The Nature of Nurture and Nature

Stoker (March 1, 2013)
star. Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, and Nicole Kidman

Stoker is something of an enigma.  Released in the relative doldrums of cinema’s late winter season, it is a combination coming-of-age story and psychological thriller that hearkens back to iconic instances of movie suspense and teenage gore.  Acclaimed South Korean director Park Chan-wook, here working with his first English language film, seems hyperaware of his references to these genres’s conventions, prioritizing such appropriations alongside sumptuous imagery.  Style soon overcomes substance and too often distracts or obscures the mysterious story Park eventually sets forth.  Yet among these numerous, bizarre elements, something about Stoker seems to click.

Uncle Charlie (Goode), his sister-in-law Evelyn (Kidman), and niece India (Wasikowska) develop an intense, semi-incestuous triangle.

Mia Wasikowska stars as India Stoker, a brooding, introverted teenage girl, seemingly preserved in her innocence.  But when her father dies on her eighteenth birthday, she is left with the threatening presence of her indulgent, competitive mother, Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), and her father’s estranged younger brother, Charlie (Matthew Goode).  The two engage in a semi-incestuous relationship until Uncle Charlie’s sights turn to India, awakening a darkly sexual and disturbed side of her psyche.  The household is thus divided into a sexually charged triangle of combatting intellectual control, dependent on discovering the murderous truth beneath Uncle Charlie’s suave, calculated facade.

Uncle Charlie shares understated confidence, a stoic smile, handiwork, and general appearance with Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) of Psycho.

Initially, the characters and the dynamics of their relationships are negotiated through extensive use of certain cinematic tropes.  India’s dark hair (parted down the middle) and clothing, black-and-white Sunday school shoes, and stoic face recall other innocent characters, such as Sissy Spacek’s Carrie (Carrie, 1976), who keep to themselves to silence their destructive potential.  More noticeably, Uncle Charlie borrows heavily from a number of cinema’s most infamous killers, including the demeanor of Norman Bates (Psycho, 1960), the name of Joseph Cotten’s character in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and the impending whistle of the child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M (1931).  The extent to which and lack of subtlety in how the script utilizes such appropriations, however, greatly harms the film’s story.  By highlighting the excess and artificiality of particular generic expectations and assumptions, the film often reads as false or unintended pastiche.

Depending on the opinion of the viewer, this lack of organic storytelling apparent from Stoker‘s beginning is either frustrated or appeased by the film’s vividly defined style.  The sharpness of the film’s look and design is certainly inarguable.  The lavish sets, period-transcending costumes, and diverse cinematography – from stark to clouded frames, tilt-shift to deep focus space – present contemplative visuals that are, in the very least, engrossing.  A sense of assertion in the film’s priority of style over substance becomes clear, until the multitude of clever graphic matches and seamless edits, too, grow tiresome.

India is initially nervous in her piano playing with Uncle Charlie, but soon submits to mounting sexual tension.

Finally, Stoker does pick up from its determined but slow pace, which makes its beginning riveting only through anticipation of anything significant eventually happening.  Halfway through the film, this moment arrives as India sits at her grim piano, reprising a tune played throughout the film, but now envisioning her uncle joining her on the lower notes.  The passion of their synchronistical playing and of the music inevitably builds into a devouring embrace, as the perceived sexual tension materializes in her intensely erotic fantasy.  This, the first important admittance of India’s latent desires, catalyzes the ensuing unleashing of her sexuality, which becomes more recognizably related to fatality and violence as she delves deeper into Uncle Charlie’s hidden past.

India’s relationship to her surroundings is quickly disturbed, symbolized by her change in hunting habits.

What follows is a blur of reveal and unraveling acts that I do not wish to spoil.  So, I will suffice in commenting on the mastery of Park’s overall subversion, the focus of the film’s form and story flowing from deliberate meditation (India’s keen awareness of her surroundings elaborated upon in her opening narration) to the preying power of observance (discovered in India’s interest in hunting, through which she warns “you do something bad to prevent yourself from doing something worse”) across the film’s trajectory.  The grace and gentle beauty with which India originally senses the world translates, by the film’s conclusion, into a realization of animosity and mortality inherent to nature.  And without the hunting trips her father devised to condition her darker side, left only to the devices of her embittered mother and scheming uncle, India is abandoned of nurture and lost within a cycle of violence propagated by Uncle Charlie.  She has effectively, by film’s end, been caught between these two facets of her sanity.

Despite the disappointingly overt cliches used to ground the film’s story, Park turns Stoker into a decently satisfying commentary on, or perhaps questioning of, the contrasting dangers society, upbringing, and lack of civilization each pose to humankind through the experiences of one girl.  If nothing more, Park seeks, like India plunging pruning shears into the face of a random police officer, “just to get your attention.”

You Never Lose Your Talent

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) star. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is quite possibly one of the most bizarre mainstream films you are likely to encounter.  One part melodrama, one part psychological thriller, and two parts master class acting, this film premiered in 1962 to positive reviews and unexpected box-office success.  This influenced a wave of similar suspense stories concerned with frenzied delusion and betrayal perpetuated in American cinema of the 1960s – from the director, Robert Aldrich’s, other success Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968).  Most of all, this frenetic piece provided classic Hollywood legends Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, aging actresses with few prospects, a rare opportunity to resurrect their craft and fame.

