I watched Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 this week. These are just a few passing notes. This is a documentary assembled from recently discovered footage that had been taken in the United States by Swedish film crews, with commentary in 2010 from such figures as musicians Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, John Forté, and Questlove, poet Sonia Sanchez, Bobby Seale and Harry Belafonte, and professor Robin Kelley.
I found the film fascinating, and ultimately, inevitably, sad. The focus is, first, on the activities of the Black Panthers, and such famous figures such as Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis (Davis also provides some present-day commentary). I'm rather abashed to have to admit that I previously had almost zero knowledge of either Carmichael or Davis, though the latter I had only recently decided to begin reading. I mean, I knew a little about them, of course, but not as much as I should have. The movie overall is riveting, but the footage of Carmichael and Davis especially so. An interview with Davis, from prison, is simply stunning in its force and clarity (the topic: violence). They were so beautiful.
We also see some footage of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the period before his assassination; the uprisings after it. Brief appearances by Huey P. Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver. The Attica uprising and the subsequent attack on the prisoners (with a very interesting interview with William Kunstler, the radical lawyer: "Well, I guess I'm a white, middle class citizen of this country, and I had all of the stereotypes about prisoners that any person in my capacity has. I had to learn the hard way that they were decent, honorable men. Much more decent and much more honorable than that went in there to shoot them."). Forté's remarks here, and especially later, after the interview with Davis, on her short 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, are particularly compelling (Forté spent some time in prison on a drug charge, and has since been active in the prison reform movement).
In the later years, we see the ways drugs flooded American cities, and politics, focus, power, recedes. In light of the scenes that came before, it is difficult to believe anything other than that this was absolutely intentional. (I've always wondered: as if there's any chance huge quantities of illegal drugs could make into the United States without some powerful governmental entity making it happen.) There'd been a clip earlier in the film, in which someone, I forget who, says something like "they can't jail all of us". Then you see the drugs, and the dissipation, and it comes to you with an astonishing clarity, though you already knew it, that this is in fact what they intended. They will jail you, or they will fuck you up. Whatever the case, you will not win.
Given this, it's weird and off-putting that the film presents us with an odd note towards the end of the film. It comes after all of the explanations for and justifications of violence, after Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers and Angela Davis and Bobby Seale, and after the more militant words from Talib Kweli and Questlove, after the assassinations and drugs and hints of the dawn of the prison industrial complex, after the clarity gives way to fogginess, after Black Power gives way to Louis Farrakhan. We hear a voice-over from the record producer, Kenny Gamble, who's not previously been heard from, but who talks of the tremendous ride of the black man (sic) in American history, and contrary to everything we've seen in the film up to that point, seems to extol the virtues of non-violence, and the constitution, and law, and black people using these to become part of "one of the greatest countries that's ever been, the United States of America". Astonishing.
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Friday, February 24, 2012
Friday, October 02, 2009
Thoughts on Effi Briest
We've had Theodor Fontane's novel Effi Briest (translated into English by Douglas Parmée) for a while (Aimée brought it into the marriage), but I admit that it was the vague notion I had acquired that it was one of Beckett's favorite novels that moved it onto my ever-shifting pile of maybe-imminent reads. With such knowledge, however sketchy, you feel, ah, yes, now that's an unbeatable stamp of approval, eh? Quality, excellence, seems guaranteed. But of course it doesn't tell you much. Nor did I really expect it to. Does Beckett's own writing tell you anything about what Effi Briest might be like? It seems unlikely, doesn't it? Anyway, in the event, it does not. I read the novel last week, and Effi Briest is a fairly straightforward, enjoyable, 19th century novel, which also functions as a lightly ironic condemnation of certain 19th century German mores. (It's called the most famous German novel of the 19th century, and I realize that it's the only one I can name.)
In my cursory search on the book, I've noticed that Madame Bovary often gets mentioned as a point of comparison, in part so that the differences can be touched on. One is this: Fontane is nothing like as pleased with himself as Flaubert is in his attack on bourgeois values. Another is that Effi is not the figure of fun for Fontane that Emma is for Flaubert. Emma has gotten her head filled with all sorts of silly notions from the silly books she reads, and she suffers. Effi suffers too, and she is not without responsibility, but ultimately she is simply too young and innocent to be thrown into the adult world the way she is. Fontane's narration seems to hold conservative society, and its emphasis on honor and propriety, more responsible for her fate.
I mentioned above that the book is "lightly ironic". It was this lightness that carried the book for me. I admit that, the Beckett imprimatur notwithstanding, I approached the novel with some hesitation. As I began reading the book, I resisted the beginning of the narrative, the recounting of details, the introduction of characters. But I was gradually won over by this lightness and by the narrator's voice, which is by turns reticent and amused. This reticence is most evident in the plot, in which major events--including the very affair that is Effi's undoing--are barely recounted, if at all, and can only really be inferred via later references. At times this reticence led to some confusion, as I found myself wondering what had happened, and wondering why all the fuss over virtually nothing. (The latter sometimes happens when we read books depicting a society very different from our own, doesn't it?--we have a hard time understanding what all the characters are on about, why it matters so much, whatever it might be. An example: the play in Mansfield Park; I know I had a hard time understanding what could be so immoral about that; I simply had to accept it as such for the sake of the book.) The point is I spent some time deciding whether my confusion about the affair in question stemmed from a question of different values or from authorial reticence (itself perhaps a function of the former? a question I'd be better able to answer if I knew the first thing about 19th century German literature). I resolved the question in favor of reticence, a reticence that I think helps elevate the book above its apparently melodramatic material.
Speaking of melodrama, the day I finished reading the novel, I discovered that Fassbinder had directed a movie version of Effi Briest. I knew that Fassbinder played a bit with melodrama, so I thought his movie would be fun. Well, we rented it last Friday and fun is not the first word I would use to describe the film. The film was slower moving, and a bit more heavy-handed in its critique of society, and yet this very heavy-handedness seemed to work well in the translation to film. The film is like a series of awkward-seeming, and beautifully composed (in black-and-white), tableaux--characters often seem to be literally waiting for cues before they begin a scene. The characters seemed more stiff to me than they did in the book, but then I have little doubt that Fassbinder, being German, would have had a better handle on the German society being depicted than I would.
In my cursory search on the book, I've noticed that Madame Bovary often gets mentioned as a point of comparison, in part so that the differences can be touched on. One is this: Fontane is nothing like as pleased with himself as Flaubert is in his attack on bourgeois values. Another is that Effi is not the figure of fun for Fontane that Emma is for Flaubert. Emma has gotten her head filled with all sorts of silly notions from the silly books she reads, and she suffers. Effi suffers too, and she is not without responsibility, but ultimately she is simply too young and innocent to be thrown into the adult world the way she is. Fontane's narration seems to hold conservative society, and its emphasis on honor and propriety, more responsible for her fate.
I mentioned above that the book is "lightly ironic". It was this lightness that carried the book for me. I admit that, the Beckett imprimatur notwithstanding, I approached the novel with some hesitation. As I began reading the book, I resisted the beginning of the narrative, the recounting of details, the introduction of characters. But I was gradually won over by this lightness and by the narrator's voice, which is by turns reticent and amused. This reticence is most evident in the plot, in which major events--including the very affair that is Effi's undoing--are barely recounted, if at all, and can only really be inferred via later references. At times this reticence led to some confusion, as I found myself wondering what had happened, and wondering why all the fuss over virtually nothing. (The latter sometimes happens when we read books depicting a society very different from our own, doesn't it?--we have a hard time understanding what all the characters are on about, why it matters so much, whatever it might be. An example: the play in Mansfield Park; I know I had a hard time understanding what could be so immoral about that; I simply had to accept it as such for the sake of the book.) The point is I spent some time deciding whether my confusion about the affair in question stemmed from a question of different values or from authorial reticence (itself perhaps a function of the former? a question I'd be better able to answer if I knew the first thing about 19th century German literature). I resolved the question in favor of reticence, a reticence that I think helps elevate the book above its apparently melodramatic material.
Speaking of melodrama, the day I finished reading the novel, I discovered that Fassbinder had directed a movie version of Effi Briest. I knew that Fassbinder played a bit with melodrama, so I thought his movie would be fun. Well, we rented it last Friday and fun is not the first word I would use to describe the film. The film was slower moving, and a bit more heavy-handed in its critique of society, and yet this very heavy-handedness seemed to work well in the translation to film. The film is like a series of awkward-seeming, and beautifully composed (in black-and-white), tableaux--characters often seem to be literally waiting for cues before they begin a scene. The characters seemed more stiff to me than they did in the book, but then I have little doubt that Fassbinder, being German, would have had a better handle on the German society being depicted than I would.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Notes on Beckett and Film Adaptations
Over the last several months, I've been very slowly making my way through the Beckett on Film series. Slowly because, frankly, the films are, on the whole, disappointing. They are too cinematic. They too often miss the point. They treat Beckett's plays as content to be filmed. The accompanying documentary is terrible, borderline unwatchable, primarily because the producers boast about being given the chance to make Beckett accessible. Given the Beckett estate's famous stinginess on allowing productions to move forward, I'm rather surprised this project was given the green light.
There are some highlights. Thankfully, one of the best is Waiting for Godot. Based on my reading of the play and my take on Beckett, it seems to me that, some fancy camera work aside, this production does ok by the play. We enjoyed it, anyway. Another is Ohio Impromptu, starring Jeremy Irons. I also felt that Not I, with Julianne Moore, was not bad. I still have yet to watch Endgame, Happy Days, or Play, among others.
Most recently, I watched Krapp's Last Tape, directed by Atom Egoyan and starring John Hurt, and it is, I think, symptomatic of the series' problems. This happens to be the only Beckett play that I've actually seen produced on stage, in a wonderful performance at Johns Hopkins by John Astin. To save some time, I'm going to quote what I said about this play and the performance in a post from last year. I wrote:
Ok, so that's a rough outline of the "content". In the play, the stage features only a desk, with two drawers facing the audience, behind which Krapp sits at a chair, when he's not fumbling through his keys, or opening the drawers to extract bananas or a spool of tape, or leaving the stage to get the reel-to-reel player, or a drink, etc. Very minimal. Krapp himself is wearing nothing remarkable, except for a pair of insane white boots. Astin's performance was restrained, subtle.
In Egoyan's film, the same things happen, yet it's completely wrong. Why? Well, for one thing, no white boots! You can't even see Krapp's whole body! But more importantly, there's a too muchness to it that overwhelms, defeating the material. This is one of the basic problems with film adaptations in the first place: the need to fill in the blanks. Set designers appear to have been allowed to roam free and do whatever the fuck they wanted. The set is simply overflowing with crap. Papers everywhere, shelving, piles of boxes, tapes, remnants of a disheveled life. And when Krapp walks around front of the desk to open the drawers, the camera moves in, over his shoulder, so that we can see what else might be in them. To top it all off, Hurt's performance is way too emotive. When, for example, Krapp expresses some dismay about his life choices, Hurt plays it like he's doing a tortured Hamlet. He is not doing Hamlet.
I come back to this basic question: Why does someone decide to make a film adaptation? In a post about adaptations of Michael Chabon's novels, IOZ suggests that "adaptation is better accomplished by someone who appreciates a work than someone who loves it so much that he wants to improve it". I would argue further (in line with arguments I've made in the past on this topic), that appreciation should include a sense that there's some reason why the book or play being adapted existed in the form it did, particularly in the case of a writer such as Samuel Beckett. Beckett wrote poems, stories, novels, uncategorizable prose pieces, and plays, and he was rather famously interested in the problems with the forms in which he wrote. To simply film a Beckett play as if it were any old story lying around, as if it were in need of elaboration, is to fundamentally betray the play. Why did he write plays? Why is Krapp's Last Tape a play? Why does he have a play called Play? A film called Film? Why do his plays clearly not take the form for granted? I'm not going to venture answers to these questions here, but they are the kinds of questions that it seems to me are in play when problems of adaptation arise. It seems to me that the decision to adapt one of Beckett's plays for film should center on how the formal problems addressed in the play itself can be similarly addressed in a filmic context. If questions are being asked of the play format, can analagous questions be asked of film? If not, then why make a film?
There are some highlights. Thankfully, one of the best is Waiting for Godot. Based on my reading of the play and my take on Beckett, it seems to me that, some fancy camera work aside, this production does ok by the play. We enjoyed it, anyway. Another is Ohio Impromptu, starring Jeremy Irons. I also felt that Not I, with Julianne Moore, was not bad. I still have yet to watch Endgame, Happy Days, or Play, among others.
Most recently, I watched Krapp's Last Tape, directed by Atom Egoyan and starring John Hurt, and it is, I think, symptomatic of the series' problems. This happens to be the only Beckett play that I've actually seen produced on stage, in a wonderful performance at Johns Hopkins by John Astin. To save some time, I'm going to quote what I said about this play and the performance in a post from last year. I wrote:
Krapp is an old man, alone. He spends part of the time listening to tapes he recorded at an earlier age. He was alone then too. We learn of paths not taken. There are, perhaps, regrets, though at the same time, he wouldn't undo what he's done, so he says. In the discussion after the play, one audience member in particular seemed fixated on the idea that Beckett didn't seem capable of "happiness". But there's happiness and then there's happiness. Krapp is alone, but he is alive. He has his pleasures. He delights in the word "viduity", as [Marina] Warner points out [in the Times Literary Supplement], but earlier he lingers on the word "spool"--theatrically savoring, to himself, the sound of "ooool"--and he enjoys his bananas, taking pleasure in their shape, color, smell. As Warner puts it:Krapp the old man marvels at the ideas held by his younger self, grand plans that didn't come to fruition, blithe talk on tape about a lost love being for the best, when it's certain details of that lost love the older man seems to linger on, at least during the play.For not everything is fizzling out, and wind is not mere wind, at least not quite, or otherwise we would not feel the tragicomic involvement that Beckett inspires. There is something to the fizzle itself.
