12 Days of Highly Tolerable Holiday Movies: Twelve Monkeys

The Freedom For Animals association on Second Avenue is the secret headquarters of the Army of the 12 Monkeys. They’re the ones who are going to do it. I can’t do anymore, I have to go now. Have a Merry Christmas!

12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995). All-time favorite film, all-time favorite director.

In a future world devastated by disease, a convict is sent back in time to gather information about the man-made virus that wiped out most of the human population on the planet.

(the imdb)

So as I said, this is my favorite movie of all time, in any genre — all other comers are just vying for second — and I screencapped the everloving Gilliamic crap out of it last week.

Filled with glee that this qualified as a holiday picture, I innocently thought, “Surely everyone who ever planned to see this film has seen it by now, so it’s okay for me to put up all my pictures.”

But if the internet has taught me anything in the past year on this here thought experiment, it is above all else that it is possible for people to get mad at you for anything, so, at a certain point, this post will have a jump/cut. You will be able to click and be taken to a standalone page with only this entry, so that those sensitive surfers who I think must actually go searching pop culture blogs specifically for spoilers will not be able to yell at me for said spoilers. I’ll also be able to prove why this is a holiday movie.

That point is now. Click below to go to the full-page entry, with trivia, analysis, lines, and tons more pictures.

“I am mentally divergent, in that I am escaping certain unnamed realities that plague my life here. When I stop going [to Ogo], I will be well. Are you also divergent, friend?” Click here if you qualify for bunny slippers at the monkeyhouse. (Be honest.)

edit: I took the jump out. Screw the small minority of spoiler-haters. Sorry, guys. Rail away if you must.

Still with me? Great!

Telephone call? Telephone call? That’s — that’s communication with the outside world. Doctor’s discretion. Uh-uh. Look, if all of these nuts could just … make phone calls, they could spread insanity! Oozing through telephone cables, oozing into the ears of all those poor, sane people — infecting them! Wackos everywhere: plague of madness.

Hence the agony of foreknowledge combined with the impotence to do anything about it. …

Surely there is very real and very convincing data that the planet cannot survive the excesses of the human race: proliferation of atomic devices, uncontrolled breeding habits, the rape of the environment. In this context, wouldn’t you agree that “Chicken Little” represents the sane vision and that homo sapiens‘ motto, “Let’s go shopping!” is the cry of the true lunatic?

(That last was Dr. “Actual Bad Guy” Peters. He says it to Kathryn after her lecture when he’s getting his book signed.)

The lion James sees at the beginning is echoed by the camel perched on the top of the hotel in 1996. The image also shows up in a frame of a statue of a lion atop a stone as they search for Goines, and by the giraffes running across the overpass in Philadelphia many frames down.

No detail is too small to be necessary to the mise en scene of this film. Kathryn watches this Woody Woodpecker cartoon as she waits for James to get back in 1996 to the Oasis hotel. In the asylum in 1990, the movie on the television in the background as Goines rants is the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business.

I get it! This is your old plan, right?

Plan? What are you talking about?

Remember? We were in the dayroom, watching television, and you were all upset about the–the — desecration of the planet, and you said to me, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a germ, or a virus, that could wipe out mankind and leave the plants and animals just as they are?” You do remember that, don’t you?

Bulishit! You’re fucking with my head!

And that’s when I told you my father was this famous virologist and you said, “Hey, he could make a germ and we could steal it!”

Listen, you dumb fuck! The thing mutates — We live underground! The world belongs to the — the fucking dogs and cats. We’re like moles or worms. All we want to do is study the original!

Chris Meloni of Law & Order: SVU in a lovely little dickish part, a totally Terry Gilliam character: an individual given all the facts who refuses to acknowledge the possibility that the truth suggested by those facts could possibly be. Gilliam thrives on the absurd, and I think throws these Doubting Thomases in to the works to demonstrate how ugly a reception his credulous character constructions would receive in the world we all agree to be “real.”

Women will want to get to know you.

For me this is the creepiest Scientist line in the film. Even in the future, when the plague has driven everyone underground, a guy who considers himself “hep” will try to use the allure of poontang to bring a poor guy down. So unfair and underselling for the Cole character, like that is a carrot that can be held out before him in the face of what he’s endured.

