Too Many Movies Tuesdays: When Things Get Busy, It's Easy To Re-Make Mistakes

Joe caught Vincere, Tucker ate some Patriot Games and washed it down with Clear & Present Danger.

Vincere
or, Il Duce: Do You Remember Love?, 2009
Joe McCulloch

This is a very good, sometimes excellent picture, commonly deemed ‘operatic’ in the writing I’ve seen, which makes some sense given director Marco Bellocchio’s past exercises in theatrical adaptation, although I’m more prone to seeing it as a booming old fashioned movie-movie: huge sets and outsized emotions and a thundering score, yes, but also a deeply affecting manner of wedding bursts of montage to disquietingly intimate, eventually languorous and finally dominant images of faces and bodies. This slow descent into corporeality is most appropriate for the story of Ida Dalser, Our Heroine, who bore the eldest son of Benito Mussolini and believed herself to be his wife, only to find herself forcibly stowed in various mental institutions upon the Leader’s rise to power. Both mother and child preceded the dictator in death - can’t you hear the orchestra swelling already?

But Bellocchio and co-writer Daniela Ceselli aren’t so much interested in a sweetened informational biography as a rich, even over-indulgent metaphor on the consumptive thrill of deeply held politics. The film begins with Dalser at a meeting of socialists, delightedly watching Mussolini disprove the existence of God by challenging the Almighty to strike him down in five minutes. Crucially, the action cuts from the first few seconds to the last, and subsequently darts back and forth through the whirling infatuation of Dalser’s early meetings with her earthly idol, snippets of eerily restored ultra high-contrast newsreel footage recontextualized as a ghostly, extra-human observational force, sometimes even intruding onto the distinctly stylized “movie-like” main action.

You’ll know if this stuff’s for you from an early sex scene in which Dalser’s lover pointedly maneuvers her underneath him and her moans adopt a gloried edge of pain, only for Mussolini to lay beside her and receive a stock footage vision of black banners unfurling to signify the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The news outside then screams of war, the words appearing on screen as leaping titles while Mussolini staggers nude across the apartment, out to the window and a second vision of adoring, authentic Fascist-era crowds rumbling under Dalser’s balcony - granted, any film can be improved with genitals and hallucinations, I’ve read Bazin too, but this is well beyond the norm! You’ll also notice that Dalser (well played by Giovanna Mezzogiorno) seems to be a supporting character in her own life’s story, and that’s no accident: these first forty or so minutes are representative of becoming absorbed into society-shifting zeal, coded as an extended femme fantasy of being taken forcefully (consensually) by a powerful man, no better realized than when Dalser’s ideal/lover arrives at her home to find all of her possessions liquidated to support his newspaper, bills stacked high on the table and her laying rapturously still in bed, her clothes totally open.

This is not most of the story, however - it never is. Mussolini, who once cursed king and clergy, is wounded in the Great War and accepts the gratitude of Victor Emmanuel III; this affront is then allegorically repeated as Dalser bursts in to discover her husband in the arms of a nurse, the Virgin Mother glowering down from a film projected onto the hospital ceiling. Soon Mussolini himself vanishes into film, or rather, actor Filippo Timi withdraws from his portrayal as Dalser is sent away to the countryside and eventually the madhouse - we thereafter see only the ‘real’ Mussolini, again via newsreel footage, because he is no longer responsive to Dalser’s pleas and letters. She is left in her body, and the movie is then about what happens when something you supported very dearly moves away from your interests to service parties you loathe, and develops into something horrible, and you can’t escape it because you supported it, and it will always, always, always be part of you and you’ll be part of every awful fucking thing it does and you will never forget and never escape, not until you are dead. To cope with this is futile, but to fight is madness, and Dalser keeps fighting to maybe, maybe bring it all around to recognizing her needs again, and -- funny! -- she’s in an asylum.

