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Once again, I have written a long post. What can I say, it's my blog, and I'll write what I want to!
Editors keep asking for "short" articles - 750 words seems to be the magic number. I think this is a reflection of the frenetic, short attention span of our society, which has been molded usually by the media - television, films, and of course article editors. Sometimes it is difficult to make one's point, or points, in 750 words; sometimes only five may suffice.
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Like the parasites they are, the Coen brothers have zoomed in on Jeff Bridges and convinced him to act in their latest venture, True Grit. Bridges won a well-deserved Oscar for his role as a fading country music star (he sings the songs himself, no less) in Crazy Heart. The Coen brothers must have been impressed with the rugged, independent character that Bridges portrayed as a country western musician, and correctly, I think, assessed that this would pass over to a role in a Western.
True Grit is a Western in which Bridges plays a U.S. Marshall hired by a young girl to find her parents' murderers. To continue with their parasitic tendencies, the Coen brothers' True Grit is a remake of an old Western with the same name, starring John Wayne who won an Oscar for his role.
Some of the reviews for the film looked good, even impressive. The critic at the New York Times gave the film a perfect 100%. Yet, the New York Observer gave it a 25%. I have never seen such a low score alongside a perfect 100. But I trusted the one or two which described the violence in the film. The reviewer from the San Francisco Chronicle, who gave the film an unimpressive 25%, writes:
If there's one big difference between this version and the old, it's in the attitude toward violence. The new version may be more graphic, but it doesn't present violence as inevitable or necessary, just ugly.I had already seen the matter-of-fact way in which the Coens incorporate brutality (even evil) into their films, where they determine horrific violence as "inevitable or necessary".
The last film I watched by the Coen brothers was No Country for Old Men in 2008. I included it in the article License for Aesthetics in Wilders' "Fitna", where I compare its gratuitous (awful, terrible) violence with Geert Wilders's calculated and intelligent manipulation of violence in Fitna, which Wilders uses to make his point on Islam. Here is what I wrote:
Then there’s "Fitna," Geert Wilders’ film on the Koran. More precisely, Wilders’ film on the violence prescribed by the Koran, as followed by Muslims. Juxtaposing footage from newspaper, television, and photographic sources with Koranic verses, "Fitna" documents the destruction of the World Trade Center, beheadings, train and subway bombings, child suicide bombers, female genital mutilations, gun-executions of women, hangings of gays, and much more, to show how Muslims are mandated to act in violence. And with a license to kill and destroy.The Coen's films have been described as aesthetically superior by almost all the critics, even those who gave the film a low score. But that seems to be the Coen's signature entrapment; making even gory blood something to contemplate in terms of form and color. They could be pardoned for this, since after all, we keep forgetting in this age of slickly reconstructed movies, film has always aspired to be an art form.
And Wilders makes a bold and correct decision with his film. He decides to go for the aesthetic effect. He places the translations of the Koranic verses on sepia toned pages of the Koran itself with its beautiful script and gilded borders. His images of newspaper, film and photographic footage are placed within diffused frames in soft-focus, once again on the sepia-colored background. Even the terrible scenes of the Nick Berg’s beheading, whose final horror Wilders spares us by substituting the images with the muffled, bone-chilling, sounds of his gagged screams, are presented within these blurred frames on this softened background. The music is two classical pieces by Tchaikovsky and Grieg.
Here's what I wrote about the aesthetics in No Country for old Men which is used to seduce us into watching the most horrifically violent scenes:
I’m sure it was the slow-moving, often still camera which is especially good at defusing anxiety in the midst of the story’s madness and mayhem that abetted me into watching scenes from No Country for Old Men. Imagine if the shots had been done in fast motion, with guns rattling away, bullets flying, and bodies falling and writhing. The director chose just the right kind of filmic device--an after-the-fact survey of the chaos--to seduce his viewers to keep on looking. I was even reminded of that great film aesthete, Robert Bresson, who constructed his austere scenes of pathos and nihilism with long, still tableaux, as though beauty would excuse what we saw.Another element the Coen brothers use is in both No Country for Old Men, and in True Grit is ambiguous racial characteristics. In No Country for Old Men, the lead female is played by someone who is clearly a white/Asian mix. I write in the blog entry "Authenticity in Movies":
The second [instance of inauthenticity] one, which disturbed me more than the first, was Llewelyn Moss' wife, Carla Jean, who looked like a Chinese, most likely mixed Caucasian/Chinese, to me. I would have expected a southern red-neck type wife, or even a Mexican (or 1/2 Mexican.) Someone who looked like she came from there.When I saw photos of the young girl in True Grit who hires Jeff Bridge's character, my first thought was that she was mixed black/Chinese. Maybe Filipino. The Wikipedia entry on her says about her background:
[Hailee - what kind of name is that?] Steinfeld's father is Jewish and her mother is of Filipino, African-American and European-American descent.I get the feeling that the Coen bros. like to mix it up. None of their lead male actors has any racial ambiguity, which leads me to wonder if much of their racial cross-overs are sexually tinged.
These days, I'm noticing a preponderance of mixed Asians - it is often white and Asian, but black and Asian is cropping up. It could just be people's tendency to follow trends - yes even in marriage. Or, it might be the subtly aggressive Asians (Chinese) women, both new immigrants and several generations down, who pursue white (and now blacks, who are acquiring their own prestige - just look at the President of the United States of America) partners to dominate society with their offspring and mates. "Whites" still get the most tickets in our divisive multi-culti society. And a white/Chinese mix can get the best of both worlds. The mixed Chinese I've met may appear to live Western lives, but they seem to have their heart (and a foot) back in their (Asian) motherland. I noticed this especially in art, where Chinese - mixed, first generation immigrants, fifth generation, it didn't matter - would almost always incorporate an "Asian" element in their work.
And white men are going for it, even in movie-making, abandoning their less "demure" white women; women, who after all participated in establishing their (the white men's) place in the hierarchy of races (and art-making). Perhaps violence and racial mixing go together, even if only in artistic endeavors. Forcing together unexpected elements is an aggressive, if not violent, act. And, at the end of the day, art is partly an expression, or a representation, of the society around it.
This 21st century seems to relish violence. More so than the previous one. Or maybe we're just getting immune to it, and we need to up the ante. Many shows and movies have their standard violent fare - audiences seem to need that fix. But we're subtly entering into the domain of excessive (the journalist-speak is "unnecessary") violence, which I think only leads to evil.
It is telling that True Grit came out around Christmas time. And not surprisingly, No Country for Old Men was released near the end of November in 2007, anticipating the holiday (Thanksgiving and Christmas) crowd. The films are a raw contrast to what we would expect from these peaceful and joyous seasons, especially Christmas. And aggressive deconstructionists/reconstructionists don't want peace, joy, and least of all truth.
As Jesus' imminent death even at his birth (through Herod's decree) anticipated his later death, we should be wary of this violence that presents itself during this holiday season. We may be in for an even bigger battle, a war between Good and Evil, in which everyone of us will have to participate. We better chose our side early, and prepare ourselves by fighting the many small battles along the way in anticipation of our imminent, eminent war.
One simple way would be to boycott and renounce films like True Grit. We are, after all, the audience, and voluntarily (so far) either go or not go to such films. Word of mouth, letters to the editor, blog posts, also do go the extra mile. The worst we can do is allow filmmakers like the Coen brothers to think that they can produce these kinds of films with impunity.
Needless to say, I skipped True Grit.