Disturbia (2007)

(This essay was edited 05.03.2023)

…Fade in

Opening credits

” I am just a copy of a copy of a copy ”

That was a excerpt from "Copy of a", which is a song by NIN (short for Nine Inch Nails) from their 2013 album Hesitation Marks. NIN are American but their name looks kind of German doens’t it, even the abbreviation does. Actually they bring to mind the German band Kraftwerk. Well...no wonder the German Rammstein has a lot of NIN in their visual and audial aesthetics. Now that i think about it Rammstein are almost like a………like a copy of a copy of a…..

What has all this got to do with the movie i am about to review, Disturbia? Well, let me explain: Disturbia is a movie from 2007 directed by D.J. Caruso. It has the following plot: "a teen living under house arrest becomes convinced his neighbor is a serial killer."

I’ll leave my analysis of the movie to that excerpt from the song and to this piece of info: the ancient Greeks had a term called mimesis, of which Wikipedia says the following.

”Mimesis; (Ancient Greek: μίμησις mīmēsis, from μιμεῖσθαι mīmeisthai, "to imitate", from μῖμος mimos, "imitator, actor") is a term used in literary criticism and philosophy that carries a wide range of meanings which include imitatio, imitation, nonsensuous similarity, receptivity, representation, mimicry, the act of expression, the act of resembling, and the presentation of the self.”

To elaborate on that the ancient Greeks basically thought that all art (derived from the Greek word τέχνη tékhnē, a term that refers to making or doing) was some sort of mimicry of the real world. Plato went as far as condemn art as a way of representation and declared all art as morally corruptive. Why? Since it was only a copy of a copy of.....the perfect world of ideas. By the way, the rest of the lyrics to the NIN song follow as such:

”Everything I say has come before

Assembled into something into something into something

I don't know for certain anymore

I am just a shadow of a shadow of a shadow

Always trying to catch up with my self

I am just an echo of an echo of an echo

Listening to someone's cry for help”

With that in mind here follows some recommended watching before, or instead of, watching Disturbia.

First act: Through a rear window darkly

Hichcock’s Rear Window (1954) has a simulacrum….sorry, i mean similar narrative and premise to Disturbia. Actually, my argument is that Disturbia wouldn’t exist without Rear Window. Other movies that have Rear Window ingrained in their DNA are Arlington Road (1999) by MarkPellington and Blow Out (1981) by Brian De Palma. A worthy mention is also the superb The Conversation (1974) by none other than Francis Ford Coppola, starring the always amazing Gene Hackman. Great movie, that one, especially the ending! I think i’ll devote an entire post to it someday. 

Another great movie is Sidney Lumet’s The Offence from 1973, which could almost be seen as a descendant of Rear Window as well. Then again maybe it is more ”Vertigoean”. It is Hitchcockian nevertheless. Amazing acting by Sean Connery and Ian Bannen ...the intensity, the intensity! I'm gonna go as far as state that Connery did never do anything else quite like this in his movie career! What a performance! All the adventures of James Bond were child's play compared to this. This is adult horror and emotional intensity! I fullheartedly recommend it! Great stuff! Unnerving and uneasy on the viewer but simply great! 

A self proclaimed nerd the musician Jon Fine tells in his book Your Band Sucks (which i most surely recommend!) that there is a certain sexuality to the relationship between the bully and the one being bullied (see page ). He doesn't necessarily mean that it involves coitus or any other form of unlawflul carnal knowledge but there is that vibe, that connection, a transfer of emotion, the show of a couple engaging in tactile bodily performances; that intensity (for example: just think about all that sublimated sexuality involved in the hazing the older students bestow upon the younger ones in Dazed and Confused from 1993. I don't know if that's just the directors own fantasy or if it represents some real common sadism in our culture, but nevertheless it is unnerving. We humans tend to have a very strange relationship with sex and violence. Perhaps it is the animal in us, that we have a hard time getting to terms with. Am i both a man and a beast? As you can read between the lines here from all the cultural references i'm making in this essay - which are mostly American - i am in many ways culturally Americanized and my criticizim of "our culture" is also self-critique). 

Backt to the movie at hand: just taka a look at this still image from The Offence, it's all there! I never knew Connery had all this in him, wow! I think the same that is said about bullying (hazing) can be said about fighting. It's almost like sex. Just take a look at my post on Fight Club (1999).  

