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. 

          

Best of 2014: Jonathan Glazer on Under the Skin

Under the Skin begins in some kind of deeper blackness, less cinema space than outer space. Perhaps it’s the same unfriendly blackness to which our protagonist will deposit her victims. A projector’s beam cuts through, and we’re looking at what appears to be the formation of an eye, listening to what sounds like the uploading of verbal nuance in infinite variety, some ultra-fast-tracked language lessons. Sound and vision—it’s alive! Alive! Or nearly so.

The “it” in question is a femme fatale of the third kind, and it’s taken control of the luscious exterior of some sacrificial lass who looks just like Scarlett Johansson. It, now she, is a long cool black widow who’s come to Scotland from another galaxy to go cruising in a big black van for hapless lusty louts, luring them to some anonymous flat where they’ll sink into some fatal ink, their bodies bloating and bursting and their flesh harvested for unspecified purposes. She hasn’t been bred or programmed for pity or compassion, but as this mysterious, singularly arresting work of science fiction-meets-quasi-anthropological experiment makes its way, she will develop something called curiosity, one of the finer but also more precarious human attributes. It can lead to discovery and empathy, but also vulnerability and danger.

The sound of a baby’s cry on some rocky beach seems to be the tipping point in our story. From here on our anti-heroine goes native begins to wonder about the world, its culture, and, in one of the film’s most humorous moments, her own body. As Mica Levi’s music—one of the best scores I’ve heard in years, its strings like agitated bees—shape the film’s sound-world into an increasingly sensitive, tenser, almost febrile place, we come to see earthly life through extraterrestrial eyes: the utter weirdness of a space heater or a television or a discotheque or kissing, or this whole eating and drinking business. I can think of few films so alienating and yet so exquisitely alert to hypothetical first impressions of what for the rest of us is just drearily ordinary life.

Jonathan Glazer

Jonathan Glazer has spent his filmmaking career loving the alien. Both of his previous features, Sexy Beast (2000) and Birth (2004), turn on the arrival of a strange and threatening visitor. In the case of Under the Skin, inspired by the less cryptic Michel Faber novel of the same name, Glazer’s visitor moves from the role of antagonist to that of protagonist in what is nearly a first-person narrative. It’s a bold, creepy notion and, it would seem, an irresistible challenge. I met with Glazer during Under the Skin’s Canadian premiere at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival and asked him about his interest in assuming the quintessential Other’s point of view.

“Making choices about what it is that she sees never stopped being exciting to me, even as years of starts and stops passed,” Glazer explains. “What does she get to experience of this world and what will it mean to her as it accumulates? Our idea in shaping the story was always that if you could understand what she saw and, latterly, how she felt, then you would find your place in this unusual story. To find that osmotic growth for her was always the bottom line.”

The project was indeed a labour of long-term love, nearly nine years in the making, yet Glazer’s perfectionism regarding filmmaking craft—those comparisons to Stanley Kubrick are not merely decorative—and the development of the script, co-written by Glazer and Walter Campbell, is shrewdly thwarted by a modus operandi designed to dismantle directorial control. The scenes which find our anti-heroine looking for men were produced by having a wigged Johansson—who’s perfect in this role, by the way—actually drive around in a van outfitted with hidden cameras and actually try to pick up random dudes off the street. The surprise and arousal of these men are real. Repurposing techniques employed by Abbas Kiarostami in Ten (2002), directorial control during these sequences was limited to what Glazer could see remotely and what he could say to Johansson via a tiny earpiece. It may sound like a gimmick, but this approach gives the film a texture that it would have otherwise lacked.

“The writing was very rigorous,” Glazer explained. “We spent a lot of time turning over ideas until they felt absolutely essential. We needed sturdy planning to allow the improvisation to flourish. Without a plan, when you go off-course you can just get lost. I wanted the film to have a clear structure but also to just find itself sometimes—and it did. Scarlett turns left and the film’s going to down that street, she turns right and it’s going down that one. It was an extremely liberating way to work, driving around in that van with all the cameras shooting simultaneously, knowing that the scene hinged on her going over to someone and making a choice in the instant. Exhilarating. I loved it. I would still be in that van, given the choice.”

