Cultural Vegetable of the Week: Inglorious Basterds (2009)
Vegetable Equivalent: The beet
Nutritional Value: A cinematic lesson in ethical causality
Recommended Serving Size: All in one sitting, preferably while drinking a glass of milk and eating apple strudel with whipping cream

 ”I’m gonna give you a little something you can’t take off.” – Lt. Aldo Raine to Col. Hans Landa

Since the new millennium began, Quentin Tarantino has been obsessed with revenge. Why? My guess is the aftermath of 9/11. The emotional dynamics of vengeance have taken international center-stage, particularly with the US’s reaction to the attack on the Twin Towers.

I’m not sure if Tarantino can explore those dynamics any better than he has in this film.

Hitler has been the basic yardstick for evil for the past sixty-plus years. The Holocaust is the crime of the 20th century. The film’s startling conclusion works not only because its characters have animus towards Hitler but because the audience does too.

In this way, Inglorious Basterds works through the ways film/art/cultural representations play an active role in defining how we live in the west. When Slavoj Žižek praises cinema as ideology at its purest, as the art form that teaches us how to desire, he is talking about films like Inglorious Basterds. We get to think through the logic of revenge using recent history’s most incendiary test case.

The film features Tarantino’s chapter-based style, with each section presenting a morality drama. We see characters presented with the choice of saving themselves and letting others die or sacrificing themselves with the possibility that such a sacrifice will still not save anybody. Every choice is loaded, and no choice comes responsibility-free.

The thing that I admire most about the film, having seen it four times now, is that it enforces moral responsibility.  Milton Friedman advocated the economic principle, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Basterds shows us there’s no such thing as a free moral choice. Ideas and actions have consequences.

I felt this most acutely in the tense tavern scene. The scene is dialogue heavy as both the Allied characters and audience keep praying for the scene to end. The camera lingers on drinks and cigarettes, on the happy faces of the Nazi officers and the anxious faces of the disguised Allied soldiers. Minute upon minute passes by, the tension mounting the longer the Nazis and Allies who are posing as Nazis drink together. Quickly, things escalate and suddenly we have a British officer and a Nazi officer pointing guns at each other’s testicles. The British officer wants to take the Nazi officer outside with him, but the Nazi officer refuses. He says that if the Allied officers are to live, they will have to kill every single Nazi soldier in the tavern, including the enlisted man who became a father five hours ago. No free lunch. The stakes are huge, Hitler and the end-of-the-war huge. There will be collateral damage. Any plan that doesn’t account for that is blatantly deceitful, not only to others but to one’s self.

To alter slightly Aldo’s above remark to Hans Landa, vengeance is the moral decision you can’t take off. That’s what Aldo’s swastika carvings are all about. The Nazi soldiers will go back home, take off their uniforms, and pretend like their war experience never existed: the Nazi scar on their forehead prevents them from making that denial. This also goes for the Basterds themselves. It’s important that everyone but Aldo and Utvich get killed in the line of duty.

Tarantino ups the ante of this revenge flick even more by setting the film in 1941 and 1942, a detail I had missed in earlier screenings. This means that while the US would have started fighting (post-Pearl Harbor), the US would not have lost a majority of its men in either Europe or Asia. The film’s ending means D-Day is unnecessary. More than that, it probably makes Hiroshima and Nagasaki unnecessary.

The film’s success is directly attributable to its willingness to engage with the ideological and aesthetic possibilities of cinema itself. War never found a better proponent than film, particularly during the aftermath of World War II (cf. Vonnegut’s ruminations on this fact in Slaughterhouse-Five). For those who think Inglorious Basterds is simply a mindless propaganda film, note that the entire concluding chapter represents/critiques that simplistic kind of (and reaction to a) film, i.e., the mindless shoot-em up that glorifies jingoism and a “nation’s pride.”

I don’t think the film is morally irresponsible or needlessly vengeful. It shows that revenge bears deadly fruit. It insists on actual guilt and actual punishment. It is not a film about moral contingency. It is a film about moral culpability.

On Tuesday, the 2011 Oscar nominees were announced, and it seems that one of the year’s pet themes is nostalgia. But if it is nostalgia we’re interested in, then we could look to a few of the other nominees for “best film”, rather than The Artist. Admittedly, I’m confused as to why this little film is being celebrated so effusively. Yes, nostalgia — by definition — feels endearing in itself, because it is seeking to alleviate a kind of homesickness. What, however, is the object of our nostalgia? Or, put another way, what makes us feel at home?

By virtue of the fact that this question matters, I’m more interested in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris than I am The Artist. Aspiring novelist Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is in love with Paris — the only problem is he has a fantastical love for 1920’s Paris, which was a magical time-gone-by in his eyes. In short, he longs for a place and time that is not his. Allen, in an endearingly dreamy display, brings Gil’s romantic imagination to life. Of course, what Gil soon finds out (I won’t ruin the details) is that over-exuberance for a time-gone-by — as if it is superior to one’s own — is folly. Our belief in what can make us feel at home can be misplaced.

A more comparable work to The Artist is Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a wonderful film that is also nostalgic for moviemaking in its love for film preservation. Scorsese’s motion picture, which is also better crafted, has more to offer beneath the surface. Hugo, an orphan boy trying to survive and find a place and purpose for himself in the world, finds solace in the hope of his life’s narrative circumstances. He recognizes that if he is to find “home,” he must pursue the mystery that is set before him. Through little revelations, he is piecing together a story that will make sense of his life and give his identity a sense of stability. Whereas The Artist’s movie nostalgia seems primarily concerned with alluring romanticism and renown, Hugo’s movie nostalgia seems to concern itself with a childlike faith.

Yet, in the aftermath of the award nominee announcements — and its focus on film’s dealing with nostalgia — I’m all the more intrigued with, what I termed in my review, the “nostalgia for the absolute” in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. My personal pick for best film in 2011 provides countless topics for discussion, but I’m still drawn to the film’s use of dream-like memory that Jack (Sean Penn/Hunter McCracken) conjures in the aftermath of his own family tragedy. Good and bad memories from his youth function as a bridge-way on his return-path to “home.” But while Jack’s memories take him back to his youth, his nostalgia is ultimately one for the “absolute” as he tries to find the way of his mother and brother: the way of Grace.

Ultimately, The Tree of Life’s nostalgia is a forward-yearning: a memory-infused hope that makes sense of the past’s hurts and losses. It does not ask us, like Allen’s film, to be nostalgic for the now, but it does give us reason to feel presently grateful. For this reason, when it comes to this year’s Oscar nominees for best film, I’m most grateful for the strange and profound nostalgia offered in The Tree of Life and less taken with The Artist’s relative triviality.

Although I haven’t the knowledge or viewing experience to comment on the films up for consideration this year at the Oscars, after Trent Reznor’s surprise victory last year, I had high expectations going into the award season this when it came to the music. Even though Best Original Score isn’t exactly the most talked-about category, film scores deserve a lot more attention than they are often given. Before I get started, I suggest checking out the entire oscar list here. Here are the nominees that I’m concerning myself with:

Best Original Score:

The Adventures of Tin Tin – John Williams

The Artist – Ludovic Bource

Hugo – Howard Shore

Tinker Tailer Sailor Spy – Alberto Iglesias

War Horse – John Williams

Before I complain about scores that got the big snub, I’ll give you my predictions and hopes for the category. To get right to the point, I’m really hoping for a win for Ludovic Bource for his work on the The Artist. I haven’t seen the film yet, but after listening to the score and reading a lot about the film, it is, without a doubt, the most creative and beautiful use of score out of the five. Here is a film who’s very existence depends on the score that the relatively unknown French composer Ludovic Bource has crafted and the whole thing just oozes with style and that classy 1920s sound. Bource already picked up the win from the Golden Globes, but if Hugo or War Horse end up gaining any momentum for bigger Oscar categories, I could easily see the Academy awarding Howard Shore or John Williams’ more traditional-sounding scores.

But don’t think that I haven’t got my list of Academy snubs. Personally, I absolutely adored Trent Reznor’s score for 2010′s The Social Network, but was not nearly as impacted by his more recent work on Girl With The Dragon Tattoo so I’m okay with that not having made the cut. The real scores that I missed on the list are the Drive soundtrack by Cliff Martinez,  Alexandre Desplat’s Tree of Life score and both of Jonny Greenwood’s scores for We Need To Talk About Kevin and Norwegian Wood.

Jonny Greenwood is one of the strongest composers alive right now, but has been constantly snubbed by the Academy — so not a lot of surprises there. Drive, however, is a different case. Because Drive was not even shortlisted for Best Original Score, I have a feeling it was disqualified for the few songs by other artists at the beginning of the soundtrack. To me, the fact that a technicality could keep Martinez’s score from being recognized alone shows to how much the Academy is living in the dark ages. Martinez’s work on Drive is powerful and borderline revolutionary — it’s what should have been the followup to Trent Reznor’s win last year.

My feeling is that there are these incredible artists out there who are finally making their way to scoring films and giving them brilliant musical touches that traditional composers have been thus far unable to do. So many of these “traditional” scores could easily be switched around to other films — whether its the big sweeping themes of John Williams or the intense action-sequence drones by the likes of Hans Zimmer — many times it’s just a composer switching from “epic mode” to “romance mode” to “intense mode” with very little thought going into what the film is actually trying to do. Don’t get me wrong, I like these composers just as much as anyone else. But with two nods to John Williams, I can’t help feel like the Academy is stagnating.

