Bug (2006): Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Madness

Last night I saw Ethan and Joel Coen’s latest film Inside Llewyn Davis with a friend, and I enjoyed it tremendously. Well maybe enjoyed isn’t the best word, because it was actually sad and funny but in a “laughing at the absurdity of the world” kind of way. While I’m thinking of ways of putting my thoughts and feelings about it into words, I figure I could write a bit about the movie we watched at his house while having drinks after. Enjoy would also be the wrong word here, but it was the kind of thing that made you say “WTF” in the best way. A relatively obscure psychological horror film from 2006 (that I had vague recollections of hearing about when I was in high school), Bug was adapted from a play by Tracy Letts who also wrote the screenplay and directed by William Friedkin, who once helmed movies like The Exorcist (1973), The French Connection (1978), and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). That last one is probably one of the most “dark and gritty” movies that I’ve seen despite the sunny Los Angeles setting, some cop movie clichés, and a soundtrack by Wang Chung (before “dark and gritty” became a thing in recent years) and does it much better than recent fares.

So why were we interested in Bug? My friend had seen and liked Killer Joe, by the same writer-director team. For me, I had recently read an article by film critic Scott Tobias, formerly of The AV Club and now writing for film-focused pop culture website The Dissolve, about movies that received F on CinemaScore, an organization that polls movie audiences on opening weekends with questionnaires. We concluded that Bug is by no means a bad movie, in my opinion, but it displeased audiences who saw it opening weekend just enough to become one of the 8 movies to earn an F on CinemaScore.

Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon co-star as Agnes and Peter. Agnes lives in a motel and repeatedly receives menacing phone calls, and her abusive ex-husband, who has just been released from prison, might be responsible for those. As we learn over the course of the story, she partakes in the use of alcohol and cocaine because she remains shaken up by the disappearance of her son years ago. Peter is the army veteran with whom she develops a relationship after a friend introduces them to each other. The new man in her life at first appears to be nice, though a bit quiet and awkward, but he gradually becomes more unsettled about the presence of bugs and government conspiracies and draws Agnes into his delusions. What begins as debauchery and fooling around between two lonely people with troubled pasts escalates into obsession, conflicts with the outside world, and a nightmare of murder and self-destructive behavior.

One can find in Bug a strong indictment of violence and a terrifying story of codependency. There are quite a few acts of violence, some are shocking, others are cringe-inducing, and all are uncomfortable. The film shows the damaging effects on the psyche to those exposed to violence. Agnes has a history of being on the receiving end of abuse. With Peter, it seems more or less the case that he began developing his delusions during military service. Agnes begins defiant when it comes to her ex-husband, snapping angrily at the repeated phone calls that she believes are coming from him and shows resistance when he first shows up, she becomes more helpless as their confrontation drags on and he gets physically abusive. Peter becomes an increasing part of her life, her codependency deepened as she began to believe in him, and they began to feed off of each other, becoming increasingly and collectively convinced of the delusions (and her abuse of hard drugs does not help). They find connection in one another because they were both subjected to violence and had been broken down.

Judd and Shannon deserve to be commended for their performances. Both effectively convey their characters’ troubled pasts, and Judd’s appearance in the film is pretty shocking, while Shannon’s becomes increasingly so as the normalcy of his character is eaten away by his disturbed mental state. Told only from their perspectives, the story tracks their descent into madness, and they are so convincingly unhinged and erratic over the course of the movie. They rail against their associates and deliver paranoid rants about conspiracy theories that eventually implicate their past acquaintances as being agents of the conspiracies. There are some unsettling acts of self-mutilation—most are implied, but one on-screen act made me yell “Oh no! Why?!” repeatedly—made all the scarier by the combination of gore and lighting that contribute to uncomfortable aesthetics.

The actors’ onscreen presence and the film’s mood are almost impossible to describe, and writing about it does no justice to the acting or the director’s use of the minimalist setting of the motel room to create such a terrifying, claustrophobic environment. The ending is more or less perfect in the context of the film, marred only inappropriate music during the end credits and a couple of mid- and post-credit shots designed perhaps to add ambiguity and make the ending less bleak. Those shots weren’t very effective and didn’t add anything, mostly because the film was such a perfectly bleak, unsettling journey into the emotional and mental states of two troubled individuals who found companionship in each other that there was really nothing more to add.

