The last two movies of Leonardo DiCaprio center around two classic philosophical views of reality. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (based on Dennis Lehane’s eponymous novel) uses Kantian a posteriori, that what we know about the world is subject to our perceptions and thus not entirely objective. Christopher Nolan’s Inception builds on Cartesian dream argument, about the limited means of distinguishing illusion from reality.

I watched Shutter Island on its last show in town, and lost the chance to rewatch. Inception, I watched its first show in town and then again five days later. I am likely to have missed and misunderstood several things in both the movies but as enjoyably ambiguous as both tried to remain I found the former more interesting.

The Kantian philosophy of subjective reality is not new to cinema. Roman Polanski’s Rosemary Baby and to some extent Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix are among the most celebrated and classic examples. I also recall Mark Pellington’s Arlington Road, Joseph Ruben’s Forgotten and Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan, all of which have parents fighting desperately against some universal perceptions in order to save their sons or daughters. Shutter Island takes a very different approach than all these. By setting it on an island filled with certified mad men and untrustworthy authorities Scorsese directly brings forth the classroom discussion about the justification of a mad man’s perception of the world. The reason I find this interesting is because it is only an exaggeration of the mild differences between the perceptions of two uncertified individuals (sane or otherwise), something that is most exceptionally handled in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly.

I have never seen the Cartesian dream argument in cinema before. Inception uses another classroom discussion, about reality possibly being a part of an infinite dream sequence. Christopher Nolan’s biggest nod to the philosophy comes in the form of Mal/Cobb’s totem, a top which is to spin indefinitely within dreams but stop spinning in the real world. In a world following the laws of physics — dream or real — every top is to stop spinning at some point according to the second law laws of thermodynamics and thus Cobb’s totem will stop spinning in a dream just as in reality. There are things like seamless sharing of the dream environment (how?), gravity transcending dreams and the subconscious (what’s with that?), and a single global limbo (like 4chan is on the Internet?) which I found hard to digest. Even after willing to overlook these and some others I didn’t find the movie memorable beyond a level because Nolan — unlike Scorsese — himself overlooked a quote that Cobb makes, something about emotions being the vehicle of ideas. His investment in the emotions wasn’t sufficient to make me care about the motivations of any of the characters, including that of Cobb’s desire to meet his children. Even though I was thoroughly entertained by the plot, the subtle hints, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s lithe manouevres through the zero-gravity dream scenes, and even though I wouldn’t mind watching the movie again.

The reason why I care more about the Kantian philosophy than the Cartesian one is because of the significance of perceptions whether the world is real or not and because there is nothing much I can do about the latter. Not that I could or would about the former. Philosophy is one of my weak subjects, mainly because I never went through a GRE word list. I find the need to reach for the dictionary twice to read any given sentence tedious. I go round and round, looking for the same word again and again as much for the same argument. I haven’t yet the leisure in life to deeply think of such matters while chewing air.

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I watched Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy during three consecutive nights three weeks ago. I’ve wanted to write about it because I’ve felt that I understood something, yet my understanding is vague enough to elude words. Now I am grappling with words to express a vagueness that I know about.

The trilogy has been called different names — Faith, God, Man-God, Religious Chamber, Silence. Some even argue that they don’t form a trilogy but two of these along with some other one do. I haven’t read or watched enough of Bergman’s interviews, so I only hope he amused his audience by keeping mum. To me it’s the Silence trilogy. After carefully arranging all my notes and reading numerous critiques and interpretations of others (most of them on the IMDB boards), I have decided to discard them all, acutely aware of their thoroughness and incompleteness. Instead I take to addressing two different questions.

Some great works are timeless, like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird. They embody powerful capsules of truth that make us gasp once they get to our bottom. Some others reflect the state of the recipient’s mind at the time of reception, like Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Bergman’s movies — at least those that I’ve seen — fall in the latter category, thus offering a multitude of interpretations from different viewers and enriching the viewer through multiple viewings. I feel certain to draw different conclusions from the trilogy after experiencing some other things in life, or even the same things.

The urgent question, for which there is no single nor complete answer: How are such kaleidoscopes conjured?

The way this is usually achieved is through an unreliable narrator. Like a Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. In Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman uses Karin, a schizophrenic. Schizophrenics make wonderful narrators when they are not in the dock and when they are not like John Nash in Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind. Karin is played by Harriet Andersson whose teetering along the edges of sanity is as dizzying as Vivien Leigh’s Blance DuBois in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire. What does one make of a Virgin Mary’s apparently immaculate conception and a woman’s claims of being raped by a Spider-God? Who among the two women is mad and who isn’t? Which of the images is symbolic and which isn’t?

