Here I surf along the ripples created in my artistic imagination by strong, overlapping resonances between the two finest films I saw in 2016, which are indeed two of the finest films I’ve seen in quite a long while: La La Land and Arrival. The title is a tribute to the French language roots shared by Damien Chazelle and Denis Villeneuve, since my focus is on so much else that they share and since weaving these two current films together somehow feels appropriate at the titular level—these films are, for me, two radically brilliant and radically different variations on a single, singularly inspiring theme.

To say this essay contains “spoilers” would be a ludicrous understatement—I explicate events, themes, structures and subtexts in both La La Land and Arrival (and briefly invoke Fences, Moonlight and Moana) in great detail. You can read this, not have watched the three films I briefly invoke, and not suffer any ill audience effects. However, if you read this prior to watching either La La Land or Arrival, the glorious experience of these films’ gradual unfolding—and that’s what both do best, gradually unfold in the course of the viewing—will have been curdled for you beyond recovery. I also spoil Whiplash and Prisoners, but quite frankly if you haven’t watched those films by now you are likely utterly uninterested in them and (particularly in the case of Whiplash) likely also uninterested in what I think matters in my blog regarding cinematic beauty. Sorry, just saying. Anyway, please watch  both La La Land and Arrival first, multiple times, for tremendously better reasons than merely to read this essay.

 

Significant Other I

In early June, 1994, I was 23 and working at Walt Disney World. My primary assignment was at MuppetVision 3D and included handing out 3–D glasses, escorting guests from place to place en masse, and collecting the glasses after the film; on–mike spiels from location to location totaling about 50 pages or so of script were part of the gig. I was living with a woman with whom I’d been romantically involved, but that part of our lives was over and I was saving as much money as I could from the Disney job so that I could move away to Pittsburgh soon to live with a high school friend. Meanwhile, one great aspect of working at WDW was that smart, funny people close to my age had been working there, since I’d started in February, as interns in the College Program—some of them, of course, beautiful women. Early June meant that a new batch was about to join us.

Ray M, who’d trained me by making sure I understand all aspects of the role and could deliver each of my on–mike spiels flawlessly from memory, had remarked to me during the training that he’d never worked with any trainee (he’d been doing this for years) who was as quick a study as I was and that I must be very smart. It was a generous compliment, but one he was able to boomerang back on me wryly when, in this early June window, he said one day, “Hey, you’re not the smartest trainee I’ve had anymore. I’m working with a College Program intern now, Amy Kilgard, and she’s a lot smarter than you.” Rather than hearing this as an insult or a challenge, I heard it as an opportunity: Who in the World was this Amy? I’d met all the other new interns except her, and I’d seen her name on the schedule and been curious about her, but wow this was sounding more and more interesting.

Then, a couple of days later, I headed, unaware, out of the break room to bump into the rotation. The first rotation station was photocells, the electronic turnstiles where we counted guests as they passed through and handed them their glasses. When you headed out of the break room and emerged onstage in front of the arriving guests, the cast members currently standing at photocells would have their backs to you. I had just enough time, as I whooshed out there, to register the barest sliver of the thought, “that’s Ray’s back, so the mystery person next to him with the long hair might be…” as Ray, turning to me, smiled and said, “This is Amy, who I was telling you about.” As he was saying this, she was already turning herself, her shoulders angling, her hips pivoting, her long ponytail swaying—all of this, thoughts, words, motion happening in a mere instant, a flash. And that flash was very, very bright, blinding, hot, my skin tingling, her smile and eyes and simple “Hi!” entering me and changing me forever. It defies every tiny shard of rationality, but I swear without even a pale glimmer of a doubt that in that mere instant I knew, with complete certainty, that this  was the most extraordinary person I would ever meet in my life.

 

Significant Other II

Perhaps paradoxically, the more I learn as a scholar of communication and culture—about historical contingencies, about limited and totalizing perceptions, about the need for constant dialectical negotiation and active construction of relationships—the more firmly I embrace my experience of “love at first sight” as no romantic fiction but, indeed, a genuine reality. Here’s one reason: Sara Ahmed, in Queer Phenomenology, describes “lines” that trace our orientations to the world around us. She claims that it’s through our orientations to the world that we take up, among the otherwise bewildering array of possibilities, particular friendships and jobs and walking routes and hobbies and culinary tastes and so on. These, when patterned over time, when clustered through combinations of habit and choice that come to feel to us like narrower and narrower possibilities for movement, make us who we are for one another and for ourselves. Not a shocking claim, of course, but Ahmed explores carefully how thinking of the orientations themselves as such, as looping, thickening lines of action and conception in each of our lives that become like gravitational lines distorting space–time in post–relativity models of the physical universe, how thinking of the orientations as orientations gives us a powerful way of making sense of our identities.

