Only Because Paul W.S. Anderson Didn’t Make a Movie This Year:

The movie world’s favorite grad-school dropout, A.O. Scott, ponders the disappearance of extravagantly awful movies, making the strange suggestion that the lack of gutter-lining gunk may be related to the lack of truly excellent filmmaking. I’m not sure I really buy his thesis, which rests far too much on a few individual examples of possibly interesting films driven into adequacy by the needs of convention, but I find it intriguing that Scott seems to think that what films really need more of is the “spark of madness” that gives violently trashy films their memorable qualities. About the film industry, Scott says that,

“The kind of ambition that can yield greatness or abomination is not something Hollywood has much interest in encouraging these days.”

And he lauds the unhinged insanity of Oliver Stone’s bloated disaster of a biopic, Alexander, saying,

“The narrative scheme makes no sense; the motives of the major characters are at once overly emphatic and maddeningly opaque; it is too long, too ornate, too talky - too much. But no one would ever call it mediocre, or accuse Mr. Stone of laziness, indifference or unseemly willingness to compromise.”

As well, he argues that Memoirs of a Geisha’s only memorable bit was one of unchecked passion:

“The one truly memorable sequence - in which Gong Li, wild-eyed and disheveled, sets fire to the geisha house - is a symbol of precisely what the film refuses to do, which is to go crazy and make a mess.”

This strikes me as a weird modern equivalent to Antonin Artaud’s call for drama to take on the properties of plague. In his essay, The Theater and the Plague, he writes, “We must recognize that the theater, like the plague, is delirium and is communicative.” Later, he says,

“[The theater] reforges the chain between what is and what is not, between the virtuality of the possible and what already exists in materialized nature. It recovers the otion of symbols and archetypes which act like silent blows, rests, leaps of the heart, summons of the lymph, inflammatory images thrust into our abruptly wakened heads.”

Scott’s call for madness fits nicely with Artaud’s desires for some inexplicable, impossible theater that would have the meta-real qualities of a dream, in that it could shock, terrify, thrill, arouse and generally shake us to our core in a reflexive, physical manner – and yet leave us essentially unaffected in a permanent sense. It’s easy to dismiss Artaud as nuts, and not just because most of his writing was overloaded (if gorgeous) space-cadet rambling, but because he was actually diagnosed as medically insane for a time. But maybe it takes a lunatic to really find the joy of dramatic insanity. It’s fitting then, then Scott ends his essay like this:

“There are fewer and fewer movies being made that send us from the theater reeling and rubbing our eyes, wondering "what the heck was that?" or demanding a refund. For precisely that reason, we are less and less likely to emerge breathless and dazzled, eager to go back for more and unable to forget what we just saw.”

Breathless, dazzled and reeling, unable to describe what we saw: if that isn’t channeling Artaud, I don’t know what is.