I am a mechanical manAnd I do the best I canBecause I have my Family-- Charles Manson ("Mechanical Man")
Was it chance I saw Hugo (2011) and The Terminator (1984) in the same day and Halloween (1978) the next? Three tales of automatons... one amok and one clockwork and one clockwork amok, all about going into the past, as it were, to either repair or destroy icons, be they girls or auteurs.
First the first two: with amazing actors glassening up their eyes and amazing photographers capturing the play of light therein, you don't have much of a chance to stay unmoved on an emotional Sunday afternoon watching Hugo, but the clockwork momentum and awe and everything coming synchroniciously true was much more machine-like than the pre-CGI Terminator; in other words the science fiction film seems ancient and primitive while the nostalgic look back to the silent film era is futuristic slick --the true 'tech noir'.

The problems in Hugo lie with the heart-shaped key (as Sarah's answering machine puts it, "machines need love too"), indication someone convinced old Marty that we need a catchy symbol to recognize a film, and the Méliès 'brand' of that rocket-in-the-moon's-eye must be recognized as iconic (ever try to watch Trip to the Moon in one sitting? Sure it's imaginative but it's also boring - all static long shots), and the douche-chilled bouts of bouncily orchestrated whimsy in the cutaways to the budding romance between old dude and the old lady who sits at the cafe, --oui, monsieur, but she has, 'ow you say, the bitey dog?-- So he gets a dog of opposite gender for to woo said old lady. This contrasts in cakey layers with the plucky orphan film lover's Dickensian bouts with the evil stationmaster (Borat); and in the station works a flower girl (Emily Mortimer) who lost a brother the way the stationmaster lost his leg, and Méliès lost his negatives... in zee Great War! Ze Jews made shoes mit dem. It all must be recognized and underlined and sugar-flecked for easy patenting. Sure, I cried. But I felt cheap for doing so. I felt like someone was trying to be Ron Howard, and that's a bad thing when that someone is already Martin Scorsese.

Then there's The Terminator, a film that makes me want to rescue from obscurity that old James Cameron, not the Titanic control freak, the Pirhana 2 protege. I remember seeing the trailer for The Terminator at the Montgomeryville Drive-In (the main feature was C.H.U.D!) Shuffled in with about six other similar-looking indie sci fi-ish titles, The Terminator looked cheap, sleazy and we in the car, all Conan fans, loudly mourned how far Arnold had fallen since 1982. Focusing on the sad-eyed New Wave disco Tech Noir, with its tacky neon and Arnold dressed like the kind of guy who usually has Rutger Hauer or a naked screaming woman reflecting in his Gucci sunglasses.
Of course that's not the way it panned out; the reviews glowed and the box office soared, and my jaw dropped in pleased amazement. I remember seeing Terminator by myself up in Woodbridge to get away from my family Thanksgiving day in 1984 and lord knows I felt pretty wowed. The trouble was that it became too popular. Overnight Cameron became an auteur, the most recognized newly minted wunderkind to emerge from the exploitation genre since John Carpenter in 1978 with Halloween. And if you meshed Hugo and Halloween together, wouldn't you have The Terminator? Look at the resemblance of the 'shape' and the mechanical man in the below shots, so many similarities to with the Sarah's roommate and her boyfriend and PJ Soles and hers, right down to the getting killed going for a post-sex snack, the annoying rock headphone-wearing, the presumption--as with so many modern cell phone users--that being myopically absorbed makes you invulnerable, etc.
1. Automaton!: The idea of the automaton goes back to the 1890s (see below right) and was forgotten by the 1920s, but the automaton killer thing began again with Halloween (or maybe the 1940s Mummy sequels). Of course I'm talking about the slow moving but unstoppable variety, the shambling shapes who can't be killed yet are not alive, and are already slowed yet won't be stopped. And like The Terminator, Halloween was a scrappy independent low budget ($6 million; Halloween was $320K) thriller that wound up being iconic and inspiring many much bigger-budgeted imitations, all of which corresponds to the figure of the forgotten auteur and his lost gem 'automaton.' The filmmaker's own alienation from the actual machinations of projection, of the mechanism of screening and seeing the film with an audience (aside from the premiere), anxiety about the cross-country marketing and promotion, and the obsessive need to tinker, to keep taking things in and out of the final cut until the last possible moment. What does it all deconstruct to?
