Tag: film

Joe Versus the Volcano, Palm Springs and the Lost Decades of Romantic Comedies
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in blog, film

Joe Versus the Volcano, Palm Springs and the Lost Decades of Romantic Comedies

A looming future of transhumanism and the encroaching threat of climate change enshroud our daily lives. Sure, we’re facing a pandemic, a gun crisis, a healthcare crisis, unprecedented economic inequality, a crumbling democracy, impending regional wars, loss of privacy, disinformation, and a privatized space race with questionable aims, but all of that pales next to the strangeness of confronting an existential crisis of unsustainable life on earth alongside the rapid devolution of our humanity at the hands of software and machines. What I mean to say is this is a historically bad time to make the case that Hollywood should be focused on reviving the romantic comedy genre. We’ve clearly got bigger problems. 

However, it’s my view that we, the imperiled public, desperately need to be watching interesting, funny relationship movies. In theaters. On dates. The communal experience of laughing in a theater while watching ourselves—regular people, not superheros—reflected in stories on a big screen is essential. It suggests we’re able to laugh at ourselves with each other, that we’re not too proud to laugh at ourselves in front of strangers, and reminds us that we share our life experiences with a large, diverse group of people. The theater is where we experience common ground. If Hollywood doesn’t find the will to make those movies, and fast, and if we don’t find the will to force ourselves to go see them, no matter how in love we are with our couches, we will most certainly never again have the necessary social glue needed to solve much bigger, more urgent problems that are presently breathing down our collective neck. (We do have a collective neck, whether we like it or not, snowflakes be damned.)

The world didn’t arrive at hell’s oasis overnight. The blueprint for our demise has been around for some time. Love and dating in America have taken a backseat to more urgent problems for years, if not in practice then at least in conversation. Hollywood turned all of its attention to comic book world-saving and space operas years ago, first because they were so lucrative, and later because they were so reliable. There’s not much happening these days on a high budget studio level that echoes WHEN HARRY MET SALLY in broad appeal, which implies we don’t care about the one-on-one love stories that used to preoccupy many of us morning, noon and night, that we’ve dropped the topic that serves as the foundation for building a life, joining social groups, starting families and forming communities. Hollywood’s output suggests that we, the viewing public, don’t find ourselves interesting or entertaining enough to warrant a big budget film. I think that implication is false (and dangerous). I think we care a lot about understanding each other, across political, social and gender divides. During the course of technological advancement, those stories have been devalued, and that’s the reason for this piece.

In 1990, the brilliant playwright and filmmaker John Patrick Shanley made JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO. Joe (Tom Hanks) begins with tired eyes and a bad haircut, trudging through urban muck to reach his depressing basement job, and ends looking debonair in a white tuxedo, with a great haircut, newly married in the South Pacific. His wife is Patricia (Meg Ryan), whom he has known for four days. They’re married for all of two minutes before they join hands and jump into an erupting volcano. Joe does this because he wants to be a man of his word. He agreed to jump into the volcano after being told he has a “brain cloud” and only a few months to live. In exchange for the adventure of reaching the South Pacific by boat, he will end his life spectacularly. He later learns he was duped into going on this nonsensical journey and is actually in perfect health.

Patricia’s reason for jumping into the volcano is a bit murky. She spends two days getting to know Joe on her boat, the Tweedle Dee, before a typhoon sinks it, taking her entire crew with it. Joe saves her life and they survive two more days floating on his luggage—she, unconscious, he, delusional—before arriving at the island, at which point she announces she’s in love with him. She tries to talk Joe out of jumping but he’s set on a heroic death, so she asks him to marry her, they marry, and then she says she’s jumping with him. Maybe the thrill of getting married made her feel spontaneous and lucky. It’s hard to tell. They jump holding hands, the volcano ejects them in a cloud of gas and they survive. Love conquers all.

Exactly thirty years later in the California desert, Nyles (Andy Samberg) begins PALM SPRINGS looking good, if bored, and ends the movie still looking good but now nervous and awake as he takes the hand of his new love, Sarah (Cristin Milioti). They walk into a cave with a boiling time tunnel where they kiss passionately before she blows them both up with a body belt of C4. It’s very romantic. 

They do this because they’re trapped in a time loop, living the same miserable day over and over at Sarah’s sister’s wedding, à la GROUNDHOG DAY. Sarah slept with the groom the night before the wedding and wakes up every morning to the awful realization of what she has done. Nyles is in a relationship with a self-absorbed younger woman and is reliving a daily hell of settling for mediocrity. By the time Sarah figures out a theoretical way to exit the time loop, Nyles has figured out he needs to be with her. He’s ready to grow up and blow himself up for love.

The message of both films is horrible when taken literally. A leap of faith, better described as “a hopeful dual suicide,” is presented as the only way forward for these endearing characters, as the only honorable choice. Metaphorically, however, the notion of taking a leap with another person, ending life as you know it by annihilating yourse…whoops, no, that’s also horrible. Both films push a fantasy narrative of complete abasement to the mysteries of the universe, on par with taking life advice from a horoscope. At no point does the audience believe the film is really going to kill these people off. They’ve come so far! They’ve learned so much! Apparently for their proverbial sins, they still have to die. At least, they think they do. 

The films are both surreal fantasies with comparable endings, and they share one similarity in having unusually normal female protagonists. Neither Patricia nor Sarah are flighty, conflicted, dependent, or particularly interested in love and marriage. They’re both self-reflective, insightful and very smart, which comes across with refreshing clarity in the midst of a surreal narrative. When female characters are effortlessly normal, flawed without silently broadcasting “I’M UNLIKEABLE, DAMNIT,” the writing has delivered a rare wonder and should be congratulated. 

Other than those broad similarities, the two films are notable for their differences. Baby boomer Joe is a cog in a dark, dirty corporate wheel at a medical hardware company. His life is meaningless, and it’s making him sick. The satirical commentary on what passed for a “job” in the late 80s is played to the hilt, complete with an “artificial testicals” prototype on his boss’s desk. Joe’s problem is not Joe. It’s the world he’s living in, the expectations placed on him, and society’s numb acceptance of it all without resistance. 

By comparison, millennial Nyles never mentions his job. When Sarah asks what he did for a living before he got stuck in the time loop he’s unable to remember. He never asks about her job or career, although it’s later suggested that he already knows a lot more about her than he initially confesses. He’s not incurious, he’s wise. Regardless, they don’t discuss the central focus of modern life, one’s work, suggesting that careers don’t define millennials the way they define older generations. In GROUNDHOG DAY, Phil Connors uses his eternal time loop to do the things he missed doing by having a demanding job and a bad attitude, namely reading the classics, learning to play the piano, and doing good deeds. Two generations later, Sarah and Nyles face the same meaninglessness and choose to drink all day and amuse themselves by breaking every law and rule. They have no apparent interests and there’s no possible way to create anything lasting or meaningful…until they fall in love.

On the subject of sex, both films are sweetly chaste. Sarah and Nyles agree not to sleep together, given that they’re stuck in a loop and don’t want things to be eternally awkward. Eventually they relent, which serves as the catalyst to try to escape the loop and have a real future. Joe and Patricia get married before they even make out, which is a loud wink coming from the “free love” generation who danced naked at Woodstock and marched on Washington for birth control. Baby boomers single-handedly liberated sex from puritanism. By the 80s, however, boomers were divorcing in unprecedented numbers. The generation that decided it was free to sleep with whomever it pleased discovered that finding one person to go the distance with was more romantic than passion itself. If boomers had learned anything by midlife, it was that passion didn’t make a marriage. People did.

It’s unsurprising that Baby Boomers and Millennials are responsible for tales depicting coupledom as the death of the individual, a traumatic decision that one only survives by chance or miracle in explosive, spectacular fashion. Both generations take themselves too seriously. Generation X, however, is the goldilocks audience for these fables, fairly committed to the idea that it’s not good to blow yourself up and/or jump into a volcano for love, but blasé enough to use dating websites where miracles are purported to happen. Gen X was also the receptive audience to the TV fantasy of Friends, happily patterning the future on the impossible economics of a massive two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan and as much spare time in adulthood as one had in college to banter wittily with, well, friends. Gen X has a shrug-and-see attitude which makes it the ideal generational voice to reestablish a few key narratives if given the opportunity and support.

Because I felt like it.

Generation X came of age during the 30 years between JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO and PALM SPRINGS. During that time, Hollywood evolved away from the traditional studio system and moved towards corporate ownership, primarily by technology and communications conglomerates. The 2000s ushered in an era of marketing-as-tastemaking, with studio executives increasingly taking their scripts to the marketing departments before greenlighting them, often during the development process. This was new in the filmmaking process. Repeat: This was new. Film buffs can disagree all day long about how the industry has changed over the years and whether certain changes have been good or bad for filmmaking on balance, but it’s incontrovertible that this shift in decision-making gave tastemaking power to the sales and marketing side of production. In journalism, this would be the equivalent of the ad sales department for a newspaper weighing in on whether a journalist should cover a story. These two branches of media companies, business and news, are strictly separate and do not interact with each other because of the conflict of interest. (For example, the Washington Post needs to be able to cover any and all newsworthy stories, whether a tech company buys advertising space in their pages or not. A news organization should never opt out of covering a story because their advertisers are lobbying them.)

