I'll Watch Anything

I love PT Anderson. He hasn’t made a movie yet that I don’t enjoy; Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, and especially There Will Be Blood are all fantastic films which contain hidden fruits rewarding repeated viewing and discussion. Yet each of these masterpieces (yes, all of his films are masterpieces!) has a hard outer surface, a lattice of desperation and obfuscation which make them slightly inaccessible, at least initially. On the other hand, Boogie Nights, Anderson’s first well-known film (ok, Hard Eight isn’t quite a masterpiece), starts out with a bang, and never lets go, pulling you in from the first notes of the intro until the final money shot.

For me, what stands out in memory about Boogie Nights is not any of the award-nominated acting (Julianne Moore), incredible direction (coaxing a masterful performance out of Mark Wahlberg), set / production design (Jack Warner’s house might be one of the best sets ever created), cinematography (the two major scenes at the Warner compound, both the initial pool party scene welcoming Dirk into the porn family, and the mesmerizing single-take, murder-suicide scene set at the New Year’s Eve party, are visual gourmet), or screenwriting, but the sound and music design. Integrating 70’s classics or disco and pop into the soundtrack is certainly not a surprising technique, but the synergies between screen and sound are often startling. Anderson encourages consumers of the 2-disc DVD set to “turn the volume up, loud” – and the carefully tailored soundtrack certainly rewards blasting. It embeds a poppy, bright exuberance which remains undiminished even when the shit goes down and the characters’ lives take a dark turn in the aftermath of the decade’s changeover. In fact, many of the match-cut-audio sequences, such as the one that almost won Julianne Moore an Oscar, set the stage for Darren Aronofsky to coin the term “hip-hop montage” after his film Requiem for a Dream.

Everything about Boogie Nights is oversized; the colors of California have never been brighter, the sounds bouncier, the plot lines more over-the-top, nor the money shots more revealing. The characters are just so damn likeable, and innocent, you can’t help but fall in love with them. Even at his narcissistic stupidest, Dirk never loses the charm that makes him so deliciously appealing to everyone at the start of the film; even in Rollergirl’s most undignified and pathetic, she maintains the aura of a 20s starlet; even when Amber leads Dirk by the nose into his fall from grace, her confused mothering always grounds the cadre with a genuine warmth that creates the unshakeable feeling of family. Even at its most dysfunctional, Anderson creates the most authentic adopted family unit in the history of cinema. Well, what fraction of it I’ve seen anyways. Despite shocking cocaine overdoses, debilitating addiction, hard-times prostitution, disgustingly obvious prosthetic cocks, and the requisite long-term rifts, what Boogie Nights gives us is an extremely watchable porn family that envelops me in love every time I watch it. With the music turned up… way up.

[This is the space where I will talk about The Matrix! but I just got off a coast to coast flight after reading Black Hole and my brain is busted, yo. Check back here later]

OK, if you haven’t seen The Matrix yet you should check yourself out – you’re probably attached to a giant mechanical cord plugged into the back of an electrochemical pod floating in space, in the barren wasteland of a destroyed continent below you, mired in your own piped-in fantasy.

Chances are you’ve seen it. And, why? Not because of fantastic reviews, that’s for sure. It’s because The Matrix enjoyed not just one of the most expensive, wide-reaching media campaigns of the era when it debuted in 1999, but because of its amazing word-of-mouth buzzes, possibly the most talked about of any commercial film in the last few decades. Within days of its release, literally everyone I talked to had seen it; it managed to transcend its shoot-em-up-and-overwhelm-em-with-effects marketting and attain a true position as must-see scifi film. While it obviously plays well to the 18-24 male target audience, it managed to quickly, and easily, permeate all our various social and cultural strata, leading to the kind of reunion of stereotypes I rarely saw in high-school: brutish, MTV-watching jocks; tall, leggy cheerleader bunnies; dark, femme fatale goths; normally quiet, chess-club nerds; literate, chalk-wielding professors, all joined the video club geeks in the near-universal, average-moviegoer praise that surrounded The Matrix following its weekend debut.

A huge audience makes a film great right? OK, not so much. But what the film did accomplish, despite some typically cardboard-like acting from Sir Reeves and dialog that often feels like it were bred in a vat, was tapping into an important cultural moment, the mix of fear and excitement that surrounded the quickly-approaching Year 2000. It evokes a world at once soul-crushingly dark and evil, and simultaneously a breathtaking vision of our own magnificent, self-made destruction. The Matrix was certainly not the first to create a dystopian world in which machines of our own making rise up to take us out of the equation (Terminator probably being the first blockbuster of the decade) nor was it the last (I, Robot, anyone?) but god damn The Wachowski brothers got it right.

While the idea of AI has, in the following decade, became far less frightening, as we realize just how complex the task of recreating true intelligence is, we should never forget quite how real everyone thought it was that by midway into the first decade of the new century, we would create some kind of cobbled-together mechanical conscience. The film reaches deep into the imagination, and fear, of that shared cultural hope and pulls out possibly the scariest nightmare of all: not that humans would be hunted down and killed by our technological masters, but that we would become the victims of a far more subtle torture: to be bred and cultivated purely for subsistence, our own marvellous minds turned against us as a means to ensure our docility and complicity. The parasitic relationship envisioned by the movie is so frighteningly plausible (except, you know, the idea that our bodies produce energy rather than consume it, which is fundamental to the plot – but quickly and effectively glossed-over) it still gives me shivers every time I see it. The film also tapped into the scientific realization that our brains are essentially vastly complex computers, based in electrochemicals as opposed to transistors, but that what differentiates reality from the perception of reality is far, far less than what we choose to believe in everyday life — this leads to the film’s greatest highs, the sequences of downloading entire volumes of human knowledge into the brain faster than eating a Snickers bar, the man vs. machine Yuen Woo Ping-flying fights, and the question of ignorance vs. bliss that still survives in the cultural groupthink today as the “red pill or blue pill?” meme. The mid ’90s cultivated a renaissance of the 70′s notion that we were, in fact, on a train heading to hell, piloted by our own destructive greed and capitalistic narcissism, and The Matrix managed to scare everyone into the wondering if it hadn’t happened already.

That’s what I really love about The Matrix; it doesn’t just exist as a fantasy story up on the projector. It forced us to contend with the idea that we aren’t so unique: that our creations could overtake us, that our bodies could be perverted against us, that our minds could be so easily corrupted, and all by our blind devotion to scientific progress. It jumps right off the screen and implants its ideas in your head, like a virus, or maybe even… an agent…

This entry was posted on September 24, 2009 at 10:34 pm and is filed under JAGP with tags Boogie Nights, New Classic, PT Anderson, The Matrix, Wachowski. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.