The Serious Wonder of Hayao Miyazaki

Last weekend, I finally got around to watching The Cat Returns, which is an animated movie from the now-famous Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. It's the story of a teenage girl who rescues a cat from the road, only to realize that the cat is the royal prince of the Kingdom of Cats. As a reward, the King of Cats captures the girl and takes her to the Kingdom, where she must escape becoming the prince's bride. As far as animated movies go, it's a little weird, and very, very awesome.

"A little weird and very awesome" is applicable to pretty much all of Miyazaki's productions. His movies are whimsical, strange, and beautifully animated. They're also deadly serious. While most contemporary American animated movies (Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks, etc.) play tongue-in-cheek games with the conventions of fairy tales, creating films that they claim appeal to children and adults alike, Miyazaki takes fairy tales very seriously. His films are almost always about war and environmental destruction and the very real danger that comes from forgetting who you are. His movies inhabit worlds whose borders can blur at any second with eerie and dangerous magics. Aerial wars can break out between zeppelins and dragons. Birds can become staircases. Shadows can coalesce into henchmen. Even balls of dust and soot can come alive.

Dust sprites from Spirited Away.

I think that by taking fantasy seriously, by favoring whimsy and wild imagination over generic humor and contemporary references, Miyazaki is able to create movies that are truly fascinating to children and adults alike. My favorite is My Neighbor Totoro, which features a cat bus and trolls unlike anything you've ever seen.

OMG catbus!!

I'm also a big fan of Howl's Moving Castle (which is very unlike the original--and also excellent--children's fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones) and Ponyo, the Studio's most recent production.

 
Ponyo is, in theory, based on the fairy tale of the little mermaid, but Miyazaki's film is as different from Disney's The Little Mermaid as the Brothers Grimm stories are from Shrek. As a mermaid, little Ponyo is cute but creepy (she looks like a goldfish, occasionally sprouts bird-like feet, and really enjoys ham), and the film features massive flooding and prehistorical sea creatures.

Ponyo in her bucket.

I'm always surprised by the genuine delight that I still feel whenever I see a Miyazaki film. I'm fascinated with the little threads that flow through his movies--the stone ghosts, the dust sprites, the menacing shadow men, the omnipresent and insect-like war zeppelins--and how with every film he makes for children, he doesn't just play in the worlds of myth and fairy tales, he actively contributes to them. It's his startling originality--his ability to create creatures that are delightful and terrifying, beautiful and bizarre--that makes me rent his movies again and again.

Howl, Howl, and Howl

What sound does a working woman in her mid-twenties make the morning after her first softball practice in two and a half years?

Why, how did you guess?

Softball practice was fantastically fun yesterday, but I'm paying for it today. I'm having trouble opening doors, people--I mean, lifting my arm, turning a knob, and stepping forward hurts. Who knew that throwing a ball and crouching for grounders and darting across a muddy field for an hour and forty-five minutes could do that to a body?

In less painful news, I finally saw Howl this weekend. Howl is a "biopic" about the obscenity trial that followed City Light's release of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems  in 1956, but the movie was nothing like what I expected.

I thought the movie would be a typical biopic in the style of Walk the Line or Lean on Me or Braveheart: conventional and predictable and utterly sentimental. Instead, the obscenity trial that the film is supposedly about serves as little more than a backbone for the 84 minutes of poetic action, a mere cage of plot line over which the filmmakers draped the central components of the film: the interview scenes with Ginsberg (played by James Franco) and the poem itself (which is read by Franco and beautifully animated). Really, the poem is what gives the movie all its heart and soul and interest; I wouldn't have minded a 45-minute movie with nothing but black-and-white scenes of Franco reading Howl in a Village bar spliced with bits of that lovely, vivid, frightening animation.



I was especially fond of the animators' portrayal of Moloch, the poem's "villain" (see above).

