Category Archives: Older Stuff

August 23, 2005

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

by Jonathan Safran Foer

[extended as of 8/26/05]

In the New York Times Magazine profile of the author, a few months back, Mr. Foer was quoted as saying something like “I don’t write to make people think I’m smart, or that I’m a good writer. I write so that I can feel less alone.” (=rough paraphrase from memory). Then it is mentioned that when he was very young, he wanted a flamboyant suit to wear, and then his mother is quoted saying something about how he has always been able to come up with the most moving things, things that touched her deeply.

I hadn’t read the book at the time, but I found all this off-putting. It didn’t bode well for his writing, in my mind. I finally read the book, and all my fears came true.

When I was a freshman in high school, I was still very uncomfortable with how I might or might not fit into the social life of the classroom, even during academic time. I didn’t trust that my contributions would be appropriate and wouldn’t annoy teachers and/or students; I had the sense that at most times, other people generally “knew what was going on” and that I fundamentally didn’t, even if I intellectually felt like I understood the material or the social situation or whatever. So I had various strategies for coping and not losing too much face. One strategy was to say only one or two things per class, but have them be “intriguingly outside the box.” “Intriguingly outside the box” is pretty easy to pull off if it’s your only criterion – you just have to sit tight for a while and notice which way the conversation is headed, and then imagine some other direction it could have gone and then mention that in a way that suggests that it’s an intellectual mistake to ignore it. As long as what you say is both surprising (because it fights the natural flow of conversation) but blatantly on-topic, you get credit from teachers for contributing something “valuable” and at the same time, little risk of having to defend yourself or get corrected, because nobody was thinking about it. So this little gambit was a safe way of regularly scoring enough points to stay afloat without really entering into a game that I didn’t think I could play properly.

My story is that during that freshman year, my English teacher used to sit among the students while we discussed our reading, and one day while I was making one of my “but what about THIS?” comments, she apparently leaned over to one of my fellow students and whispered “isn’t he funny? – he thinks he’s so wise.” Apparently, she thought I was so clearly absurd a character that nobody would think to report this to me. I don’t know what she was thinking, really. But it’s beside the point.

The point is that I was doing this calculated thing, yes, exactly, to get points for seeming wise, because I desperately needed some kind of points and I had hit on this thing I could pull off. And the moral of this anecdote is that it didn’t fool anyone: my teacher (and everyone else) thought it was comical; my “wisdom” was contrived and formulaic; my self-serving motivations were irritatingly apparent. I had taught myself a method for creating the impression of thoughtfulness and was relentlessly enacting it to meet my own psychological needs.

Ahem. Before I go on, let me point out that I have the utmost sympathy for my past self, as well as for anyone else who behaves similarly. Social interaction is tough, and I think it’s not just forgivable but in fact necessary for people to rely on these sorts of preset “systems” for creating pseudo-spontaneous effects. Happens all the time. It even, in fact, happens in literature all the time. My anecdote here is simply meant to show that when it’s too transparent, it’s annoying (even to teachers), and that it is possible for “wisdom” to actually be nothing more than a formulaic bid for approval.

So: Jonathan Safran Foer thinks he’s so wise. But since he’s a widely-praised author and his books are enormously successful, I, unlike my 9th-grade English teacher, cannot find the generosity of condescension in my heart to say that I think it’s “funny.” It just frustrates and annoys me.

His wisdom-generating-machine is of a different variety than mine ever was, and based on the Times profile (which is really quite a piece of work – I just now found it online again, via the link on this page), it sounds as though he turns its crank near-constantly.* He certainly does in this book.

He plays not for the “he sees things that other people miss” crown, as I did, but rather for the laurel of “he is so sensitive: he says the most moving things, and he can find beauty and magic in anything!” And he does so expertly. His pretentions are finely honed and virtuosic; his bids for our admiration have more grace and sophistication to them than those of even the most extravagantly self-indulgent personalities I met in college. He is, I have no qualms about saying, a true artist of the form.

Everything Is Illuminated intends to be a swirling whirling wonderworld of emotional truth, it wants to first dazzle us with a thousand tricks and treats, and then reveal that they are all tied to the painful, joyous throbbing heart that is all human experience. Right, so far so good. But have I, by writing that sentence, actually found the material to write such a book? Not hardly. I would need to first of all have something to say about human experience.

This book does not have anything real to say. And it says it in many many ways. Does it have things in it that might make people cry? Oh sure, sure – like, slowing down time to a stop during the naively ordinary instant during World War II just before an innocent peasant village is bombed to oblivion and everyone is killed, prolonging it to typographically flamboyant extremes through two pages of “. . . . . . .,” and shouting stuff like “(run while you still can!)” in parentheses because we know that they did not and will not no matter HOW MUCH WE WANT THEM TO!, and saying so explicitly, etc. etc.

That example is actually the climax of the book, in some ways. Sorry I just gave it away. But this exact same stunt actually happens at several other points, where time slows down cartoonishly to the point where the meager, unconvincing poignancy Foer has built up can be strenuously, blatantly mined out from under the toenails of the moment. So to speak.

I can tell you how that passage might make Jonathan Safran Foer’s mom cry. First of all, it’s built around the idea that the inevitability of that which has already happened (the destruction of this shtetl) still has the potential to be upsetting. Next, it refers to the fact that people will mentally dwell on such moments with the active desire to change them, even though that is of course impossible. Elsewhere in the book, he has talked about the fact that some people may desire to “rectify” history fictionally when writing it down, in attempt to psychologically address the pain of some irreversible past event. Foer is not discovering these truths for us, or even presenting them for our analysis; he is simply using them. And what is he using them to say, or do? He is trying to make mom cry. What does this book offer us? That experience of being made to cry in this way, and that is all.

Perhaps knowing that he needed more, Foer made the book structurally complicated. The structure, in fact, has a lot of potential. “Jonathan Safran Foer” and his Ukrainian translator (you’ve read excerpts, you don’t need me to tell you about that) alternate chapters, one writing about the present and one writing fantastically about the past. Interspersed are the Ukrainian’s responses to JSF’s work, which sometimes mention unseen responses sent from JSF to the Ukrainian. Guess what! JSF finds the Ukrainian’s chapters VERY MOVING, ALMOST HEARTBREAKING, and the Ukrainian finds JSF’s to be ALSO VERY MOVING! They also frequently find time to mention that they found the events that are being described to be VERY MOVING. Only we the readers get the pleasure of knowing that this all amounts to self-congratulation by exactly one real live dude.

The subject matter is JSF’s family history, but as he imagines it, which means a torrential helping of soggy faux-folk “Jewish heritage!!!” whimsy, which incorporates a good deal of “earthy” sex that is almost entirely off-putting. The present-day stuff, ostensibly “realistic” by comparison, is about JSF seeking out said family history in Ukraine and not finding it, plus some stuff about the Ukrainian that takes center stage by the end even though it remains only very loosely sketched.

The emphasis on family, on Jewish lore and tradition, on loss and memory – this stuff would seem to indicate literary substance, and he increases that impression by running many, many parallels and ambiguities up and down through the already overwrought folksy parts of the text. But the impression of substance is circumstancial, superficial. You may untangle as much as you like, but you will not find a coordinating wisdom. Writerly resourcefulness, certainly, but none of the precious WISDOM that is implicitly advertised on every page.

In fact, the more untangling you do, the less well-crafted the structure starts to seem. If you finish the book and learn all there is to learn, and then begin again, you’ll see that much of what comes at the beginning isn’t quite exactly in keeping with what comes at the end. “Moving” effects from early on make little sense in the context of the whole. I tried to work out a generous theory that made this all out to be intentional, and just another layer of the book’s interest in the artifice of writing, but I couldn’t find a way to make it work out. There’s just no getting around it: the book’s more complicated than it can handle.

I am also put off by the attitude toward dealing with Jewish heritage that is in evidence here. The real Jonathan Safran Foer seems to think that by portraying “Jonathan Safran Foer” as a spoiled American with no real cultural clue, he is demonstrating that his interest in his own Jewishness is somehow better founded than his alter ego’s. What it ultimately is is a conflation of sentimental memories of his grandmother with secondhand Yiddish folklore/Isaac Bashevis Singer. Plus some New York-y “You’ll know we’re the chosen people when you taste this delicious bagel, nu?” crap. Then he acts as though being able to channel this bunch of charoseth (in combination with a penchant for making mom cry) puts him in good standing to take a whack at recreating the emotional truth of the Holocaust. Maybe it’s wrong of me, but I found this aspect distasteful. I felt like the book was establishing Jewish “cred,” which ought not to be a prerequisite for writing about the Holocaust or about one’s grandmother. I was offended that he seemed to think it was necessary/appropriate to put this Jewish-ish stuff in, and I was also uncomfortable with the fact that this is the specific blend of stuff he picked.

Yesterday I stood and flipped through Harry G. Frankfurt’s tiny hardbound essay On Bullshit, which you’ve probably seen in large quantities at the bookstore. From my breeze-through, it seemed like a well-considered blend between very dry cuteness and legitimate light philosophy, and I’m pleased to think that it’s selling well, even if it’s for the most superficial reasons. I’m sure Princeton University Press is pleased too. Anyway. Frankfurt’s point (which he makes far more precisely than I’m about to) seems to be that bullshit, which is so prevalent in contemporary life, is distinct from lying, in that it represents not an attempt to disseminate falsehood but rather a complete disengagement from the concept of truth. It fundamentally disregards the obligations that follow when one takes seriously the possibility of being accurate, being correct. It does not actively defy those obligations but lives outside them.**

Anyway, Everything Is Illuminated does the artistic version of just that. It is artistic bullshit. It does not tell us anything about life (even though it seems to), but it is not because Foer is trying to deceive us; it’s because he has opted for a project that, for all its tears of pain and joy and love and death and war and family, does not believe that it is necessary to be concerned with those things. They are just used as the playing field for another game entirely.

Here is the score of the game: Yes, Jonathan Safran Foer, some of those things you wrote about are sad and whimsical things. Yes, I do not know anyone else who has thought of quite so many of these particular sort of sad and whimsical things. You manufacture many premium notions. You also write much better than, say, me. I. Your book was interesting to read. But it wasn’t about anything, and it acted like it was about important things, and so I didn’t like it. I know that you might not actually think you’re so wise. I know this book probably wasn’t who you are. It’s just something you’re trying to do. Despite your protestation, I think you did write this to convince people that you’re smart, and a good writer. And you know what? You convinced me. But I do not think this book will help you to be less lonely, as you claimed to want. Were you really trying to connect? It’s much simpler than all that, but very different.

