The Green Zone, an Iraq war film starring Matt Damon and directed by Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, United 93) opens.

The new film from veteran auteur Claude Chabrol, Bellamy (starring Gérard Depardieu) screens at the Como at 9:15 as part of the French Film Festival.

The Day Before: Jean-Paul Gaultier, a documentary about the designer directed by Loic Prigent, screens at ACMI at 7:30.

FRIDAY

Tony Gatlif’s Korkoro screens as part of the French Film Festival at the Kino at 6:15.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s The City of Lost Children screens at ACMI at 7:00.

The Investigator, a comedic thriller from Hungary, screens at ACMI’s “Windows on Europe” festival at 9:00.

SATURDAY

A one-off screening of a rarely-seen Jacques Becker film, Falbalas, on a specially imported print from the Cinémathèque Française, at ACMI at 7:30.

Seamstresses, a dramatic look at the harsh lives of three young women in contemporary Bulgaria, screens at ACMI at 9:15.

Alain Resnais, fifty years after Hiroshima Mon Amour and thirty years after My American Uncle, is still going – his new film Wild Grass screens at the Palace Balwyn cinema at 9:00.

SUNDAY

Best day at the Astor in a long time: Fred & Ginger double bill in the afternoon (Swing Time and Top Hat), Hitchcock in the evening (Rear Window and Vertigo).

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film, Micmacs, at the Como at 6:45.

Chaturanga, Suran Mukhopadhyah’s adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s epic of colonial India, screens at the Nova as part of the Indian Film Festival at 12:40pm.

MONDAY

The greatest living filmmaker you’ve probably never heard of, Manoel de Oliveira, has a film screening at ACMI at 7:15 – Christopher Columbus, The Enigma (2007).

Final night of the mini-Coppola retrospective at the Astor, with Apocalypse Now Redux, at 7:30.

The Girl From Monaco, directed by Anne Fontaine (Nathalie, Coco avant Chanel) and starring the great Fabrice Luchini, at ACMI at 8:45.

TUESDAY

Dev D, a contemporary take on the classic story of Devdas (most recently made into a hit film in 2002), screens as part of the Indian Film Festival at the Nova, at 8:20.

WEDNESDAY

Final night of the Melbourne Cinematheque’s Fellini season, with screenings of Roma (1972) and Nights of Cabiria (1957).

Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman screens at Rooftop at 9:00.

I write on Martin Scorsese’s new film Shutter Island mostly as an excuse to cross reference it to one of my favourite quotes I’ve encountered in my time spent reading film criticism. The author in question is NY Press’s noted contrarian Armond White, who wrote of Brian DePalma’s maligned 2000 sci-fi flop Mission to Mars that “It can be said with certainty that any reviewer who pans it does not understand movies, let alone like them”.  As declarations go it’s pretty deliciously outrageous, but it nevertheless says something important. I suggest to you that any reviewer who dismisses Shutter Island as one might dismiss Mission to Mars can similarly be said to not understand movies. Here’s why:

Most who dismiss the film will focus, not without reason, on the story, and the various narrative twists and turns. And it is true that on this account Shutter Island is pretty silly. The narrative is basically a shell game, and when people figure out they’re being fooled with, probably quite early, they’re going to get cranky. And the major turns, when they come, are going to get scoffed at, especially since the narrative logic that gets them there is tenuous at best. US Marshals Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule head to an isolated island, taken up entirely by an institution for the criminally insane, to find a missing girl. As Daniels’ troubled past rises to the fore, the line between sane and insane becomes blurred. You see where this is going. You can feel the filmmakers trying to get a two handed grip on the narrative, and for the most part the tone and intention is quite clear, but the tale itself has insurmountable logic and structural flaws.

The big issue is that Scorsese, a master filmmaker by anyone’s definition, has decided to employ all the bombast and trickery and playfulness he can muster at the service of what is essentially a weak story. And for people for whom the story is the most important element, who treat the cinema as little more than recorded theatre or literature – people who, in short, don’t really understand or like cinema – this is going to be a major discrepancy and an insurmountable flaw.

