Criterion Recollection: Erosion, Explosion, Implosion

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a noted chair connoisseur and fiction author. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


Uncanny Eye Candy: Spine #640, Koyaanisqatsi (1983)


by MARK BRENDLE

Last winter, Criterion released another of my favorite (set of) movies, the "Qatsi Trilogy" by the genius ex-monk Godfrey Reggio. Koyaanisqatsi, the first and best known of the trilogy, still makes its way through pop culture, both by direct reference in homages and parodies and by the innumerable pillaging of its technique by advertisers and filmmakers.

Despite its ubiquity, Koyaanisqatsi is often remembered and noted for its engrossing visuals, camera trickery and the outstanding score by contemporary composer Philip Glass. But the soul of Koyaanisqatsi, and the trilogy as a whole, lies in the message of the film, sometimes subtle, sometimes over-the-top, but always the same: industrial civilization and our obsession with technology and "progress" are destroying the world and us along with it.

The method by which Reggio as well as Glass and cinematographer Ron Fricke (both equal collaborators) unfold this picture of a world turned upside down by rampant acceleration of technocratic hegemony startles audiences even today. Koyaanisqatsi takes footage of everyday scenes and transforms them into amazing spectacles of beauty and horror. This transformation opens up a perspective of modern (1980s) life and pulls back the casual veneer of the quotidian, exposing the violence and sadness underlying the routine dehumanization that structures contemporary society.

The efficacy of these images comes from Reggio's avoidance of language in his narrative. The name Koyaanisqatsi was added only after the film was complete, as releasing an untitled film seemed untenable. He chose the word for two reasons: one, because it was completely unknown (an irony of the film's success, of course, is that the word is now well known and serves as a shortcut to confronting the languageless object it represents, precisely what Reggio wanted to prevent). Two, the word comes from a dying language, Hopi, a language representing the worldview of a traditional society, one apart from and destroyed by the world Reggio criticizes.

Destructo Salon: Does Matthew Yglesias Enjoy Murder?

Matthew Yglesias—a Norelco marketing experiment to see if a hand-drawn Sharpie beard on a peeled potato could sell men's earrings—wrote a morally and intellectually odious article at his second job yesterday. His Slate column, "Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That's OK," addressed the deaths of 161 workers in a factory collapse in Bangladesh with the tone they so richly deserved: bored.

Writing off the death of 161 people with 370 words of vacuous unconcern requires the machine-like efficiency we've come to expect from places where pre-teens assemble Air Jordans. Yglesias' thesis, what little exists, is that the Bangladeshis are a people squalid enough that death is an acceptable randomly applied career path, and that dead Bangladeshis are what keep flat-front chinos at $29.99 at the outlet store. Our pants are cheap because their lives are, and cheaper things are innately good. Just think how much Upton Sinclair saved on hamburger as a young man. What an ingrate.

At best, one could chalk Yglesias' attitude up to the neoliberal worship of free trade, but ascribing any ideology to Yglesias is like trying to pin a Bad Citizenship medal on fog. He differs sharply from his Slate colleague Dave Weigel, who takes pains to acknowledge his affiliation with Koch-owned Reason. While Weigel seems like an affable guy who delights in mocking the ridiculous—and, with the GOP the party that forgot math, science and history, he finds common cause with the left—it's clear that liberals probably would not enjoy handing the budget over to him. This is how honest compromises are struck.

Yglesias offers nothing so concrete. He is a process acolyte, who never strays far from the orbit of Beltway centrist think-speak. His ideological bona fides extend to thinking that slightly-left people saying things identical to everyone else are slightly better than everyone else—all of whom are essentially right anyway, because why else would people agree? Ideas are less important than the formalism of tautologically explaining them, reiterating them, then deforming reality to accommodate them. His job is not to challenge them but hammer out a 500-word explainer detailing how wrong you are, while reassuring you that we're on the right track. Matthew Yglesias' voice is the same soothing one you use on your dog while the vet is euthanizing him.

That should bother you. Today, we hope to explain why in another "Destructo Salon." Please read on.

Point-Counterpoint: Is Satire Even A Thing?

Last Monday, New Inquiry blogger Aaron Bady audited the word satire and made it clear. He wrote, "If something is not taken to be satire, it fails as satire. [It's] an effect, and everything depends on how the joke is received, what the author intended, what the circumstances were in which it was made, and so on."

