During LaMotta’s fight against Janiro, blood spurts from the latter’s face in an unrealistic, exaggerated way – one that resembles a burst pipe more than a wound. The judge’s table is doused with such velocity that blood appears to have been hosed from behind the camera. We then see the glasses of ringside photographers simultaneously splattered with blood in an absurd, cartoon-like fashion. Expressionist techniques, of which these are an example, seek to diverge from objective portrayal and distort visual reality in order to convey the psychological states of characters. In this case, the exaggerated presence of blood acquires thematic value to illustrate LaMotta’s excessive appetite for violence. Kasia Boddy points out that exploding flash bulbs and powerfully amplified punches not only act as ‘scoring music’, but make the violent display even more ‘surreal and abstract’.

The use of black-and-white dampens the appearance of graphic violence by making blood less visually prominent than if it was red. The monochromatic, high contrast duality embodies the motif of LaMotta’s internal struggle between good and evil. Even in the most nauseating instances of violence, monochrome gives the film something of an aesthetic quality, evoking early cinema such as German Expressionism and Film Noir. To give blood a stark appearance, Scorsese used Hershey’s Chocolate – the same material used in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The classical opera that underscores much of the film, most notable of which is Pietro Mescagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, instils Raging Bull with an artistic sense of grandeur.

But aestheticizing violence is not the same as glorifying it. Despite the use of conventional Hollywood techniques to make fight scenes engaging, such as fast cutting and amplified punching sounds, Scorsese presents violence unfavourably. This is done by aligning our subjectivity with the characters on the receiving end. After LaMotta knocks Janiro unconscious, a slow-motion descending pedestal shot follows his fall to the ground. Starting at eye height, the camera descends at the same speed as Janiro’s fall, rotating ninety degrees in unison with his head as it hits the canvas. By forcing us to incur Janiro’s subjectivity, somewhat of a shared experience is created between him and us, furthering our detachment from LaMotta.

Expressionist temporal manipulation is used in the Sugar Ray Robinson fight. The shot of LaMotta waiting for Robinson to stand after being knocked down runs in slow motion, conveying LaMotta’s impatient subjectivity as he waits for the violence to resume. Similarly, slow-motion shots from Jake’s point-of-view are used when Vickie interacts with other men at the bar, conveying Jake’s paranoid gaze. Through Jake’s perennial eye of distrust, Vickie’s interactions appear longer than they are in objective reality, making all men she speaks to a self-perceived threat to his marriage.

After LaMotta’s loss to Robinson, a hazy shot shows his anger at the judges’ decision. The visual distortion resembles the blurry mirage of hot air above a fire. This rippling technique, accomplished by lighting a flame beneath the camera, creates the impression that the film stock itself is alight. This not only symbolises LaMotta’s anger, but evokes imagery of his ring as a hellish inferno.

Despite the monochrome majority of the film, the home video scene is shot in colour. This found footage sequence was deliberately desaturated and optically degraded to mimic the fading effects of older films – Scorsese even scratched the negative with a hanger to bring about the grainy, aged look. We see the LaMottas’ happy moments, such as barbecues, weddings or children playing. These warming shots are the only parts of the film where the family appear happy, offering the audience brief respite from the antagonism everywhere else. The sequence is interspersed with black-and-white shots from LaMotta’s boxing career. Two consecutive shots show Jake with his hands raised as if in victory – one after a boxing contest and the other at a family gathering. If the colour footage represents what Barbara Mortimer reads as Jake’s ‘fantasy and idealisation,’ then the failed father and abusive husband’s only victory is in the ring.

The use of these aesthetic techniques is one of the film’s ambiguities. We are not given a stable, external portrayal of LaMotta. Instead, our perspective oscillates between his subjectivity and a more neutral one. Steve Neale argues that our identification with characters is ‘multiple, fluid and contradictory.’ By forcing viewers to briefly witness the destructive, frightening subjectivity of LaMotta with expressionist techniques, Scorsese draws a clear image of LaMotta’s warped psyche. During his jail cell soliloquy, a tearful LaMotta insists, ‘I’m not an animal.’ His behaviour throughout suggests something different.

Written by Callum McGrath

Website: Reel – Studies in Cinema

Bibliography
Boddy, Kasia, Boxing: A Cultural History, London: Reaktion, 2008
Mortimer, Barbara, ‘Portraits of the Postmodern Person in “£”Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The King of Comedy”, Journal of Film and Video, 49.1-2 (1997), 28-38, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20688131.

Please note that this article contains spoilers for the films Men, Annihilation, and Ex Machina.

On its most basic level, Alex Garland’s newest movie, Men, tells a fairly simple story. Jessie Buckley plays Harper, a woman whose husband James (Paapa Essiedu) has recently died. This happened while they were in the process of divorcing (on her initiative, not his): during one of their arguments, James struck Harper, and she kicked him out of their apartment. James then slipped and fell to his death while trying to break back in. Now, Harper isn’t sure whether James merely slipped (it was raining) or whether he “let himself go,” as she puts it, since he’d already threatened to kill himself if she went through with the divorce. (He also said that he would haunt her, and that she would have to live with his death on her conscience). With all of these thoughts weighing heavily on her mind, Harper leaves London, looking to get away for a couple of weeks in order to find some measure of peace. But James’s ghost continues haunting her (as tends to happen in Gothic horror stories, which Men explicitly invokes), and the young widow winds up experiencing a long night of the soul, at the end of which she directly confronts James’s spirit. The film then ends somewhat ambiguously, though I think we’re meant to believe that Harper has found the peace she’s been seeking (but more about that below).

Part of what makes Men an unusual film is that, while its story may be simple, its presentation isn’t; rather, it plays out like various European art films of the 1960s and ’70s. Watching it, I was reminded of movies such as Repulsion, Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Suspiria, and Possession. I was also reminded of Andrei Tarkovsky’s work in general, and if Annihilation was Garland’s response to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Men would seem his response to that man’s other science-fiction movie, Solaris (which features a dead spouse who keeps returning). A lot of what we see onscreen isn’t always literal, the movie’s events being filtered through Harper’s perspective. Garland also makes extensive use of associative editing, periodically interrupting the story with flurries of other images. (For example, when Harper sits down to play the piano, Garland cuts to shots of nature, which we’re meant to associate with Harper’s music; they may even represent what Harper is thinking about while she plays.)

And that’s not all. Complicating both these elements is the fact that Men does something unusual with its casting: all of the men in the village where Harper is staying appear to be the same man, or at least strongly resemble one another. That’s because all of the men that Harper encounters—her landlord Geoffrey, a cop, a petulant little boy, the local vicar, the pubkeeper and his two customers—are played by the same actor, Rory Kinnear, a feat accomplished through costumes and make-up, and a little CGI. On the one hand, this aspect of the film is something of a sly joke, a droll observation of how in some small towns, everyone looks the same because they’re related, and we should remember here that what we’re seeing is from Harper’s point of view. (This is another way in which the Irish Harper is made to feel out of sorts, since she’s the outsider, both to the countryside and the country.)

But Garland is up to more than just that. Each of the characters that Kinnear plays represents a different aspect of patriarchy, or institutionalized male authority; in that way, they are, on a structural level at least, all aspects of the same otherwise invisible cultural force. Harper, whose relationship with her husband was fraught to say the least —flashbacks show him alternately pleading with her, threatening her, warning her, striking her—can’t find respite in the village because, wherever she goes, she finds reflected back to her on a larger, societal level all the same problems that she experienced in the waning days of her marriage. (Other elements of the countryside also trigger strong memories—e.g., dandelion spores drifting through the air recall the dust motes that were swirling around her apartment at the time her husband died.) To put this point another way, while the men that Harper encounters in the village aren’t the same person, and aren’t the same person as her husband, they’re all products of the same system that birthed James (and her), and the grieving Harper sees all these men as embodying, individually and collectively, the same manipulative behaviors that James manifested during her time with him. (This is true regardless of whether the character is gently and unintentionally patronizing, as is Geoffrey, or downright sadistic and cruel, as is the young boy who curses out Harper when she refuses to join him for a game of hide-and-seek.) Harper experiences all of these encounters as an accumulating series of intrusions and disturbances, even as others try to tell her that nothing worrisome is happening (e.g., a female police officer dismisses the naked homeless man who trespassed at her house as being harmless), and their collective emotional burden intensifies until, by the end of the long night, she concludes that there really is no escape from James’s ghost. (As she says early on to her friend, “this sort of thing is going to keep happening for the rest of my life.”) This realization leads her to directly confront her memory of the man, in an attempt to learn what she must do in order to lay his spirit to rest.

