The Kind of Face You Hate

I Saw a Star Fall from Heaven

2012-01-25T23:10:00.013-05:00

John Carpenter’s a funny little muddle. He’s a filmmaker who seems to be split down the middle, a man who would probably be more at home making Westerns in the 1940s or 50s, but who obviously wouldn’t be the filmmaker he eventually became without growing up on a mix of Howard Hawks and the science fiction and monster movies from that same era. It is therefore no surprise that the Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby monster movie The Thing From Another World became such a formidable and defining influence on Carpenter. But Carpenter has been making films for a long time now, about forty years, and the quality, most would agree, has been sagging for a while. His most recent film, The Ward, has some prominent defenders, but by and large it was received as a professionally made bunch of nothing, nothing close to the kind of comeback his fans had hoped for. Oh well, as they say. The curious thing about Carpenter’s weary skid is it hasn’t been greeted with the kind of mockery, or at times even gloating, that, say, Martin Scorsese’s supposed loss of edge (a view I don’t share, as I think I’ve made clear in the past) has engendered. People still like Carpenter, and root for him, and are sad, but understanding, when he doesn’t meet our expectations. I have to point out that I’m no different in this regard – I wasn’t crazy about The Ward myself – but just typing that previous sentence makes me aware that fandom carries with it a certain condescension towards its object.

It’s just that once Carpenter was so good, and now he’s not quite that anymore. He’s made a number of acknowledged classics in various genres, from Assault on Precinct 13 to Halloween to Escape From New York to his pinnacle and masterpiece, The Thing, a remake – sort of, though the number of similarities are probably equaled, if not dwarfed, by the differences – of the Hawks/Nyby film. The era that produced those films, the mid-1970s into the early 80s, must be counted, from a film historical viewpoint, as Carpenter’s heyday, but as is often the case with filmmakers with deep bodies of work, some of the most interesting stuff is happening on the fringes, meaning just before and just after the undisputed Great Works. For example, and the point of the post, finally, for chrissake, with 1982's The Thing, Carpenter would begin what he now refers to as his Apocalypse Trilogy, though this is very loose in trilogy terms, and I suspect he didn't regard these films as such until the third one was completed and he could step back and think "Hey, there's three that sort of like that." The third film is 1995's In the Mouth of Madness, a good and interesting movie I hope to get around to writing about sooner rather than later, and in the middle is Prince of Darkness, from 1987. While not Carpenter's best film, Prince of Darkness has long struck me as his most interesting, and bizarre, and even personal.

Prince of Darkness is such a weird mix of standard 1980s horror gloss and rather cerebral ruminations on the cosmos and phsyics and God and evil that it's both easy to see why its cult has been so slow in growing, and frustrating that horror is a genre where the best work is often only appreciated well after the fact. "Horror was good and now it is bad" is the mantra that has left a number of good movies and books scrabbling in the dust, and it's a mantra I am not immune to muttering over and over myself. However, it's my speculation that the indifference with which this film was met partly led to the apparent indifference with which Carpenter now seems to regard filmmaking ("It's still shot, reverse-shot, over-the-shoulder..." Carpenter recently said in an interview with Mick Garris on Fearnet). I mentioned this to some people, and persuasive counter-arguments were offered. All I can say is, that's how it feels.

But Prince of Darkness really is special. It concerns religion and science, personified by a priest played by Donald Pleasance and a theoretical physics professor named Birack, played by Victor Wong. The two men are old friends -- and, you sense, philosophical sparring partners -- and as the film opens the priest has sought out Birack to help him with a mysterious problem. Which boils down to this: in an ancient and shadowy tomb-like room beneath the priest's church is a massive glass and metal cylinder, and inside the cylinder is a roiling green liquid. This cylinder has been kept a secret by the church, basically forever, so long that nobody living even understands it. But it's clear that what the liquid is, and means, and will do, is about to become very apparent. So Birack puts together a team of grad students -- biochemists, molecular physicists, microbioligists, even one studying Latin and ancient theology -- to camp out in the church and study the situation.

So what is this all about? Well, the film's title should give you some clue, but the key to the film's fascination is how Carpenter (writing here under the pseudonym Martin Qautermass, a choice that won't seem terribly odd if you've at least seen Quatermass and the Pit) reconstructs the universe. Eventually, Birack will explain that what the priest has always believe is essentially true, that there is a massive intelligence that controls the world on a subatomic level, a God, but our perception of that intelligence has been skewed by various things over the millenia, not least our desire to project benevolence onto the cosmos. But this is wrong. As there is matter, there is anti-matter, as there is Christ, there is Antichrist, although as far as Prince of Darkness is concerned, Christ was something other than what we imagine. The point being that, whatever our idea of God is, the truth is opposite, and the universe's Great Intelligence is an Anti-God. Who is forming, or re-forming, within that cylinder.

This is all very complex stuff, and Carpenter does a wonderful, chilling job of combining the ideas of very abstract science with visions of doom -- there's a nice shot of Brian Marsh (Jameson Parker), the film's theoretical hero (in that he's the one who develops a romantic interest), watching a TV show about quantum physics, and the camera moves down the back of the TV set to show it covered in insects. Insects are big in Prince of Darkness -- they turn up as an image, a symbol of apocalyptic doom, casually throughout the film's early going, but later take on the role of occasional eaters of the dead.

I said before that this so-called "Apocalypse Trilogy" is rather loosely tied together, and it is, but there are still interesting connections beyond them all simply being about the end, or possible end, of the world. For instance, I somehow had not noticed before how Prince of Darkness picks up on the theme of one's body being stolen and used by an otherwise unseen and malevolent force from The Thing (as well as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, while we're at it) and merged it with the more straight-up horror concept of demonic possession. Because while Carpenter's Anti-God might be less supernatural than scientific to a degree we're as yet unable to fully grasp, it does possess various characters when the green liquid begins to escape, and is soon able to transfer, via a, come to think of it, very Exorcist-like green spray from one possessed person's mouth to another, now also possessed person's mouth. There's also the horde, for lack of a better term, of possessed homeless people, bother covered in and sometimes proferring (and possibly consisting of) insects, who block any attempt at escape from the church. Admittedly, it's not as if Carpenter could show you his math, but conceptually he is rendering the demonic possession of one's soul in scientific, even subatomic, terms.

Not only that, but to hear Carpenter tell it, our end will come from space. This is shown explicitly in The Thing, with the distant shot of the alien ship crash-landing on Earth. In Prince of Darkness we're talking about a cosmic intelligence, the mind of the unknown universe, wanting to reform itself and destroy us (although, too, there is, in this film, the idea of our savior coming from the same place). With In the Mouth of Madness, things get much less scientific, or theoretical, or whatever, but that film is also explicitly Lovecraftian, and where did Lovecraft's Old Gods come from? The ones that don't come from the oceans, I mean. They're up there in space, waiting. In this sense, Prince of Darkness is every bit as Lovecraftian, its final air of hoplessness and cosmic malevolance is one Lovecraft would have understood.
As implied earlier, though, Prince of Darkness does also enjoy, or anyway have, the unusual distinction of being all this stuff I’ve just described, and also a horror movie from the 1980s. This is sometimes held against it, because in the movie people where those shirts they used to wear, and Jameson Parker is in it. Well, to begin with, Tachyon beams or no Tachyon beams, none of us are going to be able to go back in time and stop those shirts from happening, and second, I think Jameson Parker is really good in this movie (also very good is Donald Pleasance, in what must be counted as among the best of his late-career performances. He has a number of wonderful moments, but the best is when the priest is attempting to perform Last Rites on one of the characters, before realizing that the power he thought this ritual had has been proven false. Pleasance plays this moment with in a way that is very quietly heartbreaking). He’s often singled out for ridicule, anytime someone wants to praise Prince of Darkness while also signaling that, in some ways, they are above it, and this has to do mainly, I think, with his mustache, to which let me respond by simply referring you again to the fact that Tachyon beams will not help us. But Parker is very good here, honestly. There are a lot of little things, such as the way he reacts to a bad deal in a hand of solitaire he’s seen playing early on, or the way he distractedly delivers the cheap joke “Where were you planning on taking him?” in response to his friend’s (Dennis Dun) complaint that this church business is keeping him from a hot date. But again, Parker’s Brian Marsh is only the theoretical hero. He’s presented in the movie as the handsome young man who falls in love with the pretty young woman (Lisa Blount), is smart and capable and brave, but in the end he doesn’t actually do much of consequence. Not for lack of trying, mind you. It’s just that…he can’t. The opposition is too much. That pretty young woman does much more, and gives much more, but it’s Marsh’s realization that even this may not have been enough that closes the film.

The final moments of the film are very effective, though in terms of imagery it pales next to Carpenter’s masterstroke. In the film, all the characters start sharing the same dream. The reasons they’re sharing this dream are made clear, but it’s the image of the dream, the nightmare part of it – because the dream is part nightmare, part hope – that really stuns. It appears to be a video recording of the front of the church. We’re told it’s from the year 1999, a not insignificant year in regards to what Prince of Darkness is on about. And in the doorway of the church, we see a figure. In context – and maybe even out of context – this is one of the richest, in terms of generating fear and dreadful mystery, horror images I’ve ever seen, certainly from the 1980s, a decade which was sort of a wasteland when it came to this sort of thing. And it, the image, isn’t even all that much, but this, of course, is the key. It is, as I’ve said, all fear and dread and mystery. And doom and destruction, and the end of everything.

Monster of the Century

2012-01-22T19:32:00.010-05:00

Prior to yesterday, it had been a long time since I'd seen a Godzilla movie, and, prior to yesterday, I had never seen the original, unaltered Japanese cut of Ishiro Honda's 1954 original. That film, set to be released by Criterion tomorrow, is, according to David Kalat in his detailed, wide-ranging, and mildly defensive commentary track, really marks the beginning of the monster movie as we think of it today, at least in terms of giant monsters destroying lots of things, there not really being much of a tradition before that. Godzilla's real progenitor, Kalat explains, is King Kong, a film which is a full twenty-two years older than Godzilla. Subsequent giant monster movies certainly existed, but were sporadic -- Godzilla is the one that unleashed everything. Another point Kalat makes is one that he never states outright, and may not even have thought to make at all, but the way he lays out the timeline in his commentary, it seems to me now very short-sighted -- even more than it already was -- to blame films like Jaws and Star Wars for the death of 1970s Hollywood inependence. If it's important for you to blame anything, it should be the 1952 re-release of King Kong. Thirty years of what Kalat calls "unsatisfied nostalgia" was paid off with that hugely successful re-release, and the inspiration that led to Godzilla then of course also led to the wave of big science-fiction and fantasy films through the 1950s and 60s, films which were gobbled up by your Spielbergs and your Lucases, which led to you-know-what.

Godzilla is of course interesting for lots of different reasons. And it's a good movie, to boot, which is basically the gist of Kalat's commentary. His defensiveness -- which he claims at the outset he plans to avoid, but it can't help creeping in, and whos says it shouldn't? -- stems from his desire to make the case for Godzilla, which shouldn't have to be done, at least if you've seen the original cut. Kalat excitedly points out the discrepency of the New York Times claiming in their review of the film that not one of the actors is any good at all, two years after dubbing Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura, who plays Dr. Yamane in Godzilla, the greatest actor in the world for his work in Kurasawa's Ikiru. But it's annoying that anyone should have to dig up that kind of hypocrisy to defend Ishiro Honda's film. Godzilla's bona fides as a profound nuclear age allegory are undisputed at this point, and the Bosley Crowther's of the world did not have fifty-plus years of increasingly goofy and vapid Godzilla films to dilute the idea (though they did have forty minutes of Honda's film replaced with forty minutes of Raymond Burr adjusting his belt, so we must temper our outrage a little).

Suffice it to say, Godzilla holds up. The monster effects are occasionally dusty, but mostly still strong, even knowing it's one of two dudes in a rubber suit. If nothing else, Godzilla's roar remains terrifyingly weird. The opening credits of Honda's film begins with about thirty seconds of just that strange, malicious, train-engine honk repeating itself before Fumio Hayasaka's propulsive, near-martial score kicks in. It's a while into the film before that sound will mean anything to the audience, and it's quite informative to note how Honda keeps his monster off-screen, but present. Note the early attack on the village, during the typhoon, with the rain and darkness, and think, too, of Spielberg's tyrannosaurus rex reveal in the first Jurassic Park.

The story, as is usually the case in monster movies, is simplicity itself. A fishing boat from a seaside village is lost to some strange event, as are rescue boats sent after it. Giant footprints and radioactive readings, as well as old village legends, eventually lead Dr. Yamane to suspect a prehistoric creature is to blame, which is in fact the case. Godzilla will make his presence known, but just a little bit at first. Later nuclear monster films had a tendency to hold back on their reveal for a while, before putting the creature out there all at once, but Godzilla is first seen over the crest of a massive hill, first just the distinctive leaf-shaped spines on his back, and then his head. Eventually Godzilla is front and center, smashing Tokyo in a manner that would eventually become the stuff of parody, both within and without the Godzilla films. But boy, it sure takes on another aspect in the first go ‘round. There’s real terror, and real destruction, in these images, and in the set-up of victims who chat – with surprising casualness – about how they survived Hiroshima, and now they have this to contend with.

Obviously, Honda is not interested in keeping his themes hidden. The idea that Godzilla was awakened, and angered, by H-bomb tests, and the relation these weapons have to an invention Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), the film's stealth hero that will eventually lead to the monster's destruction is right there, out in the open. Serizawa is an interesting figure in the film, as he’s introduced as the third corner of a love triangle filled out by Dr. Yamane’s daughter (Momoko Kochi) and her scientist fiancé (Akira Takarada). Serizawa’s “Oxygen Destroyer” is clearly the film’s version of the next awful step after the H-bomb, and Serizawa’s despair comes not from any unrequited love – it’s pretty clear, once we meet him, that this is the last thing on his mind – but from the possibility of this invention being used for destructive, rather than helpful, reasons. What non-destructive uses something called an “Oxygen Destroyer” could be put to is anybody’s guess, but it’s eventually used to the one thing everyone wants to see destroyed. I can’t help but note at this point that Godzilla, like so many other films that address this broad issue – and I don’t just mean Japanese films – is conspicuously unwilling to deal with the role Japan played in bringing about Hiroshima (Nagasaki is, perhaps, another matter), and on that count Godzilla does rankle a bit. Then again, Godzilla was inspired, yes, by the atom bomb, but the H-bomb is something else, and the H-bomb testing that inspired the film post-dates the end of World War II by a good half decade.

It is difficult, though, to watch this film and not think of so many of the later Godzilla films in which Godzilla is portrayed as Japan's savior. The Japanese fought in World War II at the behest of an Emperor whose time had come and gone, who represented a dying way of life, and who brought out the absolute worst in his subjects. The atomic bomb seems to have violently thrust the country into the modern age, something they would come to embrace. Science fiction writer William Gibson has said that Japan "is the global imagination’s default setting for the future," which is pretty hard to argue with, and the changing role of Godzilla in their films, from symbol city-destroying nuclear power to (occasional) defender of the nation's well-being and liberty, may well reflect they would take the modern world that fell from the sky and formed it into their own image, occasionally to their dismay.

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff!

2012-01-19T10:06:00.002-05:00

Alternate title: Hang In There!

Death Still Touches Me

2012-01-16T16:32:00.003-05:00

The most curious thing about Luis Buñuel's fairly-curious-any Belle de Jour, which Criterion will be releasing tomorrow, is that even the film's ending unfolds with attempted murder, death, crippling, betrayal and despair, it never steps being, or at least feeling like, the odd, coy, erotic, fun movie that it's been pretending to be all along.

"Pretending to be" being the key phrase, though. Buñuel's film, based on a novel by Joseph Kessel, is the story of Severine (Catherine Deneuve), a beautiful young woman whose outward sexual coldness, so judged by her husband (Jean Sorel), hides a not just heated fantasy life, but a perverse one that includes among their sexual accoutrements broken bottles, lily seeds, and cow shit. To name but three. Severine's real self is sussed out by an acquaintence and habitual customer of prostititues (Michel Piccoli), and he directs her to a brothel where Severine becomes the shy, uncertain, bemused, but soon fully awakened prostitute dubbed "Belle de Jour." One of Buñuel's methods here is to not make a big deal about the stuff that is ultimately a pretty big deal, such as the violence of Severine's sexual fantasies. You don't see anything in these fantasies, but in one Piccoli breaks a wine bottle and takes it with him under a table with Severine. It's sort of played for laughs, but is it just me or is that sort of horrifying?

The violence, or death, violent or not, follows her from fantasy -- which also includes horewhipping -- to reality, a divide which can be hard to determine. There's a very Gothic, almost goofily so, scene where Severine goes to an aristocratic client's home, a client who wants her to lie nude, except for an essentially completely sheer gown, in a casket and act dead while he mourns over her (and pretends she's his daughter) before he tremblingly sinks out of frame to do...whatever.

The fantasy of the above-referenced aristocrat doesn't appear to do much to turn Severine's crank, but who knows? Her husband thinks she's cold, but the whole reason for that coldness is because that which she truly desires would possibly freak her husband out, and therefore must be released through the ministrations of strangers, even criminals like Marcel (Pierre Clementi). Marcel, scarred up, toothless Marcel, so satisfies her aggressive fantasies that she comes very close to loving the bastard, a thug Buñuel makes no attempt to romanticize. But that's what's so strange about Belle de Jour. Severine's desires and infidelity bring about real life death and destructions, but the tone of the film is always pitched straight down the non-judgmental middle.

It would be wrong to claim the film is coldly, clinically observational in the mode of, say, Kubrick or Cronenberg. There's a warmth to the photography -- the Gothic necrophile scene has an almost Hammer-esque vibrancy -- and Deneuve, despite her reputation as an on-screen personality, seems sad yet approachable, even sweet. I once claimed to dislike Deneuve, at least as sex symbol, as the icy blonde thing wasn't really my whole deal, but that was many years ago and I hadn't seen Belle de Jour. My reaction to her now is well, sure, okay. In a conversation with Buñuel and film critics Jose de la Colina and Tomas Perez Turrant reprinted in the Criterion booklet, Turrant says that Deneuve's beauty is "asexual" and "abstract," and Buñuel agrees. It may be just me here, but I think that's a very strange description to apply to this particular film. I mean, does this look abstract or asexual to you?

Well, anyway. The point is that Belle de Jour takes an almost celebratory, in that it's portrayed as charming, approach to the film's sex, yet when this sex and desire and aggression leads to gunfire and remorse, it's not like day giving way to night, but day giving way to tomorrow, when the desire will remain, and the consequences will be no less bad, but none of this will keep the sun from rising.

Those Things They Don't Have Words For Here: Dennis, Me, and The Man Who Wasn't There - Part the Last

2012-01-15T19:52:00.002-05:00

Welp, here she is -- the final installment of my conversation with Dennis Cozzalio of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule about the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There. Tonight it's all Dennis, on whose shoulders it falls to bring us to a close. I feel a great emptiness, which can only be viewed as appropriate. Go here, here, here, and here for the rest of the discussion.

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DENNIS: Bill, it has been a tremendous amount of fun trading thoughts with you this week on The Man Who Wasn’t There, even if we managed to schedule the conversation during a week in which the deadlines and demands of the outside world of work made it maybe a little more difficult to dig in than we would have liked. And those “real-life” demands are making themselves felt even on this Sunday, a designated day of rest, if I’m not mistaken, one whose status as such has never made much of an impression upon the forces that make my breadwinnin’ work available to me. (Over the past 20 years those forces haven’t been significant respecters of any free time-type hours outside the usual eight or nine demarcated in the average American workplace. But hey, at least I’m getting paid!)

So if you will indulge, and if the notion doesn’t seem particularly slovenly in the shadow of your previous, meticulously considered near 2,000-word response, I’d like to offer an answer to your final question, “How do we close this out?” with a few brief comments followed by a gallery of striking images from the movie that I found galvanizing, haunting or just plainly beautiful, accompanied by some explanation as to why.

I was really grateful for you mentioning the business of shaving. I don’t recall if I’d made a mental note of it during previous screenings, but this time the connection between Ed shaving Doris’ leg in the bathtub and later Ed’s own casual observation of the executioner shaving the patch on his calf where the electrode would be placed really impressed me. And it’s not just the shaving. We see Ed’s leg being cleaned, and that’s followed by a glance toward the bucket where, much the same way as Ed did with Doris, the executioner rinses the razor in a slosh of soapy, hairy water. You ask if I think Ed perceives Doris as being there with him. I’m not sure I made that kind of inference (and that may be due to what I bring to the table, an indicator of my own spiritual inclinations) so much as that I saw Ed reflecting, in the much the same way as he subconsciously does during that remembrance of Doris rebuffing the salesman and then coming inside for a disengaged sit-down on the couch, on his relationship with her. (He does speculate that she might be where he’s going, wherever that might be, and expresses the hope that he might be able to tell her how he feels, about her, about the world, in a way he never could during their corporeal time together.)

What’s moving about this remembrance, coming in his last moments as it does, is its quality of genuine warmth. Unlike the dream of Doris returning not so much to him but to her glass of bourbon, enduring his company as a necessary evil, as an uncomfortable aspect of the comforts of home, this remembrance harkens back to the one moment of genuine intimacy the movie affords to Ed and Doris. It comes in the moments after Ed’s first meeting with Tolliver, when he’s first beginning to turn the idea around in his head about somehow getting the money to invest in Tolliver’s dry-cleaning proposal. He muses to himself about the convenient process involved (“It was clean. No water. Chemicals.”) while he soaps and shaves the leg belonging to the woman whose infidelity will eventually inspire his impulsive scheme to extract the necessary cash from her lover, Big Dave. So it’s an intimate moment, however tinged with betrayal and suppressed anger. But in Ed’s reflection upon it as he approaches the Big Sleep, the moment itself seems cleansed of resentment, suffused with regret and even apology, the prickly stubble of a bad marriage washed away by the hope of an unlikely future, or at least the desire to reconnect with what was ever good about the marriage in the first place. It’s hard to imagine trying to insist on the heartlessness of the Coens in light of this lovely strand of emotional acuity, even as they use the most unlikely of imagery in order to express it.

Someone wrote me earlier in the week, when this discussion first started and suggested that to him The Man Who Wasn’t There was, instead of a spiritual twin to A Serious Man, a black-and-white remake of Barton Fink. Though the comparison may have rewards of the sort that we’re talking about here that I just haven’t thought through, it also seems inapt in some significant ways, the primary one being that there’s a big difference between feeling the noose tighten around one’s neck over a case of writer’s block—one’s own pretense to literary and artistic value being a contributing factor to the sense of impending doom—and not having anything even resembling talent or the opportunity of expression to fall back on during the inexorable dip into the abyss. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone back to the Earle Hotel, and truthfully I haven’t felt much compulsion to do so in the years that have passed since I saw Barton Fink for the first time. It’s always seemed to be to be the Coens’ most facile movie, dismissive of the idea of literary sincerity, either from a theatrical specimen like Fink (a stand-in for Clifford Odets) or from a boozy, dissolute figure like William Faulkner, and the strangeness of the Coen touch (the peeling wallpaper, the life of the mind, et al) always struck me as being a little too in love with the influence of David Lynch, who was heavily in vogue with Twin Peaks during the movie’s production and release. In other words, the movie many might first think of as being quintessentially Coen-esque is, to me, one of their least genuine. (I think of Barton Fink as their fanboy movie.) There are many things to like, even love about it-- Tony Shalhoub’s Ben Geisler being primary among them, as you point out. (I tried finding video clips of Shalhoub’ brilliant harangues in this film, but each one came tethered to an announcement which told me that I could not view the clip in my country. I see…) But the brand of fatalism being peddled in Barton Fink has always seemed imposed rather than earned, as it does in The Man Who Wasn’t There and A Serious Man. That said, given that my attraction to their work as filmmakers is largely one in which even their worst is better than the strained efforts of their many imitators (and even many who have no interest in imitating them), I will concede that it deserves another look, one which, being 20 years removed from that Lynch-saturated cultural atmosphere, may reveal things I’d never seen before.

And to answer my own question, because whether I like it or not Barton Fink is clearly more than a pastiche, I can’t put it at the very bottom of my Coen ranking. And can’t put The Hudsucker Proxy there either—it’s a movie I like much more than I do Barton Fink, but it’s been even longer since I’ve seen it than it’s been since I’ve seen the other, so I’ll have to refrain from any real judgment on it of this sort on it. I’ll reserve the bottom spot for Blood Simple, a movie that has always seemed like not much more than a Hollywood calling card to me, clever to be sure, but also exactly the kind of Post(modern)man Always Rings Twice reference manual that The Man Who Wasn’t There fastidiously avoids becoming. Blood Simple has the earmarks of the technical brilliance to come, but it’s an precocious, immature movie and the shadow of all those film noirs runs too deep for the brothers here— it took moving into the realm of a completely different, sun-splashed world, that of Raising Arizona, for them to find their true, original voice and escape the traps of cool pastiche. Blood Simple gets my vote for my least favorite Coen Brothers movie.

Okay, last call. The Man Who Wasn’t There is such a visually rich movie, and we’ve spoken so often in this exchange of ideas about story and character that find their expression in the richness of visual imagination that the Coens and their peerless director of photography Roger Deakins bring to the movie, that I thought it would be appropriate, and fun, to end off this series with a gallery of some of those images, accompanied by a brief line or two of appreciation. A couple of these will have most certainly already shown up here or at your place, but that’s okay. Beauty shouldn’t be restricted to a single glance.

There's something incredibly warm and sympathetic about the way they light and frame Doris in this scene when Ed first comes to visit her after her arrest. The hint of a shiner on her right eye, never explained, adds to the poignancy.

I love the offhanded way Birdy and the boy regard Ed when he talks with them outside the piano recital. It's clear they are doing their best just to indulge him until he extricates himself from the scene.

Detective Burns (Jack McGee), the gumshoe Riedenschneider hires to get the deep background on Big Dave Brewster. Visually perfect.

"You know how Big Dave loved camping and the out of doors?" "Yeah."

"We went camping last summer in Eugene, Oregon. Outside Eugene..."

Everything you need to know can be found in contemplating the haircut...

Deakins employs an extraordinary long-lens tracking shot to observe Ed swimming against the tide of humanity and his own despair, already unable to remain afloat in the wake of Doris’s arrest. “When I walked home it seemed like everyone avoided looking at me, as if I’d caught some disease. This thing with Doris-- nobody wanted to talk about it. It was like I was a ghost walking down the street.”

Dark shadows...

"I killed him."

Ed's sophisticated dinner manner (what the Coens have called his talk show host pose) cannot disguise his contempt or his disinterest...

The note.

A guard peers at Ed from outside Ed's cell...

A car crash unlike any other. The sequence in which Ed, distracted by Birdy's advances, drives off the side of the road, rendered anything but routinely by the Coens' consummate command of the power and clarity of their images. I love how they use this sequence to visually tie into the UFO motif that informs the second half of the film:

Finally, another moment of curdled intimacy between Doris and Ed. Early on in the film, as they are preparing to attend the Nirdlinger Christmas party, Doris asks Ed to "zip me up," a moment of casual companionship familiar to most couples. Yet this one, with its slow track in on Doris's back, sights on the open dress, and Ed's deliberate act of compliance, has about it one part intimacy and two parts foreboding, as if Ed were zipping Doris not into a dress but into a body bag, which metaphorically, of course, he will soon do.

On that note, Bill, thanks once again for a lively and rewarding exchange. Let's consider this conversation zipped up. Next year, Roller Boogie?

Beyond the Earth and Sky: Dennis, Me, and The Man Who Wasn't There - Part Three (Part One)

2012-01-14T18:42:00.011-05:00

Welcome back. Here's my response to Dennis, and part three, or four, depending on how you're counting, of our conversation about The Man Who Wasn't There. Click here, here, and here for the rest. Dennis's response will go up tomorrow both at his blog, and here. You may leave comments at either site, or both.
BILL: Dennis, I love your comparison to Melancholia. The power of that film's ending, as you say, comes from the realization that, from Justine's point of view, her state of mind, for once in her life, might be regarded as beneficial. For her, as the Earth is about to be obliterated, there is no horror, because whatever is to come after, even if it's nothing, can't be worse than what she's feeling now. Similarly, Ed Crane in The Man Who Wasn't There faces execution with hope, because look at what Earth has to offer. I realize I'm just parroting what you said in your last post, but what an amazing ending! I'm reminded of how Val Lewton summarized the message of The Seventh Victim: "Death is good." For some, and in a certain state of mind, maybe. Melancholia doesn't leave the viewer with any hope though, even the very grim kind that The Man Who Wasn't There does. If the endings of both films could be explained with one word each, for Melancholia it would be "Finally," and for The Man Who Wasn't There it would be "Maybe." And do you know, it wasn't until watching it again for this series that I noticed that as Ed shaved Doris's legs early in the film, so does Ed have his leg shaved in preparation for the Infinite. He even offers the slightest of ironic smiles, or glances, at the razor scraping away at his leg. Given his narration at the end, does he believe Doris is there with him? Ed seems willing to believe just about anything that will provide hope, so, you know...maybe.