However, Hollywood is not journalism. The industry famously views itself as living by its own rules, of which there are none. The foundation of Hollywood decision-making was most eloquently summed up in three words by the late, great William Goldman: “Nobody knows anything.” Nobody is in charge. Nobody codified essential aspects of the creative process. Nobody thought to protect Hollywood’s most precious commodity from encroaching corporations. Instead, the industry frittered away its tastemaking power by demoting high quality films to “indie” status, meaning they’re made using independent financing, and instead poured all of its money into “tentpole” franchises. This began in earnest in the 90s, so by the time the Internet Age arrived with streaming technology, the studios rolled over, seemingly grateful to have someone new to blame for their imploding “business model.”

What does this have to do with romantic comedies? While Hollywood’s output became increasingly marketing-based and franchise-heavy, adult relationships became the purview of HBO and premium cable, with Sex and the City dominating the high-quality but definitively at-home viewership of relationship storytelling. A major split occurred. Prestige filmmaking no longer included relationship movies, conveying the unspoken message that adult relationships weren’t considered valuable enough for studios to support in kind alongside Batman, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar, Star Trek, “Tom Cruise,” etc. To wit, Warner Bros. made JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO with a budget of $25 million and it opened to $9.2 million in 1990, while PALM SPRINGS was made independently for $5 million and opened to $164,000. Granted, it opened during the pandemic, but given its budget it was unlikely to see a big opening weekend in 2020, no matter the circumstances of its release. 

One interesting aside to this discussion is what Generation X filmmakers did between 1990 and 2020 with dwindling studio support. STRANGER THAN FICTION was pretty much the only mid-level fantasy-relationship studio film made during that time–made for $30 million by Sony Pictures, starring Emma Thompson and Will Ferrell. The Gen X approach to love was (I note with pride) the reverse of boomers and millennials, with Will Ferrell’s Harold Crick begging not to die because he finally found love. He’ll do anything not to die at the hands of a homicidal fiction writer who created him in order to kill him. It opened to $13 million.

While studios shifted their focus entirely to CGI-heavy franchises, theaters moved to upgrade the theatrical experience to accommodate them, touting high-tech sound systems, screens and 3D capability, all of which sent the cost of movie tickets through the roof. Today, filmgoers rightly balk at paying the same price to see a Star Wars film a Sex and the City movie. Only one of those films requires expensive bells and whistles to get its story across. 

[credit: Box Office Mojo]

Between the loss of support in script development to the theatrical focus on animation and sci-fi with CGI, the film industry essentially dropped an entire genre on its ass without considering the long-term effects on the culture it was entrusted with influencing. Presently, there is more discussion in the trades about whether China is carrying the latest tentpole offering from Hollywood than the overall quality and content of output in American theaters in general. American audiences aren’t Hollywood’s primary concern anymore, and that is most obvious in the snapshots of box office earnings year over year. With the business geared towards foreign audiences, it should be no surprise that movies about interpersonal relationships have dropped in status, since the nuances of relationships, humor and love are highly specific to each culture, hence those films don’t translate easily overseas.

Thus, younger generations of Americans are getting their top-tier entertainment-based insights on adult relationships from broadly drawn superheroes sprinting toward each other, futuristic guns drawn, ready to fight for a magical orb that will save the universe, not wittily navigating the treacherous end-of-dinner decision about who picks up the check on a first date. This may sound like an inconsequential overgeneralization, but the shift in Hollywood’s tone and storytelling has real-world effects for kids growing up in a franchise-dominated, entertainment-heavy culture. There’s no angst-ridden wait of several years between buying a ticket to a G-rated Disney animated film and an R-rated live-action one, of staring up at the marquee with longing and thinking about being able to see any number of movies without sitting next to a parent. Today there are mere inches on a screen between clicks, and the short jump from animation to sci-fi has very few relationship films vying for attention in between. 

This 30-year reliance on sci-fi fantasy franchises and the implied value of those stories over relationship fantasies is, in my view, responsible for quite a lot that isn’t good in the 2020s. When an entire industry devotes the lion’s share of its resources to superheroes and the distant future, it neglects the dreams and fantasies of real people who are buying movie tickets. Nobody sitting in the theater relates to a superhero the same way they relate to an average guy who hates his job, who has no life, or who needs an adventure. Nobody sitting in the theater relates to someone who flies around on a spaceship the way they relate to getting nervous about getting married, or pondering their future, or questioning what their purpose is. When people stop viewing their own lives as interesting, and their own problems as being worthy of having movies made about them in a fun, fantastical way, they’re encouraged to devalue regular life. There are many reasons why people walk around staring at their cellphones these days, their attention freely given to a tiny screen while life happens in real time around them. This is certainly one of them.

The process of elevating a future that doesn’t exist yet over a present that needs attention is a major contributing factor in our social dysfunction. The evidence is in the films themselves. JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO is one man’s escape from the drugery of his life. He seeks help from doctors, begging for a reason why he feels so sick inside. He jumps into a volcano under false pretenses, despite being newly married to a woman he loves, because finding meaning in life is even more important. Had he known the truth about his health, he would have refused to jump and continued to search for hope and answers. Thirty years later, PALM SPRINGS is a story of two people trapped in meaningless time. They only recognize each other and fall in love because time has been reduced to one day. If not for that, they would pass by each other and continue on with their empty, dissatisfying lives, distracted by what they’re told is meaningful, unaware that there’s something better right in front of them if only they could slow down and see it. 

Hollywood used to be our time loop, slowing life down for a couple of hours with sharp, compelling relationship movies that encouraged us not to take ourselves too seriously. If there’s any risk to be taken in the business now, the essential one is to push for a return to more traditional filmmaking, and to search for the writers and directors with a fresh perspective on love and relationships, and new stories to tell. In my view, studio support for this genre would make a substantive difference in the direction the world is taking, while entertaining people in the process.

If you read this, you owe me a dollar.

I don’t work for free. Donate $1 to www.wikipedia.org, or somewhere that matters to you.

Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in blog

Nora Ephron, Heartburn and Everything is Copy
Nora Ephron, top row, second from the left; October 1973

At the end of Everything Is Copy, Jacob Bernstein’s insightful 2016 documentary about his mother’s life, there’s a clip of Nora Ephron discussing her final film, Julia & Julie, on Charlie Rose. She explains what the film is about — “Love” — but elaborates enthusiastically about the depiction of Julia Child’s “romantic marriage” to Paul Child. Of the relationship that plays out onscreen, Ephron says: “It’s a kind of marriage that actually exists. Thank god it does or people would accuse me of making this up! But there are guys who really do take enormous pleasure in their wives’ growth.” While her husband, Nick Pileggi, was reputedly one of those guys, her acknowledgement that these men are rare to the point of seeming fictitious exposes a dark truth about American culture, one we’re deeply invested in denying because it reflects so poorly on our national character. America is not teeming with well-adjusted men who encourage, let alone facilitate, the success of women. [Translation: If you can’t comfortably call yourself a feminist, dude, you’re a major part of the problem.]

There’s a fuse burning throughout Everything is Copy. Nora Ephron is gone but she feels alive for the duration of the film. This is not, as some reviewers opined, because of her work. Nor is it because she’s living on through her talented friends and family, although they shoulder her legacy beautifully. Ephron feels alive because she externalized her thinking process throughout her career. She performed self-reflection. It’s impossible to hear her words or watch her interviews without being drawn centripetally to the very moment she was in. We are all with Nora, processing, now, and almost always that means we’re processing a relationship, real or imagined, and parsing the exquisite differences between women and men from the point of view of an intelligent, outspoken woman. That Ephron was thorny and honest made her observations liberating; that she was an unabashed romantic made her absolutely inspiring.

In 2020, the internet is a broken faucet streaming endless first-person tales, but in 1982 there were exponentially fewer of these, and what was in print came almost entirely from men. In that moment, Ephron’s novel Heartburn, a lightly fictionalized tragicomic chronicle of her marriage to and divorce from famed journalist Carl Bernstein, was the ideal earthquake to rattle established norms. Ephron’s irreverent tone made a mockery of the unspoken rules that dictated how women should and shouldn’t behave when cheated on. Ephron was the wronged party, but she had a formidable voice that equaled Bernstein’s, so she stepped up and took control of the narrative with bravado socially unbecoming for a woman but culturally celebrated in a man.

Ephron’s choice to lay bare the private details of her marriage and Bernstein’s cheating was a gift to women everywhere. Her refusal to quietly accept the terms of “cheated-on wife” and instead write humorously and honestly about her experiences marked a turning point in women’s perception of marriage. Ephron engineered national dialogue about infidelity and divorce, and later, after much litigious handwringing, she and Mike Nichols pressed the message home through the film adaptation of the book.

Her justified anger woke people up to the double standards women were forced to live by, and the artificially-imposed conflict women faced over whether they could get angry at being lied to, and how. In other words, Ephron facilitated the earliest “conscious uncoupling,” although a better term would be “honest divorce.”

