Kristin Lavransdatter: There have been two notable effects that have come from the part of my life I spent reading and writing about human rights and their violation. The first is that it definitively ended my interest in the depiction of violence. I was never much of a horror movie person to begin with--or comic-book-violence, or "this is art and not spectacle, no, really"--but I have very little patience for it now. The benefit of this has been missing out on a really large part of the TV renaissance, since "he comes out of the room, and half his face is blown off, but he lights a cigarette before he dies and it's SO COOL" is not appealing, and, apart from being convinced that it has redeeming aesthetic value, is in fact, and objectively, a really weird thing to think is cool.
The other has been a decline in interest in a certain type of narrative, approximately "let me show you the resilience/baseness of the human spirit by having terrible things happen to my main character for a long time." It's taken down a strangely large number of reading projects--Vanity Fair, for one; it's the problem I still have with The Mill on the Floss even though it is quite clear things will end up tolerably well. This is not a requirement that narratives have happy endings, or that nothing bad ever happen to main characters--it's just that the line between "depiction of reality" and "sadism" is remarkably thin. Kristin Lavransdatter was going along just fine--well, even--until the Beautiful Man with a Shady Past shows up, and... the momentum has been lost. I'm sure 800 pages of her learning to reconcile her past mistakes with her faith will be riveting, as will The Trials She Will Inevitably Face, which will lead to Personal Integrity In A Fallen World (word on the street is that there will be a Love Triangle with Beautiful Man and Good Man Who Was Spurned But Still Loves Her). I'm just not sure I'm willing to keep reading along.
The Bostonians: Fine, so far, which is not yet very far.
Biographia Literaria: A 400-page book best known for a famously hard-to-parse structure? Sign me up!
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
Showing posts with label adventures in cultural consumption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adventures in cultural consumption. Show all posts
2.8.15
18.5.15
Adventures in Cultural Consumption: Books About or By Women Edition
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
There's not a plot point in this book that the attentive reader cannot see coming from a long distance. The very smart girl is obviously going to do something very stupid. The woman who befriends her but seems unable to provide any good account of her own history will find that history to be implicated in what happens next. Henry James does not try very hard to get us to think Gilbert Osmond might be a decent person, and he proves not to be. The ending--so ambiguous I had to read it three or four times to confirm I hadn't missed a telling detail--is the only real surprise. Isabel is alone with Caspar Goodwood who is about to confess his love and there are only four pages left so...
What it lacks in originality it makes up for in specificity. The Portrait of the Lady is a novel of marriage, and of a very bad marriage indeed. In that sense it's a reverse of the first marriage in David Copperfield, in which David realizes the mistake he's made and how he has no choice what to do with it; it's Pride and Prejudice where Wickham occupies the central role. It, in its own way, makes very clear the stakes to old-fashioned marriage: it has all the excruciating exactness of a bad relationship, and far too many resonant passages.
Anne Tyler, If Morning Ever Comes
An enjoyable little book, which is more than can be said for a lot of books. Also predictably composed: when the old ex-girlfriend shows up, there's little question of what will happen. Its merits are in the accumulation of detail--I am gradually becoming a sucker for the south, or at least North Carolina--and one unshakeable half-dream image at the end, where the main character sees his wife and his son (having neither at that moment) at some point in the future.
Variation in reading is its own important thing: too much reading as vegetable-eating and one will never enjoy it; too much time spent on the easy stuff and even the moderately difficult will seem like too much effort. You read at different speeds, alert to different qualities, and for different reasons. It requires a lot of material to discern the relationship between art and entertainment, never so obvious as it seems (and beware of those to whom its a straightforward delineation), in no small part because there is no line that divides the two of them cleanly: art can be enjoyable and trash can be a drag; a 'guilty pleasure' suggests someone who doesn't understand the concept of pleasure; those for whom entertainment is the sole criteria for reading are quite less free than those who have many reasons for reading.
There's not a plot point in this book that the attentive reader cannot see coming from a long distance. The very smart girl is obviously going to do something very stupid. The woman who befriends her but seems unable to provide any good account of her own history will find that history to be implicated in what happens next. Henry James does not try very hard to get us to think Gilbert Osmond might be a decent person, and he proves not to be. The ending--so ambiguous I had to read it three or four times to confirm I hadn't missed a telling detail--is the only real surprise. Isabel is alone with Caspar Goodwood who is about to confess his love and there are only four pages left so...
What it lacks in originality it makes up for in specificity. The Portrait of the Lady is a novel of marriage, and of a very bad marriage indeed. In that sense it's a reverse of the first marriage in David Copperfield, in which David realizes the mistake he's made and how he has no choice what to do with it; it's Pride and Prejudice where Wickham occupies the central role. It, in its own way, makes very clear the stakes to old-fashioned marriage: it has all the excruciating exactness of a bad relationship, and far too many resonant passages.
Anne Tyler, If Morning Ever Comes
An enjoyable little book, which is more than can be said for a lot of books. Also predictably composed: when the old ex-girlfriend shows up, there's little question of what will happen. Its merits are in the accumulation of detail--I am gradually becoming a sucker for the south, or at least North Carolina--and one unshakeable half-dream image at the end, where the main character sees his wife and his son (having neither at that moment) at some point in the future.
Variation in reading is its own important thing: too much reading as vegetable-eating and one will never enjoy it; too much time spent on the easy stuff and even the moderately difficult will seem like too much effort. You read at different speeds, alert to different qualities, and for different reasons. It requires a lot of material to discern the relationship between art and entertainment, never so obvious as it seems (and beware of those to whom its a straightforward delineation), in no small part because there is no line that divides the two of them cleanly: art can be enjoyable and trash can be a drag; a 'guilty pleasure' suggests someone who doesn't understand the concept of pleasure; those for whom entertainment is the sole criteria for reading are quite less free than those who have many reasons for reading.
6.4.15
On Henry James and Proust, Finally
I have mentioned a few times a fondness for this poem by Ezra Pound--
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root -
Let there be commerce between us.
--despite liking neither Ezra Pound nor Walt Whitman, for capturing the feeling of maturing taste. Pound once hated Whitman for being too close to what he himself wanted to do, and thus making him the thing to rebel against in order to assert his own identity. It's not a rejection of his old attitude towards Whitman, just a recognition that Pound's own situation is different now, and he recognizes he should act and feel differently.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I have, finally with some measure of success, started in on Henry James and Proust. I have no difficulty, when reading either, identifying those components that made me reject them when I was younger. James is perfectly happy to write eight long sentences around a situation without ever bothering to describe it directly; Proust finds his own thoughts fascinating and follows them without seeming care to edit. In both, nothing much happens at the page or approximate-chapter level.
And yet. Ever since tackling 2666 back in 2009, I have been reading longer, more complex novels, where the action subsides in favor of Proustian digressions and Jamesian sentences. With each thing I have read where one or the other author--or both--are mentioned as points of comparison, I have drawn closer. A half-read of Turn of the Screw two years ago affirmed the point--"I will like this, but now's not the time to read it," and we've finally opened up enough reading space to bring it about.
In books, in movies, in music, there's too early and too late. I would've hated Pavement at 18, but loved them at 28; I could've gotten into Jean Cocteau's movies much earlier, but had I waited any longer for Woody Allen, or even Ingmar Bergman, they would've passed me by. My attempt to read The Fellowship of the Ring in grad school fell flat--by then I could only see the flaws in the story, which are many.*
Too early is a special kind of pleasure, though: assuming the experience with James goes well, there are a dozen or two novels waiting out there for me; assuming Proust goes well, a few thousand pages of enjoyment. Nick Hornby wrote once about discovering Jackson Browne in his middle age--a guy with a long a pretty good recording career whom he had never listened to, and could approach new--new being that rarest of things for someone who professionally listened. Reading is an adventure, a lifelong adventure for those who take it seriously. If you read quickly and seriously, the question always remains what's next. And, at least for now, I know.
*Which is not to denigrate the love or respect that other people have for it as a fictional work. I merely assert that it has considerable flaws: starting out with 50 or so pages of historical backstory, for example, before introducing characters or a plot. If one reads it with charity--which is to say, with love--then these are not flaws but essential components of the whole. That sort of reading isn't possible for me--it's not the right sort of book, and I'm not the right sort of person. But if it makes you, dear reader, feel better, I can assure you I thought equally poorly of the grand excursus on history that ended War and Peace.
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root -
Let there be commerce between us.
--despite liking neither Ezra Pound nor Walt Whitman, for capturing the feeling of maturing taste. Pound once hated Whitman for being too close to what he himself wanted to do, and thus making him the thing to rebel against in order to assert his own identity. It's not a rejection of his old attitude towards Whitman, just a recognition that Pound's own situation is different now, and he recognizes he should act and feel differently.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I have, finally with some measure of success, started in on Henry James and Proust. I have no difficulty, when reading either, identifying those components that made me reject them when I was younger. James is perfectly happy to write eight long sentences around a situation without ever bothering to describe it directly; Proust finds his own thoughts fascinating and follows them without seeming care to edit. In both, nothing much happens at the page or approximate-chapter level.
