directed by Louis Malle
written by Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn

One problem with the Netflix approach to movie-watching is that everything is part of a grand checklist, which can be deadening. In thinking back over my response to this movie it seems like the greater part of it was “I’m finally seeing My Dinner With Andre!” and that’s no good. I remember trying to write up a review of Die Hard a few years ago and realizing that my sense of checklistic satisfaction at finally having seen Die Hard completely overwhelmed anything I might have thought about the actual stupid movie.

That’s not to say that My Dinner With Andre doesn’t have anything more to offer than Die Hard; far from it. But my received knowledge about what goes on in My Dinner With Andre was pretty accurate; the movie was, for me, just the fleshing-out of the potential, secondhand My Dinner With Andre that I had already had outlined for me by pop cultural reference and, I think, by my dad telling me about the movie. So it didn’t have a lot of punch to it. But I’m certainly glad I saw it. Not only because now I’ve seen it, but because of the principle that makes the movie work in the first place: being present while a conversation plays out is intellectually engaging in a way that is not lessened by the conversation’s being on film – or, in my case, by one’s already knowing roughly what the conversation is about.

One thing that did surprise me was how simple the scripting was. There was no particular attempt to simulate the complicated back-and-forth of a real conversation; the two characters each offer their thoughts in a fairly stylized, formalized alternation. Maybe that’s how some people conduct conversations, or maybe the hocket I’m used to is more of a contemporary phenomenon than I imagine. I know it’s pretentious to say “hocket” but I’m proud of having thought of it, and if it’s new to you, then you just learned a cool word. But… right, that seems unlikely. People used to interrupt each other just as much as we do now, didn’t they? It’s so hard to be confident about a thing like that when one’s impression of the past is almost exclusively formed from works of fiction, which have always been, and for the most part continue to be, markedly unrealistic in their depiction of actual human speech.

And this was fiction too, so I ought not have be surprised. But I was a little surprised, since it was a formal experiment about the experience of intellectual engagement and exchange that arises from conversation; you might think that would be dependent on the rhythms of “real” conversation. But it still worked, just in a slightly broader, more theater-based way. Ultimately, this captured two major things about conversations: the way they can suggest a wider interrelatedness of everything under discussion by assimilating digressions and reactions, and the way that they are fundamentally driven by the confrontation between two different points of view. But the formal side of the experiment – the “it’s just this conversation” factor – didn’t seem to have been worried over very much. It was left up to the viewer to think about that aspect of it; the movie was neither coyly pointed or grittily “real” about it. In fact there’s a strange quasi-magical gesture at the end where the restaurant has mysteriously emptied around them without their noticing. It was hard for me to figure out how that sort of thing fitted into the “here’s a conversation we had” package. Again, more of a theatrical than filmic approach to the question of a dinner conversation. So that stuff surprised me.

Another thing that surprised me about the movie, slightly, was how fast-and-cheap-looking it was. A lot of badly-matched lighting and such.

As for the content: the movie could work just as well, or better, with fewer of Andre’s stories and a little more interchange of ideas; one’s sense of involvement rises considerably once they are trying to express something to one another, whereas most of what Andre says, at least in the first section, is mere storytelling. If you are like me (or like Wallace Shawn, or like almost anything other than Andre Gregory as here depicted) and not initially inclined to find the details of these stories specifically compelling, this section clearly goes on several stories longer than it needs to get “the gist” across.

As I’m writing this I’m thinking about one of my problems with theater. It seems like the attitude motivating a lot of what happens on the stage is “people are interesting because they’re people, they go deep and even the insignificant things they say resonate if you are listening closely,” but then the people to whom we are meant to bring this attention are fake people who only go as deep as they’ve been programmed to go. It’s a question of finitude vs. infinitude, one that, you’ll pardon me, I relate to the problem of contemporary video-games. I can’t play these new games, these truly vast games where the selling point is something like, ahem, “you could explore the game-world for hours and hours and not even encounter the main quest” – and I can’t play them because this is a gogglingly enormous finitude, not a real infinitude, and being aware of that, I will be subconsciously aware that a partial exploration of what its creators have to offer is incomplete. The idea of a vast offering is meant to appeal to the desire for an inexhaustible entertainment, but players are unshakeably aware, deep down, that they are still within the realm of exhaustibility. Reading some Borgesian book with no end would be an incredibly different experience from reading a book that advertizes itself as “so long that you’ll probably never finish it!” Of course we’d still want to try to finish it.

Finitude is a crucial feature of our notion of an artwork because it allows one to identify one’s experience as having been of that artwork and not of something else, or of only a part of that artwork. If artworks could not be closely correlated with the experiences they elicit, those experiences could not be clearly said to be of those artworks and so would be difficult to distinguish from experiences of real-life stimuli. If art is valuable because it is created, because it is filtered through human consciousness – that is to say, if a painting of a sunset is not necessarily just a poor subsitute for a sunset – a great part of what makes it appreciable as such is that it is bounded. Photography, which borrows its substance as directly as possible from the real, non-art world, is knowable as art because it is bounded.

I seem to be wandering toward what ought to be the long-delayed follow-up to this old posting. I guess I’m just going to go there now under the unrelated heading of My Dinner With Andre. Most video games – any formalized interactive make-believe, but video games are the best example – are ostensibly mimetic*. That is, they portray people doing things, and our interaction consists of variously influencing those people or things. But that mimetic veneer is so thin that I would say it’s irrelevant to our experience. I mean, a plumber who punches bricks, kicks turtles, and eats mushrooms and flowers? Obviously that’s all garbage. The fact that “abstract” games like Tetris feel more or less like interchangable kin with “mimetic” games like Super Mario Whatever makes clear (to me) that a player is interacting directly with the mechanics and disregarding the incoherent stab at mimesis. No man is Pac-Man. I would argue that even in story-oriented games – adventures and role-playing games and whatever – the player is always directly aware of the underlying engine. How many objects can you carry at once, and how many moves before the monster wakes up? These things feel like variables, not life. If there is a mimetic element, it is conjoined with these mechanics and offers a place for another part of the mind to vacation while the game is played, but it is distinct.

This is all to say that playing a video game is unlike being in the situation depicted.** An infinite video game, therefore, is as fanciful and undesirable as an infinite painting. After a while you feel disoriented by this monstrous painting and just want out. (Unlike life, one hopes.) An enormous painting, however, can impress by its hugeness. When I read À la recherche du temps perdu, I told people that I had come to terms with its enormity by just thinking of it as infinite and taking it in small doses as it pleased me. But obviously I was still aware of its finitude; otherwise I might well simply have stopped. Dealing with infinity is like dealing with a habit, not with an object. Soap operas are infinite, and it is the ritual event of watching, rather than the cumulative content, that drives their viewership. The cumulative content of a soap opera over any large span of time is generally contradictory and inassimilable.

I am thinking of all sorts of counter-examples and complications as I try to straighten this out. An amusement park is exhaustible (“let’s go on every ride!”), yet the actual experience had there is so personal and intermingled with reality that the offering feels unbounded. A game like Pac-Man is known to be infinite, but is practically (and intentionally) bounded by the player’s capacity. Still, a player who is skilled enough to play infinitely will only play toward the unknown but assuredly finite endpoint of a high score or a world record or whatever; actual infinite play has no appeal whatsoever. Life is bounded by death but savoring real-life experience doesn’t feel informed by that finitude except under morbid or pointedly philosophical conditions; real-life, despite its infamous finitude, is the “infinite” experience to which I am contrasting artistic experience. But perhaps that illusion of infinite life (and the resulting sense that art is distinguished from life by its finitude) is specific to this era, or this culture, or my segment of the population defined in some other terms.

Well, enough. To bring it back to where it started – for one reason or another, despite all possible examples to the contrary, I feel convinced, at this point in time, that: life offers infinity; art doesn’t. When art purports to have enriched itself by incorporating the infinite, it seems to me confused. The only way art can truly incorporate the infinite is by leading us back to life itself rather than by encapsulating it. A huge video game is never going to lead back to real life – it’s a video game! – so in this sense it is bounded. Any suggestion that infinity lives within those bounds is either false and disregardable, in which case we have a game that begs to be exhausted but makes unthinkable demands on our time (check!), or else we have an infinity that is trivial and to be avoided as a habit, as with soap operas. In theater, there are several roads by which the art might lead us back to life in a profitable way, and thereby to inexhaustible potential significance, but these must be out-roads. A character in a play who says seven lines is only seven lines deep. A person in life who says those seven lines has infinite potential significance. For a play to benefit from that infinitude, it must resign itself to merely pointing toward that significance rather than containing it. The limited clay of a play can be molded into either a decorative shape, a very shallow bowl, or an arrow pointing toward the bottomless bowl of life. The shallow bowl, which purports to put a premium on depth, tends to seem pretentious and wasteful compared to the arrow.

Oh good lord, do I really think that? Obviously not. I’ve tangled myself terribly here. Plus this really doesn’t apply to My Dinner With Andre, where the “out-roads” back to real life were entirely conscientious and obviously the point. Except for when his stories went on too long. Okay. I think that was what I wanted to say. I should have saved all this video game crap for another time after all. Someone please help me end this mess.

