Here is another case of a tough director making a sappy movie strung together with the faulty flashback device. Worse, it's a case of a screenwriter taking a perfectly poignant short story that meditates on existential truths and inflating it to the point of bursting with all varieties of Hollywood/fairy tale (for aren't they the same?) nonsense, star-crossed lovers in particular.
The most serious flaw with Benjamin Button is the structure: in an attempt to tell the life story of a man born old, who grows younger until he quietly passes away as a baby in swaddling clothes at the age of 80, the screenwriter resorts to the favored technique of the magical-real epic: the reading of the hero's story by a tangentially-related character (in this case Button's daughter, now a woman in her 40s, a smoker eating jell-o snack cups in a hospital room as she watches her mother's wheezing death while Hurricane Katrina roils outside the windows). As I've explained before, this structure creates a "dunking" effect, in which the audience is plunged repeatedly into the waters of the story only to be pulled out, sputtering, back to the "present," the "real," the hospital room. We do not enjoy the sensation.
Worse, each dunk serves as an instant fast-forward to another "chapter"—for Benjamin, another age, for the world around him, another society—so that director Fincher invests his energy in creating 5-15 minute lifestyle montages, rather than ever probing his characters for depth. Epic, and its sweeping grandiosity, is almost mocked, since Fincher gives us the encapsulated versions of five big-budget Hollywood films in one: the antebellum Southern black caretaker drama, the salty sea-faring adventure, the WWII tragedy, the 1960s love-in (complete with escape by motorcycle), and the Indian self-discovery adventure (and there are probably a few more I'm not presently recollecting).
After 159 very long minutes, what we have is less a sense of Button, his ageless love for recurring partner Daisy, or any deeper understanding of the human condition, so much as a demonstration of the kind of filmic scenography a big budget can buy, or (less sympathetically) a parade of the cliches on which writers rely when innovation is outside of their means. If this movie is successful, it will definitively confirm my fear that the average moviegoer desperately wants these cliches, is as comforted by them as the manual laborer by his Bud, and the sorority girl by her boyfriend's diamond: when their expectations are not subverted, nor exceeded, but simply met.
Had, say, Charlie Kaufman written this screenplay, we could rest assured that Daisy's name would have remained Hildegarde, and that Benjamin, as he grew young, would grow as dissatisfied with her as Fitzgerald suggests. For the essence of Fitzgerald's story is that everything in life—intelligence, success, power, beauty, pride, love—is fleeting, whether one ages backward or forward. This film, flirting with literary sacrilege, threatens precisely the opposite, that the soul and its bind to another are timeless, a dangerous fairy-tale indeed.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Friday, December 12, 2008
Books: As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
Though this book had a few magical passages, I’m still waiting for the Faulkner bug to bite. Nothing in his oeuvre, thus far, has compared to the sensation of reading his novella The Bear, which I did in high school; since then, I’ve started but not finished The Sound and the Fury, fought through Light in August and Sanctuary, and now finished As I Lay Dying without holding onto anything more than a tone, a dusty hopelessness, a repressed sorrow.
Here, we have a poor Southern family, whose matriarch has died. Her husband is intent on bringing her body back to her family’s home to bury it there, perhaps because he had promised to do it, perhaps because he doesn’t want to pay for the plot to do it locally. There are five children—the pragmatic Cash, a carpenter who builds her coffin himself, outside her window while she’s dying, the child Vardaman, who continually insists “my mother is a fish,” the hot-headed Jewel, who works nights to earn enough money to buy himself a horse and consequently can’t stay awake days to work his own family’s farm, the “curious” Darl, who eventually ends up in a home for the insane, though he seems the most sane of them all, and the girl, Dewey Dell, who finds herself with a pregnancy to be rid of. The five of them, with their father Anse, take to the road with their mother Addie in her coffin on a wagon, traveling day after day toward her hometown. A storm has ruined all the bridges, and the body begins to stink, bringing vultures. Still, Anse refuses to bury her anywhere but her home. All the townspeople they encounter shake their heads, try to talk sense into Anse, but he won’t listen, nor will he eat, nor will he sleep. The family refuses to “be beholden” to anyone, and refuse any greater hospitality than a barn to sleep in.
It’s while sleeping in a barn, when Addie’s been dead eight days, that Darl tries to burn the barn down, to end the mad journey. Instead, Jewel saves the coffin from the flames, and the family presses on—after sending Darl to the asylum. They do eventually reach their destination, and bury the body. Anse immediately finds another woman, and introduces her to his four remaining children; the novel ends there.
I think it’s fair to say that Faulkner is generally esteemed more for his style than his content, but his various narrators and mysticism-infused stream-of-consciousness tends to obfuscate his content, so that tone is the only thing that lasts—a haziness, an uncertainty, a rumor of disgrace. I’ve yet to decide whether this is an achievement or failure. Fame aside, I've yet to decide whether I like it.
