SCENE SELECTION: Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
BBC Storyville/Diverse Productions/HDNet
Films/Jigsaw Productions/Phantom Films.
USA 2008
Director: Alex Gibney

Hunter S. Thompson’s hatred for Nixon was well known, but his dealings with and regard for Patrick Buchanan—staunch conservative, Nixon’s special consultant, and White House speechwriter in the late sixties and throughout all of the Watergate affair—were productive and far healthier. So much so that when Thompson approached him to write a piece on the future of American conservatism for Rolling Stone, citing his own “twisted sympathy” for Pat’s personal stance during Watergate (“if only because,” Thompson went on to say, “of what strikes me as [your] basic integrity, along with a stylistic brutality that I can appreciate”), Buchanan accepted, and replying in kind joked: “Tell your liberal friends we expect to be treated with all the deference and respect as outlined in the Geneva Conventions on the handling of prisoners of war.” Clearly the two enjoyed a great rapport with mutual trust.

In his final appearance in Alex Gibney's super documentary, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Buchanan is, alas, accepted and rejected as a “half crazed Davie Crockett” character (as Hunter once described him)—accepted, that is, by filmmaker, and rejected (on the same terms) by audiences who never get to see the man Hunter knew. But his scene is, for me, the defining moment in the film, for it exceeds its pertinence and applicability in all ways. Speaking highly of Hunter’s promise in a soundbite that seems (more than anything) to actually bemoan his egotism, Pat’s interview is interrupted by the roar of a motorcycle engine in the street outside, forcing the production crew and Pat to stop until its fade out on the soundtrack. Glancing over at Gibney, Pat laughs, “that’s fitting!,” a joke which gestures as much towards Hunter's time with the Hell's Angels as it does to his early years as the Outlaw biker of Big Sur. The shattered, indispensable moment recalls the best of Herzog: a world that cannot be tamed, unleashed in all of its exquisite mystery. A phantom of Hunter’s world, indeed Hunter as phantom, undoing the sanctity of modern, American conservatism. Just beautiful.

Paranormal Activity (a girl, her boyfriend, their home, and a serious mistrust of cameras)

So, Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity, still very much in the news right now for scaring the pants off transnational audiences the world over, is the “scariest movie of the year” and it’s no big surprise to learn that the digital camera has everything to do with its success. The film has been spooking, chilling and thrilling millions of us as we all share helplessly in its first-person POV: whether locked off in its familiar position at the foot of the tormented couple’s bed, or as a constituent part of the action itself, the first “eye” so to speak into the loft and the first through the blinds downstairs registering the chill of night. Via our complete immersion in the reality of the home video, we become linked (again) to one character, one subjectivity, and we are asked to feel the loss of that character finally when he and the camera is, to all intents and purposes, abandoned. When the film abandons us.

Katie (Katie Featherston) lies nearly comatose in bed, just hours after emphatically convincing her
boyfriend Micah not to abandon their home.

For those who don’t know, Paranormal was produced for $15,000 by Blumhouse Productions, it was sold for $300,000 to Paramount, who then marketed and distributed the movie domestically at an estimated cost of $10 million. It was well-reported that by its fifth weekend, the film had dispatched Lionsgate’s Saw VI at the box-office and grossed in the region of $62 million across 1,945 playdates. As a result, it’s gone on to accrue the status of a small cultural phenomenon, with many claiming that if you don't watch it in a crowded cinema then you shouldn't watch it at all. So, firstly, I have to say that I saw it late on a Saturday night in the heart of London’s Leicester Square, with a great audience that was clearly up for a lot of howling and derision. It’s important to note this from the outset because, unlike Sanchez and Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project, there’s very little confusion, agency or narrative jeopardy in Paranormal to trigger unease on the part of the viewer: I can imagine for instance that, when viewed in isolation, the experience of consuming Paranormal Activity at home or on a computer will be entirely banausic. That’s the first thing; the second thing is that the film builds to a final dramatic movement which it intends to play like a rallying crowd-pleaser but which is also, surprisingly, genuinely interesting on reflection. The graphic image of Katie lying in bed in broad daylight, for instance, nearly comatose under the influence of whatever force now commands her, eerily recalls the obscure black and white photograph glimpsed earlier of her torpid “double,” long since deceased—a photograph that is discovered incidentally by Katie’s boyfriend on a website that looks as old as the web itself. And though the scenes in which Katie rocks back and forth for hours at the bedside are largely played for giggles, the sight of her body vanishing unceremoniously in the open doorway and into the darkness of the stairwell invariably recalls the highly staged and downright brilliant photography of FW Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922).

