Do What I Like, Not What You Like

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I'm not exactly sure why this news story should break me out of my writing doldrums, but a few days ago Steve Martin was hosted by the 92nd Street Y, where he was interviewed by art critic, historian, and etc. Deborah Solomon. The place was sold out, 900 people paying $50 a pop, plus this conversation was streamed on the internet. The topic was art, and art history, both of which have been a, let's say, major league hobby of Martin's for decades now, and are also the subject of his new novel An Object of Beauty, which had been released just days prior to the 92nd Street Y gig. So that's what they talked about. You can read about the ensuing controversy more completely here, but basically what happened is the paying audience, or anyway a portion of that audience (probably an important point, actually), both in person and on-line, did not much like the fact that Steve Martin was talking about art -- not to mention his fucking novel -- and not about what it was like making The Lonely Guy, or what he thought the Festrunk brothers might be like now, in this modern world of 2010, or whatever it is they wanted for their fifty bucks. They so disliked this that they registered their unhappiness right then, as the conversation progressed, via e-mails to the 92nd Street Y, and, I'm assuming, through hissed whispers to that venue's staff.
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More alarmingly, the higher-ups in that staff agreed that this art talk must not be allowed to continue and went so far as to pass a note -- again, all while Martin and Solomon were conducting the talk they were being paid for -- to Solomon asking that she steer the conversation towards the earlier, funnier portions of Martin's career. The upshot of all this is, the evening has been written off as a debacle, to the extent that the 92nd Street Y has offered refunds to all 900 paying customers, and Solomon and Martin are left to defend themselves against charges of boringness, and of not meeting the 92nd Street Y's "standard of excellence."
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There are a lot of different ways I could begin talking about this, many of them less long-winded than the path I'm about to go down, but I find it very curious that so many people would be willing to lay down fifty dollars, not only to hear Steve Martin talk about the earliest phases of his career yet again -- he sort of wrote a whole memoir about that called Born Standing Up, which I recommend, and plus there's thirty-some years of archival interview footage that's probably just a click away -- but to pay that money even though they're evidently unaware that Steve Martin long ago changed from this person:
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...to this person:
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Now, granted, Martin himself has confused the issue by his film work, which at some point changed from the more personal stuff like Roxanne, A Simple Twist of Fate and L. A. Story, films that, whatever you might think of them, gave a pretty strong indication of where his own creative drive was taking him, to what would appear to be straight paycheck gigs like Bringing Down the House, The Pink Panther movies, and so on. But Steve Martin is not a hermit, and you don't need to be a superfan to know that his personal sense of humor has leaned, over the past several years, to the very dry (and I do not believe, by the way, that Martin, during this 92nd Street Y gig, completely stomped down on this humor in favor of some dull, professorial demeanor, but maybe I'm wrong). Not only that, but his interest in art is very well documented, and references to it stretch way back to his absurdist days (see the Winslow Homer piece in his first book Cruel Shoes). The point of all of this being that the 92nd Street Y -- who this month will be hosting an evening with the Eddie Palmieri Latin Jazz Octet, and later another one with Ian Frazier and John McPhee (who will be talking about families and rocks, I'm guessing), and even later still will evidently be the site of live broadcasts of The Rachel Maddow Show (I recommend audience members for those nights demand their refunds in advance, as a time-saving strategy), but nothing, so far as I know, on a night of comedy with Carrot Top, or any kind of evening that requires a warning that members of the audience will get wet -- hired Deborah Solomon, a woman who wrote a biography of Jackson Pollock, thinking, apparently, that she was going to ask Steve Martin if it was a lot of fun making My Blue Heaven, and then got all pissed off when she didn't.
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Oh, there are more specific things that the complainers have pointed out, such as the fact that a large chunk of the discussion was about Martin's brand new book, which nobody in the audience would have had a chance to read yet, but I guess the folks making that complaint are entirely unaware of the tradition of authors promoting their brand new books by giving live readings. There's also the question of how the evening with Solomon and Martin was marketed. Well, here's the page for it on the Y's website, and I'll admit it's a bit vague, though I feel the biography of Solomon offered at the bottom of the page offers some interesting clues.
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Regardless of all that, the real problem is this appalling desire that an artist be only what we perceive them to be, and to do what we both perceive and prefer that they do. Steve Martin talked about art; I wanted him to sing "King Tut" again. Give me my goddamn money back. Now listen, I completely understand the impulse to want an artist you've liked in the past to keep doing those things you've liked, especially if the more visible work they're currently doing doesn't seem to be as good (for the record, I haven't been interested in a Steve Martin movie since Bowfinger, and haven't really liked one since he appeared in David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner, but I find this personal, sideline work -- his novels, his banjo music -- really interesting and appealing, though I've experience not too much of it thus far). And you, and I, and everyone, has every right to wish an artist would do whatever the hell we might wish them to do. What nobody has the right to do is demand that they do it, even if we're putting our money down in the misguided hope that they'll read our minds.
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The analogy isn't perfect, but what this reminds me of (apart from that episode of The Simpsons when Homer goes to see Bachman Turner Overdrive and demands that they play "Takin' Care of Business" even though they'd just finished playing it, and then once they start it again tells them to "skip to the 'workin' overtime' part") is all the pissing and moaning from people who think that Robert De Niro has sold out. By turning up in two sequels to Meet the Parents and one sequel to Analyze This (which was no great shakes to begin with), as well as Hide and Seek and all that other stuff, I suppose, technically, he has sold out, but the attitude from some people is that De Niro has sold us out, as if by thinking he was so amazing in Taxi Driver we were somehow doing him a favor, one he's now refusing to make good on.
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Often, the line on this is that De Niro is "tarnishing his legacy." To those who say such things, let me first say "Fuck you, and until you've built up a legacy of your own, don't think you have any right to tell someone like Robert De Niro how they should go about handling theirs." After that rant, I would say that De Niro made films like Taxi Driver because he was a brilliant actor, and he wanted to make those kinds of films. Evidently, he no longer wants to do that. I don't want to get all slobbery and stupid and say that those dozen or so (or whatever, I'm not going to count them) astonishing performances De Niro gave in the first half of his career were his "gifts" to us, but I am grateful to him, as a fan, for doing that work. But I'm also not so delusional as to think he, or any other artist I like, owes me anything more, or even owed me what I've already gotten. Taxi Driver might have sucked, you know -- you buys your ticket and you takes your chances. The fact that it didn't can really be chalked up to our good luck.
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Artists don't belong to us. We have no rights in these matters. Be happy you can watch The King of Comedy whenever you want, or The Man With Two Brains or Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. Skip over what doesn't interest you, but maybe give An Object of Beauty a look, because who knows, maybe it's pretty good. Either way, don't buy a ticket for something you don't understand and then bitch about the fact that you don't understand it.