I hope to god you never actually read this, and this second person thing is pure affectation on my part. Good god, Jonathan, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. Lots of people I know loved this book. That’s in fact why I read it. I just wasn’t the target audience.

Oh, but just this one last thing – among the reviews of this book at amazon.com can be found the following nugget of white-hot condescension:

You people who “loved this book!!!!” are slaves. This book doesn’t even qualify as a shadow on the wall of the cave.

It made me laugh.

[THREE DAYS LATER, 8/26]

I think I have a little bit more to say. Two things.

First: the humor in the book is grating, in that it is both smugly deadpan and yet hopelessly secondhand. I tried to read the opening chapter when it was published in the New Yorker before the book came out, and couldn’t manage to finish it, because it was so obnoxiously proud of itself over an incredibly tired gimmick. It, and a good deal of this book, was essentially the old “Wild and Crazy Guys!” routine. Yes, Foer puts his own spin on it by keeping this character around for a whole book – and the idea of taking old joke stereotypes seriously is in fact kind of interesting. But he doesn’t acknowledge it as an old joke. He thinks it’s clever.

I’m not going to go into it here at too much length, but I think you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say that there is humor and there is “humor,” and that the latter is not actually a form of creativity, but merely a sort of social quirk that rarely contains any real invention. Pre-fabricated sarcasm (“welcome to my world!”), deadpan conceits (“you my pimp daddy, Doug”), put-on mock-pretend lying (“I hate you, honey.” “I hate you too.”) all qualify as this lesser thing. There are also more elaborate quasi-comedic constructions that nonetheless are this thing, or at least are equally kin to this thing as they are to real humor. Much of the humor in this book is like that. I grant that I may be indefensibly oversensitive to this distinction. But in the context of all that affectation, it seemed baldly, irritatingly insufficient. Not unlike a teenager who is infuriatingly confident that because he can casually and dryly drop “you my pimp daddy, Doug,” he is too cool for, among other things, school.

Second: Above, I describe the “protracted moment of doomed innocence” passage and complain that its only purpose is to make us cry, as though that’s a problem. In fact, I say throughout that what the book lacks is a “point,” and imply that mere emotional manipulation is artistically inadequate. But that was a mistake: I don’t actually think that at all. I don’t look to art for philosophical news (though I appreciate it when it’s there) – I look to it for aesthetic experience, and, yes, emotional experience. Art doesn’t have to have a “point” to be good and satisfying; not a “point” beyond its inherent aesthetic effect, at least. It’s not even at all damning, I don’t think, for a writer or a reader to be uncertain what the “meaning” of some emotional effect is, so long as they derive some kind of aesthetic satisfaction from it. I confused myself into complaining that substance and purpose were lacking, but that’s the wrong complaint.

I got confused because it’s a very hard line to draw. I’m reminded of the discussion I had with a friend after leaving Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997). My friend said that the movie had been terrible because it was so manipulative. I said that I liked that movies can be manipulative, I like being manipulated, so I didn’t think that was the problem. She said that she was insulted and offended by the form of manipulation in this particular movie, which I agreed with. But it was hard for either of us to quantify what it was the movie had done to become offensive, what line it had crossed.

I have theories about how to formulate the distinction between pleasurable and infuriating manipulation, but I’m not really fond of any of them. My other complaints about this book, above, are good indicators of the direction of my thinking – I suspect it has something to do with feeling “used” by the artist himself, not just the work. Maybe.

I’m going to think about the question some more and if I come up with anything good I’ll write about it here. Anyone else wanna take a whack at this?

*I’m sorry this is going to be so mean. I’m sorry, Jonathan Safran Foer. I was very attentive and open, while I read your whole book. And the whole time, I felt like you didn’t actually care about saying anything to me, I felt like all you really cared about was getting me to be impressed with you, and it offended me that you did it by pretending to want to tell me about life and love and feeling and important things. I know you didn’t really mean to exploit those subjects, or exploit the Holocaust, or anything like that – and I know, you were drawing your material from real feelings that you’ve really had – but I still couldn’t help but feel that it was fundamentally self-serving of you. So I feel entitled to say what I thought. I know, it’s rude to say these things, and I feel bad about that. But I’m going to continue.

**Something like that. That’s what I came away with, anyway. Maybe I should read it for real.

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August 21, 2005

Broken Flowers (2005)

written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

This was my first Jim Jarmusch movie.

The whole first section of the movie felt ultra-low-key, as though nothing was really happening, despite the various things that happened. At the time I was worried that the entire plot would slip past this way, like less than a shrug; but of course that’s not how the movie proceeds. In retrospect, the lazy stasis of the first act of the movie served a valuable function: it was the boring level ground of the present, below which the character digs and finds remnants of his past. It gives the audience that feeling of mild malaise that haunts the character, and to which we (and he) refer later, trying to find a way to connect that long, slow blandness to his other experiences. That is to say: that portion of the movie gave me a feeling for “what it’s like to just be at his house” that was crucial for the emotional impact of the whole. And any kind of unconventional pacing (that ends up working) appeals to me. So I thought that was a cool aspect of the movie.

I thought it was interesting that the movie got one of its biggest laughs out of the fact that the Lolita character is in fact named “Lolita.” Or rather, it gets the laugh out of the fact that Bill Murray’s character amusedly recognizes this to be outlandishly blatant of the movie/his universe. A lot of the laughs came from his character getting to observe the oddities that have been placed in his path, but I thought this one was particularly unusual, since the oddity is not really that he’s in the company of this girl named Lolita, but that Jim Jarmusch has been so bold as to write Lolita into his script. When the character chuckles, that’s what we take him to be chuckling at. Except that for him, we have to assume, it’s an existential chuckle.

I also suspected that there was a larger nod to Nabokov and to Lolita going on. I think Nabokov probably would have enjoyed this movie. It shared with Lolita that sort of dry-wet sense of whimsy and a melancholy fantasy of driving around the backroads of the USA. It also, like Nabokov, relished both the absurdity and the mystery of symbols and correspondences – the pink, the typewriters, the dog named Winston – and kept lightly pulling the drama around in unexpected circles rather than in a straight line. I think Vladimir would have identified with both the milieu and the dramatic aims. And I have to assume, given the presence of Lolita, that Jarmusch had something like that in mind.

The other literary connection that occurred to me during the movie came at the very end, which instantly called to mind of one of the best bits in City of Glass by Paul Auster. Those who have seen the movie and read the book will know what I’m talking about. The concept is slightly different (more stark and magical) in the book, but a comparable impact is still created in the movie – to greater emotional effect, I think. Anyway, with this rolling around in my mind, it happened to jump out at me that in the final “thanks to” credits, there was a thanks to Paul Auster and his wife. Somehow that felt like confirmation that I’d made the “right” connection. I want to at least assume that Jim Jarmusch has read it.

The driving scenes – especially the scenes of driving down wooded roads – were somehow extremely vivid to me and called up the sensation of being a in car better than any movie I’ve seen before. I don’t know whether it was the sound editing or the cinematography or the accumulated atmosphere or my mood that day, or what, but somehow the “yeah, it’s just like that!” factor was high. There was a shot of the map on the front seat that seemed absolutely perfectly true to life. Then again, why wouldn’t it be? I really don’t know why I was having that kind of response. Maybe it was just because those woods looked like the woods where I grew up. I wonder where they filmed it.

Anyway. Of these movies where Bill Murray plays this character (Lost In Translation, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Broken Flowers, and, really, Rushmore), this seemed in some ways the most monotonous character study, because he was called upon to do almost nothing other than just be this guy, going about some business. But it also, cumulatively, offered what might be the most convincing emotional experience that this character has had in any of those movies: he is ultimately slightly jostled. This is interesting to compare with Lost In Translation, where he is ultimately invigorated by real emotional contact. In Broken Flowers, he is ultimately invigorated by a real fear of having no emotional contact. That’s at least how I read it: in the final moments, his vague, distracted ennui breaks through into actual fear that his lonely life truly cannot be made sense of. To me, that seems like the most valuable thing that can be done with this character – peel back his veneer of world-weariness and show the living uncertainty that defines him. I think that’s actually one of several things that Wes Anderson was trying for in The Life Aquatic, but all as seen in the mind of an 11-year-old boy, which is emotionally sort of an impossibility (11-year-olds aren’t world-weary and they wouldn’t understand world-weariness if they tried), and I’m not sure why he thought it could work. It worked here. By comparison, Lost In Translation seems hopelessly romantic. Not that that’s a bad thing. I think that’s what she was going for. But this seemed like a more mature viewpoint.

Of course, this is an over-confident reading, on my part, of a fairly enigmatic ending to a fairly enigmatic movie. I liked the vibe and I liked the ambiguities; even if they meant nothing in particular, they were pleasant aesthetic food to chew on. (Isn’t that, in fact, what Nabokov believed in?) That’s my review right there.

Comments (4)
August 20, 2005

Gates of Heaven (1980)

directed by Errol Morris

I watched this on a very hot night after a very hot day, and I drifted into a sleep-related fuzzy state in the middle. So…maybe I shouldn’t be “reviewing” it.

It was interesting. But I feel odd being invited to laugh at real people for who they really are. It’s one thing to notice people yourself and be amused by them; it’s another to make a movie about them and distribute it with the intent of making people laugh. The movie wasn’t exactly unsympathetic to these people, but the quirky framing (did Errol Morris invent that “look?” It seemed ahead of its time) and the maximum-absurdity editing seemed to be saying “crazy show, isn’t it?” I’m not saying that’s irresponsible or mean-spirited. But I was aware, the whole time, that empathy was left up to me; Errol Morris sat it out. Or took it for granted. Certainly the moviemaking itself was, if anything, at the subjects’ expense.*

In the end, I felt an interest in the various figures that went beyond mere amusement. Because any real person, given enough screen time, deserves more than a simple reaction. But again, I don’t know what to say about the film on those terms. If it had just been interviews where people expressed themselves, and that was the entire content, presented journalistically, I think I would have felt differently about this obviously good material. But the movie was made quirky, well beyond the quirks of the people interviewed. I guess what I’m saying is that to me, that sort of detracted from the humanity-encountering pleasures that were the core of the movie.

