Neil Archer

Thinking on Film

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  • Connected: A Brief History of the Cinema in Six Phone Calls

    Connected: A Brief History of the Cinema in Six Phone Calls

    In that coincidental way that often characterises innovation, the telephone arrived around the same time as the cinema. And like cinema itself, and the television that came shortly after, the telephone represented a profoundly new experience of the world and one’s relationship to it. Like those other inventions, too, the word comes from Greek – ‘distant sound’ – an epic origin for an object that has become prosaic through familiarity.

    Prosaicness might be the fate of most technologies aiming to connect us more efficiently. As marvellous as the telephone might once have been, in collapsing distance it also collapsed the epic dimensions of everyday life. Before the telephone, we waited, and we imagined. Novels from the centuries before cinema were often structured around the exchange and relay of letters, their dramas based on faulty or scant information. The tragic outcomes of plays like Romeo and Juliet hinge on written messages that couldn’t be delivered. Go further back, and Homer in his Odyssey structures a whole twenty-year tale around the absence of communication. Baz Luhrmann found a way to get around the Romeo and Juliet problem in his 1996 film, but a modern-day Odyssey is unthinkable: how much lotus would our hero have to eat not to send off a quick text?

    But that was then. The talking picture, initiated by The Jazz Singer in 1927, will soon be a hundred, and for that same time we’ve been talking on our phones. In the same way that those earlier art forms were shaped by the written message, cinema is shaped by the spoken one. What follows then is a very brief, and by necessity very selective history of the medium via six phone calls – which is, in turn, a brief history of the way we talk to each other at a distance, and what that means.

    When Harry Met Sally (1989)

    Did the telephone invent the modern rom-com? As much as the phone let you speak to someone on the other side of the ocean, it also let you speak to someone across town. The phone line was a place to hang out, but it was also a place where you could be far away and intimate at the same time.

    The phone call’s quality of closeness at a distance informed film composition and staging, first by the relay of editing, but then through the optical device of the split screen. More than just a simple trick for showing simultaneous or parallel action, the split-screen phone call could collapse the streets and buildings or miles separating its characters. In the same process, it could offer the intimacy – and often the eroticism – of interactions hinted at, or even unpermitted. Even on the cusp of its abandonment, I’m not sure the Production Code would have allowed Doris Day and Rock Hudson to share an actual bathtub, but they’re already doing it – at a ‘distance’, of course – in 1959’s Pillow Talk.

    When 1989’s When Harry Met Sally nods to this same tradition, it’s with good reason. At the heart of the romantic comedy is a badly kept secret of the main couple’s irresistible attraction. The couple are usually the last ones to know, of course, which is why we watch them go through all the motions so innocently. And why, in that case, and thanks once more to the split screen, we get Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan sharing so much time together in bed, sharing so much pillow talk. They might not have realised (yet) that they could knock down this illusory wall, but we do, and watching them not get it straightaway is the film’s whole point and charm.

    The Virgin Suicides (1999)

    There’s a lovely scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme est une femme (1961) where a bickering couple, refusing to speak, argue by pointing at book titles. Sofia Coppola pulls a similar, and in a different way no less romantic trick in her adaptation of The Virgin Suicides, shot in 1999 but set in the pre-mobile mid-1970s. Coppola grasps the bittersweet combination of closeness and distance that made the landline such a fulcrum for lovelorn sweethearts in the years prior to email, facetime and texting. Imprisoned in their own home by their strict parents, the doomed Lisbon sisters connect with the world beyond through musical phone calls, relayed back and forth between them and the smitten neighbourhood boys: a dialogue-free cinematic conversation moving between the two spaces, the separation at once obvious but collapsed in the space of an edit, cued to the suitable strains of Carly Simon’s ‘So Far Away’.

    Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios/Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

    If movies are anything like real life, US presidents spent the mid-1960s nervously clutching handsets before the missiles started to fly: Peter Sellers’ Merkin Muffley in 1964’s Doctor Strangelove, or Henry Fonda’s namely POTUS in the same year’s Fail Safe. I only learned recently that the actual ‘red telephone’ connecting Washington with Moscow, and which both these films literalise, didn’t actually exist. Or at least, the phone gripped by Sellers and Fonda was a tangible image for a less visual, and therefore less cinematic, set of communication tools.

