Monday, November 08, 2004

alfie goes with the flow

like i've said before, sometimes all i want to do is talk to you through things. sometimes paper bags or held-up newspapers, sometimes telephones, sometimes other pieces of culture. I did manage to get this one in print for next week though, so maybe the paper bag thing is the way to go...

Isn’t it such a great feeling when you are living on top of the world. You get to enjoy a sense of absolute belonging as play, people, and opportunities flow through your life. At least, they do if you are that perfectly hip GQ man that serves as a role model for so many. You know the type: that one person you know who has great clothes, finds himself at all the right places every night, and graces himself with many of the most exceedingly fine women the city has to offer. Desperately you want to be this man. Desperately you buy another beer and disgrace yourself quietly.

Alfie is one of these guys, a perfectly charming young man, British, and living in New York to the best of his abilities. His job at a bleakly on-the-verge limousine taxi company seems to provide Alfie with the income he needs to live in a shitty apartment so he can afford nice Gucci suits. If you’re quick you’ll quickly notice how brilliant a flirt this gentleman is, as a playful sense of wordplay and body language attracts nearly all of Manhattan to him. In fact, the film slyly points out Alfie’s fantastic charm as he tries to seduce the viewer through witty monologue after witty monologue. Maybe it’s best to think of Alfie as an attractive Woody Allen, cunningly willing the film’s audience to side with his audaciously neurotic personality.

It is the charm of Alfie which will make or break this film for most people, and is arguably the thematic focus of the movie as a whole. While his silver tongue and quick wit do indeed work for the most part, there is a sense of inconsequentiality to everything around him that truly shows Alfie for what he is. Despite wanting to ensure that the women in his life are made happy by his actions, he never seems to respond emotionally to the women around him. The one exception occurs the moment he discovers that one of his girlfriends is a fairly decent alcoholic and is immediately consumed by the need to break up with her. In this moment alone in the film, love is examined with a degree of maturity and insight, as Alfie realizes that he has conflated feral desire with moral responsibility.

Other sequences aren’t anywhere as effective. Alfie’s nightcap with Lonette, who had just exited a lengthy yet tumultuous relationship with one of Alfie’s best friends, teases with the issues of abortion and fidelity. Their scenes together are indeed touching, yet are almost entirely empty of any character or thematic analysis. This intellectual void is filled with an insincere sentimentalism – small emotions of little consequence are exchanged between the two. Similarly empty is Alfie’s response to Susan Sarandon’s character, an older lover who dominates him despite Alfie’s best attempts to use her for a quick “class jump”. Was it a sense of need for domination which drew Alfie to this woman, a sense of infantilisation which makes him feel disempowered and thus “in love”? Sadly, the film does not explore these areas in enough detail for the audience to care either. Writer/Director Charles Shyer never really gives any space to work out such themes.

Indeed, seen this way, it is difficult to accept that the film makers choose to examine the concept of the promiscuity which captivates Alfie’s identity. Token scenes depicting Alfie’s emotional crises dominate the last half-hour of the movie, and they serve to point to the emotional vacuum of the hour leading up to them. The biggest difference between Alfie as a lead and the aforementioned Woody Allen is that the latter understands that it is the flaws in his personality which invites the audience into his life as his luck gets worse. Alfie bemoans his position like a whiney prince who can’t have his way, and it is this ineffectual, boy-who-cried-wolf existentialism which cracks the plaster in this film. If Shyer wanted an homage to the screwball comedies of the 1940s – arguably the true inspiration for this remake of the 1966 version which starred Michael Caine – then he should have kept any seriousness as an undertone to be teased out by film buffs, and not as pivotal moments to forward the plot.

Despite this prominent flaw, it is the acting which redeems the film and will likely allow it to capture an audience. Superficiality does indeed have a place in the cinema, and as an advertisement for success-through-consumption, Alfie succeeds in spades. Jude Law is perfectly cast as the puppy-dog womanizer whose every glance can inspire envy or lust. Susan Sarandon, Marisa Tomei, and Sienna Miller gorgeously portray his three “major” affairs, with Miller’s self-destructive pleasure seeker serving as the best romantic foil to Alfie’s personality. Like Sex and the City, Alfie causes viewers to want to be the characters in the narrative, living, loving, and shopping as they do. In fact, the entire film comes across as an essay in lifestyle enhancement for the retro-analog set. Beautiful interiors are filled with sensuous yet minimally arranged furniture and decor. You can’t help but enthusiastically consume every prop in the film, and this fetish is extended into the very look of the film. Everything is about flow in Alfie: the flow of women and pleasure in Alfie’s life is mirrored by the elegantly fast pace of the film’s sequencing. Maybe we can tease out of the film this one theme: life goes quickly so grab and love what you can. Gorgeous people doing mundane things: many people will follow Alfie’s motto in the movie, and just go with the flow.

