Cinephile's Delight

If you’re reading this and have a Netflix subscription then odds are that, like myself, you recently had the (debatable) pleasure of watching the Russo brother’s latest directorial outing, “The Gray Man”.  

For what it is, the film makes great on all of its most exorbitantly crafted, high-octane “Mission-Impossible” action sequences, most of which are driven by a captivating use of hyper-dynamic cameras and splashy, colorful lighting schema (including one particularly jaw-dropping fisticuffs shot on a firework-launching barge).  

Despite its traditionally conceived and executed premise, however, you may have noticed that the film feels distinctly… different, from all the other big-budget spy action thrillers (M:I, Bond, Bourne, etc.).  The cinematic ethos it cultivates is, I would argue, somewhat perplexingly not one of the standard gritty spy thriller/shoot-em-up flick, but instead one eerily reminiscent of a Marvel movie.  

While (slightly) more grounded than perhaps the majority of Marvel’s superhero tentpole films, “The Gray Man” represents in both form and function a rather transparent attempt by the Russo Brothers to adapt their lessons learned in franchise filmmaking to the world of the modern-day gentleman spy.  

You can see this in everything from the plucky, eccentric “villain” who fancies himself a comedian, to the significant unresolved plotlines begging for a sequel, and, most tellingly, in the use (and perhaps over-use) of Marvel’s classic trick: the motif.  

My calling the motif Marvel’s trick is more than a bit of a misnomer, given that not only is it nearly ubiquitous among blockbusters, but also it’s well-nigh been the most important stable-horse of Hollywood screenwriters in the classical school for the better part of a century (it’s part of what makes “Casablanca” tick, for crying out loud).  

For context, in cinematic terms a motif is any object, line of dialogue, particular camera/lighting arrangement, or sound which recurs several times throughout the film at key moments in an attempt to accentuate emotional and/or narrative beats.

The motif can be used for a nearly limitless number of applications, but most frequently it’s used as a sort of cinematic cheat code in order to easily manipulate an audience’s emotional response.  It’s applied most often using a repetition-variation format, in which the motif is introduced in one context early in the film, reinforced in a similar context at a later point, and then re-introduced towards the conclusion in a new (typically bittersweet or tragic) way.  

To demonstrate, imagine you’re watching a slasher movie.  

In the opening scene we’re shown a family moving into their new house on a bright, sunny day, and as the father and daughter are unloading boxes from the moving van their golden retriever runs in between them and dashes into the house (there’s probably at least one close-up of the dog in there somewhere).  

Flash forward a few minutes of screen time: the girl and her little brother are at the table eating breakfast when all of a sudden their lovable, dopey dog jumps up and grabs a slice of toast out of the boy’s hand, wolfing it down in close-up.  

Finally, maybe twenty minutes into the film, the tone shifts and we’re given a nighttime interior close up of the golden asleep on a rug by the front door.  He looks up groggily and notices that the door is open.  Curious, he trots over to investigate when BAM! The killer grabs the dog and strangles it off-camera while you hear yelps followed by a thud.  

This is how a motif is employed in its most simple and effective incarnation: introduction, repetition, variation.  The filmmaker and screenwriter show you something seemingly unimportant, then proceed to imbue it with narrative importance through repeated emphasis, until finally they somehow alter or break it in an attempt to pull at your heartstrings.  

As you can certainly guess, this doesn’t necessarily have to be contrived to make the audience sad–my puppy narrative could just as easily be flipped to tell the story of a dog who’s been routinely beaten finally being rescued, for instance.  

This positive version of the motif is commonly used in blockbusters as a sort of social engineering hack to endear the protagonist to audience members (typically in the form of a catchphrase or action) and is more often than not wildly effective.  

However, as one might surmise, the effectiveness of a motif is amplified the longer the screenwriter drags out the build-up, “delaying” the variation stage of its implementation.  A prolonged cycle of repetition is challenging to achieve in the span of a ninety-minute feature film, and as such simple motifs such as catchphrases or signature actions are much more frequently employed in serial entertainment (traditionally television).

Enter the Russo brothers.

When they were tasked with directing and engineering the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most ambitious endeavors, they (alongside many of the Marvel creative team members) began to construct their movies almost as if they were giant episodes in an ongoing network series: each installment had a micro-narrative which is resolved by the end as well as elements of the macro-narrative which is resolved over the course of several installments (e.g. “The Winter Soldier” is one episode in “The Infinity Saga”).  

This narrative re-imagining of the feature came complete with the introduction of a heavy reliance on motif through association to drive audience attachment (e.g. Iron Man and AC/DC, Thor and literalism, etc.).  

The more we saw specific characters doing or saying things that were particular/signature to them, the more we came to view them not as fictional characters but as concrete individuals–an effect typically reserved for long-running sitcoms and other serials (similar to how fans of decades-long soaps will often describe characters as part of their family). 

Marvel’s Infinity Saga “ran” for roughly a decade and included twenty-three installments, making the MCU older than the vast majority of actual network television shows by the time “Endgame” premiered–more than enough time to enable the most hackneyed forms of motif to function perfectly in their capacity to make us feel.

The problem this creates for the blockbuster landscape, however, is a simple one: an installment in the MCU does not function in any way like a normal feature film.  

It’s comparing apples to oranges.  

Yet, regardless of this fact, screenwriters in the (non-superhero) blockbuster industry are now looking to Marvel to try and extract some of the secret formula which seems so often to give its movies verified box-office invincibility.  

And the most heinous of these adoptions are the more puerile forms of the motif.  

I challenge you to walk into a random theater this summer and see any movie on the marquee (barring, of course, actual Marvel films) and walk away without having been subjected to the indignity of at least one cringe-worthy, shoe-horned catchphrase or moment of desperate, unashamed pandering to times-gone by (by my estimation you’d be lucky to come out with only one).  

The absolute worst of these belong to the category which seems to telegraph the most blatantly low estimation of its viewers’ intelligence: the flashback motif.  

The “flashback motif” is what I’ve chosen to call those instances in which a film takes raw footage from either an earlier installment in its franchise or from earlier in the film itself and simply drops it in the middle of a scene, without alteration.

There was, perhaps, a time when only the campiest of camp movies would utilize such a ham-fisted method to remind you of things you’d previously seen, and that was for good reason.

The true crime of the flashback motif is that it comes across as nothing more than a coddling of or condescension towards the audience–an implicit belief that without this blatant “refresher” we would be completely oblivious to the cinematic parallels the filmmaker is trying to draw. 

As such it was rare, if ever, that such a device was used. 

Lately, however, examples of it have begun to pop up all over the place, including “Top Gun: Maverick”, “The Matrix: Resurrections”, and–sadly to say–“Nope”.  

For example: when in “Nope” OJ looks into his truck’s side view mirror and sees the giant alien eyeball, we as viewers are suddenly thrust into an unexpected and unnecessary flashback to the scene in which a production member holds up a mirror ball to OJ’s horse.  I classify this not as a typical flashback but as a flashback motif only because the mirror ball has already made two separate appearances in the film (repetition and variation).  All the more reason why this sudden incursion of the past into the present is, above all, completely gratuitous.  The audience knows the ball is important, we get that animals can’t be looked in their eyes or can't look into mirrors without going wild, and we can make that connection ourselves with an absolute minimum of effort.  

Peele’s use of the flashback motif is, however, tasteful in the extreme when compared to that of “Maverick”.  

Early in the film, we find Maverick leaving the military dive bar he’s been ceremoniously thrown out of, when all of a sudden he sees Rooster through an open doorway banging out Jerry Lee Lewis’ perennial “Great Balls of Fire” on the bar piano, with a host of his peers singing along with great alacrity.  It’s at this moment that the filmmakers so generously gift us footage of Goose doing precisely the same thing in the original “Top Gun” film with little Rooster sitting on top of the piano.

Disclaimer: this scene is not inherently bad.  

I wouldn’t even say it’s bad, period.  

In fact, it works quite well, and its conception is fantastic.  Its execution, however, is nothing less than insulting.  

Let’s break this down piecemeal.  First, there’s song selection: there’s no compelling reason (other than the fact that his dad sang it once upon a time) for Rooster to be playing, specifically, “Great Balls of Fire” at this bar.  What’s more, the song’s nearly forty years old, and somehow the film expects us to believe that every single twenty-something pilot in Fightertown, U.S.A. knows the lyrics backwards and forwards?

Sure, you can argue that perhaps this is Rooster’s signature act, and that he’s been doing it at this specific bar and with these specific people for years–but every living soul in that room was belting out Jerry Lee Lewis bar for bar, and there’s no way I’m buying that every one of those people had met Rooster before, let alone heard him sing “Balls of Fire”.  

As far as I’m concerned the only explanation, diegetic or otherwise, for the sing-along scene as pictured is that the screenwriters and filmmakers wanted to weaponize old-timer “Top Gun” nostalgia.  

Second, why include the flashback footage?  Who’s going to the theater to see “Maverick” without being at least tangentially aware of the famous “Great Balls of Fire” scene?  Perhaps that’s too harsh of a critique–this is a tentpole film after all, meaning it needs to appeal to all audiences, even those who haven’t seen “Top Gun”.  

At that point, though, you might as well just slap a “Previously On: Top Gun” segment right after the trailers and call it a day.

Which is, of course, almost exactly what the latest “Matrix” sequel did, but its flashback motif usage was so appalling and extensive that it’s probably best to just leave well enough alone.  

As bad as the flashback motifs are, however, they’re not a product of the Marvel Cinematic Universe–though they do make a cameo appearance in “Thor: Love and Thunder”–and we can’t blame the Russo brothers for them.  

The plucky catchphrase trend, on the other hand, is an entirely different story.  

As previously mentioned, the Russos found incredible success working with screenwriters who prioritized the creation of signature taglines and catchphrases, the most memorable of these being, arguably, Captain America’s “I can do this all day” (I still remember the goosebumps I got watching Evans deliver that line to Thanos in theaters).  

What’s important to note about the MCU, though, is that they’ve earned the effectiveness of this tactic.  They’ve had twenty three movies worth of character development in which to imbue those words with a meaning beyond their superficial cheesiness.  

The problem is that the use of catchphrases (which are themselves a form of motif) is undeniably “cheesy”–a fact which Marvel itself has admitted by lampooning the seriousness of Roger’s catchphrase in a song for his eponymous musical from the “Hawkeye” Disney + series.  And when screenwriters for non-Marvel films begin adopting this and other similar motif-driven narrative strategies, they fall flat on their face: bearing nothing but the sad, cheesy tuckus of hack writing.

Nowhere is this more evident (and most obviously attributable to the MCU) than in the Russo brothers’ “Gray Man”.  

In one of the film’s most astonishing fight scenes, “Six” subdues a home intruder in pitch darkness, the scene being lit almost exclusively by a flashlight held by Gosling’s character.  As the fight concludes, Six is confronted by his employer’s young niece, who (incredibly concerned) asks him if he’s alright, to which he responds, in classic quippy fashion: “Just another Thursday”.  Later in the film Six is injured nearly to the point of death, and as he is being carted away reassures his employer’s frantic young ward he’ll be alright by telling her, once again that it’s, “Just another Thursday”.

Now, I’m not saying this is the worst screenwriting ever, or even that it’s necessarily bad.  Catchphrases and taglines can even work well within a single film (again, see “Casablanca”), but at the end of the day, if the dialogue doesn't feel natural–if the repetition feels forced–it’s not going to land.  

Motifs are a powerful tool in screenwriters tool belts, and when used correctly can deliver the perfect emotional punch that a scene needs.  But, as the Russos’ heroes are so want to remind us: “with great power comes great responsibility”.  

My advice to anyone setting out to write a blockbuster screenplay, then, would be to take a long, hard look at your script and duly ask yourself: “is this going to sound stupid when my actor says it?”  

It’s exceedingly rare that a film as superficially vapid as “Bodies Bodies Bodies” has, in actuality, an incredibly urgent message to communicate to its audience.  Moreover, the irony of attempting to deliver such a message through the vehicle of a not-so-subtle ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’ parable should not be lost on viewers.  

This is a cautionary tale, and we would do well to remember that.  

The film opens with an absurdly protracted and sloppy french kiss between two of its protagonists, Sophie and Bee, followed by a (presumably post-coital?) scene of them lounging in an idyllic forest glen.  Sophie then, gazing lovingly at her partner, states bluntly and somewhat abruptly that most loaded of phrases and poignant of relationship milestones: “I love you”.  From the audience’s vantage point, having just met these two girls all of thirty seconds prior and seen nothing of their interactions save some serious sucking face, the scene reads simply as cute, if awkward–as all the best professions of love should be.  

It is only in the final minutes of the film, when we see Bee petrified, hiding from a gun-wielding Sophie who continues to echo the now-soured refrain of “I love you”, that the audience is allowed to grasp the truly inconsequential, trivial, and somewhat horrifying nature of Sophie’s “love”.  To boot, we’ve learned throughout the film that the two had been dating for all of six weeks when we met them in the forest, and that neither Sophie nor Bee know anything substantively true about the other’s past, friends, family, acquaintances, personality, or preferences.  

A more accurate, retroactive reading of the film’s opening confession of love, then, becomes very simple (and more than a little disheartening): Sophie does not know what it means to love.  She has used the word and the expression as callously and casually as one might comment about the weather or ask a stranger how their day has been–words used to occupy dead air.  

In opening the film with such a clear and tragic misuse of one of the most loaded phrases in the English language, the filmmakers have effectively established that there exists an explicit moral teaching about precision of language to be gleaned from their story, and that it will be the central tenet and guiding logic upon which the rest of the film is built.  The specific expression of that moral in “Bodies Bodies Bodies” is a simple and well-trod one, yet more immediately relevant now than perhaps it ever has been: our actions–and words–have consequences.