    But this also made the telephone a dramatic prop, and most importantly, a proxy for the tension exploited by the cinematic close-up. You didn’t need an epic canvas to depict the theatre of war when a terrified and hopeless phone call could serve the same purpose. What’s more, the handset gave focus and legitimacy to the sight of an actor essentially talking to themselves. Conversely, the actor’s silent reaction, under the telescoping effect of the camera, could speak volumes.

    Filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock would famously turn the ringing phone into a deathtrap, in Dial M for Murder (1954), or as a fearful sign of impending threat, as in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935). Hitchcock’s genius was to see in this ubiquitous object a weapon of terror, to the point where its cosily familiar form could become uncannily alive. In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Pedro Almodóvar’s different genius was to see the telephone as a fetish: an object both of devotion, and an almost eroticised substitute for the absent or unfaithful lover at the other end.

    The film’s inception was an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s short play The Human Voice: a drama, in Almodóvar’s words, about ‘a woman sitting next to a suitcaseful of memories waiting miserably for a phone call from the man she loves.’ Even if this central image from Cocteau’s play is all that remains in Women on the Verge, the telephone itself dominates the film; oversized in the foreground through forced perspective, red as a fire truck, its ring the signal for Carmen Maura’s Pepa to rush in, lunging for the receiver as if her life depended on it – which in this film, at least, is more or less the truth.

    If Women on the Verge plays out like a farce, to call the film ‘theatrical’ would miss the point that Almodóvar rethinks the stage comedy in an undeniably cinematic language. It’s one created as much in the editing suite; the telephone’s fixity and weight dictating the film’s construction of cinematic space, with everything moving or relaying in relation to this central object. Not for nothing does the phone appear in so much publicity around the film both then and now – it’s basically a member of the cast.

    Her (2013)

    It’s interesting that when Almodóvar finally makes that version of The Human Voice in 2020, by which time the rotating-dial handset is as obsolete as the gramophone, the film dispenses with Cocteau’s original image altogether: here, a cool and impeccable Tilda Swinton uses a Bluetooth earbud that, to all intents and purposes, leaves her perpetually in contact. There is no handset to run or cling to. Connection follows her at all times.

    It’s as if the sight of women running for the phone in high heels, already funny in 1988, would be absurd in our modern age. But the high-tech connectivity promised in The Human Voice still requires human constancy. The almost-antiquated telephone in Women on the Verge suited the comedic mode because of its clunkiness: its imperfections could stand in for the very unreliability of romantic relationships. Mobile technologies, along with the internet, offered the notion of permanent availability and access. If the older telephone sometimes failed to connect us, this was just a symptom of life’s messiness. When modern communications fail, it feels like a fault in the universe.

    This is what happens in Spike Jonze’s Her, set in a speculative future in which our phones and their sentient operating systems regulate every aspect of our lives, and to which we are permanently connected via wireless earphones. Near the film’s end, Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore suddenly finds himself ghosted by the OS with whom he has fallen in love. He finally gets reconnected on the steps of an underpass, only to discover that his beloved is carrying on a similar and simultaneous relationship with hundreds of other users. Without anyone tangible at the other end of the line, and without even the proxy of a handset to hold onto, Jonze films the scene in a near-continuous take of Phoenix in effect talking to himself; the only other cut being to the dozens of passersby, viewed by Theodore, also talking to themselves. They’re not, of course, at least strictly speaking. But in Her, this is the inevitable comic impression, and in some ways the inevitable fate, of our hands-free, permanently connected and permanently dependent existence: the sight of a species chuntering and chattering into the void, and taking one more step towards species obsolescence.