For the others, who know how to and enjoy engaging film on a purely formal level, it’s not such a big deal, particularly when Scorsese is just throwing big dripping gobs of pure cinema up on the screen like a guy having a seizure. It’s so much fun; just a series of punchy episodes organised around the central themes of memory, madness, and trauma. Scene to scene he‘s doing something different, and weird, and bizarrely affecting. From the strangely clunky opening dialogue scene, to the back-projection-like green screen effects he drops into otherwise normal location scenes, to the handful of gob smacking dream-sequences he pulls off, along with two or three achingly moving flashbacks, it’s pretty much a sensory feast. The formal elements that Scorsese is so good at, the kind of stuff he serves up here, is the essence of cinema, and it’s often too easy to forget that story, dialogue, ideology should be mostly secondary concerns.

I read Dennis Lehane’s book before I saw it. I’d recommend even just reading the wikipedia page. Remember: play along, don’t get played.

Mia Wasikowska in "Alice in Wonderland"

THURSDAY

Alice in Wonderland (3D), Tim Burton’s re-imagining of Lewis Carroll’s world, opens.

The Men Who Stare at Goats, Grant Heslov’s film about the US military’s “psychic spies” (starring George Clooney) opens.

Dear John, the latest Nicholas Sparks adaptation (starring Channing Tatum SQUEAL!), directed by Lasse Halstrom, opens.

Hadewijch, Bruno Dumont’s divisive film about a young woman grappling with faith, mysticism and religious fundamentalism, opens at ACMI and plays until Sunday.

Channing Tatum in "Dear John"

Ricky, the baby horror film from Francois Ozon, plays its last week at ACMI finishing on Wednesday.

Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001) at Moonlight Cinema.

Shaun of the Dead (2004), Edgar Wright’s very funny zombie film/romantic comedy, at Rooftop.

FRIDAY

The French FIlm Festival begins, with screenings at Palace cinemas (Kino, Como, Westgarth and Balwyn), running until the 21st. Films include Claire Denis’ White Material, Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass (screening Friday at Westgarth at 6:45pm), Claude Chabrol’s Bellamy, Tony Gatlif’s Korkoro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs, and the new Serge Gainsbourg biopic.

In the Zone, a two-channel video work and installation from Blaine Cooper, opens at Rearview Gallery in Collingwood.

Freaky Fridays presents Pink Flamingos (1972), the trash masterpiece from John Waters, at ACMI.

Divine in "Pink Flamingos"

Cinema Fiasco presents The Vampire Lovers (1970), the Hammer Horror film about a lesbian vampire run amok, at Astor.

SATURDAY

White Material, the widely praised new film from Claire Denis (whose 35 Shots of Rum was one of our favourites of 2009), screens as part of the French Film Festival (see above) at the Palace  Westgarth cinema at 6:45. Follow-up screenings at the Kino and Como cinemas next week.

A Fish Called Wanda (1988), an absurd crime comedy starring John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline and Michael Palin, at Rooftop.

Puberty Blues, Bruce Beresford’s 1981 coming-of-age beach drama, at ACMI.

SUNDAY

"Withnail and I"

Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel, at Moonlight. We wrote about it here.

Withnail and I (1987), the tale of two drug-addled actors taking a rest in the country (with Richard E. Grant and Robert McGann) at Rooftop.

TUESDAY

A Serious Man, The Coen Brothers tale of meaningless catastrophe and faith tested, at Moonlight. It was one of our favourites of 2009.

Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in "La Dolce Vita"

WEDNESDAY

Cinematheque presents a Fellini double at ACMI: La Dolce Vita (1960), a bittersweet tale of a vain journalist living amidst the glamour of Rome, and Fellini’s contribution to the portmanteau film Boccaccio ‘70, about a prude who is outraged by some lusty advertising and is then pursued by the object of his outrage in the form of a 50 ft Anita Ekberg.

Suspiria (1977), Dario Argento’s gory tale of a cursed dance school, at Rooftop.

The Indian Film Festival opens at Cinema Nova.

There seems to be a debate as to what kind of film Tommy Wiseau originally intended The Room to be. In my mind, there is no doubt that in 2003 he released a melodrama that he hoped would hit the big time. Instead, the film found more success in recent years after being discovered by a cult audience, and is now viewed as both a riotous comedy and the worst movie ever made. Kudos to Wiseau – who funded, produced, wrote, directed and starred in the film – for cheerfully running with this drastic change in marketing.

