OLD TROPHIES: MISE EN SCENE and FAILURE in THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001)

The subconscious way that people react to their environment is incredibly far-reaching. The behavior and mental state of everyone is constantly affected by the position of the objects around them. Since it is often said that art mirrors life, the meticulous control of visual images of a film is infinitely important to how the audience perceives the film. Mise en scene, literally "within the frame", totally exemplifies this idea. The set design, position of objects, contrast, and patterns of the objects within the frame of a film completely shapes the tone of the film and tells its story. The master of mise on scene has often been named as none other than Wes Anderson, whose distinct aesthetic can never be mistaken for another's. Wes Anderson's 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums seems to be a study in how humans cope with failure: through addiction, such as the darkly comedic Eli Cash; through paranoia, such as the disaster-obsessed Chas Tenenbaum; or, maybe, through persevering manipulation, utilized by Royal himself. The mise en scene of The Royal Tenenbaums strengthens the film's overall exploration of failure and creates a tone suggesting that the characters are each trapped in a life plagued by their failures.

It is made clear through the diegesis of the film that each of the Tenenbaum children's accomplishments peaked at a young age, leaving them to live anticlimactic adult lives. Each character's unhappiness is made clear through the film's techniques of mise en scene. Margot Tenenbaum is usually shown at a greater depth than other family members and away from the more densely textured groups of Tenenbaum children and adults. She locks herself in the bathroom all day away from her husband, illustrating her failing marriage. The only exception is Richie, whose relationship with Margot is constantly troubling. This establishes a social and public proxemic pattern, suggesting an uncomfortable and detached family dynamic and hinting at Margot's alienation and depression. In all scenes with Chas and his twin sons, they wear bright red tracksuits in order to easily identify each other. These suits are a strong dominant contrast and imply danger and tensity with their bold color. Wes Anderson also makes use of highly symmetrical design, comparing Chas with his sons and further tying Chas's identity to preserving them (and, by some measure, preserving what they seem to represent: healthy childhood, which Chas experienced as a period of high success). In most shots of Richie, his old tennis headband jumps out as dominant contrast next to his face and body, hidden by the subsidiary contrast of his hair, beard, and dull clothing. The headband remains a constant reminder of his former fame and success, which were all ruined when Richie choked during an important match and gave up his career forever.

The Royal Tenenbaums, it seems, is a story based heavily in nostalgia. At the beginning of the film, the story walks through the childhoods of the Tenenbaum children, immersing them in childlike environments with a heavy 1970's aesthetic. However, as the children grow up, the house and objects remain more or less the same, lost in time. 

This creates elements of parallelism within the film, drawing strong ties between the Tenenbaums' child and adult lives.  The past affects the present throughout every scene of a film, literally invading the present narrative through Wes Anderson's sets. The characters constantly find themselves crammed into environments built for children, such as the tent full of childhood knick-knacks which Richie sleeps in over the course of the film. He has grown too large to fit in the densely composed tent, but remains uncomfortably stuck in his old life. Most notably selected are the trophies from Richie's childhood that are crammed in that weight the right side of the frame: a constant reminder of Richie's childhood successes. It seems that the presence of those trophies seems almost comforting. The inability to move on from the past suggests that the Tenenbaum children are clinging to their most successful age, creating the main conflict of the film.

Wes Anderson's techniques of mise en scene carefully cultivate the contents of each frame, supporting the exploration of failure through its motifs of childhood. Living in a world arranged by Wes Anderson certainly seems heightened and unrealistic, but in its own way, The Royal Tenenbaums does mirror life. The effect of failure has been explored through storytelling since Gilgamesh, but the compelling and unique story of failure driving three siblings back into childhood in The Royal Tenenbaums touches on an accessibility and relatability that is rarely matched.

BENDING ALL OTHERS: ETHICS in THE USUAL SUSPECTS, GLADIATOR, AND ETERNAL SUNSHINE of the SPOTLESS MIND

The medium of a film bends all literary techniques: in a world where information is absorbed visually, the look of the image becomes all-important. Just as the storyline shapes how the viewers think, the actual image itself has immense power to sway our perception and convey a message. The photography implemented in films tells an audience how to think about the characters, who they’re rooting for, and who to sympathize with-- creating the film’s moral structure and message. In The Usual Suspects, Gladiator, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, each movie argues that the moral high ground should be given to the character that the audience perceives as most helpless or maltreated. This perception can be altered and stretched to the limits of possibility using strategic film photography.

