Unholy in Toledo: The Skin I Live In

Let’s be clear about something: the title of Pedro Almodóvar’s 1987 film Law of Desire is both emblematic and entirely cheeky with regards to this filmmaker’s singular body of work. There are no laws where Almodóvar’s characters’ desires are concerned—at least none that can’t be broken in the spirit of audacity, subversion, showing off, or compulsive plot-twisting—just an immaculately crafted blur of reptile-brain urge and wild ambition, a confusion of longing, desperation, memory and gender.

His latest film, an adaptation of Thierry Jonquet’s 1995 novel Tarantula, plunges into some as yet uncharted (by Almodóvar at least) and especially unsettling territory, with the innovative, fabulously resourceful and seriously messed up plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas, back with the writer/director who made his name for the first time in two decades) plumbing the unexplored depths of posthuman sciences in his efforts to restore order to his shattered family. There’s a beautiful young woman sequestered and constantly monitored in his rural Toledo home and laboratory. She’s both a captive, stolen away from a whole other life, and something invented. The mad doctor is, in a sense, building himself a new wife. He is attempting to recover a dead life. Most interestingly, his endeavour is driven by the conviction that all that makes us who we are is infinitely malleable once we start to tinker with the outside. The external, he believes, determines the external. And to be sure, in Almodóvar, surfaces really do matter.

Given such a premise, The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) is often extremely creepy. It’s also perhaps a little too cool and clean and clinical, too bogglingly plotty and over-calculated to truly love, but the highly composed grand design has things to ponder, revisit and re-admire. (Like Hitchcock, Almodóvar makes movies that even when flawed are tough to truly exhaust.) The source material aside, the obvious model for this macabre tale of obsession, isolation and transformation is the great 1960 French horror film Eyes Without a Face, directed by Georges Franju, who also made a movie about an abattoir that has to be seen to be believed, or has to be seen to know how much you probably wish you didn’t see it. Most Almodóvar has very clear roots in earlier, beloved, canonical films, but this one doesn’t accentuate homage with much warmth, and there are only a few fits of his characteristic humour. (One highly memorable and totally appalling example of this includes an uneasy reunion between Redgard’s assistant and some guy in a tiger costume.)

I feel like I keep wanting to warn you all about what The Skin I Live In lacks, but the truth is that despite all that I was still totally engaged with it, and some months after first seeing it, I’m easily lured into thinking about it, drawn into conversations about it. It’s fleshy, prompts goosebumps, and gets under the skin.

To fuse and refuse: The Fly at 25

Seth Brundle, the tragic genius at the core of The Fly (1986), is motivated to crack the secrets of teleportation not only because such innovation will challenge established concepts of time and space, but also because he suffers from motion sickness—teleportation means never having to set foot in a propelled vehicle again. This bit of character eccentricity is one of the many ingenious details that have allowed The Fly to endure these last 25 years, not only as what may be the defining synthesis of every major theme in David Cronenberg’s filmography, but as the modern big-budget genre film that synthesized an intelligent query into the most vital and troubling issues faced by contemporary philosophers, scientists and policy-makers with an absolutely primal and inspired display of body horror theatrics. There is no other movie at once so smart and so disgusting. Indeed, The Fly features what remains the most astonishing vomit scene—wait, make that scenes—in cinema history. (A word of warning to the uninitiated: do not watch this movie while eating yogurt.)

Rooted in the 1957 short story by George Langelaan and, of course, the Vincent Price film of the same title (1958), The Fly is several things: a chamber love triangle between Brundle, a journalist (Geena Davis) trying to file and article for a magazine named Particle, and her editor (John Getz); a science fiction about a man who accidentally gets into a machine with an insect and pays the abysmal consequences; and a shock-meditation on aging, death, and what it means to be human. “Am I dying?” Brundle wonders after his successful self-teleportation with insect co-pilot begins to exact its gooey toll on his flesh. (“His” flesh? Or something else? Teleportation obliterates form in order to recreate it elsewhere.) This being a Cronenberg film, whatever existential terror or grief Brundle feels en route to becoming Brundle-fly is eclipsed by unquenchable fascination. Other versions of Langelaan’s ‘Fly’ had its protagonist lose his ability to speak relatively early in the story; Cronenberg insisted that his Brundle keep his tongue nimble as long as possible—he wanted Brundle to articulate what was happening to him until the very end, at which point a single, unbearably sad gesture is all that’s needed for the experiment to reach its dire conclusion.