Also, the overall construction of the movie was pointlessly odd, I thought. The whole first section was devoted to less memorable interviews, about a story that was never quite made clear, and was eventually dropped. The artifice-emphasizing framing and editing were even more present in that section; seemed like Morris was working hard to try to build something with character out of his footage. And yet I couldn’t say what that character was supposed to be. I didn’t really find my footing as a viewer until the more interesting interviews later on. So I don’t really want to give that much credit to Errol Morris for what I got out of it. At least not until I see his other movies.

On the other hand, as I mentioned, I did kinda fall asleep. So, um, forget all this, because I don’t know what I’m talking about.

It was interesting. And amusing.

* I can imagine a fan of this movie saying that it’s actually intensely empathetic, just by virtue of the fact that it gives its subjects the time and space to be themselves, and implicitly says that we owe them our attention. But there’s a difference between thinking that people are intriguingly weird and feeling empathy for them, and when Morris occasionally tips his hand, we see only the former. I can believe that he might well have felt the latter too, when he was being silent, but I can also believe that he didn’t. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s something I had to bring to the movie. That’s all.

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August 20, 2005

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005)

written and directed by George Lucas

SOCRATES: This movie may have been somewhat less unpleasant to watch than Episode I and Episode II, but it was still a far cry* from the original movies that I grew up with.

R2D2: Oh come on. Have some perspective. You were a kid and you saw those movies through entirely different eyes. “Star Wars” movies have always had bad acting and writing. Your sense that something has gone wrong is just based on nostalgia and your new “grown-up” standards, not on any objective difference between these and those.

SOCRATES: No, I’m telling you, these are worse, for real. They’re vapid in a way that those weren’t.

R2D2: Pauline Kael et al. seemed to see how equally “vapid” the originals were. You didn’t, which isn’t surprising because you were between zero and four years old. What are you claiming is actually different now?

SOCRATES: The original movies seemed to believe in their stories in a way that these didn’t. When Obi-Wan Kenobi is killed in Star Wars, the movie seems to really believe that something dramatic is happening, and that’s what makes it cool. When Momba-Nil Balloono** is killed in Revenge of the Sith, the movie seems to believe that something really cool is happening, and hopes that will make it dramatic. But it doesn’t. That’s not how drama works. It’s not even how coolness works.

R2D2: You’re still just talking in terms of your impressions. If you’d been a kid, you would have liked this movie.

SOCRATES: Hard for me to know what I would have thought of a lot of contemporary culture if I’d been a kid today. Even as a kid, I was certainly capable of thinking that certain things were just too trashy, too undisciplined to take. I never had the stomach for He-Man, or Voltron, or any of that low-frame-rate stuff. I’d like to believe that if I were a kid today, I would think that the new Star Warses were too soulless, too insular/nerdy, too CGI-y.

R2D2: You aren’t really claiming any kind of redeeming value for the original movies, though. If you’re honest and acknowledge your childhood dedication to those movies, you have to admit that worthless, pulpy roller-coaster movies with bad writing and acting were just your cup of tea at one point.

SOCRATES: I’m not saying that this movie was bad because it was pulpy, or a roller-coaster, or “worthless,” whatever you mean by that (something like “humanly irrelevant, purely escapist,” I assume). I’m saying it wasn’t a good roller-coaster. I’m saying that it was bad craftsmanship. For example, unlike a lot of people, I don’t think that Jar-Jar Binks was conceptually an unforgivable abomination – I recognize his kinship with all kinds of stuff that had already existed in Star Wars movies – I just think they totally screwed him up. They just didn’t have someone on staff saying “we have to watch out that it doesn’t get too annoying. That’s just a good moviemaking principle, to not annoy your audience, and I think we need to consider that as we do our work.” Or “this CGI stuff that we’re using, it comes off as a little insubstantial, you know? A little less momentous than, say, miniatures. It doesn’t blend as well with live-action, despite all our valiant technical efforts. So let’s accept that, and think about how to keep it restrained so as not to numb the audience with visual Nutrasweet.” Nobody took those kinds of quality-control steps. So I’m not complaining that they weren’t artistically more mature, I’m just complaining that they weren’t smart about doing their immature thing. I’m saying these movies didn’t handle their material as well as the originals.

R2D2: You’re saying that you weren’t pleased, and then you’re working backward as though it’s some kind of principled thing. But that’s just arrogance. It’s just subjective.

SOCRATES: Um, yes, this is all just subjective.

R2D2: Well there you go.

SOCRATES: That’s a lame argument, R2. Seriously. You were originally arguing that I was unfairly holding the original movies and the new movies to different standards, but I disagreed and argued I was holding them to the same standards, which I accordingly tried to express in terms of principles.*** Now you’re just saying that those principles aren’t objective principles, but that’s irrelevant. We all acknowledge that criticism is subjective. You’re just using it as a smokescreen so that you can back away from your earlier position. Your accusation was that I’m being inconsistent. Stick to that.

R2D2: Calm down, dude.

SOCRATES: I am calm. Don’t tell me to calm down.

R2D2: Dude, seriously, calm down.

SOCRATES: That’s really rude. Don’t do that.

R2D2: I’m just saying you need to calm down!

SOCRATES: You’re just trying to avoid the argument.

R2D2: Dude, it’s just a movie.

SOCRATES: I KNOW.

* “NOOOOOOO!!!”

** Samuel L. Jackson. The real character name is, I think, “Mace Windu.”

*** A couple other principles ignored by Revenge of the Sith (and by other pulpy stuff I don’t like):

I. Design is subordinate to content, not the other way around. Your idea for a cool location might precede the idea for what happens there, but in the final product, that can’t be apparent. This movie had an establishing shot of the beautiful fantasy landscape of the Wookie planet. Good so far. But then nothing happens there. The camera never sits down and lets us feel that we are there. We’re just looking at it. Ostensibly we’re looking at something plot-related, but the irrelevance of the plot, compared to the design, is overwhelming. Princess Leia’s hairdo in Star Wars was cool, but it wasn’t the point of the scenes in which she wore it. Things happened despite the hairdo. When Natalie Portman comes out with the same hairdo in this movie, it’s the point. “Get it?” The movie itself is like the flatbed that carries the parade float of the design. It might as well just be sitting still on the ground. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone was another example of an excellently designed series of still images that was just barely a movie.

II. Lines should as much as possible be interesting in themselves, not only in relation to other lines. Scenes should as much as possible be interesting in themselves, not only in relation to other scenes. Movies should as much as possible be interesting in themselves, not only in relation to other movies.

III. Disney/Dickens rule of characters: if you’re not going for realism, pick two adjectives (or for complex characters, three) and then have the characters consistently be those things. Fit scene-to-scene emotions into the context of those things. Do not figure out scene-to-scene emotions and then hope that they will cohere into overall characterization. For example, in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker was: boyish, eager for adventure. Han Solo was: self-satisfied, reckless, mercenary (but secretly susceptible to idealism). In Revenge of the Sith, Natalie Skywalker was: ??, ??. Ob-Ewan Kenobi was: ??, ??.****

**** REAL PERSON WHO JUST READ THIS: “The whole thing is pretty nerdy, but that last part is like you giving everyone advice on how to make a movie, or just how to do stuff. Don’t you think it’s kind of snotty?”

ME GETTING DEFENSIVE: I’m not actually “giving advice”; I’m expressing my displeasure and dissatisfaction with this movie, which is a normal part of a “review” or “response,” which is what this is. But I don’t like just reading that something was “bad,” so I’m trying to think and talk about what made it bad, which seems more interesting to writer and reader. I’m expressing that in the form of so-called “betrayed principles,” because that seemed to me like the most thoughtful analytic way of handling my displeasure. Do you disagree with the principles? Do you think there’s a better way of expressing them?

REAL PERSON WHO JUST READ THIS: [is eating pizza, stopped listening]

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August 14, 2005

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767)

by Laurence Sterne

Apparently, John Updike never made it through Tristram Shandy, but I did. That feels pretty good. To quote Updike’s passage directly, “Like many an autodidact I have taken simple-minded pride in finishing a book once I began to read it.”

Updike’s miniature assessment of Tristram seems accurate to me, except for his central assertion that it is boring. “Facetious,” even “chirping,” certainly. But delightfully so. I mean, come on.

Of course, it did take me a very long time to finish it, on a schedule that incorporated several long hiatuses. But that makes sense; Tristram Shandy was published in five separate installments over the course of eight years, and I therefore opted to read it more as five amusing short books than as one long master-book. One hopes that nobody in 250 years is suckered into reading all ten million pages of Harry Potter as though it is a horrifically bloated single work, though arguably it is a horrifically bloated single work. I remember feeling similarly that Bleak House suffered from being reduced to a mere continuity rather than remaining a truly serial experience. Laurence Sterne seems to have believed for a while that he would live off of Tristram indefinitely, publishing new volumes every few years for the rest of his life. Accordingly, the individual volumes are modest in length and charming, while the work taken as a whole is a fair bit overweight. But avoiding boredom is easy; take time off in between installments, just like Sterne did. Don’t know why Updike didn’t see that.

I don’t have any real knowledge of the general nature of 18th-century humor, so maybe this is just ignorant of me, but I was astonished at how well the wit had aged. And the book is indeed mostly wit. Several of the contemporaneous reviews I’ve read refer to the book as a “performance,” and though for all I know that may simply be a standard 18th-century usage, I think it’s telling. The work felt very much like a kind of one-man show, an intricate song-and-dance delivered by a storyteller who blatantly intends to be fascinatingly eccentric. But unlike other “look at me!” writers I’ve read (Vonnegut comes to mind), Sterne completely embraces the standup-act quality of his undertaking and truly takes advantage of his chosen performance medium. Some of it’s sort of like prop comedy of the printed page.

Is it funny when a chapter and 10 pages are missing from the book, and then Sterne/Shandy tells us he tore them out because they were so well-written that they overwhelmed the rest of the work? I think so. Is it funny when the first sentence of a chapter gets tangled in subordinate clauses, drifts off to some other topic, and finally Sterne/Shandy says he needs to start again, and gives it another go in the next chapter? I think it is, yes. It’s a bit Monty Python, that sort of thing. And Monty Python was indeed very clever, back when it was new. The freshness and boldness of Tristram Shandy rang through for me, 250 years later. It’s genuinely clever.

