Tag: Region: America

  • The Black Dahlia (2006)

    The Black Dahlia (2006)

    Dir. by Brian De Palma

    De Palma’s introduction of “The Black Dahlia” (the character, not the film) is a show-stopper. As I recall, the camera begins more or less at eye level, following police officers Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) as they race toward a rowhouse in pursuit of criminals. Rather than going into the building, though, the camera instead floats up and over it, pausing for only a few seconds as it spots the Dahlia off in the far distance. There she is: the nude, disemboweled, disfigured body; the image that, if you’ve ever seen it in oft-duplicated black and white, is likely seared into your memory. (Here’s the image I first saw in a bookstore copy of Hollywood Babylon when I was way too young. Scroll down. Warning: graphic content.)

    A woman spots the Dahlia’s remains, screams, and then runs into traffic, crying for help. De Palma at first appears to be following her. “Twenty minutes into a film called The Black Dahlia we’re finally going to get to her story,” we think, relieved. But De Palma’s not interested in the frantic woman; he doesn’t appear, even, to be concerned with the victim. Instead, his camera, in a continuing, unbroken shot, chases after a bicyclist, who leads the crane back down and around the building, back, eventually, to Bucky and Lee, our main characters. Another five minutes or so pass before there is any mention of the poor woman whose mutilated body lies in the grass a few hundred feet away.

    I’m nowhere near deciding yet whether or not The Black Dahlia is good, but it’s certainly among the strangest and most fascinating Hollywood films I’ve seen in quite some time. As we were walking out of the theater last night, Joanna asked the key question, and I’m still wrestling with it: “That was supposed to be a satire, right?” I’m not sure if “satire” is the right word, exactly, but The Black Dahlia is self-aware to the point of distraction. (Poor Scarlett Johansson comes close to out-Showgirls-ing Elizabeth Berkley.) I haven’t done much reading about the film yet, but I do recall seeing one comparison to A History of Violence, which seems about right. Like Cronenberg, De Palma has made a decent-enough genre film that comments constantly on the genre itself — not in a snarky, wink-wink way but, rather, with a bit of bite.

    Noir has always been ripe for psychoanalytic readings, as have many of De Palma’s films, especially those that are more explicitly Hitchcock-inspired. What I find so interesting about The Black Dahlia is its making real and visible what has been suppressed in so many of the films that preceded it. In one sense, The Black Dahlia isn’t about “The Black Dahlia” at all. (That was Joanna’s main disappointment. She wanted an account of the murder that stayed within the wide bounds of established fact, and became frustrated when the film didn’t match her expectations.) And yet, one could also argue that every noir is about “The Black Dahlia” — namely, she is an embodiment (with all of the troubling connotations attached to that word in this context) of noir desire. She’s a hyper-sexualized femme fatale, dangerous and beautiful, the subject of our voyeuristic gaze, a helpless victim and sly manipulator, and a site of horrific violence. Now, in 2006, “The Black Dahlia” is also infected with sensationalism. She’s not just a murder victim; she’s the murder victim who was photographed and whose photographs have entered the public consciousness. She’s a media event. (Just imagine what Nancy Grace would have done with this story.)

    Traditionally, Film Noir heroes have been haunted by this repressed desire. (Hell, some would argue that this particular ghost infests all of cinema. I’m talkin’ to you, Mulvey.) Well, repression be damned. In the closing moments of The Black Dahlia, when Bucky returns for one final reunion with Johansson’s icy blonde Kay, De Palma kicks the proverbial psychic doors wide open. Bucky, who has been betrayed at every turn and who has just committed a sex-charged act of violence himself, sees the high-contrast, severed remains of “The Black Dahlia” everywhere he turns. In what I can only assume is meant to be a joke, he’s rescued from his reverie, finally, by Kay’s none-too-subtle invitation to “come inside.” I thought it was funny, at least.

  • Abel Ferrara’s Battle with the Irrational

    Abel Ferrara’s Battle with the Irrational

    Religious faith is utterly irrational. By calling myself a Christian, I claim to believe at least this: that we are all born into a fallen world and that each of us is in need of grace, an undeserved forgiveness possible only through the sacrifice of Christ. It makes no sense. From a rational perspective, it’s not terribly different from a belief in “Leda and the Swan” or the practices of New Age mysticism. All might otherwise be described as man-invented responses to the irrational tendencies of human experience — things like creativity, desire, curiosity, grief, suffering, injustice, and good ol’ existential dread. Faith offers a kind of all-encompassing framework of understanding, a culturally- and historically rich narrative that provides, at the very least, the appearance of meaning, even if not Meaning itself.

    To watch the body of Abel Ferrara’s films, as I’ve tried my best to do over the last month and a half, is to see a man wrestling obsessively — sadomasochistically, even — with the Irrational. The stylized violence, the scenery-chewing performances, the gratuitous and exploitative female nudity — all are window dressing. What’s at stake here is nothing less than the very possibility of grace. If looking at a woman lustfully is ultimately (or Ultimately) no different from committing adultery itself — if, in other words, each of us is equally depraved, equally culpable — then all of us are trapped in a world very much like Ferrara’s, where good and bad have blended to a shade of deep, dark gray.

    It’s this quality, I suspect, that led Brad Stevens to name his critical biography Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision, and it’s also what other participants in today’s blog-a-thon have called Ferrara’s “humanism.” I don’t think humanist is the right word for him, though. His films, in fact, seem to me to be deeply cynical. While his characters often act badly with the very best intentions — I’m thinking of Tom Berrenger’s washed up boxer in Fear City, Christopher Walken’s Robin Hood-like drug lord in King of New York, and the husband and wife of ‘R X-Mas — and while Ferrara refuses to rule over them as a moral judge (and prevents us from doing so as well), he most definitely situates them in a world corrupted tragically and completely by our cultural institutions (capital, politics, and religion, to name just three) and by man’s basest instincts. It’s an ugly, ugly place.

    But despite its ugliness, Ferrara’s world is occasionally illuminated by brief moments of redemption, and I’m tempted to say that, in each case, its an explicitly transcendent, transhuman redemption. These are Ferrara’s encounters with the Irrational. The most obvious and affecting example is the bad lieutenant, who, after witnessing the victimized nun’s extraordinary forgiveness of her attackers, confronts the very Source of her strength before performing a charitable act of grace himself. That same moment is reenacted in The Mother of Mirrors, the film-within-a-film in Dangerous Game. Sarah Jennings’ (Madonna) character has experienced a kind of religious epiphany that has allowed her to reform, and in doing so she has brought into relief the depravity of the world she and her husband have created. There is a specifically Christian character to these transformations in Ferrara’s work, just as there’s a specifically Christian character to, say, Bresson’s and the Dardennes’.

    Briefly, I want to add, also, that I think this battle with the Irrational is part of what makes Ferrara an American filmmaker. We are a confused and compromised lot, are we not? Two centuries later, our political rhetoric remains heavy with allusions to the protestant work ethic, to the Deistic ideals of the Enlightenment, and to the One God under which our Nation stands. Meanwhile, we consume, degrade, exploit, and dehumanize with the best of ’em. Which is probably why we’re so fond of transcendent redemption as a concept — so much so that we’ve made it a hallmark of American tradition. What I most appreciate about Ferrara is the messy collision of his cynicism and, for lack of a better word, his faith: grace is never cheap in his world, and that’s as it should be.

    Until this point in my post, I’ve carefully avoided making any aesthetic judgments on Ferrara’s work. Counting the early shorts, I think I’ve now seen fourteen of his films, and I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s a director of genuine importance whose films are almost all fundamentally flawed. Bad Lieutenant is, I think, his most coherent and best picture; Dangerous Game is his most interesting; and King of New York is his most traditionally entertaining. Ms. 45 is probably the best low-budget exploitation film I’ve ever seen (for whatever that’s worth); and, given a choice of which of his films to rewatch tonight, I’d pick New Rose Hotel without a moment of hesitation.

    If I were a bigger fan of Ferrara’s work, I’m sure I could put together a well-reasoned apology for the pacing problems, the tone problems, the performance problems, and the basic narrative problems that characterize, to various degrees, all of his films. (Even as a fan, though, I doubt I could justify his misogyny — I’m talking to you, Cat Chaser.) Part of me wishes he would find a strong-willed producer and editor, people willing to reign him in just enough to un-kink the various lines of thought that wind through his work. The ideas are compelling, and the execution is occasionally stunning. (I really, really love those long takes in Bad Lieutenant and Dangerous Game, especially the scene between Zoe Lund and Harvey Keitel, and Madonna’s “What do you want from me?” moment in front of Eddie Israel’s camera.) Until that happens, I’ll continue seeing his new films and, I suspect, continue being frustrated by them.

    See also:

    [with more to come]

  • The Human Stain (2003)

    The Human Stain (2003)

    Dir. by Robert Benton

    I really like this image, which I grabbed from a brief making-of featurette available on the DVD release of The Human Stain. Philip Roth isn’t a participant, really, but he does show up in this one shot — the very last shot of the featurette. He’s turning his head from left to right, I assume because he’s just noticed that he’s being filmed, and there’s a charming look of amusement on his face.

    Philip Roth and Nicole Kidman

    He’s chatting with Nicole Kidman, and Anthony Hopkins is also there in the room. As is Gary Sinise, who’s pretending for the day to be Nathan Zuckerman, a successful Jewish writer now sequestered and hard at work in an isolated cabin somewhere in the wilds of Thoreau and Hawthorne country. Roth, of course, has been pretending to be Zuckerman for nearly thirty years now. Come to think of it, this image could have come directly from the pages of one of his novels — somewhere, maybe, between Deception and The Counterlife: “Philip Roth” meets “Nathan Zuckerman” and all epistemological hell breaks loose.

    The Human Stain is a little more impressive each time I read it. I’m still frustrated by the sadistic delight with which Roth degrades and destroys Delphine Roux, the 100-pound beauty of a French feminist scholar who, as it turns out, really just needs a good fuck from a virile classical humanist like Coleman Silk. And Les Farley, the deranged Vietnam vet, is never developed too far beyond the deranged Vietnam vet “type”; though, to Roth’s credit, Les does come to life — and then some — in one or two of the best scenes Roth has ever written, most notably the conversation between him and Zuckerman that ends the novel. But those are minor complaints, really. Of Roth’s writing of the last twenty-five years, The Human Stain, I think, is second only to American Pastoral in terms of ambition, formal invention, and sheer imaginative force.

    I have no idea if Robert Benton’s adaptation of The Human Stain works on its own as a film. (The Almighty Tomatometer gives it a 41%, so consensus seems to be that it doesn’t quite.) Like the Tolkein-o-philes who continue to parse through every last detail of the Rings trilogy, I read Benton’s film as a vast intertext consisting of Roth’s many novels, his critics, the interviews, the essays, and my own evolving thoughts about — not to mention my imaginings ofThe Human Stain itself. What I did last night barely qualifies as “watching a movie.” In the guise of objectivity, though, I’ll say this much: Nicholas Meyer’s screenplay streamlines the various storylines to focus more intently on the relationship between Coleman Silk (Hopkins) and Faunia Farley (Kidman), which seems a perfectly logical choice. He and Benton cut between the postwar promise of 1948 and the politically correct era of fifty years later with a fluidity that gives cohesion to both halves of Silk. And I was especially impressed by Wentworth Miller and Jacinda Barrett, who play the young Silk and his first love, Steena “Voluptas” Paulsson. Their too-brief scenes together restore a sense of balance and scaled-down emotions to a film in more need of both.

    Adaptation is always, in some sense, an act of criticism, I suppose. Meyer and Benton, in close collaboration with their actors and crew, have in essence performed a close reading of Roth’s novel. For example, Meyer has chosen to keep Zuckerman as a narrative device — the author/detective who reconstructs “the whole story” — and Benton foregrounds that device by shooting most of the film from an objective remove. With only a few notable exceptions (Faunia’s discussion with the crow, for instance) the film is almost completely devoid of eyeline matches. When Steena dances for Silk, the camera stays near the back of the room, never allowing us to align too closely our own perception of the film’s world with Silk’s. This is an essential characteristic of Roth’s recent work, nicely transposed to the film.

    But the adaptation of a written text to film also necessarily foregrounds the authority of images, imposing specificity on what an author might have chosen to describe more generally. I was surprised, for example, to find myself suddenly moved by an image of the small boxes in which Faunia stores the ashes of her dead children. In the novel, surprisingly little emphasis is placed on the ashes; Roth does not make of them an excuse for one of his patented ten-page diversions. (I love Roth most of all for his ten-page diversions.) But seeing the boxes in the film — those specific boxes, small, gold, hidden below her bed frame — became an essential moment in the development of Faunia’s character, more essential, I would argue, than Kidman’s overwrought monologue that immediately follows. They are present, like a memento mori, with a force that Roth’s writing never achieves.

    An even more interesting example is Coleman’s last professional fight. Roth’s description:

    Walking down the aisle for the six-rounder, Coleman had had to pass the ringside seat of Solly Tabak, the promoter, who was always dangling a contract in front of Coleman to sign away a third of his earnings for the next ten years. Solly slapped him on the behind and, in his meaty whisper, told him, “Feel the nigger out in the first round, see what he’s got, Silky, and give the people their money’s worth.” Coleman nodded at Tabak and smiled but, while climbing into the ring, thought, Fuck You. I’m getting a hundred dollars, and I’m going to let some guy hit me to give the people their money’s worth? I’m supposed to give a shit about some jerkoff sitting in the fifteenth row? I’m a hundred and thirty-nine pounds and five foot eight and a half, he’s a hundred and forty-five and five foot ten, and I’m supposed to let the guy hit me in the head four, five, ten extra times in order to put on a show? Fuck the show.

    After the fight Solly was not happy with Coleman’s behavior. It struck him as juvenile. “You could have stopped the nigger in the fourth round instead of the first and gave the people their money’s worth. But you didn’t. I ask you nicely, and you don’t do what I ask you. Why’s that, wise guy?”

    “Because I don’t carry no nigger.” (116, 117)

    On the page, that scene is about Coleman’s arrogance, his intellectual superiority. Boxing, he tells his parents earlier, is a matter of outsmarting one’s opponent. The film, however, foregrounds the significance of Roth’s elision: “After the fight . . .” Benton chooses, instead, to shoot the boxing match Rocky-style, and so we are forced to watch the light-skinned Coleman, passing as a Jew, “outsmarting” his black opponent by beating him senseless. Not surprisingly, the rhythm of Wentworth Miller’s performance feels forced and awkward when he delivers the line towards which Roth’s prose so carefully builds: “Because I don’t carry no nigger.” On film, the words have been overpowered and made redundant by the force of the visual image. (I’m embarrassed to admit that, until I saw Silk fight, I’d never seriously considered the importance of Invisible Man — and “The Battle Royal,” specifically — as a precedent for The Human Stain.)

  • You’re Tearing Me Apart!

    Or, a few more words about Nicholas Ray  . . .

    Born to Be Bad (1950) — If this weren’t a Nicholas Ray film, and if I hadn’t set out with the goal of watching as many of Ray’s films as possible, and if it hadn’t appeared (as if by magic) on the TCM schedule two weeks ago, I doubt I would have made it through the first thirty minutes of Born to Be Bad. Despite its provocative tagline — “Man-bait! Trouble never came in a more desirable package!” — the film is remarkably dull. Joan Fontaine is beautiful as always, but there’s nothing especially vampy about her performance, and so she never quite rises to the level of “bad girl we love to hate.” (Where’s Barbara Stanwyck when you need her?) She doesn’t even get a vicious come-uppance at the end, and the vicious come-uppance is half of what makes films like this so much fun. Born to Be Bad is one of the early films Ray made at RKO under the watchful eye of Howard Hughes, who was at the time trying to woo Fontaine away from her husband, and so I have to wonder how much of the film’s tonal problems were generated behind the scenes. The script has the feel of bureaucratic compromise.

    Rebel Without a Cause (1955) — It’s always interesting to watch an iconic film for the first time. I’ve had the experience several times this year, actually. The best ones — Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, My Darling Clementine — work their magic despite the added burden of their status. For example, I’d seen the clip a hundred times, I’d seen it parodied to death by Carol Burnett, but I still got chills when Norma Desmond announced she was ready for her close-up. Parts of Rebel Without a Cause worked for me, but the strange psychology of the film prevented it from completely transcending its iconic status. The mother/father issues in this film make Hitchcock’s brand of Fruedianism look downright subtle by comparison. James Dean is always fascinating to watch on screen, and I especially enjoyed his scenes with Jim Backus and Edward Platt, but the motivations for the characters’ actions are so flimsy and the Tragic (with a capital T) arc of the narrative is so artificial that I always felt removed from the story. I look forward to watching Rebel again, with different expectations and with an eye more squarely on Ray’s style.

  • In a Lonely Place (1950)

    In a Lonely Place (1950)

    “I wouldn’t want anyone but you.”

    In a Lonely Place (1950) is one of those films that, by a kind of strange magic, reveals its greatness twenty or thirty minutes after it ends. There’s an honesty and emotional texture to the film that makes it really unsettling, especially given its superficial appearance as a genre picture. I say “unsettling,” of course, in the best sense of the word. Bogart’s Dixon Steele is, at first glance, a run-of-the-mill film noir anti-hero, but his performance is uncharacteristically vulnerable. Gloria Grahame’s Laurel Gray is, likewise, a fascinating meld of noir archetypes — something much more human, sympathetic, and compelling (to my mind, at least) than the Madonna or the Whore.

    More than any other filmmaker, I was reminded as I watched of John Cassavetes. There’s something even in Bogart’s mannerisms here that remind me of Cassavetes, the actor. But, much more impressively, Bogart, Grahame, and Ray seem to have captured that uncanny emotional reality that makes films like A Woman Under the Influence and Faces such rich and difficult viewing experiences. In a nice bit of self-reflexivity, Dix Steele, the Hollywood sell-out desperate to write a screenplay of substance, even comments on this during a breakfast scene. When Laurel compliments him on the love scene he’s just written, Steele (speaking for Ray?) replies:

    Well that’s because they’re not always telling each other how much in love they are. A good love scene should be about something else besides love. For instance, this one. Me fixing grapefruit. You sitting over there, dopey, half-asleep. Anyone looking at us could tell we’re in love.

    That’s good stuff. And it works, I think, only because it’s an expression of an ideal that had already been demonstrated several times in the film itself. The scene I’ve captured in the image above, for example, doesn’t to my mind have a direct precedent in any other Hollywood film of its day. Steele and Gray are sitting at a piano bar, listening to Hadda Brooks sing “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You,” when Steele asks, “Anything you want to make you happy?” Ray cuts from a medium two-shot to a close-up of Grahame’s face buried in Bogart’s neck. What she whispers to him is less important than the unexpected moment of silent intimacy shared between these two lovers in a crowded, noisy room. That moment serves, I think, as the film’s sex scene, and it’s an incredibly moving and erotic one. The whole film is in that image — Dix bowing his head to her as a gesture of trust; Laurel closing her eyes in hope of love, then opening them to the sight of a detective entering the room.

