This post discusses plot points from the movie Upstream Color.

Shane Carruth movies, for all that he’s directed only two of them, Primer and this year’s Upstream Color, seem perfectly designed for the internet age: dense, mysterious, and designed to be collaboratively decoded. But I’ve been thinking about Upstream Color since I saw it SXSW last month and had a reaction to it that was so strong and personal that I had to sit with it for a while. And I’ve decided that the best way to watch this wildly romantic movie about two deeply damaged people who come to love each other is emotionally rather than rationally, to accept its profound strangenesses rather than to try to understand them.

Those strangenesses are considerable. The movie begins when Kris (Amy Seimetz), a young film producer, is abducted and drugged with what appears to be a worm, outside of a bar. The man who has captured her procedes to order her to empty her bank accounts, to sign over her house, to drink glasses of water, and to copy over pages from Walden, and then to abandon her to face the loss of her job, her financial security, and large parts of her memory alone—though not before an enormous worm has been extracted from her body and implanted in a rather cheerful-looking pig. The people who are intervening in Kris’ life are extraordinarily strange, and the things they’re doing to her are stranger. But their strangeness is precisely what makes them powerful figures—they’re specters of ineffable forces like loss, mental illness, and isolation who suggest a sinister plan to the universe rather than the randomness of fate.

Kris might have struggled to reclaim control of her life on her own, but Upstream Color is more than a simple narrative of vengeance and female empowerment. As she comes back to herself after having been attacked, Kris’ recovery doesn’t happen in isolation: she meets Jeff (Carruth), and she’s forced to reckon with someone who is more willing to trust her and to invest in her than she is in herself.

What makes the courtship and growth of the relationship between Kris and Jeff so powerful is the extent to which Carruth has used extraordinarily strange circumstances as a frame for emotional realities that more conventional movies prefer to obscure. When Jeff spots Kris on the train they both ride to work, she’s initially diffident, understanding herself—not without reason, given that she appears to have spontaneously destroyed her own life—as far too damaged to be a worthy romantic prospect. When he asks for her phone number, she tells him only to call her for professional reasons: she has started working at a small print shop after being fired from her job as a film editor after her inexplicable absence. “I’m not going to call for signage, though,” Jeff warns her. “I don’t need any signage.” That he might want her for herself is almost impossible for Kris to comprehend, and she avoids him. But Jeff pursues her anyway in a display of curiosity and budding ardor that Carruth carefully calibrates to seem eager, but not overpowering. “I can’t do this every day,” Jeff finally tells Kris after she’s ducked a number of his calls, and revealing that he’s shuffling his schedule to talk to her. “It makes me late for work. You’re four trains behind me.”
Read more

This post discusses plot points from the February 13 episode of The Americans.

It’s Valentine’s Day today, but we’ve been living in a moment of television romanticism for some time now. Homeland started out as a nervy thriller and turned into an epic love story, which as Lorrie Moore persuasively argued in the New York Review of Books, works only if you’re able to believe that an obsessive Central Intelligence Agency analyst and a dedicated al Qaeda terrorist would be able to shut out everything else and fall uncritically for each other (whether or not they have an intense and believable sexual attraction to each other is a separate question). Downton Abbey has won over significant followings in the United Kingdom and the United States on the strength of Michelle Dockery and Dan Stevens’ performance as Lady Mary and Matthew, members of the British nobility slowly finding their way to each other. And The Americans, FX’s Cold War drama, is effective precisely because it’s a portrait of a marriage, albeit one arranged by the KGB.

But there’s something that makes Homeland and Downton Abbey very different from The Americans, and it’s not just how the relationships in each show began. In Homeland, Carrie sets aside her loyalty to the United States, and Brody’s loyalty to al Qaeda wavers because in each other they find kindred, intense, obsessive spirits. Ideology is less important than love. And in Downton Abbey, ideological concerns for Matthew and Mary after they’re married, as they debate how to modernize management of the estate and how to manage questions ranging from Edith’s offer to write a newspaper column and Branson’s integration into the family. Politics, for Downton Abbey is a means of creating obstacles for a couple in what is primarily a love story.

