These may not be good movies, but they are certainly good Twilight movies. It is difficult to imagine them succeeding better at the task at hand. They express the essence of the story, they please the fans. Each film advances the story and each contains the required kissing and snuggling. Is it a sad statement on Hollywood that integrity has become so hard to find that just making a decent movie is enough? Authenticity is precious, and I enjoyed each Twilight film more than the whole of the Frankenstein’s monster that is the new Star Wars trilogy.
Many Hollywood films now seem less like movies and more like “non-movie cinematographic products”, to adapt an Orwellian term from British law. Major films suffer from the traditional corporate greed and anxiety, but these are combined with a host of new problems. Self-censorship, pop-psychology about what “works”, the ascendance of managers over professionals, romantic narcissism, the decline of risk-taking, virtue-signalling, loss of connection to reality, political polarization, infantilization…all these factors and more have combined to hobble Tinseltown in the past decade. I really hope they can bounce back (or somebody can, because I love a good pop movie).
One question about Twilight: why don’t the vampires wear armor? They fight vicious hand-to-hand battles, tearing each other apart like soggy cardboard boxes. They bite. And yet they wear jeans and hoodies, as if they’re modeling for a clothing catalogue. No cuirass? No greaves? Not even a gorget to cover that oh-so-tempting neck area? I suppose the fact that I even ask such questions reveals how far I am from the target audience for Twilight. Oh by the way, go to Youtube and search for “Aro’s laugh”. You won’t be disappointed.
Is it possible to make good art out of stereotypes? To find an answer to this age-old question, let’s examine these two case studies. Both portray certain types of real people (rural Australians, Japanese businessmen) in a negative light, motivated by contempt (Cook) or anxiety (Crichton).
Cook’s debut tells the story of John Grant, a snobbish schoolteacher in the Outback of Australia. Grant tries to return to Sydney for his vacation but gambles away all his money in “the Yabba”, a dusty provincial town. Down on his luck, he gets embroiled in the lives of various local grotesques: a drunken doctor, a promiscuous young woman, and a gang of beer-swilling kangaroo hunters.
Crichton’s novel was written just after the “Japan as No. 1” era of the 1980s and early 1990s, when Wall Street bankers assumed that the Japanese economic boom would continue forever and dominate the entire world (they love to assume such things, don’t they?) The “lost decade” of the 1990s put an end to such grandiose fantasies and fears, and Crichton’s novel survives as an odd relic of the period. It tells the story of a Los Angeles policeman who investigates the murder of an American woman in a high-rise owned by a Japanese company whose parties are a bit wilder and nastier than the wholesome Christmas shindig across town at Nakatomi Plaza.
Both works, Cook’s and Crichton’s, were heavily criticized for their ethnic stereotyping in book form. Movie adaptations, both largely faithful to the originals, also earned critical scorn. The 1971 movie of Wake in Fright bombed in Australia, and the few people who saw it were known to stand up and shout, “That’s not us!” Likewise, Crichton’s novel and its subsequent film adaptation have been criticized as racist towards Japanese or even East Asians in general. Neither criticism is meritless, and nobody would call these novels flawless. But both Cook and Crichton are talented, sincere writers, and so their stereotyping is different and more nuanced than, say, a vial of pure poison like the Nazi film, Jew Süss. The core difference is that Jew Süss is uses stereotypes for political propaganda, while Cook and Crichton use stereotypes to create archetypes.
In Cook and Crichton’s works, the boorish Australians and deceptive Japanese slowly inch away from the stereotype into the archetype: specific personas with universal human resonance, used as elements in an artistic structure. Cook’s spiteful hatred of the Aussie rednecks turns, in the infamous kangaroo hunt, into a kind of holy terror before the endemic violence of mankind. Crichton’s worry about the conniving, hive-minded Japanese corporation eating America’s lunch becomes a tribute to discipline and agility in the fast-moving global economy. Such is the moral complexity of art that neither writer might have articulated their visions if they hadn’t been able to start in fairly crude oversimplifications.
Instead of reflexively judging artworks and looking for reasons to get offended (or to paternalistically “protect” others who might be), we ought to encourage artists to explore stereotypes without fear. Simply by representing stereotypes using the normal sensitivity of real artists towards any subject under their gaze, they can transcend them. Real art, no matter how partial and biased, tends towards universality. Of course, a world governed by free speech results in quite a few horrible, offensive, and worthless pieces. But such bad pieces tend to be created and shared anyway, even in a high-censorship environment, and the cost is well worth it for the sake of boosting creativity.
First-world critics who are completely allergic to stereotypes often live in a cultural bubble. They can imagine a wealthy white American’s stereotypical treatment of a Hispanic immigrant, but they couldn’t imagine a Hispanic immigrant’s stereotype of a wealthy American, or a Nigerian’s stereotype of an African-American, or any number of ready-made images that crisscross the globe in fabulously intricate ways. Of course it’s a noble goal to treat all ethnic groups with fairness and savviness. But it’s also a privilege that comes with a cosmopolitan upbringing. This is one reason why literary prizewinners, for all their ethnic and gender diversity, increasingly come from wealthy backgrounds and graduate from the same few Ivy League schools and prestigious MFA programs.