    The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

    As much as mobile phones suck, they’re not all bad. Being able to buy a pre-paid phone, sneak it into someone’s pocket and then guide them away from their own assassination is something we can only see – or at least see and almost believe – in this century. It’s also what we get in Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Ultimatum, with the ill-fated Paddy Considine being given the runaround in Waterloo Station, and a new kind of high-stakes action scene being created in the process. Back in the day Paddy would have had to answer a payphone, assuming they still worked, and then he’d be even more of a sitting duck. Matt Damon’s game with the surveillance cameras, rush-hour commuters and the waiting shooter makes for a classic scene, and very nearly gets Paddy off the hook. I said nearly.

    2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

    Homer’s great epic is no place for a telephone, so it’s one of the many comic touches of Stanley Kubrick’s own Odyssey that in 2001, his vision of the telephone should be at once so astounding and also so banal. Back in 1968 the idea of a video call might have seemed as distant and yet as tantalisingly possible as lunar space stations. This, then, is the space-age future promised by NASA’s moon programme, and what will it bring us? More of the same chat, it seems, only with the majesty of the rotating moon and the depths of space unnoticed and ignored just to the speaker’s left. Kubrick’s ironic cosmic vision would be to suggest that, with familiarity and time, even space travel, like the telephone itself, will become domesticated; and that the more connected we might become, even across stellar distances, the less of ourselves we might well understand.

    References

    Frédéric Strauss (ed.), Almodóvar on Almodóvar (Faber, 1996).

  • Surs Les Toits de Paris: In Praise of Parkour

    Surs Les Toits de Paris: In Praise of Parkour

    Back in 2002, the BBC ran a new ident: a ripped and shirtless guy running and jumping over London rooftops, hopping over gaps and sliding down poles, while below him the rush hour traffic groaned and crawled. The film went as near to virality as was possible in those pre-viral days. Here in the UK, at least, we’d seen nothing like it.

    As we soon discovered, this was parkour – or, as similar variants would have it, free-running – and the French had been doing it for years. Yamakasi, a Paris-set movie featuring a group of young parkour traceurs, had already appeared in 2001. David Belle, the shirtless guy from the ident, would then star in Banlieue 13 (District 13) (2004), with Paris here as a near-future dystopia.

    Plenty of academic ink (some of it my own) was spilled over the significance of parkour in Paris: a city redesigned in the nineteenth century as one of straight, wide and therefore easily policeable roads, all the better to manage the city’s historically rowdy rabble. And then there’s the (in)famous banlieue that circles central Paris and which lends its connotations to that 2004 film: a kind of exclusionary zone both in and outside the capital itself, often as mistrusted as it is misunderstood (and itself a frequent subject of films, such as Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 classic La Haine). Since the traceur could make light of walls and fences, or use the roofs when others stuck to the street, their subversive potential was obvious. They could evade whatever came at them, and where they roamed, the city was theirs.

    As I’ve sketched in a new short video, parkour also changed the possibilities of the action film. It wasn’t the first sport to transform our relationship to the city: skateboarding, which can turn kerbsides and benches and all manner of everyday architecture into its playground, established a theoretical template for parkour some years earlier. But while the peculiar angles and perspectives of skate videos might capture skating’s transformations of urban space, this was harder to convert to the scope of the big-screen feature film. Parkour, by contrast, played on a larger canvas, and its practitioners didn’t need any stunt-doubles.

    This idea of the rooftop runner who knew all the hidden angles – and a novel way to get from A to B – was a gift to the action chase sequence. Films like Banlieue 13 exploited the surprise of Belle’s unlikely routes around urban interiors, and the literal suspense of what looked like leaps into the void. Foucan would appear shortly after in Casino Royale (2006), outjumping and outwitting a still lumbering 007. And in the following year’s The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), parkour is the vehicle to show Jason Bourne’s automated and anticipatory sense of space, outrunning police and hunting down his prey over the rooftops of Tangiers.

    It was hardly surprising too that parkour’s dynamic negotiation of the urban geography should lend itself to videogames, from Assassin’s Creed to Blink to Mirror’s Edge. And it’s one short leap from there, of course, to the infinite possibilities of the computer-animated film. But that’s for another day.

