Instead of backing Gruber up with a bunch of generic thugs (plus maybe one guy who gets to be The Psycho or something), Die Hard goes out of its way to humanize his team of fellow thieves a bit. Two of them – Karl and Tony – are brothers and seem to have some sort of sibling rivalry going on (eg. the scene where Tony is working to disable the alarm system and Karl simply cuts the wires with a chainsaw while Tony yells at him). Al Leong, who played Asian Guy Who Gets Killed so many times throughout the ’80s that it became a running joke between me and my high school friends, has the scene where he looks around like he’s afraid he’ll get caught before stealing a chocolate bar. They all call each other by name and on occasion express concern for each other (Karl, of course, goes berserk when his brother is killed). And even some of the really minor henchmen have scenes where they display cunning, intelligence and an ability to improvise on the fly. These are all little things, but they add up, and when the audience feels like the henchmen are actual characters with distinct personalities it makes John McClane (Bruce Willis)’s eventual (spoilers!) victory over them more exciting.

The most striking example of this comes about halfway through the movie; Gruber’s team has secured the building and taken hostages, and the cops attempt to storm the building with a SWAT team. When this assault fails they send in an armored vehicle to break through the front door, and for the next minute and a half the film is told almost entirely from the villains’ point of view (the only exception being one shot of McClane pacing about nervously on a different floor). As pulse-pounding music plays, we see them work efficiently as a team…

…bicker back and forth in German**…

…quickly and expertly assemble a rocket launcher…

…and then, just in the nick of time, fire a missile…

…and blow up the police tank!

They even get a Witty Action Movie One-Liner (“Oh my God, the quarterback is toast!”).

What makes this scene distinctive is that these actions (working competently as a team, victory at the last second, the catchphrase) are all things the heroes usually do in action movies. If you only watched this scene you might think they are the heroes. Further alienating the audience from the traditional protagonists is the fact that the police (aside from Reginald VelJohnson‘s Sgt. Powell) are incompetent, the FBI is incompetent and heartless (“Figure we take out the terrorists. Lose twenty, twenty-five percent of the hostages, tops.”), and even 911 tells McClane to get lost when he calls them for help. So not only are McClane and Powell on their own, but the guys they’re up against aren’t the typical herd of goons who get shot down by the dozens in Stallone and Schwarzenegger flicks.

So why don’t more action movies have better villains? I suspect a large part of the reason is that big stars don’t like to be upstaged, but that’s a mistake because memorable villains make for a more compelling hero and better movies. Julia and I went to see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol a few weeks back and when I complained that the villain was boring a few days later she asked “Who was the villain, again?” Exactly.

* like Jack Palance in Tango & Cash!

** much of the dialogue between the henchmen is in German with no subtitles, which  is a) more realistic, and b) effective because you’re forced to pay closer attention to their faces and actions to try and figure out what’s going on

If the book were an essay, its main argument might be summed up in the scene in which the young and precocious Paloma witnesses a rosebud fall from a broken stem in a bouquet of flowers. The beauty of this tiny movement strikes a chord within Paloma, and she grasps after what it is about this moment that has affected her so.

“In the split second while I saw the stem and the bud drop to the counter I intuited the essence of Beauty…[B]eauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.”

Lovely.

So the bad news is that I’ll probably never feel music as passionately I did when I was 18 and blasting Zeppelin in my parents’ van on the way out to my job at the golf course. Yea, verily, that shit was awesome. The good news, for me at least, is that there’s a trade-off; music might not be as exciting as it was when I was younger, but it’s more interesting. How so?

Well, when I first started developing an interest in music I wasn’t inclined to ask many questions about it beyond “Do I like this?” Then I got a bit older and started digging through grown-ups’ music collections in search of other groups who sounded like the artists and styles I liked. In high school I was obsessively deciphering song lyrics (at 17 I could have completed a doctorate in Pink Floyd Studies), making dozens of mix tapes for myself and others, and studiously hovering over magazines and books like The Rolling Stone Album Guide. By the time I got to university I had started tracking down the obscure bands who inspired the famous ones and paying attention to stuff I’d never really noticed before like basslines, the differences between famous studios, record labels and producers…you name it. Around the turn of the millennium (coincidentally – or not – right around the time I started buying records, and then of course there’s the internet) the whole thing hit critical mass; everything I learn leads to something else – usually multiple somethings – and the more I learn the more I realize how little I actually know. And it will. Never. End; there’s always going to be another album I haven’t heard, another musician I read about in Wax Poetics, another…hey, I saw this guy’s name on the back of that other record and wow I didn’t know that Jewish Klezmer bands inspired early blues and jazz musicians and Rick James and Neil Young were once in a band together and one of the earliest hip-hop beats was from a song by a white guy in a movie named The Thing With Two Heads and what the hell Karen Carpenter was actually a shit-hot drummer? and…

* Music is my favourite art form, and whatever comes in second isn’t even close.