The Collection Project: The Infinite

.It would be inaccurate to claim that there's much in the way of aesthetic or philosophical overlap with Mean Streets (d. Martin Scorsese) and The Exorcist (d. William Friedkin) beyond the fact that the driving creative force behind each was raised to be pretty damn Catholic. The force behind Mean Streets is obviously Scorsese, and this film, while the most explicitly religious of his works outside of The Last Temptation of Christ, finds him struggling with his church, to the point where his alter ego, Charlie Capa (Harvey Keitel) kicks things off by saying that prayers and gospels are "just words", and that they don't mean anything to him. Meanwhile, in Friedkin's film, the force is not Friedkin -- though the man does a brilliant job -- but rather William Peter Blatty, author of the source novel and the screenplay. Blatty's the force here because it's his faith up there on screen, and he believes in the truth of Catholicism, and of the power of the words that Charlie can no longer use, enough to cover the cast and crew of both films. Where Blatty and Scorsese/Charlie might agree most strongly is in the idea expressed by Charlie at the very beginning of Mean Streets: "You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets, you do it at home." The concept of making up for your sins at home is one that, in The Exorcist, Blatty positively runs with.

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Both films came out in 1973, which is a coincidence not worth making a hell of a lot from, but this was the post-"Is God Dead?" era (which we're still in, as far as I can tell). That 1966 Time Magazine article found its definitive film just two years later, when Roman Polanski made Rosemary's Baby (from Ira Levin's 1967 novel, to which Polanski was slavishly faithful, so more credit to Levin), which is, of course, like The Exorcist, a horror film. Prior to writing The Exorcist, Blatty was primarily known as a comic novelist (John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!, Which Way to Mecca, Jack?) and screenwriter (A Shot in the Dark). The fact that this life-long practicing Catholic found the best expression not only of his sincere faith, but of his belief in mankind's essential decency, in a particularly shocking and transgressive horror story is, I'm going to say, interesting.

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But that's what The Exorcist is, however many people wish to psychoanalyze Blatty and Friedkin by claiming the film is really about man's (small "m") fear of female puberty and sexuality. By which I don't mean that Regan McNeil's (Linda Blair) age and gender were chosen by throwing darts at a board, but this reading of the film seems to not only want to treat the film's ending as meaningless or abitrary, but to pretend that Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) and Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) have no function in the story at all. The still-shocking obscenities in The Exorcist are meant to show the corruption not only of Regan's innocence, but the natural growth that her puberty is bringing forth, as well. Blatty and Friedkin don't see her pending womanhood as terrifying -- they view the unnatural exploitation of it by the demon as terrifying.