It’s a deliberate comedown, but I suspect a lot of viewers (myself included to an extent) will take the picture’s second hour as a long, hazy denouement. But often I’d be snapped to attention by Bellocchio’s clever elaborations on his basic formal setup - newsreel footage is cut right into the film as specters and precognitions, but characters constantly interact with movies-within-the-movie too, most strikingly as actor Timi suddenly reappears as Dalser’s grown son, affecting a nervous, parodic reprisal of his performance earlier in the film, or when a compassionate psychologist urges Dalser to pretend to respect the Fascist status quo from arm’s length, to essentially become an actress, only to realize his defeat as he observes her reactions during a screening of Chaplin’s The Kid, erupting into tears at the more-real-than-reality idealism of a loving guardian preserving the family unit - it’s not just truth, but the Divine. Bellocchio isn’t crazy about the Church -- Il Duce inevitably embraces religion as a means of solidifying his power, and no nun nor priest is seen onscreen that’s not a cog in the Fascist machine -- but he reserves the film’s most crucial line for an oblivious Mother Superior, who beatifically advises Dalser to think of the next world. Mother and son die soon enough, and then we’re suddenly back with the younger, excited lovers at the opening socialist meeting, a few seconds of those initial cut five minutes restored, and we realize that the whole damn movie may have doubled as yet another vision received by Mussolini, a movie as God out of his Heaven, and Dalser left happy and in love for her last scene before the last news snippet crushes the dictator’s head, and that’s history - It Is Written.

Patriot Games & Clear and Present Danger
Tom Clancy Redesigned The Way Humanity Processes Reality, 1992 & 1994

Attempting to explain Tom Clancy's novels--none of which I have ever actually read--to my wife, I found myself describing it as right-wing pornography for middle aged white men. This is, of course, an idiotic thing to say, as regular meat & dick-tatoes pornography is pornography for middle aged white men. Still, that's the stereotype I most associate with Clancy's extended franchise of work--extreme pro-America morality plays, wrapped around hyper-competent white men who use the phrase "I give you my word" so frequently that it takes on a mantra-esque quality not dissimilar to the barking of an abandoned terrier. Is that an accurate description of the books? It's possible, but unlikely. As many books as the guy has written, there has to be some variation on those kind of plot mechanics, right?

It doesn't really matter. Except for Red October, all of Tom Clancy's books are between 500 and 1000 pages, and that's too much of a time investment. Whether these test results are accurate or not (a 6% margin for error translates to a 94% opportunity for hope!), I'm fresh out of the patience Papa Air Force requires. Harrison Ford did some Jack Ryan, that will have to do.

First up, neither of these movies are terrible. They make sense, they're competently put together, nobody in them goes too far off model in their attempt to portray whatever cookie cutter stereotype role they've been assigned, and the egregious stupidity in the way some twists are arrived upon actually serves to make the experience of watching them sort of like a game, where you get a tug every time you notice one. (An IRA splinter faction with less than ten members has the resources to support a North African training camp, a planned-in-one-night bazooka jailbreak, and enough left over to mount a Navy SEAL level attack on American shores? Pal, there was a good ten year period when the real IRA had something like one single shot rifle to every 300 members.)

But hey, that's how these movies work. The bad guys (non-Americans, Americans who are weak appeasers) are set on the exact playing field as the good guys (Americans with strict moral codes), all so that the audience can get into the business of rooting for a guy who not only Never Compromises, but Is Incapable Of Doing So. The plots are firmly entrenched in zealotry, sure, but that's not ever their point--it's just taking for granted that the viewer agrees with that take on the world. (There's a telling scene early in Patriot Games--besides the way nobody but Harrison Ford steps up to the plate to save some prissy royals, the local British media obsesses over the Greatness of this Random American Tourist Hero in a way that seems like they're a public relations company in the business of making Harrison Ford the Mayor Of Awesometown.) When a classically cast evil British lawyer starts snarking at Ford for "rushing in without knowing all the facts", you can practically hear Tom Clancy in the background, braying at the top of his voice. After all, if everybody sat around trying to find out what was going on around them, they'd be letting the terrorists win--didn't you see what just happened, you dirty little baby kitten?

Patriot Games eventually goes full Die Hard route, with a sweet little break so that Harrison Ford can say "I will fucking destroy you" to Unforgiven's English Bob, but Clear & Present Danger never loses sight of Clancy's major theme: the law is the law, and you should never break it, unless of course you're breaking it in the service of catching the Real Criminals, who you can spot by the way they're always compromising and lying and shit like that. Also, killing little kids while they play soccer is okay if you say "Sir?" at the last possible second before you kill them even though you couldn't not kill them at that point anyway, and it's okay to fuck up somebody's secret war as long as you buy a helicopter and hire an alcoholic to pilot it around a creek, and you should never pick up an assault rifle to defend yourself when you're being hunted by a bunch of badass mercenary drug cartel types inside a house you've only been inside of for five minutes. Wait, none of that shit makes any sense. Who wrote this fucking thing?

