Video of the Day

Unlived-In

The most appallingly/appealingly artificial aspect of TLC's Sister-Wives isn't so much as the polished gooberism of the husband (more an image of a 'Hollywood polygamist' than Bill Paxton would ever be allowed to be), but the strangely antiseptic nature of the house in which this family "lives" ... mostly white walls, everything spare and strategically placed, a flimsy illusion of a family home ...

Tunnels

Has anyone ever written anything about the visual-spatial-narrative conventions of tunnels and doorways in sf spaceships? (Not just in spaceships - futuristic subterranean lairs and submarine vessels also work.) I'm thinking here, perhaps not completely accurately, of the Alien franchise, Event Horizon, Resident Evil, Sunshine, the rather good Pandorum (Christian Alvart, 2009), Leviathan, Supernova ... one's running from the villain/monster, trying desperately to beat the imminent closing of a portal, or trying desperately to close portals to cut off the v/m. The convention is about as rote as the fireball or explosion outrun by our heroes; I wonder though if there have been unsung developments or experiments in the form and substance of this particular kind of tunnel-portal chase ...

[Similar networks of tropes in these kinds of films - the mutated future of humanity in yesterday's lost ships; insanity and reckoning with the finitude of the cosmos (see also Contact). Also, the question of esoteric knowledge, e.g., a character knowing Latin in Event Horizon, and another decoding Russian in Leviathan.]

Gaga

In interviews here and abroad, I have constantly denounced America's fetish for small female noses, a phenomenon that may be fairly recent in origin. It seems to belong to the Betty Crocker period following World War II, when domesticity was a primary value and when ethnics wanted to assimilate and become just as bland as the ruling, Protestant country-club class.

Diana Vreeland, one of the great, stentorian dragon ladies of the century, had a granite profile and a will of steel. Who is a better role model for young women today -- Fashion Empress Vreeland or NOW's sanctimonious Patricia Ireland, with her blankly decorous, WASP features and breathy little treacly voice? Vreeland, with her soaring imagination and theatrical flair, was a survivor of those two splendid decades after the passage of suffrage when female power ran the gamut from Martha Graham to Joan Crawford.

While growing up, I was inundated with detestably perky, button-nosed blondes like Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee, who seemed like sticky, walking marshmallows. (As an adult, I learned to appreciate the talents of all three women.) Barbra Streisand's arrival on the scene in the early 1960s was revolutionary: That aggressive beak of a nose, which she refused to change, was the prow of the battleship of the New Woman, whose feisty spirit preceded the feminist organizations that are falsely credited with all the energy, aspirations and achievements of my generation.

My opinion is that a strong woman should have a strong nose. Look at Sarah Bernhardt, Virginia Woolf, Edith Sitwell, Maria Callas, Joan Baez, Betty Friedan, Monica Vitti, Raquel Welch, Princess Diana, Sandra Bernhard, Niki Taylor. Now look at Meg Ryan -- no, don't! Thank God for Heroin Chic, after the Meg Ryan era of Saccharine Snippiness.

I'm concerned about young girls having nose jobs too early and getting stuck for life with unfixably juvenile features. Even Cher, who had a fabulous, haughty profile, succumbed to the social pressure and dully evened her nose out at midlife. Downtown Julie Brown is another fashion victim: She was very striking when first on MTV after emigrating from England but then immediately bobbed her nose. Now Courtney Love has done the same thing and reportedly has had to be dissuaded from a second operation -- the Michael Jackson Surgical Addiction Syndrome.

Actresses are very short-sighted when they over-reduce their noses to get cutesy, ingénue roles. Michele Lee and Connie Sellecca are good examples of handsome women whose forceful, ethnic features have matured dramatically but who are stuck with the teeny-bopper pug noses that won them early popularity. The great roles for adult actresses -- Euripides' Medea, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Strindberg's Miss Julie -- require strong, assertive noses.

As an Italian-American, my premises are usually Mediterranean. I've always loved the aquiline Roman nose of senators and generals, as well as the sharp Greek nose, extending evenly without a break from the brow, that one sees on ancient statues of the Olympian gods. It's interesting that you mention Gillian Anderson, since strangers often tell my partner, Alison Maddex, that she resembles Anderson's Scully. All the women I've been involved with in a major way have had strong noses; it seems to be one of my romantic motifs.

