Seven Red

Talk about an identity crisis! Just a little something for a Saturday night. First, Ray Gelato doing the Renato Carosone classic. You may remember it from the classic scene in The Talented Mr. Ripley, below. The Italian Ideology, indeed. Enjoy.

I don’t wanna think about those things anymore. – Broken Social Scene, “Superconnected”

So I was going to write a post about some of the reality TV I’ve seen lately, largely about the connection between the house flipping shows and the credit crisis. It was going to be your fairly run-of-the-mill pomo argument collapsing culture and economy. So, Flip this House, the various home redecoration shows, and others of that ilk are themselves operating as a kind of productive base rather than functioning as a cultural superstructure. They don’t – you know what’s coming – “represent” or point to anything outside themselves; rather, they are directly deployed as forces pushing the economic phenomena that led to the mortgage crisis, etc. It’s an easy argument to make, not terribly original, and (of course) true. House flipping reality shows produced the very sorts of speculative relationships operating economically in the US housing markets. Blah.

For some reason, I’m more taken with Supernanny. I’m about to put on my parent cap, but I’ll try not to engage in parental gnosticism, since I know that pisses off booga face, and I don’t want to do that. But this show is really something else. The premise is so absurd that it would constitute an affront to your dignity. A dysfunctional American family residing in a cookie cutter home in some godforsaken treeless suburb of Dallas, Tuscon, Knoxville, or Cincinnati is in desperate need of help. (Indeed, the houses and general appearance of these families are so similar from episode to episode that if you told me the “house” was a set, I’d probably just shrug). The children, usually a brood of kids under 8, are completely out of control, and the parents are weak-kneed imbeciles unable to crack the whip. What to do? Import some foreign labor, of course, in this case, a Cockney accented (Mary Poppins, you know?) “Super Nanny” who will get the situation under control. Yes, you want to cringe. But it’s strangely compelling, for a few reasons.

First, the nanny – called “Nanny Jo,” is goddamn right about 98% of the time. The stuff she comes up with actually works, and makes sense, and fits so lovingly and tenderly into our sense of order, discipline, and control that you want to embrace it with your whole body and soul. If you’ve ever lived through a two-year old’s forty-five minute full out tantrum, you want to run to her, for real. At a very fundamental level, then Supernanny is about carving a sense of order out of a familiar chaotic scene. That it comes with rigorous “time out” policies and an East End sensibility is only gravy.

Second, the show satisfies a deep longing for superiority. The parents are total fuck-ups, so – as a parent – you sit there and shake your head and say stuff like “That type of shit would never happen in my house,” and “What the fuck is wrong with these people?” My usual comment is “My father woulda kicked my ass if I tried to pull that shit.” Also true: he would have.

Supernanny, in this sense, is really like the parents’ answer to the childless twenty-somethings sitting in judgment in restaurants. We still get to judge, see, and we’re probably even worse than the yelpers, because we know what we’re judging. The show teaches you that it really is almost always the parents’ fault, just so long as it’s other parents. In this sense, it’s quite brilliant. Parents of small children still have the residual of their life before kids, and they still have something of that desire to judge, though conditions make it hard. So they judge other parents, and quite ruthlessly. But this makes them feel a little guilty. But if it’s on television, and a whole cultural apparatus and even the Nanny Jo herself has already adjudicated these people terrible and blameworthy, well, then it ain’t so bad. This is broadcast bad conscience in a pure form, and it is well and truly delicious.

Finally, the show is engrossing because at least one of the parents is almost always suffering from what I take to be a fairly serious case of clinical depression, though this is never explicitly mentioned. But it is hinted at, which makes the whole thing at once horrifying and amusing.

Next time, I’ll write about how Top Chef is causing the global rice shortage. Fun stuff.

1) babygirl talks a lot. “My phone.” “I need help.” “On the playground.” Other such stuff. It’s pretty amazing.

