Public Enemies

Michael Mann's meditation on the landscape of crime and the professions it creates (detectives and narcs, robbers and hitmen), continues with Public Enemies, albeit a look back in time to the criminal landscape of another era, inhabited by a different breed of criminals and enforcers. We spend a good deal of time looking at both sides of the conflict, and are witness to the birth of modern federal enforcement and the demise of one of the most intelligent and successful bankrobbers in US history. At the center of the struggle are two men, John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), the aforementioned bankrobber, and Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the federal agent in charge of apprehending him. Other important characters are Billie (Marion Cotillard) as Dillinger's love interest, "Baby Face Nelson" (Stephen Graham), one of Dillenger's accomplices, and J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), the future leader of the FBI who assigns Purvis with catching Dillinger.

Please note: Entries about media reviewed in this blog are written from the framepoint that the reader has already seen the work in question and desires further commentary or explanation. Plot twists and endings will sometimes be examined.

The movie opens with a jailbreak. It happens even as Dillinger is just being brought to prison. The whole thing proceeds smoothly until one of Dillinger's gang shoots a guard, alerting the other prison guards to their presence. What would've been a quiet getaway, turns into a shootout and a chase. When one of Dillinger's friends is killed during the escape, he furiously beats and then tosses the accomplice who shot the guard out of their getaway vehicle while it's still moving. From the beginning we are given a glimpse of just how hard this man is, and Purvis's "intro" will be much the same. In his opening scene we watch him chase and gun down "Pretty Boy Floyd", another robber, in an orchid with a squad of lawmen at his back.

J. Edgar Hoover is looking to expand the jurisdiction and importance of his bureau, which at this point in time is not on the federal level. He charges Purvis with tracking down and finding Dillinger who has since moved on to Chicago where the seats of organized crime there are giving him shelter. The movie makes no attempt to disguise the drudgery of such a task. Purvis charges his own men with making endless querries into a simple overcoat that Dillinger left at the scene of his last robbery as it is their only piece of evidence, and bureau work for the moment at least looks like the tedious process it mostly is.

We can see in the beginning that Purvis and his group are not yet prepared for the enormity of this task. When he and his men come upon a choice opportunity to catch their quarry, Dillenger, Nelson and the others in their gang slip through their fingers not only because they are willing to shoot first, but because Purvis's own men, lacking procedure, abandon their road block when they hear the gunshots to come to the scene and try to help.

Dillinger hooks up with Billie, a girl he meets and dances with at a club, and very shortly after, even tells her who he really is and what he does to make money. It's hard not to marvel at the directness of this character; when Billie objects to being with him, claiming she know almost nothing about him, he replies bluntly

"I was raised on a farm in Moooresville, Indiana. My mama ran out on us when I was three, my daddy beat the hell out of me cause he didn't know no better way to raise me. I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey, and you... what else you need to know?"

He lacks almost any sense of humor, is almost always completely focused, and tends to say things in complete seriousness.

We see what a dangerous opponent he is early in the film when we watch one of his bank robberies. He and his men operate completely aware of how much time they're taking and how much attention they've attracted. They plan for contingencies like the police showing up by posting a man at the front door and marching a few bank patrons in front of them as human shields when they board their getaway vehicles. Dillinger himself knows how to go directly to find the bank manager and get him to take him to the big money.

Dillinger is ruthless, driven, very intelligent, and cool under pressure. He is also a bit cocky and perhaps a little too sure of himself for his own good. At one point Billie worries over him, saying she doesn't want to see him die. Dillinger candidly replies that he's too good for them, and that he can strike any bank he wants anytime, while they can't be at every bank waiting to stop him. While his logic appears to make sense from the standpoint of robbing banks, it's also plain enough to see that this overlooks the fact that there are other ways of catching a crook then staking out potential banks. Dillinger lives in the moment. He doesn't yet realize that the time of bank robbers like himself is coming to an end. "It ain't about we're I've been, it's about where I'm going" he tells Billie. In an important conversation later when an associate of his observes that "robbing banks is getting harder", he says "We're having such a good time today, we ain't even thinking bout tomorrow." "You oughta", the man advises, in essence saying he should take what he can and get out quick. We in the audience as well can see the way the winds of change are blowing when we look at Hoover's agency taking form and realize how the government is formulating their response to the threat of Dillinger and his like.

Dillinger is captured in Arizona and taken by plane back to Indiana. The publicity he receives upon arrival is tremendous; to judge from some of the questions he's asked when interviewed by the press, he's being treated like a near-celebrity. He meets Melvin Purvis face to face through the bars of a jail cell door, and even in this encounter he is aloof and confident. We see the ingenuity of the man as he escapes using a fake gun carved out of wood to threaten the guards, then passes through one secure door after another, obtains real weapons for himself, changes clothes, and then finally sneaks past everyone in the sheriff's own car.

All of this leads to Hoover and Purvis cracking down on all of Dillinger's known associates. Dillinger finds himself without aid from other criminals. In one scene, he is firmly rebuffed by one of them who directs his attention to the phones behind him saying "These phones make more money in a day than you do on one of your heists and they do it continuously every day unless they stop ringing cause the cops come." The creation of federal law enforcement, along with advancements to "modern" crime fighting techniques may not be able to stop crime, but what they aparently did do for a country like america is force it further underground, out of the limelight. While the truly big criminals might indeed be the ones running the phones in the background, Dillinger's exploits have created an atmosphere of sensationalism, and the public's need to feel safe pushes it up in priority. This is coupled with another factor as well. Stunts like using a sheriff's own car to break out of jail create a spectacle and embarrass the law, thus swelling their desire to catch him as well.

Dillinger now is forced to rely on less trustworthy men than those he would prefer to. Their next bank robbery is sloppy and rushed due to the triggerhappy nature of one of the men on his team. The methodical approach we've seen him use so successfully thus far instead turns into a bloodbath. Dillinger is hurt during the escape, but worse yet, one of his men is also wounded and caught. Purvis begins to show how far he is willing to go to catch Dillinger when he denies this captive treatment and inflicts more pain on him until the man divulges the location Dillinger was headed to. It's borderline torture, or perhaps it even crosses the line. Another gunfight ensues when Purvis comes for Dillinger who is hiding out in a cabin in the woods, but once more Dillinger shoots free and slips away under the cover of darkness.

The final robbery Dillinger plans with the same cautious associate who warned him to be careful before. Before this can happen, however, we learn that one of the women who is shielding Dillinger is selling him out for the chance to become a naturalized citizen of the US. Again we see Purvis's hardline as he refuses even to make a promise to the woman to get her what she wants (he'll only recommend she be allowed to stay in the country), instead coercing from her what he wants against the threat of being deported if she doesn't cooperate.

The movie both benefits from and suffers for its realism in its ending. There is no climactic shootout, only the agents staking out, following and ambushing Dillinger to shoot him dead in the street as he leaves a movie theater. It's realistic and true to history, and perhaps even holds some suspense for those in the audience as opposed to another gunfight, though real-life seldom ever is as dramatic as movies would like them to be. The movie closes with one of Purvis's men, telling Dillinger's final words to Billie, who is still in jail at the time. The words refer to a lyric in the song they danced to when they first met and provide someting of a closure to their time together.

* * *

It strikes me how men like Dillinger were ahead of their time when it came to their manner of commiting crimes. They forced the law to up its game and adapt to their new strategies. It really isn't until Dillinger becomes a media beacon that the police harass his associates, and this in turn triggers them to turn their back on him. In a way, it is Dillinger's loss of professionalism when bragging to the media that does him in, as things only proceed to get more difficult from there on out.