Until women in the television and film industry come to their senses and stop mutilating their noses, America will be stuck with this bunny-rabbit model of womanhood -- harmless, appealing and hopelessly fluffy. The Woman Who Would Be President knows better: Gov. Christine Todd Whitman may take that Duke of Wellington profile right into the Oval Office. (Paglia)

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Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest video-Alejandro) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over… (Paglia)

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Lady Gaga - who, I think, makes some wonderful pop songs - is "of her age" in a way that the poor provocateur Camille Paglia may not "get" inasmuch as Gaga's whole schtick involves the anticipation of their complex, contradictory, and perhaps overemphasized interpretations (as with reversible films). Aside from the best hooks in contemporary pop music that I know, outside of the New Pornographers & La Roux (not that I'm an expert or even a good pretender to such a thing), Gaga's music and her personality are interesting in that they are aware of the "think pieces" that are to have been written about her. It's not that she's not shallow, or still a mere product of the spectacle, but she's so in a way that deserves a certain amount of credit ...

Right to Left

From a Tiny Little Bird

Believe Your Eyes

"There has never been so much talk about 'the power of the image' since it has ceased to have any. The overwhelming majority of 'images' which have currency on television nowadays are less those which might possess any intrinsic strength than those which represent power and which 'work' for it as 'brand images' work for a company. It is strange that we have needed a war in order to re-discover that the image was also ever a lure (Lacan was interested in animal mimicry, in the eyelets on the peacock's tail and their grotesque manner of 'giving the eye'). A lure meant as a decoy, to divert attention and gain time. Advertising, for example, is less about inculcating selling reflexes than about indicating the power of paying a lot for a space with the sole purpose of no one else occupying it." (Serge Daney, from Cinema-in-Transit)

The old, "naive" realist-belief in an image, or of an image, still resides in the gray area where one isn't sure of what is being faked, or of what might happen: bills & coins flushed down the toilet in The Seventh Continent, footage of pets being (possibly) tortured, moments in which we cannot discern between an actor's emotions and a character's - not simply that we are unable to, but that there is even no hope of an abstract distinction. Fear in the eyes. This takes a certain liberality or magnificence on the part of the filmmaker; it is the artistic counterpart to advertising's own implicit indicating of "the power of paying a lot for a space."

The circus ring, and the caravan of trailers & tents, provide a set of metaphors for cinema to remark upon its own assemblage of attractions - bad films set in or around a circus can be unbearable, unless they're bizarrely, grotesquely fascinating (like with the Joan Crawford vehicle Berserk!); notable films of course like Lola Montes and I Clowns pop up from time to time; and then there's Rivette's 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup, which reserves its footage of in-the-ring performance itself for these dizzying, terrifying moments of uncertainty. (Plus, Sergio Castellito with a suitcase full of plates provides one of the bigger laughs I've had at the movies in weeks.) Rivette is the master of the slow burn, I think because he is also its most dedicated, humble student.

Vicious

"To transform oneself into a corpse, a martyr, or something formless and repellent is not a matter of expiating a collective evil but recalling its existence. These simulated remains do not aim to be hidden bodies (that would amount to making them all over again) but instead manifest as best they can the moral infection that propagates itself beginning with the moment of the Nazi death camps." (Brenez on Ferrara, p. 152)

In White Hunter Black Heart Clint Eastwood, who essentially plays John Huston, in a minor way tries to exorcise the demons or zombies of Nazism through a bit of black humor (see); again and again World War II, and the Holocaust, offer themselves or are offered up as the central pivot against which the cinema measures itself. Recently I took another look at a different postwar Huston - not The African Queen - but Key Largo, which is my favorite of the early Hustons by some margin. (Not that I have quite seen all of them.) A postwar ex-major without home or career finds his way down to the Florida Keys to see the widow of his old buddy & her invalid father-in-law. Their hotel is commandeered by Edward G. Robinson, whose villainous 1930s Hollywood legacy welcomes itself to the home of a certain stance of postwar realism (location shooting and/or its simulacrum, and relatively respectful/liberal "local color").

