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On sale now: What was the Hipster?

2010-08-27T15:41:17Z

Dear readers, we're extremely pleased to announce that the third installment of our small book series, What was the Hipster? is now available for pre-order. Based on a panel discussion of the same name held at the New School last spring—featuring editor Mark Greif, hipster critic Christian Lorentzen, and contributor Jace Clayton aka DJ/Rupture—the book represents our investigation of the rise and fall of the contemporary hipster.

In addition to the panel transcript, the book includes responses from critics Jennifer Baumgardner, Patrice Evans aka The Assimilated Negro, and Margo Jefferson, as well as essays on douchebags, Hasids versus hipsters, and ill-fated sneaker shop Alife Rivington. It ships in mid-October; order your copy today!

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First Issue of N1FR Launched

2010-08-23T21:48:54Z

We're proud to announce the first issue of the N1FR, our online film supplement, edited by A. S. Hamrah and created with the support of the Independent Film Channel. This issue includes essays on Pedro Costa, Claire Denis, Judd Apatow, macho independent filmmakers/dealmakers, cineplex hopping, 1980s mass films, and two separate reviews of Kick-Ass. The issue leads off with Chris Fujiwara's "To Have Done with Contemporary Cinema." See the full table of contents, plus A. S. Hamrah's introduction, here.

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To Have Done with the Contemporary Cinema

2010-08-23T21:45:45Z

by Chris Fujiwara

Image: Face (d. Tsai Ming-liang, France, 2009).

I used to mind being called a journalist. It seemed demeaning and beside the point of what I wanted to do and believed I was really doing, sometimes, which was criticism. Now I'm way up in my ivory tower (a flimsy one, which you access by a ladder that you have to remember to pull up after you) and am rarely asked for my opinion on anything that happened more recently than forty years ago, and I wish I were a journalist again. Journalists have lots of advantages. They get free stuff and invitations. Many people respect them even though they despise them. But the most important perk of all is that the journalist is free from a worry that haunts the rest of us: whether or not we are contemporary.

No one can challenge the journalist's claim to be contemporary. Journalists work in the very factory of the contemporary, at its "heart machine" (a term from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a film that tried to beat the contemporary by anticipating it). They make the contemporary contemporary. That their labor has market value is their clear justification. Paid to write about what just happened or is about to happen, journalists are embedded—there, I've used a word with very contemporary overtones and it's only the second paragraph—inside capitalism, deep inside.

So deep that maybe journalists might be the least alienated among us—but that word has too non-contemporary a sound. Another word might be better: say, the least expropriated. Of course this sounds like a paradox, but let's try it for a moment: Giorgio Agamben says (in Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience) that experience has been expropriated and is no longer accessible. Could journalists be people who live so much in the day-to-day excitement and change of expropriated experience that they get to where it becomes, again, experience? This might be the biggest attraction of the profession: it gives a license to live through fully, to the end, the conditions of late capitalism, conditions that for most of the rest of humanity are distresses to be endured, but which the journalist faces with the intoxicating satisfaction of having helped perpetuate them. For the sake of this intoxication, people are even willing to give up getting paid.

The most expropriated of all (and therefore, by our trial paradox, the least) might be the journalist who is also a film reviewer. This is because of the nature of film, so close to reality and yet so far away, and sometimes the closer we feel it takes us to reality the farther away we are. In that sense, just putting the words "contemporary" and "cinema" together implies a connection that isn't real. Yet people use the phrase; they seem to know what it means. No doubt it's illegitimate to try to define contemporary cinema without first getting a handle on the contemporary. But whatever gets inside a film belongs to aesthetics; only outside films does a contact between cinema and the contemporary take place. Such contacts are fleeting but sometimes electrifying: Jafar Panahi's imprisonment in Iran during the 2010 Cannes film festival; the news that Apichatpong Weerasethakul's departure for the same festival was being stalled by the Thai government (in the end they let him go, and he won the Palme d'Or); film critic Peter Brunette's fatal heart attack at breakfast during the Taormina festival. . . . These things remind us that we live in some kind of world (whether we can call what happens in it "experience" or not).

The notion of contemporary cinema is problematic in another way, too. Since the 1970s, many people have been used to thinking of the cinema as post-revolutionary, or as an unfinished revolution, or as dragging itself on in a kind of zombie-afterlife pastiche-and-parody mode. First Godard and the French New Wave in the 1960s, then Fassbinder and the New German Cinema in the 1970s, declared in different ways and for different reasons that the old ways of cinema no longer worked. The early 1970s films of Robert Altman led a wave of Hollywood genre revisionism, whose tones of suspicion, condescension, and nagging doubt proved that even residents of Malibu were finding it difficult to go home again. With the creative paralysis of Hollywood in the 1980s came a tendency to view the cinematic past no longer as an inaccessible paradise but as a repository of recyclable clichés. In a later development of that same trend, the reimagination of 1970s American cinema as a golden age of auteur-driven filmmaking led to a new generation of directors working consciously with themes and images drawn from films from that period.

The cinema of the past forty years has undergone a transformation much like that of the real-estate agent Flitcraft, whose story is told as a parable in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (though not in John Huston's 1941 film). Flitcraft was an ordinary family man who, on narrowly missing being crushed to death by a falling beam, understood that life was chaos and left his family and company, only to be found years later in a different town with a new name, job, and family. "He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling." During the 1970s, the cinema got used to being in a crisis state. Then, at various times at various places around the world but by the early 1990s pretty definitely everywhere, it got used to not being in a crisis state.

The crisis/non-crisis view of cinema expresses a cinephilic prescription of what cinema is or in some essential way must be. Jim Jarmusch's films are exemplary because they acknowledge, like Wenders's great films of the 1970s and early 1980s, that classical narrative filmmaking has become impossible. Contemporary mainstream Hollywood cinema merely confirms this proposition with its endless remakes, sequels, sequels to remakes, and remakes of sequels, its grand-scale repetition-compulsion machine that has everyone wrapped up, from the crassest ex-TV-commercial director to the most revered auteurs, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino among them.

This cinephilic narrative has undergone refinement in response to two recent developments. First, digital technology has wrought changes that have been seen variously as augmenting the old powers of cinema, freeing film from the constraints and responsibilities of photographic realism, or spelling the artistic doom of mainstream cinema by condemning it to the pursuit of ever-more stimulating special effects. (The current notion that 3D somehow radically changes, or will save, cinema—either by dragging it further toward some aesthetic destiny or just by bringing more asses into the theater—is the kind of apocalyptic idea that comes out of a crisis perception, as happened before during the crisis of the early 1950s, when Hollywood studios were desperate for some gimmick to lure viewers back to the box office; let's call it Bwana Devil Syndrome.) Second, it is sometimes suggested that the worldwide boom in independent, "art" filmmaking since the early 1990s, made possible by lower production costs and improving video image, has been more than just quantitative and that more good, even great, films are being made than ever before (at the same time as, thanks to DVDs and the internet, more films are becoming accessible than ever before).

Let's stay in the realm of art film, since it's there that we can expect to find the most contemporary of contemporary cinema, if we can live with the nagging doubt that this expectation derives from precepts of Modernism that are themselves out-of-date. Contemporary art film has its already established dominant traditions, the main one being the extending of photographic realism to the hallucinatory degree where the image is so saturated with reality that the viewer becomes aware of being faced with a gallery-installation subversion of documentary realism that throws the construction of reality back on the viewer—something that happens in Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth (outtakes from which two films were in fact repurposed for a two-screen video installation), in Lisandro Alonso's Los Muertos and Fantasma, in James Benning's recent DV work (Ruhr, Pig Iron). Those may be extreme cases, but something like this process virtually defines the terrain of contemporary art cinema, at least the best-known part of it, from Hou Hsiao-hsien, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Jia Zhangke to Gus Van Sant (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days).

Since of the directors I've just named, only the last has ever had his work shown in regular, non-specialist movie theaters in the United States, it is difficult to ignore the sense that the terrain is a very fragmented one. One's view of contemporary cinema at any moment depends not just on idealist aesthetic principles but on chance: the opportunities that films have to be distributed and that viewers have to see them. The possibility that chance should define culture being unacceptable, we tend to appeal to some kind of authority in these matters, and the film journalist, our expropriated friend, is, almost by job definition, the person whom we grant the right to define what the contemporary cinema is.

Journalists define contemporary cinema at either of two levels: by the films that are shown at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, and Rotterdam (and maybe a few other festivals) or by the films that get some kind of regular commercial release. Aesthetically, the first level is by far the more significant one, "by common agreement," if I can be allowed to use the phrase in a context where who gets to agree on anything, and in what forum this agreement would be reached, are seemingly less and less matters of common agreement. The really significant, moment-defining films emerge from the festival circuit, whether they get a wide release or not (and they almost never do).

In On Film Festivals, a recent anthology edited by critic Richard Porton, several contributors advance the idea that each year, a certain number of important films are made. Mark Peranson thinks there might be "fifty outstanding films per year, films that any programmer or critic, personal taste aside, would agree are films that any self-respecting international film festival should show—works that will stand the test of time, or take the pulse of the time." Robert Koehler, more conservatively, postulates that "a year with more than sixty [such films] is extraordinary, and that under forty is closer to the norm." James Quandt is stingiest of all: "Any given year turns up ten, maybe twenty good-to-great films, if we're lucky." In fact, there is no festival anywhere that plays all fifty, all forty, all twenty, or even all ten of these films. During the one-to-two-year window of their festival existence, they will never all be in the same place at the same time. A few will open in regular theaters a few days after their festival premieres; some will eventually go around to museums. After a year or two most of them will be available on DVD for anyone who wants them.

If the outstanding films are never all visible at the same time until the window of their contemporaneity has closed, it means they are truly contemporary only for a small group of people—critics, programmers, and distributors. (The rest of us are like people looking at stars that appear bright but, in their own real time, may have already gone dim.) And if we indeed have a common agreement that this small group can declare what the contemporary cinema is, let's acknowledge that the conditions under which they exercise their judgment are usually bad. Programmers see almost everything on DVD—usually in an office, at home on TV, on a laptop—or else, like critics, at other festivals, often at the rate of three or four a day, a rate that pulverizes both discrimination and memory.

"The Decay of Cinema," Susan Sontag's much-decried 1996 lament for a golden age of cinema that she dates to the 1960s and 1970s ("the feverish age of movie-going…. For some fifteen years there were new masterpieces every month. How far away that era seems now") expressed a certain truth. As defined by Antonioni, Godard, and Bergman, the cinema of the period Sontag eulogized was truly contemporary: its key works, made by artists who were nothing if not interested in defining their own time, were screened in theaters around the world and generally acknowledged as significant. Now cinema is pulverized, privatized, and personalized, and if this situation has resulted in much euphoria, it also results in much cynicism and despair.

The real crisis of cinema, its contemporary crisis, which Godard and Wenders foresaw well, is that the cinema no longer circulates within a common space and time but has withdrawn into that state of inaccessibility that, for Agamben, defines the contemporary and which he likens to a museum. “The museification of the world is today an accomplished fact…. Everything today can become a Museum, because this term simply designates the exhibition of an impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing” (Profanations). It's not accidental that museums have moved into film sponsorship with the involvement of the Musée d'Orsay in Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon, Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day, and Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours and of the Louvre in Tsai Ming-liang's Face, or that museums figure as locations not only in those films but in other recent films from Costa's Colossal Youth to Jarmusch's Limits of Control.

The flip side of this museification is the impossibility of ignoring anything. The journalist exemplifies this condition, whose realm is the internet. The journalist is doomed to say yes to things, even in trying to say no, just by acknowledging them. And the internet is a desert of affirmation, where users, turned into private librarians, are almost forced to conserve everything out of fear that something might turn out someday to have value for somebody. (Just as the festival programmer and the critic, knowing they may be wrong, hold on to DVDs of films they didn't like.)

It's hard to see a way out of this predicament, and in the meantime we're thrown back on the old time-defying formulas. At some level contemporary cinema comes down to a willed untimeliness, to a hunch, which any of us, no matter how far displaced from the institutional centers and paradises of cinema, might have, that whatever film we're seeing, there are probably enough other people around the world seeing it for us to call ourselves a culture. A film must be untimely to be worth talking about. Certainly there's no point (apart from purposes of cultural commentary) talking about films that need massive publicity campaigns to generate the illusion of a timeliness they will quickly lose (because it's only the time-less-ness of an imaginary requirement to be seen). Were any of Robert Bresson's films, from Les anges du péché in 1943 to L'argent in 1983, "contemporary"? And yet, they are (and not just because so much "Bressonian" audiovisual media has appeared in the nearly thirty years since he made his last film that Bressonianism can feel like a cliché of modernity). The contemporary is a hunch, a surprise, the pleasure of lighting on something that feels like it came from some place where the world still moves, something that has its own idea, surpassing our conceptions (which are necessarily old ones), of what the contemporary is.

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Bad Influences, Bad Personalities

2010-08-23T21:45:40Z

by A.S. Hamrah

Image: Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (d. Serge Bromberg and Ruxanda Medrea, France, 2009)

Exit Through the Gift Shop

What begins as an interesting documentary about how Banksy and other famous graffiti artists make their art soon turns into a semi-mockumentary that plays into people's desire to believe the art world is too easily manipulated and therefore something they don't have to pay attention to; that, in fact, they would be idiots to pay any attention to it at all. What they should pay attention to is Banksy, who doesn't credit himself or anybody else as the director of this film, but who appears on-screen to speak to us from the shadows, if that's really him, next to a monkey mask with ping pong balls for eyes.

Much of the film takes place in Los Angeles, which Banksy sees as an art-deprived suburb of Disneyland. When he brings his site-specific op-ed cartooning to a Los Angeles gallery, the film acts like this is a revelation to the locals, who (presumably after years of taking in everything from Ed Ruscha to Raymond Pettibon to Mike Kelley) are easily wowed by a live elephant.

We are told the film was originally meant to be assembled from thousands of hours of footage shot by a kooky Frenchman. The film's rejection of this footage as incoherent and unsalvageable is a normalizing strategy that forces literal meaning on us by finding a regular documentary inside a mess--we are supposed to believe that because of someone else's incompetence, Banksy had no choice but to make something anyone could understand. Banksy's own coy self-definitions, for which he apologizes in a recessive friendly-macho way, pull him into the back of the frame and out of the film. His will to absence makes the monumental daring of his work all the more impressive, especially since it's a pleasant kind of art that brightens the urban landscape and cheers people up.

Chase

Twenty folding chairs in an un-airconditioned screening room on a humid night in Chelsea. The artist is present. She is Liz Magic Laser (her real name--the question must come up a lot), here to introduce Chase, her two-and-a-half hour film of Bertolt Brecht's Man Equals Man, a play first performed in Germany in 1926.

Laser shot Chase on digital video in the ATM vestibules of banks in New York City. She worked without permission, gaining access like anyone else would, by swiping a bank card to open the door. In the film, her actors perform next to customers using the ATMs, among security guards and cleaning ladies. The actors declaim Brecht's words while bystanders, a built-in audience, make withdrawals and deposits or wait around. Usually people ignore the actors, but some, roped in, play along for a moment before they leave. Whenever a new customer opens the door, a burst of unmixed sound from the outside world floods in, then the door closes and cuts it off again. One actor, Max Woertendyke, struts and works the crowd like he was born to act in foyers backed by a chorus of beeping machines. At one point, without breaking character, Woertendyke nonchalantly takes a Gummi Bear from a package a bystander is holding and eats it.

Laser gets a lot of good angles in these small spaces no one who isn't homeless or an architect ever thinks about or studies. She does it without resorting to off-kilter framing or wide-angle lenses--the spaces are not distorted or dramatized, and the film is free of production value and art direction. Another of the many strengths of this brilliantly conceived film is how Laser does not have to fuzz-out any of the corporate logos that fill the backgrounds, because this is art for an art gallery, which is granted a freedom the movies and TV don't have and should demand. Chase shows us the world as we actually see it, festooned with advertising that isn't product placement.

Each actor performs separately in a different ATM lobby. Laser cuts the film as if they were together, talking across the void of the ATM monitors. (She explained this by mentioning Eisenstein.) Much of the cutting doesn't match, the sound cuts don't match, and some of the acting, like the camerawork, is amateurish. The actors, alone in their vestibules, never quite agree on the pronunciations of certain names, including that of the play's protagonist, Galy Gay. It doesn't matter. Chase is one of those rare films that benefits from its flaws and limitations, getting better and more interesting as it goes along.

Brecht's play, which takes place in the northern reaches of a farcical, Kipling-esque India (“where the tiger asks the jaguar about his teeth”), attempts to demonstrate how soldiers are created. The simple raw material of human personality is easily broken down, Brecht says, and it readily adapts to combat and killing. Part of Man Equals Man is set near a treasure-filled pagoda, which may have suggested an ATM to Laser. One side effect of having her actors perform opposite ATMs is that we get to see how much money they have in their bank accounts (not much) when they make withdrawals to use cash as a prop. That's not something that happens in Salt. Here, the money is on the screen.

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Sex and the City 2

A group of Americans, weighed down with equipment, is airlifted into a Middle Eastern country on a pointless mission. Once there, they live in a protected environment separated from the local population. On their forays away from the karaoke nights at their base, they screw up everything they attempt, alienating the natives and getting more confused the longer they stay. For reasons impossible to understand, their time in this country drags on and on, yet they can't seem to end it. Finally expelled from this quagmire of their own making, they leave behind a mess and some money for the help.

Just as there had to be a second Iraq war after the unfinished business of the first, there had to be a Sex and the City 2. For in the first, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) did not get what she really wanted, just like the first Bush Administration did not get what it really wanted in the first war.

In the first movie, Carrie pretended to learn that a big diamond ring wasn't what love and marriage were all about. In the second, she gets her ring, a sinister black diamond symbolizing the war-for-oil aspects of this shameless movie. Carrie's pyrrhic victory, a consolation prize, caps a movie that is a form of debasement before the Arab world. It shows Americans as grasping whores who make endless justifications for their lameness and greed, who are bored with their lives yet incapable of learning. The film is a low point in the history of American pop culture, but to mock specific scenes in it would be a waste of time. One image lingers: Sarah Jessica Parker shoving Pringles potato chips in her mouth on an airplane.

I Am Love

Of all the things that are influential about Hitchcock's films, who would have guessed that in the end it would be the hair that was the most influential of all? It proves the triviality of influence, something I Am Love goes out of its way to make us understand. Whether striving for a Viscontian lushness, an Antonionian loneliness, a Sirkian catharsis, or a Hitchcockian precision with hair, I Am Love revels in notions of provenance, which it relates to qualities of real experience and feelings of true luxury, pleasures the film lets us know few people truly understand, even if they can afford them.

One of the main ways it does that is through food. The meals prepared by the young locavore chef, the adulterous lover of Tilda Swinton's married Emma, are transcendent, enigmatic, yummy. While the two make love in a meadow by his organic farm, we get closeups of bugs that are reminiscent of the life-changing prawns he served Emma, not ants at a picnic or worms in an apple.

“The Recchis are exploiters!” someone blurts in this movie about the family of upper-class Italian industrialists it dismantles. It shouts what it has only partially managed to show. Emma's husband, for instance, a cold fish who quickly turns on her when the time comes, does callous things like change the channel when she's trying to watch the movie Philadelphia on TV. That way we know he's a real bastardo.

The film is too much in love with beauty to be anything but pretty, and by the end it's corrupted by the system it indicts. Before a bizarre, inappropriate happy ending featuring Emma and her chef curled up in a cave, Swinton has effectively left the film, running out in a track suit like she's late to the set of the next Narnia movie.

The Kids Are All Right

I have not been everywhere, and I have never lived in Los Angeles. But as far as I know, there is no corner of the universe where a guy like the unmarried restaurateur played by Mark Ruffalo in The Kids Are All Right would dump a girl like the crazy-haired hostess played by Yaya Dacosta for the married lesbian played by Julianne Moore. It boggles the mind more than The Last Airbender in 3D.

Let's examine this character, Paul, whom Ruffalo plays. Paul has such an air of manly skill about him he makes the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft look like Truman Capote. He owns a motorcycle he fixes himself. He listens to X in an old truck he drives. He has his own house with a tiered backyard and his own restaurant where he is the head chef. He grows food for his restaurant on his own organic farm; when he picks vegetables there he politely ignores the come-ons of a hot helper girl who wants to roll around in the chard with him.

Even though Paul shrugs off the farm girl, we are supposed to see him as a sexual opportunist. Paul is nice, and sometimes even wise, and he genuinely likes the two teenagers who were conceived by the married couple Jules and Nic (Annette Bening) with sperm he donated years ago. But why is he so nice? To what end? Why is he so pleasant and helpful to these people who were strangers to him until just the other day?

The Kids Are All Right joins a line of recent movies that portray unmarried men over forty as lonely, confused, and adrift--appearances to the contrary notwithstanding--because they don't have families of their own. Evidently it is inconceivable--excuse the pun--to the makers of American feature films that a man could be content without a wife and children.

On the higher end of this bachelor scale we find George Clooney in Up in the Air. He may seem suave, carefree, and capable, but no. He is a husk, only going through the motions as he flies around the country ruining people's lives. He, too, will end up staring through a window at someone else's happy family. On the low end of the scale we find Ben Stiller in Greenberg. Maybe it's better not to think about him.

Before I get too personal I should look at other aspects of The Kids Are All Right. This heartwarming family comedy is the first film I have ever seen in which t-shirt choice so thoroughly dictates character. At times the movie seems like satire, but by the end, when Bening's crotchety Nic blasts Paul with a “go make your own family, buster, and take your stinking paws off mine,” it reveals itself as only slightly less conservative than Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds.

Strange lapses puzzled me. Why do we never learn what college young Joni is going to, even though it keeps coming up and eventually we even visit this unnamed institution? Is it to make the film more generic? Why is it never established that Jules has used Paul's hairbrush before Nic goes into his bathroom and finds the incriminating tangle of hair? Is it important that the film can't mention in passing the legal status of gay marriage in California (illegal when the film was made), or would that have been tendentious and therefore not about how hard marriage is for everyone, and therefore not about how everyone is the same? And why does a bartender, who has just poured Nic a glass of wine, ask her if she's going to drink it? In my experience, once it's poured it's a done deal. In California, do they pour it back in the bottle if you've just silently realized you're kind of an alcoholic?

Dogtooth

Stills and trailers made Dogtooth look like an art film starring white people posing for emptied-out art photos influenced by Fairfield Porter paintings. It's not like that. It's something more harrowing and exciting. Dogtooth is simple and restricted, maybe in the end confinement wins out over austerity, but it is not a frosty film about pent-up people who can't show their emotions. It's more about people who aren't allowed to understand anything.

Dogtooth is a Greek film directed by somebody named Yorgos Lanthimos. I would see anything else by him after seeing this amazing film, the best of the summer. With much less at its disposal, it out-Cronenbergs Cronenberg by way of a sunny creepiness that insists on its normality even as it turns incestuous and bloody. Primarily about language and the family, it should be seen by homeschoolers everywhere.

The mother and father in Dogtooth restrict their children--two daughters and a son in their late teens--to their house and yard. The kids know nothing of the world outside, and have been taught that any word that describes something not found at home--motorway, gun--has a meaning from the natural world--wind, flower, bird. The teens gets together to watch videos on TV, but they only watch home movies of their younger selves; as they sit on the couch, they mouth along to things they said years ago. When they do good, their parents reward them with stickers they put on their headboards.

The outside world enters in the form of a young woman the father hires to have sex with the son. This goes badly: she ends up beaten in the head with a VCR wielded by the father, who curses her: “I hope your kids have bad influences and develop bad personalities!” The father (Christos Stergioglu), a fat Grinch who looks like he has no business being in movies, is boring yet scary, especially when he mouths words to his wife in the kitchen so the kids won't hear, has his daughters cut his toenails, or explains that “in two months your mother will give birth to two more children and a dog.” The actors who play the daughters, Aggeliki Papoulia and Mary Tsoni, deserve special recognition for their willingness to do anything, including frenzied dancing inspired by Flashdance and inter-family bathtub groping.

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A Short History of Cahiers du cinéma

Cinephile reviewers attacked this slim book by Emilie Bickerton, a writer for the New Left Review, when it was published by Verso several months ago. They justifiably seized on errors of fact, some of which showed an unwillingness to check simple things; others revealed an unfamiliarity with the history of cinema in general. In tracing the decline of Cahiers du cinéma from aesthetic radicalism through political radicalism and into market-driven acquiescence and subsequent irrelevance, Bickerton does not appear to have seen many of the films she brings up.

Calling John Ford's Two Rode Together by translating its French title into English--she called it The Two Cavaliers in advance copies of the book, which were corrected before publication--tipped off movie-loving reviewers that there was something wrong. Defending that mistake as a proofreading error, as Bickerton did in response to a negative review in Film Comment, did not help her case, especially since equally odd mistakes stand in the book as published. She names many French New Wave films using titles they have never been called outside of imdb.com--Godard's Vivre sa Vie is It's My Life and Chabrol's Les godelureaux and La Rupture are Wise Guys and The Breach. (She also dismisses Chabrol's 1970s films as “poor” apparently without having seen them herself, because someone at Cahiers said that about them at one point, and Truffaut backed him up.)

She has to use a footnote to describe the plot of Godard's Weekend, citing somebody else to explain a seminal film she could have easily seen, and should have before writing this book. She describes Alfred Hitchcock as an exile in Hollywood like Fritz Lang, equating a career move on Hitchcock's part with Lang's flight from the Nazis. Bickerton's most boneheaded goof will cause spit takes all over the world, but especially in France: she implies that Grand Illusion was made under Vichy. By the end, she has described Arnaud Desplechin as an '80s filmmaker and Jean-Jacques Annaud as one from the '90s. I ignore her errors of emphasis and tone only because they're not as fun to list.

Does it sound like I don't like this book? Because that's not the case. I like it very much--it was completely engrossing--and I think anyone interested in the French New Wave, and especially anyone interested in film criticism, should read it. And I think cinephiles offended by it, including the cinephile in me, should get over it and take heed. Bickerton's basic message--that starting in the '80s film criticism caved in without a fight--is undeniable.

Bickerton writes that Cahiers du cinéma started life in the early 1950s with a high-minded goal: “the destruction of prevailing value systems and the elevation of the film maudit.” Thirty years later, as “various factors combined to create an environment that was hostile to the free exploration and critique of cinema outside the market logic,” the magazine devolved into praising M. Night Shyamalan movies as if they were today's undiscovered artistic equivalents of films by Hitchcock and Hawks, side-stepping at the same time any kind of politicized readings that might counter their appeal.

Bickerton quotes Jean-Louis Comolli, an editor at the magazine during its most radical phase in the '60s and '70s. Film criticism and filmmaking, he wrote, must make “a political choice to stop seeing the audience as an inert, amorphous mass open to all sorts of manipulation by advertising,” and instead must “bank on the existence of an audience that is lucid” and “ultimately as creative as the filmmaker.” Bickerton argues that Cahiers switched tactics as the film industry changed during the Reagan-Star Wars era, dumbing down in order to please a new kind of consumer and to drive flagging sales.

Only Serge Daney, the magazine's most vital film critic since the days of Bazin and Truffaut, held fast, admitting that while “the times themselves [had] grown more feeble, in terms of thought,” film critics still had to discover and explain “what was cinema's 'specificity,' given the proliferation of images through advertising and television. . . . And how should the critic conceive of his or her role within this transformed landscape of images?”

How many film critics have taken up this challenge since Daney's death? In her sections on him, Bickerton points a way forward. To make up for the fact-checking errors, Verso could show a real commitment to a genuinely radical film criticism by publishing Daney's work in English translation. For a long time, his English-language readers have had to rely on blogs collecting stray translations. That would be a start.

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Winter's Bone

This harsh film, set in gray Ozark forests, represents a step forward in screen depictions of the rural South, and in the career of its writer-director, Debra Granik. The stripped and collapsed world brought to the screen in Winter's Bone, which was adapted from a novel by Daniel Woodrell, stands in stark contrast to representations of similar territory in indie films from the Bush era, like the odious Junebug (2005). Junebug painted small-town Southerners as humble and lovable God-fearing folks, gentle losers even if they were racist nuts. In Winter's Bone, people are poor and dangerous, which is to say they have dignity. Plus they're all on meth, the driver of their economy.

All the performances in this film work. The teenage lead (Jennifer Lawrence), a semi-parentless Renée Zellweger look-alike with no future, carries the film easily. The mountainous, unlistening crime patriarch, who rules from a huge shed that's like a barn for monster trucks, comes across as intractable, ignorant, and deadly. He didn't talk much, but he was convincing. Even the guy playing the most thankless role, a weak-willed state cop, was good. But it is Dale Dickey as Merab, the wife of the criminal patriarch, who steals the film. With her deeply lined face and mean, squinty eyes, Merab cowers and thrives in this methland, scaring the shit out of anyone who dares to asks her a question. It is a cliché for an actress in a countrified film to look as hard as the country where the movie is set, but Dickey's performance is something else. She looks as choppy and blasted as the terrain, but she doesn't slip into Tobacco Road parody mode.