The Usual Suspects establishes immediately that this will be an almost exaggerated example of a crime and drama epic-- using low key lighting with fast film stock as well as low camera angles to create drama, intrigue, and power dynamics in the opening scene. Of the three movies, Suspects comes the closest to classical cinema, implementing a variety of realistic techniques (the interrogation scenes come to mind) and taking greater liberty with style in during the film’s suspenseful heists. In the midst of all this, the character Verbal Kint stands to the side of most shots and stares at the main action from the background. Next to the drama and intrigue of the other criminals framed in the suspenseful shots, Verbal looks inexperienced and lurks in the background. Hints from the lighting sometimes illuminate Verbal to highlight the contour of his face, calling attention to him; yet he remains an unremarkable character in most of the main action. He is also portrayed as handicapped, and the film implements close up shots on his limping gait as well as the acting skills of Kevin Spacey in order to bring his disability to our attention. As the police interrogate Verbal, sitting on a desk to create a high-angle view onto Verbal’s face, we begin to sympathize with his weakness. At the end of the film when it’s revealed that he is truly the evil mastermind, our allegiance with Verbal holds true and we cheer as he enters the getaway vehicle and drives away to cause more cold death and destruction-- all through the power of some lighting and camera angles. In that way, Verbal has tricked us as an audience into sympathizing with him. In an analysis of The Usual Suspects by Bill Johnson, he asks the question: “could a powerful man of will bend all others to see what he wanted them to see? Yes. Dramatically yes.”

Stunning shots and effects along with notable use of color and clarity make the cinematography in Gladiator memorable. Shot in high-contrast lighting that embodies the “epic” effect of the story, the corruption and secrecy of Rome’s elite jump through shadows and puddles of light reminiscent of film noir. The film’s execution mirrors “the dominant literary techniques” of an epic story-- “hyperbole and exaggeration” (Eric M. Lachs). In well-lit arenas, our hero Maximus is forced to slay or be slain in battle after battle of gritty, violent action scenes. From the very beginning, the injustices performed to kill Maximus’s family in the storyline have our sympathy-- however, this is only strengthened as we watch him literally struggle throughout the film. Through stunning long shots from a birds’ eye view and deep-focus shots enveloping the whole colosseum, we get a picture of just how small Maximus is amongst the crowd cheering and booing his attempts to fight for his life. In a series of medium shots where Commodus meets our gladiator “backstage” before their final fight, we begin to notice the contrast between Maximus’s dirty attire and beaten physique next to Commodus’ spotless bone-like armor and poise. Power dynamics make the film-- and also align the audience’s sympathies. No amount of brooding and frowning from Joaquin Phoenix can outdo the film’s tone of political depravity, cultivated through its alignment of Maximus as a martyr-- and thus, the film’s view of honor and respect are made clear in its ethical discourse of politics and tyranny.

Our third film is exemplary in not only the questions it poses but the way it gives us a clear picture of how to feel about them. Scholars like Christopher Grau have offered that “[the film] implicitly offers a philosophical position.” The intense formalism of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind allows a wide range of possibility to explore ethics. Instead of focusing on pure content, the expressionist Michel Gondry designed a wildly stylistic form to shape our perception of ethics. Realists working with realistic cinema may have been limited by the difficulty of describing having one’s memory erased while remaining true to our visible reality. Sunshine’s technique of implementing warm colors in slow film stock to signify bold, enthusiastic periods of Joel and Clementine’s relationship, usually shot in high key lighting, versus cool colors to signify confusion, anxiety, and degradation related to their memory loss helps an audience quickly identify Lacuna’s effects on the couple. The colors are intense and call attention through slow film stock. This positions Lacuna as the dark force from which Joel and Clementine try valiantly to escape, creating our sympathy and thus the film’s depiction of the dangerous medicalization of our personal lives. Its heavy use of anxious oblique angles and skittering cameras as well as high-angle shots in which Joel and Clem are viewed from above (on the lake, in their bed, when Joel is literally shrunk to toddler size, etc.) also positions them as trapped and helpless, creating an “underdog” effect in which the audience subconsciously begins to root for them against the doctors and technicians.

One could argue that who we are is what we stand for. The medium of film holds immeasurable power to create stories and worlds that force us to question our morals and think critically about the world around us. When we begin to sympathize with a character, we begin to trust them and their ethical judgement and allow the film to communicate with us on a deeper level. These three films, The Usual Suspects, Gladiator, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, use different theme and character and win an audience to a character that appears, on the surface, helpless and maltreated. By using film techniques in photography to illuminate these characteristics and create these characters’ worlds, the film can then communicate its moral structure through this character. When a film is taken apart shot by shot, that communication can be analyzed, and we can ask ourselves again: what are we standing for?