It's an interesting definition, both for the way it's made and the assumptions on which it relies. He establishes criteria for the existence of satire based on its audience, citing people who mistake The Onion and The Daily Currant for real news as evidence for the genre's fragility, tying satire's ontology to whether it achieves food for thought for the permanently slackjawed. Leaving aside the fact that a satire's being mistaken for reality is often a satirist's dream, basing the existence of something on the perception of idiots is a powerful argument. Spend enough time hustling Gap jeans for the braindead in a deadpan tone and you could disprove the existence of sarcasm. Choose the right textbook, and there is no Enlightenment.

Needless to say, we were greatly exercised by Mr. Bady's essay. One of our contributors (Hitler) noted the date of Bady's essay's publication (April 1) and quipped that it says a lot about your criticism website when your jeremiad only works as satire—when one could only add argumentative heft to it by looking at the dateline and crying, "April fools!"

Even talking amongst ourselves, however, we noticed that our opinions on satire and Bady's argument were not in harmony. With that in mind, we chose to offer our first open-ended philosophical discussion. In so doing, we decided to examine the nature of satire via the old inquiry. We here at Et tu, Mr. Destructo? have always been partial to the old inquiry, wherein one asks questions or challenges the opinions of another in the hope of reaching consensus or synthesis. In the main, it is both arcane and bourgeois, but it is also a timesaver compared to newer inquiries, like asking a room full of people what something is, then asking them if the photographer has arrived yet. Then tweeting.

Come, join us for a free-ranging examination of the ideas that shape our media and ourselves, especially those of us in media. Welcome to our first ever "Destructo Salon."

Letters to Vogue: 'Come, Come, Nuclear Bombs'

In these times of economic peril—will the Dow crack 14,000 again? Where can I sell my plasma for cash? Can I volunteer for jury duty?—we, the creatives at Et tu, Mr. Destructo?, draw what succor we can from the only financial forecast any human heart needs: the word of the Prince of Peace himself, Jesus Christ. As the First Epistle of Peter tells us, "God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble."

Wise words from a former fisherman, but you don't have to have such a broke-ass job to be a paragon of humility. If you're a humble person, flaunt it—say so, loudly and proudly. Telegraph your abiding modesty until your tasteful understatement cannot be ignored. And if you happen to be a scribbler at a glossy fashion magazine like Vogue, set aside your monkish ways just long enough for your multimillion dollar Brooklyn brownstone to be captured in a multipage spread for the February issue.

Thank God that landscape designer and Vogue Contributing Editor Miranda Brooks, as well as her Gallic concubine, the architect Bastien Halard, took my advice, selflessly opening their "four-story Neo-Grec Boerum Hill brownstone" to just such a laudatory write-up and photo shoot, penned by Murphy Brown's very posh daughter. And while the reactions are still pouring in, this whirlwind jaunt through a mansion stuffed to the rafters with Moroccan rugs, ponies and wonderful people has seemed to provoke one common reaction: readers want to smash all the windows out with bricks, throw dynamite in the furnace, and guillotine Miranda and Bastien in Prospect Park.

The General's Fiction: A Military Internment of Literature — No. 2

Note: Today, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria. He last joined us to explain how Christopher Hitchens should burn in hell, how we can help Andrew Breitbart get there and how killing Bin Laden was the last spasm in the American fever dream.


Pavane For A Dead Country: Mark Brendle's Radio Fragments
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

You probably know the holiday blues, if not personally, then at least by reputation. And you probably know them more acutely when the celebrations end, when there's no one left to lie to—winter without the trappings. Wallace Stevens wrote, "The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us," and in the twilight of an economically corroded and spiritually bereft America, it is more vital than ever that artists shine a light. Mark Brendle, an Oregon-based writer and colleague here at Et Tu, Mr. Destructo, has published a new book of poetry, Radio Fragments.

Radio Fragments consists of a few dozen prose poems beneath a lovely illustrated cover, depicting a cordon of riot cops forming a human abatis, as a ribbon of radio waves bends and curls between them. How is Radio Fragments? It is superb, because as an author, Brendle gets the stakes. This poetry is neither for the aloof liberal who sets great store in a few clean tweaks, nor the reactionary clinging to his long-dead liturgy. Radio Fragments is sad, strong, crystalline, beautiful, like the thick ice atop a dark lake. This is poetry for people who, in Andrea Dworkin's words, "Don't find compromise unacceptable—[they] find it incomprehensible."