But that still only scratches the surface of what Garland’s doing here, because he is using the genre of the Gothic horror film, the formal devices of the European art film, and the theme of patriarchy to explore one of his favorite concepts, which is what’s known in philosophy as “the problem of other minds.” Put very simply, this is the problem that there’s no way for any of us to tell whether other people have minds similar to ours, capable of thinking and feeling the same way that our minds do. (Related to this is the problem that there’s no way for us to empirically prove that the world is actually real, and we aren’t instead programs running in a computer simulation, or as older philosophers put it, ideas in the mind of God.) All three of the films that Garland has directed revolve around some version of this problem. In Ex Machina, Oscar Isaac’s Nathan invites Domhnall Gleeson’s Caleb to his home in order to help him judge whether or not the A.I. that he’s created, Ava (played by Alicia Vikander) is self-aware, or merely a clever computer program that’s pretending to be self-aware. In Annihilation, husband and wife Lena and Kane (played by Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac, respectively) reunite after having ventured inside an alien phenomenon known as “the Shimmer” (which refracts information the same way a prism does light), only to wonder if they’re still themselves, or whether they’re both now duplicates, clones produced by the alien. (They also aren’t sure whether the alien is self-aware, working according to an intelligent design, or mindless, the way that nature is mindless, acting according to happenstance.) In Men, Harper’s most immediate problem is that she’s unsure what to make of her husband’s behavior (almost as though he were an A.I. or an alien entity): was he a lying, manipulative bastard who would say anything to prevent her from divorcing him (and who did in fact kill himself, just as he threatened he would), or was he sincere, a troubled and unstable person who nonetheless wanted to save their marriage (and who slipped, accidentally falling)? At the end of the film, Harper confronts James’s ghost head-on, asking him what he wants, to which he replies, “Your love.” But even this answer isn’t clarifying, due to the problem of other minds: has the ghost returned in order to speak the truth? Or is this yet another attempt by James to manipulate the woman he’s been haunting?

The problem here, as Garland knows full well, is that there really isn’t any way to tell (which is why other minds are a problem in philosophy). And I don’t think that Garland is trying to solve this problem via his films so much as he’s representing how this dilemma manifests itself not only in things like A.I. research and marriages and patriarchy (and other cultural institutions), but also in art. (Garland is the product of a family of scientists and artists, and I assume he’s fascinated by how both art and science wrestle with alternate versions of this problem). Accordingly, each of his three directorial efforts see Garland seizing on a central artistic image that embodies the problem of other minds, and which functions as a metaphor for the whole film—that stands in for the film in miniature, so to speak. In Ex Machina, this image is the Jackson Pollock painting that Nathan keeps hanging in his home; Nathan asks Caleb whether he thinks Pollock produced the painting by accident, just flinging paint at random, or whether the man was in full control of what he was doing as he dripped paint on the canvas (as Nathan claims that Pollock was). In Annihilation, the image is the invading alien entity, the Shimmer, which is certainly up to something, rearranging nature in unsettling, unusual ways, but whose true intention (if any) is difficult to discern; is the Shimmer, like Pollock, self-aware and in control of what it’s doing, making something deliberate? Or is it all just one big accident, an alternate natural logic, a mindless entity that’s invaded our own like a virus, refracting and warping the landscape willy-nilly, spreading wherever it can?

In Men, the central image that unites art with the problem of other minds, as well as Harper and James’ individual marital problem with the broader institution of patriarchy, is the baptismal font that Harper encounters in the village church, and which then recurs throughout the film (appearing at various places and times, including at one point in Harper’s London apartment). That stone basin is adorned on opposite sides with two different but related pagan fertility symbols: its Western side is inscribed with an image of the Green Man, a being who’s essentially half-man, half-plant, and who is perhaps best known today from his appearance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (which just formed the basis of another A24 film), while its Eastern side bears an image of the Sheela Na Gig, a woman who is holding open her vulva. The Sheela Na Gig is less well known than the Green Man, presumably because people throughout the ages have considered that image more obscene—and Garland is clearly interested here in why the Green Man has become the more dominant of the two.

The Green Man / Sheela Na Gig pairing recurs throughout Men (it really is the movie’s central image), and we should note how the icons on the stone are facing away from one another, peering in opposite directions. Perhaps as a result of that, the relationship between the two figures turns out to be unequal in the movie, with the male figure usually dominating the female. Even in the church, the Green Man icon is positioned to face the celebrants, with the Sheela Na Gig turned away from them and hidden (seen by only the vicar). And even before Harper stumbles upon the baptismal font, she goes for a walk in the woods, where she encounters a former railway tunnel, a large stone hole cut through nature that resembles the pagan stone. Harper enters the tunnel and starts singing, using the space to construct a song (another unification of science and art). But in doing so, she disturbs a naked homeless man, who is lying at the opposite end of the tunnel. That man, which the film associates with the Green Man (he’s later seen adorning himself with leaves) lurches to his feet, then starts running down the tunnel toward Harper, shouting, forcing her to retreat. And this is but one example; throughout the film, Harper finds herself on the opposite side of structures—windows, doors—from men who are peering at her, reaching for her, struggling to break in. Even the film itself is bookended by two versions of the same folk song, “Love,” written by Lesley Duncan, and while she sings the first version that we hear, as Harper drives out of London, it’s Elton John’s cover that plays over the closing credits (and is the version that follows us as we exit, humming).

Part of what Garland is doing here is pointing out how when Christianity arrived in the British Isles, it appropriated and repurposed pagan concepts like the Green Man and Sheela Na Gig; like a religious version of the Shimmer, the early Church absorbed and rearranged those icons into the story of Christ’s death and resurrection, refashioning them into a new artwork and cultural institution. (That’s why the stained glass window of Christ looms over the pagan stone in the church, bathing it in its “miraculous” light every morning.) The Church also privileged the Green Man over the Sheela Na Gig (being a patriarchal institution). Accordingly, Christ and the Green Man become bound up over the course of Men: when James dies, one of his arms becomes impaled on a fence spike, recalling the Crucifixion, and the man’s wounds later appear on the Green Man, and all of the men in the film. Watching the movie, I couldn’t help but think about how there are more than a few Green Man icons in the vicinity of my apartment, just like there are more than a few Christian churches; meanwhile, the Sheela Na Gig has slipped into relative obscurity.

Given the strong thematic connections between Alex Garland’s films, we should read the ending of Men in light of the endings of his other works. In Ex Machina, is Ava truly self-aware? In Annihilation, are Lena and Kane still themselves, or clones who can’t tell the difference? We can’t say; the problem of other minds defeats us. In the case of Men, we see that Harper has survived her long night of the soul, her encounter with the ghost; she also seems to have found the peace that she came to the countryside seeking. Certainly, the closing imagery is idyllic, Gothic horror giving way to the pastoral: the flowers surrounding Harper have all transformed from blue to pink, matching the clothing she wears throughout the film, and she’s smiling as she holds up and studies a leaf, a fragment of the Green Man. Perhaps the Sheela Na Gig has reasserted herself, dominating the Green Man? Or perhaps those two forces have been put back into balance? Or maybe Harper has merely chosen to deceive herself, submitting to James’s last lie? Whatever the case may be, we can’t really say; only Harper knows what she’s thinking.

Written by A. D. Jameson

Thelma & Louise is undoubtedly the film that marked my own feminist awakening, and 30 years on it remains iconic and revolutionary in its representation of women on screen. The ending to Thelma & Louise has been described by the American critic Marita Sturken as “both tragic and idealistic at the same time”, and the decision to have Thelma and Louise drive off the cliff in the film’s unforgettable conclusion has divided opinion. In my opinion, the film’s ending remains the most powerful final image in cinema history.

When describing the ending of Thelma & Louise, director Ridley Scott recalled that “it just seemed appropriate that they continue the journey”. The iconic final freeze-frame symbolises the two friends’ freedom, and by ending on them suspended in mid-air, the image immortalises the characters. As Scott suggests, if we each interpret the ending more figuratively than literally, the women do not die but carry on flying. Before they drive off, Thelma even tells Louise, “Let’s not get caught. Let’s keep going”.

The vast expanse of the Grand Canyon represents the pinnacle of Thelma and Louise’s trip. They have reached the highest points of their respective lives and, having transcended their former roles of housewife and waitress, there is nowhere else for them to go but up. As an iconic American landmark of natural beauty, the awe-inspiring canyon viewed against the sky symbolises the ascension of the two women and their literal flight powerfully symbolises their departure.

The conventional Hollywood happy ending invariably presents marriage as woman’s ultimate goal. The films of Walt Disney Animation demonstrate an ingrained insistence upon a ‘happy ending’ equating to living ‘happily ever after’ with a man. Film writer Edward Ross claims that “from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Beauty and the Beast and beyond, Disney has long characterised its female characters as damsels in need of rescue, for whom marriage is the ultimate goal”. As the first Disney animation, Snow White established the theme of the ‘marriage goal’, beginning a troubling trend that future Disney films would follow. One of the main songs in the film is “Someday My Prince Will Come”, and Snow White continually fantasises about how “then he will carry me away to his castle, where we will live happily ever after”. Snow White literally sits and waits for a romantic partner, dreaming about the day she will finally find happiness within the arms of a man. The film ends with her prince waking and rescuing her, before lifting her onto a white horse, essentially parodying the definition of a ‘fairy tale’, as the prince and princess ride off to a golden palace in the distance. There is literal narrative closure as we are shown the last page of a book that reads “and they lived happily ever after”.

Thelma & Louise is subversive not only in its refusal to conform to patriarchal conventions, but also in its lack of closure. Whereas conventional Hollywood endings encourage us to imagine a life beyond the image, as seen with Snow White and her prince, Thelma & Louise encourages us not to envisage what happens beyond the freeze-frame. With the final shot, we are left with a positive and uplifting image of Thelma and Louise flying through the sky. If their story ends when the film does, they do not die, but are immortalised in that moment, ascending from the world below.