Above: “We call ‘Evil Man,’… my face, my image, one eye is blinking a little bit. This is a provocation. Otherwise people will not talk about it…” (Tommy Wiseau, from an interview with the A.V. Club)

I went to see a late-night session of The Room at the Nova a few weekends ago. Plastic spoons were distributed outside and the atmosphere was bustling. But nothing quite prepared me for the phenomenon of cinematic hysteria that followed. The host of the evening said the Nova hadn’t ever experienced anything as loud as The Room audiences in their hallowed halls. It was an infectious night of whooping, spoon throwing, ball tossing and booing. Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I haven’t seen a cult film audience interact so rabidly with a movie since the mid-90s.

The Room is one crazy film brimming with strenuous over-acting, aborted storylines and plenty of soft porn with a generous strewing of rose petals. Is is about a love triangle and the sabotage of trust between friends and lovers. Wiseau’s character Johnny is a decent hard-working banker who falls victim to evil scheming and sexual betrayal. His world is inhabited by larger-than-life family members, zany, fun-filled friends and the daily dramas that touch us all. It soon becomes very clear that Wiseau has produced a Not Quite Right simulacrum of Hollywood’s vision of American life.

Therein lies the key to explaining why The Room has received so much raucous attention from mainstream comedians and cult audiences alike. Wiseau’s bizarre take on Hollywood’s vision of American life is so abhorrent and freakishly conceived, it has triggered a kind of bourgeois hysteria in the face of the carnivalesque.

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White originally conceived of this term in a way which relates specifically to European traditions and signifiers. The term bourgeois might seem archaic now, but it can be used here to signify an audience with a shared cultural understanding of what is acceptable or unacceptable. As Stallybrass and White put it, our common language encodes “all that which the proper bourgeois must strive not to be in order to preserve a stable and correct sense of self.”

Why would an audience such as this be moved to displays of hysteria at late-night screenings of The Room? Stallybrass and White take their examples from Sigmund Freud’s work with hysterical patients. When confronted with culturally transgressive images, they would freak out. Freud set about re-framing these images of horrific Otherness as comical. Wondrously, his patients calmed down and were no longer frightened. I don’t think Freud was the first to do this; I’m pretty sure it is an age-old function of comedy to laugh at that which horrifies us. Tim and Eric from Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show: Great Job! were amongst the first mainstream comedians to alert us to the work of Tommy Wiseau. We all followed suit because these fine purveyors of dodgy video graphics actively celebrate, and render hideously funny, the weird, creepy, NQR and unsuccessful elements of American culture.

Tim and Eric

Mikhail Bakhtin is best known for his literary theory of the carnivalesque, which has a long tradition in European culture and thought. Bakhtin sees the carnivalesque as a populist, utopian vision of the world as seen from below. His understanding of how these visions function in the eyes of the beholder still has some currency:

This laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives.

We have long accepted low-brow and trashy cult films into our repertoire of cinematic pleasures. We love them precisely because they violate the strictures of acceptability within society and fail to conform to notions of quality cinema. But as with Tim and Eric, these works are often often made by knowing and ironic artists. It is important to remember that there was apparently no irony intended in the creation or execution of The Room. While some of us (hysterically, ambivalently) celebrate the freakish and apparently misguided cinematic vision of Tommy Wiseau, others are truly disturbed by the implications of Wiseau and his byproduct.

In his recent interview with Wiseau, Crikey film critic Luke Buckmaster reveals a distinct lack of humour in his push for the ‘real’ story behind the man.

Buckmaster rejects Wiseau’s insistence that he is an American, insisting he reveal where his Eastern European accent comes from; he implies that drugs were involved in the film’s financing and that Wiseau was constantly drunk on set; and he rudely demands to know why the film is such an excruciating train-crash. In a final fit of desperation, Buckmaster says:

LB: Tommy I have a crazy theory about The Room. Do you want to hear my crazy theory?…My theory is that you guys deliberately made a really bad movie with the intention of marketing it as one of the worst movies of all time. That’s what you did, isn’t it?

TW: I will 100 percent disagree with you because again The Room is based on my work. 12 years of work. Very intensive research. I studied psychology. My background is partially psychology, partially film production. There is certain symbolism and without the symbolism within The Room you would not have The Room.

You will have to watch the film yourself to decide for yourself if it is for real or not. Just remember though, hundreds of terrible films are made in America every year. As my LA correspondent Yana Apostolopoulos reports, “LA is a circus. He’s one of many just like him in LA. They are at every cafe sitting with their laptops, plotting their scripts and their futures and fortunes. It’s a city full of crazies.”