And yet. Ever since tackling 2666 back in 2009, I have been reading longer, more complex novels, where the action subsides in favor of Proustian digressions and Jamesian sentences. With each thing I have read where one or the other author--or both--are mentioned as points of comparison, I have drawn closer. A half-read of Turn of the Screw two years ago affirmed the point--"I will like this, but now's not the time to read it," and we've finally opened up enough reading space to bring it about.
In books, in movies, in music, there's too early and too late. I would've hated Pavement at 18, but loved them at 28; I could've gotten into Jean Cocteau's movies much earlier, but had I waited any longer for Woody Allen, or even Ingmar Bergman, they would've passed me by. My attempt to read The Fellowship of the Ring in grad school fell flat--by then I could only see the flaws in the story, which are many.*
Too early is a special kind of pleasure, though: assuming the experience with James goes well, there are a dozen or two novels waiting out there for me; assuming Proust goes well, a few thousand pages of enjoyment. Nick Hornby wrote once about discovering Jackson Browne in his middle age--a guy with a long a pretty good recording career whom he had never listened to, and could approach new--new being that rarest of things for someone who professionally listened. Reading is an adventure, a lifelong adventure for those who take it seriously. If you read quickly and seriously, the question always remains what's next. And, at least for now, I know.
*Which is not to denigrate the love or respect that other people have for it as a fictional work. I merely assert that it has considerable flaws: starting out with 50 or so pages of historical backstory, for example, before introducing characters or a plot. If one reads it with charity--which is to say, with love--then these are not flaws but essential components of the whole. That sort of reading isn't possible for me--it's not the right sort of book, and I'm not the right sort of person. But if it makes you, dear reader, feel better, I can assure you I thought equally poorly of the grand excursus on history that ended War and Peace.
16.3.15
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
There are no surprises in this film. The quiet brunette girl who looks like she has a crush on the main guy, so much that you think they'll end up together? They end up together. When the main guy and main girl sleep together, and you think she'll probably get pregnant? She'll get pregnant. When that perfectly nice guy shows up and shows interest in the girl while the guy is away in Algeria, and you think they'll get married? They get married. When the final scene takes place in the snow and the girl hasn't been seen for 40 minutes or so, and it seems obvious that they'll run into each other one last time? They run into each other one last time.
Worse, all of the dialogue is sung, opera-style.
And yet, this is an indisputably great movie, warm, not melodramatic even in its very conventional turns. The casting is perfect, the music neither overwhelming nor clichéd, the story structured to bring at least relative happiness to everyone. Evidence, if you needed it, of what good solid writing can do.
There are no surprises in this film. The quiet brunette girl who looks like she has a crush on the main guy, so much that you think they'll end up together? They end up together. When the main guy and main girl sleep together, and you think she'll probably get pregnant? She'll get pregnant. When that perfectly nice guy shows up and shows interest in the girl while the guy is away in Algeria, and you think they'll get married? They get married. When the final scene takes place in the snow and the girl hasn't been seen for 40 minutes or so, and it seems obvious that they'll run into each other one last time? They run into each other one last time.
Worse, all of the dialogue is sung, opera-style.
And yet, this is an indisputably great movie, warm, not melodramatic even in its very conventional turns. The casting is perfect, the music neither overwhelming nor clichéd, the story structured to bring at least relative happiness to everyone. Evidence, if you needed it, of what good solid writing can do.
3.2.15
Fever Pitch
In which a child from a broken home responds to his devastation by becoming an Arsenal fan, one can only presume through Stockholm Syndrome. (I take it as a sign that my Spurs fandom is rooting than I cannot abide anything having to do with Arsenal)
More concretely: it was very strange to watch this movie, which has so many of the same elements as that other Nick Hornby property I know well, High Fidelity. Absent father, emotionally distant mother, woman who attempts to drag man-child into adulthood, unknown pregnancy, obsession with something generally considered juvenile, even the emotional beats--almost every one of them the same, just in a different order. I was even confused, as I was in High Fidelity, just why the woman takes the man back at the end. Let's just say that it's hard to imagine how this might've been a success as a film if it did not star a young Colin Firth.
Groundhog Day
A Troester family favorite, watched many times. Noticed this time around: when Phil is attempting to woo Rita the first time by learning everything he can about her, he always loses her when he accidentally makes a joke about something he shouldn't. Some of those instances make sense--people have weird majors in college, and it's probably best not to immediately make fun of that when attempting to impress someone--but some of them cast her as utterly humorless. Even if one did only toast to world peace (*rolls eyes*), would a normal person be so offended by the fact that someone else didn't correctly guess that they only toast to world peace as to render further conversation unwelcome or unproductive?
In which a child from a broken home responds to his devastation by becoming an Arsenal fan, one can only presume through Stockholm Syndrome. (I take it as a sign that my Spurs fandom is rooting than I cannot abide anything having to do with Arsenal)
More concretely: it was very strange to watch this movie, which has so many of the same elements as that other Nick Hornby property I know well, High Fidelity. Absent father, emotionally distant mother, woman who attempts to drag man-child into adulthood, unknown pregnancy, obsession with something generally considered juvenile, even the emotional beats--almost every one of them the same, just in a different order. I was even confused, as I was in High Fidelity, just why the woman takes the man back at the end. Let's just say that it's hard to imagine how this might've been a success as a film if it did not star a young Colin Firth.
Groundhog Day
A Troester family favorite, watched many times. Noticed this time around: when Phil is attempting to woo Rita the first time by learning everything he can about her, he always loses her when he accidentally makes a joke about something he shouldn't. Some of those instances make sense--people have weird majors in college, and it's probably best not to immediately make fun of that when attempting to impress someone--but some of them cast her as utterly humorless. Even if one did only toast to world peace (*rolls eyes*), would a normal person be so offended by the fact that someone else didn't correctly guess that they only toast to world peace as to render further conversation unwelcome or unproductive?
27.1.15
Beyond Criticism
Franny and Zooey
Other families have a 'family novel,' right? This is ours. It's been a large part of my consciousness since I first read it in seventh or eighth grade, including a number of years of attempting, with little success, to distance myself from it when I saw--and was dismayed by--the reactions of many of the other people who read it. Despite this, and despite having read the final ten pages several dozen times, I am not actually certain I have re-read it at all in the last 20 years, though if there had been some additional cover-to-cover reading, it would have had to take place before 2000.
It's a difficult novel to speak about critically for the same reason I find it difficult to speak critically about all the R.E.M. albums prior to Up: some things are formative of one's notion of the world, and this is one for me. Zooey's criticisms of television, for instance, are mostly the same as I might write into any post on the subject (tv "mistaking brutality for realism" has been a repeated theme), and its criticisms of academic types are also well-observed.
Over the years I have wavered about the novel's view of Christianity, especially in light of Salinger's own feelings on Eastern religions. On this re-reading, Zooey's point about the Jesus Prayer is quite orthodox: religion is not some magical enchantment that gives you peace and mystical visions--or at the very least, Christianity is not that religion. Franny, if she wants to say the Jesus Prayer, has to say it to Jesus, on the basis of the things she knows about him from the New Testament's reportage. And that Jesus, as Zooey says, is not someone particularly interested in making anyone's life easy and convenient, which constitutes the difference between the holier-than-thou piety Zooey sees Franny attempting to slip into and actual religion. The upshot is remarkably Calvinist: act responsibly in the situation of life in which you find yourself because that is the one and only obligation anyone has: to act in accordance with duty, not quite regardless of expectations, but in spite of them all the same.
Other families have a 'family novel,' right? This is ours. It's been a large part of my consciousness since I first read it in seventh or eighth grade, including a number of years of attempting, with little success, to distance myself from it when I saw--and was dismayed by--the reactions of many of the other people who read it. Despite this, and despite having read the final ten pages several dozen times, I am not actually certain I have re-read it at all in the last 20 years, though if there had been some additional cover-to-cover reading, it would have had to take place before 2000.
It's a difficult novel to speak about critically for the same reason I find it difficult to speak critically about all the R.E.M. albums prior to Up: some things are formative of one's notion of the world, and this is one for me. Zooey's criticisms of television, for instance, are mostly the same as I might write into any post on the subject (tv "mistaking brutality for realism" has been a repeated theme), and its criticisms of academic types are also well-observed.
Over the years I have wavered about the novel's view of Christianity, especially in light of Salinger's own feelings on Eastern religions. On this re-reading, Zooey's point about the Jesus Prayer is quite orthodox: religion is not some magical enchantment that gives you peace and mystical visions--or at the very least, Christianity is not that religion. Franny, if she wants to say the Jesus Prayer, has to say it to Jesus, on the basis of the things she knows about him from the New Testament's reportage. And that Jesus, as Zooey says, is not someone particularly interested in making anyone's life easy and convenient, which constitutes the difference between the holier-than-thou piety Zooey sees Franny attempting to slip into and actual religion. The upshot is remarkably Calvinist: act responsibly in the situation of life in which you find yourself because that is the one and only obligation anyone has: to act in accordance with duty, not quite regardless of expectations, but in spite of them all the same.