Like All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard (both 1950), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is partly a backstage drama depicting forgotten actresses competing for the spotlight.  However, Aldrich’s film incorporates elements of psychological horror as it depicts former vaudevillian child star Baby Jane (Bette Davis) attempting to isolate, starve, and torment her younger screen star sister, Blanche (Joan Crawford), in their elder years spent at their lavish Los Angeles home.  Blanche, trapped in her room upstairs, is also confined to a wheelchair, resulting from a jealous automobile accident helmed by Jane back in the ’30s, when Blanche was in the prime of her stardom and Jane was a box-office flop.

Bette Davis as Baby Jane, with her doll.

The film begins with images of strange toy clowns and life-size Baby Jane dolls, just before Jane’s introduction on stage as the child phenomenon with Blanche watching bitterly from the wings.  This very much sets the story’s tone, revealing the oppositional relationship of the two sisters and establishing a sort of perverse iconography that continues through the film.  Cuts from the young Jane’s made-up face to her reproduced replicas imply the artificial nature of child entertainment and expectations of young stars.  Eerie shots of such seemingly innocent things prepare us for cabinets of empty liquor bottles, meals of dead rodents, and an ever-present Baby Jane doll we witness on the other side of childhood fame, once Jane’s social anonymity has driven her insanely against her sister’s well-being.

Jane catches Blanche, played by Joan Crawford, downstairs calling a doctor for help in an example of deep focus composition, used to build suspense.

Aldrich uses formal elements to keep Jane and Blanche in opposition throughout the film, visually fueling their delusional competition.  Even in old age, Jane maintains a powdered white face and blonde curls, juxtaposing common perceptions of beauty with detestable morals and behavior.  Meanwhile, Blanche is always in dark garb, her face framed by Crawford’s raven hair, and accompanied by warm, swelling music.  She is lit with the same gentle light used to highlight stars during the classical Hollywood era.  Jane is presented very differently with odd, dissonant music and bold, Expressionist lighting.  Cinematographer Ernest Haller excels in distorting Jane’s physical image to match her mental deterioration, utilizing deep focus, low angles, and sharp contrast reminiscent of styles popularized by Gregg Toland in dark dramas of the 1940s.  Still, Haller, whose credits span back to the early days of the studio system, includes several shocking camera zooms that so define thriller films of the 1960s and ’70s.

There is one especial scene that stands out for illustrating Jane’s severe nostalgia and fragile sanity.  In her downstairs rehearsal room, Jane wallows at the piano’s keys before standing to bask under the light of a round overhead fixture and sing her hit “I Wrote a Letter to Daddy” from her youth.  The rest of the room is dark, but an illuminated door frame surrounds her, centering her in a chiaroscuro composition.  Her disillusionment is disturbing as immature joy fills Jane and transports her back to our first introduction of her, on stage in her vaudeville routine.  Later, when her hired accompanist stands before the mirror to fix his tie, Jane slaps off the makeshift spotlight, unable to bear infiltration of the only stage on which she has to perform.

While the story may drag occasionally, seeming tangential or not finely polished, Aldrich dedicates time to realizing the symbolism of wonderfully haunting visual motifs, allowing concepts of youth, nostalgia, fame, and sanity to resonate and evolve over the story’s progression.  This slow but steady pace also results in impeccable character development, as two of film’s finest actresses slowly unravel frighteningly complicated women.

Jane keeps Blanche behind locked doors and barred windows, pushing both women over the edge.

The true thrill and terror of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is found in Crawford and Davis’ performances, which seem to divulge new intensities and intricacies with every passing moment.  As Blanche attempts to escape further and further from her room, Jane’s mentality weakens all the more.  As Jane further isolates Blanche’s room, Blanche becomes lifeless.  And while the frenzied suffocation of Crawford and the brittle delusion of Davis are equally mesmerizing and terrifying, Davis was the sole Oscar nominee between them.  This is justifiable for Davis, whose acting and physicality are stunning, as her performance is unlike anything she had done in over thirty years on screen.  She transitions from frumpy, inebriated has-been in her home to alight, child star legend in public so cohesively it astounds.

Jane regressing and Blanche dying on the beach.

By the last scenes of the film, we are left with the fully cracked Baby Jane carrying her sister’s rag doll-like, ill form across a sandy beach, seeking the happiness she remembers between them from their childhood.  Jane has finally reduced Blanche to a figure not unlike the image forced upon “Baby Jane” as a child: that of a doll.  But it is not the lingering and haunting image of policemen attending Blanche’s dehydrated body while Jane performs in an enveloping crowd of bewildered onlookers – at last reclaiming the attention she had fought for so long – that reverberates from this cult classic.  Instead, the words of Baby Jane’s insistent, managerial father resurface.  “You can never lose your talent.  You can lose everything, but you can’t lose your talent.”  Davis and Crawford, subject to ageism, forgotten by an industry they had prospered in, and offered only a strange script of sick sibling rivalry, proved this notion true tenfold, bringing their undeniable skill to what they were given.  No one will ever ask what happened to them.