In Which We Examine The Nature Of Creation

Robotic Faith

by LILY GOODSPEED

Prometheus
director Ridley Scott
124 minutes

In the case of Prometheus the title’s nod to the classical Greek Titan is almost insultingly intentional. The mythological figure is known for bestowing humankind with the power of fire along with his subsequent and sadistically creative punishment from the Gods. Prometheus attempts to place itself on a similarly grandiose scale. In a sweeping elimination of millions of years of evolutionary progress, Prometheus reveals that extraterrestrials were the so-called “Engineers” of human life on Earth. At the start of the film, a pasty almost-human-looking alien disintegrates his body into primordial waters, and his DNA seemingly reconstructs into a new line of native Earth-based life. Prometheus then jumps to the year 2089, where archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) find awe-inspiring evidence of this original creation.

Fast-forward to the year 2093. On a streamlined spacecraft, humanoid robot David (Michael Fassbender) wanders about the empty ship, biding his time studying ancient linguistics until the human members of the crew wake from artificial slumber. Eventually, the team is assembled, which includes the aforementioned archaeologists, a few more feisty scientists, a smart-mouth pilot named Janek (Idris Elba) and an icy commanding officer Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron).

The ship has landed on a moon named LV-223, on which this motley team of scientists has traveled in hopes of answering questions about these Engineers and the bigger question of human purpose. Once there, the crew makes some unexpected discoveries. This is not the Engineers' home planet but a military base, and the Engineers' own weapons, which are organic, parasitic aliens, seemingly killed them while stationed here. Now those parasitic aliens, in various forms of maturation, are set on the destruction of the crew. Get ready for the deaths of numerous expendable characters.

The film’s impressively ambitious philosophical scope is not inherently misguided or unsuccessful. Yet Prometheus at times forces stilted dialogue and overwrought character development to definitively prove the existential importance of its thematic goals. Dr. Shaw’s Christian faith is constantly being questioned, as if the film is reminding the audience that this movie is about the meaning of life, and that’s really important. Rapace is a skilled actor, so it’s even more disheartening to see her attempt the cheesy line, “It’s what I choose to believe.”

The film also pursues extraneous storylines. Early on, David plays a holographic recording of the CEO of Weyland Corporation to the crew, as the company funded the expedition. Mr. Weyland (Guy Pearce), although apparently deceased, expresses his overwhelming commitment to the spiritual importance of the mission from beyond the grave. Eventually Weyland is revealed not only to be alive and on the ship (gasp!), but devoted to finding the Engineers simply to attain his own salvation from death. The plot twist is superfluous and unnecessary, though perhaps it solidifies a character motivation for David who hopes to impress his father figure.

The tragedy of these clumsy plotholes and dialogue is that Prometheus is an incredibly successful movie in other ways. The aesthetic execution is close to perfect. The grayish landscapes of LV-223 and primordial Earth are haunting and expansive. The streamlined symmetry of the inner ship is flawless. The spacesuits look Tron inspired and are desperately suitable for future cosplaying.

The last forty-five minutes of the movie can only be called “thriller movie porn,” with a face-paced sampling of ship explosions, flamethrower fights, and squirmy squid aliens erupting from surprising organs. On a purely visceral level, Prometheus easily achieves the same level of suspenseful anticipation that Alien is famous for.

Michael Fassbender’s performance is stunning, which is paradoxical since he succeeds in portraying a dispassionate robot. The character of David lacks human empathy, as evidenced when he infects Dr. Halloway with a parasitic spore without much concern. Despite this handicap, Fassbender’s David is also the emotional center of the film. We see brief glimpses of inner conflict, or at least some robotic version of conflict. He messes with his co-crewmembers, but does so in part to fulfill a strange father-son relationship with his creator Mr. Weyland. David watches Lawrence of Arabia in an attempt to parrot the cadence of human interaction; he exhibits signs of curiosity as he explores and discovers aspects of Engineer technology. David and Vickers, revealed as Weyland’s biological daughter, even have moments of sibling tension.

David is also engaged in Prometheus' deeper metaphysical issues. The film directly compares human’s creation of this robot with the Engineers’ creation of human kind. When David asks Halloway about the purpose of his own existence, Halloway bluntly answers, “We made you because we could.” David immediately retorts, “Do you imagine how disappointing it would be for you hearing the same thing from your creator?” This trillion-dollar space mission was funded to answer the meaning of human life, yet David is offered no answers of his own.

