a bit less cynical, and just the tiniest bit more heroic. And, even the film’s score fills this out – broad, evenly triumphant horns play in the background as Mattie Ross and her horse make their way across the rushing river, and when Jeff Bridges brilliantly-portrayed Rooster Cogburn rushes full-stop at the line of marauders ahead of him, yelling out in a voice like drunken thunder “Fill your hands, you sonovabitch!” But, every so often, a bit of stark, sudden violence will break through – during the shack sequence, severed fingers are cut loose on the wooden table-top, and a head-shot the leaves a trail of blood down to the floor. It’s a tight-rope balance the Coens are trying to achieve, and for the most part, it comes off wonderfully. Simple and plain, it’s a rousing old bit of blood and thunder, really.
I went through a pretty bad break-up recently – it’s been two and a half months, and it only lasted about just as long, but it did hit me astonishingly and surprisingly hard. Before anything else, she was a friend – one of my closest – and, now she isn’t even that, it seems like. There’s a hole in my wall as a testament to this, where I put my fist through, that I haven’t fixed up yet. In any case, all through this, it seemed like my experiences with this girl were capped off by two movies in particular that, at any given moment considering how high or low I was feeling, seemed to just encapsulate perfectly what the two of us were going through. The first I’d only seen when the two of us really started to get into each other – feeling each other out, trading stories about our exes, and that was Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. In a future post, I’m going to delve more into this movie’s bounding, leaping formalist aesthetics, which really knocked me off my feet, but more than any other film I’ve seen in a long while, this is a movie that captures so perfectly the almost cartoony exaggerated exuberance that someone feels when they’ve met a significant other that they just can’t believe exists, and the eventual triumph over both of their faults and personal fallacies. And, there are aspects of it that are downright brave – the movie makes no bones about either of the central characters at the center of the film, or how just-plain-terrible they come off at the beginning. While it’s certainly more defined in the comic, which is stretched out over a period of like a year and which ends up placing more emphasis on the smaller moments than the set-pieces, the essential triumph of these characters is their resolution to accept themselves, and move forward instead of wallowing in and being defined by the abyss of their past relationships. It’s a very exagerrated, cartoony movie, without a doubt. But – and this runs through every single character, even Wallace Wells – at the same time, it’s something identifiable, and real. On the basest level, it has weight – it has “grit,” so to speak – because the essential emotional conflicts at the core of the film are things that are so honest, and yet represented in such a bombastic, colorful way that they’re reduced to a state of purity. And really, I can’t help but remember the end of this film without thinking of how we ended up watching it together one night, but not really watching it at all.
But, that was the one end of things – that was May in December, like Def would put it; we ended up breaking off and away from each other around the end of January, and by the time the beginning of February rolled around, I didn’t ever want to see Scott Pilgrim again. Ever. It was too optimistic. A new film had gained that special kind of relevancy – the one I’d rewatch, end over end, when I didn’t want to get up. And, at certain points it felt so emotionally familiar that it was actually kind of scary, at certain points. I had had these conversations with her – I had done these things with and for her, and I had had these exact, naive hopes, both of reconciliation and of what seemed like eventual, unending malaise in bed. I still have that last one just a little bit, actually – and this film, if you can’t tell by now, is Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer. And yeah, while the initial build up to their relationship and Tom’s boyishly naive excitement in the first half an hour or so feels about as truthful as the rest of the film, it didn’t really have as much potency for me as the real meat of it, and the decline. I mean, who hasn’t felt that same kind of giddy joy after that first night together, when you feel like grabbing everyone you know and even the ones you don’t on the street and pulling them into a wide, brimming dance? Maybe it’s because this is something identifiable among most guys – but, scene after scene, I had to bite my tongue, even though I was alone and watching this in my bed-room. The scene on the Ikea bed – we’d had that very same conversation, and just like Tom I went and rushed bull-headed into the rest of it without any kind of thought of the later consequences. And, later on in the movie, after they’ve come home when Tom’s face is pulped from a brush-up at the bar, and the conversation culminates with Tom screaming, “well – you’re not the only one who gets a say in this! And, I say we’re a couple, goddammit!” Yeah, that happened too, to the T. And, just like the movie, we didn’t last much longer after that, although our break-off was a fair bit messier, compounded by the immediate inclusion of another guy. But enough about that – Webb’s made a great, bouncing first film, avoiding by leaps and bounds most of the plagues of first-time directors, and emerging unscathed and spotless as one of my newer favorite filmatists. And, even though the soundtrack is purely folk and older alternative stuff, this is a movie of pure, visual shoe-gaze music. Emotion, constant emotion – conveyed through the faces of the two leads, neither powdered nor pulled, embracing with real abandon or standing still apart, looking each other in the eye and trying to hold back tears, on a park bench. Webb seems to know better than most how to convey that essential confusion one feels when someone who, well – was a person you’d grown to care for so strongly, and who had cared for you just as much it seemed like – turns around and reveals to you that the latter wasn’t really at all the case, and then tries to salvage some kind of friendship out of it. But, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not just a thing that happens – worlds seem to shake, and you can’t think of much anything else, for a long while.
We haven’t had our park bench scene yet, though. I don’t really think we will.