Much credit has to be given to Goldblum, whose toothy, lanky charisma, dry humour and quiet showmanship rendered him one of Cronenberg’s perfect alter egos: a smart man of action; a geek with sex appeal; a guy who can endow the word "cheeseburger" with seductive magic. And Davis, Goldblum’s girlfriend at the time, is every bit his match, both intrigued and repulsed, in-love and loving and fiercely self-protective: her alarmed response to the possibility that she’s pregnant with Son of Brundle-fly is deeply affecting. Its fantastic narrative being awkwardly yet necessarily compressed, The Fly is not without its little flaws—a bit of boilerplate dialogue here, some garish lighting there; way too much showy pathos from Getz’s emasculated ex—but the immense power of its unnerving ideas, the complex dynamics of its tautly told story, and the nuanced performances of its two leads earn its status as some very peculiar sort of masterpiece.

When you're this big, they call you Mister (with a little persuasion, anyway)

It’s the middle of the night in the middle-1960s, and a handsome black stranger materializes in some backwater on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line right around the time a wealthy white industrialist is murdered. The scene seems set for a drama in which the undereducated but quietly noble negro escapes being chewed up in the wheels of injustice with the help of, say, a crusading white lawyer charged with the task of convincing the townsfolk to look past their racist presumptions. But In the Heat of the Night (1967), based on the first of John Ball’s Virgil Tibbs novels, does something much more interesting: it makes the black stranger a well-paid, nattily dressed homicide detective from Philly whose innocence is swiftly established and who winds up cracking the case the local crackers couldn’t. It was an ingenious reversal of expectations, with Mister Tibbs elegantly embodied by Sidney Poitier, probably the only actor who could have pulled it off. The film is screening at Edmonton's Metro Cinema this weekend, following Poitier’s Thursday night speaking engagement at the Jube.

It is no slight to say that In the Heat of the Night—one of Canadian director Norman Jewison’s earliest feature credits and still among his best—plays out like a very good cop show elevated by sociological innovation. (That’s why the film was eventually made into a cop show.) The murder mystery is something of a MacGuffin, making room for richer themes of tolerance, respect, professionalism, alpha-male competitiveness and the painfully protracted spread of the Civil Rights Movement. We keep watching not so much to find out whodunnit as to see how the unflappable Tibbs will finally find his way out of Sparta, Mississippi and make something like peace with its ornery, lonesome police chief Bill Gillespie. Gillespie’s played by Rod Steiger, who chews gum as a way to hold off from chewing up all the scenery—mastication keeps Steiger from shouting all the time, though this too becomes overly indicative and irritating in its way. Steiger won an Oscar for this part, despite the fact that Poitier’s cool approach—not to mention that of Warren Oates as a bumbling patrolman—seems to offer such a seductive, more intriguing alternative to Steiger’s bullishness in nearly every scene.

Historical significance and varying performance styles aside, I think that much of what keeps In the Heat of the Night fresh and worthy of repeat visits has to do with the many wonderful details that pepper the film: the plastic Jesus on Oates’ dashboard; the Dr. Pepper sliding between a young woman’s ample breasts as she lingers naked by her kitchen window; the masking tape repairs on an old vinyl-upholstered chair; or the positioning of the corpse discovered on a Sparta side street. The dead man lays on the ground like he was in middle of trying out a new dance—let’s call it the doggie paddle. There’s also sensitive editing from future director Hal Ashby, inventive shooting from Haskell Wexler, scoring from Quincy Jones, and a title tune sung by Ray Charles, an especially inspired choice to ease us into the picture. If Charles couldn’t get Americans of every colour to root for a black hero, no one could.

Carlos and the body politic: a conversation with Olivier Assayas

He blows something up and then retires to a quiet room to admire his handsome and chiseled naked figure in a full-length mirror. We see him seduce a colleague by placing a grenade between her teeth. “Weapons,” he explains, “are an extension of my body.” Revolution turns this guy on—or is it simply the promise of spectacular violence undertaken with whatever sort of justification? He committed acts of terror, including murder and hostage-taking, on behalf a people located half a world away from his native Venezuela, and attained a very peculiar and confused sort of celebrity doing so. The celebrity would eclipse the revolutionary until confused celebrity was all that was left. He donned a Che beret. He smoked cigars from Fidel Castro’s personal reserve. He stockpiled weapons, gave orders, made threats and lived all over Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Saddam Hussein was supposed to have been a big fan. “You’ll be hearing my name a lot,” he ensures us, though he’s referring not to his given name of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, but rather to his more austere nom de guerre: Carlos.

