Spotlight: Twin Peaks Seasons 1 & 2 on Netflix Watch Instantly

Wow, I knew this was coming, but I didn't realize that Twin Peaks would be available so soon on Netflix Watch Instantly.  My girlfriend just happened to notice it in the new television listings while browsing Netflix.  When I tried to figure out when it officially appeared using InstantWatcher, I couldn't find it in their database (which is unusual).  The layout of the Twin Peaks Netflix Watch Instantly page is a bit different than other current shows, so I assume that this will be the new layout for upcoming television series.  Rather than a DVD cover image, a much larger image (pasted below) serves as a header for the page. (Perhaps someone in the comments section could let me know if they've seen this layout elsewhere.)

Twin Peaks (David Lynch, Mark Frost, USA, Seasons 1 and 2) Netflix: Kyle MacLachlan stars as eccentric FBI agent Dale Cooper in David Lynch's surreal cult classic series. When Cooper arrives in Twin Peaks to investigate the murder of teenager Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), he begins to get to know the quirky residents. Soon, many secrets concealed beneath the small town's façade of normalcy start coming to light, while Cooper finds himself searching his own soul for hidden truths. Netflix link.

Revisiting this show should be interesting, as I have not looked at it since it's original run on ABC (hard to believe that it debuted over 20 years ago, now).   I have a clear memory of watching Agent Cooper's dream at the end of episode three in 1990, and not believing what I had seen on a mainstream American television network. The last time art cinema narration techniques had been seen in a weekly series was perhaps Patrick MacGoohan's The Prisoner from the late 1960s, but that was an imported series, not something produced for an American network. Changes seemed to be afoot in the broadcast television landscape, as the networks tried to address the competition from cable as well as from the emerging Fox network (which didn't move to seven nights of programming until 1993). ABC's gamble on something so genuinely weird on a Sunday night (competing with one of Fox's few nights of programming) was considered adventurous at the time, and the series was initially a ratings success.  But at the time no one was sure how Twin Peaks would change American television, if at all.

Surely with hindsight we need to place Twin Peaks somewhere at the beginning of the renaissance of episodic television that we are currently enjoying thanks to premium cable and now even basic cable (from The Sopranos to Mad Men). While few if any shows have been as adventurous in terms of narration and style, Twin Peaks was often cited as an influence on subsequent quirky shows like Northern Exposure and much darker shows, particularly The X-Files.  A more indirect but significant influence has been seen with other mainstream feature film producers, directors and actors moving to television series development; here in particular I'm thinking of the lasting impact of Jerry Bruckheimer and his CSI franchise (with feature film actors such as William Peterson and Laurence Fishburne).  And perhaps it was Joss Whedon who finally figured out with Buffy the Vampire Slayer the right balance between popular television, cinephilia, and fan culture that seemed to elude Lynch.  What Lynch could have done with Twin Peaks had he the resources and freedoms available to premium cable series producers in the wake of The Sorpranos, Dexter, or Scorsese's Bordwalk Empire is an intriguing "what if?" to contemplate. To partially answer that question, one should remember that Mulholland Drive began as a television pilot that television executives rejected, leading him to transform it into the feature film that we know today.

That said, revisiting Twin Peaks will also remind me about how disappointing the series became after the end of season one.  What was so great about season one was that Lynch and Frost probably thought they'd never get more than eight episodes, so they went all out without ever intending to wrap up any narrative threads.  Instead, the first season thrives upon delaying narrative revelations (most obviously, who killed Laura Palmer, but also key information in all of the plot threads).  A key pleasure of the series becomes that tension between anticipation and frustration that you only get with great melodrama, and clearly Douglas Sirk is a key influence here (see my related post here).  Like with Sirk, you also get a degree of excess in terms of style, particularly in the mise-en-scene and the performances, often to the point that the excess becomes just as pleasurable as the narrative (the classic example of this is Agent Cooper's dream sequence at the end of episode three.)  In a sense, we didn't want to know who killed Laura Palmer; if we had wanted to know then we would have been yelling at the screen in frustration each week.  Instead, we wanted to share prolonged, extended moments with these characters who desperately wanted to know who killed Laura Palmer, which makes for a very different viewing strategy and experience.