Once I got past expecting an actual plot to appear, I really enjoyed the movie, and I loved it best for reminding me of how much I used to love Ginsberg. He's one of my favorite 20th-Century poets, and I've read a ton of his poems and interviews. (In fact, the first poem I ever published was very Ginsberg-inspired, with long lines and stacks of lists and happy over-the-top joyful cosmic hysteria). He was severely out of vogue at my grad school, so I hadn't read him in years, but in 2004, I pretty much wanted to be Allen Ginsberg.

"You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a

sunflower!"

Watching Howl made me pull out my copy of Ginsberg's Selected Poems: 1947-1995, which (according the the receipt I found in the book) I bought from The Raven Bookstore in 2005. I reread my favorite sections of Howl (the "I am with you Rockland" section and "Footnote to Howl" with all its holy holy holy holys) and flipped through to see what poems I had marked back in 2005. It made for a lovely evening, actually.

I would definitely recommend Howl (the movie) to anyone who's read the poem and, while I'm at it, to anyone who hasn't read the poem. I believe that Franco reads the entirety of the poem over the course of the movie, and the filmmakers do an excellent job of getting to the heart of what Howl (the poem) is all about. They also did quite a good job of portraying Ginsberg as the complicated figure that I always imagine him to be: a poet, a revolutionary, an unloved lover, a square, a Beat, and an all-around brave and joyful human being.

The Supposed Hazards of Creativitiy

One of my co-workers and writing group pals sent me this video a few weeks ago. It's Elizabeth Gilbert (yes, that Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame) talking about how Western culture conceives of creativity. Basically, her argument is that it is necessary for writers, artists, and musicians to figure out a way to deal with the pressures of creativity in a positive, nurturing way. Gilbert does a great job with her talk, and I thought I'd share it here.

It also reminded me of Black Swan, which I really, really enjoyed. But  . . .

***SPOILER ALERT***

why does Nina have to die at the end? Why does she have to go crazy to be a great dancer? Why can't she just evolve into a fulfilled, well-rounded human being who can dance like hell?



The movie is beautifully made, visually stunning, and genuinely (and I don't use this word lightly) thrilling. But I think that it perpetuates a stereotype about artists and, perhaps more importantly, about artists who happen to be women.

Take 20th century writers, for example. Sure, there are plenty of male authors who have killed themselves, but Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, two of the most famous and brilliant female writers of the 20th century, are notorious for their suicides. More people know them for their deaths more than for their writing. (C'mon, be honest--how many of you saw The Hours but haven't read the wonderful, revolutionary, life-changing novel that is Mrs. Dalloway?)

In fact, I don't know how many times I've heard Plath's breathtakingly beautiful and challenging poetry ridiculed by undergraduates simply because they don't like her personal story. They won't even give her poetry a careful reading because of how she died. She even gets the cliche of the mentally ill author permanently named after her ("the Sylvia Plath effect") while Ernest Hemingway gets to keep on being the lovable big "Papa" of Modernist literature despite his suicide by shotgun. He somehow has maintained his integrity in our culture; she has not.

These women, of course, are not the only writers and artists who have experienced creativity and mental illness at the same time, but their reputations are permanently marked by their suicides in a way that male writers' stories rarely are. And in some ways, I believe that our culture tells female artists quietly yet consistently that to be a great creator requires some sort of profound personal loss or damage: you'll lose your boyfriend, you'll lose your family, you'll lose your femininity (like the bluestockings), you'll lose your life. To create, the story goes, we must risk self-destruction and death. (See Dear Sugar and Elissa Bassist for more on this.)

Pretty much every time I've not gotten a job or gone through a breakup or had a fight with a friend or was in some other way miserable, I've been told by someone that "at least it's good for your writing." And every single time I've found it profoundly offensive. Why should suffering and writing--one of the most redeeming, life-affirming, challenging, and terrifyingly real acts I know--be wed together in such hideous matrimony? I don't want people wishing unhappiness on me as some backhanded means of pushing me toward success. What an awful way to live. What an awful way to be treated.