For instance, he'll believe that Birdy is a great pianist. This was the section of the film that baffled me, on some level, the most, and for the longest time. Now I can no longer see where I was confused. Birdy -- who I think it's safe to say Ed is sexually attracted to, but that this is almost beside the point -- is simply Ed's last hope for life on Earth. There's an interesting parallel going on in this story with Birdy, and the one with Freddy Riedenschneider. Ed loses out in both, and I'd say that categorizing, as you do, Freddy's cynicism as sociopathological is so accurate as to perhaps be a little kind. He's not even that smart, as a matter of fact. He describes the Uncertainty Principle as the act of changing something through the act of observation, yet what he's applying this to is the revelation that Big Dave was no war hero, as he'd always claimed, but an Army clerk who sat out the war at a desk in San Diego. Big Dave, the thing being observed, was not changed by the observation. Big Dave was always that. His grasp on Heisenberg is about as firm as Larry Gopnik's is on Schrödinger ("I'm not even sure I understand the cat").

But anyway, Birdy. I think you have to understand Birdy -- not the girl, but the idea -- before you can understand Ed, or the film. Hearing Birdy -- Beethoven, really, but Ed is unable to make this distinction -- play the piano at the party at Nirdlinger's gave Ed a shot of pure beauty, and okay, Scarlett Johansson playing Birdy is part of that. The point being, for poor Ed, it was a brief moment of the kind of transcendence he spends most of the film searching for. And later, when Big Dave is gone, and Doris is gone, and everything seems to be over, that's when the emptiness really sets in, the absence. That's when Ed becomes the man who wasn't there. (When the film came out, I remember some critics claiming the title eluded to the notion that Ed was a guy who was such an empty vessel that he just got swept up in the film's action. This is clearly a stupid thing to think, and like an idiot, I used to hold that misinterpretation against the film, because if that's what the title was meant to mean, then obviously they'd screwed up.) That's when the film fades out on the narration "I'm the barber." But he seeks out Birdy, because he thinks he beauty, musically as well as physically, or what he perceives as her great talent, is all that's left. Life is monstrous, but if someone like Birdy can play music like that, maybe there's something else. Maybe the peace he felt in the church actually had a traceable source. What does he get? He's told Birdy would make an excellent typist. And also that Birdy never really cared about music anyway. If I was Ed, I might greet the electric chair with open arms myself.

Dennis, in your last post you wrote:

"Because The Man Who Wasn't There fails if it turns out to be simply a hipster’s pose, all film noir sheen and no substance. I think the fact that, as I suggested in my last post, the movie has its own texture and rhythms apart from those of the movies in which its rooted, that it is not simply an exercise in 'spot the references,' indicates that Riedenschneider’s uncertainty does not apply here."

I think you've pretty cleanly nailed why the Coens are so extraordinary, and how they challenge their audiences to keep up. At a glance, The Man Who Wasn't There is begging to be simply, and emptily, and tediously, taken as what you say it very clearly is not, a jumble of smart-ass cues from other films. The Coens have been accused of treating their films as this kind of playground for most of their careers, after all. But you've been right all along to point out that this film is "its own beast," just as you've been right to insist on the connection to A Serious Man. Because no, Riedenschneider's uncertainty does not apply here, because he doesn't mean a word of it. He doesn't care. Larry Gopnik's uncertainty, however, which is another thing entirely, applies throughout The Man Who Wasn't There. Larry may be much more verbal and manic and emotional (though he tries to tamp that down) than Ed, but goddamnit, after talking to you, Dennis, I'm about ready to regard these two films as twins.

So, okay, if this our last day, maybe some housekeeping? On the "liking characters" front, I mildly object to your examples, because I do like Holden Caulfield, at least by the end of that novel, and I do not like Walter Neff. Who could? The point is, that doesn't matter. This is actually a pretty big topic, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm not fully prepared to get into it all right now. Suffice it to say, sympathy, and empathy, should go to those who deserve it. Ed, I think, does. Neff doesn't.

Performances! I agree with you that they are, across the board, superb. I even think Johansson is very good, and I'm on record, somewhere or another, as not believing that she's grown into very much of an actress at all. More importantly, I think The Man Who Wasn't There may be the first time I really noticed Richard Jenkins. Not the first time I'd seen him, of course, because he's been around forever, but the first time I cared to find out his name. The way his head tilted back and his eyes closed for about a half second of sleep before his head rolled back around to Ed, and he said "Riedenschneider," is one of the finest bits of comic drunk acting I've ever seen. I've already praised Alan Fudge (who I've learned passed away last year) as Diedrickson from the ME's office, but I really do love the quiet yet subtly panicky discomfort he portrays in the few moments he has left after Ed's admission about his sex life.

For the main cast, I could go on and on. Thornton gave a brilliant performance simply by looking the way he does. He provides a clinic on minimalism throughout, which is somehow not crushed by the bigness of everyone else, from Frances McDormand's obnoxious, finally pitiable sot, to James Gandolfini's insecure bull-in-a-china-shop, to Michael Badalucco's Frank, who I think the Coens wrote with the express purpose of giving themselves a vehicle for their brand of literate, everyman speech ("What's the problem, friend? This is a business establishment, with posted hours." I like that Frank was prepared to begin an argument like that). I used to think Badalucco was one of the liabilities. I feel an intense need to be upfront about all my past foolishness.

And Shalhoub. I guess Shalhoub's Riedenschneider also provides a vehicle for the Coens' writing, but of course Riedenschneider is no everyman. Apart from everything else about the performance and the character, I was just thrilled to see Shalhoub back. He's acted in maybe a grand total of six or seven scenes for the Coen brothers, but somehow his Ben Geisler in Barton Fink established him, already, as a Coens regular, along with Turturro and Goodman and Holly Hunter and McDormand. It took, what, almost ten years for him to appear again, and it's been another ten-plus and no sign. But I love Shalhoub, and I love Shalhoub teaming up with the Coens. Why this happens so rarely is beyond me.

Finally, you ask what Coens film ranks lowest for me. Well, I'm afraid my answer is pretty boring, because it's either, depending on the day, Intolerable Cruelty or The Ladykillers. And mind you, I still like both. I think they're funny, and there's some very fine work in each, both in the performances and cinematically (I think what Deakins does in The Ladykillers is especially undervalued). But neither film feels like them. I don't know how The Ladykillers came about, but Intolerable Cruelty was a pre-existing script they agreed to rewrite and direct, and both films feel like something they had to put themselves into. Everything else they've made, including their two novel adaptations, have been very clearly part of them already. No Country for Old Men and True Grit could almost have been predicted as Coen films, long before either was made. But Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers seemed like coasting. As a fan, I admit I was worried for a while there. The fact that they've come roaring back with four great films in a row has sort of eased my worried brow on that count, however.

Now, take those two out of the equation, and rank only the pure Coens stuff, then I guess I'd have to say The Hudsucker Proxy, a film I still like a lot. I just think sometimes their instincts for the cartoonish are off, and the movie sometimes, in the early going, feels a little shrill. Also, here and there, there's a joke that I think is beneath them (the "crane kick" stance from Norville's dream sequence, for example). But there's a lot to love. In my case, the worst Coens film is the one I merely enjoy.

And what about you? How are we to close this out, Dennis?

The More You Look, the Less You Really Know: Dennis, Me, and The Man Who Wasn't There - Part Two (Part Two)

2012-01-13T19:38:00.011-05:00

Excelsior, True Believers! Today is Dennis's day, as it should be pretty much all the time, probably. Here he gets a chance to respond to my post from yesterday about The Man Who Wasn't There, and boy does he ever respond. In fact he reminds me, as if I needed it, why I agreed to this in the first place. Without Dennis's breadth of knowledge and deep intelligence and thoughtful writing, I would have been stymied over how to go about tackling this film. If I want to match him, I need to work harder than I would without him. So here we go...(and as always, comment here, or there).

DENNIS: Right off the top, Bill, I have to say how moved I’ve been in reading your posts on The Man Who Wasn’t There, a movie which generated little to no interest from the viewing public when it w s released and holds somewhat diminished stature even within the cult of the Coens. I particularly value your adept and, yes, sympathetic way of sizing up the characters. TMWWT is certainly not an easy movie to love, like The Big Lebowski, or even to admire, like most of their others, either the “serious” ones or those that are more overtly comic. (By the way, I think you’re right to have so eloquently pointed out that this distinction between forms is a very fuzzy line of demarcation in their work. The uniquely integrated way the two sensibilities coexist is at the heart of some of the confusion about how to approach and interpret their movies, and their attitude toward their characters. But I’m getting a head of myself…). In any case, you’re doing a bang-up job of making a great case for why a little extra effort to do so can be a rewarding endeavor.

The thing I’ve enjoyed most about our exchange so far, and specifically in reading your entries, is how you’ve deepened my own understanding and appreciation of the movie by disproving the central tenet of the Uncertainty Principle, as expressed by the sociopathically overconfident defense attorney Freddy Riedenschneider. In defending Ed, charged in the murder of the desperate but, as far as I can tell, legitimate would-be dry cleaning entrepreneur Creighton Tolliver ( a man who certainly had his own vision of the future), Riedenschneider describes his client as the very essence of modern man, a schlub (just like you jurors) who’s not self- aware, calculating, intelligent enough to put all the homicidal pieces together, “too ordinary to be a criminal mastermind, a ordinary man guilty of living in a world that has no place for him.” The attorney invites the jurors ( and us) to consider the emotionless husk of Ed’s outward appearance— and we’ve been privy to it for much longer and in much closer proximity than the jurors have-- and conclude that the closer we look at Ed, the less sense he makes as someone not only who could be guilty of killing but also as one who is fully engaged in the business of living.

Of course, Riedenschneider’s tactic is completely cynical and misses what we’ve come to sense about Ed, that there is something there beneath the muffled, drained expressions, visible through the ever-present cloud of cigarette smoke, if we could be convinced to look closer, to actually see what’s there rather than just use the movie’s often sardonic humor as are a son to dismiss deeper inspection. Because The Man Who Wasn’t There fails if it turns out to be simply a hipster’s pose, all film noir sheen and no substance. I think the fact that, as I suggested in my last post, the movie has its own texture and rhythms apart from those of the movies in which it’s rooted, that it is not simply an exercise in “spot the references,” indicates that Riedenschneider’s uncertainty does not apply here. But even more so, the way you’ve located the center of Ed’s spirituality (and that of the movie) goes a long way toward illuminating what the Coens are up to in this movie in revealing the value, despite his counsel’s claims, of a closer look at Ed.

One of the things I focused on during my most recent viewing of the movie is the way the Coens provide the outward appearance of adhering to some of the obvious tropes of film noir and use them to expose cracks in the deadpan reserve of their main character. The one I’m thinking about primarily is that omnipresent voice-over, Ed’s narration, where 90% of Billy Bob Thornton’s performance resides. This is where you get much of the essential information about the way an outwardly unaffected person like Ed Crane sees the world, interprets the actions of those around him. So you get a lot of musing about his own limitations (“I’m the barber”) and how he’s been deadened by interacting with people who strive to put up fronts that are far more transparent than they can allow themselves to imagine, like Doris and Big Dave, or even the incessant talkers, like his brother-in-law, the owner of the barber shop where he works, for whom he has little patience or interest. But the indicators of what you term Ed’s spirituality and his willingness, his need to look beyond the arid surface of his life are there early on in the narration—naturally, since what we’re hearing turns out to be the verbalized writing of a man considering his life from what is essentially the end of it. It’s not unusual for a noir narrator to be cognizant of his soul; what’s wonderful about the way the Coens have written Ed is that his occupation, the thing he does to literally occupy his time, to earn money, to distract him from his own existential worries, the thing that he outwardly seems to do almost by rote—cutting hair—turns out to be the activity that frames the way he sees the world and muses on the big questions.

At first it seems like a point of view that is forced upon him by his physical position in his job— through simple proximity and positioning, he knows the top of a man’s head. Somewhere in the dark recesses of my own cobwebbed mind I even seem to recall one of the Coens (perhaps on the DVD commentary?) even saying that everything you need to know about the movie can be gleaned from looking at the many different haircuts on display. Especially to their detractors, this might sound like just so much more facetious Coen-osity, and maybe it is. (I like to think other elements in the movie are equally as expressive as the admittedly boss contours Ed shapes on some of those little punks seated at one of his stations.) But seeded in Ed’s narration is a kind of skewered philosophical musing that might sound silly or inappropriate coming from anyone else, but coming from Ed, as he scratches at his own deadened exterior from the inside, looking for some sort of illumination, it’s rather poignant. And it’s why I like your term “absurdist noir” so much. How else to characterize a hard-boiled picture where the narrator, instead of cracking wise about real estate or his own doomy temptations ala Walter Neff, muses about the implications of the scientific fact that hair continues to grow for a certain period of time even after a body has died? Of course Ed is thinking about death, whether it’s from an awareness imposed upon him before the fact (on screen) or one informed by the fact that he’s speaking from a time after which he’s experienced it firsthand. But it’s his connecting up of death, and the implications of death, with his occupation that reveals his yearning spiritual curiosity, one which, as you extrapolated so well last time, leads him to discover his own hopes for something bigger than the puny activities of a planet full of self-possessed people in the most unlikely of firmaments.

“How does the hair know when the soul is gone?” Ed asks himself, his readers, us. Again, the posing of this question, like Ed’s choice of words to describe the fact that he and his wife haven’t had sex for years, could be interpreted as sniggering on the part of the Coens, artists who are well capable of finding humor in even the blackest of death rattles, not to mention the excesses of dime-store philosophizing. But such an interpretation denies the hope with which Ed greets his own fate, during that chilling white-out when he expresses hope for a world beyond this one, where there’s opportunity and desire to explore “all the things they don’t have words for here.” It takes a bit of a leap on the audience’s part to accept the searching aspect of Ed’s personality. We’re more likely to laugh, or to look on him with a mixture of pity and sympathy, not unlike the way he regards Big Dave’s wife when she first tells him of her husband’s alleged alien abduction. But it’s a measure of the Coens’ sympathy (yes, I do believe they are sympathetic toward Ed and his sense of spiritual suffocation) that they find a way to expand upon this fantastical element of the story in such a matter-of-fact, absurd and yet poetically fulfilling way. Not unlike the conclusion of Melancholia, in which Kirsten Dunst’s cripplingly depressed Justine finds not only release but relief, maybe even fulfillment in the apocalypse, Ed greets his fate with acceptance and with hope. It’s a fate in which he is punished, technically, for a crime he did not commit but one which he knows would not have occurred had he not set the wheels of catastrophic events in motion (in the name of love and moderated ambition, as you suggest). He considers his fate during his last moment in the spirit of discovery, as a chance to finally become something better, something which transcends the pettiness, betrayals and hampered dreams of his earthly existence.

(This feeling of Ed looking beyond the haircut, beyond the temporal, whether what’s on the other side is paradise or the simple, quiet rest of obliteration, is the same thing that lifts my spirit when the planet Melancholia slams into Earth, yet shudder with horror at that tornado that provides such a ghastly end punctuation to A Serious Man. In that movie, Larry’s last-minute switching of the boy’s grades, something he’s “ettically” resisted for the entire film, suggests to me a capitulation to the indifferent, biblically-tinged evil of the way humans interact with each other that offers little of a similar kind of hope for his survival, either physical or spiritual.)

I have to start thinking about wrapping up this chapter, but before I do I just want to address that question of “liking the characters” again briefly. Do the Coens “like” their characters, or are they just perverse, cackling puppeteers? It seems fairly obvious to me that when people—critics, viewers, readers—talk of “liking” the characters they’re really talking about whether or not the writer and/or director care about them beyond their simple function in the construct of the plot. Are they just pieces in the puzzle, or does the puzzle begin to revolve around them, finding its way as a narrative because of what they do and how they feel rather than leading them through to “The End” like rats in a maze? Well, if you accept that this is the question, then I think you and I have provided plenty of evidence, derived from the film itself, not to mention other Coen brothers movies (Thank you for bringing up Burn After Reading, another of their pictures that I love almost without reservation) which supports the notion that the Coens’ ability to laugh at the situations their characters find themselves in does not necessarily preclude their sympathy or affection for their characters, or for that matter ours. Do we “like” Holden Caulfield? Or Walter Neff? Or Ignatius Reilly? Would we want to spend time with even an ostensibly likable and sympathetic character like Roger Thornhill, the beleaguered dvertising executive played by Cary Grant who gets swept North by Northwest through all manner of nonsense, none of which is of his own devising? Strictly speaking, probably not, though we certainly sympathize with him. (Cary Grant, on the other hand…). It behooves us then to remember that such “thumbs up, thumbs down”-derived assessments of the worth of character go not very far at all in illuminating what’s going on in any given film or book. And certainly the attitude of the artist toward them is not so easily summed up and deserves a little more investigation than the conventional wisdom is capable of providing.

Well, hell, I’d intended to touch on the performances a bit in this post too, which I find to be uniformly wonderful. But as one observer recently put it, I tend to be “one long-winded bastard” and have once again rambled on beyond my welcome. So I’ll touch on those superb actors a bit next time. I wish I could offer something more on your observation of real-world enterprise in TMWWT and The Hudsucker Proxy, but it’s been far too long—since its original release, I think-- since I’ve seen that movie and my memory of it is far too vague to be of any value here today. I’ll take it up as an invitation to see it again, though, as I’ve always thought that The Hudsucker Proxy is an undervalued movie in the Coen oeuvre. (It certainly proved, if nothing else, that a big budget was no distraction from their signature idiosyncrasies.) As we near the end of this project, I wonder, Bill, speaking as one Coen aficionado to another, what film of theirs might be lowest on your totem pole? Whatever your answer might be (and I suspect it’ll differ from mine) I have certainly enjoyed sussing out why, for both of us, it certainly is not The Man Who Wasn’t There.

The Facts Have No Meaning: Dennis, Me, and The Man Who Wasn't There - Part Two (Part 1)

2012-01-12T17:45:00.006-05:00

Well hello, everybody! Welcome to Day Two of my conversation with Dennis Cozzalio about the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There. First thing's first: Day One, should you need to catch yourself up, is here. Second, when you consider that work sucks, it was inevitable that either Dennis or myself would find ourselves behind the eight-ball when it comes to posting exactly on time. In this case, Dennis (and, less immediately, myself) needs a breather for real-world demands. So tonight I'll be posting my response to Dennis's post from yesterday, and then Dennis's will go up tomorrow. The upshot is, this little project of ours will probably extend into the weekend a bit, but, I think you will all agree, it's no biggie. And as always, should anyone desire to leave a comment, please do so either here, or at Dennis's pad, depending on where your fancy takes you.

Onward!

I should perhaps have been more clear on what I took to be the source of the joke, or at least the audience’s laugh, in Ed’s scene with the medical examiner. I don’t believe that people were laughing at the situation, necessarily, or the reveal that Ed and Doris hadn’t been intimate in a long time, or that it was Big Dave’s baby. They were laughing at the choice of words, which means, to some degree anyway, they were laughing at Ed. Had he said something like “My wife and I haven’t been intimate in a long time,” I don’t know that the reaction would have been the same. This is why I think, and still feel, that the Coens were going for a laugh. But it’s strange, though, and interesting, because Alan Fudge as Diedrickson, the ME, plays the scene very straight, as a man performing a highly unpleasant act because he believes it’s the right thing to do. When he gets that answer, he gets out of that bar as quickly as he reasonably can, but the Diedrickson half of that scene is pitched at about the tone you’d expect such scene to be pitched. It’s as if Diedrickson, a normal human being, has suddenly found himself within the bizarre reality of Ed Crane, and he doesn’t like it.

That last point has a lot to do with my eventual turnaround on the film. You mention absurdity in your last post -- as well as the film’s “fun-house fatalism”, which is a pretty apt description, I’d say, and in this case may be the same thing as absurdity anyway – and that’s really the form of The Man Who Wasn’t There: it’s an absurdist noir. And Ed knows it, at least the absurdist part, as much as he or anyone else can know such I thing. He suspects, at least, that cosmic and existential absurdity has become the enveloping force in his life, and by the end he is trying, desperately and stupidly and ignorantly, not to mention uselessly, to claw out some kind of definable shape, or to maybe claw out a window to let some light in. Before I go too far with this, let me say that, while my not-quite-negative, but a least disagreeably bewildered, opinion of The Man Who Wasn’t There took a sharp turn towards the positive some time ago, I never had to explain that before, or even really think about it, until now, and my viewing of the film (my fourth or fifth overall, I’d say) the other night locked a bunch of stuff into focus. Two things, primarily, but the one salient to my current point – the other I’ll get to in a bit – is that while the film does stack tragedy upon tragedy, its structure is to stack absurdity upon absurdity. Some of those absurdities end in death, but that’s just a part of it. I’m not sure there’s a comic moment in the film that doesn’t have some amount of near surreal lunacy to it – take Tolliver’s sudden, grunting decision to put on his wig only after he realizes Ed’s visit is of a business nature – which I suppose is not entirely uncommon to the Coen brothers, but it usually has a different purpose. Most of the Coens comedies are actually pretty sweet, or light-hearted, or just goofy, and the comic relief in their other films tends to be just that (not always, but I’d say generally that’s the case). But the comedy in The Man Who Wasn’t There is almost entirely in the service of breaking down Ed Crane. Birdy’s attempt to give Ed a friendly thank you is played for laughs (again with the absurd phrasing: “Heaven’s to Betsy, Birdy!”) but it also serves to finally, and thoroughly, crush Ed. Not that much was needed to accomplish this, but after her thank you attempt lands them both in the hospital, Ed has nothing left, not even the sliver of hope that he could repent or find redemption (through music?) that put him in the car with Birdy in the first place. In the way it uses humor, the film is – you’re exactly right about this – joined at the hip with A Serious Man, but also Burn After Reading, and manages to be a spiritual cousin to both. It’s as if the Coens made this movie, and then decided to remake it by splitting it into those two later films. The hopeless, violent absurdity of The Man Who Wasn’t There became the film where a friendly and grinning Brad Pitt gets shot in the face, and the groping, spiritual absurdity (but, weirdly, not hopeless in either film) found its way into the movie that ends with the devastation of a looming tornado.

The spirituality of The Man Who Wasn’t There finds two expressions, one in the (absurd?) camera move that goes from a large crucifix statue in the Crane’s neighborhood church, down to a priest reading out Bingo numbers. The audience is initially led to believe the Cranes are churchgoers, but no, Doris just likes Bingo, and believes, in that wonderfully bitter line from Ed’s narration, that heaven was on Earth, and “if there’s a reward, Bingo was probably the extent of it.” Ed’s not so sure, though, and admits that, even though they’re not actually attending mass, he finds the church surroundings peaceful. But Ed’s mind is flighty and unspecific on this matter. It’s not that he thinks church, or Christianity, itself holds any answers for him. He just suspects that maybe something does, which leads to the second expression of spirituality in the film: UFOs. The comic absurdity reaches its apex with this stuff, but you’re absolutely right to say that it’s a testament to the Coens’ ability to find new ways into their characters. You also point out the national obsession for UFOs at the time the film takes place, but I’d also say that the Coens have steeped their film in pulp – that’s the source of Ed’s narration, after all, his scribbling for a true crime pulp that paid for his story from Death Row – to the point where stories from Amazing Stories sort of get mixed up in it all, too. But what I’m getting at is, the pulp expression of spirituality, or hope, or religion, or God, or whatever – for Ed, that’s UFOs. Big Dave’s widow thinks he was killed by the government (it should be noted that Katherine Borowitz plays this expression of grief-induced madness with a certain comic, twitching mania) because of what he knew about UFOs, which, while not the case, implies that Big Dave led an absurd existence himself, right up until he got it in the neck. In any case, it leads Ed to cast his eyes up to the stars and imagine something bigger that might possibly make sense of it all.

You ask at the end of your post about the idea that filmmakers must, for some reason, “like” their characters. I don’t know what it means either, and I’ve made my disdain for this notion clear in the past, but does it apply here? By which I mean, do the Coens not like Ed, or Doris, or Big Dave, for instance? To dispense with Big Dave for a moment, he’s a liar and a blowhard and he’s sleeping with Ed’s wife, so he’s not a good guy. But even he has that moment, when he confronts Ed, where he says, in effect, if you’d punched me in the nose, I would have had that coming. He also says he’s not proud of what he did, referring to his affair with Doris. His anger comes from the fact that instead of taking out some reasonable form of retribution, Ed has ruined him. Is there no room for sympathy there? More to the point, do the Coens see no room for it? Then there’s Ed, who does not, in fact, murder Big Dave – I think I’ve been careful about not using that term – but instead kills him in self defense. The worst thing he does in the film is blackmail, which Big Dave might reasonably view as way too far, an opinion the audience might share, but do you? Or do you blame Ed? Okay, yes, you blame him, because he did it, but does it make you dislike him? What do you think of Ed as a person? I think he’s obviously fairly pathetic, and would be a boring man to know, but I also believe that he doesn’t deserve his fate. Watching the film again, the other thing that really came into focus for me is the surprising, maybe subliminal warmth. It’s a deeply sad warmth, but I was shocked at myself for not seeing how important Ed and Doris’s marriage is to the whole thing. Even though his face never betrays anything, look at what Ed is willing to sacrifice for Doris – he and Frank put up the barbershop just to pay Freddy Riedenschneider, and at one point he even admits his own guilt, to Doris and Freddy, just to set her free. He tells the truth to them both, and you see that sink into Doris’s consciousness. When he tells Freddy he knows about the affair between her and Big Dave, you see that Doris, prickly, acerbic, mean Doris, is actually feeling remorse. Maybe for the first time since the affair began, but it’s real. And that is why she kills herself. If she had any reason to believe the baby was Ed’s, I don’t think she’d have done it. But for her fractured mind, the knowledge that she was carrying the child of a man other than her husband, who was now fighting for her freedom, was too much.

Then of course there’s that little vignette, a memory Ed has while he’s unconscious in the hospital after the car accident. A macadam salesman (Christopher McDonald) tries his pitch to Ed who’s sitting on his porch, until Doris comes home and snarls at the salesman until he leaves. Then she and Ed go inside, she fixes herself another of her ever-present drinks, they sit as far apart from each other on the same couch as they can manage, Ed begins to say something, and Doris says “Don’t, it’s nothing. I’m fine.” End of memory. The Coens have said that this was meant to be a memory that was representative of the Cranes daily life together, and as such, and even without that explanation, it must be the saddest moment in the whole film. There are clues, though, that Ed loved Doris, and maybe Doris reciprocated, but even if she didn’t she appreciated him. In the bathtub, when he’s shaving her legs, she says “Love you.” Was that true? For much of the film, I’d have said no. By the end, I would say yes. Creighton Tolliver’s need for a financer might have been the catalyst for all the death that follows, but after that each character has to make their own decision, good or bad, to keep this madness rolling, and one of the decisions Ed makes that actually makes things worse, is the one to stop at nothing, at least within his very limited imagination, to free Doris. Amazingly, The Man Who Wasn’t There has a beating heart after all.

Well. I’ve gone all this way, and haven’t mentioned the title (which might be self-explanatory anyway, but we’ll get to that) or the Uncertainty Principle, as Freddy sees and applies it. I guess I’ll let you pick up those threads, if you don’t mind. But one other thing I wanted to mention yesterday, but couldn’t find room for, and probably couldn’t find an organic spot to bring it up in any of these posts. Still, it occurred to me that The Man Who Wasn’t There bears some vague similarity to another, very unlikely Coen brothers film, namely The Hudsucker Proxy. As far as the era in which each is set, they are roughly contemporaneous, but more importantly in The Hudsucker Proxy, that film’s sweet fantasia revolves around the fictional invention of a real thing – the Hula Hoop. Meanwhile, in The Man Who Wasn’t There, Creighton Tolliver is attempting to spread the word and the wealth about the newest thing: dry cleaning. And look where it gets him! I don’t really know what to do with this comparison. It may be nothing more than a passing thought…

Me, I Don't Talk So Much: Dennis, Me, and The Man Who Wasn't There - Part One

2012-01-11T20:30:00.001-05:00

Okay, folks, here we go, part one of my conversation with Dennis Cozzalio about the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There. The way it'll work, because of the time difference between Dennis and me, and our work schedules, is I'll post my half here first, and Dennis will post it over at his joint, and then his response will be added later in the day. Got it? Good! Let's do this!

BILL: Okay, I’m going to try to begin with a “grabber”: The Man Who Wasn’t There is the only Coen brothers film that ever made me uncomfortable.

