Mechanism Alley

I guess that one of the saving graces of joining NetFlix is that I can keep myself from owning physical artifacts (DVDs and their bulky cases) that will later embarrass me. This is a fine lesson to learn after only the first DVD of my subscription.

I've long been interested in (though not thoroughly convinced by) the neo-primitivist philosophy of Daniel Quinn, as espoused in his books Ishmael, The Story of B, My Ishmael and Beyond Civilization. (If you're not much for didactics wedged into fiction, skip straight to that last book, which Quinn wrote as a nonfiction primer for people who missed the point of the previous three novels.) Quinn's asserts that mankind existed in a primitive state of grace ("in the world" he calls it) pre-agricultural revolution, which rather glosses over a large bit of anthropology. His lionization of the "tribe" as humanity's properly-sized social unit occasionally reminds me of the just-so stories we hear these days from the evo-psych crowd and the term unfortunately butts up against the common ills of "tribalism" that we first-worlders sneer about in the countries we invade and bomb to smithereens. But those four books (his books since have been parables of varying depth and dubious elegance) do provide some interesting vocabulary and framing of contemporary (meaning the last 10,000 years) society, and do have some resonance with other works, like E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful and the chapters about the alleged cross-culturally appearing number 150 in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

So, a while back when I read about Instinct, which was "suggested" by the novels of Daniel Quinn, I put it on the list of movies to someday watch. I was very much interested in how Hollywood, one of the prime cultural artifacts of "Taker" society, would approach a critique of that same society. And now I know how: with shallow artlessness and absolutely no sense of magic or weirdness at all. That's a shame, since the core mythology of Ishmael and its sequels is that there is a talking philosopher in the world who happens to be a lowland gorilla. Talking gorilla! Anyone who has read DC comics for any length of time knows that talking gorillas are gold.

But not in Instinct. Instead, Anthony Hopkins appears as a long-haired cross between Ernest Hemingway and Hannibal Lecter, and he's the philosopher discussing Taker society and the illusion of freedom in miserly little discussions between dreamy memory montages of Africa. (I wonder if this was one of the films that led to one of Sir Anthony's many retirements from acting.) Cuba Gooding does his eager beaver character, and the rest of the movie is populated with a few knock-offs from The Shawshank Redemption and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Throughout, the movie's problem is one of depth. Mainly, that it is lacking any in any aspect. Character development is bare sketches. Relationships between any two characters are thin gruel; what little connection there is between Hopkins' character and his daughter is barely sketched by a couple of photographs, for example. There's an obligatory mass redemption scene that has been far overdone ever since Dead Poets Society killed the idea, and it causes this sudden sea change in an otherwise minor character. There's the obligatory heartfelt farewell scene (which actually made me boo out loud; I hope Gooding puked in his trailer afterwards to get rid of the taste of those lines), an overused rain/shelter trope, a weak and implausible budding romance, and the Big Important Praxis from what should probably be three or four other movies all glued down in thin laminar sheets. Almost nothing that is meant to engender character growth in the movie is actually earned. Instead, it is just laid out pat as the next thing the characters need, just so. And Anthony Hopkins never even gets to finish off the petty sadist prison guard.

I really would rather have had a talking gorilla.

Instinct, 1999

• Read more at IMDB
• Review by Roger Ebert
• Buy at Amazon: Instinct
• Rent at Netflix

As should be evident by the title of this post, I am horribly under-exposed to movies. I'm the guy who always answers "Did you see X?" (where X is any movies) with "No" or more than occasionally, "No, but I read the book." In order to fill this gap in my cultural knowledge (and, ok, distract myself from the boredom, loneliness and pointlessness of every day -- see, I'm ready for film school already), I signed up for NetFlix only 5 years after everyone else got tired of it and I intend to catch up. Yep, I am just that lame.

