THE FILMS OF ROMAN POLANSKI

Cul-de-Sac, one of the earlier films made in English by Roman Polanski, takes a very unusual ride into the human psyches of people living alone in an isolated space, not too different from films like Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, and Knife in the Water. What those films share in common is a sense of tight space that the central characters can’t get out of and we must always follow them within whatever space they go. Polanski’s films have varied from frightening, claustrophobic thrillers to more sensual, darkly comic dramas like this one for example. Cul-de-Sac leans a great deal on the comical side, despite the fact that it’s about a couple being held hostage in their own castle by an armed criminal. However, the situation is not played out in a very suspenseful tone for much of the first half, since the characters of the husband and wife and their unwelcome guest spend the whole night and the next day going through a series of comical mishaps and self-pitying conversations about how miserable their lives have been. Donald Pleasance is so neurotically eccentric as the middle-aged husband George whose younger and more beautiful wife Teresa is more outspoken and disappointed in him, made all the more clear by her infidelity at the beginning of the film as she makes out with a man closer to her age. Because of how idiotic and outrageous they come off as, they don’t play the roles of helpless terrified victims that people would expect to see in hostage thrillers. The criminal Dickie himself is hardly intimidating and scary, given that he behaves in a very drunk and gruff manner, although we know he’s armed and there is a feeling of dread beneath his humor that he could shoot the couple any time if they don’t cooperate with him. At the same time, he also looks embarrassed to be sharing the space with this annoying couple and has to spend the whole night until his crime boss arrives to escort him out of this lonely isolated castle by the sea.

It makes the relationship between a normal couple and a dangerous criminal lighthearted and outrageous for much of the film, particularly when Teresa’s family comes to visit and the criminal has to pretend to be the servant and face all the obnoxious demands of the classy people. It isn’t until after the relatives leave and Dickie is back to keeping the couple under wraps that the suspense builds as he intends to remain in the castle until his boss arrives. It’s after Teresa recklessly lights paper in between his toes and provokes his anger that a serious display of violence is depicted when Dickie whips the wife and smacks her several times, the first moment we see a woman being brutalized. This is one of the many elements in Polanski’s films that regards him depicting victimization in some form, whether it’s men or women. Once Dickie is forced to threaten George and Teresa with his gun, it’s only by that climax that it’s dark yet still comic to some degree when Teresa stole the gun from under Dickie’s nose and gave it to George who can’t handle it right. George is too clumsy to handle a gun that he ends up mortally wounding the crook, causing him to panics and hesitates on what to do with his body while his wife keeps pushing to do something. When she realizes how weak he is to take action, she decides to run away with another man who came by the castle earlier and that displays her ultimate rejection of him in a sudden rush. The husband is left a broken man and sits alone on a rock on the beach, appearing very somber, now that he is truly alone in this desolate place. It’s here where it takes a tragic-comic twist and this comically neurotic man has nothing left for him.

Rather than be just another hostage thriller that most mainstream viewers are familiar with in modern Hollywood, Cul-de-Sac shows more interest in the relationships of human beings, civilian and criminal alike, as they prove to be equally flawed and comical without having a helpless victim and evil villain as the two forces. It thus falls into category with Polanski’s other films, which spend a great deal on the psychology of characters living together in isolation, which occupies his films until they reach a very serious climax. In Rosemary’s Baby, he spent a great deal elaborating on Rosemary’s relationships with her husband and neighbors as they live in the same apartment, up until she starts to suspect that they’re involved in a Satanic plot against her unborn child. Knife in the Water spends a great deal with a middle-class couple and a young man on a sailboat, chatting and growing very tense with one another until it leads to a mishap near the end of the ride. Death and the Maiden takes place entirely in a house by the sea as a woman and her husband spend the entire night holding a doctor hostage and try to get him to confess to crimes she believed he committed against her. The more time Polanski spends in a certain space, whether it’s a place of housing or a body of water, with a limited number of characters within the space, the more he brings a feeling of isolation and confusion as it builds up the tension to where these relationships will lead and what drastic events will occur, however comical, violent, or frightening they become. Cul-de-Sac was one of his earlier films that elaborated on the darkly comical relationships of flawed human beings, stuck in a castle together, building on suspense and humor that made it one of his kookier films of his career. His films after Cul-de-Sac grew more dark and serious, especially when he got to The Pianist and depicted his personal memories of the Holocaust through another survivor. Still, Cul-de-Sac remains unique as a film of Polanski’s that doesn’t fail to intrigue with its bizarre characters and comical situations and keeps the tension high as it follows his style of unpredictability in his filmic structure.


Repulsion is one of the more nightmarish films of Polanski’s career, which fits in as being the first film of his so-called “Apartment” trilogy, followed by Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant. After seeing those last two films first, I saw how Repulsion was the first to start a pattern of depicting a troubled person, living alone in a dark apartment with eccentric neighbors and a paranoid mind. If Rosemary’s Baby was about a woman’s fear of witchcraft and The Tenant was about a man’s fear of murder-suicide, then Repulsion is about a woman’s fear of sex and her inability to connect with people intimately.

The central character of the film Carol, played by Catherine Deneuve, is so quiet and reserved around people and with herself, hardly smiling or laughing, clearly depressed and lonely without attempting to connect or even touch people. The first time a man named Colin kisses her, she cowers and flees indoors, washing her mouth out from the touch of a man’s lips. This gives one of her signs of “repulsion” at the sexual touch of men and the tendency to look at sexual intimacy as a pathway to abuse. The way she keeps looking out the window at the nuns in the convent next door implies she has a longing and respect for them because they represent chastity and purity, which she cannot find in relationships with men. It’s never clearly explained why she restricts herself from and cringes at the sight of anything sexual, although we see her as a young girl in a photograph, standing distant and from her family and looking with a frown on her face. This may give a clue to her past to explain that she has a problem connecting with people, although she clings to her older sister and doesn’t want her to go on a vacation with her married boyfriend, who Carol despises. This shows that her best chance at intimacy are with women, also shown during her work hours at the beauty saloon, where she has a lighthearted moment with one of her female co-workers and laughs with her about a movie she saw. Yet up until that moment and afterwards, she still cannot really open or speak her mind to people. Whenever anyone asks her what’s wrong as they notice her somber and quiet, she avoids any response other than faintly saying nothing’s wrong. Whatever the problem is with her life, she can never explain it to people, least of all to men. The tracking shots of Carol walking along the streets of London, with 60s pop music playing non-diegetically, shows how empty and distant she is towards her surroundings and how alone she is in the world. This atmosphere makes the film appear at first as a melodrama about a woman’s feelings and need for connection. However, as it progresses into its second act, the struggle of this woman’s psyche becomes more terrifying and nightmarish.

