You Can't be Coughing on a Moving Train: CONTAGION and the Soderbergh/Assayas Post-Post Post

If you can't wait and must see Steven Soderbergh's disaster movie CONTAGION (2011) in a theater, be sure to sit next to a guy who won't stop coughing  --it's what this movie needs to really 'hit you' with that William Castle 'Percepto' aural 3-D meta feeling, and Steven Soderbergh must have known a coughing person in every showing was all but assured based on its early autumn release --in 2011 of all years, right before the 'man comes around'  in 2012.

As a product of one of indie-dom's few prolific auteurs, CONTAGION makes me worry Soderbergh's bottomed out in the post-affect school of eternal jet lag, i.e. he's become a permanent tourist, convinced the brooding post-modern thrill of hustling from airport to airport while a cool ambient techno track percolates underneath the electric walkway and the colors are 'cool' as Miles Davis at five AM on a Sunday will get you through the vaguest and most anemic of shaggy plague dog tales. But he forgot that some of us don't just automatically root for the cardboard humanity on display, especially if we're population control advocates. In the end, the only characters we end up feeling bad for are the animals --frightened pigs and traumatized monkeys are tortured and slaughtered in the name of science, all so a few million more people don't die, like we really need them not to.

And as far as the post-affect jet lag genre goes, Soderbergh's just tagging along in the brisk terminal moving sidewalk footsteps of French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, the genius behind the influential post-affect films BOARDING GATE (2007, above) and DEMONLOVER (2002). As long as Soderbergh is focusing on the progression of the disease--making the virus itself the star--a hand smear on a door, or the fingerprint smudge on a subway pole, bus strap, door to a store, hand-rail down the subway stairs, apron to shaking hands to panhandles--it's fine - the virus is like Jason Bourne or Will Smith in ENEMY OF THE STATE (1998), tracked by satellites and security cams patched into the nexuszzz. But there's always dumb moments that seem far more contemptible than the riots and looting, like the Matt Damon righteous father making a big beeyootiful prom space for his isolated daughter and then crying in the closet looking at his wife's pictures from Hong Kong, which he should have turned in to the feds, but then we wouldn't have all this 'perfect' meta Baudrillardian closure. 

Soderbergh himself has become so post-post that these scenes are as trite as one of those irritatingly homespun Peter Coyote ipad2 commercial voiceovers. Assayas is too smart for such rot; he finds the humanity in running from it and that is the secret to the post-post cinematic time-image affect. Soderbergh can't show the virus coming home from work after a hard day of dodging the men in the white hazmat suits, so he does the next worse thing. Won't somebody please think of the janitor!? Look at this picture of his small boy!

Moving out to a metatextual wide shot, CONTAGION will not promote international tourism (you will not want to visit Hong Kong after this film) it also doesn't encourage cinema-going in a city like New York, especially if you took the subway to the theater and forgot your hand sanitizer. One moron in our row at the BAM coughed more or less nonstop until his date made him go outside and get a drink of water. At first he just joked and pretended to be super sick like he thought she was kidding. Three minutes later he was back again, coughing away, oblivious.

I wanted to kill him, with plastic gloves on.

He confirmed my worst suspicions about humanity's decline into the abyss, and Soderbergh's suspicions seem confirmed as well, for what we see in CONTAGION is not the truth, not even a fantasy, but a problem that is the result of our overpopulated horrifically over-linked social order, the 'nonfiction fiction' collapse of interpersonal borders. With Soderbergh's smug liberalism even our fictional minor characters are too important to let die, so everyone lives to endanger humanity as a whole -- and the meltdown of genres and styles as well as communities ensures that no one can escape the thresher with a golden ticket - the sorrows of the individual are the ambivalent solution of the many.  Mere life takes effect and no one is allowed a vegan or special dietary restriction option on their in-flight meal.There are lives at stake....mmmm steak.

