Over on AC: 9 Directors Who Can Replace David Lynch on “Twin Peaks”

This sort of article is often treated as a quick toss-off for writers. That’s always annoyed me. A critic will name the first few directors that pop into their head regardless of how appropriate they are.

To me, it’s an opportunity to introduce to you directors you may not know yet. Sure, you’ll recognize Darren Aronofsky and David Cronenberg, but other names I suggest might not be as familiar.

An article like this should end up with more names off the list than make it on. It shouldn’t be word association with director’s names. So here’s my take on who should replace David Lynch now that he’s exited Twin Peaks. Click over for my article on Article Cats. I think you’ll be surprised at some of my suggestions:

9 Directors Who Can Replace David Lynch on “Twin Peaks”

– Gabe

Focus On: Photo Battle

by Gabriel Valdez

Photo Battle is my new favorite blog. Two photographers enter, one photographer leaves.

Every week, two photographers are given a single-word theme – empty, shadow, two, fear – and submit three photos centered on that theme. Readers vote for their favorite set. Photographers will battle each other a few times and…past that, I’m not sure of the rules. Tourney, round robin, single-elimination, I don’t think it matters.

What’s exciting is staring at two evocative photo sets every week and letting your mind wander. While I don’t typically like creating artistic battles where there aren’t any, I tend to think Photo Battle‘s purpose is more in sharing art with a growing community. Every week, fans of one artist are exposed to another they may not have heard about.

I was tipped off to this by the brilliant Laura Zalenga, a German photographer who uses photo manipulation to create clever, fairy tale imagery. The photo at the top of this article is one of her submissions for the “Shadow” battle, in which she faced off against Aliza Razell, a Scotland-based photographer whose imagery evokes David Lynch and Jonathan Glazer by way of Jim Henson and Waterhouse.

Photo Battle is a phenomenal way of featuring photographers and introducing new artists. It’s one of the most enjoyable blogs I’ve discovered.

“Tropico” — Lana Del Rey’s Old Testament, part one

by Cleopatra Parnell, Vanessa Tottle, and Gabriel Valdez

A few days ago, three writers sat down on Skype and had a conversation about Lana Del Rey’s Tropico, a 27-minute musical film that riffs on the Bible. Watch Tropico on YouTube here. Here’s what those writers had to say:

Gabe: The Daily Beast called this “so bad it might be good.” Billboard called it “daring…a work of overflowing, era-traversing passion.” What three words would you use to describe it?

Vanessa: Lots of tits.

Gabe: Is that really how you want to start the article?

Vanessa: Yes.

Gabe: Using more than three words?

Vanessa: It’s pretentious. It’s not my kind of movie. It gave me epilepsy. But it was pretty brilliant anyway. I love the idea of John Wayne as God.

Gabe: To clarify for readers, Tropico opens with John Wayne creating the universe. He’s accompanied by Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, and a unicorn. Lana Del Rey plays Eve, and model Shaun Ross is Adam.

Cleopatra: It uses Andy Warhol’s idea of celebrity replacing God.

Vanessa: Regurgitated images we place onto God. How Jesus looks like Kenny Loggins for Americans. If the real Jesus walked into an airport, the TSA would strip-search him.

Gabe: Do you mean John Wayne is a stand-in for God, or that for Lana Del Rey’s character, he is God? I think he represents a set of values that were important in Del Rey’s cultural upbringing. And he stands in for how any celebrity – Kardashian, Bieber, LeBron – becomes the moral standard we start using to make decisions.

Vanessa: Is there a difference? If we’re raised by the TV and YouTube, and “Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children,” the result is that God or whatever you believe in for a higher power gets replaced by celebrity.

Gabe: Is that a Crow reference? “Mother is the name for God…”

Vanessa: Thackeray.

Cleopatra: You don’t mean just for image. Like it assimilates the whole meaning.

Vanessa: Religious meaning? That’s what I’m saying – there’s no daylight. That’s what she’s saying. You posted a few days ago about Lana Del Rey being some weird dark mirror for the American dream.

Gabe: The Richard Marshall article. Her persona for Born to Die [her first album] is basically a ghost that’s constantly haunting her, sort of replacing her personality, yeah. It’s a perfect article. It’s perfect.

Vanessa: That’s the same ghost that’s replacing all our personalities. We get…we get reflected, a reflection of ourselves, and especially with Facebook and Twitter and all these things we can use to portray an image of ourselves that’s exaggerated-

Gabe: That’s more perfect and more celebritized, yeah. I mean, do you think, in that way, we’re trying to pose ourselves as gods? Celebrity becomes God, then if we become celebrity, we become God-

Vanessa: Not for ourselves. Maybe for ourselves, but mostly for someone else. It’s an emulation of God. It’s what we’re taught. You airbrush the crap out of these beautiful people for the purpose of making them into Gods, and if we’re supposed to emulate our religious icons, and our religion is celebrity, then we need to be beautiful, too.