But beyond quality (pah! quality!) I loved the way the film repeated the conversation, to which the title refers, over and over again. I wish I’d been able to watch this film in the theatre, rather than in front of my laptop with its tinny-tiny speakers, but alas.

The film revolves around an audiotape, and the conversation between a man and a woman recorded on it. The main character Harry, played pitch-perfectly by Gene Hackman, is a surveillance expert who has recorded the tape for a mysterious client.

Harry listens to it over and over again, adjusting the levels and patching the different feeds together in order to get a clear master version of what the couple is discussing. But the more he listens to it, the more anxious he becomes about what the conversation really means and to what end handing the tape over might lead.

Time to get to work.

For me, there was a great pleasure in listening along with Harry to the conversation again and again, in searching along with him for something I might have missed, some new way of interpreting what was said, some previously undetected inflection that would reveal the conversation’s subtext.

This searching, this compulsive return to an object, shows up in other movies that I’ve liked similarly, such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up, in which a fashion photographer takes a photograph of what might be a murder. We, along with the photographer, study successively larger prints of the picture in an attempt to “get closer” to the meaning of the captured image. But past a certain size, the image’s coherence simply dissolves into a series of disconnected grainy splotches.

There is something compelling and pleasurable for me in closely searching a text, an image, a sound. The object is what it is; it does not change. But my interpretation of it can. I can try to fit various meanings over it, I can manipulate its component parts like a paper fortune teller, I can turn it over and inside out and try reading it backwards. Its impenetrability becomes a mirror; it impassively reflects back whatever I project.

This impenetrable quality is beautifully captured in one of The Conversation’s climactic scenes (spoiler alert). Harry is in a hotel room, and in the adjoining room we can hear noises of what may or may not be a murder in progress. But he’s unable to clearly hear or see what’s happening, nor do anything about it. We can hear murky sounds of violence unfolding, but all we get visually is a shot of the room’s obstinate, unchanging wallpaper.

Unlike Blow Up, where the event the photo did or didn’t capture remains an enigma, The Conversation does eventually reveal the meaning of the conversation. During the final time we listen to it, the inflections and subtext become crystal clear (in fact, the new meaning changed how I received the sounds so much I wondered if there was a second version of the recording used only in this scene for emphasis). But whether they contain an ultimate answer or not, I simply like it when films ask me to do some of the work: to make my own connections, to lift a possible solution out of the clues that I’m seeing and hearing. Those kinds of films see the viewers as an equal – and I’m an equal rights kind of gal.

I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to tell you that the film begins with a shot of the titular massive blue planet colliding with Earth and completely destroying it. The thing is, Melanchoia is no more about the literal end of the world than The Hit (a great film about death and how people prepare for and approach it) is about crime. It doesn’t attempt to realistically depict what might transpire in the face of the events the movie dramatizes; the astrophysics are pretty ludicrous and society’s collective reaction to a new planet that may or may not collide with Earth seems rather muted.

No, Melancholia is about depression and how people react under pressure. von Trier has said as much in interviews (naming the planet “Melancholia” is admittedly a bit of a tip-off) and states on the film’s official website that “Justine [the character played by Kirsten Dunst] is very much me. She is based a lot on my person and my experiences with doomsday prophecies and depression.” When it becomes clear that Melancholia is in fact going to strike Earth, Justine’s sister Claire [Charlotte Gainsbourg] and her husband John [Kiefer Sutherland], neither of whom are depressed, are completely unequipped to deal with the impending disaster, while Justine seems calm, if somewhat contemptuous of Claire’s rising panic (when von Trier was being treated for depression a therapist told him that depressives often act more calmly during a crisis than “happy” people because their glass is already half empty.)

This is what a non-depressed person looks like in a Lars von Trier film.

Depression is something I struggle with, and while I don’t know if it’s a plus in a crisis, I can tell you that when you’re depressed there are days when you’d welcome the arrival of a rogue planet slamming into the Earth at thousands of miles an hour. Cheap nihilism aside, there are a number of reasons I think films like Melancholia (and Last Night, On The Beach, etc.) have always resonated with me.