Screenwriter Callie Khouri has since stated that “after all they had been through [she] didn’t want anything to be able to touch them”. By driving off the cliff, the pair escape the confines of the world. As Khouri intended, they are untouchable in their flight. Film critic Manohla Dargis suggests that the final destination of Thelma and Louise is ultimately irrelevant when compared to the strength of their friendship. Dargis contends that “no matter where their trip finally ends, Thelma and Louise have reinvented sisterhood for the American screen”. Again, this idea encourages each of us to not prioritise the coming deaths of the protagonists but to acknowledge the greater importance of the characters’ lives and friendship. The final gaze in the film is at each other, as they smile in mutual exhilaration.

The lyrics of Glenn Frey’s “Part of Me, Part of You” illustrate the essential message of the film, which is about friendship and loyalty. The line: “you and I will always be together, from this day on you’ll never walk alone”, evokes the inseparability of Thelma and Louise. Frey’s lines reflect the “tragic but idealistic” tone of the film referred to by Marita Sturken, as the women end their journey but achieve an unbreakable bond of friendship.

Though Thelma & Louise does not have a typical fairy tale ending, it draws on the ‘happy ending’ idea, albeit unconventionally by freeing its protagonists from patriarchal society. It is an adult fairy tale insofar as it eschews the naivety of the type of happy ending that involves marrying a prince. The refusal of the characters to submit to patriarchy within the narrative is simultaneously reflected in its unconventional ending.

With their deaths not being shown, the pair are effectively mythologised. American author Laura Shapiro describes the ending as being about “two women whose clasped hands are their most powerful weapon”. They are not violent in their final decision, but nor are they defeatist.

Thelma & Louise shatters expectations of a Hollywood happy ending. It diverges from the patriarchal definition, exchanging heteronormative union for liberation and platonic companionship. Scott’s protagonists pursue their own destinies and ultimately rescue themselves. Thelma & Louise is therefore subversive not only in its refusal to conform to patriarchal conventions, but also in its lack of closure, as its one final still image leaves us with an impossible ‘forever’.

Written by Gala Woolley

You can support Gala Woolley in the following places:

Twitter – @GalaWoolley
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The Moscow Film School was founded in 1919, a year after the end of the First World War. While the school was initially formed in order to bring the Russian Soviet Republic together through the use of propaganda, the Soviets were equally interested in how and why film was so effective as a medium. The Kuleshov Workshop, a branch of this school, was founded and run by Lev Kuleshov, one of the first film theorists. Since there was little to no access to film stock, Kuleshov focused on studying the psychological effects of cinema, figuring out the most effective ways to convey meaning through images. One of these experiments, The Kuleshov Effect, which was expanded upon by Sergei Eisenstein and later Alfred Hitchcock, showed how audiences derive meaning from different shots depending on the order in which they are edited together. While film pioneers in the United States, such as D.W. Griffith, approached editing from a practical standpoint – a way to retain continuity and ground the audience in a sense of reality – Kuleshov disregarded continuity all together and believed that editing could be used to manipulate the audience in order to achieve the highest emotional impact. Because of Lev Kuleshov and other filmmakers that came after, we now know that meaning is attained not from the images themselves, but their juxtaposition; the act of putting it all together. Context is everything.

In the opening sequence of Arrival, the 2016 science fiction film directed by Denis Villeneuve and based on the short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, we see the birth, life, and untimely death of a young girl, the daughter of central protagonist Louise (Amy Adams). Immediately afterward, Louise is seen at work, seemingly disinterested in the world around her even when, to everyone else’s horror and wonder, aliens land on Earth. It’s clear that Louise is still mourning the death of her daughter, that she is a shell of her former self. Our perception of how Louise is feeling, the meaning we attach to her every movement and facial expression, is derived from the sequence that came before. The entire film hinges on the juxtaposition of these two opening scenes. In fact, Denis Villeneuve and editor Joe Walker had such a firm grasp on how editing affects the presentation of a story that they were able to pull off a twist that none of us saw coming.

Throughout Arrival, the filmmakers give each of us the tools to uncover the truth. While the editing creates context and influences us into assuming certain truths about the story – Louise had a daughter and her daughter is now dead – the story itself is begging us to take a closer look, to understand that the truth (something we often think of as immovable and objective and right) is only as real as our perception allows it to be. When the aliens arrive, Louise, a linguist, is hired to figure out how to talk to these strange creatures, the intention being for her to eventually ask them what they want and why they’re here. All the governments of the world are on edge, focused solely on the possible threat of violence and alien invasion. To them, fear of the other, of outsiders and strangers, those who are different, clouds their judgment. Seen through this lens, everything the aliens do is malevolent. It’s this kind of thinking, this radicalisation and fear-mongering, that brings us to the brink of destruction.

Before two soldiers plant a bomb inside the alien spaceship, killing one of the creatures and almost murdering Louise and Ian (Jeremy Renner), Arrival shows the soldiers watching a radio talk show online. The show, whose host very obviously brings to mind right-wing American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, is a clear example of how what you say doesn’t matter as much as how you say it. It shows us how easy it is to twist and strangle the truth to fit your own narrative. Taking into account the spread of lies and misinformation following the 2020 Presidential Election and the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th 2021, Arrival now seems more timely than ever. In a film about language and communication, Arrival demonstrates how, as Abraham Maslow said, “If all I ever gave you was a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” a phrase Louise repeats towards the end of the film.

While the military views these creatures, later known as Heptapods, as hostile, Louise perceives them to be benevolent. Louise is patient and kind; she knows through her study of language that listening and learning is the key to understanding. She does not perceive their mere presence as a threat, she simply wants to connect with the Heptapods. Her curiosity about their language and her vulnerability is what allows her and Ian to unravel the mystery of what the Heptapods are trying to say.

Though the film is clearly on Louise’s side, Arrival is not about wrong or right, good or evil. It’s about the human condition, a study in why and how we respond to things we don’t understand; and, just as with film editing, the meaning we assign to them. When Ian first meets Louise, he introduces himself by saying Louise is wrong about the cornerstone of human civilization. Louise, of course, says it’s language, but Ian says it’s science. Neither is right and neither is wrong because that isn’t the point – the point is perspective. The movie is practically screaming at us to make sure we consider that everything is not as it seems. 

In the middle of the film, Louise begins learning the Heptapods’ language. During her time with them, she learns that their language is semasiographic – conveying meaning, not sound. Much like early silent films, the Heptapods rely solely on images. “Unlike speech, their logograms are free of time,” Ian tells us through voice over. This type of language is called nonlinear orthography. As she continues to immerse herself in this foreign language, Louise begins dreaming in the language, and the flashbacks of her daughter’s life and death become more and more frequent. During one of these dreams, Ian and Louise discuss how learning a different language can rewire your brain. “It’s the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis,” Louise explains. “It’s theory that the language you speak determines how you think.”

This scene is interesting not only for the information it conveys, but how it chooses to convey it. In the bonus features on the Blu-ray edition of Arrival, editor Joe Walker explained that this scene was originally much longer and the final cut was created by a happy accident in the editing room. While he and Denis Villeneuve agreed that the scene should be cut for pacing reasons, they realized that explaining the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis was key to understanding the end of the film. Joe Walker went on to say that in editing bits and pieces of the scene together, including using a bizarre jump cut of Jeremy Renner, they were able to create a nightmarish scene that better reflected Louise’s fragile mental state. This is just another example of smart and effective editing that, rather than keep the audience grounded, allows us to feel the way Louise does – disoriented, tired, and confused. It’s this ability to manipulate time and space that allows the filmmakers to construct the most satisfying and meaningful narrative. “Time,” Walker states, “is the editor’s superpower.”

Time, as it turns out, is also the Heptapods’ superpower. In the last half of the film, Louise finally discovers what the Heptapods want. In response to her asking what their purpose is, one of the Heptapods says, “offer weapon”. Because of Louise’s own views on the Heptapods, she believes this isn’t necessarily cause for alarm. For all they know, the Heptapods could actually be talking about a tool, not knowing the difference. But it doesn’t matter. The other countries are on the offensive, believing the aliens have given them weapons to destroy each other, while Louise believes that they have all been given pieces of a puzzle to solve. To work together – not against each other. As a last ditch effort, and as the military tries to stop the other nations of the world from starting a world war, Louise goes back inside their spaceship. 

The Heptapods don’t want anything. Not yet, anyway. The Heptapods have come to give us something – their language. They offer it to us as a tool to save our world from total annihilation so that, thousands of years from now, we can help them in return. Louise is confused, wondering how the Heptapods can know the future. Suddenly, she is greeted with another flashback of her daughter and then, a bombshell: Louise is not remembering the past… she is seeing the future. The theory was right. Learning how to speak their language has rewired Louise’s brain. She can perceive time as they do. It’s not a straight line anymore, It’s all happening at once. Everything that is going to happen has already happened. The realization is a gut punch to Louise and to each of us – our truth is ripped away. Louise wasn’t sad or grieving in the beginning of the film, it was only because we saw her daughter’s death first that we assigned those emotions to her. Louise was a blank canvas that we painted our perceptions upon, much like the Heptapods themselves.

