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Username: Quovak Film: 12 Angry Men Subtext: End The Fed e: Archives are back up. If you want to look at previous threads here they are: 2011 2012 2013 Quovak fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Aug 30, 2014 |
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Aug 30, 2014 20:55
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 05:49 |
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You could always reshuffle things, possibly locking in the movie or subtext, if you think a full quarter of the subtexts are boringly obvious. I doubt anyone's started working on their essays in the last hour.
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Sep 2, 2014 03:59
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Insufficiently Advanced: Chicken Run as Anti-Reductionist Polemic by Quovak Film as a medium would not exist were it not for the leaps we have made in categorizing and rigorously defining scientific laws. Similarly, it is difficult to overstate the artistic gains made possible through adding color film and the recorded voice to our litany of filmmaker’s tools. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize that the tools are not the message, and film (as well as other forms of expression) cannot thrive as merely showcases for technical feats. Chicken Run, a high-budget claymation film harkening back to the earliest special effects, accuses the industry of forgetting this message. The film argues that, by treating filmmaking as merely the sum of its parts, the modern studio system has restricted its artistry and ability to effect meaningful change. Only by rejecting this commercial, manufactured, derivative view can we return cinema to its artistic roots, equivalent not to technology or business but to magic itself. Chicken Run immediately establishes itself as a polemic against the reductionist views that art is a mechanical process, inevitably improved through increased efficiency or rigid formulas for success. Ginger is the ringleader of a group of chickens (read: artists) who live a well-ordered, penal existence at an egg farm. Their creative potentials are astounding—chickens are regularly seen knitting, theorizing, and hoping for a better life—but they are treated as no different from any other mechanistic asset on the farm. Their creations, not allowed to grow into the “miracle of life,” are merely inputs for a process aimed at increasing numbers on a spreadsheet. The chickens, bright orange and uniquely designed, are made subservient to grey and overpowering figures who value consistency and control over originality. When Ginger tries to step outside the boundaries her managers have set, she is forced into a literal box and referenced as an example for how the other chickens are not meant to behave. Ginger knows from the beginning that she wants to escape this mechanistic creative process, but her stance on how art ought to be wielded changes significantly over the film. In its first scene, she attempts to fend off her pursuers with a cheap gnome, but the kitsch mass-marketed symbol fails to have any effect. While many of the chickens are content to work within the status quo (Ginger’s point that they merely churn out eggs until their death is at one point met with “It’s a living”), the farm’s owners soon reveal the true nihilistic end of their approach. In the name of increased profits, the studio head (Mrs. Tweedy) puts technological gimmicks over creativity and restructures her artistic appropriation into a literal butchering of the creative form. After attempts at feeble imitation (such as chickens disguising themselves as a man), Ginger realizes that a true paradigm shift will be necessary to awaken the public (Mrs. Tweedy’s submissive and brainwashed husband, and the target audience for her products). She insists that the real cages are in their minds. Mrs. Tweedy’s system is inherently unstable. She aims to utterly destroy the creative potential of the farm’s chickens, with no regard for the long-term success of an industry built upon it. When her machine fails, she blames her husband (the dimwitted public) rather than the machine itself and demands to fix it with band-aid solutions rather than re-assessing her approach. She is never actually able to create what she dreams; both times chickens are shown within the machine, they are unable to provide the superior if destructive results she imagines must follow. The possibility that she could get more eggs by allowing her chickens more freedom (the grassy fields they yearn for) is never considered, and when they finally escape in the film’s last scenes she attempts to bring down their new approach out of spite. When she is ultimately buried by the end result of her schemes, she persists in directing her anger toward the viewing public, not the system as a whole. It is unthinkable that the very use of a formula itself, not merely a misjudged variable within it, could have failed to provide her with better results. Against this backdrop, an escaped circus rooster named Rocky enters the farm, offering a false hope of one form of escape. Rocky, it turns out, can “fly” (by being shot from a cannon), but he has underestimated his dependence on these systems and convinces the chickens he can teach them to fly organically. To Rocky, art is also not about magical creation (he has no eggs to offer, and thus no real possibility of creating something great) but nor is it about profit. For him, it’s about the ego, and Rocky ignorantly claims his independence (the American imagery is no doubt intentional) and experience allow him to conquer the system despite his lack of inspiration and equally reductionist approach. Rocky aims to teach flight