26.1.15
Adventures in Cultural Consumption, Movies About Women Edition
Cléo from 5 to 7
Ida
The idea of experimental or avant-garde--it might be better to say the aspiration--is that formal experimentation with the structural components of a work of aesthetics can result in the unexpected. In the case of Cléo from 5 to 7, that unexpected thing is romance. In the early parts of the film, one can see the way that the camera is playing at the conventions of typical action shots, conversation shots, and the like, in the same way that the action itself is mannered and fractured, occurring in real time but with almost Fellini-like interludes. The camera will drift out of frame to pick up someone else's conversation; it will land at unexpected angles; the screen goes black or almost black several times; it will occasionally and without explanation shift the camera from a view of the characters to the character's own view. It reminds one of the story about Akira Kurosawa, who was asked by a famous director--John Ford, maybe--why he had composed a particular shot in a film in the manner he did; the answer was that to move the camera an inch to one side would have shown the Tokyo airport, not ideal for an epic set in medieval times. The direction shows such masterful control to work in so many continuous takes, and controlling for so many things that would traditionally be offscreen. When we meet Antoine at the end, the film can suggest several possibilities for what the encounter might be--unexpected street harassment, a tryst, a threat, an awkward encounter--that when it turns into none of these, it focused quite intently on the restorative power of conversation, of art, of beliefs, of humor, of human connection. But it requires that potential volatility, and sense of the unanticipated as built up throughout the film, to make its ending so transformative.
Obviously quite an inspiration for the Before trilogy, as well.
Ida received a lot of buzz for its artistic affectations: black and white, each shot framed with minimal camera movement (most with none), use of framing to emphasize the painterly aspects of each shot, and light that borrows fully from Baroque chiaroscuro and most specifically from Vermeer. When I was a younger man, I would have undoubtedly preferred this to the chaos of Cléo specifically for its affectations and classicism, and, as an older man, was prepared to dismiss it for those affectations. But over the course of the film, the action in each scene increases, to the point that the last shot, a long take of Ida walking, is the only one done with a hand-held camera. One has to account for both the technical aspects of the film as well as its subject matter, not least because the story centers around two characters, one of whom does not reveal very much about herself. The reading I am left with is that the final shot represents the only, or first true, action taken by someone who has mostly followed the course they were on, or simply reacted to events. The young man makes the mistake of offering her all the things she only knows by their absence, or as a source of pain, and she ultimately feels unable--or unwilling--to do any of that. Ida saw herself, as her aunt repeatedly insisted, as having a duty to people like her, until she no longer knew any people like that.
Ida
The idea of experimental or avant-garde--it might be better to say the aspiration--is that formal experimentation with the structural components of a work of aesthetics can result in the unexpected. In the case of Cléo from 5 to 7, that unexpected thing is romance. In the early parts of the film, one can see the way that the camera is playing at the conventions of typical action shots, conversation shots, and the like, in the same way that the action itself is mannered and fractured, occurring in real time but with almost Fellini-like interludes. The camera will drift out of frame to pick up someone else's conversation; it will land at unexpected angles; the screen goes black or almost black several times; it will occasionally and without explanation shift the camera from a view of the characters to the character's own view. It reminds one of the story about Akira Kurosawa, who was asked by a famous director--John Ford, maybe--why he had composed a particular shot in a film in the manner he did; the answer was that to move the camera an inch to one side would have shown the Tokyo airport, not ideal for an epic set in medieval times. The direction shows such masterful control to work in so many continuous takes, and controlling for so many things that would traditionally be offscreen. When we meet Antoine at the end, the film can suggest several possibilities for what the encounter might be--unexpected street harassment, a tryst, a threat, an awkward encounter--that when it turns into none of these, it focused quite intently on the restorative power of conversation, of art, of beliefs, of humor, of human connection. But it requires that potential volatility, and sense of the unanticipated as built up throughout the film, to make its ending so transformative.
Obviously quite an inspiration for the Before trilogy, as well.
Ida received a lot of buzz for its artistic affectations: black and white, each shot framed with minimal camera movement (most with none), use of framing to emphasize the painterly aspects of each shot, and light that borrows fully from Baroque chiaroscuro and most specifically from Vermeer. When I was a younger man, I would have undoubtedly preferred this to the chaos of Cléo specifically for its affectations and classicism, and, as an older man, was prepared to dismiss it for those affectations. But over the course of the film, the action in each scene increases, to the point that the last shot, a long take of Ida walking, is the only one done with a hand-held camera. One has to account for both the technical aspects of the film as well as its subject matter, not least because the story centers around two characters, one of whom does not reveal very much about herself. The reading I am left with is that the final shot represents the only, or first true, action taken by someone who has mostly followed the course they were on, or simply reacted to events. The young man makes the mistake of offering her all the things she only knows by their absence, or as a source of pain, and she ultimately feels unable--or unwilling--to do any of that. Ida saw herself, as her aunt repeatedly insisted, as having a duty to people like her, until she no longer knew any people like that.
23.1.15
A Partial Defense of Chandler Bing
Friends
The primary issue with Ruth Graham's identification of Chandler as the problematic element with Friends is that she gives insufficient weight to his context. Chandler, in the first few seasons, is meant to be a stereotypical child of 1970s divorce: he was both quite young when his parents' marriage fell apart, and they--crucially--appear to have done nothing to keep him out of the details of their fighting. The adult Chandler is not a Nice Guy, i.e. the sort who believes that he deserves love (or at least sex) from the particular objects of his desire; he's a guy who does not believe that he deserves or could have a lasting relationship. It's for this reason that he seeks out women with imperfections or for whom the relationship is doomed from the start. Indeed, Chandler's inability to manage relationships is one of the central themes of season 5. But it's solved by the time he proposes in season 6, which means about half the show's run happens with a relatively-stable Chandler Bing.
Friends does have two serious problems on re-watch. The first is an obvious and notable decline in quality that occurs no later than season 6; on a previous blu-ray re-watch (thanks for the wedding present!), I had pegged it in season 3. There's no reason for Monica and Chandler not to get engaged at the end of season 5, but it is instead dragged out for another year, just the beginning of extending plot points for the sake of keeping the show running. The second, and more notable, failing is the manner in which Ross-and-Rachel overshadow everything else. The screen time they get as a couple is very minimal: about one year between seasons 2 and 3, one episode at the beginning of season 4, and then not again until the finale six years later. Because they are Fated To Be Together, every interaction or potential interaction gets disproportionate attention, and the whole thing falls apart. Thus the eternal question: given writers who are unable to accurately portray the interesting dramatic possibilities of a healthy marriage while needing the happy ending expressed in the possibility of a healthy, long-lasting marriage, is it better to keep a central couple apart for as long as possible, as with Ross and Rachel, or put them together quickly and never allow more than the slightest hint of friction between them, as with Jim and Pam? Or should we just admit that all tv shows, because they have runs of uncertain length, will borrow liberally from melodrama and soap operas, and go read books instead?
The primary issue with Ruth Graham's identification of Chandler as the problematic element with Friends is that she gives insufficient weight to his context. Chandler, in the first few seasons, is meant to be a stereotypical child of 1970s divorce: he was both quite young when his parents' marriage fell apart, and they--crucially--appear to have done nothing to keep him out of the details of their fighting. The adult Chandler is not a Nice Guy, i.e. the sort who believes that he deserves love (or at least sex) from the particular objects of his desire; he's a guy who does not believe that he deserves or could have a lasting relationship. It's for this reason that he seeks out women with imperfections or for whom the relationship is doomed from the start. Indeed, Chandler's inability to manage relationships is one of the central themes of season 5. But it's solved by the time he proposes in season 6, which means about half the show's run happens with a relatively-stable Chandler Bing.
Friends does have two serious problems on re-watch. The first is an obvious and notable decline in quality that occurs no later than season 6; on a previous blu-ray re-watch (thanks for the wedding present!), I had pegged it in season 3. There's no reason for Monica and Chandler not to get engaged at the end of season 5, but it is instead dragged out for another year, just the beginning of extending plot points for the sake of keeping the show running. The second, and more notable, failing is the manner in which Ross-and-Rachel overshadow everything else. The screen time they get as a couple is very minimal: about one year between seasons 2 and 3, one episode at the beginning of season 4, and then not again until the finale six years later. Because they are Fated To Be Together, every interaction or potential interaction gets disproportionate attention, and the whole thing falls apart. Thus the eternal question: given writers who are unable to accurately portray the interesting dramatic possibilities of a healthy marriage while needing the happy ending expressed in the possibility of a healthy, long-lasting marriage, is it better to keep a central couple apart for as long as possible, as with Ross and Rachel, or put them together quickly and never allow more than the slightest hint of friction between them, as with Jim and Pam? Or should we just admit that all tv shows, because they have runs of uncertain length, will borrow liberally from melodrama and soap operas, and go read books instead?
16.1.15
Adventures in Cultural Consumption, Still Don't Like Stanley Kubrick Edition
Long-time blog readers are aware of my general policy regarding cultural items I don't particularly like: they should be revisited periodically in order to see if I have different feelings about them. Sometimes my opinions really do change, or I am aware of aspects that previously escaped my attention. This goes more emphatically for those things held in high regard: a good consumer of culture should be at least open to the idea of having missed something important.