Simon West is one of the newer studio-ready action directors – all sepia tones and intensified continuity, compounded with a tendency toward the occasional bit of unintentional schlock. Unfortunately, it’s also him behind this new remake of Winner’s gritty little seventies number “The Mechanic,” and the results – while not entirely barren – don’t really leave much to gander at, and very little of what is good about it can be attributed to West, himself. You can read my review of it here.
For what is hopefully the first of many articles under the In Review letter-head, I take a look at Michael Gondry’s just-plain-perplexing recent attempt at a superhero movie, The Green Hornet – which is a movie marked all through with sudden bursts of grim, out of place violence, racial undertones, and Seth Rogen; it’s pretty much a disaster when you think about it.
In any case, you can read my extended rant about it here.
To be up in a couple of days is a piece I’m actually quite excited about – looking at Will Canon’s Brotherhood, which is a film of particular interest to me, being as its the first film that I know of to feature my neighborhood and hometown – that harsh, red Aggtown – on the silver screen, to the fullest. Ooh – gives me the shivers.
George Miller’s wonderfully idiosyncratic piece of animation Happy Feet is experiencing of late one of those weird resurgences in critical popularity that a lot of movies seem to get, four and five years after their initial release. All over, people are starting to realize that this was a film that was doing a lot of new and interesting things, both visually and narratively, and that it deserved a lot more attention than it got – which is saying something, considering the media blitz surrounding its theatrical run. And considering this, I thought I’d take a look at just how it fits into the director’s filmography, in both a visual and thematic sense, by expanding the piece I’d done on it with Glenn Heath at the beginning of last year for our retrospective of the previous decade three-fold, taking a look at the continued use and presence of the barren, biting wasteland in his all of his films, and the implicit societal myths he creates within them, among other things. It was published just recently over at The Moving Arts Film Journal. And, you can read it here.
Part two in my current series of essays – not written by myself, but instead presented initially by the clever Anon from 4chan’s /tv/. Intriguing – now, we’re moving on to Monster’s Inc and Finding Nemo, while A Bug’s Life is strangely absent. Oh, well.
MONSTERS, INC. (2001)
Monsters, Inc. came at an exciting time in the world of animation. In addition to Pixar making a play for alpha dog, Disney’s post-Katzenberg event flicks continued to do respectable business. DreamWorks was getting traction with critical successes like Chicken Run (if you have the stomach for cognitive dissonance, check out the Rotten Tomatoes page for Antz). Other studios were gearing up for the CGI scene. Animated features were conquering territory so fast that the 2001 Oscars added the Best Animated Feature category to keep them in their ghetto.
That was also the year of the first heavyweight Disney/DreamWorks throwdown, Monsters, Inc. versus Shrek. Everyone remembers Shrek as the clear winner, but was it? DreamWorks got the Oscar because Hollywood loves its own reflection, but Pixar grossed $50 million more and scored higher at RT. Perceptions are skewed by the subsequent Shrek franchise juggernaut, which exists partly because Mike Myers has a knack for persuading people he’s better than they know he is. (Seriously, nobody paid to see the first Austin Powers movie, but somehow he convinced the world they adored it and should flock to The Spy Who Shagged Me. He did the same with Shrek. The original was a big hit, sure, but a billion-dollar sequel? Shrek 2 was okay but come on. I smell sulfur and a signature in blood.)
With Monsters, Inc. Pixar played their own hot-celebrity card by hiring Billy Crystal as a sentient testicle. Crystal’s film career was in a mini-resurgence and he was a smash hosting the Oscar ceremonies throughout the 90’s, so his name definitely kicked up box office dust. Pixar’s mantra is to eschew celebrities and find the right person for a role, but they skated close to the line back then. When they cast Tom Hanks as Woody, he hadn’t yet gone nuclear with Forrest Gump but he was riding a string of big hits and some Best Actor hardware. Tim Allen had the #1 show on television. Of course Pixar famously offered Buzz Lightyear to Crystal first – apparently “the right person for the role” was a Jewish comedian from New York with a delivery somewhere between vaudeville and Woody Allen. (Imagine Buzz’s lines in Mike Wazowski’s voice. I prefer the cokehead from the Midwest, but the mind boggles at the possibility.)
I expect they would have hired somebody more popular for the role of Sully, but I’m pretty sure John Goodman had compromising photos of Michael Eisner at the time. So that was the Hollywood environment in which Pixar launched its counterattack against the DreamWorks ogre. What did they use for ammunition?
The premise for Monsters, Inc. is ridiculous. Let’s get that out of the way up front. Not so much the idea of a monster power plant that harvests children’s screams for fuel via transdimensional closet doors – that’s entirely deranged, for sure, but it’s a cartoon world. You allow a few insane precepts. However when the company can’t generate enough power to meet demand, we’re expected to believe the evil CEO responds by funding research on more efficient fuel collection? Don’t insult my intelligence. Low supply means higher prices. This was 2001, the era of Enron. It’s way more monstrous if Mr. Waternoose manipulates door selections to retard scream production, then enjoys a vigorous spree of price gouging, buys company stock with employee retirement funds and uses the profits to build a new ski lodge in Aspen.
