The Week Ending in 2/16
“No dates, placed on the shelves in no discernible order. Just [your] mind poured out on paper”
Valentine’s day weekend, floating on flashbacks of goose flesh, fumbling, desperate kisses in a cold backseat, windows fogging.
That Saturday you found To Live and Die in LA on Amazon Prime. You’ve always liked Friedkin, so you gave it a try. Every scene with Willem Dafoe is sensational. If the devil lived in Berlin that’s what he’d look like, entrenched in leather and 80’s synth.
The film is melodramatic and aesthetically driven, as the best films are. The choices made, whether by the director, costume designer, cinematographer, the actors, feel deliberate the way the most natural option for the story would be, what best serves the overall product, like a shoe fitting, making use of circumstances under which it was made— in total service to the vision of the director.
Quentin Tarantino, quoting Terry Gilliam, said that it is not the director’s job to create his vision, but that he must simply have one. In order to properly execute said vision, he needs to hire people qualified enough who can understand it and bring it to life. “You need to describe what it is you want.”
A recent example of this dichotomy is the issue with Adrien Brody’s accent in The Brutalist (2024). Brody, who plays a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant, had his accent enhanced by artificial intelligence. The betrayal of authenticity falls not on the director, Brady Corbet, but on Brody. In service of the story, written over seven years, and in demand of the immersive effect it must conjure to be effective, Corbet acted responsibly, if not morally left of center. It definitely makes you believe what you are watching, that it could have happened. Brody on the other hand, fell short of the standard required of the role, the demand of the actor, ironically, being that he is of Hungarian-Jewish descent (through his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy) and would have more intimate knowledge for the role than most leading men had they been cast.
(Not to assume the expectations or cast the aspersions rampant in the moot discussion of race, like he should just know it because he is, and he’s not, not entirely, not if you’re born here, unmoored from culture in one entirely its own, if you actually consider it to be one, in the sense of a disciplined and refined taste of aesthetics, dictated by implementation of culture through years of practice, like millennia, taking some to the next as it goes along, as opposed to circumstantial (geographic, economic) ones. Although they bleed into each other, they’re separated by a thin hair— the one caught in the waitress’s dress as she takes it to be laundered, or in the hard hat of an electrician on a pole, trying not to get electrocuted like the last guy, or the ones falling off of the fired, the laid-off, the unemployed, the ones who work like they are, possibly wishing they were, the ones grabbing their hair and are tearing it out, and then the one that’s just short of being a hair by not being one, under a rippling, thin veil, static, a trail for tears the artist wiped off as they were his own: awed by creation, by a kind of life. Rumor has it that upon completion an awed Michelangelo struck Moses with a hammer and commanded it to speak.)
If anyone could do it and do it convincingly, it would be Brody. So why couldn’t he? Obviously he couldn’t if its being changed.
That doesn’t really matter at this point: he’s already won the trophy and we’ll most likely never see the unedited cut. But with any crew, whether out on the seas or on set, loose lips sink ships. It was the film’s own editor, Dávid Jancsó, who divulged the use of artificial intelligence. Corbet should be furious and has every right to be. It shows unnecessary seams, not adding to the experience of the film but instead taking away. Movies usually aren’t enhanced for viewers by seeing how the sausage is made.
Fiction’s duplicity— whether on film or the page— comes from being as true and plausible as possible, almost hyper real, like a documentary, and even upon close examination, the audience should struggle to see the seams, if at all. It’s like a dream, which itself is like a bubble, fragile to the sharp edges of logic and reality. The skill of some creatives, particularly writers, comes from being able to entertain while showing you how they did it, taking an almost didactic approach to entertainment.
You could, however, do without the logistics of planning the chase scene from To Live and Die in LA (and its older brother, The French Connection.) It is real, for all intents and purposes. That’s the magic. It’s realism relies heavily on how it’s being depicted, and the comment it makes on it subject (namely violence) is in how it’s presented, how it feels. Form dictates function, though form is subject to taste and is therefore ever-changing.
Take fashion as an example. Everyone looks the part in this film, thanks to costume designer Linda Bass. At one point there was a prison visitation scene, two characters separated by a glass pane and talking on the phone. The prisoner’s uniform stood out, because it almost didn’t look like one at all, or at least, not a recognizable one. Of course, the jumpsuit didn’t become standard until the late 20th Century; its form is a direct response to making inmates immediately identifiable and minimizing chances of escape. It’s striking how cheap and without character, without evident intent they are— even the original work shirt and blue jeans, basic staples today, gave inmates a uniform, upright appearance, indicating labor and the required functionality it provided to engage in labor. There is seemingly less of it now, although it still exists, and is like most things nowadays, controversial. Disposability is the enemy, and only encourages a decline in quality and standards that is far reaching. Prison uniforms, perhaps the least our our worries in this respect, and for the majority of us, in general, is nonetheless a prime example.
How much of fashion is dictated by functionality and necessity? There is a difference between fashion and style (no convoluted metaphor here please), however both are concerned with style; one in the broader sense and the other more individually. Functionality and necessity would fall under the umbrella of fashion, influenced by a trend that itself could be a product of environment, geographic or social (the working-class cast of Carver characters in the sixth paragraph). Style is the person wearing it, why they’re wearing it, how they’re wearing it.
How would the spacesuits of astronauts and space colonists of the future influence on fashion on Earth?. When Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos colonize Mercury, what kind of merch would they sell? And what would be sold based on said merch?
Imagine colonialism as a space opera: an admiral, decked in red coat and white breeches and black gaiters and leggings, sits upon a rock on a beach in British Hawaii looking out to sea, Barber’s Adagio swelling over the crashing waves, but now a cosmonaut, his suit amazingly tapered given all the layers and mechanics needed to keep out the radiation and prevent collapse or implosion from the pressure, weary from their journey just getting there, scared, overwhelmed in that way one gets looking out of a plane at the cars like ants and the people like crumbs,
(or the ocean, the vast Pacific— listening to Dark Side of the Moon for the first time flying over this foreign body
And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear, you shout and no one seems to hear)
small and unmoored or unsecured and easily removed without a single trace that you were there or were at all, belied as it were by the vacuous reflection of their ink black helmet screen, nothing recognizable or human in it since to be human implies some earthly origin or tether, although this is different now, something different entirely.
What would humans look like on another planet, given all the different external factors? They’d be of man, or at least created by man, with the aid of medicine and machines. Bridging that gap would make all the difference. But what would the suits look like? For the creoles is anyone's guess, but for the peninsulares, the arriving colonists, conceived via the old fashioned way, the hunka-chunka? What would reports beamed back to Earth, the ones that would shape the ads and the vlogs, look like? Hipsters in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Berlin, London, Tokyo, subcultures in the third world capitals, how would they look and how would they wear it? Boots and bomber jackets, building upon aviation culture and design; sunglasses and reflective visors, perhaps combined, all like one long uni-lens; probably some form of sweatsuits or athleisure incorporated into the cut, sitting tapered but flexible and most of all breathable on the body; the windbreaker equivalent of keeping the sun away, so the paleness index would go up. Who are we kidding? These clothes won’t be cheap, therefor the majority won’t have access to it, at least not at first, and what they get will most likely not be authentic, and so there will be variations and different attempts of varying success to claim it for a specific region or people or in a certain style or vision, as a correction or amendment to perhaps what wasn’t thought through or thought of, but really it would probably be a misunderstanding, if only slightly, of the original intent of the design, and it will be adapted for strictly Earth wear and use, completely abandoning the original idea and purpose which it was based on, and people will ultimately end up looking like this.
