“I want to see dead people”
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, directed by Stephen Daldry and based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s type-experiment novel of the same name, starts with 9 year old Oskar Schell selling us a solution for the problem of housing the dead. With so many people inhabiting the world there will soon not be enough room to bury all of them, he thinks, and offers a solution whereby we visit them in skyscraper cemeteries or else some underground lot. He compares such visits to taking the train to visit friends who live in Brooklyn. [Yes, visiting friends in Brooklyn is a lot like visiting the dead…]
Since I’m not quite reviewing the film, but rather, making an observation under the auger of Blasianness, I’ll start by saying I kind of hated the movie but I also kind of love it, and both for the same reason: Because I had to.
For starters, the narrative conceit of a precocious 9 year old works in print. In the novel, such narrative has to keep up with our fantasies of having been that clever or exasperating when we were that age. In film, we have to depend on one juvenile actor to carry the entire weight of the story in his 100% cotton voice. Once I realized he sounded like Winona Ryder, I was completely lost. However, he is conveniently paired with a mute old man later revealed to be his grandfather. Together they interview over 400 strangers with the last name Black (viz: me sipping tea), looking for the lock to fit a key Oskar has found in his mother’s shrine to the father he lost in the WTC on 9/11.
The mute old man is referred throughout most of the movie as “the Renter.” I love that a character can so symbolically be named by a circumstance ubiquitous to only New York. And that’s where the film gets you (viz: me punching into the air at an invisible opponent). All those goddamned colorful characters of the city. Each one of the Blacks they meet represent a “type” we’re all familiar with as New York denizens. You begin to wonder if the next encounter won’t be with you… except I know exactly zero Asians with the last name Black so….. (sipping tea)
If I had to compare the movie to anything, it’d be that other movie about a precocious 9 year old in New York City talking to strangers: The Sixth Sense, by M. Night Shyamalan.
- Both main characters have secret commune with the dead. Oskar has secret answering machine tapes of his father’s last calls from WTC. Haley Joel Osment’s Cole sees ghosts living in purgatory in NYC (mutually exclusive).
- Both of them have a mentor only they can hear. Oskar has Mutey McRenter Gramps, Cole has Bruce Willis in makeup.
- Both have mothers on the verge of a nervous breakdown struggling to understand their strange only-sons.
- Both Oskar and Cole resolve their own identity crises by resolving someone else’s.
- Oskar has a secret Sixth Message on the answering machine no one knows about. Cole has the title Sixth Sense no one else knows about.
- They both wear cute thermal pajamas.
