LITTLE SHIVERS: Short movie reviews, mostly of B-horror.

Pontypool: Canadian town's destruction by zombie virus chronicled by its weird local radio station. This does a really good job at making the threat scary without showing you too much. If you like the high-concept summary, "Language is a virus which makes people zombies," you will probably like this; if the premise leaves you cold I'm not sure the movie will work for you. I really liked it. The one jarring moment is the racist Lawrence of Arabia adaptation by local schoolchildren (?). I could come up with some reason for this--art can drive us apart and strengthen our worst impulses--but that seems too heavy, so really, I just don't know why that was there.

The Howling: Ultra-sleazy '80s flick about werewolves at a hippie resort. Does exactly what it says on the tin, plus extra sleaze. Sort of awesome in an "I don't actually recommend this" way.

Oleanna: David Mamet, a college parable which is about feminism/political correctness on the surface, class and how education and language reify power disparities underneath. (Language is the villain again!) When you describe it like that it sounds like something I'd like, but the two characters are both horribly grating and one-note, and the actors recite lines rather than finding a way to inhabit Mamet's aggressively-stylized dialogue.

The Dark Hours and Creep: I'm linking these two for reasons I'll get to in a moment. At first glance they seem pretty different. The Dark Hours is a stylized, very art-directed home-invasion horror/psychological thriller, very slightly comparable to Black Swan if that's a recommendation for you, starring actors I'd never seen before. Kindertrauma reviewed it here. Creep is a movie about some kind of killer or creature living in the London subway system, with basically normal visuals, starring Franka Potente.

Both movies' protagonists are privileged white women whose social/class power over other characters becomes a major issue in the narrative. Both women are shown from the beginning in fairly unflattering moral lights: Creep's buzzy city chick is a bit self-centered, whereas The Dark Hours' psychiatrist is openly cruel and arrogant.

Creep gives you glimpses of working-class, hard-luck, or homeless characters, and gestures at their backstories in ways which make them seem like they could be interesting. But the movie itself really doesn't seem to care about them. They exist basically as props in the main character's journey... which, since it's a journey where she gets to learn about How the Other Half Lives, means that the movie (and especially its big ending visual) comes across as fairly cheap and self-praising. Poor people exist to teach rich girls life lessons about how poor people exist!

The Dark Hours forces a much tighter audience identification with its main character, not only by keeping us firmly within her POV but by constantly challenging us to figure out which of her distorted perceptions is closest to reality. That's part of what made it work much better for me than Creep. It's also crueler to her--she doesn't learn her lesson--and the psych patients under her control have their own agency instead of just reacting to her decisions. (I mean, they appear to have agency, anyway. Like I said, you can rarely be sure what is real.) This movie was tense and very sad, and succeeded in making me care about its awful main character. You can also take it--especially the final "game" between the doctor and one of her patients--as a ferocious satire on psychiatry; or, conversely, as a window into how healing and honesty can look like brutal, absurd nonsense to a damaged mind. It's a movie which works on a lot of levels, the simple ones of fear and visual interest and the complex ones of shifting meanings.

GIGER BAR. Awesome. Via Jesse Walker, I think.

I WOULD RATHER NOT GO BACK TO THE OLD HOUSE: I have a post at the spoilerous blog, comparing the endings of Silent House and Veronica Mars season one.

OH CINEMA, WHERE YOU GONNA RUN? Some very quick notes on a few of the movies I've watched demi-recently.

The Cockettes: You can find out why I wanted to watch this documentary about an avant-garde hippie-esque drag group here--the Geerdes quote is great. I think I tried to use it in the Weekly Standard once but they scrubbed it.... The movie is a labor of love, but if you weren't there you probably don't care about the ramshackle performances, and the era's darker tints are either excused (constant stealing, preference for welfare over work, general self-centeredness) or treated much too glancingly (deaths, sex and parenting, the alleyways people ran down in the search for ecstasy). Rise Above: The Tribe 8 Documentary, which I saw a bit later, did a generally better job of actually talking about punk (and s/m, and drugs, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting...) as part of a search for something beyond the self. Even Rise Above gave very little attention to that topic, obviously the angle most interesting to me. But I also just liked lead singer Lynn Breedlove a lot more than I liked any of the Cockettes; maybe it's just her scraped-up, cadging, laughing, low-rent voice. I think Tribe 8 was the second concert I ever went to (the first was the Violent Femmes opening for the B-52s).

