Wednesday 5 August 2020

Glasses in Films


    I have an early memory of Velma in Scooby Doo repeating gormlessly, ‘Where are my glasses? I can’t see without my glasses.’ Glasses are the means by which a smart woman is reduced to a crawling, pathetic spectacle. I show up to a team meeting for county rugby trials aged 13. A hulking boy-and I don’t just mean he’s big, he looks like he’s about to turn green-  says, ‘you wear glasses?!’, leaving me uncomfortable, outside the group.

    The way our world is visualised in movies and tv affects the way we visualise ourselves. And the way people with glasses are visualised in popular storytelling is bogus, bizarre and irritating. Needing to wear glasses couldn’t just mean an eyeball lens that’s infinitesimally too thick… No it must mean that person is a fragile liability, a person with no personality outside of being a nerd,  or, still more likely, perverted or morally deviant.

    Howard in Uncut Gems peeks through the crack in a closet door at his half-naked girlfriend who does not know his creepy ass is in the apartment. The glint of his lenses in the dark is the sickly glow of voyeurism. Patrick Bateman in American Psycho puts on glasses in a boardroom scene where he fantasises about killing a fellow CEO just because of his more expertly watermarked business card. The way he looks at women in particular is proprietary, lethal. Ripley in The Talented Mr Ripley, another serial killer, wears glasses. A pattern emerges: glasses become a simplistic shorthand for not a deficiency in physical sight but a troubling, sometimes even psychotic way of perceiving other people.



     In Jaws, Roy Scheider as the central (human) character, police chief Brody, wears glasses and is a good, likable man not purely defined by book smarts. BUT (and there’s always a but) he is average in the scenes where he sports his specs, essentially following around shark-expert Hooper and hunter Quint on to the high seas, where he is only brave enough to go when drunk. In the plunging mayhem of the sea, as the shark writhes its bulk in the quest for blood, a pole knocks off Brody’s glasses. After a few token seconds of disorientation, he shoots the shark in the mouth, detonating the explosive canister in its mighty chompers and making a boom fitting for the Fourth of July. Essentially at the film’s climax Chief Brody assimilates the characters of his more qualified but indisposed colleagues. He has gained the specialist shark knowledge of Hooper and channels some of the gun-toting, macho bravery of Quint, all the while conquering his childhood fear of the sea. But the problem is the way this transformation is symbolised; removal of the glasses means the making of the man. This is perverse. Ok, *maybe* his sight issue is so minor that he can still get by without his specs, but to be able to pull off this precise, insanely difficult shot that even war-veteran Quint cannot come close to?  That is pure movie hokum, and a minor blot in an otherwise glorious film.

    That most fundamental symbol of American heroism, Superman, wears glasses in his disguise as Clark Kent (I’m talking about the John Williams scored version, we pretend the modern DC Universe doesn’t exist here, ok?). He does not need them, however. It is striking that THIS is his concession to humanity and human appearance. Christopher Reeve’s classic good looks, and buff physique are unignorable (drool) and it is clear to the audience that Superman as Clark Kent is no different as a person, and looks the same. But the fiction maintains that this slight physical addition is enough to neuter heroism and make Kal-El an average office worker in the eyes of all around him, unrecognisable even to those who know Superman.


   

    The closest a movie actor has ever gotten to Superman in the American psyche is Cary Grant. In film after film he was the epitome of alpha, leading man energy- suave, sexy and capable. Bringing Up Baby, therefore, plays off the image that was developing around Grant, by giving the actor glasses, a surprise move that the studio producing the film tried to put a stop to. The shift in person is negligible, but the accompanying shift in persona is huge. Grant’s character David is nerdy - initially defined entirely by his work on dinosaur skeletons at a museum - and bumbling - over the course of the film he trips over telephone wires and tumbles down ditches. He is awkward, especially with women, extra-especially with Katherine Hepburn’s Susan, the most energetic American to own a leopard pre-Tiger King. He is a reasonably likable, if rather prissy underdog, a relatable figure baffled by a chaotic universe where leopards come to Connecticut.  But David breaks and eventually loses his glasses, and this provides the opportunity for Susan to say ‘you’re SO good-looking without your glasses’. Cary Grant’s leading man, romantic hero persona emerges in the moment when glasses are destroyed, and he marries. This change mirrors the dynamic of the countless films, such as The Princess Diaries, in which, to be considered attractive, women and girls must take part in a makeover scene where their glasses are dispensed with and their hair is literally let loose. To get the guy, for decades, was an apparent requirement  for women to be protagonists and to get the guy you had to get rid of the glasses.