In The Americans, though, politics and ideology serve a very different function. They’re among the things that draw people to each other, providing the basis for conversation, mutual conviction, and real love. As Elizabeth explains to Phillip after he discovers her affair with Gregory (Derek Luke), a civil rights activist who Elizabeth has turned into an operative, and who is pulled back into their lives when they need to conduct an operation to deal with their colleague’s secret wife, “I was 17 when I joined the KGB. I never had a boyfriend. They put me with you. When we got here, I was 22 years old. I was living in a strange house, in a strange country, with a strange man. And I met Gregory and he was passionate about the cause. He was passionate about everything. He was passionate about me. I recruited him. And he didn’t even want everything. He just believed, like I did. He was the first person I felt I could really talk to. And I needed that. It just happened. It never really happened that way for us, did it?”

Politics aren’t a side issue here. They’re not a gimmick The Americans is pulling in to the show in order to create problems for a couple in order to artificially spin out the amount of time it takes to get them together, or to create drama for a couple we want to believe is essentially happy. In this show, politics is one of the things, other than good looks or ephemeral chemistry, that draw people together, that give them the basis of work they want to do together, that gives them something to talk about and a sense that they’re profoundly in step.

As we’ve seen in previous episodes, differences in their ideology is one of the reasons that Phillip and Elizabeth have found themselves in tension, and unable to have a genuine relationship. The decision to defect or not to defect isn’t just a matter of their political views shifting: it means dramatically changing the terms on which their relationship is conducted. And it’s been an understandably traumatic conversation to have come out into the open. But the fact that they’re discussing defecting, and the impossibility of the things they’ve been asked to do by their KGB handlers, and what being in the KGB has done to them is the very thing that’s made a real relationship between them possible for the first time. The breakdown of Elizabeth’s loyalty to the agency is what let her violate the rules she and Phillip were given, and to talk to him honestly about her sexual assault, removing one of the obstacles to them having a genuine sexual life where they don’t harm each. “Things are changing at home with me and Phillip,” Elizabeth tells Gregory. “You mean you’re finally leaving him?” he asks her. “The opposite, actually,” she tells him.

Not all couples have the same challenges that Phillip and Elizabeth have to deal with. Most of us don’t have to manage country estates, our relationships determining the economic fates of hundreds of people in the region where we live. And for all Romeo and Juliet-style romances between couples dramatically divided by differences imagined, a la the Capulets and Montagues, or real, as between the United States and al Qaeda, most of us aren’t working a James Carville-Mary Matalin schtick. But politics and passionate convictions matter to our relationships, too. Whether it’s the division of housework, or the ability to genuinely support each other’s work and share our interests, our ideas and our romances aren’t separate, or obstacles to each other. The Americans is the rare show to recognize that.

This post discusses plot points from the October 21 episode of Homeland.

There’s a real statue in front of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters, much like the one Brody glimpsed Carrie through this week on Homeland, called Kryptos. A series of four elaborate encryptions, only three have ever been broken. The first to be decoded reads “BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION.” (The misspelling is deliberate.) It’s harder to think of a better lesson for Homeland, which delivered its best episode this season, and one of its most powerful of the show by sticking to the nuance of illusion, rather than the increasingly frantic contrivances the show has used to generate drama in Brody’s half of the story this season, and by examining the subtleties of the ways Brody and Carrie have lied to each other over the year they’ve known each other*.

In a way, the show makes a joke of such mummery in the first scene when David’s son from his failed marriage, Kenny, meets Saul at the door waving a lightsaber and warns him “I am your father. Don’t make me destroy you.” Saul is here on a quieter mission, to let David know that Carrie was right, with a minimum of bitterness and blame. “We could arrest him. That would be that,” Saul suggests. “Or we could leave him right where he is. Iran is planning blowback against the U.S. for the Israel bombings. Abu Nazir was going to be the agent of that plan. That’s what the Beirut meet was about.” David’s anxieties mostly have to do with his relationship with Vice President Walden. “I dupe this guy, he fires me in five seconds,” he tells Saul. “You tell him you missed the signs on Golden Boy, he’ll fire you in three,” Saul tells him, the closest he gets to nastiness for what David did to Carrie, offering him a way to redeem himself to his country, if not to the woman he drummed out of the agency.

