Thoughts on Anomalisa (2015), dir. Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman

It's been difficult for me to decide how I feel about Anomalisa.  The film is in many ways fascinating and features some stunning and moving scenes.  The animation is wonderfully detailed and the film has some really great jokes and comic scenes.

But the film doesn't fully work for me, and it has to do with the protagonist Michael Stone.  The film's problem is that it tries to have its cake and eat it too.  It wants us to care about Michael's happiness while presenting him as impossible to like.  He's in every scene, and it is his unique perspective that we are privy to, as it becomes clear a few minutes into the film that Michael sees all other people with the same face and hears them with the same monotonic male voice.  Here is the anonymizing aspect of our technocapitalism writ large.  That Michael is an author and lecturer on customer service (who preaches that customers need to be treated as individuals, each of whom is having a good or bad day) is a nice ironic touch.

But Michael is very, very hard to like.  Arriving in Cincinnati to deliver a talk, his interactions with airport personnel, cabdrivers, and hotel clerks are dripping with an exhausted disdain verging on hostility.  He's haunted by thoughts of a former girlfriend, Bella, whom he ghosted years earlier.  He impulsively calls her and they meet at the hotel bar; their interaction is already floundering before he pathetically asks her up to his room.  She is horrified and storms out. After drinking to excess and remembering he wanted to buy a toy for his son, he wanders into a sex toy shop and purchases a bizarre Japanese sex antique.  Up until this point, Michael has been shown as a character who cannot appreciate people as individuals; in fact, he cannot even perceive them as individuals.  The film draws this concept from the Fregoli delusion, wherein the deluded perceives all other people as the same person.  But the film struggles with inferring metaphoric universality to Michael's condition, especially after Lisa appears in the next act.  

Michael is finishing a shower when he hears voices in the hall, including a female voice.  Michael races with a maniacal zeal to get dressed and find the voice.  It ends up belonging to Lisa, a customer service professional attending his talk with her friend Emma (who speaks in the male monotone).  The three of them get drinks together, and though Emma is flirty and Lisa is shy, Michael is interested only in Lisa.  This leads to a hilariously awkward scene where he's forced to ask Lisa in front of Emma if she would like to come have a nightcap with him in his room.  Lisa can hardly understand, as she's never the one that men are attracted to. 

As has been much written, Lisa is a wonderful character, whose positive energy and oddly un-self-conscious shyness shine via Jennifer Jason Leigh's voicework.  In the great scene of the film, Lisa sings an a capella rendition of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," continuing on with the vocal coda despite Michael's premature interruption.  Here Lisa is fully herself, performing at Michael's request, but really performing for the secret joy it brings to her.  Her sex scene with Michael has been justly praised, but again, I felt the strength came from Lisa's tenderness.  By this point in the film we know that Michael already has a wife and son that he lacks connection with, and that he has already struck out miserably with Bella.   The sex scene really felt like punctuation after the singing scene. 

Michael becomes even less pleasant from here on out, as he suffers through a paranoid dream, proposes that Lisa run off with him, and suffers a professional meltdown during his customer service lecture.  In perhaps the saddest part of the film, after awaking from his dream, Michael convinces Lisa to run off with him, only to begin noticing (and pointing out) her flaws as she eats her breakfast.  Soon he is hearing the male monotone doubling Lisa's voice.  The only human connection that Michael has made in the whole film dies before our eyes, as he realizes she'll soon be like everyone else to him.

Obviously there's a valid, if extremely depressing, metaphor here for the human condition.  Attraction fades, sparks disappear, former lovers become future nobodies.  But while I felt sad for Lisa that her potentially exciting affair with Michael was not to be, I found it impossible to feel so for Michael.  After all, he'd shown no redeeming characteristics at all in the entire film.