The era of bank robberies showcased in this film was a unique one. It sort of progressed out of the old west style of bank holdups, although updating technology like cars and machine guns made things dangerous in a completely different way, and the rise of cities, together with the shriveling of the uncharted west made way for a renewed strategy of hiding within the law's reach but beneath its sight.

If there's a common thread to nearly all of Michael Mann's films it would have to be professionalism, although crime (and the roles it creates) plays a large part in many as well. Public Enemies contains both of these themes and in terms of similarity bears a bit of a resemblance to his 1995 film "Heat" which also shared its time looking over both cops and criminals. It's been said that Mann is the kind of person who has equal amounts of respect for both sides of the law and it shows in both Heat and Public Enemies. Juxtaposing these two films, we can see what a snapshot Public Enemies is, from the metaphor of an american history of crime. While Heat does have a similar story to tell -one of detectives on the trail of some very skilled robbers- its differences reflect the period it takes place in: modern techniques of suvailance, legal manuevres. The second of these two is especially important to note as the characters in Heat have addresses known to the police, are not wanted men but instead are merely suspected of the crimes they commit, and quite simply put, hide in plain view. In short, they are not "public" enemies in the way the characters in Dillinger's time are.

Renaissance: Paris 2054

Dark in look and feel, Renaissance is a film whose only grays are between the things we normally look at. The sharp angular lines of the city, structures, and characters' faces, conceal the fact that character-wise, they are anything but black and white, though in the end dark could be used to describe them all; dark pasts, dark acts, dark motives and methods and secrets.

Please note: Entries about media reviewed in this blog are written from the framepoint that the reader has already seen the work in question. Plot twists and endings will sometimes be examined.

As an animated film which uses the same rotoscoping technology as "Waking Life" and "A Scanner Darkly" (both by Richard Linklater), Renaissance boasts a distinct visual look. Unlike those two films, however, Renaissance takes things to another level, by reducing the palette to only black and white giving it a feel more reminiscent of the older film noirs it resembles thematically. Stylistically it's in the same ballpark as "Sin City", but whereas that film used color to bring important details to life, there are is virtually no color in Renaissance, and for that matter almost no grays either; everything seems fall within the catagory of being either light or shadow. At times we feel like what we're looking at is actually invisible and what we can "see" is merely the shadow or after-effect of the subjects we are trying to follow. It lends itself quite well to a story such as this, full of mystery, secrets, and clues hidden within the details. The saga is full of shifting alliances, culprits hiding in plain view, and plot twists which linger just around the corner and can felt before we actually see them.

The story itself is quite spare, and like many of the better film noirs it relies heavily on exposition, terse dialogue, and a slowly unfolding plot to maintain its air of secrecy. Think neo niors like Heat and L.A. Confidential though due to its futuristic elements works like Blade Runner (another sci-fi noir with sparse dialogue and a lot of atmosphere) and the anime Cowboy Bebop might be more on target. Even the romantic subplot of the film (probably its most heavily dramatic portion) is sparing when it comes to words: "I bet you meet a lot of flawless women in your line of work."

Karas and Bislane

The setting is a distopian Paris set in the not too distant future where the Eifel Tower can still be seen, and many new, tall and impressive buildings have been erected to tower over the slums and alleys where the parasites still live and continue to commit their petty crimes as they have since cities came into existance. An impressive opening shot pans down from the Eifel tower itself, lower and lower into the seemy underbelly of the metropolis. At a dingy techno-club a girl named Bislane dances on the floor. Unbenounced to her, her younger sister Ilona has come to the club to see the owner and bartender, Dimitri, with a dark purpose in mind. He's stolen something for her, a book the plot will later reveal, which contains the secret of immortality. Dimitri tells Ilona he had some trouble getting what she wanted, sleezily lets her know the price has gone up and then, after getting into a minor scuffle with her is confronted and told to leave by Bislane who finds the two where they are arguing on the balcony. Ilona will leave empty handed only to be abducted, setting in motion a plot that focuses on the search for her whereabouts, the hidden motives behind why she was taken, and what is at stake in her return.

Two exemplary images of noir

Above: Bislane in front of the Paris Skyline

Below: Reflection in the eye of Ilona's dead dog, the only witness to her abduction

A mega-company called Avalon looms above all else in the city of Paris in Renaissance. It employs the best and brightest (including the two sisters mentioned previously), and it maintains an iron grip on all. Our main character is Karas, a character like many we've seen in another film. He's tough and possesses a strong sense of justice, and is willing to bend the rules to do what he feels is right. In an early scene we watch him break protocol on a hostage situation to take out three kidnappers who have a young boy held at gunpoint. He seems to have as little regard for his own life as he does for operating procedure.

Over the course of the film, Karas will meet several important characters. Jonas Muller is a brilliant scientist and was a mentor to Ilona. Farfella is a shadowy gangster and childhood friend to Karas (the kind of friend who's useful when one wants to skirt the law, as Karas will have to later in this film). The slimy Dellenbach is the head of Avalon who bugs Karas's comm device, and later has Dimitri killed and attempts to abduct Muller with thugs who use a type of thermo-camouflage (the latter of which sets off a pretty interesting shootout in a greenhouse). Eventually Karas will get kicked off the force and have to rely upon Bislane to access information from Avalon which sets off a romantic subplot between the two. The final major character to be introduced is the elderly Nakata who was on the same team as Muller during a crucial project. He reveals the secret of their research that everyone seems to be dying to get their hands on: immortality. Muller, it turns out, had a younger brother with Progeria, a disease which causes hyper-rapid aging, and by trying to counteract it, it seems he's discovered the means to eternal youth.

Above: Another image reminiscent of classic noir, two silhouettes kissing in the rain

Below: Thermo-camouflaged soldiers

All of this leads to a confrontation as Karas and Dellenbach's men close in on Ilona's whereabouts at the same time and Karas is forced to choose between killing Ilona to keep Muller's secret or allowing her to live and reveal it to Avalon. On the one hand, Muller has died for the secret already and entrusted the choice to Karas. "Avalon cannot be allowed to obtain such limitless power. Without death life will become meaningless..." On the other hand, Karas has promised Bislane, now his current lover, that he will save Ilona, even though it has been decided beforehand that she will have to go into hiding and take on a new identity.

Things do not go as expected when Karas finally reaches Ilona. She has been held against her will by Muller (now dead) and his younger brother, who constitutes the one piece of evidence Muller couldn't destroy. When Karas arrives Ilona is trying to do just that, until Karas stops her from choking him to death. Ilona reveals herself to be completely selfish and willing to accomodate Avalon. She rejects the premise of taking a new identity and even tells Karas of her intention to take credit for Muller's work, saying "The world is waiting for MY discovery." After suffering a gunshot wound to his shoulder from one of Dellenbach's henchmen, Karas finds himself incapacitated and unable to physically restrain her and takes her life with his gun after she throws away the new identity he gives her and begins to defiantly march back to Dellenbach. When talking with Bislane afterward, Karas doesn't let on what happened with Ilona's death, choosing instead to let her sister retain a positive memory and the belief that she is still out there safe and alive.

* * *

Thematically, Renaissance is fairly ambiguous, even while the question of morallity when it comes to eternal life is a big one. "Without death, life is meaningless", utters the character of Muller right before he expires. And with the brisk pace the plot continues we viewers are given little time to contemplate this until the lights come back on and the question resurfaces in our minds.