This issue of creation is the most intriguing thematic thread of the film. Prometheus makes a lot of lip service to Elizabeth Shaw’s “faith,” but the movie is much more successful in examining that relationship between the creator and created. In fact, the scariness of the parasitic aliens comes in great part from their disruption to this natural dynamic. Parenticide is mentioned numerous times, the most famous and publicized of which is Vickers' declaration: “A king has his reign and then he dies. It's inevitable. It's the natural order of things.”

For me, Prometheus is a lot like Lost which makes sense as Damon Lindelof is behind both projects. Both ask unsolvable questions, and fall flat in attempting to answer them. Yet, when Prometheus eases on the overly aggressive religious posturing and lets the mystery of creation remain a mystery, the film triumphs. When it examines the nature of creation, instead of attempting to explain it, Prometheus is a beautiful and surprisingly thoughtful movie. And if that’s not to your liking, there’s more than enough blood, guts and goo.

Lily Goodspeed is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. This is her first appearance in these pages. She twitters here and tumbls here.

"Timekeeper" - Grace Potter and the Nocturnals (mp3)

"Roulette" - Grace Potter and the Nocturnals (mp3)

The new album from Grace Potter and the Nocturnals is titled The Lion The Beast The Beat and it was released on June 12th.

In Which We Portray A Psychoanalyst With Our Usual Aplomb

Jung at Attention

by ALEX CARNEVALE

A Dangerous Method
dir. David Cronenberg
94 minutes

The appeal of a fine Jewish woman, the unshiksa, is well known throughout the centuries. Somehow Jesus avoided the temptation, but basically no one else did. Perseus, as he crossed the Grecian plain, had on his mind only a trick named Sheila Wasserstein, who he planned to maybe hang out with and see a movie at some point down the road. When he visited the cinema with his gentile girlfriend, all she did was hold his hand.

In ensuing years, we can only guess how many gentile lives unshiksas like Scarlett Johannssen and Lizzy Caplan have ruined. Ryan Reynolds wakes up every night in a damp sweat, and he doesn't have the knowledge that he is a prominent psychologist in turn of the century Zurich to quell his innate fears. Instead he's just a fucking actor.

In David Cronenberg's new film A Dangerous Method this Jewish ingenue, Sabina Spielrein, is portrayed by Keira Knightley. To make you forget this is the Keira Knightley who has had an agent since she was six years old, she adopts a slight Yiddish accent. She tells her psychiatrist Carl Jung (a childlike Michael Fassbender) that she enjoys adopting a pose in which she kneels and simultaneously attempts to defecate and stop herself from defecating. I tried this after the movie was over and it didn't end as well for me as it did for Keira.

Watching Keira Knightley try to play the part of psychotic Jewish mistress/patient, who, after she is cured, attempts to become a psychiatrist herself, is just as anguishing as it must have been for her to try to play the role. She is working so hard to be a serious actress, to live up to the potential of her part, that she eventually wins us over through sheer force of effort. Her accent is pure shit, and her manic facial expressions are something of a disaster, but who cares? Verisimilitude has never drawn at the box office.

Keira comes into Jung's life, frothing at the mouth, bursting out of her restraints because of the humiliation she suffered at the hands of her father. Jung is in contrast the nicest man she has ever met, played by the magnetic Fassbender as a naive-do gooder turned hypocrite. Jung initially struggles as he tries to cure her madness, almost crying when she refuses his jacket on a cold day.

After he makes a mentor/protege visit to the father of his field, Sigmund Freud, it takes Keira about ten minutes of screen time to not only cease her illness, but take up the task of psychoanalysis herself. It's only the tendency of Knightley to slightly jut her jaw out that lets us know she's still a crazy nutbag. Naturally, the married Jung finds his gorgeous Jewish patient irresistible, either as a consequence of Freud's method or in spite of it. Her bushy eyebrows — Cronenberg's idea of a Semitic affectation — do nothing to dim her appeal to the entranced analyst.

the tweezer was invented in 1994

Viggo Mortensen was Cronenberg's second choice for Freud (after Christoph Waltz), and his laconic portrayal is more along the lines of what we expect in a period film. The action is set in a Swiss hospital around the turn of the century, and we meet Freud when Jung appears in Vienna for a visit. The two bray and honk at each other for 13 straight hours, detailing their hopes and dreams for the future of their profession. Their discussions come across more as impassioned exclamations of pop psychology than serious discourse. Either that, or there is no such thing as psychology, only pop psychology.