Or should I say “Asp-en.” Like the snake, see? Because it’s scary? Okay, it’s a flimsy pun. Now tell me it wouldn’t be right at home in Monsters, Inc. The movie’s swimming in that kind of weak sauce. CGI flicks have always been terrible about that (DreamWorks even more than Pixar) because they write scripts around settings rather than characters or themes. There’s nowhere to hang a joke except some vaguely-defined backdrop. I call it okay-go humor. Imagine the writers gather in a conference room. Andrew Stanton turns to the others and says, “Brainstorm. A city populated by monsters. OKAY, GO!”
“Godzilla only has to take five steps to get to work!”
“Good! I’ll write that on the white board.” *squeakle squeakle squeakle*
“The Blob is there but he falls down a sidewalk grate!”
“Awesome!” *squeakle squeakle*
“And then he says ‘Oh, great!'”
*squeakle squeakle*
“The crossing sign says ‘Stalk/Don’t Stalk’!”
*squeakle squeakle squeakle*
Please God, strike me dead from flesh-eating nether-crabs if I have to endure any more of this. I don’t know what’s worse, the idea that they used every last stupid gag from their meetings, or that they actually threw out the dumbest ones. CGI movies are finally weaning themselves off this pap… just in time for the imaginatively-named Monsters, Inc. 2 next year. I wonder if it’ll be less homophobic than the original?
Come on, you had to know this was coming. The symbolism is so obvious, there’s no way it isn’t deliberate. Mike Wazowski could see it wearing an eyepatch and high-waisted pants.
Yes, my friends, let me tell you about the unnatural world of homo-sexuals. You can’t always recognize them around you, but there’s a place, oh yes, there’s a place where homo-sexuals run rampant just like they’re normal people. You’ll never see it if you’re lucky, and moral, and vigilant, but it’s there all the same. It’s the perverted world in the closet. All closets lead to this world. They’ve built an enormous closet door network, you see, because they’re frighteningly organized. Now don’t be fooled by their smarts. They’re cunning and insidious. In the closet world, though, it’s clear as day that they’re nothing but a horrible hidden city of grotesque monsters.
Of course they’re homo-sexuals, so it’s not a dark, bloody, scary world. This monster world is full of teal and lavender and fuschia and lime green. It’s all soft edges and warm light and colorful midcentury graphics. Even the monsters aren’t very scary, just freakish and generally disgusting. But that’s okay, homo-sexuals “love” all kinds. If you like “bears,” why, here comes James P. Sullivan, the biggest, cuddliest, belly-est furball you could want! Look, he’s walking with Mike, his one-eyed love goblin, out in plain sight for all the see. But’s that’s normal here. Everybody likes Mike.
Where’s Sully going? To work at the biggest facility in town! This is the industry that fuels everything here, the backbone of the closet world. And Sully is the most productive employee of them all. What does he do? Oh, he has a very important job for a monster. He spends his days preying on our unsuspecting children
But even Sully doesn’t know what the boss of the facility is planning. It’s the next step in the homo-sexual monster agenda, the one that will make all their dreams come true. They’re going to kidnap our children into the closet world. Yes, my friends, you must believe me. If nothing is done, this will happen! Let’s hope Sully realizes the error of his lifestyle! If we all pray real hard, maybe he’ll figure out that there’s only one thing he should do outside the closet world. One thing that any homo-sexual should do. Maybe he’ll get rid of his evil boss and make every employee in the facility join in! Then everyone in the monster world will understand that if a homo-sexual is out of the closet, all he’s good for is making people laugh. Homo-sexuals can be very funny. You have to admit that! I’ve seen them in several movies and television programs, like that one old boy on that game show. I’m sure you know who I mean.
Hey, there’s one now, performing a comedy routine. What’s he doing? Swallowing that phallic microphone?! Well heck, I suppose that is kind of funny, in a way! As long as he doesn’t do that in front of the children. He wouldn’t do that, now would he? But nahh, you’re right, that was a cheap shot. An easy gag. I don’t actually believe Pixar made a cartoonishly homophobic movie. Leave the Tinkertoy symbolism to DreamWorks. As we’ve seen, Lasseter’s boys are far more subtle and their misanthropy is infinitely more sophisticated. For Monsters, Inc. it all started with casting. We’ve already discussed Billy Crystal, but the telling roles are Sully and Randall. Quick, what other movie features both John Goodman and Steve Buscemi? Sure, you know this one: The Big Lebowski. Also Barton Fink, both Coen Brothers flicks. The Coens were hot snot in 1998, when Monsters, Inc. was getting off the ground. Fargo had collected a Hefty bag full of trophies and they followed up with their popular stoner-noir. Goodman and Buscemi shot five Coen movies apiece, and it was no accident that Pete Docter, the writer & director of MI, hired from their stable of regular actors. For his first movie, Docter plainly took his cues from the brothers. (Heck, he hails from Minnesota, which is just North Dakota with pro sports. Fargo definitely spoke his language.)
How did that influence Monsters, Inc.? You have no idea. The Coens are famous for their dark symbolism and penchant for Hitchcock/noirish motifs. Docter’s inspiration was to translate these ideas into the pastel-colored playground of a Disney family feature. He succeeded so well that audiences never realized they were watching the bleak downward spiral of a weak-willed man. His obfuscation put the Coens to shame, and that’s saying something. Even at the time, people often forgot how difficult it was to do “shaggy” with computer graphics. Pixar had top-of-the-line server farms, but they were still year 2000 machines. The other little effects shop George Lucas started, ILM, had patented a beautiful technique used in 1998’s Mighty Joe Young remake, but it was proprietary and Pixar had its own dungeon of programmers they could abuse to get the same result. Naturally they conquered the world.