 

    What is fast emerging is that glasses and protagonists rarely go together; if we refine our gaze still further and look for heroic glasses-wearers, the pickings are even more scant. This is one of the reasons that (TERF author notwithstanding) Harry Potter is a brilliant series of books. The main character is a thoroughly decent, kind boy who is the hero of his own story and also wears glasses! This surprisingly unusual hero is even translated faithfully into that place most beguiled by the cleft jaw and perfect body: Hollywood. Such is Hollywood’s record on characters with glasses I half-expected there to be an added scene in the films where Harry’s sight is magically fixed by Madame Pomfrey in the Hospital Wing. Hagrid would come to say: ‘Now yer not just a wizard Harry, yer a hero too!’ Where a book leaves visualisation largely to the reader’s imagination, the movies fix what a character looks like for everyone. The audience of the Harry Potter series sees someone who can’t see and who is the hero, a decent human being who isn’t in disguise and isn’t defined by either being a nerd or being perverted. This has not entirely changed our culture but has given a tonic to the millions of partially sighted people used to being told their identities are limited by that fact. I can remember kids on World Book Day wearing glasses they did not need (Clark Kent-style!)  to try and be a part of the in-crowd. Fi-nal-ly!

 

    Of course the lack of glasses in films is a minor example of their reductive vision of the nature of heroism:  the overwhelming whiteness of screen heroes sticks out far more. This is not the place to deal in depth with the appalling history of the representation of black lives on screen (that has been done better elsewhere by writers like Ashley Clark). What is fascinating here is that one of the most engaging portrayals of heroism in any film of recent decades was given by a black man in glasses- Denzel Washington as the eponymous character in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. While Harry Potter is a decent, rather flat, everyman character who shit happens to, Malcolm is explicitly not an everyman, his problems are specific to him and his community.

     Bespectacled characters in films have so often been one-dimensional nerds, but ‘nerd’ of course is one of those terms, like jock, used to distinguish schoolyard groupings.  Many Hollywood movies encourage the infantilization of their audiences, maintaining childish ways of viewing other people, such as ‘popular’ vs ‘outsider’ or ‘us’ vs ‘them’. Malcolm X is not a nerd. He becomes an intellectual, but a public one who uses his intellect and rhetorical flair to inspire political action both in himself and others. This is poignantly shown in the film when Washington’s Malcolm saves the life of an African American Muslim being held, grievously injured and without care, at a police station. 

    Malcolm is first shown in glasses over an hour into the film at the same point as he shaves his head inside prison and changes his surname to X. Mental liberation, success and the love of a remarkable woman (Angela Bassett) all come to the person he becomes in glasses. The treatment of characters who lose their glasses in films has shown that mainstream movie character change is usually boiled down to becoming more attractive or a better fighter. But Malcolm X was someone who dramatically changed as a person at multiple different stages of his life. He started as Malcolm Little, alias ‘Red’, conducting robberies and swinging at Harlem dances in his garish red suit. He became ‘Brother Malcolm’ in prison, a follower and spokesperson of the Nation of Islam. Finally after a pilgrimage to Mecca, whilst still an advocate for black nationalism, he grew to believe in the beauty and necessity of racial co-operation in fighting the sickness of racism. 

    This film busts the limiting dichotomy of a man of action on the one hand, versus an intelligent man on the other. And it is a representation of a man who really existed, not a cultural fantasy, but a leader and inspiration for millions. It is telling that Nelson Mandela himself appears in a cameo at the end of the film delivering one of Malcolm’s speeches. Denzel Washington’s Malcolm is an invigorating antidote to the brand of heroism typically envisioned by mainstream Hollywood. Yes, he is stunningly engaging and attractive, but his heroism is located in his capacity to think and his capacity to change and his capacity to engage with the real world. Perhaps glasses function as a symbol of the ideal person in 2020 since the lockdown period has shown that we all need to correct our vision.