Until I was screencapping, I never really noticed how much screen time the so-called “Apocalypse Nut” and true villain, David Morse playing Dr. Peters, Jeffrey’s father Dr. Goines’ lab tech, is given.

When I was institutionalized, my brain was studied exhaustively in the guise of “mental health.” I was interrogated, I was x-rayed, I was examined thoroughly.

Then they took everything about me and put it into a computer where they created this model of my mind. Yes! Using that model they managed to generate every thought I could possibly have in the next, say, ten years, which they then filtered through a probability matrix of some kind to — to determine everything I was going to do in that period.

So you see, she knew I was going to lead the Army of the Twelve Monkeys into the pages of history, before it ever even occurred to me. She knows everything I’m ever going to do before I know it myself. How’s that?

Who cares what psychiatrists write on walls?

I say this when a Thing matters and we are trying to diminish it.

Hey! Is that the police? I’m in here, I’m an innocent victim! I was attacked. By a coked-out whore and some fucked-up dentist!

I love how deranged Kathryn is in this scene, screaming at James to get Wallace’s wallet before they skedaddle. “We need cash!” But moments before, so tender when she touches his scalp with her curiously ugly hands. Madeline Stowe is the bomb.

Oh, hey, what’s a holiday movie? This is! Besides taking place during the Christmas season, we got some straight-up Santa action goin’ right here. Hope you can handle how very “holiday” this movie is.

James! James! It’s okay. We’re insane! We’re crazy! It’s a carpet cleaning company —

A carpet cleaning company?

No scientists — no people from the future! It’s just a carpet cleaning company. They have voice mail; you leave a message telling them when you want your carpet cleaned.

You … you left them a message?

Yeah, I couldn’t resist. I said, “The Freedom For Animals Association on 2nd Avenue is the —”

“— ‘is the secret headquarters of the Army of the 12 Monkeys. They’re the ones who are going to do it. I can’t do anymore, I have to go now. Have a Merry Christmas.'”

I’m not crazy.

I think I’ve seen this movie before. When I was a kid. It was on TV.

The Vertigo moment. This movie’s plot was inspired by Chris Marker’s La jetée, which also, in its turn, refers to the film Vertigo. While in the past, the protagonist of La jetée visits a Museum of Natural History with the blonde object of his affections, who points to the trunk of a cross-sectioned tree, the same way Kim Novak does in Muir Woods in Hitchock’s Vertigo, as shown in this scene from Twelve Monkeys. “Here I was born, and here I died. But it was only a moment for you — you took no notice.” Kathryn wears a blonde wig in this scene.

The lion I referred to further back, part of the recurring theme of wilderness which has been kept in captivity, let loose. Like the camel, like the giraffes, like the lethal virus, like James Cole released from his future underground incarceration to try and make time turn back and stand still.

It’s not just my dream. I was actually here! I remember now. … About a week or two before — before everybody started dying. I think you were here, too. But you — you looked just like you look now.

The exterior shots for the crucial airport scenes were done at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, while the interiors are from the Reading Terminal at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Today, you gotta take in to account your Army-of-the-Twelve-Monkeys factor.

Wh–what? What did you say?

The Twelve Monkeys, honey. … Bunch’a weirdoes let all the animals out of the zoo last night.

This cabbie’s name is Annie Golden. You can also catch her in the soon-to-be-justly-famous I Love You, Phillip Morris.

That’s what they were up to! Freeing the animals!

On the walls — they meant the animals when they said, “We did it.”

Only assholes write on walls.

Excuse me, sir. I’m going to need to have a look at the contents of your bag.

Me?

Biological samples. I have the paperwork right here.

I’m going to have to ask you to open this, sir.

Open it? … Of course.

The curious, diffuse wash that bathes these final scenes was acheived with Fresnel lensed lights. Fresnels, a favorite tool of Gilliam’s, are a beveled lighthouse-and-old-car-headlamp-style lens.