Here, we have a poor Southern family, whose matriarch has died. Her husband is intent on bringing her body back to her family’s home to bury it there, perhaps because he had promised to do it, perhaps because he doesn’t want to pay for the plot to do it locally. There are five children—the pragmatic Cash, a carpenter who builds her coffin himself, outside her window while she’s dying, the child Vardaman, who continually insists “my mother is a fish,” the hot-headed Jewel, who works nights to earn enough money to buy himself a horse and consequently can’t stay awake days to work his own family’s farm, the “curious” Darl, who eventually ends up in a home for the insane, though he seems the most sane of them all, and the girl, Dewey Dell, who finds herself with a pregnancy to be rid of. The five of them, with their father Anse, take to the road with their mother Addie in her coffin on a wagon, traveling day after day toward her hometown. A storm has ruined all the bridges, and the body begins to stink, bringing vultures. Still, Anse refuses to bury her anywhere but her home. All the townspeople they encounter shake their heads, try to talk sense into Anse, but he won’t listen, nor will he eat, nor will he sleep. The family refuses to “be beholden” to anyone, and refuse any greater hospitality than a barn to sleep in.
It’s while sleeping in a barn, when Addie’s been dead eight days, that Darl tries to burn the barn down, to end the mad journey. Instead, Jewel saves the coffin from the flames, and the family presses on—after sending Darl to the asylum. They do eventually reach their destination, and bury the body. Anse immediately finds another woman, and introduces her to his four remaining children; the novel ends there.
I think it’s fair to say that Faulkner is generally esteemed more for his style than his content, but his various narrators and mysticism-infused stream-of-consciousness tends to obfuscate his content, so that tone is the only thing that lasts—a haziness, an uncertainty, a rumor of disgrace. I’ve yet to decide whether this is an achievement or failure. Fame aside, I've yet to decide whether I like it.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Movies: Deliverance
I almost always only watch movies at the theatre, because I don’t have a television and my laptop’s screen is particularly small. There’s a long list of old movies I want to see, but I am patient, and I wait for them to come to the theatre; the important ones usually do. But a visiting friend talked me into renting the DVD of Deliverance, and then left me alone to watch it. And so I experienced this film in a very intimate way, postcard-sized, on my burning lap, the sound wired into my ears by penetrating, plug-like buds.
If any movie should be watched this way, this is the one. Scaled down to the size of my two hands, each frame can be studied whole; they are all masterpieces, perfectly composed, perfectly framed. The calm, dark Cahulawassee River pushes through the center of the screen, carrying our four avatars downstream on an adventure; outdoorsman Lewis (Burt Reynolds) is intent on showing his more pansy friends what it means to actually live life. And then, everything goes to all to hell very fast.
The four friends are in two canoes; one has gotten ahead and pulls over to the shore for a bit. The two men walk up into the woods a bit and are confronted by filthy, toothless, gun-toting locals. One of the Oakies ties Ed (Jon Voight) to a tree and taunts him with a knife, making him watch while his friend Bobby is toyed with by the other aggressor, made to “squeal like a pig,” and is anally raped. Before Ed and Bobby are both killed, Lewis and Drew arrive on shore and Lewis dispatches Bobby’s aggressor with an arrow through the chest (Lewis, of course, is the kind of man whose weapon of choice is a crossbow; in a telling earlier scene, early in the morning and alone, Ed borrows the crossbow and tries to shoot a deer, but chokes). The second aggressor runs away, and the four men briefly argue about what to do with the dead body. Drew, the bespectacled, guitar-playing voice of societal ethics, insists that they find police and report the incident. Lewis, the earth-bound pragmatist, insists that they bury the body, row away, and never speak a word about it again. The others side with Lewis, the four bury the body, and return to their boats, the adventure ruined.
But that is not the adventure’s end. The men now have the increasing rapids of the river to contend with, and at a very strong break, the despondent Lewis, who hadn’t put on his life jacket, disappears when his wooden canoe is destroyed. The three remaining men pile onto the surviving metal canoe and keep paddling, with only survival on their mind, but they are shot at from a distance. Lewis is immobilized, Bobby has been sodomized, Drew has drowned, and it is left to Ed to climb a wall of rock, crossbow slung over his shoulder, to hunt down the toothless local they assume is shooting at them from the shore. Here is the most stunning night lighting I’ve seen in cinema, blue and chill and throbbing nevertheless, as innocent-eyed Voight hangs from a rope, clinging to fistfuls of rock, in a cold sweat. At the top of the cliff, he succeeds in his assassination, but realizes perhaps too late that the man he’s killed is likely not their previous aggressor, and getting an arrow through his own chest in the process. But he returns to the boat, and he, Bobby, and Lewis eventually make it to their destination, noticing Drew’s mangled, drowned body on the way.
Back on shore, before they can pile back into their station wagons, they are treated by the local doctor, and grilled by the local police. Their agreed-to story, though thin, holds, and they are left to leave with a warning never to come back.
Nothing, I think, has been so simultaneously beautiful and violent as this, so lulling and distressing, so dark and remorseless, but so seductive and compelling. They don't make movies like this these days, this brutal, this gritty.
If any movie should be watched this way, this is the one. Scaled down to the size of my two hands, each frame can be studied whole; they are all masterpieces, perfectly composed, perfectly framed. The calm, dark Cahulawassee River pushes through the center of the screen, carrying our four avatars downstream on an adventure; outdoorsman Lewis (Burt Reynolds) is intent on showing his more pansy friends what it means to actually live life. And then, everything goes to all to hell very fast.