Season two, in contrast, seemed to develop a more conventional "show bible" and narrative arc that both opened and closed narrative threads in ways more typical of American series television.  The question became could Lynch withhold the identity of Laura Palmer's murderer forever in an American television series, and the answer unfortunately was "no." [Is that a spoiler?  Hey it's been 20 years, you didn't know that?]  If series television depends upon the constant opening and closing of narrative enigmas, providing the satisfaction of closure while prompting new questions to keep the viewer coming back, the problem with resolving the Laura Palmer case in Twin Peaks was two-fold.  First, providing that narrative closure could never be as satisfying as the melodramatic delays that we had treasured in the first season and a half.  And second, no new enigma could be as intriguing or engaging in a way that would bring all of these characters together in such an intricate narrative structure.  Thus, after Laura's murderer is revealed, the series often seemed forced (at least that is how I remember it). 

Still, the series still provided many vivid memories for me, and I look forward to revisiting it. The first time around, I was busy on Sunday nights and had to watch it on video tape (remember VHS, anyone?).  In fact, the reason I was busy on Sunday nights was due to the production of a student soap opera for a class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (thank goodness I cannot find any episodes of Campus Affairs on the internet).  Since many of us missed the show on Sundays, we organized an informal screening of the first few episodes in a UW-Madison classroom (hey, it was class related, as research).  Somehow the word got out, and several people from outside of the class also showed up.  It was a great shared experience, and I distinctly recall that people got upset when I wanted to scan past the opening credits for the second episode, since we had already seen them once.  That's the kind of show it is...you want to hear that Angelo Badalamenti music, and let the opening images flow; the style of the series is just as important as the narrative information from scene to scene.  I think random people showed up for that screening because even at that point, a few weeks into the first season, we realized that this was something unique and worth sharing.  Twenty years later, I'm confident that many people are excited to see that it is streaming on Netflix.

Spotlight: The Exiles (Kent MacKensie, 1961)

The Exiles (Kent MacKensie, USA, 1961, 72 minutes)
Netflix: Director Kent MacKenzie's 1961 documentary chronicles a day in the life of a group of 20-something American Indians who left the reservations behind for a new life in Los Angeles. Interviews and candid moments reveal the hopes and struggles of Yvonne, her boyfriend, Homer, and their friends. The film paints a starkly realistic picture of the transplants' lives in the city as members of the group deal with alcoholism and impending parenthood. Netflix link.

The Exiles received a lot of attention after the 2008 release of its restoration by the UCLA Film and Television Archive that was sponsored in part by filmmaker Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep) and author Sherman Alexie (Smoke Signals).  The film has already been selected for the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, and on his blog J.J. Murphy suggests that the rediscovery of the film should propose a new understanding of the origins of American independent cinema.  Murphy's in-depth analysis of the film can be found here.  Indeed, the film will surprise many in how it seems to provide a bridge between social documentary filmmaking from the 1950s and the independent cinema of the 1970s and 1980s.

The Netflix user comments often bring up the problem of labeling the film a documentary, but that has more to do with our contemporary use of the term than anything to do with the film itself.  While sources say that the film was done without a formal script, it was clearly planned and staged in the manner of documentaries in the tradition of Robert Flaherty (Louisiana Story, 1948) and John Grierson (Granton Trawler, 1938). Murphy rightfully points out ways in which The Exiles resonates with independent fiction films like John Cassavetes's Shadows (1959) and Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's Pull My Daisy (1959); the observational, seemingly improvisational spirit of all three films have had a lasting impact and influence.  Another helpful frame of reference is the work of Lionel Rogosin, whose On the Bowery (1957) and Come Back, Africa (1959) also fused the documentary tradition with more obviously planned and staged sequences.  To relate these films to the documentary tradition it is useful to recall Grierson's definition of documentary as the "creative treatment of actuality," which led some filmmakers to use a wide variety of cinematic techniques to document social reality, including the use of staged scenes.  Once advancements in lightweight technology allowed filmmakers to record fly-on-the-wall, truly observational cinema with synchronized sound, some filmmakers rejected Grierson's aesthetics and developed direct cinema and cinema verite forms in the early 1960s.  In a sense, The Exiles arrived in the middle of this transition, both in terms of technology and aesthetics. 

