I did manage to put one relatively obscure movie this high, although it seems to be pretty loved by Letterboxd users.
4. It's Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt, 2012, USA)
Bill notes that it is a beautiful day and goes for a walk. When he arrives back at his door, he notes that is is a beautiful day and goes for a walk.
The movie starts of as nice, comfortable slice of life, but devolves soon enough. You know when Bill goes for another walk that there is something wrong with him. Then we are taken on a ride, where Bill’s condition deteriorates and we can’t really know what is true and what is not.
The starting as nice is a bit of an exaggeration… That’s how the movie starts in my head for some reason, but the actual movie is very different. The mostly animated movie actually begins with a flickering, moving filmed image of clouds in a black sky, an effect you need special cameras for. This is very ominous. After that we see the awkward adventures of Bill, where he gets unnecessarily embarrassed by banal things. This is the way the movie dispenses information: There’s a rapid fire of moments, some of which are important, others are there to explain Bill’s character. For example, at one point we quickly move from a memory of his girlfriend leaving him to a memory of someone trying to provide him with good service. The scene I started the explanation with only happens about halfway through the third and final chapter.
I guess, because of the themes of the movie, I should be worried about my own brain, but gladly I don’t live in this kind of perpetual fear. On the other hand, as I age, I do notice that I sometimes do forget things. Sure, this is normal, as we weren’t really designed to live as long as we do and at 47, I am beginning to deteriorate.
The ending of this movie is glorious. On this list I’ve taken shots at endings in general, but this one… So, there’s a narrator throughout the movie and, as narrators tend to, he keeps an objective demeanor and an emotional distance, but at the very end, Hertzfeldt’s weird approach comes in. The narrator is telling us about how Bill dies alone in the woods, having completely lost control over his actions. But the narrator refuses to let Bill die. He forces an alternative ending to Bill’s life, which in itself goes off the rails in a magnificent way.
In a way it’s a cop out, a version of “it was all a dream”. But who cares. The whole thing is done so well just thinking about it makes the tears well up.
There’s another interesting perspective to this film, if we look at it through the feminist eye. There aren’t many characters in the movie, so there aren’t many women either. The most visible one is Bill’s ex-girlfriend, who is still around in his life. She visits him at the hospital, for example. Even though their relationship is over, she still feels obligated to visit him. Of course, this is a sign that their relationship was good and meaningful for her as well, even if it is over.
This is also an animation and a simple one at that. The character designs are very iconic in nature. This just happens to emphasize how we tend to see women as something different to the default, in other words, men. Male is the basic form, on which we add or change things to make them female. You know, dresses, longer hair, leaner neck, curves and so forth. Think Wizards of the Coast trying to be inclusive by adding adding breasts to female snakepeople on Magic: the Gathering cards, even though breasts are specifically for feeding infant mammals (which snakes are not). They are not the only ones to do something like that either.
At this point, this is something that seems impossible to escape. We are so used to this approach. This simple animation style just happens to make it very obvious. It would be quite hard to move away from it. Even if we would try to set men apart from the women by accentuating certain male traits, we would just assume that there’s something about the beard or muscles or whatever we would use to denote the masculinity, that is a character trait of the specific person.
The movie also deals with how we see people with mental diseases. They make us uncomfortable in a way that physical diseases don’t (although Bill’s disease is actually physical, whatever it is, it just happens to directly affect his mind, because it is in his brain).
Honestly, I don’t even really know how to talk about this without being disrespectful as I don’t want to do that. We should be normalizing these kinds of problems. In most (almost all) cases these problems are very harmless and don’t present any kind of risk to their environment.
However, whatever Bill has is extreme. These situations are difficult for us to understand, as the person is not thinking like we suppose they should be. They might even know that there’s something wrong with their thoughts, but can’t necessarily know for sure where the problems are, because it is their mind. How do you calibrate your thoughts?
In some ways this movie is more horrific than any horror movie I’ve ever seen. After all, this could happen to anyone or it could be happening to you and you wouldn’t even know it, because, again, it is your mind. How do you verify that something is changing in there?
3. Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950, USA)
Joe Gillis, a failing screenwriter, is trying to avoid his debt collectors and stumbles into an old house, where he meets Norma Dresmond, a former star of the screen from the silent era. She is looking for an opportunity to return to the big screen, a motivation which he is happy to take advantage of. However, since we start with a flashforward of Gillis’s dead body floating in a pool, we know where this is going.
