Want it all, Risk it all, Lose it all’ – the
tagline from The Counsellor
Not
only Directed by Ridley Scott and written by the Pulitzer prize-winning
American novelist Cormac McCarthy, The Counselor (2013) also boasted a
beyond star-studded cast of Michael Fassbender, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem,
Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt, and yet, and yet still managed to comatose
audiences and critics alike with what seemed to be an icy tribute to its own
failure.
Not simply a film that fails to entertain or convince, but one
that seems to unwittingly reveal the festering machinations behind its failure.
Each symptom of its oddly misjudged tone – be it zero suspense, the sheen of
production, character inertia, or the stilted dialogue that communicates a
little less than cold brevity with a little more than vacuous excess – each of
these symptoms seem to reflexively turn into parodies of their buried cause. Consequently,
The Counselor casts an involuntary and icy light on the ugly capital of
‘the star’ in Hollywood promotion, in addition to the symbolic potency and
expectations that such ‘stars’ have historically delivered.
In a silent comedy from 1927, Clara
Bow, one of the very first stars of American cinema became synonymous with the
film’s title: It. She was the ‘It girl’, ‘Miss It, California’,
the birth of ‘It’, a title and description originally suggested in a magazine
article by the English writer, Elinor Glyn – who had a cameo in the film. The
value of ‘It’, though mainly unmentioned as a mysterious quality, does surface
in a couple of definitions: the male protagonist’s best friend reads out that
‘the possessor of ‘IT’ must be absolutely “un-self-conscious”, and must have
that magnetic “sex appeal” which is irresistible’; in Glyn’s cameo she defines
‘It’ as ‘self-confidence and indifference as to whether you are pleasing or not
– and something in you that gives the impression that you are not at all cold.’
Bow’s allure as a star came from her supposed ordinary-ness; an exemplary and
working class background that ostensibly leant her energy a lively naturalism
that distinguished her from other more consciously thespian modes of melodrama.
It was an attraction that conveyed her plucky spirit as both relatable and in
the currency of sex appeal, attainable – thus spinning off into another mythic
toxin of male fantasy: ‘star’ quality in ‘the-girl-next door-syndrome’. By the
age of 28 Bow had left Hollywood. Not because, as is suggested, through
her incompatibility with talkies, but through exhaustion: she was overworked
(completing 46 silent films and 11 talkies, all completed from the age of 16 to
28) and increasingly in the 30s attacked by the press. She retired to a cattle
ranch with her husband and suffered from various psychiatric illnesses for the
rest of her life.
Rather than simply (or only) encapsulating a cautionary example
of stardom, there is something telling about the supposed qualities of her
objectified ‘It’ status and how that has changed. Described as
‘un-self-conscious’ and giving ‘the impression that you are not all cold’, Bow
was celebrated for a spirit of naturalism in a medium that was trying to evolve
beyond the artifice of a carnival attraction, or the emulation of theatre. Not
far off a hundred years later and American cinema now has a history of ‘It’;
manufactured naturalism and the impossibly glamorous, warped, undercut or
consecrated idols of everyday have been through whole legacies of influence,
reaction and growth. Alongside that cinematic change, inevitably the currency
of the ‘it girl’ and having ‘it’ has become something very different. Now the
‘it girl’ phenomenon is usually attributed to a famous for being famous socialite,
whose primary purpose or ambition seems to be courting the press. The ‘un-self
conscious’ has become the consciously calculated and ‘the impression that you
not all cold’ has been newly configured as a coldly performed version of
warmth. Yet in The Counselor the performance has lost its currency, the
potential ‘It vitality’ of its cast seems dislocated, remote and unsure.