One way I find Ahmed’s work most useful  is through reflecting on my relationship with another queer Sara(h), my sister. Sarah is lesbian–identified, and when she hears me describe sexual identities as fluid, as shaped by communication and culture, which is how they make sense to me through the lenses of my scholarly work and my own experience, she insists that her desire for women is not fluid and is not largely constituted socially but is innate, something that’s been part of her since birth as much as her eye color. My sense is that Ahmed’s phenomenological work allows my sister and I to cut through the knot created by a rigid nature/nurture dichotomy in thinking about sexual identities—if by “orientation” we might mean not a “way of turning toward” that’s transparently volitional and reflective of a simple choice among options by the self–assured and fully self–aware turner, but instead a “way of turning toward” that’s much closer to how we might pivot in response to a sudden, sharp cry for help from a young person very close behind us, our hips and thighs and knees and ears and eyes and ankles and skin and adrenaline glands and fingertips and nostrils and body hair and all of what we’ve learned throughout our adult lives about safety and responsibility and social life and vocal pitches and body height and vocal phrase contours all with us at once, in an instant, not easily sorted by nature or nurture.

Cutting through knots: One great cinematic strength of Arrival, this masterpiece that enacts the advent of futurity, is that it, too, cuts elegantly through the knot that in most films blunderingly bunches a narrative thread, a thematic text, a structural arc and a set of cinematic lines of thought. In Arrival these four strands are always braided elegantly—from the gradual revealing of the nature of Louise’s “flashtimes” that grow ever more sharply focused visually and ever more concrete dialogically over the course of the film, “flashtimes” because they are neither flashbacks nor flashforwards within the heptapod existential condition that the film stages for us in a plaiting of theme, structure and cinematic approach, to the cinematically brilliant use of the proscenium barrier separating Louise and the other humans from the misty heptapod space, allowing us to experience the precise, identical sense of sonic and visual scale and shock and sublimity and supposition that Louise experiences as her breath heaves and catches on the glorious diegetic soundtrack, in real time and space scale (as long as we’re in a proper theatre—this is not a film that will have anything like the same quality in a living room, this film resuscitates and requires the theatrical pilgrimage in a way blow–em–up car chase films and fantasy epics and space operas cannot touch, another aspect of the masterstroke of the proscenium screen and of the vertiginous, Hitchcockian pull of focus when the humans first look down the gravity–less center of the landing capsule toward the earth, so much more luscious than anything in the great director’s own Vertigo and other focus–pulling film moments because the Arrival characters are not just psychologically but also physically experiencing an unmooring of hard reality, a deeply radical existential slippage, I mean they’re tentacled ten–foot–tall aliens!), to the way the “can she save the world?” narrative hurtles to its conclusion by the oft–used (in other cinema of suspense) structural and matching cinematic processes, structural processes like much more rapid movements from setting to setting and from action to action as the conclusion picks up its pace, cinematic processes like more rapid cuts, more close–ups and similarly shortened focal lengths on the lenses, processes that in this film also weave in the ends of the thematic arc itself, the climax reachable only when the film grasps, along with us as viewers, toward the simultaneity of thought, action, time, space and cognition that the heptapods are directing Louise to embrace. All this, at once, narrative/theme/structure/cinema that cannot be meaningfully disentangled in this eternally delicious imagining of alien existence in the most profound sense, not alien existence as merely a “thing to behold” but alien existence as a “thing to be” using the power of cinema.

 

Significant Other III

So I believe that when I first met Amy, though I could not “know” in the rational sense that she would be the most extraordinary person I would ever meet in my life, Ahmed’s lines of orientation—describing how we know what we know, describing the fundament of our personal epistemologies—suggest that I might have begun at that moment to orient to her and to every other person I met before and after that moment as if Amy was the most extraordinary person I would ever meet in my life. From that point of view, my past and future were both differently knowable to me in, and from, that moment of meeting.

My lines of orientation as an educator and as a reader of philosophy lead me to John Dewey, who argues that we typically misunderstand the relationship among past, present and future because we develop so many projects within the present for which we defer evaluation—of their meaning, of their value—to the future. We do this because we only take up the projects themselves in order to meet future goals. For instance, we have guests coming over, so we clean the house endlessly until they arrive, with no clear sense of when it’s clean enough because we cannot know if it’s clean enough until the guests arrive—and even then, we won’t really know if it was clean enough until after they’ve gone and assured us on their way out that our house was lovely and that they had a wonderful time. Another very destructive parallel example with which I’m intimately familiar is when students endeavor to study for an exam. They won’t be able to answer with confidence any questions I put to them about the quality of their study efforts until I return the exams with their scores. I don’t give exams anymore, precisely because I agree with Dewey, but this is the central point: An educator creates exams so that students can deepen their learning, and students deepen their learning through studying for the exam itself. The purpose of developing an exam is to not to sort students by their eventual grades, or at least it shouldn’t be; the fact that so much educational structure currently reflects this misunderstanding and is scaffolded on the idea that we should sort students, schools and districts by grades is why our educational structure is deficient and fails students. Dewey puts it this way: We act very often as if our present activities’  meaning and value can only be redeemed by some future outcome, but that is an exactly backwards way of grasping why we should set goals—the present is not the servant of some utopian future, which is not a pragmatically defensible relationship of future to present because the future is the future precisely because it is unknowable. Instead our vision of the future—inchoate, unknowable, but helpful because it is distinguished by the fulsomeness of our goals for it—this future is itself a servant of the present and its task, as servant, is to enrich the meaning and value of our present activities.