I’m of the persuasion that the way we recognize and receive a medium like music or film is as important a cultural product as the art itself — in other words, things like the Grammy’s and the Oscar’s tell us a lot about the culture we live in. As a music fan and film score nerd, I’d hate to see the Academy go in the way of the Grammy’s and become another self-congratulatory celebration of the safe and the predictable.

10. Hugo 3D
While it might help to be a cinephile of Scorsese’s caliber to appreciate Hugo, loving his first “family” film has less to do with having an appreciation of film history, and more to do with having a childlike sense of wonder and imagination. Set in 1930’s Paris, Scorsese’s Dickensian 3D adventure is about an orphan boy named Hugo Cabret who is trying to find his place and purpose in the world after losing both his mother and father in separate incidents. Hugo’s father was a master clockmaker who passed along a love for automation and mystery to his son. After his alcoholic watchmaker Uncle disappears, Hugo is left to himself to survive between the walls of a railway station. Hugo is working on his father’s uncompleted last project, hoping to find a key that might unlock a message from his father—perhaps a message that will make sense of the narrative of his life.

I confess that it is difficult for a film to “capture my imagination” or draw me in completely, but Scorsese’s adventure drama achieved this from the very beginning with its opening shot of drifting snow—and perhaps first awakened my sense of belief by making me believe 3D can be more than a add-on gimmick or marketing tool. Ultimately, though, Hugo captivated me because it captured so well why I love going to the movies. The film powerfully depicts how stories, and the hope of redemption they offer, help us reconcile our emotional scars. Along with Hugo, we recognize how the contours of personal identity are constituted by narrative arc, a sense of purpose, and the pursuit of mystery. In Hugo’s quest, we see that the essential self calls us to a childlike faith. -Nick Olson

9. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog delivers what might be his most compelling documentary to date. He invites us to follow him as our tour guide through the Chauvet Cave in southern France, which contains what is believed to be 30,000 year old paintings—essentially the world’s oldest known art display. In observing handprints and countless drawings that display a level of artistic creativity and expression, we learn something that is quite an affirmation, if not a revelation: our Paleolithic ancestors weren’t doltishly inept—they were creators like us, developing a sense of artistic cultivation in the land before time.

While the tour itself is the most interesting part of the documentary, some of the interviews are a close second. In one interview, a professional researcher of the cave asserts that perhaps we should not be called “homo sapiens”—“the man who knows”—but, instead, “homo spiritualis.” Over the course of history, we human beings don’t know much in the grand scheme of things, but we all, as sentient beings, have a perceiving self-awareness that has been most commonly impressed with a sense of awe, or worship. And by expressing this sense of awe through creative artifacts, the sense of communion we feel reveals something to us about the divine tie that binds us as human creatures. -Nick Olson

8. Moneyball
How does a quirky film about sports statistics make it to a top ten list?  The plot of Moneyball is a bit slow and a bit technical, two things that don’t typically make a movie a blockbuster, or even very watchable, for that matter.  But in this film, the parts that makethe whole consistently “get on base” – which of course, is how you win games.  Moneyball is part underdog story, part character study, and part heart-warmer, and each part is executed wonderfully.

The bulk of the acting is shouldered (quite well) by Brad Pitt as down-and-out Oakland As general manager Billy Beane, a man who has just lost his best players to teams with more money, and his marriage to baseball in general.  You just can’t help but step into his shoes and pull for the guy.  Throughout the entire cast the acting is subtle and sincere, and the characters are complex and interesting, so much so that you almost forget for a sec that you’re watching a “sports movie”.

Granted, Moneyball ends on a somewhat unresolved note – the team doesn’t end up winning big on the field, and Beane doesn’t end up winning big in his personal life.  But I can relate to the Oakland As and Pitt’s Beane in a way I can’t relate to overly-dramatic characters in psuedo-historic epics.  All in all, at the end, Beane and his team make an irreparable dent in “the system” – which, for most of us in this age, would be victory enough and more. -Kirk Bozeman

7. The Muppets
The Muppets is among my top three 2011 films, which, for me, means that it was one of the three total movies I would consider above mediocre. It’s been the sort of cinematic year in which, more than ever, I fear that I am slouching toward cranky senescence. Statler and Waldorf—or perhaps Sam the Eagle, minus his nationalism—have become my spiritual kin. This recognition leads me to the hard-hitting existential question at The Muppets’ emotional core: “Am I a man or am I a Muppet?” For those of us who have always suspected that we are, in fact, made of felt—writer/star Jason Segel undoubtedly numbers among this company, and I have my suspicions about songwriter Bret McKenzie—The Muppets comes as a welcome reassurance that we are not alone.

The movie-as-community aspect may veer uncomfortably into fan-fiction territory, as Drew McWeeny points out. But that community also has serious regulations, as McKenzie reveals in his description of his immersion in the do’s and don’ts of Muppethood: “Most of the animals can talk, but chickens can’t talk. Chickens can only cluck. Sometimes I’d write lyrics and the chickens would sing; then I’d find out in the studio that they could only cluck. And for penguins, it’s a subject of much controversy as to whether the penguins can talk or not. . . . And sometimes I’d be in the studio and one of the Muppets would refuse to sing a line because they didn’t think it was appropriate for the character.” In other words, it’s pretty much like Anglican/Episcopalian church: highly arbitrary and arcane rules, leading to an immensely joyful experience. And this is why I love The Muppets. -Carissa Smith

6. Super 8
When Super 8 was announced, it was done so under a veil of secrecy. The first teaser was startling and explosive, but still fairly enigmatic. But such is the case with J.J. Abrams, who certainly loves to misdirect audiences and keep them in the dark until its time for the reveal. That approach may have backfired a bit with Super 8, because when you get right down to it, it is, in many ways, a fairly straightforward summer popcorn flick.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, because it’s a rather good one. Packed with lots of humor and heart, thanks to its wonderful primary cast of youngsters, as well as aliens, explosions, and military conspiracies Super 8 certainly evokes such classic sci-fi films as Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. It stumbles a bit in the end with an emotional coda that rings hollow, and the big alien reveal underwhelms, but when Abrams is piling on the tension and action, and his young characters are rushing around trying to save their town and complete a zombie movie, it sure is a lot of good, heartfelt fun. -Jason Morehead

5. Like Crazy
In the last few years, there have been a host of films that call into question the traditional romantic comedy formula. Often, though, those films can seem like just another formula offerred up to replace the old one: Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl encounter obstacles, boy and girl realize they are not meant to be together. Rather than asking us to reconsider the nature of romantic relationships, they simply shift the focus to the other side of the story: the relationships that don’t work, and were never meant to be.

Like Crazy, on the other hand, suggests that sometimes relationships that seem perfect, even on a cosmic, fated level, may not work out in the end. It has the bravery to diverge from the formula by making a movie that is narratively messy, because that is how the end of this sort of relationship works: neither of them wants it to end, and so they fight tooth and nail to save the relationship. The only problem is that they’re never fighting at the same time, in the same way. They are ships passing in the night, after crashing against one another several times over. Another risk the film takes is to present us with protagonists we grow to love, primarily so that we can grow increasingly frustrated with their mistakes. Their failure to take the sacrifices necessary to live up to their combined potential is so clearly unveiled that we find ourselves feeling frustrated with them as we do a friend who keeps making bad choices. The final outcome can be seen many different ways, depending on who you ask, but the nature of their struggle and the motives behind it are so clear, asking those questions after this film could result in some incredibly insightful and uncomfortable discussion. -Richard Clark

4. Certified Copy
Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy was my second favorite film released in the US in 2011, but I suspect that this thoughtful, yet playful film will be the one that I return to most in the years to come. Some might be turned off by this European art house film; it follows a day-long walk and conversation through a local Italian village between a British author, James Miller (William Shimell), and an admiring French woman named Elle (Juliette Binoche). James is in town to discuss a book he’s written on the value of a copy versus the original work of art. At his presentation, Elle gives him her address and they spend the following day together discussing the nature of art, marriage, and life as they wander through the beautiful village.

The film becomes an alluring mystery when the nature of the couple’s relationship becomes a question. At a definite point in the film, the couple begins pretending (or are they?) that they have been in an intimate, perhaps declining, relationship for many years. Are they really married, or just pretending to be? The whole film plays on the themes of truth and authenticity as they relate to art, marriage, and faith. It’s the type of film that reveals something new with each viewing, and yet, while it may sound like nothing more than a mind game, Certified Copy has an endearingly light touch (perhaps because Binoche’s character shines through). While the film’s central mystery may remain open ended, this does not at all hinder an essential theme: there are ethics involved in authenticity. They’re what we might call the demands of love. -Nick Olson

3. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
I’ve followed Harry Potter (books and films) since his inception, and the series remains one of the few that I regularly take the time to reread and re-watch, becoming more entangled in the magic with each return visit. So I went to the theatre to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows II expecting to enjoy the show; what I didn’t anticipate was a game-changer, but that’s what the final installment turned out to be for me. As I read the books (and read and listen to them again), I understand Rowling’s intention with Severus Snape, yet somehow, the words on the pages just couldn’t make his sacrifice come alive for me the way actor Alan Rickman does. I am still haunted by his memories, just as his character was, and the painful realizations of love unrequited and love lost.

