Martin Scorsese Started the Fire: Hugo and The Bad Thing
by zunguzungu
The first thing to say about Scorsese’s Hugo is that, from the beginning, the concerns that actually motivate the narrative are deeply, basically, and fundamentally very simple. Hugo wants to have a not-shitty life. He wants the most universal things it is possible to want: family, friends, freedom from fear, security, that sort of thing. These are desires that it is easier to express in negative terms: he wants to have parents who are not dead, he wants to not go to The Orphanage, he wants to not be unemployed and useless, and he wants to not be alone all the time. And before The Bad Thing happened, he had those things and life was pretty great. Jude Law was still in the movie, and who doesn’t love that? But then, arbitrarily and without warning, The Bad Thing happened, and most of the movie is motivated by wanting not, wanting not-the-bad-thing.
What was the Bad Thing? It doesn’t matter; it’s an arbitrary and senseless hand of God that enters the narrative and makes things shitty. Fire came and burned the father up, in point of fact, but he could as easily have drowned or been hit by a meteor or killed in the other Bad Thing that will happen later; the fire doesn’t matter in its particularity, any more than it matters why The Great War happens, or any of the other Bad Things that happen. A Bad Thing simply happened and then life got really scary and desperate.
It is important to notice this fairly simple fact, because this is what the narrative is about. The fact that the Bad Thing is arbitrary and senseless is not beside the point; it is the point. As Event, it signifies “arbitrariness.” And while it’s a clumsy bit of writing – deus ex machina being the cheapest form of authorial intrusion there is – that is also precisely the point. Arbitrary does not mean “random,” but something more like “subject to authorial will.” And this isn’t just a badly written movie (though, good lord, it is that); this is a movie that quite explicitly wants to elevate arbitrary authorial spectacle over the complex and contingent ambiguities of human existence, to quite nakedly and directly demand that we revere the Voice of the Author[ity] over the nuances of character. After all, this is a movie whose perverse dramatic climax is when the Director gets the Lifetime Achievement award, and we are meant to believe that Hugo would risk his life to help him do it (or, rather, to overlook the fact that he never would). It’s a bold move to write your Oscar acceptance speech into the film itself – casting Ben Kingsley to play you – but Scorsese, it appears, is a bold auteur: his characters are there to serve him.
It might be too much to call Hugo a fascist movie, in this sense, but I like the way the word feels on my tongue, here, the kind of association between spectacle and authority that it evokes (and consequential contempt and crass instrumentalization of those who are weak enough to be used). In any case, I hope the slippage in my language – between auteur, author, and authority – suffiently indexes the way this movie wants to make the author both the object of the spectacle, the master of the spectacle, and the primary subject of love and sympathy. For in doing so, it wants to make us forget people’s whose precariousness – whose subjection to the whims of the powerful – would make them not give two fucking shits about an old man’s battered ego, much less risking their entire existence to give it one last pump.
After all, something bizarre happens between the beginning of the movie, when we are watching Hugo try to survive in a desperately precarious place, and the end, when we are watching Hugo watching movies and a moviemaker. How on earth has the movie gone from the paradigmatic orphan plot to a Behind the Music documentary? How have we been tricked into thinking the real tragedy of the Bad Thing was that it hampered a director’s career?
Let us go back to where we start, and where we end: Hugo’s existence – post-Event – is profoundly ruled by arbitrary fate. He is contingent, utterly dependent on the unpredictably vaguaries of chance, etc. Hugo isn’t just metaphorically an undocumented worker. He’s actually quite literally an illegal alien, as Millicent pointed out to me; he may have blue eyes and the palest of pale skin – in yet another Parisian nostalgia film where brown people don’t exist – but let us add up the details: existing on the margins of official society, he keeps the machinery running without anyone knowing, lacks a secure right to exist or assurance that his job will continue, his livelihood is illegal (in that he must steal to live), and the police question his presence on sight and will arrest him if the truth is discovered. He is, in other words, the very embodiment of precarious life, a person whose ability to exist is so radically contingent on the visissitudes of random fate that his existence can’t have any independent meaning or coherence; he will simply be, but be fundamentally dependent for life on random chance, until random chance destroys him.
The reason this happened – the thing that caused him to be cast out of meaningful society, a permanent outlaw whose life can have no reliable or secure meaning – is itself essentially meangingless. No one started the fire. He’s not a Harry Potter whose parents were murdered. It just happened. And the result of that senseless event is: to be cast into a world of senselessness.
