Yearly Archives: 2012

July 19, 2012

“Fences” (1983)

August Wilson (1945–2005)
“Fences” (1983)

Random number 2465, extremely high (the range is 1–2535), which means a very recent work (recent for Harold Bloom, anyway).

Oddly enough, the copy above had been gifted to Beth for her birthday just before this selection came up. Of all things. (Yeah, it happens to be a charmless rental-style printing and not the more normal-looking trade edition).

I read this a good many months ago, and as I’ve said before, plays are the lowest-impact of reading experiences, so my specific engagement has gotten pretty low by this point and I’m going to have to take a big-picture tack here. This may get ugly.

“Fences” is a black “Death of a Salesman.” You might ask: why did we need a black “Death of a Salesman”? Couldn’t “Death of a Salesman” be the black “Death of a Salesman”?

August Wilson answers you: “To mount an all-black production of a ‘Death of a Salesman’ or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans. It is an assault on our presence, and our difficult but honorable history in America; and it is an insult to our intelligence, our playwrights, and our many and varied contributions to the society and the world at large.” (1996)

(I should point out that the original context for this quote makes no actual mention of “Fences” — Wilson was just denouncing race-blind casting and used “Death of a Salesman” as his example. But it seems fair to assume that after 13 years of being told that “Fences” is just like “Death of a Salesman,” his choice of example was not arbitrary.)

Though I take issue with the victimized rhetoric — how can a play “deny us our own humanity”? It’s just a play, and there will be other plays. (Does “Stomp” deny me my humanity? Does “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”?) — his basic point makes some sense to me. A play dependent on “the specifics of white culture” (or any other culture) cannot be directly interpreted as applying to non-participants in that culture.

But he also says that such a play is essentially “an investigation of the human condition” through a specific culture, rather than an investigation of that culture. Which opens the door to the idea that perhaps a cultural translation can be achieved. Which is how “Fences” reads. This existentially frustrated patriarch might not be existentially frustrated in exactly the same way or for exactly the same reason as Willy Loman, but as far as the human condition goes (not to mention sheer dramaturgy), we’re on familiar ground.

In this interview with Believer Magazine, as elsewhere, Wilson begins by brushing aside any possibility of having been influenced by Arthur Miller: “I’m not sure what they say about Fences as it relates to Death of a Salesman. At the time I wrote Fences, I had not read Death of a Salesman, had not seen Death of a Salesman, did not know anything about Death of a Salesman.”

For various reasons, this claim of complete innocence is very hard to believe, and in its own way tends to trivialize his work. His protest-too-much fills me with empathetic discomfort; whatever the real story, it’s something touchy and defensive. Even if this is in fact the truth, it’s a touchy and defensive truth.

Later in the same interview, clearly feeling that he’s in some kind of guru groove, he comfortably says some questionable things:

BLVR: What’s your opinion, if any, of Eminem? Do you think he’s capable of mastering the black aesthetic of hiphop?

AW: Yeah. He’s imitatin, he ain’t creatin. There’s a very big distinction. He’s not an innovator. He can’t create in that style so everything he do is just imitatin. Anybody can imitate anybody.

BLVR: I’ve read someone say, “Sure, whites can box like Muhammad Ali, once they see him do it.”

AW: The same thing with jazz. Benny Goodman could play jazz, but they ain’t creatin no music, they not innovators. So the music, it’s gotta be there for you to step into it. I wanna see you create it; it would be something different. Different aesthetics at work. But you can be influenced by, you can imitate anything. Got some Japanese guys that play some great jazz. Man, they really good, too! It’s already been done, man.

I for my part find this kind of talk completely unsympathetic. But what’s important is that August Wilson really believes what he’s saying. This is the inalienably racialized perspective in Wilson’s own heart, the one he believes he must contend with in writing his plays. To compete with white playwrights on their own turf, he would seem to believe, is impossible, because it is their turf, and turf is racial. So his work can only be legitimately his own insofar as it is not actually a member of the same genus as a white play like “Death of a Salesman.” In his mind, the correct name of the art form to which that play belongs is “white theater.” Were he to write “white theater,” he would be merely imitatin, not creatin, something he clearly disdains. Hell, that’s like something some Japanese guys might do!

But this is an unliftable burden, since “white theater” unfortunately encompasses all aspects of theater; they got there first. The only thing he’s got that whites didn’t get to first is “black experience.” Definitionally. And so August Wilson needs to believe that “black experience,” both in content and in form, is not just a re-skin but an actual different species; that by writing “black theater” he has utterly broken away from “white theater,” which can never be his.

This seems to me quite obviously wrong-headed from an objective cultural standpoint. It’s the outgrowth of the psychology of second-class-dom, and it is self-destructive. In needing so desperately to keep Benny Goodman and his grubby mitts out of the club — because goddammit, jazz is ours, and you never shared anything with us so why should we? — he creates a notion of cultural property that effectively cedes ownership of everything else to the oppressor, and recognizes that ownership as legitimate. So someone like August Wilson, who wants to do something like playwrighting, which was part of the great cultural cession, now needs to demonstrate to himself (and his peers who think like him) that what he is doing is actually different territory, new territory, fundamentally BLACK territory.

The quote about “Death of a Salesman” really says: “That’s yours, NOT ours. It’s painfully humiliating for you to say that it’s ours too, because it’s not. Almost everything is yours. I insist on it.”

Much more constructive would be to say “Actually, racial ownership of ideas doesn’t exist. As it turns out, nothing is any more yours then ours, so excuse me while we do whatever we like.” But this idea isn’t psychologically available, because separating the impression of culture from the impression of an authoritative voice is nearly impossible. Just turning on the television I feel like I am contending with the will of some strange meta-being, who has particular ideas about me and my place in the world, none of them particularly kind or understanding. Certainly when I, a non-fan, see baseball or football broadcast on TV I have a strong sense that someone or something is telling me “this is ours, not yours.”

I gather that being black in America for many people means growing up with the sense that nearly everything is murmuring this. Realizing that there actually isn’t any meta-being whose voice the culture is, no actual unified will of the oppressor, is the ticket out, but it also feels like selling out one’s own authentic self, the one who felt it. Which isn’t really an option, especially when one is a professional artist or a thinker and has entered into a long-term contract with “the authentic self.”

