Happy Monday: new sidebar content over there, my freshly uploaded “muxtape.” If you have any other web 2.0 crap for me to try out and put in my sidebar, comment away.

We watched Dirty Harry for the first time last night. Pretty good action movie, aside from the semi-ludicrous “criminals shouldn’t have rights because Clint Eastwood says so” moral of the story. The movie is old enough too that it falls in the category of proto-action movies—the movies that invented the various cliches and plot devices we get to take for granted in our modern action movies. (Other example springing to mind: the first Die Hard.)

The other effect of being a proto-action movie is that Dirty Harry has a palpably different visual style from other movies with the same general plot. I’m not a huge movie buff, so I don’t usually notice these things unless they’re pointed out to me, but the style of the first 3/4 or so of the movie struck me as worth talking about.

image from Google Image search – surprisingly work-safe for “Dirty Harry”

The outdoor scenes at the beginning of the movie are very bright. Harry is wearing a sweater and a jacket, but other than that, you might imagine it to be mid-summer. (It doesn’t hurt that the opening shot is of a woman swimming in a roof-deck pool.) As night falls and Harry goes out to look for the woman’s shooter (oops, spoiler alert), the scenes become so dark that it is actually impossible to see what is happening. Harry fumbles trying to stand on a trash can in a dark alley, and we only know this is happening from the sound effects.

The lighting struck me particularly because I had kept thinking about one of the opening shots, where the camera sees the sniper from behind, the woman in the pool on another roof some distance away, and then pulls back to show a remarkably wide view of some San Francisco streets and rooftops.

If I were a real movie blogger, I would have a screenshot or something, but I’m not so I don’t so too bad.

The sniper’s vantage point effectively lets him see all of San Francisco, threatening both individuals (that swimmer) and society as a whole (the traffic below). For most of the rest of the movie (save the last 1/4 or so that I don’t want to spoil for you), Dirty Harry is about the power of seeing versus being seen. Given that basically every character in the movie is armed, seeing gives one physical power over the seen. As soon as a line of sight is established, the one seen is disabled: the getaway car driver that Harry notices during lunch, the killer when he is spotted by police helicopter, Harry himself, when he is seen on the trash can by some angry neighbors.

The publicity material for the movie shows this effect as well—you’d be hard-pressed to find a promo shot of Clint Eastwood as Harry not looking down the barrel of a gun.

Google Image Search for “Dirty Harry” at your own maybe-work-safe risk!

Not much to add to that, I guess. Also, out of recognition that this is probably the most obvious observation about Dirty Harry ever, I didn’t bother to search for other similar analysis. It’s easy being a dilettante sometimes.

[update: the whole seeing/being seen thing is also obviously about sex. see: killer’s flouncy walk, gay man on street, cruiser in dark park and Harry’s dead wife.]

While fancying up the site, I still managed to find time for some cultural stimulation. Since I didn’t write them up before, I’m doing it now. Join me in pretending that these things just happened.

This is how I described Freejack to one of my friends who had not seen it:

• Emilio Estevez: race car driver who dies in a crash
• Mick Jagger: bounty hunter from the future who takes Emilio’s body before he dies
• Anthony Hopkins: powerful executive from the future who wants to put his mind in Emilio’s body
• Rene Russo: Emilio’s girlfriend in the past, Anthony’s employee in the future

You can imagine the drama that unfolds. (That is, if you can wrap your head around those star-studded variables.)

I would have put a spoiler alert or something, but the plot is alternately so obvious and so poorly developed that it would be disrespectful to my reader(s).

The thing about the future in Freejack, is that it is like Victorian England—but with laser guns. The majority of the population lives in abject poverty, which we see entails wild-west-style fistfights and clothes stolen from the cast of Oliver Twist. The lucky upper class (led by Anthony Hopkins, and populated by Rene Russo and some other not-famous people) lives in an office park. They drive wacky round cars, and have filtered the air somehow to make it breathable (everyone in the poor districts has whooping cough and psoriasis or something from pollution).

See, it turns out that Anthony Hopkins is dying, and wants to use his company’s “Spiritual Switchboard” to take his mind and put it in another body. Why not just clean up a poor person and take their body? Because clearly they are too damaged by the atmosphere that stops at the border of the rich district to live a healthy life ever again. So, Mick Jagger gets hired, sucks Emilio Estevez’s body out of the past, the doctors are about to wipe his mind, and in a post-apocalyptic convoy attack, Emilio escapes into the environs, making him a “freejack.”

In the ensuing plot, we meet a cussing nun, the sleazy agent from Emilio’s past who remains sleazy, and a magical negro who eats rats on a dock by the river and speaks exclusively in metaphors related to eagles.

While I haven’t entirely figured out what this blog is going to be about, it is not going to be about plot summaries of every piece of media I shove in my brain. (Although I couldn’t help myself this time: the plot of Freejack is just too good.) Some analysis or cultural criticism is in order, I guess, and even though I am out of practice, I’m just going to kick it from my head:

Out of all the themes in Freejack (and there are a lot), the one that they repeat the most is the cognitive difficulty of involuntary time travel. First, Emilio Estevez has to figure out where he physically is, waking up in a moving doctors office with a mind-wiping laser pointed at his head. Second, once he gets that he’s still in New York, but things are weird, he has to figure out the social system.

This social system involves unfamiliar technologies (phones that can see you), neologisms (“freejack,” for one), and a completely re-worked political economy. When he tries to take shelter in a church, he is assaulted by a cussing nun with a gun, and when he tries to go to his girlfriend’s old apartment, the new tenants scream “Freejack!” and point a gun at him. His first contact with someone he knows from the past is similarly fraught: his old agent tries to turn him in for a government reward, and, of course, assaults him with a gun.

When Emilio finally finds his old girlfriend, he confronts all three of these issues at once: she assumes he is some sort of technological trick being played on her, so she responds using the current language about legality and policing that he doesn’t understand. When she resists him, he tells her how what has been 18 years for her has only been one day for him, and this is the crux of the movie’s plot.

Emilio’s experience (and the experience of the audience) is a sudden change in the entire social system, and the point of the movie seems to be “what if” this cultural shift happened overnight? While everyone else in the movie has slowly adapted to the new way of things, Emilio plays the role of alienated observer. Time travel enables a strange sort of verfremdungseffekt where sudden defamiliarization is not the result of artistic intent, but the reality of a suddenly displaced person. Emilio Estevez becomes a walking defamiliarizer, shocking people out of their complacency with the state, and bringing with him to morally bankrupt 2009 the values of idyllic 1991.

Okay, that one got a little of control. Here’s to reining in the lit major talk in the future—sorry if I alienated you.

Through the miracle of Netflix: Watch Now, I got to see another concert last night: Stop Making Sense, by the Talking Heads.

This concert movie is supposed to be great, and it is one of those things I had wanted to see but had never seen (a recurring theme, here). As a Talking Heads fan, I think it has become one of my new favorite movies. The footage is fantastic (shot over two or three nights, each night from a different angle, so there are rarely cameras on screen); there aren’t any cheesy audience response shots, and you can barely hear the crowd; and of course the Talking Heads are at the top of their game here, putting on a ridiculously good show.

Turns out the director, Jonathan Demme, also directed Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, so he’s a real director, if that sort of thing matters to you in choosing your concert movies.

The concert opens with “Psycho Killer,” performed solo by David Byrne on acoustic guitar, with only a drum machine backing track. (His staggering dance moves at the end are too awesome to be described.) So check it out.

[Update: It has been suggested that his dance moves could be described as “like a chicken”]