In a previous entry, I noted the disconnect between Guillermo del Toro’s assertion that Pan’s Labyrinth is “not about sexual identity” and the movie’s marketing materials and design.
In this short audio commentary (part of Culture Snob’s Five Minutes series), we look at the toad scene in the movie to undercut the writer-director’s claim even more. Pan’s Labyrinth is very much about sexual identity, particularly a woman’s reproductive power over a man.
When we say that a movie is more style than substance, we typically mean it derisively.
Oliver Stone’s JFK has a ton of stuff — with the director’s cut running nearly three and a half hours — that was mistaken for its substance. But the meat of the movie is its style, because it’s the fuel that made the film so combustible.
The movie was greeted with contentious debate upon its release in 1991, but Stone’s critics and supporters completely missed the boat by arguing about facts, theories, and cover-ups. JFK works not as an argument but as a style of argument — sly and forceful in equal measure — and an exemplar of contemporary propaganda.
I suggested it, jokingly, when I announced the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon:
“Is E.T. really a sophisticated exploration of diaspora?”But the more I think of it, the more it makes sense.
There’s a maxim that says a movie teaches you how to watch it, but Peter Weir’s The Truman Show teaches you how to watch it the wrong way. And in its brazen audience cues, it hints that you should question your reaction to the film. This is a movie that was made for misunderstanding.
Why does nobody take the frogs seriously? Why does nobody question them?
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, the cataclysmic, apocalyptic rain of frogs seems — outside of this essay’s titular question, posed in the movie by nurse Phil Parma — casually accepted. Nobody else says: “That’s some fucked-up shit, those frogs.”
And I guess it’s a testament to Anderson’s script, direction, tone, pacing, and heavy foreshadowing that I’ve never heard anybody say anything along the lines of: “You know, I was with it right up until the frogs.” I led a small-group discussion on the movie last year, and nobody had any problem with the amphibians, and nobody ascribed a grand meaning to them. As Stanley Spector says in the library, with wide eyes but no curiosity: “This happens. This is something that happens.”
(By Doug Nelson, for the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon.)
I did something I’ve never done before. I’ve been an avid (rabid?) movie fan since I was too young to remember. Even today it’s a rare day that I don’t watch at least two movies, more on weekends. But I have never, never (my inner drama queen insists I repeat this for emphasis) watched a movie and immediately turned around and watched it again from the beginning, all in one sitting.
(By Doug Nelson, for the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon.)
Edward Zwick is a more-than-competent director who has made some capable movies, and some that I physically detest. This is largely the fault of his love of the “ideal worth dying for,” which is central to most of his movies. I, on the other hand, feel few ideals are worth even discussing, let alone dying for. “Idealist” isn’t a snide put-down without reason.
It’s important to misunderstand movies.
Put another way: If we limit ourselves to straightforward readings of plot or themes in film, we’re denying ourselves the multifaceted nature of the medium. As the most inclusive of all the arts, cinema comprises narrative storytelling, photography, acting, sound, music, speech, movement, costume, montage, and architecture. Even the dumbest, most-crass summer blockbuster is a dense, nearly infinite trove of material to explore and analyze.
When we consider a movie “misunderstood,” we’re not latching on to plot points or obvious themes or even subtext. We’re grabbing at those oddball moments that don’t seem to fit: isolated images, tonal incongruities, digressions in dialogue, striking juxtapositions, narrative detours that seem to dead-end, camera angles.
We’re detecting latent patterns, and we’re crafting interpretations that never cross the minds of most people. We do this with the assumption that every scene, every sound, and every frame might matter. The joy of building a case for an unconventional reading is mining those peripheral moments or sights and finding meaning in them. We are watching closely.
That’s the premise of the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon, which I announced last month and which runs through Sunday, May 20.
Follow this link to Misunderstood Blog-a-thon Central, and check back for updates daily.
Have you ever read or heard a discussion of a movie that made you think, They just don’t get it? Have you ever wondered, Am I the only person who saw the movie that way?
Culture Snob is hosting a forum for essays, arguments, and provocations on misunderstood movies. The blog-a-thon will run Wednesday, May 16, through Sunday, May 20, although I won’t turn my nose up at contributions that arrive before then.
The premise is that movies are marketed and evaluated coarsely and simplistically, and that they often contain a richness that’s never mined by critics and casual audiences. Films operate on many levels, and subtle motifs, buried symbols, and seemingly awkward filmmaking choices are sometimes the keys that unlock new meanings. Is E.T. really a sophisticated exploration of diaspora? If “Rosebud” is both a sled and a clitoris, what does Citizen Kane say about sexual development among boys? How does the story of Pinocchio inform The Fisher King?
Give me your rigorous readings, your idiosyncratic analysis, and your silly, half-baked ideas.
As much as I’ve wanted to write about Pan’s Labyrinth, it hasn’t happened, so you’ll have to wait until its DVD release for a proper essay. (I have lots of ideas, but the movie’s details have faded so much that anything I write would be either too vague or filled with errors. Even more than normal.)
For now, I’ll note that I was struck by something writer-director Guillermo del Toro said in an interview:
Question: “So often in fairy-tale analysis, there’s a tendency to read any story of a young girl as a psychosexual parable, but this film specifically doesn’t go that way.” Answer: “Not at all. I consciously avoided it, not out of prudishness — though I probably am prudish — but out of the same reason why I tried to avoid the myth of vampirism in Cronos through using the most completely unerotic window I could; I tried to approach it like an addiction. In Pan’s Labyrinth, I knew that the psychosexual angle was really tired; it felt very 1980s for me, and I felt this was a movie about a girl who was on the threshold of making a choice, where she could cease to be a girl, but it was not about sexual identity.”
Perhaps he should have told that to the movie’s designers and marketers. Take a look at these images and say with a straight face that they don’t bear a striking resemblance to female genitalia.
The easy, conventional reading of Lars von Trier’s Dogville casts it as an anti-American screed. Yet that interpretation exists almost completely outside of the movie itself. In other words, many of von Trier’s critics are full of shit.
A History of Violence is a bizarre, challenging film dressed up as a mainstream entertainment, a subversive work bordering on parody yet also deadly earnest. The movie confirms that David Cronenberg has grown into one of cinema’s most sophisticated, rigorous, and probing filmmakers.
Is it any wonder the dead are fed up and primed for revolt? Is it any surprise that writer-director George A. Romero is cheering them on in Land of the Dead? And is it so hard to see these zombies as a blunt allegory for racial minorities, the impoverished, the politically disenfranchised? On the final question, apparently so.
In Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan uses the superhero mythology to create an epic study of ethics, evil, fear, and justice. It’s a bracing, dark, provocative, and serious work that at last transcends the juvenile roots of the comic-book genre. It’s not just the best superhero movie ever made, but likely also the best mainstream film of 2005.
The conventional interpretation of American Beauty is wrong, and lauding or damning the movie based on it is a major mistake. Except for the prologue, American Beauty is a movie within a movie, not a straightforward narrative.
If you think the subject of Atom Egoyan’s Ararat is the genocide in 1915 of 1.5 million Armenians by Turks (as most critics seem to believe), you’ll find the movie a confused mess. But reducing the film to that summary is akin to saying the director’s The Sweet Hereafter was about a bus accident, or that his Exotica was about strippers.
That's Just Nitpicking, Isn't It?