Everybody Dies

Of all of Donald E. Westlake's fiction, Levine feels like a bit of a lost book. This is maybe not surprising when you consider that it is, essentially, a series of six long short stories (or "novelettes", which is a term that I don't think anyone really uses anymore, but which Westlake uses to describe these stories in his very interesting introduction to the book) about a Brooklyn plainclothes detective named Abraham Levine. So it's not quite a novel, and not "just" a collection of stories, making it harder, I imagine, for some people to latch onto and categorize. But it's pretty terrific stuff. Abraham Levine is in his 50s, and has a bad heart. He's also terrified that his heart will give out before it should, and this effects his relationship to life and death, particularly the brand of death he encounters on his job. What particularly infuriates him is when he sees anyone treat life as something frivolous, whether the life in question is someone else's, or their own. Life is something Levine is sure he's soon to be without, and the idea that anybody can take such a gift lightly is horrifying to him.

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Five of the six stories were written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and each one deals with a different kind of crime, and a different kind of death -- suicide, murder, Levine's killing of a suspect, and so on. In each one, Levine's heart seems to be getting worse -- he discovers a way to block his hearing and listen directly to his heartbeat, and since that heartbeat is already irregular, he focuses on the number of beats he can hear before it skips one, and he dreads the moment when it will skip two, because that means lights out.

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In his introduction, Westlake talks about his relationship to these unusual group of stories, and to the character, and how those stories changed over the years. The fifth story, "The Death of a Bum", is probably the most interesting of the bunch, in that it focuses on an aspect of police work that almost never gets dramatized, because nobody ever thinks there's any drama in it. Westlake knew better, though he also knew it would never sell to any of the normal mystery magazines (because it's not a mystery), so while he could write it free of any thought of markets or audiences, it also took three years to finally place it. By that time, he felt he'd lost momentum with the Levine stories.

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However, in the 1980s, Westlake was approached by Otto Penzler about putting together a book of the Levine stories, but was told he needed to write one more, which he did. "After I'm Gone" was written in 1984, and it's the best written piece in the book -- obviously, by that time Westlake had matured as an artist quite a bit, but he was also the same age as Levine. The first five stories were written by a guy in his 20s about a guy in his 50s, but in "After I'm Gone", Westlake and Levine were contemporaries. As a story, "After I'm Gone" loses something to "The Death of a Bum", and, in fact, each of the five early stories has, as stories, a more unique kick to their plots than "After I'm Gone" (although "The Sound of Murder" is a bit much, tipping over almost into Gothic territory, and isn't quite in keeping with the every-day realism of the rest of the book). But the last story has a brilliant final page, sad and sardonic and moving in the most off-hand kind of way. After reading about the death-obsessed Abraham Levine for 150 pages before reaching this final piece, it's not hard to guess what the last page is about, but Westlake makes it hurt anyway.

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This may sound like faint praise, but reading Levine made me feel like I was watching episodes of an old cop show from the 50s, a particularly ambitious and original one that, due to its somber and unique take on cop dramas, only got six episodes before it got yanked. And it's a show everybody kind of remembers, and which sometimes still gets shown on TV, and which everybody wishes had gotten a longer run.

Good Eggs

It has been a relaxing weekend, and it is almost over. This saddens me. I may sill try to cram in a viewing of The Devil's Rain, but pretty much my hefty chunk of weekend downtime is at an end. Bummed though I am, I can't help but think of Levine, a book by Donald E. Westlake that I spent a fair amount of the aforementioned weekend reading, which features, at the end, a Medical Examiner responding to a cop's statement that "[t]he wrong ones die" with this
observation: "Everybody dies...It's a thing I've noticed."

All of which is to say that things sure could be worse. And along with that fact is the feeling, possibly inaccurate, that I've done a fair bit of writing on this blog lately, and so I don't feel terribly compelled to write anything of substance right now, as I didn't, you may have noticed, yesterday or the day before. But I'm cool with that, and I'm not usually. The difference today is that, unlike previous fallow periods, I feel pretty confident that the compulsion will return very shortly, like in say a day or two.

In the meantime, I'm going to take a page from Glenn Kenny's book and post a picture of a meal I ate today, one my wife cooked and which we both thoroughly enjoyed. It's called "egg and bacon pizza", or something like that, but there's not much "pizza" going on here -- all it is, is somebody's brand new way to make eggs even better to eat. As if such a thing were possible! But it was good, as you can probably imagine, looking at that picture, and now I think that The Devil's Rain sounds like a capital idea. Hope everyone had a good weekend, and I will talk to you in a couple of days.

