The Curse of Chucky

My research on cinema and puppetry is taking me to some odd places. If, for instance, you've never seen a kung fu movie performed entirely with glove puppets, I suggest you give some attention to Legend of the Sacred Stone. At the moment, I'm sketching the first draft of a section on devil dolls and killer puppets (seemed like the easiest place to start!), which has meant delving into the kind of stuff that wouldn't normally land on my "to watch" list. The three hours of When Puppets and Dolls Attack, a compilation of clips from the work of Charles Band, has not been a highpoint of my cultural life. Band's work at Full Moon Features has, as far as I can tell initially, received no sustained critical attention at all - perhaps the films are not arch enough to push them into the respectable sectors of trash film, and not good enough to stand up on their own merits, but for my purposes, they include an extraordinarily fetishistic playing and replaying of the motif of the killer puppet. I'll put this in my "to do" pile to write about at greater length another time, save to say that there is an entire ants' nest of movies in which murderous dolls play out their slalk-and-slash roles with numbing repetitiveness and manic persistence, carrying on a strain of cultural work that has been in play for as long as there have been puppets to be spooked by. And if The Gingerdead Man is one of the limpest puns in movie history, at least its sequel has one of the neatest (see image to the right).

Anyway, The Passion of the Crust (oh, I'm still chuckling about that one...) is not what I wanted to write about. I've been wading through the Child's Play movies, a cycle of films that I had never seen before, despite being firmly within the range of their target age-group of clueless teens first time around. For those who've never had the pleasure, the five (so far - a remake and franchise reboot is rumoured to be in the early stages of production) Child's Play films follow the fortunes of Chucky, a doll possessed with the spirit of a dead serial killer who desperately wants to quit the plastic body and find a fleshy one in which to be reborn. His attempts to perform the necessary voodoo ritual are always thwarted; despite his skill at offing the human obstacles to his progress with a variety of household implements, he just can't seem to get his hands on Andy Barclay, the little boy who first receives the demon doll as a birthday gift.

Let me lay my cards on the table, although I don't usually like to reduce my judgements to a qualitative assessment: the first three Child's Play movies are rubbish. Derivative and predictable in their cycles of slashing, stabbing and jumping out of the shadows, tiresome in their dogged, unkillable persistence. Oh, and clunky in their execution, perfunctory in their plotting and scripting. The only point of research interest for me has been to notice the ways in which the films use puppets as figures of fear and recepticles of animist superstition. Chucky is able to get away with murder because he can always slip into "Barbie mode" (a witticism that is only cracked in the much sharper episode 4) and become inert, indistinguishable from an ordinary plastic plaything. Therefore, the films play on the doll's loaded potential to spring into life at any moment, a simple jack-in-the-box fear generator that is endlessly replayed. In many sequences, Chucky is invested with a sense of life not just by the magic of animatronics that allow his facial features to contort with malice, snapping him out of the smiley congeniality of his factory settings, but by mediating his image through shot selections that are usually reserved for human characters in dialogue. For instance, the back-and-forth of this over-the-shoulder, shot/reverse shot sequence from Child's Play 3 builds suspense over when Chucky will fulfil his side of the filmic bargain and enter the conversation with the barber who has yet to realise that the doll is alive and preparing to take a razor to his throat.

Cute. But the analogy of film with animistic power, the ability to endow inanimate objects with an impression of life, and the correlative use of puppetry as a shorthand for that power, is an interesting one to me at the moment, not least because it is so frequently invoked in horror films.