Ok, so that's a rough outline of the "content". In the play, the stage features only a desk, with two drawers facing the audience, behind which Krapp sits at a chair, when he's not fumbling through his keys, or opening the drawers to extract bananas or a spool of tape, or leaving the stage to get the reel-to-reel player, or a drink, etc. Very minimal. Krapp himself is wearing nothing remarkable, except for a pair of insane white boots. Astin's performance was restrained, subtle.
In Egoyan's film, the same things happen, yet it's completely wrong. Why? Well, for one thing, no white boots! You can't even see Krapp's whole body! But more importantly, there's a too muchness to it that overwhelms, defeating the material. This is one of the basic problems with film adaptations in the first place: the need to fill in the blanks. Set designers appear to have been allowed to roam free and do whatever the fuck they wanted. The set is simply overflowing with crap. Papers everywhere, shelving, piles of boxes, tapes, remnants of a disheveled life. And when Krapp walks around front of the desk to open the drawers, the camera moves in, over his shoulder, so that we can see what else might be in them. To top it all off, Hurt's performance is way too emotive. When, for example, Krapp expresses some dismay about his life choices, Hurt plays it like he's doing a tortured Hamlet. He is not doing Hamlet.
I come back to this basic question: Why does someone decide to make a film adaptation? In a post about adaptations of Michael Chabon's novels, IOZ suggests that "adaptation is better accomplished by someone who appreciates a work than someone who loves it so much that he wants to improve it". I would argue further (in line with arguments I've made in the past on this topic), that appreciation should include a sense that there's some reason why the book or play being adapted existed in the form it did, particularly in the case of a writer such as Samuel Beckett. Beckett wrote poems, stories, novels, uncategorizable prose pieces, and plays, and he was rather famously interested in the problems with the forms in which he wrote. To simply film a Beckett play as if it were any old story lying around, as if it were in need of elaboration, is to fundamentally betray the play. Why did he write plays? Why is Krapp's Last Tape a play? Why does he have a play called Play? A film called Film? Why do his plays clearly not take the form for granted? I'm not going to venture answers to these questions here, but they are the kinds of questions that it seems to me are in play when problems of adaptation arise. It seems to me that the decision to adapt one of Beckett's plays for film should center on how the formal problems addressed in the play itself can be similarly addressed in a filmic context. If questions are being asked of the play format, can analagous questions be asked of film? If not, then why make a film?
Friday, May 08, 2009
Awesome Fatigue
Not too long ago I read this piece by David Foster Wallace about the movie Terminator 2 (link courtesy this interview at The House Next Door with Glenn Kenny, about his editing relationship with DFW). Wallace calls the movie "an appalling betrayal" of the original Terminator, and blames it for effectively inaugurating the era of what he calls "Special Effects Porn"; that is, movies featuring "half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes -- scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff -- strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative". One can date this period differently, but it seems to me that he's right to lament it.
And it's hard to argue with his specific criticisms of Terminator 2 itself, even as I recall that my own considered evalution of the movie, back when it was first released, amounted to variations of "that was awesome", no doubt all the while convincing myself of its wit and intelligence. In recent years, though I don't wish to disavow my earlier enjoyment of such entertainment, I've grown increasingly weary of movies that can only be said to be awesome or to suck. I eagerly await the day when this weariness means that I actually avoid said movies altogether, rather than merely being bored or alienated by them. This personal trend began with, I think, the insipid Gladiator and its battle scenes, which I hated but overlooked in the interest of being generally entertained. Then there were the three Lord of the Rings bloatfests; by the third installment (Best Picture, naturally), I had completely lost interest, and yet there I was, watching it with everybody else. Last year's example, The Dark Knight, was a mess, and in many ways a betrayal of the character, to the extent that I am still able to fret about how characters like Batman can be betrayed (like, isn't Batman supposed to be brilliant? In The Dark Knight he is stupid to the point of distraction), and I remember feeling oppressed by the movie, its lighting and frenetic pace and general incoherence. And yet it was kind of awesome, I had to admit. Which isn't anything like the same thing as "great" or "smart" or "complex" or whatever other kind of praise it received. I'm tired of "kind of awesome". I'm even tired of "completely awesome". Call it awesome fatigue.
Meanwhile, we recently watched the cult classic Withnail & I, and though I didn't think it was quite as great as its devoted fans seem to think it is, I nevertheless did think it was quite funny and took pleasure in watching real people move in real space. More of this please.
And it's hard to argue with his specific criticisms of Terminator 2 itself, even as I recall that my own considered evalution of the movie, back when it was first released, amounted to variations of "that was awesome", no doubt all the while convincing myself of its wit and intelligence. In recent years, though I don't wish to disavow my earlier enjoyment of such entertainment, I've grown increasingly weary of movies that can only be said to be awesome or to suck. I eagerly await the day when this weariness means that I actually avoid said movies altogether, rather than merely being bored or alienated by them. This personal trend began with, I think, the insipid Gladiator and its battle scenes, which I hated but overlooked in the interest of being generally entertained. Then there were the three Lord of the Rings bloatfests; by the third installment (Best Picture, naturally), I had completely lost interest, and yet there I was, watching it with everybody else. Last year's example, The Dark Knight, was a mess, and in many ways a betrayal of the character, to the extent that I am still able to fret about how characters like Batman can be betrayed (like, isn't Batman supposed to be brilliant? In The Dark Knight he is stupid to the point of distraction), and I remember feeling oppressed by the movie, its lighting and frenetic pace and general incoherence. And yet it was kind of awesome, I had to admit. Which isn't anything like the same thing as "great" or "smart" or "complex" or whatever other kind of praise it received. I'm tired of "kind of awesome". I'm even tired of "completely awesome". Call it awesome fatigue.
Meanwhile, we recently watched the cult classic Withnail & I, and though I didn't think it was quite as great as its devoted fans seem to think it is, I nevertheless did think it was quite funny and took pleasure in watching real people move in real space. More of this please.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Find a Subject
At Already Half Naked, David E. Ford, Jr., has posted an intriguing review of Gus Van Sant's latest movie, Paranoid Park. He ends with this:
(Oh, and please check out David's excellent new blog. He's been posting some very interesting stuff over there.)
Some reviewers have even remarked that Van Sant appears to be in a rut, going over much of the same territory he explored in his earlier films. This complaint echoes many of those made about the recent films of Wes Anderson. What these reviewers seem to ignore is that this is precisely what artists do: find a subject and repeatedly explore it in order to reveal new perspectives and deeper meanings.These reviewers (and others) don't ignore this so much as they remain blissfully unaware of it. Yet it seems obviously true to me.
(Oh, and please check out David's excellent new blog. He's been posting some very interesting stuff over there.)
Friday, December 21, 2007
Happy Holidays
I'm probably going to be out of commission here for a few days, so have a safe, happy holiday weekend, however you choose to spend it.
In the meantime, check out the Books of the Year 2007 symposium over at Mark Thwaite's excellent Ready Steady Book site, which includes contributions from several writers and bloggers, including yours truly.
Also, just because we could use more awesomeness in the world and because I love you, here is a clip of the wonderful dance sequence from Godard's Bande à part (aka, Band of Outsiders) (which I mentioned in my recent movie roundup post):
In the meantime, check out the Books of the Year 2007 symposium over at Mark Thwaite's excellent Ready Steady Book site, which includes contributions from several writers and bloggers, including yours truly.
Also, just because we could use more awesomeness in the world and because I love you, here is a clip of the wonderful dance sequence from Godard's Bande à part (aka, Band of Outsiders) (which I mentioned in my recent movie roundup post):
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Movie Roundup
Other than No Country for Old Men and I'm Not There, we've seen a number of movies in recent weeks. Here are a few that come immediately to mind, in more or less reverse order of viewing, with short-ish comments about each:
Blade Runner (1982) - The so-called final cut. Aimée had never seen any version of Blade Runner; I've seen it several times, largely because I have trouble with it. I keep trying, and failing, to see what it is that others think is so awesome. I don't dislike it by any means, I've just not been able to see what all the fuss is. I still don't, but I'm not sorry I saw it again. Whatever my problems with the movie, there's no question that this new edition of it looks great. Vangelis' score is more intrusive than I had remembered it (Aimée called it cheesy; she's not wrong, though I was less bothered by it than she was). (Classic painful--and painfully expository--acting moment from Harrison Ford: "Memories. Yer talkin' about memories!" Yeah, no kidding.)
Superbad (2007) - not as funny as we expected it to be, but we love Michael Cera and his deadpan delivery is the best thing about the movie. (See this Joseph Kugelmass post, from September: "I'm McLovin It: Sexuality in the Age of Advertising".)
The Band of Outsiders (1964) - Each of us had previously seen only Breathless from Godard. This was my first encounter with the striking Anna Karina. The basic story: two men try to convince a girl (Karina) to help them break into the house she lives in and steal another boarder's cash. Hijinks and much flirting ensue. Why does it seem like the men in French films are always such callous assholes? So the movie sort of meanders, but it has a great sequence midway through, with Karina and the two men in a cafe or diner dancing, finger-snapping and cool, to jazz music (the soundtrack is all jazz, if I recall correctly). I would have been happy to watch this sequence over and over all night, if Aimée had let me.
Miller's Crossing (1990) - after No Country for Old Men, we decided to check out a Coen Brothers movie that neither of us had seen in years. There are people who claim this as the best mob movie there is. I don't see it. It's enjoyable, no question about it, though it seems, to me, more canned than it ought to. A lot of fun performances: one of Aimée's favorite heartthrobs, Gabriel Byrne; the weaselly John Turturro; Jon Polito's passionate speech about "et-thics" in the opening scene; etc.
Lars and the Real Girl (2007) - This is a small, sweet movie that could have been killed by excessive sentimentality or cloyingness, or by its central premise (perpetually alone Lars orders an anatomically correct doll from a porn site and presents it to the community as girlfriend) being played for cheap, Farrelly-like laughs. Happily, neither turns out to be the case. Ryan Gosling's performance as Lars is remarkable. We loved it. I'm pretty sure I was crying like a baby at the end, for a variety of reasons that would be too difficult to articulate here. One related reason: I am almost always moved by shows of genuine communal affection and involvement. The terrible Baltimore Sun reviewer Michael Sragow referred to this movie as "Capra-corny", which says vastly more about him than it does about the film.
Hiroshima mon amour (1959) - Director: Alain Resnais. Screenplay by Marguerite Duras, who I happen to have been reading some of recently. Her stamp is immediately evident, with the sparse, repetitive dialogue, and the emphasis on the characters' erotic histories. Some harsh, disturbing images, early in the film, of the effects of the bomb. The movie is short, but still our attention flagged some by the end. It may not have been the best choice for a baby-sitting assignment.
The New World (2005) - I don't know if it's right to say that Terance Malick is one of my favorite directors. What would I mean by that? I can say that Badlands is my favorite movie, or at least close to it, and that I liked my only viewings of both Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, each of which I would need to see again. The New World is stunning. I'd seen it at the end of its abbreviated theatrical run (a friend and I had had to go out of our way to see it, knowing it was going to be gone soon; it never did play in Baltimore). I remember emerging from the theater, into the harsh daylight and the ugly, modern strip-mall-scape, and feeling disoriented. This second viewing was necessarily somewhat muted by comparison--our television's not tiny, but it's no theater screen--but still a powerful experience. The story of John Smith and Pocahantas has been told and re-told and embellished so many times that it's hard to keep straight what the facts are supposed to be. Here it hardly matters. The focus is more on the tragic impact of the white settlers on the land its people. Aimée was crying at the end, simply at how beautiful the world was.