Wow, who could ever stop reading after that bombshell? So let me write some more things to keep that momentum going. First, I should probably note that I do love the Coens’ comedies, but my preference is for their more serious (which isn’t always synonymous with “violent”, but often is, and also, curiously, is almost never antonymous with “funny”, which is more to the point I will eventually be making) films. The Man Who Wasn’t There followed two straight comedies, two great ones, The Big Lebowski and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?. Even as a fan of both of those – especially the latter, at least at the time, though now it’s probably a push – I was raring for the Coens to get back to what, given Blood Simple, you’d have to call their roots. Except of course they have two sets of roots, their second film being the entirely zany Raising Arizona, so the tonal divide has always been there, and has always been hazy, Blood Simple having a few laughs of its own. This has also contributed to a common knock against the Coens, at least indirectly, which has to do with their alleged coldness, and, especially, the mocking and disdainful regard in which they supposedly hold their characters. As someone who has been moved by Raising Arizona, Oh Brother, Where Are Thou?, Fargo, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man, even Miller’s Crossing and The Big Lebowski, and who loves HI and Edwina and Marge and Ulysses and Tom and Leo and the Dude and Donny and Walter, and so on, I’ve always bristled, at the very least, at this ridiculous criticism, especially since, for a while, this was received wisdom for a while. “Yes, they hate their characters – we must use this as the base from which to build our opinion.” That, and the idea that, with their interest in genre films and styles from early Hollywood, the Coens were merely constructing pastiches or spoofs or icy, ironic dissections, rather than real, full-blooded movies. The answer to that came from either Joel or Ethan (whichever) around the time of The Hudsucker Proxy, when he said (paraphrase): “We think, ‘Hey we like this kind of movie, let’s make one,’ as opposed to ‘Let’s comment upon them.’”

There’s so much that goes into my initial reaction to The Man Who Wasn’t There that I don’t want to get lost in it so early, but basically, with all this in mind, going to see it in the theater in 2001, I was mighty pumped for it. It was a crime film, specifically in the noir style, even black and white, a visual approach I was very excited to see the Coens (and Roger Deakins) take, and a wonderful cast led by one of my then-and-probably-still-I-guess favorite modern actors, Billy Bob Thornton (never have the Coens cast better than they did here). As for its antecedents as a crime story, if Miller's Crossing is Dashiell Hammett, and The Big Lebowski is Raymond Chandler (in a roundabout way), then The Man Who Wasn't There was James M. Cain, with some Jim Thompson in there, too. Cain's characters tend to have a lot of misguided passion, which Thompson's characters can have, too, but the very gradual shift in morals that occurs in The Man Who Wasn't There feels more like some of Thompson's work. But the setting -- the California no one else writes about, the everyday California, with small businessmen looking for some meager leg up, casual adultery, and one choice made by one man that brings down the whole world (plus, the final few minutes is straight The Postman Always Rings Twice territory) is all Cain. And I watched it, and I just didn’t know what to make of the damn thing. The tone of it had me all screwed up. Even early on, when James Gandolfini as Big Dave tells his story of World War II cannibalism, a grotesquely absurd tale that he uses as a punchline any time he doesn't like his wife's cooking ("What do I say when I don't like dinner?"), I wondered how seriously the Coens were taking this thing that I wanted them to take very seriously, indeed?

And later, with the UFOs, and Birdy's (Scarlett Johansson) attempt to thank Thornton's Ed Crane, which adds some let's say highly adult themes to some deliberately old-fashioned, rear-projected mayhem, plus let's not forget Jon Polito's very welcome return to the Coen fold, yet still, I thought (then), weird presence as Creighton Tolliver, the gay, innocent (in comparison to most people in the film), vain, and be-wigged dry cleaner whose search for an investor leads to the deaths of pretty much all the film's principle characters. All of this left me unsteady, in a way I wasn't used to with the Coens, who up to then seemed to be making one film after another that was pitched specifically to my sensibilities. Of course, it's hardly as if The Man Who Wasn't There feels like anything other than a Coen brothers film, and their movies always have jokes, but I felt like, for the first time, the charge that perhaps the Coens are too ironic for their own good, and less interested in making films than in mocking them, might not be too far off.

The scene that really made me squirm, when I saw it in the theater, is the bit where Diedrickson (Alan Fudge, one of an endless parade of unknown character actors in Coen brothers films who come in, nail the part, and then seemingly disappear from the film world once again), the medical examiner, comes into the barber shop where Ed works with his brother-in-law Frank (Michael Badalucco). At this point, Ed has killed Big Dave, after blackmailing him for the money needed to invest in Creighton's dry-cleaning business, using Dave's affair with Ed's wife Doris (Frances McDormand) as the leverage. However, for various circumstantial reasons, Doris has been accused of the murder, and was awaiting trial when she suddenly commits suicide. Diedrickson asks to take Ed across the street for a drink, and in a gorgeous shot of deep black wood and shadows splashed with white sunlight, he reveals to Ed, because he thinks Ed has a right to know, that Doris was pregnant at the time of her death. After a pause, Ed, staring straight ahead, says "My wife and I have not performed the sex act in many years."

In the theater, this got a big laugh from the crowd I saw it with. I didn't laugh. Not because I'm so much better than those people, but because, for one thing, I didn't find even Ed's ridiculous choice of words that funny, but also because I didn't want to. There wasn't much in that situation that I could find humorous, and it bothered me that, clearly, the Coens could.

Now, I realize this all makes me sound like a stone-faced, uptight prig. Maybe I was, or am, or something. But I found the film very frustrating in a way I didn't want to admit, because, Coen brothers super-fan that I am, to not like their new film, especially for these reasons, would be like admitting defeat. And of course the new and separate danger (not really) is that by admitting this, my eventual turnaround on the film, which came much earlier than my recent viewing of it in preparation for this project, it could easily appear that I'm talking myself into liking it. I do not believe that's the case, not least because even from the beginning there were parts of this film that I absolutely loved. There was nothing in The Man Who Wasn't There that I loved more than the sequence that has Ed putting his drunk wife to bed, while Ed's narration recounts their first date -- one which would seem to have offered little promise, but which also neatly forecast their future together -- only to be interrupted by a ringing phone, which leads to the killing of Big Dave, and Ed's return home, with clean hands, to resume his narration, the shadows of lacey curtains fluttering over his face, while Beethoven's "Piano Sonata, Opus 79" (I had to look that up) underlines all this awful grimness with counterintuitive beauty. This sequence is as good as anything the Coens have ever done, and it's the sort of thing I held onto tightly as I left the theater in 2001.

Boy, there's a lot more. The UFOs, the performances, the strange, shaggy final stretch, Freddy Riedenschneider, Ed's strange and empty pursuit for redemption, what that title's all about, not to mention, among other unmentioned things, my final turnaround. But what about you? Did this film ever make you uneasy? Does the film seem anything like the strangest of the Coens films, as I, changed opinion or not, persist in believing? Just what do you make of this?

DENNIS: Bill, as I was settling down to watch The Man Who Wasn’t There in preparation for the journey you and I are undertaking this week, your recounting of your experience with the audience guffawing over Ed Crane’s numb, detached expression when he says, “My wife and I have not performed the sex act in many years” struck a couple of different chords for me. First, it seems to me many audience members who are going to make the trek out to a theater to see what amounts to American art-house fare from the Coen Brothers are often overly eager to share just how tight they are on what they perceive to be the filmmakers’ wavelength, so much so that no slight joke or snide aside is small enough to not warrant a hearty guffaw. And certainly given the context in which it occurs, a guffaw seems mightily inappropriate. It didn’t seem to me, in viewing the scene last night, that even the Coen brothers, masters of morbid mirth that they may be, were inviting derision here, piling upon humiliation upon numbing loss just for the fun of it. It seemed to me they were giving Billy Bob Thornton’s character some room for his existential exhaustion at this point. I didn’t feel them going for the laugh here. Ed’s phrasing, his detachment from any kind of emotional involvement at this point, is expressed with chilling empathy through the passionless disregard for euphemism with which he describes his sex life with the recently deceased (and, as it is revealed, three months pregnant) Doris, and I think the Coens respect that in this moment. The audience you saw it with, it seems to me, may have been looking for some kind of release, or an indication that the smothering sensation they may have been feeling needn’t be taken all that seriously, and that they laughed doesn’t necessarily mean that they were responding to cues that were placed there by the filmmakers. Sometimes one man’s weary verbiage is simply one man’s weary verbiage. (Maybe the resistance to this movie is rooted in its humor being much more of a intellectual construct than usual, even for the Coens? One of the funniest things in the movie is when Scarlett Johannson's Birdy, after a failed audition with a renowned piano teacher at Ed's insistence, turns to him and confesses that she has no ambition to pursue music professionally, that she hasn't the passion for it. "But you," she says to Ed's deadpan mug, "you're an enthusiast!" It's a great comic moment, and I've never laughed out loud at it.)

The other thing that I realized as I began watching the movie last night, in addition to the fact that I probably hadn’t seen it in upwards of 10 years, was the fact that I didn’t remember being aware of the audience’s reactions, positive or negative, annoying or reassuring, because I never saw the movie with an audience. My first exposure to The Man Who Wasn’t There came several months before it was released here in the U.S. when I created the closed-captioning stream for the movie’s original VHS/DVD home video release, and it has the distinction of being, alongside Intolerable Cruelty, one of only two Coen brothers features I’ve never seen projected in a theater. (I even saw The Ladykillers in 35mm.) Seeing a movie this way means a specific kind of detachment is imposed on the experience from the start, because it requires breaking down the movie into lines of dialogue and patterns of shots and shot changes before you’ve had the chance to establish any kind of familiarity with it at all. Depending on the quality of the movie you’re seeing this way, it can actually help make the experience more pleasant— after all, some (most?) movies don’t give you even this much to think about on their own. But seeing a Coen Brothers movie this way first is to put it, and yourself, at a disadvantage. When the movie was eventually released, during its brief stay in American theaters, I never got a chance to see it (and may have felt less inclined because I’d already been exposed to it). So I never had the privilege of luxuriating in Roger Deakins’ radiantly bleak chiaroscuro cinematography on the big screen, and two or three DVD screening s in the interim years have done nothing to console me in that regard.

Disregarding all that and to attempt to answer your question, what, after all these years, to make of The Man Who Wasn’t There? I’m very interested, as I know you are, in trying to figure out why the movie has held my imagination over the course of a decade, even when the movie’s almost perverse shifts in tone, its deliberate attempt to keep its viewer off-balance, in a disoriented state somewhat resembling Ed’s moral and emotional lethargy, almost seem to invite disengagement. It s telling that the Coens, after having won an Oscar for Fargo, following that film up with the often literally shaggy The Big Lebowski and then stumbling into perhaps their most unlikely box-office success, O Brother Where Art Thou, would then continue to focus on making movies whose central motivation seem to be amusing their creators rather than appeasing audience demographics. This is important because, for the most part, the Coens aren’t interested in telling stories that are deliberately off-putting or insular—they deal for the most part in familiar Hollywood genre types, not for the purpose of deconstructing or commenting on them, as you pointed out, but because these are the movies that hook them as storytellers, and viewers, and luckily for us they just happen to come at those genres from a slightly different angle. Even their most straightforward genre exercises, like the Hammett-influenced Miller’s Crossing or last year’s True Grit, are enlivened and empowered by their sensibility while remaining true to the elements that general audiences would find most appealing about a fast-paced gangster tale or a laconic, elemental western.

But it does seem that The Man Who Wasn’t There is a special beast. I think you’re spot on to suggest that while the movie starts us off in James M. Cain territory, it deposits us somewhere nearer the bleak, scorched terrain of Jim Thompson. It is Thompson who might have, as the Coens do here, insisted that we indulge in the thorny issue of identifying with, or at least willingly spending time inside the head of this largely passive sociopath Ed Crane and, without insisting on redemption, recognizing in his behavior the way in which we might also have made similar choices. But for all the talk of The Man Who Wasn’t There being some kind of precious, insider neo-noir pastiche, how it actually plays it has precious little to do with the kind of lurid sexual gamesmanship of The Postman Always Rings Twice, the raw tabloid energy of pictures like The Killing (written by Thompson) or noirs like Crime Wave or Narrow Margin, or even the queasy fatalism of something like Two Seconds or Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour.The movie’s stillness, in regarding Ed’s deadpan, perpetually smoking visage which is always taking in what’s going on-- or not going on-- around him with apparent cynical reserve (or is it just a lack of certainty?), and its unfalteringly steady procession through a grim series of events in practically a benumbed hush, seems to me distinctly European. (Roger Deakins’ inarguably gorgeous black-and-white cinematography contributes to this disassociation—there’s nothing on display here that mixes the picturesque and the perverse with the stark roughness of something like Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past or Don Siegel’ The Big Steal.)

What’s more, the movies that this one clearly has on its radar-- pictures like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Scarlet Street and Detour-- don’t feel anything like this one. The Coens would scoff at the idea, but at times The Man Who Wasn’t There, more contemplative than brash or mean, most resembles a noir Robert Bresson might have made, albeit one with scores of dry, wisecracking allusions to modern alienation and even modern aliens, of the UFO kind. This movie embraces the stately, unassumingly attractive small-town California milieu and creates in it the palpable presence of a vaguely sinister energy. It gives you time to really contemplate the intimidating depth of those dark shadows. And those shifts in tone you allude to at the end, especially the ones involving the presence of creatures from another planet who at least one character believes may have contributed in a significant way to the pileup of tragedy upon tragedy in the film’s plot, are jarring, at first. But they also indicate the Coens’ instincts for trying to find an alternate way into the heads of the characters, and alluding to a national obsession with possible life on other planets that was gaining traction during the time this movie takes place, seems a legitimate way of going about that business—even if it would have never occurred to Jim Thompson. It seems initially jokey, but ultimately it becomes, I think, more than that.

The best joke, however, the one that truly reflects the fun-house-mirror fatalism of the Coens storytelling worldview, is that in The Man Who Wasn’t There no one is convicted or punished for anything they actually did—the driest chuckle is reserved for those who are hung out to dry for someone’s else transgression—and for those who do take their deserved lumps for lesser misbehavior, the punishment is wildly disproportionate to the crime. (For a movie that is ostensibly steeped in the visual iconography of film noir—it’s really more an impression of that visual iconography—there are surprisingly few obvious nods to other movies, but the one that stuck out to me as much in 2001 as it did last night was the brothers’ pitch-black tribute to the underwater fate of Shelley Winters in Night of the Hunter, substituting Jon Polito’s bewigged would-be dry cleaning magnate for the starlet and her long, flowing locks.)

There’s so much more to talk about regarding this movie. Thankfully we don’t have to take care of it all at once. So I’ll leave for next time my thoughts about what the title means. I’m glad you mentioned the sequence where Ed has his fatal meeting with Big Dave at Nirdlinger’s department store. I love that sequence too. It's a typically thrilling touch that Ed's own narration is interrupted by Big Dave's call, and then after Ed returns to the house to see his wife asleep as she was when he left, the narration picks up right where the interruption occurred. I also would like to delve a little deeper into this widely accepted, utterly nonsensical platitude regarding the Coens and the alleged disdain they have for their characters. Even if it were true, who was it that decreed filmmakers have to “like” (whatever that means) every character they present? Does dislike preclude artistic or narrative validity? What about Freddy Riedenschneider and the uncertainty principle? And to connect up with another bedeviled Coen protagonist, do you think there’s a link between Ed Crane and Larry Gopnik? (Ed is, after all, a very serious man.) As it turns out, there’s plenty there in The Man Who Wasn’t There, and maybe we can find words for some of the things that they didn’t have words for in Ed Crane’s ill-fated universe.

Modern Man

2012-01-09T12:08:00.006-05:00

Back in 2009, Dennis Cozzalio, of the very wonderful blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule teamed up and pooled together our superhuman powers (he can fly, I can chew glass) to discuss Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds in depth, over the course of four blog posts, each one going up not quite, but near enough, simultaneously both at SLIFR and right here at TKOFYH (that's the first time I've ever acronym-ized my blog, and it gave me a huge adrenaline rush). These seemed to go well for both of us. So, a while back, Dennis and I were talking about the Coen brothers, and at some point the conversation turned to their film The Man Who Wasn't There, which we both seem to have the same reaction to. I don't want to speak for Dennis, though, so I can only speak for myself when I say that this reaction is basically "That's a great movie. What the fuck is it?"

Dennis, then or later, suggested that he and I tackle this most peculiar of Coen brothers films in the same way we did Inglourious Basterds. So, beginning Wednesday, probably at night some time (if you're on the East Coast, anyway) Dennis and I will once again join forces, Dennis soaring through the air, and I eating whatever glass objects our foes hurl at us, to take on The Man Who Wasn't There. Currently, this project is pegged to last three days, but you never know, it could end earlier or later than that. We will have to See How It Goes, as they say. But so anyway, that's the plan, Stan. Be there! Or here!

Expressionism

2012-01-06T20:26:00.002-05:00

Why Didn't You Help Me?

2012-01-03T17:51:00.005-05:00

[Spoilers for Stuart Gordon's Stuck follow]

Stuart Gordon’s Stuck is based on the true story of Chante Jawan Mallard, who, one night while driving drunk and high on Ecstasy, ran into Gregory Glen Biggs with such force that his body was thrown halfway through her windshield. Instead of stopping, she drove home with Biggs, who at this point was still alive, stuck there. She parked her car in her garage and left him, where he died about two hours later. Which means there was plenty of time to save his life, but Mallard, a nurse, never called anyone to help. Until after he’d died, that is, at which time she sought help from her brother who helped dispose of the corpse.

This was in 2001, and was a big news story, as tends to be the case when someone behaves in a fashion either so brutal or so callous that most people (let’s hope) have a hard time even processing the information. The case was mined for TV episodes here and there, but the only person to approach it cinematically is Gordon, he of Re-Animator and From Beyond fame. Though Stuck is regularly categorized as a horror film – and the material could certainly have been used that way – it’s closer to Edmond among Gordon’s work, and is still different from that film in that it is really a crime film (a fact which would seem to pair it off naturally with Gordon’s King of the Ants, except that nothing pairs off naturally with King of the Ants) about, as so many crime films are, moral decay. Very sudden moral decay, moral decay depicted via time-lapse photography. In the film, Mena Suvari plays Brandi (Stuck is heavily fictionalized, so the characters’ names have all been changed and so forth), a nurse at an elderly care facility, as was Mallard. Intriguingly, she is shown early in the film to be good at what she does, and caring. This is done in a very Stuart Gordon-ian way by having one of her patients defecate in his bed, a regular occurrence, the nasty clean-up of which the patient always insists be done by Brandi (not out of any kind of demented cruelty, we gather, but because she is a comforting presence for the old man). I can’t really imagine doing a job like that, day after day, so from where I sit Brandi, at this early stage, occupies a higher plane of selflessness than I can claim for myself. She doesn’t perform this task, or any part of her job, with huffy disdain, but as warmly and professionally as she can. She is good enough at her job, in fact, that her boss (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon) hints that she is being seriously considered for a promotion.

But as we will soon learn, Brandi is nowhere close to being perfect. In her off hours, she associates with drug dealers, such as her boyfriend, Rashid, played by Russell Hornsby. It is after a night of revelry, or debauchery, depending on how you approach such things, that Brandi thinks nothing of driving home high and intoxicated, and plows into Tom (Stephen Rea), whose sad state of affairs, which includes joblessness and homelessness, has been playing out in parallel with Brandi’s day. Outside of one homeless man (Lionel Mark Smith), among whose ranks Tom now finds himself, no one has treated him with any kindness on the day that would appear to be his last. He’s been given several choices – by his awful landlord, by an obnoxious case worker at a job interview – that offer no choice at all. Vacate your apartment and leave all your belongings until you can pay the rent, or else. Fill out and mail in the form that got you this interview in the first place, but which has been lost, or have no shot at the job. Now that he finds himself near death and pinned by broken glass in Brandi’s windshield, the choice is all Brandi’s. And of course, she considers it no choice at all: go to prison, or let the man die.

Here is where Stuck deviates pretty drastically from the case of Mallard and Biggs, because Stephen Rea's Tom doesn't die. As Brandi goes about her life, albeit more hysterically and more recklessly, Tom, his legs shattered, struggles to live. This is not to imply that Biggs didn't do the same, but that he probably couldn't. Gordon makes it possible for Tom to survive as a way to gain for Biggs some measure of revenge. I don't claim to know that Stuart Gordon was trying for this, but Stuck works that way all the same. Stuck becomes a film about moral choices, which should go without saying, and it carries a strong contempt for those who refuse to make them.

I'll mention here that the film came under some small amount of fire, from various quarters, for changing the race of the female perpetrator -- Mallard was black, Suvari is white -- but any hint of PC cowardice that you might think is implied by this choice is washed away by actually watching the film. But never mind why -- I'll go ahead and continue to assume things about Gordon's motives and say that to introduce the race issue would be to confuse the issues Gordon cares about. Stuck is a film that is neither PC, nor interested in appearing ostentatiously un-PC. It's an angry film that refuses to set up easy targets (except for maybe the landlord and the job interview guy, but it's necessary to depict Tom at his lowest point when the car hits him). He does this by pulling from Mallard's life the fact that she was a nurse and caregiver who is outwardly good and helpful and selfless, but only so long, perhaps, as she's paid to be that way. It may not even be that cynical, though. It may simply be a touch more misanthropic. To paraphrase Chinatown, Stuck could simply be acknowledging that in the right place, and in the right time, people are capable of anything. You're only as good as the choices you've been forced to make. It's not hard to understand the difficulty of Brandi's choice, and lesser circumstances have driven people to murder before, but as Tom is reminded again and again, sometimes, even when presented with two distinct choices, you have no choice at all. Brandi (and Mallard) had to choose between their own well-being at the expense of another, and saving a life in an act that would land her in jail. Morality demands only one option.

The most bracing aspect of Stuck is its revenge-from-beyond-the-grave ending. Tom lives, and escapes, and brings down, both directly and indirectly, those who would let him die (or murder him outright). His choice in the film is death or self-preservation, and finally self-defense. When faced with the option of killing someone who he's now rendered helpless, he doesn't do it. But that person, the one who is helpless before him, dies anyway because they still can't face the consequences. This act is not like all those films where revenge comes after the hero has removed the gun from the villain's head and grunted "You're not worth it!", only have to have Gary Busey or whoever pull a gun at the last second, giving the audience the death they wanted without the taint of revenge. It's an awfully craven way to go about depicting revenge -- I'm perfectly happy, and entirely prefer, my revenge to be straight-up. But in Stuck, Brandi's fate is sealed by her character. Everything she does, including the last thing she'll ever do, follows logically from her decision to drive home with a dying man stuck in her windshield. Once that kind of selfishness takes hold of one's nervous system, it can be hard to shake loose.

So in Gordon's world, Biggs gets to live, and Mallard, who is still in the first long chunk of a very long prison sentence, has to endure more than she did in reality, and who can blame you for thinking what Gordon has imagined is only fair?

Best Books of 2011, Which Were Read By Me

2011-12-30T12:15:00.022-05:00

Oh, hello. I haven't been around much lately, and for that I apologize. It is my hope -- though I will stop short of calling it a resolution -- that next year will find me in higher spirits and in the throes of a mighty creativity, which will exalt this blog into the cosmos, in the sense that I will write more and hopefully some of it will be pretty good. Right now, though, that's all beside the point. The one post that has pulled me away from my slouching inactivity is my annual list of the best books that I read in 2011. Please note the distinction: these are not necessarily the best books published in 2011, but rather the best books that I read. I don't read much new fiction in a given year, because I mean Ready Player One?? Like I don't get enough '80s nostalgia dogshit on a daily basis that now I have to go read a whole book about it? Also, to the best of my knowledge, Ready Player One is the only book to come out this year, so I was sort of handcuffed.

But, as the saying goes, anyway. Enough of that. On to the list! Which, once again, is in no particular order until you get maybe into the top three or so. Everything prior to that is viewed by me on a more or less equal plane of quality. Roughly. Mainly, I don't want to do the work of ranking too much of this, because I think that's boring, to do, if not to read. But I'd rather not be bored than be bored, so there it is. Regardless, you can safely regard the book in my #1 spot as my favorite book of the year.

The Sour Lemon Score by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) - It was between this and The Black Ice Score, a slightly curious entry into Westlake's (writing as Stark) series of Parker novels. Black Ice has one of the iciest bits of violence Westlake ever wrote, and the time spent on it, and what it reveals about those who perpetrate the violence, is somehow all the more effective as Parker is nowhere to be seen at the time, and the killers are one-offs, present in that book, and that book only. But The Sour Lemon Score almost has that tone throughout. Sour Lemon is almost absurdist, as it finds Parker driving up and down the Eastern seaboard again and again, tracking one-time accomplice, turned violent betrayer, George Uhl, as well as the money Uhl stole from Parker (who stole it himself, of course, but whatever). Parker has been nastier in other novels, and there are mildly worrying signs of a softening to the character (I'm told the next four books in the series, starting with Deadly Edge, return to some awfully dark territory), but The Sour Lemon Score remains entirely satisfying, with some beautiful sketchwork of the secondary characters, not just Uhl -- who's an awful, awful man -- but Matt Rosenstein, who, at least as far as I've read, must be the most evil man in the series. The chapter devoted to him and his psychology is a masterpiece, and the novel ends with a great stinger of a last line.

The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells - – I wrote about this book in October for my “The Kind of Face You Slash” series, and I think I’ll let that stand as is. But I have to admit, and with some amount of chagrin, how surprised I was by the richness of this slender little novel. What I wanted was animal men wrecking shit, and I got that, but I was concerned about Wells’s tendency towards loony-bird social philosophy. That’s there, too, except not so loony-bird. The whole thing is pretty brilliant.

Gilligan's Wake by Tom Carson - This is a book you have to read to understand. This probably goes without saying, because so is Hop on Pop, but to describe Gilligan's Wake in flat terms is to do it an injustice. The idea is, basically, the history of the second half of the 20th century, starting at about World War II, as told through the eyes of characters from Gilligan's Island. I know, but wait. The amazing thing about the book is that Carson can place the Skipper, John F. Kennedy, and McHale from McHale's Navy in the same scene -- all of them being PT boat captains during the war -- and make you say "Sure, why not?" This integration of the historical and the very lowest of our modern culture is done with very few winks. It's a very funny book (and occasionally very disturbing: the chapter about the Professor is a grotesque, pansexual -- which doesn't even cover it -- paranoid nightmare), but it's not mocking. Or maybe it's more accurate to say there's no snark. Carson can throw in anything, from Sinatra to Bettie Page to Roy Cohn to Daisy Buchanan to Un Chien Andalou to pornography to Mary-Ann having an affair with Jean-Luc Godard, and somehow make it all play. This is the sort of novel that gets called "rollicking," and for good reason, but the tenderness is almost alarming. Your heart goes out to Lovie. How is that even possible? Ask Tom Carson, because I don't know.

Now's where I have to offer up the whole "in the interest of full disclosure" deal. I know, and am friends with, Tom Carson. I did consider leaving Gilligan's Wake off this list because of that. But I'm not getting paid for this, and so I believe that all I'm required to do in cases like this is acknowledge the fact. Otherwise, I can praise whatever I want to praise, as long as I do so sincerely. I am being very sincere.

The Cook by Harry Kressing - This is another one I wrote about this past October, and I think there's very little I can add to that. Suffice it to say, The Cook, possibly the only novel ever written by "Harry Kressing", depending on who that name is a pseudonym for, was the great find of this year's "The Kind of Face You Slash" posts. Weird, precise, disturbing, funny, and totally original, it's a novel you have to hunt for, as prices for used copies can run pretty steep. Some publisher who specializes in these kinds of forgotten classics, like Europa or NYRB, should jump all over this. It's a great book.

The Black Mass of Brother Springer by Charles Willeford - This early Willeford novel is, like so many of his books, not a crime novel, until it is. Sam Springer is, when we meet him, a writer, a published novelist, who fails to capitalize on that minor success. Since writing, in and of itself, means nothing to him, he takes whatever money-making scheme sounds good to him, such as that of a preacher of a black Southern church. And then things sort of spiral out of control, because when it comes to morality, Springer just doesn't seem to get it. The novel could be considered comic in a general sense, but you get to a point where Springer's disinterest in the wellfare of others becomes horrifying. The fact that the full consequences of some of his actions are never known cements the feeling that you are completely in Springer's head.

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki - Yet a third novel that I did, in fact, write about earlier in the year, in this case in conjunction with the Criterion DVD release of Kon Ichikawa's film adaptation. A quietly devastating portrait of a family being dragged slowly away from their roots in Japanese tradition.

Sam the Cat and Other Stories by Matthew Klam - Klam's collection of short fiction made a bit of a splash back in 2000; curiously, and unfortunately, he's published no books since. A short story here and there, but no collections, and this is a real shame. Sam the Cat is everything that contemporary American fiction is often claimed to be, but rarely is, which is funny, honest, painful, and, within the realm of actual, day-to-day life, imaginative. The title story is a hilarious first-person account of a guy who is stopped dead by the fact that he mistakes an effeminate man for an attractive woman. His fumbling, bizarre attempts to make contact with this man are so awkward that you sort of curl up into yourself -- the suspense of the impending humor is an interesting effect, I think, and hard to pull off on the page, but Klam does it over and over.

