Author: Leah Carlson-Downie

Where The Fuck Are Mona Lisa’s Eyebrows

Posted on by Leah Carlson-Downie
Conner4Real (Andy Samberg) sings the Mona Lisa song onstage in the movie Popstar

 

Where The Fuck Are Mona Lisa’s Eyebrows: In Conversation with Keith About the Dumbest Song on the Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping Soundtrack

 

If you’ve met either me or my husband Keith, you likely know that we’re obsessed with The Lonely Island mockumentary Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016). The film spoofs the kind of concert documentaries that were ubiquitous in the early part of the decade—movies like Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never (2011), Katy Perry: Part of Me (2012), and One Direction: This Is Us (2013) that mixed arena concert tour footage with behind the scenes material to ostensibly give viewers a peek into the artists’ real lives. Keith and I unquestionably formed part of the Popstar vanguard; we saw the film in the theater together, and we immediately knew it would be a cult classic. Popstar bombed theatrically, but it has indeed gained quite the following in the four years since it was released. Last year, for example, the Alamo Drafthouse chain of theaters scheduled Sing-Along showings of the movie, complete with props. (I’m jealous I didn’t get to attend one of these screenings, I have to say.)

As with any good musical comedy, some of the best laughs in the film come from the songs, and Popstar’s soundtrack is full of bangers. For this month’s blog, I thought it would be fun to do a deep dive with Keith into one of our favorite songs on the soundtrack: the “powerfully stupid” “Mona Lisa.” Below is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. (If you really want the raw audio file, complete with cat interruptions and New York sirens, to prove just how much we should NOT start a podcast, I will send it to you.)

 

Leah: The first thing that I wanted to ask you to do is to explain to me how much you love Popstar. Like on a scale of one to ten. How much do you love it?

Keith: Well, clearly, it’s ten. It may be one of my most watched movies.

L: We have watched it a lot. How often do you think we watch the movie together? I think it’s probably at least once a year, but it’s probably more than that?

K: No, it’s probably more like once every six months. It’s on par with how much we watch Walk Hard, I would say.

L: Yeah. I feel like that’d be a good double feature. Walk Hard and Popstar. They’re very complimentary films.

K: Usually watching one gets us to watch the other, too.

L: That’s true. Also, whenever we meet someone who hasn’t ever seen Popstar, then we have to make them watch it.

K: Well, yeah, because no one saw it when it came out; they didn’t advertise at all.

L: We are Popstar evangelists. I think many of the times we’ve seen it have been because we’ve watched it with someone who hasn’t seen it before.

K: If I had a religion, it would be Popstar.

L: So you know this movie inside and out, that’s pretty fair to say.

K: Well, I can probably quote more than I’m proud of.

L: So, if we needed a Popstar expert for court, we could call on you?

K: If Andy Samberg is busy, then I can fill in.

L: (laughs) You can be back up?

K: Uh huh.

L: So, I wanted to talk with you specifically about the song “Mona Lisa” for a few reasons. First, I think it’s probably the song off the soundtrack that we spontaneously sing to each other the most. Would you say that’s accurate?

K: Probably.

L: I mean, “Mona Lisa, you’re an overrated piece of shit” is, like, such an earworm? I think it’s just that part.

K: Yeah, I would agree, that definitely is the one that gets stuck in my head the most.

L: I also wanted to talk to you about this song because you were the one that discovered the full length version of the song on the soundtrack, right?

K: Yeah.

L: I think you showed it to me. You listened to the soundtrack before I did, and then you were like, “There’s a whole full length version of this song.”

K: Yeah. The clip of the song in the actual movie is very short. It’s, like, maybe ten or fifteen seconds.

L: Do you want to tell me a little bit about when you heard the full length version for the first time?

K: It was just when I was going to work. This was probably a couple months after the movie came out on VOD. I had one of the Popstar songs stuck in my head, and I was thinking of something to listen to. None of my podcasts were doing it for me, so I was just surfing around Google Play [Music]. And that song was still in my head, so I just decided to see if it was on Google Play. And they had the whole Popstar soundtrack; so I, of course, naturally, listened to all of it. “Mona Lisa” was one that really stuck out to me because the lyrics are very creative, and most of the song is not in the movie. There are a couple other throwaway songs on the soundtrack that aren’t exciting at all, but “Mona Lisa” seemed like a major song to leave out.

L: So would it be fair to say that “Mona Lisa” was kind of the discovery of the soundtrack?

K: Yeah. Although, I think that that was the song that I had stuck in my head. Either that or “Humble.”

L: Oh, yeah, you know all the words to that one. It’s pretty impressive.

K: Most of the words, yes. Except I can’t rap.

L: I mean… You do an Andy Samberg-level job.

K: (laughs) Yeah, yeah, that’s true.

L: You can do the rap parts, and I can do the Adam Levine parts; that’ll be our karaoke song. (laughs) So, before we listen to “Mona Lisa” again and really get into it, I’d like you to tell me what you like about the song, either in the context of the film or just as a standalone piece of music.

K: I mean, one of the reasons I like the movie in general is that the songs are so whimsical. In the film, Conner4Real has kind of lost inspiration for good songs and came up with a bunch of random throwaway songs for his new album. That whole album tanks because it’s terrible. I think that the awfulness of the Mona Lisa is just such a random topic to be singing about that it perfectly embodies how he just has no material. He’s trying to go solo without his partners and it’s bad. [pause] But it’s also true. The Mona Lisa kinda sucks.