The book's strength comes from its unity of vision—a dire one. In one of the book's final poems, "An Elegy For Cinna The Poet," the speaker plainly doubts the ability of any creative work to puncture the violence and anomie that has come to dominate our lives: "What are words to the angry mob, or anyone else for that matter? The patricians have been fighting with each other over their toys again." The poet is ignored, Caesar gets whacked by his equally loathsome usurpers, and "atomized, dissonant voices howl in the marketplace." As Brendle writes in another poem, "The equivalence of words brands us with proper nouns like Charlemagne, Babylon, Gilgamesh, Constantinople, Prospero." Let any dissidents bay; they've always been ignored in time for the next collapse. What change could a poet possibly effect?

Criterion Recollection: Phantom History

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


Phantom India, The Eclipse Series (1969)

by MARK BRENDLE

Phantom India is such a fitting title for Louis Malle's most personal work. The film not only focuses on India's underclasses, a near invisible people, hidden from western view by the pretense of India's elite, but the documentary form proves a phantom as well, mixing self-awareness, humility and outrage into an organic whole that even today jars us from our expectations. This seven-part miniseries, running over six hours, explores India during the late 1960s, before its unbridled industrialization exploded in full force.

Westerners hailed India as an exotic jewel, a land of sensuous pleasures, of vibrant colors, robust vitality and spirituality. India became an ideal, a sentimental notion of otherness to which westerners could retreat when they tired of their own mechanistic society. Take for example, the Powell-Pressburger masterpiece Black Narcissus, which used this idea-model of India to great effect. Malle shatters this image with an honest foray into the lives of Indians and a comprehensive overview of India's sociopolitical conditions in the late 1960s. This film captures a fragile and lost part of India’s history, between the era of colonial imperialism and the modern era of outsourced labor force, when the tides of westernization were on the horizon, but had yet to crash.

Criterion Recollection: Jesus the Ripper

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


The Messiah and Murder: Spine #132, The Ruling Class (1972)

by MARK BRENDLE

Using a schizophrenic Earl who's cured of his messianic complex by choosing instead to believe that he's Jack the Ripper, Peter Medak's Buñuelesque The Ruling Class levies harsh social commentaries against established power hierarchies like the British aristocracy and the Christian church. Medak's adaptation of Peter Barnes' exceptional, darkly comic and surreal play can be read as a delicious skewering of class antagonism and a well-meaning but trite expose on the hypocrisy of power, but its true meaning lies in the necessary existence of the extremes of both The Christ and The Ripper.

Medak and Barnes implicate the structure of power in this schizophrenic split right away, introducing us to Jack's predecessor, Ralph, the 13th Earl of Gurney. After delivering a speech on the noble heritage of England, he returns to his bedroom to perform autoerotic asphyxiation in a tutu. The tutu might strike modern audiences as a cliché of crazy, but as Ralph prepares his ritual, one that he has obviously performed for some time, he speaks about how, for a judge, who has the power of life and death, all of life's other experiences fail to produce satisfaction. To experience a high close to that of sending men to the gallows, he must engage in bizarre and dangerous behavior. The ritual goes wrong; Ralph kicks over the stool and hangs himself, finally achieving full identification with the victims of his justice.

The Internet's Little iDeath for Steve Jobs

Note: Mark Brendle is a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com, a short-fiction writer and the author of both book reviews and the Criterion Recollection series for Et tu, Mr. Destructo?. Today he takes a break from books and cinema to address the first great humanitarian crisis of the 21st century: the potential that Apple gadgets might become less awesome before you've paid off your iPhone 4. You can follow him on Twitter.

Last week, when Apple CEO Steve Jobs stepped down from his position — a purely formal change in the Apple Corporation's executive management — it struck a chord with many people who feel invested in Apple, despite having no shareholder investment. Why this over-response about an insignificant event in a private company? Because, as even email and Twitter spam can tell you, the latest Apple release is the commodity-object of our time.

Apple proponents often cite innovation as the reason behind both their idolization and Apple's success. But what does innovation mean in this context and what has Apple innovated? Mp3 players? Tablet computers? Touch screens?—these existed long before their Apple versions came out. One would be hard pressed to find a single significant innovation on a fundamental level made by Apple computers since their very early days.

Despite this, Apple has innovated since, and it is this innovation that dominates their markets and the minds of their fans. What initially set the iPod apart from the numerous other Mp3 players with identical functionality was its coolness.

Apple campaigned heavily for the iPod, in much the same way they did for the iMac, forcing connotations of coolness, taste and style onto the device. It is through what David Riesman calls marginal differentiation that Apple innovated and continues to innovate. This marginal differentiation expresses itself through form (everyone has heard Apple products called "sleek"), through social consumer-competition (kids don't want an Mp3 player; they want an iPod) and through self-referential endorsement (our heroes in the film, music, art and publishing industries often use Macs).

