July 15, 2020
WELCOME TO THE END OF OPINION
By BENJAMIN SHEARNThis moment, the moment you’re reading these words, right now, whenever that may be, is – and yes, this is quite official – the End of Opinion.
The commonplace qualitative model of judgement, that tedious vertical Good-Bad binary, is now as unimportant as your vague reasoning for why The Lobster just “didn’t work for you.”
Hot takes are now hot trash. And yes, I completely understand how adrift you must feel.
Because without your arbitrary art rules, your peer-tested conjecture, your mountain of prop books and performative merch, without the abstract wreckage you refer to as your “taste”… why even watch a film anymore?
It’s an age old conundrum really: If a dude tees off on how Malick’s never been quite “grounded enough” and no one’s around to hear him, did he even ever see The Thin Red Line three times in theaters?
I remember in 2011 the New York Film Critics Circle hastily moved their awards date up to November, before many of the films in (supposed) contention had even been released.
Some film journalists saw this as typical east coast elitism, New York writers flexing intellectual precedence by forcing their way into the inaugural awards position.
That, to me, was not the issue.
The rosiest, most benevolent view of a film writer is one of pop-cultural archaeology. There’s an altruistic sense of responsibility to unearth and champion the work you believe in to your readership.
And by ranking, by saying “this is the best film of the year,” you boldly pronounce strongly held aesthetic values. You compel readers and peers to debate, to examine, to ponder the nature of what makes film a true and vital artform.
If this is the level of artistic zeal the New York Film Critics Circle felt for the cinema of 2011, well then, I thought to myself, have at it. Flood the digital tributaries with your simmering passion which could not possibly have waited another two weeks to boil over into public view…
… the day came. And the NYFCC proudly announced their pantheon of cinematic prestige:
Best Film… The Artist
Best Actor… Brad Pitt
Best Actress… Meryl Streep
Ooookay, so let me stop ya’ right there if I may.
And just allow me to pose a simple question: Why... did you even... bother?
Every year the top ten lists come out and every year they’re just a deck-shuffle of the same 25 films.
Film criticism, in the classic Kael-ian model, has become little more than a social media-damaged conformity.
And this has had a significant trickle-down effect on the amateur dialectic. My generation and younger are so addicted to bandwagon-ism that when they’re confronted with dissenting perspectives the result is akin to LIGHTS ON at the rave.
Opinion is the new religion.
Its institution is corporate interest. Its church is Twitter. Every service is an all-night open mic. And yet every guest preacher really just wants to prosthelytize that “Yep… Get Out ruled!”
‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ are suppressant words. And like Huxley’s soma the words are pills to anesthetize conversation to the transactional complexity of giving out doggie treats.
Rotten Tomatoes is our Golem, and it’s trampled our brains into a barren landscape of Netflix thumbnails. Existential obedience to the algorithmic order of Silicon Valley.
No more.
Consider this Luther’s parchment nailed to the Church door.
Consider this a liberation.
Consider the question “Hey, is Zardoz actually any good?” as a FULL ON ASSAULT on your philosophical freedoms!
And together we will usher in a messianic age of opinion-less analysis.
Think of yourself as an alien, or post-apocalyptic future human, and consider films not as fuel for simplistic assertions of identity but as odd, potentially profound artifacts. Each one holding an insight into both the intricacies of the medium and the humanity of the message.
Some initial steps in this glorious new freedom:
- Watch What Lies Beneath and resist the urge to rage on its contrivances, its chintzy Hitchockian cheap shots, its huffy celebrity performances. Instead meditate quietly on its prophecy of cell phone technology ruining the classic suspense film.
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Watch every single James Spader movie in a row up to Crash and realize that it is a detailed chronology of the rise and fall of Yuppie Culture.
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Watch Body Horror films not just for their goopy gory payoffs but as subconscious statements of Man’s irrational fear of the Female anatomy.
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Watch Field of Dreams not as an uplifting balm of magical Americana, but as Baby Boomer apologist propaganda with Baseball nostalgia as its MAGA Trojan horse.
Look beyond the vanity of auteurs, the vagaries and vulgarities of corporate marketing, the academic tyranny of the so-called canon, and crucially understand that all hype is hypnosis.