This view of future and present helps explain why Dewey’s so committed to art and aesthetic experience: When engaged in art, or with art, we’re exploring possibilities in an open way, in a way that reaches into a murky future of playful freshness at the very same time we’re completely committed to our present activity. In this mode of being, we mold a relationship between alternatives and realities, living through their intertwining, and thereby practice the swelling and intensifying of our immediate world through the process of reaching for something new—a skill vital when we frame practical, achievable goals outside the aesthetic realm. And so back to Ahmed and lines of orientation and the unique joy of the five greatest films (for me) of 2016: They are united, in both formal method and thematic arc, by their staging of the process of unfolding self–discovery. In La La Land Mia and Seb imagine themselves first individually, then in connection to one another and their shared dreams, then apart again—and the film, too, imagines and reimagines itself, moving from glib, sunny musical to romantic comedy to darkening, bittersweet heart–squeezer to, in the climactic Seb piano solo scene, magnificent treatment of how we come into being through enacting ourselves across imagined possibilities. In Arrival Louise learns that she’s bound by her world of sounded speech, of linear language, of ordered systems constraining contact, and that saving the world requires unmaking these parts of our world and touching the eternal—and the film, too, teaches us how to watch it, moving from chilling alien invasion tale to trippy Nolanesque sci–fi to Nietzschean celebration of eternal return and the possibility of transforming human limits. Moonlight and Moana and Fences (the last film an existing dramatic piece, to be sure, but one exquisitely played onscreen and one quite well suited to this pentad of thematic linkages) is, in each case, a film that reveals itself, only gradually over the course of our viewing, as a meditation on how we become ourselves only through interacting with Significant Others.

Levinas, another of my philosopher–heroes, argues that the Face of the Other is sufficient to demand our recognition of the Other as our ethical companion, a companion whose wholeness and mystery is irreducible to our efforts to come to know her as an object of study but who is as fully human and complete in herself, for herself, as we are for ourselves. It’s no coincidence, in my view, that the hero of each of these five great 2016 films is someone other than the autonomous, “maverick” white male who dominates so much cinematic history—Seb’s journey in La La Land is entirely dependent on Mia’s, and Ian is frankly marginal in contrast to Louse in Arrival. Moonlight, Moana and Fences are films in which white males are utterly irrelevant as characters. I’d like to believe Levinas is correct, that the Face of the Other is a complete foundation in itself for ethical orientation if we take the time to behold it, but I’d also like to believe that artistic experience, too, can attune us to the ways our own lives are projects requiring mutual construction with those who share our world—and these five fabulous films enact exactly this, with great beauty and compelling execution.

 

Audition I

Mia’s finally–successful audition, a great turning point in her life, begins with the casting director asking her to “tell us a story.” In this scene, a musical number with Mia gradually finding her melody, her rhythm, her theme over the course of the song as it firms up from speaking to verses to chorus, the film also settles firmly on its own theme, clarifying this theme after 100 minutes of gradually finding it with us up to this point: We tell ourselves stories, like “I will be a film star” or “I will run a jazz club” or “I will raise a daughter who dies young from illness” or “I will develop a blog in which I explore music and film,” and through telling ourselves these stories we make them real, we make our lives into them, bit by bit. The unfolding reality may not match precisely the stories we tell to birth it, but it’s recognizable nevertheless. Amy would say that’s what art–making is, most powerfully, the birthing of ourselves. She would also remind me that we make art together, not alone, and one of La La Land‘s great triumphs is its portrait of this collaborative art–and–life–making: Mia and Seb create together, and Mia and her aunt create together, and Seb and Keith create together, and Seb describes the dialectical tug between solo and ensemble at the heart of jazz. Through these acts, we see relationships develop—before our eyes, in the cases of adult connections for Mia and Seb, and in narrative performance, in the case of Mia’s powerful song about her aunt, “The Fools Who Dream.”

Novelist Haruki Murakami developed a series of conversations with conductor Seiji Ozawa into a 2016 book titled Absolutely on Music. In it, Ozawa stresses several times the need to give “direction” to music, something he considers his job as a conductor but that he also indexes as part of active, humanizing performance practice for orchestras and active, humanizing listening practice for music lovers. Ozawa describes this process as changing over time, as he and Murakami discuss the changed nuances across several recordings Ozawa has made, separated by years from one another, of single pieces in the classical repertoire. Through his life’s work, Ozawa gives direction to the music we hear. And we hear Mia, in “The Fools Who Dream,” giving direction to her childhood memories with her aunt. She’s tried to tell this story before, tried to give it direction in describing to Seb how she came to act and to write plays as a kid, and this telling led her to the solo performance (“One Night Only” read the posters) that at first seems like disaster. Now that the solo performance has found its purpose, the one–night–only–connection to the casting director, Mia finds a new voice in the moment she most needs it and tells the story of her aunt again, gives the story a new direction, using her aunt as a single instance of a dreaming fool and weaving outward from her aunt a description of art and its purpose in giving life direction for all of us, giving life fresh possibilities for artists and audiences alike. Through her music, she gives direction to her memories, to her audition, to her art, to the film itself and to its grand claims about art and possibility.