But at this point, there are two points to make. On the one hand, we’re at the level of very basic universals: Hugo’s Good life went away because of a Bad Thing, and that Bad Thing could happen again, at any time, and take away what little he has left. All that bullshit about movies and clocks and machines and magic tricks haven’t entered into the picture because they’re all essentially compensatory. Why is Hugo into movies? Because he and his father used to watch movies after his mother died. Why is he so into machinery and the automaton? Because it’s his connection to his dead father. The plot – a splendid and incoherent minefield of machines and clocks and movies and magic tricks and all sorts of great MacGuffins – is nothing more than Hugo’s attempt to deal with a reality defined by the absence of everything that is universally good, his effort to bring about a state of being where his life will be not bad. In other words, we have to reduce the movie down to its crude essence: Good Things and Bad Things. Drama! Loss! Pathos!
Which brings me to my second point: someone did start the fire. It was Martin Scorsese. All that bullshit about clocks and magic tricks is there to hide the simple fact that Scorsese’s movie has built us a perfect orphan, with a perfect orphan story, using fire and spectacle to do it. But this is purely functional necessity. For while the movie ends with the important rich director saving him – just as the important rich director put him in this mess in the first place – it turns out, obscenely, that the plight of this orphan was, itself, mere spectacle for us to enjoy feeling sorry for, and the real question in the film is whether we’ll remember that spectacle is the most important thing. Because somewhere in the middle, what is at stake in the narrative suddeny, seamlessly, becomes the question of whether important rich guy will get his proper due from society as an important guy. Martin Scorsese expects us to believe that the most marginalized and vulnerable member of society imaginable – Hugo – would suddenly, for no apparent reason, decide that what he truly needs to do is help an old man who has been, uniformly and without exception, cruel to him. He doesn’t just expect it; he takes for granted that in a movie which starts off being (essentially) about an undocumented alien trying to stay out of an ICE detention center, what we really need to be concerned about is the question of whether a great filmmaker will get lauded and praised for being great.
Underneath all of this, I want to suggest, is the realization (and repression) of the fact that “Martin Scorsese” is profoundly irrelevent to the world today. By putting him in quotation marks, I don’t mean Scorsese himself; I mean that “Famous Director Obsessed With Blurring the Boundaries Between Film History and Real History” is tremendously out of step with a world now defined not by glorious luxury, but by precarious workers whose lives are being destroyed by senseless Bad Things. We are (or he is afraid we are) the people who came back from the Bad Thing and stopped giving a shit about wonderful daydreams, a la the soldiers who came back from the Great War and stopped watching The Director’s movies. And by making Hugo’s narrative about this tragedy and its resolution – about the terrible fact that this is the case, and then building a dream world in which we look away from a terrible reality and fluff his ego as dream-maker once more – is it too much for me to note and to abhor how he has decided to put the focus on himself? Is it too much to scramble around for the worst words you can find to describe a movie that starts with an incredibly powerful evocation of the fear, loneliness, and terror of useless and discarded life — the pain of being disallowed even to be a cog in the machine — and apply them to the filmmaker who would make that movie, ultimately, about how great it is to be on top of the pyramid, and how sad it is to not be on the very top any more? And then put himself back on top?
Have you read the original book? I thought it was a fantastic bit of genre-bending and writing, but it was over a year ago and I wasn’t taking notes or reading with a post-colonial mindset. Some of what you describe – haven’t seen the movie yet, myself – is in the source material, but there’s layers which I think got stripped out. Still, it would be interesting to see how much of what you describe really is Scorsese’s responsibility.
I haven’t, and I’m glad to hear that it has more to it than the movie. I write this kind of post through the coneit that it sprang fully formed from Scorsese’s brain, since part of the movie is, in fact, exactly that conceit (in which the director writes, films, and stars in his own films). And also because it’s easier on me!
It’s a pretty quick read — being half graphic novel — and most decent public libraries have a copy in the children’s section, especially now that the movie’s out. Not sure how many decent public libraries are left, especially in California….
“Fascist?” Really, Aaron?