The next time you watch Monsters, Inc. and marvel at scope of the climactic chase scene through the door warehouse, recall that you’re looking at thousands of rigid rectangular objects moving around common axes. That’s candy-corn kid stuff. Throughout the rest of the film, you’ve been watching Sully’s 2.3 million hairs flop around each other like well-ordered Silly String. The servers took 17 hours to render a single frame with Sully in it. Why go through so much trouble? Docter knew he had to sell you this character, and he threw as much computing power as he could at the task. It’s not happenstance that Sully is the only character in the whole movie you’d want to snuggle. You totally fell for it, too. (You can make arguments to include the disgraced Abominable Snowman in the snuggly category, as well as George Sanderson, the furry orange monster who not coincidentally is the only other scarer to instigate a “2319.” The purpose for these exceptions will become clear as we go.) The reason Sully is appealing is because the movie occurs in his POV. The entire setting and story are designed to characterize him via his naive, childlike worldview. So who is James P. Sullivan?
Sully is a company man. He’s the top performer in his entire office, about to break the all-time record even in a downturn. He lives in a colorful cityscape of warm weather and friendly neighbors and copious accolades at his job. The outrageous setting is the mental landscape, the “life of the mind,” of the real-world person he represents. But something’s wrong. To understand a character’s self-image, it’s revealing to examine what he considers to be alien. What constitutes “the other.” Sully lives in a city entirely populated by bizarre monsters of endless grotesque shapes and sizes. He’s the closest thing to a human being and the only one who’s soft instead of scaly or slimy or serpentine. Good grief, for Sully the entire world is “the other.” Our fuzzy protagonist is highly maladjusted. He’s alone in his mind.
So what about fast-talking Mike Wazowski, his roommate, coworker, sidekick and best pal? They’re joined at the hip because metaphorically, they’re two sides of the same character. Mike is Sully’s interface to the world. He’s the part that wants to be normal, to drive a car and have a girlfriend and live a real life. He’s Sully’s conscience – revealed in the very first shot of the characters – waking him up on time, making sure he’s in game shape. That’s why Docter made him a walking eyeball; he’s literally keeping an eye on Sully. Mike is Sully’s humanity. He’s a little green Jiminy Cricket. But he’s a Jiminy Cricket who actually succeeds in protecting Sully from the world. He’s Sully’s defense mechanism. Mike answers the phone after the TV commercial airs, keeps the janitors at bay when they praise him, romances Celia with cornball efficiency. But Mike’s as physically grotesque as the rest of the world, because Sully doesn’t understand social contact. Sully is detached, numb to actual human interaction. Witness his bored disregard of Celia. Assuming this romance represents an actual relationship in the real world, he’s clearly just going through the motions. Sully is an empty excuse for a man. Well, of course he is. He knows it. He’s a monster too. They didn’t name the character “Sully” to be cute.
There’s just one thing in the world that actually matters to Sully: his job. It’s all he really does. Mike chastises him for that. Mike’s well-adjusted enough to understand that the cute receptionist is important and the crap paperwork isn’t. Sully meanwhile just keeps working, without a thought or care. Practically the only other person he talks to is his boss, during which he’s revealed as a shameless suck-up. Man, no wonder Pete Docter had to make him fuzzy and huggable. The rest of him is just sad. In return the company itself, the titular Monsters Inc., takes great interest in Sully. But in what way? Do they appreciate the whole package? Let’s see, during the TV commercial they feature Sully twice, but when Mike appears they quickly blot him out. On the Employee of the Month wall, Mike is cropped out of every picture. Hell no, Monsters Inc. doesn’t want a Sully with a conscience and a life. They want a mindless performer, a number-producing robot.
So tell me, who is Sully without his Jiminy Cricket? He ain’t no real boy, that’s for sure. The Oscar-winning theme song spells it out as clear as you could ask: “I wouldn’t have nothin’ if I didn’t have you.” Sully is ultimately hollow without his little green mask. He’s a nonentity. A cog. Which begs the question, a cog in what? What exactly does Monsters Inc. do? I almost don’t want to say. You can bail now, if you want to preserve some remaining scrap of innocence. Unlike previous movies, I’m not going to spend much time on worldbuilding logic. Monsters, Inc. is so absurd that it’s basically logic-proof. Where the closet doors come from, how they sync up with their counterparts, how the monsters know about the children in their files, none of it was meant to hold up to scrutiny and it’s pointless to pretend otherwise. The “scaring children for fuel” gag is just a hook. The monster world is 100% allegorical. The important question is what it represents.
So what does the company Monsters Inc. represent? Let’s break down how it operates for Sully. His workplace is a huge, bustling facility that’s vitally important to the functioning of the city. No surprise there, he’s justifying his life of drudgery. Safe to say it’s not as glamorous in the real world. At the office, he and his fellow “scarers” are like star athletes. They get a slow-motion entrance and everyone ooo’s and ahh’s about how awesome they are. Again it’s justification, not to mention masturbatory. This guy’s got a major inferiority complex. What’s a scarer’s job? He receives a file about some unsuspecting person, goes in, frightens the piss out of them, collects the screams and starts over with the next file. The company matches him with the best victims. He may revisit someone he’s already scared, looking to spook more out of them. Sully in particular is an expert at squeezing out more screams than his coworkers. He tops the leaderboard. He is hot shit.