See the forest through the trees, don’t just see The Tree of Wooden Clogs and proclaim how much you “dug” all the tree shots.
Films are complex documents of unintended spiritual, political, societal, and institutional significance, and the century-plus reign of Opinion has suppressed these hidden meanings.
This column is an act of anthropological radicalism, of ideological detective work. An attempt to re-contextualize all of cinema, freeing films as feeble fodder for your feed, and lifting them up as profound reflections of your humanity.
Welcome, friends, to the future. Where should we begin?
Benjamin Shearn is a film editor and writer. His last feature, Ladyworld, premiered at BFI London, Fantastic Fest, TIFF: Next Wave and was presented as part of the Frontieres Showcase at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Shearn’s work in narrative and documentary films has also been exhibited at ComicCon San Diego, the Louisiana Museum of Art in Copenhagen, la Gaîté lyrique in Paris, as well as official selections of the CPH:DOX, Melbourne International, Planete+Doc, TIFF After Dark, Court Metrage du Clermont, Chicago and Boston Underground Film Festivals, amongst others. For more of his work, go to benjaminshearn.com and/or follow his absurd Instagram account @actorsupset.
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July 8, 2022
BODY HORROR (WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?)
By BENJAMIN SHEARNIt’s been nearly 50 years of analysis and argument since Laura Mulvey summoned the Male Gaze into cinema’s self reflective dialectic.
Has there been enough talk, however, on what gazes back?
Allow me an infantile thought experiment…
… an Alien, one of superior intelligence yet total ignorance of Earth’s anthropological eccentricities, makes its way down the research curriculum to films.
They’re told by an overzealous custodian (some crumbling Boomer still huffing on Hitchcock fumes, think Ben Mankiewicz) that these “moving pictures” are a near-mystical conjuring of our deepest truths. Miraculous machinery recording history, externalizing imagination.
Yes- it’s almost certain the custodian will hard-sell the filmmaker as a portrait artist of the human condition, thinking mostly of Mr. Smith going to Washington. He’ll be dead right, of course, but less so in the triumph of the human spirit and moreso in the sickening surplus of female punishment that’s as vivid and disturbing in cinema as it is in society.
At this time of publication, there's nothing more horrific than the unthinkable setbacks for women's rights rapidly tightening their grip on America's fragile legal architecture. Body Horror, as both a genre and a concept, has for decades offered a prophetic and unnerving double-edged blade of violence against women in film. More often than not it’s a transparent expression of mostly male filmmakers’ obsessive, conflicted and ultimately fearful relationship with female anatomy.
Underneath that fraught membrane, however, one can sense a feminine consciousness (sometimes intentionally, oftentimes accidentally) talking back - with yearning, sadness, defeat, rage and, inevitably, vengeance.
This short video essay, created with my eternal creative partner Amanda Kramer, is an attempt to harness that consciousness into a voice. It has very upsetting imagery from very famous films. Buyer beware.
Benjamin Shearn is a film editor and writer. His latest film Please Baby Please was the opening night selection of the 2022 Rotterdam Film Festival. It played as part of a retrospective on Shearn's work with filmmaker Amanda Kramer. His films have also been screened at SXSW, BFI London, Fantastic Fest, Sitges, Fantasia, Outfest, TIFF: Next Wave, ComicCon San Diego, the Louisiana Museum of Art in Copenhagen, la Gaîté lyrique Paris, CPH:DOX, Melbourne International, Planete+Doc, and the Frontieres Showcase at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. For more of his work, go to benjaminshearn.com and/or follow his absurd Instagram account @actorsupset.
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August 14, 2020
ACTORS ARE IDOLS:JAMES SPADER
By AMANDA KRAMERI’m often shit on for my Hollywood People-Worshipping of white straight men. It’s wildly out of fashion, I guess, especially for a woman like me. You don’t know me, but you’ll have to trust that no one around me wants to hear about how much I adore this popular actor or that rich actor.
Anyway fuck fashion: I LOVE JAMES SPADER.
Thinking about James Spader makes me physically ill. It twists my insides. But one of my favorite things in the world to do is think about James Spader; his motivations, his movements, his vibe, his voice. I take pleasure in every single acting choice he’s ever made. Like when he leans on desks or leans on cars, always this effortless leaning, like he’s too chill to stand but too chic to sit. James Spader knows intrinsically the James Spader character. He’s never missed a Spader beat. God I love thinking about him.