I remember the first time I saw the movie with a friend we ended up having a long discussion about the ending. He was ticked off at the decision Karas had made, feeling immortality was something which should have been allowed into Avalon's hands. I've often wondered if there isn't something inherently corrupt in the very idea of eternal life. Few can deny the power it would confer on those who possess it, and power as we all know, corrupts.

What if eternal life were made into a product? Should it really? Who decides who lives and who dies, and in the end is all of it merely a matter of money or favors? In many ways we live in something of a similar system already where those with large amounts of money or influence survive much longer despite sometimes having far worse ailments. The poor who become sick or infirm or just plain old suffer as their bodies slowly break down, addicted to medicine or life saving treatment, but what if there were a source of immortality and we all knew we could live on forever and not just for a few more years if only we could afford to pay the price... Movies like this one reflect the real world in a real way, and businesses like the fictional Avalon are not a far cry from the dirty pharmaceutical companies that deny medicine to the dying if there isn't a profit in it for them to make.

Another question I'd have to consider is what even if immortality were granted to the common man would be his future? Imagine being a slave for all eternity, with no release ever to be seen. It's been often said that there are fates worse than death, and with death no longer a master to us, who would be left? That human beings can be far crueler than death is something I have little doubt of, and characters like the villain Dellenbach make it quite believable that immortality might not just be the end of death's great menace, but also the beginning of an endless living hell as humans without scruple acquire what damn near amounts to godhod. Richard Dawkins once argued that death coupled with reproduction could actually be seen as a very big advantage to immortality, largely due to the ability to start over, brand new from scratch, and potentially fix the problems within a previous version of any creature.

Like the Watchmen movie which was adapted from the graphic novel of the same name, Renaissance doesn't give its viewers answers to these questions per se. Instead it merely shows us the decisions of its characters, leaving us to ponder them and whether or not we agree or disagree.

Reviews

I love reading online about the movies and books I've gone through, but have found something that leaves me really unsatisfied a lot of the time. I've found that sometimes the reviews I've read seem to stop short of giving me everything I wanted to hear about. While I certainly respect the ability of those writing online to do such a good job of providing eloquent commentary without spoiling the movie, it's left me with absolutely in the dark at times when it comes to exploring some of the deeper themes of the movies and other media I've seen, simply because these themes happen to coincide with the surprises in the plot. Oftentimes the endings in particular of any given film are the most maddening part, because they leave us with so much confusion, so many questions, so much desire to discuss what we've seen, to delve deeper into it and make sense of it all. If we're fortunate enough to have a friend who's seen the film in question, this isn't such a bad thing, we can always turn to them, but in the other cases... It can be a disappointing. Many of the best films leaves us with more questions than answers, full of thoughts we want explained or even just acknowledged. Sometimes I find myself having an original thought, and wanting to explore it further, scour the net looking to see if anyone out there has thought the same thing, or at least has bothered to write it down if ever they had, only to come up empty handed.

I want to write more reviews, but have come to the conclusion that avoiding plot spoilers is just not for me. I hate spoilers more than anyone I know, and yet the irony of all is that because of this, I generally avoid reading any reviews or opinions on a film or book I've yet to experience. I like going in to it all not knowing what to expect, fresh and free of preconceptions, not sure what to look for. Like most everyone else I like the surprises to be surprises, but where I differ, I suspect is that while I avoid information like the sickness before checking out something new, when it's all done, I can't seem to stop looking for it. I read reviews for opinion, for perspective, for added meaning, not to whet my appetite. Maybe I'm just reading it all backwards, but so what? There's something to be said about doing it this way too, where at least I know some of the conclusions I've come to are my own and not the critic whose review I read beforehand as so many others do. It is so difficult to find commentary by people willing to write in a way that reveals plot points about the movie for the sake of further examination, and yet, I find that's what I truly crave sometimes. Sometimes I want read more between the lines, between the lines of the lines between which I'm already reading. I want to examine the hypotheticals no matter how unlikely, bizarre, and out there they are.

Well, I think it's time to stop griping and do something about it all, damn it. Why I am whining about no one writing about this when I could do it myself? I've occasionally encountered some excellent reviews written by non-professionals on works that don't always get the serious attention that others do (things like well written, full bodied reviews on manga can be very difficult to find, especially if the following for it is small). It gets me sometimes that a user review from Amazon.com or IMDB can finally give a work the credit it's due. This is what the internet is here for. When we have an original thought, we have the option of putting it out there for others to see so they don't have to dwell in the darkness the way that is driving me so crazy right now.

The reviews I write are gonna be done with the idea that the reader has already experienced the work in question and wants more answers or reflection. I'm gonna drink the language of film in with eyes and bleed my thoughts straight onto the page in word form. Who knows? Maybe what I believed were original thoughts have been had by others but no one just bothered to put it out there until now.

Stand By Me: A Review

"Were the golden years ever really golden?" I wonder sometimes. When we think of the 50's in America, often an idyllic portrait akin to an episode of Leave It To Beaver or Father Knows Best comes to mind. When we watch the more realistically done movies portraying that time, like L.A. Confidential, The Majestic, Shawshank Redemption, and the Green Mile, the view we get is a good deal grayer. Stand By Me falls a bit more into this latter catagory although there is still a certain poignancy to it all that seems to find its way to a lot of the movies about that era.

Please note: Entries about media reviewed in this blog are written from the framepoint that the reader has already seen the work in question. Plot twists and endings will sometimes be examined.

The movie depicts a group of young boys on their summer vacation, who are about to enter junior high, and make a discovery that launches them on a journey of sorts. It's a "boys-who-are-up-to-no-good" sort of trip that has many of the best elements of such a traveling/adventure story: the laughing and joking around, the occasional danger or harrowing situation, arguing, bonding, self-discovery.

The narrator of the story is a young boy named Gordon (played by actor Wil Wheaton, who is called "Gordie" by his friends in the film) who lost his older brother, Denny, a short while ago. His parents are quiet, distant, and have yet to recover the loss of this son who clearly was more well liked than young Gordy is. Early in the film, his father chastizes him, asking why he doesn't have better friends the way his brother Denny used to. Gordie's best friend is Chris (played by River Phoenix), a boy whose family includes drunks and criminals. Chris acts tough because of the negative reputation his family brings him. Teddy (Corey Feldman) is another similar such kid; he acts tough because his father, a war veteran, seems to have snapped and at one point even punished the boy by holding his ear to the grill of a stove. Everyone in town seems to know this as well, and the discredit which follows him around has made him defensive when it comes to his father, and weary as a result of that. Rounding out their group is Vern, a pudgy boy, who is most often the butt of their jokes. He seems to follow them around because he might have been rejected from other groups before them. These four form something of a unit, and one gets the sense that they formed it as a means of survival by banding together in the face of the ostracization that is rained down on them.

The story starts with Gordie, Chris, and Teddy sitting in a treehouse playing cards. It's a scene worthy of a Rockwell picture, though the details give us a slightly courser view of things. The boys are smoking, talk in a very smart-alecky way, and curse a lot. "Thinking up new, and cruder ways to describe someone else's mother was always looked upon with high regard." Gordie recalls in his narration. Vern arrives, out of breath, and asks the boys if they want to see a dead body. And so the journey begins.