Oh look, it’s over! Thanks for your help with that.

* I’m using it!
** A good rebuttal to this would be that, actually, a wide variety of games are very much like being in the situation depicted – flight simulators, first-person war games, and so forth. Good point. Nonetheless the point holds that the experience of playing these games is entirely distinct from living; flight simulator-ers might hope not to “crash” the “plane,” but the fact of interaction has not confused them into actual fear, the way a dream would. They are still participating in artifice. Furthermore, the screen may resemble a cockpit and the sorts of choices a player must make might be analogous to those made by a pilot, but the player still knows that this is so only because it has been programmed this way. For example, a flight simulator might be described as “totally realistic except for the trees, which you can fly right through” – surely the player does not think of these mysterious trees as being of some other “type” from the rest of the simulation. If things are comparable to life, it is because of the talent of the artist, and everyone is always aware of this. There’s no trompe l’oeil in video games, just as there’s no trompe l’oeil in life.

directed by Alfred Hitchcock
screenplay by David O. Selznick
based on the novel by Robert Hichens (1933)
adapted by Alma Reville

125 min.

Traumatically boring. You always hear stories about bigshot producers (like David O. Selznick) throwing their weight around and bullying directors into changing storylines, casting different actors, etc. Always the idea in these stories is that some kind of thickheaded, cigar-chomping “I know what I likes” sensibility ends up getting dumped all over the helpless art. This movie was written by Selznick, so you could think of it as a sort of perfect realization of that producerial sensibility. It was certainly thickheaded. The funny thing is that Selznick’s idiotic screenplay has none of that good stuff that the cigar-chomping producers are supposed to like – sex, violence, spectacle, happy endings, etc. It was as though the challenge of simply making those things happen was too much for him. A great deal of the dialogue consists of people stating what we’ve just seen, like in a radio play, or discussing the plot situation as it stands. You could feel Selznick’s frustration as he tried to wrap his mind around what the hell people might do or say to each other, like the scene on Seinfeld when they sit down to write their sitcom screenplay and immediately agonize… until they have a breakthrough and decide to have the first character say “Hello” and the second character respond with “Hi.” Which is funny because not only is that worthless dialogue, it’s also bad dialogue. This movie was all like that; people saying needless things to each other and saying them awkwardly.

The photography was more stylish and intelligent than this material deserved, which is saying nothing, and which unfortunately redeemed the film not at all. I don’t know how it could have been redeemed, and it doesn’t seem like Hitchcock cared to try; looks like he just made the movie and got his paycheck. The idiocy of the script was so apparent to us that I have to assume he was well aware of what he had on his hands, but who knows.

This was off the on-demand movie service. It is interesting to note, we observed, that the plot of Jagged Edge, the last on-demand movie we watched, is essentially identical. I’d say that Joe Eszterhas had intentionally borrowed it except why on earth would he have done that? The point is: we picked the same stupid movie twice!

This movie includes a scene where Charles Laughton, as a leering, flabby old judge, fixes on the bared shoulder of his friend’s wife and begins making a creepy, drunken pass at her, sitting next to her and taking her hand. I was forcibly reminded of this. Isn’t Charles Laughton perfect casting? But his dialogue wasn’t as good.

directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack
screenplay by James Ashmore Creelman and Ruth Rose
after an idea by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace

One paragraph about King Kong (1933). Cooper apparently said that the idea of a giant ape threatening New York City came to him in a dream and it was that dreamlike craziness that struck me this time. I mean, an enormous monkey? I wanted to pretend that I was a first-time viewer who didn’t know what this “Kong” was going to be – the build-up to his first appearance gives away only that he will be something terrible and powerful – but I have to assume that Kong’s monkey-dom was a non-secret even in 1933, given that he appears on all the posters. Still, in the moment where suddenly we see what she sees – a surreal, jerky, monstrous gorilla with a hypnotic stare – the movie takes a huge leap forward in force of personality. Up until that point, all genre indications point to a typical kidnapped-by-the-natives-and-fed-to-the-volcano plot. But the giant monkey staring into the camera tells us that the movie is not about that or anything else; it simply must be taken on its own terms. That’s still exciting today, even though every scene in the movie is now familiar. Dinosaurs fighting, a Broadway theater, the top of the Empire State Building… it defies any conventions of plot or formula; each sequence arises out of its own sheer need to exist and is the more involving for it. I think of Nabokov writing (I forget where) about the complete vitality of fairy tales, the way that each element of the storytelling retains its full savor. On the other hand, these particular elements – dinosaurs, Broadway and so forth – are recognizably all part of the 30s imagination, and the fact that some musty “Weird Tales” mindset may be the only thing that holds them together becomes another delectable aspect of the experience.

Second paragraph is just extras. The whole thing is just so junky, but done with such panache. It makes me happy to think that nobody really seems to want to say a word against King Kong – sort of like it makes me happy when I hear non-junky people praising junk food; those pleasures that draw us to non-nutritional things are real and it feels good to acknowledge and endorse them as a part of the human experience. I think that’s the main thing that drives the cult of dignifying and mythologizing Hollywood* – the idea that this stuff might be worthy of dignity is immensely reassuring. The recent DVD looked wonderful. Fay Wray is a lot more appealing onscreen than she would seem to be from still photographs. I’ve heard people go on about how great and important Max Steiner’s score is, but for my money it was plodding and unimaginative. The recent remake, in retrospect, had more thought behind it and, obviously, fancier thrills, but was lacking that sense of actual craziness. I personally came away from the actual craziness more delighted, because it’s so much harder to be critical of actual craziness, but I could understand someone who felt, given the roller-coaster aspirations, that bigger and more sentimental was actually better. But not me; on its own scale, and its own way, this was the more unambiguously satisfying experience.

* e.g. see: TCM, AMC, or any Oscar broadcast.

Winter 2005-2006

I already said a few general words about this little DVD magazine. Just wanted to briefly (read: at great length) address the actual contents.

This is not the order in which the DVD menu compels one to watch them, and thus is not the order I watched them. It’s the order they’re listed on the website, which, incidentally, has now made three of the pieces available in their entirety.

Al Gore Documentary directed by Spike Jonze. 13 min.

Like this one. Click here to watch it. Certainly this is an interesting and historically noteworthy chunk of footage. I guess Spike Jonze’s contribution has been to edit it in such a way that we don’t feel he’s pushing any sort of message or ideology on us. It successfully allows us to feel that weird sense of intimacy one gets from being warmly welcomed inside some stranger’s house. Gore comes across, to me, as someone who really doesn’t know how to present himself and only in the abstract understands this to be a problem. Which is a little touching and a little sad. Maybe that’s what his campaign could have used, I don’t know, but I’m not of the mind that this little video would have turned the election. On the other hand, that’s the strange thing about our media-driven elections; a well-placed tuna-fish sandwich can throw the balance. As the old saying goes. But it’s still hard for me to imagine this idiot impressionable voter that pundits are always talking in terms of – like, if you thought it was a problem that Al Gore was stiff, this video shouldn’t change your mind, because he is stiff, on this video as much as anywhere else. But apparently, campaigns can sell discomfort more generally and irrationally than that. If he’s stiff, maybe that means he doesn’t love his family or watch movies or bodysurf. Oh, it doesn’t? Well then!

People get uncomfortable with candidates because they imagine them to be fully knowable; they extrapolate a grotesquely insufficient human being, working only from the single data point of the public persona and extending it to cover everything. When we see one of those crabs get exposed by the waves, then shimmy back into the sand and out of sight, we think, “Well, I can’t see him anymore, but I know what he’s up to. Same thing he was doing when I could see him.” But politicians aren’t crabs; they’re people, and under the sand they probably own VCRs and whisks and whatnot. If it’s true that the citizenry would have found this to be refreshing news, then this, yes, could have been an important video. But maybe this is all a fake, right? Acclaimed director Spike Jonze is just messing with us. What’s Gore really like? Either you believe in the existence of reality or you don’t, but a video isn’t going to help you trust. That’s what I’m saying.

Soldier’s Pay directed by David O. Russell. 11 min.

I haven’t seen Russell’s Three Kings (1999), but part of the point seems to be that the true story in the present documentary resembles the story in Three Kings. This was just talking heads but it still managed to rub me the wrong way. The story, about American soldiers stealing millions of dollars in cash from an evacuated Iraqi home, is what it is, and the soldiers are who they are, and that’s interesting as far as it goes. But underlying the existence of the film at all is the implication that through this proudly unflinching look at the moral grayscale of war, big corruption is getting skewered. And maybe this really is a slam-dunk case of hypocrisy, but that wasn’t totally clear from these brief interviews. More to the point, as a viewer, I felt like I was being asked to enjoy the slam dunk and also admire the fact that this documentary was too respectful, and too real, to slam or dunk anything. Am I just a cranky jerk? I think that given the context, on a hip DVD next to a Turkish sitcom played for kitsch value – see below – I was more sensitive to attitude than to content. It was interesting enough content for 11 minutes. It should be noted that this was an excerpt from a longer short film (35 min.) which I see is properly called Soldiers Pay (2004). That is, without the apostrophe, so as to allow the pun. Exactly like Finnegans Wake. (1939).

