I hated this, but DI's defense is alluring and I think there's value in his reading to a point, especially this part (bolding mine):
DarkImbecile wrote: Fri Jun 10, 2022 7:37 pmGarland's previous sci-fi features are more careful to construct an internal logic that allows for an examination of what Mr Sausage correctly identifies as more complex and multifaceted themes than are tackled here, but
Annihilation in particular dips into the well of horror for its more unknowable and irrational sequences.
With Men, Garland dives recklessly into the illogic and brute force of horror. I don't think he's as concerned with offering fresh insight or new angles on the oppressive weight or brittle insecurity of masculinity as he is with a maximalist expression of grotesque toxicity, and there I think he largely succeeds. I also don't think Garland is aiming for either polar extremity of "didactic explication of feminist principles" or "inscrutably-coded Lynchian puzzle box" — his intentions are not hidden, but they're not articulated like a simple equation either — and some of those expressionistic flourishes (like the first act connection between femininity and a state of natural grace) worked quite well for me.
The film functions more effectively for me if viewed as an inverted horror film - that is, toward how our real-life (rather than cinematic) experiences of horror pray on our senses on a level that defies logic and rests in ineffable emotional terrain. This film itself is not scary, but I'm also not sold that it's trying to be. While I'm not inclined to give Garland enough rope to say he's intentionally subverting and reconstructing the genre's signifiers in a self-reflexive manner, it's remarkable how he refrains from utilizing one of horror's greatest tools -its score- to play into jump scares or mere suspension-induction when it would be so easy, and even instinctual, to rely on this asset to aid in the goal of triggering our responses in sync with its subject. Instead, nearly every time a cryptic figure enters the frame, within Buckley's awareness or not, we don't get the expected needledrop. Whether this means that she's desensitized to oppression or that her experience of the horror of living with trauma is constant and obfuscated to herself -thus behaving illogically as we consume her subjectivity against the friction of what our non-traumatized perspectives are (at least in reference to her unique psychological relationship to trauma, as our own traumas =/= another's)- is up for debate.
But to DI's point, I think it might be unfair to order a clear internal logic that is accessible to us through the same nonverbal language as the film's protagonist when the only transparent message here is that we cannot know her experience, her trauma, that she herself does not know. It makes sense that Garland would betray the instincts of a horror film's soundtrack and narrative techniques, when Buckey's psychology has been warped to its own nebulous yet singular instincts, as that's what trauma does to a brain. Plus artists have used their respective mediums to translate these feelings to audiences without a concise, crystalline abstract for as long as art has been around, so this is all fair game as far as I'm concerned, and would make for an honorable -even if not successful- exercise if it played evenly by its own rules of obscurity.
The problem is that this doesn't, nor does it really add up to much if we don't care about the character or have any reason to engage with the material due to its mysterious premise and ill-defined purpose.
Like Swallow (a film I compared this to presumptuously but that nonetheless fits as a companion piece), this film doesn't make choices that it desperately needs to make - to either treat its subject's experience as subjectivity with an internally-directed focus on unconditional empathy, or opt for a more objective portrait that examines something else (be it the tragically skewed but sympathetic condition she's in against actual occurrences, a sincere alignment with factual injustices zoomed out, etc.) as various junctures. That doesn't mean that films can't do both (artists have accomplished this before, most recently exemplified by Wright's latest effort, which I'll get to later), but the problem comes when a filmmaker construes the two as one without either consciousness to this misguided conflation or a willingness to separate definitions with deliberate distinction and alternate between lenses.
Garland tries to have his cake and eat it too: Engaging with the subjectivity of a person actively living with acute trauma, processing her truthful-to-
her experiences in real time as the only experience that matters in a vacuum,
and seemingly committing to some didactically-thin allegory, demanding this experience to be objectively meaningful - but not even just that,
more important than our experiences that might ignore hers. You know, the kind those of us with the targeted dominant status can turn off and ignore if we didn't witness this great work of art to remind us. That I didn't buy, not because it isn't true, but because of the way it's expressed. Unlike
Promising Young Woman, which cynically empathized with both Cassie's subjectivity and everyone who chooses to cope through cognitive dissonance to some degree out of self-preservation for mental health, this movie seems to be finger-wagging and pandering to audiences without offering a solution or merely a tangible hold we can attach our attentions to in taking that prompt to grow and become a sharper, better audience (
or validate the impotence of the state we’re in with well-rounded humanism, which would be another form of tangibility vis a cue of magnetism toward acknowledgement of our collective futility to overcome intangibility on these issues).