We all have experiences like this when we're young, I think. Times when we decide to go farther than we allowed by our parents, times when it's just us and friends with no supervision, and times when it feels like we might have gotten in a bit over our heads. One thing that seperates this journey from what one the average viewer might've had is that this one has something that's a little bit extraordinary at its end (a dead body that's as of yet undiscovered).

Around the same time that the boys are questing out, a second group is getting ready to do so. This one is led by the thuggish Ace (played by a younger Kiefer Sutherland). It is revealed from the beginning that Vern learned of the location of the body when he overheard two of Ace's cronies talking about it. The boys' plan to travel out to see the body developed when they thought that said cronies were just going to remain hush about the whole thing because of a crime they had committed at the time. Ace and his crew are a bit bigger and older than the young heroes of our story, and Ace himself, is clearly bad news; early in the story he steals a ballcap from Gordie (one given to him by his brother Denny when he was still alive); he bullies his underlings into going along to get the body despite thier apprehension from guilt; he causes a truck carrying a load of wood to crash onto the side of the road so he can win a race with his friends in their cars. This setsup a confrontation of sorts when the two groups converge on their goal.

Along the way, the boys break into a junkyard (and subsequently escape the owner's angry dog), swim across a swamp, camp alone in the woods, and outrun a train when they decide to use a long, high bridge over a gorge despite the fact that it affords them no place to allow the train to safely pass them until they reach the other side. The last two events in particular offer some importan moments. The boys not only talk and tell stories around their campfire during the camping scene, but also take turns staying awake to defend each other when they hear wolves howling in the forest (Chris reveals to Gordie earlier that he has hidden one of his father's guns in his pack). The train scene as well offers a little more than just a quick moment of excitement; Gordie more or less saves Vern's life when he helps him up from a stumble and forces the cowering kid to get moving when they see the train coming. He also pulls Vern out of the train's way at the last possible second when they reach the other side of the gorge.

All in all, however, it is the quiet conversations that stay with us the most in this journey of a movie. We learn that Chris is innocent of something everyone in town has blamed him for, but that he can't escape the accusations because of his and his family's reputation alone. Gordie confides that he knows his parents loved his brother more than him, and feels they wish he'd been the one to die instead. Chris and Gordie in particular form a special sort of bond during the course of the trip, if in fact there wasn't already one there to begin with. Despite the preconceptions about him, Chris understands that Gordie has a gift compared to the others in their group and at one point lets on that he feels it's all coming to an end soon: "You're smart, and you'll probably start hanging out with other, smarter kids soon when we start junior high. Me, Teddy, and Vern are idiots who'll just get relegated to shop class", he says to Gordie who responds, "No way, I'll take that class with you guys to be around you", "Then you're idiot who's throwing away a gift." It's an important conversation, and one that ends with Gordie doing his best to encourage Chris and reaffirm their friendship.

The climax to the story comes when the boys finally reach the corpse they'd been seeking. The best thing about the scene is that there aren't any cheap surprises put in to try and shock the audience. Gordie tells us simply that it wasn't a monster, wasn't anything gruesome, it was just what it was, a body that had ceased to live. Then comes Ace and his crew who threaten the boys to get out and let them have have the body (they want it because they believe it will make them look like heroes to the townsfolk). The boys stand up to their assailants despite being smaller and outnumbered by Ace and his gang. When Ace pulls a switchblade on Chris things look to get violent until Gordie fires off the gun Chris had hidden earlier and then points it at Ace. Ace tries to threaten, bluff, and even out-reason Gordie: "You gonna shoot us all kid?" he asks him, "No, Ace, just you." Gordie responds cooly. The look in his eyes is all else that's needed to make Ace see he's serious. Ace and his crew leave, and the boys decide to let an annonymous phone reveal the location of the body rather than try to take credit.

Walking back into town, the narration tells us that things felt different for them, and indeed we in the audience know that things have changed. The boys have certainly undergone some realizations about each other, and also about themselves. And two of them in particular have grown much closer and stronger in friendship. It is revealed that Vern and Teddy both ended up just as expected, doing somewhat simple jobs after graduation: Vern as a forklift operator after getting married, Teddy only after being rejected by the military and then serving jail time for some crimes. Chris on the other hand, went on to confound the exceed the low expectations for him, perservering with school and eventually becoming a lawyer. It's at this point I recall the conversation he has with Gordie about being left behind while the latter goes on to do bigger and better things. I can't help but think that it was because of the bond made by the two of them on their trip that the two were able to pull together and Chris was able to find the strength to become more. In many ways Gordie has saved him because of their talk. Then a much older Gordie reveals in revelation that Chris died many years in a stabbing shortly before the telling of the story, and we realize suddenly our narrator's reason to tell the whole story, as an ending for one of the characters has come.

The final words of the story are: "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?" I'm reminded of another quote, this one from All The King's Men. It went something like: "You go to your childhood friend because he sees your face as it was when it was young. Before it became what it was, before you became clever and wise..." The friends we make as children we can never quite have again, and it isn't just because of the years of shared history it takes to make, for even those we meet later in life and stay friends with for longer periods of time aren't quite the same. It has a lot to do with the quote I mentioned, with them seeing us when we're still young. They see us when we act silly, bold, flambouyant and childish as, of course, all kids are. But more importantly, they see us as vulnerable and scared and insecure in a way only a child can be.

The Digital Divide: Games vs Movies

For a long time now a debate has been raging as to whether video games constitute art or not. The gaming industry now brings in more money than the film industry, although, so too does the porn industry which few would argue qualifies as art. When one considers the number of people working on the development of a game it might seem like common sense. Games employ programmers, writers and storyboarders, actors for voice acting and motion capture, architects for computerized landscapes, and yes, artists, for character, costume and locale design, etc... Of course video games are art, aren't they?

I suppose a more important question on the issue might be to ask whether or not they constitute "high art", or even just good art. We could argue semantics all day, and come up with either a narrow view that only so-called "classics" which have stood the test of time are art, or a broad view that even childrens' drawing constitute it (not very good art, but art nonetheless). Using the latter criteria, it could very reasonably be argued that no game ranks even close to the greater works of film and literature. Roger Ebert recently took up such a view -to the renewed ire of many a gamer- when he re-entrenched his earlier opinion that games do not constitute high art and will never be within the lifetimes of current gamers. Video games can never be art or http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html (He mostly was refuting a TED Talks key-note speech by student Kelley Santiago, who cited a few examples of "artistic" games and likened still developing gaming industry to that of ancient art.)

Though personally I am of the opinion that games do qualify as art, it's a much more difficult question as to whether or not they rank as high art. While I'm sure that many out there would disagree, I'm not sure anyone can reasonably say they've acheived the levels attained by books and movies. I've been wondering recently why this is exactly. I somehow doubt it's for any lack of trying. Developers nowadays are pushing the envelope in just about every aspect imaginable within the games themselves, attempting to immerse, engage, and yes, even emotionally involve gamers. "So what exactly is the holdup?", we find ourselves asking, "Why aren't you art yet, gaming industry?!!"

One of the arguments in Ebert's blog entry seemed to indicate that the competitive/goal driven aspect of games was what interferred with it all. At first this would seem a strange angle with which to try and dismiss the power of games. The fact that the gamer shares goals with the characters they control gives games an additional level of identification with those who experience them. Many a gamer seems to site Final Fantasy VII as an example of this, and I have no doubts that a few people out there did indeed cry when the character Aeris died as part of the story, since the gamer was up until that point in charge of keeping her alive. But does the whole objective-part of games somehow cheapen them?

