The Blunt Edge of Tomorrow

Edge of Tomorrow – a highly entertaining if overlong mix of preposterous metaphysics and uber-meta-cinematic technique – is when, all is said and done, the most elaborate cute-meet and courtship film perhaps ever made. It’s also a movie about how a novice version of Tom Cruise, wimpy and unsure of himself, learns how to become the unstoppable professionalized Tom Cruise. In other words, a kind of boot camp for stardom.

The logic of the film is the Mulligan – a golfer's series of endless do-overs. (I should know; once reader, I did golf. Badly). This produces a kind of philosophical slapstick that is very amusing and a subtle if not sufficiently elaborated critique of the working of capital and everyday life. You have to wake up. You have to go to work. There's always some guy yelling at you to pick up the pace. Repetition, as Adorno might say, is the lynchpin of capital, the human body reduced to a machine performing the same tasks over and over.

Cinematicaly, it works because it’s entirely consistent with, indeed, evolves out of the principles of montage. A logical inference of causation or association is established by simply cutting from one image/scene to a parallel one. The audience fills in the gaps. The gaps -- both cinematic as well as narrative -- consist of jumps in time. The script is smartly constructed; as Richard Brody remarks, it's "Groundhog Day meets Saving Private Ryan" (which is probably just how it was pitched, I imagine).

Brody is right, too, when he points out that Doug Liman, the director, missed a chance to explore the script's implications of a truly harrowing existential crisis: what it means for a person to become unstuck in time, ala Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, or Traven in Ballard's "Terminal Beach." Pilgrim's journey becomes a martyr's progress, but Traven grows deranged. Cage's name indicates his predicament: the trap of endless resurrection, which is also the dilemma Stanislav Lem (as well as Soderbergh) investigates in Solaris. Instead, Edge of Tomorrow is content to revel in its nested doll/maze-like plot about continual reiteration. This is the logic of FPS games. But it also mimics the film production process -- next take, better take/fix it in post -- and indeed, the marauding aliens are called, for reasons that go unexplained, "Mimics."

But the end result of repelling the alien invasion and its lotus-like hive mind, glowing beautifully at the bottom of a flooded Louvre like a mammoth Damien Hirst installation, is only to serve as prelude for Cruise’s naïve, shirking Major Cage to learn how to become a fitting match for the Angel of Verdun AKA Full Metal Bitch, played with cut-throat aplomb and glistening deltoids by Emily Blunt, a blue-eyed beauty who suffers no fools as she wields an enormous carbon-fiber blade like some avenging Valkyrie. "The Angel of Verdun," of course, is a famous sculpture by Rodin which, if memory serves, Geoff Dyer writes about in his wonderful book on World War I memorials, "The Missing of the Somme." So "Edge" is also a film about star-crossed lovers and destiny and all that rot. To win the war, the hero must learn how to win the heroine. The rest is not silence, but explosion.

The credit music for Edge of Tomorrow should have been Chrissie Hynde's sardonic "Like in the Movies," (from Stockholm): "the audience goes home satisfied/because nobody really died." I went home satisfied, in a Hollywood popcorn sort of way, even though the film annoyed me no end. It's impossible not to compare this film to Cruise's last SF outing, the vastly inferior "Oblivion." Both hinge on replicating the hero through multiple iterations; "Oblivion," via clones, in "Edge," through constant re-births. Has Tom Cruise (who's better here than he has been in a long time) acquired some kind of ironic distance on his own image, offering us a commentary on stardom's emptiness? Or has his vanity metastasized, achieving some kind of infernal Omega Point of the image, disappearing up its own fundament?

The New Golden Age or, Why TV is Often Mistaken for a Visual Medium

In a recent New Yorker piece, my friend Josh Rothman waxes enthusiastic about the network TV drama, “The Good Wife,” claiming that its most recent season marks an unprecedented rise in sophistication for long form TV. “The Good Wife,” he writes, “has become profound.” Maybe it has, but I have good reasons for remaining skeptical. Granted, I can only speak from a grossly uninformed position since I’ve seen very few of these shows, nor watched them with anything like the kind of totalizing devotion they inspire in their admirers. But I’ve seen enough of them to catch both their flavor and their formula. To paraphrase Cary Grant in “The Philadelphia Story,” “To hardly know them is to know them well.”