    – – –

    Bonus: As soon as Bogart gave his signature line — “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me” — I found myself humming a tune. It was an hour or so later before I realized it was a song from the Smithereens album, Especially for You, a song I played ad nauseam in 1986 and 1987. Turns out the song is called, “In a Lonely Place.” Go figure. I still like it — mostly for all of the things that make it sound nothing at all like a Smithereens song: the syncopated rhythm, vibraphone, tasteful acoustic guitar, and backing vocals from Suzanne Vega.

  • Diving Deep into Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World

    Diving Deep into Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World

    Dir. by Caveh Zahedi

    This essay was presented at the 2005 conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.

    – – –

    When asked recently about the trend toward reality programming on television, filmmaker Caveh Zahedi called it a “good thing,” arguing that, despite the inevitable and corrupting influences of advertising and profit margins, reality TV does satisfy, to a certain extent, the viewing public’s craving for the “genuine article.” “Reality is where it’s at,” Zahedi said. “It’s where people ‘live,’ it’s what’s deep and true.” “Genuine, “reality,” “live,” “deep,” and “true” are, of course, among the most loaded of terms in discussions of documentary filmmaking, a fact not lost on Zahedi, who has spent the majority of his career blurring the lines between fact and fiction in his own peculiar brand of autobiographical cinema.

    In his official filmography, Zahedi lists four features and three shorts. A Little Stiff, his 1991 feature debut, co-directed with Greg Watkins, re-enacts his failed attempt to win the affection of a fellow art student. Constructed almost entirely of static master shots, the film is quite different formally from his other work — he has described it as an “aesthetic reaction to the kind of by-the-numbers filmmaking that [he was] being taught in film school” — but it introduces many of what would become Zahedi’s signatures. He himself stars as “Caveh Zahedi,” a sincere and strangely charismatic filmmaker whose charm (or off-putting eccentricity, depending on one’s general opinion of him) stems from his refusal to mask what he considers his most basic human desires, opinions and, perhaps most notably, his faults behind the guise of socially-constructed, “acceptable” behavior.

    That’s not to say, though, that Zahedi is a hedonist. Far from it, in fact. When exploring the most shameful and transgressive aspects of his nature, as he does, for example, with unflinching candor in his most recent feature, I Am a Sex Addict, there is actually a conspicuous element of moral instruction in his work. Rather, what interests Zahedi is what he consistently refers to as the “ego” — that manifestation of self-image that each of us performs in the day-to-day narrative of our public life. For Zahedi, the problem of the ego touches upon the most fundamental questions of life, art, and (for lack of a better word) God, all of which, in his view, are inextricably intertwined. As man lost faith in the Divine, Zahedi argues, the artist grew in self-importance — no longer a humble servant of Creation but, instead, a new kind of hero: the artist/performer as celebrity. “This problem of the ego in art,” Zahedi writes:

    stems in part from the fact that our self-worth has been severely eroded. To compensate for this erosion, artists have tended to emphasize their specialness, and to attempt to make themselves appear better than those around them. This is a big problem for the arts because if all art is in fact “channeled,” then Art rests on a connection to the Source of all creation. The problem with the ego in art is that it destroys this connection to the source by positing itself as the source, much like the Satan figure in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

    By virtue of its mechanical ability to capture and re-present photographed reality, or so the argument goes, film has a unique relationship with the ego. On the one hand, a camera establishes a power relationship not unlike Foucault’s panoptic gaze — and, indeed, Zahedi has cited Sartre’s policeman as a metaphor for the situation. Like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, there’s the sense that a camera — or an editor’s cut, for that matter — inevitably distorts “reality” by the very act of its observation. Under the scrutiny of a spotlight, the guilt and self-hatred we’ve internalized feel threatened with exposure, and so the ego blossoms, becoming large in order to protect its own integrity. On the other hand, film is also uniquely shaped by randomness, or by what Zahedi describes as “Fate or Reality or God.” It’s that peculiar aspect of the cinema that he calls a “Holy Moment” in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Because God is manifest in all of creation, and because film is able to capture and re-present those manifestations, the cinema, once loosened of ego, can reorient our perspectives not only toward the arts but also toward the beautifully varied and complex creation in which we live.

    In each of his films since A Little Stiff, Zahedi has attempted to create a “complex dialectic” between these two qualities of cinema, a dialectic, more or less, between “the will” and “chaos.” In order to do so, he’s employed very particular narrative and formal strategies, the most essential of which is his devotion to autobiography. Zahedi has jokingly referred to his on-screen persona as a “Mascot of Humanity,” as if he were somehow redeeming us all through his willing sacrifice to this artistic project. In I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, he dispenses with his script entirely, trusting, instead, that God will become revealed in the chaos of filmed life. In both I Was Possessed by God and Tripping with Caveh, Zahedi ingests large doses of hallucinogenic mushrooms in an effort to completely obliterate, temporarily, his own ego. And in his latest work, I Am a Sex Addict, he has taken an almost-Brechtian turn, carefully balancing the intellectual distance of meta-narrative with the emotional immediacy of “real” human experience.

    Which brings me, finally, to In the Bathtub of the World. Zahedi has written of the film:

    [It] exploits the most democratic genre that exists, the home movie, in order to reveal the workings of the divine in all of our lives. I had no idea what would happen in the film, but I knew that only a subtle combination of will (demanding of myself that I shoot one minute everyday) and surrender (I would try to listen each day to “hear” what I was supposed to do that day) would lead to the result that I desired, namely a film that would also be a work of art, meaning a work that has in some way been channeled.

    To approach In the Bathtub of the World from Zahedi’s perspective, then, would see it as a document of a life — a representative life — freed of the fictions of ego. If we take him at his word, we must assume that the Caveh we “meet” on-screen is the “real” Caveh. When he looks into the camera and makes a frank confession like, “I had a wet dream this morning” or “I have a problem. I don’t know how to live,” we must trust that these statements — in combination with the unspoken language of his facial and body movements and the aesthetic effect of the cinematic reproduction — are as honest an articulation of his immediate experience as he is capable of expressing. “In that particularity” of his own experience, “there is universality,” he has said. “Your life is meaningful and unique. . . . It is the expression of creation happening.” As far as I can tell, it is Zahedi’s deeply sincere belief that the socially-constructed ego-masks we wear degrade human worth and human relationships, and In the Bathtub of the World is his purest and most egalitarian (if such a word is appropriate here) argument for the healing power of honesty.

    Okay, so two important points need to be made here.

    First, we’ve gathered here this morning to participate in a panel called “Reality Effects: Documentary in Film, TV, and Video.” And so I assume that, after watching the first few minutes of the film, and after listening to this overview of Zahedi’s career and guiding principles, at least a few of you are skeptical. If so, you’re certainly not alone. His work is routinely derided as “narcissistic and vain, in the pejorative sense” (to quote a great line from Bathtub). His intrusive use of the camera — for example, turning it on friends, family, and strangers against their expressed wishes — has been condemned as unethical. Popular critics often dismiss his films simply for being banal and boring. (In fact, on their DVD commentary, Zahedi and co-editor Thomas Logoreci recite by memory lines from Bathtub‘s original reviews: “There is no art here” and “The year 2000 couldn’t come soon enough.”) And then, of course, there are the theoretical problems of any post-Enlightenment aesthetic that calls upon transcendence or mystification for its epistemology.

    My second point is something of a confession. Despite my own reservations, I really like most of Zahedi’s films, and Bathtub, in particular. I’ve probably watched it fifteen times now, and I never fail to be moved by Caveh’s humor and sincerity. I suspect this speaks to my own peculiar and evolving ideas about art, democracy, humanism, and (again for lack of a better word) God, but it is also testament, I think, to Zahedi’s skill as a filmmaker. And so, with the remainder of my time, I want to begin to look more closely at the formal strategies he employs here in his effort to dig “deep” into reality.

    The first observation worth noting is that, despite Zahedi’s frequent calls to a kind of divine intervention, there is very little connecting his cinematographic style to that of the filmmakers most often associated with the term “transcendental.” Tarkovsky’s demand that images spring from the memories or “subjective impressions” of the author may have influenced Zahedi’s general approach to filmmaking — he has even cited, as a direct inspiration for Bathtub, Tarkovsky’s discussion of a theoretical film sculpted from the entirety of a single person’s filmed life — but little of the Russian’s uncanny, poetic logic is apparent here. Likewise, Bresson’s formal rigor, Ozu’s meticulous shot breakdowns, and Dreyer’s long tracking shots are all conspicuously absent.

    Bathtub also does not sit comfortably beside the films of other prominent autobiographical filmmakers. Although it raises interesting questions about, say, the nature of addiction and the sacrifices of art-making, Bathtub does not craft a specific argument along the lines of the essay-like films of Ross McElwee or Agnes Varda, for example. If Bathtub can be described as documentary filmmaking, then it’s a strange hybrid of documentary, performance art (here, I’m thinking specifically of Tehching Hsieh’s Time Piece, in which Hsieh photographed himself punching a time card every hour for a year), and also experimental filmmaking. Certain shots in the film are reminiscent, for example, of Jim Jennings’ meditations on the beauty that is to be found in the everyday. I especially like Zahedi’s strangely affecting compositions of stickers affixed to his bathroom tile and the shots of sunlight pouring through his apartment windows.

    Like I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, Bathtub is, in its final form, a deceptively conventional narrative. Granted, it originated from an unconventional conceit, but Zahedi has crafted from the raw footage a collection of compelling (if elliptical) stories. Assuming that he did, in fact, shoot at least one minute each day for a year, then his 80-minute film is cut and pasted together from approximately one-fifth of the available footage, allowing ample room to pick and choose which particular stories to develop. Among the narrative strands weaving through Bathtub, we see Zahedi’s battles with sex-, food-, celebrity-, and art addiction; we watch him struggle to survive as a poor independent filmmaker, teaching classes, applying for grants, and acting in others’ films in order to make a living; we experience the very real drama of his family life, particularly when his father suffers a massive heart attack, and Caveh, visibly shaken, fears for the man’s life; we get to share in the mundane details of an average routine — vacuuming, mailing letters, cooking dinner, traveling; and, most essential of all, we watch the evolution of Zahedi’s relationship with his live-in girlfriend (and now wife), Amanda Field. I’m tempted to call Bathtub a docu-romantic-dramedy (or something like that).

    Zahedi’s editing strategy is apparent from the opening moments of the film. The first shot is a medium-close-up of his almost-motionless face, a quiet, static image followed immediately by the more lively and kinetic scenes in which Amanda cuts his hair and Caveh discovers the contours of his own skull. His entry for January 4 th is an efficient narrative in miniature. He begins by echoing the opening shot in another direct confession to the camera (a recurring motif throughout the film), then cuts relatively-quickly to close-ups of a Frank Black CD and the front of a CD player, before pushing back to a medium-long shot of Caveh dancing. Another close-up, this time of a tape recorder, then a jump-cut confessional shot. January 6 th opens with a nicely-composed, still-life image of sunlight hitting shelves of books and fruit, followed by a shot of his kitchen window and the green wall on the other side.

    I mention the specific shot-pattern because, in the course of writing this paper, I’ve realized that there are two main reasons I find Bathtub so improbably watchable. The first is the complex rhythms of the piece — what Leo Charney calls the “peaks and valleys” of narrative. Even in that opening sequence I’ve just described, a sequence that lasts barely three-and-a-half minutes, Zahedi varies, quite deliberately, the shape and color of felt time. Juxtaposed against the quick pace of the earlier sequence’s efficient story-telling, those static images of light and shadow are made all the more strange and new. Likewise, the shot of Caveh’s body in motion, dancing ecstatically to a Frank Black song, is especially surprising after we’ve witnessed his first two, staid confessionals. Zahedi’s greatest talent, in fact, might be as an editor. I Am a Sex Addict is an even more impressive exercise in precise modulations of tone.

    Finally, though, I must concede that the greatest source of pleasure in this film is, for me, Caveh himself. In the Bathtub of the World seems to prove that a compelling narrative can be shaped from the “real” moments of “real” life, which shouldn’t come as too great a surprise, I suppose, to anyone who has read a decent autobiography or memoir. But what of the ego? And what of its relationship to cinema? Zahedi has said that a camera has the unique ability to capture “truth”: “You want to be accepted for the true self, not the false front. . . . . Love me despite all this.” Ultimately, despite my intellectual resistance as a critic, I find myself of the same mind as one of Zahedi’s film students, who, given a moment alone with his camera, looks it in the eye and says, “Caveh, I was touched by your sincerity.”

  • I Am a Sex Addict (2005)

    I Am a Sex Addict (2005)

    Dir. by Caveh Zahedi

    After staring at a blinking cursor for better than an hour, trying — and failing — to compose the opening sentence of this “review,” I’ve finally abandoned all hopes of objectivity. I can’t seem to find the right tone of third-person voice to describe this film, which is only appropriate, I guess. Like each of Caveh Zahedi’s previous features and shorts, I Am a Sex Addict is a work of autobiography in which Zahedi himself plays the starring role. In the opening shot, he addresses the camera directly, introduces himself as Caveh, and tells us that for many years he was a sex addict. His film is a frank, neatly-plotted, and curiously moving recreation of those years. It’s also incredibly transgressive and very, very funny. Quite a balancing act.

    Hi, Caveh. I’m Darren, and this is my attempt to make sense of how and why I reacted to your film as I did.

    By way of plot summary, I’ll just mention the two marriages and the three other relationships that were affected by Zahedi’s addiction. We meet all of these women over the course of the film. A few are glimpsed only briefly in old footage; others are brought to life by actresses. “Brought to life” is actually a curious choice of words here, given the film’s meta qualities. In several cases, we meet the “real” woman (via home movies), the performed version of her (via the film proper), and the “real” actress who plays her (via behind-the-scenes, documentary-like footage). I say documentary-like because the film’s form questions the truthfulness of cinematic representation at every turn. I mean, after Zahedi interrupts one of the opening scenes to tell us that the Paris street we are looking at is actually in San Francisco because he couldn’t raise enough money to shoot in France, and after he interrupts a later scene in Paris to inform us that they made the trip after all, all epistemological ground is up for grabs, including some of our most basic interpretive strategies. Home movies and behind-the-scenes hand-held footage are more “real” or trustworthy than staged recreations? Who says?

    What most impresses me about I Am a Sex Addict, and what makes it, I think, Zahedi’s most accomplished film, is the care with which he (in cooperation with co-editor Thomas Logoreci) controls its tone. The film feels as though it could fall apart at any moment, and that it doesn’t is some kind of miracle. After writing that sentence, it occurs to me that I’m quoting almost verbatim Hal Ashby’s description of Being There: “This is the most delicate film I’ve ever worked with as an editor,” he told Aljean Harmetz. “The balance is just incredible. It could be ruined in a second if you allow it to become too broad.” It’s not a perfect analogy. Ashby’s challenge was to illuminate the absurdities of simulacrum politics while preventing his satire from slipping into banal parody. Zahedi’s task, I think, is even more difficult. For I Am a Sex Addict to really work, it must humanize the victims of sex addiction, expose the very real consequences of addictive behavior, and, despite all that, remain watchable, which is easier said than done given the particular nature of Zahedi’s fetishes.

    Zahedi’s addiction became manifest most often in a desire to have sex with prostitutes. To combat that desire, he instituted a series of progressively destructive strategies, beginning with a genuine desire to openly and honestly acknowledge the problem with the support of his partner; by the time he attends his first Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting years later, his “prostitute fetish” has taken a much darker and sadistic turn.

    Zahedi shapes the film’s tone through careful modulations in humor, self-reflexivity, and music. The image of a sound mixer comes to mind — raising and lowering the levels of each voice to create a kind of satisfying harmony. I’m thinking of two difficult scenes, in particular. In the first, Zahedi tells his wife about his desire to receive oral sex from a prostitute. She responds by offering to satisfy the craving herself. Which she does. Three times. In the second scene, Zahedi visits a prostitute with the intent of enacting his deepest, most humiliating desires. Warning: the following blockquote is verygraphic:

    In my fantasies, I will grab whoever it is by the hair, and I’ll make her say things like, “I want to suck your dick” and stuff, and maybe call her a bitch or a slut. And then I start fucking her really hard in the mouth and make her gag and stuff. . . . What I’m thinking is that, if I went to a prostitute one last time and just did everything that I always fantasize about doing, then I think maybe I could get it out of my system once and for all.

    If Zahedi’s story had been told by a more naturalistic filmmaker, it would, I imagine, have looked something like Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms, and, in that case, my tendency as a critic would have been to describe — and to experience — the onscreen sex metaphorically. Zahedi, however, has a vested interest in exploring the psychological underpinnings of his own addiction, and so he constantly undermines our learned tendencies as “readers.” About Twentynine Palms, I wrote, “Audiences are forced to observe everything — the ordinary and the terrifying — unloosed from the safe comfort of quick cutting, manipulative sound design, or stylized photography.” Zahedi’s approach is the polar opposite, and, as a result, watching I Am a Sex Addict is, interestingly, a simultaneously intellectual and deeply personal or human experience.

    The passage of dialogue quoted above is from a conversation between Caveh and Greg Watkins, who was not only Caveh’s best friend at the time of his addiction but is also Sex Addict‘s cinematographer and co-producer. (Their conversation is also a nice echo of the opening scene in their first feature, A Little Stiff.) When we see Zahedi’s visit to a prostitute a few minutes later, his words — with all of their graphic detail and hopeless self-delusion — linger over the scene. The act portrayed in the scene is difficult to watch. It’s misogynist and sadistic. But the scene itself is fascinating. Zahedi interrupts the sequence several times with jokes and with his ubiquitous voice-over, both of which act, throughout the film, as Brechtian distancing devices. Whereas someone like Dumont dares you to keep looking (and assumes, probably, that many of us won’t), Zahedi needs you to look. It’s important. This is what he did to women, and not metaphorically speaking. A man who had once marched in an anti-pornography rally and who considers himself a feminist degraded himself and women, and did so recklessly. Asked recently about his approach to comedy in the film, Zahedi quoted Oscar Wilde: “If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh or they will kill you.”