SOURCES:

http://www.storyispromise.com/wusual.htm

http://plaza.ufl.edu/icon2480/academia/essays/gladiator.html

http://www.academia.edu/208537/Eternal_Sunshine_of_the_Spotless_Mind_and_the_Morality_of_Memory

film terms for my mise en scene-sei

JULIA FALKNER, ERIN DORSEY, LUCAS LAIRD

DOMINANT CONTRAST

The Animatrix (2003)

DENSITY OF TEXTURE

Lost in Translation (2003)

HIGHLY SYMMETRICAL DESIGN

Freaky Friday (2003)

PROXEMIC PATTERNS (intimate)

Brother Bear (2003)

eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (2004): formalism

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) raises a multitude of questions about love, ethics, and the human psyche. It also offers an array of choppy and tilted shots, impossible sets which morph and disintegrate, and wildly changing colors and shapes that make the film a poster child of "formalism"-- the thought that the focus of a film should be on the style rather than content.

• Sunshine asks us if ignorance is truly bliss-- that is, whether an erased memory can still have an impact on our minds and souls. After Clem has had Joel erased from her memory, she appears easily agitated, confused, and upset when elements of her life with Joel re-enter her surroundings. The instability of Joel and Clem's lives post-erasure is conveyed through the almost dizzying and swinging camera angles, bringing an anxious touch to the film. When we enter Joel's dream world, the camera angles, colors, and sets become extremely surreal. However, even in the opening scene full of moving full shots that ruffle past his bedroom and showcase his unsure body language, that surrealism and anxiety is present. This tells us that the extreme instability of Joel's world and surroundings in the dream are still present-- albeit much more subtly-- in real life after the erasure of the pair's memories.
• To further this from Clem's perspective, Clem and Patrick are shown post-erasure on the frozen river to which Clem once took Joel. The high-angle shot of them laying on the ice is a parallel shot to a former (chronologically) shot of her and Joel, however the differences in shadow and her facial expressions convey that something about this setup is vastly confusing and wrong. The bird's eye view traps them and Clementine scrambles to escape from a scenario that she once found peaceful.

• Aside from the trippy camera perspective, the film's highly symbolic use of color is a multifunctional device used to clarify the passage of time and the stages of Joel and Clem's relationship (from her personal perspective). The viewer can eventually map out that Clem's hair is green upon their first meeting, orange and red during their relationship, and blue in "real time"-- after the erasure of their memories. It's possible that the colors convey emotional meaning as well. The green might convey new life and birth. The red represents a bold, bright, "glory days" time in which Joel and Clem are happy together. That color begins to fade to a dull orange as their relationship falls apart. She changes the color abruptly from warm orange to a cool dark blue post-Joel-- signifying a rapid change in thought (returning to a cool color, as her hair was before she met Joel) as well as the literal idea of being "blue", depressed and uncomfortable with no clue as to why. When Joel remembers Clementine as they race around the dream world trying to escape the erasers, her hair is a bold red-orange, signifying that he ultimately chooses to remember her as a boldly positive force in his life.

the usual suspects (1994): lighting & camera angles

• The opening scene of a film is extremely important for setting the tone of the story, and The Usual Suspects (1994) does not disappoint. The movie opens in extremely high-contrast, gritty lighting and color-- a trademark of dramatic, suspenseful movies. The flames contrasted with the dark atmosphere creates a hell-like environment. Keyser Sozë is filmed from below, creating a low-angle shot that contributes to his dominance and supremacy in the wreckage of the ship. The snakelike ropes all over the deck of the ship symbolize deceit and the devil, setting the stage for Keyser's debut.

• The film also uses the faces of the characters to maximize its lighting direction. In the scene where Verbal is first questioned, his head is lit from above like a skull. In art (i.e. vanitas skill lifes) and literature (for example, Yorick's skull in Shakespeare's Hamlet), skulls have served as a reminder of death and the fleetingness of mortality. This lighting ties Verbal to death and places him, in a sense, above the police officers and FBI agents questioning him-- in alignment, again, with the devil and with death, the collector of happiness and success. 

• As Verbal, Keaton, McManus, Fenster, and Hockney meet McManus's friend Redfoot at the isolated temple after he tricks them, the faces of McManus and his men are lit from underneath. This is used to make characters look gruesome and menacing. This, combined with the low-angle shot, asserts that they are angry, powerful, and seeking to gain control of the encounter.

