The mis-crediting of Tarsem Singh

Given how frequently I feel I watch The Cell, it was a real surprise that last night's viewing was my first in almost five years. My last Cell viewing, according to my meticulously kept records, was October 1, 2017. Which means that when I asked myself it it was time for another Cell viewing last night, the answer was certainly "yes," given that the previous four were in much closer succession (2010, 2013, 2014 and then of course 2017). 

For once I'm not going to write a post that gives you some new Cell takeaways. Instead, I'll write about something extra-textual that's in conversation with something else I wrote a few days ago.

On Thursday I sort of cheekily gave one possible reason for the critical hatred of Catwoman: the single-name moniker of its director, Pitof. In making this specious point, I listed other single-name monikers that had raised ire among cinephiles, like McG and Tarsem.

Interestingly, Tarsem Singh -- the director of The Cell -- is not actually credited as "Tarsem" in The Cell. 

I'm having trouble recreating the narrative of how I came to think of him as Tarsem, then, given that The Cell was easily the first time I became aware of him. I say "easily" because his follow-up, The Fall, didn't come for another six years, meaning that even if I hadn't seen The Cell in the theater (which I did), it would have taken not seeing it for another six years to have possibly heard of him first through The Fall.

Now, according to IMDB, he is credited as just "Tarsem" on The Fall. But the knowledge of his unique crediting was with me long before then. (And given that some people hold The Fall a lot more dear than they hold The Cell -- in fact, some people hate The Cell -- I'm thinking I really need to prioritize another Fall viewing to remind myself why it never really struck a chord with me.)

So in continuing to scan those IMDB credits, I'm deciding the conversation about his proclivity to credit himself with just his first name must have dated back to his earlier work, when he was making music videos. His 1990 video for En Vogue's "Hold On" lists him as being credited as just Tarsem, though that's the only one of five videos listed (which include R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion") where it says "as Tarsem." We can't assume the crediting on IMDB is 100% accurate, but it's all we have to go on unless we do a deeper dive, and that's not in the cards for me on this Sunday morning.

So maybe I was reading articles about The Cell at the time, and the writer knew of his earlier crediting and made some snide remark about it. Or, maybe some of the 2000 advertising for the movie said it was from "Tarsem," but when it came to the actual movie he was credited with both his first and last name. 

The other thing the IMDB credits showed me is that these are not the only two ways Singh has referred to himself in his credits. In fact, considering that he has only made five features, the means of crediting him that is tied for the most common is as Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, which is how (according to IMDB) he was credited on Immortals (2011) and Mirror Mirror (2012). Then for Self/less (2015) it was back to "Tarsem Singh." 

Yes, what I'm saying is that "Tarsem" is actually the least likely way for him to have been credited, a lark he tried for one movie that persists in our collective memory of his identity as an artist. 

Maybe his sixth feature will be the tiebreaker. IMDB lists something called Nanda Devi in pre-production, which I will welcome even if none of his last four features had anything like the impact on me that his first did. But I don't even see any actors attached so it may be a while. 

Tarsem's inspiration

If you've read my blog a lot you know that Tarsem Singh's 2000 film The Cell is a favorite of mine, the kind of favorite I revisit about once every two years. Which is pretty often, considering that two of my top four movies of all time are films I haven't seen once in the past ten years. (A discussion for another time.)

In fact, today happens to be the two-year anniversary of my last viewing of The Cell, meaning that it's definitely time for another one. And there could be no greater encouragement than having just finally seen for the first time Ridley Scott's 1985 film Legend, which now seems like an obvious source of inspiration for The Cell.

Some spoilers may follow.

The plots could not be more different. One is a fantasy in which a demon is trying to bring about eternal darkness by killing off the last of the unicorns. The other is a horror-thriller in which a psychiatrist must enter the mind of a serial killer to discover the whereabouts of his last victim.

But the imagery they use? Well, I'll let you be the judge.

Both movies feature a princess character who becomes hypnotized. In Legend she's an actual princess named Lily, played by Mia Sara. In The Cell she's the psychiatrist, Catherine (Jennifer Lopez), who is only symbolically a princess in terms of the role she takes while hypnotized in the kingdom of the killer. "Queen" might be a better description than princess. Anyway, here's how they look:

That's Mia. And here's J-Lo:

I suppose you could argue that one being influenced by the other is not a given, since the costumes are more suggestive of each other than replicas. They are both ornate "dark princess" outfits -- so what?

But then there's the evil ruler of this lair, who hypnotizes these princesses. In Legend he's named Darkness and played by Tim Curry:

And in The Cell he's played by Vincent D'Onofrio and named Carl Stargher. We need two images of him to get the full breadth of the allusion, and it definitely does seem like an allusion:

One has the pronounced nipples and chest, the other has the horns. D'Onofrio's multiple incarnations in The Cell are one of its chief pleasures.

