I'm Still Here (2010) - a movie by Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix

(I saw Joaquin Phoenix's notorious 2008 Letterman Show appearance when he presented himself as a non-responsive, sunglassed and bearded guest. He was mumbling about becoming a hip hop artist. I thought that he was playing with performance in a reality-situation and I was pretty curious. Contemporary culture is still a bit fuzzy on how and when to assign authenticity to the different types of interaction, perspective and persona creation that continue to be created by new technologies. The general public is becoming as attuned, and as confused, with the concept of persona as actors are. A good actor even in his sleep, Joaquin Phoenix seemed as likely a candidate as any to explore persona in a reality-style work (where there is often much sleeping). So I was excited when I heard about the movie "I'm Still Here" being presented as a documentary. When it was announced, by the creators, as a hoax during the Toronto Film Festival, I felt disappointed. A hoax suggest more of a put on than an experiment. It also suggested a bit of a failure. Unambiguous creative sucess rarely needs to come with such foreceful, and unambitious, explanations. I went to see it anyway with my friend Julia Rosenberg, a movie producer, who had also been following the process. We had popcorn.)

Joaquin Phoenix decides to leave acting. It’s confusing being an actor and also confusing to be a celebrity. I believe this. He looks good, he’s hiding out in a well-worn hoodie, smoking at night on a grassy hill and looking down at the bright lights of Los Angeles. His friend, Casey Affleck is filming him. “I don’t want to play the character of Joaquin anymore” Joaquin Phoenix says. This scene is physically dark, seductive and promising. We don’t care if it’s documentary or staged because we suspect that, as with any good documentary or fiction, something truthful might be happening here. Unfortunately this is the most truthful-feeling part of the movie.

Joaquin Phoneix spends the rest of the movie smoking pot, growing his hair, yelling at his assistants and chasing down Diddy (formerly P. Diddy), the famous music producer. Joaquin Phoenix's plan is to become a successful hip hop artist by finding Diddy and having Diddy produce his album. When securing Diddy's help fails, along with Joaquin Phoenix's meager and wildly unsucessful 4 or 5 public hip hop performances, Joaquin Phoenix collapses, mentally and physically, and then returns to his birth place for some water redemption.

In the last scene Joaquin Phoenix walks down a river. It is shallow at first and then becomes deeper. We follow him from behind. There is some "movie music" overlaid - the kind of music that reminds you to have feelings now. It doesn't give me feelings, it makes the scene feel clumsy, long and sentimental. A joke or not - I don't know. But at this point in the movie, I was needing some "real" in my "reality tv". I wanted the music to stop and to at least, after enduring this movie, be allowed to indulge in the refreshingly natural sound of a quiet river. If Joaquin Phoenix was going back to nature, I wanted to come with him.

It's hard to know what was intended. Did they set out to make fun of reality tv? Were they interested in mocking the public - hoping to hold up a mirror, showing them embracing Joaquin Phoenix as a hip hop artist because he was famous - but then were derailed by the public's poor reaction to the idea? Were they hoping to say something about the insanity of celebrity culture but then didn't quite know what to say? Were they trying for a remarkable performance? Was the absense of any visible sign of hard work (on the part of Joaquin learning to be a hip hop artist and Casey Affleck learning to be a director - or the two as artistic collaborators) an indication of the creators conceit of a famous fame-seeker not having to work hard - or was it a genuine misconception about how one goes about making art? Was Joaquin's painful "failure" after simply not securing one of the world's most famous music producers and not doing well at a few gigs supposed to really represent genuine failure? Or was it to show someone who is bound by being an actor? Was it all really just to say that something that looked real was scripted? Was the music at the end supposed to be funny?

I wouldn't ask these question if there was something truthful here at the centre to hold on to (I consider a biting satire truthful for instance). If there was something truthful at the centre, then all these questions would be trivial and besides the point. But at the end, I just had the questions and a wish that the creators had worked longer or harder or had taken the ideas to a more developed place. I think there was a lot of potential. I hope Joaquin Phoenix tries something like this again, just... with everything else different. Much has been made of the ridiculousness of Joaquin Phoenix suddenly becoming a hip hop artist, but no one has mentioned how crazy it is for Casey Affleck to suddenly become the director of a contemporary reality experiment. The traditional well-oiled machine that makes a Hollywood movie might have been an easier choice.

When Joquin Pheonix finally manages a meeting with a hesitant and wary Diddy, Diddy eventually looks over at Joaquin and says slowly, “You can’t come into this shit disrespectfully.” I agree, this shit is hard - respect is essential. That goes for reality tv, experimental movies, and hip hop (acting was properly respected in this motion picture). Joaquin Phonix nods along with me. I believe him.

