Twixt (Francis Ford Coppola, 2012)

[domino harvey]

US Blu-ray coming July 30th

[MoonlitKnight]

I finally saw this the other night, and I'm still not quite sure what to make of it. Some parts felt kind off, others were oddly fascinating.

[therewillbeblus]

After an uncertain first viewing followed by a couple years of it swimming around in my head, I'm finally on board with this film's greatness now that I've given it a second go. Right from the start the narration is tonally unpredictable, eerie and hilarious, and the 'logical' reason for a seven-sided clock with different times is bluntly stated as.. that there simply must be evil lurking in this town. For all the wild ideas floating around in this bold, alienating work of genius, the theme of 'seeing what you want to see' stands at the front of the line and weaves itself throughout its many waves of content. Alcohol colors in illogical thinking, trauma is externalized into VR-fantasy, idols are exhumed for guidance, ego-boosting, and closure. Is this a satire or parody, a comedy-horror jarringly-bifurcated self-reflexive ghost story, or the desperate attempts of a broken man using his only dependable skill in constructing narratives to find peace? I think it can be and is all of these things, as well as a commentary on how we can find what we need in the ubiquitous possibilities of life, including dreams, imitated here in art.

The real horrors are deeply tragic to the point of drawing tears, but not in the ways one might expect- instead hitting on the relatability of horror in Kilmer's, and our, real lives and daily news stories through subtle gestures embedded in the louder iconography. The modern social contexts of human existence are farced-up as ludicrous in objective terms, but individual experiences are also afforded maximized, dignified empathy for the pain that Coppola maturely treats with respect around the humor. Mostly this is just creative filmmaking actualized against the rules we've come to expect from ordered, limpid genre pics. I agree that this is one of Coppola's best films (and domino's observation of the Rumble Fish nods), but it's also one of his most ambitious, which is hyperbolic when talking about the man behind Apocalypse Now, but for me this is nearly as audacious as filmmaking gets.

SpoilerShow

The ambiguous reading of whether the film is an examination of a solipsistic alcoholic's world turning inside out as he goes insane haunted by his past, or narcissistically capitalizing on self-pity to sublimate into superficial success, is exceptionally well-played. While the ending may 'clarify' this for some in absolute terms, I believe it must be both- for human beings are complex, cope through cycles of conscious reflective therapy and avoidant disengagement, and if anything the ending can be seen as equally ambiguous: either a win in returning to a stable, ironic world on the impermanent wheel that will inevitably spin back around to horror, or another layer of now-far gone fantasy, which too may be optimistic depending how you look at it. Even the final title cards don't mean anything since it's impossible to tell what has been objective all along- with the other omnipotent-narrator prime bookend's declaration on seven-sided clocks=evil making as much sense as the happy endings delved out in spades over type.

[therewillbeblus]

I watched my copies of Twixt and the new edit of B'Twixt Now and Sunrise back to back tonight, and at first could barely discern any major differences in the scenes included in the daytime segments, not even in Kilmer or Dern's improvisational bits. The clearer changes are the trimmings - Coppola shaved off a lot of small movements or lead-ins to scenes in a film that was already a shining example of economy in the editing room. Kilmer's acclimation into town is like a cartoon, even within isolated scenes- for example, his entry into the coffee shop and the cue to the Poe hotel happens in the blink of an eye. So do a lot of pivotal narrative bits - like the ouija board seance, the morgue intro, and the infiltration of Flamingo's community in particular - which irreverently abolishes any sense of atmosphere or sincerely-pitched curiosity the original film had for that milieu. Kilmer shows up, and then Dern arrives. I guess that's one way to slap the noir and mystery devices in the face, and let us know that the scene and subplot don't matter one bit to Coppola anymore (this is the first big clue as to what he's really up to here).

A few cuts feel unfortunate. Kilmer setting up his work station cuts the best gag - the few seconds of unpacking the wood while we have no idea what the hell it is, and that eventually folds into.. a regular table... that's all cut. But curiously, the set up of items on the actual station is paced out as normal. Strange. The drunken post-Brando-imitation 'gay basketball player' improv is cut significantly too. The agility of Kilmer and Dern's interactions does kinda work though, because their relationship is already basically a screwball comedy. Their interplay is edited even quicker, and the way they drop-in on, or out of scenes together, practically in media res, heightens the silliness of their antics - which are over as soon as they start, emphasizing the vapid, transactional nature of the relationship too. A lot of these scenes play like the file on 2x speed, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was intentional and an intervention Coppola chose to implement. It felt like Lynch playing around with motion in Twin Peaks: The Return, only often in the hyperactive reverse.

The nighttime fantasy-horror stuff is entirely rearranged though, so I'll spoiler these parts:

SpoilerShow

The climactic scene with Elle in the morgue at the very end is recut and spliced into the scene of Kilmer initiating his writing. It's a weird insert, and must be jarring for those seeing it for the first time. I think the imagery is effective as a climax, but I can see how placing it there disrupts the flow of what we've gotten so far and contributes to the totally unhinged sense of what's happening. But it's especially sensible given where Fanning and Kilmer's relationship goes (spoiler: nowhere), and the attention Coppola wishes to give to this section of his film, or rather, how he wishes to utilize it. Most of the backstory and regular engagements with Elle Fanning don't happen as often and aren't drawn out. They were welcome in the original cut, but that's because her relationship with Kilmer was significant for both of their narratives to play out to their logical conclusions as a kind of mutual support.. not here though.