So even though Gilbert doesn't mention gender in her talk, it has sparked in me a belief that pursuing mental health as a female writer is a feminist act. And I truly appreciate Gilbert's thinking on this topic, even if I'm not entirely satisfied with her solution of the happy and distinct genius.

Becoming Buffy

I'm pretty sure that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was instrumental in getting me through the first month after my breakup.

There's something deeply rewarding about watching a strong female character beat-up some grody-faced vampire dudes. More importantly, there's something deeply rewarding about watching a profoundly cute, intrinsically girly blond girl with a great sense of humor beat up a bunch of vampires while growing from a teenager into a mature-ish adult. Grrrrl power, much?

Buffy is part of the feminist-y kick I've been on lately. I'm listening to a lot of Madonna and Lucinda Williams. I'm reading Wonder Woman comic collections and rereading some of my favorite novels that feature strong female characters, like Thea Kronborg from The Song of the Lark. I'm reading excellent articles like this one on the importance of just getting over yourself and "writing like a motherf****r."

In general, I don't feel like I see nearly enough strong, independent, fierce female characters in movies, books, and television. When I do see them, these women are rarely allowed to be both independent and happy. Instead, we're usually shown uptight career women who can only be happy when they let their guard down, give up control of their lives, and marry a hunky Mr. Right. And don't even get me started on how terrifying it is that so many young women choose Pretty Woman as their favorite romantic comedy . . . oy, vey!

But I digress. Basically, I find it difficult to find role models for how to be a woman who is single, strong, successful, and genuinely happy, which is precisely what I'm going for these days.

So what can I do about all this, besides watching all the Buffy I can lay my hands on? I guess I'm given no option but to do it for myself: If there aren't enough Crazy Badass Amazon Warrior Artist Women in the world for me to emulate, then I guess it's up to me to be one of the first.

Now, don't worry, I'm already on my way. My hair is already superhero red . . .

 and the new Buffy-esque pleather jacket is already hanging in my closet.

If I can look like a superhero, why can't I be one?

Food, Inc.

On Wednesday night, I finally got the chance to watch Food, Inc. on PBS. It's a documentary about the American food industry, more specifically the meat, corn, and soybean industries.

Now I've seen the PETA video about the horrors of slaughterhouses, chicken houses, and feedlots (Warning: Do NOT click on the previous link unless you have a strong stomach!), and I was expecting more of the same: excruciating scenes of sick and dying animals, fetid killing floors, and desolate swaths of polluted ponds and fields.

Instead, I was surprised to find that the documentary focused on the human costs of industrialized farming and food processing. The film covered a wide range of abuses, many of which I had never heard of before, including

• food corporations' gross exploitation of immigrant worker communities,
• the coercion of American farmers by giant seed and meat corporations,
• the rising diabetes epidemic as an unintended consequence of government subsidized corn products,
• and the prevalence of e. coli and salmonella contaminations in slaughterhouses across the country (which the USDA is largely unable to regulate).

I know that these bullet points seem unbelievable--you may be thinking, what a bunch of hippie, anti-capitalist babble!--but the documentary does an excellent job of talking directly to the persons involved and explaining these issues clearly. So I highly recommend that you check it out for yourselves and form your own opinions.

One of my favorite things about the documentary was its concluding message: each of us has the power to change our food by "voting" with our money. By buying conscientiously, with an eye toward human costs as well as the more obvious monetary costs, we can change the way food in America is grown and raised. So buy locally, choose sustainably raised and organic foods when possible, and go to your local farmers' market this weekend!

Twilight: New Moon--A Review

Last night, I rented Twilight: New Moon and watched it with my mom. It was . . . long. And pretty boring. But it did give us plenty of opportunities to make cracks whenever a character took off his shirt. We could have made it a drinking game: take a shot every time you spy a bare pectoral!

The Twilight: New Moon poster.

I've mentioned before that I've read all of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books, and that I enjoyed them a little too much. Her writing is terrible, her characters are shallow, and her plots are predictable at best and downright silly at worst. But they're also fun: Meyer can entertain an audience nearly indefinitely, dragging out her frivolous storylines and serious sexual tension for thousands of pages. I wouldn't read the books a second time, but they made for one great weekend's worth of reading!