It’s also very funny in a non-gimmicky, situational, frequently bawdy way. I laughed out loud several times; usually at penis-related humor, of which there is plenty. By contrast, the most dated elements are the rather abrupt injections of “sentiment,” generally in the form of lumps in the throats of men feeling deep affection for their loyal friends. The interrelation of these two poles – the sentimental and the vulgar – is in some ways the theme of the book, and one that Sterne, the clergyman and preacher, clearly takes seriously in a spiritual sense. The welling-ups of brotherly love may have seemed a little lame, to me, but the overall message I took away was extremely sympathetic. Roughly, I understood the book to be saying, “God’s Earth is full of all kinds of stuff; tons and tons of stuff. Every imaginable thing can sustain our attention, and everything, from the sacred heights of love to the dirty depths of sex, is part of the picture of what makes up creation and what makes up life. And love isn’t actually all that far from sex, is it. Life is a holy overabundance of tiny things, buttonholes and long noses included. The idea that some things are important and others aren’t is an absurdity; some of the greatest human joy is found in worthless projects and lazy conversations. The title is a red herring in this book about nothing in particular, just as any purported ‘meaning of life’ is a red herring in a creation full of silly, vulgar details. And that’s how a joyous, witty God wanted it.”

The book as a whole may be a bit of an uneven hodgepodge, but the overarching sense of a warm philosophy behind it all came across clearly throughout. At the same time I occasionally got the sense that I wouldn’t want to spend any social time with Sterne, whose self-amusement is tangible. But since I, too, was amused, that impression didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the book. Prior to reading this, I had read A Sentimental Journey, the work he began immediately after the final volume of Tristram and left incomplete at his death. I think it may actually be more successful in conveying a similar philosophical message, and a finer literary product as well. But Tristram is the more memorable, for sheer volume of comic invention if nothing else.

Reading Dickens, one frequently feels the thrill of being in the presence of bold, durable, archetype-creating characters. Sterne draws his characters much less efficiently and with some false steps, but by the end, Walter Shandy, Uncle Toby, and Corporal Trim are similarly vivid, charming little people. By the late scenes of Toby and Trim (such as the one in which Trim attempts to tell Toby the story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles but never really gets past the title), I felt that thrill, the joy of watching characters who were so strong as to seem “famous,” for want of a better word. A bit like the pleasure of actually reading the conversations of Don Quixote and Sancho, or Holmes and Watson, or even watching Casablanca: that’s really them, you think, and they’re really doing that thing they do, in all its glory. That’s about the strongest praise I can think of for this kind of characterization.

The various famous “goodies” – the black page, the marble page, the blank page, the line diagrams of the narrative, etc. etc. – all these things are actually fun, when they arise. Knowing about them in advance, out of context, as I did, just detracts from their proper value within the text. Sure, maybe this is an early “modernist” novel, in that it’s full of gimmicks and talks about itself and doesn’t do what it says it’s going do. But, you know, so’s Don Quixote (a direct, acknowledged influence on Sterne), and if I was a real scholar I bet I could find a bunch of other examples. In the final analysis, “whimsically self-referential” (or “whimsically unconventional”) is just one of a thousand things a book can be. It’s a tool, a device that doesn’t carry with it any particular aesthetic value. Tristram is a charming book, a funny book, and a humane book. It happens to use the device of “whimsically self-referential” to excellent effect. Let’s be impressed by the effect rather than the device. I don’t think I have the stomach to read this (report on its predecessor to come), but I’m led to understand that it’s the most recent tick on the prison wall of books that are full of gimmicks because they believe that GIMMICKS ARE MAGIC. Gimmicks are not magic. Don’t be dissuaded from reading Tristram Shandy by overemphasis on the gimmickry. Sterne knew what he was doing.

Tristram Shandy is an early “modernist” novel in a more important sense of the word “modernist” – its catholic embrace of all things high and low as equally significant. It’s the forward-looking philosophy of the book that has kept it alive. People often ask how Thomas Jefferson (or some such person) would manage if transported into the present day. I think Laurence Sterne, for one, would manage quite well. He saw and commented on all the particulars of his time, but from a perspective well above and beyond that culture. I understand why Joyce took him as a model for Finnegans Wake.

No “original edition cover” for this one – you had to get your own binding, back then. Here’s the attractively bound set of first editions that’s been going at abebooks.com for just under $30,000.

And here’s the title page and frontispiece from volume one (7th edition, as you can see).

Several online editions are available. For some reason, internet folk seem to love Tristram Shandy. A lot of them talk about how it’s a sort of proto-hypertext (get over yourselves, people!). I personally think it’s because of the gimmicks. Anyway, I can’t imagine really reading this whole book off a screen. For what it’s worth, this one makes a point of maintaining all the original formatting quite strictly, as does this one (albeit with all kinds of annoying HTML navigation and “annotations”). This is of course just plain text. I read the Oxford edition and found the footnotes (and layout) extremely satisfying. Far superior to the Norton Critical edition, which I also glanced through.

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August 8, 2005

Scriabin: Prometheus (1910)

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915)

Prometheus
The Poem of Fire
for large orchestra and piano with
organ, chorus and light keyboard
Op. 60

~23 min.

This may be the most unnerving piece of music I know. I mean that as a good thing. I’ve been listening to it a lot recently because I like the way it’s unnerving.

Enjoying it requires investing some time in listening repeatedly – it’s not particularly “easy” – but it’s well worth the effort. The three main reasons that it’s not “easy”: 1) The crucial melodies/motifs are rather eccentric and aren’t likely to “catch” too firmly on a first listening. 2) The piece is long, with many distinct episodes, but the form isn’t clear, so it’s easy to feel structurally lost. 3) What the piece is famous for (well, one of the two things): it’s made up almost entirely of variants on a single chord (“The Prometheus Chord”), which means there are very few clear harmonic guideposts to help the listener. The harmony is in fact handled brilliantly, but on the first several listens the sense of homogeneity will probably be numbing.

Once you’ve gotten on its wavelength, these things all end up being really marvelous characteristics of the piece. The strange little melodies are, I think, some of the best in late Scriabin. They’re more cleanly carved than a lot of his other melodies, at least to my ears. He had a fascination with fragmentation that I think undermined the listenability of some of his other works from this period, but in Prometheus, the fragments are bold little molecules full of character, and once you know them, the whole thing sings continuously. There are four or five very short ideas that make up most of the material in the piece, and two or three less important ideas that account for the rest of it. It’s actually not that much to learn, but because they are so short, it takes some listening before you can hear them and remember them as melodies.

As for the form: the long, ambiguous course of the piece is still a little confusing to me (and I’ve been spending a lot of time with it these past few weeks), but the overall flow is compelling once you have a rough sense of the landscape. I never like it when liner notes describe a piece as “building to a series of climaxes,” because I think it’s a worthless description; that said, this piece builds to a series of climaxes, and now that I know the particular character of each of those climaxes, I feel comfortable enough following the piece’s progress even though I can’t see any clear scheme that governs it.

The reason the form of the piece is so difficult to map is probably because, like several of Scriabin’s other works, it has an explicit – and yet totally abstract – mystical program. As I understand it, it’s about man’s place in the cosmos; man as a rebel who steals the power of creation from the eternal gods (hence the title). Some of the musical motives have to do with the life and efforts of man; some of them have to do with the universe/the eternal/nature/god. The solo piano is man, sort of. The chorus that joins toward the end is all mankind. Scriabin may have been a bit of a nut, but I’m willing to take this stuff moderately seriously.* But without more specific play-by-play information, I can’t use it to help me make sense of the overall structure.

Nonetheless, the really remarkable thing about this piece is that it actually sounds like a piece about man and the cosmos. At times it sounds like it’s about something even more awesome and unthinkable than that. Frankly, I think it’s absolutely terrifying. I’ve heard people say that Scriabin’s music is sexual, or spiritual, but for me, the strongest connection is with horror. I’m talking about heavy-duty horror of the unknown, “cosmic and uncanny” in the Lovecraftian sense. Several times while listening to the piece and getting a creepy feeling of supernatural discomfort, I’ve been reminded of Arthur Machen’s The White People, and in particular this passage:

“Then, on the other hand, we underrate evil. We attach such an enormous importance to the ‘sin’ of meddling with our pockets (and our wives) that we have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin.”

“And what is sin?” said Cotgrave.

“I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?

“Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is.”

Scriabin’s late works, like horror of the Machen variety, have some of that power of overwhelming one with a sense of something being profoundly wrong, something weird and sour in the center of your mind.** Some of the strangest, most pungent sensations I have ever experienced have been tiny flickers of weirdness, neither smells nor sounds nor textures but reminiscent of them, that every now and then pop into my head, particularly when I’m exhausted or sick. I’ve compared notes on this experience and I know that at least some of my friends have occasionally experienced something similar. Scriabin’s best music reminds me a bit of those weird, wrong, not-quite sensations. He takes some peculiar, gooey little idea – usually containing a single chord-change and a temperamental melodic fragment – and then obsesses over it. The weirdness never explains itself, it just is; over and over and over, looked at from every point of view, built in to all sorts of different configurations, but never evolving into anything other than itself, like a creepy Magritte man who turns around to reveal that his head is continuous back, but no face. There are some very beautiful moments in Prometheus that induce in me a kind of exquisite nausea.

I get some of the same creepy-crawly uncanny-beauty feeling from Tristan und Isolde, actually, and I think it’s part of the experience that one is expected to have with that piece (it’s certainly part of the experience you’re expected to have with the faux Tristan score to Vertigo). But Wagner’s idea was to delay resolution at great length, to create a heightened sense of striving and yearning. At the end of the opera, famously, the resolution comes as promised. Scriabin’s music, too, strives and yearns, but not for any earthly closure we can anticipate. Prometheus certainly creates a sense of expectation, but it’s hardly the expectation of resolution. It’s more like the expectation that the fabric of reality will tear open. Or, to put it another way, the expectation that the universe will end and all creation will be reunited with its creator in transcendent, incomprehensible flaming oblivion.

Which is indeed what happens.

