Doctor's Notes: Weapons, Sirāt, Mank, and American Graffiti
the town, the desert, the circus, and Modesto
Welcome to Doctor’s Notes, where I — Charlotte of The Treatment — share some shorter but still Treatment-coded reviews for films I’ve watched lately. This will largely comprise recent and/or more commercial films so that I can keep my foot in the Rotten Tomatoes door while also introducing the widest possible audience to the New Film Criticism.
If you’re coming here from Rotten Tomatoes, know that “Fresh” and “Rotten” ratings indicate my personal enjoyment of the film only; they are not a testament to whether or not they’re worth watching. If I write about a film, that means I consider it worth watching.
I give star ratings for every film I plan on including here over at my Letterboxd account, where these reviews will then be posted after the Doctor’s Notes post goes live. Follow me to get a sneak peek at what I plan on writing about!
Table of Contents:
Weapons
Weapons
There is a review on Letterboxd — which I can’t seem to find now, unfortunately — that eviscerates Weapons for what the reviewer perceives as codes of anti-queer moral panic being distastefully utilized for the emotional and thematic engine of the narrative. This is not unfounded; between Gladys’ aesthetic flamboyance, the parents deputizing themselves as witch hunters (in the literal and colloquial sense), and Gladys’ more active efforts to murder the one gay couple in the film, Weapons’ unchecked queerphobia is an interpretive conclusion based in reasonable literacy.
That being said, I buy the evidence of the premise, but I reject the premise itself. That is, I think the aforementioned plot elements are, in fact, laced with anti-queer moral panic codes, but I do not think the text itself amounts nor contributes to anti-queer sentiment.
Why? Because when Alex is driving with his dad — prior to Gladys’ arrival — and his dad asks him if he “kissed any supermodels today,” the look on Alex’s face is one that I would recognize anywhere, because it’s the exact same look that inhabited my own face when I was a little boy and a (cishet) adult would, for whatever reason, ask me about my libidinal recreation.
“Oh man,” I said to nobody but my couch, “Alex is queer, and he has no language/context for what queerness is.”
It’s the back half of that revelation — having no language with which to understand oneself — that bears most of Weapons’ thematic heft. As teased by a plot structure that binds these characters in an interconnected codependency, Weapons comes to illuminate how a small town wreaks its oft-invisible violence; not only by resisting change or differences, but by stunting — via that sameness — one’s ability to dream beyond one’s surroundings.
Indeed, how to break one’s alcoholic proclivities, how to unlearn a masculinity that prevents you from telling your son you love him, how to quit burglary in pursuit of your next fix, when the small town provides such grotesquely limited contexts in which you can understand your existence? How to inform yourself of who you could be when the extent of your world is sparse hegemony?
These are adult questions that adults are responsible for answering — and I mean actually answering; not resorting to defeatist resignation — so that children A.) Don’t need to, and B.) Can go on to have the freedom to evolve beyond their banal surroundings/small town “subcultures” (which often amount to either sports or drugs).
And if the adults in question are too socially incompetent to do so, you end up with a group of kids who will likely go into the world without well and truly knowing who they are; obedient husks whose life will be sapped away — via what might as well be wiccan methods — by a system that will try and forcefully tell them who they are instead.
—
Now, I do think Gladys is a bad, queer-coded (if not literally queer) adult, but, again, I don’t subscribe to the notion that her being so makes for an anti-queer text. In fact, I would argue that it makes for a text that’s so acutely provocative that it can only read as utterly queer.
Because just as the queerness of a bad queer adult does not erase their badness, neither does their badness erase their queerness, and at the end of the day, the mere presence of a queer adult immediately creates a new context with which a small-town child may measure existence — their own, and just generally — in the world.
And indeed, it’s Alex who rescues his classmates via the things he learned from watching Gladys, casting a spell to free and then sic his classmates on her so that she may never harm anyone again. Parabolically, Alex comes to terms with a language for his queerness while rejecting the badness that the isolated context of Gladys insists on packaging with it. Not knowing what you can be is far different from knowing what you aren’t, and sure enough, Alex may not have known he could be queer, but he sure as hell knew he wasn’t bad.
Smartly, the inherent tragedy of it all lingers. A voiceover at the end informs us that most of the children — after brutally murdering Gladys — were trauma-mute for weeks before they started talking again, because of course they were. There is no positive context in which children must solve adult problems or answer adult questions because the actual adults couldn’t get out of their own way enough to do good by the children. Such was the case with the limiting sameness on where and around whom the children were growing up, and such was the case with the witch.