L: (laughs)

K: We’ve been to the Louvre. There was a huge crowd around this tiny painting, and it’s not particularly impressive to look at. The history behind it is another thing, but if you just went into the museum expecting something grand and, like, awe-striking, it’s not that.

L: No, it’s very unassuming.

K: So, I don’t know, the song both fits the context of the movie and is also true. [pause] And is also an earworm. So, it just fits the bill for a perfect comedy song.

L: Yes. For me, it’s one of the songs on the soundtrack where the more I’ve listened to it, the more I’m convinced that it’s secretly brilliant. Like, it’s STUPID, but it’s stupid in a very smart way. And it gets better every time I listen to it. My favorite song the first time we saw the movie was “Finest Girl ([subtitle redacted])”.* But part of the humor of that song is the shock, right? Like, as you’re watching the movie, you’re going, “What? That’s not what I thought you were gonna say!” And so it’s hilarious because it’s the last thing you expect him to sing. When you know the song, and you know what’s gonna happen, it’s still funny; but it’s never going to be as funny as that first time when you just had no idea where it was going.

*I redacted the subtitle for spoiler reasons. Only click the link if you want the surprise spoiled! You’ve been warned. (If you’ve seen the movie and are looking for bonus content, the link leads to the full music video version of the song, not the performance scene from the film.)

K: Yeah, absolutely. The payoff is in the first time you see it.

L: Right, and I feel like “Mona Lisa” is kind of the opposite of that. At first, you hear the clip in the movie and you’re like, “Heh, heh, that’s dumb, that’s funny, yeah, the Mona Lisa sucks.” But then you listen to the full version, and you listen to it more, and you’re like, “This is sublimely stupid. It’s perfect.” (laughs) So, that’s why I thought it would be fun to dig into this song in particular, both because it’s kind of a hidden gem on the soundtrack, and also because it has increasing rewards rather than diminishing ones as you listen to it multiple times. [pause] So, are you ready to listen to the song? Let’s do it.

 

 

L: So, after listening to the song again does anything new strike you?

K: I didn’t really realize that the part that gets stuck in my head the most is actually the part that’s in the movie. But it’s also the part of the song I find the funniest, because it’s got the Garbage Pail Kid line, it’s got the DaVinci sucked a historian’s dick part, that girl who looks like uncooked bread.* I don’t know, there’s not too much new to realize about the song because I’ve heard it so many times.

*The clip in the film actually only has the Garbage Pail Kid line. It’s very short.

L: That’s true. (laughs) What I was struck by listening to it is how you can see the song as one of those unhinged Yelp reviews.

K: (laughs)

L: Like someone who’s just pissed off that this thing they’ve been looking forward to didn’t live up to their expectations, so they go on Yelp or TripAdvisor to rant about it. One kind of person would have this disappointing experience and go on Yelp and write about it—

K: Yeah, one star review.

L: Yeah! And then, you know, Conner4Real writes a song about it.

K: (laughs) Yeah, that’s accurate. Especially ending with “I’m an American man.”

L: Yes, yes, yes. There’s definitely an element of the stupid American.

K: Writing an ignorant review on Yelp.

L: (laughs) And I think that made it funnier for me, thinking about the song like that. And it goes back to what you said before about how Conner4Real is so desperate for material. I can just imagine him sitting around thinking about how much his trip to France sucked and the Mona Lisa was disappointing. And then he’s like, “I’ll write a song about that!”

K: Maybe he actually wrote the review and then, later, turned it into a song because he didn’t have anything better to do.

L: (laughs) I love that. 

 

 

L: Also when I listened to the song this time, I remembered a song by Nat King Cole called “Mona Lisa.” And it’s from 1950, I think? It won the Oscar for Best Original Song that year because he had written it for a movie. [The movie was Captain Carey, U.S.A.] I think the movie was set at the end of  World War II, and it was about these American soldiers in Italy. I don’t know what the song particularly has to do with the movie, other than it’s about this Italian woman who Nat King Cole is comparing to Mona Lisa. Because she’s beautiful and coy, and, you know—

K: You could land a helicopter on her forehead?

L: (laughs) Well, I was thinking about this song because in it, Mona Lisa is standing in for this kind of paragon of beauty and the height of art; so I was thinking about The Lonely Island’s “Mona Lisa” as a kind of riposte to Nat King Cole as well.

 

The painting Mona Lisa with her face covered by a red X

Single cover art for The Lonely Island’s “Mona Lisa”

Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q., a postcard of the Mona Lisa with a mustache drawn on it

Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q., 1919 version (image courtesy of Wikimedia).

 

L: The last thing that I want to show you is the cover art for The Lonely Island’s “Mona Lisa.” They released the song as a promotional single, which I found out when I was researching for this. So, this is the cover art. I’m an art historian, and you can’t take that out of me, so when I saw this, I immediately thought of Duchamp. He did a piece called “L.H.O.O.Q.” which, when you say it really quickly, sounds like “She has a hot ass” in French.

K: (laughs)

L: So what Duchamp did is he took a postcard—and he made multiples of these, this was kind of one of his ready mades, so there are many versions of this. He made the first one in 1919, but there are other versions that exist as well. So he took a postcard of the Mona Lisa and drew a mustache on it.

K: (laughs)

L: And put the “L.H.O.O.Q” underneath, and it was very iconoclastic. He was trying to make a commentary upon, you know, the seriousness of art and the canon. Duchamp was associated with the Dada movement for a while, and they were very kind of absurdist—

K: Flippant.

L: Yes, and also very irreverent. So when I saw the cover art for the single, I immediately thought of Duchamp putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. And I thought, you know what, I think Duchamp would probably have approved of The Lonely Island’s “Mona Lisa.”

