'ANOMALISA'
Charlie Kaufman's new film is set in
Connecticut. Well, nominally. It's actually not set somewhere so much
as anywhere – an anonymous, interchangeable
world of bland hotel lobbies leading to nicely made-up suites.
Service encounters are simultaneously object-oriented and
substanceless, ritual exchanges, a means of masking empty space.
Those encountered talk like Hal from '2001', their
modulated smoothness the sonic equivalent of the lobbies they
inhabit. The casting of David Thewlis as Michael, a Brit adrift in
America, neatly underlines this. (I kept having to remind myself
creator Charlie Kaufman isn't English himself.) Remember the old Bob
Dylan line, “There'd be no point talking to me, It'd be just like
talking to you”? The conceit is that to him everywhere is like this
and everyone, men and women, both look and sound the same.
Which makes it bizarre to consider this
was made with puppets. Generally, we file puppetry animation
alongside cartoons, and expect the same zippy pace. (Think of how we
picture 'Wallace and Gromit' as so quirkily
English, yet how frenetic it would seem if filmed as a live action.)
And we expect characters to look iconic rather than identikit, coming
complete with some distinguishing tell like Mickey Mouse's ears. Here
things proceed at a trudging pace, including a checking-in to a hotel
and elevator ride to the room in all its excruciating endlessness,
with the room card that only seems to work the fifth or sixth time
you swipe it.
And yet its actually so perfectly
suited to the form. Everything, from sets to characters, looks
produced. People are just assemblages of parts
given motion. Most animations avoid the uncanny valley, the disquieting midpoint between iconic and
realistic. This film finds its uncanniest depths and pitches its tent
there.
It would be tempting to see in this a
critique of alienation and corporate conformity, seen through the
prism of service culture. But when Michael turns his blundering
convention speech into an off-script rant against The Man, he merely
looks ludicrous. And in his dream the depersonalised mass cry not
“you must conform”, the catchphrase of Pod people everywhere, but
“we love you”. We learn early that this is the (non)relationship
he has with his own family, an indication we'll be spending time with
not with a heroic rebel but one of life's losers.
The customer service guide he's written
seems to have not only read but been absorbed by everyone he
encounters. He's not only implicated in this world – he's not far
off having created it, having made his world this anonymising
purgatory he now has to lie in it's king size bed. Kaufman has a
penchant for allegorical names and not only is Michael's surname
Stone, not the most porous or flexible or substances, but the hotel
he stays in is named after the Fregoli delusion. And the image of him checking into his own myopia
is strong. Though what he's really suffering from is a case of
solipsism less acute than all-embracing.
Michael's constructed a world for
himself where others have become instrumentalised by him, there to
help him with his problems. To the point where all human encounters
become service encounters, the need for love and understanding
equivalent to the need for room service. And of course he ruminates
ceaselessly over his problems, unable to see it's this which has
become his problem. (The tag line for this film should really be
‘Instrumentalising Others – A How Not-to Guide’.)
He seems so inured in this world that not only does he no longer
notice other people as other people, he's even stopped noticing he
doesn't notice. There's one scene in the whole film not seen through
his eyes, a brief coda, mostly there to show the world with his
filter removed.
Then he encounters Lisa, the one person
he's able to see and hear for who she is. And immediately, and quite
literally, he pursues her. Which cues in a virulent debate over
whether that makes her a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. (See for example this Guardian discussion.) Certainly he obsessively assumes
she can provide him with life validation. He fixates upon her
identifying facial scar, while she does her best to conceal it behind
her hair.
At one point he buys a Japanese sex
toy. And some have suggested she is this toy,
animated into personhood only in his warped mind. (See here for an example.) Certainly, we're given multiple
points of comparison between the two, a clear sign she is being
objectified by him. But to turn a comparison into an equivalence is
too literal a reading. In the morning-after scene, perhaps the film's
key moment, he sees her turn back into another faceless face, as she
starts to recite the set platitudes he's heard earlier. Were she the
toy, surely it's that she would turn into. In fact, I'm going to
argue almost the opposite about her.
It's not precisely spelt out why he's
able to perceive her uniquely, but it must be to do with her lack of
'face' - of presentation. Unlike the smoothly smiling mass she's
almost childishly guileless, spilling out her lack of her sexual
experience. Yet when he hits on calling her Anomalisa she asks to be
called that “all the time”, then corrects herself – there won't
be any “all the time”. And for all his compulsively gushing that
this is a life-changing event, that they should straight away move
cities to be together, its her assessment which holds. While he
compulsively grasps at straws she – if crippled by low self-esteem
- is grounded. (To a degree they resemble to the identical twins in
Kaufman's earlier 'Adaptation', one self-important
and self-absorbed, the other louche but at home in the world.)
And we recognise the same truth as her.
We're expected to not just recognise the Dream Girl trope but
simultaneously see the folly in it. A self-pitying middle-aged man
will manage to turn his life around by screwing an impressionable
younger woman? Yeah, right. “I thought she was special and unique,
so special that being with her could change everything. But she was
just like the rest!” How many times have you heard some sad sap
burble that one in a bar, as he cries into his beer? We don't expect
it to work for him, and then it doesn't.
But the film's great paradox, which
makes the Dream Girl debate so potent yet so irresolvable, is this -
Lisa's easily the most likeable character in the film. (There's such
a false opposition between her low self-esteem and his insistence
she's extraordinary, I felt like yelling at the screen “no, you're
just okay. And it's okay to be okay!” I am at
heart a simple soul like that.) But then most-liked out of this
company may be a prize for which there's little competition. More to
the point, she's also the most realised. She may well be a bundle of
quirks and insecurities, but Michael's no more than a set of symptoms
with a name attached. Lisa's not just the most real character to
Michael but to us too. And yet the film remains his.