Oh, i almost forgot! Stakeout (1987) and Another Stakeout (1993) both by John Badham are definitely descendants of Rear Window! Parodies of it even, one might argue. What the hell, let’s be broad with our definition of ”Rearwindowean” and even include Special Effects (1984) by Larry Cohen  and F/X by Robert Mandel on our list! And i'm going to add Martin Scorsese's After Hours (1985) too, for good measure! 

Unlike the other examples above, in De Plama’s Blow Out viewing (”video” from Latin) is substituted with another sense, hearing (”audio” from Latin as well): the protagonist is a movie sound man who happens to record an accident on tape, or was it actually a murder that he witnessed? (btw, check out ”Chappaquiddickaccident”! It's a real life incident involving a senator, who is no less than part of the Kennedy clan (!), that inspired the movie. Intriguing stuff! Ever heard of the Kennedy curse? Well, now you have!)

Doesn’t this all make one ask oneself can we truly trust our senses, or are we just immersed in an illusion created by them? My hip-hop alter ego, who goes by the name of Jokirapu, has coined a term to describe this: ”olla aistiensa horo” (literally: ”to be a hoe of the senses”). Let your senses pimp you out, so to speak. I think Immanuel Kant said it in a more eloquent manner. He had some good viewpoints (sic.) on the matter. Descartes too. And now that i think about it Jean Baudrillard thought about this as well, just to name-drop a few philosophers here among movie directors and musicians (and imaginary musicians).

Hey, wait a second! Maybe Rearwindowean movies are actually a genre of their own: ”Peeping Tom gets in trouble for his nosiness” (a late inclusion to our list: Peeping Tom from 1960 by Michael Powell). Curiosity killed the cat and all that. I’m pretty sure we can now include Tinto Brass’ The Voyeur (1994; originally L'uomo che guarda – ”The man who looks”) - and maybe all of his movies - into our list as well: Hitchcock always lurking somewhere there in the background. Hitching the first syllable of his surname to the second one, just to give Brass a veneer of artisticity among all that flesh.

Just take a look at the movie poster, ’nuff said!

Right back to the topic at hand: i’ll also argument that the 1966 movie Blow-Up by Michaelangelo Antonioni is a precursor to Blow Out in the same sense as Rear Window is to Disturbia (and all the others mentioned above). I haven’t seen Blow-Up though, so be free to call out my bullsh*t in the comments section. And just a fun fact: Gus Van Zant re-made Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) in 1998, shot-for-shot, even copying the original's camera movements and editing!

Second act: Sounds from the killing floor

I would now like to hitch this post again to my earlier one about Fight Club (1999). The best way to approach this is through a jungian-thepolician sense of synchronicity (or maybe through indexicality): the auteur-primus motor behind NIN, Trent Reznor, is to David Fincher what Rota is to Fellini and Visconti, Morricone to Leone and Elfman to Burton.

”Why arbitrarily name-drop Fincher here? What has he got to do with Hitchcock?”, some of you might ask. Well he is no Gus Van Zant, but Fincher is no stranger to mimesis either. In 2011 Fincher made a ”cover version” of the 2009 Swedish-speaking movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (original name Män som hatar kvinnor) by Niels Arden Oplev in the form of, well, a movie called The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The score to this movie was composed by…..you guessed it right, Trent Reznor! ”Now wait”, you say! ”Didn’t Fincher reference Ikea and Bergman there in Fight Club”? Oh, yes he did! Maybe it’s just a coincidence…...or has it got to something to do with that record by The Police? I’ll leave that up to your imagination.

If you bare with me still and allow me to continue with this theme a bit further. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo begins with Reznor’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant song (1970). This song is an all original composition by the band, but during their career Zeppelin did their share of mimesis as well. Just take a listen to Zeppelin’s You Shook Me (1969) and You Shook Me (1962) by Willie Dixon/Muddy Waters. Or The Lemon Song (1969) and Killing Floor (1964) by Howlin’ Wolf. Or……you get the point, just go to the Wiki-page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Led_Zeppelin_songs_written_or_inspired_by_others

One might even make the - somewhat exaggerated – argument, that Zeppelin were a glorified cover band that played blues covers. As you can see many of their songs were…..umm….a copy of…a copy of a…..

To tell the truth, i'm pulling your leg a bit here since it fits my narrative for this post. I do love Led Zeppelin, how could you not?! Page bought a house that used to belong to ”The Great Beast” himeslf Aleister Crowley, and stuff. Without Plant we wouldn’t have Jim "Dandy" Mangrum, which means that the world would have gone without David Lee Roth as we all know him. John Bonham played the drums (that already makes up for most of the blues-stealing and non-crediting Zeppelin did during their carreer). And John Paul Jones gave us No Quarter (1973)…..and that album with Diamanda Galas (!) called Sporting life (1994).