This post reminds me of the worst tendencies of academic film studies, in which all the life and blood are drained out of great films to try to fit them into preconceived lit-crit narratives. The Melies character, like the real Melies, isn’t a “rich white guy.” He’s a broken old artist and film pioneer forced to make a living selling wind-up toys in the train station!
As far as I’m concerned, Hugo is a film about love — family love, love between friends, and the way in which lack of parentage can warp our notions of love (as in the Sascha Baron Cohen’s character). I think Scorsese took a lovely but thin book and expanded it in to a rich, generous tapestry of characters and motion, a love letter to the cinema itself from one of its greatest exponents.
I’m a huge & vocal admirer of your work. I encourage you to be aware of the ways in which your real-world preoccupations can bleed into the way you see and process works of art.
I agree with you that it’s a love letter to the cinema–but I don’t see how it’s about any of the other forms of love you mention. What family? How is Hugo’s lack of parentage warping his notions of love? He’s the most loving, least warped character in the movie. He is those things *despite* his family (specifically, the drunken uncle who abandons him). His family exists only to provide nostalgia, only to provide us with a poignant sense of what he’s lost.
Re: Sacha Baron Cohen, what does it say about this film that the “villain” is, as you so rightly point out, an orphan, and, perhaps more importantly, a veteran of the war? (The latter might have “warped” him more?) This is a movie about ignoring “real-world preoccupations” in the service of glorifying the cinema and crediting it with “making our dreams”. I have no objections to any paean to movie-making as art or escapism, but this was neither. If Hugo was an invitation to forget real world challenges, it should not have featured as its protagonist a Dickensian amalgam of all that is poor and bereft, albeit prettily filmed.
Compared with the Sascha Baron Cohen character, Hugo grew up with a loving father and only became an orphan recently, He finds love with the girl (friends? lovers? siblings?) and ultimately joins Melies’ family. Cohen’s character is the ostensible “villain” but he is also redeemed through the love and compassion he apparently lacked growing up.
Melies is a bitter, heartbroken man who has seen his life’s work destroyed and erased from history. He is also healed by love: by the love of the film critic (a wet dream for cinephiles!), the love of his new audiences, and by his bond with Hugo, who returns his long-lost automaton masterpiece.
And then, of course, there is the little side story of the cafe owner and her little dog, who both find love…
MPL,
But what does it mean to be “about” love? For me, the problem is that Melies’ behavior makes him out to be kind of a terrible person; he might be a great artist or whatever, but he’s really cruel to Hugo in the beginning, and the point at which Hugo starts trying to help him comes long before Hugo has any reason to see him as other than cruel. The bonding scene in workshop is totally inadequate for me; after taking Hugo’s most treasured position and lying about destroying it — which is an incredibly cruel thing to do — he offers Hugo the wonderful opportunity to work for him until Melies decides it’s been enough. I’m not saying he should be the villain of the story, but from Hugo’s position, he’s not someone you would throw your life into jeopardy in order to save. And so my problem with the movie is that rather than see things from Hugo’s perspective, it sees them from the Great Artist’s perspective.
As for Melies not being a rich white guy, of course he is …from Hugo’s perspective. Compared to Hugo’s position in society, he’s massively privileged, massively secure. Hugo lives every minute of his life under the sword of Damocles of being sent off to The Orphanage (which, frankly, gave me the willies), while Melies has a nice house, nice family, security, even some great stories from his youth when he was A Big Deal. What he lacks is compassion, but the film doesn’t seem to value that (and I do).
As for my real-world preoccupations, I really don’t make (or value) distinctions between the “real world” and art; that’s a much longer debate and conversation, but for me, the starting point is the impossibility of distinguishing between them. So if we disagree on that, well, we disagree on that (and that’s okay).
It seems you wanted Hugo to be about something that it never was going to be about and something you dearly wanted it to be about. For starters, read the book by Brain Selznick who, I’ll note, gets NO mention in your piece. Second, you also fail to mention Isabelle – the young girl [also an orphan!] who is the one link between Hugo and the old shopkeeper [filmmaker]. Third, the automaton and the memory of his father as it ties into movies – and therefore the old filmmaker – is what leads Hugo on a journey [with Isabelle!] that revives the old man. To say Hugo does this for no apparent reason is to admit maybe you didn’t understand the basic plot of the movie.
Hugo is without a family. He finds a new family [as it were] via the automaton which is the only thing in his life that links the world he once had to a world he will now have. The fact that he revives the career of some old curmudgeon filmmaker is a nice way of rounding out the story. It’s win win.
