So Long, Suckers So Long, Suckers

Dear fellow travellers,
Christopher Nolan is no stranger to imagining disaster. His Dark Knight trilogy, adapted from various Batman comic-book stories, toys with various visions of urban destruction, both physical—those involving guns and explosions—and psychological, with each of the films’ major villains threatening no less than full-scale urban breakdowns. The cycle even concludes with the detonation of a nuclear bomb: here, symbolically the ultimate threat and one that even, shock horror, appears to kill our hero. Following these, the director’s sci-fi epic Interstellar explored the aftermath of what would, in the real world, mean effective apocalypse—irreversible climate change; global crop scarcity—but in this tale is heroically mitigated with an interplanetary expedition and, indeed, an actual, quantum alteration of history. Tenet, another film that fantasises the pliability of time, follows the attempt to avert another disastrous detonation, this time of a weapon that could destroy not just a single metropolitan area but the whole world. (“Including my son,” intones Elizabeth Debicki, insightfully.)
Such imaginings, of course, are ten-a-penny in Hollywood and have been for decades. Susan Sontag, in her influential 1965 essay ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, aptly summarised the links between the looming nuclear threat and the then-recent cycle of speculative science-fiction films; her observations have remained relevant through the subsequent years and countless cultural trends. Much of Nolan’s work certainly sits within this space of allegory and speculation. With Oppenheimer, however, he pushes further and does something fascinating: he swings his lens right to the source of modern pop cinema’s apocalyptic fixation. His film, in so doing, explores and to an extent explains this very fixation.
As discussed on the podcast, many of Oppenheimer’s roots are in the Hollywood of the 1950s—a milieu, incidentally, that’s ambient in the film’s red-scare subplot. This is a large-format, star-studded historical epic released into the midst of a global downturn in popular cinema-going, itself partly fomented on the one hand by sweeping structural changes within the film industry and, on the other, by a revolution in home-viewing options. So far, so Film History 101. But in its subject matter the movie also, unavoidably, refers to that aforementioned sci-fi cycle. In a sense, then, it uses its prestige trappings to outline the psychological conditions for the modern disaster imaginary, described by Sontag as
the trauma suffered by everyone in the middle of the 20th century when it became clear that, from now on to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life under the threat not only of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost insupportable psychologically—collective incineration and extinction which would come at any time, virtually without warning.
This film is a biopic not just of J Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the atomic bomb”, but of the bomb itself: its design; its birth in the New Mexico desert; its role in the murder of thousands of Japanese citizens; and the profound long shadow it would soon start to cast on the psyche of the global body politic. Nolan, after Sontag, clearly argues that the atom bomb’s legacy is basically existential, serving an omnipresent ambient threat. Meanwhile, the film’s smartly jumbled narrative structure serves at least three purposes: one, it aptly represents a quantum-level interpretation of time and space; two, it evokes Oppenheimer’s guilt-ridden psychology as he works through his own memories of the Manhattan Project and its aftermath; and three, it reflects that broader state of existential panic that comes with contemplating this whole, sorry issue—that is, the “trauma” as outlined above. The terrifying hallucinations experienced throughout the film by our protagonist are oft

Dear neon demons,
In July 2018, some 10 months before premiering his Amazon Prime Video series Too Old to Die Young at Cannes, Nicolas Winding Refn wrote an op-ed in the Guardian with the headline, “our times need sex, horror and melodrama”. His straightforward and, we think, perfectly admirable argument can be boiled down to the following:
We need to be pushed out of our comfort zones – of complacency, and, for most of us in the west, an easeful life. I’m not advocating physical pain, but I do believe mental pain can be a way to stimulate and reset the brain.
What’s needed is art: good, challenging art, not good-taste art, which is the chief enemy of creativity. Problem is, most of our culture comes to us via a small number of conglomerates whose sole purpose is the bottom line.
Refn wrote this piece as promotion for his independent and esoteric streaming service, byNWR, and—significantly—while in America shooting his own debut streaming production for Amazon, then ranked by Forbes as the world’s second most valuable company. The column has its broad socio-cultural-political angle, of course; a wider application for the “use”, if you will, of art—at any point in time, in any place on the globe. But one may also take it specifically as a guidebook for Too Old to Die Young itself. 
Too Old to Die Young was written by Refn in collaboration with the veteran comics writer Ed Brubaker, whose own work represents a fascinating and consistent ongoing project that tinkers around with crime genre conventions. For the series’ latter portion, which evolves to focus more clearly on the female leads, the men were joined by Brubaker’s one-time Westworld colleague Halley Gross, a TV and videogame writer whose expertise lies in sci-fi and dystopian narratives. Refn shoots largely in chronological order, cultivating a loose and fluid approach to the story as it goes along (Brubaker has described the director’s approach as involving “a zillion daily rewrites”) which renders it difficult to judge the specific contributions of his co-writers. But the broad generic elements that interest this trio are all brought to bear on a visionary series that is, perversely, just as muddled as it is coherent.