K: He probably would get a kick out of that.

L: (*crosses fingers*) Andy Samberg and Duchamp, like that.

K: (laughs)

L: Aright, so, I want to go through the lyrics, just stanza by stanza. We can get as nitty gritty or not as you want.

K: Sure.

 

INTRO

What’s up, y’all? This is Conner4Real

You know I’ve been all around the world, right?

But tonight I’m on my dumb shit

 

L: So, I love the intro because he says, “Tonight I’m on my dumb shit.” Like he just immediately sets up that this is gonna be a dumb ass song, so get ready.

K: (laughs) Right, and that really emphasizes that he just wrote this when he was, like, high one night or something.

 

VERSE 1

I’m landed in Paris at a quarter to noon

So excited to see her, I went straight to the Louvre

I heard she’s exquisite, so I bought my ticket

Pushed my way to the front of the crowd

And I couldn’t believe what I saw

 

L: So, I like that he sets up this narrative. He’s like, “So I’m all excited, I get to Paris, I get to the Louvre, I get there and then—”

K: Right.

L: “And I couldn’t believe what I saw.”

K: When you’re first listening to this, you could maybe think that he is going to like it? He doesn’t really give away in this first part that he’s just gonna shit all over Mona Lisa.

 

CHORUS 1

Mona Lisa, you’re an overrated piece of shit

With your terrible style and your dead shark eyes

And a smirk like you’re hiding a dick

What the fuck is this garbage?

Mona Lisa, the original basic bitch

Traveled thousands of miles to see your beautiful smile

Talk about a bait and switch, you ugly

 

L: Which I think is what makes the first line of the chorus so great. Because he’s like setting up this narrative. He’s like “Okay, I’m excited, I’m excited,” but, what do you know, “Mona Lisa, you’re an overrated piece of shit.” And then you’re like, “Okay, now we know what the song’s gonna be about.” (laughs) Then we get to “with your terrible smile and your dead shark eyes” which is good. I like that he mentions the eyes in particular because, again, everyone talks about her mysterious eyes or little smile, how her eyes follow you, and that’s part of the whole mystique of her. And he just shoots that down.

K: Her eyes are a little dead.

L: (laughs) And then, “And a smirk like you’re hiding a dick.” Which, again, that comes to the smile. So, like, it’s not a mysterious, alluring smile, it’s like—

K: She’s up to something.

L: So then he calls Mona Lisa the original basic bitch. Which… Mona Lisa is the basic bitch of art history. And then he brings up the smile again. “Traveled thousands of miles to see your beautiful smile.” 

K: Yeah.

L: And then he’s like, “But you’re ugly.”

K: (laughs)

 

VERSE 2

I’m landed in Cairo to see the pyramids

But what did I find there? A dirty pile of bricks

There was trash all over and a very foul odor

The smell was that of a camel’s ass

But even that wasn’t as bad as

 

L: So then he continues this travel narrative. “By the way, here’s another thing I saw and was disappointed by.” Which again reminds me of the Yelp review, because they never stay on topic, right? When somebody’s ready to rant, when they hate something, they’re just on a roll, and then they’ll bring in other things they’re pissed about.

K: Right, like going to see the Statue of Liberty, and finding out that it’s not as big as you may have built it up to be in your head or something.

L: There’s something special about the wrath of a disappointed tourist. They’ve put all this effort into doing something on their bucket list or something that they feel they should do, and when it’s disappointing, then they don’t know how to handle it.

K: There’s actually an interesting phenomenon where Japanese tourists will get depressed after they go to Paris. I don’t remember what it was called exactly, but it does remind me of that.

L: I think that’s a very extreme version of what Conner4Real is experiencing with the Mona Lisa.

K: (laughs) Right.

L: So, getting to the end of the verse, he ultimately brings in this other example only to highlight just how bad the Mona Lisa is.

 

CHORUS 2

Mona Lisa, you’re worse than the pyramids

Can someone explain why the whole wide world

Is obsessed with a Garbage Pail Kid?

Looks like a Garbage Pail Kid

And DaVinci must have sucked an art historian’s dick

To get this girl who looked like uncooked bread

At the top of the all-time list of paintings

 

L: Now we get to your favorite part. And I found out, from the annotations on Genius Lyric, that there was actually a “Mona Loser” Garbage Pail Kid—

K: Oh, no.

L: —trading card. So that is—

K: That’s horrifying. It has the little smirk. (laughs)

L: I like the “Leonardo must have sucked an art historian’s dick” line, too. I don’t think DaVinci sucked an art historian’s dick, but this line is another way that this is a very stupid song but in a really smart way. I think the line points to the ways that the modern myth of the “genius artist” came about in the Renaissance. In the high Renaissance, Vasari wrote his Lives of the Artists, and that’s generally considered the first work of art history.* The book was made up of biographies of artists. And Vasari was Italian, so he highlighted Italian artists, obviously. DaVinci was included in this book, which is part of the reason he’s canonized as a Great Artist. There was this kind of myth making going on that was independent of the work in a lot of ways. (laughs) So, the line in the song is funny, but also, like, now I am imagining DaVinci sucking Vasari’s dick.

K: (laughs)

L: And it’s funny. (laughs)

*Vasari’s Lives of the Artists was published about forty years after DaVinci’s death. Vasari and DaVinci were not contemporaries, like Vasari and Michelangelo were, but the point still stands. Vasari’s entry on DaVinci is very long and full of effusive praise, and it’s safe to say that DaVinci was one of the author’s favorites.