In the end, Louise saves the world. In a time rife with disease and poverty, where leaders are more concerned with lining their pockets than stopping a global pandemic, it’s a nice thing to see, a nice place to escape to. At its core, Arrival is a fantasy about what would happen if our world leaders finally put their own interests aside and did what was right for society – for humanity. And although Louise is altered irrevocably, although she can see her entire life, every single thing, before it has happened, and can feel the loss of everything she’s yet to lose, she chooses to do it all anyway. “Memory is a strange thing,” Louise says in the opening lines of Arrival. “It doesn’t work the way I thought it did. We are so bound by time, by its order.” It’s only now that we fully understand what she means.

We may never figure out how to see the future, or how to get all of the nations of the world to work together. Maybe we’ll always be afraid of the unknown and maybe, no matter how hard we try, we’ll always hate what we don’t understand. For us, time will always be rigid and fixed. But film can transcend time. It can alter and manipulate it. Film is a language too, a language that can be used as a weapon to sow dissent and fear, or as a tool to teach us that some things are universal; that maybe we aren’t so different from one another after all. Film can bypass language barriers. Film is a living, breathing memory of how we think and feel, how we live and die. No, movies can’t save the world, they can’t quell our desire for destruction or rid us of our thirst for violence, but with movies we can rewind and replay our favorite parts, skip the bad stuff and relive the magic. Even though we may already know the ending, even though it might not be the one we want, like Louise, we still choose to sit down and press play. 

Written by Margaret Roarty

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The first shock for the trailer is that it contains no footage from the film at all. Instead, director Alfred Hitchcock himself takes the viewer for a guided tour around the Bates Motel, or as it is now to be referred to as: ‘the scene of the crime’. The trailer proceeds like this. We’re taken up to the house, and introduced to the stairs, where ‘at the top of these stairs, that’s where the second murder took place.’ We are led through ‘the woman’s bedroom’, a quick glance towards the bathroom, and then escorted down to the motel. There’s a quick detour to the reception, and then across to cabin number one, which, in the bathroom, is ‘all tidied up now. Big difference. You should have seen the blood.’ Hearing the shower running, Hitchcock pulls back the curtain, to reveal Vera Miles (thought of as Janet Leigh for many years) in the shower, and at her scream, the famous logo fades into view over the screeching violins of the shower scene, and the credits roll for the feature film.

It’s an astonishing text on a variety of levels, not least of which is that Hitchcock draws a very fine line between comedy and suspense, a trademark of all his films. This is clearly evident in the music, which is a combination of Hermann’s score, and music re-used from The Trouble with Harry (dir Alfred Hitchcock, 1955), also by Bernard Hermann. The Psycho score is sinister and suspenseful, whereas the music from The Trouble with Harry is very light, jolly, and upbeat. This piece is usually played when moving from one location to another, as a theme park might pipe music on the paths between attractions. Tensions are therefore raised as Hitchcock suggests what might have happened in the woman’s bedroom, or the reception, but he soon sweeps us along to somewhere else, leaving us hanging in an amusingly frustrating fashion.

The writing of Hitchcock’s dialogue is remarkably clever. He introduces most of the plot points, such as the murder at the staircase, or the toilet where ‘an important clue was found here’, which those who have seen the film will understand. Yet the precise details of all of these things are never revealed, making it frustrating for those who haven’t. For instance, when referring to a painting in Bates’ reception, Hitchcock says that ‘this picture, has great significance, because… erm, let’s go along to cabin number 1; I want to show you something there.’ He goes through half a dozen of these moments, beginning to venture into spoiler territory, before leaving again to avoid spilling the beans.

This is both hilarious and, for anyone who hasn’t seen the film, which would have been most people at the time, incredibly suspenseful. He has piqued his audience’s interest, but hasn’t revealed anything. We know something happens, but not exactly what, and we wait for him to reveal answers as he deliberately denies the knowledge over and over again. As any student of storytelling knows, there’s a theory called ‘Chekhov’s gun’, which, roughly paraphrasing, says that if you have a gun on stage in act 1, it must go off by act 3. Nothing must be superfluous, and anything created for tension needs to pay off. Therefore, after creating comedic tension throughout the film with several of these metaphorical guns, Hitchcock needs a way to release it. Here’s where the Vera Miles shower comes into play at the end.

Recommended for you: Top 10 Alfred Hitchcock Films

By dialling down the sound just before to a quiet section of strings, once revealed, Miles’ scream pierces our ears with additional force. When the title also flashes across the screen, and Hermann’s violins screech in the background before fading into the main theme, Hitchcock has presented a well-earned jump scare. The tension the viewer has been feeling is suddenly and violently released, the shoulders relax, and the names of the cast begin to appear. Everyone has survived. Well done to all for making it through the trailer. But is this really the answer the audience has been looking for? What does someone in the shower have to do with the rest of the clues that Hitchcock has given us?

It isn’t uncommon to hear complaints that modern trailers reveal too much; it must be said that with some, you can work out most of the plot until act 3 from two minutes of footage. Hitchcock here, humorously and with lashings of satire, gives you exactly the same thing. You know that there will be at least two murders (one of which is at the top of the stairs of the house), that there’s a strange, horrible and ugly woman, and that there’s a lot of blood in the bathroom of cabin 1 from another murder. Most people would say that’s giving away an awful lot of spoilers, and yet to compound this, the trailer states that nobody is allowed into the cinema after the start of the film, which was one of the main marketing ploys to keep one of the deaths a secret, and to stop someone walking in on it without context. Hitchcock gives us a trailer, a press review, and a new short film, all in one go, whilst choosing exactly which clues to give, and how they will be given. An astonishing feat.

Trailers have used clips from scenes that never made it into the film (The Dictator did this in 2012 for example), but by and large, most of the footage is either from the film, or made to appear as if it’s from the final product. For a film to do something so radically different, unique, tongue-in-cheek, and downright incredible, is to be admired. Why don’t others follow this route? It may be purely financial reasons; fitting it into the schedule and budget would be concerning; but some larger productions would surely have the money and the time? Perhaps someone like Taiki Waititi could go off the rails and produce something similar to be memorable and stand out from the crowd; he certainly has the comedic mind for it. In any case, the theatrical trailer for Psycho is a shining outlier against an invasion of bland, monotonous, similarly-styled trailers that have become the only way films are advertised in today’s world, and a marvellous film in its own standing.

-Article by Kieran Judge
-Twitter: @kjudgemental

For context, the proceeding scenes outline the scenario the characters are in. Stryker (John Wayne) has been told that he and his men are going to be thin on the ground, and need to dig in and stay put until reinforcements arrive. If they get charged, they’re all that’s there to stop the enemy. There’s to be no smoking, no talking, no moving around, or else the enemy will see how few they are, and they’ll be overrun. They must stay put, or risk ending up in body bags. The men spread out along the trench with a very nice tracking shot, with Sgt Stryker hunkering down on the far left of the trench (for us it’s the far right).

The next scene – the one being analysed – begins with two static shots of desolate palm trees. It’s night time, quiet, with smoke billowing from fires nearby. To emphasise the scene’s dread, and the unnerving quiet of the landscape, despite the occasional shelling in the background, Victor Young’s music kicks in. He uses a delicate ringing sound, presumably a sustained high note on a violin, with a heartbeat-like repeating motif underneath. The same sort of ringing noise would be used later in the D-Day shell-shock landings in Saving Private Ryan, and a similar, uncomfortable two-note droning would be used to great effect in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, in the bathroom scene with Pyle. It’s not the usual 40s war movie soundtrack, full of big brass and sweeping strings, and so it heightens the unusual tension, a kind of moral twilight zone, to use a phrase which would become well known in the coming years.

The scene cuts to the faces of two men in the trenches, dark and muddied. They’re keeping watch, nervous and on edge. And here it begins, the sound of a man on the battlefield crying out for help. Slow and deliberate, not the frantic cry of the wounded, but a name, repeated over and over again, methodically. The men note the cry, and the camera tracks along to the next duo through flashes of light from the explosions all around. It pauses. “That’s a marine,” one says, before the camera moves on again, passing over the next lot to the team fourth in line. They call to Stryker that they should go and help, but Stryker refuses. “You had your orders; don’t move.”

This is the crux of the scene’s impossible conflict. Someone calls out for help on the battlefield, but to obey orders, they must leave him to die. By situating Stryker as the last man in the line for the camera to reach, director Allan Dwan has allowed us to see and hear the reactions of all his squad before getting to the man in charge. Emotional and scared, they hear the plea of a wounded man and sympathise with him, wanting to help. By hearing everyone’s wish beforehand, it fires us up as well. The repetition of this drive to aid this person helps to convince us of its reasonableness, and also builds up a simple scenario of numbers, because it’s nine against one. When Stryker has to pull someone back in, claiming it could be a trick by the Japanese, another dimension is added to the conflict. There’s no way to tell who it is, and any movement could get them all killed. It’s against orders, and a risk he can’t take. In charge of another nine men as well as himself, he has to go somewhere deep within himself, and let someone die.

