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kickahaRecently saw two movies that both dealt with rage in very different, yet equally valid and wonderful ways. I can't really discuss the movies and their treatments of the emotion without giving away massive spoilers however, so if you're not in the mood to have Hulk and 28 Days Later ruined for you, whatever you do, don't click here.
A few weeks ago,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ginkgo and I went and saw Hulk. Yeah, it was light on plot for a serious film, and yeah, it seriously mucked with the origins and backstory much to the comics fans ire. I don't care. I thoroughly enjoyed it for entirely personal reasons.
Hulk relates the story of Bruce Banner, a seriously messed up genius researcher who is trying to create a nanomed (nanobot) based super-healing system... the 'meds swarm in the host body, and when trauma is detected, they rush to the scene and rebuild instantly. Accident involving a gamma radiation projector occurs, hilarious hijinks ensue.
Okay, not quite.
See, young Bruce witnessed his amazingly insane father (accidentally, we're assured) murder his beloved mother in front of him. Daddykins wasn't meaning to kill Mom... he was trying to kill Bruce. Dad was also a researcher into healing, but using genetics (okay, genetics, radiation... can we toss in any more techno-FUD here?), and himself as a test subject. Before Bruce was conceived. Dad is convinced that Bruce is... 'off' (as if he was normal himself), and needs to be destroyed.
His mother dead, his father in military prison (did I mention he was a military researcher? Bad me.), Bruce gets placed in an adoptive family who knows nothing about his past. Which is fine, neither does Bruce. A blanket amnesia has taken away most of his childhood memories... but for some odd reason, he doesn't seem to mind. At all.
His just-recently-ex-SO actually ended the relationship due to his emotional distance... and again, he doesn't mind.
It's like emotions just don't exist for him - good, bad, he's indifferent.
Hulk is another of Ang Lee's treatises on repressed emotion, but this time he adds in the element of repressed memory stemming from childhood trauma, and it works. It works amazingly well.
Perhaps I'm an intended target audience of one, being a comics geek, a CGI dabbler, and someone who has been dealing with his own emotional disturbances from childhood trauma, but for me, personally, it was nearly perfect.
The green persona isn't Bruce's id... that would be too simple. It's his pain, his sadness, his guilt, his questioning... his rage.
Now that may seem completely obvious to most people. I mean, after all, he's pissed off and rampaging. He's smashing the utter CRAP outta anything that comes after him, right? But... what's he mad *at*?
Himself. Watch the positively eerie facial expressions that ILM and Lee gave Bruce. He's a child. One that wants to know 'why'... he's searching, but doesn't know for what. He hasn't the words. In fact, the only words he ever says in this phase are during a dream sequence that only confirms this. Bruce, human, is shaving in a steamy mirror. Something in the mirror catches his eye, and he wipes the mirror clean... camera angle reverses and we see Bruce, green, wiping the mirror from the dark side (literally), with a fingertip. The two lock eyes... and the green Bruce reaches through the glass, violently, enveloping the human Bruce's head in one hand, snarling "Puny Banner". And the *voice*. Gravel grating in a throat tight with anger that has never had a release.
He hates himself. He hates himself so thoroughly that he has blocked every memory contributing to that part of his life.
Bruce confides to Betty, after saving her from (god help me) Hulked out dogs (don't ask... and yet, the movie was so well crafted that for a while I didn't disbelieve a killer poodle the size of a Beetle) in one of the most *brutal* sequences I've ever seen on film, that he likes the release when he loses all control, and the beast takes over. When asked what it feels like, he answers simply. "Rage, power.... freedom."
It's a freedom he's never known, a freedom from fear and hatred specifically because they are being *expressed*. Only though expression can he be free of them, and only through a rather dramatic transition can he give himself the 'permission' to express.
