The above image is from Mamoru Oshii's Innocence, which I got to see in a theater over the last few months. I considered writing about it below, but I don't know where I would begin. All I really want to say is that it's one of the best movies ever to see in a theater because you need a good sound system to do justice to the "Ballade of Puppets," Kenji Kawai's theme for the film. It's like being in a cave surrounded by dozens of singers desperately calling out to the gods for salvation.
The Conversation (1974)
Gene Hackman dresses like an upper-middle class professional in this movie, because that's where he is. Collared shirts and ties. Over it he often wears this awful coat made of thin, translucent plastic. It doesn't look good as part of his outfit, but it suits him. His business is spying on and investigating high-class people. He's working in the mud with a respectable veneer.
He knows it and it bothers him. Robert Bresson, in his films after The Trial of Joan of Arc, moved away from stories focused on individuals moral journeys and started making films about people stumbling over a world that's become too complex for personal ethics to matter. The Conversation is like those later films, except where Bresson's characters only wish to live in peace, Hackman's character still wants to be a hero.
Interestingly, that story ends before the film does. The way we hear the line "he'd kill us if he had the chance" would be cheap for a mystery film, but not for the portrait of vulnerability this film becomes. That kind of subjective emphasis was something Bresson preferred to avoid.
Evil Does Not Exist (2024)
I've seen a few different takes on what the title of this movie means. Some take it as an exhortation to understand each character's benign motivations. Some people take it as a judgment on what happens the end of the movie, tasking the audience with figuring out what the ending means if it doesn't involve "evil." I think the title refers simply to the fact that there are many ways the events of this movie could have turned out.
In an early scene, as the main character drives away from a group of children playing in a parking lot, the camera watches them out the back window of his car. It's a shot that draws attention to its perspective, even though it's a perspective that belongs to no particular character. It's a moment to consider how the world goes on moving when you're not around to see it.
In the past I've said that Ryusuke Hamaguchi's films show us situations where it's ambiguous what characters are thinking, but which are clearer in retrospect, once we see them in the context of the whole film. We see this in Evil Does Not Exist with Takumi, Takahashi, Mayuzumi, and even Takahashi and Mayuzumi's callous boss. In a given moment, we aren't sure if their intentions are hostile, self-serving, demeaning, or collaborative. We find that the characters aren't sure either, and in their standoffish moments, they're working things out.
But it's a delicate process, and again, the world goes on moving without you. None of them has to be "evil" for things to go seriously wrong.
I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
For a while watching this movie I thought it seemed a bit corny. I also never watched the kind of show the characters were watching or listened to the kind of music that plays on this movie's soundtrack. I initially thought the extended metaphor made it a YouTube-explainer-bait puzzle film.
But the last 25% destroyed my guard and I felt the same way I've seen a lot of people say they feel, like they connected to this film more closely than anything. It was like playing Night in the Woods again. If I had seen this in 2017, I probably would have been even more impacted.
Again, on paper I would say it shouldn't work--I don't see the purpose of fitting details into puzzle schemes, and I question the need for allegory over something more direct. But it's what it evokes in the moment, on a sensory level and an emotional level. Some people are bothered by the characters being miserable but frankly I appreciated the forwardness about the characters' fear, frustration, and resentment. Owen says "I love them more than anything" about a family we never see, and you can't possibly believe it. People seem to hate these emotional expressions because they take them as arguments, and not just a depiction of something; but while the metaphor is obvious, I don't think its purpose is some kind of imperative. Maybe it's interpreted that way because that's how a lot of other movies are, or because fear and resentment are feelings some people think are totally unacceptable to have. But doesn't it get a little tiring, pretending that all the time? People complain about the movie being focused on misery, but it can be just as annoying to hear constant jabs against acknowledging such feelings. If your reaction to someone else's misery is "smile more," then you have a problem.
And now when I think about it in retrospect, I can appreciate the effect of the nighttime lights and colors not just as part of an extended metaphor, but as sensations to chase after. For this reason, however miserable the characters are, I don't think it's just wallowing. There are fragments of exhilaration, things fondly remembered. Also, it isn't a film about nostalgia for a TV show, it's about nostalgia for the first time you exercised agency as a kid. There are things that feel good in this movie, even if it ultimately turns out like The Red Shoes, with characters spending a large portion of the movie chasing after the high of their greatest performance. For that matter, I ended up appreciating the distance the metaphor creates--this is a movie partly about the impulse to pull back before you let what's inside your head become real.
The criticisms I've seen leveled against this movie have ranged from absurd to theoretical points I would agree with if I hadn't been so taken with it on a sensory and emotional level. But either way I've been struck by the tone of sneering contempt in much of that criticism.
Trash Humpers (2009)
A friend told me to watch this as a horror movie. The ending was the scariest part. One of the trash humpers somehow obtains a baby, and seems to show affection for it. Or at least, she plays at showing affection. But if it is just playing--most everything is a game to these people--how long before she gets tired of it? If she's not playing, how long before the other trash humpers get tired of her?
While watching Trash Humpers, I thought of two other, very different films: Satantango and Foolish Wives. Satantango is a highly polished arthouse film and Foolish Wives is an extravagant spectacle. But Satantango is, in part, a film about how people produce waste; Foolish Wives is as well, and it also shows us just how trashy people's aesthetic sensibilities really are.
Talk to film fans and you'll find many who appreciate playfulness and personality; alternatively, you'll find people who claim to appreciate universality. But it can all seem a little sanitized. Most of the characters in Trash Humpers are in fact artists, but not ones whose work you'd care to see. It's ridiculous, offensive, disgusting, even harmful. It's a film that provides an outside perspective on the act of filming something, of appropriating things into an artist's personal, petty games.
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