The Great War is the backdrop, yes. And perhaps there should be more focus on that tragedy. But you could make the same argument for the flu epidemic that killed more than 20 million people. “How could Scorsese be so insensitive as to not make this movie about the tragedy of the flu?”
Hugo may not be a great movie but to roll the word ‘fascist’ off your tongue is – to say the least – absurd. I’ll note too that the timing of your review is interesting. The day after Scorsese wins for best director at the Golden Globes you drop your review. Can we say contrarian?
To build on MattL’s point about the automaton, I thought that thread was the cleverest part of the movie. Father and son—that is a true genealogy—work together to unlock a piece of machinery that will eventually reveal to the son a new, artificial genealogy (one preferable to the uncle). Scorsese, fascistically or not, does the same thing by reanimating the sets of a cinematic founding father. It’s a cinephilic version of the Dickensian orphan plot, which is about the production of just such genealogical fantasies amidst just such squalor. I had my problems with the movie—the treacly art appreciation scenes, the clumsily handled sublots—but to draw fatuous comparisons to ICE detention centers is as loony (bilingual pun intended) as Melies’ moonscape.
In light of the last paragraph Aaron, I’d be curious to hear whether you’re as suspicious about the grandiose claims comedy makes for itself in a film like Sullivan’s Travels (specifically the prison movie screening.)
Thanks for the post–hadn’t thought about this movie since discarding my glasses.
CBR,
ICE detention centers: dude, all I can say is that I found the orphanage stuff genuinely creepy; Millicent can attest to how jumpy the movie made me. I’m a softy though, and this is why I can’t wacth horror movies.
I genuinely don’t know what to make about the Sullivan’s Travels thing; that part of that movie always weirds me out. So the literal answer is, yes, I am suspicious about that part of the movie. I’m not as sure that I’m right to be suspicious, though, since I have a much higher opinion of Preston Sturges.
Genealogical fantasies: maybe; I didn’t see it that way, but it’s an interesting argument. Will have to think about it.
MattL,
I didn’t mention the book because I didn’t read it; as I told Jonathan — but which I can say more clearly here — I actually think that’s the right way to do it. A movie and its original are not the same thing at all, and since most filmmakers radically change their source material, it’s better to treat them as two different artifacts. The interesting thing would be to look at the book and see how Scorsese changed it; I might even go ahead and do that.
As for the point about Isabelle and the automaton, as I see it, he only finds a new family once he’s proven to the old man that people still love him; until that point, Melies treats him like shit. And Isabelle is kind to him, certainly, but there’s also the fact that she wants to have an adventure, and he helps her do it. She becomes a friend to him, but it would be something utterly different if he tried to help *her*; she would have deserved it. Melies, by contrast, is a love-suck: everyone must help him, but he never does anything to deserve or warrant it (and yes, that does irritate me). And the point about the Great War is how weird it is that the movie positions it as a tragedy mainly because it ruined Melies’ film career; the sense of proportion by which people stopped paying attention to film — the sense of proportion imposed by great hardship — is the thing the movie wants us to overlook, and it’s this explicit argument for overlooking that I object to.
Also, I’m glad to learn that the post was timely, but your reconstruction of my motives gives me too much credit; I wrote it week ago and happened to post it today for reasons having nothing to do with anything but my own schedule.
Thanks for responding. Regarding how Melies treats the boy badly – I’ll agree. But it is a rather common plot point that – if anything – can be criticized for being too formulaic; “Old curmudgeon is hateful but comes around in the end to be lovable and misunderstood.”
I will agree that Scorsese saw in the material something that was to HIS liking, which is movies and such. But, again, the source material has to be a factor. Of note, I will say the film deals with a common theme that Scorsese uses again and again. Only, in this case, he takes it one [positive] step further. It is the theme of the main character who gets caught in a situation from which he cannot escape – from street criminals to mafia thugs, from Soho to the responsibilities of being a religious leader his characters are burdened by their culture and their actions. But in this film the character finally breaks free.
Much as you didn’t write this review as a contrarian review [sorry for the accusation] I think neither Selznick or Scorsese made the film with the intention of making a statement that the true tragedy of the Great War was that it lead to the end of Melies career. It may in fact have – but indirectly.
