This was a originally written as a reading response for my Theory and Criticism class, and I thought it might find a home here while I work on getting the blog back into gear.

Thierry Kuntzel’s ideas about the use of Freudian psychoanalytic models as a mode of analysis for narrative film has the potential to be applied to a wide range of film genres, but given my own critical leanings, I’m particularly interested in its relevance to the discussion of 1930’s animation, which tends to be particularly dreamlike in its structure, and to have a strong element of the uncanny.  Thus inspired, I decided to follow Kuntzel’s lead and examine one of my favorite animated shorts, Snow White (Dave Fleischer, 1933), in terms of dream-work.

There are three primary constellations of dream elements which recur throughout Snow White: sexual desire (and specifically, the desirability of Betty Boop/Snow White), ice/freezing, and physical metamorphosis.

Betty is introduced as an embodiment of desire by her theme song, which opens the cartoon: “Made of pen and ink / She can win you with a wink / Ain’t she cute? / Boop-oop-a-doop / Sweet Betty.”  Interestingly, the lyrics make clear not only that she’s meant to be desired by all who meet her, but also that she explicitly does not exist.  Despite her considerable charms, she’s only “made of pen and ink.”  Her lack of physical existence frees her from the messiness of being a real person, making her a pure object of desire.

When she enters the story a moment later, the Queen’s two guards (“played” by recurring Fleischer characters Bimbo the Dog and Koko the Clown) immediately fall for her, as does the Magic Mirror.  Even the empty suits or armor in the castle hallway fall apart at the sight of Snow White.  The Queen cannot abide this, of course, and orders her execution.  In a manner similar to the original fairy tale, however, she survives because the guards are incapable of overcoming their infatuation with her, and throw themselves into a pit instead.  The very tree she has been tied to takes pity on her as well and lets her go.

The constellation of ice and freezing, which takes over the narrative at this point, was hinted at earlier in the short, when Snow White arrives at the castle with snow in her hair and flanked by a duo of singing icicles.  After she is released by the tree, she becomes completely engulfed in snow, which is quickly converted to a perfectly formed block of ice, thanks to a dip in a frozen lake.  Snow White, our immaterial object of pure desire, remains frozen in this ice coffin until the end of the film.

The third constellation, metamorphosis, occurs to some degree in almost every shot (and in all Fleischer cartoons, for that matter).  In this world, everything is living and fluid, and nothing holds its shape for long.  The first overt metamorphosis of a primary character, however, occurs when the Queen becomes angry at Snow White.  As she fumes, her face becomes a skillet, complete with fried eggs in place of eyes.  Later in the film, the Queen becomes the focal point of transformation.  Using her Magic Mirror, she turns herself into a witch, and then transforms Koko into a ghost and Bimbo into a potted plant.  The Mirror soon gets fed up with her, however, and changes everyone else back to their true forms, while changing the Queen into a dragon.

The high point of Snow White is Koko’s performance of Cab Calloway’s “St. James Infirmary Blues.”  He sings this song (with its lyrics telling of a dead or departed lover, and contemplating the speaker’s own death) to the frozen form of Snow White.  As he sings, the Witch changes him into a ghost.  Aside from the obvious shifts from alive to dead and from material to immaterial, this metamorphosis has an unmistakable visual element of castration anxiety.  Koko is drawn with human dimensions (in fact, he is the only “man-shaped” character in the film), but his ghost form lacks any sort of torso—its legs reach all the way up to its shoulders.  In other words, as he sings his song of lost love to the frozen object of his desire, he is reduced to a creature with only empty space where his genitals should be.  Even within the often bizarre Fleischer canon, this stands out as a particularly strong example of the uncanny.

As with most of the Betty Boop cartoons, the “climactic” chase and happy ending are rushed and unrewarding, because that sort of resolution is beside the point of a cartoon like this.  The real climax is the musical number, in which all the elements of the cartoon come together in a perfect blend of swinging jazz, virtuosic hand-drawn animation, and a heaping helping of subconscious dream imagery.