Fuck You, Warren Buffett

Dear Mr. Warren Buffett,

Thank you for your recent editorial, "Stop Coddling the Super Rich." I never thought you would write to me, part of a working class of people rarely recognized for their great contribution, a letter dictating to politicians what they should do with regard to The Super Rich. Some might say that your article should have been sent to the people it presumes to lecture, but that would not allow those who don't have so great a share in power to know the steel morals with which you handle the billionaire's reins.

Your sharing this simple human statement, so identifiable to the average Joe, reminds one of Henry V demonstrating that, although he descended from a divine line of kings with complete autocracy, based solely on domination and exploitation of labor via violent force, he wasn't above walking among the common dead, showing his radiant face as a final grace for those who suffered so much.

Your lightning bolt of righteousness descended as if thrown from Olympus, a modern Prometheus risking his immortality out of pity for mankind. It is as a blessing that I receive your vision, so highly esteemed in the press because you've spent your life as a scholar of the humanities, and can offer your accumulated wisdom, you’re a life long teacher, dedicated to the dispensation of wisdom to future generations, well-studied and with a real stake in humanity’s future, and you have a lot of money.

Criterion Recollection: Provocateur, Pauper, Prisoner

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


Repression and Rebellion: Spine #533, Crumb (1994)

by MARK BRENDLE

Terry Zwigoff's Crumb offers everything one could hope for in a documentary: interesting subject matter, intimate access, multiple, conflicting perspectives, great music and a host of unanswered questions that leave a viewer thinking about the film for days, weeks or even years after watching.

Crumb presents a fairly bleak portrait of a family struggling to maintain even the thin veneer of sanity while pursuing invisible demons in the form of art, spirituality and isolated reflection. Because of the relatively dark psychological subject matter and the unflinching portrayal of "bizarre" characters on the margins of society, Crumb developed a reputation as depressing. Especially with only one viewing, Crumb can overwhelm an audience, but beneath the surface tension, it exposes a fundamentally optimistic message, one of rebellion in the face of overwhelming odds, of individuality prided over conformity and of a trio of brothers who emerged out of the stifling repression of an abusive 1950s family, fearlessly seeking the truth about themselves and their place in the world.

Robert Crumb, seemingly the protagonist of this documentary, leads us through the byzantine and strange world of his art, libido and family. R. Crumb's celebrity provides a sort of keystone for viewers, allowing them a familiar foothold with such popular works as the once-ubiquitous "Keep on Truckin’" comic, or the hatchet-job adult film of Fritz the Cat. However, early into the film, as Robert Crumb speaks to a crowd of college students, we quickly realize that celebrity and popularity hold little interest for him, and that his most well-known works are also those which he most vigorously despises. Instead of veering into a navel-gazing "my REAL art is…" diatribe, we engage the essence of R. Crumb's art, both from his own, shockingly self-aware perspective, as well as those of art critics, feminists, former and current lovers, friends and foes.

Even that barely skims the surface of this film. The heart of this movie resides in the relationship between, and personalities of, the three Crumb brothers: Robert, Charles and Maxon. Each of the Crumb brothers, in his own way, lives an ostracized, tortured life. Each of the brothers sought a device with which he could cope with the intense trauma of their upbringing, as well as the social marginalization they had experienced since their school days. The core of this trauma is an intense repression of fundamental sexuality, brought about by the tyranny and abuse of their father. Only by rebelling against this repression could they begin to function in society. Or, in the case of Charles Crumb, the oldest brother who apparently bore the brunt of their fathers' abuse, the inability to break free from this internalized rule-of-the-father determined the tragic course of his entire life.

Criterion Recollection: Silent Bob Strikes Out

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


Pretentious Farts from a Stupid Dick: Spine #75, Chasing Amy (1997)

by MARK BRENDLE

Watching the Criterion logo fade into this waste of celluloid brings a single, artificial tear to my eye, much like when Jason Lee's character Banky poignantly asks Ben Affleck's Holden MacNeil, "Girl?" Criterion introduced Chasing Amy into its collection early on, in the laserdisc days, and I see its inclusion in the same light as Armageddon and The Rock: a movie that exemplifies its genre, even if it lacks individual merit in spades.

