Review: Scorsese's Hugo; Reality and Illusion

Scorsese's Hugo

From curioushairedgal's post 

The Magic Thing: The Artist, The Book of Illusions and The Violence of the Image

Cinema was a visual language, a way of telling stories by projecting images onto a two-dimensional screen. The addition of sound and color had created the illusion of a third dimension, but at the same time it had robbed the images of their purity (...)

It struck me that I was witnessing a 

dead art, a wholly defunct genre that would never be practiced again. And yet, for all the changes that had occurred since then, their work was as fresh and invigorating as it had been when first shown. That was because they had understood the language they were speaking.

They had invented the syntax of the eye, a grammar of pure kinesis, and except for the costumes and the cars and the quaint furniture in the background, none of it could possibly grow old. It was thought translated into action,

human will expressing itself through the human body, and therefore it was for all time(...) The flat screen was the world, and it existed in two dimensions. The third dimension was in our head. (Auster - The Book of Illusions, p.15)

Asa Butterfield and Chloe Moretz of Let me In

HUGO is a love letter to childhood and the movies, and childhood's  - whatever age - 

love of the movies.

It is also a story of separation and death, connection, reparation and reconstruction.

Hugo has rescued an automaton. A museum fire has killed his father, who was carefully repairing this beautiful artifact. It is his only connection with his dead father, an invisible ribbon tying them together.

AS Eric Packer in Cosmopolis spends his last day to get a "haircut", traveling through New York City traffic to go to the barbershop his father went to, and where he got his haircut as a child. Another invisible ribbon tying him to his dead father.

Scorsese Directing Hugo

Scorsese is tying himself to his own childhood, and his childhood love of movies and illusion that determined his future as an adult filmmaker. 

As nikola ties herself with invisible ribbons to robsessed, tying herself to her dead father and Old Timey Hollywood. 

And as someone I know ties himself to his dead father with baseball, DeLillo's book Underworld, because when he was a child his father took him to see DiMaggio play for the Yankees, and pointed out the great player in centerfield. An experience to become memory that is lost forever now with the advent of Moneyball, all illusion gone.

A long time ago I was reading psychoanalytic case studies of camp survivors of the Holocaust. One was with a woman who was a child with her mother at the selection platform. Her mother gave her a handkerchief (? some small thing) when she knew they would be separated. She never saw her mother again, but she held on to this "piece" of her mother. And she survived. The analysts have found that this "transitional object" was often the difference between life and death for the child's camp survival, and the  ability to have developed a self as an adult. 

Hugo is a philosophical statement about reality and illusion. Illusion wins hands down.

The Great Ben Kingsley with Asa Butterfield

Sasha Baron Cohen in an Astonishing Performance

Moneyball: The Order of Seduction and Challenge OR The Order of Production and Accumulation

Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill

The flashbacks of Billy Beane as a child, a young baseball player in high school, etc are shown in the order in which Beane/Pitt remembers them. While we may live our life linearly, we remember it in clusters.(Reconstruction - Josephine Hart)

As a child we see the joy and thrill in Billy's eyes. Playing. Then his child's uniform that makes him so proud. Little League probably. His doubt at signing so young with a full scholarship to Stamford in hand, the worry lines in his face that will deepen as he ages.

If you have ever loved baseball in any way, spent a great deal of time planning around games, then you will know the pure seduction of the game. Playing as a child puts you in Baudrillard's Order of Seduction and Challenge. It is a time you will always treasure, and in seeing this film, it all comes back, along with the feelings.

In the film we watch the great former Yankee Justice, now on the downward curve of his career. He is bitter. No wonder. A love of his life is coming to an end as it does for all of them. It's a terrible loss. Justice stands there and practices hitting a mechanical pitcher that keeps throwing the ball at him, keeping in shape, trying to maintain his edge as long as he can. But now we observe Justice in the Order of Production and Exchange, no longer in the Order of Seduction and Challenge. And this is a sad moment, a real moment, a Baudrillardian moment.

This moment will happen to all of us, unless we reflect on it carefully.

An object does not exist until and unless it is observed. - William Burroughs

This moment came very soon to Billy Beane, the boy of such great promise who couldn't deliver. Brad Pitt enlightens us as he reveals his superior intelligence to us. An intelligence that perhaps wanted more than just physical expertise and eye hand coordination in playing a game? He knows when destiny opens that window to him in the form of Pete/Jonah Hill, the recent Yale graduate, who has invented a mathematical model for predicting the value of undervalued players. He gets on base being the mantra. 

And so begins the change in the Dominating Discourse of major league scouting. Gone completely now the Order of Seduction and Challenge as baseball enters the Order of Production and Exchange, a mathematical calculation spreadsheet that determines who gets chosen.

Joltin' Joe DiMaggio

Will winning games ever replace the thrill of seeing DiMaggio in motion on the field or at the plate? Or watching the aged Satchel Paige come in as relief pitcher for the Indians at home in Cleveland in 1953? Finally in the big leagues at last.

Young Satchel Paige

By Saam Philadelphia Sports Announcer

Or the Phillies' Whiz Kids, or Bobby Feller the first $100,000 check in baseball? Or By Saam's excitement on radio and then TV as "It's going! It's going! It's over the fence!"  




In  Connie Mack Stadium at Shibe Park. No, I cannot even remember 








who won the games I watched when I saw these players. Nor I bet did 



Hemingway when he wrote Old Man and the Sea. This model is














going to implode the game just as Scummit is imploding the 
Hollywood machine. Unless the personalities remain intact, as is seen at the end of the movie. Let us pray.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Pitt of course is remarkable in this film. But then he always is, after being used as eye candy when young with his self-described "wonder-bread look". 

Seymour Hoffman is that special character actor who always surprises without surprising us. How does he do it!

Connie Mack

Connie Mack was the original owner and mastermind of the Philadelphia Athletics, now the Oakland Athletics. I cannot forgive them for leaving for the West Coast. They played at Shibe Park, later renamed Connie Mack Stadium in honor of the original.

Shibe Park - Connie Mack Stadium

Billy Beane received the "gift" of a large contract offer when just out of high school.

Has he given the "counter-gift" that will destroy baseball

as Baudrillard gave Foucault the "counter gift"

with his book Forget Foucault.
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