2) We Own the Night is a painfully bad film. Plotwise, it’s absurd. For some reason, though set in New York in the late-80′s, the director has decided to run a late-70′s soundtrack, which is just weird. But she and I both noticed the same thing: the dialogue is terrible. The exposition dialogue is ridiculous. At a cop’s funeral, one cop tells another that “They’re setting up a new drug deal,” or something to that effect. It’s silly. I mean right when they hand the shovel over. Amusingly, Ed Koch makes a few appearances, despite the fact that the whole premise of the film was that his administration of the City in the late-80′s was a catastrophe. Good to have a sense of humor, I guess.

But the really awful dialogue is interesting, since the film has otherwise good qualities. The acting is pretty strong, the production values are good, they clearly spent money on it. In fact, it could almost be a good film if it weren’t for the terrible writing. Which made us wonder: why did nobody stop this thing? Why didn’t anybody say, “Hey, we’re making a gritty thriller here, let’s get the lines right!” Then we saw that the guy who wrote it also directed it, and both Joachim Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg (the two leads) produced it. In other words, there was no quality control on the writing at any step in the process, and probably others were too intimidated by thye director and producers to say, “Hey, that sucks.”

That said, the film had a distinctly New York outer boroughs feel, so it was somewhat satisfying. At one point, a couple in the film is staying at the Kew Motor Inn, a famous “by-the-hour” joint on Union Turnpike in Queens, near where I went to high school. Friends of mine used to brag about having gotten the “Jungle Room” at the Screw Motor Inn, and other laughable high school sex stories. A character in the film correctly mentions that everybody calls it the “Screw Motor Inn.” Strangely, though, the film cuts to the sign, and it reads “Cue Motor Inn,” which means that they bothered to construct a fake sign, but they spelled the name wrong. It’s a metaphor for the whole film, really: a lot of effort expended for a relatively shitty product.

3) I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 today. It’s nice. I’ll play with it tonight.

I Am Legend – Preposterous.

No Country for Old Men – Masculine toughness is proportionate to degrees of separation from Barbra Streisand. Casting hurt. Of course, I’m still hung up on the “Danny Boy” scene in Miller’s Crossing, so grain of salt. Can somebody explain to me why Woody Harrelson’s character is even in this film?

Atonement – I’m dead inside. I found the film thoroughly unmoving. It was my greatest hope that all the characters would die in a fire. The only thing that could have saved this film is an incest subplot, because it was that thoroughly modernist. For some reason, I never quite caught the faux heft of the constantly invoked “implications” for the little girl’s lies. So two people who love each other are separated. By World War II. Forgive me if I don’t follow the purity of their attraction when the whole world is spinning into massacre and chaos. Let me revise: I don’t give a fuck about these characters. Hollywood thinks I need therapy, I suspect. And it was almost as predictable as that awful The Namesake (she and I worked out the whole plot of that one in the first 15 minutes, the only disagreement being whether the father would die of tuberculosis or – my suggestion – in a fire).

The big revelation interview at the end of Atonement drew an eyeroll. It would have been much better if the older Briony had revealed that she made the whole thing up after too much scotch, not enough sex, and a solid month devouring the works of Somerset Maugham and D.H. Lawrence. You see, when the brother brings the friend home from Oxford, the friend is always an asshole. We know this from every drama set between 1890 and 1940 in every single manor house in all of England. Oxford friend = Asshole. Always.  Moreover, we also know that the son of the housekeeper will be spicey hot and labor pure, a real go-getter who will get both comeuppance for his class passing, and validation for working class grit.  Two cheers for democracy. Now die in a fire.

It’s fitting that David Simon and Co. would leave the most intense speech of The Wire‘s last episode to the least likely character. A review of the blogs and entertainment magazines (which I’ll leave to you) suggests that the key speech – even the key moment in the episode – belongs not to Marlo, or McNulty, or Bunk, nor is it really the eloquent encomium put forth by Landsman at McNulty’s fake wake. Rather, it comes from Cheese Wagstaff (ahem, Melvin), played by the inimitable Method Man.