We also hear and see this process of giving direction to the music, giving direction through the music, again in the most exquisite, triumphant and bittersweet moment in the film, the moment when the film finds its own voice: Seb’s piano solo near the end of the film, with Mia and her husband in the club. There, Seb plays a theme we have heard several times before in the film, developing it musically in the most extensive way yet—and through this development, reveals an alternative possibility, another direction his life with Mia might have taken. As Ozawa suggests, though, he cannot do this alone; he needs our collaboration for the theme to have its tremendous force within the film, needs us to remember the moment he brushed past Mia in the Christmas music scene, needs us to imagine the texture of their life together as sharply as he is, as sharply as the film has imagined the life that has brought Mia here with her husband. Something about the music itself, the intense, visceral impact sound has on both our emotional responses and our memory (sound, like smell, is a sense that takes us right back into a remembered moment, strongly), imbues this scene and this film—and, indeed, Whiplash—with a drama that more merely visual, less musical films cannot easily match.

Another way this astonishing scene works, and works in a way strikingly like the way the final drumming scene works in Whiplash, is by juxtaposing two different levels of imagination against one other. In Whiplash this works primarily musically: The film has already, by the final scene, been filled with music and thematically centered on music, especially drumming, throughout, in a way distinct from the typical non–diegetic soundtracks in cinema. But the temporally and visually intensive focus on the drumming in the final scene gives that music a weight and vigor that draws us into the sound, that invites us to help give it direction, that textures it distinctively within this film and exceptionally distinctively within cinema—something pointed up by the shocking, brilliant cut to black on stroke of the final drumbeat. Elaine Scarry, in Dreaming By the Book, traces a technique used by authors in prominent literary texts in which objects and textures and qualities of light and sensation that are faint, indistinct, featherlike, translucent are integrated into author’s descriptions as a way of giving comparative weight to other objects, textures and qualities of light and sensation, a way of making them more real to us by contrast even though they are themselves fictive descriptions as well—a lace curtain fluttering in the wind and letting in fading late afternoon sunlight, for instance, described in detail, might give great relative weight to the heavy, dark, immobile, soot–covered leather furniture also described in the same image with the power of a gifted wordsmith. In La La Land the gifted cinema–smith Chazelle has one again, by the time of Seb’s final solo in his club, involved us through music, invited us to give direction to the narrative and the characters through music, throughout the film—in my snobbish view, the “convincing” way to create a musical on stage or screen, and why I love this film in some ways like I love Moulin Rouge, because the music and characters and narrative all mutually shape one another. So we know how to link music to character and narrative by the time of Seb’s final solo because the film itself has taught us to do this, from start to finish, through songs like “The Fools Who Dream.” And when the solo ends and we’re outside of Seb’s (and Mia’s, perhaps?) imagination and back in the “real” club, the weight of Seb’s choice—bittersweet within the story told in any form of art—is exceptionally, grippingly weighty because of the cinematic equivalent of the technique Scarry has described, the integration of the faint, the translucent, the achingly ungraspable within the firmer fictional world that holds it. And instead of accomplished through verbal description it’s accomplished through jazz, the thematic centerpiece of the film—through music, through the way that people can collaborate to give direction through music, Ozawa–style. And if your heart isn’t throbbing when that solo ends, like Seb would insist I cannot understand why you listen to music or why you watch films.

 

Audition II

As for creating and following lines of development: The heptapods in Arrival have come to encourage direction in human development, but the conflict in the film derives from their inability to merely direct us themselves. Instead, we must direct ourselves in order to develop as they need, as we will according to the time–collapsing heptapod “history” Costello tells Louise. One implication that unfolds in the film, and that exemplifies Villeneuve’s effort to match form to content, is that our linear language has given bluntly linear direction to our experience of time, to our ability to conceive relationships—according to the film and to the heptapods, we’re imprisoned by the very lines of thought Ahmed describes as human orientation to the world. So to help push our conception in this story beyond the linear narratives normed in cinema, Villeneuve gives us access to Louise’s ideation of her daughter’s life, bit by growing bit, circling around again and again to her visions, allowing us to share her deepening understanding of that life and what it means, what it will mean.

But our existential separation from heptapod life is not only about linear, sequential order—ordered time, ordered thought, ordered syntax. It’s also about sound, a medium that flows temporally. A heptapod ink symbol’s circularity reflects not only a lack of linear linguistic order, an unbounded cycle of past/present/future, it also reflects its imagistic nature: Louise makes the point that the croaks and snarls Abbott and Costello make have no relationship (that she can discern) to any of the particular pictographs they squirt. Though their croaks and snarls may be meaningful to one another, Abbott and Costello rely much more fully on a language grounded not in sonic patterns but in visual ones. Our lifeworld, the one in which we have developed our human languages and ranges of human thought, is according to the film paradigmatically oral/aural, even in the way it governs our use of writing—because we write in deeply structured, recursive (in the Chomskyian sense) juxtapositional grammars. This texturing of human existence within a sonic environment fits well with Ahmed lines of orientation and Dewey’s pragmatic emphasis on goal directedness: When we hear a sound, most obviously a siren warning us of its approach from a distance, the Doppler effect of changing frequencies and loudness helps us trace not only its linear travel through space but also its advent, its quality of ever–more–fulsomely–arriving. Through listening to all the sounds in our environment, not only sirens but the myriad of blooming and buzzing around us, I think we do precisely what Ahmed and Dewey argue we do, which is to develop an affinity for reaching our cognition out just beyond the horizons at the edges of our present senses, just beyond what we know now to what we knew, then, and what we will know, when. We’re very, very good at it—so good that we might even know our soul mate when she’s said nothing but “hi.” And it’s one explanation for why the heptapods might need us, at some point, to “help” them as Costello promises: Because as gifted as they are, the heptapods’ all–at–once, time–shattering cognition, sliding as it does along Jakobsen’s paradigmatic axis, all experience a totalizing synthesis, cannot do this human trick, the trick of living not “all at once” but in gradual, graduating process, living along Jakobsen’s syntagmatic axis, always juxtaposing, stringing ourselves along, given the music direction, reaching beyond the immediate while rooted in the immediate, moving through time and irradiating the infinite with irruptions of sound.