I should love Weapons. I vibe with the genre, the form, and I find its textual heft impressive and directly relevant to the specific social fabric that I’m enmeshed with. It is an impossibly complete package in that regard and close to the same on a more technical, cinematic level (I can’t think of any scene from any horror movie I saw last year that even touches the level of visual fluency that the closing sequence of Julia Garner’s segment does). And yet, I’m only just fond of it. I preferred Barbarian. Just goes to show the fruitlessness of using one’s personal experience with the film as the baseline for film criticism, although I can’t say I’m not hopelessly fascinated by the chemical mysteries from which our bodies build said experiences. Maybe Cregger’s Resident Evil movie will take that on. It might as well.
Sirāt
Earlyish in Sirāt, the young Esteban suggests to his father, Luis, that they offer some of their chocolate to the group of ravers that have been helping them through the desert. As a thank-you, yes, but also as an expression of the childlike (complimentary) principle of camaraderie and being there for each other.
Luis — following this wisdom — brings the chocolate to the ravers’ van, and one of them, Jade, invites him into the van to hang out for a bit. She’s playing with a blown speaker and geeking out over it, and Luis remarks how he struggles to listen to it because (paraphrased) “it’s all just noise to me.” Jade — and, by extension, director-co-writer Óliver Laxe — says “You don’t listen to it. You feel it.”
What surrounds this moment is a deeply versatile thesis on the dichotomy of knowing something as fact versus comprehending and accepting something as truth. You can know of a World War III-type military conflict without actually comprehending such a thing with your naked eyes and flesh (as this group does later during the minefield sequence). You can know for a fact that your daughter is her own adult without accepting that she doesn’t owe you correspondence. You can know your child is dead without accepting that you can do nothing to change their fate.
It’s the space between these things — the path from the known to the accepted — that interests the film; Sirāt’s opening crawl even clues us in to meaning of the title, that being an Arabic eschatological (essentially, the study of theological end times) term referring to the path that connects Hell to Paradise, and which only those worthy of Paradise can cross.
Implicit in the concept of sirāt is the idea of a correct path, which of course implies other, incorrect paths, such as the one that Luis begins the film on. Namely, he’s in the desert, searching for his daughter Mar, who — we’re encouraged to infer — is not terribly keen on being found. Luis does not accept this, though it seems obvious to Esteban.
And so Luis persists and persists and persists on this journey, going up and up and up a cliffside and then Esteban dies in a freak accident because God didn’t know how else to tell Luis “Wrong!”
Luckily — though this of course isn’t at the front of Luis’ mind in the moment — children go straight to Paradise. We know this because Esteban understands and accepts truths as a means to know them as facts (see: camaraderie and being there for each other), rather than learning a fact so that he may learn to accept it. In other words, children exist at the end point that adults like Luis are trying to find their way back to.
Now, obviously, this is reductive logic; plenty of children work to accept new truths/lessons all the time. But one must realize that Sirāt concerns itself with spiritual logic in order to illuminate acceptance — the means with which we rise above our emotional/existential discomforts or itches — as a human superpower of sorts. In my own experience as a Person Who Has Shitty Days, I make much more emotional progress when I accept and welcome the shittiness of how I feel rather than trying to force the shittiness out of my system via distraction of some sort.
Emotion, of course — particularly grief — is depicted in Sirāt as the obstacle these characters must overcome in order to survive.
Luis’ grief, for example, sends him marching into the desert to certain dehydrated doom, only surviving by the grace of the ravers. The death of Jade, meanwhile, sends Tobin into a grief-stricken sprint towards her body as if he can still save her, or as if escaping his grief depends upon going to her body rather than accepting that she’s dead. He immediately dies for it.
You see? Both men try to forge ahead on the whim of emotion without the compass of acceptance and find themselves at dead ends, one literal. Esteban’s death, meanwhile, came by the very same virtue of Luis emotionally resisting acceptance about Mar, which is what led them into the desert and up the cliffside in the first place.
But when Luis and the remaining ravers find themselves 80 feet from the end of the minefield and just watched Bigui blow up? Suddenly, Luis simply walks forward — the same direction that Bigui went — and makes it to the rock. Stef asks him how he knew(!) he wouldn’t blow up. Luis says he didn’t. Stef and Josh walk the same path with their eyes closed — blind faith, visibly anxious but full of acceptance — and survive.
And really, what other way is there to be in that moment? Especially in a desert whose emptiness belies so few observable facts to know, what else can you do but learn how to cultivate acceptance of all that the railroad of destiny has in store for you and all the refugees you find yourself on the train with?
I thought — and still think — Sirāt was a brutal slog, which is perhaps the ideal sentiment one can mine from the viewing experience, keeping in mind the film’s thematic interests. Tremendous.
Mank
I’ve written before about the maddening irony of Roger Ebert spouting such gratuitous mythologizations as “its depths surpass understanding” about Citizen Kane1, a film that concerns itself with a culture that fixates on performance, spectacle, and celebrity mystique rather than any actionable democratic philosophies that may be learned or cribbed from it/them.