The influence of Kubrick on Glazer is obvious, but Under the Skin contains more distinctive and intriguing echoes of the films of Nicolas Roeg, not only because Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) works from a similar premise, but because the radical approach to editing and perspective in Roeg’s best films invite a balance of precision and spontaneity into storytelling that Glazer seems to be aspiring to. Of course, after spending so many years conceiving of and giving birth to Under the Skin, Glazer’s eyes glaze over when the subject of precedents or influences arise. So much goes into making a movie, the countless choices and compromises, it’s hardly like Glazer spent the whole time thinking, “What would Nic do?”

“Film is a language,” Glazer says with a calm objectivity that kind of mirrors that of his film’s protagonist. “You start with the letters, working through the alphabet, and then one by one you write a sentence, then a paragraph, and then you get to the point where you’re fluent enough to write poetry.”

Glazer’s particular poetry is layered in a way that’s native to cinema, austere on the surface but dense with sensations arrived at by the collision of artifice and reality, direction and observation, fruitful collaboration and auteurist vision, exposition and mystery. There is a long, dreamlike dissolve near the film’s unforgettable ending that matches nothing else in the rest of the film, yet it is haunting, and it feels absolutely critical to the protagonist’s journey. It is perhaps the strongest evidence in favour of Glazer’s unique creative gifts—other directors would not have found it. Under the Skin will surely frustrate some. It does have a way of getting under your skin. And it is a work of eerie and cruel beauty.

       

Time, stillness, returning, remaking

How do your memories, your visual memories, come to you, as stills or as moving pictures? I have a hunch about this, but I wonder if the answer is generation-dependent, photographs no longer holding the monopoly on our access to the past they once did. Still, there’s something poignant about the arrested moment, the sense of having stopped time. It’s surely one of several reasons why La Jetée (1962), despite being a featurette (it’s only 28 minutes long), remains the mysterious French filmmaker Chris Marker’s most famous movie. Despite being a featurette, yes, and maybe even despite not exactly being a movie. Comprised of still photographs, voice-over narration, music and soundscapes, La Jetée calls itself a photo-roman. It is something between cinema, comic books, photo albums, radio drama and storytelling. And it’s a perfect marriage of form and content, this “story of a man marked by an image of his childhood,” an image of someone dying on the pier at Orly Airport, an image that is actually two images: he also remembers a woman’s lovely face. The man is one of a small number of survivors of World War III, forced to live underground due to poisonous levels of radiation on the planet’s surface. Because his fixation on this childhood image is so acute, so powerful, some rather sinister scientists select the man for an experiment in time travel, a way “to call past and future to the rescue of the present.”

Marker was inspired in part by Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and the homage made explicit by a scene in which the man and a woman, just like Scotty and Madeleine, examine the rings in an old tree as a way to read time. Like Vertigo, La Jetée is about projection and morbid nostalgia, about the desire to fashion the current object of one’s affection into a copy of someone long-lost—and in both films, the current object of affection and the long-lost love are the same person. The woman is played by Hélène Chatelain, an actress about whom I know little, but whose screen presence, whose captivating ability to transmit thought and emotion in just a handful of still images, is absolutely essential to the haunting power of La Jetée. There is a sequence, which could be memory or dream, in which the man remembers watching the woman sleep, the images of her slumbering head draped in light shadows, dissolving one into the other until that astonishing moment when this photo-roman, ever so fleetingly, becomes motion picture.

from Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968)

So this singular little masterpiece of French cinema is a genre film, a work of science fiction—another reason to love it. It could be a Philip K. Dick story. And it inevitably became a major influence on subsequent films, most obviously 12 Monkeys (1995), which Edmonton's Metro Cinema will be screening as a double-feature with La Jetée on May 24th, and which is essentially a big-budget, star-studded, elaborately designed extrapolation of La Jetée, though there are many, many others. (An eerie coincidence: between watching La Jetée and 12 Monkeys on DVD at home, I went out to a screening of Je t’aime, Je t’aime, Alain Resnais’ rarely seen 1968 film, which I bought a ticket to for no other reason than it’s being a rarely seen Resnais. I knew absolutely nothing about it. But my jaw dropped when about ten minutes in I realized it was about a guy haunted by an event from his past who’s selected by a group of scientists for an experiment in time travel! Also, for the record, it is deeply creepy, intermittently baffling, and very, very good.)