!Women Art Revolution (2010) – written and directed by Lynn Hershman

(In a rush during the start of the Toronto International Film Festival, I decided to pick movies based on the names alone. Going over the first two days of programming, my eyes stopped at “!Women Art Revolution” and I investigated. The movie is from Lynn Hershman. Her 2007 film “Strange Culture”, a piece that documents a personal tragedy in artist Steve Kurtz’s life that led to an FBI investigation of his artwork, was one of my favourite things at a past Whitney Biennale. “Strange Culture” was one of the few things in the show that genuinely confused my sense of art, government and reality. Playing on a little tv in the corner of one of the galleries, it looked like an unassuming but well-developed portal out of the museum.

I was late getting to the theatre because I ran into a parade, the first sign of which was two women walking down the street with 4 legs, 1 torso, 2 heads and two enormous plush breasts protruding from their uni-shirt. “There go some balls”, I thought as they passed in front of my bicycle. I was late to the theatre but was ushered to my seat in the dark. After the screening, the director thanked artists featured in the movie who had also made it to the premiere - names, for the most part, that have been familiar to me since I was a teenager beginning to investigate art. The last shout-out was for the Guerrilla Girls. I was startled to see that they were sitting next to me. Two well-dressed women, in gaping-mouth gorilla masks, stood up and took a bow.)

*Below image from Ana Mendieta's "Silueta" series, 1976

This movie portal starts from the museum (most of the artists featured have found some success in the art world) but goes back in time, approximately 40 years, to when women could barely get into them. The movie is pieced together from footage shot in between.

As is true with most hopeful acts of defiance against enormous adversity, hearing these cultural workers talk with humour and self-awareness about their struggle to have a voice in the world is unavoidably moving. I specifically fell in love with Marcia Tucker, a curator I was unfamiliar with. She started The New Museum in 1977. Like the movie, she seemed a fountain of good things with very few blind spots. I was sad to eventually discover (in the duration of the movie) that I had learned of her too late - as she died in 2006. But I will look for her book, A Short Life of Trouble.

In the movie, a thesis develops. Lynn Hershman suggests that these past forty years (and counting) of feminist art creation have been dominated by performance, role-playing and persona because these are the activities necessary for creating new spaces and new ways to be – creating bigger (and less oppressive and less boring) spaces for women to live and work in.

An interesting moment comes when Janine Antoni, a performance artist from the younger generation, talked about an experience she had in graduate school. Her professor, Mira Schor, looked at her work and asked if she had ever heard of Anna Mendieta or Hannah Wilke or Carolee Schneemann. She hadn’t, so she went to the library to investigate. There, she found absolutely nothing on any of the artists. Eventually, when Mira Schor brought in her own personal catalogues and clippings from home, Janine Antoni looked through the work and thought “I am making the work of an earlier generation.”

It is a pleasurable idea, and not one I take for granted, to think that some art really needs to be in the world – that there is actually a great deal of order to the often random-seeming nature of art creation. It is interesting to think that if some art doesn’t find its rightful spot in the library, this art will continue to be made until it arrives there.

Donny Darko (2001) & Southland Tales (2007) - both written and directed by Richard Kelly, Donny Darko exec produced by Drew Barrymore

(My friend Ryan Kamstra, a poet and a musician, recently asked me if I could articulate why “Donny Darko” worked as a movie when “Southland Tales” didn’t. They are both poetic, intuitive and unlikely Hollywood science fiction narratives, set in the near past and near future respectively and grounded in the contemporary. They were both made by Richard Kelly.

A lot of people love “Donny Darko”. A lot of people have defended “Southland Tales”. It’s easy to understand why – “Southland Tales” is an unusual movie that seems to have been made with just enough hope to strain past private despair about America, the war, the end of the world and celebrity in order to try to say something meaningful about it all. It is the kind of movie that most people I know would want to make – if they were the kind of people who made Hollywood movies. All that being said – I bet Richard Kelly had wanted “Southland Tales” to touch more people than it managed to. I bet it was confusing why “Donny Darko” touched so many people when “Southland Tales” struggled to. This is how I understand my friend's question.)

