Realism and magic realism

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Other

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan surely catches our attention because Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers grows feathers after she kills Mila Kunis’s Lily backstage to perform the Black Swan role in the final act. You cannot just forget the film because of that.

This psychological thriller—featuring Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers, a ballerina haunted by some schizophrenic ambition—brims with magic realism, an aesthetic style in which “magical elements are blended into a realistic atmosphere in order to access a deeper understanding of reality.” The effects particularly in the final ballet scene where Nina grows more feathers than the previous times it appeared would surely remind us of the film.

Because of the device used, we are made to believe that “magical elements are explained like normal occurrences that are presented in a straightforward manner” allowing the “real” (Nina Sayers dream to be the Swan Queen) and the “fantastic” (she really becomes a Swan) to be accepted in the same stream of thought.

The obsession to become the Swan Queen later brings into the character graphic hallucinations that eventually cost Nina Sayers’ life.

Natalie’s facial features being transformed into a swan—rouged eyes, aquiline nose and elongated neck—all compliment to a dramatic flourish—where at the end of the performance, even we the audience could be convinced that she very well looks as the best Swan Queen for Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

While Nina Sayers’ obsession for the Swan Queen role is enough persuasion, the horrific undertones notwithstanding, we the audience get the eerie feeling in Aronofsky’s close-up shots of the lead character who dances her way to death as the ambition-obsessed ballerina who lived and was haunted by realities she herself created.

Anyone or anything from Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan will win an Oscar. Choreography, effects, actress. Let’s see.

Meanwhile.

The first time I watched Christian Bale’s Dicky Edlund in The Fighter, I already rooted for him to win a Best Supporting Actor citation.

A drama about boxer “Irish” Micky Ward’s unlikely road to the world light welterweight title, The Fighter features Ward’s Rocky-like rise as he is shepherded by half-brother Dicky, a boxer-turned-trainer who rebounded in life after nearly being knocked out by drugs and crime.

A far cry from Batman and his previous roles, Christian Bale’s Dicky Edlund exudes with stark realism, a has-been boxer backed up by his mother who hoped for a could have been contender, reminiscent of Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954).

Not another boxing movie at the Oscars you might say. But there is more to this boxing movie which rather “depicts subjects as they appear in everyday life.”

In The Fighter, we see Dicky Eklund’s mere claim to fame is his 1978 boxing match with Sugar Ray Leonard, where Eklund knocked down Leonard, who eventually won the match.

Now a crack addict, Eklund is in front of HBO cameras making a documentary about him. Dicky has also acted as one of the two trainers for half-brother Micky Ward, a decade younger than him, first known as a brawler and used by other boxers as a stepping stone to better boxers.

Both boxers are managed by their overbearing mother Alice Ward (Melissa Leo) who believes it better to keep it all in the family. Now unreliable owing to his crack addiction, Dicky’s move with Alice at one of Micky’s bouts dawns on the latter that his boxing career is being stalled and even undermined by them, who are only looking out for themselves.

The situation allows Bale’s character to deliver an uncontrived performance that highlights a family drama and gives sibling rivalry a kind of high never before seen onscreen before.

Meanwhile, Amy Adams’ Charlene Fleming—Micky’s new girlfriend, a college dropout and now local bartender who inspires him—pulls out the fulcrum to the other side, opposite Micky’s family, when she salvages him from this predicament.

Much to Alice and Dick’s anger, Micky comes to choose between them and Charlene. The story’s rising action renders each character emotionally charged—each one wanting to claim what is good for the fighter, and each one being allowed to shine individually onscreen. Awesome story.

Bale’s character greatly evolved from the Batman lead role and other virile roles to one that exudes with so much life. Like Tom Hanks’ Andrew Beckett in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993), Bale must have shed weight to fit the role of a has-been boxer who makes business out of his brother just like his mother.

Earning three Oscar nominations for Bale, Adams and Leo, The Fighter drives some of the best punches among other films I have seen in the past year.

The first time I watched it last year, I immediately thought it was essentially noteworthy of recognition. Christian Bale’s crack[ed] character is so real you will find him in your neighborhood.

With the larger-than-life performance of an underdog who wants to bounce back, Bale’s character transforms the movie about his brother to a movie about himself. If at all, he is the Fighter being referred to in the film.

Let’s see how some real practitioners of the craft consider these performances, which other people might call art.

The Little Prince & We

Every writer has some purpose inherent in his work, a mindset to which his ideas and ideals gravitate. In one good book, this strikes as some insight which enables the readers to see the author as an advocate of some truth.

While such truth is universal, embracing an aspect of human life, it is only when the reader realizes this truth that the author is seen as his interpreter, his means to see himself.

French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is no less than this author. His popular novel The Little Prince (1945) is just but one of his greatest revelations of the self, much as he reveals himself.

Considered a fairy story ostensibly written for children, The Little Prince is the type of book immediately dismissed as “charming,” something only delightful and attractive. Others insist that it may not be necessary for one to finish reading the work to interpret what it sends him to know. The book may be simply for children in each of us.