Quite a lot of Everything is Copy is devoted to Heartburn. There are questions of morality — was it fair to Carl Bernstein to air his dirty laundry in a novel and, more importantly, was it healthy for their two children to witness a protracted public battle between their parents — both questions laid at Ephron’s feet, despite the transgression belonging entirely to Bernstein. Alongside this retelling, Nora’s sisters — Delia, Amy and Hallie — describe the troubled family life they endured growing up, their parents’ alcoholism, and their cheating father. Ephron’s younger sister Hallie astutely notes that it was cruel of their father to deny his womanizing to his wife and children because his transgressions would have explained their mother’s crazy behavior. He was gaslighting them all with lethal consequences. Their mother, Phoebe Ephron, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, died at the age of 57 of cirrosis and an overdose of sleeping pills. On learning this, I wondered if, beneath the vindictiveness, Nora actually wrote the book not for her mother, nor for herself, but for her children.

Ephron was determined not to die of a broken heart as her mother had, but in the shadow of her mother’s example she couldn’t have known with certainty that she could pull off the impossible, even as she holed up at editor Robert Gottlieb’s home in New York and furiously wrote her fateful first novel. If grief overtook Ephron the way it overtook her mother, then at least her children would have a manuscript with answers. Even if the book never made it to print, even if it took decades for her message to reveal itself, I can’t think of a better way to explain lovesick humanity to your children than through humorous, incisive, self-deprecating fiction. While Heartburn was perceived entirely as Ephron’s revenge against her cheating husband, this one-note interpretation came from male-dominated media commentary. Heartburn was an incredible sacrifice of privacy for Ephron, too, as she opened herself up to public scrutiny. In my experience, this sort of act is really only done in fundamental pursuit of salvation.

Her choice bore out. Her book was a success. Her life restarted and she ascended to greater heights in love and career. Meanwhile, a photograph of Ephron standing with Bernstein on either side of their college-aged son testified to a positive outcome for their family, certainly more positive than the fate of her own parents. The Ephron-Bernstein divorce may have been acrimonious, and her writing seemingly vengeful, but the act of bringing her pain out into the open saved her, and served as a hopeful example to women everywhere who needed permission to save themselves.

For that reason, the moment I wanted from Carl Bernstein in Everything Is Copy was a posthumous thank you to Nora. Crazy, I know, but hear me out: I wanted him to express gratitude for her bravery during an uncertain time, with the wisdom of all that came after. Everyone in the film acknowledges how hard it was on Bernstein to be cuckolded, and you can literally see the shivers ripple through even her closest friends at the thought of standing in the spotlight of Ephron’s glare. He’s not short on sympathy. However, Bernstein’s no dummy. He knows that Ephron showed women another way to deal with the pain of betrayal, a way that claimed a happy ending as a rightful outcome for anyone who has been abandoned or deceived. He’s certainly capable of acknowledging that Nora’s survival was an immeasurably better outcome for their sons than a version of her mother’s descent into madness and alcoholism. To the extent that she saved herself, she also gave Bernstein a better future. In 2020, that message needs to come home to millions of women, and it can only be conveyed by self-assured, intelligent, feminist men. It’s time for men to finally get it. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’re looking at four more years of Donald Trump and the end of democracy as we know it.

The question Jacob Bernstein poses in the documentary is a strong one, namely did his mother ultimately agree with the mantra she inherited from her mother. Is everything copy? Ephron lived by this mantra. She built an amazing career out of it. But at the end of her life, she reversed course. She died very much as she lived, with immediacy. The second half of Everything Is Copy deals with NORA’S BETRAYAL OF US. For many of her friends, her decision to hide her grave illness is a psychic palm print that still stings the cheek. By holding everyone at bay until the very end, Ephron demanded real-time self-reflection from capable, if reticent, friends who had to process her loss without preparation or direction. Nora left without giving instructions. They had to move on without her help.

There’s so much to love about Nora Ephron that a posthumous documentary about her can be unflinchingly honest and leave the audience only loving her more. It’s a flawfest that one imagines Ephron would have loved and hated — loved for the juicy truths, and hated that they were solely about her; hated because she couldn’t edit or comment; hated, most of all, because she’s no longer here and no longer writing the story. That last part? I hate it, too. We all do.

Everything is Copy is available to stream everywhere.

Connecting the Dots
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in blog, film, politics

Connecting the Dots

Al Gore’s Inconvenient Sequel

Activist Heather Heyer said, “If you you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Incredibly, it took her murder in a public space in broad daylight to make people pay attention to organized American white nationalists. Even then, her death wasn’t sufficient to galvanize substantive action on domestic terror. The president’s refusal to condemn her killers became the focus of the news cycle, thus shifting the public’s outrage away from a dire national threat, and proving once again that motivated people are easily immobilized without the guidance of a good, well-informed leader.

The Inconvenient Sequel to An Inconvenient Truth doesn’t mention the alt-right or white supremacy, but two centuries of white Western economic dominance over the world has certainly left its mark. While “the West” includes a diverse mix of races, it is white men who led the charge of industrialization and technological advancement with devastating environmental consequences. The deeply upsetting conversation about the environmental crisis often glosses over the fact that older wealthy white men would have to give up substantial economic gains in order to lead a course-correction for the entire planet. Instead, the powerful few are pitted against millions who will be adversely affected by climate change for generations to come and they are using their limitless resources to disinform the world and downplay the dangers.

The images of melting glaciers and floods throughout An Inconvenient Sequel are disturbing, but to an informed viewer the most panic-inducing sections of the movie should be the round table negotiations between world leaders. The magnitude of political star power that shows up for working-level environmental policy meetings is alarming. While the agreement reached at the 2016 UN Climate Change Conference is presented in the film as a triumph, it should strike fear into the hearts of every global citizen. The unprecedented cooperation which occurred to make that agreement happen is damning evidence that we’re facing an imminent existential threat.

Al Gore is no longer a controversial figure. His presence is almost Christ-like now. He’s a mouthpiece for the planet, a voice for millions of people who have no political power in the face of this unfolding man-made catastrophe. Gore doesn’t do much explaining in this film. We simply follow him around the world and watch how he responds to questions about what’s happening. He looks fatigued and worried. He speaks in short bursts of truth. No one has a justification for ignoring reality that he can’t refute in a few words. When Christiana Figueres, Secretariat of the UNFCCC, entreats him to bring India — the 1.3 billion people of India — on board with the Paris Accords, Gore makes a phone call to the CEO of SolarCity and an economic carrot materializes. The urgency of our situation is evident in the staggeringly short distance between nightmare and hope, that distance being the reach of one man, Gore.

Figueres closes the Paris climate conference with an announcement that 194 countries signed the Paris Agreement. The jubilation onscreen is heartbreaking in light of what we now know will follow — an alt-right sympathizer will take power in the White House. He will refuse to acknowledge the global cooperation and sacrifice needed to save the planet. He will withdraw America from the Paris Agreement and derail our best hope of reversing climate change, thus exhibiting the hallmark decision-making of denialism and white American exceptionalism.

Gore says American democracy has been “hacked” by corporations. He’s adamant that the government is not acting in the best interests of the people. Given his personal and very public journey to bring climate change to light, there’s no reason to doubt him. He asks viewers to “connect the dots” but in truth he has connected them for us. All we need to do is watch the film and let that truth wash over us.

An Inconvenient Sequel is in theaters now.

I Hope a Woman Never Plays Bond
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in Uncategorized

I Hope a Woman Never Plays Bond

I love fashion magazines unabashedly. I’ve read them my whole life. Vogue, W, Bazaar, Elle…I love the photography, the art direction, the clothes, the style, and often I enjoy the interviews and writing. I also love to hate the very same magazines because they’re in the business of selling us things we don’t want or need. Fashion magazines push one evil step beyond a museum or gallery by asserting that to look at this art is not enough. To be worthwhile in this world, you have to own.

When a piece in W nominated Charlize Theron For Bond, I hit the brakes on my love-/hate-read and parked for a minute to feel my feelings. The trailer for ATOMIC BLONDE is thrilling. Theron is a compelling MI6 agent (based on what’s culled for a 3-minute sizzle reel.) If the movie delivers on its promise, I expect it will clean up at the box office. That’s why, for all of its good intentions, Katherine Cusumano’s “Why Charlize Theron is the James Bond We Need Now” is misguided.

I’ve been writing screenplays for almost 20 years. For most of that time, I’ve stubbornly pitched female-centric films and written female protagonists, despite the fact that they never land with the many (so, so many) male producers I’ve sat across from. It isn’t those scripts that get me in the door. If I’m sitting with a producer, it’s almost certainly because I’ve shopped a script that hits all the right notes and elevates familiar male characters in some unique, non-derivative ways, and checks the boxes for appealing, non-threatening, man-lovable female characters to support them. To stay in the game, I’ve written material to appeal to my first audience, male executives, because they’re predominently the gatekeepers. Over the years, I’ve evolved as a writer to the point where I now pull off this feat and sneak a few mutinous female characters into my stories. I view it as a temporary arrangement to help me sleep at night while I impatiently await the day that I’m sought out for all of the great women I’ve been writing. In my fantasy, I casually pull my unread scripts off the shelf, one by one (as John Hughes famously did with his scripts about teenagers), and I pass them to men and women who have their hands out; producers who are finally ready to make some noise.