Carlos is also the title of Oliver Assayas’ 333-minute bio-pic, made for French television, starring the tireless and valiant Venezuelan-born actor Édgar Ramírez, and is now playing, with two intermissions, in cinemas. It opens today in Toronto at Bell Lightbox. With its focus on action, its frenetic post punk soundtrack, its jump cuts that jump just a few frames forward, as though our storyteller is at once impatient and doesn’t want to miss a thing, the film unfolds over an engaging and surprisingly fleet-footed five hours-plus. Assayas is working in a mode entirely divorced from the complicated familial exchanges, subtle emotional nuance and passages of pastoral tranquility that characterized his previous film, the masterful and heartbreaking Summer Hours. Like its eponymous central character, the flamboyant terrorist who came to prominence in the 1970s and would eventually be dubbed “Carlos the Jackal,” Carlos is a corpulent and muscular work, carefully tracking the evolution, or rather devolution, of the mind and body of a figure that is, as Assayas explains below, both utterly singular and representative of certain ideological shifts that erupted in the wake of 1968.

It was my great honour to interview Assayas, whose body of work is so prolific and diverse, and contains a couple of my favourite films of the last 15 years or so. Slim and electric, Assayas is like a wire. We met at a Toronto hotel. He wore a smart little cardigan over a T-shirt emblazoned with the cover art for Sonic Youth’s Goo. He’s 55 and there remains something boyish about him. But his nervous manner of speaking is countered by his confidence and convictions, his volubility countered by the precision of his answers, even when delivered in his second language. A former critic and editor of Cahiers du cinéma, Assayas has no trouble talking about movies. What follows is longer than I’d planned, but if you’ve seen Carlos or know something about Ramírez Sánchez’s life you might find the initial exchanges interesting. If you haven’t seen it or don’t know his story, you might want to scroll down just a little.

Assayas on the set of Carlos

JB: You’re only a few years younger than Carlos, which would have put you in your late teens and early 20s when he first became active. Do you retain memories of him from that period?

Olivier Assayas: The Rue Toullier killings were for me very striking, as they were for any Frenchman at the time, because of their brutality and mystery. No one knew what had really happened or why. It was like lightning striking. It was very close to home in that it occurred in the Latin Quarter, which is where all the universities were, and I was a student at the time. I would walk those streets every day.

JB: Had you formed any opinion at the time about his activities?

OA: You couldn’t have an opinion because you had no idea who he was. He was from Venezuela. He wasn’t a Palestinian militant. So who was this guy? Why was he shooting French cops? There was no apparent rationale. There was no way of feeling close to whatever the cause was because the cause was unreadable. He was a cop killer. As a teenager, you know, maybe you’re not fond of cops, so you stupidly think it’s kind of cool that he killed three of them.

The real Ilich "Carlos" Ramírez Sánchez

JB: Between that period in the 1970s and your being approached with this project, had you kept track of him?

OA: Only as much as anyone who reads the newspapers. He had been again in the news in France later, when Magdalena Kopp was arrested and with the series of bombings that followed, supposedly done with the intention to set her free, though in reality it was more connected to the ongoing war between France and Syria. But at the time this was all a blur, because it was not established that Carlos was involved in the bombings and it was not widely known that Magdalena Kopp was his wife. There were just these Germans who were arrested in connection with a car bomb. We knew that they were arrested in the parking lot, that there was supposedly weapons in the car, that they tried to escape and to shoot the cops. All of a sudden Carlos sends this menacing message saying those guys are part of my group and I want them free. We didn’t know if it was the real Carlos or what his connection was to these two. Carlos would not say at the time that Magdalena was his wife. No one knew, because if they had she would have been interrogated. They would have never let her go. So I read about these actions, but the reports available rendered them completely blurred, full of contradictions. Carlos was just a bogeyman.


JB: Did this project seem to offer an opportunity to explore and perhaps critique a political ideology?

