“The Trail is Cold”: The Coen Brothers’ “True Grit”, John Cameron Mitchell’s “Rabbit Hole” and Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan”

Screen Cap from 'True Grit'

 Copyright © 2011 by James Clark

    Since completing the film, Inland Empire in 2006, David Lynch has devoted his impressive and lugubrious energies to the production, in France, of a number of series of lithographs. Many have noted that, when he was an art college student in Philadelphia, Lynch was conversant with productions along those lines, though not specifically rendered in the technically difficult mode of stone lithography. Few, if any, as far as I know, have wondered why he has returned to college pursuits that had been superseded by film work.

    There are two superb facsimiles in book form displaying this new/old output (namely, David Lynch Lithos and David Lynch Dark Splendor [both presented in 2010 by the German publisher, Hatje Cantz]), the art world commentators of which gloss over this turnaround as a return to a far better fold than the rude marketplace of movies. The latter work documents the Hollywood maverick’s coming within the embrace of institutional Surrealism in the form of the Max Ernst Museum. (At the outset of that book the reincarnated exhibition star is quoted as follows: “ ‘And so, even though I’m from Missoula, Montana, which is not the surrealistic capital of the world, you could be anywhere and see a kind of strangeness in how the world is these days, or have a certain way of looking at things.’” Although its pedantic efforts to entangle Lynch’s output, including the films, in the extremity of Continental Angst fall short of accounting for the delights tucked away in its darkness, the Germanic comprehensiveness of this reckoning does come to a symptom exposing the putative free spirit’s susceptibility to eclipsing his mature lightness with a darkness bordering on the formulaic. Before specifying this pitfall, let’s see a bit more of the revisionist manoeuvring.

    David Lynch Lithos presents a battery of black and white stills taking nourishment from two contradictory sources, namely, the full thrust of the artist’s problematically witty feature films; and the overdrive short-circuiting upon dynamics the subtleties of which the films so expertly maintain. Painters specializing in contortion, like Francis Bacon and Edvard Munch, whom Lynch has admired since school days, have been, in the cozy and concealed academic polemics of both texts, brought to bear as character witnesses in defence of an eleventh-hour litho spree which, though inventive, fascinating and touching, comes out of a crowd rather than, as with the feature films, out of a unique heart. For instance, the pieces titled, “Alice Thinks about Suicide” (shown here) and “Pete No Start Fucking Car” capture downdrafts befalling those protagonists of  Lost Highway, but leave missing in action the formidable upswings, particularly those of Alice. Another strike, “Hello/ Goodbye,” featuring a two-headed monster, does not exactly rise to the interactive sophistication of Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express. (It must be admitted that the mordant presences are texturally and compositionally tinged with an impetus of recovery; but their upswings’ frissons are overwhelmed by an avalanche of carnal decay.) That brings us to the sure-footed revisionist who is more than pleased to let Lynch praise to the skies his guru and that subsequent area of mystical banality the films counter by digging down to problematical rather than programmatic actions.

              “For the artist, it makes no sense to demand logical conclusions rather than explore the

               organic process. Death and life, crime and love are components of a universal process

               that is not ours to explain.

                   Lynch draws this attitude toward life from Indian philosophy. He reveres Maharishi

Mahesh Yogi and meditates regularly. For him, consistently practicing contemplation

               has become an essential and even indispensable part of his daily experience and the

               source of his ideas and creativity. For Lynch, everything material is transitory. Death—

             ‘when the body drops life’—is not the end, however: ‘We are eternal, but we don’t know

               it yet.’….all of [his] artistic activities follow the same urge to point out the transitory

               nature of life” (David Lynch Dark Splendor, p.80).

    That brings us, moreover, to artists who have not abandoned (or been forced to abandon) the special logical fluidity of film. A clutch of recent film hopefuls enact memorable physical conundrums with neither monastic finality nor modernist momentum. In this unguardedness they provide a glimpse of how widespread and contingent are concerns otherwise arising from conspicuous, obsessive expertise.