Both of these things — Kane and Ebert’s response to it — speak to a culture of pseudo-transcendental exaltation and emotional-manipulation-as-virtue, which is the shared, strategic, placating ammunition of politics, Hollywood, and America at large. Such becomes the target of Mank from the moment Rita Alexander (Lily Collins) venomously remarks that the British will “do the praying, and the fighting” in a war that America will go on to glamourize its paltry role in (largely with the help of the movies!).
Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) gives a more practical demonstration of this in one of Mank’s earliest scenes, monologuing to Herman’s (Gary Oldman) brother Joe about “the real magic of the movies,” which Mayer identifies as the fact that (paraphrased) “The merchant still owns that which the customer pays for”; a perversion of the colloquial sentiment for romanticized awe — itself perverse upon recognizing its function in the aforementioned cultural engineering project — so often associated with the picture house.
Moments later, Mayer appears before the MGM “family” and makes a poetically-rendered plea for all his staff to take an eight-week, 50% pay cut to keep the dream factory alive, promising reimbursements once they make it out of the Depression. Pushback from set technicians is met with “Families root for each other in the good times and take care of each other in the bad ones!” A slow chorus of yeses — one of them from a child performer, eliciting “Aww”s from the rest of the soon-to-be-converted holdouts — becomes applause becomes Mayer’s crocodile tears of gratitude. He does not, of course, end up keeping his promise about reimbursement. “Not even the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” remarks Herman.
From there, it’s beat after indicting beat of one Herman J. Mankiewicz — staunch in his politically-astute truth-to-power ways, from sponsoring Jewish refugees to being the only adult in the room when a Hearst’s-Inner-Circle conversation veers to an illiterate compare/contrast between Upton Sinclair and Adolf Hitler — sardonically navigating a climate that hardly even hides the role and reverberations of the Hollywood machine in its political/cultural engineering affairs:
Mayer and William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) bankroll a series of anti-Sinclair propaganda films through MGM.
Joe asks Herman why he’s holding the line on Citizen Kane’s subject matter, and Herman says “Posterity.”
Herman’s wife Sara — exhausted from his drinking, gambling, and silly platonic affairs — tells him that she’s probably only still married to him because she’s never bored; the perfect parable for Americans and America.
The title of the screenplay that will become Citizen Kane — “America” — can be subtly peeped in a few shots.
Herman tells Shelly Metcalf that they must be vigilant of “people sitting in the dark, willingly checking their disbelief at the door.”
Mayer triumphantly remarks — following Republican governor candidate Frank Merriam (who’s in Hearst’s pocket, and vice versa) pulling ahead of democratic socialist Sinclair on election night — that “If you just give people what they need to know in an emotional way, you can expect they’ll do the right thing.”
All of it, culminating in the would-be coup d’état of Herman drunkenly ripping into Hearst for turning his back on his old democratic ideals in favour of elite cultural power (“How about we make our Quixote a newspaperman [who] runs for public office, and because he’s notably rich, he wins! No, no, wait a minute. Notably Rich-and-Powerful can’t win over an audience unless Notably Rich-and-Powerful sees the error of his ways in the final reel. Notably Rich-and-Powerful and making no goddamn excuses for it is only admirable in real life…”).
But then Mayer brings the house down on Herman by pointing out that Hearst pays half his salary, and that Herman is only kept around because Hearst likes the way he talks — not writes, but talks. Acerbic, entertaining wit; perfect to dress up in the style of an organ grinder’s court jester.
Indeed, come to think of it, what good is an anti-Hitler screenplay if the rich are too enamoured with the German market to put it front of the masses? What good are ideals, period, if they’re just going to be swallowed by Hollywood’s storm of silver-screen romance ancestral of today’s TikTok clipfarms? How does one hope to inspire lasting political change from within the Hollywood system when the American public is too entrenched in the grammar of “the magic of the movies”; a phenomenon whose grip was displayed in Upton Sinclair’s loss to Frank Merriam, and whose endurance was proven all those years later with Ebert’s fondling of Citizen Kane’s depth?
Maybe taking credit for what you believe in — all that you left on the page — is all you can do in a position like that; that you even had to fight for credit on a script that you wrote is its own magic of the movies, as Herman might have said in his Oscar acceptance speech.
Perhaps to its own point, Mank’s stylish renderings (in form, in performance) read as satirical whilst coexisting with such a ferocious prosecution of one of the most prominent — and, accordingly, misunderstood — legacies in cinema history and in the Western cultural imagination more broadly. As consciously aligned and despondently honest as the subject himself. I love and loathe every second of it. Louis B. Mayer would’ve adored Project Hail Mary.
