Roberto Rossellini was born on May 8, 1906, so the centennial of his birth is coming up. This showing had something to do with that. Isabella, who introduced it – that’s right! – told us that no Rossellini film has been seen on American television for twenty-five years, or something like that, and that in honor of the centennial, the Sundance Channel is going to show the following on May 8. I think.

First:

My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005)
directed by Guy Maddin
written by Isabella Rossellini
16 min.

Quite an oddity. My sense that something heightened and unlikely was happening – namely, that I was watching a short film by Isabella Rossellini while she sat nearby with her bored-looking son – got a serious boost when I saw what the actual film was like: wacky. It’s a completely Isabellacentric memoir of her father with about equal emphasis on her personal recollections and on his artistic ideals and struggles. As she said, in introducing it, anyone could do a documentary about him; she wanted to do something that only she could do; hence: a movie that takes place in her mind. The technique is, um, Euro-whimsy. I.R. told us that her strongest memory of her father, as a little girl, was of his big belly as he lay in bed. So: Roberto Rossellini is portrayed as a giant, screen-filling belly, which jiggles in some sort of celestial fog while Isabella’s voice, modulated down to sound like god, rumbles his wisdom. Meanwhile, narrator-memoirist Isabella (in black turtleneck and jacket) wanders through a run-down movie theater where the specters of Fellini, Hitchcock, David O. Selznick, and Charlie Chaplin engage in stilted exchanges about the merits of realism, commercialism, art and whatnot. All are played by I.R. in variously bizarro caricatures. Eventually she shows up as Ingrid Bergman. We’ve all wanted to see her do that, right? Yeah, but oddly, dressing up as Ingrid Bergman only made Isabella Rossellini look much less like her than usual. The whole strange dream ends with Isabella in a void, caressing a giant sculpted landscape-like belly and expressing her love for her father and her sadness at his diminishing reputation.

What can we say to this? The whole time I was watching it, I felt pretty clearly that it was ridiculous. The elaborate poetic-cinematic aggrandizement of any individual person’s private feelings is a bad idea; the implication here that we should care about a visualization of this particular person’s feelings because her father was famous (or worse, because she herself is famous) was a little irritating. But all memoirs can be tricky that way; there’s a fine line between generously open and self-indulgent. For all that the scripting seemed artless and self-involved, I came away with the feeling that as a “love letter to her father,” the project had been entirely sincere, uncomplicated by any other sort of ego aspirations. And if the notion of a memoir-film is legitimate, why shouldn’t it be self-involved? Flamboyantly self-involved, even?

The look and feel, and probably the specifics of the writing too, were Guy Maddin’s doing. I haven’t seen The Saddest Music In the World yet, but I will. I’m hopeful but wary. From this little piece, I got the sense that his sorts of pseudo-antiquated stylistic quirks will tend to shut me out more than invite me in. Maybe that was my problem with this film in general – it was supposed to be this warm, human thing, but it was done as a weird magic-lantern show. I know, I know, it was all supposed to portray the sensation of fading memories. But a piece either exists inside the mysterious life of the mind or outside it, and seeing Isabella sitting in the midst of all that fog, looking so well-groomed and famous and talking directly to me about the artistic philosophy of Roberto Rossellini, pretty much answered that. I was kept well outside the poetic space where the visuals wanted to live. Maybe that tension was their joke, their vibe, but it didn’t gel for me.

But, you know, whatever. I was a little embarrassed, watching it, but there was no need. She’s obviously doing just fine, and this little movie is getting very warmly reviewed. So who was I embarrassed for? Whom, in fact?

Next came an actual Rossellini film, one that Isabella said was a personal favorite. After it started, she and her son slipped out of the room. So did several people I was with. But they shouldn’t have, because it was good.

It being:

Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950)
directed by Roberto Rossellini
screenplay by Federico Fellini, Father Antonio Lisandrini, and Father Félix Morión
story by Roberto Rossellini

The English title was The Flowers of St. Francis, though a literal translation of the Italian would have been Francis, God’s Jester. We watched this projected from the Criterion DVD that had just recently been released. This was and is the only Roberto Rossellini film I have yet seen.

Those people who want to explain why art films (European art films, usually) are worthier stuff than standard American fare tend to sketch the same outline: slower pace, less artifice, more interest in the human, more room for the lyrical and the profound, more ambiguity, greater resonance. We all know this list well; I’ve come to have a very clear sense of the slow, admirably humanistic “European art film” as an archetype. But until now I wasn’t entirely sure I’d ever quite seen it. This was definitely it.