A Letter to Three Wives: Desperate Housewives of the 1950s. I mean that in a good way! A really well-done "women's picture" about married life, with a surprising absence of children and an unusual, souffle-light mix of candor and utopianism about class.

The Lost Weekend: Sickly, and then sickly-sweet, melodrama. Was I just born too late for this? Only intermittently seemed to capture the shame and disintegration of addiction.

Silent Hill: Love the scabby, rancid color scheme of this movie. Love the idea that the deserted, fog-shrouded and frightening "daytime" Silent Hill is actually the happy version--it gets much worse! Found the last half-hour or so speechifying and boring. Another of the seemingly endless "evil comes from people who have been hurt! Fear the weak, not the powerful!" horror movies. I could really use fewer of those--obviously it isn't entirely untrue, but when it's pushed relentlessly as the only explanation for cruelty or, as it is in Silent Hill, used to reject the possibility of forgiveness and allow the audience to wallow in vengeance, then I find it really cheap.

28 Weeks Later: Starts out really powerfully, focusing on the horrible choices made during a zombie apocalypse and the need to come to terms with those choices somehow after the immediate crisis has passed. I was super invested in this "Where did they bury the survivors?" story and was disappointed that overall that isn't the story this movie wants to tell. Still, it's fast-paced and compelling, maybe more of a suspense flick than the misery-horror show I was hoping for.

CATS AND KITTENS: SOME MOVIE NOTES. Recently watched:

Sweet Smell of Success: This is still one of my very favorite movies. Ferocious and scathing and sad. Tony Curtis is unbelievably charismatic in his sordid, humiliated role; Burt Lancaster is terrifying. Glorious stuff. This time around, I especially noticed how often little sister Susie slipped in some candy-coated cruelty--she may lisp a bit, but she's clearly related to her brother, acidic and even calculating.

Friday Foster: Pam Grier thwarts a race-war plot. That's really all you need to know. There are fashion shows, there is music, there are afros, there is liquor, there are car chases, it is very glamorous and there's lots of shooting! Parts of this are set in DC but it doesn't have any real local color, unfortunately.

The Tomb of Ligeia: Look, this movie has some schlock elements and you've just got to roll with that if you want to have fun here. The screeching demon cat never really works at all, and there's some awesomely bad dialogue ("Let's go for a walk." "A walk?" "Or a stroll! What does it matter?"), and a tiny hint of evil-sapphistry teasing (which is a bonus, really). But you also get really gorgeous sets, one and a half compelling performances (Vincent Price is terrific, and the romantic lead is serviceable when she's playing his contemporary love interest but much better when she's playing the dead/undead Ligeia), and an ultimately painful story about the undertow of grief and the triumph of past over present.

WHY CAN'T A MAN STAND ALONE? WHY CAN'T AN ALIEN BE JUST WHAT IT SEEMS? The friend I mentioned in my previous post about Attack the Block sent me a really good email clarifying her point. Because there's one very specific plot spoiler, I've posted it over at the spoilerous blog, but the main point is: "...[T]he kids, like the audience, imagined they were in a different kind of movie, and that turned out to be a disastrous mistake." They needed a different kind of hero from the kind they wanted to be.

NO ALIEN INVASION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION! Last night I saw Attack the Block with a couple friends, and I absolutely, relentlessly loved it. It does exactly what it promises--aliens attack a British housing project, working-class/underclass community bands together to save their home--and does it with tons of energy and heart. It's sort of sf/horror/comedy, and real comfort food, giving you every cliche of its genres but giving them to you with style and love. Demi-spoilers in what follows.