Steven Soderbergh posted a new cut of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which seemed as good a moment as any to revisit the film, not least because the central feature of the cut is removing 50 or so minutes of runtime to bring the entire film under two hours. I am not a Kubrick fan. I've seen Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, not an exhaustive list but a reasonable number from which to draw conclusions. Those conclusions: most of the movies are too long--far too long. If they contain any moral point, they hit that point over the head repeatedly and without any nuance--the only film that works for is Dr. Strangelove, as a satire. The slow pacing and the emphasis on composition rather than dialogue is the primary reason the films seem stretched. As a compositor of images, Kubrick may be without equal--every film has striking shots and takes, many of them memorable and justly celebrated*--but they come too infrequently. (I prefer lots of dialogue and emphasis on the interplay of the actors, unless the film is going into avant-garde art-film territory.)
On Soderbergh's edit: it was shorter, which is something. It contains all the iconic moments, also something. It makes better use of the eye topos as a theme connecting the disparate elements of the story, something this film needs quite desperately. But it also cuts out much of the dialogue. It is perhaps most worrisome that an hour can be removed from the film and I was unable to identify exactly what was missing, aside from expository dialogue. So we'll put Kubrick back on the shelf for a while longer.
*The problem with this reliance of image is that most of them work so long as you don't focus too much on the thing being symbolized. The ending sequence of 2001--the baby and the earth--is shocking and striking, and works as a general means of connecting the broader themes of the movie. But what is that broader theme? Perhaps something about the fragility of humanity, the contrast between the origins of man and what looks (or looked) like our fate, the contrast between the serenity of nature and our own capability for violence. Why is that represented by a fetus and a shot of earth from space? Well, it's a striking image. Don't think about it too much.
Steven Soderbergh posted a new cut of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which seemed as good a moment as any to revisit the film, not least because the central feature of the cut is removing 50 or so minutes of runtime to bring the entire film under two hours. I am not a Kubrick fan. I've seen Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, not an exhaustive list but a reasonable number from which to draw conclusions. Those conclusions: most of the movies are too long--far too long. If they contain any moral point, they hit that point over the head repeatedly and without any nuance--the only film that works for is Dr. Strangelove, as a satire. The slow pacing and the emphasis on composition rather than dialogue is the primary reason the films seem stretched. As a compositor of images, Kubrick may be without equal--every film has striking shots and takes, many of them memorable and justly celebrated*--but they come too infrequently. (I prefer lots of dialogue and emphasis on the interplay of the actors, unless the film is going into avant-garde art-film territory.)
On Soderbergh's edit: it was shorter, which is something. It contains all the iconic moments, also something. It makes better use of the eye topos as a theme connecting the disparate elements of the story, something this film needs quite desperately. But it also cuts out much of the dialogue. It is perhaps most worrisome that an hour can be removed from the film and I was unable to identify exactly what was missing, aside from expository dialogue. So we'll put Kubrick back on the shelf for a while longer.
*The problem with this reliance of image is that most of them work so long as you don't focus too much on the thing being symbolized. The ending sequence of 2001--the baby and the earth--is shocking and striking, and works as a general means of connecting the broader themes of the movie. But what is that broader theme? Perhaps something about the fragility of humanity, the contrast between the origins of man and what looks (or looked) like our fate, the contrast between the serenity of nature and our own capability for violence. Why is that represented by a fetus and a shot of earth from space? Well, it's a striking image. Don't think about it too much.
14.1.15
Looking up music on my phone, as one sometimes does, and was faintly amused by the results. I was looking for Grieg's Peer Gynt, and these were the suggested additional videos:
Mozart, Requiem in D
Holst, The Planets
Dvorak, New World Symphony
Tchaikovsky, 1812 Overture
Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherezade
Though I don't know very much about classical music, I know enough to recognize this as an algorithm's equivalent of saying "you have so little taste here we will throw up only the most widely-known and pandering-to-audience options so as not to make you come out of your shell, Philistine."
Mozart, Requiem in D
Holst, The Planets
Dvorak, New World Symphony
Tchaikovsky, 1812 Overture
Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherezade
Though I don't know very much about classical music, I know enough to recognize this as an algorithm's equivalent of saying "you have so little taste here we will throw up only the most widely-known and pandering-to-audience options so as not to make you come out of your shell, Philistine."
12.1.15
The Only Living Car Chase in New York
The French Connection
For a movie billed as containing the most exciting car chase scene of all time, this was a considerable disappointment. It's not hard to spot the influences and see what the film was trying to do: it's an attempt at a French gangster heist noir in the style of Jean-Pierre Melville, except focusing on the police rather than the gangsters; it's like nothing more than a bizarro-adaptation of Le Samourai. Thus Melville's characteristic objective camera presence, establishing little about the plot and less about the motivation of the characters. It doesn't hold up to the Melville example because the stakes of the average Melville film are personal even when placed in the midst of objectively difficult situations: each individual person in Army of Shadows, Le Samourai, or Leon Morin, Priest are attempting to stay alive and maintain their personal integrity, regardless of whether they are working with the Free French or possibly selling them out, working as a hitman for mobsters, or attempting to win converts. One may know little or less of the details of their social situation because those details are irrelevant.
The French Connection relies too much on its setting to give significance to the actions of its characters: one needs a sense of a New York City crumbling into total decay, of police overwhelmed in their attempts to do good, of heroin as a scourge that will make things even worse.* One could even accept setting up the plot as a reverse-Casablanca, where the intense effort put into stopping this shipment is a losing cause because it is only one small problem amongst many of them. As it is, the audience is given little reason to care about the actions and fate of these two detectives, and no sense of where this fits within the overall scheme of a situation left unexplained. I would not be surprised to find out that this film's critical reputation is strongly correlated to how close to its premiere one first saw it.
*Those of us watching it now have the benefit of hindsight to know that none of these will end up being particularly true, which undercuts its realism.
For a movie billed as containing the most exciting car chase scene of all time, this was a considerable disappointment. It's not hard to spot the influences and see what the film was trying to do: it's an attempt at a French gangster heist noir in the style of Jean-Pierre Melville, except focusing on the police rather than the gangsters; it's like nothing more than a bizarro-adaptation of Le Samourai. Thus Melville's characteristic objective camera presence, establishing little about the plot and less about the motivation of the characters. It doesn't hold up to the Melville example because the stakes of the average Melville film are personal even when placed in the midst of objectively difficult situations: each individual person in Army of Shadows, Le Samourai, or Leon Morin, Priest are attempting to stay alive and maintain their personal integrity, regardless of whether they are working with the Free French or possibly selling them out, working as a hitman for mobsters, or attempting to win converts. One may know little or less of the details of their social situation because those details are irrelevant.
The French Connection relies too much on its setting to give significance to the actions of its characters: one needs a sense of a New York City crumbling into total decay, of police overwhelmed in their attempts to do good, of heroin as a scourge that will make things even worse.* One could even accept setting up the plot as a reverse-Casablanca, where the intense effort put into stopping this shipment is a losing cause because it is only one small problem amongst many of them. As it is, the audience is given little reason to care about the actions and fate of these two detectives, and no sense of where this fits within the overall scheme of a situation left unexplained. I would not be surprised to find out that this film's critical reputation is strongly correlated to how close to its premiere one first saw it.
*Those of us watching it now have the benefit of hindsight to know that none of these will end up being particularly true, which undercuts its realism.
9.1.15
In Which I Remember That I Have a "tl;dr" Tag For A Reason
A reader asks:
"Do you have any practical advice for how to develop into a more sophisticated reader? You mention practice and I was wondering if you meant a high volume of reading or something more?"
The end idea of reading is to notice things systematically as part of an organic and comprehensive experience of the act of reading. In my old days of teaching I would suggest to my students that liking a piece of writing or not liking it--or agreeing with something or disagreeing with it--is not much of a reaction; a good opinion needs to be concrete and specific, or at least be capable of becoming concrete or specific.
How does one reach this point? It requires both a plan and at least one guide. The nature of the plan and the identity of the guide hardly matter, because good readers revise their plans and end up finding multiple, partial guides. My first plan was a list of 'classics' prepared by my local library, and my first guides were the large volumes of literary criticism that were, for inexplicable reasons, in my high school library. I poked around the list to find the books that seemed most initially interesting to me, read them, read some reactions to them, and picked subsequent books off the list that seemed to match what I liked in the first ones. I was fortunate in that the list and the books of criticism were old: there's nothing that matches the old view of Great Books whose value can be known and measured. Not all of them are great, not all of them are still great, but it gives a useful outside measure for one's own reactions: "this book has been known and appreciated for 300 years, but I seem to think it's boring. Perhaps I'm missing something." And from these readings one goes looking for influences and disciples. It helps if the guides one chooses are willing to name-drop those authors they find especially noteworthy. Fortunately, almost all of them do. This should provide a framework in which individual acts of reading happen according to mood, interest, etc.
Once I've finished a book, I have a set of tentative reactions to it. At this point, I find it helpful to go and read criticism of the book, both positive and negative. Good criticism will give you a sense of what is important to notice and how the book works as a unified whole. It can cause you to correct your opinions by pointing out things you did not notice on your initial reading, and can confirm when your instincts are pointing in the right direction. I read a large number of Graham Greene novels, and enjoyed them, until I read a Christopher Hitchens essay that pointed out Greene's serious novels tended to repeat the same plot elements, themes, and structure; what I was responding to was less the quality of his writing than the fact he was producing certain outcomes and conclusions I found agreeable. I still think of Greene as a good writer, but only a good one, and one who writes novels that beg the question on his own most cherished beliefs. Alternatively, the criticism of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 confirmed for me that a number of its technical and structural features, which I had found essential to appreciating the book as a whole, were indeed functioning as I had suspected. Given enough time, this will trickle down into opinions about various people who write in a critical capacity: Zadie Smith, for example, is a very wise writer talking about the technical act of writing, but her literary recommendations are strongly colored by what she finds useful as a writer, and are not generally what I like to read.