Much of our podcast episode on this series-cum-long film focuses on its contradictions and complications, so we’ll focus in this short companion essay on its successes as a stylistic exercise. Many of the work’s key dynamics and ideas rely on duality, contradiction and hypocrisy—so it’s probably appropriate that any serious criticism of it should proceed from a point of schizophrenia.
Refn’s Guardian column specifically highlights the role of Donald Trump—then, of course, President of the USA—in engendering an “apocalyptic” sensation across the country and the world. It is to this condition that the director chooses to respond in Too Old to Die Young. But of course, the show itself never names the President, or any of his cohorts, or America’s Republican party, or political conservatism, or the far right. It instead—rather more smartly—chooses to broadly evoke… well, not so much America as it exists but a poetic idea of America, “Late” America, as the bloated corpus of contemporary screen media presents it. The Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Mexico of Too Old to Die Young bear only the most bizarro relations to the real deals; by comparison, the LA of Refn’s Drive (2011) is a model of careful realism.
In turning away from direct, 1:1 political commentary and instead throwing a mélange of abrasive social ideas, nightmare motifs and weird jokes into this Boschian melting-pot, Refn does find something genuinely compelling: a deadpan parody of America, or perhaps the myriad, prismatic cultural images that make America up. His Guardian column may be framed, like so many late-2010s liberal acts of cultural criticism and marketing—the two sometimes indistinguishable—in the over-familiar terms o

Dear friends,
Perhaps what really marks out Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s seventh feature film, Winter Sleep (Kış Uykusu), against his prior work is the different method by which it encodes time. It’s not necessarily inaccurate to taxonomise this in terms of “cinematic” drama versus the distinctly “theatrical”—but of course, things are never that simple. At the very least, Ceylan’s talky, Chekhov-inspired tragicomedy uses its stagey sense of conversation in a manner that remains specially and intrinsically filmic.
The nuts and bolts of the film’s form are simple: the drama consists of lengthy dialogues, each held within one of relatively few settings. Ceylan cuts more frequently than in his earlier, so-called “slow” films—Uzak (2002) being the exemplar—but the cutting he deploys here, during those lengthy conversations, deliberately implies continuous time rather than elision and other filmic trickery. From the off, Winter Sleep—a film about the travails and the considerable ego of a former stage actor, turned landlord and hotelier—seems to be consciously aping the temporality of a stageplay.
Ceylan's use of style, though, creates real tensions between the stage and the screen, and so actively interrogates those differences in medium. Whatever its storytelling approach, this is obviously conceived as a film, and much of its atmosphere comes from the director’s characteristic use of uniquely beautiful establishing shots; his awareness and understanding of landscape and its poetic opportunities. The exacting rhythms of these conversations are key, too: Ceylan and his co-writer (and wife), Ebru Ceylan, would often bring rewrites to successive rehearsals and even shoots, working with the actors to craft material that ultimately lies at some precise stylistic intersection between the philosophic, the mundane, the comic, the serious, the contemporary, the timeless. One can certainly use similar techniques in honing a play, but with film the simple act of selecting the best take of a scene—or threading together different takes—creates something totally different: a meta controlling presence that immediately redefines the moment in which that take was filmed.
So it is that, like many good films adapted from plays, the typical feeling of stage-time throughout these long dialogue scenes is instead displaced; made something else. In that sense, though Winter Sleep is not—as we remark on the podcast—strictly ”slow cinema”, its primary concern is still adjacent to that mode, in that it explores how the cinematic object exists within the flow of time. And this film, unlike many good films adapted from plays, reflexively reminds us that there is such a thing as “real time”—but in a different medium, one where the performers are unmediated by the screen. Ceylan then practises a judicious editing style that simultaneously clings to the “real” time of the stage (and the “stagey” film) and takes full advantage of film’s fluidity as a means of encoding this time. It is significant that the source for the Ceylans’ screenplay is not, in fact, a play; the writers instead use their lead character Aydin, a retired thespian (played ingeniously by Haluk Bilginer), as a means to create and explore staginess, in a manner seemingly incidental to the key themes of the stories from which they draw. The temporal tension, then, is less an end in itself and more a brush with which to paint the film’s more specific socio-political musings. Winter Sleep’s unending eristic, its constant combative chatter that seems to emanate from the very consciousness of its belligerent, entitled, pathetic protagonist, is undergirded by the film’s palpably constructed, almost fussy dramatic cadences.
As a final thought: this multi-pronged link between duration, pace, structure and meaning (as well as between “the theatrical” and “the cinematic”) is subtly reinforced by Ceylan’s use of action. Punctuati

Quick note: this has been a while between recording and release. You’ll notice almost immediately, when we say David Warner died, er, “last week”.