 

BRIDGE

Mona Lisa, I got to know

Where the fuck are your eyebrows, I really wanna know

You could land a helicopter on that big potato forehead

Get this chick some Rogaine

You a bloated corpse, girl

 

L: He goes all in on her here. He just totally goes all in on her looks in this bridge. 

K: Yeah. (laughs) He’s really laying in. 

L: I think musically that fits, because in the bridge there’s a change of tempo and the song slows down a bit. Like he’s taking a breath to really lay it out. And then he lands the punch, “You’re a bloated corpse, girl.”

K: And he’s setting up for the ignorant American take. So, really going all in on being a dick about it makes sense, in terms of the progression of the song.

 

CHORUS 3

I’m an American man, this is my native land

Where no one lies about paintings

But that’s not the case in France

Where the naked ladies dance, and they look like Dennis Franz

You’re so mangy, Mona

Hair part wider than a country road-a

Unless you count cats, she died alone-a

The Mona Lisa sucks, la da da da da

 

L: Yeah, this is where the stupid American really comes in. He really makes it about, like, if Americans were in charge, Mona Lisa wouldn’t be famous! Because we know better! And we can see how ugly she is.

K: We know what real art is.

L: He really sums up the song in the last line. “The Mona Lisa sucks.” (both laugh) He leaves you with the final thought, in case you missed it. The song is about how much the Mona Lisa sucks.

K: Just summing up his entire thesis in four words.

L: Yes. The song’s got a good structure. When you go through the lyrics, you can see how he builds up.

K: Yeah, it’s a well crafted song.

L: As I said, it’s exquisitely stupid. So, I think that’s it, unless you have any concluding thoughts?

K: More people need to see the movie.

L: Yes, that’s a given.

K: It’s genius. (pause) It has Michael Bolton in it.

L: He has a good cameo at the end. That’s another exquisitely stupid song.*

*This song is literally the end of the movie, so don’t click this link if you’re avoiding spoilers.

K: Oh yeah.

L: So, have I totally squelched your love of “Mona Lisa” with my analytical zeal? Or did you have fun?

K: I think that’s pretty impossible to ruin my love for that song. Deconstructing the song just reveals even more genius, so…

L: So the lesson is we have to do this with all of the songs on the Popstar soundtrack at some point? We’ll start a podcast.

K: Yeah (laughs)

L: Well, this was fun. Hopefully this gets some people to watch the movie. Like we said, we’re Popstar evangelists, and we don’t knock on doors Mormon-style yet—

K: —but we might get there. Pass out pamphlets about how humble we are.

L: (laughs) We’ll include this discussion in the pamphlet.

 

Exploring Embodied Empathy Through Coronavirus Personal Essays, Bisbee ‘17, and Hannibal

Posted on by Leah Carlson-Downie
Reenactors on a bus in the film Bisbee '17

 

Over the past several months, a peculiar category of personal essay cropped up all over the media landscape: the first-hand narrative of what it feels like to be ill with COVID-19. Although reported pieces about those suffering from COVID-19 and its long term effects also proliferate, the essays I’m thinking of are works of creative nonfiction. I should say upfront that I’m not necessarily a fan of the “pandemic personal essay” as a genre; however, these primary accounts of illness became a sort of exception to the rule.

The authors of these pieces seem more concerned with describing experience than analyzing it. The best of these works possess an immediacy that provokes a visceral reaction by asking the reader to imagine the physical reality of sickness. Envisioning this can be upsetting, which may be why some of these essays lodged themselves in my memory. In late March, reading Jessica Lustig’s piece about taking care of her husband when he was sick with coronavirus triggered my first real anxiety spiral of the pandemic. A small detail about keeping the cat out of the bedroom where the author’s husband lay confined sent me spinning; I obsessed over the heartbreaking thought of keeping one of my cats who is desperately attached to my husband away from him if he fell ill with the virus. Krista Diamond’s reflection about losing her sense of taste after contracting COVID-19 left me unbearably sad. I, too, have been relying on the small joys of food to get through this weird and awful year, and the notion of losing my sense of taste, as Diamond did, filled me with dread. Last month, Patricia Lockwood wrote a fevered “Diary” entry for The London Review of Books about the deleterious effects of a coronavirus infection on her mental state. Lockwood recounts her delusions and delirium with an almost shocking frankness, even if the essay ends on an ostensibly positive note.

Sure, these stories scared me, but, more than anything else, they moved me. These chronicles of sickness struck me differently than other pandemic personal essays—the ruminations on the nature of time in lockdown or the contemplations of the joys of baking bread—because they spark with a sense of urgency. These works ask readers to try to understand what the state of illness feels like on a subjective level. “What if I were sick?” “What if someone I loved were sick?” “How would I feel?” “What would I do?” I saw these essays as pleas for empathy in the face of a largely unempathetic national response to the pandemic.

In the midst of a concerted partisan effort to discourage any empathetic reaction to the situation, how does one provoke empathy in one’s fellow Americans? I’m consumed by this question as I read the news, watch case counts rise in places where my loved ones live, observe extended family members post disinformation on Facebook about the efficacy and safety of wearing masks, see the statistics on how the virus has disproportionately affected non-white and poor communities, and see how this reality only helps comfortable, white people “other” the problem of the pandemic. Obviously, I don’t want everyone in the country to know someone who has contracted COVID-19; it shouldn’t take that kind of experience and that magnitude of potential suffering for us to collectively understand the importance of keeping each other safe. As humans, we should be capable of an empathetic recognition of others’ suffering. To be empathetic is to understand another’s feelings as if we were having them ourselves; therefore, empathy is always an imaginative, interpretive act.* But what sets off our empathetic imaginations?