Another way is to use an introvert. In Winter Light we closely follow the life of a Doubting Tomas, but it is so filled with silence (his, God’s, and Bergman’s) that his doubts themselves aren’t clear (to him, to God, to the viewer), and when Tomas speaks one is not sure what to make of his words, like when he brutally tells Märta what he exactly thinks about her. This movie appears the most direct and simple of the whole trilogy, but it is this silence that is beguiling and thus seeds interpretations.

Another way of allowing multiple interpretations is through maintaining a strict distance from its characters, the way Bergman does in The Silence. In this movie he never tries to explain anything and allows the viewers to make what they can out of what is shown and heard, the way young Johan is forced to do all around the hotel. The actions are not always clear, and even when clear their intentions remain mystifying. This is not as easy as it sounds, neither for the director nor the viewer, and in addition to meticulous craft requires the director to trust the viewers with their intelligence.

Another question, one that is more commonly raised by Bergman’s fans is: Why incest?

As is perceived by many (not all) viewers of Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence, and in a few other Bergman’s movies, incest is never shown nor even implied. But it is frequently hinted. As simplistic and incomplete as this seems, I think one can find answers in the Bible. This Jonah hasn’t yet read the book and is hopefully waiting for an Esther to handover a leaf of translations.

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The last book of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is not unpredictable. From the outset it is clear that the book will be about the final trial, which we know that Salander and her “Knights of the Idiotic Table” will win, despite the several new difficulties and dangers that the supporting cast face and survive from time to time. We do not even learn anything new about superhero Lisbeth Salander. But I never felt the need to complain, except whenever I had to put the book down for reasons beyond my control.

The entire trilogy is very old-fashioned, with its well fleshed out but stereotypical characters and the plainness of its themes. The reason it captivated me is because of the pain-staking research and thorough factual approach that Larsson takes. I haven’t read any of his journalistic reports in the Expo magazine, but I suspect that he was an investigative journalist very much like Mikael “Kalle” Blomkvist, in dogged pursuit of facts for the establishment of what he had reason to believe to be truth.

“Who will clean up Bhopal mess?” “Dow not liable for Bhopal?” “Could it have been averted?” “Two arrest warrants, last ignored by CBI?” “Is Digvijaya Singh targeting his own party?” “Did Arjun Singh arrange Anderson’s exit?” These are a few separate headlines and news stories about the Bhopal gas tragedy from the past few days. Recently I’ve noticed that many Indian news channels have graduated from conducting SMS polls (like “Are reporters morons?”) to posting questions as headlines (mostly rhetorical, I hope). I have been of the opinion that facts about unknowns cannot be established from opinions of a million sheep, but I confess that I am not up to date with the latest research in the applications of stochastic models on social journalism involving sheep. I may have missed the forward about the evolutionary manner of establishing facts, which probably proves that if a Twitter follower is moved enough to reply or a serious citizen to call a news desk then he or she must be knowing and telling the truth with an accurately calculable probability.

Unlike them the reporters and other investigators throughout the Millennium trilogy weren’t taught in the new methods of journalism. They start with their beliefs and gut feelings, with what they feel must be the truth, but they don’t thrum the world with persuasive reports about their perceptions of truth being true based on a long list of opinions, on historic observations, on psychological studies, nor on the ever-so-dependable instincts and intuitions. They ask questions and sieve through provable facts. In an explicit lesson Erika Berger tells a young promising journalist, “Think like a reporter. Investigate who’s spreading the story, why it’s being spread, and ask yourself whose interests it might serve.” In another lesson she rules that under her reign news reports have to deal with provable facts and that editorials (not by every person with an asshole) are the only place for opinions. Blomkvist shows them in his actions. Even though the trilogy is a work of fiction I hold it as a text-book example of old school investigation, and Millennium as a magazine of very high standards unswervingly clinging to the elements of journalism.