Here is a brag, a swagger, a triumph: I happen to know someone (well) who knows James Spader (well). I love thinking about this. He has James Spader stories, personal ones and professional ones. He’ll tell me the stories sometimes if I ask - I do have to ask, and ask without too much excitement, and then I have to listen, also without too much excitement, or he may not tell me another one again. Have to keep it “cool,” have to keep my energy “low.” But in truth my soul is fed by these stories. In every single one James Spader does exactly what I want him to be doing. He’s acting exactly like James Spader, and there’s a joyousness (a jubilation) in the storyteller as well - here are two people (one, a brilliant decades-long television director/the other, me) in agreement that James Spader is a marvel, an actual treasure. We’re also in agreement that if Hollywood brings back Columbo, Hollywood would be fucking stupid as fuck not to get on their knees and happily hand the role to James Spader.
James Spader is an enduring icon who has given us the gift of his work.
James Spader should have played Patrick Bateman, not Christian Bale, and I stand by that one hundred percent and don’t care about any opposing opinions. I am right. James Spader is a flawless 80s demon, a uniquely dimensional Reaganite, the personification of charmed smarm, a performance artist whose art is a disappearing act. He has wholly disappeared inside the James Spader aesthetic, which is a frightening, libidinal, impish, formal, magnetic, untrustworthy (in)human masterpiece. James Spader doesn’t do anything unless he’s doing it masterfully. James Spader is a legendary weirdo. We are lucky to have moving images of him.
Can you imagine being David E. Kelley? I try to imagine it all of the time. It’s an overwhelming thought experiment and that’s before I let my mind wrap around marrying Michelle Pfeiffer. Imagine you’re David E. Kelley. You want to cast James Spader in a role on a television show called The Practice. Yet every person around you, all of the people who normally tell you you’re a goddamn TV genius, is looking at you like you're a diseased lunatic off the streets. "You can’t cast James Spader! He’s the single most sexually charged nefarious symbol of class, the most bizarre seductor in the business!” And you cast him anyway and you win awards and he wins awards and the Spader Legacy mutates and transforms and deepens and enriches all of America into the 21st century. And that’s what it’s like to be David E. Kelley, a very important piece of the James Spader puzzle.
And it’s a puzzle that is ever-rewarding as its pieces continue to interlock.
Please watch Mannequin. No matter how you feel about Kim Cattrall. You won’t BELIEVE the Spader look, and even if you remember it, you only vaguely remember it, and need to interact with it again. It is undeniably strange and wondrous.
Please watch Jack's Back. In this film James Spader plays a Spader medical student. He also plays a Spader medical student’s Spader criminal twin brother. Here every opportunity for classic Spaderism is mined: shirtlessness on white sheets, compelling male blondness, charismatic night sweats, balletically-timed one liners, levels of sinister secrecy, jocular affirmations of alt-heroics, a complex comfort in the leading man as stranger/danger. Ebert watched. He then compared James Spader to Jack Nicholson, another created persona, another example of exuberant, mythical villainy. I would agree with Ebert there, save for the fact that James Spader is much, much more allegorical and intriguing than Jack Nicholson. As we all know.
Please go to YouTube. Click on the video titled “James Spader,” wherein James Spader sit-leans next to a very tall leafy plant and discusses his film Pretty in Pink. He wears a leather jacket with shoulder pads. He has the presence of a god. He’s hilarious, suave, subtle, unfazed, alluring. If a man can be a pair of dark sunglasses attached to a slightly wrinkled linen blazer, then that man is James Spader. He is entirely meant to be James Spader. He has an impeccable vocabulary.
Some people don’t want to meet their heroes. That’s absolute bullshit. What the hell is wrong with those people, nothing makes sense about that. Nothing. I want to meet James Spader and I want to recount back to him every moment of his career, I want to say his best and most potent lines to his face, I want to make sure he understands fully that his decisions (all of his decisions) have been perfectly executed and brilliantly designed. And more than anything I want to let him know that he is meaningful, representational, and amazing. He amazes me. He is a maze. He is an amazement.