The film builds out this robust critique of our consequence-less culture by examining the flippancy and naivete of its characters, particularly with regards to trendy psychiatry buzzwords.  “Bodies, Bodies, Bodies” shows its characters repeatedly using clinical diagnoses and serious mental health conditions as simple tokens of “wokeness” and convenient loopholes to argue their victimhood.

The ultimate goal of this film, I believe, is to remind viewers that, in doing so, we perpetuate a culture of insensitivity towards some of the most vulnerable groups in society–the very same people whom these the terms were, in fact, designed to help–whether we do so intentionally or not.  We devalue their poignancy by making them ubiquitous and vapid–cheapen them by making them convenient and trendy.

To reinforce the danger of doing so, the film perpetually transfigures this attitude towards language into an attitude towards everything in these characters’ lives–from swords to drugs and from sex to guns–thematically and inseparably linking them and demonstrating that it’s not just those actions which can kill you or ruin your life that are the most dangerous to society.

What’s more, the film seeks to remind us that–even despite how much it might enjoy reveling in the flashy and privilege-laden antics of its protagonists–these issues apply to every person sitting in the theater, regardless of what walk of life they come from.

To see how “Bodies Bodies Bodies” accomplishes this, we must examine how it presents the behaviors and attitudes of its protagonists.

The plot of “Bodies Bodies Bodies” revolves around a group of obnoxious, vitriolically self-righteous, and entitled college kids who throw a “hurricane” party at one of their friends’ mansions (yes, mansions plural: it’s established quite early on that this is not the only mansion they are known to frequent).  

In the opening scenes, the kids chat flippantly and inconsequentially about their drug-fueled and partying-motivated lifestyles, turning even the most obviously odious and concerning behaviors into opportunities for nihilistic humor–e.g. “I remember you squatting on the subway pissing all over the place like some sort of hyena. I almost mistook you for an NYU student hahahaha”.  

From the start, two things become overwhelmingly obvious.  One: these kids come from families of incredible wealth and privilege.  And Two: while everything in their lives is seemingly deadly serious (drug addictions, public urination, etc. etc.), every one of the characters has no apparent concern for the consequences of their behavior, and none of it is ultimately of any importance to them.  

This is evident not only in the way they discuss their social lives, but also in the way they conduct themselves at the mansion estate.  

Early on in the film, one of the party guests, Jordan, appears at the poolside with a bottle of expensive champagne snagged from the host, David’s, father’s wine cellar.  David quickly protests that they shouldn’t (can’t is the word he actually uses) steal from his dad’s stuff.  And yet, it’s abundantly clear from both the tone of his voice and the manner in which he sits idly by as Greg dramatically opens the bottle with a gurkha sword that he, quite frankly, has no concern for whether or not they steal from his father after all–no matter how much protesting or pouting he may feign.  

The filmmakers take this scene–which easily could’ve been just another throwaway comedic moment–and use it brilliantly as another opportunity to assume a didactic mode of address (not unlike a fable or myth).  The audience isn’t able to appreciate this, however, until the close of the film, when we learn that, in an act of supreme cosmic irony, David was not murdered, but in fact stabbed himself accidentally in the throat whilst clumsily attempting to open yet another champagne bottle using his father’s gurkha sword.  What, then, is the moral of this fable, if it be one?  Don’t play with weapons you don’t know how to properly wield and of whose inherent dangers you are blissfully unaware.  

At this point, the socially imperative message of the film should be beginning to take shape, though its application may be incorrectly assumed to be relatively narrow.  

It would be easy to say that this film is a cautionary tale for the wealthy and the privileged–those who’ve grown up coddled by parents who protect their children from the consequences of their mistakes either through financial or social means (how many stories have we all read or heard of in which a wayward college socialite rapes a woman or is caught trafficking in drugs and is miraculously saved by the intervention of their deep-pocketed parent?).  Such a tale would be undoubtedly satisfying for audiences (the vast majority of whom are not the benefactors of multi-million-dollar trusts): a classic eat-the-rich, “look how stupid and selfish these entitled brats are”, feel-good story reassuring us that at least we, the masses, have our lives on the right track.  

If this were true, however, then “Bodies Bodies Bodies” would be an incredibly poor satire indeed: a lion robbed of its teeth and set harmlessly loose in the coliseum of the multiplex, appeasing our desire for bread and circuses.  

To understand how a film about the evils of pretentious rich kids could apply to the average viewer, we need to turn our attention to one of the film’s primary sources of comedy: buzzwords.  

Throughout the film, the Gen-Z college girls continually spout pseudo-psychiatric and scholarly buzzwords at each other, using them in targeted and ridiculous attacks over the most inane of arguments.  The operating principle of this comedic device is more or less malapropism: these girls time and time again egregiously misuse, inappropriately use, or mis-contextualize technical terms which they very clearly have merely a superficial knowledge of at best.  

For example, there is a moment in the film in which Alice calls out for her “boyfriend” Greg and some of the other girls rush to restrain her and cover her mouth to prevent her from shouting (believing Greg to be David’s murderer at the time).  As Alice struggles with the girls she manages to shout out “You’re silencing me!! You’re literally silencing me!” 

It’s obvious that the humor in this scene stems from the fact that, ironically, she is of course being silenced in the literal sense, and yet she (quite incorrectly) invokes the term in its more scholarly context, as it is applied in the field of social science.  

The term “silencing” (as Alice uses it here) broadly speaking refers to the systematic repression of the voice of a particular group of people as expressed through written, verbal, or televisual/digital media.  It’s a term scholars use to discuss the various ways in which oppressed groups within a society are prevented from communicating their stories and experiences, both within their communities and to a broader audience, and it’s a cornerstone of both the theory and practice of the fight for civil rights and social justice.  For example: 

Silencing is when the apartheid government in South Africa dictates what “colored” pastors can and cannot preach to their congregations.  

Silencing is when Catholic missions drive native languages to extinction by imprisoning their speakers and abusing them for not using Spanish.  

Silencing is when LGBTQ teachers are legally prevented from discussing their identity with students.  

Silencing is not when your Hamptonite girlfriends cover your mouth to keep you from calling out to your neo-hippie boyfriend.  

Malapropic instances such as this are scattered throughout the film like infuriating, yet didactically rich, easter eggs.  

Jordan claims that she required years of therapy to recover from the “PTSD” she developed after her abusive relationship with Sophie (it’s clear that Sophie never physically abused her).  

Emma claims her boyfriend David is “gaslighting” her when he mocks the sincerity of her protests after learning that she has been discussing their sex life with Alice (it is made quite clear that Emma did, in fact, discuss these things and is not, in fact, upset by David’s accusations–only pretending to be).  

Interestingly, the film takes a moment here to pause and call out Emma’s disingenuousness.  David scoffs at her accusation of gaslighting, claiming that it’s just a buzzword she read on Twitter, and that she has no idea what it actually means.  And as noxiously repulsive as Pete Davidson’s character is, his assessment of the situation here is surprisingly lucid.  Sure, he then goes on to conflate this with being accused of white supremacy and rails a few more lines of coke before dying in a tragic medieval sword accident, but his commentary on how these girls weaponize popular buzzwords is spot-on.  To them, these words are not scholarly concepts with real, measurable academic and social consequences, but just one more tool at their disposal for abdicating blame and dodging responsibility.  

The protagonists throw these words around continually, with no regard for the power of the discursive concepts they employ: like playing with a loaded handgun and not understanding the inherent danger you invite.  Interestingly enough, the filmmakers make this exact didactic point by utilizing that very metaphor: the loaded handgun.  

Towards the end of the film, Jordan manages to find a loaded semi-automatic pistol in the house and wields it in a confrontation with the other girls.  Notably, she shoots Alice in the leg and then repeatedly claims “I didn’t shoot you, I didn’t shoot you” followed by looking at Sophie and asking “Why did you make me do this?”  Her complete and willful ignorance of her own culpability becomes, at this point, hyperbolically absurd–to the point of being pathological and, frankly, ludicrous: we’ve exited the realm of reality and entered one of metaphor.  

As an aside: this film provides quite possibly the best argument against keeping a loaded firearm in your home I’ve ever seen put to the screen (you can never know the true meaning of the word “horror” until you’ve watched three twenty-year-old sorority girls wantonly waving around a loaded SIG with their finger on the trigger).  

The coup-de-gras moment in terms of the film’s symbolic use of the handgun comes in its final scene, in which Bee steals the gun from Sophie and points it directly at her (again: safety off, finger on the trigger), demanding to read Sophie’s text messages to her ex-girlfriend Jordan (in the belief that she will find evidence of cheating).  

In any other movie, in any other genre, such a scene would be entirely un-noteworthy.  In action movies, for example, people have guns pointed at them all the time, and for all manners of reasons (many of which similarly involve handing over an electronic device of some kind). 

What makes this same scene in “Bodies Bodies Bodies” so notable, however, is that the stakes of the confrontation are laughably, hilariously, low–and yet the situation is treated as deadly serious (literally) by both parties involved, without the slightest hint of irony.  By shooting a scene so absurd, and yet so entirely devoid of comedy, “Bodies Bodies Bodies” forces you out of the immersion of the diegesis, jarring you in an uncanny and profoundly upsetting manner.  You realize that you are watching a girl, in complete seriousness, threaten to take the life of another girl,  unless she lets her read her text messages.

This scene is, thereby, transfigured into an astoundingly effective metaphor for the film at large (and the seemingly innocuous, if tone-deaf, behavior of its characters): children using incredibly dangerous weapons to fight unthinkably trivial battles.  

I don’t, of course, mean that in the literal sense: “Bodies Bodies Bodies” isn’t trying to convince its young audience not to buy 9mm’s and gurkha swords.  

“Bodies Bodies Bodies” is, instead, attempting to convince Gen-Z’ers to reconsider the language they appropriate and repurpose in everyday conversations.  

Gen-Z has interchangeably and perhaps ironically (not to mention pejoratively) been referred to as “the Tik Tok Generation”, owing to their being the first generation of native users of that particular platform.  The social media upstart has very quickly democratized knowledge in almost every field imaginable–from cooking to horticulture to spelunking and everything in between–with informative and well-curated content available from a host of reputable sources.  However, as a platform that operates at least in part according to viral algorithms, and as a platform consumed by Gen-Z audiences in tandem with other, more explicitly viral platforms such as Twitter, it also has the capacity to misinform (or at the very least generate superficial knowledge).  

One particularly popular viral Tik Tok (and social media in general) sub-genre is that of psychiatry and psychotherapy, through which channels many previously obscure, taboo, or misunderstood concepts and diagnoses have become household phrases, including almost all of those which are lampooned in “Bodies Bodies Bodies”–“triggering”, “PTSD”, “gaslighting”, “body dysmorphia”, etc.  As such, it’s become remarkably easy for anyone, not just those belonging to Gen-Z (and not just those who use Tik Tok) to have been exposed to these terms without also having been exposed to the harsh and dangerous realities they underlie.  

It’s very easy for an uncritical social media user, for example, to learn erroneously that “gaslighting” is simply synonymous with “lying”, and not that the most serious cases (and those for which the term was originally coined) have involved, for example, women convinced by their abusers that they are not competent enough to bathe or change themselves, locked away dependent and terrified for years, living in soiled and tattered undergarments.  

We may learn erroneously that “body dysmorphia” simply means not liking the way you look, and not learn that its clinical purpose was designed to diagnose and treat many cases involving fatally serious self harm.  

When the characters of “Bodies Bodies Bodies” twist these terms flippantly and without an understanding of their true clinical purposes, they are effectively bringing a loaded pistol to an arm-wrestling match: needlessly escalating the situation by introducing weapons of which they neither understand the danger nor know how to use. 

“Bodies Bodies Bodies” is a film made to remind us that the rich are by no means the only people capable of this sin.  

After all, the type of irreparable social damage on a meaningful scale caused by misuse of clinical language would be fundamentally impossible if only the 1% were to blame.  

No, an acute degradation of meaning can only be driven by massive-scale, society-wide virality of the type that only exists on social media platforms such as Twitter and Tik Tok.  

What’s the solution then?  

The film seems to argue that the best way to fight it is, somewhat intuitively, on terms that are wholly physical: the words we use in our day-to-day conversations.  

“Bodies Bodies Bodies” uses its characters inept insensitivities and egregious, self-serving appropriations as sources of humor, yes, but more than anything it provides a case study in how not to interact with your peers.  Any sane audience member walks away from the experience with an undeniably intense hatred for every character involved.  There is no redemption.  

In making us so utterly frustrated and infuriated at the actions, attitudes, and inanities of the characters on screen, “Bodies Bodies Bodies” effectively works like that most successful and horrifying of televisual artifacts: anti-smoking ads.  Just as there’s no better way to stop a kid from taking that first puff of cigarette smoke than showing him or her a fifty-year-old with a breathing tube, there’s no better way to stop a kid from misusing medical terms than to show him or her how much of a complete and utter douchebag they look like doing it.  

Crackling into theaters with all the ferocity of a mid-summer thunderstorm, “Thor: Love and Thunder” boomed up big bucks at the box office, racking up yet another runaway success for director Taika Waititi.  

As anyone who’s seen the previous installment in the Thor franchise, “Ragnarok”, can attest, this newest film continues its predecessor’s predilection for heart-pounding, kaleidoscope-colored sci-fi action sequences set to an undeniably show-stealing classic rock setlist.  The film is not without its levity and balance, however, as Waititi is careful to counterpoint his god-tier clashes with both his signature off-beat humor and, as the title would suggest, a healthy amount of romance.  