    One of the most seen and talked about movies of the year 2010, Black Swan, is also one of the most tonally compromised productions since the days of Ed Wood. Aronofsky takes as his focus the extreme difficulty of accomplishing sustained physical grace as comprising abysses of conscious sensibility both serene and earthy. He promisingly establishes his drama with regard to a ballerina’s struggles to master the range of powers encompassed by the role, “Odette”/ “Odile” (White Swan/ Black Swan), in the ballet, Swan Lake. But this is a project that could serve as an object lesson in the differences between touching upon a classy and cogent endeavor and having it make economic sense in the mass market world of feature films. A glance at the worldwide audience statistics for Swan Lake would be enough to convince Aronofsky he wouldn’t have nearly the numbers were he to embark upon the complexity and subtlety  (and the practical sanity [dance companies, too, having to face what works, against what would be suicide])  involved in showing a recognizably professional dancer (and this says nothing against Natalie Portman’s heroic preparation for the role, but has to do with the daftness of the writing as driven by an abortive directorial concept) in the course of a kinetic task like the principal role in that ballet. (There is considerable reason to doubt he had ever confronted the incongruity of his long-simmering fondness for the notion of being haunted by a rival who would double for one and the reality of dance production, particularly as to the role of Odette/ Odile. He is quoted as finding real dancers to inhabit “a very insular world” and “not impressed by movies.”) Rather than mount his interests in a more popularly comprehensible and enjoyable socioeconomic precinct, he has calculated that the polarities he wants to run with can be safely and effectively discharged in a pseudo-highbrow horror flick, perhaps reminding audiences of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera. In taking that questionable step, he risks dividing audiences between those who know and care a little about ballet and those who don’t, while being braced by the obvious odds. But there is much more to making a movie that matters than simple arithmetic; and in not being fully serious about that sticking point Black Swan skirts precariously upon farce, risks seeming to assume that there is little difference between a ballet company and a roller derby.

    In order to bring away from this project its traces of reflective audacity, we have to ignore as best we can its premise that we are watching a ballet in the making—rounding up an actor who sort of resembles the New York City Ballet’s Director, Peter Martins, cannot gainsay that the real Martins would never blunder into counting upon so inept a figure as “Nina” to undertake a highlight event for a major creative entity (nor, in fact, would he ever promote such a one-note cipher to the level of soloist, let alone principal, let alone Prima Ballerina)—and instead see what Aronofsky has to say about an ambition to shine in a field that unbeknown exacts sensual sophistication the rigors of which are very apt to kill anyone lacking even more than True Grit.

Screen cap from 'Black Swan'

   

The Company Director (thinking the girl has viable hidden resources because she bit his tongue while he was molesting her) puts to his naive charge the challenge of bringing to fruition her Black Swan game. (Though the assurance is her White Swan is state-of-the-art, such a pat analysis—as if she were a golfer with grand putting skills but needing to beef up her long game—overlooks that only a cogent Black Swan could leverage a cogent White Swan.) Being a twenty-something virgin living alone with many dolls and a stage mother—and even the latter eventually has to declare, “This role is destroying you”—she has been handed a mission impossible within a time frame of a few weeks. (She does, though, repeat to all and sundry, “I want to be perfect,” which, at its farthest reaches, implies an obsessiveness about the physical salience of rightness. As thus primed, her dream role would spotlight an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.)  Again and again during rehearsals, she fails to bring Odile to life; and the Brains and Inspiration Trust of the firm thinks to bring off a fourth quarter miracle by this route—“You could be brilliant. But you’re a coward.”/ “Sorry.”/ “Stop being so fucking weak!” (He does go on to specify, “Perfection is about letting go!” But although a world of intensifying riches may obtain within that factor, such an imposition in these circumstances fails to be credible.) Nina addresses this steep learning curve (which has accelerated her penchant for nervously scratching and otherwise bloodying herself) by accepting an invitation by her colleague, “Lily,” to go “out for a drink,” the stimulative powers of which are booted up by cocaine (“You’ve never roped? It’ll loosen you up. You’ll see the night sky!”). An awkward slide, into a territory of dynamics she has needed to know about for a long time, allows us to forget about the job and get somewhere with the work. Further fizzing Nina’s sensuous capacities is Lily’s (did they have to say she’s just in from San Francisco?) rubbing her vagina during the cab ride home, joining her in dissing Mom and barricading the bedroom/Toyland door in order to thrill to an orgasm induced by cunnilingus. At this point the delirium of venturing to become a convincing warrior sends her into binges of hallucinatory paranoia, a culmination point of this meltdown occurring on Opening Night. As with any serious monitoring of that transformative kinetics far more salient in real dance performance than in all but a few movies, any full distillation here would entail detailed evocative registering of the protagonist’s facial and bodily attitudes (amenable to the tracing of narrative progressions the flavors of which are apt to be disregarded) in the throes of exertions not readily embraced by movie audiences. Since this particular movie has heavily hedged its intensification, full tracking is not required because the outcome cannot take us far.