What I'm Reading Right Now #1

[Click for bigness]

He watched through the glass jalousies as she walked down to the dock, spread the blanket out, sat on it and began to carefully anoint her white legs and arms and shoulders and midriff. She stretched out in the glare of the afternoon sun, quiet as a corpse. The fish jumped. Wind ruffled the bay water. Harry made another drink. He felt restless. He tried to take a nap. He gave up and went down onto the dock. He took the aqua shirt off and sat near her in the sunshine. Maybe she was right about getting a tan. His skin was dead white. His ribs showed. There was a small mat of black hair on his chest. He sat hugging his knees. His shoulder blades stuck out in an angular way. There were two deep dimples on the back of his left shoulder, the scars of bullet wounds.

Cap-Syool Reviews!! Enjoy Them Now!

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Here are some for you to read! Will you!?

Dragonwyck (d. Joseph L. Mankiewicz) - This is one of Vincent Price's very early Gothic thriller/melodrama roles (it's also the first film by Mankiewicz). The story is basically that a young woman (Gene Tierney) is overwhelmed by the wealth and smoothness of distant relative and wealthy landowner, Nicholas Van Ryn (Price). Then when she marries him, she finds out he's a crazy asshole. Price is wonderful, as always, and his final breakdown is terrific -- nobody did sweaty, arrogant psychic disintegration quite like Price -- but Mankiewicz seemed a bit too concerned with making his film important -- laying on the plight-of-the-worker stuff a bit too heavy -- and therefore, in his mind (I'm wildly speculating) better than your standard genre film, and the result is that the film sags. There's a terrific efficiency to the best genre films, especially from this era (the film was made in 1946), so that when a film like Dragonwyck makes a transparent attempt to rise above them, it's hard not to see why those other films are so very good.
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Summer Hours (d. Olivier Assayas) - This beautiful and beautifully acted French film, about a wealthy French family, whose matriarch passes away in an early scene, struggling to deal with her estate (consisting mainly of a gorgeous country home, and a sprawling collection of artwork), is not actually about family strife so much as it is about losing your past, and how much more meaningful art can be to the individual than it ever will be as art. Charles Berling, as the eldest son Frederic, gets the top marks, but as I said, everyone is superb. And for a movie with such a small, intimate story, there's an incredible pace to it, of the kind that would utterly confuse your run-of-the-mill contemporary thriller filmmaker. Carried along, no doubt, by those performances. Top shelf.

Johnny Guitar (d. Nicholas Ray) - A quite strange Western from the 1950s, featuring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge as the White Hat and the Black Hat, respectively. A lot has been made of this gender twist on the traditional Western, but the film itself doesn't hammer on any particular point: this is just the story, and these are just the characters. Mind you, its tone is less that of a Western than it is a melodrama, or "women's picture", of the kind that Douglas Sirk made at his most bombastic (which shouldn't be taken as a criticism of Sirk). But if it works, it works, so why complain about bombast, if that's the goal, and the goal is struck dead center? Besides which, any film that features Sterling Hayden and Ernest Borgnine can't be that bad. The fact that Hayden plays the title character who is also the Mysterious Stranger shouldn't confuse one into thinking that Joan Crawford isn't, in fact, the star (she's great, too, as is McCambridge). So what it is, in fact, is a genre mash-up; while that idea tends to yield horror-comedies, or horror-Westerns, or horror-SF, here we have Western-melodrama, which is actually a hybrid with a long history. All of which I suppose to say that I'm a bit curious why so many people think Johnny Guitar is so bizarre.

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Extract (d. Mike Judge) - Each of Mike Judge's live-action films (I'm excluding Beavis and Butthed Do America, because I remember that being a bit of a sensation at the time) has taken its own sweet time finding an audience. Office Space and Idiocracy were both dumped by their studios, and each has gained cult audiences of varying degrees of healthiness. His newest film, Extract, actually got a legitimate theatrical release, and still nobody went. Nobody who did go seemed overly taken with it, and my expectations were therefore low. But I really enjoyed it, as it turns out. It's not as near-perfect as Office Space, or as occasionally riotous as Idiocracy, but unlike that latter film it also doesn't run out of steam in the last third. It's consistently genial and entertaining, bolstered by a terrific cast of outstanding deadpan comic performers -- Jason Bateman, J. K. Simmons, Kristen Wiig, Ben Affleck, and the inhumanly attractive Mila Kunis, to name a few. Mike Judge knows ordinary people, and he knows what's so funny about them.

