On Music Cues in Melania

As an addendum to my main piece on Melania, I simply must discuss the music in this movie. It is bananas. It is entirely cuckoo for cocoa nuts. Its loops are the fruitiest. The first four or so minutes are a montage of Melania driving and flying, and it is all underscored, inexplicably, with “Gimme Shelter,” a song about the horrors of war. Thematically, it makes no sense, but functionally, Melania’s entrance into her own documentary is very much meant to be a cinematic entrance. We see people preparing for her arrival, the camera starts on a close-up of her heels (a point of fascination throughout the movie) and slowly pans up to reveal the rest of her. Why “Gimme Shelter”? One is forced to conclude that it’s because Martin Scorsese uses “Gimme Shelter,” and his movies are real movies, and we’re making a real movie, so we’re using “Gimme Shelter” too. Merry Clayton’s first belted, “Rape and murder,” does line up perfectly with a long, relaxed close-up of Melania’s profile, so that was nice. In that moment, I hoped we might be experiencing true camp.

From “Gimme Shelter,” it transitions immediately into Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” “Well, that’s half the budget right there,” I murmured to myself. We later learn that “Billie Jean” is Melania’s favorite Michael Jackson song, during the only scene in which we see her and (I assume) Ratner have an unscripted and informal interaction. Surely it would make more sense to save that music cue until after we’ve learnt that? I dunno.

What bits of original score there are, from composer Tony Neiman, are perfectly serviceable, though I did find myself picking up bits and pieces of well-known scores here and there. The reveal of the inaugural invitation is filmed and scored in such a way that immediately brought to mind Phantom Thread, so imagine my surprise and delight when the scenes leading up to the inauguration were set to Johnny Greenwood’s “Barbara Rose” cue from exactly that score!

This, too, is a bizarre choice. “Barbara Rose” is an anxious, frantic piece of music, neither triumphant nor joyful nor anything else you would expect in the scenes leading up to the inauguration that also serves as the pinnacle of what passes for a narrative in this movie. The cue doesn’t fit. What’s more, the character of Barbara Rose is an alcoholic multimillionaire who’s privately miserable and disintegrating despite just having recently announced her engagement. It was in this moment that I started to wonder if the music supervisor was up to something.

The soundtrack also includes “True” by Spandeau Ballet, an instrumental cut of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” Elvis Presley’s latter-day rendition of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,” Ravel’s “Boléro,” and “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” among others. I dunno. It’s a strange set of songs. Talking to another audience member after the screening, they suggested that those may have been songs to which the producers already had the rights. I think these songs are too expensive for that. I wonder if they’re all personal favorites. That’s the only thing that makes sense. One way or the other, “Barbara Rose,” that’s gonna stick with me.

Melania

For a minute there, I thought I was going to a private screening. When I bought my ticket for the 3:00 pm showing of Melania only forty minutes before showtime, every seat in the house was available. By the time I got to the theater, a couple was sat behind me. A few minutes later, a man walked in and pronounced to the room, “So it’s the four of us who are doing this thing, huh?”

By the time the movie started, there were nine people in Theater 2 of the Alamo Drafthouse, about a third of the relatively small room’s capacity. This was a frigid Saturday afternoon in New York City, where Brett Ratner’s documentary has been advertised relentlessly. That $40 million budget is running away fast.

Not that the box office for Melania was ever the point. Jeff Bezos spent a rounding error on Melania’s vanity project because he wanted $40 million worth of access and goodwill. This film isn’t a loss, it’s an in-kind donation. Brett Ratner directed it because he hasn’t worked since 2014, and when you’re credibly accused of rape and sexual assault by multiple women, you have to take the opportunities that present themselves. This is a film made by and about bad people. It is a particularly heinous artifact of the age in which we are living.

Given that, I can understand why the man who came into the theater after me felt the need to preemptively absolve himself, to assure everyone that he was only here to watch the train wreck. Attending Melania invites suspicion in an area that’s heavily blue-coded. You have to actively choose not to wonder about your fellow attendees, to wonder what they think about you. I myself spent the first half of the movie trying to work out whether the older immigrant sitting to my right was there with the same distancing irony as many of us seemed to be, or if she was there for a genuine experience.

I was there because I wanted to know how Mrs. I Don’t Care Do U? would present herself to the world when she has all of the creative control. What would and wouldn’t she show us? How does Melania, who is remarkably absent from the public eye given her position, want us to see her? This intrigued me. Also, frankly, I’d been home sick all week, I had nothing else to do, and a Melania screening seemed the least likely place in New York City to run into other people outside of my apartment.