Thursday 30 July 2020

Best Films of the 2010s: Moonlight

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

Moonlight

  

Moonlight is a film that is excellent in every aspect, emotional and smart in equal measure. It follows the coming of age of a young boy named Chiron, who is fundamentally disadvantaged growing up in America by his race, class and sexuality. Chiron’s story is split into three segments and in each the character is played by a different actor (Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Treyvante Rhodes). These sections are delineated by the names and corresponding identities he is afforded: Little, Chiron and Black. We might think of these as boy, adolescent and man. These identities are, of course, not self-contained but bleed into and overlay one another. Chiron gets called Little in the middle section and Black in the second section, for instance.

    The film does not preach to its viewers, but immerses them as surely as young Chiron’s surrogate father Juan (Mahershala Ali) tilts and rocks him in the surging ocean, teaching him how to swim. The three sections are patterned by liberating, almost epiphanic moments at the local beach and recurring, awkward encounters with a contemporary named Kevin who seems to offer a safe outlet for Chiron’s burgeoning sexuality. Director Barry Jenkins regularly uses the unusual and immersive technique of having characters conversing while looking straight into the camera lens, in close up. This implicates and involves the audience in the relationships on screen, breaking up the main flow of the story with something akin to visceral photographs.

        For all the raw power and immaculate structure of the script, this film is turbocharged by its all-star ensemble cast. Naomie Harris shows her full quality as Chiron’s mother, struggling with addiction and an inner wildness that often scares her son. Mahershala Ali is a quiet but powerful presence early on, but for me Andre Harris as the eldest iteration of Kevin steals the show. He has found his feet as a diner chef and, though troubled, has never lost his teasing humour or warmth. When he calls up Chiron after ten years of separation, he proves how powerfully love and care can be expressed just in cooking a meal for someone.

    This culinary compassion is something Kevin shares with Janelle Monae’s Teresa. I am high-key obsessed with Janelle Monae’s role in this film as surrogate mother Teresa, who is always ready to tease Chiron into talk with a glass of orange juice, a slap-up meal and her sardonic, warm eyes. Her album Dirty Computer soundtracked my own process of coming out to myself, so when she says ‘it’s all love and all pride in this house’ my breath hitches every time.

     These hugely talented, experienced artists orbit around the three Chirons at the centre of the piece; young Alex Hibbert, eyes so wide they almost pop from his skull; Ashton Sanders, gangly, eyes all skittish anxiety; and Treyvante Rhodes, outwardly macho, eyes too weary to be fully sad anymore.

     I have seen several reviewers who consider the transition between the scrawny Sanders and the bulked-up Rhodes implausible and to the film's detriment. The size disparity is shocking, but thoroughly intentional and Kevin comments on this upon his reunion with Chiron, openly stating, ‘this is not what I expected’. The change rings true to me. Many people do emerge bulked up after prison time because there is little to do there other than work out. I’m lucky due to racial and socioeconomic privilege to have never been close to prison and the sort of radical rethinking of one’s identity incarceration can force. Yet I do know that as a boy, not yet able to articulate that I was probably gay, the first time in life I felt safe from bullies was when I started to fill out and got good at rugby. The physical discrepancy between Rhodes and Sanders makes perfect sense, and Treyvante Rhodes delivers a note-perfect performance in the final section. He says that I ‘built myself from the ground up. Built myself hard’, but the film reveals that identity constructed from a place of fear is always built on shaky ground. Rhodes conveys with many a look that physical growth belies a shivering, shrivelling spirit.

     This film portrays modern, and specifically African American, masculinity like no other and that is why when I watch it, like Chiron, ‘I cry so much sometimes I might turn to drops’. It contains radiant moments that will hit viewers in ways that are hard to articulate. For instance, there is the point in the second section when Ashton Sanders’ hands splay on the beach in a moment of post-coital relief. ‘Sand angels’, I think, every time.