Perhaps the hardest obstacle for contemporary audiences to appreciate the film is the post-dubbed dialogue that is prominent throughout the film, but this is a shame because it distracts attention away from the subtle, emotionally rich visual storytelling that makes the film so interesting.  (By shame I mean that audiences cannot adjust their expectations from modern production values.)  Post-dubbing is typical of lower-budget independent films of the era (again scenes from Shadows comes to mind), but The Exiles is particularly dependent on the technique. The strongest sequences, however, depend more upon voice-over interviews with the subjects rather than attempts at synchronous dialogue.  When the voice overs are matched with the images we get a much better sense of what these experiences and environments mean to the participants.  This is particularly true for Yvonne, who is pregnant and is quietly frustrated with her life with Homer.  The shots of Yvonne walking the nighttime streets alone as she explains how she imagined herself growing up are particularly heartbreaking.

But I will also defend many of the post-dubbed sequences for their ability to capture the frustrations of the men portrayed in the film, Homer and Tommy.  Their lives have become routines, and while some audiences may become frustrated with that routine, the routine is all the more frustrating as lived experience.  And while certainly some sequences could have been edited more concisely, duration is an important formal property that is exploited for particular effects.  Again, I would encourage comparison to scenes in Shadows involving young men hanging out, picking up girls, and starting fights.  The Exiles does a much better job of conveying the shallowness of conversations (despite the post-sync obstacle) and the lack of connection between the men except for their common plight, perhaps because it doesn't try to pigeonhole those scenes into a more linear narrative; the scenes just play themselves out on their own terms.

When the film does hit the occasional lull it is brought back to life by a particularly compelling image or a scene that vividly captures a time and a place that has long since passed.  Most of these moments are quiet moments, sometimes simply observing the expressions of Yvonne, Homer, and Tommy.  Some of them are seemingly throw-away moments, such as a long shot of a cop spinning his night stick with impressive skill as it glistens in the street light; with that one quick image you realize that he has spent a lot of time with it out of its holster.  Other images pass by quickly but stay with you: seemingly effeminate men arguing in a bar; signs for cheap kosher wine in liquor store windows; men reading comic books while drinking their beers in the daytime.  The Exiles is a film of small pleasures that come to you if you allow the images to work on you, rather than try to force them to be part of some other kind of film.

It is not hard to see why later independents such as Charles Burnett would be intrigued by The Exiles.  As Burnett himself concludes in an indieWIRE interview, "It’s too bad he wasn’t known. I think it would have saved all of us a lot of experimenting."  The most obvious connection between The Exiles and later independent filmmaking is indeed Burnett's own Killer of Sheep, with its emphasis on the plight of working class African-Americans in Los Angeles.  But it doesn't take long to start thinking about other connections.  There are moments that seem like a European New Wave film, such as the long sequence in Breathless in which Michel and Patricia hang out in her bedroom without moving the narrative forward with any efficiency.  Murphy rightfully associates the film with Beat aesthetics, and the experimental cinema of Ron Rice.  Jim Jarmusch translates the aesthetic of the mundane into a more minimalist visual style in Stranger than Paradise.  And while The Exiles eventually focuses on a handful of characters, at first we seem to move from character to character as they interact with each other, not unlike the structure of Richard Linklater's Slacker.  One reason The Exiles may have been overlooked was that it in many ways was ahead of its time.