The entire instrument consists of a metal housing, a reflector, a lamp assembly, and a Fresnel lens. Fresnel instruments usually have a convenient way of changing the focal distance between the lamp and the lens. The Fresnel lens produces a very soft-edged beam, so it is often used as a wash light. A holder in front of the lens can hold a colored plastic film (gel) to tint the light or wire screens or frosted plastic to diffuse it. … The Fresnel lens is useful in the making of motion pictures not only because of its ability to focus the beam brighter than a typical lens, but also because the light is a relatively consistent intensity across the entire width of the beam of light.

(the wiki)

I remember reading a review when this film came out which criticized the inconsistency between Cole’s memory of this moment from dream to dream and what happened in actuality. The reviewer said it took away from the original inspirational idea in La jetée, where Marker’s narrator saw himself die as a child but, they felt, moved more definitely toward that moment as events unfolded in the short film. The supplanting of an unseen “Watch it” man in a yellow jacket with first Goines and then Dr. Peters was, the reviewer claimed, too foggy.

Well, excuse me, Mr. Super-brilliant reviewer, but the fogginess is kind of the entire point. The weirdly symmetrical plot of Twelve Monkeys is a cyclical rumination on the subjectivity of memory and identity. Put that in your cool-guy pipe and smoke it. Asshat.

I went to this film probably a few months after its release, when it hit the $2 second-run theater we had in town at that time, and I ended up going back almost every night that week, taking different friends. I remember very clearly that one of my friends said when it was over, “That’s so weird that in the future the insurance lady that sits by the bad guy on the plane is a scientist.”

“Um — I’m pretty sure she’s from the future in that scene.” Like, maybe it’s too late for Philly, but she’s going to stop Peters from going to San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, et al. She says she is in insurance. Right? I mean, we’ve seen her in 2035, looking exactly the same, a highly placed physicist. I sincerely doubt that in 1996 she was an insurance agent who planned to survive the plague and not age.

Is this even up for debate? I’m serious, does someone have an alternate interpretation of that scene?

Movie Moment and answer to yesterday’s Blake trivia question: Manhunter (part 1) and nominal review of Red Dragon

ATTN: Spoilers like a bat outta hell. Stop if you’ve never seen nor read Red Dragon and Manhunter and are the kind of person who yells at people on the internet for posting spoilers of things that have been out for decades.

I was relaxing after dinner and I suddenly remembered yesterday’s random Blake trivia — forgot about that!

Okay, soooo, I used this picture yesterday in the “Tyger” post …

… because it comes from Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986). This is part 1 of its Movie Moment because I need to cover technical aspects a different day. Today I want to just sort of compare Manhunter and a more recent adaptation of the same fucked-up and riveting material. Manhunter is the original filmed adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon (1981), in which the writer William Blake plays a very large part of the dissociative disease that leads the antagonist to kill and sets off the action of the novel/film.

Manhunter, the original Red Dragon screen version.

In 2002, a different adaptation, whose title was the same as the book — Harris’s novels have a weird and haphazard history of screen-arrival in Hollywood — was released in light of the success of the year before’s screen adaptation of Hannibal (novel: Thomas Harris, 1999; film: Ridley Scott, 2001), a rather late-breaking sequel to the infamous film version of Silence of the Lambs (novel: Harris, 1988; movie: Jonathan Demme, 1991).

Red Dragon, second adaptation.

A totally different animal, not even attempting to remake in part the cinematic masterpiece that is the color-drenched, painstakingly-framed Manhunter, the alternate more recent film is what I consider a sloppy adaptation of Red Dragon. It is nothing like the very-admirable entry into the Harris genre that is Hannibal, which despite the replacement of Academy Award-winner Jodie Foster with Academy Award-nominee Julianne Moore as the infamous “[Hello,] Clarice” Starling managed, I think by virtue of Sir Anthony Hopkins’ reprisal of the sensationalist character of Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter combined with Scott Free productions’ attachment to the project in the wake of smash-hit Gladiator, to make quite the box office splash. As it ended up, that success was deserved.

Check out Vegetarian Times in the background. No. 1 favorite Hannibal still with A Bullet.

The Red Dragon revamp that followed it the next year, on the other hand, falls short of its predecessors due to cocky casting and the hasty pudding nature of the picture. It is almost unfair to stack it against such a stunning piece of eye candy and psychological discourse as Manhunter. But I’m going to anyway.