Though I’ve refused to give into “Breaking Bad,” “The Wire,” “Game of Thrones” or “True Detective,” despite the urgent pleadings of friends, I have watched quite a few episodes of “The Sopranos” in its heyday (engrossing, dramatically superior TV, but finally, forgettable) as well as several seasons of “Mad Men,” whose rapacious slickness was fascinating before it became stale and repetitive; it’s a show that fairly preens with the smugness of hindsight. Of all these recent entries in the so-called second Golden Age of television, only “Battlestar Galactica” has consistently held my interest, partly because it’s SF, which I teach quite a bit, and partly because it takes on large moral, ethical and political questions – big questions about post-9/11 culture – that no other show has really grappled with in a meaningful way.

Rothman’s plea for “The Good Wife” finally boils down to this: that TV has finally become as good – as intellectually sophisticated and psychologically enriching – as good novels. It’s an argument I have no real problem with. Except that TV is a visual medium. Or at least, it’s commonly mistaken for one. Richard Brody, in a spirited exchange with Emily Nussbaum, notes that there’s nothing about “Breaking Bad” or any of the other new Golden Age shows that “thrive as audiovisual creation.” And that’s the crux of the matter. There’s no denying that TV has grown more psychologically complex, able to show deeper forms of interiority, as novels do, and that's no small thing. And while comparing TV to film is very much a case of apples and oranges, TV resolutely remains a form in which the visual is just a means to an end.

What excites Rothman is how shows like “The Good Wife” have made what he calls an existential turn, moving from the usual courtroom dramatics to something more ambiguous and self-reflective, something that engages powerful themes like the relationship between gender and power. But it's still the visual medium reduced, restricted, placed almost solely in the service of narrative. You rarely get a shot, a composition, an edited sequence that elicits awe or astonishment or does the visual work cinema is capable of, one that produces a deeper affective resonance than the usual staid series of close-ups TV must adhere to. TV, in other words, is about the pleasures of identifying with actors and plot payoffs. These are not small pleasures and I enjoy them myself. But films are about the pleasures of seeing itself and are, therefore, for me at least, infinitely richer.

One example comes to mind: I just re-watched Joseph Losey's “The Servant” (I was peer-reviewing a very good essay on it) and it’s astonishing how much emotional and psychological power Losey conveys, not through dialogue, but through mise en scene and meticulous camera compositions. TV is capable of this, one supposes, but eschews it because the demands of the medium must answer to a different marketplace, a different consumer or viewer logic.

I realize I'm inviting a cyber-donnybrook here by confessing to membership snobbish cult. And maybe I’m just being obtuse, but it seems to me that quality TV fails one simple test – the ability to re-visit it, years afterwards, and derive even more meaning and pleasure than the first viewing provided. Re-watching the best, most moving, most memorable TV episode of “The Good Wife,” or “Mad Men,” or “Games of Thrones,” I would argue, fails this test and moreover, pales beside revisiting “The Searchers,” “Vertigo,” “Touch of Evil,” “Ball of Fire,” or “The Godfather.” Long form television like “The Good Wife” is meant to be consumed and disposed of – that’s what it makes it a serial. It’s quite unlike the visual poetry and ingenuity of films by Max Ophuls or Michael Powell, Steven Soderbergh, or Kathryn Bigelow.

In film, it should go without saying, composition equals emotion. That’s why I tell my students to experiment by watching a scene with the sound muted to see how the director frames and blocks a shot or sequence, what spatial relations the actors occupy (and therefore what psychological space they’re in) or how the editing, the lighting, and so forth, accomplishes aesthetic and dramatic effects that either enhance or actually work against the narrative.

Of course, it’s not fair to ask TV to do the work of cinema. They’re simply too dissimilar. Finally, despite their family resemblances, they’re completely different mediums. Still, I think it can be said that all TV, even the best, exists as a form that’s designed to be exhausted and replaced, whereas great films can never be exhausted, only submitted to, over and over again. If this makes me a cultist, so be it. The test of a classic is how often one can return to it and be enriched. Still, it would be all too easy to condemn Golden Age television as the opiate of the intellectuals. But the test of pleasure is something else again and while I doubt any of the Golden Age shows now can pass the former test, they obviously more than meet the requirements for the latter.

Gravity's Pallid Rainbow

Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity took my breath away, especially in the sublime opening scenes, where the astronauts undertake their tasks 600km above the dazzling surface of the earth in a series of ballet-like movements which the camera’s whip-like tracking orchestrates to utterly entrance the eye. The first ten minutes of this very tightly economical film of 91 minutes is a mini-tour de force.