I can relate, on a slightly less dramatic level. For years I've battled my own lack of permission, stemming from emotional lockdowns put in place for sheer survival. I've also fought an extreme temper problem at times, and a low level simmering anger at a disconnect between my internal state and what I was allowed to show. It may have ebbed, but has never gone away.
And at times, when it became too much, I found a socially acceptable way of bleeding off some of the pain: rock scrambling. Not running, but bounding over rough terrain, leaping, jumping, crawling, and climbing until I collapsed from exhaustion. If I was lucky, I'd bleed. Inevitably, my body gave out before my emotions did, however, and I'd end up even more disgusted with my weakness and my lack of power. It's still one of the times I feel most free.
Lee gave celluloid life to my dreams in a rock scramble that stretches across the deserts of Utah and Nevada. There's no exhaustion, no limit to the freedom of movement, of sheer raw power... of running. Running from one's self, is of course the point. And of course it never works.
It doesn't matter how much rage we expend directed at the external world, the source is limitless because it never has a proper target. Internally, it's often incorrect and improper to be angry at one's self for childhood traumas, but to the child it's a more palatable solution than to direct the anger at the parental or authoritarian sources that betrayed the trusts in the first place. That would require acknowledgment of the events or betrayal. In extreme cases, the very event is expunged... but the anger and pain remain. We can't forget emotions - they embed themselves in our very physical fibers, literally, and we carry them until we move through them through expression.
And that is the genius behind Lee's work here - he took a rather mindless comics character (Peter David's work notwithstanding) and drilled to the core of a shattered psyche, presenting it in a form that many can, sadly, relate to on some level.
It makes you wonder how many of the people you see every day would go green if but they could.
Which brings us to 28 Days Later, another film about rage, but this time on a more societal level.
At times a classic Romero-feel zombie-esque flick, at times reminiscent of The Stand, it plays with the effects of blinding rage on society and civilization. The message is clear... we all have the capacity for rage, somewhere within us. In this case, it is cause by a virus of fantastic properties... first, a 10-20 second incubation period. It produces rather massive hemorrhaging without killing the victim, eliminates the hunger sense, and apparently incites the victim to attack any human that is not infected (pheromone based?), by producing a mindless rage (direct amygdala activation?). Yes, I actually thought it through. I'm a geek.
ginkgo actually put it best... it's a nightmare film. It doesn't make a terrific amount of sense, but the feel is spot on. The cinematography is stunning, and the acting is, all around, quite good.
It culminates in the lead character entering his own rage state - but without infection. He goes positively feral, losing the trappings of civilization one at a time, but for a purpose. He has packmates to save... and in doing so, he becomes the most animalistic of them all. He makes the infected look positively cuddly by comparison. They are mindless - he is calculating. They scream and rant - he is silent. They move from victim to victim as fast as they can find them - he melts back into the shadows for the next opportunity.
So why do I say he is raging? One scene, where he kills his final tormentor, silently, methodically and *brutally* killing the man with a face twisted with contempt, as he drives his thumbs through the man's eye sockets and into his brain. Slowly.
It is not swift, it is not clean. It is slow, planned, and intended to inflict pain and fear. It is, actually, the antithesis of animalistic. It is uniquely human.
It demonstrated that what we have in ourselves is more frightening that anything we can conceive coming from without.
Much like Lee's vision.
Each film has its definite own feel, its own message - and yet they are wonderfully complementary. I'm quite glad I got to see them one soon after the other.
As an aside, if you do see 28 Days Later, do stay for the credits. There is a second, darker, original British ending that they added after the credits roll. To be honest, I had heard much of the 'incredibly dark' ending, and had envisioned something much, much more intense than what was presented. A jet contrail, our heroes relieved at the sign of life elsewhere in the world... then a terminal flash. After all, what is better than a quarantine but an amputation?