It doesn't take long for the younger doctor to be uncomfortable in Freud's shadow. Freud sends him a lecherous patient (a scene stealing Vincent Cassel) and Jung manages to not only worsen his condition, but allows him to escape the sanitarium. Jung speculates that Freud is so obsessed with sex because he doesn't get any, and almost immediately begins to disregard his mentor's advice in favor of a spiritual understanding that will allow his patients — and himself — to escape the roles life has written for them.

around 1902 a public HJ from your pregnant wife was de rigeur

Jung is married to a rather boring gentile woman who has a lot of money. She buys him a lovely estate, and also a cute sailboat. They take naps in the cabin together like chaste siblings. It is never mentioned that she herself also became an analyst. Even after ten years have passed, they don't age her with makeup one bit, so as not to give Jung any excuse whatsoever for cheating on her so flagrantly, for not exhibiting the slightest bit of guilt. She is simply an unwanted beautiful thing.

Carl takes out his frustrations on his Jewish friends. Henry Kissinger is not available and The Prince of Tides hasn't yet hit local theaters, so Freud himself bears the brunt of his anguish. (I'm not sure what I was doing, probably practicing my jiu-jitsu.) There is never a shouting match between Freud and Jung. The most evocative moments of conflict occur in monotone readings of their letters to each another, which is great fodder for blog posts, but somewhat inadequate for a visual medium.

Freud's wife bought him a toy sailboat

When the two eventually reunite for a trip to America, Freud believes the closeness between him and Jung will not ebb, and is shocked that Jung's wealthy wife has booked him a first class cabin while he labors away on a manuscript in the middle decks. Celine Dion refused to score the soundtrack unless Cronenberg apologized for making his 1999 film eXistenZ, so no music outside of a random note here or there adorns the ship's arrival in Manhattan.

near, far, wherever you are

Instead of watching the two psychoanalysts stroll the streets of SoHo, it's back to Europe again. Cronenberg's disgust for the period makes A Dangerous Method more amusing than the staid stage play it is based on. He doesn't bring the past to life, quite the contrary: he murders it again and again. Europe holds no glory for him; even a magnificent Swiss vista absorbed by Jung in his waning years symbolically represents only another personal tragedy. The fact that Europe is so much older than his own country is a point of regret, not an enticing feature of its history. In this landscape, we are forced to be continually reminded of that continent's many disappointments, foretelling the genocide to come. (Sabina Spielrein herself was ended by a SS death squad.)

Strangely, Freud comes across as the only sympathetic figure in the film. This is half due to Viggo's dreamy, sad eyes, and half a consequence of the fact that he is the only person in the film not to behave abominably. In fact, he doesn't behave at all — he smokes over 82 cigars in the movie, one for every scene he is in (I counted out of boredom) and the only time he moves more than an inch is when he collapses after a panic attack. The idea is to subtly associate the staidness of his psychoanalytic viewpoint with his literal motion, but the end result is so dull you can't properly appreciate the meme.

a relationship that spans space and time

I don't know why Cronenberg, usually the purveyor of such cinematic excitement, tension and pain, chose this project. Perhaps he wanted to zig instead of zag. A sanitarium would seem to be the perfect setting for scares and frights, and none are in evidence here. There is nothing to suggest that the same man who directed A Dangerous Method also wrote and directed a horror film about the psychosomatic offspring of a mutant woman, or one about sex after car crashes. The underlying message here is that none of us can afford to live in the past; as Jung himself puts it in the film's final scene, "Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living."

Until the very end of A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg resists nearly all the trappings of period films: the maudlin crossfades, the montages connoting the passage of time, the dreamy/sweeping score, the Mad Men trope of exposing the outrageous conventions of the time to modern eyes. Cronenberg prefers instead to focus on the psychic unraveling of deeply misguided individuals. It's true that this has been his subject before, but the analysis never came to such a hopeless conclusion.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about Lars Von Trier's Melancholia. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Cut Me Out" - MNDR (mp3)

"I Go Away" - MNDR (mp3)

"Jump In" - MNDR (mp3)

historical moment as sabina receives first ever crap e-mail from a dude