American Hustle (2013): Cynicism, Idealism and the American Dream

David O. Russell’s American Hustle is the story of people trying to survive at a time of economic and social malaise—after a period of economic crisis (Oil Crisis), an unpopular war (Vietnam), government scandals, with youthful idealism and activism on the decline and the government in deficit—of the conflict between belief in the American Dream and cynicism toward American institutions. The setting may be the late 1970s, but the movie, though it is really more entertaining than profound, couldn’t have come at a better time.

Christian Bale, Amy Adams, and Bradley Cooper in American Hustle

Christian Bale and Amy Adams are Irving and Sydney, con artists who run an embezzlement scam by pretending to be art dealers and investors with “London banking connections” through Sydney’s British aristocrat Edith Greensly persona. They are fairly successful until they are caught and pressured into service by ambitious FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) to arrest other con artists. Their ploy to seek out potential phony investors eventually grows into Operation Abscam, a sting operation against Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner) members of the U.S. Congress, and the mafia.

A recurring theme throughout is survival through struggle and subterfuge, with the hopes of building a better life and future. Beginning the story in media res with the operation already underway, Russell wastes no time in establishing the tension in the trio, as Richie and Irving not only battle over methods but also for the affections of Sydney. Yet minutes later, like a frazzled candidate about to walk into a job interview, they must present themselves as amiable business associates as they meet the mayor for the first time to guarantee the operation’s success.

As the movie delves into the origins of Sydney and Irving’s association, it is revealed that Sydney was a stripper who moved to New York to gain a fresh start and works as a clerk at Cosmopolitan magazine. Irving was the son of a small business owner who fell on hard times, and in order to help his father’s ailing business, a glass shop, he went around town smashing windows to create demand. Over time he came to run a dry cleaning business while dealing in forged art on the side. They become lovers and eventually partners in crime after meeting at a party, all the while he struggles to maintain his marriage with his wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) and an image of legitimacy.

Rosalyn is a skilled con artist in her own right. Her outward appearance is classy and the life of the party. Domestically, she is jealous, manipulative, and highly unstable, and Irving appeases her because he knows that she would take away her son, his beloved stepson, if they became divorced. Though he wants to keep her out of his business, she unknowingly forces her way into Operation Abscam by through a convoluted series of events making a good first impression on the Polito family and becomes invited to subsequent social events while trying to get closer to the elites.

The film maintains that the world is one of “gray” morality, and as much as it’s a cliché to say, it is portrayed not necessarily in depth but nevertheless convincingly. Operation Abscam begins by targeting Mayor Polito, a newly elected mayor who helped to legalize gambling and is seeking funds to renovate a building for the casino, in order to lead to get to bigger targets. Yet the charismatic mayor, despite charges of corruption, seems like an honest family man genuinely interested in reaching out to his community and helping the citizens as a public servant. That he seems willing to bend the rules and accept and give out bribes is one thing; that he genuinely wants to bring investment, jobs, and development to a poverty-stricken area is another. Perhaps he is indeed mostly altruistic, and it’s only the legalism of the FBI and the cynicism of the public, and of the audience by proxy, that is skeptical of him. Indeed, maybe his lack of political savvy is why he is so easily led into the trap, and why Irving has a crisis of conscious arising not just from the friendship that they share, but out of the belief that the mayor is a mostly good man who can build up the community.

By contrast, the law-upholding Richie becomes increasingly erratic and skirts the line legality to entrap and bring down corrupt officials. Even though he is engaged, he pursues an affair with “Edith” (Sydney manages to keep him ignorant of her real identity). Though he does not recognize it (or he does and simply does not care), he becomes corrupted as his ambition to advance his career combines with a desire to raise his social status.

Having established the setting and major players, Russell creates more of a character-based drama than a crime thriller. These individuals rub against one another, and battles of wits play out as conflicting interests clash, even as some ostensibly work with one another, as if in an elaborate game of Diplomacy.

The last movie I saw before American Hustle was Kill Your Darlings, another period piece that dealt with Allen Ginsberg’s year as a freshman student at Columbia and his friendship with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac that gave birth to the Beat literary movement. The characters’ energy and emotions felt genuine there, but the aesthetics were a bit ponderous. I know it was supposed to be partially a crime drama and all, but was almost a bit too gray and grimy. The visual aesthetics in American Hustle may be exaggerated, but the exaggerations in costumes, sets, and hairstyle bring the period to life; though not everyone might agree, I felt that they complemented the film without being distracting.