Navigating the emotions of being a black intellectual in America is obviously very complicated and difficult. Understatement, I know. I can only imagine how incredibly tired and lonely someone like Cornel West is. I get that impression from August Wilson, too. The albatross of identity must be dragged through every action, through every day, without end; it cannot be distinguished from life itself. I can hardly stand to think about my “identity” for even a minute; to me real life only takes place when I’m freed from that kind of self-awareness. I really don’t know how they can bear it.

This is all a roundabout way of saying this play wasn’t really for me.

I have found it subtly unpleasant to write this, just as I found it subtly unpleasant to read the play, because I feel that I am up against an artistic impulse that is inextricably linked to a congealed bitterness, a kind of angst of deprivation. Is that racism on my part? Whenever a piece of work with an overt “identity agenda” bothers me, it’s usually for this reason; people don’t have identity agendas unless they feel misused by the world at large, and people who feel misused by the world at large are not the people I would hire to be my singers and storytellers. And as a consumer of culture is this not what I’m doing?

I don’t remember “Juno and the Paycock” so well at this point (good lord, five years!), but I think my feeling there, in what was ultimately a very similar work, was that the ethnography of it was more dispassionate if equally prominent. But maybe that’s just Sean O’Casey getting the benefit of the doubt that time (and my ignorance) brings. The grudges of generations past always eventually wilt away, no matter how bitter they may once have been. Perhaps in a hundred years the politics of today will have washed away from August Wilson and only the solid rock of the work itself will remain, a durable fossil.

But that’s where I came in. That really is how I read “Fences”: innocently. I’m just saying the rock is an old and familiar rock.

The better justification for such a work, I think, setting race etc. aside, is simply that there’s no reason for lots of people not to keep writing “Death of a Salesman” over and over, just like they make a zillion westerns, mysteries, etc. Why not Death of a Salesmans? It’s a resonant and rich scenario. We could stand to go back there. And we do, and lots of writers continue to retread this same ground over and over, and more power to them.

As Death of a Salesmans go this is, in fact, quite a fine one. What it says it says with vigor.

I will now call your attention to this depressing video. The first half is the play I read — “theatrical” in ways both good and bad, but confident and clear. The second half is something else. Does this hateful laughter need psychoanalysis? The burned-out hole where love should be is no longer recognizable in the character on stage because it now encompasses the entire audience. It is a pit into which we are all eagerly leaping.

————-

Now to quickly post something else so as to bury this one as fast as possible.

Inevitably in writing such a thing as this I feel wary of all the angry angry people out there who might appear at any moment, like avenging ghosts, to tell me I’ve done some kind of wrong here. Or more likely, that I AM some kind of wrong. I don’t know what good they think they’re doing. All I can say to appease those gods is that I am, as always, open to reason, persuasion, and education. Racism is a dogma, and I am not being dogmatic.

Facebook is depressing, among other reasons, because it reveals that many of one’s friends and acquaintances want to present themselves as avenging ghosts. This is our venue for social self-reinvention, and THIS is how people want to re-invent themselves, as self-righteous crusaders? Why would they want that? I truly don’t understand.

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June 27, 2012

22. Summertime (1955)

directed by David Lean
written by H.E. Bates and David Lean
based on “The Time of the Cuckoo” by Arthur Laurents

22 Summertime

Criterion #22.

Whew, this was really a long time ago. There have been several times here where I’ve written about books nine months after reading them, but I don’t think there’s a precedent for writing about a movie so late. I believe I watched this in September 2010.

Which do we forget faster, books or movies? My instinctive answer is books, but I think that might be an illusion.

When it’s only a few weeks after finishing a book and all I can remember is the general feeling and a few disjunct details, that seems like a shocking act of forgetfulness to have perpetrated against all those words and pages and hours spent. And since there’s no content measure of a movie corresponding to a “page count,” I think I intuitively compare them in terms of time: a book is a 10-hour experience that I have managed to forget where a movie is just a 2-hour experience that I have managed to forget, which is why the book seems like a greater loss. But movies are actually much denser with content than books (by a factor of 10,000 x 24 ÷ your reading rate), the vast majority of which drains away almost immediately. I need to remind myself, here, that being able even partially to summon up something like this picture in my head is in fact a feat of significant memorization earned only over many years and many rewatchings, equivalent to retaining not just a sentence but several paragraphs. (And, let’s be honest, I still couldn’t tell you anything about the upper half of the image.)

SO: I probably forget everything at the same average rate.

More interesting and more mysterious is to try to identify what exactly has been retained. My recollected images of Summertime are of course quite vague in the most literal spot-the-difference sense, but I can still visualize the general staging and sense of quite a few shots. Let me count.

[he counts…]

Well, my estimate is that the number of particular shots I can readily call to mind is somewhere in the 30-50 range. But somewhere in there I lost count because I began to wonder if some of these “memories” were more reconstruction than retention. Between “remembering” and “not remembering” is the wide gray stripe of “tricking yourself.”

I can also summon up a general aural sense of several of the main scenes — a subconscious impression of the music and ambient sound, and of the voices — but not of any particular moments in sound, or spoken lines. And revisiting actual kinetic motions is very hard for me — maybe five movements in the whole movie can be projected at speed in my inner screening room, and even they require hefty restoration to make them really move.

Sometimes when I am trying to fall asleep I challenge myself to really picture some motion that I know extremely well (a classic test case: the original Mario running, jumping and punching a block). I tend to find this very difficult, though not impossible.

Are these memory strengths and weaknesses typical for everyone or is this just my own profile? Comments are welcome.

Anyway, what was I talking about?

(Get it?)

Summertime is the movie adaptation of the 1952 play “The Time of the Cuckoo.” (“Do I Hear a Waltz” is a musical version of the same material.) There might be some minor tweaks but it seems like the basics are the same: An American woman, middle-aged and long single, goes on vacation to Venice wanting to feel alive; is offered a chance at romance with a handsome Italian (married) man, after much protesting takes the chance, but then departs alone. Has she somehow changed her life? Has this been enough?

Oops, spoiler alert. Sorry. But I think this is one of those stories that only gains force when the end is known.

