The festival has officially started! I kicked off my 2021 schedule with a documentary shorts program, and then in the evening I joined the premiere stream of CODA, one of the opening night selections.
For context, the festival organizers have set up two types of screenings. Each movie gets one premiere screening that consists of a three hour slot with a live Q&A afterwards; then, on a subsequent day, each film gets a second screening, which is a 24-hour on-demand window. The shorts programs are an exception to this model—the shorts programs have no premiere screenings but are available on-demand throughout the whole festival. (I love this idea, because it encourages people to try the shorts programs since they’re constantly available.)
First, I checked out the shorts on-demand screening format. I appreciated that the shorts on-demand stream included a programmer’s introduction, the Sundance introduction, and the category information card before the films started playing. After the shorts program concluded, a pre-recorded Q&A with the filmmakers followed as part of the stream (there was no need to click to another page to find the Q&A). Having all of this packaged together helped preserve that “screening” experience; I didn’t feel like I was watching a playlist of shorts on YouTube or something. Including the Q&A at the end of the stream, rather than putting it on a separate page, encouraged me to watch it and spend some time with the filmmakers. One big positive about the pre-recorded Q&A: the festival programmer moderating the discussion had very thoughtful questions that elicited interesting answers. The pre-recorded Q&A also ran a bit longer than an after-screening Q&A normally would, which allowed all of the filmmakers to speak for an equal amount of time. The Q&A consisted of a recorded Zoom call, so it didn’t feel overly polished or worked-on, but I found the quality of the discussion to be much higher than you’d get at a standard after-screening audience Q&A at an in-person festival.
I opted to watch the Documentary Shorts Program 1, which included the short films Tears Teacher, Up At Night, This Is The Way We Rise, Dear Philadelphia, Snowy, and The Rifleman. Snowy and The Rifleman were the standouts for me in this program. Snowy, the most playful of the films in the collection, is about the filmmaker’s family’s pet turtle, Snowy. Snowy lives in the basement, tended to mostly by the filmmaker’s dad. The short investigates the question of whether or not Snowy is happy. The Rifleman succinctly exposes the links between the modern NRA, resistance to gun control laws, and xenophobic violence at the U.S.-Mexico border. The film, composed entirely of archival footage and photographs, focuses on Harlon Carter (who is considered the father of the modern NRA) and his personal history.
My first premiere screening also went smoothly. Fifteen minutes before the screening begins, a virtual waiting-room opens up. You can click in to join the waiting room, and you’re taken to the screening landing page. This landing page functions as a virtual space; a countdown banner ticks down at the top of the page, the video player below that displays the pre-screening content (ads and music), there’s a live chat feed where everyone in the virtual screening room can say hi, and there’s a little tracker bar in the shape of a row of theater seats to show how full the screening is.* The chat, while a good idea in theory, quickly became unusable due to the number of people typing at once. I followed the feed for a few minutes before the messages started coming in too fast for me to read them. Mostly, it was people saying where they were tuning in from and adding their Twitter or Letterbxd handles for others to follow. I did notice, however, that festival programmers and staff were in the chat answering logistical questions, and useful announcements (like how to access the live Q&A after the film) popped up in the chat periodically. Overall, I liked the idea of the screening room page and appreciated the effort made to create a virtual space. The chat function could be tweaked to allow for actual conversation, but the flurry of comments reminded me, in their way, that this screening was a shared experience. I sort of liked the way that the crazy chat signaled the busyness and crowdedness of the virtual screening room.
Once the countdown clock got to zero, the screening started automatically. (Well, it should have. I had to refresh the page in my browser, but then it worked.) The premiere screening also included a programmer’s intro, the Sundance intro, and the category information card. After the film, there was a live Q&A, which was on a separate page. When I clicked through to the Q&A page, it looked similar to the virtual screening room page. The video player displayed the Q&A (a livestream via YouTube of a Zoom call with a programmer and the filmmakers), and below the player there was a space for audience members to submit questions. Although this Q&A was live and questions were being submitted in real time, the moderating programmer could smartly pick and choose between submitted questions; so, again, I felt that the Q&A in this format was much more interesting than the after-screening Q&As usually are.
CODA (directed by Siân Heder) turned out to be a pleasant opening night pick. The film, part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition category, is a classic Sundance crowd pleaser; I’d put it in top contention for the audience award at the end of the festival. The movie follows high schooler Ruby (a fantastic Emilia Jones in what should be a breakout role), the hearing daughter of two deaf parents (Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur). Ruby helps her parents and her brother (Daniel Durant), who is also deaf, navigate their fishing business, often acting as an interpreter. But Ruby possesses a talent for singing, and as she realizes how good she is with the help of an interested teacher, she decides to apply for music school and think about leaving her family. The particulars of the movie, especially the way it portrays deafness and deaf culture with warmth and care, set the film somewhat apart from the countless other indie coming-of-age dramedies that have premiered at the festival in years past. Personally, I was delighted to see Ferdia Walsh-Peelo (such a stand out in 2016’s Sing Street) pop up in the film as Ruby’s love interest. He’s not given too much to do, but he is so charming anyway that I didn’t mind. (The second screening of CODA on January 30 has already sold out, but I’m willing to bet that this one will get distribution and a decent release.)
That’s a wrap for Day 1! Cheers to a good start to the festival; I’m looking forward to my first full day of movies tomorrow.
*Please note that “pre-screening content” is the term used by the festival staff in the chat. It’s weird and corporate sounding, I know.
We’re doing Sundance 2021 at home this year, baby! It’s going to be a little weird, and my butt will probably meld with my couch cushions by the end of the week. But I bought a pass, and I’m ready to watch as many films as I can from January 28 to February 3. Challenge accepted.
Sundance and I have a long-term relationship; I started going to the Sundance Film Festival when I was sixteen and attending Park City High School. After class got out, I’d hop on the waitlist line and try to get a standby ticket for whatever was showing at the Eccles theater that evening.* On the weekends, my mom and I would try to get into four movies a day waitlisting. We loved it. When I moved down to Salt Lake City, I didn’t stop attending the festival every January. I became a Salt Lake City Sundance convert. The festival moves at a slower pace down the canyon (and the celebrities rarely show up at the Q&As), but I could usually get into whatever screenings I wanted—and locals passes that only worked for Salt Lake City screenings were cheaper. Plus, the filmmakers would always gas us up by saying that they preferred the Salt Lake screenings with “real audiences” to the industry audiences in Park City. The mostly local audiences, including me, loved to feel special, and the line always worked like a charm on us.
2020 was the first time I missed the festival in ten years; last year, I couldn’t justify traveling back to Utah, missing class at the beginning of the semester, and taking the time off work. So, while Virtual Sundance will definitely not be the same, I’m quite excited to be back at the festival in whatever form. So far, I’ve been impressed with the way the virtual festival has been set up. Everything has run smoothly, from a technical standpoint, and the user interface is conveniently centralized and easy to navigate.
I’m curious about how buzz will circulate during Virtual Sundance, as well as what things the festival planners have put in place to create a sense of community. The atmosphere is half the fun of a film festival, and I’m looking forward to exploring what that looks like in a virtual setting. For what it’s worth, maintaining a “festival atmosphere” in a virtual environment appears to be a priority of the festival planners. I want this diary to serve as a critique of Sundance’s virtual festival model as well as a record of the films I watch. So here’s what to expect with each entry: some thoughts about the Virtual Festival experience as the week goes on, a roundup of the films I’ve viewed each day, and then an assortment of whatever miscellaneous notes I’ve collected. This is the first time I’ve done a Sundance diary, so thanks for reading and going on this journey with me. Also, now seems like a good time for a reminder that anyone from anywhere in the U.S. can join the virtual festival this year! So, if you want to, you can totally get in on the fun if you have an internet connection and $15.
Tune in tomorrow for my Day 1 post! The festival starts today, but my diary posts will be a day behind since screenings go late every day. (My January 28 diary will go up on January 29, for example.) Let’s get this party started!
*The largest screening venue in Park City by capacity is the Eccles theater, which is also the Park City High School auditorium. Yes, it was weird to see celebrities stand on the stage where I did the fall musicals.
If you’re interested, I’ve put together a little bonus post with my 2020 honorable mentions and other miscellaneous items. Think of it as a sort of “P.S.” to my favorites list.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
While Lover’s Rock proved the standout for me, I appreciated all of the films in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology (available in the U.S. exclusively on Amazon Prime), particularly the first installment Mangrove. Also exclusively on Amazon Prime: Julia Hart’s I’m Your Woman, a crime drama starring Rachel Brosnahan that’s told from an interesting sideways perspective; and What the Constitution Means to Me, a filmed version of Heidi Schreck’s one-woman hit Broadway play, directed by the incomparable Marielle Heller.
If you watch The Old Guard and think to yourself, “Whoa, I need more Luca Marinelli in my life, stat!” try checking out Martin Eden (available to digitally rent through KinoNow). As the title character, the Italian actor owns this film, a nationally transposed adaptation of the Jack London novel. (I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the film as a whole upon first viewing, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if I had made time for a rewatch, Martin Eden would be on my main list instead of in the honorable mentions.) If you watch The Old Guard and need another fresh take on the superhero genre, try Harley Quinn spin-off Birds of Prey (currently available to stream on HBOMax), Cathy Yan’s satisfyingly feminist entry into the DCEU.
Although only one nonfiction film made my main list, I’d like to add a few more here in the honorable mentions. Bloody Nose Empty Pockets documents the closing day of a dive bar, blending fact and fiction to intriguing ends. With its similarly non-judgemental exploration of the bonds alcohol forges, Bloody Nose could make an interesting double-feature with Another Round. Collective, a propulsive film with the pace of a thriller (if not the satisfying resolution), follows a group of Romanian investigative journalists as they expose the extreme corruption in the Romanian hospital system.