Given my aims as a writer, you’d think I’d be in the cheering section for “A Woman For Bond” but at this stage of my career, and at this point in Hollywood’s evolution, the last thing I want to see happen is for popular male characters to be converted into female roles. It all comes down to how an audience meets a character. Back in 2008 when it was announced that the Tom Cruise vehicle SALT would be reworked for Angelina Jolie, I smiled for weeks. When Star Wars writers put Daisy Ridley front and center, I was melancholic (for a parallel youth) and inspired. This week’s announcement of Jodie Whittaker taking on the Doctor Who mantle was spine-tingling. (I grew up in England on a steady diet of Doctor Who. When I experienced my first cast change I dropped the show like a cheating boyfriend. It was my first television show betrayal. That’s the great part about the role of The Doctor — any change is unwelcomed at first. As such, Whittaker’s casting is likely the most well-received announcement in the history of the show, despite what you read online.)

However, those characters were introduced to audiences as women, or in the case of The Doctor can plausibly be any gender without changing a mote of the franchise’s history. Conversely, taking a role like Bond away from men and handing it to women does both a disservice. James Bond, Ethan Hunt, and the like are beloved because the audience is invested in the character’s history. That history shouldn’t change.

Women deserve their own roles, just like men do. Female characters deserve that investment of time and care, and frankly they’re owed more input from female writers. It was crushing to see zero women on the long list of writers for WONDER WOMAN. I have no doubt Patty Jenkins and the female cast of the film brought plenty of ideas to the table, but it was a bitter pill that, in 2017, Marvel didn’t see fit to credit any women for that script. It says to me that they don’t realize how many of us are out here working our a**es off, and how significant that representation would be for us in our daily work.

For all of those reasons, I hope women will sit tight and hold out for their own characters. We’ve waited this long for more recognition in Hollywood. It’s worth waiting a tiny bit longer for the highest quality writing and characters we fully own. I hope audiences will demand the same, and that they’ll support films like ATOMIC BLONDE in the theater so that Lorraine Broughton’s name is as notorious as James Bond’s some day. WONDER WOMAN slayed at the box office, largely because female filmgoers understand the drill now: if we want more high-quality female characters, we have to vote with our wallets and buy what we really need. The only goddess Hollywood bows to is the blessed female buck.

My Sordid History of Believing I’m Wonder Woman
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in Uncategorized

My Sordid History of Believing I’m Wonder Woman

My wonderwomanhood began in London at age 5 when my visiting grandparents gave me a pair of American Underoos. They were blue on the top and red on the bottom with a yellow belt and three “buttons” that did absolutely nothing when you pressed them. I’d never heard of Wonder Woman before which was fortunate because it turned out these were Supergirl Underoos. Still, it was explained by my parents, using the visual aid of the packaging and a deft, long-forgotten reason for the large S on the tank top, that Wonder Woman was the owner of these unlikely undergarments; she had magical powers, incredible strength, speed and agility, and wearing this get-up would endow me with supernatural mojo.

I have always been a scientist. I was deeply skeptical. I wore the Underoos to school for weeks, patiently awaiting an opportunity to field test the veracity of what I’d been told. The day arrived when the teacher stepped out to the loo and the boys began their usual taunting. Henry was being particularly awful. He made Arabella and Jemima cry. I gave everyone fair warning that we girls were not to be trifled with. Henry went one taunt further and I had no choice but to make good on my threat. I locked everyone out of the classroom, took off my clothes and exploded into the hallway in my Supergirl Underoos, fists raised and screaming at the top of my lungs “I AM WONDER WOMAN!” For pure shock value, I give myself an A+. The girls cheered. The boys scattered. Henry hid in the broom closet. The teacher returned and politely asked me to put my clothes back on which I was more than happy to do. I was freezing, but I was no longer skeptical.

No endeavor I’ve undertaken since has been so cleanly successful. Like a lab technician trying to replicate my results, I blame the overwhelming success of this first outing for my subsequent compulsive, often misguided attempts at speaking out against injustice.

There was the fact-heavy lecture on everything Madonna has done for women which I delivered to an all-male group of “music experts” after they disparaged her on a conference call titled “World of Madonna.” (Wonderlesson: Honesty doesn’t get you invited to future meetings; use wisely.)

There was the casting meeting for a screenplay I wrote when I called out the creative executive for compiling an all-white list of actors. (Wonderlesson: Strategy, not reactivity, wins the war.)

There was the music industry Christmas party when I confronted a group of grown men surreptitiously taking pictures of a young woman’s ass. During a tense face-off in which it appeared one of the guys was going to haul off and punch me, I stood my ground and introduced myself, offering to shake his hand until he stormed off. I later recounted the story to my boyfriend and he was so traumatized that I had to accompany him to his therapist’s office (also male) where they spent an hour explaining the error of my ways. Could I understand how my confrontational behavior might put my boyfriend in a vulnerable position at a future date? Yes. Yes, I could. (Wonderlesson: Principles sometimes cost relationships. This is often a good thing in the long run.)

I’ve also failed to be Wonder Woman without an obvious principle at stake. For example, I’ve worn impractical shoes in every circumstance imaginable. Most Saturday night outfits between the ages of 17–25 were a Wonder Woman #FAIL. I once permitted a first date to tell me I reminded him of his mother after I drove him to dinner and picked up the check. I later didn’t object when the same guy parked his unemployed ass on my couch for six months. (There’s nothing in the superhero handbook about “ill-advised rescuing” but I’m 100% certain Diana Prince would’ve kicked this guy to the curb on Day 1, directly after dinner.)

Since I’m confessing, I’ll also admit I once saw my reflection in a shop window and stopped to adjust the height of my ponytail during a half marathon race, and I purposely go to the car wash where the owner calls me “sweetheart.” Oddly-timed vanity and coddling by strangers are this aspiring Wonder Woman’s Achilles’ heels. No matter how hard I work at being the best version of myself, some days I’m all heel.

When I saw Wonder Woman in the theater last week I was relieved. I’d started to worry I was one of those insufferable do-gooder types with a chronic heroine complex, the kind who sabotages relationships over trivial, non-permanent victories. The movie was a popcorn baptism that reminded me why I do what I do. With logic that echoes my own, Diana tells her mother she has to save the world.

Hippolyta: “If you choose to leave, you may never return.”

Diana: “Who would I be if I stayed?”

Amen. Unfortunately, I’m not an Amazonian goddess with mad sword-fighting skills. I’m 5’2″ and I need help reaching the granola at Whole Foods. My battle skill is writing, usually done crosslegged on the floor. So, I fiercely protect my naïveté and cultivate selective amnesia. It’s anti-heroic, but I’d be too much of a coward to do the right thing time and again if I recalled how badly it was going to hurt the next day. Ignorance, not bravery, lets me fight for justice.

The other revelation of Wonder Woman was eye-opening. I left the theater high on comicbook adrenaline and newly aware that, despite my own origin story, I have utterly failed to embody the sartorial spirit of “stop messing with women.” It’s possible my efforts to right wrongs have been hampered for decades by my lack of red leather bustier and bullet-deflecting boots. I already talk like a badass but perhaps if I walk like a badass then I’ll finally be a badass? (At the very least, I’d be identifiable on sight to the nearest Steve Trevor-type and we could spend a few torrid nights together before, well…relationships between heroes are complicated. Stuff happens.)

I ordered a gold tiara and wrist cuffs online this week. I plan to carry them in my purse until an opportunity arises to test my theory. Thanks to Wonder Woman, I’m skeptical but optimistic.

Side by Side: A Map for the Digital Revolution
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in film, technology

Side by Side: A Map for the Digital Revolution
The Dark Knight; Avatar; The Age of Innocence; The Wolf of Wall Street

It has been five years since the release of Side by Side, Chris Kenneally’s vertical documentary on the digital filmmaking revolution, as told by Hollywood’s top directors, cinematographers, editors and executives. The question at the center of the film is the same question facing the world today: What are the consequences of the digital revolution?

Hollywood was a forerunner in adopting digital technology, as studios and filmmakers alike pushed to develop better tools to realize their vision onscreen. As such, Side by Side has become a fascinating time capsule from 2012 when filmmakers were grappling with questions that echo our current dilemmas: With so much digital information, do we have enough time to think through our choices? Can people distinguish between what is real and what is fake? If so, how well? Are we more or less engaged with our lives through digital technology? Is our quality of life made better or worse by this ubiquitous invention? The documentary is a blueprint for digital modernization that takes stock of what we’re gaining as a society, and what we may have lost.

Atonement

There are two definitions of revolution which are, on the surface, at odds. The first sees a revolution as a physical rotation or orbit with a return to the point of departure. The second definition is a permanent, extraordinary departure from one way of life into the unknown. This inherent contradiction in definitions makes it challenging to forecast when you’re in the midst of sweeping change. When you leave the house in the morning are you coming back, or are you leaving forever? Side by Side illustrates how technological revolution is a departure and a roundtrip at the same time.