Port Mungo by Patrick McGrath - Looked at broadly, Patrick McGrath's novels could be seen as a bit repetitive -- they pretty much all focus on a man or woman, a first person narrator, who tells a story about other people, family or friends or associates, often soaked in some sort of Gothic, but somehow still reined in, sleaze. Sex, murder, and the like. And the narrator, you come to learn, is not to be trusted. But McGrath does this so well so often that to complain about this will only get you a hearty "Oh why don't you just shut up" from yours truly. I haven't read Martha Peake, generally considered his weakest novel, and for my money Trauma, his most recent effort, is his one major stumble. But at his best, Asylum, Dr. Haggard's Disease, Spider and Port Mungo are all brilliant and chilling. Port Mungo takes place, in part, in a sweaty, swampy Central American port village, a change-up from McGrath's favored towering New York City and green English countrysides, but the reader, the appalled observer, still bears witness to the horror selfishness can inflict. Here, incest, booze, and criminal neglect reduces a putatively fine artist to something less than a bug, one under glass as befits McGrath's clinical, even Cronenbergian (those two were, and are, a good match) style.

Swag by Elmore Leonard - Looking back on my past “Books of the Year” posts, a practice meant to remind myself what I’m supposed to do, I noticed that Elmore Leonard has yet to make any of my lists. This despite the fact that I consider myself a fan, and I read at least a couple of his books every year. Well, bad Elmore Leonard books exist (Touch and Maximum Bob) and there’s a whole lot that’s middlin’. Now is probably not the time to break down Leonard’s strengths and weaknesses, so I’ll let it stand that I think he’s a very fine writer who nevertheless frustrates me with some regularity. Even so, every fifth book or so that I read tends to strike me as some kind of masterpiece, and this year Swag knocked me out. Most Leonard novels are relatively simple in their core idea – in this case, the story focuses on two no-goodniks who find, within each other, the inspiration to commit various robberies. One of the men turns out to be a bit reckless, while the other, Stick, sort of just wants enough money to take it easy. He’s like a laid-back, non-violent, humane Parker, in fact. But violence arrives whether he likes it or not, and the tension of Swag comes from watching Stick, the smart one, try and remove himself from this horrid tangle of deadly stupidity he’s gotten himself into. It’s a great story, filled with choice writing and Leonard’s wonderful dialogue. It’s also interesting, and hugely refreshing, in the way it upends the standard cops and robbers narrative. Since Stick’s a good guy, basically, it should follow that the cop hunting him should be a prick (this is the case only in stories where the criminal is the focus, and a nice person). That’s how these things are done! Not so here, where the cop is simply a good cop with a job to do, one that we, as the law-abiding public would wish him to do regardless of how likable Stick is. All of which leads up to probably the best ending of Leonard’s long career.

A Meaningful Life by L. J. Davis- It just occurred to me that L. J. Davis's A Meaningful Life bears some similarity to the novels of Charles Willeford, in that it's a very funny novel, of a fairly despairing sort, until the point where it isn't anymore. Well, depending who you ask. There's a certain point late in the novel where the laughter catches pretty securely in one's throat, although I'm aware of one or two people who managed to force it out anyway. Regardless, this story of a man, no prize himself, caught in a hopeless marriage and stuck in a hopeless job, seeks salvation through the purchase and renovation of a Brooklyn brownstone. The place is a money pit, though, and shit hits the fan with some force. Then the fan explodes, and the blades go whizzing towards you. Brilliant, and brilliantly dark. Davis passed away earlier this year, with very little in the way of respectful notification the author of a book this good deserves.

Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov - This early Nabokov novel is the first book I read in 2011. It was a good start. Nabokov's writing is beyond reproach -- he is, as far as I can tell, the greatest writer of prose in the 20th Century. In English, I mean, even though it was his second language, and he translated, or co-translated, all of his early Russian-language works, of which this is one. So I kind of think, fuck that guy. Reading Nabokov can frustrate me to the point of hopelessness, but he's too magnificent to stay angry at for long. Laughter in the Dark finds Nabokov in his gleefully black, almost genre-tinted mode. It begins:

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; he was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

A fair summation. Nabokov's writing is such that even a novel so packed with disaster can be read joyously.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - I read fewer books in 2011 than any year in recent memory. David Foster Wallace's massive, rat-crusher of a novel is the reason why. I read it for a long time, and struggled more than once with its amazingly dense digressions on science, pharmacology, tennis, Quebec, assassins, death, mental illness, and pleasure at any cost. But Wallace's fierce intelligence, wicked humor, and intense, all-encompassing humanity (considered phony by some bullshit idiot losers) make Infinite Jest a reading experience like no other. It's a testament to something-or-other, or an indicator of same, that the moment where Infinite Jest lifted up to the level of genius was the ending. The peculiar focus, by which I mean the, for lack of another word, anecdote Wallace chose to close this 1,100 page behemoth, is so bizarre and grotesque and obliquely enlightening, that I was just floored. Among many other things, ending this book this way took enormous guts and self-confidence. Plus, early on, there's this:

My silent response to the expectant silence begins to affect the air of the room, the bits of dust and sportcoat-lint stirred around by the AC's vents dancing jaggedly in the slanted plane of windowlight, the air over the table like the sparkling space just above a fresh-poured seltzer.

I live for that kind of writing.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell - This, my favorite novel of the year, comes from an unexpected source. A couple of years ago, I read Mitchell's novel Ghostwritten, and I sort of kind of hated it. It struck me as the work of a smug, self-satisfied kid, the kind who would think that simply telling many stories in one novel, alternating characters and globe-trotting with the settings and whatnot, is in and of itself a pretty big deal, never mind the contents of those stories, or the actual writing. I was about set to turn my back on David Mitchell, but rave reviews and curiosity led me to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and it's a goddamn barn-burner. What I love about it, or the first thing I love about it, is that it's a good old-fashioned novel, in the classical sense (well, modern classical sense). It's a historical novel that explores the weird, even counter-intuitive, relationship, mainly through trade, between Denmark and Japan in the late 18th century. Jacob de Zoet is the reader's surrogate for this almost surreal clash, and Mitchell fills him out, as well as the various other Danish and, especially, Japanese characters with such fluidity that it's quite easy to love the heroes, and absolutely fucking despise the villains. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a grand old story, one that gripped me early -- it's exciting, funny, moving, disturbing, sweet, sad, and everything else you could want. Mitchell's greatest achievement here is how his plot goes bonkers so quietly -- it reaches levels of almost pulp, even grindhouse, hysteria, without ever being hysterical. It's monumental and wonderful and everyone should read it.

Anyway, happy New Year, all you sons'a bitches!

Very Brief Thoughts on Straw Dogs (2011)

2011-12-23T13:08:00.011-05:00

Very Brief Thought #1: From what I can tell, Rod Lurie walked away from Sam Peckinpah's controversial 1971 film Straw Dogs with the sole thought that Peckinpah must have really had some pretty significant beefs with rural England, a position, while oddly specific and seemingly incongruous when coming from a very Old West-focused man from Fresno, CA, that was not unlike Lurie's own sniffing, self-righteous disdain for the American South. That's my guess anyway, because in Lurie's remake of the Peckinpah film the whole idea seems to be that the South is pretty fucked up, and has it coming. What Lurie seems to have failed to notice about the original movie is that Peckinpah's English village of Cornwall isn't overly specific -- Peckinpah includes what you might expect, such as pubs and pints and some hunting and little details of small-time life, but there is nothing there to imply that anyone is meant to think "This is what all those places are like." Lurie's South in his Straw Dogs, however, includes, yes, hunting, and also high school football and revered ex-coaches and church before football, and of course religious hypocrisy, casual racism -- in short, everything people who aren't from the South think are the only things Southerners do or have or talk about. And Lurie wants you to know he's not afraid of it. Or not anymore.

Very Brief Thought #2: James Marsden plays David Sumner in the remake, smarty-pants city boy who has moved from Liberal City with his wife, back to her backwoods hometown in search of peace and quiet. This time around, David is still an intellectual, but in keeping with our theme of Hollywood self-absorption, he's not a mathematician -- because writing about math is sort of hard -- but a Hollywood screenwriter. He's writing a film about the Battle of Stalingrad, so that's pretty intellectual I guess. This leads to some of my favorite moments, such as the idea that the battle took place in 1943, but ignorant people think it was 1944 (actually the bulk of it took place in 1942, but never mind). Even better is when David looks up at Amy (Kate Bosworth) and happily announces "I've figured out how to get Khruszchev in on the action. He's going to be Yuri's friend." Yuri, presumably, is the hero of his screenplay. So his big idea to make Khruszchev a part of his film is to just make him the main dude's friend. And how long did it take him to come up with that? Regardless, I smell Oscar.

Very Brief Thought #3: Speaking of religion, and Russia, at one point, Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), who is the main villain here, the former beau of Amy and head of the roofing crew David hires to patch up their barn, asks David if he doesn't think that God had something to do with helping the Soviets win the Battle of Stalingrad. David wonders at the absurdity of God helping an atheist country. This is about as far as Lurie's theological thought is able to take him. And following Lurie's metaphor to its logical conclusion, if David is the far-Left atheist under siege, then Southerners are Nazis.

Very Brief Thought #4: I happen to like James Marsden. If a good remake of Straw Dogs could have been made, or if Straw Dogs had never been made in 1971 and it was being made, and made well, for the first time now, I would see no reason not to cast him in the lead. Based on seeing Lurie's film, I still think that. And I used to think I liked James Woods, too, but after watching this film I'm not so sure about that anymore.

Very Brief Thought #5: It had been my assumption, going into this remake, that Rod Lurie would skitter, like a tiny kitten startled by a wind-blown leaf, away from all of the original film's highly uncomfortable elements. Peckinpah's film is one of the few films genuinely built to work on an audience's beliefs like they were a bundle of raw nerves. Any time you think you can comfortably find your spot within the film's morality, Peckinpah rubs your nose in the part of the mess you forgot you had to contend with. My confidence in Lurie's cowardice is based on having seen Lurie's 2000 film The Contender, which is one of the most snivelling, weak-willed pieces of self-righteous horseshit I've ever seen. You can practically see The Contender nervously straightening its tie as it tries to figure out how to get away from all the things it's said that it now wants to take back. It's so cowardly that it bleats on about how a vice presidential candidate's college sexual experiences are immaterial to their ability to serve in that office, and then assures the audience at the end that, don't worry, we thought all that sex stuff was pretty gross too, don't worry, she didn't really do that. If she had, she should still be vice president, but isn't it better to know she didn't? We can congratulate ourselves for not caring one way or the other, but at the same time we don't have to picture it.

So. But much to my dismay, in Straw Dogs Lurie does not entirely flee from what Peckinpah hath wrought. He flees from it enough to make a difference, but, for instance, David is still kind of an asshole. He's still in denial about his own fear. Lurie does recreate the rape scene, and if you squint hard enough it might make you uncomfortable in the same way Peckinpah's did, sort of, almost. Jeremy (Dominic Purcell), the mentally handicapped man who is ordered to stay away from young girls, does actually, accidentally, kill the young girl, which sets up the whole ending siege. One notable exception in all this is the complete rounding off of Amy. The rape makes her angry, and David still doesn't know about it, but her anger and fear doesn't lead her to want to chuck the handicapped guy out to the wolves. The furthest Lurie is willing to go by way of making Amy somewhat prickly and human is to have her ask David why he won't give Jeremy over to the rednecks. He tells her why, and she says okay. The tension between David and Amy during the siege, which in Peckinpah's film has the effect of separating David from everybody, including those he's trying to protect, is completely gone. Lurie portrays a household defending itself, instead of Peckinpah's one man scratching and clawing and clubbing everything he sees and once believed in. So in Rod Lurie's movie, a lot of the same things happen. But who gives a damn?

Very Brief Thought #6: The part where Rod Lurie actually has poor James Marsden use, and explain, the phrase "straw dogs" is one of the shit-stupidest things I've ever seen.

On History

2011-12-17T20:31:00.004-05:00

“History is like a big bowl of soup. What kind of soup? Well, that’s where this analogy gets interesting. You see…” Abraham Lincoln spoke these words to Major Henry Rathbone on April 11, 1865, but before he could finish the thought, John Wilkes Booth shot him in the eye with a crossbow, and escaped from Ford’s Theater on a zipline, never to be heard from again. As “The Grand Inquisitor”, as Lincoln was known across the globe, lay dying, Rathbone grabbed him by the lapels and shook him furiously, shrieking “What kind of soup??? WHAT KIND OF SOUP!?!?!?” Alas, the arrow had destroyed the talking part of Lincoln’s brain, so that his last great speech was lost to the mists of Heaven.

Nevertheless, Lincoln’s point, however unfinished it may be, was well-made. What, finally, is history? Zachary Taylor once claimed “History is not unlike my wife's gingham dress, in that the dress, much like history, as often as not, though by no means continuously, and perhaps not even sporadically, now that I think about it, but essentially my point, which I do believe remains valid despite these newly considered reservations, is that my wife’s gingham dress and history share in common the fact that they both…ACK!” The light shed by Taylor’s brave words may be dim, but I think it is quite clear that both of these great men proved beyond all argument that history is very like a great many things, and it is in the comparing of history to these other things that knowledge, which is precious, is, indeed, gained.

History, as an idea, was invented by the Greeks, or the Romans, one of those. Back then, the belief had been that all the things you remembered happening, including past rulers, wars, economic upheaval, natural disasters, societal change, and scientific advancement, didn’t actually happen, and what you thought had happened were all false memories implanted by sea sprites that lived in your hair so that each soul that was born anew at the rising of the sun every morning would have things to talk about, and so that everyone could pretend to be smart, instead of waking up, looking around and saying “What the fuck???”, after which they would just wander around being scared of dogs and water and throwing sticks at each other. How they could believe this and believe the false memories is unclear, but this paradox is likely the catalyst that led one of them to realize this was all bullshit. Sea sprites living in your hair? Shouldn’t they live in the sea? Get out of here with that nonsense.

This new theory, that things actually happened and if they were big enough they added up to history, was presented one day to Caligula, who wiped his mouth, put down the horned wooden dildo, and demanded that someone bring him whatever paper was back then, and probably also a pot of infant blood, so he could begin writing down all these things, all this…history. When the senate read what Caligula had written, they all looked at each other and scratched the backs of their necks, whistled, and made “Hoo, man” sounds. Some announced that they had a thing they had to be at, while others pretended they couldn’t read. Those who remained tore up Caligula’s pages and went about writing their own history, saying Caligula would never notice because they still had to explain to him what apples were, and they were getting ready to poison him anyway. The resulting work, called the Historica Von Tabular, is the basis of all human knowledge.

It is because of the Historica Von Tabular – or HistVoT’bular, as several centuries’ worth of hip and savvy teens have dubbed it – that we have any kind of recorded history, or, for that matter, know that Archimedes had a penis “the mass of which could shatter Olympus itself.” Along the vast amplitude of time, the HistVoT’bular has been updated and expanded with such diligence that any history book you might have seen is not merely a chapter of the HistVoT’bular, extracted for study of a specific topic, but an abridgement of a chapter. The actual, physical HistVoT’bular is now so enormous that noted Norwegian historian Arnkjell Skarstadhagen, one of the few living scholars to have seen the book, said “the book could shatter Valhalla itself. It is very much like Archimedes’ penis in that way.” Currently, it is stored inside a dead volcano, on some secluded and mysterious Asian island. The vault – or bunker, really – where it’s kept is made of an indestructible metal that came from space, and might, some have speculated, actually be sentient. Regardless, Cilia Sumo, the seven-foot-tall Japanese fashion model, nuclear physicist, arms dealer, and, as of last Tuesday, possessor of all the world’s gold, has assured world leaders that the “laughing walls”, which the few contractors who built the vault and survived to tell of it, have spoken of, claiming that the sound of the “alien cackling” that vibrated from the metal slabs melted the insides of many of their colleagues, is just a lot of “silly shenanigans. What’s not so silly is world poverty.” And how can you deny that? Poverty is pretty bad.

So thank you, Cilia Sumo. Without you, the great “soup” of history might forever be nothing but scattered ingredients, hidden on the highest shelves of the universe’s kitchen, the strong fiber of its “gingham” absent from the “dress” that would, without your watchful eye, fall in tatters to the floor of Hades, around the ankles of Ignorance. And so the question remains: What kind of soup is history? The answer is: Delicious.

Beast Needs Beast

2011-12-11T19:29:00.010-05:00

Criterion's release of Masahiro Shinoda's Pale Flower earlier this year caused at least two instances of confusion that I'm aware of, having to do with the belief that Pale Flower, from 1964, would be something like the crime films Seijun Suzuki would become famous for later that decade. I think the source of this confusion was the use, by Criterion, of the word "jazzy" to describe Shinoda's film. That word does not really evoke Pale Flower, apart from its score, but does put one in mind, or did me and at least one other person, of the fractured New Wave mania of films like Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill. As it happens, my own affinities are closer to what Pale Flower actually turned out to be, and I think that is a pretty terrific movie, so there was no disappointment at play in my case. It did make me think a bit about Suzuki, though, who I don't have a great deal of experience with, as New Wave pop abstract genre hoo-ha is often not my thing. So much so that even Godard's Breathless, as well as even Godard's Band of Outsiders, leave me listless. Crime films once removed, I call them, and it's here that Godard and I begin to part ways. My interests would simply appear to lie elsewhere.

Or do they!? Criterion already released Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill many years ago, but tomorrow they're being re-released, remastered and with gorgeous new covers and so on. Having watched them both (rewatched, in the case of Branded to Kill) I find myself rather stunned. Less so by Tokyo Drifter, I must admit, eye-popping thought it unquestionably is, as you see:

The whole film felt to me like the adaptations of Yukio Mishima's fiction, in all their Brechtian phantasmagoria, within Paul Schrader's Mishima (genre differences aside, Tokyo Drifter must have been a huge influence on Schrader's film). The film's bright, assaultive colors contrast pretty sharply with the black and white of Branded to Kill, which came out three years later, and it's interesting, for me anyway, to consider Suzuki's relationship to the genre in these two films. In his essay for the Criterion re-release Howard Hampton ably notes how little care -- in the sense that it didn't matter to him, by which in turn I mean the absence of its mattering is what interested him, if you follow me -- Suzuki gives to Tokyo Drifter's coherence as a plot, crime or otherwise. But the story, which revolves around Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari), a former Yakuza who has left that world with his boss, Kurata (Ryuki Kita), to whom he is devoted, and Tetsu's legendary skills as a hitman, which trade he plies his trade in a way he believes is an honorable way to protect Kurata from encroaching Yakuza forces, brings to mind elements of the Coens' Miller's Crossing. Ultimately more bitter than that film -- or maybe clear-eyed, as another former Yakuza will eventually try to right Tetsu's naive ship -- Tokyo Drifter nevertheless almost hides that stuff, the criminal psychology, or pathology, or what have you, under some pretty crazy shit. The ending, a gunfight which takes place in a room of stark white, with maybe big yellow doughnut sculptures, is acrobatic -- that one gun-catching move of Tetsu's is pretty slick -- and bloody and more about all that whiteness and that one big spray of red than it is about much else.

"So what?" you might argue, and fair enough. I'm not here to knock Tokyo Drifter. It's just that boy, did I love Branded to Kill, a film I did not remember as being quite this excellent. And it's interesting how much more reserved it is, visually, than Tokyo Drifter, coming in 1967 when the push for most would have been to pull out even those last few remaining stops and let the style all spill out. Instead, nutty as Branded to Kill is in a lot of ways, here Suzuki seems to find more interest in the actual genre, the trappings of which, like the women and the guns (especially the women, though Hanada's (Joe Shisido) machine pistol gets a fair amount of screen time), become more central to Suzuki's visual design. And the violence, too, which is typically more brutal and fast. It's true, though, that both films share a specific theme about the empty and destructive ambition of the Yakuza. In Tokyo Drifter, that particular absurdity is expressed through the notion of honor and loyalty even being possible (it's not, Suzuki says), and in Branded to Kill the question is, if you're in the Yakuza, what does it mean to be the best at what you do?

Joe Shisido's cold-blooded and efficient hitman is ranked as the Number 3 killer. Number 2 is pretty well know, but who is Number 1? He's never been seen, he's a rumor, you can't get to him. It's worth noting her that Patrick MacGoohan's TV series The Prisoner first hit TV screens in 1967, the same year Branded to Kill was released, and while Shisido's hitman may be Number 3, not Number 6, his quest is still for Number 1, the discovery and defeat of Number 1, and Suzuki, very much not a realist (the course of Hanada's life literally depends on the weight of a butterfly) also has voices blaring at Shisido from intercoms, giving him instructions, threatening him, pointing out the foolhardiness of his quest. Put everybody in funny clothes and throw in a giant menacing bubble, and Branded to Kill could almost be set in The Village. Here, what Suzuki hid, due to lack of interest, under layers of color and even slapstick, he plays up and makes the focus: the death-wish inherent in the criminal life. The mysterious and deeply seductive Misako (Annu Mari) even says she wants to die, almost before she's said anything else, and Hanada is almost willing to help her out with that. The sociopathic elements of this relationship are not entirely unlike those at the center of the, I guess, romance in Pale Flower, actually, but the drive for success is much more feverish in Branded to Kill, and more theatrically abstract. And in Pale Flower, at least you could put your finger on the goal -- it was repulsive, but it was concrete, anyway. In Branded to Kill, you can define it, but you couldn't say what achieving it would mean. Tokyo Drifter's brand of absurdity is all in its visuals; in Branded to Kill, the absurdity is in the motivations.

Tetsu in Tokyo Drifter and Hanada in Branded to Kill really are trying to do the same stupid thing, which is to seek worth, even redemption (however they might define that) through the Yakuza. Both men are also both trailed by a theme song, each sounding like the Japanese equivalent of the "lonely wanderer" brand of American folk ballads, except in this case shot through with the fatalism of gangster life. By the end, though, Tetsu keeps drifting, and Hanada has pulled the trigger again and again until he's hitting empty chambers.

Demons Took Your Gold

2011-12-10T15:53:00.010-05:00

Something not unlike what I found myself resisting in Snakes On a Plane is going on in Cowboys and Aliens. Namely, in that earlier film, the one with snakes, the audience was being asked to take a film with an intentionally ridiculous title, one that was perversely literal -- and one which, I admit, I still to this day find genuinely funny -- and apply it to a film that was supposed to be, if not exactly serious, then at least not a joke. In other words, yes, the film is exactly what the title says it's going to be. We're actually kind of not kidding. For myself, I wasn't able or willing to do the kind of work necessary to get past the joke that was that film's central marketing gimmick and accept that it could both be a joke and not a joke. For a film like Snakes On a Plane, that's simply asking too much. Of course, had it been great, that might have been something else entirely, but obviously that was never going to happen.

Cowboys and Aliens, directed by Jon Favreau, is exactly the same thing, only more so. That title puts me in mind of that witheringly exhausting genre of, I don't even know what you'd call it -- wish-fulfillment-fantasy-comedy? -- where one of those geeks that they now have these days says how awesome it would be if robots fought zombies in an underwater kingdom. They're only joking, of course, except are they really? I confess, I've made a joke or two like this in my time, but I hope to find the strength never to do it again, and anyway when I do it I actually am kidding, and don't strive to turn it into a movie that's as straight-faced as Red River, which actually had more laughs, now that I think about it.

Although the truth of it is that I actually kind of liked Cowboys and Aliens. Kind of. The story is very simple, at least the parts you need to pay attention to: you have a mysterious stranger (Daniel Craig) who is quiet and able to inflict violence but would rather not to, and also is suffering from amnesia; a mean and nasty old man (Harrison Ford) who recognizes Craig as a thief who stole his gold; another mysterious character, a lovely young lady (Olivia Wilde) who knows that Craig and the source of his amnesia is vital to her quest; and various other Western types, such as the unassuming businessman (Sam Rockwell) who finds himself forced to pick up arms against an enemy, a wise and kindly preacher (Clancy Brown) who acts as the conscience of the town; the old man's vile son (Paul Dano); the sheriff (Keith Carradine) who's just trying to do his job, and so on. Then they all get attacked by space aliens.

There's not much more to it. Certain secrets are divulged along the way, and character dynamics shift, or whatever the term for that stuff is, but nothing that distracts from the central theme of cowboys fighting aliens. I personally don't have any serious problem with that as an idea. I like some steampunk stuff, after all, and if this is essentially the same thing. The problem I have is with the having-cake-and-also-eating-it aspect of that title versus the film. I know this is based on a comic, and I don't know the tone of that comic, but just in general why scoff at your own idea if your plan is to handle it in a straightforward manner? Until Walton Goggins shows up as an amusingly naive criminal, I'm not sure there are really any jokes in this thing.

Not to harp on the title too much. The film has other problems, such as its weird lack of imagination. I happen to basically enjoy Jon Favreau's films, and I will vigorously defend Iron Man 2 on the grounds that I thoroughly enjoyed watching it. One of the things that film's detractors will point out as a shortcoming is the supposed sluggishness of its action scenes, a complaint I find slightly baffling, but okay. If they wanted to shore up their argument by saying it's a common failing with Favreau and pointing to Cowboys and Aliens as an example, then that would be at least something. I can't help but think about Steven Spielberg, whose name is on this film, but of course, as an executive producer, and I think about The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which is maybe Spielberg's worst film (for the record, I like Always and have never seen Hook) and even that has the terrific setpiece with the camper dangling off a cliff and the broken window and the dinosaurs that eat the shit out of the one guy. Now, Lost World also has that terrible bit in the tall grass where you see a bunch of people fleeing the raptors, and one person gets dragged down from underneath the grass, then the raptor tail goes up. Then another guy goes down, up goes the tail. Then another guy goes down, up goes the tail. That scene was unimaginative. The conflicts between cowboys and aliens in Cowboys and Aliens feel like that scene over and over again. The alien spacecraft fighter jet things strafe the cowboys, who run away until one of them (Daniel Craig) is able to blow one of them up, then they leave.

That is until the end, and the final assault by the cowboys on the alien fortress. Which was fun enough. Favreau pulled out some stops for that, I guess, but the film is still left with a curious absence of, I don't know...verve. It's as if the crazy idea of throwing cowboys and aliens together in the same movie was enough. More than enough, really! Who could ask for more than that? Besides, I liked Sam Rockwell a lot -- I wish he could play the same character in another movie -- and it was an odd but interesting experience watching a new film with Harrison Ford in it. I just refreshed my memory about his recent career, and counting Cowboys and Aliens I've seen exactly four of the films he's appeared in since Air Force One. Before that, I'd seen every feature film, plus the Star Wars Holiday Special he'd made going back to 1977, when he made two, one of which, Heroes, I haven't seen. So yes, if you're asking me if I've seen Force 10 From Navarone and Hanover Street, yes, I have. The result of all this being that now, bizarrely, watching Ford put on funny clothes and caper about on screen no longer feels like a natural thing to be doing.

One other thing I'm reminded of is something I read about Made, Jon Favreau's first film as a director, following Swingers, his breakout as a writer and actor. Some film critic remarked of Made that it was very surprising to discover that Jon Favreau's real ambition this whole time was to be John Cassavetes. Now, again, I generally enjoy Favreau's films, but yeah, that guy was wrong.

Oh, You Old Vampire, You!

2011-12-05T12:14:00.004-05:00

It is very tempting, and would not be inaccurate, to say that Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living, which will be released to DVD tomorrow by Criterion, is what the word "effervescent" means. To the film's credit, however, that is only part of the story.

Any time a pre-Code movie is set free once again among the public, those who care tend to get pretty excited by the prospect of seeing classic Hollywood engaging in matters a bit racier than would soon be the norm. I'm not judging, because I get excited, too -- there's an inherent fascination to it all, and anyway I will never forget the first time I saw Tarzan and His Mate. But what's great about it is less the raciness than the bluntness. It's nice to see adult filmmakers making films in which they don't have to pretend to be talking about something they're not, and hide what they're actually talking about. And Design for Living is sort of blunt. It's the story ("freely" adapted, according to the Criterion case, from a Noel Coward play by Ben Hecht. How freely can be judged by you, as Criterion has included another adaptation of the play from 1964) of best friends and starvign artists George Curtis (Gary Cooper), a painter, and Tom Chambers (Frederic March), a playwright, and their mutual love for advertising artist Gilda Farrell (Miriam Hopkins). This all happens in Paris, and what's surprising about the whole set-up is that Gilda can't choose between the two men, and would rather not, as a result, when you get right down to it.

So that's where a lot of the effervescence comes from, the free-spiritedness of it all. But Design for Living goes beyond that by making the love between these three feel like it matters. The initial plan, devised by Gilda, is to exclude sex entirely, but when Tom goes to London to stage his new play (up to that point he was a writer of "unproduced plays, very good, of that kind"), Gilda and George can't help themselves. They try to let Tom down easy, but when he confronts Gilda later, he says that he can excuse, if not forgive, George because George betrayed him for Gilda, something Tom is able to understand. But Gilda betrayed Tom for George -- "An incredible choice," he says, and there's no little pain, and even a touch of malice to that line.

Things flip around quite a bit as the film goes along, as you'd expect, but the actual pain inherent in their situation never faulters. If George and Tom and Gilda are able to come through it all in the end, it's because the love is genuine, all around. And for my money, while Hopkins and Cooper are both great here, and Cooper in particular was a bit of a revelation as I'd never seen him so energized, it's Frederic March who walks away with the film. He has that "incredible choice" line, and also the terrible change from happiness, as he dictates a letter to George and Gilda regarding the success of his play, to the desperate wilting that follows his receiving of the news that Gilda and George have, for lack of a better term, become exclusive.