And this paradox is accentuated by Lisa
ostensibly coming out of it the best. She writes to Michael in a
bookended counterpoint to the “fuck you” letter he still keeps
from his ex, suggesting the encounter's instilled in her a new-found
confidence. Is Kaufman simply trying to reverse the Dream Girl trope,
where the validation rubs off him and sticks to her? If so it doesn't
really work. For all its fumbling attempts at intimacy, there's a
creepiness – even a wrongness – about their one night stand which
goes against any notion there's validation to be claimed.
It doesn't seem too unreasonable to
suggest that Michael is a dark reflection of Kaufman himself, his own
worst tendencies taken out and stuffed inside a latex fetish. But
perhaps the film succeeds too well in this, in getting inside
Michael's head, and can't extricate itself when it needs to. One
small line stood out, when Lisa's friend encourages her to go with
him because “he's gorgeous”. Which must surely qualify as one of
the most unearned lines in cinema history. Perhaps she's supposed to
have her own perception filter, which can't tell fame from
attraction. But it's one of several points which come too close to
wish-fulfilment for comfort.
Some films you review because you feel
you have something to say about them. For others its almost the
opposite, you need some way of working out how you felt about them
and it might as well be pen and paper. And there's nothing wrong with
the second kind, films don't have to be neat and tidy. But sometimes
when you have a conflicted reaction to a film its because the film
itself is conflicted.
THE DEVIL SPEAKS TRUE
Dome Studio Theatre, Sat 19th March
A version of 'Macbeth'
played out in actual or semi darkness? It did cause me to joke about
'The Scottish Murder in the Dark' and all the rest
of it. Yet as a way to see one of Shakespeare's most claustrophobic
plays, it also appealed. As it turned out, Goat and Monkey had a
different fish to fry. They describe their performance's means and ends like so:
”'The Devil Speaks True'
uses wireless headphones, projection, scent, a physical performer and
binaural sound design to plunge audiences into an intimate, 360
degree experience... a chilling exploration of the psychological
effects of war.”
Scenes from the play were alternated
with testimonies from those who warfare had inflicted with post
traumatic stress disorder. When not in pitch black, the onstage
action was confined to a few semi-static tableaus, in a manner
similar to illustrations in a novel.
The headphone-based sound design by
Dominic Kennedy was indeed evocative. The disturbing nature of the
performance, warned of in both pre-publicity and by the ushers before
you went in, seemed to concern itself with the interview accounts.
But it was the sound design which unsettled. The headphones trap you
in with the sounds and voices, they're directed at you rather than
disseminated, like you're inside someone else's psychoscape. And
sound devoid of context often takes on an eerie effect.
'The Rest is Silence' by DreamThinkSpeak, also took a
Shakespeare play as a jumping-off point. But where they condensed
'Hamlet' down to a skeleton, this was more
reductive still - like chopping some limbs off 'Macbeth'
and shaking them at you.
It might seem charmingly traditional to
assume an audience will know Shakespeare from their eddyercation,
along with how to do up a bow tie and which direction to pass port
in. But in actuality it's something much
more modern. The performance is something like a hypertext, patching
itself together out of chunks of iambic verse and testimony tapes.
But so little of the play survives it becomes a hypertext with no
underlying text. Sections were rendered inaudible, as if just a sound
source.
The focus on Macbeth's erstwhile buddy
Banquo as the PTSD survivor becomes problematic. One reason given is
that he sees the witches. But while (as we're told) survivors can
continue to 'see' memories of incidents they can't shake, there's no
suggestion they also get beset by apparitions – so the connection
seems unclear. And besides, Macbeth sees the witches too. Plus, in
what's normally regarded as Banquo's best-known appearance, he
returns as a ghost to silently accuse his old mucker of his murder.
Which fits the model more closely, though it makes Macbeth himself
seem more like the afflicted. So why not make Macbeth the subject of
their 'Macbeth'?
But that would start to associate the
affliction with feelings of guilt. Which would undermine the narrow
focus where sufferers are treated as witnesses of horror, never
involved in what they saw. A kidnapped IT consultant is treated as on
a par with soldiers. Let's not get on to how or why a soldier might
experience guilt, or whether or not the feeling is rational or
justified. (This isn't, and doesn't have to be, a work about the
British occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan.) The point is that this
narrowness seems symptomatic of treating the play as a set of
pullable quotes. You cut up the cloth to make your patches, and the
big picture cannot help but be lost.
There's also more prosaic problems. I
find I need time to tune in to the heightened nature of Shakespeare's
language, and the everyday English of the testimonies kept throwing
me back out of it. And the lack of narrative leaves the performance
with no real momentum. We don't just not get the play's ending, we
really don't get much of an ending at all.
Lin Gardner's Guardian review summed the problem up as not
enough 'Macbeth'. But perhaps it was the other way
round. For what I found to stay speaking to me afterwards was not the
Bard’s timeless verse but the survivor testimonies. Perhaps they,
set among the soundscapes, would have been enough. Or perhaps they
could have been interspersed with multiple quotes from literature and
poetry which seemed to suggest at post-trauma, rather than trying to
pin the whole of it onto poor Banquo.
Some intriguing ideas made for an
interesting failure. But still, a failure.
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