Cleopatra: That takes sexism to a whole other level. I just got depressed.

Gabe: So it’s religiously reinforced for celebrity and follower, and our Church is Facebook and our apostles are TMZ?

Cleopatra: Facebook’s more like Babel.

Gabe: I know you want to talk about the bikini, but to go back to Richard Marshall for a minute – he compares Born to Die to Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive. Those are avant garde films by David Lynch, in which – theoretically, the main characters are stuck in limbos. OK, if our religion is celebrity and our form of worship is social networking and seeking to celebritize ourselves, does Born to Die say that we’re stuck in a limbo pursuing the American Dream, seeking to become gods?

Vanessa: Absolutely.

Cleopatra: An image that isn’t there. I don’t see how you could say anything else.

Gabe: The leaf bikini.

Vanessa: The leaf bikini. The fucking leaf bikini is everything, that’s just everything the movie’s about.

Gabe: The one Lana Del Rey wears in John Wayne’s Garden of Eden. And we talked about this before, but specifically how it cuts to her life as a stripper. We go from Garden of Eden bikini to stripper bikini.

Vanessa: The Garden of Eden one is more revealing. It’s sexier, and the Garden of Eden story in the Book of Genesis is one that punishes and subjugates women at the end. It sexualizes subjugation. Makes it hot. Not that it can’t be as a choice by two adults, but doesn’t Genesis make it a requirement? Not just socially, like the man runs the house. God lays that all out. Sexually. Subjugation and painful childbirth are Eve’s punishments. If childbirth is an oppression and sex is required for childbirth, then sex should be oppressive. That’s what the Bible says to a lot of people. Lana Del Rey equates Eve to a fucking stripper, and it’s right.

Cleopatra: I read that as her falling from Paradise into sin.

Vanessa: It is, but even as Eve, she’s sexualized – that’s the important part. Eve is always sexualized. And I want to say that stripper is a viable choice. I’m not saying all strippers are sinful people.

Gabe: You’re saying that Tropico uses it as shorthand for sin.

Vanessa: No, I don’t think so. Tropico uses it as shorthand for the male – I don’t want to say tendency or the need. It uses strippers as shorthand for the training we give males to oppress and be violent. Strippers aren’t naturally sinful, whatever “sin” is supposed to mean, but they let men play out their fantasy to- I’m losing my thought.

Gabe: To oppress and dominate?

Vanessa: That’s Biblically justified, and one component of what she’s saying.

Cleopatra: I agree with the idea, like what you have to say about the subject, but I disagree that’s what Lana Del Rey’s saying here.

Gabe: You think it’s a more natural fall into sin? More straightforward, narratively?

Cleopatra: I think that her becoming a stripper is her, yeah, falling out of the Garden of Eden. She copes however she can. She struggles and goes through sin so she can come out the other side.

Vanessa: It’s the same thing. Her punishment could be working in a coal mine, but it’s not. It’s – I want to be careful here because I don’t want to judge a whole profession that a lot of people work.

Gabe: Just say, “In the film.” It’s what I do all the time. Blame the film.

Vanessa: In the film, she has to perform in a sexually submissive manner. Her struggle is her relationship and the gang tensions, but it’s also this sexually debased place John Wayne puts her into.

Cleopatra: But John Wayne shakes his head-

Gabe: When she bites the apple. What I find interesting is that she also plays Mary, mother of Jesus. Is that a reflection of the perfection and lack of sin that she can’t get back to? An ideal of what she was in the past?

Vanessa: Yeah. That or a judge, but like a soft judge. Someone who’s impossible to measure up to. The idea of what women are supposed to be.

Gabe: Fetishized as both a saint and a whore, you mean?

Vanessa: Yes.

Cleopatra: It’s struggle. It’s not what John Wayne, or God, puts her into. It’s what she has to undergo.

Vanessa: But it’s the society that looks up to John Wayne, or God – they’re all shooting guns in the air, they all look tough like him – it’s their idea of how to emulate God that says women belong in that place.

Gabe: I like both perspectives because yours is a very Old Testament interpretation and Cleopatra’s is a very New Testament interpretation of what Eve does and goes through, and there’s a point at which Tropico shifts from Old Testament to New Testament. It’s just that we may disagree where that point is…

Once again, you can watch Tropico here. The second part of this conversation will be posted on Thursday, May 1.

Wednesday Collective — Lana del Rey, Game of Thrones, & Gabriel Garcia Marquez

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Lana del Rey, our master storyteller
Richard Marshall

Lana del Rey is our best storyteller-in-song since Pearl Jam. She portrays an image of wealth (or sometimes the emulation of it) and a conscious rejection of consequence that speaks to the profound boredom of excess. Her character is one who’s traded in her own desires so that men can project their fantasies onto her. She narrates with the idealized nostalgia that drove Fitzgerald’s Gatsby to obsession, but plays it with the despondence of Camus’ Meursault, who was apathetic to his imprisonment because he could while away the hours listing off what he once owned.