What the Twilight movies miss is just that: fun. They're long (both films run a little over two hours) and exhaustive (they include every minor detail from the novels, necessary or not) and relentlessly serious. Their color palette is muted--all blacks, browns, and silvers, with occasional dashes of red and yellow--and their soundtracks are painfully emo. (I'm not saying that the music is bad, mind you, just very angsty teenager.) The movies show no sense of humor at all. Instead of a gentle awareness of Twilight's innate camp, we get a lot of awkward, twitchy teenage conversations; yearning half-kisses; and lovelorn staring.

 Teenage Bella being moody, missing Edward, and thinking about how all grownups are phony.

While watching New Moon, I couldn't help but wonder where Stephanie Meyer's deliciously silly, hyper-romantic, super-dramatic cheese-fest sensibility has disappeared to? Why is New Moon a meditation on teenage depression instead of a thrill ride of yearning and vampire make-out sessions and unnecessarily frequent werewolf fights?

The only thing that the movies get right is that everyone is incredibly good looking. In the books, the main characters are blatantly shallow, and that blandness if effective if not entirely purposeful: their vapidness allows a reader to imagine herself in Bella's generic little sneakers and imagine her own tasty versions of Edward (the vampire boyfriend) and Jacob (the werewolf boyfriend) to vicariously lust after.

The casting directors have done a great job of choosing attractive young actors who are capable but not too interesting: Bella (Kristen Stewart) is dull, likable, and very pretty; Edward (Robert Pattinson) is dreamy and has the deliciously tortured air of a pouty consumptive;  and Jacob (Taylor Lautner) combines a cute, boy-next-door sort of appeal with a whole heap of well-tanned muscles.

Battle of the beefcakes.

I think that the producers of the Twilight movies know that as long as they produce a set of four decently made movies full of pretty faces and meticulously accurate plotlines, teenage girls (and their mothers) (and 26-year-old bloggers) will show up for the spectacle. But I would have loved to see the filmmakers make Twilight their own, to make a movie with a little lightness, charm, and romance, maybe something with some rock music or characters with actual personalities. Then maybe their films would stand a chance of being watched twenty years down the road.

Instead, these filmmakers are happily raking in the cash by creating a suite of films whose expiration date seems to already have passed. Or will have passed just as soon as Robert Pattinson gets his first wrinkle or Taylor Lautner goes squishy around the waist.

Avatar: A Review

So here's the thing: earlier this week, I wrote a really long review of Avatar that had links and references and smart words in it and everything. Unfortunately, the more I wrote, the more I hated it.

This has happened to me before: I've written a few long posts that, once I stop typing, strike me as just awful--long-winded, pretentious, and dull. I never post them, and I won't subject you to this one, either.

Instead, here's my review of Avatar in brief Q&A form:

Was Avatar . . .

• Long? Yeeeessssssssss.
• Preachy? Uh huh.
  
• Racist? For sure.
• Moving? Yes.
• Beautiful? Definitely.
• Exciting? Sometimes.
  
• Good? Ummmmm, well, sorta . . .
• Bitchin'? Yes! (Fight scenes + dragons + helicopters = automatic bitchin' rating.)
  
• Worth your $10: Yes. Seeing the world that James Cameron creates is worth the price of admission. Go for the pretty blue people communing with trees in a gorgeous CGI forest, just don't expect too much from the script.

Scary Funny

This has been the summer of the scary/funny movie. In the space of a few months, I saw Dead Alive, The Final Destination, and Jennifer's Body.

Dead Alive (1993), directed by Peter Jackson and set in New Zealand, is a masterpiece of zombie cinema. It's also an unspeakably silly gore-fest, best-known for making audiences want to laugh and retch at the same time. Zombie ears pop off and tumble into jiggling bowls of pudding. Zombies gnaw the flesh off their victims and each other, leaving wiggling bone stumps. And then there's the lawnmower scene. 