We cut back to the desolate palm trees, and the call changes. “Stryker,” says the voice. “Stryker.” In the wilderness of grenades and tank fire, someone is calling for Stryker personally to help. Cutting back to a two-shot in the trenches, Pfc. Conway (played by John Agar) tries to convince Stryker that it’s his man, Bass, because how many others would know his name? Stryker, however, is resolute. He won’t go out.

We cut to a different two-shot, the focus on Conway. He speaks out, asking if Stryker realises a man might be dying. He goes on about how he was brought up to be a great marine, but Stryker doesn’t want to hear it. Stryker stares out into the battlefield throughout the monologue, trying to get the thoughts out of his mind. His face is in the shadow, whereas Conway’s is raised to the moonlight. It’s a good cinematic touch which says exactly how each of them feels. Conway wears his emotions on his sleeve, trusting in moral virtues and righteousness to give him the ability to run in and grab their guy, whereas Wayne is in the midst of inner turmoil, his thoughts darkened.

Then Conway says that he’s going to get him, and if Stryker doesn’t like it, he’ll have to kill him. Conway leans over the edge of the trench and the camera shifts to focus solely on him, but it keeps Stryker’s rifle in shot. The barrel moves to Conway’s face. “That’s just what I’ll do”. It’s impersonal, cold and rational, and the camera shows this by hiding Wayne’s face, removing any trace of humanity from the decision.

It cuts back to Stryker in a close-up as, cold and merciless with eyes narrowed and hard, he cocks the rifle. Then back to Conway, and then Stryker, slowly building up the tension as the two men battle between emotion and logic, humanity and orders. All the while, the background score works its way into our nerves. Everything is on a knife edge, and we don’t know which way it will go. Would Stryker really shoot his second in command down for trying to save someone?

But Conway backs down, and Stryker returns to looking out into the battlefield. The calling starts up once more, and Conway casts Stryker a glance. Can he really just sit there and let the man call for help, possibly dying in a forgotten trench, without at least summoning the courage to take a chance and look?

The scene then cuts back to Stryker for a gut-wrenching single. It’s almost identical to the singles used in the confrontation between Conway and him, but the cinematography has changed. There’s now a dark shadow from his helmet covering his eyes, almost invisible save for two tiny points of light reflecting off the pupils, like a predatory animal. Stryker looks away, looks back, swallows, trying to keep his emotions contained. It’s clear that the decision to stay isn’t as easy as he made it seem. He’s battling with himself, trying to hold good to his orders against his own moral compass. And the most remarkable thing is that this final single lasts for roughly twenty-five seconds including the final fade to black. It never cuts away from Stryker’s face as he battles with himself, allowing Wayne to put in the performance of a lifetime, having to sit in the trenches of WWII listening to his man die, calling for his aid, and not being able to risk helping.

That this final shot fades away without resolving anything doubles up on the moral ambiguity of the scene, and keeps the tension high. This article won’t reveal the actual identity of the caller on the battlefield (you’ll have to watch the film yourself to find out), but who they were doesn’t detract from the pit-of-the-stomach terror felt every time the scene plays. It’s slow, agonising torture, which showcases one of the greatest actors of classic Hollywood on top form. He might have been best known for swinging a gun around on horseback with a cool accent, but here Wayne goes to the utter depths of his inner torment, and truly brings home how monstrous war is.

Recommended for you: Shot-for-Shot – Safe-Theft Scene in Hitchcock’s ‘Marnie’ (1964)

– Article by Kieran Judge
– Twitter: @kjudgemental

One such an answer that is often the cause of grievance and controversy is John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988). For those who adore the season’s staples such as White Christmas and It’s A Wonderful Life, and modern favourites such as Elf and Love Actually, the idea that a film about a showdown between a single NYPD officer and a group of vicious terrorists is even considered a Christmas film is, frankly, disgusting.

Well, sorry haters, but it turns out that Die Hard is actually part of a long tradition of non-conventional Christmas flicks – we have an extensive catalogue of Christmas Horrors for example, from Black Christmas in 1974 to Krampus in 2015. Christmas even makes its appearances in the most unlikely of plots: Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece Brazil, an Orwellian black comedy, is a prime example, as is the legendary crime thriller The French Connection. However, neither of these examples are considered Christmas movies (not even in the alternative or ironic sense), and rightly so. Christmas isn’t the focus of these films and is in fact used to highlight the darkness and evil of the stories it’s used in. That’s not very festive at all!

How Can a film Be Considered a True Christmas Movie Beyond the Mere Inclusion of the Holiday?

If we ignore the blatant capitalist message behind nearly every mainstream Yuletide film, we should consider the real message behind the original Christmas Story – The Nativity of course.

Pushing past the shepherds, kings and angels, Christmas is essentially the tale of light shining in the darkness, living in the hope of reconciliation and redemption. These are therefore the essential themes of any real Christmas film. Natalie Hayes of BBC Culture, in her article “The Magic Formula that Makes the Perfect Christmas Film”, noted that for a film to be considered a true Christmas movie, it must include the following elements: desire, a touch of magic, the value of family, and of course a dose of trial and tribulation for our heroes to overcome.

As hollow as some of these films seem to be to the lovers of a more Traditional Noel, the likes of Jingle All the Way do in fact meet these requirements, and with Die Hard being one of the most exceptional and beloved action movies of all time, it seems a very reasonable choice as a favourite Christmas film too. But what has come to my notice is the criminal overlooking of another alternative festive watch, one with striking similarities to Die Hard, released only a year prior: Lethal Weapon.

Like Die Hard, Richard Donner’s film meets the pre-requisites of a Christmas Classic and is again one of the most popular action movies from the 80s, likewise spawning an iconic franchise. Have we been duped all along with putting our money behind the inferior flick, or is Die Hard truly the superior of the pair? On the basis of which film boasts the truest Christmas Spirit, let us experience the most exciting of movie battles… Die Hard vs Lethal Weapon.

Desire

Is there an element of desire in these films? A want for something unattainable?

This is the first of the many uncanny similarities between Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, as both display a desire for a return to normality.

In Die Hard, John McClane (Bruce Willis) is flying to L.A from New York to see his wife Holly Gennaro (Bonnie Bedelia) on Christmas Eve, who works at the Nakatomi Plaza which is throwing a party. It becomes apparent that this is the first time John and Holly have seen each other in over six months and that they are more or less separated (especially as Holly is now going by her maiden name). It is revealed that Holly’s move to L.A. for a once in a lifetime promotion became a point of contention in their relationship – we don’t know exactly why, but it’s easy enough to make some assumptions: back in 1988, finding out that your wife is making more money than you would be an enormous shake up in the family dynamic, possibly too much for some men to handle. It is clear though, that although they are estranged, their marriage isn’t finished – Holly and John obviously still have feelings for one another, but it’s mixed in with a great deal of hurt, stopping them from seeing eye to eye. Thus we have the desire element: John wants a return to normality, the re-establishment of his traditional family set up (very nuclear, with the man being the breadwinner and all), but more importantly he desires to be a part of his family’s lives again.

Lethal Weapon has a more convergent plot than Die Hard.

It begins with the daily life of two LAPD police detectives – Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover), a fairly buttoned-down distinguished officer who enjoys the comforts of marital and familial bliss (and is learning to try to age gracefully), and Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson), a seemingly unattached man who is a total loose cannon on the job, wreaking havoc in his wake. The plot gleefully puts this odd couple together. It is Riggs who is the festive focal point of the movie as it his character that embodies the required desire element. Riggs’ careless and dangerous behaviour at work is suspected to be caused by suicidal tendencies after recently losing his wife in a car accident. There are occasions where it seems Riggs indeed wants to end his life, but this is actually more the desire to be reunited with his wife – the desire to be in a loving relationship again, the desire to have purpose.

It seems to be contradictory to the spirit of Christmas to have the film focus on the likes of depression and suicide, let alone in a film with probably the most insensitive approach to these topics, but that would be ignoring the fact that one of the most popular Christmas movies of all time, It’s A Wonderful Life, is about the divine intervention of an Angel working to stop a man from taking his own life on Christmas Eve. Die Hard is also depicting a common theme in Christmas fare, which is the impending breakdown of the family unit seen in the likes of The Preacher’s Wife and The Santa Clause. Technically both films are winning Brownie Points on that front, but the desire element is far more visceral in the case of Lethal Weapon: a shot of a teary-eyed Riggs shakily placing the end of the gun in his mouth after looking at the wedding photos of his dead wife is truly impactful.

Magic

The magic we could see in the likes of Die Hard and Lethal Weapon is not going to be in the traditional vein: no angels, no reindeer, no pixie dust, and very sadly no Santa Claus! That does not mean, however, that the magic they do have is not completely spine-tingling.

At first glance, the magic in Lethal Weapon is rather elusive, but it becomes apparent that the touch of Magic is indeed Martin Riggs, or really more Martin Riggs’ unorthodox policing methods:

“You’re not trying to draw a psycho pension! You really are crazy!”

