In this latest episode, the Substandard discusses box-office bomb The Circle and the techno-thriller genre. Vic loves WarGames, Sonny goes on an Andy Rooney rant against elitist foodies, and Jonathan shares an L.A. story. All on this week’s “inchoate” episode of the Substandard!
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Endnotes and digressions:
* So this is the click-bait Super Nature guy who got Sonny so . . . angry . . . by slagging off on chain restaurants and Science. I’m kind of in love with the idea of an all-GMO place that offers you categories of food according just how pumped up the genes are. “Would you like the Gen-Xtreme apple compote? Or the Genzilla watermelon-berries salad?”
* Pursuant to our discussion of War Games, here’s a look at the tech from the movie. Epic nerd history.
* Also, I mentioned that the world of computer hacking has its origins in phone phreaking back in the 1970s. It’s a fascinating sub-culture that’s now totally extinct. If you’re interested, there are a ton of good pieces written about that world. Wired gives you a good start here and here and here.
* However, what I want to spend most of our time today talking about is a long digression from that scene in Boogie Nights where the three guys (Mark Wahlberg, John C. Reilly, and Tom Jane) show up at the house of a drug dealer (played by Alfred Molina) looking to sell some coke. And maybe rob the guy.
I cannot emphasize enough what an amazing piece of work this scene is. You could spend a week at film school analyzing it and looking at how perfectly it’s constructed along every axis. Paul Thomas Anderson (who, remember, was 27 years old) pulls off the hardest trick in cinema: He takes the audience from a conventional story and suddenly puts them into a situation where they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s like you’re suddenly strapped into an indoor roller coaster that’s running in the pitch dark, Space Mountain-style. That’s easy to do if you’re avant garde, but incredibly difficult to pull off in the service of traditional narrative storytelling.
I can’t find the whole scene online, but you can watch the two halves here and here.
This is eight minutes of perfection. Watch the way Tom Jane walks up to the front door, stepping and arching his back, almost like a ballet dancer. Watch the entrance shot framed down the hallway into the house. And then, strap in for Alfred Molina.
To my mind, this is the most dominant performance I’ve ever seen on film. Molina simply demands your attention and pulls the focus of the frame so tightly onto himself that the other three guys—all leading men—almost melt into the sofa. It’s a highly mannered performance, all the way down to the way he lightly walks about on the balls of his feet. Yet it’s also entirely organic. Look at how he plays the keyboard and drum parts in “Sister Christian” and then blurts out, as an afterthought, that Rick Springfield is a buddy of his. Without any exposition, Molina gives us a character so completely drawn that we almost want to see his movie. One of the great single-scene performances of all time.
And you know who won the Oscar for best supporting actor that year? Robin Williams, for Good Will Hunting. It’s not your fault.
* One final point about this scene: I said it was in service to Anderson’s story, but it’s actually more than that—it’s the hinge upon which Dirk Diggler’s character swings. Up to this point in the story, Diggler has gone from a sweet kid, to an uppity jerk, to something even worse. And it’s only here, as he sits in a room with a drug dealer and his bodyguard and a strange Chinese guy walking around in his underwear tossing firecrackers, that Diggler realizes, My life is out of control and I’m going to die if I don’t do something about it.
How does Anderson tell this part of the story to the audience? He holds the camera on Wahlberg for 50 seconds. With nothing happening. Wahlberg is sitting on a sofa barely moving, saying absolutely nothing, for almost a full minute of screen time—you have to watch it to be reminded how long that really is—and he closes the second act and moves on to the third act entirely with his eyes.
As a piece of filmmaking, this might be my favorite scene in any movie, ever.
* One final note: Last week I talked a little bit about chav culture and mentioned the ur-chav, Michael Carroll—a British miscreant who won $10 million in the lottery and continued to be a lout. Well, you’ll never guess how the story ended. Priceless.
* As always, you can download the episode
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-JVL
