(A Superhero Named) Tony

In Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, life imitates art imitates life imitates Robert McKee. There is a gleeful post-meta-something going on that is self-conscious yet surprisingly natural, allowing the screenwriter to become not only a lead character, but also a believable driving voice. Charlie Kaufman is a character; Charlie Kaufman is a writer; Charlie Kaufman is a star. So it should be perfectly clear what I mean when I say that, after watching his Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I had a Charlie Kaufman moment.

Eternal Sunshine concerns a shy schlub named Joel (Jim Carrey, who plays it quiet), who learns that his flighty girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet, who plays it Jim Carrey) has undergone a radical procedure to erase all her memories of him. Unable to cope, Joel decides to do the same thing. Step one in the procedure is to get rid of all possessions that might trigger memories of the soon-to-be-erased loved one. At the screening I attended, after the film was over and the lights went up, I leaned over to pick up my coat, which I’d neatly stashed under my seat. But in picking it up, I noticed something. Missing from my coat collar was a pin that I was pretty damn sure was there when I sat down. I got on my hands and knees and searched under the seat through someone else’s sticky popcorn waste. No pin.

Why tell all this? The pin was a gift from my girlfriend, a handmade memento. Not always keen on reality, I suddenly wondered if she’d been erased. I even started talking to myself. My Charlie Kaufman moment.

Notice that I gave Kaufman, a screenwriter, the possessive on the films mentioned above. Often that’s an honor only attributed to directors. Kaufman, however, is not just another screenwriter. He stands out as a rare, much needed breed: an auteur, in whatever sense of the word you like. Literally, he is a writer, an author. But his films also share a distinct sensibility — of form, of subject matter (the mind) and of a relentless weirdness — that is the boiled down essence of auteur theory (a misunderstood dinosaur if there ever was one). So, like the joke of a third act in Adaptation, Kaufman’s career and burgeoning name status subvert Hollywood conventions. Simply put, the guy is an auteur, but he isn’t a director. At least, he isn’t yet.

And so we think of Charlie Kaufman as a primary creative force, but with good reason: Since his feature debut with Being John Malkovich, Kaufman has consistently managed to overshadow his directors both in style and substance. That’s saying a lot, especially when two of the directors in question have big time connections, either to the Coppola mob (Spike Jonze) or to the Soderbergh factory (George Clooney, who many people, myself included, forget made his directorial debut with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind). Not that light-handed direction is necessarily a bad thing; it leaves more room for Kaufman to restore authorship to the person who, well, wrote the movie. A few quirky hits in that mold, and voila! He’s a celebrity artist.

Rather, he’s a celebrity screenwriter, and that’s where the subversion really kicks in. To most Hollywood folks, that makes as much sense as dubbing someone a celebrity janitor. And the writer in Hollywood usually is treated like a janitor; he’s an expendable laborer whose importance you will promptly forget or ignore. (Until you realize you need him to clean up your mess.) To many, there can be no celebrity screenwriters (unless they are writer-directors, or Paddy Chayefsky) because writers are Movieland’s bottom-feeders, given only minor glamour status on the Academy Awards’ red carpet with a resounding chorus of “Who the hell is that?” Here’s to hoping Kaufman can change things.

At the very least, he’s contemporary proof that a writer must have ideas. How many other working screenwriters read (and understand!) Alexander Pope? And how many of those have the balls to quote him? And how many of those ever see the quote in the finished film? As the title indicates to the lit geeks, there is a bit of Pope’s “Abelard and Heloise” in Joel and Clementine’s relationship, not to mention a lot of Annie Hall. But primarily the film is a disjointed chase through Joel’s stream of sub-consciousness that plays as a series of replays, overlaps and black-outs. It’s an inspired lack of cohesion that suggests a Burroughs cut-up. Again, both in story and in form, Kaufman has ideas.

To be perfectly fair, though, director Michel Gondry contributes significantly to Eternal Sunshine’s success. (He and visual artist Pierre Bismuth conceived the story, a credit for which they both share with Kaufman.) There’s no arguing against Gondry’s visual imagination and knack for the surreal — his music videos give him that cred. Yet here he astutely veers toward a naturalism in his visuals, invading it all with a variety of simple effects to emphasize the increasingly erratic narrative shifts, most of which rely on Joel’s increasingly erratic brain patterns. This approach ultimately gives the film a sense of immediacy, although most of what we see takes place in the past. Naturalism is a perfect contrast for Kaufman’s flights of brain fancy, which, as his past scripts indicate, lean toward annihilating the audience’s understanding of movie reality.