As she spends most of her days in the apartment alone while her sister is away, Carol’s sanity and isolation begins to drive her towards a horrific series of erotic and disastrous delusions that begin to catch on her biggest fears. Whenever she goes to bed, she imagines a man coming into her room and sexually assaulting her in bed, in which all the sound goes out and we can only see her traumatized expressions as men gang up on her brutally. This is where we are seeing her worst fears being displayed as she imagines the opposite sex as dirty and abusive, which points closer to the answer to why she is so distant from men. Every morning, a telephone rings and no one speaks when Carol answers it, which is never explained, unless it’s another delusion. However, the fact that we can’t hear anyone speak is to imply that someone is stalking her and just wanting to hear the sound of her voice. That can only play further on her paranoia and assumptions about men, especially at the moment where Colin comes to the apartment one night, begging to make love to her, before she beats his head in with a candlestick. This pushes the film into a darker and scarier area as we see the deranged and violent side of a woman who lives in fear of men and seems driven to hurt them any moment they lean onto her. This act of murder shows her fearful nature in a more extreme manner as she kills a man before he does anything to imply rape or abuse. He is a man who in his spare time can’t stop thinking of her and only wants to reach out, although he barely knows her and may be just trying to unleash his sexual longings. Still, he’s full of sympathetic qualities and seemed to feel concerned about her fragile and depressive state that he wanted to connect with her, which made me we wish he and Carol could have made peace and gotten along to soothe her psychological problems. It’s mainly Carol acting upon paranoia than anything logical when she kills him, but it does reveal how traumatic it is for a woman if she had any previous experience with sex and felt abused in some way. It’s like a horrific revenge film for women who hate being taken advantage of by men, which makes Carol appear as a role model for female purity and liberation. However, as she is consumed more and more by her nightmares and delusions of hands coming out of the wall to grab her, she is far from being a sane, reliable heroine.

Her behavior and reactions to the world around her are defined by paranoia and coldness that she appears more broken and disturbed than any other female character Roman Polanski ever portrayed in his films. She is more irrational than Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby and less heroic as Faye Dunaway in Chinatown; she is a broken woman seeking revenge against the opposite sex and will do so by any means, however delusional and paranoid she grows. The more the walls crack around her, the more the film shows how her sanity and world is breaking apart and that her own home is trying to swallow her up for all the isolation she has made use of from staying within its walls. She leaves a raw rabbit on a plate without ever cooking it and letting flies eat on the carcass. It’s shows how she is allowing her life around her to wither and devour her for not taking control of her life and letting it pass her by. Her daily life is centered on walking amidst this quiet and tight space, breaking a cracker and staring out the window, hardly truly spending time with anyone but herself. This eerie space provides the film with a gloomy and depressing inside look at her mind, as though the apartment is her mind and she is unable to open it up and see anything deeply and intimately outside of these surroundings.

However, her fate is completely uncertain by the very end, after she has killed two men and has fallen into a frozen state, with all the neighbors and her sister staring down at her in concern. What is most moving about the final scene is where her sister’s boyfriend Michael picks her up and carries her out of the room, a sign of real charity and warmth from a man towards a woman. It contrasts the tension that existed between the two at the beginning and he is capable of showing compassion towards a woman. The shot of him carrying her away out the door is then blocked by darkness and the camera tracks across the room at all of Carol’s valuables and the messes she left in the apartment, such as the dead rabbit, a broken cracker, and last of all the photograph of her as a girl with the family. This time, the camera zooms closer into the picture and we can see her looking uncomfortable at an older man looking at her. This gives a clue as to how she must feel disturbed about the signs of sexual feelings, as it appears that this man, who may have been her father or a relative, could have used her and has traumatized her ever since. It zooms closer into her face and finally into her eyes, ending the film with this last sight of a depressed girl who was clearly uncomfortable around men since this experience as a girl and it juxtaposes this fear of men with the warmth Michael shows her as he carried her out. Together, this brings Polanski’s vision of a woman’s disturbed psyche to a very bittersweet close as we are left with no clear answers of Carol’s past or her future, only more troubling questions, even though they all relate to the relationship between the two sexes. This is one of those films in Polanski’s career that takes time with focusing on character, with very little dialogue and open expressions, before the darkness and horror begins to rise up and swallow her. The more it spends on this young woman’s loneliness in her apartment and distance from people of the outside world, he creates a disturbing and bleak horror film with no exploitative or gory sights, but something more uncomfortable and frightening that relates to a person’s life in loneliness with a world they can’t reach out to and can make them feel broken and insane.


Chinatown is definitely a much straighter film than Polanski’s earlier films and is not filled with the same bizarre and creepy elements as Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, or Cul-de-Sac. It was one of the two films he made in Hollywood and was also hired as a director by Robert Evans, the second time after Rosemary’s Baby, so it was more like he was applying his directing style to a film from another source, in this case, Robert Towne’s original screenplay. It was an easier film to follow than his earlier works given that it’s a detective mystery that needed to have all the secrets and loose ends tied up, whereas his other films usually kept a lot of questions unanswered. Still, he made it as a very gritty and complex film with a very cynical and pessimistic look at society that was in line with his other films. Chinatown’s most defining characteristics that relate to Polanski’s technique in film include the focus on a first-person perspective, a destructive relationship between the sexes, the danger of sex itself, and a very bleak conclusion about life.

Throughout this film, the first-person perspective is that of private eye, Jake “J.J.” Gittes (Jack Nicholson), as he investigates a mystery that he didn’t want to get thrown into from the beginning, but which he immerses himself into once he gets in over his head about something he doesn’t fully understand. Everything witnessed on the film is shown from his point of view so that we can follow him up until the mystery is unveiled. The time spent with Gittes is taken seriously and humorously whenever he behaves nosy and slick with his crime-solving techniques, yet at the same time we can see that the crime he is trying to solve is bigger than he thinks and that there is a tension on the rise for how he can get out of this case alive – or even get someone else out alive. The more uncertain and reckless he gets with his methods of snooping into forbidden information or makes an enemy out of bureaucracy, he becomes unreliable at times because he hasn’t that smart to know what’s at risk. He falls in line with the main characters in Polanski’s other films, which are curious and irrational at the same time about their surroundings and make a bad call on the way they try to make sense of it all. Gittes gets his nose slit, gets into fights with farmers, causes a scene at a retirement home, and slaps Faye Dunaway’s character Evelyn Mulwray for information. All these moments expose him as a flawed man who is not out to make a good impression on people, but since he’s involved in a case that is filled with corruption and lies, we have no choice but to follow him and let him have his way. He needs to act quickly and rough in order to find the answers quickly, although he’s not exactly a muscle man who can overpower his enemies. His past experiences in Chinatown have broken him, where his efforts as a policeman led him to no success when he tried too hard on a case that he didn’t have a full understand of. Now that he’s throwing himself in a new case that’s full of deceit and murder, his life and limb are put higher on the line, mostly noticed by his bandaged nose as a sign of him as a wounded warrior. His mind and wit are what work for him to investigate the mystery and Jack Nicholson makes him very sharp-mouthed, slick, and charming enough to remind audiences of a Humphrey Bogart-type of detective who can seduce the ladies and outwit the villains. The challenge for this character is that his charm and wit are facades for a man who suffered a great loss in Chinatown because of not getting all the facts in good shape to protect a woman from getting hurt. He still maintains his demeanor to help him get through the job because he clearly doesn’t like to be embarrassed or displayed as weak, which he’s clear about when telling Evelyn that he’s not the “one who is supposed to be caught with his pants down”. In that way, he’s trying to solve the case to avoid any disgrace on his career without letting any sentiments get in the way, up until he has a sexual encounter with Evelyn and feels intimate with her in that one moment. Once again, he’s getting emotionally involved with a woman he’s trying to help and is in danger of screwing up again like he did in Chinatown.

