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Artist Diana Kingsley uses a Hasselblad camera to make her images; she's as picky and exacting as a high-paid product photographer, but instead of putting all that energy and care into the service of crass commercialism, she takes the little slippages that drive art directors crazy and turns them into content. Her photos have that creamy, so-seamless-as-to-be-slightly-otherworldly look common to high-end retail catalogs (and Robert Mapplethorpe), but there's usually something wrong with them. To her credit, the "errors" (and they're not just photography errors, but screw-ups suggesting a whole range of human dysfunctions) don't leap out at you like Mad magazine gags. They're subtle, so subtle that you sometimes don't even see them.
In Net, 1997, a woman in tennis whites has collapsed face-down on the court, ball resting near her head. She's wearing a red wig, and in a detail that's barely visible in the photo (and completely invisible online), the hair is parted to reveal a kind of netting--a super-tacky echo of the unseen tennis net and racket. In Sensitive Son, 1997, the "error" is more obvious: a cute kid in a knit cap who might or might not be a sportswear model posing for the perfect catalog shot sheds an unfortunate (time-, film-, and money-wasting) bead of sweat. The offending fluid is shaped like a teardrop, suggesting a subliminal, Oedipal message to a pushy off-camera stage mom.
Ultimately, the "errors" occur within a much larger comedy of visual manners. In Diane, 2001 (below), a female conventioneer has a name tag with ink smeared so badly it slides onto the fabric of her top. This is a joke at her expense, but then she's not really a person in the photograph, just a superlative pair. One of the more amusing features of the picture is the water bottle in her hand--a sexual pun, of course, given its location in the picture, but also a sly comment on contemporary mores. Everyone seems to be carrying around quarts of Evian and Poland Spring these days: at what point did they not become ridiculous?
Diana Kingsley, Diane, 2001, lambda print, 30" X 30"
The George Romero zombie picture is alive and well and its name is Black Hawk Down. Ever since Saving Private Ryan, stuff filmmakers couldn't possibly get away with in a wide-release horror film (such as the dangling viscera excised from Scream) has become perfectly acceptable as long as the movie wraps itself in the flag and pays token homage to our Brave Fighting Boys.
Each of Romero's films (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead) features an intrepid band of survivors fighting off an army of implacable marching ghouls. The gore factor is straight through the ceiling, and the audience gets a lot of vicarious thrills watching the depersonalized zombies get offed in creative ways (Hey, they're already dead, right? So it's OK!). Also, the audience has no idea which of the (barely sympathetic) good guys will buy the farm, either, so tension is at a maximum throughout. Romero's films are resolutely antiestablishment, and the viewer is constantly reminded that things are going to hell because the people who are supposed to be in charge f-ed up.
Well, same with Black Hawk Down! Instead of zombies, it's hordes of "skinnies"--which is what the Rangers and Delta Force guys called the starving Somalians--who just keep coming and coming no matter how many of them are cut down by machine gun fire. Charges of racism have been leveled at the film because the "skinnies" are all black and the American military guys are all white (save one); inconveniently for the forces of political correctness, that's exactly how it was in Mogadishu in '93.* And gore? You bet! A soldier sees a severed hand (with wristwatch) lying in the dust and he picks it up and stuffs it in his flak jacket; an inexperienced medic plunges his hands into a soldier's ripped open lower abdomen, trying to find (and close) a spurting femoral artery.
And for incompetent leadership, it would hard to find a better image than Sam Shephard gnawing impotently on his knuckles back at HQ, watching his boys get wasted on a live video feed (from surveillance helicopters hovering uselessly over the battleground).
Black Hawk Down, an intense kinetic experience that is beautifully filmed and utterly ambiguous politically, was recently screened for Donald Rumsfeld and various military brass. It's being touted as a patriotic film with great relevance to our recent military adventures.** Maybe when Rumsfeld watched it he was thinking: "We didn't let our troops down the way Clinton did in Mogadishu, by God!" But you can't help but wonder if part of him wasn't also asking: "Exactly what does this candy-ass Hollywood Brit pinko Ridley Scott think he's pulling here?"
*Bootleg copies of the film are reportedly drawing big crowds in Mogadishu. According to an AP story, "the young men cheer...whenever an American [i]s hit, but there [i]s no reaction from the audience when a Somali character [goes] down. [Somali] Mohamed Ali Abdi, who had been living at Bar Ubah junction, where the battle took place, says, "The reality of the Somali character is captured in this movie, but there is not a single word of the Somali language, no Somali music, nothing of our culture. This is absurd, but still they reproduced our sandy streets and battered buildings and the crazy way Somalis just kept on fighting." **Or maybe not. For an excellent summary of how the film gets it right and wrong, see this essay.