So was this to Anomalisa's benefit or detriment?  I still haven't made up my mind.  I'm not one of those people who complains that a film had no likable characters.  Some of my favorite films are centered on incredibly difficult and alienated individuals.  Scorsese's Taxi Driver comes to mind.   Much of Taxi Driver's power lies in how it convinces the viewer to sympathize with Travis Bickle, despite his nihilism shading into psychosis.  But Bickle's unpleasantness is grounded in his humanity, and his desire for connection.  In a way, Bickle simply longs to be like everyone else.  Notice the way he gazes upon the American Bandstand dancers as Jackson Brown sings to us of loneliness.  But Michael's inability to perceive other people as individuals, and the surrendering disdain with which he treats them, gives way to the opposite feeling: that Michael simply cannot stand others.  The film presents us with his potential salvation in Lisa, then snatches it away, too good to be true.  In the end Michael goes back to his family, where's he's confronted with a personal hell: a surprise party where he cannot recognize any of his supposed friends.  He presents his son with the Japanese sex antique, horrifying his wife when semen seeps from it.  The film doesn't resolve so much as simply end, Michael stuck in his mental prison.

Friday Night Links

Missed Connections: How to Tell if “Nathan For You” Is For You - Excellent essay unpacking the mindfuckery of one of America's truly great weird shows.  
  
Adventure Time’s Kirsten Lepore on the joys and pains of stop motion animation - Fascinating interview with the director of the recent stop motion episode of one of America's other truly great weird shows.

Can Short Stories Still Shock? - Christian Lorentzen examines the state of the American short story.

 
Pazz & Jop 2015 - I've been obsessed with the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll for a good 15 years.  This year's includes a great roundtable discussion among some of the real heavies of contemporary pop music criticism, including my spirit animal, Robert Christgau.
 
The National Eater 38 - I like Bill Addison's commitment to appreciating a variety of culinary styles and presenting wider geographic diversity then you tend to see.  So many "Best Restaurant" lists are half NYC/San Fran restaurants.  There's a lot of good food out there, in a lot of places.

Why You Can't Love David Bowie and Hate on Jaden Smith - The headline is disingenuous, because of course you can love David Bowie and hate on Jaden Smith if your criteria is solely auditory.  But the essay draws smart parallels between the fashion forwardness of Bowie and Smith and the necessity of supporting those pushing boundaries.

Meat Market - I'm a pretty major Anthony Bourdain fan, so I'll be reserving judgment on his Pier 57 venture, but there's a lot of good writing here about the authenticity trap and its pernicious effects on our aesthetic culture.  I will say in Bourdain's defense that on his TV shows, he's much more knowing and perceptive in his understanding of the fluid ways the concept of authenticity has interacted with economics, migration and colonization patterns, and ingenuity and artistry in the development of cultural foodways.  The piece is not quite honest when it comes to Bourdain's shows, which have showed him unapologetically enjoying, and examining about his enjoyment of, some very inauthentic eateries (Sizzler and Jollibee come to mind). If Bourdain has a single thesis regarding authenticity, it's that authenticity is simply one aspect of the unruly and complicated cultural beast that is human cuisine and its relationship to the rest of human culture.

editor's note: In general, I'd prefer to alternate links with reviews, but I wasn't able to catch any new movies last weekend.  I should see Anomalisa this weekend, so expect a review soon, and I also plan to review the new David Bowie album.

Friday Night Links

Slate Movie Club - These guys kill it from start to finish, all 18 entries.

The Millions: Most Anticipated Books 2016 - A must read for must reads.

N+1 Year in Review - RIP Ornette Coleman (1930-2015).

ESPN's Fights of the Year - I probably would have gone with Glowacki-Huck at #1 over Vargas-Miura.  Matthysse-Provodnikov mostly notable for Provodnikov's incredible chin; for the most part, Provodnikov was too slow to catch Matthysse with anything the Argentinian couldn't handle.  Alvarez-Kirkland too one-sided to be truly great.  Still catching up on the rest.  

Diving in Blind: Here's What One Critic Learned From Her First Phish Concert - The barriers to entry are surprisingly low.