Children are said to face the world by themselves. They always ask questions and they never run out of them. They want to know almost everything, just like the little prince who wants to know everything about the earth.

In The Little Prince, the characters that the prince meets one by one represent the influence on the mind of a child: the snake the fox and so many others shaped his view of the earth in many ways.

Chapter 16 begins: "So then the seventh planet was the Earth". On the Earth, he starts out in the desert and meets a snake that claims to have the power to return him to his home planet (A clever way to say that he can kill people, thus "Sending anyone he wishes back to the land from whence he came.")

The prince’s meeting with the snake delineates the author’s concept of isolation—desert imaging the loneliness or more aptly the dryness of everything. This resonates in the author’s distance from his family and his dangerous position as pilot unsure of his future feats during the war.

When the snake tells the prince, “It is lonely among men,” the author affirms that some men are unhappy even with their peers, as if to say, loneliness knows no favourites. The presence of the snake applies to the author’s judgment of evil—as one who confuses people and creates chaos in human life, but also one who will eventually make him realize his weakness or strength.

As the little prince wanders in the desert, vivid perception about the author and his work are seen. When the prince meets the flows in the same desert, the author elaborates that all things—short joys, isolation, and intense emotions brought about by evil—are so useless if man does not find meanings from them. Man has to transcend all circumstances with them to find meaning for himself.

In their conversation, the little prince comes to know from the rose about the nature of men—or what men really are. The reply of the flower strongly tells of human nature: “But no one never knows where to find them. The wind blows them away. They have no roots and that makes their life more difficult.

The prince meets a desert-flower, who, having seen a caravan pass by, tells him that there are only a handful of men on Earth and that they have no roots, which lets the wind blow them around making life hard on them.

Children, the author suggests, should realize through time that while life is fleeting, men have no constancy in their lives. Their decisions often have no permanence.

As the prince goes further, he now finds himself alone in the desert. When he speaks, an echo answers him: “Be my friends. I am all alone.” “I am all alone— all alone— all alone.” This scene makes for man’s call for companionship, for by his very nature, man is virtually made for companionship. Needless, man is social by nature. He cannot live by himself or alone. He needs the company of other people. He must interact with other people. Though the world does seem unfriendly, he needs to.

The little prince climbs the highest mountain he has ever seen. From the top of the mountain, he hopes he will see the whole planet and find people, but he sees only a desolate, craggy landscape. When the prince calls out, his echo answers him, and he mistakes it for the voices of humans. He thinks Earth is unnecessarily sharp and hard, and he finds it odd that the people of Earth only repeat what he says to them.

Here, it is as if de St. Exupéry says every person must reach out; for he will have no grasp of the wholeness of the world unless he reaches out to others. With others he may be able to find (the) meaning (of things).

After wandering the desert for a while, the little prince sees signs of civilization, and “all roads lead to the abodes of men.” There he meets a flower very much like his flower in his own planet.

Eventually, the prince comes upon a whole row of rosebushes, and is downcast because he thought that his rose was the only one in the whole universe. He begins to feel that he is not a great prince at all, as his planet contains only three tiny volcanoes and a flower he now thinks of as common. He lies down in the grass and weeps.

Of course, he is saddened to know that his flower is only one among many others, and later realized that he need not brag about it. To know and realize one is not entirely different from millions of others saps confidence. One therefore realizes there is nothing here to brag or boast about.

The author places the helpless child—a little prince—such a minute character as his focal point of introspection, his looking glass to articulate that the universe is too vast, if not too profound, for man to simply ponder.

Contemplating Cruz Contemporary

In the heyday of Philippine Panorama’s fiction prize some ten years ago, Isidoro Cruz’s “Chalk Dust” won first prize for 1996.

A short story originally submitted to the Iligan National Writers Workshop the year prior to its win, “Chalk Dust” must have won the coveted national literary prize for its sensitivity to the individual plight of the overseas Filipino worker who, in recent years, has been considered our contemporary national hero, because of the dollars they scrape and scrimp for one of the lamest economies around the world.

Cruz’s “Chalk Dust” weaves a piece in the life of Clarissa, a former teacher back in the Philippines who went to work as a domestic helper in Singapore. After her contract failed because her original employers backed out, Clarissa eventually worked for the Tangs, a couple with two boys—and with whom the story virtually takes an unforgettable turn.

The situation of the protagonist comes in handy—one morning Clarissa is leaving the Tangs. Apart from a cheap card that she gives to Clarissa, Mrs. Nancy Tang has only few words to say to her as she starts for the airport.

The rest of the story unfolds quite symbolically through flashback, a narrative device that best renders a regretful tone—the one portrayed by the protagonist herself. Right away, we get to ask why Clarissa is leaving the Tangs. What must be the reason why she stops employment?

We answer this question by taking the trip with Clarissa as she journeys home. As memories flash back and forth—we are bit by bit drawn into her sad story. We learn that Clarissa was a former teacher back in her country. We also learn that her father is totally outrageously against her working abroad as a domestic helper, lamenting that they had labored much to help her through college, but not just to end up “scrubbing somebody else’s bathroom.”