Taken in combination, there's no doubt that Tarsem seems to have been inspired by Legend. Right? I'm not saying it's a ripoff. I'm saying it's a repurposing, and a damn effective one at that.

Both films even have another male character who is involved in a climactic ceremony -- played by Vince Vaughn and Tom Cruise -- though their functions are a bit different. Vaughn is actually having his guts twisted out of him while desperately trying to break through to Catherine, while Cruise is a bit more of an onlooker as Lily prepares to possible sacrifice the last unicorn.

And speaking of which ...

Both movies feature a horse (unicorn, same difference) in harm's way. While the unicorns are ultimately saved in Legend, things don't turn out quite as well for the horse in The Cell ...

A favorite's ability to rivet

Exhaustion is not absolute.

You'd be tempted to think that it was. You'd be tempted to think that once you reach a certain point of the evening, no matter what someone puts on the television, your eyelids will be just as heavy, will close just as involuntarily.

Uh uh.

Take Saturday night. It had been a bit of a trying day, with our older son working on everyone's last nerve, so thank goodness that my old friend Mr. Fermented Grape was there to help me unwind. However, a couple glasses of vino also made it next to impossible for me to concentrate on the first episode of True Detective, which we'd downloaded from iTunes. It's a very deliberate, gradually paced show. I was waging a desperate battle against sleep, and losing.

You might guess that I crawled right into bed as soon as it was over, but it turns out I still had a 107-minute movie -- and several more glasses of wine -- in me.

What True Detective did for me more than anything else was put me in the mood to watch The Cell again. A girl is murdered in ritualistic fashion at the start of the show, and that sure as hell sounded like The Cell to me. Her body had that bleached-white appearance of the victims in The Cell as well.

As my last viewing of The Cell was barely 18 months ago, it is now becoming clear that this is one of my go-to movies. Since I've gotten so familiar with it -- this was probably my sixth viewing overall -- I figured, the worst that would happen was that I'd fall asleep on the couch 20 minutes in.

Nope. I was awake the whole time, reliving old pleasures, discovering new ones.

Riveted.

There's a good chance that The Cell's winning combination of engrossing police procedural and hallucinatory world building is just the perfect thing to keep a person's attention, but it may just be that being familiar with a movie makes you less likely to fall asleep than more likely. You'd think your mind would let go, free from the worry of missing a crucial plot detail, and happily succumb to sleep in that mentally restful state. Instead, I'd argue that the tension involved in assimilating an unfamiliar plot, especially while fighting sleep, serves only to further exhaust you. It compounds a difficult situation, rather than improving it.

I don't really have anything more profound to say on this topic, but I think it's worth writing about for this conclusion: The next time you aren't quite ready to wind down for the night but don't know if you can take on a whole movie, don't try something new -- just pop in something you know and love. More likely than not, you'll make it to the end -- and feel so enthralled by the experience that you might just be ready to cue up another one when you're done.

Double feature candidates aplenty

I had a pretty good weekend as far as bringing movies home from the library. I told you on Saturday that we were watching movies on the projector in our garage, and I mentioned that Jaws was up first. It turned out we watched the other two movies I brought home as well, which I believe marks the first time ever that my wife and I have watched all three movies I plucked from the library shelves in one visit. (I've watched all three myself, but I don't think she's ever watched all of them with me.) Since you get a maximum of three movies for only two days (three on the weekends), it makes such a success rate pretty unlikely.

We got an earlier start on Saturday than we had on Friday, so even with running over two hours, The Matrix finished up by a little after 10. There was no way I was going to miss the opportunity to tack another movie on and make it a double feature. But which movie?

It wasn't quite so simple, but it looked like I was going to subconsciously choose a thematically appropriate double feature, whether I liked it or not.

Before I start, I should tell you that I rarely plan double features where the movies will be good companions for each other. People have called me a cinematic omnivore, and I think that's true to some extent. This means that I am not usually gravitating toward the same kinds of movies, which also means that the best movie to appear as the second half of a double feature is usually the movie I feel the most pressing urge to see.

The one factor that does influence my decision is whether there is anything about the circumstances that dictates one choice over the other. So the projector was the influencing factor in this case. The theory when watching a movie on the projector is that you want it to be visually impressive in some way. That was a guiding influence in my choosing Jaws and The Matrix, though not necessarily 21 Jump Street, which we watched on Sunday night to cap our weekend. 

Having already seen all three of the movies I checked out of the library at least once, I was eager to crack the seal on something new to follow up The Matrix. I don't mean that literally. There would be no cracking of seals on unseen DVDs, because there are only a few movies I own that I've never seen, and that means I acquired them in some unusual way (as a present or a gag gift) and did not expect them to be projector-worthy.

