Seeing Belief: a visual aid to a brilliant book

There’s a moment in Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Disbelief when Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigate journalist who authored Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Disbelief, explains, “My goal wasn’t to write an exposé. It was simply to understand Scientology, to understand what people get out of it, you know, why do they go into it in the first place.” That’s pretty much the difference between Gibney and Wright, between this new HBO documentary and Wright’s masterfully calibrated, sensitive and expansive 2013 book: Gibney’s in it for the exposé. His approach is far more blunt than Wright’s. Which, it turns out, is just fine, because the documentary, though its title is inexplicably foreshortened, forms a welcome audio-visual aid to the book, and because, frankly, there is sooooo much to expose. 

Mr. Hubbard

Where to begin? I’d suggest you begin with the book, of course, which wasn’t released in Canada (I ordered mine from the US), but perhaps the reverse will work just as well: think of the doc as a teaser. The basic trajectory of doc and book are in any case the same, using the highly publicized 2011 resignation of Canadian filmmaker Paul Haggis from the Church of Scientology as a framing device, tracing the batshit crazy life of galactically prolific science fiction writer and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and examining the transformation Scientology undertook when Hubbard died and an equally crazy if less creepily charismatic man named David Miscavige took the celestial reigns and conquered the Internal Revenue Service, who has been demanding millions from Scientology and finally had to cry uncle when Scientology finally managed to get classified as a religion, thus apprehending their financial holy grail: tax exemption! Along the way we hear testimonies from various former Scientologists, such as actor Jason Beghe, John Travolta’s liaison Sylvia “Spanky” Taylor, and Mark Rathbun and Mike Rinder, who both worked their way to Scientology’s upper echelons. They confirm every litigious thing you’ve ever heard about Scientology, the kidnapping and child labour, the coercion and torture, the billion-year contracts and other elements of the Church’s risible mythos. Along the way we also, through archival footage, meet a gentleman by the name of Tom Cruise, the all-powerful evil robot with the eerily strained laughter, who, after shedding his infidel spouse Nicole Kidman, became Scientology’s favourite son and reaped all the benefits. 

Mr. Haggis

Gibney makes several problematic choices in how he assembles the material, a fairly obvious example is the way he’ll make a hard cut from Miscavige giving a dumb-sounding speech at some expensively tacky Scientology event to an audience bursting into applause, creating a relationship between what’s said and its response that may not represent what really happened. Gibney focuses almost exclusively on the most sensationalistic incidents reported in Wright’s book—though there are so many jaw-dropping stories to choose from that those hungry for dirt will still find their appetites sated should they read it. You won’t leave Going Clear feeling any lack of outrage, but you may, alas, feel slighted with regards to fascination. Gibney shows less interest in the allure of Scientology holds for so many perfectly intelligent, credible, ambitious people, something Wright illuminated beautifully and respectfully. In short: see Going Clear, but also read Going Clear. There’s a far more complex—if no less damning—story to be found here. 

          

The condemned united

The opening newsreel footage tells of an epidemic of prison riots across the U.S., and contains a stern message from Prison Association spokesman Richard A. McGee about the lamentable conditions that will continue to prompt such riots if left unchanged. Opening a film with real-life reportage was not uncommon in crime films of the period, but Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) was more grounded in reality than most: producer Walter Wanger had recently done time for shooting Jennings Lang, who had been having an affair with Wanger’s wife, the actress Joan Bennett. Wanger received a light sentence, but those four months were more than enough to make him understand that the penal system was in appalling shape. Overcrowding, underfunding and the placement of highly dangerous, mentally ill convicts in with regular offenders were chief among the problems Wanger gained first-hand knowledge of, though it’s the unfair placement of prisoners in solitary confinement, and the inhumane treatment received while there, that prompts the titular riot in this bleak, bracing, sometimes savage politically driven actioner. In the intervening 60 years things have only gotten worse. The same day that Riot comes out on DVD and BD from Criterion, PBS will broadcast a new documentary entitled Solitary Nation, which concerns the deep trauma suffered from long-term placement in solitary, and the consequences for everyone, both inside and out.