Not to be a devil's advocate, BUT... If contagious diseases can spread this fast because we're so super-connected, wouldn't it help to be less connected? To lose sixty percent off our world population total and revert to an agrarian hunter-gatherer post-apocalyptic paradise? A couple billion people could die on this planet and--if you didn't know them--would you miss them? Would you weep with frustration at the big statistics in the paper or would you breathe a sigh of relief that real estate prices are going down? And what about the pigs, chickens, goats, cows, and fish who die by the billions daily to feed our combined appetite? Won't someone think of the innocent turkeys and pigs that might have more on the ball than the slack-jawed cradle-to-grave welfare recipient who assumes his red meat just comes magically from the back of the supermarket, and who gets indignant when an activist shows him photos of an abattoir? If any and all humans weren't 'entitled' by the welfare system to a lifetime of free meals they are way too stupid to ever catch for themselves, natural selection might have a fighting chance. To use the TEXAS CHAINSAW analogy, we're a nation of comatose grandpas, too weak to even lift the hammer but still guaranteed a piece of Marilyn Burns, and thus the Burns's are chopped up by the thousands at the Leatherface brand Marilyn packing center.

CONTAGION brings these feeling up by ignoring them, never realizing the animals seen in the film are the only humans worth rooting for, and their welfare is in the hands of sadistic liberals who would kill an entire population of chimps if it might save one terminally ill human pedophile.

12 Monkeys

If I was king I would free these monkeys, move them to an animal sanctuary and use convicted felons and pedophiles for lab rats instead: one monkey freed for every criminal convicted --making a reverse monkey jail!  Reverse Monkey Jail monkeys, you shall be free...(If you appreciate my overpopulation concerns, see my "Necessity of Plagues" on the 'C' Influence 10/10)

In a way I'm secretly proud of my fellow humans that so many of them seem genuinely concerned for the welfare of those people in places like Indonesia or Rwanda, places they only read about on the news but still feel, by 'virtue' of having read the stories--connected, outraged, and personally responsible. They don't need even to see the faces of the suffering, just the statistics alone awaken the armchair humanitarian's strident compassion. Maybe, though, it's all  just a pose they've been taught at their bourgeois private schools and somehow Soderbergh's seems enamored of the pose rather than the compassion.

I personally think that genuine compassion must engage the issues of overpopulation, cruelty to animals and depletion of resources. If you only have food to feed three people, why struggle to keep 30,000 more mouths alive, knowing that in a few years it will swell to 50,000 because America's fundamentalist Christian bloc won't let you give them condoms?

And it's that stony, long range humanism that marks a great genius like Assayas, the abandoning of the publicity-garnering, short-sighted moral high ground in favor of a prismatic retreat that the not-one-domino liberal quagmirism of CONTAGION fails to encompass, and thus the whole film falls flat unless it's to turn you vegan.

Compare for example Assayas' CARLOS (2010) with Soderbergh's CHE (2008): they're both multi-part biopics about globe-traveling revolutionary terrorists, both are set in the 1960s-70s, both have one word name titles that start with 'C', but the lines dividing them are so basic, so elementary, they go back to the basic dividing line of all pop culture - the Stones/Beatles dichotomy: Assayas and Carlos the Jackal are the Stones to Soderbergh's, Guevara Beatles. Like the Beatles, Soderbergh seems to believe in humanity as it currently defines itself, never losing faith in 'Us' - believing that love is all there is and the love you take is equal to the love you make and still confident in the possibility of utopia.  Like the Stones, by contrast, Assayas knows you can't always get what you want, but if you keep moving forward, keep lunging through the crack in every closing door, keep rocking and balling, never saying no to a drink or drug, always showing sympathy to the devil and jiving sister morphine then maybe you might at least get what you need, and not have to wait for some scientist to tell you it's safe to eat. There's no belief the possibility of a fair system for Assayas because he knows any system in itself doesn't exist... and never has. Men live and die by ficciones.