Oh, yeah: the worst acting in this movie is the part where the best actor in the movie--Willem Dafoe--takes the whole thing too seriously and starts method-ing up the action scene where he's pulling Harrison Ford into the helicopter. Instead of playing it all badass Action Figure, he decides to play it as if what he's doing--pulling a full-grown man into a speeding helicopter with one hand--is something that he's actually doing, which just makes him seem like he's really exhausted and his arm hurts and jesus christ how much does this guy weigh and...it's weird, the faces he makes. It belongs in another movie, a bleaker, more honest one, one where the guy in the helicopter lets go of the other guy because life is absolutely meaningless, there is no believable path that won't result in a future that will be anything but a darker excursion into pain and loss, as the masses bury themselves further in waste and fervor, accepting our dwindling incomes and limited social interactions as an exchange that we have to make even if we mustn't, as the splintering of social cliques becomes broader and cleaner and sharper until no one escapes the cages they build for themselves, all the while claiming the prison isn't as small as it looks and it's still better than the one you live in anyway. There's never a question why the American citizens in Clear & Present Danger kill themselves for the drugs that the poor citizens of Columbia provide for them, there's never a moment where anyone is less than righteous citizen or murderous evil doer. A firebomb gets dropped into a massive underground factory, and nobody ever asks why the people were down there in the first place. They were bad, they had to die. These politicians are liars, surely this group of Senators will be better. 

I was wrong about them being pornography. These are just bedtime stories.

-Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2010

Comments

[seth hurley]

When the convoy drives into the shooting gallery in Clear & Present Danger and each car gets picked off, then each guard, then the very guy they were protecting, until it's just Ford with a gun in a doorway?

the producers of 24 stretched that scene into 8 years of television.

[Tucker Stone]

Ah, you're misremembering that. Harrison never uses a gun in that scene, he chooses instead to carry a body over his shoulder. He never really steps up to the table in the do-some-violence department, and for all the implied badassery, neither does Dafoe. It's all radios and computers for these guys. I think that's meant to help the audience member identify with them, but it just makes them look like a bunch of wimps.

[moose n squirrel]

right-wing pornography for middle aged white men. ... Is that an accurate description of the books?

YES YES YES, a thousand times, yes.

[Tucker Stone]

Ah, you've read them? So what's the deal: action porn or protocol porn? I can handle action porn, those books that have the giant mustache guy have always seemed like a high possibility, but i'd rather read non-fiction protocol porn.

[david brothers]

It's a mix-- the Rainbow Six stuff leans more toward action than protocol, the Jack Ryan stuff toward protocol and intrigue.

Clancy mixes it up, though. At one point, DC gets hit by a bomb or a crashing plane or something and through some insane series of events Ryan ends up being the president and just tells people what to do all the time. There's another where he talks the president down from freaking out and launching an all-out nuclear holocaust.

Rainbow Six, iirc, opens with the team foiling an airplane hijacking in midair because they can carry guns on their plane due to a special license. It kinda sets the tone for the book.

I read all of these in middle school when I went wild with a library card. I remember Without Remorse being a pretty rocking revenge story, with John Clark killing his way across the country while grieving his dead wife, but wiki says it's 600+ pages so that's probably wrong.

But yeah, they are very much in that lane of "We are America and right, now just unzip your pants a little while we talk about terrorists being beheaded. It's okay."

All in all, though, the Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, and Splinter Cell games are way, way better than the books. Sam Fisher is Michael Ironside as Solid Snake.

[Tucker Stone]

I keep believing there's a fiction book in this genre out there that's as balls-the-fuck-out as Steve Coll's Ghost Wars, but the wiki pages for Clancy just sound silly. I did like the description of The Ryan Doctrine for its sheer banality, but again, 800 pages?

[Chris Jones]

This is such a 19-year-old thing to say, but there are Splinter Cell BOOKS?!?

[Lugh]

So basically Tom Clancy novels are superhero comics for middle aged right-winger military enthusiasts?

Hell, as long as people don't take it seriously, I'm all for that. Every group deserves their own escapist fun.

[moose n squirrel]

Basically, imagine a right-winger's version of The West Wing, with all the attendant jerking off to the magisterial authority of Process.

[LurkerWithout]

"I keep believing there's a fiction book in this genre out there that's as balls-the-fuck-out as Steve Coll's Ghost Wars"

John Ringo maybe?

[Dave]

Do the John Ringo ones about a serial-rapist ex-Navy SEAL who is also king of his own kingdom with an army of mercenary whores flies around in a black Hind-D blasting Black Metal while killing terrorists count?

God I wish I still had the PDFs of that series, they were probably some of the most insane shit I've ever read.