Hope you've enjoyed the April Showers series. There are SO many films we could have covered. (Tangent: I'm dying to know, for example, when the first shower sequence ever filmed was. The earliest I personally know of is Marilyn Monroe in Niagara (1953) which I meant to write about. Oops. But there has to be something earlier, right? I've searched but can't find any definitive info.)
Though I hate to end on a disturbing note I haven't been able to get Edward Norton out of my mind recently so we have to look back at American History X (1998).
Edward Norton as "Derek" in American History X
I'm not sure how Mr. Norton became lodged in my brain recently but if I had to guess it'd be the combo of Mark Ruffalo taking over the Hulk (they just started filming The Avengers) and a random flashback to The Painted Veil. Then at some point last week I said to myself "Edward Norton was Ryan Gosling before Ryan Gosling was Ryan Gosling" i.e. the actor that everyone thought was The Actor of His Generation, The Future. And then I really couldn't get him out of my head.
Norton famously gained much of his Great Actor reputation from American History X (1998), and won a longshot Oscar nomination for Best Actor. In the film he plays Derek, a loathsome racist who, after realizing his world view is full of shit while serving time in prison, tries to turn his life around before his younger brother follows his same dark path. It's disturbing to note how much acting cred can come from playing racist skinheads; Russell Crowe (Romper Stomper) and Ryan Gosling (The Believer) had similar artistic breakthroughs.
I've never known quite what to make of American History X -- it's one of those films like, say, Natural Born Killers, that seems to struggle with its own theme merely by addressing it. If you keep visualizing something awful through strong visuals and hugely charismatic acting, aren't you actually glorifying what you're supposed to be condemning? So this post is also a call for your opinions. I'm just curious how readers feel about the movie because it's one of those key late 90s Oscar players that I don't believe we've ever discussed. (I was in the Sir Ian McKellen camp that year but I was enormously pleased that Norton managed a nomination.)
As Derek begins to form a tentative friendship with a black prisoner, his neonazi counterparts turn violently against him. Showers are always bad news in prison movies. More after the jump [NSFW]
Derek looks around nervously when he first hits the showers after breaking the unspoken rules of the prison by playing basketball with a mixed race group. But strangely he doesn't stay nervous when people begin leaving the showers en masse. Instead he sinks into his shower and seems lost to the world.
The saddest image of what follows might be the prison guard, head lowered, backing out of the room, eyes lowered, fully complicit.
Movies often paint characters into easy corners of good guys and bad guys but when you're protagonist IS a bad guy, things get more complicated. Do you feel sympathy for the devil and wish him well on his reform or do you think he has pain and violence coming to him because that's what he's always dished out? The following sequence is entirely queasy -- hateful dialogue and violent rape (I'll spare you photographs)
The director Tony ends up cutting away briefly to a shower nozzle recorded in slow motion -- water looks so surreal and beautiful when its frozen in time like that. Surely it's an apt decision since people often go out-of-body when they're experiencing trauma. But it still brings up questions of how to visualize awful events. The scene ends with Derek facedown on the tile in what is more or less a beautiful photograph, just as the water in slow motion was. Are beautiful images okay when you're conveying ugly events?
The Tyler Durdens: Norton in 1998 and Pit in 1999
I mean how is this much different than a fashion magazine photo of Brad Pitt, Edward Norton's next co-star (Fight Club), taken the following year?
But I digress. After Derek is out of prison, Edward Norton has one more shower scene to go. This one is of the Cleansing Shower Scene variety where the hero or heroine attempts to wash their past worries away, to emerge rejuvenated. This time we also get close ups of shower nuzzles and water moving in slow motion, but no violence. Only nostalgic memories of childhood in cutaways.
But the cleaning magic of the second shower scene is all in the superbly handled mirror scene. Derek sees himself, still wearing that tattoo representing everything that's wrong with his life, the tattoo he's been so proud to show off earlier in the film, and he covers it up with his hand, blotting out the ugliness. Norton shifts his face so subtly in the scene from recognition to confusion and regret and hope and pride and self-loathing that it's probable that different viewers project different emotions onto it.
It's really a marvelous performance and what's shocking about it later on in years is how unstrained and natural it feels. The films subject matter is so purple but Norton's performance doesn't ever go as big as you would imagine just hearing about the character.
Norton had a similarly self-confrontational climactic moment in 25th Hour (2002) his best work from the past decade. But he may have peaked right here with American History X just as we all were assuming he'd Arrived.
That often happens in the fickle world of the movies. Let's hope that Ryan Gosling is the new Ryan Gosling and not the new Edward Norton. It shouldn't be ending just as it's begun.
For the comments:
What do you make of the 1998 Best Actor Oscar race? Benigni vs. Hanks vs. McKellen vs. Nolte vs. Norton?
Who gets your retroactive Oscar vote? What do you think of American History X?