Please don't confuse the enthusiasm I have for the review for the enthusiasm I may have felt for the film itself, however...

Monday, November 01, 2004

don't you throw that piece of shit Swiffer in the trash

This past summer, a friend told me that the $69 DVD player which he had purchased a little over a year prior had died. Naturally, this petit mort occurred about a month after its warranty had expired. I told him that he should get it fixed anyway, as the motor required to fix the loading tray couldn't cost more than $50 to install. That kind of thinking was absurd to him, as he could just pick up a new player for another $69, and that spending about $69 a year on DVD players was actually a pretty good idea. "It's like leasing a car," he admitted.

I tried to argue that there was more at stake than the cost of the player, as electronic components are not easily recycled on the consumer end of things. If Canada were to landfill, say, 200,000 DVD players every year, then we would quickly learn the value of keeping these things around for a while at an increased purchase cost rather than continually disposing cheap models. Then there's the fact that consumers are currently working too much as it is, and such product disposability would quite literally mean throwing away the labour required to earn the money to pay for the shitty product in the first place. Surely consumers would not put up with the illogical nature of an accelerating pace for product disintegration as our technological ability increases.

The first company to prove me wrong was Disney, which announced this summer that it would adopt the disposable DVD system of Flexplay, er, "Technologies". Flexplay thought it would be a good idea to produce DVDs that would self-destruct 48 hours after being exposed to air, thus rendering them effective pay-per-view options for all of us lazy bastards who find it hard to return films on time. Instead of bringing the film back, you toss the DVD in the garbage. Purchase price: $5 - $7 per film, roughly equal with high-end video rentals. Long term cost to the environment: rising logarithmically with trends in human stupidity. One of these trends would be the proposed introduction of these disposable DVDs into every fast food lid you ever purchase, from pop cans and cups to pizza and burger boxes. It should be noted that this trend was inaugurated by AOL's decade-long bombardment of our landfills with tens of millions of unsolicited CDs.

The recall of 175,000 Swiffer vacuums should further demonstrate to us the irrational redundancy of badly produced consumer items. There is simply no reason in contemporary technological terms that an item as benign as a vacuum could betray the owner in so widespread a manner. Companies like to make things as cheap as possible . And yet at the same time it is ungodly to think that we cannot simply make a vacuum and that would be the end of it. I mean by this that the vacuum you have would stick around for a while longer than Proctor & Gamble wants it to. But then in all honesty, no one purchasing a battery-powered vacuum would concern themselves with permanence.

The Swiffer rag came to prominence by confusing the public into thinking that things weren't clean unless you actually made more garbage than you had in the first place. Now you are expected to throw away your entire electrical cleaning system after a limited number of uses. Proctor & Gamble understands well that the foundation of the company's business is the production of garbage, and so they fetishize this act in their commercials. Nice ass you say, as the TV mom dances the dust into her garbage can, along with a Swiffer product. That paid actor sure looks happy now that her prop house is easily cleaned every day. In order to demonstrate the apparent ease with which you clean your house, the production of garbage is glorified by literally getting the cleaning supplies you used out of your life, kind of as though they were never there to begin with. I do hate to state the obvious here people, but those reusable rags that we all used to use before 2000 still work wonders.

We can indeed see these moves to complete disposability -- planned obsolescence, as those marketers like to say -- as demonstrating the end of consumer culture in a logical sense. I mean by this the fact that, in general, production comes pretty easy to us. The economic structures which provided so much personal, technological, and cultural development are currently operating in a field of hyper-production. Industrialism was the growth spurt which has allowed us to realize many benefits for individuals and society as a whole. Yet once grown, it should be time to put away childish things, or at least put them into their proper context. Now that we have demonstrated the capacity to provide for many, it is time to provide a degree of permanence to our possessions. Sustainability is adulthood in this context.

It is time for populations through government to stand up to the market whims of companies and force them to accept that which they have continued to regard as externalities: the cost of cleaning up the shit which they produce. This cost is deferred to future generations. Some US lawyers have even gone so far as to argue that this process amounts to taxation without representation, a position which would ultimately undermine the authority of the present government. We are, after all, in this together, and polluting the earth is to pollute ourselves. Do not kid yourself about involvement with environmentalism (to appropriate Lenin's comments on politics). We cannot allow companies to pollute the earth just because it interests them economically. This is a form of warfare, and perhaps the definitive Orwellian omnipresent-conflict that was heralded to consummate the 20th century. What we call economic logic in the present day is usually a euphemism for totalitarian greed and a tyranny for power which is antithetical to democracy. Ecology is democracy in its most primal and universal form.