So I scanned our Netflix instant queue for a visually dynamic film that I hadn't seen that was short enough for me to have a reasonable chance of consuming before sleep overtook me. The title that jumped out was David Cronenberg's Existenz, which I have been trying to prioritize for years. I may have subconsciously had The Matrix on the brain when I chose it, but I don't think so, in part because I was scouting choices earlier in the day, before we'd popped The Matrix in.

Existenz sure would have been a natural partner for The Matrix. Although I haven't seen it, I know that it has to do with a virtual reality form of gaming, in which people are connected via a port inserted into their spinal column. Not only does this speak to The Matrix's traveling between two worlds, one real and one imaginary, but Existenz also shares the physiological logistics of making the connection.

I say "would have been" because Existenz was defeated by two technological realities with which it couldn't grapple. My computer reported that a plug-in needed to be updated in order to play Netflix (it's my new work computer, so it hasn't done this job previously), and after 10 o'clock at night, I just didn't want to bother with that. Then there was the fact that the wifi signal just wasn't at maximum strength in our garage. Although it had worked fine for email on another night, I noticed it struggling along at just two bars out of five.

Having lost the possibility of a new movie, I turned to our DVD shelves in our living room, and quickly came away with two sound choices -- both of them also inadvertent double feature pairings for The Matrix.

The first was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which may just be my all-time favorite film adaptation of a video game. This 2001 film, which is in the anime tradition but uses a far more advanced animation style (as you can probably tell from the poster), should have been a technological marvel and a real hit. But for some reason, it just wasn't. Even if people didn't like the story, although I don't know why they wouldn't have, this was perhaps the most effective CG recreation of human beings that had been seen yet at the movies, and that should have counted for something.

Anyway, the setting is a post-apocalyptic earth that is ruled by phantoms, which are diaphanous alien creatures who can kill by mere physical contact with human beings. Their physiognomy is often squid-like or otherwise aquatic, making them reminiscent of the robot sentinels that come searching for the Nebuchadnezzar in The Matrix. Not to mention that the "real world" in both movies is a torched wasteland, where a small pocket of human resistance living in a thus-far impermeable "final city" try to stave off the extinction of the species.

I tried to watch Final Fantasy as my third movie of the night, actually, but I made it only 20 minutes, the last five of which were spent more asleep than awake. It lost out to the eventual winner of this double feature sweepstakes simply because I didn't want to watch it quite as much.

That eventual winner was Tarsem Singh's The Cell, the movie I would have been least conscious of having a connection to The Matrix before I started, but may have had the most significant similarities when all was said and done.

Both movies feature characters who use a specific procedure to consciously leave their real world and enter a fantasy world where rules don't apply -- a fantasy world they can manipulate, but one that will eat them up if they're not careful. In both movies there's a lot of talk about how if you die in the fantasy world, you die in reality, because your mind can't separate the two. (Each movie has a specific line about this. In The Matrix, it's "The body cannot live without the mind." In The Cell, it's "It's like that old wives' tale, if you die in your dream you die in your real life.")

Both movies feature the hero "going back in" when it will very likely result in his/her death, while people sitting at the controls stand by in shock, either physically unable to prevent the hero or reluctantly agreeing not to. Both movies also conclude with a race against time -- in one case, to prevent a victim from drowning in an underground cell, and in the other, to prevent sentinels from killing all the human resistors we have come to know.

As discussed, any one of these would have been a great match for The Matrix, but I'm glad The Cell ended up winning out. I wouldn't say it enthralled me quite as much this time as when I wrote about it in 2010, but each viewing further reminds me that this is an underappreciated classic involving a singular vision by its director.

Now I'm just licking my lips for my next opportunity to borrow the projector.

New discoveries

Oh how I love The Cell.

And one of the great things about coming back to a movie you love for the first time in five or six years is the new discoveries you hadn't yet made during the previous viewing, either because you didn't notice them, or you hadn't yet had the life experiences that would make those discoveries relevant.

Last night, as I watched Tarsem Singh's masterful blending of the Silence of the Lambs-style serial killer movie and the Jacob's Ladder-style head trip for about the third time all the way through, I was awash with new discoveries. Such as:

1) I knew I had seen footage from Fantastic Planet before. When I saw Rene Leloux' trippy 1973 animated film about a wondrous planet where humans are the pets of giant blue creatures 20 times their size, something about it struck me as familiar. It turns out, a couple scenes from this film appear on the TV set of Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) when she's relaxing at home after a long day. (And has just smoked a joint, which is appropriate for that film.) It was cool to see this film -- which I saw for the first time two years ago, have now seen twice, and am considering buying -- appear in another visually breathtaking film that I admire terrifically.

2) Dean Norris plays an FBI agent. That's right, the guy who I now know as Hank Schrader from Breaking Bad is one of the team of FBI agents who hunt down Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio).