I wasn’t sure I’d ever quite seen it, because when I’d seen it before, it didn’t exactly do all those things it was supposed to do. Why is slow better? Why is ambiguity better? I don’t really buy this idea that real, humane human affairs are the ones with the soft pillows, or that the faster the car, the less soulful the driver. The word “humanistic” and its little cluster of connotations/implications seems to me a gang that could be broken up a bit. It’s become one of my stock disillusionments to realize that something is purporting to be “humanistic” in the sense that it relates to human universals, potentially to my own life, but is actually only “humanistic” in the sense that it is froofy.

But St. Francis was exactly that film you hear tell about, wherein the basic, traditional links between humanism as a way of thinking about life and humanism as an aesthetic approach shine through as essential and fundamental. Sure, I might want to break up that gang now because it’s gotten out of control*, but in the end I know there’s something down there that still makes sense, and there it was on the screen in front of me, playing out at that “leisurely pace” you hear so much about, and I understood what it was worth.

Analogously, this is a movie about the ways that religious devotion and goodness relate and connect. The connection is traditional, frequently overemphasized or misconstrued, and at bottom, real and important. The film is absolutely, unquestionably loving toward St. Francis and his followers (portrayed to great effect by non-actors), and, like them, toward all humanity that passes by, even the barbaric, the spiteful, and the annoyed. The whole of the world is presented with that certain grace of being a great gentle comedy, in the classical sense, which is how St. Francis sees it. And yet, with that attitude established beyond question, Rossellini’s portrait is more complicated. To what degree should we actually be emulating these lyrically, comically simple men of God? Not clear. We see their self-denial taken to unsympathetic extremes; what are we to make of it? Is their goodness of God or of themselves? Room is left for many possible interpretations.

The Italian title, “God’s Jester,” which I didn’t know while watching it, helps me a bit in clarifying – Francis and his followers are portrayed as divine innocents, not unlike clowns. Or Harpo. Francis himself is very slightly more knowing than his followers; one young guy is slightly less knowing than everyone else. They’re all pretty much absolute in their simplicity and dedication to simplicity. The sermon to the birds is, characteristically, played both as absurd and spiritual at once. Is devotion nonsense? Possibly, but we all know that nonsense has something divine in it. That’s basically what I took away from the film, but the film itself was bigger and bigger-hearted than that.

The movie breaks down into a series of titled vignettes, a format which very successfully evokes the world of the parable – depth in simplicity. Events are significant as they relate to philosophy but not to any narrative. The beauty of any given moment or idea is left to resonate in spiritual space rather than being tied to a structure of meaning. That sounds flaky but it’s just the way I expressed it. The loose structure works because of Rossellini’s dedication to his sort of realism, to a completely earthbound presentation. God only knows what he would have thought of Guy Maddin.

The biggest showpiece sequence somewhere in the middle of the film has the simplest of the brothers and some kind of hairy tyrant warrior brute confront one another. The tyrant stares down the monk, threatens him, makes enormous infuriated faces at him, but the monk does not flinch or vary his simple, mild smile. The tyrant is absolutely befuddled – what is this person and how can he be this way? In the absolute perfection of his bottomless simplicity, the existence of God is demonstrated, at least to this guilty conscience. The scene is reduced to a beautiful comic image, and the possible meaning of the image can extend in many directions – political, spiritual, philosophical. Rossellini (and Fellini) are not judging and despite what it might seem, they are not preaching. In this scene they present an image as fine and durable as any fairy tale or bible story.

I also found the scene with the leper particularly rich and affecting.

I can’t imagine a better Christian movie.

If that’s what it was.

* Business politics are one thing, but is the independent coffee house actually a better place to sit than Starbucks? Is the coffee better? Is your individuality better-loved there? And what Christmas tree should Charlie Brown have chosen?**

** I keep using the word “humanism” and talking about its connotations, but I’m actually only talking about it in the most generic, ahistoric sense, which is how I tend to think about most words. I realize that “Humanism” has meant several different distinct philosophical movements in several different eras, and right now tends to be used a lot as a partner to “secularism,” but, guess what, I don’t mean any of that stuff. Just the basic stuff about relating to human interests and values. Hm. I just looked it up and apparently the opposition to the supernatural is sort of the defining aspect of the word. So… I guess I won’t be using this word any more. What word did I mean, friendly readers? I want a word that just means “relating to human (rather than institutional or abstract) interests and values; based on a respect for aesthetic experience and the experience of the individual” but doesn’t actually oppose itself to religion. You know – like in The Flowers of St. Francis and also in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

I think at the time of the showing, I was told that I was going to see two short films that had been featured in the Sundance Film Festival, which is true, but it seems noteworthy and probably intentional that both were Oscar contenders in 2005. One of them won, in fact.

So:

Two Cars, One Night (2003)
written and directed by Taika Waititi
12 min.