Out on bond, Cheese is looking to take the lead in the drug consortium; he pledges $900,000 to a general fund for buying Marlo’s contact with the Greeks. When the other dealers express surprise at his offer, he notes, “We sellin’ dope and coke in Baltimore…any y’all who ain’t got that kind of money need be ashamed.” It’s the set up. There’s something eloquent in the delivery of even this line, but the killer move is coming: “There ain’t no back in the day. There ain’t no nostalgia to this shit here. There’s just the street, and the game, and what happen here today.” And then Slim Charles offers a rebuttal. Apart from nailing Cheese’s character as the perfect post-industrial opportunist (when Joe was on top, he was with Joe, when Marlo was, with Marlo, etc.) – a pretty consistent portrayal, I might add – it’s also the real moment of nihilism, a kind of nihilism that (even in Cheese) is almost attractive: the cow with no memory. A man’s gotta have a code, Omar tells us. Cheese has no code other than this: we sellin’ dope and coke in Baltimore. That’s it. It’s a perpetual decoding. At first glance, Omar’s version – which is also, of course, Bunk’s – seems the more admirable; they’re men of principle, ultimately. Cheese’s version – which more closely reflects McNulty’s (“They don’t get to win. We get to win.”), however, may be the more interesting. Here’s the preview clip: Cheese’s speech appears at the end here too:

I also want to tip a hat to Method Man for his performance throughout the series, which this speech illuminated for me in some ways. Cheese might seem like a one-dimensional character, a pure sociopath (supposing one believes in that category), and would therefore seem not too distant from the kind of character Method Man might have played in his Wu Tang role. I think it would be interesting to go back and follow out the performance in light of this speech. For my money, Method Man was never the best lyricist in the WTC. That would be RZA and Inspectah Deck, although he’s definitely a close third, and probably with better delivery. But I think he was always the most charismatic and just plain interesting of the crew; there was always something extra and off that made his verses strange and memorable. So, for example, this from “Protect Ya Neck” (which was, amazingly, an independent single, pre-record deal):

And like fame, my style’ll live forever
N*ggaz crossin over, but they don’t know no better
But I do, true, can I get a zuuu
Nuff respect due to the one-six-ooo
I mean oh, yo check out the flow
like the Hudson or PCP when I’m dustin
N*ggaz off because I’m hot like sauce
The smoke from the lyrical blunt make me *unh*

It was that last line that got me way back in 93 or 94, the line that made me say “Hey, what is this we’re listening to?” Because it’s a brilliant little transformation and twist on the rhyme. The way it’s supposed to work is AABA: “N*ggaz OFF because I’m hot like SAUCE/ The smoke from the lyrical blunt makes me COUGH.” That would be perfectly fine as a lyric. But Method doesn’t do that. Instead of saying the word “cough,” he actually coughs, like “unh.” This twist not only substitutes the sound for the word, but also ends up rhyming the sound with “blunt,” thereby changing the rhyme scheme to a totally unexpected AABB. It sounds ridiculous trying to explain it, I know. It’d make a good parody skit to have a tweedy English professor doing some New Critical close reading of th Wu. But that is goddamn good stuff. Take a listen instead, starting at about 1:05:

I’d like some time to digest The Wire in all its brilliance. For now, I just want to comment on one minor feature of the dialogue that I love: the colloquial use of the word “behind.” Every Wire fan knows that the show made the term “to get got” popular for white folks everywhere. I think that the usage of “behind” is similarly African American vernacular that plays throughout the show while receiving little recognition from our language experts. It was satisfying that the usage plays an interesting role in the final episode, when Carcetti’s chief strategist and aide, Norman Wilson, uses it:

It does have a certain charm to it. They manufactured an issue to get paid. We manufactured an issue to get you elected governor. Everybody’s gettin’ what they need behind some make-believe.