• When Hockney opens the back of the truck full of money, he turns to glimpse the figure standing before him just after he is shot. The camera focuses on a big close-up shot of his face in which he revolves into a light, illuminating his face from right to left as he looks at the figure wide-eyed. This change in lighting symbolizes truth as it finally dawns on Hockney exactly who Keyser Sozë is-- literally "shedding some light" on the situation.

what's eating gilbert grape (1993): observations

• An overarching diegesis that I noticed throughout What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) dealt with the concept of limits and boundaries. Gilbert and several other characters are often trapped in a crowded shot, such as the setting of the grocery store. Arnie is sent to prison, Mrs. Grape never leaves the house, and the entirety of the film takes place inside sleepy Endora. Both Gilbert and Becky's mother are also shown trapped inside a stalling car, literally stranding them to the spot in the shot. Mr. Carver is constantly asking Gilbert over the first section of the movie if he's "free" for a meeting. The family's house is slowly collapsing as the faulty foundations and the floors reach the limit of what they can take. Later in the film, Becky and Gilbert watch a sunset that she describes as "limitless". All these small details help contribute to the storyline and the theme of possibility and confinement.

• Gilbert Grape is known for its phenomenal acting-- obviously by Leonardo DiCaprio, who invokes a childlike element through his use of movement and space as well as his speech. However, Johnny Depp's acting is also important, although subtle. A key element I noticed throughout the film was his use of eye contact. During his affair with Mrs. Carver, he almost never looks her directly in the eyes-- in one shot, the camera moves between their two faces, his staring off elsewhere as Mrs. Carver fixates on him and kisses the side of his face. However, throughout the movie he is always facing and staring at Becky, mastering the concept of eye contact as a key indicator of attraction. At the grocery store, parallel sequences show Mrs. Carver and Becky moving through the boxes of food-- however, Gilbert avoids Mrs. Carver and stares fully at Becky.

• An interesting aspect of the use of mise-en-scene and symbolism in Gilbert Grape is the movie's attitude toward food-- especially in scenes with women. Obviously, Mrs. Grape's addiction and indulgence in food is a core aspect of her character, highlighting her depression and how she is immeasurably changed by her husband's death. However, several other female characters are tied to food, eating, and the mouth. Gilbert only makes grocery deliveries to women-- Becky and her mother as well as Mrs. Carver. Amy Grape is constantly baking and transporting food for her mother. Mrs. Carver is highly associated with sugar-- she is always seen in a grocery store or a kitchen (and on one occasion a drive-thru), both of her scenes highlighting her indiscretion with Gilbert are punctuated with eating desserts, and when she is upset she burns a pan of cookies. Even Becky is never seen without her red lipstick and pastel-colored clothing, evoking a more visual sense of sweetness and drawing attention to her lips as she and Gilbert eat ice cream and watermelon. The women in the film act as the prime emotional navigators and are very important to the plot line, yet by the end of the movie I have next to no sense of Becky's inner conflicts, emotions, and desires-- or, for that matter, anyone's but Gilbert's. The film's view of women is interesting to me and seems to straddle a line in which the women are numerous, present, and significant, but also associated with a frivolous "excess", indulgence, or consumption.

• Something particularly interesting to me about the framing of shots in Gilbert Grape was a certain shot of Arnie in the bathtub. Although I've never seen the film, I've read before that the Japanese anime movie Perfect Blue (1997-- created later chronologically than Gilbert Grape) contains an iconic frame of a character in a bathtub viewed from above. The director Darren Aronofsky wanted to use a similar sequence for his movie Requiem for a Dream (2000), so he bought the rights to remake Perfect Blue just in order to include a parallel shot. He also used this in his movie Black Swan (2010). Since reading that, I watch for overhead shots in films of characters in bathtubs-- the angle is so interesting, and the symbolic implications of washing, purifying, drowning are especially important in Gilbert Grape. Arnie is both drawn to and repulsed by water in the film. In one shot, the residents of Endora literally flock towards a water tower to watch Arnie climb as if drawn by an eerie supernatural force. Seeing the Perfect Blue-esque shot of Arnie completely submerged in water brought to mind the baptismal qualities of water in literature. 

• Another thing I noticed about the film was its constant mis-foreshadowing. There are parts of the movie in which Arnie literally knocks on a hearse or characters have a conversation about death, for instance specifically about the "fun" parts of death, while Arnie plays pinball in the background. In the opening voiceover, Gilbert discusses Arnie's lifespan, and constantly characters refer to his impending death-- "I just want to see my boy reach eighteen", etc., etc. Arnie is constantly placed in perilous situations, such as climbing the water tower or being left in the bath, yet all this hinting and foreshadowing never culminates in his death. Arnie is constantly balanced on a precipice of peril, misleading the audience into believing that he will die during the film, when really their attention should be directed elsewhere (towards his mother).

film terms

JULIA FALKNER, ERIN DORSEY, EUSTACHIUS MALEACHI

AUTEUR

Sofia Coppola

FLASHBACK/FLASH FORWARD

Kill Bill (2003)

GENRE

John Tucker Must Die (2006) : rom-com / The Conjuring (2013) : horror / Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969) : western

MISE-EN-SCENE

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) is remarkable for Wes Anderson's use of props, etc.