When it comes down to putting the woman in danger, Polanski has usually made the female characters in his films as victims in some way, whether by a sign of abuse or unhappiness, which arises from their relationships to men. Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion is a traumatized and depressed woman who is uncomfortable in the presence of men out of fear of rape and abuse. Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby suspects that she is a pawn in a Satanic plot against her unborn child and has a very dream-like sequence where she is raped by Satan and apparently is carrying his child. For Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, she is a femme fatale who appears to be hiding something dark from Gittes and could be the prime suspect in her husband’s death. However, as she slowly begins to come off as a victim of a traumatizing event from her past, she is another example of a woman in Polanski’s films who has been brutalized or tormented and doesn’t have anyone to rely on. She clearly doesn’t trust Gittes all too well because she won’t reveal the whole truth of what is making her nervous about her father, Noah Cross, and her dead husband. She seems uneasy about sharing her secrets with him and that furthers the complicated relationship between a man and a woman that Polanski has explored before, from the unhappily married couple in Cul-de-Sac to the seemingly happy yet deceitful relationship in Rosemary’s Baby. Some of the sexual tension in his films is also defined by age differences, such as the awkward tension between the young man and the older married woman in Knife in the Water to the age distance between Mia Farrow and John Cassavettes in Rosemary’s Baby to the young woman-older man relationship between Isabelle Adjani and Polanski’s character in The Tenant. There is some sense of unease between the people of age boundaries, yet it takes a darker step with Chinatown as we learn the dark secret of Evelyn’s past with her father after we learn that he raped her when she was 15 and begot a daughter from her. Long before we uncover the secret, we see the daughter in a seemingly romantic affair with Evelyn’s husband when Gittes spies on them after being told they’re in an affair. It’s uncertain if the relationship was sexual between Evelyn’s husband and daughter, yet it’s the opposite of the incestuous relationship between her and her father in that Hollis Mulwray was clearly trying to look after the daughter and protect her from the evil father. It still creates a rather uneasy feeling of a relationship between a man and a woman of different ages and frighteningly mirrors Polanski’s own history with young women and eventually his sex scandal with a 13-year-old girl that he has been notoriously known for. Of course, Polanski’s own personal tragedy of losing a woman may have had an influence on the way he decided to Chinatown on a bleak note.

Despite protests by the writer Robert Towne over the ending of the film, Polanski strongly aimed for the ending in which Gittes’ crime-solving techniques lead him to a drastic conclusion right in the place of Chinatown, where most of his past mistakes in policing had come out in the open. Rather than take Towne’s idea of a happy ending, Polanski chose to kill off Evelyn allow her horrible father Noah Cross get away with his crimes. As she attempts to keep her father away from the girl, she tries to be strong and hold a gun against him. However, it’s an attempt in vain as flees in the car with her daughter and is then shot through the eye by one of the police. She has been wrongfully accused of killing her husband and the police will not listen to Gittes’ discovery that Cross was the murderer that their attempts to stop her end in her death. The horrific sight of her dead body with the bloody eye and the piercing cries of her daughter brings a very tragic feel to the end of the film that parallels a sense of bleakness in Polanski’s earlier films. The idea that a victim cannot escape the evils of corruption and crime reflects a very cynical edge to Polanski’s films in how he makes a person appear helpless and unable to break free of their torments. Now that Evelyn is dead, Gittes is left with further torments to go through, ever since his tragic mistakes in Chinatown. The fact that Polanski lost his own wife, Sharon Tate, at the hands of the Manson Family a few years before making this film must have had an influence on choosing to the end the film on this tragic note. It fits in with the trauma of Gittes’ past that he faces another tragedy within Chinatown, after getting involved in solving a crime in which he’s dealing with corrupt bureaucrats that he has no control over and doesn’t prepare himself for fighting. When Polanski portrays his characters as damaged and weak to a degree, he hardly has them exit the film with any liberation or hope for their lives. Rather than put them through a journey where their lives are changed for the better, he only finds ways to make their lives get worse and exposed as being disturbed and full of hopelessness. However, just as Polanski suffered a loss that made his life feel worse for a time, he made one of his biggest mistake that put him in even worse conditions.


The fact that this film was released a few years before his statutory rape of Samantha Geimer, I wonder how far Polanski felt he could go in his relationships with young women when he was making a film in which his main female was raped as a teenager, yet nevertheless made the wrong move in a private place on a minor. It was as though he was experiencing exactly what Noah Cross says to Gittes: “Most people never have to face the fact, that at the right time, at the right place, they are quite capable of anything.” We can’t be sure if Polanski felt inspired by that line in how the old man defends himself for what he did to his daughter and it sounds very creepy that Polanski may have felt sympathy for this villainous character. In possibly understanding the nature of evil, he ended up committing a crime that was similar to the crimes he depicted in his movies. Yet rather than put himself in the skin of a murderer, he chose to put himself in the skin of a sexual pervert to get a taste of an attractive young girl and let her go with her life. Because the girl has grown and forgiven him for what he did, she is not as traumatized as the victims he depicted in his films and she possibly could see that there are worse things than sex with a minor. He has remained in Europe without having sex with any other girls, which is to say his sexual assault on Samantha Geimer was a one time thing that he now wishes he could take back and will never repeat again. Yet, there still lingers with him a fascination for young women, especially since he’s been married to a younger attractive woman for two decades. Apparently his interest in young women is reflected in his films whenever he depicts a relationship between men and women of different ages and sometimes shows the darker side of it, particularly in incest between a father and daughter. I wonder that whenever Polanski tackles these issues in his films if he’s doing so out of awareness for his own perverse desires. In his country, he seemed to have felt at liberty to seduce young women and face no backlash for that, so when he came to America, he felt the same liberty and then got into trouble for it. He pleaded not guilty in his case and spent only 41 days in prison, before he fled the country and never returned to this day. Likely he would have been spent more time in jail and then be deported, but Polanski’s self-imposed exile into Europe seemed to be a way of forcibly deporting himself. He has spent the remainder of his life in Europe and likely had relationships with teenage girls, including the star of his film Tess, who was about 15 or 17 when they had an affair during the making of the film. It didn’t get him into trouble, which further makes note of the liberty that Europeans appear to have in pursuing teenagers. Since Samantha Geimer was just beginning her way into teenage-hood, Polanski may have been turned on by her pre-maturity. Since she agreed to pose for Vogue magazine for him, she may have also felt mature enough to have herself be photographed to show off her body, which doesn’t mean it’s her fault that the whole sex thing happened, but girls going into that age become eye candy for the eyes of men. His view on sex and age boundaries just didn’t side with those of the people of America and many people dismiss him as a sick pedophile. Now that he’s back in his homeland, it’s hard for him to give up affections for girls and young women, especially since his wife Emmanuelle Seigner is about 30-something his junior. Yet Polanski continued on making films that addressed issues of sexual abuse and the discomfort of being taken advantage of.