As used in The Wire, “behind” means “as a result of of,” as in “He gonna get got behind this shit.” Bunk is a big fan of this word, but it is used by many of the black characters. It appears nowhere in the OED; indeed, a quick search turned up nothing in any lexicon or dictionary that mentions this usage (I’d be grateful if one of you fine folks with better researching skills could turn something like this up). It sounds wholly natural, and I’d heard the term a lot growing up, but I always took it to be an African American and even distinctly Southern expression. So, why do I like it, apart from some authenticity fetishism? It’s pretty much perfect as an expression. We usually think of the cause as hidden, and we usually designate this hidden depth with the term “behind.” We say somebody is working “behind the scenes;” we ask what is “behind this turn of events.” The list could go on: the result is on the surface, while the cause is behind. But what I take to be the AAVE usage reverses this, at least (semi-)grammatically. The result (getting got; getting what they need) is behind the cause (this shit; some make believe). Of course, it’s not hidden; behind does not mean behind as a metaphorical spatial location (as it does in the typical usage). Rather, it is a pure substitution for “as a result of.” It still interests me as a reversal, though. I wonder whether it indicates a different way of parsing out causality.

I finally got a chance to catch American Gangster. I heard a lot of buzz about it when it came out, so I was expecting it to be pretty good. I really wanted to add it to Great New York City 70′s Films, put it up there with Warriors, you know. But it wasn’t. Instead, it was spotty at best, with choppy narrative, half-drawn characters, and general confusion. Not even Denzel – who I usually like (hell, I liked him in the awful Deja Vu) – or even Russell Crowe, or even a moderately killer soundtrack could save this one. What does any of this have to do with Graffiti Fridays? I’m glad I asked.

I may have been disposed early against the film because of its blatant graffiti anachronisms. They occur throughout the film, but were particularly noxious in the first few minutes, when Russel Crowe and his partner are discovering a bookie’s money in New Jersey, circa 1968. Here are some still from the offending scene:

I will tell you with full assurance that no such thing existed in 1968, period. It’s not merely that VELO, KUMA, and MEER hadn’t been born yet, although this is true in all likelihood. I don’t mean that the specific writers are anachronistic. I mean the form itself. It simply hadn’t been invented yet. There were no tag fill-ins or straight letters or throwees anywhere at all, much less on a rooftop in New Joizy. Nobody had experimented with the caps necessary to do that MEER throwee, period. It didn’t exist at the time. The form itself didn’t exist. Crowe could just as well have pulled out a cell phone and checked his email. That’s how off it is. You might as well have a Picasso hanging in the background of a Jane Austen flick. That’s how bad it is.

So, big deal, right? Wasn’t I praising Kubrick just a few posts ago for his anexact representation of Hue City in Full Metal Jacket? And really, isn’t the graffiti just serving as a signifier of urban decay here? Isn’t it just in the frame to develop that feeling of the late-1960′s and early 1970′s anomie? Yes, fine. I get it. That’s great. At the same time, I don’t see why’d you’d bother getting the cars just right, getting the clothes just right, getting the technology and phones and shoes just right, but leaving in something like that. And if you’re making the BIG movie, the putative Oscar contender, the “true story,” the secret history of New York, it’s pretty close to unforgivable. The film gets a 3 out of 10. The location scout gets a 1 out of 10.

If you want to see a bunch of writers celebrating this anachronism, go here. They also provided a more recent flick of that KUMA YOUTH rooftop:

We finally got a chance on Monday to check out Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s homage (again) to Red Sox Land. I have to admit, after seeing little brother Casey in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and now in Gone Baby Gone, I’m taken by his talent. The guy can act. I suspect that this film was a lot more subtle in the initial cut, then the marketing people got their hands on it and screamed that the dumb viewers would not understand the connections, so Affleck (Ben, that is) was forced to insert all kinds of reminders to help the audience follow the thread. It kind of ruins the film. You’re constantly asked to remember some event that you witnessed 25 minutes prior, the suggestion being that you’re too fucking stupid to put it together yourself. If you had been paying attention, you would know that… It’s so heavy-handed – particularly as the final sequence of the film unfolds – that you want to scream at the screen “I know! I know!” It’s like when they remind you every friggin’ time that the guacamole is extra at Qdoba. Or, you know, it’s like something.