Idiocracy (2006) - I was really looking forward to this one, but now it seems wrong to list it immediately after the sublime The New World. I love Office Space, Mike Judge's hilarious and disturbingly spot-on comedy about office workers, and Beavis & Butthead, well . . . let's just say it was occasionally smarter than it seemed, and that there was sometimes something brilliant in its stupidity. Unfortunately, a lot of times there wasn't. Enter Idiocracy. I'd heard some good things about it, yet I have no memory of it ever being released to theaters. When we finally had the chance to rent it, the video store clerk told me it was "terrifying" because, he said, it was so true. I'd like to sit down and have a talk with the clerk: In reality, this is a terrible movie, the worst I've seen in a long time. All of its problems stem from its underlying thesis: smart people have stopped having children, while stupid people are reproducing like rabbits. In the opening sequence, when all of this is explained to us, we see a stereotypical upwardly mobile, middle class, professional couple (both thin, of course) delaying and delaying the decision to have children--the time's not right, career, money, fertility issues, and so on. Alongside this, we see a grotesque stereotype of poor people: stupid, fat, completely ignorant about how and why babies even happen, children all over the place. Eventually, over the course of 500 years, then, the smart people increasingly lose pace to the dumb people and, you see, humanity evolves until literally everyone is stupid. Needless to say, there are countless problems with this idea, beginning with the brazen class prejudice that equates "poor" with "stupid", and the extremely flawed understanding of evolution on display. In my view, the movie does not ever recover from this premise, nor could it, since every moment is shot through with its implications. And yet, there are some funny gags and evidence that there could have been a much better movie with similar, marginally smarter materials. The plot? Oh, yeah, there's a plot. Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph are frozen as part of an Army experiment. Naturally, said experiment goes somewhat awry, political funding -wise, and they are forgotten about and not un-frozen until The Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505 (this is admittedly a great touch). They awaken into a world in which everyone is vastly stupider than they are, where people can only speak some annoying combination of Valley-speak, hip hop slang, and grunts. They try to find their way back to their own time. Along the way we encounter various aspects of this future world, some of which reveal some hints at what might have been the better movie I was hoping for: Everyone is required to be bar-coded. All aspects of life are corporatized down to the minutest details. The most popular show on tv involves a man being repeatedly slammed in the nuts. There are some amusing gags surrounding the evolution of language and corporate identities. The Fudruckers hamburger chain (which was built on the site of the closed Army base), evolves over time into Buttfuckers (still a family restaurant). Starbucks specializes in legalized prostitution (the menus are more or less the same, but the items stand for altogether different products). The political arena is about as coarse as can be imagined, if not more so. There is much that could have been satirized about the coarsening of our society and our public discourse, but the satire here is never able to gain any real traction, because the (ridiculous, irresponsible) premise handicaps the movie from the start. With none of the characters native to 2505 able to form anything even resembling a complete thought with any complexity, the satire that could have been essentially dies before it gets started. Disappointing.
Blade Runner (1982) - The so-called final cut. Aimée had never seen any version of Blade Runner; I've seen it several times, largely because I have trouble with it. I keep trying, and failing, to see what it is that others think is so awesome. I don't dislike it by any means, I've just not been able to see what all the fuss is. I still don't, but I'm not sorry I saw it again. Whatever my problems with the movie, there's no question that this new edition of it looks great. Vangelis' score is more intrusive than I had remembered it (Aimée called it cheesy; she's not wrong, though I was less bothered by it than she was). (Classic painful--and painfully expository--acting moment from Harrison Ford: "Memories. Yer talkin' about memories!" Yeah, no kidding.)
Superbad (2007) - not as funny as we expected it to be, but we love Michael Cera and his deadpan delivery is the best thing about the movie. (See this Joseph Kugelmass post, from September: "I'm McLovin It: Sexuality in the Age of Advertising".)
The Band of Outsiders (1964) - Each of us had previously seen only Breathless from Godard. This was my first encounter with the striking Anna Karina. The basic story: two men try to convince a girl (Karina) to help them break into the house she lives in and steal another boarder's cash. Hijinks and much flirting ensue. Why does it seem like the men in French films are always such callous assholes? So the movie sort of meanders, but it has a great sequence midway through, with Karina and the two men in a cafe or diner dancing, finger-snapping and cool, to jazz music (the soundtrack is all jazz, if I recall correctly). I would have been happy to watch this sequence over and over all night, if Aimée had let me.
Miller's Crossing (1990) - after No Country for Old Men, we decided to check out a Coen Brothers movie that neither of us had seen in years. There are people who claim this as the best mob movie there is. I don't see it. It's enjoyable, no question about it, though it seems, to me, more canned than it ought to. A lot of fun performances: one of Aimée's favorite heartthrobs, Gabriel Byrne; the weaselly John Turturro; Jon Polito's passionate speech about "et-thics" in the opening scene; etc.
Lars and the Real Girl (2007) - This is a small, sweet movie that could have been killed by excessive sentimentality or cloyingness, or by its central premise (perpetually alone Lars orders an anatomically correct doll from a porn site and presents it to the community as girlfriend) being played for cheap, Farrelly-like laughs. Happily, neither turns out to be the case. Ryan Gosling's performance as Lars is remarkable. We loved it. I'm pretty sure I was crying like a baby at the end, for a variety of reasons that would be too difficult to articulate here. One related reason: I am almost always moved by shows of genuine communal affection and involvement. The terrible Baltimore Sun reviewer Michael Sragow referred to this movie as "Capra-corny", which says vastly more about him than it does about the film.
Hiroshima mon amour (1959) - Director: Alain Resnais. Screenplay by Marguerite Duras, who I happen to have been reading some of recently. Her stamp is immediately evident, with the sparse, repetitive dialogue, and the emphasis on the characters' erotic histories. Some harsh, disturbing images, early in the film, of the effects of the bomb. The movie is short, but still our attention flagged some by the end. It may not have been the best choice for a baby-sitting assignment.
The New World (2005) - I don't know if it's right to say that Terance Malick is one of my favorite directors. What would I mean by that? I can say that Badlands is my favorite movie, or at least close to it, and that I liked my only viewings of both Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, each of which I would need to see again. The New World is stunning. I'd seen it at the end of its abbreviated theatrical run (a friend and I had had to go out of our way to see it, knowing it was going to be gone soon; it never did play in Baltimore). I remember emerging from the theater, into the harsh daylight and the ugly, modern strip-mall-scape, and feeling disoriented. This second viewing was necessarily somewhat muted by comparison--our television's not tiny, but it's no theater screen--but still a powerful experience. The story of John Smith and Pocahantas has been told and re-told and embellished so many times that it's hard to keep straight what the facts are supposed to be. Here it hardly matters. The focus is more on the tragic impact of the white settlers on the land its people. Aimée was crying at the end, simply at how beautiful the world was.
Idiocracy (2006) - I was really looking forward to this one, but now it seems wrong to list it immediately after the sublime The New World. I love Office Space, Mike Judge's hilarious and disturbingly spot-on comedy about office workers, and Beavis & Butthead, well . . . let's just say it was occasionally smarter than it seemed, and that there was sometimes something brilliant in its stupidity. Unfortunately, a lot of times there wasn't. Enter Idiocracy. I'd heard some good things about it, yet I have no memory of it ever being released to theaters. When we finally had the chance to rent it, the video store clerk told me it was "terrifying" because, he said, it was so true. I'd like to sit down and have a talk with the clerk: In reality, this is a terrible movie, the worst I've seen in a long time. All of its problems stem from its underlying thesis: smart people have stopped having children, while stupid people are reproducing like rabbits. In the opening sequence, when all of this is explained to us, we see a stereotypical upwardly mobile, middle class, professional couple (both thin, of course) delaying and delaying the decision to have children--the time's not right, career, money, fertility issues, and so on. Alongside this, we see a grotesque stereotype of poor people: stupid, fat, completely ignorant about how and why babies even happen, children all over the place. Eventually, over the course of 500 years, then, the smart people increasingly lose pace to the dumb people and, you see, humanity evolves until literally everyone is stupid. Needless to say, there are countless problems with this idea, beginning with the brazen class prejudice that equates "poor" with "stupid", and the extremely flawed understanding of evolution on display. In my view, the movie does not ever recover from this premise, nor could it, since every moment is shot through with its implications. And yet, there are some funny gags and evidence that there could have been a much better movie with similar, marginally smarter materials. The plot? Oh, yeah, there's a plot. Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph are frozen as part of an Army experiment. Naturally, said experiment goes somewhat awry, political funding -wise, and they are forgotten about and not un-frozen until The Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505 (this is admittedly a great touch). They awaken into a world in which everyone is vastly stupider than they are, where people can only speak some annoying combination of Valley-speak, hip hop slang, and grunts. They try to find their way back to their own time. Along the way we encounter various aspects of this future world, some of which reveal some hints at what might have been the better movie I was hoping for: Everyone is required to be bar-coded. All aspects of life are corporatized down to the minutest details. The most popular show on tv involves a man being repeatedly slammed in the nuts. There are some amusing gags surrounding the evolution of language and corporate identities. The Fudruckers hamburger chain (which was built on the site of the closed Army base), evolves over time into Buttfuckers (still a family restaurant). Starbucks specializes in legalized prostitution (the menus are more or less the same, but the items stand for altogether different products). The political arena is about as coarse as can be imagined, if not more so. There is much that could have been satirized about the coarsening of our society and our public discourse, but the satire here is never able to gain any real traction, because the (ridiculous, irresponsible) premise handicaps the movie from the start. With none of the characters native to 2505 able to form anything even resembling a complete thought with any complexity, the satire that could have been essentially dies before it gets started. Disappointing.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
N.P. Thompson on I'm Not There
I'm Not There (2007)
We saw I'm Not There Friday night, the Todd Haynes-directed, mytheo-pic about Bob Dylan. We had a great time. Both of us had seen a couple of reviews or responses to the movie and expected to find a non-linear, if entertaining, assemblage of disconnected takes on the Dylan myth. Well, entertaining it is, there's no question about that. But when it was over, Aimée said she didn’t recognize the movie she'd seen in the reviews she'd read. She said: "I was expecting something a lot more difficult, but I was surprised by how literal it is." It's true. While the movie does, as you've no doubt heard, feature six or seven actors portraying different aspects of Dylan and plays with various elements of his life and legend, it's a mistake to say that the movie does not hang together. It not only hangs together, but it has a definitely discernible through-story. If you like Dylan's music at all, then I highly recommend seeing it. (If you don't, then I'd steer clear of it. The movie is saturated with it.)
Aimée called the movie "literal". She didn’t mean that the movie tells the story of Dylan's life in a more or less straightforward fashion, or that it shows us Dylan as a musician or as a working songwriter. That’s hardly what the movie’s about. What she meant, I think, is that the movie, while somewhat impressionistic, is not especially avant garde or remotely difficult to watch or understand. I came to the movie as a big fan of Dylan’s music, and I know a fair amount about the basic story told about him--and enough of it to know where certain elements of that story are either obviously not factually true or more than a little embellished. Aimée likes Dylan’s music, but didn't know much of anything other than that he was part of the protest folk music scene that included Joan Baez and that he later went electric, to the dismay of some people back in the mists of time. She didn’t even know, for example, anything about his Christian phase.
On to the movie, then. I'm not going to attempt a formal review, but I'm also not going to try to avoid going into detail, so if you're worried about spoilers or whatever, then I suggest not reading the rest of this entry. My belief is that the movie is not nearly so disconnected as we were led to think it would be, yet my comments will themselves be disconnected. I would need to see it again in order to attempt anything more cohesive. (And as much as I enjoy it when film critics actually discuss movies as a visual medium, I am not a film person myself, so I won't be talking about how Haynes achieves the effects he achieves. I will say that the movie looks great, and rarely lags, despite its 135 minute running time.)
The movie is full of excellent performances, and as with most everyone else, our favorite was Cate Blanchett's. She is Jude Quinn, and her resemblance, in look and mannerism and voice, to the mid-60s, amphetamine-fueled, plugged-in Dylan is uncanny. It's easy to try to dismiss such acting as mere mimicry, but Blanchett is so good here, so completely disappears into the iconic Dylan character, that such complaints strike me as churlish. I enjoyed just watching her face as she smoked a cigarette, or moved her mouth and eyes, looking just like Dylan one second, then bleeding into "Cate Blanchett" the next. Perfect. (I should say here that the scene in which Quinn and his band play at the "New England Folk Festival" is almost physically painful. This is the only scene in the movie in which the music is difficult to listen to: it's loud, overbearing, and sounds like it's about to destroy the amps. This, I think, is important to remember when we talk about the poor, addled folkies complaining about Dylan's electric music. I'll have more to say about this, I hope, in another post. But suffice it to say that the scene begins with an image of the band machine-gunning the audience. This makes sense from the perspective of the audience itself, which might have felt like it was being attacked, which in a sense it was.)
My second favorite part of the movie was the much-maligned segment featuring Richard Gere. I've seen comments that these scenes are "bullshit" or boring or else completely incomprehensible. I'm happy to be able to report that this is not the case. They are enjoyable in themselves, but more importantly, they are crucial to whatever sense the film hopes to make. Gere is an aged Billy the Kid, hiding out in a rustic setting, away from the noise of the world. Dylan, of course, appeared (not as Billy the Kid) in Sam Peckinpah's 1973 film, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (and supplied the soundtrack, which included one big hit, "Knockin' On Heaven's Door"). This fact has been said to be a little too neat, too cute, but I think that's a lazy criticism. Here, Billy has obviously survived his encounter with Pat Garrett. And the people he meets could be extras from the photo-shoot for the cover of The Basement Tapes, or characters from those songs, the population of the "Old, Weird America", to use Dylan’s own phrase (as reported in Greil Marcus’ fascinating, if occasionally tedious book about Dylan and the Basement Tapes, Invisible Republic). It could be, and has been, argued that these scenes will only make sense if you know a lot about Dylan and American traditional folk music. But I don't think this is true. This was an aspect of Dylan about which Aimée knew nothing, but she had no trouble with these scenes. Many reviews have observed that the movie is about Dylan's need to constantly reinvent himself (hence the use of so many different actors to portray different aspects of his story). This is true, but in the movie, where the "Dylan" character resists being nailed down to any particular style or opinion or even coherent statement of any kind, this is made physically explicit more than once, as the different manifestations of Dylan try to evade capture.
Some other observations and comments:
I didn't realize while watching that the same actor (Bruce Greenwood) who plays the elderly Pat Garrett also plays the establishment, Don't Look Back-like Quinn-interviewer, Mr. Jones ("You know something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" from "Ballad of a Thin Man"). This has been said (in comments to this review at The House Next Door), to be a cheap move on Haynes part, to too eagerly assign Dylan role as the besieged victim. I disagree; I don't think the movie sees Dylan as a victim.