Also worth mentioning is Edward Everett Horton as Max Plunkett, a very business-minded fellow whose love for Gilda precedes that of both George and Tom, though in Max's sad case the love is unrequited. Horton is very funny, and so damn natural and smooth with every pompous and self-regarding syllable he's given to utter. Plunkett functions as sort of the villain of the piece, if villain there be, though, actually, there is no villain. Plunkett is an obstacle, but he's less likable than the rest of the main characters only because he's less fun. He's not made to suffer for this, however, and is instead shown than his particular path to happiness lies elsewhere. But his grabbing for Gilda does lead to what must be the most remarkable shot in all of Design for Living, and the one that most betrays the film's pre-Code roots: George and Tom waiting for Gilda in the bedroom she has come to share with Max, both men silently looking down at the couples' bed. Each feels anguish, that's clear, knowing what must have happened in that bed, but both have a tiny bit of light in their eyes, too, based both on their memories of their own time with Gilda, and of the future they plan on bringing about.

Capsule Reviews Which Are Actually Rather Long

2011-12-03T19:39:00.023-05:00

The Hunter (d. Buzz Kulik) - What would have been terrific is if Steve McQueen's last film before his death in 1980 at age 50 had been really great. Or that he'd not died in the first place, but keeping our wishes manageable, The Hunter could have been a tense and gripping, stripped down thriller in the The Driver mode, but instead it is, in fact, quite thoroughly bad. Based, I have to think with a great sense of freedom to stray from the known facts, on the career of real-life bounty hunter Ralph "Poppa" Thorson (McQueen, of course), The Hunter feels exactly like the kind of made-for-TV movie that was so common and popular back in those days, and in fact director Buzz Kulik's best-known and easily most enduring work was on the made-for-TV Brian's Song. There's a loose, yet stitched together quality to The Hunter, as it clumsily tries to weave together elements of Thorson's private life -- which includes a former bounty, played by Levar Burton, he let off the hook because the young man is gadget-oriented and can fix things -- as an old-school macho fellow caught up in his modern-day lady's (the ever-delightful Kathryn Harrold) requests to accompany her pregnant self to this new thing they have called "Lamaze classes", and his life as a hardboiled skip tracer.

To underline the disparity, Kulik and his screenwriters (including Peter Hyams who, say what you want, wrote some good shit for Hal Holbrook to say in Capricorn One) toss in a lot of comic relief, mainly of the slapstick variety. The problem is, unlike Paul Newman, McQueen, who at this point was starting to age into Richard Widmark, did not possess a natural gift for comedy, so there's lots of mugging and clownish weariness. Add to that some of the most tedious action scenes, which stem from the weirdly anemic "bounty hunter" portion of our plot, I've ever seen, to the point where a chase through the city made me think "Shit is this still going on?", and you, like me, will soon find yourself feeling sort of depressed.

Hunger (d. Steve McQueen) - There's a -- I don't know what you'd call it, but it's a formula of movie dialogue that involves one character asking another character to explain something, usually a motivation, and the character being asked responds with an anecdote meant to hint at an answer without directly answering. So you'll have somebody say "Why did you become a cop?" and the cop will respond with something that begins "When I was seven years old, my dad got me a dog..." Although I don't doubt that writers I like have used this construction, I nevertheless hate it pretty profoundly. It doesn't have the stones to be stylized, and doesn't have the ear to be naturalistic. It pretends to be the latter, without realizing that nobody speaks in such naked metaphors, nor are they typically able to dredge up wonderfully illustrative childhood anecdotes for any occasion.

Whether I'm alone in hating this or not, I don't know, but I do think it's significant that it turns up in Hunger, a completely different Steve McQueen's 2008 film about Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and the hunger strike that ended his life in 1981 while he was imprisoned by the English government for...well, Hunger doesn't really worry about what for. It's rather more interested in transforming Sands' suffering into something religious -- the wasting away of his body (and what did Michael Fassbender do to himself here!?) takes on the holy aura of thorny crowns and spear wounds in the side. What Sands was in prison for had to do with his work in the Provisional IRA, the most brutal wing of Ireland's Republican terrorists through the late 60s, all of the 70s, and much of the 80s. No actual violent acts were ever pinned to Sands, but many gun charges were, and if anyone thinks that Sands wasn't at least an accomplice to violent terrorist acts, well, they'll probably be walking into an open manhole pretty soon.

None of this much matters, I guess, or according to some, as Hunger is less about politics than it is just a series of mostly quiet emotional imagery that records the build to Sands's decision, and the falling away of his body as he carries through with it. Except that all the clips of Margaret Thatcher speaking, it would seem, coldly about the hunger strike, in what is very nearly a silent film, is clearly about something else again.

Why the suffering on display in Hunger, the very explicit martyrdom, did not ping in the brains of critics as another example of what some of them regarded as crazed masochism in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, I couldn't say, because the religion that was once at the heart of the Troubles, though subsequently got fogged up by centuries' worth of other things, is by no means absent from Hunger. But here there's a political element to the core story, without adding a filmmaker's bias, that is easy for some to hang their hats on. And when a priest (Liam Cunningham) pushes Sands for the basic truth behind his decision to starve himself to death and Sands responds with some creative writing bullshit about a foal he had to put out of its misery, an act of mercy which got him in trouble with a schoolmaster, everything just starts to make sense, doesn't it? Or doesn't it? The problems of Northern Ireland did not get easier as time went on. An easy moral stance changed over the decades so that a noble end was being sought through monstrous acts, and to defend the cause started to feel like you were defending the acts. Meanwhile, Hunger is a film that tries to impose on that time a very ugly clarity.

Dark of the Sun (d. Jack Cardiff) - On the subject of morality, legendary cinematographer and occasional director Jack Cardiff's Dark of the Sun, adapted from a novel by Wilbur Smith, immerses itself in the very rich moral swamp of mercenary armies. Made in 1968, the film is the kind of "men on a mission" movie that Quentin Tarantino claimed was his inspiration for Inglourious Basterds, even though that's not what that movie turned out to be. As deeply as I love Tarantino's film, there is a part of me, the part that routinely looks gift horses in their mouths, that wishes I could see a film all about the Basterds and their various adventures, because brother, films like Dark of the Sun ain't nothing to sneeze at. Anyway, Tarantino did go so far as to borrow parts of Jacques Loussier's score for his World War II epic, not to mention Dark of the Sun's star, Rod "Brief 'Im" Taylor, who not only costars here with Jim Brown, but reunites with his Time Machine costar Yvette Mimieux. The Taylor/Brown pairing turns out to be more significant, as Taylor's Captain Curry is hired by shady government and business types to ostensibly save a group of Congolese civilians from bands of marauders, but also to maybe grab that bag full of millions of dollars worth of diamonds while you're at it.

As someone who has a particular interest in cinematic violence, I'm fascinated by that curious part of the late 1960s from which Dark of the Sun comes, when an action film might include a shot of someone spraying a crowd of bad guys with a machine gun, each of whom clutch their chest and fall bloodlessly, no more traumatic to audiences than anything you might have seen from post-Code Hollywood, and then one second later show a guy getting stabbed in the face with a burning torch. If the violence in this film settles into anything, it settles into brutality, as was becoming the style at the time. Along with that, of course, must come the moral hand-wringing. On one hand, there's a good reason for that, as Jim Brown's Ruffo, Curry's right-hand-man, actually originally hails from the Congo, and would like their mission to be about something more than making money, and wants his willfully cynical friend to understand that. On the other hand, one of the mercenaries that hitches himself to their mission is actually an ex-Nazi, and when he causes the film to take a tragic turn late in the story, this leads to one of the better examples of someone clouding up and raining all over somebody else I've seen in a while, it also asks me to feel regret after the fact. Which is a little bit disingenuous, actually, and regardless the regret never took hold in me. But even before any of that happened, I wanted to know why in the world the team needed an ex-Nazi who was not just willing, but eager, to murder people with a chainsaw?

Still a good flick, though...

Night Creatures (d. Peter Graham Scott) - I've always been interested in the lesser known horror films from Hammer Studios, and this one certainly counts, despite starring Hammer stalwarts Peter Cushing and Oliver Reed. Reed, for once in his life, doesn't seem like he's about to start foaming from his mouth and smashing whiskey bottles over his head, and in fact plays the romantic lead in this rather curious story about a small English seaside village, during the 18th century, whose peaceful existence is disrupted by government officials, headed by Patrick Allen's Capt. Collier, who believe the village is smuggling hootch. Mix this with a subplot about the Marsh Phantoms, a wholly-unconvincing looking hoard of night-demons, I guess, who reportedly bring the unwary to a marshy grave, and the dishonorable Mr. Ash (Martin Benson), whose willingness to do whatever he needs to do to get what he wants, be it money or Imogene (Yvonne Romain), Reed's fiancee', jeopardizes the whole village. Which is smuggling hootch, by the way, as overseen by Rev. Blyss (Cushing) which is an interesting early revelation, and what's all this about the pirate, Captain Clegg, who is often heard about but never seen?

Certain plot elements function sort of as twists but are not at all hard to see looming, but none of that matters. Night Creatures seems to be about too many disparate things in the beginning, but winds up as entirely entertaining, and even unpredictable, obvious twists notwithstanding. What transpires as a result of those twists is both organic and emotional and somehow unforeseen. The damn thing just comes together. It does not aim as high as the best Hammer films, and what it is, in the end, is a yarn, but it's a damn good yarn, told by a crew of professionals, and boasting that great dusky blue stone look of, say, Brides of Dracula. I was very pleasantly surprised.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (d. Edgar Wright) - Edgar Wright's third film is simultaneously not as good as his previous two, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and miles more ambitious in terms of its visual style and scope. Based on a comic books series, my unfamiliarity with which somehow proves to me that I'm too much of a geek, and not enough of a geek, to really belong anywhere in this crazy, lonely old world, by Bryan Lee O'Malley, it's about Scott Pilgrim's (Michael Cera) love life, the turmoils of which are ordinary at their core, but heightened into the world of superhero comics and video games so that in order to cement his relationship with Ramona Flowers (a, let's face it, completely fetching Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the girl of his dreams, as far as he knows, he has to defeat her seven ex-significant others in Mortal Kombat-style battle. Much of this is quite funny (this may seem like nothing to you, but Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World includes the funniest washing of a character's hands after they've urinated that has ever been put on screen), and the film, not just shot but also set in Toronto, has a nice, unique look that is both snowy in an everyday sort of way, and in the mildly stylized way of a comic panel. Wright really knows what he's doing in terms of transplanting the feel of reading a comic book, moving one's eyes across the panels, to film, with such seemingly simple ideas as using sound effects that you both hear and "see", which arc into the next scene. You'll know what I mean when you see it.

But the film also does sort of wear out its welcome. The "seven exes" thing loses its verve after a couple, or a few, or anyway that verve is scattered, to the point that they arbitrarily and even wearily double up on the exes towards the end. And while some of the humor is delightfully anti-hipster (every character in the film being a member of that species), it is occasionally as tone-deaf as any hipster you might imagine. For instance, ironic Bollywood is never going to be welcome. Still, Michael Cera, whose casting was the cause of some controversy by the comic's fans at the time, was very good. Maybe my ignorance is helping me immeasurably here, but in terms of the movie, it's the movie that counts, right? And anyway, if you think Cera in this film is simply rehashing George Michael from Arrested Development, then you might be losing your ability to tell the difference between two different things.

As a final kudos, I would like to note that Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, with the following exchange from Scott and Ramona's first date, captures male thought patterns about as well as I've ever seen:

Ramona: I think an act of God is as good an excuse for a bad date as any.
Scott: This was a date?
Ramona: Did I say date? It was a slip of the tongue.
Scott: Tongue...

Affinity #28

2011-11-30T20:46:00.004-05:00

All three of us were laughing, and we couldn't stop.

- Charles Willeford, The Shark-Infested Custard

A Recommendation

2011-11-28T07:21:00.004-05:00

Over the past however-many months, I have become a devoted fan of radio shows you listen to on your computer or some other such device that is not actually a radio, also known as “podcasts.” They’re quite the thing these days, and cover a huge variety of topics, through various tones and at varying levels of professionalism. As one would assume, this being the internet, movie-based podcasts are everywhere, and me liking movies the way I do you’d think I’d be all up on those. But actually no: the majority of my podcast-listening habits are devoted to the comedy ones, of which there are also many. My experience with movie podcasts so far has led me to believe that they’re all either too smug, too negative, too geeky, or too empty -- you know, the whole “this movie was good but not great” thing. Now, I do enjoy a couple of what have become known as “bad movie podcasts”, but the ones I enjoy are, while too taken with their own ironic interest in Nicolas Cage, tend to be mostly free of malice, and actually funny. But at this point we’re dealing with comedy more than we are with movies.

The big exception so far, and the reason for this post, is The Kubrick Series, itself a miniseries within the ongoing Movie Geeks United podcast. So far I only know the Kubrick episodes, but they’re pretty glorious. They come out only very occasionally, and once you’ve heard an episode you can see what takes so long. The most recent episode, Episode 5: Redrum, about, of course, The Shining, is two hours and forty minutes long. Longer than The Shining, in fact, and it plays, the podcast does, like a series of audio documentaries. Smoothly hosted by Jamey Duvall, each one is structured around a series of interviews, with Kubrick associates like Tony Ferwin and Leon Vitalli, film critics like Glenn Kenny and Keith Uhlich, Kubrick biographer Vincent LoBrutto, and on and on. These interviews are then sliced up and stitched together as you would in a documentary film, with voices weighing in on different aspects of a given film as the podcast episode shifts from theme to theme. And it’s all terribly fascinating.

You pretty much get everything. In The Shining discussion, you have people talking about how the ghosts in the film must be in Jack Torrance’s head, a beloved and totally infuriating critical theory, that you can hear happily dispelled when the next guy pops up and says “Well, Wendy sees them too, so…” Also, at the beginning of the A Clockwork Orange episode, which I haven’t heard in its entirety, during the “On this episode…” montage, you hear Tony Ferwin saying that he finds the whole idea, put forth by a depressingly large number of critics, of Alex being almost admirable because in his evil he is at least “alive”, very troubling. I have not often heard this fairly, let’s say gross, critical reading refuted, so I can’t wait to sit down with that episode as well, or any of the rest. They’re well worth your time.

Achieving Immortality Through Not Dying

2011-11-21T18:48:00.020-05:00

"I married a very immature woman, it didn't work out. Tell me if you think this is immature: I'd be home, in the bathroom, taking a bath. She would walk in, whenever she felt like it, and sink my boats."

That, taken from an early Woody Allen stand-up routine, is a very good joke. I would argue that it's a great joke, though greatness is probably achieved through the delivery, something that, it goes without saying, is lost here. But either way, I think the joke is pretty stellar, and while I typically resist the temptation to explain why a particular joke strikes me as funny, I have to say that the writing of this, the self-contained nature of the joke, and the simple declarative nature of the punchline, paired with the implication that Allen believes this story will win you over to his side, renders the whole thing truly brilliant.

In Robert Weide's new three-and-a-half hour documentary Woody Allen: A Documentary, Weide links that joke, without needing to strain himself too terribly much, with the fact that Allen's first marriage, to Harlene Rosen, occurred when both parties were teenagers. Which I think you'll agree gives the joke a whole other thing to think about, though frankly it doesn't make the joke funnier. It just makes you go "Oh, I see" and then move on. The joke is the kind that, if you find it funny (and I'll allow for the possibility that some of you don't), you're going to want to repeat it to others. I seriously doubt, and anyway sincerely hope this isn't the case, that anyone who chooses to repeat that joke to friends and also happens to know about Allen's past will follow up "...sink my boats" with "And did you know that the man who told that joke was married to..." That wouldn't help anybody.

All of this is perhaps slightly illustrative of the tension that has been present in Woody Allen's filmmaking career since the mid-70s, which is basically Allen's own repeatedly stated regret that his mind functions comedically first, and not just first but above all, rather than tragically. That is, creatively, so that his bone-deep gift is for the joke, and not the existential weight and philosophical profundity that he nakedly strives for and idolizes in other filmmakers. In Weide's documentary, Allen comments on the strangeness -- and you have to think he regards this as debilitating -- of his having been influenced primarily by Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, and Ingmar Bergman. I think "strange" is probably fair enough, although I'd say some version of that combination, with equivalent figures swapped out based on generational differences and what have you, is hardly unique. What's unique about Allen is his ability to make it work.

I came to Woody Allen through his comedy. Everybody who has ever been a fan of Allen, even if they eventually fell away, took the same basic route. Regardless of the fact that I believe there is a depth to Allen's best work that he himself doesn't believe is there, I still started with his early, funny ones. Which one, I couldn't tell you now, but I remember working backwards through Bananas and Take the Money and Run and Sleeper and Annie Hall, so I'm going to guess it was either one of two film which I still regard as among my favorites: Love and Death and Broadway Danny Rose. If you care to know how my top five Allen films gets rounded out, I'll tell you: Crimes and Misdemeanors, Purple Rose of Cairo, and Radio Days. So pretty clearly, as far as Allen is concerned, I consider the 1980s to be the Salad Days. And I'll be honest, using these films, and also Zelig, probably, as my base, working back through his 70s stuff was mostly a disappointment. I would say that, obviously barring Love and Death, his greatest pure comedy, as well as Take the Money and Run (and What's Up, Tiger Lily?, while I'm at it), the movies by which Woody Allen made his bones and which are still considered by many to be among his greatest work strike me as being more evident of the kind of strain towards seriousness and Artistic Expression that others claim -- and in many cases I would probably agree -- mar a lot of his later films. It was years before I saw Manhattan, and now I would happily watch Cassandra's Dream again before it, if given the choice. Speaking of which, in Weide's film, Larry David talks about the impact Annie Hall had when it was first released, and says that his father, who'd seen it first, told him "Don't go see House of Wax!", which apparently he'd been out the door to check out before his dad stopped him. I like Annie Hall, and I'd still take House of Wax.

I like jokes, and I don't devalue them as Woody Allen does, or as anybody who shrugs off criticism of a bad comedy or bad comedian by saying "Comedy is subjective." The idea being that if you laugh, it's funny, and you can't force anyone to laugh at something they don't think is funny. Well, you can't force a boner on somebody either, but if crime scene pictures of the Black Dahlia case are doing it for you, you're wrong. So jokes matter, and there are levels of quality in jokes as there is in anything else. It can be difficult to see a comedian you admire turn his nose up at the entire world of humor simply because it comes so easily to him, and because he wishes he was better at something else. Another early experience I had with Allen's work was his three (at the time) books of comic writing, Without Feathers, Side Effects and Getting Even. In "The Scrolls", a piece in Without Feathers the conceit of which is that versions of famous Bible stories that differ significantly from the versions we know have been discovered, Allen wrote this line:

And Abraham awoke in the middle of the night and said to his only son, Isaac, "I have had a dream where the voice of the Lord sayeth that I must sacrifice my only son, so put your pants on."

Reading that for the first time, it must have been the single funniest thing I'd ever read. Still, today, it's right up there. How is it possible that such a talent is not enough?

As it happens, that’s none of my business, and good thing, too, because (again, barring Love and Death) Allen is at his best when he finds some outlet for both sides of his brain. I should probably preface this statement with the confession that, phony superfan that I am, I have pretty much avoided Woody Allen’s completely serious films as if they’d been made by a filmmaker in whom I had no interest whatsoever. With the exception of Another Woman, which has thus far been enough (I am also somewhat familiar with “Interiors”, a basement-tape type song by Randy Newman, who regards the sort of infamous Woody Allen drama of the same name with some amount of sarcasm). I do not, let it be noted, count Allen’s latter-day crime films like Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream in this not-actually-a-boycott, and in fact find them, though flawed, an entirely fascinating and welcome new-ish facet of Allen’s career. The only major problem with Match Point is that it never needed to be made at all, at least judging by Allen’s stated motive, which is that Crimes and Misdemeanors, Match Point being a remake of half of that film, is too funny. It, of course, isn’t too funny, so the problem seems to be that it’s funny at all, all of that funniness coming from the Woody Allen section. The Martin Landau section, the one that Allen thinks is worth anything, is a chilly tale of murder and guilt and, more importantly, the overcoming of that guilt in the face of a shrugging universe. The Woody Allen section, the one that Allen came to think hobbled the film overall, is a light-hearted bit of romantic comedy that involves heartbreak – unalleviated at film’s end, by the way – a particularly grotesque form of rape, and suicide. So what I’m saying is, Woody Allen is wrong about Crimes and Misdemeanors, mathematically and demonstrably (in fairness, as seen in Weide’s film, he seems to view Crimes and Misdemeanors somewhat differently and more affectionately now than his comments at the time of Match Point’s release would indicate). The film is funny, but the humor sort of chokes a little bit. And anyway, without the flashes of humor and even warmth that film has and Match Point does not, he would not have achieved the rather astonishing tone of hopeless optimism, or optimistic hopelessness, that is the film’s final note, and is of a complexity that Match Point can’t even comprehend.

Not that I can blame Woody Allen for being wary of his own impulses. By the time he made Crimes and Misdemeanors, he’d already made Hannah and Her Sisters, after all. That’s a film that, for many years, I would have placed among my favorites, but now I have to say that when I read Allen claim, as he does in Woody Allen on Woody Allen, a book-length interview with Stig Björkman, that he had a failure of nerve on Hannah and Her Sisters, that he “copped out”…well, it’s true, he did. It’s not that the film is, in the end, happy. It’s the godddamn pregnancy. The ending of the film goes something like: I can’t ever get pregnant, oh wait yes I can, roll credits. The passage of time has revealed to me that this is objectively terrible. This is a shame, because there’s a lot that’s very nice about the film, a bit New-Yorker-up-his-own-ass, certainly, but funny, full of fine performances, and empathetic. It’s just that the harder edge Allen wishes he sometimes had would have really come in handy. When Allen derides his light and comic impulse as his greatest weakness, he’s not doing it just because he thinks comedy is a lesser form – I mean, he does, he’s said so, but he’s also been creatively harmed by it before. And Allen would never patronize to the comic abilities of Bob Hope or the Marx Brothers as he does to his own. Maybe this simply makes him a hypocrite, but see, too, Shadows and Fog, a film that I – perhaps only because of my personal tastes and interests, but still – believe could have been his masterpiece, but which manifestly isn’t. When Shadows and Fog is discussed, one thing that is never, as far as I can tell, remarked upon is the fact that it’s based on a one-act play Allen wrote called Death, which can be found in Without Feathers. This play is mostly the same as the film – both are funny, eerie tales of murder and vigilantism in some unnamed, early 20th century European town, possibly in Germany or Austria, mixed with questions of God and Godlessness, plus some other things, too. Setting aside the various digressions the film, with its longer script and running time, allows itself, Death and Shadows and Fog seem to follow the same path narratively, until you remember how Death ends, and how, in an early scene, Shadows and Fog removes any possibility that it will end the same way. Okay, but Death remains eerie right up through the ending, and Shadows and Fog…well, it loses its nerve, and it cops out. It actually becomes charming, of all things. This is not the desired outcome for a film such as this. Why would Allen purposely do himself in like that? He had an ending that he could have used and which would have been better, but he refused. For all the talk of Allen’s amazing position in the film world to do whatever he wants to do, did he or somebody else convince him that, in this case, nobody would accept his ending? Not coming from him, anyway? Whatever happened, Shadows and Fog does two things: one, it adds credence to Allen’s assessment that his natural-born wit sometimes gets in the way of his better artistic judgment; and two, it places all the blame on Allen and makes you think that maybe you’d rather he not complain about it, even in the modest, resigned way he does, if the examples offered are actually going to be acts of sabotage. It also makes me think of another short play by Allen, Death Knocks, which is not terribly closely related, but also not entirely unrelated to Death and Shadows and Fog, and I start to wish Allen could give up the struggle in favor of his particularly formidable gift. “Holy Christ, and I thought you were saving sixes.”

Which I suppose brings me to Broadway Danny Rose, my single favorite Woody Allen film. Viewed, I’m guessing, as an accomplished trifle by not just Allen but by the majority of his admirers, it is, for me, his single most moving film, and in the 80s, in particular, that was a crowded field, with Radio Days and Purple Rose of Cairo, to name but two. It’s also his funniest (again, although only possibly this time, barring Love and Death). And these two points, the emotional and the comic, are completely bound up in the character of Danny Rose, played by Allen. What Allen accomplishes with Danny Rose, as well as the various lowest-grade novelty acts for whom he is a sun, is pretty extraordinary. There’s an old saying that critics like to paraphrase, as do schoolkids trying to avoid getting in trouble, that goes “We’re not laughing at you, we’re laughing with you.” When the schoolkid says this, he or she is lying, of course. When a critic uses some version of it, usually by saying it makes them feel uncomfortable to be offered characters in a comedy who are meant to be laughed at, he or she is revealing a few things, among them a lack of understanding of comedy, as well as their preferred use of movies, which is to allow them to feel superior to the filmmaker. Plus also, like the schoolkid, they’re lying. The films that practice laughing with tend to be engaged in some very shrewd self-mockery, an excellent and time-honored tradition, and they are exceedingly rare. I'm thinking, almost exclusively, of Albert Brooks here (there are more, and it can get a bit murky, but by and large...). Show me a comedy that’s made up of a bunch of people laughing together, with no derision or mockery stated or implied, and I’ll show you a movie that doesn’t exist, or at least is the worst comedy that has ever been made. To one degree or another, it’s almost always laughing at (the essential meaningless of the phrase “I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing with you” reminds me of a family joke: “I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing near you”). In Broadway Danny Rose, we’re laughing at Danny Rose constantly. But what cuts this is the fact that there’s a great deal of affection in that laughter – laughing at need not be acidic, which is a key point. But it can’t be laughing with, because Danny ain’t laughing. Hell, the movie even has us laughing at a guy with a stutter! Because he has a stutter! I don’t know, maybe all that means is that we, and Allen, all suck, but I never feel like anyone in Broadway Danny Rose is being condescended to, and when Danny gets stabbed in the back, it’s infuriating. Not just that, but Danny’s lovable cowardice does not mark him for sainthood, as a more condescending film would do. No, that cowardice lands an innocent man in the hospital, and Danny suffers the guilt he deserves. Broadway Danny Rose is human, and humane, and funny as shit. It certainly, for me, is more meaningful than Match Point, the film he made specifically as a corrective measure because he thought another film wasn't meaningful enough. It's strange to think that after forty years, Allen hasn't learned to just let things happen, and to seek profundity will almost ensure that you don't find it. Or that when you laugh at a really good joke, you're not laughing at nothing.

Another Chump Flaps His Wings

2011-11-18T12:09:00.014-05:00

Sidney Lumet and Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men, which will be released on DVD by Criterion on Nov. 22, had a huge impact on me when I first saw it some, I don’t know, 25 years ago. It remains, with the possible exception of Dog Day Afternoon, my most often re-watched Lumet film, and I think, or rather know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the reason this small film got its hooks so deeply into me, is all the talking. It’s a very well-made film, without question, as should be evident by the fact that it is so relentlessly rewatchable, and since the film only uses four locations -- four rooms, really -- and that’s if you count the courtroom at the very beginning and the courthouse steps at the very end, with, meanwhile, twelve significant speaking parts, you sort of have to hand it to Lumet, if you weren’t already inclined to do so, for the supremely graceful confidence he displays in this, his debut feature.

But 12 Angry Men is a film about talking, and the talking is, if I may say so, real good. There are lots of odds and ends involved in the talking that are worth noting, but to begin with the whole film revolves around what might be the most interesting form of talking that mankind has yet invented, but which rarely gets properly depicted on film, and that is the argument. Monty Python understood this, though I wonder if I’m the only one who watches “Argument Clinic” and thinks, once Michael Palin gets frustrated with John Cleese’s continued and empty gainsaying so that suddenly, if briefly, the two of them are arguing cogently about what defines an argument, that the sketch makes a pretty good case for why someone would seek out the services of an argument clinic in the first place. This is the fascination inherent in 12 Angry Men: one man, Juror 8, Henry Fonda, arguing with eleven others over the guilt or innocence of a young man facing the death penalty for the murder of his father, and swaying them one by one (more on that in a bit). Now, obviously, throughout film history there have been more than one or two arguments portrayed on screen, but very often they descend from, or explode beyond, the realm of intelligent debate and become shouting matches, or were arguments never based on an intelligent point of view in the first place, but were of a more personal and fiery nature, such as why did you sleep with my best friend, because you’re distant can’t you see that I’m suffocating. Technically an argument, I suppose, but emotional, not intellectual, and personal, not removed. Of course, Rose and Lumet will make a big deal about how certain stubborn jurors, specifically Juror 3 (the tremendous Lee J. Cobb) who take up the side they don’t happen to agree with are making the argument personal while pretending otherwise, but, again, more on that in a minute.