It would be hard to count the number of times Kevin Smith has justified his filmmaking by explaining in his Comic Book Guy voice that he just makes "dick-and-fart joke movies" and that taking them seriously misses the point. If only this were true. The problem with Smith's filmmaking, evident in Chasing Amy, is that he actually does think his movies are more than dick and fart jokes; he makes a point of forcing his juvenile ideas of morality, social commentary and intelligent dialogue into his already jumbled and mismanaged work. That he also utilizes an excessive amount of dick-and-fart filler to offset the pretentious emptiness of his dialogue and plot proves only that he has the faintest glimmer of awareness that his movies suck and, as such, need sufficient cushion to repel critical barbs.

I won't dwell on the whys or hows of Clerks' success, but its unlikely acceptance into the usually hermetic world of filmmaking launched Smith's career and developed a cult following that has maintained its adamant support all the way down the steep trajectory of his oeuvre. After the abysmal failure of Mallrats, Chasing Amy almost did not get made at all. But low budgets and independent productions can be positive aspects of a film. One of Smith's stated influences, Richard Linklater's Slacker, proves that a movie does not require a big production to be good. It does, however, require some kind of unique insight and respectful self-awareness, the lack of which can only produce pretentiousness, something that seems as much an integral part of Smith's "Askewniverse" as hockey, skeeball and inside jokes.

Ostensibly, Chasing Amy tells the story of Ben Affleck's giant face, complete with goatee (or, as Smith angrily points out on the commentary track, a "van Dyke"), mugging the camera for a consistent two hours, under the laughably allusive name Holden MacNeil, while one of the women Smith somehow convinced to touch his penis, Joey Lauren Adams, rambles incoherently in her trebled screech about gays and lesbians, much to the chagrin of homosexuals everywhere. Adams' Alyssa is the comfortable sort of movie lesbian: she's blonde, good-looking, politically null and evidently just a little bit of pitched-woo away from not actually being a lesbian.

SomethingAwful: Youtube and Vlogging Every Day in April

Every year, thousands of Youtube users participate in VEDA, "Vlog Every Day in April." While its purpose might be to promote community ties, compel users to practice making Youtube content and, of course, drive up interest and pageloads on Youtube itself, it mostly turns into a horrible collision between vanity and inaptitude. Many of these people have nothing to communicate but, on top of that, lack the means to communicate anyway. The question is: why do they do it? Why expose themselves for so little?

Mr. Destructo book and film reviewer Mark Brendle attempted to answer this question, and eventually I tagged in to try my best to help understand these often accidentally funny, alarming and vulnerable people. It's at once a heartening and disheartening spectacle. People yearn to connect, dazzled by the possibility of finding accidental celebrity just for being themselves — educated by a television culture that runs on such a self-evident and free-form paradigm — but they lack the means to make a connection, as well as ideas alluring enough to establish one with others. Also, the videos are pretty funny.

Click here to read the article at Something Awful.

Special thanks to Andrew Miller for arranging the numerous embedded VEDA Youtubes, as well as Kak, JHVH-1 and BlastYouVileWoman for finding many videos and, lastly, Beowulf LaGrange and Chandelier Stuntin (aka Woodmuffin) for writing blurbs for the article.

Criterion Recollection: A Funny Thing About 'The Vanishing'

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


The Sociopathy of Everyday Life: Spine #133, The Vanishing (1988)

by MARK BRENDLE

George Sluizer's The Vanishing (Spoorloos) masquerades as a mystery-thriller in order to expose the structure of the genre itself. This suspenseful film actually contains many comic moments; in fact, it's founded on a subtle, dark irony that revels in pulling the curtain of suspense back to reveal the mundane reality of a terrible crime. In addition to exploring the motivations of a thriller, The Vanishing uses its examination of a sociopathic kidnapper, Raymond, and an obsessive selfish husband, Rex, to obliquely tackle the question of solipsism — the inability to truly share one's experience of life with another person.

Although The Vanishing fits in the "missing woman" category of suspense thrillers (see Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes), it self-consciously toys with audience expectations so subtly that the viewer easily can get caught up in the very devices the movie works to undermine. A married couple, Rex and Saskia, go on vacation, and Saskia disappears. The rest of the movie focuses on Rex's increasingly obsessive attempt to find out what happened to her. The fairly simplistic plot structure betrays both Sluizer's skillful manipulation of genre norms as self-parody as well as his keen psychological insight.

Early in the film, when their car runs out of gas in a dark tunnel, and Rex leaves Saskia alone to find a gas station, one expects her to be abducted. Sluizer includes all of the essential elements of the dangerous situation: solitude, darkness, feminine vulnerability, alien surroundings and anxiety-inducing music. Nothing happens.