Cyrus

A drab comedic love triangle between a mother (Marisa Tomei, a sexy chipmunk), her son (Jonah Hill, a poison toad), and her new boyfriend (John C. Reilly, a catcher's mitt). Directed by Jay and Mark Duplass, Cyrus was produced by Ridley and Tony Scott to atone for their sins while showing support for a younger pair of director brothers.

Cyrus depicts the lower rungs of media employment as lackluster and low-paying--Reilly's character is some kind of TV editor and lives in the shabbiest apartment I've seen in movies for a long time. Wherever it goes, it is excessively drab for a movie set in LA--a peach nightgown Tomei wears is the same color as her skin and the walls at her place--but it lacks the mortifying intensity of an Elaine May movie, which it at times seems to be going for and really needed.

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Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno

This documentary partially re-assembles a big-budget, ambitiously experimental film Henri-Georges Clouzot, the director of Diabolique and The Wages of Fear, left unfinished after suffering a heart attack on location in the Auvergne in 1964. The film, L'enfer, meant to push cinema to the breaking point, broke Clouzot instead--his heart gave out while he was shooting a lesbian kissing scene between Romy Schneider and pert Dany Carrel. Whenever Clouzot's footage takes over, the film comes to glorious, decadent life; other times, it gets bogged down in talking-head interviews with the original crew and cringe-worthy reenactments featuring two uncomfortable actors on a soundstage.

L'enfer, an international co-production meant to top Hitchcock, adopts techniques from lurid Italian genre films and the surrealistic avant-garde; it looks like a more starkly modern Mario Bava or Kenneth Anger movie. To make the water in a lake to appear blood-red on film, Clouzot's actors are painted green or blue like real-life Na'vi--in 1964, Clouzot had already exposed the superfluity of CGI. Much of the footage consists of camera tests of the alluring Romy Schneider. Her skin spangles and glitters while dots of light roll and spin in her eyes. She exhales cigarette smoke backwards, appearing to breathe it in--smoking in reverse, she inhales smoke from the air. In a purple slip, wearing purple lipstick, she licks her lips with a purple tongue. Trying to find “the improbable colors of madness,” Clouzot predicted a lurid psychedelic world still three or four years away.

The soundtrack, edited together from the film's electro-acoustical music cues and a musique concrète score, competes with kinetic-art-inspired lens effects that bend figures into primitive sculptures seen in funhouse mirrors. Several long scenes are cut together. In one, the film's protagonist (Serge Reggiani), Schneider's jealous husband, desperately follows her from a twisting highway above the lake as she gyrates back and forth on water skis in the foreground--mesmerizing footage from a film that was never made. It calls into question the category of the “late masterpiece,” usually seen as radically austere and stripped-down. It makes you want to see other excessive late-career works plotted in the 1960s and never made, like Fritz Lang's Death of a Career Girl and Hitchcock's Kaleidoscope, which in a reworked version became 1972's Frenzy, not exactly a sane and mild film, but not the freak-out Hitchcock planned.

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Around a Small Mountain

Somber or apprehensive moods or tones in this movie about summertime, the countryside, clothes, and the little agonies of failing circus performers save Around a Small Mountain from being too light, making it strange and buoyant. The way Jane Birkin pauses in a sunny graveyard demonstrates Jacques Rivette's interest in stopping his performers short at moments of reflection. Rivette does this in an unobtrusive, subtle way within simple long takes that do not call attention to themselves the way they do in the work of younger arthouse directors. Similarly, the film's lack of a music score isn't noticeable until Pierre Allio's Tati-esque jazz returns over the end credits, after a final shot of the moon, large in the frame, that makes it look balanced in the air, with a weight we can feel.

It is to the honor of Sergio Castellitto that he appears in Rivette's late films. With his Humphrey Bogart-Leonard Cohen looks, this classic-style film star shows great aplomb even when confused or doing nothing. He contrasts stillness with abrupt motion, enacting the mental agility of Rivette's mise-en-scene. The way he pulls out a chair and sits down mirrors the way he talks and listens. He wears a different suit in every scene, which he carries off more impressively than Tilda Swinton's wardrobe changes in I Am Love, and which, as in that movie, also seem to be part of the point. Here it is an entertaining point, free from histrionics or indictments of society. A nighttime scene in front a café puts Castellito and others on an impromptu stage and goes through several on-off light changes in one shot, plunging the actors in and out of silhouette, reminding us that simple effects in movies are the most sublime.

Inception

Something about Inception confused me. I know it's a head scratcher in general, but after I saw it there was one thing I wanted to understand more than anything else: How did Christopher Nolan come up with the name “Dom Cobb”?

Was it because “Dom Cobb” sounds like something you say when you're just waking up but you're not really awake yet? And you're making that jaw motion where you open and close your mouth like a fish trying to talk while you mumble some incoherent “om, om” syllable because your lips are sticking together? And the person next to you goes, “What was that, honey? Dom Cobb?”

Maybe Dom Cobb is a metaphorical name like Ariadne or Mal, other characters in this turgid crowd pleaser, and I just didn't know what the significance was. A lot of people who have seen it will tell you that Inception is one big metaphor--a movie about making movies, about how movies work, about what it's like to see movies, and how close they are to dreams and how life is a like a dream and like a movie, too. “It's a movie about movies!” these fans insist, giving special emphasis to the word movies the way sometimes people used to say something meaningful was about life. Then they tell you how it was about movies. What they don't tell you is that it's about bad movies.

“Always imagine new places,” Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) instructs, but Inception refuses to do that. It presents instantly recognizable non-places, swanky hotel bars in world capitals, vistas from James Bond movies with skiing in them, post-apocalyptic landscapes from comic books. Suffused with an ahistorical sensibility, this insta-remake of Shutter Island combines the washy metaphysics of Nicholas Roeg films with Where Eagles Dare--a range of unsmiling British unfun. Terrible dialogue fights to the death with bombastic music meant to pound a “militarized subconscious” into further submission, which it does.

Inception succeeds in convincing us for two and a half hours that somehow our dreams and lives are exactly like all the bad action movies we have ever seen. The film has none of the vivid unpredictable banality of dreams or life. Instead it has the kind of banality found in Speed 2--it puts dreamers on cruise control, lays them out on gurneys, runs them up and down elevators. I can't recount the plot of Inception or tell you what it means, but I can tell you this: People whose dream movie is a bad movie about dreams that are like bad movies are fucked.

The section on Dogtooth has been corrected to reflect that Dogtooth is not Yorgos Lanthimos' first film. We're grateful to Mark Asch of The L Magazine for pointing this out.

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Claire Denis

2010-08-23T21:45:35Z

by Christine Smallwood

Image: 35 Shots of Rum (d. Claire Denis, France, 2009)

Last February, I went to a screening of a film I love, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. In Jeanne Dielman, a middle-class Belgian single mother and part-time prostitute (she stays at home for that, too) spends two-hundred minutes doing dull housework and then stabs one of her clients to death with scissors. It’s a long haul. Frame by frame, tension expands to fill Jeanne’s salmon-drab kitchen and underwater-blue living room like an invisible poison gas. Jeanne Dielman is an entirely consuming experience, or would have been, if the woman next to me had refrained from repeatedly opening her phone, thereby emitting white light, and sending text messages, thereby emitting soft beeps. I tried to give her dirty looks, but the light was insufficient to illuminate my glare.

Phones are in museums. They are in libraries and in classrooms. But there’s something more offensive about a phone in a movie theater, even more offensive than in a theater-theater. It must be because movie theaters have a kind of cemetery quality—you’re there to commune with absent or departed spirits. People ought to be able to get away from ringtones when they’re dead.

People used to fret about the “masses” using the movies as “escapism.” It is actually supremely difficult to escape into a movie. The impulse to send texts during a movie, or the power of the smallest square of light to distract everyone in a six-seat vicinity, is proof of this. Besides: escape from what? Into what? When I watch movies, I have a running internal monologue of thoughts like, “What would I do if I had to clean all day?” or “Do I look that good when I smoke?” The human brain does not turn off so easily. The drive to identify with narrative, to insert oneself into the story, the basic desire to be in that story, is boundless. That’s not escapism, that’s participation. And even if you can stop identifying, you’re still thinking—if not of something else, then at least of something also. As Chris Fujiwara has written, in a piece called “The Force of the Useless,” “it’s impossible to concentrate entirely on a film or on one’s self.”

The whole point of going to the movies in the first place is to experience this slide. It’s to have the freedom to be thinking in tandem with the film—really, to be thinking at all. At home, it is nearly impossible not to interrupt viewing—to pause, to get a drink of water, go to the bathroom, to check email, yes, to send a text. In the theater you are captive, or you should be, and so your mind ranges more freely, because it traverses the same course, bouncing against those images, again and again, back and forth, until it arrives at last at someplace new.

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French filmmaker Claire Denis is a master at creating this state of cognitive oscillation. It has something to do with what her movies are about, but it has more to do with how they are put together. Take, as a counter-example, Park Chan-Wook's recent vampire-action-romantic comedy-horror picture Thirst, which opened in New York in 2009 a few months before Denis's latest American release, 35 Shots of Rum. Park specializes in a kind of stylized perfection that makes you hold your breath for fear of getting something dirty. In Thirst, he creates a pristine white room for the purposes of splattering it artfully with blood. The sequence is as beautiful, and cold, as deep space. You watch it as if through a pane of glass.

Denis’ films are the opposite—they are permeable. Their energy is a recognizably human energy, fueled by the intensity, drive, musculature, and posture of bodies, by how they move. Even her landscapes—dusty roads, frozen snowy expanses, the jungles of Tahiti—are suffused with the sense of being looked at. They seem to absorb the gaze rather than reflect it back blindly.

Denis works with cinematographer Agnès Godard (no relation to Jean-Luc), and their pictures tend to be warm and lush. There is no single Denis style—the camera might be rough and hand-held, a little bit like Cassavetes (1990’s No Fear No Die); it might wander sensually (1997’s Nénette & Boni). In Chocolat (1988), it hardly moves at all; scenes open on principals in clusters of two or three like they are posing for picture postcards. Nor does she stick to one genre. What she has is a rhythm and certain thematic commitments. My favorites of her films—Chocolat, No Fear No Die, Beau Travail (2000), Trouble Every Day (2001), 35 Shots of Rum—whether set in French Cameroon or in a basement cockfighting ring, whether about legionnaires or sex cannibals, are dramas about families or people living together in close quarters. She is particularly drawn to the legacy of colonialism and in giving an inside look at those, often black French people, who are elsewhere caricatured as “outsiders.”

Denis is especially receptive to three things: human bodies (especially when they are semi-nude, and especially black touching white skin); bodies of water; and transit. Several of her films open with shots of bodies of water and end with close-ups of human figures. The most remarkable of her last shots comes without question in Beau Travail: Dennis Levant’s sadistic, repressed, rageful legionnaire Galoup, clad all in black in an empty black room, disco dancing alone to the ‘90s dance hit “Rhythm of the Night.” People talk about this ending like it’s a climax—in the New York Times, Stephen Holden described it as a “frenzied Dionysian release.” It is, sort of. Galoup is exploding. But it’s not disco heaven; it’s disco limbo. Levant’s frenzy has the feeling of being suspended out of time, somewhere beyond the laws of cause and effect. He’s practicing for more practice. In Denis, what we are waiting for is often to see how the next waiting will look.

Even when psychotic—even when they are drag queens who murder old ladies—Denis’ characters radiate calm self-possession. We know how they feel based on how they open or close their eyes, and they tend not to speak very much. The couple in Friday Night (2002) interrupts their tryst to have dinner at an Italian restaurant, but they spend the meal gazing at each other, looking at the food, fantasizing—doing anything but having a conversation. Quietness is a moral virtue in her world, part of an ethic and aesthetic of restrained power. She is obsessed with male bodies of the strong, silent type. Denis has worked repeatedly with the same actors, notably Grégoire Colin, Alex Descas, and Isaach De Bankolé. Colin is sexy, rangy, but not exactly handsome. He always seems a little trembly, like he’s got a finger stuck in a running faucet, and the faucet is his emotions, and the finger is his face. De Bankolé is fierce and self-possessed and a little scary. If Colin is water, De Bankolé is fire, or steam. He simmers. Descas is, simply, the best-looking actor on the planet. But his features almost never move. His face is like a mountain where occasional little cracks of light or water poke through. He acts with his posture and his weight as much as with his eyes.

You only realize just how still these men are when the occasional chatterbox shows up. Towards the end of 35 Shots, we meet a German woman played by Ingrid Caven, who seems to have wandered in from the set of In a Year of 13 Moons, the last movie she made with Fassbinder, thirty years ago. She writhes against a high-backed burnt orange sofa and enunciates like an aged Hollywood star. She rambles about her fear of the sea. “So vast, so wide . . . and when you scream, no one hears you.” It’s a totally jarring encounter. Denis’ protagonists are more likely to blow cigarette smoke or throw back a drink than to make confessions.

Denis is deeply attuned to the rituals of cohabitation, how people cook and clean and pour things. Chores become regimes. Training is a main interest, and not just in Beau Travail, with its yellow scenes of sweaty legionnaires scurrying under barbed wire, swinging from bars and doing push-ups in the desert. Jocelyn (Descas) training his cockfighters in No Fear No Die, Jo (Mati Diop) chopping garlic and precisely spooning out rice in 35 Shots—it’s all part of the same solitary discipline. People are always bathing in her movies. Sometimes they give other people sponge baths.

These are the rituals of caretaking, and they carry the action. On the first viewing of Trouble Every Day, for instance, you may think that it’s a movie about sex cannibals. This is wrong. The second time you see Trouble Every Day, you realize it is actually a movie about marriage—about what two people can and cannot share, about love and tenderness and forgiveness, waiting around, cleaning up other people’s messes. On this second viewing, you also realize that the most disturbing scene in the movie is not when Vincent Gallo’s character literally eats a hotel maid while performing oral sex on her. The most disturbing scene is when the newlywed Browns (Gallo is the husband), so brutally ensconced in their embrace, so cloaked in their intimacy, ignore that same maid when they enter their room for the first time, treating her like one more piece of furniture, without eyes to see or ears to hear.

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No one can pay attention to every frame of a movie, anymore than anyone could truly be absorbed by every word of a novel for hours on end with no breaks. A good narrative gives you some breathing room, opportunities to go in and out, to look up and away. Absorption is only possible if it is porous; otherwise we would call it strangulation.

Art trains perception. It works by signaling what is important and what can be ignored or forgotten. This is a skill we need to live, and one that the many people I see with hands fused to their camera phones, who indiscriminately photograph their friends, themselves, and their food, are clearly confused about. I sympathize. Self-surveillance is not just about vanity. It’s motivated by fear, a fear that we will not know which things we are living through will turn out to be the ones that mattered. So we take photos of all of them, just in case.

All of Denis’s films prominently feature views from vehicles moving through landscapes or cities. Are they breathing space, signposts that we are on a momentary vacation from meaning? Or are they in fact the meaning itself? Sometimes, as in Friday Night, half of which takes place inside a car creeping through Paris during a metro strike, they aren’t more important than “what happens”—driving is what happens. Sometimes, as in Chocolat, they are triggers to a flashback. Sometimes they are simply prettier than anything else. In 35 Shots we get mesmerizing shots of the tracks along which Lionel (Descas) drives his train. We get them in gray clear skies; in sunlight, with splotches of yellow crowding the window; at night, with apartment windows lit, twinkling like picture frames of photos of more night. The driving is a break, a chance to meditate as Lionel does, to imagine and daydream and remember, like he does. Denis knows that what is beautiful about a view is usually that you are leaving it, and that what you’re doing as you leave is usually taking stock.

Fujiwara has praised cinematic boredom. But boredom can be oppressive or dominating. It tends to be about endurance and submission—the brutally long take, the exhausting slow pan, the excruciatingly slow zoom. When a film is boring it bores with its whole soul. The only Denis film that is properly boring—and this is no condemnation, but simple phenomenological fact—is The Intruder (2005). It is no coincidence that The Intruder is her most difficult film to follow. One is bored when one does not know what is happening. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes of a child who remarked that his mother did not permit him to be bored. When Phillips asked what would happen if he were to become bored, he replied, “panic-stricken” at the thought, “I wouldn’t know what I was looking forward to.” Boredom threatens the self by eroding its ability to make sense of nonsense.

It’s a feeling adjacent to terror. Which is why the right word to describe Denis’ effect, and technique, is not boredom—it’s reverie. Reverie is not at all related to panic. It has no anxiety. It’s imagination, distraction. When Kracauer wrote on the distraction of German film palaces of the 1920s and ‘30s, the word he used was Zerstreuung, which has connotations of fragmentation, decay, vaporization. Denis is not interested in distraction as decay. Her films induce a private experience, an ongoing, associative process of identification and reflection.

Reverie ricochets against fixation. The most gripping scenes in Denis’s movies are dances. Sometimes these are club scenes—the group of neon-clad African women gyrating in the dark disco in Beau Travail—but they’re often focused around couples dancing at home or in some other private place. It helps that she chooses perfect diegetic music. In an unforgettable sequence in No Fear No Die, Jocelyn, who raises cockfighting roosters, circles in the training ring with a new bird. They go round and round, Jocelyn intently baiting the rooster with a soft toy. When his business partner (De Bankolé) changes the music to “Buffalo Soldier,” Jocelyn softens, sweeping the rooster into his arm and swaying in circles, his eyes closed. This is a crowded movie with a rusted and aquamarine color palette shot with a slightly shaky camera filled with horrible sounds—slamming doors, flapping wings, screeching birds, car horns, men’s shouts. Even its silences are portentous. Descas caressing his rooster as they dip to the sound of Bob Marley brings everything to a complete stop. I said before that you can’t ever turn your brain off while watching a movie, but I should have said that brains can only be turned off for short spells. This is one such spell. When Descas picks up that rooster, you stop thinking about yourself; it’s like you have been emptied out and for just a few seconds are only in the presence of Descas. Two scenes later the men are in a nightclub, with flashing lights in primary colors. Descas dances with a young white woman with long brown hair, burying his face in her shoulder. When she pulls back he stares at her as if seeing her for the first time, as if disappointed to realize that she is not his rooster, and walks out.

The oldest meaning of reverie is not, in fact, daydream. It is not related to one’s mental state at all. The first meaning of “reverie” was uncontrolled behavior; a fit of fury; wild joy or delight—maybe something like Levant’s dance. Denis has said that her shy actors express themselves in dance. But it feels more like they take shelter in it. In I Can’t Sleep (1994), Camille (Richard Courcet) and Theo (Descas again) both dance with their mother at her birthday party, cutting in on each other. Denis shoots them close, but it takes a few seconds for them to work their way into the frame and become the center. They emerge out of this fabric of brightly colored dresses, chattering family, an old sofa. Minutes later, Daiga, a Latvian immigrant (Yekaterina Golubeva), gets sloshed on white wine with the jolly female hotelier who has taken her in, and they slow dance to “Whiter Shade of Pale.”

In the most intense sequence in 35 Shots, the protagonists dance in a tidy, warm café that a glamorous woman with long braids in a silk maroon wrap opens just for them on a rainy night. The first song to come on is Ralph Thamar's “Siboney,” a contemporary, crooning rendition of an old bolero love song by a popular vocalist from Martinique. Then, smoothly, Denis switches registers. The romantic nostalgia of piano and rose petals gives way to a sweaty, intense modernity. The music is “Nightshift,” by the Commodores. As Lionel moves with his daughter, and her sort-of boyfriend cuts in on them, the dancing becomes a way of making the restaurant into a home, of creating a family. But ultimately, of course, they can only remake the same relationships they had when they walked in. The scene is so intimate that it hurts to watch. It’s composed of beautiful people looking at each other and away from each other, cuts on single faces or couples—a lover limping with frustrated desire; a father looking frankly at, then turning away from, his daughter’s passion; the open disappointment of Lionel’s ex when he seizes the hand of the café owner, who stares at him with eyes that I don’t know how to describe other than to say that they look like they are inhaling.

I would say that this scene short-circuits reverie like the rooster dance in No Fear No Die, but that’s only partially true, because the last time I watched it, I cried. I think crying at a movie is never about sympathy. It’s about yourself. It’s about wanting to have what the movie has, especially if that thing is something sad. It’s an expression of the desire for total identification, frustration at the fact of being a viewer at all. If there was really such a thing as escapism, if you could flee the reverie altogether and join with the movie, there wouldn’t be anything to cry about.

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We All Die There Now

2010-08-23T21:45:30Z

by Elizabeth Gumport

Image: Kick-Ass (d. Matthew Vaughn, UK, 2010).

Kick-Ass was meant to be revolutionary, the final assault on the innocence of American audiences. In early previews, it presented itself as putting to rest all remaining cinematic taboos. Here was Hit-Girl (Chloë Moretz, 11 years old at the time of filming), annihilating adult men and, in the film’s final scene, brutally attacked by one herself. She addresses a roomful of gangsters as “cunts”; when another teenager (Aaron Johnson, playing the misfit who reinvents himself as the superhero of the title) asks how he might contact her, she tells him the mayor shines a light “in the shape of a giant cock.” It’s not the only Batman reference: Kick-Ass is an action movie based on a comic book in which everyone reads comic books and watches action movies. Superheroes aside, the movie invokes De Palma’s Scarface—“Say hello to my little friend,” a henchman gloats as he turns a bazooka on Hit-Girl. In an early scene, her father (Nicolas Cage as a former policeman who calls himself Big Daddy) quizzes Hit-Girl on the name of John Woo’s first English-language movie. Watching Kick-Ass is like taking a two-hour long Rorschach test. That part when a group of gangsters is ambushed from the air recalls the Atlantic City massacre in The Godfather, Part III, does it not? When Kick-Ass says, “with no power comes no responsibility,” that's a Spider-Man reference, right? Many critics have likened Kick-Ass to Kill Bill, an analogy that seems vaguely offensive, when you consider how it sounds when inverted. A woman killing people? Why, that is as uncanny as a child killing people!

In a just world, these relentless references would cost Kick-Ass something. Allusion invites comparison, and in every face-off Kick-Ass comes out the loser: in fact, as soon as Cage mentioned Woo, I wished I were watching Face/Off. Good movies, or at least pleasurably bad movies, make the worthless ones even worse. They remind us that watching Kick-Ass was not inevitable, that there are other, better ways to spend a Tuesday afternoon, an afternoon that will not come again. Maybe you can get your money back but not your time, and so whatever worth Kick-Ass has is only as a memento mori. As the credits rolled, I told myself: You must change your life.

For everyone else, the experience appeared to be much more pleasurable. If Kick-Ass neglected a potential allusion, the audience provided it. When Christopher Mintz-Plasse (as Red Mist, a high school outcast-cum-supervillain desperate to prove himself to his father Frank D’Amico, a crime boss) appeared on screen for the first time, the man sitting behind me cried out joyfully, “McLovin!” His exclamation was met with murmured agreement from the rest of the audience. The sensation was akin to watching someone add a link to a Wikipedia page.

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Much of the action in Kick-Ass takes place on, or because of, the internet. After a YouTube video of Kick-Ass taking on some ruffians in a parking lot becomes the “most watched clip on the internet,” his MySpace page and email account are inundated with requests from the fearful citizenry. It is through MySpace—not a penis lantern—that Kick-Ass communicates with Hit-Girl and Big Daddy. His celebrity inspires copycats. The costumed man Frank D’Amico murders turns out to be a Kick-Ass impersonator on his way home from a child’s birthday party. Repetition and imitation are key not only to Kick-Ass’s plot but to what it passes off as humor. The laughter it inspires is the laughter of recognition—of mem(e)ory. If people enjoy Kick-Ass, they enjoy it for the same reasons they use “teh” and “fail.” There is nothing hilarious about these words. They are simply signposts people use to indicate they are being funny. We laugh at them because they identify themselves as things to be laughed at. “Viral” is right. Replicating madly, these catchphrases destroy their host, whether it be a movie or an IM conversation. They crowd out the original content, if there was any; jokes give way to things that resemble jokes. “Funny” has been redefined to mean “familiar,” and we do nothing to fight this disease because it flatters us. When Kick-Ass’s screenwriters quote Stan Lee, they are saying: we know that you know that this other thing exists. How does the desperate guy seduce the stupid, pretty girl? Anyone who has ever seen a movie can tell you: he tells her she’s smart.

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One of the major differences between Kill Bill and Kick-Ass—besides the twenty-seven years that separate Uma Thurman from Chloë Moretz—is that Kill Bill is good and Kick-Ass is bad. Tarantino’s action sequences are as elegantly constructed as a well-turned phrase. When Thurman kills Gogo Yubari, Gogo’s metal ball drops to the floor, ending their fight as neatly as a period ends a sentence. The only part of Kick-Ass at all worthy of comparison with Kill Bill is one that has drawn dutiful outrage from critics: Hit-Girl, dressed in a white blouse and plaid skirt, is granted entrance to D’Amico’s lobby by his guards, whom she shoots quickly and quietly. In a movie full of jet-packs and gigantic explosions and burning warehouses, the scene seems spare and refined. But the sequence is one reason why critics have called the movie's violence pornographic.

Porn, however, involves a degree of reality—people who seem to be having sex are actually having it. Kick-Ass, however, is explicitly unreal. In one voiceover, Kick-Ass asks the audience if we’re telling ourselves he’s going to be fine just because he’s talking to us now. Haven’t we, he demands, seen American Beauty? As we listen to this, D’Amico’s underlings strap Kick-Ass and Big Daddy into chairs and beat them. The assault—intended to end in their deaths—is being broadcast on television. When the networks realize what is happening, they cut the feed, and everyone rushes to their laptops to watch what, if it weren’t for Hit-Girl’s interference, would be a live execution. The suggestion is not simply that, when it comes to real violence, television has higher standards of decency than the internet—that Kick-Ass is about to be the star of another viral video, one in which he will join the ranks of Daniel Pearl and Saddam Hussein. The American Beauty reference reminds viewers what they are watching is not real. People don’t die in TV shows or movies—they die on the internet. The myth of the snuff film has evolved since it originated. Now, the rumors put filmed murders not in Times Square but online. For good measure, the movie includes a scene in which Kick-Ass masturbates to internet porn.

Kick-Ass claims to be controversial, but is in fact conservative. It is part of old media’s attack on new media, a campaign whose other flanks include To Catch a Predator and a growing number of Lifetime TV movies. You guys thought watching people get hurt was bad, the battle cry goes, but the internet connects you with people who actually want to hurt you. (Red Mist, as a reminder, first contacts Kick-Ass online and his father’s associates are able to capture Big Daddy—who does, in fact, die—because of the message Kick-Ass posts on MySpace.) To protect yourself, all you have to do is stay in the theater. Download the movie for free and its soundtrack might include the bell-like peal of instant messages, whose chimes are your death knell. Kick-Ass is an advertisement for itself and for a frightened industry. Twelve dollars doesn’t seem like so much if what you’re buying is your safety.

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Headless in Salta

2010-08-23T21:45:25Z

by Benjamin Kunkel

Image: The Headless Woman (d. Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2008).

It opens cramped. The truncated or headless frame is filled by the running legs of a boy, a German shepherd at his side. Just about the sole establishing shot of the film then discloses that the boy is one of three dark-skinned kids, Indian or mestizo, horsing around on a sparsely trafficked dirt road. A quiet note of menace is struck by the horn of a passing bus—it could have hit someone—but more ominous is the absence of music, a withholding of emotional cues that, like the shallow-focused, constricted, almost claustrophobic framing of shots, will characterize almost the whole of the film. The tight framing often means you’re not immediately sure where you are. The ban on music means the film won’t tell you how to feel. Which uncertainties make you anxious, afraid to find out.

One of the boys is petitioning the other two, without success, for “la bice,” la bicecleta, which they seem to have taken or hidden from him. A boy cartwheels into a dry culvert running beside the road, and the boy who wants the bike gives chase, but is unable to clamber out of the culvert, with its raked concrete sides, quickly enough to keep up with his brothers or friends.

Cut to a woman trying out some new mascara in the improvised mirror of a car window. A few kids and their—it is instantly visible—well-to-do mothers are dispersing after a some kind of gathering. I guess it took until my fourth viewing before I got it that one of the ladies must have held a sort of Tupperware party, but selling cosmetics instead. At any rate, with their elegant small boxes of mascaras and creams, the women are piling into their cars. A little boy has left some handprints on the driver’s side window of one car. This car turns out to belong to Véronica, a woman of about forty being complimented by a friend on her newly bleached hair.