The first time we see the titular ‘counselor’ (played by Michael
Fassbender) and his lover (Penelope Cruz) they are writhing beneath white
sheets in a luxurious bed. There is an extended take hovering over the bed,
bodies discernible only as draped forms and pre or post-coital small talk
between them supplied in voiceover. Rather than a heated sense of intimacy, the
extended lingering on white sheets feels almost sepulchral. Clearly aiming for
an evocative scene of promiscuity and proximity, the draped and entirely
concealed bodies (no erotic glimpse of flesh) become only the awkward trace of
sex – clinically remote from its physicality in folds of perfect white and
closer in appearance to squirming body bags, or absurd mummified shapes. The
camera then joins them beneath the sheets: a close up, looking from Cruz’s
point of view at Fassbender’s confident smile as he says “tell me something
sexy”, we then see Cruz for the first time as she brushes away a strand of hair
and replies “I want you to put your hand up my dress”. Her smile is as white as
the sheets, disturbingly white, the tone of her voice an awkward attempt at shy
and girlish daring. Fassbender grins, enjoying his sense of playful wit, “but
you’re not wearing a dress -”, “what does that have to do with it?” is Cruz’s
gnomic response, followed by: “something you’d like for me to say?” Fassbender
then tutors her, “but it has to be real doesn’t it?” Dirty talk has to uphold
the pretense of pertaining to the situation, to being real, otherwise it is
just an excruciating charade. Just as this scene demonstrates.
Both actors, despite ticking the requirements for a standardized
type of Hollywood beauty and exchanging breathy lines of flirtation, feel
remote and even embarrassed, and despite the camera’s nestling intimacy we – as
the audience – feel coldly removed from the scene. A scene of dirty talk that
acknowledges the need for a sense of realism that it itself lacks. An opening
scene between the film’s central romantic relationship not only fails to
inspire any connection or care in the viewer but similarly seems strained to
convey its connection between the characters, all of this while evoking a
deathly white shroud in the disheveled sheets. For a film written by the
infamously bleak Cormac Mccarthy surely this could all be intended? A portent
of Cruz’s later fate (kidnapped by members of the drug cartel and killed in a
snuff film), a foreshadowing of her death and the film’s end latent in its
beginning? I would like to suggest that this would be too generous and
forgiving a reading of the film’s manifold failings. Instead, though I believe
there are elements of awareness to the film (reflexive, cine-literate nods),
what is more compelling is its haunted sense of that which escapes awareness. I
would like to read the film as a prolonged demonstration of a kind of visual
parapraxis, whereby the repressed is the Hollywood star system and the
implications of its modes of representation. The desire to escape this, both
intentionally and at times without knowing, causes in The Counsellor a troubled documentation of its own inability to exist
as either a critique of a Hollywood film or as a Hollywood film – falling
instead into a confused and uneasy neurosis between the two.
The film’s most obvious and perhaps more conscious attempt to
parody and distance itself from Hollywood ‘star’ systems is through an explicit
referencing of its existence. Michael Fassbender appears as the male lead,
central protagonist and, by star rules, a hero. Fassbender is cold, unreadable
and for the most part uninteresting (especially for a central character whose
peril we should ideally care about). He recalls the automaton, ‘David’, he
played in Ridley Scott’s previous film, Prometheus
(2012). In a scene before one of the film’s most memorably jarring sequences,
Fassbender looks at a photo of the actor Steve McQueen (the earlier icon of
lead action roles) as though wistfully observing a past version of himself.
Brad Pitt – in this lineage of male stars – appears as jaded
middleman, eternally wearing a cowboy hat, a memento that literally tips its
hat to his much earlier role in Scott’s Thelma
and Louise (1991). A film when Pitt arrived as a star – with sex appeal, cowboy hat and youth. No
longer an object of lust (at least in this film) and thus not a bankable star
at the top of the business, Pitt appears as a weathered figure reduced to a
lecherous version of his previous success – the middleman criminal who has seen
it all and reports ‘it’s all shit’.
Cameron Diaz, an actress who was ‘discovered’ (that creepy
euphemism) as a model and then, after her first role aged 21 in The Mask, was declared a sex symbol,
appears in The Counsellor as its
femme fatale. Her sexuality is a mark of strength, wielded in increasingly
contorted versions of itself. Meanwhile Penelope Cruz perhaps suffers most as
the romantic interest: the ornament
with which to furnish the male lead. She is not only devoid of any discernible
character, being a lazy counterpoint to Diaz’s libidinous empowerment, but she
also becomes the expendable body (after being killed), that is unceremoniously
and literally dumped as waste.