Although the subject matter is serious, the film possesses tremendous energy and sense of fun. There’s plenty of witty banter, lavish colors, and retro aesthetics that add authenticity to the setting, all accompanied by period-appropriate soundtrack. The characters and scenarios are outlandish, and unlike Ben Affleck did with last year’s Argo, which includes a ridiculous airport chase at the end, Russell makes no pretenses that it’s a factual account, beginning the film with, “Some of this actually happened.” I also enjoyed the cameo by Robert DeNiro (who really should just work with David O. Russell from now on) in a moment that recalls his earlier works. An anecdote that Richie’s hapless superior Stoddard Thorsen (Louis C.K.) keeps trying to tell but is interrupted every time by the eager agent also provides a running gag throughout the story.

American Hustle balances a multitude of characters and storylines, and between cynicism and hopeful sincerity. The worst thing I can say about is that it can be too frenetic. Russell juggles the many characters and storylines relatively well, and I don’t think I ever felt that the transition from one scene to another is awkward, but it does come at the expense of some character and thematic development, leading to a few quick, easy resolutions. Whether motivations and feelings are genuine are at times underexplored, or perhaps they are intentionally left opaque to reflect the characters’ moral ambiguity and the way they obscure facts for a living. The film is cynical toward institutions—legal ones in particular—and existing structures. It depicts the struggles of individuals and community that drive them toward underhanded methods, of the difficulties in being decent men in an indecent time. Nevertheless, each character expresses hope about the possibility of achieving a better life for oneself, and of building a better family and community. 30-some years after Abscam, David O. Russell has made a witty, clever, character-driven drama that captures the aspirations and anxieties of a bygone period and of ours.

Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)

Released in France as La Vie d’Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2 (The Life of Adele – Chapters 1 & 2), director Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color tells the coming of age of Adele and of her exploration of sexuality and transition to adulthood. The story progresses from her relationships with a handsome but boring male classmate followed by with Emma, an artist from a nearby university, and of her progression from high school student to elementary school teacher.  Seeing it back in November was the first time that I can remember being carded at a movie theater due to the film’s NC-17 rating for its sexual content, including a lovemaking scene between the leads that lasts 8 minutes. Over a month later I’m still not quite sure how I felt about it as a whole.

The central relationship is handled with honesty and sincerity, with its depiction of love, jealousy, heartbreak, and lingering feelings of longing. The lead actresses Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux deliver genuine, emotive performances: from Adele’s “love at first sight” moment upon seeing Emma in the streets to their intensifying feelings culminating in a lengthy love scene with their passions on full display, from Adele’s verbal and physical fight with taunting, homophobic classmates to Seydoux’s real fury in an argument that also turns physical, and the pervasiveness of depression and emptiness that come after heartbreak and the struggle to not let those feelings show.

The film comes at a time when gay marriage is a hot topic in contemporary politics. While it is not an explicitly political film, as a work that revolves around the socially relevant subject of same-sex relationships, it illustrates different reactions to and individual expressions of homosexuality, showing contrast between Adele’s modesty and Emma’s openness. The latter expresses herself through art, and her family is aware and very tolerant; having been taunted by her high school peers, the former chooses to hide her relationship from her parents. There is an awkward dinner where Emma pretends that they are friends because she is Adele’s tutor, and that she has a boyfriend who studies “business” while Adele’s parents go on about how being an artist is a poor career choice. Adele also hides her sexuality from her coworkers, including a male coworker who asks her out several times, and this eventually becomes a point of contention when her relationship with Emma begins to fray.

I got the feeling from the film, in the way it depicted the contrast between Adele and Emma, that there was some commentary on class. Adele comes from a family of modest means and even as she settles into a middle-class lifestyle, her teaching career promises neither fame nor fortune. That her parents and her career path are more conservative is implicit. Emma has a more understanding family and as an art student and artist, she gets to choose her peers in ways that her partner never had. That she would yell at Adele for being “ashamed” during an argument comes off as inconsiderate and hypocritical. Emma’s attitudes seemed like a sign of privilege, since her family appeared not only more tolerant but also more affluent. The very first time that she introduced Adele to her parents over for dinner, they had oysters; when Adele invited Emma over, their meal consisted of spaghetti. I learned from a friend that the French in general tend to not view oysters the same way as Americans, so I might have been reading too much into it through an Americanized lens with regards to the class context, but it’s hard to ignore that Emma’s family and peers always feel more high society.