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"Draughtsman-Writer" by Henri Maillardet c. 1800 |
2. Women are the fathers of Horror - And now, gender controversy comes into the mix, because creating mechanical people and automaton killers is a man thing, his approximation of the birth giving experience. The mad scientist is the classic Apollonian archetype, attempting to replace the chthonic madness of woman's birth canal with living tissue over titanium endoskeleton... or big fat cogs. The man rejects reality and creates his own, either a shape, a tower, an automaton, a poem, a science fiction or horror film...
So wouldn't it follow that women, then, are perhaps the 'fathers' of these creations, the automatons, and therefore of all the best science fiction and horror films? Look over the roster and you see women right behind the scenes, letting the man take the director credit, and instead working as producer and writer, script supervisor, and sometimes star
Consider yet another Halloween-Terminator similarity: in both films the target of the monster is a normal, good-hearted girl who locates her true heroic self in the course of events, and both films transcend cheap boy's club sexuality and feel more assured about gender than a genre picture had seemed capable of prior to. And a look at the credits reveals why: women were actively involved, as writers and/or producers, in both productions: Debra Hill in Halloween and Gale Ann Hurd in Terminator, and though their contributions tend to go unrecognized in the rush to canonize directors like Carpenter and Cameron, looking at the later works of each lady you see a lot of the same wit and charm that made both these early films so successful, a wit and charm lacking in the director's work without them. For example Hill also worked with Carpenter on The Fog and Escape from New York and Hurd worked on Cameron's Terminator 2, Aliens, and The Abyss. These films all have a spark and wit and self-effacing deadpan soul that is lacking in later work by the men (unfertilized eggs, if you will). The trick of course is to find and then honor the woman creative voice who understands the masculine psyche without being contemptuous of it (the genius of this being Katheryn Bigelow, below w/ Oscars).
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Debra Hill, left |
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Blue Meanies: (from top) Terminator, Halloween, Hugo |
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Man Ray - Rayograph |
To avoid this we like to keep a respectful distance from the mechanism itself, to hide the wires behind the walls, but as we prepare for 2012 it becomes pretty terrifying to realize how hopelessly addicted we are to electricity. If it goes out, we will be totally lost. The Terminator and the mechanical man in Hugo are both examples of machines that don't use electricity - one just needs to be wound up, the other is nuclear-powered. Neither needs an outlet. They, alone, are truly independent.
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blood and gears (from top: Hugo, Modern Times, Terminator) |
The Terminator on the other hand is my experienced moment of childhood whimsy (well, teenagerdom - right at the time I was changing from comic book nerd to punk rocker)--and revisiting the film today it seems, at least on the surface, refreshingly trashy. With its pouffy hair, pastel clothing, Italian rock synthesizers, rear screen-projected stop motion animation, copious neon, pet iguana, and casual sex roommate getting killed off first, slasher-style, this pre-digital futuristic film is the 'real' wake-up to nostalgia that Hugo can only catch from a fleeting Parisian postcard, that is, unless Scorsese actually remembers going to films at the turn of the century, pinning that rocket-in-the-moon's-eye image on his bedroom door to piss off his a-mama. (Mama, why-a you cry? It's just a the moon-a?)
Because without that genuine connection, only an egoist would think he could deliver any real meaning... unless he admitted Méliès films lacked narrative thrust, and that--depending on how long it's been since we saw our favorite childhood films--our expectations are seldom met. But it's in not meeting expectations the actual magic occurs. It's the very gritty low budget tangibility, the tactile vividness, of the 1984 Terminator that somehow makes it seem more alive today than a CGI-sandblasted 2011 film like Hugo. No one knew at the time of Terminator's making that "I'll be back" would become such a catch phrase, to the point there was no way avoid its embarrassing repetition in the sequels.
