J.D. Hansel

Four and a Half Stars

What About Bob? Review

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I generally try to be a really tough critic.  I never give five stars, and I only give four and a half stars to the movies that grab me in the most intense and personal ways possible or impress me such that I would not object to considering them the greatest films of all time.  Naturally, I try to keep the list of films that get this most esteemed rating as small as possible, with only a few such reviews every year so they only make up about 10% of my reviews.  As I watched What About Bob?, I could tell that this film was in the 4 to 4.5 zone, but I wasn’t sure where, and I regrettably remained unsure even after the film had ended.  Over time, however, I found myself leaning towards 4.5 not only because its particular story and comedy style grab me personally, but because I kept laughing at its comedy after weeks had passed since I watched the film.

I do believe that this film is truly (and perhaps objectively) good, but the reasons why I love it are more subjective.  I have a personal connection to What About Bob? because I love Frank Oz, who directed the film, and I’ve grown fond of his style as a filmmaker and humorist.  He also cast fellow Muppet performer Fran Brill as a fairly significant character in the film, which I greatly appreciate – it’s not every film that pairs Bill Murray with Prairie Dawn.  I also just like comedic stories about craziness, mental illness, anxiety, psychology, and the brain, which is why films like High Anxiety, Silver Linings Playbook, Crazy People, and Inside Out are among my favorites.  I also like comedy that focuses on the dynamic between characters that each have distinct and understandable personalities, a la the early Harry Potter films and certain Muppet movies.

To be more objective, however, the story is cleverly written, and the performances are absolutely excellent. Richard Dreyfuss in particular clearly had a difficult task in that his character must become progressively and consistently less sane, while staying somewhat relatable during most of the film, and I think he handled it very well, delivering most of the film’s best comedy.  I will say that the extent to which I empathize with Dreyfuss’ character does at times get in the way of the comedy, and it is perhaps a consequence of this that the film’s ending feels a little weak, but overall, What About Bob? offers the high level of cinematic craftsmanship that I’ve come to expect from Frank Oz.  I don’t think this movie gets a lot of credit as one of the greats – although it did make Bravo’s list of the “100 Funniest Movies” and a quote from the film is in my movie quotes daily calendar – but regardless of what anyone else might think of it, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Carrie (1976) Review

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MINOR SPOILER WARNING

This is one review that I didn’t think I’d ever be writing.  Some readers may recall the first time I reviewed a Carrie adaptation – when I saw the 2013 Carrie movie – at which point I decided that the original Brian de Palma film was not for me. I was in a place in life when I wanted to see the story taken very seriously, and I didn’t want it to be too fun, too silly, too campy – with the possible exception of the ending. For anyone with any familiarity with the Stephen King story, the ending is the part where, no matter how serious and dramatic the adaptation has been up until this point, the viewers had better throw their hands in the air and get ready to ride this roller-coaster down into the pits of Hades, laughing and screaming all the way. Still, this is one of the very few stories for which I feel it is best for a film to do as good of a job as possible at making everything seem very real, believable, and even mundane for the first two acts – employing an almost Our Town-like structure in saving the fantastic elements for the ending.  Much to my surprise, this movie mostly sticks to this form, offering much more realism than I would have expected.  The fact that so much of de Palma’s film makes it feel like these could be real people in a real high school assuages most of the concerns I had about about watching this movie, but the parts that are over-the-top and expressionistic are the kind of fun ’70s cult horror moments that my recent fascination with this sub-genre has made me crave.

When I wrote the review for the 2013 movie, I was in a different place in life.  I wanted to approach this story as seriously as possible and find in it something that could be used to express to the older generations why it is that so many teenagers suffer from depression and anxiety these days.  The 1976 film doesn’t work for that, but it might have served that purpose back in its day, leading me to suspect that – in general – the best version of Carrie is whichever one best expresses the anxieties to the viewers in its time.  The film I watched first may have been best for 2013 (at least for teenage viewers) while the 1976 film was probably best for the 1970s – each feels very much like a reflection of its time.  That’s why the ’76 version needs to be approached differently now – it’s a time-capsule, and the fashions of the era have not aged well.  As I’d initially feared, much of it is comical, but even some of the cheesiest moments with John Travolta feel they could have happened back then.  That being said, part of why I loved this movie so much is the stuff that doesn’t feel normal at all.  I watched this movie specifically because I wanted to see more of the kind of thing Brian de Palma did with Phantom of the Paradise, so I wanted to laugh, to feel confused, to have fun, and to cheer as the style got very expressionistic and experimental.  I came into this movie with the goal of seeing weird little kinks like sped-up dialogue to get us through a scene faster and a split-screen effect that shows two aspects of the same action – and I kind of wanted everything to be a joke.