POV of the "locked off" home video in the bedroom, familiar from so many graphic advertisements,
trailers and TV spots promoting the film.

There’s been some commentary in the press about what precisely it is that affected audiences are taking away with them after a screening. Mark Kermode, for instance, is these days regularly questioning the film’s efficacy as horror (very nearly from a position of non-partisanship), asking why some viewers are taking its apparent jouissance so close to heart. That isn’t to say that the film’s pleasures are necessarily orgasmic of course, at least not in the traditional literary sense of a thumping, exploding, attainable pleasure that leaves you drained, tingling and sweetly enervated; no, rather the film comes closer I think to forging a (possibly intense) connection between the self and the diegesis, which the fantasy then propels beyond boundary. In other words, the filmmakers are making you a participant and then scaring you, but the film is I think achieving something else entirely—something less to do with horror, then, and more to do with the comforting zone, the behavioural routine, of domestic familiarity.

Katie questions her boyfriend's unfettered stupidity as he produces the camera that will prove
to be such a pain in the ass.

It is true, admittedly, that horror (or “paranormal activity”) is the principal, saleable pleasure on offer here, particularly since we are aligned with characters who experience shocks, bangs and frights first-hand. Over the course of the film we’re presented not with the vision of a demon or an apparition, but the sensational affect of that demon. So, we hear its great big, clumping (one presumes) hooves entering the bedroom, we see the powdery trail left in its wake (apparently testament to its corporeality, albeit in another dimension seemingly), we witness both its brutal attack on Katie and, in a manner reminiscent of Sidney J. Furie’s bulky 1981 horror The Entity, its salacious attempts to defile her when at her most vulnerable. Anyone who reads the film as a straightforward horror tract, unproblematically supernatural at its core, will also see the creature’s influence clearly in Katie’s apparent “possession” at key intervals in the plot development, not least in the film’s rousing final moments when she finally gets to “kill” her boyfriend’s annoying camera (as my viewing companion remarked at the time, “it was worth the £10 just for that”).

Literally now a character in "our" own right, the first-person digital camera descends the
stairs that will become so iconic for us throughout the movie.

However, for me, Paranormal Activity seems to be more in the mould of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, a film in which the director’s roving eye ritually prowls the communal spaces of an American high school (hallways, canteen, library, football field), over and over again, until the institution feels properly “lived in,” perhaps as familiar as one’s own workplace. This same routine behaviour of the roving lens is evidenced in Paranormal, albeit less discreetly. If horror is the catalyst which finally surfaces here to move us beyond our self—in other words, if the “fantasy” breaks the boundary of self-control, permitting us to sample one of the possible delights of jouissance in the final reel—then importantly the warm domestic setting of the Katie and Micah household forges this connection in the first place. It is precisely this connection which I am arguing that affected audiences lament in the aftermath of viewing. I don’t think audiences are troubled by effects (neither aural nor visual), but rather by a sense of lack, and I think that, theoretically, what we lament “losing” is precisely this emotional connection which we forge with the domestic milieu, with the familiar. How many times, for instance, does the first-person camera, with which we are aligned, wander out into the hallway in order to see downstairs? Not surprisingly, the ritual leaves its mark on us, as participant-spectators. We glimpse the white teddybear at the end of the hall so often that it becomes imbued with personal history (the prize that Micah (the subjective “I”) won with Katie (“my girlfriend”) at the fair on a biting winter’s evening). And we see that big-screen TV so many times that its mystery, its attractive commodity glamour, inevitably fades like the formerly intoxicating appeal of an ex-lover. So we’re no longer simply transgressing our own spectatorial position of detachment (in which process we are aligned with the camera to mimic a POV), but we are beginning to “learn,” behaviourally, the lives of others, the rituals and routines of tangible characters as if we have lived in their place. In fact, there comes a point in the film when the camera (having been waved so many times around the kitchen and either deposited on a countertop or left in the living room watching from afar) becomes almost childlike in its voyeurism; we, too, mimic the POV, and so we begin to experience the house (or at least, the kitchen area) for a moment as the vulnerable child, tracing the contours of the kitchen units like a pranksterish sneak.

