Movies: Paths of Glory and The Killing

As early films in his career, these might defy your Kubrick expectations; and yet, I would argue that their odd, stilted, heavy-handed (dare I say ham-fisted) qualities come not from their being early movies, or old movies, but in fact, Kubrick movies: for all his fame (well-deserved, of course), there is something very odd, stilted, and heavy-handed (and dare I say ham-fisted) about later Kubrick movies (I'm thinking 2001, Eyes Wide Shut, and Clockwork Orange, respectively, though all qualities apply to all of his films).

Paths of Glory is a war movie turned courtroom drama (think All Quiet on the Western Front (the book) meets 12 Angry Men (with Kirk Douglas as Henry Fonda's voice of reason, this time silenced by military corruption). Douglas plays Colonel Dax, charged to send his men on a suicide mission by General Mireau (George Macready), who is hoping for a promotion. When the men run back into their trenches under unrelenting fire from the Germans, Mireau insists that his artillery man fires on his own soldiers, cursing them as cowards, but the artillery man refuses. Incensed, the General demands that all of Colonel Dax's men be charged with cowardice and sentenced to death; his superior, General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou), agrees to charge three men as examples to the rest of the company.

Dax (who was a famous attorney prior to entering the military) volunteers to defend the three soldiers in the next day's court martial; he does what he can, but that isn't much, as the entire court is against him and his soldiers from the get-go. The three are unfairly sentenced to death and, after a grueling night in prison, during which one man breaks down into tears and prayer when he meets the priest, one man asks the priest to deliver a letter to his wife, but refuses to pray, and the third soldier lashes out and attacks the priest, leading to a near-fatal injury that leaves him in a coma all night long, all are blindfolded and shot to death in the early morning (the comatose man leaned up against the pole on a stretcher). Kubrick inserts a painfully long pause prior to the shots, cutting to show the faces of Dax and the two Generals who might, at any time during a different movie, pardon the men and spare their lives; they don't. Three gunshots are fired, and the three soldiers collapse dead. Afterward, we do see Mireau get his comeuppance; since Dax had privately explained to Broulard Mireau's orders to fire on his own troops, Broulard brings Mireau into his office while he and Dax are lunching to break the news that there will be an inquest. After Mireau's sputtering, splenetic exit, though, Broulard offers Mireau's job to Dax, having assumed that Dax was motivated all the while by his ambition rather than his ethics. Then it's Dax's turn to exit, shouting and splenetic, rather than just sputtering.

My number one complaint about this film is that it's all in English. Oh, did I not mention that these soldiers in question are French? Well, I didn't figure that out until halfway through the movie, either, because, well, French soldiers, particularly during WWI, speak French! Not American English. I realize that in 1957, there was probably less of a market for foreign-language films, but then why not make the film about English soldiers (based on a true story or not, Hollywood always allows finagling)? Everyone else I've asked about this has just shrugged, but I still insist that it's important.

The Killing is a much more fun-to-watch film, a kind of horse-race noir in which an incredibly well-planned robbery of a racetrack goes all according to plan, until it's foiled at the end by the gun-wielding boyfriend of the spoiled femme fatale wife of the nervous and victimized track clerk, who's in on the robbery as the one who opens the employees-only door for the robber in exchange for a big cut of the take, with which he hopes to finally satisfy said femme fatale wife. In that way, one would think that all the other characters fall away, but we also follow a number of amusing side plots, which lead up to the dramatic end, when, after everyone but the actual robber has been serendipitously (for him, of course) killed, he stuffs all the cash into a giant suitcase and tries to carry it onto a plane with his girlfriend. As those airline bastards are wont to do, they force him to check his bag due to its size and, on its way to the cargo hold, a little dog runs onto the tarmac, causing the cargo driver to stop short, the suitcase to tumble to the ground, and the million dollars to go up in a delightful whirlwind. The moral? The same as all old movies: Crime doesn't pay, of course, and Never trust a broad.

So what makes this one identifiable as Kubrick? Nothing as much as in Paths of Glory (although there is a similar sour chord struck in the soundtrack during the opening credits, when the name "Kubrick" flashes up onto the screen, as if the director had chosen his identity before he was ready to make it known to the public), although there is an obsessive fastidiousness (and more the Kubrick kind than, say, the Hitchcock kind). The sad, soured morality we find in Paths of Glory precursing the same in future films is lacking in this noir, because noir doesn't lend itself to that kind of existential nobody-wins scenario: either the bad guy gets caught (for the triumph of "good"), or the bad guy gets away with it (for the triumph of lawlessness).