Another rarity is the vast number of women characters throughout the trilogy. In this last installment Larsson couldn’t have been more explicit with the numerous annotations about (sometimes mythical) women warriors like Dahomey Amazons, Libyan Amazons, Shammuramat, Semiramis, and Boudica. Were it not for those footnotes I probably would have not paid enough attention to the women in the book: Lisbeth Salander, Erika Berger, Advokat Annika Giannini, Inspector Monica Figuerola, Inspector Sonja Modig, Susanne Linder, Malin Eriksson, Ragnhild Gustavsson, and even the award-winning reporter at She of TV4. (Harriet Vanger and Mirriam Wu were strong too, but they are barely mentioned in this book.)

All these characters have a role to play, all of them are what Larsson likes to call “resourceful” in some way, all of them hold on their own and dominate male characters at sometime. Equally noteworthy is the fact that there are no women on the wrong side, no women who finally lose, no women who show cruelty towards other women (or men without justification). In one clear breach of the fourth wall Larsson through Blomkvist says, “When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it’s about violence against women, and the men who enable it.” He is very clear here that it is not about violence and injustice in general, but about that perpetrated by men against women. It is as if he is apologizing on men’s behalf, making sure that they all win. Yet in another dialogue he (again through Blomkvist) mentions that he does not believe in collective guilt, as if conscious about what appears to be so.

Despite many apparent shortcomings — stereotypes, unsubtleness, even clichédness if you will — Larsson with his matter-of-fact reporting style, by mixing fiction with non-fiction (real places, real scandals, real characters), and most importantly with his idealism makes the trilogy fascinating and memorable.

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This Friday evening a friend who wanted to get out of the office told me that he hadn’t been to a theatre in a long time. Actually I haven’t been to a theatre in a long time and he hasn’t been to one in a very long time. We decided to watch some movie, any movie. Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2 couldn’t be the one for various reasons – I watched it this morning – and after striking through every other movie playing in the nearest multiplex I stumbled upon Allen Coulter’s Remember Me. The title was desperate enough to match our impulsive neediness, and I vaguely remembered Roger Ebert’s review.

The hour-long schmooze before the delayed start and the three-hour-long drunk confessions after it overshadow the movie, but they didn’t need to. I wouldn’t anyway remember anything about the movie apart from its title. The good thing about the movie is that it is mediocre enough to shove me out of my slumber and tempt me to at least show the snarkier side of me. Though being snarky is my first nature, as I show every now and then, it is hardly satisfying being so for an insignificant movie that no one would remember. I am going to try something “different”, as we Indians – filmmakers and moviegoers – like to say.

Within a few minutes of the movie I got bored enough to embark on my own journey making vague references from any given scene. It was largely a purposeless and unconscious act of recalling recent movies and books through Remember Me. Being a fan of Marcel Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past (which I haven’t read) and of the concept of involuntary memory, I found the exercise engrossing enough.

Update: Below is only a list of several things that I remembered, and not a description of any of the memories corresponding to them. This makes it boring. It makes sense to delete the post, but I’m tempted to preserve it for posterity. If it stirs any of your own memories, that may give this a little more value.

When the opening scene was set in 1991 and the next scene in 2001 I remembered the many anachronisms that commonly feature in the Goofs section of IMDB.

During the introductory scene of Robert Pattinson several girls sitting beside me gasped in delight on seeing his face. When he bent across a bed to reach for the phone his pajamas fell below the hips. I remembered all the metrosexuals consciously buying low waist jeans to ostentatiously wear and unconsciously walk around in them. Once I saw his face clearly I wondered whether he looked paler in the Twilight series and I couldn’t remember how he looked as Cedric Diggory. Most of all I remembered the year-old interview in which Stephen King declared that Stephenie Meyer couldn’t write worth a darn.

When I saw Lena Olin in the next scene I remembered her tattoo in Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate. I was saddened to see how much older she has become in a decade and remembered Kamal Hasan in Gautham Menon’s Raghavan. Later when it was mentioned that her character is a social service worker she reminded me of Urmila Matondkar in Jahnu Barua’s Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara.

During the post-funeral scene when all members pieces of the Hawkins family sat at a table, I remembered JD Salinger’s Catch in the Rye. When it was clear that the only person Tyler cared for was his sister Caroline, the image grew more intense. I quickly wrote off Tyler as the real empty phony, but continued to think of little Phoebe Caulfield whenever Caroline entered a scene. I also remembered Coraline, which I’ve neither read nor watched. (After watching the entire movie, I wish it had been about Caroline Hawkins, about her loneliness and “freakishness” and her way of dealing with the tragedies in her fragile life, because that character had a vivid story arc and because Ruby Jerins can act.)