Steven Soderbergh’s deceptively small-scale Let Them All Talk (available exclusively on HBOMax) has been growing on me since I first watched it. If you watch The Forty-Year-Old Version and find yourself looking for another film that treats women over 35 like real human beings, try this one.
Finally, I’d like to single out Johnny Flynn’s excellent turn as Mr. Knightley in Autumn de Wilde’s delightful adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma.(available to stream on HBO Max or for digital rental). The whole movie is a confection; the two leads have crackling chemistry, and Anya Taylor-Joy (having a banner year after the success of The Queen’s Gambit last fall) brings a wonderfully bratty energy to the title character. But it’s Flynn who plays one of my favorite scenes in any movie this year. That would be the short scene where Mr. Knightley, after a thwarted attempt to confess his newly realized sexual and romantic feelings for Emma, returns home, tears off his outerwear, and literally throws himself on the floor in frustration and anguish. It’s hot, relatable, hilarious, raw, and heartbreaking all at once. Flynn plays a man completely destroyed by unrequited love like no other working actor (see also: the cult favorite TV show Love Sick)—give him his flowers.
2019/2020 liminal release special mentions:
I did not see Portrait of a Lady on Fire (currently available for digital rental or to stream on Hulu) or Uncut Gems (currently available for digital rental or to stream on Netflix) until early 2020, when they went into wide release. Because both films are technically 2019 releases, I did not want to include them on my 2020 list and be redundant. But I loved them both.
TV special mention:
Michaela Coel’s HBO limited series I May Destroy You is absolutely one of the best things I watched this year; but it’s not a film, so I made this special category for it. [TW: sexual assault] Coel, who wrote and starred in the series, took inspiration from her own experience as a victim of sexual assault to create the show. When Arabella (Coel), an up-and-coming London writer, gets roofied and raped, she finds herself unable to go on with her life as normal as she processes the trauma. The show charts Arabella’s journey as she seeks justice for herself and tries to come to terms with what happened to her. Each episode also explores the boundaries of consent in different circumstances, following Arabella’s friends or showing flashbacks to Arabella’s past. The result is devastating, funny, sensitive, urgent, and a radically different approach to a subject that has long been misrepresented on screen.
Some notable 2020 films I haven’t caught up with yet because I’m only human:
I don’t have an Apple TV+ subscription, so I haven’t been able to see Cartoon Saloon’s newest film Wolfwalkers or Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks. I have also been meaning to check out The Painter and the Thief, She Dies Tomorrow, Babyteeth, Time, Luxor, Beanpole, His House, and Swallow. Promising Young Woman and Nomadland, two films that some critics have included on their Best of 2020 lists, still aren’t widely available as of this writing; if I end up loving either of those films, find them on next year’s list! I am stubbornly waiting to watch Tenet, because I would like to experience it on the big screen and am hoping it gets a re-release when movie theaters open up again.
First things first: If you didn’t watch a single new film in 2020, I wouldn’t blame you. Last year, I had entire months where I found it very difficult to focus on anything new, let alone anything challenging. The allure of the Comfort Watch pulled strongly at all of us, and I was certainly not immune to the siren song of the familiar. Frankly, sometimes watching something that required full engagement felt like work for which I didn’t have the mental capacity.
Watching films entirely at home for the majority of the year presented another hurdle. I’m a devotee of the movie theater for many reasons, but I love going out to the cinema first and foremost because, when I’m in the theater, I am forced to pay attention to what’s on screen. It’s immersive, and the rules of the place forbid me from taking out my phone to absentmindedly scroll Twitter or take pictures of my cats. It’s also, to be blunt, hard as hell to keep track of new releases when everything goes straight to streaming. If I wanted to see a new movie before, all I had to do was check what was playing at the cinema—multiplex or arthouse. Finding the latest releases on streaming and VOD can feel like the Wild West in comparison. While critics like Alissa Wilkinson at Vox have been compiling wonderful weekly lists of new streaming releases since March, I still put in more effort last year to keep track of what was out and where to watch it than I ever had to before. If this is the future of movie-going, we’d all better brush up on our spreadsheet skills.
Despite these unusual circumstances, I managed to experience new films that charmed, confronted, edified, unsettled, moved, enraged, and electrified me. As people more knowledgeable than I have noted, the general lack of tentpole releases dominating the cultural landscape left room for a greater variety of films to reach a wider audience. The cultural conversation felt less mandated (very rarely this year was everyone talking about the same movie at the same time) and more passionate and idiosyncratic. Cinephiles of all stripes found room to vocally advocate for their favorite smaller new releases—which now, because of the pandemic-accelerated streaming revolution, more people than ever could actually watch. I found much value this year, even more so than usual, in recommendations shared by film critics and friends. My hope is that you might find similar value in this list. I put this list together in the spirit of sharing, and, as such, I would love for the sharing to go both ways! I encourage you to add your favorite films of the year in the comments and start a conversation.
So, without further ado, here are my 14 favorite films of 2020 (plus a guest pick by Keith), listed in alphabetical order because I avoid ranking things whenever possible.*
Another Round
The premise of this Danish film sounds like the set up for a raunchy, The Hangover-esque comedy of escalating disasters: a quartet of middle-aged men, dissatisfied with the ways they’ve settled as they’ve gotten older, decide to conduct an experiment in which they keep themselves day drunk every day of the week. They want to see if maintaining a buzz will improve their lives. What follows is a remarkably humane, non-moralistic exploration of male friendship, midlife crisis, and the role that alcohol occupies in the fabric of social life. Director Thomas Vinterberg pulls off an astonishing tonal balancing act and makes it look easy with the aid of his leading actors. Vinterberg’s frequent collaborator Mads Mikkelsen has received deserved praise for his work in the film—the movie’s final scene, all Mikkelsen’s, is sublime—but the film’s three other leading men turn in equally sensitive and fully-realized performances. / Where to watch: Another Round is available for digital rental.
The Assistant
Documentarian Kitty Green brings an observational style to her first narrative film, about a single day in the life of an executive assistant named Jane (Julia Garner) who works for a lightly-fictionalized—and never shown or named—version of Harvey Weinstein. When Jane finds potential evidence of her boss’s sexual misconduct, the abusive and complicit office culture discourages her from taking any meaningful action based on her suspicions. This quiet film depicts the crushing environment of a truly toxic workplace with devastating accuracy, but any woman who has worked an office job will recognize, to some degree, the power dynamics at play. The film takes an understated approach to the material, recognizing the way that, in real life, these power dynamics are so insidious because they are always understood but never spoken. / Where to watch: The Assistant is available to stream on Hulu or for digital rental.**
Dick Johnson Is Dead
This unconventional documentary poses the question, “How do you prepare yourself for the death of someone you love?” With Dick Johnson Is Dead, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson attempts to face the imminent loss of her elderly father by repeatedly staging and filming his death by horrific accident. If that sounds weird and maybe a little uncomfortable, that’s because it is. The film inevitably deals with heavy subject matter, as Dick’s slow decline due to Alzheimer’s disease sits at the tragic heart of the project; but Johnson, by and large, treats these “death” scenes (and the accompanying “afterlife” scenes) playfully, positioning them as surreal imaginative exercises. Ultimately, the film works as an experimental and heartfelt corrective to our cultural taboos around discussing death and as a celebration of its subject’s life. / Where to watch: Dick Johnson Is Dead is a Netflix exclusive.
Driveways
Andrew Ahn’s delicate drama knocked me out when I watched it last May. The film starts when Kathy (Hong Chau) takes her young son Cody (an outstanding Lucas Jaye) with her to clean out her sister’s house after her sister’s unexpected death. Kathy’s sister, it turns out, was a hoarder, and getting the house ready to sell will take more work than Kathy anticipated. Cody, trying to find a way to fill his time while his mom cleans, ends up befriending his new neighbor, a Korean War vet named Del (Brian Dennehy, in his final performance). Driveways deals with loss, loneliness, and alienation; but the film is mostly about the balm of finding community where you least expect to find it. This one is a must see. / Where to watch: Driveways is available for digital rental.
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
At last, a comedy! Lars (Will Ferrell) has desperately wanted to compete in the Eurovision Song Contest since he was child. Sigrit (Rachel McAdams) is less ambitious, but she makes music with Lars because she loves to sing (and because she loves Lars). Through a mounting series of mishaps, the Icelandic duo finally manages to fail their way into competing at Eurovision, where the majority of the film’s action takes place. The movie functions as more of an homage to the real Eurovision than a satire of it, and this enthusiastic and sincere appreciation of the song contest’s bombastic absurdity is the film’s greatest strength. Pop producer Savan Kotecha put together a soundtrack of ridiculously catchy, legit-sounding Eurovision-style bangers for the film; I dare you to watch it without getting at least one of the songs stuck in your head. Bonus: Dan Stevens delivers one of his best performances to date as the scene-stealing Russian contestant, Alexander Lemtov. / Where to watch: Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is a Netflix exclusive.***
First Cow
In the Pacific Northwest of the 1820s, two very different men (played by John Magaro and Orion Lee) cross paths as they seek to make their fortunes on the frontier. They have no startup capital and no resources to their names, so they band together and engage in a harmless act of theft to get their business going: they clandestinely milk a rich landowner’s dairy cow every night. With the milk, they make “oily cakes” to sell in town. The oily cakes are a hit, and the men’s fortunes start to look up until the landowner starts to suspect them of dairy theft. Kelly Reichardt directs this quiet but stealthily powerful reexamination of prevailing myths about the wide-open economic opportunities of the American frontier. / Where to watch: First Cow is available for digital rental.