    Zahedi’s attention to the personal and human dimension of his story pays emotional dividends in the film’s final act. Each time I’ve watched Sex Addict, I’ve felt my relationship with the material shift categorically at exactly the same moment. Soon after the release of A Little Stiff, Zahedi began a relationship with a woman named Devin, who, as it turns out, was an alcoholic. The actress who plays Devin, Amanda Henderson, is also an alcoholic — or, at least, so claims Zahedi, who interrupts the film to show us backstage footage of Henderson pulling her bottle from a brown paper bag. (I have no idea if she actually has a drinking problem. It’s impossible to know given the film’s hall-of-mirrors relationship with “truth.”) Sex Addict is structured around such revelations. The woman who plays Zahedi’s first wife, as it turns out, is actually a porn star. The woman who plays Zahedi’s girlfriend Christa, as it turns out, is unwilling to simulate on-screen sex.

    But the scene with Devin/Amanda is different, and I think the difference is owing both to the quality of Henderson’s performance (which is much better and more natural than either of the other two female leads’) and to the deftness of Zahedi’s direction. For the first 75 minutes of the film, I feel at some remove from the material. It’s an intellectual distance, the ironic distance of, say, Annie Hall writ large. But when Zahedi cuts from Henderson and her bottle to Devin drunk and spewing slurred insults, that comforting distance vanishes, and the effect is potent. I’ve been on the verge of tears both times I watched the film. I’m reminded suddenly of the “Eternal City” chapter in Catch-22, when Heller steps out of his satiric voice just long enough to send Yossarian on a walk through the grotesque streets of war-torn Rome.

    For the remainder of the film, Zahedi exists, by and large, outside of his mensch-y persona. There are fewer jokes, and the voice-over and recurring musical motif become less obtrusive. Like the lines of dialogue I’ve quoted above, images of Zahedi’s transgressive sexual encounters linger over the final twenty minutes of the film, but they’re suddenly transformed by the tragic human consequences of his behavior. We in the audience, in effect, undergo an awakening similar to his own. He “hits rock bottom” (to borrow from the language of recovery) and is forced, finally, to abandon his intellectual justifications. The stakes are high. And real. In the opening scene, Zahedi informs us that he’s narrating the film on his wedding day — his third — and those of us familiar with his previous feature, In the Bathtub of the World, know that it’s Mandy who will soon be walking down the aisle toward him. I can’t seem to resist the urge to paraphrase that cheesy Jack Nicholson line: Mandy clearly makes Caveh want to be a better man.

    I’ll be damned if the last scene in Sex Addict wasn’t the first time I’ve ever cried at a wedding.

  • The Moviegoer (1962)

    By Walker Percy

    “What’s the Matter?”
    “Ooooh,” Kate groans, Kate herself now. “I’m so afraid.”
    “I know.”
    “What am I going to do?”
    “You mean right now?”
    “Yes.”
    “We’ll go to my car. Then we’ll drive down to the French Market and get some coffee. Then we’ll go home.”
    “Is everything going to be all right?”
    “Yes.”
    “Tell me. Say it.”
    “Everything is going to be all right.”

    If you’re reading this in the future — say, you’ve wandered here via some poof of Google magic — you should know that if I were to turn on my television right now (now being the afternoon of September 2, 2005), I’d flip past image after image after image of destruction, violence, and misery. I’m writing five days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, destroying most of Biloxi, Mississippi and tearing up whole sections of states that were still trying to recover from Ivan the year before. I’m writing four days after the levees gave way in New Orleans, filling the city to its rooftops with putrid water and trapping the thousands of people who were still there, whether because they chose to ride out the storm or, as was more often the case, because they couldn’t afford to leave. I’m writing three days after the looting and violence began and two days after the buses arrived to begin shipping “refugees” to Houston.

    I’m also writing four-and-a-half years after President Bush took office and began systematically dismantling FEMA. I’m writing almost exactly four years since September 11th, which we all assumed had motivated federal and state officials to plan seriously for worst-case scenarios on American soil, or at least to have stockpiled rations, water, and the means to distribute them. I’m writing slightly less than three years since FEMA called the New Orleans hurricane scenario “the deadliest of all” (or so reported The Houston Chronicle) and two years after the White House cut funding to an Army Corps of Engineer project intended to strengthen the levees. (Those cuts coincided with President Bush’s decision to deploy the bulk of our national guard in Iraq, we should remember.) I’m writing nine months since small-government conservatives throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama helped re-elect Mr. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress, and three days after Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert announced that he saw no reason to rebuild New Orleans.

    I’m writing during the first week in my lifetime when all of America is suddenly being confronted by the poverty and de facto segregation that determines the lives of so many people in the South.

    I’m filled with anxiety and sorrow and anger. (And guilt. I’m anxious? I’m angry? In my air-conditioned home with running water and a stocked ‘fridge?) I’m doing the only things I know to do — keeping in contact with our friends and family in harm’s way, offering them a place to stay if they need it and my prayers, regardless. I’ve made my donation and had my stiff drink, and now I don’t know what to do with myself, so today I sat down and read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. I have a friend in Baton Rouge who knows quite a lot about Percy. When I asked him what I needed to know about The Moviegoer, he wrote back, “I guess one thing to keep in mind is that none of the places where it’s set are there anymore.” So you’ll understand, I hope, if everything I’m about to write is bloated with sentiment.

    Binx Bolling is about to turn thirty. He’s living in a suburb of New Orleans called Gentilly, where the “old-style California bungalows,” the “new-style Daytona cottages,” and the local movie theater offer him some kind of indefinable comfort. The French Quarter, the Garden District, all of the parts of New Orleans that breathe with history and authenticity — they’re all too much for Binx. “Whenever I try to live there,” he tells us, “I find myself first in a rage during which I develop strong opinions on a variety of subjects and write letters to editors, then in a depression during which I lie rigid as a stick for hours staring straight up at the plaster medallion in the ceiling of my room.” He sells bonds or something or other during the day, and seems to have a knack for making money, but most of his energy is directed toward the Lindas and Marcias and Sharons who work for him (then date him, tire of him, and leave).

    Binx is surrounded on all sides by family and by tragedy. His father is dead, as are his brother and one half-brother. Another half-brother, only fourteen years old, is sick, confined to a wheelchair by some unspecified disease. His cousin Kate lost her mother as a child and is still coping with the death of her fiancee in a car accident. Binx himself carries the scars of his service in Korea. Percy reveals this to us slowly, though. A novel that begins with the feel of Catcher in the Rye: Ten Years Later becomes something more as we follow Binx on his “search.” The “search” is also hard to define. For Binx, it’s “what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.” It’s a battle against malaise,”the pain of loss.” It’s a search for permanence and wonder. It’s a retreat from despair. It’s simultaneously agnostic and Holy. It’s creative and endowed with impossible power.

    It’s been a long time since I’ve fallen in love with a book the way I’ve fallen in love with The Moviegoer, and I’d like to think that would have happened even if New Orleans weren’t under water. Percy’s novel, more than any work I’ve read since first beginning these long pauses, answers directly the call of Levertov’s poem, a poem that, after all, is the search. Near the end of The Moviegoer, Binx sits with Kate and watches a black man fumble with something in the passenger seat of his car. It’s a beautiful image. The man has just stepped out of a church on Ash Wednesday; his forehead is “an ambiguous sienna color and pied.” Still watching, Binx wonders:

    It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus?

    It is impossible to say.

    Peace.

  • Short Takes

    Short Takes

    I’m adjusting to a new schedule. Getting up early, driving to campus, setting up my laptop in the library, and forcing myself to sit there — to write — until late-afternoon. In other words, I’m finally turning my dissertation into a full-time job. By the end of the day, I have little energy left to write about films or anything else, really, so instead I’ve been relaxing each night with a DVD. Because GreenCine doesn’t carry the later seasons of The West Wing, I’ve re-upped with NetFlix as well, meaning that, until I cancel one of the subscriptions, I’ll have a steady stream of titles to choose from. Good times. Some recent viewings:

    Notre Musique (2004, dir. Jean-Luc Godard) — I won’t even attempt a reading of this film after only one viewing, and I’d be suspicious of any reviewer/critic who does so. Is it anti-American? Anti-Semitic? Anti-Intellectual? Maybe. I have no idea at this point. I’ve already mailed the disc back, but I think I’d like to buy copies of Notre Musique and In Praise of Love (which I loved, also after only one viewing) and give both films the time and attention they deserve.

    I can say without hesitation, though, that the opening ten minutes of Notre Musique, the “Hell” section, are absolutely compelling. A collage of violent images, some real (documentary), some imagined (fiction), “Hell” is disgusting and fascinating. Godard digitizes, distorts, and makes abstract a timeline of human sadism and suffering, and I’m beginning to suspect that the remainder of the film is an argument about the moral and political consequences of that very act.

    The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, dir. William Wyler) — The night before my grandmother’s funeral, my grandfather told me about a letter he wrote to her when he was in Europe. Actually, he dictated the letter to a nurse. And in it he told her that he would be returning “half the man” he was when he left. He’d been wounded badly by a German mortar somewhere in western Europe, and he was ashamed of the toll it took on his face. I wish now I’d had the chance to watch this film with them.

    If I hadn’t seen Best Years, I wouldn’t believe a film like it could exist. The story of three men returning from war to the same home town, it unsettles every expectation I had about Hollywood World War II films. The heroic Army Air Force captain is haunted by nightmares and unable to find his place in a booming postwar economy that places little value on the skills he learned as a bombardier. The gruff and hard-drinking ol’ Sarge’, a staple of service films, is a banker who discovers that words like “collateral” and “investment” are absurd when used back home. And Homer, who lost both hands to a fire, returns to a society better-equipped to accept a heroic death than a disfiguring wound.

    And along with that setup, you also get brilliant performances from Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Harold Russell, Hoagy Carmichael, and Teresa Wright (with whom I’ve fallen in love again); you get the patient, impeccably-human direction of William Wyler; and you get a stream of jaw-dropping images from Gregg Toland that rival his more famous work in Citizen Kane. Best Years might be my single favorite film of the classical Hollywood cinema. An absolute masterpiece.

    Sunrise (1927, dir. F. W. Murnau) — I first watched Sunrise several years ago on a 9″ viewing carrel* at the university library. Having now seen it projected at 100″ — thanks to the kind generosity of a friend — I finally get what all of the fuss is about. I’d seen Janet Gaynor a week or two earlier in Frank Borzage’s Street Angel, which was made the same year, and I’d become fascinated by her face. It’s the perfect silent film face — all round eyes and round cheeks, like Betty Boop. Her character is almost too perfect, too forgiving in Sunrise, and I wonder if the film would hold together if not for that face.

    The star of the film, though, is Murnau’s camera. Nearly every image is a knockout, but it’s the double-, triple-, quadruple-exposures that take your breath away. I’m not sure which film is the greater miracle, Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, which was brash enough to toss away the old book of film grammar, or Sunrise, which displays many of the same feats of daring but in the service of a more traditional narrative.

    Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004, dir. Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller) — I think I’ve watched too many great essay films over the past year. Too much Resnais, Marker, Varda, Jost. They’ve changed my expectations for non-fiction films. Unfairly, perhaps. I tuned in to Moving Train on IFC a few nights ago because I was curious about Zinn, and the film gave me all of the information I was looking for — a biographical sketch, interviews with him and those who have known him, archival footage of key moments from his career, and historical context. Moving Train is interesting because Zinn is interesting. I wish the film were more than just a Biography channel profile, though. I wish it had a voice of its own, a voice offering insight into why Zinn matters, if Zinn matters.

    * Note: Apparently, this is the first time I’ve ever typed the word “carrel.” Did you know that both “carrel” and “carrell” are acceptable spellings? English, really, is a ridiculous language.

  • Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004)

    Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004)

    Dir. by Xan Cassavetes

    Xan Cassavetes’s Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession tells the parallel, rise-and-fall stories of a Los Angeles pay-TV channel and Jerry Harvey, the man who acted as its chief programmer and svengali. Harvey, as the film informs us in the opening minutes, murdered his second wife in 1988 before turning the gun on himself, and the “tragedy” of his end is ostensibly at the heart of Cassavetes’s documentary. I say “ostensibly” and put scare quotes around “tragedy,” though, because in Z Channel the only real tragedy is the loss to film buffs of Harvey’s single-minded cinephilia. We’re reminded of this loss again and again, as talking head after talking head (Altman, Tarrantino, Payne, Jarmusch, Verhoeven, etc.) wax nostalgic for the days when any Los Angelino could turn on Z Channel and see Berlin Alexanderplatz, The 400 Blows, an Italian skin flick, or the premiere of Peckinpah’s cut of The Wild Bunch. Cassavetes includes a bounty of clips from Harvey’s favorite films and supplements her story with interviews of his co-workers and friends.

    I love many of the same films that Harvey loved. And I would pay quite a lot to have a station like Z Channel beamed into my home. Watching Cassavetes’s film, I was once again reminded — as I assume was Cassavetes’s intention — of how pedestrian and market-driven so much of current film programming is, both theatrically and on cable. But, so what? I knew that before the film began. When asked whether writing political theater is just “preaching to the choir,” Tony Kushner once responded:

    A good preacher rattles her congregants’ smugness and complacency, and congregants do the same for the preacher. Good preachers are exhilarating to listen to, and the converted have a lot to think about. So this “preaching to the converted” question doesn’t address all religious practice, or all theater — just crummy religion and inept theater.

    Z Channel is a crummy film. It’s poorly constructed from short segments that offer superficial observations about specific films (“the director’s cut is obviously better”), the film industry (“without studio support and marketing, a film doesn’t stand a chance”), and Harvey himself (“he was seeing a psychiatrist several afternoons a week”). As an aside, I was also annoyed by Cassavetes’s systematic use of only the most provocative film clips — for example, the hot tub scene from McCabe and Mrs. Miller and the pagans in Andrei Rublev. Instead of rattling her audience’s smugness, Cassavetes relies upon it, offering up a paean to cinephilia that is audacious enough to equate metaphorically the death of a TV station (and the eclectic programming it represented) with a murder/suicide.

    Z Channel comes to life for only one brief moment during the very end. After describing the last few days of Harvey’s life, Cassavetes includes a brief snippet from one of his former friends and colleagues. Barely containing his emotion, he says something to the effect of, “There’s a danger of turning Jerry into a hero here, and I’ve got a real problem with that.” I sat upright in my chair. It was the sentiment I’d been waiting for more than an hour to hear expressed. Lest we take this warning too seriously, though, Cassavetes then cuts to Robert Altman, who, when asked the same question about Harvey, pronounces with little hesitation, “I like him.”

    I did a quick scan of other online reviews of Z Channel and was disappointed to find so many critics accepting this redemptive narrative of the inspiring soul who was taken from us, tragically, and whose work for the integrity of cinema we should take up in his stead. Such a reading is possible only because of Cassavetes’s decision to elide the violence of Harvey’s end. How would the tone of the film change, for example, had she included reports from the crime scene or interviews with his wife’s surviving family? Instead, we are offered only one quick glance at a photo of the woman who later would be brutally murdered, and a few fond remembrances of her from Harvey’s friends.

  • Slacker (1991)

    Slacker (1991)

    Dir. by Richard Linklater

    Fifteen minutes or so into Slacker, a college-aged guy (Tom Pallotta) steps out of a coffee shop and is greeted by Jerry Deloney, a fast-talking, 40-something conspiracy theorist in a Batman T-shirt. Tom is headed home, and Jerry invites himself along for the walk, unloading a stream of paranoid fantasies as they go. Anti-gravity technologies, Mars landings, “secret groups in charge of the government,” drug cartels, missing scientists—Jerry’s ideas sound deluded and absurd even when they creep into the realm of verifiable fact. (Fifteen years later, his warnings about greenhouse effects seem eerily prescient.)

    On his commentary track on the Criterion DVD release of Slacker, writer/director Richard Linklater recalls his one direction to Tom:

    “It’s very important how you react. This is the tone of the movie.” I didn’t want any judgment. I said, “Don’t look at him weird. Don’t judge him. That’s up to the audience to do.”

    That refusal to judge, I’m finally realizing, is what attracts me again and again to Linklater’s films. Even in a genre picture like Dazed and Confused he avoids the typical teen movie cliches by affording equal value to all of his characters, regardless of their clique or social standing. That some of the characters come off looking worse than others (Ben Affleck’s O’Bannion and Parker Posey’s Darla, for example) is more the product of their particular behavior—a kind of socially-sanctioned sadism not uncommon among teens (and adults, for that matter)—than any too-simple, prescribed plot device.

    Linklater, perhaps more than any other contemporary filmmaker, is alive to the potential and the basic human value of the men and women who walk in and out of his films. And he seems to have a particular fondness for the folks who live on the margins, whether by choice or necessity. Slacker takes on one particular marginalized community—that class of restless, searching, “underemployed” artists, musicians, and drop-outs who seem to congregate in the corners of all American college towns—but his attitude toward them is not markedly different from his treatment of those teenagers in Dazed, the lovers in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, or the philosophers, scientists, and poets who drift through Waking Life: all are people of ideas with active imaginations and complex human desires. That we instantly fall into the habit of judging them is a bad thing, Linklater reminds us again and again.

    The young men and women of Slacker often talk nonsense. Their ideas are seldom fully-formed, and the most articulate of the lot are occasionally guilty of parroting whatever book they’ve read most recently. There’s the “Dostoyevsky Wannabe” who grabs a pencil to transcribe his own pretentious ideas at the moment of inspiration, and the “jilted boyfriend” who reads from Ulysses as he tosses his friend’s typewriter from a bridge. The film is smart enough and self-aware enough to acknowledge that simply parroting others’ ideas isn’t enough. As in Waking Life, there’s an existential bent to much of the film, a constant debate between theory and action. “You just pull in these things from the shit you read, and you haven’t thought it out for yourself, no bearing on the world around us, and totally unoriginal,” one girl tells her boyfriend. “It’s like you just pasted together these bits and pieces from your ‘authoritative sources.’ I don’t know. I’m beginning to suspect there’s nothing really in there.” And by that point in the film, we’re already feeling a bit bored and a bit superior, and so we nod our heads in agreement.

    But, while it’s not enough, reading and debating, becoming engaged with the world of ideas, is something of value, even when in its earliest stages of development and even though it can’t be easily commodified by a consumerist culture. Linklater refers to several of his characters as “uncredentialed authorities”—people like the JFK assassination buff, the old anarchist, and the video backpacker. They are experts in their various fields, knowledgeable and articulate, and yet they remain marginalized just the same. With a Ph.D. after their names or a five-figure price tag beside their art installations—with a credential—their place in society would be more secure, their market value more easily quantifiable. But, instead, they’re “slackers,” a term that has become derogatory in the years since the film’s release.