In the real world, Riggs’ behaviour is not the kind to praise or laud, but Riggs’ apparent death wish makes him an almost unstoppable crime-fighting force – a lethal weapon. From deescalating a possible shootout by scaring the life out of a perpetrator, and saving a potential jumper’s life by throwing himself off the building whilst cuffed to them, it can be said Riggs gets the job done (in the most thoroughly entertaining way possible). However, his magical powers aren’t fully activated until he and Murtaugh are captured by the movie’s villainous drug barons – is it the electric shock torture or the power of new found friendship with Roger Murtaugh? Either way, Riggs is propelled into overcoming his captors and killing every bad guy that stands in his way, all in the name of rescuing his new partner. By the time we reach the climax, he is brutalised and half-drowned, yet he still manages to subdue the film’s Big Bad, Joshua (Gary Busey), by the power of his thighs alone. Magic.

With all that said, John McClane smirks and replies with a “Hold my beer.”

Die Hard is a more plot-driven story which lends itself to even more glorious action movie magic. It is made clear from the very beginning that McClane possesses the power of snarkiness, but the storming of Nakatomi Plaza by Hans Gruber’s (Alan Rickman’s) team of terrorists/thieves, catches McClane with his pants down (or rather with his shoes and socks off), leaving him to watch helplessly as the revellers of the office party are rounded up as hostages and Holly’s boss Mr Takagi (James Shigeta) is murdered. Luckily a present from Santa Claus re-establishes his cocky self-assuredness:

“Now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho.”

In the 2 hour run-time, we witness McClane relentlessly wiggle his way out of tight squeezes using the meagre resources at his disposal (which he usually attains by annihilating some hapless bad guy), whether its irritating Gruber with smart-ass comments through a stolen walkie-talkie or tossing the body of a man out of the window in an attempt to attract help from the outside. It is once McClane manages to get the attention of the LAPD (the corpse-tossing worked a treat) that the real magic begins, which is the revelation that McClane is better than everyone else alive, including you – ironic given that he spent the first half hour desperately crying out for help.

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John McClane resolves the terrorist siege single-handedly despite the presence of the LAPD, SWAT and the FBI; in fact McClane saves these apparent bozos from the machinations of the terrorists several times (whilst being mistaken as some sort of psycho killer to boot). Such a magical moment includes McClane blowing up a whole floor of terrorists (without miraculously harming any of the hostages), thus stopping their rocket launcher onslaught against the unsuspecting SWAT teams attempting to storm the plaza. Another noteworthy moment is when he rescues all the hostages from certain death seconds before some idiotic FBI agents unwittingly blow up a helipad they were gathered on (and as if saving countless lives isn’t enough, he narrowly escapes this chaos by leaping off the building with only a fire hose to save him from gravity).

It can’t be denied that the police politics of this 80s classic would be unnerving to modern eyes with its idolisation of McClane’s almost vigilante brand of justice, but with a healthy dose of self-awareness Die Hard is the ultimate power fantasy; one that is guaranteed to put a smile on your face. The exact kind of magic that you would need and want at Christmas.

As a basic siege film, the physical dangers faced by John McClane in Die Hard are of a much greater intensity than that of the leading duo in Lethal Weapon: the action is non-stop and quick paced, and far more shocking and gory. However, whilst Die Hard is driven by its plot, Lethal Weapon is more character focused, and as a consequence the psychological hurdles presented in Lethal Weapon are much more immense than those seen in Die Hard, despite the huge amount of peril Holly and John McClane face.

The Value of Family

It is now time to consider how much family is valued in these films; starting with Die Hard…

Is this film not just a metaphor for marriage and the active battle that is maintaining such a relationship?

It has to be confessed that it’s not exactly hard to be initially disappointed by John when we first meet him. It appears he has let his fragile masculinity get in the way of his marriage as he struggles to cope with his wife’s flourishing career. But my goodness is this an incredible attempt at reconciliation; the man walks over broken glass barefoot for Christ’s sake!

As we all know, big grand gestures can often be empty and meaningless; it is changed behaviour that is the real apology. So what a brilliant way to finish off this metaphor with Hans Gruber being defeated by John and Holly working together; transforming their marriage into a partnership – a union of absolute equals. It earns their riding off into the sunset, entangled in each other’s arms, and so gives us that desired cosy Christmas feeling – excellent!

Lethal Weapon, by comparison, has no such romantic metaphor; it instead depicts the very real devastation caused by unimaginable loss.

Martin Riggs is a man who is constantly putting himself and others in danger through his reckless behaviour, as he is now without purpose. He does state that it is “the job” that has so far prevented him from eating one of his own bullets, but the way he achieves results still points to a blatant death wish.

It’s when the initially dubious Murtaugh begins to let his guard down and allows Riggs into his inner sanctum, inviting him into his family home, that we see a transformation in Riggs. For you see, the central criminal scandal of Lethal Weapon – ex Vietnam War Special Forces officers turned drug baron mercenaries – most deeply affects Murtaugh; he is the most entangled and has the most to lose from this situation. By actually giving Riggs a chance (whose life literally hangs in the balance if he can’t find a working partnership), Riggs no longer lives dangerously for the sake of trying to feel alive whilst consumed with grief, he instead directs all of his ferocity towards protecting Murtaugh and his interests; this deep sense of caring spreads to the wider community surrounding him, seen when he is willing to grapple in the mud with Joshua after he murdered his fellow officers.

Lethal Weapon, in the contest of greatest redemption arc, takes the victory: Riggs is quite literally pulled from the jaws of death by the power of found family through his partnership with Murtaugh – they even share Christmas dinner. This transformation from death to life proves that Lethal Weapon values family the greatest.

True Christmas films are affairs of great emotion, our heroes often go through hell to then be redeemed with the happiest of endings. This is true for both Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, but it is proven that Lethal Weapon boasts the most intense and emotionally driven Christmas tale of hope.

All you Die Hard fans may have to reconsider your all-time favourite Christmas film, but if you guys don’t change your mind, there is nothing but respect for you: Die Hard is pretty kickass.

Recommended for you: 10 Excellent Non-Christmas Films Set at Christmas

Ever since Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) was released, fans and critics have been in awe of the cinematic tropes and expressive artistic choices displayed throughout the film. The Talented Mr. Ripley tells the story of Tom Ripley, played by a young Matt Damon, who travels to Venice to convince Dickie (Jude Law) to return to the US on his father’s request – Tom actually befriends Dickie’s father through false pretence at a Princeton University reunion (a university he never attended). The plot follows Tom as he makes friends with Dickie, pretending they have a backstory from Princeton, and becomes obsessed with his lifestyle – so much so that he begins to impersonate him as the narrative develops.

The film’s greatest achievement, and the moment that explores this tension in the most depth, is the final sequence. This sequence represents the last straw for Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) in his struggle between being himself and adopting another life – a struggle which ultimately results in him deciding to throw his real life away.

Throughout The Talented Mr. Ripley, Damon convincingly and eerily conveys Ripley’s character, expressing creepy mannerisms and an ultimately dark characterisation through expressive facial movements that work to communicate the individual’s complex personality. Damon portrays a shyness, combined with a strangeness, through both his awkward physicality and his unique delivery of the dialogue, cleverly portraying the other attributes of his character – most notably his more innocent and attractive traits – through his charming interaction with other characters and his emotional engagement, aspects that make him an utterly watchable and almost likable central character. Damon’s likable characterisation also increases his character’s impact upon the audience, making it even more surprising and scary when he unveils the darkness within him, his portrayal shifting as Minghella’s mise-en-scene transforms to emphasise the minute aspects of his performance, the cinematography elevating this powerful combination as arguably the most important cinematic element in the whole film.

The final sequence begins in the cabin of a boat, with Tom Ripley and Peter (his partner at the time, played by Jack Davenport). The entire sequence takes place in their cabin, bringing about an expectation of threat from Ripley that ensures that this section is extremely claustrophobic and uncomfortable to watch, not least due to the proximity at which Minghella positions us via the camera.

The camera’s position and placement throughout this sequence is significant; an over-use of over-the-shoulder shots (from Tom’s perspective) effectively emphasise the symbolic distance between the two characters while ensuring we are never too far from their tension. Tom has manipulated Peter in the narrative, and this untruthfulness is reflected in the physical distance between them – the camera’s position almost creates an element of dramatic irony, as it foreshadows the ultimate betrayal Tom commits on Peter, which Peter is obviously unaware of. The use of over-the-shoulder shots also portrays Tom’s dominance in this scene, prominently the high-angle, which furthermore adds to the uneasy atmosphere as the audience somewhat suspect that Tom has dark intentions for Peter.

This use of camera placement could be compared to the choices of Hitchcock, as the over-the-shoulder shot is frequently used in his films when ramping up tension. For example, in Psycho, Hitchcock uses many of these shots to create an almost constant sense of unease, cleverly communicating exactly what that character is seeing. There, we are each positioned with the character Hitchcock intends for us to identify with, and we are therefore encouraged to follow their emotional journey by being placed almost directly in their shoes. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Anthony Minghella positions us with Tom, asking us to adopt the character’s predatory eye, thus increasing our concern for Peter and the likelihood that Tom may strike at any moment.