Head now above the water's surface: childlike, we eavesdrop on mum and dad as they discuss serious matters.

Importantly, then, the novelty “surface” value of spectatorial mobility is supplanted by the first-person experience, by the ceremony, and the propriety of domestic ritual. The POV, therefore, is no longer about action, or story “event” as evidenced in Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008), nor is it necessarily “about” the documented quasi-reality of Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980), nor the promise of interactivity and mobility offered by The Blair Witch and [Rec.] (Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, 2007). Forget all that. Paranormal Activity is about a number of things which can be grouped loosely under the category of lived experience, but at its heart it is a film about the home, about our personal attachment to our homes, and more crucially about our established customs in the home. That may seem like an obvious point to make, but it signifies nevertheless an interesting development in the aesthetic of handheld, “found footage” movies. A first-person POV film that chimes with its audience on account of its depiction of ritual behaviour, and custom, is I think finally, demonstrably, tapping Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious.

The London Korean Film Festival 2009

My first highly virginal, but more importantly cinematic, encounter with a movie of the New Korean Wave in London came, so to speak, in the I dare say impoverished setting of the Covent Garden Odeon cinema a little over three years ago. This coincided with the then inaugural launch, or more accurately the BETA-testing period, of the official London Korean Film Festival 2006; it was very much a localised event, distressingly low-key but with enough ingenuity on the part of its ambitious programmers and artistic manager to capitalise on the immense goodwill still demonstrated in this country towards, among other films, Park Chan-wook’s third entry in the “vengeance” trilogy, the then titled, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (and, indeed, the film continued to do business for the Curzons well into 2007). Film4 was at the time about to unroll its “Brilliant Korea” season on television also, which shepherded us all, from the novice and the intrigued to the passionate evangelical, through the gates of the New Korean Cinema via the more populist works of such filmmakers as, Kong Su-chang (R-Point, 2004), Kang Je-gyu (Brotherhood; Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo, 2004), Kim Jee-woon (A Tale of Two Sisters; Janghwa Hongryeon, 2003), and, of course, Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, 2003; Lady Vengeance; Chinjeolhan geumpjassi, 2005).

My first, and only as it turned out, selection for the 2006 festival was Jang Jin’s highly enjoyable Baksu-chiltae deonara (2005), which was screened with the title Murder, Take One but has since become The Big Scene for imponderable retail purposes. Shortly after, I wrote a piece on the event in which I complained, but not in a fatuous or caustic way, about what I saw as the general lack of support from the public for the “Korea Film 06” enterprise (to retrieve the original brand name, since abandoned to the past). It had good maintenance marketing in the Evening Standard, it was launched in the Odeon where it stayed for the length of its run (not a chain which can be easily avoided in the West End), plus the tickets were free in those days which, as any Londoner will tell you, goes down VERY WELL in this part of the capital (it is almost unheard of today, for instance). And yet, it appeared as if the festival was little more than a recapitulation of the 4-day movie event sponsored by branches of the Korean communications corporation CJ and housed at the Prince Charles and in Soho during the 4th London Korean Festival in May. The project was a clever exercise in market orientation, and I’m sure that for the organisers this was precisely the purpose of Korea Film 06, but it disappointed me that seemingly so few moviegoers or enthusiasts were responding in number to their commercial plan (I had hoped, a viable one). Which leads me neatly to the crux of today’s post.

It pleases me considerably that the KFF has become emboldened, inspirited, invigorated, and endowed in the interim. Held predominantly in the more intimate screening rooms of the Barbican Centre, the festival reaped a veritable whirlwind in the Autumn of 2008 (arguably the event’s banner year), when—aided, animated and abetted by the UK office of the wonderful Korean Cultural Centre (and no doubt buoyed by the triumph of entertaining Park Chan-wook himself in 2007 for the exhibition of his Vengeance follow-up, I’m a Cyborg But That’s Ok)—its organisers secured the high-profile guest appearances of Kim Jee-woon and Lee Byeong-heon (the latter, for those not in the know, is of a par with Brad Pitt circa-Seven Years in Tibet in terms of national celebrity, complete with questionable K-pop career). The programme also featured some immensely powerful, eminent works of contemporary Korean cinema from director Lee Chang-dong, including the slightly masochistic Secret Sunshine (Milyang, 2007), Peppermint Candy (Bakha satang, 1999), and Oasis (2002). In addition, the committee was sensibly aided by the input of resident lecturer, Julian Stringer (who I never seem to fail to mention enough around this blog).