    There’s something wonderfully subversive about Slacker. I think so, at least. Linklater gives us a world functioning within a different economy. People live communally in shared houses, taking with them little more than a pile of clothes and books. They repair their own cars using borrowed tools and junked parts. One stamp and a few licks gets several people into a bar for free. “I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work at it,” one guy says. Of course, as anyone who has ever toyed with radical ideas knows, even alternative economies are slaves to “the real thing,” and so viewers of Slacker are forced to balance whatever romantic idealism they find in the film with the practical questions of life in capitalist America. I enjoy wobbly discussions of the Smurfs as much as the next guy, but somebody’s got to buy the next round of beers, know what I’m saying?

    Is there a single issue more important in America today and more absent from our movie screens than class? We occasionally get one of those fairy tales about some guy (usually white) who has it all but who doesn’t learn to live until he is befriended by some world-weary and wise person (usually black) from the wrong side of the tracks. Or we get satires of the suburbs that ask us to “look closer.” But we seldom see films that fundamentally challenge the system itself. I love that Slacker, like a good documentary, explores this other world, this other economy, while allowing us relative freedom to judge its merits.

    In one of Slacker‘s final sequences, an old man walks alone, speaking into a tape recorder.

    My life, my loves, where are they now? But the more the pain grows, the more this instinct for life somehow asserts itself. The necessary beauty in life is in giving yourself to it completely. Only later will it clarify itself and become coherent.

    It’s as close to a defining moment for Slacker as you’re likely to find. The first time I watched the film, I fixated on that last sentence, reading it as a challenge to anyone who would dismiss Linklater’s experiments in form. “Coherence is a lie of narrative cinema,” he seemed to be saying. (And I still believe that, by the way.) But now I can’t seem to get past the old man’s comments about the “necessary beauty” of the struggles of life. Or perhaps that should be the struggles with life. Active rather than passive.

  • Fallen Creatures in a Fallen World: The Films of John Cassavetes

    Fallen Creatures in a Fallen World: The Films of John Cassavetes

    This essay was originally published at Sojourners.

    – – –

    Superficiality is the curse of our age.” So begins Celebration of Discipline, Richard J. Foster’s classic defense of traditional spiritual practices such as meditation, fasting, study, simplicity, and solitude. Published in 1978, Foster’s book offered a corrective to America’s increasingly alienating and shortsighted cultural values – values that had inevitably infected the life of the church as well. Three decades later, Foster’s critique of the “doctrine of instant satisfaction” is more vital than ever, for technology now mediates all aspects of our lives, putting gigabytes of information in our hands (or handheld devices) but offering us little incentive to process it meaningfully. As a result, we are a people driven to distraction by trivia – by facts and figures, sound-bites, and rhetoric divorced from meaning or human consequence.

    The traditional Hollywood cinema is a direct contributor to this superficiality. Most films playing at your local multiplex – like most television shows, political speeches, and pharmaceutical advertisements – actively reinforce the comforting notion that all determining forces, whether social, political, economic, or biological, can be overcome through some combination of will, effort, and, if need be, superhuman or transcendent goodness. The assumption is that a narrative can and will be written that will discover a perfect order amid the filmed world’s chaos. Think of the standard comic book blockbuster, murder mystery, courtroom drama, or police procedural. The clues will all add up in the end. The dissonances will all be resolved. And in two hours or less.

    John Cassavetes, best remembered for his starring performances in such films as The Dirty Dozen and Rosemary’s Baby, countered Hollywood’s lazier, dehumanizing tendencies in a series of landmark films made between 1959 and 1984. Serving variously as writer, director, actor, financier, and all-around master of ceremonies, Cassavetes crafted a handful of films that, collectively, give lie to Hollywood’s faith in melodramatic plotting. Instead of stock character types, his films are populated by people who exist in constant flux, defining and redefining their social roles in relation to ever-changing circumstances. Rather than plotting a traditional narrative arc, Cassavetes’ films resist resolution (and often exposition, climaxes, and denouement as well), offering us poignant glimpses of recognizable lives, messy details and all.

    The Criterion Collection’s recent release of a Cassavetes DVD box set offers the perfect opportunity to discover five of his most important films: Shadows (1959), Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and Opening Night (1977). The collection also features an impressive, if regrettably uncritical, assortment of DVD extras, including a new documentary, interviews, and archival materials that provide further insight into Cassavetes’ working methods and his defining preoccupations.

    CASSAVETES WAS BORN in New York City in 1929, the son of Greek immigrants. After graduating from the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts and finding moderate success on stage, on television, and in the movies, he opened a method-acting workshop in Manhattan that attracted a core group of young talent. Recognizing the dramatic potential in his students’ improvisations and eager to explore alternative approaches to filmmaking, Cassavetes scavenged $20,000 and over a two-year period developed Shadows, a jazz-scored, Beat-infused document of disillusioned youth and race relations. In doing so, Cassavetes essentially gave birth to America’s independent cinema.

    Shot with a handheld 16mm camera, Shadows feels at times like a documentary, and indeed Cassavetes’ early methods owe more to the work of documentarian Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) and to the Italian Neorealists (Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti) than to the classic Hollywood studio system. Shadows achieves additional verisimilitude by means of its improvisatory nature. Cassavetes scholar Ray Carney offers a useful distinction between our typical understanding of “improvisation” – that is, an actor spontaneously inventing dialogue – and Cassavetes’ approach, which, though meticulously scripted, captures the performative nature of our daily lives, those moments when we improvise conversations, struggling to find the right words and too often stumbling upon the wrong ones instead. His characters, Carney writes, “are not denied moments of zaniness, inconsistency, or improvisatory inspiration because these would violate some tidy, coherent, package of ‘character’ – an entity, it is easy to forget, that exists only in certain forms of art and almost never in life.”

    This preoccupation with capturing the complex rhythms of “real life” extends to the structure of Cassavetes’ films as well. The average movie is composed of 50 or more brief sequences, each typically lasting less than five minutes, and each is designed with a particular end in mind – say, to move the plot from point G to point H or to develop a significant aspect of a character or relationship. Faces and A Woman Under the Influence, both starring Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands, throw off this traditional plotting and are instead built from a relatively small number of extended scenes. The result can be disorienting for the first-time viewer. Without the familiar tropes of melodrama (good vs. evil, love triangles, comedic relief, etc.), viewers are freed to explore the film without bias. As Carney writes, “every moment becomes as potentially important, interesting, and worthy of our attention as every other.” The multiplex is where we go to “lose ourselves” for a few hours at a time. Films like A Woman Under the Influence deliberately frustrate this tendency at every turn, forcing us to participate actively in the lives depicted onscreen.

    The films of John Cassavetes will never be accused of being “mindless entertainment.” His characters are, like the rest of us, fallen creatures in a fallen world who suffer the consequences of their behavior, deserved and undeserved, but who hold out hope despite it all, egged on by occasional encounters with love and something like grace. That makes them rare finds among American movies: characters deserving of our time, our patience, our empathy. “I am a moralist,” Cassavetes once said, “in that I believe the greatest morality is to acknowledge the freedom of others; to be oneself and to not be in judgment.” He extends that freedom to his audience as well. It is a powerful corrective to Hollywood’s superficiality.

  • Tarnation (2004)

    Tarnation (2004)

    Dir. by Jonathan Caouette

    The theater where I saw Tarnation subjects early arrivals to “The Twenty,” an obnoxious barrage of advertisements that I tolerate for two reasons: first, because it helps to subsidize Knoxville’s only venue for foreign and independent cinema (and given the small crowds that typically greet me there, it would appear that those subsidies are essential); and, second, because I relish the moment immediately following “The Twenty.” The digital projector is quieted, the house lights dim, and the film projector comes to life. In those few seconds of silence before the first trailer begins, you can hear actual film spooling through a gate—a mechanical process with gears and a bulb and celluloid.

    I mention all that because when the projector kicked into motion yesterday, I wondered how much longer the sound would last. Jonathan Caouette, as we all know by now, constructed Tarnation on his Mac for a couple hundred bucks. It’s composed largely of still photos and home videos. Little film was exposed in the making of his movie, and the quality of its presentation would have suffered little had it been projected digitally. As most films will be. Soon enough. That’s what was I thinking, at least, as trailers for Kinsey and The Sea Inside streamed by. Two biopics of extraordinary men who led extraordinary lives. Two films I haven’t the slightest interest in seeing. I’m just not interested in extraordinary lives, apparently. Give me the ordinary. The mundane. But present them to me with a touch a grace, and do it honestly and artfully. That’s what I was thinking, at least, when the ads finally ended and Tarnation finally began—in darkness and to the diegetic rumblings of Caouette’s camera.

    A quick synopsis. When she was twelve years old, Renee LeBlanc, a strikingly beautiful child, fell from the roof of her home and suffered temporary paralysis. Her parents, convinced that Renee’s troubles were psychological, approved aggressive treatment, and over the next two years she was subjected to more than two hundred rounds of shock therapy. Whether her mental illness existed prior to the treatments or was, in fact, a result of them Tarnation does not make clear (and cannot make clear, given the vagaries of memory and denial). Caouette, Renee’s only child, suspects the latter, however, and his film is a blinding, visceral document of the anger, sorrow, desire, and hope (despite it all) that have forever colored his perceptions of art, family, and love.

    Drawn from nearly 160 hours of home movies, tape recordings, and clips from Caouette’s amateur narrative films, and complimented by odes to pop culture and by an aggressive soundtrack, Tarnation has been described by its executive producers Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell as a “movie of the home” and an “autobiographical documentary.” In the case of Tarnation, classification is no exercise in pedantry, for evaluating its success or its artfulness (for lack of better words) demands discussion of its aims and methods. The film is compelling, to be sure—always interesting and, at times, deeply moving. Only the most jaded could emerge from the experience of Tarnation without respect for its subjects, a mother and son who have somehow managed to emerge from the circumstances of their lives with a hard-fought love for one another and for the sacred moments of beauty in life. It’s worth seeing for that reason alone.

    But, finally, I think, the film’s formal problems—its haphazard construction, conflicted voice, and questionable representations of life—become too great to sustain the weight of Caouette’s noble ambitions. (Because this is a blog and not a formal essay, and because I really should be working on other projects, I’m going to make it easier for myself by tackling each of these critiques in turn. The best compliment I can give Tarnation is to say that it’s the first film I’ve seen in weeks that compelled me to write.)

    Construction. The first of my complaints with Tarnation is also perhaps the most petty, and it’s simply this: After the opening titles, I don’t recall a single moment of silence. The film moves from one montage to the next, each accompanied by music culled from Caouette’s personal collection of CDs and LPs. Occasionally the songs are manipulated for effect—tailored to enhance the images on screen—but much more frequently, the picture is cut to sound. Caouette’s much-discussed exploitation of iMovie’s editing features explodes his home movies into stunningly beautiful abstraction, but they find their rhythms too easily in the music. This, it seems to me, creates an aesthetic dissonance. I could too clearly imagine the filmmaker, exhausted by the endless decisions of editing, pulling an album from his shelf and allowing the song to determine the cuts. “Rhymed abstraction” (or some such makeshift term) might be employed to justify the technique. Perhaps it’s a fitting description of schizophrenia. I don’t know. I just felt that the form too often co-opted the content, which is most regrettable because when Tarnation does find its voice, it’s stunning. Which leads me to . . .

    Voice. Following a trip to visit his mother, the teenaged Jonathan smoked two joints that he later learned had been laced with PCP and dipped in formaldehyde. The resulting psychotic episode left him with depersonalization disorder, “a feeling of disconnection from the body and a constant sense of unreality.” Caouette writes:

    They don’t really have a cure for this disorder, so it’s something I have learned to live with. Tarnation is designed to mimic my thought processes so the audience can also feel like they’re in a living dream, which can be scary and intense, but also beautiful and glorious. Tarnation is a documentary in the sense that it’s a true story but it’s also a happening, an encounter, and a way for you to meet me and for me to meet you.

    Caouette mimics his thought processes through formal means, beginning with the narration, which is textual, rather than the expected voice-over, and which refers in the third person to the Jonathan we meet on screen. This is a Jonathan Caouette, the film implies, one of many that we will eventually meet. There is the young Jonathan with his first camera, acting the role of an abused woman “givin’ testimony” to her sins. There is the teenaged Jonathan, openly gay and directing his musical adaptation of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (brilliant!). There is the 20-something Jonathan, living (happily?) and acting in New York City. We are asked, in a sense, to read each of these personae as characters in a film about a boy’s search for the love of his mother. It’s all happening to them, the film implies, to those people.

    But the step into third person is a conceit, and, in my opinion, it’s an unnecessary and misguided one. In the final act of Tarnation, when Caouette is living in a long-term relationship and is choosing to take on the responsibility of caring for his mother, we meet the Jonathan whose voice has been, by turns, whispering, screaming, and crying in our ears. Caouette’s effort to dramatize the “disconnection from his body” is a posture: Tarnation is no less self-aware than one of Caveh Zahedi’s autobiographical films and it lacks Zahedi’s formal rigor. I like the idea of a film such as this deliberately fracturing the narrative voice, but the execution in this case is poor. A symptom of Caouette’s relative inexperience, I would guess. Which leads me to . . .

    Representing a Life. Look closely at the image I’ve posted above. Mother and son. Finally at rest. Finally at peace. It’s one of Tarnation‘s closing images and also one of its most poignant. A glimmer of hope. Love among the ruins. But here’s the thing: the scene is staged. Renee is, as far as we know, really asleep, but Jonathan is not. He and David (Jonathan’s boyfriend) found her there on the couch and apparently couldn’t resist the precious, pieta-like beauty of the moment. The film begins with a similar trick: the camera is fixed on television static when David returns home to their apartment and wakes Caouette from a nightmare. He’s been dreaming about Renee, we are told. He’s worried. Cut to the next morning. Jonathan and David wake to the sound of an alarm clock. Try to ignore the tripod. Try to ignore the fact that you’re now suddenly watching a narrative film.

    I was anticipating Tarnation with some excitement because I had assumed that, unlike the larger-budget biopics filling the multiplexes right now, it would, without compromise, elevate truth above affect. But it does feel compromised. Caouette betrays the integrity of his film by focusing again and again on images that seem to float outside of the film as aesthetic objects. Like his mother, Caouette is a striking beauty (as is David, actually), and portions of the film play like a love song to their remarkable faces. (Notice the slow zoom-ins on Jonathan’s and David’s dark eyes.) Perhaps it’s another symptom of depersonalization disorder to reduce people to two-dimensional characters, but, regardless, it doesn’t make for great filmmaking. Ultimately, Tarnation is a compelling film about extraordinary people who have lived extraordinary lives, and that, regrettably, is its greatest asset.

  • Tell Them Who You Are (2004)

    Tell Them Who You Are (2004)

    Dir. by Mark S. Wexler

    Tell Them Who You Are has the best opening scene of any film I saw at this year’s festival. Haskell Wexler is standing in his camera equipment room, taking stock of his inventory for an upcoming sale. When his son Mark, who is shooting the documentary that we are watching, asks his dad to explain where they are standing, Haskell shakes his head, twists his face with exasperation, and says (I’m paraphrasing from memory here): “No, Mark. You’re holding the fucking camera. Just shoot the room, and you’re audience will figure it out. If this is what your fucking movie is going to be like, if you’re planning to just shoot a bunch of talking heads, then the hell with it. I want nothing to do with it.”

    It would be nearly impossible to make a dull documentary about Haskell Wexler. Now in his mid-80s, Wexler is as sharp and as full of piss as ever — still decrying injustice wherever he finds it, still ridiculing the mistakes of other filmmakers whenever he encounters them. Having shot nearly fifty features over the past five decades (including John Sayles’s Silver City, which also played at the festival), Wexler is justified in thinking himself an authority on the subject of filmmaking, which is why Tell Them Who You Are is such a fascinating movie. Being on the other side of the camera forces Wexler to revisit the aesthetic decisions that guided him through the making of his own documentaries forty years earlier, groundbreaking social films such as The Bus (1965), Medium Cool (1969), and Introduction to the Enemy (1974). He can barely tolerate his son’s direction at times, and that tension is at the heart of the film.

    Mark Wexler is quite good with a camera himself, however, and his film is remarkably well-constructed. What begins as a standard Biography-style portrait, complete with childhood photos, juicy gossip, and celebrity testimonials, slowly evolves into, first, a self-reflexive commentary on the ethics of documentary filmmaking and, finally, a touching story of forgiveness and reconciliation. One of the final images is of Haskell sitting at a monitor, watching his son’s completed film. Mark doesn’t linger too long on the shot or allow it to become sentimental, but the emotion is evident on his father’s face and it speaks volumes. Mark seemed reticent to speak too candidly after the screening but did acknowledge that having a camera fixed between them offered both men a much-appreciated filter and that their relationship has, in many ways, been healed by the process.

    I hope that Tell Them Who You Are finds decent distribution, and given the recent critical and popular success of so many documentaries, perhaps it will. It was one of my favorites of the festival, largely because of Haskell Wexler himself. His bottomless hatred of corporate interests and political conservatives (like his son) is inspiring and laugh-out-loud funny. But the film also exposes his pain and, though he would be loathe to admit it, his regret, particularly in a moving scene with his ex-wife, Mark’s mother. Another high recommendation.

  • Arthur Miller, Then and Now

    Arthur Miller, Then and Now

    No new Cine Club notes this week, as we decided spontaneously last night (and with mixed results) to watch John Huston’s The Misfits (1961). I love parts of the film — Thelma Ritter’s jokes and Montgomery Clift’s performance, in particular — and I think it’s a fascinating film to talk about. Clark Gable is so perfectly cast as the anachronistic cowboy lost in a world of conspicuous consumerism. Gable himself is as out of place as the character he portrays — Gable, the classic Hollywood star duking it out with a raucous bunch of method actors.

    Also, it’s impossible for me to watch Marilyn Monroe in this picture and not imagine then-husband and screenwriter Arthur Miller by her side, feeding her lines and exploiting her beauty. The Misfits borders on pornographic in its treatment of Marilyn. Her body is oggled constantly by every man she encounters, by the camera in leering close-ups, and by the audience. In Miller’s short story treatment for the film, Marilyn’s character, Roslyn, personifies that same strange blend of sexpot beauty, schoolgirl innocence, and sympathetic fragility that Monroe exudes on screen, but on paper Roslyn can exist as metaphor, just as the horses that are so viciously and unnecessarily broken at the end of the story/film can exist as metaphors. When captured on film, however, the real seems to overpower the symbolic, and we’re forced to watch a real woman (with whose tragic end we are all familiar) be exploited and real horses be broken, which is a different thing entirely. (I’m sure that there is a film theorist, probably French, whose work would help me explain that better.)

