Community service announcement
Posted on | June 8, 2005 |
I feel compelled to advise anyone thinking of going that The Machinist is the least enjoyable film I’ve seen in a very long time. I mean it’s groan, laugh in despair and stare at the ceiling indeed anywhere else but the actual screen kind of bad. I am really starting to question my ongoing allegiance to the opinions of favoured glasses-wearing geek girl (ah, but love is blind, and I’ll be watching tonight to see the latest outfit and hairdo). Seriously tho, in my view it doesn’t even make the ‘have an opinion on it in case it comes up over dinner’ category towards which most of my viewing tends to be directed. To wit, recently: Million Dollar Baby (ok, this was actually because I presented at a seminar on sociology and sport this week, and I wanted to be prepared for one of the other papers on boxing. It didn’t really help any more than say, Raging Bull, which probably isn’t a fair comparison), Star Wars, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Gangs of New York, Monster, Elephant. A very Anglo-American list indeed. Hopefully the Sydney Film Festival will be able to broaden my vision a bit next week.
Thinking of Monster and The Machinist in the same paragraph makes me curious to ask, is anyone else a little bit offended by the way that actors are viewed as heroic or dedicated or inordinately talented because of their ability to transform their weight? Especially so in the case of the latter: if Christian Bale’s successful rendition of a concentration camp victim is supposed to be anything other than spectacle I’m afraid the symbolism was lost on me. The queasiness I felt had little to do with the bleached film stock, and more to do with what makes for entertainment in a very perplexing world.
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4 Responses to “Community service announcement”
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June 8th, 2005 @ 8:53 pm
Isn’t Raging Bull talked about as the first film where an actor famously, heroically put on weight for a role? I’m sure it wasn’t the first time, but it’s the first I know about that was highly touted as such. There’s so much wrong there, I can’t decide what to be offended about. Should I want the industry, for instance, to leave people “as they are” (as if being ridicuolously skinny is any more natural) and choose an unknown actor who is “naturally” the “right” weight? Should I encourage them to fatten the actors up a bit, with the understanding that they are probably “unnaturally” thin to begin with and because of the industry? But you’re right, it is spectacle: we are encouraged to go and see the famous person made fat; it’s like another special effect. Often they make them fat just to make them skinny again in the same film (e.g. Tom Hanks in the shipwreck movie).
June 8th, 2005 @ 10:11 pm
well, raging bull is one example where the protagonist needs to be a heavyweight boxer, so…(although, duh, there’s issues there with an excess of masculinity being articulated to an excess of flesh)…and then the ‘healthy’ american diet to starvation diet transformation that Tom Hanks quite sensibly was made to perform…but obviously the biggest and best example of all this is Renee Zellwegger’s heroicism in transforming from competent shiny Hollywood babe to hopeless, self-doubting unlikeliest-romantic-heroine ever-hahaha frump - a transformation achieved pretty much exclusively by a. putting on weight, and b. refraining from airbrushing her entire head. [The fact that she looks scary and android-like as her 'normal' star self is a whole other argument.] So, yeah.
June 9th, 2005 @ 8:56 am
Great responses - tho I should probably clarify that the gendered dimension to weight gain/loss is a slightly different issue than the one I was getting at above. It’s the situation whereby some people have the choice to starve and be rewarded for it that I find offensive. In Bale’s case particularly, a Western audience seems likely only to recognise his body in comparison to concentration camp victims (we never usually see screen representations of starving white bodies, they are always brown). This is why it’s so unsettling, to use David Stratton’s term: because in Bale’s case he may have done this out of commitment to his craft (or whatever) but such an achievement has had the effect of compensating for a very disappointing plot with little wider ambition than to be a thriller for a US audience. I just don’t see this as good enough. I’d be less annoyed if I thought the film was attempting a commentary on US culture in some way (tho I don’t expect this of every film). It does suggest some of the alienation and difficulties of suffering mental illness. To me the most promising character could have been Jennifer Jason Leigh’s, yet she too ended up as just another plot device.
June 9th, 2005 @ 12:07 pm
Oh, I also saw Three Dollars - how could I have forgotten?
Wait a minute, don’t answer that.