When I can’t sleep I’ll often say to myself “You’re going to step into your cave and you’re going to find your power animal.” A line from the scene in Fight Club where Edward Norton’s character attends a meditation class and fantasizes of finding his power animal, a CGI penguin, inside an icy cave. Sometimes I’ll even quote the penguin to calm myself: “Slide.”
When I count to five on my hand I’ll often start by counting on my pinky. Probably a leftover from watching Se7en one too many times when I was younger. Morgan Freeman counts the seven deadly sins like this.
When I watch tv commercials promoting some useless product, I’ll often hear myself whispering “You’re not your fucking kaki’s!” or “We’re the all singing all dancing crap of the world.” Quotes from Tyler Durden’s fourth wall breaking monologue in Fight Club.
And sometimes, but only sometimes, I’ll look at my girlfriend and think “What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other?” A quote from the beginning (and ending) of Gone Girl.
Only in writing this podcast introduction I was once again reminded of how David Fincher is one of my favourite directors. A somewhat strange realisation because I started wondering what that says about myself. His films being these pessimistic, somewhat empathy lacking, meticulously crafted pieces of browns-and-beiges. And green, a lot of green, because David Fincher really hates pink. In a recent interview he said that he hates pink because it makes people look healthy and that, to him, is unrealistic.
Fincher is, not unlike myself, an obsessive perfectionist. Known for his, to quote Ben Affleck, “relentless” number of takes. His opinion is that if you spend $250 million to build a set, get the crew in and line-up the actors, you better use all the time you need to get the best result.
This obsessive nature can also be traced back to his Pandora’s Box of themes. “What in the box?!” you might ask. Well, if you take characters like John Doe (Se7en), Mark Zuckerberg (The Social Network), Jake Gyllenhaal’s journalist (Zodiac), Michael Douglas’ banker (The Game) or the fucked-up couple in Gone Girl, his core set of fascinations seem to be concepts like obsession, social alienation, anti-consumerism, chaos, narcissism and hubris. I’ll hereby thoroughly deny any links between these themes and my own character! But it’s clear Fincher has something to say about the condition humane and it’s not pretty. His worldview, not unlike his colour scheme, is bleak, grim and gritty. And he also has an opinion about his relationship to you, the audience, watching his films. In a making of featurette for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo he grimacingly says: “I think people are perverts. That’s the foundation of my career.”
Another key ingredient of Fincher films are their endings. They’re not necessarily unhappy endings as much as they are almost always open-ended. For a man who structures his camera movements like they’re a top of the bill ballet performance, he sure likes to keep his endings loosey-goosey; he likes to keep us guessing. And maybe, while the world is crumbling around us, I’ll do the same. [cue Where’s My Mind by The Pixies]
Somewhere in my early high school years my classmates and I were instructed by our French teacher to read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s sweet little novella Le Petit Prince. For those unfamiliar to the book: the story follows a young prince who visits various planets in space, including Earth, and addresses themes of loneliness, friendship, love, and loss. On this interplanetary adventure he encounters a geographer who, after some insisting, tells him the definition of the French word ‘éphemere’ or, as the English would say, ‘ephemeral’. “It means,” says the geographer ‘that which is in danger of speedy disappearance.’” We would call it ‘fleeting’.
Ever since reading these passages at an early age ‘ephemere’ has remained my favourite word in the French vocabulary. It’s certainly a term that comes to mind when discussing the renaissance woman and idiosyncratic chameleon we will be talking about today, Tilda Swinton. The London-born actress returns in Joanna Hogg’s once again highly autobiographical sequel to her 2019 film The Souvenir as the mother of protagonist Julie, a struggling student filmmaker. Hogg’s shimmering story of first love (mostly depicted in Part I) and the struggles with a young woman’s formative years, is a portrait of the artist that transcends the halting particulars of everyday life — a singular mix of memoir and fantasy.
In it Swinton plays a woman somewhat years her senior, once again transforming into a character she is not, but surely seems to know quite well. That Julie is portrayed by her real life daughter Honor Swinton Byrne certainly helps.