I’ve been putting off writing about this, because I’m not sure my thoughts are fully formed, but I’ve decided to go ahead and broach the subject.  This is pretty drastic thing to declare for a former theatre major like myself, but the longer I spend immersed in film studies, the more inescapable this feeling becomes.  So, to get right to the point: I’m pretty much sick of acting, as it relates to film.

Now don’t get me wrong, acting is a serious craft, and I’ve known people who were extremely good at it (and others who were quantifiably bad).  Even in film, there are some truly great actors (most of whom came out of theatre).  Phillip Seymour Hoffman comes to mind, and of course Meryl Streep, William H. Macy, Cate Blanchett, etc.  So I’m not saying there’s no such thing as good acting, or that I don’t have respect for it when it occurs.  I think acting has its place… and that place is the theatre.

Great acting in the theatrical tradition can happen in the movies, but it’s not what the movies are about.  It’s often sort of beside the point.  When movies are centered around it, they run the risk of becoming “plays on film” (oh, hello there, Doubt).  A great film needs to balance acting (if it contains any, which it doesn’t need to) with its other concerns: cinematography, mise-en-scene, editing- all that Bordwell/Thompson stuff.  If it becomes all about the acting, it ceases to be much of a film.

It’s important to understand that I’m drawing a distinction between acting and performance.  Nobody in Gold Diggers of 1933 is much of an actor, for example, and the film doesn’t suffer for it.  But if they couldn’t sing and dance, on the other hand, the movie would have been forgotten by 1934.  What it comes down to, I guess, is that a performer needs to be able to do what a particular film requires of them.  That could be crying real tears over the death of a child, or speaking like a famous dead person with a very distinctive way of speaking, or doing a flawless tap dance up and down a massive staircase.  Sometimes it might just be seeming really, really cool.

The actors who I enjoy most, I’ve realized, the ones I get excited about seeing, are those who bring something compelling to their roles just by being who they are (or who they present themselves as, anyway).  Robert Altman was a master at finding and casting these people: Elliott Gould, Shelley Duvall, Henry Gibson, René Auberjonois, Ronee Blakley and so forth.  Some of them are “great actors” and some of them aren’t, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re perfect for the roles he gives them.  This is how John Ford made John Wayne into the Great American Movie Star: you find someone that the camera loves, and you give them roles that play to their strengths.

I definitely plan to write more about this, and focus a bit more on what I like about specific performers (if it’s not acting, it must be something).  I just wanted to go ahead and get my thoughts out there, though, half-formed as they are.  I’m curious about my readers’ opinions as well.  What’s the role of acting in film, as opposed to theatre?  Who are your favorite actors, and what makes you like them?

Credit where it’s due: I’m currently reading Richard Dyer’s Stars.  Its focus is a bit different that this entry, and I was having these thoughts already, but Dyer is definitely an influence.

I was sad to hear about Lena Horne this morning, although if anybody had a good long run, it was her.  Here she is with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, from Stormy Weather.  I figured the title song would be everywhere today, so I went with “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” If I mention she was easily one of the most beautiful women of the 20th Century, I don’t mean to minimize the fact that she also had one of the most beautiful voices of the 20th Century.

This week’s number finds a gorgeous jumpsuit-clad Jane Russell on an ill-advised quest for romance in a gay gym.  This ought to run off any lingering masculinists brought here by the Heavy Metal takedown…

I regard this blog as still being pretty young. Most of the people who comment are people I know in real life, although I’m hoping that if I keep it up long enough that will change.  Occasionally I do get comments from strangers– mostly Betty Boop otaku (or Booptaku, if you will) who like to make unsourced arguments about who did which voice in what cartoon.  It seems, however, that as I become more and more visible (despite still not being all that visible) on Google and the like, trolls are starting to show up.