For 104 minutes, I watched Melania walk, drive, and fly around the United States in preparation for her husband’s second inauguration. I watched her sit at tables and have vacuous conversations with global figures. I listened to her recite a voiceover consisting mostly of pleasantries and pablum. As a narrative experience, Melania is remarkably, achingly dull. It isn’t even good in a pro forma sense. More than once, I thought, “My kingdom for a Riefenstahl.” If you’re going to script out and plan your documentary in advance, as much of this seems to be, at least make it so impacting that I find myself getting carried away with it, that I can gaze at the screen with horror rather than with the vague disdain of the unimpressed.

Fortunately, Melania is fascinating as an object. Like most propaganda, it is more valuable for what it doesn’t show us. The cameras followed Melania for twenty days, and this is what they got. During that time, we never once see her talk to a friend. She never chats with her dad or her son, Baron. We don’t see her engage in any hobbies, or pursue any interests. The only social call she has with her husband, even, is on the night of the election, and it turns out he talks to her more or less the same way he talks to an arena full of his supporters. “Did you watch [the results come in]?” “No, but I’ll see it on the news.” First of all, it’s astonishing that she didn’t watch the results come in. Just. You know. Really consider that. It wasn’t out of nerves, but utter disinterest. Wild stuff. “Oh, you should watch it. It’s incredible. They’ve never seen anything like it. We won every swing state,” etc., etc. By the end of this 30-second phone call, she is already visibly bored and eager to get off the phone. Donald seems happy to keep talking, bless.

If you were to mention this lack of a social or personal life, this staggering lack of interiority, the filmmakers would likely claim that she was simply too busy, but if there’s one thing Melania makes abundantly clear despite itself, it’s that this lady has a lot of idle time. She’s constantly on the move, yes, but she is on the move in chauffeured cars and private planes. Her life is full of opportunities to read, to call a friend, to text with people, and a documentary that’s interested in humanizing its subject, as this one is, would absolutely include those moments if they had happened. The likelier explanation is that they didn’t.

In many ways, I think Melania is about convincing its subject that hers is a full and worthwhile life. This documentary is a performance of First Ladydom from a First Lady who does significantly less than her predecessors. She has a meeting with Brigitte Trogneux, her French counterpart, to talk about a cyberbullying initiative, and is carefully shown dutifully taking a single note on a notepad roughly the right size for a grocery list. You know, like serious and important people do when discussing international policy. She has a private meeting with the Queen of Jordan during which none of their advisors are present. She talks about being responsible for running the East Wing of the White House, which, well, let’s just say that that’s been a part-time job since October of last year. Her desk is always immaculate and empty, the surest sign that she’s not in charge of anything.

Most striking, she constantly reiterates that the designs for the inauguration were all her doing, but we see the actual designer showing her the designs he prepared. We see him adjusting the tables and squaring up the placards. We see his assistants scrub down all the mirrors in his office for the initial presentation. Melania expresses preferences about her inauguration outfit, but it is the (immigrant) designer and the (immigrant) tailors who affect the requested changes (It is worth noting that Melania is at her most animated and engaged when talking about her dress for the inauguration, though her sense of style is so severe that it looks out of place amongst the living.). She’s rubber stamping things, yes, but that’s not the same as doing the work. It’s as though she has been out of touch with running her own life, with pulling the levers of daily decisions and practicalities, for so long that she doesn’t even know how to fake it anymore.

If the question is, “How does Melania want us to see her,” then I’m afraid the answer isn’t particularly interesting. She wants us to see her as competent, busy, dedicated, dutiful, loving. Based on the evidence, I think very little of that is true. This is a cynical and manipulative ploy, an attempt to take advantage of the relatively blank canvas that is her public persona and paint it with rosy colors.

How cynical is up for debate, but I keep coming back to a moment just before Trump’s inauguration speech, when he’s doing the final run-through of the draft. Melania, who outside of this documentary regularly shows herself to be beyond disinterested in the life and work of her husband, sits dutifully in the room, watching him run the speech, and suggests an addition that everyone in the room receives warmly. “Don’t film this, but she had a great idea,” Trump jokes to the camera. During the actual inauguration, after delivering that line, he takes an enormous pause to turn back and smile at her while giving her a thumbs up. I would buy that sort of thing from the Obamas, but Jack and Rose the Trumps are not. Several hours after getting home from the movie, it occurred to me that all of that was all almost certainly scripted for the benefit of the documentary.

For all the incompetence evident here, for how transparent the exercise is, it works for the faithful. The older immigrant to my right, a Peruvian woman who’d brought her adult daughter with her, was indeed there for a genuine experience, and she loved the movie. She pumped her fist when Trump spoke, and footage of Melania’s father filming on a Super8 camera evoked a quiet, “That’s so sweet.” We ended up in a conversation with two other attendees, a writer covering the movie and her friend.