A gentle slice of life thing with a couple of kids, Maori Norman Rockwell in a parked car. The kids had charm and the black-and-white was pretty. I think my enjoyment of this particular slice of life was slightly hampered by certain mannered aspects of the whole package, which included some snippets of time-lapse (or otherwise tricked-up) photography, meant to sketch passing impressions of the neon world of adults. Those, and perhaps the all-around black-and-white quiet short-film seriousness itself, put me in mind of artsy/literary aspirations, whereas the very sentimental spirit of the thing (check out the official site and you’ll get the idea) really demanded the most absolutely direct approach. Like Norman Rockwell, whose tableaux of pure sweetness manage not to seem distasteful by virtue of the sobriety and clarity of their craftsmanship.

But the film understood all the basic stuff about how a sentimental tune needs to be a simple one, and other than the sped-up motion, it didn’t make any mistakes. The kids and their moment are genuinely cute, and the overall sense of nostalgia was clearly heartfelt. I drew a connection, possibly absurd, to turn-of-the-century sentimental parlor songs, with their gently wistful recurring sentiments about childhood sweethearts meeting and parting and such. The film found that sort of thing in a more or less contemporary setting.

After the showing, some other people present were saying things like “what a beautiful people they are,” and “what wonderful accents,” and I must admit to feeling uncomfortable about this sort of response. Any sort of aesthetic assessment of racial characteristics seems to me worrisome. Maybe that’s irrational racial anxiety on my self-flagellating white liberal American part, but I don’t think so. At the very least, saying that the Maori are “beautiful” is sweepingly simplistic – surely, many of them, like many of everyone, are ugly. These kids, however, were cute. The “what a beautiful people they are” comment would seem to stem from conflating these kids’ particular cuteness with their general Maoriness, and that sort of confusion seems to me to be genuine kin to the infamous bad kind. Albeit obviously benign.

But I can handle that. My real discomfort comes from the fact that I can readily imagine that Taika Waititi (who is “of Te-Whanau-a-Apanui descent and hails from the Raukokore region of the East Coast”) really did intend to convey “the beauty of his people” or some such thing, and that I was indeed being invited to admire the bone structure and marvel at the regional accents (which were, I must say, THICK and difficult for me to disentangle). And that sort of thing is hard for me to take. The relationship between foreignness as a point of pride and foreignness as an illusion of provincial minds is still troubling to me; no matter how the issue gets sliced, it always seems like somewhere along the way, some irrelevant middlemen got their egos tangled up in it. Does it make a Maori feel good when an American sees a 12 minute movie about kids in a parking lot and decides to say that the Maori are a beautiful people? Or does it make a Maori angry?

For my part, I just have to hope and trust that nobody cares, Maori or otherwise, because any kind of cultural agenda in a work of art, per se, is pretty much doomed to fail. That might be a bit broad, but I don’t think I’m alone in feeling it. This is a politically loaded subject and I don’t want to talk about it right now; I actually don’t feel all that strongly about the general political/cultural questions, which are more complex. I just know that artistically speaking, whatever might allow a work to be classed as “[ethnic] interest” is not, in itself, any kind of interest.

This movie was made in New Zealand starring New Zealanders who looked and sounded it. I watched the film assuming that those facts were context rather than content, and I hope they were, though I know it’s all fuzzy. Admittedly, foreignness is an undeniable element of the experience of watching something foreign, and if it adds to the experience for a viewer, I guess I can’t knock that. But that sort of thing is specific to the individual viewer’s associations and shouldn’t be passed off as part of a general response. The clanging parallel fourths of cheap Charlie Chan “oriental” music are offensive not specifically because they are inaccurate, but because they, as a subjective reworking of real Chinese traditional music, presume to know just how “foreign” that music would sound to a listener and thus reveal an implicitly exclusionary attitude. If my fellow audience-members thought that this movie was wonderfully “New Zealandy,” they needed to recognize that they themselves brought that, not the film. Or if the film brought it intentionally, it, um, shouldn’t have. Hm. Or something. My cranky discomfort seems to be swallowing its own tail here.

All I’m saying is, I didn’t like hearing “what a beautiful people they are” as a response to this film. But maybe I should just get over it.

But doesn’t it just sound so patronizing?

Oh well, I’ve said stuff like that lots of times.

Wasp (2003)
written and directed by Andrea Arnold
26 min.

This one won the Oscar. If you’re so inclined, you can watch it in its entirety here – how’s that for a link?

