So this week for Film Club, we continued our string of films about restless minds trapped within radically damaged bodies, watching Dalton Trumbo's anti-war classic Johnny Got His Gun (1971).
People who are around my age and who share my basic bank of cultural references may know Johnny through the Metallica song "One," a song written from the point of view of Trumbo's protagonist, Joe. The video for this song goes so far as to incorporate pretty substantial chunks of the film's footage:
I include it here because does a good job of presenting the basic narrative conceit of Johnny: a young man, in the prime of life, gets blown literally to pieces by a mortar shell, losing his arms, legs, and facial features, as well as his capacity to see, hear, and speak.
The film opens with Joe getting wounded, and being taken to reside permanently in a convalescent hospital. Opening your film this way presents a certain amount of screenwriting difficulty in that it sets up a situation wherein the protagonist—the character who, in a classical screenplay, would be the primary active agent driving the narrative—is specifically defined by a near-absolute lack of agency. He's silent, mostly immobilized, and literally under wraps:
It's fruitful, at this juncture, to compare Johnny to last week's pick, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. That film opens nearly the same way, and so faces this same problem. Diving Bell's director, Julian Schnabel opts to solve this problem in a fairly classical way: he introduces a desire on the part of the paralyzed protagonist (specifically, the desire to dictate a memoir). Joe also has a desire—he wishes to be put on display as a cautionary spectacle—and, as in Diving Bell, this desire requires that the protagonist communicate effectively with the outside world, which necessitates the development of an ingenious means of non-verbal communication. But whereas Diving Bell shapes this into an (admittedly slender) narrative through-line, Johnny lets this desire crop up only intermittently, and it really only takes shape as a coherent problem around the exact time that he comes up with the solution.
So we might be forgiven, at this stage, for thinking that maybe the Metallica video is actually the appropriate format for this story: it delivers the payload of the ghastly concept and the arrestingly creepy key visuals without needing to be burdened with the necessity of trying to develop a story around this character. It's win-win!
Except... well, the primary way Trumbo attempts to fill up the run-time is by presenting us with the phantasmagoric weirdness that's unfolding in Joe's head: a mish-mash of hallucinations, memories (often of psychosexually-charged interludes), and fantasy sequences. This is the stuff that gets discarded when you reduce the film to a music video or an anti-war soundbite, and really, more's the pity: it represents some pretty whacked-out filmmaking, somewhere between engagingly weird and just plain addled. This dimension of the film can maybe best be illustrated by this shot of Donald Sutherland, portraying Jesus the Locomotive Engineer:
Or perhaps by this interlude, which is the type of sequence for which the word Fellini-esque was coined:
Or the sequence in which Joe hallucinates his former girlfriend, lost in a kind of Neoclassical nightmare landscape, of the sort that only 1971 can really deliver:
I'm choosing images that have a bit of camp value, and that's not by accident: it must be said that the film doesn't always stay on the safe side of that line. Often the sequences threaten to collapse into the simply laughable. But at their best, these sequences are actually oddly mysterious and compelling. (Which is not also to say that they're not also totally bonkers.)
The whole film's like that, in a way, even its more celebrated passages—the actor who plays Joe, Timothy Bottoms, has a willowy softness to his voice that often seems at odds with Trumbo's weighty dialogue: a seeming mis-match which threatens, again, to skew the proceedings into camp. But then it goes around the bend and becomes affecting again: after all, what is it the film wants us to look at if not the suffering that war visits upon the people least equipped to bear it?
There are other movies that look at that same point, and I considered choosing some of them for the next Film Club pick, but ultimately I was more intrigued by the theme of disfigurement, and the aspects of personhood that cohere around our recognizable features, a line of thinking that led me to choose Georges Franju's Eyes Without A Face (1960).
So here's this week's Film Club pick, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Netflix summarizes it thusly:
"In 1995, author and Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a stroke that put him in a coma; he awakened mute and completely paralyzed. Mathieu Amalric stars in this adaptation of Bauby's autobiography, which he dictated by blinking."