Art: SCOPE and The Armory Show

Why would an artist who can do this:
do it, but also do this:
These are two pieces by Karl Haendel that I saw at the Armory Show this year, which highlight the kind of confusion endemic to the art scene these days (you'll find it at the Whitney Biennial, gallery-hopping in Chelsea, and so on). The first picture is a pop/photo-realist pencil drawing, about three feet wide; the reflections are the fault of my shoddy photography on the glass. The second picture is of a work about the same size, but portrait instead of landscape: a list of ways in which Hitler and Karl Haendel are different. It's funny, but I would personally hesitate to call it good art. I would be less hesitant to call the giant baby good art, but I wouldn't buy it for my house, either. It feels a little dated. Both pieces do, actually, although they represent opposing ends of a dated spectrum (pop and conceptualism; all image versus no image).

The positive thing that I can say about Haendel's work is that it caught my attention and made me want to take a picture and write down his name. I didn't take pictures of any of the exploded-craft-store variety (the kind of work we see a lot today, in which labor intensity is highlighted, while "craftsmanship" is ignored, using a good amount of sequins, tape, fabric, wax, blinking lights, vinyl banners, colored plexiglass chips, markers, sparkles, rhinestones, day-glo paints, and all other ephemera of bling-meets-kitsch). I didn't take pictures of any of the so-tedious-I-walked-right-by-without-noticing stuff, either. I didn't take pictures of anything at the Eleanor Antin booth, because I couldn't decide whether I liked it or didn't (I know I don't like the Eleanora Antinova film, but I do maybe possibly like the photographs, and the concept of Eleanora Antinova, and I do probably like the new photos, the full color ones that play with the photography/sculpture/painting and post-modernity/antiquity (they would have fit in nicely with my graduate thesis), but I do remember it, which is more than I can say for much of the rest of it.
I also didn't take pictures of my favorite thing at the show, because I instead bought the book: The Hyena & Other Men by Pieter Hugo. I really wanted to buy one of his gorgeous, serene, dingy pictures, but at $9,500 a piece, that wasn't really a possibility. While I didn't see anything else at the show that I would have actually wanted for my own collection, I wrote down a few names of artists whose work was sort of maybe remotely interesting: Anthony Goicolea (it must have been photography, because looking at his website now, his drawings are awful), Dan Perjovschi (who did a fairly amusing installation at MoMA recently, although I've already forgotten what he had at the Armory that made me note his name), Juliao Sarmento (whose paintings I remember seeing last year and liking then, too), Youssef Nabil (whose small, hand-tinted pictures grabbed my attention at first, but quickly grew tiresome and gimmicky, and don't work as well in large format), and Justine Kurland (whose name I wrote down, but whose work I can't remember at all).

I feel like I actually had better luck the day before, at SCOPE. Perhaps the smaller festival is just less overwhelming, or perhaps I was a bit more fresh. Or, perhaps SCOPE features art that's way less hip (I think it does), and my tastes are sort of dated (I get that feeling more and more; when it comes to art, I can defend my generation against an older naysayer, but I'm not genuinely of it, and amongst a group of peers, I'll play dinosaur). At SCOPE I fell in love, really in love, with a painting by Gavin Nolan. It was already sold, so I didn't bother asking the price (I think that was a mistake), but here it is; I love it, and I can't even tell you why. It's just brilliant.
The gallerist showed me some photocopied images of some other Nolan paintings they still have "in stock," but I didn't like them at all; they were very Bacon-inspired. . . sort of Bacon-meets-Interview magazine. They didn't combine the hyper-real flesh tones with the blocks of print and color; this is apparently a new departure for him. I hope he sticks with it, because it's great. It's the best painting I've seen in a long while.