It’s hard to discuss the movie without giving away the ending, so I’ll keep my points here at a very general level. And at the very very general level, you get the ethical “choice” – the moment of decision. In this way, Gone Baby Gone is very much in the same vein as some of the other films I’ve discussed here, particularly those in the revenge genre, which constantly ask the viewers to revisit their ethical commitments and compare them to the Law. One could throw in the spate of other films that ask characters (and, by extension, the audience) to review their ethical inventory, and especially those that take a liberal stance on the War, like the painfully predictable torture film Rendition. It’s no mistake that such matters would arise alongside the War on Terror, or that cultural production would be so imbued with the whole thing. In Gone Baby Gone the choice is stark and clear, and constitutes the whole rationale for the film. The film doesn’t ask the audience to feel so much as to choose. It may even be that the audience is asked to disagree vehemently with the choice made by Affleck’s character. As I said, I’ll stay out of the details of this choice, but it does seem like an awful lot of labor we’re doing now at the movies, turning over these ethical conundrums that follow one another like catechism drills.

And it put me in the mind of Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous essay on the culture industry, which I read from time to time when I’m feeling particularly cynical and need a good laugh (it’s an hilarious essay, and I think deliberately so, despite what people may tell you). In the culture industry A&H were analyzing during the 1940′s, we still had the censors and a fairly uniform studio system that ran on monotonous formulas. Whether things are different today is a subject for  debate, of course. At the very least, the official censorship of film has been distributed to some kind of market function. But I wonder whether the ethical labor we’re asked to perform isn’t just as tedious as the moral dictums churned out by the culture industry of 1940′s Hollywood. Moreover, at a formal level, I wonder whether these films don’t demonstrate more strongly than ever some of the observations A&H made then. It seems to me that Gone Baby Gone, The Brave One, and Rendition, for all their seeming differences, are actually very similar both in their formal structure and in terms of what they ask the audience to contemplate. In effect, they imply and invoke an audience that is capable of the ethical choice; they create and bank on precisely that version of subjectivity. So one may be the darling of the liberal left and one the rallying cry of the conservative right, but these turn out to be slight differences.

This is a tough situation. What should I do? What is right?

What’s more important than how you answer the question, for these films, is the form of the question itself, your capacity to ask it. Which is good, right? We like the ethical question, right? I’m not so sure. At a minimum, the rapid and widespread emergence of what I’ll call the ethical culture industry should make us all a bit suspicious.

A few weeks ago I posted a short review of the awful Kevin Bacon flick Death Sentence, an insipid and poorly constructed little revenge drama. I received this response, from points unknown:

So 7 Red prefers Zodiac’s celebration of due process and The Wire’s attention to bureaucratic and historical baggage to the rejuvenated revenge fantasies offered by Kevin Bacon and Jodi Foster? Take THAT, liberal media!

The point—and I’m guessing here—is that I am some sort of dupe for the fetishes of liberalism, because I like the “celebration of due process” in Zodiac (a more bizarre characterization of the film I cannot imagine), and the “bureaucratic and historical baggage” of The Wire (I’m still trying to figure out what this one means), while I bash and bash and bash the “rejuvenated” revenge fantasies (was the genre ever stagnant?) that cropped up in the cinema last year.

Never mind that all of these productions emanate from the same supposed liberal media. Never mind that labeling Death Sentence and The Brave One a rejuvenation of the revenge fantasy, a rejuvenation that indicates some larger post 9/11 cultural phenomenon, likely began in that rattrap of due-process lovin’ and bureaucratic-historical valorizin’ known as the New York Times itself. And never mind that the responder probably had tongue firmly in cheek: I can’t imagine that people I don’t know read this blog, and I’m well convinced that I don’t know anybody who would use the phrase “liberal media” unironically. Never mind all that. I’m willing to play the believing game on this one and take it as a serious critique. The initial problem for the argument was that I hadn’t seen The Brave One (or commented on it), so I couldn’t be sure if I was truly getting all gaga over due process and bureaucratic historical baggage thanks to the predatory propagandizing for 1970’s liberal values that so clearly characterizes our contemporary media phylum.