The four friends are in two canoes; one has gotten ahead and pulls over to the shore for a bit. The two men walk up into the woods a bit and are confronted by filthy, toothless, gun-toting locals. One of the Oakies ties Ed (Jon Voight) to a tree and taunts him with a knife, making him watch while his friend Bobby is toyed with by the other aggressor, made to “squeal like a pig,” and is anally raped. Before Ed and Bobby are both killed, Lewis and Drew arrive on shore and Lewis dispatches Bobby’s aggressor with an arrow through the chest (Lewis, of course, is the kind of man whose weapon of choice is a crossbow; in a telling earlier scene, early in the morning and alone, Ed borrows the crossbow and tries to shoot a deer, but chokes). The second aggressor runs away, and the four men briefly argue about what to do with the dead body. Drew, the bespectacled, guitar-playing voice of societal ethics, insists that they find police and report the incident. Lewis, the earth-bound pragmatist, insists that they bury the body, row away, and never speak a word about it again. The others side with Lewis, the four bury the body, and return to their boats, the adventure ruined.
But that is not the adventure’s end. The men now have the increasing rapids of the river to contend with, and at a very strong break, the despondent Lewis, who hadn’t put on his life jacket, disappears when his wooden canoe is destroyed. The three remaining men pile onto the surviving metal canoe and keep paddling, with only survival on their mind, but they are shot at from a distance. Lewis is immobilized, Bobby has been sodomized, Drew has drowned, and it is left to Ed to climb a wall of rock, crossbow slung over his shoulder, to hunt down the toothless local they assume is shooting at them from the shore. Here is the most stunning night lighting I’ve seen in cinema, blue and chill and throbbing nevertheless, as innocent-eyed Voight hangs from a rope, clinging to fistfuls of rock, in a cold sweat. At the top of the cliff, he succeeds in his assassination, but realizes perhaps too late that the man he’s killed is likely not their previous aggressor, and getting an arrow through his own chest in the process. But he returns to the boat, and he, Bobby, and Lewis eventually make it to their destination, noticing Drew’s mangled, drowned body on the way.
Back on shore, before they can pile back into their station wagons, they are treated by the local doctor, and grilled by the local police. Their agreed-to story, though thin, holds, and they are left to leave with a warning never to come back.
Nothing, I think, has been so simultaneously beautiful and violent as this, so lulling and distressing, so dark and remorseless, but so seductive and compelling. They don't make movies like this these days, this brutal, this gritty.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Books: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, by Philip K. Dick
It has been my intention to read a PK Dick novel for three or four years now, but we already know that my ever-increasing list of things to read is self-defeating. I chose this Dick novel at random, mostly for the ring of its long and poignant title, and found it to be a perfectly serviceable sci-fi dystopian novel; famous television host and crooner Jason Taverner finds himself suddenly non-existent according not only to extensive government records (all of his ID cards have disappeared, and when he’s picked up by the cops, they find no Jason Taverner records on file), but also to the world—once a household name with hundreds of thousands of adoring fans, no one—not even previous friends, colleagues, lovers—recognizes him by face or name; he is completely alone. A slightly imbalanced young waif, who falsifies IDs and then finks to the police about it for a living, comes to his aid, though he’s not certain all the while whether she’s for him or against him; the entire world seems to be a conspiracy, and for a moment, he wonders whether he’s been living in a drugged dream, fantasizing his entire life while knocked out in a flophouse, and only now coming out of his life-long high.
The policeman, whose story comes out in tandem with Taverner’s, lives with his psychotic, drug-addled sister-cum-lover, who briefly seduces Taverner and gives him the drugs that make him wonder whether he’s been drugged all along, but her own dose of drugs kill her, and he sees her withered skeleton on the bathroom floor and flees. Now, the world has shifted again, his files have reappeared, his songs are on the jukebox. He again exists, but has been recognized at the scene of the woman’s death, and is now targeted by the police as her murderer. His lover, who previously seemed not to know him, now knows him but wants nothing to do with him, wants to turn herself and him both into the authorities. The epilogue kindly resolves all, freeing Taverner after trial, and describing a future in which the police apparatus breaks down, the students are freed from hiding and forced labor camps, and multiple-space-inclusion drugs are no longer experimented with. Dick does not disclose whether cars still fly or whether the phone-grid sex network still prematurely ages people, or whether Sixes (the elite group of engineered humans of which Taverner is one) are ever surpassed by Sevens. But there is enough resolution that he loses some of the gains he made, for sci-fi’s ultimate goal is not to satisfy, but to shatter, to disturb, to shake; happy endings don’t make lessons learned.
