Aaron Taylor

How to See Things Differently: Tim Burton’s Reimaginings

Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) emerges from his earthy prison to find Collinsport, Maine, much changed from the colonial fishing port he last set eyes upon 200 years ago. Bedeviled by monstrous construction equipment, satanic Golden Arches, and unnervingly smooth tarmac, he eventually stands transfixed by a pair of blazing Gorgonic orbs that rush toward him at supernatural speed. Expecting death, he is instead unceremoniously told to “Get out of the road, asshole” by the car’s panicked driver. Wrenched out of his New World fiefdom, this undead aristocrat has been rudely awakened to the fallen world of Nixon’s America. His abrupt recontextualization is disconcerting to say the least. Darkly Byronic romanticism is now passe, supplanted by the banalities of the Carpenters, the studied glam of T. Rex, and the calculated grotesqueries of Alice Cooper. He endeavors to restore the grandeur of his family name but finds the process of adaptation distasteful. In short, Barnabas discovers to his dismay that enthrallingly Gothic dark shadows have been enfeebled by postmodernity’s florescence, and he is but an insubstantial shade. His second coming has been prefigured and diminished by an array of pop cultural predecessors, and his ghoulish charisma dwindles to tolerable eccentricity in an era incapable of astonishment.

Blind Spots And Mind Games: Performance, Motivation, and Emotion in the Films of Stanley Kubrick

The acting style in Stanley Kubrick’s films can be regarded as a symptom of the “other minds problem” and its ramifications for the cinema. Performances in Kubrick’s work reveal the complications involved in positing narration as a rhetorical system with a priori claims to direct and accurate evaluative knowledge of characters. For Kubrick, narrative discourse is not a systemic correlative for authorial mastery over characters, and so his actors help establish narrational patterns that collide with the intricacies of fictional subjectivities. The performative techniques that complicate our ability to conceptualize and engage with characters’ emotions are itemized with the aim of precisely conceptualizing the director’s unique approach to performance. These strategies include strategic improvisation, excessive ostensiveness, expressively neutral action, and artificially immobilized expressions. Such techniques allow us to appreciate Kubrick’s “skeptical classicism,” a mode of narration whereby we negotiate various avenues and impediments surrounding our longing for knowledge of an other’s mind.

Uncelebrated Lives: Reflections on the Supporting Player

One of the pleasures of viewing a tautly-constructed classical film lies in the potential to discover understated complexity in the most unassuming of sequences. Singling out these moments, or identifying a work that seems particularly adroit in subtlety and nuance is often a rather subjective, even personal, enterprise. Often, it is the performance of a uniquely skilled actor that will retune one’s attention toward the film, directing one toward otherwise overlooked connotations. For me, John Huston’s 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon is just such a film. The performances of its ensemble cast yield suggestive riches with wondrously casual insouciance. Witness, for example, the brief pas de deux between private investigator, Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and his girl Friday, Effie (Lee Patrick) that occurs fifteen minutes into the film. The motivation of the scene seems straightforwardly functional: we are presented with an opportunity to briefly take stock of the problems facing Spade. He must investigate two murders that the police are anxious to hang on him—Floyd Thursby, a heavy he was hired to tail, and Miles Archer, his own partner—as well as extricate himself from the demands of Miles’ widow, Ida, with whom he had been having an affair. Curiously, though, I find my attention drawn away from the pressing matters at hand—from speculating about the source of these unfurling conspiratorial tendrils. After all, Thursby is but a murdered name, and will remain disembodied for the entire narrative. Archer is little more than a mustachioed leer, and unlike Spade, my desire to see justice done on his behalf is minimal. As for Spade himself, something distracts me from his plight, in spite of the pleasure I briefly take from the blithe insolence that Bogart brings to the character’s reactionary flippancy. In point of fact, it is the casual intimacy of a series of gestures undertaken by Effie that detracts from the intended narrational focus of the scene. I note the forthrightness of Lee Patrick’s poise as Effie insinuates herself within Spade’s office, moving with languid familiarity towards his desk, rocking herself up onto it with practiced ease; the sensuality with which she dots tobacco onto one of Spade’s rolling papers, cinches the bag shut with small, neat teeth, and passes it to his waiting lips to seal and then accept; her winsome readiness with a match as she lights his cigarette even as she offhandedly reveals her discovery of Ida’s recent duplicity. None of these things necessarily speak to the referential meaning of the scene. While the narrative busily sends story threads involving vamps, hoodlums, victims and widows