this is the post I was writing in my head at 4 this morning when I should have been asleep

[truepenny]

I watched two movies recently that were worse than they had to be: Cowboys & Aliens (2011) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009). There are all kinds of reasons for this (I could write a book on the things that are wrong with Cowboys & Aliens), but there's one that was thrown into sharp relief by a third movie I've watched recently: High Noon (1952--that would be the ACTUAL Gary Cooper High Noon, not the remake from 2000, which frankly I can't imagine why you'd watch when you've got Gary Cooper and Katy Jurado RIGHT THERE). Because what High Noon does stunningly well, and what both Cowboys & Aliens and Wolverine flounder and fail at, is structure.

I never used to understand structure. (I still bitterly remember the only C I've ever gotten on an English paper, which was a paper on the structure of Emerson's "American Scholar." To this day, I have no idea what that structure was or what I was supposed to say about it.) But apparently somewhere along the line, I've picked up at least some opinions about it, and the thing I want to talk about has been nagging me and nagging me to write it down.

High Noon is beautifully structured. Every single damn thing in that movie points either forwards or backwards, to something that did happen or something that will happen. (And of course, the clocks, the terrible relentless clocks.) Chekhov's Gun applies with vindictive precision. Nothing is wasted; nothing is thrown in as a set-piece or "comic relief" or any of the other things a movie can stupidly choose to clutter itself up with. And the single point I really want to talk about is that the movie knows where to begin.

(I'm going to pretend the hairshirt penance that is the soundtrack and the insipid vacuity of its shockingly successful title song (Oscar for Best Original Song? Seriously?) simply do not exist. I'd actually love to see a version with the music stripped out, because that awful awful song is intrusive like whoa.)

High Noon begins with a cowboy waiting for something, him and his horse and a picturesque tree. Turns out he's waiting for his friends, and once they meet up, they ride down to the Hadleyville train station. And only at that point, in the terrified reaction of the station master, do we learn that these three friends (and even more to the point, the man they're waiting for) are the villains. (Given that part of the problem Will Kane is going to face is the waffling of the citizens of Hadleyville about these same villains, the ambiguity in the opening is neither accidental nor inappropriate.) The camera follows the station master as he sneaks out the back and books it hell for leather into town, and then jumps to introduce our hero, Will Kane, just at the moment of his marriage to Amy Fowler and his concommitant resignation as the marshal of Hadleyville. (Not sheriff. Sheriffs are for counties. Marshals are for towns.) Nothing that happens in that wedding scene is accidental or pointless either, because Carl Foreman wrote the damn movie like a perfectly balanced pocketwatch. But the opening draws us in from a romantic view of a cowboy on a ridge to the town of Hadleyville. It makes us work to get our bearings, which, as I said, is thematically like a warning shot fired across our bows. It establishes the threat--Frank Miller is arriving on the noon train, and he's going to be out for blood--and it establishes with beautiful economy both our hero and the ugly bind he's caught in. We learn about the past only in what the characters say to each other (and I love the way that we barely learn anything about the relationship between Kane and Helen Ramirez EXCEPT WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW, which is how it affects them now in this last hour before the train arrives).

Okay. Keep that in mind while I turn my attention to the next contestant. Wolverine made a earnest, literal-minded decision to tell an origin story and therefore start at the beginning, with sickly seven-year-old Logan and the first manifestation of his claws. Very traumatic, with shocking revelations and murder and Freudian family romance, blah blah blah, ending with Logan and his half brother Victor racing off into a muddy montage of war after war, to establish that (a) they both apparently stop aging at 40 and (b) Victor's a bit of a psychopath, to go along with the mutant fingernails and genuinely creepy four-legged run. (Of all the things that are wrong with this movie, I should add, Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber are not among them. Ditto Ryan Reynolds, Dominic Monaghan, Kevin Durand, Daniel Henney, and the entirely awesome Will.i.am. Killing off John Wraith was a rookie mistake, guys.) They get recruited in to Stryker's team of mutants, we have a mission to estabilsh everybody's powers, and then Logan gives them a well earned fuck-you-all and walks off to his romantic shack in the Canadian wilderness with his pointless romantic interest.

(Kayla and Ella in Cowboys & Aliens, come to think of it, are the only romantic interests I can think of so enduringly, unvanquishably pointless that they have to be killed twice.)