Follow Amanda:
Website: afilmbyamandakramer.comBio:
Kramer's short films BARK, INTERVENE, and SIN ULTRA have played at Fantastic Fest, Monster Fest, Final Frame, Court Metrange Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival and Boston Underground Film Festival's Dispatches from the Underground. Her screenplays have been accepted into IFP’s Emerging Filmmakers program and Frontierés International Co-Production Market in Brussels. Kramer's music videos have premiered on Vogue, LA Record, Flaunt Magazine, and Complex.Her feature film PARIS WINDOW opened the Women Texas Film Festival and won the jury prize for Creative Vision at the DTLA Film Festival. Her feature film LADYWORLD was selected for the Frontierés Buyers Showcase at the Marche du Film at Cannes. The film had its US Premiere at Fantastic Fest ('18) and its International Premiere at London BFI Film Festival. LADYWORLD also showed at Denver International Film Festival, SF Indie Fest, TIFF Next Wave, Seoul International Women’s Film Festival, and Sydney Film Fest. Distributed by Cleopatra Entertainment, LADYWORLD had its theatrical and
streaming release in August 2019.
September 23, 2020
A BLANK CHECK FOR UNCHECKED ADOLESCENCE
By BENJAMIN SHEARNI knew it was risky. And almost certainly... illegal? Echoes of a past scandal concerning Pee-Wee Herman and a movie theater and Florida rattled around somewhere in the muddle of memory.
And yet... I proceeded... slowly... outwardly covering my guilt with nonchalance. A tan windbreaker slipped off the back of my seat onto my lap - adjustments were made, both physical and psychological.
I wish the fog of recollection would allow me to round up in my favor, and that I could tell you the theater was empty. Sadly, it’s all still imprinted on my cerebellum with the same finality of light on nitrate. Surrounded by strangers in a midwestern movie house, I pursued my compulsion well before reason and restraint dissuaded me.
The film was True Lies and I was masturbating to the scene where Jamie Lee Curtis dances a goofy lingerie striptease. The year was 1994 and I was 13 years old.
How and why I committed such brazen self-gratification could be attributable to youthful fatuity. But I’d never tried anything like that before, or since. Only in retrospect can a case be made that I was acting out as a so-called ‘product of the culture.’
Hollywood’s output that year was more directly catered to (and in praise of) the straight male adolescent psyche, than any other demographic. The movie capitalists had red-blooded American boys in their crosshairs, and I was both victor and victim of the spotlight.
The box office tea leaves could not have been more overt. What started with Big, continued with Home Alone, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Hook, Encino Man, T2, Bill and Ted and Wayne and Garth. Here, movies whose central figures were adolescent males (either literally, psychologically, or magically) were winning audiences with overwhelming fervor.
The Age of Boy was nigh and the mid-90s were to be its apotheosis era.
Boys saved baseball in Rookie of the Year, Angels in the Outfield and Little Big League.
They taught recalcitrant adults life lessons in North, The Client and The War.
They laid claim to the animal kingdom in The Jungle Book and The Lion King.
They revealed themselves as the inner-children of adults in Forrest Gump, Clerks, The Hudsucker Proxy, Reality Bites, Cabin Boy, Clifford, Crumb and of course the trifecta of Carrey - Ace Ventura, Dumb & Dumber and The Mask.
They even found time to free Tibet in Little Buddha.
But of all the boy-driven narratives Disney’s Blank Check, for me, held the most potent and indelible subtext. A film that offered up unapologetic adolescent wish fulfillment and was one of my key cinema enablers.
11-year-old Preston Waters, by virtue of a car-on-bike accident, is handed a blank check connected to a money laundering scam. He fills in one million, gets his backpack stuffed by a buffoon banker, then proceeds to spend and live unencumbered by the restrictions and prejudices of the adult world.
Blank Check attempts to establish a clear ‘money can’t buy everything’ theme, inasmuch as Preston’s family wrongly preaches the opposite. Middle-class Dad berates Preston for a lack of income, and his entrepreneurial brothers make known their capitalist-fascist beliefs with a perversion of the Golden Rule, chanting: “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”
Clearly, the screenwriters intended to affirm the original Golden Rule but end up reinforcing this false one. If they had succeeded in their intended thematic cohesion, I’m not sure it would have been as impactful on my licentious 13-year-old psyche.