The Forty-Year-Old Version
Writer, director, producer, and star Radha Blank broke through in a big way at last year’s Sundance Film Festival with The Forty-Year-Old Version, her semi-autobiographical debut film. This sharp comedy follows “Radha,” a mid-career playwright, as she struggles to maintain her artistic voice and integrity in the face of market demands as well as her own fears of wasted potential. When “Radha” gets one of her plays produced, a piece about gentrification in her Harlem neighborhood, she finds herself artistically unfulfilled as she realizes what kind of script the (white) producers actually want. “Radha” starts writing raps, casually at first, until she realizes that rapping might be more personally rewarding than the play she’s working on. The film, shot in beautiful black and while, looks gorgeous, and Blank gives a charismatic, winning lead performance. The Forty-Year-Old version provides a meta-answer to “Radha’s” conundrum, standing as an assured and delightful example of what results when an artist refuses to filter her own viewpoint into something less singular and personal. / Where to watch: The Forty-Year-Old Version is a Netflix exclusive.
Kajillionaire
Multi-hyphenate artist Miranda July strikes again with Kajillionaire, her latest film. Evan Rachel Wood stars as Old Dolio, a twenty-something woman who has spent her entire life running bizarre, small-scale cons on behalf of her parents (Debra Winger and Richard Jenkins). When Old Dolio’s parents rope a charming stranger, Melaine (a sparkling Gina Rodriguez), into their scheming, Old Dolio starts to become jealous of the way they treat the newcomer. To say more would be to spoil too much. Kajillionaire operates in July’s usual whimsical, off-kilter register, but the film is far from twee. July creates a dreamscape in which to explore what it means to accept your biological family, even if you might not exactly love them, and what it feels like to discover your own found family. / Where to watch: Kajillionaire is available for digital rental.
Lovers Rock
Lovers Rock is the second installment in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology of films, which focuses on the lives of West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s to the 1980s. Some of the films in the anthology are based on historical events, while others, like Lovers Rock, focus on everyday lived experience. Lovers Rock depicts a house party, tracing the energy of the evening. That’s it. It’s simple, universal, and humming with the promise of sex; it’s complex, particular, and humming with the threat of violence. An unforgettable, euphoric sing along scene serves as the film’s centerpiece. Clocking in at just 68 minutes, Lovers Rock is a perfect little gem. / Where to watch: Lovers Rock is an Amazon Prime exclusive.
The Old Guard
Birds of Prey and The Old Guard kept swapping places on my list and in my honorable mentions. They’re both hugely entertaining, and they both play with superhero movie genre conventions in exciting ways. The Old Guard won out for two reasons. 1) I watched Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film multiple times this year, but I have yet to revisit Birds of Prey. The Old Guard has a soulful melancholy at its core that I found irresistible. I mean, any good movie about immortals has to be at least a bit moody. 2) It has my favorite on-screen kissof the year. / Where to watch: The Old Guard is a Netflix exclusive.
Shirley
Shirley doesn’t give author Shirley Jackson the biopic treatment. Almost nothing about Shirley is factually accurate to the author’s life; instead, director Josephine Decker pays homage to the real Jackson by artfully evoking the atmosphere of her horror stories and placing a fictional Jackson (a deliciously scenery-chewing Elisabeth Moss) inside of it. When Jackson’s husband invites one of his graduate students and his wife to stay at the Jackson home, Shirley starts playing mind games with the wife. Like Moss’s Shirley, this film is wickedly smart, wildly unpredictable, and just menacing enough to keep you on edge the whole time. / Where to watch: Shirley is available to stream on Hulu or for digital rental.
Sorry We Missed You
Ken Loach’s latest takes a hard look at the social cost of the unchecked rise of the gig economy. The film tracks Ricky, the patriarch of a working class family in northern England, as he takes a contract job as a delivery man for a thinly-veiled Amazon-like corporation. (If you’ve ever wondered how Amazon Prime one-day delivery works, this is it.) The mounting indignities of working a contract job eventually overwhelm Ricky and his economically precarious family. This angry, bleak movie succeeds both as tough social commentary and as an intimate family drama. It’s a tough watch, but it should be required viewing as more laws like California’s Prop 22 show up on ballots in states nationwide. / Where to watch: Sorry We Missed You is available to stream on the Criterion Channel or for digital rental.
Sound of Metal
Riz Ahmed absolutely dazzles as Ruben Stone, a heavy metal drummer who suddenly loses his hearing. Darius Marder’s film, made with the input and involvement of members of the deaf community, sensitively shows Ruben’s journey as he tries to come to terms with being deaf. The film also treats its lead character’s sobriety with unusual care; this is a rare film about sobriety, not addiction or relapse. Although the star turn belongs to Ahmed, the supporting cast also does uniformly excellent work, particularly character actor Paul Raci (in what I hope turns out to be a breakout role). I also must mention the exemplary sound design, which throws the viewer into Ruben’s new auditory world to disorienting and anxiety-inducing effect. Anticipate some deserved love for this film in the below-the line Oscar categories, as well a Best Actor nom for Ahmed. / Where to watch: Sound of Metal is an Amazon Prime exclusive.
Sylvie’s Love
I would say, “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore,” but the truth is that they never made ‘em like this. First-time director Eugene Ashe’s Sylvie’s Love takes the mid-century romantic melodrama and reimagines it with two Black leads and a mostly Black supporting cast. The movie feels decidedly old-fashioned, but in the best way; Ashe’s decision to center a Black couple in this type of movie, without totally deconstructing the genre, is quietly radical. Well-bred Sylvie (Tessa Thompson) and jazz musician Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha) meet when he applies for a job at her father’s record shop in Harlem. The film follows their relationship and chance encounters over several years, from the late 1950s to the mid-’60s. This sweeping romance works on the strength of the leads and the impeccable production design, with an assist from the lush jazz soundtrack. / Where to watch: Sylvie’s Love is an Amazon Prime exclusive.
The Vast of Night (Keith’s Guest Pick)
Set in 1950’s New Mexico, the movie opens as a small town is setting up for the big high school basketball game. That night, while everyone else is at the event, a call containing a mysterious signal interrupts what would otherwise be a quiet night for the switchboard operator, Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick). A puzzled Fay calls the local disc jockey and audio guru Everett Sloan (Jake Horowitz) for help. Everett plays the signal on the air, hoping to get more information from anyone listening. Channeling classics like The Twilight Zone, this throwback sci-fi follows Fay and Everett as they attempt to understand and decode what they’ve heard. This film is an exciting journey of discovery that gradually leads Fay and Everett further toward the paranormal and keeps the audience guessing in unexpected ways. One of my favorite parts of this character-driven film is how skillfully it shifts in pace and tone, and some of the witnesses that our main characters find have some truly engrossing tales to tell. — contributed by Keith Downie / Where to watch: The Vast of Night is an Amazon Prime exclusive.
*All provided information about streaming availability is specific to the U.S. and up to date at the time of posting. If a film is only available on a specific streaming service, I have noted it as “exclusive” (i.e. “Netflix exclusive”). “Digital rental” means that the film is available for on-demand digital rental through the major services like iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon Prime. “Amazon Prime exclusive” means that the film is only available to stream with an Amazon Prime Video subscription; these titles are not available to rent via Amazon Prime. I know, I know. Like I said, it’s the Wild West.
**The Assistant was the last film I saw in a movie theater before everything shut down in March. I went to a screening at the Angelika in Manhattan, and there was a Q&A with the director afterwards. My kingdom to be able to do this kind of thing again soon!
***I think Eurovision is my most-watched movie of the year, at three viewings since June. That’s how much joy it brought me. I also learned to play “Ja Ja Ding Dong” on the ukulele “as a bit.”
I don’t remember precisely the first time I watched O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I may have caught some of it as a kid one afternoon, as my mom watched it, thinking my sister and I were busy. My mom may have let me watch the whole thing when I was still too juvenile to appreciate its picaresque rhythms. I know that I saw at least part of the movie when I was pretty young, because I do remember two things clearly:
I had never seen the white, hooded robes of the KKK before I saw the cross burning scene in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I don’t think I really knew about the KKK at all before I saw this scene.
I had never heard the word “miscegenation” until I heard it in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I vaguely remember my mom explaining to me what it meant, but maybe I just put it together later.
(It bears mentioning that the film, despite being set in the Jim Crow South, doesn’t substantively engage with anti-Black racism. But, then again, neither did my education up to that point.)
I can recall the first time I took pleasure in watching the movie. In my freshman year of highschool, I had English class with a “cool” teacher. He was young and a real hipster, which, in 2007, was still cool to a bunch of fourteen-year-olds. In retrospect, he tried very hard.* (I should say that, at the time, I liked this teacher and thought his assignments were fun. Although, to this day, I’m not sure if I remember his class because he was a good teacher or because his class was the only one I shared with the boy on whom I had a raging crush that year.) After we read The Odyssey, this teacher showed us O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and we had to write about how the film worked as an adaptation. I think he skipped the cross burning scene entirely to avoid getting into any potential trouble with the school.
This English class viewing finally unlocked the film’s humor for me. For months, I couldn’t stop quoting the movie. I made my mom and sister watch it with me again at home fairly soon after I saw it in class. Particular favorite quotes included:
“R-U-N-N-O-F-T”
“Damn, we’re in a tight spot!” (x3, naturally)
“Well ain’t this place a geographical oddity? Two weeks from everywhere!”
“They loved him up and turned him into a… a horny toad!”
“I’m the damn paterfamilias!”