In a way this is quite topical. Norma complains essentially, but with more poetic words, that the system only wants to pump out money from movies. That’s what we are, once again, going through. Producers are trying to supplant writers and directors in the artistic process, which Norma feels killed her career. Now we are not talking about new people either, but instead the goal is to remove the human involvement in favor of artificial intelligence. The difference here is that sound brought new possibilities, AI let’s us regurgitate what has been done before.
Sure, all creativity is just combining existing things, but what the people trying to do this are missing is that, it’s not only combining things, it’s combining things in new ways. Even Gillis, who is seen as a hack, can produce something much more interesting than an AI ever could. At the same time, the studios will try this. They will attempt to make movies with AI, even though the writers have already won big in this regard. The studios will fail, but that won’t matter much to the people, who lost their jobs in the meantime.
Gloria Swanson, who played Norma Dresmond, was herself a huge star in the silent era, but as for so many other actors of the time, had lost her stardom when the talkies came in (or some actors just felt the movies lost their magic and they just left to do other things, sometimes this ended well, like in the case of Hedy Lamar who ended up as a prominent inventor, sometimes not as much, like in the the case of Ossi Oswalda, who died penniless at 49 after a tumultuous life). I don’t know why this happened in this specific case, but it was often because the audience found it hard to reconcile the voices of the stars to the faces, when they might have expected something else.
She is not a good person (Norma, I think Gloria was kind of cool for simply willing to do this). Gladly, Billy Wilder has sympathy for such characters. Norma is selfish, but Wilder understands where that comes from. Joe Gillis is at least as bad as Norma, but he isn’t judged for this either (except, ultimately by Norma).
In 2017, Vulture asked 40 working screenwriters about the best in their field and Wilder was voted in first. While the whole list feels like it emphasized both American movies and directors working with their own written material way too much, I think this win is deserved. Despite having had some very close relatives, including his mother, die in concentration camps, he still seemed to believe in the positive side of humanity. It just often happened in his scripts that the good side would kick in too late to save the day.
This is one of those situations. At the end of the movie, Gillis begins to regret the whole deal, but at that point the lie has taken on a life of its own and he is in just too deep.
The movie doesn’t really blame Norma either. She is just trying to survive in this environment the best she can. She feels she only has value as a person if she is on the screen. What else is she supposed to believe? We are talking the first part of 20th century here. Women just didn’t have many opportunities to do anything.
It doesn’t really help that the man, who used to direct her movies, is now voluntarily her butler. He, in the weird self-referential way this movie operates, was played by Erich von Stroheim, who was also a highly respected director from 20s and 30s (even if his lack of financial success kept him from becoming as prolific as many of his compatriots with only 12 movies under his belt, which wasn’t much in those days). He is working hard to maintain the illusions Norma has about herself. He has this twisted worldview, where he thinks he is doing Norma a favor, but is also honored to be able to do this for her. He just wants to be close to her, so in his way, he keeps her imprisoned in this fantasy life.
Norma also hosts a regular Bridge night, which has very famous guests (most notably Buster Keaton), who had lost their star status at that point. So, this is pretty much the first generation who had that happen to them in Hollywood.
Norma also represents a fairly typical role for a woman in the 1950s. Hollywood was working under the Hays Production Code (although it was over by this point, the effects lingered) and that meant that women had their own morality. They needed to be family-oriented. If they weren’t, they had to be punished for that. In this case Norma has lost her touch on reality. She wasn’t interested in men, but put her energy into her career instead, so there had to be consequences. In the end, she goes mad and is taken into custody, even if Wilder gives her a one final moment.
It could have been worse. In The Red Shoes, another movie from the same period, where a woman, Vicky, chooses her career over her husband, she has to die. Whether she killed herself or let the titular shoes take over her and do it is left ambiguous, but I’m not sure that matters.
It’s just hard to see Wilder feeling the need to punish Norma. I think he does what he does to the character regrettably. It just what happens to all of his characters.
2. Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996, United Kingdom)
Renton is finding it hard to get his life under control, as both drugs and his problematic group of “friends” keep things complicated. Ol’ Rents has to navigate through an arrest, an intervention, accidental relationship with a minor, everpresent threats of violence from people close to him, a career and even sudden bowl movements on his way to choosing life, the very thing he and his friends had been making fun of for years.