    And speaking of Arthur Miller and his exploitation of Marilyn Monroe, it turns out that my favorite TV actor, Peter Krause, is getting poor reviews for his turn as Quentin in the current Broadway revival of Miller’s After the Fall. Seems a horrible bit of miscasting to me. The role was originated by Jason Robards in 1964, under direction by Elia Kazan. Robards was, by turns, desperate and terrifying and imposing and, when necessary, sympathetic. Krause is so good at provoking our sympathy; I wonder if the reported lifelessness of his performance was a deliberate attempt to moderate that somewhat. For what it’s worth, I’d still really like to see the production.

  • Random Musings . . .

    Random Musings . . .

    On some recent viewings . . .

    Shame (Bergman, 1968) — Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow star as Eva and Jan Rosenberg, cultured musicians who escape to a rural island when their orchestra is shut down during a war. Their new, more simple life as farmers is soon interrupted when their home is invaded, and they are forced to confront the violence that they had so meticulously avoided. Shame is typically described as a psychological portrait of the dehumanizing consequences of war. The splintering of Eva and Jan’s relationship, then, becomes representative of savage self-interest and alienation, and the interruption of their careers (captured most obviously in an image of Jan’s broken violin) serves as a metaphor for war’s denial of Art, beauty, and culture.

    Shame is my least favorite of the Bergman films I’ve seen. By setting the action amid some unspecific, fairy tale-like war, Bergman (who obviously knows a thing or two about the proper uses of symbolism) invests too much “Meaning” in his characters and in their actions. Shame is an Allegory with a capital A, trapped uncomfortably somewhere between absurd, dystopian satire and the real here and now. I think I would have preferred the film had it jumped completely to one of those extremes. As with all collaborations between Bergman, Ullman, von Sydow, and cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Shame is packed with remarkable performances and jaw-dropping photography, and it’s well worth seeing for those reasons alone. I was only disappointed because it fails to reach Bergman’s own ridiculously high bar.

    I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (Zahedi, 1994) — Zahedi, his father and half-brother, and a small film crew spend Christmas in Vegas, where Zahedi hopes, among other things, to heal his familial relationships and to prove the existence of God. With this film alone as evidence, I would say that he accomplishes neither, but the attempt is fascinating to watch. Caveh is a polarizing figure, to be sure, and Las Vegas shows him at his most obnoxious and manipulative, particularly during an extended sequence in which he attempts to talk his 62-year-old father and 16-year-old brother into taking Ecstasy. I’m still not sure whether or not he succeeded.

    To me, the appeal of Caveh Zahedi is his willingness to emote unapologetically, to subject those emotions to close scrutiny, and to do so all under the watchful eye of a camera in which he places an almost naive faith. In his more recent film, In the Bathtub of the World (2001), and in this interview with Film Threat, Caveh talks about his disappointment with an experience (reading a great book, attending a film festival) that failed to be “salvational,” and I think that word is the key to his project. There’s something beautiful about watching someone search so desperately for that salvational experience, particularly in a mostly Christian nation like America, where we are so comfortable with the language of grace and forgiveness. Caveh’s films remind me of a concept that I seem to come back to again and again: negative transcendence — “God appears only as the Absent One, as that which is signified only by the depth of the artfully expressed yearning.”

    Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995) and Before Sunset (Linklater, 2004) — I had planned to write up a full-length response to these films, which, when taken together, are something of a minor miracle. Sunset is my favorite film of the year so far. Told in real time, it captures an eighty minute conversation between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), a couple who spent “one magical night together in Vienna” nine years earlier, then never spoke again. When they finally reunite in Paris, they are older (their early-30s) and somewhat hardened by experience, and their reunion unravels the comfortable lies upon which their lives are founded. I can’t seem to write or talk about this film without rambling on about my wife, about how we met ten years ago, and about how our ideas of love and romance have evolved since, which is why I’m cutting this short. I’ll just say that Before Sunset is a remarkably well-crafted film that ends at precisely the right moment and that treats its characters and its audience with great tenderness and respect. Like I said: a minor miracle.

    The School of Rock (Linklater, 2003) — A film that doesn’t for a minute divert from its by-the-numbers plot but that is a hell of a lot of fun to watch anyway. In other words, I laughed when Jack Black tried to be funny and I got goose bumps when the band played their big show. Plus, any film that mentions Rick Wakeman’s keyboard solo in “Roundabout” get bonus points. The School of Rock‘s biggest surprise: Who knew Joan Cusack was so hot?

  • Dreamer

    I’m almost finished Dreamer, Charles Johnson’s novel about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s struggles in Chicago in 1966, and it’s amazing — the finest novel I’ve read in months. (Dreamer wants to become part of my stalled dissertation; I have, as yet, managed to fight that urge.) Early in the novel King meets Chaym Smith, his doppelganger, and seeing his own face on the body of a homeless drug addict shakes his faith in the very foundation of his Movement: Equality.

    Nature was unjust. Who could deny that? But in the realm of the spirit invoked by the Founders, in God, there was no defensible social distinctions, for all creatures great and small, black and white, were isomers of the divine Person. It was a shamelessly Platonic argument, he knew that, yet of its veracity he’d been so sure.

    At least until now. . . .

    In no other way than the somatic were [King and Smith] equal. In fact, they were like negatives of each other. He laughed, humorlessly. The idea of justice in his life and Chaym’s was a joke. Not only was the distribution of wealth in society grossly uneven, he thought, but so was God-given talent. Beauty. Imagination. Luck. And the blessing of loving parents. They were the products of the arbitrariness of fortune. You could not say they were deserved.

    Smith acts throughout the novel as a foil to the Movement’s idealist platitudes. When Amy, a young volunteer, tells of her grandmother’s and great-grandfather’s back-breaking efforts to forge a strong black community and strong family values, the novel’s narrator, another volunteer, compares her story to “being gently led into the past, a distant better time when black people were the moral fiber of the nation” (88). Smith will have none of it: “That story she told, . . . it’s a fucking lie. Front to back, it was kitsch. All narratives are lies, man, an illusion” (92). It’s a nice device: interrupting a story to expose it as myth.

  • Great Directors: Hal Ashby

    Great Directors: Hal Ashby

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    “I was born in Ogden, Utah, the last of four children. Mom and Dad divorced when I was five or six. Dad killed himself when I was 12. I struggled toward growing up, like others, totally confused. Married and divorced twice before I made it to 21. Hitchhiked to Los Angeles when I was 17. Had about 50 or 60 jobs up to the time I was working as a Multilith operator at good old Republic Studios.”
    – Hal Ashby

    The temptation, when writing about American filmmaker Hal Ashby, is to reduce his life and career to any of a number of ready-made, Hollywood formulae: the small-town boy done good who works his way up from the studio mailroom to the Academy Awards stage; the 1960s free spirit who champions individual rights in a world of oppressive authority and takes his fair share of lumps in the process; the cautionary tale of regrettable indulgences and falls from grace. Unfortunately, the relative dearth of critical and biographical writing currently available about Ashby makes such a trap unavoidable. This, despite the awards, the misty paeans from his collaborators and, most importantly, that amazing streak of films in the 1970s, a streak that rivals those of his more famous contemporaries, Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Altman. With The Landlord (1970), Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978) and Being There (1979), Ashby proved himself a prodigious talent. That he disappeared behind a string of disappointing pictures in the 1980s and died before redeeming his reputation has led many critics of the Hollywood Film Renaissance to dismiss Ashby as a filmmaker who lacked a coherent voice or who was simply the competent beneficiary of remarkable collaborations. This essay will, I hope, become part of a larger critical reappraisal of Ashby’s films, for they document, with equal parts grace and polemic, a moment in America’s history that was defined by precisely that dichotomy.

    No biographer has yet made a subject of Hal Ashby, which is surprising considering the quality and influence of his films and the dramatic circumstances of his life. Soon after discovering his father’s body at the age of twelve, Ashby dropped out of school and began working odd jobs; by seventeen he had already been married and divorced (the first of his four failed marriages). According to Peter Biskind, whose Easy Riders, Raging Bulls offers the only readily-available discussion of Ashby’s life, the young Mormon decided in 1950 to leave the cold winters of Utah and Wyoming behind and to head off for the golden skies of California (1). After arriving in Los Angeles, and after three hungry weeks of fruitless efforts there, Ashby visited the California Board of Unemployment and requested a job at a film studio. He was sent first to Universal, where he worked in the mailroom, but by 1951 he had become an apprentice editor at Republic. He later moved on to Disney and then to Metro, where he met Jack Nicholson, then an aspiring unknown.

    Ashby’s film school was the editing room. “It’s the perfect place to examine everything,” he told Michael Shedlin. “Everything is channelled down into that strip of film, from the writing to how it’s staged, to the director and the actors. And you have the chance to run it back and forth a lot of times, and ask questions of it – Why do I like this? Why don’t I like this?” (2) After working as assistant editor under Robert Swink on William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion (1956) and The Big Country (1958) and George Stevens’ The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Ashby began to gain attention for his own cutting of films by Tony Richardson (The Loved One [1965]) and Norman Jewison. Ashby and Jewison would collaborate on four films: The Cincinnati Kid (1965), The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), In the Heat of the Night (1967), for which Ashby won a Best Editing Oscar, and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). It was Jewison, also, who recommended his friend to direct The Landlord, a project under development at United Artists. Thus Hal Ashby came to make his first film at the age of 40. “If I had it all to do over again, I would rather go at it a different way,” he later said. And, predicting the generation of young American filmmakers who would emerge in the 1970s, he then added: “I say, Good Lord, go out and somehow raise the money to make your own projects. It’s not easy, by any means, but the potential is there for becoming just as good a filmmaker in a much shorter time. I feel very strongly about this” (3).

    The Landlord is an outrageous debut, a film that, 34 years later, still feels daring, both stylistically and politically. Beau Bridges plays Elgar Enders, who at 29 leaves his opulent family estate and buys a row house in a New York City ghetto. His plan is to remodel the home once he has evicted its tenants, including Marge (Pearl Bailey), Mr. and Mrs. Copee (Louis Gossett Jr. and Diana Sands) and Professor Duboise (Melvin Stewart). When we first meet Elgar, he is reclining on a lawn chair, sipping brandy. He looks directly into the camera and tells us: “It’s just that I get the feeling that we’re all – I mean everybody, black, white, yellow, Democrats, Communists, Republicans, old people, young people, whatever – we’re all like a bunch of ants, see. See, the strongest drive we have as a true life force is to gain territory.” All of his preconceptions and values – racial, political, economic and otherwise – are tested, though, once his life becomes entwined with those of his tenants. Ashby’s skills as an editor, now freed by his creative control over the picture, are on display from the opening moments, as he crosscuts between high contrast footage of a racquetball game and the softer, more natural tones of the African-American neighbourhood, a visual motif that continues throughout the film. That divide between the white world and the black is heightened also by Ashby’s treatment of his characters: the Enders he turns into absurd and often hilarious caricatures; the tenants are afforded greater sympathy. The end result is an often brilliant, occasionally uneven film that (ridiculous as this might sound) resembles late Buñuel’s attempt at a blaxploitation film.

    Capsule reviews of The Landlord typically describe it as a bildungsroman in which an emotionally stunted white man comes of age through his first-hand encounter with the realities of African-American life. Elgar “grows fond” of his tenants, such reviews claim and, by witnessing his blossoming romance with a woman of mixed race, viewers are to learn something about the possibilities of racial reconciliation in America. What we actually learn, though, is just the opposite. Ashby’s film plays like the cinematic equivalent of Radical Chic, Thomas Wolfe’s 1970 account of a fundraiser for the Black Panthers held in the well-heeled home of Felicia and Leonard Bernstein. Like the “limousine liberals” who gathered there on Park Avenue to sip wine, write cheques and discuss – in the measured tones of the New York Review of Books – the “race problem”, Elgar is unprepared for the messy radicalism that greets and, even more significantly, that excludes him. “See, children? Some people can’t learn what we learn,” Professor Duboise tells a room full of students who are already well versed in the rhetoric of Black Power. Ashby captures this tension in a brilliant sequence near the end of the film, when Copee, who is threatening Elgar with an axe after learning that his wife is carrying Elgar’s child, stops and slowly lowers his weapon. Rather than turning his attention to the film’s protagonist, however, Ashby instead stays in a tight shot on Copee, and we’re made suddenly aware that the film has been his story all along. The white, liberal audiences that watch The Landlord root for Elgar because, like him, they (we) believe that their idealism and distant sympathies can somehow make the world “colour blind”. By forcefully shifting the film’s perspective from Elgar’s to Copee’s, Ashby reveals just how naive and politically charged such a position really is.

    Ashby inherited his second feature project, Harold and Maude, when executives at Paramount decided that Colin Higgins was too green for the job. Higgins, who wrote the screenplay while still a film student, had hoped to direct the picture himself but acknowledged that the project was never really his to lose. “I was going to make a half-million dollar film and they wanted to make a million-and-a-half dollar film,” he told Shedlin (4). The thematic similarities between The Landlord and Higgins’ script made Ashby a logical, if somewhat risky, choice for the studio. The story of a twenty-year-old rich kid who learns to love life through his encounter with a woman sixty years his senior, Harold and Maude delights in everyday transgressions: uprooting trees from manicured suburban streets and returning them to the forest; parading a yellow umbrella past the dark faces of a funeral line; flipping a bird to repressive authority figures, whether they be mothers, priests, psychiatrists, soldiers or highway patrolmen. That the film manages to do so without surrendering to the carpe diem-like sentiment that has made a respected actor of Robin Williams is testament to the fine performances of its leads, Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon, but also to Ashby’s deft direction, which transforms Higgins’ dark satire into a Brothers Grimm fable (mixed, perhaps, with a Charles Addams drawing or two). As with fairy tale, the moral of Harold and Maude is ultimately less important than the telling of the tale itself. The pure joy of Ashby’s story-telling frees the film to transcend its often banal symbolism and preachy didacticism, creating a filmed world that, like that of Wes Anderson, Ashby’s most gifted disciple, allows for the possibility of grace and childhood wonder in a fallen, cynical, adult world.

    And Ashby’s is, most certainly, an adult world. When, two-thirds of the way through the film, we learn that Maude is a Holocaust survivor – and we learn this only from a wordless, one-second shot of the identification tattoo on her forearm – the context within which the film is operating suddenly blossoms to include not only Nixon’s America but all of the impossibly tragic 20th century. Like Walter Benjamin who, in his famous description of Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” imagines the angel of history propelled irresistibly forward by the storm of progress “while the pile of debris before him grows skyward”, Harold and Maude demands that viewers experience a glimpse of hope despite the tragedies of the past (5). Ashby accomplishes this to best effect in the final sequence, in which he dismantles and intercuts three events: Harold and Maude’s arrival at the hospital, Harold’s agonising wait for news of her death, and his high-speed drive up the California coastline. Accompanied only by Cat Stevens’ song “Trouble” and by the roaring engine of Harold’s Jaguar-cum-hearse, the sequence is marked by a tragic inevitability. There’s no question of Maude’s survival, no possibility that this dark fable will be appended with a Disney ending and yet, despite the sadness, Harold walks away in the end strumming his banjo, and the film is rescued from the nihilism of its day.

    Ashby’s follow-up is less optimistic. In The Last Detail, “Badass” Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young), two Navy “lifers”, are chosen to escort Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) from Norfolk, Virginia to the Portsmouth Naval Prison in New Hampshire. Only 18 years old, Meadows has been court-martialled and sentenced to eight years for attempting to steal $40 from the base’s polio charity. Badass and Mule intend to deliver their prisoner as quickly as possible and spend their per diems and remaining leave in New York City, but they’re soon charmed by the young Meadows and become increasingly troubled by their mission. Written and produced during the dark, closing days of the Vietnam War, The Last Detail employs the picaresque structure of the standard World War II-era service comedy but undercuts its cliched devices at every turn. When a drunken Badass attempts to teach Meadows to be a signalman, for instance, Ashby drowns their dialogue (and much of the scene’s potential humour) in the sounds of gunfire and explosions emanating from the war film playing on the hotel room television. It’s an ironic reminder of the “good war” that precipitated America’s disastrous involvement in Southeast Asia and that helped to define masculinity and heroism for men of Badass and Mule’s generation. Those definitions are repeatedly called into question throughout the film: Badass’ attempts to seduce a young hippy (Nancy Allen) with his anachronistic tales of military adventure fall flat; Mule’s justification for his tour in Vietnam – “Gotta do what the Man says” – is less noble service than mindless obedience; Meadows’ first trip to a whorehouse ends with the most premature of ejaculations. When Badass and Mule do finally hand Meadows over to authorities at Portsmouth, they head home spouting their hatred for this “motherfucking chickenshit detail,” but there’s little doubt that the home they’re heading back to is in Norfolk. Unlike the wealthy Elgar and Harold, these blue-collar warriors have no other options.

    The standard critical line on The Last Detail is that its many and obvious merits are attributable, first and foremost, to the quality of Ashby’s collaborators, Nicholson and screenwriter Robert Towne chief among them. Towne certainly deserves much credit, both here and in his next teaming with Ashby on Shampoo, but the film soars on the strength of Ashby’s direction, and particularly on his restraint of Nicholson. By casting 6’4” Quaid and 6’2” Young in the supporting roles, Ashby turns Badass into an embodiment of aggressive overcompensation; Nicholson has never looked so small or his shtick so impotent. And when the actor does launch into full-on “Jack” mode – as when he trashes their motel room in a vain effort to rouse Meadows’ anger – Ashby refuses to allow Nicholson’s persona to subsume the character. Instead, he cuts abruptly to a quiet moment of Badass and the young seaman together on the edge of the bed, now bored and contained. Such a jumpcut works here only because Ashby’s verite approach with actors and with the staging of key sequences, an approach employed to even greater effect in Coming Home, allows room for freedom and improvisation. That so many actors – Quaid and Young, but also Cort, Gordon, Lee Grant, David Carradine, Peter Sellers, Jack Warden and Bruce Dern, among others – delivered arguably the best performances of their careers in Ashby films is perhaps the finest testament to his gifts as an actor’s director.

    As with The Last Detail, Ashby is often treated by his critics as merely a hired gun for his work on Shampoo, offering competent but unexceptional direction in what is essentially a Robert Towne and Warren Beatty picture. Beatty stars as George Roundy, a hip Hollywood hairdresser whose reputation is built as much on his prowess in the bedroom as in the salon. As the film begins he’s torn between three women: his girlfriend Jill (Goldie Hawn), his ex Jackie (Julie Christie) and Felicia (Grant), a client whose wealthy husband Lester (Warden) holds the purse strings to George’s dream of owning his own salon. When all five characters attend the same election night party, Shampoo collapses quickly into a sexual farce straight from the Restoration stage. But the film is seldom laugh out loud funny. Instead, Shampoo plays like a melancholy answer to The Graduate – complete with original Paul Simon music – except that Ben is now no longer fucking just Mrs. Robinson and Elaine, but also every other bored, vain housewife in the neighbourhood. The youthful naiveté and reckless adventure that mark those final, iconic moments of The Graduate have been replaced by disillusionment, pathetic posturing and moral apathy. When George tells Jackie, “I don’t fuck anybody for money, I do it for fun,” he’s accusing her of whoring herself to Lester, but he’s also deluding himself. George is the biggest whore of the lot, and he pays the highest price for it.