The original Terminator is a movie free of that kind of presumption, it presumes it won't be loved any more than most sci-fi down-and-dirty action pics, which is why it's so indelible. Hugo all but tells us we have to let its magic symbols -- the rocket-in-the-moon's-eye, the heart key--into our hall of future golden memories, to make this an Xmas staple to get gooey with grandma over. But for me, even though I well-knew of Méliès beforehand, and I had his Trip to the Moon on super 8mm and we'd project it in our band's light show in 1986-9, what that moon makes me think of all these decades later is "Tonight" by Smashing Pumpkins, another recreation that doesn't even bother with the rocket in the moon's eye shot... to its credit. Instead, the Pumpkins take the look and feel of Méliès' pre-modernist world's fair whimsicality and then update it to rock, speeding up the imagery and adding deep emotional hooks.
Scorsese instead tries to slow us all down into Méliès' worship, to put the film in a shrine or museum and destroy its last link to the real world. If Hugo were truly to be worthy of the Scorsese canon it might end, for example, with the audience slowly realizing that the static long shots and endless flurries of spastic activity make Méliès' films kind of boring. The films only capture attention when used in a new context, a collage like the Pumpkins, or as an element of a multimedia fantastic plastic acid test with my own Mexican Mud Band, c. 1987. Scorsese instead captures the chaotic making of the films and does way better hand-tinting and covers up the dullness through just showing a long Academy-style montage of highlights from the found Méliès oeuvre.
Hugo's unthinking reverence for the great Méliès reminds me of the ending of Teacher's Pet: Clark Gable plays a scrappy self-taught city reporter going up against Doris Day as a journalism teacher whose father won a Pulitzer for his smalltown paper editorials. Love happens against their will, with Gable preferring to pick fights with Day's platonic pal Gig Young than make love. It's not until Gable finally reads Day's dad's old editorial clipping that he can proclaim "they stink" and come into his own as the confident uneducated lover of an educated gal. Call it reverence prior to investigation, or just bourgeois idolatry, but it takes him awhile to value his own opinion enough to make this claim, and until he does he's stranded behind this slab of journalistic integrity that he's expected to measure up to even though he's long since surpassed it. I wouldn't even bring it up if it wasn't Marty.... Marty, come back to the 'hood!
I'm not knocking Hugo; I cried and thought Asa Butterfield was eerily perfect, but while I normally love Moretz she seemed ungainly and confused... Super 8, which was released the same year as Hugo but not nominated for an Oscar, is nostalgic for the era that I too was a a young super 8mm filmmaker in (the Terminator era), but also proactive about actually making movies instead of revering the makers or cleaning the projector. There's no real salute to the creative energy of the moment in Hugo; it's all about preservation and repairmanship; it has to run all the way around the massive sets five times just to make us think the right hand doesn't know the left from a hole in the wall, through which it hopes to add some Amelie Rear-Window-Psycho insights without drawing attention to its own absurdly over-qualified self-awareness.
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Eyes of Laura Mars... or Supergirl? |
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Super 8 |
If that doesn't make a Hugo, I don't know what does, or a Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) in The Terminator, who is also in his way, an archivist, going back in time to preserve some imperiled damsel in mid-bloom. Don't we all hope some Hugo is going to dig up our little forgotten super 8mm films up when our time is ready?? Or some collector of my old hand-drawn comic books look me up in hushed awe?
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"A mistake is made." |
When will intelligent women stop writing about man's obsession with giving life to the dead, as if it's she who should be jealous?!
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Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley (Bride of Frankenstein) |
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ReplyDeleteA fascinating subject for a post, alternately insightful, lyrical and personal; I can think of no higher praise than to quote some of my favorite lines: "there's an unspoken bourgeois law that says ahead-of-their-time 'underground' artists must lie buried for not less than one and ideally not more than seven decades" and “This is what non-family man artists do instead of having real human children of our own: we make them out of clay and wire and words and weird machinations of mechanical whimsy, hoping some version of ourselves in a future generation will come along and figure out what we were trying to say to our unborn grandson” (this last is especially poignant as I had never considered the parallel between the two “sparks of creation”). I would point out that Brian Selznick's original book has more in common with a graphic novel, and none of the romantic interests of the film. Perhaps we have exhausted our well of creativity regarding film and story and hence the look to the past for inspiration, but in the case of "Hugo" isn't this a bit like sending a bunny out amongst two Rottweilers (deus ex machine wise)?
ReplyDeleteAnother interesting piece! Way to go.
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