Véro, with her incredible head of yellow hair, is next seen driving down the same country road where the boys were playing. She’s listening to some inoffensively banal and cheerful pop when her cell phone chirrups. She turns to answer it, and you hear two sickening thuds. Véro steps on the breaks. She retrieves her sunglasses from the floor. You observe her in profile as she considers turning around to learn what she’s hit. (The pair of ghostly handprints is fading from the driver’s side window.) Véro puts the car in gear and drives away without looking back. In a rear window shot, you see a dead dog that she does not.

Farther up the road, she stops the car and gets out. The camera remains in place for the profile shot, though the profile is gone; in fact, you can’t see Véro’s head, only her agitated body, as she paces outside, where it’s started to rain. The opening titles announce La mujer sin cabeza.

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The Headless Woman, written and directed by Lucrecia Martel, seems to have divided its small audience about equally into contemptuous detractors and bewitched fans. Even among people who didn’t like the film, no one seems to have denied that the opening sequence is remarkable.

I first saw the film one afternoon in October of 2008. It was springtime in the southern hemisphere, and violet jacaranda blossoms flanked the broad avenues of Buenos Aires, and the streets smelled faintly, as always, of diesel exhaust from the colectivos, as the ubiquitous brightly-painted buses are called.

Latin America, being a world of privatization and inequality, is also a world roughly divided into the drivers of private cars and the riders of buses. Public transportation systems have languished where they were built at all. The over-trafficked and under-maintained roads are correspondingly dangerous, and it occurs to me that the traffic accident movie—like Amores perros and La mujer sin cabeza, not to mention all the gruesome pile-ups in the recently-released and very bad Carancho, from Argentina, or all the improvised roadside crosses and tell-tale sirens in a non-traffic-accident movie like Y tu mamá también—may be a particularly Latin American genre. The fact that a movie like Crash emerged from LA would then only further confirm that city’s Latin Americanness.

In any case it was almost two years ago that my sister Lisa and I walked up from the San Telmo neighborhood, where I live, to the microcentro, where we watched The Headless Woman on the warped screen of a musty-smelling art house theater, with wooden seats bolted to the flat cement floor, on the calle Salta. No street in the city could have been more appropriate, since Lucrecia Martel grew up in Salta and has set each of her three features (La ciénega and The Holy Girl are the previous two) in or around that colonial city in the mountainous northwest of Argentina.

The Headless Woman is one those movies you talk about the whole way home. Did Véro merely run over a dog, or did she actually hit one of the boys from the opening scene? Undeniably that was a dead dog on the road, but then later on, as you and the main character learn, the body of a boy has been found clogging a pipe in the culvert, now filled by the rainstorm, the downpour of the opening sequence. Wouldn’t it be possible to knock a kid off the road and run over his dog? And yet the boy did have some trouble climbing out of the culvert. Maybe the tormenta unleashed a flash flood that drowned him?

Several relationships in the movie were also puzzling. When, after the mysterious, definitive accident, Véro checks herself into a hotel, is that her cousin or brother-in-law (or both) that she sleeps with? And is this their first time together, or has Véro been having an affair? By the way, does the cousin own the hotel? It does seem like a well-connected family. Anyway, did you notice how after the accident Véro basically doesn’t speak to anyone? Have you ever seen a movie in which the main character says so little? Even when the cousin, taking her home, asks whether he should drop her off on the corner or at the front door, she says only, “Bien.” Really Véro hardly says anything at all until one morning she says to her husband, “I killed someone on the road.”

My sister Lisa, who has a degree in clinical social work (as well as better Spanish than mine), mentioned that sometimes obsessive compulsives develop a nagging, incontrovertible delusion that they have committed a hit-and-run. It wasn’t all that uncommon a clinical condition, she said. And yet, she thought, if you believe you’ve run over someone when you haven’t, just who you think your victim is probably says something important about what’s really going on.

I had another idea. The discovery of the boy’s body in the culvert sets the men in Véro’s life into motion, erasing all traces of the accident. Her husband has the car repaired. Her brother removes her X-rays from the clinic where she’d gone, post-accident. Her powerful, adulterous, perhaps hotel-owning cousin must be the one who eliminates any record of her stay at the hotel. All of that now seems perfectly clear to me. But at the time I wondered whether the missing records—the entire campaign of erasure—didn’t mean the headless woman was herself some kind of ghost. Carry a cover-up too far and maybe you’d end up expunging your whole implicated existence.

Part of our puzzlement owed to imperfect Spanish and no subtitles. Not all of it, though, as other published discussions of The Headless Woman confirm. We were only sure that we’d seen a fascinating, original, disturbing film. Two years later I found I still couldn’t get it out of my head, and recently watched and re-watched it again.

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The Headless Woman was released in the States last year to what they call mixed reviews. The mixture in this case was interesting. It’s not every movie about which the people who don’t like it complain not only I get it! I get it! and I don’t get it! but lodge both of these complaints at the same time, as several critics and many website commenters have done.

The charge of obviousness has to do with the stark class relationships on display. White and well-to-do Véronica fears she may have killed a dark-skinned poor person, and when the discovery of the boy’s body lends a new plausibility to the notion, her male relatives are in a position—a social position—to eliminate any potentially corroborating evidence. Thus, according to the New York Times, Véro’s “greater crime is being bourgeois.” Naturally the Times doesn’t consider this a very serious offense.

The charge of obscurity stems from Martel’s extremely economical story-telling. The close framing and shallow focus, the absence of expository dialogue of the usual kind, and of course the music-lessness all deprive the viewer of context, and together mimic the situation of a dazed, maybe concussed protagonist emerging into a world as thoroughly familiar to its other inhabitants as it’s become unfamiliar to her. Miss a clue, and you’ll lose some vital piece of information about the exact economic, familial, and sexual complexion of Véro’s intimate relationships. So that’s her niece, the teenage girl who has an intense lesbian crush on her? And she’s in practice, as a dentist, with her brother? But she is also clearly related, by blood, to her cousin’s (and/or brother in law’s) wife, since it seems to be their aunt who is dying and has lost her mind, no? The tangle of connections is all very incestuous, not for the first time in Martel’s work. But if Martel is confusing, it is out of precision rather than vagueness. Richard Brody’s complaint in the New Yorker that “the characters evaporate into symbols almost upon their appearance” suggests he could figure out the class relationships in the film, but not the private ones. For him, The Headless Woman was at once “heavy-handed” and “thinly realized.”

Any appreciation of the film in a way has to say the same thing. The Headless Woman does fuse the schematic and the intricate. But once you’ve granted Martel her brilliantly established premise and her fastidious approach, both the crude social schema and the delicate filigree of private relationships come to seem like features of the observable, inevitable world rather than impositions by the director. Indeed if you came upon your own life, one day, as a stranger, knowing who everyone was but not how to feel about them, surely this is how your life would look too, with the class structure in place almost unmentionably obvious, and the private relationships almost unspeakably complex. It might also prove a bit appalling if the people closest to you felt it wouldn’t offend you in the least for them to cover up the evidence of a crime you might have committed. What kind of person would you be, or in what kind of world, when they didn’t even need to ask?

For despite Véro’s angelic hairdo, reminiscent of Kim Novak’s in Vertigo, she appears to be suffering not from amnesia but from a kind of defamiliarization. Her bleached hair is the sign of this estrangement, a halo of otherworldliness. She must watch and wait before extracting a feeling, a judgment, a mood from the raw materials of a given scene. In other words, she’s in the same position as the viewer. Few films I’ve seen propose such a strict identity between the audience’s and the protagonist’s points of view. Equally few are at once so subjective (in the sense of adopting the protagonist’s point of view) and so objective (in the sense of refusing to comment on and contextualize the action that unfolds). This merger of subjective and objective is possible because Véro’s subjective state has become a sort of camera-like blank objectivity. In a rather amazing way, the limitations of so many films—their difficulty in conveying interior states except through the devices, both eschewed here, of voiceover and music—become a local means for transcending these limitations.

The special emotional eloquence of film lies in the actors’ faces (one reason why it’s frustrating when filmmakers pant after generically stunning young people). And the casting of María Onetto, in the role of headless woman and audience surrogate, was for this reason a real coup. The soft modeling of Onetto’s handsome face makes her look vulnerable, a bit pulpy and raw, undefined. The tentativeness and unconfessed bafflement, the expectation of protection, and the sheer and silent, supplicating grief in one of her half-smiles alone constitute a triumph of acting. The ideal star of the film, Onetto also does an excellent turn as a black hole. And this is how one comes to feel about the movie as a whole. How brilliant. How dark. How precise. How elusive. What quietness. What a howl of lamentation!

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An allegorical premise at once obvious and obscure, a simultaneous proliferation of arguably pointless (but weirdly sexual) quotidian detail—there is something Kafka-like in this combination. And, as with Kafka, the choice here is either to multiply allegorical interpretations indefinitely, or just to throw up your hands and declare the whole thing a commentary on the absurdity and unknowability of life. The first option is the more interesting one.

It’s worth noting, with regard to the already highly allegorical Mujer sin cabeza, that the allure of allegorical interpretation becomes even more pronounced in the case of the so-called international art film. The reason for this is simply that a movie from Argentina or Senegal, or even Germany or China, will for most of its viewers be the only one from that country they see in a given year. This film then will then serve to represent Argentina (or Senegal, et cetera) as such, a condition of reception that also becomes a premise of artistic production. Few contemporary directors make such intensely local—in her case, salteña or Salta-centric—movies as Lucrecia Martel. Even so, she can’t help her movies being seen as “about Argentina,” and probably even intending them that way.

The first two allegorical notions to come to the minds of most English-language critics and commenters on The Headless Woman are the obvious ones, and not necessarily wrong for that. On the one hand, as people tended to note with a certain irritation, here is a movie about rich and poor set in a country, not so different from the US in this respect, in which class differences have acquired an allegorical starkness. Regardless of your views on economics (neoliberalism, Keynesianism, socialism—each is supposed to promote prosperity for all), extreme class differences, often aligned with differences of pigmentation, constitute a scandal throughout the Americas and the rest of the world. Everyone knows this, no matter who they vote for or which economists they pretend to understand. But the scandal of an aggravated class structure is too obvious and intractable to mention, and then, at length, even to notice. De eso no se trata—it isn’t discussed—would be the Argentine way of putting it. It might take bumping your head, or feeling a sharp stab of guilt where usually there’s at most a dull ache, to get you to truly see what you look at every day.

Probably everybody who saw The Headless Woman knows not only that class society exists, but that most Argentines averted their eyes during the late ‘70s when the ruling junta “disappeared” and tortured tens of thousands of civilians. So the film was sometimes also interpreted as a national allegory on willed forgetting or repressed guilt. (It’s a curious irony that people who are annoyed at anyone’s pointing out an obvious scandal, such as that of class society, in which we Americans are implicated, are often perfectly content to observe that other nations tend to ignore the manifest crimes going on in their midst. One evening in the middle of the Bush Administration, I watched Imagining Argentina—a solemn, mediocre British film on the dirty war of the ‘70s—with an American couple, one of whom afterwards exclaimed, “But how could they have let their government torture people and detain them without trial?”) In the unsettling mixture of possibilities that makes up The Headless Woman, a specifically Argentine guilt over the refusal to look back is a likely enough element. But what persists of that element, a residue of the ‘70s, has probably been compounded with confused national feelings of more recent vintage.

Eduardo Duhalde, a right-wing Peronist who stands a chance of winning the presidency next year, has taken to calling Argentina’s underfed and under-schooled poor children the country’s “new disappeared.” The expression, repugnant for its minimization of the fate of the old disappeared, still captures something of the national reality. Formerly the most egalitarian, the most middle-class society in Latin America, Argentina today, and especially since the 2001 crash, is more nearly two different and separate societies, often invisible to each another except on TV. Most well-to-do people never see the villas miserias, the tin-roofed slums of the poor, except when they pass by them on the highway, and private security guards keep the poor out of the gated countries—the English word is used—of the rich. This split is only the more pronounced in the Salta of La mujer sin cabeza. Like the other northern provinces, Salta is both poorer and more Indian than the most of the country. Already in the early eighteenth century, at a time when Buenos Aires was hardly more than a collection of mud dwellings, the Spanish had erected a splendid cathedral, in the city of Salta, on the backs on the native population. The area is still noted for its physical beauty, its pre-Colombian ruins, and the social and religious conservatism of its prominent families. So Martel’s allegory about capitalism and Argentina is probably one about Salta as well.

And yet there is another allegorical possibility inherent in La mujer sin cabeza that I haven’t seen addressed, in English or Spanish. Véro is picking up her cell phone when she hits something on the road. That much is clear. But who is calling? Understandably, given the circumstances, she doesn’t answer. But nor does she call whoever it was back. And twice more you see her answer the phone, evidently hear a voice, and immediately hang up without saying a word. None of the adults in the family complain about this, so she mustn’t have done it to them. The sole character to utter anything like a protest, however oblique, is Candita, her besotted lesbian niece. In one scene she tries to kiss Véro, obviously not for the first time, demands to know whether Véro likes her or not, and then petulantly declares, “Love letters are to be either answered or returned.” Later you see Véro and her niece talking together, clearly at the niece’s urgent insistence, but can’t hear what they’re saying. My own reading, not exclusive of any of the others, of this film written and directed by a woman whose other films also deal with lesbianism, is that Véro and her niece have been lovers, and that La mujer sin cabeza is therefore an allegory of, among other things, a love that dare not take the call. It can only have been Candita, I think, who was calling Véro when she ran over the dog and/or boy. Here, then, is a woman who, being who she is in the world, can neither confess what she might have done on the road, nor who she might be in bed. (Candita’s mother, you notice, is casually homophobic—and wouldn’t likely become less so if she found out her teenage daughter had slept with an older aunt.)

The richness and perturbation of the film derive, of course, not from any of these interpretations, but from its way of sponsoring all of them while at the same time confining itself to the strictest realism. The Headless Woman is an astonishing movie about an overdetermined and, in that way, highly life-like and familiar situation—at once very local, global, social, and sexual—in which something has gone badly wrong, and the wrongness is compounded by your inability to say exactly what. At first this silence is enforced by the confusion you share with the protagonist. Later on, for Véro, at any rate, the silence is imposed by the rules that define this or just about any other contemporary society. Eventually, she dyes her hair dark brown—no more its natural shade than the previous one—starts behaving normally again, and goes to a party with her husband. The end.

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The Aggro Indies

2010-08-23T21:45:20Z

by Richard von Busack

Image: Touching Home (d. Logan and Noah Miller, US, 2009)

From the moment I wake up in the morning, I live in a world fraught with danger. Is this going to be the day that some disgruntled reader mails me a toxic substance? It happened once, in the 1980s—a gram of odorless dung in the kind of tiny plastic bindle dealers use for meth, with an unsigned letter reading “Have some dialectical materialism! The Kremlin dishes it out every day!”

If the readers don’t get me, the neighbors might. I live in one of the California’s most hair-raising craptowns, with an awe-inspiring murder rate considering its small size. Me and the wife hide behind our doors when the sun goes down, and pray that some cutthroat doesn’t break in and execute us just for the thrill of it.

But I’m tough. I’ve come a long way from the bad side of LA’s Pico Boulevard. No one survives twenty-five years in the bloody-knuckled world of weekly journalism if they’re a pink powder puff. This is the life I chose. And it could be worse. I could be an independent filmmaker.

The cover of the book Either You’re In or You’re In the Way (2009) depicts a pair of red-headed bruisers. Arms folded to flatter their biceps, standing against a scratched-up, scrawled-on urban wall, they are the authors who inside recount their struggle to make a film. Identical twins Logan and Noah Miller play characters thinly based on themselves in the indie movie Touching Home, which they wrote, produced, and directed, and which came and went this year. The jacket of the Millers’ book serves us what’s described as “a modern day Horatio Alger on steroids.” The presumption may be that Alger wrote autobiography.

If you think the cover is imposing, check Touching Home’s coming attractions trailer. Co-star Ed Harris Mount Rushmores it side by side with the two game-faced filmmakers. All three inform us of how Touching Home was based on the life and death of the Millers’ father, a traumatized alcoholic Korea War vet who died in the Marin county jail.

The actual film, which is pretty bad, is almost immaterial to the deal-quest. The movie itself is distilled Sundance: a tale of a dysfunctional family trying to knit itself up in picturesque rural surroundings. It’d take phenomenal talent to make West Marin look ugly: it’s rolling country full of portly cows and fine Victorian ranch houses, irradiated with the Pacific gloaming, kept from insipidness by stark volcanic outcroppings and groves of redwoods. Here and there are cozy looking roadhouses glowing with neon, serving cold pitchers of what made Lagunitas famous. Unfortunately, the cast keeps getting in the way of the scenery: a round of aimless driving, squabbling, fistfighting, re-bonding.

The Millers were once minor league baseball players, so the movie is pumped up with loads of exercise montages. That goes double for their book. Chapter headlines like “An Army of Two” contains asides about staying in training during the search: “We worked out at Gold’s Gym Venice Wednesday evening, after dinner. It was our third workout of the day: a run in the morning at 5:30 AM, a pile of pushups and pull-ups mid day.” Later: “We hit the iron hard in our friend Julio’s garage, throwing weights around in a 105-degree mechanics shop, breathing in the gasoline and oil fumes. We blasted Judas Priest.” The tableau needs sparks from a grinder flying around to perfect it as a male version of Flashdance.

Similarly, Either You’re In . . . stresses the physical side of beating the bushes for movie-making money. “Selling a product is a war of attrition,” they write. And Part One of their book is titled “Holly-War.” Even something as quotidian as buying a beater car to be used in a driving scene is suffused with potential violence. “We brought our pistola,” the Millers write. (The weapon is elsewhere described as “a .40 caliber HK automatic.”) They should have brought their gat to deal meetings, since overcautious investors also get on the brothers’ nerves: “We didn’t come here to fucking barbecue!… we don’t know how to play the nickel and dime tables, it’s not our style.”

Clearly, these mavericks are in armed opposition to the powers that be in Hollywood: they write up a playlet of how they dealt with Ed Harris’s schedule conflicts. There’s a fantasy scene of Harris’s agent unable to block the handshake deal the Millers made with the star; the agent howling “noooooooo!” like a thwarted villain just before his hollow volcano blows up. The moral is plain, so the authors re-emphasize it: “To those who no longer believe in the American dream, read this and say otherwise.”

The Millers’ Chevy-tough dream encompasses two different aims, though. One was to fulfill a deathbed promise to Dad to become filmmakers, so they could tell the dead father’s story honestly. The other was what the Millers characterize as the American dream: to become players, in the position to make a commercial-looking movie with name stars, crane shots and perfect Skywalker Ranch sound, with the two of them making their acting debuts starring in the leads.

It’s not that I’m mocking the hunger of the artists. For that matter, baseball isn’t a bad preparation for filmmaking. Buster Keaton used to think up strategies while playing a few innings. And Ron Shelton, writer-director of Bull Durham, played with the O’s farm team. The meditative state induced by The Pastime has for years inspired artists. But Millers’ implicit threat, the line they draw in the sand—the pose that says “finance our film or we’ll kick your ass” . . . that’s something new.

Two 1990s fiascos predicted this aggro method of indie film financing. One is recorded in producer John Pierson’s book Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes (1996); the other is the subject of Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith’s documentary Overnight (2004). Pierson’s book, on the beginning of the indie film bubble, tells of his disenchantment with a client: Rob Weiss, first-time director of the film Amongst Friends. This was a crime film, set in the leafier suburbs of Long Island. Weiss was careful to play his tale as first-hand experience. Shortly before Amongst Friends made it to 1993’s Sundance Film Festival, he told a Premiere magazine reporter that he would neither confirm or deny having killed someone during his wilder years as a young man. (Sensibly, Weiss told the New York Observer in 2007 that he’d been misquoted.)

Meanwhile Pierson (who later denounced Weiss and his producers at length) tried to find the perfect way to give Weiss street cred in the poster. Pierson even considered the following tag line: “They grew up/in a suburban world of big houses/nice cars and nice families/they wanted something money couldn’t buy./Danger.” In the end, it was the investors who took the danger, when the film opened to shrugs and mutual recriminations.

Overnight, which debuted at Sundance ’04, is the documentary saga of Troy Duffy. Duffy is seen writing and directing the Irish gangster film The Boondock Saints while sizzling in the torments of development hell. He’d seemingly got the dream deal: $300,000 for his script, a $15 mil budget, final cut—“It’s like something out of the movies,” USA Today crowed, when announcing the signing on the front page; here again was the implication that the deal for a major motion picture was more important than the subject itself. Sadly, the deal soon dissolved after it had made its splash, and Duffy and his colleagues made it worse by badmouthing dealmaker Harvey Weinstein to various cameras.

The drift of Overnight is prejudicially, if succinctly, summed up by one commentator at IMBD: “There is nothing more enjoyable than watching a very mean and terrible person getting what he deserves.” The person in question, according to the commentator, is not Harvey Weinstein. Duffy later described Montana and Smith’s Hard Copy-ish documentary as “a back stab.” If only he hadn’t had the cameras following him for years, Duffy could have claimed he was misquoted.

Watching Overnight, one develops a grain of sympathy for Duffy, even as he weathered his temporary fame laying drunk on sidewalks, stiffing his brother, and cackling over the topless sunbathers at Cannes. Despite the evidence of what’s on screen in Boondock Saints, Duffy must have had some professionalism that drew people to him—in Overnight, we see worthwhile actors like Billy Connelly and Willem Dafoe taking Duffy’s direction without protest.

Was this because Duffy had experience with ultraviolence from things he’d seen on the street, man? Weiss had been a club promoter. Duffy, like the Miller Brothers, had been a bar bouncer. Duffy’s line to a producer: “I’m just a poor kid from Boston who never had anything in his life,” insisting on that million-to-one shot that the movies dote on.

Happy endings all around: eventually, Weiss became a regular producer and writer on Entourage. And Duffy released the sequel to Boondock Saints last October, after the original became a cult favorite in minimum-security prisons and frat houses nationwide. The sequel Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day got similar reviews to the first one, though the typically easy-going A. O. Scott gave it a pass. Not that it matters. As a Boondock Saints fave-raver named Ashley Pratt summed up at Cinematical.com: “Screw the critics. I never listen to them. Movie (sic) are a form of art.”

While the Millers were blitzing the Bay Area media with Touching Home, after I’d received my second free copy of their memoir in the mail, I came across Michael Tully’s “Take Back” Manifesto online. In excerpt it read: “We realize that bringing any film into fruition, however great or small the budget, is an outrageously difficult task. We realize this, and yet we don’t care . . . From this point forth, we are only interested in the film itself. By marketing your marketing, you are only alienating us.”

Tully is a filmmaker, not a critic. When I got in touch with him, I was astonished to find out that he’d never heard of the Millers or Either You’re In Or You’re In the Way. Tully told me his manifesto was the direct result of attending too many panels regarding financing, crowd-sourcing and the use of Twitter to flog indie films. At panels, for a few hundred bucks a pop, striving filmmakers can hear the latest thoughts on how to form an audience for a movie with no stars and no advertising.

Response to the “Take Back” manifesto came thick and fast on the Internet. Journalist Courtney Sheehan suggested that what Tully the blogger proposed was a gag order prohibiting filmmakers from publicizing their films over social media and panels. Social media may be the future for the struggling no-budget filmmaker. But isn’t the larger implication of Tully’s manifesto unignorable? Isn’t he arguing, sensibly, that it’s the art of the movie that counts, not the art of the deal?

Critics have been all too guilty in building up the mystique of the renegade deal-maker. Ever since the 1990s we listened, heads nodding like bobblehead dolls, passing on the hagiography of the Indie Film Revolution. Robert Rodriguez—sometimes an intrepid maker of lowbrow entertainments, sometimes a profoundly commercial filmmaker whose Spy Kids films are one box of Trix short of a cereal commercial—flogged the tale of how he submitted himself to medical experiments to raise the money for his movies. Spike Lee used his MasterCard as the master’s tool to dismantle the master’s house. TV’s Project Greenlight, the first reality/contest show making a competitive sport out of filmmaking, urged us that the real action was in the deal memo. The nut-cutting and telephone-screaming were far more urgent than the actual films developed from the show: Stolen Summer, The Battle of Shaker Heights, and Feast. Remember them?

Of course deprivation could conceivably make a filmmaker more sensitive as opposed to more desperately aggro. Consider writers like Dickens and Zola, or filmmakers like Chaplin, Capra, Jean Vigo, Bill Douglas, Mizoguchi and Naruse, deprived artists who turned their poverty into soul, instead of using that tough past to flaunt their gats and pose as “the biggest hard-on in the room,” in Duffy’s phrase in Overnight.

Toughness is like sensitivity—it’s never a good idea to boast you’ve got it. The supplicant filmmaker, like the hospital intern, like the new recruit at boot camp, has to be pressured to show that he won’t crack under the strain. But it’s not the pressure process that’s interesting; it’s the grace under the pressure. And of course, it’s the cracks that are interesting too. As that Leonard Cohen verse goes, the cracks are where the light comes through.

Why ultimately worry about first-timers like the Millers? Simple. It’s because of what will inevitably come next. Stories of sacrifice were always good copy, so naturally they’ll be topped by far more pugnacious filmmakers in the years to come. If one budding director jumps off the roof to promote his film, why wouldn’t another one jump off of a cliff? And the long violin sonata, from the first pitch meeting to the last interviews, makes it all too easy for the public to laugh. It encourages the sadistic fantasy of saying, “I don’t know how hard your film was to make, but I can tell you how hard it was to watch.”

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Ground Culture

2010-08-23T21:45:15Z

by Ben Maraniss

Image: Cobra (d. George P. Cosmatos, US, 1986)

“The trick is not minding”—G. Gordon Liddy, holding his hand over a flame, quoted in All the President’s Men.

Somehow, the sentence “I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, in the 1980s” sounds depressing. In truth, growing up there was excruciating. The economy in my town was centered on education. That is not a bad thing in itself, but it bred a smugness which rendered my childhood a minimalist dystopia in which pop culture had to be consumed surreptitiously, just the same as candy bars. Most of the kids my age there had the shared experience of being monitored and judged based on the ratio of hours spent practicing and studying against hours spent in front of the television, assuming there was a television in the house. Growing up in Amherst felt like living in a can of spinach, and transgressions were not punished with physical abuse, but with a frigid disapproval handed down from the Commonwealth’s Puritan founders and mixed with all the humor of the Swiss-German dairy farmers my mother was descended from. Relief came in the unbounded joy of watching the rest of the world funneled through MTV, HBO, and CNN. True, they had the disadvantage of being completely full of shit, but they also offered vogueing, glitter-clad women in high heels, Live Aid, Yo! MTV Raps, 120 Minutes, Club MTV, Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Rocky sequels, the Reagan Administration (which, despite its long periods of dullness, fit easily into this programming schedule), and movie promos which led to hitch-hiking trips to the four-screen cineplex in neighboring Hadley, Massachusetts.

I would like to say that movie aesthetics were defined for me by an auteur-based cinema of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and the French New Wave, but the truth is that I carry the mark of Simpson/Bruckheimer, Golan/Globus, and Kassar/Vajna much more than the mark of any name directors. The legacy of these super-producers is a bafflingly embarrassing array of films that trail American culture like skunk spray. Despite the indisputable weaknesses of their films as drama, there is no denying the endurance of their work. In a very real way their movies collectively represent the cinematic iconography of their decade. Picture for even an instant Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy, or lesser stars like Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme or Jennifer Beals, and you are very likely conjuring an image from one of the movies that came from these production mills, humming a synthesizer refrain against your better judgment, and questioning the decisions that have brought you to this moment in your life. Their movies reached a cultural saturation level that broke through the unacknowledged media embargo of Western Massachusetts and, in the moment, made the world bearable—and in the long term, bizarre.

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“Losers are boring.”—Don Simpson

Jerry Bruckheimer met Don Simpson when they were young executives at Paramount in the late 1970s. They witnessed the juggernaut that was Saturday Night Fever, both the movie and the soundtrack, fell in love with its success and never let the world forget it. Their 1980s output consisted of American Gigolo, An Officer and a Gentleman, Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, and Days of Thunder. A number of men—and no women—are credited as directors and writers on these films, but their narratives are clearly dictated by the men whose names appear in the credits, third from the end.

If you don’t recognize the list of films above you can identify one before the credits are through just by going through this checklist: Open with the Paramount logo, fade to a sunrise, which gives way to a montage of the main character doing whatever it is that makes him special (busting a criminal; flying a jet; waking up naked, in the Philippines, with a tequila hangover). In Top Gun (1986), by the ten-minute mark, we find out that Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise), despite his talents as an aviator, lacks discipline—he nearly engages with a North Korean jet fighter during a mission over the Indian Ocean, barely avoiding an international incident. Soon after, Stinger (Maverick’s commander, played by James Tolkan, a character actor who made a living in the 1980s by snapping the line You’ve got a real attitude problem, kid!) dresses down Maverick and his radio-man, Nick “Goose” Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards), before sending them off to the Navy’s top flight school. Why are these fuck-ups being promoted? Because they’re just that good.