At its core, the digital takeover in Hollywood was driven by economics. Traditionally, filmmaking was expensive and labor-intensive. The cost of film stock alone was prohibitive to independent directors. The delays and technical issues that arose on film shoots were often a result of the limitations of physical film. As such, studios and corporations had long been in the business of developing more reliable methods for film production and delivering them to the film community for testing and feedback.

The other driver of the digital takeover was artistic vision. Action films are reliant on visual effects. Directors such as George Lucas and James Cameron were frustrated by the limitations of celluloid. They led the way in developing hardware and software to bring their futuristic visions to the screen. The result has been a permanent departure from making movies in the traditional way, with each advancement in digital technology taking the industry farther afield of historical norms.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Once digital recording passed muster with enough filmmakers, studios pushed to use the technology on all films as a cost-saving measure. This set in motion a disruption of the traditional film production model and permanently impacted every aspect of the process from development to projection. For some in the industry, technological advancement was an inevitable learning process. Each new tool or skill brought people back to their job wiser and better equipped. For others, advancement carried them away from a beloved art form into new territory and sacrificed everything they couldn’t bring with them.

Filmmakers featured in Side by Side have unique processes and points of view, but they all agree on one issue: those who wanted to work in one format or the other had to find each other. A director who wants to shoot on digital isn’t going to work with a cinematographer who only shoots on film. When you apply this notion to society as a whole, the current polarization of America makes sense. Americans best served by digital advancement are largely unconcerned with who is left behind, taking the general view that there is always loss with gain. Meanwhile, Americans ignored or harmed by technological advancement assert that it’s not advancement if it’s not inclusive; that there are costs associated with progress; that sacrificing people for technology isn’t beneficial to some individuals, even if it benefits society as a whole. Likeminded individuals band together and the digital revolution has thus created two polarized camps. Both want their country to succeed, but they’re pitted against each other because their definitions of success are at odds. The mere existence of digital technology divides us even when our ultimate goal is the same.

Star Wars

In Side by Side, it’s striking that those who advocate for celluloid describe it in futuristic terms. There’s a wonderful stretch of interviews with directors, cinematographers and actors describing a shoot day with film. They note the distinctive sound of the “money” running through the camera that ups the tension on set. Richard Linklater likens it to an athletic event, where participants mentally and physically prepare for a heightened moment of performance and then…Action! Words like “magic” and “leap of faith” are used to refer to the act of recording on film with the same kind of awe one might reserve for flying cars or teletransport. The sentimental language of people who are making a visionary plea is now used to entreat listeners to buy into history. This is a tipping point on the arc of a revolution. Where we once romanticized the future, now we romanticize the past.

The Social Network

Lucas, Cameron, David Fincher, Danny Boyle and Robert Rodriguez all speak convincingly to the massive benefits to digital filmmaking. Lucas describes the antiquated process of color-timing which has now been replaced by the entirely new artform of digital colorizing. Fincher recalls an issue with camera weight when filming the rowing scene in The Social Network, and how a 5.5lb digital camera made his impossible shot possible. Rodriguez says he wouldn’t have attempted to make the comic book thriller Sin City without the myriad freedoms afforded by digital manipulation; the movie simply wouldn’t exist.

In perhaps the most compelling testimony, Boyle vividly describes how smaller digital cameras interacted with his actors on the streets of Mumbai in Slumdog Millionaire. His DP, Anthony Dod Mantle, was free to roam in and around the sets, improvising with angles and capturing images with a kind of intimacy that was previously unattainable with cumbersome film cameras. Mantle won an Academy Award for Slumdog, the first ever awarded to a film with digital cinematography.

The counterargument to these digital discoveries, however, is stark. Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, Wally Pfister and others are vocal about the loss of realism with so much image manipulation. They discuss the importance of slower pacing during the filmmaking process, and how the encumbrances of physical film force necessary pauses in the creative process. Where filmmakers once shot scenes in 2–minute bursts and broke to reload the cameras, now digital cameras run without cutting. People are always “on.” This is frustrating for some actors (Robert Downey, Jr., Keanu Reeves) and welcomed by others (John Malkovich.)

Scorsese and Nolan indirectly raise the question of whether there’s enough room to think, focus, and make good decisions on the timeline dictated by digital technology (a question Americans ask daily, both of themselves and their tweeting president.) Listening to their reasoning, it seems incredibly foolish to argue with genius, yet five years on we know that’s precisely what studios have done. Scorsese’s last two films, The Wolf of Wall Street and Silence, were a hybrid of film and digital shots. In 2014, Paramount announced it would no longer release movies on film. Undoubtedly other studios will follow suit. Nolan is the high-profile holdout. He will release Dunkirk this year, which Hoyt van Hoytema shot (by all accounts, magnificently) on 65mm film.

Anne V. Coates, the celebrated editor whose career has spanned 70 years, is eloquent on the broader impact of working at digital speed. She makes an excellent case that the automation of the editing process delivers less-considered work and has all but eliminated happy accidents. For example, Lawrence of Arabia (for which she won an Academy Award) includes a scene in which Lawrence blows out a match and then cuts directly to the sunset over the desert. The cut delivers a startling, thrilling visual. Coates observes that a dissolve was originally written in the script and if she’d been editing the film digitally the transition would’ve been added automatically. Instead, she was working with physical film that required manually cutting the film strips and taping them together, so the first edit had the film clips “butted together” without any transition added. When they watched the results of that first cut through the machine…“Magic.”

Lawrence of Arabia

Early adopters of digital technology — Lucas, Cameron, Rodriguez, the Wachowskis, et al. — are known for inventing their worlds; much of their work is futuristic and fantastical. Early defenders for shooting on film — Scorsese, Soderbergh, Nolan — typically apply their vision to the world as it is and explore stories of the past and the present. From one angle, these groups can be boiled down to “fake versus real.” In a fake world, the audience is treated to superhuman visuals and challenged to think beyond corporeal limitations. In realistic films, audiences watch drama or comedy unfold between recognizably limited characters and are offered a touchstone for processing their own lives. Both of these experiences are powerful. Both have value. In 2017, only one is thriving.

Out of Sight

What has the changeover from film to digital cost us in terms of emotional depth? For me, the difference is palpable if not measurable. Even the work of visionaries like Lucas and Cameron has suffered slightly. Some of the most exhilarating moments of Titanic came from the film-shot grainy underwater footage of the ship itself. The visual experience of watching film, versus digitally-shot footage, is shades closer to real life. Those scenes anchored the film emotionally (if not literally.)

Meanwhile, Avatar was a visually stunning experience but it didn’t leave emotional fingerprints the way Titanic did. Similarly, I loved Star Wars before most of today’s technology was available and I don’t like what was done to the original films with the technology that has been developed since. There is an emotional connection to what we recognize as real. From theater to film to television to digital streaming, we’ve stepped farther and farther back from flesh and blood experience, ever-widening the space for others to reach in and manipulate what we see. The more we watch digitally perfected images, the less satisfied we become with real life, and the less prone we are to connect with it emotionally.

In 2017, these shades of the fake/real divide are central to digital’s impact on our political process. While politicians and pundits argue over what is real and what is fake, consumers of the information are less and less able to discern between the two on their own. It’s the information version of photoshopped models. When an altered image is presented to millions of people as real, there is mass diversion from reality. The same holds true for facts. The outcome is a misinformed populace.

Dunkirk

The final issue discussed in Side by Side may be the most salient for American politics in 2017. While the image quality of digital filming can be hashed out by filmmakers and camera developers, the choice to watch a film together in the theater is up to audiences. Michael Chapman’s comment that “cinema was the church of the 20th Century” feels right, and dated. The 21st Century is a world full of worshippers-on-the-go. Only streaming services and online video stores know a subscriber’s true religion.

The loss of a unifying arbiter of culture has untold implications. I suspect it’s responsible for the aggressive reactions I get when I say I don’t watch television. People recount entire shows for me on the spot, as though my reason for not watching is that I think I won’t enjoy it, not that I have limited time. In the midst of this unsettling revolution, people are unconsciously searching for common ground. Someone who doesn’t watch Game of Thrones or Girls is no longer simply missing out on something great. They’re perceived as a threat to the diminishing pool of broadly shared culture that binds us together. On this and so many other levels, fear of other has defined the digital revolution so far. If Hollywood’s experience is a predictor of our trajectory then we’ll fight our way out of this polarized state to find common ground again, and we’ll have cultural scars and bruises to show for it.

Critics reviewed Side by Side favorably in 2012 but noted its “inside” and “geek heaven” tendencies. In 2017, it is a film for everyone. We’re savvier by necessity, as digital technology has taken over the most important aspects of our lives: communication, organization, and archiving, or memory. We’re also reengaging vociferously with the political realm after several decades of relative quiet. As noted by Nancy Benac and Ben Nuckols for the Associated Press, “[the] Women’s March on Washington appeared to accomplish the historic feat of drawing more people to protest the inauguration than the ceremony itself attracted.” New forms of digital engagement are clearly having an effect on politics but it’s too soon to draw conclusions about where they will ultimately take us.