80 Books Every Person Should Read - I have read 15, which was more than I expected.  I never do very well on lists like this.  I think my best score is on Larry McCaffery's list, where I've read 25 out of 100.  

Inside the Mind (and Mouth) of America's Gutsiest Food Critic - Almost certainly America's best food critic.

Philly Jesus in the Mummers Parade - Pretty much the most Philly thing possible.

Thoughts on The Hateful Eight (2015), dir. Quentin Tarantino

Where ever you live in America, you're living on hidden truth.  That truth is that the nation of America, the land of baseball, jazz, and the Bill of Rights, owes its existence and continued success to the extermination of one people and the enslavement of another.  You can choose not to think about it, and can choose not to talk about it, but the truth is there, and you can't get away from it.  Generally, we as Americans don't like to dwell on our violent history.  We go about our lives, working, shopping, eating, sleeping; this is necessary.  But it's also necessary that major artists should force us from time to time to confront, examine, and reckon with our history. 

Over the last several years, a number of films have been released that seek to do this.  Among the more successful, I'd place Terrence Malick's The New World, Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, and Ava DuVernay's Selma (in chronological order of era depicted).  But I submit that none of these filmmakers have tackled the wretched and brutal ugliness of America's bloody history as successfully or as powerfully as Quentin Tarantino has, first with Django Unchained and now with The Hateful Eight.

That Tarantino has become one of the foremost chroniclers of America's ugly history is a curious development.  For many people, Tarantino is first and foremost the director of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs (for instance, see the 2012 Sight and Sound Poll, where Pulp Fiction received 13 votes, Reservoir Dogs received two votes, and no other Tarantino film received more than one).  Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs are brilliant films, but in a stylish, post-modern way.  As films, they contain almost no subtext in the larger world; that is to say, they make essentially no comment on either America's history or the social, political, or economic realities of the America they were made in.  The films are each basicallly a closed ecosystem, and with their digressive and circular plots, MacGuffins, and inane chatter ("the usual, mindless, boring, gettin'-to-know-you chitchat," to quote Mrs. Mia Wallace), they are essentially about nothing, in the most gloriously Seinfeldian sense. 

On the other hand, Tarantino's Westerns are definitely about something.  They are about the violence of America's past, and they are about as subtle as the cone of blood spewing from Kurt Russell's mouth in Hateful.  In a sense this is what sets them apart from the non-Tarantino films I mentioned at the outset.  All of those films try in their own way to illuminate the ugly truths of America's past.  But all of them are too well-mannered, too artistic, too clean to show the worst of it all.  In a word, they are too tasteful.  And this level of taste shields the audience from taking the full measure of America's brutal past.

Tarantino's Westerns don't have this problem.  They wallow in all that is ugly and throw it in the faces of the characters and the audience.  His gunfight scenes explode in cartoonishly exaggerated volumes of fake blood.  Profanities and racial slurs fly left and right.  The violence is racialized and sexualized, with black and female characters taking much of the worst.  Obviously movie audiences are conditioned to accept terrible acts of violence so long as they are inflicted upon villains by heroes.  The Hateful Eight refuses the audience even this refuge, making each character so despicable as to deny the audience any proxy to identify with or root for. 

I think Tarantino himself is well aware of the oppositional divide between his grindhouse Westerns and the tasteful arthouse and studio prestige historical fictions that have dominated critics' lists and award season.  Witness the Lincoln letter that winds its way through The Hateful Eight.  Fully a fiction, it cloaks the horrors of Marquis Warren's war crimes and protects him from racial violence in his life as a bounty hunter post-Civil War.  As we learn in the final scene, it is full of exactly the homespun phrasing and decency of tone we've come to expect from fictional depictions of our 16th president; that it is read aloud by two dying scoundrels, each soaked in the blood and viscera of themselves and others, is no accident.  I submit this is Tarantino aiming a broadside at works like Spielberg's aforementioned Lincoln, works that would seek to make centuries of dirty, nasty, hateful violence into sanitized tales of great men doing great things to make a great nation.