• When you’re depressed you worry about the future a lot. If you knew exactly what the future held (and when) it would in one sense solve a lot of what you thought were your problems. In Last Night and On The Beach, many of the characters stoically accept their fate (à la Claire), and a few even seem cheerful. Feeling resigned to upcoming events one considers inevitable is also a hallmark of depression, and there is always a measure of cold comfort in having one’s dark suspicions about the universe confirmed.
• In Donnie Darko (another film about the end of the world, or universe, or…something) one of the characters states “Every living creature dies alone,” which is a profoundly desolate sentiment and something I would imagine almost everyone is afraid of. By comparison, an instantaneous global cataclysm where we all die with our loved ones by our side seems almost grand and romantic by comparison, especially if it’s gorgeously filmed in slow-motion with cool special effects and soundtracked by Richard Wagner.
• As Samuel Johnson said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” On The Beach and Last Night are full of characters who, faced with humanity’s imminent extinction, make a conscious choice to fulfill their personal and professional duties right up until the final moment. In Melancholia Justine is the one who takes charge of the situation at the very end and makes an effort to comfort Claire’s young son Leo (after Claire panics and tries to escape – to where? – with him). Depression has a way of making your range of opportunities in life seem paradoxically overwhelming and futile, so I could see how having them narrowed down to a very few stark choices in an end-of-the-world scenario just might have the kind of clarifying effect Johnson speaks of.

Please rest assured that none of this should be taken to mean that I harbour a death wish for either myself or the world at large (although I must admit I was rooting for the asteroid in Armageddon). Life, as much as it sucks sometimes, is precious and beautiful, and sometimes it takes a gigantic rock hurtling toward Earth to make us realize we don’t know what we’ve got until it’s (almost) gone.

* I think I find the choices people are forced to make when there is zero chance of survival more dramatically compelling than fights to the death over canned vegetables.

But for me, it’s one of the trickiest genres to get right. I’m not an expert, or even a geek, but in this genre I don’t need to be – real horror quickly announces itself. My heart beats faster; my sense of reality starts to warp and wane; I no longer feel like I’m safe, psychologically speaking and…uh…wait – why did this seem fun, again?

At any rate, I recently watched cult classic The Last House on the Left, directed by Wes Craven and released in 1972 (itself based on Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring – now on my list to view in future).

Not from the movie, but creepy nonetheless.

(Spoiler alert: skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to know how the film ends.)

The story follows two young women, Mari and Phyllis, who venture into the city to see their favourite band. But on the way, they’re captured by three murderous criminals on the lam, assisted by a young junkie. The story intercuts Mari’s worried parents and the incompetent local cops with drawn-out torture and rape of the two young women in the nearby forest. After Phyllis and Mari are finally killed and their corpses abandoned, the criminals manage to talk their way into Mari’s parents’ house for the night, posing as insurance salesmen. Their act is suspicious, however, and Mari’s parents soon realize who they really are – and what has become of poor Mari. Here the film turns the tables on the killers, and Mari’s parents avenge her death by gruesomely murdering each of them, one by one.

The Last House on the Left was met with revulsion and harsh criticism upon its release, and it’s easy to see why: even by today’s standards there remains an impressive raw power to this film.

It veers between tones that don’t always go well together, or even necessarily make sense – for example, there’s a lot of loopy banjo getaway music following the first night of rape and torture of the two young women, which seems oddly out of place to say the least. There’s also a choppiness to the intercutting of the various plotlines – literal choppiness, where sound and music in one scene will instantly stop on the cut; but also tonal choppiness, where we’ll suddenly go from a wacky comedic tone to the starkly realist horror of the torture scenes.

In part, it’s this unpredictability of tone and cutting that lends the film its power. When we cut to apparently comedic scenes with the inept police, I felt a kind of relief – okay, we’re in a safe space now – but when we returned to the forest, all bets were off. There’s an artlessness to these shifts that jarred my viewing experience, yet at the same time that very artlessness intensified the horror by creating a sense of destabilization: moment to moment, I just didn’t know where this film was going to take me. And isn’t that feeling – literally, the fear of the unknown – at the core of any horror film?

That wildness, rawness, messiness is what was most effective about The Last House on the Left. Unpredictable and seemingly out of control, its flaws and bizarre tonal shifts leaves you feeling vulnerable, disoriented and on edge.