Wait, but what’s he really doing? What does “scaring” represent? Hmmm, screams are a pretty obvious analogue for money. He’s scaring money out of people. Is he an extortionist? No, holy crap, it’s worse – Sully is a freaking salesman. Probably hawking insurance supplements or fake security systems or something that requires scary stories about criminals or catastrophic health problems. Well, hell. Sully just got twice as pathetic as before, and that’s saying something. How about the closet doors, what are they? Instant connection to anywhere in the world, in and out quickly, making sale after sale after sale from one office. Jesus God, that sounds like a telephone. Yeah, it’s dawning on you now, isn’t it?
James P. Sullivan is a goddamn telemarketer.
The “scare floor” is a bloody call center. Sully is top dog in a crowded, dimly-lit boiler room, preying on weak, innocent victims rendered as children but more likely to be senior citizens. Think of that the next time you watch all those cannisters filling up. Blllllloop! Another old grandmother robbed of her retirement. Blllllloop! And another one. Bllloop bllloop bllloop bllloop! Slumber party! I suppose it’s no wonder Sully thrives here. He’s disconnected from society. When he goes in for a sale, he doesn’t even bring his conscience. Nor has he any chance of developing something like a real human identity; the horror of being a predatory monster will push any spark of humanity to a safe distance. Meanwhile Mike, in his role as defense mechanism, keeps the world at bay, happily calls this life “success” and dreams of his car and his date with Celia.
Pete Docter, you magnificent asshole, you used millions of dollars of technology to make us root for this despicable son of a bitch. And that’s just the movie’s setup. Which brings us to the actual plot of the film, wherein a monster falls in love with a human little girl. Does the real-world bully – I mean “Sully” – encounter a victim of his telephone terrorism? Does the monster meet his match? Come on, this isn’t Beauty and the Beast or its rote inversion, Shrek. Docter is no Katzenberg. As you can imagine from the setup, he’s after something much more twisted and dark.
“Nothing is more toxic than a human child.” Hasn’t that always seemed like an odd claim? Monster society keeps a whole branch of agents on standby to handle the danger of toxic children, yet children aren’t toxic, something Waternoose, Randall and even Roz already know. The cartoony setting of Monsters, Inc. isn’t supposed to make sense, but this was always a weirdly obvious stumble given its major role in the motivation of pretty much every character. I don’t know if Docter and his team didn’t sufficiently spackle the plot hole, but its presence is revealing. The only conclusion is that “children are toxic” is a myth designed to warn monsters away from interacting with kids. Fill in your own perverse theory about why; it doesn’t matter. We’ve already established that children are metaphorical in this movie. Let’s follow the path that Docter laid out and see what answer it leads to. Sully works the phones in a sleazy boiler room. He’s the biggest producer, but he has a sneaky, belligerent coworker named Randall who does everything he can to take the top spot. One day Sully – conspicuously without his Jiminy Cricket – finds Randall working after hours on some secret scheme, some edge to get ahead. Naively, he pokes his nose where it wasn’t invited.
Then something happens. In the movie it’s the arrival of Boo, a two-year-old Asian-American girl (presumably she’s American, though the time zone board had stopped over central Asia). Sully’s horrified! He runs around like a madman but there’s no escape, so he takes her home. The authorities are on alert! This could wreck his job! Mike’s more worried she could kill them. They need to get rid of her immediately. Then Sully finds a quiet moment and starts to think hey, you know, Boo’s not really so bad. Maybe they can take her to work tomorrow and fix it there. Mike protests, but Mike’s not in charge. The office is swarming with agents, but they can’t turn back now. Mike is determined to send Boo packing. First he summons a random door, but Sully balks. He’s starting to like Boo and won’t get rid of her that way. Then Boo vanishes and Sully is utterly panicked until he finds her again. Mike finally gets the correct door from Randall, and Sully balks again. You can’t trust Randall! Holy cow, Sully always has an excuse not to let Boo go, doesn’t he? It’s like the more he’s with her, the more he wants to stay with her. Even at the risk of ruining his career, or possibly his life. Everyone else sees Boo as dangerous, but to Sully she’s a sweet, innocent, mischievous little secret that comforts him like nothing else can. For the first time in his empty life, he can feel something.
So what does Boo represent? Have you pieced it together yet? For the answer, I refer you to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. The DSM-IV gives seven criteria to diagnose substance dependence: “unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control substance use”, “important social, occupational, or recreational activities are given up or reduced” and so on. The next time you watch Monsters, Inc., see if you can check each one off the list. After the end of the first act, when Boo appears, they fall like British Petroleum stock. The evidence is all there in soothing pastels. Sully, the near-sociopathic phone-shark, stumbles across something that suddenly makes him feel emotion. Something that seems human in his world of monsters. Something that society warns you is poisonous and enforcement agents are always chasing. Seriously, the question isn’t whether Boo represents an illicit drug, but which one? Pete Docter named her after an old term for pot, but that doesn’t map. (Hey, Dory’s not a dory and Marlin’s not a marlin.) The whole thing started with Randall looking for an extra edge in the boiler room, so most likely we’re talking about some species of amphetamine. Regardless, Sully stuck his hand in the cookie jar and got the cutest little monkey on his back. (That shot always gets a hearty laugh, doesn’t it?)