And in a final inversion, Tommy Wiseau looks refreshingly normal compared to these two.

Author Christopher Isherwood

But the popularity Ford wants to claim for his film and his version of Isherwood is, of course, a popularity amongst only the right people – people of feeling (as Colin Firth’s George remarks during the film, “a world without sentiment is not a world I want to live in”), people of intelligence, and most importantly, people of taste. As every review of A Single Man has pointed out, Ford is a well-known fashion designer and first-time film director, and his attention to ‘matters of taste’ -  fashion style, costuming and set design – often comes at the expense of the ‘bread and butter’ elements of narrative cinema, like character and plot. Set in Los Angeles in 1962, the film’s lavishly detailed mise-en-scène and soundtrack establish an impeccably tasteful simulacrum of that world, in a manner that bears the influence of such loving reconstitutions of early-sixties style and cool as Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood For Love and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times.

In The Mood For Love (the composer of whose famous score, Shigeru Umebayashi, contributed some of his trademark, lush music to A Single Man) may be an ostensible cinematic influence upon Ford’s film, but a far more crucial point of reference is TV’s Mad Men. A Single Man simply could not have been made in the way it has been, and certainly could not have been released to the wide acclaim it has received, if Mad Men had not gone before it. It is not simply that Ford uses Mad Men’s team of production designers, and that as a result superficial elements of the sets and costumes immediately recall the world of that show; rather, the most significant thing A Single Man adopts from the show is its rhetorical use of these details of set and costume.

Colin Firth in "A Single Man"

As Brad Nguyen discussed in his recent piece on Mad Men here at ScreenMachine, the lovingly constituted particular elements of the show’s ‘world’ are recurrently rendered as fetish objects; but they also have a rhetorical function, what Roland Barthes called the “reality effect,” wherein the sheer narrative superfluity of a precise detail serves to lull viewers or readers into an uncritical acceptance of the reality or ‘givenness’ of the represented world – and it is this that A Single Man has picked up on. As we follow George, a professor of English in mourning over the recent death of his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), over the course of one day and night in LA – from his home to the college campus where he teaches, to a bank, to a bar, to the beach – this reality effect functions by impressing upon us the authenticity of the represented world, whose sensory attractiveness (in addition to the costumes and sets, almost all of the supporting actors in the film are preposterously good-looking) is as alluring as its repressive social mores are damnable.

Ford isn’t possessed of much talent as a director, and his maddeningly pedestrian editing and tediously overstated use of lighting changes threaten at times to derail the immaculate lushness his team of production and sound designers have worked so hard to establish. But what is most troubling is Ford’s co-opting of Isherwood’s good name for this tiresome vanity project, which sadly cannot be saved even by a very fine performance from Colin Firth. Seemingly destined to become as overrated as another recent literary adaptation hack-job, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (directed by another non-filmmaker, Julien Schnabel), A Single Man is less a reclamation of a major author than it is a total evacuation of all (enunciative, thematic, narrative, poetic, personal) content from that author’s work, turning his name into another glittery signifier of Ford’s excellent taste – another pink cigarette, another jazzy number played on a period-appropriate turntable, another stylish pair of shoes.

Colin Firth and Julianne Moore in "A Single Man"

THURSDAY

A Single Man, the debut film of designer Tom Ford, opens.

Ricky, François Ozon’s baby horror film (described as Cronenberg meets the Dardenne Brothers) opens at ACMI exclusively and plays until March 10.

Triple R presents Sympathy for the Devil (Jean-luc Godard, 1968) at Rooftop.

The Blind Side, the Oscar-nominated(wtf!) film starring Sandra Bullock, opens.

The Leopard (1963), Visconti’s epic period drama, plays at ACMI tonight and Sunday.

Francois Ozon's "Ricky"

Grindhouse (Tarantino and Rodriguez, 2007) at Astor.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975) at Moonlight.

FRIDAY

8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963), recently remade as Nine, plays at ACMI.

Freaky Fridays presents Black Dynamite (Scott Sanders) at ACMI.

Pulling a steamer through the Peruvian hills in "Fitzarraldo"

Girl with a Suitcase (Valerio Zurlini, 1961), starring Claudia Cardinale, at ACMI.

Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008) at Rooftop.

Sandra (Visconti, 1965) at ACMI.

Fitzcarraldo (Herzog, 1982) at ACMI.