American Graffiti
The automobile is America’s graffiti; a stylistic externalization of the way of being it wishes to express, willed into the fabric of public life without anyone’s permission. Aforementioned way of being is commerce, is status, is the pretense of independence. But perhaps most of all, it is complacency; a refusal to evolve.
Consider: The most honest offering of the automobile — of any vehicle — is the possibility of going somewhere; moving forward in time and space towards some kind of destination. And yet, here, that potential of the automobile is squandered in the name of circular leisure cruising, driving for the sake of driving. The automobile, then, becomes an arena of choice; move forward, or go in circles.
Less interesting than what choice will be made, however, is the fact that choice itself is a uniquely American tool of seduction; the promise/concept of choice, of freedom, all of it the cheese on the mouse trap of America that — during the time in which American Graffiti is set — will soon be sprung by the murder of JFK, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Vietnam draft. Talk about coming of age.
—
Individually, consider how John Milner’s personhood revolves around his yellow deuce coupe and his mythologized status as Modesto’s best drag racer, together with the theme of disillusionment and mortality that runs through his storyline:
The long walk through the scrapyard, each car carrying the ghosts of drivers.
His pretending to come on to the young Carol to make a point about how growing up isn’t the freedom-fantasy it’s cracked up to be.
His charged insistence to Terry that he was losing the race against Falfa before Falfa crashed, and Terry telling him back that “You’re always gonna be the greatest,” much to John’s muted resignation.
Two years later, he dies at the hands of a drunk driver.
Consider how Steve relinquishes his car to Terry before going through motion after toxic motion with Laurie, leading to a breakup. But then Steve gets his car back — gets his choices back — and ultimately decides to stay with Laurie in Modesto after a close-call car crash causes emotions — those temporaneous hallucinogens — to run high enough to convince them that their love will conquer all.
Later, we find out he grows up to be an insurance agent. In Modesto. Indeed, it seems that in American Graffiti, the power to choose often works against your better interests; interests that may become fatally clouded by emotion or some attachment to a social fabric that was decided for you by Henry Ford and the boys.
Consider how Curt:
Spends most of this film in the backseat of a car, bound to the whims of other drivers as he hems, haws, and hesitates about leaving Modesto for college, especially after seeing the blonde woman in the T-Bird, whom he misses a connection with twice precisely because he was in a passenger seat.
When he finally gets on the payphone with the girl, and their brief correspondence vanishes with the click of a receiver, he smiles; the possibility of this woman is gone, and there’s nowhere left to go but forward, away from Modesto.
Suddenly, the thematics of his passengership snap into place; when the automobile stops being an arena of choice, you’re bound to the automobile’s original purpose of bringing you forward, allowing the wind to take you to your karmic destination.
Indeed, Curt’s night was completely out of his hands, and he therefore could not make the mistakes that Steve did. He could not foolishly pursue any key-jingling fantasies (i.e the blonde woman) that were never for him in the first place; a fate that Steve — also bound for college until he wasn’t — almost escaped, were it not for him getting his car back.
In the final scene, Curt gets on a plane as a passenger, ass in gear, destined for Canadian citizenship, sheltered from his birth country’s impending implosion.
And so what George Lucas ends up getting at, ultimately, is the question of not only whether America is mature enough to make choices, but also if we can get hints of an answer by looking at the kinds of choices America creates for itself. American Graffiti recognizes the automobile as vessel of so-called “choice and freedom”; as perverted point of national pride and unwitting tool of self-harm. Give America a wheel and it will steer off the holy path just because it has the choice to, nuclearizing impulse and calling it self-determination. Seven different types of Jolly Rancher-scented shampoo but no healthcare, anyone? What about all that imperialism? Need I go on?
It’s no wonder, of course; the anti-culture base of colonialism/whiteness would naturally be so starved for purpose that the mere sockpuppet of choice would be tantalizing enough to handwave — even celebrate — whatever damage results from said choice. Wherever you were in 1962, America was busy living for the key-jingle.
Sidebar: I’ll get into this more when I write about Star Wars, but it is endlessly funny to me that George Lucas is so often cited as a story structure wizard when he made such crazy motion-going joints as THX 1138 and American Graffiti, and only got Star Wars — itself far more congruent with Eastern storytelling philosophy than Hollywood’s artificial throttling — greenlit because Graffiti made a graffillion dollars at the box office. One of our most flippantly instinctual storytellers at large and still he’s cited in attempts to justify the tools of expectation-first storytelling as if he didn’t pull a “Well, actually” on Alfred Fucking Hitchcock re: MacGuffins. Bonkers.
Another sidebar to American Graffiti: at the very end when the graphics tell us the story of what happened to everybody we just spent 2 hours with, only the men get mentioned -- not a word about what happened to the characters played by Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, or the incredible Candy Clark who spent the night with Toad and just loves tuck and roll upholstery.