  • TOY STORY and the Suburban Nightmare

    TOY STORY and the Suburban Nightmare

    The Great Duality

    It’s a revealing aspect to the discussion of suburbs, and especially of suburbs in film, that they can embody two seemingly distinct poles. Suburbia is at once framed as the ‘idyllic’ site of semi-rural yet sufficiently urban living, an image that presumably meets the expectations of anyone choosing to move there. Yet at the same time, suburbia has long been the preeminent site for a certain kind of cinematic dystopia. From Poltergeist to Pleasantville, from American Beauty to The Stepford Wives, from Carrie to Halloween, American cinema of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has sold an image of the suburb as both symbol and fount of societal and psychological faultlines. In contrast to the opportunities of the city, argue David Forrest and his co-editors in Filmurbia, the suburb’s distance from this same city ‘could suggest isolation, its affluence could imply insatiability, its privacy could become redolent of secrecy and deviance’. Suburbia on screen, as Angus McFadzean adds, is typified by a ‘fundamental split in [its] character’; ‘the scene of domestic quarrels, adultery, divorce, alcoholism and unhappiness, but on the surface … the utopian embodiment of the American Dream – safe, comfortable and homogenous’.

    As over-determined as some of these representations might often be, they still invite us to think why they gravitate so frequently to the suburb, and less so to the not-so-distant city. To some degree this might just be part of the mystery, the unfathomable sense of weirdness that sustains the cinematic suburban image, but that’s just to go in circles. Unlike the decaying ear Kyle McLachlan picks up at the start of Blue Velvet, sometimes the answer isn’t so far under the surface. Maybe it’s already there in the urban planning.

    It’s a reflection of that same duality that McFadzean’s The Suburban Fantastic can hold apparently oppositional views of the suburb in the space of one page. For children especially, McFadzean writes, ‘suburbia is a self-contained, autonomous world, designed – with its schools, parks, skateparks, etc. – with the experience of childhood at its centre, a space in which children experience a degree of freedom and security.’ Yet the ‘external force’ that is the source of the ‘fantastical’ interruption in his chosen films – such as the titular aliens of E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial andThe Iron Giant, or the little monsters of Gremlins – is a (mostly) welcome disruption to these protagonists’ ‘dissatisfactory lives’. So much for the suburb placing ‘childhood at its centre’!

    Big Trouble in Little Whinging

    There’s no real self-contradiction here: the nuance lies in the ‘degree’ of freedom that is in truth highly contained. The suburb is always at once connected to and separate from the big city that, at least for the child or younger teen, remains inaccessible. The disruption of the fantastic into the young suburban life is both a symptom of and compensation for an absence in this same life that, by implication at least, wouldn’t be there in the city.

    A paradox Jane Jacobs illuminates in her seminal The Death and Life of Great American Cities, written after the postwar boom in urban (white) flight, is the extent to which suburbs were held up as the antidote to what in reality works perfectly well in the metropolis. Busy cities, she argues, at least when left mostly to their own devices, offer diversion for the young people allowed to interact in and explore them. But the crowded city also offers a high degree of safety, due to the constant presence of other adults in overlooking neighbourhood homes, cafés and stores. Strangers, linked by community like this, provide an unspoken and innate security against the very dangers that city-phobic planners suggest they embody.

    The suburb, by contrast, fails to offer any real sense of ‘public life’, merely ‘differing degrees of private life’, and if there is vigilance there at all it is, a bit like Hot Fuzz‘s N.W.A., both paranoid and over-active. Suburban areas of recreation, meanwhile, often isolated from any busy street life, become the no-go areas to which they are supposed to be a safe alternative. Such tidy suburbs, Jacobs goes so far as to suggest, have ‘a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder’: they wear ‘the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or supressing the real order that is struggling to exist and be served’.

    Harry Potter famously grows up in the cupboard under the stairs in the Dursley’s suburb of Little Whinging, though the more Dahlian aspects of the early novels and films give way to an almost (social) realist vein in later instalments. The opening of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix sees a forlorn Harry in a token playground in the middle of a barren swathe of land, one separated from the suburb across the busy road and therefore almost comical in its isolation from regular street life:

    It’s into this same space that the dreaded Dudley barges in, and since there’s no one else around, he can pretty much do what he likes; just as the eventual presence of a dementor in an empty, graffiti-strewn underpass – the only access back to the town proper – can go unnoticed by anyone.