    However, a précis is apposite. After their spate of loveless lovemaking, Nina hears Lily spit toward her, “Weak girl!” With that once-too-often insult ringing in her ears, she dumps her doll collection down the garbage chute, smashes her mother’s hand in a slammed bedroom door as she emphasizes an unprecedented appreciation of solitude, lets the hitherto care-giver know that she now comes into her molten vision as a stepping-stone (“I’m the ballerina, and you’re the one who couldn’t leave the corps”), and imperiously puts a stop to Lily’s taking over the role. Her freshly minted anger has tapped into the workings of Odile, but the advent of fresh blood has not received the benefit of adept tempering ensuing from long years of learning the (dancer’s) logic of sensual equilibrium. As such, her big night involves a hemorrhaging torrent of murderous and suicidal delirium. Her White Swan suffers a pratfall, which she ascribes to her partner’s colluding with her rival. In her dressing room, at the intermission heading toward Odile, she thinks to be slashing Lily to death for presuming to take over, and manages to critically gouge open her own belly. Like a picador-stabbed bull she crashes out upon the arena-stage and impressively horrifies dancers and audience alike (the scene being undermined by a floppy-winged costume that induces a robotic patina).She retools at the last intermission, gets through the last scene’s White Swan’s death and really does die along with the character. “I’m perfect!” is her wrong-again last move.

    For all its dumbfounding tipsiness, Black Swan puts out there one hell of an elusive continuum of sensibility, and its being worth dying for. John Cameron Mitchell’s Rabbit Hole confronts us with a couple, “Becca” and “Howie,” who make emotional coherence seem an even longer shot than Nina ever does. Some months before, they have lost their young son in a traffic accident, and now nature seems to have sucked all the life out of them, rapidly drawing them toward nullity, like some version of a black hole.

Stars of "Rabbit Hole"

    They attend a support group for grieving parents—to which they invariably and pregnantly refer as simply, “group”—and at one of the sessions another couple stage a reflection centering upon the insistence that God “needed another angel” and hastily recruited their daughter. The other group members (one couple of which have been showing up to absorb this sort of thing for eight years) are quietly nonplussed; but Becca cannot quieten her disdain, and in a metallic voice rips into them, before cutting out forever, “Why didn’t He just make another angel? He’s God, after all!” At a restaurant after that debacle, Howie reproves her. “It was their time…” But some evenings later, after smoking pot with the woman who has served hard time for eight years, both of them now soloing at “group,” he can’t control himself against loud guffawing on hearing another candid sentimentalist—on a “rage [theme] day”—admit to wanting to say to those at his workplace, “You haven’t had your life ripped apart yet! Hey, guys, my daughter died of leukemia!” This discrediting of rage does not prevent Howie from flying into a rage when the boy who was driving the car that killed their child shows up to present to Becca, as she had planned, his completed comic book, titled, “Rabbit Hole,” a school project apropos of “Parallel Universes.” Becca, so sharply critical of theist schemata, enthuses about the boy’s misreading of quantumelectrodynamic polarity to an upshot that the architecture of black holes sees to a duplicate of everyone in a different precinct, a duplicate apt to be less distraught than the state of affairs obtaining in the world we know. “I liked this so much. That’s beautiful. It reminded me of Euripides and Orpheus… [for whom] In the end it doesn’t work out…”/ “I think it’s basic science. Space is infinite and anything’s possible. The laws of probability”… [demand other, happier selves]/ “I’m just the sad version…”/ “Assuming you believe in science.”/ “I like that idea. Somewhere out there I’m having a good time.”