The Children (d. Tommy Shankland) - This horror film was primarily striking to me because it plunks a family down as the only possible victims, and then begins killing them. It's quite a bit more complicated, as well as better, than that sounds, but it's still the aspect of the film that stands out most strongly for me. The gist is, over Christmas an extended family gets together to celebrate, but one of the children has contracted some sort of virus, which only seems to be spread through the other children nearby, and which turns them into blank-eyed killers. This is brutal stuff, especially when the adults start fighting back, which you do sort of hope they'll do, but for God's sake look what they're doing! It's that sort of film, with, it would seem, some deeper implications having to do with abortion, but which I haven't quite parsed, and which may not be totally parse-able.

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Dead Snow (d. Tommy Wirkola) - This movie was fun enough, I suppose, but if you're going to make a movie that spoofs other zombie movies, don't get around to the spoofing eventually. Don't play it reasonably straight for half the movie, possibly longer, and then go all zany and madcap all of a sudden. I'd prefer a movie about zombie Nazis in the snow to be played as straight as possible, myself, but if I can't have that I'd at least like a filmmaker who can commit to a tone.

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You know, I think I want to withdraw that "fun enough" comment. It is, in a way, but it's also sort of incompetent, and cheap, and thinly imagined. I'd forgive it a bit more if it had ended with the stirring scene of zombie butchery cut to a Finnish folk spiritual song, but they didn't stop there, and all my goodwill drained off.

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Gamer (d. Neveldine/Taylor) - Well, it's happened. We now live in a world where you can watch a new film and not see the influence of Hitchcock, or Ford, or Welles, or Chaplin, but rather of Tony Scott. And not the Tony Scott of Crimson Tide, but the guy who made Domino and slapped those motherfucking English subtitles of lines already spoken in English by American actors all over Man on Fire. And all in service of what? A remake of The Running Man. And it's worse than the original.

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Take me, Lord. I'm ready. I cannot breathe air with the same people who allowed Gamer to be made. With the two unconscionable bastards who made it, and who joined their last names with a meaningless backslash, Face/Off style, creating in my mind the Hellish image of a bi-headed, quadri-limbed Nether-God, who would thunder its heavy legs across the planet, leaving blasted cities and fallow land in its wake as it tossed back its slavering heads and shrieked its murderous laughter into the cosmos. Such a world is more than my feeble mind can accredit.

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Day 37

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I awake in the middle of the night. A ghastly storm is assaulting my home, throwing back my shuttered windows, the latches all tinfoil and twine to these blustery and soaking hands! The window....the window is open, and inviting.

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Day 38

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The television flickers on, unbidden by my hand or mind. Gamer is on. Michael C. Hall is dancing to "I've Got You Under My Skin" while his henchmen, in time to the music, prepare to attack Gerard Butler.

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The open, flapping window is streaked with the chilled rains. As flaps the window, so flaps the pages of Al-Hazred's Necronomicon. A book I had destroyed. I know I did. I set it alight and flung its blazing, ashy pages into the sea's gaping throat!! How can it be here now!? And now that kid who plays Butler's controller is on the screen again...as through the window I hear the bleating of the dread Neveldine/Taylor rolling over the distant hills...

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The window! The window!!

A Post-Script Regarding Predictability

>There is an element of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island that I barely touched on in my review, but which I believe needs to be briefly addressed at (slightly) greater length: the ending. I'm going to assiduously avoid spoilers in this post, but I would like to invite anyone who knows the film, or Dennis Lehane's novel, to let 'er rip in the comments, should they so desire, so anyone unfamiliar with either version of the story should be warned that the comments section here could turn into a hotbed of storytelling ruination. A hotbed, I tell you.