    Of the films he made in the ’70s, Shampoo feels the least like a Hal Ashby picture. It’s too restrained, too closely bound to the tight structuring of Towne and Beatty’s remarkable screenplay. At times, there is also an uncharacteristic staginess to the blocking of actors, as in the first scene between Christie and Warden, where they move unnaturally around Lester’s office, self-consciously hitting their marks in synch with the choreographed movements of the camera. Ashby’s films come alive, instead, when his actors are allowed room to move, as when George flies into a rage outside of a bank that has just denied him a loan. Here, Ashby shoots Beatty in an extreme long shot, watching silently from across the parking lot as the actor rips off his jacket and tie and throws them both into a trashcan.

    Such long shots are a trademark of Ashby’s films: Elgar standing in the street with his child in his arms, Maude’s introduction at the first funeral, Badass and Mule wrestling Meadows to the ground, Bob undressing at the beach in Coming Home, Chance walking off across the water in Being There. The extreme long shot serves, for Ashby, the same function that the close-up does for many filmmakers – heightening emotion at critical moments in the narrative – but it does so without forcing a shift to a particular character’s subjective perspective (Ashby, in fact, very seldom cuts on an eyeline match). We remain always detached observers, judging and, occasionally, sympathising with characters, but never coming to see the world exclusively through their eyes. Shampoo also makes effective use of popular music, another Ashby trademark. Except for the Paul Simon song, which returns like a Greek chorus five times in the film, the only other non-diegetic music is The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” which plays over the opening scene and returns again for the closing credits. Released in 1975, within months of Nixon’s resignation, and set seven years earlier on the day he was first elected, Shampoo is an elegy to the wasted potential of America’s cultural revolution. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” is wistful nostalgia, as ironic as the final words we hear uttered by the President-Elect on George’s television: “A teenager held up a sign that said ‘Bring Us Together,’ and that will be the great objective of this administration at the outset. To bring the American people together.”

    While Shampoo is, at times, stylistically different from Ashby’s other pictures of the era, it continues his investigation of the theme that most dominates his work – that is, the cost, both literal and metaphoric, of individual freedom and integrity in a world dominated increasingly by oppressive, dehumanising economic interests. Bound for Glory, then, is a logical, if ambitious, next step in that project. A document of four years in the life of folksinger Woody Guthrie – the “dustbowl” years when he was travelling through the southwest, living with and singing to camps of migrant workers – the film is part hagiography, part Waiting for Lefty-like agitprop, part old fashioned Western. Joseph McBride, writing for Film Comment in 1976, called it “a majestic film, the most ambitious film made in the United States since The Godfather Part II, and one of those rare pictures which are made with the lavish resources, meticulous care, and concern for epic breadth that characterize the way the great Hollywood movies used to be made” (6). While McBride might be accused of hyperbole, Bound for Glory remains a remarkable film, and it is an interesting artefact from Hollywood’s Film Renaissance. After the massive commercial success of Shampoo, Ashby had carte blanche for his follow-up, and he used that muscle to rescue the Woody Guthrie project from years of development problems and script rewrites. At a production cost of nearly $10 million and starring David Carradine, then known mostly for the television series Kung Fu and for low budget films like Death Race 2000 (Paul Bartel, 1975), Bound for Glory was a sizeable risk for United Artists. It’s difficult to imagine a studio taking such a gamble at any time other than the mid-1970s, those few years when adventurous filmmaking was still occasionally rewarded at the box office and when studio heads had yet to learn the various lessons of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980).

    What is most striking today about Bound for Glory is Haskell Wexler’s photography, which turns Depression-era California into one more of Ashby’s many worlds of the haves and have-nots (7). Los Angeles, with its green lawns and sparkling sheen, couldn’t be more different from the small Texas town where Guthrie begins his voyage and where everything – even the people, it seems – is covered by an inch of dust. Wexler shoots it all in soft, muted tones; the sky is as brown as the desert landscapes through which Woody travels, slowly, for the first third of the film. Like Ashby’s and Wexler’s next collaboration, Coming Home, much of Bound for Glory was filmed with long lenses that pull characters into focus against an impossibly expansive backdrop. When Woody sits down to play his harmonica, for instance, he and his chair appear to float above a desert highway that stretches, in a dead-straight line, from Arizona to the Atlantic. The long lenses also allow Ashby and his crew to stay far-removed from the action, capturing the spontaneous “performances” of his lead actors and his large cast of extras. A two minute montage of such images lends the campground sequences, in particular, a documentary-like feel; Wexler and Ashby would later return to this technique for Coming Home‘s Fourth of July picnic sequence.

    In many ways, Coming Home epitomises Hal Ashby’s cinematic style, and it is also his most personal film. The project was conceived by Jane Fonda with the help of screenwriter Nancy Dowd, and was originally intended for John Schlesinger. When he left the project, however, the screenplay was reshaped significantly by the circle of talent who would eventually bring it to the screen: Fonda, Ashby, Wexler, Jon Voigt, producer Jerry Hellman and screenwriters Waldo Salt and Robert Jones. They were united by their opposition to the Vietnam war and by their concern for the veterans who were returning to an America unable or unwilling to reacclimatize them to life back home. Told as a love triangle between a young woman (Fonda), her Marine husband (Dern) and the paralysed vet (Voigt) she meets while he is overseas, Coming Home confronts head-on what had been treated already as a sidebar in Harold and Maude, The Last Detail and Shampoo: the lingering wounds – physical, psychological, emotional and political – from America’s involvement in Vietnam. The film earned Ashby Best Director nominations from the Academy and from the Director’s Guild; Voigt, Fonda and the team of writers won Oscars for their efforts; and Dern, Penelope Milford (as Sally’s friend, Vi), Don Zimmerman (editor) and the film itself were all likewise rewarded with Oscar nominations.

    If Coming Home is guilty, at times, of over-earnestness or of slipping into polemic, it is rescued from such potentially fatal missteps by its many fine performances and by the filmmaker’s palpable respect for his characters. Even Dern’s disgraced Bob, a Marine who could so easily have been reduced to a caricature, becomes instead a tragic figure capable of eliciting our deepest sympathies. Dern’s desperate delivery of the line, “What I’m saying is I do not belong in this house!” is one of the most affecting moments in any of Ashby’s films and it encapsulates, in a single breath, the crisis of the dislocated veteran. Ashby and Wexler once again blend dramatic set pieces with documentary style footage, most notably in the opening sequence, when Voigt’s character, Luke, listens quietly as a group of actual, paralysed vets discuss their very real feelings about the war. That same sense of verisimilitude also informs many of the scenes between the lead actors, as when Fonda and Voigt stroll down the boardwalk, discussing Bob’s impending return. On the DVD release of Coming Home, Wexler remarks that the scene was shot with an 800 millimetre lens from a distance of more than 400 yards, freeing us, once again, to remain distant and relatively objective observers, and allowing the actors room for spontaneous improvisation. The film’s showpiece, however, comes in its final sequence, when Ashby crosscuts between Luke’s speech to a group of draft-eligible teens, Sally and Vi’s trip to a grocery store, and Bob’s walk into the ocean, all of it accompanied by Tim Buckley’s “Once I Was”. Like the finale of Harold and Maude, this sequence balances tragedy – is Bob swimming off to his death? – with painful progress. Despite the still-lingering wounds of war, Sally’s new-found independence and Luke’s charity suggest that Ashby retains some measure of hope for healing.

    The last of Ashby’s signature films is Being There, his adaptation of the Jerzy Kosinski novel. After publishing Being There in 1971, Kosinski swore that he would never allow it or any of his other work to be filmed, but after learning that a movie project was in the early stages of development, and after experiencing first-hand Peter Sellers’ aggressive campaign for the lead role, the author set to work on a screenplay of his own. Ashby’s final product is, by most accounts, a smashing success, both as an adaptation of a much-respected novel and as a film, judged on its own merits. The story of Chance, a simpleton gardener who stumbles into America’s most powerful spheres of influence, Being There is a satiric jab at the co-opting of the nation’s public discourse by television’s empty images and content-free rhetoric. Such ideas were nothing new to Ashby, who had been toying with similar themes in his own work for years. In The Last Detail, Shampoo and Coming Home, in particular, characters are unable to free themselves from the constant barrage of political speeches, commercial advertisements, and reportage that emanate from the televisions, billboards, and radios that seem to have them surrounded. When Sally asks Bob what combat was like, his response echoes the main argument of Being There: “I don’t know what it’s like; I only know what it is. TV shows what it’s like; it sure as hell don’t show what it is.”

    For Ashby, the great challenge of Being There was sustaining its absurd premise for two hours without allowing it to slip, even for a moment, into farce. “This is the most delicate film I’ve ever worked with as an editor,” he told Aljean Harmetz. “The balance is just incredible. It could be ruined in a second if you allow it to become too broad. Peter’s character is a sponge. He imitates everything he sees on television and everyone he meets. In one scene, he imitated the voice of a homosexual. It was very funny, but we couldn’t allow it. It would have destroyed the balance” (8). Ashby’s film, like Sellers himself, plays the comedy straight-faced, refusing to rob the character of his allegoric simplicity by making of it little more than a cheap joke. Chance is, instead, the ultimate straight man, a tabula rasa against which his associates’ ridiculous behaviour might be exposed. In the film’s funniest scene, Eve (Shirley MacLaine) – the wealthy, sex-starved woman who first tempts Chance into the world of earthly delights – tries to seduce her guest while he watches a passionate romance on television. When the program ends, however, Chance is no longer able to imitate the “appropriate” behaviour and so he flips the channel, leaving Eve confused and frustrated. “I like to watch,” he tells her, which sends Eve to the floor, where she masturbates to climax. Ashby builds additional layers of commentary and humour onto the scene by having Chance flip to an aerobics program, whose instructor encourages viewers to “explore slowly.” By the end of the scene, Eve is panting on the floor, unaware that Chance is standing on his head, just like the woman on television. Self-indulgence and superficiality have never seemed more absurd.

     

    Being Thereis a strangely fitting conclusion to Ashby’s enviable run during the 1970s. Commenting on Kosinski’s prescient novel, Barbara Tepa Lupack writes, “while Kosinski did not live to witness the Chance-like candidacy of H. Ross Perot, conducted largely via television time purchased with his own millions, he surely must have appreciated the irony of actor Ronald Reagan’s two telegenic terms in office as well as understudy George Bush’s subsequent lacklustre performance in the White House” (9). Ashby’s career, like those of so many of his contemporaries, was derailed by sweeping changes in Washington, D.C., in Hollywood and in America at large. The studios, now on the lookout for blockbuster box office returns and wary of signing over creative control to “cost no object” directors, turned their attention away from smaller, more personal films like Ashby’s. Reagan’s America likewise awoke to a “new morning”, conveniently ignoring the traumatic events that had defined the previous decades. For Ashby, who had embodied the country’s counter-cultural spirit in thought and deed, the “Me Decade” must have been catastrophically disheartening. In an era of conservative piety and institutionalised greed, Ashby’s politically motivated irreverence and his simple faith in humanity’s potential for radical change were suddenly an anachronism.

    Ashby finished his career with a string of largely forgotten films. He reunited with Haskell Wexler for the first two: Second-Hand Hearts (1981), starring Robert Blake and Barbara Harris, and Lookin’ to Get Out (1982), a character study of two gamblers written by and starring Jon Voigt. Like the rest of Ashby’s final work (and The Landlord), neither is currently available on any home video format. He also directed Let’s Spend the Night Together (1982), a by-the-books document of the Rolling Stones’ 1981 tour, and followed it with The Slugger’s Wife (1985), an irredeemably bad translation of Neil Simon’s abysmal screenplay (10). The poor quality of the film is frequently attributed to Ashby’s growing dependence on drugs and alcohol, which had precipitated a physical collapse during the Stones’ tour. Because of his increasingly unreliable behaviour, films were taken from him during post-production and given to others for final editing. Ashby’s final feature, 8 Million Ways to Die (1986), however, marked something of a return to form for the director. An adaptation of Lawrence Block’s popular detective novel, the film is an entertaining piece of film noir, with Jeff Bridges as the hardened ex-cop and Rosanna Arquette as his femme fatale. Though burdened by the stylistic influence of TV’s Miami Vice and by James Newton Howard’s cloying, synthesized score, 8 Million Ways to Die comes to life at surprising moments, particularly in the final act. When Bridges confronts the young drug kingpin, played by Andy Garcia, we are reminded of Ashby’s gifts as a director of actors; they appear to have set aside Oliver Stone’s screenplay and discovered a more palpable energy in their improvisations. Ashby’s final production was Jake’s Journey (1988), a television project developed by ex-Python Graham Chapman. After filming the pilot, both men were prevented by poor health from continuing their collaboration.

    Hal Ashby was diagnosed in early-1988 with a cancer that spread rapidly to his liver and colon and to which he succumbed, finally, on December 27. Ashby’s death at 59 prevented him from witnessing the re-birth of independent cinema that energised America’s filmmakers, young and old, during the early-1990s. Imagine how different our appraisals of Robert Altman’s career might be had it ended with Popeye (1980), Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) and Secret Honor (1984) – had it ended before he made The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993). Or, imagine how different our opinion of Francis Ford Coppola might be had he not retreated to his vineyards and re-emerged as an acclaimed producer of others’ films – had his career ended with One from the Heart (1982), The Outsiders (1983), and Rumble Fish (1983). Hal Ashby personifies, better than any other director, Hollywood’s Film Renaissance of the 1970s: its moral ambivalence and political rage, its stylistic audacity and deeply human voice, its supernova of energy that could not possibly burn so brightly for very long.

    Endnotes

    1. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, New York, Simon, 1998. Unfortunately, because Biskind’s book has become so influential, and because it is (sadly) the only text that devotes more than a few sentences to Ashby, what little we know of the director’s personal life has been reduced to a series of sensational anecdotes. There’s Hal the chain-smoking, hyper-obsessive editor, sitting at his Moviola for twenty-four hours at a stretch; Hal the recluse, holed-up in his beach house, unwilling to talk to anxious producers; Hal the Hollywood rebel, who promised to use his Oscar as a door stop; Hal the drug-addicted depressive, who fought suicidal tendencies throughout his life and whose addictions cost him several high-profile projects in the 1980s.
    2. Michael Shedlin, review of Harold and Maude, Film Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1, 1972, p. 53.
    3. Shedlin, p. 53.
    4. Shedlin, p. 52.
    5. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New York, Schocken, 1985. p. 285.
    6. Joseph McBride, “Song for Woody”, Film Comment, November/December 1976, p. 26.
    7. Wexler, in fact, was fifth in a line of talented young DPs to work with Ashby. He was preceded by Gordon Willis on The Landlord, John Alonzo on Harold and Maude, Michael Chapman on The Last Detail, and László Kovács on Shampoo.
    8. Quoted in “Chance Encounters: Bringing Being There to the Screen” by Barbara Tepa Lupack in Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski, New York, Hall, 1998, p. 214.
    9. Lupack, p. 213.
    10. If watching Rebecca DeMornay sing a synthesizer-backed cover of Neil Young’s “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” was not the most depressing moment of my film-watching life, then it’s only because I could imagine Ashby enjoying the irony of it all.
  • Lost in Translation (2003)

    Lost in Translation (2003)

    Jonathon Rosenbaum on Lost in Translation:

    Coppola does a fair job of capturing the fish-tank ambience of nocturnal, upscale Tokyo and showing how it feels to be a stranger in that world, and an excellent job of getting the most from her lead actors. Unfortunately, I’m not sure she accomplishes anything else.

    I like that Rosenbaum threw “not sure” into that last sentence, as if he’s still mulling over his reaction. I feel the same way.  It’s that rarest of finds: an American film that is invested enough in its characters to reveal them slowly, patiently to the audience. For instance, in the third act of the film, when most writer/directors would send their leads into an impassioned and cliche-ridden argument, Coppola sits Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson on opposite sides of a table and films them from a distance. It’s an awkward moment — uncomfortable and tense and recognizably real. I loved it. Their final embrace is also brilliantly staged.

    But, as I watched Lost in Translation, I kept thinking of two other films, and it suffered for the (admittedly unfair) comparison. Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Good Men, Good Women also depicts the modern Asian metropolis as a storehouse of stuff — of manufactured goods marketed, packaged, and photographed with the glossy hipness of a five-page spread in Architectural Digest — but Hou’s film grounds that critique in a particular cultural and historic context. Like a few others, I was annoyed by the outsider-looking-in-and-laughing easy jokes that give Lost in Translation‘s American audiences something to mock but too little to admire. Charlotte’s solitary walks through a temple and a flower-arranging class do offer something of a counter-balance. I guess I’m just ultra-sensitive to anything that smacks of American xenophobia these days.

    More often, though, I was thinking of Tsai Ming-Liang, and of his film, The Hole, in particular. Like Lost in Translation, The Hole is about the desperate desire for communion in an alienating environment, told as an unlikely “love” story. Tsai and Coppola share an interest in elliptical editing, but their styles are quite different. Lost in Translation is composed of brief episodes — short takes of beautifully composed images — while Tsai tends to leave his camera running for minutes at a time. What can I say? I prefer the latter, and at times I sensed that Coppola does to. We often see Charlotte and Bob alone in their rooms, bored and lonely, but we aren’t forced to experience it with them. The most impressive shots, I thought, were of Charlotte pressed against her hotel window, looking over the Tokyo sprawl. It’s a familiar image to Tsai’s fans (is Coppola one?). At times, I wish we could have stayed there longer with her and come to know her better.

    Think I’m going to have to pick up the soundtrack next time I’m out. Great stuff from Air, Kevin Shields, My Bloody Valentine, and The Jesus & Mary Chain.

  • Little Feat Mix

    Little Feat Mix

    Let me make this point perfectly clear: Little Feat is the great unsung American rock and roll band. The July mix is a collection of songs from their golden period — roughly 1972 – 1978 — the years when founder Lowell George was at his peak. I’ve deliberately omitted a few staples, including their most famous numbers “Dixie Chicken,” “Oh Atlanta,” and “Willin’,” so that I could dig a bit deeper into the catalog.