That should maybe have a spoiler warning on it, since these two sentences encapsulate the central narrative arc of the film, from beginning to end. (The movie fleshes out its run-time with some stuff about Bauby's relationship with his wife, mistress, father, children, and friends, but the dictation of the book is the strongest through-line, and the one granted the most classical resolution.)
So, even if you only know that much, you essentially know the entire story. And then Netflix's summary goes on, revealing the film's theme and overall tenor: something about it being a "poignant film about the strength of the human spirit." This doesn't really constitute an additional spoiler because "the strength of the human spirit" is a cliche, and if we're going to be watching a film about a paralyzed guy who writes a memoir by blinking, the only way it's not going to be about the strength of the human spirit is if it's made by the Kids in the Hall.
None of this is to call out the poor Netflix synopsis-writers; I'm sure they have more serious things to worry about. It's to make the point that this film faces a real dilemma at the outset. We know how the story ends, and we know that the central thematic motif of that story is, well, "shopworn" is putting it kindly. So the challenge becomes: how can you take a film that in synopsis sounds like a Lifetime TV movie and pitch it to an art-house audience—an audience that (at least theoretically) is supposed to be more adventurous in its narrative and thematic tastes?
Well, the film's French, which probably helps.
But to find a more serious answer, we have to turn to an appreciation of the film's craft. Having been trained as a fiction-writer, I often approach films from the perspective of analyzing what works and what doesn't in the film's narrative. But the director of Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel, is trained as a painter, and so a more appropriate method might be to try to appreciate the film's "painterly" qualities. In this regard, the film is not a series of stale cliches, but rather a smashing success, especially in its opening scenes, which masterfully manipulate focal depth, color, and light:
There's something else that Schnabel does from a craft perspective, and it involves an exceptionally canny control over the usage of point-of-view, at least for the first third of the film. Bear with me for a minute while I explicate...
After his stroke, protagonist Bauby suffers from something they refer to in the film as "locked-in syndrome." Schnabel perceives a relationship between locked-in syndrome and cinematic spectation: like Bauby, we, the film's viewers, can perceive things, but are prohibited from interacting with them. To cement this relationship, Schnabel chooses to present the majority of the early portion of the film in first-person POV shots.
This sort of extended use of the first-person POV has been experimented with in the past rather dubiously— see: Lady in the Lake (1942) —but that was a film which promised to put you "in the action," which feels awkward in a passive medium like the cinema (it works great in an interactive medium like video games, though not when those video games are translated back into first-person film experiments). Schnabel's film, in effect, promises the opposite: it puts you in "the inaction," which works surprisingly well (perhaps most viscerally in a striking, memorable sequence in which Bauby has his right eye sewn shut to prevent infection).
Schnabel cheats a little, breaking from a strictly naturalistic POV by using effects like jump cuts (which could arguably be said to have a rough analogue in the way our vision works, but it'd be a stretch), and by bringing people so unnaturally close that they'd practically have to be bumping noses with Bauby. This is maybe plausible when it's his wife:
...but a bit less believable when it's his doctor:
These deviations have their effect, though: they contribute to an overall sense of disorientation and invasive presence, both of which help to get the viewer into Bauby's head (and body) better than a strict adherence to first-person POV might have done on its own.
Eventually, the film quietly begins to move us out of the subjective POV and into an objective, third-person POV. We start getting shots like this:
...which increase in both frequency and duration throughout the first third of the film. As a viewer, attuning yourself to your consciousness' flow into and out of Bauby's body is an odd experience: it is as though you are some kind of restless spirit. Adding to this are the moves into and out of memories (via flashbacks) and into and out of Bauby's imagination (via fantasy sequences)—it's safe to say that the film strives to get its audience to be aware of itself as a living perceptual apparatus, which is a damn sight more interesting than getting its audience to be aware of the "strength of the human spirit." It's also a generous approach to filmmaking, one that—at its (unsustained) best—invites comparison to avant-garde work which goes further with drawing attention to the audience's status as perceptual agents (Stan Brakhage's work is the best example I can summon to mind).