“The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed In Sun” — William Blake. Blake’s illuminated print-making process is actually still partially guessed at, as he never troubled to write down most of how he did it. Another post — I promise.

The novel Red Dragon, the first in the Hannibal Lecter series of books by Thomas Harris, has as its main detective not Clarice Starling, but rather a young FBI mindhunter named Will Graham. The book and 2002 film take its title from the antagonist’s personal inspiration (and devil with whom he dances) for his transformation to what he views as a higher being. This is a highly detailed, uniquely gnostic series of ritual murders which the “bad guy” bases around Blake’s work, particularly his illuminated manuscript print “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed In Sun.” The killer calls this multiply murderous, cleansing-by-blood process “Becoming.”

This antagonist is called the Tooth Fairy by the press, a name he loathes, but he’s tipped to the reader early on — by his preferred nomenclature as the Red Dragon — to be a shy and cleft-palated industrial photographic-development-expert named Francis Dolarhyde. Francis is an abused and orphaned soul with an unfathomably deep dark side due to psychosexual torture in his upbringing.

Meanwhile, young Will Graham is a bummed-out “good guy” chilling in Marathon, Florida with his family on the beach, trying to get his mojo back after unhappily closing the toughest case of his career as a profiler with the FBI: arresting former friend and consultant, reknowned psychiatrist, classical music fan, and noted long pig gourmand one Dr. H. Lecter — M.D., Ph.D., hella murderer.

As the action unfolds, the already tightly-strung Dolarhyde — who, as the Red Dragon, writes in supplication to Dr. Lecktor/Lecter appealing for help in his quest to purify his weak flesh and Become, further enmeshing the good doc in the plotohs — finds his demon not only hunted by highly-skilled semi-retired agent Will Graham and the FBI, but also must elude his own dark side’s brutal orders when he suddenly finds himself in an unlikely and empathetic mutual attraction with a plucky handicapped co-worker and falters in his faith in “Becoming.”

This complex character is played equally well by Tom Noonan in Manhunter and Ralph Fiennes in Red Dragon. Noonan gets the edge for creepy wordless scenes such as rasing his head to the sunlight like an animal drinking in vital and engrammed diurnal directives; Fiennes has the advantage in the all-important following tattoo-revelation scene and Red Dragon cry of chagrined triumph at tabloid reporter and luckless human torch Freddy Lounds (Steven Lang, 1986; Philip Seymour Hoffman, ’01: winner Hoffman on that one — ♥ that dude’s freaky energy 4eva-evah).

YOU OWE ME AWE.

Totally disturbing scene.

Tormented by the demon with which he wrestles, Dolarhyde attempts to steal and eat the original Blake painting which has been, in his mind, masterminding his murders. He believes that by consuming the painting, he will stop the voices, visions, and impulses torturing his brain with which he valiantly argues.

He finds himself particularly rising in opposition to the Red Dragon’s orders that he murder Reba (infinitely worthy and perpetually underused Joan Allen plays her in Manhunter while shiny-eyed dope Emily Watson —I know it’s an unpopular opinion but this chick bugs the hell out of me — got the role in the revamp), the outspoken, sexually bold blind woman from the photo labs with whom he has fallen in love.

Punch Drunk Love, Cradle Will Rock, me shaking my head and saying “Boo.” (limited theatrical release)

Dolarhyde is a sadder, sympathetic and strangely more touching, conflicted character than the early Lecter (or even his later and in my book cheaply slapped together Hannibal Rising incarnation) and much more relatable than Dolarhyde’s equally compulsive 1988 series successor, Buffalo Bill — “it puts the lotion on its etc” — are ever portrayed to be, yet because of Dolarhyde’s disorderly mind and act-driven kills, the Red Dragon as a predator has scenes that are in some ways more resonantly chilling than any of the often-quoted histrionics hailing from either star of Silence of the Lambs‘ gruesome sideshow.