I was really interested in the gender issues, in part because unlike the race/class issues they were never raised explicitly. All the men in this movie are gangsters, mini-gangsters, or layabouts. The women are much more responsible, and the girls are both drawn to the local guys and deeply mistrustful of them. That felt pretty real to me.

One friend suggested that the movie overturned the "action hero" archetype: A man doesn't become a hero by killing. He becomes a danger by killing. He becomes a hero by risking his own life to save others. I think that's sort of true (and the "carrying the evidence of your sin on your back" scene actually reminded me of the amazing waterfall scene from The Mission--that's how much this movie believes in its characters), although it is mostly a feel-good movie and that limits how much it can overturn worldly ideals of heroism.

This is a really, really funny movie, which never takes itself seriously; and yet it's also a movie with a really strong emphasis on redemption, forgiveness, and the need to attempt understanding of others. I was hugely fond of it.

IT'S AN UNSAFETY DANCE--IT'S AN UNSAFETY DANCE! Disney's Skeleton Dance, via Kindertrauma. I had a music teacher in middle school who did us all the favor of wheeling in a giant tv on a fat black cord every Halloween so we could watch this, followed by the Fantasia "Night on Bald Mountain." So middle school wasn't all bad, is what I'm saying.

THE PLANTS UNDER THE RUGS ARE MOVING. Have I done this post before, where I talk about what you should read if you want to read Stephen King? [shifted to my other blog, because there are a couple spoilerous things.]

Blogwatch--so they say--is the root of all evil today...

"Out of Poverty, Family-Style":

A turning point came when Keshwar was asked to join a group of families who had self-organized as part of an initiative that helps people in low-income communities achieve their goals. Called the Family Independence Initiative (FII), its approach is radically different from the American social service model. Although it is still quite small — working with a few hundred families — its results are so striking that the White House has taken notice. What FII does is create a structure for families that encourages the sense of control, desire for self-determination, and mutual support that have characterized the collective rise out of poverty for countless communities in American history.

FII is not a “program” in a traditional sense. It doesn’t seek to implement changes, but to elicit them from others. It was launched as a research project by Maurice Lim Miller in Oakland in 2001. Lim Miller, whose mother was an immigrant from Mexico who worked multiple jobs to support her children, had previously spent 22 years building Asian Neighborhood Design, a youth development and job training program, for which he was honored by President Clinton during the 1999 State of the Union address.

Lim Miller had come to believe that the American social welfare system focused too much on poor people’s needs and deficits, while overlooking — and even inhibiting — their strengths. A safety net is crucial when people are in crisis, he said. But most poor families are not in free fall. They don’t need nets to catch them so much as they need springboards to jump higher. In a conversation with Oakland’s mayor Jerry Brown (now California’s governor), Brown challenged Lim Miller to try something different and gave him broad scope to be creative.

Lim Miller wanted to see what families would do if they came together in a context that supported their initiative. He began by identifying families in low-income communities who were surviving, but who had “given up hope” of aspiring to more. He asked them to pull together six to eight other families. He offered them a challenge. The country had been waging a war on poverty for 40 years, he said, but the problem remained unsolved. “What we’re going to do is give you some resources and connections and we’re going to trust that you’ll do something,” he said. “You guys are in the power position. If you do nothing we’ll fail. If you do something we’ll all learn.” ...

“When you come into a community that is vulnerable with professionals with power and preset ideas, it is overpowering to families and it can hold them back,” he said. “Nobody wants to hear that because we’re all the good guys. But the focus on need undermines our ability to see their strengths — and their ability to see their own strengths.”

more (via WAWIV)

Megan McArdle: Create a special job credit for the long-term unemployed. More here, including McArdle's own memories of the fear and shame provoked by unemployment. And a relevant much earlier post on the economics of hiring convicts, among other things.