I never enjoyed (in the book or the film) the epilogue where Harry Potter and his friends stand around on the platform enjoying their immense good fortune with their prodigious and poorly-named offspring; that scene seemed too obvious, too contrived, with too much pandering to a fan base desperate for a happily-ever-after that never seemed in peril to me. But I wept with Snape, and for Snape. I felt the weight of sixteen years of sacrifice, the burden of his unbearable mission as he cradled Lily’s dead body and moaned. It wasn’t the joy of Harry’s future that this final film brought to life for me, it was the tragedy of Snape’s past. Harry gets his pseudo-resurrection, his heroic recognition, his beloved wife and children; Snape gives and gives and gives, leaving behind only a breathless emptiness in the wake of his cry.

That emptiness, for me, made the story complete—bigger than the happiness of a single boy whom we loved from scene one. Months later, I recall enjoying the film as a fitting conclusion to an epic series, but it’s not Harry’s story for me anymore. It’s Snape’s. -Erin Newcomb

2. Of Gods and Men
In the midst of a cultural moment when boisterous arguing and power-posturing are the means by which we seek cultural and human change, Xavier Beauvois’ film, Of Gods and Men, is a quiet meditation that is also one of the most moving portraits of Christlikeness that I’ve ever seen on film. Based on the true story of a group of Trappist monks who sacrificed their former lives to live modest, meditative lives in the Tibhirine monastery in Algeria, Beauvois’ film depicts the sacrifice they would have to face to remain in a war-torn region under increasing threat from Islamic terrorists. Yet, the monks’ desire to stay in Algeria amidst rising tensions is largely inspired by their peaceful inhabitance, interaction, and solidarity with Muslims (the film offers a clear contrast between “Islam” and “Islamism”). What will it say of their ministry—their identities and witness as Christians—if they abandon the region?

The film’s drama, then, centers on the monks’ decision of whether to stay in Algeria in the face of almost-certain persecution. What could possibly motivate them to sacrifice themselves—even unto death? On the eve of Christmas, it’s the Incarnation of God in Christ—and its embodied imperative to love one another—that is a source of strength to the monks. In short, Of Gods and Men is powerful in its depiction of a Gethsemane-like situation—where, in the face of violent persecution, we are called to put our swords down, and in fear and trembling, focus in prayerful worship on the love of God. In so doing, we come to experience our new birth in Christ more and more vividly. -Nick Olson

1. Tree of Life
When discussing The Tree of Life, there’s much to talk about. For example, the film’s creation sequence (which condenses billions of years of cosmic, geological, and biological evolution into a mind-blowing 20 minutes), its dreamlike rendition of childhood and small-town life circa the 1950s, and its exploration of topics ranging from the mercurial nature of memory to theodicy. But whenever I reflect on Terrence Malick’s stunning film, I invariably come back to one thing: it’s exploration of fatherhood.

The film exists solidly within the shadow of the main character’s father, a man we know only as Mr. O’Brien (wonderfully played by Brad Pitt). And I was completely unprepared for the extent to which I, myself, became overshadowed by this character, and by the way the film explores his relationship, both good and bad, with his sons. But perhaps this will tell you something: My first impulse upon leaving the theatre was to rush home and hug my children.

Heading into The Tree of Life, I was prepared for gorgeous visuals, for heady (even pretentious) dialog stuffed with grandiose philosophical and theological musings, for a meandering, non-linear storyline. I was not, however, prepared for how the film would destroy me as a father, and how it would reveal to me the ways in which I so often fail as a father. I was left wondering about how I am shaping my children, and will continue to shape them; about the values and ideals that I’m planting in their little souls even now; and about the earliest memories they will have of me. In a word, The Tree of Life left me… shaken. -Jason Morehead

It is to Fincher’s credit that he captured a sort of atmospheric tension that made me feel, for much of the film, like Mikael did in this moment. Most alluring — and striking — about this paired sense of boundary and pain is the way in which Fincher depicts the Vanger family island with cold, deranged effect as a “locked room mystery” — a subgenre of detective fiction that I confess to be easily taken with. I felt a struggle between being drawn into this engrossing, enclosed-spatial sense of narrative, while at times regretting I had entered. This struggle embodies, I think, one of the film’s implicit themes: the appropriateness of boundaries, and the tie between the relational and the geographical.

The film opens with Mikael losing a libel case against a crooked businessman named Wennerström. Mikael seems eager to go after the corrupt elites. However, he’s also not afraid to use journalistic tactics that cross the line in order to achieve the desired end. As a snapshot of Mikael’s failed sense of boundaries, look no further than his marriage-ending lusty affair with his editor. His compromised state is only confirmed when he strikes a deal with Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) — the grandfather CEO of the family-owned industry — to obtain the necessary evidence to bring down Wennerström. For his end of the deal, Mikael will live on the Vanger family island while he tries to figure out who among them killed Henrik’s niece, Harriet, nearly forty years ago.

Aiding Mikael in this task is the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a motorcycle-riding tragic heroine whose edgy coolness derives primarily from her ability to subvert boundaries. She’s a genius hacker who can break into nearly any computer system. Coupled with a photographic memory and a general affinity for electronic gadgetry, Lisbeth’s ability to bypass or manipulate boundaries is the perfect complement to her equally adept ability to keep other people at arm’s length. She likes – needs – to have control of the contours of every situation.

But we quickly understand why: she’s a lifelong victim of sexual abuse and violence, made most evident in a grotesque scene where she is raped by her new guardian, Nils Bjurman. A ward of the state due to “mental incompetence,” Lisbeth has only known the pain of exploitative, enslaving boundaries. When she revenge-rapes Nils — or when she initiates sex with Mikael — it’s to take control of the situation of their relationship. One wonders if Fincher felt the need to include the viewer in the sense of violation with his prolonged, lingering imagery, or if it might have been effective enough if, for instance, the close-up on the closed door, with Lisbeth’s cries for help in the background, had been the lasting image. Perhaps the film relies too much on the extremes, gadgetry, and cool edginess to keep us involved in a story that offers little beneath the surface.

In one sense, I fear that Lisbeth is most emphatically depicted as a late-modern heroine in her subversion of boundaries. The question of whether or not Lisbeth should be celebrated or emulated is blurry at best thanks to her cool hacker appeal and powers. Yet, on the other hand, Lisbeth is a tragic heroine in Fincher’s film, for it is difficult to see her approach Mikael — the only man who actually seems to care about her — with a thoughtful gift, only to find him with his editor/mistress. The alienated hacker is looking for a sense of boundary that is infused with love instead of pain: she’s just looking for it from a man with can’t give it to her. Lisbeth, like Harriet, has made it over the bridge to safety from the Vanger’s island, and seems poised to devote her life to exacting revenge against corrupt boundary makers. But will she herself remain an island?

Cultural Vegetable of the Week: The Third Man
Vegetable Equivalent: Potatoes or some other easily obtained vegetable that can be distilled for the black market
Nutritional Value: A cinematographically gorgeous glimpse of post-war life and American disillusionment
Recommended Serving Size: In one sitting in Vienna itself, if you can manage it; if not, then via the gorgeous Criterion Collection print

Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) writes dime store westerns. In The Third Man (a title he suggests for his new novel), he finds himself, by turns, the hero and villain in another kind of Old West: the post-war ruins of Vienna, Austria. This west is not a promising frontier; rather it is literally the “old” west that World War II destroyed. It is the city turned into a desert. Martins stumbles through the ruins of a culture that makes the settings of his novels seem strikingly new.

The Third Man gives us two versions of America. One is the hapless Holly, a naïve tourist who has just enough conscience to feel bad after he’s bungled the job. The other is the titular third man, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), capitalism’s dark avatar. Lime sees Vienna’s war-torn environs as a market ripe for profit, and he makes his cash by stealing, diluting, and then reselling the city’s penicillin supply. It’s telling that the film was written and directed by Brits (Graham Greene and Carol Martin, respectively), and the chief British character, Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), comes out the best.

The war’s effects can be seen throughout the city: piles of rubble, an empty amusement park, military guards that stand at every street corner, and disabled vagrants littered across the city’s cobblestone. Until now, Martins has remained blissfully aloof, having managed to avoid fighting in the war. On its surface, Vienna tries to pretend like nothing ever happened. The same cultural events — operettas at the local theater, old dependable saloons — hint at Vienna’s pre-war glory. But the cinematography registers how phony this is. Canted frames pop up all over the place. We rarely get level shots of anyone, and the city only looks its best at night, with the water glistening on its stone streets and mysterious shoes echoing down the cavernous alleys. The city, and moral bearing of the film, looks superficially sound, like the hotel Martins stays at. But as we later discover, the back has been blown out of the whole operation.

The most famous bit of dialogue in the film is Harry Lime’s kiss-off to Holly:

“Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Welles delivers the lines with gusto and just a tad too much haste. The easily-persuaded Martins stands silently, unable to respond. The argument is an interesting microcosm of both Lime’s problems and Martins’ gullibility. Okay, so war generates artistic progress while peace encourages men to make dawdles. But does that mean Lime is Michelangelo? Hardly. He’s a selfish profiteer who leaves nothing but mangled bodies in his wake. He volunteered to act as patron for Martins, who is evidently an artistic lightweight. This world war produces the Louis L’Amour-esque The Oklahoma Kid, not the Sistine Chapel. Meanwhile, Martins wants to negotiate a personal settlement that won’t cost him anything. He will sell Harry out for a woman’s sake without reckoning that his betrayal will completely poison the woman’s affection for him. Martins tries to find a middle ground between Italy and Switzerland, but the war has exposed everyone’s neutrality as a farce. No one is innocent.