Write off Human Nature, the early Kaufman script that served as Gondry’s feature debut. It was an innocent mistake. Eternal Sunshine hints that Gondry too is shaping up to be a rare, much needed type of director: the ironic hipster with a heart. He seems to get what Jonze missed in Being John Malkovich: that Kaufman’s disinterest in explaining a movie’s high concept leaves room better filled by genuine emotion than by detached humor. For Jonze, the shoddy explanation for the passageway to Malkovich’s head is part of the Big Joke. But for Gondry, the lack of sci-fi details about the memory erasure hook lets him invest more in character details, most notably the rise and fall and rise again of Joel and Clementine. The movie can still fly high on irony — and it does, and it’s funny, and David Cross gets more laughs than Carrey — but a prevailing sense of humanity evens the score. And somehow this transfers from writer to director to cast to audience — no doubt via some sort of Charlie Kaufman brain conduit.

(Apologies to Jonathan Rosenbaum. Unbeknown to me at the time of writing, he also explores Kaufman as an auteur in his more comprehensive and generally better Chicago Reader review.)

Violence in The Passion of the Christ by Tony Nigro

With Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in theaters, general audiences can finally wallow in the mire that has plagued critics, scholars and religious leaders like locusts: Does it promote anti-Semitism? Will it hurt Mel’s career? And did Papa Gibson really say that?

Reaction to the film’s graphic violence has been salt to all those wounds. Moviegoers are learning fast that this is not their daddys’ biblical epic. Whether or not it is Gibson’s daddy’s biblical epic remains under scrutiny and probably will forever. It is, however, fact that Gibson did not remove the blood libel line — only its subtitle — and that the Bird on a Wire star belongs to a radical Catholic sect that rejects the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which among many things officially reversed the allegations that Jews “did it.” Take that as you will. One thing is certain: Gibson’s movie makes me think of a comic book.

When I was a child, my Catholic parents gave me a copy of The Picture Bible. An average-sized hardcover, it was holy highlights in comic book form — a graphic novel, really — designed for those of us who were too young (or too impatient) for thees, thous and all that begetting. My comic book Bible was Christianity Lite, and I was more apt to read it than to pay attention during Mass. My parents knew that. I was a kid, and my main interests in faith and the afterlife were Daredevil and Ghost Rider.

Eventually I questioned religion and spirituality, like adolescents will when their hormones rage and their best friends become Bar Mitzvahs. The Catholic notion of bread and wine consumed as flesh and blood freaked me out, but mostly I dwelled on the Crucifix. The primary religious symbol of Roman Catholicism, it symbolized to me not only the body of Jesus, but a tortured man nailed to the cross, a cadaver who later rose from the dead. This represents the whole of faith for many, but to me the omnipresence of the crucifix downplayed the dread and anguish of the real suffering involved. And my comic book certainly didn’t detail it very well.

Shortly thereafter, I dropped out of Confirmation classes, never to return to the Church except for the occasional wedding or funeral.

Back to The Passion of the Christ, which is omnipresent in its own right: The Crucifix and all the morbidity that comes with it are Gibson’s springboard, and the resulting film is, pun intended, passionate. Incidentally, the word “passion” comes from the Latin verb “pat,” which means “to suffer,” a word that in turn pops up in every Catholic’s weekly affirmation — that Jesus “suffered, died and was buried” for the sake of your salvation. Arguably, the cultural majority’s belief in Jesus’ self-sacrifice has led the English usage of “passion” to mean something like “intense emotion,” often in connection to love, and even the ultimate in love.

It is unsurprising then that in Gibson’s film, the subject of which he loves, a whole mess of suffering ensues. All told, however, the movie’s ultraviolence is not as graphic as critics will have you believe. There are indeed copious amounts of blood, but the notorious scourging sequence only has a handful of shots in which full contact with Jesus’ body is shown. The construction of the scene relies more on classic montage techniques like close-ups, reactions, sound effects, a manipulative score and, most importantly, the film’s longest lack of subtitles, an artistic choice that helps us to focus on the action, or in this case the pain. Always the pain — that is Gibson’s point.