So here’s what I’d like to say for the record:  Please, argue with me.  Nothing makes me happier than getting a comment from a stranger who disagrees with me.  But if you want to disagree with what I have to say about movies and pop culture, let’s talk about movies and pop culture.  Because if the best you can do is make ignorant, personal attacks on me and the other commenters (who, as I mentioned before, are usually my friends and family), I’m just going to delete your comment.

I debated whether or not deletion was the way to go, but Amanda’s response was, “Hilarious as the troll is, the comment doesn’t do anything but make for a hostile environment. There’s no actual attempt at a conversation, so why keep it?” and I think she’s right.  Conversation is what I would like it to be all about.  So please, if you want to comment here, learn to have one.

Spending as much time thinking about movies as I do, it’s really hard to answer the inevitable, “What are your favorites?” question that most people ask when they find out I’m a film student.  Well, really they first ask, “What kind of movies do you make?” and I have to explain that I’m in theory, not production, but then they always ask for my favorite movies.

Anyway, now I have a handy Venn diagram (click to embiggen):

The green and blue circles could be much more full, but I tried to limit myself to films I’m particularly excited about.  The red circle, on the other hand, is 100% complete (unless I’m just forgetting something).  I only listed the years for those movies that share titles with other (inferior) films.

So I suppose you could call those ten movies in the center, which fit into all three circles, my Top Ten Favorite Movies.  Maybe I’ll write an entry (or series of entries) focusing on them sometime.

And yes, for a grad student in film, my tastes are pretty US-centric.  I do my best to expand my horizons, but my fascination with American culture is a part of who I am as a nerd and a scholar.

For this week, here’s Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, along with Billy Barty and a vast chorus, doing a classy Busby Berkeley number about fooling around in public.

I’m trying to avoid too much critic-talk on these MMM posts, but I have to take a second to mention  what an interesting picture this number paints of issues relating to sexual consent at the time of its creation.  It’s clear that male pleasure comes first, but the ideal seems to be that the woman will enjoy it just as much, but both partners (though especially the woman) are expected to pretend to disapprove.  When the woman really is into what’s going on, the faux-resistance can be experienced as a fun game (as it seems to be between Powell and Keeler here), but obviously if a woman genuinely didn’t want to, that’s where things would get disastrous pretty quickly.  I think that the issues on display here are the same as in a number of Betty Boop cartoons, as well as the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (arguing about the implications of that song has become a Holiday tradition across the feminist internet).

Let’s go back to the early days, for a really great Bimbo short.

First of all, I think it’s worth noting that the whole “raiding the chicken house” trope is inextricably tied up with blackface minstrelsy.  Of course, Bimbo being a canine, he comes at it from his own angle (not unlike Mr. Fox), but in 1930 the racist minstrel tradition would have been fresh in the minds of audiences.

On the other hand, the bit where Bimbo and the chicken switch heads and clothing is pure  Fleischer craziness, with their usual touch of the uncanny (particularly when the chicken has Bimbo’s head but still makes chicken noises).  Even when his head’s on the right body, though, Bimbo never speaks in this cartoon, which isn’t really the norm for him.  It works here, though, putting the emphasis entirely on the song.

And what a song it is! In a cartoon this fun, made by Jewish animators no less, you can’t really take the hellfire-and-damnation lyrics seriously.  In fact the song has the same sort of ironic winking quality as Fats Waller’s “Devil to Pay.”  It seems to be largely a vehicle to subject to Bimbo to this round of surreal frights and tortures.  And honestly I’m not even sure I can parse all the levels of intersecting cultural implications at play when, amid all the Christian ghosts condemning Bimbo for stealing food, a stereotypically Jewish ghost shrugs and says, “You needed it.”

As usual in these sorts of cartoons, the weirdness escalates until it reaches a frenzy.  There’s a singing scythe, a scatting chicken, booty-dancing ghosts, and a trio of creatures I can only describe as angry crotches.  As Bimbo runs away at the end, the faces of the monsters who taunt him take on a surprising level of grotesque detail, reminiscent of the work of Basil Wolverton (who must surely have been watching these sorts of cartoons in his formative years as an artist).