Some viewer comments on Netflix have called the film racist, in that it seems to reinforce negative stereotypes about Native Americans in regards to alcoholism and related issues.  Sherman Alexie told the New York Times, “It’s a little problematic in that it’s a white guy’s movie about us. But in learning how the film was made, I think people will discover it was truly collaborative. The filmmakers ended up in the position of witness as much as creator.” Alexie's point is most clearly supported by the voice over interviews in the film, in which the subjects' own words guide our understanding of what is happening.  But the point about collaboration between outside observer and a group subject also calls to mind various experiments by French documentarian Jean Rouch.  In response to objections to an alleged colonialist point-of-view inherent in anthropology, Rouch collaborated with his African subjects in films like Jaguar (shot in the 1950s, released in 1967) which resulted in what Documentary Educational Resources has called, "part documentary, part fiction, and part reflective commentary."  These experiments led to Rouch's cinema verite classic, Chronicle of a Summer (1960, made with Edgar Morin).  This is just another thread in cinema history that helps illuminate why The Exiles is so interesting.

So while The Exiles certainly does not transcend the racial politics of its time, it is far more complex than to simply dismiss it as a white man exploiting Native Americans for a film.  And since Native Americans are still to this day woefully underrepresented in American cinema, the fact that MacKensie did help bear witness to these lives will hopefully inspire more filmmakers to do the same.

Spotlight: Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, UK, 2009, 122 minutes)
Netflix: The life of hot-tempered teen outcast Mia (Katie Jarvis) takes an unexpected turn when her mother, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), brings home a handsome and mysterious boyfriend named Connor (Michael Fassbender), who pledges to bring sweeping positive changes to the household. British writer-director Andrea Arnold's sophomore feature won Best British Film at the 2010 BAFTAs. Netflix link.

Director Andrea Arnold has had a great deal of success on the international film festival circuit after leaving her earlier career as a presenter on the children's television show No. 73. Her short film, Wasp (2003) won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival and eventually won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short in 2005.  Her feature debut, Red Road (2006) won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and The Observer listed it at #20 in their list of the best 25 British films of the past 25 years.  Red Road is also available for streaming on Netflix Watch Instantly.  And most recently, her latest film Fish Tank also won a Jury Prize at Cannes, as well as Best Film at the 2010 BAFTA Awards.  Time Out listed Fish Tank at #84 on their list of the top 100 British films ever made.

The cast of the film is superb, led by newcomer Katie Jarvis as Mia, and Michael Fassbender as her mother's new boyfriend, Connor.  Mia lives with her mother and younger sister in a public housing complex in Essex, and there is not much hope in that environment.  Mia aspires to be a hip-hop dancer, inspired by images in music videos, but unlike the other girls who practice their moves for the boys in the courtyard, Mia practices by herself in an abandoned flat.  Mia meets a boy named Billy when she tries to free an malnourished horse from Billy's brothers, but Billy does not engage her curiosity as much as her mother's new male companion, Connor.  Connor encourages Mia to audition for a dancing job, and loans her his camera for an audition tape.  The relationship between Connor and Mia moves uncomfortably from a generous Connor standing in as a father figure to a drunk Connor behaving inappropriately with a impressionable 15 year old girl.

While this may sound bleak (and it is) the film also provides a wide palate of textures to share dimensions of Mia's experience.  The staging and cinematography alternates between stark documentary realism to beautiful, lyrical imagery.  Too often filmmakers adhere to the shaky-cam school of social realism, but while the camerawork here does allow for loose, hand held scenes, it also produces several vivid moments with light and color.  A few sequences stand out in this regard.  First, when Connor picks up a drunken Mia to take her from her mother's room to her own room, Mia only pretends to be asleep as Connor prepares her for bed.  A camera angle suggests Mia's perspective as she tries to watch Connor without his realizing that she is watching her.  This both confirms the awkward tensions between Mia and Connor, and foreshadows more troubling developments later in the film.  The cinematographer Robbie Ryan is confident to allow such moments to go into deep shadow and amber highlights, rather than being exclusively interested in conventionally crisp cinematography.