Once he arrives, Maverick is paired with two older authority figures, against whom he rebels. One is a woman, an instructor named Charlotte “Charlie” Blackwood (Kelly McGillis), and the other is a commander named Mike “Viper” Metcalf (Tom Skerritt). Charlie will spar/flirt (splirt?) with Maverick in class until their relationship becomes romantic, at which point she will reveal a vulnerability that neuters her role as an obstacle—she is now a victim of Maverick’s chaotic sexual energy (an energy which Tom Cruise would display ever more chaotically in the years that followed). Viper will resist Maverick’s charisma and humiliate him by getting the flight team to outmaneuver him in the sky, thus demonstrating the vulnerability of his showboating. The two men remain at a standoff until a crisis (Goose’s death in a doomed mission) forces Maverick to submit to Viper’s training. A montage at the end of the second act demonstrates Maverick’s progress. Limp scenes follow, anti-climax threatens, Maverick leads the recruits in an engagement with Soviets fighters and emerges triumphant. He accepts expressions of admiration from Viper and Iceman (Val Kilmer, Maverick’s rival—“You can be my wingman any time”) and from all the other aviators in his class. Charlie finally seduces him. Freeze frame, cue the “Danger Zone” theme song, fade out.

Despite the presence of white stars front and center in most of the Simpson-Bruckheimer films, race and gender formed a central subtext to their stories. The progressive breakthroughs of the 1960s were referred to obliquely through the presence of female and black instructors, friends and cops (usually captains angry about getting their asses “chewed out”). But, with the exceptions of Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Beals, no black men or women of any color were cast as leads. Even then, stereotypes and boundaries were enforced. Murphy was used to crack jokes and teach uptight white cops how to ignore the rules and get away with it. He is the only Simpson-Bruckheimer hero never to be paired with a love interest. Alex Owens, Beals’s character in Flashdance, has an older male mentor (Michael Nouri) who becomes her lover. Like Maverick, she learns that she will need help to get into the academy. Unlike Maverick, she will also need to sleep with the right man to succeed.

This casual sexism might be more compelling if it were not only a single remove from the S&M rituals of the other Simpson-Bruckheimer movies’ male stars. An Officer and a Gentleman, Top Gun, and Days of Thunder are all dramatizations of men forcing each other into submission in a thinly sublimated expression of sexual frustration. The mise-en-scène of these films, with their wall-to-wall semi-naked men (or masculinized women) and pounding dance music, make them at once a powerful extension of disco culture (alleged to be long dead at the time) and a reactionary movement against it, externalized through the conservative nature of the plots and the conventional cultural assumptions of an audience that couldn’t have bought tickets faster.

The amiable jingoism of Simpson and Bruckheimer was so repellent to the lefty atmosphere of my town that it inadvertently made these movies seem rebellious, and in turn bred a cult of the winner, which led to frightening humiliation in every forum available. From battle-of-the-bands contests, to mathletes, to the local quiz show, the tenor of competition was nasty, petty, and small. The one-upmanship was witless, and you couldn’t help noticing that there weren’t any women lining up to sleep with you after you displayed your mastery in some domain of geekery. This fact of life was exacerbated by the lack of credible mentors in Amherst’s five-college area. Yes, almost everybody had an advanced degree, and there were even some famous thinkers around, but ultimately, when I was a teenager, the only practical advice I got from adults was “think about how much worse it would be if you were retarded” and “don’t listen to your father.” It didn’t matter whether the people who said those things to me had Ph.D.’s or not.

It wasn’t until 1996, when Don Simpson died, from a heart attack, on the toilet, weighing nearly three hundred pounds, with a $10,000 per week prescription drug habit and a bill to Heidi Fleiss that rivaled Charlie Sheen’s, that it became clear to me that winners are as thin on the ground as they are thick in the air in Top Gun.

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"If you make an American film with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with a budget of less than $5 million, you must be an idiot to lose money.”—Menahem Golan

In 1979, Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus acquired a mid-level distribution company called Cannon Films and turned it into one of the two premiere independent production companies specializing in action-revenge-fantasy films. The other was Carolco, headed by Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna. By the end of the next decade the two companies would, between them, produce Hercules, Missing in Action, Missing in Action 2: The Beginning, Cobra, Over the Top, the Death Wish sequels, Masters of the Universe, Cyborg—all from Cannon—and Angel Heart, Red Heat, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Cliffhanger, Showgirls, and the Rambo and Terminator series (Carolco). Each company was built by outsiders—Kassar and Vajna were from Beirut and Budapest, respectively—who believed in developing genre pieces as cheaply as possible, promoting them to within an inch of their lives, and then making a profit from foreign distribution and television sales before the movies opened. The scheme worked beautifully for many years, until the budgets started to spiral and the public appetite for action films dried up, briefly, in the early 1990s. While they lasted, Cannon and Carolco succeeded not least because both understood that the dark side of the Simpson-Bruckheimer ode to victory was the bitter pursuit of revenge, and that nothing inspired bloodlust quite like the 1960s legacies of civil rights and Vietnam.

Most observers have noticed the sharp cultural divide between films made about the Vietnam War after the fall of Saigon. On the one hand there are the Oscar-nominated critical reassessments (Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket) and on the other, the profit-drenched pictures which focused on re-fighting the war with a different result. This divergence obscures the special place of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), which got the ball rolling in both directions. Ostensibly a film about the war’s unique brutality and its effects on a group of steel workers, The Deer Hunter was also the first major hit to use the POW/MIA storyline in which a veteran returns to rescue his deserted buddies. That film’s massive success helped to teach Hollywood that backlash jingoism would play. The disaster of Cimino’s follow-up, Heaven’s Gate, solidified the industry’s new conventional wisdom: Big-budget pictures made specifically for adults weren’t viable. This shift, coupled with the continuing success of the vigilante/renegade cop movies of the 1970s (the Dirty Harry sequels, the original Death Wish), insured that there would be generations of new cinematic anti-heroes/stalkers and that very few of them would be made for more than $5 million—at least not at first.

Of the Cannon-catalogue examples cited above, the most representative are Missing in Action and Cobra. The former is both the peak of Chuck Norris’s career—made for $2.5 million, it grossed over $22.5 million worldwide—and the bottom feeder of post-Vietnam revisionism (yes, even more than Missing in Action II: The Beginning and Braddock: Missing in Action III, which at least had the decency to gross only twice their budgets and remain largely unseen since their releases).

In Missing in Action (1984), Norris plays retired Marine Colonel Jim Braddock, a vet haunted by his memories of the war. Like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, we find him in a hotel room waking from a combat nightmare. In this case, his vision climaxes when he commits suicide by leaping from a Montagnard hooch with a live grenade in each hand. Awake, he’s soon contacted by the US State Department to investigate American soldiers still being held in Southeast Asia. Once there, Braddock finds a map to a shadowy place in the jungle, enlists an old army buddy (M. Emmet Walsh) with a boat to get him there, where he discovers a slave labor camp populated by POWs and defended by communist Chinese troops. After much mayhem, Braddock, carrying an emaciated soldier cradled in his arms, escapes with the bulk of the prisoners in time to crash a summit between the US Secretary of State and the Vietnamese government. Freeze-frame, cue music, and out.

If Dirty Harry is the prototypical cop fantasy, in which a super-cop breaks the rules of law enforcement in pursuit of a homicidal lunatic, then Cobra (1986) is the genre’s final residue. Unlike the earlier film, which, as performed by Clint Eastwood and directed by Don Siegel, managed to find dimension in the psyche of its lead character, Cobra tries to combine the “renegade cop, out for justice” narrative of the earlier film with the triumphalism of the Rocky sequels, and ends up negating both. Marion “Cobra” Cobretti (Sylvester Stallone) is a Los Angeles super-cop who is called in whenever the police have no recourse but to shoot first and never ask questions. Like Simpson and Bruckheimer, Golan/Globus preferred opening sequences shot at magic hour. Cobra gives us a weirdly threatening and strangely cold Southern California sunset (not unlike the New York dusk that opens Death Wish) under which a motorcycle riding, trench-coated creep drives into the parking lot of a grocery store, parks in a handicapped spot, walks in, shoots up the place, and takes hostages.

When the cops arrive, they find that negotiation with this criminal psychopath doesn’t work. They are forced to “call in the Cobra,” who arrives in a solid black 1950 Ford Mercury bearing the license plate “AWSOM 50” and seatbelts designed for an F-14 fighter jet. Stallone’s “Cobra” Cobretti wears black motorcycle boots and aviator sunglasses, chews on a match, and carries a pearl-handled gun with a cobra-design inlay tucked into his pants just above his crotch. This trick of unveiling the protagonist in bits and pieces was one Stallone and his director, George P. Cosmatos, had used before, in Rambo: First Blood Part II. In doing so, they revealed a weakness for body oil and mist that became a visual hallmark of the decade.

A shootout with the gunman follows, in which Cobretti takes cover behind large, elaborate Pepsi, Coors, and Mountain Dew displays. The sequence ends when Cobretti kills the villain with a huge knife he also carries. Golan or Globus or Stallone or Cosmatos thought to cast Andy Robinson, who played the Scorpio killer in Dirty Harry, as a milquetoast detective who is Cobretti’s superior, thereby underlining the right-wing audience’s suspicion that criminals and civil-libertarian bureaucrats are one and the same.

As with the Simpson/Bruckheimer movies, both of these films proceed from the assumption that special, talented individuals (winners) are worthy of cinematic treatment. The difference has to do with the order of their luck. In the world of Golan/Globus (and Kassar/Vajna) the superman is a failure, defeated by the collusion of weaker men, and must be roused from lethargy and cynicism to regain the victory that was denied him the first time around. Rambo, Braddock, Kyle Reese of the original Terminator, and the Terminator himself in subsequent installments, all fit this profile. In the Cannon Group/Carolco universe there is no need for a mentor—all of their heroes’ obstacles are external and therefore, mercifully, not worthy of reflection. The righteousness of their goals is never questioned.

It is this certainty that is most reminiscent of the Reagan administration: Cobretti, Braddock, Dirty Harry Callahan, Paul Kerse (Charles Bronson’s character in Death Wish) John Rambo, and Rocky Balboa all ignore the rules as surely as Maverick, Axel Foley, and Alex Owens do, but for first group the rules are set by characters who are clearly liberal in their politics and naïve in their nuanced assumptions about good and evil. As president, Reagan used language that evoked simple sentiments. In reference to aid to the Contras: “We cannot turn away from them, for the struggle here is not Right versus Left; it is right versus wrong.” This is the kind of writing that could fit easily next to “You’re the disease, I’m the cure” (Cobretti on criminals), “All we want is for our country to love us as much as we love it” (Rambo on Vietnam veterans), and “I’ll be back” (the Terminator, in general). The right-wing loved these films and even incorporated them into their talking points. When Reagan emerged from a screening of Rambo: First Blood Part II, he announced that next time he’d know what to do when an American was taken hostage.

With so much in common on the level of politics and vengeful motivation, the most telling distinction between Missing in Action and Cobra (and the one that would signal the future for their parent company) was in their budgets. Cobra was made for $25 million, and failed at the box office. It was followed by disasters like Over the Top and Masters of the Universe, films that bombed in part because their budgets grew beyond the $5 million target Golan/Globus prized, in part because they sucked. As their budgets increased, Golan/Globus films got more moronic. That’s part of their legacy to the film industry and American culture.

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“For better or worse, MTV sort of bridges the whole country together almost like the BBC does in England.”—Joey Ramone

Across the board, low-budget action films would become victims of their own success once their stars began demanding higher quotes (salaries) as they aged out of their roles. Still, these pictures formed vital reference points in the imaginary blueprint that I had for my life, in no small part because the videos that accompanied their promotional blitzes hammered them into my consciousness. Really, you didn’t have to watch these movies at all to be affected by them. Their stories were so easily communicated that they could be reduced to three- or four-minute clips and sent through the megaphone that was MTV in its first incarnation.

To say that MTV was a network dedicated exclusively to commercials is to diminish its credibility only slightly. The channel’s programming schedule encompassed videos, movie trailers, frequent ads for Stridex, Oxy 10, and Alfonso’s Breakin’ Board, and a news program on which authority was derived from the self-serious manner of its anchor, Kurt Loder, the only on-air personality over thirty, and probably the only one who could write his own copy. The shows’ visuals referenced old media (the opening of news breaks featured typewriter tiles crashing towards the screen, spelling out “MTV News”) and the focus of coverage was simultaneously global in its scope and provincial in its perspective. That was one of the things that made it so appealing to me. Having never lived farther than thirty miles from where I was born, it wasn’t easy to grasp the finer points of global politics, but it was easy to understand the appeal of pop music.

The topic of discussion on the channel was immaterial. It could be the slow break-up of Duran Duran, the destruction of the Space Shuttle, or the apartheid government in South Africa. The news itself revolved around how it affected the personal lives of pop stars and the music industry. Duran Duran would form rival factions with successive movie tie-ins (A View to a Kill, American Anthem), the Space Shuttle would inspire songs of tribute (“Ron’s Piece,” by Jean Michel Jarre), and musicians who played South African venues would be informally blacklisted until their careers could be reassessed, typically (as in the case of Freddie Mercury of Queen) after they were dead.

In this way the channel was less the Rolling Stone Television that it pretended to be—no William Greider, Lester Bangs, or Greil Marcus here—than it was an extension of the 24-hour news drone that CNN had pioneered and a precursor to the agenda-pushing Fox News bullies that would follow in the next decade. But instead of championing a political orthodoxy, MTV promulgated an aesthetic dogmatism that easily appropriated symbolism of both the Right and Left and reduced it to a consumer choice. After an afternoon spent watching MTV you could be forgiven for believing that Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ronald Reagan, and Mikhail Gorbachev spent most of their time in the same city; that Amnesty International was a corporate partner with MTV and Doritos; that Kenny Loggins, Michael Sembello, and Robert Tepper were important musicians on the same level as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones; or that one day this MTV Beach Party might move to your house or mine.

This homogenizing of political and pop culture defined its decade and in retrospect it seems inevitable that Paramount (Simpson/Bruckheimer’s home studio) and MTV would be bought by the same parent company, Viacom. The balanced assault of uplift and marketing propelled both of them ever forward toward a pop culture hegemony, right up until MTV stopped programming videos, Simpson dropped dead, Carolco and Cannon Films went belly-up, and pornography became easily accessible to anyone with a computer, anywhere, at any time.

Well, this is a moment through which we have passed, a decade in which an omni-directional media organ (movies, the music industry, television, Music Television) could dictate the national mood to an eager public. The big bad media that scared my parents so much twenty-five years ago isn’t visible enough to scare people anymore. The record industry’s loss of control over its format (and thus its content) has destroyed the idea of the long-playing record, the lack of an actual object to purchase has destroyed the PMRC insanity that used to take up space on CNN, and TiVo, Netflix, and streaming video have cast doubt on the true worth of TV ad space. Today the mainstream media giants are such despised dinosaurs that you can almost feel sorry for them as their ratings sag and their power is usurped by burrowing mammals of the web. But their crippling raises the uncomfortable question of what comes next.

In the short term we are left with a memory of consensus to which the establishment stubbornly clings. If anything, the events have become bigger. Million-selling artists (the most mainstream of the mainstream) and big-budget movies have not gone away, but now recording contracts are reserved for those artists who can move a million units; Avatar, the highest grossing movie in cinema history, has made its impression based primarily on its 3D gimmickry and on its promotion as a unique cinematic spectacle designed for theatrical viewing, with tickets costing more than usual, opening worldwide on a single day. The unprecedented nature of its production, promotion, and distribution make it either a view of the future, the last gasp of an old industry, the latest reactionary stunt pulled by the movie industry in the face of an evolving media world, or all three.

Free distribution on YouTube, Facebook, and other social network sites has created a DIY movement so cacophonous that one could spend hours a day browsing the web and still have no idea where the center of the culture lies, and if the media universe keeps expanding at the current rate, that question may seem as silly as asking where the center of the literal universe is. The answer is everywhere and nowhere—“everywhere” has been added to the “nowhere” of my 1980s Amherst.

The legacy of Simpson/Bruckheimer, Golan/Globus, and Kassar/Vajna functions as the sarcophagus of a received wisdom which has ceased to live but still animates the zombified Right in modern political debate. The 1980s sloganeering that suggested that “the government that governs best is the government that governs least,” the assumption that a few trained American soldiers are capable of subduing an entire nation of “bad guys,” and the insistence that virtuous intentions justify insane action, formed the intellectual substance of the Right then and has lingered long enough to form the emotional core of its rhetoric today. Regressive tax policies, the invasion of Iraq, and the entire sad phenomenon of the George W. Bush Administration (to say nothing of the Sarah Palin show that is its direct extension) have all been wrapped in the same cultural assumptions that these producers used to sell their product to the world thirty years ago.

As the age of the 1980s action film fades into quaintness, I can’t help but notice the irony that the only film of the genre to achieve any kind of prescience is the Fox-produced Robocop (1987). With its vision of a privatized police force run by a corrupt and inefficient multi-national corporation, patrolling a decaying Detroit, this film alone predicted the destruction of the US automakers and their city, the crony capitalism of Dick Cheney/Halliburton/KBR, and the advent of private military firms like Blackwater. As a new decade unfolds and the old Right works itself into apoplectic rage over its decline, it might be best for them to remember Robocop’s friendly advice to the kids watching at home: “Stay out of trouble.”

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Dicking Around

2010-08-23T21:45:10Z

by Christian Lorentzen

Image: Funny People (d. Judd Apatow, US, 2009)

America is a country of overgrown boys, stunted and warped, who, left to their own devices, are fit to do little more than play video games, stare at pornography, and crack jokes about genitals, flatulence, and defecation. The country’s womenfolk match men’s obnoxious behavior with a reflexive shrewishness. They are ever vexed by anxiety about their diminishing horizons and fading looks. The men need to be tamed, and the women gain purpose from the taming, marching the men through a program of self-improvement consisting of grooming, gainful employment, relinquishing their toys, and disavowing their fraternal bonds. The women laugh and coo as the men emerge, docile clowns consoled by a friendly gaggle of children to whom they can pass on their dick jokes. This is Judd Apatow’s vision of America, as realized in three self-help fables—from the unmediated crudity of The 40 Year Old Virgin, through the mock cryptoconservatism of Knocked Up, to the pseudosolemnity of Funny People. Over the last half-decade it has really struck a chord.

Apatow delivers a method as well as a message. He films his actors improvising many scenes—film enough dick jokes and you can weave them into a plot. The improvisatory style has taken on the proportions of legend in the press of late, as if it were a novelty, or anything other than a sign of the lassitude of contemporary screenwriting. At certain points in the Apatow oeuvre reliance on the method is obvious, as in a montage from The 40 Year Old Virgin of Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd calling each other gay (as in: “You know how I know you’re gay?”) while playing video games. In that sequence at least the pair seem like friends. On average, the method yields a scene like Rogen’s visit to the bookstore with Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up. He rattles off a series of vulgar jokes about sex, pregnancy, and parenthood as she forces a series of laughs, none of which is timed right. Their lack of chemistry belies the movie’s premise—that the sweetness beneath the Rogen character’s oafishness is enough to charm a woman with Heigl’s TV-ready good looks.

The struggle between superficiality and emotional authenticity is a constant in Apatow’s work and is a function of the fact that all of his characters labor in the entertainment industry. The movies march in a progression up the entertainment food chain, as if no world existed outside the realm of pop cultural consumption and production. Virgin is set largely in an electronics store, where Steve Carell, Rogen, and Rudd hawk TVs and stereos. Carrell’s paramour, Catherine Keener, runs an eBay store selling the same. As she initiates him into romance, she also prods him from a life of service employment and consumption into entrepreneurship, helping him sell his collection of pop culture artifacts to raise the necessary capital.

The characters in Knocked Up toil a rung higher on the chain, in the parasitical realms of entertainment news and management. Heigl plays an E! channel correspondent, an occupation her character takes to with the earnestness of an NGO hand even as her managers are depicted as cynical cretins. Paul Rudd, as Heigl’s brother-in-law, is an A&R man, having given up a career as a musician because of fatherhood. Rogen is starting a website about celebrity nudity with his hapless buddies until the concept’s redundancy is pointed out and, burdened by new responsibilities, he settles for a desk job at a web design firm, presumably one with Hollywood clients. Funny People dispenses with the pretenses and merely portrays comedians with varying levels of success in movies and on television, thus allowing for more celebrity cameos than could be squeezed out of Heigl’s E! job. The cameos pretend to mock the world of celebrity but instead serve to affirm Apatow’s own status therein.

It turns out that Funny People is the movie Apatow wanted to make all along. It takes as its subject the misery of success in Hollywood. Poor Adam Sandler basically plays Adam Sandler if Adam Sandler were a barely redeemable asshole with leukemia. The redemption he seeks is reunion with a now married ex-girlfriend on whom he cheated. That doesn’t work out, but he is redeemed through friendship with his assistant/protégé Rogen, whose character, by means of a subplot, lands a redeemer, too, his in the form of a girl.

It’s unclear whether Sandler’s success is corrupting or just a force that gradually empties you out by allowing you to buy anything or fuck anyone. Clips of movies starring the fictional Sandler—one resembles Look Who’s Talking, except Sandler’s head is placed on a baby’s body; in the other he plays a merman (a woman Sandler beds screams “Fuck me like Merman! C’mon! Do Merman! Do the Merman call!” and he obliges)—imply that Hollywood movies are stupid as a rule but that Funny People itself is operating at a higher level. Yet for all its self-consciousness Funny People relies at every turn on the basest level of humor, and when the solemnity of the leukemia plotline is shaken off it descends quickly to a repertoire of plot-forwarding antics functionally no different than what we might expect from another Look Who’s Talking sequel. Apatow and his cohort, confident in their status as showbiz machers, have discovered self-consciousness but have little idea what to do with it.

Which is why they fall back on dick jokes. Generally dick jokes in Apatow’s films take on some form of self-deprecation. I found a gray hair on my balls, but I realized it made them look distinguished. My balls asked my dick if my dick was okay because they were worried I was hurting it. I don’t like blowjobs because I don’t know what to do with my hands. My dick is so small. Your dick is so small. Etc. Funny People adds women (Sarah Silverman and Aubrey Plaza) who make jokes about their vaginas. Heigl in Knocked Up is not so evolved; when the subject of her vagina comes up, she mostly seems distressed about the impending transformation to be wrought on it by childbirth.

There are three curious nods at the relentless genital gags in Funny People. Rogen asks James Taylor (playing himself) if he ever gets tired of singing “Fire and Rain,” then Taylor asks him “Do you ever get tired of talking about your dick?”—a defensive maneuver. Later, Sandler’s father tells him, “A man who’s funny doesn’t have to work blue”—how innocent, the elderly. Then there is the Randy character played by Aziz Ansari who brags that his act “fucked the crowd in the ass” and says “my standup’s my dick.” An explicitly aggressive libido gives away the game. (An exception is allowed black and South Asian characters in Virgin and Knocked Up, whose unbridled sexuality is treated as an ethnic quirk.) To admit to actual desire crosses a line of vulgarity that would repel the public (at least as voiced by a white hero); in other words, you’re allowed to talk about your dick if you stick to the facts—that it is small, doesn’t work right, and is inevitably embarrassing.

Still, the dick jokes are more sophisticated than any of the dialogue that bubbles up when the characters have to stop joking at moments of emotional crisis and can only express themselves in clichés. When, for example, Rogen proposes to Heigl in Knocked Up and she declines, their conversation cannot get beyond the basic terms “love” (they love each other), “ready” (they’re not ready), and “pressure” (there’s too much of it). In such scenes it can be hard to tell whether they’re improvising or Apatow went to the trouble of writing them lines. When, in Funny People, Leslie Mann says to Sandler, “Why did you cheat on me? I was so hot,” you sense that she’s been supplied the barest outline of a backstory and instructed to rely on her wits. The viewer feels less sympathy for the betrayed character than for an actress set adrift.

What is the difference between an Apatow movie and a run-of-the-mill Hollywood comedy like Dinner for Schmucks? It’s rare to come across a Hollywood comedy without one of Apatow’s cohort, known as the Bucket Brigade, attached—Schmucks delivers Rudd and Carrell, along with affiliated director Jay Roach, of the Meet the Parents movies. The club grows, but Apatow remains the auteur. While something like Schmucks or Date Night is clearly commercial product, keeping the actors in work and the money flowing studioward, his films have come to be perceived as the deluxe version of the current Hollywood comedy—the sort it’s acceptable for smart people to like. They come with self-consciousness, a running time of more than two hours, and the implication of an Important Social Message. Thus they have earned the adulation of critics who have variously claimed that Apatow has reinvented comedy, rendering obsolete everything from Lubitsch to the Farrelly Brothers; that his films are actually deep meditations on aging; that he has made movies in line with Stanley Cavell’s ideas about the American comedy of remarriage that thrived in the ’30s and ’40s; and, perhaps most perniciously, that they constitute an antidote to a pervasive culture of quirk in American cinema, which had for too long been under the siege of hipsters like Wes Anderson.

It is hard to read encomiums to Apatow without the sense that his champions are desperate to bear witness to a comic filmmaker who is both popular and worthy of their attention during an age of dreck. They strain to wring relevance out of Apatow’s pro-family message. (Who in America is against families and children?) They strain to argue for his place in a tradition. They use him as a cudgel against flawed filmmakers who are both smarter and more ambitious than he is. All the while they miss the simple moving force behind the gratuitous cameos, the accumulating in-jokes, the repeated casting of the director’s wife, children, and friends, and the constant carping about aging in Apatow’s films; they miss all the vanity. He is allowed this vanity because he delivers a message Americans crave to hear. As long as you behave yourself, take on a modicum of responsibility, and wear the yoke of commitment, it is entirely acceptable—even preferable and profitable—to be stupid.

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Costa's Letters

2010-08-23T21:45:05Z

by Jeanette Samyn, Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon

Image: In Vanda's Room (d. Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2001)

Pedro Costa’s films are meant to be letters. For Costa, letters act as metaphors, ways of addressing the possibilities of cinema. In a speech at the Tokyo Film School in 2004, he told his audience that making a good film is like writing a love letter in a bank: “Few people are going to see this love letter in a bank, and still fewer are going to write a love letter in a bank. . . . Your work is to continue trying to write love letters, and not checks. Sometimes people don't notice your work, of course. Well, we resist and we keep going to the bank to write love letters.” Costa invites an understanding of his films in epistolary terms. The form of a basic letter, requiring just a pen and a piece of paper to compose, is a useful analogy for Costa’s minimalist approach to filmmaking. And the time-consuming revision of letters parallels Costa’s method of paring his films from countless hours of footage. The problem of letters being ignored, misread, or forgotten—their potential for failed exchange—recurs in three of his films: O sangue (1989), Casa de lava (1994), and Colossal Youth (2005). The opposite problem, that unwanted letters might arrive, propels the plots of Tarrafal (2007) and The Rabbit Hunters (2007).

It’s fitting, then, that the Criterion Collection recently packaged Costa’s massive slum chronicle under the title Letters from Fontainhas. But if the films are letters, where and what is Fontainhas? The short answer is that it no longer exists, at least not in the form it did when Costa filmed it. Fontainhas was an outlying neighborhood of Lisbon, a meld of casbah and shantytown. Before the year 2000, a visitor to the district might see immigrants, mostly from Portugal’s former colonies, squatting in single rooms alongside destitute native Portuguese. In those days, city buses still drove into the neighborhood, depositing low-wage workers at its mouth. During the years between 2000 and 2005, however, demolition workers entered the heart of Fontainhas, marking its man-made structures with yellow X’s. Piece by piece, they cleared the area with bulldozers and fubars. Some of the inhabitants were relocated to public housing; many of the immigrants were dispersed in an ironic version of the diaspora that brought them to Lisbon in the first place. The films that comprise the Criterion box set—which includes Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and Colossal Youth, and the shorts Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters—chart the lives of these inhabitants through the destruction of Fontainhas and its aftermath.

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Maybe it’s more helpful to think of Costa’s work as a cycle comprised of six films made over the course of thirteen years: the five films released as part of the Criterion box, plus Casa de lava, a reworking of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie shot in the island nation of Cape Verde. With letters as a constant motif, the films map the volley of Cape Verdean immigrants between the Lisbon slum Fontainhas and the bleak heat of Cape Verde.

In Casa de lava, Cape Verde is a wasteland with little room for male labor, where an unpromising emigration is the only choice for men seeking work. In the films that follow, Costa presents Lisbon as a dead shell left behind by António Salazar’s repressive regime, where Cape Verdean immigrants and their neighbors share in economies without money, through various forms of casual labor and exchange. Costa’s subjects are maids, beggars, vegetable peddlers, and construction workers. Yet despite the drudgery that forms the pulse of his films, these characters never trade a cent. We see them clean houses and sell vegetables, but they never accept anything but food, or flowers. We get the sense that these films are meant to transcend capital. This is a reason why Costa appears to be the last card-carrying member of an historical avant-garde, those artists who emptied their images of belatedness so that they might be as free as air and lighter than money.