 

Audition III

One way sound and its pregnant unfolding across time can do what vision and its totalizing dissection within space cannot do is vary a theme. Sure, fractals do this visually when graphed, contain themselves in iterative, repeating structures. La La Land’s sections are a season cycle, Winter through Spring through Summer through Fall to…but what’s glorious in Richard Feynman’s apocryphal attribution of the claim that “the whole universe is contained in a glass of wine” as he describes the magic of the iterative majesty of the physical world, atomized and electric and bonded from smallest drop to greatest ocean, is that we cannot behold this iterative, structural beauty all at once, we must use microscopes and telescopes and worked–out problems and investigative assembling that all, like the season cycle itself, take time. The great piano solo sequence in La La Land is a clear instance of the “whole universe in a glass of wine” metaphor, as within that solo the film’s thematic and cinematic and emotional core are all concentrated like a diamond, but the logic of the whole film across its total organic arc suggests that each moment in a lifespan—the moment of spontaneous tap dancing under the lamppost after the party, the moment of Mia attending her first Messengers concert and beaming up at music that shocks her, the moment of Mia first hearing Seb play at Christmas, the moment of honking and cavorting on the freeway, Mia’s becoming the next iteration of the  adored actress she once admired at her own coffee stand—each moment in a lifespan contains its own fullness, its own perfectly whole vision (or perhaps soliloquy) of an entire life.

In Arrival we have perhaps the most persuasive vision to date of a science fictional theme we’ve seen and heard before in this genre, the idea that “aligning ourselves against aliens will bring unity to a previously divided, post–Babel Earth.” Space invasion films and television shows have sung this song for decades, and the most memorable use of it for me is rendered in graphic novel form by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in Watchmen as Ozymandias/Veidt’s terrifyingly tentacled contraption explodes its manufactured gore all over the urban landscapes of modern blight, depravation and decay. But vitally, the theme in this case is cleverly and carefully laid out in the opening sequence, with the daughter and her illness and Louise’s voice over about “the beginning of your story,” a story of love and loss subsequently varied upon in each of the “flashtime” sequences. Here in this superb film we will be told a tale of how unity might be enacted not just by frightening our divided world into fighting a common extraterrestrial enemy but by changing how we, in this world, experience unity and division as temporal/existential conditions—and like Louise needs help from Costello, we need help from Villeneuve, we need scaffolding. The “flashtimes” that were first laid out in the opening sequence, the variation on this opening theme or love and loss, erupt more and more often within the “present” narrative of alien invasion and are used as a linear anchor, as a glowing filament for viewers within this dark cave of circular orthography and eternal return, as a narrative device that parallels and signals Louise gradually learning the universal language—and Louise’s strongly felt love for her daughter, our scaffolding via this heart–wrenching linear narrative of birth and death, must be personal, must not be about aliens and fear and language learning, because it is through the personal that we can best connect to the infinite. Isn’t this, after all, what “love” is? On a narrative level, if the eruptions into the “present” narrative were not personal, Louise would not have a way to make sense of what she was intuiting about the future. On a cinematic level, we learn to love the film’s conception of the infinite along with Louise, through our connection to one character. Like a cinematic fractal. In this extraordinary way, La La Land and Arrival are cinematic twins well beyond their common thematizing of how we enact our own lives through imagining; they use cinematic form to immerse us in their organic structures of unfolding.