The trick in working through a book is to think of writing as those critics do, as something other than the neutral content through which a story is transmitted. Structure matters, style matters; any act of writing is a collection of individual decisions about what to do--it is almost always phrased this way instead of that way for a reason. Write down individual passages you like, and figure out what you like about them, paying attention to the really boring stuff you hopefully learned in Freshman Comp in college: how is the paragraph structured? Are the individual sentences the same, or do they vary, and how do they vary? What's the cadence of each line? Where do the important words in the sentence end up? What unusual things does the writer do? It's often simply a matter of noticing what works and what doesn't: everything in Zola's Therese Raquin is good except for the passages in which he allows himself to present his psychological theories, which are dull, not insightful, and make the story lag; this plays out in the rest of his books: it's hard to think of a more insightful cataloguer of the range of human emotion who so poorly understands the nature of his own gift.
When you find yourself reacting strongly in a positive or negative manner, the important thing to sort out is why. Reading, reading criticism, and a reasonable attentiveness to your own reactions go quite far. I sometimes make the cooking analogy: if you never cook, cooking will be quite difficult; if you cook a bunch of disconnected things, you'll have individual spots of knowledge; if you supplement by reading the non-recipe portions of cookbooks, and working through a bunch of different options within one cookbook, you'll see the way the ideas and techniques repeat themselves.
It's also important to read mediocre books with some regularity. Occasionally finding novels one dislikes is a sign of being adventurous enough, either guessing wrong or finding an unanticipated weak spot in an author's oeuvre. Books less than classics also make the method of their composition much plainer; the various imperfections are easier to see, and this is one easy way to recognize what constitutes excellence, and how vertiginous the gap is between those things that are written at all (hard enough to do), those that are merely good, and those that are classics. That's the real value of grad school: one reads so much that is written for a wide variety of reasons, and in the social science, with so little emphasis placed on the elegant expression of ideas, that one gains many, many examples of how one can go off-model.
On plans: reading over a list of classics with a long historical scope makes for a good starting point. Doing so allowed me to make a few first tentative cuts into literature: Greek drama, medieval and renaissance literature, poetry, French and Russian 19th century novels. All but the last two eventually faded away, and 20th century literature came on quite strongly, especially British novelists of the second rank and, eventually, Spanish and Latin American literature. But the general idea is to read enough in any niche one favors to be able to offer some elementary comparisons amongst its figures, and some comparison between niches (T.S. Eliot talks about this quite helpfully in one of the first lectures in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism).
"Do you have any practical advice for how to develop into a more sophisticated reader? You mention practice and I was wondering if you meant a high volume of reading or something more?"
The end idea of reading is to notice things systematically as part of an organic and comprehensive experience of the act of reading. In my old days of teaching I would suggest to my students that liking a piece of writing or not liking it--or agreeing with something or disagreeing with it--is not much of a reaction; a good opinion needs to be concrete and specific, or at least be capable of becoming concrete or specific.
How does one reach this point? It requires both a plan and at least one guide. The nature of the plan and the identity of the guide hardly matter, because good readers revise their plans and end up finding multiple, partial guides. My first plan was a list of 'classics' prepared by my local library, and my first guides were the large volumes of literary criticism that were, for inexplicable reasons, in my high school library. I poked around the list to find the books that seemed most initially interesting to me, read them, read some reactions to them, and picked subsequent books off the list that seemed to match what I liked in the first ones. I was fortunate in that the list and the books of criticism were old: there's nothing that matches the old view of Great Books whose value can be known and measured. Not all of them are great, not all of them are still great, but it gives a useful outside measure for one's own reactions: "this book has been known and appreciated for 300 years, but I seem to think it's boring. Perhaps I'm missing something." And from these readings one goes looking for influences and disciples. It helps if the guides one chooses are willing to name-drop those authors they find especially noteworthy. Fortunately, almost all of them do. This should provide a framework in which individual acts of reading happen according to mood, interest, etc.
Once I've finished a book, I have a set of tentative reactions to it. At this point, I find it helpful to go and read criticism of the book, both positive and negative. Good criticism will give you a sense of what is important to notice and how the book works as a unified whole. It can cause you to correct your opinions by pointing out things you did not notice on your initial reading, and can confirm when your instincts are pointing in the right direction. I read a large number of Graham Greene novels, and enjoyed them, until I read a Christopher Hitchens essay that pointed out Greene's serious novels tended to repeat the same plot elements, themes, and structure; what I was responding to was less the quality of his writing than the fact he was producing certain outcomes and conclusions I found agreeable. I still think of Greene as a good writer, but only a good one, and one who writes novels that beg the question on his own most cherished beliefs. Alternatively, the criticism of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 confirmed for me that a number of its technical and structural features, which I had found essential to appreciating the book as a whole, were indeed functioning as I had suspected. Given enough time, this will trickle down into opinions about various people who write in a critical capacity: Zadie Smith, for example, is a very wise writer talking about the technical act of writing, but her literary recommendations are strongly colored by what she finds useful as a writer, and are not generally what I like to read.
The trick in working through a book is to think of writing as those critics do, as something other than the neutral content through which a story is transmitted. Structure matters, style matters; any act of writing is a collection of individual decisions about what to do--it is almost always phrased this way instead of that way for a reason. Write down individual passages you like, and figure out what you like about them, paying attention to the really boring stuff you hopefully learned in Freshman Comp in college: how is the paragraph structured? Are the individual sentences the same, or do they vary, and how do they vary? What's the cadence of each line? Where do the important words in the sentence end up? What unusual things does the writer do? It's often simply a matter of noticing what works and what doesn't: everything in Zola's Therese Raquin is good except for the passages in which he allows himself to present his psychological theories, which are dull, not insightful, and make the story lag; this plays out in the rest of his books: it's hard to think of a more insightful cataloguer of the range of human emotion who so poorly understands the nature of his own gift.
When you find yourself reacting strongly in a positive or negative manner, the important thing to sort out is why. Reading, reading criticism, and a reasonable attentiveness to your own reactions go quite far. I sometimes make the cooking analogy: if you never cook, cooking will be quite difficult; if you cook a bunch of disconnected things, you'll have individual spots of knowledge; if you supplement by reading the non-recipe portions of cookbooks, and working through a bunch of different options within one cookbook, you'll see the way the ideas and techniques repeat themselves.
It's also important to read mediocre books with some regularity. Occasionally finding novels one dislikes is a sign of being adventurous enough, either guessing wrong or finding an unanticipated weak spot in an author's oeuvre. Books less than classics also make the method of their composition much plainer; the various imperfections are easier to see, and this is one easy way to recognize what constitutes excellence, and how vertiginous the gap is between those things that are written at all (hard enough to do), those that are merely good, and those that are classics. That's the real value of grad school: one reads so much that is written for a wide variety of reasons, and in the social science, with so little emphasis placed on the elegant expression of ideas, that one gains many, many examples of how one can go off-model.
On plans: reading over a list of classics with a long historical scope makes for a good starting point. Doing so allowed me to make a few first tentative cuts into literature: Greek drama, medieval and renaissance literature, poetry, French and Russian 19th century novels. All but the last two eventually faded away, and 20th century literature came on quite strongly, especially British novelists of the second rank and, eventually, Spanish and Latin American literature. But the general idea is to read enough in any niche one favors to be able to offer some elementary comparisons amongst its figures, and some comparison between niches (T.S. Eliot talks about this quite helpfully in one of the first lectures in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism).
8.1.15
Boyhood
This Slate discussion seems sort of backwards:
I liked the earlier years of Boyhood when it felt like an ensemble picture, though the parents, too, got less interesting thanks to the film’s message that eventually we all become square and middle-class. But as the focus narrowed on Mason, I completely lost interest. That ending with that sunset felt like unearned, banal triumph—congrats, kiddo, looks like you’ve got a reason to put a sock on your dorm-room doorknob.
This is the danger of bringing a little too much to one's viewing. The movie read to me in the opposite way: the parents become more interesting as they get older, since the son gets a progressively larger view of them. Ethan Hawke isn't cool anymore, but he's a much better father, more grounded and mature, who has opened himself up to experiences whose validity he had previously denied (he's clearly somewhere on the religious map, if not as crazy as some of the relatives). The mother is an accomplished professional who gets to do work she loves, and the focus is at least as much on her as anyone--she gets the pleasure of seeing her son succeed, all that work coming to fruition, and a real moment of actual pain at losing him to college. What the parents are no longer is godlike, inexplicable beings: they're people. And people are both deeply interesting and a little boring.
The ending is, indeed, an "unearned, banal triumph," which seems as accurate a description of going away to college as one could imagine--it feels, significantly, like both the beginning and the end of something big, when it is (in reality) usually neither.