As proof Carrie remains unredeemed in his eyes, David assigns another agent, Peter Quinn, to oversee her. But that insult appears to be an unexpected gift, because after some initial prodding at each other, it seems like Quinn and Carrie might turn out to like each other. Some of the best scenes in the episode happen between Carrie and Quinn, pitting her emotional wrecking ball against his penchant for cleverness as they learn the basic facts, the subtle shadings of each other. “I don’t like surprises,” he tells her when they meet. “I’m not crazy about them either,” Carrie agrees. “Crazy. Interesting choice of words,” Quinn tells her, reminding her he knows who she is. Where Carrie gives out information directly, Quinn does it at a slant, cloaked in sharp, short phrases. “You were fucking him, huh?” Quinn asks her. “Who are you fucking?” Carrie responds, her voice going up in confirmation. “An ER nurse. I’m not that into her,” Quinn deadpans. But he’s sympathetic. “I’m just saying, if he did to me what he did to you, got me fired, and made me think I was crazy when I wasn’t, and sent me off to get my brain zapped, I’d fucking rip his skin off.” When he pushes again, asking “So, was it work or love? Brody?” Carrie snaps at him “What are, we, girlfriends?” and he lets her interrogate him instead. “You ever go back to Philly?” she asks of his past. “There’s no good Indian food,” he complains as a form of the negative. “Why does Estes like you so much?” she wants to know, not revealing that once upon a time, Estes liked her a lot, too. “I’m pretty likable.” He might be, but there’s a knife edge to him, too.

They aren’t alone in their flirtation, either. “Makes you realize there’s this whole big world out there,” Dana tells Finn Walden when he sneaks her away from a study break to the top of the Washington Monument (bonus points for the post-earthquake construction setup). It’s heartbreaking to contrast Dana’s hope for that big world with Carrie, who has a world of experience Dana can’t even begin to contemplate, tentatively approaching someone new. Finn and Dana are sweet and tentative with each other because this is new to them. When Finn tells Dana “I like your attitude,” and she tells him artlessly ‘I like you,” they’re tentative because the risk of rejection is some of the worst hurt they can imagine, Dana’s need to untangle herself from Xander the most complicated emotional extraction she could undertake. Dana and Carrie have the same problems, magnified and distorted by pain and experience.
Read more

When the first teaser for The Host, the adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s science fiction novel starring Saorsie Ronan as an alien lifeform implanted in the body of a young human woman, came out, I decided to give Meyer the benefit of the doubt and give the book a shot. I was pleasantly surprised, and it made me wonder how Meyer’s career might have gone if The Host had been published before Twilight and Meyer had been embraced as a science fiction novelist, rather than primarily as a romantic one. But we live in the world that Twilight built, and so The Host looks like it’s going to be marketed as an intense young adult love story:

This is too bad, because to my mind, the most interesting thing about The Host as its status as a kind of peaceful Old Man’s War from the aliens’ perspective. Ronan’s character is an extremely fragile alien who goes by Wanderer. Her species is a colonizing—and as they see it—civilizing one that travels to new planets, removes the consciousness from the sentient species who live there, and insert themselves. The worlds they run are free of conflict, poverty, disease, and ecological devastation. In Wanderer’s opinion, this is a significant improvement, and lets her species, known as Souls, gather the stories, traditions, and wisdom of the species whose bodies they occupy. Where in Old Man’s War, John Scalzi’s characters drop in on species and civilizations as they fight their way through the galaxy, Wanderer gives us fleeting but powerful glimpses of life in all its possibilities.

