Stretching the Subtext: The Terminal

On the whole The Terminal is a fairly hokey, sometimes unbearable attempt at cuteness that is clearly a Hollywood-ization of a true story. That story- due to some complicated paperwork problems an Iranian man who landed in De Gaulle airport could neither leave to go home nor fly to his final destination in England-is transposed by Steven Spielberg to New York’s JFK airport with Tom Hanks as Victor Navorski. With Hank’s nationality changed to a fictitious “Krakozian” instead of Iranian, as well as arbitrary plot additions like a forced romance with flight attendant Catherine Zeta-Jones, The Terminal seems pretty easy to dismiss as a serious film.

But surface appearances are not everything, and there is a distinct, if not direct, link between this film and Spielberg’s near masterpiece Minority Report that can be found in the subtle neo-fascism of a government controller future. Navorski is trapped in JFK not due to a paper snafu but from the fact that while in the air his home nation suddenly suffered a coup and is now engaged in civil war as a new government tries to assert its power. Krakozia therefore rescinds the use of its citizens’ passports and the U.S., having not yet recognized the country’s new government, fails to let its citizens into America. Thus Navorski is trapped in what would seem to be a vacuum within JFK, a vacuum between countries and settled lives, all kept under the watchful eye of the airport’s security chief Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci).

Aside from the obvious Twilight Zone quality of Navorski’s situation (one actually noted by Dixon in the film), eerie references abound in The Terminal that push the idea that Navorski isn’t so much amusingly stuck in an airport as he is carefully manipulated in a controlled and manufactured environment. Unintended intertexual references are the first to point in this direction. Dixon’s security center and especially the way he hovers around the airport’s camera feed constantly looking for legal indiscretions bares more than passing resemblance to the headquarters of the mind/thought police of Minority Report who determine the fate of so-called criminals that have done nothing more than contain the possibility or likelihood of future crime. An even more disturbing (albeit very loose) connection is that Tucci’s eye-glassed deadpan bureaucratic controller easily calls up the memory of his role as the ultimate deadpan administrator of them all, Adolf Eichmann in Conspiracy.

The environment that Dixon restricts Navorski to is key to the film’s extra-narrative themes (its narrative themes being of the highly dismissible “be patient and wait it out” kind of simplicity). Kept out of hotels or first class relax areas like the Red Carpet Club, Navorski is “sequestered” to the International Lounge-a bizarre name for what amounts to an inside shopping mall that has no place to rest and only places to consume. Locked inside a glass cage with “views” of both New York (taxi cabs) and freedom in general (the constant coming and going of flights) Navorski is forced by Dixon to have access only to monolithic corporate storefronts-Starbucks, Borders, Burger King, etc. A security guard remarks to Navorski that the only thing to do in such a place is shop, and indeed that does seem the only possibility. In a bit of Kafka mixed with a Dick, Navorski is given food vouchers are turned into trash, finds employees talking in strange business-speak, people who don’t seem to notice him, and phonecard that he can’t use with a phone. The man is veritably forced to work for his money, “amusingly” finding creative but non-legitimate ways of scrounging a living like hording baggage carts to collect the financial reward. Once he is funneled into this system of control the mall of consumption is at his finger tips, and later the film goes so far as to push the well used flight stewardess-as-prostitute motif into new heights as Zeta-Jones appears as just another good to consume and dispose inside this area where politics are nonexistant and the only thing that's important is to keep consumers in and the world's loser out. The terminal becomes a little ant farm type experiment, with Dixon manipulating Navorski into a consumer mindset where he must work to live and must live for the hope that someday he will leave. Dixon actually has other priorities, seeing this frumpish Eastern European immigrant as useless and desires to get him off his hands as soon as possible, but the is a narrative requirement and does little to destroy the impact of this jail consisting of American brand name stores. (Navorksi’s forgoing sleep to teach himself English just so he can function in the shopping mall not only develops the evolution of the man into the mall's perfect consumer, but also weakly points The Terminal towards some kind of metaphor on immigration to America in general.)

Keep in mind as well that in this information age-where Dixon keeps careful watch on Navorski by using the eye in the sky-and that Navorski only knows about his country’s “demise” through reports via a 24-hour TV news network that talk in a language he barely comprehends. Even Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum seeps into Spielberg’s bizarre mixture of cute hokum and quasi-paranoid picture of neo-America, where disoriented visitors are manipulated by the filtering/control of information through TV broadcasts by phantom news networks. Though probably unintended these details add up, like how the undistinguished masses of workers at the airport mall unite behind Navarski in his subverting of Dixon’s Homeland Security policies.