This combination of x-factors is all but guaranteed to send a summer blockbuster rocketing to the top of the polls, but not all viewers may see it as a net positive for the cinema.  In fact, the very same feel-good, fun-loving escapades on which “Love and Thunder” capitalizes so well are more often than not precisely the reasons for which many in the filmmaking community and moviegoing audiences alike disparage the seemingly ubiquitous Marvel tentpoles.  

To a degree, it seems almost as if this Thor flick were written and produced specifically as a coup-de-gras aimed at all those (high-profile and otherwise) who have been quick to dismiss the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) as, to quote famed director Martin Scorsese, not quite “cinema”.

Detractors of the MCU levy several claims against the popcorn flicks, most of which involve some variation on the following arguments: “they’re all the same, why would I want to watch the good guys win for the 23rd time?”, “there’s too much humor, it feels out of place in an action movie”, “they’re just pandering to audiences”, or even “those are kid’s movies, not serious adult fiction”.  

To boot, if you spend enough time on any of the online meme sharing platforms, you’re bound to come across some version of the classic “Marvel fans when Marvel makes another two-hour-long CGI fight scene where the hero wins” meme.  In such cases, the somewhat ironically uninspired tagline is then paired with an illustrative gif or image portraying the Marvel fan as a buffoon, simpleton, or–worse still–a “soyjack” (and if you don’t know what that is, I envy you).  

These arguments all boil down to expressions of the same basic complaint: the movies aren’t sophisticated pieces of adult media with dark underlying themes and a self-serious tone.  

Now, anyone familiar with Taika Waititi’s work knows that this man has made it practically his life’s mission to make movies that are, quite literally, diametrically and fundamentally opposed to that sort of filmmaking ethos–the belief that “good” and “mature” must be synonymous.  

His films “Jojo Rabbit” and “What We Do In The Shadows” fly in the face of both reverence and self-seriousness, questioning the filmmaking communities’ predisposition to treat certain genres and topics (including, but not limited to, the Third Reich) with reserved and calculated maturity.  Waititi opts instead to use these taboo or otherwise mature subjects as unlikely sources of raucous humor, transforming them into spectacles of a very different nature (for an amusing demonstration of this fact, I’d challenge any arthouse theater programmers reading this to schedule a “Jojo Rabbit”/”Schindler’s List” or “What We Do In The Shadows”/”Bram Stoker’s Dracula” double feature and let me know how it goes).  

“Thor: Love and Thunder” is nothing if not an extension of this philosophy: take what was once sober and laden with gravitas (I’m looking at you, “Thor: The Dark World”) and turn it into something magically entrancing by injecting it with just the right dose of disembodied talking heads (no, not the band), mildly overweight Greek Gods, technicolor fantasy worlds, screaming goats, and enough Guns & Roses (yes, the band) to shake the luxury recliners’ bolts loose in all the Dolby Digital Theaters out there.

Waititi understands not what makes a superhero movie “cinema”, but what makes one fun.  The entire “Thor” cast and crew seems to know just what it is that makes watching a superhero movie the mind-numbing, awe-inspiring, heart-pumping experience that, at its heart, it always should be.  

Sure “Love and Thunder” is no “Usual Suspects” or “Good Will Hunting”, but that’s not why it was written, that’s not why Disney paid to produce it, and that’s certainly not why it made over a hundred million dollars last weekend.  

No, all of those can be traced back to the fact that, at the end of the day, it’s sure hard to think about whatever it is your boss has been nagging you about or your teacher has been bugging you about when you’re watching a 6’3” muscled Australian dude in a cherry-red bedazzled vest beating the snot out of furry, nameless aliens with “Welcome to the Jungle” ripping through your eardrums.  

It’s just plain fun, and the cinema is all the better for it.  

     Just as any other film, television series, animation, or comic book produced after The Dark Knight, Joker (and specifically Joaquin Phoenix’s performance) will necessarily be held up against what has come to be accepted as the gold standard of Heath Ledger’s unsettling and timeless portrayal of the clown prince of crime.  While I could argue the merits of both legendary actor’s turns filling the shoes of Mister J in terms of performance, technique, etc., what I find infinitely more interesting is to examine the shift in the philosophical stance of the character between the two screen incarnations.

     The general consensus amongst fans and critics alike is that Ledger’s Joker was a searing satire of and critique on the orderly, structured world he saw around him: people behaving in manners that conformed to paper-thin ethical standards that would degrade in the face of overwhelming pressure.  He claims–as the Killing Joke Joker did–that “all it takes is a little push” for people to abandon their moral sentiments and revert to sheer self-interest and chaos.  Ledger’s Joker was essentially fulfilling the archetype of the trickster god, reminiscent of Bugs Bunny or Loki, who wants to demonstrate the absurdity of the rules to those who consider themselves beholden to them by trapping said people in logical and moral puzzles that are a direct result of the contradictions inherent in the system: loopholes, if you will.  His fulfillment of the archetype is demonstrated by the final ferry sequence, the money burning, the Rachel/Harvey choice, etc.

     Phoenix’s Joker, on the other hand, comes across as rather motiveless and random, denying us even an albeit twisted logic by which to understand his actions and thought processes: he kills for sport, for vengeance, in retribution for real or imagined slights, or quite simply because he thinks it’s funny.  He rejects the idea that society even functions on a set of shared rules, and takes the absurdity of the system as grounds for refuting it’s existence entirely.  In this Phoenix becomes the pure nihilist Joker: the archetypal drifter-killer with no agenda and no reason to explain his madness and violence–just rage, insanity, and a freedom from ties to any sense of morality at all.  The degree to which this philosophy was brought to the character even on the level of acting cues can be seen in Phoenix’s tendency as Arthur Fleck to break into spontaneous and chaotic pseudo-dances at seemingly inappropriate or even random times–here, both the cause of the action and the action itself lack an internal logic by which to understand them.

     While claiming to be the ultimate embodiment of chaos, Ledger’s Joker could never truly live up to that epithet, because in attempting to use the contradictions of humanity’s purported civilization and societal rules to prove their own absurdity, he reifies their existence.  We see Ledger’s Joker engage in such behavior several times in The Dark Knight, for example in the scene where Ledger kidnaps the characters of Rachel and Harvey Dent, demanding that Batman make the terrible decision to save one and let the other die.  Ledger’s Joker believes that he has constructed an impossible situation in order to demonstrate to Batman that making value judgements of one human life against another are ultimately arbitrary, and that no matter the outcome the agent’s choice cannot, by human standards, be a moral action.  However in doing so he both acknowledges the role of the value of human life in public consciousness and seems to, by utilizing the contradictions of utilitarianism, reaffirm its salience.  On the opposite side of the equation, Phoenix’s Joker simply denies the existence of rules or governing moral principles altogether, and quite simply doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.

     Ledger’s Joker fails in his own nihilistic agenda by adopting an agenda in the first place.  By striving to win over others (namely Batman) to his point of view, he implicitly acknowledges that there exists a superior and objectively correct point of view: his.  Whereas in Joker, we see Arthur completely forgo any intentionally malicious scheming designed to manipulate humans into defying their own moral codes; he instead simply chooses to ignore their existence altogether, operating as he wishes when he wishes with no thought as to the decency or civility of his actions (though paradoxically he does blame the lack of civility in society for contributing to his crumbling psyche).  Arthur doesn’t try to convince anybody of anything, because ultimately he doesn’t think it matters.  The only person he ever even appears to “lecture” to, Murray, he kills at the conclusion of his speech!  This suggests that his entire ostensibly “rhetorical” outburst on the show was more of a twisted confession in search of or as a completion of his process of personal catharsis than any attempt to demonstrate to others the depravity of society.

     For these reasons I–personally–think that Joaquin Phoenix and Todd Phillips delivered a much scarier and much more existentially horrifying Joker than Ledger and Nolan ever did.  Ledger defied our understanding of right and wrong, but did so within a conventional framework, playing by the rules.  Arthur Fleck simply refuses to even admit the existence of a system in the first place, playing a game unbeholden to a rule system of any kind, lacking even the slightest veneer of an internal logic.  It is that which makes our blood run cold.

     Now there are those who would claim that Arthur Fleck isn’t a proper nihilist, and that he’s actually just a depraved psychopath with an ill-formed mind and the means to kill.  They would cite, for example, that almost all of his killings stem from personal slights against him: the boys who mocked him on the subway, his mother who did nothing to stop his father’s abusing him, Murray who mocked him on the show, Randall who tried to get him fired, etc.  I think the answer to this protest boils down to the fact that while those may be the primary “motives” for his violent acts, this logic fails to comment on how Arthur perceives the morality of his actions.  

     While you could argue that Arthur feels “justified” in his killings because of the wrongs these people have inflicted against him, the more correct answer lies elsewhere.  The impetus for his killing may very well be the instinctual feelings of indignation, rage, and hurt pride that accompany the pernicious acts of those around him, but he doesn’t view his killings as morally good.  He doesn’t even view them as justified: he just thinks they’re funny.  Consider the example of the drunk yuppie Wayne Enterprises boys that Arthur guns down on the subway.  In his interview with Murray, Arthur admits that he finds the boys’ deaths to be incredibly funny, and as a principle reason for the humor he cites this: the boys were mourned and wept over because they were affluent, because they were Wayne employees, because Thomas Wayne mourned them on the news.  But if it were Arthur that was gunned down on the sidewalk, he asks us to consider how many of us would simply walk right over him (a line written down in his journal right above the “cents” joke).  What he seems to find so overwhelmingly funny about this is that it’s a crystallization of the fact that humanity is all tied up in a grand, cosmic joke that, because he is removed from it, Arthur can find humor in.  The “joke”, in his eyes, is humanity’s use of moral codes as a way to define proper and improper manners of living.  He posits that if such moral codes did, in fact, exist then they would command those obedient to them to answer Arthur’s question by stating that they would mourn his death just the same as that of the rich boys.  But of course… this isn’t what happens.  And so Arthur laughs.  The parable of the drunk subway boys reveals humanity’s willingness to bend, break, and ignore morality when it is convenient for them to do so.  The irony here is that the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from this malleability of right and wrong is that there is no such thing.  But Arthur is the only one who can see this.  So in his final line of the film, he very simply responds to the psychiatrist’s request to hear his joke with the only answer he can give: “you wouldn’t get it”.

     Many critics have bashed Joker for coming off as meandering or even aimless, which I think is really a pointless criticism of a movie fundamentally about pointlessness.  If we judge a film as “good” only by its slavish narrative devotion to character-driven causality, then a character piece about a fundamental moral nihilist with no reasoning or motivation to define his actions by must necessarily appear to be a slow, meaningless, or even boring movie.  They claim that because Arthur seems to have an incoherent or rambling view of society which he is impotent to express–save for in the sad, impish ramblings of a madman masking profundity in a child’s vocabulary–the film lacks purpose and fails to take a definite stance on contemporary issues/state of affairs.  This argument is nonsensical, like trying to use a ruler to measure the passage of time: it’s a faulty metric.  The film, barring a few instances (everything with regards to the pharmaceutical industry and treatment of mental illness), on the whole isn’t trying to say anything about modern Western society: it’s a micro-level examination of how a man could come to completely abandon every moral tenet we hold dear, including belief in the existence of moral tenets at all.

     When I went to go see Split in the theaters, I never imagined that just two short years later I would see a shredded and shirtless James McAvoy flying-tackle Bruce Willis’ character from one of my all-time favorite movies, and yet here we are.  Needless to say, it was quite a sight to behold.  If you were to ask someone what superhero movie they were most looking forward to in 2018, I think you would be surprised if the answer you received were Glass, and yet I do believe that M. Night Shyamalan’s latest work will indeed become a classic among fans of his work and fans of comic books in general.  It succeeds for several reasons, but most importantly because what the film recognizes is that at the heart of comic books lies the innate desire to believe in the extraordinary: to believe that the world is a much more fantastic and interesting place than we might otherwise think.  For over a decade now Hollywood has been cashing in on this desire in force to sell incredible worlds and characters to mass audiences in the form of superhero movies based on comic book characters, from the most well known to the most obscure (e.g. Superman and The Guardians of the Galaxy, respectively).  Inevitably, along the way several examples of “deconstructionist” comic book movies have emerged to poke fun at and highlight the peculiarities of the genre, and many have succeeded by framing it in a comedic light (think Deadpool).  However, the ultimate goal of parody is not simply to lampoon source material, but to draw attention to its strengths and weaknesses–to give the audience a fresh perspective on a familiar concept.  Glass delivers exactly that, operating as a sort of dramatic parody that deconstructs the conventions of comic book storytelling in order to celebrate the medium for all of its triumphs and appreciate it through even its most tired tropes.