Schnabel shouldn't be faulted for not making an avant-garde film, though, especially when he's able to use his manipulation of POV for such striking narrative effects. One notable effect is that Schnabel navigates us through over a third of the film before we ever get to see what our protagonist looks like, in the present—this is something that most films, of course, provide within the first few minutes. By the point where we finally get an unobstructed view of his face we've already become familiar with him as a lively, handsome man in flashbacks and fantasies, and seeing him with the distorted features of the stroke victim comes as a vivid shock, even if you're expecting it. At this moment—which essentially constitutes the "turning point" that most films put at the end of their first act—the film chooses to move us suddenly outside the consciousness of Bauby himself, and abruptly into the consciousness of someone who knows him from before and is experiencing the shock of seeing him transformed. (It fits, not least because the middle third of the film is largely occupied with the changing relationship between Bauby and his network of loved ones.)
So. As a story, not that compelling, but it's a finely-wrought piece of cinematic art. This might lead to an interesting follow-up question—something about the decision to transform someone else's suffering / disability into a beautiful aesthetic object?—but let's hold off on that until next week, when we look at a very different portrayal of disability, Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1971).
Last week, when writing about Bonnie and Clyde, I spoke on how the film makes a life of crime look exciting and glamorous. Even though we know that the film probably won't end well for the central couple, and even though this knowledge generates a few moments of real pathos, the overall tenor of the film is largely playful: the film invites us to join the Barrow Gang, and succeeds in making that invitation enticing by making the experience of being among the gang one that is, in a word, fun.
This week, we turn to They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. This film also is made in the late 1960s, and also examines the lives of people struggling through the Great Depression, but it could not be more different from Bonnie and Clyde in terms of its tone or its narrative devices.
The premise is simple: a canny promoter (Gig Young, in an Oscar-winning role) orchestrates a dance marathon, in which various couples compete for a cash prize. Essentially, it's an endurance test: the couples get a ten-minute rest period every hour, but beyond that they must remain on the dance floor, in constant motion. (You're welcome to sleep on the dance floor, as long as your partner can keep holding you upright.)
It should go without saying that this isn't going to be as much fun as robbing banks, and, indeed, as the contest wears on, from days into weeks, the contestants slowly transform from dancers into zomboid shells. I've seen Saw, and I've seen Hostel, and I've seen my share of Asian shock cinema, and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? still took me aback: its depiction of physical and mental suffering is as sustained and extensive as any that I've ever come across.
Focused as it is on the anguish of the participants, the film mostly keeps its attention on the dance floor and the complex of rooms that immediately surround it. This zone, inhabited by a shifting field of couples, functions interestingly as a kind of networked narrative space, but there is, indeed, a central couple, who function essentially as the film's protagonists. Here they are:
If the Protagonist Factor—discussed here last week—is operational in this film, it should dictate that we identify with this suffering couple, even though the circumstances are more grim, and the process of identification more discomfiting. But director Sidney Pollack, in a series of exquisitely cruel gestures, attempts to deny us whatever cathartic pleasure we might glean from this identification. He does this by emphasizing the presence of the audience that consumes the spectacle of human ruination unfolding before them.
Our protagonist couple has an observer, a little old lady who roots enthusiastically for them:
...and by including her, and the other audience members, Pollack reminds us, repeatedly, that to imagine ourselves as the body that suffers is falsely self-validating. We aren't the dancers there on the floor, exhaustedly jerking; we are the the ones who watch them, the ones who, for some unexamined reason, enjoy witnessing the horror of other humans undergoing something terrible.
Now, one could argue that making a movie that criticizes people for coming to see your movie is kind of a cheap thing for a filmmaker to do (see also: Showgirls (Film Club 42), or the flap that emerged last year around Michael Haneke's Funny Games remake). I'd argue, instead, that it's a variant on the benign masochism that undergirds the bargain that horror films and tragedies make with their audience (see also: The Vanishing (Film Club 40). In either case, I'm impressed with the lengths to which Pollack's critique extends: this film is not only anti-capitalism and anti-spectacle but also explicitly anti-narrative (as anti-narrative as a narrative film can be, anyway).