Grimm’s Tales 2: Death of the Hen directed by Brian Dewan. 16 min.

I thought this was cute. Maybe deadpan is easy and I should go harder on it – I think Beth did – but I liked the idea and I liked the execution. It was a classroom-style filmstrip, presented as a filmstrip, with the narrator making a “boop” every time the frame was supposed to advance. The story was this, from the Brothers Grimm collection. The cock and the hen set out about their business but the world throws a confused string of complications in their path until eventually everyone is dead. Aarne-Thompson type 2021! The guy’s illustrations were clumsy but in a committed and thus effective way. I think he’s on to something with this filmstrip idea. The deadening formality of filmstrip presentation, well known to fifth-graders, which completely smothers and mutes the potential awe of any grandly important subject – solar eclipses, or the evolution of mankind, or whatever – meshes perfectly with that sense of strangely muted, formalized horror one finds in fairy tales. Why did all these animals have to go through this maddening series of fairy-tale-ish trials just in order to die? What is that vague threat in the air? Just like fifth grade. I like thinking about the worry in fairy tales and the worry in elementary schools, and I liked this piece for making that connection in its quiet way.

I just found this page about a 2003 exhibition at a nearby gallery – a gallery where, it so happens, I once saw a show of my second-cousin-once-removed’s work – of this guy’s filmstrips, presented in a little classroom they set up. To me this is charming and I wish I had been there. I like exhibitions that manage to have an element of make-believe or the surreal but without actually making any pretense to being important in some way that everything that goes on in a gallery clearly is not. Unassuming peculiarity. At least from this piece, this guy seemed genuinely unassuming. It says he’s a musician, and I’d be interested to hear his music.

Are You The Favorite Person Of Anybody? directed by Miguel Arteta; written by Miranda July. 4 min.

Like I said – and said before that too – I think Miranda July means it, so I don’t mind. So far I still like her thing. I like that this little movie has the setup and rhythm of a comedy commercial, except it’s not selling anything; it’s not even selling any particular punchline or non-punchline. It’s just a little bit of dialogue. It doesn’t have a lot of thought behind it, but what thought it does have it keeps hidden, which allows us to feel that the process of feeling our way to the place where she began, in writing it, has been worthwhile.

What I like about Miranda July’s thing is that she embraces flakiness, but always seeming to have approached it from the direction of non-flakiness. The question of whether to allow oneself to embrace flakiness is always going to be a troubling one, and it’s heartwarming to see someone saying “flakiness is so great!” and yet not have to worry that they only think so because they’re irredeemably flaky. She seems to be espousing a tone of thought that is not usually endorsed by people capable of succeeding, as she has, in the real world. That’s why the question is: is she sincere? Because even in this internet age, it’s surprising to think that a sincere expression of flaky warmth can reach from a stranger all the way to me. Much more likely that it’s coming from a spammer in Nigeria. So one has to be wary. But since that very point – about the myriad possibilities for, yet unlikeliness of, connection – was the recurring theme of her movie, and sort of of this short, and certainly of that website, I believe she is sincere. And I’m all for that. Plus it’s only 4 minutes long.

The Writer directed by Carson Mell. 3 min.

You can watch this at the website too. There’s not a lot to this and I get a slightly distasteful vibe off it, but it is kind of funny. The best thing in it is the lion drawing, which he apparently found in a yearbook, so don’t give him credit for that. His actual drawing style and subject matter seems like a practiced imitation of both Dan Clowes and Charles Burns. I couldn’t find the Dan Clowes picture of the guy with the creepy things coming out of his eye sockets just like in this movie, but, anyway, it exists.

The Big Empty directed by J. Lisa Chang and Newton Thomas Siegel. 21 min.

This sucked. It was a performance of everything that’s wrong with the McSweeney’s brand. A lot of money and love went into making the production design look like the equivalent of the McSweeney’s layout – that is, ostentatiously restrained. As for the content, after letting slip the phrase “toxically asinine,” I will let imdb user alpi wan kenobi from Turkey do the talking for me.

This movie is about Alice’s vagina and other characters around her. She has pain in her vagina and during examination very cold tundra place is found in it. During movie a lot of characters( doctor, Eskimo’s, scientists) is entering in her vagina but find nothing. In fact, there is only problem about her,pain. nobody concern about that except a man.

Selma Blair played very successfully in this short movie. She could show the loneliness of Alice. I think everybody that seen this movie can find something about life, especially love.

Therefore George Clooney and Peter Soderbergh are the executive producers of this movie. Finally, this movie should be watched, I promise you would have a nice time.

Except for Peter Soderbergh, he’s got the facts right. In fact he’s pretty well packed it all into that one paragraph. Except he doesn’t make clear that it’s all infused with that American Beauty-style middle-class benign secular transcendence thing. Mystico-materialism, it should be called. Those guys, Alan Ball and Sam Mendes (and Thomas Newman), pretty much invented it outright, as far as I can tell, and now it seems like it’s the fuel driving half of our culture. At least American Beauty was about it, and endorsed it purposefully. I don’t think J. Lisa and Newton Thomas had any conscious awareness of what they were diddling with. But that didn’t stop them from making a smug-ass movie. If it had been selling a minivan I would have understood, but this was supposed to be about human emotion for god’s sake! At the beginning one might think, given that the whole thing is about Selma Blair in well-ironed clothes holding a deadpan and being pronounced completely empty, that it’s all some kind of smirky joke. But by the end it’s all too clear that they haven’t a clue what they’re smirking about. It’s mind-boggling, but the movie is ultimately a celebration of the redemptive power of sex with another clean attractive person, for the utterly spiritually vacuous. With all the shimmering music and CGI that that entails. It was sort of like one of those hateful lavalife ads we see on the subway – where sex is always depicted as twinkling sparklies and offers the only possible salvation for those hipsters fabulous enough to emanate it. Here’s that one where the girl has the magical butt. Oops, looks I didn’t let alpi wan kenobi do the talking for me after all! Okay, let’s move on before I get any more worked up.

Here, in between two of the items, I have a new idea for how to articulate the irksome subtext of McSweeney’s: “Look, we never stop being interested in things. Look, we are open to every possibility, no matter how awesome, for a richly thoughtful life. Sufficiently hip attention makes everything worthy of attention; ours is the hipness of substance. The difference between uncool people and us is that their patterns of thought are bound by convention and thus tend toward disinterest; our playful approach to the world is an approach to the real world and our minds are alive. This is fun – it is in fact the only real fun; the fun of being alive.” This is irksome because it is smug, and also because it creates its own blind spot: the real world as a deadpan mix-tape might well be slightly more attentive than the American status quo, but in the end it’s just as stifling an m.o. as anything else.

That said, I like the fact that they’ve assembled, for me, deadpan mix-tapes like this DVD, which I found diverting and interesting. It’s good that they sell the actual stuff they do. But they are also selling a brand, which as marketing people the world over will tell you, is the real product, and like any well-formed brand, it makes me cringe. Maybe it makes me cringe in particular because I admire the values – attentiveness, versatility, whimsy – that it has aestheticized, abstracted, and sold as an identity.

My long, heartfelt lament for personal identity in this country, which seems more and more uncharacteristically political to me each time I think about it, will have to wait for another time. But brace yourself.

The House in the Middle presented by the National Clean Up, Paint Up, Fix Up Bureau in 1954. 6 min.
You can’t watch this at Wholphin’s site, but you can watch it here. Something that would typically be called “an artifact of the atomic age,” except who says we’re out of the atomic age? I’m still worried. That said, this is certainly an artifact of that peculiar historical time where cultural innocence and loss-of-innocence tried to find a way to coexist. Horrible weapons could kill millions but it’s still important – maybe it’s even more important – to keep your house looking tidy and smart. Those 1954eans weren’t idiots; they missed the absurdity of this sort of thing because it was simply the continuation of two cultural strains that had only begun to battle it out. Clean homes and nuclear war both probably seemed equally likely to be the right thing to be talking about, so here they are in a reassuring, but ostensibly tough-minded, combination. I wouldn’t be surprised if, say, our era’s endless appetite for sarcasm and irony comes off, to some future era, as hopelessly, provincially 90s/00s-ish, and stuff like “The Daily Show,” which seems so sharp now, will seem like a grotesque juxtaposition of philosophical incompatibilities. Anyway, this was interesting enough and, like anything with an atomic bomb in it, a little upsetting.

The Delicious directed by Scott Prendergast. 16 min.
This was very silly. I used to make very silly videos with my sister when we were kids; this was more or less like that. I laughed at it and parts of it are still making me smile when I think back on them, so I think that counts as a complete success. Giggly ideas like this tend to die in the execution and this one was probably a little less all-out zany than it could have been if less planning and care had gone into it, but that’s always a trade-off, of course, and I think the trade-off here wasn’t bad. It revolves around a guy wearing silly clothes and making silly noises and silly movements. When I was eight or nine, the first Monty Python skit I ever saw was this and it made me Roll On the Floor with Laughter, literally. It certainly wouldn’t anymore, and neither does this. But it might have then.