It’s a “tough stuff” movie that proudly announces “tough stuff, coming through” with rough handheld camerawork and the sort of full-on garish grit that I associate with contemporary art photography. I’m not inclined to like that sort of thing – “we dare you to face the ugly truth” deadpan is an easy, bitter game to play. The world will always be full of ills enough to allow any number of contemporary artists to assault me with their social consciences. But after staring down all my reservations about this particular prodding of the beach rubble, I ultimately came to the conclusion that it had been a respectable and sufficiently humble attempt at capturing a certain depressing social reality. The nightmarish image from whence the title was a bit too much, but once that moment had ventured over the line, the rest of the movie became, retroactively, less abrasive and less indignant than it had at initially seemed. By the final sardonic long shots, I felt pretty sure that the whole thing had been trying for fairness rather than ugliness, despite the relentless ugliness. If I knew more about the subject matter, I might be able to stand up and say, “well, this isn’t how it really is, it’s just been done for shock value,” but I can’t, and I find it entirely believable that this is probably how it really is. Perhaps that’s naive. I feel obligated to keep clearly in mind that a movie, even a real-world-social-ills movie, should not be my primary source of information on any real-world anything, so I must acknowledge that this movie depicted a situation and problem that seemed to purport to be realistic, about which I continue to know very little.

The straightforward narrative style combined with the moral mudpie made for an interesting sort of effect. Our empathy for the protagonist was, rightly, just about nil, and was simultaneously sort of all-encompassing. The movie didn’t pull an “anti-hero” inversion, nor was it dismissive of the character’s humanity. That dismissal was left up to us, and I appreciated that. The ugliness was as unpleasant to her as to us; if we chose to distance ourselves from her, it was by choice and therefore on our own terms. That’s the kind of setup that actually inspires thought about an issue, the sort of thought that artists are always claiming they want to inspire.

Now, I’m pretty sure my thoughts about the issues in this movie aren’t worth anything, but the fact that I was made to engage emotionally with this material is, I think, good. The spreading of “awareness” is still definitely a commendable goal, despite the rampant flakification of the concept. This is how it should be done – through art that induces the viewer to consider the issues in the course of sorting out a reaction to the art itself. A lot of artists are under the misapprehension that shock is a good technique for bringing this about, but it’s not. Shock, generally, just makes me think about the obnoxious artist who shocked me, rather than the implications of the material they used, or (as if!) my own capacity for being shocked.

This film flirted with the lure of the shocking, and I maintain my several reservations, but on balance, I think it was trying to communicate, not offend, and that’s what counts to me. Of course, I’m not about to watch it again any time soon.

The acting is again quite good.

directed by Boaz Yakin
written by Gregory Allen Howard

Who here remembers the Titans? Raise your hands if you remember the Titans.

I actually don’t remember the Titans very well because they were such a by-the-book genre movie, in a genre that I haven’t learned and loved well enough to file subtle variations separately in my brain. Did this one play the race card and the football card into some new hand? Maybe, maybe this was the first movie ever made that dealt this particular setup. But if it was, it succeeded at not seeming like it was, which is probably exactly the sort of milkshake-smooth ride that they aspired to.

My thoughts watching the movie and thinking back on it all revolve around the idea of old-fashioned genre moviemaking. In Barton Fink, the title character loses his existential bearings because he is assigned to write a “wrestling picture” that remains unimaginable to him, a symbol of the inscrutable absurdity of the universe. If I’m remembering Barton Fink correctly, which I may not be. Anyway, genre movies do exist in a strange half-world. It would seem like this movie was all about people and their lives, and race and loyalty and teamwork and whatever, the things that count to humans. And then again it was entirely that other thing, a “feel-good” formula flick, and what are we to it? If Denzel Washington looked in at our lives, what could he possibly think? That’s not where he comes from.

This is the essence of art, I guess, back to the Greeks, who I must always remind myself, reading Sophocles or whoever, did not actually live and speak in masks. But what is the connection between life and the Titans? I guess they serve us better by not being like us; the bible is a best-selling advice column because it’s so weird, and kids read fairy tales because their applicability is always and only metaphorical. Kids on IMDB are telling me that they watched Remember the Titans in high school health class. Barton Fink gets lost because he believes that art should be a mirror, but art can also be a tool, carved roughly in our own image only because that makes it more obvious how to apply it. Remember the Titans (and most of the classic Hollywood output of which it reminded me) makes a lot more sense to me as a quasi-functional artifact done up with a relatively sophisticated trompe l’oeil facade than as a rendition of reality that’s been abstracted down to its essentials (or to its crowd-pleasing components). But this model is stupid; obviously all art is the fusion of the tool and the mirror. This is the meaning of “pageantry,” no? At some level I still haven’t quite gotten my head all the way around the issue, and maybe I never will, and maybe that’s the fascination of art for everyone. But here I am watching a pleasant enough, by-the-numbers Hollywood pageant and feeling uncertain what manner of thing it is. I mean, what are we, life on earth, trying to do, making movies like this and showing them to ourselves? I guess I am saved from these sorts of questions during other movies by the fact that they provoke thoughts on their own terms. But this was a very simple movie and it didn’t have anything up its sleeve, and I knew that it didn’t, so I was free to feel like I was in someone else’s temple watching their lovely ceremonies with interest. But then I thought, well, actually, this is my temple too, isn’t it, and I don’t know what any of these rites mean.