The film’s final shot jars against what has been mostly urban mise-en-scene and encapsulates the film’s main themes. The camera holds a long shot of a long road stretching from the graveyard back to town. Bare trees line both sides of the frame while leaves flitter across the screen. Martins smokes in the foreground, waiting for Anna (performed by the incredibly moving Valli), Harry’s girl and the woman Martins has fallen for. Without even batting an eyelash, Anna walks past Martins and out of the frame. Martins is alone. He has taken the life of his friend. His love remains unrequited. He has missed his plane back to America. Martins, the dime-store novelist, discovers that the world doesn’t suffer from a lack of villains. In fact, it has too many.

Mavis — a ghost author of a young adult fiction series — returns to her small hometown to rekindle a romance with her high school boyfriend, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson). She has only one minor obstacle standing in the way of her personal happiness and pursuit of true love: Buddy is married with kids. Mavis is convinced that Buddy is held captive in his roles as husband and father, and she is equally sure that he will be thrilled that she has come to set him free from this traditional, boring, and life-ending dilemma called “raising a family.”

Accompanying Mavis in her pursuit of Buddy is Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), the requisite ridiculed outcast (“ridicule” is an understatement) who is there to be a listening ear for Mavis. Matt is aware of her obliviousness, but, like his sister, he is also interested in garnering the popular girl’s attention. When Mavis is not taking advantage of opportunities to meet up with Buddy and failing to seduce him away from his wife, she is drinking heavily with “Matt-the-cripple,” hoping to feel better about her fleeting and ineffective high school popularity powers.

Mavis’s essential struggle is her fight to maintain a teenager’s no-strings-attached “freedom” (well, self-absorption disguised as freedom) and still find fulfillment. Reitman’s young adult is myopic to the point of exaggeration, and this contributes to the film’s tendency to overstate its ironies. Yet, Mavis’s over-the-top immaturity also makes for cringe-worthy comedic moments not unlike the Michael Scott variety of uncomfortable laughs in The Office.

While watching Mavis, I kept thinking about Arcade Fire’s song “Rococo.” She’s like one of the “modern kids”, only to Flannery O’Connor-style fictional extremes. Which is to say: Reitman’s young adult is highly ornamented, but severely lacking in substance or authenticity. Mavis moved to the big city to have a better life than the “hicks” she left behind, but our glimpses of Mavis’s “better life” includes a lot of Keeping Up with the Kardashians in her apartment. She proclaims herself a celebrated author, but actually ghost writes for a failing series of awful young adult fiction. She spends time presenting an attractive, put-together appearance, but nearly every personal environment we see her in is dirty. Her idea of love conquering all includes breaking up a marriage, a “thing” that she and Buddy can “beat together” like a cancer. When it is suggested that Buddy “has a life” that Mavis should not interfere with, she responds in exasperation with “no, he has a baby.” And when she is described as a “slut” in reference to her behavior in high school, Mavis thinks she was just being normal.

Thus, the worst part about Mavis’s degenerative behavior is the nearly complete delusion that she lives in. She has convinced herself that she is still the popular girl, still free in ways that others are not, and still progressing toward something that makes her superior to others. In reality, though, she is devolving, and nearly everyone recognizes it but her. When Mavis exposes herself in total humiliation and hate-filled angst at Buddy’s baby shower, it’s no surprise that she turns to Matt-the-cripple for validation in what is perhaps — at least in its grotesquerie — the most Flannery O’Connor-esque scene of all. Having a one-night stand with Matt allows Mavis to still be praised as the all-in-all of her own existence that she perceives herself to be. And her delusion is reinforced.

Yet, as long as she seeks fulfillment in exalting herself and avoiding significant responsibilities, Mavis will continue to pull out her superlative “best” hair. And so will we.

Cultural Vegetable of the Week: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Vegetable Equivalent: Bok choy, a vegetable that helps sharpen your memory
Nutritional Value: The film helps you remember to forget
Recommended Serving: All at once, preferably on an overcast afternoon

Joel (Jim Carrey) has broken up with Clementine (Kate Winslet). He discovers that she’s had a procedure performed to erase Joel from her memory — because, you know, you can do that. Impulsively, Joel demands the same procedure. The film documents the erasure and its aftermath.

Here are the film’s three intriguing paradoxes:

1. Scientists have discovered a way to erase memories, but only by means of alarmingly outdated technology. The doctors in the film use cassette tapes, the best Dell Laptops 1995 had to offer, and a jumble of wires and analog-looking voltage monitors. In every other respect, the film looks like it is set in 2004, yet the brain-scan headpiece looks like it came out of an 80s Five Boroughs hair salon. The procedure’s medical advancement jars against the equipment used to accomplish it.

2. Joel has to have already forgotten what he loves most about Clementine to choose to have the procedure done in the first place. That is, Joel experiences the erasure process not simply as loss but as recovery then loss. He paradoxically remembers what he loves most about Clementine even as he’s having his memories of her erased. This means his motivation to forget is that he has already forgotten.

3. From what we can tell, people are doomed to repeat the same mistakes even after they’ve had their memories erased. Clem and Joel are drawn to one another, destined to replay the emotional mixtape of fascination, happiness, boredom, frustration, and disgust they made together before they underwent the procedure.

The film’s title is an oxymoron too, a reference to the Alexander Pope poem “Eloisa to Abelard,” where the convented Eloisa writes:

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d…

The paradox Eloise articulates is that by forgetting the world, the vestal is able to have every prayer answered because the things she would want most are no longer in her memory. Her desires have been forgotten.

The film’s central problem is change. How do you change? You have a medical procedure performed on your brain, and yet you can’t shake free of your impulses. Apparently, the erasing process doesn’t go deep enough.

Lacuna Corp.’s philosophy, voiced by the young and impressionable Mary (Kirsten Dunst), is that babies are innocent while adults are just piles of neuroses and sadness. Lacuna’s fatal presupposition is that humanity isn’t already ideologically corrupted at birth. I use this film to talk to my students about ideology, the unknown knowns that orient our behavior in ways we’re never entirely cognizant of. Love operates that way in the film. Joel knows that Clem won’t complete him; she tells him as much. But he believes she will anyway. These characters are smart and appropriately cynical 21st century adults, yet they act like fools when emotions get involved. The film implies that there is something that the scanner can’t erase.

The delightfully contraption-esque quality of Lacuna’s equipment speaks to the gap between the reach of science and human nature.  The procedure puts a band-aid on a bullet wound.

As the movie ends, Joel and Clem stand in the hallway of Joel’s apartment. They’ve forgotten each other, met each other for the first time all over again, and have just heard their taped confessionals about why they broke up with each other in the first place. Once again, they’ll have to run the paradoxical gauntlet: they’ll have to forget the way the story ended the first time in order to give it a go, but if they completely forget what they’ve heard they’ll necessarily repeat the same mistakes. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking.

One last note: I absolutely adore Jon Brion’s theme for this film, which you can listen to here. It condenses all of the film’s bittersweet qualities into a three-minute bar-room waltz.

Of Gods and Men is based on the true story of a group of Trappist monks who left much behind to live modest, meditative lives in the Tibhirine monastery in Algeria — where they would eventually be martyred for their faith. The monks’ lives become threatened by Islamic terrorists in the war-torn region. And yet, somehow, their reaction to the terrorists is not one of disdain or hostility, and the film is quick to show a healthy, loving relationship between the monks and the non-extremist Muslims in the region. The film clearly distinguishes between “Islam” and “Islamism.” No, this film is not about an us-versus-them power struggle, and it’s certainly not out to promote xenophobic propaganda. So what motivates the monks to persevere in the face of almost-certain persecution? It is the most singular theme of the film: the Incarnation of God in Christ, and its embodied imperative to love one another.

The first time the terrorists break into the monastery is on Christmas Eve. Christian, the Abbot of the monastery, has a clear message for the terrorists in the face of gunpoint and potential capture or death: “tonight is different from other nights,” for tonight “[we] celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace – Sidna Aïssa [our Lord Jesus].” On this night, invoking the “Prince of Peace” seems disarming, if only momentarily, and the monks continue their evening with a heartened, hymn-filled celebration of Christ’s birth.

In one of the hymns, the monks sing together:

This is the night, the immense night of origins
And nothing exists except love
Except love which now begins
God has prepared the earth like a cradle
For his coming from above

Later, Christian reflects on their plight in relation to the celebration of Christ’s birth: “We welcomed that Child who was born for us, absolutely helpless, and already so threatened… We had to resist the violence. And day after day, I think each of us discovered that to which Jesus Christ beckons us. It’s to be born. Our identities as men go from one birth to another. And from birth to birth, we’ll end up bringing to the world the child of God that we are.”

The film depicts a Gethsemane-like situation for these monks who are seeking after Christ. Must they stay? Can this cup be removed from them? In their own strength, this work of love is a source of anguish for the monks. But, together in communal solidarity with one another, they grow more resolved in their willingness to love those that God has placed in their lives.

By virtue of its depiction of these monks embodying Christian love and fidelity, Of Gods and Men challenges Christian and secular viewers alike. Toward the end of Christian’s reflection, he comments that “the Incarnation, for us, is to allow the filial reality of Jesus to embody itself in our humanity.” And, indeed, this is the film’s most striking chord embodied in its quiet tone: we experience our new birth in Christ more and more fully — we learn the grandeur of being heirs with Him, together as sons of the Father — in sacrificing our lives in the pursuit of love, even love for our enemies. It’s a humbling — and sobering — message this Christmas. “God is with us” and “God is love,” so “take up your cross and follow [Him].”