Che, top / Carlos, bottom

Even when doing non-fiction like CARLOS, Assayas isn't too concerned with 'real' people and integral consistency: his Carlos changes as a character from moment to moment as calmly as Travis Bickle or Lawrence of Arabia, fluctuating along lines that erase all distinctions between social and personal action, and maybe the only difference between terrorism and heroism lies along these same lines. Soderbergh's Che must always struggle for the people, for the cause... and that means tending to the wounded even if it means staying behind, and of course never smiling because he's just so full of righteousness. Both characters delude themselves in their quest for a 'better world' and how to get it. But at least Carlos knows--deep down--there wouldn't be a movie about him if he wasn't dangerous. Che can't allow such honesty to corrupt his Marxist buzz. While Che would be making bandages, showing you photos of the poor people of his village and reading aloud from Das Kapital, Carlos would be hiding his bazooka under your bed, drinking all your whiskey, and stealing your girlfriend.

demonlover

This is why Assayas' heroines--like Asia Argento's jetset assassin in BOARDING GATE or Connie Nielsen's corporate spy (above) in DEMONLOVER--are so much more alive and sympathetic and even realistic than the 'good guy' girls in CONTAGION like Winslet's epidemi-vestigator or Marion Cotillard's Stockholm-syndrome hostage (her run back to her abductors in the airport comes off phony and bleeding heart self-righteous) or Jennifer Ehle's spunky little biologist (top) in her cute orange outfits and blue-green dishwashing gloves, cooking away in the sterilized lab kitchen-- the ultimate petrochemical-armed mom as envisioned in Laurie Anderson's "O Superman." In their noble paths to save as many space-wasting lives as possible Soderbergh's chicks are the bleeding hearts that stop human evolution in its tracks -- not that they shouldn't save the planet but they could at least acknowledge the paradox: If they could go back in time and prevent the bubonic plague, would they? or the Spanish influenza, or even small pox? I can see some idiot out there saying of course they should! Life would be so much better if our global pop. was 12 billion instead of only six! They're all for it until, of course, someone expects them to share their bedroom with a homeless family and their chicken.

That last image I cribbed from Dr. ZHIVAGO, and like that film, CONTAGION is the kind of moving train Howard Zinn decided awhile ago you can't be neutral on, though by now this train has become so crowded you can't even sit down, let alone remain neutral, or anything but suffocated. The only time a seat opens up is when someone dies but then Soderbergh's doctors run up and save them for a few more stops, until the only ones allowed to sit are the dying which never quite die thanks to those 'heroic' medicos... and soon there are many trains on the track they all have to crawl slower and slower until they're nearly as torturous as the 4 'express' at NYC rush hour, and people are hanging off the sides like the commuter to Kolkata.

And people wonder why we're broke, and why our democratic system is so crippled by fear of change. Being from France, Assayas moves much more freely through the post-affect landscape: his characters get off the train and sneak down alleyway shortcuts. Soderbergh might ape the New World Order / Assayas post-modern gridwork image-within-image paradigm, but he's still a tourist, and CONTAGION is just another stack of high-res postcards from the edgelessness.

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Great 70s Dads: Roger Winslet at 2008 Oscars

 

Of all the key moments at the 2008 Oscars, who could forget the single shot of Kate Winslet's pa, way way back in the mezzanine, his big black slouch hat on, rosy cheeks, as cheery and unshowy about it as you could ask. In a way he was in a way a bit reminischent of Jack Nicholson, who's easygoing rogue charm usually fills in the front row, usually (was he there that night? Who remembers.) Winslet won for THE READER, a film that to me epitomizes all  that's wrong with craftsmanship Oscarbait (see my Oscarbait checklist for the Reader here), but Winslet deserved to win, for HEAVENLY CREATURES, her debut which is still iressistable to this old codger's eyes, and for having a salty-looking 70s dad like Roger.

From the site Free Frank Warner 2-23-09

  Kate Winslet accepting the best actress Academy Award and wondering aloud where he father was in the audience.