Malek Khorshid directed by Ali Akbar Sadeghi. 16 min.
This was definitely the finest piece on here – Iranian animation from 1975. I believe this one might be translated as The Sun King but I don’t know for sure because it was completely unsubtitled here. There was very little speaking or writing, but there was some and I can’t say that I know what they were saying, or, exactly, what was going on. A mysterious, poetic, save-the-princess legend quest of some sort, with quasi-traditional Persian imagery. The film had a very lovely 70s-lyrical quality and reminded me of old Sesame Street pieces as well as of Yellow Submarine.

The website and liner notes originally listed Sadeghi as “bio unknown” and gave no year of production, so I googled to see what I could find out. To my surprise, there were plenty of sites with info. So much info that I couldn’t imagine why they had settled on “bio unknown.” So I wrote an email to the editor with some links and said (unpleasantly) that maybe their “bio unknown” was supposed to be somehow coy, but if so that seemed disrespectful. He responded (very promptly!), thanking me for the links, but also said, “coy? disrespectful?” I felt a little chastened for my bad attitude toward McSweeney’s and resolved to be more generous in assessing their motivations, and in general to calm down and be nice. Simultaneously I felt like, “don’t play innocent with me, guy! You know exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!” Which might be a sign of mild delusion. But come on! If you type it into google you get lots of hits.

Anyway, their site now has some biographical info about Ali Akbar Sadeghi. I hope he appreciates!

Tatli Hayat (“The Sweet Life”) Turkish sitcom. 25 min.
This is an episode of a recent, reasonably slick Turkish sitcom on the premise of “The Jeffersons” – Ihsan and Sevinc are using their new money to live “The Sweet Life” in a fancy building, but… whatever. This is the one where Sevinc gets jealous on the night they’re supposed to be celebrating their anniversary because Ihsan has hired a new sexy secretary. A nice clear translation is available in subtitles. Then they’ve got five “alternate” subtitle tracks written by American comedy writers. I watched the whole thing with the original text, which was, in a mild way, interesting. Mostly it was interesting how exactly it followed the American mold. There was nothing particularly “Turkish” about it; just a slightly lower budget and a reliance on material that we’ve finally written off as “tired” in the US – “hide in the closet!” routines etc. Is that modern Turkey in general, just TV, just sitcoms, or just this sitcom? I don’t know. There were no funny jokes in it but it wasn’t pitiful, either. It was just a Turkish sitcom. Then I watched a few minutes each of the five alternate tracks. Each writer seemed to take the task slightly differently, but none of them really jumped out as being clever enough to justify another 25 minutes of my time. A lot of the same old stuff I did when I dubbed Friends into German for a project in high school. So maybe I’ll watch them, maybe I won’t. Actually, I did watch one to completion, because it cut off early and played against the image the whole time, doing a sort of stand-up routine instead, independent of the characters. That seemed to be the best one. All in all this seems like an idea that probably seemed brilliant in the pitch but in reality just felt tedious and a little mean-spirited.

Stairway at St. Paul and The Great Escape, directed by Jeroen Offerman. 8 min. + 10 min.
The first of these is the artist singing “Stairway to Heaven” backwards, backwards. I used to do this with Sound Recorder in Windows – recording things forwards, reversing them, imitating the reversed sound, recording that, and reversing it. A video performance of a song is cleverer and this is entertaining pretty much the whole way through. Good idea. Apparently now he does live performances of this stunt and is making a sort of career of it. The second is a video piece of a hovercraft approaching from the distance, landing, letting someone on, starting up again, and returning to the horizon. It takes a long time to happen and so works sort of like a still image that happens to be moving. It reminded me of the Bill Viola video installation I saw a few years ago, except less interesting. Had I not seen that exhibition, I might have gotten more out of this. I think things like this, which are more like painting than film, are among the few things that actually benefit from being seen “disembodied” in a gallery and not on DVD or in a theater.

Also on this disc is an untitled thingy with Patton Oswalt making faces at the camera in a long take… and then the camera eventually follows the guy next to him into a storage facility where we hear music… he opens one of the units to reveal David Byrne with a guitar. I think that was it. It was cold-deadpan, joyless nonsense, with celebrities; in other words: “cooler-than-thou.” I was not surprised to learn that it was the uncredited output of Mr. Dave Eggers himself. How did I find that out? I saw it on the prior version of the Wholphin website. But look! – it seems to have vanished in the interim. I imagine that was an intentional choice. But maybe I should remember the case of google and Ali Akbar Sadeghi and just calm down.

I think Dave Eggers is probably a cool guy in real life – that’s what a friend of his told me! – but obviously I am not happy about something here. That may be all my fault. If I get around to writing that identity-politics entry, I’ll put it there. Anyway, sorry Dave, and sorry Wholphin. It’s just me. Keep it up. I will buy the next one. But I promise not to write about everything on it.

Note: Upon reading this through, I see that I’ve used the word “deadpan” about ten times, which is unacceptable. Still, it’s an important concept for this material and I can’t think of too many good substitutes. Maybe the time has come for our culture to make like an Eskimo in snow and invent a full lexicon of deadpan. The word “irony” is doing duty for a thousand things that deserve their own names. Let’s give it a break and start neologizing, people! Leave suggestions here.

directed by Martin Ritt
screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr.
adapted from a group of stories by William Faulkner

That’s what the credits apparently say. Word on the street is that the material for this movie all comes from the novel The Hamlet (1940). Alternately it’s said to be derived from two stories: Barn Burning (1939), the substance of which was incorporated into The Hamlet, and Spotted Horses (1931), which appears essentially intact as a chapter of The Hamlet. However, the character relationships and plotting are, my research tells me, a bit of a free improvisation on Faulkner rather than a direct adaptation. It felt that way, to be honest.

All I know is, it was funny at the beginning when the Hollywood violins zoomed up their golden staircase to usher in the CinemaScope title sequence, and the proud words appeared: “William Faulkner’s THE LONG HOT SUMMER,” with “William Faulkner’s” written in a suave brush script. And then someone starts crooning Alex North’s immortal song, “The Long Hot Summer as featured in Jerry Wald’s production of William Faulkner’s THE LONG HOT SUMMER.” Why was it funny? What is it that’s so ignoble about that possessive? The 1958 audience probably didn’t spontaneously laugh, like we did, when they saw it hanging smarmily above the title. Is it that the silly movie is shamelessly trying to puff itself up with absurd name-dropping? It’s not, after all, that absurd – the stories are by William Faulkner – they are William FaulknER’S. And yet there’s something about that attempt at chumminess, in the apostrophe-S, that seems false and undeserved. It’s a little glimpse of the class struggle between literature and film, which, though we’d like to think it’s been resolved, is still bitter. Film is trying, in its desperate bourgeois way, to cozy up to the aristocracy, and we’re laughing at the oafish transparency of the scheme. The irony of course is that Faulkner himself was for years a working stiff in the film industry. Money can’t buy you class, I think is the lesson, or at least is the motto behind our laughter. Oh, so this is William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet? The William Shakespeare? [long, impressed whistle].

Searched to see what anyone else has said on this subject. This guy is implying, as regards the present case, that the real idea was to capitalize on the William Faulkner brand. Well, right. That’s also embarrassing. And it can’t account for everything. You know who’s gonna love this version of The Odyssey? Homer fans. Let’s put something in there to really catch their eye, let ’em know just whose Odyssey this is.

Okay, well, that’s just silly. Obviously that’s a special case.

Oh, The Long Hot Summer? Right. It was okay. At the time I was watching it I enjoyed it more than that, but it rapidly paled in my retrospective opinion, I think primarily because the plot was so hodgepodgic.* By the end it had become clear that the depth and weight intimated by all that meaty dialogue was a bit of a mirage. During the course of the movie, though, I several times thought: “this all has an old-fashioned, conscientious, cared-for, acted quality and I admire that.” It felt like a good, invigorating evening at the theater. It was written that way, too.

And here is the thought I specifically wanted to record from my watching of this movie: This idea of how people work – people as characters who might well name the very things that define them, if caught at the right moment. This paradigm of people who fall in love with each other, and become murderous when angered, and suicidal when defeated. I understand these things making plots go, and making those amphitheatre-sitting Greeks gasp and marvel, and muse about life. But there’s something odd about this Shakespearean or whoeverean notion that if we take these army-men out of their plotted campaign and just let them sit and talk, their thoughts and feelings are worth our attention too. I’m not sure how to say this because it’s so broad. Something is strange to me about the quintessentially Hollywoodish scenes, of which this movie had several, where two characters storm and struggle against each other, through dialogue, and we are meant to feel that we are seeing something wholesomely real and earthy. Is it just me? Mind you, I don’t actually find this phenomenon troubling or confusing in practice – but during this movie I kept thinking, “but on what grounds are you trying to convince me that this matters, again? It’s something to do with ‘universal human truths,’ right?”

What is that thing, where people pace around rooms and say dramatic stuff to one another? It’s a very odd bunch of conventions. That’s all I’m saying. They did a very good job of it in this movie.