Through it all, there’s the ghostly afterimage of a soul who might break through were she not so practiced at replacing her own thoughts with the distractions and egos of others. This is mirrored by a fear of old age, of wisdom, of a loss of beauty that would force her to finally face the world as it is, of the dissipation of an illusion created from such thin veneer it threatens to tear apart at the slightest conscious challenge not immediately subdued.

Richard Marshall compares her style to the work of director David Lynch: “There’s the theme of the double in all these songs, where a consciousness of intense eagerness to survive the blackest nightmare places the feelings onto another ego, like in a diabolical pact.”

This is an elegant, thoughtful article about the woman who may very well become the most important musical artist of this generation, and it pairs superbly with last week’s article of the week, Izzy Black’s analysis of the new films of excess.

Rape as Social Issue, or Just a Plot Device
Genevieve Valentine

Game of Thrones uses rape as a plot device. That it’s difficult to criticize a TV series set in a medieval world for not interrogating the topic with a modern sensibility is a deflection. Valentine only has to go as far as Mad Men to find another male-dominated world that found a way to fold the topic into its characterization and storytelling.

It’s not that Game of Thrones chooses to use rape as a plot device. It’s that – unlike Mad Men – it fails to fully deal with what this use means, both in its own world and in ours. Thus, it trivializes rape as a MacGuffin, a lazy shorthand to get people from point A to point B, rather than seeking to understand the effects the act has. It is disappointing storytelling from a series that has a lot going for it, but might quickly be burning up its goodwill.

Thanks to Chris Braak for the heads-up on this.

An Interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Peter H. Stone

Marquez may be the most important author in my own life. He was also a rousing and challenging interview. Paris Review republishes Peter H. Stone’s 1981 interview with the man at a time when he was at the top of his art.

A Brief History of the Art-Horror Film
Bilge Ebiri

I somewhat object to the delineation between art-horror and regular horror. It lacks defining structural tendencies or stylistic elements that other genres can hang their hats on, and usually devolves into simply separating horror that’s good from horror that’s bad, or horror that’s weird from horror that’s not. Nonetheless, this article at Vulture does a solid job of describing the history of critically applauded horror in the lead-up to Under the Skin and Only Lovers Left Alive.

“Why Historical Accuracy on Film Matters”
A. E. Larsen

Last week, I highlighted an article I didn’t entirely agree with – why the expert review should die. I diverged somewhat from Matt Zoller Seitz’s scorched-earth approach to the subject by saying that expert reviews done by non-experts in that particular field should be avoided. From now on, I’ll differentiate those by calling them the “inexpert review.”

A. E. Larsen, my favorite medievalist film critic, rebuts Seitz with a defense of the expert review that describes our need for more contextual awareness in how we view art.

Ranking Rocky
Matt Singer

While researching an upcoming article about the best films never made, I came across this ranking of the Rocky movies by Matt Singer. Ordinarily, I don’t link to best-of/worst-of lists. I’m a recovering list addict and I find many of them – much like the inexpert review (wow, that caught on fast) – go in one ear and out the other. I’m careful about which ones we do here – there’d better be an important reason to make one. For instance, we made our No Miley Here list to highlight under-seen music videos in a year plagued by Robin Thicke, Miley Cyrus, and the terrible music criticism that holds their celebrity as an artistic accomplishment.

Well, this ranking of the Rocky movies passes the List Test by reflecting on Singer’s own experiences of the films growing up – defining the moment they changed from character study to superhero movie – and by describing how Sylvester Stallone himself originally envisioned the franchise and the drastic concessions he made in exchange for bigger and bigger paychecks.

“How Hollywood Killed Death”
Alexander Huls

I wrote about something similar in my Pacific Rim piece last year. American filmmakers have a tendency to treat death as an operatic moment that every single character forgets about minutes later. In contrast, many foreign films have death occur off-screen or so suddenly that characters don’t have a five-minute, slow-motion sequence with its own theme song in which to prepare for it.

It connects a bit with Valentine’s piece above, about the treatment of rape on television. We use death in much the same way, devaluing it as a basic plot point or momentary inconvenience, and not treating it as a searing moment the remaining characters deal with for the rest of their lives. There are some spoilers in this article, obviously.

Kicking a Good Bond While He’s Down
Horatia Harrod

This interview sparked an interesting discussion between some friends and myself, especially after Russ Schwartz’s article on Skyfall last week. Brosnan critiques his run as superspy James Bond harshly, taking himself to task for never fully inhabiting the role.

I tend to think this was an asset – the films he was given were so glossy and empty and badly written that Brosnan’s ability to wink his way through them made even the worst semi-watchable. If he didn’t take them so seriously, we didn’t have to either, and that moved the goalposts considerably.

Thanks to J.P. Hitesman for the heads-up on this.