OA: To me there was a broader arc that concerned the story of a generation, this question of whether or not to be involved in the armed struggle. After 1968, people really believed that revolution was imminent. But the years passed and nothing happened. You had unrest and activism, but ultimately this revolution did not seem like it was coming. That was when militants started asking questions. Maybe they lacked the right approach. Maybe the solution was to take up weapons, as had been done in third world countries, or in Europe in the distant past. In France the conclusion was that no, it wasn’t a good idea. But in other countries, like Germany, Italy or Japan, that was the route they chose. Carlos was just one step ahead. When he was 19 he had a gun in his hand. He was fighting with the Palestinians in Jordan. He was militant and active at a very young age. So in a sense, he went faster and further than anyone else of his generation, but acted in the background of the political mainstream of the time. So I realized how emblematic his story could be of a particular idea that this generation had lingering in their minds. He is, of course, a very unique character with an exceptional fate, but somehow I realized how connected his fate was to the story of his time.

JB: A significant part of Carlos’ story is told through the body of your lead actor, Édgar Ramírez. His is a marathon performance and required a truly exceptional commitment. Did you have to use different tactics with him than you’d used with actors in the past?

OA: Frankly, Édgar was pretty much on his own. His input in this film goes way beyond embodying Carlos. He was a partner in creating this film. He had a vision of Carlos. He understood exactly what was going on. I kind of helped him and we discussed things, but these discussions were not frequent.


JB: Were you aware from the start of just how fundamental the link would be between Carlos’ shifting physicality and his shifting philosophy, between his sense of sexual potency and his desire for violence?

OA: It was always essential. For me, the film, or at least one layer of the film, was, as you say, the story of the body of Carlos. It’s a layer that’s nourished by historical fact. It’s highly relevant that at the end of this story everything falls apart, including his body.

JB: Did it require a great deal of negotiation to find the right ways to photograph Édgar’s body?

OA: Édgar was 100% open to basically anything. He went all the way with every scene, without blinking. Sometimes it was very tough on him.

JB: I understand he underwent therapy afterwards to deal with the trauma of playing Carlos.

OA: I only discovered this when I read the interview he gave for the press notes. I was surprised. But I understood. You know, the one thing that kind of disturbed me when I started working on this film was this question: Was I ready to spend a year and a half of my life with Carlos, who’s basically a very unpleasant character? Do I want to be in touch with the darkness of that character? I did not have any kind of easy answer for that. But meeting Édgar was key to solving the problem because, frankly, he was going to take over Carlos. He was going to lift that burden from my shoulders. I was in a better position because I was able to witness Édgar struggling to make sense of Carlos, to absorb the unpleasantness of the character. I think he did an extraordinary job, but I can understand why it’s been very hard on him. He had to think like and be like Carlos, which involved damaging his own body in the process, for a very long time, much longer than what’s typically demanded of actors.

demonlover

JB: Your earlier work demonlover has certain affinities with Carlos, being an international story and a political thriller, but what I find very interesting is that demonlover is very much characterized by the absence of connective tissue—it’s inherently elliptical—while Carlos is all about the fortifying of connective tissue. Did this aspect of the project excite you? Did it intimidate you?

OA: Basically, I like to do in movies the things I’ve not done before, so the more I feel intimidated, the more stuff I have no idea how to handle, the more exciting it is. That’s what keeps you alive. It puts you in danger. You have to reinvent your ways of approaching scenes, actors, and so on. The thing too is that the connectivity you’re describing is sort of what those times were about. There was this notion of collective action, of connection through ideals. Carlos can only function through organizing a group. Demonlover comes from another age. It tries to grasp at something that was going on 20, 25 years later, a time when people are becoming more involved in their private, imaginary worlds, when ideology and collectivity is replaced by disconnection, when economic logic overwhelms the logic of ideals. Demonlover is about a world where politics are not relevant anymore, where the fluidity of money is more important than any political ideal, where real power is bestowed upon corporations rather than politicians. Which is pretty much what the modern world is about.

JB: The formal structure of Carlos is obviously hugely ambitious. Did you have any models that inspired or encouraged you? Was Steven Soderbergh’s Che useful to you?

OA: Yes, it was. It’s a completely different film, but it was inspiring in the sense that, first of all, I enjoyed watching this four-and-a-half-hour film. It could have gone on and I would have been game. But in terms of the texture of the film, here is a movie that uses a mythical character—that uses the star power of this character—to deal with some very interesting issues. Che is a case study in guerilla warfare, how it can be used to win a war and lose a war. The first part is triumphant, it’s about how you move from the bush into the villages, how you win over the peasants, how you enter the city, how you negotiate an urban guerilla situation, how you then move onto the capital and eventually win the war. The second part in Bolivia shows you exactly the opposite, how you never convince the peasants, how the terrain can be unfavourable, how the local politicians don’t support your actions, how the enemy has grown stronger because it’s come to understand your tactics, and so on. So it’s really a study in strategy, and this is something very few movies can deal with because it simply requires time. Strategy is about complexities, about small details, about understanding the connection between ideas and reality. The length of the film allowed it to deal with issues that shorter films cannot. Che gave me the conviction that I could shoot for something like that.