Actually, maybe the peculiarity of the insinuation that we can learn something about life from the melodramatic goings-on in a movie is a direct result of that clash between the high of literature and the low of movies. In a movie, especially a pre-70s Hollywood movie, we see every detail and are thus always aware of the artifice, of how shallow the make-believe goes. Just off-screen is a man with a megaphone; between the lines of the script there is only blank space. In a well-written book, we only see what we are intentionally shown and thus it’s possible for an author to keep alive the thought that whatever we aren’t seeing is real life in all its richness and relevance.

I guess this is one of my problems with modern theater. Or, like, whatever Chekhov is considered. Or O’Neill. Seeing people playing in costumes on a stage, the fakest of fake, doesn’t put me in a frame of mind where I’m ready to believe that the emotional grit is relevant because it’s real. If you know what I mean.

Orson Welles looked like a mess and talked like a coughing animal but I think he made the movie. Or maybe he weakened the movie by being SO huge and blustery that nobody else could compete with his presence. It may well be that the plotting felt arbitrary to me only because my focus had been drawn too far from Paul Newman, who should have been the rightful center of attention. But that said, I enjoyed Orson and I couldn’t imagine anyone else in the role. Newman comes off as a natural and someone with a lot more potential than this movie can put on show. Joanne Woodward has a bad haircut and in general isn’t photographed very attractively, whereas Paul Newman looks great. I guess he didn’t mind, though.

Alex North’s music may also have been part of what was keeping me in an unconvinced frame of mind. He did some nice summer-heat things with a lazily tinkling piano embroidering over smooth strings, and, honestly, his song wasn’t so bad, but his dramatic scoring was too forceful. The long scored scene between Newman and Woodward in the middle culminates in some “SHE! JUST! SLAPPED! HIM!” chords that are laughable. Again, a conflict between naturalism and…that other thing. Epic-izing. What’s the word for that?

So in typing out my thoughts I seem to have exposed a common thread: the movie was essentially in the – for want of the correct word – epic style – and by epic I mean some other word entirely, suggestions please – but had some gestures toward naturalism in content and performance that didn’t mesh with that style and created awkwardness. That stylistically unsettled quality characterizes a lot of 50’s dramas, to me – as I’m typing this I’m thinking of On the Waterfront.

That I’ve ended up here is sort of interesting, in light of the (lame) Long Hot Summer DVD mini-documentary, wherein Angela Lansbury talked about the discomfort Orson Welles apparently felt on set being surrounded by all these young “method” actors, whereas he was a proponent of the “old school.” Maybe what I’m saying is that his discomfort was ours as well, and that Hollywood didn’t yet know how to make good use of “the method.”

I haven’t read any Faulkner – yeah, really – so I can’t comment on that, but obviously that would inform all of this in a valuable way. Sorry, everyone. I will.

* According to google, I am the first.

[The Magic Flute]
directed by Ingmar Bergman

screen adaptation by Ingmar Bergman of the opera Die Zauberflöte (1791)
music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder

135 min.

I have some difficulty with opera – like most people, but not like most people who enjoy classical music – and though this charming film version (“congenial,” the Bergman website calls it) was both appealing and comprehensible to me, it was because of the ways that it smoothed over and touched up the weird, barbed edges of the original form. Watching the easy film while listening to the zany opera (so to speak) I was made, perhaps, even more aware of that strangeness that lurks in so much purportedly accessible classical music, distressingly strange because it goes uncommented upon.

Here, hiding under my own little soapbox, I can ask the stupid questions to which I still have no satisfactory answers. It’s really just one big stupid question with many examples. The question is: why doesn’t the music in opera sound like what it should, dramatically? For example, why does the famous second aria of the Queen of the Night (you know, the piping coloratura thing that you’ve heard before) sound like that? It sounds like some kind of birdlike jubilation, no? But the thing is actually “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” – “Hell’s Vengeance Boils in My Heart” – and, by all normal dramatic appearances, it ought to be a threatening, frightening moment. At the very least, even if we disregard the dramatic context, you’d think that, taking a cue from the lyric, it would sound angry. But musically it sounds like, you’ll pardon me, a choo-choo train.

Now, I’m always ready and willing to give art the benefit of the doubt, and try to open my mind. I think that’s my responsibility. Especially when the judgment of Western Civilization As A Whole is more favorable than mine, it seems like some good-faith effort ought to be made. And I can easily concoct a long string of possible justifications for this (and, in general, for this sort of thing), most of which I even find fairly convincing.

1. This is only a part of the aria as a whole. The first few bars of the aria, accompanying the actual “Hell’s Vengeance” lyric, do sound rather angry, are suitably minor-key (as is the conclusion of the aria), and in general make dramatic sense. The central, superficially cheerier section should be seen as added to, not distractedly departing from, this context.

2. The peculiarity is purposeful. The juxtaposition of the superficial musical “cheeriness” against the already-established dramatic/expressive tone of hatred creates an intentionally grotesque effect, suggesting madness and evil. This is heightened by the unnervingly abstract lapse into non-linguistic sound.

3. It’s not really so far off the mark. The music may not be expressing “scary” or “violent,” but it is pretty clearly expressing “intimidating,” “imperious,” and “wild,” none of which particularly necessitates, say, minor chords.

4. The aria is primarily a showcase. The extremity of the vocal display is itself the characterization. The design of the music is only partly expressive, partly a vehicle for this display. In this latter capacity, it might stray a bit from the pure dramatic content of the moment, but one’s attention is meant to be on the spectacular performance, from whence the character flows.

5. The aria is only part of the opera as a whole. Part of the ethereal distinction of The Magic Flute is its overall use of a simple, almost naive harmonic language. The oddity of the present case arises from the choice of this peculiarly uncomplicated “sound world” and should be taken as part of the effect for which the opera is known, of mysteriously innocent resonance.

6. As always, the historical consideration. Back then, dramatic situations played a little differently; musico-dramatic associations were a little different, and, most importantly, those parts of music that were so conventional as to be ignorable were different. Mozart would no doubt wonder why all of our love songs are so violently motoric and have all that percussion in them, which to him would sound Turkish or Oriental. In part, the violence he would hear in our pop is an intended effect, but the effect is muted for us because it conforms so comfortably to stylistic norms. The expressive quirks of the Queen of the Night’s aria would have been similarly muted to a contemporary audience.

7. Of course it seems unnatural; it’s a song. The ideals that seem to me natural regarding the continuity and “realism” of musical expression in a dramatic context are the product of my time, and became part of the culture only in the late nineteenth-century, or even more recently. The far-more-absurd inaptness of “Shipoopi” was still viable as of 1957. Perhaps the only thing lacking from my appreciation of this aria is my readiness to hear it as a “number” in its own right. And yet this is, in fact, how I tend to hear it at first, because of its fame. So maybe that’s right on the money. This film version, by doing something boldly dark during the sequence – the Queen’s face floats past, ghostly and masklike, staring at the camera, as she sings – happened to make this interpretation less natural than it would have been under normal performance circumstances.

As I said, these are all pretty convincing to me. But my point here is that it is still not clear to me which of these are the “real” explanations, since all of them are after-the-fact inventions, and so I am still left having the same authentic reaction to operas time after time, which is: what happened to the drama? Why are you doing… that? and that? and that? And it frustrates me, as it does with classical music in general, when attempts to serve this stuff up to a general audience reassure us that all we need to do is either a) just sit back and trust our reactions, or b) study up until we know the names, dates, and keywords. Neither of which helps me with the harder problem. I’ve come to some of the answers for instrumental music myself, and am eager to try to share them with others, but they’re hard to communicate. But maybe that’s only because I end up formulating the questions on the behalf of uninterested people and then forcing information on them. I think if a person came to me with sincere questions I’d have helpful answers. Is there someone out there who can give me helpful answers to my sincere questions, here, about opera?

As for Bergman, he has, as per his reputation, a sure hand and a very warm touch. The film does a remarkable, loving job of showing us what is universal and humanistic about this thoroughly nonsensical material. Bergman’s affection for the theater itself, for its homey and gentle mysteries, is used to frame and support the opera itself, to excellent effect. We hear the rumblings of scenery moving, get playful glimpses behind the scenes, and during occasional scene-changes, keep cutting back to the little girl in the audience, whose happiness is in itself a part of the message. The opera is some sort of an ode to the ideals (for Mozart and Schikaneder, Masonic ideals) of love and wisdom, and the generosity and humanity of the theater itself is a reflection of its vision. Or so Bergman is saying, and I don’t think anyone would claim that Mozart and Schikaneder would object.

There’s something intimate and suitable about the close-miking of the spoken dialogue. At the beginning, when we hear the three ladies whispering to Tamino, their whispers seem to be coming from extremely close by; much of the sound had that soothing effect of things heard while waking from a nap.

I like the handling of the overture, cutting from audience member to audience member, though one ends up thinking about Swedish racial features more than is probably desirable. The cutting does not strictly synchronize with the rhythmic play of the music, though it suggests it, which sets the stage for the relationship the film will bear to the music throughout – moved by it more than with it. But this is probably appropriate with Mozart. Like I said above, I’m in no position to say how such things should be done. I know that Bergman loved music but considered himself to have a poor ear. The film presumes to join forces with the drama but lets the music itself issue from somewhere above and beyond.