    “Easy to Slip” — The opening cut of Sailin’ Shoes (1972), the Feat’s second album and their last as a four-piece. Singer/songwriter/slide-guitar-genius George and bassist Roy Estrada formed the band after leaving the Mothers of Invention. They were joined by pianist Billy Payne and drummer Richie Hayward, both of whom continue to tour and record with the ’90s incarnation of the Feat. “Easy to Slip” is just a perfect opener.

    “Two Trains” — From Dixie Chicken (1973), which introduced the classic Feat lineup. Estrada left to rejoin the Mothers and was replaced by Kenny Gradney, who was joined in the rhythm section by percussionist Sam Clayton. Paul Barerre, another top-notch singer and songwriter, also added a second guitar to the sound. A nice display of George’s trademark slide playing, “Two Trains” was later reworked for his first solo album, Thanks I’ll Eat It Here (1979).

    “The Fan” — Feats Don’t Fail Me Now (1974) is far and away my favorite of their studio albums. The main thing to know about Little Feat is that Hayward, Gradney, and Clayton consistently created the fattest pocket ever enjoyed by a rock and roll band. Gradney is that selfless bass player that every great band needs — seldom flashy but always teeth-rattling.

    “All That You Dream” — By the time they made The Last Record Album (1975), Barerre and Payne were beginning to contribute more of the songwriting. If I could step into a wayback machine to see Lowell George sing just one Little Feat song, I might choose Barerre’s “All That You Dream” — just so I could tip my head back and sing the opening line at the top of my lungs, “I’ve been down, but not like this before.” More songs should open with the chorus.

    “Got No Shadow” — One of the first of Payne’s Feat tunes (1972), it also might be his best. “Got No Shadow” is probably my favorite cut from Sailin’ Shoes.

    “Juliette” — Dixie Chicken is most known for the Bourbon Street boogie-woogie of the title track, but most of the album sounds more like “Juliette,” which is just a beautiful song. I love the production of this album. It’s warmer and a bit cloudier than anything you’ll get today. Even on CD, you can practically hear the record needle pop.

    “Day or Night” — George is credited for only two of the nine songs on Time Loves a Hero (1977). By the end of the ’70s, most of his time was devoted to other “recreational” pursuits (which would lead to his death a few years later). The Feat’s sound changed accordingly. Hero features Michael McDonald and Skunk Baxter on a few tracks — evidence that, like the Doobies, Little Feat became slightly Steely Dan-ified during this period. It works on “Day or Night.”

    “Time Loves a Hero” — Little Feat does Jimmy Buffett? Not my favorite track, but it’s such a great singalong chorus, and I like the bassline.

    “Cold, Cold Cold” — A great antidote to the uber-production of “Hero,” “Cold” is Lowell George in concentrated form. This song shows up again at the end of Feats Don’t Fail Me Now. On the Live at Rockpalast DVD, you can listen to a running commentary with Payne, Barerre, and George’s widow. Her response to “Cold, Cold Cold” is classic. It couldn’t have been easy to hear her husband sing, “That woman was freezing, freezing cold.”

    “On Your Way Down” — I could listen to this song every day for the rest of my life. Written by Allen Toussaint, “On Your Way Down” was just made for George’s voice, which never sounded better.

    “Roll Um Easy” — Lowell George and an acoustic guitar. What I wouldn’t give for a chance to sit alone in a room with that voice.

    “Skin It Back” — I had planned to only include songs with George on lead vocal, but Barerre sounds so good here. I’ve been known to break into this song at odd moments. And once I get started . . . “Well, I’m waiting for something to take place, something to take me away from this place, round city to city, town to town, runnin’ around in the shoes of a clown, and that desperate . . .”

    “Day at the Dog Races” — I just had to include this one. The story goes that “Dog Races” was written during those long hours when the rest of the band was waiting for George to show up for rehearsals. What began as an impromptu jam grew into one of Little Feat’s few instrumentals. The 12-minute definitive version is now available on the remastered 2-disc Waiting for Columbus, but this studio version from Time Loves a Hero proves, I think, that they were capable of music as harmonically and rhythmically interesting as anything that Return to Forever and Weather Report were doing in the late-70s. Plus, how good is Billy Payne? He’s Rick Wakeman with a soul.

    “Mercenary Territory” — If you don’t own a Little Feat album, just go buy the newest release of Waiting for Columbus (1978), which is without a doubt the greatest live rock album ever, Live at Leeds be damned. “Mercenary Territory” is relatively bland for the first two minutes, but then it changes gear, switching into a groovy walking bassline and Lowell George slide solo. When Lenny Pickett from Tower of Power unleashes his sax solo, all hell breaks lose. As he’s climbing into ridiculously high notes, notice how George is trailing him with his slide. If it don’t make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, then you ain’t breathin’.

    “Spanish Moon” — Little Feat, at their best, make you feel like you’re walking through the French Quarter, and this live version of “Spanish Moon” does that better than any other single track I can think of.

    “Fool Yourself” — Consider it a coda.

  • From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1996)

    From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1996)

    Dir. by Mark Rappaport

    Inspired by my recent wanderings through Ray Carney’s Website, I rented Mark Rappaport’s From the Journals of Jean Seberg and watched it twice this weekend. Here, Rappaport — who Carney calls “a geographer of our fantasies, dreams, and obsessions” — splices together news footage, film clips, and original video, creating a documentary-ish collage that transforms Seberg’s life into a meditation on misogyny, the Hollywood star machine, and the morality of spectatorship. He also manages to chart America’s journey from Eisenhower-era consensus through the rise and fall of the New Left, and does it all with wit and authority and insight. Quite a feat for a 95 minute film.

    Journals is built around the performance of Mary Beth Hurt, who plays Seberg from beyond the grave. The actress stares directly into the camera — which is only appropriate for someone standing in for the star of Godard’s Breathless — and recounts her life in the first person: born in 1938 in America’s heartland, discovered in Otto Preminger’s nationwide talent search for his adaptation of Shaw’s Saint Joan, launched to international stardom by Godard, abused by a trio of husbands, excoriated for her involvement with the Black Panthers, ignored in a series of forgettable roles, dead from suicide at the age of 40.

    Rappaport follows this line in mostly chronological order, using Seberg’s major film roles as jumping off points. For instance, when discussing the artistic and commercial failings of Saint Joan, he wanders off through the lives of Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman, and Alida Valli — all leading ladies who carried the “curse” of playing Joan of Arc. It’s a fascinating conceit — a kind of associative editing that, in a sense, hyperlinks the various threads of film history and, in the process, forces us to acknowledge the strangeness of narrative and symbolic archetypes. Why do we take such pleasure from watching a noble young woman burned before us? Or, as Rappaport asks when discussing Seberg’s most interesting role — her lead in Robert Rossen’s Lilith (1964) — why must men (the writers, producers, and directors) always equate female madness with aberrant sexuality?

    Journals is at its best, I think, when Rappaport intertwines the lives and loves of Seberg, Jane Fonda, and Vanessa Redgrave. All are of the same age, all made films directed by their husbands (another of the film’s more interesting concerns), and all participated actively in radical political movements. Their stories ended quite differently, though. Redgrave retreated to the stage and to small, innocuous film roles. The public, Hurt’s Seberg tells us, doesn’t care to watch its young beauties grow old on screen. Fonda exploited her sexualized Barbarella persona by stretching and gyrating her way through a series of popular workout videos that earned her millions. My favorite of Hurt’s lines is when she mentions that in 1988, in order to stave off bad publicity, Fonda apologized to veterans groups for her Vietnam-era activities, but never, as far as Hurt could remember, apologized to feminists for being a bimbo.

    Seberg’s life ended in 1978, when she finally succeeded after a series of failed suicide attempts. The reasons for her depression are complicated, the film shows us — her lopsided marriage to Romain Gary, a lifetime spent “doing what she was told,” the death of her daughter, and the hounding pressures exerted on her by both Hoover’s F.B.I. and the popular press. But, ultimately, we’re left to wonder about the destructive effects of a life lived on screen. A life of being looked at. At one point, Rappaport draws a line from the Kuleshov effect to Breathless to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name — or, from Russian Formalism to the first Modern cinema to Reagan-era machismo. Seberg is stuck there in the middle. Her blind stare into the camera is “enigmatic” and “sphinx-like,” or so the male reviewers have said, and all I can do is project my own desires onto her beautiful, beautiful face. The story of her life.

    I look forward to sharing Rappaport’s film with students who bristle at the word “feminism,” because Journals is not the least bit preachy — in fact, it offers few pat answers at all — but it makes feminist concerns immediate and (I hesitate to use the word) entertaining. Quite a feat.

  • A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

    A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

    Dir. by John Cassavetes

    It took me three tries to make it through John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence. I wasn’t bored by the film; I was in agony. Gena Rowlands’s performance as Mabel Longhetti, a blue collar housewife collapsing under the weight of mental illness, is the single most painful experience of my film-watching life. Cassavetes doesn’t make it easy for us. His brand of cinema verite forces us to look on helplessly, passively, as if we were just a few more strangers in Mabel’s life, a few more strangers who refuse to stand up for her. He uses static medium shots to sit us down at the Longhetti’s large, loud dinner table, then denies us an escape route when the tension builds. These moments are balanced with equally painful close-ups that bring us into intimate contact with Mabel, someone with whom such intimacy is a constant threat and danger.

    Peter Falk plays Mabel’s husband, Nick, an abusive bastard who, though occasionally capable of stealing our sympathy, is one of the screen’s most loathsome villains. In the final act of the film — an hour-long scene that takes place on the evening of Mabel’s return from a six-month stay in a sanitarium — the depths of Nick’s depravity and the extent to which he has contributed to Mabel’s instability are revealed in a series of devastating sequences that play out in real time. I found myself literally squirming in my seat, gasping aloud and wiping away tears. Because of that I just can’t accept Roger Ebert’s take on the final image: “Only by the end of the film is it quietly made clear that Nick is about as crazy as his wife is, and that in a desperate way their two madnesses make a nice fit.” Calling that fit “nice” is a disgrace. I don’t get it.

    As he would be the first to point out, Ray Carney is the authority on and champion of John Cassavetes’s films. A professor of film and American studies at Boston University and director of the film studies program there, Carney is best known for being something of a polemicist and provocateur (and a damn fine film critic, to boot). I like to browse through his impressive Website when I’m feeling pessimistic about the current state of academia. Doing so certainly doesn’t cure me of my condition, but I find it strangely comforting to read such articulate and well-informed rants on the subject. It also helps that the guy seems to lack any kind of internal censor. Carney doesn’t pull punches, and it’s damn refreshing.

    In “‘A herd of Independent Minds’: Or, Intellectuals Are the Last to Know,” Carney sits down with an unnamed interviewer and skewers contemporary film criticism, Hollywood, the intellectual influence of the New York Times, academic biases against film art, and Citizen Kane. God bless him. The whole piece is worth a read (as is much of the other writing collected at his site), but I think Carney is at his best when he talks about the incestuous relationship between art, academia, and the cultural forces that shape critical opinion.

    Journalists and the things they write about have become part of the celebrity culture, which means that once someone or something appears in The New York Times or The New Yorker, he, she, or it is taken seriously. If someone’s name appears in the New York Times or The New Yorker a certain number of times, that’s all that it takes to constitute importance. And the people who appear in The New York Times or The New Yorker the most are journalists. So they are taken the most seriously. They become the cultural definition of what it is to be a thinker. If a journalist is merely a bit clever verbally and shows up on the breakfast table long enough, most academics and intellectuals mistake him or her for a thinker. No one ever asks if you are really important. Are you really smart? . . .

    My understanding of being an intellectual is that it is to be given a unique opportunity to stand just a little outside our culture’s system of hype and publicity. It is to be someone who refuses to be pulled into the muddy undertow of advertising, journalistic sensationalism and celebrity worship. While more or less everyone else is paid to sell something, the academic is paid to be independent. Or not paid. But is independent anyway. But what has happened in our culture is the opposite. At least in film, the intellectuals line up to sell out to the culture’s values. And for the people giving out the grants and prizes, the celebrity tail wags the intellectual dog. Our universities are no different.

    But academics, obviously, aren’t the only people getting wagged by that celebrity tail.

    This applies to every group. What is it Joyce says in Finnegan’s Wake? “We wipe our glosses with what we know.” For literary critics, a movie is good if it has clever dialogue or is a faithful adaptation. It’s no different from why multiculturalists judge a film in terms of how many minority characters are in it or what their income level is, why Jewish viewers like Schindler’s List, World War II vets like Saving Private Ryan, teenage girls like Titanic, and teenage boys like The Matrix. It’s identity politics. People enjoy seeing themselves and their own views represented — not their real selves and views of course, but a flattering, idealized version of them. It’s not a terribly sophisticated view of what makes great art. Yet how many times do you hear something like “Holocaust survivors said that Spielberg’s movie was accurate” invoked as proof that Schindler’s List is a great movie?

    Carney offers some advice for film-viewers — tips and tricks that he’s learned over the years as he’s tried to empower young film students and complacent professors alike:

    I do a lot of things to lever them out of their old ways of knowing — including deliberately destroying a lot of the pleasure of the screening, by calling things out during it, or stopping the film at a climactic moment and asking questions about it—so that they can’t just sit back and relax and watch the movie. I am reprogramming their brains, teaching them new sets of responses, new things to look and listen for. Sometimes I talk all the way through a film to prevent them from “dropping into it” even for a minute. I have to play a lot of mind games and sprinkle a lot of fairy dust to keep them motivated. Students really have to put themselves in my hands, and there may be a certain amount of resistance for the first couple months, but that too becomes part of the learning process—a lesson in how we resist change and hold onto past viewing habits. But the best ones stay with it because as the challenges get greater, the trust and personal bond grows. I can’t do any of that when I am showing the film to a professor. The relationship is entirely different. With twenty-year-olds who are malleable and open to new experiences it’s not that hard to orchestrate the changes, but for someone older and more set in their ways it’s much less likely to happen.

  • The Sweet Sting

    The Sweet Sting

    With nothing better to do last Saturday night, my wife and I found ourselves watching Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused again. Aside from my lingering obsession with Sixteen Candles, I’ve never been a big fan of teen comedies. Most are cut-and-paste collages of cliches and bad pop that are too busy romanticizing high school to remember how much it sucked and how damn interesting the typical teenager really is. I’m not being ironic this time. Seriously.

    The best compliment I can give Dazed and Confused is that it makes me deliriously nostalgic. My American Heritage calls “nostalgia” a “bittersweet longing,” which gets it just about right, I think. I’ve never been one to miss high school. I would guess that in the last ten years I’ve spoken to three people from my class. But I do occasionally find myself longing for something from those days, something lacking in the day to day management of adult life.

    Joanna and I chatted about this as we watched Dazed and Confused Saturday night (as adults are wont to do — we chat), and we decided that that something is an “intensity of experience” only found amidst the stew of anxiety and wonder that is adolescence. Think about it. When you’re in high school, whose car you ride around in on Friday night matters. And who sees you in that car matters even more. It’s not trivial, although I think we adults like to console ourselves by pretending it is. In fact, I’m not sure that anything I’ve done in the last ten years has mattered as intensely as almost everything mattered when I was fifteen. Dazed and Confused gets that just right, which makes it the only teen movie that, well, that matters.

    Watching it again, I was really struck by this conversation, which is also just right.

    Mike: I’m serious, man, we should be up for anything.
    Cynthia: I know. We are. But what? I mean, God, don’t you ever feel like everything we do and everything we’ve been taught is just to service the future.
    Tony: Yeah, I know. It’s like it’s all preparation.
    Cynthia: Right. But what are we preparing ourselves for?
    Mike: {glib} Death.
    Tony: Life of the party.
    Mike: {glib again} It’s true.
    Cynthia: You know, but that’s valid. Because if we’re all gonna die anyways, shouldn’t we be enjoying ourselves now? You know, I’d like to quit thinking of the present, like right now, as some minor, insignificant preamble to something else.
    Mike: Exactly. Man, that’s what everyone in this car needs is some good ol’, worthwhile, visceral experience.

    Sure, it’s a bit carpe diem-ish — and I usually recoil at anything that smacks of Robin Williams sentimentality — but there’s also something wonderfully freeing in that existential naivety. That “insignificant preamble” stuff has come up often in my conversations with other well-adjusted adults lately. Odd.

  • A Few Words Upon Discovering Cassavetes

    A Few Words Upon Discovering Cassavetes

    John Cassevetes is my latest obsession. On a whim, I recently picked up a used copy of Faces (1968), the story of Dicky and Maria Forst’s disastrous attempts to find peace and companionship outside of their loveless marriage. Shot entirely in stark, high-contrast black-and-white, and featuring Cassevetes’s trademark dialogue, Faces feels at times like a documentary — voyeuristic, discomforting, and brutally real.

    It took me about 15 minutes to fall into the film’s rhythms and style — the opening sequence might be its weakest — but by the time we see Dicky and Maria alone together at the dinner table, I was absolutely hooked. Faces is like the New Wave meets Edward Albee, as it builds its emotional conflict from the tension between the characters’ false surface bravado and all of those painfully insecure close-ups. I’m amazed by how genuine some of the shifts in emotion feel.

    The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) might be a more refined film, but it’s also, I think, less satisfying. Ben Gazarra’s performance as Cosmo Vitelli, a strip club owner deep in debt to dangerous men, is always convincing and occasionally brilliant. But nowhere does he (or maybe it’s the material) reach the same plaintive heights achieved by Lynn Carlin and Gena Rowlands in Faces. Still, though, his closing monologue is the best scene I’ve seen in some time. His fate is now sealed, yet he manages to inspire a strange joy and pride and community among his performers. It’s almost like a moment of grace.

    Special mention goes to Bookie for featuring the always fascinating Tim Carey, most memorable for his performances in the early Kubrick films, The Killing and Paths of Glory. There are several scenes here in which his castmates (especially Seymour Cassel) seem almost apprehensive — or even afraid — around Carey. Those moments give the film a nice spark, an odd bit of unpredictable energy.

  • Adaptation (2002)

    Adaptation (2002)

    Last night my wife made some kind of sarcastic comment — a not unusual occurrence around our home — and I responded with, “Oh, honey, irony is so 2001.” After two or three seconds of silence we both laughed.

    The problems of irony, particularly when of the postmodern bent, are on mind-numbing display in Adaptation, a film that collapses under its own self-referential weight so many times that, at some point — and I think it was right about the time that Meryl Streep started humping Chris Cooper — I stopped watching the film and began waiting for it to end. Which is a shame because there are moments in it that are quite good, especially those few scenes when we get to listen to Susan Orlean’s beautiful prose in voice over. If we are to believe anything in the script — a big if, I realize — we can assume that it was that prose that inspired Charlie Kaufman to begin his adaptation in the first place. Or maybe it was the beauty, that most mysterious and troublesome of encounters for the postmodern ironist. I feel about Adaptation like I did the Coens’ The Man Who Wasn’t There a little over a year ago: I’d be much more willing to accept their cynicism if they hadn’t given me glimpses of something more.