Blue Is the Warmest Color is not lacking in passion and authenticity thanks to its leads, but clocking in at 2 hours and 59 minutes, it can feel sprawling and directionless. Covering Cannes for the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that Blue Is the Warmest Color was “wildly undisciplined” and “overlong.” We often lose track of the characters, and even Adele’s parents are never mentioned again after a certain point for no reason. (She doesn’t even call them after she graduates and starts working?) Most other things, such as the way acquaintances may drift in and out of the narrative or Emma and Adele’s domestic drama, however, do feel pretty real to life. A lack of structure isn’t something I inherently dislike or else I’d hate Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming or Frances Ha, but it’s a problem when you are getting bogged down in minutiae, as Kechiche does here.

Critics and authors have also objected to directorial choices relating to content and camerawork, which have been criticized for voyeurism and portraying a male-centric perspective, designed solely to appeal to male viewers despite the subject matter. Julie Maroh, the writer of the graphic novel from which Blue is adapted, flat out called the depiction of sex “a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn.” There’s a whole other issue about depiction of sex in films and the line between art and pornography, but even without getting into all that, the sequence of Adele’s first time with Emma began to feel porn-y in part because it went on for so long, and the positions and reactions so over-the-top. I have to agree with Maroh that the scene felt “surgical” and “cold,” not because of the passions—the leads said that they had spent 10 days on this scene to get it right—on display, but because the way it was filmed made it all feel too much like we were just watching two women have intercourse for eight minutes.

Kechich has stated that he did not want to make a political film, but one scene felt like a reinforcement of hegemonic masculinity. Here, an art gallery owner in attendance at a party hosted by Emma and Adele delivers an impromptu speech in a way that calls back to Adele and Emma’s sexual encounter earlier about the depiction of female orgasms in art and why there is such a strong interest in the female form. A friend and I have both talked about the movie and felt that it was the director’s way of justifying and defending the film. It’s meta-commentary about the film’s importance done in a navel-gazing kind of way, but my problem with it is that it’s an act of mansplaining using a character who is said to be a big shot, a man with influence in the art scene and can exercise power over Emma’s career, and the entire thing is played straight without any trace of irony. It’s weird and creates this dissonance between what the film purports to be and what the scene conveys.

All of this is not to say that Blue Is the Warmest Color is bad. It’s flawed and has some problematic patriarchal undertones. The speech about female orgasm is one thing, but there’s also the issue that the modest Adele comes off more positively than the expressive, out in the open Emma, who has more moments of meanness and hypocrisy. I loved the performances, and even if I didn’t feel as engaged with the film as a whole, it’s socially relevant and worthy of respect as a daring project.

Twin Peaks: “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” and Beyond (Part 3)

Now that Episodes 14 – 16 have been covered, part 3 of this series about the central mystery in Twin Peaks will go back, as Lynch did, to the beginning and what set the events of the series in motion.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992): A Midnight Show

I hadn’t finished the second season before going seeing Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me last month, but that’s OK, because the movie was a prequel focusing on the days leading up to Laura Palmer’s murder. It also included the investigation into the death of Teresa Banks, which took place a year before and had the same MO. If you haven’t seen up to Episode 14/”Lonely Souls” of the show and have not been spoiled about the major reveal, though, it would be best to get there before seeing this.

Fire Walk with Me begins contains two narratives. It begins with the investigation into the murder of Theresa Banks in an extended prologue, and then goes into the final days of Laura Palmer. In an extended prologue, FBI Regional Chief Gordon Cole, played by David Lynch himself, assigns Special Agents Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) to the case. Desmond is similar to Cooper in his perceptiveness and somewhat quirky, unorthodox investigative, though he’s more forceful. He acts as a mentor to Stanley during the course of the investigation and has a likable demeanor. His ways of getting the locals, including a hostile sheriff’s department, to cooperate with the FBI’s investigations provide a good amount of humor in an otherwise dark film.

Audience expectations that Desmond would be a hero who might help uncover clues to the mythology of Twin Peaks are subverted when he mysteriously disappears. The last time he is seen, he is picking up a ring, and while the ring reappears later, he does not. Cooper, investigating Desmond’s disappearance, only finds the words “Let’s rock” scrawled on the missing agent’s car. The same words were spoken by the Man from Another Place (the dwarf in the red suit who first appeared to Cooper in his dreams in Twin Peaks), implying involvement of the Black Lodge, though he would not know this at the time.