 

Reenactor in the film Bisbee 17, man standing in front of the Arizona flag
Fernando, reenacting a historical scene in the film Bisbee ’17.

I was already thinking about ways to generate empathy when I sat down to watch Bisbee ‘17 (2018), director Robert Greene’s third feature-length documentary film, for the first time last month. The film follows a handful of residents of Bisbee, Arizona, as they plan a centennial reenactment of the so-called Bisbee Deportation of 1917. As is the case with Greene’s other work, Bisbee ‘17 explicitly investigates the porous boundary between fiction and nonfiction, as well as the line between acting and being. The reenactment forms the backbone of the project. Most of the activity shown on camera relates to planning and executing the reenactment, and filmed, reenacted scenes make up a considerable portion of the movie’s runtime. Greene intersperses the “real” scenes with the reenacted scenes indiscriminately and with little delineation, to slightly disorienting effect.

While labor historians and historians who study the Mexico-United States border are generally well acquainted with the event, Greene’s film presents the Deportation as a sort of tacitly suppressed history among those who live in Bisbee. In 1917, local law enforcement, at the behest of the copper mine owners, kidnapped suspected participants in a planned labor strike supported by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Mexican and Eastern European immigrants made up the majority of the strikers, who had organized the action to demand equal pay and better working conditions in the copper mines. The sheriff recruited a large posse of locals, mostly white men, to apprehend nearly two thousand striking miners and community members who supported the miners’ cause. After rounding up the labor activists, the sheriff and his crew loaded the strike supporters into cattle cars and sent them east to the New Mexican desert, where they were left to fend for themselves.**

Some residents of present-day Bisbee, the Bisbee of 2017 that Greene visits, are descendants of those who rounded up the striking miners. Since almost none of the deportees ever returned to Bisbee, no descendents of the victims of the Deportation live in the town. Greene’s film suggests that those who participated in enacting the Deportation—those who stayed in Bisbee and whose children stayed in Bisbee—perhaps had complicated feelings about the action and therefore did not want to discuss it or remember it. The centennial reenactment is thus positioned in the film as a  sort of catharsis, a way for the residents of the town to relive this potentially painful incident in history and face it in a new way.

In a book chapter on the rise of reenactment as a form of historical study in the 1970s, historian M.J. Rymsza-Pawloska writes about the ways that historical reenactments enable participants to identify with historical subjects in affective ways.*** She refers to reenactments as “embodied history” and “experiential history,” and both terms point usefully to the ways that participants relate to historical reenactments. Essentially, historical reenactment gives participants unique insights into historical subjects by setting up the conditions to foster empathy across time. By reliving historical events and embodying historical persons, participants begin to develop a new sense of historical consciousness on the emotional level; this helps participants make connections between the past and the present in interesting and sometimes surprising ways. The framework outlined by Rymsza-Pawloska allows us to see historical reenactments as one form of practicing embodied empathy.

 

Reeenactors in the film Bisbee 17; men loading other men into a cattle car
Reenactors in the film Bisbee ’17.

Bisbee ‘17 documents how walking in the shoes of the 1917 deporters and the deportees allows participants in the reenactment to form new understandings of the Deportation one hundred years later. Some participants end up identifying even more closely with the figure they are tasked with playing; after the reenactment, a man who portrays one of the mine owners who set the Deportation in motion seems firmer in his belief that the Deportation was a justified, necessary action. One young man, a Mexican-American non-actor and resident of Bisbee named Fernando, takes a role as one of the striking miners. Fernando, who knew nothing about the Bisbee Deportation until participating in the film, finds meaningful resonances between the events of 1917 and his own life as he performs in the reenactment project. But some participants find their beliefs challenged over the course of the reenactment. In a stunning moment, one reenactor breaks character (as a member of the Sheriff’s posse) to say to the camera, “This feels wrong,” after herding the reenactors playing captured labor activists into a cattle car. This man previously expressed stronger sympathy with the law enforcement side of the Deportation, characterizing the group as well-meaning, patriotic citizens doing their duty.

Greene’s film makes a compelling case for the power of reenactment to engender experiences of empathy through embodied action. Although Bisbee ‘17 cannot be classified as didactic, this thematic throughline is fairly straightforward; the participants themselves verbally express what they’re feeling. Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, by contrast, uses visual language to articulate and play with the close, instinctual relationship in our imaginations between reenactment and empathy. In Hannibal, the protagonist’s almost supernatural gift of “pure empathy” manifests on-screen as reenactment.

 

Overhead shot of Will Graham from the TV show Hannibal
Will Graham mentally reenacting a murder (Hannibal S1E9, “Trou Normand”).

Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), the FBI criminal profiler who serves as one of the show’s two leads (the other lead being, of course, Hannibal Lecter, played here by a perfect Mads Mikkelsen), can catch serial killers by precisely recreating their thinking. Graham arrives at a crime scene, surveys the evidence, and slips into the mind of the killer to reconstruct the murder. The show—as well as the novel it’s based upon—describe this ability as a kind of extraordinary empathy, since Graham catches killers by identifying with them so closely that he can divine their motivations and predict their moves.

When Hannibal depicts Graham retroactively piecing together a series of events at a crime scene, the murders are shown as reenactments. Rather than show the murderer acting out the process Graham describes, like a flashback of sorts, the camera shows Graham himself going through the violent motions. As Graham describes what happened at the crime scene, he also assumes the voice of the killer, using the first person “I” to refer to the murderer.

