Code 46 (U.K., 2005, Michael Winterbottom)

Complex and cold, intelligent and aloof, fascinating and off-putting, Code 46 is one of 2004's most interesting films, with images and ideas that will stick with you for days, even if the movie lacks the sort of emotional resonance we might hope for in our masterpieces. Code 46 offers us such a grim glimpse of the future that any sentient audience member will exit shouting: Go Back!







Director Michael Winterbottom, master cineaste whose 24 Hour Party People was such a blast, steps lightly in the footsteps of great dystopians like Orwell and Huxley, and gives us his vision of the future, which he shows us to be insulated, pasteurized and rigidly-controlled. Global economy creates islands of “haves” who live in artificial, grey-lit plenty, while those on the outside lead a colour-saturated but much more materially-meagre existence. Not unlike the current state of things. While various languages have been fluidly absorbed into the lingua franca of daily life, restrictions on travel and access between people and places is strictly enforced, with a monolithic enforcement agency ensuring people do not slip between the cracks. The great paranoia of those within the safe confines on the inside appears to be the infection of the body politic by those on the outside. Further, due to the proliferation of in vitro fertilization, laws—those of the film’s title--have been enacted to prevent people with similar genetic codes from breeding, and punishing with expulsion from said body politic those who knowingly disobey them.

In a move that computer geeks and fans of their annual flu shot will appreciate, people in this world can be infected with viruses in order to strengthen areas of weakness. Want to sing with perfect pitch? Speak Mandarin? Read people’s thoughts? This place has the virus for you. As the movie opens, an inspector searches for a document-forger who is illegally greasing the wheels of travel for her fellow citizens, William (Tim Robbins) has been injected with an empathy virus, which allows him to intuitively clue into people’s most personal information. This, needless to say, makes him a valuable commodity for his employers, The Sphinx Organization, a ubiquitous mega-corp that appears to control most of this world’s industry. However, while William is able to quickly identify Maria (Samantha Morton, who is predictably marvelous) as the guilty party, he finds himself drawn to her (is the empathy virus to blame?) and in an act of complicity that appears to pose a threat to his entire way of life (which includes a wife and son), lies to protect her. When his employers discover William has fingered the wrong person, he is forced to return to the scene of the crime and get it right. This is, as the saying goes, when the games really begin, as William discovers that Maria has disappeared, having transgressed against Code 46, and thus has been forced to have an abortion as well as the requisite memory-wipe that accompanies it, leaving her unable to remember her previous relationship with him.

While the memory-wiping aspect of the story may lead you to expect Code 46 to be the cinematic cousin to Gondry and Kauffman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, those similarities are only surface deep. Rather than an absurdist commentary on the vagaries of memory and the inevitability of pain as the cost of risking love, Code 46’s angst-ridden tone and overall sense of alienation, not to mention its new-wave sense of audio-visual style, is much more reminiscent of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. The karaoke scene in the Asian bar doesn’t hurt the comparisons any either, as The Clash’s Mick Jones has an amusing cameo in a lounge lizard singing Should I Stay or Should I Go? This classic bit of stunt casting actually works, and not just cuz Jones is a quirky-looking dude in an exotic locale, but also cuz the song’s lyrics mirror the us vs. them-ness conflicts inherent in the plot. And so it appears that like Ms. Coppola, Winterbottom’s talents at matching swirling imagery and hypnotic sounds suggest that he’s also fallen under the spell of Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-Wai, particularly his 1990s efforts like Chunking Express and Fallen Angels, yet more evidence that Wong remains a seminal force for art house directors.

Code 46 is a cool film, in every sense of the word. It’s message is timely and politically hip, but it is also at times emotionally distancing, particularly given the sometimes-stilted performance of Tim Robbins in the lead role. Despite this, the film has a clear and profound application to our contemporary world, divided so cleanly between us that has and them that hasn’t. In the end, Code 46 is about the forces that attempt to keep people apart, despite the innate desires that draw us together. We may have absorbed a few words from a handful of languages, but we haven’t absorbed the people who originally spoke them, leaving them on the outside, begging to be let in. It is hardly an accident that the well-to-do upper class white male is able to indulge his desires and emerge from the experience entirely unscathed, while the Hispanic woman is tossed out of the community and left only with her brittle memories of these brief moments of happiness.

My Year in Film Studies (Part Three)

For those who missed it, here's part two.







Psycho (USA, 1960, Alfred Hitchcock)

My rationale for moving onto Alfred Hitchcock next is multi-fold. First, despite what might be viewed by a modern youthful audience as his decrepitude, Hitch's films are instantly accessible, requiring little or no explanations or apologies for their age. Secondly, at this point in the course I wanted to begin to introduce some of the fundamental elements of filmmaking to the students, stuff like mis-en-scene, editing, deep focus, montage and set design, and there are few filmmakers whose work lends itself to this sort of technical discussion better than Hitch. An entire lesson could easily be built around the shower scene alone, such is the man's technical virtuousity. Furthermore, I wanted to continue to look at narrative films that take on the confines of a genre and then play with them, and Psycho is an excellent choice here, being the father of the modern slasher flick and at the same time often a subverter of said genre. Also, Hitchcock's preoccupation with those twin American obsessions, sex and violence, play themselves out best in Psycho, where sexual desire and violence are inextricably linked in an orgasm of Freudian perversity. This is not to say I don't have problems with Hitchcock's ouevre, and some of those problems would come out later when we studied Vertigo, his most fascinating and personally revealing film, but for now I was willing to stash those reservations on the back burner.