Oblique references to these themes as Cold War rhetoric-employees thinking Navarksi is part of a C.I.A. operation, Navarski’s generic Eastern European country and language, etc.-make it fairly clear that whatever the film has to say it is saying it without really having a clear point to make. The themes mostly hover between a textual and subtextual level but there is no doubt that they are orchestrated by Spielberg and not by Andrew Niccol and Sacha Gervasi’s conventional and gag-based script by. The fact that most of The Terminal’s subtext feels unintended and neither structured thematically, nor highly linked to the plot, nor even to character development (Hanks-always good natured-takes the whole thing in stride, which is no surprise given his unnaturally flawlessly good-hearted character) leaves one only with a handful of interesting ideas menacingly hovering in the background of an occasionally creative, sometimes funny, but usually mundane Hollywood film.
Posted By Daniel Kasman at 11:52:00 PM 0 comments

 

Question of the Week

The Unofficial Milk Plus Canon, Part IV: 1985-1989

It's back...

Create a list of the Top 10 films released between 1985 and 1989, providing rationale for each choice

Remember, this question is open to all blog members and readers, so get your list in so your vote will count. Again, because of the variability of release dates, please use IMDB.com as your resource when it comes to a film's actual release date. I will be using the same scoring system as before, with your #1 movie being worth 10 points, your #2 movie being worth 9 points, and so on. Since this is only a game, please, please rank your movies so I don't have to figure out how to assign points.

Polling ends at 9pm CST on 6-24. Please have your lists submitted by then.
Posted By Anonymous at 9:12:00 PM 0 comments

 

The Stepford Wives

I’ve never actually seen the 1975 film version of The Stepford Wives (though it is now sitting near the bottom of my GreenCine queue), though the film is so ingrained in modern popular culture I can almost swear that I have. Say the word “Stepford” and everybody nods knowingly, so it probably seemed like a good idea at the time to take the film in a more comedic direction, to push it into the more satirical realm of Ira Levin’s source novel. Yeah, not so much. Whereas the original came out during a specific historical period, during the social upheaval engendered by the rise of feminism as a cultural-political force (among other similar movements), as well as a 70s popular culture revival of an idealized, fantasy version of Eisenhower’s America (i.e. Happy Days, Grease, etc.), the new version of The Stepford Wives supposedly comes out in the more enlightened times of “post-feminism.” (This historical confluence is probably the real reason for the first film’s reputation, since I can not find anyone, except for Ed Gonzalez, who thinks of the first film as “great.”) And like most examples of mass consumerist product designed under the banner of “post-feminism,” it’s a limpid specimen which pays lip service to the ideas of gender equality and anti-sexism, but in reality it has as many thoughts in its head as the titular androids. I was gummed to boredom by the toothless satire, and only the zingers of Paul Rudnick’s one-liners gave the film any life whatsoever.

The film starts promisingly enough with the credit sequence, a montage of “you have to see it to believe it” 50s era clips depicting ridiculous seeming concepts of femininity, domesticity, and technological consumerism run amok. But then the film launches into its dominant conceptual framework with the introduction of Joanna Eberhard, Nicole Kidman’s character (in an uncharacteristically bad performance, at least in my opinion, characterized by shrieking, whispering, and looking incredulous), an all powerful TV network executive unveiling her new fall lineup of crass reality shows, which are all based on an opposition between men and women, with the women in firm control, and the men, well let’s just say were beyond Stiffed territory here. In the film, the men are uniformly milquetoasts, nerds, and losers (with the exception of the one flamboyantly gay character). This may seem like a neato gender inversion, but of course, the film shoves the main female characters into caricatures of the successful career woman=bad wife/bad mother, if not dour, emasculating harpies, and in a not surprising twist (SPOILERS), it is really a woman (a very crazy woman who once was a brain surgeon and geneticist, and now wants to make the world “perfect”) who is behind the sinister Men’s Association that is replacing the women of Stepford (END SPOILERS). Wait, sinister may be too strong a word, since the Men’s Association is more like an infantile frathouse, though Christopher Walken does his best with what he is given, and as usual, he’s great.

