CineLinkr #11: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Citizen Kane begins at Xanadu (a decayed estate, a sled named Rosebud, a dying man) and ends at Xanadu: news reporters sifting through the possessions, the camera pulling back, the furnace, the sled. You've completed the loop and understood it at the first frame and understood it differently at the last. Orson Welles was 25 when he directed it. The film was made in 1941. Structurally it remains the most cited example of how to use space as punctuation.

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🟢 Easy: Directed by Tim Burton

Movies: Beetlejuice · Edward Scissorhands · Batman · Big Fish

Tim Burton spent the first decade of his career making films about people who looked wrong in the world they'd been placed in, and the films were kind about this, which was unusual.

Beetlejuice (1988) is a ghost movie played as comedy: a recently deceased couple haunting their own house, a family of New Yorkers redecorating it, and Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse in fifteen or so minutes of screen time that somehow defines the entire film. Edward Scissorhands (1990) is the most explicit statement of the theme: a man-made by-an-inventor boy with scissors for hands, living in a pastel suburb, capable of extraordinary beauty (haircuts, topiary, ice sculptures) and unable to touch anything gently. Johnny Depp's physical performance almost communicates without dialogue.

Batman (1989) is a studio film wearing the outsider aesthetic: Michael Keaton as a billionaire who dresses as a bat because something broke in him as a child, Jack Nicholson as the Joker who was chemically broken after falling into acid. Both characters have creation myths. Both are positioned as equivalents. The film was enormous and it established both Burton's gothic visual vocabulary and the tone that superhero films would eventually reject and then return to. Big Fish (2003) is the one that showed what happens when the outsider is beloved: a dying storyteller, his estranged son, the gap between tall tale and truth, what it means to inherit a father's mythology.

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🟡 Medium: Starring Cate Blanchett

Movies: Elizabeth · The Aviator · Blue Jasmine · Carol

Cate Blanchett has two Academy Awards for Best Actress for completely different kinds of films, and four additional nominations, and the range across all six is the argument.

Elizabeth (1998) was Shekhar Kapur's historical drama and Blanchett's breakthrough: Queen Elizabeth I, the early years, the paranoia and isolation of the crown, the transformation from uncertain inheritor to political force. The Aviator (2004) is Blanchett winning her first Oscar, not as lead, as Katharine Hepburn, supporting. The impression has been debated and praised; she captures something rather than imitating.

Blue Jasmine (2013) is Woody Allen's best dramatic work of recent years: a former socialite whose world has collapsed, visiting her estranged blue-collar sister, managing the cognitive dissonance between who she was and who she has to become. Blanchett won her second Oscar for it, this time carrying the film. The performance is exhausting in the good way, Jasmine is difficult and the film doesn't relieve her of that. Carol (2015) is Todd Haynes' adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel: a love affair in 1952, told through glances and restraint, the cinematography by Edward Lachman shooting everything through glass and at distance. Blanchett and Rooney Mara were both nominated. Neither won, which was wrong on at least one count.

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🔵 Hard: Film Begins and Ends at the Same Physical Location

Movies: Citizen Kane · The Godfather · The Wizard of Oz · Sunset Boulevard

Four films that use the same physical location as both opening and closing image, and each one uses the repetition to mean something different.

Citizen Kane opens in Xanadu's ruin and closes in it; the structure is circular, but the second viewing of the location is freighted with everything the film revealed. Sunset Boulevard (1950) opens with Joe Gillis floating dead in a swimming pool at a decayed Hollywood mansion, narrating his own death. It closes in the same pool. The film's entire plot is contained within a prologue. Everything you see is flashback delivered by a dead man.

The Godfather (1972) opens and closes in the Don's study: the opening provides Vito Corleone in full power, hearing petitioners; the closing shows Michael Corleone receiving the same homage, the door closing, the transformation complete. The Wizard of Oz (1939) begins and ends in Dorothy's farmhouse in Kansas, framing the Oz sequences as either dream or magic depending on your age when you first see it. The repetition makes the farmhouse strange on return, you've seen what the sepia world can transform into.

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🟣 Tricky: Title Is the Name of a Real City

Movies: Casablanca · Chicago · Munich · Selma

Real city. In the title. The challenge is that these feel like four different categories of film (classic romance, jukebox musical, historical thriller, civil rights drama) until the geographic structure reveals itself.

Casablanca (1942) is, by most available metrics, the most beloved American film ever made. Rick's Café. "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. The ending is the one everyone knows: the fog, the airport, "Here's looking at you, kid." Chicago (2002) is Rob Marshall's adaptation of the stage musical: Velma Kelly, Roxie Hart, the 1920s, murder and celebrity and the vaudevillian structure of justice. It won Best Picture.

Munich (2005) is Spielberg's most morally serious film: the aftermath of the 1972 Olympic massacre, the Mossad team assembled to assassinate those responsible, the weight of each action on the agents performing them. Selma (2014) is Ava DuVernay's account of the 1965 voting rights marches in Alabama: Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo), the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the political negotiations with Lyndon Johnson. It was nominated for Best Picture and won Best Original Song for "Glory." The cinematography won nothing, which was wrong.

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The bookend location category is the most structural of today's four. It's about how films use architecture to close meaning, the room that was the beginning becomes the room that is the ending, and the difference between those two rooms is the whole film. Sunset Boulevard does this most irrevocably: the dead narrator watching his own past arrive at the pool where he's already floating.

Today's PixelLinkr puzzle covered Devolver Digital's catalog, Obsidian's writing consistency, rhythm games that punish you for losing the beat, and hotels as game settings. Luigi's Mansion 3 shares a category with Hotel Dusk, which feels right.