Cultural Vegetable of the Week: Out of the Past (1947)

Vegetable Equivalent: Any vegetable that looks good in the chiaroscuro-lighting of film noir

Nutritional Value: Actions have consequences

Recommended Serving Size: In one sitting on a rainy evening, preferably with a trench-coat and fedora handy

Kathie: “Is there a way to win?”

Jeff: “Well, there’s a way to lose more slowly.”

Every film noir has its unofficial motto. The above exchange works for Out of the Past, Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 detective flick. In film noir, you never win; you just try to stave off losing.

The film contrasts city and country life, the corruption that comes with the urban environment and the absolution offered by nature. But once you go to the city, you never really leave it. And this movie gives you plenty of reasons to leave it.

Tourneur opens the film with gorgeous panoramic shots of the Western mountains. Tahoe and other bodies of water shimmer against expansive landscapes and endless sky, all in glorious black and white. The film lends these locales further reality by shooting them on location, providing a stark contrast to the urban scenes that are all shot in dingy interiors, places that are even phonier because they’re compartments on an RKO set.

Robert Mitchum’s Jeff is one of noir’s best protagonists. He smokes like a chimney, “stays inside himself,” and manages to be the most interesting man in whatever room he’s in. He’s self-aware. His cool, laconic style contrasts sharply with the firebrand energy of Kirk Douglas, appearing here in only his second film. Douglas’s Whit, a big-time gambler, is the past that Jeff can’t keep away. In the noir universe, you don’t get mulligans for your mistakes.

But the men are only one half of the film’s equation. The film’s two women, the femme fatale and femme bonne, are featured prominently on its poster. The woman adorned with a skimpy negligee and dangling pistol is Kathie, the dangerous woman from Jeff’s past. We can read the effects of her threatening appeal in Mitchum’s disembodied head, his face looking as though it has been exposed to the sun, melted slightly, and then congealed. At the bottom of the poster we see a shot of Jeff with Ann, a blonde-haired country girl who loves the mysterious Jeff without knowing anything about his past. That relationship’s fate? Let’s just say there’s a reason it’s been relegated to the bottom of the poster.

Leonard Eels, an attorney who like Jeff has crossed Whit, says, “Women are the 8th wonder of the world because they all reduce men to the obvious.”  In this film, women reduce men to their little eels. Every prominent male character is in love with a woman beyond reason. Eels falls for his duplicitous secretary. Whit and Jeff both fell for Kathie, a woman who stole $40,000 right after she put bullets in her beau. And Jeff and Jim, a local law enforcement agent, are dueling over Ann, who Jim says he’s loved since he fixed her roller skates.

There’s some sort of primordial past that keeps calling to these characters — not just the histories of specific individuals, but some sort of ur-narrative that lingers over or lies beneath the noir universe. We could call it the Fall, a sort of intuitive recognition that paradise, somehow and someway, has been lost. Confronted with a bleak post-war world, the best these characters can hope for is to lose more slowly. The best noirs come up with inventive ways to postpone the inevitable. Out of the Past is one of them.

Looking back, the most annoying scene from the preview for The Descendants may have embodied what, for me, made Payne’s film so underwhelming. The trailer’s most memorable scene is when Matt King’s (George Clooney) father-in-law, Scott Thorson (Robert Forster), announces to family friend tag-a-long Sid (Nick Krause), “I’m going to punch you,” and then follows through. Which is to say: The film’s comedic elements felt contrived, thereby diminishing the effectiveness of what could have been compelling drama.

This is not to say that Payne’s film doesn’t have its moments. Presumably, The Descendants is about the responsibility Matt has to cultivate a better future for his daughters by being a more available father. He is hit harshly by the realization that he is not just a steward of monetary and proprietary resources; after a tragic boating accident leaves his wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), on life support, Matt begins reflecting on how he is also a steward of the relationships he has been given. In this way — much like 50/50 – The Descendants is about how it often takes a tragic jolt to the senses to re-calibrate our debt of gratitude to others, particularly loved ones.

In the tragedy’s aftermath, we learn along with Matt that his wife was having an affair with a real estate salesman named Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard). With his wife days from death, Matt recognizes acutely what their poor marriage has cultivated in their children. His 17-year-old daughter is so out of line that she had to be sent to boarding school where she is an embittered, drunken, and foul-mouthed mess, and his 10-year-old daughter insults her classmates and has a propensity for passing around a one-fingered obscenity. Given a dying mother leaving behind a dying marriage, the girls are beset with insecurities.

Part of the reason, then, why The Descendants was disappointing and unaffecting for me is that the focus of the film shifts away from this primary narrative about Matt’s responsibility to his daughters. The film’s second half focuses almost entirely on Matt’s quest to confront Speer, and then Payne attempts to connect this quest to Matt’s decision to sell or keep the land that has been passed down to him by his Hawaiian ancestors. The problem is not so much that these two elements of Payne’s story could not have connected well with Matt’s responsibility as a father. Rather, it is that they are not supplemented well enough by this primary problem, and, thus, they ultimately fail to provoke emotional resonance.

Rather than confront the underlying reasons for Matt’s family being like “separate islands,” the second half of the film feels exaggerated in its focus on he and his eldest daughter’s (Shailene Woodley) comedic quest to track down Elizabeth’s lover. And the result is an (anti) climactic scene in which Matt and Speer’s wife confront a comatose Elizabeth in the hospital — a scene that felt like a failure because it left me unsure whether it was trying to make me laugh or cry; the failure, of course, is reflected in that I was even thinking about what it was trying to do.

Near the end of the film is a scene that was visually arresting, but that I didn’t feel invested in at all. As Matt and his daughters overlook the beautiful land that their family has owned for generations, they reflect on memories they’ve shared in the past and memories they still want to make together as a family moving forward. But by this point, I’m too busy thinking about the film’s downward spiral to think about the stewardship involved in ancestral proceedings.

Cultural Vegetable of the Week: Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Vegetable Equivalent: Beans, the musical vegetable

Nutritional Value: Recognizing emotional authenticity in the midst of artifice

Recommended Serving Size: All at once, preferably while you’re cozily sitting at home; bonus points if it’s raining outside

“Dignity. Always dignity.” ~ Don Lockwood, the movie’s protagonist

Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) has not always been so dignified. At the premiere of his new film, Don talks to his adoring fans about his privileged childhood and education. But it all jars humorously against the film’s flashbacks of Don dancing in bars, sneaking into tawdry movies, hoofing it in middle-of-nowhere burgs, and riding motorcycles off cliffs. He’s a working class boy who made good because of his body, and he’s sensitive about his humble beginnings. The silent movies — with their pantomime and empty show — have only made him feel more like a phony.

In this movie, dignity equals an authentic and unified body and voice. When those two things get separated, you lose face.

As a result, Singin’ in the Rain’s tone is deeply ironic: We’re constantly seeing a gap between what is said and what is meant, or between what is heard and what is seen. Fortunately, this is a formula for great comedy. Irony can be very, very funny.

But the film wants to have a heart too. Does it get to have it have it both ways?

Don’s problems are Hollywood’s problems. Hollywood wants to traffic in authenticity and realism. The film takes place right as Hollywood films are transitioning to sound, and the implication is that since real people talk, Hollywood needs to replicate that reality. But the “realism” of movie sound is just as manufactured as the stilted acting of silent films. Monumental Pictures’ first foray into talkies includes a lead actress whose voice is not her own. You can still fake sound, and as a result, films still sound fake.

Hollywood uses illusions that have a whiff of truth. There’s the romance between Don and Lena that’s a bunch of hooey. There are the numerous doubles that do all the risky stunts for their far more famous counterparts. And then there’s the gross disparity between the real-life actors and the onscreen roles they play.

But Singin’ in the Rain admits all this. That’s what so glorious about it. The film revels in its own artificiality. This is, after all, a musical, that most fantastic of all non-fantasy genres. People spontaneously break into song and find orchestral accompaniment with nary an oboe in sight. In fact, the movie’s title comes from the ability to maintain an ironic distance from the world. ”It may be raining outside,” the title song implies, “but it’s sunny in my heart!”

This impulse for authenticity within illusion is most clearly seen in Don’s declaration of love to Kathy (Debbie Reynolds). He admits that he’s “too much of a ham” to say the proper words out in the open, so he has to set the appropriate scene in a bare studio. It’s all so horribly fake: the moonlight, the breeze, the stars, the bower. And yet Don sings his heart out before he and Kathy break into synchronous dance. There’s real emotion there.

Only in the movies.

Correctly discerning the gap between what we see and what we feel: That’s where we find dignity. It doesn’t just come from a unified body and voice. It can come from copping to the disconnect between the two. It’s something Lena (Jean Hagen) never admits, and as a result, she becomes the classic comedic scapegoat. Don admits that he’s not the man in real life that he is onscreen, and it lands him his girl. It took the singularly unreal world of film for Don to discover who he really was. As “The End” flashes on screen, it’s no longer raining outside. The ironic disjunction between appearance and reality has evaporated in the noonday sun.