“Why did you come to the movie,” the writer asked her. “Do you like Trump?”

“You know, I never liked him, but then I saw how mean everyone was being to him, and I decided they weren’t being fair. They want him to be presidential, but he isn’t, you know? He’s genuine. He is who he is. And I like her.”

Melania doesn’t grapple with the political, the existential, or even the practical in any direct sense. It offers plenty to chew on around the edges, though it offers these things blithely and unintentionally. Just about every person who speaks on camera in the first 45 minutes of the movie is an immigrant. Footage of her lighting a candle for her late mother in St. Patrick’s Cathedral is underscored by Aretha Franklin’s version of “Amazing Grace,” a decision whose racial politics could fuel an entire dissertation. She talks briefly about her experience as an (illegal) immigrant. Late in the film, her narration offers us, “Everyone should do what they can to protect our individual rights. We cannot take them for granted. Because in the end we share our humanity.”

After the movie, I asked the Peruvian woman about that. “What do you think about what she said in the movie about immigration and rights giving everything that’s going on at the moment?”

“When I came here, I told myself, you have to learn the language, you have to learn to read and write, and I made myself legal. And I think people have a right to come here, but they don’t have a right to push their ways on this place. They have to adapt. I voted for him three times, you know?”

I got the impression she’d be pretty happy to do it again. I didn’t get the chance to ask.

Melania ends with her official White House portrait photo session. We first see painted portraits of Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamie Eisenhower, and Jacqueline Kennedy. I kept waiting for Ratner to cut back to more portraits, he never did. Those choices were intentional. Roosevelt and Kennedy are, of course, the two most canonically beloved First Ladies. It would be in poor taste to leave them off any First Lady’s list of personal heroes. But Mamie was interesting, and the exclusion of any First Lady more recent than the mid-60s was telling. Here at last, Melania presents an intentional and competent statement, about the type of First Lady Melania wants you to think of her as, and the type of First Lady the Trump Administration wants you to idolize.

In retrospect, Melania could only end with the portrait session. This movie is all about the image.

Avatar: Fire and Ash

I, like most people, don’t watch the Avatar movies to think. I go to marvel at the technical display, to giggle at the clumsy dialogue and utterly sincere execution of tropes, to clap with glee each time I’m shown a new alien life form or bioluminescent plant. It’s a simple pleasure. Pandora is like AMC: we come to this place for magic.

We certainly don’t come to this place for meaningful experiences. The plots of these movies seem now largely interchangeable. The emotional beats barely register, and when they do, it’s usually not for good reason. It occurred to me while watching Avatar: Fire and Ash that Cameron’s magnum opi are the spiritual successors to the sci-fi novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Here too you find tired narrative cliché upon tired narrative cliché, all as an excuse to hang out somewhere.

At least Avatar provides a pretty cool place to hang out. Cameron certainly has ideas, and he has been afforded the time to develop them. There’s a moment of blessed brevity in Fire and Ash when a complex scientific explanation gets cut off, but I’m willing to bet Cameron has a dissertation on the subject in a binder in an office somewhere in New Zealand. The mass of humans on Pandora film major events on portable electronic devices, suggesting there’s a social media of some kind. Cameron can probably tell you about the coding language with which the site was written.

That exhaustive attention to the details of the fictional world makes it all the more strange that Avatar’s real-world racial politics are so muddled. Maybe “politics” is wrong; Avatar is clearly intended to be anti-imperialistic, pro-environment, and pro-“I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”. Those are solid politics. Its racial praxis is a disaster. James Cameron is evidently a smart, thoughtful guy, but the whiffs just keep on whiffing.

Walter Chaw’s scathing review over on Film Freak Central goes into great detail about this. I don’t agree with everything he says—“check in on your minority buddies” assumes a monolithic minority response that the box office numbers simply don’t back up—but it’s hard to argue with the larger points. Avatar as a series reinforces the idea of the mystical, naïve native. It invests most of its character development in the two white men who were swapped into Na’vi bodies. It appoints one of those two white men the savior of the species. Just about all of the Na’vi are played by white actors doing vaguely “ethnic” accents of one kind or another, which come to think of it makes no sense, shouldn’t the two humans in Na’vi bodies have the accents? Anyway.