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Criticism of Pedro Costa divides roughly into two camps. In one corner: Mark Peranson and Cyril Neyrat, who work mostly for Cinema Scope magazine. These writers build the legend of Costa as slum-saint, acting as his primary hagiographers. In 2006, the obscurity of Costa’s films gave birth to Peranson’s harebrained “Vote for Pedro” campaign—a film festival lobby complete with t-shirts and tabloid-style editorials (“for those eager readers looking for even more on Colossal Youth, keep watching these pages”). Now that Costa has emerged from relative anonymity, critics like Neyrat praise him as the paragon of a new cinematic authenticity. In his essay accompanying the Criterion release, Neyrat charges Costa with “the invention of a new primitivism, of a new elementary simplicity, without denying the legacy of a century of cinema and the arts.” Yet Costa didn’t make these films alone: his characters, the letters they recite, the songs they sing, and the stories they tell, are all culled from the lives of Costa’s non-actor actors, blurring the line between documentary and fiction. These well-meaning hagiographers conceal the slum-dwellers and immigrants that Costa’s films forefront and rely on.

The other critical camp accuses Costa of aestheticizing poverty, of making “poverty porn.” This age-old indictment finds a champion in Armond White. In his review, “Portrait of a Black Man,” White writes that Costa’s “zombie-like characters inhabit miserable social conditions (poverty, drugs, AIDS) that Costa slants into a new existential complacency. The political indifference that prevails in contemporary film culture is newly indulged by Costa’s artiness. His style—long takes, chiaroscuro compositions, minimal movement—is a highly refined decadence. It allows guilt-free detachment from the reality of his characters and the many non-professional actors he enlists.” By denouncing this “artiness,” White is really attacking a Bressonian-Brechtian tradition, one that denies the audience easy access to the character’s point-of-view. This tradition spurns reverse angles and reactions shots, time-tested devices of escapist movies and TV. White reads this formalism as complacency; it is actually a vote—if we are going to have voting—for contemplation, a deliberate ethical maneuver against insincerity.

Disdained by wage earners, seduced and cheated by the middle class, Costa’s slum-dwellers and immigrants have also been neglected by his critics. It’s become unpopular to point out the obvious: Costa confronts his audience with a population of wayfarers and drug addicts, a volatile lumpenproletariat. It is his gamble that this constellation of characters can be united through the pain of their shared memory.

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Casa de lava is Costa's second film and his inaugural letter, a foreboding salutation of sexual and political entrapment sweltering with the logic of colonization. The film begins with footage of lava pouring from the Pico volcano in Cape Verde. After two soundless minutes, a fleet of violas sweeps in, followed by a rush of images that will echo throughout the Cape Verdean cycle: mixed-race women standing in various states of repose, with their eyes directed off-screen. These initial moments are hallmarks of Costa’s early minimalism. The viola sonata is Paul Hindemith’s, and it harks back to his Gebrauchsmusik, or music for non-musicians performed in service of a political point. This is Costa’s dramaturgy boiled down: non-actors voicing themselves as a political gesture. That Costa chooses to open the film with a collection of mixed-race women is crucial to the rationale of Casa de Lava: this is a film about the sexual drive of the colonizer, in this case white Portuguese, as it persists in liberal politics. We soon discover that these women are the underlaborers of the island, and that Costa wants us to contemplate their bodies. The flowing lava of the opening sequence, which will harden into unregenerate rock, reflects back on the heartache of Cape Verde from its explosion of independence in 1975 to the country’s slow economic death ever since. Costa’s early style is to be understood as a minimalism, but it’s a Bressonian minimalism of precision where nothing is wasted. A handful of elements are employed—archival footage, women’s bodies, violas—for maximal effect.

Where Lies Your Hidden Smile? (2001), though not part of the Cape Verdean cycle, refines this minimalism. For this reason it is probably the quickest route to the heart of Costa’s evolving aesthetic. The film—made during the Fontainhas years—is an ars poetica couched in a portrayal of the uncompromising filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. From the 1960’s to Huillet’s death in 2006, the partners co-directed elliptical, word-drunk films, like The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968). In Where Lies Your Hidden Smile? Costa treats Straub and Huillet as time-tested artists performing themselves. His economy is startling: with a stationary camera and a minimum of shot variations, he manages to nail down the pissed-off laboriousness of Huillet, who sits quietly editing their film Sicilia! (1999), and the exuberant rantings of Straub, whose hyper-kinetic waltz in and out of frame provides an almost musical counterpoint. A projector whirs and clicks onscreen. The tension between Straub and Huillet mounts, releases at the editing bench. Where is Straub going when he exits stage right? A minor fiction is born as he wanders down an unseen hallway. The frame suddenly becomes a threshold.

This reductive technique is Costa’s ethic at work, achieved by a frank admission: there are epistemological limits to the frame, there are images the camera cannot and should not capture. By subtracting the images available to the viewer, by “closing the door,” as he sometimes puts it, Costa achieves a tenuous balance that highlights the visual exchange between the remaining figures. Straub’s movement begins to require Huillet’s stillness, just as Huillet’s edits require Straub’s input. And so Costa sets his subjects in motion, allowing their conversations to elaborate his own principles. “One fine day,” Straub exhorts, “you realize it’s better to see as little as possible.” For Costa that day has already come. The hidden smile of the film’s title lies precisely where the viewer least expects it: just out of view, on the lips of its filmmaker, Costa.

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In Ossos, his first letter from the Fontainhas slum, Costa brings his minimalist technique (the film’s title translates to “Bones”) to bear on the other side of the post-colonial nexus. The film focuses on Fontainhas residents as they weave in and out of Lisbon for work, usually as housekeepers or beggars. The city, which took a back seat in Casa de lava, comes to the fore as a center of capital and sexual exploitation. This is something that comes up in Casa de Lava, too, when Mariana, a well-meaning Portuguese nurse, develops an insatiable sexual appetite upon her arrival at Cape Verde. The capacity for sustained sexual desire seems tied in Casa de lava to the sexual politics of colonialization. In Ossos, Costa is more interested in the sexual politics of capital accumulation. This is why his figure for the sexual tourist in Ossos is not so much an insatiable whore as a middle-class vampire.

Of all Costa's films, Ossos represents his most sustained engagement with liberalism. The film can be read as a distress signal from the slums, warning against neoliberal charity. Here, our only figure of relative wealth is Eduarda, a nurse who tricks Nuno, a young resident of Fontainhas, into bringing his infant to the hospital where she works. In the hands of a Hollywood director, the story might be more The Blind Side than The Night of the Hunter. The nurse’s interaction with Nuno would be presented as humane. Under Costa, Eduarda’s actions are philanthropic in form, but always dubious in action. For if Mariana was young and pretty, and the sex in Casa de lava was more or less about mutual desire, Eduarda's sensuality is something different: middle-aged and thin, she reverses the power dynamic found in Costa's earlier film, because she’s in a more clear-cut position to exploit the slum dwellers that appeal to her. Eduarda is the one with the information, with the money, with the place to stay in the city, and all of her scenes are heavy with disgust and expectation. She is discomforting, sleazy in her prim white nightgown, and we are forced to keep in mind the desire on which her charity depends.

When it comes to her relationship with other residents of Fontainhas, Eduarda’s brand of sensual maternalism is no less unsettling. Suspicious as we are of Eduarda in her role as nurse after her dealings with Nuno's baby, it is hard to sympathize with her even when she saves the life of the child's mother, who has come to clean her house. Even if in theory her apartment has an open-door policy for residents of Fontainhas, Costa persists in shooting her door as closed, locked. In Eduarda's apartment, the focus is not on crossing a threshold so much as opening and closing, locking and unlocking, highlighting the unevenness of exchange between her and the slum dwellers.

In the figure of Eduarda, the liberal impulse towards the poor looks more like a combination of paternalism, voyeurism, and sexual exploitation. Her intercession in the lives of slum dwellers is little more than slumming, and by the end of Ossos we see her hanging out in Fontainhas, tipsily heading for a bedroom. This is the film’s end point of liberal sympathy, but it is also an attempt to come to terms with the limits of Costa’s own project and its potential connection to a gentrification nightmare that culminates in the slum clearances of In Vanda’s Room. In an interview for the Criterion Collection release, Costa describes himself as a “petit bourgeois” among the slum dwellers; in this sense, something of the liberal vampire haunts him, too. His next two films, In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth, his most critically admired, are an attempt to face up to this fact by subtracting himself as much as possible. This reduction leaves him room to document the end of Fontainhas.

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In an early sequence of In Vanda’s Room, a small fire lights a narrow alley in the foreground, as chunks of debris pile in the distance. A pack of schoolchildren passes through, oblivious to the falling concrete. The demolition of Fontainhas is under way. Its inhabitants are tidying up their unauthorized living spaces, choosing the few items of sentimental value they can freight into the next world, wherever that may be. If Costa now manages to lend his imagery an elemental vitality, it’s because the enormity of the disaster, the likelihood that it will be repeated with great speed throughout the developing world, retains its biblical echo. This is why one slum dweller warns, “Beware Noah’s Ark! Noah’s Ark is coming!” Costa delicately sanctions these messages, and embellishes them by having Vanda (of the film’s title) discover a model boat, an ark, later in the film, in a scene that was clearly staged. The minimalism here is so reductive that Costa merely chooses between authoring and authorizing; he uses the distinction to maintain a documentary veracity without relinquishing his aesthetic sense.

Slum clearances like the one documented in Costa’s film have a long history. The most famous of the historical evicted are probably those forced to move by Baron Haussmann’s restructuring of Paris during the Second Empire, in the interest of modernization, sanitation, the free-flow of traffic, and the prevention of working class barricades. Today, especially after Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums, slum clearances tend to be associated with the Third World, where, as Davis writes, “every year hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of poor people—legal tenants as well as squatters—are forcibly evicted” from their neighborhoods. But even outside the Third World, much of the urban poor is subject to forcible removal, often without much notice or compensation; when provided with alternate housing, it is almost always on the outskirts of the city, further away from work and familiar ground.

The gravity of slum clearance affords Costa the chance to shed film, with its shackling allusive weight, in favor of DV. This technological leap-of-faith is often used to explain the primitive, docufictional feel of In Vanda’s Room. This explanation rings false, and it dehumanizes Vanda Duarte, who is Costa’s great Brechtian actress, precisely because she refuses to play a predetermined role; instead, she plays the film, willfully destabilizing it by performing herself. In Vanda’s Room is the director’s only work about the living—no zombie immigrants or liberal vampires—and Vanda, a kind of slum Diogenes, is its heartbeat. Shuttered inside her chamber, Vanda hacks and coughs, sleeps all day, and prepares her drugs. She shares everything freely, and exits only to peddle vegetables from door to door in the neighborhood. Her room is a polis, and in her arguments with other slum dwellers, she matches her director as a furious dialectician. When the self-pitying Nhurro laments, “Life has shown me nothing but contempt,” Vanda sternly dresses him down: “This is the life we want, doing drugs.”

Vanda’s room is a space of equality, but it is not a scene without labor or exchange. For offering some pills, Vanda receives a bouquet of flowers, one that later decorates her room in Colossal Youth. Her labor is a different story altogether. Aside from selling vegetables, Vanda’s most involved work is the protracted freebasing of heroin. This labor, performed with razors on an open phonebook, is destructive. It also represents a problem—not just for Vanda, in that she has a “drug problem,” but on larger scale: it is a problem of the self-interested poor on whom no cooperative politics can rely. What do you do, Costa asks, with those who no longer hope for a better life? What kind of stories do they yield?

Elsewhere in Fontainhas the mood is diluvian. The residents help each other erect a lean-to from a tarp. In a film prepossessed by the rhythms of life, everyone talks of impending death, wondering where they might end up after the flood. The film closes with demolition workers resting on a jutting rock. This lonely altar offers up Fontainhas for sacrifice, and it is the film’s most compelling image of subtraction.

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In Colossal Youth, Lisbon leaves Costa’s cast to rot for good. Ventura, Costa’s premier method-actor and a former construction worker, is our guide to the devastation. In the earlier films, Fontainhas was decrepit. But its economy of space and its broken-down walls allowed for the sociality cultivated by both the slum-dwelling Vanda and Eduarda, the nurse. By Colossal Youth, however, Fontainhas has been cleared, and its inhabitants have mostly been relocated to new housing projects on the outskirts of Lisbon. The new buildings isolate their residents as much from each other as from Lisbon proper.

Vanda reemerges as the figure most comfortable in her new apartment. She is a mother now, older and bloated on beer, and she spends her days sitting in bed, watching TV. This—Vanda's new room—is just as public as her old one, but few people stop by, save her daughter and Ventura. The camera pauses on Vanda's walls. They are imposing, painted a sterile white that washes out any decoration, not to mention Vanda herself. A force-of-nature before, she's strangely inert in Colossal Youth.

After the vibrancy of In Vanda's Room, death after relocation is quiet, disconnected, built towards forgetting. And against the construction of the new housing project, Ventura and Costa work to condense the demolished slum into a transportable culture, a letter to send across time. To this end, Ventura acts as Costa's conduit, a black Tiresias traveling between the scattered homes of his "children," trying to rescue a fragment of Fontainhas in new circumstances defined by distance rather than nearness, locked doors rather than open corridors, television rather than conversation.

Colossal Youth is Costa's culminating ode not just to Fontainhas but to Cape Verdean labor in Lisbon. Working off the books, under the table, or simply without money, Costa's subjects form the fringe economy of a liberal democracy. This is Fanon's lumpenproletariat: seething and destructive, drug-addled and abandoned. Costa's unsung achievement in the Cape Verdean cycle is to face this group and heed its warning, to salvage its culture from the cleared slums and make it cohere.

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If Costa’s work reached critical mass with the release of Letters From Fontainhas, the intervening years have been a come down. Maybe Costa didn’t know where to turn in the aftermath of Fontainhas. Without his cast, he seems lost. Certainly it’s difficult to reconcile Ne Change Rien (2009), a music film that follows the French actress Jeanne Balibar, with the man who shot Vanda Duarte cooking heroin in her bedroom. Yet it’s just as hard to imagine that Costa has abandoned the memory of Fontainhas. Five years separated Casa de lava from the slum films that followed. So assuming another letter surfaces, who might it be written for?

The final images of Costa’s films are always self-referential. Sometimes these images look backwards, like at the end of In Vanda’s Room, where you can see the name “Nuno” (the father from Ossos) spray-painted on a wall behind the stone altar. Elsewhere, they project forward to Costa’s future work, as in Casa de lava, which ends with a shot of a girl waking up in a doorway, going inside, and exiting the frame with a bucket on the way to work. The same girl resurfaces in Ossos—shot in another country—a few years later. In this sense, the final sequence of Colossal Youth might provide some insight into his work after Ne Change Rien. Here, Ventura, heavy with memories of labor, lies sprawled on Vanda’s bed. Vanda has entrusted him with babysitting her daughter, who crawls unattended on the floor below. The image of the child is a strange reminder of the title’s literal translation, once a slogan of Cape Verdean independence: Youth on the March. The scene is disturbing because you‘re waiting, at first for something to happen to her, then you wonder about her growing up.

Costa’s other Fontainhas films don’t introduce children as a question like the final scene of Colossal Youth does. The earlier films are more interested in adults—the only child given a lot of screen time is Nuno’s baby in Ossos, but he spends most of the film in a trash bag. In this scene, however, Vanda’s daughter, left as the only figure moving in the frame, comes to life, unlike her mother, and we’re forced to consider her, to think about what it would mean to grow up as Vanda’s daughter in this new white-washed building. We know what happens to the children of Fontainhas as grown-ups—this is a subject of In Vanda’s Room in particular—but Vanda’s daughter is a figure for a new generation, and she marks out the stakes of Costa’s project against forgetting. After the clearance of Fontainhas, after all, the only living connection between the crawling infant and Ventura’s memory, the culture he carries from place to place, is the film itself.

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Cineplex Hopping

2010-08-23T21:45:00Z

by Nicholas Rombes

Image: Cineplex HDR 1, 2008

Facts about the Cineplex: 1) Several movies play simultaneously. 2) The movies begin at different times. 3) When you purchase a ticket, it is to spend approximately 120 minutes in one movie, not 120 minutes in several different movies.

The experience is both democratic and hierarchical: people with different tastes mingle for a while in the lobby, buying tickets and popcorn, and then split off into individual theaters. The power of the Cineplex lies in the standardization of the moviegoing experience, as each theater is basically the same, an interchangeable auditorium of stadium seating. There is comfort in this, but also numbing familiarity. Close your eyes and open them again; in this room, you could be anywhere.

The surrealists André Breton and Paul Éluard used to enter movie theaters at random and stay only a little while, until the plot became clear to them and the films’ images were drained of their power. In the Cineplex you can do the same thing all in one building. I did that one day this summer. What I saw was not excerpts from ten different movies, but one movie made up of ten interchangeable parts—the imperial power of Hollywood, still alive and well, surviving postmodern fragmentation and resisting détournement.

Oceans

So real it looks fake, the colors more real than real, the way we imagine colors to be, not the way they really are. Pierce Brosnan narrates as if he is reading from some sacred text. The Ocean: “most of us only experience a small part of it.” Something about “it is more than just a place.” What is happening? A group of iguanas at sunset rest on the shore, and then a rocket takes off on the horizon (the Space Shuttle?) and suddenly they all go alert and raise their heads and look toward the light, as if this were the first time these creatures had seen evidence of human technology. The movie’s dark intonations suggest that the fire in the sky is a bad thing (“Fire bad!”), but why?

For a tortuous twelve minutes Oceans smashes its neo-liberal humanist fist against the natural world, which is not permitted to exist for its own sake, but must be oversaturated with post-production oceanic sound and color and over-glorification of fish and amphibians and lizards that are just being themselves and not performing and that have no moral system as we know it. But Oceans suggests that these creatures are secret gods brought forth by the camera to enlighten pathetic humans about the perils of Homo sapien progress, which has created nothing more than artificial fire in the sky that catches the attention of dumbfounded iguanas, whose look of shock at this fire is designed to remind us of many Bad Things at once. We are charged with having lost our innocence, of disrupting the comfortable myth of the natural world, and, worst of all, of moving ahead to destroy the heavens and earth despite that fact that we know we are destroying the heavens and earth.

Kick-Ass

Twelve people in the theater, plus me. The first dialogue I hear, in voice-over, is spoken by some kid who turns out to be a major player in the movie: “We see someone in trouble,” he says, “we wish we could help. But we don’t. The world I lived in, heroes only existed in comic books, and I guess that would have been okay if the bad guys were make believe, too. But they’re not.” Cut to a man about to be tortured by having his fingers garden-clipped off one-by-one (then he is shot) mixed in with self-referential banter—lots of talk about Batman, in a movie based on a comic book about comic-book heroes.

Deeply conservative, Kick-Ass announces itself in its very title as the phantasmagoric wish-fulfillment of the Bush doctrine. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” a Bush aide told Ron Suskind in 2004. For the dozen-plus minutes that I’m in the theater Kick-Ass slips out of its moral noose and runs amok in a desperate attempt to create and make legitimate its own reality. Characters come and go, but they mean nothing to each other or to us. “This fuckin’ guy comes out of nowhere, kicks our asses, and steals all the coke,” the poor guy about to be tortured and then killed says to the men who will kill him. But only the weak-willed among the audience see him as a “poor guy.” He is instead, in the worldview of the movie, a nothing, a blood-spurter, a screamer, a spectacle, a vessel awaiting the creation of a new reality of torture.

Two plots develop at the same time. Plot #1: Kids Dress in Comic-Book-ish Costumes to Kick Ass. Plot #2: Break Some Taboos. But there are no more taboos, today, except to be boring. The sixteen minutes I watch flip by like comic book pages, and this makes us, in the audience, feel like we are moving together, old and young. Nicholas Cage (b. 1964) plays Big Daddy to Hit Girl (Chloë Moretz, b. 1997). “I’m just fuckin’ with you, Daddy!” she says, and in that one moment we understand that the idea being advanced is this: there is a sadness in the absence of authority. In The Outsider, Colin Wilson wrote that the “world has no meaning for us because we do all things mechanically.” The people in Kick-Ass are smiling but they are sad because they do things like kill other people as a matter of course, and there is no authority telling them to stop. In the film’s overdetermined celebration of this freedom there is a longing for the old strictures.
The Last Song

There is a generational death-match going on here, too. I have stepped into an extended version of Kick-Ass. The words are different, the faces on the screen are different, but this is the same movie. Ronnie Miller (Miley Cyrus) vs. her father Steve Miller (Greg Kinnear), as Steve tries to win his estranged, post-divorce daughter over, enduring her boredom, her sarcasm, her empty-faced gazes. They are somewhere warm. Steve works on a church stained-glass window in his garage or studio. The film wants to be about redemption.

For nine minutes, absolutely nothing happens in The Last Song. People meet each other and say things. The fact that nothing happens makes the movie interesting. The theater is empty. The projector runs for no one except me. I move around and sit in the very back row and then in the front row. I watch the movie standing up. I turn around and look up at the projection booth, but that seems to be empty, too. Steve’s estranged wife, Kim, Ronnie’s mother, is played by Kelly Preston.

Steve: She’s [Ronnie’s] still not playing [piano]?
Kim: Not since the day you left. Brian even bought her an electric piano. She won’t go near it.

A little later:

Kim: We hurt them Steve, especially Ronnie. We can try and pretend that we . . .
Steve: I’m not going to do this, okay? Things happen.

The characters exchange lines like this with the force of gum dropping from a dead man’s mouth. Ronnie is supposedly a piano prodigy who “gave up,” and yet not for one moment do we believe that she even knows that a piano is a musical instrument. There is nothing musical about Ronnie or Steve or the theater I am alone in, watching the screen, waiting for something to happen, even the flickering of an exit sign.

The Losers

I find the exit, make my way to the over-lit restroom. The kindly assistant manager smiles at me. She is surrounded by over a dozen movies playing simultaneously, and her desk is at the center. Walkie-talkies on her desk crackle to life periodically with reports from the theater staff. She watches me as I make my way back toward the next movie, The Losers, in Theater 15, and it is only then that I see that her smile is a warning: I am being watched.

I enter the darkened theater, punctuated by bursts of yellow and orange explosions in a jungle somewhere. I count fifteen or fifteen backs of heads. I take a seat near the front.

“He’ll kill you too, you know.”

A dead child’s teddy bear on fire. A bus with rescued children smashing down the side of a mountain in Bolivia.

“Sir, there’s not enough room for your team now.”

Everyone inside the bus should have died a dozen times. We are conned. No one today minds the con. The secret of movies, now, is to show us how we are conned. This—revealing the con—used to be someone else’s job.

“Keep your bear. Keep him safe.”

The child is obliterated by a rocket. The stuffed bear survives.

“He’ll kill you, too, you know.”

Americans have sensed that there is no longer any such thing as “orthodoxy.” For many years, there was something sad about this. But now that sadness has lifted. Why? Because they sense a new orthodoxy coming. In The Losers a helicopter of innocent children is blown out of the sky.

“Keep your bear. Keep him safe.”

The filmmakers are orthodox enough not to show the children’s bodies in the burning wreckage. Instead, they show the burning teddy bear. This is the new orthodoxy, a post-neo-conservative impulse to police ourselves, seeping into Hollywood movies which are not too violent, as is so often charged, but not violent enough. “The violence is supposed to be upsetting,” Casey Affleck has said in defense of The Killer Inside Me. In The Losers, the stuffed bear stands in for the children, a synecdoche borne out of fear.

The new orthodoxy denounces representations of reality for representations of representations of reality. In The Perfect Crime, Jean Baudrillard wrote that “contrary to what is said about it (the real is what resists, what all hypotheses run up against), reality is not very solid and seems predisposed, rather, to retreat in disorder. Whole swathes of reality are collapsing.” For nearly 30 minutes, The Losers itself collapses under the weight of how to solve this unsolvable dilemma. The fact that it tries marks The Losers as both a failure (as a movie) and a low-grade form of theory.

The Bounty Hunter

The stadium seating has made me dizzy and I sit in the third row this time, the screen filling my field of vision. In The Bounty Hunter, there are jokes. It is, like The Dick Van Dyke Show, full of false entrances, of eruptions of exaggerated laughter followed by wide-eyed stillness, of physical comedy that hearkens back to television’s blossoming confidence in the early 1960s that it could compete with the movies through the very constraints of the medium. But if The Bounty Hunter tries to capture some of the madcap adventurism of early sitcoms, it fails because its nostalgia is unearned, the product of an attenuated sense of bedlam.

It is around twenty minutes into the film. Nicole Hurley (Jennifer Aniston) is handcuffed to a bed in a hotel room, while a bounty hunter, Milo (Gerard Butler), is in the bathroom. It turns out Milo is Nicole’s ex-husband. It is morning. A woman from housekeeping enters:

Nicole: Um. You’re probably wondering why, uh, I’m handcuffed to the bed.
Housekeeping Lady: I just came from a room where a man was lying in a bathtub full of mayonnaise wearing a dog collar.
Nicole: To each his own.
Housekeeping Lady: You’re not the one who has to clean the tub.

This is a joke, complete with a punch line, and had The Bounty Hunter continued down this path—piling one joke on another—it might have achieved a level of lunacy. There are fake high-tempered tantrums and arguments and the stomping of feet. Pouting. For some moments you think this might turn into something like What’s Up, Doc?, but none of the scenes interlock tightly enough to accelerate into pitched madness. It’s as if someone was hired to make the movie less funny than it might have been. Here, Nicole asks Milo for permission to use the bathroom:

Nicole: Can I have some privacy please?
Milo: No. Something tells me I should frisk you.
Nicole: Oh, pshh. Right. Why, do I look like I’m hiding a weapon between my breasts?

(Shakes her breasts in front of Milo.)

You expect a punch line, even a not-funny one, like Nicole goes into the bathroom and removes a weapon from between her breasts. That’s not funny, but it’s something. Yet nothing like that happens and you begin to wonder, was this movie released before it was completed? Was a joke finisher supposed to come in and write the punch lines? It is the idea of The Bounty Hunter to anticipate that its audience does not need punch lines, and for nearly twenty minutes the film succeeds as an exercise in self-defeat, an experiment in which nearly every comedic moment is undercut by the movie’s relentless insistence on not delivering the goods.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

The most antagonistic eleven minutes of my life in a movie theater. That includes the ads. Maybe once I left the theater the movie became soft. But I did not see that part. I saw approximately eleven minutes from somewhere near the beginning.

This is a movie written by adults attempting to sound like children. So are most all movies about children, but many of them disguise that fact. The movie is narrated by the protagonist, 11-year-old Greg (Zachary Gordon), who sets up and comments on the action.

Greg (in voice-over): If you’re as discriminating as I am, it can be tough to figure out where to sit on your first day of middle school. One bad move, and you’re stuck next to some idiot for the rest of the year.

But how would Greg know this? The voice-over seems to be contemporaneous with the action (the first day of school) so how would he know about being stuck with a kid for the rest of the year on his first day of middle school? His is really the viewpoint of older people who have failed at disguising, on even the most basic narrative level, their adult voices. Greg and his buddy come across a cute girl under the bleachers, Angie (Chloë Moretz again) reading Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. This shows that she is deep, that she is an outsider despite her good looks. Howl, part II, begins with these lines:

     What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
            their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
            nation?
      Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob-
            tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
            stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
            weeping in the parks!

Angie is not reading Howl, but holding it in such a way that we can see that the book that she holds is Howl. Because the filmmakers chose to put Howl in the film, it is a duty to respond that this is an unusual form of product placement. Perhaps watching the totality of Diary of a Wimpy Kid would obscure the fact of Howl in this movie. But watching a random, small portion of the movie elevates everything in that portion to a higher level of prominence. What might typically be forgotten as the plot of the movie carries us forward is lodged in memory. Thus, Howl is lodged, a thorn in the brain, an out-of-place book in a movie about the longing for social inclusion and the careful navigation and acceptance of social norms. At the end of “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Horkheimer and Adorno wrote: “The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.” Today, the triumphs are of a different order. We consume media like Diary of a Wimpy Kid not even though we see through it, but because we do.

Clash of the Titans

With the exception of The Bounty Hunter, every film discussed thus far was directed by someone born in Europe. Maybe not so surprising as Hollywood has had its share of famous and not-so famous European-born directors over the years. Yet most of these films (Kick-Ass, The Last Song, The Losers, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Clash of the Titans) could easily be dismissed as crassly American. Is there evidence of some sort of European New Wave in these films? No.

“There’s a god in you.”

That is a line from Clash of the Titans. There is dialogue in the movie, but the dialogue is not necessary because Clash of the Titans is pure cinema. We enter into the realm of images so dominating they make talking irrelevant. What does it matter what characters say to each other?

