1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 88: Insomnia

And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

(John 3:19)

I should admit, I fell asleep a few times while watching Insomnia. Not that it’s ever boring; I was just tired. Stellan Skarsgård’s portrayal of an even wearier sinner is very entertaining. (The story was transplanted to Alaska five years later, in 2002, by Christopher Nolan, with Al Pacino in Skarsgård’s role; I prefer the Nordic version.)

Skarsgård is Engström, an accomplished Swedish homicide cop banished to Norway because of “improprieties” done with/to witnesses. He travels north of the Arctic Circle to investigate a young woman’s killing. He’s chronically sleepless, and the sun-pierced evenings don’t help; even so, he quickly figures out how to lure the killer into a trap. But during the “sting” the killer wounds a policeman and escapes into a dense fog. Engström pursues and shoots, killing a colleague by mistake.

He tells the other police that the killer fired the shot. Now the killer knows that he’s a killer.

He’s forced to truce with the killer, deceive his colleagues, and pin the blame on someone else.

Forced? Why not just tell his colleagues what really happened? It was an accident, after all. But Engström can no longer think of himself as not guilty. He knows his own depravity. In the Arctic, he continues – compulsively – to engage in the kind of “impropriety” that landed him in exile. And he habitually lies to cover his tracks.

All of this takes its toll. There’s a remarkable scene in which Engström waits near a busy sidewalk. Folk stare accusatorily as they pass by. Engström withers under their view. They’re all judging him. The judgment probably is all in his head. You’d think he was the crim, not the cop. When he meets the real crim, he can’t help looking away, can’t help shrinking, as if he were the guilty party.

It’s like a Poe story. The doubling. The paranoia. The sinning rushed into, to relieve the misery of previous sinning.

Decent people surround Engström. Vik, his southern colleague – the man he accidentally kills – offers wry, bleak comfort, even a sort of affection, while alive; in death, he appears in Engström’s daydreams, alarming but not unfriendly. Less disturbing, almost angelic, is a friendly and pretty hotel clerk; Engström makes a hash of that relationship, too. The local police conduct themselves with sympathy and professionalism. One of them, tasked with looking into Vik’s shooting, treats Engström curteously even as she notes inconsistencies in his statement. Engström can’t look her in the eye.

This isn’t a subtle movie. That’s all right. Sometimes, a glaring metaphor – in this case, harsh, inescapable daylight – is what’s required.

One more metaphor: a highway tunnel, the only truly dark place in the movie. This image is more enigmatic. What does it mean when Engström sees the light at the end of this tunnel? Significance aside, is he fit to drive?

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 80: Cure

I’ve been stumbling across references to mesmerism – in Poe, in William James. Even this month’s E. M. Forster reading, Maurice, touches on hypnotism, mesmerism’s better-regarded cousin.

This is the key difference between the practices, as I understand them. Hypnotism, to be effective, must be welcomed – or at least not resisted – by the subject. In contrast, mesmerism, due to its eerie basis in “animal magnetism,” is supposed to influence even those who resist.

Mesmerism once was widely feared. After the French Revolution,

major politicians and people in power were accused by radicals of practising animal magnetism on the general population.

In his article “Under the Influence: Mesmerism in England,” Roy Porter notes that James Tilly Matthews suggested that the French were infiltrating England via animal magnetism. Matthews believed that “magnetic spies” would invade England and bring it under subjection by transmitting waves of animal magnetism to subdue the government and people. Such an invasion from foreign influences was perceived as a radical threat.

Not everyone objected to being mesmerized. Desperate people welcomed it as a cure. Scientists lent it credibility.

No longer. Now it belongs to history – and to the horror genre.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The distinction between mesmerism and hypnotism is blurred in the thriller Cure (1997). Subjects are induced to commit murders they wouldn’t ordinarily commit. The question is whether they murder willingly.

How different, really, are you and I from the “monsters” we condemn? This is the theme of many policing stories, and of such cringe-thrillers as Oldboy. Cure belongs to both traditions.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Bizarre killings plague Japan. The victims are slashed with similar markings. Each killing is done by a different person.

Each killer immediately and remorsefully confesses and is taken into custody. Each killer had never done violence before. Each is baffled.