It’s often disturbing to depict, least of all his film adaptation of the play Death and the Maiden, in which the main female Paulina is traumatized by her experience as a hostage of a fascist government and the rape and torture that was inflicted upon her body multiple times. When she finally nabs and ties up the man she believes took part in the dirty methods, Polanski spends much of the film sympathizing from her angle as she recounts to her husband the experience of the torture and nearly breaks down a few times. At the same time, he sympathizes with her hostage, Dr. Roberta Miranda, who continuously denies he ever took part in the torture and rape and pleads with fear to be spared of any torture. So Polanski allows sympathies to exist on both sides, as though he may have felt pity for himself but also for his female victim and personified those dual sides in Paulina and Miranda. By the very end, when Paulina has Miranda knelt before her at the edge of a cliff, she forces him one more time to answer if he raped her, and this time, he admits it and goes into a monologue of how he went about doing it. He sometimes describes it with glee on his face as he talks about how he “enjoyed it” and “didn’t have to be nice” and felt “very sorry that it ended”. He’s confessing with the true honesty of a rapist, one who isn’t talking with too much remorse and isn’t afraid to admit that he enjoyed the process. Perhaps the more he denied it in the interrogation, he didn’t feel guilty enough or have his eyes opened to the real evil of his actions. That sounds closely to how Polanski may have enjoyed his own experience with raping an underage girl and didn’t admit to the public that he did anything wrong. Just like his own life, he lets Miranda go free without being persecuted for his crimes, he lets him go back to his family and we can see him looking down with unease at Paulina during a violin concert. The two people apparently realize at this moment that they will have to co-exist in modern society and live with their past, just as Polanski gets to live the rest of his life in Europe with his mistake while his victim lives with it as well but openly forgives him for it. Polanski must think that whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger and doesn’t provide any real punishment for a rapist and satisfaction for a victim because in time, it’s something they both can eventually put aside and continue on with their lives.

Of course, Polanski has gone through other experiences than just sex scandals to affect the way he makes films, given that he was a victim of the Holocaust, who had to struggle with his time in the concentration camps and then with his escape in Nazi-occupied Poland. He reflects that experience in his Oscar-winning biographical film, The Pianist, about another Holocaust survivor, Wladyslaw Szpilman, who avoided being sent to his death, but ended up losing his family and was left on his own in an unwelcome territory. The suffering his goes through, from the arduous labor camps to his hiding in-and-out of different apartments to his rescue by Allied forces at the end of the war, must bear parallels to Polanski’s own life on the run from the Nazis, running into places where he would be rejected and would have to steal to survive. Because Polanski and Szpilman are both survivors, there is a feeling of hope at the end of the film, something that is not often felt at the end of Polanski’s previous films. Yet survival doesn’t mean that people can ever forget what they went through, which implies further why Polanski provides a bleak and edgy tone to his films out of his own dark experiences. He can never forget what happened to him and so he continues to depict the nature of evil in his films, whether it’s sexual abuse, murder, psychological torture, corruption, conspiracies, or scarring. Sometimes he sympathizes with the evil-doers in his films by making them appear charming and decent, such as the devil-worshippers in Rosemary’s Baby, Noah Cross in Chinatown, and Dr. Miranda in Death and the Maiden. In The Pianist, he made the Nazis very difficult to sympathize with, as it happens commonly in depictions of the Holocaust, and portrays them as merciless, unhinged monsters that always act on murderous and brutal inclinations. The only Nazi who is allowed any kind of humanity in the end is the German captain, Wilm Hosenfeld, who in real life spared Szpilman and didn’t turn him over to the Germans. In that one exception, he shows that were Nazis who still had humanity intact, even though Hosenfeld never lived through his years as a prisoner of war and died before he could ever be pardoned or revealed as saving a Jew’s life. Yet the film shows at the end that Szpilman owes part of his survival to Hosenfeld, despite any role he played in the murders of millions of Jews. It isn’t known whether Polanski feels forgiveness towards the oppressors; he won’t shy away from how wrongful they were and he continues on through his films to show how the wrong-doers are guilty of their crimes by their own fault. The Pianist is definitely the film of his career that defines the evils of totalitarianism and the struggles of the victims without putting in any of the bizarre, darkly comic elements seen in his previous films. It’s a film that people could compare to Spielberg’s Schindler’s List for the harsh depiction of the Holocaust and for shaking up the audience with the sight of horror but also with a sentiment by its ending. It’s one of his straighter films that doesn’t linger on mysteries or ambiguity but shows the hard truth openly to those who didn’t witness the horror and those who witnessed it and live with it today.

BLUE VELVET: WHY DO I KEEP WATCHING IT

Blue Velvet has been infamous as a controversial independent film from the strange mind of David Lynch that it gains a mixture of opinions and interpretations that keep people talking about it. Many can be turned off by its disturbing content of violence, drugs, and sex, others can be mystified by its surreal imagery of a small town and its citizens, there are even some huge laughs at some of its eccentricities, and at least some respect for its actors. All of these elements boggle my mind, but I feel they work altogether to create a unique piece of art for film by an artist like Lynch with his strange and dark style.

The movie starts off with an opening credits sequence with a wall of flowing blue velvet and haunting classical music playing, giving it an eerie start, before it fades into a more colorful image of a small American town. The shots of the clear blue sky, a white picket fence with red and yellow flowers, a smiling fireman waving on his firetruck, and neat clean houses provide a picturesque and stereotypical view of a suburban community as friendly, clean, and safe. However, it juxtaposes with a darker side below the pretty surface when we see a man collapse from a heart attack and we look deeply into the green grass at an ugly pack of termites, groveling through the dirt. It symbolizes a sign of darkness and when Kyle Mac Lachlan as Jeffrey discovers a severed ear in a field, it shows an ordinary young man making a shocking discovery in the town he's treated as his home after returning from college. It's that one discovery that throws him into a conflict that gets him in over his head with a voyeuristic and perverted journey. It excites me to see what an everyman like Jeffrey will uncover beneath his picturesque world and it's original to say that an ear is what jolts him into an underworld he has never experienced. The clean and peaceful surroundings he is used to look comfortable when I see that and it makes me think of my own comfortable surroundings living in suburbia. Of course, the imagery of that blissful life looks exaggerated with its colorful and eccentric elements that it comes off as an alternate world that Lynch creates to be strange. When Jeffrey’s amateur detective work leads him to the mysterious singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), the film takes a deeper step into a world within Jeffrey’s world that is dark and grim and is ruled by the ruthless and maniacal Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper).

The violent world of Frank is disturbing to witness and makes the movie unbearable to watch, but Lynch never shies away from keeping it strange. As cruel and sadistic as Frank is, there are eccentric behaviors displayed around him and his henchmen, such as the scene where his accomplice Ben is dressed in white make-up like a transvestite and lip-synchs “In Dreams”. This scene brings a strange edge to the creepy and menacing nature of the underworld, despite how cruel and sadistic these villains are about their crimes. They act as though there is nothing to be ashamed of because Frank is able to hold off any guilt by laughing and drinking with his cohorts and speak loud and fowl language for fun. He’s just so consumed by his energetic but disturbed idea of fun and partying that he can’t see how cruel he is about abusing and controlling Dorothy for his own pleasure and holding her husband and son hostage to make her cooperate. He also seems to be in love with her when he hears he sing “Blue Velvet” at the Slow Club and lets a tear come down from his eye. He wants her and doesn’t have the guts to kill her, but he can at least torture her and threaten her family’s life so that she will behave like his object of obsession. This makes him more dangerous, but at the same time, I can't look away from him because his rage and humor make draw a lot of attention to him and he fits the type of a psychotic character in a mystery-thriller who works as a formidable foe to the young and innocent Jeffrey.