Each subsequent viewing of the film has opened up new avenues of enjoyment and frameworks for interpretation. Nothing about the movie changes, of course, but every time I rewatch it, something new reveals itself. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the rare movie that I appreciate not just in different ways but that I appreciate more every time I watch it. I couldn’t Revisit, with a capital R, the film for the twentieth anniversary because I revisit it—casually, like an old friend, with a lowercase r—whenever the fancy takes me. I seem to come back to the film every few years or so. It’s not a well-worn old favorite, exactly, but these repeated viewings over such a long period of time have made the film feel foundational to me in some way.
The film’s influences include Greek myth and epic poetry (specifically, The Odyssey), Depression-era South Americana, and 1930’s Hollywood screwball comedies (notably, the film’s title comes from Preston Sturges’ 1941 Depression-set comedy Sullivan’s Travels**). The film isn’t necessarily interested in recreating any of these things faithfully; rather, the Coen Brothers take these influences, remix them, and present them in sepia-filtered digital photography that looks like the forerunner of the faux-vintage early Instagram aesthetic. O Brother is sort of a satire, sort of an homage, and sort of confounding.
Critics sometimes consider O Brother to be minor Coen Brothers. In a recent ranking of the directors’ films for The Ringer, Sean Fennessey called it, not unkindly, “a vibe more than a movie.” If you’re into that sort of thing, rankings of the Coens’ filmography rather consistently place O Brother somewhere in the lower middle. A consensus appears to have formed that the success of the movie’s Grammy-winning soundtrack, assembled by producer T Bone Burnett, transcended the film. Indeed, most of the pieces published so far for the twentieth anniversary of the film’s release have been about the soundtrack album, not the movie itself.
As chronicled in an anniversary deep dive for Pitchfork published earlier this year, the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack had lasting reverberations in the music industry. Music critics widely credit the popular soundtrack for reviving mainstream interest in Appalachian folk and bluegrass music and, perhaps indirectly, leading to the indie folk revival of the late aughts and early ‘10s. Considering the soundtrack in isolation, as an album divorced from the context of the film, is certainly possible and occasionally interesting.
I like the soundtrack album, which my mom bought after it won Album of the Year at the Grammys in 2002. She would play it in the car, where the new CDs usually got put on rotation, and, after a while, in the house when the mood struck her. The soundtrack, along with The Chicks’ album Home (also from 2002), unquestionably served as my introduction to bluegrass and instilled in me a love of the genre. In some ways, my relationship with the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack follows the narrative traced by music and entertainment journalists alike.
My memories of the music and the film aren’t necessarily separate, though. I have a hard time thinking of them independently of one another. I can’t hear “I Am Man of Constant Sorrow” without seeing George Clooney’s Everett launching into the song in front of a tin can microphone, wide-eyed and looking side to side as he searches for Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) and Pete (John Tuturro) to come back him up.*** I can’t hear “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby” and not remember the sirens, in their wet, white cotton dresses, sitting in the river and sexily doing laundry. “O Death,” of course, conjures the cross burning scene.
As I watched the film most recently, it occurred to me how much the music bolsters the structure of the movie. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a loosely plotted collection of vignettes, ostensibly about Everett returning home after escaping a hard labor sentence. Delmar and Pete come along because, well, all three of them are chained together when Everett makes his escape. This trio’s misadventures constitute the majority of the film, which ultimately doesn’t build a strong narrative arc out of these episodes. If each episode were a Lego brick, the movie would look like… a line of Legos. That is to say, the parts don’t seem to make anything exceptionally interesting when looked at all together.
I don’t feel like the parts necessarily need to add up to anything. The Odyssey is also highly episodic. Do you remember how you read it in class? The teacher would pick the most famous “books”—Circe’s island, the cyclops, Scylla and Carybdis, Odysseus disguising himself as an old man to trick Penelope’s suitors—and you’d read those. The narrative arc of The Odyssey is quite simple, and the excitement comes from the smaller stories within the larger epic.
The music in O Brother complements and reinforces the film’s anecdotal structure. Each vignette (with a smattering of exceptions, because nothing about this film is regular) features a song either sung diegetically in the scene or played non-diegetically over it. I realized that the songs work as markers; I remember the scene by the song or the song by the scene. If pressed, I could probably recount the incidents in the film sequentially because I know the order of the songs. The music organizes the film’s episodes in my memory, and the consistency of the musical style creates a tonal throughline.
Scholars know that ancient epic Greek poetry, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, was sung. Epic poetry was an oral tradition before the stories got written down, and bards would use established systems of meter and melody to semi-improvise the performance of a tale. The bard would know the scenarios and motifs of a story and fit them into the schematic song as he performed. I know film is a fixed medium—what’s depicted on screen doesn’t vary—but watching O Brother, Where Art Thou? after a few years feels like this: I know the music, and the plot details and themes fit with it differently every time I reȅxperience the story.
As my observations and musings about the film pile up with each new viewing, I wonder if any of my thoughts about it will ever cohere into a unifying theory. I don’t subscribe to the idea that any piece of art is a puzzle to be solved, but repeatedly searching for new meaning in a work can sometimes lead to a sense of holistic understanding. But the more I watch O Brother, the more I am convinced that the film is designed to resist comprehensive interpretation. The ideas I’ve laid out here about the integral role of the soundtrack won’t “crack” the film. They’re just my latest reflections on it, prompted by my twentieth anniversary rewatch.
Perhaps the next time I come back to O Brother, and I notice something new, I’ll return to this blog post and add my thoughts. The discursive nature of the movie inspires digressive discussion. I’m never sure what fresh train of thought the movie will elicit or what old memories it will resurface. Only one thing about watching the film remains inevitable. “Man of Constant Sorrow” will be stuck in my head on a loop by the time I get to the end credits.
*A peek into my writing process: Did I Google this teacher while I was writing this, starting down a procrastination rabbit hole? Yes. Is this teacher pretty much exactly how I remembered him, based on his Twitter and his LinkedIn? Yes.
**In Sullivan’s Travels, the main character is a film director who wants to make a serious, social-issues drama called, you guessed it, O Brother, Where Art Thou. The studio heads want him to make an escapist comedy instead, “with a little sex in it,” because they think it will sell better.
***Can we take one moment to pause and appreciate how well George Clooney lip syncs for his life?? Masterclass. Also, for the purpose of this blog post, all song titles refer to the soundtrack versions of the songs.
Where The Fuck Are Mona Lisa’s Eyebrows: In Conversation with Keith About the Dumbest Song on the Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping Soundtrack
If you’ve met either me or my husband Keith, you likely know that we’re obsessed with The Lonely Island mockumentary Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016). The film spoofs the kind of concert documentaries that were ubiquitous in the early part of the decade—movies like Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never (2011), Katy Perry: Part of Me (2012), and One Direction: This Is Us (2013) that mixed arena concert tour footage with behind the scenes material to ostensibly give viewers a peek into the artists’ real lives. Keith and I unquestionably formed part of the Popstar vanguard; we saw the film in the theater together, and we immediately knew it would be a cult classic. Popstar bombed theatrically, but it has indeed gained quite the following in the four years since it was released. Last year, for example, the Alamo Drafthouse chain of theaters scheduled Sing-Along showings of the movie, complete with props. (I’m jealous I didn’t get to attend one of these screenings, I have to say.)
As with any good musical comedy, some of the best laughs in the film come from the songs, and Popstar’s soundtrack is full of bangers. For this month’s blog, I thought it would be fun to do a deep dive with Keith into one of our favorite songs on the soundtrack: the “powerfully stupid” “Mona Lisa.” Below is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. (If you really want the raw audio file, complete with cat interruptions and New York sirens, to prove just how much we should NOT start a podcast, I will send it to you.)
Leah: The first thing that I wanted to ask you to do is to explain to me how much you love Popstar. Like on a scale of one to ten. How much do you love it?
Keith: Well, clearly, it’s ten. It may be one of my most watched movies.
L: We have watched it a lot. How often do you think we watch the movie together? I think it’s probably at least once a year, but it’s probably more than that?
K: No, it’s probably more like once every six months. It’s on par with how much we watch Walk Hard, I would say.
L: Yeah. I feel like that’d be a good double feature. Walk Hard and Popstar. They’re very complimentary films.
K: Usually watching one gets us to watch the other, too.
L: That’s true. Also, whenever we meet someone who hasn’t ever seen Popstar, then we have to make them watch it.
K: Well, yeah, because no one saw it when it came out; they didn’t advertise at all.
L: We are Popstar evangelists. I think many of the times we’ve seen it have been because we’ve watched it with someone who hasn’t seen it before.
K: If I had a religion, it would be Popstar.
L: So you know this movie inside and out, that’s pretty fair to say.
K: Well, I can probably quote more than I’m proud of.
L: So, if we needed a Popstar expert for court, we could call on you?
K: If Andy Samberg is busy, then I can fill in.
L: (laughs) You can be back up?
K: Uh huh.
L: So, I wanted to talk with you specifically about the song “Mona Lisa” for a few reasons. First, I think it’s probably the song off the soundtrack that we spontaneously sing to each other the most. Would you say that’s accurate?
K: Probably.
L: I mean, “Mona Lisa, you’re an overrated piece of shit” is, like, such an earworm? I think it’s just that part.
K: Yeah, I would agree, that definitely is the one that gets stuck in my head the most.
L: I also wanted to talk to you about this song because you were the one that discovered the full length version of the song on the soundtrack, right?
K: Yeah.
L: I think you showed it to me. You listened to the soundtrack before I did, and then you were like, “There’s a whole full length version of this song.”
K: Yeah. The clip of the song in the actual movie is very short. It’s, like, maybe ten or fifteen seconds.
L: Do you want to tell me a little bit about when you heard the full length version for the first time?