So are the lead detective, Takabe, and Sakuma, the psychologist he consults.

Even if you manage to hypnotize someone, you can’t change their basic moral sense. A person who thinks murder is evil won’t kill anyone under hypnotic suggestion.

So says Sakuma, a rather naïve figure. His manner conveys that this is the scientific orthodoxy. I don’t know if it is, but the assertion, in this unqualified form, is doubtful. People murder deliberately while believing that murder is wrong; if people act wrongly while aware of their moral beliefs – if their urges aren’t stopped by the safeguard of their own conscious disapproval – why wouldn’t they acquiesce to a hypnotist’s suggestion?

Sakuma’s personal advice to Takabe is better. Don’t let the investigation consume you, he urges; look after yourself. Not all is well with Takabe, whose wife is psychologically disturbed. His own smooth façade has started to crack.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The investigators learn that a young drifter has been seen near every crime. They track him down. He appears to have severe amnesia.

The scenes with the drifter are, to me, the movie’s most absorbing ones. Do-gooders take him in, try to help him. Police question him. Or, rather, he questions his questioners. Where am I? Who am I? Then, after a half-dozen questions, the sequence resets: Where am I? The drifter is quiet, laconic, apparently uninterested. His failure to supply answers suggests insolence as much as memory loss. As his questioners’ frustration mounts, he imposes his own rhythm on the interrogations. Then, he flips the questions back on the questioners. Who are you? He asks about their lives, their homes. He plants suggestions. In short, he hypnotizes, or mesmerizes. I don’t know how realistic this is. I’ve not seen conversations like this in life, or in any movie. But they’re fascinating; their rhythm is … hypnotic. They’re worth the price of admission.

There are dreamlike locations, too: an empty, wintry beach; an abandoned, old, wooden dormitory; the bowels of hospitals and prisons. There are hallucinatory sequences (the halluciations are Takabe’s).

Here is a long video about Cure’s unsettling techniques – an exposition of how movies use ordinary sights and sounds to subtly re-tune our emotions.

Don’t watch it now if you plan to see this movie; do if you don’t.

The dig

Poe wrote “A Valentine” …

But, for a more affecting Valentine’s Day poem, see the previous entry.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

For our own Valentine’s Day, Karin & I watched The Dig, a new Netflix movie about the excavation at Sutton Hoo upon the eve of the Second World War.

(Was the theme of searching in Britain’s “lonely earth” suggested by the TV show Detectorists? The actor Johnny Flynn is a link between the two productions.)

The Dig is an imperfect movie with some transcendent moments. Its success is due to its two lead performers. Ralph Fiennes plays a humble “excavator” – he lacks an archaeologist’s formal training – and Carey Mulligan is the widow who hires him to dig on her land.

He is a true craftsman who works for the love of his art, expecting to pass unnoticed, uncredited.

She is a person of steely resolve. Even so, she is unsettled by a presentiment of death – of oblivion.

The recovery of the ancient gravesite has existential resonance for them both. So does connection with the past. They live in a moment when their culture faces a terrible threat.

Artifacts turn up; other interested parties jump in. The dig becomes a bit of a circus. Fiennes and Mulligan retreat into the background. This is a letdown after the beautiful simplicity of the opening, in which the two lonely principals together survey this bleak land under its striking sky.

But the supporting characters – some of whom are cultural gatekeepers and preservers, others whose lives will be upended by war – do reinforce an important point. Oblivion beckons to civilization, also. The threat recurs above the level of mere individuality.

This is an anxious time in our own history. Not only are things very bad, the old foundation seems about to disintegrate. Though The Dig is a period piece, it feels up-to-date; it takes the pulse of our moment more cannily than most new movies do.

February’s poem

Poe, “To My Mother”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,

The angels, whispering to one another,

Can find, among their burning terms of love,

None so devotional as that of “Mother,”

Therefore by that dear name I long have called you –

You who are more than mother unto me,

And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you

In setting my Virginia’s spirit free.