JB: Hm. It strikes me that, in a way, Carlos is really Che Part III, in that you’re now looking at what becomes of revolutionary actions after the precedents of Cuba, after Bolivia, and going from Latin America in the ’50s and ’60s and into the Europe of the 1970s.

OA: Absolutely. That’s a very interesting way of looking at it. It’s like that famous phrase about how history repeats itself in the form of a comedy. It’s about how Carlos uses the image of Che at a later historical moment for his own ends. You have Che, who, whatever you think of his ideas, was kind of a hero. He was a theoretician and a revolutionary. He was involved in internationalizing the Cuban Revolution. He was ready to put his life on the line and wound up dying for his ideals. He was also a good writer and left a lot of reflections on his life and times. Carlos, by contrast, is a soldier. He’s not a thinker. He’s a guy who executes missions. He was very aware of his media image and knew it was beneficial to connect it to Che’s image, but it’s somehow pathetic.


JB: Was it always obvious to you how you wanted to end Carlos?

OA: It was pretty clear that the film would end with his arrest. His story really does end where we end it. He’d already been surviving himself for years at that stage. He’s become irrelevant.

JB: Kind of a ghost.

OA: Precisely—he’s a ghost of himself. So once he’s finally arrested, it was like something that just had to happen. He hardly even resists it, and no one will help him out, not even the Sudanese. I think even Carlos knew that this was the end of the movie.

TIFF '10: Ways of dying

The 35th Toronto International Film Festival is in full swing, and I’ve finally found some time to give a few impressions. The weather’s been kind of rotten. I got soaked last night biking home from a sort of ridiculous event held at a downtown beauty salon. Everyone was waiting for Guillermo Del Toro, not the first guy you think of when you think of high-end cosmetics. Rubbery prosthetics, sure, but energizing foot moisturizers not so much. When he finally arrived the poor guy was accosted out front so insistently it took about an hour for him just to get in the door. I spoke with him only briefly. We had a very silly exchange about tacos. I guess I was hungry. It started to pour precisely when I decided to make my way home, too drunk on free wine to have the sense to take a streetcar. Halfway along my journey my complimentary bag of cosmetics became so waterlogged it burst all over Queen Street. As I parked my bike on the curb and ran out into Saturday night traffic it occurred to me that if I were hit by a cab and killed while fishing tubes of gels and creams out of puddles I would probably feel really embarrassed about it afterwards. But we’re talking about, I don’t know, $200 in beauty products here. Anyway, I didn’t die.


I have however been watching a number of movies about dying, how best to face up to it, and how best to deal with its aftermath. By far the most playful of these is Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg, which opens with what is certainly the most awkward on-screen kiss in recent memory before unfolding its narrative through something like cinematic snapshots, brief, often wordless scenes punctured with curiosity, mischief, humour, and a subtle, creeping morbidity. Whole days in Tsangari’s expansive chronology are conveyed with just a few such enigmatic passages. Like last year’s Dogtooth, which Tsangari co-produced, Attenberg is marked by its somewhat perverse engagement in family, belated sexual development, and an extreme case of naïveté that, aggressively quirky as it may be, is mercifully and rigorously stripped of affectation—its lead actress Ariane Labed just won a much-deserved award at Venice. Dogtooth director Giorgios Lanthimos meanwhile shows up here playing a kindly, soft-spoken love interest who connects with Labed by way of their mutual fondness for the ’70s electro-punk duo Suicide. Tsangari’s approach is at once anthropological, elliptical, and surrealistically comic. The movie surprised me more than once, not the least reason being that it genuinely touched me by the time it concluded. It’s the story of a dying widower trying to prepare his adult daughter for, well, basically for he rest of her life. Like Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums, this feels like another enormously creative variation on Ozu’s Late Spring.


Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful finds a very stressed-out Javier Bardem given only weeks to live and trying his best to ensure his children will be safe after he’s gone. The Barcelona they’re inheriting is forbidding, characterized most boldly by illegal migrant labourers living in secret huddled masses and in danger of mass arrests or meaningless death. Their mother is deeply unstable and unable to see her kids as dependents rather than peers. The movie feels like a study in entropy, though there is some consolation via rather beautifully staged intimations of an afterlife. Bardem’s character has a special gift: he speaks with the recently deceased and thus knows there’s something after all this suffering and worry. His performance is marvelous, alternately fiery and calm, and there are moments, sequences, actually, of real grace—we’re dealing with a director that above all thinks in sequences—but there’s also that nagging sense that González Iñárritu is, once again, just too heavy-handed, too eager to impart upon us his own ostensible profundity. I have very mixed feelings, though nothing in Biutiful irritated me as much as that third act of Babel.


Alexei Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls begins in the Kostroma village of Neya, “a place no one remembers anymore,” while its story deals with customs that are equally in danger of being forgotten. A woman dies, and her husband, the director of a paper mill, wants to deal with her remains in the traditional ways of the Merja, an ancient Finno-Ugric tribe from whom many of Neya’s citizens are descended. This involves, among other things, washing the body, fastening coloured ribbons to her pubic hair, and transporting her to a river, where she’s to be cremated before having her ashes deposited in the water. The ritual requires the cooperation of the paper mill’s photographer, who’s the picture of discretion, and also our narrator. Silent Souls just won the FIPRESCI prize at Venice and has already received a lot of highly enthusiastic reviews. It’s a serious, thoughtful, very respectful work, and I’m happy to see it doing well, but I just wasn’t quite as taken with it as many of my colleagues. Based on a novel by Aist Sergeyev, I am sure found it too reliant on voice-over, too overbearing in its use of music, and, even when taking the somberness of the action into account, its performances still struck me as a little more lifeless than seemed entirely necessary. Yet its story, especially as it pertains to the Merja culture, is never less than fascinating. It’s final image is truly poetic—and relayed almost entirely through voice-over.

Vibration analysis: The Shaking Woman

“At one time or another all of us go to pieces,” writes Siri Hustvedt, “and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” I first heard of Hustvedt though her husband, the writer Paul Auster, and first encountered her writing through Mysteries of the Rectangle, her collection of astute, insightful, and engagingly personal essays on various works of visual art, before digging into her novels, starting with her debut, The Blindfold, which among other things fictionalizes her experiences with chronic debilitating migraines. Her new book, The Shaking Woman, or a History of My Nerves (Henry Holt, $28), is a relatively slim memoir and a seeming departure from her body of work. Yet The Shaking Woman is in many regards a synthesis of nearly every major theme she’s ever dealt with. It’s a nonfiction, existential detective story with faint promise of any neat resolution, concerning the search for a missing diagnosis. It explores lingering mysteries of behaviour and perception, of the body and the mind—if you’ll excuse the dualism—while attempting to uncover established facts with a discipline and fervor rare in writers of fiction. It’s at times scary, always fascinating, and a pleasure to read.

The Shaking Woman was prompted by an experience Hustvedt had in 2006, two years after the death of her father. She was giving a speech in his memory at the university where he taught when her body began to violently convulse. She was already in her 50s by this point and had no history of seizures. As her limbs began to shake and flail, she noticed that her ability to speak wasn’t impaired in the slightest. She gripped the edges of the podium and went ahead and gave the speech while from the neck down her body went nuts. The shaking woman returned three more times, once while giving another public presentation, once while appearing on a low-key Norwegian television programme, and once while hiking in the Pyrenees. The attacks are obviously triggered by something more than stage fright, a particular memory, or repressed mourning. Four years have passed and Hustvedt still doesn’t know where this shaking woman came from.

“I can’t really see where the illness ends and I begin,” writes Hustvedt, addressing how neurological or psychiatric illness is identified with self in a way that corporeal illness isn’t. A large part of this book is devoted to trying to come to terms with what feels like an experience with a separate Other, despite the fact that this Other comes from within. Hustvedt provides readers with a brief history of hysteria, a condition and/or a term that’s been used and abused, discarded or renamed, yet whose real significance remains ambiguous. She consults a number of doctors, both real and imagined, including psychiatrists, a group who, despite her obvious interest in psychology, she’d previously avoided. “I have the vague sense that there are hidden recesses of my personality that I am reluctant to penetrate,” she writes. “Maybe that’s the part of me that shook.”