Watching the characters in a movie is lot like witnessing events in real life, we might sympathize with some and loathe others but we cannot interfere when it occurs in a movie. And having this level of control does indeed take away some of the power the storytellers would otherwise have. This can be especially noticeable in the so-called "sandbox" games where gamers now have the ability to simply attack or beat up nearly anyone they encounter who annoys them. I noticed while watching others play, that even poeple who would never become violent in the real world have a habit of lashing out randomly in the games they play. I don't know that we're living out our fantasies on screen per se, but perhaps this element does in the end lower the overall experience of games.

Character models have advanced to amazing levels, but still don't look and move entirely like a human beings which can at times lead gamers to simply not care about these figures who can be strange in a very uncanny valley sort of way. You add this to the control level I mentioned earlier, and there's just an unrealistic aspect to the whole thing that comes from gamers being able to simply behave in completely unbelievable way. Killing oneself for example, or attacking a cop, or stealing a car and then crashing it into a building... The realistic qualities of many movies are cited as being strengths, but much of this gets torn down in the sacrifice games make to give their players more freedom. How serious are gamers really taking the story when in between cutscenes they can go on a murder rampage to relieve stress?

When it comes to film, the masters of suspense like Hitchcock have a habit of winding the audience up by not difusing the tension with action. The thrill of the fight scene often leads to a subconscious feeling that all is safe again when it's over, and for this reason, action movies do tend to lack any kind of real suspense. In games, however, action very often is the point, and even in situations with objectives like: sneak around, or: go undectected, gamers have a habit of simply doing the opposite on purpose to "see what happens". The lack of any consequence can lead to a sort of detachment from the whole thing with the attitude of: "It's just a game, I can always try again later" being the last word. Perhaps there's no consequence to watching a film either but our lack of control can make it feel that more is on the line for the characters on screen. Viewers of movies don't have the bottom line of success or failure (of neither which matter anyway when it comes to games) to govern their overall feelings of what they see on screen. Empathy, anger, and whether or not a person agrees or disagrees are instead more common emotions after watching a film. Are the pleasures of success and disappointments of failure in games simple and cheap and dominating their art form? And in the absence of them are film viewers left then to dig deeper for the meaning of what they've just seen?

So what are we feeling when we play games exactly? The adreneline of battle is certainly there, as well as a certain kind of tension present in many types of competitive sports when you really aren't sure how things will play out. But then again, this kind of tension can be found in pretty much any game or situation really where gambling is possible, and it has nothing to do with a well-crafted story. I suppose if there is one area of games which really gives them an emotion that can't be found in movies, it's struggle. Games are interactive, not passive. When we play a game, we really do have to struggle through it to see its conclusion, it isn't as simple as pushing the play button or turning the page. This interactive element does to some degree make games "not-for-everyone" (it especially becomes harder to learn to do new things when you get older and this is well reflected in the very low numbers of seniors playing games), but to those who do play them, the added effort could be enhancing things in a way movies aren't able to do as well.

I've noticed that games are pretty good at getting an "epic" kind of feel to them. Of course, part of this could be due to the scale and length which games are capable. Games can take anywhere between 5-60 hours (though some are even longer) to get through, putting them more on a level with books and television in this regard, though recently movies have been trying to keep up with a multitude of sequels. Longer length does tend to help the epic feel; it can have a more episodic nature and when more time has been invested, more feels at stake as well. But returning to the idea of struggle, it's hard not to argue that the gamer going through the genuine ordeal of fighting in a game doesn't give them something of an advantage to movies. Almost any gamer out there can tell you about one particular section of one particular game, the many hours it took them to conquer it, and the feelings they had afterward. Gamers also do tend to have a sort of bond with each other because of this, which in a funny sort of way is a bit like the bond that soldiers and athletes have. Persevering through conflict brings people together, even ones created as digital entertainment.

While I wouldn't say the games chosen as examples in Santiago's key-note, were good ones, I would have to say her argument about games in their infancy being akin to primitive rock paintings and early film is a sound one. It even prompted Ebert to revise his statements with the aforementioned qualifier; even if he is basically saying: "Not in this life-time", that's quite a difference from stating outright that games are not art. Early movies were not considered art, and neither were many different genres of music or fiction at their inception, but considering film was introduced only a little over a century ago, its recognition as art has been quicksilver compared to painting and literature, and things just keep on happening faster in these expnential times we live in. I have serious doubts games will ever be able to do drama or love stories on the level of film and literature any time soon, but perhaps time really is all that's needed for games to hit those higher levels.

Unforgiven - An Examination Of A Film That Changed Film

It could most certainly be called the western to end all others. It is noted as a great film by nearly all who see it. But more than anything else, it simply changes its viewers, transforms their thinking, and their expectations of what a movie like this one is, of what all other movies are. How exactly did Clint Eastwood do it? What is awakened in those who watch it? And why are those who see it forced to look at things differently? When looking at the methods of deconstruction that Eastwood uses throughout his film, and also in the ways he embeds them within the confines of Unforgiven's own story, we're given a chance to question what makes all movies out there believable.

Please note: Entries about media reviewed in this blog are written from the framepoint that the reader has already seen the work in question. Plot twists and endings will sometimes be examined.

Deconstructing the Western

When we talk about the "deconstruction" of a genre, we aim to take the thing apart, look at its inner workings and see how and why it has the effect on us it does. Unforgiven is a very layered movie, and before looking at its particular mechanisms, it might be prudent to briefly look at the genre as it stood before.

With the box office success of "Unforgiven", the western as a genre was deemed to be a bankable commodity once more by the major studios. The western had largely ceased to draw crowds and interest viewers at the time of its release. Sergio Leone had famously revitalized the genre decades earlier with his "Dollars Trilogy" ("Fistful of Dollars", "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly", all staring Clint Eastwood in his much younger years) by adding a certain level of realism that simply wasn't present in the westerns of that time. Leone's films had a gritty style, morally ambiguous characters, and harsh landscapes unlike those found in the american westerns of the time. In many ways, the westerns of that time (the 60's) had grown right out of the very dime novels from the era of the source material itself, following a natural progression to full length novels, radio narrations, TV shows, and the movies themselves.

The westerns of the past drew more heavily on a style of storytelling descending from the tall tale and the wildly exaggerated recounts of people from the "old-west" era who actually experienced such events and embellished upon them with each new telling. Added to this was a sense of morality imposed by each new chronicler, re-enforcing what was each felt was right or wrong. By the time of Leone's westerns, many had gotten to the point where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys black, enabling audiences to distinguish at a glance. Needless to say, this reduced a lot of pressure on storytellers themselves, but intelligent men like Leone capitalized on audience expectations by giving them more true to life characters who inhabited the moral gray areas of society, keeping them guessing on what would happen next.

When Unforgiven came around this was all old hat. Leone had readjusted the moral abiguity of the western, but its elements as a tall tale were still very much intact. To be certain, there is plenty of room in literature for the "amazing stories" that make up not only the old dime novels, but much of the pulp and even the sensationalized newspaper articles of today. And a lot of what transpires in westerns is the stuff of mythos: gunfights in the streets, women in distress, and men who step up do what they feel is right. So how exactly did "Unforgiven" accomplish to break all of this down so it could rebuild it? Dashing the story with a little authenticity in several areas was a start, but asking the audience to question it all was its true masterstroke.