Tamino and Papageno both seemed just right to me. Sarastro’s appearance and voice seemed a little lacking given that he’s supposed to be The Embodiment of The Powers of Goodness and Light. Pamina was a bit chilly. Lovely sets.

This is the second time I’ve seen this. I can imagine myself watching it yet again some time. It has a quiet, children’s book peace to it that seems like it might remain inviting. But not for a while, anyway.

This was Criterion Collection #71. No “extras,” by the way, and though it was apparently from a new print, it still had visible splices in it, plus some odd flickering. It was still nice to look at. The Flowers of St. Francis, which I wrote about in February, was Criterion Collection #293. That leaves 350 that I haven’t talked about. I’ll let you know.

directed by Jon Favreau
screenplay by David Koepp and John Kamps
after the book by Chris Van Allsburg (2002)

113 min.

On a bus. A movie about a fantastical board game is predestined to be flimsy; it’s basically “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.”* To this movie we say: a whole bunch of stuff better jump out at me! And it better look like I’m about to hit something and then it falls away at the last second! The movie was scripted to include all these things and so there they were, but they fell flat – too flat to justify the movie, anyway. One problem is that the movie was edited at too slack a pace to evoke a roller-coaster. Another problem is that John Debney’s score refused to pick up any of the slack and just mailed in the usual outer-space choirs of awe, over and over again, to numbing effect. But the main overarching problem was one of attitude. In the movie, an astronaut character, played by one of these post-Generation-X boyish 30-year-old types, emerges from the game and takes on an avuncular role with the little kids whose movie this is. Despite being part of the fantasy – wearing a spacesuit, knowing about Zorgons, and so forth – he doesn’t seem to take it as reality. His manner is, like I say, avuncular; he seems to be Jon Favreau – I’m going to attribute this all to Jon Favreau because it fits with what I imagine his personality to be – playing babysitter and being proud of himself for being such a cool deadpan babysitter. “Okay, guys, the Zorgons are coming. There’s nothing funny about it. This is serious.” And that’s how the movie as a whole felt, like it was saying, “Look how seriously I’m taking this stuff. It’s fun and it’s also exciting. Look how fun and exciting it is when you kids get to hang out with me,” all the while looking forward to getting a beer afterward and saying something about how it’s no big deal to take care of cool kids – chicks eat that stuff up. Steven Spielberg would make this movie from the point of view of the kid – awed and terrified – whereas Jon Favreau made it from the point of view of the awesome babysitter. “Dude, this isn’t funny. This is scary.” Chris Van Allsburg’s books are all about that hovering, textural sense of mystery. I get the sense that there’s no room for that sort of thing in Jon Favreau’s personality. And without it, this premise has nowhere to go.

I’m skipping over the whole “we need a sentimental side story” sentimental side story about brotherly compassion, which was incoherent, and the stupid frame with Tim Robbins doing his best impression of a normal dad, and the kids not wanting to be left alone in this “big old spooky house” which is actually a completely un-forbidding, gorgeous, welcoming dream home. The movie encouraged you to skip over these things.

When it started – and the opening title sequence, featuring the “retro” game board designs, was attractive – I thought, “this is the perfect movie for a bus!” and became genuinely excited about what it might have in store for me. But by the middle, and certainly by the end, I was just bored. I think if I were still a kid I might have enjoyed it anyway. Kids are good at subconsciously filling in mystery and atmosphere on their own. Seemingly unobjectionable illustrations in kids’ books become too frightening to bear because they’re so rife with nightmarish implication. But now, as a jaded boyish 30-year-old type, that power has passed out of my subconscious and into my conscious will, and I don’t feel like putting in the sympathetic work to beef up the atmosphere of every bus movie that gets thrown my way. Of course, maybe that’s the very definition of the crankiness that characterizes the hopelessly grimacing adults in kids’ movies – the reluctance to shoulder too much of the burden in the process of being amused.

So, sure, if I had come to this movie with a fixation on outer-space make-believe, the movie would have provided me with the visuals to fuel my fixation. But I don’t really regret holding the movie responsible for selling me the idea that its premise was potentially delightful, or deeming it to have fallen short. When you’re old enough to know that a movie can be about a board game that takes you to outer space or about a serial killer who cuts the skin off his victims or about the Holocaust or about My Best Friend’s Wedding, you learn that directing your sense of interest is half the battle, and it is, indeed, the movie’s battle to fight. They almost had me there on the strength of the title sequence alone, and then they still lost me, because they weren’t really there themselves.

* By which I mean the Disneyland attraction, and not the latter half of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), from whence the imagery, but not the mechanics, of “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.”

written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

I enjoyed it.

Something else I’ve watched recently: some of the content from Wholphin, that DVD from McSweeney’s.

Ghost Dog was like Broken Flowers (and therefore, I extrapolate, like all the other Jim Jarmusch movies I’ve yet to see) in that it attempted some quizzical blend of seriousness and silliness. It attempted a recognizably similar blend. McSweeney’s & Co., particularly represented in my mind by the content and presentation of Wholphin, is also all about the blend (or the middle ground) between the serious and the frivolous, but theirs has a somewhat different flavor. Still, it seemed like they have something in common. They both are implicitly saying that being serious is not necessarily a serious business, or that being frivolous is not itself frivolous. This may be an ancient literary/philosophical notion but it seems at least in these two incarnations somehow very contemporary; both Jim Jarmusch and McSweeney’s get mileage out of the fact that this attitude makes them appear youthful and fresh. Jarmusch seems to me someone who is more or less honestly going about exploring his fascination with this attitude, whereas McSweeney’s, at least to me, represents the self-regarding use of this attitude as posture (or, depending on what kind of cynic you are, the commodification of the attitude). Miranda July, who has a short piece on the Wholphin DVD, courts annoyance by being so flagrantly fixated on her own serio-frivolous breeziness, but flagrancy is generally a sign of sincerity. There were scenes in Ghost Dog that were so shameless in their pursuit of being “peculiarly silly” that I knew he wasn’t doing it for the glory. McSweeney’s (and some – if not all – of Wholphin) irritates me because it plays the seriousness-of-comedy cards from so close to its chest; it’s so cagey/deadpan about its performance of an attitude that ostensibly is founded on a relaxed opennness to the real mysteries of life. How can I believe in (or be moved by) your simple, childlike wonder at the world when you’re so obviously so hyper-conscious and calculating about self-presentation? Well at least that was my problem with Dave Eggers. Or was before I stopped reading what he wrote.

This is what the term “faux-naif” should refer to. Unfortunately I think it means something closer to “playing dumb.”

During Ghost Dog – and I guess maybe this speaks to some kind of failing on the part of Ghost Dog, but maybe not – I was thinking about how this attitude, like I said, gets credit for being youthful and fresh, a spiritual antidote to our numb assumptions about the world… but maybe it’s as regressive as the stuffed-shirts would say. Childlike wonder and childlike incomprehension are more or less the same thing. I think often about how the things that filled me with strange impressions as a child are now things that make sense to me; a book that has lost its aura of mystery has gained its meaning. That’s not a bad tradeoff. Doesn’t the world offer us enough opportunities for wonder (death, consciousness, and so forth) that we don’t need to be so nostalgic-desperate about the whiff of mystery that clings to things when we don’t yet understand them? If Miranda July and friends are simply saying that we must never forget that we are fallible and that we may understand less than we think, I wholeheartedly endorse that message. But there seems like some kind of sentimentalism about confusion; that it wasn’t the openness and lack of prejudice but the actual bewilderment of childhood that needs to be shown respect. I mean, I certainly enjoy the trip, when that’s what art offers, which is often! – but once we start insinuating that it’s an actual good; in fact, that maybe even the wisdom of not-understanding is a wisdom that goes beyond the wisdom of understanding – then I start to want some reassurance that this is wisdom and not just a form of immaturity.

On to these thoughts the movie juxtaposed Samurai wisdom (I was going to say “Zen,” but I know that would betray a gross ignorance of distinctions between schools of classical Japanese philosophy), which also sanctifies (what’s a word that means “makes seem wise”?) the embrace of mystery as mystery and sadly (but superior-ly) shakes its head at the idea that the world is knowable. But again, isn’t mystery the domain of children? Certainly in many ways, in the cosmic sense, we are indeed all children – but why deny ourselves the rights and responsibilities of adulthood with regard to understanding, say, interpersonal relationships (, Miranda?) or the self (, Jim?) Isn’t there a way to acknowledge our shortcomings and inconsistencies, to be aware of our lack of understanding without aggrandizing mystery as beautiful and complete? Why is it wrong to see mystery as a challenge? This suddenly reminds me of my irritation when I saw Jules et Jim – is life really as poetry? Are you sure? And if the point is not that life is this way, if the poetry is a tool for us to bring back to life from another sort of place, why cast poetry in life’s image at all? I already asked this here once before. Still haven’t finished Mimesis, but I’m working on it.

I don’t know, this isn’t at all my long-term attitude but the devil’s advocate in my brain was gnawing out a tunnel in this direction last night, anyway. It’s actually a little hard for me to write it now, by the light of the next day, because these ideas don’t have as much inherent appeal to me at this point. But look, I got it down anyway.