Avoiding the rush to judgment helps us appreciate art that is more raw and real, less refined and self-conscious, and ultimately more alive than the high-minded intellectualized nonsense that often passes these days for morally benevolent art. Cook’s and Crichton’s novels belong in this category of raw, real works. In ten years, maybe it’ll be an African writer’s stereotype about Indians or a Palestinian’s stereotype of Iranians.
When you see a stereotype in a work of art, the best question is not “Is this stereotype offensive?” but rather “What purpose does this stereotype serve?” Is it propaganda, cynical opportunism, a private grudge?; Or is it the undermining of the stereotype, or the painful birth of an archetype?
The mood is tense. Our heroes, Estelle and Joshua Bright, have confronted the crooked mayor of Bose in his office. The mayor burned down an orphanage to build luxury vacation homes (points for plausibility), and now he’s in trouble. He pushes a button and opens a trap-door. Two kirin, chimeras with sharp hooves and long whiskers, burst out and attack. Estelle and Joshua dispatch the baddies with great difficulty. The mayor is undaunted. He cackles and pulls out an “orbment”, a magical sphere, that paralyzes the heroes. He’s about to kill them when a second orbment, which has been lurking unnoticed in Estelle’s pocket, blazes into life and sets them free. The mayor jumps down the fire escape and into a waiting motorboat. The plucky heroes race after the scoundrel. But the camera stays in the mayor’s office, where a long-suffering butler turns to a bystander and says, “That battle took a few years off what remains to me”.
This throwaway moment captures the special charm of the J-RPG or Japanese Role-Playing Game. The bright colors, constant battles, and innocent protagonists may evoke Saturday morning cartoons, but the aesthetic effects are diametrically different and much more epic (in the technical sense). Villagers, shopkeepers, and random tourists appear throughout the game for no apparent reason. Most of the time they simply go about their business. A woman chides the heroes for interrupting her – she’s lost a favorite book. A man explains his business plan – he’s selling snacks to off-duty bad guys. A journalist badgers the heroes for a scoop. Slices of life.
You’d think these moments could be trimmed. They don’t advance the plot, give us backstory, or contribute much to world-building. All the same, they are crucial in fostering the epic atmosphere. I remember Roger Ebert writing about a similar effect in The Return of the Jedi, when Luke kills a monster in Jabba’s palace and the creature’s caretaker, a “musclebound jailer”, bursts into tears. Here’s Ebert:
It is that extra level of detail that makes the Star Wars pictures much more than just space operas. Other movies might approach the special effects. Other action pictures might approximate the sense of swashbuckling adventure. But in “Return of the Jedi,” as in “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back”, there’s such a wonderful density to the canvas. Things are happening all over. They’re pouring forth from imaginations so fertile that, yes, we do halfway believe in this crazy Galactic Empire long ago and far, far away.
The “density” that Ebert writes about ensures that the fantasy world seems real, that the main story events take place in a context where other, unrelated things are happening. Contrast this with a scene in Zach Snyder’s Justice League, reviewed a few weeks ago. In this scene, the evil Darkseid confronts his minion Steppenwolf. The pair meet on a broad platform suspended in a hellish landscape. The platform exists for no good reason (perhaps it’s a perk that real estate agents offer Masterminds when selling them an Evil Lair; “Look at that platform, honey! It’ll be perfect for threatening my minions”). Clearly the writers needed this confrontation to happen and chose the most obvious place for it. But the stripped-down efficiency that benefits, say, the layout of a cargo airport, or the mind of an egotist, doesn’t benefit a fantasy setting.
Trails in the Sky is a well-written fantasy and a great example of the classic J-RPG style I’ve adored since childhood. It lacks the gravitas of Final Fantasy VI, the haunting mysticism of Illusion of Gaia, and the intricate cleverness of Chrono Trigger, but it boasts a unique steampunk-lite setting and an energetic warmth that would charm a lifelong cynic. Also of note: top-notch characterization, with dozens of indelible characters, major and minor. As an anime series, it would be captivating. It’s almost a shame that you have to play the game (and endure the battling, equipping, shopping, save-point visiting, etc.) to experience the story. Good thing I needed a mindless stress release – otherwise I’d never have discovered this. It’s available on several platforms including the Sony PSP and Steam.
[Due credit to the game’s writers: Hisayoshi Takeiri, Yoshihiro Konda, Shūji Nishitani, Homare Karusawa]
Let’s face it, the main character des Grieux is an idiot. As soon as he meets the femme fatale, Manon, he is smitten. He doesn’t just fall for her – he wads himself in a sticky blanket of lust, puppy love, and faux chivalry. Manon favors a life of luxury over everything else. She views men as sources of wealth that she can access in exchange for sex (whether she is a mercenary materialist or a weak-willed seductress is never fully resolved, probably due to the narrator’s focus on the far less interesting des Grieux). We understand des Grieux having the hots for her. But he squanders his opportunities, hemorrages his money (and everyone else’s), and gives up his dignity, just to be with her. He learns virtually nothing. The key word here is “masochism”.
I didn’t much enjoy the book, but to be fair, it fully commits to its theme. What’s more, this work and Moll Flanders were quite daring in the 1730s in their honesty about the brutal calculus of 18th century sexuality. If that sounds like your cup of tea, by all means, put on your powdered wig and sip away. But for me it’s farewell, Manon. Good luck with your ensnaring.
The Door Without a Key 