Awake in the Dark

A movie, or any work of art, isn’t complete until someone sees it. Even the most modest studio film these days represents about two hundred years of collective work from the cast and crew, and when the result of their labor is projected on a screen in a darkened room, where it can shape and channel the emotions of a theater full of strangers, surprising things can happen. In Behind the Seen, Walter Murch compares this phenomenon to that of an old-fashioned radio tube, which takes a powerful but simple electrical current and combines it with a weak but coherent signal to transform it, say, into Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. A similar thing happens to an audience in a theater:

The power—the energy—isn’t coming from the film. It’s coming from the collective lives and emotional world of the audience. Say it’s a big theater—you have a thousand people there, and the average age of that audience is 25. You have 25,000 years, three times recorded history, sitting in the audience. That’s a tremendously powerful but unorganized force that is looking for coherence.

And the mark of a great movie is one that takes up an unexpected life, for better or worse, once it meets the undirected power of a large popular audience.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since finally seeing Zero Dark Thirty, which I think is unquestionably the movie of the year. (If I were to repost my list of the year’s best films, it would occupy the top slot, just ahead of The Dark Knight Rises and Life of Pi.) It’s an incredible work, focused, complex but always clear, and directed with remarkable assurance by Kathryn Bigelow, who tells an often convoluted story, but never allows the eye to wander. Yet it’s a film that seems likely to be defined by the controversy over its depiction of torture. This isn’t the place to respond to such concerns in detail, except to note that Bigelow and writer Mark Boal have already argued their own case better than anyone else. But it seems to me that many of the commentators who see the movie as an implicit endorsement of torture—”No waterboarding, no Bin Laden,” as Frank Bruni writes—are reading something into it that ignores the subtleties of the film’s own structure, which begins with enhanced interrogation and then moves beyond it.

But it’s a testament to the skill and intelligence of Bigelow, Boal, and their collaborators that they’ve given us a movie that serves as a blank slate, on which viewers can project their own fears and concerns. Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t tell us what to think, and although some, like Andrew Sullivan, have taken this as an abdication of artistic responsibility, it’s really an example of the art of film at its height. It’s a movie for adults. So, in very different ways, are Lincoln and Django Unchained, which is why I’m not surprised by the slew of opinion pieces about the lack of “agency” in the black characters in Lincoln, or whether Django is really a story about a slave being saved by a white man. Such responses tell us more about the viewers than the movies themselves, and that’s fine—but we also need to recognize that movies that can evoke and sustain such questions are ultimately more interesting than films like Argo or Les Misérables, which reassure us at every turn about what we’re supposed to be feeling.

Needless to say, the Oscars have rarely rewarded this kind of ambiguity, which may be why Zero Dark Thirty had to content itself with a shared award for Best Sound Editing. And both Argo and Les Misérables are very good movies. But it takes remarkable skill and commitment to tell stories like this—and in particular, to give us all the satisfactions we crave from more conventional entertainment while also pushing forward into something darker. (That’s why many of our greatest, most problematic works of fiction tend to come from artists who have proven equally adept at constructing beautiful toys: Bigelow could never have made Zero Dark Thirty if she hadn’t already made Point Break.) When we’re sitting in the dark, looking for coherence, we’re at our must vulnerable, and when we’re faced with a movie that pushes our buttons while leaving us unsettled by its larger implications, it’s tempting to reduce it to something we can easily grasp. But in a medium that depends so much on the resonance between a work and its viewers, such films demand courage not just in the artist, but from the audience as well.

Quentin Tarantino and the violence of restraint

I have a friend who hates Reservoir Dogs. He’s willing to grant that some of Quentin Tarantino’s other movies have merit, but refuses to rewatch this particular film, mostly on account of its violence—which, he says, he found increasingly hard to take after he had children. I can understand what he means. In the case of my own daughter, I’m still working out what kinds of media she’ll be watching at what age, and while I definitely plan to introduce Beatrix to the joys of Pulp Fiction and the two movies about her namesake at the right time, I might give Reservoir Dogs a pass. I liked it plenty when I first saw it, but I haven’t been tempted to revisit it in a long time, and these days, I think of it mostly as an inventive and resourceful debut that paved the way for the astonishing career to come. (The recent Vanity Fair oral history of the making of Pulp Fiction just serves as a reminder of how deeply influential Tarantino has been, even as his influences and innovations are absorbed into invisibility by the culture as a whole.)

And although I understand my friend’s point about the violence in Reservoir Dogs, what lingers with me, weirdly, is Tarantino’s restraint. Take the movie’s most notorious sequence. When I think of it today, what I remember is not so much the violence as two amazingly assured shots. The first is the moment when the camera turns aside as Mr. Blond prepares to hack off the cop’s ear, tracking away to focus on a nondescript corner of the room as we listen to the screams coming from just offscreen. It’s a startlingly subjective camera move, as striking in its way as the moment in Taxi Driver when Scorsese pans away from Bickle’s telephone rejection from Betsy, and reflects Tarantino’s understanding that such things are more effective when left to the imagination. Even better is the shot immediately afterward, when Mr. Blond leaves the warehouse, crosses a peaceful street in silence, retrieves a gas can from his car, and returns, all in a single unbroken take that ends back in the room where “Stuck in the Middle With You” is still playing. Mike D’Angelo of The A.V. Club has sung this shot’s praises, and it’s one that still knocks me out, more than fifteen years after I first saw it.

Given this kind of filmic grace, which Tarantino had in spades before he even turned thirty, it’s instructive to turn to Django Unchained, which I finally caught over the weekend. (I liked it a lot, by the way, although it strikes me as one of his less essential movies, somewhere above Death Proof and below Jackie Brown.) Django has also aroused controversy over its violence, and while I wouldn’t want to argue that it isn’t a violent movie, here, too, I’m more struck by its restraint than anything else. This is partly because it’s the first movie in which Tarantino hasn’t done deliberate violence to the medium of storytelling itself: the plot proceeds in a linear fashion, without any of the structural games we find in his previous work, and the boundary between good and evil is much more clearly delineated than usual. Even if we hadn’t been clued in by the fact that audiences, for the most part, seem to be embracing the movie, there isn’t a lot of doubt about how this particular revenge story will conclude. And although Tarantino doesn’t shy away from the blood squibs in his climactic shootouts, he’s even more careful here in his use of violence than usual.

Django Unchained takes place in a violent time, with plenty of human misery inherent to the story, but it doesn’t linger over scenes of cruelty and torture. Tarantino gives us these moments in flashes, just long enough to lock them in the mind’s eye, and doesn’t deal with sexual violence at all, except by implication. Which doesn’t mean he shies away from the implications of the material. The film’s most memorable scene is the long monologue by Samuel L. Jackson—who gives what I think is the supporting performance of the year—in which he coolly explains how a living death in the mines, to which slaves are routinely condemned, is far more cruel than any torture Django’s captors could invent. Tarantino knows the difference between the violence of history and that of escapism, and it’s fascinating to see a film in which they exist so casually side by side. Sometimes his canniness goes a little too far: when Django engages in one killing that might make him seem unsympathetic, he instructs the bystanders to tell the victim goodbye, and when he fires, the body is jerked offscreen by what can only be a stagehand with a length of piano wire, leaving it conveniently out of sight for the rest of the scene. It’s a cheap gag, but done with the artistry that separates Tarantino, not just from his imitators, but from his precursors. And like it or not, that’s the mark of a master.