 

That concludes my list of the best films of the 2010s! If you've stuck with me all the way I'm slightly amazed and please do comment your own favourites if you like:)


Wednesday 29 July 2020

Best Films of the 2010s: Interstellar

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

Interstellar

  Her was the best example of the inward looking sci-fi that dominated this decade; with Interstellar Christopher Nolan delivered that shaggy, glorious old-fashioned beast: an epic. Inception may have been more innovative and Dunkirk tighter, but this is the Nolan film that combines heart and dizzying ambition to the greatest effect. The motivator for Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper to take to the stars is climate change- in this future almost every grain has been blighted and the natural world is suffering. Cooper’s time in space throws up all sorts of dilemmas about thinking as a family member versus thinking as a species. In some of the places he must go to seek a future for humanity time runs differently. This leads to an extraordinary scene where McConaughey must watch videos of his children growing up. Decades for his kids are elided into seconds for him. As we as people age, favourite films act as time machines transporting us back to the people we were at the time of previous viewings. It’s a marker of the rise and fall of new icons that when this film was released in 2014, no one (maybe his family had faith I guess?) knew that the younger of Cooper’s two children was played by Timothee Chalamet, and that he was going to be a star. In 2014 I'd never seen one of the main inspirations for this film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now it is one of my very favourite films and I'm so grateful to Christopher Nolan for leading me there.

    One foundation of what makes us human is the instinct to protect and love the people closest to us. Climate change demands of the characters in this film that they transfer that love to the species as a whole and start now. Beyond this potent relevance, though, the film features mythic imagery of two lone men duking it out in an icy hellscape, Michael Caine being Michael Caine (excellently) and a robot with sarcasm settings turned up high. Like the legendary onion, it’s got layers.

Next and FINAL time: compassion and home cooking must stand in for space rockets in the quest to heal. 

Tuesday 28 July 2020

Best Films of the 2010s: Her

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

Her

    

The thing I forgot about Her is that it’s really funny. It was perhaps the first arthouse movie I saw at the cinema, when I was 13, and I remember being left in something like emotional shock for the rest of the day. But as well as being a dazzling enquiry into the nature of love and consciousness, (and so much more than ‘the one where the man falls for his computer’) it is a quirky portrait of 21st century masculinity. Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore Twombley (‘Big Guy Four by Four’ to women online) is only half-joking when he says he struggles to prioritise between videogames and online porn. He makes his living working for a (digital) company called ‘Handwritten Greeting Cards’, essentially using his eloquence to articulate other people’s feelings about other people. Vicarious living is the cornerstone of this world.

    What makes this film great is that we are primed, like Theodore’s ex-wife to mock when he falls in love with his operating system Samantha. Surely this is a sign of his inability to connect with a real woman? There are some swipes about modern living, but this film is far better than to make the usual anti-Instagram jokes that movies made by old people seem to think are endlessly clever. His love for Samantha is real, or at least Scarlett Johansson’s tender, playful, inquisitive voicework makes us feel Theodore’s perspective makes a certain sense. The ups and downs of their relationship before the devastating final act feel true, and Joaquin Phoenix delivers his greatest performance: more nuanced and convincingly suggestive of damage than his Joker.

     But the humour of the world building! The Super Mom video game where if you’re not perfect the virtual kids scream and writhe, the other mums judge you and you lose ‘mom points’. Another game where the player is guided by a  blob-like creature that I can only describe as the demonic id of a modern man-child who swears, giggles and makes remarks like ‘I hate women, all they do is cry all the time’. Director Spike Jonze creates a world as fascinating, damaged and offbeat as the characters that inhabit it, lit up by his trademark satirical flourishes.

Next Time: less cyber space, more outer space.



Monday 27 July 2020

Best Films of the 2010s: A Separation

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

A Separation

    The way George Miller detonates a stunt truck, Iran’s Asghar Farhadi explodes the fault lines within a family. A man leaves his father who suffers from Alzheimer’s in the care of a nurse. She seems to leave him for dead and in anger the man shoves her which later seems to have caused her to miscarry her baby. Little is what it seems, however, due to deception, mixed motives, guilt and shame. The shifting and interlocking bonds of gender, religion and class influence who will speak and what they will say in the public enquiry that follows.