The other thing at SCOPE that really caught my eye was a group of little icon-like paintings, on small scraps of wood and tin, in brilliant orange and greens that were clearly heavily influenced by graphic arts, but maintained that extra je ne sais qua that makes art art. They were hung on a wall with no label, and were minded by no gallerist. I had to circle back a few times, hoping to find out what they were; at long last, I was able to interrupt an obnoxious L.A. slag wearing a clingy leopard-print wrap dress with spike heels while she chattered away with a (male) client, refusing to give me the time of day. I stood next to them for a few minutes, looking at her pointedly, and being pointedly ingored, and then they started to walk away. I had to interrupt and ask her cooly "excuse me, but does this artist have a name?" "The Date Farmers," she snapped, and walked away. And so, to the internet, where I found some more pictures, and decided that these guys are totally awesome, wherein painting is concerned (I'm hesitant on installation in general, and their installations looked a little. . . crafty/cloying/tedious). But their paintings? Brilliant.

Movies: Raging Bull

Watching the young De Niro is sort of dangerous for me, because he always reminds me of this, um, fellow I used to know, who had a similar sweet smirk, and who would snap from unbelievably tender ("You're like a miracle") to unbelievably vicious ("You're just a hole") and back again in the way that De Niro does in The Panic In Needle Park, Taxi Driver, and now Raging Bull, in which he plays middleweight champion Jake LaMotta, switching like a light bulb from love to rage, from power to weakness, from fat to thin, from proud to wretched. He's amazing, but so amazing that it hurts.

I hate boxing and I hate violence and I can't watch it (a friend expressed something bordering on shock that I was going to see this movie, but it couldn't be avoided as part of my education); I did have to close my eyes during some of the more explosive fight scenes (broken noses in particular nauseate me). I love that Scorsese shot it in black and white, even though it was 1980, and I love all of the other old movie glamour touches (the roadsters, the high waisted pants, and the bathing suit Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) is wearing when he first meets her) that can more easily be taken for granted in the period piece (although the film has too much grit to be an actual film from the 1940s, such that it becomes something hyper-real: the violence that was always there, but that we never got to see before).

What we see here are the risks of old-fashioned manhood: the rage and then sullen sickness that follow when weakness and self-doubt and fear have to be repressed and wrapped up in layers of denial and rebellion like papier-mâché, hollow inside and not as sturdy as it looks. LaMotta's relationship to his growing belly, fueled by his brother's comments and the weight restrictions for his class (his brother is played by a brilliant Joe Pesci, who offers his own treatise on manhood in concert with LaMotta's, smaller than his fighter brother, but constantly trying to keep him in line) begins as a symptom of depression but becomes an act of defiance, the same defiance that used to erupt in fights but has now mellowed into a different kind of destruction, pointed inward rather than out.

Books: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, by Tom Wolfe

Before I requested it from the library, I thought that this was a chronicle in the vein of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but it turned out to be a volume of essays on a variety of topics comprising 1960s Americana (kind of like 25 mini Acid Tests). My only real experience in essay reading comes from my devotion to David Foster Wallace, whose volumes of essays originally published in magazines like Harper's and Esquire are the contemporary versions of this volume. They're great (both Wallace and Wolfe, but we're discussing Wolfe here): absolutely fantastic.

Wolfe catalogs the ephemera that constitutes America via the microcosms of cars (hot-rodding, customizing, drag racing, demolition derbies), fame (Baby Jane Holzer, Phil Spector, Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, and the Beatles (and the Stones, indirectly)), and style (tight pants, big hair, "decal" eye makeup, and dances like The Mashed Potatoes and The Monkey) from the point of view of the innocent bystander, tossed about in the flotsam and jetsam, part confused but mostly delighted; he registers this delight in everything-but-the-kitchen-sink lists of everything that he sees, creating a kind of transparency and putting the reader right there in the middle of it.

Essay-reading can become tedious when the essayist uses his topic as a platform from which to spout about his personal philosophies, and continually "steps back" to analyze whatever it is that he's writing about. Wolfe never does this. It seems his only personal philosophy is "Wow—Aren't people neat?!" and all he has to do to prove it is to faithfully describe (with infectious excitement) all of the crazy things going on around him. It's not that he's non-thinking; he's more non-judging (even though we can tell he feels a smidgen of disdain for the girls with the tight pants and big hair); mostly, he's just fascinated, and he makes us fascinated as well.

