Jim Emerson on No Country for Old Men

One of my favorite writers about film is Jim Emerson, who edits Roger Ebert's site and also runs his own blog called scanners. Since the Toronto International Film Festival in September, he's been raving about the Coen Brothers' latest movie, No Country for Old Men (based, of course, on Cormac McCarthy's novel). I've always loved the Coens (even if their last couple of movies didn't thrill me), so his excited advance word on this movie had me practically salivating in anticipation. Well, we were able to see it last weekend, and it's fantastic.

With the Coens, there always seems to be a body of reviewers who accuse them of being "smug" or "condescending", or who criticize them as "technical wizards" but "emotionally cold" or something like that. I've never had much use for these criticisms, and Emerson isn't having any of it. He is frustrated with the tendency for some critics to talk about the movies without reference to supporting elements in the film. Over the course of multiple posts (one, two, three, four, five) he has spent some time reviewing the reviews of No Country for Old Men, trying to tease out what certain reviewers are really talking about when they make claims about what the movie "means". His most recent post on the film is the best yet, and comes after a second viewing of his own. He brilliantly discusses the various images in the movie and how the Coen Brothers achieve what they achieve. He is concerned with how the film works as visual storytelling, with an emphasis on getting past the tendency we still have to consider "style" as existing independent of "content". This comes from early in the post:

"No Country for Old Men" has been called a "perfect" film by those who love it and those who were left cold by it. Joel and Ethan Coen have been praised and condemned for their expert "craftsmanship" and their "technical" skills -- as if those skills had nothing to do with filmmaking style, or artistry; as if they existed apart from the movie itself. Oh, but the film is an example of "impeccable technique" -- you know, for "formalists." And the cinematography is "beautiful." Heck, it's even "gorgeous." ...

But what do those terms mean if they are plucked out of the movie like pickles from a cheeseburger? How is something "beautiful" apart from what it does in the film? (See uncomprehending original-release reviews of "Barry Lyndon" and "Days of Heaven," for example, in which the "beautiful" was treated as something discrete from the movie itself.) When somebody claims that a movie overemphasizes the "visual" -- whether they're talking about Stanley Kubrick or Terence Malick or the Coens -- it's a sure sign that they're not talking about cinema, but approaching film as an elementary school audio-visual aid. When critics (and viewers) refer to the filmmakers' application of "craft," "technique," and "style" (can these things be applied, casually or relentlessly, with a spatula?) without consideration of how these expressions function in the movie, we're all in trouble. A composition, a cut, a dissolve, a movement -- they're all manifestations of craft (or skill), technique (the systematic use of skill), style (artistic expression).

It's really a great post, with an excellent comment thread. I highly recommend reading it if this kind of thing interests you in the least. (One other thing. There are some elements in the movie that are not fully resolved, to the apparent frustration of many. Emerson quotes Joel Coen, circa Barton Fink, on this: "The question is: Where would it get you if something that's a little bit ambiguous in the movie is made clear? It doesn't get you anywhere.")

Follow up on Cormac McCarthy

Commenting on my last post, Brandon says that, in fact, like "a thriller" The Road "had a certain 'pulp' quality which makes it fun", contrary to Levi Asher's dismissal. Makes it sound sort of like a "genre" novel, doesn't it? Which is funny, since I wrote not too long ago that "It's pointless to say that [McCarthy] 'wrote a genre novel'." Well, I still think it's pointless, but largely because it doesn't mean anything. The claim is devoid of content, positing McCarthy as a so-called "literary" writer who has written some undefined thing called "genre". This tells me nothing.

Some might argue that he's always written genre, in the sense of that fiction marketed as "literary fiction", but which doesn't question or ultimately stray from the dominant form of the novel. One of these people might be Ellis Sharp, who writes that McCarthy's writing doesn't "engage" him: "Although the prose looks more technically up to date than [Kiran] Desai’s I’m not entirely convinced that they are quite as far apart as all that." Ellis notes this McCarthy sentence from the same extract presented by Asher: "And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders." When I first read this sentence I tripped over the "sightless as the eggs of spiders", and I would have hard time arguing against Ellis' assessment that this is bad writing. (I like this comment from Ellis: "McCarthy’s eye is on the reader – not the creature.") And yet, as mentioned in the last post, I liked the "glaucoma" simile from earlier in the passage, as well as the insistent rhythm of the prose. Those carry more weight with me than the later poor sentence, at least in keeping me interested in reading the book.