Or no, let’s do it now. It’s sort of where I’m going with all this anyway, so why not get to it. Like a lot of Lumet’s films, and like a lot of films Henry Fonda came to be interested in making (he was a producer here), 12 Angry Men does make it clear that A Social Topic Or Topics Is Or Are Being Discussed Here. Also like a lot of Lumet’s films, the topic either is, or is viewed through the prism of, the criminal justice system. The problem inherent to Reginald Rose’s script, however, is that the argument that is finally being made seems to be that one shouldn’t find other people guilty of crimes under any circumstances. Of course, that wasn’t the plan, and if you were inclined to boil 12 Angry Men down to the “point” you thought it was trying to make, you’d end up with something about prejudice being bad rather than the fallibility of juries, the boy on trial being poor and ethnic (Puerto Rican, it's generally assumed, though that's never stated in the film).

But for God’s sake, look at the case Henry Fonda’s Juror 8 tries to build! The case as laid out by the prosecution is that this boy killed his father with a knife that had a distinct handle. He was heard to say "I'm gonna kill you!" by an elderly downstairs neighbor, who also saw the boy run from the building. The knife found in his father's chest was known to belong to the boy. The murder itself was witnessed from across the street, through the windows of a passing elevated train, by a woman who testified in court that the boy did it. The boy claims that he did fight with his father, but didn't kill him. When he ran out, the knife fell through a hole in his pocket, and someone else must have picked it up and killed his father. Also, his alibi was that he was at the movies, but when questioned couldn't remember which movies he saw or who starred in them. So, pretty clearly this is the construction of a writer trying to make it easy to understand why the vast majority of his characters would vote guilty right off the bat, while setting up little bits of things he can come back to later when Juror 8 needs to start dismantling everything. The problem is, Juror 8's dismantling basically consists of yelling out "It's possible!" any time one of the other jurors says that, for instance, the idea that the knife fell out of the kid's pocket and was picked up by someone who decided now would be a good time to go kill a stranger, is a bit tough to swallow. Because that's how Juror 8 gets around that one -- he says "It's possible!" Then of course there's the big dramatic reveal that the knife used to kill the father was not, in fact, the only one of its kind ever made. Much is made in the film about the idea of "reasonable doubt", but Juror 8 seems to think that just means that the defendant's argument doesn't break any of the laws of physics. His alibi wouldn't require him to achieve faster than light travel, for instance.

It actually gets worse from there. Although it goes unstated in Reginald Rose's script, what I've decided, after all these years, to take away from 12 Angry Men is that old people and women can't be trusted, because in the case of the former, old people are so goddamn lonely that they'll do anything to get noticed, up to and including perjuring themselves in court by falsely claiming to have seen a young boy run out of a building shortly after his father has been murdered (and another thing: when Fonda has to demonstrate how long it would actually take for the old man to get from his bed, where he said he'd been when he heard the boy scream "I'll kill you!", to the hallway where he actually saw the boy, he imitates the man's crippled shuffle, and is told by one of the jurors who is still (stubbornly!) voting guilty that the old man could move twice that fast. Fonda says he'll go faster. Now you go watch that scene and tell me if Henry "Slyboots" Fonda picks up the pace even a little bit), and women, meanwhile, are so caught up in their physical appearance that the very idea of being seen in public wearing eyeglasses would mortify their cute little souls no end, so yes, they too will lie and send a boy off to the electric chair if that means the facade of their womanly vanity might be preserved for one more day.

One could reasonably argue that a case against the old man's testimony has been made, or at least a reasonable case has been argued, but the woman and her glasses holds no water. Yes, two dents on the sides of her nose are noticed, and may indicate that she wears glasses. If she does wear glasses, as Lee J. Cobb furiously and correctly points out, they could be any kind of eyeglasses, including sunglasses, that would not have kept her from clearly seeing what she testified she saw, but no, because she wears some kind of glasses sometimes, that's enough to assume her to be a liar. Testimony shitcanned. The juror who makes the case against the old man happens to be old himself (Joseph Sweeney), so that's okay, and you can bet your ass that if it was common practice for women to serve on capital murder juries in the mid-1950s, Patricia Neal or someone would have turned up to sympathetically point out that whole eyeglass business, not some dude. Then, too, there's Fonda's desperate need to justify the boy's inability to remember the films he claims to have seen, by taking Juror 4 (the wonderful E. G. Marshall) back through his week until he finds a night that Juror 4 can't remember with total clarity, before triumphantly bellowing "See!?"

The crown jewel of the Criterion disc's extras has to be the original television broadcast of 12 Angry Men, written by Rose and directed by Franklin J. Shaffner for Studio One in 1954. This provides the opportunity for interesting comparison to Lumet's film on many levels. Speaking to my current point, Robert Cummings plays Juror 8 in the original, and while I'm not about to claim Cummings was better than Fonda, or his equal, his take on Juror 8 is rather interesting, because he plays him -- and this is crucial -- as uncertain. Fonda's Juror 8 talks a big game about not knowing, but it's easy to imagine that his Juror 8, when it comes time to first make his stand as the lone holdout in the jury room, is thinking "This is it: my big moment." Or more precisely, this was planned, this whole drama of fighting against the majority. All he had to figure out his justification -- the untrustworthiness of women and the elderly, for example -- as he went along. But Cummings's version of the character really doesn't know what to think. In fact, he's closer to the film version's indecisive Juror 12, "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit", played with evaporating self-confidence by Robert Webber. Not that Cummings is ever seen to reconsider what he's doing, but early on he really doesn't know if the course he's mapped out for himself in this jury room is the correct one. Plus, Fonda's Juror 8 has a bit of "smug prick" about him, as when he's shown baiting Lee J. Cobb's Juror 3, a man we'll come to learn -- and we already have some inkling of this early on -- is grief-stricken over the fact that his own son has run away. So that's a dick move, and one Cummings never makes.

The other thing about the Shaffner/TV version of 12 Angry Men is that Lumet's film is better than it in every way. I don't say this to kick the Shaffner version, but to acknowledge, despite everything I've been saying, that Lumet's 12 Angry Men is an absolutely terrific movie. At 50, 55 minutes, the TV version is hobbled right out of the gate, and its origins, imaginatively speaking, as an "issues" story are highlighted at almost every turn, because there's no time for anything else. One of my favorite performances in the film is given by the great Martin Balsam as Juror 1, the foreman. If anything justifies that bullshit about the woman's glasses, it's Balsam's reaction to being reminded of her nose dents by saying "He's right, I saw them too, I was the closest one to her! She had these things on the side, what do you call those things, on the side...?" In the TV version, Juror 1, played by Norman Fell (or "Feld", as he's credited here) is given precisely nothing to do but call for votes and pass out scrap paper. The refusal to give any of the minor, or essentially non-crucial jurors, a thing to do or be is why Lumet's film stands as a classic. So in the original TV version, there's no "That was a damn stupid thing to do!" or "Your horn works, now try your lights", "That's not bad, I mean, considering marmalade" or "Let's put it on the stoop and see if the cat licks it up" or tic tac toe or rain or broken fan or anything. It's just "Juries are prejudiced", hammered on relentlessly until the end.

Lumet's film, meanwhile, is alive. Sidney Lumet is of course now remembered as, among other things, one of the great directors of actors in the history of American film, or just film, period, and his great victory in 12 Angry Men is compiling this excellent cast (only two of whom, George Voskovec as Juror 11, and Joseph Sweeney as Juror 9, appeared in both versions) and either encouraging Rose to flesh out his script by putting actual people in it, or working with the cast himself to do so, and finding all these little moments ("It just came down, WOOSH!"). I don't know which it was, and don't care. 12 Angry Men remains endlessly entertaining, a sublime record of human behavior, and exquisite acting. And also a testament that eleven men can be made to believe anything if you make them feel guilty enough first.

An Encounter

2011-11-11T01:32:00.003-05:00

I was outside the sandwich shop where I worked smoking a cigarette. It was wet out, the only dry parts the sidewalk just outside the row of stores, at one end of which was the sandwich place, myself and a scattering of other cigarette butts, a lot of them mine, shielded from the very fine rain by the overhang that turned where I was standing into an incomplete tunnel, its missing side opening out onto the parking lot.

A guy was walking up to me. He was wearing a dark blue windbreaker, he was about my age, he had a baseball hat on, also dark blue, with a big white “E” one the front. I didn’t know what team that was for.

The way he was bearing down on me with some kind of purpose, I thought he was going to ask me for a cigarette, or at least a light. But instead he stopped with one foot on the sidewalk in front of me, the rest of his body still leaning out into the wet misty air, and he pulled a lone, loose cigarette out from somewhere inside his thin windbreaker and lit it with a tiny black lighter.

“Hey man,” he said, “any of these stores cool at all?”

I exhaled smoke that in the cold day looked like steam from a train engine. “Cool how do you mean?” I asked.

“Like movies or tapes or whatever?” He hunched himself onto the sidewalk and under the shopping center’s little roof, as though it had just started to rain right then.

I didn’t know what kind of tapes he meant, but I said, “No movies or anything. There’s a music store about five doors down, by the nail salon. I don’t know if that’s cool to you.”

“Music like how? Like CDs or tapes?”

“No,” I said, “like instruments, or sheet music. Guitars.”

“Yeah well, music’s cool, but I can’t play any instruments. I can’t even sing,” he said, implying that he thought most people could.

He stepped backwards, back out into the rain, but further back into the parking lot so he could scan the row of store signs that began above my head. He held the hand with the cigarette wedged between two fingers up above his eyes, in a sort of salute. As he scanned, his eyes widened, his mouth formed an “o”.

“That a tattoo place?” he asked, still looking at the sign.

He was talking about Squid Ink Tats, which was a ways down. I said, “Oh, yeah, that’s a tattoo place.”

He chuckled and rejoined me out of the rain. He nodded his head and took a long pull on his cigarette.

“You think they tattoo dicks?” he asked. “I’d go in there, be like ‘Hey, you guys tattoo dicks?’ They’d be ‘What the fuck?’ All right, you have a good one, brother.”

It took me a minute to realize the last part was him saying goodbye. I didn’t want to actively wish him a good day, so I said “Yep.” I was noncommittal.

He walked away then, into the misty parking lot, his head turned back so he could keep his eye on the tattoo place’s sign, maybe because he thought it was going to change. After a bit, though, his walk slowed, and I watched his path drift leftwards, towards the tattoo place. He walked in a horseshoe, looping into the parking lot and back to the shops. I took my time with my cigarette so I could watch him walk quickly to the tattoo place’s front door, pull it open, and slip in.

Then, for a brief moment, I was watching nothing, just empty sidewalk. But after only what seemed like a few seconds the door opened and the guy walked back out. He was looking at me, and he stood there, shaking his head no.

Through the German Night

2011-11-10T23:18:00.005-05:00

Lars von Trier, you must admit, has had a very strange career. He currently enjoys a place as a filmmaker with one of the year's most celebrated films (Melancholia, which I still haven't seen, goddamnit) and as a filmmaker with one of the most reviled, or at least distrusted, personalities and artistic philosophies and psychologies. This last is largely a product of ill-timed and unfortunately public jokes, Von Trier's taste for provocation, and a deeply wearying global self-righteousness which has flipped the generally accepted principle that what you do means more than what you say.

But anyway. That's all just what's going on right now, and the strangeness of Von Trier extends way back. There's always a lot going on in any given Von Trier film, many reflecting his various social prejudices or fetishes or fears (maybe "terrors" works better), as well as, always, all the sources of his despair. But the central struggle of Von Trier as an artist is stylistic. Still known, eleven years after he made a film even remotely in this mode, for the Dogme set of artistic rules he devised back in the mid-1990s, Von Trier has gone from seeming to want to send up filmmaking convention, to dispensing with it -- sort of, or so he thought, or so he said he thought, but you never really know now do you? -- to throttling the very life from its bones, to shooting electricity through it to see if it could be made to kick again, Von Trier seems to have for now settled into a kind of style of classical composition and photographic beauty (he did this first, by my count, with Antichrist. Of all things, need I add). Back with Dogme, the rules of which were picked up by several other like-minded Danish filmmakers, the idea was to strip away everything that made films, to Von Trier's way of thinking, boring and predictable. What he was stripping away sometimes made sense, under the circumstances, such as no artificial light, and sometimes seemed entirely arbitrary and pointlessly limiting, like no guns, and anyway, in the end, did not achieve the clear-eyed, kitchen-sink realism that a lot of people mistakenly believed was the goal. Dogme was, if anything, a phase, and a way for Von Trier to reinvigorate himself. It's like when you hear artists talk about working on tight budgets, or under the thumb of censorship, and how this forces them to be more creative, although in Von Trier's case the restrictions were self-imposed, and the true creativity seems to have followed the mantle of Dogme being shrugged off, or more accurately slowly chipped away.

But what led to Dogme, anyhow? Von Trier's stated reasons don't interest me too terribly much, but what does interest me is that the Von Trier film that directly precedes Breaking the Waves, his first Dogme film (barring some Danish TV work) is Europa, the least Dogme-like film you could imagine, in that it is so aggressively artificial both in style and content, but mostly style, that it's not hard to imagine Von Trier looking at the film upon its completion and desperately choking down a scream. If anything like that happened, I know how he felt.

What Europa is, is The Good German as if it had been directed by Guy Maddin. While Maddin's hyperventilating, fever dream take on silent film aesthetics is not only content to hold on to the rough edges, as compared to today, of the early days of filmmaking, to the point where he wants to twist the relatively primitive technology to perform grotesque acts. In Europa, Von Trier sort of gets that, but he still wants to keep the polish of Hollywood's golden age. This leads to moments of characters walking in place in front of a rear projection in a setting where, in a Hollywood film from the 30s and 40s, no rear projection would be used. Verisimilitude is hardly Von Trier's top priority, though, because Europa operates as, and wants to evoke, a dream.

It tells the story of Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), an American of German extraction who travels to Germany shortly after World War II has ended. A dull, naive, and therefore easily led young man, Leopold comes under the wing of his shady and very Teutonic, with all that implies in relation to World War II, uncle (Ernst-Hugo Järegard) who gets him a job on a train as a sleeper car conductor, a gig were led to believe is kind of plum. The train is part of the Zentropa line, which is owned by the troubled Hartmann family, whose members include Max (Jorgen Reenberg), the mournful patriarch; son Lawrence, played by Udo Kier and notable mainly because Udo Kier's Udo Kier-ness not only doesn't, but is never asked to shine through; and daughter Katharina (Barbara Sukowa), with whom Leopold will fall in love, and whose loyalty to Germany, not just generally but possibly Germany as it had just very recently been, becomes the cause of some distress. As does, not unrelated, the presence of a band of underground Nazi terrorists known as "werwolfs" (or "werwolfen"? I don't believe the plural is ever spoken). Leopold will eventually be approached by the American military, in the person of Eddie Constatine (who in 1991 looked a whole lot like Järegard), to try to infiltrate the Nazi group, and will be approached by the Nazi group to plant a bomb. Until the film's ending, Leopold is, as I've said, such a weasley, inactive little turd that his eventual crack-up leads to a brief moment of basically impotent aggression that briefly put me in mind of Saving Private Ryan's Cpl. Upham.

So. I found Europa largely infuriating. It has elements that are powerfully, dreamily haunted -- Max von Sydow as the hypnotic narrator doesn't hurt -- and an ending that is entirely gripping. But it is finally too schematic as a story and earnestly willed into being as an exercise in style, and a confused one at that. Classic film techniques as a metaphor for a dreamstate seems workable enough, but the dreamstate itself as a metaphor for post-war Germany specifically and Europe generally, and post-war Germany as a metaphor for any situation that might call for a human being to either take a stand or be swept away...perhaps it's all too much for Von Trier, at least the Von Trier of 1991. Not to mention the fact that it's pretty much impossible to invest oneself emotionally in anything to do with Leopold, let alone the eventual romance that is supposed to pack any sort of punch. Aggressive artificiality and sincere emotional stakes don't need to be mutually exclusive, but they are in Europa.

Boy, the ending's good, though. It's hard to see much of what would become Dogme in those few minutes, but you can see what Von Trier would finally leave Dogme behind in favor of. He would take baby steps away from Dogme with the, let's face it, entirely wretched Dancer in the Dark, which attempted to match Dogme's realism (or "realism") with not just melodrama but the musical, too (more Dennis Potter than Stanley Donen, though) before almost seeming to send up his own rules with his masterpiece Dogville, a film that keeps guns and artificial lighting but sweeps away a good deal more of the things one might expect a movie to have. It's frankly been fascinating to watch Von Trier over the years trying to decided what things -- and by "things" I mean actual, physical things -- a movie needs, before deciding, at least for now, that it's okay for movies to have the kinds of things that movies usually have, and see what he can do with that. Antichrist, apparently. A film for another day, perhaps, but I will say that if movies like Antichrist are the end result of Von Trier's struggle, then it has been well worth it.

----------------------

TIFF Lightbox just started a Von Trier program and are screening most of his work, including Melancholia and the hard to find The Idiots, as well as Europa, which is playing Nov. 12 and 17.

Apparently, I Have a Blog

2011-11-09T10:02:00.002-05:00

And I have been neglecting it! Well, this break was planned, just not announced, but with October and everything like that there, I figured I needed to not write anything for a little while. Plus I was away, because my life is not spent chained to my computer like the rest of you. I was in New Orleans just a few days ago, and I saw a table of radicals at a book fair selling (or perhaps offering up to be stolen) signs that said "Kill Your Xbox". Oh, indeed! Indeed! TEAR IT DOWN!!! TEAR IT ALL DOWN!!!!

So anyway, probably this weekend is when something that is ostensibly worth reading might once more make an appearance. I'm not dead or anything.

Dear Naomi Watts...

2011-11-01T17:51:00.001-04:00

Thank you for once again making the first day in November a wonderful and deeply pleasant experience.

Sincerely,

Everybody ever

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 31: You Who Are Not Accursed

2011-10-31T12:03:00.004-04:00

Last night, I was quietly angry inside my brain about the idea that a writer, or any kind of artist, is no longer “relevant”. I despise this way of thinking because not only do I not know what it could mean, but I seriously doubt those who use it regularly know, either. Never mind for a second what it means for a writer to be irrelevant; what does it mean for a writer to be relevant? Relevant to whom? There are a lot of very good, even great, writers that nobody reads anymore, and this is the reading public’s loss entirely. Somebody once said to me that they’d never read E. L. Doctorow because they didn’t think he was relevant anymore. So you don’t even have to read the person to reach this conclusion. And what had led to this in the first place? Because Doctorow writes mainly about old-timey days?

Among the many, many writers to whom the “not relevant” label could be, and no doubt has been, applied is Kingsley Amis. Father of the, according to some, no longer relevant Martin Amis, Book Prize-winning author of The Old Devils, his place in some sort of canon assured with the publication of his first book, Lucky Jim, one-time Communist who eventually swung pretty hard to the right, assumed to be a bigot and homophobe by those who don’t read him because he’s no longer relevant or something, enough of a drunk to be admired on this count by Christopher Hitchens, friend of controversial but much-revered (and apparently, and surprisingly, still relevant) poet Philip Larkin and historian of the Soviet nightmare Robert Conquest, and one of the very few writers who can make me laugh out loud, Kingsley Amis was once very big, but through a mixture of various things, political persuasion likely among them, as well as – to be fair – the widely held opinion that his later books weren’t up to snuff, his literary star was plummeting well before his death in 1995, and despite the very surprising (because outside of me I don’t think anyone was asking for such a thing) and very massive double-hit of the 1200 page The Letters of Kingsley Amis and the 900+ page The Life of Kingsley Amis (the former compiled by, and the latter written by, Zachary Leader), there are currently no signs of a resurgence in interest. This must be regarded by anyone with an interest in the comic novel as Too Bad, to say the least.

None of which matters to us today, though, I suppose. Fortunately, Kingsley Amis, who specialized in cynical, even bitter, drunken comedies of manners, was also something of a dabbler in genre fiction. His interest in reading it generally far outweighed his interest in writing it – in later years, he expressed a preference for Dick Francis novels over pretty much anything else – but along with his still-classic non-fiction overview of science fiction (his genre of choice, it must be said) New Maps of Hell, Amis made every attempt to dish it out, as well. With, to be frank, very mixed results. Of the three major genres whose waters he tested – science fiction, mystery, and horror – SF got most of his ink, and earned him the most genre credibility. He turned out at least one stone classic of SF, The Alteration, and several other novels and short stories of varying respectability (one of his science fiction novels, Russian Hide-and-Seek, which I haven’t read, also has the distinction of being considered his worst book, at least according to Martin Amis and Margaret Thatcher). Amis’s mystery fiction has to be his least successful, and most disappointing to me on a personal level. One of them, the one that’s most like a real book, The Riverside Villas Murder, has a murder plot reveals Amis as simply trying to fit a puzzle together in the most convoluted manner possible, though it works pretty well as a non-genre Amis book about growing up. Another, Crime of the Century, doesn’t have that going for it (it’s my least favorite Amis novel, mainly because it’s not funny, and is barely a novel).

Amis’s horror fiction, meanwhile, is something else again. There’s not very much of it – unless there’s a short story I’m missing, he only has three: the novel The Green Man, itself considered a classic at about the level in its genre as The Alteration is in SF, and two short stories, which are what bring us here today. They are “To See the Sun” and “Who or What Was It?”. Had I known what “To See the Sun” was, I’d have read it a long time ago. It’s a vampire story, what the back cover of my copy of Amis’s The Collected Stories calls “a brilliant Amisian version of the Dracula legend.” The cover does not identify which story that is, though, and when my investigations revealed that, against all logic, the story “All the Blood Within Me” was not the one, I apparently gave up all hope, or most of it. I mean, the word “blood” is right there…no other titles have “blood” in them. Who, exactly, is jerking me around here? Of course, I hadn’t remembered that, in vampire lore, the sun is also a pretty big deal, so way back when this nightmare was playing out I just gave up. The older, more determined me who you see before you is more determined, and is not about to let some stupid table of contents fool me again. I’ve had the book for about twelve years, by the way.

It should be noted right off the bat that “To See the Sun”, which I liked very much, is not an Amisian version of the Dracula legend. It is not a version of the Dracula legend, which is the key point. This was something of a kick in the pants, considering that my whole reason for choosing Amis to close out The Kind of Face You Slash this year is so I could loop this story back around to Dracula, which as you may recall is where we began. But no. “To See the Sun” is a vampire story, and it does take place in a Transylvania-esque part of Europe. It’s also an epistolary story, with all the information being delivered either through letters from Steven Hillier, a middle-aged man working on a book about vampire mythology, to his wife Constance, or to his friend and, I gathered, publishing associate Charles Winterbourne; and the journals of Countess Valvazor, who Steven is scheduled to meet at Valvazor Castle, where she lives, to discuss and study the vampire-rich history of her family. He does meet her, and she falls instantly in love with him – you’d assume it would go the other way, her being a beautiful countess and him being your basic middle-aged English scholar, and it does, but the Countess is the one who instigates their brief, but heated, and tragic, love affair.

A love affair which must not last, as should be obvious. The truth is, “To See the Sun” is finally pretty straightforward. Its novelty comes from having been written by Kingsley Amis, although it is quite good, just as vampire story, removed from the context of who wrote it and how many other horror stories has this person written? The Countess is a vampire, but one who has become most reluctant and remorseful after meeting Steven. The history of how she was turned, and who turned her, which is revealed towards the end, is full of all sorts of hints at many tens of decades of depravity and murder, yet somehow the Countess remains sympathetic. Pretty effortlessly, even, not least, in the end, because of, well, the ending, which it occurs to me is not unlike the ending of two vampire films from the last decade, the latter of which was accused by some online folks of ripping off the earlier film. Had anybody read “To See the Sun”, none of that would have ever happened, I bet.

Also managing to be sympathetic, but weirdly less so, is Steven, our ostensible hero, who gleefully cheats on his wife and feels a bit bad about it later. It’s necessary to point out that this is not an uncommon feature of Amis’s fiction, though as Martin Amis points out in his memoir Experience, it became something of habit of his father’s to give the women in his books the last word. This is not the case in “To See the Sun”, but it’s also very possible to hurt yourself with all that finger-wagging. Anyway, Steven’s infidelity actually brings about a cosmic good. Speaking of which, the supernatural elements of “To See the Sun” are rather intriguing. There’s some wonderfully creepy stuff involving a painting of the funeral of a prominent member of the Valvazor clan, and the tossed-away violence of the later sections is surprisingly brutal (and could not have been brought about by a normal human), but the interesting stuff comes from Amis’s treatment of the religious connection to the vampire legend. What’s interesting, to me anyway, is that Amis doesn’t dismiss it. I only find this interesting because, while Amis shed his youthful Communism, he retained the atheism, and it would have seemed much more in character for him to devise some other means of portraying the Countess’s remorse than to have her wish to come back into the good graces of the Christian God, which is what she ends up doing. Not that I’m complaining, and all this stuff is rather touching – she asks Steven to pray for her, as she’s no longer able to do it herself – but it is surprising.

More surprising, mainly due to its overall strangeness, is “Who or What Was It?”. In The Life of Kingsley Amis, Leader mentions this story (which was written, and retains its form, as a monologue delivered on the radio) mainly to wonder about the fact that, all things in the story considered, Amis doesn’t refer to himself as a drunk, Amis himself being the story’s protagonist. I think Leader might be casting about for a too-literal interpretation of not only “Who or What Was It?”, but The Green Man, too, but in any case he seems to have missed the key line in the story, if one wants to read the story the way Leader does, which is: “I drank a fair amount.”

But I see I’m getting way ahead of myself. What “Who or What Was It?” is, is The Green Man told again in miniature. Literally, that’s what it is, because it features Kingsley Amis and his wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, stopping at a pub, or inn, that apart from the name of the place (which Amis refuses to reveal) bears some striking resemblance to the one used as the setting for The Green Man. That pub/inn was called “The Green Man”, which only explains half of that title choice, the other half being that the actual Green Man, the pagan spirit, comes to threaten the life and sanity of Maurice Allington ( “a boozer”, in Amis’s words), protagonist and proprietor of “The Green Man”, as well as his family, specifically his teenage daughter. What Kingsley Amis discovers in “Who or What Was It?” is that this pub has a proprietor named Allington, and employs with names similar to, but not exactly like, the names of corresponding characters in his novel. There’s a lot that’s different, but enough is weirdly on the mark, or just off the mark a tiny bit, that Amis decides he’d better hang around in case the Green Man comes after this Allington’s daughter.

And to say anything more would be to not only spoil “Who or What Was It?”, which is sort of a lark, but The Green Man, which isn’t. That’s a novel I read before I probably should have -- it's a novel where life is being lived around the edges of the genre, as is the case with The Riverside Villas Murder when it's working, and which did not fit my idea of "horror" at the time I read it -- but it’s hung with me ever sense, largely because of a bizarre scene involving God, in the form of a young man, speaking to Maurice Allington about various things. It’s a very unflattering portrayal of the Almighty, and more in line with what I would have expected from Amis than “To See the Sun”. Interestingly, and amusingly, some of Amis’s thoughts on all this are touched on in his introduction to The Collected Stories when he says that, after the radio reading of “Who or What Was It?” was broadcast, he received some phone calls and letters from people asking questions as though the story was true. At least one came from a friend who Amis had always taken to be reasonable, and Amis asked him how he could have believed any of it. The friend said he didn’t, really, but thought maybe Amis was suffering from DTs. Others actually did buy it, though, and Amis marvels, in a depressed sort of way, that anyone could believe what he relates in “Who or What Was It?” and not act accordingly. Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast supposedly caused some people to panic and flee by car. Amis notes that this may be evidence of stupidity, but it is also evidence of reason. If aliens are attacking, and you really believe they are, then you run. If you believe that pagan ghosts are attacking a teenage girl, you don’t simply ask “Which pub was this again?”

Anyway, strange and larky though it is, I would say I enjoyed "Who or What Was It?", more even that "To See the Sun", even though "To See the Sun", certainly as a horror story, must be considered the better. But "Who or What Was It?" is funny, partly due to its conversational style, written to mimic a man telling you a story off-the-cuff. That allows for things like this, which involves Amis trying to figure out how to tell his waiter, named Palmer, why he's so curious about the employees of the inn:

Jane had said earlier on, why didn't I just tell the truth, and I'd said, since Palmer hadn't reacted at all when I gave him my name when I was booking the table -- see what I mean? -- he'd only have my word for the whole story and might still think I was off my rocker, and she said of course she'd back me up, and I'd said he'd just think he'd got two loonies on his hands instead of one. Anyway, now she said, Some people who've read The Green Man must have mentioned it, -- fancy that, Mr Palmer, you and Mr Allington and Fred are all in a book by somebody called Kingsley Amis. Obvious enough when you think of it, but like a lot obvious things, you have got to think of it.

Well, that was the line I took when Palmer rolled up for his brandy, I'm me and I wrote this book and so on. Oh really? he said, more or less. I thought we were buggered, but then he said, Oh yes, now you mention it, I do remember some chap saying something like that, but it must have been two or three years ago -- you know, as if that stopped it counting for much. I'm not much of a reader, you see, he said.