As an example, in the above screencap, the Red Dragon side of Francis’s beaten, slavish personality makes the nervous newly-dating Dolarhyde give blind Reba McClane a drink of water from a glass with not only ice floating it but also the anciently misshapen and hideously rotting false teeth of the author of his schizophrenia, Dolarhyde’s dreadful dead grandmother, which dental implements he fits in to his own mouth and bites his victims in a frenzy during his kills. (Hence the hated nickname.) That part is not a-okay with me.

Forensic expert showing an FBI-Atlanta PD task force meeting a plaster mold of Gramma Dolarhyde’s choppers.

Um. Yeah. All that biting and teeth stuff? And the yells from the Red Dragon and his grandmother to murder Reba before he accidentally tells her how they have him trapped in his own mind? That’s fucked up. And oh, god. When those teeth knock against the glass as Reba thanks him, raises it to her lips, and sips, there is not a cringe-free face in the room.

So. In Manhunter, the first jump of Red Dragon from novel to screen, Will Graham is played by William Petersen, and Brian Cox plays Lecktor — not a typo. The film spells it this way. (You may recognize my darlingest dearest awesome Mr. Cox, pictured below as “Lecktor,” from Rushmore, The Ring, or Supertroopers — he is a personal fave from Way Back).

In 2002’s adaptation of Red Dragon, Edward Norton performs the part of Agent Graham with Sir Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as Dr. Lecter. Hopkins did get to have a little fun, for once off of his familiar smug game of “fava beans” and psychological bullshit, because this whelp of a wolf among the lambs has just recently been chained in the Red Dragon storyline.

The Lecter of Red Dragon is still a young and relatively vengeful Lecter, pacing a gym on a harness and leash for mandatory exercise to keep the other prisoners of his psychiatric facility safe (no mask just yet), unthinkably pissed at Graham for having caught him several years earlier, even lunging for him in an unguarded moment of rage — Lecter is not yet completely at home in the role of Fucking With the Po-lice as is the maturing character encountered in Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal.

In spite of Hopkins’ fun stretching his wings, I still feel that Brian Cox plays him with a hair more dignity and better-hinged chilliness than Hopkins does, which gives Lecktor, vs. Lecter, that slender shoot of a just-germinating seed of polish-mixed-with-go-for-broke-ruthlessness which is so necessary for the character’s believable development in to who he is by Hannibal. I think Hopkins saw the chance to finally show the less-controlled, animalistic side of a character he’d been at home playing as an after-the-fact “tyger” — caged and angry but a careful planner — for a long time and jumped, maybe too high, at the opportunity for this gamier potrayal. Just an opinion.

“You think I’m stupid?”
“No, Dr. Lecter. I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“But you still caught me.”
“You had certain … disadvantages.”
“Disadvantages? Such as … ?”
“You’re insane.”

You are correct to recognize Petersen from the original, Las Vegas-set television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Fun fact: for Halloween 2002, the producers deliberately teamed William Petersen up in his role as Gil Grissom, the brilliant but troubled detective able to get in to killers’ minds, in pursuit of a nemesis freaky killer performed in the October 31st episode by Tom Noonan (Francis Dolarhyde, aka the Tooth Fairy) as a nod to their parts opposite one another in Manhunter. Noonan played a demented illusionist, escape artist, and master magician known as Zephyr. Near retirement, the Zephyr still had some scores to settle and a lot of pyrotechnic sleight-of-hand tricks up his sleeve before he was ready to call it a day. The episode actually ends in delightful ambiguity, but I will not spoil it.

Special thanks to wetpaint, a CSI: fansite, for the screencaps.

I used to wonder with great conflict why, having lost someone special to me to a real life version of this type of shit, I am okay with fare such as the Lecter film and novel shenanigans, CSI:, and the like when I am so vehemently opposed to so-called “true crime” and often even discussions of such stuff in company or on the news. I will leave the room on certain topics and I don’t consider that burying my head in the sand — I have seen all I want to see for now of what people will say “needs to be reported” like as some kind of lesson.

Fiennes and Watson in Red Dragon; my professor friend and I looked nothing like this during our deep conversation (below) — I just felt like I had not shown enough stills from it as opposed to Manhunter.