What is it with Tilda Swinton? She has, to stay with the French vernacular, a certain je ne sais quoi. An ungraspable aura that lends itself to an almost bizarre variety of roles and performances. From her early works with friend and fellow artist Derek Jarman (Caravaggio, Wittgenstein and the amazing Blue) to collaborations with Sally Potter (Orlando), Spike Jonze (Adaptation), The Coen Bros. (Burn After Reading), David Fincher (The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button), Luca Guadagnino (Io Sono L’Amore, A Bigger Splash, Suspiria), Wes Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom), Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer), Lynne Ramsay (We Need To Talk About Kevin), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Memoria), the list goes on. Summing up her palmares one would think her focus lies mainly in the artistic, but let’s not forget she popped up in both the Narnia and Marvel universes… Few actors can navigate the balance between high and low brow, between light and heavy, Hollywood and arthouse, without ever being pigeonholed, as Swinton has been doing for almost fifty years.
So the question arises, what makes her so unique? What makes her stand out? And why, like the rose the Little Prince desperately wants to protect de Saint-Exupéry’s novel, does she seem so ‘éphemere’?
For over 40 years, movie fans have eagerly awaited the arrival of the summer season, the time when some of Hollywood’s most vibrant and imaginative popular films emerge to battle out who will amass the biggest opening weekend. The nature of so called the “summer blockbuster,” as well as the time of release, has changed over the years, but most have been broadly appealing movies with a clever, easily understood concept. They have featured some of the most memorable action sequences, beloved characters, and enduring universes created in (mostly American) cinema. The memories of seeing the Dark Knight battle the Joker, a Tyrannosaurus walk the Earth again, and the high-speed flight down the Death Star’s trench will live forever in our minds. As will the sweet taste of copious amounts of popcorn and fizzy drinks.
Prior to the 1970s, the summer period was not particularly viewed as an ideal time to release a film, as many cinemagoers would be on holidays elsewhere. Through the 1950s and 1960s, studios would release their costly and therefore heavily promoted films in the last three months of the year. The term “blockbuster” had already been used to describe popular Hollywood releases since 1948 but was not associated with any particular time of the year. To make the crucial link between “blockbuster” and a release before July, something memorable would have to rise from the depths of the ocean…
With its release on June 20, 1975 in a then-massive 400 theaters and a ubiquitous marketing campaign based around its memorable poster, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws grossed over $400 million, becoming the first ‘summer blockbuster’. But it would take another film – one set in a galaxy far, far away – to prove to Hollywood that the age of the summer blockbuster had begun: George Lucas’ sci-fi epic Star Wars. Many connected to the film were quite skeptical of its potential for success, and the studio moved the film from its original Christmas 1976 release date to May 1977 because of production delays. The studio didn’t see the film as a major blockbuster and thought little of its franchise potential, infamously signing away many of its rights, including merchandising, to Lucas. Once Star Wars released to an incredible response by audiences and widespread support from film critics, the response to Star Wars changed the focus of Hollywood’s release schedule and the way they approached contract negotiations so as to emphasize securing the sequel rights to any film that went into production – and to NEVER give up merchandising rights! It was the success of Star Wars – and the possibilities of endless sequels and merchandising revenue – that spurred the development of many summer blockbusters over the course of the 1980s.
Spielberg would dominate the 80’s with both the Indiana Jones series and a certain endearing extra-terrestrial, but other franchises would also emerge with the cast of the original Star Trek series moving to the silver screen and the arrival of the Ghostbusters. But the biggest hit and game changer would emerge from the darkness of Gotham City. Tim Burton’s Batman convinced Hollywood that superhero films that took their source material seriously could become critical and popular successes and also generate massive profits through merchandise and tie-in sales. The same can be said for yet another from blockbuster maestro Spielberg, his 90’s dino-sized hit Jurassic Park. The 1993 classic would usher in an era of CGI-heavy summer blockbusters like Independence Day, Men In Black and the Star Wars prequels.