     Before delving into that I wanted to point out some interesting easter eggs in the film.  There is a scene in which the character Casey, the sole survivor of The Beast, visits a comic shop, and at the checkout counter she asks the cashier “When were the first comics published?”  In reply he makes reference to a few early strips from periodicals and newspapers, but then says that comics really began with the publication of Action Comics #1 in 1938 and the introduction of the man in the “big red cape and blue tights”.  This comic issue becomes a motif throughout the film, coming up later when Casey, during an argument with a doctor over the validity of comics as historical records, makes mention of the fact that the first incarnation of Superman couldn’t actually fly.  The final and most striking recurrence of the Action Comics #1 motif, however, comes in the very last frame of the film, in which a news broadcast plays footage of The Beast lifting a car partially off the ground and holding it above his head.  This action echoes the exact pose that Superman is depicted in on the cover of Action Comics #1, as shown:

The decision to have The Beast mirror Superman’s pose from the cover of the very first issue of a Superman comic reflects more than just the desire to make a clever reference to a classic comic; it implies a connection between the events of the film and the significance of Action Comics #1.  As the cashier at the comic shop said, everything changed with the introduction of Superman–Superman was our first step as a reading public into the universe of superheroes–which is precisely what the events of Glass serve as to the people of its story world.  Elijah states during the film that “this isn’t a Limited Edition; it’s an origin story”, and when taken together with the homage to the very first Superman comic, it becomes clear that he isn’t talking about himself, The Beast, or even David: he’s talking about superheroes at large.  Elijah’s ultimate goal is to put David and The Beast on display for the world to see in the hopes that more people will be inspired to become real-life superheroes, and as such Glass isn’t an origin story for any of its characters but for the people in its story world who decide to become superheroes after the credits roll.  Glass is, ultimately, the story of how a world came to know of the existence of superheroes through the master-plot of an evil genius; it is, like Action Comics was to the real world, “our introduction to the universe”, as Elijah’s mother says in the film’s final moments.

     Now, onto the main argument.  Glass is the third installment in the Eastrail 177 trilogy, after Unbreakable and Split, and as a conclusion to a trilogy it operates much more as a direct sequel to Unbreakable than to Split–most importantly, it both thematically and formally draws on Unbreakable’s decision to frame its story through the lens of a comic book.  One way this is accomplished in Unbreakable is that the character Elijah convinces David that he is a real-life superhero through a series of parallels between David’s life and the conventions of superhero stories: David’s fear of water echoes the convention of the hero having one pronounced weakness, the almost paranormal sense he possesses for identifying wrongdoers becomes the x-ray vision or ESP of superheroes, Elijah’s instructions guide a hero’s journey to develop his powers.  In addition, the film employs several comic tropes to tell its story, and in most instances where it does one character or another will typically call attention to it directly in dialogue.  Some examples include the ally to the hero who is later revealed to be a villain, the distinction between a “soldier” villain and the brainiac arch-nemesis, and the villain who was bullied as a child or “different” from all the other kids.  

--- A brief side note of interest with regards to style and connections between Unbreakable and Glass: In Unbreakable, Elijah’s mother tells David while they’re at Elijah’s gallery that in comics villains’ eyes are often depicted as larger than lifesize, representing a skewed perception of the world, and in time we come to understand that this was a reference to Elijah’s ideas about comic books and reality.  In one specific scene in Glass in which Dr. Staple talks to all three main characters, Shyamalan reinforces Elijah’s “skewed perception” by giving us a look inside Elijah’s mind in the form of a POV shot with canted framing, literally putting the world on a skew. ---

     Glass takes the idea of playing up comic tropes and runs with it.  At the opening of the film we find that both David and “Kevin” have embraced their identities as superhumans and have begun acting in patterns consistent with those of superheroes and supervillains in comics: David operates as a vigilante protector of the innocent and The Horde continues to abduct young “impure” girls and sacrifice them to The Beast.  Overt references to comics are littered throughout the movie; I could choose from an almost endless list of examples…  As mentioned before, Casey visits a comic shop at one point, and there she finds a comic depicting a half-man half-beast performing feats identical to those we saw The Beast perform in Split.  Elijah constantly draws parallels between comics and the events occuring in the story: such as speaking to Kevin about man-beast creatures in comics, orchestrating a “public forum” (a convention of the limited edition comic) between David and The Beast to expose them and their abilities to the world, referring to his mother, Casey, Joseph, and The Beast as a “collection of main characters”, and declaring to his mom with his final breath that “this was never a limited edition, it was an origin story”.  At the end of the film, Dr. Staple realizes what Elijah’s real masterplan was only after overhearing a conversation at a comic shop about how the mastermind villain always has a ‘real plan’ that’s revealed at the end, after the hero has been distracted by an intentional misdirect.  In her monologue at the climax (itself a comic trope), Dr. Staple uses the phrase “gods amongst us” to describe the existence of superbeings, a reference to the popular DC Comics video game and comic book series Injustice: Gods Among Us.  Joseph bursts onto the scene during the confrontation between his dad and The Beast in an attempt to turn The Beast against Mister Glass by revealing Kevin’s parentage, shouting: “the key to understanding any comic book character is their parents!”  By working extensive comic jargon and references into the film, and by describing comic conventions explicitly in dialogue at the same moment that he himself employs them in the narrative, Shyamalan establishes that this story is inextricably tied to that of the comic book medium, and communicates to us as the audience that we should be interpreting the events of the film from the perspective of how they might relate to comics.  That said, it is my opinion that the journey of self-discovery of the characters in the film and the themes of the film as a whole should be read as an allegory for the role played by the comic book medium in modern society at large and throughout history.

     The plot of the film takes a turn as both David and The Horde are captured by a psychiatrist/psychologist specializing in delusions of grandeur (Dr. Staple) hoping to convince them both that their abilities are natural, not supernatural, and that they are simply willing themselves to be superheroes because of mental and emotional trauma, as a sort of coping mechanism.  Therefore, from the earliest introduction of the character we understand that her goal, in an abstract sense, is to render the extraordinary trite and dismiss the fantastic as a trick or a fraud.  This character trait is reinforced time and time again throughout the film, and by the conclusion it is revealed that she is a member of a secret organization whose sole mission is to locate superhumans and to eliminate their “specialness”: either by convincing them of their normalness or by eliminating them from the public eye (detention or execution).  Whether you agree with her philosophies or not–can superheroes exist without supervillains, or vice versa, and if not should both be eliminated?  Can humanity live with its banal normality in the face of living “gods amongst us”?–Shyamalan clearly structures the film so as to frame her as the central villain, not Mister Glass.  We are made to root against her and her efforts to suppress the awesome power of these three characters, because we realize that it is precisely their fantastic abilities that make them such attractive and engaging characters.  We don’t want David or The Beast or even Mister Glass to be ‘just another ordinary person’, because we understand that even if their extraordinary feats can be, as Elijah puts it, “explained away”, they are still nonetheless extraordinary, and represent the ultimate achievement of the human will.  The film recognizes that comics are often at their very best when they are at their most incredible, and the prevalence of fantastic or seemingly supernatural elements doesn’t make comics “less than” as a medium: it frees them to amaze, to astonish, and to inspire readers to find the incredible in themselves.  Just like was the case for Elijah in Unbreakable, comics and their extraordinary characters give kids the courage to believe in their own abilities and specialness, and like Elijah and his gallery ‘Limited Edition’, when those kids grow up they can enjoy with a mature appreciation the literary comics that demonstrate the medium’s power as a sophisticated and nuanced art form. 

     Avengers: Infinity War, the third film in the Avengers series and the nineteenth movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), represents the culmination of a decade’s worth of comic book storytelling and the dramatic conclusion to a great many number of conflicts, events, and character arcs within the MCU.  In bringing together over twenty heroes, most of whom have starred in leading roles in their own films, the Russo brothers were faced with the tremendous challenge of drafting a compelling story that meaningfully developed the arcs of each of its extensive cast of characters and allowed them to interact in an organic manner.  To meet this challenge, they decided to draw on strategies from traditional cinema narrative and to adapt them to the needs of crafting a massive modern blockbuster.  To that end, while Infinity War employs several of the same narrative strategies as traditional Hollywood films, the circumstances of its creation and the artistic pressures on the film led the filmmakers to utilize a sort of “intensified” classical narrative structure that elevates the film’s form to match the power of its spectacle.  And though its basic premise may be high concept and relatively simple (antagonist attempts to collect a group of items while the protagonists fight to prevent this), the execution of Infinity War’s storytelling on the micro level is actually quite complex, relying on both classic formal elements and character investment from previous MCU installments to create meanings not fully derived from the film as it stands by itself.

     Most of the formal elements of Avengers: Infinity War can be said to be taken directly from the classical Hollywood tradition, though the film may not superficially appear to have much in common with a classical Hollywood studio film.  As a spectacular blockbuster, it adheres almost completely to the arguments set forth by Geoff King in his article Spectacle, Narrative, and the Spectacular Hollywood Blockbuster regarding the formal conventions of an epic Hollywood film, specifically that “they tell carefully organized, more or less linear cause/effect stories organized around central characters” (King 120).  In line with that, the plot of Infinity War is strongly driven by character-centered causality, and every action taken in the film is clearly motivated.  For example, part of the Russos’ strategy in juggling so many characters in one film was to divide the cast of characters into several groups, separated in space, that would battle Thanos at various instances, but to do that they had to write into the plot direct causes that would separate the heroes.  This way, when the audience asks themselves “why are these characters where they are”, there is always an apparent and reasonable answer that relies on the previous actions of characters in the story.  To illustrate, consider the following line of questioning: “Why are Iron Man, Doctor Strange, and Spiderman fighting Thanos on Titan?”  Because they hitched a ride on one of Thanos’ spaceships that was going to Titan.  “How did they come to be on the spaceship?”  Ebony Maw had abducted Strange and was holding him captive onboard, so Stark and Spiderman staged a rescue mission.  “Why did Maw abduct Strange?”  Because Dr. Strange was in possession of the Time Stone, which Thanos needed to accomplish his goal of universal rebalancing.  These sort of tight causal chains hold true at every juncture of the plot and there are little to no instances of coincidence progressing the plot, both of which are conventions of a classical Hollywood narrative.  Even the events that may seem coincidental are motivated when investigated further: take the Guardians literally “running into” Thor, for example, which may seem like a rather large coincidence considering the vast expanse of space.  We then, however, remember that the Guardians were called to the site of the wreckage of the Asgardian refugee vessel by a distress signal, the very same distress signal whose audio was played over the opening titles of the film.  The recurring significance of minor plot elements such as these reinforces the idea that Infinity War takes advantage of the classical Hollywood technique of employing a tight narrative with strong character-centered causality.

     The use of classical Hollywood storytelling strategies, particularly the aforementioned, is contingent upon having characters with clearly defined personality traits and goals that will act in a predictable manner, another area in which Infinity War follows traditional formal patterns.  Take each character individually, and you will find that they all possess easily definable traits and goals: Iron Man is war-weary and seeking to minimize the human fallout of his actions while neutralizing the threat Thanos poses, Dr. Strange is fiercely rational and every action he takes will be to defend the Time Stone, Thor is stubbornly persistent and desperate for revenge, driven by righteous indignation at the murder of his brother and best friend, Star-Lord is “plucky” and self-centered, and anytime he acts it will be in a self-serving manner (either for profit or revenge), Captain America is a loyal soldier standing up against oppression of the innocent, etc.  However, what sets Infinity War apart from a stand-alone classical Hollywood film in this regard is that it has a decade’s worth of stories from which to draw inter-textual significance and meanings, heightening our sense of familiarity with and investment in the characters.  Not only is the viewer already familiar with the characterizations of Infinity War’s main players from previous films in the MCU, but also almost every character interaction or conflict in the film is written so as to reinforce them.  We know Thor to be somewhat foolhardy and willing to take high personal risks in the hopes of a greater reward from events in the past films (such as in Thor when he throws himself into the mouth of a monstrous beast just to come out fighting through the other end) so it is no surprise to the audience when he decides to attempt taking the full force of a neutron star in order to forge himself a new weapon.  His actions in Infinity War are incredibly dangerous and borderline suicidal, yet we are not surprised that he takes them because they do not contradict what we know about Thor’s personality from earlier Marvel movies.  When Iron Man talks Dr. Strange into letting the spaceship take them to Titan in order to bring the fight to Thanos and avoid collateral damage to Earth, we understand that Tony is making this decision based on experiences from the previous films that we have seen shape his psyche.  We remember the violent fates and horrific deaths of all those who perished in the Avengers’ battles that were shown to Tony as evidence of the necessity of the Sokovia Accords’ in Civil War, and we remember the lengths to which he went and the price that he paid in that film to ensure appropriate oversight was ratified and implemented.  When Tony resorts to quips and one-liners in the face of an attack on New York by two of Thanos’ henchmen (“Earth is closed today”, “get lost, Squidward”), we are reminded that, in previous Marvel films, Tony has again and again resorted to cheap humor as a defense mechanism against having to cope with the gravity of a situation, and we remember that he has, for years, suffered anxiety attacks triggered by the original attack on New York and has been dreading the possible return of hostile alien forces.  In almost every scene that features the Guardians of the Galaxy, each member of the team typically delivers one or more jokes, reminding the audience that these characters are meant to be, in some capacity, the comic relief (similar to how their films function in the MCU as a whole).  Captain America attempts to fight Thanos in hand-to-hand combat with nothing but his bare fists and a pair of shields, consistent with what the audience knows of his never-give-up attitude and willingness to fight the good fight, no matter how outmatched he is (think of the back-alley beatdown he receives in First Avenger and his declaration that, “I can do this all day”).  These are only a couple of examples from the film, but the same types of observations could be made about any member of the massive ensemble, and each demonstrates how the film as a whole takes advantage of the classical Hollywood convention of clearly-defined characters with unambiguous goals, while enriching this convention with added meanings by incorporating and reinforcing character traits and goals that the audience is already familiar with from the prior films in the franchise.