Everything changes with the final installments, Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky. Together, these two invigorate the franchise with greater visual invention, a sharper wit and an extreme level of self-reflexivity. Having attained full franchise-royalty status alongside cyclical slasher series such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and Friday the 13th, the Chucky movies use their lofty position to look down on their previous efforts, and to try and shift the series to the heritage site of Universal horror. They thus join the ranks of the Scream, Nightmare and Gremlins films as franchises that become so self-referential that they end up chewing on their own tails. This interests me. Can a series of horror films not go for any length of time without getting self-conscious about its own naked repetititivity? Do they always need to turn inwards and act so "knowing"? Either way, the leap in quality from the stolid and ridiculous Child's Play 3 to Bride of Chucky is quite remarkable. Bride may not reach the giddy heights of reinvention and frenetic genre-thrashing of Gremlins 2, but it fixes a lot of the series' original problems by acknowledging the daftness of the diminutive doll's deadly prowess and telling the tale from Chucky's perspective instead of hiding him in shadows. Plus, the addition of Tiffany, his sweet but lethal partner undercuts Chucky's primacy and gives him someone his own size to bicker with. Tiffany, in human form (Jennifer Tilly) is the first to turn Chucky's dollhood against him by locking the little bastard in a cage and treating him like a naughty baby.

There's a long tradition of horror films offering alternative visions of family relations, whether its the inbred rustic nutcase clan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Satan's attempts at child-rearing in The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, or the abortive, cobbled-together union of The Bride of Frankenstein, which the fourth Chucky film repeatedly references (hey, you'll even find clips from Bride of Chucky on the Bride of Frankenstein DVD, just to claim Chucky's place in the heritage of the Universal monster cycles). With Bride and Seed of Chucky, the formation of a new family comes to the fore, with Tiffany reincarnated in doll form and later, their son (or is it daughter? They can't figure out which, leading to another movie reference - is he/she to be named Glen or Glenda?) struggling with his sexual identity and descent from a family of serial killers.

This increased focus on family drama (I'm stretching that definition a little perhaps) is matched by the filmic syntax of human drama, giving the puppets close-ups and reverse-shots to align the spectator more thoroughly with their story, instead of hiding them in the shadows as pop-up monsters. It kills the fear, but it heightens the pleasure.

It's not just the way the film insinuates itself into a nest of external reference points and self-mockery that allows Bride of Chucky to raise its game: the introduction of Ronny Yu (the man behind the delirious, insane and romantic Bride With White Hair films) as director, along with Crouching Tiger's Peter Pau on cinematography duties adds a bit more verve to the imagery, with faster cutting, canted angles and extremes of blue-hued lighting. This is in stark contrast to the flat and perfunctory style of the earlier films - there can't be many sequences less effective in horror film history than the protracted battle in a doll factory that drags out the end of Child's Play 2: the bright uniformity of the strip-lighting throws away the golden opportunities for the hiding places and grotesqueries of the setting, and the leaden set-ups do nothing to make the conflict more dynamic. Ronny Yu at least has some form as an action director, and even if he can't seem to do anything without hyperbolising the moment, at least it shows someone investing the franchise with some effort, care and attention by appearing to make aesthetic choices as opposed to just the most basically functional narrational ones.

Seed of Chucky is less successful, partly because it takes the self-referencing a little too far, but there is fun to be had. Jennifer Tilly plays herself as a self-absorbed, over-eating has-been ("I'm an Oscar nominee, for Christ's sake, now I'm fucking a puppet"), appearing in a film about the alleged Chucky murders, allowing for one of those mise-en-abime shots where the camera pulls back to reveal that the scene we were watching is actually taking place on a studio set, giving us a good view of the cables that work the animatronic puppets. There's a cameo from John Waters, a walking representative of the heritage of trash cinema (and apparently a big Chucky fan), the death of Britney Spears and a scene in which Chucky and Tiffany decapitate their own puppeteer. This latter piece of puppetic rebellion, with the proxy people rebelling against their status as objects on strings is, as I hope my project will eventually demonstrate, a recurrent motif throughout the history of puppetry. That kind of self-reflexivity, the ability to comment on the text from the position of one of its constitutive props, occupying that bordeline place as an animate/inanimate object, not quite in or out of the fictional world, is an embedded property of the puppet. Once Chucky acknowledges his status as a doll (not just a man temporarily trapped in a plastic body), he can come into his own and start performing his true function as the focus of the story and commentator on its construction. But more on that another day. I'm shocked enough that I just wrote a lengthy appreciation of a couple of films I expected nothing from, but maybe I was just pleasantly surprised that they weren't as god-awful as previous form had led me to expect. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Avalon

"Oshii Mamoru's Avalon is one of the most sophisticated and
visually achieved movies ever made about intersecting levels of reality."