Just as Chazelle has developed the artistic tools he needs in La La Land through his work in Whiplash, Arrival is not the arrival of Villeneuve’s art of the unfolding. He is exceptionally effective at elaborating the thematic material gradually, in seamless integration with the narrative itself, in all three films I’ve watched of his—Prisoners, Sicario and Arrival. Most cinema is generic in the sense that its narrative structures are predictable and its thematic structures can be intuited simply from the genre (rom coms, westerns, action capers, gross–out slapstick films, horror films, buddy films)—but in nearly all cinema, even the formally experimental stuff I love from Bergman or Welles, the stuff with unpredictable narrative and/or unpredictable form, the thematic material we largely intuit at once, relatively close to the start and certainly by the film’s midpoint. Not so Villeneuve’s films, quite impressively. I can explain what I love about this with a quick digression into Prisoners, not everyone’s cup of burning hot villainy and not a masterpiece of cinema on the level of Arrival, but a good illustration of what’s so distinctive about Villeneuve. At the start of Prisoners we realize we’re watching (even if we go in cold, no trailers, no reviews in advance) a creepy film about the abduction of two little girls. It’s an unusually interesting such film in two ways: First, it’s not just a “catch the creep” film but a puzzle, for us and for the characters, because none of us can figure out why Alex acts genuinely innocent and nothing like the scheming pedophile he clearly must be based on what we’ve all seen, and second, the film seems more interested in its characters—the cop, the family, even Alex—than a typical “thriller” about killers on the loose. The titular Prisoners seem to be the girls and, by extension, the vulnerable among all of us—perhaps even Alex himself, in a way. At this point, we’re perhaps 30 or 40 minutes into a two–hour film, and it’s shaping up to be a really cleverly written, glitzy–scale–produced episode of Criminal Minds (a compliment from me, I love that show in its early form). Then, the film’s thematic material shifts, deepens—our focus on the characters has led us to a meditation on how much brutality we are willing to inflict on one another in the service of aims like rescuing loved ones or remaining loyal to friends or maintaining professional standards. The Prisoners include Alex and those who imprison him and, by extension, those ensnared by the lure of violence as a solution. Thematically, we’re at a level more rich than anyone other than maybe Fincher could pull off in a “killer thriller.” But as the bits of the puzzle finally fit together in terms of the resolution of the mystery, and the vicious “aunt” gives her “waging a war against god” speech to the stunned father at gunpoint, we feel a tectonic shift in the film’s thematic material one more time—we’ve moved beyond studying the limits of our own brutality to a place that, in some respects, even Se7en didn’t quite get to when David opens the box containing his pregnant wife’s head (oh for heaven’s sake, I surely cannot be blamed for spoiling that in 2017—you know Bruce Willis is himself a “dead person” that Haley Joel Osment sees, right? There has to be a shelf life), we’ve moved to a treatment of violence itself as a human act of willful, seething resistance to order and a treatment of patriarchial order itself, in the form of priests and cops and fathers, coming to terms with the violence that props it up and gives it authority, of patriarchy itself facing the repressed, disordered horrors of chaotic Escher–like mazes and snakes on the loose and spider–like predatory grannies kidnapping and torturing the young. We are, under patriarchy, all Prisoners of what we fear and what we repress, in ourselves and in one another. I love Fincher’s work and I love Se7en and Zodiac both in particular but this film, Prisoners, at least matches them as a philosophical thriller, and its success depends on Villeneuve’s unerring ability to use cinema to move us like prey ourselves through layers of thematic grit within his multi–level directorial maze. One final note, one final effort to praise VIlleneuve’s Prisoners above the much–more ballyhooed (and I’m one such ballyhooer) Se7en: Prisoners beautifully contrasts with “high body count” narratives in televisual culture, from horror films to serial thrillers to crime shows, in that we do not personally know anyone who is murdered. The film is certainly gruesome in its more violent scenes, and it has its suffering victims: The abducted girls, the “snake maze” fellow and, especially, Alex all suffer differing but unthinkable (for most of us) levels of psychological torment and terror, with Snake Maze suffering unto suicide and Alex assuredly unrecoverably deranged—but all four of them are spared death at the hands of the creepy killer. She and her ex–husband have, we learn, murdered a number of young people in their twisted war, but we never even see the faces of any of those people. The girls, Snake Maze, Alex we come to know—they speak and have agency (of varying kinds) and are treated as people, even if people who can and will suffer. The parents of the abducted girls are four quite distinct characters who act and react each in her or his own way. Se7en is valorized for, among other effective cinematic qualities, giving us a richly textured treatment of the cops and of the enigmatic, crusading killer, but we hardly know nor care about the fat man, the pedophile, the sex worker who help accumulate the ticking count of the sinning murdered. This is typical of all “killer thrillers” I’ve watched, from horror to crime, from film to television, from country to country. Yet Prisoners, a thematically dense exploration of fear, repression and violence, refuses to resort to the ultimate violence, murder (it does resort to filming suicide and other grim brutality) to achieve its ends—we get to know nearly every character in the film as a person, save for a couple of nurses and cops, and none are murdered in the present–day narrative. As someone who has watched, quite literally, thousands of hours of “killer thriller” visual media, I swear this film is unique in this way, and I’m astonished and in admiration. Perhaps I’m wrong—perhaps Prisoners is indeed a cinematic masterpiece.

Again, Prisoners is no Arrival, but both attest to Villeneuve’s ability to threat theme in an extraordinarily impressive, cinematically acrobatic and graceful way. That’s what La La Land does, too, with its tap dances and romantic–lead–witty–patter and its nostalgic love for old Hollywood and for the heyday of jazz and its season cycle, another kind of eternal return like the one limned in the heptapod pictographs—it gracefully glides across its own organic structure, the whole film gorgeously unified yet each scene its own unity in its formal and narrative shapeliness. Robin Wood has taught me that this is the signature marker of great cinema, the organic unity that weds form and content, cinematic structure and thematic fabric. La La Land and Arrival are tapestries, mosaics, aesthetic recapitulations of their shared single theme: how we create ourselves through interacting with Others. They are, each, a theme and variations.