Programatically speaking, of course. It happens in the form of a terrifying, tremendous, world-destroying chord; quite possibly the loudest in all music. By contrast, the piece Scriabin was working on when he died, Mysterium, was meant to actually end the world. Seriously. Luckily for those of us who like the world, he didn’t manage to write very much of it.***

The real climax of the piece a few minutes earlier, an enormous flaring ball of overwhelming awe, never fails to give me goosebumps. It could kick Daphnis et Chloé‘s ass.

Scriabin commissioned a special cover illustration for the score from fellow wild-eyed mystic Jean Delville, who had concidentally already painted this on essentially the same exact theme. Delville’s work in general seems to me to be a very good match for Scriabin, albeit much inferior – there’s something trashy and overbearing about a lot of it, like fantasy-novel covers. But there’s no question that he too had his finger on something inexplicably terrifying. I’m never clicking on that link again. I think I’m gonna have nightmares.

Anyway, Delville’s Prometheus cover is really amazing and a perfect, perfect match for the piece. Sadly, it hasn’t been reproduced very often or well since the first editions. I have the following lovely scan courtesy of the Sibley Music Library at the Eastman School of Music. The clipping at the top and right side apparently occured during binding, long ago. Oh well.

The end of the piece sounds exactly like that picture.

That’s actually the cover from the original two-piano reduction by Sabaneyev, a ridiculously dense, viciously difficult arrangement that’s nonetheless a convenient way of studying the score. And you can (quite legally) download a pdf of the whole thing here!

Here’s a smaller scan I found online of the unclipped cover as it appeared on the full score, plus the title page from the original pocket score (first issued somewhat later).

Koussevitzky’s publishing house, the Edition Russe de Musique, had offices in Berlin as well as Moscow and St. Petersburg, and I get the impression that the different locations sometimes issued different covers for the same scores – French for the European market and Russian for Russia. Hence the rather different cover designs seen here. That’s my guess anyway.

Recordings: I’ve heard several recordings, and none of them really struck me as perfect. Nobody seems to want to take Scriabin’s melodies seriously – conductors and pianists just revel in the harmonies and textures and don’t properly deliver the actual rhetoric of the piece. Everyone also plays everything a lot slower than Scriabin marked it. I’ve read reviews saying that Ashkenazy’s performance is the best and I haven’t heard that one. I’ll let you know when I do. Because of the excellent sound quality and instrumental polish, the one I’ve been listening to is the recent Gergiev/Toradze recording. But I’m sure the piece can be done better.

The one thing I haven’t mentioned is the second of the two things for which this piece is famous: the “light keyboard.” What is a light keyboard? It’s an imaginary instrument; you play it like an organ but instead of sound it produces light. There’s a part for it in the score; certain notes correspond to certain colors. Has it ever existed? No. But people talk about this ambitious, nutty idea a lot more often than they talk about the music itself. You can bet that absolutely any discussion of “visual music” will eventually touch on Prometheus.

The reason I haven’t talked about it here is because for most intents and purposes, it isn’t part of the experience of listening to this piece. Some live performances attempt to realize the light part in some form or another – read all about it – but Scriabin himself never saw it performed with lights. I know I certainly haven’t, and I still like it.

I’m also putting off talking about the light thing because I’ve got a little multimedia presentation in the works but it’s not done yet. Stay tuned.

Addendum 11/05 – Okay, now it’s done!

*In college I took a seminar on 20th-century music where Scriabin was discussed. After distributing a handout containing outlandish quotes from Scriabin about the relevance of mystico-sexual energies in his life and work, the professor furrowed his brow and tentatively said, “I think we should try not to just dismiss this.” As I recall we didn’t live up to his request and he didn’t really know what to say either. I respected his attempt, though.

**I’ve read that John Ireland composed several works explicitly in relation to Machen’s writing. I’m certainly curious about those, though I suspect they’re more “mystical British pastoral” rather than “world-rending horror.”

***I’m not sure why this hasn’t been made into a sci-fi/occult movie, yet. I mean, we’re talking about actual madman-style end-of-the-world plans, here! The story would start with someone discovering a previously unknown complete copy of the score, and then it would get stolen by a mysterious group of villains, and our hero has to find them and stop them from performing it. The movie would be called Mysterium, obviously. Someone needs to tell Jerry Bruckheimer about this. Or Dan Brown, or Neal Stephenson, or some other jerk.****

**** Addendum 1/06: I have been roundly encouraged to take this ridiculous suggestion seriously (along with some other related ridiculous suggestions), so as of now, that other jerk is me. Hands off, everyone! Don’t worry, I’ll keep you all posted regarding the movie rights and the tie-in CD. Boffo, Lenny! Socko, Lenny!

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August 2, 2005

The Sound of Music (1965)

directed by Robert Wise
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
after the stage musical (1959) by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse
music by Richard Rodgers
lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
based on the book The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (1949) by Maria Augusta Trapp

Another one on the big outdoor screen. The crowd was dead-set on audience participation and insisted on it like it was a right, even when the movie resisted. Some of the crowd swayed their arms during “Climb Every Mountain.” People eagerly hissed at the baroness, even during her “graceful exit” speech, and booed at Rolf, even when he was just gearing up to sing “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” Mind you, I wasn’t at this. It was just a showing of the movie. But people seem to really believe that an opportunity to clap in rhythm and shout during a movie must not be passed up. The whole phenomenon of Rocky Horror Picture Show-style congregational ritualization of movie-watching is interesting to me, in part because I truly don’t feel the impulse. Seems like movie-watching is already inherently ritualistic.

The movies that tend to invite this kind of treatment are, basically, “fabulous movie musicals!” It’s not just because musicals have songs – it’s because there’s something both artifical/irrational and utterly rock-solid confident about the way they’re presented. They’re sort of magnetic that way, in the way a charismatic cult leader might be magnetic. I’m still curious to hear a really good explanation of why “the gay community” has traditionally gravitated toward things like over-the-top musicals and female cabaret singers, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with these same qualities.

When Julie Andrews ended “My Favorite Things” with a series of stagy postures ecstatically clutching drapery, I thought, “wow, she’s doing something that makes no human sense, but emphatically and with utter assurance! This is what the material demands – and yet who would dare do this today?” Her character’s desire to feel self-possessed in her new and intimidating home is symbolized, fairly absurdly, by her desire to make new clothes for the children; the idea that she has obstacles to overcome is symbolized, again absurdly, by the Captain’s cold refusal to purchase materials for these new clothes; her eventual victory over obstacles is symbolized, quite absurdly, by her realization that the old drapes (she has gratuitously been told that the drapes are to be replaced) can provide her with materials; and her sense of self-assurance is, yes, symbolized by her triumphant musical revelry among the drapes. Symbol upon symbol upon symbol until what we are seeing is more ritual than life. Stylized out of all reality, but not yet out of all meaning.

I took a course on Nazi propaganda film techniques, the most interesting notion in which was that footage of enormous marching hordes, like Busby Berkeley spectaculars, were compelling for their patterns even though those patterns had no “meaning.” “Empty signifiers,” or something like that. “My Favorite Things” is far from an empty signifier, but it’s been stylized in that direction. All the old “fabulous” movie musicals tend toward the meaningless – the purely aesthetic – and audiences frequently love them for their emptiness rather than their significance. The audience shouted “boo” at the Nazis in The Sound of Music like they were so many Professor Coldhearts* and not an actual historical political reality that posed an actual threat to this actual family. And who could blame them? The next thing you know we’re watching a puppet show about goats.

What I mean is that stylized, half-empty signifiers are closer to ritual already and thus invite a kind of frenzy of participatory enthusiasm. (Just ask Rolf!) There’s some deep-programmed (very useful) human impulse toward social ritual. Hence the people dressing up to be a part of the violently meaningless Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the people dying to find a way to incorporate themselves into “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?” Not clear why homosexuality should tie in to this, but I will say that the gay attitude, that of “camp,” has something to do with the poignancy of simultaneously recognizing the absurd emptiness and wanting to be it. The scariest thing about Nazi propaganda was that Nazis didn’t seem to realize that the desire to be a part of shiny-uniformed mass ritual was indulgent, meaningless, and therefore possibly dangerous. Sing-Along The Sound of Music, on the other hand, seems to consciously identify itself as “indulgent” and “meaningless.” Phew.

There’s more to be said in that direction, obviously, but lets just wrap this up with some stuff about the movie.

When I was a kid and this would come on TV, I’d always give up after the first half hour, and watching it again, I remembered why. After “The Sound of Music,” none of the next three songs is satisfying. “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria” is the most plot-bound song in the movie and has that extra layer of opera-style clumsiness that musicals get when they try to explain what’s going on. The sheer lameness of that nun having to sternly say “A clown!” in both choruses puts me in a bad mood. Plus, the song is musically arbitrary. It neither sounds like nuns nor people trying to solve a problem like Maria; it tries to be both amusement and disapproval and ends up being basically the same half-assed barnyard song as “Everything’s Up To Date in Kansas City.” Not that I don’t whistle it; I’m just saying it’s lame.

Then the movie original “I Have Confidence,” which is really well filmed (and Julie Andrews wears a pretty cool hat during this number, I must say!) but never quite convinces me that it’s a real song. The introductory verse is a big mush of nothing, and then when it picks up with the real melody, it just doesn’t have enough personality to recover from our sense of being lost in mush. The performance far outweighs the material, which encourages distracted, lazy viewing in 8-year-olds watching it on TV.

Then the clincher, “Sixteen Going On Seventeen.” This song, as anyone can see in retrospect, doesn’t belong in the movie. None of the other kids gets an identity like Liesl does, and though the Rolf-grows-up-bad storyline deserves some screen time, this song doesn’t really relate to it. In fact I was a bit taken aback by the not-all-that-coy sexual undertones of the song, at least as presented here. The boyfriend says, “boys will want to do things to you that you wouldn’t understand, but don’t worry, I’ll take care of you, wink wink” and then she says, “ooh yes, I don’t know what you could possibly mean, wink wink, please take care of me, wink wink.” Maybe the original intent was for them to seem innocent and the “I’ll take care of you” to be amusing in its naivete, but it all read to me as a genuine “do you know where your sixteen-going-on-seventeen-year-old is?” warning. Naturally, this doesn’t make any sense to an 8-year-old, and at this point the movie really seems to have wandered off course. Why, why, after dinner, did we follow this girl out here to sing with this guy we’ve never even seen before? I always felt like I was in over my head by that point.