We then know that Clarissa left teaching because she did not like it, and it didn’t really pay. We also learn that Clarissa could not really stomach her students’ behavior. That is why she must have left the country to seek the virtual “greener pastures,” whatever that means to her. Because the previous employers whom she applied for backed out, we get to know that Clarissa had to make do with what is in front of her nose—she had to work for a couple with two kids.

Through her sensitivity, we also learn that her employers’ residence is a stifling enclosure, squeezed in a rising metropolis, a busy city where probably progress dissipates the very energies of people, and where the only thing you are given to eat is noodles.

In the midst of this cloistered, monotonous life [which she finds too irksome even exasperating], Clarissa does not at all realize that at any rate she lives in a home that instead rises from the stifling smog and pollution which can kill her.

Eventually, Clarissa realizes her work is not much different from her classroom work. Yes, she may have fewer kids to attend to—just the two sons of her employers, but she is rather convinced they are not much different from her students whom she despised back home.

In the airport, Clarissa meets Trining, a fellow domestic helper. Unlike Clarissa, Trining is a “full-fledged” maid, who must have worked for a number of employers already—so much so that she has been going abroad back and forth, seeking to earn a living for relatives back home who rather only tell her what to bring home next time, and perhaps shying away from the neighbor’s prying eyes or gossip about her work abroad.

And unlike Trining, Clarissa cannot talk as much because hers is a different story—she is not happy from where she came. She’s not excited about going home to family with bags full of pasalubong.

Along the way, after all that was said and done, Clarissa vacillates between what has beens and what ifs. Inasmuch as she does not want to return home, she is doing so right now. She is even catching her trip on time.

What has she gone wrong? When asked about her whereabouts, she also wonders why is she going back to the place where she once despised because she did not like it—everything, what she was doing, what she was, what she was not doing, etc.—there. Was it something she did?

“I’ll tell her! I’ll tell her.!”—Clarissa cannot forget the boy’s face. When the mischievous elder son Jimmy saw Clarissa eating her favorite noodle soup, he started teasing her, soliciting the attention of his younger brother Sam, and told him they’d be playing cooking. Jimmy took condiments from the countertop and sprinkled sorts of other condiments on to Clarissa’s soup.

Even when Clarissa tried to stop Jimmy, the boy did not listen to her until he completely spilled what Clarissa was eating. When Clarissa flared up and then physically reprimanded the boy, the situation only got complicated—the boy spat at her, and on impulse, she slapped him until he cried and kicked her away. When the boy cried and threatened to tell his mother, Clarissa equally threatened that she’d burn the whole place should he squeal.

Interestingly, we do not learn whether the boy ever did tell his parents about it. The slightest hint we learn is that Clarissa must have grown tired of her wards’ misdemeanor which, to some, might have been unobjectionable—if one is well oriented enough to work there for the sake of money to send home, or if one is totally disposed to earn money in a foreign country.

In all, she must have only relived the days when she was a teacher, perennially irritated by the slight, mischievous ways by her students, and taking all these things personally. After all, how else can she take all of these, without her being a person?

At least, her employers are quite civil enough to just let her go—no questions asked. Whether the boy squealed to his parents, she can only assume. She cannot demand as to ask them how come she has to go. On the ways with which they rear their children, her gracious employers must have learned a number of lessons in the past—so maids like Clarissa cannot do as much.

The story’s title “Chalk Dust” forges the clearest image for the whole story, as it spells the dichotomy between the good and bad elements of the protagonist’s experience.

She is going home now because the Tangs simply fired her for her misbehavior. Funny that it was her who most probably misbehaved. Once she must have thought she cannot be a teacher. But now she thought she cannot also be a helper—inasmuch as she must have hated the chalk dust, it is also easy for her dust off any irritating situation she finds herself in. Shouldn’t she realize that a teacher is also a helper? Or has she ever realized that?

Of course, the story ends as the journey ends. She has arrived home, but what still pesters her is how that boy made fun of her picture, and made her see it when he put it on her pillow.

Clarissa’s plane landed already, but her disgust about the whole thing has not yet subsided—truly, she must have been home now, but is she at all unscathed?

In the bigger picture, “Chalk Dust” was hewn just as when the country would witness the tragic fate of Flor Contemplacion, a domestic helper charged of murder of the child of her employers. For months, Flor Contemplacion dominated the country’s headlines, as it was not just the case of one Filipina maid working in a foreign country.

It was rather the Filipinos’ global repute—the sheer dignity that people have come to associate with the “dignity of a Filipino” which reads much like our national pride.

Despite the intervention pursued by the Ramos government who was rather concerned with globalization [read: the fast-rising export of domestic helpers,] Contemplacion still was hanged in the Changgi prison. The most that we succeeded in doing was to immortalize her story via Nora Aunor, whose performance raked more profits for film and media moguls.