The truth is that I believe many people will outright hate the ending. And the further truth, as I implied in my review, is that when reading the novel, I was quite disappointed at the conclusion. I thought, in a sense, that I'd been jerked around. But the film has me reconsidering my harsh judgment of said ending, and most of this is due to the fact that Scorsese foregrounds an aspect of the story in a way that, to people who know nothing about where the story's heading, will make the ending predictable, even a foregone conclusion...intentionally so, perhaps. Okay, I have no way of knowing quite how predictable the film's climax -- the solution to the mystery -- will be to people who don't know the novel. However, it seemed to me that, experiencing the ending as the final moments of a, I believe, masterfully constructed film, the ending, specifically the solution to a complex mystery, has been backgrounded a bit. It's pretty much the exact same ending as the novel (with one interesting jolt to it), but it didn't seem like Scorsese cared about it functioning as a "twist". I think he'd be perfectly happy if everyone predicted what was coming early on, and just wanted to see how the story and visuals built to it. Scorsese has said in the past that while he loves well-plotted films, as a moviegoer, as a director he doesn't have much sense on how to make them. I think he sells himself short a bit in that sense, but clearly his primary interest lies elsewhere. And I think it's hard to argue that his interest lay elsewhere when putting Shutter Island together -- every frame of the film practically shrieks that fact.

All of which, I acknowledge, sounds very much like an attempt to make excuses for what could be regarded as a big flaw in the film. But I wonder, if you do not pick up on Scorsese's clues -- which I think are quite blatant -- and find yourself as bugged by Scorsese's Shutter Island as I was when I first read Lehane's novel, what your reaction would be when and if you revisit the film at a later date. If, in other words, you go in experiencing the film as work of visual art, and not as an unfolding narrative. And by the way, I'm all about experiencing films as an unfolding narrative -- it's one of the main reasons I watch them -- but I also know full well what a given film's greater power can be in the long run. If narrative was all films were about, then very few films would have any rewatch value, and we all know that an overwhelming number of them do. So what I'm arguing for here is Shutter Island's rewatch value, something even I can't gauge, and I loved it the first time around.

But those of you who've seen it, ignorant of where it was heading...how did the ending strike you? Did you think, as I do, that Scorsese was relentlessly and deliberately signalling his intentions almost from the start, so that the ending was not quite the left turn that other takes on the story might have been, but entirely of a piece with the intense imagery that preceded it?

Traum

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In David Edelstein's negative review of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, he takes a second to place at least a little bit of the blame on Dennis Lehane's source novel. "Dennis Lehane's novel," he writes "...is a doodle, a Paul Auster Lite breather between his tortured Mystic River and the panoramic The Given Day." What Paul Auster has to do with what's in that book, I don't know, but I will agree with Edelstein on a couple of things about Lehane's work, neither of which are stated outright, but which can be inferred: that Mystic River is a masterpiece, and that Shutter Island isn't as good (I haven't read The Given Day yet). What I absolutely do not agree with Edelstein about is the idea that Shutter Island was, for Lehane, a lark, some inconsequential dash-off that he needed to get out of the way before he settled down to something that mattered. I don't know how you can read that book and not feel to your bones the deep sense of loss, the spiritual tearing that comes with grief, on every page. Where I turned ambivalent to Lehane's novel was the climax, when the hugely entertaining post-World War II Gothic-detective maze reaches its destination, and I was forced to incredulously ask "That's what this was about?"

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Yes, that's what it was about, and while I still am not sure the ending is as strong as it could be, either on the page or on the screen, or that there maybe wasn't some other way entirely to do it, Martin Scorsese's film version (written by Laeta Kalogridis, and co-produced by Lehane) makes me feel a little bit like a chump for being so unsure about Lehane's motivation. Before I get into why, I should probably confess something. You see, I think Martin Scorsese -- or "MartSco", as he'd probably insist I call him, should we ever meet -- is a good filmmaker. I enjoy his films very much, and have done so for many, many years. Wait, don't leave! I understand that a past and -- worse, and therefore more importantly -- consistent appreciation of Scorsese's work renders any opinion I have of whatever movie he has out right now null and void (provided that opinion is a positive one), and that the only people who can be trusted to give an honest and clear-headed assessment of MartSco's current work are those who haven't liked any of his movies from the past decade (or so I've recently learned), but please, let me at least finish. These water buckets are heavy.