"Patt Morrison Asks: Donald Heller, Death Penalty Advocate No More":

'Remanded" -- taken into custody. In his career as a New York prosecutor and a federal prosecutor in California, Donald Heller has asked the court to remand guilty defendants countless times. He helped put away Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford, and a big-time heroin dealer, a man Heller believed destroyed many lives. At the dealer's sentencing hearing, the prosecutor remarked that were the death penalty an option, he would volunteer to "throw the switch." After that, a law clerk called him "Mad Dog," and the nickname stuck. Heller left the U.S. attorney's office in 1977 -- the "remanded'' sign was a farewell gift -- but he didn't give up his law-and-order cred. He's the author of the Briggs initiative, a 1978 ballot measure (named for its sponsor, state Sen. John Briggs) that broadly expanded the kinds of murders eligible for capital punishment. It helped make California's the most populous and expensive death row in the nation. But for more than a decade, Heller has been saying it's time to stop. Now a defense attorney with a mostly white-collar clientele, he testified recently at the state Capitol about the need to undo his legal handiwork, which has changed so many lives -- and ended some.

more (via SKTJ--some interesting stuff here, even for those who have followed the issues relatively closely)

Geek Cornucopia: Christian movies! A couple of these look really fascinating, and are definitely getting added to the queue.

Kindertrauma: "How to End Things, With John Carpenter."

And finally, Unequally Yoked has opened voting on the "Christian Turing Test." Basically, she got a bunch of Christians and atheists to answer questions about why they're Christian, so half of the field is bluffing and the other half is answering honestly. You get to guess which is which! It's a pretty fascinating cultural project, and while I have no idea how I would answer any of the questions (including the ones for atheists, in the previous round), I am really looking forward to reading her conclusions and other people's comments.

"I AM A YOUNG MAN." I know it's hard to believe, but I had never seen The Hunger before last night! It was just as awesome as I'd hoped, lush and not gory and very sad. I liked that vampirism was really horrible--sexual, yes, but not some sanitized metaphor. The music is great, the cast is stellar, and while I'm glad I went into it knowing that the ending lacks what the philosophers call "sense," it was very emotionally-effective. Few horror movies focus on fear of aging and its humiliations without demonizing the elderly, IME; this movie didn't pull many punches on those subjects, but identified with the sufferers rather than being disgusted by them. (Cf the kissing-old-Bowie scene.) Really glad I saw this.

IF MY HEART WERE A HOUSE YOU'D BE FROM A BROKEN HOME BY NOW: The Mountain Goats, redux. I'll catch up with myself in the next post. (Really!)


All Hail West Texas: Yes, I know I already talked about this disc. I have a lot of feelings, okay?

This is an album about the American experience as, above all else, transience. Post-office boxes in towns we don't live in anymore. I wonder how much this contributes to our obsession with marriage--cf. Andrew Cherlin on European obsession with birthrates rather than marriage, for example. Home is anywhere you hang your head. Home is anywhere you hang my effigy.

The standard, effective guitar chords often serve in place of rhyme--a way of making simplicity seem more than sincerism. The chords make the songs rhyme in your heart, if you're an American raised on the "three chords and a hope" of rock'n'roll.

"Blues in Dallas" is a 25-cent hymn on a jukebox heard from the bottom of a bottle. "Will I see you there/When that final trumpet blows?/Will I see you there/When that final trumpet blows?/If I don't see you there/I will run/a comb through my hair/and I will wait./I will wait./I will wait."

"And night... night comes to Texas." (last song on this album, quiet, shaky)

Tallahassee: "Moon stuttering in the sky like film stuck in a projector"--this is the exact kind of expressionist metaphor which will always work for me. Art is more real, in our experience of life, than the raw experience itself.

"And I hand you a drink of the lovely little thing/On which our survival depends./People say friends don't destroy one another./What do they know about friends?"

I got really into Elvis Costello because of his lyrics. I don't know if that can happen with the MG (this is how it really happened for me) but maybe if I quote the lyrics enough you can find out for yourself.

"The House that Dripped Blood": the whole first verse is amazing, and that killing harmonica whine at the end just makes it. Dostoevsky had a spider the size of a marriage; this song has a mosquito.

"the cellar door is an open throat"

"dig up the laughing photographs"--wow, this really is a horror movie of a song. I bet this house has laughing windows, too.

And then that IV needle of a harmonica, which carries you all the way into the vein.