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Best Family Movie of the Year: The Muppets — Erin Newcomb

When Erin Straza approached me about nominating the best family film, I knew my criteria right away: The movie had to be intelligent for adults, musical to engage children of all ages, and void of too many intense plot points that might read as scary for younger viewers. Of course, the acting, storyline, and musical numbers also need to be high quality. The Muppets, starring Jason Segel, Amy Adams, and the whole lovable cast of original Muppets (plus newcomer Walter) makes a strong showing for the finest family film of the year. My two caveats center on the rating and the plot. The film is rated PG, with a lot of physical, comedic violence that small children might find scary (I’d recommend this movie for 7+ depending on the child). As for the plot, my feeling is that children will find it more entertaining and engaging if they’ve been introduced to the Muppets first at home, since much of the story relies on already knowing and loving the characters. Those qualifiers aside, I found the film delightfully refreshing.

The premise focuses on the Muppets’ comeback to save their studio — and the lingering question of their current cultural relevance. By the film’s conclusion, both the studio and the Muppets’ popularity are restored. Along the way, Segel treats viewers to an endearingly goofy performance, complete with all his Freaks and Geeks charm sans the pot. His song “Man or Muppet” encapsulates the film’s magical silliness. Parents will appreciate the nostalgia trip to the Muppets’ heyday through pop culture references (like the celebrities Kermit unsuccessfully tries to enlist — Jimmy Carter and Molly Ringwald) and the movie’s meta-awareness. Children will adore the slapstick and the whole range of nutty Muppet personalities. Add these characteristics to the slew of self-aware song-and-dance numbers that keep all the audience members smiling and tapping their toes, and this film seems like a frontrunner for family film of the year.

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Best Most Ridiculous Meme — Kirk Bozeman

In 2011, “Planking” was a pretty strange meme in itself. But Planking’s attempted (and, thankfully, less dangerous) spinoffs were even weirder: including Batmanning, Tebowing, and… Horsemanning?

Unlike most other photo-posing fads, horsemanning is a team sport. Take a picture of yourself and a buddy posed so that it appears one of you is headless and the other is the missing head. (You know, like the Headless Horseman in The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow. Get it?)

It never really caught on, probably because it’s just plain creepy. But the strangest thing about horsemanning is that it isn’t something new. All related sites are quick to point out that it was a photo fad in the 1920s. Yep — the 20s. Check the family photo album pic, you may have missed the pic of the great-grandparents attempting to horseman.

Horsemanning is the most ridiculous meme of 2011 because it was both way too creepy to catch on and also an attempted revival of a genuine historical artifact that was too creepy to stick around. How many memes can claim all that?

Cultural Vegetable of the Week: Citizen Kane

Vegetable Equivalent: The vegetable you loved as a child but through a cruel twist of digestive fate can now no longer consume

Nutritional Value: America encapsulated in one gloriously conflicted tycoon; the responsibility of interpretation

Recommended Serving Size: The entire film, viewed in one sitting and without commercial interruption

Citizen Kane is a litmus test.

Watch Kane to figure out what you think about film. Do you believe that cinema is an essentially artistic medium? Here is the best film of all time (as voted by scores of high and lowbrow critics). Do you believe that cinema is essentially entertainment and that film critics are selling the public a bill of goods?  Here is what film snobs say is the best film ever made. Confirm your suspicions that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

One basic criticism of the film is that it offers more style than substance, which is to say that the film stylistically mirrors the traits of its protagonist. Charles Foster Kane is heavy on talk and light on kept promises. To critics, the film uses cinematic tricks to cover over its weak plot.

But let’s be generous. Let’s say the film has anticipated our critique by making its own artistic and stylistic features into the equivalent of Kane’s personal and political rhetoric.

The film famously had the working title, The American, and in the film’s early tour-de-force “News on the March,” Kane tells a reporter that he’s always been an American. So, let’s work with the assumption that the film says something essential about being an American.

On the one hand, Kane is a trust fund millionaire afflicted with liberal guilt on account of his own wealth. He didn’t really earn his money. He never actually makes investments. He isn’t interested in money qua money. He imagines that he must have committed some sin to have received the cash he’s gotten, and he tries to find different ways of paying that debt off. On the other hand, he’s a conservative wolf who dresses himself in the sheep’s clothing of reform in order to feast on the populace lambs. He targets his own enemies, not those of the people. If his targets happen to afflict the public, so much the better, but his pursuits are never altruistic.

We see this tension played out today in competing visions of America. Is this a great land that has simply never fulfilled its promises of freedom and equality? Or is it a den of thieves that has always used the rhetoric of freedom as a cover for political oppression and personal greed?

Kane’s guardian Thatcher labels him a communist. Another critic labels him a fascist. The latter is closer to the truth, which says something interesting about America.

Remember that fascism is national socialism that retains private property. And there is no bigger champion of private property than Kane. The opening shot of the film is a “No Trespassing” sign. Kane’s fortune comes from a deed foreclosure, where property is used to pay off debt to Kane’s mother. But Kane keeps talking about the “working man” and the slums, offering socialist programs for the underprivileged.

So America is a mass of contradictions. Big deal. Where’s the symbolic profundity in that?

It’s in the film’s numerous assurances that this all simultaneously means everything or nothing.

Look how the film turns the reporter sent to investigate Kane into a cipher hidden in the shadows and pushed into the corners of the frame. If I’m honest, I’m not Kane. I’m the reporter. Kane’s waste of his prodigious talent and resources does not indict me. The reporter’s rote questions and empty research do. I am the faceless wage slave performing someone else’s grunt work. I’m writing text for a magazine that specializes in photos. I can’t find the one thing I’ve been assigned to find. I leave the room right before the answer is revealed.

I need somebody to tell me the answers.

The tragedy is not that “Rosebud,” and by extension Kane’s life, is meaningless. It’s that the word is too loaded with significance, too meaningful, so that when I misinterpret it or refuse to interpret it, I am lost.

Have you ever wondered — dreamed — about what prehistoric humanity was like? Our popular culture has had plenty of imaginative representations of the Paleolithic man, be it Fred Flintstone or, more recently, Year One. In most cases, the running joke is the doltish ineptitude of the Neanderthals in comparison to evolved modern man (i.e., “so easy a caveman can do it”). But in acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog’s latest breathtaking documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, we are invited to explore the Chauvet Cave in southern France, which contains what is believed to be the earliest known cave paintings yet to be discovered. Herzog becomes our winsome guide to the world’s oldest known art display.

Scientists are saying that around 30,000 years ago, a man used some coloring of a sort to handprint the wall multiple times. The handprints are accompanied by countless drawings, though we’re unsure if the handprints and the drawings are from the same artist. If the archaeological estimates are correct, then the images would be twice the age of the previous oldest artwork. The apparent age of the cave’s art is stunning, adding an element of awe and mystery to our touristic interest in the documentary. It’s as if given an even more ancient ancestral origin, we might better understand ourselves. Herzog’s film, in this sense, is a kind of vehicle of discovery through ancient-historical anthropology.

What’s most thrilling, then, about what we discover in Chauvet Cave is that uniquely and essentially human capacity for imaginative expression. Interestingly, the images in the cave — which consist of bears, horses, panthers, and other wild creatures — display plenty of elements that support specific forms of communication and interpretation. In other words, they are not merely replications of the animals themselves. There are depictions of aggression, allusions to movement and animation, and an awareness of sexuality and reproduction.

In short, our paleolithic ancestors were creators. There was some sense of artistic cultivation in the land before time.

In a compelling interview toward the end of the documentary, one of the professional researchers comments:

Humans have been described in many ways… for a while it was “homo sapiens” — “the man who knows” — I don’t think it’s a good definition at all… we don’t know much. I would think “homo spiritualis.”

Given the nature of Chauvet Cave’s artifacts, it seems evident as to why he might say that humankind is more defined by spirituality. It is characteristic of sentient beings to have a perceiving self-awareness or self-consciousness. And, further, it seems equally evident that what we human creatures have been most aware of throughout the ages is that all surrounds us inspires a sense of awe, of worship.

In what seems like a follow up to this point, Herzog later asks the same scholar two penetrating questions: “Do you think that the paintings in the Chauvet Cave were somehow the beginnings of the modern human soul? What constitutes humanness?” The scholar responds:

Humanness is a very good adaptation within the world. Man’s society… needs to [adapt] to the landscape, to the other beings, to the animals, to other human groups… and to communicate something. To communicate and inscribe [their memories] on very specific and odd things like walls, like pieces of wool, like bones… This is the invention of communion… but with the invention of the “figuration,”… it is a way of communication between humans with the future, to advocate the past, to transmit information that is better than [basic oral communication].

What of this “communion” among humanity through creative artifacts? If in the act of creation there is a signal of union, what could be the tie that binds humanity but a Creator?

Patrick’s god-like seduction of Martha begins when he suggests that she “looks like a Marcy May.” From then on, Martha is Marcy — and Marcy is effectively Patrick’s. At first glance, the cult seems attractive to Martha in its resistance of the consumerist tendencies that capitalism can enourage. Rather than celebrate the self-reliance in modern society, Patrick’s cult emphasizes trust, interdependence, giving of one’s self, sharing, and resisting self-indulgence. But while these virtues are attractive on the surface, Patrick’s underlying motivations are sinister. An initial rape that Martha endures from Patrick is termed a “cleansing”; sexual abuse is cast as the women being willing to “share themselves” openly; “respect” means the women waiting for the men to finish eating before they can eat; and “trust” is considered obeying Patrick unquestioningly.