Other moments with memorable naturalistic lighting include when Connor drives Mia, her mother and her sister to the countryside, and much later, the turning point when the relationship between Mia and Connor takes an unfortunate turn after a night of drinking.  In the car interior in the countryside, the exposure for close-ups of Mia is set for the brightness of exterior of the car, allowing her face to fall into a grainy shadow.  And in the pivotal scene with Mia and Connor, the room is lit by an amber streetlamp outside the apartment window as Mia gets feedback on her dance routine from Connor.  Neither moment is particularly flashy in terms of technique but they provide the kind of imagery that neither conventional Hollywood dramas nor ultra-realistic independent dramas seem to be interested in anymore.

Much of the film's emotional impact comes from alternating between understanding the world a bit better than Mia does at some times, but comprehending harsh realities at exactly as she does at other times.  When she breaks into Connor's house late in the film, neither she nor the audience notices important details that only stick out when Mia herself has pieced together who Connor really is in his life away from Mia and her mother.  At other times it is just as painful to be several steps ahead of Mia, especially in regards to her dancing ambitions and our understanding of her talent.  Near the end, as she tries to re-establish a friendship with Billy and she discovers that Billy's horse has died, we understand more than Billy does why she has to break down in tears.

Rather than just objectively observing Mia's world at a distance, director Arnold guides us to engage with Mia's world physically and emotionally, from the sights and sounds of the housing complex to the raw feelings of a young girl with very little to look forward to.  The deceptively simple style of the film obscures the meticulously crafted imagery and narration, so that some images and revelations seem to sneak up on us even though we have been thoroughly prepared for them.  There are no villains in the film, only people who are trying to do the best they can, but they make some horrible decisions. Mia herself is not necessarily the most sympathetic character, but her world is vividly portrayed in a manner that leads us to understand her a bit better.

While Fish Tank is not necessarily the most upbeat film, and the final interaction between between Mia and her mother is far from the most hopeful moment recorded in the cinema, the film does not leave you completely hopeless in the end.  It does leave you hopeful that Arnold will continue making films in such an uncompromising manner, with as much insight and artistry as she has so far.     

Spotlight: Monsters, or Attack of the $500,000 SFX Film!

Monsters (Gareth Edwards, UK, 2010, 93 minutes)
Netflix: Six years after aliens invaded Earth, a security force maintains tenuous control in the Infected Zone straddling the U.S.-Mexican border. Andrew (Scoot McNairy), a photographer, is documenting this war-torn area when he's interrupted by an unexpected rescue mission. Samantha (Whitney Able), daughter of a media mogul who just happens to be his boss, needs an escort home, and Andrew reluctantly takes on the job. Netflix link.

Monsters has generated quite a bit of buzz since its initial release, and it has been quite hot on the InstantWatcher tracker since being introduced to Netflix Watch Instantly just yesterday.  This is the kind of film that everyone wants to root for: a super-low budget sci-fi film ($15,000 equipment budget, total budget around $500,000, if Edwards's estimate is reliable). Monsters has both the strengths and the weaknesses of a good old fashioned genre film; it delivers the goods in terms of suspense and spectacle. 

The film does not start off strong, however, and it is at its weakest when it does not seem to be anything beyond a low-budget genre film.  The exposition-thick dialogue in the film's first few scenes didn't make the best initial impression.  When the two protagonists, photographer Andrew (Scoot McNairy) and publishing heiress Samantha (Whitney Able) first meet each other, Andrew introduces himself with the line, "I work for your father's publication."  Now, not to get too picky, but that line was written for the audience, not for Sam.  We need to know that her father owns a publication, but she already knows it.  And I'm confident that she would also know the name of that publication.  So I'm pretty sure that any non-expositional human would say something along the lines of, "I work for The Whatever Times" and the human on the receiving end would be able to make the connection, "Oh, he therefore works for my father."  The first third of Monsters has other moments like this, but luckily they are transcended by the charismatic performances by McNairy and Able. They have a genuine chemistry that helps us forgive the exposition that sometimes is forced upon them.  True, their characters are not much beyond a handful of character traits and some relatively simple goals and internal conflicts.  But they do give a degree of humanity to these characters, so that they seem neither campy nor cardboard.