 

City of Stars

La La Land‘s appeal to Hollywood nostalgia is very much on point thematically within the film; it’s not just cute, it’s crucial. It’s crucial with respect to how life imitates art not only in the present moment but in lines that reach both backward and forward, lines that become circles like heptapod pictograms: Mia and Seb create for one another an intertwined life by recreating, again and again, scenes that invoke classic Hollywood. Those classic films (and music) have taught them how to imagine romantic movement, and so they reach backward into cinema’s past to reach forward together, imbuing their present romance with meaning as they do. And the film winks at us, counts on us to sense the traces of classic Hollywood even when we can’t place them precisely so that we can imagine where Mia and Seb, where the film, might be going—necessary for us to be both affirmed and surprised by where we land.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson argued, before Congress in an invited swath of testimony, that when we collectively imagine the future—even in art such as science fiction, especially in art such as science fiction—we create the cultural tone and the social will necessary to fund scientific research that is otherwise difficult to support. In his gripping testimony the phrase “reach for the stars” becomes a much more literal description of how we develop ourselves. Our lives, too, are unsupportable without the ability to fantasize the way Mia and Seb fantasize, the way Louise fabulates a daughter she’ll one day give life to, the way she also formulates translations of heptapod language and thought she’ll one day save lives with.

And sometimes the fantastic is not reserved for art or for imagining; sometimes the fantastic does come to life, come into our lives. When I lived with Jay in New York City in 1992, early in the year (maybe they first week of February), shortly after I’d moved there and while I was still desperately looking for a job, as he and I sat up into the wee hours of the morning because his School of Visual Arts classes were all in the afternoon and evening and I had nothing to wake to but more pavement–beating, he asked me one night in the throes of mutual depression what I really, more than anything, would do for a living if I could. I answered that I would teach college. He told me that I should do what he does, that I should draw ugly cartoons alone for hours until I could cartoon well, that I should write screenplays poorly until I could write them well, all the things an artist does when yearning to be other than he (Jay) is at that moment. I told him that’s not how becoming a college professor works. He called my bluff and demanded that I give him a lecture, right then, right there, about anything I wanted. I thought for just a minute or so about Christopher Ricks, the most gripping lecturer I have ever heard, my undergraduate icon, one of our age’s great poetry critics, and I told Jay that I’d give him a lecture about poetry, right then, right there. One reason I thought that’d be a workable choice is that a favorite poem is something you can recite from memory, without any prep. So I recited the following John Keats poem, from memory, with no prep, and began my lecture:

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

So that in my veins red life might stream again

And thou be conscious–calmed

See, here it is—I hold it towards you.

I spoke immediately after reciting it, for perhaps half an hour, just to Jay, there in the dead of depressive night in a tiny, cramped living room in a tiny, cramped apartment, about the anachronistic horror–cinema imagery of life and death and veins, about the sonorous wonders of sibilant “icy silence” and the thudding deadness of “cold” and “tomb” being resuscitated by the slightly lengthened vowel of “blood” and the complicating vibrating thrum in the come–to–life “calmed,” about the hyphen and the stretching of “toward” into “towards” as the last line reaches out unendingly to close the poem on the only end sound not rounded out with a consonant, the echoing finale of “yooooooo,” and about many other things besides. Jay is a smart guy, and he was absolutely right to call my bluff, and without even realizing I’d done so I’d enacted what the poem I’d chosen “simply because I could easily remember it and loved it” itself enacts, the quickening of the life force, the reinvigorating of my confidence that I could make my life what I wanted it to be.

So now it’s nearly a year later, mid–December. I’ve spent the entire Fall 1992 semester writing all of Jay’s papers for him for a class on Literature and Cinema. He hated college and just wanted his film degree; I missed college and missed writing college essays. Not that I actually read any of the books I was writing about; I recall writing about a D.H. Lawrence novel and a Kafka novel and perhaps Fitzgerald (I actually believe I had read Gatsby, though not for a while by then). But I figured, why not, Jay doesn’t want to write them and the class is huge so even though Jay talks in class quite a bit and the prof likes him there’s no way anyone will find our scam out and I like doing the writing and playing the game of impressing the prof, so what the hell. And I’d been winning the game—every paper that Jay and I got back had more and more detailed, over the course of the semester, glowing comments about my acuity and my insights and my prose—I mean, about Jay’s acuity and insights and prose. So it’s mid–December and this professor I’ve never met and will never meet for a class I have never attended, this professor who erroneously believes he’s reading papers written by Jay, hands Jay back his final paper. And Jay is stunned, because he’s never connected with this prof outside of class, never done anything more than chat about film in class discussions, never broached the subject of actual literature in those discussions for fear that might give the game away, never even mentioned poetry in any context in any way—and he hands me the returned paper. There, on the final page, in the prof’s handwriting, after another set of delightful compliments on my writing, he’s written a relatively obscure poem by a poet he never one time mentioned during this class, to Jay or anyone else, and he wonders if I know the poem and have considered how he understands what it means. And it’s This Living Hand—verbatim—line for line—there on the page, written by HIS living hand as the final words this ghost professor will ever write to this fabricated interlocutor who has deceived him, who he will indeed haunt until the deceiver’s (my) dying days.

That’s the most extraordinary, bizarre, incomprehensible experience I have ever had or ever seen—I’m not sure ten–foot–tall tentacled aliens or walking into my former lover’s bar by chance with my husband or knowing from the first moment I see her face that I will love a person more than I will love any other can top that for “wow” factor for me.

So I continue to believe, as a rational skeptic, that all things may be knowable in principle—but I’m damn certain we may never, ever fully know why or how we know what we know. And La La Land and Arrival both offer this same quandary to us, beautifully.