Recommended for you: Top 10 Alfred Hitchcock Films

These over-the-shoulder shots are frequently mixed with close ups, which poignantly convey Tom’s rising internal panic, as the spectator uncomfortably views his facial expressions and reactions up close, the frame offering nowhere for us to hide. This increases the dramatic irony, as the audience know of his dark nature but Peter does not. A key example of this is the use of a medium close up of Tom laughing at Peter’s naivety, as he asks, “Why lie?”, and Tom’s response (referring to himself as Dickie – the personality he steals from Jude Law’s character), confirms to the audience that their relationship is built on lies. This scene is cut using shot-reverse-shots, which create a fast-paced continuity which intensifies the action in the scene; as the characters are mostly stationary, the quickfire shot-reverse-shot adds some energy to the dialogue. It is unknown at this point whether Tom is going to change and open up to Peter, but this is soon confirmed to not be the case as he asks, “Tell me some good things about Tom Ripley…”, and lays down with his head on Peter’s back – symbolic of his power in this situation but also the aspect of pathetic childish insecurity in his personality.

These close-ups and their cousin, the extreme close-up, are continuously returned to throughout this sequence as an effective way of conveying the intensity of Tom’s character and the rising tension occurring in his cabin. It creates an intense and overwhelming atmosphere because of its invasiveness, which is in contrast to how often close ups are used in cinema to encourage sympathy from the audience. The camera focuses on Damon’s contrasting emotions; the character is smiling one minute, and close to tears the next. Using close up shots to communicate Tom’s complex thought processes cleverly reflects his split personalities in playing both Tom and Dickie, and importantly they ramp up the tension even further, slowly unraveling the likely drastic action Tom will take to ensure his survival.

Lighting is also used as an important communicative device in this scene, creating a visual darkness to convey the underlying darkness of the narrative. The only lighting throughout this sequence is low-key, displayed through the lamps visible within the frame. This artificial, but naturalistic dim lighting, alongside the claustrophobic location, helps the framing and editing to create the depressing tone of the action and the grim foreboding each aspect is working towards us noticing. The use of low-key lighting here evokes Film Noir, and especially classic releases such as Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), where the dark colours and use of contrasts in the lighting create an ominous tone to the action and a clear view of the moral black and white, good and evil narrative at its core.

In addition to the Noir inspired lighting and the Hitchockian camera placement, the colour palette of this sequence also adds to the darkness within the narrative and its central character Tom, the colour scheme being dull, including lots of browns and greys – one reason could be to suggest Tom’s feelings of dullness and boredom in his own real life, whereas another reading could be that Tom is beginning to blend his two lives (the one of Tom, and the one he stole from Dickie) together. The costume design places Tom in a black outfit, connoting his inner darkness and his capability of murder, as Peter’s grey outfit connotes misery and the impending doom of his death, while still presenting the character as being a faded colour that can blend into the background, just as Tom is beginning to see him as yet another person standing in his way. The contrasting costume choices for Tom and Peter signify the negative development between the characters, how their lives have been derailed (mainly Tom’s), and ultimately outline Tom’s foreseeable fate.

The visual dullness of the mise-en-scene is nicely juxtaposed with the frantic nature of the camerawork. Continuously in this scene, the camera movement represents the bobbing of a boat, as it moves up and down constantly, which creates immersion for the spectator because they feel as if they, too, are on the boat with the characters. The erratic nature of the cinematography could also represent the instability of Tom, as well as the inevitable combustion of his relationship and of the narrative. The camera moving up and down constantly is a stark contrast to the cinematography on offer in the rest of the film, which is more steady and traditional, thus increasing the impact of this cinematic choice in this sequence.

The penultimate part of this sequence is the murder of Peter by Tom’s hand, which interestingly occurs off-screen. The camera focuses on Damon’s face and then cuts to a long shot of Tom entering his empty room on the boat, which is almost parallel to Peter’s, but the symmetry emphasises the room’s emptiness. This suggests to the audience that he has wiped his slate clean of his real life as Tom Ripley and will now forever live a lie. The editing used here poignantly closes the chapter in Tom’s life, whilst simultaneously closing the sequence and the film in general. The decision to not show the murder visually, and to just keep the audio track, is arguably more traumatic and harrowing for the audience as it would have been for Minghella to show the murder fully, as the choice not only leaves the murder up to the imagination of the viewer (a far more potent force than that of a visual depiction) but it adds some more mystery to this mystery-thriller, Minghella choosing to play a cunning game with his audience as Tom has with the other characters.

The voiceover of the previous shot continues over the new visuals, where Tom asks Peter to “Tell me some nice things about Tom Ripley”, and Peter responds with numerous comments which are elongated to build the tension for the audience as they wonder what happened and why Tom is now alone in his cabin. As the ending nears, Peter’s voice becomes raspier and slower in the voiceover, as he says “Tom is crushing me”. This line is repeated, and the desperation in Peter’s voice becomes apparent as the audience realise that he is being suffocated. The audio used in the last section is Peter’s, and only Peter’s, describing nice things about Tom and then leading onto the traumatic repetition of “Tom is crushing me”. The disconcerting and distressing juxtaposition of dialogue and tone here emphatically communicates Tom’s sudden change in character, and shocks the audience due to the suddenness of Peter’s suffering and unavoidable death.

Mirrors are used as a motif in the mise en scene of this sequence, which represent Tom’s reflection process of his life choices and symbolise all of the different personalities that he has portrayed throughout the narrative. In the last shot, a door in his cabin ominously closes, reflected in a mirror so it appears there are multiple doors – this is a visual metaphor of his characterisation. The door finally shuts, which symbolises that Tom will be metaphorically trapped forever in the basement – as he references to Peter earlier – which is a symbol of his entrapment in his dark mind. It is also symbolic of closing a chapter in his life, which is in fact his whole existence as Tom Ripley, as he has given himself an ultimatum and chosen to become his fake personality for life. The ending of this sequence perfectly concludes the dark narrative, and this impactful sequence ties together the crazy twists and turns of Tom Ripley’s story.

The darkness of this sequence is the reason why it is arguably the most poignant part of this film. The combination of convincing characterisation, phenomenal performance, low-key but effective lighting, gloomy set and costume design, and uncharacteristically erratic cinematography, ensures that this harrowing narrative is delivered with the most impact, and done in a way to impress the viewer every time. The cinematic tropes explored in this sequence never fail to disturb, and continue to appear unique due to the way they are used and exhibited in union.

Written by Sophie Cook

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Other sequels make people wonder why they were made. You’d probably say “money”, but that answer isn’t satisfying the segment of film fans that could prefer original work to Transformers: The Last Knight or the millionth Paranormal Activity. Sure, most franchise garbage wasn’t created at the expense of an underrated indie gem, and commercial tripe like Paranormal Activity ends up funding the projects more discerning film fans do enjoy – none of that will end the perpetual whining about the next big budget shlock sequel. 

Evidently, some films have artistic merit, and others will line the pockets of studio executives. What’s the deal with a sequel to the So Bad It’s Good 2015 movie Pitching Love and Catching Faith? 

Marketing materials for the original title, Pitching Love and Catching Faith 2. Who is the catcher in the first photo? I need to see the original script.

Star Mountain Pictures returns to the saga of Tyler with Romance in the Outfield: Double Play. The first film was initially titled Romance in the Outfield, and this film followed in the tradition of changing the name of Star Mountain’s flagship franchise. Double Play is obviously a brilliant double entendre, referring to the baseball term and the fact that this movie has two storylines. The film was released in February of 2020 and, as of writing, has received a 6.3/10 on IMDb and a 3/5 on Amazon because people can’t tell generic, sappy romance from genuinely terrible filmmaking.

Comparing this movie to Hallmark is offensive to Hallmark – their films are basically Citizen Kane compared to this.

Star Mountain Pictures no longer has a website, so their Facebook page is the only existing source of first-hand information on the film. Here’s the verbatim plot summary listed under the “About” section:

“When TYLER comes home from an injury that could end his career, and has him in the dugout coaching in a high-stake game of softball, against KENZIE, a pretty face, and a feisty coach, where they have a history together. They don’t exactly hit it off in the game opener where she pitches him some love of her own, but in the game of love—competitiveness and love don’t mix. They must rekindle the love they once had and learn to forgive and forget leaving behind their complicated history.

Love strikes in different ways when TIFFANY, the iconic Christian girl is running away from her vows, and randomly jumps into CHASE’s car, a free-spirited Maverick—who quickly sweeps her off her feet and leaves her questioning her faith and values.

Tyler must choose what’s most important between a career and love, and Kenzie must let go and give him a second chance. Will he choose his baseball career over her? And will she steal his heart, or strike out in the game of love?”

Who let someone get away with writing this? That first sentence is a wild ride.

Here’s a handy tip I use to write: read what you’re writing out loud to see if it flows naturally. There are so many ways to convey that Tyler is injured and coaching softball against an ex-girlfriend, but someone decided to let a young child dictate this summary. The heavy-handed metaphors will induce more eye-rolls than interest, but that won’t stop the film from recycling any word that can be used to describe baseball and a relationship.

After the first movie, the idea that “competitiveness and love don’t mix” still doesn’t make sense. Who is getting that theme from this film where the main characters ultimately end up together? Sure, the first movie says it once at the end, but it does a terrible job of showing how competition gets the better of these boring relationships. Do the filmmakers think that competitiveness within a relationship is a problem, or the desire to compete in other fields like sports is an issue? Is acting sassy or flirty the same thing as being competitive? The exact answer is never clear. This movie doesn’t even bother to have the woman apologize to someone for being too competitive with a sport… because that’s the other thing that’s vying for Tyler’s heart.