The policeman, whose story comes out in tandem with Taverner’s, lives with his psychotic, drug-addled sister-cum-lover, who briefly seduces Taverner and gives him the drugs that make him wonder whether he’s been drugged all along, but her own dose of drugs kill her, and he sees her withered skeleton on the bathroom floor and flees. Now, the world has shifted again, his files have reappeared, his songs are on the jukebox. He again exists, but has been recognized at the scene of the woman’s death, and is now targeted by the police as her murderer. His lover, who previously seemed not to know him, now knows him but wants nothing to do with him, wants to turn herself and him both into the authorities. The epilogue kindly resolves all, freeing Taverner after trial, and describing a future in which the police apparatus breaks down, the students are freed from hiding and forced labor camps, and multiple-space-inclusion drugs are no longer experimented with. Dick does not disclose whether cars still fly or whether the phone-grid sex network still prematurely ages people, or whether Sixes (the elite group of engineered humans of which Taverner is one) are ever surpassed by Sevens. But there is enough resolution that he loses some of the gains he made, for sci-fi’s ultimate goal is not to satisfy, but to shatter, to disturb, to shake; happy endings don’t make lessons learned.
Monday, December 8, 2008
Movies: Milk
The more I write about movies, the more concerned I become about being repetitious. And yet, I must say it again: flashback is a lazy way of structuring narrative. Flashback inclines the filmmaker to create a series of superficial vignettes, strung together like beads on a cord, rather than an integrated length of film. We go to the movies to fully immerse ourselves in lives unlike our own. Why else the dark room, the larger than life screen, the surround-sound speakers? We want to swim in the water of cinema, wetting even the tops of our heads.
The usually impeccable Gus Van Sant makes this mistake in his new film Milk. After beautiful opening credits culled from stock black and white footage, Van Sant opens with Sean Penn as Harvey Milk sitting at a kitchen table. Milk is speaking into a microphone, taping his memoir, in case he is assassinated (which he eventually will be). This scene then invokes Milk’s memories, so that Van Sant cuts away to illustrate key moments in the gay activist’s life, each time coming back to the kitchen table, shaking us out of the past we were just slipping into, pulling us out of the water into some purgatorial, intermediate state—not really in the movie, but not quite out of it either.
What happens, then, is that the flashbacks become less about storytelling than moment-capturing. We watch a series of lifestyle commercials rather than a movie, groups of beautiful young boys hanging out in Milk’s Castro camera shop, in droopy mustaches and bell-bottomed pants, flush with the thrill of making something important happen, or two men in bed, their shadows wrestling, implying something dangerous and beautiful and different than anything straight lovers have experienced. Nothing binds these experiences to each other; Van Sant plunges his audience again and again into the dunking tank, rather than letting us swim through the pool.
Van Sant has always treated his male subjects with a particular tenderness, caressing their awkward faces with his camera (c.f. Gerry, Elephant, Paranoid Park). Milk is no departure from this signature, and if there is any reason to watch this movie, aside from Penn’s startlingly on-point performance, it is to see the way Van Sant handles James Franco’s wistful smile, or Emile Hirsch’s mercurial eyes.
Watching the trailer for Milk, my friends and I always laughed at the very end, when a giant credit, “screenplay by Dustin Lance Black” flashed across the screen, larger than any credit we had seen before. We laughed because the banner was only appropriate to a big-name writer, someone with serious cache. But the only appropriate response to this was, “who the hell is Dustin Lance Black?” And now we have an answer: the man responsible for this lazy screenplay, who, had he known better, would have written something that wasn't a waste of Van Sant, Penn, Franco, and Hirsch's special magic.
The usually impeccable Gus Van Sant makes this mistake in his new film Milk. After beautiful opening credits culled from stock black and white footage, Van Sant opens with Sean Penn as Harvey Milk sitting at a kitchen table. Milk is speaking into a microphone, taping his memoir, in case he is assassinated (which he eventually will be). This scene then invokes Milk’s memories, so that Van Sant cuts away to illustrate key moments in the gay activist’s life, each time coming back to the kitchen table, shaking us out of the past we were just slipping into, pulling us out of the water into some purgatorial, intermediate state—not really in the movie, but not quite out of it either.
What happens, then, is that the flashbacks become less about storytelling than moment-capturing. We watch a series of lifestyle commercials rather than a movie, groups of beautiful young boys hanging out in Milk’s Castro camera shop, in droopy mustaches and bell-bottomed pants, flush with the thrill of making something important happen, or two men in bed, their shadows wrestling, implying something dangerous and beautiful and different than anything straight lovers have experienced. Nothing binds these experiences to each other; Van Sant plunges his audience again and again into the dunking tank, rather than letting us swim through the pool.
Van Sant has always treated his male subjects with a particular tenderness, caressing their awkward faces with his camera (c.f. Gerry, Elephant, Paranoid Park). Milk is no departure from this signature, and if there is any reason to watch this movie, aside from Penn’s startlingly on-point performance, it is to see the way Van Sant handles James Franco’s wistful smile, or Emile Hirsch’s mercurial eyes.