I kind of want to read this, but oh man, that’ll be heavy going.

There, I found a thought to think about Remember the Titans, albeit a roaringly pretentious one. I’d been putting this one off a long time, because, really, what is there to say? I don’t need to tell you that I didn’t actively choose to watch this.

It was very well done, I thought.

directed by Richard Marquand
written by Joe Eszterhas

Onward through my backlog. Why did I watch Jagged Edge of all things? We were at the beach and we wanted to take advantage of the On-Demand movie service, but they cleverly deny you the option of watching anything good. That Jagged Edge seemed like our best bet indicates the quality of the selection.

The movie was serious junk, and, given that we were at the beach and had thus lost our capacity for feeling our time was being wasted, slightly amusing as such. Joe Eszterhas is one of these simple folk who thinks that when people say “fuck” a lot, things become more gritty, exciting, and fun. That sort of thinking governed not only the amount of swearing but much of the plot, which revolves excitedly around rape-murder-mutilations. They get described in delighted detail; just as with saying “fuck,” there’s the sense that Joe, like 10-year-olds, still can’t believe how cool it is that if you call it “forensics” you get to talk about naked women and cutting people with knives and other stuff that, oh man, is totally wrong! But, as every 10-year-old knows, when you get to stay home sick from school, you’re not supposed to act like it’s fun; you’re supposed to act like you’re indifferent – and when grownups talk about rape, or say “fuck,” they don’t enjoy it, so to be really mature you should just say fuck whenever the fuck you want and not make a big fucking deal about it. And so this movie goes its ridiculous way.

It’s hard for me to build up any annoyance with director Richard Marquand, because, knowing that he was also the nominal director of Return of the Jedi (a poster for which appears on a kid’s door in this movie), I’m inclined to think of him only as a simple pawn caught up in someone else’s crazy scheme; in this case, Joe Eszterhas’s.

The movie attempts only to be “one of those movies” and is nonetheless a little too stupid to pull it off. The “answer” to the mystery isn’t decisively revealed until the very very very end, which adds absolutely nothing to the movie and in fact only heightens the viewer’s overall impression that any given detail of the plot has been completely arbitrary. Watching the movie isn’t like being drawn into any kind of story or world or experience; it’s like watching some idiot moving chess pieces around, concentrating hard with his tongue sticking out. He manages to win the game, after starting with the wrong number of pieces and making a few illegal moves. And playing both sides.

Is it possible that in 1985 this genre (Bleached Noir, it should be called) was so new, and its proper form so incompletely established, that Jagged Edge could pass as clever and intriguing? What was Roger Ebert thinking? Something about the movies of the 80s is genuinely different; every era has its own set of superficial things that are passed off as sufficient and vital – but 80s Hollywood picked such a weird set of those things. It’s not just their superficiality; it’s that they don’t even seem to relate to basic human desires – not like the much-mocked superficial nonsense of the 50s, which at least was meant to evoke security, luxury, and confidence. These Jagged Edge folk were neither perfect nor troubled; they were just characters. The focus seemed to be somewhere slightly to the left or right of them, on something I couldn’t quite place, like maybe the movie was actually, secretly, about their curtains. A lot of movies from the period seem to share that quality.

I was there but I wasn’t watching Jagged Edge at the time so I can’t call on any memories to help make sense of it all. By the time I was old enough to really notice what was going on in movies, things had changed, so this remains a historical puzzle for me to figure out.

written and directed by Roman Polanski
based on the novel by Ira Levin (1967)

This movie is great.

I’m going to start off with the first edition book cover this time, instead of saving it for the end.

Sorry I couldn’t find a cleaner image, but you get the idea. For once, I actually know who designed this cover: Paul Bacon, whose work (click on the ‘image gallery‘ link), now that I’ve googled my way through a bunch of it, readily coheres into an “okay, that guy.” One of those figures whose importance is indicated by the fact that I was aware of his work’s significance before I was aware that it was any one person’s work. It’s always a bit exciting to discover that some vague part of the aesthetic landscape in one’s mind can actually be quantified and ascribed to a specific point of origin. This recent piece on jacket design by John Updike includes a brief assessment of Paul Bacon. It’s got some other interesting stuff in it too – the thing at the end about the possible legitimacy of a “deceptively conceptual… nonexistent point of view” is going to ring in my head for a while. But it has nothing to do with Rosemary’s Baby so let’s move on.