“It’s a message. They’re watching us,” Perseus says. I haven’t been in the theater long enough to know who he means. The gods?

Gigantic scorpions that seize men in their pincers and rip them in two or hurl them against stone walls overpower the false words of human beings. The men and women in Clash of the Titans appear to be lonely. Why are they lonely? Because they secretly wish to be monsters and gods, and yet the actors cannot see the monsters and gods their characters wish to be, because the monsters and gods are not actually there on the set with them. As hard as the filmmakers try not to show it, it is easy to detect how the monsters and human actors are separated by time and space. Maybe the giant scorpions were rendered before the humans stood before the cameras. Maybe they were rendered after. Either way, they are separate.

This separation is tragic for us, too, because it reminds us of our own divisions, from loved ones, from family, from the natural world that we dismiss as a nostalgic relic even though in our hearts we yearn for it, just as we yearn for our teachers from many years ago, or for the difference between the person we hoped to become and the person we are now. In Clash of the Titans, as in so many other films, the actors are alienated from the conditions of their acting, and although the logic and genius of CGI movies today is to erase this separation, it still bleeds through. The beauty of the scorpion fight sequence is not in the seamless integration of human actors and CGI monsters, but in the gap between them.

“There’s a god in you.”

Either Travis Beacham, Phil Hay, or Matt Manfredi (the credited screenwriters) wrote than line. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “God enters by a private door into every individual.” There are two people in the theater, plus me. “Hey, people,” I want to announce, “come over here and let’s sit together.” A screen-filling scorpion chases a man and crashes through a wall that explodes into dust. I am in the back, so as to make my quiet exit after fifteen minutes or so. By the light of the screen I can see a balding man four rows down and to my left, and then a small person whose gender is unidentifiable in the dark, down very close to the screen.

“It’s a message. They’re watching us.” Was the character who spoke those lines referring to us, in the audience?

The Back-up Plan

I walk in to banter. Zoe is played by Jennifer Lopez. Stan by Alex O’Loughlin.

Zoe: This is just not a good time for me. I’m going through some changes.
Stan: Menopause?
Zoe: Menopause? Seriously? How old do you think I am?
Stan: Okay, you know, let’s start over, because the more I think about it we’d never make it as a couple anyway. You’re way too skeptical. We should be friends.
Zoe: I have enough friends.
Stan: You can never have too many friends. What are you doing tonight?
Zoe: Getting take-out and going home to bed.
Stan: Clearly you don’t have that many friends.

There are twenty-two people in this theater, and for the first time I sit next to someone. The person next to me does not like that, and I become distracted. He does not appear to be enjoying the movie; my presence makes it worse. I remove myself by two rows. I am now behind the person—a balding man—and so far I have only caught a glimpse of Jennifer Lopez. The man turns around and looks back—I imagine for me—and at the next noisy scene I move again but drop my notes and must fish them out from beneath the empty seat in the row in front of me. I make my way to the back row, against the wall, immediately beneath the projector, which hums above me like a weird whisper from a Robert Coover story about the movies.

Stan says he just wants to walk with Zoe to a take-out food place, order with her, and then they’ll go their separate ways. I’m looking for my notes when this happens, but I have the feeling it’s crucial to the plot. I can’t see the screen, and can’t see Zoe’s reaction. There is a cut to some loud music, and I assume they are at the take-out place. Snatches of dialogue: “trust,” “I told you,” “why don’t we,” “you are persistent.” I look up at Jennifer Lopez and for one moment all my cynicism drains away. I see her beauty and fall sideways through the walls into the next darkened theater.

Death at a Funeral

Dear Neil LaBute: I was forever branded by In the Company of Men. What the fuck happened to you?

Who knows at what point during Death at a Funeral I entered the theater. The funeral. We are at the funeral of Aaron’s (Chris Rock’s) father. Guests are arriving. Aaron and his wife Michelle (Regina Hall) are trying to have a baby.

Michelle (trying to seduce Aaron): Listen, um, we still need to finish that thing.
Aaron: Oh come on baby, I’m just not in the mood right now.
Michelle: I’m not wearing any panties.
Aaron: Hey, my father’s dead!
Michelle: I’m trying to help here. Please honey, I really want to make this baby thing happen. We’ve got five min. . .

To say that Death at a Funeral plays on countless racial stereotypes would be like saying that leaves grow on trees, for without its racism the movie would cease to exist. I watched about fifteen minutes as the film lurched and faltered like a poisoned horse with a broken ankle, my thoughts already confused by dodging from theater to theater. People who are black, I thought, and people who are white. This is a movie about black people and white people. Does it matter that some are black and some are white? It seems to matter, I’m not sure how or why. The black characters talk in exaggerated ways, and the white characters talk in reserved ways, unless they are high. Is this important? But as soon as these questions entered my head they burn away, as if evaporated by light from the projector’s 3000-watt bulb burning out my eyes. I was light-headed, troubled, suddenly full of a hatred that was fed by the images and sounds of this comedy.

Hot Tub Time Machine
I wander in somewhere, I think near the halfway mark, my mind spinning from fragments of nine movies. There are people talking to each other on the screen. There are lights strung around like it is Christmas, but maybe it isn’t Christmas. I look for evidence of time travel. I lose track of who is talking, what their names are. The theater is overheated. Some lines:

“We’re gonna make, like, Hitler president or something. We can’t do this.”

“We’re gonna have sex with this girl. You, me, together.”

“No, you were supposed to do everything that we did.”

“I didn’t fuck that girl, okay, because I’m committed to not changing the past.”

“So you’re telling me I cheated on my wife for no reason?”

Who are these men? One of them is Adam, played by John Cusack, who was also one of the film’s producers. What kind of men are they? They are regular guy men, made to appear representative. They are not afraid to swear a lot or talk about sex.

Are they nostalgic? They are. They are nostalgic for the '80s. The time machine transports them back to 1986, just like Michael J. Fox was transported back to the '50s in Back to the Future, in the ‘80s. Their collective father is Ronald Reagan, whom they outwardly hated but secretly loved. They loved him because he sanctioned their behavior. He was not a stern father, but a distracted father, very much a “boys will be boys” father. His anti-regulatory policies extended to them, and they miss him.

“I didn’t fuck that girl, okay, because I’m committed to not changing the past.”

Whether the film endorses this scrap of dialogue I don’t know, but from just fifteen minutes it’s clear that Adam is the voice of sentimental moralism in the film. He longs for something deeper than just fucking “that girl.” Already, from a piece of time near the middle of the film, I can feel the gravitational pull of the faux Restoration of Order that was the symbolic project of the Reagan era. Funny and fitting that in order to learn how to be good men, the characters in Hot Tub Time Machine have to reverse-engineer their futures.

I leave this Time Machine. On my way out, the Cineplex is hopping with people, packs of teenagers I feel a ridiculous affinity with. My brain is scrambled from watching random fragments of ten movies in two hours. By writing this I try to convince myself that I am no slave to images, that I am the master, not the mastered. And yet I know I will be back again, and I am strangely comforted because I am not completely free.

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Future Sentimental Group

2010-08-20T14:11:27Z

by Christopher Hsu, Dushko Petrovich

Image: Milk Plus—James Howard, 2009

Written to accompany the exhibition “Milk Plus (Special ‘Don’t Worry’ Chemical)” at Fold Gallery, London, June 2009. Published on the Paper Monument website.

People want to have a new sense of voyeurism, they want a new level. This is something I’m really interested in. We still don’t know how this is going to grow or pop, but we know it isn’t going away. This is very important to me—I want to be in the middle of this. These other people have cracked something fundamental, and that’s what we’re looking for. We want to crack something fundamental. I think when I was in, you know, corporate America, I think part of my soul died. Now I want to be inside at the beginning of something, not the so-called well-oiled machine.

+ + +

This Hi-Ping Poon was an upstart, with his mediocre hair-statement, and outdated cowboy-look. Vice-Supervisor Sun decided he would show him who was the most creative ideas-man in the Future Sentimental Group.

+ + +

My status is I just finished jerking off. I was picturing this romantic movie, you know with like Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, but when they wanted to do the sex scene, they didn’t want to do it, so they just brought in other people, and they fucked. They switched to the porno scene and they just put in these like, stuntspeople. Like body doubles. They might have to use some editing tricks, you know, have the double paint her nails the same color as Meg Ryan when she’s cupping his balls and shit. She’d probably have to clip her nails. Have you ever noticed how they have such long nails, like when they put their hands above their heads? They’re so lazy, they just want to lay back and get fucked and not think about anything else.

+ + +

Two week of always exhaustion, always angry for small annoyuance, memory no good. “Immeasurable virtues is patience and forbearance.” Ren Shen Yang Rong Tang and licorice decoction. Also turning off air conditioner during rest-time.

+ + +

How’s that different from drugs? It sounds like drugs. What do I mean? I mean the illegal kind. Chinese Flower? Is that like chamomile? I don’t really care, so long as it’s not ginger—don’t give me the ginger lemon thing. It’s probably chrysanthemum. Looks like chrysanthemum—that’s a powerful insecticide. It is! What, you don’t believe me?

+ + +

Two or three cups of café-style into the Friday morning meeting of the Future Sentimental Group, Sub-Director Hi-Ping Poon spontaneously brain-childed a new creativity: “total revelation vibe.”

Around the office, it was rumored that this Hi-Ping Poon, who was rarely seen interacting with co-workers on a smalltalk/mingle basis, was a loner-outsider-complex type, or “loner-con.” It was known that he had succeeded in only two personal achievements since he had started at CVTV, one of which had been with Administrative Assistant Genevieve-June Kwok, who had facial disfigurements.

“Are you going to begin any time soon, or do I go grab another café-style while you prepare yourself psychologically?” asked Sun, with a sneer.

“Please, Vice-Supervisor, if you wish to refresh before I begin,” said Poon.

“No, Sub-Director,” barked Sun. “I do not wish to refresh. When I feel the need to, I will myself decide to refresh. Now are you going to unveil your creativity, or do I just get back to my task-at-hand?”

+ + +

This was wintertime, and I was in a hotel pool, very drunk, up in the skyline, in the middle of the night. I couldn’t feel my face. I had been crawling around on the floor, pushing people away. We had gone south. I led a group of young people south. But I felt it even harder and had to call the doctor. I hadn’t been planning. I had to call the doctor that morning. Someone else had to, someone at the hotel desk. He told me I needed a “deep, restorative sleep.” The medicine he gave me gave me headaches. I was glad to know it was the medicine because when I walked through the crowds, I thought it was the crowds.

+ + +

Buy VCD x 3 (Sigh of His Highness恭亲王), DVD x 4 (Wars Of In-Laws 我的野蛮奶奶 Volume 1-20). Disc 3 of “Wars of In-Laws” is found wrong one, he only advertising about facial disfigurement suffering, solve acne embarrass, something this kind. I send angry complain on email.

“Feeling despair only when arrives at Yellow River.”

+ + +

I couldn’t call anyone. I kept calling my lover. I called her over and over. I thought she wouldn’t be my lover, I called her so much.

+ + +

Executive Vice-Supervisor Jik William Sun hadn’t escaped the backwater of the Junior Department by being an ignorant “agree-man.” As the Chairman himself had told him once, while they were both drunk on Chianti-style, “Here in the entertainment circle, our commodity-focus is people. So we must devote to become people experts.”

+ + +

You are perfectly talkative when we’re talking. I mean, we communicate in the same way. It’s not a question of whether you can communicate or you can’t, but that it has to go somewhere. It takes practice. We have been practicing for, what, five years, but well, it’s hard. I mean, if you’ve been doing something for a very long time, like longer than you’ve known your spouse, that’s hard. When I was younger I’d just take bits and pieces of fairytales, but now I have this voice that says, you can’t tell stories. I don’t know how to not tell myself that I don’t know how to write prose. It’s not that easy. You tell me it is, but look who’s talking.

+ + +

“What is this?” the Vice-Supervisor screamed. “Where is the spontaneous creativity in this? Ripping up our Elegance-Reverie Strategy like it was a piece of paper! Typical loner-con behavior!”

Director Kult looked at him uneasily; one of the sub-directors adjusted her boob-tube.

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On Sugar Minott

2010-08-19T14:44:30Z

by Erin Sheehy

Image: From Sugar Minott's Myspace page.

In Jamaican parlance, a “selector” is a DJ, and a “DJ” is an MC. Before he became a great reggae singer, Lincoln “Sugar” Minott was both. Though he will perhaps be best remembered for his smooth voice and prolific recording career—forty albums in around as many years—it was his hustle and charm, cultivated in the highly competitive and wildly energetic Jamaican dancehall, that endeared Sugar to the world.

I interviewed Sugar just a few months before his death, at his recording studio compound in Kingston, Jamaica. When we entered the empty cement room that was to be the guesthouse at his studio yard, Sugar grabbed my recorder and squatted on a milk crate to deliver a well-rehearsed spiel: “Yeah I’m here, Sugar Minott, Black Roots Production, original Dancehall, original Lover’s Rock, original Reggae, you know? Comin’ from way back when.” Much of what he said during our interview felt like a dancehall toast; a healthy dose of bravado tempered by a steady pour of “big ups,” or shout outs, to Sugar’s contemporaries, his mentors, his protègès.

Many older Jamaican artists suffer from a “kids these days” attitude, but Sugar always had an ear to the street. When Jamaican youths in the turbulent late ’70s began to turn away from the roots reggae made internationally famous by Bob Marley, Sugar was one of the first to step in with a more danceable, relatable style that continues to dominate the domestic Jamaican market today: “reggae inna dancehall style.” Known as “The Godfather of Dancehall,” he took a continued interest in the development of his fractious godchildren. In the early ’80s, after establishing himself as a solo artist, Sugar formed his record label, Black Roots, and another organization, Youthman Promotion, a non-profit committed to cultivating and promoting young talent. Sugar could rattle off an impressive list of artists who’d come through Youthman Promotion’s doors: “people like Tristan Palmer, Little John, Tony Tuff, you know, coming up right to Junior Reid, Yami Bolo …” But when I met him, just months before his death, he was even more excited about the work ahead. “We have a band,” he told me, “we have a small sound system here, so you know, we’re just trying to build a guest house and looking to go to some festivals this year. We have a crew in New York, we have a crew in Japan, we have a crew in Germany, you know. Youth Promotion, we trying to spread worldwide.” He died with much left to do.

+ + +

The obituaries keep mentioning Sugar’s smile. NPR called it adorable, the New York Times ran a quote from Roger Steffens, co-founder of reggae magazine the Beat, describing it as “a hugely gap-toothed smile that you could drive a minibus through.” Well I’ll have you know that Sugar Minott died with a gleaming set of gold teeth in his head. I remember because they matched his gold bracelet, his gold watch, and his gold Star of David ring. When I met Sugar, he was wearing a yellow do-rag, a red green and gold sweater vest, and a shiny heart-shaped pin. In videos from his youth, Sugar is stylish, spry, and endearing, but the Sugar I met was built like a bouncer, and carried himself with a slow swagger. Charming and helpful as he was, Sugar intimidated the hell out of me. At one point, flustered, I asked him why he switched from rootsier reggae to a dancehall style. “I’m the originator of dancehall,” he said, deadpan. “I didn’t switch to dancehall, I made it.”

Often when I write about musicians I play their albums in the background as I work. Writing about Sugar has quickly taught me the downsides to this method, since every few songs I’ve had to run to a full-length mirror for some emphatic dancing on the offbeat. In contrast to the emphysemic grind of his speaking voice, Sugar sang with a sweet, melty croon. I usually favor screamers and shouters who claw their way to emotional peaks, but I love how subtly Sugar’s voice gained intensity, rising in plumes until finally at the bridge it reached clearer air. Sugar was a versatile singer, shifting from dancehall to roots to Lover’s Rock with equal success. Some of his most enduring songs are his early ’80s politically-tinged hits like “No Vacancy” and “This Old World (Babylon),” but in the weeks since his death, it’s his very first solo album from 1977, the groundbreaking Live Loving, that I’ve been playing over and over again.

The innovation in Live Loving that earned Sugar the title “Godfather of Dancehall” is a relatively simple one. Instead of using a live band in the studio, he sang new lyrics over previously recorded instrumentals, or “riddim sides,” of old hit songs. Called “versioning,” this practice had been widespread in live Jamaican music since the emergence of ska in the late ’50s, but after Sugar brought it to the studio, versioning became the cornerstone of the emerging dancehall style. Some might consider this move artistically regressive; it effectively did away with studio musicians in Jamaica, and though dub reggae artists intricately reworked instrumental tracks, many dancehall producers played the original record straight through with few alterations. Over the years, the most popular riddims have given rise to hundreds of versions. While it's usually untrained listeners who complain that all hip hop or all metal sounds the same, this is a legitimate critique of dancehall reggae, in which backing tracks are constantly recycled.

Nonetheless, by introducing the process of versioning to recorded work, Sugar helped to preserve and prolong the Jamaican music industry’s unique concept of intellectual property. Though unauthorized use of beats is common in hip hop, the basic premise is that at one point a producer and an MC decide to get together and make a hit song. In Jamaica, however, riddims circulate as unofficial creative commons, and the success of a new riddim is often gauged by how many different artists record over it. Financially it’s disastrous. Many of the most-used riddims were made in the 1960s and ‘70s, while there were no copyright laws in effect in Jamaica until 1994. Sugar displayed the same ambivalence toward the situation as most artists I met. He complained of Jamaica’s “backward” publishing laws, but took pride in the dancehall tradition of musical homage. “When it’s a classic riddim that you bring back from memory, it’s nice, because people that are giving up on the music, say ‘Oh, this is something I can relate to.’ And then it’s modern enough that the kids can relate to it; it’s more stepping up.”

For the well-versed dancehall fan, the system of riddims and versions creates a unique listening experience. Any popular instrumental is entangled in such a web of songs that to hit upon one is necessarily to jiggle up the memory of another. So when Sizzla sings “Way Out,” over the “M-16” riddim—originally released in 1968 by Lloyd “Matador” Daley —his song can actually be mixed rather seamlessly into Little John’s “All In The Game,” Bounty Killer’s “Mi Bad Mi Bad,” or Sugar’s 1983 song “Babylon.” Sure, a certain level of intertextuality is inherent in any art that exists within a canon. We have cover versions and remixes and allusion, for that matter. But it’s the centrality of musical recycling to dancehall that makes it unique. It’s Sugar’s legacy: the culture of big ups.

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Coming Attractions: Announcing N1FR

2010-08-18T17:48:42Z

Image: Film still from Un Chien Andalou, dir. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. (1929)

We're very pleased to announce the imminent launch of N1FR, our new online film review. If you subscribe to our RSS feed, you may already have seen a preview of the issue. If not, you'll have to wait until next week.

But we can tell you now that N1FR is edited by n+1 film critic A. S. Hamrah, and that this first issue features ten new essays and reviews. Check back for Chris Fujiwara on film criticism, Benjamin Kunkel on Lucrecia Martel's Headless Woman, and Elizabeth Gumport on Kick-Ass; reviews of the work of Pedro Costa, Claire Denis, and Judd Apatow; a film column by A. S. Hamrah; and essays on cineplex-hopping, "aggro indies," and Ben Maraniss on the action-film/MTV nexus of the 1980s.

We'll launch the issue this coming Monday the 23rd and feature a new review each day for the next two weeks.

To whet your appetite in the meantime, here are A. S. Hamrah's most recent film columns:

This Planet Is Not Yours to Rule

Nature Will Regulate Us

Say Something in Chinese

The Human Pyramid Thing

Scary Creature Action

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Rick Warren in Rwanda

2010-08-18T14:42:54Z

by Alexis Okeowo

Image: Tony Blair, Paul Kagame, and Rick Warren at a prayer breakfast in Rwanda. November 15, 2009. From Paul Kagame.

Kibuye Presbyterian Church is quaking. Wooden benches in every direction are filled with Rwandans shaking Bibles and swaying hips in tune to pulsing music. The singing of the choir echoes off the walls, swimming up to the open-shafted roof, as the kaleidoscopically dressed audience members clap their hands and pound their feet against the cement floor. American evangelist Rick Warren, the center of all this enthusiasm, joins the fervor, banging on a conga drum. Dressed in trendy jeans and a cowboy-style oxford, he booms his trademark line to the worshipers: “God has never made a person who doesn’t have a purpose.” He continues: “People may say you are small; you are poor; you have no education; you have no mother or father. But you have not lost one franc [the Rwandan currency] in value to God.” And so the rest of the sermon goes. Warren has become famous in the developing world for his PEACE plan, a religious self-improvement plan that he maintains would allow Rwandans to realize that “everyone has talents to make a difference.”

In the rest of the world, Warren is most famous for his slim self-help book The Purpose-Driven Life, a set of basic rules and tough-love advice that would be appropriate on a reality television show hosted by a life coach. My parents own a copy. In the book, Warren outlines seemingly simple, positive affirmations to help the average nobody take control of his life and become a somebody with a God-fueled mission. The principles have presumably been tested out at his Southern Baptist megachurch Saddleback, which is based in Orange County, California and accommodates 20,000 faithful a week. The book has sold 25 million copies--according to Publishers’ Weekly, it’s the biggest selling hardcover in American history--and it’s said to be the second bestselling book in the world after the Bible. When then-President-elect Barack Obama asked Warren to lead the prayer at his inauguration, the pastor’s fame drowned out protests against his anti-gay marriage stance.

+ + +

During the Rwandan genocide, in which over one million people were killed in 100 days, many pastors and priests were implicated in the deliberate killings of their parishioners. Those found guilty of participating in the genocide were jailed, but the sheer number of convicts overwhelmed Rwanda’s prisons. As a result, many were released to be tried by traditional gaccaca courts, and later returned to their home villages to live side by side with the families of their victims. Not all of Rwanda has been convinced to trust churches again. Ninety-five percent of the country is Christian, but Rwandans say the percentage of churchgoers is significantly smaller. Yet the feeling in the church, as Warren launched into his sermon, was one of jubilation, not fear. Before the service, a 30-year-old Rwandan named Augustin Mpotori, a child of the genocide, told me that the moment was right for Warren to make a difference through the church. “Before the mistake was of the churches, but they have changed,” he told me. “Their new vision of forgiveness convinced me to come back.” He had left his religion after his relatives were attacked in the church to which they had fled during the genocide. They believed they could hide there safely. None of them survived.

Yet Mpotori, like the entire congregation, exudes hopefulness. The month is April, the same month the genocide began in 1994, and all the church seems to want to do is put it behind them. The joy is also unsettling. By dedicating himself to raising healthcare standards through churches, Warren is grappling recklessly with the legacy of clerical collusion in the genocide. And he is asking Rwandans to put their trust back into a place that has betrayed them. Most of the churchgoers are whipped into a state of ecstatic fervor, but I wonder how far his words of forgiveness will follow them on their way home.

+ + +

We have not been in the country long, but it already feels like a place I could settle. The land is breathtaking: luscious rainforests, glittering waterfalls, immaculately kept rows of coffee plantations. After Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame was elected to office, six years after his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) army drove out the genocide militias, he embarked on a fierce clean-up campaign. The streets of the capital, Kigali, were scrubbed, the residential areas sanitized. Upon disembarking from the tiny plane that takes me from the Ugandan city of Entebbe to Kigali, I can already sense that something is different. Compared to other dust-covered, trash-littered capitals of East Africa, Kigali feels like heaven. The streets are paved and pristine, and I even spot litter police on patrol in bright yellow smocks. The air is light and breathable; trucks don’t emit noisy curls of lethal black smoke—in fact, I don’t see many trucks at all. And everyone is driving calmly, even slowly. The bushes on the side of the road are free of discarded plastic bottles and bags.

Kigali seems to be transparent and welcoming, but Rick Warren is difficult to know; on first acquaintance, he invites affection, bemusement, and occasionally suspicion. This is a man who sells metaphors like advertisements. The most repeated and popular of them is the “three-legged stool.” He says that public-private sector partnerships are equivalent to a two-legged stool. It will fall over if a third leg is not added—that of the church, the missing link in a country’s development. “Rwanda chose us,” Warren says at the start of his weeklong visit. Kagame read The Purpose-Driven Life five years ago and wrote a letter to Warren inviting him to Rwanda. So Warren flew over, wearing his usual mismatched, rumpled suits, and began to stump for what he calls a “fifty-year reformation” of Rwandan healthcare.

His massive PEACE plan aims to expand health coverage in the country by utilizing the many churches in Kibuye and other rural areas, where the majority of Rwandans live. Warren and his wife Kay like to tell the adage of rural Rwandans being forced to walk for two days just to reach a hospital. In Rwanda’s western province, where Kibuye is located, there are three district hospitals (though several smaller health posts) for over 650,000 people, compared to 726 churches. Their solution? Turn churches into health centers, where patients can get tested for HIV and receive medication and counseling. As Rick (everyone seems to be on a first-name basis with him) says often in his thick Western drawl, “There’s already a church in every village … the church was global before anybody started talking about globalization.”

The Warrens' PEACE plan is now operational in both Rwanda and Uganda. At best, PEACE blurs the line between religion and state; at worst, it aims explicitly at a new (yet very, very old) kind of colonialism. Unveiled in 2005, the plan called for the first global model of political and church leaders working together under a mandate to generally improve the country. Warren claimed he was impressed with the strength of Rwandan Christian leaders who resisted the genocide, but many wondered if he was becoming the cheerleader of a president who was already using the genocide as an excuse to suppress dissent and abuse his power. Warren's mentor C. Peter Wagner writes in his book Dominion! that the PEACE plan fits into “the 7-M mandate"―the notion that Christians must seize control of the “seven mountains” of a country: government, business sector, media, education, family units, arts and entertainment, and religion. In Rwanda, PEACE settled on heathcare as a starting point, effectively combining three mountains: government, family, and religion.

A strong church and a strong community are two completely different things, the head of a different Rwandan nonprofit tells me. Not in Rick Warren’s world. Like missionaries before him and other church-funded philanthropists alongside him, he equates the idea of strong religious institutions with the idea of strong government institutions. Instead of bolstering national healthcare structures to create a self-sustenance and independence that will last long after he is gone, Warren has—perhaps deliberately—created a system that will need the guidance of his church for a very long time. And the administration of a public service that is supposed to be for everyone in Rwanda regardless of race, ethnicity, or creed, has become inextricably intertwined with Christianity, with all of its morals, codes, and taboos. I can’t help but fear how gays, AIDS patients, rape victims, and women with unwanted pregnancies will fare under this system. Recently a wave of brutal anti-gay legislation has been sweeping sub-Saharan Africa, with direct roots in the work of Western evangelicals like Warren.

But at night under radiant moonlight, Kigali’s rain-soaked avenues shine. Boda-boda drivers whiz past on their sleek motorbikes, and the inky black streets unwind, rising then falling, stretching into the unknown distance. Shops are dark inside, abandoned for the night, gas stations without a soul at the pump. The city feels empty then, spooky but also calm.

+ + +

A few days later, the entire group boards buses and vans to go to Kibuye, a leisure destination for tourists and expatriates and also ground zero for the Warrens’ health plan. My van pushes into an incline as it advances on the mountain road, leaving the lush valley behind. I am riding with a few Saddleback Church members, and we get out at one point to stand at the road’s edge and peer into the abyss, a drop of hundreds of feet, and stare at the gushing waterfalls in the distance. Two young boys in torn clothes approach our van, singing and playing a harp-like instrument. The instrument tings loudly and off-key, but the church members gather around and clap to cheer them on. When the boys finish, they hold their hands out for money, causing my fellow travelers to rush back to the van.

When we pull into Kibuye, the village is homey and simple. The lodge that has been booked for our stay, however, is magnificent:a multi-layered open-air resort of swirling slate steps, quaint courtyards, fruity gardens, and room upon room.. Just on the other side of a low stone wall lies the huge, rippling Lake Kivu, a deep blue-black lake wedged between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the distance, fishermen float in their canoes, throwing lines into the water and slowly reeling them out.

After a long lunch, we pile into the vans and drive back to town to the St. Kizito Hospital, at the end of an orange dirt road. The hospital is the nexus of the church healthcare plan. Kay Warren tells me later that church-affiliated volunteers in Kibuye are being trained in basic tasks like teaching hygiene. The goal is for churches to be able to monitor patients taking ARV medication, offer voluntary HIV testing and counseling, and act as a referral point for hospitals. The decision to shift primary healthcare from the clinic to the church distresses critics who say those resources could be invested in Rwanda’s weak public healthcare system. But Kay, sighing and touching a wrinkled hand to her blond bobbed hair, counters that the Warrens share “many ideas” in common with the government, including involving religious institutions in distributing social services. “There’d be no reason to recreate the wheel—there are existing hospitals, there are existing health clinics,” she tells me with a small smile, adjusting her pastel cardigan. “So what we can do to strengthen them and make them more efficient?”