Deconstructing Unforgiven

Our story begins with a brutal crime. In the town of Big Whiskey, a spurned cowboy slashes the face of a prostitute, sparking the fury of her fellow ladies of the night. The local sheriff, Little Bill (Gene Hackman), renders his judgement in an absolutist sort of fashion, but handles this case with a less than just decision. He orders the cowboy and his accomplice to pay the Skinny, the saloon and brothel owner since the hooker will no longer be as valuable to him. Unsatisfied with this judgement, but with Bill refusing to listen to any disent, the women scrape together a reward hoping to have the two cowboys killed. This attracts the attention of young gun calling himself the "Schoffield Kid" (Jaimz Woolvett) causing him to seek out William Munny (Clint Eastwood). Having heard of Munny's reputation of a violent past, the Kid hopes he will help him kill the cowboys and collect the reward. Munny in turn recruits his old friend Ned (Morgan Freeman), whom he rode with in the past. When the three meet up, Will and Ned discover that the Kid is near-sighted and needs spectacles which he doesn't have.

From this beginning, things are turned on their head in quite a few ways. The cowboys themselves are not the unrepentent bitches one might expect, and one of them even tries his hardest to make amends by offering the mangled prostitute a choice pony. The prostitutes themselves, while looking out for their own, are hardly noble in their quest for justice. They're bitter and want revenge. They even reject the peace offering of the pony without the victimized girl's consent, despite the fact that a pony would do her much more good than two dead cowboys. Little Bill is a tough man and an efficient enforcer, but his rendering is hardly fair. He will soon prove himself to be both merciless and unremitting, but in the meanwhile we often see him in good humour, building a house rather than lounging around the sheriff's office like such a character might in a typical movie. The Kid too, is something of a surprise in that, for all his tough talk, he actually is nearly defenseless in a true gunfight, considering he can't see very far. He hides his disability from others by never mentioning it and pretending he can see fine. He hides his insecurity about it with tough talk and a nickname he clearly has given himself rather than received by others. And William Munny? He's old with two young children, reformed by a dead wife into a strict sobriety, barely scraping by raising hogs -many of which appear sick. He has trouble catching an unruly hog and can't shoot very straight anymore, and even struggles to get back in the saddle when he decides to find the Kid and take him up on his offer.

While all of the above mentioned aspects help the film to turn the paradigm of the western on its end, its most obvious device is the inclusion of a journalist character (Saul Rubinek) who chronicles much of the events as they happen. He is introduced on something of a sideplot; he comes into town along with English Bob (Richard Harris), a gunslinger from England who has also heard about the reward. The journalist (who goes by the name of Beauchamp though I'll simply refer to him as "the journalist" throughout this article) seems completely obsessed with capturing material for his own dime-novel style stories. English Bob provokes a man on the train he takes in to town, and then does manage to demonstrate that he can shoot straighter than average by challenging the man to shoot some pheasants from an open car, helping to re-enforce some of our "old west mythos" to the journalist, and the viewers as well. When Bob gets to town, however, this is shattered immediately by Bill who catches Bob unawares, has him surrounded with his own men and then after disarming the man, proceeds to beat him savagely in the midst of the whole town. While Bob is imprisoned at Bill's office, the latter looks over the journalist's stories, ridicules them, and tells the man about how inaccurate the stories are, as he actually witnessed several of the incidents mentioned, and has been in a few fights himself.

It really is at this point that Unforgiven begins deconstructing things for its audience, inter-cutting between Bill and the journalist on the one hand, a conversation with William Munny and Ned on the other. Questions that aren't generally asked in a western come up. Things like the difficulty and effect on a man's psyche to point a gun at another and then pull the trigger. When Bill challenges the journalist and even puts a in his hand, the journalist can't bring himself to pull the trigger, and hearing the way Munny and Ned remember doing it, they recall it with denial and disbelief saying things like: "We was young and full of beans back then, and drunk most the time too..." and "When I sobered up, I couldn't remember the other guy doin anything so bad it really deserved me to shoot him..."

The journalist leaves Bob's company, deciding instead that he can learn more by following Bill around. Bob is sent away in a carriage, while Munny, Ned, and the Kid arrive in town shortly after. At this point, Bill has set himself up as something of a villain in the story. His and Munny's first meeting is nothing if not unconventional for a tale like this. Munny refuses any alcohol even though it might have helped keep him warm during a spout of bad weather, and arrives in town too cold, sick, and weak to defend himself. He is taken unawares by Bill in the saloon, who in a manner quite similar to that of English Bob, once again beats the man cruelly before kicking him out of town. Ned and the Kid escape unscathed, and the three regroup with the prostitutes later while Munny slowly recovers.

More unconventional still are the scenes of "justice" which follow when the trio ride out to hunt their prey. In many an unrealistic movie, violence is glory, revenge is sweet, and the killings are clean. The same can hardy be said of what occurs next in this story. Munny shoots and kills the kinder and more repentant of the two cowboys (the one who didn't actually cut the girl, and tried to make amends with the pony). The details of this scene are very important. The trio do not confront the cowboys face to face or challenge then to duels or anything like that, but rather ambush them from an elevated vantage point, a move that many would consider cowardly and dishonorable. Munny takes the shot only after Ned backs down, realizing he no longer has it in him to kill a man, demonstrating just how much has changed for these characters since the days when they were killers. Ned no longer finds it easy to take life because he's had time to live a little for himself and knows what he's taking from the boy. At first Munny manages only to cripple the boy with a shot to the leg and then misses several times after while the boy desperately tries to crawl to the safety of cover behind a rock. After shooting him in the stomach the boy cries sadly and begs for water as his life drains away. Listening to it all, Munny feels compasion for the boy and calls out to his companions telling them to bring him some water saying that he won't shoot. And so the movie shows us, taking a life can be awkward, ugly, and clumsy, not to mention difficult work both physically and mentally. Eastwood chooses purposely to have to have the more guilty of the two cowboys follow this one, to further highlight the ugliness of the act. It is after this scene that Ned decides to quit the group and head back home alone, while Munny and the Kid continue.

The killing of the second of the two cowboys can be described with many of the same words as the first. William Munny and the Kid wait for him to leave the house he's holed himself up in to visit the outhouse, and there ambush him literally with his pants down. Again there is no confrontation, only an attack and an escape without warning, but two things strike me about this scene as worthy of mention. First, the cowboy that Munny and the Kid set out to kill knows he's in danger and even has several deputies guarding him at the time. When he has to use the outhouse, one of them even asks him to wait so he can escort him out there, but the cowboys, cocky and rude, makes fun of the man refusing his help. His death is largely his own fault because of this. Second, as two assassins run away Munny tells the Kid to fire his gun at their persuers. Because the Kid cannot see very at all, and yet insists on killing at least one of the cowboys himself they are forced to get close to their target and then run away. As they run, Munny tells the Kid to shoot at the men chasing them. When the Kid objects that he can't see, Munny mentions that he only wants to slow them down by scaring them into taking cover. He knows that their chances of hitting or their persuers is very low, and probably does not even want to since doing so might even cause them more trouble. But escape is tantamount and scaring the men behind them buys them time. How men actually fight, and the fact that fear plays a huge part in it seems to be something that Munny understands intrinsically.