During the classroom discussion in a Global Politics class about morals and ethics in the recent wake of terrorism (2001, before Sep 11th) I remembered the classroom discussion about the nature of fantasies in a Philosophy class in Alan Parker’s The Life of David Gale. I wondered why there is hardly ever a second discussion in a similar setting in such movies.

When I heard Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich coming from the Craigs’ TV, I was sure that Sgt. Craig must have had a better time watching that movie than I would watching this one and than Ally would with Tyler on their first date.

When Ally started getting intimate with Tyler, I wondered why and how many girls fall for the damaged types. I invariably remembered Dr. Lisa Cuddy, Dr. Allison Cameron and Stacy Warner, and winked at Dr. Gregory House. Of course, Tyler only resembles a violent vampire eternally sucked by teenage angst. Later, whenever Ally looked happily in love with Tyler, immediately after his displays of anger, I was reminded of the few such women I’ve heard about in real life and felt sorry for them.

When I saw Chris Cooper sulking alone in his apartment as Sgt. Craig, I remembered his several lonesome characters like in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty and Billy Ray’s Breach, and realized that I’ve never seen him play an upbeat character.

When the interval began I remembered an old Little Hearts advertisement. Reporter: “Which part of the movie did you like the most?” Moviegoer: “Intruvall.”

When Caroline was shading a drawing with a pencil while talking to her brother’s new girlfriend the soft scratching reminded me of couples rocking on beds, and then the scene where young Forrest Gump sits on the front yard listening to the sounds coming out of the room with Mrs. Gump and the principal inside, and inevitably of the subsequent grunts that the boy himself makes.

Pierce Brosnan showed a paunch in the movie. I don’t know whether it was a prosthetic, but the word (and he himself) reminded me of his panache, more as Thomas Crown than as James Bond. When Charles Hawkins missed his daughter’s art gallery exhibition, I imagined the irony of his Thomas Crown character enamored by Claude Monet. When he finally took Caroline to the museum, I remembered James Stewart looking dazed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. When he argued with Tyler and Ally that some Yankee team member was not fat but only big-boned, I may have laughed louder and longer than anybody else in the theatre, thinking about Eric Cartman’s claim that he was not fat but big-boned and Stanley Marsh’s retort that Jay Leno’s chin was big-boned and that Cartman was a big fat ass. When the family album scrolled on Charles’ office desktop, I remembered Brosnan’s deceased first wife and their three sons. (The word ‘deceased’ is used in the movie once, by Chris Cooper.) When Tyler told Ally that he came from a family of Irish musicians, I wished that they had kept the Irish accent of Pierce Brosnan. The Irish connection sprang several other memories like its great works of literature (I recently completed James Joyce’ Dubliners. Involuntary memories play a significant role in his works like Dubliners and Ulysses.), the current golden age of Irish crime, the beautiful Irish accents, of how Meryl Streep disappointed me with her accent in Pat O’Connor’s Dancing at Lughnasa, and of the Magdalene Asylums.

During the scene in which Tyler was sitting in a theatre, apparently wondering why he is sitting there, I empathized with him. (Or did the director empathize with the audience?) I remembered another recent mirroring of the character in a movie with the audience, in a scene in James Cameron’s Avatar.

Towards the end of the movie, I remembered that namedropping books and writers was regular early on in the movie and quickly died down. Rereading this very post, I realized that it may have been for the best.

When one of the main characters died at the end of the movie, I thought not about Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay, but about K Balachander’s antulEni katha and Mark Rydell’s Intersection. I have been particularly impressed by the latter movie (which I never saw completely), where the death of a character significantly alters the outcome of the movie, and it was not how the character died but under what circumstances the character died that made a difference. After thinking for a long time I also remembered VN Aditya. In all his movies that I’ve seen he gets the hero or heroine stabbed and then promptly recovered, and it felt insignificant in all of those movies. In Remember Me as well, the death is in the Sep 11 attacks. “What a croc of shit!” I thought, and remembered the wonderful monologue in Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman. It would’ve made no difference had that character died of dysentery (like in Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima), for the aftermath is only a montage of closed ones dealing with the death in due course of time. This also reminded me that I haven’t yet read any Sep 11 literature, and decided that John Updike’s Terrorist should be an especially good choice.

