I’m finding that I’m really liking the Wiseman films that generally receive lesser attention. “Aspen” is one of them, and I think it’s both a little bit difficult to make progress figuring it out and also is the first of the Wiseman films expressly about a town or community, so that takes some consideration too. Canal Zone was sort of about a community, but the large military component there and the foreign locale made it a bit more straightforward. Aspen is a little different, which already is a good thing, that it’s not what we’d anticipate. I don’t see it so concerned with dissecting the town, pushing the rich-poor contrasts, or getting that caught up in the skiing. There are elements of all three certainly, but I think it can be a little misleading when the town is the name of the film and that might bring certain expectations along with it. I did find the film quite interesting and focused and rather thematically consistent - very interested in pretense, New Age speak, education, anti-aging, self-help, and religion - all of which come under a fair amount of critique if not outright smirking attack. There are also some nice stalwart Wiseman components that provide pleasurable continuity, but seemingly deliberately missing are things we might have expected - no town meetings or workings of government, no police, a medical problem only mentioned once by phone, and except for some snowplows and one brief appearance of a broom, no one concerned with cleaning the place up. Let’s try to see what we can make of it.
I may have mentioned something like this before, but this film had me reaffirming that it’s not productive to go “What does Wiseman really think about what’s going on in this film” or “What opinion does he want us to have”. There’s a reason these films have no narration, a serious reason. He’s not here to guide us through. We should be saying “What do we think”. We can look to all sorts of stylistic or structural things if we choose to, or listen to what people say or how they say it - all the things we do in movies ordinarily. But then we’re on our own, which is a good thing in these films, as they are built on ambiguity and situations often with no clear answers. I will certainly weigh in heavily on this one, but I’m telling you what I think, not what I think Wiseman thinks.
I’ll start with heading straight to hands down the absolutely funniest most incredible scene in what are now twenty-five movies. I watched in disbelief and stupefaction. It can also get us going on major Aspen preoccupations. It’s just one of the weirdest damn things I’ve ever seen. We’re about two-thirds into the film, and we might expect some big thing to be coming, as we take a long car trip through winding roads in the snow, past a guard gate, and on to a remote building. It turns out inside is a strange technician, not apparently a doctor, who is operating a weird beeping device that sounds like one of those horror movie theramins, and he’s got a little probe that he’s using to poke his client/patient. “This is designed to clean cancer in the blood”, he says, and already we know we’ve got a charlatan on our hands. When he adds “this is from a scientist in Canada,” I was already in stitches. He says one idiotic thing after another, as he supposedly takes readings to diagnose his client’s medical needs. “It affects these things at a metabolic level and not that much at an overall organ level” and “this is a product called 714-X that’s used in Canada for cleansing the blood”. Why the repeated invoking of Canada is supposed to impress is anybody’s guess, but the client, one of the many Aspenites ready to solve his problems through non-traditional means, is lapping it up. The technician decides for awhile that the problem is prostate congestion, and after letting the computer beep for a while, decides there’s an “old-time homeopathic remedy” to deal with this, that he calls “diluted marijuana”. Don’t try to google that, because there ain’t no such thing. Just when you think this horror show of medical quackery is winding down, the technician says they need to begin what he actually calls “a symphony orchestra of harmonic therapy” as he starts poking different toes and claiming one gets him a liver reading, another toe the kidneys, another the stomach, and then switching hands with his poke stick, says he’s getting readings off of different fingers for the guy’s intestines, his heart, and then his endocrine system. There’s stuff about hormone functions too, and the technician actually starts in on some diagnosis about the man’s teeth having “problems originating in the prostate”. Locating what he describes as a spot “behind your ear in this little hollow” his claim is that with a probe there he can “test and make contact with your hypothalamus point - that’s the ultimate regulating system.” He gets back to the teeth again, proclaiming that “certain teeth belong to the stomach system”, and somehow the man’s mammary glands enter the conversation, as they somehow relate to prostate problems. We hear the sound of printouts throughout all this, and the guy who’s had these supposed probes looks extremely pleased he’s made this pilgrimage to the middle of nowhere to get these pronouncements. Sorry to go on about this, but I want to keep a record for myself that I didn’t hallucinate this whole mad scene.
The reason to recount this craziness is that it’s one of Aspen’s repeated points, these well-to-do people who are getting older and who are living a vacation-like life and on the prowl for comforts and amusements of all sorts, are suckers for pseudo-science, pseudo-art, pseudo-religion, and various others pseudos. A major pleasure and simultaneous shock of this film is the sheer quantity of phony teachers and experts who speak with an air of authority about things they clearly know next to nothing about. Priceless are the pronouncements of an art class teacher, who pompously explains that the space under the arms of a bird sculpture is somehow what his students should draw: “What’s really important is this shape, the negative area” and goes on to hope that “I want to see people drawing negative areas and filling them with color”, which you would think might destroy their negativeness. He moves on to a birdcage, exclaiming “This birdcage is fabulous, Matisse, if he were here, my God, he couldn’t afford one of these,” as serious a non sequitur as I’ve heard in quite a while. “I want you to draw the negative area of the cage, that’s where he (the bird) exists, in the negative area.” It goes on, but I just wanted to give a flavor of the off-the-cuff phoniness of this supposed teacher. An amazing moment comes when he directs attention to an upstairs room in the open-air fancy house where the class is taking place, and we see about ten Warhol Mao prints on the wall, no doubt worth a serious fortune. “Just stare and think about what you’re really looking at” he tells his students, and it’s one of those great Wiseman lines that echo straight back to the viewer.