Marcus Carl Franklin is excellent as the 11-year-old black kid who calls himself Woody Guthrie. His Woody sings some Dylan songs (including “Tombstone Blues”, with Richie Havens) and songs about trains and hobos, like he's a Guthrie-like Depression-era troubadour. Like Dylan making up his biography as he went along, changing the details depending on who he was talking to, Woody tells fabulous stories about where he's come from and where he's going (Hollywood, he says), and is on the run from a juvenile center in Minnesota (again, evading capture). One woman advises him to stop with the hobo songs, to look around and see the struggles real people are going through now (it is 1959, right in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement), to live in his own times.
Christian Bale is the protest-singer, Jack Rollins. These scenes look like some combination of the non-electric parts of Scorsese's No Direction Home and Christopher Guest’s sort of funny but mostly annoying mockumentary, A Mighty Wind, complete with comfortable old folkies looking back on Rollins and his role in the protest movement. Julianne Moore plays Alice Fabian, an obvious Joan Baez analogue, and she looks back on Rollins with the same amazement and disappointment that Baez shows in No Direction Home. Moore's Alice is incredibly earnest and seems pretty clueless. Moore is good, as usual, but her scenes are played for laughs and come close to being unnecessarily mean to Baez.
Rollins, like Dylan himself did, converts to evangelical Christianity. Here the move happens earlier, and it results in Rollins completely abandoning popular music. For two decades, Rollins has been working as a minister (Pastor John) where he is tracked down by an interviewer for another documentary-like segment. We see him delivering a fiery sermon about the evils of music that doesn't glorify the Lord. I thought this was an interesting twist on this poorly understood era of Dylan's life. Bale is excellent here as well. (I almost always like Christian Bale.)
Heath Ledger plays an actor, Robbie Clark, who portrays Bale's folkie Rollins in a movie. Robbie's marriage to Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) seems to run parallel with Dylan's own to Sara Lownds, and ends with the end of the Vietnam War, the original version of "Idiot Wind" playing on the soundtrack. Robbie is a jet-setting movie star, a poor husband, and a womanizer. He has walked away from whatever values he once claimed to have, scorning those who still want to change the world. I felt that the energy of the movie lagged when Ledger and Gainsbourg first appeared on screen, though their later scenes were better.
Ben Whishaw's Arthur Rimbaud, who appears as a recurring interview subject, also like the mid-60s Dylan, has some of the best lines in the movie. One of our favorites: "I can accept chaos; I don't know if chaos can accept me."
David Cross as Allen Ginsberg is a little goofy, but that's about it. His casting carries no implications for the rest of the movie. One very silly scene involves Quinn and Ginsberg dancing around a large, white sculpture of Jesus on the Cross, shouting at the crucified Jesus. At the end of this Quinn shouts: "Why don’t you do your early stuff?" This might read as a bit heavy-handed (Dylan, again, as victim, the crucified artist), but in context it was actually very funny.
Aimée called the movie "literal". She didn’t mean that the movie tells the story of Dylan's life in a more or less straightforward fashion, or that it shows us Dylan as a musician or as a working songwriter. That’s hardly what the movie’s about. What she meant, I think, is that the movie, while somewhat impressionistic, is not especially avant garde or remotely difficult to watch or understand. I came to the movie as a big fan of Dylan’s music, and I know a fair amount about the basic story told about him--and enough of it to know where certain elements of that story are either obviously not factually true or more than a little embellished. Aimée likes Dylan’s music, but didn't know much of anything other than that he was part of the protest folk music scene that included Joan Baez and that he later went electric, to the dismay of some people back in the mists of time. She didn’t even know, for example, anything about his Christian phase.
On to the movie, then. I'm not going to attempt a formal review, but I'm also not going to try to avoid going into detail, so if you're worried about spoilers or whatever, then I suggest not reading the rest of this entry. My belief is that the movie is not nearly so disconnected as we were led to think it would be, yet my comments will themselves be disconnected. I would need to see it again in order to attempt anything more cohesive. (And as much as I enjoy it when film critics actually discuss movies as a visual medium, I am not a film person myself, so I won't be talking about how Haynes achieves the effects he achieves. I will say that the movie looks great, and rarely lags, despite its 135 minute running time.)
The movie is full of excellent performances, and as with most everyone else, our favorite was Cate Blanchett's. She is Jude Quinn, and her resemblance, in look and mannerism and voice, to the mid-60s, amphetamine-fueled, plugged-in Dylan is uncanny. It's easy to try to dismiss such acting as mere mimicry, but Blanchett is so good here, so completely disappears into the iconic Dylan character, that such complaints strike me as churlish. I enjoyed just watching her face as she smoked a cigarette, or moved her mouth and eyes, looking just like Dylan one second, then bleeding into "Cate Blanchett" the next. Perfect. (I should say here that the scene in which Quinn and his band play at the "New England Folk Festival" is almost physically painful. This is the only scene in the movie in which the music is difficult to listen to: it's loud, overbearing, and sounds like it's about to destroy the amps. This, I think, is important to remember when we talk about the poor, addled folkies complaining about Dylan's electric music. I'll have more to say about this, I hope, in another post. But suffice it to say that the scene begins with an image of the band machine-gunning the audience. This makes sense from the perspective of the audience itself, which might have felt like it was being attacked, which in a sense it was.)
My second favorite part of the movie was the much-maligned segment featuring Richard Gere. I've seen comments that these scenes are "bullshit" or boring or else completely incomprehensible. I'm happy to be able to report that this is not the case. They are enjoyable in themselves, but more importantly, they are crucial to whatever sense the film hopes to make. Gere is an aged Billy the Kid, hiding out in a rustic setting, away from the noise of the world. Dylan, of course, appeared (not as Billy the Kid) in Sam Peckinpah's 1973 film, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (and supplied the soundtrack, which included one big hit, "Knockin' On Heaven's Door"). This fact has been said to be a little too neat, too cute, but I think that's a lazy criticism. Here, Billy has obviously survived his encounter with Pat Garrett. And the people he meets could be extras from the photo-shoot for the cover of The Basement Tapes, or characters from those songs, the population of the "Old, Weird America", to use Dylan’s own phrase (as reported in Greil Marcus’ fascinating, if occasionally tedious book about Dylan and the Basement Tapes, Invisible Republic). It could be, and has been, argued that these scenes will only make sense if you know a lot about Dylan and American traditional folk music. But I don't think this is true. This was an aspect of Dylan about which Aimée knew nothing, but she had no trouble with these scenes. Many reviews have observed that the movie is about Dylan's need to constantly reinvent himself (hence the use of so many different actors to portray different aspects of his story). This is true, but in the movie, where the "Dylan" character resists being nailed down to any particular style or opinion or even coherent statement of any kind, this is made physically explicit more than once, as the different manifestations of Dylan try to evade capture.
Some other observations and comments:
I didn't realize while watching that the same actor (Bruce Greenwood) who plays the elderly Pat Garrett also plays the establishment, Don't Look Back-like Quinn-interviewer, Mr. Jones ("You know something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" from "Ballad of a Thin Man"). This has been said (in comments to this review at The House Next Door), to be a cheap move on Haynes part, to too eagerly assign Dylan role as the besieged victim. I disagree; I don't think the movie sees Dylan as a victim.
Marcus Carl Franklin is excellent as the 11-year-old black kid who calls himself Woody Guthrie. His Woody sings some Dylan songs (including “Tombstone Blues”, with Richie Havens) and songs about trains and hobos, like he's a Guthrie-like Depression-era troubadour. Like Dylan making up his biography as he went along, changing the details depending on who he was talking to, Woody tells fabulous stories about where he's come from and where he's going (Hollywood, he says), and is on the run from a juvenile center in Minnesota (again, evading capture). One woman advises him to stop with the hobo songs, to look around and see the struggles real people are going through now (it is 1959, right in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement), to live in his own times.
Christian Bale is the protest-singer, Jack Rollins. These scenes look like some combination of the non-electric parts of Scorsese's No Direction Home and Christopher Guest’s sort of funny but mostly annoying mockumentary, A Mighty Wind, complete with comfortable old folkies looking back on Rollins and his role in the protest movement. Julianne Moore plays Alice Fabian, an obvious Joan Baez analogue, and she looks back on Rollins with the same amazement and disappointment that Baez shows in No Direction Home. Moore's Alice is incredibly earnest and seems pretty clueless. Moore is good, as usual, but her scenes are played for laughs and come close to being unnecessarily mean to Baez.
Rollins, like Dylan himself did, converts to evangelical Christianity. Here the move happens earlier, and it results in Rollins completely abandoning popular music. For two decades, Rollins has been working as a minister (Pastor John) where he is tracked down by an interviewer for another documentary-like segment. We see him delivering a fiery sermon about the evils of music that doesn't glorify the Lord. I thought this was an interesting twist on this poorly understood era of Dylan's life. Bale is excellent here as well. (I almost always like Christian Bale.)
Heath Ledger plays an actor, Robbie Clark, who portrays Bale's folkie Rollins in a movie. Robbie's marriage to Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) seems to run parallel with Dylan's own to Sara Lownds, and ends with the end of the Vietnam War, the original version of "Idiot Wind" playing on the soundtrack. Robbie is a jet-setting movie star, a poor husband, and a womanizer. He has walked away from whatever values he once claimed to have, scorning those who still want to change the world. I felt that the energy of the movie lagged when Ledger and Gainsbourg first appeared on screen, though their later scenes were better.
Ben Whishaw's Arthur Rimbaud, who appears as a recurring interview subject, also like the mid-60s Dylan, has some of the best lines in the movie. One of our favorites: "I can accept chaos; I don't know if chaos can accept me."
David Cross as Allen Ginsberg is a little goofy, but that's about it. His casting carries no implications for the rest of the movie. One very silly scene involves Quinn and Ginsberg dancing around a large, white sculpture of Jesus on the Cross, shouting at the crucified Jesus. At the end of this Quinn shouts: "Why don’t you do your early stuff?" This might read as a bit heavy-handed (Dylan, again, as victim, the crucified artist), but in context it was actually very funny.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
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:
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." ...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.")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).
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Erased from the Public's Memory
At Feral Scholar, DeAnander has posted an excellent review of David Zeiger's great documentary, Sir! No Sir!. She opens her review asking what we think of when we think of the movement against the Vietnam War and sketches a stereotype of what that likely is: singing, marching, civilian hippies, basically. "In other words", she says,
Seeing Sir! No Sir! in this context was perhaps even more instructive than it would have been on its own. It reminds us that the purpose of learning about history is not for positioning (taking an irrelevantly correct stance towards some distant historical event), but that we can and must learn from past successes and failures.
I've written a little about the concerted effort taken by the U.S. government and its willing accomplices in the press and the intelligentsia to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War as it was still happening, and I've read a lot about the nature and makeup of the opposition to the war. So I should know better. But I still have a tendency to imagine the antiwar movement as having been along the lines of the hippie stereotype DeAnander describes. It's hard to imagine earlier times, even times as relentlessly over-documented and seemingly shoved down our throats as the 1960s. Read DeAnander's review to get a fuller flavor of what the film depicts, but I can say that I found it revelatory, even though I already supposedly "knew" the basic story it tells. This documentary is essential viewing.
you’ll most likely think of a movement of young people in civilian society — students and draft resisters — mostly on college campuses, mostly white middle/upper class kids, in direct and hostile opposition to the armed forces as well as the government.We happened to see this film a few weeks ago at an Iraq Veterans Against the War speaking engagement held in here Baltimore at 2640, a "cooperative events venue" run, in part, by the excellent local radical bookstore and coffeehouse collective, Red Emma's. The veterans of the Iraq War who spoke were for the most part stirring and inspiring--they talked about their experiences both in the war itself and in raising awareness inside and outside the military.
What you most likely won’t think of — unless you remember it personally — is the veterans’ and soldiers’ anti-war movement. You won’t think of the song “Soldier We Love You,” and you won’t remember that the FTA Show in which Jane Fonda starred draw cheering crowds of US soldiers throughout its tour of Pacific Asia. You won’t remember soldiers in Viet Nam wearing peace signs in place of their dog tags, or going to jail for refusing combat duty. You probably won’t remember radical Black soldiers making a direct connection between US policy in Viet Nam and US policy in the inner cities. Memory of the pivotal social moment of the Sixties has been selectively edited (especially through the sugar-coated amnesia pills cranked out by the Hollywood vending machine). The soldiers’ and veterans’ antiwar movement has been erased from the public’s memory.
Seeing Sir! No Sir! in this context was perhaps even more instructive than it would have been on its own. It reminds us that the purpose of learning about history is not for positioning (taking an irrelevantly correct stance towards some distant historical event), but that we can and must learn from past successes and failures.