Watching the trailer for Milk, my friends and I always laughed at the very end, when a giant credit, “screenplay by Dustin Lance Black” flashed across the screen, larger than any credit we had seen before. We laughed because the banner was only appropriate to a big-name writer, someone with serious cache. But the only appropriate response to this was, “who the hell is Dustin Lance Black?” And now we have an answer: the man responsible for this lazy screenplay, who, had he known better, would have written something that wasn't a waste of Van Sant, Penn, Franco, and Hirsch's special magic.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Books: The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
It is difficult for me to discuss this book on its own terms because of the scenario surrounding its reading. I was on the subway, settling in for a long ride from Brooklyn to the Bronx on a rainy Sunday evening. The car was nearly empty, and I was reading. A few stops later, a group of black teenagers, perhaps six or seven, get on the train and commence being rowdy. They make a lot of noise. I don’t look up; I am reading my book. My book is The Old Man and the Sea. It is not very compelling, but I am reading it anyway. Meanwhile, the thuglets are creating a rather wild rumpus; there are plenty of open seats for them in which to sit down together, but instead, they sit, one at a time, directly next to white strangers, even insinuating themselves at one moment between the children of a white family. But I don't see any of this; I don't look up. I'm reading my (very plodding) book.
Then one sits down next to me. I don't look up from the page. His friends come and sit across from us and watch. I continue to read. He puts his head on my shoulder. I am holding my book with my right hand. Without looking up, I wrap my left arm around his shoulders and begin to stroke his hair through his hat. His friends bust up laughing, shocked, shouting ho! As he snuggles into my arm, I lean in and ask if he wants me to read to him as well. He nods his head yes. I begin to read (this very plodding narrative) aloud. At first my voice is unsure, but as I notice more and more people watching (the children of the white family have gathered around, their mouths open, and everyone else in the car is staring as well), I read more confidence and clarity. Another of the black teens comes over and wraps my arm around him as well. I read for about ten minutes until they start to get fidgety. One of the kids starts singing, let's talk about sex, ba-by, and, without missing a beat, I look up from my book and sing, let's talk about you and me, and again, shocked, they shout ho! nuh-uh! and laugh. We commence chatting for the rest of my ride; they ask me how old I am, what my name is, what my number is, and whether we can talk. I give them my number with the caveat that I mostly like to talk about books (they tell me that books are boring, but that they'll call me and let me read to them). When I have to get off the train, they are disappointed, and say why are you leaving us? I wave to them from the platform as the train rolls away.
They didn't call me. That made me sad.
This was the best thing about the book, but any book could have stood in. As an archetype, I suppose any book should fit in with The Old Man and the Sea, which is the same story as Steinbeck's The Pearl, only with an old man and a fish rather than a young couple and a pearl, and with a bit less calamity. The novel is didactic; spare, yes, but not intelligently so. In fact, it's rather naively so, and, in fact, rather pompous. Hemingway's connection with the Cuban fisherman is distanced and strained; clearly he wants to write in the man's simple voice, but he has no access to that simplicity, so that he instead inserts native words here and there, inadvertently breaking the fourth wall ("Tomorrow I will eat the dolphin. He called it dorado.") Toward the novel's end (the plot is a parabola of labor, with the apex being the lashing of the great fish to the side of the boat), the entire fish has been consumed by sharks, in spite of the fisherman's bravest efforts to kill them off. We are neither surprised nor disappointed; that is, obviously, the only possible end to this plodding theme of suffering.
No wonder those kids think books are boring.
Then one sits down next to me. I don't look up from the page. His friends come and sit across from us and watch. I continue to read. He puts his head on my shoulder. I am holding my book with my right hand. Without looking up, I wrap my left arm around his shoulders and begin to stroke his hair through his hat. His friends bust up laughing, shocked, shouting ho! As he snuggles into my arm, I lean in and ask if he wants me to read to him as well. He nods his head yes. I begin to read (this very plodding narrative) aloud. At first my voice is unsure, but as I notice more and more people watching (the children of the white family have gathered around, their mouths open, and everyone else in the car is staring as well), I read more confidence and clarity. Another of the black teens comes over and wraps my arm around him as well. I read for about ten minutes until they start to get fidgety. One of the kids starts singing, let's talk about sex, ba-by, and, without missing a beat, I look up from my book and sing, let's talk about you and me, and again, shocked, they shout ho! nuh-uh! and laugh. We commence chatting for the rest of my ride; they ask me how old I am, what my name is, what my number is, and whether we can talk. I give them my number with the caveat that I mostly like to talk about books (they tell me that books are boring, but that they'll call me and let me read to them). When I have to get off the train, they are disappointed, and say why are you leaving us? I wave to them from the platform as the train rolls away.
They didn't call me. That made me sad.
This was the best thing about the book, but any book could have stood in. As an archetype, I suppose any book should fit in with The Old Man and the Sea, which is the same story as Steinbeck's The Pearl, only with an old man and a fish rather than a young couple and a pearl, and with a bit less calamity. The novel is didactic; spare, yes, but not intelligently so. In fact, it's rather naively so, and, in fact, rather pompous. Hemingway's connection with the Cuban fisherman is distanced and strained; clearly he wants to write in the man's simple voice, but he has no access to that simplicity, so that he instead inserts native words here and there, inadvertently breaking the fourth wall ("Tomorrow I will eat the dolphin. He called it dorado.") Toward the novel's end (the plot is a parabola of labor, with the apex being the lashing of the great fish to the side of the boat), the entire fish has been consumed by sharks, in spite of the fisherman's bravest efforts to kill them off. We are neither surprised nor disappointed; that is, obviously, the only possible end to this plodding theme of suffering.
