I'm Still Here - A Review

I’m Still Here. The title of the film seems to take its name from a song JP performs near the end of the film, but lacking a coherent transcript of lyrics, we are forced to find meaning in it some other way. It seems to me the very thing someone would say upon discovering they are the brunt of some joke that everyone is laughing about. It is at their expense that these people find humor. They are by no means laughing with him, they are laughing at him. This is not a film simply about a man trying to become a hip hop star, or a film about a man trying to trick the world in believing that. This is a film about how the world refuses to let him.

In February of 2009, Joaquin Phoenix appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman, bedraggled and spacey. At the time, many thought it was a publicity stunt, a hoax, that he was tricking us. Regardless, though, it became the subject of many a parody. Letterman said that he was “sorry [Phoenix] couldn’t make it tonight.” Paul Shaffer laughed out loud when Phoenix announced that he was going to be a hip hop star. We ridiculed him endlessly for his apparent dreams. Knowing now that it was indeed a hoax, doesn’t change the fact that we told him that he had the wrong dreams.

The alleged documentary follows Phoenix as he decides to give up acting, and become this hip hop star. He begins by discussing his frustration, artistically, with acting. He is always forced to say what others have written for him, to act as a director tells him. Never does he get to express himself fully in his work. And since hip hop has had such a profound effect on his life, he decides that if he could produce one album saying everything he wants, then he could be satisfied. At least there, he has the ability to say what he wants.

He announces his retirement from acting, and immediately hits the rumor mill. All of a sudden his bearded visage is everywhere. Edward James Olmos personally comes to his house to convince him that he should return to acting. In one of the best scenes in the film, Ben Stiller offers him a role in Greenberg. Stiller is awkward around the camera and Joaquin tells him that he needn’t act. “You’re playing the role of Ben Stiller now. Just relax, man, be yourself.”

This is quite possibly one of the many cruxes of the film. We debate endlessly how true it is, but the thing is it doesn’t matter. We are all always acting, putting on a persona. We act differently around our parents than our friends; we act differently around our boss than our coworkers. What is the real me, and who am I around when that comes out?

But these things have been said before. Shakespeare told us that “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” The reason this is a brilliant film is not because it says that. Rather the construct of the film invokes those themes naturally. Any truly great film can be felt in the gut before it can be described. As was once said about pornography, “I can’t tell you what [it] is, but I know it when I see it.”

That gut reaction for me was one scene in particular immediately following his Letterman appearance. Know that I went in to this movie having read Casey Affleck’s press release that the movie is a fake, is staged, and even though I knew not to take his word at face value, I expected to still laugh a whole lot at the shenanigans JP got into. He leaves Letterman in his limo, and starts to feel sick, or so it seems. He requests that the driver pull over for a moment, at which point, he darts out of the car and goes into Central Park. Affleck is upset, as we can hear him cursing in the background, and tries to follow him from a distance. One of his friends catches up and we see Phoenix sitting next to a tree sobbing. (People had already believed it was a hoax at this time, and he had heard some of that prior to this incident, making him already upset). Between his tears, we hear him lamenting his decision to quit acting. At least as an actor he could get a job, he could get Oscar nominations, and he could succeed, even if he hated it. Now though, the world would never take him seriously again. If he sells any copies of the record he is working on, it will be entirely because people want to laugh at him. If people attend his shows, they do so to laugh at him. They can’t take him seriously as any kind of artist anymore and as the scene changes admits to having “fucked my life. I have fucked it all up.”

As I watched this unfold, I couldn’t help but cry a little with him, in addition to feeling like the worst person in the world. I laughed at him. I ridiculed him, as did the world. We live in a time where we love to hate. We troll on the internet, our humor is largely derisive. It is a cruel, cruel world we create. The plight of JP is the plight of any of us who want to do something new, and attempt to be true to our own selves. The world doesn’t allow it. So what if it was all a joke, a hoax? That doesn’t make it any less true. So many more things were going on in this film, all of which were excellent, but the one that moved me was the fact that regardless of whether or not it is a hoax, we would never let him become a hip hop star. Yeah those who said it was a joke all along can sit there smugly announcing to the world their blithe I-told-you-so’s. But they are the people at whom the film is directed. If he had become a rapper we would never have seen him as that. It is the same thing that happened when Michael Jordan became a baseball player: you go to a White Sox game to see him because he was better at basketball.

Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix have created one of the truest, most honest and earnest films about the nature of celebrity and acting ever made. Perhaps it couldn’t have been made until this decade, one supersaturated with instant communication and globalization or where a lonely broken man’s appearance on the Late Show can get thousands of hits on youtube.com within the next 5 minutes. Maybe this film could only be made in a decade well known for its celebrity breakdowns, and how viciously and voyeuristically we watch them suffer. But it is by far one of the greatest films of the last decade, let alone this year.

The King of Comedy

No one can survive becoming a legend. For as long as mankind has crafted stories, created narratives, it has projected legendary status upon its great members. From Jesus Christ to Billy the Kid, from Abraham Lincoln to Alfred Hitchcock, the great members of society have become larger than life, even at times deified. This process took several years, sometimes decades or centuries to do, as word of mouth had to spread, and the stories surrounding them painted pictures that far outshone the actual men. This is no longer the case however. Legends have been replaced by dime-store celebrities, mediocre men looking for their 15 minutes, nobodies scrounging for the limelight. This is the subject of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy.

The King of Comedy revolves around Rupert Pupkin, a wanna-be comedian who is waiting for his big break. He befriends Jerry Langford, a legendary comedian, one of the greats, and convinces him to give Rupert a chance. Besieged by passive-aggressive rejection upon submitting his audition tape, he desperately decides to kidnap Jerry. So he and his fan-girl friend take him hostage and demand that Rupert get the opening spot on the show. Rupert gets up and delivers his series of one-liners, several of which are funny, but none of which are overwhelmingly so. Even though we the audience laugh, there is this lurking suspicion that we’ve heard these jokes before, and that he is bringing nothing to the scene. Was it worth it then to kidnap Jerry Langford? As Rupert says “It’s better to be a king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime.” He is sent to prison, but upon his release publishes a book of memoirs and starts his own show, because in a sense he has become the king of comedy.

In a sense, we would like to condemn Rupert to list him among the mediocre men, to argue that he has no talent. But while he may be mediocre and talentless, those don’t seem to come into play in his apotheosis. He risks everything to become king for a night, and proves that he belongs among the celebrities. Steven Spielberg, for example, walked into Universal Studios one day wearing his father’s suit, carrying an empty briefcase and set up shop in an unused office. And while it took him a while to make films as great as Jaws and Close Encounters, he still managed to become great by subverting the typical paths of rise and fall. Robert Frost famously wrote that when “two roads diverged in a wood…I took the one less travelled by and it has made all the difference.” What if by taking the unused road, by doing something completely crazy and irrational, this is the only way to become great?

While it seems like Rupert Pupkin is one of the afore-mentioned dime-store celebrities, making bank off of a book deal outlining his criminal ascent to stardom, I would posit that he is of the greater variety. He is a legend of postmodernity, a legend that has shifted the paradigm and validated a wolrd in which all can be celebrities. He has taken the road less travelled by; he has reacted to a world that refuses to let anyone out of the caste they are born in. These castes are not made of race or background, but of means to fame. The world would have been satisfied if it had never heard of Rupert Pupkin, if he had remained a schmuck for life, but he refused to allow that to happen. He rose to the circumstance, and in the world of the film, people would talk about him for decades to come, insuring that he would always be remembered as the King of Comedy.

The Meaning of Meaning in Lost

[As the final season has just begun, this post is not about theories about Lost as a whole, but rather some ideas I’ve been having about the nature of meaning itself told through some scenes in Lost.]