Still, while that may seem like the exact opposite of what I wanted from this story when I watched the 2013 film, there are some things that I would’ve had to admit are perfect here even if I’d watched this movie back in the summer of 2015.  Julianne Moore may be a great actress, but the mother in this film is obviously superior, making the character seem believably uncanny for most of the film and then delightfully creepy in the end.  Even the Carrie in this film, whom I’d suspected I would have a hard time taking seriously with her acting style and her accent, is generally as relatable, likable, and believable as I’d like, and is exactly as scary as one would hope by the end.  The final scene is absolutely perfect and gave me a bigger scare than anything I’ve seen on screen in a long time – in a good way.  Even the colors, which I thought would detract from the reality of the world, actually make sense because they come from the lights at the prom, so the parts that feel theatrical still feel plausible and very much at home here.  Then, of course, there is the visual poetry in the resemblance between Carrie’s mother and the creepy Jesus figure, which may not have much of a deep meaning in this story, but it’s a heck of a cherry on top.

It’s also worth making it clear that most of the things critics complained about in the 2013 film aren’t very different from the 1976 film that is so critically revered.  The Carrie in this movie is just as pretty as Chloe Grace Moretz, and it actually seems less plausible that Sissy Spacek would have been considered too strange-looking to be one of the popular girls.  Critics complained that the 2013 film isn’t scary enough, but this film isn’t much scarier, and that’s not really the point of the story anyway.  Critics argued that the Moretz film lacked a build-up to the finale that the story requires, but I felt the build-up about equally across each film – although that may have been because I already knew the story before watching either movie.  I will concede that the critics are right in pointing out that, in comparison to de Palma’s work, Kimberly Peirce’s film didn’t seem to do much with the story that stood out – she didn’t get very playful, and one could call her work rather boring – but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing if the aim is making everything feel normal for most of the film (again, I refer to Our Town).  With that said, however, it is the Brian de Palma film that must go down in history as a classic because it manages to be such a great and important drama while being a bundle of fun and laughter.  As far as I’m concerned, while it may not be the kind of horror that most people are used to, this is the ultimate horror classic (excluding horror comedies like Gremlins) and I love it just the way it is.

Heathers Review

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MINOR SPOILERS

Lately, it seems I’ve been in the mood to watch movies about bad teenagers committing extreme crimes.  I recently watched The Bling Ring, which focuses on the least likable people on the planet breaking into the homes of celebrities and stealing their priceless belongings.  It’s fascinating because it has the feeling of an Animal Planet documentary, giving the viewer a mostly objective look at the lives of creatures that don’t seem to be humans – at least not if my friends, family, peers, and roommates are the standard for “human.”  I thought that I liked it, until I saw the ’80s classic (and life-long member of everyone’s Netflix watch-list) Heathers, which takes a far more interesting approach.  While just as much a satire, this film largely throws realism to the wind and thrusts the audience into a world of mercilessly dark comedy.  I’m not sure exactly how much it made me laugh, but I will say that, when watching this movie, I had more fun – just pure and simple childlike giddiness – than I’ve had watching any other since Suspiria or Animal House – or maybe even my beloved Phantom of the Paradise.

Part of what makes this movie work so well is that it embraces cinema’s area of expertise: not truth, but “truthiness.”  Anyone who knows what my high school was like knows that my experience there did not resemble that of this film’s characters in any way, and yet everything about this movie feels weirdly familiar.  I’ve never met characters like the Heathers, but it feels like I’ve encountered them countless times.  It feels like every high school in America has these same jocks, these same nerds, and this same staff.  It’s almost like a bizarre take on Carrie, offering a chance to see justice done to the people in high school we all kind of wish were dead.  I think that’s why it resonates with so many people, and why it’s a great example of how cinema ought to function, at least in its comedies.