I don't know about you, but this is just the kind of thing I need to ease myself out of horror for a while. And with that, I bid you good day.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 30: Watched it Burn

2011-10-30T15:07:00.006-04:00

Daphne du Maurier is responsible for a lot of brilliant ideas that moviegoers typically and thoughtlessly attribute to others. Hitchcock's The Birds is Hitchcock's The Birds, and du Maurier's name in the credits registers for most people as someone who had to be paid off so the film could be made. This is nothing to do with Hitchcock himself, and du Maurier is by no means unique in this way. But I think of the unfairness when I think about du Maurier, because of this line from Roger Ebert's review of Insignificance, directed by Nicolas Roeg:

Roeg is a master of baroque visuals and tangled plot lines. His Don't Look Now still has people trying to explain that Venetian dwarf in the red raincoat...

Oh? Is that what Nicolas Roeg did? I remember first seeing Don't Look Now -- which is one of my favorite films -- and being stunned by that ending, then finding the du Maurier story on which it's based and (I still sort of hate myself for doing this) reading the ending. Same red dwarf, same red raincoat, same everything. Roger Ebert is a very well-read man, but it's something I've noticed about some well-read people, that after a certain point, if they haven't read something, it might not actually count as having been written.

All this made me very curious about Daphne du Maurier, who before my Don't Look Now experience I'd pegged as some sort of jumped up romance novelist. I was probably being sexist in my youth. Not only that, but even though I've overcome that knee-jerk assumption, it didn't actually spur me to read du Maurier. My reading life, or more accurately, my not reading life, is positively littered with writers who passingly interest me, and whose work I collect about me, and then leave untouched on the shelf. Even the recent raves of a discerning friend of mine -- too discerning, I might sometimes say -- couldn't provide the necessary push to make me actually crack one of my du Maurier books. Feeling bad about this whole thing and having no idea what to read for today finally did, though.

I finally decided, after much indecision, to go with "The Birds". Like Don't Look Now, Hitchcock's film is a favorite of mine, and I was very curious to see how du Maurier's original played out. And the comparison is very interesting. Reading "The Birds" and watching The Birds is not entirely unlike partaking in the many different films and books that share the premise of humans cloned for the purposes of organ harvesting, but very little to nothing in terms of tone, style, goals, or even plot. The Hitchcock film takes place in San Francisco, and as a result has a larger canvas, of character, setting, set pieces. Du Maurier's original story has a very small cast, made up mostly of a single family: Nat Hocken and his wife, and their two children, Jill and Johnny. Outside of that is the Trigg family, on whose farm Nat works, and Jim, another of the Triggs' employees. Like the film, du Maurier's story takes place in a bayside community, but calling both San Francisco and the small English village where the story takes place "bayside communities" is a little like saying Monte Carlo and Lawrenceburg, IN both have casinos.

Everything that happens -- and it all gets started pretty fast -- in "The Birds" is seen from Nat's point of view, and he's one of the only people in his small circle of family, friends and acquaintances who takes this sudden thread of attacking birds seriously, even though it quickly becomes clear that this is, at least, a national situation:

Various incidents were recounted, the suspected reason of cold and hunger stated again, and warnings to householders repeated. The announcer's voice was smooth and suave. Nat had this impression that this man, in particular, treated the whole business as he would an elaborate joke. There would be others like him, hundreds of them, who did not know what it was to struggle in darkness with a flock of birds. There would be parties tonight in London, like the ones they gave on election nights. People standing about, shouting and laughing, getting drunk. "Come and watch the birds!"

Nat's relationship with what's going on is different from what he predicts will be the reaction of others for several reasons, and is key to why du Maurier's story is so brilliant. First, as implied, he has struggled in darkness with a flock of birds, when, at the story's beginning, they crashed through into both his own bedroom, and that of his children. But it goes beyond that, because throughout Nat also remembers, and compares the bird attacks to the World War II air raids he and so many other English people had suffered through:

Jim was no more interested that Mrs. Trigg had been. It was, Nat thought, like air raids in the war. No one down this end of the country knew what the Plymouth folk had seen and suffered. You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.

This attitude helps Nat and his family revert to the strength and planning that got Nat through those bombings. The fabled stiff upper lip of the British during the war returns in the Hocken home -- and not, you get the sense, elsewhere -- and Nat's enthusiastic attempts to bolster the optimism of his young children is du Maurier at her most moving. As the birds slam heedlessly into the Hocken's cottage, which has been transformed into something as close to a fortress as Nat can manage, Johnny, the youngest, pipes up:

"Stop it," said young Johnny, pointing to the windows with his spoon, "stop it, you old birds."

"That's right," said Nat, smiling, "we don't want the old beggars, do we? Had enough of 'em."

They began to cheer when they heard the thud of the suicide birds.

"There's another, Dad, cried Jill, "he's done for."

"He's had it," said Nat, "there he goes, the blighter."

This was the way to face up to it. This was the spirit.

Because birds suddenly turning into bloodthirsty man-killers could not have been predicted, and travelling far from home soon becomes suicidal, the Hocken family soon even has to resort, once more, to rationing. The two cigarettes Nat has left not only becomes an indicator of his unostentatious ability to go without, but they provide a stark and despairing capper to the story that, quite frankly, trumps the hell out of the still great climax envisioned by Hitchcock and screenwriter Evan Hunter.

So not only all that, and not only does du Maurier get the shaft when it comes to what she invented that has carried over to the film adaptations of her work, but as I read "The Birds" I thought about Richard Matheson, and how he -- more or less good-naturedly, it must be said -- has often pointed the finger at George Romero and claimed Romero liberally borrowed from Matheson's I Am Legend for his own Night of the Living Dead. Apart from the general, very loose idea of the undead in both stories, I have to assume Matheson is referring to the idea of one man, or a small group of people in Romero's case, holed up in a house that they've boarded up and rigged out as best they could to both keep out and defend against massive groups of unnatural killers who will only stop when they're all dead. But in du Maurier's "The Birds", and far more so than in Hitchcock's obviously much more famous film adaptation, the story is about a small group of people holed up in a house that they've boarded up and rigged out as best they could to both keep out and defend against massive groups of unnatural killers who will only stop when they're all dead. Matheson wrote I Am Legend in 1954. Du Maurier wrote "The Birds" in 1952. Not that it can possibly matter at this point, but even so I'm starting to think that maybe it's a good idea to not throw stones.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 29: God Hates a Coward

2011-10-29T17:35:00.004-04:00

There is a lot of horror fiction I have not read. This goes without saying, I suppose, but I mean that there is a lot of horror fiction that I should have read by now that I haven't. This fact is driven home to me on a regular basis, just by seeing names of writers like Seabury Quinn, and thinking "Who?" Yeah, well, if I was the kind of guy who was actually qualified to write about horror as often as I do, I wouldn't be asking that question. And yet here I am. One of the pluses of doing this -- and it's a plus enjoyed only by myself -- is that I have an excuse to systematically fill in these gaps while leaving lots of time free (most of the rest of the year) to read whatever else I feel like. Today is one of the days where I felt a strong urge to fill some gaps.

And neither of those gaps is named Seabury Quinn! I know, perverse, right? But I've been putting off reading any of Ambrose Bierce's straight-up horror fiction, as well as Robert E. Howard's famous "Pigeons from Hell", for a very long time, but I've ended that negative streak. As it turns out, Bierce's "The Damned Thing" and Howard's "Pigeons from Hell" make a nice pairing. The title of this post, apart from being a very old phrase, is used in the Bierce story, but applies to both. In each story, a regular fellow, like you and me, finds him facing some immensely powerful supernatural force, and instead of running they steel themselves for a showdown. This works out better for one of the guys than it does the other, but Bierce's man, Hugh Morgan, who is dead on a table while his inquest plays out around him, has no help. There is no reason why this is happening to him, specifically -- and what "this" is, is an invisible thing, a "Damned Thing", he calls it, wandering the grounds of his home and terrorizing him -- but he will try to deal with it. He even finds a solution, of sorts, though it doesn't save him. It is extraordinarily Lovecraftian, though, even blatantly Lovecraftian, except that doesn't quite work when you consider that Bierce himself disappeared (forever) three years before Lovecraft ever published a word.

My experience with Bierce before reading "The Damned Thing", his most famous straight horror story, was a college reading of his black-as-night Civil War story "Chickamauga", and a knowledge of the entire plot of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge". I don't even really know if I've ever read that story, though I suspect I haven't. It's just one of those stories that everybody knows, one way or the other, not least because, judging by the current state of American genre films, it must be counted as one of the most influential short stories of...ever. But mainly I knew Bierce's wonderful and caustic The Devil's Dictionary, a short mock-dictionary featuring definitions like:

ACHIEVEMENT, n. The death of endeavor and the birth of disgust.

or:

RADICALISM, n. The conservatism of to-morrow injected into the affairs of to-day.

The idea behind The Devil's Dictionary seems to have been to carefully identify and label each kind of hypocrisy that human beings are capable of. This sort of thing, along with stories like "Chickamauga", led to the always-clever press labelling Bierce "Bitter Bierce". It had been my belief before today that whatever "horror" Bierce wrote was closer to "Chickamauga" -- horror by way of stark reality -- than "The Dunwich Horror". Even a title like "The Damned Thing" couldn't quite dissuade me of this belief, but anyway, I was wrong. "The Damned Thing" is unambiguously a horror story, with an ending that must have influenced Lovecraft in its specifics, but in the cosmic philosophy it implies. Lovecraft is known to have been a reader of Bierce, and considering the shadow Lovecraft casts over an entire century of horror literature, "The Damned Thing" begins to take on an amazing significance. Put it like this: if modern horror fiction is a disease, "The Damned Thing" is Patient Zero. Combine that with "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and you see what an enormous figure Bierce really is.

Robert E. Howard's influence is similarly huge, but, being the creator of Conan, his influence was in the world of fantasy -- dark fantasy, to be sure -- more than horror. Still, Howard wrote in the genre a great deal. The 500 page The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard is proof of this. Reading "Pigeons from Hell" (not just my first horror story by Howard, but my first Howard, period) now, you can practically feel the pages of the pulp magazine (Weird Tales, this would have been) as you turn the pages. Of all the stories I've read in the four years of doing this series, or, frankly, the thirty or so years I've been reading horror, the one "Pigeons from Hell" most brings to mind if Hugh B. Cave's "Murgunstrumm". This isn't because the two bear any story similarities, or even thematic ones outside of those inherent to their shared genre, but both positively reek of pulp. Lurid and violent and refusing to waste any time, "Pigeons from Hell" (an unfortunate title from today's perspective, as it sounds like part of a Richard Lewis bit from 1986 about what a pain in the ass Central Park has become) includes, in its first few pages, this:

Yes! The figure had moved into the bar of moonlight now, and Griswell recognized it. Then he saw Branner's face, and a shriek burst from Griswell's lips. Branner's face was bloodless, corpse-like; gouts of blood dripped darkly down it; his eyes were glassy and set, and blood oozed from the great gash which cleft the crown of his head!

Italics Howard's, needless to say. The story is something of a zombie tale, or more precisely a "zuvembie" tale, which we learn is a sort of witch that creates and controls zombies. Poor Griswell is just an innocent New Englander travelling with his old friend John Branner in search of "vacation pleasure"(!) in the South, where the, to my mind, not great decision to bed down for the night in an old abandoned house leads to the death of Branner, and Griswell nearly being arrested for his murder. The sheriff who discovers the terrified Griswell is a smart man named Bruckner, whose logical mind is quite satisfyingly portrayed by Howard. Earlier this year, I read a book called The Manitou by Graham Masterton. This book is about an evil American Indian spirit who is returning to the earth by growing as a tumor in a woman's neck. The characters who come to believe that this is actually happening do not necessarily need to see it with their own eyes. One man, an expert in Indian mysticism, is consulted and told "This is really happening" and his reaction, more or less, is "Well, I never believed in it before, but I hardly think you'd lie about something like this. I'm in!" By contrast, Bruckner has to wrestle with a lot of conflicting information, but he's not going to commit himself to any one answer until he sees proof. The pulps rarely concerned themselves with this sort of thing, so Howard's commitment to it is deeply refreshing. Of course, Bruckner gets his proof, which supports Griswell's wild and eerie story about something on the stairs with a yellow face, and his friend's split-open head that nevertheless did not keep him from pursuing Griswell with a hatchet.

There is much that is quite eerie, in fact, in the first half of "Pigeons from Hell". What Griswell and Bruckner find in the house, upon their initial search, is as creepy as any reasonable person could hope for. Once the backstory, the solution to it all, starts to kick in -- it involves brutal slave owners, lost fortunes, and revenge -- "Pigeons from Hell" begins to lose steam. Twas ever thus, I suppose, but the truth is I began to lose steam myself as I read. Its grip loosened, let's say. The chill wears off when you follow it with all the whys and wherefores. It's a little bit like telling a joke and then saying "Now let me tell you why that's funny..."

This is not a problem of Howard's, per se, but rather of this particular form, which is the horror story as whodunnit. This is a very popular form, was in the pulp era, is now, and whatever pleasure I take from it is relatively meager. I can enjoy the story, I can enjoy the pre-solution horror, I can enjoy individual sections, but I'm also going to drift after a point, as I did here. Plus, and I hesitate to bring this up, but...look, I have a limited time every day before this posts have to go to "press", and "Pigeons from Hell" is a long-ish story, one that's hard to thoroughly review in the time I have. So I don't know for sure if the thunderously big plot hole I think I detected at the end is really that -- and I did reread portions to see if something hadn't sunk in for me -- and not a miss on my part, due to the story losing me, and a sense I have that if I have to do this for one more day, I swear to Christ...

This enormous, possible mistake is tough to talk about without spoiling the ending, so I'm asking anyone who knows the story well to help me out here. Neil Sarver? Any help?

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 28: Until the Rivers Run Red With the End of the World

2011-10-28T20:13:00.006-04:00

The common wisdom is that the world of self publishing is rife with terrible, useless, bitter writers who have been rightly rejected by the traditional and professional publishing houses, and think they'll show them by dumping their own money and Photosopping skills into ragged and unedited...thing, which they then flog relentlessly to anyone who will listen, and then fly into mad frenzies of self righteous delusion when someone claims that their book is maybe not so deserving of the ink and paper and glue that's been sacrificed in their honor. And there is often a good reason for this belief (please see the comments).

Still, though, my knee-jerk disdain for this sort of thing was dealt a sharp blow last year when I read Larry Blamire's collection of horror/Western stories called Tales of the Callamo Mountains, and since then I've been forced to reconsider my whole stance on self publishing as it pertains exclusively to Larry Blamire. Honestly, that was as far as I was willing to go. Blamire has a follow up collection in the works, and I'm led to understand that, too, will be self-published. It would count, I figured, as my second purchase within that shadowy realm.

Now, though, I don't know what to do with myself. I just finished a new book, a self-published one called Boroughs of the Dead by Andrea Janes. It's a first book, and it's a slender collection of ten horror stories set in New York City. I make no extravagant claims for this book -- I would not, for instance, put it at the same level as Blamire's book -- but it's good, and is quite interesting in a lot of ways. First, though, to give you some kind of perspective, I typically, as you've probably gathered, read around two or three stories to focus on for these posts. Boroughs of the Dead I read in its entirety. Now, some of this is just practical -- Janes' book is only about 120 pages, the the average length of the stories in it is about 12 pages. Still, though, I could have stopped after three. That's all I technically owed to the post. But the damn thing's just so brisk, for one thing, and for another there's such a variety of styles and tones and plots that I was compelled along by the constant question "What's the next one about?"

You can see Janes' comforts and discomforts pop up again and again, and it becomes clear pretty quickly that her strength lies in period stories, generally from the early 20th or late 19th century. Most of the best stories are of this type. "We'll All Be in the Arms of Our True Loves Before Long" (set actually in the late 18th century) kicks things off, and is told in the form of a diary kept by Dr. Charles H________ who, we're assured in a brief preface by former colleague Dr. Nathaniel W________, is "innocent of any wrongdoing by virtue of what seems to be, in my medical opinion, an acute nervous condition." We learn of the wrongdoing, of course, and what led to it -- a ghost, the ghost of a beautiful woman, who urges Charles along:

Suddenly I felt a faint pressure on the small of my back, and I shivered in the cool air. A voice, very close to my ear, said faintly: "Please." The spirit, for that is the only word I can think to call it, led me down the dusky evening streets. When it stopped, I was standing in front of the new well.

It whispered again, "Please."

I walked toward the well.

I Leaned over and pushed aside the wet, heavy snow. There I saw it: her white face in the well's dreadful depths, one hand pressed against the icy surface. She was even more beautiful in flesh than she had been as a wraith.

I know what to do.

At the end of the story, Janes informs us that this was based on a true story, a crime in which the accused was defended by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, but interesting as that is it has little to do with the sad, grimy story we've just read. I did think at the time this would be a feature of every story: Here's How I Thought This One Up. But no, that happens only one other time, and in fact one or two stories, such as "A Fitting Tribute", with its supernatural cruelty, don't need to take place in New York at all. I'll takes Janes' word on it that it does, but it doesn't need to be, and doesn't much matter one way or the other.

Not so others, though. Possibly my favorite story is also based on fact, and it's called "The General Slocum", about a horrific 1904 ferry tragedy that cost around 1,000 people, mostly women and children, most from a single community, their lives ("When the fathers of the community returned home from work, that night, they learned that their wives and all their children had drowned.") To this material, Janes connects a particular and very famous fairy tale. A maybe obvious choice, but she takes an already rather chilling fairy tale and renders it hideous:

They have forgotten all that I have given them, all the stories I have told them, all the bargains they've struck with me. Their ancestors forgot our bargain once, a long time ago, and I drowned their children in the River Weser.

Also inextricable from its New York setting is "The Northern Dispensary" (the building pictured above). This is also a modern story about a woman named Bailey Parker who scrapes up a living as a tour guide of historical New York. One of her favorite sites is the title location, a now-closed former medical center that provided care to the poor, including, Bailey initially delights in telling her uninterested customers, Edgar Allan Poe. The story goes weird places -- Bailey is also an actress who seems on the cusp of landing a lead role in a Boardwalk Empire-type HBO series -- that have no link to the dispensary, yet that sad place is always there, leading us to a bizarre and gruesome ending. I really like the story's strangeness, but a curious think about "The Northern Dispensary" is that, despite being one of the longest stories in the collection, it's also one of the most rushed. There is much more Janes could do to fill this out -- it's not necessary to plow so headlong towards your conclusion. Also, Janes' style is generally very plain-spoken. This is often good -- I don't view the easy style of her period stories as symptomatic of a lack of ability. One story has a line near the end, "I deeply regret the loss of my bag of gold", that is rather hilarious in a way it would not be if the language was more adorned. But in her contemporary stories, I do sense a some flailing.

This is most apparent in "The End", the weakest story in Boroughs of the Dead. This one is more of a black joke, an over-the-top story about a lazy beach vacation that takes a crazy turn towards the bloodthirsty occult when Grace, the main character, meets Joan Hassell, a famous mystery writer into whose friendly acquaintance Grace nervously and shyly tries to insinuate herself. She'll wish she hadn't, and "The End" is rather nasty in a casual sort of way, but boy it gets to its climax really quick, seemingly jumping steps and not taking the kind of time that would have avoided having the whole premise of the story's horror spill out in a speech of the "Now that you're about to die, let me tell you everything" sort that simply never, ever works, and can't work, unless you're making fun of it, which can't work anymore either because it's been made fun of endlessly. What we learn is going on is pretty ridiculous, but that doesn't matter. It could have worked. An impatience, or a discomfort with the modern-day, on Janes' part cuts it off at the knees.

Janes herself may flat-out say what the problem is here. In "The Northern Dispensary", Bailey -- a character my research tells me may share some experiences with Andrea Janes -- is told in her audition for HBO that the show will be set in the 1930s. Janes writes:

"Oh that's great -- I love history, anything old-fashioned." This actually was true. Bailey loved vintage clothing and the musty smell of used books. She smiled at the thought of costumes she'd get to wear if -- no, when -- she got a part on this show.

Well, I love all that stuff, too, minus the costumes, and I feel as though, if given her druthers, Janes would write in the mode of "A Fitting Tribute" and "We'll All Be in the Arms of Our True Loves Before Long" and "The General Slocum" exclusively. Was she warned against this, for commercial reasons? I have no clue. I have no clue if I'm right about any of this, and anyway the market for short horror fiction ain't too strong, so my own unsolicited advice would be to, as Fat Tony once said, listen to your heart.

Let us not forget that Boroughs of the Dead was self-published, after all. Which seems to be sort of a kind of whole thing with horror fiction these days. So much horror fiction, both the good and the bad, but especially the best, like Reggie Oliver (boy I mention him a lot, don't I? Well, if you possibly can, find his story "The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler" and read that sucker) is, not self-published, but either in new small independent presses, or specialty presses like Centipede Press. From my dealings with Centipede, I feel like outside of the actual putting together of the physical books (which are gorgeous -- expensive, but gorgeous) that there's one dude handling the whole deal. The line between independent publishing and self publishing can become pretty hazy. And that means that there could be good stuff hidden away somewhere in the least likely, most degraded corners of that world. Quite frankly, I'm not sure I feel like digging. It's just too much, and it's too unlikely to bear any fruit. But if I hear about something, something good like Tales of the Callamo Mountains by Larry Blamire, or Boroughs of the Dead by Andrea Janes, then count me in.

The Kind of Face You Hate - Day 27: O the Devil!

2011-10-27T12:07:00.006-04:00

That's a picture of Robertson Davies. I wish I'd seen that picture earlier, because it would have given me a better idea of what to expect from a Robertson Davies-penned ghost story. Or barring that, I could have read the introduction to High Spirits (the title of which could perhaps be construed as yet another tip-off), Davies' one collection of ghost stories, in which he says:

Writing ghost stories, and in particular, cheerful ghost stories, set me to the task of examining the literature of the ghost story, and its technique.

And so on. My point was made at the use of the word "cheerful". I'd read some Davies before last night, two full novels, in fact, which is a good deal more that is often the case here. Those novels, Fifth Business and The Manticore were both read long enough ago that the details are more than a little bit hazy, and the ravages of time have not been held back at all by my own inability to retain anything that I read, think, or say, but I can still recall that both novels, the first two parts of Davies' Deptford Trilogy had their share of humor, they were certainly not all frivolity (one of the few things I remember is a sad and embarrassing scatological mishap that occurs late in The Manticore), so I thought however Davies would approach the ghost story, it would include at least a nod towards the terror that the genre is traditionally meant to evoke. Plus, the back cover copy of my Penguin edition of High Spirits uses the phrase "a touch of true scariness" as one of its descriptive highlights.

But no, as I'm sure you've guessed by now. Or no, not as far as I've read, at least. I read three stories from High Spirits, and not one of them was ever intended to frighten or disturb anyone. This is certainly not the fault of Robertson Davies, and there's a mild irony in the fact that while the stories don't quite suit my purposes for The Kind of Face You Slash, I still want to read the rest of the book. What's fun about High Spirits is that each story is told by the same narrator, an unnamed (from what I've read) man who could probably be safely dubbed "Robertson Davies" who is a professor at Massey College, in the University of Toronto. Such was the case with the real Davies, Massey College being a real place who, Davies explains in his introduction, needed a ghost. So at various Christmas parties on campus, throughout the years, Davies would tell a new ghost story. The ghost story told at Christmas is a long, but sadly now apparently long-dead (and anyway, never American) tradition, one that also led the world to have the ghost stories of M. R. James in it. James never saw himself as a writer of ghost stories, but he was so good at coming up with them for Christmas parties that he was urged to publish. He did, and got on with his life. Similarly, Davies had other things in mind for his own fiction, but he enjoyed ghost stories very much, had a good time thinking up his own, was already a published writer of strong reputation anyway, might as well. The difference is, Davies is playing with a tradition that James was smack dab in the middle of. A certain light-heartedness is bound to follow.

Anyway, as I was saying, what's fun about High Spirits is that the stories are almost connected by virtue of all having the same setting, the same narrator, and some recurring characters. I enjoy this sort of thing, and when, in one story, "Einstein and the Little Lord" (the one of the three I read that is the least like a horror story) that the ghost of Albert Einstein would count as the seventeenth ghost to visit Massey College, and after some quick counting on my part I discovered that "Einstein and the Little Lord" was indeed the seventeenth story in the collection, I thought that only a curmudgeon like myself would turn his nose up at such a delightful lark of a book. And even I couldn't do it!

It's impossible to say for sure if this was a lucky coincidence or simply that I'm picking up on one of the book's running jokes/themes, but it does seem as though the three stories I chose contain an interesting peek into the way Davies built off of throwaway bits from one story to inspire him for another, completely separate one. For example, the earliest story I read is called "When Satan Goes Home for Christmas". This story does include Satan, who wants to go home to heaven for Christmas, but can't, because of what happened and everything. This, by the way, is the story that contains the greatest whiff of the antiquary about it, especially ending how it does, which is important in this strain of the ghost story tradition. But the story begins with someone from the college mocking the narrator, Davies, for his previous, self-regarding ghost stories -- it's always the ghost of someone famous, apparently, visiting him -- so he goes about making one up:

It is an excellent story -- what used to be called in an earlier day 'a ripping yarn' -- and quite original. It is about a Junior Fellow of this College called Frank Einstein, a brilliant young biologist who discovers the secret of life in an old alchemical manuscript, and manufactures a living creature out of scraps he steals from the dissection lab in the new Medical Building...But because he cannot give his creation a soul, it is a Monster, and kills the Bursar and the Librarian and finally deflowers and then eats Frank's girl-friend, a graduated student called mary Shelley.

That "Frank Einstein" is a bit of a groaner, and there's a lot of that, frankly, in these stories, though Davies is also entirely capable of relating the lyrics applied due to "polar musical taste" to Dvorak's Humoresque Number 7 in G flat:

Passengers will please refrain
From flushing toilets when the train
Is standing in the station:
I love you.

It's the "I love you" that kills me. But anyhow, so in a later story, called "The Cat That Went to Trinity", Frank Einstein returns, with his full name being given as Victor Frank Einstein, and he falls in love with a student named Elizabeth Lavenza, a pretty young girl the narrator took note of as he likes to pick out the pretty girls in his class early on, so he'll have something to look at as the year proceeds. Also "Elizabeth Lavenza" is the name of the pseudo-sister Frankenstein falls in love with in Frankenstein, and the coincidneces are simply too strong for our narrator. The plot of "The Cat That Went to Trinity" has Frank and Elizabeth being given Shelley's novel to read, by our narrator, and then, because Massey College can't hold onto their cats (they all go to Trinity College), trying to make "the greatest cat you've ever seen" out of a dozen stray cats. Having been inspired by Frankenstein and everything. A version of which our narrator thought he'd come up with all by himself in "When Satan Went Home for Christmas".

As if all that weren't enough, when Davies introduces Frank Einstein in "The Cat That Went to Trinity", he writes that "some mention was made of a great-uncle of his, an Albert Einstein, whose name meant nothing nto me, though it appeared to have special significance in the scientific world." And of course, as I've already noted, the ghost of Albert Einstein visits Massey College in "Einstein and the Little Lord", a story I chose thinking it would be the continued adventures of Frank, not his great-uncle. In "Einstein and the Little Lord", our narrator seems fully aware of who Albert Einstein is, so either, in one of the stories between "The Cat That Went to Trinity" and "Einstein and the Little Lord" our narrator learns about the great physicist, or Davies couldn't give a fig about such continuity. I suspect I'll find out when I read the rest of these stories, which I surely will, horror be damned.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 26: The Skullcap of the Beast

2011-10-26T13:11:00.006-04:00

Speaking of genre hybrids, as I was yesterday, remember two years ago (of course you do, why wouldn't you?) when I talked about Laird Barron's "The Imago Sequence", a crime/horror hybrid that won me over as I was in the act of writing the post? Well, crime/horror -- or as its practitioners would probably prefer you call it, horror noir, or noir horror -- has become enough of a thing that the ubiquitous Ellen Datlow recently published an anthology called Supernatural Noir (or maybe that's what its practitioners would prefer you call it) devoted entirely to such stories. Having read a bit of it now, I'm quite happy it exists, because just based on my small sample Datlow has drawn from a pool of talent who know what it mean to combine these kinds of stories, as well as these tones, which neither Datlow nor anyone else represented in Supernatural Noir would be the first to point out aren't too terribly far apart to begin with.

It's a nice lineup, in Supernatural Noir. The great Brian Evenson is there, Joe Lansdale (of course), Lucius Shepard, Melanie Tem. Lee Thomas, who I wrote about earlier this month. There's enough here that I could have, and maybe should have, skipped over the already-covered Laird Barron, but I'm finding this year, that I'm continuously drawn towards writers I've given little more than a glancing look in the past, not least because that glance is probably the last time I've read anything by them. Barron is here, with a story called "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven", and I wanted to read it. It's that simple. So I paired that one off with a story called "But For Scars" written by Tom Piccirilli, who I've never read but who I know of because of his occasional penchant for baroque titles like A Choir of Ill Children, and This Cape is Red Because I've Been Bleeding, a book of horror poetry. From that perspective, as a title "But For Scars" can only be regarded as a disappointment, but boy he sure has a handle on his material.