Riot was directed by Don Siegel, a specialist in clean, male-centred, brutal thrillers, like The Big Steal (1949), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Lineup (1958) and, most famously, Dirty Harry (1971). It was shot in Folsom Prison, cast with relative unknowns, kept on the cheap, though it doesn’t look it. The scenes of violence are framed and edited in such a way that nothing is lingered over yet everything looks like it really, really hurts. There’s hardly what you could call a hero in the film, but Dunn (Neville Brand), the convict who leads the riot and announces the prisoners demands—which just happen to match those repeatedly filed by the prison’s warden—is an extremely compelling protagonist, not a good guy, but a guy giving a reasonably intelligent voice to a good cause, while the warden (the wonderful character actor Emile Meyer) is a weary, hardboiled yet sympathetic figure caught between a chaotic mutiny led by sociopaths and a greater authority willing to resort to violence, murder and trickery to restore an unsustainable veneer of order.

It all works best when most of the artifice is stripped down to a minimum. Herschel Burke Gilbert’s martial score is exciting, but it also gets in the way of what makes Siegel’s work tick. For all its chaos, Riot in Cell Block 11 is in a sense a procedural, showing us step-by-step how a riot is staged, maintained, and finally undone. It is thus never more riveting when simply showing us action unimpeded by style or flash. The convicts clamouring for better treatment in this film are men with almost nothing left to lose—“We’re rotting to death,” declares Dunn—men whose daily existence has been reduced to numbing austerity. Riot does their story justice when it too feels austere, numb, and scarily go-for-broke.

             

The strangeness at the top of the world

When you ascend past Camp Four you enter something they call the Death Zone. It is not named that for nothing. After 8,000 feet every cell in your body is reeling from oxygen deprivation. Aside from the numerous physical difficulties this brings, this means that logical decisions become increasingly difficult to make. You are in a sense inebriated—you’ve gotten very, very, very high. That high comes with thrills of the sort you may never again come across. As is often the case, the hardest part is coming down.

Director Nick Ryan’s The Summit is a documentary chronicling an attempt made by representatives of various countries in August of 2008 to make it to the top of K2, the world’s second highest peak, but the one more serious climbers concentrate on, rather than Everest, which I guess is too much the terrain of motivational speakers for the sort of hardcore maniacs we find in this film. Am I out of turn calling Ryan’s subjects maniacs? Perhaps, but consider the fact that one in four climbers dies trying to get to the top of K2 and you might start to wonder about their sanity, even before they hit the Death Zone. Those odds actually turned out to be far too optimistic for the crowd of 2008: 18 climbers approached the summit; 11 did not make it back alive.

To nitpick Ryan’s approach to The Summit: the portent is laid on a little thick at times, there are a few too many title cards providing information someone could have just told or showed us, and the recreations seem a little superfluous and confusing when there’s so much excellent real footage to work with. But all that aside, The Summit is pretty riveting. The testimonies are engaging and ultimately very moving; the images of the Himalayas are consistently astonishing, a glorious landscape out of science fiction, Norse mythology, or illustrated religious pamphlets; the narrative is mostly very well organized, with the emphasis wisely not on psychology but on story, most of all on the strangeness of this story, on how everything is stranger when you’re up above the entire world, apart from it, immersed in airless beauty and imminent doom. So much of what transpired during the 2008 expedition is, in the end, a mystery. Even to those who survived. Why did some of the climbers do what they did when what they did would so surely lead to their demise? As one of Ryan’s subjects puts it, “Only the mountain knows.” 

                    

The colour of no money

A series of sea changes in class position have made Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) blue. Or is her rattled state symptomatic of something more fundamentally flawed in her psyche? Maybe it’s just early dementia? We see her nattering away to a fellow passenger in first-class; traumatized and narcissistic, she has a serious handicap when it comes to over-sharing. But Jasmine needs to share—the bad thoughts creep up when she’s all alone—and it seems anyone will do. She was not so long ago filthy rich. By the rather devastating end of Blue Jasmine, she’s mostly just filthy.