K: It was just when I was going to work. This was probably a couple months after the movie came out on VOD. I had one of the Popstar songs stuck in my head, and I was thinking of something to listen to. None of my podcasts were doing it for me, so I was just surfing around Google Play [Music]. And that song was still in my head, so I just decided to see if it was on Google Play. And they had the whole Popstar soundtrack; so I, of course, naturally, listened to all of it. “Mona Lisa” was one that really stuck out to me because the lyrics are very creative, and most of the song is not in the movie. There are a couple other throwaway songs on the soundtrack that aren’t exciting at all, but “Mona Lisa” seemed like a major song to leave out.
L: So would it be fair to say that “Mona Lisa” was kind of the discovery of the soundtrack?
K: Yeah. Although, I think that that was the song that I had stuck in my head. Either that or “Humble.”
L: Oh, yeah, you know all the words to that one. It’s pretty impressive.
K: Most of the words, yes. Except I can’t rap.
L: I mean… You do an Andy Samberg-level job.
K: (laughs) Yeah, yeah, that’s true.
L: You can do the rap parts, and I can do the Adam Levine parts; that’ll be our karaoke song. (laughs) So, before we listen to “Mona Lisa” again and really get into it, I’d like you to tell me what you like about the song, either in the context of the film or just as a standalone piece of music.
K: I mean, one of the reasons I like the movie in general is that the songs are so whimsical. In the film, Conner4Real has kind of lost inspiration for good songs and came up with a bunch of random throwaway songs for his new album. That whole album tanks because it’s terrible. I think that the awfulness of the Mona Lisa is just such a random topic to be singing about that it perfectly embodies how he just has no material. He’s trying to go solo without his partners and it’s bad. [pause] But it’s also true. The Mona Lisa kinda sucks.
L: (laughs)
K: We’ve been to the Louvre. There was a huge crowd around this tiny painting, and it’s not particularly impressive to look at. The history behind it is another thing, but if you just went into the museum expecting something grand and, like, awe-striking, it’s not that.
L: No, it’s very unassuming.
K: So, I don’t know, the song both fits the context of the movie and is also true. [pause] And is also an earworm. So, it just fits the bill for a perfect comedy song.
L: Yes. For me, it’s one of the songs on the soundtrack where the more I’ve listened to it, the more I’m convinced that it’s secretly brilliant. Like, it’s STUPID, but it’s stupid in a very smart way. And it gets better every time I listen to it. My favorite song the first time we saw the movie was “Finest Girl ([subtitle redacted])”.* But part of the humor of that song is the shock, right? Like, as you’re watching the movie, you’re going, “What? That’s not what I thought you were gonna say!” And so it’s hilarious because it’s the last thing you expect him to sing. When you know the song, and you know what’s gonna happen, it’s still funny; but it’s never going to be as funny as that first time when you just had no idea where it was going.
*I redacted the subtitle for spoiler reasons. Only click the link if you want the surprise spoiled! You’ve been warned. (If you’ve seen the movie and are looking for bonus content, the link leads to the full music video version of the song, not the performance scene from the film.)
K: Yeah, absolutely. The payoff is in the first time you see it.
L: Right, and I feel like “Mona Lisa” is kind of the opposite of that. At first, you hear the clip in the movie and you’re like, “Heh, heh, that’s dumb, that’s funny, yeah, the Mona Lisa sucks.” But then you listen to the full version, and you listen to it more, and you’re like, “This is sublimely stupid. It’s perfect.” (laughs) So, that’s why I thought it would be fun to dig into this song in particular, both because it’s kind of a hidden gem on the soundtrack, and also because it has increasing rewards rather than diminishing ones as you listen to it multiple times. [pause] So, are you ready to listen to the song? Let’s do it.
L: So, after listening to the song again does anything new strike you?
K: I didn’t really realize that the part that gets stuck in my head the most is actually the part that’s in the movie. But it’s also the part of the song I find the funniest, because it’s got the Garbage Pail Kid line, it’s got the DaVinci sucked a historian’s dick part, that girl who looks like uncooked bread.* I don’t know, there’s not too much new to realize about the song because I’ve heard it so many times.
*The clip in the film actually only has the Garbage Pail Kid line. It’s very short.
L: That’s true. (laughs) What I was struck by listening to it is how you can see the song as one of those unhinged Yelp reviews.
K: (laughs)
L: Like someone who’s just pissed off that this thing they’ve been looking forward to didn’t live up to their expectations, so they go on Yelp or TripAdvisor to rant about it. One kind of person would have this disappointing experience and go on Yelp and write about it—
K: Yeah, one star review.
L: Yeah! And then, you know, Conner4Real writes a song about it.
K: (laughs) Yeah, that’s accurate. Especially ending with “I’m an American man.”
L: Yes, yes, yes. There’s definitely an element of the stupid American.
K: Writing an ignorant review on Yelp.
L: (laughs) And I think that made it funnier for me, thinking about the song like that. And it goes back to what you said before about how Conner4Real is so desperate for material. I can just imagine him sitting around thinking about how much his trip to France sucked and the Mona Lisa was disappointing. And then he’s like, “I’ll write a song about that!”
K: Maybe he actually wrote the review and then, later, turned it into a song because he didn’t have anything better to do.
L: (laughs) I love that.
L: Also when I listened to the song this time, I remembered a song by Nat King Cole called “Mona Lisa.” And it’s from 1950, I think? It won the Oscar for Best Original Song that year because he had written it for a movie. [The movie was Captain Carey, U.S.A.] I think the movie was set at the end of World War II, and it was about these American soldiers in Italy. I don’t know what the song particularly has to do with the movie, other than it’s about this Italian woman who Nat King Cole is comparing to Mona Lisa. Because she’s beautiful and coy, and, you know—
K: You could land a helicopter on her forehead?
L: (laughs) Well, I was thinking about this song because in it, Mona Lisa is standing in for this kind of paragon of beauty and the height of art; so I was thinking about The Lonely Island’s “Mona Lisa” as a kind of riposte to Nat King Cole as well.
Single cover art for The Lonely Island’s “Mona Lisa”
Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q., 1919 version (image courtesy of Wikimedia).
L: The last thing that I want to show you is the cover art for The Lonely Island’s “Mona Lisa.” They released the song as a promotional single, which I found out when I was researching for this. So, this is the cover art. I’m an art historian, and you can’t take that out of me, so when I saw this, I immediately thought of Duchamp. He did a piece called “L.H.O.O.Q.” which, when you say it really quickly, sounds like “She has a hot ass” in French.
K: (laughs)
L: So what Duchamp did is he took a postcard—and he made multiples of these, this was kind of one of his ready mades, so there are many versions of this. He made the first one in 1919, but there are other versions that exist as well. So he took a postcard of the Mona Lisa and drew a mustache on it.
K: (laughs)
L: And put the “L.H.O.O.Q” underneath, and it was very iconoclastic. He was trying to make a commentary upon, you know, the seriousness of art and the canon. Duchamp was associated with the Dada movement for a while, and they were very kind of absurdist—
K: Flippant.
L: Yes, and also very irreverent. So when I saw the cover art for the single, I immediately thought of Duchamp putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. And I thought, you know what, I think Duchamp would probably have approved of The Lonely Island’s “Mona Lisa.”
K: He probably would get a kick out of that.
L: (*crosses fingers*) Andy Samberg and Duchamp, like that.
K: (laughs)
L: Aright, so, I want to go through the lyrics, just stanza by stanza. We can get as nitty gritty or not as you want.
K: Sure.
INTRO
What’s up, y’all? This is Conner4Real
You know I’ve been all around the world, right?
But tonight I’m on my dumb shit
L: So, I love the intro because he says, “Tonight I’m on my dumb shit.” Like he just immediately sets up that this is gonna be a dumb ass song, so get ready.
K: (laughs) Right, and that really emphasizes that he just wrote this when he was, like, high one night or something.
VERSE 1
I’m landed in Paris at a quarter to noon
So excited to see her, I went straight to the Louvre
I heard she’s exquisite, so I bought my ticket
Pushed my way to the front of the crowd
And I couldn’t believe what I saw
L: So, I like that he sets up this narrative. He’s like, “So I’m all excited, I get to Paris, I get to the Louvre, I get there and then—”
K: Right.
L: “And I couldn’t believe what I saw.”
K: When you’re first listening to this, you could maybe think that he is going to like it? He doesn’t really give away in this first part that he’s just gonna shit all over Mona Lisa.
CHORUS 1
Mona Lisa, you’re an overrated piece of shit
With your terrible style and your dead shark eyes
And a smirk like you’re hiding a dick
What the fuck is this garbage?
Mona Lisa, the original basic bitch
Traveled thousands of miles to see your beautiful smile
Talk about a bait and switch, you ugly
L: Which I think is what makes the first line of the chorus so great. Because he’s like setting up this narrative. He’s like “Okay, I’m excited, I’m excited,” but, what do you know, “Mona Lisa, you’re an overrated piece of shit.” And then you’re like, “Okay, now we know what the song’s gonna be about.” (laughs) Then we get to “with your terrible smile and your dead shark eyes” which is good. I like that he mentions the eyes in particular because, again, everyone talks about her mysterious eyes or little smile, how her eyes follow you, and that’s part of the whole mystique of her. And he just shoots that down.
K: Her eyes are a little dead.
L: (laughs) And then, “And a smirk like you’re hiding a dick.” Which, again, that comes to the smile. So, like, it’s not a mysterious, alluring smile, it’s like—
K: She’s up to something.
L: So then he calls Mona Lisa the original basic bitch. Which… Mona Lisa is the basic bitch of art history. And then he brings up the smile again. “Traveled thousands of miles to see your beautiful smile.”
K: Yeah.
L: And then he’s like, “But you’re ugly.”