With that piece on the table, it’s easy to fit the whole puzzle together. While you read this, think as Pete Docter did when he wrote it: this is a Coen Brothers movie starring a bewildered John Goodman and a scummy Steve Buscemi. Everyone’s in over their head and the only good guy is the creepy lady cop working undercover as the bookkeeper. Business is down, so call center kingpin Mr. Waternoose has started dealing on the side, using Randall’s aid and connections. Sully bumbles into the plot and, out of his mind on the product, nearly hands the whole thing over to the feds. Waternoose fires him, leaving him out in the cold, but didn’t count on Sully’s newfound meaning in life. Sully returns, steals a fix from Randall and trips like hell while fighting off the scumbag. After a chase sequence, Randall falls into the hands of one of their telephone victims, who beats him to death with a shovel. Meanwhile Waternoose is trying to hand Sully to the feds as a fall guy. How does Sully win? He tricks the old man with a magic closet door – which is to say, a telephone. He gets Waternoose to confess and records it for the cops. Sully is, after all, the top phone-shark in the company.
That’s the superficial plot, but the real story is in Sully’s head, where the truly twisted stuff happens. That’s what Docter put on the screen and called a family movie. Let’s have a look at the black heart of Monsters, Inc., then wrap it up and move on. I’m starting to get depressed just reviewing it. To track Sully’s heartwarming downward spiral, we only have to observe his relationship with Mike, his conscience and connection to society. When Sully grows fond of Boo, Mike screams at him to come to his senses. Sully knows he’s doing something wrong. Then they get tossed out in the cold and Mike’s had it. He draws the line. But it’s too late – Sully’s cut off from his Boo and she’s important enough to sacrifice everything, even the career that once gave him purpose. Nothing else matters. So he turns his back on his conscience. Fuck reality. You’d think this is the low point for Sully, but you’d be wrong. Because this is where his abused conscience start to crumble. Mike chases after him and starts making excuses about how he was confused and needed time to think. The last vestige of Sully’s willpower is failing. His only link to reality is corrupted. From here on, Mike literally humors Boo. (Nice touch, Docter.) He’s even misty-eyed after Waternoose is arrested and the authorities force Sully to give her up.
The end is the darkest scene of all. Robbed of his newfound emotional awakening, Sully has returned to what he knows – his work. He’s taken over running the boiler room. Of course under his watch everything’s happy clowns and juggling balls. His low self-esteem has re-emerged, so he fantasizes himself a big shot again. He’s even on the cover of a magazine. (The magazine is named “Business Shriek!” *squeakle squeakle*) But it’s worse than before. Now he understands how empty he is. It’s his corrupted conscience, scarred and bandaged, that finally comes to the rescue: Mike leads him back to the loving embrace of Boo, the beautiful miracle that makes him warm and innocent. Every part of him now believes this is right and good. Sully takes the final step into ruinous addiction at the sweet little voice that cries “Kitty!”
Brrrr. You know, when I first saw this movie, I wondered why Waternoose got arrested for planning to kidnap children. Are the monsters suddenly sympathetic to their prey? Then I realized they didn’t care about the kids – they cared that he was endangering the monster world with hazardous contraband. Pete Docter had totally suckered me with the adorable Boo and fuzzy ol’ Sully, so much that I lost sight of the premise. That’s the genius of Monsters, Inc. It’s the story of an emotionless scumbag whose desire to feel good drags him all the way down, and he goddamn deserves it. Pixar ran it through their dream machines and cutting-edge computers and made us feel as euphoric as Sully when he’s stoned. They’re the masters of euphoria, right? Don’t they always make us feel warm and innocent?
Suckers.
Yes. Also, surprise – Finding Nemo.
FINDING NEMO (2003)
If Toy Story launched Pixar and Toy Story 2 boosted them into high orbit, Finding Nemo kicked them into warp drive straight at the fucking face of God. The captain of the Starship Hubris was Andrew Stanton. Stanton was a writer for all the previous movies and lead name on the last three, but this was his first time in the director’s chair (an Aeron, no question). Looking at the assignment, I’m pretty sure John Lasseter was hazing the rookie. The degree of difficulty in this film is positively unwholesome. To start with, it’s a movie about fish. Think about that. Any animator can make toys, bugs and monsters dance and sing. But a fish is just a floating face. It’s as if Lasseter took Stanton’s characters, yanked off their arms and legs and handed them back. “Still think you can win an Oscar, Andy?”
On top of that, most of it takes place in the open ocean. Remember in the previous films, all those countless clever details and jokes and Easter eggs in the background? Forget that sissy bar, Poindexter. A good third of this movie has no background at all. Much of the rest occurs on a dull, featureless sea floor. Finding Nemo makes Our Town look like freaking Phantom of the Opera. Plus we shouldn’t have any villains like before. Villains are a crutch, am I right? And just for fun, let’s kill four hundred children in the first five minutes. OKAY, GO!