Next on the list is Krzysztof “Christopher” Komeda, composer of the movie’s excellent score. I’ve seen the movie quite a few times and the distinguishing thing about this viewing was that the score “popped,” for me. I remembered the main lullaby theme (sung, I have only since learned, by Mia Farrow herself), but I don’t think I had ever listened closely to the other cues, which all sounded sort of familiar but now revealed themselves as really interesting, clever choices, especially the squeaky freaky jazz elements under scenes of horror. I love the little cue when she eats the raw liver, without which the scene wouldn’t work. Komeda’s straight jazz compositions are less interesting to me, and even his other movie work, from what I can hear of it, sounds pretty similar in style to Rosemary’s Baby. But his dramatic sense seems to have been strong, and of course a smart musician can get a lot of emotional range out of a limited style. I’d be curious to see some of the many other movies he scored – they’re pretty much all in Polish, though, but several of Polanski’s are still available. Komeda was apparently a major jazz figure in Poland and might well have been just on the verge of becoming an international big deal, what with this movie and Polanski’s career in general, but he died less than a year after its release, from injuries sustained in a car crash.

The best thing about the movie is John Cassavetes’ thrilling performance, which constitutes a perfect, archetypal caricature of a certain popular blend of impenetrable bullshit and misogyny-by-default, and which frequently comes to mind when I am trying to figure why I hate some guy so much. For me, one of the most upsetting sequences in the whole thing, I’m not entirely sure why, is when Rosemary asks Guy to show her his shoulder (suspecting that he has been hiding some kind of satanic tattoo), and he complies, as though he can’t imagine why she’s asking, in faux good humor, smirking “that’s as far as I go without a blue light.” I think what gets me is the fact that even his malicious and unfunny joking is, itself, bullshit; even the part of his personality that’s a dismissive asshole is only bullshit. Even his cruel display of disinterest is just a mask for the true blackness of his fundamental, cosmic, deadly disinterest. Yes, he is after all a “bad guy,” but there’s something scary there that goes well beyond the issue of Rosemary’s baby or Rosemary’s Baby. To me, there’s something truly, philosophically dark in that performance that I want to attribute to Cassavetes himself. The role as written (as it appears in the book) is just a hateful, frivolous, self-serving jerk. In the movie, he’s a pit of darkness that has decided to act the part of a hateful, frivolous, self-serving jerk because that seems like a good idea.

More than any paranoid fear of conspiracies or of the devil, the horror in Rosemary’s Baby is of the possibility of complete isolation. It’s the fear that nobody cares about you, regardless of what they might say – nobody.* While, in the movie, the reason for all the lying is a conspiratorial plot, the presence of that horrible husband character gets the wider message across – people might be lying to you and using you for their own purposes because that’s all there is out there. Rosemary’s childlike claim to being a sophisticated young woman is terrifying because it’s so insufficient in the face of b) all of them witches and a) her husband and everyone else. Almost nothing scary happens in the movie that we don’t pretty much know is going to happen – the fear comes from the worry that we are all as nitwitted and hopeless as Rosemary, being duped for whatever reasons (the devil is just a nice stand-in for any dark cause) by everyone around us. Ultimately she’s duped by her own baby. In the book the punchline seems to be “and now the world is doomed ’cause of the devil baby!” but in the movie, I read it as “of course, your friend Rosemary can only ever be a witless, hopeless slave – sound familiar?”

Is that just me? Or, alternately, is it of course everyone and I’m the only one who thinks it’s just me? Anyway, it’s me.

* The presence of good ol’ Hutch definitely dilutes this a bit, which is part of the reason that I don’t think this kind of sweeping existential curse was ever quite Ira’s (or Roman’s) intention. But it’s what makes the movie work, to me, and I like to imagine that John Cassavetes was in on it. Assigning the role of Satan to the ridiculous, commonplace Castevets is a gesture that the real horror is elsewhere. I think Ira’s idea was that horror in the present day would take a familiar present-day form, and that its outward mundanity would make it all the more horrific (cf. The Stepford Wives). But by keeping the Castevets silly even to the bitter end – in the theater where we saw this (midnight screening!), Minnie’s gossipy delivery of the grandiose in her climactic line about “he chose you out of all the women in the world!” got the movie’s biggest laugh – the book and the movie don’t make them more horrific, they just indicate that the horror is something above and beyond their specific machinations. Maybe they thought it was the devil, or the whole conspiracy thing. But obviously that stuff is just fun genre stuff. The real scare in the movie, though it may well have arisen only as a serendipitous byproduct of the plotting, is that we are all on our own and the world couldn’t care less.

Oops, okay, so I’m putting this below the footnote because it’s an addendum a few days later and unrelated to the above, but related to Rosemary’s Baby.