K: (laughs)
VERSE 2
I’m landed in Cairo to see the pyramids
But what did I find there? A dirty pile of bricks
There was trash all over and a very foul odor
The smell was that of a camel’s ass
But even that wasn’t as bad as
L: So then he continues this travel narrative. “By the way, here’s another thing I saw and was disappointed by.” Which again reminds me of the Yelp review, because they never stay on topic, right? When somebody’s ready to rant, when they hate something, they’re just on a roll, and then they’ll bring in other things they’re pissed about.
K: Right, like going to see the Statue of Liberty, and finding out that it’s not as big as you may have built it up to be in your head or something.
L: There’s something special about the wrath of a disappointed tourist. They’ve put all this effort into doing something on their bucket list or something that they feel they should do, and when it’s disappointing, then they don’t know how to handle it.
K: There’s actually an interesting phenomenon where Japanese tourists will get depressed after they go to Paris. I don’t remember what it was called exactly, but it does remind me of that.
L: I think that’s a very extreme version of what Conner4Real is experiencing with the Mona Lisa.
K: (laughs) Right.
L: So, getting to the end of the verse, he ultimately brings in this other example only to highlight just how bad the Mona Lisa is.
CHORUS 2
Mona Lisa, you’re worse than the pyramids
Can someone explain why the whole wide world
Is obsessed with a Garbage Pail Kid?
Looks like a Garbage Pail Kid
And DaVinci must have sucked an art historian’s dick
To get this girl who looked like uncooked bread
At the top of the all-time list of paintings
L: Now we get to your favorite part. And I found out, from the annotations on Genius Lyric, that there was actually a “Mona Loser” Garbage Pail Kid—
K: Oh, no.
L: —trading card. So that is—
K: That’s horrifying. It has the little smirk. (laughs)
L: I like the “Leonardo must have sucked an art historian’s dick” line, too. I don’t think DaVinci sucked an art historian’s dick, but this line is another way that this is a very stupid song but in a really smart way. I think the line points to the ways that the modern myth of the “genius artist” came about in the Renaissance. In the high Renaissance, Vasari wrote his Lives of the Artists, and that’s generally considered the first work of art history.* The book was made up of biographies of artists. And Vasari was Italian, so he highlighted Italian artists, obviously. DaVinci was included in this book, which is part of the reason he’s canonized as a Great Artist. There was this kind of myth making going on that was independent of the work in a lot of ways. (laughs) So, the line in the song is funny, but also, like, now I am imagining DaVinci sucking Vasari’s dick.
K: (laughs)
L: And it’s funny. (laughs)
*Vasari’s Lives of the Artists was published about forty years after DaVinci’s death. Vasari and DaVinci were not contemporaries, like Vasari and Michelangelo were, but the point still stands. Vasari’s entry on DaVinci is very long and full of effusive praise, and it’s safe to say that DaVinci was one of the author’s favorites.
BRIDGE
Mona Lisa, I got to know
Where the fuck are your eyebrows, I really wanna know
You could land a helicopter on that big potato forehead
Get this chick some Rogaine
You a bloated corpse, girl
L: He goes all in on her here. He just totally goes all in on her looks in this bridge.
K: Yeah. (laughs) He’s really laying in.
L: I think musically that fits, because in the bridge there’s a change of tempo and the song slows down a bit. Like he’s taking a breath to really lay it out. And then he lands the punch, “You’re a bloated corpse, girl.”
K: And he’s setting up for the ignorant American take. So, really going all in on being a dick about it makes sense, in terms of the progression of the song.
CHORUS 3
I’m an American man, this is my native land
Where no one lies about paintings
But that’s not the case in France
Where the naked ladies dance, and they look like Dennis Franz
You’re so mangy, Mona
Hair part wider than a country road-a
Unless you count cats, she died alone-a
The Mona Lisa sucks, la da da da da
L: Yeah, this is where the stupid American really comes in. He really makes it about, like, if Americans were in charge, Mona Lisa wouldn’t be famous! Because we know better! And we can see how ugly she is.
K: We know what real art is.
L: He really sums up the song in the last line. “The Mona Lisa sucks.” (both laugh) He leaves you with the final thought, in case you missed it. The song is about how much the Mona Lisa sucks.
K: Just summing up his entire thesis in four words.
L: Yes. The song’s got a good structure. When you go through the lyrics, you can see how he builds up.
K: Yeah, it’s a well crafted song.
L: As I said, it’s exquisitely stupid. So, I think that’s it, unless you have any concluding thoughts?
K: More people need to see the movie.
L: Yes, that’s a given.
K: It’s genius. (pause) It has Michael Bolton in it.
*This song is literally the end of the movie, so don’t click this link if you’re avoiding spoilers.
K: Oh yeah.
L: So, have I totally squelched your love of “Mona Lisa” with my analytical zeal? Or did you have fun?
K: I think that’s pretty impossible to ruin my love for that song. Deconstructing the song just reveals even more genius, so…
L: So the lesson is we have to do this with all of the songs on the Popstar soundtrack at some point? We’ll start a podcast.
K: Yeah (laughs)
L: Well, this was fun. Hopefully this gets some people to watch the movie. Like we said, we’re Popstar evangelists, and we don’t knock on doors Mormon-style yet—
K: —but we might get there. Pass out pamphlets about how humble we are.
L: (laughs) We’ll include this discussion in the pamphlet.
Over the past several months, a peculiar category of personal essay cropped up all over the media landscape: the first-hand narrative of what it feels like to be ill with COVID-19. Although reported pieces about those suffering from COVID-19 and its long term effects also proliferate, the essays I’m thinking of are works of creative nonfiction. I should say upfront that I’m not necessarily a fan of the “pandemic personal essay” as a genre; however, these primary accounts of illness became a sort of exception to the rule.
The authors of these pieces seem more concerned with describing experience than analyzing it. The best of these works possess an immediacy that provokes a visceral reaction by asking the reader to imagine the physical reality of sickness. Envisioning this can be upsetting, which may be why some of these essays lodged themselves in my memory. In late March, reading Jessica Lustig’s piece about taking care of her husband when he was sick with coronavirus triggered my first real anxiety spiral of the pandemic. A small detail about keeping the cat out of the bedroom where the author’s husband lay confined sent me spinning; I obsessed over the heartbreaking thought of keeping one of my cats who is desperately attached to my husband away from him if he fell ill with the virus. Krista Diamond’s reflection about losing her sense of taste after contracting COVID-19 left me unbearably sad. I, too, have been relying on the small joys of food to get through this weird and awful year, and the notion of losing my sense of taste, as Diamond did, filled me with dread. Last month, Patricia Lockwood wrote a fevered “Diary” entry for The London Review of Books about the deleterious effects of a coronavirus infection on her mental state. Lockwood recounts her delusions and delirium with an almost shocking frankness, even if the essay ends on an ostensibly positive note.
Sure, these stories scared me, but, more than anything else, they moved me. These chronicles of sickness struck me differently than other pandemic personal essays—the ruminations on the nature of time in lockdown or the contemplations of the joys of baking bread—because they spark with a sense of urgency. These works ask readers to try to understand what the state of illness feels like on a subjective level. “What if I were sick?” “What if someone I loved were sick?” “How would I feel?” “What would I do?” I saw these essays as pleas for empathy in the face of a largely unempathetic national response to the pandemic.
In the midst of a concerted partisan effort to discourage any empathetic reaction to the situation, how does one provoke empathy in one’s fellow Americans? I’m consumed by this question as I read the news, watch case counts rise in places where my loved ones live, observe extended family members post disinformation on Facebook about the efficacy and safety of wearing masks, see the statistics on how the virus has disproportionately affected non-white and poor communities, and see how this reality only helps comfortable, white people “other” the problem of the pandemic. Obviously, I don’t want everyone in the country to know someone who has contracted COVID-19; it shouldn’t take that kind of experience and that magnitude of potential suffering for us to collectively understand the importance of keeping each other safe. As humans, we should be capable of an empathetic recognition of others’ suffering. To be empathetic is to understand another’s feelings as if we were having them ourselves; therefore, empathy is always an imaginative, interpretive act.* But what sets off our empathetic imaginations?
Fernando, reenacting a historical scene in the film Bisbee ’17.
I was already thinking about ways to generate empathy when I sat down to watch Bisbee ‘17 (2018), director Robert Greene’s third feature-length documentary film, for the first time last month. The film follows a handful of residents of Bisbee, Arizona, as they plan a centennial reenactment of the so-called Bisbee Deportation of 1917. As is the case with Greene’s other work, Bisbee ‘17 explicitly investigates the porous boundary between fiction and nonfiction, as well as the line between acting and being. The reenactment forms the backbone of the project. Most of the activity shown on camera relates to planning and executing the reenactment, and filmed, reenacted scenes make up a considerable portion of the movie’s runtime. Greene intersperses the “real” scenes with the reenacted scenes indiscriminately and with little delineation, to slightly disorienting effect.
While labor historians and historians who study the Mexico-United States border are generally well acquainted with the event, Greene’s film presents the Deportation as a sort of tacitly suppressed history among those who live in Bisbee. In 1917, local law enforcement, at the behest of the copper mine owners, kidnapped suspected participants in a planned labor strike supported by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Mexican and Eastern European immigrants made up the majority of the strikers, who had organized the action to demand equal pay and better working conditions in the copper mines. The sheriff recruited a large posse of locals, mostly white men, to apprehend nearly two thousand striking miners and community members who supported the miners’ cause. After rounding up the labor activists, the sheriff and his crew loaded the strike supporters into cattle cars and sent them east to the New Mexican desert, where they were left to fend for themselves.**
Some residents of present-day Bisbee, the Bisbee of 2017 that Greene visits, are descendants of those who rounded up the striking miners. Since almost none of the deportees ever returned to Bisbee, no descendents of the victims of the Deportation live in the town. Greene’s film suggests that those who participated in enacting the Deportation—those who stayed in Bisbee and whose children stayed in Bisbee—perhaps had complicated feelings about the action and therefore did not want to discuss it or remember it. The centennial reenactment is thus positioned in the film as a sort of catharsis, a way for the residents of the town to relive this potentially painful incident in history and face it in a new way.