Oddly enough, this film struck me as being the high school equivelent to a film noir.  Perhaps it’s because of the odd, awkward dark tone matched with a bit of expressionism, or maybe it’s because of the situation the protagonist finds herself in, or maybe it’s because of the ending, but the whole thing feels like the filmmakers had been watching a lot of old films noirs when developing this story.  It particularly feels like noir when Veronica looks down at the dead body of the man she just shot, seemingly realizing that she killed him and starting to feel bad, and then she proceeds to shoot the other jock, without explanation.  I got a similar vibe when the film awkwardly tried to work in a message about how bad teen suicide is, with several references throughout to a song entitled, “Teenage Suicide (Don’t Do It).”  This message feels clumsily shoe-horned in, and it reminds me of all the times when the police officers in movies from the 1940s and 1950s explained to the characters (and, more importantly, to the audience) that the actions of the criminals were bad.  These are just some of the ways in which Heathers is both strange and familiar for movie-lovers, and maybe that’s what makes it hit the spot for me.

La La Land Review

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SPOILER WARNING

I should not be writing this review.  I am not capable of doing the film justice having only seen it once.  There are many movies that have left my friends, family, and peers thinking they ought to watch them multiple times to make sure that they’ve taken everything in, and usually these are either mind-bending thrillers (think The Matrix or Spy Game) or pseudo-intellectual Oscar-bait like Mulholland Drive.  Most of the time, I feel no need to see these movies again – I tend to pick up on everything I want to upon my first viewing – but for La La Land, I think I’d need many more viewings before I can fully comprehend the scope of its intellectual assessment of its own situation.  As I’ve written about before, we are in a time in film history when cinema is growing more reflective than ever before, submerging itself further into the worlds it has already created to find the nooks and crannies of the Wizard World or the Death Star that it may have missed at first.  This applies to genres as well.  When the romantic comedy was revamped with When Harry Met Sally, the “rom coms” that followed in the 1990s clearly confronted the movies of Classical Hollywood and addressed “the compatibilism question” – how do we bring together the people of today with the genres of yesterday in a way that feels believable?  The musicals of today, such as Into the Woods, Muppets Most Wanted, and The Jungle Book, haven’t really addressed this question head-on, resulting in an embarrassingly awkward transition in Jungle Book from a dark, ominous shot of a giant, scary ape to a bouncy little ukulele song.  La La Land has the intelligence to recognize that we actually need to sit down and talk about the compatibilism question, but I don’t think it’s very sure of what the answer is.

It’s interesting to me that Rotten Tomatoes describes the film as having “thrillingly assured direction,” because the nature of the director’s assurance is fairly complex.  To me he seems unsure as to what the movie ought to be exactly, yet he refuses to allow it to be anything other than what it is.  The film is very technically impressive and is shot with great care, but just because he understands the film’s essence on a technical level does not mean he has a grip on what it is as a story (or as an argument).  The film is fairly insecure, sometimes suggesting that it will do a certain musical number a certain way, then backing out of it as though it would be too corny for 2016, before finally overcoming its skepticism (and embarrassment) and diving into theatricality.  Still, there is always a sense that Classical Hollywood is watching over the characters in this film, waiting to see what they’ll do with a genre that doesn’t belong to them, showing that the director knows exactly where his film stands: it is being scrutinized closely by both the past and the future, wondering if it is truly capable of pleasing both masters.

The compatibilism question takes three forms in the movie, first asking how an old-fashioned musical film can succeed today, then asking how jazz can continue to thrive, and finally asking if two different dreamers of two different dreams can have a lasting partnership.  As for question one, its answer seems to be that the contemporary drama and the classical musical are, inevitably, an awkward pairing, but it’s decided that this awkwardness is okay.  There are times when a jazzy musical number ends with a ringtone, or an old cartoonish iris-opening transition presents a profane term that would never have been used in the days of Singin’ in the Rain.  It’s an odd clash, but a cute and coquettish clash, not unlike a couple in a romantic comedy.  The film also has elements of the mid-19th century musical that don’t work very well today, and these can stir up debate and arguments among viewers pertaining to the issue of how this genre should be handled in the new century.  For example, consider how the film might be asking questions about race in much the same way that musicals like Singin’ in the Rain feature white men borrowing from black dance, and La La Land features a white man explaining black music.  The film goes so far as to include musical numbers that contribute nothing to the plot at all – an often forgotten element of the mid-century musical – and this is part of what makes the film so divisive: it has flaws built in that I suspect were carefully designed to make some viewers hate it (and make most viewers debate it).