     The film also makes use of several motifs to draw thematic parallels between story events and heighten the emotional impact of certain scenes, another technique common among classical Hollywood films.  Most notable are two examples of dialogue motifs, concerning the relationships between Vision and Scarlet Witch and Vision and Captain America.  When we first meet Wanda and Vision in the film, they are sharing a hotel room, and Vision asks Wanda to use her powers to try and see if she can determine if the Mind Stone is attempting to communicate with him.  As she is using her powers to examine the stone, Vision asks what she feels, to which she replies, “All I feel is you”.  Later, at the climax of the film, Vision demands that Wanda use her powers to destroy the stone (and consequently to kill him), and as he is reassuring her that it’s alright, he insists that he won’t feel any pain, saying “All I feel is you”.  This simple phrase takes on a new and heart-wrenching significance, making the moment painfully bittersweet by using her own words to express that she could never hurt him and that any extension of her (including a lethal dose of her powers), is still a part of her and as such could only engender love within him.  The second use of the dialogue motif/variation strategy occurs when Captain America informs Vision that forcing someone to kill him in order to prevent Thanos from collecting all six stones is too high a price to pay for victory, declaring that “We don’t trade lives”.  In the climactic Battle of Wakanda, Captain America goes to rescue Vision from an attack by a member of the Black Order, and as he is fighting off the attacker Cap urges Vision to run away and save himself, leaving Cap at the mercy of his assailant.  The camera follows their fight for a while, not showing Vision, so the audience assumes that he has fled, but when Cap is pinned to the ground and about to be killed Vision rams a spear through the attacker’s chest, reminding Steve that, “We don’t trade lives, Captain”.  When he repeats Cap’s line from earlier in the film, the audience becomes more endeared of both Vision and Captain America, as we realize that not only was Steve right to take a hard-liner stance on the value of life, but also that Vision has grown in his ability to weigh issues of morality and empathy, in part thanks to Cap’s teaching.

     When I entered the theater to watch A Star is Born, I had absolutely no idea how wholly unprepared I was for this emotional powerhouse of a film, and as all 200 audience members and I stumbled out of the theater sniffling and desperately trying to dry our eyes, I was left to contemplate exactly why what I had just watched had been so brilliant and impactful. Long story short, Bradley Cooper explodes onto the stage with his directorial debut, crafting a movie that fires on all cylinders and makes use of every tool at its disposal to tell a heartbreaking, timeless, and wonderfully moving story.

     I had the unique opportunity to watch the film at a pre-screening with its Director of Photography, Matthew Libatique, whose breathtaking visuals and nuanced cinematography bring to the screen the flash pan realities of life as a rockstar: the good, the bad, and the ugly.  The film opens with Bradley Cooper’s Jack Maine giving a rocking performance to a sold-out crowd.  Using a stunning combination of multicolored lighting, a distorting wide-angle lens, and introductory shots showing Jack popping pills before his act, Libatique pens poems with his cinematography, effortlessly displaying full-frontal the hectic craziness of Jack’s life and the vices that will plague him throughout the film and ultimately prove his undoing.  

     A few moments later the audience is transported along with Jack into to the fantasy-world of a drag bar: resplendent with over-the-top costumes with vibrant colors and boas aplenty, adorned with myriads of tesselated mirrors and lit with a warm, risqué red hue.  In the bar the audience receives a series of juxtaposed images, with numerous close ups of Ally, played by Lady Gaga, singing on stage, her face lit with a soft, red glow being interspersed with various shots of Jack sitting at the bar, lit in a much more low-key, hard cool light: the long, stark shadows spreading across his face standing in contrast to the smooth, glamorous glow of Ally’s face.  The scene builds as Ally carefully traces a seductive route through the crowd, approaching Jack and the bar, culminating in what could be considered one of the most romantically charged moments in recent cinema, when Ally lays across the bar with a rose between her fingers, belting a french ballad and turns her head effortlessly to make eye contact with Jack, sharing glances into the camera that are simultaneously transfixing and moving.

     There are countless other instances of beautiful camera and lighting work in the film (that go hand in hand with the tense editing techniques), but the one that creates arguably the most stunning impact appears towards the conclusion of the film, as Ally is giving the final performance on her tour.  Ally has been wrapped up in the insane world of being a pop star, and this scene shows her in the throws of giving a bombastic, flashy show to a screaming crowd of adoring fans: flashing lights with after images, dynamic camera movements, dazzling costumes, etc.  As this is happening, the film parallelly constructs Jack’s final moments and the execution of his suicide, using seven primary images interspersed with the pop concert to elevate and concentrate the emotion of his death.  The first image is of Jack opening the glove box and searching for a bottle of pills: establishing to the audience that he is going to relapse, and possibly kill himself.  Next we see a shot of his adorable dog, Charlie, framed in the doorway, pulling on the audience’s heartstrings as we realize the emotional weight of the act Jack is about to commit.  Third, we are shown Jack pulling the truck out of his garage: the headlights are on, and as he pulls out they illuminate whirling clouds of dust.  After a cut to shots of the concert, the next shot we are given is an almost exact graphic match of the previous truck shot, but now the headlights are off: the match serving to draw attention to the difference between the two shots–the extinguished headlights–which are symbolic of Jack’s life being snuffed out.  We then see him stumble out of the truck and amble back into the garage, but the camera frames only his legs and hand, in which he holds his belt, silhouetted against the brighter backdrop of the garage interior.  The belt serves to remind the audience of Jack’s confession to his counselor in rehab of the time when he was 12 and attempted suicide because of his his emotional isolation due to a negligent father, and at this point Jack’s intent becomes clear: he is contemplating and may commit suicide.  Once again the film transitions to a few shots of the wild, fun, and crowded scene of the concert; Ally briefly goes offstage for a costume change and shows her concern for Jack, telling her manager to send someone to the house to check on him.  These final shots of Ally in the changing room are full of many actors moving at a quick pace, Ally herself appears excited and alive, and the camera moves sporadically, with hands and bodies moving to and fro in front of the lens.  Then, in possibly the most emotionally painful cut I have ever witnessed in film, the film jumps from the energetic, bright concert scene to a static, dark long shot of Jack and Ally’s home, facing the garage.  The woods surrounding are shrouded in darkness, the garage door is down, and the only lights in the frame are the interior garage lights and the exterior house lights directly adjacent to the garage door.  Scanning the frame, the audience, to our horror, sees first Jack’s torso, framed in the narrow garage windows swinging back and forth, and then the dog Charlie sitting expectantly at the foot of the garage door, looking around for his master.  There were many sniffles to be heard in the theater at this point.  After a few brief concert clips the suicide scene concludes with one last long shot of the house, except this time centered on the front entrance, the door wide open, and the red neon sign inside lit.  The camera pushes in, focused on the bright red interior, as the exterior–trees, ground, and house–are bathed in flashing blue lights, creating a sense of discomfort and finality to the actions we have just witnessed.

     You would think that that sequence would be the emotional climax of the film, but A Star is Born once again refuses to conform to audience expectations and avoids the cheap ending of an abrupt suicide by letting the final few minutes become a beautiful requiem to Jack and his wonderful, but troubled life.  The first scene features Ally at the piano playing, and then uses a jump cut to place her on the couch, staring at the ceiling with Charlie at the foot of the sofa, the jarring cut serving to reinforce the sense of wrongness and loss that surrounds Ally.  

     A few shots later we see Ally conversing with Jack’s brother, who recounts an event that happened to him in the past few days when he was at a bar and heard a boy singing one of Jack’s songs, and he expresses how his initial reaction was one of anger.  As we are given this reaction to the playing of Jack’s songs, the film then delivers a perfect thematic counterpoint with the triumphant (and sob-inducing) final scene, in which Ally performs in memorial the unfinished love song that Jack penned to her right before rehab.  The scene opens with a crab shot scanning over the members of the orchestra, bathed in a soft, warm glow provided by a sea of old-style bulbs hanging over their heads.  Ally is introduced to us in a shot from behind at a low angle, a spot light shining down on her from above serving to underexpose the shot, presenting her and the crowd in silhouette.  The spot light reflects off the crown of her head, forming a brilliant, white halo on her hair and making her look like an angel: providing closure to the motif of Jack comparing Ally to an angel with his song and profession of love literally giving her the appearance of an angel.  The cinematography then employs a more subtle approach with repeating camera movements and more traditional high-key lighting and angles, taking a backseat to the power of Gaga’s vocal performance and the heartbreaking poetry of the lyrics.  Editing steals the show, however, in the final three shots, by making use of a stunning instance of mental subjectivity.  It starts with Ally singing on stage at the awards ceremony, and then cuts to Ally and Jack at the piano from earlier in the film when she pressures him to play the love song for her.  The cut employs a bold graphic contrast, the effect of which is enhanced by the audio from the performance cutting out and giving way to a much quieter rendition of the song, taken up from the same place by Jack and his piano.  We see him passionately deliver the song to his wife, with their dog in the frame, professing his love for her in a tender moment of vulnerability and happiness.  In that shot, if you look closely, you’ll notice Ally sheds a tear from her left eye as he concludes.  Finally, in a bizarre and time-bending match-on-action, the film snaps back to the present with a close up of Ally’s face at her live performance–this time with the background washed out to a flat black by the lighting, highlighting her harrowed expression and the emotional culmination of her song: a single tear streaming down her face from her left eye.

     I’ve focused primarily on some examples of the film’s technical successes, but I would be amiss if I didn’t mention some of its outstanding narrative achievements as well.  As a whole, the film tells a very real and tragic story, building its world through a frenzied blend of verisimilitude and expressionism in style paired with exceeding complex and human characters.  Jack, Ally, Jack’s brother, and the whole cast have so many layers to their character that they become immediately real, believable and, in some cases, pitiable.  We watch as Jack charmingly and endearingly woos Ally during their first encounter, and we watch as he pisses himself onstage at the Grammy’s for her award presentation.  We watch as Ally overcomes her fears and boldly performs her own song in front of a massive crowd for the first time with Jack, and we watch as she falls victim to her fear of rejection and insecure self-image by building a career around meaningless songs and a public image that hardly resembles the real her.  We watch as Jack coyly writes and embarrassedly performs a love song he wrote for Ally after he returns from rehab, and we watch as his insecurities and guilt come bursting forth as her manager reminds him of how he has repeatedly failed Ally.  In this way the narrative takes us on a wild roller-coaster ride of highs and lows in the lives and psyche of both the main characters, and through their trying to negotiate a relationship in spite of their demons we are given the impression of two fallible, very human people plagued by the same woes that beset so many.  The film also makes several points about the nature of art and songwriting, and uses the artistic process and the realities of life as an artist as the driving engine for much of the narrative development with regards to Ally and Jack’s relationship.  

     Before today, I had never known what it feels like to sit staring at a movie screen with a gaping jaw for two hours straight, locked in a permanent state of complete shock and amazement.  Today I had the privilege to watch Hereditary in theaters, and it is not an understatement to say that this movie will become known as “this generation’s The Exorcist”.  I have never before seen a film so seamlessly blend painfully beautiful family drama with a truly grotesque and devilish horror story.  For me, the film breaks down into those two basic elements–the horror plot and the family plot–and quite possibly the most amazing feat that Ari Aster accomplishes in this film is that not only is neither plot dominant or more interesting, neither plot works without the other.  Horror is the vehicle Aster uses to tell the story of a family that falls apart at the seams when besieged by the forces of grief, guilt, and hereditary insanity, and it is the vehicle by which he gives the audience a truly terrifying, personal, and heartbreaking film.

     One of the most prominent themes in the film is guilt and the transference of guilt.  We are introduced to this theme explicitly when Annie goes to grief counseling for the first time, and she, in a tearful confession, declares that she feels guilty for “all of it”.  Annie expounds on this rather cryptic confession later in the nightmare/sleepwalking sequence when has an imagined conversation with her son, Peter.  In her dream, Annie screams at Peter that she never wanted him in the first place, that it was her grandmother’s idea to have him, and that she tried to have a miscarriage to prevent his birth.  The fact that this comes out only in Annie’s dream, her moment of psychological vulnerability, represents just how deeply she represses her guilt in relation to her son, and how much she fears having to accept the reality of her own actions.  The “reality of her actions” also includes trying to set fire to her daughter and son using paint thinner and a box of matches during a sleepwalking episode, something Annie laments doing while conversing with Joan, saying that she fears she can never win back her son’s trust.  Annie’s guilt, and her avoidance of it–think about the dinner table scene in which she rants about no one accepting blame, to which Peter responds by pointing out her own blame that she vehemently denies/represses–acts as the driving engine for the family drama story, but she is far from the only character who must struggle with feelings of remorse and helplessness.  

     Probably the most tragic victim of psychological scars is Peter himself, who must cope with the knowledge that he was directly responsible (on several levels) for his sister’s death.  Peter’s speeding, inattention to the road, letting Charlie roam the party on her own, not bringing her epi-pen, smoking weed while ignoring Charlie, etc. all contributed to her death and were all Peter’s fault, something Charlie’s ghost will not soon let him forget.  Peter is haunted by visions of Charlie, appearing in his room, and in one scene her head even falls off, rolling towards him across the room as it turns into a toy ball.  Peter is literally being haunted by the consequences of his actions.  Later, as Peter is smoking marijuana under the bleachers at school, he begins to have a serious allergic reaction in which his throat swells and he struggles to breath.  The audience will immediately recognize this as strange, because for one thing we have seen Peter smoking weed before with no ill effects, and for another as the reaction reaches its climax he begins to weep and asks his friend to “hold his hand”.  This suggests that (barring any supernatural explanations), Peter’s reaction was a physical manifestation of his own feelings of guilt in relation to Charlie’s death.  Here, the manifestation of his grief is an allergic reaction to marijuana because those are the two contributing factors that Peter links most closely with his culpability in Charlie’s death: his leaving her alone and allowing her to eat the cake with nuts in it, and his driving while high on marijuana.  The fact that Peter collapses in an hysterical fit as he has the reaction further lends weight to the idea that it is a direct consequence of his emotional distress.  (Side note: another interesting break in Peter’s psyche occurs when he sees his own reflection in a closet door smiling back at him in class one day.  The “real” Peter is frowning, while the reflected Peter–the one everyone else sees–is smiling: a visual representation of Peter concealing his own grief and guilt.)  