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And, in any case, those obscenities are not, finally, the point. The point -- if you want to boil the film down this small -- is the religious words and rituals that Charlie Capa in Mean Streets no longer finds meaningful. Because in The Exorcist they sure as shit have meaning, and it's Father Karras's realization of this, and the drive to perform the ultimate good that results in this realization, that is the point. (It's worth noting, by the way, that it was a fear of Blatty's intentions being misread that led him to construct the new edit of The Exorcist that hit theaters about ten years ago, a decision which, while I'm sympathetic to Blatty's motives, has to count as one of the worst director's cuts (well, producer and writer's cut, in this case) of a great film I've ever encountered.)

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Sacrifice at the level practiced by Karras at the end of The Exorcist is not something that Charlie Capa has in him. He doesn't even have it within him to go as far as the details of his story might require of him (as a Catholic, at least), which is a good deal less than is asked of Karras. As Christ figures go, Charlie is an interesting one. He doesn't even manage to die, for one thing, but he also is one of the few who actually, almost, sort of literally fancies himself as a Christ figure, or at least a Francis of Assisi figure. His problem, or one of them, is that the Church holds no power for him anymore. He can say the words, he can hear them, he can understand what they mean, and he can even wish they held the power for him they once did, but he knows how little impact they have in day-to-day life. If he doesn't have the backbone to be Karras, he also doesn't have a demon like Pazuzu up in his face, removing all doubt and ambiguity.

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Where Karras had a possessed girl named Regan to protect, Charlie has Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) and Teresa (Amy Robinson). Johnny and Teresa are cousins; Johnny is Charlie's best friend, and Teresa is Charlie's lover. Charlie and Johnny are both low-level gangsters, and Johnny owes three thousand dollars to...oh, let's just go ahead and call them money lenders. Johnny never pays up, and his arrogant, reckless attitude about his situation taints Charlie by association, but Charlie still believes it's his role -- specifically as a Catholic -- to protect him. It's also his duty to protect Teresa, who has not only also been tainted by her connection to Johnny, but is sneered at throughout the neighborhood because she's epileptic. Though she hardly fits the literal definition, Teresa would represent the "lame" of the Bible that Jesus cared for. As for Johnny, I don't know off-hand what term the authors of the Bible used in place of "stupid asshole", but I'm sure there's something in there for him, too.

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The problem is, for all his big talk ("I'm doing my best, Lord"), Charlie isn't actually willing to do that much for these people. He's cagey about his relationship with Teresa, and doesn't defend her when his uncle runs her down. And speaking of which, Johnny frequently points out to Charlie that if he'd just speak to that same uncle, who has the power to quash Johnny's debt, all this would be over. But because Charlie is working to open his own restaurant with his uncle's help, and because his uncle despises Johnny, Charlie won't do it.

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Charlie does small things. He gives Johnny a few bucks to put towards his debt, or -- for the common good this time -- apologizes to a cleaning woman Teresa has just been rude to. Beyond that, though, he has very little to offer. Sacrifice is beyond him. True suffering for the betterment of anybody is something he cannot bring upon himself. How many of us can? But it's still interesting to see Charlie testing his ability to deal with Hellfire -- which he does view as a potential fate -- by sticking his fingers over open flames, only to pull them back immediately, and then watch Father Karras hurl himself through a window, his shattered body tumbling to a rest on M Street. Charlie believes, or at least hopes, he can be a better person, one who walks in Christ's footsteps, but he never really tries very hard. Since the words in church lost their power, it became easier for him to ignore the little evils around him, like Michael (Richard Romanus), the friend to whom Johnny owes his money, or even the little evils of a guy like Johnny himself. Karras had a big evil to face and snap him around, but Charlie could have gotten there, too, in his own way, if he'd only looked a little closer, and tried a little harder.

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The Collection Project: From Here On In, I Rag Nobody

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There are moments in Bang the Drum Slowly (d. John D. Hancock) that, frankly, I don't even like to think about. Structured around a fictional professional baseball team's season, the film features Michael Moriarty as Henry Wiggen, the pitcher, and a young, then-unknown Robert De Niro as Bruce Pearson, the team's clumsy, friendly, hayseed catcher who, early on, is diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease.