Ah, the lawnmower scene!

Again and again, Jackson escalates the gore; every time you think it couldn't get more gratuitous, you see another blood-covered femur or pile of zombie hamburger or a zombie baby popping out of a human skull.

Neat!

While Dead Alive rips on the goriness of the zombie genre, taking it from gut-wrenchingly gross to gut-wrenchingly funny, The Final Destination rips on its many prequels.

 

You know the premise: a group of teenagers miraculously survives a horrible accident only to realize that they are all destined to die anyway. Fate (or something) picks them off one by one in a series of bizarre sub-accidents while the kids try to break the curse.

I've never seen the original Final Destinations, but that didn't keep me from enjoying the final installment in the series. Each death is gruesome, to be sure, but they're also riddled with gags, surprises, and pure silliness. Take the guy whose intestines get yanked out and spewed out of a swimming pool water pump, or the girl who drowns in a car wash.

That's right, a car wash.

Finally, there's Jennifer's Body.

The premise: a hot chick gets possessed and starts eating teenage boys. The screenwriter: Diablo Cody of Juno fame. The result: a horror movie that combines Megan Fox vomiting black spumes; teenage girls making out; and witty dialog that trashes high school, best friendships, horror movies, indie rock bands, and teenage girl-hood alike. Jennifer's Body never takes itself too seriously, never forgets that it's a movie about demonic possession that puns on the term "man-eater" (har har!).

See it now, if only for the fight scenes peppered with tampon jokes.

But why should you watch funny horror movies at all? Why should you indulge in the admittedly sick pleasure of laughing at squirting blood and eviscerations and cannibalism?

Because truly great serious horror movies are so hard to come by. They're like the poetry of the film industry: it's so easy to make a slasher flick that's bad (red food dye and corn syrup are very cheap), but it's so difficult to make a great one. Great serious horror movies are subtle, restrained, and moody, and have a sound plot and realistic characters to back up their myriad scares. I mean, really, how many brilliant horror movies can you name? The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project, The Omen--what else?

But because bad horror movies are so common, the genre is completely worn out. Any horror buff can name the top ten horror movie cliches Scream-style, and we all know what's going to happen when the heroine reaches her trembling hand toward the doorknob. Horror movie fans are incredibly well-educated about their genre; it's almost impossible to surprise them with a new premise or a new scare.

So how can a filmmaker overcome an audience's expectations to give them an experience that's fresh and exciting? 

Well, if you can't beat the genre, you can always play up how funny its failings can be. Instead of trying to circumnavigate the challenges of making a good horror movie, scary/funny movies plow straight into the cliches: they amp up the camp and load on the gags, because it's better to laugh with your audience than to be laughed at, right? The jokes in these movies aren't about finding death and gore funny, they're about genre, tweaking the audience's expectations, and seeing how far a gag can be pushed.

Satirical horror movies don't undermine or pervert the horror movie genre, they're just a sign of horror's continuing relevance and popularity. So while I'll keep watching The Rings and the Quarantines Hollywood keeps churning out, hoping for the next Exorcist, I'll always be more excited for the Drag Me to Hells and Cabin Fevers and Slithers of the world, excited to see yet another genre-ripping, soon-to-be-classic.

Art & Copy

I managed to see Art & Copy this weekend at Tivoli Cinemas in Westport. It was absolutely fascinating and, for a documentary about advertising, it was surprisingly moving. I decided to write a review about it because a) I figured it would help me sort out my thoughts about the movie, and b) it would give me another journalistic writing sample. I managed to trim this piece down to 415 words without sacrificing any major facts, ideas, or opinions, so I was very pleased.

Anyway, I hope that my review persuades you to go out and see Art & Copy for yourself. If you're at all interested in advertising, art, writing, or the creative process, I think you'll enjoy it.