After walking out of the theatre I remembered that I seldom watch movies about teen angst as I can neither appreciate it nor tolerate it. This movie actually doesn’t fall under teen angst, for neither of the main romantic pair is a teen (both are college students), but the movie seems targeted on teens.

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I was driving home one night. I stopped at a red signal, still thinking furiously about the movie that I had just watched. There was a long queue growing with cars coming out of the multiplex that I had driven out of. The driver in the car behind me got impatient and started honking. I tried not to let it bother me. The signal time was unusually short. I could see him in the rearview mirror, honking relentlessly, with his wife beside him. I pulled up the window glasses but my ears could still feel the blaring horn. Did he think that I was a retard who couldn’t tell red from green? It got on my nerves. I wanted to step out of my car, walk to his, and bang his head against the steering again and again while viciously looking into the eyes of his wife. I was scared. I turned up the stereo and clenched my fists around the steering.

I felt the constant presence of the movie at the back of my mind for the next couple of days. I felt its presence when I read about another bombing. I felt its presence when I encountered a reckless salesman in an electronics store. I felt its presence when I was chopping vegetables with the knife. A few days later when I sat down in front of the laptop to write about the movie, I quickly skipped it after a little pondering and instead watched a rerun of South Park to distract my thoughts.

Among all the movies that I watched during PIFF 2010, Dominic Murphy’s White Lightnin’ is the one that haunted me the most. It is in black and white. It is probably the movie that haunted me more intensely than any other ever. I hoped that I would be able to write about it some day. It took me this long. I wasn’t processing it all along. I was only stalling.

White Lightnin’ is a movie based on the life of legendary “dancing outlaw” Jesco White. It opens with young Jesco huffing – glue, paint, gas, booze, anything with a distinct odour – and living through phantasmagorical nightmares and horrifying fantasies. A few minutes into the movie, he has already snuffed coke and too many other things, fought with too many kids, been to the juvenile prison too many times, and spent a good deal of his life in a mental asylum. Jesco lives with his large redneck family, including his famous father Donald Ray, in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. All his escapades are despite his father’s desperate attempts at thwarting them (which to me seemed weak), and the only thing that brings him sanity is when his father teaches him mountain dancing.

The father gets murdered in a gruesome manner, and this greatly worsens the already sensitive psyche of Jesco. It is an event that haunts him for the rest of his life. The doctor tells his mother that he will never be able to live without someone looking after him.

Within the first twenty minutes, while Jesco is having a meal in the asylum dormitory another ward show

I won’t tell you more about what happens. It might come across as only a spiral of violence which you must have realized by now anyway. While detractors may look at the movie as an ill-connected string of one gratuitously violent scene after another, that they all happen throughout a single man’s life, and that they are shown along with the rest of the events through his perspective make a great difference. There may be many lives like this, but this one is his.

Jesco is a character with surplus energy, an energy that is very well conveyed by the music and sound effects. He never finds a reliable way of releasing it regularly. He is content while mountain dancing on an eight by four piece of plywood while wearing his father’s shoes. He is on the edge of sanity while partying with his crazy girl. He has a slippery switch in his dark grey matter. It goes on without his consent, and then all hell breaks loose. He is aware of that switch. He struggles to find it, to control it, and finally to remove it. He gets increasingly religious. He quotes the Bible. He solders fine religious woodburnings. But something elusive keeps stepping on that insidious switch. As I saw him oscillating between hope and madness, I was acutely aware of my own ignorance of that chaos and the emptiness of my empathy.

It is a bold script by Eddy Moretti and Shane Smith. I guess it comes with the territory for someone who founded the Vice magazine. The movie works because of the excellent performance by Edward Hogg who gets under the skin of Jesco White with his big expressive eyes. Clearly the movie has been overlooked. I hope that at least the fans of Carrie Fisher will be tempted to give it a try. When Edward Hogg becomes the star that many are hoping he would, the movie might get a few more patrons. I see the movie as a rare thorough (and necessary) documentation of violence through the eyes of an anguished perpetrator.

I read all I could about Jesco White, including a fine essay by Jeff Stover and a fan’s day out with him. He is very much alive, and very much seems to be the character that he was portrayed as. The eighteen-year-old documentary “Dancing Outlaw” must have helped as well. I can’t find the resources that I’ve previously read, but I remember reading that Jesco White himself helped while writing the script. As a man who truly struggled (struggles) with depression, addiction and other “distorders”, I wonder if most of the events in the movie are his attempt at exorcizing the demons in his head.

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