Tony Rayns

[Plot synopsis: Ash is one of the greatest players of the game Avalon, a virtual battle simulation that has attracted many devotees and addicts all trying to reach its highest levels. Ash works solo, with memories of the days when she was part of a team whose leader was lost in the game. Hearing rumours that there is a more advanced level of the game that can be attained with potentially deadly consequences, Ash decides to become part of a new team.]

I've been dithering over whether or not to use Mamoru Oshii's Avalon on a film studies course, on a week devoted to cyberculture and virtual embodiment. After taking a good look at it, I'm still dithering. Avalon is a tricky one. Is it a beautiful, enigmatic and elusive masterpiece that I just didn't connect with, or is it a stodgy, pretentious mess with little substantive to say about the way we interact with virtual spaces and lives. If you don't recognise the name of its director, Mamoru Oshii, you've probably heard of the anime classics he lists on his c.v., most notably Ghost in the Shell (1995) and its extraordinary sequel, Innocence (2004), which must surely rank as one of the most sublimely beautiful bits of animation ever crafted: take any frame, blow it up and frame it. It looks perfect throughout. Animation encourages that kind of carefully composed precision in its imagery - if you have time and tools to make something look exactly how you want it, why not take control of every element and make sure it is composed exactly how you want it? Paint over it if it goes wrong. Avalon is Oshii's fourth live-action feature, but the first to get any kind of international recognition or release. Shot in Poland with an all-Polish cast (Oshii likes Polish cinema, apparently, but seems to have modelled his environments on a gloomy, post-war Eastern European template gleaned from movies rather than any kind of futuristic Warsaw), it contains many elements that are far from "live". Soaking almost everything (food seems to come out quite colourful) in sepia tones adds to the vintage look (though it could also be that the US DVD has altered the colour of the film) and shows Oshii exerting an animator's control over his images. CGI is used quite sparingly, and is closely integrated with the themes of the film. If the tendency with digital effects is towards excess, to show off with grand scale what can be done with a few pixels and mouse clicks, Avalon seems to go in the opposite direction. Its every move is economical. Rather than creating a virtual world that is radically different from the filmic real world, Oshii makes them visually similar. In the virtual world of the game, characters who are killed disintegrate into a shattered two-dimensional oblivion like stain-glass pictures, and in several shots (see below) Oshii fractures the illusion of the simulation by inserting these succinct perspectival tricks into the 3D world to immediately mark it out for what it is - a Plato's cave of flat data experienced as actual space.

In an interview with Tony Rayns in Sight and Sound, Oshii stated:

I wanted to create characters in the same way that I do in animation. I did a lot of digital work on Ash's face during the post-production, which went on longer than the actual shoot. I felt free to alter expressions to give me exactly what I wanted to see on screen.

This is all very well, but it does give the film a certain coldness, probably not in the service of its themes of alienation and emotional disconnect (although it certainly contributes to that), but in order to get everything neatly composed. Whatever, the tidy compositions of nearly every shot, and the aesthetic similarity between Avalon and the external world of its gamers cumulatively facilitate the interpretation, which is there if you want it, that none of this is real, that everything we see is just layer after layer of fabrication with no externally real reference points. Oshii himself is vague on the subject, so make of it what you will - what is probably most important is that you cannot know for certain what is real, imagined or simulated when you watch this film. While The Matrix trilogy gives you a pretty strong sense of the divide between the solid and simulacrous environments in which each scene takes place, Avalon makes that division increasingly fuzzy and suspect. This is mostly because no sequences are privileged with cinematic techniques that might traditionally be associated with filmic realism - in that sense, I suppose, we're back to an animation-style aesthetic again.