This is the work of the serious Woody, which is a good Woody in that seriousness can bring out a focus and discernment sometimes lacking in Allen’s recent comedies. Woody on the economy might sound like a dubious tag, but Blue Jasmine is pretty smart, if cynical by default, about the pitfalls of privilege and the ways that desires for class ascension corrupt everyone. As the film begins, Jasmine arrives in San Francisco. She’s hopeless, penniless and needs to crash at the modest home of her cashier sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins). Jasmine is self-absorbed and snobby, and Ginger seems set up as her salt-of-the-earth, pure-hearted foil, but Allen isn’t one to sentimentalize any class, so as the plot thickens Ginger will also spy an opportunity to better herself, however slightly, in the arms of a much classier man than her current beau, Chili (Bobby Cannavale), and stoops to deception—both of Chili and herself—to accelerate the new romance. The Ginger subplot may seem predictable, but it also feels alive, thanks in part to the nuance and urgency brought to it by Hawkins and Cannavale, and by Andrew Dice Clay giving a shockingly strong performance, and Louis C.K., who’s wonderful, not emphatically funny but a welcome breath of fresh air at the film’s musty midpoint. He’s one of those actors who should be working with Allen as much as possible.

As is Alec Baldwin, very funny in an incoherent role in To Rome With Love and very slimy here as Hal, Jasmine’s ex, a Bernie Madoff-type whose imprisonment for running a Ponzi scheme leaves Jasmine—who may or may not have been onto him—broke and humiliated. “I sign everything,” Jasmine claims. “I’m very trusting.” Hal was a millionaire, a philanthropist and serial philanderer—we see him chatting up a nipply confection at what seems like an otherwise deadly boring party full of rich old people during one of Blue Jasmine’s many flashbacks. The line separating past and present in this film is diaphanous. For Jasmine, as her confusion burgeons, it occasionally dissolves altogether. At times the camera itself (Vicky Christina Barcelona’s Javier Aguirresarobe returns as Allen’s cinematographer) seems to float, disembodied, in time with Jasmine’s spells of dislocation. That these fugues finally work as well as they do are a testament to Blanchett’s daringness, collaborative intuition and clarity of choices. Amazingly, Allen claims to have not seen her in Liv Ullman’s 2009 production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—amazing because Blanche Dubois is so obviously a template for Jasmine, whose mind keeps escaping to some idealized past. She too is always relying on the kindness of strangers, and is usually lying as a way of soliciting that kindness—a recipe for small, personal tragedies of the sort that Allen, however old-fashioned his sensibility may remain, is still very good at evoking. 

                   

Let's go crazy

Does love actually make you crazy, or is it really the other way around? Mental illness has been the psychic engine of some more convincing modern romantic comedies—see Punch-Drunk Love (2002)—perhaps because it places an obstacle between lovers and coital consummation where, in a post-sexual revolution universe, there might otherwise not be. That’s certainly the case with the tweaking twosome in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, in which a manic schoolteacher (Bradley Cooper) newly released from a state hospital—where he was placed after nearly beating his wife’s lover to death— meets a young cop’s widow (Jennifer Lawrence) with impulse control issues who’s been flirting with nymphomania. He’s adopted a program of blind optimism and is obsessed with reuniting with his estranged spouse; she’s focusing her ferocious energies on preparing for a dance contest. Given that’s he the subject of a restraining order, he needs a secret marriage-mending go-between; given that the sort of dance she has in mind generally works better with two people, she needs a partner. So they make a deal, go out on Halloween Raisin Bran-and-tea dates, crazy shit happens, more crazy people enter the picture, bumpity-bum-bum, da-ta-da-ta-da. 

But when I say “crazy,” I don’t mean crazy-crazy, like real-life crazy, but rather that special we’re-in-a-crazy-movie kind of crazy that allows for ids to run rabid in the name of controlled comic chaos; not the sort of crazy that leads to tragedy, despair or, in the case of John Cassavetes’ movies, that most fragile, unnerving, eerily exhilarating sort of equilibrium. The characters in Silver Linings Playbook, based on Matthew Quick’s eponymous novel, are only as crazy as they need to be to keep the story’s central conceits afloat for the film’s duration; as we near resolution, the craziness is fully contained. Near the top of the film our protagonist chucks a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls through a window—not out, but through it—from frenzied disgust for its scandalizing, downbeat finale. He demands happy endings from his stories, and we know that come hell or high water—or in this case, flagrant, flailing dance floor amateurism and football triumph—he’s going to get one. So yes, under its batshit guise of high neurosis, this is deceptively close to being a perfectly conventional rom-com. 