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It's hard to know where to begin talking about Scorsese's Shutter Island. It might do to quote Edelstein again, who laments that the film is "suffocatingly movieish", which is a hell of a thing to complain about. When Edelstein reads Nabokov's fiction, does he complain that it's "too novelly"? If I take him to mean that the film is too bold in its style, then I would ask what, exactly, he was expecting? After all, Shutter Island is about two U.S. Marshals -- Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) -- who, in 1954, are sent out to the titular island, on which can be found Ashcliff Hospital, an institute for the criminally insane, from which has escaped a patient named Rachel Solando, who is, we are told, a very dangerous woman. Daniels is a pretty beat-up looking wreck when we first meet him, and he's also a war hero who helped liberate Dachau, an ex-drinker, and a widower -- his wife died a couple years back, in a fire ("She died of smoke inhalation," Daniels tells Chuck. "Not the fire. That's very important."). So this island, and this asylum, is packed with mentally deranged killers, and, as the film opens, the hospital staff and the prison guards (for Ashcliff is that, too, in a sense) are a bit concerned about the massive stormfront heading their way. So, 1950s, island, mental asylum, deranged killers, hurricane...all well and good, but please, could you tone it down a bit!?

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The gist of all this being that I think Shutter Island is beautiful, the most visually arresting film Scorsese has made since Gangs of New York, and the most stylistically consistent, and the most justified and organic in its specific bold choices, since at least Casino, and probably as far back as Goodfellas. With this film, I got the feeling that Scorsese was scratching a particularly nagging itch, one he hadn't quite reached the last time he tried for it, with his, I believe, badly misjudged remake of J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear. As Teddy Daniels goes deeper into the case, he begins to have some fairly awful flashbacks, and even worse nightmares, about his past traumas in the war, and dealing with the death of his wife. The nightmare sequences, in particular, are gloriously horrible, rich and varied in their imagery, and like all good nightmares, more terrible before we know what they mean than after.

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These scenes -- the whole film, really -- are nightmare-as-opera, Gothic horror treated seriously, not as a way to get a few kicks. Scorsese is pulling from a very deep cinematic well for his inspiration here: Kubrick, film noir, Val Lewton, Ingmar Bergman (the very welcome presence of Max von Sydow in the film, as one of the hospital's senior doctors, wasn't the only thing about Shutter Island that made me think of Hour of the Wolf). So it's this self-consciousness, and not just what Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson make the camera do, that is probably what Edelstein means when he talks about the movie being "movieish", but so what? Remember how last year everybody was saying that Inglourious Basterds was really, at its heart, all about movies? And how that was so great and everything? Well, so is Shutter Island. In this film, characters say things, important things, while staring off into the middle distance, like characters in a 1940s melodrama. And watch Mark Ruffalo in the background of an early scene set at the home of Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley); DiCaprio, Kingsley and Von Sydow have pretty much all the lines, but when Ruffalo does interject, he has the jittery bits of business and sweep-the-room eyes of a film noir character actor.

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The puzzled look on your face tells me that I'm doing a bad job of describing this -- well, it is difficult to put into words, but the point is that while Scorsese may be wearing his cinematic influences on his sleeve here, and he wants you to notice (though it's plenty okay if you don't), his motives are pure: this is the best way to tell this story, to build this mood, and to oppress you with an atmosphere of violence, mourning, madness, and soul-destroying guilt.

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All of which is just more "water-balloon throwing to Marty", or whatever it is people who enjoyed this film are supposed to be doing. If you clicked on any of those links I provided earlier, you'll probably have seen people making reference to the dishonesty inherent in anything positive said about the film, and Scorsese in general, and you'll have seen Glenn Kenny -- who was quite keen on the movie -- wonder if possibly some of his goodwill towards it has to do with his state of mind at the time he saw it. Well, let me offer my own bit of justification for feeling the way I do about Shutter Island: this is the kind of shit I like! I love film noir, I love Gothic horror, stories about storms and the criminally insane, and their possibly evil doctors. And I love it best when it's taken seriously.

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I've often wished that I'd never seen The Shining, so that I could still look forward to seeing it for the first time. The very idea that an artist of Kubrick's stature made a straight-ahead horror film on such a grand and chilling scale is something I will always be grateful for. Shutter Island, for reasons that might finally amount to nitpickery, is not quite horror, not literally, but in its wonderfully suffocating moviesh-ness, it recognizes two things very specific to the genre, and even portrays both: that all supernatural horror is a metaphor: for death, our fear of it, of the unknown and our fear of that; and that the truth behind the metaphor is quite often worse than we ever imagined.

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Our Boys Need and Deserve Books

The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, edited by Donald A. Wollheim, pub lished by Pocket Books, 1943

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I have a scanner now. So I hope you all like book covers and shit.