    But as the Coens, Kaufman, and Spike Jonze would surely tell me, “That is precisely our point, man.” (Well, I don’t know if they’d add the “man,” but most apologists for these films probably would.) There’s even a nice little bit in Adaptation when Donald Kaufman tells his brother that he’s decided to add to his screenplay a “snake eating its own tail.” “Ouroboros,” Charlie tells him. “He’s called Ouroboros, and that’s me.” Get it? Kaufman (the real Kaufman) has covered all the bases, predicted and undercut our arguments, sealed off any avenue of epistemological escape. And you know what? I just don’t care.

    Adaptation may have felt fresh to me if it had been released thirty-five years ago, or if I had never watched a Godard film or read The French Lieutenant’s Woman (and seen the adaptation, also starring Streep), or if I were oblivious to Sam Shepard, whose True West casts a formidable shadow here. But it’s not fresh and, aside from several amazing performances, it’s not even that interesting. I can’t decide if that opinion leaves me resigned to the realm of the unhip or if I’ve somehow transcended the unhip and circled back around to hip again. But, again, who really cares?

    On a side note, before Adaptation I was subjected to the trailer for Bruce Willis’s next film, Tears of the Sun. Based on this trailer alone, I’m going to pray that this film not only fails miserably at the box office, but that it takes down the careers of everyone involved, too. Imagine a jingoistic and imperialist version of Rambo. (See? There remains the proper time and place for effective irony.)

  • Full Metal Jacket (1987)

    Full Metal Jacket (1987)

    Dir. by Stanley Kubrick

    Images: All of the Kubrick trademarks are on display here: languid tracking shots, perfectly symmetrical compositions, slow dissolves, Barry Lyndon-style zoom outs, and thematic changes of color temperature (most noticeable in both blue-tinted scenes involving Pyle). Favorite images: Joker’s “war face,” the long shot of Mr. Touchdown’s crumpling body, the interview segments, “the Jungian thing, sir,” and Pyle’s “major malfunction.”

    • • •

    “Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it.”
    — Michael Herr, Dispatches

    Full Metal Jacket has been unfairly characterized by many as a deeply flawed narrative, a film whose brilliant first act overshadows the “in country” sequences that follow. I’ll admit to having spent some time myself in that camp. Lee Ermey’s kinetic performance as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman is a sight of strange beauty; his uber-masculine, profanity-fueled taunts are terrifying both for their misogyny and for their undeniable appeal. Likewise, Vincent D’Onofrio’s turn as the pathetic Private Pyle invites us to experience Parris Island by way of a comfortable narrative convention: the bildungsroman. Though unusually impersonal and free of easy sentiment (both Kubrick trademarks), the basic training sections of FMJ essentially conform to our classic genre expectations, mapping out the well-worn path from raw recruit to U.S. Marine.

    That Kubrick undercuts his coming-of-age story with Pyle’s brutal murder/suicide has led many to call Full Metal Jacket an anti-war movie, one that challenges America’s call for “a few good men” and the very processes (militaristic and sociological) that create them. While that’s certainly true—and I’ll soon return to Kubrick’s critique of masculinity—I wonder if it might be more useful to call FMJ an anti war-movie movie. For the auteur is obviously fascinated, in a deliberately self-reflexive way, with the influence of images and storytelling on the formation of what might be described as ideological mythology, that is, the conventions of belief and behavior imposed upon us through cultural narratives by various makers of meaning. Kubrick, always an intellectual filmmaker (and I would deny the negative connotations so often attached to that word), destabilizes those familiar myths, appropriately representing the Vietnam War by way of a narrative that, like the war itself, frustrates expectations and refuses progress.

    Private Joker’s opening line—”Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?”—serves as a refrain throughout FMJ, making explicit the unspoken ties that bind America’s victory in WWII (and the subsequent cinematic representations of it) to the Cold War ideology that made Vietnam possible. In the film’s most self-reflexive sequence, a camera crew interviews a platoon of grunts, who affect bravado, but seem genuinely bewildered by the failure of their actual war experience to conform to their preconceived notions of “heroism,” “bravery,” and “sacrifice.” The aptly named Private Cowboy (Arliss Howard) describes the battle at Hue as the first to be like “what [he] thought a war was supposed to be. There’s the enemy. Kill him.” Another wonders why the locals are unappreciative of their efforts: “They’d rather be alive than free, I guess. Poor dumb bastards.” The stories of American masculinity and historical progress—written during WWII by their fathers, political leaders, and commanding officers—are revealed to be little more than Tall Tales.

    In that sense, John Wayne, I guess, is like Pecos Bill. Despite the interesting moral ambiguity of some of his finer roles, for many critics of the Cold War he serves more often as an icon, a shorthand referent to the nostalgia and arrogance that continues to characterize so much of America’s foreign and domestic policy. In Dispatches, journalist and FMJ co-writer Michael Herr complains that neither the Duke’s brand of flag-waving patriotism nor the traditional Hollywood films in which it was trumpeted could possibly make sense of the morally ambiguous Vietnam experience. “The Green Berets doesn’t count,” Herr writes. “That wasn’t really about Vietnam, it was about Santa Monica.” Hartmann’s murder, then, is a symbolic gesture for Kubrick, a violent erasure of an anachronistic icon. Watch the scene again, and notice how closely Hartmann’s voice and swagger mimic John Wayne’s when he learns that Pyle’s rifle is loaded: “Now you listen to me, private pyle, and you listen good.”

    Like Herr’s and several of the other landmark accounts of Vietnam—Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, in particular—Full Metal Jacket proposes a new narrative form, one that capitalizes on the contradictions of war instead of reducing them to an impossibly coherent heroic myth. Gone are the noble feats of bravery that would lead, inevitably, to the taking of Pork Chop Hill or to victory at Iwo Jima. Gone are the rag tag group of soldiers who share stories from “back home” and pour over letters from Mom. Instead, Kubrick splices the “in country” acts into disjointed episodes, leaving viewers, like the soldiers onscreen, wandering without direction.

    Nowhere is Kubrick’s narrative strategy more obvious and effective than in the film’s closing sequence, that moment when we most desire closure. After showing Joker (Matthew Modine) fire his pistol into a dying female sniper, Kubrick cuts to a long shot of soldiers on the march from left to right across the screen, their figures silhouetted by the fires burning throughout Hue. Then, in the final cut of the film, Kubrick deliberately breaks the 180 degree rule: we now see Joker in a medium shot as he and the others march from right to left. By maintaining continuity through the soundtrack, Kubrick prevents the unusual cut from being as jarring as one might expect, but the implications are obvious: unlike traditional war films, Full Metal Jacket has refused to honor our journey by arriving at any prescribed destination. Instead, we continue to hump it back and forth, longing for the direction and ideological stability of Parris Island.

    • • •

    As a side note, I felt almost compelled to write this response after watching Full Metal Jacket last night—the first time I had seen it in several years. Despite my deep affection for Kubrick, I had always felt strangely ambivalent about this film, mostly, I think, because I considered it a retread of concerns that had already been tackled in better films: the possibility of noble action in war (Paths of Glory), technological hubris (2001), Cold War ideology (Dr. Strangelove), and the dehumanizing influence of the State over the individual (A Clockwork Orange). But after spending several months knee-deep in some of the best literature to emerge from the Vietnam experience, Full Metal Jacket struck me with something of the force of revelation. This really is an impressive film. One of Kubrick’s best.

    Reading suggestions:

    • David Rabe: The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Streamers, and Sticks and Bones
    • Michael Herr: Dispatches
    • Gustav Hasford: The Short-Timers
    • Tim O’Brien: Going After Cacciato
    • Bobbie Ann Mason: In Country
    • Joan Didion: Democracy
  • Frida (2002)

    Frida (2002)

    Dir. by Julie Taymor

    Images: I’m tempted to compare the cinematographic style of Frida to “magical realism” of the Borges and Marquez bent, but Taymor’s visual flair is more often mannered than magic. The worst example is a strange sequence involving Nelson Rockefeller that alludes, both visually and through the score, to Hollywood gangster pictures of the 30s but comes off as campy instead of expressionistic. Still, though, there are a few stunning images. My favorites: Frida and Diego as painted cut-outs at their wedding reception, a low-angle shot of one of Diego’s mural-covered ceilings, Frida and The Broken Column.

    • • •

    Julie Taymor’s Frida is a better-than-average 2-hour biopic, evidencing many of the typical strengths and weaknesses of the genre — a fascinating life told too quickly that borders, uncomfortably at times, on hagiography. Beginning in 1953, on the day of Frida Kahlo’s first formal exhibition in Mexico, the film then jumps to 1922, when the artist was a precocious 15-year-old, shocking her family with her outrageous behavior and rogering* her boyfriend in a bedroom closet. The remainder of the film weaves chronologically through her life, ending with a remarkable image of her deathbed in 1954. In between, we watch as she develops a complex, lifelong relationship with fellow Mexican artist, Diego Rivera — played to perfection by Alfred Molina — and as she flirts with political radicalism, artistic inspiration, and an assortment of lovers.

    Frida is a film about a significant Modernist art movement; it’s about love and loyalty and marriage; it’s about Communism, Leon Trotsky, Josephine Baker, and Nelson Rockefeller; it’s about the struggle for personal, political, and artistic integrity; but mostly Frida is about Salma Hayek’s body. It’s about her washboard midriff, her flawless skin, and, perhaps inevitably, her bombshell breasts. It’s about her lips (in a lock with Ashley Judd’s). It’s about her 5′ 2″ frame (dwarfed by Alfred Molina’s). It’s about her eyebrows, her legs and feet, her vagina, and the small of her back. It’s about her brown eyes and her brown skin and her black hair. And I wonder now if a biopic of Frida Kahlo could be shot in any other way.

    While still a student, Kahlo was involved in a bus accident that left her back and legs broken and her abdomen impaled. The emergency procedures intended to save her life launched a decades-long struggle through corrective operations, chronic pain, and, significantly, several miscarriages, all of which are chronicled in brutal and explicit detail in her often autobiographical work. In a move that is at times remarkable, at others painfully self-conscious, Taymor brings several of Kahlo’s self-portraits to life. Doing so offers us something that is lacking, I think, in Hayek’s performance: access to the artist’s troubled, fearless, and (in the first-wave sense) “feminine” subjectivity. The most effective instance comes near the end when, after watching Kahlo be lashed by her doctor into a back brace, we are transported into her painting, The Broken Column (1944). The tears in the portrait meld in the film with the tears of the artist and with the drips of her brush, joining in a single image a recurring message of the film: as Diego tells his wife, “I paint what I see; you paint what you feel.”

    And what Kahlo feels is always inextricably bound — psychologically, politically, and quite literally — to her body, which is one of the many reasons that she has been appropriated in recent decades as an icon of sorts by feminist scholars. A painter who might be compared to, say, Kate Chopin or Virginia Woolf, she approaches her medium from (excuse the jargon) a gynocentric perspective: documenting the particularly female experience from a particularly feminine subjectivity. Which is exactly why I find myself, a day later, still struggling to reconcile my ambivalence over Taymor’s treatment of her star.

    It would be dishonest, of course, to elide the details of Kahlo’s physical condition or those of her sex life — both of which are absolutely key to understanding Kahlo, the artist — but somewhere in the process (and it’s quite possible that Hayek’s much publicized struggle to “get this film made” is a factor) Taymor chose to charge much of the film with an often dissonant eroticism. The effect is created by a host of smaller decisions: the omission of Kahlo’s facial hair in all but a few shots, the framing of close-ups so as to include what could only be described as Hayek’s “heaving bosom,” the deliberate effort of the camera to show what had already been more effectively implied. I’m afraid that, in this age when images are inevitably captured from films, stripped of their context, and posted on the Internet, Frida will only become more and more about Hayek’s body in time and that much of the artist’s message will be distorted in the process.

    * I’ve been looking for an excuse to use “roger” as a verb ever since discovering it a few years ago in William Byrd’s The Secret History of the Dividing Line (1729). What a strange, strange book.

  • Punch-Drunk Love

    Punch-Drunk Love

    Dir. by P. T. Anderson

    Yesterday afternoon, I had the strange pleasure of watching PT Anderson’s latest film, Punch-Drunk Love. Anderson is one of only two contemporary American filmmakers who are able to genuinely surprise me each time out (the other is also named Anderson). Anderson makes Hitchcock proud in a few scenes, cranking up the dramatic tension to almost unimaginable heights. I am so impressed. Apparently a few others weren’t, though, including the six or eight people who got up and left midway through. Stuart Klawans’s review is now up at The Nation. I love these two paragraphs, which come closer, I think, to explaining the magic of the film than any other review I’ve found:

    Which brings me to the shot: the climactic moment you may have seen excerpted in TV commercials or frozen in newspaper ads. As the song approaches its high point, Lena flings herself onto Barry. The two are silhouetted, in medium long-shot, against a doorway that opens onto a beach. For a second, they’re alone: two black outlines against a blue rectangle, in the middle of the CinemaScope frame. Then, from the left and right, other silhouettes begin to cross the screen, as Lena and Barry go on embracing. Barry finally knows, a little, how another person is; and now that he does, multitudes of people come rushing in — people of every description — as if Barry were being released into the world.

    Or maybe the audience in the movie theater — a multitude of figures in the dark — is released into the movie. As the shot filled up, I felt as if I, too, might walk right through this movie, which had abruptly opened into gregariousness. Here was a moment of pure happiness, discovered at the violent, innocent heart of Punch-drunk Love. Whether it’s delirium or sanity I can’t say, but I’m very glad to have been included.

  • Life at War

    If there’s such thing as a truly legitimate call for the use of art as a practical means to change the world, then it will probably never find a more sure voice than Denise Levertov’s. In the final throes of preparing for my final comprehensive exam, I found this poem, which was included in her 1966 collection, The Sorrow Dance. I couldn’t imagine a better blog for today.

    “Life at War” by Denise Levertov, 1966

    The disasters numb within us
    caught in the chest, rolling
    in the brain like pebbles. The feeling
    resembles lumps of raw dough

    weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.
    Or Rilke said it, ‘My heart. . .
    Could I say of it, it overflows
    with bitterness . . . but no, as though

    its contents were simply balled into
    formless lumps, thus
    do I carry it about.’
    The same war

    continues.
    We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives,
    our lungs are pocked with it,
    the mucous membrane of our dreams
    coated with it, the imagination
    filmed over with the gray filth of it:

    the knowledge that humankind,

    delicate Man, whose flesh
    responds to a caress, whose eyes
    are flowers that perceive the stars,

    whose music excels the music of birds,
    whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
    whose understanding manifests designs
    fairer than the spider’s most intricate web,

    still turns without surprise, with mere regret
    to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk
    runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,
    transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,
    implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.

    We are the humans, men who can make;
    whose language imagines mercy,
    lovingkindness; we have believed one another
    mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—

    who do these acts, who convince ourselves
    it is necessary; these acts are done
    to our own flesh; burned human flesh
    is smelling in Viet Nam as I write.

    Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space
    in our bodies along with all we
    go on knowing of joy, of love;

    our nerve filaments twitch with its presence
    day and night,
    nothing we say has the not the husky phlegm of it in the saying,
    nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness,
    the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

  • American Pastoral (1997)

    By Philip Roth

    Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth’s alter-ego for nearly four decades now, is settling uncomfortably into old age. Now a literary recluse like E.I. Lonoff, the mentor of his youth in The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman has survived prostate cancer (though, given his notorious past, not without ironic complications), and, as the novel begins, has returned once more to his school days in Newark, New Jersey. The device here is a class reunion, a gathering of former athletes, beauties, and outsiders, transformed by time into uncanny snapshots of their own immigrant grandparents. Zuckerman is most surprised to find Jerry Levov there. Now a ruthless, four-times-married Miami surgeon, Jerry had once been important to Nathan only because of the access their friendship afforded him into the private world of Jerry’s older brother, Seymour “Swede” Levov, the finest athlete to ever walk the halls of Weequahic High and Nathan’s lifelong hero. From their brief conversation, Nathan learns that the Swede’s life was forever altered in 1968, when his teenage daughter, Merry, blew up the local post office, along with a local doctor, in protest of the Vietnam War. The rest of the story is left for Zuckerman’s telling.

    The form of American Pastoral is established in two early passages. After his encounter with Jerry, Zuckerman becomes obsessed with the Swede, locking himself away to restore life to his fallen idol. Typical of Roth, the moment is captured in mirror images: “Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day?” After pouring once more over the few “facts” at his disposal, Zuckerman/Roth retreats to fiction, adding, “anything more I wanted to know, I’d have to make up.” And he does just that. One-fifth of the way through the novel, Zuckerman disappears completely, surrendering his own voice to the Swede’s sorrowful lament.

    American Pastoral also finds its structural precedent in The Kid from Tomkinsville, a children’s book the young Nathan had once discovered on the Swede’s bookshelf. It tells the story of a baseball phenomenon whose life is marked equally by stunning success and heart-breaking tragedy. “I was ten and I had never read anything like it,” Nathan says. “The cruelty of life. The injustice of it.” It’s perhaps too literary—too easy—of a device for Roth, but the 400+ page story of the Swede’s fall follows a similar trajectory, as does, Roth implies, the story of America’s recent history. For the Swede is Roth’s finest personification of the post-war American Dream and all the complicated realities that frustrate it. “Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success. Three generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people. And now with the fourth it had all come to nothing. The total vandalization of their world.” The Swede’s longed-for American pastoral becomes its grotesque counterpart, “the indigenous American berserk.”

    What most fascinates me about this novel—along, of course, with Roth’s beautiful prose—is its inability, ultimately, to make any sense of the Swede’s tragedy. Those readers who turn to the final page, hoping to find resolution, answers, grace, will find, once again, only the question that haunts every preceding chapter: “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” The Swede, though occasionally chastised for lacking requisite self-awareness, is a good man: hard-working, honorable, a loving father and husband, a good-hearted liberal opposed to Vietnam and actively involved in the fight for civil rights. And yet he is unable to escape the violence, the destruction of his family, the rape of his daughter—that rape that haunts him more than the deaths or the explosions or the decay. He is unable to escape the mysterious, inarticulate pain that has become his life. After a reunion with Merry, the Swede returns home to a dinner party, broken by the sight of his frail, filthy daughter, but unable to speak about it. “He was supposed to do this forever,” Roth writes. “However much he might crave to get out, he was to remain stopped dead in the moment in that box. Otherwise the world would explode.”