Regarding the jazz question, the film shows its hand a bit more, presenting an explicit answer to the question through John Legend’s dialogue, and thus revealing the film’s intellectual pursuit to viewers who haven’t yet caught on.  Here too, however, the film is somewhat ambiguous, presenting the contemporary jazz music as unsatisfactory, impure, and greatly problematic for our characters.  Even the song it uses to represent the future of jazz (“Start a Fire”) is mostly comprised of pieces of older genres, mixing jazz, Motown, soul, funk, disco, and ‘80s pop, revealing a reticence to accept the modern even from the characters that claim to embrace it.  On the other hand, this choice may have just been made so that the director, who seems to prefer older music himself, can tolerate it.

The third question – the question of the couple – is the area where I am most critical of and disappointed with the film’s argumentation.  This is the reason why I almost deducted half a star (or even four of the stars) from my rating.  The problem here has to do with the logic of cinema, which generally ought to resemble a symbolic logical sentence (A ⋀ B → C → D, for example).  This is the basis for one of the holy and unbreakable rules of screenwriting: the ending may be unexpected, yet it must be set up and inevitable.  Obviously, La La Land does not follow this rule, because the decision for Mia to end up with another man comes out of the blue and seems entirely arbitrary.  There is no rational reason for her to choose to be with someone other than her true love, nor is there anything in the film’s plot that suggests she would forgo the rational/emotional/intuitive choice to serve some other purpose.  This ending is ultimately a non-sequitur, so the film’s conclusion that Mia and Sebastian’s romance cannot work is seemingly a random one with little or no basis in the logic of the story.

What makes this so frustrating is that the film seems to make the case that their romance could have worked had they made better choices.  This is, of course, suggested by the fantasy sequence in the film’s final act, during which Mia imagines the better way the story could have gone had things been just slightly different . . . or so it seems.  What seems hard for some viewers to notice is that this fantasy is actually a completely impossible one – their story could not have gone this way.  Sebastian could not have known that Mia wanted him to kiss her after she first heard him play their song; he could not have attended Mia’s play and remained dedicated to the source of his income that was required in order for him to open his jazz club; he could not have veered off the main road at the end and coincidentally stumble upon his own jazz club (which somehow managed to exist without him).  This is only Mia’s fantasy of what life could have been like if she had magically gotten every little thing she wanted regardless of how much it cost Sebastian and regardless of whether or not it was even humanly possible.

The reason why this ending is so important is that it relates to questions about the musical romance as a genre.  Traditionally, the Classical Hollywood romance story exists almost solely for the formation of the heterosexual couple – to convince its audience for the thousandth time that the formation of a happy and healthy romance between a man and a woman is possible.  If the film has not made this case in such a way that the viewer believes it, the narrative and/or genre does not function.  The fact that Mia and Sebastian were not able to form a lasting romantic couple means that the genre has failed – it tells us that Classical Hollywood’s way of forming a couple does not work for people in the modern world.  In other words, the fact that the genre could not serve its function today answers the first compatibilism question with a definite negative.  Whether he meant to or not, the director told us that his attempt at making a mid-20th century musical in the 20th century was a failure, regardless of how well the film has been received.  The problem with his answer, of course, is that he did not show his work, instead selecting an arbitrary ending that gives his argument a random conclusion rather than a logical and satisfactory one.

As much as I detest this laziness of writing, I still must give this movie the highest of praises because I believe it is very, very good for the future of cinema.  Even if its logical argument is very poor, at least this film is different from most of the films that the “cinematic elite” embrace in that, rather than prompting the viewer to ask meaningless questions the way that Mulholland Drive does, this film uses the argumentative power of cinema to get the audience thinking about real and important questions (in this case pertaining to the future of media).  This could lead to other films that can ask the viewer questions about ethics, laws, cultures, progress, the environment, and any intellectual topic imaginable, all without sounding preachy.  In this sense, La La Land has the potential to shape this century’s cinema into something great – something that is highly intelligent and that is beneficial to humankind.  (It’s worth noting that the film’s ending is an attempt to do the kind of “open to interpretation” endings that Lynch and other “art film” directors love, so this film’s director clearly has a fondness for the kind of pseudo-intellectual ambiguity that the “cinema elite” adores, but this element of the film hopefully won’t hinder the potential positive effects that I have outlined in this paragraph.)