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The Faces of Advertising

Don't let the trailer fool you: Art & Copy isn't a documentary about creativity or the American advertising industry. It's an astute examination of psychology: the psychology of the American consumer and of advertising's greatest creative executives.

In Art & Copy, director Doug Pray interviews a handful of creative giants to find out what makes them tick. We meet Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein (“Got milk?”), George Lois (“I want my MTV!”), David Kennedy and Dan Wieden (“Just do it.”), Mary Wells (“I love New York”), and even Hal Riney (the mind and voice behind Ronald Reagan's “Morning in America” reelection campaign).

Pray presents a wide array of campaigns in the film, taking us from Volkswagen's revolutionary “Think small” 1959 Beetle campaign to iPod's 2001 iconic dancing silhouettes. Each campaign is introduced and explained by its creators.

While this formula sounds dull (talking head-style interviews, office tours, and a slew of commercials), the results are electric. The creative directors are fascinating characters: George Lois is outspoken and crass, Mary Wells crackles with drama, Lee Clow (of iPod fame) looks like a beach bum but talks like a revolutionary, and Hal Riney simultaneously soothes and charms from his unassuming cream-colored couch.

As we learn more about the artists and writers behind each campaign, the commercials take on a whole new life. We forget to suspect them as calculated sales tools and begin to see them as their creators do: as works of art, as haiku, as tools for social change, as legitimate cultural artifacts, even as expressions of human truths.

Pray is enchanted by the creatives he interviews, and his take on advertising is overwhelmingly positive. But he does gesture briefly to advertising's tremendous size and influence: he tells us that the average city dweller sees 5,000 ads a day, that 65% of us feel bombarded by too many ads, and that more than $500 billion is spent per year on advertising. But these stats don't stick. The creatives are too compelling, too charismatic to ignore.

In a way, Art & Copy is the best advertisement you'll ever find for the advertising industry. It shows us the faces behind the images and catchphrases that have become as quotable to us as Shakespeare (“Where's the beef?”).

Pray does for his subjects what they do for the huge, anonymous corporations they work for: he gives the advertising industry a face, a personality, a heart.

All Our "Excessive Passions"

It's been awhile since I've posted here, but I've been unusually busy. Between applying for jobs last week, a hectic weekend with friends, and running a lot of errands this week, I haven't been writing much. So here's to getting back in the swing of things!

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I grew up reading Robert W. Butler's film reviews in The Kansas City Star. In high school, I thought his opinion was law, and after an introductory film class at KU where I learned about editing and mise-en-scene, I spent a couple of years breathlessly following his recommendations for Criterion classics like The 400 Blows (there's two hours I'll never get back).

These days, I'm more aware of Butler's biases. Any comedy--even a well-paced, joke-laden, emotionally relevant comedy--gets 2 1/2 stars out of 4 at best; any international or independent film--including long-winded, heavy-handed, emotionally flat films--are awarded 3 1/2 stars out of 4 at worst. Butler is prejudiced by his preferences (as any reviewer must be), but he always writes intelligently and convincingly and, well, a lot (he has three bylines in today's FYI Weekend Preview alone).

My favorite piece from this week is his fall film preview "Duck and Cover--Doom and Gloom Await." Butler highlights the apocalyptic films lined up for fall and winter release, including a film version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the computer animated 9, and a cheesy-sounding Denzel Washington vehicle called The Book of Eli.

The most compelling chunk of Butler's piece shows up right at the end: "It’s been noted that one reason science fiction is perennially popular is that it argues that mankind actually has a future. If so, why our fascination with end-of-the-world scenarios? Perhaps we subconsciously hope that if we get our cosmic comeuppance in the movies, we’ll somehow avoid it in real life."

As I would tell my composition students, Butler's tagging this tidbit on the end of his article to strengthen his conclusion, to go beyond the obvious educational premise of his article (to inform us about new sci fi releases) and make us think for a moment about human nature. This tail makes for a nice closing paragraph, but I disagree with Butler's interpretation of apocalyptic films. He doesn't put enough thought into answering his own question, and I'm sure he wasn't given the page space to do so.

