The Gatekeeper–produced, directed, and written by someone you’ve never heard of, with a cast that’s equally unknown–is a realistic, no-nonsense independent feature about Mexican immigrants enslaved just after crossing illegally into the U.S. Masked and Anonymous–a Bob Dylan vehicle packed with stars, directed by a sitcom veteran, and produced by the BBC–is a fantasy about a legendary singer giving a benefit concert for wounded counterrevolutionaries in a slum-infested city where the country’s dictator is dying.
The Gatekeeper, with its 70s-exploitation-picture look and its refusal to make any detours into comedy or atmosphere, has an unvarnished clarity. By contrast, Masked and Anonymous is borderline incoherent in spots, and it’s certainly mannerist: nearly all of the characters talk the same way, just as they would in a William Faulkner novel or a Joseph L. Mankiewicz chat fest like The Barefoot Contessa–only in this case they all talk like Bob Dylan. Neither feature qualifies as what we’d commonly label “professional” filmmaking, but even though Masked and Anonymous gets metaphysical and The Gatekeeper milks suspense as routinely as any B thriller, the absence of polish enhances my sense of the reality in them.
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In Gigli Jennifer Lopez, playing a hit woman for the mob, gives Ben Affleck, an only slightly less ridiculous employee of the same mob, an outlandish lecture on the innate superiority of the vagina to the penis after he’s explained to her why he’s sure the penis is better. She delivers this speech while doing exercises on the floor of the suite they’re sharing, and we can readily accept the floor and the exercises as real even if we can’t accept that her character is. (That she’s an avowed lesbian and Affleck’s character is straight is an additional factor in the scene’s dynamics, and credibility may be further strained because we know these actors are a real-life couple.) It is of course utterly preposterous to place the vagina and penis in competition–a reductio ad absurdum of the American obsession with seeing everything in competitive terms, whether it’s businesses, sports teams, political parties, Time and Newsweek, McDonald’s and Burger King, races, or countries. Nonetheless I think something real is going on in this scene, and it probably has something to do with Lopez’s pleasure in her own narcissism and my pleasure in observing it, combined with the small frisson that comes from seeing a burst of neofeminist pride smuggled into this movie.
To answer this question adequately, we first have to determine what the social and political taboos are that govern commercial moviemaking today. But are we in a position to know? Audiences seem to believe that movies are no longer censored, at least not as they once were–which is precisely what gives the suppressions that do exist a power they never had before. And once we lose awareness that omissions are being made, we also lose an awareness of the reality of what’s being omitted.