Heidegger, 1949: "Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same thing as the blockade and starvation of the countryside, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs." (See also Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command.)

(Back) across 110th St ...

... down to the Bowery, and beyond.













And then:














If you compare early sleazy genre films by Ferrara to comparable projects, like the queasily-entertaining Vice Squad (dir. Gary Sherman, 1982), you may see where the differences between the good & the great inhere. Ferrara cuts to the root of an image, a sound, or a desire, like a notable poet is supposed to cut to the root of a sound or a word; his films are intriguing because they rise above being only symptomatic in a rich or sophisticated or enjoyable way. (Though in some contexts, in some conversations, I might well defend these latter kinds of films, too.) Ferrara takes us to a source, to the place where the stream might be redirected, even if only - for now - in our imaginations.

"I don't know why you do it, Walsh. You'll never change the streets." (Princess in Vice Squad)

Image of the Day

Tryin' to Make Ends Meet

(a) media culture places far too much emphasis on endorsement, as though all opinion were ultimately nothing but polemics, and in service of polemics.

(b) though there are certainly "divisive" films or filmmakers I'll "take a stand" on, only a thoughtless person would allow the received imposition of the property of "divisiveness" to force a public all-or-nothing stance on any and every purportedly divisive entity.

(c) which is not to say that contradictions and oppositions don't exist and are not sometimes of exceptional importance, naturally.

(d) as if one person's public stance, in more than a minuscule percentage of instances, has any bearing on anything of importance at all - outside, perhaps, that person's own sphere of acquaintance and intimacy, in which case, "public" isn't always the right word, is it?

(e) in Jackie Brown the face of Pam Grier is a beloved ghost, the haunting of a screen idol, but the film (and her image in it) is not a direct homage but, if anything, an indirect one - an echo, a detachment -

(f) because Jackie Brown (like much of Tarantino, who is not "just" an upgraded video store clerk, though that he is too) is a filmic translation or expression of a particular kind of genre fiction, a Leonard-Willeford realm of writing that is itself a take and a twist on older forms of pulp knowledge.

(g) a dimestore author-psychology observation, to be thrown out but not necessarily accepted: Tarantino likes leisurely long shots, holding the frame (like the final two shots of Jackie Brown) because he is constantly revisiting totemic, imaginary constellations of images and moods from his own experiential, audiovisual past; his work is a form of yearning, which is why title cards and musical accompaniment seem to elicit just as much as care & attention as, say, plot mechanics. If not more. The character of this yearning may be immature, underdeveloped, pointless, or any number of things wanting - and yet, a problem of film culture is that, I fear, some reader too snarkily intelligent for her own good may read that I have even ascribed so noble and counter-intuitive a property as that of yearning to a guy like Tarantino. Because one must "endorse" or "reject."

(h) in the current issue of CinemaScope, Olaf Möller summarizes shortcomings in the scholarship on German filmmaker Veit Harlan by insisting that, of course, not only were his allegedly "apolitical" melodramas hardly apolitical, but his greatest work is often absolutely also the worst, politically and ideologically.

(i) Serge Daney warned of the dogmatism of a question of film critical intervention, in one case, where "the aesthetic criterion and the political criterion are given equal status. We assume that 'if there is something missing on the formal level there must also be something missing on the political level.' We remind those inclined to forget it that 'forms are not neutral,' but this is just an excuse for not investigating their very real content, for not spelling out this content in political terms - we leave that to others." (from "The Critical Function," 1973-1974) Daney, in this piece, also points to the problematic importance of discerning, apparently, what is being said by a film, and how. But in trying to go to the roots to find the strongest and most powerfully effective answers, criticism may paralyze the critic, so that they are "bound to have nothing to say when called upon to make a concrete 'intervention' in respect of particular films."

(j) the abandonment of polemics is not even possible as far as I can speculate, but I do think that to subordinate all thought to polemics is the death of thought, and the death of culture.

(k) it's the small detail, like e.g., Irving Lerner, in whose two great late '50s Vince Edwards vehicles, Murder by Contract and City of Fear, we see some of the through-lines from real filmic "noir" to this later oblique-homage "pulp" almost imperceptibly ... accomplishing the latter by the accumulation of small offbeat details and characterizations, characters noted for their character-ness.