Katharine Hepburn, of Katharine Hepburn fame, has never entirely convinced me that I love watching her as much as TCM and the like inform me that I do. She has a metallic and gooselike quality — yes, thank you — that impedes sympathy. All that jabbing force seems like a defense and I get uncomfortable. I know that the idea in all those romantic comedies is that she is hard because she can’t count on love, “but don’t worry, she’s going to get the love she needs” — but I’m not so sure she will. Her hardness seems to go deeper than any movie happy ending can actually set right. It stems from beyond the script. But here in Summertime it all worked for me, more than it ever has, because this character’s fierce pride was revealed as both symptom and cause of a desperate, perhaps incurable loneliness. The movie won me over by acknowledging that Katharine Hepburnism is pitiable.

The people I know who act like Katharine Hepburn remind me more of the troubled character in this movie than of the timeless icon of stage and screen etc. etc.

The drama of the movie is of the risk of self-reliance vs. the risk of connection / the romance and the folly of pursuing “the genuine article” — and these themes are approached by a metaphor of tourism, which is an especially inspired conceit for a movie, since it means that the pure cinematography of Venice has real resonance. The sense of place is the point, moreso than the playing-out of the melodrama itself, and the obvious care that David Lean has put into the scene-setting pays off. It is a tasteful and thoughtful movie, but at such an unobtrusive and quiet level that the surface remains fairly conventional — which can be seen as either an asset or a drawback, depending on your taste.

David Denby’s essay for Criterion is a good one, but he starts by saying that the film exemplifies the “long-running idiom” of “the Continental lover”: the idea, soon to go out of fashion, “that Americans needed Europeans for sensual instruction.” This is certainly true to a degree, and yet the movie is really telling us that what Hepburn’s character is looking for could in fact be found anywhere, but that she is only receptive to it while on vacation, surrounded by her own ideas of beauty. It is made very clear to us — and to her — that contrary to the fantasies in which she has invested her own romantic feelings, Rossano Brazzi is just some guy who happens to be there; “the Continental lover” has no exotic authority after all. Only she can make the decision to open up, if she dares; it can’t be done to her by any amount of tall dark and handsome.

There’s a slowness and an old-fashionedness about the script and I felt a bit like I had to will myself not be indifferent while watching most of it. But having reached the end and suddenly felt its impact — which like the ending of The 400 Blows earlier in this project affected me by its genuine agnosticism: Dare we hope for this person? — I see greater depth in what preceded. I think a second viewing would actually affect me much more than the first did.

The opening credits are a stylish overture-in-paintings of her European travels thus far, set to sprightly music that I considered posting here but which has a few too many sound effects and no ending. The only real stand-alone track is this exit music version of the love theme, such as it is, known as “Summertime in Venice” in song form. There’s some wobble in the audio but oh well. Here’s your Criterion Collection track 22. Composer is Alessandro Cicognini, prolific in Italy (he was De Sica’s regular collaborator) but hardly any English-language films.

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June 23, 2012

Disney Canon #38: Fantasia 2000 (1999)

ADAM I thought that had the same dispiritingly humdrum quality as when we go to see all the Oscar-nominated animated shorts. Which I did not do this year. But every year it’s much the same.

BETH Except here we didn’t get to see how long they were in advance.

BROOM This is much shorter than the animated shorts show often is.

BETH No, it’s about the same.

ADAM I think the idea of remaking this was sort of in poor taste, unfortunately. Or maybe it’s just that the individual pieces they chose. I don’t mean to shower this with my negativity, but… everything they picked sounded like they picked it because it sounded like cartoon music. It was very difficult to hear the pieces as anything other than cartoon music. Whereas the cartoons didn’t have any value to them other than as accompaniments to music. Everything was worth less than the individual pieces.

BETH I was thinking about how challenging it must be to start with pieces that exist and try to craft a story to them. They didn’t usually work, but they were interesting. I think we should probably go one by one.

ADAM Any other blanket thoughts before we do that?

BETH I thought the famous-people aspect was really distracting.

ADAM It was a little bit like watching an Oscars presentation from the late nineties.

BROOM Yeah. But I thought the frame was more or less okay. What else could they do?

BETH But why did they need a frame? I think I would have enjoyed it if it was more like one of those early medleys.

BROOM How did you feel about the frame in the original Fantasia, where Deems Taylor talks to you? Do you think that’s too didactic?

BETH I don’t love it, but I think it works better than multiple hosts who are making bad jokes. I think the bad jokiness makes the whole thing feel out of touch. And now weirdly out-dated. It will always feel like that moment. Which I guess is fine, because it’s called Fantasia 2000, but it’s just strange.

ADAM Yeah, the people they picked were unusually dated.

BETH Penn and Teller?

ADAM “Angela Lansbury and Quincy Jones bring you…”

BROOM Well, they each have a sort of significance. But fine, I hear you. It was exactly like an Oscars broadcast.

ADAM I thought it was interesting to watch the original sequence of “The Sorceror’s Apprentice,” which obviously marries famously well with its piece. But they didn’t try to choreograph or illustrate every little note in the piece. Did there really need to be a leaf or an ash or a butterfly wing for every single note in every single piece this time around? That’s what I mean by “in poor taste.” It was just much too literal.

BROOM I definitely agree. I feel like the “Sorceror’s Apprentice” piece being here just points up all of what has gone missing over the generations in between. But you have to remember the sequence this is part of, and that it comes at this historical point. Remember we just watched Mulan and Tarzan. Even the gesture toward art and a respect for their own heritage, toward trying to be classy — even at that Oscars-show level, I want to encourage this. “Good! Go in this direction, guys!” And they don’t. This was an anomaly, and I think Roy Disney had to sort of force it into being.

BETH But if it had been done better, it might have started a tradition. It’s their own fault, I think.

BROOM I think the first Fantasia has so much greater feeling for the music and for what the animation can be, and this one was hampered by the lack of insight into those things in the present day.

BETH They had a lot to live up to.

ADAM The colors and the look were so garish.

BROOM Especially when you see “The Sorceror’s Apprentice” and the color design is so tasteful and effective, everything else is this overblown nineties look. Which I guess they’ve improved somewhat since then. I guess the post-Lilo and Stitch movies have better use of color?

ADAM You’ll find out!

BROOM There’s just a certain sensitivity and taste lacking.

ADAM Yeah, there’s no understatement. Having to have everything magenta and green is the same as having to have a little swoop or flourish for every note, which is the same thing as picking… I mean, these pieces are ludicrous. “The Pines of Rome”? What the hell is that?