"Dad, whistle or something ’cause then I’ll know where you are."
Roger Winslet whistled so loud everyone in the world heard him. (Dad is an actor, too, appearing in several television productions. Kate is 33. Dad is 69.)

The UK's Daily Mail ran a thing about Kate's childhood where she talked of being poor, fat and bullied, which proved in the face of it to be exaggeration:

Kate Winslet never seems to tire of repeating the story of her miserable adolescence. She says that she was fat, weighing 13 stone when she was 15 years old and nicknamed-Blubber' at school.She was picked on and bullied, mentally and physically, and even locked in a cupboard; or so she says. 'I was bullied for being chubby. Where are they now!' she tells this month's Marie Claire.

Class act: Kate Winslet who grew up in a working class family in Reading, Berks., pictured with her sister Beth and father Roger.

It is interesting that, now that she has won an Oscar as Best Actress, Kate feels that she wants to talk about her past misfortunes.

It rather gives a different dimension to her current achievements and acknowledged beauty: that she has suffered in earlier life makes her seem, perhaps, all the more likeable.

But speaking to some of the friends from those early days, one can't help but become a little suspicious about just how very miserable it all was.

It is true that the Winslet family did indeed live in a small terrace house, and she shared a bedroom with her sister Anna while her father, Roger, took on all kinds of part-time work to supplement his faltering acting career.

And yet, despite a lack of ready cash Roger to this day drives an ancient Vauxhall car, the fact is that money was found to send both Kate and Anna to a private theatre school. Kate went aged ten to Redroofs, then based in Reading, at a cost of £1,000 a term. (more)

Now, why would such a childhood indicate a 70s dad? It's not the childhood, it's the remembrance and the freedom to talk about. Were her childhood truly dismal I don't think she would remember it the way she does, or be so free to talk about it with journaliststs. A great 70s dad, as I've discussed in past 70s dad entries, is a master of indirectly inspiring rebellion against himself; he provides for his kids while seeming to be louche and undisciplined, to free the child from the neurosis caused by parental expectations, anxieties and insecurities. If Kate knew their lives were semi-impoverished JUST SO she could go to a tony drama school, she might have decided not to go. Instead she seems to not make the connection at all.

A great 70s dad runs counter to the average hypocrite:  they preach vice but practice virtue; they roll their eyes at the self-sacrificing martyr while doing them one better. Looking at those pics above, the truth is all there in the casual smiles, the relaxed atmosphere. At the Oscar podium Winslet didn't need to paint her father in noble colors; she just spake directly to him, "Whistle!" and he whistled immediately - he was right there, like a faithful steed; he seemed to be having a great old time way the hell back in the audience, completely relaxed and needing no validation, no 'credit' for her win. Not worrying if he would be thanked or not, he doesn't need it and that's why he deserves it. In that winning sense he's a cross between Stella Dallas and Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara.

Still in a punk band and it's not weird? Yep, 70s dad

Lastly, you can tell he's a 70s dad by the persona of Winslet herself, her keen thrilling sense of gravitas and lack of self-serious sanctimony. A real 70s dad can only be behind that, the kind of dad who gives his daughter the space to freely criticize the way he brought her up. He doesn't measure himself by his parenting; he pursues his own (mostly TV) acting career and music career and isn't afraid to take a tumbler or two. In the process he allows a true actress to thrive, for children are like plants - you water them, give them access to sun, transplant as needed, and then step back and let them figure it out - most stage parents prune and fuss and overfeed until the plant's a nervous wreck, not the 70s dad. Instead he leaves an invisible signature. You'd never guess he was even there - until it's time for him to whistle, and show an entire academy audience the definition of ballsy 70s dadness.

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TWILIGHT's Cinematic Ancestors: THE WIND, DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY, MOROCCO, TITANIC, PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, LITTLE WOMEN

I'll always stick up for TWILIGHT (the films at any rate) because I love the death drive, and what other series is the lead girl allowed to have an unrepentant disdain for life? That's so ninja! What other teen series is it not only sanctioned but wholly recommended to die for love? That's pre-code woman's picture Hollywood, as old and venerated as Lilian Gish and D.W. Griffith. In refusing to be embraced by the positive life energies of the social order that pines for her, Bella becomes an Antigone-by-way-of-Camille tragi-diva. She may be a virgin, but she's not afraid to give it all up for the idea of love.

