Christine Chubbuck dies a poet, her last act in life
that of a shooting star. This loner and misfit should
have been a writer but chooses journalism. Then again,
isn't poetry a mirror held up to the truth -- rendered in
words -- as has been said? The film by Antonio Campos
focuses on her last days and bestow on its subject a
profound empathy that she herself has not always managed
to bring to her life and work.
Cinema of Suicide makes for grim, crowd-repelling affairs
(I saw _Christine_ with 2 other people in the theater).
Yet to voluntarily extinguish one's consciousness is the
ultimate existential choice; it often makes for profound,
philosophical dramas that demands our attention (_The Devil,
Probably_, _Mulholland Drive_, _Miss Julie_, _Van Gogh_,
even _The Thin Red Line_, and _Joan of Arc_.) The professional
and personal disappointment that drive Christine to shooting
herself during a live newscast in 1974 seem more mundane, but
are all the more relevant to the contemporary human condition
for that reason.
She is a singularity, intense and serious, prone to depression.
Married to her job, she remains a holy innocent unaware of
the rules of the broadcasting game. The same is true of her
personal relationships, which consist of co-dependency with her
pot-smoking, much more socially adept mother, and unrequited
romantic fantasies about co-workers. (An internet rumor
postulates that she dies a virgin.) These days most films
about such oddballs dull the edge with comedy and star "Saturday
Night Live" light-weights. _Christine_, fortunately, boasts
one of the best actresses of our generation.
Rebecca Hall brings utter commitment to a role far less flashy
than her Sylvia Tietjens in _Parade's End_, far less noble than
Evelyn Caster in _Transcendence_. In fact she is cast against
type and has to eschew glamor and theater-honed large gestures.
Her voice is self-consciously grave and her face grim. The effect
must be fully apprepreciated by constrasting with her other work.
In _Frost/Nixon_, she is the girl friday and comic relief as her
talk show beau matches wits with the disgraced ex-President.
_Christine_ opens with her character re-enacting just such an
interview. Such is her professional perfectionism that she even
writes her own orbituary for her fellow newscasters to use
after her suicide. Yet her paranoia and insecurity makes her
more Nixon than David Frost. She is doomed to fail in a business
that is largely a popularity contest.
The cinematography evokes the jaundiced look of 1970s color TV.
(Is this the "great-again-America" that reactionaries wish to
return to?) Other than the uninspired period pop soundtrack and
excellent casting choices (the supporting actors are uniformally
convincing), the most notable directorial touch is to heavily
feature Christine's volunteer work at a chilldren's hospital,
where her puppet shows reveal a calm, contemplative, reflexive
side not seen in her workplace. It makes the character more
self-aware and less of a victim. Other than that, the film
wisely focuses on her professional passions, her obsession with
serious journalism (how zoning law changes affect the community)
and aversion to "human interest" fluff or sensationalism. In
a way, she is both an anachronism and ahead of her time. Ratings
obsessions would soon cripple broadcast news at the national
level, and factual accuracy and context (in which she passionately
believe) are increasingly swept aside by scandal-mongering
and cynicism. (Aaron Sorkin's recent series _The Newsroom_ was
panned by the NY Times for being insufficiently cynical. Hilary
Clinton, at a debate, addressed exasperating Clinton Foundation
"scandals" by stating what the charity organization actually does.
No media outlet, not even the supposedly liberal CNN, has bothered
to explain the work of these institutions, and used them only to
milk scandals. Is it any surprise our mistrust of government is
at an all time high?) Yet the explosion of alternative news
outlet in the digital age would have given her free rein to
cover real news. For these reasons, and for the not-so-subtle
sexism that impedes her career, _Christine_ is amazingly timely.
------------------------------------------------
Leonard Cohen, the consensus darling songwriter of American
Indie Cinema, has arguably also been writing his own obituary
(and those of others) for decades in his elegiac ballads. He
passed away a couple days before I saw _Christine_. His
"Joan of Arc" would have been the perfect theme song for
the uncompromisinng protagonist of that film. It is such
a magnificent commposition, structured like a Bar Mitzvah
hymn and celerbration, calculated to inspire the best in us
in the midst of the worst cruelties and tragedies. The tag-line
to one of the Joan of Arc movies stresses that the French
warrior-saint lived to 19 and has not been forgotten for the
next 500 years. Who would want to bet against the 82 year-old
St. Leonard's songs being used in movies (in whatever mutated
form) the next two millennia? If a poet-songwriter had to win
the Nobel Prize for Literature, I wish it had been Cohen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCbMM9K7i8o
Now the flames they followed Joan of Arc
as she came riding through the dark;
no moon to keep her armour bright,
no man to get her through this very smoky night.
She said, "I'm tired of the war,
I want the kind of work I had before,
a wedding dress or something white
to wear upon my swollen appetite."
Well, I'm glad to hear you talk this way,
you know I've watched you riding every day
and something in me yearns to win
such a cold and lonesome heroine.
"And who are you?" she sternly spoke
to the one beneath the smoke.
"Why, I'm fire," he replied,
"And I love your solitude, I love your pride."
"Then fire, make your body cold,
I'm going to give you mine to hold,"
saying this she climbed inside
to be his one, to be his only bride.
And deep into his fiery heart
he took the dust of Joan of Arc,
and high above the wedding guests
he hung the ashes of her wedding dress.
It was deep into his fiery heart
he took the dust of Joan of Arc,
and then she clearly understood
if he was fire, oh then she must be wood.
I saw her wince, I saw her cry,
I saw the glory in her eye.
Myself I long for love and light,
but must it come so cruel, and oh so bright?
(for A.)
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)