At some point I forgave the expositional dialogue because other dimensions of the film were done with intelligence, wit, and charm. In other words, while Monsters does not go much beyond what the genre calls for, it does go well beyond simple fanboy sensibilities. If you were to take out all of the special effects, this would still be a well acted and extremely well shot and edited film. Even when the plot introduces somewhat artificial delays in the action, that doesn't effect the pace of the film because the performances are always engaging, the images are often quite striking, and the scenes snap briskly.  The relative lack of spectacle in the first half actually helps set the right tone for the more spectacular sequences as Andrew and Sam find their way into the Infected Zone.  Perhaps taking a hint from the initial dinosaur attacks in Jurassic Park, many of the more genuinely suspenseful sequences have a slow, quiet burn.  Like a classic horror B-film, Edwards makes the most of darkness, obstructions, and silence.  From a budget and special effects perspective it doesn't hurt that these sequences are mostly at night or with limited visibility (so that the seams don't show as clearly).  But at some point you stop thinking that this is good considering its means, and you simply think this is good stuff.

It is hard to discuss a film that involves a huge wall sealing off the Mexican-American border without considering ideology at some point.  But while the film does hint at an attitude towards the privileges of the American protagonists and the economic disadvantages of those trapped in Mexico outside of the Infected Zone, overall the allegorical aspects of the film are underdeveloped (which may be more infuriating, ideologically speaking).  There are also potential ecological allegories that also seem muddled or underdeveloped (the creatures depend up on trees to reproduce; but they also seem to feed off electricity and television broadcasts).  In other words, there are a lot of intriguing ideas floating around in Monsters, but the most focused ideas have to do with creating suspense, not creating coherent socio-political commentary. And when it does focus on creating suspense, Monsters does very well.

The film raises some interesting questions about the future of digital filmmaking, and the distinctions between genre and so-called independent filmmaking.  One way that independent filmmakers have distinguished their films from Hollywood studio fare has been to move away from spectacle and towards character development and story.  Part of that, of course, has to do with budget and resources, but another part has to do with a commitment to different aesthetic principles.  But will independent filmmakers stay committed to those aesthetic principles if the budget and resource obstacles are removed, and they are perfectly capable of making an effects-driven genre film if they want to do so?

My tentative answer is that advances in technology will not eliminate so-called independent sensibilities.  A good analogy to look at is to see what computers have done for independent and studio animation.  Sure, on the one end you have Pixar and Dreamworks animation; but you also still have Bob Sabiston (creator of Rotoshop, used on Linklater's Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly) and even smaller-scale animators like Nina Paley (Sita Sings the Blues) using computers with a very different aesthetic sensibility.  In a way you have a similar distinction going on with Monsters, despite its dependence on genre conventions.  It is not nearly as loud and boisterous as The War of the Worlds or even District 9.  Instead, most of its strong non-spectacle moments have to do with quiet observations in sequences that could have fit in so-called independent features, stylistically speaking.  If anything, rather than eliminating independent sensibilities, new technologies might open up a wider stylistic range within genre filmmaking, which would be greatly welcomed, in my humble opinion. 

I look forward to your feedback and responses in the comments section below.  Meanwhile, here's a film that Edwards made for the Sci-Fi London 48-Hour Film Challenge, Factory Farmed.  -- JLK



Factory Farmed
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Spotlight: Dogtooth / Kynodontas

Dogtooth / Kynodontas (Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece, 2009, 96 minutes)

This entry is inspired in part by the Filmspotting podcast and its “Golden Brick Award” for the one film that its listeners most appreciated that the podcast brought to their attention in the past year.  The award was inspired by the 2005 film Brick, and the grateful response that the film received from the Filmspotting audience.  Brick also happens to be available on View Instantly, as is the 2009 Golden Brick Award winner, Moon.  Dogtooth won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and it is nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at this Sunday’s Academy Awards.