However disturbing it gets in the portrayal of female abuse and psychotic behavior in drugs, sex, and violence, the strangeness of the film never goes away and it keeps me intrigued by its artistic approach. Whenever Jeffrey and his friend Sandy talk about it being a “strange world” it’s very laughable to hear these young people calling the dark side of life “strange” in a juvenile way as though they don’t understand this evil. Jeffrey and Sandy carry on their young romance in between the moments of Frank’s ferocity that it provides the film with a soap opera touch on young love in the midst of crime and violence. It’s almost funny when Sandy comes off as a stereotypical innocent small-town girl in her blond hair, her pink clothes, and her dream of “thousands of robins” breaking through darkness and bringing light into the world. She has this naïve perception of the world that is there to bring comfort to Jeffrey after his horrific discoveries and it provides a balance of the light and darkness that works for the film. Whenever Jeffrey is having his lustful encounters with Dorothy and facing the heat of Frank’s violent nature, Sandy is there as a figure of contrast to that perverse and violent underworld. Her innocence is not so meaningless in that way and provides a breather from the perverse and violent world of Frank that they have discovered to show there is still good in the small town.
This keeps the film at its balance of light and darkness, however satirical and stereotypical it may come off as. It’s David Lynch’s vision of his filmmaking style and he has since then made films about strange worlds full of picturesque, scary, and humorous images.

Like the negative viewers of the film on its initial release, I’ve watched Blue Velvet a good number of times and I feel different all the time. I’ve had viewings where I feel it’s artistically beautiful and strange and other times where I feel it’s over-the-top or ridiculous in the strange satire being set against the serious backdrop. So mixed feelings pile up in my head, but in the end, Lynch approached it with his vision of film and brought something unique out of all his elements. It’s helped the film stand the test of time as an accomplishment in independent cinema and I even got to watch it in one of my film classes. A lot of people in the screening room laughed at a lot of places, especially at Laura Dern’s performance of Sandy, which got me to laugh as well because I could feel the same absurdity as they did about her manners as a caricature of a small town girl. As funny as it may have been, even when I laugh at her performance occasionally, I believe she serves the film’s purpose in bringing the strange perception of small town citizens who have naïve and picturesque about the world. Kyle Mac Lachlan definitely comes off as eccentric and voyeuristic in a comical way at times that when he stares awkwardly with no expression or makes subtle jokes, he can be as strange as the darkness he falls into. That strangeness still works for him to convincingly make Jeffrey be curious, naïve, and perverse about what he discovers that he helped move the story along. Dennis Hopper hit the energy pitch hard as Frank Booth in his style of method acting; the more loud and vulgar he got, he would sound funny, and the more ferocious he got, he would get scary. Isabella Rossellini may have felt embarrassed by the experience and that viewers were picking on for how abused and helpless her character was, but her portrayal of Dorothy made her someone I could feel sorry for and feel disturbed by her sadomasochism as well. She had this dark and exotic aura about her that made her appear as a femme fatale out of film noir and would change in her behavior all the time to make her more unpredictable. Just when we think she may be involved in murder from the beginning, we get disturbed by her torments and feel for her as a victim. If she had been too cold and vain as a sexualized woman in film noir tends to get portrayed, she wouldn’t have come across as a serious victim and we would have expected her to act tough in the situation. Her make-up, black hair, and her red and blue silk can make her look glamorous and eloquent, but not too glamorous since she appears very sad and Gothic like a woman who is starting to fade from that glamour. Whenever she sings “Blue Velvet” on stage, she sounds very sad in her lyrics because of wanting to be free and live happily again with her family when the last lyric “…and I still can see blue velvet through my tears” comes out of her voice. Beneath her beauty and soft voice, she is a sad and broken mother and wife who wants to regain happiness. That is what the film is all about, trying to regain beauty and innocence as one falls into a dark pit and tries to get out of it. The more Jeffrey tries to live through his dangerous experience, we can hope for him to return to the safe and normal life of suburbia and leave the “strange world” behind. Blue Velvet still remains a strange piece of art, filled with beauty and horror that can be found in Lynch’s other work and helps him stand out as a visionary in artistic cinema.

MARATHON MAN

Another film produced in the 70s by Robert Evans and directed by Oscar-winning director John Schlesinger that brought another psychologically paranoid edge was Marathon Man, which depicts not a champion race for glory, but a race for escape from the suspicious and sinister activities of the urban landscapes that ordinary people can least suspect. Like other chilling mystery-filled thrillers like Blue Velvet, in which ordinary young men with a clean streak are thrown into a situation that never should have concerned them to begin with, Marathon Man takes Dustin Hoffman into the role of a nervous grad student named Babe who tries to keep his cool through running but can’t break his sweat with the unease and insecurity that fills his mind. His flashbacks of a traumatic childhood and his nervous energy displayed around his peers and teachers makes him very tense, despite his ambition to become a historian and face his past. When his brother Doc returns from a secret operation as a Division agent, curiosity arouses him but he’s never filled in on the trouble until he is pulled against his will into a frightening web of conspiracy and crime and faces the most chilling human being of absolute evil, Dr. Szell.
Just like Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, Laurence Olivier as Szell is another example of a veteran actor who entered a different generation with a breakthrough role as a creepily disturbed menace, but portrays him with a delicate and soft-voiced persona of an old dentist who takes his time before acting. As he is observing Babe strapped to a chair under a light, he calmly and repeatedly asks “Is it safe?” without shouting or slapping him in the face, but merely taking his time before beginning a painful dental operation. The brutality of this operation isn’t disturbing just for how cruel it is but because of Szell’s sophisticated mannerisms about carrying out the procedure, making him humanly scary in how he looks in his glasses and long coat and tie with a stern yet soft expression. His stern and authoritative look is one that people would expect a Nazi to appear as, but in a very subdued gentleman-like fashion without much predictability. At other times, he shows his vulnerabilities whenever he appears afraid and paranoid that his plans to recover stolen jewels may not turn out as he hoped, making him all the more desperate in asking “Is it safe?”. The fear of failure and of being caught also arises from the uneasy look in his face as the camera looks at the vast population of Jews in New York City he passes by on the streets, as he is being forced to look at the faces of people he hated and helped in trying to eradicate from the world.
The paranoia of the villain is almost as equal as that of the hero, providing an even match between the two adversaries and building up to the moment where they will confront each other in a stand-off they hadn’t expected. Hoffman keeps up with Babe’s nervousness the entire film as he dreads the fate Szell and his co-conspirators have in store for him and is forced to run for his life through the dark dimly lit streets with the bad guys on his track. The fast pace and the camera tracking of Babe running from a right angle with the dim lights of the city in the background makes the sequence look like a psychedelic episode of paranoia and heavy breathing for a young ordinary man who is no longer running for the exercise but for survival. It keeps the tension heated figuratively and literally as this long run is heated for Babe but also for the audience as they run with him to see the outcome. The jittery chilling score by Michael Small be heard creeping from beginning to end to give a sense of doom, even in moments where Babe is just running for the fitness, to foreshadow the desperate time for which he will have to run for survival in a frightening occasion. His life of trying to remain in the comforts of running for exercise and his studies is no longer the issue as his life is turned upside down in a terrifying direction.
Throughout this film, the heat of running hard with the feet and with the mind is brimmed with a frightening edge that makes an urban landscape more eerie and maze-like to find one’s self in deep trouble when they least expect it. The fact that Babe’s life will never be the same as he faces his limits and his demons of the past brings the notion of psychological turmoil home to the viewer in areas where they feel safe and will leave them sweating and gasping for air from racing through an air of darkness that has come for them against their will.