Movies: E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

So you've probably seen E.T. like 600 times and you can't believe that I hadn't ever, until now. But it came out the year I was born, and we didn't watch movies when I was a kid, and what teenager wants to see a ten-year-old kid's movie? And anyway, I have a feeling that I would have been deathly afraid of E.T. In all honesty, I was a bit frightened watching it now, and I'll be 26 this week. I was also terribly upset. I cried, and cried, and cried, starting in the middle (when E.T.'s ravaged body is found in the creek in the woods, and he's all pink and emaciated and about to die) and going all the way through the elating rescue, and to the end, when E.T.'s spaceship comes back to get him, and he has to say goodbye to his new friends. I'm generally quite wary—even disdainful—of the word "magical," but there's no way around it; not only are flying bicycles and instantly healed wounds and childhood friends that parents can't see magical (all found in the movie), but the darned thing is just magical all around; just the sound of E.T.'s gravelly voice, simultaneously ancient and naive, saying "Ell-i-ott" (the name of his friend and the movie's human hero) moves one to profound realizations about the beauty of language and communication and friendship and the development of each of these (E.T. is like a baby and an wizened old man at the same time—both cute and hideous). And of course, there is the cutest childhood performance of all time by Drew Barrymore.

And somehow, all of this cuteness is never cloying, and the profundity never reaches or grasps, talks over our heads, or down to us. The movie makes us see the world with fresh eyes, kids again; we're scared, we're sad, we're worried, we're triumphant, we're in love (the non-sexual kind, which is plain and simple and not at all confusing, unlike the adult version). That's the magic; I wish it could last forever (without, perhaps, so many tears).

Movies: Jaws

I wasn't yet born in 1975 when Jaws came out, and all through the 1980s when it might have aired on television, I was too young to watch such a scary movie. Throughout the 1990s it must have seemed embarrassingly hokey, because I never heard a thing about it, and plenty of people, more than 30 years later, still find it embarrassingly hokey, because, when I announced the other day that it was being screened at the old Ziegfeld and I that I was going, I received a variety of unimpressed and sarcastic responses. And so, as usual, I went by myself, and I had a grand old time.

Since I wasn't even born until the 80s, it can't be simple nostalgia speaking when I say that they just don't make movies like this anymore. I screamed out loud four or five times, but my screams were of delighted, delicious terror (the distinction between a scary movie (like Jaws)and a horror movie (like The Hills Have Eyes, listed under IMDB keywords "gory violence" and "mutilation") has something to do with whether the fright attacks your spine (that tingle means it's scary) or your stomach (that feeling that you're going to puke means it's horror)). While plenty of people refused to swim in the ocean after watching Jaws, I doubt that anyone puked in the theater; the "gory violence" is generally off camera (all we see is blood-red water, and few already-dead body parts), and when on-camera, never sustained (screams, yes, but mastication, no).

It might be safe to assume that you know the plot of Jaws, but I didn't know it walking into the theater, so there might just be one or two of you out there who, like me, grew up under the rock of extreme youth. And so, here it goes: Brody (a likably nerdy Roy Scheider) is the new Police Chief of Amity Island, an Eastern Seaboard summer resort; he has just transferred with his family from New York, and this is his first summer on the job. When the remains of a missing girl point to a shark attack, he tries to close the beaches, but the mayor, worried about preserving tourist income, won't let him do so. The shark, though, keeps attacking; soon a little boy is eaten alive, then a few fishermen. Hooper (a young, bumbling Richard Dreyfuss), a young shark aficionado from the Oceanographic Institute, arrives on the scene to tell the fishermen that the shark they've just caught is not the shark responsible for the attack. Ultimately, he, Hooper, and kooky old Quint (a salty Robert Shaw) sail out to catch the beast; it's quite a battle of wills, and after the shark chomps more than halfway through the boat, and all the way through Quint, man finally prevails.

What's really so delightful about Jaws is the intense aestheticism. I was warned about a "mechanical shark" that would make me laugh with embarrassment, but I found myself screaming and squealing instead of laughing, even at the end, when we see its giant head up and out in plain air. In fact, this film is never visually wanting; Spielberg creates a number of stunning tableaus, often of the lone mariner/man against beast/allegorical variety (what I really feel like he does here is make Moby Dick accessible, giving nobility back to the humans). Toward the end, the tilted sails and rigging of the sinking ship stand in silhouette against a darkening sky, with Brody's exhausted body perched in elegant exhaustion at the top. You never would have imagined that the ocean could be so peaceful just minutes after the explosion of a giant shark (and it probably wouldn't actually be so; I imagine all the blood and fresh carrion would bring on a swarm of sharks and carnivorous fish). This accomplishment, resolution, sigh of relief is key to the scary movie (the horror movie would have ended with the threat of continued violence—a shark fin following the two heroes as they swam home); it frees us to walk out of the theater happy, satisfied, reassured, and ready to swim in the ocean again.