I've written a little about the concerted effort taken by the U.S. government and its willing accomplices in the press and the intelligentsia to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War as it was still happening, and I've read a lot about the nature and makeup of the opposition to the war. So I should know better. But I still have a tendency to imagine the antiwar movement as having been along the lines of the hippie stereotype DeAnander describes. It's hard to imagine earlier times, even times as relentlessly over-documented and seemingly shoved down our throats as the 1960s. Read DeAnander's review to get a fuller flavor of what the film depicts, but I can say that I found it revelatory, even though I already supposedly "knew" the basic story it tells. This documentary is essential viewing.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Movie Notes
I watched Miami Vice on Friday night. I admit that when this movie came out, I had no interest in seeing it. I tend to avoid movies based on tv shows, and I have some mysterious aversion to Jamie Foxx. It was reviews like this one by Keith Uhlich at The House Next Door, its presence on certain critics' year-end top ten list, and then this fascinating discussion between Uhlich and Matt Zoller Seitz (also at The House Next Door) that persuaded me that I wanted to see it. The Uhlich/Seitz discussion is about the so-called "death of film". At one point they're talking about how filmmakers who don't work in the classical narrative style get ignored by the canon-makers and marginalized. In this context, Seitz says:
In the event, I enjoyed the movie. There were some striking visuals, to be sure, though what they necessarily meant I'm not sure I could say. As for the plot, I'd kept hearing that it was impossible to follow, but this complaint is strange, since the plot seemed pretty basic to me. (For another interesting--positive--take on the movie, see Brandon Soderberg's at No Trivia.) (By the way, the film's music included two or three Audioslave songs and somehow they didn't suck and may even have been good. I'm not sure what to do with this unexpected information. On the bad side, there was also a truly terrible cover of "In the Air Tonight".)
And last night, we watched The Departed, which was a second viewing for me. I liked it again, perhaps even more than I did the first time; still think Leonardo DiCaprio was better than I'd ever seen him before; still enjoyed Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg immensely; and still think Jack Nicholson's performance was all too often annoyingly cartoonish.
And we're implicitly excluding filmmakers who do radical things within the context of formats that are quite well-established. Circling back to where we were a minute ago, I think that to have been made within the commercial exhibition system, Miami Vice and INLAND EMPIRE are, hands down, the two most radical works of popular culture to have appeared on American screens in 2006. Nothing else comes close.I admit that I'm not well-versed in the visual-language of movies, and it often doesn't occur to me to think about why a certain visual appears instead of another. But damn, when a critic I respect says something like this, I'm going to want to see that movie. They talk about Vice some more in the discussion, but the whole thing is worth reading, if you're interested in film.
In the event, I enjoyed the movie. There were some striking visuals, to be sure, though what they necessarily meant I'm not sure I could say. As for the plot, I'd kept hearing that it was impossible to follow, but this complaint is strange, since the plot seemed pretty basic to me. (For another interesting--positive--take on the movie, see Brandon Soderberg's at No Trivia.) (By the way, the film's music included two or three Audioslave songs and somehow they didn't suck and may even have been good. I'm not sure what to do with this unexpected information. On the bad side, there was also a truly terrible cover of "In the Air Tonight".)
And last night, we watched The Departed, which was a second viewing for me. I liked it again, perhaps even more than I did the first time; still think Leonardo DiCaprio was better than I'd ever seen him before; still enjoyed Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg immensely; and still think Jack Nicholson's performance was all too often annoyingly cartoonish.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Recent Political Reads
Edie at Annotated Life on the media. A sample:
Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon with a feminist response to Children of Men (my review here).
Joe at American Leftist on the "wishful thinking" of left-leaning bloggers, who keep expecting Democratic politicians to be more leftwing than they really are (this post is where I found the link to Marcotte's review of Children of Men).
Gabriel Kolko at Asia Times Online on how Israel "cannot survive allied with the United States" and so it is time to make peace, and concessions, with its neighbors.
Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report, on Barack Obama, who, like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice before him, as president would merely put a "black face on imperial aggression" (article first seen at CounterPunch).
Arthur Silber at Once Upon a Time. . . on the ongoing propaganda effort to prep us for an attack on Iran, in "Iran: All Propaganda, All the Time".
While ostensibly wringing their hands at the sordid celebrity lifestyle, the article’s authors simultaneously capitalize upon it to sell the magazine on the lowest level possible, and completely omit the fact that the giant media empires—not Paris and Britney—are themselves most responsible for the quality of news coverage, Newsweek included. Instead, the authors insult and attack parents and their daughters for following popular fashion.Lenin at Lenin's Tomb on Mike Davis' new book on the history of the "car bomb".
Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon with a feminist response to Children of Men (my review here).
Joe at American Leftist on the "wishful thinking" of left-leaning bloggers, who keep expecting Democratic politicians to be more leftwing than they really are (this post is where I found the link to Marcotte's review of Children of Men).
Gabriel Kolko at Asia Times Online on how Israel "cannot survive allied with the United States" and so it is time to make peace, and concessions, with its neighbors.
Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report, on Barack Obama, who, like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice before him, as president would merely put a "black face on imperial aggression" (article first seen at CounterPunch).
Arthur Silber at Once Upon a Time. . . on the ongoing propaganda effort to prep us for an attack on Iran, in "Iran: All Propaganda, All the Time".
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
More on Children of Men
In my last post, I'd meant to include links to some other interesting responses to Children of Men. I'm glad I didn't; it gives me the opportunity to do so here, and say a little about them without overloading the original post.
At I Cite, Jodi Dean actually posted first about P.D. James' novel:
k-punk's post about the film touches on, much more eloquently than I did, what I was trying to say about youth and culture. For him, the question the film asks is "how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?" Also from k-punk's post:
Many of these posts have discussed, sometimes in great length, an aspect of the film that I did not address at all, its pretty overt Christian symbolism and imagery. It's not difficult to see the birth of a baby, symbolically, in terms of humanity's salvation, and Clive Owen's Theo plays something of a Joseph to Kee's Mary. Apparently, James' novel is a much more reactionary Christian work, which is not in as much evidence in the film. Žižek , in the item quoted in Jodi's post cited above, aside from saying that the film "gives the best diagnosis of the ideological despair of late capitalism. Of a society without history", praises the movie for subverting its reactionary source:
At I Cite, Jodi Dean actually posted first about P.D. James' novel:
No more playgrounds or toy stores. The last generation moving through schools which are then boarded up or repurposed. Initial efforts to solve the problem as well as initial warfare, chaos, and espionage, are ultimately abandoned in the wake of an overwhelming global ennui. In a way, it's a strange sort of big Other--a big Other that knows that it is dying, that it will not exist. This makes me think differently again about the non-existence of the big Other today--it may not exist, but it posits its existence in the future.This addresses, I think, some of the complaints some have had about the logic of the movie. Also, it occurred to me after writing my post, that one of the reasons Britain would have to restrict immigration--given the downward pressure on population worldwide--is that we are told that the rest of the world has more or less collapsed, while "only Britain soldiers on". If this is true, then Britain would be overloaded with immigrants--or, at least, anxieties . Jodi also posted a passage quoting Žižek talking about the movie; he will be featured on the dvd release. In another post, Jodie talked about Žižek and the movie again:
Commerce, it seems, grinds slowly to a stop. The last cars are made about 15 years after the last generation is born. There is a geriatric science and various evangelists appear from time to time offering if not hope then at least momentary respite from the gray present. Academics give courses for adults. Apparently, the state sponsors pornography--people have lost interest in sex. Adults from less privileged countries are shipped in as guest workers and treated horribly. People become even more involved with their pets. Anglicans argue over whether pets can be christened. Could there be a stock market, a bond market, without a future? Mortgages? Is this a variation of the only way to imagine a[n] end to capitalism? Imagining only a lack?
To imagine the world of Children of Men is to imagine an end to capitalism--no borrowing against the future. But it is also to imagine an end of meaning, the impossibility of sense insofar as the horizon that structures a world, that makes meaning possible, is missing.The question of immigration and migration is also discussed at this excellent post about the movie at the naked gaze, and in the comment thread there.
k-punk's post about the film touches on, much more eloquently than I did, what I was trying to say about youth and culture. For him, the question the film asks is "how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?" Also from k-punk's post:
alas, a blog also has a thoughtful response to the film.. . . the film is dominated by the sense that the damage has been done. The catastrophe is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn't end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.
[. . .] Children of Men is a dystopia that is specific to late capitalism. This isn't the familiar totalitarian scenario routinely trotted out in cinematic dystopias
[. . . ] public space is abandoned, given over to uncollected garbage and to stalking animals (one especially resonant scene takes place inside a derelict school, through which a deer runs). But, contrary to neo-liberal fantasy, there is no withering away of the State, only a stripping back of the State to its core military and police functions. In this world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist.
Many of these posts have discussed, sometimes in great length, an aspect of the film that I did not address at all, its pretty overt Christian symbolism and imagery. It's not difficult to see the birth of a baby, symbolically, in terms of humanity's salvation, and Clive Owen's Theo plays something of a Joseph to Kee's Mary. Apparently, James' novel is a much more reactionary Christian work, which is not in as much evidence in the film. Žižek , in the item quoted in Jodi's post cited above, aside from saying that the film "gives the best diagnosis of the ideological despair of late capitalism. Of a society without history", praises the movie for subverting its reactionary source:
. . . Children of Men is a model of a kind of materialist subversion of a reactionary classic, because the novel is obviously a spiritualist Christian parable of resuscitation, bringing new life and so on. The novel ends with baptizing. It’s clear Christian parable. The film is a model of how you can take a reactionary text, change some details here and there and you get a totally, a totally different story. I would say that it’s a realist film, but in what sense? Hegel in his esthetics says that a good portrayal looks more like the person who is portrayed than the person itself. A good portrayal is more you than you are yourself. And I think this is what the film does with our reality. The changes that the film introduces do not point toward alternate reality, they simply make reality more what it already is.Or, as the naked gaze put it:
through the use of Nativity and other Biblical iconography Cuarón performs a double inversion: sublating historical specificity in favor of quasi-ahistorical biblical iconography, but then taking that same iconography and reinvesting it with historically specific connotations from the recent past (thereby re-anchoring the film in contemporary political concerns inspired by not only the conflict in the Balkans, but also 9/11, the Iraq War, global immigration debates, etc.).
Friday, January 26, 2007
Children of Men (2006)
We saw Children of Men nearly three weeks ago, and I've attempted a couple of passes at writing about it, with little success. The short version is that it was the most visceral movie-going experience I've had in many years. I was emotionally affected by this film to an extent not at all typical for me. (In what follows, there may be some spoilers, if you're worried about that kind of thing, but not too many, I hope.)
Matt Zoller Seitz, in his mixed review at The House Next Door , wrote that the movie is "superbly crafted and compelling throughout, and filled with note-perfect performances", but that, finally, "it stops being about what it purports to be about and becomes a paean to its own proficiency". Needless to say, I disagree with the latter. But I bring up Seitz's review because he also describes the movie as "not so much an allegory as a depressive leftist projection". There is some truth to this. The movie, as any preview will tell you, takes place 20 years in the future, in a fascist Britain and a condition of world-wide (and unexplained) longterm infertility. Immigrants and political prisoners are rounded up and kept in camps or ghettoes. City bombings are so routine as to be virtually ignored. People go about their business while the world around them has already fallen to pieces. There are references to disasters: nuclear attack in Africa, "catastrophe" in New York, a flu pandemic. England itself looks like a constant warzone.
In various ways, then, the movie seems to embody many of the worst fears and nightmares we on the left (myself included) often have about "the way things are going". Economic instability, environmental degradation, political imbecility, current and projected resource shortages: all of these and much else contribute to a sense of hopelessness, that the problems the world faces are simply too huge, and the political will too lacking and elite power too overwhelming, to do much of anything.
The movie is often said to be about a "dystopian future", but my first instinct in describing the images is to refer to those we can see on the news or internet every day. In a comment to this Lenin's Tomb post (which is not about the movie but about "the death of liberalism" and is excellent; I highly recommend reading it), Richard Estes invoked the movie, writing that the post "highlights a curious aspect about the way the film has been reviewed. Critics consistently describe it as a dystopian vision of the future, while it is fairly evident that there are many people around the world who live in such conditions right now. [emphasis in original comment]" Indeed. Instead of merely being a "leftist projection"--except insofar as most of the privileged West largely does not currently face the conditions shown in the film--the film is about the problems of the world today. Images of prisoners with black hoods over their heads, of checkpoints, of references to "homeland security", make this point more explicit (too explicit for some).
So, the movie is political, but not in the sense that it attempts to articulate a coherent program for change.
A brief run-through of the story: Former activist Theo (Clive Owen), now largely apathetic, gets dragged into a plot by his ex-lover, Julian (Julianne Moore), who works with a group called the Fishes. They want him to procure travel papers for a young woman named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), who it turns out is pregnant. There hasn't been a live birth in more than 18 years, so this is huge. Julian's plan is to get Kee to a shadowy group called The Human Project, which may or may not exist. The Fishes as a group have their own plans. Intrigue and action ensues.
As I mentioned, the movie appears to nod in the direction of present-day left-wing concerns, but its images of left-wing activity are problematic. The Fishes are just as murderous as the government, just as bad as the fascists. They are depicted as nothing more than an extreme radical faction, willing to use Kee and her baby for whatever political aims they may have, which are never really articulated. We don't know what their aims are, and it doesn't appear that we're meant to care. The apolitical Theo--the former activist, now a successful professional--emerges, with the death of Julian, as the only character with a functioning moral compass and the strength to take any positive action. So the film appears to scoff at the notion of any kind of collective solution to anything. Also, Kee's guardian is a woman named Miriam (Pam Ferris), who is a figure of ridicule, spouting New Age mumbo jumbo about everything happening for a reason, mocked in a scene where she stumbles trying to do T'ai Chi. And yet, she does sacrifice herself for Kee and the baby.