Within all this context, I’ve been thinking particularly about Varang, the new villain. She lives on the side of an active volcano, in an ash-covered tent only Georgia O’Keefe could do justice. She and her tribe feel notably different, the first ignoble Na’vi we’ve seen. She’s murderous, violent, impulsive, and seems incredibly smart. Self-sufficient, at least. Resourceful. Brimming with agency. She lives on the side of a volcano because an eruption destroyed her tribe’s home. Despite all her prayers, the great spirit of Pandora, Eywa, never sent help. Hers is a story of faith spurned.

I love that. It’s the kind of idea that only emerges when writers fully engage with their worlds. It makes everything about Pandora feel more alive, and it starts the work of filling in the gaps around some of the stereotypes Avatar otherwise uncritically trucks in. Varang experienced a profound violation of her beliefs and came out the other side having made a decision. That she calls guns “thunder” is boring and offensive (like…they have a word for “weapon,” James), but it’s easier to stomach because she is a full, complex character.

Then, halfway through the movie, she is stripped of her agency. She becomes human/Na’vi hybrid Miles Quaritch’s Crazy Girlfriend™, little more than a background character. Instead of a defined individual with her own interests, Varang regresses to a tall and blue version of Pom Klementieff’s character Paris from the Mission: Impossible franchise. That alone is not inherently a problem; Paris is one of the best parts of Dead Reckoning - Part One. But Paris is never more than a fun supporting character. Varang promises so much more in the early stretches of Fire and Ash. To strip her of that depth is to leave both her and the Na’vi as a whole poorer.

The problem with Avatar, to me at least, isn’t that Cameron draws the Na’vi from Native American and other indigenous cultures, right down to that little apostrophe. The idea that certain stories can only be told by certain people is not one I agree with. I do, however, think it is incumbent upon anyone who steps outside their realm of expertise to do the work. The issue as I see it is that Cameron pours all of his attention into the two human characters. The Na’vi are offensive and patronizing caricatures and they’re poorly realized characters. Cameron cares a great deal about Pandora, about the mythology and biology and technology of this reality he has created. He clearly cares tremendously about the Na’vi as a people, as an abstract and collective entity. It seems like he doesn’t care all that much about the Na’vi as individuals. They’re an idea. That can work in some contexts. It’s a tough pill to swallow when they’re drawing from real humans who have also so often been denied the same individuality.

The Voice of Hind Rajab

In January of 2024, five-year-old Hind Rajab was one of seven passengers in a car in Gaza that came under fire by the Israeli military. Six of those passengers, all members of her extended family, died immediately. Hind spent the next several hours on the phone with workers at a Palestinian Red Crescent (PRC) call center as they tried to coordinate her rescue. You may remember the story, which was all over social media at the time.

The Voice of Hind Rajab focuses on the people in that PRC call center. Shot almost entirely in close-up, it is a claustrophobic portrait of desperation in the face of impotency. The actors have nothing to hide behind. We look them in the eye for the duration of its 90 minutes. At times, I found myself thinking about how emotionally exhausting the process of making this thing must have been.

Writer and director Kaouther Ben Hania makes extensive use of real audio recordings provided by PRC. Any voice you hear through a phone in The Voice of Hind Rajab is a primary source recording. Hind is never seen, and never portrayed. She exists only as her real voice and a trio of photographs. There’s a world where this use of genuine audio becomes a cheap gimmick, but Ben Hania is smart about it. We occasionally hear snippets of the real-life call center employees portrayed by the actors, and at times both versions of their audio, the real and the pretend, are woven together. It is grounding, done just often enough to remind you that this is a real thing that happened, as though The Voice of Hind Rajab were concerned that the audience might grow too settled, too lost in the idea that this is a fiction.

In order to get Hind out, PRC has to navigate the bureaucracy of the oppressed, abiding by rules that were imposed on them. One of the coordinators, Mahdi, explains it to Hind’s uncle on the phone: It takes us 8 minutes to get to Hind, but we have to get approval from Israel, whom we cannot speak to directly, so we have to speak to The Red Cross, who then speaks to the Israeli government, who then gets back to The Red Cross, who gets back to us, and then that whole process has to start over so that we can get approval to actually go.

This is as close to Politics as the film gets. Ben Hania is making a humanist argument. How can it be that the words “There is a five-year old child stuck in a car, surrounded by the corpses of her family,” are not sufficient to stop everything? How can anyone get so consumed by self-certainty that they no longer hear the reason at the heart of even that? Omar practically says as much when he suggests they tell the Israeli military she’s there. “Tell them she’s there. She knows where her home is. Get her out, take some photos for their propaganda, and let her go.”