When Raymond, the kidnapper, finally takes Saskia, he does so in broad daylight, in a crowded public place, in clear sight of Rex. What Sluizer cuts through here isn't the naïve misconception that only dark alleys are dangerous, but rather an audience's expectation that the terrible event will happen in a suitable mise-en-scene. The Vanishing's efficacy springs from Sluizer's refusal to bend to genre expectations. On top of this, he allows his film a self-reflexive irony, so that this refusal can be read not only as an avoidance of clichéd devices, but as a statement on the devices themselves — an opposite tactic than the standard thriller, which tries to support our suspension of disbelief by utilizing the same old tricks "better."

The Poetry of, Like, Alienation and Stuff

A former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com, short-fiction writer and author of the Criterion Recollection, Mark Brendle is also a regular reviewer of literary fiction for Et tu, Mr. Destructo. His last piece, "Huck Finn and the Nigger in the Woodpile," examined the new bowdlerized edition of the classic Twain novel. In his private life, he has inspired the television series Portlandia and been romantically linked to both Winona Ryder and Adam Duritz. He uses a different open-source operating system for every mood. You can follow him on Twitter.


Guinness World Record: A Hipster Say '...'


by MARK BRENDLE

"…"

i don’t hide my sadness
and i don’t glorify it either
my sadness is displayed exactly as it should be

Poetry that matters reflects contemporary society upon itself, in its funhouse mirror way, with various layers of meaning, allusion and intent. Lehan Li's self-published book of poetry, "…", gives voice to the information-riddled, developmentally arrested, yet surprisingly self-aware modern manchild. An overarching theme of intimacy versus irony ties this collection of short, funny poems together in a way that produces a cohesive worldview, one shared by many people in their twenties, of absurdity, loneliness and destructive wit.

The title of the book, "…", lends itself to multiple interpretations: the ellipsis as silence, the ellipsis as gap between sentences, the absurd symbol of failed communication or the popular catchphrase of many a Final Fantasy protagonist. In past forms, an author typically chose between irony and sincerity, clueing in the reader to the mode in which they were operating. In "…" however, no such distinction exists. More than a narrative technique, the simultaneity of ironic sincerity betrays an emotional compartmentalization that drives the author and readers who share his malaise through a cycle of mockery and desperation.

We've internalized the mechanisms of too many cartoon anti-heroes, sarcastically dynamiting anything sincere and pointing out the inescapable vulnerability in those who fail to armor themselves with ironic distance. TV characters spout witticisms in every direction, blow up every sacred bond and ideal, yet exert an image of unattainable happiness, appearing inhuman, unreal, like media golems forged from the worst pieces of our realities and the best phantoms of our desires.

Criterion Recollection: A Kurosawa Crime Drama

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


A Question of Air Conditioning: Spine #24, High and Low (1963)

by MARK BRENDLE

Thanks to the success of films like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, many western viewers associate Akira Kurosawa with sword-wielding Samurai riding through feudal Japan. However, one of his finest films is a thoroughly gripping modern drama called High and Low (Tengoku to Jigoku, which directly translates as "Heaven and Hell"). Though very loosely based on Ed McBain's King's Ransom, the film bears Kurosawa's inimitable auteur stamp: his ability to take a run-of-the-mill police procedural and transmute it into an existential, socially aware exploration of injustice.

Toshiro Mifune heads up a wonderful cast as Kingo Gondo, an executive director at National Shoes, who, despite having a name better suited for an uncomfortably large marital aid, leads us through the very serious social dilemmas of the film. However, one of Kurosawa's mottos, "a good movie should also be enjoyable to watch," comes to fruition in High and Low, which follows its own theme of amalgamated binaries as both an artistic triumph and a genuine entertainment. In addition to being a dense and heady indictment of social conditions across the world, the film functions on a basic level as an extremely watchable suspense-thriller.

High and Low explores dichotomies: heaven and hell, high and low, rich and poor, good and evil, law and crime. The film itself can be split into two separate sections; the first hour consists of a tight, claustrophobic chamber drama — almost exclusively in a single location, Gondo's living room — shot in long takes. The second section blows up into the police procedural, where the viewer is taken on a tour of "hell": the slums, ghettos and underworld of postwar Japan. The ethical crux of the film occupies the gap between these dichotomies, and at every turn Kurosawa asks how it is that these disparities can exist, and what are the consequences for human beings caught at either pole.