It’s notable that Graham must go back to the scene of the crime to reconstruct it. He gains insight into the crime by seeing the evidence, but it seems important to his process that his body be where the killer’s body was. The significance of his being at the crime scene suggests that Graham is practicing embodied empathy by putting his body in the same conditions as the killer’s. He can only truly reenact the killing in his mind, but the way these scenes are filmed takes us into Graham’s psyche, where we see him “commit” the murders—making these reenactments “real” for the viewer.

As a way of visually communicating Graham’s powers of empathy, the reenactments are extremely effective. The show takes advantage of the audience’s deep-rooted sense of the link between walking in someone else’s shoes and the work of being empathetic; the images of Graham reenacting gruesome murders stand in clearly and plainly for his empathizing with killers. The reenactment scenes function thematically, as well. The show presents Graham’s extreme empathy, especially used to empathize with psychopaths as he does in service of the FBI, as something unbearable. The reenactments make explicit the implication of what it means for Graham to imagine himself as a murderer, and they lay bare for us what repeatedly and closely empathizing with serial killers does to Graham’s mental state. If he keeps imagining himself as a serial killer, how long will it be until he becomes one?

 

Will Graham from the TV show Hannibal imagines murdering a man
Will Graham in the act of imagining a murder (Hannibal S1E9, “Trou Normand”).

Bisbee ‘17 and Hannibal stand out for how they illustrate the potency and sometime unpleasantness of practicing embodied empathy. Locating feelings in the body and trying to understand others by putting or imagining our bodies in the same state as theirs is hard work. It’s vulnerable work. It’s scary work, particularly when one is trying to empathize with someone going through something disturbing. But it’s worthwhile work.

As confirmed COVID-19 cases rise to record high levels in the U.S. this week, I’ve been thinking about the utility of embodied empathy as a way to foster greater levels of compassion. Illness is primarily a physical ordeal. Confinement and quarantine are physical conditions. Working from home is a physical circumstance. Much of so many people’s understanding of the severity of the pandemic is bound up in whether their own physical states have been affected by it. Could practices of embodied empathy, then, be a fruitful place to start when thinking about cultivating more empathy in our pandemic response?

For me, the answer is yes. Isolated in my own apartment, both my spouse and I so far uninfected and still employed, I’m constantly tempted to ignore what’s going on—to think of no body but my own healthy, housed, and fed body. The personal essays detailing the physical reality of COVID-19 infection are ultimately so forceful for me because they ask me to empathize by requiring me to picture myself in the author’s physical state. They demand that I think about all of the suffering bodies I am so eager to ignore.

Absorbing these essays can be distressing, admittedly. Reading things like coronavirus personal essays, long Twitter threads from “recovered” COVID-19 patients suffering from long-haul symptoms, news stories about mass evictions, and the rest can feel like torturing myself over something I can’t control. Seeing these things as tools for practicing embodied empathy, however, changes the frame. They aren’t scare tactics to be ignored for my own self-preservation, but rather they serve as a critically necessary impetus to look outward—outside of my own body—and find empathy for those who are most adversely affected by the pandemic. From viscerally elicited empathy, positive action can spring.

While practicing embodied empathy can certainly be uncomfortable (as suggested by Bisbee ‘17), even horrifying (as posited by Hannibal), in both Greene’s film and Fuller’s show (at least for the first season), positive action does come from the understanding gained through the practice. Bisbee ‘17 implies that the reenactment of the Deportation might initiate a process of exorcising the town’s ghosts; emotionally engaging with history allows the participants to productively face the town’s violent past and begin to look towards the future. In Hannibal, Graham uses his unique talent to catch serial killers before they strike again. He saves innocent lives.

Perhaps we should cultivate an openness in ourselves, if we can, to practices of embodied empathy and challenge the people in our lives to do the same. Where appeals to logic and reason fail, maybe appeals to the body could prevail. We’re all human. We all have bodies. If we could all be pushed to imagine the experiences of bodies that are not our own, maybe we could collectively conceive of a more empathetic response to the pandemic.

*I would like to note here that real empathy requires a radical openness and a willingness to listen; to be empathetic is to take on another’s feelings as if they were our own, but it is not to project what we think another person’s feelings or experiences might be. Empathy must be based on information and evidence received from the person with whom one empathizes.

**The film implies that the men were left for dead in the desert; however, this is not exactly accurate. While the workers were deserted in a tiny New Mexican town with no provisions, New Mexican officials and the U.S. Army located the party, escorted the deported men to a larger town, and provided them with food and water. Some sources claim that the deportees were deliberately left in close proximity to a U.S. Army base, and evidence suggests that the deportees were meant to be found. For greater context, see Johnson’s introduction to The American Historical Review’s special roundtable on the film (Benjamin H. Johnson, “Introduction,” The American Historical Review, Volume 124, Issue 3, June 2019, pp. 955–958, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz590).

***M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, “Cultural Logics of Reenactment: Embodied Engagements with the American Past,” in History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), pp. 118-138.

Your Dad Is Right: A Paean to Master and Commander (2003)

Posted on by Leah Carlson-Downie
The HMS Surprise from Master and Commander

 

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World released in the fall of 2003, at the height of Russell Crowe’s stardom. The film, based on a long-running series of novels by Patrick O’Brian, had franchise potential and a subtitle that promised sequels. Despite a strongly positive critical reception, the movie famously could not attract enough people to the multiplex to make a profit against its generous $150 million budget. The film earned ten Oscar nods, including for Best Picture, but The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King swept the competition at the ceremony.* Having gotten neither the box office receipts nor the awards hardware to justify a sequel, Master and Commander faded into collective memory as a particular kind of middling prestige picture and a failed franchise starter.