Perhaps more importantly, I think this film just might be a greater movie experience than nearly any other film made within the past ten years because this movie is alive!  In a time when nearly every movie released from Hollywood is hideously drab, gray, and monochromatic, this film has color!  In a time when nearly every filmmaker tries to capture an almost depressing realism with the camera, this film has theatricality!  In a time when nearly every Hollywood soundtrack sounds like a collection of durges, this film has boogie!  Director Damien Chazelle has found that the perfect combination of visual beauty and musical beauty can sometimes be enough to form emotional beauty, using pure spectacle and unfiltered passion to overpower and enthrall me, filling me with bubbly excitement and childlike wonder from the very first scene.  Never before have I found myself tearing up within the first few minutes of a movie, and never have I given myself over to a musical number the way I did with “Fools Who Dream.”  It’s true that not every moment in the film is captivating, and I may have checked my watch over a dozen times while watching it, but its best scenes were so riveting, enchanting, and divine that its flaws are forgivable, and I may never have had so many tears fill my eyes from just one film in my entire lifetime.

Therefore, I must give this film the highest of praises – long live La La Land, the greatest work of art of this century!

Network Review

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The first part of this film I ever saw was the famous scene with everyone shouting from their windows.  It was in a film history course I took a few years ago, and ever since I saw the clip, I’d been really wanting to see the whole film.  That scene really moved me when I first saw it – it spoke to me in a way that the most touching and emotional of scenes from other classic movies don’t – but I had to wait to watch it until I was in the right mood.  Since that course was back in early 2014, it seemed like late 2016 was a good time, ensuring that the scene wouldn’t be so fresh in my memory that it would be spoiled.  For this most recent viewing, once I could tell the scene was coming, I turned off the lights, sat up close to the screen, and let it overpower me.  Because the scene is so greatly enhanced by its context in the plot, I found myself quivering as tears fell down my face, and all I could do was remark at the beauty of what I was experiencing.  I’ve found myself tearing up while writing this review just at the thought of it, and this is a very unusual sort of experience for me.  This is exactly what cinema should be doing, and in a time when artsy drivel like 2001 is seen as the kind of thing the elite film critics want from Hollywood, it’s nice to know that a film with true meaning and power is still regarded as a great cinematic achievement.

As for the rest of the film, it’s not bad.  It can be a little boring at times, but most of it is pretty satisfying in its comedy, its irony, or at the very least its brutal honesty.  The film shows us exactly what we would like to think the evil overlords behind our television programming would be saying and doing behind closed doors.  The balance between comedy and drama is pretty good, particularly with the way the lines between the two are blurred.  I will say that I found it somewhat difficult to keep track of names and faces, but the story kept me interested.  The writing is smart, the characters are what they ought to be, and the ending is just perfect (and it merits comparison to the ending of another of my favorite ’70s movies, Phantom of the Paradise, to gain an appreciation of the cinema of the Vietnam-era and the years that followed).  What’s most impressive about the story is that it manages to be very dramatic, very absurd, and very believable all at the same time, such that the ridiculous solution proposed at the end of the film leaves the viewer gaping and thinking, “By gosh, at this point that actually seems plausible!”

Essentially, the movie is an interesting analysis of the normalization of madness, and it raises the question of just how sane a species we truly are.

The Graduate Review: Upon Further Consideration…

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NOTE: This is an amendment to a previous review of the same film.

I’m a little bit surprised to say that this film is better on its second viewing, but not too surprised.  I think sometimes it helps to “get used to” a film’s essence, or a film’s ending, in order to appreciate the film’s greatness.  The interesting thing about The Graduate is how well it works as both a comedy and a drama.  The tone of the film can be described as such: imagine if a filmmaker told his actors in secret that they were making a comedy film, but told the cinematographer and camera crew that he was trying to make a drama, and then tried to see how long they could make the comedy before anyone figured out it wasn’t a drama.  That’s the feeling of The Graduate, and while other dramedies have often gone for a similar effect, The Graduate is the film that pulls it off, perhaps because of its playful style.  Mike Nichols seems to become the seducer himself, baiting the viewers in with comedy, but manipulating and emasculating them all the while.  Nichols understands that people often laugh when they are vulnerable, and the brilliance of this film is its ability to use the drama to make the audience vulnerable enough for its comedy to be effective.  The drama and the comedy both play on the same discomfort – a fear of a sort of castration – which may make it a great drama for male viewers, but also establishes the film as being almost exclusively for men because of its constant focus on the American male experience.