Toland's Mitchell wrote: Sat Jun 11, 2022 8:47 pmThematically, the first two thirds of the film kept playing the same note, as we moved from one example of male oppression to the next. Kinnear's performance of every character cemented this concept. However, the supernatural third act, while visually interesting, didn't offer much to expand on it, and felt rather empty as a result.
I agree with this, but what bothers me is that Buckley's character is such a vapid canvas that pitting Kinnear's reverse-
Kind Hearts and Coronets one-note perfs against hers didn't accentuate that point. If anything, it's like, alright, one boring, empty female character is equal to like seven boring, empty male characters. So, what's your point? 0 > 0 x7? Is that really an effective use of the multiplying actor gimmick? Buckley is a talented actress, but (and I'm sorry to DI in advance for ruining his Sunday) she needs to sit her agent down and advocate to be given more to work with than weird, thin blends of subjectivity and objectivity, her characters often caught in the middle of whatever the director is trying to accomplish and minimizing her and/or her character's intrinsic merits in the process.
This worked really well in
I'm Thinking of Ending Things, because she represented an Internal Family Systems part of a psyche that, using that psychological framework, is allegorically a multidimensional human being that is of equal value to our other internal parts, supplied with a personality, wants, needs, dignity and worth. In
The Lost Daughter, I was frustrated with how her character was filtered through memory in a subjective manner, but treated as if we don't need any information since we're examining her through our character of alignment- her future self- and thus objectively observing someone we are told we should know and care about because we're in Colman's head. But we don't know her, because we don't know a character that doesn't know herself (sound familiar?) so there was an uncomfortable dissonance that forced detachment, and not in a self-aware 'Ah Because She
Feels Detached' way (both Colman and her younger self in Buckley felt detached from their environments, but whether the memory was a filter influenced by the current self's state was never insinuated, instead presented objectively as a regrettable behavior by someone exhibiting the same behavior.. and so this subjectivity and objectively merged in a convoluted mess that was disrespectful to the level Gyllenhaal was attempting to attract her audience).
Buckley's character here is used again for this frustrating function, and
that reduces her worth via film grammar. It's not just that we're disallowed a lot of information about her- that could be fine and work to empathize with a human being devoid of their exterior traits - but how she is manipulated like a pawn by the script and director's ambitions. It’s ironic, and yes I recognize the additional irony of a male writer making declarations about a female actress’ career choices in the wake of watching this film, but I don’t think gender should exclude the opportunity to offer a critique and I hope I’ve made a case for why I feel this way outside of a sexist lob. Buckley is a dynamic actress with so much potential - within the faux-‘confines’ of these types of roles (see: Kaufman)- and I selfishly just want to see more of that.
So it’s ironic, and works as the opposite of what Wright did recently with
Last Night in Soho, which has been irritatingly misunderstood to be a unidimensional didactic exercise on #metoo (just like some are reading this film, perhaps fairly so, I'm really not sure even after finishing it!) when Wright imbues all the many shades of color one experiences as they go through their most challenging and important life transition into his central character. He also oscillates between valuing her subjective experience with supremacy and zooming out for the purposes of humility regarding the limitations of that subjectivity, which reflexively services growth for the character as it has for all of us who have ‘been there’ (which is everyone above a certain age), and the writer/director as well. Wright is doing the same thing with his own subjective infatuation with the era and his humble awareness of the problems with fetishization, allowing the merits of his ingrained perspective and identity to coexist with self and external critique; checks and balances, without permitting one to usurp the other. It’s a challenging balance to attempt in execution, let alone accomplish, and one I don’t expect a movie like this to aim for- which is not where the bar is set. Still, ultimately not making any choices and rendering us powerless to endure a pointless and nonsensical but self-important Art Film, that may or may not be trying to be or exhibit horror on a meta-level, is too great an offense to not try to critique it - even if I'm very unclear about exactly what the film thinks it's doing and exactly what part deserves critiquing first.
brundlefly wrote: Fri Jun 10, 2022 9:44 pmHer Harper (yikes, name choice) doesn’t do much of anything and is not concerned about revealing herself to us.
Okay, this has to be an unintentional detail by everyone involved, but that's a funny thing to recognize, even if maybe Garland would defensively counter that, by recognizing the degrading subtext of her moniker, you're part of the problem because that shows that you've ingrained an oppressive instinct to defend... you know what, I don't have a clue what he's trying to do, so I'm not going to give even that much credit. If the film had formed an indication of how it would respond to this in its thematic DNA, I’d give it an extra star just for aiding my exhaustion by making one single choice. Respect the audience, man, even if you do so by letting us know you don’t respect us.