I’ll point out too that in real life Melies did not get the honor this film shows. He died poor and forgotten. But what is history other than a bunch of past events that can be made into entertainment? I jest.
I can accept the cahrge that Scorsese has been critically over-praised but in his defense (not having seen the film in question) I would say that child actors rarely produce decent performances and CGI dominated movies doubly so. Of course, Of course, Scorsese chose a project featuring both so he put himself in harms way. I wonder whether he wanted to do a kids’ story so he could show one of his films to his grandchildren. He doesn’t exactly have much work in his back catalog suitable for a young audience (Taxi Driver? Raging Bull? Goodfellas? Even Age of Innocence would bore most pre-teens).
I take exception to two claims:
1. Melies is very cruel to the boy. — He caught the boy stealing! And he knows the boy has been stealing continually from his shop. We have built-in sympathy; we know why the kid needs the gears & cogs. But Melies does not. As far as he’s concerned, the boy is a street urchin and thief.
Melies starts out angry and perhaps cruel (although he’s convinced the boy stole the sketchbook from somewhere) but he quickly softens and allows the kid to work in his shop. Not exactly a long-term cruelty. In fact, one could argue that early in the film the adults are seen through the eyes of the boy as scary and formidable but they all soften and become humanized as he (and we) learns more about them.
2. WWI is somehow underrepresented. — Scorsese doesn’t spend much time on the subject but the Sascha Baron Cohen character’s crappy mechanical knee is a source of humor through much of the film…until he acknowledges his deficiency as a war injury that “will never heal” and the flower seller tells him she lost her brother in the war as well. It’s a beautiful moment, in which the Baron Cohen’s character is instantly humanized and the great tragedy of the War to End All Wars bubbles gently to the surface. Hugo is not a film about war but the sadness and loss of WWI seems to pervade the station and its characters.
————–
Same film, different eyes, I guess. I think the film is brilliant and Scorsese’s control over the characters, tone, rhythm, visual style and pacing is astonishing. Not many directors living or dead have the wisdom and compassion, let alone the technical chops, to have pulled off such a triumph. The opening sequence alone is worth the price of admission.
You’re wrong. We don’t have built in sympathy for Hugo. The boy’s acting is too lousy for sympathy and “built-in sympathy” is the kind where everyone says “AWWW” because we know we are supposed to- “built-in sympathy” ain’t sympathy. The movie was t-e-r-r-i-b-l-e. It had bad acting through out, horrible “this-is-to-help-you-get-the-point-stupid” music, many scenes repeated nice and slowly for droolers, perhaps, or the director just had all this 3-D kapok lying about, (twice the kid falls on the tracks with the train approaching, twice the kid wakes out of a nightmare, more than twice the rocket hits Mr. Moon, twice the chase scene through the clockworks). Oh gee, you talk about bubbles on the surface! At one point, why, the wee little girl (she’s an orphan, too, it turns out! One wasn’t enough to get the point across, that is, they-don’t-trust-the-audience),well, the wee thing crinkles her little brow and chirps out her love for good old “Charles Dickens”, and this in a loud, long cringe-inducing drag of a movie about two orphans who are hated and vilified by very queer, nasty adults- Hey Mr. MagicLovePeaceSqueakyFromme! CHARLES DICKENS!! GOT IT…YET??
Does the sadness of WWI ‘seem to’ pervade the station when SB Cohen, the cripple, gets his nuts crushed by a steamer trunk? Boy howdy, now that’s what this Pilgrim calls a source of humor! What’s with the crappy English accents in Paris? The drunk uncle, Mr. Bill Sykes to you, apparently is, what, Cockney? Aren’t they always?
The tone, rhythm, pacing was astonishing- Bad! Melies is upset because the drawings in the book are of his own work- why doesn’t the kid just say the book was his father’s? “Wisdom and compassion”? It was a very slow cringe-fest. Everybody said the “…opening sequence is worth…” blah blah blah- and that’s all the opening scene was, at best…blah. A “blah” CGI chase scene which was (yawn) repeated. The people who calculate their feelings and honesty according to Hallmark card sentiments told the same lie about the opening sequence of “Bridesmaids”- so screw ’em. Maybe you think the creators of this film are being wise and compassionate- I say they don’t trust us, you, me, the audience.
What makes this movie different from say, Inglorious Basterds?