It seems that as we go through the world we find meaning in all sorts of things. We seek out “truth” and “beauty” to find meaning in the world, in the way we live, in living itself. Perhaps nowhere in the realm of popular culture is this truer than as it pertains to the TV series Lost. For 5 seasons, going on 6, the shows producers have sent its audience down a path ridden with enigmas, seeking, it seems, to confuse rather than elucidate. But if we look at Lost from a meta-point of view, it seems to discuss our need to find meaning in potentially meaningless things.

One of the primary mysteries of the show is the Numbers: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. We first see them as Hurley’s winning lottery numbers, which he believes are cursed. Shortly thereafter we begin noticing them in everything: Oceanic 815 left from Gate 23, Kate’s ransom was 23,000 dollars, Lost was paralyzed for 4 years, the vaccine is identified by a serial number 48-15162-342. All of these things crop up and an alarm goes off in our head because we know they are significant. But I wonder about all the other numbers that show up. When the return flight is Ajira 316, no one bats an eye; when the time is 11:45, we dismiss it. The thing is that even though the producers of the show are knowingly inserting the numbers everywhere, they cannot have any inherent meaning.

In the last several episodes we have been introduced to a new concept of the Numbers. Sawyer was taken to a cave by the Man in Black, and Jack and Hurley were taken to a Lighthouse by Jacob, both to discover “the meaning” of the numbers. Jacob purportedly assigned numbers to each of the candidates for replacing him. It appears that each of these numbers applies to a particular candidate of note. Locke was 4, before he died, Hurley is 8, Sawyer and Sayid are 15 and 16, Jack is 23, and Kwon is 42, though no one knows which Kwon it is. Here then is a potential explanation for our numbers. However what everyone has failed to mention is that there is another candidate whose name hasn’t been crossed out: number 51 is Kate Austen. So we brush it off, we forget about this number because it doesn’t quite mesh with our schema.

See, the Numbers are like anything else we use to find meaning in the world. They highlight certain moments; they open our eyes at specific times and allow us to see something deeper about the fabric of life, or at least to make us think so. We will never know what the numbers mean, not because the producers hate us and want us to suffer, but because they have no inherent meaning. We find meaning in them when we notice them in other places. When the shift in the swan station lasts 108 minutes, and we realize that this is the sum of the Numbers, we get excited because there is a new example. But if the shift lasted 90 minutes we would think nothing of it.

The Numbers, and perhaps by extension the show, or life is meaningless. But this is not something over which we should despair. The meaninglessness of life is not so much an abyss of darkness as a blank canvas upon which we can ascribe whatever meaning suits us. We have an immense freedom in life from this meaninglessness because anything can be meaningful. I will always find certain themes to be prevalent in films and literature; I will always interpret them from my own point of view, whether it is on masculinity, rebellion, sexuality or what have you. In the same way, we all interpret the world around us; imprint on it our own meanings as diverse as there are people. All of this can be summed in Robert Brown’s analysis on Ikiru: “It consists of a restrained affirmation within the context of a giant negation. What it says in starkly lucid terms is that ‘life’ is meaningless when everything is said and done; at the same time one man’s life can acquire meaning when he undertakes to perform some task that to him is meaningful. What everyone else thinks about that man’s life is utterly beside the point, even ludicrous. The meaning of his life is what he commits the meaning of his life to be. There is nothing else.”

Raging Bulls and Goodfellas: Masculinity in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

There was something precarious about the state of masculinity in the mid-seventies, just as there was something precarious about white superiority in the sixties or the French royalty in the late 18th century. A rebellion had taken place, the paradigm had shifted, and those left to make sense of the rubble had some trouble piecing it all together. Following the Women’s Liberation movement, the question of male identity was a metaphysical can of worms. Sexism aside, prior to the movement, men and women had set roles, roles that were unflinchingly rigid that defined their existence. Because of the historical bias, men were in power, and women sought to change this. When this happened, though, the things that were previously associated with masculinity (having a job, head of household, even sexual promiscuity) were all being subverted and commandeered by feminism. And so a void was opened in the soul of man that made him question what it means to be a man. It is out of this void that many of Martin Scorsese’s cinematic antiheroes are born.