I’d like to take the time to systematically go through the ways in which the film explores the anxieties of the young American male, but before I get to the sexual side of this issue, I’ll start with the “formal” aspects.  What I mean by “formal” in this case is the use of traditional models of the successful American man to form oneself into this ideal image.  The typical image of the young person of the late 1960s involves a very passionate, driven person who aims to change the world by screaming in the streets while holding a cardboard sign, but this film presents a later view of the essence of the college kid – a  spaced out, zoned-out, dazed haze.  The film tells us that he has been a successful undergrad student with seemingly good grades and a potential future in graduate school, and has also been a track star and was very well-liked in college, yet he has no idea what he wants to do with his life, no satisfaction from what he’s done so far, and is completely lacking in ambition.  Even for someone like me, a very ambitious person with big goals in life and concrete ideas for achievements I’d like to make in my career, this is still relatable because of how difficult it was for me to choose a college, a place to live, and so on.  Mr. Robinson tells Ben that he wishes he could be young again, buying into the idea that “these are the best years of your life” (not the character’s exact words, but similar) and that people in college have a special freedom of choice.  This film shows that notion to be faulty, instead showing how being  in one’s early twenties is a perfect example of the Kierkegaardian idea of being “lost in the infinite” – having too many choices to be able to make a good one.

What makes this matter so stressful is that he must make a choice.  The fact that he has such a bright future ahead of him forces him to live up to the image of the bright future.  The fact that he is smart means he must continue to be smart, and the fact that he is handsome means that he must marry someone beautiful, and the fact that he has studied at a good college means his next college must be better, and the fact that his parents are wealthy means that he must find a great job, and so on and so forth.  When most people think of encouragement and parental pride as something positive, this film’s thesis is that his parents’ bragging not only sets extremely high expectations for him to constantly hope he can attain, but also leaves him out of the process of forming his identity, making it no surprise that he lacks vision and drive.  Every success he has and every compliment he receives becomes another picket in the fence that’s closing the young man into his ever-shrinking pen.  This film, perhaps like The Breakfast Club, tries to recognize the paradox in that what America calls personal growth is actually an experience of personal compression – society squeezing its youth into a narrow mold.  Being the perfect kid is revealed to be both incarcerating and distancing, as one comes to look at oneself as an image formed in the minds of others that is separate from the autonomous self, but has unfortunately replaced the self as the newly formed identity.

After considering how the film has depicted the daily anxieties of the young male, one must then consider how it depicts the nightly anxieties of the young male – the Freudian nightmare.  Everything that Mrs. Robinson does serves to make her absolutely terrifying to the young male viewer.  While I know it’s generally bad form to use the word you in an essay, I must ask you to make this story as personal as possible and put yourself in Ben’s shoes: a woman who looks like your mother and has known you since you were a small child tricks you into going with her into her house, blocks the door so you cannot avoid seeing her naked body, tempts you into an ongoing secret affair with her, makes you look like an unintelligent fool, challenges your experience and ability to perform adequately in sex, ruins your relationship with your newfound love, calls the police on you, convinces everyone that you raped her, sics her husband on you, and finally marries your lover off to another man.  Ben is tricked, trapped, used, patronized, and ultimately framed.  The audience is inclined to celebrate when he still wins the day and gets the girl, but the ending shows that Ben has woken up from his nightmare only to find himself back in the anxiety of his daily life – his lack of identity and future.

The film’s only focus is on intensifying these anxieties, and the film’s strength is creating the feeling that Mrs. Robinson is holding a giant pair of scissors just under the viewer’s balls.  The film obsesses on this theme almost to a fault, as the film is happy to leave plot holes and skip important parts of the story just to get back to the scenes that showcase anxiety.  The film does not show how, why, or when Ben came to love Elaine and find her to be the only person he could talk to, as the movie even goes so far as to cut out the audio in one of their few on-screen moments of romantic conversation, as if to hold up a sign for the audience that the romance is not what the viewer is supposed to care about.  Nichols even went so far as to give the audience no indication of how Ben escapes the police who arrive at Robinsons’ house to arrest him – a scene that one would think is fairly important – and yet he sees no problem in including two musical montage sequences in a row that are nearly identical, seemingly just because they stay on point with his thesis.  His aggressive focus on the male experience can also have the effect of alienating female audiences, since the story does not play to their interests or anxieties as much, and the drama of Elaine’s life (finding out that her ex-boyfriend raped her mother and has now followed her to her college) is almost entirely overlooked.  Still, it uses its topical conservatism to its advantage by making the most of what it does explore, with a visual style that is adamant on making Ben seem as blocked and confined as possible for the majority of the film’s shots.  In a way, however, one would expect the cinematography to focus less on a claustrophobic effect and more on a dizzying effect, since the film’s thesis can be summed up with one great quote from Søren Kierkegaard: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

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