3) And so does James Gammon. That's right, the recently deceased cantankerous old coot (that's the role he always played, anyway) appears here on the same team. I loved the guy in Major League, where he played the manager, so it felt ordained somehow that I should be inadvertently paying him tribute, after he died last Friday at age 70.

4) Peter Sarsgaard is in this thing for like a second. It wasn't his first movie, but it was early enough in his career that I never thought twice about the guy who appears very briefly as the fiancee of the missing girl Julia Hickson (Tara Subkoff).

5) The director actually used his first name and last name. As the credits roll over those endless dunes, part of an impressive opening that prepares you for the film's one-of-a-kind art direction, I noticed that the director is listed as "Tarsem Singh," not the single-world moniker "Tarsem," as I'd previously thought, and as he's sometimes credited. I feel a little more comfortable when people have two names -- I argue that's one of the main reasons McG is not taken more seriously -- so this was a pleasant surprise.

6) Jennifer Lopez is lit beautifully. A friend of mine used to laugh at the scene where J-Lo is walking around her kitchen in her underwear, then bends down to feed her cat -- and it does serve as a somewhat obvious attempt to give the audience a little bit of Jen's goods. But one thing I noticed throughout the film is that Lopez is shot like a movie star, shimmering in almost every scene -- the luminescence that comes off her is almost magical. Yet it doesn't undercut the credibility of the film in the slightest.

7) Jennifer Lopez can actually act. J-Lo is not known as an actress of particular range, but I found myself admiring her work in this movie more than I'd remembered. I especially like the scene that's depicted in this poster, when she's had a break with her reality as a therapist entering the dreams of her patient, and entered into a new reality, where she's the idealized slave of an evil tyrant. Staring blankly forward, as if your mind has been erased, does not seem like it should require too much talent, but Lopez really nails the expression here -- and it's creepy as hell.

8) Acting tells stories, not dialogue. Speaking of facial expressions, I absolutely love this moment -- I was actively waiting for it -- where the FBI agent played by Jake Weber answer his cell phone, and the caller on the other end apprises him of a break in the case. Singh holds the shot for about ten seconds without Weber saying anything beyond the initial greeting, and then, right before he cuts, Weber's face changes -- his eyes shift, and gives this perfect little expression that I can only describe as a smirk of recognition. For some reason that moment has always stuck with me as a shining example of cinematic minimalism. But what I discovered on this viewing is that this is a film made up of such minimalism, especially in the expressions. There's also the scene where the endlessly watchable Pruitt Taylor Vince -- you know, the guy with the twitchy eyes, otherwise known as pathologic nystagmus -- is telling Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) that there are no other options for getting through to the catatonic Carl Stargher. When he digs up a Hail Mary from the recesses of his brain, he doesn't need to say anything -- he just needs to alter his expression ever so slightly to register the "Eureka!" moment. Next shot is of a helicopter landing outside the research center where Catherine works, and that's all you need to know. The other element the script chooses to underplay is the childhood trauma suffered by Novak, which is only hinted at -- and which is all the more effective for that reason.

9) Vincent D'Onofrio makes an incredible villain. This is more something I was reminded of than something I discovered. But how terrifying is D'Onofrio in all his incarnations? Whether it's the real Stargher, sitting naked in a bathtub, humming silently to himself while expectorating small streams of bathwater, or the dream Stargher, with flowing robes that are so long, they cover the walls of his massive throne room, the man is consistently disturbing.

10) Amazing visuals must serve the story, or else they are just masturbation. Singh made another film that came out a few years ago called The Fall, which features many of the grandiose palaces, stark deserts, and ridiculously ornate costumes you see here, as well as a plot that's split between the real world and a fantasy world. But that movie was ultimately disappointing because the story was not interesting. No such complaint about The Cell.

11) And to prove it has a good story ... I actually found myself getting choked up at the end, when (SPOILERS!) Peter finally discovers the location of Carl's final victim, moments before she'll drown in her cell, and saves her from that terrible fate. As she's lying in his arms, crying, it's a catharsis for both of them, and for us.

Two other things I've always loved about the movie, but would like to mention again:

1) That awesome scene where the horse is sliced into sections. This was the moment when I knew The Cell wasn't fucking around, and that I was in for something new, something exciting, something that might push the limits of my personal tolerance for graphic imagery. (For the record, the horse is not killed by this dissection -- its internal organs are all functioning fine, thank you very much.)

2) The cacophonous music. The opening scene reaches a delirious climax as the out-of-tune, Middle Eastern-sounding horns build and build. Then there's a more traditional symphonic cacophony as the FBI storms Stargher's house. Like many other moments in the film, these scenes brought chills of intense anticipation down my spine.

So, what movie do you need to pop in again, to make some new discoveries that'll help you fall in love with it all over again?