Quote of the Day

"Perhaps one of the last true shills in exploitation marketing, films like Blood Cult and Death Row Diner pulled the wool over many-a-renter’s eyes. Instead of an actual “movie,” take home viewers were scourged by 90 minute blasts of overly sleazy guts ‘n’ boobs, all filtered through the lenses of consumer quality camcorders and 3/4” tape. No-budget producers tapped into a goldmine when they realized that it was cheaper to finance their own productions than license already existing films. And why not? Since a renter couldn’t detect the filming method by its box art, it was too late once they returned home. The $2 had already been spent. Touché!" (Joseph A. Ziemba, Bleeding Skull; see also here.)

Young People

(Image h/t to Andy Rector's Kino Slang post on the film from a while back, in the comments section of which you can read him and Miguel Marías discuss Allan Dwan movies.)

Premised upon the most treacly New Deal propaganda you can imagine, Young People (1940) is a Shirley Temple movie with the superb talents of Jack Oakie and Charlotte Greenwood, playing her adopted parents. The trio is a stage family intent upon giving up the vaudeville life in order to raise Shirley "normally" in a classic American town. However, once the Ballantines get to their idyllic New England town, they quickly and obliviously decide they know what's best for everything, and their first night in - during the town meeting - they side with the town's dynamic "young people" contingent - against the mean, stingy, stodgy old farts who oppose progress. By "progress," the film means that the old folks oppose, essentially, a voluntary WPA-ish program to stimulate the economy in their town: industrialization, tourism, and so on. They oppose this because they are geezers and marms who don't like to have fun, which is really what they need to do in order to implement a more open sociopolitical program in their town, courtesy of a sub-quasi-Wilhelm Reichian solution. Meanwhile, the Ballantine family flips between being utterly charming (for us as viewers) and nosy, boorish 'accidental elitists' (to the old citizens of the community). The moral: Anyone who opposes the New Deal programs - although explicit references to partisan politics or policy in this film are fairly tame & vague - is, obviously, old at heart, blindly traditionalist, pessimistic, no fun, cruel, snobbish, and exceedingly petty.

Why is any of this the way it is?

OK, so the film is addressing children (in part), but why is the political component of the film also motivated by a logic as absolutely simplistic as the standard storyline logic of rebellious young kids vs. old codgers? Young People is utterly devoid of social criticism on even the most basic level: as a political movie, it seems to me, it is entirely a flimsy bit of propaganda for voting (thoughtlessly) in favor of the party which most loudly trumpets what it brings is Progress. Progress, of course, is imagined here solely as economic stimulation by way of government assistance and oversight. (That, and ensuring that the village elders give ample space to the twentysomethings, and also allow the kids of Shirley Temple's age to perform vaudeville routines and not just sappy choir numbers.) There's no such thing as race, class, or capitalism in this world; politics reduces to character flaws, and the way to solve problems is to barge through them - so long as Progress is on your side.

It is not as though Hollywood was incapable of making films that evinced the admittedly stereotyped - but not necessarily wrong, and in my eyes far more sympathetic - code of small towns and tough neighborhoods that you have to earn your place in the community over time, and work your way toward the respect of the citizenry. This is how organic communities work, how they develop and (yes) change - it's partly why John Ford's films are so richly realized, because he & his collaborators know something about how to sketch lively communities (families, towns, nations, all complex networks of interrelation between materiality & mythology). But Young People's political program makes Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman look like a model of both balanced portraiture and cutting criticism. Both objects work under the banner of triumphant progress, but the latter, at least, nods in the direction of slowly built community ties (Michaela Quinn has to get her tooth pulled - unnecessarily - in the first or second episode to earn the respect of the townsfolk), and also provides at least initial awareness of those differentiations of the social body such as class and race.

So again, I ask, why is any of this the way it is? Having done no research toward answering the question, I am still provoked by this movie to ask why, how, for whom it was really working. Did anyone buy its "message" in 1940? Or today?