Also in his comment, Brandon observes that McCarthy "constantly bounces between really good and laughably poor" and that, for him, "[t]his is part of his appeal". How much work do readers do forgiving bad writing in search of story? A lot, I think. I'm usually not interested in doing it. I'm happy to expend even considerable effort when I read, but I'm not interested in forcing my way through bad or clunky prose because there just might be some "story" lurking behind there somewhere. I'll say more on this point later. I've already said that McCarthy is not a key writer for me; indeed, the books of his I have read did not compel me to seek out the rest of his fiction. We'll see what happens when I read The Road.

Thoroughly Humorless

I acquired Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road yesterday, as part of a birthday gift certificate-enabled book-buying bonanza. I've previously read only Blood Meridian and All The Pretty Horses (in a bold critical move, I prefer the former to the latter, by quite a lot), and in general I don't consider McCarthy at all central to my reading interests. I expected to borrow The Road from my father eventually (he's a McCarthy fan), but I keep hearing more and more about it and, I admit, my interest has been piqued by all the hubbub (not that it matters, but I swear I decided I would get it just before I heard that Oprah selected it for her book club thing, though I find that she selected it rather entertaining).

All of which is just a lead up to my noting Levi Asher's post today in which he reiterates his hatred of Cormac McCarthy (link via The Mumpsimus). He is certainly entitled to his taste, and as far as I can tell his taste does not resemble mine (for starters, I have never had much interest in Kerouac or Bukowski), which is fine. His critical assessment is honest: he's not trying to suggest that other people are stupid for liking McCarthy; he just doesn't get it. I thought his post was interesting, though, less for what he says about McCarthy, than for what those things say about his interests as a reader and how those are quite different than mine. He quotes for us two opening passages, the first is from The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai, the second is from The Road. He does this to show what is good about Desai's opening, bad about McCarthy's (go to Asher's site to read them; they're too long for me to usefully reproduce here). I was amused to find that, after reading both passages, I felt little inclination to want to continue reading Desai's book, and I do still want to read The Road.

Then Asher tells us what he doesn't like about the McCarthy passage. He says:

The first thing the reader detects is that this will be a thoroughly humorless book, a book of punishing, guilt-ridden unpleasantness, a book that must be aimng to be "good for us", because it's sure not aiming to be fun. That's the moral outlook Cormac McCarthy always offers -- a stern "church lady" tone warning of stark choices between evil and redemption.

I think this is a strange comment to make. No one ever accuses Cormac McCarthy of being anything like a broadly comic writer, that's for sure, but an epithet like "thoroughly humorless" still seems weird. I've not read enough to be able to argue that there's some great comic vein in McCarthy's work that he's just too dense to get, but I seem to recall references in some reviews to dark humor in McCarthy in general, and The Road in particular. For example, in a review picked more or less at random, here is Benjamin Whitmer at The Modern Word:

As bleak as the novel is, it’s also funnier than one might expect. Granted, it generally takes a grisly sense of humor to properly appreciate McCarthy, but that’s what makes his humor so effective. The funniest bits of The Road are found in the viciously sharp dialogue, particularly in scenes where the man and the boy encounter other stragglers on the road.

Ok, so maybe there's some darkly funny stuff Asher just couldn't manage to get to, especially since he finds the prose itself so galling. I can see having trouble with McCarthy's style. In the past, it's taken me a few pages (ok, 40) before I feel like I've adjusted to it. But the quoted passage definitely sets a mood and a tone, and the prose has an insistent rhythm, which is aided by the hated "ungrammatical half-sentences" (which are "the prose signature of junior high school students everywhere"--a cheap shot, sure, but this is hatred he's expressing, so cheap shots are to be expected). And I like the simile in the third sentence, in which the days are said to be increasingly gray, "Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world." I want to read more.