I sort of want to dismiss all of the above, now, to show where I “really” stand, but I think that argument is an easier one to make – at least it seems that way to me because I’m naturally drawn to it – and anyway, it’s annoying for you to have to read something and then read the opposite of it, and annoying for me to write it.

Yeah, that’s really going to be it for Ghost Dog. Oh, but I will say this: Miller’s Crossing, which also takes gangster genre stuff in a moody philosophical direction, is more genuinely thoughtful and much less childlike. The main thing that Ghost Dog had that Miller’s Crossing didn’t was the element of Samurai codes and, in a related vein, hip-hop. The solemnity in both cases seemed sort of borrowed rather than presented, but that was the point. But maybe that’s also a limitation.

Okay, some more about the actual movie. I liked the music by RZA – or as I like to call him, THE RZA. Of course, this is one of those cases where the choice of composer was more of the point than any particular thing the composer did for the movie itself. Good mood-music instinct on Jarmusch’s part. I was reminded of a similarly apt atmosphere-creating choice of that pre-existing music for Amélie. Then he goes and actually shows Ghost Dog putting on mood music, which I was less into. Mood music can have a profound effect but it isn’t all that profound a concept. In fact it’s kind of embarrassing to show it; it’s a kind of self-manipulation, but the movie didn’t seem to see it that way. I guess meditation is also self-manipulation. Jim Jarmusch (and Ghost Dog) probably see mood-music self-prescription as being more like meditation than willful submission to a romantic illusion. It’s so hard to figure out where to draw these lines!

This movie was one of those custom-designed vehicles for the vibe of a certain actor as perceived by a certain director. The whole movie was kind of like a frame of concentric Forest Whitaker outlines lovingly traced around Forest Whitaker himself, just like Punch-Drunk Love was a weird sort of frame fondly built around a particular impression of Adam Sandler, and of course like all those Bill Murray movies that reveal the parts of themselves that certain people like to project on to Bill Murray.

This was a program of short films that, as I look at the date, ought to have come before the items above, chronologically. Probably before my entry about The Tattooed Potato, too. Oh well. Anyway.

I had seen many of these, but not all of them, before, a few years ago at another screening (and a few in some very low-quality files online), but this was a rare opportunity – plus I wanted Beth to see them. I can’t seem to find the program – and it wasn’t quite the lineup promised in the press release linked above – so, thankfully, I can’t/don’t have to address each film separately. Many of the individual films shown, especially the earlier items, were experiments in the rawest sense of the word – fragments (or, sometimes, extended loops) without much form (form through time, that is).

Basically, my feelings about Oskar Fischinger are that his visual ideas are wonderfully obvious – seeing one of his films for the first time, you think, “ah, this sort of thing,” as though you’ve always been aware that it existed, and this particular execution of it is just a historical detail. I suppose I could say that this reveals the ways that Fischinger’s work has been quietly and broadly influential, that it feels familiar because we’ve encountered its offspring – but I actually think it speaks to something more interesting than influence; I think this work elicits a response of “of course there’s this” because the particular visual elements Fischinger chose – zooming arcs and expanding planes, gliding circles, bouncing bars, etc. etc. – these speak at some primal level to the way we conceive of kinetics. I’ve seen (and attempted to produce) other work in the same vein – visual abstract movement inspired by music – and I can assure you that not everything connects the way most of Fischinger’s imagery does – not just any bunch of dots rhythmically boinging around seems as inevitable as his generally do.

And, for all that, that’s also one my reservations about Fischinger’s work – it doesn’t always connect. His spirit of experimentation seems to have prevented him from ever really nailing it – to me, each film has a couple concepts in it that don’t quite pop. His moire-patterns and rippling spirograph vortices, for example, are so much less communicative and interesting than his circles and curves, and yet he keeps trying to find a place for them in films where they end up being distracting and frustrating.

My other major reservation about these films is the way they handle their music. At some level, Fischinger was obviously very sensitive to the nature of musical flux – bursting or accumulating or contracting or approaching, etc. etc. But the ideas he created in this visual language, which is immediately recognizable as musical, seldom seem to work completely in sync with the music they purport to accompany. It’s as though Fischinger couldn’t help but let the visuals order themselves according to their own principles – music-like principles, yes, but not necessarily the music of the soundtrack. The little arcs and circles and whatnot frequently do not illustrate or serve the music; they perform a duet with it. I don’t think this is quite what he had in mind, since quite often the visual and the music will seem to line up exactly and speak together – and it’s thrilling! – but then at the next instant, the visuals have begun to do something that’s lovely in itself but seems to have its own agenda. That offers a different kind of satisfaction, and I wish I didn’t have to switch between them over the course of the film.

This is probably why my favorite of his films, by far, is Motion Painting No. 1 (1947), which, though it has a Brandenburg Concerto playing throughout, is not a “music” piece, and in fact employs a different and simpler sort of time-logic, one with much richer implications. The film is, as titled, a painting, one which is continuously painted and repainted. Nothing “moves” and nothing is “taken away”; Fischinger simply adds more and more paint, simultaneously adding to and covering up that which came before. The process, as it plays out, is absolutely abstract and yet full of possible significance. My first association is with the process of pencil doodling, which in its purest, least self-conscious form, is improvisatory and additive. These parallel lines, what do they demand? How about some concentric circles? After a certain point the concentric circles reach capacity and it suddenly becomes opportune to add radii. Etcetera. Everyone who has ever doodled has a taste and talent for making these decisions, but the pomp of “art” often prevents us from feeling that it’s appropriate to bring these instincts to bear in thinking about abstract art, though in fact they ought to be our first point of access. Watching Motion Painting, that identification is immediate, and we experience the joy of deciding how many circles is enough circles, or we savor the irreducibly abstract experience of a number of circles that is slightly beyond “enough”; truly aesthetic thought, in the purest sense. This kind of thought is implicit in abstract painting, but here it plays out openly, and everyone is involved. The film almost teaches us how to think unpretentiously about abstraction.*

But as I said, the implications go well beyond that. The painting is always constructing itself, like a doodle, toward being a static, completed aesthetic whole, but that process is never, can never be, consummated. As a painting, it implicitly strives to be “finished,” but the only possible finished state is the obliteration that comes with the end of the film; the journey has been the point – and yet the journey was a process of construction. This paradox of purpose has a deep philosophical resonance. In the film’s coda, the processes of construction and destruction accelerate until they are indistinguishable from movement; as the scale of time shifts, we feel the poignant futility of the process, even as its beauty, captured on film, plays out before us. The phases of the abstraction are the cycles of life, of history: endless birth and endless death synthesized with the roving forward movement of a striving consciousness. A fundamental artistic vision, encapsulated in such a simply constructed work. It is forcefully simple.

Steve Reich wrote about the value of hearing “music as a process” and his better music has always given me some of that sort of pleasure; its beauty is not strictly musical but rather the beauty of the natural world, of mathematics. It is not a particularly human beauty, and though I’m very appreciative of the taste Steve Reich had to exercise in order to construct those forms and surfaces, I don’t really ascribe the beauty in his music to him. His music is to me like the photographer’s art – the art of delivering, extracting, or summoning beauty from the world rather than attempting it oneself. This is the generally the way with art attempting mathematical beauty; the purity is the point and so it’s best tapped at the source. Motion Painting No. 1 offers that beauty of natural processes, and of time, but is, to me, far deeper and more moving because it is also inescapably human – it is a performance of nature rather than a reproduction of it. And in these senses, it is in fact very well matched with the Bach that accompanies it, which in its own way is a sort of superhuman immortal order as conceived by a mortal. The beauty of Bach is its combination of the worlds of God and man, the infinitely perfect surrounding and sustaining the emotional and finite. But Bach’s music is sometimes too devout for me, too ready to believe that those two kinds of order belong with one another. Motion Painting No. 1 is the same combination but, in a sense, more arbitrary, more mortal. The infinite aspect is provided by Bach’s music, and by the quasi-geometric designs, and most of all by the inexorable forward movement of the film and of time. But the geometric designs are imperfect, hand-drawn attempts, and everything that emerges over the course of the film dies.

Then again it’s just a bunch of shapes. Doodle-y shapes, no less. It seems odd for me to feel so moved by these shapes, and maybe I ought to be saying that this reaction is probably peculiar to me. But I don’t think it is, and I don’t think it’s wrong to ascribe profundity to a work of art that uses the simplest means and leaves the depth to play out in the mind of the spectator. And then again, it’s simplistic for me even to feel the need to justify and ascribe that profundity to the art rather than to my own thought process; the art experience is, of course, always the result of the combination of work and audience, and even if an experience is more audience than artist, there’s nothing wrong with that. But in deciding how to value the work, I tend to want to decide how much it brought to the table; a kaleidoscope may be beautiful and thought-provoking but it brings little of its own, and it seems important to me to recognize that if I’m going to respond to it like this. Then again maybe that’s just a prejudice I should get past; I’m really not sure. Maybe the fixation on “value” is misguided. Anyway, this is a whole other discussion and maybe I’ll address it again whenever I finally get around to talking about the “Unseen Cinema” films and say some more about Portrait of a Young Man, which created an experience that seemed profound to me despite being almost entirely dependent upon the photographic method mentioned above.