Of the two, "But For Scars" feels the most like a crime story, while Barron's story feels more like horror. Piccirilli structures "But For Scars" as an investigation, conducted not by a regular cop but by a man on the fringe of society, and in a setting of rampant lawlessness and corruption. "But For Scars" begins with our unnamed narrator waking up in the very early morning to find a sixteen year old girl holding a .22 pistol, fatally overfeeding the narrator's fish. It's an image not out of line in something like, say, James Crumley's fiction, nor is Piccirilli's language:

Men would consider her sexy as hell until she hit maybe twenty-five, and then she'd be downgraded to bruised fruit. By the time she was thirty the neighbors would be saying she hadn't aged well.

The narrator knows the girl -- he's living in what was once her home. Her parents, Ron and Katy Wright, were brutally murdered in the basement, and their daughter, Emily, dealt with the loss in a manner that landed her in a state hospital for six years. It is from there she's just escaped. Our narrator knew Emily's parents very well (Emily asks him "Did you ever fuck my mother?", and while he doesn't answer her, he answers us through the narration: "I had. A lot."), and in fact was and is a part of the same outlaw biker gang as they, and within said gang the murders of Ron and Katy are believed to be an internal thing. Emily wants to know who killed her parents, and she wants to use her .22 on them. He wants to get the gun from her and calm her down and help her. She tries to seduce him, and he, by the skin of his teeth, manages to resist. They fall asleep in his bed, and when he wakes up she's gone. He sniffs the air, and smells something terrible coming from under his bed:

I crouched down and peered underneath and saw Emily wedged there wit her eyes and mouth open. She'd cut he wrists with the pocketknife I kept in an ashtray on my dresser. It hadn't been very sharp and she'd really had to saw into herself.

The narrator had awoken in the first place because he believed Emily had whispered in his ear that she was pregnant, and this, along with her death, fuels his desire to find out what's going on, who killed her parents, who got her pregnant if indeed she was (the narrator seems confident he wasn't dreaming, and I was never clear why) -- all of this leads him to state hospitals and into the lair of the biker gang. It's quite an excellent short crime story, where the supernatural horror is so subtle as to be questionable as that. You don't really doubt that there is something ghostly going on here by the end, because two different characters describe the same phenomenon that neither would have been likely to privately share with the other, but it's interesting that our point of view character never sees anything otherworldly for himself. "But For Scars" is a morbid and sad crime story that has just a hint of...something. Plus, as I write this, I'm asking myself other questions, the answers to which are not provided, and which on reflection add a more visceral horror kick to the whole thing.

But mainly, "But For Scars" is a really nicely written piece of crime fiction, of the currently popular semi-rural type. It's tough, though, and mean. When the narrator is being roughed up by probably corrupt cops, following Emily's suicide, Piccirilli writes:

One detective smacked me with a sloppy open palm. His hand was soft and smelled of aloe. Afterward, he looked like he wanted to apologize. Another cop tried to work my kidneys but he couldn't find them. I didn't know whether to be grateful or disgusted.

Well, that's great, and proves that Piccirilli knows the language of crime fiction. If anything about "But For Scars" is frustrating it's that in just under thirty pages, Piccirilli creates a world that I would love to return to for other crime stories, or, better yet, novels. Forget the barely-there horror stuff, even -- this overcast world of brutal biker gangs in control of a corrput town is a great setting that I fear I won't be reading about again anytime soon.

Laird Barron's "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven" does not have the same effect, and it's hard to talk about this without sounding like I'm criticizing one story or the other. It's just interesting to me that Piccirilli leaves me wanting more, and Barron leaves me feeling as though I've been given enough, and both reactions reflect well on the stories. I think I know why this is. "But For Scars" is a crime story first, and for whatever reason crime fiction is most effective in novel form. Something about the genre benefits from the long form. Horror, for whatever reason, is precisely the opposite, finding its greatest power in the short story. And, of course, as I've said, "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven" is a horror story before it's anything else.

It does have a common crime set up. Lorna is on the run from her rich, abusive husband, Bruce, and with Miranda, her lover, she has moved into an old cabin outside of the very small town of Poger Rock in the state of Washington. The cabin is known by locals as the Haugstad Place, and of course the history of the structure, and the bloody past of Haugstad himself, will come into play later. But Miranda gets a gun, private investigators hired by Bruce come sniffing around the place, Lorna drinks a lot, and violence is considered as an end result of all this. As indeed it is, but of a rather different sort.

One day Miranda comes home with a giant animal skin, one used apparently as a cloak, that she'd found in the surrounding wilderness. Lorna finds it hideous, but Miranda becomes more and more attached to it, and her behavior, and desire to be violently proactive in regards to Bruce and his hired guns, begins to very reasonably freak Lorna out:

The pelt covered Miranda, concealed her so she was scarcely more than a lump. She whined and shuddered and took otice of the pallid light, and she stirred, Lorna was convinced that the pelt was not a loose cloak, not an ill-fitted garment, but something else entirely for the manner in which it flexed with each twitch and shiver of Miranda's musculature.

...Lorna's mouth was dry. She said, "Sweetheart?"

Miranda said, in a voice rusty and rugged, "Why don't you...go on to bed. I'll be along. I'll come see you real soon."

So "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven" is rather creepy, actually, and it moves from there to grotesque, at a level that is nearly Clive Barker-ian. I could nitpick at the concept behind Supernatural Noir as it pertains to "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven", as it doesn't really feel like Barron wrote a genre hybrid so much as it was realized that the common set-ups for any number of horror stories could double as the set-ups to crime stories, but pffffft. Who cares. This is good fiction. Good new horror fiction, even. And brother, that ain't hay.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 25: Corpseworld

2011-10-25T17:58:00.006-04:00

You know who’s pretty popular right now? George R. R. Martin. My research tells me that Game of Thrones, the first book in his now massively successful A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, came out a full three years before I’d ever read a word of the man, and I don’t believe at the time that I knew he had this fantasy series going that was about to light shit up all over the place. No, the book I was drawn to was Fevre Dream, an early horror novel about vampires and steamboats set during the glory days of the Mighty Mississip’. If you want to argue with me that those things don’t go together, be my guest, but it is an argument you will lose, sir. Although the truth is, I ultimately felt a little let down by Fevre Dream, I think possibly because it played out more as an adventure story, with vampire killings, than actual horror. It’s been so long, I can’t remember what exactly bothered me about the book, and because of this I now have kind of fond memories of it. I don’t know how that works, but science is working on it.

Since then, until recently, I’d followed up on George R. R. Martin by reading not one more word written by him. I did become intrigued anew when the HBO series Game of Thrones (why is the series named after the first book, and not the overarching title? Drives me nuts) kicked off, and I did read about 100 pages of the first novel, was enjoying it thoroughly, but had to respectfully set it aside – since when my wife has swooped in and picked it up – because other, ongoing reading projects had to be my priority. But anyway, I loved the crap out of the HBO series, and want to learn more of this “George R. R. Martin” person.

I did learn a fair bit from this New Yorker profile, which focused on the weird, in some cases combative, relationship he has with his fans – the weirdness all coming from the fans, it should be noted – who demand that he write faster than he’s currently able. It gave me a lot of respect, not to mention sympathy, for a guy whose dreams of becoming a writer have come true in a way that I’m sure surpass anything he’d imagined, and has also put him on the firing line, in the crosshairs of a bunch of nerds who think what Martin is doing is somehow easy. “Just take these hundreds of characters and several dozen plotlines you’ve created over the course of many books and bring everything together in a way that is not only viscerally and artistically satisfying, but looks just like it does when I have dreams about it. And do it fast! God!” Of course, I haven’t read the books yet. If I had, I guess I’d probably hate Martin for writing books I love, too.

But we’re not here to talk about fantasy fiction. Although I gather we probably could pretty easily, as it seems to me the concept of genre hybrids is one with which Martin is intimately familiar. From what I’ve read/seen, A Song of Ice and Fire is a cross between historical fiction (in this case everything’s made up, but still Martin drew on it as an influence), fantasy and horror. Fevre Dream is an adventure/historical/horror novel, and the story I read for today, “Meathouse Man”, is science fiction/horror. Any number of stories I’ve come across in various anthologies could, from what the editors claim, be easily slotted with fantasy or horror. I’m not sure Martin has written in a genre that he hasn’t crossed over with something else. In this case, like “The Savage Mouth” from a few days ago, Martin ties his horror to a genuine – if extremely unlikely – science fiction concept. “Meathouse Man” wonders what might society – for lack of a better word – be like in the future, and what about it might crack open a man’s brain?

Martin has said that “Meathouse Man” was born out of a great deal of personal pain, all of which he dumped into the story, one he now finds it painful to reread. Not that it’s any of my business, but it’s not hard to imagine at least which region on the giant map of pain he was suffering through. “Meathouse Man” is an anti-love story about a man named Trager whose profession is one of corpse-handler. Martin wrote a short series of stories about this line of work, and the idea is that in the future – and maybe the details of this get worked out in one of the other stories, not that it matters at all – in certain parts of the inhabited cosmos, corpses have been made to come alive, not in a literal sense, and not even in a zombie sense, but in a puppet sense, so that they can be controlled remotely and made, by their handlers, to perform any kind of task a living person could do, but at this point no longer wants to. Trager’s work is a little vague, but his corpses do manual labor, digging pits and blasting rock and the like. When we meet Trager, he’s not even twenty years old, and he’s a very shy and nervous sort who has been partially taken under the wing by Cox, who is essentially the foreman of Trager’s crew. Through this group of older, more streetwise men, Trager learns of the pleasures of the meathouse, which is a brothel where all the professional women are corpses. Upon finishing:

He left her as he'd found her, lying face up on the bed with her legs apart. Meathouse courtesy.

So there’s your horror, I think it’s safe to say. As he grows older, Trager tries to strike out into a mature world -- having sex with galvanized corpses being this story's equivalent of a peep show, or I guess a regular hooker -- of real love. It's his desire for this, and his failed attempts to bring it about, that provides "Meathouse Man" with its gut-punch.

[The meathouse] had been good, exciting; for once he felt confident and virile. But it was so easy, cheap, dirty. There had to be more, didn't there? Love, whatever that was? It had to be better with a real woman, had to, and he wouldn't find one of those in a meathouse. He'd never found one outside, either, but then he'd never really had the courage to try. But he had to try, had to, or what sort of life would he ever have?

We'll find out soon enough, unfortunately. There are a few remarkable things about this story. The first one, for me, is Martin's approach the the hybrid of genres. I would now very much like to read the other "corpse-handler" stories (and I will, in short order), because I wonder about the tone, if each one was as despairing as this one. I have to think that's part of it, given that the series deals with corpse-handling, but I'm interested in the idea that the same science fiction concept can be used by the same author to explore the different ways it affects those who live within that world. I can imagine any number of tones being struck and genres utilized, from comic to, well, "Meathouse Man" would be the opposite end of that spectrum. Martin didn't write more than a few of these (according to his notes in the career-retrospective story collection Dreamsongs -- volume one, to be specific -- which is where I've gotten all the information about this story) so I don't guess he got that deep into it, but I do like the idea.

Another thing, "Meathouse Man" being a horror story, I thought I knew where it was heading, but I was entirely wrong. I thought it was going to be more conventionally horror-y, really, more genre specific, and it's not that a version of this story that followed that route would have been bad -- I was quite interested when I thought I was right -- but that Martin was evidently completely uninterested in making something that categorizable. What "Meathouse Man" is, is a horror story about despair. Not about the violence despair can drive one to, but the bone-deep damage that can be done to the person suffering from it. "Meathouse Man" ends with a line of extraordinary bitterness, one that might seem a bit juvenile on its own, but in the context of the story, and knowing how personal the story is, it ends up being a slap. You don't have to believe it yourself -- I don't -- just that Trager does, and that Martin, in 1973, had to spit out the words even if he didn't really believe it himself. Everybody at one time in their life has thought, or even angrily said, "Fuck everything, I don't care anymore." The difference between those people and George R. R. Martin is that Martin turned that into a story.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 24: Tiny Last Straws

2011-10-24T17:55:00.003-04:00

I’m running on not a great deal of sleep today, having tried last night to fall asleep while listening to a podcast that dealt extensively with the Jack the Ripper murders, and feeling about that awful bit of history -- possibly for the first time in my life, as unhappy a thing as that is to admit – rather depressed. And then actually sort of frightened, as images of disturbed men entering my bedroom as my wife and I slept drifted unstoppably through my mind. The details of how this fear manifested itself shall be left out of this account, as they would cast me in an undignified light, but rest assured the whole time I was berating myself for thinking and acting like a scared child. (You might also consider excusing any rambling quality that might seep into tonight’s post.)

The upshot of it all is, again, that I didn’t sleep too well, which turns out to dovetail pretty nicely with today’s reading. My impulse for today was to go back and read someone I consider to be one of the giants of horror, Robert Aickman. Aickman’s short fiction is a bit on the long side, typically thirty to fifty pages, and my dumb ass somehow regards reading even a single Aickman story to be something of a commitment, within a single day at least, so as a result my reading of the man I consider to be one of the two best, if not the single best, horror writer of the 20th century, is rather scattershot. I’ve grabbed at his stories off and on over the years, rarely reading more than one over as many days (the one time I did was when I read two for my post on Aickman back in 2008). One of the results of this is that when I do sit down with an Aickman story, I get very excited because I know I will be having a rare reading experience.

So it has again proved with today’s story, “Into the Wood” (which, for anyone who cares to know these things, and I hope there are more than a few of you who do, can be most easily and cheaply found in a used copy of the Aickman collection The Wine-Dark Sea). I chose this one because Peter Straub, in his introduction to the book, says “’Into the Wood’ seems to me the masterpiece of this collection. In it all of Aickman’s themes come together in an act of self-acceptance which is at once dangerous, enigmatic, in narrative terms wholly justified, and filled with the reverence for the imaginative power demonstrated by Aickman’s work in general.” Now, The Wine-Dark Sea also includes “The Inner Room” which I consider to be among the small handful of greatest horror stories ever written (and which Straub, in another book I have, once chose as his own favorite horror story, the fickle bastard), so in my view “Into the Wood” has a lot of work ahead of it in order to supplant that story as the collection’s masterpiece. That I don’t believe “Into the Wood” manages it, though, is of course meaningless. “Into the Wood” is very odd, and very Robert Aickman-esque, which certainly stands to reason, but what I mean is that it is as full of the things Aickman liked to put in his fiction as Straub suggests, to the point that it achieves a certain density, both of tone and of detail and, if such a thing can be dense, of pacing. A lot of Aickman’s stuff is very deliberate in its pacing, and it’s hard to see how it couldn’t be, but “Into the Wood” might achieve some kind of zenith in the area. Which is not a criticism.

It certainly does help that Aickman was a superb writer of prose. His story here is about a middle-aged English couple, Henry and Margaret (aka “Harry” and “Molly”, which confused me for a bit early on) who travel to Sweden because the husband, an engineer, is helping to build a road there (this is something Aickman-esque in itself, a career detail from a man whose non-fiction books bore titles like Know Your Waterways). The husband has his work to deal with, and Margaret has what basically amounts to a vacation to attend to. This separates the two of them at various times, and causes Margaret to reflect on the state of their marriage, which seems quite tenuous, though whatever is at the heart of the rift -- apart from Margaret's clear dissatisfaction -- is not spoken of. Anyway, with one thing or another, Margaret learns of sanitarium, which doubles at a hotel called Kulhus, that intrigues her, and when Henry is called to Stockholm she asks to be put up there to help along her relaxation. Henry agrees, and soon Margaret is checking out her room:

Margaret was given the most beautiful room: large, with a view from the windows extending for miles, charmingly furnished, and with no fewer than three long rows of assorted books in at least four languages. Margaret, who read books, looked at this small library with considerable curiosity. As far as she could tell, the volumes seemed even to have been chosen with care, and to be by no means mere left-behinds or the bedtime reading one might expect -- if one could in an hotel expect anything of that kind at all. But immediately it had occurred to Margaret that these were not books of the sort that most people would read to induce slumber, she observed that the next work on the shelf was a substantial tome named Die Schlaflosigkeit, which she suspected might mean "Insomnia."

And she's probably right, because it turns out Kurhus's function as a sanitarium is to help chronic insomniacs. This Margaret learns from another Englishwoman, a patient there, named Sandy Slater. Among the things Margaret learns from Sandy is that the whole name for the place is Jamblichus Kurhus, "Jamblichus" coming from Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

"Jamblichus was the one among the seven sleepers who after they had slept for two centuries, went down into town in order to buy food, tendered the obsolete coins, and found himself arrested...Anyway, places like this used often to be called Jamblichus Groves; even by the unsophisticated."

The Kurhus is also set against a large expanse of wood which Margaret comes to learn is full of well-worn and smooth paths used by the insomniacs to walk through at night, when they should be sleeping. For what purpose? And of course Sandy warns Margaret away from it, but not too strenuously, not in any typical horror story, stay-out-of-the-woods sort of way. Along the way, we will meet some of the other patients, such as Colonel Adamski, a Pole World War II veteran who wants Margaret to feel more free to indulge in the customs of the insomniacs than Sandy is; and a young, thin girl who Sandy claims has never slept a wink in her life. Then, eventually, Margaret goes home.

This is a very hard story to summarize, as are all of Aickman's, because it doesn't follow any typical structure -- it's unique not just to horror, but to fiction in general, in my experience. It is a story that climaxes with a frustrated attempt to find a room to rent. It features the main character leaving the source of unease successfully because she doesn't feel comfortable. So she leaves. What kind of a story is this?

It's a story where the aforementioned unease comes from without, the insomniac hospital, to afflict something within Margaret, her unhappiness and desire for some kind of freedom beyond the thoughtless ideas -- such as "creative outlets" -- generally suggested to housewives in her frame of mind. Colonel Adamski says:

"...For men and women there is to everything a limit, beyond which further striving, further thought, leads only to regression. And this is true even though most men and women never set out at all; possibly are not capable of setting out. For those who do set out, the limit varies from individual to individual, and cannot be foreseen. Few ever reach it. Those who do reach it are, I suspect, those who go off into the further forest."

Margaret's eyes were shining. "I know that you are right," she cried. It is something I have long known, without finding the words."

It doesn't sound very scary, does it? But fairy tales are in there, of an only hinted-at, sinister turn, and myth, and Freud, and all somehow jumbles up in Margaret's head to make her follow an honest and fair train of thought about her unhappiness, and lead her into an abyss. Why? Because she's wrong? No, I don't believe so, nor do I believe Aickman believes so. About his own work, Aickman once wrote:

...I do not regard my work as "fantasy" at all, except, perhaps, for commercial purposes. I try to depict the world as I see it; sometimes artistically exaggerating no doubt...and occasionally exaggerating for purposes of parable... I believe in what the Germans term Ehrfurcht: reverence for things one cannot understand. Faust's error was an aspiration to understand, and therefore master, things which, by God or by nature, are set beyond the human compass. He could only achieve this at the cost of making the achievement pointless.

In a sense, Aickman's stories are magnificently pointless, in that what can be taken away in terms of meaning is usually quite nebulous, or you can't take anything. There's an unease, and a horror, that doesn't come from nowhere, but there is a connection between character and experience that you often can't locate. There's a thread, or a trail, that you can follow, and willingly do, but when you come out the other side, even if you're home, you're still lost.

* * * * *

I apologize for this one. I've been half asleep all day. Robert Aickman deserves better.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 23: His is the Lightning-Flash, His is the Deep Salt Sea

2011-10-23T18:00:00.003-04:00

In A Grief Observed -- a book that, as you read it, you feel like you shouldn't be allowed to read -- C. S. Lewis writes: "Someone said, I believe, 'God always geometrizes.' Supposing the truth were 'God always vivisects'?" As it happens, this desolate questioning of the God Lewis has spent much of his adult life believing and serving, and will come to again, rather neatly summarizes the plot of The Island of Dr. Moreau, H. G. Wells's bleak, even black-hearted tale of mad science, torture, and transformation.

You can pretty much choose your parallel: either the animals, transformed by the mad Dr. Moreau, via vivisection, into near-human monstrosities go from believing Moreau is essentially God, until his death makes them question everything he'd taught them in order to control their naturally savage instincts ("Not to eat Flesh nor Fish; that is the Law. Are we not men?"), before our narrator, Edward Prendick, picks up Moreau's thread of deification and restores the creatures' need to worship in order to save his own skin (not that you can blame him) only to see things go one step beyond Lewis and revert back to dumb savagery; or Prendick sees his view of civilized humanity smashed again and again, until even the everyday world he finally returns to seems populated by people just shy of animalistic wildness, but managing to achieve a kind of peace in the end -- one brought on by voluntary solitude, mind you, but you take what you can get.

Or the novel can be both of these things, and in fact is. The Island of Dr. Moreau is astonishingly rich, in other words, despite being quite short. This richness is a bit backloaded, occurring almost entirely in the later portions of the book as the full ramifications, both immediate and philosophical, of Moreau's obliviousness become clear.

But he was so irresponsible, [Prendick writes of Moreau] so utterly careless. His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations drove him on, and the things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer; at last to die painfully.

This might double as a description of human existence, depending on how bad you feel about the whole thing. Wells explains the book, which he also called "rather painful", this way:

The Island of Dr. Moreau in an exercise in youthful blasphemy. Now and then, though I rarely admit it, the universe projects itself towards me in a hideous grimace. It grimaced that time, and I did my best to express my vision of the aimless torture in creation.

God, or the absence of God -- or the idea of God, or the idea of the absence of God -- is everywhere in The Island of Dr. Moreau. The lives of Prendick, Moreau, and Moreau's drunken, angry assistant Montgomery are only preserved by Moreau's ability to make his cast-off creations believe that he, Moreau, is their maker, which is true enough, but also their God, and their punisher. The Laws (spoken famously, in a somewhat altered form, by Bela Lugosi in the controversial 1932 film version Island of Lost Souls) that Moreau has taught to his creatures each has, as its core, an attempt to thwart natural, instinctive animal behavior. This is his entire reason for conducting these vivisections (which, by the way, is the no-longer-allowed practice of dissecting a still-living animal), but he also knows the moment those laws are questioned, or more likely the moment the "creeping Beast flesh", Moreau's description of the slow return of his failed creations' natural behavior, which process is the reason Moreau considers every experiment up to the novel's action to be a failure, obliterates whatever he's tried to make the Beasts believe, is the moment his neck is well and truly on the line. And so it eventually proves, of course, so that at one point in the novel, God, from the perspective of Montgomery's domesticated butler creature M'ling, or the Ape Man, or the Hyena-Swine, or the Dog Man, or the Sayer of the Laws, is well and truly dead.

This idea would not particularly impress Prendick, whom, in a moment of anger, Montgomery calls a "logic-chopping, chalky-faced saint of an atheist". This revelation, as it were, comes a little bit out of a blue, and renders his subsequent attempt, a mostly successful one, to deify himself in place of the deceased Moreau unquestionably cynical. But it's pretty clear that at this point its claim to be Jesus (which is essentially what he does for Moreau, too, telling the Beasts that Moreau is not dead but has cast off his body and ascended to heaven; yet Prendick remains on Earth to preach on his behalf, so it gets muddled if viewed from a strictly Christian point of view, a choice of reading that is, to say the least, unnecessary) or die. The events of the novel, and life in general, have already destroyed any spirituality of Montgomery, the one man who may have possessed any going in, because I think it's safe to assume the ruthlessly rational Moreau had room in his mind to only think about vivisection and transformation. Late in the novel, Montgomery, who has already confessed to Prendick that he was basically shanghaied by Moreau one drunken night after medical school, rages against the cosmos:

"This silly ass of a world...What a muddle it all is! I haven't had any life. I wonder when it's going to begin. Sixteen years being bullied by nurses and schoolmasters at their own sweet will, five in London grinding hard at medicine -- bad food, shabby lodgings, shabby clothes, shabby vice -- a blunder -- I don't know any better -- and hustled off to the beastly island. Ten years here! What's it all for, Prendick? Are we bubbles blown by a baby?"

Tell Prendick something he doesn't know. Typically in books or stories like this, our straight-edged narrator is little more than a dull witness, marshaling all the considerable good within him to perform heroic acts when the narrative calls for it. Prendick is rather different, and in the early pages of The Island of Dr. Moreau his life is one of a man suffering one cruelty after another. Barely surviving a shipwreck to be picked up by a ship that happens to be carrying Montgomery and M'ling, as well as a new batch of animals picked up by Montgomery for Moreau's experiments, back to Moreau's island. It is Montgomery who nurses Prendick back to health, but when Montgomery and his animals come into conflict with the ship's drunken captain, Prendick's desire to help his savior serves only to turn the captain on him, so that when they reach port, the captain orders off the ship and into a dinghy. Moreau, who has arrived to collect Montgomery and his specimens, notices an imploring look from Montgomery on Prendick's behalf, and coldly says to Prendick "Can't have you."

This episode actually ends with Prendick writing "I prayed aloud to God to let me die," which calls into question Montgomery's labelling of him as an atheist, though when that time comes Prendick doesn't argue the point. Regardless, this moment, of Prendick suddenly alone and friendless, only a strong tide away from being lost at sea, is one of the novel's most painful. The island's few natives eventually take pity on him, but I feel like the damage has already been done. Prendick is well on the path that will lead him to view all humanity is little more than savage, pitiless seekers of only their own gratification. What he finds on the island certainly won't do anything to weaken that view, and anyway how different from the fearsome Hyena-Swine, who Prendick will come to view as his personal enemy, is that drunken captain? Or Moreau? Or Prendick himself, even, who barely ever acts to help the creatures being so mercilessly tortured -- and for what? -- by Moreau, and by his own admission only cares about it because he can hear the animal screams:

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe -- I have thought since -- I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

This, it must be said, conforms to the cynic's appraisal of humanity pretty cleanly. But who says Prendick exempts himself anyway? After he's made it back home and has chosen to remove himself from as much of mankind as he can possibly manage, so that he will no longer have to see barely-human citizens of London "with tired eyes and eager faces like wounded deer dripping blood", it's entirely possible that this choice was made not just to be alone for his own sake, but to remove opportunities for himself to behave too callously or with too much self-interest. He even admits as much:

And even it seemed that I, too, was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain, that sent it to wander alone, like a sheep stricken with the gid.

By the end, The Island of Dr. Moreau seems to be far more Prendick's novel, to actually be about him, than it did during the long middle stretches of terror and mystery, and of Moreau's long, diseased rationalizations. The novel drags Prendick's spirit down, down, and down, until only isolation can restore it to any degree ("But this is a mood that comes to me now -- I thank God -- more rarely."). C. S. Lewis would chart his slow, painful return to a sort of peace, as well ("Didn't people dispute once whether the final vision of God was more an act of intelligence or of love? That is probably another of the nonsense questions.") Lewis's God is perhaps Prendick's Beasts: the central question through which they each grapple with the more tactile bits of their normal lives.

* * * * * *
In the various screen adaptations of Wells's novel, the beasts are apt to take center stage. This is only natural, and even desirable in terms of screen drama. It is a function of first person narration, which is what Wells employs, that unless your narrator is constantly in the thick of things, a certain amount of action is going to be missed, and in the case of The Island of Dr. Moreau it's rather surprising how much of that action happens off-stage. This would defeat the entire purpose of the best screen adaptation of the novel (well, I haven't seen the TV version from 1977, but I don't mind assuming in this case), 1932's Island of Lost Souls, directed by Erle C. Kenton and starring Charles Laughton, Bela Lugosi, Richard Arlen and "The Panther Woman" (now that's showmanship). The film, which will be released for the first time on DVD, or home video of any kind, by Criterion this coming Tuesday, is one of the more alarming horror films of the pre-Code era, with its air of almost cackling sadism, as personified by Charles Laughton's superb and properly vile take on Moreau, its, at times, near-merciless violence, and also its, you know, blatant hint of bestiality. The Panther Woman -- actually Kathleen Burke -- ain't there for nothin'.

The Panther Woman would have to be the film's equivalent of Wells's puma, which is the creature Moreau is working on, and whose screams Prendick can't block out until he's moved to sort-of act. But in the novel, the puma would really rebel and vent its rage violently (the puma was a female, by the way) while the Panther Woman is more content to fall in love with Edward Parker (née Prendick, I suppose), which is exactly what Moreau wants, or he wants what that will lead to. "Perverse" maybe doesn't exactly cover it. Of course, Kathleen Burke looking the way she does calls into question how one gets there from a panther via vivisection, but one could reasonably ask the same question of the novel -- despite Wells's insistence that that stuff was based on at least theoretical fact -- and those Beasts aren't even that hot.

Island of Lost Souls is pretty gleeful about its whole way of being, or maybe "heedless" is the better word. Although this would be far from unheard of today, the way this film off-handedly dispatches of its lone source of comic relief is actually pretty shocking. It's hard to relieve comically when that's how you're treated. The film is also gorgeous, perhaps predictably so, with Karl Struss manning the camera, so that the whole thing, the island and Moreau's compound, has a King Kong-esque level of depth, the jungle in which the story unfolds possesses a genuine, leafy thickness. It's all just wonderfully brisk and weird and full, boiling Wells down and extracting the pulp, a process that Wells evidently objected to like it was vivisection or something, publicly deriding the film as coarse or vulgar or some such thing. Which it is, at least vulgar, but Montgomery occasionally railed against Prendick for not being vulgar enough, and who knows? It might have done him some good.