People don't watch something bad happen on screen in the hope that it won't happen in real life. Films are vicarious by nature. People want what happens in movies to happen in real life, but they want it to happen without consequence; they want to see how it feels to foil a terrorist plot or fall in love with a best friend or enact some brutal revenge on a rapist without throwing away their own security to do so. How else can one account for the popularity of formulaic romantic comedies where the heroine (who serves a stand-in for the typical female audience member) gets the perfect guy? Why do we watch movies about mobsters and criminals if not to imagine what it would be like to feel so free, so powerful, and so violent without consequence?

We watch apocalypse and disaster movies because they illustrate and involve us in a horrifying reality for two hours while we enjoy the cushy safety of our theater seats. We watch them to bring our potential doom closer, not to push it away.

But why do we want to experience harrowing disaster again and again at movie theaters? As a big fan of sci fi, horror, and disaster movies, I have some hypotheses about the source of our love of apocalyptic cinema:

1) Spectacle: Apocalypse movies tend to include a lot of explosions, twisted landscapes, tidal waves, and alien spacecraft, which makes CGI professionals very happy and gives viewers a chance to see something familiar get completely demolished. (Did anyone watch Independence Day for any reason besides seeing the White House lasered into oblivion? I didn't think so.) These movies are usually action flicks at heart: they have a big visual wow-factor and lots of good, clean, family violence. It's the Colosseum all over again.

2) Adrenaline: Not only do these movies allow for plenty of chase scenes and war zone violence (see 28 Days Later and Mad Max), but they imbue the heroes and heroines with special importance: we want them to survive the apocalypse for themselves and for the rest of us. If a few good characters survive, then humanity survives. These movies ensure our unequivocal emotional investment in the films' outcomes and guarantee that we'll all be surging with adrenaline when the movies are over. We leave the theater feeling ragged, exhilarated, and a little high when our characters survive, and an excited film goer is a happy film goer.

3) Thought Experiments: Most apocalypse movies are science fiction, and sci fi thrives on brainstorming and enacting the future's possibilities. The best sci fi involves premises that are novel and inventive yet utterly believable, like Children of Men (humans mysteriously lose the ability to reproduce) and District 9 (aliens arrive on earth and get shunted into concentration camps because of their otherness).

Because apocalypse movies take our world and put it in crisis mode, they can be deeply mentally stimulating and topical (see District 9 for its take on race and refugee-ism, or read World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War for criticism of Americans' soft and impractical skill sets). Of course, the best sort of apocalypse movies are the ones where humans are responsible for our own destruction. These movies let the screenwriters and audience mentally gripe about humanity's failings and how nuclear weapons (The Day After), environmental abuses (The Happening), or moral and religious failings (Legion) will certainly be the end of us all.

4) Survivalist Fantasies: As I mentioned above, people love to imagine themselves as a movie's hero or heroine, and we love to do it even more with apocalyptic movies. Every time I see one of these films with a friend, we come out of the theater wondering whether we would survive a nuclear winter or a zombie apocalypse. Would I be tough enough to kill my newly zombie-fied husband? Would I be smart enough to hole up in a safe cellar with lots of guns? Would I be brave and industrious enough to venture out for supplies before I starved?

These movies serve as a mental testing ground for us, a sort of training that we (hopefully) will never need. Perhaps imagining the worst and mentally planning for it is innately human; maybe these mental exercises are instinctual games we play to prepare ourselves for the worst. We used to spend every hour of our waking lives planning for a tiger attack or a long, vicious, food-less winter; now, we spend our Saturday nights planning how we would escape paralytic tree pollen and volcanic fumes.

5) Catharsis: My favorite apocalyptic film is not a sci fi movie or a disaster flick. Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal is really a historical drama about the black plague. It's relentlessly dark; everyone dies, and though the characters hope to make it through the next wave of disease, their hope is flimsy at best. Death wears a long black robe and stalks the main character. The movie's only jokes involve paintings of chess-playing skeletons. Everyone does a little death dance at the end.