Let us yet again think about mimesis here for a second. A philosopher called Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) has redefined it as follows:

mimesis is not imitation but modeling. It is a creative act, that seeks to articulate experiences and perceptions of some dimension of reality. Narrative mimesis models human reality, above all the motives, boundary conditions, consequences, effects, and moral dimensions of action: perhaps a whole worldview. (translation by yours truly)

Maybe in this new sense of the word we can think of Led Zeppelin as modelers: they are not rebuilding an exact simulacrum copy of the old house of the holy blues, but instead they model and build on its old foundations an entirely new temple. This temple rises in front of us and makes us gaze at the blues from a completely new angle. One could almost come to the conclusion, that in their mimesis Zeppelin enter the house of blues by coming in through the out door. Or perhaps they climb in through the rear window.

Could the same be said about Disturbia? Does it bring to us some new knowledge on, new associations from or new insights into the themes that Rear Window discusses and ponders on? You have to go and see both of those movies for yourself. I have no easy answers for you, unfortunately.

Third act (no funny name for this heading...in other words, off with the head!)

Well, i think i have argued some kind of a point here…or maybe my thoughts are just copies of what i have read somewhere. I have a feeling, that everything i said has come before. Mostly i just referenced a bunch of stuff. I guess that lead you, the reader, into something into something. I don't know for certain anymore. Well, after all it’s my blog, and i’ll write what i want to (that contained an interpolation of the lyrics to It’s My Party by Lesley Gore, written by Seymour Gottlieb).

As we are nearing the end i’ll share a thought with you here; to be left lingering in the air:

are movies always nostalgic? And in a larger sense is art - even when it creates something ”completely” new - always nostalgic?

This scene from The Matrix (1999) comes to mind:

"Neo: Whoa. Déjà vu.

Trinity: What did you just say?

Neo: Nothing. Just had a little déjà vu.

Trinity: What did you see?

Cypher: What happened?

Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.

Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat?

Neo: It might have been. I'm not sure.

Morpheus: Switch! Apoc!

Neo: What is it?

Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something."

(https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/quotes/?tab=qt&ref_=tt_trv_qu)

End credits

Maybe Neo was in fact talking about ”Schrödinger’s cat”? What a concept! Well, for those who didn’t get bored, or confused, and read all the way to the end of the post: my congratulations and thank yous! I’ll keep throwing these ideas into the void here until someone ”stares back” ;) (I am as ashamed by the tackiness of my philosophical shout-outs as you are, rest assured. My relationship with philosophy is roughly analogical to the relationship Alex Löfström in Solsidan (2010 -) has to Orhan Pamuk). For those of you who already hate me for my self-ironical style of writing, i feel your pain. I can’t stand reading Chuck Klosterman either! (Hey Chuck, if you happen to stumble upon my blog, you are to me what Kraftwerk is to a Rammstein cover band, that also plays some Nihilist songs from The Big Lebowski (1998) soundtrack!).

Maybe it would be wiser to not write these ramblings. Just yield to the ”Dark Forest theory”. Maybe so, but as a civilization we are sending out a constant signal from our Tellus to the great unknown, so in the good-natured spirit of communication i shall continue (”Is there anyone out there who can hear me?”, asked Melodie Mc already back in 1995). Since we know that no man is an island (although The Bee Gees, Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers might disagree with me on this one), but we do not really know what man is, then maybe communication is the one thing, that in itself, is a way to find solace in this existential void one has to navigate as an ”aistien horo”. That was actually not an original thought of mine….duh! I came across it while discussing cosmic matters and the materiality of the cosmos with a guy simply called Frank. As in Kaurismäki’s Calamari Union (1985) kind of Frank. We were both drunk.

Now i am truly rambling and even the most die-hard fans have stopped reading………So thank you all and see you all soon, my imaginary readership!

Greetings,

The Author (or Auteur…?)

P.S.

I assure you no substances stronger than nachos, and one glass of non-alcoholic Estonian lager, were consumed in making such a confused and confusing movie review as the one i have presented to you above. I like to think that in its own humble way it is Huntersthompsonian, but i am pretty sure even the biggest Thompson-haters would say it’s more amateurishpsychographian....

In Nick Cave’s words

”we call upon the author to explain…..”

THE END

Fade out…..