While wating for one of the prostitutes to deliver their reward, the Kid breaks down and cries as the gravity of what he's done begins to settle in. He admits to Munny that up until now he's never killed anyone, despite having said otherwise before. "Killing a man's a hell of a thing," Munny replies, "You take away all he has, and everything he ever will have..." On several occasions throughout the movie, the viewer hears the characters say "They have it coming", when talking about the cowboys, never to any real response. It's only when the Kid says it this time that Munny gives us in the audience a reply: "We all have it coming Kid..."

The final part of the film is set up when the prostitute arrives and the Kid and William Munny, along the viewer, learn that Little Bill and his men captured Ned and later, tortured him to death. Munny, who has staunchly refused to drink any alcohol up to this point in the movie, takes the bottle and begins to do so and we begin to see the way alcohol allows Munny to kill indiscriminately. He then tells the Kid to go back to his homestead alone and give his share the money to his children and Ned's woman, and says that he's going into town alone to confront Little Bill.

When Munny arrives at the saloon, he finds Ned's body in front with a sign attached more or less condemning the man and his accomplices. Munny enters quietly to see Bill rallying up a posse he's assembled with alcohol and talk of their success in capturing Ned. Munny figures out which of the men is Skinny by asking who owns the place, and then shoots him to the shock and horror of all gathered. It's worth noting that Munny doesn't even flinch while doing it. Throughout the film it's talked about how difficult it is to pull the trigger on someone and Munny has not only just done so but semms to lack any remorse or sense of consequence. The people in the room are of course all terrified; they've just seen a man killed right in front of them. The only other person who keeps their cool is Little Bill who becomes enraged and calls Munny a coward for shooting and unarmed man. Munny's response, a very oft-quoted line, is absolute indifference: "He should've armed himself if was gonna decorate his saloon with my friend!" Munny points the gun at Bill and then tells him that he's come to kill him, and then a very curious thing happens. Bill cleverly tells all those gathered in the saloon that Munny has only one barrel left in his gun and to kill Munny after he's fired his shot. I can just imagine that every man in the place would be so terrified up till this point that without Bill saying this, it's altogether likely that Munny might've simply walked in, shot both Skinny and Bill and walked right back out, with everyone who saw the thing happen too petrified to act. Whether or not Munny had planned it that way all along is never said, because this doesn't happen; Munny puls the trigger, but his gun misfires, and Bill wastes no time in telling everyone to shoot. Munny's reaction is unique as well; he throws the empty gun at Bill and uses the time he's bought to draw his pistol and shoot Bill. He gets down on one knee and and shoots the each of the men who've drawn weapons on him. Earlier in the film, Bill describes for the journalist how many men make a common mistake in gun-fighting: by drawing and firing too quickly without aiming properly. The gunfight in this scene is indeed over quickly, but there is nothing stylized or elaborate about it at all. The men nervously draw their guns, fire too quickly or unsteadily and miss, while Munny aims, shoots and kills each in turn. When it's over he tells all bystanders to get out unless they want to die as well. It strikes me how the final showdown of this film plays out much like similar climaxes in other westerns (the main character kills everyone, and walks out alive), but at the same time is completely different as well. The details have been arranged in such a way that it all feels real rather than contrived.

Munny takes a drink from the bar, and then gets into a brief but interesting conversation with the journalist who has lingered because he was trapped under a one of the men who fell on him as he died. He remarks that Munny killed the men in the exact order of how dangerous they were, but Munny is dismissive of the whole thing stating simply that he's always been "lucky when it comes to killing people". He doesn't appear to have put much thought into what makes him good at doing it. The journalist character really does seem like something of a leech, and at this point he appears almost ready to begin following Munny around the way he did Bob and Bill up until he is threatened by Munny to get out of the saloon. The final conversation between Munny and the dying Bill is brief as well. Bill complains that it isn't fair: "I don't deserve this. I was building a house..." Munny's reply is cold as ever: "Deserve's got nothing to do with it.", "I'll see you in Hell, Munny.", "Yeah." Munny is more or less unmoved by any of what he's seen or heard, let alone what he's done. He's cold and mechanical and it almost appears that he does what he does because he's simply supposed to. That is to say, he came back and killed Bill not due to sorrow, or anger, or hatred, but simply because that was what someone should do when a close friend gets killed. Though an overwhelming change occurs in his behavior as soon as he hears of Ned's death, he doesn't seem incensed, just quiet, cold, and completely driven. The closest thing to any emotion he shows is when Bill berates him verbally for killing Skinny. Even then, it has more to do with the fact that he's defending his actions than anything else when he says: "He should've armed himself!" Truth be told, he seems only agitated by the accusation. Within the icy logic of his mind, he's doing something completely justified.

Munny shoots Bob dead after their final words together and then the movie gives us a few final surprises in it's treatment of the plot. Munny shouts out several threats to the townsmen lingering outside to help ensure no one else tries to kill him. "I'm comin out now and if I see anyone I'm gonna kill em! And if anyone takes a shot at me, I'm gonna kill them, AND their family AND burn their damn house down!" It's chilling the choice of words he uses. He knows the value of a threat in this situation, doesn't want another fight, and realizes that running out will only get him chased. As he exits we see a couple men outside hiding and one of them gets ready to fire but he too cowers saying he can't do it, though it's never explained if this is because he's frightened of Munny's threats or if it's for the same reasons that have kept many men from pulling the trigger throughout the film. "My god..." one of the prostitutes remarks softly as he leaves, and we sense that only now has the consequences of her action's full weight come down to be felt by her. Did all of those men need to die? Does any of this death make things right?

Unforgiven as a deconstruction of fiction

Unforgiven is to a certainty a deconstruction of the western as a genre. It looks at the time and place and asks questions as to what life was like for people living there, on a day to day basis and not just in times of extraordinary occurance. It picks apart the pieces of the genre itself, turns them on their side and invites us to look in from a different angle that makes things look completely different. But then, one can't help but wonder as well, don't a lot of other genres use similar elements in their story building? Damsels in distress appear in fantasy yarns as well as westerns, lurid tales of murders and kidnapping are found in a lot of the pulp magazines of the noir period and in modern crime tales too. When we say that something is a "tall tale" are we not simply referring to some of the more sensational aspects of any story?

Now with Unforgiven we have a movie that almost seems aware of itself and asks us to ask questions not only of its plot but those of others. Questions like: "Is the way this person is telling their story accurate, or are they just exaggerating to try and impress us the Bob and the Kid did?", "Can these characters really be believed to be as skilled, hard, or intelligent as they say or is it a farce?", "Is what we're seeing really unfolding in a believable way?" All of these questions relate to the scenario of an unreliable narrator. I've found myself strangely aware of Unforgiven with every western I've seen since it; it's almost impossible not to remember the lessons it teaches and this subsequently reflects on other works we view and, after all, isn't a movie in its own way just another account of some story we're being told. It's practically at a point where one could refer to westerns as "post-Unforgiven" because we more or less expect the film makers to have learned from watching the film. To a point, many of the westerns which followed Unforgiven do seem to be aware of this. Films like "Tombstone" and "Open Range" are its successors. "3:10 to Yuma" and "The Assassination of Jesse James" both made direct reference to the dime-novels, newspaper stories, and fiction printed about notorious men, purposely drawing a line between the fantasy and reality of an outlaw existence. The samurai films, many like to point out, have much in common with those of the western genre, and now even a few modern entries such as "Twilight Samurai" and "Hidden Blade" (Kakushiken) both by Yoji Yamada have engaged in a little deconstruction of their own upon the samurai genre.