SUNDAY

Adventureland (Greg Mottola), Screen Machine’s #1 film of 2009, at Rooftop.

The Wizard of Oz (1939) at ACMI.

A Fistful of Dynamite (Sergio Leone, 1972) at Astor.

Fellini's "La Strada" at Cinematheque

Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968) at ACMI.

MONDAY

The Godfather II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) at Astor.

TUESDAY

Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990) at Moonlight

WEDNESDAY

Opening Night Gala Screening of The Men Who Stare at Goats at Nova.

DIY art in "Beautiful Losers"

Cinematheque presents a Fellini double-feature: Amacord (1973) a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story and La Strada (1954) the story of a circus strongman and his naive companion.

Beautiful Losers, the documentary on a collective of influential DIY artists (including Harmony Korine and Mike Mills) at Rooftop,

“The world sees Rome the way you invented it,” Sophia Loren tells Daniel Day-Lewis in Nine. This is the power that a director has when he makes intelligent, affecting films. And from the way he is depicted, it seems that director Guido Contini (Day-Lewis) has achieved such splendour. Emphasising the control that films have over their spectators, declaring that they are indeed not modest, director Rob Marshall is more paying respects to Federico Fellini (from whose 8 1/2 the musical is adapted) than he is boasting about his own work. His film is entertaining, but it lacks the wholly enveloping world that is potentially achieved by film directors, and is a missed opportunity. Marshall’s failure seems almost a replica of Guido’s failure to envisage his country in the ambitious epic Italia (arguably, a similar outcome of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia).

The problem with Nine is not that the songs are terrible, as New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott has claimed, even though some of them really are. The problem is that their presence in the film does not contribute to our understanding of the characters. The one exception is Marion Cotillard’s ‘Take It All,’ the only song that does not have a shallow basis, allowing the viewer some emotional insight into her character. The conversation in the film which revolves around the director’s “easy” job of merely saying “yes” or “no” turns out to be sadly ironic; there is little originality in the film, and even cinematographer Dion Beebe’s work, although impressive, does not fully show off the exceptional talent to which we are privy in his other films. The problem with Nine is its emotional emptiness, badly disguised by the spectacle of performance. The most lively and alive part of the film is the credit sequence, where shots of each character are intercut with shots of each actor rehearsing. Here, we see enjoyment.

At its structural core, Nine is an untidy mélange of life and internal monologues in place of plot. The musical asides are so dramatically staged that they remove the viewer from the actual process of the story and the character development. For Marshall, the answer to all problems is song and dance, costumes and glitter – nothing out of the ordinary in the musical cinema business. But the realisation of this glamour does not live up to the achievements of Fellini; Marshall relies on cross-cutting and Video Hits-style editing rather than long shots of pure performance. In Marshall’s Chicago (2002), this style of editing was fitting because of the snappy personalities of the leads and because, really, Chicago was all about sex. But in Nine it does not fit, and the result is confused and unsatisfying. The sexiness just seems a flourish, an addition assumed necessary, but the film should really have been about Guido’s difficulty with relationships. Instead Marshall hints at this emotional boiling pot and, disappointingly, just leaves it to simmer.

Oscar-nominated Jeremy Renner in "The Hurt Locker"

THURSDAY

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (a Best Picture Oscar nominee and Screen Machine favourite of 2009) opens.

Martin Scorsese’s thriller Shutter Island (with Leonardo DiCaprio) opens.

Celine: Through the Eyes of the World opens.

Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart (with Oscar-nominated performances from Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal) opens.

FRIDAY

Leonardo DiCaprio in "Shutter Island"

ACMI begins a season focusing on actress Claudia Cardinale, star of 1960s Italian cinema, with Visconti’s Sandra (1965) and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982).

Freaky Fridays presents last year’s blacksploitation kitsch Black Dynamite at ACMI.

SATURDAY

Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967) at Rooftop.

Valerio Zurlini’s Girl With a Suitcase (1961) and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) at ACMI.

SUNDAY

Focus on Claudia Cardinale at ACMI

The Wizard of Oz (1939) at ACMI.

Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther (1964) starring Peter Sellers at ACMI.

Fellini’s 8 1/2 at ACMI.

MONDAY

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1969) at Astor.

TUESDAY

Woody Allen’s Whatever Works at Rooftop. We wrote about it here.