That’s not to say there isn’t a YA-level love triangle in the novel, but rather than being defined by Who Loves Bella Swan more, the people who end up competing both for Wanderer’s love and the affection of the body she inhabits offer differing models of human independence in the face of alien invasion. The man who loved the body Wanderer occupies before it was hijacked stands for resistance to the invasion, to an inflexible vision of humanity as pure and independent, while the man who comes to love Wanderer for herself is one of the first humans she meets who is intrigued by the possibility of expanding his knowledge of the universe and his understanding of the kind of people who are worthy of sympathy and empathy. It’s a triangle with intellectual purpose beyond emotional frisson.

The book isn’t perfect, far from it. But it’s going to make me sad if The Host gets sold as another romance in the vein of Twilight and not as anything more. I’d like to think that a sense of wonder is still something that can get pricked by exposure to the potential size of the universe, not just by the sensation of being desperately wanted. Maybe The Hunger Games will convince folks that if you heighten romance with a postapocalypse, girls won’t be deterred, and boys will feel there’s something there for them, too, and we’ll all get a better movie as a result.

Because I am deeply dedicated to exploring any and all pop culture phenomena for your benefit no matter the cost to my own sanity, (and because what else was I going to read poolside in California?) I spent part of my time away reading Fifty Shades of Grey*. The novel, a self-published best-seller that started as Twilight fan fiction and subsequently landed print publication and a major movie deal, is essentially a conventional romance about a broken man rescued by the love of a good woman. But Fifty Shades‘ embrace of BDSM isn’t tight enough to leave a bruise, or to open up a serious conversation about power in intimate relationships.

The potential submissive here is Anastasia Steele, possessed of one of the great stupid romance novel names of all time, a virginal college senior who hopes to go into publishing. Her roommate, the editor of the college newspaper, inexplicably asks Anastasia rather than another reporter to fill in for her at an interview with an elusive industrialist who is a major university benefactor. The interview is outwardly a disaster: Anastasia falls down, gets flustered, asks Christian Grey if he’s gay. But as in Twilight, her incompetence ignites a possessive urge and an erotic obsession in Grey. He asks her to sign a contract to become his submissive, divests her of her virginity, and gives her an education in erotic spanking, riding crops, and handcuffs, then begins breaking all his rules and forging an emotional relationship with her as well. While Fifty Shades of Grey has references to all sorts of toys in what Anastasia refers to as Christian’s “Red Room of Pain,” and some discussion of dominant-submissive power dynamics, overall the novel reads as if author E.L. James did what Christian encourages Anastasia to do after proposing that she become his sub: hit up Wikipedia.

The novel, told from Anastasia’s perspective, consistently insists that Christian, who was born to a drug-addicted mother and sexually initiated by a dominant friend of his mother’s at fifteen, is interested in BDSM because it’s a way of containing and channeling his psychological damage. And Anastasia constantly insists that Christian is an unreliable narrator of his own life. She describes him as “A young man deprived of his adolescence, sexually abused by some evil Mrs. Robinson figure.” When she thinks about his experiences with Elana, his first lover, it’s with distrust and disbelief: “I just can’t picture it. Christian being beaten by someone as old as my mother, it’s just so wrong. Again I wonder what damage she’s wrought.” Some of her jealousy is the result of a sense of inadequacy. Anastasia wonders “Did she have the best of him? Before he became so closed? Or did she bring him out of himself? He has such a fun, playful side.” But mostly, Anastasia firmly believes that Christian’s interest in dominance and submission is the result of profound self-loathing, something that Christian can grow beyond to heal rather than a source of what he needs: “He doesn’t even love himself. I recall his self-loathing, her love being the only form he found acceptable. Punished— whipped, beaten, whatever their relationship entailed— he feels undeserving of love. Why does he feel like that? How can he feel like that?”