Today safely entrenched in the Barbican Centre, with a retrospective or two lined up and running in parallel at the BFI Southbank, the London KFF has proceeded along perfectly acceptable lines. For 2009, it has extended the terms of its remit, engaging the kiddies with an Animation Day; extolling the virtues of arguably Korea’s most important filmmaker, Yu Hyun-mok, in a richly archival retrospective; showcasing an extended cut of Park Chan-wook’s latest, Thirst (Bakjwi, 2009), for the opening gala this coming Thursday; highlighting a handful of offbeat, so-called “independents” from Jang Kun-jae, Kim So-yong and Jeon Soo-il; and receiving relatively new talent in the form of star/director Yang Ik-june, whose heavily publicised debut feature, Breathless (Ddongpari, 2008), this year garnered much critical attention on the international festivals circuit. Stringer is on the committee again, and joined by Daniel Martin, who has presented in the past on the marketing tactics and cultural reception of contemporary Korean films in the UK. As I’ve said before, there are a number of films I’ll be attending—in fact, the festival is to all intents and purposes already underway; I just had to go to last night’s screening of Bong Joon-ho’s brilliant Memories of Murder at the BFI, a real favourite of mine and a treat to catch finally on a cinema screen. It’s come a long way from its humble, four-day, twelve-film beginnings. Good on you, KFF.

Festival programme, 2009

Festival Links

She, A Chinese (Guo Xiaolu, 2009)

It’s that time of year again when the London Film Festival winds down and we think forward to the provocative treats on offer at the forthcoming Korean Film Festival, held as usual this year at the Barbican Centre but crucially with a special Bong Joon-ho retrospective underway at the BFI Southbank. Among the highlights are a Director's Cut of Park Chan-wook's blockbuster, Thirst, which is set to be introduced by the director himself; Scandal Makers, the new film from Kang Hyung-chul about a celebrity radio show host who is hit by a "comic" paternity scandal; and a tantalising new film from Kim Ki-duk, titled Dream. In the meantime, I want to post briefly on last night’s film at the LFF, She, A Chinese, the first feature-length drama from prolific Chinese author and poet, Guo Xiaolu (key referent: “A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers”).

The film plays in two parts (a smalltown life in rural China; a cosmopolitan one in London) and Guo presents her story in a very particular style, ordering events into a novella form and incorporating various whimsical intertitles that comment at one stage or another on her protagonist's predicament. The story concerns a Chinese peasant girl, Li Mei (Huang Lu), who lives in a village somewhere outside of the major city of Chongqing; there, she scrapes together an existence barely above the poverty line in which she performs menial tasks for her dismissive mother and oversees a local stall for pool-playing layabouts who ritually overlook her as a growing, desirable young woman. An apparently remote but anxious girl, Mei protests against her mother's undignified (but still honest) work by taking off with a petty gangster, but when she refuses to submit to him for sex she winds up in the arms of another admirer, a local truck driver, who unceremoniously rapes her. As a consequence, Mei begins to move opportunistically from one sexual encounter to another and over the course of the film arrives finally in London, where she suffers the same asphyxiating sense of isolation that undercut her spirit so painfully back home—except that here her one saving grace is her quite obvious exoticism; thus, we have a low-budget film in which the spectre of Orientalism is writ large, and its chief protagonist appears to take full advantage of the fact in the hope of settling her life.

Because you're worth it: Li Mei (Huang Lu) becomes
a local prostitute in Chongqing province where she meets a
nameless hitman who reaffirms her faith in love.