Whilst this suggests a degree of
conscious parody, I would argue it breaks down around Cameron Diaz’s character,
Malkina. Javier Bardem (Reiner) is fatally obsessed with Malkina and, in the
jarring scene that follows Fassbender looking at the portrait of Steve Mcqueen,
he recollects a disturbing sexual incident. He reflects that he found out too much about
women and by way of a begrudging explanation, Bardem tells Fassbender that Malkina
literally ‘fucked his car’. This involves a cut away of Diaz removing her
underwear, climbing up the car’s bonnet and on to the windscreen, where she then
spreads her legs – sliding herself up and down to orgasm. Rather than being
turned on, Bardem is left in a mixture of horror and appalled curiosity,
describing the action (as seen from the car-seat, staring up into her exposed and
sliding vagina on the windscreen) as like a “catfish – a bottom feeder” before
concluding ‘it was too gynecological to be sexy’. It seems a fevered and
uncomfortable enactment of the actress as star, sexualized in film not through
her own comfort or realistic sexuality but through pressures of a pornographic
leering, here the cinematic male gaze and its fantasy becomes grotesquely
realised in its objectivity. This is at the repressed heart of the film and its
cold but obsessive relationship with sex and stars. Bardem stares up at a
literal screen and when he gets what he wants in its most unadorned form, a
front row seat to the sexual worship of his financial, phallic and four-wheeled
status – he is horrified. This sequence is also notably the only flash back in
the film, a conspicuous detail considering we never find out the past of ‘the
counselor’ let alone his name. For a film with many other unanswered questions
about what came before, this - sex, commodification and masculine wish-fulfillment
– is the only flash back.
When
the fantasy is made real it is ‘too gynecological’, is this a hysteric victory
for Diaz’s Malkina in a critique through literalizing extremes, or is it
perhaps more complicated? I would suggest it is more complicated, mainly for
the reason that the film, neither in McCarthy’s screenplay nor Scott’s
direction, seems to know precisely what is meant
in this scene. Is it possibly a moment of witness, where the star system is
turned into an unwanted strip-tease revealing the exploitation of its own base
logic: a vagina rubbed up against the screen while the male viewer is in the
driving seat. A vision later repressed as like
a ‘catfish’ – and then, again unsure of its own implications beyond the
image, the phrase “a bottom feeder” unwittingly attempts to control the fantasy
made real through a denigration of power. Or is this the ultimate death dance
of the femme fatale, the film noir creation of anxious misogyny, parodied here
by a powerful woman…or perhaps it is just the logical extension of the femme
fatale taken to its seemingly perverse extreme (The Counsellor alludes explicitly to film noir, when Pitt quotes
the neo-noir Body Heat,1981, itself heavily drawing from Double Indemnity, 1944). Does Malkina’s
act expose sexist expectations in star culture through a horrific and absurd
image, while also offering the self reflexive critique on Cameron Diaz as sex
symbol? Or, does it only extend those expectations as a dangerous fantasy, one
to be buried and then incorporated into a star-led film as a semi-repressed acknowledgement,
later dismissed by men in a recollection that mentions ‘catfish’ and the loaded
insinuation of ‘bottom-feeder’. This jarring and somewhat neurotic instability,
both in tone and interpretation, spreads out throughout the film.
In
the film’s concluding scenes, we join the counselor on the phone to a man whose
role is one of questionable philosophical aid – helping the counselor realize
he has no choice, all the significant choices that can be made have been made,
he must now choose only to accept this fact. Again we approach this through the
windscreen, the glassy separation of the screen and a visual slip back to the
Malkina scene. The criminal system into which the counselor has entered, through
his very entrance, has set into motion choices and movements that cannot be
avoided. In the star system, as with the film’s narrative, agency and choice
are gone. As by this point, is anything resembling the viewer’s interest. The
‘it’ of Clara Bow as arguably Hollywood’s first star has grown, from a
celebration of warmth and lack of self awareness, to the critique of a cold
self awareness, one that remains unaware of how inextricable its own critique
is from that which it criticizes. I used the phrase ‘visual parapraxis’ as a
way of imagining this troubled slip, a symptomatic accident of clarity that has
at its root something not fully acknowledged or made entirely consciously
available. This is the unresolved flashback of Malkina and the equally
unresolved involvement and legacy of the star system. The original German word
used by Freud, from which parapraxis was translated, is Fehlleistungen. A word defined as either “faulty functions”, “faulty
actions” or, most significantly for all involved in The Counselor "misperformances".
