Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Disturbia
or Amnesia?
(Disturbia, 4/23/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Clive
James has published a book this year called Cultural Amnesia: Necessary
Memories from History and the Arts. D.J. Caruso's Disturbia
probably isn't in it, but the flick serves as a good example of cultural
amnesia. For how else can we explain trying to get away with releasing
a movie based so obviously on the classic 1954 Alfred Hitchcock thriller,
Rear Window, without crediting the original, front and center?
Granted, I probably date my curmudgeonly
self with this quaint insistence on giving credit where credit is due
(that is, to Hitchcock and his writers, Cornell Woolrich and John Michael
Hayes). Maybe I should be calling Disturbia an homage
to Rear Window, or some kind of "hip Gen-Y mash up."
Whatever it is, the movie exemplifies cultural amnesia in one other
significant way: it is forgettable as hell.
Near as I can recall, the Jimmy
Stewart role is played by newcomer Shia LaBeouf. LaBeouf is Kale, a
wiseacre teen who is sentenced to house arrest after he decks his Spanish
teacher. When his mom (Carrie-Anne Moss) takes away his cable and his
i-Tunes, the bored Kale takes to peeping at his neighbors, including
the too-hot-to-be-true new girl in town, Ashley (Sarah Roemer). Ashley
turns out to be as cool as she is fit, joining him in a stake-out of
Kales creepy neighbor (David Morse), who may or may not be a serial
killer.
Disturbia gets a fair amount
of comic mileage out of the hero's house arrest. The characters are
portrayed roundly and with economy, with not a second of time wasted
on the way to the thrill-ride climax. To this reviewer, LaBeouf comes
off as prematurely jaded, like an 18 year-old going on 38, but no doubt
there's a crowd that finds his act appealing. Roemer has the appealing
look of Cate Blanchett's kid sister, but her character comes off a little
smug, as if the world is a nightclub where a sharp posterior always
gets you through the rope-line. (Take it from me, it doesn't).
So why isn't this movie anywhere
as fun as Rear Window? For starters, though one suspects the
makers patted themselves on the back for the ingenuity of replacing
Stewart's broken leg with Kale's legal detention, in fact they miss
the point. One of the things that make Window so viscerally entertaining
was that the hero was literally rooted in one spot, unable to flee or
intervene. In this way the story resembled the kind of nightmare everybody
has had at one time or another, where they can see danger coming but
can't . . . seem to . . . get . . . their legs . . . to . . . work .
. . That Kale can simply head out anytime, police alarms be damned,
just undermines the premise.
Of course, one can also complain
about the canyon-like stature gap between Jimmy Stewart and young LaBeouf.
Stewart, after all, was 47 years old when he made Rear Window.
In World War II (the real one), he flew bombers. His presence in a movie
automatically suggests we are in the world of adults, with grown-up
dangers and grown-up stakes. I don't know LaBeouf's background, but
I suspect that like most of us, his greatest achievement may lie in
successfully downloading ringtones to his cell phone.
And then there's the simple fact
that society has changed since 1954. Surveillance was an edgy theme
fifty years ago, and what we would regard as an impoverished set of
communication options (no email, no IM, no mobile phones) was just ordinary
life. Today, many people actually seem to welcome being watched, and
hardly anyone is isolated. Now what would Hitchcock have done with that?
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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