Movies: Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures

We didn't watch movies much when I was growing up, but we did get a VCR in the early 90s, and I was able to record a few movies off of television (Big Business, Troop Beverly Hills, and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures). I was the kind of kid who could gleefully watch the same movie over and over again, and I probably saw each of these over 100 times. I watched Bill and Ted so many times that, to this day, my sometimes socially-awkward father still speaks to me in Bill and Ted-isms (e.g. "Would you like to taste my stir fry? It's most excellent.") Of course, by high school I had grown out of such nonsense, and started seeing fresh movies at theaters; I hadn't seen Bill and Ted for more than ten years when I saw that it was IFC's midnight movie last week, and decided that I had to go.

I mustn't have caught the opening credits on my childhood VHS tape, because they were completely unfamiliar. As soon as the throned, silver-clad figure announced "It is time," sending Rufus (George Carlin) into the time machine/phone booth, though, everything progressed as I remembered. If you happen to be so unfortunate as to not know what this movie is about, I will tell you (though you really need to see it for yourself): Bill and Ted live in Southern California, where they attend public high school and spend their free time in the garage, rocking out with electric guitars that they don't know how to play. In the future, a highly-evolved society is founded on their music, and so, when they are about to fail history, with the consequence of Ted being sent to military school and their band, Wyld Stallions, being broken up, the people of the future send Rufus back in a time machine, to help them pass their final project and thus evade a less-excellent alternate future. Bill and Ted, after meeting Rufus and 24-hours-into-the-future versions of themselves, pack into the phone booth and start traveling through history, kidnapping such historical figures as Billy the Kid, Joan of Arc, Sigmund Freud, Socrates, Genghis Kahn, Napoleon, etc. They bring these figures to the local mall to get a taste of modern life (where hilarity ensues), and then bring them to school, where they put on a blow-out presentation, causing the auditorium of students to wave their cigarette lighters and their teacher to give them an A, ensuring that the future is protected. It's sort of silly, and it's sort of brilliant, featuring such existential moments as when Bill and Ted meet themselves the first time, and then, go back to meet themselves again and have the same conversation, only this time as the other two selves (remarking afterward that, woah, that conversation made a lot more sense this time around).

A note on the language: Bill and Ted are the first main characters of a film to speak in the stoner/surfer Southern Cal lingo that would later define Pauly Shore. If there had been no Bill and Ted, the future (the present as we know it) would be different; there could have been no Dude, Where's My Car?, for better or for worse (I've always found that film existentially brilliant, but perhaps all that can be blamed on my childhood obsession with Bill and Ted).

A note on fame: Ted, as you likely know, is one of the first serious (ha!) roles played by the now-famous "hearthrob" Keanu Reeves. Bill, as you probably don't know, is played by some guy named Alex Winter (who never had a Speed or Matrix to cement his fame). I distinctly remember being a little girl and thinking Bill was the cute one. So how is it that Ted became the famous one? I thought that maybe my tastes had simply been childish (after all, my earliest childhood crush was on Davy Jones of The Monkees), and yet, upon re-watching, it's clear that, while neither Bill nor Ted is cut out for rocket science, Bill is definitely the smarter of the two (he fixes the broken time machine with a wad of gum and some tin cans, he tends to use the larger vocabulary words in more creative ways ("We are destined to flunk most egregiously"), and, when caught in a Waiting for Godot loop with regard to recruiting Van Halen for the band, and first needing a "most-triumphant video," but not being able to have such a video until they know how to play their instruments, and hence needing Van Halen, Bill's thoughts the more coherent, whereas Ted's are the more circuitous). It does not surprise me that, even as a child, I went for the more intelligent of the two characters (who also happened to be blond, which had to have helped, since I hadn't yet grown into an appreciation of the "tall, dark, and handsome" thing).

A note on watching movies hundreds of times: Yes, I still remembered most of the lines. Brains are amazing.

Books: Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, by Tom Wolfe

This isn't Wolfe at his best, but Wolfe is generally pretty good, even when he's lazy. Not that these two essays are lazy, exactly, but somehow (and it might simply come down to a personal preference of mine with regard to essay content) they aren't as gripping as those contained in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby and other volumes.