Donny Darko is a teenager who lives in a big white house. He is very smart and a little off – luckily his family is also very smart and a little off too. A tall bunny with a scary silver face, named Frank, communicates to Donny Darko in hallucinations. Frank often calls Donny Darko out of bed and Donny Darko, sleepwalking, follows him out of the house. Donny Darko often wakes up on the road or in a field or in a golf course. One morning, after waking up on a golf course, he returns home in his pajamas and learns that, in a freak accident, a jet engine fell from the sky and crashed into his bedroom. He was not killed because he was sleeping on the golf course.

Life continues. Life is the suburbs, the bus stop, the private school, the television and the Iowa landscape. There is the school bully, a dearth of good friends, a little girls’ dancing troupe, the national election and the town’s beloved motivation speaker who spreads his own brand of gobbledygook. And though it is hard to see where meaning is in this life, the whole movie has the feeling of a meaningful dream that you can’t quite remember – a suggestion that meaning is hidden everywhere, but we just can't quite see it.

Frank’s visits increase as do coincidences in Donny Darko’s life. Donny Darko is not sure if he is a high-functioning schizophrenic or someone who has been chosen for a great mystical mission. We don’t know either.

“Donny Darko” simultaneously tells two mirror-image stories: one is of someone going over and over random events in their life until they seem to be full of meaning and etched in stone by god; the other is of someone going over and over random events in their life because their destiny was etched in stone by god and they want to stay on the right path. The very beautiful thing about Donnie Darko is that it is both. It is meaningless and aching with meaning. It is meaningful and heartbreakingly senseless.

And then there is “Southland Tales”.

Boxer Santaros (an action star with Republican ties) starts out with amnesia, a porn-star girlfriend, and a screenplay. We’re not sure how he got there, how long he has been in this relationship, or why he seems so untroubled by his amnesia. Though the back story isn’t clear, we are easily fascinated by Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) and his girlfriend Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar). They are both a pleasure to watch. This situation is followed by time-warps, neo-marxists, poetic tag-teams of conservative presidential candidates, internet surveillance, riots, quantum soul-splitting and other catastrophes. Boxer Santaros doesn’t know what’s going on and neither do we.

Luckily there is an equally fascinating, gun-wielding and bible quoting narrator, Iraq war veteran Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake). Unfortunately, he is a poet.

Some movies don’t work at all – things are consistently off key or, say, barely present. But “Southland Tales” is a different kind of not-working. In “Southland Tales” - though scenes contain humour, powerful moods and dynamic tensions - it is often difficult to understand what is happening, what people’s intentions are or even just who is who. It is hard to grasp the full weight and meaning of the narrative elements – and there are A LOT of narrative elements.

Near the end of the movie, when Boxer Santaros and Madeline Frost Santaros (his wife played by Mandy Moore) are reunited, alone together, in a luxury suite - no words of explanation or exasperation are shared. Instead, Boxer Santaros quotes Jane’s Addiction’s cryptic song of apocalypse “Three Days”. Madeline Frost Santaros quotes it back to him.

It is exciting to hear Dwayne Johnson quoting Jane’s Addiction to Mandy Moore with brutal sincerity in their luxury suite. If you sliced “Southland Tales” into 16 sections, you might have 16 remarkable poems. It is enough that Dwayne Johnson is quoting Jane’s Addiction to Mandy Moore in a luxury suite – that is a brilliant art show. That is something to think about. It is also exciting to witness an Iraq war scarred Justin Timberlake intentionally misquote T.S. Eliot to us while swiveling a machine gun around a crowd of civilians in a near-future Venice Beach.

But it is a very difficult task to turn 16 remarkable poems into a narrative movie. It is a lot for the director to control and a lot for the audience to pay attention to. In our attempt to grasp the full meaning of the complicated narrative (we assume that the director has given the narrative equal importance) AND juggle the depth of our culture’s beloved poetry, we frequently loose grasp of both. We are not good jugglers. So the power of the narrative's turning points frequently escape us.

We understand narrative as well as we understand poetry (which is to say – not very much). But we have a great sense of both. We want to take meaninglessness and turn it into meaning, and we want to take what the world tells us is meaning and turn it into meaninglessness. It takes a lot of skill and luck to stay in the middle of those things.

In the familiar world of “Donny Darko”, we hold onto to the humble discoveries of meaning as tightly as Donny Darko does – they appear so infrequently. As we linger in this world, we also eventually begin to take the meaningless things and turn them into meaning - just as Donny Darko is beginning to do. There is not much else to do here and we have some time to spare. We begin to make out a beautiful and crazy (or senseless and sad) pattern. It's a poem that's inseparable from a narrative, a narrative involving meaningless tragedy and time travel - my favourite kind.

~

Southland Tales, section 16: