Existential unmooring in Noyce and Wimmer's "Salt".
Evidently I can't leave Salt well enough alone. It hits my buttons more than Inception does, though the why behind that is a question probably best left for another day.
In my spare-moment Googling, I've turned up this July 23rd review of Salt by Charlie Jane Anders at io9, which I must have skipped over at the time because I hadn't seen the film yet. According to Anders, Salt, which was written by Kurt Wimmer (the writer/director behind Ultraviolet and the cult action-sci-fi Equilibrium) starring Christian Bale), portrays a "paranoid dystopia":
In Wimmer's world, everyone's a liar, and nobody lies more than the people you've enshrined in your heart as authority figures. The people you trust to guide you and shape you are actually brainwashers and thugs, and any values they instill in you are just cult indoctrination. You see this pretty clearly in Equilibrium, in which the whole of society has become a kind of Prozac-driven cult, but the theme returns quite strongly in Salt as well. In Salt, nobody is who they seem, and it's not so much a question of whether someone has been secretly brainwashed - it's how many times they've been brainwashed, and which round of brainwashing will be the one that takes.
And the way in which the evil authority figures in Salt try to own you is the same as in Equilibrium - they strip you of all your personal relationships and try to isolate you, in order to deaden your emotions.
[...]
Salt shares the elements that made us love Wimmer's earlier films, including the way that killing people and inflicting mayhem are the only way that anybody ever expresses an emotion, or communicates at all for that matter. That's a beautiful thing, in an action movie - the action is where people show us who they are, and there's no time for people to tell us shit. They'd only be lying anyway.
Which I think is a spot-on dissection of Salt's anti-authority leanings (Wimmer's favourite book, no surprise, is Tom Sawyer) and the function of violence in the film, and leads nicely into this comment by
charlie_d_blue at my earlier meta post:
...I felt that no matter how fiercely Salt fought, and despite the fact that all that fighting, in the end, pointed to her siding with 'America', I never got the vibe or sense that she was fighting due some deep and imbued sense of patriotism, or even of what was 'right'.
She's like a sleek, harsh-edged gunshot, barreling straight through long-laid plans, almost, quite simply, just so that she could be free of it all.
There's an Inception/Salt crossover somewhere in all of this talk of brainwashing and subconscious indoctrination, I know it. (Thanks to
dorukai for helping me to make the connection.)
ETA: And if you want to know my answer to the question, "Who is Salt?" you should read this comment.
This entry was originally posted at http://the-grynne.dreamwidth.org/882585.html and has
comments.
In my spare-moment Googling, I've turned up this July 23rd review of Salt by Charlie Jane Anders at io9, which I must have skipped over at the time because I hadn't seen the film yet. According to Anders, Salt, which was written by Kurt Wimmer (the writer/director behind Ultraviolet and the cult action-sci-fi Equilibrium) starring Christian Bale), portrays a "paranoid dystopia":
In Wimmer's world, everyone's a liar, and nobody lies more than the people you've enshrined in your heart as authority figures. The people you trust to guide you and shape you are actually brainwashers and thugs, and any values they instill in you are just cult indoctrination. You see this pretty clearly in Equilibrium, in which the whole of society has become a kind of Prozac-driven cult, but the theme returns quite strongly in Salt as well. In Salt, nobody is who they seem, and it's not so much a question of whether someone has been secretly brainwashed - it's how many times they've been brainwashed, and which round of brainwashing will be the one that takes.
And the way in which the evil authority figures in Salt try to own you is the same as in Equilibrium - they strip you of all your personal relationships and try to isolate you, in order to deaden your emotions.
[...]
Salt shares the elements that made us love Wimmer's earlier films, including the way that killing people and inflicting mayhem are the only way that anybody ever expresses an emotion, or communicates at all for that matter. That's a beautiful thing, in an action movie - the action is where people show us who they are, and there's no time for people to tell us shit. They'd only be lying anyway.
Which I think is a spot-on dissection of Salt's anti-authority leanings (Wimmer's favourite book, no surprise, is Tom Sawyer) and the function of violence in the film, and leads nicely into this comment by
charlie_d_blue at my earlier meta post:
...I felt that no matter how fiercely Salt fought, and despite the fact that all that fighting, in the end, pointed to her siding with 'America', I never got the vibe or sense that she was fighting due some deep and imbued sense of patriotism, or even of what was 'right'.
She's like a sleek, harsh-edged gunshot, barreling straight through long-laid plans, almost, quite simply, just so that she could be free of it all.
There's an Inception/Salt crossover somewhere in all of this talk of brainwashing and subconscious indoctrination, I know it. (Thanks to
dorukai for helping me to make the connection.)
ETA: And if you want to know my answer to the question, "Who is Salt?" you should read this comment.
This entry was originally posted at http://the-grynne.dreamwidth.org/882585.html and has
comments.