The movie is interesting for seeming like it has a sequel right in it. Once Maria and Captain Von Trapp get married, it really feels like everything has been wrapped up tight and what follows smells a bit like some writer’s clever pitch for “The Von Trapp Family 2.” Now they’re married, but the whole family is threatened by the Nazis and has to flee by singing in a festival! Brilliantly faithful to the original, but with a whole new twist. Obviously, that’s not how any of this was written. I’m just saying; it has that “same characters, new type of plot” quality that sequels do.

The movie really looks lovely throughout, and apart from putting her hand on her head every five seconds, Julie Andrews carries it all very gracefully. There’s something eager and focussed about the way it’s all shot and edited. It never gets tripped up in its own plot, like a lot of sillier musicals, and it never forgets to try to please the crowd. It’s old-fashioned theater thinking in its maturity, just before the call of “but look how ridiculous she looks clutching those drapes!” tore down the whole tissue-thin establishment.

I tried to find the 1st edition (1949) cover of Maria’s book, but no luck, though the book itself doesn’t seem to be rare at all. Here are two post-Broadway, pre-movie softcovers.

* Look it up yourself.

July 29, 2005

The Phantom of the Opera (1925/1929)

directed by Rupert Julian
screenplay by Elliott Clawson
after the novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910) by Gaston Leroux

79 min.

This movie has a complicated history in addition to having been a complicated collaboration, and the credits above don’t really do justice to any of that. But oh well. You can go read about it on one of the thousand “Phantom of the Opera” fan sites out there.

(1925/1929) because the original 1925 release of the movie was heavily reworked with new material for a re-release in 1929, and that’s the version that’s generally seen, sort of. It’s the version I saw last week, anyway. Sort of. Like I said, check your local library for details.

People say that this movie is still creepy, that it has remained effective as horror, etc. That’s sweet to say, but it’s misleading. To watch an old movie sympathetically, especially as stiff and stagy a movie as this, you have to accommodate all the dated mannerisms and absurdities; you have to translate from the dead filmic language of the era. That translation process, to me, sometimes feels like internal amplification: the movie shows me something that, because it is so dated, imparts only a very slight emotional effect to me, and then I intentionally amplify that emotion so that I can see it as important. The amplification is my responsibility, and no matter how subconsciously I do it, I’m always quite capable of not doing it. What I’m saying is that since this movie is inescapably of its time, it feels fundamentally harmless. Real horror needs to feel threatening. I always felt that I was much, much less frightened than the people on screen. I don’t think that’s true for, say, Dracula (1931) or Nosferatu (1922), which each contain moments that still manage to have a true, sustaining creepiness.

But The Phantom of the Opera definitely has stuff in it that’s aged very well. Lon Chaney’s phantom face was both effective as “horrible” and also kind of fun to look at; I kept hoping we would see more of it. The movie seemed most alive when his ugly face was on screen. The version we saw had a very attractive restoration/recreation of the original “hand-tinting” of his red cape in the scene on the rooftop. The sheer intensity of that unearthly billowing blotch of color was also still pretty exciting.

The effect of the movie is pretty well summed up by the scene (apparently famous but I’d never seen it before) when the phantom is first unmasked. Suspense builds up and then with a calculated suddenness, his pruny face is screaming right at the camera.

It’s clearly a bald attempt to scare everyone as much as possible, and it’s fun and exciting as such. On the other hand, it’s basically the facial equivalent of the venerable word “Boo!” and about as effective. “Boo!” isn’t horror, it’s “horror,” and so is this movie. It’s showmanship circa 1925, and that’s fun to see. But while the source story seems to contain a note of actual subterranean creepiness, this movie is pretty much just a melodrama about a crazy man who kidnaps a pretty girl.

Of course, I’ve never read the source material, and I didn’t know much about it until I started poking around online a few days ago. It’s really pretty schlocky stuff! Somehow Hollywood had tricked me into believing that The Phantom of the Opera was some kind of literature and that “Gaston Leroux” pretty much just meant “Victor Hugo.” But no. Gaston Leroux was a potboiler schlockmeister! I guess I could have guessed that from the presence of a character named “Raoul.” Not to mention “Erik.”

The first editions of Le Fantôme had several charming illustrations by André Castaigne that were quite explicitly restaged in the movie. You can see them all linked from this page. The picture below, of the first American edition, was pulled from Abebooks.com, where it’s going for $1450.

Here are the jackets of a few other Leroux works found on Abebooks (as well as the “Photoplay” edition of Phantom and a pulpy later one). I must admit my curiosity is piqued. A brief bio online ends with these tantalizing sentences:

In the novella The Burgled Heart (tr. 1925) Leroux employed supernatural elements – the astral body of a French woman is abducted by an English artist. The Kiss that Killed (tr. 1934) and The Machine to Kill (tr. 1935) featured a vampire and a robot as murderers.

I saw The Phantom of the Opera at an outdoor screening, which was cool, accompanied live by the Alloy Orchestra, who I tend to think are a bit overrated. I’m glad that they do this sort of thing, and I even like that they use unusual instrumentation – the musical saw was an excellent choice for The Phantom, I thought – but as film composers they just aren’t so hot. For The Phantom, they did what anyone would do: they wrote a lugubrious little main theme featuring organ (natch) under a musical saw “ghostly voice” melody. Musically it sounded like something out of Amélie. It wasn’t bad, as far as it went, but though it sounded like it might well portray a “Phantom of The Opera,” it didn’t live very comfortably with this particular movie itself. In fact, they had the phantom playing it during his scene at the organ, despite the fact that he is explicitly shown to be playing “Don Juan Triumphant,” the opening bars of which are shown on the screen – typical fanfares and such. The intertitles have him saying something like, “Listen! It is the triumph of love! But underneath, do you hear it? A note of warning!” Meanwhile the Alloy Orchestra is rocking away confidently at their cobwebby variation on “Zelda Dungeon.”

The end of the movie (in this version) is a big chase through the streets of Paris. Alloy resorted to pounding on their gongs and anvils whenever it was time to indicate action, which maybe works for a minute, but not for three minutes. Monotonous accompaniment is a disservice to the picture – it’s like the music is saying, “well, this is all basically the same kind of stuff, building up.” I felt like Alloy was making the scene boring. If I’ve learned anything from John Williams, it’s that good action scoring treats every stupid little thing like it’s a big deal. Star Wars would fall completely flat on its face if that music wasn’t there telling us that every explosion matters. Or else it takes the long view and portrays it all as epic. Alloy could easily have made the phantom’s final chase into the height of tragedy by playing truly against the action and having the musical saw sing over it all. But no; they chose to play the action in the dumbest way possible. I was frustrated.

I was also frustrated that all the opera and ballet performance scenes were scored with that same crappy fake-classical synthesizer junk you hear all over the place. You know, the bad fake oboe sound and the bad fake pizzicato sounds twiddling around ineffectually. That stuff always makes me feel like I’m drinking discolored post-Froot Loops milk. Uugh.

By far the best modern scores for silents are those by Carl Davis, and I see he did one for the Phantom. I want to see that and compare.

One last thing: at this showing, the second projector burned out spectacularly in the middle of the movie, with a puff of smoke, and so after that point, we had to stop and wait for a minute or two during reel changes. That was a throwback I’d never really thought about before, but I enjoyed it. It took me back to a time when movies were still finding their own feet, formally. This movie had chapters! It was like turning the page to see what happens next, or waiting for the next installment of a serialized novel. To their credit, Alloy improvised appropriately through the breaks, which strongly suggested operatic “scene change music”, or even vaudevillian scene change music. I think it would actually be a nice thing for a group like Alloy to intentionally work in: brief, pre-composed musical interludes between reels. There’s something classical and satisfying about formal divisions like those when they’re done wholeheartedly.

Afterthought, a few hours later: it’s not really right for me to dismiss the unmasking scene as “not actual horror,” when it would have, I’m quite sure, scared all the willies out of me when I was younger. I’m still quite susceptible to the “scary face in your face!” school of scares. A movie that has a scary enough face lurking somewhere in it is for me completely suffused with horror, because it is indeed “threatening.” So my sense that this movie wasn’t really scary was due primarily to my comfort with Lon Chaney’s pig-nose and puffy cheeks. But that’s just me, and me as I am now. If you think his face is scary, the movie works, because it has that weapon and uses it pretty well. And yes, the makeup has aged well; as I said, there’s something magnetic about that face. So I understand why people say this movie retains power. It’s a credit to Lon, who designed the makeup himself.

July 28, 2005

Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within (1995)

designed and written by Jane Jensen
film directed by Will Binder

developed for PC and published by Sierra On-Line

For those of you who don’t know what this is, this is a computer game. This is the second of three “Gabriel Knight” adventure games put out by Sierra between 1993 and 1999. I’d played the other two already. If you read websites that discuss computer adventure games (and there’s no reason why you should) you’ll find that these games are much-beloved – though the term “much-beloved” means little on the internet, where it seems that every cultural misbirth has a thriving community of passionate fans. For my part, I played a lot of these sorts of games when I was younger, and I’m still very much interested in how people have solved the problem of combining a game with a story component. So, yeah, I’ve read a lot of websites about these games, and though it seems clear that the writers are generally horrible geeks, I take their recommendations seriously. The geeks roundly recommend Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within. Not just the geeks, in fact: check out the press quotes at the designer’s site, including an “A-” from Entertainment Weekly and praise from Billboard, Rolling Stone, Time Out New York, and others. Obviously, I had to eventually play this one. So I played it.

What the nostalgic geeks specifically say about this game is that it was one of the very best of the “full-motion video” games. There was a trend in the mid-90s to build games around huge video clips. Why did game designers do this? Pretty much “because they could.” CD drives had become standard and suddenly games could have hundreds and hundreds of megabytes worth of data. I think the thinking went something like, “We’re always trying to promote games by calling them ‘interactive movies.’ Now that we have all this extra storage space, we can just put actual movies right in the game! One giant leap closer to real interactive movies!” But this is stupid, as anyone who’s ever played a computer game can tell you.