As she struggles to reorient herself to social norms and freedom while living with her sister and brother-in-law, Martha is beset with paranoia. Her sense of self is dramatically wounded, and the stress induced by this wound is pressing. It’s as if she is still under the control of Patrick and his cult. Subjecting herself to an aspiring god like Patrick has not offered Martha direction, fulfillment, or flourishing. Rather, it has rendered Martha lost to herself and others, empty, and dilapidated. Sean Durkin offers nuance in his film by suggesting that the content of modern society’s “freeing” conditions can be just as manipulative or cult-like, but he also avoids any temptation to equate the problems between life within Patrick’s cult and life outside it. Martha’s sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), and brother-in-law, Ted (Hugh Dancy), genuinely want to help Martha retrieve herself whereas Patrick genuinely wants to distort Martha and have his way with her.

Patrick’s gentle offerings and false sense of providence seem like a fountain of life to the vulnerable, even as his ways are evidently deadly to the onlooking outsider. This is the nature of cults — a concentrated form of deception that says one can find freedom in its controls. But rather than offering boundaries that create flourishing, cults demand boundaries that entangle. The twisted nature of Patrick’s musings are perhaps nowhere more self-evident than when he tells Marcy May that death is the most beautiful part of life. It creates a fear — a fully-present awareness that is the source of pure love. “Death is pure love,” he casually concludes. Having submitted herself to “fearing” Patrick, Martha is anything but fully aware. Instead, she is lost under his control even after her escape — to the point of delusion.

The resulting chasm between Martha and Marcy May — between who she was created to be and who Patrick has fashioned her to be — is caused by the seductive intentions of Mr. Death (to borrow an Updikean nickname). And only an authority which is the Source of Life can restore Martha. Only by finding herself in this Source can she be someone other than “Marlene” to the outside world, find her bearings, and be Martha again.

I’m invested in this topic. I wrote about Macbeth for my dissertation, have delivered conference papers on Shakespeare’s sonnets and All’s Well that Ends Well, and even teach my university’s Shakespeare course. After surveying the debate, however, I’m convinced that this authorial kerfuffle is not important for anything it tells us about Shakespeare. The stakes are pretty low. We’re interested in the man because of the plays, not the plays because of the man. The dirty secret is that if we had waited for a biographical incentive to read the plays, we would have never done so: You could list all of the empirical evidence for Shakespeare the man on a few pages. What is important is that the debate provides a benign way of diagnosing our own response to a “conspiracy,” regardless of whether it’s about the Bard or not.

Why should Christians pay attention when someone asks, “Who was Shakespeare?” Because even if you don’t adhere to this particular conspiracy, it’s crucial to know what it would take to get you to buy in to any such position. For the sake of this piece, I’ll define a conspiracy as a hypothesis about events that directly contradicts the establishment’s account, i.e., “the account that gets included in the most popular textbooks” (for example, the numerous theories surrounding the moon landing). Occasionally conspiracy theories become establishment theories (read Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men for the story of how people initially reacted when the pair started investigating Watergate). Conspiracies are first and foremost about knowledge: whose authority we trust and what that authority says. They are fueled by the impulse that there is something in addition to what we’ve been told — something that has not yet been accounted for — that can help better explain the world around us. In short, conspiracies are deeply religious.

Conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen, and the flooded market can’t support them all. Anonymous hits theaters at a cultural moment when interest in Shakespeare’s biography is particularly high, however, and that means the conspiracy theories concerning his authorship have boomed accordingly. The arts and opinion pages of the nation’s biggest newspapers — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal — and magazines both print (The Atlantic) and online (Slate) have spilled a lot of ink on the issue over the past month. Major book publishers like Simon & Schuster and Random House have released multiple Shakespeare biographies in the last decade, most of them written by high-powered academics better known by members of English departments than the wider public. Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) and Jonathan Bate’s Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of Shakespeare (2009) are just two examples. James Shapiro, the professor of Early Modern English literature at Columbia University, just this past year published the most thorough Stratfordian defense yet titled Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

The anti-Stratfordians, by contrast, have used the democracy of the Web to their advantage. The Wikipedia entry for “Shakespeare authorship question” features over 230 citations, nearly six pages of references, and a hefty paragraph of “sources and contributors.” More biased sites, such as the official Web site of the Shakespeare-Oxford Society, make public a lengthy list of Stratfordian skeptics. Emmerich’s film simply represents a “mainstream” manifestation of this impulse to question Shakespeare: Two weeks ago, Anonymous screenwriter John Orloff was given a venue in the weekend Wall Street Journal to defend both his anti-Stratfordian stance and his decision to fudge some of the facts in the interest of art.

The debate features a structural irony. If you are an academic and hold the anti-Stratfordian position, you are a pariah. The academic establishment — the people paid to teach and write about Shakespeare — thinks the anti-Stradfordian position is bunk. Thus, the polemical anti-Stratfordian position is a populist one, championed by people outside the hallowed halls of academe. The irony is that both sides support their stance with inverted arguments about class. Most anti-Stratfordians maintain that the low-born Shakespeare could never have learned or lived enough to write the things he wrote. The establishment then responds that the populists are secretly elitist, for who is to say that the meagerly educated Shakespeare could not have imaginatively concocted the worlds of his plays? The debate also foregrounds issues of proof. Each side routinely points to the other’s lack of evidence. For example, anti-Stratfordians point out that Shakespeare’s will says nothing about books or papers. Stratfordians reply that none of Shakespeare’s contemporaries give the slightest hint that the actor William Shakespeare was just a front for the real writer of the plays and poems that bear his name.

Because this controversy can often feel like it is being told by idiots full of “sound and fury, signifying nothing,” it’s difficult to determine what’s at stake if either side wins. English curriculum won’t change. Shakespeare is, as Harold Bloom contended in his book of the same name, “the western canon.” Polemicists on both sides, however, provide some reasons to pay attention to the structure of such debates. Here, the Stratfordians have led with their pens. Writing on the issue of giving the anti-Stratfordian position equal time in the classroom, Stephen Greenblatt responds with the rhetorical question, “Should claims that the Holocaust did not occur also be made part of the standard curriculum?” While not as polemical in his approach, Stephen Marche moves seamlessly in his recent New York Times op-ed from criticizing skeptics who doubt Shakespeare’s authorship to indicting a larger cultural trend with Rick Perry’s skepticism about climate change as his chief example. Slate writer Ron Rosenbaum even name-checked creationists and birthers in his piece on why he hates Anonymous. Conspiracy is an easy label to apply to any position that isn’t widely accepted, and when you label someone a “conspiracy theorist,” you poison the rhetorical well.

The ideal of “complete knowledge” is a flawed one. Only God is omniscient. Interpretation consequently begins not after all the evidence has come in but with the actual selection of evidence. It’s not just putting the puzzle together: It’s knowing what counts as a puzzle piece. Here, then, are five biblically influenced questions you can ask when confronted with a conspiracy theory to help determine what your response should be.

1. “Says who?” — All conspiracies start with a question of authority. God created the world, and sin-scarred men and women try to suppress that fact (cf. Psalm 2:1, Romans 1:21). The most obsessed conspiracy theorists assign to their particular fixation something only God possesses: sovereignty. Start by evaluating 1) the person presenting the conspiratorial news and 2) who that person puts trust in.
2. “What’s your evidence?” — What counts as proof? Things you can see? Statistical reports from particular agencies? Thick footnotes? Remember that an appeal to evidence always contains an implicit appeal to authority. In The Gospel of Luke, the rich man asks Abraham that his family receive a warning from the resurrected Lazarus. Abraham’s response is chilling: “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (16:31). You should know what proof you ultimately trust. Beware of deploying the skeptical “if only,” as in, “If only I could could see X, then I would believe.” If you don’t know what constitutes positive proof, you will explain away even “convincing” evidence.
3. “Compared to what?” — Conspiracies are always package deals. What are the implications of buying into the theory? Pay particular attention to other theories that both the establishment and the conspiracy theorist lump in with the issue at hand. You may not know how you feel about Shakespeare’s authorship, but if its challenger likens it to the conspiracy to disavow a flat earth, you may have your answer by default.
4. “What are the stakes?” — Causality exists. “Be not deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows” (Galatians 6:7; emphasis mine). Ideas have consequences. Follow an idea through to its logical conclusion. People act in their own best interests. Determine who benefits from the theory and how.
5. “What do I know for sure?” — What are your bedrock beliefs? What are the things you no longer need to be convinced of, that you take as a given any time you process new information? Radical skepticism is self-defeating. Paul tells the Corinthians that he determined to know nothing while he was with them “except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). That’s where true Christian thought starts.

Conspiracy is not just something that hovers above Shakespeare’s plays: It’s often a theme within them. As dramatic vehicles, Shakespeare’s conspiracies are not theories propounded over beers at the local tavern but political plots designed to overthrow rulers. In Julius Caesar, for instance, head conspirator Brutus asks where conspiracy can “find a cavern dark enough to mask its monstrous visage.”

When you confront a conspiracy theory, use the above questions to shine some light into your epistemologically dark cave. Get Conspiracy to show its face. In short, make it less Anonymous.

High-brow Cultural Vegetable of the Week: Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

Vegetable Equivalent: Any vegetable that requires migrant workers to help harvest it

Nutritional Value: Helps metabolize the cell walls in your physical and spiritual eyes

Recommended Serving Size: Watch in one, commercial free sitting; for maximum effect, pregame by listening to Alexander Scourby’s reading of The Book of Ruth while looking at an Andrew Wyeth painting

“I met this guy named Ding Dong. He told me the whole earth is goin’ up in flames. Flames will come out of here and there, and they’ll just rise up. The mountains are gonna go up in big flames. The water’s gonna rise in flames… See the people that have been good are gonna go to heaven and escape all that fire. But if you’ve been bad, God don’t even hear you. He don’t even hear you talkin’.”