It's important for hand-wringing moralists to remember that most everyone in the world knows the difference between fiction and reality, so these kinds of death drives are meant for films -- films are their outlet. They are death on a stick, 50 cents a seat. In a dream, does it really matter if you live beyond the credits? Doesn't Oscar prefer a gloriously overwrought death scene over a happily-ever-after fade to nothing?  Don't we love to pretend to die as children? To achieve true immortality the ideal lover must become only a memory, a twinkle in Gloria Stuart's eye, rather than one who ages into her sofa and squintes at the crosswords through dirty bifocals.

TITANIC (1997)

What could be more functionally Goth than the frozen Arctic ending of this film? I was deeply surprised the frosty hair, pale skin, chattering teeth and purple lip look didn't sweep the world as a fashion trend after this film came out. Sometimes in cultural hypothermia a lag effect doth dwell. A decade or so later, TWILIGHT sped the lag to a close.

LITTLE WOMEN (1994)

I saw this in the theater the same weekend as INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE, and was hungover and repentant both times and cried at each. For the purposes of this post, however, WOMEN trumps VAMPIRE. Why? Here's why: a) Brad Pitt's ethical guilt tripping over biting folks in VAMPIRE gets soooo tiresome, and b) Tom Cruise as Lestat? Who cares if he was actually good at it? It's just wrong, no matter how sexy is the Antonio Banderas.

LITTLE WOMEN, meanwhile, has super young Christian Bale, Kristen Dunst (not quite as good as she was in VAMPIRE but who cares), Clare Danes (I cried a thousand drunken times over My So-Called Life reruns on MTV) and Winona Ryder! And even today, the film has a weird charm, like you're staying over at the spooky-cozy mansion house of a group of very, very cool girls in long nightshirts and candles, and that sense of 'belonging' to a cool group of beautiful people is really what TWILIGHT hinges on. Also, Ryder's combination of brainy, brunette and no bullshit-taking becomes a steampunk version of Jo that's a clear forerunner to the whole Kristen Stewart-Bella Goth thing, which Ryder basically invented anyway, six years earlier in BEETLEJUICE.

PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (1951)

Here's a love story where the guy is a legendary romantic hundreds of years old and only true love will set him free from sailing on into the horizons for centuries, eternally alone. He's willing to give up his chance at salvation when he meets Pandora, though. She's a free spirit who all the boys kill themselves, and each other, over: a macho toreador, a dry British sportsman motorist, and a wise older archaeologist who narrates the tale all pine as the free spirit Pandora, Ava Gardner lolls under thethe painterly camera eye of Jack Cardiff. And the parallels with TWILIGHT are, like, super obvious - her giving up her life to be with him, he giving up the chance for her to give it up because her life means so much to him, and all the rivals fighting over her but she chooses the immortal, to become mythic, this earthly plane be damned... 

DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY (1933)

Death is played by Frederic March, who poses as a count and meets a far-away-eyed debutante (Evelyn Venable). She's death-obsessed enough to make Bella seem like Mary Poppins and her Edward ain't some deer-blood drinking Puritan. Love + Death = Modernism, a cry-in-your-whiskey highball tradition. This isn't available on DVD, except as an extra on the two-disc Meet Joe Black (Ultimate Edition), which since you can pick it up for under nine dollars, is worth getting just for that (avoid JOE BLACK itself, and I say this as a man who deeply adores Claire Forlani).