Aspenites seem easily fooled, and art looks like one of those areas that’s somewhat easy pickings, as there’s an art gallery scene that’s pretty great as well, where a lovely sounding older woman artist expresses disbelief at how well her work sells, work that depicts paper bags, fire hoses, and phone booths. She explains that a decade earlier she figured out “with the coming of when Reagan was elected and the family became important again and politics got conservative and the art got conservative, and art mirrors the times.” This led her to calculate the kind of work that would sell, and even she sounds surprised that her assessment of the zeitgeist has worked out so well. You might expect mention of P.T. Barnum, but she doesn’t quite get there.
If you’re rich in Aspen and getting older, there’s also plastic surgery, and Wiseman has a brilliant early sequence, because it’s a talk by a plastic surgeon that’s mainly done as a slide show, and Wiseman stays fixed on the slides during the entire talk, as the guy spews forth a stream of racist evaluations of the problems he’s claiming he can fix. “Blacks have extremely receding chins” he lets us know and then “commonly in Orientals you see that significant depression just below the cheekbone.” He’s cheekbone crazy in a misogynistic way too, in his observation "You show me a beautiful woman, I'll show you beautiful cheekbones”. He manages a bit of anti-Semitism too, showing a woman who he says “inherited her father’s ethnic nose”, which of course he displays in a post-nose-job slide as well. Like others in similar situations in the film, he gives quick assessments of what’s wrong with the world out there, presumably all of America once you leave Aspen city limits: “In our society there are philosophical and religious and social mores that prevent people” from jumping right in and availing themselves of the services of fellows like him. The scene ends with his answer to this problem: “The way to grow old gracefully is to have cosmetic surgery.” We talked just three films ago (Missile) about my figuring out Wiseman’s smart technique of Abrupt End of Scene Lines. There are noticeably many here too, but this one will stand for now as a clear example. It’s usually something that hangs in the air of non-dialog exterior shots, allowing us to soak in the surprising things we so regularly hear in his films.
Exercise and self-help get considerable attention, and I’ll just marvel at the varieties we see - a large exercise room, for example (where Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes fame gets a close-up on a treadmill but no identification) to some obviously much more expensive high class small gym with opera playing on loudspeakers as personal trainers attend to a very small group, doing slow movements more like meditation than anything that would work up a sweat. Exercise, meditation, yoga, religion - somehow they’re conjoined repeatedly throughout the film in the oddest ways. What looks like some sort of meditation class becomes at the sound of a small chime a course where a teacher says it’s about “our ego and how to transcend our ego”. He has an assistant who somehow has to keep saying “we’re all holograms” and “like holograms, we’re all fragments, but we’re also parts of the whole”. The students ask some questions as they try to make sense of it all, and get answers like “We all share a oneness that makes us one somehow at the level of spirit.’ It’s a great sequence of New Age dumbspeak.
I’ve gone on about all these bizarre activities because this seems to me the real investigation of the film - the varieties of seeking that this sort of wealth-age-leisure leads to and that Wiseman serves up in abundance. (Once again, see the film, as I’ve barely, as they say, scratched the surface on this theme. Many more examples abound.) I’ll mention religion only to point to yet another amazing sermon scene at the end of the film, and also the way religion pops up all over the place in odd combinations, a great one being “the third of a series” of lectures on “God and the Global Economy”, which includes a listing of the “Six Christian Views of Work”. The charlatan teacher who knows very little about history tells the group that “the Industrial Revolution was a very good thing, but what they did to their workers was a very bad thing” because businessmen forgot their principles “in order to put poor small children down the mines and exploit them”. He’s a bit like the preacher at the end who casually mentions members of his former congregation like the woman who “had been raped over 100 times by her father when she was a little girl” and another who murdered his wife’s lover but later reconciled with her when he got out of prison because they had both found Jesus in the meanwhile. Over and over, you can’t believe what you’re hearing and how Wiseman has both caught it and knew it was essential to include. (In perhaps a tip of the hat to Essene, the film begins on a religious note as well, with some monks in prayer followed by a hymn - not exactly how you’d expect Aspen to start out.)
There are serious issues in Aspen like the role of immigrants (we’ll see Wiseman get to that later at greater length), some glimpses of poverty and environmental problems, and all sorts of other stuff, but so much oddness is what somehow caught my eye this time around. And I can’t leave Aspen without marveling at an amazing and beautiful shot - a dog running alongside three skiers, keeping up beautifully as the camera watches them move quickly downhill and into the distance. Wiseman finds so much that’s interesting to look at - from stunningly beautiful vistas to great varieties of human behavior we can only shake our heads at ruefully.