This apocalyptic narration from Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven does not complement images of a blood-red moon or prairie holocaust. Instead, Malick deploys it over the faces of smiling migrant workers as they ride a train out into Texas’s glistening wheat fields. The life these workers lead is a tough one, but the visuals connote a gospel parable more than a prophetic vision. And our narrator is not one of the train’s grizzled seniors or poor, beautiful adults. She is a child who has accompanied her brother, Bill (a young Richard Gere), and his lover out to the Texas panhandle. Though Bill hails from Chicago, this narrator (Linda Manz) sounds like she’s from Jersey. And her tiny, but tough voice adds a lyrical counterpoint to Malick’s epic images.

The story is rich with biblical symbolism. Bill and his lover, Abby, tell their harvesting compatriots they are brother and sister, much like Abraham and Sarah. The wheat baron (a young Sam Shepard) falls in love with and woos Abby, much like the story of Boaz and Ruth. And most obviously, an Egyptian-esque plague of locusts descends on the baron’s field and hastens the film’s fatal showdown. The Bible is littered with stories and images of wheat-gathering, and Malick relies upon the dim sense that what we’re watching has allegorical import to help hold this fragmentary and emotionally enigmatic story together.

When you watch this film, you keep falling back on particulars because its scope seems so grand. You think things like: “God allowed train trestles to exist so Terrence Malick could film them” or “Ennio Morricone’s score is the musical equivalent of a sepia-toned photograph.” And while Malick’s last three features – The Thin Red Line, The New World, and Tree of Life – each exceed 150 minutes, Days of Heaven clocks in at a scant hour-and-a-half.

Since the film seems to beckon its viewer toward something larger, I’ll venture a guess at its meaning. The film begins and ends in the industrialized city. Bill opens the film by working in a Chicago mill. In one of the film’s last scenes, Abby skirts automobile traffic on her way to the train station. In between, the film is pictorially pastoral. It is there, on the open wheat fields, where men and women see nature and, by extension, God. These are their days of heaven. But those days are few. Heaven is fleeting. Because heaven on earth is transient, we are tempted to spend the few hours we have with it fretting. But Malick’s images won’t let us forget the world’s beauty, even if we know that it could go up in flames any second.

Paul Kemp (Depp) is a nomadic journalist looking to solidify his life when he arrives in the Caribbean to write for a second-rate newspaper. Everyone around Kemp seems a mess for one reason or another: his colleagues are laughably incompetent and regularly drunk; his fellow American expatriates living in Puerto Rico are pursuing illegal, greed-driven property gains; and he notices a beleaguered class of island people who are being defrauded so that egoistic elites like Sanderson can thrive. Yet, none of these three strands quite come together in any compelling way.

Perhaps this is because they seem secondary to Kemp’s relatively inconsequential conundrum: a lusty desire for the mysterious and attractive Chenault (Amber Heard), who is the girlfriend of Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), the leading American exploiter of the island. Sanderson has his eye on Kemp because he hopes that some postitve journalism will propel his shady business ambitions. But Kemp has his eye on Chenault from the time she catches him off-guard on a late-night swim. Much of the film centers on the sexual tension between the two wandering souls. Yet, because the nature of their flirtatious relationship is mostly a playful jaunt, the film, too, struggles to maintain any focused purpose, and the rest of Diary‘s narrative threads suffer the consequences.

The film seems almost desperate to say something profound about the American Dream as a veneer covering the reality of the perpetrated evils that are necessary for the Dream to exist. This desperation is nowhere more evident than in Diary‘s overtly scripted antagonists. Sanderson is mostly a bore, uninteresting because his greed and maniacal temperament are so obvious (though Eckhart does the best he can with what he has to work with), while the pack of Americans following his lead are borderline-caricature conservatives. Most detracting from the film’s more serious aims, however, is its protagonist. Kemp seems less concerned with betraying Sanderson’s interest in using his journalistic sway than he is with stealing his voluptuous girlfriend.

So when the seemingly never-ending film finally comes to a close — after all of the thrills, drinking, one-liners, and sexual tension have happened almost haphazardly — the supposed journalistic resolve that Kemp has to spend his life ensuring “the bastards got what was coming to them” feels empty and unaffecting. And it’s not just that the film doesn’t provoke concern through its narrative (it doesn’t), it’s also that we’re not even sure Kemp has the journalistic perception necessary to know who the “bastards” are. His seemingly urgent declaration is incongruous with the oft-distracted meandering that precedes it. Ultimately, Kemp’s supposed newfound purpose feels like more of a façade than the American Dream.

There’s too much rum involved in Kemp’s diary-recorded search for stability for us to take seriously any “voice” that he may have found.

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Best Use of 3D in a Film: Cave of Forgotten Dreams — Richard Clark
3D film and a documentary about a cave: It’s pretty difficult to defend the existence of either of these things, but seeing is believing in this lone case. Werner Herzog, the master of suggestive, subjective documentary film making finds his latest muse in the Chauvet caves of Southern France. These caves contain some of the earliest known forms of artistic expression, and at first glance, it’s nothing spectacular. We’ve seen cave paintings before: Guys stabbing animals, running from animals, worshiping animals . . . animals being animals and cave guys being cave guys. Traditionally, people think of these paintings primarily as ways to study previous civilizations and gain spotty, speculative knowledge about their experience. What’s the point of spending a whole movie focused on more of the same?

But this is far beyond more of the same. The third dimension provides us with an opportunity to view the paintings as they were meant to be viewed: on the curves, the crevices, and the slopes of the cave walls. We see how the paintings played with depth, angles, and how they interact with light. Warner does spend some time talking about the ancient civilization that created these paintings, but spends even more time gazing at them in wonder. A significant portion of the film is spent in silent observation of still images that dance, mingle, and interact as the camera pans across them. What justifies this film’s existence is that it’s not a historical excavation as much as it is an appreciation of the artistic experience — something that is apparently as ancient as man himself.

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Best Album I Couldn’t Write To: tUnEyArD’s, WHOKILL — Jonathan Sircy
When you pop in the second tUnE-yArD’s album, WHOKILL, it’s hard to do anything but listen. You get the sense that Merrill Garbus is already multitasking enough for the both of you. The album demands you acknowledge it. The music is so dense and frenetic that if you have it on as background music, it will make you feel like you’re watching a movie that’s slightly out of focus. Once I took the time to hone in on the music, the image suddenly became clear.

Garbus plays her ukelele with abandon. She has an unbelievably dexterous voice that goes from supple to gritty in a heartbeat; its only limit is Garbus’s imagination. And it’s not just the instrument here. Garbus has things to say. The album’s lyrics are introspective but not myopic. She’s trying to figure out how to live in America in 2011, with all the white-liberal-guilt and body-shame and personal heartbreak that can include. And, oh yeah. The answer to the album’s titular question? That would be one Nate Brenner, the bassist, who absolutely kills it on this album (particularly on “Gangsta,” “Bizness,” and “Doorstep”).

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Best Worst Song Remake in a TV Spot: “Poop! There It Is!” — Erin Straza
Old songs never die — they simply become the inspiration for atrocious advertising jingles. Take the 1993 classic by Tag Team, “Whoomp! There It Is!” Luvs took that song and abused it further by renaming it, “Poop! There It Is!” The (thankfully) animated spot depicts babies competing in the Heavy Dooty Championship. All three competitors turn their little bums to the cheering crowd and give the Luvs diapers (with Ultra Leakguards) all they’ve got.

It’s no wonder this little gem-of-a-spot has been awarded the Worst Ad in America for 2011 by those polled through the Consumerist. The worst part about the use of Tag Team’s tune is that it gets stuck in your brain. I realize that is the goal of a good jingle. Recall-wise, this ad may be a marketing success. But taste-wise, the song is a total fail. No one wants a jingle about poop stuck in on the brain.

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Best Use of Violence in a Game: Shadow of the Colossus — Drew Dixon
I’ve been thinking a lot about videogame violence this year:  how games tend to cheapen it and how it could actually be meaningful. Where is the Saving Private Ryan of videogames? Where is the game that depicts violence for what it actually is—namely destructive and costly? While this year saw the release of many stellar games, I am not sure it really produced many memorable or nuanced moments in the realm of violence.

This year, however, did see the high definition rerelease of Fumito Ueda’s Shadow of the Colossus—the most honest depiction of violence in a videogame I have ever witnessed.

Shadow of the Colossus is game about slaying giants. You play as “Wanderer,” a boy by most people’s accounts, charged with the task of slaying 16 giant mythical creatures. While each battle possesses a certain epic feel, the subsequent victories feel more and more troubling rather than gratifying. Wanderer’s violence against these giants is not provoked by the Colossi themselves. The Colossi are peaceful until attacked, Wanderer often has to shoot arrows at them or slash them with his sword just to get their attention. What drives Wanderer to kill these creatures is not any noble desire to protect others, but a selfish hope that slaying these creatures will unleash a mystical power that will resurrect his dead lover. Instead of making the player feel powerful and accomplished, each battle with the Colossi feels somber and tragic.

Wanderer’s violence doesn’t empower him nor is he rewarded by it. Shadow of the Colossus is the most memorable violent game I have played because its violence is attended with far reaching, tragic consequences.