In the 2000’s Batman would return, no doubt due to Hollywood noticing the brand recognition potential of the cloaked vigilante. This time the comic book materials would be taken under the Batwing of Christopher Nolan in 2005’s Batman Begins, 2008’s The Dark Knight and 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises. The immense success of these films would not only kickstart the age of superhero summer blockbusters and the career of director Christopher Nolan, but it would also lead to the term ‘intelligent blockbuster’ being associated with the films of the British filmmaker (see: Inception, Interstellar and Tenet for other, not always as intelligent or successful, examples).
Merchandising, sequalization, brand recognition and franchise potential are key buzzwords in understanding the current climate of summer blockbusters. The seemingly endless stream of superheroes Marvel Studios has been tapping into since 2008’s Iron Man has given them a unique position in delivering box office sureshots, reaching its zenith in 2018 with Avengers: Endgame and its record-breaking worldwide opening of $1.2 billion
But only a few months after Endgame’s April 2019 release, the age of the blockbuster would come to a sudden, jarring halt. The COVID-19 pandemic would cause movie theaters to close and films such as Ghostbusters Afterlife, the new James Bond No Time To Die and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune were delayed for over a year. With all the tumultuous events of 2020, the concept of a “summer blockbuster” could only occasionally drift through our minds like some happy mirage from a pre-pandemic universe.
Meanwhile studios such as Disney and Warner Bros. have started experimenting with their release strategy, moving from a focus on releasing a film exclusively in theatres to simultaneously releasing said film on their streaming platforms or forgoing a theatrical release all together. Resulting in a mixed bag of, underperforming and sometimes easily forgotten, films like f.i. Marvel’s Black Widow, or the bizarrely enjoyable big budget Troma-inspired gore fest of The Suicide Squad. The question arises if the classic concept of the summer blockbuster can survive without the communal magic of the movie theatre. With solid blockbuster potential in the likes of Mission: Impossible 7, No Time To Die and Dune coming to theatres soon the upcoming period might decide the fate of how we interact with this particular brand of popular cinema.
We are living in an age where having a penchant for the past is increasingly worn as a badge of pop culture honor. Who hasn’t reminisced about the films seen in one’s youth and uttered a phrase along the lines of “they don’t make ‘em like they used to”? As a child of the late 80’s I myself will look back fondly on the weekends my dad, unsure what to do with me after the divorce of my parents, placed me in front of the shelves of our local video store with the absolute freedom to pick whatever I wanted to see. The nightmare fuel I tanked from seeing Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, John Carpenter’s Halloween or witnessing Chucky’s and Freddy’s murderous rampaging in the Child’s Play and A Nightmare On Elm Street franchises at far too young an age, shaped my love for cinema and what it can do. Of course my nostalgia for those days isn’t solely tinged by 80’s horror films, but at such an early age the horrific does tend to leave the most indelible of marks.
During the 17th to 19th century nostalgia was considered a serious psychopathological disorder requiring rather dubious methods of cure. Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined the term in his 1688 medical dissertation, from the Greek nostos, or homecoming, and algos, meaning pain. The disease was similar to paranoia, except the sufferer was manic with longing, similar to melancholy, except specific to an object or place.
We have to be thankful psychology now looks at the phenomenon differently otherwise the entire film industry would have to be put into a sanitorium for life. For nostalgia – sometimes flashily concealed under the guise of ‘retro’ – is rampant in the Hollywood system. Rehashing old ideas or remaking films has always been in the bloodstream of both filmmakers and productions studios – Carpenter’s The Thing and David Cronenberg’s The Fly two praiseworthy examples and Gus van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho being a severely dubious one – but as of late it seems more widespread than ever before. From the seemingly endless string of comic book movie adaptations to various reimaginings of the very horror films I watched as a child, the critique that the film industry is running out of ideas is getting louder and louder. From a commercial standpoint one could argue that this tendency to rehash, revamp or ‘update’, let’s say, the entire body of work of Stephen King or Clive Barker, is a great way of getting bums on seats as we already have a connection with these materials. We’ve all been to the Overlook Hotel before, we all remember Pennywise The Clown lurking in the sewer, and we’ve all looked in the bathroom mirror saying Candyman, Candyman… And even if Michael Jordan is replaced by LeBron James to sink a hook into Generation Z, and I do my best to tell myself I should never go see it, I still couldn’t restrain my nostalgia once the trailer for Space Jam: A New Legacy dropped this month. Nostalgia is one hell of a drug.
