Freud, War, Death: Your Sunday Night Read
by Giampaolo Bianconi
It’s Sunday night, and Mad Men won’t be around until next August. I know what you’re thinking—-what am I going to do with all this time? In honor of 2012, why not revisit Sigmund Freud’s 1915 text, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” It touches on the difficulties of imagining our own death—-and, somehow, sheds light on why a filmic imagining of our own death will always require our survival.
In the Event of My Death
by Giampaolo Bianconi
2012, dir. Roland Emmerich (2009)
In an interview with USA Today, Roland Emmerich announced that 2012 would be his last disaster movie. “I said to myself that I’ll do one more disaster movie,” he explained. “But it has to end all disaster movies. So I packed everything in.” The film is meant to serve not only as the end of the world, but as the end of a genre and the end of a chapter in Emmerich’s career.
What’s bizarre about 2012 is that the scope of the disaster is so immense and the characters are so close to death that the necessities of the genre itself become all that matters. There are pretenses here, to be sure—but the only logic is the logic of Hollywood itself. As Woody Harrelson says in the film, “This is a plot that only could have been hatched in Hollywood.”
The Pleasure of Everything Vanishing
by Giampaolo Bianconi
(Quick note: This review, which takes the form of an essay, does contain spoilers. If you haven’t yet seen the film, you should.)
The Passenger, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni (1975)
In his time, Michelangelo Antonioni was a melancholic enfant terrible. L’Avventura caused impassioned boos at Cannes, while Zabriskie Point is now recognized as a hysterical mega-flop where everything laughable about European artistry converges with American 1960s kitsch. The Passenger, a film surrounded by noir conventions yet shot in blistering color in 1975 with Jack Nicholson as a man outrunning his own identity, has a strange reputation. On the one hand, the film saw Antonioni crawling out of the grave in which he’d been prematurely buried by the failure of Zabriskie Point (Nicholson met him half way, digging from the surface); on the other, he seemed to emerge weakened by his tribulations: gone was the force of his play with space, replaced by the speed and diligence of his camera. Antonioni himself, perhaps, was on the run. (more…)