A music professor of mine once gave a pre-concert lecture (that I missed), the gist of which was (I gathered, or perhaps simply imagined based on scraps) that in order to engage with a work of music, the audience must bring its own “compositional” opinions (of the “how many circles is enough circles” sort) into play; that asking “what would I do next?” and answering it with these sorts of instincts goes a long way toward making the meaning of a “difficult” work accessible. You know, maybe I completely made up that that’s what his lecture was about, but for some reason, real or not, I’m ascribing this idea to him; and I agree with it, possibly because I invented it.

directed by Peter Jackson
screenplay by Fran Walsh, Phlippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson
after a story by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace

I mean, really, they should say
based on the film King Kong (1933)
directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoesdack
screenplay by James Creelman and Ruth Rose
after a story by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace

because it’s not as though Peter Jackson read the original story notes and then re-interpreted them. This is as fannish a remake as you’re likely to see; it’s assertively based on the actual editing and performances of the original. And beyond that, it’s based on the actual iconic stature of the original, which, come to think of it, is sort of an odd attitude for a remake to take. You’d think that a remake would want to act like it invented the wheel rather than admitting off the bat that it’s an imitation product.

But no, at least, in this post-The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) era, that’s definitely not the case. Remakes, like TV-show movies, are just another form of comic book adaptation wherein the comic book just happens to be another movie. So many movies willingly lower themselves to the status of sequels: only fully functional when they’re plugged into some other movie, like someone on one of those breathing machines that must have a name but I can’t think of it. I’m not even talking about Psycho (1998), which was just a half-baked stunt. I mean stuff like Fat Albert (2004), which wasn’t a movie about Fat Albert; it was a movie about what would happen if the characters on that TV show Fat Albert came out of the TV, which is only a viable plot concept if you’re already versed in the Fat Albert universe, the inherent entertainment value of which is the ostensible justification for the making of a Fat Albert movie in the first place. Why would they do that – cripple their movie by making it dependent on a TV show, and then sabotage it by taking the focus off the subject and putting it on the meta?

In that case I really don’t know what they were thinking – but only because it’s such a grotesque example. I mean, really, like there’s enough Fat Albert love in the world to support a straight movie, even less a meta? And no, of course I didn’t actually see it.

The rest of the time, though, I would say it’s all part of a general tendency in the entertainment industry to cater to nerdy behavior, I guess because obsessions are more consistent, and thus more profitable, than curiosity. No entertainment property is truly inexhaustible*, but cult-devotion is forever. It’s smarter to bet on being able to sucker people into a fetishistic commitment than it is to try to keep appealing to them over and over with new actual content. For some reason, this is only being discovered now. It took TV Guide decades to stumble into the fact that if they print four covers and say “collect all four,” they will sell more copies, especially if they put pictures of Star Trek characters on the covers. It is not coincidental that nerds and fetishists are overlapping genera.

Maybe American society is getting more nerdy, or more fetishistic, or maybe commercial culture is just getting savvier/more cynical/more shameless about exploiting it. I dunno. I don’t have a thesis here. I’m just trying to talk about King Kong.

So. It all relates. I don’t think Peter Jackson is the next Spielberg, or whatever they’re saying. BECAUSE… he’s too much of a fetishist, or a nerd, or something. He’s miles above Attack of the Clones, mind you, but watching his movies I still feel a hint of that sense that I’m at some little kid’s tea party, playing along, and that it’s not really for me, per se. Or rather, it’s only for me if I’m a co-conspirator in the tea party and am thus willing to play along. Peter Jackson, for concrete example, has shown time and again that he thinks a chunky low-framerate slow-mo effect is fun and exciting. Maybe it’s just me, but I think it looks like crap. I don’t just mean that it reminds me of crap, that it’s too lowbrow a technique – I mean, it actually looks bad. It’s not a good thing to do with your film; it’s hard to watch and it tends to break the spell of whatever alternate reality has been created by somehow making everything look much more like props and sets and actors in makeup. It’s just not effective, but Peter Jackson loves it. He thinks he’s offering it up like junk food, like a guilty pleasure, but he’s actually offering it up like a kid showing you how cool his toy car is by going “vroom” and making it ride up the side of the wall and then along the tabletop and then down the table leg and then along the floor, while you have to watch, wondering whether he still even remembers that he told you to watch.

Obviously, Peter Jackson is far from a distractable kid. But the things I admired about The Lord of the Rings and King Kong – the spectacle, the effects, and I suppose the durable old-fashionedness of the characterizations – these weren’t exactly Peter’s doing. He has a very clever special effects group working for him (those behind-the-scenes documentaries on the Lord of the Rings DVD’s were really cool, I thought) that manages to turn his overblown visuals into entertainment – a fine counter-example to the doofuses who managed to make those Star Wars movies so cluttered and garbagey. And his wife and her friend seem to be mostly quite smart about the big scripting decisions – the relationship they constructed for Kong and the woman was a very well-calibrated solution to the assignment of writing a love story for a giant special-effect-monkey and Naomi Watts. Except that I personally didn’t buy or want to see their moment of peaceful bliss sliding around in Central Park. And I really didn’t need to see as much pre-Kong stuff about anyone – the whole first hour could have been cut way way down. But otherwise, good.

But anyway, Peter Jackson’s actual directorial style is not those things; it’s something nerdier, less thought-out, that gives form to those things. The spirit that motivates those low-framerate effects (there’s a particularly ridiculous one in this movie where Adrien Brody types each letter in the word S K U L L while the camera careens clumsily toward him) seems to lurk everywhere – an undiscriminating fondness for things that seem like they’re much cooler than they actually look. And only his fellow nerds in the audience are there rooting for these things, because, as participants in whatever fetish is being indulged at the moment, they are already at the tea party. And I’m torn, watching these movies, in the choice between thinking, “but this just doesn’t come off, for me,” and thinking, “whoa, dude!” Unless I’m really and truly uncomfortable, I choose in favor of the latter because it’s more fun. But I still know inside that it’s just not the highest quality, sharpest fun around – it’s fun that we’re kind of hyping up to ourselves as we go, to cover the gaps. Spielberg, by contrast, has, or at least had, a great visual sense and a great pacing sense, and always attuned to theatricality. Jackson is simply more of a nerd; he’s doing it in his world. I want my escapism brought to me, not played out in front of me.

I’m talking here only about his crowd-pleasing megamovies. Heavenly Creatures was a whole other animal. Somehow his craftsmanship there was both recognizably the same, and also much richer in effect. Though perhaps that was a one-time-only affair. It’s interesting to note that Heavenly Creatures was a movie about the darkness that lurks behind nerdy obsessions. It’s a depiction of childish escapism that’s meant to be disturbing in its insularity; maybe that’s why the childishly insular slant to Peter Jackson’s direction happened to strengthen the effect of that movie. I think it may have been a sort of serendipitous coincidence. It’s just not clear to me how much control he has.

And who even knows about his early trashy splatter horror comedy whatevers. I’m never going to watch them. I guess what I’m saying here is that his origins as a purveyor of cult-interest-only exercises in gore are still apparent, and I don’t think that spirit serves the fantasy escapism genre quite as well as it could; it transmutes it into something less communicative, less whole. Just like remakes that resort to fandom and fetishism. Right. I’ve said this all ten times. But no revision! Let’s keep moving forward.

The music by James Newton Howard was undistinguished in both the action and melodrama categories. I know he had to write it really fast because Howard Shore was mysteriously dropped from the movie at the last minute, and it sounded that way, like the most reflexive, fastest possible solution to every problem. There were a few gestures toward 30s Hollywood, as with the title cards, but like the title cards, the gestures weren’t memorable or forceful enough to impart the actual tang of “vintage” to the movie, which would have benefited from it. Why couldn’t the whole score have been all old-fashionedy and classically symphonic (as opposed to slick-synth-symphonic, the way everything is orchestrated these days)? Oh well. Just like Lord of the Rings, an opportunity to do something cool was wasted on forgettable blandness.

All the complaining about Peter Jackson above is an attempt to articulate the difference between the movie and some higher standards I would have preferred it to meet. But, you know, roller-coaster overkill was the point of the movie and pretty much whenever it was on the tracks, I was having a great time. The gross-out sequence was my favorite part. Again, it speaks to Peter Jackson’s strengths. It was like a kid holding a bug in your face and watching you squirm. The kid nailed it! And when those dinosaurs were all running at the camera, it didn’t look perfect but I was still smiling because the movie’s sense of delight at having so much dinosaur onscreen at once was, again, so overblown that it became accessible to me. A-plus, kid!

And seriously, that’s worth something. It’s a rare and ticket-worthy thing, to get grossed out and overwhelmed. I knew Peter Jackson would do it well, it’s why I went, and I got it, and I had fun. On those counts, he definitely beats Spielberg – this movie’s bug scene was far, far better than the one in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. But the movie wanted to be at least a little bigger than just the thrills, and I don’t feel altogether safe with Peter out there beyond the amusement park. You must be taller than this sign etc.

* Well, maybe some are, I don’t know, sake of argument, work with me here.