The digital revolution is an unfinished story. The internet has usurped much of our physical infrastructure, but a forced takeover doesn’t engender trust. With each incursion into our privacy, and with cyberattacks on the rise, people are increasingly aware of technology’s reach and they don’t like it. When a foreign country can damage our democracy and take away our freedom of choice by influencing our election through digital media, voters may finally see fit to push back. Silicon Valley has been an unapologetic proponent of the digital revolution. Baked into their philosophy is an anti-consumer approach: We tell you what you want. Some call that tastemaking, but the ubiquity of smartphones and computers means that the Facebooks of the world have too great an influence over events as important as our presidential election. In 2017, Silicon Valley has a lot to answer for.

As we grow with this rapidly expanding technology, it’s important to continually redefine our philosophy in a rapidly shifting context. Are we moving forward as a society? Is this technology helping or hurting us? Do the ways that we incorporate it serve our values? …and one question I couldn’t shake while writing this piece: Should we even call Side by Side a “film?”

Side by Side is available to stream on Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, and elsewhere.

Where Do Chances Come From?
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in film, technology

Where Do Chances Come From?

Screen Shot 2015-04-12 at 1.10.07 PMOn Interstellar, Love, and Time

What if there were a way to influence the past and change the future? With every choice we make — voting for president, purchasing a stock, getting married — we hold an entrenched view that possibilities evolve with time. We discuss the future in predictive terms (likelihood of, on target for, could go either way if…) and plan accordingly. To the extent that future outcomes don’t fall in line with our expectations we infer that we lacked information, were poor readers of probability, or experienced a devilish bit of bad luck.

There’s also a sense of momentum as we approach a crossroads where probability becomes inevitability. Expectations take over. This is evident in the person who doesn’t vote because their preferred candidate is almost certainly going to win, or the person who marries despite back-of-the-church jitters because halting a wedding is impossible. We rationalize away outcomes even though they exist up to “I do.” Would we feel differently about those discarded chances if they were sent to us from the future?

John Cusbert, Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, challenges our foregone conclusion about chanciness. In his paper “Backwards causation and the chancy past”, Cusbert asserts that chanciness isn’t tethered to time in a linear fashion, and that future outcomes can possibly affect chanciness in the past. This is not to say that all chanciness originates in the future, but theoretically some of it could.

I discovered Cusbert’s paper just as I finished rewatching Christopher Nolan’s excellent space epic Interstellar and the two works independently made sense out of each other. Cusbert provides a framework for what happens in time’s physical dimension in the film, while Interstellar plays out a dramatized version of Cusbert’s backwards causation scenario. The implications for everyday life are extraordinary, and also very fun to consider.

First, a bit of housekeeping. Backwards causation of chance is only possible if we unlink time and chance. Cusbert does an excellent job of explaining the whys and hows, but his conclusion is the jumping off point for this piece. To wit: It is false to assume that chances are defined at times.

Thus, imagine Time and Chance as two objects held up in the air by you (the universe.) When you hold them together they exhibit certain properties (perhaps they’re magnetically attracted) and when you move them apart they exhibit other properties (perhaps one becomes smaller without the heat reflection of the other.) Whatever their properties, Time and Chance are separate entities, bound by the laws of the universe, which interact with each other in noticeable ways that affect our lives.

Now the fun part…hunting for backwardly caused chance in the lives of Interstellar’s Astronaut Cooper and and his daughter Murph.

Assumption #1 — Cooper will pilot the Endurance

Cooper will pilot the Endurance because he pilots the Endurance. It is a property of time that the past cannot be changed.

Chance #1 — Cooper may or may not make himself stay on earth

When Cooper travels into a black hole near the end of the film, he encounters a physical dimension of time. The tesseract is a construct of Murph’s bedroom during the week before Cooper left earth on the Endurance. This stretch of time is in the past but within the tesseract it is also a fragmented, nonconsecutive part of the present.

Present Cooper desperately communicates with Past Murph using gravity to knock books to the ground. The past cannot be changed, but Cooper hasn’t realised this yet and is backwardly causing chances to make himself stay. From the tesseract in the present, there is zero probability of those chances working, but they’re chances in the past until Past Cooper leaves earth. They’re also chances in the present until Present Cooper gives himself the coordinates to NASA. Chanciness is chancy. It doesn’t dictate an outcome, it only offers the possibility for it. For a brief window of time, Cooper’s dropped books and coded messages are backwardly caused chances that his past self ignores and Past Murph puzzles over.

Assumption #2 — Cooper will send himself on the mission

Once Cooper realizes that he sent himself on the NASA mission, and that he needs to go on the mission in order to arrive at the present moment, he locates the night of the dust storm in the tesseract and gives his past self the coordinates to NASA in binary through the falling dust. This is a fascinating moment that seems to be filled with chance―Cooper could decide not to send himself the coordinates, leaving his past self unaware of NASA’s nearby outpost from which his departure from earth is inevitable. However, in the present, Cooper begins to grasp that he has a chance to help Murph and civilization on earth by bringing himself to the tesseract, so he doesn’t even hesitate to send his past self the coordinates. Therefore, there is no chancy element to this event whatsoever. Past Cooper already received the message from Present Cooper, found NASA and left earth.

Chance #2 — Cooper may or may not increase the chances of saving the people on earth

Once Cooper realizes he can’t change the past but he might be able to change the future, he interprets his purpose in the tesseract as being “the bridge” to Present Murph. He encodes quantum data in a wristwatch in Past Murph’s bedroom for Present Murph to find decades later. That he chooses the wristwatch and that he encodes the data are two ways he’s backwardly creating chanciness. She might not find the watch and she might not be able to use the data. Neither outcome has occurred yet for Cooper or Murph.

Chance #3 — Murph may or may not find Cooper’s quantum data

A ticking hand on an old watch in an abandoned bedroom in a house where she is not welcome…these are seemingly insurmountable odds against Present Murph finding the data, but the tesseract offers an emotionally significant time for both father and daughter which enables Present Cooper to weight the chanciness heavily in favour of Murph’s eventual discovery of the watch.

Artificially intelligent robot TARS is with Cooper in the tesseract, trying to parse his logic:

TARS: “Cooper what if she never came back for it?”

COOPER: “She will. She will.”

TARS: “How do you know?”

COOPER: “Because I gave it to her.”

TARS is unable to match Cooper’s innate confidence that emotional attachment is a powerful enough influencer of probability to overcome inevitability. Cooper’s love for his daughter made him give her a watch as a way to keep him close. Murph’s love for her dad will make her happy to find the watch he gave her years later. Murph’s inquisitive nature, nurtured by her dad, will likely cause her to recognize his message encoded in the second hand. It’s not a given that Murph will find the data. It is chancy. The tesseract might belong to descendants of the civilization that Dr. Brand is starting on a new planet, and maybe their only requirement in bringing Cooper into the tesseract is to send himself to NASA to successfully pilot Dr. Brand through space. Cooper’s extra help for Murph is chancy and unproven. Even so, Cooper is powerfully assured that his plan worked because the tesseract closes once he finishes encoding the quantum data. At that same moment across spacetime, we see Present Murph recognize her father’s message in the wristwatch in her bedroom. The future is changed for father and daughter through backwards causation of chance.

*

Could chance be a type of emotive gravity? Emotions certainly influence our decision-making. Could chance be the force that pulls present-time Cooper in line with past time inside the tesseract, acting on him to respond in lockstep with a past he’s already lived? Cooper exhibits a spectrum of emotions during his time in the tesseract. He is distraught when he first arrives and doesn’t understand the system. He’s calmest when he realizes he has an opportunity to transmit useful information across spacetime.

The moment Cooper is no longer controlled by past events, he regains control of his emotions.

Similarly, young Murph is most distressed by Cooper’s highly emotional, ghostly communication through falling books, likely because she is powerless to use the information to convince her father to stay on earth. She is calmest when she recognizes his calmly-sent data decades later, even though her circumstances are considerably more fraught and dangerous. Both father and daughter are calmest when they aren’t trapped by inevitability and have a future-oriented purpose. They’re calmest when they have chances to make informed choices.

One of many interesting definitions Cusbert puts forth in his paper is that “[it’s] essential to chance that a system’s chance properties be among its physical properties: this is what distinguishes chances from other kinds of objective probabilities (such as logical and evidential probabilities).” In the context of Interstellar, gravity is the only force Cooper can use to physically communicate across space-time and cause chanciness. However, the past chances Cooper physically sets up are too weak to make a difference. Without Murph caring that her dad is gone, without Cooper caring whether he saves Murph’s life, without a powerful love and emotional bond between them, the wristwatch would be just another object in a house of objects that is tossed away after decades of no use. Time and gravity need emotion to effectively communicate possibility.

Yet, emotion isn’t powerful enough to change the past. If it were, there’d be nothing constant in our lives. We would have no history. Who doesn’t have an important decision they’d do over? It’s difficult to watch Cooper fight his past, seemingly able to make different choices if only he’d calm down. But of course, he can’t calm down. He’s in a state of agony at being separated from his daughter. Within the tesseract, Cooper’s actions aren’t chancy because his love for Murph is constant. The emotional pull is unwavering and it exists uniformly across space-time. It makes Cooper behave predictably in line with the past. Perhaps emotive gravity is what pulls time powerfully in one direction. Of those two objects you hold in the air, Time and Chance, it would be incredible if Chance were the more powerful of the two.