Radical Chic is definitely the better of the two, describing in great name-dropping detail a party thrown by Leonard Bernstein and his wife for the Black Panthers, to help them fund raise. All of the New York liberal intelligentsia attended, ready to throw money at this violent, revolutionary cause, and Wolfe plainly lays out the before, the during, and the aftermath: a PR backlash criticizing these wealthy liberals for demonstrating their hipness by throwing a party in honor of a bunch of bigoted killers (rightfully so, Wolfe seems to think, without telling us that outright).

Mau-mauing the Flack Catchers also approaches the topic of race, and less gingerly. The scene this time is a government office, in which a bureaucrat is approached by a group of Blacks, Hispanics, Filipinos, and, most frighteningly (to him, of course) Samoans. These people are there to demand more summer jobs for the district (something over which this office seems to have some but not much control), but ultimately, they get much more satisfaction out of scaring the bejeezus out of him by shouting and making a scene (this threatening without making good is the mau-mauing, the man, whose sole purpose is to catch flak while the boss is out in Washington lobbying for more funding, is the flak catcher). The laziness here, I think, is not in Wolfe's writing, but in his intellectual conclusion—a bit of a cliche, and a racist one at that.

Books: The Emperor, by Ryszard Kapuściński

I picked up this book after reading about Ryszard Kapuściński somewhere, and deciding that I should be familiar with his work, and then finding out that he had written something on Haile Selassie. A long-time reggae fan, I've always wondered who the hell this Haile Selassie guy is (he's probably the most name-checked figure in all reggae). Unfortunately, while The Emperor gave me quite a good idea of Selassie's governing style (he was the Emperor of Ethiopia until 1974), it did not refer in any way to Jamaica, Rastafarianism, or reggae; in fact, it presented Selassie in a negative enough light to make me wonder why my favorite songs would celebrate him with lyrics like "Hail to the King, Haile Selassie."

Kapuściński's volume is comprised of a well-curated series of interviews he conducted with a number of people who had been part of Selassie's retinue, as servants, ministers, and lackeys. (One testimonial, for example, comes from the man whose job it was to place a pillow under Selassie's feet each time the Emperor sat in a chair (he had short legs, which dangled from his high thrones).) What emerges is a shadowy portrait (if I were to make a movie from this book, Selassie would never be shown in an objectifying light; he would either be constantly in shadow, or, occasionally, he would emanate his own light) of a self-isolating paranoiac who retained power much in the way that Stalin did (rather than killing his enemies, though, Selassie seemed able to achieve the same affect by simply demoting them: either a testimonial to his greatness, or to the absurd poverty of Ethiopia).

Later, I read about Selassie on wikipedia (where I found out that his birth name was Ras Tafari, hence Rastafarianism. . .), and it seemed as though what actions Kapuściński presents as the empty gestures of bad leadership (traveling the world to meet with other leaders, building factories and dams and other signs of industrial progress, erecting palaces in far-flung regions of the desert, all while his people were starving) had paid off rather well; wiki presents him as a good leader who modernized his country and spoke out internationally against colonialism. So. . . who's biased? It seems that Selassie, like Christ, never asked that a religion be started in his name. And yet, he did arrive in Jamaica and see people praising him, and failed to deny his divinity. While that doesn't disclose whether his leadership was good or bad, the fact that he closed Universities (where subversive Western ideals of Democracy were spreading) and squashed a Democratic revolution (as told by Kapuściński, not wiki) is haunting. There's no reason why a leader can't be somewhat good and somewhat bad, or good for awhile, and then bad, but, if I had to choose right now, I would lay my odds on Kapuściński. One man on the ground speaking in real time with people close to the throne must know more than a bunch of wiki drones who weren't there. Although the wiki drones should have read this book. Hmm.

Movies: Le Mépris (Contempt)

I was warned that this movie was awful, but I went to see it anyway; that might be why I liked it so much. It's not that I'm a complete contrarian, but I have noticed an inverse correlation between expectations and pleasure (but not for brilliant films and terrible ones, merely for the fence-straddlers). Contempt scores a ten for aesthetics, featuring not just Bardot, whom I actually don't like so much (there's something about her teeth that makes her look sort of dumb), but the insuperable Mediterranean coast of Italy, as well as director Godard's primary color obsession, such that every shot features items in at least two if not all three: mustard yellow, fire engine red, and royal blue. Bathrobes, books, couches, towels, dresses are tossed against a generally neutral background (the creme color of raw canvas, or the stark white of gesso) in pre-meditated carelessness, disclosing that we are in a stylized, aestheticized world: the world of the cinema (which, the opening quotation from Bazin instructs us, is where we go to find "a world that corresponds to our desires.")