One reason that it’s stupid is that the interaction between “story” and “game” is already a delicate and awkward one – this will be the subject of an eventual entry – and extended movie clips, no matter how lovely they might look, are fundamentally non-interactive and thus unsatisfying, because they ruin that balance.

Also, and more obviously, it’s stupid because the video clips inevitably didn’t look lovely at all. It takes a lot of money to make film look “right.” Even the best acting can come across as a little flat when it’s on video, or even on that lesser film stock that I think of as “miniseries-grade.” So imagine the emotional impact of bad acting captured sloppily on compressed computer video. Now imagine buying a “game” and finding that the experience of playing it consisted primarily of watching such video. That’s why “full-motion video” games were bad.

So fine, this game might in fact be one of the best of the form, but who cares? It’s all still a grotesque mistake. In fact, it’s not even interesting for me to complain about the foolishness of the video-based design, or the production values, or the acting – ggguh – or any number of other things like that. That stuff goes entirely without saying. (Though it is, truly, embarrassing to watch.)

What was a surprise to me was that the game didn’t redeem itself in other ways. I sort of went into this expecting that, sure, the video itself will be sub-soap-opera and ugly to look at, but the game could still be fun. But it wasn’t.

Here’s the part of the review where I tell you what the game’s about. The game’s about Gabriel Knight, and if you played the first game (Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers) you know that Gabriel Knight is a contrived protagonist who has recently learned that he is the last of a long line of ancient European ghostbusters. He’s a lovable cad, or so the games tell us over and over, though he rarely does anything truly lovable or caddish. He has an assistant, Grace, with whom there is a great deal of very potent sexual tension, or so the games tell us over and over, though in fact there isn’t any. But Gabriel Knight does indeed have flowing, Fabio-esque hair. (Google gives me 641 hits for “Fabio-esque.”) Basically, he’s just a slightly romance-noveled-up version of every cardboard dude who ever “get rope”d his way through an adventure game. The game designer, however, seems to think she’s got real character interest on her hands, and in every one of these games, irritates me by spending a lot of time trying to wring drama out of it. I cringe to think of all these internet people who seem to have actually cared whether “Gabriel Knight” and “Grace Nakimura” would ever sleep together. I guess there are people for whom there can never be enough Mulders in this world, nay, nor surfeit of Scullys. Google gives me 0 hits for “surfeit of Scullys.”

For these very same people there can never be enough Da Vinci Codes, and so it’s fitting that Gabriel Knight author Jane Jensen (don’t look now but I think she herself might be one of those people) builds her plots out of that same mixture of encyclopedia research and public domain schlock. Now, it may sound like I’m writing off all manner of Indiana Jonesery, but I actually get a kick out of it when it’s done well. I actually really enjoyed the trashy mix in the first Gabriel Knight game, which basically combined the “secret conspiracy Temple of Doom” concept with the “New Orleans is the home of voodoo” stuff. It worked in a nice, by-the-book way, and when at the end of the game I finally got to go down the secret elevator right in the middle of New Orleans and infiltrate the vast underground hounfour I sincerely thought, “cool!”

On the other hand, the third Gabriel Knight game (Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned – I know, it’s hard even for me to believe I played a game with that title) typified the worst excesses of this sort of would-be-historical casserole. It took the Dan Brown/Foucault’s Pendulum elements (you know, Templars, The Priory of Sion, bullshit) and mixed in… vampires who seek to drink the blood of Christ’s descendants. The climax included a sanctimonious 3D computer rendering of the crucifixion, among other tasteless things. An “if you want to learn more” bibliographical note in the manual uncritically recommended checking out the infamously skeevy book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. It all left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

This, the second episode, is not so tasteless as the third but not half as palatable as the first. The concept: werewolves, in Germany. The mysterious death of Ludwig II of Bavaria (of Neuschwanstein fame) is easily explained when one realizes that he had recently been bitten by a werewolf and thus was one. He commissioned Richard Wagner to write an opera that, when the sound was refracted through a series of crystal chandeliers, would cause his attacker to be revealed by causing him to transform into a wolf right in the opera house. However, this plan was never put into action and the opera was lost. Gabriel Knight, asked to investigate a wolf-related killing, becomes involved with a men’s club run by an aristocratic werewolf (the son of Ludwig’s attacker), is eventually bitten by another werewolf and ultimately has to put on Wagner’s lost opera in order to kill the head werewolf to save his eternal soul. Which he does. He does not however sleep with Grace until the third game.

This stuff is, unfortunately, stupid in a non-standard way and thus hard to swallow even if you’re ready for silly junk. I mean, seriously, an opera (by Wagner, no less)? Maybe if you convinced me that the opera had some sort of spell in it, but this is just some singing. As a classical music person, I was of course looking forward to seeing how the game’s abominable composer would tackle the “previously unknown opera by Wagner” problem. I’m sorry to say that the opera is neither impressive (as if!) nor astonishingly bad an any kind of fun way. It’s just your typical klunky fake-classical synthesizer writing that doesn’t have anything to do with Wagner; exactly what you’d expect. But it is actually sung, in an excruciatingly long and chintzy-looking video, by trained singers in silly costumes.

Ms. Jensen has, as usual, done a poor job of integrating her research (about Germany, Ludwig II, etc.), typified by one particulary egregious portion of the game in which Grace is forced to go to several museums and look at every exhibit. A couple of game-relevant lies are mixed in among the exhibits, but mostly it’s just information from tourist guidebooks, repackaged and made tedious in an all-too-obvious attempt to be “intelligent.”

The game is completely riddled with the classic adventure game puzzle-plot-structure flaws.

1) Plot-progressing game events that are triggered by unrelated actions. i.e. a phone call that you won’t receive until you’ve looked at a certain painting in another location. This is a lazy way for the designers to force-order a linear series of plot events. It just creates a lot of worthless dead time for the player, who must frequently resign himself to exhaustively doing absolutely everything possible until he hits upon the action that happens to trigger the next segment of the game. (And even then, he may not realize what he’s accomplished and will have to exhaustively check every corner of the game to see if anything’s changed.) This is sometimes known as “thrashing” in the adventure-game-criticism world. A lot of thrashing in this game. Gabriel Knight 3 was worse. All three games are pretty bad about it.

2) Actions that only make sense in retrospect and are thus unguessable. i.e. purchasing a cuckoo clock for the sole purpose of placing it behind a plant and setting the alarm to distract an attendant so you can search his desk when he goes to investigate the sound. Prior to the point in the game involving this puzzle, the cuckoo clock store is closed. Then it silently becomes open when the puzzle arises, but the player must click on it whenever he passes in order to notice this. There is no way to test the sound of the alarm in advance, nor is there any indication that a distracting sound is called for. We do not even know that we need to search the desk. The game only shows us that the desk attendant is slightly annoying and that there is a locked door elsewhere in the building. From the player’s point of view, buying a cuckoo clock, setting it to go off, putting it in the plant, waiting for the desk attendant to go check on it, searching his desk and finding the key, and then unlocking the locked door…this series of actions is simply unguessable and therefore must be arrived at by: thrashing.

3) Interactivity that is not thought-based. i.e. clicking on every possible choice in a dialogue “menu” in order to have a conversation. Or, again, clicking on every exhibit in a room at a museum. Sure, it’s interactive insofar as, if left unattended, the game will not play out the way a movie would. But 90% of the player actions in this game are, truly, merely part of the absolutely necessary campaign of clicking on everything presented as clickable. No, really, NINETY PERCENT. This is interactive in the same sense that a filmstrip projector is interactive.

The game is, in fact, a lot like a filmstrip. I was reminded several times of Hypercard. When the designers decided to go with the full-motion video approach, I guess they figured that the actual interactive portions of the game might as well be almost static, since every reasonable action would have a full video to go with it. The upshot of this dumb decision is that when the video is over and you’re returned to “the game,” you’re basically looking at a crappy still image. At the end of every video clip, the actors solemnly step back to their static positions and hold still in order to “match” the frozen absurdity of the subsequent game screen.

Okay, yeah, and the acting and dialogue. Whew. Gabriel, who was lazily voiced in the other two games by actual actor Tim Curry, is here portrayed by a guy who looks remarkably like Conan O’Brien mugging his way through a skit. Here’s a picture of him doing his trademark “thing where he scrunches up his lips” to show that he is reacting to something; in this case, to having looked out a window and seen some trees.

Grace is whiny, constantly attempts a “sarcastic” delivery that doesn’t work, and outright shrieks with maniacal rage delivering lines apparently meant simply to show frustration. I don’t have a picture of her, but here’s her hands with what WorldCat suggests must be Richard Wagner: Paraphrasen und Transkriptionen aus seinen Bühnenwerke, Schott, 1982.

The other item in this picture is purportedly Cosima Wagner’s diary, out of which Grace, who does not speak German, is conveniently about to read in perfect English. Don’t get me started about the German in this game.

The game took me around 12 hours of play (and that’s with frequent, shameless online cheating), which I spread, because I had little patience for it, over many many weeks. 12 hours is considered a short game (and spending any longer on this game just means spending more time thrashing around, because I saw absolutely everything there was to see, most of it repeatedly), but in the real world, it’s a long damn time, and there’s just no excuse for it. In closing, and to summarize, this was not a good game.

I know that, in light of how beloved this game is among geeks, some of my disgust here may read a bit like Harold Bloom’s review of Harry Potter. But I think condemning this game is actually important. No, seriously. There are a lot of people out there who, like me, are disappointed that the video game industry has so thoroughly turned its back on the design concepts of the “adventure game” genre. If we really want there to be new adventure games, or at least a further development of the underlying ideas, we need to acknowledge that most of the old adventure games were utter crap. This game was, in every essential, trash, and anyone who’s not an adventure game geek would see that immediately. That’s an important test. Video game designers would do well to keep in mind what a non-gamer might think of their wares. This has always been a blind spot for the industry, probably because of the analogous social blind spot for the many nerds who compose it.

Why did Entertainment Weekly give it an A-, then? I’m going to guess it’s because back in 1995, the people writing about video games, even for major publications, were just video game geeks. They mostly still are. So the standards reflected by game reviews in Rolling Stone are no higher or more “mainstream” than the standards reflected by game reviews in Nerd Porn Monthly. Maybe lower, in fact. They just don’t know what they’re talking about. Game players, please: hold games to as high a standard as you can! The standard of your non-gamer friends is so much higher than you can possibly imagine…and yet if games get that good, they will, finally, be a giant leap closer to movies. Not in style, but in scope and audience. Those are the things that actually count.