ROSEMARY'S BABY

One of the best films released by Paramount, under Robert Evans, and directed by Roman Polanski in his early career of English-language films that remains an iconic classic of the New Age of Hollywood is Rosemary’s Baby, a very bleak and eerie thriller of psychological horror that never exaggerates on the genre but remains subtle in its seemingly normal surroundings. From the beginning of the film, the eerie atmosphere is brought out by Mia Farrow’s non-diegetic singing of a lullaby, which sounds pretty and sweet but haunting and eerie as it plays over the large Gothic apartment building in New York City where much of the action takes place.
The sight of the apartment, which was shot at the Dakota, with its black wall coverings and bars in the courtyard, gives the feel of an imprisoned, claustrophobic space for the main character Rosemary and her husband Guy. It seems like a quiet and desolate building to stay, except for the loud-mouthed neighbors Minnie and Roman Castevet, whose arguments are heard through the walls, along with a strange chanting. When their young ward turns up dead from jumping out of the window, it’s the first instant where something horrifying is noticed in this apartment, which already has a sinister history for housing witches and a Satanic leader named Adrian Marcato. Roman and Minnie appear disturbed by this tragic incident, yet they heal very soon and cheerfully intrude on the lives of Rosemary and Guy and invite them for a highly talkative dinner. Their interest displayed in the couple is friendly yet nosy in an eccentric fashion, especially when Roman talks to Guy in private and we don’t know what they’re discussing, except Roman’s puff smoke emitting from the den. It makes the elderly couple eccentric in a way that doesn’t reveal too much for Rosemary to suspect, we hardly even leave Rosemary’s perspective to see what is going on outside of her tight space in the gloomy apartment.
It takes an even darker turn when Rosemary dozes off from a dinner with wine and a weirdly tasting chocolate mousse and finds herself in a nightmarish montage of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling and a hairy black creature crawling on top of her her naked body, surrounded by black and green fog that gives the sequence a dream-like quality. It’s from this moment that we first see Rosemary as a vulnerable victim of mysterious plots at hand that she has no understanding of until she turns up pregnant. If the dream sequence was one that expressed nightmarish imagery, the rest of the horror is expressed more through subtlety, such as the moments where we see her holding her body in pain and hear the eerie score of Krzysztof Komeda, which implies there may be more to this pregnancy than just normal pain in pregnancy. It’s all the more odd that this begins after Minnie and Roman send her to a doctor very hastily after saying the doctor she had originally is not good if no one has heard of him. The fast pace the couple show in helping Rosemary and giving her a strangely tasted herbal drink accumulates on how suspiciously helpful they are for a woman who just moved in not too long ago. Ruth Gordon portrays Minnie with a sweet edge of humor and eccentricity combined and Sidney Blackmer brings soft-spoken charisma to Roman, which prevents them from being openly scary but appear as just eccentric old people who are being “too friendly” as Rosemary says to one of her friends.
In regards to Mia Farrow’s performance as Rosemary, she brings a nervous and vulnerable edge to the young woman the more frantic and paler she grows with her painful pregnancy. She suffers so much without getting any answers that she begins to suspect her neighbors and their friends are apart of a witches’ coven that is plotting something sinister for her and her unborn child. The scene where she confesses her suspicions to her former doctor in a hasty and tearful pace shows show how disturbed she feels about her suspicions and that there is something to fear. At the same time, we can’t be too sure if her suspicions are real and if her husband Guy is also involved in the plot against her after all the times he assures her that she’s overreacting and that she should trust the old people to help her. John Cassavetes can easily come off seductive as Guy in the way he assures Rosemary that all is well with his sharp looks and charming all-American voice, yet at the same is carrying a dark edge to him with his devilish eyes and strange distance he maintains from her. Since we only have Rosemary reacting to all of the strange happenings and no one helping her, we don’t know if she’s really overreacting and having a paranoid suspicion or if the plot is real and Polanski won’t let us find out early enough.
The approach Polanski takes with this film, as he does with his other films, is not to reveal anything except from the main character’s point of view until the end so that it keeps the uncertainty very haunting and shocking once it is revealed. The paranoia that fills the atmosphere makes the film all the more nightmarish and cloudy in its depiction of psychological horror without resorting to special effects or grim violence or monsters. It’s Polanski’s subtle outlook on the ordinary yet dark surroundings of the apartment building and Rosemary’s psyche that gives Rosemary’s Baby a mixture of ambiguity and frightening truth.

A Look at Robert Evans

It’s amazing how people complain about the shifts and changes of movies for each generation, but what can they do about it? When there’s a new generation, change is inevitable and if you don’t like, go back into your nostalgia club. That’s what I’m feeling after watching The Kid Stays In The Picture about the rise and fall and rebirth of Hollywood hotshot producer, Robert Evans, who personified an era of Hollywood where filmmaking took a grittier approach for an older audience.
In his early career as an actor, he was looked at as a hot new lead for film and was thought to become a movie star, until he quit and became a producer, where his real strength as a smart-mouthed, vulgar, womanizing, and seductive exec was unleashed as he helped Paramount Pictures bring big hits like The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby, and Chinatown to the screen. He was very much the hot prince of Hollywood in the days of the 1960s and 70s for his wealth, his burning teeth, his slick black hair, his giant glasses, and the group of beautiful women surrounding him. However, it didn’t last for long when he was busted for drugs and suffered one of his first big movie failures, The Cotton Club. This was a new era in which his hot success as a big-time producer was going on a downspin, which isn’t surprising when the 80s brought a new shift in cinema. Those who are familiar with the 80s era may be aware that most of the popular trends in cinema were teen-aimed cult hits like The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, blockbuster franchises like Indiana Jones, The Terminator, and Star Wars, and epic films of inspiring true stories like Gandhi, Out of Africa, and The Last Emperor. It was no longer the era of the 70s, when the New Age of Hollywood was about more realistic modern day films aimed at adults on subjects like crime, corruption, drugs, free love, and rebellion. Evans was an icon for the 70s for all his wealth, smart talk, and good looks and knew how to make the movies for the adults
It’s sad for people of his generation to see that old age gone and that he’s not the king he used to be, especially as he began his descent from success. The voice of Evans in this documentary is so gruff and husky that it has a rough edge that is appropriate given the seriousness of what he details from his life in troubled times. It sounds like the in-voice of a main character in film noir who talks about his demons and the situation he’s in. Some of the topics touched upon in Evans’ life are his failed marriage with Ali MacGraw, who he swore to love and give all the time to, and his stepping down as the head of Paramount. In a way, The Kid Stays in the Picture feels like a noirish, psychological profile about Evans’ demons and dwindling success as he narrates the whole film and we feel the journey of his tough descent. The montage we see in which he talks about trying to escape from an asylum and it juxtaposes with clips from the films he produced, like Marathon Man, Chinatown, and The Godfather, bringing a very haunting and poetic feel about his psychology as though he was living the life of the broken male characters in the movies. He could have been in those movies if he had stayed an actor, but his life as a producer is what made his responsibilities more serious and exhausting to try and stay respected in Hollywood and continue making movies. Despite that, he expresses hope in how he managed to stay in his luxurious manor and remain on good terms with his old working pal, Jack Nicholson, who provided support for him in his troubled times.
Today, he’s not as busy a producer as he used to be and Paramount, the studio he used to run, hasn’t made many movies that have gained huge attention lately. Evans helped Parmount gain popularity with its string of successful hits in his earlier producing career, yet his place in Hollywood of the 60s and 70s remains in memory and I still watch the movies he helped bring to the screen. It goes to show he is one of the Hollywood kings of a golden age who we owe a great deal to for how movies have turned out, no matter how sleazy and seductive a wealthy bachelor like him appeared to be. Slick and tough-talking is what made Robert Evans a special man in the hearts of Hollywood and for men and women alike and I indeed owe some of my favorite movies to his contributions. Thank you Bob!