In a book chapter on the rise of reenactment as a form of historical study in the 1970s, historian M.J. Rymsza-Pawloska writes about the ways that historical reenactments enable participants to identify with historical subjects in affective ways.*** She refers to reenactments as “embodied history” and “experiential history,” and both terms point usefully to the ways that participants relate to historical reenactments. Essentially, historical reenactment gives participants unique insights into historical subjects by setting up the conditions to foster empathy across time. By reliving historical events and embodying historical persons, participants begin to develop a new sense of historical consciousness on the emotional level; this helps participants make connections between the past and the present in interesting and sometimes surprising ways. The framework outlined by Rymsza-Pawloska allows us to see historical reenactments as one form of practicing embodied empathy.
Reenactors in the film Bisbee ’17.
Bisbee ‘17 documents how walking in the shoes of the 1917 deporters and the deportees allows participants in the reenactment to form new understandings of the Deportation one hundred years later. Some participants end up identifying even more closely with the figure they are tasked with playing; after the reenactment, a man who portrays one of the mine owners who set the Deportation in motion seems firmer in his belief that the Deportation was a justified, necessary action. One young man, a Mexican-American non-actor and resident of Bisbee named Fernando, takes a role as one of the striking miners. Fernando, who knew nothing about the Bisbee Deportation until participating in the film, finds meaningful resonances between the events of 1917 and his own life as he performs in the reenactment project. But some participants find their beliefs challenged over the course of the reenactment. In a stunning moment, one reenactor breaks character (as a member of the Sheriff’s posse) to say to the camera, “This feels wrong,” after herding the reenactors playing captured labor activists into a cattle car. This man previously expressed stronger sympathy with the law enforcement side of the Deportation, characterizing the group as well-meaning, patriotic citizens doing their duty.
Greene’s film makes a compelling case for the power of reenactment to engender experiences of empathy through embodied action. Although Bisbee ‘17 cannot be classified as didactic, this thematic throughline is fairly straightforward; the participants themselves verbally express what they’re feeling. Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, by contrast, uses visual language to articulate and play with the close, instinctual relationship in our imaginations between reenactment and empathy. In Hannibal, the protagonist’s almost supernatural gift of “pure empathy” manifests on-screen as reenactment.
Will Graham mentally reenacting a murder (Hannibal S1E9, “Trou Normand”).
Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), the FBI criminal profiler who serves as one of the show’s two leads (the other lead being, of course, Hannibal Lecter, played here by a perfect Mads Mikkelsen), can catch serial killers by precisely recreating their thinking. Graham arrives at a crime scene, surveys the evidence, and slips into the mind of the killer to reconstruct the murder. The show—as well as the novel it’s based upon—describe this ability as a kind of extraordinary empathy, since Graham catches killers by identifying with them so closely that he can divine their motivations and predict their moves.
When Hannibal depicts Graham retroactively piecing together a series of events at a crime scene, the murders are shown as reenactments. Rather than show the murderer acting out the process Graham describes, like a flashback of sorts, the camera shows Graham himself going through the violent motions. As Graham describes what happened at the crime scene, he also assumes the voice of the killer, using the first person “I” to refer to the murderer.
It’s notable that Graham must go back to the scene of the crime to reconstruct it. He gains insight into the crime by seeing the evidence, but it seems important to his process that his body be where the killer’s body was. The significance of his being at the crime scene suggests that Graham is practicing embodied empathy by putting his body in the same conditions as the killer’s. He can only truly reenact the killing in his mind, but the way these scenes are filmed takes us into Graham’s psyche, where we see him “commit” the murders—making these reenactments “real” for the viewer.
As a way of visually communicating Graham’s powers of empathy, the reenactments are extremely effective. The show takes advantage of the audience’s deep-rooted sense of the link between walking in someone else’s shoes and the work of being empathetic; the images of Graham reenacting gruesome murders stand in clearly and plainly for his empathizing with killers. The reenactment scenes function thematically, as well. The show presents Graham’s extreme empathy, especially used to empathize with psychopaths as he does in service of the FBI, as something unbearable. The reenactments make explicit the implication of what it means for Graham to imagine himself as a murderer, and they lay bare for us what repeatedly and closely empathizing with serial killers does to Graham’s mental state. If he keeps imagining himself as a serial killer, how long will it be until he becomes one?
Will Graham in the act of imagining a murder (Hannibal S1E9, “Trou Normand”).
Bisbee ‘17 and Hannibal stand out for how they illustrate the potency and sometime unpleasantness of practicing embodied empathy. Locating feelings in the body and trying to understand others by putting or imagining our bodies in the same state as theirs is hard work. It’s vulnerable work. It’s scary work, particularly when one is trying to empathize with someone going through something disturbing. But it’s worthwhile work.
As confirmed COVID-19 cases rise to record high levels in the U.S. this week, I’ve been thinking about the utility of embodied empathy as a way to foster greater levels of compassion. Illness is primarily a physical ordeal. Confinement and quarantine are physical conditions. Working from home is a physical circumstance. Much of so many people’s understanding of the severity of the pandemic is bound up in whether their own physical states have been affected by it. Could practices of embodied empathy, then, be a fruitful place to start when thinking about cultivating more empathy in our pandemic response?
For me, the answer is yes. Isolated in my own apartment, both my spouse and I so far uninfected and still employed, I’m constantly tempted to ignore what’s going on—to think of no body but my own healthy, housed, and fed body. The personal essays detailing the physical reality of COVID-19 infection are ultimately so forceful for me because they ask me to empathize by requiring me to picture myself in the author’s physical state. They demand that I think about all of the suffering bodies I am so eager to ignore.
Absorbing these essays can be distressing, admittedly. Reading things like coronavirus personal essays, long Twitter threads from “recovered” COVID-19 patients suffering from long-haul symptoms, news stories about mass evictions, and the rest can feel like torturing myself over something I can’t control. Seeing these things as tools for practicing embodied empathy, however, changes the frame. They aren’t scare tactics to be ignored for my own self-preservation, but rather they serve as a critically necessary impetus to look outward—outside of my own body—and find empathy for those who are most adversely affected by the pandemic. From viscerally elicited empathy, positive action can spring.
While practicing embodied empathy can certainly be uncomfortable (as suggested by Bisbee ‘17), even horrifying (as posited by Hannibal), in both Greene’s film and Fuller’s show (at least for the first season), positive action does come from the understanding gained through the practice. Bisbee ‘17 implies that the reenactment of the Deportation might initiate a process of exorcising the town’s ghosts; emotionally engaging with history allows the participants to productively face the town’s violent past and begin to look towards the future. In Hannibal, Graham uses his unique talent to catch serial killers before they strike again. He saves innocent lives.
Perhaps we should cultivate an openness in ourselves, if we can, to practices of embodied empathy and challenge the people in our lives to do the same. Where appeals to logic and reason fail, maybe appeals to the body could prevail. We’re all human. We all have bodies. If we could all be pushed to imagine the experiences of bodies that are not our own, maybe we could collectively conceive of a more empathetic response to the pandemic.
*I would like to note here that real empathy requires a radical openness and a willingness to listen; to be empathetic is to take on another’s feelings as if they were our own, but it is not to project what we think another person’s feelings or experiences might be. Empathy must be based on information and evidence received from the person with whom one empathizes.
**The film implies that the men were left for dead in the desert; however, this is not exactly accurate. While the workers were deserted in a tiny New Mexican town with no provisions, New Mexican officials and the U.S. Army located the party, escorted the deported men to a larger town, and provided them with food and water. Some sources claim that the deportees were deliberately left in close proximity to a U.S. Army base, and evidence suggests that the deportees were meant to be found. For greater context, see Johnson’s introduction to The American Historical Review’s special roundtable on the film (Benjamin H. Johnson, “Introduction,” The American Historical Review, Volume 124, Issue 3, June 2019, pp. 955–958, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz590).
***M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, “Cultural Logics of Reenactment: Embodied Engagements with the American Past,” in History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), pp. 118-138.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World released in the fall of 2003, at the height of Russell Crowe’s stardom. The film, based on a long-running series of novels by Patrick O’Brian, had franchise potential and a subtitle that promised sequels. Despite a strongly positive critical reception, the movie famously could not attract enough people to the multiplex to make a profit against its generous $150 million budget. The film earned ten Oscar nods, including for Best Picture, but The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King swept the competition at the ceremony.* Having gotten neither the box office receipts nor the awards hardware to justify a sequel, Master and Commander faded into collective memory as a particular kind of middling prestige picture and a failed franchise starter.
Seventeen years later, Peter Weir’s naval epic has its small share of passionate fans who will sing its praises whenever given the opportunity. It would be fair to say, though, that Master and Commander now has a bit of a reputation as a Dad Movie. It’s generally remembered as a solid war film made with impeccable attention to historical detail, even if the specific characters and events depicted are fictional. I’m not here to argue that the film isn’t a Dad Movie, because that would be disingenuous; however, inclusion in the Dad Movie hall of fame does not automatically disqualify the film from consideration as a truly great work. Master and Commander is the best kind of Dad Movie, and the film deserves a broader appreciation.