The movie captures the apocalyptic mood of the Middle Ages when everyone really believed that God was wrecking his revenge upon the world's sinners in the form of black pustules and overwhelming agony. Its characters truly believe that the world is ending, that life is nothing but death and loss, and there's a finality to their attitude that goes far beyond pessimism or even fatalism.

Whenever I watch The Seventh Seal, I find myself wallowing in its dark mood, in its sense of utter defeat. I enjoy the feeling that nothing matters because everything and everyone is an instant away from death. The feeling is sickening and somehow freeing at the same time, and when I turn off my DVD player, I am inexplicably cheerful about having looked at the rotting underbelly of life and seen its worst. I don't feel grateful that my life is not so bad as the lives of the plague victims, and I don't value my health or my family any more than I did before. And yet, illogically, I feel better, somehow. Why?

Aristotle described catharsis as "the human soul [being] purged of its excessive passions" by watching another person's tragedy unfold on stage. The experience is pleasurable because it is healthful; once the audience's despair, fear, and hatred has been spent in empathy with the ill-fated actors, their emotional balance is restored and they are happy again.

Perhaps catharsis is why we love to watch our world end again and again: once we've seen it happen to someone else, felt the horror of death and the sorrow of loss through our hero or heroine, perhaps we don't need to worry about our potential for self-destruction any more. We already know what it will look like when it happens.

Headlines: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Truth

I've always been a big fan of The Kansas City Star, which I think of as my hometown newspaper and read regularly whenever I'm in KC. Here's a round-up of my favorite headlines from the past few days.

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Sunday, Matt Campbell reported that Kansas City is turning a portion of its biosolids (read: human poo) into fertilizer for trees and biofuel crops. According to Campbell's article, the city is currently turning 8,000 pounds of dry biosolids into fertilizer each year and plans on expanding the program in the future. The system helps the city save money by reducing the amount of waste the Water Department has to burn, by providing cheaper saplings for planting in public parks, and by contributing income to the city budget in the form of biofuel sales.

Not only is this process amazing, but it's especially impressive in Kansas City, a place that has, until recently, never seemed particularly interested in going green. But then again, large-scale composting has come to KC, so maybe we're not as environmentally backwards as we Midwesterners sometimes seem to be.

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More bad news: Today, Emily Van Zandt and Chad Day (who, ironically, are recent college grads employed as summer interns at the Star) revealed that college grads may have diplomas, but they're still missing their paychecks. Van Zandt and Day profile four local college graduates who can't find work, despite their degrees in civil engineering, music education, communications, and Latin American studies.

It's a good article, but not a terribly surprising one since I'm also struggling to find my first post-graduation job. This piece did make me wonder, though, why such articles get published and read at all. Each new issue of every paper in the country is running articles about the state of the economy and how high the unemployment rate has soared, yet nothing visibly changes day to day; there's nothing new to make this "news" exigent. So why are newspapers giving this space, and why do I find myself reading these pieces again and again?

Well, to be honest, they help me feel a little better when I don't get called back for an interview. So there.

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Mary McNamara's piece on the shrewish business woman type in American comedies first appeared in The Los Angeles Times but was reprinted in today's Star. McNamara uses Katherine Heigl's role in The Ugly Truth as an example of how most comedic movies depict independent women: as high-strung, neurotic, cold, and bitchy, at least until the manly co-star proves the woman vulnerable and persuades her into leave her career for love. McNamara argues that actresses like Heigl (and Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston) should avoid these Taming of the Shrew-style roles in movies and stick to the richer, more realistic, and less misogynistic roles found on television shows like In Treatment or The Closer.

While I don't watch enough TV to know whether or not I share McNamara's preference for women on the small screen, I do know that she's dead-on when it comes to romcoms like The Devil Wears Prada. Plots like these are why I want to hurl a copy of A Room of One's Own at my TV screen every time a Jennifer Aniston movie comes on late-night cable.