I hope I've already made clear what I think of "No Children." It's like getting punched in the face by all the girlfriends you never even got the chance to disappoint. It's what dripped into Loki's face all those years in the cave with Sigyn. It's like if the present and future and subjunctive tense ganged up on the past and beat it up in an alley and stole its lunch money--and then spent the money proving it right.

Oh hey, I seem to have crossed "This Year" with "Old College Try" even though they're basically opposites. Story of my life! "Things will shortly get completely out of hand." Wow, the contrast between the easy chords and bass and synth/organ here vs. the brutal, hope-in-a-hopeless-world lyrics really hit me in a part of my 1980s day-glo heart which will always be badly bruised. Fans of Diamanda Galas's poppier, more fluorescent songs might like this.

"Oceanographer's Choice": Disorienting, bitter, catchy, poppy, self-lacerating. Are we totally sure this isn't an '80s MTV hit with the synth stripped out? ...Seriously, not sure I could love this more unless it somehow incorporated the Reagan-era "it's happy hour in America!" day-glo swizzle-stick aesthetic.

"And night comes to Tallahassee." (not the last song, but ferocious and vengeful)

"WELL IT CERTAINLY ISN'T OUR MISTAKE." Kindertrauma's "Stream Warriors" series continues to be a fantastic guide to overlooked horror/suspense gems, now available on Netflix Instant Viewing. Last night's movie was 1969's Games, a creepy, twisty little pleasure-cruise of a movie.

The premise: A plush New York couple live in the world's most awesome apartment, filled with pinball machines based on car accidents ("You're Dead, Man!"); pop art about infidelity; spirally things; crazy porcelain-and-gilt masks, and similar rich and strange flotsam. From the luscious jewel tones to the '60s seafoam and lavender, the colors in this movie are just a joy. Even the crocheted afghans are art-designed within an inch of their lives. Plus the entire movie takes place in the apartment, so although you get terrific lightning, rain, and falling leaves outside, you never really leave the glittering web.

The rich couple enjoys spooky dress-up games, living in a decadent playground free of any actual children. Then one day a mysterious European saleslady/con artist (Simone Signoret--!) rings the doorbell and insinuates herself into their lives. She holds their childish, American "games" in contempt, and begins to introduce some more dangerous varieties. There's simulated wife-beating... simulated adultery... but there's also a very real gun.

As Kindertrauma notes, several of the final twists are easy to guess if you've seen this kind of movie before, but the pleasure is in the journey and not the destination. There are a couple real scares, about a thousand stunning shots (including more meditative ones, like the wife dreaming in a garden chair as rain begins to spatter and leaves begin to blow through her long hair), a great ambiguous femme fatale in La Signoret, and a slightly vicious class-war angle. The fun of this couple's life is part of their problem (which gives a nice subtle edge of condemning the viewer for enjoying it so much!) because they have no sense of when the party needs to end.

"WITHOUT HESITATION THEY BEGAN TO DANCE." The 2008 movie Exam is basically a cheapened version of William Sleator's terrific novel House of Stairs.

As the comparison suggests, Exam's first half-hour or so highlights the way that contemporary job applications and economic pressures infantilize adults (much as the surrounding pop culture infantilizes people who, in a better world, would already be raising children of their own). The adults in this movie can be treated like the teens in Sleator's novel because their life-stage is so similar. The pencil-skirt precision with which they present themselves, the marketing ethos which leads them to accept the most reductive nicknames, all make college applicants look like careerist twentysomethings and make thirtysomethings look like children.

Exam is a really bad movie, with tons of overplaying and overwriting. I do think it's kind of amazing as a cultural document. The parallels with House of Stairs were startling, and the really boringly obvious AIDS references were harsh enough that I choked up a couple of times despite knowing that I was being manipulated. A B-movie, if not a B-minus--every single twist will be guessed well in advance--but this is a window into what job-hunting really feels like, and that makes it painful. I thought the twistiness of the "are we pro- or anti-Big Pharma?" plotline was also surprisingly thoughtful, though I have really intensely low expectations there.