    By contrast, at one point in the later Deathly Hallows: Part One, Harry, Ron and friends apparate from the Weasley home into Shaftesbury Avenue, the populous heart of London’s West End: a street that, according to Hermione, she picked because it just ‘popped into [her] head’. And why should it not? Conspicuousness is the enemy, and there is safety in the anonymity of the metropolitan crowd: just three more wizards in theatreland.

    Toy Stories Behind the Picket Fence

    Not being seen might be one of the rules of the toys’ world in the Toy Story films, but the lack of other vigilant humans is no less a dilemma. In the very first instalment, those humans are almost completely absent. Might we blame this on the medium’s more limited rendering capacity back in 1995? Perhaps, but then the story hinges on the fact that everything happens precisely because no one is around to see. And this is more than just a cinematic nod to those earlier suburban horror-homes recalled in the very framing of Andy’s house. Because Woody and co are in a suburb, this is a geographical circumstance, and not just a narrative one.

    To go back to McFadzean’s point, that the fantastic might erupt within such an environment is partly the product of loneliness and neglect. In E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the distracted mother doesn’t even notice there’s an alien in the house; but then to follow Jacobs, if this was a busy borough of Boston, Chicago or New York City, a hundred other mothers who would notice for her – and one reason more why such films rarely take place in big cities. Elliot is lucky in this case: the alien turns out to be on his side. Will in Stranger Things less so, but The Upside Down’s existence isn’t the reason he ends up there. It’s because, in the ‘differing degrees of private life’ that sum up the town of Hawkins, no one is around to see him vanish.

    Andy’s demomic neighbour Sid is evidently the most obvious worm in the bud of Toy Story’s suburban idyll, an embodiment of the film’s own Upside Down, and to the toys what Dudley is to Harry Potter. But surely more troubling than Sid himself is the thornier question of how he has come to be such an accepted local terrorizer in the first place. Or put slightly differently: how is it, in fact, that both Andy and Sid can both thrive in such proximity? Yet Sid proves no more an anomaly within the sunny heart of the Tri-County Area than is, it turns out, the existence of talking toys.

    The architectural ambiguity of Toy Story rests on the way in which that same ‘mask of pretended order’, and the self-sufficient privacy that is a part of the suburban ideal, allow the opportunity for Buzz and Woody to get into a scrape in the first place – the shenanigans that end with their capture at Pizza Planet – but also for Woody to rescue Buzz from these same dire straits. Even at her most Sesame Street-utopian, Jacobs would not suggest that no child ever tortures a toy in Boston’s busy North End, but that’s not her jist. The point is that, because of the vigilance of busy street life, no child there would ever be allowed to do so with such impunity. Sid disintegrates a Combat Carl with an explosive, not in the cover of night or a dingy basement, and not in a city street either, but in a backyard in the bright light of day: an atrocity which, despite being just across the fence, is witnessed only because it is seen by a toy in the neighbouring window – and only then because this same toy is using a pair of toy binoculars.

    The suburban terror in Toy Story, in other words, is at once just over the picket fence, but also defined and maintained by the picket fence itself. And if Sid’s deed eventually does go punished, it’s only because Woody can turn the cover of this same backyard to his and the abused toys’ advantage – at which point, and only at which point, does Toy Story cease to be the horror story it not only threatens to become, but in some respects already is.

    References

    David Forrest, Graeme Harper, Jonathan Rayner (eds), Filmurbia: Screening the Suburbs, Springer, 2017.

    Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Modern Library, 1961.

    Angus McFadzean, Suburban Fantastic Cinema: Growing Up in the Late Twentieth Century, Wallflower, 2019.

  • Doctor Strange and the Mandelbrot Madness

    Doctor Strange and the Mandelbrot Madness

    Back at the end of the last century, it would be the straightest of student dorms that didn’t somewhere have a fractal poster. You probably know what I mean. And if you don’t, it might have looked something like this:

    The kind of thing, as a deeply unbelieving Steven Strange says to Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One, that you might find ‘in a gift shop’. For once he’s not wrong, but then Marvel’s bong-hit of a movie owes more than just its trippy plot to those dorm room walls. Doctor Strange’s grasp of Asian philosophy may be strictly 2D, but that fractal poster is the gateway into the film’s astral plane.