Ransom stories may seem cliché now, but High and Low is extremely clever in its presentation and structure: the fundamental nature of ransom acts as an objective correlative for the dangers of capitalism. In the world of ransom, money and life are interchangeable; we place a fixed, though arbitrary, price on a human being. Because Gondo leads a rich lifestyle and surrounds himself with cutthroat business partners, the line between money and life already blurs in his perspective. Kurosawa and his co-writers pepper the dialogue with zero-sum choices between life and money. Gondo's assistant Kawanishi embodies the modern businessman; he operates without any kind of moral compass, using his own professional success as the only measure of his actions. He says to Gondo, "If you pay [the ransom] it's suicide," and later rationalizes a betrayal to other executives with, "I had to protect myself." The complete conflation between money and life defines these businessmen. Gondo tells Kawanishi that he is "inhuman," and it is this lack of humanity that separates the other businessmen from Gondo, who is held up as an exemplary businessman — an ethical capitalist.

Huck Finn and the Nigger in the Woodpile

Note: Mark Brendle is a media critic for BarnesandNoble.com, a short-fiction writer and the author of the Criterion Recollection series for Et tu, Mr. Destructo?. Today he takes a break from reviewing classic cinema to address a word volatile enough to create powerful anxiety and debate for parents' groups, school representatives and even booksellers. You can follow him on Twitter.

Recently NewSouth Books, an impossibly ironic name, partnered with a Mark Twain scholar named Alan Gribben to publish an edition of Mark Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The noteworthy thing about this edition is that it completely removes the word "nigger" from the book.

While some may see this as a harmless attempt to render Twain’s novel accessible to younger children, in fact it does a two-fold harm and sets a dangerous precedent for the publishing industry. First, manipulating a text after the fact, especially one as well known and well-liked as Huckleberry Finn, is a disservice to the author and more importantly to the work itself. The second, more grievous harm caused by this attempt to make the novel "politically correct" consists of a revisionist mentality toward American history.

Gribben, the brains behind this edition, claims that the idea for changing the book came to him as he gave public readings of Huck Finn and substituted the word "slave" for "nigger" as he spoke. However, his hesitation to speak this word aloud, in front of an audience of listeners, illustrates the very reason why it must remain in the novel. The very embarrassment Gribben, and most anyone, feels when using the word "nigger" is a direct result of a complex and terrible history that will be a part of our country forever. "Nigger" and "slave" are in no way synonymous — just ask a racist whose ancestors came to America in indentured servitude. While it’s true that slavery is the central issue around which the word "nigger" was developed, it can hardly be said that "slave" carries the same connotations as "nigger."

Criterion Recollection: a Close Reading

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


In Bourgeois Hell—Between Discreet and Discrete: Spine #102: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

by MARK BRENDLE

Luis Buñuel’s satire of modern capitalist life, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, operates on several levels. It is satiric social commentary but also a picaresque farce and an absurd comedy of errors. These levels bind together around the core of the bourgeois consumer-capitalist lifestyle, exploring both desire and the bourgeois subject's inability to satiate it at any meaningful level. For him, desire is always just missed — postponed, interrupted, or otherwise barred — but always with the promise of future satiety. This manipulation of desire acts as the engine maintaining the semi-perpetual state of late capitalism.

This Tantalus-like arrangement is fitting, for Buñuel sees bourgeois existence as a kind of hell, similar to Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, except instead of being other people, Buñuel’s hell is the gaze of other people. The concept of the gaze, of being observed, suggests the key word of film’s title, "Discreet." Discretion serves at least a two-fold purpose for Buñuel’s hapless protagonists: it removes their acting upon their desires from the gaze of the observer and allows them to take their place within the prescribed symbolic order. This double-life represents the cornerstone of consumer-capitalist existence: compartmentalization. The film could just as easily be named The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Because the looming fears and momentous events of bourgeois existence are often so quotidian and discrete from others' experience, it seems only too fitting to look at this film with an intense focus. The following is a thorough, scene-by-scene analysis of the film and how it exposes the truths of bourgeois existence.


The film's protagonists, to use the word loosely, are six upper-class bourgeoisie, three men and three women. One of the men, Rafael, serves as an ambassador to Miranda; the others are French businessmen. The two businessmen, Francois Thevenot and Henri Senechal, are married to two of the women, Simone and Alice, respectively. Simone’s sister Florence completes the sextet. However, characterization is not so important. These six people represent an entire class and as such are vague, symbolic and nearly interchangeable. Only the ambassador's specific role gives him any differentiation, and as will be shown later, this differentiation plagues him throughout the film.