And so what? The big picture feels a bit pedestrian, but scene-by-scene Silver Linings Playbook is giddily inspired. Cooper’s nothing if not committed, a little scary, a lot talky, running around his parents neighbourhood with a trash bag over his torso so he can sweat better. Lawrence brings nothing but wild conviction and drive to her secondary role. She’s got feral Medusa stares, is seductive in a way that makes you want to remove sharp objects from the house when she comes over for dinner. And the supporting cast populates Russell’s suburban Philadelphia milieu with memorable, distinctive neuroses of their own, most especially Robert De Niro, terrific as Cooper’s OCD bookie dad, who’s insanely superstitious about sports. Russell’s movies run on anxiety, urgency and carefully tuned babble, and everyone gets some great dialogue. The final scenes kind of blow it, the dance-off most of all, since it keeps cutting away to reaction shots to remind us how we’re supposed to feel. But whatever, if you don’t have a good time with Silver Linings Playbook, you’re nuts. 

Shake, rattle and roll against the dying of the light

It’s 2002, and somewhere in Mud Creek, East Texas, in a backwoods nursing home called Shady Rest, a place of long, echoing, ominous corridors and giggly kleptomaniacs, Elvis Presley (Bruce Campbell) wakes up, and the first thing he sees is an old man violently expiring in the bed next to his. Now Elvis needs a walker to get anywhere and big-ass glasses to see anything. There have been two presidential campaigns since he last had a hard-on, and a tumour has erupted on the end of his penis. He has intoxicating flashbacks of performing under a hail of projectile panties. But is this the real Elvis? The Shady staff seem to think his name is Sebastian Haff (which sounds an awful lot like “Half”). Elvis claims to have swapped places with the real Haff, an Elvis impersonator, at some point in the 1970s, when he was tired of fame and melancholic about his failing marriage. Now admittedly, his story sounds a little fishy—until our Elvis meets another Shady Rest resident, an elderly black man (the late Osssie Davis) who says he’s John F. Kennedy. In this world, fishiness is a matter of degrees. 

And Elvis and JFK aren’t the only people in Bubba Ho-Tep who are supposed to be dead; there’s also a reincarnated Egyptian mummy, with whom our elderly and infirm duo will eventually do battle in a wonderfully anti-climactic climax. I say anticlimactic simply because this comedy with horror trappings only seems like it’s some sort of cheeky, po-mo monster mash-up showdown. The genius of screenwriter/director Don Coscarelli’s adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale’s eponymous novella lies in its use of pop-culture, the absurd and the fantastical to craft a relentlessly inventive fable that could finally be about anyone suffering the anxieties of getting old: the loneliness, the invisibility, the mounting physical ailments, the disintegration of your credibility, the erosion of all your past glories, the depletion of your sex life, and the fear of having your soul slowly sucked out of you, leaving only a tired, wrinkled shell of a human being behind. 

Campbell, beloved star of the Evil Dead films and Army of Darkness, has stated that the script for Bubba Ho-Tep was the weirdest things he’d ever read—and that’s saying something. Indeed, one of the pleasures of experiencing this film, which became an almost instant cult classic upon its debut ten years ago, is simply reeling from the accumulation of batshit plot interjections. In this way Bubba Ho-Tep shares something with the Coen Brothers at their most free-form, ie: The Big Lebowski. Of course, Coscarelli, whose credits include The Beastmaster and the Phantasm series, doesn’t exude anything like the Coens’ high standard of craftsmanship, but I don’t think Bubba would be as charismatic if he did. This film is singularly shaggy and silly in the most inspired sense of the word. It’s a story about facing death with dignity, trying to maintain one’s integrity in the face of time’s potentially humiliating effects, and it’s about good old-fashioned showmanship. Whether our Elvis is the real thing or a fake, he’s convincing in all the important ways. 

