“Upstream” Battle: How a Filmmaker Makes an Incredibly Weird Film in 2013

A few days after seeing Shane Carruth’s new film Upstream Color, it still seems hard to know where to begin.  Carruth was the come-from-nowhere savant, trained as an engineer, who made Primer, perhaps the most realistic and compelling movie about time travel ever imagined, filmed in the suburbs of Dallas on a vanishingly small budget ($7,000). That was 2004.  The densely plotted and lapidary filmic wizardry of Primer suggested an indie filmmaker of great ambition, one who could follow in the steps of Christopher Nolan and Memento and jump from high-concept underground films to “conglomerate-backed mall-magnets, another Bryan Singer or Darren Aronofsky,” as Wired recently put …

No Oscars but Plenty of Action: Subverting Traditional Masculinity in Die Hard and Point Break

In a recent podcast of Slate’s Culture Gabfest, moderator Stephen Metcalf, movie critic Dana Stevens, and Deputy Editor Julia Turner discussed the inaugural issue of Kindling Quarterly, a new print publication aimed ostensibly, despite the protestation of the publication’s founders, at “hipster dads.” Whatever one thinks of the quarterly’s premise, all agreed that ideas about masculinity were in flux. Metcalf described the current state of American masculinity as “troubled” or “ambivalent.”  The rise of creative types with flexible schedules who promise to be more present parental figures than their own fathers, Metcalf argued, was in many ways a new phenomenon, if not in …

Freddy from Mad Men, and Mass Murder in Obama’s America

I think I first became aware of Bobcat Goldthwait when he appeared on the seminal sitcom Married… with Children as one of Peg Bundy’s many degenerate relatives from the Wanker family.  His uniquely grizzled and whinnying voice sticks in the memory, like Gilbert Gottfried’s or Sam Kinison’s (both Married alums, incidentally), and it seems to have been genetically transferred to Charlie of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, breaking through in the illiterate janitor’s most strained, frantic moments.  It bespeaks sincerity, frazzle, anger, and hard luck all at once.  The comics who appeared on Married—a show that prefigured the amorality of Seinfeld and It’s Always Sunny as …

Frankie Fitzgibbons, the Coen Brothers, and the Free Market

Some of them want to use you Some them want to get used by you Some of them want to abuse you Some of them want to be abused The Eurythmics’ synth-pop anthem seemed to speak for something about the 1980s—a cold, cool attitude that if you wanted it, you could find it on the free market (no matter how self-destructive it was).  Yet Annie Lennox’s lyrics also evoked a classical kind of of sexual supply and demand.  The whole system would approach equilibrium between those who wanted to abuse and those who wanted to be abused, and ultimately the market would align everyone’s interests, resulting in a kind of kinky harmony—the greatest good for the greatest number. Other …

Tropics of Meta’s Best of 2012

It has been a big year for us at ToM, as we rebooted and redesigned the site back in March and welcomed many new contributors.  (Hi, Jude, Lauren, Maryann, Nick, Adam, John, Jonathyne, & co.)  We were also lucky to see several of our pieces circulated more broadly in the online world, such as Alex’s look at the politics of Atlanta’s Beltline, Ryan’s analysis of sexuality in the films of Wes Anderson, and our roundtable discussion of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.  Meanwhile, the manic, occasionally psychotic antics of the US election cycle prompted both mild laceration from our friend Clement, who covered the presidential conventions and debates, as well as the periodic spike in …

The Joys of Organized Nerd Singing: Best of 2012 Part VI

A capella is having a major pop culture moment right now. A form of singing where the voice is the only instrument, it has burst from the confines of the church to the steps of every college dorm in America.  This is no Gregorian chanting, friends.  This is sassy shimmies and winking wailing of cheesy radio hits, and it’s been showing up on your TV screen in increasing volume. First there was The Warblers of Fox’s Glee, then the NBC reality a capella competition The Sing-Off. On NBC’s The Office, Andy Bernard’s famed college a capella group Here Comes Treble finally made an appearance this year, with special guest Stephen Colbert. And like a musical version of Jennifer Aniston or …

Visions of FDR

On visiting my old hometown last week, I had the good fortune to meet an old teacher of mine.  She was at the hospital for the birth of her granddaughter, accompanied by her own mother, a spirited nonagenarian.  A discussion of our delight at the serendipitous meeting -- I had probably not seen this retired teacher and librarian in 15 years -- suddenly and unexpectedly turned to the sorry state of the world, the incipient rise of socialism, and the unfortunate career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  As a youth, my teacher had plumped for Goldwater in the 1960s, and her venerable mother recalled her own father railing against the "dictator" Roosevelt back in the 1930s.  The world was going …

So You Say You’ll Change the Constitution: Seven Historians Respond to “Lincoln”

On this most American of holidays, we convened a roundtable of éminence grises (French for "nitpicking academics") to discuss the new film about the man many consider to be America's greatest President, Abraham Lincoln.  Here are their responses: Keith Orejel (Columbia University) First and foremost, I would like to say that I fully concur with Kate Masur’s recent op-ed in the New York Times, which draws attention to the film’s portrayal of “passive black characters” who are not only insufficiently examined, but also poorly captured when given rare screen time. That said I do think the movie offers a number of improvements on the more standard cinematic representations of the …

Time, Fate, and the History of the Future in “Looper”

You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal. Time travel has not yet been invented but 30 years from now, it will have been. I am one of many specialized assassins in our present called loopers. So when criminal organizations in the future need someone gone, they zap them back to me and I eliminate the target from the future. Loopers are well paid. We live the good life and the only rule is never let your target escape, even if your target is you. My furtive love for the dystopian sci-fi genre is no secret to regular readers of ToM.  Children of Men is, to me, the superlative example of how to explore contemporary social issues and cultural anxieties by telling stories about …

The Sexuality of “Whimsy”: Gender and Sex in the Films of Wes Anderson

Writing about Wes Andersen’s latest production, Moonrise Kingdom, New York Times critic A.O. Scott summarized the symbolic consummation between the film’s adolescent protagonists Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward): "There, with a tent, a French pop song and unembarrassed honesty (Sam warns Suzy that he may wet the bed), they consummate, metaphorically, an enchanted, chaste affair capped with a hilariously symbolic deflowering."  While academics, critics, and others have long discussed dominant Anderson motifs such as loving but dysfunctional families, unreliable patriarchs, and the aesthetic particulars associated with the now-veteran director, far fewer have examined the …