Salting the Mines

Rating: Null/10 (25 July 2010)

Two things are of interest to me here.
One is the growing demand we have for plot twists. We expect to be presented with the unexpected. I think this is a direct evolution from how the detective story entered the film vocabulary. In its pure form, it is an engagement of discovery with the viewer, usually in collaboration with an on screen character. We might "solve" the puzzle by creating the narrative before the film does.
This is a "fold" that engages the viewer more intensely than otherwise, simply because of the investment. Over time, a branch appeared where the viewer was not expected to guess. Clues and red herrings ceased to be placed. The game was not played. The enjoyment of the movie was in creating a baffling set of facts that were "explained" at the end. Our thrill comes from the pleasure of making sense out of the nonsensical. This branch has many more examples than the more directly engaging one.
I hesitate to say it is less intelligent, because we infuse anything with narrative depth. In this branch, the intelligence comes in being presented with more and more complex solutions. The "explanation" at the end takes on its own mini-narrative where the initial solution is proved to be yet another level of deception.
I believe this is the yearning we have to be engaged.
The second interesting thing here is the obvious re-invention of gender roles. Female pop singers are pulling the center of female roles more toward the openly sexual and seductive. The action movie's response is the leather clad kickass woman. The woman on top. The sexual being that is in control. This started first, I believe, in revenge movies where the woman has been raped, so the response is justified.
Then we moved into an era where women were fit into samurai-like cartoon figures. This is the scowling, leather dominatrix mode, or alternatively less realistic mode. The extreme is anime where the female is a teen girl in a magical universe where exposed body parts matter. To the best of my knowledge, we have never had a woman — acting as a real women — in this genre.
By that I mean a true noir character, not someone winking at the camera. The closest we came that I remember is Geena Davis in her Renny Harlan periods, but they still were based in humor and in any case failed at the box office. However, we were all aware of Geena's Mensa status and her prior life playing flurry, sexually available characters.
Only Angela could do what she has done here. I understand that the script was written for Tom Cruise and very little changed with the gender shift. Our Angel allows herself to be photographed looking unattractive. Until the very end, she is not her normal seductive self. Never in the entire thing are we aware of her body. At one point, she is effectively disguised as a man.
I'm not one to pick celebrities and follow them like some follow sports teams. But I do believe that this woman carries a lot of responsibility for how a generation of girls will think of themselves. I think she did this in part because of some awareness of that archetype- bending power.
And there is the challenge. Like the fundamental changes within the story where "people" are not as we believed, the slots for people are shifted as well in the larger story in which we live.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.