If I'm hard on Young People here - a bonbon, a Shirley Temple movie, a sentimental musical comedy - it's primarily because it so nakedly portrays something I dislike about the industry and the system which produced it. However. It's also quite an impressive film in many ways. If you look at the camerawork from the opening stage routines here, for instance, you'll see some assured filmmaking. There's a scene where Jackie Oakie rouses Charlotte Greenwood out of bed under the ruse of their having to catch a train - but the five-second reaction shot of her in the bathroom, when she realizes it's a joke and that she's "home" for the first time in her adult life, is a wonderful bit of synergy between actor, director, and editor. Greenwood - what a delightful actress! I could watch her in a film a day for weeks on end, though I think I must have only seen her in five or fewer films at this point ...

An Addendum on Violence

To be taken up after my earlier quasi-defense of Apocalypto. Something occurred to me when I was just looking over On the Genealogy of Morals - specifically the second essay, section 7 (on pain). Of course one can reject Nietzsche's position, and one can reject Apocalypto, but to have a considered opinion for or against the violence in Apocalypto, one needs to address (directly or otherwise) Nietzsche's point about the historical dimension of pain, of the senselessness of suffering, and of the (alleged/conjectured) "cheerfulness" of a life where causing pain was seen as a kind of pleasure. I think that Apocalypto's world is one in which this is quite true, and implicit in the characterizations, cf. the pranks the villagers play upon one another even in the 'idyllic' prologue.

Having said that, of course, I am now more interested than I think I have actually ever been to eventually see The Passion of the Christ, which gives a new and potentially intriguing spin to this particular snuff-bondage passion play. Please note, particularly if you're new to this blog, that I am not endorsing Gibson here, and in fact I believe I am light years too far away from ever influencing anything about his life one way or another. I just think that the weirdos tend to be more valuable barometers & experimentalists than the vast majority of the mainstream folks.

Unaccomplished Artistry

Doing some research for some of my own nebulous academic projects, I watched on YouTube (part 1 here) the shot-on-video slasher movie Blood Cult (dir. Christopher Lewis, 1985), which advances the notion that neither craft nor authorship - in at least some senses that these terms frequently take on - need have much to do with the experience of wonderful cinematic art. An inept, unoriginal piece of pure hucksterism, Blood Cult as a mere market burp (see here) nevertheless presents haunting images, powerful compositions, and a quite absorbing trip down the rabbit hole. A lot of it has to do with "video aesthetics," which is mainly why I watched the thing. And you should watch it too, if you are at all inclined.

Quote of the Day

"If the outstanding films are never all visible at the same time until the window of their contemporaneity has closed, it means they are truly contemporary only for a small group of people—critics, programmers, and distributors. (The rest of us are like people looking at stars that appear bright but, in their own real time, may have already gone dim.) And if we indeed have a common agreement that this small group can declare what the contemporary cinema is, let’s acknowledge that the conditions under which they exercise their judgment are usually bad. Programmers see almost everything on DVD—usually in an office, at home on TV, on a laptop—or else, like critics, at other festivals, often at the rate of three or four a day, a rate that pulverizes both discrimination and memory."

(Chris Fujiwara, "To Have Done with the Contemporary Cinema," n+1)

Double Identity

A Val Kilmer vehicle, direct-to-video (or, if not, might as well have been), with a title that bears the brute generic beauty of exactly this kind of movie. Vague potential to be misread as Double Indemnity, which might only led to a couple of disappointed, perplexed viewers. It's also known as Fake Identity: less elegant, more to the point, still not entirely "accurate" with regard to the plot. I admit that I only paid half-attention to the film, and I wouldn't call it good, but I admire the fact that it trusts in its audience's either intelligence or inertia enough to withhold exposition of its outlines of the premise until the hour mark. We don't really know who's doing what, who's working for whom & why, and whether or not Kilmer's character really even does have a "double identity."

Step

There a plenty of things to say about the richly formulaic world of the Step Up movies, and the alternately lazy-intense, infuriating-charming stories they tell. Nobody needs to tell me about how these movies are awful because I'm aware of the ways in which they are shallow and mediocre; but in some ways they are wonderful - such as in Step Up 3D's reconciliation scene between Adam Sevani and Alyson Stoner, where the "you got served" logic underlying the dancing* goes to the lavatory for a few minutes, and the logic of the classical Hollywood musical takes over, and a - sincerely sincerely sincerely - beautiful, fantastic dance number breaks out. I guarantee you that this sequence will be better than any scene in at least eight (8) Best Picture-nominated movies this year.