So, let's assume that you're familiar with ideas of virtual reality, and that old science fiction chestnut that said virtual reality turns out to be more seductive, sensual and downright exciting than the glum, organic place where your skin and bones are situated. Avalon retraces these generic tropes, but it doesn't seem like an insider's view of the addictive rush of playing at being a superhero in an alternative reality: I feel as certain that Oshii is not a gamer as I am that Woody Allen doesn't know any East End crooks. I never got a sense of why these characters were so obsessed with a game that offers actual deathly danger as opposed to the fantasy of danger, which is surely the point of video games: we play them to avoid the incursions of unpleasant realities into our lives, not because we want to risk our necks every minute of our spare time. And, of course, with her lithe physique and classy mid-1960s Anna Karina style, Ash just doesn't look like someone who spends most of her time jacked into a games console. This piqued my suspicion that Oshii doesn't care about the actual impact of technology in society. He hasn't researched patterns of behaviour amongst people who spend a lot of time on the internet, and he hasn't extrapolated his future world from the current state of things simulacrous. He treats the concept of virtual reality as a philosophical metaphor, a means to question our own solipsistic interactions with the world around us.

I should add that I watched this on a Region 1 DVD, brought to me by the good people at Miramax. Now, it's OK that they've produced their own English language version. It's not even a problem that they've added a Blade Runner style voice-over to some of the quiet scenes to make it a bit easier to follow what's going on. It's not a problem, because I'll be switching over to the original Polish language track and turning on the English subtitles. Thanks for including both versions, Miramax, but would it have been too much trouble to offer English subtitles that don't include the voice-over narration sequences?! That way, I won't have to have inaninities like "Is this what they call reality?" popping up on my screen every time there's a gap in the dialogue. It may not be entirely Miramax's fault also, but let's blame them anyway, that despite being made almost three years earlier, it didn't get a release until 2002, meaning that it seemed to trail like an imitative latecomer behind The Matrix, Dark City, Existensz in a chain of popular movies about manufactured realities usurping, er... real ones. This is unfortunate, because it's certainly an interesting film that haunts you in a way that films you can't quite figure out often do. It's a goal-orientated quest narrative in which a tightly-clad heroine seeks to reach a plateau of gaming achievement through skilful, choreographed violence, and in that sense it is quite conventional. It lingers in the mind because of the unnerving doubt that that goal might just be a fleeting, futile or vapourous one: you're never sure what is at stake, what can be won, and any victory could be an empty one. This is the masterstroke of the movie, because it calls into question the value of the virtual reality that it might otherwise privilege, but at the same time it undercuts (deliberately) the potential for thrilling spectacle that its generic identity may have promised. So, will my students find it a provocative talking point, or will they hate me for not letting them watch The Matrix instead?

Review at Midnight Eye.

The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb

This was one of those films that I saw about fifteen years ago, and which had become one of those hazy memories where you wonder whether or not it really happened. My memory was not helped by the film's surreal, dreamlike quality, created primarily through the use of pixilation. This rarely used animation technique is nothing to do with computer animation (that's a different kind of "pixel"), but a way of moving live actors frame by frame as if they were stop-motion puppets. Norman McLaren used this effect in Neighbours (1952). One can only imagine the discomfort of actors required to hold their position between exposed frames while their bodies, faces and surrounding puppet models are incrementally moved with painstaking care.