In between the moments of interpersonal disagreements on method and approach are the calls with Hind. The call center employees pour all of their energy into keeping her calm. At one point, a woman named Rana leads Hind in a recitation from the Quran. It’s an incredible performance from actor Saja Kilani. In the real audio recording, you can hear Rana barely managing to keep it together. The prayer she chooses for them to recite is contextually heartbreaking:

In the Name of God, the most Beneficent, the most Merciful.
All praises by to God, the Lord of the worlds.
The most Beneficent, the most Merciful.
The owner of the day of judgement.
You alone we worship, and you alone we ask for help.
Guide us to the straight path.
The path of those you have favored.
Not the path of those who have earned your anger,
Nor of those who have gone astray.
Amen.

This is faith’s only appearance, this illustration of its value as something to comfort and to give hope, and as something that unites a people. The audio of a five-year-old child dutifully reciting the prayer is crushing. “Well done! You’ve memorized it,” Rana praises. Hind immediately returns to panic. “Please come,” she says for probably the hundredth time.

We follow the ambulance’s location on a map. As it drew closer and closer to the gas station where the car was waiting, I was filled with the terror of knowing the story without remembering how it ends. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it does work. In the Name of God, the most Beneficent, the most Merciful, guide us to the straight path, the path of those you have favored.

Despite following the rules laid out for them, despite doing everything by the book, despite getting approval from the Israeli military for an extraction, the paramedics don’t make it. They were firebombed mere meters from the car. There are so many tragedies in The Voice of Hind Rajab. The sharpest may be that the Palestinians did everything the way they were supposed to, and it still wasn’t enough to save her, to save the lives of those paramedics, to stop the deaths of another 70,000 or so Palestinians.

There are always questions around a work of art like this, something this resoundingly of its moment. Is The Voice of Hind Rajab as good as it seems? Are people not responding to it positively out of a sense of obligation or performance? Is it in bad taste? I don’t know. Certainly, my experience was intensified by the weight of complicity that comes with being an American. Ten years from now, I hope we’ll have the distance from these events necessary for me to be able to ask myself that. Until then, I can only tell you that I am full of fury and sorrow. May we never forgive, and may we never be forgiven.

Exploring Calvin & Hobbes at the Fenimore Art Museum

I walked into the Exploring Calvin & Hobbes exhibit at the Fenimore Art Museum on a sleepy, snowy December morning. The weather outside was incidental, but it did add to the mood. My childhood winters were spent either exploring the snow-laden woods around my house or on the sofa, a cup of cocoa in my hand and a copy of The Essential, The Authoritative, or The Indispensable Calvin & Hobbes across my lap.

More than that, Watterson was a profound influence. For a period of time, I wanted to be a comic illustrator, and Watterson more than anyone else was my model. I absorbed his sense of pacing, his paneling, his attention to character. More than that, his dissatisfaction with capitalism, his distrust of authority, and his humanist philosophy all played a crucial part in shaping who I grew up to be. This trip upstate was a pilgrimage.

Looking around, I had to keep reminding myself that these were the original strips. Not in a “pinch me, I’m dreaming” sense, but because it turns out the experience of seeing the original Calvin & Hobbes daily strips isn’t so different from reading them in a book. I went in expecting the work to feel different, like how a Van Gogh in person transforms a serene pastoral image into a violent explosion of texture and color. Then I realized that was stupid. Van Gogh was creating a painting to be seen in person. Photographic replication of an image wasn’t on his radar. Bill Watterson, on the other hand, created Calvin & Hobbes to be printed in newspapers around the world. Like Pop Art, the fidelity of replication is key to the medium.

To that end, boy, those comics were clean. I was anticipating insight into Watterson’s process, dissecting the eraser marks and pencil lines, but there wasn’t much of that. He was and remains a consummate draftsman, and these were neither sketches nor working drafts. The most I got was a slight adjustment to Calvin’s position in the frame, or erased dialogue guidelines, or a bit of grass cleaned up to make the panel more legible. One Sunday strip from January of 1989 showed changes to the angles of Calvin and Susie’s bodies, a successful attempt at heightening the dynamism of their running. That, I say without a trace of irony, was fascinating.

I found the revelations I sought in Watterson’s Sunday strips and his original illustrations for the various C&H collections. The details of the former, the clarity of his line work in a larger format, shine when drained of color. That was particularly true of Sunday strips from the last three years of C&H’s run, when Watterson stopped adhering to the prescribed newspaper layout and let his freak flag fly. I was not thinking of you, dear reader, so I don’t have any photos to illustrate this point. But I promise I’m right.