Kayla's really only there to be the Girl in the Refrigerator and motivate Logan's transformation into Wolverine, and it's at this point that the movie actually, FINALLY begins. Everything heretofore, before the push that sets Logan in motion, is backstory. A lot of it we don't need, or would even be better off without. (Frankly, if the movie started cold with the murder of Chris Bradley, aside from being an absolutely classic X-Files teaser, we would be informationally no worse off--and we would benefit from the tension of wondering why Logan has this weird relationship with Victor the psychopath, instead of already knowing.) The only necessary thing all that backstory does is to give us a good look at Wade Wilson, because when he shows up again, we do genuinely need to have met the smartaleck with the swords to understand just how horrible this thing that Stryker has done is. Everything else could be conveyed (as High Noon conveys its backstory) in the dialogue between the characters. And if you have to do flashbacks, it occurred to me that they would actually work brilliantly in REVERSE order, so that the moment you learn what Logan and Victor really mean to each other is paired with the moment when Victor says to Logan, "Nobody gets to kill you but me."

The story the movie is telling doesn't begin with child!Logan, so the fact that the movie begins there is one of the reasons the movie doesn't work very well.

Cowboys & Aliens, on the other hand, doesn't work at all.

The reasons for this are basically endless, but the one I want to focus on is, again, the beginning. And I want to focus on the beginning because in some ways, it's very like the beginning of High Noon: the transition from the man alone in the hills to the town and the lives of its inhabitants. We start with a man in a picturesque landscape. We don't know anything about him--as it turns out, he doesn't know anything about him--except that he's got a weird, obviously not-Earth-made cuff on his wrist that won't come off. And is a weapon. (The damn thing might as well have a label on it reading PLOT DEVICE, honestly.) Lonergan emerges victorious from his encounter with the villainous Claibornes, leaving the bodies of his enemies behind him, and rides down into Absolution, where he encounters the Dolarhydes, father and son, the sheriff (who's probably also actually a marshal), and the rest of the cast of stereotypes who populate the town.

And then the aliens attack.

Now here's the problem, and why Cowboys & Aliens is wrong, and High Noon is right. Partly it's that High Noon is about the change that Miller, Pierce, and Colby bring with them into the town of Hadleyville. They're the pebble that starts the avalanche. But it's also an even bigger problem. The basic premise of Cowboys & Aliens, to rephrase it, is that the cast of a generic Western find themselves forced to fight for their lives against equally generic aliens. That being the case, there's a serious scale imbalance between the hero and the threat. Whereas Kane is facing men (and his real problem isn't Frank Miller, it's the way that everybody in Hadleyville decides to surrender before Miller even gets there--as he himself says, he beat Miller before, when he had the deputies and posse to back him up), Lonergan is facing capital-A Aliens, and by the time we get to Absolution and the tired character arcs of the people there, we already know that. We have NO REASON to invest in these characters' concerns because we already know that the movie has no investment in them either.

Lonergan is a bad viewpoint character to begin the movie with. Sheriff Taggert would be a much better one, because this isn't a movie about the outsider who comes into a community and changes/is changed by it. This is a movie about a community being invaded by outsiders. What we want is to establish the community first, make the audience care about the sheriff and his grandson, the bartender and his Mexican wife (compare her to Helen Ramirez, and a full hand of the other things that are wrong with this movie deal themselves out like magic), the cattle baron and his wastrel son. Give some weight to the Western, to the lives of the people of Absolution. THEN have the bleeding amnesiac stranger come stumbling into town, upsetting everybody's arcs and bringing chaos in his wake. THEN have the aliens attack.

Establish the microcosm of Absolution before the reveal of the hostile macrocosm, because otherwise neither side has any weight, and the story becomes a kind of shallow sludge.

Again, I compare back to the sharp, relentless precision of High Noon, which is a simple story told in an elegantly complicated way. It's a little overly facile to say that Wolverine and Cowboys & Aliens are complicated stories told in overly simple ways, but it's also not entirely wrong. Certainly, they are stories that would have benefitted from some elegance in their telling.

Comments

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Pretty much the only things that C&A had going for it were the explosions* and the dog. Because the rest of it....eh. Really really eh. Even the blue-eyed steely gaze of Daniel Craig could not make it not eh.