I first saw the film back in September, and it made for a memorable screening experience; my friends and colleagues who saw it with me were grateful for the opportunity to see it.  I hope to use this Spotlight section for films that people haven't heard about to create similar screening experiences, but at first I thought that maybe enough people already know about Dogtooth thanks to the Oscar nomination.  But listening to the Filmspotting podcast today changed my mind, because even at this point people are saying that they wouldn't have known about the film if someone hadn't brought it to their attention. The Filmspotting audience’s response to Dogtooth is understandable.  The film seems to come out of nowhere and very quickly creates a vivid, surreal world with the threat of violence always just beneath the surface.  In that sense, it would probably be best to stop reading now and just trust me and watch it.  But I'm always a bit cautious about recommending black comedies.  As you can see from the DVD cover, the word "hilarious" is featured prominently; while there are many laugh-out-loud moments in the film, the tone is far from happy-go-lucky.  One of the Filmspotting audience members actually asked why he had to watch 90 minutes of torture, to give you a sense of how some might respond.

Here is the brief synopsis from Netflix: In this Oscar-nominated Greek drama, siblings who grow up cut off from the world -- homeschooled and reliant on one another for entertainment -- create their own idyllic alternative universe, which is shattered when their father lets in an outsider. Sex enters the picture when dad begins bringing home a female security officer to satisfy his son's libido ... and suddenly nothing is the same within the highly idiosyncratic family unit. Netflix link.

The film starts with the now grown siblings listening to a tape recording of a woman reading false definitions of words, showing the consequences of their unconventional home schooling, followed by one of them proposing rules to a new game that she has invented, showing their relatively immature status.  This, in turn, is followed by the blindfolded female security officer being driven to an undisclosed location, which we eventually learn is the estate where the siblings have been isolated their entire life.  Thus, within the first five minutes we understand that we will be spending time with a very dysfunctional  family that has created a very unusual environment that the grown siblings cannot leave.

While the rules dominating the siblings' lives are in the end terrifying when you think about them, the humor of the film derives from our gradual understanding of those rules and watching their logical consequences play out.  Since the siblings can never leave the estate, their sense of perspective and scale is skewed by the distances visibly available to them within the gates.  As a consequence, they have difficulty understanding the difference in scale between an airplane in the sky and a toy airplane on the ground, which leads to a few comic moments.  And since their home-schooling has essentially terrified the siblings about anything that exists outside of the estate gates, there is always an ironic gap between how we watch the scene and how the siblings understand what they see and hear.  This is especially effective in the later half of the film after the siblings are exposed to popular cinema via some smuggled videotapes; we have to use our pop culture knowledge to identify and translate what dialogue they are citing and famous scenes they are referencing in their behavior.

But just as this skewed world view is presented in a matter-of-fact manner, the violence that emerges is all the more shocking because it is presented as a natural extension of this world.  A cold, detached tone is achieved through off-balance compositions, long shot scales and occasional planimetric staging (for a great description of the use of planimetric compositions in a wide range of films, see here).  Rather than telegraphing the violence through shot selection, cross cutting, and music, some horrific moments simply emerge within the shot as characters inflict violence on each other and on themselves within a static composition; sometimes it takes a moment to realize the degree of the violence that has occurred.  Perhaps those who are most disturbed by these images are more used to having their attention and emotions guided more overtly by popular film language and music cues.

Some have criticized the film for being shocking just for the sake of being shocking, and not having any real point to make about these parents and these siblings.  But I think it is a reminder that any family environment has both positive and negative consequences.  As demented as these parents seem to be, they do what they do because they love their children and they want to protect them; they just make some horrifying decisions in their efforts to do so. To a far less extreme degree, can't that be said about many family units?  Okay, maybe in addition to love this is also about love of power...but isn't that also found in other families (big and small)?  The film works best when it pushes the logic of "family values" ad absurdum (and I don't mean that the film comments on the American politicized use of that term, I mean family values more generally).  The problem is that the siblings have accepted their parents values at face value without questioning them, and they don't have the means to explore anything outside of that system.  I hope I don't need to list the many current global situations (including some close to home) where people are in danger of being trapped in an analogous situation.    

I look forward to your responses and comments.  --JLK

Update 3/14/11: Dogtooth is also available at Fandor.