Hustvedt at one point describes the shaking woman as “a speechless alien who appears only during my speeches… an untamed other self, a Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll, a kind of double.” She interrogates the shaking woman, and tries to befriend her. She emphasizes the essentiality of language to reflexive self-awareness, of putting together words so as to find meaning through making a story of one’s life. Of course, she questions that, too. “Am I looking for a narrative,” she asks, “a confabulation, to interpret a debility that is no more and no less than synaptic wiring and firing?” Yet she accumulates ample evidence of the scientific and therapeutic value of storytelling, quoting physician Rita Charon, who describes how “narrative knowledge, by looking closely at individual human beings grappling with the conditions of life, attempts to illuminate the universals of the human condition by revealing the particular.”


While hurling herself into what seems a very personal search it’s interesting, and endearing, to observe how Hustvedt is continually fascinated by other people, among them Neil, the boy who can remember things exclusively through the act of writing, only to forget the information written as soon as he sets down his pen; Bertha Pappenheim, Breuer’s famous hysterical patient who lived with a “double consciousness,” one basically normal, one who was always observing the other from the outside; S., the man from whom everything was involuntarily associated with images, even numbers and individual words, so that reading a single sentence overwhelmed him with myriad detailed and competing pictures; or the psychiatric patients to whom she teaches writing. Hustvedt also looks to fictional people for help in her investigation, such as Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych, unable to accept death, Dostoyevsky’s epileptic Prince Myshkin, or Borges’ Funes the Memorious, who can’t forget a thing.

Hustvedt is a truly voracious reader, as fascinated by psychology, philosophy and science as she is by art, poetry, and fiction. At times her points of reference are so esoteric, so indicative of deeply obsessive research, as to be nearly comical. I had to laugh out loud when she pulled a quote from Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Yet this all-inclusive devouring of literature provides Hustvedt with a healthy skepticism, a view of various phenomena so broad and alert to contradiction as to keep her from latching too readily onto any one theory, however fashionable. It allows her to be as judicious as she is promiscuous, so that every time she seems in danger of losing the thread, of digressing far off from her personal detective story, she always manages to loop back to the essence of her search and feed it with more insight and precision. “The search for the shaking woman takes me round and round because in the end it is also a search for perspectives that may illuminate who and what she is.” And, inevitably, what Hustvedt comes to accept is that the shaking woman is her, or one part of her, an individual like any other, unfixed, unimaginably intricate, and alive.

Half man, half beast, half measures: The Wolfman

The family has already suffered the untimely demise of its beloved, beautiful matriarch and the institutionalization and exile of one of its boys for mental illness. As our story begins tragedy strikes once more with the gruesome slaughter of another Talbot son on the eve of his marriage. He’s cut down one night along the moonlit moors by something that seems both beast and man. When Laurence Talbot returns from years abroad to find out what happened to his fallen brother, he’s reunited with John, their father, still lurking in the gloom of the family’s decrepit rural mansion, who advises Laurence to forget the past. It is a “wilderness of horrors,” he says, and best left ignored. Of course we know Laurence will do no such thing, since gothic tales such as this feed on obsession with the echoing creaks of old traumas that never die.

The Wolfman is itself an exercise in looking back, referencing a long tradition of lycanthrope flicks, mostly notably Universal’s own 1941 classic The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney, Jr. This latest entry isn’t set in the present or even in 1941 but rather in 1891, setting it just a few years after the Jack the Ripper murders. It doesn't really set out to renovate any aspect of the werewolf legacy but rather subscribes devoutly to the established rules and tropes of the familiar myth. Yet it feels uncertain as to how fully it wants to surrender to the spell of old things. Victorian England is made to look artificially caked in soot, and while early scenes thrive on the anxiety of the unseen, such as one riveting sequence that plays out in the terrifyingly insufficient firelight of a fog soaked gypsy camp, the movie, helmed by Jumanji director Joe Jonston, gradually makes concessions to contemporary demand for souped-up gore, offering flamboyant decapitations and buckets of organ spillage. The Wolfman boasts make-up design by the legendary Rick Baker, yet its transformation scenes, heavily accentuated by smooth and slick CGI, have nothing on the ferocious tactility of Baker’s precedent-setting work on 1981’s An American Werewolf in London. (You just don’t squirm the same way watching this newfangled stuff, perhaps because the horror isn't located in the body or even some likeness of the body but rather in some hovering screen of synthetic imagery.)