    Though Becca (as a former Sotheby’s cherisher and promoter of deluxe goods) reaches back to her Art History training to note a salience of the mythic drama enacted by Orpheus and Eurydice, about reaching back to a dead loved one only to have the prize fall back due to becoming too rapt about consuming it, what her recourse to the saga really entails is her being put to an exigency of not looking back to a point triggering debilitation. Germane to this unheeded warning is their distant and slightly deformed body language tracing, through the midst of their outdoorsy suburban territory, a chain of dark tunnels. (On the other hand, the scenes in a park where that halting consideration of new horizons occurs are this visually sterile [by design] film’s only moments of visual depth. Coinciding with that turn toward sophistication is an emphasis upon overcoming resentment. The boy says, “I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t help.”/ “Yes, it does. It really does!”)  She snaps at Howie for trying to make love to her, “Things aren’t nice anymore.”/ “It [playing Al Green songs] worked in college.” They have been concussed by the deadly moment in such a way that their sensibilities can no longer digest the consolations of conventional life and, like bewildered rabbits, lack the agility to move beyond their confinement. We see her carving up her well-meaning (but untutored and suffocatingly blue-collar Mom): “Some people find it [“God talk”] comforting.”/ “…it pisses me off!”/ “I brought you to church every Sunday.”/ “God says, ‘Worship Me and I’ll treat you like shit.’ He’s a sadistic prick. No wonder you like Him. He’s just like Dad.” (Such a confrontation points to the real import and thrill for her [from out of the incipient audacity elicited by her trauma] of the notion of parallel universes inhering in a critical mass of perversity [a remote hell], in contrast to a remote blessedness.)   Bailing her sister out of jail in the middle of the night, she emits an unspoken level of vitriol far exceeding what she says. “Why don’t you just say you think I’m trashy?”/ “You were in a bar fight?… There’s a cut-off time for acting like a jackass!” When together, Becca and Howie are seldom not at each other’s throat, on the point of her wanting to remove all vestiges of the little boy. His college-level sentimentality (during a tentative liaison with the perpetual student of “group,” she at least has the grace to be embarrassed by his finding her smoking grass in her car at a dark parking lot—“I can’t believe you saw me doing that! I swear I never do this.”) clearly makes her wonder how she ever tied up with him.

    This cold war between them, spinning off atrocities of resentment toward everyone in sight (Becca fumes about a friend’s having cut off contact due to the “weirdness” of their cripplement) does not reach any breakthrough discovery or turnaround, but hits a wall of attrition in their being at the brink of divorce. After spending the night in her car on getting back to the author of “Rabbit Hole,” she shows up at their kitchen and finds him in a close to inert state. From there, they reach a tiny, overgrown and cold trail to generate some semblance of life. “I thought you had left.”/ “I didn’t leave…So what are we going to do?”/ “Not a lot…We could invite Rick and Debbie [the phobic] over for a cookout.” Also shown to be invited to the barbeque are Becca’s Mom and sister, and neighbors they had been snubbing for weeks, from the edge of their rabbit hole. Becca’s voiceover takes the following as a microscopically promising fact, not a war cry. “We’ll ask a lot of questions about their kids. We’ll pretend we’re interested.” They sit side-by-side in Cape Cod chairs in the now-empty yard overlooking the Hudson. Their hands tentatively touch and hold. “After they go…then what?”/ “I don’t know…something though…”

    Whereas Rabbit Hole covers us with a sharply tactile, almost olfactory, impression of the unremitting smallness of the lives of the grieving couple, and goes on to moot, from the unremarkableness of their entitlement along those lines, a deadened world-history for the foreseeable future, True Grit, set in nineteenth century Arkansas when the embers from the violence of the Civil War were apt to spring into flame at any moment, lets us breathe a swatch of largeness in the course of contemplating severities pushing to the level of footnote the presence of “Rooster Cogburn,” on a playbill for a Wild West Show staged many years after his moment of vision.