This movie is an impossible task. This is sixty men guarding Humperdinck’s gate. This is Han Solo facing three Star Destroyers. It’s like a circus act that piles on more obstacles, just to be insane. “Ladies and gentlemen, please direct your attention above the center ring, where Pixar will now attempt to produce a hit movie… about faces floating in a void! Not difficult enough, you say? What if they have to do it… with Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres in the lead roles!” What sort of arrogant bastards take a kid’s movie and turn it into an epic ego-gasmic grandstand? They couldn’t have been more ostentatious if they’d dressed like Evel Knievel and driven a Bugatti on the wing of a stealth bomber. Finding Nemo made it official: Pixar is the ‘roid-stuffed bodybuilder in the gym, and you can’t use the freeweights until he’s through posing in the mirror. Just watch and dream, flab-butt.
Incidently, I wasn’t serious about Lasseter assigning Andrew Stanton the movie. Finding Nemo was Stanton’s baby, script to screen. He got an Oscar nom for the screenplay and rightly so. It’s crazy dense with craft. The humor is character-driven, with minimal capitulation to punchlines and broad absurdity and okay-go stuff. Above all it’s sober and deliberate. No thin spackling here. (Well, maybe one spot.) So it can’t be an accident that, for a colorful film about talking fish, there’s an awful lot of death imagery. Not just the manipulative mass-child-murder opening (“Oh look, they’re dreaming!”) or the endless parade of deadly threats. I mean random bits, like Gill living in a skull and the recurring abyss scenes and “Conscience, am I dead?” This movie has death written all over it. Look close and you’ll find that it’s intrinsic to the whole structure of the film. I should probably explain what that means.
You may or may not know that modern Hollywood movies are all about structure. And by “structure” I mean “shameless formula.” In 1979 the screenwriting guru Syd Field turned Aristotle’s three-act format into a Tinsel Town religion called the Paradigm (yes, capitalized). Here’s the gist: A movie is divided into four quarters. The first quarter is the first act, the setup. Near its end commences the first big turning point, where the story takes off. Usually this occurs fifteen minutes in. (Go ahead, load up your favorite Hollywood flick. Fast forward to the fifteen-minute mark. It’s the first turning point, right? Early Pixar was slavish to this timestamp.) The next two quarters of the film comprise the second act, what Syd Field labels “Conflict,” in the middle of which occurs a “point of no return.” The end of act two is the second major turning point. The last quarter is the climax and denouement. Roll credits. (If you want to depress yourself, think of any wide-release movie from the last thirty years. Now watch how it bows to the formula like a perverse Lovecraftian god.)
Finding Nemo follows the Paradigm. Divide up the running time and check the timestamps. It’s pretty spot-on. Stanton obviously kept a firm hand on the structure of the screenplay. So why does it seem like so much more happens in Nemo than in other movies? And what does that have to do with death imagery? The why is structural. Nemo is built like a cathedral, with stunning art layered atop precise architecture. As for the what, have you ever seen All That Jazz? The movie All That Jazz has a recurring motif about the “five stages of grief” (where “recurring” means “drilled into your head like trepanation”). The five stages describe emotions felt by someone who is dying or grieving a loved one. In Finding Nemo, death-obsessed Andrew Stanton uses them as a second layer of structure. (The primary layer, as we discussed, is Syd Field’s Paradigm. Despite Pixar’s idyllic workplace, so famously isolated from Hollywood, the Paradigm lives like a cockroach among the lunch counters manned by cherub orgies and computer chairs stuffed with unicorn eyelashes.) As repeated ad infinitum in All That Jazz, the stages are Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Split Nemo into five parts and you’ll find they track within a minute.
– The first stage, Anger, pivots around Nemo and Marlin getting angry at each other, triggering the whole adventure.
– The second stage, Denial, kicks off with the fish-addict sharks. The theme is right in the dialogue: ” I don’t have a problem.” “Oh, okay. DENIAL!”
– The Bargaining stage is about Gill’s scheme to escape the dentist’s aquarium, while Marlin negotiates with Dory and a school of real asshole performance artists.
– Depression starts with Nemo and Gill moping over their failure. This is the segment where Marlin and Dory are stuck inside the whale, Joseph Campbell’s symbol of the death and recreation of self.
– Acceptance begins when Nemo gets scooped out of the tank, to be given to Darla. Marlin arrives after his long journey to find that Nemo is dead. He heads for home while Nemo literally goes down the drain.
Okay, but what’s the point? Why did Stanton build his script around grief? Because Finding Nemo isn’t a movie about a child growing up. It’s about a child never growing up. Once again let’s dive into the subtext to see what’s bubbling under the surface. (No, I have no shame. Why do you ask?)
Finding Nemo starts with a very different Marlin. He’s noticably cavalier toward the four hundred eggs he and his mate are about to hatch. “We’ll name this half Marlin Junior and this half Coral Junior. Okay, we’re done.” He’s much more interested in flapping Coral’s flippers. He’s also cocky and confident. When the barracuda attacks, the tiny clownfish charges right into battle. This little dude has grit. Then Coral and the embryos are devoured and a single egg remains: Nemo’s. Not much subtext is hidden here; it’s all on the surface. Our protagonist’s family dies. The only question mark is the surviving egg. Now we skip ahead to Nemo’s first day of school. This symbolism is pretty blatant – we’re dealing with separation anxiety. After the opening tragedy, Marlin is neurotically skittish. His grit is apparently destroyed. When Mr. Ray swoops in and takes the boy away, Marlin freaks out, chases them down and refuses to let Nemo go. This action kicks off the whole adventure.