In the movie (and in the book), Rosemary proudly tells several people that Guy “was in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross and a lot of TV commercials.” Only in googling around for the above post did I learn that both plays were real and both premiered on Broadway in the 1963-4 season. Obviously, the first question was: was there an actor who was in both productions? Answer: no. Luther, by John Osborne, ran from September 1963 to March 1964, and Nobody Loves an Albatross, by Ronald Alexander, ran from December 1963 to June 1964. Obviously, nobody could be in both shows. More likely, in fact, that Ira Levin saw both shows around the same time. He certainly seems to have seen Luther, based on the fact that Roman Castevet calls it “a good picture of the hypocrisy behind organised religion,” and from the sound of the thing, it seems possible that the subject matter of Albatross was meant to connect to Guy’s life of cynical TV-land lies.

So, to the important questions: did Albert Finney play the title role in Luther as reported by Roman Castevet? Answer: yes. (Scroll down to see a press caricature here.) Okay, and does his character have a fit, as reported by Guy Woodhouse? Answer: Yes, at the end of the first scene, according to the synopsis in this helpful study guide. And now the big question – did Albert Finney have an understudy, and if so, would he have been onstage during the scene when Luther has his fit, so as to make the “involuntary reach” gesture for which Guy Woodhouse is praised? Answer: yes, and most likely, yes. The IDDB page (same link as above) indicates that one John Heffernan was the understudy for the role of Martin Luther, and that he played Weinand, whom, if you read the synopsis carefully, you will see is very likely onstage during the fit.

So, who is John Heffernan? Well, he played Eddie Niles, the bank teller who takes the bets at the end of The Sting. Can anyone find me a picture?

What does this mean? I believe it means nothing. When asked if he was Albert Finney’s understudy, Guy does, after all, say “no.” However, the implication of the scene is that Roman Castevet noticed Guy and identified him in the program, which would have been impossible if he were just one of the six cast members credited only as “Monks, lords, peasants, etc.” On the other hand, the further implication of the scene is that Roman is masterfully manipulating Guy and his praise for Guy’s performance is probably a bluff based on research rather than memory. BUT, since the scene mentions a real event in the play, it seems probable to me that Ira Levin was describing an actual gesture he saw onstage. Perhaps he had Guy say that he was not Albert Finney’s understudy solely to avoid slandering the actual understudy, whose gesture was nonetheless the one described. Or perhaps John Heffernan is a horrible horrible person, the kind who’d sell his wife’s womb to satanists, and I’ve revealed the truth to the world. But I doubt it. He comes off like a pretty nice guy, in The Sting. Plus, remember how he was so reasonable and pleasant that time when he witnessed an explosion on 20th Street? Now that was scary!

ADDENDUM 2: Okay, now it’s almost a month later and I’m still adding to this. Enough already! I just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve checked the book itself and the dialogue actually runs like this:

“A good picture of the hypocrisy behind organized religion,” Mr. Castevet said, “was given, I thought, in Luther. Did you ever get to play the leading part, Guy?”

“Me? No,” Guy said.

“Weren’t you Albert Finney’s understudy?” Mr. Castevet asked.

“No,” Guy said, “the fellow who played Weinand was. I just covered two of the smaller parts.”

“That’s strange,” Mr. Castevet said; “I was quite certain that you were his understudy. I remember being struck by a gesture you made and checking in the program to see who you were; and I could swear you were listed as Finney’s understudy.”

“What gesture do you mean?” Guy asked.

“I’m not sure now; a movement of your–“

“I used to do a sort of thing with my arms when Luther had the fit, a sort of involuntary reaching–“

“Exactly,” Mr. Castevet said. “That’s just what I meant. It had a wonderful authenticity to it. In contrast, may I say, to everything Mr. Finney was doing.”

“Oh, come on now,” Guy said.

“I thought his performance was considerably overrated,” Mr. Castevet said. “I’d be most curious to see what you would have done with the part.”

Laughing, Guy said, “That makes two of us,” and cast a bright-eyed glance at Rosemary.

Which very explicitly lets John Heffernan off the hook. I’m not going to do the hard research right now, but if we take Guy’s comment to mean that he understudied two of the smaller parts, which is how I take it, that leaves us with these three, all originally credited as “Monks, lords, peasants, etc.”:

Harry Carlson (understudy for Lucas, Weinand)
Stan Dworkin (Eck, Hans)
Roger Hamilton (Leo, Prior)

Though it doesn’t sound like Guy thought of Weinand as a “smaller part.” My bet is on Roger Hamilton, the only one of the three with a real Broadway career. Thoughts?

written and directed by Noah Baumbach

I thought it was really excellent, the best new movie I’d seen in the theater in a long time.