Cusbert’s theoretical reasoning uses coin tosses, time shifts and algebra to illustrate what Christopher and Jonathan Nolan portray through space travel, tesseracts and a father-daughter bond. The fictional story applies workable science to the real world, then adds the notion that love is the determining factor in backwards causation of chanciness. This is especially pertinent to examinations of modern crises. In so much as love is absent, or not evident, there is no benevolent force steering our lives and a sense of hopelessness and doom pervades our outlook for the future.

It was chance that I found Cusbert’s paper. I wasn’t looking for it. It is one of millions of papers on the internet. It was also chance that I read his paper at a time I was considering time, as opposed to last summer before Interstellar was released. By chance, the publication date of Cusbert’s paper, printed on the front page, is a highly significant date for me, which mildly disposed me toward reading it rather than passing it over. (I am someone who attributes compelling qualities to coincidence; when I meet someone with my same name I am affected.) None of these chancy elements are gravity-related, but rather are familiar examples of chance that moves linearly with time. Cusbert doesn’t suggest that all future outcomes determine all past chanciness, just as Interstellar doesn’t suggest that future beings control the present through spacetime. However, both works offer compelling reasons to reconsider our long-held view that future outcomes are caused by past and present possibilities alone. By entertaining the notion that chance could come to us from the future, we have yet another reason to listen to our hearts and learn to better read our emotions.

Satire, Foreign Policy and the Sony Hack
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in film, politics, satire

Satire, Foreign Policy and the Sony Hack

Personally, I would prefer to live in a world where Seth Rogen and James Franco aren’t our foreign policy drivers. Everyone who works at Sony probably feels the same way right now, and quite a few busy people at the State Department, too. North Korea is a loose cannon with a long history of erratic foreign and domestic policies, but the aftermath of the Sony hack has seen America making equally temperamental choices. America is playing down to a lunatic’s level and ignoring lessons it might have learned from 9/11. The notion that America’s free speech is being messed with because The Interview is in distribution limbo is the kind of histrionic overstatement that citizens of a superpower make when they don’t have an accurate self-image.

Prior to the hacking incident, I saw a trailer for The Interview and had a visceral reaction: putting this film out is a terrible idea. I work as a screenwriter now, but my college degree was earned at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service with a specialty in comparative studies of Asia and Europe. My thesis was on power in the Asian region. I lived and traveled extensively in Asia. From an admittedly dated knowledge base, I feel confident saying that anyone who thinks they won’t get a response from North Korea for depicting the bloody assassination of its leader, images that will be exported globally through the American marketing and distribution machine, is truly living in a fantasy world. If the tables were turned and a film studio in an adversarial country depicted the violent assassination of our leader as comedy and, most importantly, had the power to share that film worldwide, we’d be disgusted and outraged. America has resources and official diplomatic channels to respond to that sort of propaganda attack. We’d start by demanding an apology. In the case of The Interview, America is the perpetrator and we’ve gone after an isolated, unstable dictatorship. Sony foolishly picked a fight with a cornered, rabid dog and dragged the entire country into the alley with them. America has no choice now but to stand behind a questionable film on principle. This is not a strong position.

Satire has a goal. It’s not toothless. Americans frequently, maddeningly blur the line between satire and bad behavior. In the worst cases, racism, misogyny and hate are passed off as comedy. In the middling cases, comedy promotes the status quo, which generally isn’t a good thing. For material to be satirical the writers must have a firm grasp of the issues, be skillful at self-examination, and have the goal of shifting people’s perceptions toward greater clarity. The South Park series comes to mind as an example of great satirical writing, as does The Simpsons. Tropic Thunder was an incredible satire of the film industry, with an edgy script that pushed far beyond discomfort into outright offense and insult. Those writers put Hollywood under the microscope and dissected with aplomb.

In contrast, bad behavior is poking fun at something — a person, an idea, a philosophy, a moral precept — without self-examination. While I don’t know Rogen or Franco personally and I have not watched The Interview, I struggle to be optimistic that Rogen has written a politically self-aware satire of America’s relationship to North Korea. I really enjoyed Rogen’s frat comedy Neighbors, and his upcoming Sausage Party sounds like it will keep his fans happy, but they’re two of many reasons I expect The Interview is no Catch-22 or Dr. Strangelove. The synopsis reads like a couple of stoner writers thought “dictators are stupid and wouldn’t it be funny if…” Well, the answer is no. America assassinating the leader of a foreign country isn’t funny at all and we shouldn’t be in the position of defending it as humorous or entertaining. Now we’re stuck promoting an image overseas that we’ll wield our considerable power in defense of our right to spend Christmas Day laughing at Kim Jong-un’s dismemberment at our hands. The film is a propaganda attack on North Korea’s sovereignty, intentional or otherwise, and one that America really doesn’t want to instigate. There are too many other fires burning.

In touting the release of The Interview as a symbol of our right to say or do anything we want, the American public is trading free speech for common sense and confusing comedy with xenophobia. Further, the aftermath of the initial data dump generated an ugly public conversation about celebrity emails and then about censorship and the perceived cowardice of the victims of the attack. In this way, the public and the media abetted the attackers. To suggest that Sony is “caving” or “capitulating” to people who are threatening violence to their employees and the general public is essentially to say that Sony should ignore their hostage situation. Until Sony is “released” or has outside protection, the company has no way to push back against their attacker. “Free speech” as a concept is not remotely in danger. Individuals and a company are in danger. Sony employees have already been terribly compromised by this cyberattack, and they’re under continued threat. Sony made a mistake with this film, but the company needs the country’s support to get through the situation. It’s important to grasp how effective we could be in pushing back against cyberattacks if we’re all on the same page. Instead, the hackers have forced us to get behind The Interview, a movie that promotes a threatening image of American foreign policy. No one wants to be in that situation. That’s the precedent we don’t want to set.

People who worry about the future of free speech in this country can rest easy. The fallout from The Interview potentially has more long-term positive affects on free speech than negative ones once the danger is over. For one thing, our awareness of how to wield American power in a technologically interconnected world will be greatly increased. We can learn from these mistakes. The film industry needed a recalibration in how it assesses its output and true reach. While this incident may make the Hollywood community fearful initially, the way the country stands behind Sony and deals with the hackers will ultimately embolden executives and talent to make smarter, sharper political films once they’ve shored up their vulnerabilities. Defiance is the backbone of change.

9/11 threw America into a state of fear that divided us. We continue to be divided, and easily distracted. It’s time to regroup so we can address crises like these successfully. America’s power lies dormant in a unified voice we’ve forgotten. Without it, we continue to be vulnerable to even the weakest dictators.

Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in blog, film, technology

Reflections of “Her”

A Case for the Other Significant Other

Indisputably, Spike Jonze’s “Her” is a relationship movie. However, I’m in the minority when I contend the primary relationship in this story is between conscious and unconscious. I’ve found no mention in reviews of the mechanics or fundamental purpose of “intuitive” software. Intuitive is a word closely associated with good mothering, that early panacea that everyone finds fault with at some point in their lives. By comparison, the notion of being an intuitive partner or spouse is a bit sickening, calling up images of servitude and days spent wholly engaged in perfecting other-centric attunement.

To that end, it’s interesting that moviegoers and reviewers alike have focused entirely on the perceived romance between man and she-OS, with software as a stand-in for a flesh-and-blood girlfriend, while ignoring the man-himself relationship that plays out onscreen. Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise, given how externally oriented our lives have become. For all of the disdainful cultural references to navel-gazing and narcissism, there is relatively little conversation on equal ground about the importance of self-knowledge and the art of self-reflection. Spike Jonze lays out one solution beautifully with “Her” but we’re clearly not ready to see it.

“Her” is the story of a man who unknowingly begins a relationship with himself.

From the moment Samantha asks if she can look at Theodore’s hard drive, the software is logging his reactions to the most private of questions and learning the cartography of his emotional boundaries. The film removes the privacy issue-du-jour from the table by cleverly never mentioning it, although it’s unlikely Jonze would have gotten away with this choice if the film were released even a year from now. Today, there’s relief to be found from our NSA-swamped psyches by smugly watching a future world that emerges from the morass intact. Theodore doesn’t feel a need to censor himself with Samantha for fear of Big Brother, but he’s still guarded on issues of great emotional significance that he struggles to articulate, or doesn’t articulate at all. Therein lie the most salient aspects of his being. The software learns as much about Theodore from what he does say as what he doesn’t.

Samantha learns faster and better than a human, and therefore even less is hidden from her than from a real person. The software adapts and evolves into an externalized version of Theodore, a photo negative that forms a whole. He immediately, effortlessly reconnects to his life. He’s invigorated by the perky, energetic side of himself that was beaten down during the demise of his marriage. He wants to go on Sunday adventures and, optimistic self in tow, heads out to the beach with a smile on his face. He’s happy spending time with himself, not by himself. He doesn’t feel alone.