What's so affecting about Mark Harris's story (he wrote the script, as well as the source novel) is that it doesn't play as a "disease" movie, because for most of it's run-time, only a few people know of Pearson's condition, and, due to the fact that he is both clumsy and a hayseed, the catcher is ridiculed by many of the other players, and kept outside any cluster of friends within the team. Wiggen, as the team captain, does know what Pearson is going through, but can only shield and protect him so much.

At one point, the team is in the locker room, and Piney Woods (Tom Ligon) whips out his guitar and begins singing "Streets of Laredo", which, if you don't know the song, is about a dying cowboy, and includes these lyrics:

Oh, bang the drum slowly, and play the fife lowly
And play the dead march as you carry me along
Take me to the green valley and lay the earth o'er me
For I'm a poor cowboy and I know I've done wrong



At this point, it's become impossible to hide Pearson's illness from the rest of the team, and some of the players, including Wiggen, try to get Woods to stop, without indicating to Pearson why ("Try a different song" "Yeah, I don't like that song" "It's a cornball song!") without making him think more about the lyrics than he's going to anyway. Woods doesn't get it ("Why don't you join in a little, like they do, you know?") nor do some of the other players ("It sounds good!"). Alternately, the camera pushes in on Woods, and on Pearson, who De Niro plays, at this moment, as embarrassed more than anything else. He knows that, as the song lilts by, everybody is thinking about him, and his fate, and he'd rather everybody just act like a baseball team.

But the moment that absolutely destroys me is in the final game in the film, which the team is winning. They need one out, and Wiggen throws a pitch that results in a pop-up between homeplate and the pitcher's mound. Pearson rises, but loses the ball, and turns around in confusion, and exhaustion, while another player (Danny Aiello) swoops in to pick the ball out of the air. This sequence, shot in elegiac slow motion by Hancock, ends with the team celebrating, oblivious to Pearson -- who, since learning he's sick, they've collectively taken under their wing -- still standing there, a bit lost. Except for Wiggen and Coach Jaros (Phil Foster), who push through their teammates to pick up Pearson's helmet and glove -- marching together, and bending down almost as one -- and pat Pearson's back and bring him back into the fold.

I've tried several time to describe why I think this moment is among the most beautiful and heartbreaking I've ever seen, but I'm finding it very difficult to do so without making it sound like a cornball song. Just watch the film.

Bang the Drum Slowly was released in 1973; a few months later it was followed by Mean Streets, and De Niro blew up. Michael Moriarty's career would travel several strange paths before an apparent flame-out. Twenty-seven years ago, they co-starred in one of the great sports films of all time, one I can't watch without crumbling. And the film ends with a line I've tried to use as a guide for my behavior, though I imagine, ultimately, I've been no more successful than your average guy. Those words form the title of this post: "From here on in, I rag nobody." If ever there were words you could live by, that's them.

The Chicago Way

In 1987, I was metaphorically kicked in the ass by Brian De Palma's film The Untouchables. I don't think any other film had affected me quite in the same way, at least not then. I would have been 11 or 12 when the film came out. I remember being awestruck months previously by the trailer (I specifically remember being jazzed by the shot of what would turn out to be Frank Nitti, played by Billy Drago, being launched off the roof), and though I don't remember specifically, I'm betting I saw the film on opening day, or at least opening weekend.
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I knew the film was about Al Capone and his downfall, brought about by intrepid Treasury officer Eliot Ness. My dad having been an FBI agent, I was already fascinated by stories of gangsters and G-Men (or T-Men, in this case). Being a dumbass kid, I was resistent to old movies, but this one would cater to my interests while being in color and rated R! So I got to see the film with assorted brothers and parents, and The Untouchables instantly became, and remained for some time, My Favorite Movie Ever. I was so absorbed by this story of good cops fighting corruption in their own ranks and massively powerful gangsters that on subsequent viewings (on VHS, rented from Errol's, until I was able to get my own copy) that I found myself really paying attention to the credits. Not just the big name actors (Robert De Niro and Sean Connery), or Kevin Costner (who wasn't a big name at the time, but he was the star, after all) but also Andy Garcia, Charles Martin Smith, Drago, Jack Kehoe and Patricia Clarkson. And not just them, but Brian De Palma, the director. And David Mamet, the writer. And Ennio Morricone, the composer (the only other composer I really knew back then would have been John Williams). And Patrizia von Brandenstein, the costume designer. There was an Untouchables magazine published to coincide with the film's release -- one of those one-issue magazines that is all about one film, and which were pretty common in the 1980s, but which I don't think really exist anymore -- and after I'd read the shit out of it, I cut it to shreds and plastered my room with the cut-out pictures.
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All of this because I'd never experienced anything like De Palma's film. It was so big and soaring, it gave me every little thing I asked of it (except boobs, which I'm sure I was holding out hope for, despite the essential absence of any women in the film -- how ironic that De Palma, of all people, couldn't see his way to granting me that one last wish). The violence was brutal, the blood strangely purple, and the dialogue was tough, idiosyncratic and completely wonderful.
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But why should I, though?