FANTASY FILMS: THEIR CHANGE IN POPULARITY

It’s amazing that most of that fantastical epics about good and evil, magic and mystery, and action and adventure have become most popular at the beginning of the 21st century, way more than the end of the 20th century. Ever since then, the genre has accumulated to more fantasy films, all of which are based on popular novels, such as The Chronicles of Narnia, The Golden Compass, Eragon, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Lemony Snicket, and The Seeker. Some of those that I have named haven’t achieved much success or led to flourishing franchises because whenever the first film fails and disappoints fans of the book, it prevents the chances of more films. They also have been generally appealing to younger children because of their whimsical, funny, and colorful styles that sometimes it makes the grown-up audience turn away from fantasy, except when The Lord of the Rings trilogy was in theaters. Yet it’s amazing how the fantasy genre has become more popular with audiences and is the most commercially promising one, not back in the 1980s when films like The Dark Crystal, The Never-ending Story, and Labyrinth were financial disappointments and received mixed reactions. Instead, those films became more popular cult hits whenever they were released on videocassette and gave audiences a second chance to observe and indulge in them for fantasy entertainment. I wonder if the growing promise of fantasy is different now than it used to be in the ‘80s because of how special effects have become more advanced and how the fantasy genre has blended in with the more epic, action-oriented films like Gladiator and Star Wars have been known to fit into. LOTR is like many Hollywood epics, such as Braveheart and Gladiator, in its epic scope, massive battle scenes, and concrete details that it must have helped in making it one of the first films to bring about the rebirth of fantasy films for a more commercial value, which hadn’t been popping up in the 1990s after the failure of Willow.
Even though there have always been films with fantasy elements, like Ghost and Babe, a more traditional fantasy film would focus on a purely imaginative setting that is either discovered or exists in another time and place. So films like The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and Willow fit into that convention of the fantasy genre because they are either set in fictional representations of our world or they are simply created by a child’s imagination, which makes them up in the air. For example, the world of Fantasia in The Never-ending Story is the place that is born out of the human mind through the imagination, which strips away any boundaries that there would be in a science-fiction film, where other worlds are found on another planet, another dimension, or another time. In that way, the conventions of science-fiction are to make the fantastical seem plausible because some people believe there could be aliens living in space, or that robots will one day grow in advance, or that cars might be given the ability to fly. Fantasy, however, has nothing to prove of existence since its conventions of magic spells, fairies, dragons, sorcerers, and elves are purely invented outside of the realm of science and only exist inside the human heart. For that reason, fantasy speaks less about the modern world of science that science fiction seems to address allegorically and rather aims for a more mindful truth that transcends the everyday world around us. Perhaps because fantasy is born out of a very child-like imagination, it makes it hard for an older audience to take it seriously as a reasonable genre. Since the fantasy films of the 1980s were mostly invented from the minds of filmmakers with a somewhat kid-oriented audience, it made it hard to take them seriously, in contrast to the action-packed blockbusters like Indiana Jones, The Terminator, and Back to the Future which had more to offer with their share of heavy action, special effects, and humor.
Of course, Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, and The Never-ending Story are not entirely innocent child's fare because of the amount of dark content they contain. There are no munchkins, flowery lands, or colorful kingdoms like in Wizard of Oz or Peter Pan because the worlds of the 80s fantasy films are portrayed as gloomier and perilous from the beginning that it's hard to see them as worlds that children would want to escape to. There’s something that is both dark and wondrous about these films that they could appeal to audiences of any age, although The Dark Crystal seems to have the most adult-oriented style because of its gritty world, its hideous creatures, and its theme of death. This makes Dark Crystal like a small-scale take on The Lord of the Rings, except it has no human characters and has creatures that can’t be found in any mythology or fairy tale, making it a very unique film for its originality of a fantasy world. Labyrinth is another example of a fantasy that is about exploring the imagination of what another world beyond any probability and awakens a child within us, except it’s not a cute child because most of the creatures are ugly and eccentric and the environment is very dank and dreary. So Jim Henson’s fantasies brought back a sense of the more nightmarish imagination that frightens children and brings back the feeling of Tolkien fantasy that shows an adult audience how frightening fantasy can be for children. The Never-ending Story is yet another fantasy film that depicts a world that is created out of a child’s imagination and which a young boy finds himself falling into once he starts believing in it. This world is both wondrous and nightmarish because it’s full of colorful and eccentric creatures and a dangerous force that threatens its existence. The feeling of maintaining imagination in the case of the boy Bastian is a way of remaining a child, but not blinding him to the fact that this world lives through as much suffering as his world does. It brings a dark adult touch to a fantasy world that children would want to escape to, except that they have to face many tests in order to resist the dark forces that encroach it. Willow is another film that depicts the fantastical clash between good and evil and reveals another world in another time that is dank and dreary and living through a tumultuous time. The difference it has to Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and Never-ending Story is that it tries to follow in the steps of a swashbuckling action-adventure with elements of knights, armory, swords, castles, battles, dragons, and sorcery. In that way, there’s a lighthearted feel in the action and humor of the characters Willow, Madmartigan, the Brownies, and Fin Razael, who hardly come off as bleak and lonely but as colorful archetypes in the tradition of Star Wars. Since George Lucas wrote the story for the film, it’s like he was trying to make a fantasy film that could follow in the steps of his science-fiction saga and hopefully become a Hollywood blockbuster. Unfortunately it didn’t make enough money or receive much acclaim, possibly because it was regarded as just another fantasy film, just like the other fantasy films that came before it and didn’t make much success. Even if it tried to be an action-adventure movie, it maybe disappointed people who saw it as a Star Wars copycat or rip-off to Lord of the Rings. Today, Willow has only been regarded as a cult favorite and not as a classic of the fantasy genre like Wizard of Oz, particularly because of its violence and its campy humor.
Today now, the fantasy genre has become a more popular pick for the Hollywood industry to make promising mega-hits for a wide audience by combining fantasy with epic action/adventure elements. The funny difference about the recent fantasy films is that they are all based off of popular books, rather than being made originally from a filmmaker’s mind. Instead of using their imagination to create something of their own, filmmakers keep turning to reliable source material to bring a fantasy to life on the screen. That could be saying that filmmakers don’t want to dig deep into their minds and bring out the child within them to create their own wondrous fantasies like the ones made in the ‘80s. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and The Chronicles of Narnia are the three most commercially successful film franchises based off of popular fantasy novel, which have gained anticipation over the years each time one of the next films is released. They have gained anticipation from children, teenagers, and adults alike, although Narnia is the most child-oriented of the franchises with its Disney backing and its very light source material. I see Narnia as having main appeal toward family audiences for its colorful world and Christian themes, which could make it a favorite for people to watch after going to church. Putting that appeal aside, fantasy seems to grow wider in success today for its more human elements, rather than its fantastical elements, since Harry Potter is primarily focused on young kids going to school to learn about magic and grow into accomplished wizards and witches, while also dealing with their raging hormones, playing teenage humor on one another, and facing the threat of dark wizards and witches. That makes it seem less like a wondrous fantasy and more of a coming-of-age story about Harry growing up and finding his place in the world, rather than simply showing off magic tricks and spending time with magical creatures. Although Lord of the Rings is heavy with fantasy, it is more focused action-packed sequences of swords and arrows, not so much magic, like out of an epic war film, making it all the more appealing to older audiences who don’t care for fantasy. The characters are very much human in the portrayal by living breathing actors, despite the pointy ears, beards, and furry feet, with the only completely non-human characters being Gollum, Treebeard, the Orcs, and the Ringwraiths. The elves, the hobbits, the dwarves, the wizards, and the humans are all involved in fantastical surroundings, yet their human surfaces and behavior makes them less fantastical and more believable, which makes them different from the ‘80s fantasy films that showed off many non-human characters with little human resemblances and more connections with the fantastically impossible. Perhaps it’s because of that realism that fantasy films today are not as wondrous as they used to be because now they have been regarded as heavy CGI-laden, melodramatic, action-packed, adventure epics as opposed to the less theatrical, more mysterious, artistic, puppet-filled cult films of the ‘80s. I definitely think the fantasy genre has been helped through the use of CGI and big action scenes, seeing how large and epic the battles in LOTR and Narnia turned out. Yet I feel it’s hard to do anymore fantasy epics in which there is a need for big action sequences because we have seen one too many action sequences like space battles, dog fights, gun battles, and sword battles in war films, action films, and science-fiction films that usually look all the same. In that case, films are running out of good ideas for battles, especially now that we have seen wand battles in Harry Potter, something that has never been seen in a film before. Now that Harry Potter is over with, another fantasy film might come along in which there will be another grand wand battle and people will run out of their own original ideas for battle scenes. I think fantasy films are going to need more than epic battle sequences to make it stand out because fantasy films use to not have to rely on it back then. The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and The Never-ending Story had no need for battle sequences, they were all about the adventure and the wonder of a magical world as opposed to being re-hashes of war films. Filmmakers may have to make more fantasy films where they can spend more time with the adventure and wonder of fantasy as opposed to the bad-ass attitude of action. Because CGI has developed and the need for huge mainstream blockbusters grow higher in demand, fantasy has entered into a new phase that has distinguished it from that of its reputation in the 1980s, which looked promising back then but didn’t have enough patience and encouragement from the audience to make its leap.