Every mind a battlefield

A lot of guys came back from the war a little messed up, but what messed up Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) must have started long before he went to sea. He father died from drink and his mother wound up institutionalized; now Freddie boozes with an uncommon passion for oblivion and responds to the world with equal parts naïveté and rage. In early scenes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master we see Freddie drain something out of a torpedo and a little later get creative with darkroom fluids. He’s poisoning himself—and others—for shits and giggles. He can make some kind of barely digestible homebrew out of just about anything; this is one of Freddie’s genuine talents, the other being portrait photography, though he loses his first postwar department store job when he gets into a fight with a customer for no apparent reason, other than the acceleration of the inevitable. The Master is, among other things, a portrait of Freddie; so much of this picture is made of portraits, haunting images of eyes and mouths, heads and shoulders, necklines and hairlines, captured by cinematographer Mihai Malaimare in gorgeous, dizzyingly detail-saturated 65mm images, that at times mirror the softening gaze of its deranged central character, that render every wrinkle, blink and lip-tremble as dramatically as the movement of armies across a battlefield. Indeed, faces, and the minds behind the faces, are battlefields upon which wills are bent and self-realization is a merciless, violent endeavour.

Always in a gorilla hunch and cradling his injured kidneys, Freddie moves from job to job, place to place. He may have killed a man who looked like his father. He’ll never know for sure; he ran from the scene. So he shambles; he is a shambles. Until, in 1950, he meets Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), author, self-declared scientist, what we now call a New Age guru, a fictional figure many observers have pegged as a stand-in for Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Freddie stows away on the borrowed yacht on which Dodd is marrying off his daughter, and Freddie is immediately taken under Master’s wing. Freddie and Dodd recognize each other as the unlikeliest of kindred spirits (literally; they’re sure they met in a another life), chosen father and chosen son, another of Anderson’s surrogate families (see Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, et cetera; families sprout like fungus on Anderson’s broad canvases). Dodd likes Freddie’s hooch and psychic malleability; Freddie likes Dodd’s paternal attention and fraternal, vaguely (or not so vaguely) homoerotic affection and apparent belief in his untapped potential. Freddie submits himself to “processing,” to answering Dodd’s standardized questions, many of them bringing up painful memories, a bastard hybrid of psychoanalysis and past life-regression hypnosis. (This scene, the two men below deck, a few swigs of hi-test swill already in their bellies, with only a microphone between them, with the focus so shallow that all there ever is on screen is one furiously alive face, just the surface of a face, is itself one of the most riveting pieces of cinema you’ll see this year, I promise.) Central to Dodd’s theories is the idea that man is not an animal, but Freddie is about as animal as any man can get. He’s also devoted to Dodd, at least until he can’t take it anymore, or until he feels abandoned. These men need each other, and this dark, fluid and captivating film is about the intensity and eventual collapse of their codependency.  

There’s so much to The Master, its fusion of classicism and narrative idiosyncrasies ,some akin to literature than cinema per se; its very noir protagonist (imagine Robert Ryan in the Nicolas Ray version); its shifts in rhythm, its silences and now-cantering, now-shimmering music, from Radiohead’s spindly genius Johnny Greenwood; its commentaries on religion, state and commerce; its slips into reverie (the moment when every women becomes naked, when phones are brought to you while sleeping in movie houses); its sensual beauty and monumental sadness; its performances, perhaps most of all: Hoffman’s mesmerizing, Wellesian convergence of hysteria and colossal confidence; Amy Adams’ pedagogical tones and velvet-iron control as Dodd’s wife, the master behind the master; and Phoenix’s go-for-broke yet unnervingly real embracing of alcoholic derangement, childish longings, internal bleeding, and broken masculinity. (A key visual motif: the image of Naval Officer Freddie on some beach in the Pacific, snuggling up to a woman sculpted from sand, all generous breasts and spread-apart legs, Freddie’s feminine ideal—until the tide sweeps her away. Watch his fellow officers looks of growing discomfort as Freddie engages in too elaborate, protracted play-sex with her. ) The film will draw different ratios of unease and awe in different viewers, but I feel no reservations about called The Master a masterpiece, with all the provocations and points of contention that term implies.