The Adventures of Tom Thumb may be just a simple tale of a little guy who, separated from his parents, goes on an odyssey, escaping from a grotesque laboratory (featuring creatures that look rather like extras from Quay Brothers or Svankmajer movies) into a quasi-medieval miniature world that is in conflict with the giants who have birthed Tom. But it suggests that more is going on. The opening shots show the fertilisation machines that send Tom down a conveyor belt to be delivered to his mother in another dimension. Animation, dealing as it does with the incarnation of things as living beings, is the perfect medium for such a mechanistic image of conception. Tom is tiny, like an undeveloped foetus. They seem surprised to find him alive. His parents inhabit a grim and grimy post-industrial town that looks like the worst of British social realist depictions of Northern working class squalor (enough adjectives in that sentence?). The simple happiness which Tom gives to his new folks is disrupted when he is abducted and taken off to a vivisection facility, from which he is shown an escape route into a toxic waste dump peopled by medieval peasants his own size, who live in fear of the giants (who are portrayed, like Tom's parents, by live actors). Befriending Jack (the Giant Killer), Tom is reunited with his parents, before finding himself back in the "laboratorium", where, from what I can work out, he is able to be reborn, full-size, to the same parents in more illustrious circumstances. Did I get it right? If anyone has a different understanding of events , please let me know. Sometimes the intricacies of plot escape me when I'm entranced by the animation.

Pixilation is a strange thing. Ordinarily, when live and animated performers share the screen, they are recorded separately then composited using optical processes. They therefore occupy distinct spaces and express very different modes of being and moving. When the human actors are also moved frame-by-frame, the effect is unsettling, a jerky unnatural kind of movement. It brings puppets and people onto the same ontological plane. Watching it for a while, it put me into a kind of trance with the uncanny oscillation that occurs when familiar things are rendered strange by a trick of the eye. Model animation can make objects seem haunted. The presence of the animators' hands, edited out of the process to leave only the interstitial images that comprise the finished film, can be sensed but not detected. It is stranger still when applied to people. When objects are brought to life, there's a powerful display of the power of moving images to instill the inanimate with the illusion of being, but with people, the effect is deaden them, to make them seem somehow less alive. The animated object and the objectified actor meet somewhere in the middle, on equal ground.

See also: Frankie Kowalski, "Instinctive Decisions: Dave Borthwick, Radical Independent." Animation World Network.

Paranoid Park

I'd heard mixed reviews of Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, so perhaps I was surprised to find it riveting, hypnotic and beautiful (there's a poster-quote for you). GVS seems to have found that delicate equilibrium between the formal experiments of Gerry (2002) and Last Days (2005) and the subject matter that obviously interests him (the moral dilemmas and looming life-choices facing alienated teens), but which became rather cloying in Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester. It deploys remarkably vivid techniques (particularly slow motion and a sparkling soundtrack of musicalised ambient noise) to convey its lead character's subjective experience and his perceptual disconnect from the people around him.

Van Sant's skillful marriage of form, tone and content is exemplified in the central incident at the core of the film (do not read on, not even the rest of this sentence after the parentheses, if you haven't seen the film and don't want to know any plot details!), the bissection by train of a security guard. In Blake Nelson's novel, the guard is knocked down and killed by the train during a scuffle, but Van Sant's decision to restage the death as a bravura sequence of baroque violence, during which the guard is cut in half, living long enough to crawl pleadingly towards his accidental killer, pushes the film into a new zone of oneiric excess. In a film that constructs a strong tinge of naturalism, this moment, briefly going all Dario Argento on us, could easily have overpowered the surrounding drama, but instead it effectively lodges in the memory as a bizarre and imposing memory that will haunt our central protagonist forever, regardless of whether he eventually takes responsibility for it. (See here for more on the distinctions between book and film.)




Van Sant has suggested that this event, sitting temporally and dramatically in the middle of the film, represents all of the divisions and separations contained in the film - divorced parents, the gulf between adults and youth (Alex's parents are seen almost entirely in long shots, and his mother's face is never shown), and the binary oppositions of confession/concealment, guilt/innocence, conformity/individuality. The death of the guard doesn't really need all of this symbolic freight: it is important enough that it stands as an extravagantly shocking fragment of time that stays as Alex's personal secret and permanently separates him from others.