Something that I always admire about Wes Anderson’s troubled output is that way he has of pushing his characters through a plotted script, with clear, story-progressing events in every scene, and yet keeping the focus on silly superficial details. The overall effect is of slightly bewildered characters who are trying to contend with the fact that they’re caught up in some kind of drama but can only seem to think directly in terms of the frivolous quirky stuff around them. The problem for Wes Anderson is that his movies have been increasingly fetishistic about the frivolous quirky stuff, to the point where it no longer seems justified by the fact that life is full of such stuff; the effect is of a diorama world entirely unlike life, into which this stuff has been placed, and it all becomes as bewildering to the characters as the drama was. In The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, the characters seemed gamely bewildered in relationship to everything about their world, including themselves. Bill Murray was playing a character who always seemed to be on the verge of saying “Hello, I’m [quote marks] Steve Zissou.” Which, I would say, takes the device of bewilderment in the face of the details a bit too far.*

Anyway, so The Squid and the Whale took that sort of approach but took it seriously, and the effect was, I thought, tremendously successful. The progression of events, which was perfectly clear, registered as a kind of dark, steady undercurrent to the actual goings-on, which were all about the eccentricities and petty details. The writing and (especially) the acting were attuned to the eccentric surface life of things in the smartest possible way; I never felt that I was being offered smugly calculated “quirkiness” or, alternately, that I was watching a formulaically “realistic” gloss on something fundamentally simplistic (as in, say, a pseudo-improvised Woody Allen scene with lots of hemming and hawing “because that’s the way people really talk”). By taking seriously this idea that was, it seemed to me, at least latent in Rushmore – that the absurd surface of life is our only interface with (and protection against) the despair that lies underneath it – Noah Baumbach found the ideal device for portraying the coming-of-age struggle that the Noah Baumbach stand-in teenager goes through.** Namely, the pain of facing the fact that one’s parents are fallible and that one is therefore all alone. Kids, even as they hunger to understand what’s really going on with themselves and everyone else, would still much rather believe that their problems have to do with ping-pong, just as audiences, even as they hunger to recognize themselves in drama, would rather believe that their movies are about quirky people doing funny stuff. By not overselling the comic detail-work but still letting it be the life of the movie, The Squid and the Whale allowed a certain desperate and queasy feeling to seep in that I recognized well but hadn’t felt with such force in a movie before.

On the commentary track on the DVD of You Can Count On Me (2000), Kenneth Lonergan says something about how people always say that characters should change and develop, but that actually people in real life don’t change very much, and that if someone really changes in some small way, that’s a big thing, and that he tried to make his movie be about that scale of change. I really admire that movie and that goal, and I think back to that comment often, regarding other movies (and books, etc.). I know someone who complained that the final sequence of The Squid and the Whale came on too suddenly and didn’t seem to suit the movie. I can see ways that it might have seemed a little artificial, from a technical perspective, and while I was watching it, I was preoccupied by stupid thoughts like, “Oh, so it’s one of these things where the music rises up and he has a moment. Is he going to end on that? Will that be the last shot? I’ll bet this will be the end. Or will they show something else? Is this the last shot? No, I bet this is the last shot!” That sort of thing is probably my own fault, but could equally be blamed on the movie’s pulling out a “gesture” for the finale rather than remaining with the more naturalistic scene that precedes it. In any case, it was a gesture that I liked and one that delivered the only possible resolution to a movie like this: one of the characters has changed, internally, in some small way. It’s left up to us to imagine just what that way is, but we have a good idea. Doing it as a lyrical “moment” was actually deserved, because that’s no doubt what the change feels like for this character.

I guess that’s what I enjoyed so much about the movie – it was a movie about fairly unpleasant people that got laughs out of their unpleasantness, and yet we were drawn into empathy for them because movie was to the audience what the world was to the characters.

On a whim, I thought I’d try to find the name of the artist responsible for the “artist’s conception” diorama for which the movie is named, but all I could find was this page. The museum does, however, have a little article and gallery about diorama arts, which is more than I can say for the rest of the internet. For shame, internet! Does nobody care about dioramas anymore?

Hopefully this movie will give a boost to diorama appreciation, and the names of Francis Lee Jaques and James Perry Wilson and Rudolph Zallinger will finally get the recognition they deserve. Okay, so I’m joking, but hey, why not?

* Although I think I was more willing than most people to give The Life Aquatic credit for being a sincere shot at portraying the peculiar paralyzed post-adolescent pseudo-adulthood that Wes Anderson must be experiencing along with everyone else I know. I just think Wes is too deep into it to say anything about it without it getting muddled.

** I know, I sound silly saying that this idea comes from Rushmore when of course it’s a basic idea in all comedy back to Shakespeare and before. I just mean that the specific aesthetic-cinematic execution of that idea in The Squid and the Whale seemed to be of a piece with Rushmore as opposed to, say, with Twelfth Night. Also, Noah Baumbach co-wrote The Life Aquatic and Wes Anderson was a producer on The Squid and the Whale. So this comparison is, um, reasonable.