BROOM It’s a piece that’s the musical equivalent of exactly what you’re talking about, except it’s the fascist Italian equivalent, it was like Mussolini’s favorite piece or something. [Ed. Okay maybe not… but the association of Respighi with Mussolini’s regime is long-standing if perhaps unfair]

ADAM But it was like a tasteless…

BROOM It’s known for being a tasteless piece, yes.

ADAM Okay.

BROOM You’re saying they didn’t need to match something to every note, and I agree with that, but there were also places where I wanted them to match something in the music and they had neglected to, usually because they’d gone for a very literal approach — “there’s a beat here and there’s a beat here” — rather than feeling the real flow and meaning. Like the “Rhapsody in Blue,” which we’ll talk more about in a second: I felt like they had addressed the largest issues in a reasonable way, and the smallest surface issues in a reasonable way, but the middle-ground of actually feeling what the music was doing, they were sort of blind to it. And that’s what’s so effective about “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”; you really feel that the animation is a proper complement to the piece. All right, let’s go through in order.

ADAM First was the dreadful butterflies piece.

BROOM Beethoven’s Fifth with butterflies. That’s the one that’s most tone-deaf in the sense that I’m talking about.

ADAM Yeah. They start the evil butterflies midway through the first part.

BROOM Right, they introduce the blackness when nothing has shifted in the music. And there’s three elements — rays of light from god, and pastel butterflies, and evil butterflies — but there’s not really three elements in the music. And that the pastel butterflies had to play little games in the water with each other, which doesn’t correspond to anything in the music. And that one of them gets its wing injured by the evil butterflies…

BETH It was harsh.

ADAM And it was so gratuitously CGI. Haven’t they gotten used to CGI by now?

BETH It reminded me of the Donkey Kong video game, when all those spiders would come at you.

BROOM When there’s a mass of them on the screen like that all squirming around, it’s ugly to look at. The first time I saw this I remember being really dismayed. This time I tried to figure out what it was that the artist who made it had cared about. I think there were some layouts that they had felt strongly about.

ADAM The only thing that was at all pleasurable about that was the massed clouds of black and red butterflies.

BROOM Oh, that’s what I’m saying was ugly.

ADAM At least it was something.

BROOM It all displayed a depressing lack of feeling for the piece.

BETH Yes, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with it.

BROOM It seemed like they thought that making an “abstract” animation for “abstract” music meant not feeling any of the obvious points. Like when it sounds happy or sad. What’s next? “Pines of Rome.”

ADAM What was the accompaniment to that again?

BETH Flying whales.

ADAM Oh man. Well, at least, of all these pieces, that had a weird mysticism that was sort of engaging.

BETH I found it compelling.

BROOM I agree with that. It doesn’t go with the music exactly, but it at least felt the music somewhat.

ADAM When he goes into the ice cave, it is different than when they’re swooping.

BETH That’s exactly when I thought it was the most effective.

BROOM The first movement of that is the worst.

ADAM When they go underwater, before they emerge, that was also effective.

BROOM The finale of “Pines of Rome” is noted for being this infinite march of triumph over and over, and I thought the whales surmounting the clouds, and then the stars, and so on — I thought that was about right. And I didn’t mind it. But that there was a baby one? It’s still sort of a reflex Disney action.

ADAM Every one of these, no matter what, had to have some conflict, no matter how ill-adapted, and had to have some cuteness, no matter how ill-thought-out. Why?

BETH Who is this for? Is it for kids?

ADAM It’s meant to be enriching, isn’t it?

BROOM That’s a question about the original too. I think a lot of the flaws of this are things that many people would say are flaws of the original, but I personally would debate that. We just read an essay where someone knocked it, and that’s kind of the critical party line in a lot of ways, that Fantasia was this supremely tasteless endeavor. But I don’t feel that way. I feel like what Disney had in mind is a legitimate use of animation and a legitimate way of listening to music. And that this one missed the boat because they didn’t feel it, they didn’t know what the answers to those questions were. So I don’t know who this was for. I think it was “whoever Disney movies are for, except our assignment this time is classical music.”

ADAM Then it was “Rhapsody in Blue.” The most stylish, certainly, and the best characterized.

BETH I basically was okay with it.

ADAM There were funny things where they used mood notes in the music to do unlikely things. Like the thing with the nuts. Really?

BROOM There are things in there that are satisfying to me, and then there are other things. In nearly every scene. If they’re going to make Rhapsody in Blue a panorama of the city with six different stories, you’d think that the places they’d switch from story to story would be between the chunks of the music. There are completely discrete themes, and they always plateau out in obvious ways and then the next thing starts. But here it would change in the middle of a melody — it would pan across town to the next guy, and the first half the melody would be synced to one kind of action and the second half to another.

ADAM Maybe that’s meant to be like when Maya Angelou would read her poetry and intentionally not recognize the line breaks.

BROOM Yes, it is like that it. They clearly chose to do it that way intentionally. But you want it to reach this balletic sync where everything flows. When you see the people scurrying to and from the subway out the window, that feels good to me. And when they go down into the subway and everyone’s riding the rhythm, that felt good to me too. But like, the kid who has to work on the construction site? All the stories…

ADAM It was much worse than The Triplets of Belleville, which was the same thing.

BROOM I don’t remember The Triplets of Belleville well enough, but I do remember being irked by it so I’m not sure I’m going to agree.

ADAM It was sort of a jazz fantasia in the same way, with some of the same characters even, like the big woman dragging along the little henpecked man.

BROOM All the stuff they gathered into a “Rhapsody in Blue” world was about right: Hirschfeld, and the color scheme, and the Thurber-type people, the New Yorker cartoon types. And when they pan up and there’s George Gershwin at the piano, it feels earned. “Yeah, he could be there.” But the actual dance of it, and the story-ness of it, felt like it came out of a cartoon playbook that wasn’t as sensitively thought through.

BETH Nonetheless, it was fun.

ADAM Fun to watch.

BROOM It’s a reasonably classy effort. Just flawed.

BETH I think the animators were able to get that piece more than the other ones they were working with, because it’s more accessible to contemporary people.

ADAM I thought having the wistful dream sequence to the American Airlines music — that’s not the only way to do it, but it works.