    Those fractal images popularized in the early 1980s were the fruits of mathematics, and especially the work of Benoît Mandelbrot, after whom many of these fractal ‘sets’ are named. In essence, the fractal is a formula for self-similar recursion on multiplying scales, like the famous Koch snowflake, created by adding triangles to each side of a triangle ad infinitum:

    As Mandelbrot showed in books like The Fractal Geometry of Nature, and as summarised by James Gleick in his bestselling Chaos – another dorm-room fixture of the decade, and the book that helped popularise the idea of the Butterfly Effect – the fractal was not just an abstraction but the building block of the organic world. That’s because natural forms – plants, clouds, or in Mandelbrot’s famous example, coastlines – could themselves be infinitely sub-divided, revealing that inside every tiny form was a tinier form that looked exactly the same. And so on.

    Fractals were also a gift to the earliest computer-based animators, since it offered an algorithmic base for creating dense, detailed but also more volumetric forms. Vol libre, a short film by future ILM and Pixar animator Loren Carpenter, showcased the possibilities of this new medium in its fly-by shots of mountain ranges. Carpenter contributed in turn to the ‘Genesis’ sequence in 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: a brief glimpse into the future face of American cinema.

    Once the organic world could be described like a computer programme, of course, it followed that the boundaries between one and the other would get blurred. If CGI could give us the T-1000 and a T-Rex, it could also replicate tornadoes or black holes using the same software scientists use to track and model them. And as an end point of sorts, it could even erase all visible trace of animation itself, as in the simulated photorealist worlds of Disney’s ‘live action’ reboots.

    If the Mandelbrotian image is now buried too deep within the code to know it’s there, the revivalist delights of Doctor Strange lie then in the fractal’s exposure. Images of infinite snowflake-like multiplication and recursion, fractal landscapes seemingly everchanging and yet staying the same, each evolution one self-similar fragment of the whole:

    Images, for example, like this:

    And shot sequences a bit like this:

    And not to forget this:

    Because whatever your views on astral projection or the multiverse or the power of chakras, in the film at least these are little more than a pretext for the world-building powers of fractal-based computer animation. A power that is, in its way, no less mind-boggling than anything the Ancient One might have to say, and the object of devotion to which everyone in the MCU ultimately has to bow.

  • Bob Parr Comes Out of the Closet: Designs for Living in The Incredibles

    Bob Parr Comes Out of the Closet: Designs for Living in The Incredibles

    Action. Office

    Mr. Incredible is not built for the office. This much is obvious from the first shot we have of him, post-relocation programme, at work as a claims adjuster for the Insuracare Company. The upper-body bulk of his glory days gone to seed, or rather to his waistline, Bob Parr barely squeezes behind a desk that barely squeezes into the dividing walls of his cubicle.

    In creating the splendidly-named ‘Action Office’ system of the 1960s, it wasn’t Robert Propst’s vision that it should end up putting workers in a box. Like the Taylorists and Fordists who preceded him, though, Propst was a nut for time-management, and if the Action Office vision was more open-plan, it was hardly a free-for-all. Its workstations were built to put everything the worker needed within reach, which means it made work easier, and therefore more efficient. The cubicle might have been anathema to the dreams of the Action Office, but it was also its flip side.

    If to modern ears the Action Office sounds at best an oxymoron, as Nikil Saval explores in Cubed, the mid-20th century office building was a heroic place – just one in which the ‘system’ was the true hero. Entrepreneurship and smaller companies were becoming subsumed into larger corporations, whose various strata occupied whole office-block tiers. America was built on the ‘individual striving’ of the Protestant work ethic, but in a postwar America of enforced political consensus, ‘society’ had replaced the individual as the heroic model, and the middle-manager – exemplified in The Incredibles by Gilbert Huph, Bob’s diminutive boss – ruled the office floor.