In a cramped classroom at St. Kizito, I listen to Warren explain his plan for the hospital and watch how the doctors and staff react. They seem eager but cautious. I wonder how things are when the Warrens are not around to create a publicity storm.

The center is not the worst-off I have seen. Still, there are not nearly enough beds, not enough doctors —the people are overwhelming the health system. Dr. Paulin Polepole, head of internal medicine and HIV/AIDS at St. Kizito, tells me that he believes trained volunteers could help tackle the western district’s HIV rate, which at 8 percent is twice the national average. But he admits the difficulties of the effort. “This is something very new, and it will take a long time to see results,” Paulin says. “People who have no knowledge in medicine are now expected to treat people.” The doctor, one of six at a hospital that serves a population of over 100,000, points out that the overstretched hospital could use the help. Just what kind of help would be most effective in Rwanda, however, is still up for debate.

The Kigali-based Access Project, a nonprofit unaffiliated with Rick’s project, aids in building the capacity of Rwandan health centers. Its head, Dr. Blaise Karibushi, is skeptical about the feasibility of the Warrens’ plan. “Theoretically, it (the church) should be a good network of reaching communities, but to make it happen there is a lot of work up front. You can’t just take the pastor of a church and ask him to distribute ARVs,” he says. As for the two-day walk to a hospital, over 80 percent of rural inhabitants actually go to local health centers, and the trip is a “maximum two- or three-hour” walk. Dr. Karibushi says that the vast resources required to train church volunteers in health skills would be better put toward community health posts, ambulances, and telephones. Churches, which already own about 40 percent of health facilities in Rwanda, should be left to their greatest strength: education. Rwandans could be taught how to prevent easily avoidable diseases like worms and malaria.

+ + +

I met Warren a few days prior to our trip to Kibuye. Time magazine had sent me as a stringer to Rwanda to record my observations for a feature story on the pastor that would be written by a New York-based staff writer. I was sitting in Kampala’s tiny airport, sitting on a stool in the fluorescent-lit, linoleum-floored cafeteria, eating M&Ms and waiting for my flight to Kigali. I lifted my head when I realized that a chorus of American voices had taken over the room. Opposite me, a large group of white people had taken over at least three tables. Could they be affiliated with Warren? I heard someone say something about Rwanda and another call out “Rick,” so I decided it must be them. I approached a tall man whose voice carried across the cafeteria and drowned out all the others. “Hi, are you all with the Rick Warren group?”

“We are the Rick Warren group!” he boomed back to me. This must be the man, I thought.

“Oh great,” I said. “I’m Alexis Okeowo with Time magazine. Nice to meet you, I’m looking forward to this trip and interviewing you.”

“OK, that’s great, that’s great,” he said. “That’s Rick over there, though.” He jerked a thumb to another table.

I made my way to the table and extended my hand to another tall, confident-looking man. “Rick? Nice to meet you.” The man shook my hand and said, “Nope, over there.”

I finally spotted him, stout, tucked into a chair, and talking in a low tone. With an easygoing face and a bowl haircut that looks as though he’s kept it since boyhood, Warren appears more average than most average people. He stood up, gave me a big smile, and pulled me into a bear hug.

But like any celebrity, he has his entourage. People of all ages, from teenagers to retirees, were working in some capacity on the tour. They were all members of his Saddleback Church and deeply passionate about the man and his teachings, quoting him at the drop of a hat. It was a struggle to get near Warren without his protectors around, avidly shielding their prophet from outsiders. Even during our “one-on-one” interview, Larry sat at the edge of our table in the hotel’s restaurant, injecting himself into the conversation when he felt it was required.

Despite his thick human padding, or perhaps because of it, I was immediately struck by how genuine Warren seemed to be, unpretentious and goodhearted. But he is also prone to unnecessarily grand gestures. He and his wife arrived in Kibuye in a roaring army helicopter that landed in a stadium; upon disembarking, the Warrens were enveloped in a crowd of doctors and curious street kids. The Warrens are known for their promotion of HIV-related causes, a fact that likely drew them to Rwanda (though at 4 percent, it has one of the lowest HIV rates in sub-Saharan Africa). Warren and President Kagame are close, and met several times over the course of Warren’s stay. Over 2,000 pastors have been trained in healthcare giving and the couple are investing millions of dollars into Rwanda during the next five years. When I asked him what he envisions Rwanda will look like at the end of his reformation, he said that a lower birth mortality rate, an increased number of ARV treatment patients, and a decreased number of orphans are signs that Rwandan leaders have told him they want. As we relax at a table by the hotel’s sparkling aqua pool, he adds: “I trust local people and I trust churches and I trust pastors. Poverty is … a mindset.”

Warren is immensely quotable, even when you doubt the substance of the sound bite. Catchy one-liners roll off his tongue like raindrops off East Africa’s slick banana trees. My favorite is still this, said in a tangy, sweet-and-sour drawl: “One out of every three people in the world is a member of the Christian church; I would be happy if one-third of people in the world do this (his PEACE plan). There’s nothing bigger than the church.”

But the Kibuye project is still a start-up, barely off the ground. The Warrens have held a series of self-congratulatory meetings with local volunteers and pastors involved in healthcare training, but examples of the church-clinic model (the “three-legged stool”) in action are missing. The couple tells me their initiatives will, of course, take time, but whether that lag is due to unrealistic expectations or to the massive work needed to expand the role of Rwanda’s churches remains to be seen. In other words: do the Warrens just have a lot of work ahead of them or are they undertaking something that can’t—and shouldn’—be done?

Another looming problem is the possible contradiction between the pro-life attitude of Warren and his acolytes, and Rwanda’s goal of population control. Rwanda is the most densely populated country in sub-Saharan Africa, and President Kagame has actively encouraged families, especially those living in poverty, to plan for no more than three children, compared to a national norm of around six. Kay Warren says she and Rick will “do what the Rwandans want us to do” in terms of teaching families about family planning, but I have to wonder about the objectivity of PEACE plan–trained Catholic volunteers. In perhaps his only major deviation from Warren’s project, President Kagame later tells me that he hopes “the church will be realistic” when it comes to the family planning issue.

+ + +

On my first night in Kigali, it is raining and the streets are slippery. I check into my hotel, then borrow a phone from a Fox Studios cameraman and call my friend Amity, who is living in Rwanda.

Africa is a small place for foreigners, despite its massive amounts of terrain and water, 53 nations, and countless ethnic groups and languages. Time and time again, I run into the same people all over the continent. A few nights later at a hybrid African-Italian pizzeria in Kigali, Amity introduces me to Ricardo, an Italian photographer whose hard-partying, womanizing ways I had heard about in Kenya. I also meet Ricardo’s long-suffering girlfriend, an American aid worker. Amity and I go dancing at a club with wall-to-floor mirrors and stay out much later than planned. President Kagame is expecting me in the morning.

I wake up with plenty of time before the interview, too anxious to sleep much. I take a hot shower, eat a breakfast of toast and cereal, then go back to the guest room. For the end of my stay in Rwanda, I decide to crash with Amity. I remove the clothes from my suitcase and realize that, in my effort to pack lightly, I have brought only one pair of pants: a pair of dark jeans.

I stare at them at in horror before I hurriedly pull them on as I run upstairs calling Amity’s name. Her roommate yawns and tells me that Amity has already left for work and locked her bedroom door. When I meet Kagame's press secretary, Yolande, at the State House, I hold my breath as she scans me up and down, taking in my pinstriped collared shirt, knee-high leather boots, and the offending pants. I see her squint at the jeans. But then she smiles and leads me into his private office.

Inside, I settle into a couch and spend a few minutes deciding if I should recline to seem relaxed or sit upright to appear alert. I conclude that leaning back is too casual and straighten myself. As I examine the plush velvet-covered stools, it strikes me that there is so much history lingering in the room.

Kagame was elected in 2003 with an alleged 95 percent of the vote, a questionable number in any country. But Rwanda was in recovery from genocide, so no one was really allowed to question the landslide. No one is allowed to question much under Kagame. Political and media freedom are suppressed under the benevolent dictatorial president, who when criticized points to Rwanda’s impressive economic growth or warns about the dangers of stoking ethnic flames. He has not allowed any viable opposition parties to flourish and blacklists local and foreign politicians and media that impugn the RPF, condemn his policies, or raise Hutu grievances from the genocide. He doesn’t encourage challenges to his fifteen years of continuous rule and he doesn't give many interviews.

In mid-August, after a horrific summer in which opposition candidates and independent journalists turned up dead, Kagame was re-elected president. This time, his party claimed he won 93 percent of the vote.

On first appearance, Kagame seems like an otherworldly giant. He is astoundingly tall; his endless limbs fall in every direction and fold themselves underneath him. His face is also long and elegant, betraying nothing and rarely bending into a smile, which does not put me at ease.

Kagame tells me that he wants Rwanda to become a "purpose-driven nation." The president explains that he wants to finally harness the church's influence, manipulated once by killers, for good. And he says that it was Warren's "practical, realistic approach" that first attracted him to the healthcare project.

Ethnicity is not supposed to matter anymore in contemporary Rwanda. Hutu or Tutsi? Don’t ask, don’t tell. That night, I meet a former RPF soldier, a tall, striking young man. He is now a photographer for a local newspaper. I tell him that I interviewed Kagame today. President Kagame is incredible, he says. He asks me where I’m from and I tell him the United States. “Ah,” he says. “I thought you were one of our beautiful Tutsi women when I first saw you.”

The next day, I tour a number of genocide memorials. With some members of Warren’s church, I visit churches where the bullet holes and bloodstains remain on the walls. The images are horrifying and ghastly, but mainly just incomprehensible. As I step out into the comforting sunlight. I try to reconcile the country’s warring elements in my head: the spotless city streets and the dirt-covered human bones still displayed at country churches; the president intent on preserving his rule and the freewheeling American evangelical. Maybe that is the beauty of it, order and disorder coexisting to help put a country back on track. We can only hope.

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I Never Went to Blanes

2010-08-16T15:54:32Z

by Diego Trelles Paz

Image: Bolaño (far right) with friends in Blanes, 1997. From Enrique Vila-Matas.

Translated from the Spanish by Carolina De Robertis.

The first time I read Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives I was 22 years old. I lived in Lima on a miserable salary and the only thing I was doing with my life, other than getting drunk to the point of senselessness, was reading and writing, imitating and attempting, as well as throwing myself against the door each time my literary style proved to be nothing more than a pale and clumsy echo of the voices of writers who’d influenced me: a kind of polyphonic collage of Vargas Llosa with Ribeyro, Onetti with Puig.

Anagrama’s gray edition cost exactly 78 soles. I remember this clearly as it was the period in which I’d go to Quilca Avenue in Downtown Lima and literally submerge myself in a pile of Populibros and Comida Peruana manuals to salvage books by classical authors that cost no more than 8 soles. Thanks to Oveja Negra and Seix Barral, an underpaid and curious young man such as myself could, in Lima, read Céline and Faulkner and Carson McCullers and García Márquez for 40 soles.

So the mere idea of spending 78 soles on this anonymous Chilean’s fat novel not only seemed idiotic and insane, but also, in terms of physical health, would deprive me for a week of the inexpensive fare at the restaurant where I regularly ate. On the other hand, there were two powerful factors that complicated my decision. The first was the absolute devotion that The Savage Detectives had generated in a friend of mine, the only person in the world who introduced me to books and authors that seemed essential to my future as a writer. The second, without a doubt, was the fantastic title, so appealing and precise, so Welles and so Godard, which I immediately associated with Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, translated into Spanish as La pandilla salvaje, which uses cowboys to speak of solidarity and codes of honor and friendship among delinquent friends.

In summary: I decided to buy it and devoured those 78 soles in a single day, and that didn’t matter one bit: I read it again and again, and talked about it and recommended it to others. I wrote a masters thesis about the novel and, in addition, went to Mexico in search of the diffuse shadow of a promiscuous female poet who resembled María Font.

+ + +

What did I like about Bolaño’s novel?

In formal terms, it was clear to me that his prose, while apparently simple, has a restrained and suggestive lyricism and a powerful musicality that are very different than what the authors of the “Boom” produced. Reading Bolaño generated an instant addiction in me: whether due to the lucid and demystifying spirit with which he adopts diverse genres or to his eagerness to involve us as active readers, to offer us fragmented works so we might fill them in with our imaginations. We become accomplices who search for truth through narrative devices that blend reality with fiction, facts with conjectures, apocryphal characters with historical ones. As the critic José Miguel Oviedo has said, “Bolaño always ends up turning his readers into detectives.”

On an emotional level, there is something in Bolaño that I had never found in any other writer, something akin to a brotherhood or silent complicity through which he, who had suffered everything, spoke to me as a young, lost, anxious writer. This became clear to me after reading the following paragraph from his story "Meeting with Enrique Lihn":

This happens to all young writers. There is a moment in which you have nothing to lean on, no friends, and much less teachers, nor is there anyone to reach out their hand, the publications, the prizes, the scholarships are for others, for those who have said ‘yes sir’ many times, or for those who have praised the high officials of literature, an endless horde whose only virtue is their policed sensibility of life, nothing escapes them, they forgive nothing.

+ + +

I never met Bolaño, although I certainly tried. In 2003 I went to France to write and live the way I imagined Latin American authors had written and lived in Paris in the 1960s. It was an utterly stupid idea, of course, but back then, when I wandered through life like an orphan, it seemed quite real and significant to me. By chance, I met Robert Amutio, Bolaño’s French translator, and with his help I sent a handwritten letter to Bolaño, emulating a letter that Bolaño himself had written to Enrique Lihn when he was an adolescent poet.

The response came electronically, through Amutio. Bolaño commented with irony that it seemed I had no email. Here I transcribe the brief epistolary electronic exchange we had a few days later:

Dear Mr. Bolaño.

I received a message from Robert Amutio. You can write to me whenever you wish, I would very much like to receive your response. I sent you a letter by mail because you did it that way with Enrique Lihn and, well, I thought it would be better that way. It was an error not to include my email address, I am sorry. I will be in Barcelona in October (although I believe you already know this).

With cordial regards,

D.

Dear Diego:

When I wrote to Lihn the Internet did not exist, nor did email, or whatever we call this electromagnetic postal system, nor did I have any money to buy the necessary machine, had it existed. In any case, I want to thank you for your essay on The Savage Detectives, which is very generous, and which I read as if it were not about me. By the way, I think you correctly identified the Peruvian poet. What are you doing in Too loose?

A strong embrace,
Roberto

Roberto.

I don’t live in Toulouse although, yes, I frequently feel Too loose. I came to Bordeaux to write (that may sound naive, but it’s true). I finished my masters degree and decided to postpone the doctorate for a year to dedicate myself entirely to my novel. You have no need to thank me for the essay, on the contrary, it’s I who thank you for the novel.

I recently read Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a strange and marvelous novel that you’ve probably read. The notion of the reader as detective is clear in it. The act of leaping through the pages in pursuit of a fictitious editor, and the shreds of information or distortions he offers along the way have given me valuable ideas for my own novel. I’d like to tell you about it. I haven’t told anyone about it because I’m one of those people overcome by shyness. Not that I want to write you ten pages on the subject. I know how busy you are and Robert has told me a little about the new book of stories you are working on.

Well, Roberto, thank you so much for your response, it has been very moving. An embrace.

Until soon.

D.

Dear Trelles:

How I envy your youth, your tremendous energy, ready to conquer all the possibilities of the world or die in the attempt. Tell me about your novel, but above all write it. Without fear. But in addition, and this may matter, with a humility worthy of San Francisco or at least Giacopone da Todi. With every day that passes, I am more convinced that the act of writing is a conscious act of humility. Well, I await your reply. In the meantime, receive a strong embrace.

Bolaño

+ + +

I wrote one last letter to Bolaño but never received a response. In it, I asked for a few minutes of his time to meet him in Blanes. On July 15, 2003, I learned of Bolaño’s death through a succinct and heartfelt letter from Roberto Amutio.

The act of writing is a conscious act of humility.

Never, in my thirty-one years of life, have I received better advice from anyone.

I never went to Blanes.

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From the Inbox of Chi-Chi, Friend of the Dead

2010-08-13T15:00:00Z

by Jeff Parker

Chi-chi, dude, ain’t it bad enough that the shit on here tells me how long it’s been since I last poked my dead friend Bill? Or posted on his wall? Ain’t it bad enough that it suggests maybe I’ll like to consider reconnecting with Bill now and then? Ain’t it bad enough there’s some tools who post on his wall about checking out their records and shows and shit and sometimes when his birthday comes around they write happy birthday to him on here. Hella bad enough, Chi-chi. Hella.

Now what is this with you all of a sudden his friend? How does that shit work, Chi-chi? Because this was going to be a productive day for me. I was maybe going to get a few things done. But after that came up, all I could pretty much think about was writing to ask what the hell is up with my dead friend Bill’s confirming you as a friend?

Sincerely,

Bill’s Boy

+ + +

Dear Chi-chi,

In life those of us who truly knew Margaret called her lovely Margarine. I can’t go to her grave so it’s kind of nice to be able to visit her wall even if I can’t post there, because, you see, Margarine wasn’t much of a techie. It took me years to get her to create a profile. Finally she did, and then before she could accept my friend request, she drowned in a sinkhole. Nothing can be done now through the official channels, so they tell me.

It was a shock to see that line of text on my screen today: “Margaret is now friends with Chi-chi.” I know you probably didn’t mean any harm, but I broke down crying. Can you please just tell me how you became friends with her? I don’t care if it’s something illegal you’re doing. If you’ve hacked into her account, I would ask you only not to post anything crude and to please accept my friend request that she never had a chance to accept? If there is something else involved I am willing to pay. I hope you understand this is very important for my heart. Thank you for listening.

Patricia

+ + +

Hey Chi-chi,

You have such a beautiful name!

Why won’t you friend me, Chi-chi? I looked through all your friends now that you’re friends with my friend Eli. You’re his friend in fact as of today, which is two days after he killed himself. I noticed something interesting looking through all your friends. It seems to me all your friends—almost a thousand—are dead, Chi-chi. Is the reason you won’t friend me because I am living?

Your friend (I wish!),

Graham

+ + +

nice name fuckdick. i know who you are. i know exactly who you are. and after what you did, i want to be sure you accept my friend request. accept it now, and i want you to study all the pictures in the profile album. get a good look at me. study the eyes, fuckdick. you kill my friend and then you friend my friend from some bullshit chi-chi profile. you might have had a cushy life of social networking in there the next twenty years, but now, i am writing mark fucking zuckerberg, my congressman, the president of the united states, and glenn fucking beck to demand murderer facebook accounts cutoff on incarceration. so look me up now and look me up good. one day you’re going to be out, and i’m going to be there and i want to be sure you know who it is that has come for you.

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Dear Chi-chi,

Miller Judson here. I hope that this message doesn’t come across as antagonistic. I don’t intend it to be. I am genuinely curious. I’ve always thought the situation of my friend Jodee’s profile to be an extremely interesting one. She is dead but her page lives on. Of course you should know this since you, as of a few days ago, are friends with her too. I don’t know you. And I knew everyone in Jodee’s life. I am really not accusing you of anything. It’s just that this is how I’m thinking through it. I checked her page out. There doesn’t seem to have been anything else done to her information, nothing that’s visible at least. The only out-of-the-ordinary thing is her posthumous confirmation of your friendship. I can imagine some people becoming very disturbed by something like this. That would be the logical response, and I am typically a very logical person. But I am not disturbed by it. Quite the opposite, I find that it has given me a strange sense of hope. Wherever she has gone, the inventory record of her relationships from her time on Earth is plus one. But it’s going to nag at me forever if I don’t just come out and ask. I really want to know. Would you mind telling me how you became friends with my friend Jodee when she is already dead?

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Postcard from Detroit

2010-08-12T15:39:56Z

by Mark Binelli

For months my friend John had been promising to treat me to an epic Detroit bar crawl. When we finally got together one Saturday night in July, John announced that he was taking me to Club Thunderbolt. It was a strip club a guy named Jay ran out of his dead parents’ house, in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, near East 7 Mile. In the perverse unofficial zoning of Detroit, the lack of abandoned homes and grassy "urban prairies" results in more drug trafficking and home invasions—there are still people there to rob. Jay placed small classified ads in the newspaper, in order to recruit both customers and girls, which was how John discovered the place and decided to write a profile.

“This place is really bizarre,” John warned me. Coming from him, this was a statement to be carefully considered. John prides himself on his ability to go anywhere, which he attributes in large part to his appearance (white guy with shaved head), a look that leads people to assume he is either an ex-con or a cop. “I’ve learned to adopt the demeanor of both,” John said. “If I’m either, it’s not a good thing for them.” This talent has proved fruitful for John, creator of the Detroitblog, who has managed to file dispatches from some of the weirdest places in Detroit.

The club was BYOB, so en route, we stopped at a party store and bought a six-pack of lime-flavored Labatts, which John thought the strippers might like. Turning onto Jay’s street, we passed a group of young African-American guys standing around in a driveway, most of them wearing jeans and oversized white T-shirts. They looked at us suspiciously.

Then we pulled up to Jay’s house, a modest brick bungalow. John called Jay to let him know we were outside. Within seconds, Jay appeared on the porch, waving at us to park in the driveway. He cut a striking figure: a six-foot-five rail-thin white man in his early forties, he wore a white dress shirt with an enormous collar tucked into a pair of pants the color of a store-greeter’s apron (a brisk, utilitarian shade of blue), a sharp pair of snakeskin wingtips, and rectangular black-framed glasses. His hair, streaked with grey, was combed back into what could have been a starter pompadour.

Jay had been shot in the face when he was 11, two blocks from his house (not the Club Thunderbolt house) on Detroit’s far east side, where his family moved after his father, a union truck driver, lost his job and the original family home. “We had a lot of gang stuff going on,” Jay told me later, sounding bored with his own shot-in-the-face story. Jay maintained such a rigorous deadpan that it became mildly confrontational, as if he were challenging you to reveal your naivetè. Though in fairness, his skeptical air may not have been entirely intentional. The bullet had passed through Jay's left cheek, cut a nerve, hit his jawbone and finally bounced up through his right ear, which remains deaf. The left side of his face was partly paralyzed, leaving his voice permanently slurred and locking his mouth and cheek in a half-melted rictus, so that he seemed perpetually on the verge of twisting his face into a full frown, a man prepared for inevitable disappointment.

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The cover was twenty dollars, another ten for a lap dance (with G-string on), or twenty (G-string off.) Jay, who also collected ten percent of the girls’ tips, insisted the place was not a brothel, which sounded dubious to me; he also booked larger parties for labor unions (iron workers, tree cutters, carpenters) and bachelors. Before opening Club Thunderbolt, Jay had worked as a bodyguard for a crooked cop and was the owner of a porn theater.

He led us inside. Club Thunderbolt still looked very much like the home of someone’s elderly parents, the decor frozen in time circa the Nixon Administration. The dimly lit family room in the back of the house, where the girls performed, had no stage or stripper pole, just thick blue-and-gray shag carpeting, wood-paneled walls, a sloped drop-ceiling with water-stained tiles, an old stuffed couch of the grandmother variety, and a dining room table decorated with a pair of candles. A white towel was draped over the center of the table, covering a mysterious lump.

Tonight, Jay had three dancers on hand: Paige, who was blonde and dressed in lacy black lingerie, fishnet stockings, and high-heel shoes; Stacey, who was African-American and wore a matching black leather bustier and thong, fishnets, and heels; and Sasha, also blonde, but wearing glasses and a regular black dress. A bachelor party was scheduled for 10, but they were running late. While we waited for the customers to arrive, Jay handed me a thick photo album. Again, it was the sort probably favored by your grandmother: a binder with a floral-print cover and photo-sleeve inserts, appropriate for shots of family vacations, beloved pets or, in this case, naked women with their legs spread wide and yanked up behind their ears.

One of the first women depicted was Paige; this was awkward. I quickly flipped to the next dancer. The book was a menu of sorts, featuring the various women in Jay’s employ. “Sometimes, I’ll tie them to the table,” Jay explained, unnecessarily, when I came to a Polaroid of a stripper hog-tied atop the dining room table. (A creepy detail omitted: the shots were all fading Polaroids.) Gesturing at the toweled lump, Jay asked, “Want to see what’s under the towel?” I have possibly never been less eager to see what was under a towel, but a sense of journalistic diligence persuaded me to nod yes. Jay lifted the towel to reveal an enormous pink dildo—at least eighteen inches—attached to a power drill. “Two-and-a-half horsepower Milwaukee, variable speed,” Jay said proudly. “If you’re drilling that into cement and it gets caught, you’ll break your fucking arm.”

I glanced anxiously at the girls. Detroit was locally infamous for the variety and depravity of its strip clubs. A few days before my visit to Thunderbolt, a place called the All-Star Lounge had been closed by the city for employing a 14-year-old as a topless dancer; the police chief acknowledged at a press conference that eleven nonfatal shootings and three fatal shootings "related to this club" had taken place over the past six years. Still, there was something uniquely depressing about Thunderbolt—or rather, about the thought of groups of men who found legally licensed Detroit strip clubs like Trummp's, Henry VIII South, and the Booby Trap somehow too corporate or bourgeois, and actually preferred to gather at this creepy Blue Velvet set to watch women confront a weapon-grade vibrator.

But when I looked over at the dancers, they were just talking to John, who was sitting on the couch drinking a lime-flavored beer. I detected no signs of distress on their part. If anything, they seemed relaxed and far less narcotized than strippers I’d met in the past. “It’s a little different,” Paige acknowledged, smiling in a knowing way, when I asked her about the gig. She also evinced what seemed like genuine fondness for Jay. One night, she said, a customer tried to follow her home; unluckily for him, Jay was dropping her off. “I had to go tap on his window with my .357,” Jay told me. “He said, ‘I’m resting!’ I said, ‘No you’re not, motherfucker!’ I don’t put up with any bullshit. Everyone who comes here gets shaked down when they come through the door.” When Jay crouched down to adjust a computer monitor set up on the floor, I noticed the butt of a gun sticking out of the back of his pants.

Sasha’s phone rang. The other girls giggled. Her ringtone, a parody of a song by the children’s group the Wiggles, featured the lyrics, “I’ve got the clap and I’m giving it to you!”

Jay’s phone rang. It was the bachelors. They were still at a bar. “Finish your fucking drink and get over here,” he snapped. “I’ve got girls waiting!”

John gave me a look. “We should get going soon,” he said. But Jay wanted to show me his website, which would soon involve a web cam but for now seemed to be a slideshow of naked girls similar to the scrapbook photos. Jay fired up the slideshow. Whenever he caught me glancing away from the monitor, he would shout, “Mark! Pay attention! You know how hard I worked on this?”

I still couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. There was something inscrutable about Jay, and my emotions towards him continually shifted during our brief time together. There were moments where I felt guilty for taking notes, like some Arbusian exploiter of freaks. But then that would seem condescending, and I would wonder why I pitied this guy, who for all I knew was a sinister pimp with severe anger-management issues. I also hoped he would make telling comments about Detroit that I might use for the book I was working on. But when I asked him how the city had changed since he was a boy, he only snorted and said, “It hasn’t. It’s always been a shithole.” Then, “Want to see the War Room?”

Jay led me to a room upstairs, where he’d set up a backdrop for photo shoots and, in the corner, had stacked a pile of cardboard boxes. “Brand new AK-47 here, and 10,000 rounds of ammo,” he said, patting one of the boxes. Then he leaned into the open doorway of his bedroom and emerged holding a double-barreled shotgun. “I’ve always got this ready to go,” he said. “I sleep with numerous weapons.”

I could see a pair of nun chucks and a crossbow hanging above his bed, and a Kevlar vest hanging closer to the door. “I even have a 55-gallon Zep drum out in back,” Jay said. I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about. Later, I looked up Zep and discovered the company makes industrial-strength cleaning solutions used to remove, among other things, blood. “You really don’t want to fuck with me,” Jay continued. “Shit, with the police we have here I could dig a hole in the backyard and nobody would know. I saw a cop car seven days ago. And I saw a sheriff at the gas station yesterday. That’s it, in this neighborhood, in a week.”

I asked Jay why he didn’t move to a safer place. He explained that his parents had fallen behind on their mortgage payments before they died, and that “the motherfuckers at the bank” wouldn’t cut him a deal. “It’s true, I have a feeling things aren’t changing around here,” he said, shifting his shotgun from one hand to the other, then added, “But this joint? They’re not taking it.”

The apparently hard-drinking bachelors still hadn’t arrived, and John and I said we really had to leave—we were meeting some friends at a less creepy after-hours club. But Jay insisted we have lap dances first. This was not how I wanted the evening to end, but Jay was very persistent. I found the dance stressful and unsexy, and spent most of it worrying my obvious lack of enthusiasm might hurt Paige’s feelings. I wanted to whisper, “It’s not you, it’s the entire concept of the lap dance,” but instead I thought about how perfectly Club Thunderbolt fit into the standard narrative of Detroit decline: Jay’s violent past, his father’s lay-off, the danger of imminent foreclosure. Jay told us that since the publication of John’s article, he’d received a call from both a documentary film crew and Vice magazine.

