Essays – Page 5 – Smug Film

‘Bicycle Thieves’ and Other Apocalyptic Movies

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As far back as human civilization can be traced, there have been stories about the end of the world. The Norse had Ragnarok, Christianity has the Rapture, and the Mayans had 2012.

Some have argued film as a form of modern mythology, and as anyone who has been to a movie theater in the past decade or so can tell you, modern film is chock full of apocalyptic stories. It’s only right—every mythology needs its ‘end of times’ tales. They tell a lot about the culture that produced them: what their fears were, and how they perceived death.

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The Movie Lied: Tactical Realism and ‘The Return of the Living Dead’

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I really like zombie films. Not because I find the creatures interesting, but because these films tend to be open and blunt about their ideas. The first three of Romero’s Dead movies are not really about the zombies themselves—they’re about how, in many ways, we’re zombies already. Dawn of the Dead’s shots of zombies milling around in a shopping mall is one of the most haunting things I have ever seen.

What I don’t like, however, is a particular brand of zombie fan—the ones who obsess over the idea of the zombies themselves, like they’re some kind of mathematical puzzle that can be ‘solved’. This leads to the creation and popularization of books like The Zombie Survival Guide. This completely misses the point of the films these fans supposedly like, and has led to a school of film viewership I will hereby refer to as ‘Tactical Realism’.

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There Is No Such Thing As A ‘Reboot’

I saw the new Godzilla yesterday. I enjoyed it a lot, but I’ve been weirded out for months over the fact that I’ve had to call it something I’ve never had to call a Godzilla film. Just like how I recently had to call a Bond film something that, in 50 years of recasting and returning to ground zero, I’ve never had to call a Bond film.

I’m all for specialized vocabulary. Film needs its own exclusive words to describe its own processes, but ‘reboot’ is not such a word. I’ve asked people time and again to define it, and I’ve read about it online—god help me, I’ve even read the Wikipedia page for it. It’s just not a real and distinct concept. It’s a cheap marketing buzzword, that’s all it is. And more than that, the very existence of the term is symptomatic of a rot at the core of contemporary filmmaking.

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Michael Bay: Futurist

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Paths of Movement + Dynamic Sequences, 1913 | Transformers: Dark of the Moon, 2011

Film, the most sensory of the arts, is probably the best-equipped to present movement. It has a unique combination of music’s temporal toolkit, painting and sculpture’s visual toolkit, literature’s narrative toolkit, and dance’s physical toolkit.

Movement is one of the great challenges of art. From The Iliad, which has been beautifully defined as a work about “the human spirit […] as modified by its relation to force,” to Debussy’s Engulfed Cathedral, a non-representational description of the vertical motion of a building sinking and rising out of the ocean, a great deal of art across all media and all eras strive to fabricate motion without actually moving the observer. And if film is the most intuitive for presenting movement, action film, with its implicit promises, is the most intuitive approach within the medium. Just as the existential novel is the story of the human spirit navigating metaphysics, action cinema, just like The Iliad, is the story of the human body navigating time and space.

Great (or at least vital) action, from Die Hard’s annihilation of architectural space (I don’t praise much about Die Hard but this is definitely a plus for it) to 300‘s development of the fluid freeze frame, refines how we process space and time. But, of course, cinema is incomplete. Motion can only be suggested, not reproduced (with the exception of awkward jerky theme park rides). You don’t really get hit when Rocky does, of course—and you don’t really jump off that building with Sergeant Riggs. That distance between reality and presentation means filmmakers must translate physical sensation into aesthetics, and hey—that’s where art lives.

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To Punctuate Or Not To Punctuate

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There’s an immediate irony to this piece in that its title lacks punctuation. Said punctuation is not missed, of course—it’d be superfluous of me to put a period, due to the fact that the title text being larger and bolder than the long column of text below it makes it feel plenty contained. The only reason for me to put a little black dot at the end of it would be if I wanted it to be read with stern inflection:

To Punctuate Or Not To Punctuate.

See the difference? You can’t help but it read it in your head as though shit has just gotten real, and that this will be a seriouser-than-normal article where I’ve got a real bone to pick with a thing. Such is not the case—if anything, I’m merely raising a bone to the sky a la that ape in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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