Now, I have several problems with the film, but I also want to defend it. On the first matter: the issue of narrative. Interestingly enough, Guo has said in her director’s statement that “it is crucial to show the process of leaving, the inner journey she is going through, a person taking risks, discovering herself and at the same time paying a high price.” Which is fine, except that some of the crucial acts of “discovery” and the “risks” that Mei takes (which set in motion her flight from China) are never shown. Scenes in which Mei exchanges (hitman) Spikey’s money for foreign currency (for the first time), or the totally alien business of booking her first transcontinental plane ticket (even if it is part of a guided tour package), are altogether absent from the film; these are admittedly minor moments, but I still feel they’re intensely personal, and probably daunting for someone so immature: these are the experiences, after all, that helped to build our confidence as we ourselves ventured into the unknown, some of us on our own. Similarly, we never see Mei take Spikey’s money from the mattress (the act is inferred), yet this is possibly the riskiest transgression she will ever make in her adult life (she is, effectively, stealing mob money); and there are other absences: Mei’s seduction of the grumpy senior citizen, Mr Hunt (Geoffrey Hutchings), which somehow leads to their marriage of convenience; her best friend was evidently instrumental in helping her to leave her village for Chongqing, but she barely registers in the first act; and presumably Mei had a GP who arranged for her first antenatal visit and the ultrasound scan, but how on Earth did she swing that in light of her ignorance about British culture and her lack of papers?

Li Mei waits in the local hair dressing salon, where gathering
hookers advise her to commodify her body in order to attract a client.

Interestingly, once the screening was over and Guo returned to take questions from the audience, somebody asked simply if she liked the central protagonist of her film. Frustratingly (deliberately or otherwise), the question got lost and no answer was forthcoming, but it nevertheless raised an important issue about She, A Chinese’s autobiographical status, and of Guo’s relationship to a girl who may or may not be a film-idea of her self. It’s clear we aren’t meant to “like” her in the traditional sense (of the redundant, i.e., “transparent” figure of the classical narrative), but it’s alright to feel attracted to her because she is “enigmatic,” because she is “risky;” the trouble is, she’s also sullen, wan, and more than a bit easy. Then there is the question of whether or not she is deliberately using her lovers, primarily to stabilise her own screwed up emotions. On that note, Guo has said that Mei is something of a “tease” despite herself, that she is not a “victim,” and that her lust for everything ranging from the close personal intimacy of relationships and the passion of fucking (all equated with a swollen appetite for food), to the environment itself and the aural sensation of living in a vibrant, otherworldly city is what fundamentally steers her through life. So whether or not we like Mei isn’t, perhaps, a concern; the film’s success hinges, rather, on the authenticity of her desires and the strength of her lust for new sexual partners; I also think, therefore, that our personal identification with the joy, passion, disappointments and failure of her experiences is a key part of this: the film, finally, immediately, mirrors us. Two points, then: 1) I personally don’t buy Guo’s claim that Mei is a tease (to me, this admission sounded polemical), and if her character is intended as such then she is partly redeemed by the fact that her loves and her lovers, by and large, mistreat her just as flatly: Rachid (Chris Ryman), an Indian Muslim, abandons her once she is pregnant; a petty gangster (Wu Leiming), likewise, when she rejects his advances; and was it not simply a matter of time before her relationship with the nameless hitman (Wei Yibo) was soured by infidelity and physical abuse? 2) Many critics have pulled up the film for being little more than a series of sketches, a writer’s portmanteau of episodes which intentionally frustrate our “desire to understand.” I don’t have a problem with Guo’s approach (I think it just about substantiates any anti-classical stance she may have): to me, the film regards its characters and events with a privileged intimacy; it carries a point of perspective that is highly personal in grammatical terms. I don’t like to draw on the term “vignettes,” if only because I feel like I’m trading on language personalised by another, but the term nevertheless infers a mode of thinking, a means of private expression, that I think characterises the film. She, A Chinese is a life in vignettes; it is a life of vignettes also.

Finally in London, Li Mei accepts several menial jobs on her own
before meeting the men she will expect (and demand) to become her
shining white knights.

As I’ve said, it feels like a mature yet angry piece of filmmaking that’s not without some genuinely uncomfortable (for being so authentic) emotions—emotions which speak to anyone who has moved on perhaps prematurely from a lover to prevent a situation from deteriorating further, or even anyone who has simultaneously admired and loathed from afar those endlessly fortunate few who move from relationship to relationship without a sense of real loss or affection, and who seem to do so to their own great advantage. The “survivors” of our kind.

SHOTS I LOVE: Star Trek (2009)