As the marquee star and the leading man, the film’s marketing positioned Russell Crowe front and center. Crowe, at the time relatively fresh off of three consecutive Oscar nominations for Best Actor and considered a bankable headliner, received a reported $20 million salary up front for the picture. Although he’s continued to work steadily in Hollywood, many accounts of Crowe’s career mark the misstep of Master and Commander (in conjunction with increasing reports of his violent outbursts offscreen) as the beginning of the end of his superstardom. Given this context, reevaluating the film’s place in Crowe’s filmography becomes an excellent place to begin a larger reevaluation of the film’s reputation.
If Master and Commander is a generally underrated film, then it follows that Captain Jack Aubrey never ranked as one of Russell Crowe’s iconic roles. But for those of us who love the movie, Crowe’s magnificent lead performance stands out as one of the best of his career. The actor’s charisma and gravitas have never been put to better use on screen. Crowe gives a lived-in performance that feels effortless; he anchors the film, but he never seems to be working for your attention.
Crowe’s ultra-masculine screen persona has frequently led Hollywood to cast him as men capable of great violence. His imposing physique, coupled with his intense demeanor, lends credibility to his portrayals of brutality. Whether a Crowe character registers as a hero, villain, or antihero often comes down to how the film frames that capacity for violence. Captain Aubrey is of a piece with the rest of Crowe’s decidedly masculine characters; the role is not a pivot or a play against type. But Captain Aubrey epitomizes a masculine ideal rather than the toxic masculinity so often at the root of Crowe’s characters. (Remember, this is a Dad Movie!) As a successful military man, the violence Aubrey enacts is ritualized, justified, and honorable. It is controlled to the utmost degree by both military norms and the captain’s own rigid moral code. The Napoleonic wartime setting rationalizes the necessity of the violence in the film, as the killing occurs in the service of an imagined greater good.
Besides his facility with a bayonet, Aubrey displays another key trait of idealized masculinity: leadership. As Scott Tobias wrote last year in his superb “Revisiting Hours” piece on Master and Commander for Rolling Stone, the film works particularly well “as a study in leadership.”** The film takes a keen interest in what it means for Aubrey to be a worthy leader, and Crowe’s acting choices perfectly complement this thread of the film. Crowe possesses a natural charisma that provides authenticity to his portrait of a respected commander, but he doesn’t coast on this alone. He brings a three-dimensionality to Aubrey by subtly modulating his behavior depending on what image the captain needs to project in any given situation. Crowe reminds us that leadership is an act in both senses of the word—an action and a show. He communicates the way that Aubrey constantly performs leadership without drawing undue attention to his own performance as an actor.
Crowe’s work in the film stands out as some of the most delicate and nuanced acting in his oeuvre. Yes, he delivers stirring speeches with aplomb. (“England is under threat of invasion, and though we be on the far side of the world, this ship is our home. This ship is England,” Aubrey intones to his crew in a particularly rousing moment before the film’s climactic battle sequence.) He fixes his trademark Russell Crowe squint on the horizon as he watches for the enemy ship that Aubrey has been tasked with capturing. Aubrey is, to a degree, another one of Crowe’s serious men. As captain, Aubrey assumes responsibility for everyone on the ship and must bear the burden when men under his command die. But he also cracks jokes—one dinner scene in the captain’s cabin ends with a memorably bad pun about “the lesser of two weevils”—, mentors the younger crewmates, and generally tries to make all of his men feel needed on the ship. Crowe brings an attractive warmth to Aubrey, a quality that rarely shines through in the actor’s other roles. It isn’t all glowering from the deck; leadership also looks like forming honest connections and making people feel special. Crowe takes an understated approach, and this light touch belies the intentionality and thoughtfulness of the performance.
Master and Commander undoubtedly provides a window into an exclusively masculine world. Women are barely alluded to visually or verbally; men comprise the bounded universe of the HMS Surprise. In addition to the military hierarchy of power codified and enforced by the British Royal Navy, a network of homosocial relationships defines life onboard the ship. These relationships are largely positive and entirely platonic; the crew members mostly support each other, with one tragic exception. This isn’t a film about problematic or alienated masculinity. As one would expect of a Dad Movie classic, Master and Commander mostly posits that men are alright.
The film does not completely gloss over the more unpleasant or even traumatic aspects of British naval service in the Napoleonic Wars. An adolescent midshipman undergoes an arm amputation early in the film; one character offhandedly mentions the practice of impressment, reminding the viewer that some of the men on the ship are likely there involuntarily; and several members of the crew who we have gotten to know rather well are dead by the end of the movie. But the crew members make a home for themselves on the ship, and life there isn’t unbearable. They make friends, they make do. Weir’s film suggests that there is something redemptive, something powerful, about male camaraderie. While this theme isn’t at all unusual for a war film, Master and Commander is especially compelling for the way it treats this idea as more than a truism.
The film takes male homosociality as one of its main subjects, and so, fittingly, the close friendship between Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin (an also excellent Paul Bettany) serves as the film’s center.*** Aubrey technically outranks Maturin, so it’s not truly a relationship of equals; but Aubrey treats Maturin as a confidant and sometime advisor. Aubrey and Maturin seem to hold each other in genuine high regard, and their mutual respect forms the foundation of their relationship. In fact, these two men respect each other enough to remain friends even as they almost constantly disagree with one another. Their opposing approaches to life lay out the final thematic preoccupation of the film.
I love Master and Commander most of all for the way that it captures the rhythm of pursuit. On the one hand, Master and Commander is literally about the thrill of the chase—the HMS Surprise follows the French privateer Acheron for the entirety of the film’s runtime. Aubrey has orders to engage the Acheron and hopefully take her; what little plot the movie has revolves around this objective. Weir mounts three battles between HMS Surprise and the Acheron, and each encounter thrills in its own distinct way. Watching Aubrey and his men outwit the superior French ship through various clever means proves to be an undeniable pleasure. Most of the film’s budget went into the action set pieces, and the practical effects on display are spectacular.
But the movie spends just as much time with the crew during the downtime between battles, providing a glimpse into everyday life on the ship. The texture of the film comes from this contrast between the action and the waiting, the forward momentum of the hunt and the stillness of the quiet points when action is impossible. Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin each embody one of these two states, to a certain degree. Aubrey always wants to push onward and take every opportunity for a fight that presents itself. He’s driven by duty and motivated by the thought of glory. Maturin thrives in the cessations, enjoying the moments when he can indulge his interests as a naturalist. He sees stalking the Acheron beyond what was explicitly ordered as a doomed exercise, and he repeatedly asks Aubrey to consider giving up on taking the enemy ship.
Aubrey’s desire to unceasingly chase the next goal exists in tension with Maturin’s wish to stand still and find contentment in the observable present; the way that the film doesn’t resolve this tension only strengthens the metaphor. Master and Commander never exactly comes down on the side of one man or the other. The film presents both men as reasonable, capable, and intelligent. Aubrey and Maturin each willingly concede their point to the other at different junctures of the film. We experience the gratification of a successful maneuver against the Acheron, but we also see the human cost of Aubrey’s refusal to call it a job done and leave the Acheron alone. The film makes us privy to the small joys among the crew during the pauses in fighting, but we’re also made to understand how an inability to go after a common objective can lead to discontent and unrest among the men. The film depicts this push and pull with an unusual clarity, resulting in a work that perfectly reflects the core truth of how it feels trying to balance ambition and fulfilment in one’s own life. Seen through this lens, the open ending of the film turns out to be rather perfect. There is no single achievement the attainment of which will satisfy the ambitious person. The pursuit is incessant.
The purity of this metaphor cannot be separated from the masculine milieu of the film. The drive to make one’s name, to leave some mark of one’s existence in a public way, has historically been coded as masculine in the Western tradition. Concepts of gender essentialism used to keep the status quo reinforce the idea that women aren’t naturally ambitious. Films about women’s ambition necessarily have to grapple with (or can be biased by) that complicated reality. On film, as in life, ambitious women face different treatment than ambitious men. Because ambition is often assumed to be an unquestioned positive value for men to possess, Master and Commander can more easily extrapolate its argument to the realm of the abstract.
As a film that deals with ideal masculinity, Master and Commander works so well precisely because of its Dad Movie tendencies. The movie presents an aspirational and positive, but not sugar-coated, vision of what it means to be an admirable man. Russell Crowe’s casting and performance are so perfect here because the actor trades in on his “masculine” reputation to create a paragon in Captain Aubrey. The film posits that these masculine ideals are valuable in and of themselves, in isolation. By sidestepping the subject of women almost entirely, the film never puts its masculine ideals into any oppositional, binary configuration with feminine ideals. Although the film shows a solely male domain, the movie never implies that only men can achieve these ideals. Like the true Dad Movie that it is, Master and Commander instead envisions these positive aspects of masculinity (like good leadership, camaraderie through hardship, and healthy ambition) as universally good values applicable to anyone on the gender spectrum. If you’ve written off Master and Commander as “just a Dad Movie,” it’s worth a second look. The film’s Dad Movie-ness is actually its secret strength.
*Master and Commander won two Academy Awards, for Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing. These were the only two categories in which Master and Commander did not compete against Return of the King, which won all eleven awards for which it was nominated (and which still holds the record for highest clean sweep at the Oscars).
**This piece convinced me to revisit Master and Commander myself. Prior to last year, I had not seen the film since I was a preteen. Tobias’s framing of Weir’s film as the anti-Pirates of the Caribbean made me laugh; when I first watched Master and Commander, I disliked it essentially because it wasn’t Pirates, with which I was obsessed at the time.
***While I’m sure someone has written Aubrey/Maturin fanfic and published it somewhere on the internet, there’s no textual evidence in the film that Aubrey and Maturin are more than friends to each other. I would also argue that Crowe and Bettany don’t have enough sexual chemistry to support a ship. (No pun intended.)