*I am a big fan of explosions in my cinema. I totally admit that for me movies are escapism, and my escapism better have explosions in it. Or really good gunfights. And car chases. I will forgive a lack of explosions if there's a good gunfight and a totally ridiculous car chase to replace them.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

This? This is why Casablanca works. We don't spend half the movie watching Ilse and Laszlo in Czechoslovakia, or Rick in Spain, or Captain Renault giving up on everything but personal benefit. Aristotle had a point with that whole in medias res argument. This is why Tombstone, although not a great movie, is still a better movie than Costner's Wyatt Earp movie. This is why you can't look away from the screen in the original 3:10 to Yuma. The story starts where the story starts, not back somewhere in geologic time, as if movies were James Michener novels.

We don't get the whole history of the early Kingdom of Scotland, either. We get the Thane of Fife and his wife going up against temptation and not even trying for a saving throw.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, jeez, yes. Casablanca would be UNWATCHABLE.

[carbonel]

I never saw the attraction of Westerns as a genre (when I was a kid, they were part of the boring mass of not-interesting stuff that populated most of what was on TV), but I've watched a number of Western movies (including High Noon) as part of my 4-star movie-watching project. I've come to realize that structure is mostly what the good ones are all about.

I happened to see a preview of Cowboys vs. Aliens, and was intrigued enough to look out for the review. But those were sufficiently abysmal that I didn't bother to watch the movie, even on Netflix. Thanks for the analysis of what they did wrong.

(Tonight, I'll finish watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which is just as stylized a thing in its own way. I'm trying to turn off the part of my brain that keeps insisting that it doesn't work that way and occasionally remind myself of the episode of West Wing that referenced the movie.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is that Hollywood has become convinced that audiences are stupid and need everything explained to them in linear fashion. This is true in general, but goes quintuple for speculative fiction: "Audiences won't like it if this guy just shows up with claws coming out of his hands! That doesn't make any sense! We have to show where the claws came from, or they'll be confused!"

What they forget is that Confusion and Curiosity are fraternal twins. Years ago, somebody critiqued the beginning of one of my (unpublished) novels and was very dissatisfied with it, because she had all these questions she wanted me to stop and answer before I got on with the story. What I thought, but did not say to her, was that her having those questions was a feature, not a bug. Because the desire to know the answers is the fishhook that will lodge in your lip and drag you into the story: who are these people? How do they know each other? What's going on? Go too far with that, and you have Confusion and people quit in annoyance. But play it right and you have Curiosity, and you have audience engagement.

I would not be at all surprised if Wolverine's structure is partially the result of some executive or whoever insisting that you had to Explain Things First. (The structure of C&A is probably the result of some executive insisting that if you were going to pay for Daniel Craig then you damn well had better start the movie with him and make the thing his story.)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I don't like the High Noon song, but I think it's a deserved Oscar, even though I wish there had been some way to call it, that year, 'Best Use of a Song in a Motion Picture'. Because I think the song is actively structural. It's just like the damn clocks. You can't get away from it. It never fucking resolves. Things keep almost falling into its beat-- footfalls, horse hooves, arm movements-- and then not, because it isn't a heartbeat, it's a syncopated heartbeat and nothing but the song carries the syncopation all the way through. Heartbeat, heartbeat, heartbeat, double-time for one and a half measures, heartbeat. You keep wanting it, or something, to drop the other shoe already. The movie doesn't care whether we like the song or not; a certain amount of annoyance may well be what they were aiming for. I've never tried watching the film with the sound off, but I think it would lose something.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, a handful of classic westerns are full of diversions and set-pieces that don't advance the plot. The Searchers has this eeeendless comedy routine in the middle of it, actually THREE (Mose Harper, Look, and the nervous cavalry messenger), and to the modern eye they're annoying and off-putting, because they fall in the middle of a serious and unpleasant story about revenge gone too far. I've long suspected that resorting to comedy was a strategy of John Ford's to keep the audience engaged even after they realize it isn't a story of unalloyed good guys.

(The same thing happens in Cheyenne Autumn, too.)

Whereas, the Ringo Kid doesn't show up till 1/3 of the way through Stagecoach, and we only ever find out about his rivalry with the villainous brothers he kills in the final act via dialogue. It's a strikingly efficient use of John Wayne, that I suspect was only really possible because it was his first starring role.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Having watched Rio Bravo, which was EXPLICITLY John Wayne's answer to everything he thought was wrong with High Noon, I am inclined to agree with you.

[robling-t.livejournal.com]

Cowboys and Aliens remains the only movie that our SF-of-occasionally-dubious-merit watching-group has ever bailed on, because we realized two hours in that there was about another hour to go and the consensus was that none of us gave half a flying crap how it ended...