No wonder those kids think books are boring.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Books: The Sweet Dove Died, by Barbara Pym
Knowing nothing about Pym, I started this novel assuming she was a contemporary of Henry James, writing about characters taken from the time of DH Lawrence. I quickly checked the publication date and was shocked to see “1978,” but still assumed her fiction was of the historical nature, her protagonists being an orphaned young man working in his uncles antique shop and an older, refined, single woman the boy and his uncle encounter at an antiques auction.
Because of the things they do, the way they speak, and the things about which they talk, her characters have the repressed musty-fustiness of the Victorians—but that turns out to be something of an aesthetic choice. Leonora Eyre, the “heroine” (of cautionary, tragic sorts) collects Victorian baubles and her pristine flat, like her wardrobe, recalls that era. She has aged well, therefore drawing the attentions of impressionable James and his decorous uncle alike.
Pym gently implies that Leonora doesn’t care for sex, and James doesn’t seem to mind that, especially once he falls libidinously for the unkempt bohemian Phoebe. This new girl, who lives out in the country, makes him terribly uncomfortable by dressing poorly and leaving breadcrumbs around the apartment, but he keeps going back for the you-know-what, and successfully keeps it a secret from Leonora.
The secret comes out when James leaves both ladies behind for a tour of Europe. There, he meets Ned, and the two have a (very much implied, but never stated) affair. While he’s gone, the two women discover each other, as each feels entitled to his furniture. Upon returning, James smooths things over with Leonora by ignoring Phoebe, and all is peachy again, until Ned comes for a long visit, and convinces James to drop Leonora. The irreproachably proper woman finally loses herself in tears, but by the novel’s end, Ned has moved on to another man more interesting than James, and James has come back to Leonora.
There’s something rather repressed in all of this, and it’s hard not to read Leonora as a stand-in for Pym (although if she is, the woman was rather hard on herself). Pym’s own shying away from description of any sex acts or even words—like “homosexual”—that might clarify James’ relationship with Ned are the literary version of Leonora’s turning her head away in embarrassment when James’ poor uncle tries to kiss her mouth after an evening of cocktails.
At first, this shuttered world of implication and innuendo is attractive and fascinating, but, like Leonora herself, it begins to cloy rather quickly. Disappointingly, the appearances of Phoebe and Ned breathe no fresh air into Pym’s narration; she is forever trapped in Leonora’s voice, in spite of being an omniscient narrator.
Because of the things they do, the way they speak, and the things about which they talk, her characters have the repressed musty-fustiness of the Victorians—but that turns out to be something of an aesthetic choice. Leonora Eyre, the “heroine” (of cautionary, tragic sorts) collects Victorian baubles and her pristine flat, like her wardrobe, recalls that era. She has aged well, therefore drawing the attentions of impressionable James and his decorous uncle alike.
Pym gently implies that Leonora doesn’t care for sex, and James doesn’t seem to mind that, especially once he falls libidinously for the unkempt bohemian Phoebe. This new girl, who lives out in the country, makes him terribly uncomfortable by dressing poorly and leaving breadcrumbs around the apartment, but he keeps going back for the you-know-what, and successfully keeps it a secret from Leonora.
The secret comes out when James leaves both ladies behind for a tour of Europe. There, he meets Ned, and the two have a (very much implied, but never stated) affair. While he’s gone, the two women discover each other, as each feels entitled to his furniture. Upon returning, James smooths things over with Leonora by ignoring Phoebe, and all is peachy again, until Ned comes for a long visit, and convinces James to drop Leonora. The irreproachably proper woman finally loses herself in tears, but by the novel’s end, Ned has moved on to another man more interesting than James, and James has come back to Leonora.
There’s something rather repressed in all of this, and it’s hard not to read Leonora as a stand-in for Pym (although if she is, the woman was rather hard on herself). Pym’s own shying away from description of any sex acts or even words—like “homosexual”—that might clarify James’ relationship with Ned are the literary version of Leonora’s turning her head away in embarrassment when James’ poor uncle tries to kiss her mouth after an evening of cocktails.
At first, this shuttered world of implication and innuendo is attractive and fascinating, but, like Leonora herself, it begins to cloy rather quickly. Disappointingly, the appearances of Phoebe and Ned breathe no fresh air into Pym’s narration; she is forever trapped in Leonora’s voice, in spite of being an omniscient narrator.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Movies: Rachel Getting Married
This baggy, scraggly, mopey film reminds me of the baggy, scraggly, mopey teenagers you can usually find at mall food courts. From a distance, or to the uninitiated, there is a flash of something desirable, an artsy pain and edgy fragility particular to girls aged 13-19. Any actual time spent with them, though, reveals the same tedious troubles haunting the girls on the other side of the mall, shopping at Abercrombie and Fitch.