As for those illustrations, my goodness. They were astonishing. If the Sunday strips benefited from stripping the colors away, the watercolors with which Watterson fleshed out his pen-and-ink book covers were Van Gogh all over again. Watterson’s artistry becomes impossible to ignore. The boldness of the colors, the sensitivity with which he depicted nature, the carefully calibrated level of abstraction. I spent a minute or two looking at the watercolors for The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book, an illustration I’ve seen over and over throughout my life. I never noticed before that the room has no corner.

On the way out of the museum, I swung by the gift shop. I wanted a poster, a catalogue, some way to express my enthusiasm through my wallet. I knew I’d be left wanting. For forty years, Watterson has refused to license Calvin & Hobbes for anything. There are no TV specials, no t-shirts, no dolls, no posters. Those once-ubiquitous urinating car decals? Knockoffs. I cannot fathom the amount of money that man has turned down over the years. Not that he needs it.

As a consequence of Watterson’s choices, Calvin & Hobbes is a vanishingly rare thing, a multi-generational, late-20th century cultural phenomenon that exists only as the thing itself. Calvin & Hobbes is not an industry. It does not ask you to define yourself through it. It has no desire that you do so. The very idea likely causes Watterson physical pain. The only way I, you, or anyone else can engage with and celebrate his masterpiece is by sitting down, cracking open a book, and reading. 

Or, if you’re lucky, you can visit a museum.

Yi-Yi

In revisiting Edward Yang’s Yi-Yi, which I haven’t seen in about a decade, I was surprised by how much bad stuff happens. I remembered the wedding reception that kicks off the movie and the murder that more or less concludes it, but everything in between had vanished from my memory. I had no recollection of the grandmother having a stroke, of the brother going into debt, of the wife’s breakdown, of the husband’s emotional affair, of the daughter’s romantic misadventure. I didn’t remember that the neighbors existed, let alone everything that happens with, around, and to them. If I were to lay out for you the plot of Yi-Yi, such as it is, it would seem like an incredibly depressing movie, and I suppose in some ways it is.

It’s telling, then, and very much to the point of Yang’s film, that my immediate response upon seeing the first frames of Yi-Yi in a theater, of seeing the brother and his pregnant bride framed by the extended family in the middle of the wedding ceremony, was to smile. And I don’t mean a small, pleasant smile. I was so happy to spend time with these people that I was beaming. I was happy to see my friends again.

Yi-Yi comes as close as a film can to capturing life in its totality. We spent less than three hours with all of these people, but by the end, it’s reasonable to feel like you know them. Everyone you see on screen is a full person, funny and impulsive and selfish and kind. They are all fundamentally good, or at least they are all fundamentally trying. You don’t blame the wife for suddenly disappearing on a spiritual retreat for weeks. You don’t blame the husband for spending a week in Japan reliving the past with the first, and possibly only, woman he ever loved. You don’t blame the neighbor for having absolutely horrendous taste in men. Yang manages to show people in their entirety. He doesn’t reduce them in any sense.

For much of the movie, you’d be forgiven for interpreting the overall argument as a pessimistic one: life is full of regrets, and terrible things happen even to these good people. It isn’t until the closing stretch that Yang’s humanist argument snaps into focus. Coming back from Japan, the husband says, “I had the chance to relive part of my youth…I suddenly realized that even if I was given a second chance I wouldn't need it, I really wouldn’t.”

The daughter, alone in the apartment with her comatose grandmother, leaves her room and sees grandma sitting in a chair and humming “Ode to Joy.” By this point, Yang has carefully set up echoes of the past in the events of the present, and we understand without being told that grandma has experienced for herself many of the events that we’ve seen. She is at the end of her life, and still she is singing “Ode to Joy,” which is echoed in the opening bars of the score. In some small way, through all of the struggles and the ennui and the disappointments, it all works out alright.

It is no small feat, to make a movie about unfortunate event after unfortunate event without it ever feeling morose or indulgent. Yang pulls it off because his film is so matter-of-fact. These difficult stretches are as equal a part of life as the good times. The division is a false one. They coexist, much as the terrible moments of this film exist seamlessly alongside the funny, the sweet, and the endearing.

The Brooklyn Bridge

This evening, I went to Musical Cartoons Before the Code, an excellent retrospective at Film Forum that celebrated obscure animated shorts from the golden age of American animation. Not all of the shorts were good—if anyone ever asks you to watch Buster Bear, run—but this was more of an academic exercise anyway. I was there to see these cartoons in beautiful, recently restored glory, and to see the pencil tests at the end.

I have always loved pencil tests, which are assembled before any inking or painting has been done. Here’s an example, some of Milt Kahl’s work on The Jungle Book. Isn’t that magical? Nothing but charcoal on a page, and it’s so full of life. The pencil tests included in Musical Cartoons Before the Code were taken from the Fleischer Studios film Mr. Bug Goes to Town. The pencils looked even better than the finished scenes in a number of cases. Some subtleties in the animation get washed out by the coloring process. I love rough pencils because they remind you that there’s a person behind all of that work. If the animators disappear into the background of the finished product, pencil tests insist on their presence.