It was almost too neat. Detroit! At times the city seems so real, it ceases to be entirely plausible. Some of the people whose parents ostensibly fled the city because of its lawlessness and danger and vice return, on a regular basis, for that very reason—to visit crazy strip clubs and downtown casinos, to buy drugs (one of the longest-operating dopehouses is located just off the freeway, for convenient suburban access), to illegally dump trash in vacant lots, to sneak into abandoned buildings and take "urban exploration" pictures for their Flickr streams. Places like Thunderbolt exist to fill a demand. Maybe my being disturbed was simply a sign of my own uptightness; maybe there was something quaint and Etsy-ish about a 21st century entrepreneurial sex business happening live and not on the Internet. Was Club Thunderbolt essentially the porn-enthusiast's equivalent of a DIY spot I might like—a punk-rock show in somebody's basement, or a clandestine supper club in a Brooklyn brownstone?

Well, okay, no. But Detroit's decades-long collapse—the lack of jobs and city services and adequate policing, its lingering existence as, essentially, a failed state—has left wide-open spaces for all sorts of possibility to flourish. It's not exactly anarchy, but the place doesn't operate by the rules of a normal American city.

Jay walked us to the front door, which, I now noticed, was patched with a mosaic of wooden boards. The door had been this way since last fall, when one night Jay was sitting in bed watching Jay Leno—Leno was still on at 10 at that point—and heard a burglar creeping up the stairs. He grabbed his shotgun and chased the man outside, firing at him through the door.

“I shot high, because I didn’t want to kill somebody,” Jay said.

A cop showed up five-and-a-half hours after Jay called 911. When he arrived, he told Jay, “Next time, aim lower.”

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This Will Kill That

2010-08-11T19:05:26Z

by Nicholas Dames

Image: Cassiodorus at work.

This essay was written in response to a conversation on our website about the future of reading and writing. The conversation started with essays by Benjamin Kunkel and Marco Roth, and continued with responses from the editors on our news page.

“Ceci tuera cela”: the famous slogan of Claude Frollo, the archdeacon of Notre-Dame in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, as he touches a printed book and glances nostalgically at the cathedral towers. “This will kill that.” It’s not hard to sympathize these days. Hugo had to reimagine the 15th century in order to evoke a major shift in technologies of the word. We just have to hold our smart phones while looking at a copy of Hugo’s novel--or read Hugo’s novel on our smart phones. Resistance is futile: welcome to our new digital overlords!

But Hugo’s resigned pessimism as well as his technological determinism, are, I think, unwarranted now, for reasons both abstract and pragmatic. The abstract reason is that technological changes to literacy have slow and unpredictable effects. Right now many digital formats are still straightforward recreations of the book; the Kindle and its cousins reproduce a mise en page that hasn’t changed in fundamentals since 13th century scribes at the new universities of Western Europe offered harried students books with running heads, chapter titles, indices, and the like. What remains to be seen is if, and how, digital technology changes that format at all.

Along this abstract vein: a history of cultural pessimism should counsel us to be cautious about our dismay. Take Q. D. Leavis, author of the stern 1932 jeremiad Fiction and the Reading Public, which bemoans over two-hundred years of declining cognitive abilities and standards. Mass literacy, newspapers, and popular fiction were all for Leavis signs of the slow death of attentive reading. In many ways Leavis was right--Miltonic prose couldn’t thrive in the 19th century, nor could epic verse. But would we have it any other way? Would we surrender the novel, say, so that we could learn to concentrate and memorize properly again? And what did that concentration feel like, exactly? (And how many people were capable of such attention?) All the more ironic, then, that Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, and others have made the classical novel a paradigm for engaged, attentive thought, while for Leavis it was a disaster for cognition.

We don’t know what it felt like to read before newspapers, before mass media, before printing. We don’t even know what “attention” is; one person’s rapt, deep attention is another person’s dangerous trance, while what looks like constant distraction might also be an ability to synthesize. Pragmatically, for intellectuals to stake a claim on such things as “attention” or “concentration” is an abdication of our best ground: content. There is no valid reason to think that War and Peace teaches deep attention any better than a first-person shooter game. There are plenty of reasons, enduring ones, to think that War and Peace aerates and nourishes our daily lives more fruitfully, and productively, than Call of Duty. Which is to say that staking our claims on a format (the printed book), rather than on specific, lasting artifacts of a bookish culture is a losing proposition.

Not simply because digital formats are bound to win. ("Win" what, anyway? Older textual technologies never quite vanish.) More importantly because by pontificating about the shame of declining attention-spans and the like, we ignore the very real social, economic, geopolitical causes that make bookish “attention” of the kind we like to imagine so hard to come by. Raymond Williams once pointed out the same thing as a response to Q. D. Leavis: even if one grants that cultural standards of concentration or attention have declined, one has to ask what conditions of life for most individuals (industrialized labor, for a start) make it hard to “attend” to text. The answer is not simply that technologies of text, or literary standards, changed. It is a more complicated and possibly more discouraging picture of the needs and capacities of those outside the boundary of high-literate schooling. As Williams put it: the question isn’t whether ephemeral, fragmented consumption of text or images is a drug of choice for many; it’s what social conditions make such a drug necessary--ways of life that produce no satisfactions, only a momentarily appeasable itch for sensation. (A problem that the great novelists, Tolstoy included, made part of their explicit content.) We should beware being sidetracked by issues like attention spans--fuzzy, ill-defined issues ripe for self-satisfied laments--from the main problems facing us.

If there’s a useful image for intellectuals of the moment, I’d suggest an ancient figure living through a moment of looming and seemingly total change: the 6th-century public figure and textual theorist Cassiodorus. Following the collapse of Ostrogothic rule in Italy, Cassiodorus seems to have withdrawn from public life for some decades, only to emerge in later life as the founder of a Calabrian monastery. There he laid down methods and rules for the scribal preservation and dissemination of scriptural and secular texts, trained scribes, attempted to forge networks of the learned, and amassed as many texts of value as he could, all in a moment of political and social chaos. For generations of scholars, Cassiodorus was a self-congratulatory mirror: the last sad remnant of classical culture, watching Europe spin into barbarian, vernacular anarchy. But now it might be possible to see him as a remarkably pragmatic, even cheerfully adaptive intellectual of his time: trying hard to preserve what he could and reworking the old into new formats and forms. There is in his lifework a humility about the limits of what we can predict mixed with a confidence about what can and should be kept alive in the face of change that any present-day intellectual (scholar, writer, thinker) would do well to emulate.

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On Tony Judt

2010-08-09T20:21:19Z

by Nikil Saval

Tony Judt began as an intellectual historian; he will be remembered by many as a bracing critic of Zionism, a vigorous proponent of European-style social democracy, and--tragically--a victim of ALS. I have heard many describe as “moving” his snatches of memoir, published at intervals in the New York Review of Books over the last year of his life. This is true--but what may have been even more moving was the extent to which he devoted his last days to making the case, which he had made many times before, for the welfare state. He broached the issue as early as “The Social Question Redivivus” in 1997 (reprinted in the collection Reappraisals), and he delivered what turned out to be one of his last salvos in the magnificent “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy”--delivered in 2009 from the wheelchair where he felt like he was “imprisoned in a cell that shrank by six inches every day.”

In the way his scholarship informed his larger political concerns, Judt was an old-style intellectual, after the manner of his teacher (and New York Review of Books writer) George Lichtheim. It was a fact Judt emphasized. His titles often alluded to the debates among previous generations of writers, such as Benedetto Croce’s “What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel." He singled out intellectuals of an earlier generation for praise (Raymond Aron, Albert Camus) and others for censure (Jean-Paul Sartre, E. P. Thompson), suggesting the models that he either followed or abjured. Though he weighed in on contemporary issues rather widely, his writings betray barely any dilettantism: except for his polemics on Israel, borne out of an initial support for Labor Zionism, his work rarely moved beyond the horizons of 20th century Europe (and even Israel could be said to fit within those horizons).

Like his forebears and a few contemporaries, he was also extremely angry. Any kind of cant or whiff of intellectual dishonesty could set him off, a spectacle which was either highly gratifying or angering in turn, depending on your tastes. Like most of his readers, I usually exhibited both reactions. His essay “Bush’s Useful Idiots” from the London Review of Books lavished his every last reserve of scorn for liberals who supported the American adventure in Iraq. I remember reading it with an admixture of relief, and shame that I had to travel, intellectually speaking, all the way across the Atlantic to get an opinion that frank and true.

On the other hand, he had a habit of sideswiping great writers in a fashion that usually seemed unnecessary. For someone so gifted at intellectual history, he had little understanding of his own generation’s interest in the fringes of left theory and politics; in Postwar, he managed to sweep away all of the '60s student movements with one laconic hand-gesture of a sentence: “The boys and girls of the Sixties just weren't serious.” Particularly egregious was his recounting of a debate between Leszek Kolakowski and the great E. P. Thompson, where Judt described Thompson as behaving “his priggish, Little-Englander worst: garrulous . . . patronizing, and sanctimonious.” His self-awareness deserting him, Judt goes on to lament Thompson’s “pompous, demagogic tone,” while claiming that anyone who reads Kolakowski’s response to Thompson “will never take E. P. Thompson seriously again.”

“I fail to understand the tone, the content, or the purpose of Tony Judt’s assault on E. P. Thompson,” wrote one reader, expressing my sentiments and surely those of others. Judt’s response--that Thompson really was self-indulgent--doesn’t fully explain what really must have brought out all his anger. As one sees from his other writings, Judt was particularly incensed by an intellectual sympathy for Marxism. He liked to remind us that he had been a Marxist at one point, only to recant rather quickly, more quickly than most of his heroes. While I am sure that Judt was quite serious in his interest in Marxism, as he was about everything else, his hatred for Marxists seems to have come less out of a personal discovery of its inadequacies than out of the history of those who embraced it--particularly the French “fellow-travelers” he wrote about in his fine book, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956, who pardoned every one of Stalin’s crimes in the name of a doctrine they supported ardently and understood poorly. In Judt’s view, if you did not discard Marxism, you did not discard a manner of thinking that could only lead to human catastrophe. This is why he admired the courage of those who broke from communist orthodoxy to condemn the system they knew intimately. From Kolakowski, himself a Polish ex-communist, Judt took the idea that “all-embracing ‘systems’ of thought [lead] inexorably to all-embracing ‘systems’ of rule.” (In these pages, Saul Austerlitz noted an analogy between Judt’s criticism of Marxism as a blind system and his rhetorically similar criticism of Israel.)

To his eternal credit, Judt did not leap from a repudiation of Marxism to an embrace of markets. There have been few spokesmen for the welfare state--that most prosaic of institutions--as eloquent as Judt. Postwar itself can be seen as one long paean to the construction of welfare states across Western Europe in the aftermath of World War II. European social democrats, Judt once wrote, occupy an essentially schizophrenic position: they constantly have to resist calls for freer markets while emphasizing their support for regulated ones; at the same time, they have to reiterate a belief in democratic institutions, committed to reducing inequality, against the more radical claims for transformation embodied by the revolutionary Marxists. Their successes have been fragile, Judt showed, and they need expanding. In any case, he said it all best himself, as the quote below displays amply; would that he were here to keep saying it, in a way that few others could.

The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.

That these accomplishments were no more than partial should not trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing those same improvements: this should make us much angrier than we are. It ought also to worry us, if only on prudential grounds: Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?

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Letter to Norway

2010-08-06T15:00:00Z

A report on the American fiction of the last decade

by Benjamin Kunkel

Image: "Stacks in the Strand." October 2006. From amycgx.

This essay was written in response to questions posed by Norwegian literary journal Bokvennen about American literature written since 2000. The questions were to be answered in 1,200 words or fewer.

Before venturing any trendspotting comments about American literature of the past decade, it’s probably worth scanning the ground hovering behind any exciting new figures stamped on the air—in other words, to observe again that novel-writing as an artistic practice has changed more slowly than almost any other, producing not only over the last ten, but over the last one hundred-and-fifty years mainly examples of what you might call the perennial novel. The perennial novel’s degree of realism or of sentimentality; its mixture of description, analysis, and dialogue; the social and psychological variety of its characters—all of these things and more shift across time, but only slowly. The novel of this past decade, then, is above all like the novel of previous decades; and it may be precisely because the novel is so open to changing historical content—new ways of talking, eating, and dressing, along with new technologies, manners, and beliefs—that the form itself displays such a glacial stability.

In fact, one of the main developments in recent American literature has got to be a newly self-conscious traditionalism, a preference among many sophisticated writers and critics for what are felt to be tried-and-true ways of doing things. For the novel, this means endorsing a relatively high degree of sentimentality, as against the chilly affect of someone like DeLillo or Brett Easton Ellis; a “well-rounded” approach to characterization, as against a previously avant-garde commitment to the evasiveness or speciousness of robust personal identity; and an acceptance of all the artificial contrivance involved in the kind of plotting associated with Dickens, say. This trend could be said to run through the novel of the 0’s from Franzen’s Corrections (2001)—its most distinguished instance—through Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) to Adam Haslett’s recent Union Atlantic (2010). The relative eclipse of another sort of novel—one of flintier feeling and flatter characters, and more diffuse plots—can be seen in the decline of DeLillo’s work from social critique toward mysticism, and in the sad death of David Foster Wallace, whose fiction had seemed to promise a kind of avant-garde humanism that now we’re left to imagine or, more likely, fail to.

Another big development has been what Marco Roth called “the rise of the neuronovel,” in which novelists bless or afflict their characters with one or another recognizable neurological disorder. In a skeptical survey, Roth argued that the neuronovel (whose practitioners include some talented younger writers, including Rivka Galchen and John Wray, as well as the older and better-known Jonathan Lethem and Ian McEwan) prematurely cedes the novel’s ground to science, and gives us linguistic experimentation as a special case rather than, as in modernism, a new way to write about all people sane and insane. My own suspicion is that the neuronovel reflects some unconscious marketplace pressure to successfully brand a novel’s story and voice, to evoke in a single term (Tourette’s, autism, Capgras) whatever is distinctive about a character whose nature the readers of another age might have been more patient about discovering. But this shouldn’t sound too disparaging or discouraging about the possibility—the necessity, really—of reckoning new ideas about brain function into our approach to fictional character. My own Indecision, whatever its artistic success or failure, could be characterized as ironic variety of neuronovel, and in The Unnamed (2010) Joshua Ferris turned the genre on its head: here the imperative to name the main character’s neurological disorder persists without anyone being able to identify the condition. I admired the formal restlessness Ferris revealed through his peripatetic, undiagnosed protagonist.

At first blush, another kind of formal restlessness seems evident in the breakdown over the last decade and more of the distinction between “literary” and genre fiction (sci-fi, thriller, noir, historical romance), as more and more mainstream writers import features of those genres into their work and a few sci-fi writers (most notably William Gibson) produce novels set in the futuristic present moment. This sort of genre-bending has produced a few superb books, but shouldn’t be given too much credit for formal experimentation or artistic bravery: remodeling a house is not the same as architecture.

Finally, as several critics have observed, a fair amount of fiction by younger writers of the 0’s celebrates moral and sexual innocence and therefore childhood if not childishness. Leslie Fiedler’s great study of Love and Death in the American Novel established that such sentimentalism has deep roots in American literary culture, along with its opposite number, a Gothic preoccupation with the putative evil of human nature whose most formidable recent incarnation is the work of Cormac McCarthy. Fiedler held that American literature tended to vacillate between an immature and evasive sentimentalism, and an equally immature and evasive Gothicism, and no writer seems to me to have succeeded better at illustrating the continued validity of Fiedler’s stern, Freudian thesis than the one who most completely transcends it: namely, Norman Rush, author most recently of Mortals (2003), a book about love and horror both, and to my mind one of the best American novels of the decade. Even more than Middlemarch a novel for grown-ups, Mortals—with far too much historical and psychological precision to indulge any metaphysics of innocence or evil—seems like the latest culmination of that effort at complex moral imagination that F. R. Leavis baptized “the great tradition” in English-language fiction. What’s interesting and maybe a little dismaying, at a time of what I’m tempted to call neotraditionalism in fiction, is how marginal a novel exemplifying the great tradition has come to feel, as far away from the sentimental American heartland as the Botswana where Rush has set his books. Formally, Rush isn’t up to anything very new here; the novelty lies in the rare honesty and accuracy of his perceptions.

Neotraditionalism has been not only ascendant in the work of writers, but articulate in the views of prominent critics. James Wood of the New Yorker has been a brilliant exponent, and Lev Grossman of Time a crude publicist. So in spite of some postmodern or genre-bending refurbishing, we have witnessed at once a practical and an ideological return to “realism.” But realism needs to be understood in a dual way: as a grammar of conventions on the one hand, and a drive toward truth on the other. Clearly realism and reality or truth don’t automatically serve one another, and are often at odds. To use some convient examples: Kafka and Saramago could be called true without being realistic, while the hallmark of middlebrow fiction was always supposed to be that it was realistic without being true. The disappearance of the term “middlebrow” over the last decades only confirms the triumph of the thing itself: enjoyable books, not too trashy, not too hard, sentimental and well-plotted but not so much so as to totally traduce the world. Such realism should be sharply distinguished from that of a Norman Rush.

Generally it’s considered snobbish to mention the spread of the middlebrow at all, though it’s the development that lies behind the others enumerated above. More productive, though, than to trade accusations of snobbery or equally plausible charges of reverse snobbery would be to ask whether a given work points us toward or maneuvers us away from what it’s somewhat embarrassing to call the truth of the world. We might follow Fiedler’s example by reverting to a slightly simple-minded Freudianism and recalling the opposing claims of the pleasure principle and the reality principle, both legitimate and only rarely to be reconciled. It doesn’t necessarily condemn, any more than it vindicates, the renovated realism of the past decade to notice that it has more often been defended in terms of pleasure than of reality; but it seems worth observing that this has been the case.

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Coming Soon: What was the Hipster?

2010-08-05T15:00:00Z

Image: Ashton copyedits the "What Was the Hipster?" panel transcript.

Hello from the n+1 office. We're hard at work making the next installment of our small book series, What Was the Hipster? Based on a panel discussion of the same name held at the New School last spring—featuring editor Mark Greif, hipster critic Christian Lorentzen, and contributor Jace Clayton aka DJ/Rupture—the book represents our investigation of the rise and fall of the contemporary hipster.

In addition to the panel transcript, the book includes responses from critics Jennifer Baumgardner, Patrice Evans aka The Assimilated Negro, and Margo Jefferson, as well as essays on douchebags, Hasids versus hipsters, and ill-fated sneaker shop Alife Rivington. It has been a pleasure to index and helped us reach new frontiers of copy-editing. The book goes on sale this October, and will be available for pre-order sooner rather than later. Look for it at the n+1 store, and at a bookstore near you!

Update: What was the Hipster? is now available for pre-order.

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Pynchon in Poland

2010-08-04T22:29:16Z

by Nick Holdstock

Image: The muted post horn of Trystero. March 2006. From Jake Dobkin.

When the time came for International Pynchon Week, held this spring in Lublin, Poland was a country in mourning. There had been a plane crash in which the Polish president, his wife, a dozen members of parliament and members of the clergy had died. The church altars were draped in black. Portraits of the dead hung on the walls. A funereal hush was on the countryside as well. During my two hours on the train from Warsaw I saw horses, several angry geese, and a dignified-looking goat, but only one person, a young man with bottles of beer on the roof of a barn. Further south there were submerged trees and fields, the first sign of the floods that had already drowned several picturesque towns.

I arrived in Lublin late in the evening, and caught a taxi to my hotel. The room was quiet, and my bed comfortable, but my head was fizzing too much for sleep. The main source of bubbles was the prospect of delivering a paper on Pynchon’s latest book, Inherent Vice. Set in California at the end of the 1960s, the novel follows a private investigator’s attempts to part clouds of pot smoke, bad karma, and paranoia in order to find a missing ex-girlfriend and divine the nature of a shadowy organisation known as the Golden Fang. At 369 pages, the book is one of Pynchon’s shortest, with a linear narrative that builds to a fairly straightforward resolution—straightforward enough, even, to make the book seem un-Pynchonesque. But by my third reading (the first for sheer enjoyment, the second to get over character names like Trillium Fortnight and Puck Beaverton, the last to begin some sort of analysis), I felt that despite its fairly welcoming narrative structure, it was still, in its blend of the mystical and absurd, very much a Pynchon novel. Thematically, it seemed a close cousin to Vineland, which is set in California in 1984. Each book depicts an era that feels like a quickly fading “parenthesis of light,” and each exhibits a marked distrust of the mass media, especially television.

At 5 AM I decided it wasn’t worth trying to sleep. After a long, wasteful shower, I put on my wool suit, then ate a leisurely hotel breakfast of processed cheese and meat to a soundtrack of justly neglected disco songs from the 1990s. Despite getting lost and having to ask schoolchildren for directions—which they gave scornfully—I arrived at Marie Curie University ninety minutes early. I bought several packets of unfamiliar candy from the vending machines, which I ate while sitting beneath a pine tree. As I chewed, I considered my talk, which was on the idea of utopia in Inherent Vice. Anticipation, coupled with the growing heat—by 8:30 the temperature had climbed to 27 degrees—caused me to pant and sweat in a manner that may have been misunderstood by the hordes of beautiful women in short black skirts floating around the campus.

The conference room looked like the United Nations as depicted in ’60s spy movies: windowless, with curved banks of seats, and a microphone before each chair. All that was missing was the name cards. I took a seat at the back (in what would have been “Togo” or “Benin”) next to a man who resembled a Biblical prophet as drawn by Robert Crumb. He had a long, grey beard and eyes like hot coals, and was with a woman whom he introduced as an “illustrator”—which word required him to relate the entire plot of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. As he talked, and talked, I looked around the quickly filling room. Of the fifty or so people, most were middle-aged white males. It occurred to me that a) I had never met a woman who said she loved Thomas Pynchon and that b) while not a virgin, I was, at the age of 36, very far from married. I hoped these two facts were unrelated.

The first talk was by a British young man whose sentences were long, curving roads that forked repeatedly. Though the audience at first mistook this for garrulousness, after twenty minutes it became clear that he was paying deliberate homage to some of Pynchon’s more Byzantine passages, a fact we acknowledged with gentle nods and the occasional yawn of rapture. The only dissenting voice was the prophet to my right. “That boy talks out of his ass,” he said in an angry whisper.

Another talk in the session was by a Frenchman who, after discussing the anarchists in Against the Day, argued that you can “build a bomb with letters and words.” His heavily accented English was like afternoon rain on a skylight when you are reading a book in bed, and though you are very warm and comfortable, you are definitely not going to sleep, you will just rest your eyes and head for a moment, not for long, just a second more …

I snapped awake in time to hear him say, “The detonator is more often than not a small breach in the syntax, and as for the nitro, well, it’s easy—it’s the nuclear energy that holds together our reality.” I wasn’t sure this made sense, so I looked to my neighbours for confirmation. The prophet’s expression was unreadable; on the pad of the man to my left there were no notes, just a drawing of a cat wearing a shirt and tie.

The third talk was a more focused affair. The speaker was a balding American who began by acknowledging two of the most frequent criticisms of Pynchon’s novels—that they feature flat, cartoonish characters, and that their narratives present a conflict between a powerful Them and an impotent Us —then announced his intention to disagree with both of them. Using E. M. Forster’s definition of a round character as one capable of surprising the reader, he showed how several of the supposedly flattest characters in Gravity’s Rainbow are actually psychologically complex, and have at worst a divided moral sense. From there, he went on to argue against a similarly binary reading of the novel’s politics. By re-examining its theology, much of which centers around the idea of a preterite and an elect—only the latter will go to Heaven—he showed that it was no longer easy to assign the novel’s characters to these categories. Though there are conspiracies within the novel, many of the passages that rail against a dark and shadowy Them intent on Our destruction actually take place as interior monologue, not straight narration.

The man concluded his talk by stressing the importance of Judas, and the need to forgive him, which, in a silently magnanimous moment, I agreed to do so. Then we were applauding, and then we were in a small room swallowing bad coffee, indifferent tea, an orange drink with bubbles. Our names were written on small badges over our hearts, but unlike at the awkward reunion it resembled, we had never known each other. For a moment we were quiet. We became fascinated by our drinks, the hair on our hands, the tiny macaroons. “I really enjoyed your paper,” said three people, not quite in unison, to the day’s three speakers. The speakers smiled and said thank you, the compliments were repeated by others, and then we all knew what to do.

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Over the next few days I realised that when it came to love, I was still a child. I had first come across Pynchon while living in a small town in China where books in English were hard to come by, with the exception of digested Victorian classics: Vanity Fair in sixty-five pages, David Copperfield in forty. The sight of any non-genre contemporary novel was enough to send me into spasms of desire. It was on the bookshelf of a hostel in Kunming that I found Mason & Dixon (“found” being a nice word for “took”). The opening sentence made me hurl the book at the wall:

Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr’d the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk wind off Delaware,—the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking’d foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel’d Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,—the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon coax’d and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy Advent, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.

At the time I was an acolyte of the Church of Raymond Carver. If I picked up the book again a few days later, it was only out of defiance, an unwillingness to be beaten by what seemed a wilfully impenetrable style. I read slowly, carefully, occasionally out loud, and somewhere along the way my idea of what constituted a Good Sentence changed. Instead of forming clipped phrases that cut, words could be more like unravelling yarn, travelling on wood or carpet, dropping abruptly from stair to stair, taking time and gathering distance.

What I loved, as I sped through the rest of Pynchon’s oeuvre, was that unravelling prose. Lines like the following got me through those long books, their difficult sections, the vertiginous moments when I was no longer sure what was happening (let alone to whom):

Over it all the enormous gas ruin of the sun among the smokestacks, the barrage balloons, power lines and chimneys brown as aging indoor wood, brown growing deeper, approaching black through an instant— perhaps the true turn of the sunset —that is wine to you, wine and comfort. (Gravity’s Rainbow)

And this:

The more I studied her face—dark hair blowing, foreshortened eyes, freckles fading into the general green of that afternoon—the more anxious I became. I wanted to protest, but there was no one to protest to. Perhaps I wanted to cry, but the salt Harbour we had left to gulls and fishing boats; had not taken it in as we had the city. (V.)

On the conference’s second day, when it came time to deliver my own love letter, it seemed little better than a triumph of paraphrasing. My thesis was that Pynchon’s characters (and by tenuous extension, all of us) invent utopias from which we have been cast out, so the ills of the present can be explained as the karmic price for the sins of those who came before us. In Inherent Vice, the utopia in question is a sunken continent known as Lemuria, somewhat akin to Atlantis. The term ‘Lemuria’ was in fact coined by the 19th-century zoologist Philip Sclater, who proposed that lemur fossils in Madagascar and India were relics of a sunken continent. Though the theory of continental drift discredited such ideas, Lemuria was taken up by Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, who claimed it had been inhabited by the “Third Root Race,” whose members were said to be seven feet tall, sexually hermaphroditic, egg-laying, mentally undeveloped, and spiritually pure. My own theory was that, like Pynchon’s characters, we use these myths to avoid feeling responsible for our own social and political problems, but that finally there is “no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable.”

My peers were appreciative, as they were toward every speaker, even those who pursued so esoteric an approach it verged on the personal. The role of the L.A. Lakers in Inherent Vice; the anti-gravity devices developed by the Nazis during WWII; the fact that Pynchon was 33 when he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow, “the age of Christ at his death”; even the long, long talk on imaginary numbers which concluded that “the differences between texts could be understood as a very complex four-dimensional object slowly turning round”: each of these was treated with the same respectful attention. Some of this was simply academic etiquette; however boring, obtuse, or just plain wrong you are, your peers will withhold their disapproval till it’s time for questions. Then (it often happens) the knives come out, knives that cut on the way in and again on the way out, because, as the old Venezuelan saying goes, “A sin that has only been paid for once, has not been paid for at all.”

But I did not see a single flash of steel during those three days. The only time it seemed a possibility was during a talk by the Polish translator of The Crying of Lot 49. He began in a winning manner—by telling us that Lublin was the city in which his grandfather had killed his first man—but quickly squandered this goodwill by launching into an attack on the book he had translated, which he said was “out of date,” “obsolescent,” and “no longer relevant.” If he had continued in this vein for long, one of us would have stood and, with burning cheeks, asked the man to step outside. But he soon spiralled off into a narrative of personal confession so full of hard luck—culminating in his time spent frying chickens for KFC—that it would have been churlish not to forgive this man, who was clearly one of the preterite. And perhaps it made us feel good to do so. Perhaps it made us feel that we were more than pale and pitiful creatures who worshipped the books of a man we would never see, let alone meet, about whom we knew almost nothing.

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