So when The Brave One became available through pay-per-view, I knew I had to check it out, if only to test my core liberal value of letting brutal criminals off the hizzook (because of history, you know?). And I don’t agree at all. I think The Brave One is a smart and remarkable film, even if I’m not jumping on the metaphorical troop transport or reviewing Charles Bronson’s collected works on urban renewal just yet. It’s remarkable for two reasons. First, it’s a gripping study of perception, and particularly auditory perception, a strange move for a film. Second, it doesn’t really seem to be about revenge so much as it is about transformation, and what happens when the euphoria of a transformative process crashes back down into a new routine.

Foster plays Erica Baine, a radio host for a poetic and nostalgic show about the way New York is changing. She walks around the city with a giant microphone taping the sounds of trains running overhead and Latino teenagers playing handball, that most New York of New York games, then goes into the radio station and waxes eloquent about Edgar Allen Poe and monkeys at the slips of the old South Street Seaport. Will we lose the old New York? Will it just be a memory that we hold in our limbs? That sort of thing. Her nostalgia for the old New York might be one of her liberal credentials; her goofy Capri pants and bike messenger bag another; her distinctly white wine sipping artist friend essentially seals the deal. She’s living in a fantasy world.

To be brief on plot, Baine is engaged to doctor and decidedly non-white David Kirmani, played by Lost eye-candy Naveen Andrews. Kirmani and Baine are brutally attacked by a gang of muggers in Central Park, with Kirmani beaten to death and Baine just barely pulling through. She then has the bad luck to witness another murder, a domestic killing in a bodega, but this time she’s prepared: packing an illegal gun (she couldn’t hack the 30-day waiting period), she shoots the killer through a juice bottle. Presumably finding this version more pleasurable than waiting on the desk jockey cops to solve Kirmani’s murder, she sets out on a vigilante quest, blasting various wrongdoers with Bernie Goetz style eloquence as she is inexorably drawn toward the final confrontation with Kirmani’s psychotic killers.

Mixed up in her murder spree is Detective Mercer, played by the decidedly non-white Terrence Howard. (Indeed, the film gets around the very convincing charges of racism lodged against earlier vigilante flicks by making damn sure that virtually everyone in the film who is not Jodie Foster is also not white like Jodie Foster; Death Sentence gets around the same problem by making the criminal gang rather preposterously multicultural). A secret listener of Baine’s show, Mercer appears to have some role in every murder investigation in the City of New York, not least being the one involving this new vigilante who has the notorious New York tabloids all abuzz. Needless to say, he develops a relationship with Baine, thinking at first that it is about interviewing him for his favorite radio show, then befriending her, and finally, slowly, coming to an awareness about her possible activities. If there’s an ethical component to the film, it has nothing to do with Foster’s character. The subject of the ethical quandary is good cop Detective Mercer, who has asked himself since his beat days whether he would have the fortitude to “arrest somebody he knows well,” like a best friend. His answer heretofore has been a resounding yes—he’s a man of the Law, you see, and the Law doesn’t distinguish between the friend and the stranger—but events will test that. Howard is once again sterling in his performance; few can play the move from naivety to revelation very subtly, but Howard pulls off the “AHA!” in small, poignant increments without making it ridiculous.

THE SOUND OF THE DISASTER

The plot is organized around a series of audible events at the same time that it moves toward the visible. Baine is insistent that her show is a radio show; early on we see her refusing requests to meet with the people from Bravo for a television version. There’s something about the sound of a city that fascinates her; she goes home and listens to her sound recordings of mundane events around the city. Later, she will record her vigilante slayings and listen to those, too. Just before the fatal mugging that sets the story in motion, we get two sound events. The dog, who has run into one of those menacing Central Park tunnels, has stopped its barking, the negative event. Then we get the money shot: we hear the sound of a plane flying low over Manhattan, a sound that faintly colors Baine and Kirmani’s dialogue about their future together. I guess we can’t accuse Neil Jordan of being particularly subtle, but it certainly injects the requisite foreboding into the scene. Significantly (I guess), the thugs have brought along their video camera for the attack; as with al Qaeda, the violence is not real if it’s not captured in its visual horror.