Drive

Drive marks a different turn for a young pretty idol like Ryan Gosling who has charmed people with his looks and quiet demeanor, but this film is meant to show the opposite of his romantic side. This time, he takes on a role that is similar to what most Hollywood stars take on as they reach their 30s or 40s, like Harrison Ford or George Clooney, which is to take make choices in which they can offer deep looks into the feelings and consciences of men. There’s a masculine, gritty edge to what most macho stars can display when it comes to violence and action and a heartfelt side to them as they wish to follow a moral code of theirs that makes them into chivalrous knights. Gosling has walked into that area in his recent early 30s and leaves behind a romantic drama that would have restricted to being another pretty face. Yet Gosling has hardly been restricted as a pretty face icon for young people since he had been doing very serious drama from the beginning of his 20s, such as The Believer to The United States of Leland to Half Nelson. The difference with his character in Driver from his other roles is that it’s one of the few times we see him as a person with a sense of morality, unlike a bigoted Jew in The Believer or an arrogant D.A. in Fracture or a murderous teen in Murder by Numbers. It’s the role where he is once again caught up in the dark side of humanity, but he spends much of this film trying to do battle with evil out of a sense of morality. As violent and dangerous as he grows in the film, one cannot forget that there still lingers a sense of moral purpose behind his agenda, which puts him in the position of heroic movie stars like the few I mentioned earlier. Through this variation of roles, he has shown that he is capable of taking on serious roles that are the opposite of what young people would expect to see in an attractive leading man. He already has an Oscar nomination on his credentials and he may get one in the future, although he lost was snubbed of one on Blue Valentine which people had hoped he would receive. Driver may be the next best film of his serious roles that will earn him more awards and nominations, but it also secures his role as a daring movie star in the way he takes on rough action and gory violence with deep thought and intensity in his behavior that he could easily become the star of an action/adventure flick.

However, this film is beyond an action flick as it spends a great deal of time in deep moments with Gosling’s nameless character “The Driver”, who spends many scenes without many words and few other expressions than just the gentle look in his eyes that implies a smirk or a kind assurance. He rarely has to express himself as angry or devastated because he looks as though he is good at predicting trouble without much difficulty. He’s like a battle-scarred warrior who has seen tumultuous events that have made him wiser and sharp-eyed about his surroundings that he can smell danger and act quickly without blinking or flinching. The more the camera follows him from behind his jacket with the sign of the scorpion as he walks at the center of the frame, he looks isolated and alone in a dangerous world, like a cowboy walking alone into the horizon to face the world on his own. Most of his time alone is restricted to his car as we spend many shots of his face from in front, to the side, and into his reflection in the rear view mirror. He is alone when he faces the road and sits in the car without passengers for most of his driving time and looks with the same expression of awareness and good senses of his surroundings. He’s willingly facing the world on his own and taking action without hesitation like a robot, but not a soulless robot. He seems like he knows what he must do like he’s programmed to do it, but is aware of what purpose he is aiming for. From the moment he meets Carey Mulligan’s character Irene, we can tell he is drawn to her and cares about her without seeing his mouth drool or talking flirtatious with her. He is very easy in his mannerisms because he has no trouble with socializing or helping out people since he gives her and her son a ride home without complaints or nervous energy. From this moment of attraction to her, we can tell that she is a woman that he finds worth protecting from the dangers that are about to plague their lives. Throughout the film, his purpose in fighting off the dangerous forces of the violent underworld of urban Los Angeles is motivated by a sense of love and devotion to the young woman and her son, which often drives him to the most violent behavior ever.

Whenever he takes on violent methods to deal with the underworld and avoid getting killed, he rarely screams like an angry avenger or smiles like a sadistic killer, but keeps the same expression as he usually does. He is not openly afraid of violence or excited by it, he has a very banal acceptance of it as though he can never escape it and will take it in when Death comes looking for him. Violence is clearly something that he has had much experience with in the past, which affects his mood and behavior that he has just learned to accept it and use when necessary. There’s even a point where he hits a woman and threatens to hurt her more if she doesn’t provide him with vital answers and hardly flinches or gives her any warning before he does it. He very cautiously and patiently makes his moves of violence without overreacting or giving a warning, he takes his time and acts quietly, which makes him more unpredictable and tense as to how he is going to act. He’s like a silent predator about to make his mark on his prey through patience and softness before he can finally catch it and hurt it as much as he wants. The build-up is nicely done, yet the violence that results is not as interesting as it is simply gory and no different from what kind of graphic violence that exists in many movies today that I wonder why it was necessary for the director Nicholas Winding Refn to get so excessive with it like out of a Tarantino flick. It ruins the mood and just shows off special ways to hurt or kill people like it’s another entertaining spectacle of gore and feels out of place with the emotional mood of the film.

 Overall, the film is not a commentary on violence or a spectacle on the subject matter, but rather just a series of events that the "Driver" is surrounded by because he is caught up in an underworld of the L.A. area that he cannot escape from. This can easily come off as a neo-noir about a man who confronts his demons in an urban landscape or one of the many crime-dramas that depict Los Angeles for its dirty side (e.g. Heat, Crash). Whatever it is labelled, it is a film that Gosling shines in that helps cement his image as more than a pretty face and assures us that he will play more serious projects soon.