What does this sequence represent? It isn’t difficult to work out. Nemo started production just after The Sixth Sense grabbed 1999 by the short hairs. Secretly-dead stories were popping up like barnacles on a corpse. Andrew Stanton wasn’t immune to its gimmicky charms. It’s a parable within a parable. Look closer: the barracuda scene ends with Marlin finding a lone, improbable survivor. What’s he feeling at that moment? His future is destroyed and this little orange egg is the last scrap for a scrappy fish to hang on to. Remember, Marlin’s a fighter. He’s not going to let this egg die. We cross-fade into the titles, then segue without a cut into Nemo as a child. We’ve now passed into the future that Marlin, in his mind, is protecting. What seems like cowardice is actually Marlin fighting desperately not to let go of the last egg. He hasn’t lost his grit at all. He’s redirected it against a horrible, empty future. Stanton has thrown us a clever, if rather morbid reversal.
From there the metaphor is clean and clear. Mr. Ray takes Nemo to the place where Coral and the other eggs became sashimi. Mr. Ray is the grim reaper, a psychopomp stealing away his son. When Marlin interferes, Nemo gets whisked off by a godlike diver. Nemo’s now stranded in a cramped glass limbo, separated from the world of the living but unable to pass on. Unwilling to accept his son’s death, Marlin has metaphorically trapped the boy. The movie then chronicles the steps of his grief until at last, in the dentist’s office, he sees Nemo floating belly-up and finally accepts the truth. Nemo, the metaphor for the last egg, is dead. Only after this happens does Nemo escape limbo, passing through the proverbial tunnel to oblivion. Dory, the avatar for Marlin’s memory as he tries to forget the tragedy, allows him one last glimpse of his lost boy. This is when he’s waking from his metaphorical journey (“Swim down! Swim down!”). As Nemo lies unmoving on the sea floor, the story flashes back to the present, where Marlin is holding the last egg. We’ve come full circle. Marlin now accepts the death of his family and his future. The movie closes as Marlin’s grit fails and he allows death, as Mr. Ray, to take Nemo away for good. Somewhere in the present, Marlin drops the dead little egg and swims away into the night.
The ending always made me tear up, but I never knew exactly why. The fact is, Stanton has given us the saddest goddamn movie ever to pretend it’s a lush, colorful exploration of parental love. You wonder why I show him respect? The macabre motherfucker earned it. Stanton doesn’t limit his structure to Dr. Kubler-Ross-with-a-dash, by the way. For the sake of brevity I won’t go into great detail, but pretentiously enough he also leans on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Dante’s Purgatorio is a place where souls must atone for the Seven Deadly Sins before reaching Paradise. To demonstrate how Stanton (who is vocally religious, like most Pixar brass) references this, let’s examine the first Deadly Sin he tackles: Lust. In Dante’s tale, Purgatory for the lustful is a mountain ledge with a precipice on one side and a wall of fire on the other. Sound familiar? In the opening scene of Nemo, Marlin and Coral move into a stinging anemone – portrayed like a living flame – at the Dropoff. When they start getting frisky, the barracuda appears. At stake are hundreds of eggs, the product of their Lust. We know how it works out.
Coincidence? Sit tight. You know how Nemo’s fish tank is a reflection of his prior life? Now recall his initiation when he swims up the side of Mount Wannahockaloogie, which is covered with orange pebbles notably similar to clownfish eggs. At the top, he must pass like a penitent through the “Ring of Fire.” (Oh, that’s why they called it fire.) Yeah, there’s no question this imagery is deliberate. Nemo and the aquarium inmates work through each Deadly Sin just as Marlin does. I’ll leave the other sins as a homework exercise. (Gluttony comes next. Dante had a specific order.) The point here is that Finding Nemo isn’t just a sad, bittersweet tale of a father letting go of his son. Nemo has an undercurrent of dark self-righteousness that belies its visual innocence. For example, why did Coral and the babies deserve to die? Simple: fornication. You always assumed Coral was Marlin’s wife, but strangely, words like “wife” or “husband” or “married” never appear in the film. Do these talking beasts even wed? Or do they just breed, like Hollywood movie stars? The barracuda is a pretty big tell from Stanton.
How about the movie’s opinion on addiction? There’s a scene about sharks who decide to stop eating fish via an AA-style program of steps. (Allegedly they just eat dolphins.) It’s a gag when two of the three fail onscreen, but the real offense is that sharks are designed to eat fish. It’s intrinsic to their nature. These addicts are destined to fail; moreover they were destined to become addicts from birth. What is Stanton saying about addiction here? And are sharks racially inclined to be degenerate? His Christian charity seems to yield to something very ugly. And the ugliness keeps coming. We’ve talked about Pixar’s treatment of female characters. This movie is particularly grim. We’ve got a fornicator, a brain-damaged simpleton, a narcissist schizophrenic, an idiot pet-killer and a starfish who’s basically the aquarium secretary. Even the octopus girl poops herself. Meanwhile the dudes are smart and capable and resourceful. How did we get here, Pixar? You always say you make the kind of movies you like to watch. Your message is loud and clear.
The Filmist 