How you project yourself to the world is something you think about constantly, whether you want to or not. You fix your hair, you choose your clothes for the day, you decide to put on less-than-utilitarian footwear. Even idiots like me – who have had the same excessively simple haircut for decades, wear virtually the same outfit everyday, and wear sneakers regardless of the weather \u2013 do this. My sneaker allegiance is built around the simple conceit that I don\u2019t want to be a \u201cboots person,\u201d whatever that means. Dressing to avoid standing out in any way is still a stylistic choice. (Tom McCarthy got nominated for an Oscar for his directorial version of my daily attire.)<\/p>\n
Our image is something we have to think about all the time because – assuming you live in a city – people look at you all the time, even if only for a fleeting glance. If people are merely looking for an instant, enough of these instances will still make you care. This is why I don\u2019t wear sweatpants outside of the house.<\/p>\n
You want people to look at you in a certain way. We all do, whether we\u2019re willing to admit it or not.<\/p>\n
Carol is a romance between two women at a time when such things were not allowed, but \u2013 like all of director Todd Haynes\u2019 best work \u2013 there is a strong theme of personal image projected throughout. As the film progresses, the most interesting questions become about something other than the romance at the centre of the film. How does Carol see herself? How does Therese see herself? Most importantly, how does Therese see Carol through the lens of her camera? What is the image captured?<\/p>\n Anytime one makes a movie, they are inherently commenting on image in some capacity, because filmmaking is an image-based medium. When Anomalisa was staged as an audio play in 2005, it was done specifically to augment the facelessness of the script. As it became a film in 2015, the stop-motion animation techniques used were chosen specifically as a way to comment on humanity. Everybody looked and sounded the same, because that is how Michael Stone views the world outside of his own mind. That co-directors Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman chose to not remove the spaces between the various pieces in the puppets further augments the way we see ourselves: as people constantly on the verge of falling apart. In Anomalisa, you can see the cracks in the fa\u00e7ade, and everybody has them.<\/p>\n Todd Haynes understands this relationship between film and personal image perfectly, and seemingly all of his movies are about the way image is projected in some way. His previous film, the borderline masterpiece I\u2019m Not There, was about your own ever-changing image of yourself more than it was ever about the life of Bob Dylan. (I suspect that I will be able to watch this film every decade for the rest of my life and have a distinct, equally positive takeaway each time. There are almost no other films I feel this way about.)<\/p>\n In Carol, we see a similar image-based thread running beneath the plot of Carol and Therese\u2019s forbidden appreciation of each other. Therese is a closed-off, quiet person, and she is also a photographer. Naturally, we are meant to believe she projects herself through her art, because this is what we have been taught through decades of cinematic language. As Carol progresses, we see Therese stop taking photos of inanimate objects in order to embrace human subjects, starting with Carol as she falls more in love with Kyle Chandler\u2019s wife. Therese sees somebody, she wants to be with somebody, and then eventually she starts looking at that somebody differently, and in a more confident light. The way she looks at Carol changes the way she looks at everything, and then she opens the shutter and prints that look onto a frame of 35mm film.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In Anton Corbijn\u2019s little-seen 2015 film Life, Corbijn shows photographer Dennis Stock\u2019s journey to try to get an about-to-be-known James Dean to agree to a naturalistic photo shoot, one away from the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. The idea behind Stock\u2019s proposed photo essay is that Dean is going to have a public image soon enough, and it is going to be constructed whether he likes it or not. Stock merely feels that his ideas for that image are better for Jimmy than those of the gorillas in the paparazzi pit at the East of Eden premiere. Stock wants Dean to stand out from the fray, because he believes Dean is a standout in waiting.