6.1.15
The Dry Bones
The Soldier's Art
The Military Philosophers
I would like to attempt to outline something from the fifth book in this series, The Soldier's Art, to give a sense of Anthony Powell's tremendous attention to structure, and how it allows him to do certain things that might otherwise seem melodramatic in perfectly understated ways. In the book, Powell arranges for the members of an estranged marriage to both be killed in separate incidents on the same night, when it looked like a reconciliation between them might begin to be possible.
The key structural decision is to compartmentalize them within the narrator's (Nick's) evening. The husband, Chips Lovell, pesters Nick to have a drink to talk about unrelated matters, but only just before Nick is to have dinner with a friend who once carried on with Chips' wife. Thus Chips has to go, and early, and mentions in passing a party he was going to attend in the faint hope his wife might also attend, and they could reconcile. The dinner with the friend begins, is interrupted by his current mistress, and is then intruded upon by the wife, Priscilla, and the man she is currently carrying on with, who also happens to be known to Nick. She makes a great show of being unperturbed by the situation until Chips and his faint hope of reconciling are mentioned, at which point Priscilla announces a desire to go home, alone. Later that evening, at a pub, Nick receives word that the club Chips was at had been hit by a bomb from the Blitz, and Chips was killed. The phones are out, so Nick resolves to go and break the news to Priscilla directly, where he finds that house to have been destroyed later that same evening, and Priscilla and her mother killed.
It works as drama and not melodrama because the deaths are, in the compass of World War II, random and explicable. And it works because the details are simple and affecting. Nor is it merely the confluence of detail, but the scope time time involved: Chips Lovell, Lady Molly, and the rest were introduced in At Lady Molly's, published nine years before The Soldier's Art. Their deaths are not melodrama because their deaths are not put in for shock--they're not even the central events of the novel; the characters are all given narrative lives independent of their ends. There is no great gush of emotion, either: the two most affecting moments are Nick having to tell the friend that Chips is dead, and the reminiscence of Chips first taking him to the place where he'd meet his wife. No great indulgence in emotion, no pointing out they could never reconcile, just a pair of stories that have stopped. It has the elegance of understatement, a quality sorely lacking in fiction these days.
The key structural decision is to compartmentalize them within the narrator's (Nick's) evening. The husband, Chips Lovell, pesters Nick to have a drink to talk about unrelated matters, but only just before Nick is to have dinner with a friend who once carried on with Chips' wife. Thus Chips has to go, and early, and mentions in passing a party he was going to attend in the faint hope his wife might also attend, and they could reconcile. The dinner with the friend begins, is interrupted by his current mistress, and is then intruded upon by the wife, Priscilla, and the man she is currently carrying on with, who also happens to be known to Nick. She makes a great show of being unperturbed by the situation until Chips and his faint hope of reconciling are mentioned, at which point Priscilla announces a desire to go home, alone. Later that evening, at a pub, Nick receives word that the club Chips was at had been hit by a bomb from the Blitz, and Chips was killed. The phones are out, so Nick resolves to go and break the news to Priscilla directly, where he finds that house to have been destroyed later that same evening, and Priscilla and her mother killed.
It works as drama and not melodrama because the deaths are, in the compass of World War II, random and explicable. And it works because the details are simple and affecting. Nor is it merely the confluence of detail, but the scope time time involved: Chips Lovell, Lady Molly, and the rest were introduced in At Lady Molly's, published nine years before The Soldier's Art. Their deaths are not melodrama because their deaths are not put in for shock--they're not even the central events of the novel; the characters are all given narrative lives independent of their ends. There is no great gush of emotion, either: the two most affecting moments are Nick having to tell the friend that Chips is dead, and the reminiscence of Chips first taking him to the place where he'd meet his wife. No great indulgence in emotion, no pointing out they could never reconcile, just a pair of stories that have stopped. It has the elegance of understatement, a quality sorely lacking in fiction these days.
2.1.15
Casablanca
The absolute pinnacle of studio-system movies, one of the very few that lives up to the hype. The lead performances are both excellent: Bogart does some convincing emoting, and who can blame the DP for all those long reaction shots of Ingrid Bergman?* The supporting performances are all memorable and excellent: Peter Lorre, Syndey Greenstreet, Claude Rains, S.Z. Sakall, Dooley Wilson. The cinematography plays with light and shadows so well, in a way that borders right up on German Expressionism. The plot is twisty but not overly so: it plays straight, with only one flashback, and the character motivations are clear pretty much all the time. It steals one of the excellent scenes from Grand Illusion, to similar effect. It plays dark humor, cynicism, and earnestness all at the appropriate moment.
The energy of the Marseillaise scene in particular seems odd until you realize that the actors and extras drew heavily from exiles and refugees from Nazism, and also if you happen to not realize the lyrics of the Marseillaise are, essentially, "we are going to murder you and your family for messing with us". It's not just defiance, it's an open threat.
This time around, it was easier to appreciate how early Rick starts his plot, and how it depends on playing everyone. It's not always sufficiently appreciated in celebrating this film: Rick's idealism comes out gradually, but his ability to succeed is dependent on his cynicism, not his idealism; it provides the motivation and then gets out of the way. An only-idealistic Rick is going to fail in just the same way Victor Laszlo will fail without Rick, sooner rather than later. The same applies to Capt. Renault: willing to ride the wave of Vichy for as long as it seems like no particular good can come from opposing them and while he can still do some small amount of good (if for selfish payoff), recognizing that anyone else in his role would likely be far worse, and prepared to reject it all at the critical moment because he knows what he should do.
Casablanca is not unlike The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in its--mid-war!--suggestion that it hardly matters how you come to the right side, so long as you join it, and that success will require both integrity and ingenuity, an insistence that some rules cannot be broken alongside the willingness to bend other of the rules. There's probably an excellent paper to be written on this.
*People are down on Paul Henreid, apparently quite the ass in real life, but I think he realistically portrays someone who is both larger-than-life and monomaniacally focused on his goals. (No one mistakes the figures of Army of Shadows as wooden, though they are similarly opaque.) That's the point of Rick sending Ilsa: Victor does not recognize his own emotional needs, though everyone else does.
The absolute pinnacle of studio-system movies, one of the very few that lives up to the hype. The lead performances are both excellent: Bogart does some convincing emoting, and who can blame the DP for all those long reaction shots of Ingrid Bergman?* The supporting performances are all memorable and excellent: Peter Lorre, Syndey Greenstreet, Claude Rains, S.Z. Sakall, Dooley Wilson. The cinematography plays with light and shadows so well, in a way that borders right up on German Expressionism. The plot is twisty but not overly so: it plays straight, with only one flashback, and the character motivations are clear pretty much all the time. It steals one of the excellent scenes from Grand Illusion, to similar effect. It plays dark humor, cynicism, and earnestness all at the appropriate moment.
The energy of the Marseillaise scene in particular seems odd until you realize that the actors and extras drew heavily from exiles and refugees from Nazism, and also if you happen to not realize the lyrics of the Marseillaise are, essentially, "we are going to murder you and your family for messing with us". It's not just defiance, it's an open threat.
This time around, it was easier to appreciate how early Rick starts his plot, and how it depends on playing everyone. It's not always sufficiently appreciated in celebrating this film: Rick's idealism comes out gradually, but his ability to succeed is dependent on his cynicism, not his idealism; it provides the motivation and then gets out of the way. An only-idealistic Rick is going to fail in just the same way Victor Laszlo will fail without Rick, sooner rather than later. The same applies to Capt. Renault: willing to ride the wave of Vichy for as long as it seems like no particular good can come from opposing them and while he can still do some small amount of good (if for selfish payoff), recognizing that anyone else in his role would likely be far worse, and prepared to reject it all at the critical moment because he knows what he should do.
Casablanca is not unlike The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in its--mid-war!--suggestion that it hardly matters how you come to the right side, so long as you join it, and that success will require both integrity and ingenuity, an insistence that some rules cannot be broken alongside the willingness to bend other of the rules. There's probably an excellent paper to be written on this.
*People are down on Paul Henreid, apparently quite the ass in real life, but I think he realistically portrays someone who is both larger-than-life and monomaniacally focused on his goals. (No one mistakes the figures of Army of Shadows as wooden, though they are similarly opaque.) That's the point of Rick sending Ilsa: Victor does not recognize his own emotional needs, though everyone else does.
29.12.14
Michael Ruhlman, The Soul of a Chef
Somewhere in the midst of this celebration of French cuisine in all its glory, I found the most plausible explanation for why I do not and have never particularly cared for French food. The majority of French cooking, even the highest of Escoffier-and-descendants haute cuisine, comes from a variety of methods to compensate for using undesirable parts of animals and dealing with less-than-fresh foods. One cooks vegetables to mush in order to make them palatable; one cooks terrines and galantines in order to disguise undesirable cuts or the last remnants of something; one adds butter and salt for the same reason fast food restaurants do (they taste good), and every dish needs a sauce so you taste the sauce and not so much the food underneath.
Well, there you go: people who have cooked for long enough know that Asian or Mexican markets (or whichever markets are favored by recent immigrants from Asia or Latin America) will have the best, and cheapest, produce because their clientele demands it; lightly cooked dishes of fresh ingredients feature prominently in each. Italian food centers around so few ingredients that "fresh" and "highest possible quality" are understood as starting points for everything. All of these are compatible with 21st century globalized American life in a way French simply is not, so it's not surprising that tastes have shifted in the direction of these options. They may undergo changes in method and technique, but don't require nouvelle as French did in order to learn not to overcook a carrot.