Dear friends,
Dramatic payoff is one thing, but there’s an immense and specific satisfaction to the climaxes of the very best crime films. This is, to be sure, a pretty nebulous generic designation that can centre gangsters, professional thieves or small-town crooks; or indeed lawmakers, enforcers or civilians caught up in the middle. But it seems axiomatic that all such films have in common an appeal inherently absent from, say, a romcom or a family drama: whether the film’s payoff lies in the success or the defeat of its criminal element, and no matter the film’s overarching perspective or alignment, its buildup rests on the audience’s willingness to play around in the margins of society and morality. Even an unambiguously pro-law flick such as Richard Fleischer’s US Treasury-supported semi-doc Trapped (1949) rests entirely on the thrill of spending time with slimy, nasty counterfeiter Lloyd Bridges, and realising at the end a simultaneous moral gratification (the narrative parts fit together; the government operation succeeds and Bridges gets what’s coming to him) and, if only to a very minor extent, sympathy with the outlaw who can’t get away.
The two-part epic Gangs of Wasseypur takes this to still more extreme lengths over its near five-and-a-half hours, focusing on two successive protagonists as well as myriad supporting players and subplots, using digressions and digressions from digressions as it spins the fictionalised tale of 60-plus years in India’s Dhanbad region. We are aligned with various members of the Khan family, organised criminals who are driven simultaneously by prosaic ambition and a highly dramatic thirst for vengeance against the kingpin who had patriarch Shahid killed back in 1947. (It’s a foundational part of the film’s symbology that this occurs at the time that the Indian subcontinent was declared officially independent from the British Empire and blithely left to sort out its own complex social and geographic divisions.) When vengeance does come, in Wasseypur’s final minutes, it is prolonged and operatic: a practically never-ending stream of bullets, bursting squibs and hardcore techno music. With admirable self-consciousness, director Anurag Kashyap seems to say to us: here you go; this is what we all wanted; we’re finally there; enjoy it. In other words, if the text is the story of pay-back, the metatext is all about pay-off.
Much of the movie’s subplot-heavy structure, and therefore its unusual length, is redolent of India’s masala movie tradition, though Kashyap is one of a number of fairly recent innovators who have found ways to blend this heightened approach with something more consistently naturalistic. It’s a stylistic binary that comes to undergird the many binaries littering the (again, bipartite) narrative—and one summed up deliberately during the final act by “big bad” Ramadhir (the marvellous Tigmanshu Dhulia), who attributes his long-term success in the real criminal world to not preoccupying himself with the fictive realm of Bollywood movies. It’s a puckish detail from a screenwriting team determined to have their generic cake and eat it.
Perhaps the single sequence that most resembles our idea of aesthetic “long-ness” is one that also explicitly works through the stylistic binary. Four hours and 20 minutes in, the prologue (Oh yeah, you think, I remember that) is revisited, and then extended (or answered). The sequence in its initial form is pure spectacle within a grand mainstream tradition: a bunch of gangsters come and shoot up their enemy’s sanctum. It is loud, flashy, quickly edited. When Kashyap and team return to it, however, the second part of this event—the one that shows what, exactly, happened to the attack’s target—is an almost total stylistic reversal. Here, Kha

Fellow travellers,
In the late 1960s, Soviet students and lecturers held a debate on the merits of Andrei Tarkovsky’s second feature, which had premiered to controversy in December ‘66 and would not be passed for release—slightly cut down—until 1971. Tarkovsky quotes from the debate’s transcript in his diary of September 1, 1970, and this speech from one of the film’s defenders sounds eerily familiar to us Suckers:
Almost every speaker has asked why they have to be made to suffer all through the three hours of the film. […] It is because the twentieth century has seen the rise of a kind of emotional inflation. When we read in a newspaper that two million people have been butchered in Indonesia, it makes as much impression on us as an account of a hockey team winning a match. The same degree of impression! We fail to notice the monstrous discrepancy between these two events. The channels of our perception have been smoothed out to the point where we are no longer aware. However, I don’t want to preach about this. […] Only the point is that there are some artists who do make us feel the true measure of things.
That closing description—attributed to a Maths professor—could either be of Tarkovsky himself or of Tarkovsky’s subject, the medieval monk and icon painter Andrei Rublev. This duality is, to say the least, appropriate for the film, being as it is about art and art-making—or, more precisely to its oblique, elliptical presentation, around art and art-making. How does one begin, or end, with something this fluid, that takes the complexities of the historical film (whereby it is about the era on screen and its era of production; about the figures on screen and the figures presenting them; and so on) to such esoteric, instinctual extremes? This is, to put it modestly, a biography of a Great Man—although it only rarely decides to analyse that man, and sometimes declines to involve him in the narrative at all. And, of course, much of this biography is completely made up.