Harvey Keitel in "Who's That Knocking at My Door"

WEDNESDAY

Cinematheque presents a Scorsese double: Who’s That Knocking At My Door? (1968) and After Hours (1985).

Killer ant sci-fi thriller Phase IV (1974) directed by graphic designer Saul Bass at Rooftop.

I. I hate Don’s life but I want his suit.

In The Reality of the Virtual, Slavoj Zizek makes what at first seems an absurd claim: that the Sound of Music is a racist film. But, when put under analysis, his argument is hard to deny. Basically, Zizek makes a distinction between the narrative reality of the film (i.e. Mary Poppins and the seven dwarfs must escape the fascist Nazis) which only seems to appeal to an anti-fascist sensibility, and the overriding virtual texture of the film which is overtly fascist. That is, if you look at the visual coding of the film, you can see that what is really at stake in The Sound of Music is not just a Nazi invasion but the sullying of Austria’s blonde-haired blue-eyed population and their “down-to-earth” provincial lifestyle. Or in other words, the purity of the Austrian nation is under threat. Let’s be clear: I love The Sound of Music. But I wouldn’t be surprised if “Edelweiss” became an anthem for the “Fuck Off We’re Full” Facebook group. “Small and WHITE! CLEAN and BRIGHT! Bless my HOMELAND forever!” Indeed.

This dichotomy between “narrative reality” and “virtual texture” is, I think, a useful way to explore some of the misgivings I felt towards Season One of Mad Men, the television series created by Matthew Weiner exploring the employees of an American advertising agency in 1960. On one level it’s easy to argue that Mad Men is an indictment of the consumerism and social conservatism of that time inherited from the 1950s. The series’ main dramatic strategy is, as Benjamin Schwartz points out, is to shock its audience “by presenting as reasonable and commonplace behavior we now find appalling”. Hence we find scenes of casual sexism, homophobia and racism and the expected response is for the audience to mutter about the social mores of the past and pat ourselves on the back for living in the enlightened present. The advertising agency is an especially effective setting for allowing the writers to dramatise the way the American Dream is a media construct operating as an ideological mask for the social conflict and oppression in society. The most memorable images from Mad Men centre around the protagonist Don Draper wearing a suit. Don Draper is the American ideal: a square-jawed alpha male, a corporate success who pulled himself out from a life of poverty, the ultimate self-made man. The suit that Don Draper wears encapsulates these ideals but what it importantly represents is how restricted Don Draper’s life is. For Don Draper is not happy. He resents his perfect wife and home. He has worked his whole life to achieve the American Dream and all he has to show for his troubles is a load of ennui. How ironic that he is a victim of the ideology that he sells to his advertising clients day in and day out.

But if the narrative reality of Mad Men describes the oppressiveness of American consumerism, the series’ virtual texture is telling a completely different story. Each episode of Mad Men revels fetishistically on details such as period-accurate fitted suits, pleated skirts, expensive cocktails and cigars. In Mad Men, the frame often seems drenched in cigarette smoke. Far from operating as a critique of American corporate/consumer culture, the real legacy of Mad Men lies in the way it functions in the exact same way as any clothing advertisement, creating a desire for expensive suits and floral print dresses. Hence, the enthusiasm that the series has sparked amongst television viewers for Mad Men-themed parties; the ubiquity of Mad Men avatars; the Mad Men/Banana Republic tie-in; and the Special Edition Mad Men suit from Brooks Brothers. We are less interested in thinking about what makes Don Draper unhappy than in marvelling at how someone can be so unhappy but look so good.

I wish it was the sixties. I wish I could be happy.

I thought I wouldn't be able to "Mad Men myself" but thank goodness they included the "squinty Asian nerd" option.

II. Actually, no, I really want to be Don Draper.

Yet another aspect of Mad Men’s glamour derives from its affinity with Great American Literature. That Don Draper’s power depends upon a war-hero backstory he invented for himself is a device borrowed from The Great Gatsby. When Don Draper’s brother appears from nowhere, a spectre of his actual abandoned childhood in a rural backwater, we are reminded of Holly Golightly from Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. By borrowing elements from The Greats, Mad Men hopes to adopt the mythic resonance that such classics have and in so doing, be included among them. There is, however, a significant difference between Mad Men and The Great Gatsby as texts. When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, the Jazz Age was not some mystical, alluring point in history. The glamour of the Jazz Age was Fitzgerald’s present and The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s critique of his present. When The Great Gatsby was released in 1925, it wasn’t just a bunch of beautiful sentences; those sentences had political bite. They hit home.