Sadly, though, what starts out as a voyage into the possibilities of the beyond, becomes a very predictable survival story – riveting, to be sure, but anchored by the trite narrative arc of the triumph of the human spirit, as embodied by the ever-perky – but also immensely watchable – Sandra Bullock. The camera lavishes an unseemly amount of attention on Bullock’s buttocks – and the rest of her, as well, which is as perfectly sculpted as one would expect from a multi-million-dollar star. Call it eye-candy in space.

Richard Brody – in my opinion, the most discerning film critic in America right now – launches a devastating attack on the film in the online version of The New Yorker. His tirade is aimed at both the plodding humanist clichés of the film itself and the accolades the critics – like his colleague, David Denby – are lauding it with. In this fraternal sphere of mutual admiration, no real critical work can be done, according to Brody, and while I largely agree with his indictment of the film and its critical reception because it addresses a much larger problem, I take issue with his charge that it lacks any meaningful sense of interiority.

This clearly comes through in the back story scenes, where Clooney’s Matt Kowalski, the consummate veteran professional, unflappable in the face of crisis, drags out of Bullock’s character, the absurdly named Ryan Stone, her tragic history – motherhood, dead child, spiritual desolation – check, check and check. Cue grieving strings. The interiority is weak, yes; barely sketched out in the hackneyed way of many Hollywood movies, yet these characters do have inner lives, even if they consist of pure proceduralism and corny tics, as in Clooney's character, who listens to country music as he zooms about. The egregiously shameless and sentimental bait of the dead child smacks of the most cynical calculation, evidence of what Pauline Kael once called "contempt for the audience." One can easily imagine much more compelling arcs for both these characters. Instead they are reduced to components in a complex physics problem that also poses, preposterously, as a work of mourning.

Brody seems largely disappointed that Gravity is not 2001. But what film could be? Still, he's right – a huge opportunity was wasted here. Gravity is all technique and no soul.

The film goes downhill after Kowalski sacrifices himself to save Stone. The rest is simply a gripping procedural about a plucky-bootstrap-gal and Bullock is great in it. This is what she does best. (That, and zero-gee striptease, which, reader, seen in 3D, on an XD digital screen, is not totally a bad thing. But no, really, it is).

The film’s geopolitical logic takes over then, with Stone leap-frogging from the ruined American shuttle to the International Space Station and its Russian ship and from there to the Chinese shuttle, also a bit of a shambles thanks to the Russians setting off a chain-reaction of catastrophic space debris by blowing up one of their own spy satellites. Meet the new Cold War, just like the old Cold War.

Bullock manages not only to maneuver her way through this impossible crisis, but put behind her the devastation of her young daughter’s death. It becomes, in other words, not a story about the consequences of the colonization of orbital space, but one woman’s triumph over adversity. That she’s a) American and b) swiftly and shrewdly commands both Russian and Chinese space modules to splashdown in a final, over the top, rebirth, is not really worth commenting on. Except to say that anxieties about globalization and the precarious future of a totalized capitalist sphere of influence for which orbital space is both the actual and allegorical arena are the film's repressed contents. The entire network of international trade and exchange -- in other words, the world system, the totality of circumnavigated space -- is fragile, always poised on the brink of the next calamity.

Adorno, Shoah, and The New Yorker

Richard Brody is one of my favorite film critics. His squibs in the “Now Playing” section of The New Yorker are masterpieces of poetic sensibility and compression (like the current one on Children of Paradise) and often the best things in any given issue, while his book on Godard, Everything is Cinema, is masterful. So it’s disappointing to see him resort to the usual tiresome cliché about Adorno on art after Auschwitz in his otherwise moving and perceptive review of the life and work of Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah.

As Brody tells it, Lanzmann’s desire to make Shoah a beautiful as well as a morally forceful film – in Lanzmann’s eloquent phrase, “to make the unbearable bearable” – provides “a resounding response to Adorno’s assertion that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” For response here, read "refutation."

It’s easy to misread Adorno. Understanding him means reading him alongside his friend Walter Benjamin’s definitive statement of dialectical thinking: “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” By saying that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Adorno was not condemning the power of art. He was saying that the culture that produced the poetry of Goethe and Rilke also produced the language of the Final Solution: culture itself is the problem. It’s impossible to think the two apart from one another, as though civilization was safely walled off from barbarism. Surely Abu Ghraib is the nearest reminder of that.