This new film's nighttime sections are communicated in a clearer manner, linearly, if slighter in what content is shown. Kilmer's climb up the tower is not tense nor generously built up - it's equally rapid and he's fallen almost as soon as he's set out to reach the top. As soon as Fanning is captured, she's sealed up behind the wall - none of her trauma is allotted an ounce of generous time or space to meditate on the tangible horrors of pain. The first cut was already unpredictable, chaotic, and bizarre, but this one -while kinda-sorta uncluttered in the dark fantasy parts - chooses to sacrifice a balance of earnest engagement with the ghosts of traumatic history for manic energy reflecting pure psychological disintegration and unreality. At least, that's what it's pretending to do.

But wow, that ending! Twixt used the 'It was All a Dream' ending for an interesting purpose, revealing that at least part -if not the bulk- of the narrative was a 'fantasy' of traumas, processed in the safe space of a silver screen, computer file, written page, and the characters' and our minds. This results in a conclusion that returning to the cycle of engagement, sublimation, and suppression is inevitable, but that this at least offers an optimistic interpretation of human resilience and hope for momentary reprieve; that we won't always be suffering as we live with our traumas. However, B'Twixt Now and Sunrise literally ends with Kilmer and Poe still in the nightmare dreamscape, which becomes (or is revealed to be) his 'reality'. Kilmer has just confronted his guilt and shame around his daughter's death (handled/edited much better here than in the original cut, which went on too long and was muddled with tonally-inconsistent sentimentality), and he stays there, trapped in this trauma. There's no waking up, no intimacy with Fanning, no false narrative that he 'saves' her - he didn't even engage with her in a meaningful way (or any character, really) after that first encounter. She doesn't get him to help her evade her circumstances either. He's just alone - directionless, purposeless, stuck. The camera angle is a long shot, establishing that inescapable alienation like Claudia searching on the vast island in L'Avventura, only in the endless dark of hell's static midnight hour, and we just end there. Nothing ambiguous about this ending, at least in a literal sense. Fuck.

It's really odd how little Elle Fanning features in this version. She's hardly a character, and seems to exist only as a red herring - an idea in the form of a character that Kilmer is chasing but cannot form a connection with this time around. Kilmer doesn't 'get' to use her to resemble his daughter- the first version's climax is inserted into the middle when he starts writing, then he stops. Her usefulness has peaked, and reveals itself to be a distraction and an artificial 'fix' for focusing on his own trauma with his daughter, which essentially scraps their entire 'relationship' and collaborative narrative that's so central to the first incarnation of this story! It's as if Coppola realized Twixt could be interpreted as enabling this diversion, and scrapped it to reflexively deprive Kilmer and us of that self-fulfilling fantasy. Similar to the questionably-rapid edit of the priest capturing and killing Fanning compared to Twixt mentioned earlier, Coppola's economic strategy seems to be in service of a punchline that undercuts sentimentality. By stripping these scenes of audience involvement, the disbarring film grammar mimics the lack of support these characters are given, disrupts the false notion that we can be their surrogate advocates or validators, and emphasizes their experience as victims of abrasive, isolating, oppressed action. I like to think that this serves as kind of a sequel to Twixt, where Kilmer is off to his next book, stuck in the purgatory experience of going into a town and getting inspired and struggling and sobering up, only this time he can't get out and finds that becoming sober is to face his trauma and stay there, because he was not sobered but inebriated when emerging from it in previous trials.

It feels like a trick - not just of tonal whiplash within the film itself, speeding up the comedic lunacy only to deliver an intra-film payoff - but an inter-film payoff; one that documents the erosion of optimism Coppola feels as he ages further from this more torn (twixted...?) externalization of grappling with the value of artistry in either covering up or as a tool expressing internal conflict from his past. So the "authentic" cut wouldn't so much mean that it's the vision he always meant to tell (we know that he played this for test audiences to receive input, tinkered with ideas, and concocted it over and over throughout the years) but it's the cut that he's come to form as the most "authentic" to what it's like for him, to sit with the mess in his mind after so many decades of heavy 'life' accumulated, with no where to run to; perhaps the most "authentic" way he can tell this story, or the most "authentic" intervention we can take to our own baggage. Though it's possible that Coppola always wanted to give it this bleak ending, I like to imagine that it's one he's come to as he's lived a bit more, and you know what? Maybe this kind of surrender is actually the more optimistic path. It's nice not to feel like you have to run anymore. And he never pretended like the ending to Twixt was anything other than the depiction of a man still on the run, not ready for that surrender quite yet. Is Twixt -> B'Twixt Now and Sunrise Coppola's psychological autobiography?

Also, I thought there were a string of posts about this film's new cut, curiously absent from this thread. Must be because this new version is a different movie and it should be moved to the 1971 thread

[swo17]

I bought the German Blu-ray of this so I could see the 3D version. There are just two brief scenes presented that way, and it's pretty funny how the movie instructs you to put on and take off your glasses:

SpoilerShow

For reference, the two scenes start at 58:52 and 1:20:32, and portray the following:

SpoilerShow

Baltimore wandering through a clock tower; Baltimore removing a stake from V's heart, which causes blood to gush everywhere. The 3D then continues through the remainder of the film, including the end credits