Maybe coming right off of the narrative elegance and emotional complexity of Chris Marker (and Alain Resnais) spoiled me. Maybe I’ll just never completely get the ostensible appeal of Terry Gilliam’s trademark cartooniness, his Dutch angles and bulbous long-lens close-ups. (This cartooniness strikes me as much more controlled and effective in what’s widely accepted as Gilliam’s masterpiece, 1985’s Brazil.) Maybe, no matter how much I’ve grudgingly come to admire his work in recent years, I’ll never stop feeling annoyed when Brad Pitt acts “crazy” and surrenders to that fidgety finger flinging he does when he seems to not know what else to do. (And yes, Pitt was nominated for an Oscar for this.) Maybe all of the above and other biases dulled my experience, but 12 Monkeys left me underwhelmed. The film utilizes every essential aspect of La Jetée’s story, yet seems to have misplaced that story’s soul.

That paucity of soul certainly can’t be blamed on any lack of woundedness being conveyed by Bruce Willis, in the role that seems to define his battered and bruised, vulnerable macho man persona. (He actually gets pretty hysterical at points.) And it’s hardly as though there’s any lack of imaginative production design: those cavernous, at times seemingly infinite interiors; the frost-encrusted post-apocalyptic surface ruins overrun by wildlife (who apparently aren’t affected by radiation?); the subterranean cages in vertical rows that make it look like living in the future will be like being trapped in a mine for your entire life. (Though all of these locations are weirdly over-lit, or just ugly-lit.) Perhaps it’s simply that, for all its 129 minutes of impressive spectacle, 12 Monkeys never takes the time to stop time, to suspend us in a single moment-image like the one that marks the man. Perhaps the only way to travel through time is to learn how to be truly still. 

                               

Head in the cloud

One of the things that irked me about Spike Jonze’s Her was its failure to consider any number of consequences generated by its eerily close-to-reality science fiction premise. By contrast, Transcendence, which shares a key narrative element with Her—its protagonist’s beloved is an omnipresent immaterial being who exists solely via the supernatural realm known as the Internet—bends over backward to consider all sorts of grandiose consequences of living in a world where such love is possible. The problem is that consider is all Transcendence does. The film, written by Jack Paglen, checks off a lot of big ideas that we should probably all be thinking about, but is ultimately just as soft-headed as Her, while bearing little of that film’s distinctions. Her sacrificed coherence in favour of some resonant knowingness about the nature of love and possession. Transcendence sacrifices coherence for the veneer of intellectual and/or spiritual heft—and for a nonsensical third act full of big-ass explosions and sundry special effects.

The portentously named Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Deep), a genius in the realm of artificial intelligence, gets shot by radical anti-AI activists. At first it seems he’s going to be okay, but then a doctor with an astonishingly poor bedside manner informs him that the bullet was laced with isotopes and he’s going to die from radiation poisoning in a matter of weeks. A devastatingly brief window of time, but just enough time for Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), Will’s partner in love and science, to encode Will’s memories, ideas, emotions—in short, his consciousness—and upload the whole package into PINN, or Physically Independent Neural Network, the Casters’ revolutionary AI program. So Will’s flesh perishes, but his mind, or some facsimile, lives on in the cloud. He’s everywhere, all the time, and, it seems, all-powerful. He makes a bunch of money fast, and sets up Evelyn with an entire desert town, and, apparently, all its inhabitants, to continue their research, which, needless to say, has the capacity to take over the world!

Evelyn is our Dr. Frankenstein, her hubris driven equally by grief and scientific vision, her fundamental innocence underlined by the fact that she wears Keds with every outfit. Will is her disembodied monster, HAL 9000 with a handsome synthetic visage, a novel spin on the abusive, controlling spouse, Big Brother as bad husband. There are other characters to complicate and crowd Transcendence: a soundly sceptical neurobiologist pal (Paul Bettany) who conspicuously wears a cross around his neck, a wise old former colleague (Morgan Freeman), and a fed (Cillian Murphy) who keeps a watchful eye on the Casters’ mad science, which could one day prove useful to the Department of Defence.

The first hour is very intriguing, if poorly paced—so many scenes are a few lines too long, and there’s a great deal of padding—but then the script devolves into ungovernable plottiness. First-time director Wally Pfister, already famous as Christopher Nolan’s regular cinematographer, opts to emphasize spectacle, whether it be clouds of infectious nano-dirt reaching up out of the earth or a diamond-like drop of dew sliding off a sunflower in slow-motion, the former being an empty conceit designed solely to look freaky and thrilling, the latter being an empty stab at profundity.