    This picaresque panorama of open and close is stage managed by a fourteen-year-old girl, “Mattie,” who puts into words her surprising endeavors in this way: “There’s business Mama doesn’t know about.” Ostensibly the business she takes upon herself to transact concerns apprehending and eventually exterminating the murderer of her father, with the assistance of Rooster, who looks perfect for the job in her eyes when she learns he is the “meanest,” most relentless bounty hunter (cum-US Marshal) at the settlement on the portal to the wilds of “Indian Nation” to which the murderer has escaped. “He’s a pitiless man. Fear doesn’t enter into his thinking.” There is a moment, before the trek, when we receive an inkling that there is much more to this excursion than hyperactive adolescent idealism under the impetus of grief at the loss of a loved one. The undertaker repeatedly assures her it will be alright if she kisses her Dad goodbye, and she presses on with logistical questions as if he were using a foreign language. You get the distinct impression she’s far from crushed by her father’s mishap, and that her white-hot embrace of justice is about a rightness not to be seen on this side of “the Territories.” She watches a courtroom proceeding in which Rooster is assailed by and rudely obviates an attorney aghast that he had blown away a troubled soul coming after him with an iron rail. “Sentimental son-of-a-bitch” is his recap on leaving the courtroom, and Mattie elatedly interrupts his exit with the gambit, “They tell me you are a man with true grit… Nothing will be done [about the long-gone troubled soul] unless I do it… I’m about to embark on a great adventure.” Her bearings in her Mama’s world—which many, including Rooster, urge her to settle for—may be awry; but she’s seized the moment to leave it behind and get down to “unfinished business.”

Scareen cap from 'True Grit'

    Neither Mattie nor her long-in-the tooth, one-eyed, Bourbon-swilling partner is a picture of incisive aplomb. (Understandably inexperienced in policing—but startlingly learned [or at least pedantic] in the details of law, so much so that they evince a deficiency lurking within her precocious equilibrium—she does, though, radiate a newly-budding, robust beauty in stark contrast to the generally complained-about “malarial” infirmity of the bulk of the citizenry.) Far closer to that sterling profile is “Leboeuf,” a Texas Ranger fashion plate who is also on the trail of the vulnerable pest, for a murder he committed in the Lone Star State. Mattie expresses her questionably founded first impression of him in terms of his being “a rodeo clown… In Arkansas [suddenly she’s a patriot!] your Texas ways are of no significance.”/ “Your headstrong ways will land you into a tight corner one day.” Undermining Leboeuf’s procedures is a tic, common to all three members of the search party, of ferocious self-impressiveness couched in lively and extravagant rhetoric. Soon after embarking (Leboeuf making it a trio of hunters), Rooster rags him about his “…lappin’ filthy rain deposits in hoof prints” being Ranger policy. His rival bristles, “Make me out foolish in this girl’s eyes!”

    She has roused her hung-over hit man from his sack-cloth bed in a feed shed, with thrilling to a moment of truth that could be proof against sluggishness. “It is I, Mattie Ross, your employer.” And he has taken her retainer, leaving next morning before she arrives and providing a train ticket to Mama. She, having acquired a truly coherent accoutrement in the form of a dazzling stallion, which she names, “Little Blackie,” ignores the bribed ferryman refusing to carry her at the frontier and plunges across the river marking, with a prodigious swim by her horse, the beginning of the place for getting on with her game face. Watching from the bank of the deep, wide and fast-flowing river, Rooster’s face is clamped into a grizzled smile, and when she comes upon them he says, “That’s quite a horse.” Off of that crest, she mocks her elusive employee’s stand that pressing a complaint against him would be “futile,” with, “It is neither futile nor feudal,” gets harshly spanked for her sauciness by Leboeuf, and Cogburn, who had made a deal to let Leboeuf take the prey to Texas, sides with the uncanniness of her ardor as against the Texan’s canny priggishness, as signing off with the strident ridicule, “You have graduated from marauder to wet nurse.”

    The odd couple (almost quixotic)—he getting things straight about the shambles of his former domestic life—soon come within the orbit of the prey as ensconced within a band of criminals led by one, “Lucky Ned Pepper.” Rooster and Mattie first easily devastate a couple of the gang’s crude and weak gofers, Mattie being shocked by the sudden violence and carnage, and touched by the demise of that shaky firm’s young and foolish member. Then there is a skirmish in the night, the preparation phase for which elicits a hasty tribute from her to Rooster. “You display great poise!” and a childish confiding to Blackie, “I’d not want to be in [the target’s] shoes.” The ambush fizzles and Mattie finds herself splitting points of legality with Leboeuf, who has become caught up in the firestorm and wounded by Rooster’s wretched gunplay. Declaring, “The trail is cold,” the Inspiration announces, “I bow out,” and Mattie admits to the presumably viable Leboeuf, “I picked the wrong man.” On his bowing out also, she explicitly indicates that this is only incidentally about useful sidekicks and is in fact a solitary trek. “I will not go without [the nefarious] Chaney, dead or alive.”  