Pretty much the majority of the movie consists of watching the nonconformists of Stepford, all dyed in the wool Manhattanites, whose grousing about suburban life provides many of the film’s best jokes, slowly succumb to their partner’s machinations. However, the film does little with it’s “1950s as nightmare” premise other than gawk. Presumably, the threat of returning to some kind of weird, 1950s inspired fantasy is so far removed and incongruous from the average spectator’s experience, that simply pointing the camera at several doll-like women in floral dresses and floppy hats constitutes “satire.” You almost wish the filmmakers had had the guts to update the fantasy from the 1950s to something more contemporary and uncomfortable, and you could occasionally tell that the filmmakers were trying to go in that direction. For example, a couple of sights gags about the ubiquity of identical SUVs in Stepford, but that would be too biting. It’s much easier to simply laugh at something the average viewer is already programmed to interpret ironically.

It’s actually the last 30 minutes or so which completely torpedoes the movie. After playing one key sequence entirely straight and melodramatic, the film recreates what even I know to be the final scene of the original movie, before launching onto a clearly tacked on conclusion which involves setting everything right, redeeming Matthew Broderick’s character, and revealing the mysteries of Stepford through pages of endless exposition delivered by an over the top Glen Close. Other than one jolt, and one cool image, this ending is completely ridiculous, and let’s everyone off the hook while delivering the message that “perfection” is not everything, and that men could stand to be more, well manly, and women, more feminine. Yes, let’s compromise and everything will be just great! Kidman even remains a blonde at the end of the movie, though she compromises and keeps her same hair style. Yeah compromise! It's so easy. And the film tops it all off with the men of Stepford’s punishment (at least in a stereotypical case): feminization. Blech.
Posted By Anonymous at 9:04:00 PM 0 comments

 

The Day After Tomorrow

During its tense opening moments I wasn't sure which way The Day After Tomorrow was headed. The disaster flic foreboding starts right away -- planetary temperatures go wonky, weather anomalies crop up, it's the literal calm before the storm. Yet there was also THE MESSAGE, lurking behind the effects like the classroom science nerd with his hand up. Global warming is, after all, unlike rogue comets and invading aliens; this is a very real, very topical, concern, and I thought maybe, just maybe, it was time to stop slurping the Moka-Java smoothie and listen to what was being said here.

But, of course, it's spring outside, and all serious issues get dropped faster than a homework assignment on a sunny day. Dennis Quaid -- the film's head science nerd -- yells to the Vice-President, "If we don't do something now it'll be too late!!", and, voila -- it is, indeed, too late. With dialogue that scintillating and credibility that shallow my brain instantly shut down for the remaining two hours. Who can concentrate on serious stuff when there's so many special effects to enjoy! I mean -- cyclones and floods, guys!

As you've likely figured out by now, that nonsense story about Republicans being put off by the film's message was nothing but good marketing. This is not a deep film with some added character subplots. Instead The Day After Tomorrow anchors itself around cliche-driven characters who use global warming as motivation to act even more cliched. It's all about father and son relationships, husband and wife issues, buddies bonding over a crisis, and, naturally -- because it's Hollywood -- a young couple discovering love. In this supposed 'message-film', it's all about how everyone feels rather than that problem of a disintegrating climate right outside the door. See if you can guess how all of the above relationships turn out. That's right -- how'd you know?

And therein lies my source of my grumbling -- The Day After Tomorrow turns out to be yet another BIG THEME movie with a cut-and-paste screenplay. All that's changed is the disaster. There's plenty of awe to be inspired by the degree of destruction rained down on the planet, the effects are monstrously big as all get-out and writer/director Roland Emmerich does his usual good job of pumping non-stop adrenaline. It's a two-hour Disney ride that doesn't disappoint.

But that's the extent of it -- a theme park ride. The Day After Tomorrow never bores, but it never enlightens, either. There's a "Wow!" every minute, but it's never followed with, "...I never thought of that!" For an issue as crucial as global warming, the audience walks out of this film remembering nothing but huge walls of water. All morsels of real information are pummeled beneath the waves. What can we do as individuals to fight global warming? What should we expect of our governments? Damned if I know after watching this film. Sorry...what was I saying...oh yeah -- cyclones and floods, guys!!

It's a shame, really. Disaster films don't have to be synonymous with mindless effects. The similarly-named The Day After was a 1983 made-for-TV movie about nuclear war that haunts me still and Titanic managed to recreate a palpable aura of history around a then-85-year-old event, despite the film's romantic shlockery.

I'd recommend The Day After Tomorrow as the fun summer flic it was intended to be. It's just too bad the day after tomorrow is about as long as you'll remember it.

Posted By Anonymous at 4:48:00 PM 1 comments