You really should read House of Stairs though. It's a sad, compromised look at martyrdom and complicity, and its characters are incredibly memorable. Peter and Lola are one of the most memorable and unexpected teams in children's lit.

DARK, DARK MY LIGHT: Lake Mungo turns out to be a Blair Witch-ified version of Pet Sematary--King's best novel, if you ask me and I know you didn't--a cruel and sad meditation on grief. We are so convinced that there must be reasons; and I loved Lake Mungo for its insistence that no reason could ever be as big as the loss.

Lake Mungo is also about proof. It's about the difference between knowing something happened and knowing what happened. (The imagery of linear streetlights along the highway vs. randomly- or divinely- or fate-placed stars is intentional, I think.) For a while I worried that the twists upon twists would solve the mystery rather than deepening it; that didn't happen.

This is a big, sad movie which uses every inch of its genre.

>HOLY CATS THIS LOOKS GREAT. I was already kind of excited for this aliens-vs.-the-council-estates flick, but now I want all of it, right now.

HOLY CATS! (Sorry.)

I haven't watched the linked YouTube video, since I'm pretty sure it would freak me out even at age 32.

GOD LOOKS OUT FOR FOOLS, CHILDREN, AND DRUNKS. EXCEPT WHEN HE DOESN'T. Speaking of Frozen, I've been fascinated by the reviews I've read online. I mean, it is not a great movie--it is not the Hamlet of being stuck on a ski lift. But in a way that makes it a perfect Rorschach test. Virtually all of the negative reviews I've seen point out how stupid these people are, how unnecessary their torment really was.

And... for me, that was actually one of the best parts of the movie. I loved The Descent in large part because outside of the central terrible decision, the women are hyper-competent. They're better than me. Seeing their terror was a reminder that no matter how amazing and competent you are, there are things in life you can't control, and that's genuinely horrifying and tragic. The best qualities of the people you love won't save them.

But I loved Frozen for the opposite reason. These people screw up the way I've screwed up about one thousand times in the past year alone--except that they get the consequences, and I mostly haven't. I was overdrawn late last year (don't worry, Mom, it's fine!) by my own fault. Last weekend I left my laptop unattended in a public place because it was inconvenient to take it with me while I went to get my cafeteria food, and it didn't get stolen. If it had been taken I would fully expect everyone to tell me that I'd been stupid--even though all of us take risks like that all the time. If you don't take major risks fairly frequently, I'm guessing your caution is the result of neurosis rather than prudence. We walk down dark alleys and we make snap decisions and most of the time this turns out to be either awesome or neutral.

And then one day it's not.

I love that Kindertrauma's review emphasized the "there but for the grace of God go I" aspect of the movie. While I genuinely think it's well-paced and beautifully-shot, neither of those things will mean anything to you if you resist identifying with the characters. And I identified with them not because I have ever skied (I can't think of a recreational activity I'd enjoy less) but because I've often taken my safety for granted, or taken dumb risks. I try to do that a lot less now, because I'm not twenty anymore and I care about the people who care about me, but I'm not going to cram my life into the two-foot-by-two-foot box of sanity and safety.

I know that a lot of horror movies bank on characters making dumb decisions which are really hard to fathom. I liked the kids in Jeepers Creepers a lot, but I thought the initial decision which put them in danger was inexcusably stupid and naive, and threatened more lives than their own. So I get that a lot of the time, "Why the $#@! did you go in the barn?!" is a valid complaint about horror movies! I just don't think it applies to Frozen very well, because the bad decisions are so normal and small, and because the stupidity of those bad decisions isn't glossed over by the narrative at all.

So yeah: The kids in Frozen are stupid. That's why horrible things happen to them. They made a lot of small, understandable bad decisions, each one of which drew them down toward destruction. And when horrible things happen to you because of your own stupidity--I can guarantee, this will happen--you will not want or need people to tell you you should've thought twice.

THE IMAGINATION OF MAN'S HEART IS EVIL FROM HIS YOUTH. A few more thoughts on Black Swan and its reviews.