This emerges from the way Pollack presents the character of Rocky, the promoter, who also serves as the Master of Ceremonies.
In order to engage the audience more, Rocky literally narrates the entire event, verbally adorning the occurrences on the dance floor with little story hooks. And yet, we repeatedly get a sense that these story hooks are simplistic, distorting—in a word, false. And Pollack refuses, really, to provide any counternarrative: we're given only the most fragmentary and incomplete backstory for any of these characters. The protagonists are our protagonists not because they're better or more likeable; not because they're more noble than any other couple, but simply because they're the ones put in front of us. (The old lady, our nearest analogue, favors them for chance reasons: the number assigned to them is her favorite number.) What Pollack seems to be saying, ultimately, is that there's no story here, only spectacle, specifically, the spectacle of desperate humans being transformed, by capitalism, into twitching meat-puppets. Extend this logic to the entire world, and it becomes clear that the only real way to retain any kind of dignity is simply to opt out, to take death by a bullet over the agony of continued existence. (Hence the title.)
Next week, though, we'll attempt to see if there aren't other strategies for surviving and navigating a hostile world: we'll be watching "angry young man" Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).
When we wrapped up last week's pick, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), I said that it picqued my interest in two different things: 1) how a filmmaker might control the level of sympathy an audience might feel towards a criminal couple, and 2) how a filmmaker might approach the long-term success or failure of a romantic relationship born in the heat of an impulsive moment. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), this week's pick, addresses both of those questions in ways that are worth examining.
First the question of sympathy. There's something powerful about the psychology of movies—perhaps inherent to the psychology of storytelling itself—which enables us to give over our sympathy to nearly any character placed at the front and center of a narrative, even characters who might otherwise strike us as repellent. (I've written on this before, when discussing Psycho (Film Club 39) and Peeping Tom (Film Club 38).)
The addition of "star charisma" pretty much doubles whatever bonus we get from this "protagonist factor": we're prone to root for Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange in Postman not only because the narrative centers around them but also because, well, they're incredibly good-looking people.
Does Bonnie and Clyde play this card? Absolutely. If anything, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty are even more charismatic than Lange and Nicholson:
But, star charisma or no star charisma, the protagonist factor will only get you so far if the characters' motivations aren't clear, and if they aren't ones that we feel at least loosely sympathetic towards. This is where Postman drops the ball: as I wrote last week, we end up not being sure why Nicholson and Lange decide to flee to Chicago, not being sure why they give up on that plan, not being sure why they have to resort to murder, not being sure why they can't settle down after the murder has been enacted. Each time we encounter one of these moments of confusion, our ability to identify with them drains away a little bit more.
Bonnie and Clyde doesn't make the same mistake. Clyde argues explicity for why Bonnie should join him in a life of crime, presenting it as a clear alternative to (and improvement upon) the service-industry life that Bonnie's headed towards. The two of them later use an identical argument to enlist gas station attendant C. W. Moss as a sidekick:
Neither Bonnie nor C. W. need all that much convincing, and neither does the audience: we've all imagined, at some point or another, that being a bank robber would be more exciting, glamorous, and sexy than whatever it is we do for a day job. The argument also involves an explicit contempt towards the concept of living a "normal" life, a contempt which I think holds ground in the mind of the contemporary film-goer—certainly it must have resonated with audiences in 1967. (Whether it would have been a motivating factor for a young girl in the early 1930s is anybody's guess.)
Once the crime spree is underway, it doesn't take long for the authorities to begin pursuit. This kind of relentless external pressure makes for very strong motivation: they spend the entire remainder of the film trying not to get imprisoned or shot, and we're right along with them, every step of the way.