Not too long ago, I wound up one day in deep, private conversation after a where-am-I-going-in-life conference with a former professor I dearly love about Harris’s novels and perhaps Patrica Cornwell’s, or some line very similar, and I confessed that I felt conflicted about my reading of that type of material because of things I’d dealt with in the past. He surprised me by saying he’d also lost a friend to violent crime growing up and despised, as I did, the cult of violence and serial-killer-admiration that seems to grip the tabloid television shows and bestselling non-fiction shelves. Yet he, too, read with genuine enjoyment many series of fictional genre crime thrillers. He said that, like me, he’d often disgustedly questioned himself as to how he kept both opinions in balance, and why he differentiated between hating the one and being all right with the other.

We need this hero.

He said he’d read a great scholarly article just a few years earlier, and I cannot remember the writer he quoted because I am garbage and frankly slugging a margarita on the rocks right now (it’s hot where I live), which forever answered our question for him.

This psychological scholar and literary critic posited that the murder mystery — all the detective thrillers and suspense novels and cop vs. boogeyman films the genre spawns — even with a detailed portrayal of a base, disturbed and seemingly random monster like Lecter or Dolarhyde as their antagonist — far from the feeding of dark fantasy that we anxiously supposed, serves instead a need in humanity to see our fears realized (as we had already done in reality) but the conflict then resolved.

Couldn’t go the whole post without a Silence of the Lambs scene.

What he basically said was that every time he and I watched CSI: and Grissom caught the Bad Guy, or read a James Patterson book on the beach and cheered as Alex Cross brought in his latest nemesis, we were solving our friends’ murders and seeing the people who disrupted our lives brought to task for their wrongdoing. We were gaining our much needed closure. Even people who have not suffered loss but empathetically and logically fear it because they love people in their own lives and understand that the possibility of these lives being taken by cruel injustice is never far away, seek and enjoy that same positive resolution to this basic human anxiety as it plays out in genre crime fiction.

Lecter caged and contained, kept in by the Forces of Good and therefore shut up like a witch in a well of a fairy story. (temporarily in this case but you get my drift) The people of the village are Safe.

It blew my mind, and I almost wanted to reject it because it was so far from my self-loathing castigation, but it felt very true. I know he was right. I am no longer so guilty nor constantly probing myself for some latent and despicable, prurient interest in fictional depictions of things that in real life have caused me pain. I understand now that I am actually acting out in my mind, against a cathartic and safe backdrop, the conflict and agonized anxieties from which I shy away in real reports on the news, and deliberately seeking through a book in my hands a satisfactory resolution which will lay my mind at ease that justice has been reached — and, by extension, that justice can and will be reached in reality.

That strayed pretty far afield from Blake and Manhunter but I’m kind of not sorry.

All of this entry’s screencaps come from kpannier and thewadingegret on the lj; rottentomatoes forums; and personal grabs here and there over the years.

Talk nerdy to me: Star Wars propaganda edition

“Truth is always the first casualty of war.” — Aeschylus.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

— Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928).

“It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.” –Joseph Goebbels.

“[In] Democratic societies … the state can’t control behavior by force. It can to some extent, but it’s much more limited in its capacity to control by force. Therefore, it has to control what you think.” — Noam Chomsky, Chronicles of Dissent, 1992.

“Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.” — Adolf Hitler.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. ” — Joseph Goebbels.

“Propaganda must confine itself to very few points, and repeat them endlessly.” — Adolf Hitler.

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” — George W. Bush.

“The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.” — H.L. Mencken.

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.” — Chomsky.

“Intellectual activity is a danger to the building of character … Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the state can play.” — Goebbels.

“[The propaganda system] recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them.” — Chomsky.

“The truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” — Goebbels.

“Propaganda must never serve the truth, especially not insofar as it might bring out something favorable for the opponent.” — Hitler.

“One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.” — Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

“We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.” — John F. Kennedy.

Is that so? I think I disagree, but I’ve debated this before, during Sam Haskins month, when I went off on Leni Riefenstahl. It is a damned tangled web, and the propaganda flows from all sides.

Some of those posters are by Cliff Chiang and some by Joe Carroney, and some by unknown others; see, the sources from which I gathered all these images were kind of slipshod in their own sourcing so if you know specifics please do shoot them my way because I am dissatisfied with the low-class credit attribution job I’m turning in on this one so far.