So I’m going to have to go with what seems to be the critical consensus on The Wolfman as a movie that can’t quite make up its mind about what it wants to be, a moody and mysterious homage to the subtler chillers of old, or an iconoclastic, bracingly modern monster mash. It shifts uneasily from sinister to silly, from brooding to camp, especially once we’re thrown into one of these insane asylums where the torture treatments are administered by drooling, grinning maniacs. Yet for all that I was still pretty engaged with and entertained by The Wolfman. The perfectly cast Benicio Del Toro, who also produced, is arguably a bit wasted on Laurence for lack of rigorous character development, yet the character is just inherently interesting. Laurence is an actor, known for his Hamlet. He's perhaps psychologically unstable, and bears a confused but deeply-rooted Oedipal grudge against his father, played for kicks by Anthony Hopkins; he's drawn to his dead brother's fiancée, played fairly straight by Emily Blunt, who's made to resemble the brother's dead mother; and the hairy situation he finds himself in may be as much the product of repressed rage as a disease contracted from a particularly nasty animal bite. It just goes to show that certain monsters endure for a reason. No matter how often they’re overwhelmed by kitsch, no matter how often we recycle them, they still maintain the power to fascinate us by virtue of their primacy. You might chuckle at the conceit of a werewolf running loose in London, but it’s no great leap to buy into the metaphorical potency of the beast within.

Eight speakers in search of an author

Early in Examined Life writer/director Astra Taylor appears onscreen to address the problem of approaching philosophy in a movie as opposed to a book. With a book we’re able to set our own pace, to comb over the material at will. Ideas receive more exhaustive treatment than can be granted in a movie, especially one in which eight subjects receive only ten minutes each to speak. Taylor’s wise to confess from the outset her awareness of her project’s limitations, that she can perhaps strive to, above all, as Samuel Beckett would have had it, fail better. Yet even within the constraints imposed upon Examined Life, one can’t help but consider how much more dynamically this movie could have failed.

As with Taylor’s Zizek!, what makes Examined Life a sympathetic and engaging yet finally frustrating experience is a sensibility that feels star-struck and easily sated. The problem with Taylor’s subjects—which include of course the flamboyant Slavoj Zizek—isn’t so much that they’re only given ten minutes as they’re too often speaking so generally as to provide only superficial impressions of their individual philosophical proposals. Avital Ronell for example, charged with kicking things off, gives us a good taste of her personality—she makes a cheeky comment about the injustice of her not being allowed more screen-time that her colleagues—but conveys almost nothing of the particularity of her insights or arguments. Likewise, Cornel West, a self-described “bluesman of the life of the mind,” is a rant-master flash whose championing of dissatisfaction and contagious enthusiasm for music, art and literature is hugely entertaining. But he leaves us with little more than a blur of references, and really, what the hell is a “Chekhovian Christian”?

Peter Singer by contrast turns his ten minutes into a concise mini-lecture, yet the way he addresses applied ethics, questioning consumer choices while strolling along New York’s Fifth Avenue, feels facile, using pretty flimsy analogies aimed at stimulating our guilt rather than our critical faculties while working under the assumption that what constitutes the common good is unambiguous. Zizek’s segment works much better, partly because of his knack for provocative one-liners—“We should become more artificial!” he declares, sweating furiously before a backdrop of towering trash—yet he still has a hard time approaching something like full coherence.

Examined Life is handicapped by its paucity of dialogue. Everyone’s given their podium but, with one exception, no one to interact with. Taylor appears fleetingly but, opening statement aside, is literally just smiling and nodding. For this reason, the segment featuring Judith Butler and activist Sunaura Taylor is in many regards the most successful. They wander through San Francisco, discussing body difference and interdependency, at one point entering a thrift store to buy a sweater for Sunaura—the very act of doing so going some distance to elucidating their subject. Sunaura, the director’s sister, is a high-functioning disabled person, confronted daily with the discomforts and limitations of her community.

The movie that Examined Life reminded me of most wasn’t another documentary but rather Richard Linklater’s animated feature Waking Life, and I have to say that Waking Life is in some ways more philosophically engaging for inviting not only monologues and dialogues about ideas, but also fantasy sequences that embody and dramatize these ideas. Let me say that I really love how Taylor had her subjects walking as they spoke—except for West, who does his thing in the backseat of Taylor’s car, and Michael Hardt, who rows a little boat in Central Park—evoking the timeless relationship between walking and thought. But walking also implies movement and exploration, and, for all the critical heavyweights onscreen, by the time Examined Life is over we’re left feeling like we should have gotten a little farther.