My mother – my own mother, who died early,

Was but the mother of myself; but you

Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,

And thus are dearer than the mother I knew

By that infinity with which my wife

Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

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TNF

Thursday Night Football just broadcast its last game of the season. The show became more tolerable a few weeks ago when I realized I didn’t have to listen to Troy Aikman and Joe Buck: Amazon Prime offered channels with nontraditional commentary. I liked the Mexican commentators pretty well, but my favorites, on the “UK” stream, were the Irishman and the Scot. They described the plays accurately, told nice jokes, and didn’t murder the language.

Nor did they overstate the obvious. Aikman and Buck usurped tonight’s broadcast at the beginning of the second half, opining that “It’s of PARAMOUNT IMPORTANCE that the Jets score touchdowns,” before the audio switched back to the UK commentary and I was able, again, to breathe calmly in my armchair and enjoy my tea and kippers. The Irishman recited a line of poetry: “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’”

The Jets got some touchdowns, all right, but the Ravens still destroyed the Jets, 42 to 21. The Ravens looked very, very good. The Jets also looked good, uniform-wise. This season they’ve switched from their traditional white and forest-green garments to an ensemble that’s closer to what they wore in the Eighties and Nineties, with a color between forest green and kelly green. (Officially, it’s called “Gotham green.”) The Jets’ helmets are solid green now, not white or striped, and they look like solid-patterned billiard balls. I do miss the simple piping that used to run all the way up and down the sides of the pants. The team itself is awful.

A messed-up world

Tonight, Karin and I watched The Big Lebowski. … And right now, as I type this, I’m listening to one of its best songs: “Gnomus,” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This week, I had an especially good session with my eighth-grade tutee. We discussed the religious differences among Britain’s thirteen North American colonies. This required me to explain the relationship between being a Puritan and being a Protestant, which necessitated a survey of the Reformation.

First, I explained about Lutherans (led by Martin Luther) and Calvinists (led by John Calvin). “And then,” I said, “the English church also split away from the Roman Catholic church. This was so that King Henry VIII could divorce his wife.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

“Who was the leader of that church?”

“King Henry VIII. He also cut off some of his wives’ heads.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

Then, I explained how Puritans and Quakers, among others, emerged from the Church of England.

“The Quakers settled in Pennsylvania. They allowed other Christians to settle in Pennsylvania, too.”

“Were different kinds of people allowed to settle in the other colonies?”

“Not all the colonies permitted more than one kind of Christian group. The Puritans kept Massachusetts pretty much just for the Puritans.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

Then, we went over Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” – line by line, just about, because my tutee didn’t understand a lot of the vocabulary.

As she grasped the meaning of each sentence, she exclaimed: “That’s messed up!”

But I had trouble getting her to finish reading the story.

When she told me she’d gotten to the end, I asked her how the narrator had killed the old man.

“I don’t know.”

So we checked the relevant passage, and I told her what its words meant. “So,” I explained, “the narrator held the bed against the old man’s face until he couldn’t breathe anymore.”

“That’s messed up!”

“All right, now: where did the narrator hide the body?”

“I don’t know.”

For someone so taken with the messed-upness of the world in general, and of the story in particular, my tutee was remarkably incurious about the story’s major plot points.

Which, I thought, was a little messed up.

Juan Bosch

It’s Day Two of my second spring break – the break from my highschool job – and so I have the morning off.

Martin is leisured all day long. He attends to his hobbies: watching David Cronenberg movies; reading Poe, Bierce, and Lovecraft. I told him I would read At the Mountains of Madness with him. We’ll see. This year, I haven’t been so good at finishing books.

For my college history class, I’m writing a 20–25 pp. paper about U.S./Dominican relations during the early ’60s, focusing upon the ideological (and personal) antipathy between U.S. officials and President Juan Bosch. Bosch is a lively case study. Soon after he was ousted, he wrote several books about Dominican democracy. His enduring idea, still discussed by Latin Americans, is dictadura con respaldo popular – dictatorship with popular support – a defense of non-electoral “democracy.”

(Bosch also wrote a work called David, biografía de un rey, which reviewers could make neither head nor tail of. It climaxes with Absalom’s rebellion.)

As historical analysis, I’m not sure how well my paper is turning out. As an anthology of quotations, it’s quite breezy to read.