BROOM But again: that being people dreaming, and that being people skating at Rockefeller Center, seem right to me — but that being people projecting themselves into their fantasies which are to: have a job, play snare drum, fly like a bird, and be loved by your parents… I guess she was sort of a reference to Eloise. But she didn’t look like Eloise, she looked like Little Lulu.

ADAM Apparently the way to be loved by your parents is to run into traffic.

BROOM All the ideas were okay but the directorial instincts were off.

ADAM Next came the toy soldier.

BROOM I believe first there was the flamingos. [Ed. i.e. “Carnival of the Animals.” Incidentally Broom is wrong and Adam is right about the order]

BETH Oh right.

ADAM Harmless.

BROOM I think it was one of the most successful in actually feeling musical. And it has all that sort of strong color direction in the background, but done so correctly, for a change, that you hardly notice it.

BETH Actually, I did appreciate that.

BROOM And the sync to the music was strong and clear and genuinely funny in the way it meant to be, in a musical way.

ADAM Yeah, but it was easy. They clipped the piece of music so it had only one emotion.

BROOM Fine! They did something that had integrity to it. As a complete farcical throwaway, at least it had integrity. In the way that the others felt like they were almost not what they thought they were. This was exactly what it meant to be.

ADAM Somebody tell James Earl Jones! “Flamingos with a yo-yo?”

BROOM I found it satisfying.

ADAM But it was not ambitious.

BROOM A silly thing well-achieved is less uncomfortable for me than grandeur that doesn’t quite know what it’s doing.

ADAM Then the toy soldier. As a story I guess the characters were the best-developed. Sort of. I mean that Jack-in-the-box was creepy. The deus ex fish was a little odd.

BROOM I think that’s in the Hans Christian Andersen story.

ADAM Then fine. I don’t remember a thing about the music.

BROOM Shostakovich Piano Concerto number two. It’s actually one of the most unusual musical choices, repertoire-wise. I liked it okay. I wanted it to have more of the quaint toyshop atmosphere, and their facial expressions sort of prevented that. And the synthetic low-framerate CGI look…

ADAM The pre-Toy Story look.

BROOM It was post-Toy Story but it was intentionally stylized to look early that way. They made them stiff – I think they thought it would make them seem like toys. I wanted it to have more atmosphere and character than it had. It felt sort of smart about the music too, which is more than can be said for other stuff.

ADAM I don’t know. When the rats were there, it wasn’t correct.

BROOM Yeah, it’s a bit forced. Those rats with red eyes came out of other movies. Lady and the Tramp. I like the piece, and I think that way of storifying it isn’t bad, but it never quite lands. If you ask people about this movie more than ten minutes after they’ve seen it, they will not remember that one.

ADAM That’s the one that would win the Oscar, and you’d come out afterward and be like, “That one??”

BROOM It doesn’t have quite enough oomph to it. Then “The Sorceror’s Apprentice.”

ADAM A classic.

BROOM One of the great pieces of animation, I feel like.

BETH It is.

ADAM It fits so perfectly. The music is meant exactly to suggest what is happening there.

BROOM More or less. The dream sequence I think is their own imposition on it, but it’s appropriate. And the illustration is just so perfect. When he goes outside and you see the sunlight, it feels so storybook-satisfying.

BETH And the characterization of the wizard is great. I love at the end when he’s angry but amused, and it shows in very small facial expressions.

BROOM It’s very well done and they don’t got it no more. Then Donald Duck. [Ed.: “Pomp and Circumstance.”] That’s the worst one.

ADAM That was the worst one. Ugh, that was so bad.

BETH Why did they do that?

BROOM Totally tasteless.

ADAM Ugh. Everything about that.

BETH Everything about it.

ADAM The chorus that comes on at the end reminds me a little of… I don’t know, “Gangsta’s Paradise” or something.

BROOM People talk about how Walt was this tyrant, but I think that’s why the movies were better in his day. There was some one person who had a real vision. Once you put it into the hands of the various craftspeople… that obviously was made by professional animators, but it had no vision. No vision.

ADAM Yeah. It was gross. The colors in that were the worst. And then, ugh, Daisy? What were they doing there? And what was with their Three’s Company storyline?

BROOM I can explain it to you if you need. Note that this was Daisy’s first and probably last appearance in a feature film.

ADAM That’s really sad.

BROOM And it’s been a long time since Donald had any role. But this didn’t feel like the real Donald.

ADAM She’s so simpering, and they didn’t look right, and they didn’t have any personality.

BROOM He didn’t do any Donald stuff. And when Noah’s face wasn’t shown, I thought, “it’s just Noah!” If it were God, then I would agree, yes, you should just show his back.

ADAM Is there anything redeeming in it? Um… no.

BETH It’s terrible.

BROOM Some of the animal animation was… competent for those animals.

ADAM After that was the finale, “The Firebird.”

BETH Did you guys like that? I really zoned out.

ADAM No. I wrote poems like that when I was in fourth grade. You know, “The Rebirth.” I could have written that. I remember writing a poem in fourth grade about a homeless man who gets a quarter on the sidewalk and sees “a ray of light across his once-dark valley.” It’s sort of at that same pitch.

BROOM I felt like this was more or less on par with the whales. “Nice try; I’ll go with it because why not, but.”

ADAM I understand that there’s something delicious about spring coming, but why is spring just a rippling aqua-green sheet that doesn’t change? There was nothing inventive about the way they depicted that.

BROOM She seemed like she came out of a Miyazaki movie, sort of Japanese in inspiration.

ADAM The only thing I liked was the firebird’s eye.

BROOM I liked when she made a flower by rubbing her hands together and then made a bigger one by doing it more vigorously.

ADAM There were so few touches like that, given that it was supposed to be this rippling sensuous “life is coming!” It was like the backdrop to the Smurfs when you’d see the same four frames over and over again. And why did she and the firebird look exactly the same? They just had long capes of different colors. And at the end they just gave up. There weren’t even different tones of green! It was really ugly.

BROOM The haunted-castle-is-reborn-as-a-technicolor-castle ending is pretty lame at this point, it’s true. But I felt at least like that one had some connection to the music. So let’s talk about the big picture here. We’ve worked our way through the twentieth century, as Disney has become more and more a set of rote gestures and reflexive not-quite-ideas. And this felt like a good-faith effort to recapture something that they had genuinely forgotten how to think about.