    In Hollywood around the same time, the mass anonymity of the office and its squeezed denizens is embodied by Jack Lemmon’s C. C. Baxter in The Apartment (1960). Some reflection of the changing postwar decades is that, little over a decade previously, a very different vision of the office and its employees could be envisaged in The Fountainhead (1949), with Gary Cooper as the architect Howard Roark – a mouthpiece of sorts for Ayn Rand, on whose novel the film is based. Lemmon’s insurance clerk squirms and shivers on the streets while his middle-manager superiors borrow his apartment for affairs. Cooper’s visionary builder, by contrast, stoops for no one. Standing over a vast quarry in Rand’s book, he even becomes Mr. Incredible: ‘These rocks, he thought, are here for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them’.

    Bob Parr, then, at least as The Incredibles opens, is a Roark trapped, if not actually in C. C. Baxter’s nebbishy body, then at least in his working- and domestic space, with a similarly cookie-cut suburban home to go with his office cubicle. Until, that is, the enigmatic Mirage summons him to more exotic climes, where he gets to break Omnidroids instead of rocks. Freed from the desk, Bob’s waistline contracts in inverse proportion to his expanding horizons.

    Nemesis

    The suitably named Mirage is of course luring Bob into a trap, and the showdown with Syndrome on Nomanisan Island. Maybe no man is, but Mr. Incredible’s repeated insistence that he must ‘work alone’ suggests otherwise. Liberated from Insuracare and the office floor, Bob gets what he’s due: the etymology, as it happens, of nemesis. Syndrome, spurned by Mr Incredible as a youth, is the comeuppance for Bob’s hubris; a distorted mirror-image of his own insatiable will to power.

    The architectural comparison between Syndrome’s island and the maximalist bases of numerous James Bond villains, as designed by Ken Adam for films like Dr. No (1962) and You Only Live Twice (1967), is a familiar one. Though a point perhaps less frequently made is that these same bases – Dr. No’s giant aquarium, Blofeld’s volcano lair – are in their way playgrounds for 007 himself, the ideal theatre for every male with an itch to get away from the house.

    As architecture historian Anthony Vidler writes, Roark’s similar ideal in The Fountainhead is to be as far away from the street and other people as possible: ‘claustrophobia’ and ‘touching’ are both the symptom and cause of the new middle-class malaise. Roark’s vision, like that of a young Le Corbusier standing at the Acropolis’s cliffside edge, is by contrast an architecture of the ‘purest transparency’; one that ‘will finally render buildings … subject to space, absorbed and dissolved by it’. An architecture both of exclusion and isolation, as well as vast scale.

    Has Syndrome read Ayn Rand? Maybe not, but I suspect Brad Bird has: hence the docking bay opening up out of a waterfall, or dining rooms with a proscenium backdrop of flowing lava; the dome built into the mountainside as if etched out of its same stone, or the monorails silently skirting the island edges, a bit like the one-way, ever-flowing roads dreamed up in Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. Not to mention Bob’s eternally exclusive view from the vantage of his own guestroom : one in which the building and inhabitant himself is subsumed into the airy heights and horizons that surround them.

    Home

    Just as the animated building is always a doubled building, as I suggested at the beginning of this series, animation is reflexive in its representations. Animation by default draws attention to film form, such as aspects of style and mise-en–scène, all of which might be less conspicuous in the given realities of live-action film. Which is to say that the movement from live action into the animated film might always bring with it a dimension of exaggeration, which is also to say that animation, as Jonathan Gray has observed, already functions in a mode of parody. Maybe the hyperbole in Ken Adam’s designs for James Bond needs no exaggeration, but the cartoon dimension of The Incredibles, with its capacity for realising anything, means we can’t avoid seeing these designs for the monuments to ego they really are.

    The irony though is that, at some level, Bob is running away to the thing from which he wants to escape. The Insuracare world loathed by Bob, as Eric Herhuth points out in Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination, epitomises the bourgeois mitigation of risk: such middle-class life is therefore the antithesis of a Nietzschean or Randian kind of ‘dangerous’ living. Yet the flawless and luxurious lairs of Syndrome, like those of the Bond villains before him, machines for living where all needs are catered for, are not exactly fortresses on the wild frontier. If anything, they exemplify that same ‘bourgeois pursuit of contentment’ Bob has rejected.