It's a separation that Van Sant enforces with overwhelming bursts of ambient sound, extreme slow motion and compositions that isolate Alex or hide his face from view (even when we can see his face, it is often difficult to read - a blankness that emerges as troubled contemplation rather than listless unconcern), but also with his signature following shots, illustrated below with examples from Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), Last Days (2005) and Paranoid Park :




The shot from Gerry is no doubt a tribute to Bela Tarr's Sátántangó, with tumbleweeds standing in for Tarr's flurries of litter. I thought perhaps that Van Sant was using this shot to suggest that he was observing, following and being led by his protagonists, rather than positioning them along pre-ordained lines of action. It's certainly unsettling to have faces hidden, backs to the camera and destinations unknown. But, particularly in Elephant and Last Days, the impression of ineluctible lines of fate drawing people towards a mortal destiny is difficult to shake. Elephant's tracking shots bring the film's scattered characters gradually into deadly coincidence, while in Last Days Blake's wanderings in the woods are more circular, repetitive and searching. It seems that Van Sant has found a range of different meanings for nearly identical shots, and by the time we get to Paranoid Park, it has become part of a more varied visual syntax that comprises a picture of Alex's conflicted state of mind.

There are problems with Paranoid Park. It is dismissive of Alex's girlfriend, portraying her as needy, self-absorbed and desperate for social acceptance. By portraying her as a needling representative of the forces of conformity, Van Sant misses out on a chance for compassionate consideration of the forces that alienate, control and define her. It's reminiscent of the crude, embarrassing moment in Elephant where a group of chattering schoolgirls casually puke up their lunches in a synchronised display of eating disorders that makes them easy targets for laughter rather than dismay. But I'd hate to see Paranoid Park considered the runt of the litter in Van Sant's great run of fascinating, exploratory movies.

Miscellaneous Catch-up

At first I thought I had a cold, but it turned out to be a nastier bug than that, so my blogging slowed down a little, as did my work routine. You don't want to hear the gory details.

Some random things to tide things over until I can devote more time. I want to blog a bit about Wall*E and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, both of which, especially the latter, I liked a lot. But I'll save that for another day. Just three initial thoughts on Wall*E:

a) The first section, with Wall-E pottering about alone on Earth, is so engrossing that it's a shame when the humans appear and the chasing around starts.
b) People who think this movie is bleak really need to raise their bleakness threshold.

c) I don't appreciate a lecture on consumerism handed to me by the Disney Corporation. But I suppose I'll just have to suck it down this once.

Has anyone read Werner Herzog's blog? I added it to my list of links in the right hand column of this page. It's graced with the terrible pun "Werner Herzblog", and I can't work out whether or not it's for real. It reads like a parody of Herzog's distinctive, deathly-serious-but-suspiciously-wry speech patterns, and features some wonderfully terse entries. Here are some favourites:

December 20th, 2007
Question:
What do the mice do when the snow storm hits?
Answer:
They spit at almighty God and persevere.

August 15th, 2007
I was offered a drink called a Snapple Iced Tea yesterday. There was a sketch of the sun on the label. A note next to this sketch informed me that this picture was not to scale. Another reminder of how completely ignorant and gullible advertisers take us for. I refused this drink, even though I was severely dehydrated at the time. I have also noticed that certain toilet tissues use images of babies on their packaging. This is highly misleading, as babies are the only people who do not use toilet paper.

Thinking about this further, it could be said that certain invalids are also exempt from using toilet paper. I have no doubts that the severely disabled will soon appear on television extolling the virtues of various toilet papers.

I suspect it's not real. I wish it was, but I don't care if it's not. It made me laugh.



I'll also put a shout out for Tativille, one of the most beautifully designed websites that's ever been dedicated to a French comic film-maker. The interface is designed after the set of Playtime, which I'm very excited about inflicting on my students this year ("isn't it just Mr.Bean with subtitles?!"). It's also slightly cold and irritating, perfectly in keeping with the central thesis of the film...