Preston uses the cash to close on a small castle, and does so under a false name of a false idol; Mr. Mackintosh. He fills the house with unbridled childish Id; walls of TVs blasting video games in surround sound, a wilderness of giant inflatables and the ultimate male adolescent wet dream home addition; a built-in water slide.
Preston flaunts it with limos and wardrobe montages and even an improbably romantic dinner with a pretty bank teller (played by Karen Duffy, MTV’s “Duffy” at the time). The teller is, in reality, secretive Shay, an undercover FBI agent who sees Preston as a conduit to criminals.
Preston’s impish clash of naivete and burgeoning bravado thaw Shay’s crucial adult layers of professionalism and age-gap skepticism. In only a few encounters, this child empowered by bottomless wealth is seamingly the perfect man and he seamlessly charms Shay into an unlikely romantic co-lead.
And this is where any of Blank Check’s original altruistic sentiments fray irrevocably into an unregulated glorification of adolescent instincts.
In the film’s final act, Preston’s exposed as a fraud, broke, and in massive debt. All of which, naturally, are forgiven and absolved by quaint Disney logic. A series of jarring moral reversals then haphazardly appear. Preston experiences firsthand the cold isolation of wealth and even goes as far as to swear off money in the face of family reconciliation.
However, this turnaround is shoehorned in so suddenly it reeks suspiciously of a desperate hail mary for moral catharsis.
What Preston truly wants is plainly stated from the beginning; freedom and autonomy. He craves whatever force can transcend his child class and at the same time satiate his adolescent desires.
The eponymous Blank Check then takes on a symbolic prowess; Preston’s signature unlocks more than funds but an entire relativistic universe in which his basest intuitions are rewarded and worshipped.
All the adults of Blank Check are so passive and corrupt that Preston emerges as a God in a Godless world, self-generating all of his own moral quandaries and conclusions. Within this ethical vacuum Preston feels no pain, suffers no repercussions and is even decorated with the highest trophy of the gross straight male adolescent fantasy... the “babe.”
After all is revealed, Shay offers Preston both a statutory kiss and promise of future nooky once he’s of age or even ‘wink-wink’ before then.
With that, Blank Check accidentally offered my 1994 lizard brain a modern fable; the uncurbed ascendency of a boy king who discovers that his boyishness is fundamental to his power.
At the time Blank Check played like a fetish film for me. A revisionist myth that shifted away from adages of family, responsibility and morality, into an unambiguous exaltation of pubescent hedonism. Watching it tickled psychological pressure points with ASMR-like reward tingles, entwined with my subliminals, and endowed me with an overgrown sense of strut.
I felt as invincible as Preston, and that I lived in a world which would only ever cheer me on.
Of course, I wasn’t consciously aware of any of this as I was engaging in public self-abuse during a Schwarzenegger movie. Nor was I aware of the deep matrix of male privilege and empowerment driving all if not most of my instinctive actions.
Simultaneously I felt zero shameful misgivings or moral doubt. If I felt any fear it was only the fear of being caught. And not even from the potential for embarrassment. Only disciplinary repercussions. Even that fear was hypothetical at best. I felt more than safe that both True Lies and myself would reach denouement without incident.
If you’d ask me then, ‘why?’ I’d probably maneuver blame on to the power of runaway train hormones. Looking soberly back though, I see it as a sort of paradoxical and sad victory lap. A gestural attempt to reinforce the idea that my adolescent vigor was as powerful as a bag full of money...
Benjamin Shearn is a film editor and writer. His last feature, Ladyworld, premiered at BFI London, Fantastic Fest, TIFF: Next Wave and was presented as part of the Frontieres Showcase at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Shearn’s work in narrative and documentary films has also been exhibited at ComicCon San Diego, the Louisiana Museum of Art in Copenhagen, la Gaîté lyrique in Paris, as well as official selections of the CPH:DOX, Melbourne International, Planete+Doc, TIFF After Dark, Court Metrage du Clermont, Chicago and Boston Underground Film Festivals, amongst others. For more of his work, go to benjaminshearn.com and/or follow his absurd Instagram account @actorsupset.
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NEW YORK, NEW YORK
EST 2020
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© THE QUARTERLESS REVIEW ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
EST 2020
︎
© THE QUARTERLESS REVIEW ALL RIGHTS RESERVED