Movie magic notwithstanding, The Passion is more likely to appear extremely brutal because of its religious ties. From the first strike in the Garden of Gethsemene — the film’s only offensive by Jesus, aimed at the midget-loving Satan (don’t ask) — the violence builds until the end and in fact comprises major plot points. The protracted scenes of torture and flying viscera may not appear stylistically like that in a sleazy exploitation flick such as I Spit on Your Grave, but the effect of giving the audience no escape is just the same.

How can I dare to compare a biblical adaptation to such amoral drive-in schlock? By focusing primarily on the choices Gibson makes with regard to depicting violence. (Anyhow, critic Richard Corliss called it a “splatter-art film” first.) Gibson’s story is explicitly about suffering, and his way of showing it is to hover on the pain, meditate on it, just as I Spit on Your Grave revels in real-time sadism. What can be said in one brief picture is drawn out into many long ones that continue nearly as long as it might take to actually commit — and suffer — the same heinous act.

Gibson’s intent in The Passion seems to be making his audience feel as deeply as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did, feelings which allegedly compelled them to later spread the stories of the Gospels. But the marked difference here from other violent films is that revenge for Jesus’ suffering is absent, as it is in the Bible, and that this is the foremost point of the story as well as the creed behind it. The suffering is still unbearable for many viewers, whether they are believers or not. Revenge, as Kill Bill demonstrates, is a timeless safety net for movie violence. (Pastiche is really the dish best served cold, but that’s a different story.) A movie’s revenge angle functions as justification for showing the atrocious, which often consists of revenge’s cause and effect, summed up by the vigilante cliché, “This time it’s personal!” In I Spit on Your Grave, a nearly unwatchable gang rape is followed by methodical, equally repellent scenes of revenge. That’s the whole story. Just like the whole story of The Passion is Jesus getting his ass kicked and crucified. The resurrection could be called justification — or revenge in some circles — but given the movie’s inordinate amount of time spent on Jesus’ torture, such a brief coda leaves little salvation for anyone. Gibson doesn’t even bother with the Easter tales of Jesus sightings, a prophecy fulfillment that could have at least assigned the suffering some motivation.

Charges of The Passion’s excessive cruelty imply the movie could just be unrepresentative of what is publicly understood of contemporary Catholicism. If you’re a believer, that means it’s the second oldest branch of Christianity — don’t forget the Greek Orthodoxy — that is promoting loving thy neighbor while trying to change with the times and live up to the true definition of “catholic.” If you’re a detractor, that means it’s the oldest surviving political machine that differs from the Bush Administration only in its stance on invading Iraq, and which is now best known for sexual molestation. Neither of these views, however, begs the masochism involved with watching two hours of bloodshed. Regardless, Catholic bishops claim the movie “succeeds in stripping Christ’s sacrificial suffering of its Sunday school sugar-coating.”

Religion aside, Gibson’s movie shows us that crucifixion is a bad scene. That its victim here is a figure like Jesus and not an anime version of Lucy Liu’s Dragon Lady #834 makes the movie carry emblematic weight — whether you like it or not. Every subsequent controversy only reinforces that yes, some things are still sacred, and to a whole lot of people.

So why all that blood? Some critics of The Passion claim that more should have been made of Jesus’ preaching and well-known messages of love. That could make for better Aristotelian character development, but without the tried and true revenge angle, it’s still hard to balance out the brutality and not point fingers. Critic David Denby has pointed out that Gibson’s film belies the past’s cleanlier portrayals of the Crucifixion, notably those from the Italian Renaissance. These were, for the most part, beautiful works of art stylized with the intention of extolling the Church and its majesty rather than representing a gruesome reality. Conversely, Gibson makes a ferocious spectacle with very religious intentions. It is not unlike the Romans’ goals of spectacle, first when they performed the crucifixion of an alleged blasphemer, and second when they formed their own church in the fourth century and selected the crucifix as its symbolic of suffering.

But the Romans are old news, and a lot people only care about what this all means today. The inevitable outcry of the parents who suffer their little children unto the multiplex as if it were decreed by the Lord Himself might know the answer: Even some who do carry the weight of faith aren’t prepared for such an aggressive revelation.

Ostensibly indifferent, Gibson succeeds in making a film that reminds us that, despite gorgeous stained glass, the Church couches its peaceful philosophies in a brutal and macabre history — effectively, the trappings of a horror movie. The director, however, may have reached his favored audience better by staying the Hollywood course and giving people what they expect, a more uplifting picture of the Passion as it was in my comic book — crudely drawn in bold primary colors that exclude red.