Some critics have complained that no explanation is given for the inability to procreate. Others have taken issue with some of the logic of the film. If the population is dwindling, for example, what reason would the government have to lock up immigrants? Would there not then be an excess of resources? (See this thread at Cinemarati). I don't think questions like these ultimately matter (though they are interesting). The movie makes no attempt to answer the many questions that it raises. It offers the idea of hope, in a world that appears utterly hopeless (in which people believe, with reason, that there is literally no future), but this hope is tentative, potentially illusory. For all we know, the much-anticipated Human Project doesn't exist.
A minor closing observation: all the music in the movie is "oldies", from 50 years ago to today. We clearly hear radio stations refer to classics from 2003, for example. I wondered about the role of music in a society and nostalgia. The society of the movie has no future, so nostalgia for the music of the past (when the future existed) is strong. Who makes art when there is no future? Does the question make sense? In the movie, the character who Theo visits to obtain the travel papers collects famous art or artifacts (Picasso's Guernica is on one wall; the floating pig from Pink Floyd's Animals tour can be seen outside the window). He seems to be protecting it from destruction (if memory serves), as if society no longer had any use for it. All the pop music, anyway, is old. Obviously, even those songs that are new now would be old then, but the movie seems to treat all of the music as nostalgia. No youth, no pop music, it's all looking back.
Matt Zoller Seitz, in his mixed review at The House Next Door , wrote that the movie is "superbly crafted and compelling throughout, and filled with note-perfect performances", but that, finally, "it stops being about what it purports to be about and becomes a paean to its own proficiency". Needless to say, I disagree with the latter. But I bring up Seitz's review because he also describes the movie as "not so much an allegory as a depressive leftist projection". There is some truth to this. The movie, as any preview will tell you, takes place 20 years in the future, in a fascist Britain and a condition of world-wide (and unexplained) longterm infertility. Immigrants and political prisoners are rounded up and kept in camps or ghettoes. City bombings are so routine as to be virtually ignored. People go about their business while the world around them has already fallen to pieces. There are references to disasters: nuclear attack in Africa, "catastrophe" in New York, a flu pandemic. England itself looks like a constant warzone.
In various ways, then, the movie seems to embody many of the worst fears and nightmares we on the left (myself included) often have about "the way things are going". Economic instability, environmental degradation, political imbecility, current and projected resource shortages: all of these and much else contribute to a sense of hopelessness, that the problems the world faces are simply too huge, and the political will too lacking and elite power too overwhelming, to do much of anything.
The movie is often said to be about a "dystopian future", but my first instinct in describing the images is to refer to those we can see on the news or internet every day. In a comment to this Lenin's Tomb post (which is not about the movie but about "the death of liberalism" and is excellent; I highly recommend reading it), Richard Estes invoked the movie, writing that the post "highlights a curious aspect about the way the film has been reviewed. Critics consistently describe it as a dystopian vision of the future, while it is fairly evident that there are many people around the world who live in such conditions right now. [emphasis in original comment]" Indeed. Instead of merely being a "leftist projection"--except insofar as most of the privileged West largely does not currently face the conditions shown in the film--the film is about the problems of the world today. Images of prisoners with black hoods over their heads, of checkpoints, of references to "homeland security", make this point more explicit (too explicit for some).
So, the movie is political, but not in the sense that it attempts to articulate a coherent program for change.
A brief run-through of the story: Former activist Theo (Clive Owen), now largely apathetic, gets dragged into a plot by his ex-lover, Julian (Julianne Moore), who works with a group called the Fishes. They want him to procure travel papers for a young woman named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), who it turns out is pregnant. There hasn't been a live birth in more than 18 years, so this is huge. Julian's plan is to get Kee to a shadowy group called The Human Project, which may or may not exist. The Fishes as a group have their own plans. Intrigue and action ensues.
As I mentioned, the movie appears to nod in the direction of present-day left-wing concerns, but its images of left-wing activity are problematic. The Fishes are just as murderous as the government, just as bad as the fascists. They are depicted as nothing more than an extreme radical faction, willing to use Kee and her baby for whatever political aims they may have, which are never really articulated. We don't know what their aims are, and it doesn't appear that we're meant to care. The apolitical Theo--the former activist, now a successful professional--emerges, with the death of Julian, as the only character with a functioning moral compass and the strength to take any positive action. So the film appears to scoff at the notion of any kind of collective solution to anything. Also, Kee's guardian is a woman named Miriam (Pam Ferris), who is a figure of ridicule, spouting New Age mumbo jumbo about everything happening for a reason, mocked in a scene where she stumbles trying to do T'ai Chi. And yet, she does sacrifice herself for Kee and the baby.
Some critics have complained that no explanation is given for the inability to procreate. Others have taken issue with some of the logic of the film. If the population is dwindling, for example, what reason would the government have to lock up immigrants? Would there not then be an excess of resources? (See this thread at Cinemarati). I don't think questions like these ultimately matter (though they are interesting). The movie makes no attempt to answer the many questions that it raises. It offers the idea of hope, in a world that appears utterly hopeless (in which people believe, with reason, that there is literally no future), but this hope is tentative, potentially illusory. For all we know, the much-anticipated Human Project doesn't exist.
A minor closing observation: all the music in the movie is "oldies", from 50 years ago to today. We clearly hear radio stations refer to classics from 2003, for example. I wondered about the role of music in a society and nostalgia. The society of the movie has no future, so nostalgia for the music of the past (when the future existed) is strong. Who makes art when there is no future? Does the question make sense? In the movie, the character who Theo visits to obtain the travel papers collects famous art or artifacts (Picasso's Guernica is on one wall; the floating pig from Pink Floyd's Animals tour can be seen outside the window). He seems to be protecting it from destruction (if memory serves), as if society no longer had any use for it. All the pop music, anyway, is old. Obviously, even those songs that are new now would be old then, but the movie seems to treat all of the music as nostalgia. No youth, no pop music, it's all looking back.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Unfilmable
Via this discussion at Jeff VanderMeer's blog, I came across this entertaining list of "unfilmable novels". The list includes One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ulysses, Beckett, Proust, Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, etc. There are well over a hundred comments, with readers chiming in with their own pet nomination for unfilmable novel. I've had discussions like this before, and I always feel like people are talking about different things when they say a book "can't be made into a movie". Often people are simply worried that their favorite novel will be sullied by some hack screenwriter's attempt to force it into 90 minutes or two hours. Or they think that it's just too much, they could never "get it right". Something like The Lord of the Rings was thought unfilmable, I suppose, because of the sheer scale, along with the problem of special effects. In the event, of course, those obstacles were overcome, and yet, to hear some Rings enthusiasts (e.g., my brother, who has not only read the trilogy countless times, but has read The Silmarillion at least four times, which is just wrong) tell it, the movies succeeded on the level of spectacle, but missed the point--the essential theme--of the books (by, for example, leaving out the scouring of the Shire). Perhaps. But that's another thing readers worry about, the undermining of theme to please some imagined desires of a mass audience. Obviously, there's no rule that says this must necessarily happen, so it's not really relevant to the question of "unfilmability".
What, then, are we talking about when we say a book is "unfilmable"? I think that visual imagery (special effects) does not qualify; that's only a question of filmmakers' (and effects makers) imagination and ingenuity (which is not to say that any given reader would approve of a given filmmaker's interpretation). Similarly hugeness of scale: a novel's length might make it unlikely to be filmed, but that's not the same thing as "unfilmable". I think what we mean, in principle, by "unfilmable" is that we think that a film version would not be able to be the same as the book, would be unable to provide the same aesthetic experience, or even approximate the experience of the book. In some respects, I think readers need to get over this: movies are not the same as books. It seems silly to write it, but somehow necessary. Movies should be treated as independent of their source material.
Well, ok, we approach the movie as its own thing. Great. But I think the question of the filmability of certain written works is still of interest.
Jan at Jahsonic has attempted to define the characteristics of a novel that might make it unfilmable. He came up with two: plotlessness and philosophical introspection. And in an earlier post "on the nature of the 20th century reading experience", he described a kind of reading experience in which the book "is". In both posts he offers Martin Amis' Time's Arrow as a perfect example of this. It's an interesting selection. Certainly reading Time's Arrow (in which the story is told in reverse order) can be a disorienting experience. I recall having to adjust myself to the normal flow of the day after having been immersed in the book. And of course Amis has a distinctive prose style. But the story, surely a movie could be made of the story, including its reverse order? In the wake of Christopher Nolan's Memento? It seems to me that it could be, but that's not to say that the experience of reading the novel would be replicated. It would be a different experience, if possibly still disorienting. Here, of course, we end up reducing novels to their content--where's the story underneath all this literary gunk, anyway?
Looking at it this way, I think there are novels that can't be reduced so simply to their content (even so, I object to the reduction elsewhere), which are therefore effectively unfilmable. As mentioned above, Jan suggests plotlessness and philosophical introspection. Neither of these strike me as anathema to film.
In the comment thread to one of the Jahsonic posts, Harry Tuttle mentions Georges Perec’s La Disparition (which famously was written without the letter 'e'). And here I think we get to the crux of the problem. Experimental fiction. Formally inventive fiction. I'm thinking of the recent work of David Markson (what would be the point of a movie of This Is Not A Novel?). Or Gilbert Sorrentino. Or, imagine the "stories" in Stanley Elkin's novels without his wondrously inventive prose. Unthinkable. These narratives must be read. I think these books and many others highlight what is finally unfilmable about even more conventional novels. If too often novels are reduced to what they're "about", formally experimental novels draw our attention to how they are made, to how they achieve their effects, which might remind us to think more about how the others are made. I think that any book or story or whatever can be the source material for a film, but that which is literary about a novel--that which makes it a novel--cannot be transmitted to film, because reading is the whole point.
In the course of writing this post, I noticed that Steve at This Space has touched on this today, too. He says, in response to Jahsonic's question, What makes a novel unfilmable?:
What, then, are we talking about when we say a book is "unfilmable"? I think that visual imagery (special effects) does not qualify; that's only a question of filmmakers' (and effects makers) imagination and ingenuity (which is not to say that any given reader would approve of a given filmmaker's interpretation). Similarly hugeness of scale: a novel's length might make it unlikely to be filmed, but that's not the same thing as "unfilmable". I think what we mean, in principle, by "unfilmable" is that we think that a film version would not be able to be the same as the book, would be unable to provide the same aesthetic experience, or even approximate the experience of the book. In some respects, I think readers need to get over this: movies are not the same as books. It seems silly to write it, but somehow necessary. Movies should be treated as independent of their source material.
Well, ok, we approach the movie as its own thing. Great. But I think the question of the filmability of certain written works is still of interest.
Jan at Jahsonic has attempted to define the characteristics of a novel that might make it unfilmable. He came up with two: plotlessness and philosophical introspection. And in an earlier post "on the nature of the 20th century reading experience", he described a kind of reading experience in which the book "is
Looking at it this way, I think there are novels that can't be reduced so simply to their content (even so, I object to the reduction elsewhere), which are therefore effectively unfilmable. As mentioned above, Jan suggests plotlessness and philosophical introspection. Neither of these strike me as anathema to film.
In the comment thread to one of the Jahsonic posts, Harry Tuttle mentions Georges Perec’s La Disparition (which famously was written without the letter 'e'). And here I think we get to the crux of the problem. Experimental fiction. Formally inventive fiction. I'm thinking of the recent work of David Markson (what would be the point of a movie of This Is Not A Novel?). Or Gilbert Sorrentino. Or, imagine the "stories" in Stanley Elkin's novels without his wondrously inventive prose. Unthinkable. These narratives must be read. I think these books and many others highlight what is finally unfilmable about even more conventional novels. If too often novels are reduced to what they're "about", formally experimental novels draw our attention to how they are made, to how they achieve their effects, which might remind us to think more about how the others are made. I think that any book or story or whatever can be the source material for a film, but that which is literary about a novel--that which makes it a novel--cannot be transmitted to film, because reading is the whole point.
In the course of writing this post, I noticed that Steve at This Space has touched on this today, too. He says, in response to Jahsonic's question, What makes a novel unfilmable?:
"Being a novel" would be my first suggestion. A novel should be a novel because it cannot be anything else. The hype generated by an adaptation as an adaptation indicates a lack of faith in its original form, most obviously a lack in the original's cultural authority, but also the residual lack inherent to all art. A question borne on this lack is the one that excites me, drives my entire interest in writing: what cannot be written?I like that: "a novel should be a novel because it cannot be anything else". Of course, the rest of this paragraph suggests much else to think about, many other potential posts (the kinds of writing we often find at Steve's blog). But, not wanting to be any more long-winded here than I already am, I'll end on this note.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
The other night, we saw the Romanian movie The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which was directed by Cristi Puiu and won the Un Certain Regard jury prize at Cannes. My wife will report that when we walked out of the theater, I said that I hated it. And it's true: I did say that. But that is not the whole story. In fact, I backed off of that more or less immediately. The reality is that I was so tired when the film began that I strongly wished that we hadn't bought tickets, that I could go home and immediately go to sleep, that it wasn't two-and-a-half hours long, that it wasn't the last night the film would be shown. Once it got going, I quickly realized that this was a movie that required my attention and I was sure that I did not have the requisite attention to give it. I repeatedly closed my eyes, waiting till I heard voices, when I would open them and read the subtitles. An excellent way to approach a visual art, I find. I was exhausted, and the movie felt brutally depressing and claustrophobic, and I wanted to go home. But then something strange happened. With about 15-30 minutes remaining, I realized that I had been watching, relatively alertly, for some time, without closing my eyes, without wanting to slip off into a coma. I had been sucked into the film quite in spite of myself.
