Device Notes

At the start of this film, Roger Thornhill tells himself "think thin," hoping to lose weight. He works in advertising.  He intends to change the world by thinking about it.  But the film properly starts when the tables are turned on him.  He stumbles into fictions that everyone but him finds more believable than reality, and his only way out is to deal with hard, uncompromising matter.   Suits, mansions, "libations," amber waves of grain, high art, and finally Mount Rushmore lose any social or symbolic weight they might have had .  In the cornfields, he gets down among the dry leaves and dirt.  On Mount Rushmore, he grasps the contours of the cliff face.  He finds himself trapped in an auction house, surrounded by the people of high society, dignifying themselves with art and money.  Faced with a threat to his life, his escape is to mock these people until they toss him out.  He cracks wise about everything, however serious ...

  Please.  The whole "civil war" notion is a joke.  T here's no room to criticize the Avengers' actions in the MCU.  No one else is powerful enough to battle the various preternatural forces that threaten humanity, and every film shoves their backs so hard against the wall that questioning their actions becomes pointless.  In a film like this, in which an argument about it appears to take center stage, it must dissolve into the articulation of a cosmic Cheney doctrine.  The people in this film who want accountability from the Avengers have to be wrong at the end of the day. So, in the conflict between Iron Man and Captain America, the movie must insist that Captain America, who wants to keep the Avengers free from oversight, is right.  Except he's wrong.  When Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, is accused of bombing the United Nations, Cap decides he needs to capture Barnes himself, before the government does, so he can be sure of Barnes's guilt...

Rear Window  is often discussed as a metaphor for film viewing: Jimmy Stewart's L.B. Jefferies amuses himself by observing his neighbors through their windows.  We, the audience, who sit down to watch this movie for our amusement, are doing the same thing - so the critics often say, at least.   What, specifically, does the watching mean though?  The characters debate the ethics of watching, but ethics don't rule this movie.   The point isn't that any of the watching is good or bad; w hat comes of their watching is sometimes good and sometimes not.  The same amoralism that we see in Rope and North by Northwest is here.   Interest and excitement rule.   Jeff lives in the bohemian Greenwich Village, surrounded by artists for neighbors.  They put themselves out, in some ways, to be seen.  Making compelling surfaces, negotiating what you find compelling with how others respond, is the objective for the characters he...