through imitation, telling the chickens to flap and rotate in circles because he has seen other birds perform similar acts. By arranging tropes and hiding behind his position as “ideas man”, he perpetuates the myth that artistic expression is merely putting in grunt work to rearrange existing ideas in predictable ways. While Ginger is initially excited for Rocky’s independent take, she soon realizes it too is insufficient to change the status quo. It is important to realize that, within the narrative, Rocky’s teachings have absolutely no impact on the chickens’ eventual escape. Disillusioned by his lack of immediate success, Rocky leaves the farm. While his exit is not directly shown, the implications of this are significant. The mere emotional force behind wishing to leave had a greater real-world impact than the most perfectly planned and coordinated attempts, reinforcing Ginger’s theory that the real cages are in their minds. This demonstrates that Rocky, and others, are capable of great things when they allow their interplay with the restrictions placed upon them to be a form of magic rather than trying to understand them in literal, scientific terms. When Rocky returns for the final escape, embodying deus ex machina, his preference for the magical over the reductionist allows him to serve a far more powerful role. In Rocky’s temporary absence, the true artists embrace a new plan: building a plane. While this may seem like a submission to the forces of technology, it is important to recognize their machinery is built from miscellaneous things around the farm such as discarded seatbelts, badminton birdies, and spools of thread, not from the rigid components the plans insist must be used. The chickens are building on earlier inspiration, but they are making it their own, and they allow the result to be greater than the sum of its parts. The ultimate plane is no committee-designed, purely mechanistic device, but a new creation which flaps its wings and commands a sense of life. That the individual chickens must pedal to keep it afloat demonstrates the continued role of the artist as an active creative force. That the stodgy rooster who previously shot down escape attempts and kept order for the Tweedies now finds great purpose and joy through his role in this flight is impossible to misunderstand. Throughout the film, Mr. Tweedy has become gradually more awakened by the inexplicable things he sees the chickens do, challenging the stupor that his wife (the studio) seeks to entrench and exploit. True artistic expression removes the wool from his eyes, and Ginger eventually launches a direct attack on the homogenized mass-produced consumption he represents. With tensions high, the chickens aim to escape in the plan despite noting that it’s not complete, accepting that the core idea and creativity involved outweighs the lack of polish. The film has made significant note of the Tweedies endlessly refining the slaughtering machine to no success, as well as showing the failure of Rocky's attempts to teaching flight through mere repetition, and it is here Chicken Run explicitly promotes true magical creativity as reaching greater heights than imitation and formulaic construction ever could. As the plane takes off, Mrs. Tweedy stows on board by hanging on a trail of Christmas lights. Ginger attempts to force her off, as she burdens their creative efforts with her insistence on making a return. It is here Ginger fully realizes the benefits of magical creation and casts off her dependence on the system. First, she attempts to cut the cord with scissors, a pale imitation of a technique others have used and dependent on tools she doesn’t understand. When this proves ineffective, she goads Mrs. Tweedy into swinging an axe and pretends to get beheaded, tucking her head underneath her wing. As Tweedy gloats, Ginger reveals her head once again and shows she is now holding both ends of the cord, severed by the swing of the axe, and as she lets go Tweedy plummets into the machine. Besides clearly showing how the studio system will destroy itself, this scene makes the equivalence between artistry and magic explicit. It is no accident that Ginger recreates the earliest magic trick ever recorded, in which the 28th century BCE magician Dedi severed and then reattached a bird’s head. Nor is the presence of baby chicks throughout the final scene merely a saccharine Hollywood ending, but a clear example of letting previously restrained creative efforts now blossom into life, the ultimate example of something greater than the sum of its parts. Without a belief in the miraculous power of artistic creation, the chickens would have continued a nihilistic existence, churning out homogenized creative efforts for an uncaring business only to be cast aside when they failed to show profitability. Without a willingness to accept adversity and the magical accidents of the creative process, the chickens’ attempts to escape through imitation and routine would lead nowhere. By embracing the unpredictable adversity of the artistic process, however, and allowing the magical, fantastic results to emerge, they are able to resist the status quo and truly create. This message would have resonated with an early-2000s audiences who had just been exposed to The Phantom Menace, watching a premier example of magical creation become a manufactured, artificial product. It resonates even louder today as the traditional system, increasingly under threat, retreats further into gimmicks and manufactured success. That the creators followed up their polemic with a mass market CGI film should not undermine Chicken Run's intent.
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Sep 15, 2014 07:03
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