In the beginning of the movie, Lazarescu Dante Remus calls an ambulance because he has been suffering from headaches and vomiting, which may or may not be caused by an old ulcer or his excessive drinking. Naturally, the ambulance takes forever to come, and that's just the beginning of the bureaucratic nightmares he must endure on the way to his probable death. He is taken to hospital after hospital. One of the movie's strengths is that, while he and his attending paramedic encounter indifferent or hostile doctors wherever they go, who are actors definitely caught up in a bureaucratic hell and as a result are often quite indifferent to his fate, each hospital and each doctor or nurse is distinctively realized. As tired as I was, I have no trouble bringing to mind several clearly delineated characters.
Lazarescu's full name should no doubt have been a tip off that he was traveling into something like circles of hell, but the brutal realism of the film (not to again mention my exhaustion) somehow enabled me to not attend to such details until afterward. Identifying his predicament as Kafkaesque was trivial enough. When my wife and I discussed the movie we focused on the realism, of course, but for her it also exemplified existentialist ideas: there was no transcendent meaning, no resolution. This is what life is, the film seems to be telling us, and any human connections (and there were some real connections--and disconnections--in the movie) are made by the characters, not determined by any externality. There is the bureaucracy, yes, and there are rules to be followed, but the doctors and nurses pretend to have no control over what they do; they clearly pick and choose which rules to enforce, and how strongly to enforce them, at any given time, and they repeatedly hassle Lazarescu for choosing to drink. I felt that there were a few lines of dialogue here and there that were hamfisted in their attempt to drive home the point about the bureacracy and the conditions of life in Romania, but as a whole the movie managed to avoid heavy-handedness: everyone seemed so natural and unaffected, it was much like watching a transparent documentary. Indeed, it occurs to me that those lines were often undermined by the reality of the scenes in question.
In the end, a good film. I recommend it, but with some caveats. Avoid sleepiness, and expect to encounter some pathetic characters and a painfully realistic, not to say depressing, story. I, for one, am glad that I did not force us to leave the theater and go home.
For more on The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, see this Cinema Scope article, of which the following is a sample:
In the beginning of the movie, Lazarescu Dante Remus calls an ambulance because he has been suffering from headaches and vomiting, which may or may not be caused by an old ulcer or his excessive drinking. Naturally, the ambulance takes forever to come, and that's just the beginning of the bureaucratic nightmares he must endure on the way to his probable death. He is taken to hospital after hospital. One of the movie's strengths is that, while he and his attending paramedic encounter indifferent or hostile doctors wherever they go, who are actors definitely caught up in a bureaucratic hell and as a result are often quite indifferent to his fate, each hospital and each doctor or nurse is distinctively realized. As tired as I was, I have no trouble bringing to mind several clearly delineated characters.
Lazarescu's full name should no doubt have been a tip off that he was traveling into something like circles of hell, but the brutal realism of the film (not to again mention my exhaustion) somehow enabled me to not attend to such details until afterward. Identifying his predicament as Kafkaesque was trivial enough. When my wife and I discussed the movie we focused on the realism, of course, but for her it also exemplified existentialist ideas: there was no transcendent meaning, no resolution. This is what life is, the film seems to be telling us, and any human connections (and there were some real connections--and disconnections--in the movie) are made by the characters, not determined by any externality. There is the bureaucracy, yes, and there are rules to be followed, but the doctors and nurses pretend to have no control over what they do; they clearly pick and choose which rules to enforce, and how strongly to enforce them, at any given time, and they repeatedly hassle Lazarescu for choosing to drink. I felt that there were a few lines of dialogue here and there that were hamfisted in their attempt to drive home the point about the bureacracy and the conditions of life in Romania, but as a whole the movie managed to avoid heavy-handedness: everyone seemed so natural and unaffected, it was much like watching a transparent documentary. Indeed, it occurs to me that those lines were often undermined by the reality of the scenes in question.
In the end, a good film. I recommend it, but with some caveats. Avoid sleepiness, and expect to encounter some pathetic characters and a painfully realistic, not to say depressing, story. I, for one, am glad that I did not force us to leave the theater and go home.
For more on The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, see this Cinema Scope article, of which the following is a sample:
Lazarescu is only 63, but he is treated as a useless piece of junk. Everything and everyone conspires against him: his bad mood, his drinking habits, the quality of the emergency services, aggravated that night by a horrific bus accident that led to hundreds of victims. But, above all, Mr. Lazarescu’s enemy is authoritarianism, so embodied in Romanian society (and elsewhere), and so easy to adopt as a maxim by the members of the medical profession, leading to the contempt and mistreatment of patients. But the film functions along the lines of a thriller, not only because of the mysteries of medical diagnosis and its procedures based on hints and clues, but also because it’s obstructed by laziness and arrogance. Nobody knows what’s wrong with Mr. Lazarescu, but he slowly and steadily deteriorates until he reaches a state where he can no longer communicate. Ironically enough, everybody puts forward his or her guess before the truth is established, though by that time, maybe it’s no longer important. Puiu’s treatment of the subject is so intelligent that he even builds a suspense that is very difficult to appreciate, although it’s essential for the plot.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Hamming it Up
I was amused to read Ellis Sharp's recent post on the movie The Lion in Winter . He concludes that it's "truly dreadful". I unabashedly love this movie. When I first saw it many years ago, I made some snotty remarks about how it was ridiculous, "people today" want more historical accuracy from their movies (seriously), etc. But then I got sucked in and enjoyed the hell out of it. And yet everything Sharp says about is surely right. Virtually nothing happens in it, there is no dramatic development or payoff, it's anachronistic, "[i]t’s just an excuse for two Hollywood megastars to ham it up together." Yes. But that's just what I love about it. Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn are just hamming it up, and it's great. I look elsewhere for more serious art.
Friday, March 10, 2006
DFW, 3 Women, and the question of how to live...
What follows has been heavily revised from its original form (when I was writing to myself only) for this post. I want to emphasize upfront that I do not look for messages in art, nor do I think that art must serve some other, "higher" purpose in order to be worthwhile. I do not believe that art must teach or, in fact, do any given thing. Nevertheless, I believe that art cannot help but impact how we see and experience the world, that, indeed, this is one of its many virtues. But I don't think this is its primary function. In this post I am discussing two artistic works and, besides also admiring their art to the extent that I can, trying to discuss how they have made me think about the world--some of which, I think inevitably, leads me to touch on "political" areas (however vaguely).
Back in August 2004 I read the first story in David Foster Wallace's then-new story collection, Oblivion--"Mr. Squishy". The story is long-ish (67 pages) and dense, written substantially in marketing-speak. Navigating the sometimes arcane, sometimes arduous sentences is, for me, part of the fun. Terry Schmidt is facilitating an advertising focus group and most of the story seems to be, in one form or another, from his perspective, his interior view of or take on things. There is some explication of his personal life, as well as an at first seemingly unconnected bit about a man scaling the outside of the building the focus group is located in. I enjoyed the story, and I think it serves as a good an example as any of what Wallace is doing, in general, in his fiction.
At The Reading Experience, Dan Green and the Rake presented "dueling" reviews of the book. It was an interesting idea, first of all, to read, back-to-back, two different takes on the same stories, all the more so since they were by two of my favorite bloggers. Rake began by saying he is wary of DFW's short fiction, that he thought Brief Interviews With Hideous Men an "almost unmitigated disaster". I was more than a little surprised by this assessment; I happened to enjoy that collection very much. In fact, I thought much of it to be among the best things by DFW I'd read to that point. I recall being impressed with how thoroughly he occupied the "language-world" of the characters in his stories. What's more, I felt the result of him doing this so effectively, was that the stories often carried, if subtly, great emotional impact--a charge, it would seem, not often leveled at him. Indeed, in his review, and elsewhere, Rake essentially holds that DFW falls short in this very area, in achieving a human response in his fiction, in failing to ask "what do we do?" or "how do we live?"
Dan Green's review was more interesting to me, if only, admittedly, because it seemed to gibe with my own already existing take on DFW. But that take had been thitherto unarticulated, so, I think, instead it was the pleasure of recognition that interested me. Yes, I thought, that sounds right. Early on he says this:
At this point, I still have not completed the collection, with the final story still left to read. When I get around to reading it, I plan to re-visit the rest of the collection. So far, my overall assessment is positive--there is enough good stuff in this collection to recommend it. Now, however, I want to go back to revisit the questions of "how do we live?" or "what are we to do?" that Rake says Wallace often fails to address, thus preventing his fiction from being, he feels, more emotionally resonant. I happen to disagree with the assessment, but I don't intend to spend much time in this post discussing why I do. Instead, these questions stick with me sort of metaphysically. Strongly related to these questions in my mind is a movie I watched around the same time--Robert Altman's 3 Women. The movie really focuses on two women (the third sort of hovers throughout, weirdly), Millie (played by Shelley Duvall) and Pinky (Sissy Spacek). It begins at an old-age spa, where Millie works as a therapist, and Pinky is just beginning. Millie is constantly talking, seemingly oblivious to the fact that no one is the least bit interested in anything she has to say. She talks about recipes, her evenings, her supposed dates with different men (who in reality are not interested in her), her apartment, stuff. No one cares; any response she gets is entirely perfunctory. Pinky is new to the state (California, the desert), apparently completely naive about how things are. She latches onto Millie, obviously aping how Millie does things, trying on her clothes, reading her diary, trying to be more like her--actually at one point calling her "the most perfect person in the world". She is seemingly oblivious, too, to the fact that Millie is not popular, arguably not someone to be emulated, certainly not if one wants to be accepted.
Plot-wise, things take a turn midway through, when Pinky is confronted by something Millie is doing that she doesn't like, and she tries to kill herself. When she emerges from her subsequent coma, she has adopted the persona of Millie's ideal image of herself. Indeed, Pinky actually becomes popular with the guys who had been ignoring Millie. Etc. This part of the movie is interesting but ultimately not the part leading me discuss it. It is the first part of the film that interests me here. It is palpably clear that Millie and Pinky are essentially lonely people. They don't get it. There are some scenes that are just plain sad, from a cluelessness perspective, scenes of such social embarrassment, one would think, that it startles one to observe the characters not self-destructing. I'm trying to get at the idea of their loneliness, their isolation. I listened to some of the commentary track by Altman himself after the movie was over. I didn't watch the whole thing again, because it was late, though it was one of the more interesting commentary tracks I've listened to. In any event, Altman talks about Millie and Pinky being "lost souls", people who do not know how to live in the world. Millie is completely by herself, no one has told her how to survive in the world, and she has interpreted the outside world's messages in such a way as to fashion her own version of what things are like. She takes advertising at face value, she decorates her apartment according to catalogs and Better Homes & Gardens-type magazines, she clips recipes (she surely has none of her own, nothing she has learned as part of any heritage). She wears what she wears because that is her take on what fashion has to offer someone like her. But she has no friends, no family. Pinky is similarly adrift. No one has shown her how to live, either, so she gloms onto Millie. When Pinky has her accident, Millie manages to find Pinky's parents, who come in from Texas. Pinky, having adopted the "ideal Millie" persona, does not recognize them as her parents, but more importantly, here, her parents are quite old indeed, and clearly do not have any inkling of how to deal with Pinky. It is perhaps apparent that they have been thoroughly unable to provide Pinky with any useful examples on how to be, how to live, how to make her way in the world.
Ok, so what? What is the upshot? What am I getting at? Well, again, I tend to bristle at attempts by people to find messages in art. So, I'm not trying to find any messages here. Nevertheless, I think the question "how do we live?" is central, not to the film itself, but to life, certainly, and art can and does allow us to illuminate such areas of discussion. While watching the film and while thinking about it afterward, I imagined how easy it would be to ridicule them, the characters, as "stupid" or "losers" or something similar.
But. But what? I am increasingly thinking, if admittedly only in the abstract (how does this really reflect itself in how I conduct myself during my day?), that "ordinary" people need to be given a break. People are only trying to live in the best way they know how. And it is difficult. And I think people are fundamentally lost. It's easy to look at someone, such as the characters in the movie, who appears hopeless and criticize their way of life, their "choices", as irrational, as "stupid". Worse, to attack them, to mock them for their awkwardness, their attempts to fit in. (This is by no means to excuse people from actual responsibility. But, for example, much of the rhetorical hand-wringing about the last election reeked of the worst sort of liberal self-righteousness, much of which consisted of rants directed at those idiots who voted for Bush, without attempting to actually understand why they might do such a thing, or anything. Thomas Frank at least makes an attempt.) I think people are grasping at things, at ways to live, at some way to survive, to make a mark, to not be finally alone. Altman makes an interesting aside, in his commentary, about individuality. He posits that, in fact, contrary to the popular estimation of everyone being so different from each other (like a snowflake, etc) that, instead, people are so alike, in the end, to not being that far off from being the same person. So as a result, to differentiate ourselves somehow, we exaggerate what differences we do have. At the same time, he makes a seemingly contradictory comment about how no one finally knows what it is like inside your own head, we are unique, no one sees things in quite the way we do, etc. I guess these are, together, just different ways of expressing the human paradox (?). We are genetically virtually identical (indeed, there are twins in the movie, and Altman discusses them in this vein--that, though everything genetic about them is identical, they nevertheless are uniquely themselves), but our minds are undiscovered countries, so to speak, the attempts of psychology (evolutionary and otherwise) to provide explanations notwithstanding.