I think I’ve previously discussed the tendency of Fleischer cartoons not to have real endings in any narrative sense.  For what it’s worth, this one is an exception.  The ghosts and demons come to drag Bimbo to hell, and that’s just what they do.

So yesterday, for whatever reason, I found myself in the mood to watch a cheesy cultish fantasy movie I’d never seen.  Something fun, where the appeal lies more in the visual splendor than the writing or acting.  After browsing the Netflix Instant options, I settled on Heavy Metal.  It’s a film I remember being keenly aware of as a child in the 80’s.  It was one of those rare animated films that I wasn’t allowed to see, which made it unbelievably enticing.  Not only that, but I’d seen enough posters and VHS boxes to know that it involved space ships, epic battles, alien creatures, and pretty ladies in skimpy scifi outfits.  In other words, it was just like my favorite movie at the time, Return of the Jedi, plus it was a cartoon, and it was forbidden.  Needless to say, at the age of eight, I was convinced that Heavy Metal had to be the greatest movie of all time.

And yet, even though it became easy for me to see R-rated films somewhere around the age of 13, I never saw Heavy Metal until yesterday.  Part of that might be the snags that apparently kept it from video release for several years, but separate from that, I feel like sometime in the decade or so after the film’s release, people completely stopped talking about it.  Even later on, when it was on video, and I was taking an interest in psychedelic culture and underground animation, recommendations for Heavy Metal were few and far between.  Now that I’ve finally watched it, I have some ideas as to why.

First of all, the animation itself hasn’t aged well (and I can’t imagine it looked that good to begin with).  Some of the design (much of it inspired by the comics, of course) is gorgeous, but even in those segments the motion is stiff and awkward.  It’s obvious which characters are meant to be hideous and which are meant to be beautiful (and more on them momentarily), but even the “beautiful” characters are frequently pretty ugly.  You can tell the filmmakers spent a lot of time looking at the work of Moebius and others, but they clearly lack either the ability or the inclination to produce anything close to that interesting.

The bigger problem, though, is the extraordinarily overt misogyny on display in this film.  I mean, obviously a 30-year-old psychedelic adventure film is bound to be male-centric, and I wasn’t expecting it to be otherwise.  Still, the volume and shamelessness of the sexism left me shocked.  Heavy Metal is a fantasy about men who get to do awesome, ass-kicking, groovy things, and some of those things they get to do happen to be women.  From the moment any adult female character appears on screen, you can start counting the seconds until she gets totally naked, and you probably won’t make it to ten (so yeah, South Park pretty much has this film’s number). One segment does offer a female protagonist, but she has no lines, alternates between little and no clothing, and is tortured and killed by the end.  No exception could better prove the rule.

This degree of misogyny in a film like this seems glaring in this post Whedon/R.D. Moore/Rowling world, because there’s so much more acknowledgment that just as many women are into scifi/fantasy as men, but I guess that still wasn’t regarded as the case at all in 1981.

I was reminded of some of Amanda Marcotte’s writing, particularly on the subjects of Playboy Magazine and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.  Basically, both essays make the point that there was a time when women could be openly excluded from any sort of culture of cool.  Hugh Hefner presents himself as a symbol of sophistication, and Kerouac and Cassidy are presented as avatars of rebellion against the mainstream, but all three men proceed from an unquestioned assumption that women exist solely to look hot, fuck them, and make them feel good.  This same assumption is at the core of Heavy Metal, which makes it a much harder film to enjoy these days.  Realizing this, I’m actually glad that people stopped discussing and recommending it, because I probably would have looked at those people a little differently afterward.

I’ve always found that nothing helps start the week on a positive note quite as well as a great old fashioned upbeat musical number.  Even though I’ve shared it in other venues before, I can’t think of a better clip to start with than “Jumpin’ Jive” from Stormy Weather, by Cab Calloway and his orchestra, featuring the genuinely mindboggling dancing of the Nicholas Brothers.