Though ultimately named, simply, Andrei Rublev, this epic is better thought in terms of its original title, The Passion of Andrei, which would refer more generally to the events and hardships that surrounded its subject (played by Anatoly Solonitsyn). Tarkovsky and his co-writer, Andrei Konchalovsky, understand their biopic not as that of a Great Man in the classic sense, nor even its cousin, the wannabe “complex” picture of a Tortured Genius. Their Rublev is, rather, part of the landscape, something of a Great Conduit for a higher calling, a possibly divine talent—that which we call art. In other words, their subject is not presented necessarily as some special genius in and of himself. He is little more (yet no less) than a spiritual vessel who channelled his historical moment (and, to follow the mindset of both Andrei the monk and Andrei the filmmaker, his access to God) into something creative. Historically Great, yes, but the provenance of that greatness is here profoundly diffused.
This complex view of creative sensitivity—where the artist is at once passive, reactive and active, an onlooker and an agent, a face in the crowd and the story’s protagonist—infuses every part of the film and adds up less to another workaday hagiography than a living, breathing manifesto on the nature and meaning of artistic creation. It continues to demonstrate how cinematic biography can be used fully as cinema rather than the prosaic, over-plotted, essentially unimaginative point-and-shoot televisual garbage that comes around like clockwork every so-called awards season. (Tarkovsky once commented on filmmakers who rely on adaptation: “they have no ideas of their own. … If you stand for the truth, then you have to speak the truth. And if you do that it’s not always going to please everyone. So directors turn to adaptations.”)
This thoughtfulness is manifest in the film’s loopy structure, which sees the whole break down not j

Fellow passengers,
James Cameron’s films have a lot going on, but they are not thematically complex. Yet, there is something to the drawn-out ruination of his grandest vision, the three-hour Titanic (1997), that transcends his rollicking blockbuster style and its classical roots. As we observe (if hardly originally) on our latest podcast, the film is smartly cleaved into two halves, the former of which serving to intensify the latter. But, despite the way this highlights the narrative’s obvious point-of-no-return moment—the titular ship’s fateful iceberg collision—Cameron actually seems to stretch and weave his story’s various revelations across the whole run-time.
During the film’s first half, Cameron tells two stories in parallel: primarily, that of Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), the betrothed New York aristocrat who begins to chafe against her social surroundings; and meanwhile, the dubious choices made by the Titanic’s men in charge that would lead, swiftly, to her sinking in the Atlantic ocean. Each narrative is presented with, frankly, the subtlety of a collapsing smokestack, but they do each rest on an involving sense of accumulation, as multiple major turns are made until everything, eventually, coalesces into the sustained chaos of the second half. Of course, Rose’s discoveries and decisions throughout are directed towards her ultimate survival and, more to the point, her thriving via the quasi-bohemian lessons learnt from her itinerant lover, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio). The decisions made by ship captain Edward Smith (Bernard Hill) and managing director J Bruce Ismay (Jonathan Hyde), on the other hand, those that led to the deaths of over 1500 people, are each irreversible parts of the historical puzzle that Cameron, as both a storyteller and a literal deep-sea researcher, is attempting to reconstruct.
This epic-novel structure, balancing the personal/fictive against the universal/historical, using one to reflect the other, immediately makes the film of a piece with a particular strand of Hollywood’s prestige products over the decades. It also sets the pace for Cameron’s particular approach to history: one inextricable from his showmanship, which takes form not just in technical spectacle but in the film’s constant stream of rhetorical flourishes. The tale-as-old-as-time tragic love story becomes a clotheshorse for all manner of ostentatious metaphors, all of which build a vision of the Titanic and its fate as a critical nexus for class, capitalism, Empire, misogyny, etc. etc. The film’s action-packed second half responds to several of the propositions of its rather more polite first half while taking the narrational reins from the Rose character—whose specific, personal reminiscences are our entry point to the aristocrat class—and passing them to the unseen director for his omniscient tour de force.
In other words, Cameron uses his clear genre shift to delineate also his two theories of storytelling. As discussed on the podcast, he puts great effort into highlighting the importance of a personal oral narrative, while self-reflexively “justifying” this within a mode—the flash-bang stuff, essentially—that seems to say, at every turn, “See? You can’t look away!” Riffs on this split are also present in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), True Lies (1994) and his co-authored screenplay for Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995), all of which vary their modes of narration within the very specific context of thinking through the end of the world. Titanic’s particular, terrifying depiction of apocalypse in microcosm may bear a tonne of problematic baggage with its attempts at reconciling its various ideas and approaches, but the basic proposition with its converging thematic and narrative strands is an essential part of its overall effect.
But, again: that big, mid-film shift is just the clearest, not the sole, mark of its balancing of modes. The oft maximalist treatmen