But that stuff's all down to basic taste, more or less, or can be argued to be, but in the middle of that passage of Asher's I quoted above, he says The Road is going to be "a book of punishing, guilt-ridden unpleasantness, a book that must be aim[i]ng to be 'good for us', because it's sure not aiming to be fun". It's not clear to me why he should think that the book "must be aiming to be good for us" like "medicine". Rather, it's not clear why he opposes such books with books that are "aiming to be fun", as if these are the only options we have. And, fun? What does fun have to do with it? Using the word "fun" implies, to me, a desire for broad entertainment. I might praise a pop song as fun or a movie comedy (or thriller, or whatever), but I read very little literature that could be helpfully described as "fun" (which is not remotely the same as "pleasure"), but it's beyond me why anyone would go into a book by Cormac McCarthy expecting to find something that could be called "fun". And of course, he knows he won't, since he's already expressed his distaste before, so in that sense his attempt to read The Road was not entirely honest (I don't mean that to sound snotty), since he doesn't seem able or willing to put aside his expectations of what a novel should be like in order to discover what might actually be worthwhile in McCarthy. But then nothing says he has to; you can't read or appreciate everything.

I hope to read The Road relatively soon and report here at least a little of my experience of it.

Genre

Last week, Ed Champion posted a "field report" from Richard Grayson, who attended the NBCC panel discussion, The Mandarin at the Minimart: What We Talk about When We Talk about Mass Market Fiction. In the discussion it appears (as conveyed by Grayson) that the panel-members are talking past each other, that no one seems to share any definitions or expectations. In many respects, it is reduced to publishing and reviewing decisions (admittedly, the basic topic of the panel is the question of why "genre" or "popular" books are treated differently than "literary" books by reviewers and review pages). Book A is marketed as Science Fiction or Mystery, so it gets ignored, or shunted off to a genre review page. Book B is marketed as "literary fiction", etc. Panel-member Walter Mosley says that the "smartest writers wrote science fiction". Another, Louise Ermilino of Publishers Weekly, says that "good writing is good writing" no matter where it appears, and later asserts that "a hundred years from now, people are more likely going to be reading Stephen King than Philip Roth". Everyone seems to agree that it's all about story, and good stories can be found anywhere.

Ok, I have no desire to rehash the entire thing, but some points interest me, particularly in the context of my last couple of posts. First of all, I agree that "good writing is good writing". I see no reason why a nominally "genre" book could not be great art or great literature. The key word, though, is "nominally". If they are great literature, they cease to be "genre". In case it's not clear, I think the same is true of most so-called "literary fiction".

One thing said in the panel, which I've seen said elsewhere, is that "literary" writers "borrow" from genre, and get treated with more respect:

Cormac McCarthy wrote a genre novel [presumably The Road, which I gather is set in a post-apocalypse, like many dystopian SF novels; but what about Blood Meridian? Is not "western" a genre?] [...] Philip Roth can do alternate history in The Plot Against America and literary reviewers who don’t know that genre actually give Roth credit for inventing that kind of book, as if he were the first one to do it...

I think these kinds of comments are revealing. While it's probably true that many reviewers did give Philip Roth all kinds of credit for "inventing" alternate history (and more generally true that literary writers get more respect than genre writers when they "borrow"), this is because most reviewers don't know what they're talking about. The best parts of The Plot Against America (which, incidentally, I thought was wildly overpraised) were those that were the most typically Rothian. Roth, it seemed clear to me, chose his setting as an interesting way to explore certain ongoing fictional concerns of his. Whenever he had to move the plot of the alternate history along, it became less interesting and often felt rushed. As a result, this aspect of the book was unquestionably "unsatisfying". But I doubt he cared whether it was conventionally satisfying. No doubt several SF writers would have handled it better, made the facts of the alternate world more convincing, but it would have been quite beside the point; they wouldn't have been Philip Roth. Same with Cormac McCarthy. It's pointless to say that he "wrote a genre novel".

Then there's Ermilino's comment, quoted above, that "a hundred years from now, people are more likely going to be reading Stephen King than Philip Roth". No, they're not. Stephen King is popular entertainment. Philip Roth is a great writer. I see this kind of thing said all the time. This inability, or refusal, to tell the difference is depressing. But, then, what does she mean by "people"? "People" don't read Roth now, if we mean people in the huge kinds of numbers who read Stephen King. A hundred years from now, the people that read Roth will be the same kinds of people who read Henry James now, broadly speaking. Some other popular writer will be in King's place. I don't see why it should be offensive to say this. King gets routinely compared to Dickens and to Shakespeare--not their abilities as writers, of course, but their apparent popularity, as if this is any kind of useful indicator. People read Dickens and Shakespeare now, don't they?, these people observe, ergo they will be reading King a hundred years hence. And if you don't think so you must be a snob, looking down on other people's "tastes".

More later.