After the prologue, we are re-introduced to the town of Twin Peaks, and here, Lynch shows his skills at tapping into both warm familiarity and unease. There’s something very reassuring to hear the opening theme song of the show as we see Donna and Laura leave for school and walk past picture-perfect lawns and suburban homes, sometimes running other townspeople. It feels almost like a second opening credits sequence for the movie and ends a darker note with Laura snorting a line of cocaine in the bathroom, setting the audience up for the darker second story.

Lynch takes the story to some dark places as the narrative progresses toward its nightmarish, tragic conclusion. Though the show might have its lighter subplots, quirky characters, and moments of sentimentality to balance out the show’s exploration of lost innocence and the dark underbelly of suburbia, the film is generally pretty grim. The moment Laura discovers the identity of Bob’s host is not a twist to those already familiar with the show, but it is a shocking, disturbing scene, because it occurs during a rape and due to the relationship between the perpetrator and victim. Her death scene where she is tied and murdered in an abandoned train car is brutal, visceral, and difficult to watch, particularly because the view is obscured by darkness and all we hear are her heartrending screams.

There is plenty of trademark Lynchian weirdness, both humorous and unnerving, and in both the surreal and the grounded drama, there is a strong sense of unease, decay, and of loss of control. In the prologue, Lynch struts out surreal humor with the character of Lil the Dancer. In the role of Gordon Cole, he introduces her to agents Desmond and Stanley to perform something of an interpretive dance, providing clues to the agents before they leave on their assignment. There’s a pretty great cameo by David Bowie as Phillip Jeffries, another FBI agent who went missing. He suddenly reappears at the FBI regional headquarters, seemingly unhinged and speaking in a raving, incomprehensible manner while we see images of the supernatural characters from Twin Peaks, before disappearing again. Both this and the disappearance of Agent Desmond highlight the lack of control of law enforcement at protecting the innocent and their own. (Hint: If you don’t want to mysteriously disappear, don’t join the FBI in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks universe.)

In Laura’s narrative, we see the disintegration of her family as the story progresses. Laura and her friends find themselves in outrageous, increasingly dangerous situations. A night out with Donna turns into an alcohol- and drug-fuelled nightmare that almost ends in a date-rape, and a drug deal with Bobby ends in a real murder. Strange figures visit Laura in broad daylight and in her dreams; paintings in her room seem to come alive at times; and she is haunted and abused by the supernatural entity and her would-be murderer Bob.

The characters from the Black Lodge, including the Man from Another Place, the One-Armed Man Mike, Bob, an older woman and her masked grandson (previously seen by Donna) all make appearances. Their presence is generally marked with a sense of unease, as they deliver cryptic, portentous statements, or speak incomprehensibly. Lynch’s strong point is to insert the strange into the seemingly mundane. Through the use of distorted, cacophonous sounds, sudden change in colors and visuals, close-ups, and sudden appearance of bizarre, deranged characters, he makes the stranger moments in the film all the more unsettling.

I admit I wasn’t too crazy about the idea a full-length film about Laura Palmer’s last days. The details of her life and the identity and motivation of the murderer had been explored in the show after all. Lynch nonetheless manages to create a very unnerving, dark film. The dual-narrative that follows two protagonists who fall victim to paranormal forces feels hopeless, and Fire Walk with Me enriches, but not necessarily clarifies, the mythology of the world Lynch created in Twin Peaks, as we get a greater sense of the forces at play, though their motives remain inscrutable.

It’s not hard to see why Fire Walk with Me was not a huge commercial and critical success. As a standalone narrative on its own, it doesn’t really work too well, and the film’s lurid subject matter, including teenage promiscuity, drugs, rape, prostitution, and murder, and grim tone can be off-putting. With its references to the show, it’s very much a movie made for fans of Twin Peaks. Even then, it doesn’t always offer the answers or closure that they seek, and it’s not at all readily comprehensible to those unfamiliar with Twin Peaks. That said, the hazy, mysterious, dream-like (even nightmarish) atmosphere does make Fire Walk with Me a great experience late at night. It helped that the interior of the State Theater in Ann Arbor where I saw the movie looks a bit like the Black Lodge with all of the red drapes. As I was leaving, I overheard a guy say, “I’m not going to sleep for a week.” I can’t think of a better compliment for something like Fire Walk with Me.