Anne Hathaway, whose charms are consistently lost on me, is surprisingly well-cast as an awkward twenty-something who takes a break from rehab to spend a long weekend at her family compound in hoity-snoity Connecticut. It slowly comes out that Kym (with a “y,” of course, sigh) has been addicted to a variety of drugs since she was a teenager, and that, when left to baby sit her toddling brother Ethan, she drove their car into a river because she was high. He died.
Now her divorced and remarried parents are coming back to the house to see their third child, Rachel, get married. Rachel, the most tedious white girl you have ever seen, is marrying Sidney, the coolest black dude you have ever seen. Supposedly, Rachel and Kym’s father has something to do with the music industry and therefore this liaison makes sense (Sidney, too, has something to do with the music industry).
In fact, the entire movie/weekend is actually just a set piece of hipster porn where upper-class blacks and whites intermingle happily over their shared love of every kind of music, from jazz to indie rock to contemporary chamber to Caribbean electronic. Kym’s brittle moments of nerve-wracking social self-flagellation are washed over by lengthy cuts of people dancing to really good music.
But who wants to watch a movie of people dancing to really good music? If this movie doesn’t totally annoy you, it will only make you jealous—I want to hang out at that party and dance to really good music. (Everyone there, with the exceptions of Rachel and Kym, seems pretty cool, probably too much so to pass the reality test.) The cinematography—random, shaky, handheld—clearly intends to quote the home-movie/“Our Wedding” sensation, so that we in the audience get an ultra-intimate, through-the-keyhole look at the unfolding drama. But: is this a keyhole we even want to look through?
Anne Hathaway, whose charms are consistently lost on me, is surprisingly well-cast as an awkward twenty-something who takes a break from rehab to spend a long weekend at her family compound in hoity-snoity Connecticut. It slowly comes out that Kym (with a “y,” of course, sigh) has been addicted to a variety of drugs since she was a teenager, and that, when left to baby sit her toddling brother Ethan, she drove their car into a river because she was high. He died.
Now her divorced and remarried parents are coming back to the house to see their third child, Rachel, get married. Rachel, the most tedious white girl you have ever seen, is marrying Sidney, the coolest black dude you have ever seen. Supposedly, Rachel and Kym’s father has something to do with the music industry and therefore this liaison makes sense (Sidney, too, has something to do with the music industry).
In fact, the entire movie/weekend is actually just a set piece of hipster porn where upper-class blacks and whites intermingle happily over their shared love of every kind of music, from jazz to indie rock to contemporary chamber to Caribbean electronic. Kym’s brittle moments of nerve-wracking social self-flagellation are washed over by lengthy cuts of people dancing to really good music.
But who wants to watch a movie of people dancing to really good music? If this movie doesn’t totally annoy you, it will only make you jealous—I want to hang out at that party and dance to really good music. (Everyone there, with the exceptions of Rachel and Kym, seems pretty cool, probably too much so to pass the reality test.) The cinematography—random, shaky, handheld—clearly intends to quote the home-movie/“Our Wedding” sensation, so that we in the audience get an ultra-intimate, through-the-keyhole look at the unfolding drama. But: is this a keyhole we even want to look through?
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Movies: Slumdog Millionaire
Based on his previous work, you may have thought of Danny Boyle as an artist grounded by the simple acknowledgement of life's inherent darkness. Like me, you would have misread him. In this romantic fairytale, he discloses that he's never been interested in the darker side of things, except so long as they illuminate the brighter by contrast. This is all the more disappointing for its profligacy: he squanders brilliant child actors, gorgeous cinematography, and shattering social revelations in the service of a lame flashback-driven plot about destined lovers, ultimately undoing all of the expose-style work he began.
The film opens with a Guantanamo-sytle interrogation scene (it's disconcerting that we're becoming accustomed to these) of a skinny boy by a fat man and uniformed officer Irrfan Khan. Twenty minutes later, the same officer is serving the boy chai and listening to him spin a reticent yarn: the introduction to flashback scenes that explain how such a boy (an uneducated orphan of the slums who, now in his early 20s, makes his living serving chai at a mobile phone call center) could win Rs. 20,000,000 on a quiz show; mystically, each question related to a dramatic—usually traumatic—experience from his childhood and adolescence.
These flashbacks allow cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, working in perfect concert with a team of astonishing child actors, to reveal the sordid slums of Mumbai—a cross between a Hooverville and a trash heap—as little more than the children's playground: a playground where marauding terrorists light your home on fire and kill your mother, a playground where you are lured by a frosty Coca-Cola into the arms of a Dickensian villain who will burn your eyes out with hot oil (blind singers, and otherwise damaged beggars, earn more than the bodily able), and a playground where the girl you've befriended will be groomed carefully for the whorehouse. This is enough to make a movie; Americans don't like to see things like this happening, and when art shows it to them in a meaningful way, they do something about it.
They won't do anything about it, though, because halfway into the film, Boyle derails and decides to develop a romantic relationship between groomed-to-be-a-whore Latika and about-to-be-millionaire Jamal. When they finally kiss at the end (for the very first time), they are in their early twenties, and have spent a total of less than five hours together as adults. And yet, we expect them to live happily ever after, because "it is written." Audiences are so excited that Jamal has not only become a millionaire, but has also won the girl, they have forgotten all about the real orphans in India who do live on trash heaps (I know; I saw them) and who won't become millionaires or fall in love with a partner marked from before time. Worse, by giving his protagonist the two-for-one special, Boyle does not address the ugly reality that, had Jamal not won mad rupees, Latika (who is living with an abusive gangster twice her age when Jamal comes into his wealth) would not have run away with him.