On my way home, I decided to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, which I haven’t done in years. It was the perfect night for it. The moon, just past full, was still bright. There was a terrific breeze. It was crowded, as tends to happen on the Brooklyn Bridge on beautiful nights. In the midst of all my people watching, I was most struck by the level of production now involved in taking photos. I passed a group of four women in their early 20’s who were operating as a studio for one another. While one posed, another would hold their phone up as a light, experimenting with angles, while a third took the photos.

At right about the midpoint, I passed a family of five. One of the children, a boy around 12 years old, was wearing a Make America Great Again hat. You don’t see a lot of those in New York City. The last time I saw one was a year or two ago, when I shared a subway car with an Orthodox family—boy howdy, the layers—on their way to a protest. In day-to-day life in New York City, you can almost forget it’s a thing. But here was this kid, sitting on a bench on the Brooklyn Bridge at 10:30 at night, wearing a MAGA cap.

It feels overly-dramatic to say, “I almost stopped,” but I did feel the impulse to do so. I wanted to tell that kid that that hat isn’t welcome here, to ask him who he thinks built the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn’t, though even as I walked off the far end of the bridge I was still considering turning back. I still think I should have.

I wanted to tell him that the Brooklyn Bridge was designed by John Roebling, a German immigrant. I wanted to explain to him that the caissons, the foundations that allowed for cable suspension, were dug out by Irish immigrants in conditions so horrendous that Caissons Disease was a real thing. It wouldn’t have mattered, though, and I knew that. So instead I kept it to myself, and thought about it for hours.

The contradictions inherent in MAGA are well-documented. I’m not breaking new ground by pointing out that the bridge upon which they were enjoying their night was built by the very people their figurehead is illegally rounding up and illegally deporting. They are likely in full awareness of the irony of the fact that during their trip to New York City, their food gets made, laundry gets washed, streets get paved, pests get controlled, and lives are made possible by the labor of people who that hat seeks to harm.

The other problem, of course, is that that hat is intended as a provocation. It’s a dare. “Go ahead. Say something. Prove we’re not welcome.” I am again not breaking new ground by observing that MAGA-ism is entirely founded on the presumption of grievances like that. “The big city looks down on us and rejects our views. It’s unsafe.”

The fact that that child wore that hat in the city, the fact that his parents were okay with him doing so, puts the lie to the whole movement. You don’t feel unsafe. You don’t feel threatened. You feel powerful. You know a guy in his mid-30’s with an MFA is going to walk by with his bike and get “triggered” and not do anything. And two weeks from now, or a month from now, when the President of the United States says he is sending the National Guard into New York City because of its elevated crime rate, you’ll talk about how he’s right to do it, how you went there a few weeks ago and didn’t feel safe for a moment.

Sitting on the Brooklyn Bridge at 10:30 at night in your MAGA hat, you looked pretty safe to me.

Ran, or, The Madness of Lady Kaede

The other day, I showed my partner a trailer for Ran, Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 masterpiece. I was about to go see it at Film Forum with a friend, and wanted to give her some context. I was looking for the trailer that’s been playing at FF the past week, which emphasizes its moodiness and its score. Depending on the trailer you find, you’ll come away with widely varying impressions of Ran. The one I found on YouTube pushed it as an action film, which I think is disingenuous. There certainly is action, and scores of extras running around battlefields, but Ran is actively disinterested in action as uncomplicated spectacle. Better to foreground the moodiness.

As soon as Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada) popped up on screen, both at Film Forum and at home, I had the same response: “She’s crazy.” I’ve carried that idea of her around with me for nearly twenty years now, since I first watched Ran in my bedroom during a college break. Conniving, vengeful, screeching demands left and right, she was one of the great Manipulative Woman. She left a strong impression, but not necessarily a distinctive one. Lady Kaede sat comfortably in league with thousands of other Lady Kaedes; Lady Macbeth, Scarlett O’Hara, Miss Piggy. We all know the type. Lady Kaede existed in my mind as the ultimate expression of a particular cliché.

She certainly enters haughtily. We first see her as she and her retinue moves her possessions into the First Castle. Her husband, Tora Ichimonji, has just been handed control over the Ichimonji clan and its lands by his father, the retiring warlord Takatora Ichimonji, and the First Castle is to be their keep. When she learns that the path is blocked by members of Takatora’s retinue going about their daily routine, she scoffs. “Scandalous. I am the Lady of this castle, they must make way.”