ADAM I think that the whole concept of the year two-thousand, in retrospect, was tasteless and overblown. I have an image of New Year’s Eve nineteen-ninety-nine into two-thousand, of Bill Clinton in a tuxedo, presiding over a ballroom — I remember seeing this on the front page of the newspaper the next day — and that’s exactly right. It’s all the schlockiness of the nineties but done up in this mock-seriousness of the millennium. It’s like — do you remember the commencement ceremony where they gave Nelson Mandela the honorary degree? It’s like that. It has all that inflated sense of self-worth, but also this gross… the whole concept of the year two-thousand in retrospect is stupid and embarrassing. But pompous at the same time. And this movie is the kind of thing that summarized the year two-thousand, to me.

BROOM I don’t think this movie was made because it was the year two-thousand.

ADAM I know, it’s like Windows 2000.

BROOM Calling it that does make it sound like a Microsoft product. Or a Chessmaster. When people write about Fantasia nineteen-forty, they talk about things like whether it’s a legitimate artistic project or just kitsch, whether it shows Disney’s limitations or shows him at the height of his art. Whereas when you read people talking about this one, the context and the framework for thinking about what kinds of products might come out of a cultural factory like Disney is so much narrower. The ambition implicit in the project isn’t actually active, alive. There is no one who was working on this who was motivated by the idea “we will make music come alive with animation!”

BETH People by that point had such a different relation to classical music than they did in nineteen-forty to begin with. I think it was probably difficult to muster that.

ADAM Yeah, people are more illiterate listening to classical music by an order of magnitude than they were in nineteen-forty. So maybe you have to hit people over the head.

BROOM You’re talking about the audience, but she and I are talking about the people who made it. Not to be overly grandiose, but the original inspiration seems right: animation seems like an art with affinities to classical music. And that these people don’t feel that seems to me symptomatic of their not really feeling animation. Animation art in the nineties — as we talk about these movies we lower and lower our expectations because the minds making it seem to have smaller and smaller ideals.

ADAM There’s maybe a reason no-one has ever undertaken the project we’re undertaking.

BROOM Because it’s depressing?

ADAM Yeah. I mean, it’s worth doing now that we’re so far along, but I didn’t realize we were going to flame out in mediocrity.

BROOM Did you not know that?

ADAM It is not my recollection.

BROOM When you look at the present day do you not feel that you are in the midst of the flame-out-in-mediocrity of most culture?

ADAM I feel like I often draw my attention to forms of culture that were not in existence a hundred years ago, and those feel exciting and have no reference point.

BROOM Like what?

ADAM Well, you probably don’t go to a lot of electronic dance parties, but… I do. And that is a thing I can appreciate without having to think, like, “ugh, I wish it was nineteen-thirty!”

BROOM But you don’t see it as the same form as the dance party of nineteen-thirty where the music was in fact so much richer and better?

ADAM No. Or, like, you know, HBO series.

BROOM Beth was doing a workout video earlier today, and the music in the workout video is this electronic pulse like in a thriller movie, just pounding over and over. And I was thinking, “why is it so grim and robotic?” And I was trying to think what the music was like in the Jane Fonda Workout video we had when I was a kid. I assume it was exuberant.

BETH I remember what it was like. It’s slow, like, [commercial soft-rock beat].

BROOM I’m not going to say that nineteen-eighty-five or whatever year that was was a high point for the human spirit or anything, but at least that music is about feeling good. It seemed like this music was about continuing to live out some kind of fantasy that you were like a robot on a track.

BETH I didn’t even hear it though.

ADAM I don’t know, have you been to one of the redesigned Starbucks? There’s new Starbucks now where all of the finishes are extremely dark wood and more natural, and it’s nice. It’s nicer than the old ones. There are things about modern life that are fine. We went through a great period of riotous architecture in the last ten years. All kinds of things. But living among forms of art where the air has gone out is depressing.

BROOM You know that I would take issue with saying that this is a heyday for architecture. I feel like a lot of it is anti-human in various subtle ways. I feel like a lot of this stuff lacks a humanist impulse. So maybe you think that we’re in a heyday of animation too; you don’t need to agree with me.

ADAM We’re obviously not. I obviously don’t think that.

BROOM How did you feel about Toy Story 3?

ADAM It was really sad. It was not as good as everyone said it was, but it was good. Ratatouille is as good as Bambi.

BROOM I disagree.

ADAM Well, Spirited Away is as good as anything in animation. It’s as haunting and moving to me as any work of animation I’ve ever seen.

BROOM It definitely is its own thing. It feels legitimate.

ADAM So fine, this one company that became a massive corporate conglomerate and one of the twenty-five largest corporations in the United States, yeah, they maybe don’t have the gift anymore.

BROOM Well, as David Thomson writes, Walt Disney is probably the most influential person in the history of the aesthetics of the medium of film. The ideas and the ideals of Walt Disney have such a huge sway. You can disagree with that as a claim, but there’s definitely an importance to what the Disney company believes in. And I feel like they think they’re believing in the same thing they always have, but it’s actually shrunken down to a tiny little hole that they’re looking through.

BETH As the rest of culture has pressed it in, I think.

BROOM You can say that, but I think there’s no reason that they couldn’t have gathered to them the people who still had that vision.

ADAM Well they don’t have any writers. They don’t have any artists. They just have illustrators.

BROOM They put “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in this movie because it can still be released to the public now. The piece really hasn’t aged in any way, in any sense that relates to people and the way they listen to music or the way they look at film. It’s just that we don’t have the people who can make it anymore, because the ideas that need to be in the heads of the artists are not in very many people’s heads anymore, and the company doesn’t know how to prioritize those kinds of ideas. They don’t even distinguish.

BETH But it’s also that the kids who decide to become artists — there are fewer opportunities for them to be artists now, so they end up with very technically-minded animators. That’s who succeeds in the business now.

BROOM I guess the saddest thing is that it feels so strongly like it lacks heart, and also that the accusation that it lacks heart is so period-specific that it’s not even legitimate to level against the movie, because that’s just the kind of world that it’s from. Why should we feel comfortable saying that there was a time in history that lacked heart? Do we say that of any other times? Do we say it about the fifties? Maybe.