<\/p>\n Now, I occasionally get to view those red carpet gorillas, and I can tell you nothing is faker than the whole process. I\u2019ve seen it occasionally for approximately five years now, and literally the only interesting thing that has ever happened in a photo pit was Kristen Stewart angrily telling the photographers that she can\u2019t follow all of their demands at once. Corbijn is a photographer himself, and I trust he has seen his fair share of such horror shows as well. These pits exist to have photographic proof that, yes, the stars were here and, yes, they sure looked gorgeous and, yes, we all had a grand old time in this perfect world. But the reality is that these images mean nothing, because your true image exists outside of it.<\/p>\n Nobody gets boiled down to a single image anymore, because today images are so much easier to capture than in the past. Sam Shaw\u2019s iconic photograph of Marilyn Monroe can\u2019t exist anymore, because if Monroe had been a celebrity today her image would have been even more ubiquitous than it already was. There would be no single, iconic image, because there would be too many images to have one lock into our collective cultural mind.<\/p>\n If you try to think of a single image of Kim Kardashian right now, you are likely thinking of the Break the Internet cover of Paper Magazine. But there\u2019s also a pretty good chance you\u2019re thinking of something entirely different; maybe a still from the Bound II music video, or a paparazzi shot of her carrying North somewhere. Even in a shared culture, your exposure to Kardashian is likely different from mine, because we have so many ways to be exposed. Nobody, not even the most controlling of stars, gets to be seen how they truly want to be seen. The totality of humanity is always collectively more creative than any team of publicists can be, even those working for Jennifer Lawrence.<\/p>\n But Joy is not the type of person to let somebody else tell her what to do. She charges into a meeting with Neil and demands he let her get on television and sell it her way. The mop comes from her life experiences as a single mother, and she put everything she learned cleaning up after her kids into this, so she deserves the opportunity to sell it herself. Neil relents and \u2013 finally – the exposition ends, so the exhibition can begin.<\/p>\n As Joy gets ready to go on-camera, the film drives home how removed from this world she is: Joy refuses to wear the dress Neil gives her, and is taken aback when the spinning set slowly puts her in front of the necessarily bright lights of television. She is stopped in her tracks, stammering and sounding unconfident, until Neil cues a call from Joy\u2019s friend. This lifeline to reality brings Joy back, and allows her to connect the fake world with her reality, and to sell a shitload of mops.<\/p>\n The most interesting element of this portion of the movie is how it seems to comment on Jennifer Lawrence\u2019s own ascension to fame. As Neil, an obvious extension for David O. Russell, explains as he parades Joy around the QVC studio, \u201cDavid Selznick, who was the son of immigrants, married Jennifer Jones from Oklahoma, who was America\u2019s sweetheart. That just goes to show you, in America, the ordinary meets the extraordinary every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n This is what we have been told Jennifer Lawrence is: an ordinary person who exists in an extraordinary world. She is Jennifer Jones from Kentucky, born anew in District 12. She\u2019ll find her son of immigrants soon enough, and complete the American dream of extraordinary normalcy.<\/p>\n When Joy informs Todd how he should sell the mop, Todd responds by saying such tips aren\u2019t helpful. \u201cThat\u2019s not my process,\u201d he says, and Joy looks surprised, further implying that Lawrence might be an actress too, but she has no \u2018process.\u2019 She\u2019s too normal for that. Russell just turns the lights on and Lawrence comes out there to play pretend. There\u2019s nothing more to it than that, even though there obviously is.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/carol3.jpg\" "\\"carol3\\"")
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\nDavid O. Russell\u2019s latest film Joy is a messy affair, like all second-phase Russell work, but its highs are more than worth waiting for. (Not unlike \u2013 hopefully, at least \u2013 this paragraph. Prepare yourself emotionally for some boring exposition, beginning just past the parentheses.) As Joy Mangano invents a mop head that can be wrung out and thrown into a washing machine to be easily cleaned, she tries to come up with a way to sell it, eventually finding her way into the new world of shopping television. Bradley Cooper\u2019s character Neil is sold on her idea and gives it to one of his finest salesmen, Todd, to sell on the air. When the time comes for Todd to shine, he fails miserably and Joy\u2019s hopes and dreams, as well as her finances, are crushed.<\/p>\n