It’s a weirdly condescending perspective for Anastasia to take towards Christian’s understanding of himself. She’s jealous and confused that Christian could consider Elana a friend, that he’s in business with her, that they have dinner together. “It wasn’t like that,” he tells Anastasia. “Okay, it didn’t feel like that to me…She was a force for good. What I needed…She’s not an animal, Anastasia. Of course she didn’t. I don’t understand why you feel you have to demonize her.” A more sophisticated novel might have delved into the question of what Christian believes that he needs. Anastasia is convinced that, for Christian, domination and submission are about associating love with pain. But the book never examines the idea that a dominant-submissive relationship might be about providing Christian with relationships that have an extreme clarity and predictability to them after the chaos of his childhood before he was adopted, about knowing exactly what he’s supposed to do or expected to do or allowed to do in one arena of his life, or about guaranteeing that he has someone who will be receptive to his offers of love and pleasure. Giving more respect to his perspective could have moved Fifty Shades of Grey beyond the romance novel conventions that form its skeleton, and into a more serious consideration of what people want from their relationships and the fact that pop culture ideals of love and sex are not sufficient to everyone’s needs.
Read more

One of the best movies I’ve seen so far at Sundance, the poignant gay love story Keep the Lights On, reminded of me of Shame, but with more emotional depth and less air of an art installation. It’s also a completely exceptional romance, one steeped in the realities of sex and intimacy, and with the acknowledgment that not all relationships, even the deepest and most intimate ones, succeed.

It helps, in both intensity and structure, that this fictional love story is based on the real-life relationship of Ira Sachs, who wrote and directed the movie, and literary agent Bill Clegg. Erik, the film’s main character, meets Paul, a semi-closeted literary lawyer with a girlfriend, on a phone sex chat line in 1998. What begins as a one-night stand evolves into a decade-long on-and-off romance, Paul and Erik’s cohabitation interrupted by Paul’s trips to rehab and relapses into a crack addiction. The men disappoint each other, Paul by failing to show up for the triumph of Erik’s long-gestating documentary about a seminal New York gay artist, Erik through indecisiveness and devotion that begins to feel like a weight.

Paul’s addictions, and the things it makes him do as a result, provide the movie’s obvious parallel to Shame, if the movie released last year was told from the perspective of someone Brandon perpetually hurt rather than Brandon himself. Erik undergoes an escalating series of worries and humiliations as Paul spirals deeper into his relationship with crack, panicking when the same lover who threw him surprise parties and gives him thoughtful gifts vanishes for days and winds up passed out in the hall of their apartment. In the movie’s most searing sequence, Erik refuses to leave the hotel room where Paul is holed up on a crack binge during a relapse. While Paul muses nervously about his weight loss, explaining “It’s the crackhead diet, I wouldn’t recommend it,” and promising he’ll return home tomorrow, Erik refuses to leave until Paul is ready to go home or to rehab. And he stays even when a hooker Paul’s ordered arrives. When Paul asks Erik not to leave, Erik sits on the bed and holds Paul’s hand while the other man has sex with Paul. It’s simultaneously a humiliation and a deeply moving statement of intimacy and love.

Sex in the movie isn’t all grim, though. Keep The Lights On features some of the better sex scenes I’ve ever seen on-screen. Erik’s periodic hookups before his relationship with Paul solidifies and when it’s in a lacuna are alternately funny and satisfying. When he and Paul go to bed, the sex they have is simultaneously tender and awkward — it looks real, which is vastly more than can be said for most movie sex scenes, and is vastly sexier as a result. In the decade after the emergence of the AIDS crisis, the syndrome is present, but not dominant. A scene where Erik panics on a payphone begging a clinic worker to give him the result of his latest HIV test even though she’s not supposed to tell him over the phone is a stand-out for star Thure Lindhardt.

And sex isn’t the only kind of intimacy in the movie. Throughout the rise and fall of Erik and Paul’s romance, Erik relies on his best friend Claire (Julianne Nicholson, who deserves to be known beyond her stint on Law & Order: Criminal Intent) for support. They discuss having a baby, and she’s one of the few people who can challenge him on his reticence. “I’ve been hiding crucial events of my life since I was 13 years old,” he tells her at one point, provoking a tough but loving reminder that “That’s no excuse!” As his relationship with Paul falters, Erik also makes a tentative connection with a young artist named Igor. And when he and Paul finally split for good, Igor’s promise “I’ll take you to dinner,” is a reminder that even when big relationships fail, there are always new beginnings.