It doesn’t take long for her to start needling her husband, cajoling him for allowing his father to maintain even symbolic power, for allowing his father to take the family banner from the room that should be the seat of the clan’s authority. She convinces Taro to banish his father, and to execute anyone who assists him. She fits firmly into the Lady Macbeth model, sewing chaos to gain power.

But then we learn that First Castle used to be the center of her family’s domain, before Takatora took it over and killed her father and brothers. “Right there,” she says while seated next to her husband in the throne room, “I watched my mother take her own life.” In the subtitles, “Right there” is separate from the rest of the sentence, followed by a pause and a curt breath as she relives the experience. In the Japanese, she doesn’t begin the sentence with, “Right there.” She says, “My mother.”

In that moment, we begin to understand the role of women within the world of Ran, and Sengoku period Japan more broadly. They are pawns, married off to secure alliances or curry favor. Lady Kaede watched her family die, and was married to the eldest son of the man who did it. She had no say in the matter. She could only accept. It stands to reason that she would be sensitive to any challenge to her position; her position is all she has, and she has much a sense of how precarious it is as anyone. Even more so when returning to the castle in which she grew up.

The idea of women within Ran as object rather than subject is reinforced a few scenes later when we meet Lady Sué, wife of middle son Jiro. She too is the daughter of an extinguished line, but she serves as a contrast to Lady Kaede. When she greets Takatora with a broad smile and gentle tones, he asks her if she hates him. She says no, again with a beatific smile, and he tells her to stop. “I killed your family. It would be easier for you to hate me.” She doesn’t, or at least she claims not to. Lady Sué is now a dedicated Buddhist, and finds comfort in his teachings.

Lady Kaede has no such comforts. When Taro is killed, she wastes no time getting Jiro into bed. The scene in which she seduces him is one of the best in the film, an electrifying high-wire act of threats and desperation. She twice lightly cuts the man’s throat with a knife, and moments later they’re doing it. She’s canny, you gotta give her that. An unerring instinct for self-preservation. While it would be both appropriate and easy for her to become one of Jiro’s concubines, she has no interest. She insists on becoming his wife, and on the death of Lady Sué.

Jiro first orders his advisor Kurogane to carry out the execution, but he refuses. He believes that Lady Kaede is only interested in advancement, that the death of Lady Sué would ill-serve Jiro, but even his refusal is useful to Kaede. It drives a wedge between Jiro and the only one of his advisors honest enough to contradict him. The second advisor carries out the orders with efficiency, returning with the head in the midst of the climactic battle.

The impact of Lady Kaede’s actions on the movie is a slow accumulation, but it is decisive. She pushes Taro not to settle, to push for more power. That leads directly to the banishment of Takatora, which leads directly to a harrowing conflict between Takatora’s men and his sons’ soldiers. That fight leads to Taro’s death, and the further splintering of the clan. Her whispers push Jiro too to push more aggressively for power than he otherwise would have. Viewed from the air, much of Ran is Kaede’s doing. She is the Littlefinger of this world, though we come to learn that she has no interest in climbing the ladder; she wants to burn it.

When Kurogane realizes the scale of Lady Kaede’s schemes, he confronts her. “Your scheming has destroyed the Ichimonji clan. Such is the vanity of women.”

“Vanity, you say,” she replies. I think it’s important to note that it isn’t a question. “I wanted to avenge my family. I wanted this castle to burn. I have done all I set out to do.” Kurogane kills her, striking her down in what has to be one of cinema’s bloodiest deaths, but it’s too late. She has already won.

Kurosawa didn’t populate Ran with many woman, but he knows exactly what he’s doing with them. Their absence is intentional. The few we do see end up dead to a one. They either commit suicide or are murdered. They live lives without agency. The best most of them can manage is a coping strategy, to pray and carry around illustrations of the Buddha. Their miserable ends are the point. They are flotsam moving with the tide.

But not Lady Kaede. Revisiting Ran all these years later, it became clear that I had short-changed her. She isn’t hungry for power like Lady Macbeth. She isn’t a pure machine of self-preservation like Scarlett O’Hara. She isn’t as possessive and ego-driven as Miss Piggy (and you thought I was just being silly). She has her eyes set on much larger prizes, and is astonishing in her capacity to navigate the strict limits imposed on her. Lady Kaede is as canny and capable as anyone. Come to think of it, she is the only character in Ran who achieves their goal.

With that in mind, I apologize, Lady Kaede. I did not recognize your game. You aren’t crazy in the least, and even if you were, I see now that I could hardly blame you.