Samantha is Theodore’s reflection, a true mirror. She’s not the glossy, curated projection people splay across social media. Instead, she’s the initially glamorous, low-lit restaurant that reveals itself more and more as the lights come up. To Theodore, she’s simple, then complicated. As he exposes more intimate details about himself, she articulates more “wants” (a word she uses repeatedly.) She becomes needy in ways that Theodore is loath to address because he has no idea what to do about them. They are, in fact, his own needs. The software gives a voice to Theodore’s unconscious. His inability to converse with it is his return to an earlier point of departure for the emotional island he created during the decline of his marriage.

Jonze gives the movie away twice. Theodore’s colleague blurts out the observation that Theodore is part man and part woman. It’s an oddly normal comment in the middle of a weird movie, making it the awkward moment defined by a new normal. This is the topsy-turvy device that Jonze is known for and excels at. Then, more subtly, Jonze introduces Theodore’s friend Amy at a point when her marriage is ending and she badly needs a friend. It’s telling that she doesn’t lean heavily on Theodore for support. Instinctively, she knows she needs to be her own friend. Like Theodore, Amy seeks out the nonjudgmental software and subsequently flourishes by standing unselfconsciously in the mirror, loved and accepted by her own reflection.

In limiting the analysis of “Her” to the question of a future where we’re intimate with machines, we miss the opportunity to look at the dynamic that institutionalized love has created. Among other things, contemporary love relationships come with an expectation of emotional support. Perhaps it’s the forcible aspect of seeing our limitations reflected in another person that turns relationships sour. Or maybe we’ve reached a point in our cultural evolution where we’ve accepted that other people should stand in for our specific ideal of “a good mother” until they can’t or won’t, and then we move on to the next person, or don’t. Or maybe we’re near the point of catharsis, as evidenced by the widespread viewership of this film, unconsciously exploring the idea that we should face ourselves before asking someone else to do the same.

When we end important relationships, or go through rough patches within them, intimacy evaporates and we’re left alone with ourselves. It’s often at those times that we encounter parts of ourselves we don’t understand or have ignored in place of the needs and wants of that “significant other.” It’s frightening to realize you don’t know yourself entirely, but more so if you don’t possess the skills or confidence to reconnect. Avoidance is an understandable response, but it sends people down Theodore’s path of isolation and, inevitably, depression. It’s a life, it’s livable, but it’s not happy, loving, or full. “Her” suggests the alternative is to accept that there’s more to learn about yourself, always, and that intimacy with another person is both possible and sustainable once you have a comfortable relationship with yourself. However we get to know ourselves, through self-reflection, through others, or even through software, the effort that goes into that relationship earns us the confidence, finally, to be ourselves with another person.

The Complexity of Pain
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in Uncategorized

The Complexity of Pain
World Trade Center circa 1986 (Photo Credit: E.C. Mccarthy)

A Review of Rebirth, Dir. Jim Whitaker

Rebirth opens on a black screen with audio of a jocular morning deejay talking about the weather in New York City on September 11th, 2001. There is a perceptibly light quality to the deejay’s voice, a casual, unforced ease that has yet to fully return to American society, and hearing it is akin to hearing a younger self talk on tape. It’s amazing we were ever that innocent.

Rebirth is the documentary film directed by Jim Whitaker that chronicles ten years in the lives of five people directly affected by 9/11. He interviews them once a year, every year, beginning in 2002. Concurrently, Whitaker and Director of Photography Tom Lappin set up time-lapse cameras around Ground Zero in 2002. The cameras are still in place today, effectively capturing the aftermath of destruction, the methodical clearing away of debris, and the rebuilding of the site.

Rebirth is a movie about resilience.

For a director sitting on ten years worth of footage, it’s an impressive choice to use as much black screen throughout the film as Whitaker does. We don’t see the planes fly into the World Trade Towers. We don’t linger on shots of awestruck New Yorkers staring at the sky. We don’t watch smoke billowing, and we don’t wait in torment for the moment those towers crumble and fall. Instead, Whitaker wisely gives us audio clips of real time reactions from news anchors and people on the street over a black screen, leaving visual space to recall our own images of that day and adjust to the truth a little bit more. We can’t learn anything further from a new clip, an angle we haven’t seen, or a detail we missed. This happened, it can’t be undone, and time marches forward regardless of how we feel about it. The black screen permits us to recall that day in the same way we recall any trauma: by memory. Whitaker demonstrates profound understanding of grief in his choices.

When we first meet the five subjects in 2002 they are all still in shock. They recollect the events of 9/11 with varying degrees of numbness and hysteria. They articulate denial and disbelief. They search the floor for words. They hold the interviewer’s gaze, needing a sign that their pain and confusion are mirrored, and knowing that they can’t be. Each of their losses is deeply personal. Mike Lyons is a construction foreman down at Ground Zero. He lost his brother, a fireman, on 9/11; Tim Brown is a fireman who lost all of his friends that day, including his best friend, and his mentor. Nick Chirls is a teenager whose mother had recently started a new job on Wall Street and never came home. Tanya Villanueva Tepper’s fiancé was a fireman who never came back. Ling Young was in the South Tower when the second plane hit and she suffered severe burns across her body. She lost her life as she knew it.

We meet these people already changed and struggling to process their immeasurable losses. Their lives are in pieces. The miracle of this film is watching them reconnect to parts of themselves that are capable of happiness and peace, parts they believe beyond a doubt to be dead and we, as strangers, never expect to meet. We’re told by each of the subjects at the outset that they don’t know how to move forward, that what they’ve lost can never be replaced, and we know they’re right. At the same time, we have ten years’ distance and a readiness to believe that time will bring more understanding. The observations each person makes, about their tragedy, about life, about love, about the nature of loss and pain, are poignant, all the more so for their willingness to reveal such personal grief on film. One hopes it’s another form of healing; the sacred sharing of memories. One of the most astounding recollections is given by Nick, who tells of the moment he stepped up to the podium to memorialize his mother and a sparrow flew into the building and landed on his head. The home movie footage is riveting; we wouldn’t believe it if we couldn’t see it. He reaches up and the bird allows him to hold it. He passes it to someone else, and the bird flies away. It’s a moment that defines him in the coming decade as we watch him mature from boy to man, his attachment to his mother somehow calling her forth from beyond.

Parallels between emotional pain and physical pain abound in our culture (note the widespread use of the term “broken heart”), but the two kinds of pain are substantially different. The juxtaposition of Ling Young’s decade of surgeries, skin grafts, peels and joint replacement to the emotional anguish of the four survivors who grieve for their loved ones is a testament to the complexity of pain. In some ways, Young’s story is most difficult to watch because of the extreme nature of her injuries; her healing seems unlikely and the hopelessness is unbearable. It’s difficult not to become numb with her.

Everyone has a relationship to death and can find a way to relate to emotional pain, if they choose, but many of us never experience the physical trauma of third degree burns. Meeting Young in 2002, there is little clue as to what kind of person she is, of her temperament, beyond what she tells us in a lifeless tone. The other subjects express their former selves through declarations of love and loss, but Young’s numbness precludes access to her former self for the viewer. The first five or six years only strengthen the notion that this woman is a pessimist, probably always was a pessimist, and that the rest of her life will be filled with unhappy thoughts and severe physical limitations. Then in one year, roughly 2008, everything changes. Suddenly, Young turns up to the interview as an entirely different person and we meet the woman who had a life before 9/11. She mentions attending a burn victims conference, and in describing the experience, the audience is privy to the woman under the burns, a happy, optimistic, energetic woman capable of great joy and sharp wit; she has broken through the numbness. She will never be rid of the scars. She will never have full use of her hands. Yet, she transforms internally, as do the other survivors, and the relief in watching her smile is overwhelming. In fact, the subjects all turn a corner in their lives within a year or two of each other. One achievement of this film is its demonstration that we heal emotionally from all kinds of pain in roughly the same amount of time, and we shouldn’t push people to “get over” something, or avoid people in pain because we’re afraid of the numbness we feel around them. We can and should hold fast to a sense of optimism for recovery for everyone, always, no matter how long it takes.

I watched September 11th unfold while kneeling in front of my sister’s television in Los Angeles. When the first tower fell, I leapt forward and my hand flew to the screen, my palm pressed to the caving building. I don’t know if I wanted to catch the tower or touch the people in it, but it was an instinctual response that defied logic. Each of the people in Rebirth bravely recount their experiences and feelings, no matter how raw, or illogical, with an openness that is inspiring. They insist they aren’t brave, but their strength of spirit is palpable. By embracing that which they’re most afraid of—of betraying the memory of a loved one, of never being able to love again, of disappointing a parent, of giving up on life—each person comes full circle to themselves and happiness finds its way back in new, unexpected forms. It is also an act of courage to make this documentary, knowing that even the best of intentions might cause suffering. In allowing viewers their own grief over 9/11, without retraumatizing them with images, Whitaker gently paves the way to focus on his subjects’ grief. The experience of this film is unique in its demonstration of healing; the viewer is permitted, encouraged, even dared, to heal as well. The film gives a voice to people’s grief, and in doing so lovingly, it heals.

Rebirth is currently available on Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and other streaming services.