    For Pamela Wojcik, too, the kinds of superhero lair so beloved by the comic book’s golden and silver age – from Batman’s cave to the Fantastic Four’s penthouse HQ – were themselves places of ‘private escape’, which in their exclusive location and luxuriously modern tastes echoed the same era’s Playboy-magazine ‘bachelor pad’ ideal. If The Incredibles chooses not to over-egg this particular pudding, it might be that Austin Powers already made it abundantly clear by turning this same vision into pure camp. The bachelor, like the songwriter played by Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk, feared more than anything the prospect of having their branches lopped, and to be made subject to a supposedly female space of furnishings and ‘décor’. Yet in that same flight from the entanglements of domesticity, the bachelor or super-agent, or even the superhero, creates for themselves another version of this same domestic ideal through their ‘mastery of home decoration and design’.

    If for the playboy superhero such a lair epitomised ‘dangerous living’, then, it was dangerous only in its proximity to the feminine home ideal. For all its masculine assertiveness, in fact, lairs such as Syndrome’s Nomanisan Island come to represent a version of the closet: not for nothing, Wojcik adds, are such lairs so often prefixed as being ‘secret’.  

    That Bob Parr needs Elastigirl to bail him out, then, is hardly surprising in the contexts of The Incredibles. For most of the film he’s been running away from himself, and also from what he most needs, yet is perhaps too closeted to admit: the reality that even Mr. Incredible, whatever he might say about only working alone, can’t do a thing without a woman’s touch.

    References

    Jonathan Gray, Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody and Intertextuality, Routledge, 2006.

    Eric Herhuth, Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling and Digital Culture, University of California Press, 2017.

    Nikil Saval, Cubed: The Secret History of the Workplace, Penguin, 2014.

    Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture, The MIT Press, 2000.

    Pamela Robertson Wojcik, The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975, Duke University Press, 2010.

  • ANIMATING ARCHITECTURE: THROUGH THE THRESHOLD

    ANIMATING ARCHITECTURE: THROUGH THE THRESHOLD

    By its own nature the animated building is a double construction, existing both in the world of the animated film and as a unique creation of this same film. If the art of animation is to build a world from scratch, it also follows that nothing in this world is accidental. The architecture made visible by the animated film is itself, then, born of this second architectural process.

    I’ve recently finished writing a book on Pixar Animation Studios, over the course of which I found myself giving more and more attention to the role of place in Pixar’s work, and above all, the studio’s fascination with urban life. It’s there from the start in the ‘Tri-County Area’ of Toy Story (1995) and its first sequel (1999), as well as the Monstropolis of Monsters, Inc. (2001) and The Invisibles’ Metroville (2004). In Ratatouille (2007) and more recent films such as Inside Out (2015), Soul (2020) and Turning Red (2021), the studio turns its attention to the actual metropolises of San Francisco, Paris and New York; in Coco (2016) and Elemental (2023), meanwhile, it looks to imaginary and metaphorical cities. All of them, as works of animation, cities of the mind.

    Pixar is hardly alone in this respect, of course. Disney’s Zootopia (aka Zootropolis) films (2016, 2025) are named after the same city they depict in such detail. The plot of the first LEGO Movie (2014), if you wish to see it that way – and how else could you, really – is essentially about urban planning. Live action films, making use of existing architectures, reflect the cities in which we live and work by default, but animated film is under no such obligation.  If the city is there, it’s because someone has chosen to rebuild it all once more. And because nothing we see in an animated film is without intention, and therefore invites its audience to reflect on this intention, it follows that these films, amongst many others, want their audiences to see the city all over again.

    What follows then over the next few months (0r more?), with no map or order, or with any real idea how it will turn out, are some of my own reflections on architecture in the animated film. Thanks in advance to those other writers on animation and other things on whose work – the study of film being itself a kind of endless construction – I will build on as we go. If nothing else, I hope it encourages readers to see these films with new eyes, if not the city itself for which they are virtual proxies.