Movie Moment: Metonymy and Synecdoche in Legally Blonde

I’d like to take a moment of your time to demonstrate the intriguing and in many ways fun fetishistic metonymy in Legally Blonde (Rob Luketic, 2001). The shot list calls for the constant breaking of the women down in to digestible parts when they are focused on Warner. This is important because, to a man like that character, taken as a whole, what are we ladies? Too much to chew on, it seems. That’s my personal theory as to why scenes that involve Warner or preparing oneself for Warner so vigorously metonymize Elle and Vivian (Selma Blair). In cinema, where it functions differently than in literary criticism, this metaphorical use of small parts to symbolize the whole, and the psychological underpinnings of its use, falls beneath the aegis of metonymy but really is a better example of synecdoche.

Synecdoche, sometimes considered as a metaphor, is also a metonymical device enabling an idea or object to be indicated by a term whose meaning includes that of the original term or is included in it. The singular replaces the plural, the type the species, the abstract the concrete — or the other way round. Most of the part takes the place of the whole: a sail for the ship, a palm leaf for the tree.

As Elle becomes self-actualized during her rising success in law school, she ceases to so flagrantly feed this synecdoche, insisting on being seen as a whole person. That’s why in the next-to-final sequence, when she walks away from Warner and disappears in to the sun of the outside world, we see her entire body for only the first time from his perspective: slipping in to the haze because Warner never really knew Elle, he knew only the idea of her that he formed in his mind between her misguided visual clues and his contextualized experience of women.

More properly, if I had to put it in pretentious film school bullshit parlance, the cinematic discourse established by director Rob Luketic employs the consistent rhetorical metonymical device of synecdoche to psychologically reinforce the theme of a woman’s appearance and its attendant little kicky details being only a small part of her fuller self. The arc of the narrative allows for the falling away of this device, which further serves to underline the discursive element of metonymy and its being unnecessary to a fully-fleshed-out, dynamic character who has undergone change throughout the film. (I am so glad I quit film school. I would eat my right hand in a sandwich with razor-blades and broken glass before I put my name to and was proud of the publishing of such empty academese for a goddamned living.)

This trope is familiar in the cinema where metonymical juxtaposition becomes changed in to metaphor without the syntagma (this contiguous form) becoming paradigmatic (integrated as a fixed sign, like a lexeme, folling a substitution of meaning. The connoted meaning is objectified in to an object, which performs the function of a sign; but this objectification depends on the connotation: it does not precede it or present it ready-made.

(Semiotics and the Analysis of Film. Mitry, Jean and King, Christopher. London: Athlone Press, 2000. p. 198)

When they are grooming themselves for Warner and aiming at gaining his attention, the camera’s conversation with us shows that Elle and Vivian subconsciously understand he could never possibly grasp nor appreciate the entirety of the experience of “having” them — what will lure, fetch, and keep him are the pieces he can actually conceive of as they relate to him and fit in to his ideas of feminine symbols. Hair, feet, fingers: they can speak of wealth (Vivan) or sex (Elle) — in both cases, the women feed his vision rather than contradict it, despite it being only one small aspect of their larger identities as people. In cooperating with his metonymical synechdochized view of them, Elle and Vivian allow Warner to make them a woman first and a person second. As both of their understandings of Warner evolves, this cooperation begins to sour, and, able to see one another as people first once they have discounted his view of them as women (which made them rivals), they become friends who appreciate the unique facets of one another’s different personalities.

This is not the case with all men, not even in the film; you never see that shit getting pulled on Emmett, who sees and admires the wholeness of Elle from Day One. Look, ma: whole person!

Look, Legally Blonde is not a perfect film even at all, and I know that. It’s not meant to be psychoanalyzed, most likely, and I am also aware of that. I’m just saying it has slightly more artistic merit than most people give it credit for. That’s right: I am a Legally Blonde apologist. Alert Gloria Steinem.

I like this movie and there ain’t no shame in a name. I’m off for C-town right this red-hot minute to soak up its sunny pink silliness with Miss D. Have a great day and catch you on the flip side!