Seventeen years later, Peter Weir’s naval epic has its small share of passionate fans who will sing its praises whenever given the opportunity. It would be fair to say, though, that Master and Commander now has a bit of a reputation as a Dad Movie. It’s generally remembered as a solid war film made with impeccable attention to historical detail, even if the specific characters and events depicted are fictional. I’m not here to argue that the film isn’t a Dad Movie, because that would be disingenuous; however, inclusion in the Dad Movie hall of fame does not automatically disqualify the film from consideration as a truly great work. Master and Commander is the best kind of Dad Movie, and the film deserves a broader appreciation.

As the marquee star and the leading man, the film’s marketing positioned Russell Crowe front and center. Crowe, at the time relatively fresh off of three consecutive Oscar nominations for Best Actor and considered a bankable headliner, received a reported $20 million salary up front for the picture. Although he’s continued to work steadily in Hollywood, many accounts of Crowe’s career mark the misstep of Master and Commander (in conjunction with increasing reports of his violent outbursts offscreen) as the beginning of the end of his superstardom. Given this context, reevaluating the film’s place in Crowe’s filmography becomes an excellent place to begin a larger reevaluation of the film’s reputation.

 

Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey

 

If Master and Commander is a generally underrated film, then it follows that Captain Jack Aubrey never ranked as one of Russell Crowe’s iconic roles. But for those of us who love the movie, Crowe’s magnificent lead performance stands out as one of the best of his career. The actor’s charisma and gravitas have never been put to better use on screen. Crowe gives a lived-in performance that feels effortless; he anchors the film, but he never seems to be working for your attention.

Crowe’s ultra-masculine screen persona has frequently led Hollywood to cast him as men capable of great violence. His imposing physique, coupled with his intense demeanor, lends credibility to his portrayals of brutality. Whether a Crowe character registers as a hero, villain, or antihero often comes down to how the film frames that capacity for violence. Captain Aubrey is of a piece with the rest of Crowe’s decidedly masculine characters; the role is not a pivot or a play against type. But Captain Aubrey epitomizes a masculine ideal rather than the toxic masculinity so often at the root of Crowe’s characters. (Remember, this is a Dad Movie!) As a successful military man, the violence Aubrey enacts is ritualized, justified, and honorable. It is controlled to the utmost degree by both military norms and the captain’s own rigid moral code. The Napoleonic wartime setting rationalizes the necessity of the violence in the film, as the killing occurs in the service of an imagined greater good.

Besides his facility with a bayonet, Aubrey displays another key trait of idealized masculinity: leadership. As Scott Tobias wrote last year in his superb “Revisiting Hours” piece on Master and Commander for Rolling Stone, the film works particularly well “as a study in leadership.”** The film takes a keen interest in what it means for Aubrey to be a worthy leader, and Crowe’s acting choices perfectly complement this thread of the film. Crowe possesses a natural charisma that provides authenticity to his portrait of a respected commander, but he doesn’t coast on this alone. He brings a three-dimensionality to Aubrey by subtly modulating his behavior depending on what image the captain needs to project in any given situation. Crowe reminds us that leadership is an act in both senses of the word—an action and a show. He communicates the way that Aubrey constantly performs leadership without drawing undue attention to his own performance as an actor.

Crowe’s work in the film stands out as some of the most delicate and nuanced acting in his oeuvre. Yes, he delivers stirring speeches with aplomb. (“England is under threat of invasion, and though we be on the far side of the world, this ship is our home. This ship is England,” Aubrey intones to his crew in a particularly rousing moment before the film’s climactic battle sequence.) He fixes his trademark Russell Crowe squint on the horizon as he watches for the enemy ship that Aubrey has been tasked with capturing. Aubrey is, to a degree, another one of Crowe’s serious men. As captain, Aubrey assumes responsibility for everyone on the ship and must bear the burden when men under his command die. But he also cracks jokes—one dinner scene in the captain’s cabin ends with a memorably bad pun about “the lesser of two weevils”—, mentors the younger crewmates, and generally tries to make all of his men feel needed on the ship. Crowe brings an attractive warmth to Aubrey, a quality that rarely shines through in the actor’s other roles. It isn’t all glowering from the deck; leadership also looks like forming honest connections and making people feel special. Crowe takes an understated approach, and this light touch belies the intentionality and thoughtfulness of the performance.

 

Dinner in the Captains Cabin on the HMS Surprise

 

Master and Commander undoubtedly provides a window into an exclusively masculine world. Women are barely alluded to visually or verbally; men comprise the bounded universe of the HMS Surprise. In addition to the military hierarchy of power codified and enforced by the British Royal Navy, a network of homosocial relationships defines life onboard the ship. These relationships are largely positive and entirely platonic; the crew members mostly support each other, with one tragic exception. This isn’t a film about problematic or alienated masculinity. As one would expect of a Dad Movie classic, Master and Commander mostly posits that men are alright. 

The film does not completely gloss over the more unpleasant or even traumatic aspects of British naval service in the Napoleonic Wars. An adolescent midshipman undergoes an arm amputation early in the film; one character offhandedly mentions the practice of impressment, reminding the viewer that some of the men on the ship are likely there involuntarily; and several members of the crew who we have gotten to know rather well are dead by the end of the movie. But the crew members make a home for themselves on the ship, and life there isn’t unbearable. They make friends, they make do. Weir’s film suggests that there is something redemptive, something powerful, about male camaraderie. While this theme isn’t at all unusual for a war film, Master and Commander is especially compelling for the way it treats this idea as more than a truism.