But even if ‘retro’ has replaced ‘renaissance’ and, like Hugo put it rather eloquently recently, mainstream filmmaking can sometimes feel like a calzone of familiar ideas being folded on top of each other over and over again, we shouldn’t condemn our personal sense of nostalgia, for the films that we remember so longingly, and in some cases rather naively, helped shape who we are as grown ups. Looking back at my childhood one director stands out as having the biggest impact on my nostalgia to come and that is of course Steven Spielberg. After scaring an entire generation out of the waters two decades earlier, the American director of other sentimentality drugs like E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and the Indiana Jones series, would in 1993 forever convince me that a velociraptor can easily open a steel door with its sharp claws. “Clever girl.” Jurassic Park remains a masterpiece of 90’s Hollywood filmmaking with its childhood wish fulfillment premise, groundbreaking blend of CGI-special effects and animatronics, thrilling roller coaster-like action set pieces, that iconic score by John Williams and the most memorable Jeff Goldblum laugh in cinematic history. It’s a story about a wealthy businessman who, inspired by his own case of ultimately naive nostalgia, builds a wildlife theme park filled with previously extinct dinosaurs, and can be read as a cautionary tale about what might happen when you bring the (very distant) past into the present. Therefore it’s an excellent starting point for a conversation about nostalgia and nightmares, sequels and remakes, retro and rehash and the question if we can ever truly escape our past. So like Samuel L. Jackson’s character would say: “Hold onto your butts!”
As I lie here waiting for these lonesome, dreadful days to pass, pacing the cage of my homely confines, flipping through my film collection and returning time and time again to the same classics I’ve watched dozens of times, I began to wonder what it is that I miss so much about the cinema. Movies have always been a reflecting pool for me; a basin of fantasies to experience vicariously so as to better understand oneself and the world around us, or – being the preferred modus operandi in the middle of an apocalypse – to escape reality wholesale. Is it that without the fantastical the real just becomes too unbearably real?
One of my all-time favorite fantasies is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 classic Vertigo, a film that’s all about looking, projecting and, very much, gazing, and in doing so asking the viewer what it means to be looking, projecting and gazing (at a film). What makes the greatest films so great is that, unlike any other art form, cinema is manifested on what you project onto it as a viewer. As James Stewart’s former police detective Scottie tails the mysterious woman he is tasked to spy on, we project our own thoughts and feelings onto his gaze, making it our own. As cinema can do like no other, we get swept up in it all. And so these films become part of our psyche and of who we are. Not just touchstones for small talk at cocktail parties, but signifiers of our very identities.
There is a great deal of unrest in the seas of cinema. Waves of change are crashing down on everything from the way films are made to how they are screened. But no matter how the climate has changed over the decades the medium and its brave creators have always proven to be incredibly versatile in navigating any sea-change, finding new streams to traverse and tap into. As the programmer of LAB111, a cinema dedicated to maintaining and celebrating the mind-boggling rich reflecting pool of cinema, I dearly miss the captain’s duties on our ship. There’s nothing like putting together the puzzle of a film program and sharing the experience of escaping into films with others in the magical dark of a film theatre. I believe that the past year has proven that we need film more than ever, that we need those twenty-four frames per second to encounter life through fantasy, to escape and dive deeper into ourselves and each other. We need, we crave, however different we may be from one another, to share these experiences with others, because it is in sharing those cinematic reveries we can find what it is to truly be together.
As I lie here waiting for these lonesome, dreadful days to end, wishing to return to my beloved cinema and the beloved visitors who frequent it, I am reminded of two Morgan Freeman voice overs. The first from David Fincher’s Se7en, which concludes with Freeman stating: “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.” I agree with the second part.” The other from a sentimental prison drama I need not name. “I hope to see my friend and shake its hand […] I hope.”