* The pinnacles of the hip-hop dance battle in narrative film, that I know of, are Beat Street's amazing subway battle (the set-up is key, more so than the dancing itself), and Step Up 2: The Streets' fantastic final dance (which Step Up 3D alludes to in its own dance battle scenes more than once, but never replicates, let alone tops). I'm happy to accept nominations for other 'greats.'

To Hear Your Banjo Play

Pete Seeger, Alan Lomax, Richard Leacock, Woody Guthrie, Willard Van Dyke, Irving Lerner - amazing, the names and talent that can gather around a 16-minute film from 1947 about the banjo.

Realism: Vagaries of Lighting

Above: a tame/risque scene from the James Cameron potboiler-blockbuster True Lies (1994).

Those who would focus solely on the masters and masterpieces are missing out. (Those who focus mainly the Cameron-type films aren't likely to be regular readers of this blog, so I don't think I need to address them, right?) A major reason why the Great Men / Great Film traditionalists are missing out is because aesthetic excellence is - and must be - always relational. The mountain of dreck & routine justifies, contextualizes the jewels. But even more interestingly, if you ask me, the entire field of a/v culture is more fertile when aesthetic standards are ... I do not say abandoned (how could one even pretend to do this?), but placed to one side for a bit.

At a certain point, who cares if True Lies is an awful film, or an awesome flick, or a "genuinely underrated" something-or-other? More important is how we use it and what we draw from it. I have a mild sentimental attachment to True Lies, this movie having entertained me greatly over 5-10 viewings during my early teen years. So, revisiting chunks of it on Netflix Instant over the last few days, I was struck by the scene above: Jamie Lee Curtis' striptease.

No, not as striptease.

It's the lighting. (And the sound.)

We are to believe that Curtis' character won't recognize her own husband in this dim light - not even his silhouette. I'm sure a cognitive psychologist would be able to explain to me something about vision & expectation, but I'm inclined to believe that a realist direction of the scene - in this light, in this sound - would inevitably show Curtis quickly growing suspicious, and from there quickly discovering the truth. And I'm sure Cameron and whoever was working with him would have been able to develop the interaction in a suitably "entertaining" way if Curtis just ended up recognizing Schwarzenegger. So the question is: why this particular deviation of psychological believability in a film that draws all of its energy from the interplay between the quotidian and the violent-sublime-absurd?

(And the sound, about which I have even less-formed thoughts, is intriguing here too: presumably Curtis does not hear the clicks of the play/stop/ffwd/rew buttons, but in close-up the film indeed replicates them, shows that this tape recorder is a perfectly "normal" tape recorder, not a special digital gadget requiring special CIA-ninja training ... is the disconnect the blatant, and open, jump from realism to fantasy, i.e., realism as a type of fantasy?)

In the videotape of the film I saw the film on multiple times in the mid-'90s, as I recall, the image was darker, murkier: it was somewhat more believable that Curtis wouldn't recognize Schwarzenegger. The YouTube clip above is a little closer to this VHS experience. The more optimal digital future, however, has scrubbed the composition clean - it seems - and at least on Netflix's stream, it seems baldly impossible that Curtis can't just recognize her husband sitting in a chair a couple yards away from her.

How are we to take this series of images? Depending on the level of incredulity one applies to the narrative as well as the medium (and condition of the medium) in which one views the film, the lighting is a marker either of very subtly, deftly coded realism or quasi-realism (if the image is murky and Schwarzenegger cannot be recognized in long-shot by the viewer), or it is a bold divorcement from realism that requires our faith, much like the scenes of Westerns shot in la nuit américaine.

The Moment of Decision

Below: something about the inscrutability of the child actor ("child actor") - the last scene of the first episode of Freaks & Geeks. The character Sam Weir's hopes to dance to a slow song with his freshman year crush look to be horribly, inevitably stunted once Styx's tune starts the rock-out portion ... but there's a moment of beauty around the 2:34 mark here, because it looks like - crucially! - the body decides what to do first, and then the cerebral cortex does, and for that split second John Francis Daley's face becomes a portal into infinity, folks.