On the simple manner of details, Unforgiven makes an interesting point as well. When the Kid tells Munny what the cowboys have done to the girl, he uses all kinds of incorrect information making the whole thing sound much more gruesome than it actually is. The way journalist makes it sound, these warriors have deadly aim, and fire with pinpoint accuracy the moment they become aware of each other, making speed everything. The movie makes short work of this logic by showing us just how messy a real fight can get. But in a way, aren't we in the audience being challenged to think about some of the other films we see? Would anyone really flip three times in the air over a simple obstruction in the midst of a battle? Would anyone really spin their blade around repeatedly thinking it would add power to their slices? Details like this are stylistic flourishes to be sure but they certainly do cheapen the reality of a situation when we see them. I remember watching in suspense when the machine slowly beat in a metal door in the first Terminator movie, and shaking my head in disbelief when another knocked a door flying off its hinges in the fourth movie of that series for no reason other than to show the audience the strength of this new opponent (no reason aside of course the fact that it was never bolted in the way a real door would be and obviously not really made of metal). A film like Unforgiven transcends typical fiction not only in its meaning but in its execution as well.

Unforgiven as a Film

So far I've talked about this film as a collection of its elements: pieces and parts that when put together make a whole. This of course all begs the question: "Is it really any good as a film, or simply valuable as a lesson for what it says?" And if it is a good film, in what way has it benefited from tearing down the very genre it represents?

When we see more of the same we get bored. We feel we know where it's all heading, everything we expect to happen often does, and we have little to get excited over. When things don't happen the way we think they will, it puts us on our toes. I might even dare say it's truer to life this way, since few things in life are more memorable to us than the surprises.

Few people expect Munny to be beaten so onesidedly by Bill in their first encounter, or for Ned to die after giving away Munny's identity. So much time is spent tearing down the ideas that these men are tough or even skilled at all (let alone invincible), that by the time Munny walks slowly through the rain to the saloon to confront Bill, we genuinely fear for his death. He's walking into a situation where he is completely out numbered and up against a man who seems as smart and calculating as he is; the movie has been setting up Munny's ultimate fate one step after another, marching inexoribly towards his death the entire time, hasn't it? It's already torn down the myth of the american gunslinger by this point, doesn't it make sense for him to die onscreen physically now as well? By showing us that he has young children, alone at home, without a mother, only worsens the dread. If Munny dies what will happen to them? By making the situation more real, we feel that much more is at stake in this contest, and the tension of it all enough to stretch any viewer.

Clint Eastwood's Own Legend and Mythos

It strikes me that for all its meditation on the genre, Unforgiven is also destined to join the ranks of the very films it scrutinizes. Unforgiven is, in the end, just another western itself. Oh, but it is also so much more, for all the reasons I've just mentioned and also for one final one that actually has less to do with the film itself than the history of its maker, Clint Eastwood.

I remember watching the film with a few friends once, a few of whom had seen it before and some who hadn't as well. At the end of it all, one of them turned to me to say "Man it would be cool to see a movie about William Munny's past." I remember the first thing I could think of was, maybe we already have. As a star in nearly a dozen film westerns (including the famous "Dollars" Trilogy) and countless TV westerns as well, sometimes I can't help but wonder if the Man with No Name we all became so enthralled with didn't eventually become William Munny. He certainly did in a figurative sense, Eastwood did indeed go from the one part in his earlier career to the other at his end, and looking at it all from this frame of mind it's an interesting thought that with Unforgiven, our legendary character finally arrives at the end of their journey.

The Warrior Spirit: Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian

Above: Some of the Conan the Barbarian artwork by Frank Frezetta, whose images immortalized the character

I can still remember the first time I watched "Conan the Barbarian" with my father as a young boy. The brutality and violence stayed with me long after the initial viewing, but more than anything else it was the story, the characters, and the powerful narrative which burrowed its way into my fuzzy memories. I've since gone on to read many of the comics, and even sought out the original works by Robert E. Howard trying to trace things back to their origins, wondering what it is about the character exactly which inspires me so much.

There's something about the whole tale that just feels very ancient and sweeping. Howard's incredible prose has much to do with this, but there are certain thematic elements at work as well which I've noticed more recently. The idea of a person of humble birth rising to the level of general and then king is indeed an inspirational one. Much of what gives the Conan stories their appeal is their mythological feel, and while this concept has been done many times before in countless fairytales with commoners becoming princes (or princesses) and living happily ever after, the story of Conan was one of strength, power, brutality, savagery. All of this came to lend the tale a quality of the oldest stories, a realistic hardness, and a world without rules. When Howard created Conan, the U.S. was in its Depression Era and a sort of bitter harshness reflecting that period pervades many of his other stories as well.

Those stories were originally published in the monthly pulp-magazines of the era with little bits and pieces of each published a few pages at a time in an issue. Every now and then, works that were written as pulp -mere, consumable entertainment for the masses- manage to acheive something higher: a sort of literary and artistic greatness that reaches the attention, appreciation, and analyzation of scholars as well as the common man. Sherlock Holmes provides a good example of another early, cheap magazine to do so; in more recent times, films like Star Wars; and manga like Naussicaa have done so as well. It's strange in a way to think that Conan's fate in the stories (man of lowborn birth becomes a king), mirrors that of the character's success and popularity in the mainstream, literally a common man's form entertainment that has risen to a higher level.

Above: Copy of the original, unabridged Robert E. Howard stories edited into a single book.

Howard was a proliflic writer and he did manage to turn out quite a bit of material on Conan, though this has now been absolutely dwarfed by the combined amount that has now been produced by other writers continuing to give his creation's life. Howard's life itself is another very interesting story as well, but as far as the character's history is concerned, the fact that its phenomenal success occurred after Howard's untimely death is what left publishers in a bind to release more Conan material. Thus free reign was given to others to create more stories and sate the appetites of fans. While there are certainly a lot of purists out there whose loyalty is to Howard, a person could also very well argue that one of the best things about Conan is all the additional work which has been produced over the years since his death that is much in keeping with the spirit of the original.

Yet another unusual parrellel the Conan character shares with many mythological stories throughout history, is that his saga has been passed on from one story teller to another. This is much the same as many trully ancient legends whose origins predate writing, which were passed on orally, and often embellished and added upon with each new storyteller. I remember (reading, ironically enough) a criticism by an oral storyteller on the written word and its effects on relating these stories. They seemed to feel that the written word was lifeless, like it was dead even though it was certainly more accurate than recounting things orally. While not an oral tale, Conan, like many other stories is still an ongoing one; it is continuously being retold differently and being added to as well by new writers and artists and even actors.

Getting back to the character and the story itself though, I once more find myself asking what it is about them I like. Perhaps more than anything else, it's the idea of the path he took in life: the road of the wanderer, the road of the warrior. There are certainly truths of a special sort to be discovered in such a way of life which one might not otherwise know: To learn about life by taking it from others, to find meaning in the struggles and conflicts even as they escalate in to the extremes of violence, to know many friends and lovers and watch them come and go in the thoroughfare of an eventful life, to celebrate in excessiveness and try to find the limits of joy and pleasure in such revelry, to live each day like it might be the last. There's something absolutely primal about the character and the stories that penetrates the soul of the reader and never relinquishes its grip.

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A quick excerpt from the story "The Queen of the Black Coast", my favorite of all of Conan's lines and an excellent example of Howard's poetic, mythical sounding prose:

"I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death... I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and the stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exutation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion, I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

-Conan the Barbarian
from, The Queen of the Black Coast
by Robert E. Howard-