BETH Yeah, a little.

ADAM I think this has more to do with the fact that we’re a certain age than anything else. This is every old person’s lament. Although in this case it’s a lament about our own childhoods.

BETH Everyone throughout history has always said that everything’s worse than it was before. For any given time. When are things not going to hell?

ADAM Yeah, cheer up!

BROOM I try to keep that in mind. I try not to be that person. But the thing here — it’s not going to hell, it’s just losing sight of itself. It’s frustrating because there’s nothing stopping them except for the cultural norms. It takes a stronger vision to make something sensible and humanist now because the culture less and less has that stuff implicit in it.

ADAM Irony’s about to end.

BETH That was going to happen ten years ago.

BROOM He’s saying it ironically.

ADAM No, I’m saying by the time the next movie comes out, irony will have ended.

BROOM But that’s simply not the case. As you well know.

[we read the Times review]

ADAM Stephen Holden’s not a very good writer. It was both poorly thought out and poorly organized, and really wordy.

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April 8, 2012

Esquisse de printemps

Or whatever.

With really terrible hiss because something is wrong with my setup but I can’t bring myself to invest the time to figure out what.

Nice day today. Making up music like this is almost, but not quite, a substitute for actually going outside. I’m going to go outside now.

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January 4, 2012

Disney Canon #37: Tarzan (1999)

MIKE The storyline seemed very similar to Avatar.

ADAM It’s true. It felt like an archetype.

BROOM In that he leads the bad guys to the secret place in the forest and betrays his tribe. But here he is one of the tribe, unlike in Avatar. Avatar is more interesting than this.

BETH I thought this was pretty dull, except that the action sequences were well done.

ADAM Oh, come on. Come on, everyone! Didn’t this touch your heart?

BETH Not that much.

ADAM No?

BROOM This was like my least favorite in a while. That’s where I’m coming from.

ADAM What? What??

BROOM I was sleepier this time than usual, but yes.

BETH It looked like you were about to fall asleep for most of it.

BROOM I was waiting for something to be meaningful to me but it felt totally synthetic.

ADAM I was very touched by the rank sentimentality of this movie.

BETH I think it must be your mood or something.

BROOM The opening, the stuff about his parents dying, I was willing to take that as something. But all the Sonic The Hedgehog stuff, I felt distant from it.

BETH I enjoyed the Sonic The Hedgehog stuff! That was fun to watch.

ADAM I mean, like… yes, we keep seeing the same movie over and over again, everyone, that’s true. In Pocahontas, she went away with him at the end, but basically the same concept.

BETH I actually liked the woman here; I thought that she had…

ADAM She had a goofy personality.

BETH And she looked kind of like Maggie Gyllenhaal.

MIKE But aren’t their weird button noses and pointed chins some kind of… bizarre Anglo-beauty?

ADAM They felt anime-ish.

BROOM They felt comic book fetish-ized, to me. Which is another way of saying the same thing.

ADAM But I enjoy that.

BROOM This one had more of that skeevy geek-sex veneer on it than any of them.

BETH Because of how Tarzan looked?

BROOM You know, there are certain lines on the physique that don’t really exist in real life, but they exist in people’s sex-minds. Something about the way his legs met his body wasn’t anatomically realistic but it certainly had fetish value. And that skeeves me. And the whole thing, even the Sonic The Hedgehog stuff, it’s got this amped-up synthetic quality.

ADAM I frankly enjoyed his unnatural physique. Finally the shoe was on the other foot, gender-wise.

BROOM But I’m saying the same thing about her. Her design also tweaked in a direction that doesn’t have anything to do with “character.”

BETH She almost looked more anime than other Disney characters. Her eyes were way too big.

ADAM She does continue the tradition of Disney heroines who are very much unlike their squat-nosed, bizarre fathers.

BROOM Yeah, what a terrible character the father was. Adam, isn’t this the movie about which those self-righteous people in [college dormitory] said “Can you believe they wanted to cast Chris Rock? And he was like ‘No way man, no way am I playing a monkey!’ They just don’t get it! Can you believe how insensitive Disney is?” And you and I said, “as the Rosie O’Donnell part? It would have been exactly the same with Chris Rock. It has nothing to do with race.” Who played Kerchak?

BETH I wondered that too. But I missed it.

ADAM Not a black man.

BROOM And was the mother Glenn Close?

BETH Glenn Close??

BROOM That’s what I think I read in the DVD info.

BETH Okay, I believe it.

ADAM Well, it does kind of have to do with race. In the way that Dances With Wolves did. Like, it’s sort of weird that this charismatic white man can become the leader of these, you know, apes, just because of his awesomeness.

BROOM Well, it doesn’t even feel right on the movie’s terms. How can he be the dominant male? We were making jokes about it because it doesn’t make any sense.

ADAM He is obviously not stronger than the other males in the band.

BROOM I haven’t read Tarzan or seen any prior Tarzan movies, but isn’t the story that he does go back to England, and lives between both worlds?

ADAM But then it would be hard to have the villain character.

BROOM Well, they made up this stupid villain character. I’m saying this is a much less interesting story.

ADAM Isn’t this also the story of The Jungle Book, by the way?

MIKE Mowgli.

BROOM Yeah, that’s right. He’s raised by wolves.

BETH And then he meets that girl.

BROOM Exactly — he goes to live with the humans, which is what he’s supposed to do. The Jungle Book is much better than this.

ADAM I found the Phil Collins score extremely effective and touching.

BROOM I certainly thought he did a better job than Elton John.

BETH It was very restrained. They didn’t overdo “musical numbers” at all; there really weren’t any.

ADAM There were like five.

BROOM I think “Trashing the Camp” is pretty awful.

ADAM As a musical number.

BROOM Clearly someone was like, “They can do ‘Stomp’! It can be like that great show ‘Stomp’!” Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to do that in animation.

BETH The music just wasn’t as cheesy as it usually is.

BROOM Because it wasn’t Alan Menken and it wasn’t Elton John.

ADAM And it did feel very period.

BROOM I thought the songs were actually not bad. “You’ll Be In My Heart” is actually not a bad song.

ADAM “I Wanna Know”: also a song that I have caught myself singing many times.

BROOM I thought that sequence was okay, even though it didn’t make sense that they were teaching him about all these things when he had no human language at all.