…um…

And yet, and yet, every game has its “thing going on.” It’s the strange and powerful effect of video games that they force you to live in them no matter how little there’s a “there” there. This game wasn’t a there at all, and yet I feel I’ve been there, and I can all-too-easily imagine myself, years and years from now, thinking, in that knee-jerk nostalgic way my generation knows so well, “hey yeah, remember Gabriel Knight 2? Remember all that crappy video? Oh yeah, that was so fun and quaint and crappy! I’d love to see that again sometime.” But I’m going to militate against that kind of thinking. Because that kind of thinking creeps down, backward through time, until one day it hits the present, and you suddenly have no standards because everything can be, potentially, indulgent nostalgia. And you can’t tell the difference between irony and sincerity and good and bad, and you end up wearing an A-Team T-shirt and saying that everything is “awesome” and the next thing you know everyone is in hell.

At the end of the closing credits of this game, Sierra mentions the use of these patents: 598,174; 658,297; 5,377,997; and 5,430,835.

5,377,997 is the message-handling system underlying the main game engine. Here, for your edification, are figures 2 and 3 of that patent, which *spoiler alert!* reveal what is behind the bush.

5,430,835 is image-to-sound synchronization routines, apparently primarily used for lip-sync purposes, though there was no lip-sync in this game. I always kind of wondered how animated games managed the lip-sync. I might go back and read that one.

598,174 is a Dress Stay, patented by Mr. John Byfield of Chelmsford, Massachusetts on February 1, 1898. He writes, and I quote, “The advantages of this stay are its strength and lightness, it being very strong in proportion to its weight. It not only yields inward or outward, but laterally also, whereas the ordinary style of stay does not yield laterally.”

658,297 is a Water Wheel, patented by Mr. John Williams Taylor of Atlanta, Georgia on September 18, 1900. He writes, and I quote, “It is the object of my invention to provide several important improvements in the class of turbine water-wheels. … My improvements pertain more particularly to gates which are made sensitive and easy working and so arranged exteriorly to the wheel and chute-box and so supported as to work without friction and wear with the parts the gates inclose; also, to a construction and arrangement of parts for operating the gates simultaneously in opposite directions, lengthwise of the chute-boxes, and wheels proper.”

July 18, 2005

Psychonauts (2005)

Tim Schafer, creative director
Erik Robson, lead designer

developed by Double Fine Productions for Xbox and PC
ported to PlayStation 2 by Budcat Creations
published by Majesco Games

This was the first time in several years that I’ve bought and played a recently-released video game. I’ve recently had an upsurge in interest in video games in general and have played several games in short succession, including this one. They’ve all provoked a lot of different thoughts about the subject, and in the course of playing Psychonauts, I was frequently thinking about larger gaming issues. For various reasons, Psychonauts is a good starting point for lots of different discussions about video games in general. But for right now I’m just going to try to review the game itself, and save the broader discussion for another time.

One more general note, though. Most video game reviews tend to focus on somewhat technical aspects of the game design: whether the interface is intuitive, whether there are glitches like 3D objects passing through each other, whether the “load” and “save” functions are helpful or frustrating, etc. etc. I just mention it because I am intentionally going to try to keep the focus away from the technical, even if that means the review feels incomplete. In my view, technical problems like these are a symptom of the immaturity of the video-game form – really basic design questions still need to be resolved by games as a whole. Imagine movie reviews in 1915 being all about whether too many intertitles are distracting, or whether painted backdrops are too fake-looking – those questions are important, but they’re not where the art’s at. On the other hand, they’re the reason that most of today’s games will probably be forgotten as technically insufficient, just like the movies of 1915. BUT THIS IS ALL FOR ANOTHER TIME!

Okay: if one can simply accept the state of the form and of the industry, Psychonauts is an excellent piece of work. It is intelligent and ambitious without being ground-breaking, and can you blame them? If I were a game developer and I wanted to be good and stay in business, I would aspire to make something like Psychonauts. Like the people at Pixar, the people at Double Fine Productions deserve to be immensely proud of themselves. They stayed within the lines and filled them with great stuff.

Better said, they stayed within the technical lines. The game doesn’t make any steps toward resolving the general technical questions mentioned earlier, though it deals with them all thoughtfully. What it does is take all that standard “video game” stuff and use it do something with some actual character. Summer camp for psychic kids is a cute idea that’s right up there with boarding school for wizard kids. Atmosphere and plot are built right in. The plot progression is, in fact, just like a Harry Potter book: the first part is mostly concerned with the everyday challenges of psychic camp (earning psychic merit badges, a campwide scavenger hunt, dealing with counselors and fellow campers), while the second half is a fight against a truly threatening plot. Unlike J.K. Rowling, Psychonauts opts not to take itself very seriously even in this section, and in general the game tries to make each new character or concept as goofy as possible. In retrospect, that makes the game’s plot seem a bit like a mere assemblage of eccentricity, but in the course of playing the game, it’s probably a smart choice: every time the plot progresses, there’s a sense of new, unexpected worlds opening up. I found myself grinning, at one point, when something that had initially seemed like a jokey whim revealed itself to be the basis for several entire levels. I was surprised and delighted that the game had all along been holding this stuff up its sleeve, so to speak.

Still, I’m a bit sorry that the camp and the campers end up being a sideshow to the sillier, more frenzied main thrust of the game. Not to give anything too serious away, at about the halfway point, the game pretty much leaves the camp behind for crazier, cartoonier settings like a monster’s lair, an abandoned insane asylum, and a mad scientist’s laboratory. Part of the success of Toy Story was that it managed to keep the entire story believably within the world of toys and suburban kid-dom; the mad scientist’s laboratory there was the neighbor kid’s bedroom; the journey into the unknown was a drive to the local pizza place. Harry Potter manages to have all his adventures right at Hogwarts Academy. Psychonauts lets itself get a little too loose and squanders some of the charming camp atmosphere it establishes. Given the extremely flexible premise they establish, wherein different levels exist in the minds of different characters, you’d think they could find more coherent ways of providing variety.

On the other hand, a distinct difference between Psychonauts and either Toy Story or Harry Potter is that Psychonauts is a video game and requires, according to most reviews, at least 12 hours of play time. (For my part, I spent 19 hours, with a fair amount of sidetracking from the main story to collect unnecessary doodads. A special bonus is promised for those players who do a whole lot of extra busywork, and I, intending to achieve that special bonus, did a good chunk of it, though not nearly all. Having finished the game and surveyed the remaining busywork, I estimate another 5 or 6 hours at least for the “optimal ending,” for a total of ~25 hrs.) 12 hours, which is generally considered a very short game, is a long, long time to spend doing anything, and one of those general questions about video games is: “what is worth doing for this long?” I can’t blame the designers for wanting to get more than just the camp in there. I just think they could have come up with a way to do it that would have allowed players to take the story more seriously.

The “explore mental worlds” gimmick is smart, because it allows for extremely varied level design, but the real treat, for me, was that they actually take advantage of other aspects of the concept. A level that takes place in the mind of a cool, logical, well-composed character consists of running around a perfect cubic planetoid floating in a void. As he becomes less able to control his emotions, bits of stuff from his childhood pop out of holes in the cube while his internal “censors” (business-suited, bespectacled fellows with red stamps) run around shouting “no! no! no!” Eventually the “boss” emerges – an enormous, monstrous baby that bursts, Hulk-like, from its adult clothing. That the designers have dropped this Freudian stuff onto the video game format – that the inner child is a “boss” – seems almost like a parody of video games. But it also is a video game.*

In a later level, the “boss” announces his attacks as he makes them, in a simultaneous parody of dubbed Japanese fight scenes and of standard “level boss” tropes. “Haaard-to-avoiiid…AREA ATTACK!” he shouts as he executes a typical hard-to-avoid area attack. I laughed out loud. Again, a clever parody of the very thing it was.

There are also places where the cleverness isn’t conceptual commentary, it’s honest-to-goodness cleverness. In the first level (also available as the demo), there’s one point where, as you pass through a tunnel between two areas, gravity takes an unexpected 90-degree turn. Now, playing a game like this, in-game gravity isn’t just decorative; you’re intimately aware of it as you maneuver. Feeling it yanked out from under me, on a level-design lark, I thought, “wow, that was a new and delightful sensation they managed to offer me.” Little did I know that it was just a preview of some really wild world-distorting that goes on later in the game. The most remarkable example – which I found, to my surprise, was truly, almost disturbingly disorienting – didn’t even involve any abuses of gravity. But it went well beyond the usual weakblooded tributes to Escher. Strong, memorable stuff.

What do you do in Psychonauts? Run and jump, climb and swing, bop things, pick things up, and, of course, watch pre-rendered movies. You also gradually learn how to zap things, set things on fire, bounce around on a ball of energy, turn invisible, create a shield, etc. etc. There are a few items that you can “buy” with other items, a few items you can hold on to and use in various ways, and a few items and characters that will respond in new ways if you do the right thing to them. For this reason, the game has been described as having “adventure elements,” and I suppose it does. But so do lots of running and jumping games, to an only-slightly-lesser degree. I don’t tend to think that this game was fundamentally any type of “hybrid” – it was just a running and jumping game that was more creative and more successful than most at incorporating story elements.

The game looks really lovely, at least on the PC (and, I gather, Xbox) – though I actually played it on the PS2, where the graphics don’t get quite as much fancy smoothing and shading, and where, additionally, the loading times were much slower. The visual design of just about everything is lively and done with great care. One sequence, set in a mental world of black velvet paintings, was aesthetically one of the most involving areas I’ve ever experienced in a video game. For me it went well beyond black velvet, and in fact reminded me of my fascination, as a child, with this Picasso, (L’Atelier, 1955), which I always sort of wanted to be inside.

Psychonauts offers, if not exactly that, something similarly enveloping.

* Okay, well, I seem to be the only person who thought that boss was a baby/inner child. The game refers to it only as a “mega-censor” and on second consideration, I see that the wild babyish face might just have been a typical “monster man have small brain, big muscles!” touch. But I prefer my original take. The psychological image of a monstrous baby in a suit is a good one, and I really wanted to attribute it to this game.