F. Scott Fitzgerald with his wife Zelda

Unlike Fitzgerald, the creators of Mad Men seemingly have no interest in the now; no desire to come to grips with the shallowness of contemporary culture. What they are really interested in is aestheticising the sadness of Gatsby. This speaks to the inevitable change in the way audiences receive texts. It may be that The Great Gatsby is no longer able to say anything significant about society. Perhaps all The Great Gatsby can possibly do for the contemporary reader is engender feelings of nostalgia and yearning for a past we wish we had experienced. What this leads me to conclude is that there is no conflict in Mad Men between the repulsive narrative reality and the attractive virtual texture of the TV series. There is not one element of the series which is social critique (i.e. the dramatisation of Don’s ennui, the social oppression of women, black people and gays) and another element which is just eye candy (i.e the fetishism of suits, skirts and cocktails). In Mad Men, the entirety of the 1960s, everything including the alienation and oppression, is reduced to a pleasurable commodity. You can even wear alienation and oppression. It’s available for only $998 from Brooks Brothers.

III. What is happening here?

Here is Arlo Weiner, son of Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner. He was featured in GQ, a lifestyle magazine.

You will never look this good.

The Road tells the story of a father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) wandering through a post-apocalyptic landscape where humans have been reduced to their basest survival instincts. The relationship between father and son represents the ability of humanity to endure in inhuman situations. Thus against a backdrop of hopelessness and cruelty, the father exorts his son to survive in order to “carry the fire”. One might describe the film as both beautiful and unremittingly bleak, yet these qualities, striking as they are, also indicate the shallowness of director John Hillcoat’s vision (and perhaps also Cormac McCarthy from whose novel the scenario is taken, though I have not read his work).

Take the colour palette. Hillcoat’s film is almost monochromatic in browns and greys. This colour scheme makes sense in the shots of exterior landscapes as we are to believe that the world is dying. But this becomes ridiculous in scenes set in the interior of a domestic house. Perhaps we are to think that the past owners of the house had hired an interior decorator and instructed them to decorate the house in brown and grey; to remove all books, paintings or toys with a hint of colour. What is more probable is that Hillcoat is less concerned with constructing a fully, realized and complex world than he is with maintaining an aesthetic of bleakness. Perhaps the film would have been more honest if Hillcoat was prepared to disrupt this aestheticised bleakness with the garish colours of a rundown McDonalds or the sound of Lady Gaga emitting from a found iPod on its last legs. (Though Hillcoat is not so above product placement that he wouldn’t let his protagonists stumble across a hidden stash of VitaminWater® Gossip Girl-style.)

But it is the construction of the Boy that rings most false in The Road. The Boy only exists as a sacred symbol of childhood purity. He is the one who takes seriously the idea of “carrying the fire”; he who is charitable towards the handful of harmless strangers that pass their way. Hillcoat would have us believe that the Boy tells us something about the ability of “goodness” to survive in inhuman conditions. But the Boy is only a projection of goodness, not a flesh and blood character. Rather than delve into how the Boy is shaped by the landscape, the culture of fear instilled in him by his father, the withering of his own body, Hillcoat depends on the Boy’s innate goodness to convince us of hope for humanity after the apocalypse.

Linda Manz in "Days of Heaven"

I much prefer the rage of Max from Where the Wild Things Are, an uncontrollable response to his shifting social world; or the face of Linda from Days of Heaven, plain and weathered from days in the field; or the snide put-downs of Laurent from Murmur of the Heart, his survival technique against his bourgeois upbringing. What is shared between these examples is that these on-screen children’s subjectivities are shaped by a complex world rather than exist as symbols of purity closed off from their environment. But where the filmmakers of The Road could really have found inspiration is in Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night. The similarities between Night and The Road are striking. Both are accounts of the relationship between a father and son enduring the unendurable and whose faith is tested by extreme, inhuman conditions. In Wiesel’s book he recounts with brutal honesty how he came to resent his father whose deteriorating health became a liability for him: “Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever.” He also recounts witnessing a father killing his son as they fight over scraps of bread. There are no scenes like this in The Road because the filmmakers naively believe in the transcendent bonds of family. The Road ends on a note of hope but all I could feel after watching it was indifference.