So, on to the work at hand. Psycho is, as mentioned, often referred to (sometimes reductively) as the original slasher film. But it is so much more. Shooting the film at the same time as he was producing his very popular TV series, Hitchcock conceived of the film as a cheap exploitation flick and ispired by the look of these films and the grainy feel of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on his TV set, the director returned to black and white cinematography. Yet, beneath it's b-movie veneer is a masterfully crafted horror film, a movie meticulously conceived and delivered. However, Psycho also exposes some serious cracks in the Hitchcock veneer, early indications of the sort of problems that would afflict much of his work for the next fifteen years that wound down his career. More on that later.






Before I discuss what makes Psycho smarter than your average bear, I need to post the requisite SPOILER ALERT for anyone who has yet to see the film. I cannot examine what distinguishes Psycho without getting into some serious discussion of plot, so caveat emptor, mes amis. I will get to the film's technical accomplishments soon enough, so let us instead look at the narrative genius. First off, what kind of madman kills his leading actress, and the only "name" in the cast, before the film is half over? Well, a madman who is subverting the genre he is exploring, that's who. Also, the film's dual narrative is a cleverly mirror act, with the first act duelling with the second. In the first act we follow a deeply troubled Marion Crane (a dead sexy Janet Leigh), who, caught up in the throes of an illicit relationship with the good looking but very broke Sam Loomis (John Saxon) decides to abscond with $40,000 so the young lovers can have a fresh start free of debt and obligations. Her getaway eventually leads her to The Bates Motel and Norman Bates, played to twitchy perfection by the man whose performance defines much of what is memorable about this film, Anthony Perkins. It is here that her story ends, in the famous shower scene, and Norman's takes over. And the narrative mirroring begins as Norman now is the hunted and haunted figure in distress who must try to hide his tracks. The dualism of the narrative shows most clearly in that both characters are committing illicit acts and attempting to hide the evidence. But once Marion arrives at his hotel and Norman's sexual urges are first triggered, then perverted, by an implied Oedipal relationship with his mother, he is lead to violence. And as Norman becomes the violator and Marion the violated, the story's point of view trips on through the Freudian looking glass.





Interestingly, Hitchock plays with the conventions of the genre by knocking off his beautiful movie star lead, the figure we've invested 45 minutes and lot of our emotionals in, only to replace her with an insectile, tic-ridden, oedipal weirdo. And he expects us to, no questions asked, simply pick up and shift our allegiance? Is he nuts? Thing is, and here is the genius at play, it works. The master manipulator knows how to shape and craft sound and image so that we will do just as we are told. The masterful technician uses all the tricks in his bag, including crafty point of view shots, fascinating camera set ups, detailed set design, and a combination of playful and taut editing, to lure us away from Marion and into the world of Norman. And this despite witnessing Marion's horrific murder at the apparent hands of Norman's diabolical mother in one of the most famous 30 second sequences in cinematic history, a scene of such technical brilliance that audiences are certain that they have seen things--like knives penetrating flesh and bright red rivers of blood--that closer inspection proves that they did not. The first two acts of Psycho show Hitchcock at his manipulative, Skinner-ian best.

But what to make of the flaccid and tedious final act?

Once Norman dispatches Arbogast (Martin Balsam), and focuses on the investigation of Marion's absence by her lover Sam and Marion's sister (Vera Miles), the film loses all energy. Much of the fault lies at Saxon's wooden feet, as he emits a dull and asexual vibe, and for that much fault must lie at the feet of Hitchcock who oversaw the casting of all his films. Could he not see beyond Saxon's chiselled surface appeal to the lack of thespian skills beneath? On top of that, we have the sticks out like a bad smell-ness of the movie's penultimate scene, where a determined Simon Oakland plays a police detective expert on the sort of sexual deviance that marks the character of Norman Bates, and he seems intent on hitting every note of that aspect of the story's denouement on its over-obvious head. This is a scene that seems inserted to speak to the most oblivious in the audience who didn't pick on the half dozen leaden clues to Norman's Oedipal motivations and taxidermian inclinations. Recast Saxon, and dump this scene, and Psycho is a film I would recommend unreservedly, as it works in a number of ways, particularly in the film studies setting.

Evaluating the results

Psycho definitely works as an examination of how to work within and without genre conventions, how to subvert audience expectations and get away with it, and as a lesson (hell, a whole unit) on the many aspects of Hitch's cinematic technique.

Initial post edited to add: The film, as I suspected it would, went over well, up until the 3rd act tailspin anyways. It received an average rating of just under 4/5, and was in the middle of the ratings pack (10th highest of the 20 films rated.) Psycho was the most popular of the three Hitchcock films we watched (Vertigo and Rear Window being the other two).

What didn't

As mentioned numerous time, the film's final act is a near-disaster. But it was instructive in that it pointed out the importance of casting. Further, that poorly written second to last scene is a teachable moment as well, I suppose. But I'd just prefer to excise it if I could.

What would I do differently?

Since I'm planning on using North by Northwest instead of Jerry Maguire to kick off the year, I would prune Psycho back and focus on the film's opening two acts, and skim over most of the final act. Yes, it's instructional to mull over what went wrong, but simply put, I don't need this much Hitchcock in the course.

Overall Grade: B

Up Next: 2001: A Space Odyssey.