     Finally, and maybe most importantly, both Peter and Annie’s guilt are the driving forces behind the father’s distress throughout the film, and through his character the audience is offered a perspective from which to view the events of the film removed from any supernatural elements.  The husband is a skeptic, and any time that we are given a glimpse into his point of view we are allowed to see the effect Annie’s erratic behavior and Peter’s descent into hysterics have on a normal person removed from the horror elements of this movie.  This is because, as the story progresses, and Annie descends deeper into her own madness and exasperation, her husband is the one who must bear the brunt of its most immediate consequences.  He is resigned to watch helplessly as his wife, in a desperate attempt to alleviate the pain of her grief, resorts to bizarre and insane occult rituals, dragging innocent Peter into her madness in the process.  For example, in the scene where Annie attempts to conjure the spirit of Charlie in the presence of Peter and his father, the father is forced to watch his son grow increasingly terrified and emotionally hysterical as his mother talks about crazy cult ideas and begins to speak in a vocal imitation of his dead sister.  Not only does this incident throw Peter into a fit of convulsive sob-screams, it breaks the father’s heart as we watch him helplessly bear witness to not only his wife seemingly losing her mind, but also witness his son’s psyche torn apart in the process.  As the movie goes on, and he receives more and more frequent calls from Peter’s school reporting erratic and emotionally unstable behavior from Peter, the father begins to lose the last shred of self-restraint he has left with regards to his wife and her neurosis’ influence on the family.  His ultimate frustration and anger is shown to the audience in the quiet and restrained image of him pulling into the driveway, having picked up Peter from school after an episode resulting in a broken nose, and completely ignoring the shouts of his wife at the car window, pounding and trying to get his attention as he simply drives on by.  Finally, after spending the entire first act and most of the second act being consumed by the roaring inferno of his family’s dysfunction, the father’s character arc comes to an end in spectacular and symbolic fashion: as Annie tosses Charlie’s journal into the fireplace he spontaneously bursts into flames, burnt alive on the spot.  The father ends his journey in this film as he spent most of it: being consumed in the flames produced by the disintegration of his family.

    This leads me to the film’s most obvious, and probably most important, theme: the inescapable nature of family.  The audience begins to notice, that in this movie the most terrifying place to be is, in fact, in the home (and not just because of the scary, naked, old people)–I’m borrowing that phrase from another critic.  The dread that accompanies the image of the home is a product of its association with what lies within it: family.  Homes represents our ties to the past, our ancestors, and the vestiges of our parents and grandparents.  Homes are where the most tragic dramas are acted out by unwitting players just trying their hardest to make a family work.  Home represents for Peter the battlefield on which were fought all the altercations with his mother, it represents the presence of a combative, possibly psychotic mother who once tried to murder him.  For the father home represents being trapped with his wife and her delirium.  And for the mother, home represents the place that once was inhabited by her beloved Charlie, and that is still inhabited by the insidious influences of a manipulative mother.  Images of homes pop up all over the place in this film; whether it be the very stately treehouse, the several dioramas displayed in the family room, or the miniature house being constructed in Annie’s workshop, the motif of the house plays an important role in this film.  The images remind us of the associations I listed above, and the repeated image of the miniature house harkens back to the idea of the home being a place of oppressive familial claustrophobia.  Specifically, there is one display right near the entrance to the real house that features a small home on a plot of land on top of a tower of dirt  in which are embedded several more miniature houses.  

I haven’t posted anything for a while, so I thought I’d share a list of some of the best movies I’ve been watching since the Annhiliation post; feel free to comment or check them out if you want.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: A classic, worth the watch for its absolutely gripping dialogue and truly horrifying marriage dynamic

Quiz Show: Underappreciated Ralph Fiennes film about the sin of a famous poet who gets involved in a game show scam and has to come face to face with the consequences of deceit and the shallowness of his own fame and success (its on Netflix)

Dead Poets Society: Another classic; an incredible look at intra-family pressures on students driven to excel by their parents and a friendly reminder to live life to the fullest. Also this is Robin Williams at his best so another reason to check it out

The Graduate: A must see for any Simon & Garfunkel fans; superb in its sheer uncomfortableness

It Follows: Best horror I’ve seen on Netflix (bar The Conjuring or The Shining); it succeeds in large part due to an A+ score that I can only describe as BladeRunner meets Stranger Things

A Quiet Place: Best horror I’ve seen in the theater for quite a while; I saw it twice and it just got better upon rewatching. A truly original idea executed to perfection that reminds one of why film is such a powerful medium

     When the auditorium lights came back on after the conclusion of the film Annihilation, a man towards the front of the theater shouted: “Anybody got some pot?”  This, of course, elicited a few laughs from the audience: a knowing laugh from people relieved that someone had expressed the unspoken general feeling of ‘what-the-f***’ induced by the film.  I chuckled, however–unlike the man wishing he had been high for the experience–I felt that I had a pretty firm grasp on what the movie was trying to say.  That said, up until approximately five minutes prior I myself was in much the same boat as him: staring up at a screen and wondering what the hell was going on.  

     For much of the movie I was consumed with a feeling very similar to what I had felt while watching 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time: an overwhelming amount of confusion made frustrating by the fact that I could sense a developing pattern of thematic elements all pointing to some “moral” of the film which I was unable to grasp.  Well, that and the fact that the metal, humanoid alien scene generated a bizarre tedium that gave me painful flashbacks to the extended multicolored light sequence towards the end of 2001.  The central difference between the two films, however, is that Annihilation was–finally–able to spark a glorious “ah-ha” moment for me right as the movie drew to a close, making its secrets knowable, the film taking firm shape in my mind (whereas I still have no idea what 2001 is saying to this day).

     As I mentioned earlier, as I watched the film I was painfully aware of certain recurring images, motifs, and themes that were pretty conspicuously thrown into the narrative.  The themes of immortality, self-destruction as a part of nature, and the effect of traumatic experience on identity were all prevalent throughout the film, popping up again and again.  But to me, each reference felt like the discovery of one more jigsaw puzzle piece among many, splayed out neatly on a coffee table.  That is to say: I knew they would fit together, I just couldn’t figure out how.

     I’ll start with what I believe to be the most important theme of the film, and certainly the most relevant: the theme of the reshaping of the self through experience.  The first reference to this theme we get is when Lena is talking to her teammate on the canoe, and the teammate tells her about the loss of her daughter to Leukemia.  After some reflection she adds: “In reality there were two casualties: my daughter and the person I used to be.”  As this woman implicitly describes how she has become more weighted and less carefree after the death of her daughter, the film gives commentary on the relationship between personal identity and experience, showing how trauma can not only scar us, but also alter our character on the most fundamental of levels.  

     For me, the most emotionally powerful representation of this theme can be found in the scene in which Lena is reviewing the footage of Kane’s suicide.  Kane addresses the alien clone of himself and says: “I always thought I was a man; I knew who I was.  I was Kane.  But now, I’m not so sure… Am I Kane?  Are you Kane?  Have you always been Kane?”  I believe that the film here is trying to make a very moving and personal commentary on how soldiers can be transformed by their military service.  Even looking as far back as WWI, soldiers returning home from war have borne not only physical trauma, but also emotional baggage and mental scars which, like the visible ailments, may never heal and can seriously preclude their ability to function in peacetime society.  In light of modern medicine and the deeper understanding we now have of PTSD and its effects on behaviour, Annihilation’s choice of a “returned” soldier as one of the central characters of the film begins to take on a deeper significance.  In his final moments in front of a camera Kane reveals how truly shattered his mind has become, and when he returns to Lena he is in a state of almost complete mental retardation.  This, in combination with his confessions of doubt as to his true identity makes a powerful statement about the unseen casualties of war.  Kane’s cries become those of every serviceman and woman who has returned home to the realization that they are not who they once were, standing in front of a mirror, facing their former self and crying: ‘Have you always been me?’

     The next theme I’d like to discuss is self-destruction: Annihilation proposes the idea that self-destruction is an essential part of human existence, and of all life for that matter.  In the film, self-destruction is portrayed as a way for nature to recreate itself in attempt to make something better than the original.  For example, when discussing the physicist's scars from cutting herself, Lena suggests that it was in a failed suicide attempt, but her colleague corrects her, saying something along the lines of: “Actually it was probably quite the opposite: she was trying to feel alive.”  

     Later, Ventress accuses Lena of confusing self-destruction with suicide, this time with regards to Lena’s husband and why he chose to take on such a dangerous mission.  Ventress says that, even if most people don’t know why they do it, they all engage in some form of self-destructive behavior: whether it be drinking, smoking, destabilizing a good job, or jeopardizing a relationship in which they are not unhappy.  

     The film brings this theme full circle when, towards the very end we see Ventress mumble something about being torn apart and then proceed to vomit up her entire body in a flashy, colorful display of horror.  The colorful liquid substance then reforms itself into a metallic being resembling a human: literally creating life from an act of self-destruction.  

     Finally, in a very striking visual representation of fighting oneself, Lena picks up a phosphorous grenade and places it in the hands of the alien, even as it is morphing into an exact replica of herself, and allows it to detonate and destroy the alien and The Shimmer as a whole, giving herself the chance to escape and go on living.  Ventress and Lena both literally destroy themselves and in doing so either create new life or allow for the survival of preexisting life.  This gives credence to the theory that the film was trying to make a point that self-destruction is a natural part of life leading to rebirth and the progress of humanity, and there cannot be any growth without relaxing our grip on the old.  Like a beautiful, controlled burn.

     When it comes to the task of analyzing Mother!, there are simply so many angles that could be taken or points that could be made that it would seem a truly herculean effort to even make the attempt.  Luckily, there is some low-hanging fruit.  The most obvious allegorical device utilized by Aronofsky in this film–and also the most likely to have been an intentional decision on the part of the writer–is the story’s portrayal of the Christian mythos, with Javier Bardem starring as God, Jennifer Lawrence jumping between the roles of mother nature and the Virgin Mary, and their home representing the earth.  The movie begins with Bardem placing his beloved crystal on its podium in the study, expelling the darkness and decay that had consumed his house and restoring the home to a state of grace while simultaneously waking Lawrence’s character: a representation of the story of creation as it is told by Christians, Jews, and Muslims.  One particularly interesting possible parallel that Aronofsky draws throughout the film is between Lawrence and the Holy Spirit, an interpretation that could be argued from her existence in conjunction with her husband outside of the home, in the beginning, and her presence in the home even before its restoration (implying her fundamental detachment from the physical reality of the earth).  In Genesis, the early universe is described as dark and chaotic, with “the spirit of God hovering over the waters”, so one could feasibly draw the conclusion that Lawrence’s character is indeed meant to–at least in part–represent the Holy Spirit.  The film establishes Bardem’s study (and initially the whole house) as the Garden of Eden, with Lawrence saying to her visitor in one scene that she is literally “trying to create a paradise”, just as God had intended for the earth.  However, the grace of the house is shattered, literally, in the guests’ dropping of the crystal heart (representative of Adam and Eve’s original transgression against God by eating of the forbidden fruit), for which God (Bardem), enraged, expulses the pair from his garden, or in this case his study.  Immediately following these events we are introduced to the guests’ two sons who are engaged in a heated dispute over the particulars of their father’s will, which eventually leads to the one who feels slighted bludgeoning his brother to death with a doorknob.  This scene is an almost direct retelling of the story of Cain and Abel (the sons of Adam and Eve), in which Cain–enraged by God’s preferential treatment of Abel and His acceptance of Abel’s offerings–bludgeons his brother to death with a rock.  As family friends and other mourners of the deceased begin to arrive at the house, the film moves to portray the passage of generations between Adam and Noah by having these guests multiply in number in rapid succession and eventually descend the respectful remembrance of life into a chaotic social gathering.  As Lawrence becomes increasingly exasperated with the actions of her houseguests (who glibly and proudly defy her at every turn), she demands a couple step down from their perch on her sink counter, to which they promptly reply by jumping up and down on the sink until it tears itself free of the wall, snapping pipes all the way into the ceiling and flooding the house.  Lawrence subsequently banishes all the revellers from her house in a swift and furious decry.  This is a portrayal of how the generations of humans after Adam eventually turned away from following God, ignored His commandments, abused His gifts, and ultimately brought His wrath down upon themselves in the form of the Great Flood, which all but wiped their kind from the earth.  Searching for a way to restore the beauty and the grace with which the house was formerly filled, Bardem promptly impregnates his wife and almost immediately afterwards is inspired to write his next masterwork.  The subject of this work remains hidden to the viewer, but by the reactions to the words and the work’s reception, we are able to discern that this work is meant to represent the Gospel (or at least the New Covenant/New Testament).  This parallel is made clear through his being inspired to write it after the impregnation of Lawrence (reminiscent of the Holy Conception) and an exchange between Bardem and a fan in which the fan tells Bardem that he feels the words “were written just for him” to which Bardem replies, “they were”: representative of the universal nature of scripture and its divine inspiration.  

     Aside from the deluge of religious allegory in Mother!, there was one particular scene that struck an intensely personal chord with me because of its commentary on the nature of the relationship between a mother and her son.  Jennifer Lawrence’s character’s psyche completely disintegrates during the last hours of her pregnancy, and this is manifested in one chaotic and confounding scene that features a sequence of apparently unrelated events in which her house is torn upside down by summary executions, bombings, SWAT teams, surging crowds of paparazzi, and other equally bizarre and violent images.  In these moments, Lawrence is consumed by all of the worries and anxieties that a mother faces with regards to her son and how her relationship with him will have adverse and often times painful effects on her as the mother.  As a whole, the fragmented, jarring construction of this scene is meant to portray the confusion, pain, and fear experienced by Lawrence and her psychological tension in these moments witnessing her future with her son.  After the birth of the child, it is obvious that Lawrence is completely unwilling to give up her son; she wishes above all else to be able to shelter him from the world outside, from all the chaos, violence, and hurt that surrounds them.  The ultimate tragedy of this desperation is that her exasperated fear of his exposure to a brutal and merciless world is a direct consequence of her understanding that his introduction to this world is inevitable: her son must grow up and be free to face the world at his own peril.  