An incidental question that discussions of culinary history always bring up: most places have cows, pigs, chickens. Almost all of these cuisines will talk about how a preference developed for sweetbreads and tougher pieces of meat because they were cheaper and more readily available. This always makes me wonder: where did the good cuts go? Who exactly is eating them? (Presumably they're not being wasted) Why do regional cuisines, presumably composed by farmers and town-dwellers, not feature them? I could understand omitting meat entirely, if animals need to work or provide other things, but once you're killing the cow anyway, it still has a tenderloin, which presumably is still a muscle that never gets worked, right?
Somewhere in the midst of this celebration of French cuisine in all its glory, I found the most plausible explanation for why I do not and have never particularly cared for French food. The majority of French cooking, even the highest of Escoffier-and-descendants haute cuisine, comes from a variety of methods to compensate for using undesirable parts of animals and dealing with less-than-fresh foods. One cooks vegetables to mush in order to make them palatable; one cooks terrines and galantines in order to disguise undesirable cuts or the last remnants of something; one adds butter and salt for the same reason fast food restaurants do (they taste good), and every dish needs a sauce so you taste the sauce and not so much the food underneath.
Well, there you go: people who have cooked for long enough know that Asian or Mexican markets (or whichever markets are favored by recent immigrants from Asia or Latin America) will have the best, and cheapest, produce because their clientele demands it; lightly cooked dishes of fresh ingredients feature prominently in each. Italian food centers around so few ingredients that "fresh" and "highest possible quality" are understood as starting points for everything. All of these are compatible with 21st century globalized American life in a way French simply is not, so it's not surprising that tastes have shifted in the direction of these options. They may undergo changes in method and technique, but don't require nouvelle as French did in order to learn not to overcook a carrot.
An incidental question that discussions of culinary history always bring up: most places have cows, pigs, chickens. Almost all of these cuisines will talk about how a preference developed for sweetbreads and tougher pieces of meat because they were cheaper and more readily available. This always makes me wonder: where did the good cuts go? Who exactly is eating them? (Presumably they're not being wasted) Why do regional cuisines, presumably composed by farmers and town-dwellers, not feature them? I could understand omitting meat entirely, if animals need to work or provide other things, but once you're killing the cow anyway, it still has a tenderloin, which presumably is still a muscle that never gets worked, right?
23.12.14
Christmas in Connecticut
It's interesting that this decidedly minor picture:
is a farce, which requires serious writing ability to pull off, since the elements need to scatter, form and re-form, and resolve in a satisfactory manner;
stars Barbara Stanwyck, and has a supporting role filled by one of the bad guys from The Maltese Falcon;
has in Uncle Felix a remarkable comedic minor role and audience surrogate;
gives intelligence and dignity to the two(!) speaking roles for African-Americans;
and goes pretty far in its fake-marriage and fake-adultery games for a 1940s movie.
It is, for these reasons, one of my favorites.
It's interesting that this decidedly minor picture:
is a farce, which requires serious writing ability to pull off, since the elements need to scatter, form and re-form, and resolve in a satisfactory manner;
stars Barbara Stanwyck, and has a supporting role filled by one of the bad guys from The Maltese Falcon;
has in Uncle Felix a remarkable comedic minor role and audience surrogate;
gives intelligence and dignity to the two(!) speaking roles for African-Americans;
and goes pretty far in its fake-marriage and fake-adultery games for a 1940s movie.
It is, for these reasons, one of my favorites.
22.12.14
Tina Fey, Bossypants
Amy Poehler, Yes Please
The remarkable thing about Tina Fey: she will give lots of individual details and tell stories about her family members and her child, and you will be left with exactly zero information about them, an act of obfuscation that is very impressive. Amy Poehler says she doesn't want to get into the details of her personal life but inadvertently reveals a lot: the basic dimensions of what happened between her and Will Arnett that led to their divorce are clear. Fey's method is more cerebral and she is clearly a better writer--better not so much because her jokes are funnier, more because she understands very well what a joke needs to be surrounded by--while Poehler seems like the best possible person to work with.
Amy Poehler, Yes Please
The remarkable thing about Tina Fey: she will give lots of individual details and tell stories about her family members and her child, and you will be left with exactly zero information about them, an act of obfuscation that is very impressive. Amy Poehler says she doesn't want to get into the details of her personal life but inadvertently reveals a lot: the basic dimensions of what happened between her and Will Arnett that led to their divorce are clear. Fey's method is more cerebral and she is clearly a better writer--better not so much because her jokes are funnier, more because she understands very well what a joke needs to be surrounded by--while Poehler seems like the best possible person to work with.
The Lazy Writer's Guide to a Blockbuster Movie
Guardians of the Galaxy
Actual dialogue from this movie:
There's an old bit about how the difference between amateur clowns and professional clowns is that the professionals will never paint their entire faces. Too much expression comes from the area around the mouth; obscuring it is unnatural. If the clown's goal is to look recognizably human and not, say, creepy, they know that restraint is sometimes appropriate. Attention to detail is a sign of professionalism and care about one's metier. If people think those details don't really matter, and you should just have fun and enjoy it, well, that's a vote in favor of creepy clowns.
The dialogue above is a representative sample and not nearly exhaustive. Nobody paid much attention to the details for this movie. Had they done so, there would not have been an incomprehensible rush of names at the beginning, that eventually resolved itself into a proposed genocide of one people by the representative of another for violating (maybe?) a peace treaty whose terms and purposes were not well-established, despite far too many Phanton Menace-lite scenes of diplomatic negotiation. There was also an Infinity Stone, not that the movie told its viewer anything about it other than it had a lot of power and maybe could only be harnessed by certain types of beings. As with all the other Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, there is no clear metaphysics, or physics, or economy, or politics, which all great science-fiction movies--even all the good ones--manage to establish. The sequels to Guardians have already been announced, lest the viewer be concerned someone might die: all the important characters will stick around for another two movies, no matter how 'dead' the viewer is to believe they are 70% of the way through the film.*
There are also the political complaints: a multi-ethnic, multi-species group of heroes led by a white man.** Four women characters in total: a dead mother, who lied about the main character's father's identity; the appropriate-for-a-13-year-old 'love interest,' who is just a female man except when she inexplicably isn't able to fight for herself and needs to be saved; a slave; one of the clear bad guys.
Drax has some generic "you killed my family" backstory that is delivered entirely in dialogue, without any useful details. It's as though no one thought to do the Gladiator-style flashback, which requires no actual action sequences and takes up perhaps five minutes. Everyone else in the group goes along for the ride for reasons that are never made clear, or quickly abandoned. There's also no character development, a rising problem in science fiction and comic book movies. No one has even the most basic of character conflicts: no one has to make any difficult choice, never mind being troubled by the conscience of a Mystique or Nightcrawler. Has any character learned any lesson aside from, perhaps, "believe in yourself" or "trust in your team"?
And this leaves aside the question of whether this is a worthwhile type of movie to be making in the first place, but what it sets out to do, it does poorly. Why was it so successful? Why is it so well-regarded? Because it was explicitly not as gloom-filled as many other MCU and science fiction movies.
*I am not dumb. If someone is "dead" and the movie has an hour left, they are not dead. If Agent Coulson wasn't dead, ain't nobody in any Marvel movie ever going to be dead. So that's some metaphysics, at least.
**Professor X might run the X-Men, but he clearly has some ambivalence about it.
Actual dialogue from this movie:
"Put it down, you fool, or you'll destroy us all!"
"You're scared because you're soft!" [Pounds chest] "In here!"
"The time has come for you to renounce your paltry gods" (bonus: mangled pronunciation makes it sound more like "poultry gods")
[Hero miraculously survives] "But you're mortal! How?!"
There's an old bit about how the difference between amateur clowns and professional clowns is that the professionals will never paint their entire faces. Too much expression comes from the area around the mouth; obscuring it is unnatural. If the clown's goal is to look recognizably human and not, say, creepy, they know that restraint is sometimes appropriate. Attention to detail is a sign of professionalism and care about one's metier. If people think those details don't really matter, and you should just have fun and enjoy it, well, that's a vote in favor of creepy clowns.
The dialogue above is a representative sample and not nearly exhaustive. Nobody paid much attention to the details for this movie. Had they done so, there would not have been an incomprehensible rush of names at the beginning, that eventually resolved itself into a proposed genocide of one people by the representative of another for violating (maybe?) a peace treaty whose terms and purposes were not well-established, despite far too many Phanton Menace-lite scenes of diplomatic negotiation. There was also an Infinity Stone, not that the movie told its viewer anything about it other than it had a lot of power and maybe could only be harnessed by certain types of beings. As with all the other Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, there is no clear metaphysics, or physics, or economy, or politics, which all great science-fiction movies--even all the good ones--manage to establish. The sequels to Guardians have already been announced, lest the viewer be concerned someone might die: all the important characters will stick around for another two movies, no matter how 'dead' the viewer is to believe they are 70% of the way through the film.*
There are also the political complaints: a multi-ethnic, multi-species group of heroes led by a white man.** Four women characters in total: a dead mother, who lied about the main character's father's identity; the appropriate-for-a-13-year-old 'love interest,' who is just a female man except when she inexplicably isn't able to fight for herself and needs to be saved; a slave; one of the clear bad guys.