MOROCCO (1931)

Marlene Dietrich's cabaret chanteuse courts androgyny and shuns rich Adolphe Menjou (the Jacob), knowing he'll eat it up. She's defined more by what she's not than what she is, and that's why she falls for 'tall drink of water' Cooper, a shadow in the Foreign Legion who, like her, is bored with the opposite sex throwing themselves all over him. They're each surprised by their deep yen for one another, but both are so used to being pursued they barely remember how to actually do the pursuing. Not to worry, since neither one gives a damn about life or death and Dietrich's final renouncement is as valiant and Goth as anything in the back of Bella's death drivin' mind.

THE WIND (1929)

Silent (or sound) films have seldom spun along with such crazy spirit as in THE WIND: Lillian Gish is the poor virginal girl who gets way less than she bargained for when she moves in with her far-off mail order husband. His homestead is in a dust bowl-ravaged land so windy she spends the bulk of the day sweeping sand out of the shack, and repelling her husband's would-be rapist friends. The whole thing works well as a metaphor for virginity and the loss thereof, the endless sacrifice and loss in exchange for nothing but maybe love. In a way, it's the most sexually and emotionally 'mature' film of the lot. It's the REPULSION of the silent era! Don't miss it, and don't front if you have to read intertitles, or you may never understand DOGVILLE. You been warned! 

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Great Acid Cinema: The first 11 minutes of HOLY SMOKE (1999, Jane Campion)

Ah, what to do with Jane Campion? For every step forward, she takes two steps into her navel. Emboldened by her success with THE PIANO (1993), Campion forgot herself and went too deep therein, alienating us new fans with PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1996) a film so bogged down in weird costume design and John Malkovich's overacting that it forgot it was supposed to be about a feminist, not a dumb woman who falls for the first artsy dude she meets. Then there was HOLY SMOKE (1999). At least it's not Malkovich the protag falls for this go-round, but Jeeze Louise, or should I say, Kali Durga Smurga!? 

And yet--and it's a freakin' big-ass yet--the opening minutes, set to Niel Diamond's "Holly Holy," are perhaps the most brilliant thing in all cinema: a delirious free-flowing montage of Winslet and her pal's trip to India, meeting a holy man, riding up in an elevator; Winslet having her third eye opened, literally, in a brilliantly animated scene; intense and delirious and full of the chugging momentum into the white light which Diamond's song is all about. Winslet's just trusting herself to be led forward and winds up awakened in the power of this guru who zeroes right in on her third eye and slits it open with a touch of his finger. As the badass Niel Diamond song increases in intensity--slowly and surely, to its epic spiritually cool heights--so does Winslet's spiritual homecoming euphoria. It's perfect, blissful. You can feel it in your saliva; your Kundalini energy serpent stirring from its slumber at the base of your spine and commencing his slithering climb to your crown chakra. What's going on? How can cinema have such magic power, how can Neil Diamond be the trigger to our third eye opening?

Then of course -- the crash. She has to go back to Australia, and that's where the problems start as her mom doesn't like the idea of her being one of a hundred wives marrying this crazy swami, etc. As with Campion's other shrill Aussie hick humor films, like SWEETIE, she forgets she's supposed to be artsy now, not stupid art school artsy but badass brilliant artsy like she just was, two seconds ago, and then Harvey Keitel shows up and you're like "But he was the original Bad Lieutenant, how can he be such a wuss?"

It would be great if Winslet's spiritual seeker just stayed in that free-flowing opening credits, but then again, that's what spiritual awakenings are all about: the crash, the come-down or as the book says, "and then the laundry" or "chop wood and carry water" or "joyful participation in the sorrows of existence." The awakening always brings you eventually right back to tedious suburban wasteland hell you escaped from and then, what? How are you going to infuse your awakened self into the banal mix of unconscious consumers slurping their way through meaningless existences all around you?

Then again, was it ever really banal, or were you just not participating with full interest? Isn't even the dullest Wal-Mart parking lot a place of beauty have we but eyes to see? Good questions to ponder, but does the film ponder them? Frankly, I forget. All I remember is the great opening, and the downhill slope from thence. I'm sick with a bad summer cold... raisins dancing in a dish, and like the gas chamber, Varla. And then the darkness.

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