ADAM Did you enjoy it, Mike? Did you not enjoy it?

MIKE It was okay.

ADAM Could you elaborate?

MIKE I wouldn’t rent it again.

BETH We won’t.

BROOM I thought — especially at the beginning; I think it actually got better later — that the editing pace had been goosed up significantly from where it had been, in a way that numbs me.

BETH You felt like it was more our current era?

BROOM Yeah, I felt like it leapt forward into that sense of, like… and I was thinking, “Is this because I’ve gotten a chip on my shoulder about this issue and I’m sensitized to it?” but, you know, I’d seen this before and it just went in one ear and out the other, and I think it’s going to do that this time too. And it has something to do with that. When the visual gets so stylized and the cutting gets so fast, it just starts be like a wash of… stuff.

ADAM We were watching a trailer today for Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows, which we considered seeing today.

BROOM I gather it’s very bad.

ADAM And it’s cut like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Like, there’s a lot of, like, a gun fires and then there’s like fwoooosh! [indicating awesome camera motion]. And this does have a complement of that.

BROOM This was like that. It was cut like a trailer. It has that kinetic…

ADAM Because we’re too bored to just watch a movie.

BROOM I use this word “fetish” all the time, and I need more words for this, but there’s just this way of dealing with the surface as surface, and that’s the level of interest. The early Disney movies — you think of Dumbo and the love of his mother, which is the same thing they were going for here — that’s all about feelings and the characters, where this just felt like it was about a “look and feel.”

ADAM I would like to stand up for this movie, because I enjoyed it very much at the time; it was one of my favorites of the nineties ones, and still is. Even though it is a little sentimental — but they’re all a little bit sentimental. Even though it’s a little bit archetypal — but they all are.

BROOM I don’t object to the sentimentality. I would rather they’d have laid that on thick, because that would have been something. But the elephant, and Rosie O’Donnell…

ADAM You just hate sidekicks.

BROOM I do hate sidekicks. And the conflict with Kerchak? None of that meant anything to me; it all seemed really to be about whoosh! whoosh! boof! chh! whoosh! When the gorilla went up into the treehouse at the beginning, and we see that it’s all ruined, I was almost going to ask, “did we already see what happened here? Were we supposed to already know that this is what she was going to find?” We’ve only been watching the movie for two minutes, and I already don’t know whether I’m missing information, because it’s all been this quick cutting…

BETH Well, it’s a montage. That whole opening was a montage.

BROOM But like a trailer. A fast montage where you just get a sort of general impression.

ADAM So the movie was too complex for you.

BROOM I thought that! I thought: this very fast montage technique, either it’s a high-intellectual art sort of thing, or it’s something where you’re just supposed to space out. In music videos where that style was popularized in the eighties, you weren’t supposed to be having individual thoughts like “oh, now they’re singing in that room again! — oh, now it’s that fish tank again! —” It’s just stuff, and you sort of roll with it.

BETH Yeah, but you know, music videos were much slower than this.

BROOM That’s true too. This was even faster. It just makes me glaze over, and then they sort of designed the movie so that it doesn’t matter if you glaze over.

BETH So you think this was the beginning of a trend, of that.

BROOM Yeah.

ADAM Well, I’m sorry everyone.

BROOM It’s really pretty. The production was really, really high quality.

BETH The background illustrations were among the best we’ve seen.

BROOM Technically really good.

BETH Yeah. Except for the faces. I didn’t think the faces were good.

ADAM The villainy could have been a little more complex, I’ll grant you that. Like, couldn’t they tell that he was a bad dude from the beginning? Evidently not.

BROOM And the jokes. And everything.

ADAM Is Avatar really a better movie than this? Or is it just a prettier movie than this?

BROOM I think Avatar is a more interesting story if you’re going to follow the story, because the guy is sent in and has to learn the ways of the native culture, and then he’s conflicted when he betrays them because he’s made himself be of two worlds. Whereas here it’s just dumped on him.

ADAM Well that really is more Dances With Wolves than this.

BROOM And Avatar had a bunch of distinct sequences to it. It had the part where he learned to fly on a dragon bird…

ADAM This had the montage where he learns to, like, use vines.

BETH That was the montage when he grew up, right?

BROOM And it had a very long fight with a leopard. And you started looking at your phone —

BETH Sorry.

BROOM And I thought, “When she looks up, I’m going to call her out and ask her, Beth, how did the leopard die?” But you looked at your phone for four minutes, and when you looked back, he was still fighting the leopard. You didn’t miss anything. I couldn’t even throw it back at you, because you were right, it was a waste of our time.

MIKE This movie came out in ’99. Economically the modes of production are shifting pretty dramatically. And you have the internet, and media companies thinking about convergence. And I gotta think there was something about this that we’re not getting. Like, there was a video game series already built into this, or it was an internet play. There was something about this that was a commercial —

BROOM Well, a Broadway show was supposed to have been built into this, because of the success of Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. And they tried it, eventually. It happened. It just didn’t do as well as those.

BETH It has video game characteristics.

BROOM I thought cause-and-effect there went the other way. I’m not kidding about Sonic The Hedgehog; that’s where that comes from. But as for franchise potential… I mean, since Aladdin they’d been making video games when they made the movies. Maybe even earlier.

MIKE I guess the internet is the thing that I would think had some influence. I don’t know, it’s just interesting.

ADAM Disney is, of course, now 0 for 2 on movies set in Africa featuring black people.

BROOM What is 1?

ADAM The Lion King.

MIKE I thought The Lion King was a home run.

ADAM There’s no black people in The Lion King either.

BETH Oh, oh, I see what you’re saying.

BROOM His mother was black, right?

ADAM Well, she’s voiced by a black woman.

MIKE Why can’t Disney, the company, be coming out with different formats for around the world? Like, why aren’t they producing an Indian-ized animated film, and an Asian one…

ADAM Like an Aladdin set in Asia?

MIKE Yeah.

[we read the New York Times review]

ADAM He does have a striking physique for someone who presumably was raised on insects and fruit.

BROOM Kerchak was Lance Henriksen. And it was Wayne Knight as the elephant. We were just asking what happened to him.

ADAM They know better than to cast Morgan Freeman as the head ape.

BROOM It was pretty, you know. But so is Bambi.

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