 

Are You Dreaming In Their Language?

Amy’s favorite cinematic aesthetic is magical realism—from Amelie to Hugo to La La Land. Magical realism is certainly a quality cinema can capture at least as well as any art form, given its power to enrapture us and transport us while still rooting us in the sensory cues of sound and vision through which we most often and most intensely engage the natural world. I’m not always quite as strongly drawn to magical realism in film, but what does feel strong to me about the magical realist aesthetic in La La Land is that this aesthetic allows each character the space, visually and sonically, to do her or his own thing. From the opening number on the freeway to the ensemble number with Mia and her roommates to Mia and Seb’s tap dance under the lampposts to Seb brooding over “City of Stars” to, of course, the glowing brilliance of “The Fools Who Dream” at the audition and Seb’s closing piano solo—each person gets the chance to embrace and explore what makes her or him unique, using her or his own voice and body to imagine the moment. It makes the snappy flirting dialogue Mia and Seb engage in, for instance at the party with Seb playing the plastic keyboard, credible within the romantic arc of their relationship: The magic is in relying on one’s own creative spark, and in this way even when not natural, when not embracing verisimilitude, it’s magic that’s realistic.

Just like Mia and Seb find their way in fits and starts through the process of coming to know how and why they know what they know, just like Louise does the same, I have grappled through most of my life with an experience involving ephemeral epistemology: Since at least my adolescence and perhaps earlier, I’ve had what I have come to call “déjà vu dreams.” They work like this: I’ll be having an utterly ordinary conversation with someone, perhaps in a kitchen of a house I don’t know very well about something having nothing at all to do with butter, and a faint chill will flutter up my spine, goose bumps will prickle my skin, and time will seem to slow down—and I’ll know, with instantaneous recognition, that the person I’m talking to is about to suddenly begin to rhapsodize about butter for no reason whatsoever and will then, a couple of sentences later (I’ll know this is going to happen and think it to myself before the butter rhapsody even begins) reach inside a drawer I have never seen opened and withdraw a pink envelope with a glittery rainbow stamp right in the center. How could I have possibly known these events were about to occur, in advance? The Ahmed/Dewey conception of our human ability to reach into the past and the future, beyond the horizon of the present, in ways we cannot quite consciously grasp certainly offers an explanation, but what’s strangest about the whole experience is that I’ll have an extremely clear, precise memory of having dreamt the mundane moment. You know how when you first wake up you remember the peculiar details of a dream, but then if you don’t tell someone or write them down you forget them? Well, when I have these “I know what’s going to happen in this mundane moment for no earthly reason” moments, each time I will realize that I dreamt the moment several days or weeks earlier and, having no context for understanding the dream because its events were so mundane and because I did not understand the meaning of the sequence of events, I forgot the dream after a few minutes of being awake—until now, when the dream comes back to me and allows me to magically predict the future.

My curiosity about “déjà vu dreams” and their provenance and purpose has shaped my cinematic taste: I’m obsessed with a series of films united not at all by quality (they range from the personal favorite–above–all–favorites Donnie Darko to the outstanding Inception and Interstellar to the mediocre Déjà Vu and Source Code to the “acquired taste” of the Final Destination series to the appallingly bad The Butterfly Effect) but by their thematic focus on our ability to develop knowledge across the boundaries of time and space. Donnie Darko has always been the most compelling of this group of films for me, with Inception and Interstellar close behind, and La La Land and Arrival help me understand why by sharing with these three films one particular quality that I find genius: The “knowledge across time and space” power across all five of these films, the ability to ability to alter the path of one’s own life or the lives of others, is an epistemological ability rather than an ontological one, an ability imagined within each film as a special aspect of the power to know. Cinema’s reliance on sound and vision, on enfolding us fully within its embrace, is quite effective at enacting this epistemological reaching beyond the pale. The dreamlike quality of so much cinema, represented best perhaps by Hitchcock’s realization that Notorious needed Dali and that Vertigo needed, well, vertigo, stems I believe from its ability to enact epistemological reaching. Just as Amy most loves magical realism in cinema, I most love epistemological bursting of boundaries in cinema—and La La Land is the precise point where our cinematic fantasies most perfectly converge.

 

All Around Me Are Familiar Faces

When classical composers use the “theme and variations” form in their work, a common element of the form is that the penultimate variation will be quite distinctive—perhaps a light–hearted major key theme that has been inverted and jazzed up and set in double or quadruple time and reharmonized will now, in the penultimate variation, appear in a brooding, passionate, minor key lamentation. The transcendent beauty of this musical form is encapsulated in the distinctive penultimate metamorphosis, for when you can trace the germ of the theme even through this wide–ranging reshaping you finally feel that you know, that you truly hear, the theme in its essence.

Where Donnie Darko dared to deify death through a young man’s dark dreams and his cheating of time, La La Land reaches for romance and sends us soaring with a song about substance in art and a spectacular solo on the sweet bitterness of solitude and acceptance, and Arrival allows us to learn to live with language that leaves the languor of time and sound for the imagistic radius of the infinite. These two recent films are intertwining penultimate variations on the theme of what cinema, of what our minds, can bring into our lives and can make out of our lives. Without them, I would understand cinema much less than I do, and for that, for their many deep and twinning resonances, I am glad.