A few weeks ago,
ginkgo and I went and saw Hulk. Yeah, it was light on plot for a serious film, and yeah, it seriously mucked with the origins and backstory much to the comics fans ire. I don't care. I thoroughly enjoyed it for entirely personal reasons.Hulk relates the story of Bruce Banner, a seriously messed up genius researcher who is trying to create a nanomed (nanobot) based super-healing system... the 'meds swarm in the host body, and when trauma is detected, they rush to the scene and rebuild instantly. Accident involving a gamma radiation projector occurs, hilarious hijinks ensue.
Okay, not quite.
See, young Bruce witnessed his amazingly insane father (accidentally, we're assured) murder his beloved mother in front of him. Daddykins wasn't meaning to kill Mom... he was trying to kill Bruce. Dad was also a researcher into healing, but using genetics (okay, genetics, radiation... can we toss in any more techno-FUD here?), and himself as a test subject. Before Bruce was conceived. Dad is convinced that Bruce is... 'off' (as if he was normal himself), and needs to be destroyed.
His mother dead, his father in military prison (did I mention he was a military researcher? Bad me.), Bruce gets placed in an adoptive family who knows nothing about his past. Which is fine, neither does Bruce. A blanket amnesia has taken away most of his childhood memories... but for some odd reason, he doesn't seem to mind. At all.
His just-recently-ex-SO actually ended the relationship due to his emotional distance... and again, he doesn't mind.
It's like emotions just don't exist for him - good, bad, he's indifferent.
Hulk is another of Ang Lee's treatises on repressed emotion, but this time he adds in the element of repressed memory stemming from childhood trauma, and it works. It works amazingly well.
Perhaps I'm an intended target audience of one, being a comics geek, a CGI dabbler, and someone who has been dealing with his own emotional disturbances from childhood trauma, but for me, personally, it was nearly perfect.
The green persona isn't Bruce's id... that would be too simple. It's his pain, his sadness, his guilt, his questioning... his rage.
Now that may seem completely obvious to most people. I mean, after all, he's pissed off and rampaging. He's smashing the utter CRAP outta anything that comes after him, right? But... what's he mad *at*?
Himself. Watch the positively eerie facial expressions that ILM and Lee gave Bruce. He's a child. One that wants to know 'why'... he's searching, but doesn't know for what. He hasn't the words. In fact, the only words he ever says in this phase are during a dream sequence that only confirms this. Bruce, human, is shaving in a steamy mirror. Something in the mirror catches his eye, and he wipes the mirror clean... camera angle reverses and we see Bruce, green, wiping the mirror from the dark side (literally), with a fingertip. The two lock eyes... and the green Bruce reaches through the glass, violently, enveloping the human Bruce's head in one hand, snarling "Puny Banner". And the *voice*. Gravel grating in a throat tight with anger that has never had a release.
He hates himself. He hates himself so thoroughly that he has blocked every memory contributing to that part of his life.
Bruce confides to Betty, after saving her from (god help me) Hulked out dogs (don't ask... and yet, the movie was so well crafted that for a while I didn't disbelieve a killer poodle the size of a Beetle) in one of the most *brutal* sequences I've ever seen on film, that he likes the release when he loses all control, and the beast takes over. When asked what it feels like, he answers simply. "Rage, power.... freedom."
It's a freedom he's never known, a freedom from fear and hatred specifically because they are being *expressed*. Only though expression can he be free of them, and only through a rather dramatic transition can he give himself the 'permission' to express.
I can relate, on a slightly less dramatic level. For years I've battled my own lack of permission, stemming from emotional lockdowns put in place for sheer survival. I've also fought an extreme temper problem at times, and a low level simmering anger at a disconnect between my internal state and what I was allowed to show. It may have ebbed, but has never gone away.
And at times, when it became too much, I found a socially acceptable way of bleeding off some of the pain: rock scrambling. Not running, but bounding over rough terrain, leaping, jumping, crawling, and climbing until I collapsed from exhaustion. If I was lucky, I'd bleed. Inevitably, my body gave out before my emotions did, however, and I'd end up even more disgusted with my weakness and my lack of power. It's still one of the times I feel most free.