The film opens with a Guantanamo-sytle interrogation scene (it's disconcerting that we're becoming accustomed to these) of a skinny boy by a fat man and uniformed officer Irrfan Khan. Twenty minutes later, the same officer is serving the boy chai and listening to him spin a reticent yarn: the introduction to flashback scenes that explain how such a boy (an uneducated orphan of the slums who, now in his early 20s, makes his living serving chai at a mobile phone call center) could win Rs. 20,000,000 on a quiz show; mystically, each question related to a dramatic—usually traumatic—experience from his childhood and adolescence.
These flashbacks allow cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, working in perfect concert with a team of astonishing child actors, to reveal the sordid slums of Mumbai—a cross between a Hooverville and a trash heap—as little more than the children's playground: a playground where marauding terrorists light your home on fire and kill your mother, a playground where you are lured by a frosty Coca-Cola into the arms of a Dickensian villain who will burn your eyes out with hot oil (blind singers, and otherwise damaged beggars, earn more than the bodily able), and a playground where the girl you've befriended will be groomed carefully for the whorehouse. This is enough to make a movie; Americans don't like to see things like this happening, and when art shows it to them in a meaningful way, they do something about it.
They won't do anything about it, though, because halfway into the film, Boyle derails and decides to develop a romantic relationship between groomed-to-be-a-whore Latika and about-to-be-millionaire Jamal. When they finally kiss at the end (for the very first time), they are in their early twenties, and have spent a total of less than five hours together as adults. And yet, we expect them to live happily ever after, because "it is written." Audiences are so excited that Jamal has not only become a millionaire, but has also won the girl, they have forgotten all about the real orphans in India who do live on trash heaps (I know; I saw them) and who won't become millionaires or fall in love with a partner marked from before time. Worse, by giving his protagonist the two-for-one special, Boyle does not address the ugly reality that, had Jamal not won mad rupees, Latika (who is living with an abusive gangster twice her age when Jamal comes into his wealth) would not have run away with him.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Books: Hell's Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson
This book reads more like an extended newsmagazine article than a novel, but I don’t ultimately have a problem with that (um, it’s not a novel, duh. Okay, whatever.) Thompson seems to be less of an insider than one would expect (buying an English make rather than a Harley, and then driving a car to the Angel’s big run on the lake rather than a bike)—and eventually, in fact, ends his uncomfortable pseudo-friendship with them when he gets “stomped” (Angel for “beat up,” the way only Angels do it, which seems to involve literal stomping on the victim’s fallen body) and flees the scene, never returning.
Thompson’s angle is that of an outsider-insider perspective; he does a careful reading (and quoting) of media to demonstrate that the Angels’ reputation usually preceded them; one or two stories, blown out of proportion by lazy journalists, created a mythic reputation that the biker gang then did their best to live up to—often failing even at that. The gonzo journalist manages to scrounge up enough street cred to hang with them at a few exclusive locations (the run on the lake being one, their favorite bar being another), talk to them about their reputation, and see firsthand whether they are as dangerous as they’re made out to be.
The portrait that eventually emerges is less scary than depressing—there’s an impulse, Thompson points out, to see the Angels as re-figured cowboys, heroes riding solo across the open plains. And yet, they subscribe to a very rudimentary group mentality, not unlike that of today’s street gangs or yesteryear’s KKK. They keep “mamas,” shared women who voluntarily become the sexual property of the Angels, and who are used, um, communally. They take as many of any kinds of drugs they can get their hands on, heedless of doses or compatibility, often not knowing what they’re taking at all. If these are heroes, they are heroes for a world in need of therapy; if they are monsters, they are monsters in a world that is eerily sterile, if comfortably safe.
Thompson’s angle is that of an outsider-insider perspective; he does a careful reading (and quoting) of media to demonstrate that the Angels’ reputation usually preceded them; one or two stories, blown out of proportion by lazy journalists, created a mythic reputation that the biker gang then did their best to live up to—often failing even at that. The gonzo journalist manages to scrounge up enough street cred to hang with them at a few exclusive locations (the run on the lake being one, their favorite bar being another), talk to them about their reputation, and see firsthand whether they are as dangerous as they’re made out to be.
The portrait that eventually emerges is less scary than depressing—there’s an impulse, Thompson points out, to see the Angels as re-figured cowboys, heroes riding solo across the open plains. And yet, they subscribe to a very rudimentary group mentality, not unlike that of today’s street gangs or yesteryear’s KKK. They keep “mamas,” shared women who voluntarily become the sexual property of the Angels, and who are used, um, communally. They take as many of any kinds of drugs they can get their hands on, heedless of doses or compatibility, often not knowing what they’re taking at all. If these are heroes, they are heroes for a world in need of therapy; if they are monsters, they are monsters in a world that is eerily sterile, if comfortably safe.
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