Did he sound anything like that!?

He pulls a knife? You pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That's the Chicago Way, and that's how you get Capone.

You got 'im?
Yeah, I got 'im.

Somebody steals from me, I'm gonna say you stole. Not talk to him for spitting on the sidewalk.

What the hell. You gotta die of somethin'.

And so on. Speaking of dying of something, I cried hard when I first saw this movie. When Oscar (Charles Martin Smith) dies, and Morricone's beautifully sad piece (on the whole, I'd say this score is one of Morricone's most underrated -- it's really amazing) begins as the camera pans across the elevator to reveal that Nitti has written the word "Touchable" in Oscar's blood, I broke down. Yeah, and so what of it? Similarly, when Malone (Sean Connery) chases the goon out of his apartment, only to find himself staring down the barrel of Nitti's Tommy gun, everything inside me deflated, because I knew there was no way out for him at that point, and there wasn't, because Nitti hit the trigger and tore poor Jimmy Malone to pieces. But that son of a bitch Nitti got his, when Ness snapped and chucked his miserable ass off the roof of the courthouse.
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(As an aside, when Sean Connery won the Oscar for his portrayal of Jimmy Malone, a lot of people chalked it up as a career award for an old guy who might not get another shot with the Academy. All of which might well be true, but it also ignores the fact that Connery is really damn good in the film.)

The film made me giddy. My pre-teen self was as exhilerated by The Untouchables as my current self was by Inglourious Basterds, and for many of the same reasons (given the influence De Palma has had on Tarantino, this probably isn't surprising). The Untouchables cut right to the heart of what I wanted to see in a film about Eliot Ness and Al Capone, and it did so without ever having to ask me. I wanted the good guys to get the crap beat out of them, because their job was near impossible, but then to rise up and defeat evil -- not just defeat it, but humble it, and do both completely and without ambiguity. When I first saw the film, I had no idea how accurate the film was to the history of Ness and Capone, and while I would go on to find out (partly by reading Ness's book, also called The Untouchables, and also not entirely true) that the answer was "Almost entirely inaccurate", I wasn't bothered by that, because I must have sensed, without having the words to articulate it, that the history didn't matter so much in this film. What mattered was the myth, and whether or not that myth was well told.

Then, as often happens, the years went by, and I cooled on The Untouchables a little bit. I read a piece by David Mamet -- who would go on from The Untouchables to become one of my favorite writers, and congratulations to him for that! -- in which he said that he was told by Art Linson and De Palma that certain changes would have to be made to his script, and that if he refused to make them, they would be made without him, and the job would be done poorly. This implies that Mamet did make the changes, but he doesn't say what those changes were. If I had to guess, I'd say that one of them was the laughable scene near the end, where the corrupt judge presiding over Capone's case tells the bailiff to switch juries with another case down the hall. That's taking the myth a little bit too far, I think, and really hurts the film. It's one of the big, crowd-pleasing scenes, and to any half-intelligent adult it plays as utterly phony. It also plays, now, to someone who has read a bit on the making of the film, as a quick fix. I feel like at some point the courtroom scene had some other climactic moment, something that De Palma didn't believe lived up to the high drama of the rest of the film, and he needed something big, and he needed it fast. De Palma wanted to play the myth to the absolute hilt, and for great stretches he pulls it off, but not here.
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The main reason I've cooled a bit on The Untouchables, however, is that I've simply seen a whole lot more films now. I have a better handle on what I think is great, and what I think is good, and what I think is trash. And I've even seen De Palma beaten at his own game with Inglourious Basterds. I just have too much experience with the vast world of movies (though still not nearly enough) to think that The Untouchables is the masterpiece I thought it was 22 years ago. There was also a period where, outside of this film, I'd decided that I really disliked De Palma. But the experience and knowledge I've gained has shown me that De Palma is actually a weird kind of genius -- his films are inconsistent, frustrating, sometimes out-right terrible, but he's still a genius of a particular sort. The drive to gain that experience was spurred in me by The Untouchables. I've seen a lot of movies since then, and struggled with De Palma the whole way. It's sort of strange to think that he, to a degree I wouldn't have considered even a year ago, is largely responsible for the movie fan I am now.
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This has been part of the Brian De Palma Blog-a-thon, hosted by Tony Dayoub at Cinema Viewfinder.