I wish a physical manifestation of baseball was in this movie trying to get Tyler to ditch Kenzie and come date it instead. Watch baseball incarnate teach him how to bat, get into a fight at a baseball field, and then declare its love while asking Tyler to forgive it for being so selfish.

Released a few years after Pyscho, Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) was more of a tense drama than a thriller, though there are still some typical Hitchcock elements interwoven into the film. About 1/3 of the way through the film comes a truly remarkable scene: a theft from a safe. In this article, the safe theft scene will be dissected shot for shot to establish how it was that Hitchock manipulated his audiences into feeling so on edge in his often overlooked 1964 classic.

Spoilers Ahead!

The Setup: Marnie (Tippi Hedron) is a thief posing under an alias at a company owned by Sean Connery’s character Mark. Worried about the growing intimacy between Mark and herself, Marnie makes the decision to break into his company’s safe, steal as much cash as possible, and then vanish into thin air.

The first shot shows everyone in the company leaving after the end of a working day. Marnie puts on her coat, says goodbye to her colleague Susan, and proceeds to the bathroom. There are several things to notice about the initial tracking shot that follows behind her…

Firstly, it gets us intimately involved with her movements, and then it ties us (at least for this scene) to Marnie. We are with Marnie, and thus it feels like anything that happens to her in the future, happens to us too. This basic establishment of empathy (by establishing the character as a proxy for ourselves) means that if any danger should stalk our heroine, it shall stalk us as well. This subliminal empathy alignment is a fundamental necessity for increasing suspense.

Marnie walks into the bathroom and blanks everyone at the sinks. This sets her apart from the others; she is different, and it’s a different treatment of her colleagues than we have seen with Susan. She silently heads into one of the stalls and Hitchcock cuts to being inside with her, in darkness save for a strip of light piercing over the top of the door and illuminating Marnie’s face. You’ll see this cinematography a lot, a character in darkness save for light across the eyes; think of Orson Welles clapping in the theatre in Citizen Kane. The surroundings suggest the character to be in some kind of danger or trouble, but we still see the emotions on their face reacting to the situation. Hitchcock holds this shot for what seems like an age, Marnie listening for those in the bathroom to leave, then listening outside, and then finally stepping out. It’s nearly a full minute between cuts. As an audience, we’re so used to seeing cuts in films at a regular pace that long takes always throw us off. Waiting and waiting ratchets up that tension like nothing else in the editor’s arsenal.

Marnie steps out of the stall and stands by the sink for a moment before heading out to the main office space. From the moment she leaves the stall to the very end of the scene, the whole thing is devoid of almost any sound at all. Every little sound from now on could be a giveaway, letting someone know that we are here when we shouldn’t be. Sometimes an absence of sound and music is just as effective as having it.

Now we get to the main body of the scene.

We watch Marnie exit the bathroom and check to see if anyone is there. Hitchcock, obeying all his classical film principals, cuts to a POV shot of an empty office on Marnie’s look, and we cut back to her looking behind, subsequently beginning to walk into the office. Hitchcock doubles down on our association with Marnie, and so he uses a POV tracking shot of Marnie checking the cubicles for any workers. He wants us feeling every little tremble of fear, every slight moment of paranoia. We then return to watch Marnie reach into her bag for the key to the drawer where her boss keeps the safe combination, focusing in for a close-up on the key to make sure we know the information is important. Hitchcock is always very economical in that fashion; every shot has a very specific purpose that suits exactly what the story calls for.

The shot returns to a medium and continues to follow Marnie. It doesn’t cut away as Marnie rounds the table, picks up her bag, comes back around, heads over to another desk and uses the key to open it up. Again… long, simple takes show exactly what is happening, drawing out the tension like an elastic band.

Hitchcock cuts to a close-up of the combination as Marnie tracks it down with her hand, slowly, laboriously. Then right back to another close-up of Marnie looking around, the character making sure nobody is there to see her getting the safe combination. There’s nobody there. Phew, we’re safe… for now. Keeping the same shot, the heroine moves to the door to the room where the safe is kept and slips inside. She thinks about closing it, but instead holds it wide open; making sure she’s got a quick getaway if she needs it. This, in turn, sets up the key shot of the whole sequence which comes into play in a moment’s time.

Next is a close-up of Marnie’s hand turning the dial to the safe, and then the next wide is what really makes this sequence stand out…

Here we have a great big wide shot. On the right hand side of the screen is Marnie opening the safe. In the very foreground Hitch makes sure to include the balustrade for the stairs, reminding us of where the exit is. And then, at the moment Marnie swings open the second safe door, on the left hand side of the screen comes the cleaning lady, both characters oblivious to one another.

This kind of two-shot is an absolute classic of Hitchcock’s masterful, economic framing. He presents the character on one side of the screen, and the danger on the other. You see this kind of framing in Psycho with the shadow of Mother through the shower curtain. Much of Rear Window is built on this same technique. In a single shot he applies his ‘bomb theory’, where suspense is built by an audience having knowledge the characters don’t (find a link to an interview with Hitchcock about this at the end of the article). Even if you see nothing apart from this single shot, the way it is framed and designed means that you know exactly what is happening without any context. The shot is held for over 40 seconds, letting the suspense creep and creep as the cleaning lady mops the floor, getting ever closer to us, to blocking our escape, to discovering Marnie at work.

Finally we cut to a close-up of Marnie as she leaves the safe, and stops as she sees the cleaning lady. Here the POV serves doubly, not only to keep us in Marnie’s predicament, but also by showing us exactly where the two characters are in relation to one another. The flat two-shot can’t give us all the information regarding the spatial relationship between them, so this shot serves. We see our threat through the glass, but she can see us too. We’re now incredibly vulnerable, and any slight slip will give the game away. We return to Marnie, and another POV follows, looking for the stairs. It seems so close, and yet we’re still too far away, and we have to risk exposure to get there. Here we have a clear goal, and a clear obstacle stopping us. It’s simple, effective storytelling.

We cut to a medium of Marnie, and pan down as she takes off her shoes and slips them into her pockets. Again it’s all in one shot; if we can keep from cutting, the more we can stretch that elastic band of tension. And then, we track behind her as she begins to step out from the safety of the safe-room and across the office towards the stairs. The sound of water in the mop-bucket keeps us on edge. It’s menacing, all the more so because there are no other noises. All we hear is the constant reminder that danger is right in front of us, and can catch us at any moment.

Hitchcock chooses now to break his routine and goes for quicker, more rapid editing, trying to get our hearts truly pumping; wanting us to run. A quick cut down to Marnie’s feet to remind us of her lack of shoes, and then a close up of her left hand pocket, shoe sticking out. Her feet remind us of the need for silence, and the shoe begins the next danger; it falling out. We return to our tracking with Marnie, and then back to the shoe. It’s definitely further out now, and we realise, sick to our stomach, that she doesn’t know it’s about to fall out. Once again, a danger the character is unaware of, piling on bomb after bomb, all with the potential to explode in our face. A further cut to Marnie walking, eyes focused on not being detected by the cleaner, and another cut to her shoe. It’s almost out now, ready to fall and give us up.

It falls. Our breath catches. We cut to a low angle, camera on the floor, of the shoe hitting the floor with a thud made all the louder by the relative quiet. In the background, the cleaner is specifically positioned. Not only has the noise just given us away, but right in front of the threat we were avoiding, tying both dangers together. Again, economical Hitchcock does it in a single shot.

We cut to Marnie, her eyes wide in horror as she turns to see the shoe on the floor, before looking to see if she has been caught. To our relief, the cleaner is still going, oblivious to us. But does the heart rate stop? Of course not. The shoe falling shows that we’re not invulnerable, that things can go wrong, and she still might turn around and spot Marnie at any given moment. We cut back to Marnie as she quickly, quietly picks up her shoe and heads for the stairs.

In this same shot, Hitchcock gives us a final little heart pump as we hear a door open. Marnie makes it to the stairs with barely a second to spare as a worker comes in from the left hand side of the screen. Once more, the screen is split (this time by the wooden post) to position Marnie in peril on the right hand side of the screen, with this new danger on the left, both again unaware of each other. Marnie descends out of shot and down the stairs as we follow the gentleman to the cleaner, who talks to her loudly with a hand to his mouth to amplify his voice. She was hard of hearing the whole time. Hitchcock uses this to end the scene by deflating our pent-up tension, allowing the next scene to begin from a neutral standpoint, closing it off in a natural and pleasing fashion.

The safe-stealing scene is a perfect example of what made the director so famous. Alfred Hitchcock presents us with a slice of simple, elegant unease, pulling out every trick in the book to get our hearts beating far faster than they should be. There are no killers here, no evil birds; just the simple fear that we, like Marnie, will be caught in a horrifically compromising situation. The graceful efficiency in this scene is what makes it such a delight to watch, and an underappreciated master class in subtle suspense.

Article by Kieran Judge
Twitter: KJudgeMental

A link to a quick interview with Hitchcock discussing his ‘bomb’ theory of suspense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPFsuc_M_3E