Bardot might be the simplest thing that corresponds to our desires (or the thing that corresponds to our simplest desires?), and so Godard serves her up nude, in bed, in the opening scene, bathed in cool blue and warm red lights. She speaks to her lover and asks him, starting with her feet, whether he likes each part of her body, and he tells her yes, he quite likes her feet, her knees, her breasts, her face. The camera roves over her bare buttocks and we rather like them, too. Coming on the heels of the opening credits, in which we see part of the film being filmed, while a voice speaks the credits aloud (in whimsical French a younger movie-goer might associate with Jean-Pierre Jeunet), until the cameraman turns and points his lens right at us, we immediately know we are watching an "art film," and our expectations are set for such. But then, Godard turns a bit on us, and turns his film into a kind of domestic pot-boiler; it turns out that Paul (Michel Piccoli) is more than Camille's (Bardot) lover; he's her husband, and he's a writer, and a rift is about to come up between them.

American movie producer Prokosch (a magnificent caricature by Jack Palance) has hired veteran Fritz Lang to shoot Odysseus, but the artiste keeps filming unmarketable shots; he wants Paul to rewrite the screenplay. Paul seems amenable to the project (Prokosch writes him a big check, which he examines and then puts into his breast pocket in assignation, at which point we are to read him as something of a sell-out, though he maintains a kind of psychic connection with Lang throughout the exchange, so that we are hesitant to accuse him of completely subsuming art for money), and even sends Camille off with the lecherous Prokosch as a kind of collateral, packing her into Prokosch's two-seater red convertible, against her will. This starts the boiling (and also the first tiring lull in the film, which I would argue is a bit too long for its plot). Back at home, Camille and Paul quarrel; she's clearly angry with him, but refuses to explain why. She toys with him, wearing a black wig over her blond locks, getting in and out of the bathtub, walking around their Mondrian apartment wearing a bath sheet, insisting that she will sleep on the couch that night, refusing to Capri with the film crew. He asks whether anything happened between her and Prokosch; she declines to answer.

Ultimately, they do both go to Capri, and during filming at the producer's awesome villa, which clings to a cliff over the sea, the proverbial pot begins to boil over. Camille at last kisses Prokosch (even though she clearly still detests him) when she knows Paul will see. Paul gets a gun and tries to decide what he ought to do with it. Camille goes for a swim in the ocean, naked, baiting him. All the while, Paul and Fritz Lang are engaged in a conversation about the Odyssey, considering a theory that Odysseus originally left home for the Trojan war because he was unhappy with Penelope, and stayed away for so long for that very reason. (It is clear, when Paul gets the gun, that he is mirroring his actions in some way on those of Odysseus, who kills Penelope's suitors upon his return.) But Paul doesn't use his gun; instead, he says goodbye to Fritz Lang and leaves Capri, having read a note from Camille, who has already left with Prokosch in his little red convertible, which crashes into a truck and kills them both (in a very aesthetically pleasing way, I should add).

I generally have trouble identifying with women's feminine behavior in films, but here, I found Camille's wrath, motivated by, dare I say it, contempt of Paul's sell-out behavior (selling out art is one thing, selling out your wife quite another) perfectly understandable and perfectly defensible. In leaving with the revolting Prokosch (who, I failed to mention, speaks only English, whereas Camille speaks only French), she almost literally cuts her nose to spite her face. It's the kind of retribution that simultaneously seeks to detach and enrage, demonstrating to the offender the infinite conclusion of his actions. Though Bardot plays Camille as a kind of passive, frustrated chess piece (even if she's the Queen, she can't travel off the board, as she seems to want to do, moving from room to room of their small apartment like a caged animal), it works; at first I'm as annoyed at her as her husband is, but soon he begins to annoy me as much as he annoys her, and though I hate Prokosch (as much as they both do), I don't blame Camille for using him for the dual purpose of escape and retribution.