    This film is as engrossing as a panic attack, complex but not overly complicated. Shot like a documentary so the camera seems invisible, this is a detective film minus an in-story detective, the revelations masterfully drip-fed to the viewer. Every character is right in their own minds and that’s what makes what happens to them so awful, and so true. If it wasn’t for Western cultural biases Leila Hatami and particularly Peyman Maadi would be lauded to the skies for their portrayal of the central couple torn between making the best life for their child Termeh and caring for a father. This film deserves to crossover into the Western mainstream conversation the same way Parasite has done recently, since it is perfect, scene by suspenseful and emotionally devastating scene.

Next Time: another troubled relationship, if not an entirely human one.

Sunday 26 July 2020

Best Films of the 2010s: The Florida Project

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

The Florida Project

 

This film’s keynote is the raw and heady joy of being left as a kid to roam without adult supervision. It is poignant and ironic that some of the poorest parts of America lie within a stone’s throw of Disney World; this is the world The Florida Project explores. An Orlando strip-motel is the most American of underworlds, painted like pop art with eye-smacking purples and oranges. Six year old  Moonee is our joyous tour guide (‘this man gets arrested a lot…this woman thinks she’s marriaging Jesus’), the kind of kid destined to be labelled a ‘bad influence’, swearing and starting fires, dripping sass and melted ice cream wherever she goes with her friends. Spitting on cars is fun, washing that spit up is fun when washing up liquid s transformed into water guns. The camera is situated at the kids’ eye level drawing us into their perspective.

     The kids’ world is plotless: their summer break is a blank canvas to paint (or spit) on. Structure is provided by the adult world of Moonee’s mother Halley which runs concurrently: the weekly grind of hustle and rent. Some of the best acting of the decade comes from first timer Bria Vinaite as Halley, whom the director spotted on Instagram. She is an affectionate and fun mother but has a defiant, sharp face ready for the rest of the world which has messed with her plenty. Also I 100% envy her pink-green hair and it would be dishonest if I didn't mention this. Brooklynn Prince as Moonee should with any justice end the careers of a raft of cutesie child actors. These two actresses together convince utterly as single mother and daughter, and it is one of the most joyful relationships I’ve seen in a movie. The final act of the film, though, will threaten this bond. The Florida Project sends the viewer into that place between laughter and tears where the world seems painted in particularly vivid colours.

Next Time: less Mickey Mouse, more Iranian psychodrama.


Saturday 25 July 2020

Best Films of the 2010s: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

We Need To Talk About Kevin

 Every once in a while Lynne Ramsey directs a film and its one of the best, rawest and most direct films of its year (check out Morvern Callar please please please). This chiller was no different, combining one of the world’s best directors with a uniquely compelling actor in Tilda Swinton. Alongside Ezra Miller she crafts a mother-son relationship that is tortuous for both, making the sometimes icy mother-daughter bond in Lady Bird look like a daisy-filled pasture of unconditional love.

    Something has gone wrong somewhere. On one level this seems like the most unnerving of demonic horror films: the child’s eyes are full of maliciousness and hate right from the youngest age. Was he born evil, or was it grown in him like a dark seed? It is hard to answer because the whole film seems to take place in Swinton’s head, as she mentally skates around a traumatic event involving Kevin, time spooling backwards and forwards. In one scene the boy deliberately shits himself to provoke her with the most casual cruelty, and he has a violent tendency from a young age. On the other hand we gather that his mother didn’t want to get pregnant, is quick to anger and has a deep-seated resentment towards her son. Wherever Kevin’s darkness comes from, Jasper Newell and then Ezra Miller are magnetically watchable, even if it is like watching a car crash in slow motion. And the opening scene at La Tomatina, Swinton rolling in the red of the tomatoes, is one of the most extraordinary openings to any film I’ve ever seen.

Next Time: less bloody tomatoes, more waffles and Disney.


Glasses in Films

     I have an early memory of Velma in Scooby Doo repeating gormlessly, ‘Where are my glasses? I can’t see without my glasses.’ Glasses are...