Sound also plays a role in the other death scenes. In the bodega, Baine is given away when her cell phone starts ringing. The murderer searches the aisles for her, whispering “I can hear you breathing” just before he catches one in the throat. On the subway, two thugs rob a stoner boy who’s listening to his iPod. “Whatchoo listenin’ to?” one says. The stoner is predictably unaware of his surroundings until they pull his iPod away and start smacking him up. “Radiohead,” he responds meekly. When they approach Baine they ask, mockingly, “You got some Radiohead for me, too?” Get it? Radio head? You can guess the next sound you hear after that. The sound events pile up: the clicking locks of a car door that signal a threat, the dinging of an elevator that drives Mercer’s epiphany, the ringing cell phone that identifies a killer’s girlfriend. It’s all juxtaposed against visual perception, which is at once too raw, too flawed, and too obviously mediated. The stoner boy’s description of Baine for a police sketch artist ends up looking like Jennifer Aniston. But sound, you see, is real. And it’s the video of the mugging, of Kirmani’s murder – conveyed, tellingly, as a cell phone message attachment – that sets off the closing action.

Apart from the sheer cleverness of it, I’m not quite sure what to make of the film’s commitment to sound. If these “revenge dramas,” which seem to have very little to do with actual street crime, inevitably refer us to 9/11, it may signal the failure of the visual. What I got from being in Lower Manhattan that morning (apart from constant, intractable anger and an utter incapacity to act) was the sound of the disaster, a sound that I haven’t heard replicated in any recording. But I know what Foster’s character is doing when she listens to the recordings of New York, and then of her revenge killings. She’s listening for that sound. And it’s not there. If there was something shocking about the event – in Benjamin’s sense – it wasn’t the visual; if there was some aesthetic sublimity to it – in the Kantian sense – it wasn’t the video. This is a strange argument to come from a filmmaker. Perhaps we’ve had our fill of the visual; perhaps it’s too easy.

Or, alternatively, it may be that the commitment to sound is the ultimate form of Baine’s nostalgia. And this would be not just nostalgia as the waning of the sound era, the vinyl heads and radio heads, but nostalgia for the moment. Where the video seems to bring it back complete, the sound always comes up missing something, and what is missing serves as the basis for that nostalgia. Sound is that which cannot – for all our digital accuracy – be mechanically reproduced. Once Baine gets the cell phone video of the mugging, the sound events end; if she’s been transformed into something else, it is not the brave one, but the deaf one. The film is done with sound, with the authentic relation to the event. But maybe it’s not so easy.

At the very least, Neil Jordan’s attention to the sounds of the city signals an expansion or difference of perception. You’re forced to pay attention to the sounds of the film; the sheer prevalence of sound events produces a listening subject in the viewer. You could read this, at worst, as the very conservative notion of increased awareness, where the expanded field of perception relative to the film represents our supposedly expanded perception relative to the terrorist threat. Put another way, The Brave One replays in cinematic form the transformation of perception required to handle terrorism. We’re now on the lookout for the proverbial “Arab crop duster,” a perception that would have been impossible before. The threat is now on our cultural radar, beeping, beeping. Can you hear it? That’s certainly one way to see it. But Baine’s transformation seems to follow a different trajectory: she begins as a sound freak, and progressively shuts out sound in favor of vision. If anything, her transformation is about a subtraction from the perceptual field, not an addition. In this way, the trajectory of the character is in conflict with the trajectory of the viewer. Indeed, the final scene of the film literally makes no sense for any viewer who has become accustomed to the logic of sound. It presupposes a world in which the entire city, or at least one particular housing project, cannot hear anything. The film’s concluding scene falls apart if sound constitutes evidence.

THE STRANGER

Like Death Sentence and other films in the genre, then, The Brave One is about transformation. Conservatives may see this positively: the soft bourgeois tendencies of the American polity were transformed by 9/11; the whole society is now the liberal who has become conservative after being mugged. This is presumably why people who have been duped by the “liberal media” would dislike the “rejuvenated” revenge fantasy genre; they want to hold on to the “celebration of due process” and “bureaucratic and (notably) historical baggage” of the pre-mugging liberal culture. They want to reject the transformation.