As a kind of shorthand for a profound resignation about the fate of culture, the phrase “poetry after Auschwitz” needs to be viewed in the wider context of Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment, which as he observes in 1947, had “aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty,” only to culminate as “disaster triumphant.” As Adorno and Max Horkheimer elaborate in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “the human being’s mastery of itself, on which the self is founded, practically always involves the annihilation of the subject in whose service that mastery is maintained … self-preservation destroys the very thing which is to be preserved.”

In other words, events like the Shoah are not aberrations, not psychotic breaks from social reality. Rather, they exemplify the logic of technocratic culture at its most extreme. Adorno’s concern is with not succumbing to the collective amnesia and repressions of the fate of the Jews in post-Auschwitz culture, as described in the brilliant epilogue to Tony Judt’s magisterial Postwar, "From the House of the Dead."

Here’s Adorno’s full quote, more or less, from “Cultural Criticism” (1949):

“The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.”

As Michael Rothberg helpfully points out in Traumatic Realism, the phrase “poetry after Auschwitz” is perhaps rendered with greater clarity (but less urgency) if translated into “poetry after reification.” Reification is the agent of poetry’s impossibility, for, as he explains, “the barbarism or irrationality of ‘poetry after Auschwitz’ is that, against its implicit intentions, it cannot produce knowledge of its own impossible social status … this impossibility is neither technical nor even moral … it results instead from an objective and objectifying social process that tends toward the liquidation of the individual,” or what Adorno elsewhere calls the totally administered world, the society of "radical evil”.

Language’s complicity in the catastrophe of the modern means that poetry itself is vulnerable to reification. Poetry that does not acknowledge its own barbarism, then, its tendency to valorize subjective experience as though it floated free of its larger ideological framework, will do nothing to resist the cultural conditions that make an Auschwitz possible. Making it pretty just don’t cut it anymore.

To write poetry after Auschwitz means rejecting traditional aesthetic values like harmony, consonance, and even beauty. These values aim at reconciling tension and thus, for Adorno, can only corrupt the poem. As he writes in Aesthetic Theory:

“Art is true to the extent to which it is discordant and antagonistic in its language and in its whole essence, provided that it synthesizes those diremptions, thus making them determinate in their irreconcilability. Its paradoxical task is to attest to the lack of concord while at the same time working to abolish discordance.”

All critiques of culture, Adorno insists, must begin by implicating themselves in the wreckage they are sifting. This is why the understanding that poetry after Auschwitz has become barbaric is endangered, he warns, of being confused with a merely punitive or reductionist gesture banning all aesthetic expression. If lyric poetry is also a critique of culture – a point he makes strongly in his 1957 essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” where he writes “that the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism” – then it, too, is always already fully a part of the aporia of culture.

This does not mean that subjective suffering has no right to express itself. Even if, as Adorno claims in the famous conclusion to Negative Dialectics, “all culture after Auschwitz, including the urgent critique of it, is garbage,” “perennial suffering still has as much right to expression as the martyr has to cry out.” The aporia of cultural failure does not mean the collapse of culture into total barbarism, neither does it signal the end of dialectics.

Instead, Adorno tells us in Minima Moralia, it compels seeing things from “the standpoint of redemption,” an act that requires the construction of perspectives that “displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear on day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with objects – this alone is the task of thought.” That such a redemptive stance is to be achieved solely through “felt contact with objects” might seem at first glance a strange claim to make. Yet what Adorno is advocating here is a non-idealist move that, while reducible to vulgar materialism, seeks a return to things, not as essences, but as fragments whose integrity is guaranteed by their loss of wholeness. Located through a micrological sifting of the ruins, these fragments possess the ability to form new constellations of meaning.

Lyn Hejinian offers a nuanced reading of Adorno, suggesting that his maxim “has to be taken as true in two ways.” “First, because what happened at Auschwitz … [rendered] all possibilities for meaning … suspended or crushed.” And second, and more importantly, because the event of the disaster enjoins poets “not to speak the same language as Auschwitz … poetry after Auschwitz must indeed by barbarian; it must be foreign to the cultures that produce atrocities. As a result, the poet must assume a barbarian position, taking a creative, analytic and often oppositional stance, occupying (and being occupied) by foreignness—by the barbarism of strangeness.”

Adorno was never opposed to the power of art to register the Shoah. His essay on Beckett’s Endgame provide ample evidence of that. Indeed, the whole of Aesthetic Theory, his final work, is devoted to working out this intractable problem. But the clearest statement he issued comes near the end of Negative Dialectics:

“A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler on unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”