The friend group, besides Renton, consists of Simon, also known as Sick Boy due to his psychopathic tendencies, who is a small time crook, who thinks too much of himself, and loves Sean Connery; Spud, a drug addict who is the least in touch with reality from the group, but is also much more sympathetic than the others due to his innocence, even though he takes part in various criminal activities besides the drug use; Begbie, who’s drug of choice is alcohol and he rails against the other substances his friends use, but is much more out of control than anyone else here; and Tommy, who probably took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up befriending these people, he has very little in common, but ends up screwed by them anyhow.
These are people, who have largely been forgotten by the society. Sure, their close family cares, in those cases they have that family, but the society in a larger sense will only do the bare minimum to seem as if it cares. After all, while the movie doesn’t present this very well (the book does a much better job of showing how much time goes by, here we only have the music and not much more), these are the children and communities Thatcher so thoroughly fucked over with her economic policies in the 70s and the 80s. People don’t choose drugs (see what I did there?) for no reason. They choose drugs, because what else is there? They are fulfilling some need with chemistry instead of something else that would make them feel good about themselves. Fighting the supply doesn’t work, because its the demand that we need to work on, but not in the sense of punishing them, but finding something else for them to focus on. As I understand it, Spud is a self-insert by Welsh, the original author of the book, and Spud starts to write just for this purpose in the sequel. (Sidenote: While I don’t use any drugs, even alcohol, I am for full legalization.)
The friend group is pretty much pushed on them. I don’t know how Spud and Tommy ended up in it, but Simon also known very appropriately as Sick Boy and Begbie are basically legacies. They have simply known Renton for long enough that he can’t really get rid of them despite his understanding that they are such a bad influence. Spud and Renton are even deathly afraid of Begbie, while Simon seems to believe that he can manipulate Begbie into another direction if needed and is thus safe, although it would also seem that Simon is somewhat overconfident about certain things.
Renton even goes so far as to tell us that one of the worst things about going straight is that he has to stand these people while sober. It all goes so much further than simple irritation. Even our hero is actively backstabbing his closest friends throughout the movie, often just for fun. Even when he finally decides to leave this life behind, he does it by fucking over his friends. While Sick Boy somehow manages to always dodge any repercussions to his actions, the other three of Renton’s friends are not so lucky. Tommy dies while both Spud and Begbie go to prison and all these instances can be put on Renton. He does make a minimal effort to put things right, but those are kind of obviously just so that he can explain to himself that he is not the bad guy or at least not the worst guy. I guess he is sort of trying to stay a little head of Sick Boy and Begbie in this regard, but that is not a very high bar.
Still, some of the most iconic images from the movie, marketing and otherwise, do emphasize this group of men, even if they are barely friends. Are we, or were we, just so starved for that? The movie does begin with a scene in which the gang is playing football. Even there, at a moment where they should be a coherent unit enjoying something they all love, they are dysfunctional.
Women don’t have much of a role in this world, once again. They are around. Tommy and Spud have girlfriends (at least in the beginning), but because of the movies focus on the friend group, the women aren’t around that much. They do seem to have themselves together much better than the guys (and we see in the sequel that this is definitely true), but is that just what Renton is aware of or is there something else here?
Of course, they are fairly completely segregated. There’s a very limited number of activities, where the men actually interact with the women. The women are allowed to watch the men while they play football, but can’t participate themselves. Even in their ring of drug addicts, there’s only one token woman.
There’s only one scene, where the women actually talk to each other and that’s a conversation about men. More precisely, they discuss how fun it is to withhold sex from Spud.
In general, women seem to be more responsible here. Their circle of drug users only has one of them and that has terrible consequences when her child dies of neglect, which sort of blames women more for the practice, although even at this point Renton is more interested in Simon, the one they all assume is the father even though they don’t really know.
Simon doesn’t seem to respect anyone, but he has more of a disregard for women. He tries to become a pimp at one point (trying to recruit an underaged girl for this purpose) and idolizes the icon of toxic masculinity that is Sean Connery’s 007 – you know, the guy whose method of seduction is raping women until they are into it.
In the book, women have an almost antagonistic role. For example, after Renton’s brother dies, Renton has sex with his pregnant wife in a bathroom at the venue of the funeral, but assumes immediately that the purpose of that encounter was to manipulate him into taking over his brother’s responsibilities for the family. Whether this is true or not, it is telling that Renton’s mind goes there immediately. The Renton of the book is not nearly as sympathetic as the Renton of the movie, though.