The Brave One certainly plays up the theme of transformation. Visually, Foster changes from a kind of hipster casualness to action hero hard core. If we’re too dumb to notice that her leather jacket is straight out of Death Wish 3, Neil Jordan makes good and sure that we do by having Mercer comment on it. But the real trope of transformation comes through Foster’s voice over, presumably a set of notes for Baine’s radio show. And the key trope there is the presence of the Stranger. Baine notes after her subway vigilantism that a Stranger is now growing in her body, using its limbs, its mouth. This is a classic trope of becoming, the liminal space, the transition phase. And Jordan plays it just right; it is, in the trajectory of the film, the sequence of delirious pleasure, the highest energy and maximum euphoria. The build-up around each set of doomed villains is increasingly laughable, their one-dimensionality as Despicable Predators increasingly satisfying. Baine’s subjectivity is displaced, her control over those limbs very tenuous. The viewer, like Baine, experiences a certain ecstasy – not outside the body, but within.

The traditional revenge drama manages to hold this ecstatic position through the film and even close with it. The final satisfaction still reels with it; it’s why there can be a Death Wish 2. Both Death Sentence and The Brave One, on the other hand, close very differently. The transition phase, at the end of each film, is complete, the affect exhausted. Baine ends the film by noting that (and I’m paraphrasing here) “You can never go back. The Stranger is all that’s there now.” As a critique of liberal nostalgia for the pre-mugging days, this is about as compact and essential as it comes. But it also signals the exhaustion of that affective energy that accompanied the transformation. The film manages to work that let down even into the vigilante killings themselves. The villains never really get the sense of awareness that they’re being punished. When Baine encounters one of the original muggers in a housing project, he asks whether she wants drugs. She says “I want my dog back,” and immediately shoots him. But it’s unsatisfying because we never get the moment of recognition, his awareness that he is being killed for a specific reason, as revenge for the Kirmani slaying. Death Sentence gives us that in bucketfuls; The Brave One is better because it short-circuits the rites of recognition so central to the revenge genre. It’s all too quick. And the let down is distinct.

The let down is all that’s there now. If these films register anything about the culture, it is not the ethical question of revenge (right or wrong, etc.), but the exhaustion that follows transformation, the dead zone of becoming. Death Sentence does this too, but not nearly as well. That’s where they’re historically situated, in any case. Both films come far too late after 9/11 to constitute responses to that event. Rather, they are responses to the affective energy that marked the response to that event, an unsustainable energy, and its bitter waning as the cultural revenge dramas in Iraq and Afghanistan wear on and on and on. Response to a response, the reterritorialization that followed the euphoric line of flight, or the depression of the dialectic that now seems frozen.

The Stranger is all there is now. Yes. Absolutely. A better comment on the contemporary American scene would be hard to produce. But that’s a moment of exhaustion, not rejuvenation. One might even say that these films are not revenge fantasies at all; the revenge is past, the fantasy lived out already, finished. They’re more about what happens when your fantasy becomes reality, and the crushing affective collapse of that.

Watched terrible Kevin Bacon revenge fantasy Death Sentence. Brain hurts. Reduced to telegraphic sentence fragments as a result. Usual bourgeois man becoming-criminal to avenge wrongdoing against nuclear family. Gang leader very mean, but also family-oriented. Bacon character preposterous: a bullet-proof risk analyst. Cops completely incompetent, like Bacon escapes from guarded hospital with nothing but his hospital robe to go kill gangsters and the cops manage to show up at his house some time the following day, giving him plenty of time to go home, get clothes, and plot strategy. Absurdities pile up; John Goodman character less believable than a Scooter Libby autobiography. Repeat: brain hurts. Only clever twists on the genre involve a chase scene in a parking garage and the visual transformation of Bacon into scar-bodied gang member. Yes, both done before. Skip it.