Lee gave celluloid life to my dreams in a rock scramble that stretches across the deserts of Utah and Nevada. There's no exhaustion, no limit to the freedom of movement, of sheer raw power... of running. Running from one's self, is of course the point. And of course it never works.
It doesn't matter how much rage we expend directed at the external world, the source is limitless because it never has a proper target. Internally, it's often incorrect and improper to be angry at one's self for childhood traumas, but to the child it's a more palatable solution than to direct the anger at the parental or authoritarian sources that betrayed the trusts in the first place. That would require acknowledgment of the events or betrayal. In extreme cases, the very event is expunged... but the anger and pain remain. We can't forget emotions - they embed themselves in our very physical fibers, literally, and we carry them until we move through them through expression.
And that is the genius behind Lee's work here - he took a rather mindless comics character (Peter David's work notwithstanding) and drilled to the core of a shattered psyche, presenting it in a form that many can, sadly, relate to on some level.
It makes you wonder how many of the people you see every day would go green if but they could.
Which brings us to 28 Days Later, another film about rage, but this time on a more societal level.
At times a classic Romero-feel zombie-esque flick, at times reminiscent of The Stand, it plays with the effects of blinding rage on society and civilization. The message is clear... we all have the capacity for rage, somewhere within us. In this case, it is cause by a virus of fantastic properties... first, a 10-20 second incubation period. It produces rather massive hemorrhaging without killing the victim, eliminates the hunger sense, and apparently incites the victim to attack any human that is not infected (pheromone based?), by producing a mindless rage (direct amygdala activation?). Yes, I actually thought it through. I'm a geek.
ginkgo actually put it best... it's a nightmare film. It doesn't make a terrific amount of sense, but the feel is spot on. The cinematography is stunning, and the acting is, all around, quite good.It culminates in the lead character entering his own rage state - but without infection. He goes positively feral, losing the trappings of civilization one at a time, but for a purpose. He has packmates to save... and in doing so, he becomes the most animalistic of them all. He makes the infected look positively cuddly by comparison. They are mindless - he is calculating. They scream and rant - he is silent. They move from victim to victim as fast as they can find them - he melts back into the shadows for the next opportunity.
So why do I say he is raging? One scene, where he kills his final tormentor, silently, methodically and *brutally* killing the man with a face twisted with contempt, as he drives his thumbs through the man's eye sockets and into his brain. Slowly.
It is not swift, it is not clean. It is slow, planned, and intended to inflict pain and fear. It is, actually, the antithesis of animalistic. It is uniquely human.
It demonstrated that what we have in ourselves is more frightening that anything we can conceive coming from without.
Much like Lee's vision.
Each film has its definite own feel, its own message - and yet they are wonderfully complementary. I'm quite glad I got to see them one soon after the other.
As an aside, if you do see 28 Days Later, do stay for the credits. There is a second, darker, original British ending that they added after the credits roll. To be honest, I had heard much of the 'incredibly dark' ending, and had envisioned something much, much more intense than what was presented. A jet contrail, our heroes relieved at the sign of life elsewhere in the world... then a terminal flash. After all, what is better than a quarantine but an amputation?
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(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-09 02:31 pm (UTC)Indeed.
Date: 2003-09-09 04:35 pm (UTC)And Nolte was, as one reviewer 'bugfuck nuts'... also appropriate. Of course, there's little evidence he was *acting*, but that's neither here nor there.
I have to admit, the point at which I really had to wonder what the *HELL* parents were doing bringing their 4 year old kids to this movie was the dog-attack. Up until that point, I thought that most of the more interesting plot elements would go right over their heads effortlessly, but *that*... the point at which Bruce gets even more enraged and breaks the dog's jaw clamped on his shoulder by just *flexing*... gah. 'Force of nature' comes to mind.