    At this point of dissolution, the raw-scrabble saga shifts into a mode of coincidental fantasy ensuring a prevalence of the self-testedness of Mattie, Rooster and Leboeuf in a world history where rare kinships do meet those tests with distinction. Chaney takes one bullet from her, and then takes her prisoner. Rooster feigns a retreat, only to confront Ned and three others by way of counter-attack, killing the three others and having his horse shot from under him by the leader. Leboeuf levels Chaney just as he moves to kill Mattie. Leboeuf drills Ned from four-hundred yards, freeing Rooster. Chaney levels Leboeuf and, consumed with cleansing the world and devouring the topspin of the rigors of another kind of civil war, Mattie blows Chaney away, the recoil from which blows her backwards, like a dry leaf, into a compatibly benighted mine shaft infested with rattlesnakes. She is bitten, Rooster appears and clears the vermin away, does a preliminary venom removal, mounts Blackie with her and their last ride together becomes Blackie’s last ride, too, as the striking forth at top speed into the day, the dusk and the night (along a ridge with a big sky above) eventually leaves him a wreck that Rooster must shoot, and from which he must go on carrying her on foot for a long, hard distance until coming within hailing distance of canny medical attention—an uncanny cataclysm that rips away all the preceding (frequently goofy) tentativeness. During the sweep of that ride and hike, all three participants are enveloped in what clearly overtakes them as the adventure of their life, their delirious faces in shifting close-ups, their no-tomorrow presence catching us by surprise. He falls with her as an outpost doctor approaches. His “I’m growin’ old,” marks the end of the line, as transpiring in a startling fast-forward to twenty-five years later.

    All of the full-bodied subtleties of her muscle tone and the delicate balances of her features have sharpened into skeletal hardness. The vivid anticipation of her eyes has become flat and defeated. Mattie has lost one arm due to the venom she brought upon herself, leaving her stigmatized in a nagging disablement. She survived but she did not live. And yet she kept an appointment to see Rooster as a bit player in a company of (long-gone and presumably implausible) adventurers for a price, only to find he has died three days before. The director of the company tells her that the Arkansas humidity was hard on him, making flare up a condition he called, “Night Hoss.” Being amidst such memories—“We, too, had lively times”—does not hold at bay the acidic crone she has become. Addressing, as she leaves the Wild West Encampment, the now elderly outlaw, Frank James, who sits beside the director, she hopes to burn him up with the resentment and bathos that have supplanted love and excitement about life. “Keep your seat, Trash.” At Rooster’s grave, she thinks of Leboeuf and tells herself, “He would be an old man, now. I would be pleased to see him again…The past slips away from one…” Her measured walk from the rural cemetery, across its almost endless field of deep green grass stretching beyond the knoll at the horizon, speaks forcefully of her solitary retreat at the hands of a historical dynamic leveraged by the world of her Mama in which she could not thrive.

    All five of the artists making their moves here render due respect to a level of difficulty, far from generally comprehended, about carnal consciousness entering upon uncharted territory. Four out of the five are on the scent of something more than catastrophe. (Alice, in fact, does not contemplate suicide in Lost Highway.)  As Chaney prepares to kill her, Mattie’s ostensible target remarks to her (and to himself), “I must think over my position and how I may improve it.” Being, in addition to a homicidal jerk, a commonplace entity locked into gobbling down material advantages, he would miss the point swirling around him; but his fussy little declaration inadvertently contains a wake-up call as to simplification for the multi-tasking distraction of the players so engaging to us here. Busying oneself with practicalities of getting to the top entails a tempering factor only effectively discernible to an exertion which all of those compelling figures have underestimated at terrible cost. Over and above its haunting and dark beauties (which put into play other avenues to explore), their defeatedness draws us to consider the ordeal and delight of an abundantly strange trail that is not cold. The dynamics of film can, as the three features under consideration have shown, cherish the promise of rare warmth amidst a time of hypothermia.