Drax has some generic "you killed my family" backstory that is delivered entirely in dialogue, without any useful details. It's as though no one thought to do the Gladiator-style flashback, which requires no actual action sequences and takes up perhaps five minutes. Everyone else in the group goes along for the ride for reasons that are never made clear, or quickly abandoned. There's also no character development, a rising problem in science fiction and comic book movies. No one has even the most basic of character conflicts: no one has to make any difficult choice, never mind being troubled by the conscience of a Mystique or Nightcrawler. Has any character learned any lesson aside from, perhaps, "believe in yourself" or "trust in your team"?
And this leaves aside the question of whether this is a worthwhile type of movie to be making in the first place, but what it sets out to do, it does poorly. Why was it so successful? Why is it so well-regarded? Because it was explicitly not as gloom-filled as many other MCU and science fiction movies.
*I am not dumb. If someone is "dead" and the movie has an hour left, they are not dead. If Agent Coulson wasn't dead, ain't nobody in any Marvel movie ever going to be dead. So that's some metaphysics, at least.
**Professor X might run the X-Men, but he clearly has some ambivalence about it.
17.12.14
Gilmore Girls
The criticism around Lena Dunham's Girls takes two different, overlapping, forms: criticism of the fictional protagonist modeled to some unknown extend on the actual life of the auteur, and criticism of the fictional portrayal of the shallow or blinkered. These are difficult to parse because the first set of issues are longstanding; people have genuine difficulty in separating writers from their writing, artists from their art, etc, and the tendency to read fictional output as personality simpliciter is frequently enacted--see Woody Allen, Kanye West, and most biographies of literary figures. The second is part of a set of issues about what, and how, fiction is supposed to work; there is a particular sense that now there are a greater number of unlikeable characters, that this unlikeability is a way of signifying 'realism,' and this realism is expressed primarily through the grim, the awkward, and the mundane. In the case of Girls these issues are heightened by considerations, alternately facile and serious, about the role of women and/or people of color in fictional worlds (the pushback on Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot is another example of this ongoing conversation with respect to the role of women). Lastly, one must say that Lena Dunham does not always appear to be her own best advocate.
Well, no one, to my knowledge, thinks of Alexis Bledel and Rory Gilmore as being the same person, and while auteur Amy Sherman-Palladino certainly writes with one very typical type of voice, Gilmore Girls nicely divides up its concerns between a wide variety of women, and finds the time to validate many of their own particular choices and beliefs. It's fitting rather than reductive that Lane inherits her mother's values--people tend to end up like their parents, more or less. Sookie gets pretty much what she wants. Paris might be a pain, but she's an endearing one. The way the latter seasons suggest that Rory draws her personality most strongly from her grandmother are well-observed. All that as preamble, let's get down to business:
The show is a real drag once Rory gets to college, if not sooner. That she would find Logan and his gang of rich folks to be enjoyable is not surprising--the freedom that comes with money is a real kind of freedom, after all--and that she would enter into a relationship with the least suitable of these and eventually decide she didn't want to be with him also seems realistic. She also steals a boat and drops out of college, and spends a significant amount of time being a general dirtbag and mean to anyone who wants to help her. Of course Lorelai takes her back--motherhood is about nothing if not infinite forgiveness--but the whole thing is unpleasant to go through. So also the slow process by which she discards her first boyfriend--infinitely patient with her, as it turns out, and working so hard to avoid trying to change Rory while also carving out time for his interests--for the pseudo-literary bad boy who just feels too much to subscribe to your middle-class notions of 'acting like a regular human being,' man, is also realistic, and also uniformly unpleasant. Anyone who was in high school will recognize it as A Thing People Sometimes Do. Why anyone would want to relive this particular set of emotional experiences is baffling.
Rory is a character who is quite plausibly drawn as both very intelligent and poor at making decisions, particularly about relationships, and this seems like a plausible combination of traits. But the question is not whether they're real, but whether these mistakes are dramatically interesting, especially when she repeats the same mistakes--choosing someone who is unable to clearly articulate his feelings, who is ambivalent about the nature of their relationship, someone who is in some relevant sense a bad person (if not an evil one). The defense usually offered is that these people draw Rory out of her shell, and this is a good thing, but the series itself raised and answered this question in the first season episode where Chilton gets concerned she is not active enough socially. In that episode, it eventually resolves that she is perfectly fine as she is: she has friends, and makes new ones, if at a slow pace, and wanting to read, etc, is a perfectly fine way to go through life. However, the adventures of someone who is fundamentally well-adjusted to life, but introverted, lacks dramatic spark, so it must be brought in from outside forces; in order to bring the same spark, these outside forces must become progressively stronger (also following the rule of patterning or matching and intensifying in a television show), and thus the reasons for the show's well-accepted slide in quality during later seasons. It is a short-term attempt to goose the dramatic value of the show, with the benefit of being a realistic depiction of the poor decisions made by a very smart young woman, but is generally recognized as a creative failure.
Gilmore Girls, then, is a show whose titular characters are often the least interesting, and whose conflicts, even when believable, are both realistic and unpleasant. It seems entirely possible to say that it is a success in its aims, and not very much worth watching through to the end.
The criticism around Lena Dunham's Girls takes two different, overlapping, forms: criticism of the fictional protagonist modeled to some unknown extend on the actual life of the auteur, and criticism of the fictional portrayal of the shallow or blinkered. These are difficult to parse because the first set of issues are longstanding; people have genuine difficulty in separating writers from their writing, artists from their art, etc, and the tendency to read fictional output as personality simpliciter is frequently enacted--see Woody Allen, Kanye West, and most biographies of literary figures. The second is part of a set of issues about what, and how, fiction is supposed to work; there is a particular sense that now there are a greater number of unlikeable characters, that this unlikeability is a way of signifying 'realism,' and this realism is expressed primarily through the grim, the awkward, and the mundane. In the case of Girls these issues are heightened by considerations, alternately facile and serious, about the role of women and/or people of color in fictional worlds (the pushback on Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot is another example of this ongoing conversation with respect to the role of women). Lastly, one must say that Lena Dunham does not always appear to be her own best advocate.
Well, no one, to my knowledge, thinks of Alexis Bledel and Rory Gilmore as being the same person, and while auteur Amy Sherman-Palladino certainly writes with one very typical type of voice, Gilmore Girls nicely divides up its concerns between a wide variety of women, and finds the time to validate many of their own particular choices and beliefs. It's fitting rather than reductive that Lane inherits her mother's values--people tend to end up like their parents, more or less. Sookie gets pretty much what she wants. Paris might be a pain, but she's an endearing one. The way the latter seasons suggest that Rory draws her personality most strongly from her grandmother are well-observed. All that as preamble, let's get down to business:
The show is a real drag once Rory gets to college, if not sooner. That she would find Logan and his gang of rich folks to be enjoyable is not surprising--the freedom that comes with money is a real kind of freedom, after all--and that she would enter into a relationship with the least suitable of these and eventually decide she didn't want to be with him also seems realistic. She also steals a boat and drops out of college, and spends a significant amount of time being a general dirtbag and mean to anyone who wants to help her. Of course Lorelai takes her back--motherhood is about nothing if not infinite forgiveness--but the whole thing is unpleasant to go through. So also the slow process by which she discards her first boyfriend--infinitely patient with her, as it turns out, and working so hard to avoid trying to change Rory while also carving out time for his interests--for the pseudo-literary bad boy who just feels too much to subscribe to your middle-class notions of 'acting like a regular human being,' man, is also realistic, and also uniformly unpleasant. Anyone who was in high school will recognize it as A Thing People Sometimes Do. Why anyone would want to relive this particular set of emotional experiences is baffling.
Rory is a character who is quite plausibly drawn as both very intelligent and poor at making decisions, particularly about relationships, and this seems like a plausible combination of traits. But the question is not whether they're real, but whether these mistakes are dramatically interesting, especially when she repeats the same mistakes--choosing someone who is unable to clearly articulate his feelings, who is ambivalent about the nature of their relationship, someone who is in some relevant sense a bad person (if not an evil one). The defense usually offered is that these people draw Rory out of her shell, and this is a good thing, but the series itself raised and answered this question in the first season episode where Chilton gets concerned she is not active enough socially. In that episode, it eventually resolves that she is perfectly fine as she is: she has friends, and makes new ones, if at a slow pace, and wanting to read, etc, is a perfectly fine way to go through life. However, the adventures of someone who is fundamentally well-adjusted to life, but introverted, lacks dramatic spark, so it must be brought in from outside forces; in order to bring the same spark, these outside forces must become progressively stronger (also following the rule of patterning or matching and intensifying in a television show), and thus the reasons for the show's well-accepted slide in quality during later seasons. It is a short-term attempt to goose the dramatic value of the show, with the benefit of being a realistic depiction of the poor decisions made by a very smart young woman, but is generally recognized as a creative failure.
Gilmore Girls, then, is a show whose titular characters are often the least interesting, and whose conflicts, even when believable, are both realistic and unpleasant. It seems entirely possible to say that it is a success in its aims, and not very much worth watching through to the end.
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