As early as J.R. and as late as Billy Costigan and Howard Hughes, Scorsese seems drawn to characters of a certain haunted quality, a certain volatility. But this seems to be made most clear in his film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. At surface value this film is about a woman and her son who have to make a living for themselves after her husband dies. Along the way she falls for several men, all but one of whom led to great disappointment. Even the last lets her down, but he wins her over in the end. The story is standard, the hero wins in the end, and the film wins an Oscar, none of which are trademarks of Scorsese’s canon. The interesting thing that is done here is his focus on the savage masculine characters.

There are three men in the story: her husband, Ben (played by Harvey Keitel), and David (Kris Kristofferson). Each of these characters in their brief time onscreen are painted more richly than Alice, not due to Ellen Burstyn’s lack of talent, but rather because (as Blake said about Milton) Scorsese is of the devil’s party. He explores the masculine condition naturally, even in a film that some would describe as feminist. Her lethargic husband is unstable, he lashes out at their kid because of simple pranks, and Alice would really rather he were out of the picture. Then out of some perverse form of wish fulfillment, he dies, just like that. This is our first perspective of the married man in a post feminist world. He has a pent up tendency towards violence, but it is not out of anger, it is out of frustration. The radius of his will has shrunk, and out of his increasing impotence, his actions are reduced to futility or a vague attempt to regain control.

The second image we get is that of Ben, the slimy pick-up artist that Alice meets at one of her many gigs. She tries to make it as a lounge singer, and on her first night Ben sidles up next to her and she lets him in. He seems quite nice at first, but when Alice gets a knock on the door from his wife, all of a sudden his character becomes three dimensional. Ben is not just a philanderer, he is a womanizer; a man who beats his wife and, to add insult to injury, cheats on her at the same time. His sexuality and his rage are intertwined, as he discovers all the truth that is to be found in the old adage about women: he can’t live without them but he can’t live with them either. The confusion of sexual morals, his misperception of the world around him, even his apparent manipulation of Alice seem to stem from this simultaneous need and rejection of the new woman: the mid-seventies woman.

Our final character is David, and he seems perfect. By this time Alice has moved to a new town, and she finds herself employed as a waitress. With David she begins a casual romance, one that she is hesitant toward, given her recent history. But David seems to be a genuinely good guy. However when he seeks to discipline her son Tommy, she sees the violence that is just a part of him as it was her husband and Ben. She sees that he too lashes out when frustrated over simple things. They have a fight that seems to erupt volcanically out of a happy birthday party. Emotions pour out that were bottled up in both of them and from this catharsis, even though they are temporarily blind with anger, they can finally see each other for who they are. If David is to be with Alice, he has to deal with the fact that she wants control over her life and her son. If Alice is to be with David, she has to see that he needs control over his life, too. But in the end they are both willing to make do.

It ends with him promising to take her to Monterey to try and become a famous singer, and we might see this as a happy note. However, I anticipate that the two will be happy for a while, but soon they’ll start fighting, soon he’ll resent her and she’ll find him contemptible, because there was just as much spark in her husband when she married him. We’re always willing to take a chance on love, but when relationships are radically changing at their core, when the way we interact as people, as genders is mutating before us, it is easy for both parties to have misconceptions.

Scorsese made a film here that seems like a feminist film, it seems to be about empowered women who make it on their own in the real world. But when you look closer you can see that Alice needs men just as much as ever. You can see that all the female characters are stereotypical, with Alice filling the ironic role of “strong woman.” What this film is really about is the men she encounters along this path. She acts as a lens, a medium through which we can see the men, these haunted characters that are driven mad by the worst of times. They might as well be Travis Bickle or Johnny Boy; they might grow up to be Charlie or Ace Rothstein. Because at their core, men are simply raging bulls who occasionally become good fellas, but who spend most of their life groping in the dark for meaning.