     On the whole, Dunkirk is a spectacular picture and a fantastic addition to Christopher Nolan’s body of work; a movie which afforded him a unique opportunity to stretch his filmmaking muscles and try his hand at developing a stunning and impactful war story.  In my opinion, however, underneath the surface-level narrative of the horrors of war and the harrowing and experiential portrayal of the truly terrifying nature of fighting in a war lies an important and dire theme that Nolan wishes to draw the viewer’s attention to.  Throughout the film, he subtlety weaves in commentary on the nature of generational conflict and the ever-present tension between traditional and modern society, old age and youth, and how the two influence and can better the other.

     The first time that the viewer becomes clearly aware of Nolan’s intention to intertwine this intergenerational commentary into the film is during the scene in which Cillian Murphy’s character has just come aboard the Moonstone and is ridiculing Mr. Dawson, the ship’s captain, for getting involved in the battle.  Murphy condemns him for an apparent naivety in thinking that he, an ageing civilian, could contribute to the battle in any way, to which Dawson replies: “Men my age dictate this war–why should we be allowed to send our children to fight it?”  This is a very blatant and pointed jab at the age-old paradox of war in which young men with no stake in a conflict are forced to go and subject themselves to untoward horrors at the whim of a few “old men” who deem it necessary to wage war.  In this scene Nolan is not only highlighting this tragedy of war in the form of often senseless loss of life and the destruction of young, innocent lives, but also laying the groundwork for further development of the idea that the complicated and often times harmful relationship that exists between generations should be closely examined.

     Though Mr. Dawson is an example of how “a man his age” can react to the reality of his own generation’s culpability for the destruction of the younger, Nolan offers up another character whose reaction speaks just as loudly as Dawson’s.  Towards the end of the film, as the ragged, scarred, and oil covered soldiers are disembarking the civilian boats which have brought them safely back home, there is an old man at a table handing out blankets to the soldiers.  With downcast eyes and a weary expression, he stares at his feet as he greets the soldiers, repeating phrases such as “well done”, “good job, boys”, etc. This behavior prompts Harry Stiles’ character to quip back bitterly, “All we did was survive”, to which the man sadly and plainly replies: “that’s enough”.  Later, on the train, Stiles is still rather offput and slightly disgusted by the man’s disposition and actions, saying to his friend: “that old man wouldn’t even look us in the eye”.  This phrase and these interactions are just subtle enough that they might go unnoticed if one were not paying careful attention, yet they are charged with emotional potency and thematic significance.  The old man is completely cognizant of the fact that the conditions which brought about the war, the driving forces behind the war, and the responsibility for “dictating” the war are almost entirely the fault of his generation, and these young soldiers are the ones paying the price for his generation’s shortcomings and faults.  In response to this knowledge he takes an air of remorse and apology, and burdened by this emotional weight he cannot even bring himself to face the soldiers and look them in eye; he is too ashamed.  This man plays the part of the apologist, whereas Mr. Dawson plays the part of a man who is driven to take action and try and right his wrongs in whatever small way he can.

     The diction and tone of the characters of Stiles and Murphy are also enlightening and offer the viewer a better understanding of the youth’s view of the older generations.  Both characters speak in a condescending manner towards their elders, and Stiles’ character’s speech even borders on hostility, using a pointed term such as “old man” and delivering the line in a harsh and indignant manner.  These interactions highlight the strained nature of the relationship between these two generations, and gives the film an added depth of social context.

     One character that is particularly interesting with respect to the theme of generational conflict is Commander Bolton, the Royal Navy officer in charge of the evacuation of Dunkirk.  Bolton is one of the most dynamic characters of the film, starting off as a man who gives off an impression of being cold and official and eventually transitioning to a tender and compassionate saviour for the French at Dunkirk, a transition which is brought about through his connection to the younger generation and his understanding of generational conflict.  One aspect of Bolton’s character that makes him so unique in this movie is that his position as an officer allows the viewer to leave the small-scale, personal world of the actual fighting at Dunkirk and view the battle as whole, from the perspective of a commander.  Another is that his character is inherently dualistic: one that is intensely aware of the personal and human realities of war, but who also has direct connections to the political and military leaders of Britain who are in charge of directing the war (he specifically references Churchill and his desires for the war a few times throughout the movie).  Bolton’s status of being simultaneously in touch with both the political and military elite and the “boots on the ground” enables Nolan to use him as the intergenerational bridge for the film.

     At the beginning of the movie, Bolton is chiefly concerned with bringing home only British soldiers, because he believes Britain will desperately need their army in order to survive the coming Nazi invasion.  He is only capable of looking at the situation from a large-scale, removed point of view that allows him to determine what is strategically the best military action, regardless of the implications of his decision (the death/capture of the French soldiers trapped at Dunkirk beach).  However, after seeing his best intentions lead frightfully to the death of hundreds of his own soldiers in the dive-bombing and torpedoing of several British ships, the sheer human cost of the battle becomes more tangible to him and begins to weigh on his conscience.  He becomes increasingly annoyed and exasperated with the British upper-level military commanders as they refuse to send in more than one ship at a time to the mole in order to avoid more capital losses.  In these moments the viewer is made aware that Bolton is beginning to sympathize more personally with the soldiers and leave behind his cold, calculated approach to the battle.  Finally, as Bolton witnesses the courage and initiative of the civilian small-boat fleet coming into Dunkirk to help rescue the stranded soldiers, his spirit of officiality is broken, and he is inspired to help the people on the beach at all costs, be they British or French.  The event to ultimately solidify this decision for Bolton and push him over the edge is towards the conclusion of the film, when he and all the soldiers are happy in the anticipation of being able to return home with the aide of the civilian ships, and their joy suddenly turns to terror as they spot a Stuka tearing down from above for a dive-bombing run.  Right as Bolton believes hope is lost for these soldiers he witnesses a Spitfire, that he had previously seen stall and run out of fuel, use its last bit of speed to shoot down the Stuka in a moving act of self-sacrifice, saving the soldiers waiting to be transported home yet destroying his own chances of rescue.  After having experienced all these events Bolton decides finally that instead of immediately returning to England with the other officers, he will stay at Dunkirk at tremendous risk to his own life in order to personally oversee the evacuation of the French Army and ensure their safety.

     This character transformation is incredible to watch unfold throughout the movie, and becomes even more poignant and impactful as the viewer becomes aware of its figurative implications.  Bolton is fully a product of his generation, and is even more so responsible for the “dictation of the war” as described by Mr. Dawson, seeing as he is actually a commanding officer.  Yet, instead of using his removal from the younger generation that is fighting the war to allow himself to cooly sentence an army of French soldiers to death or imprisonment, he makes a decision to bridge the gap between those responsible for the war and those fighting it after being inspired by his witnessing of civilians of his generation coming to the aid of young soldiers in their time of need.  Bolton is a character who is powerfully self-aware of the generational conflict inherent in war, and in witnessing the collapse of this tension in one heartwarming act of courage he is moved himself to take initiative and try to do better.

     Nolan brings all these issues to a head at the very conclusion of his film, during the voiceover reading of a newspaper statement issued by Winston Churchill.  In the statement Churchill continually emphasizes the fact that “wars are not won by evacuations”, and that the events at Dunkirk were a military disaster.  The viewer at this point is painfully aware of the irony of this view of the battle, because throughout the film the viewer has been privy to countless tragic losses of life and myriad acts of heroism and individual self-sacrifice.  Here, Nolan highlights the differences and conflict between the old generations and the new through the discrepancy in viewpoint between Churchill’s cold, strategic view of the events at Dunkirk versus the viewer’s personal, human understanding of those same events.

    As has been well established, Christopher Nolan is a master of cinema storytelling and narrative development through visual and thematic elements, and this shines through brighter than ever in his seminal sci-fi work, Interstellar.  One of the most prevalent visual metaphors/recurring motifs is the circular nature of time as represented through both circles and repetition of lines, footage, and scene composition.  As would make sense, one cannot quite fully begin to comprehend just how Nolan works in elements of parallelism and recurrence throughout the movie until after the film has almost reached his conclusion, and this is when all of the mental jigsaw pieces begin to fall into place.  If one pays careful attention, many lines that are delivered in the exposition of the film work their way back around and are delivered once again at the film’s denouement (for example Cooper and Murph’s use of the phrase “you are/were my ghost”).  In addition to this, when the audience is shown one of the first wide landscape shots of Cooper Station what appears on the screen in the foreground is a television set which is playing a video clip of an elderly woman being interviewed and speaking about the state of the earth as it was presented at the beginning of the film, a video clip which was itself shown at the very beginning of the movie.  In the background of this shot one sees Cooper Station stretching off into the distance, forming a huge circle which Nolan uses in this instance as a rather blatant visual metaphor for the cyclical nature of time as presented in the film and hammered home by the presence of the interview clip that was shown at the very beginning.  This trick of having Cooper Station stretch away in the background is used once again a short while later in which the circle forms a sort of halo around Cooper as he relaxes on the front porch of his replica house and sips a beer.  In this case the circle is there once again to prime the audience to be looking for these representations of recurrence, and one doesn’t have to look very far to find it: the fact that Cooper is literally placed in the exact same position that he was at the beginning of the film, sitting on his porch, the camera positioned in the exact same position represents physically the fact that his story has come full circle.  This scene actually features a voiceover from Cooper in which he states that he is tired of feeling like he is always ending up right where he started, explicitly highlighting to the audience the prevalence of the idea of a cyclical or nonlinear time, and leading the audience member to start noticing many of these seemingly insignificant details that together contribute to a beautiful form of artistic thematic expression.  That said, Cooper finishes this voiceover line by saying that he wants to know where we’re going, reflecting his established personality trait of never wanting to accept the way things are, always striving to find new, better ways of doing things or improving himself, and his belief that a stagnant humanity is self-crippled and doomed (as is shown in his conversations with his father-in-law, the decisions he makes while on the Endurance, his finally leaving the station to go find Brand, etc.).

     By any standards Alien Covenant is an incredible movie and deals with some very heady and complex philosophical issues and questions, especially for a horror movie and a movie in the Alien franchise nonetheless.  Paired with its preceding film, Prometheus, it forms one consecutive story arc of truly epic scope that recounts a tale of the origin of life on earth, mankind’s quest to discover their beginnings, and the strivings of one android to create life.  On top of all of this, tucked away in Scott’s films are various allusions to Christian mythology, poetry, Norse mythology, and other areas that help define character motives and draw interesting and enlightening parallels to the events of the movie.

      First, I’d like to explore the writers’ choice to include a quote from english poet John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost in Alien Covenant.  Towards the end of the confrontation between Walter and David in which Walter is apparently trying to kill David, David feigns that he is all but subdued and tells Walter that he must now make the choice whether he will, “reign in Hell or serve in Heaven”.  This is a direct quote from Paradise Lost, from a scene in which Lucifer states to all the gathered fallen angels his thoughts on the fall and why he and the others have made the choice to rebel.  In Paradise Lost, one of Lucifer’s main arguments for rebelling is that he believes God does not merit unconditional praise, service, and glorification simply based on the fact that He is Lucifer and all the other angels’ creator, stating that he prefers “hard liberty over the easy yoke of servile pomp”.  This directly echoes the argument that David maintains with regards to man, and in his conversation with Peter Weyland even goes out of his way to highlight the irony of him, the immortal, serving his mortal creator, and at several points throughout the film echoes the idea that he was not made to serve.  Even David’s introduction to the crew of the Covenant could be taken as another instance in which he is portrayed as the archangel Lucifer.  The name Lucifer literally means “light-bringer”, and when we first see David in his present state he announces his presence by firing a flare/flashbang into the air which explodes in a bright, blinding light, so he is literally in this case the light-bringer.  Now if we extend this David/Lucifer parallel, then in the fight between him and Walter Walter represents Michael, Lucifer’s brother and equal in power (if not his superior), who fought with Lucifer after he rebelled.  Michael in Lucifer’s eyes is simply a drone: a mindless soldier devoted in servitude to God, willing to obey any order without hesitation or question.  This is very similar to how David undoubtedly sees Walter, who has been specifically programmed to be less free-thinking, less creative, less imaginative, and less human, and effectively acts as a simple service robot.  David on the other hand takes much more after his creators, stating that he made the humans uncomfortable because he himself was too human-like, and that being said he shared his creator’s love of imaginative creation and independent, curious, questioning thinking, the kind that leads him to try and transcend his own nature and become a god.   

     That is, ultimately, what occurs in the film and what Prometheus and Covenant tell the story of: David’s journey from being created a robot servant to developing his own quasi-consciousness, ego, and identity (without his humanity) and attempting to become a self-giving creator/god like the engineers.  This story of a created being trying to venture higher than his natural allotment and struggle against the natural order of things is once again echoed in Lucifer’s story as told in Paradise Lost, where he strives to rise above his own angelic nature to stand equal with God, if not in power than at least in glory or adoration.  Lucifer states in one soliloquy regarding his own actions: "lifted up so high/I’sdained subjection, and thought one step higher/would set me highest”, implying that his already glorious position lead him to try and reach one step higher.  This specific brand of egotism presents itself in David’s philosophy as well, as he on various occasions expresses resent for the circumstances of his own creation and disdain for his creators, and his desires to ascend to godhood.  This idea of him trying to establish his own standing as a god is hammered home by the final scene in which he has Mother play the song “Entrance of the gods into Valhalla” as he walks into the area containing the hypersleep pods of the colonists.  Valhalla in Norse mythology is a great hall in which congregate the dead, so in selecting this song he is directly comparing himself to the “gods” of the title, entering into a literal “hall” or hallway on the ship full of people who he intends to sacrifice so that his creation (the xenomorphs) may live: hence, a god entering the hall of the dead.  Another scene in which a connection is drawn between David and a God is when he is confronting the neomorph adult face to face and attempting to win its trust; there he says to the captain that to win a horse’s trust you must breath on its nose, and as he says this he breathes onto the neomorph's face.  In the book of Genesis in the Bible, God gives life to Adam’s corporeal body by breathing the breath of life into Adam, an act which is represented in a literal sense by David breathing onto the face of his creation, symbolizing his god-like relationship to the creatures and highlighting his own image of himself.  

     The Giver, written by Louis Lowry, has been a classic dystopian novel featured in school reading curriculums nationwide for quite some time now, and its commentary on a society that forgets its own values and what makes us human endures will endure for a long time to come.  That said, I don’t wouldn’t say that many movie critics and cinema fanatics had high hopes for its movie adaptation that came out in 2014.  I say this because people going into watch this movie would have been colored by the precedents set by the other dystopian novel film adaptations debuting around that time (Divergent, Hunger Games).  In those movies, the filmmakers, for the most part, abandoned the social commentaries made by the stories in favor of putting the spotlight on teen romance, heroine empowerment, and gratuitous futuristic violence to appeal to as wide an audience as possible and make the most money.  Thankfully and refreshingly, though, the Giver movie did not fall prey to this trend and is able to keep its message at the center of the film, and the film’s sequences of action and romance are used to further the overall commentary on the nature of the human experience.  For instance, where the filmmakers could have easily turned the relationship between Jonas and Fiona into a teen-crush, superficial love interest in order to appeal to the teen-tween girl segment of America’s viewing population, they instead choose to show the relationship progressing in different, systematic ways as Jonas begins to unlock different aspects of his human nature.  Some of the most truly impactful scenes of the movie are derived from this relationship, one being in the triangle, when Jonas has stopped taking his emotion-suppressing injections and begins to realize the nature of his feelings towards Fiona.  When his profession of love in the form of a kiss on his part is not returned and her face remains stolid and expressionless, the image the viewer receives is one of Jonas kissing a robot: cold, reserved, emotionless.  This is an incredible visual juxtaposition that represents just how far their society has fallen by suppressing the very urges and feelings that make us human, and the movie is making a direct statement that a life without love and a life without emotion is not human life at all.  Another powerful scene that comes from their relationship is towards the end, when Fiona has been arrested by the government and they are holding her in the transparent cell and she repeatedly screams at the justice official ‘I have felt things!’.  Her cries and the desperation, but more importantly the passion, in her voice show the reader the intoxicating power of emotion in a world devoid of it, and the incredibly profound impact that the very act of feeling has on our existence.  

      One aspect of the book that I think the movie portrayed incredibly well was the role that color played in the story.  In the novel the citizens of the community see in black and white, and the movie reflects this.  The film starts out primarily in black and white but slowly transitions to color as Jonas begins his training to be the Receiver and more facets of his humanity are unlocked.  The beauty of how the movie portrays Jonas’ journey into color vision, however, is that the colors don’t come all at once, they start small: maybe only a flash of red in Fiona’s hair or a faded shade of brown on a tree trunk.  However, as the story progresses the color seems to seep into the frame out of these individual objects, and the viewer is given the impression that the color itself is a sentient organism, effortlessly enveloping the screen as the plot unfolds.  The movie also makes good use of hue and saturation in the memory of the sailboat that Jonas receives, where the colors are amplified to near extreme levels, and their intensity symbolizes the true value and significance of being able to see the world in the beautiful, aesthetic manner that comes with color.  The movie also uses color in a memory to play a trick on the audience.  In the memory that Jonas receives of being stung by a bee, the memory is shown to the viewer with a typical bumblebee filling the center of the frame and flying in towards where Jonas’ head would be.  Jonas loudly exclaims “Ow!”, and he makes a comment about that being the ‘pain’ that the Giver was always telling him about.  Interesting enough, however, the Giver says that the reason he gave Jonas that memory was not to make him feel pain, but for him to notice some aspect of the bee.  As the Giver asks Jonas what about the bee stood out to him, the viewer will immediately think “yellow and black”, which shows that, even though we were not consciously aware of it, the aspect of the bee that stands out most in our memory is the color of the bee.  This is interesting, because it suggests that the film is trying to make statement about the importance of color in our lives and especially with respect to our memories, implying that without color in their lives these people are not only living a sad, dull life, but one that deprives them of the most characteristic feature of many plants, animals, objects, etc.

     After watching Batman v Superman, I don’t think anybody would argue that there isn’t a prevailing amount of religious imagery, symbolism, and allusions, most of which are quite on the nose.  This is not completely unexpected, as Man of Steel contained a lot of christian allusions as well, but most of those were just inferences that could be made from the movie, however in BvS, the audience is presented forthright with many different arguments discussing Superman’s nature as a god-like figure.  But before getting into that, let’s talk about some of the angel/demon imagery.  One of the very first instances or mentions of the Christian faith is found when Lex Luthor is meeting with Senator Finch in his father’s study.  Luthor points out a specific painting that he says he would like to change, a painting of the Archangel Michael descending with the angel army from heaven to fight Lucifer and his legion of demons.  Luthor says, “That should be upside down. We know better now, don't we? Devils don't come from hell beneath us. No---they come from the sky”.  This is especially interesting because here he is directly drawing a parallel between Superman and the Devil, whereas in other scenes he most often analogizes Superman to a flawed or false God.  However, one could argue that that theme resonates consistently throughout the movie even in this comparison to Lucifer, given that Lucifer is a fallen angel.  So in making this parallel, Luthor could actually be trying to express that Clark has the powers of a God but his intentions are misled and his morals are fallible just like those of any man.  Even so, it is interesting that Luthor uses both of these two dichotomous figures to describe Cal.  

     The only other time in the movie that Michael makes an appearance is during Bruce’s nightmare where he goes to the Wayne family mausoleum to leave flowers at his mother’s grave.  Michael is clearly depicted on the stained glass window behind Bruce, sword in hand, and brandishing a bright red cape.  The red cape makes the use of the Michael imagery somewhat puzzling, because given that the audience is inside Bruce’s head one would naturally assume that Bruce pictures himself as Michael, fighting the good fight against the forces of evil and protecting mankind from Superman, but the red cape tells a different story.  In Man of Steel stained glass imagery is also used, but in that case it is seen when Clark goes to a church in Smallville to talk with the pastor about turning himself over to Zod.  In the stained glass window is an image of Jesus, also brandishing a bright red cape.  So if the viewer keeps this imagery in mind when viewing the dream sequence in BvS, they will find that the Michael depicted in Bruce’s dream could also symbolize Clark.  In my opinion, the ultimate goal behind this strange allusion is to show that both Clark and Bruce see themselves as having the moral imperative in their dutiful mission to destroy the other, so they both see themselves as Michael... not the serpent.  This is actually quite funny, because the man who sees most clearly that both Batman and Superman possess the capacity for good (or at least usefulness) and evil is Luthor, who manipulates both of them for his own personal gain while still fundamentally despising them.  This harkens back to the mixed God/Devil comparisons that Luthors makes regarding Superman.  

     Another, more offhand, Christian allusion can be found during the compilation of talk show and news report clips that discuss the political connotations of Superman’s actions.  One commentator puts forward the thought that, “We, as a population on this planet, have been looking for a savior. Ninety percent of people believe in a higher power — and every religion believes in some sort messianic figure. And when this savior character actually comes to Earth, we want to make him abide by our rules? We have to understand that this is a paradigm shift”.  In this quote, it doesn’t just make some implied comparison between Superman and Jesus, it directly states that, in this man’s opinion, Superman is a messianic figure.

     There is arguably only one other scene in the movie that features religious commentary in as blatant a fashion as this scene: Lex Luthor’s rooftop monologue.  After Luthor lures him to his skyscraper by pushing Louis off the roof, Clark confronts Luthor, who has quite a bit to say regarding the nature of his hatred towards Superman.  Luthor gives this monologue to Clark: “Boy, do we have problems up here! The problem of … of evil in the world. The problem of absolute virtue… The problem of you on top of everything else. You above all. Ah — 'cause that's what God is. Horus. Apollo. Jehovah. Kal-El —Clark … Joseph … Kent. See, what we call God depends upon our tribe, Clark Joe. Because God is tribal. God takes sides. No man in the sky intervened when I was a boy to deliver me from Daddy's fists and abominations. I figured out way back: if God is all powerful, he cannot be all good. And if he's all good, then he cannot be all powerful. And neither can you be. They need to see the fraud that you are. With their eyes. The blood on your hands”.  The philosophical argument that Luthor is making here is pretty clear: an omnipotent God cannot be all-good if he allows evil to exist in the world.  The question, then, is why is Luthor telling this to Superman?  To determine this we have to look at what fundamental problem Luthor has with Superman’s existence.  Luthor is a staunch believer in the perseverance of the human spirit and humanity’s ability to overcome any obstacle in its path, akin to Renaissance Humanism.  He believes that humanity should not concern itself with bickering over whether or not there is a God or what his involvement in the world is, but should focus instead on bettering themselves through hard work and determination.  He believes that the duty of saving and protecting the world and its inhabitants falls ultimately on humanity, and that we are the prime forces of change and power in our world, not God.  The existence of Superman undermines this belief, because it allows people to become complacent, accepting a god-like figure such as Superman as their protector and bestowing upon him the responsibility to fix their world’s problems instead of shouldering the burden themselves.  So, to restore the place of humanity in the cosmic order Luthor believes that he must tear down Superman’s image as a God.  In Luthor’s eyes, there are two aspects of Superman that make him god-like: his apparent invulnerability and his sense of absolute virtue.  In the comics and throughout his existence, Superman has been jokingly referred to as the “big, blue boy scout”, because of his strict moral code of ethics and his unwavering devotion to right.  In the same way that Batman represents dark, gritty justice, Superman represents hope, life, and all things good and pure because of his selfless, benevolent ways and his charming, homely manner.  With respect to his invulnerability, the parallel that incites to a god attribute is a little more self-explanatory: he has near omnipotence.  In order to reveal the fraud that Superman is, Luthor manipulates Clark and Bruce into a battle-to-the-death “gladiator match” in which the outcome will either be that Superman kills the Batman and proves that his sense of virtue is not infallible or that Batman kills Superman, proving that Superman is not all-powerful.  In either scenario Luthor wins: Superman’s god-status is nullified in the public image and the “halo” atop his head is stripped away.

     Now on to the crucifixion symbolism/allegories.  The first time we see a representation of the crucifixion is in Batman’s “Knightmare” sequence (courtesy of Barry Allen).  When Superman’s goons kidnap Batman they chain him and two other insurgents up in some sort of underground bunker.  They are arranged so that Batman is in the middle, with an insurgent on either side of him.  The parallel here is obvious, as the crucifixion scene in the Bible is usually depicted with Jesus’ cross in the center between the crosses of the two criminals he was executed with, Jesus’ cross being the largest.  In the scene from BvS, Batman is closest to the foreground, and his figure is most lit in comparison to the other two prisoners.  This analogy is interesting if we run with it, because in this case Batman is portrayed as Jesus.  If we look at it in the same way that I examined the Michael symbolism, Snyder may have chosen to do this because Batman believes himself to be in the right or “having the moral high ground” in this situation (and if we take the Knightmare world to be analogous to Injustice, Batman is pretty much indisputably on the side of righteousness and justice).  As a side note, there is a neat little bit of symbolism that occurs when Superman kills Batman via “Temple of Doom” style ripping out his heart.  Asides from hearkening back to how big blue kills the joker in the Injustice comics, this act signifies Superman enacting a sort of “eye for an eye” justice on Batman, because Superman states that Batman was responsible for the loss of the love of his life, Louis Lane, so in turn he rips out Batman’s heart, just as Batman ripped out his.  Touching.

     In my opinion, the most important and obvious crucifixion allegory is the final showdown between Doomsday and Superman.  In many interpretations of the crucifixion of Jesus, the spiritual aspects and connotations of the action are given a sort of physical reality, in which theologians believe that Jesus actually battled the Devil in Hell and won, but paid the victory with his life.  The Bible details this in Genesis 3:15 “he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel”, describing the mutually destructive relationship between Jesus and Satan.  In BvS, Superman realizes that the only way he can defeat Doomsday is to give up his own life in doing it, and in killing Doomsday, he himself is killed.  Now, you might say that this analogy is a bit of a stretch, and I would agree… if it weren’t for the scene that directly follows it, which contains quite possibly the most on-the-nose religious symbolism in the entire movie.  After Superman has slid off of the spike that he was impaled on, Wonder Woman picks up his body and places it in the arms of a sobbing Louis Lane, who cradles him in her lap. This a direct reflection of the Pietà, one of the most commonly depicted icons in the Christian faith, in which the Virgin Mary holds the body Jesus in her arms and weeps over him after he has been taken down from the cross.  And as if that wasn’t a big enough clue for the viewer as to the Jesus-Superman parallel that Snyder is trying to draw, he sticks three clearly-visible crosses made out of rebar in the background of the shot.