The subscription hasn't yet kicked in, but my parents' subscription has, and while I lay on their couch in a ham/turkey/cookie-induced stupor, I kicked off my movie watching with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Up until now, I had only ever seen the jumping-off-the-cliff scene from this film, and I had always thought it was the end of the story. That it is not does not surprise me. I can be wrong about things like this for decades. For example, it was years and years after I heard my dad describe Black Sunday that I finally understood that the Super Bowl had not been attacked by a blimp full of gorillas in that movie.

But anyway. I approached this movie with some trepidation, mostly because of the Burt Bacharach soundtrack. I knew it had won a passel of awards back in the Jurassic, and it starred two dudes who are still the gold standard for Hollywood movie star guys, and so damn many other movies refer to it. Obviously, it must be a Very Important Movie, right?

Well, let me set up a parallel experience. When I was in 4th or 5th grade, I wanted nothing more in the world than this boxed set of the first three Dune books. Sandworms! And there was the Dune Encyclopedia which I had already read (and totally misunderstood). And there was a Dune board game in a local toy store that looked complicated and expensive (it was neither, as it turned out). It had to be important! And so I tried to read Dune. Despite being a fairly advanced reader for that age, I was lost. I gave up after about twenty pages and didn't open a Frank Herbert book again until I was in my thirties, at which point I realized I should have read those books in high school like every other nerd, because they were actually pretty good if you just accepted all the baroque politics and religion and such as window dressing.

I had much the same reaction to Butch Cassidy. Perhaps I've become inured to the charms of simple stories after so many years of, well, Dune and its ilk, and a linear narrative can't engage me any more. I was a little intrigued by the beginning of the movie, with its simulated projection of a silent movie depicting the characters we were already watching a movie about. Meta-textual! Postmodern! A commentary on film! Right? Huh? And then that largely went away, save for some ham-handedly timed sepia washes. Later, when I heard about the Indian tracker who lived as a white man and went by the name "Lord Baltimore" I wanted to know more about that guy. Give me a couple hours of that guy sometime, eh? But again, not much to see there. Just a guy in a straw boater hat, and all you even se there is the hat (which wasn't even his). The only part of the movie I really engaged with was the pursuit by LeFors and Baltimore. These guys burst out of a secret train on a bunch of black horses and track our heroes across bare rock in a straight line, like they were the Nazgûl. For a minute there, I thought maybe Butch and Kid were being pursued by something otherworldly, vengeful (metaphorical) demons from Hell. I likes me some ghosts with my cowboys. But no. After an interminable chase, and the famous cliff scene, all of a sudden they are back at Hole-in-the-Wall and headed to Bolivia. How did the bounty hunters not think to stake that place out, by the way? It was in the name of the damn gang. You'd think someone would have looked at a map.

And about that trip to Bolivia. I understand they needed to have Paul Newman show off on the bicycle for a while and be cute for the ladies to swoon over, and so you get the "Raindrops" montage. But there at the end of the "New York" montage, when you can tell they had filmed a real scene, I was griping loudly that whatever the dialogue was in that scene, it had to be better than another second of that late-sixties "la la la la" evil that Bacharach subjected us to. Even a map with a slowly drawn arrow from New York to Bolivia would have been better than that stretch of boredom.

I kept waiting for something real to be at stake in the movie, beyond just corporeal danger. There are some good scenes in the opening -- the card game, the gang mutiny. But then it just flattens. The romantic triangle is as dull as could be. Butch could have stolen Etta away at any time, because it was clear that Kid really didn't care about her other than as a comfort for himself. But he doesn't, and neither she nor they show much care when she leaves them in Bolivia. They show more concern for the dead mine operator, in fact. The movie is one long string of lightweight episodes with cartoonish violence, right down to the end. There's something to be read regarding loyalty among friends? Thieves? Nihilists? But that's pretty hard mining for so little gold.

On to the next classic. The future's all yours, you lousy bicycles.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969

• Read more at IMDB
• Review by Roger Ebert
• Buy at Amazon: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
• Rent at Netflix