Anyway, again, I think people are lost, many vastly more so than others. I was discussing this with my brother, and I was worried that the conversation might veer off into religion (I am leftist, atheist; he is conservative, Christian--although, as such, he does not fit a number of the stereotypes). Because I essentially believe that the modern world, as currently situated, results in this widespread existential lostness (yes, I am going to use that as a word), he might have been justified in arguing that, well, we have gotten away from God, from religion, and that is why people are lost. That would not have been my point, obviously, though, in a sense, he'd not have been wrong: religion did (does) provide structure and guidance for people. That is not to be denied. And yet, I am not interested in a return to the past in that way. So, what, then? It is admittedly not entirely clear to me, but I am increasingly certain that the world of capitalism that we find ourselves in now is, in fact, antithetical to human nature--in stark contrast to what is held to be common sense by many people--though I am loath to attempt to actually define, definitively, anything so mysterious as "human nature". In fact, though, since we are inside the beast, it is highly difficult to imagine the beast as not being there. In any event, without going into massive detail here (fodder, perhaps, for several later posts), people are lost because the structure of life (essentially modern economic life) makes no sense, and they know it on some level, but they also cannot imagine any other structure, and, indeed, are conditioned ("educated") to believe that certain others are untenable, even "evil", so that, finally, the lostness is compounded because they see no way out. They are trapped in their own lostness.
I've gone somewhat far afield, but now I am going to return to Wallace and quote a relevant, I think, portion from "Mr. Squishy":
Back in August 2004 I read the first story in David Foster Wallace's then-new story collection, Oblivion--"Mr. Squishy". The story is long-ish (67 pages) and dense, written substantially in marketing-speak. Navigating the sometimes arcane, sometimes arduous sentences is, for me, part of the fun. Terry Schmidt is facilitating an advertising focus group and most of the story seems to be, in one form or another, from his perspective, his interior view of or take on things. There is some explication of his personal life, as well as an at first seemingly unconnected bit about a man scaling the outside of the building the focus group is located in. I enjoyed the story, and I think it serves as a good an example as any of what Wallace is doing, in general, in his fiction.
At The Reading Experience, Dan Green and the Rake presented "dueling" reviews of the book. It was an interesting idea, first of all, to read, back-to-back, two different takes on the same stories, all the more so since they were by two of my favorite bloggers. Rake began by saying he is wary of DFW's short fiction, that he thought Brief Interviews With Hideous Men an "almost unmitigated disaster". I was more than a little surprised by this assessment; I happened to enjoy that collection very much. In fact, I thought much of it to be among the best things by DFW I'd read to that point. I recall being impressed with how thoroughly he occupied the "language-world" of the characters in his stories. What's more, I felt the result of him doing this so effectively, was that the stories often carried, if subtly, great emotional impact--a charge, it would seem, not often leveled at him. Indeed, in his review, and elsewhere, Rake essentially holds that DFW falls short in this very area, in achieving a human response in his fiction, in failing to ask "what do we do?" or "how do we live?"
Dan Green's review was more interesting to me, if only, admittedly, because it seemed to gibe with my own already existing take on DFW. But that take had been thitherto unarticulated, so, I think, instead it was the pleasure of recognition that interested me. Yes, I thought, that sounds right. Early on he says this:
In my view, Wallace's real subject is language, but not just language as the medium in which writers create stories, not just style, and not exactly the "failures of language," ...although ultimately language can only fail to communicate fully or to cohere into an entirely satisfactory aesthetic rendering of the world. What Wallace's stories try to do is to inhabit the consciousness of the characters they feature, but this can only be done by inhabiting the language-world of these characters, a world itself evoked by the very language they habitually use in confronting it and only through which can they perceive it to be comprehensible at all. His stories are composed of the stream of words by which his characters construct a manageable account of the reality they negotiate--although in most cases these characters do not literally speak in their own voice, tell their own stories.I think this paragraph describes very well what it indeed appears Wallace is doing in his fiction, and it is this that I've responded to in his work, when I've responded to it. I've already stolen, above, Green's phrase "language-world". Certainly when reading Brief Interviews I was aware of this, even if I did not articulate it as such, how DFW was so thoroughly inhabiting the language-world of, for example, professional therapy, or the double-speak or interior rationalizations of relationships. Even in Infinite Jest, where, I have to admit, the "story" itself kind of lost me along the way, I was very much taken by the way in which he represented the language of the different characters and their respective milieus.
At this point, I still have not completed the collection, with the final story still left to read. When I get around to reading it, I plan to re-visit the rest of the collection. So far, my overall assessment is positive--there is enough good stuff in this collection to recommend it. Now, however, I want to go back to revisit the questions of "how do we live?" or "what are we to do?" that Rake says Wallace often fails to address, thus preventing his fiction from being, he feels, more emotionally resonant. I happen to disagree with the assessment, but I don't intend to spend much time in this post discussing why I do. Instead, these questions stick with me sort of metaphysically. Strongly related to these questions in my mind is a movie I watched around the same time--Robert Altman's 3 Women. The movie really focuses on two women (the third sort of hovers throughout, weirdly), Millie (played by Shelley Duvall) and Pinky (Sissy Spacek). It begins at an old-age spa, where Millie works as a therapist, and Pinky is just beginning. Millie is constantly talking, seemingly oblivious to the fact that no one is the least bit interested in anything she has to say. She talks about recipes, her evenings, her supposed dates with different men (who in reality are not interested in her), her apartment, stuff. No one cares; any response she gets is entirely perfunctory. Pinky is new to the state (California, the desert), apparently completely naive about how things are. She latches onto Millie, obviously aping how Millie does things, trying on her clothes, reading her diary, trying to be more like her--actually at one point calling her "the most perfect person in the world". She is seemingly oblivious, too, to the fact that Millie is not popular, arguably not someone to be emulated, certainly not if one wants to be accepted.
Plot-wise, things take a turn midway through, when Pinky is confronted by something Millie is doing that she doesn't like, and she tries to kill herself. When she emerges from her subsequent coma, she has adopted the persona of Millie's ideal image of herself. Indeed, Pinky actually becomes popular with the guys who had been ignoring Millie. Etc. This part of the movie is interesting but ultimately not the part leading me discuss it. It is the first part of the film that interests me here. It is palpably clear that Millie and Pinky are essentially lonely people. They don't get it. There are some scenes that are just plain sad, from a cluelessness perspective, scenes of such social embarrassment, one would think, that it startles one to observe the characters not self-destructing. I'm trying to get at the idea of their loneliness, their isolation. I listened to some of the commentary track by Altman himself after the movie was over. I didn't watch the whole thing again, because it was late, though it was one of the more interesting commentary tracks I've listened to. In any event, Altman talks about Millie and Pinky being "lost souls", people who do not know how to live in the world. Millie is completely by herself, no one has told her how to survive in the world, and she has interpreted the outside world's messages in such a way as to fashion her own version of what things are like. She takes advertising at face value, she decorates her apartment according to catalogs and Better Homes & Gardens-type magazines, she clips recipes (she surely has none of her own, nothing she has learned as part of any heritage). She wears what she wears because that is her take on what fashion has to offer someone like her. But she has no friends, no family. Pinky is similarly adrift. No one has shown her how to live, either, so she gloms onto Millie. When Pinky has her accident, Millie manages to find Pinky's parents, who come in from Texas. Pinky, having adopted the "ideal Millie" persona, does not recognize them as her parents, but more importantly, here, her parents are quite old indeed, and clearly do not have any inkling of how to deal with Pinky. It is perhaps apparent that they have been thoroughly unable to provide Pinky with any useful examples on how to be, how to live, how to make her way in the world.
Ok, so what? What is the upshot? What am I getting at? Well, again, I tend to bristle at attempts by people to find messages in art. So, I'm not trying to find any messages here. Nevertheless, I think the question "how do we live?" is central, not to the film itself, but to life, certainly, and art can and does allow us to illuminate such areas of discussion. While watching the film and while thinking about it afterward, I imagined how easy it would be to ridicule them, the characters, as "stupid" or "losers" or something similar.
But. But what? I am increasingly thinking, if admittedly only in the abstract (how does this really reflect itself in how I conduct myself during my day?), that "ordinary" people need to be given a break. People are only trying to live in the best way they know how. And it is difficult. And I think people are fundamentally lost. It's easy to look at someone, such as the characters in the movie, who appears hopeless and criticize their way of life, their "choices", as irrational, as "stupid". Worse, to attack them, to mock them for their awkwardness, their attempts to fit in. (This is by no means to excuse people from actual responsibility. But, for example, much of the rhetorical hand-wringing about the last election reeked of the worst sort of liberal self-righteousness, much of which consisted of rants directed at those idiots who voted for Bush, without attempting to actually understand why they might do such a thing, or anything. Thomas Frank at least makes an attempt.) I think people are grasping at things, at ways to live, at some way to survive, to make a mark, to not be finally alone. Altman makes an interesting aside, in his commentary, about individuality. He posits that, in fact, contrary to the popular estimation of everyone being so different from each other (like a snowflake, etc) that, instead, people are so alike, in the end, to not being that far off from being the same person. So as a result, to differentiate ourselves somehow, we exaggerate what differences we do have. At the same time, he makes a seemingly contradictory comment about how no one finally knows what it is like inside your own head, we are unique, no one sees things in quite the way we do, etc. I guess these are, together, just different ways of expressing the human paradox (?). We are genetically virtually identical (indeed, there are twins in the movie, and Altman discusses them in this vein--that, though everything genetic about them is identical, they nevertheless are uniquely themselves), but our minds are undiscovered countries, so to speak, the attempts of psychology (evolutionary and otherwise) to provide explanations notwithstanding.
Anyway, again, I think people are lost, many vastly more so than others. I was discussing this with my brother, and I was worried that the conversation might veer off into religion (I am leftist, atheist; he is conservative, Christian--although, as such, he does not fit a number of the stereotypes). Because I essentially believe that the modern world, as currently situated, results in this widespread existential lostness (yes, I am going to use that as a word), he might have been justified in arguing that, well, we have gotten away from God, from religion, and that is why people are lost. That would not have been my point, obviously, though, in a sense, he'd not have been wrong: religion did (does) provide structure and guidance for people. That is not to be denied. And yet, I am not interested in a return to the past in that way. So, what, then? It is admittedly not entirely clear to me, but I am increasingly certain that the world of capitalism that we find ourselves in now is, in fact, antithetical to human nature--in stark contrast to what is held to be common sense by many people--though I am loath to attempt to actually define, definitively, anything so mysterious as "human nature". In fact, though, since we are inside the beast, it is highly difficult to imagine the beast as not being there. In any event, without going into massive detail here (fodder, perhaps, for several later posts), people are lost because the structure of life (essentially modern economic life) makes no sense, and they know it on some level, but they also cannot imagine any other structure, and, indeed, are conditioned ("educated") to believe that certain others are untenable, even "evil", so that, finally, the lostness is compounded because they see no way out. They are trapped in their own lostness.
I've gone somewhat far afield, but now I am going to return to Wallace and quote a relevant, I think, portion from "Mr. Squishy":
...at least half the room's men listening with what's called half an ear while pursuing their own private lines of thought, and Schmidt had a quick vision of them all in the conference room as like icebergs and/or floes, only the sharp caps showing, unknown and –knowable to one another, and he imagined that it was probably only in marriage (and a good marriage, not the decorous dance of loneliness he'd watched his mother and father do for seventeen years but rather true conjugal intimacy) that partners allowed each other to see below the berg's cap's public mask and consented to be truly known, maybe even to the extent of not only letting the partner see the repulsive nest of moles under their left arm or the way after any sort of cold or viral infection the toenails on both feet turned a weird deep yellow for several weeks but even perhaps every once in a while sobbing in each other's arms late at night and pouring out the most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and terrible and thoroughgoing smallness within a grinding professional machine you can't believe you once had the temerity to think you could help change or make a difference or ever be more than a tiny faceless cog in, the shame of being so hungry to make some sort of real impact... Or maybe that even the mere possibility of expressing any of this childish heartbreak to someone else seemed impossible except in the context of true marriage, meaning not just a ceremony and financial merger but a true communion of souls, and Schmidt now lately felt he was coming to understand why the Church all through his childhood catechism and pre-Con referred to it as the Holy Sacrament of Marriage, for it seemed every bit as miraculous and transrational and remote from the possibilities of actual lived life as the crucifixion and resurrection and transubstantiation did, which is to say it appeared not as a goal to expect ever to really reach or achieve but as a kind of navigational star, as in the sky, something high and untouchable and miraculously beautiful in the sort of distant way that reminded you always of how ordinary and unbeautiful and incapable of miracles you your own self were, which was another reason why Schmidt had stopped looking at the sky or going out at night or even usually ever opening the lightproof curtains of his condominium's picture window when he got home at night and instead sat with his satellite TV's channel-changer in his left hand switching rapidly from channel to channel to channel out of fear that something better was going to come on suddenly on another of the cable provider's 220 regular and premium channels and that he was about to miss it, spending three nightly hours this way before it was time to stare with drumming heart at the telephone that wholly unbeknownst to her had Darlene Lilley's home number on Speed Dial so that it would take only one moment of the courage to risk looking prurient or creepy to use just one finger to push just one gray button to invite her for one cocktail or even just a soft drink over which he could take off his public mask and open his heart to her before quailing and deferring the call one more night and waddling into the bathroom and/or then the cream-and-tan bedroom to lay out the next day's crisp shirt and tie and say his nightly dekate and then masturbate himself to sleep again once more.
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