First, here's Kindertrauma, with prose as OTT as the movie itself! Much love, but as with the movie, you have to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate the review. I wonder if our mutual appreciation for this flick and Frozen (otherwise vastly different horror-shows) is because we were willing to watch two desperately flawed movies for what they did right? It's so hard to make recommendations, in general, because nothing is perfect, Nina, so it's a question of whether the misses will overwhelm the hits for any specific viewer. For me Black Swan hit hard. (Like this guy!)

Commonweal's review did one thing right, in comparing Black Swan to Repulsion. I wish I'd thought of that! But what's bizarre to me is that the review accused Black Swan of being cold, compassionless, unable to take the audience into empathy with a disturbed mind. And that's a criticism I'd make of Repulsion--despite its astonishing imagery--whereas I thought, as I tried to indicate earlier, that Black Swan actually has a lot of sympathy for all of its characters.

Repulsion also has a much more simplistic underlying psychological theory than Black Swan, I think. (Black Swan's dialogue appears startlingly on-the-nose, which is why I called it "crude," although I do appreciate that no one who speaks about Nina is actually right.)

OH, ROMANCE IS NOT A CHILDREN'S GAME: A review of Black Swan, finally. [lightly edited bc I initially posted an unedited version--fixed some typos and rhetorical fumbles, but substantively this is the original post--sorry! A bit more on this movie later tonight.]

I saw this movie I think more than a month ago, but had a hard time figuring out how to talk about it. So this is my flailing attempt to describe why it completely worked for me despite often being crude.

I think The Vault of Horror is really on to something in labeling the movie "expressionist." Black Swan is almost a Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for women. I know some viewers were disappointed that the movie pulled its punches on "body horror"; for me, Natalie Portman looking at herself in the mirror was vastly more terrifying than any H.R. Giger-influenced scuttling creation. I explained it to a friend by saying I thought Black Swan had achieved balletic body-horror: camp, because camp is always the razor's edge where tragedy meets parody. Loveless, cruel, and longing: that's how Black Swan woos its audience, all femme-fatale.

Black Swan gives us both repression-is-horror and self-expression-is-horror. I'm not sure I can think of a horror movie which managed to stay en pointe so completely. (For example, and I get that other people have other experiences of this movie, I thought that the hippies [eta: pagans, but you know what I mean!] in the original Wicker Man were so gross and silly that the movie's central conflict never felt real to me. I almost think that a horror movie, to succeed, needs you to love two conflicting sides [cf Juno and Beth in The Descent, for a case in which the obvious enemy is, for the audience, really just a way of raising the stakes and illuminating the conflicts between the women?].) Anyway, I loved Nina, I loved her naive idiot director, I loved her rivals, and I think if I were a better person I would have even loved her mother. I thought TVOH's line, "Nina's startling transformation into the black swan is the transformation of an individual who can only find release in the acceptance of that within her which also has the power to destroy her," was exactly not the point of the movie. Free to Be You and Me was not what this movie is about. More like, "The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."

One reason I didn't post about this movie before is that I wasn't sure how to talk about the fact that there are at least two, maybe three, scenes in which Natalie Portman simulates masturbation. And I'm kind of intensely ambivalent about that, even beyond the part where I did actually look away from the screen for certain moments of the movie. First, I was reminded of how censorship breeds creativity. If the makers of this movie knew they couldn't get an actress, a human person, to deploy her sexuality in this creepy diffused poly- and abstracted-erotic way, I think they would have found some metaphorical ways to make their point.

But that point would always have been masturbation, I think. Black Swan is actually aligned with Catholic sexual morality insofar as masturbation is one manifestation of Nina's spiral down into herself. Even her fantasies about connection with another woman are presented, by the movie, as masturbatory hallucination. Nina is never granted eros. All she has is self--the hated self, the perfect and exalted self, but never anything or anyone but Nina.

Soldiers, this solitude
through which we go
is I.

When you tell somebody, "Express yourself"--you'd better be pretty sure you know who she really is inside. Black Swan, with its rage against both repression and self-actualization, is a movie against our times.