Criterion Recollection: 9/08/10

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


Gimme Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll and Shelter: Spine #99, Gimme Shelter (1970)

by MARK BRENDLE

Gimme Shelter frequently carries the label "the Anti-Woodstock." Many viewers and critics claim it documents the exact moment that the peaceful, innocent 1960s came to an end. Those simplistic interpretations of a complex documentary miss the point entirely. What Gimme Shelter accomplishes isn't the depiction of a turning point at all. Rather, it reveals the hidden underside of the entire hippie movement and shows that beneath the love-all, carefree surface, there was always an extreme violent tension. The dynamics at work at the Rolling Stones' Altamont concert are so complicated that multiple viewings of this movie are crucial in order to begin to sort out the apparent chaos and understand exactly what was going on.

Gimme Shelter is the cinema verité (or direct cinema, if you want to nitpick) rock documentary extraordinaire by the famous Maysles brothers, Albert and David, along with collaborator Charlotte Zwerin, about the Rolling Stones' 1969 US tour and its disastrous culmination in the poorly planned free concert at the Altamont Speedway in northern California that led to several deaths, the most remarkable of which was the stabbing of an (armed) African-American by a member of the Hells Angels.

The film's structure consists of three main parts: live footage of the Rolling Stones' performances during the tour, documentary footage of the process and happenings of the concert, and finally the most interesting piece, footage of the Rolling Stones watching the other two parts of the film in an editing bay, with their initial reactions to the material. This meta-layer of the documentary provides a whole different tone to the film than if it were omitted. However, like all aspects of direct cinema, it provides at best only a partial glimpse into reality.

It's no news that observing something changes it, but this simple fact renders the entire idea of direct cinema and documentary filmmaking in general a kind of imaginary concept. Sticking a camera in someone's face is a surefire way to modify their behavior. If the directors' goal is to capture truth on film, he works against his own interests the minute he pulls out a camera. But what's really important to understand is that people are always acting as if a camera is rolling. Jacques Lacan's concept of the Other (with a big "O") is the arbitrary, third-party gaze of the social-symbolic system. It is for this abstract entity that people "perform" their daily lives. So documentary film isn't just one step removed from reality, it's two: it's people pretending to be a certain way, different from the way they normally pretend to be.

Criterion Recollection: 8/25/10

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


The Subconscious Thought Monster: Spine #92, Fiend Without a Face (1958)

by MARK BRENDLE

The Criterion Collection is generally known for distributing high-quality transfers of high-art world cinema. Or as a guidebook for pretentious movie nerds everywhere on what to watch in order to be cool (Godard). Or as the masters of the fetishization of cinema, delivering the best physical packages for home media in the business: lavish digipaks, beautiful cover art and thick booklet inserts packed with production stills, essays and insider information on each movie. So, if that’s the case, and Criterion hosts such seminal movies as Seven Samurai, The 400 Blows, The Seventh Seal and Armageddon, why would I start this column with a critique of a 1950s B horror movie? The answer is that I intend to subvert Criterion’s standing as the leading distributor of important cinema. Actually, it’s because like most 1950s horror movies, it contains at least a fragment of social commentary (maybe even criticism?), some of it very subtle, some not so much.

If you listen to the ridiculously banal audio commentary on the DVD by producer Richard Gordon (topped only perhaps by fellow B-movie producer Jack Harris’ commentary on The Blob) you might come away with the knowledge that Fiend Without a Face was one in a long line of cheap monster movies that happened to grab the audience’s attention because of the (then) unique design of the monster. Looking at it now it might remind you of H.R. Giger’s design for the Facegrabber in Alien, sans overt sexual neuroses. But despite Gordon’s insistence that the most interesting thing about the movie is the monster’s design, something deeper stirs underneath the surface of this rather simplistic tale of an experiment gone awry.

First, a quick outline of the plot for those who haven’t seen it: In a small town next to a United States military base on the American-Canadian border, people suddenly start dying. At first the citizens of the town blame the radiation from the military base’s atomic power plant, then a psycho killer, but later all involved, including the supposed-to-be-dashing lead man, a Major from the base played by Marshall Thompson, realize it is the work of invisible monsters generated from the thoughts of a mad scientist. These monsters kill their victims by attaching themselves around the neck with their spinal-cord tail and sucking out the person’s brain through two Dracula fangs on tendrils. (Giger, I’m looking at you here.) When the monsters sabotage the atomic power plant, the plant goes haywire and begins producing more energy. This renders the monsters visible, at which point they are brought down by everyday household bullets. Finally, our hero goes to the power plant and destroys it, cutting off the monsters’ source of atomic energy and killing them.