The film takes male homosociality as one of its main subjects, and so, fittingly, the close friendship between Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin (an also excellent Paul Bettany) serves as the film’s center.*** Aubrey technically outranks Maturin, so it’s not truly a relationship of equals; but Aubrey treats Maturin as a confidant and sometime advisor. Aubrey and Maturin seem to hold each other in genuine high regard, and their mutual respect forms the foundation of their relationship. In fact, these two men respect each other enough to remain friends even as they almost constantly disagree with one another. Their opposing approaches to life lay out the final thematic preoccupation of the film.

 

Dr. Maturin and Captain Aubrey

 

I love Master and Commander most of all for the way that it captures the rhythm of pursuit. On the one hand, Master and Commander is literally about the thrill of the chase—the HMS Surprise follows the French privateer Acheron for the entirety of the film’s runtime. Aubrey has orders to engage the Acheron and hopefully take her; what little plot the movie has revolves around this objective. Weir mounts three battles between HMS Surprise and the Acheron, and each encounter thrills in its own distinct way. Watching Aubrey and his men outwit the superior French ship through various clever means proves to be an undeniable pleasure. Most of the film’s budget went into the action set pieces, and the practical effects on display are spectacular. 

But the movie spends just as much time with the crew during the downtime between battles, providing a glimpse into everyday life on the ship. The texture of the film comes from this contrast between the action and the waiting, the forward momentum of the hunt and the stillness of the quiet points when action is impossible. Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin each embody one of these two states, to a certain degree. Aubrey always wants to push onward and take every opportunity for a fight that presents itself. He’s driven by duty and motivated by the thought of glory. Maturin thrives in the cessations, enjoying the moments when he can indulge his interests as a naturalist. He sees stalking the Acheron beyond what was explicitly ordered as a doomed exercise, and he repeatedly asks Aubrey to consider giving up on taking the enemy ship.

Aubrey’s desire to unceasingly chase the next goal exists in tension with Maturin’s wish to stand still and find contentment in the observable present; the way that the film doesn’t resolve this tension only strengthens the metaphor. Master and Commander never exactly comes down on the side of one man or the other. The film presents both men as reasonable, capable, and intelligent. Aubrey and Maturin each willingly concede their point to the other at different junctures of the film. We experience the gratification of a successful maneuver against the Acheron, but we also see the human cost of Aubrey’s refusal to call it a job done and leave the Acheron alone. The film makes us privy to the small joys among the crew during the pauses in fighting, but we’re also made to understand how an inability to go after a common objective can lead to discontent and unrest among the men. The film depicts this push and pull with an unusual clarity, resulting in a work that perfectly reflects the core truth of how it feels trying to balance ambition and fulfilment in one’s own life. Seen through this lens, the open ending of the film turns out to be rather perfect. There is no single achievement the attainment of which will satisfy the ambitious person. The pursuit is incessant.

The purity of this metaphor cannot be separated from the masculine milieu of the film. The drive to make one’s name, to leave some mark of one’s existence in a public way, has historically been coded as masculine in the Western tradition. Concepts of gender essentialism used to keep the status quo reinforce the idea that women aren’t naturally ambitious. Films about women’s ambition necessarily have to grapple with (or can be biased by) that complicated reality. On film, as in life, ambitious women face different treatment than ambitious men. Because ambition is often assumed to be an unquestioned positive value for men to possess, Master and Commander can more easily extrapolate its argument to the realm of the abstract.

As a film that deals with ideal masculinity, Master and Commander works so well precisely because of its Dad Movie tendencies. The movie presents an aspirational and positive, but not sugar-coated, vision of what it means to be an admirable man. Russell Crowe’s casting and performance are so perfect here because the actor trades in on his “masculine” reputation to create a paragon in Captain Aubrey. The film posits that these masculine ideals are valuable in and of themselves, in isolation. By sidestepping the subject of women almost entirely, the film never puts its masculine ideals into any oppositional, binary configuration with feminine ideals. Although the film shows a solely male domain, the movie never implies that only men can achieve these ideals. Like the true Dad Movie that it is, Master and Commander instead envisions these positive aspects of masculinity (like good leadership, camaraderie through hardship, and healthy ambition) as universally good values applicable to anyone on the gender spectrum. If you’ve written off Master and Commander as “just a Dad Movie,” it’s worth a second look. The film’s Dad Movie-ness is actually its secret strength.

 

Dr. Maturin and Captain Aubrey playing cello and violin

 

 

*Master and Commander won two Academy Awards, for Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing. These were the only two categories in which Master and Commander did not compete against Return of the King, which won all eleven awards for which it was nominated (and which still holds the record for highest clean sweep at the Oscars).

**This piece convinced me to revisit Master and Commander myself. Prior to last year, I had not seen the film since I was a preteen. Tobias’s framing of Weir’s film as the anti-Pirates of the Caribbean made me laugh; when I first watched Master and Commander, I disliked it essentially because it wasn’t Pirates, with which I was obsessed at the time.

***While I’m sure someone has written Aubrey/Maturin fanfic and published it somewhere on the internet, there’s no textual evidence in the film that Aubrey and Maturin are more than friends to each other. I would also argue that Crowe and Bettany don’t have enough sexual chemistry to support a ship. (No pun intended.)