Interestingly, as this pursuit ramps up, and as the escapes grow more and more harrowing, the normal, domestic life (which we rejected so soundly in the first third of the film) begins to seem more and more appealing, at least to Bonnie, and, to a degree, to the audience. This is where we begin to part ways with Clyde: during one memorable moment where we see (and where Bonnie sees) that he is unable to imagine a life other than the one he has chosen. (There's a definite purity to his world-view, but such lack of doubt can't, it seems, be sustained by non-mythic mortals like ourselves.)
This leads up to the inevitable conclusion—I won't discuss it here in great detail, beyond saying that, like Postman's director Bob Rafelson, this film's director, Arthur Penn, seems to be saying that the criminal impulse and its associated libidinal energies are nonviable foundations for a stable, long-lasting relationship. From a narrative perspective, this works: the forces that eventually doom the relationship are pretty much the natural end result of the choices they've made. This contrasts especially well against Postman's resolution, which muddies the point by descending into mere capriciousness.
This makes Bonnie and Clyde the more satisfying tragedy, but there's a way in which I wonder if there isn't a faint conservative attitude behind this conclusion: isn't the ultimate moral here, then, that Bonnie would have been better off locked into Depression-era service work? Debatable, sure. But it did get us thinking about exactly which life strategies are the appropriate ones for surviving economic hard times, a line of inquiry that brought us directly to our next pick: 1969's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. This one marks the first choice of our new third member, Tiffanny E. Welcome aboard, T., looking forward to seeing where this goes.
The Postman Always Rings Twice is a novel that's been made into a movie not once, not twice, but four times. Clearly there's something in the story that continues to captivate the minds of audiences... or, at the very least, the minds of filmmakers. The makers of the 1981 version (which we watched this week for Film Club), however, seem unable to effectively locate whatever that compelling element might be—they end up chasing down a few different narrative paths, diluting their energy and losing momentum at every turn.
The setup is certainly fecund enough: we open with shiftless drifter Frank Chambers, played here by Jack Nicholson.
Chambers agrees to work at a service station that's owned by local entrepreneur / ethnic stereotype Nick Papadokis.
It's pretty evident from the outset that Frank has taken this job not because he aspires to mechanichood as a career but because he wants to fuck Papadokis' wife, Cora, played here by Jessica Lange.
Now, I'd argue that there's some miscasting here. Both Frank and Cora, we later learn, are impulsive, brutish, and more than a little bit dumb—so when Nicholson plays Frank as impish and Lange plays Cora as icily elegant, it doesn't, for my money, work. (If I were remaking the film today, I'd get Joaquin Phoenix and Rose McGowan—two dim-witted-looking actors who basically ooze erotic energy.) In any case, if we set aside these quibblings, we can see that we're left with a dramatic structure that's basically sound—it's a garden-variety love triangle. From a narrative perspective, it works. If you want to make an erotically-charged thriller—and it seems, at the outset, that this is what director Bob Rafelson and screenwriter David Mamet are out to do—then all you really have to do is lay out the promise of some forbidden fucking among charismatic protagonists and, as long as you delay the payoff for long enough to generate some dramatic tension, the script basically writes itself.
David Mamet is a world-famous, award-winning screenwriter and playwright, so I know that he knows some basic methods for generating dramatic tension. And so I'm surprised to see him throw away a lot of opportunity by having them fuck within the first twenty minutes of the film:
Hrm. OK—the film, at this early point in its development, has made only one promise to the audience, which is that we'll get to see Lange and Nicholson transgress on camera. When the filmmakers deploy this plot point so early, without a suitable period of tease and buildup, it feels, frankly, like the narrative equivalent of sex without foreplay.
Granted, the buildup is only one half of the narrative arc of the romantic triangle—there's also all the drama inherent in dealing with the aftermath. Again a number of ready-made dramatic situations present themselves: one expects to see scenes wherein Papadokis grows suspicious, perhaps a scene where we get some sense of the risk involved in his reaction, eventually a big reveal... they're cliches, admittedly, but they're cliches because, frankly, they work. Maybe Mamet thinks they're too cheap. He must think something, because he eschews every one of these scenes, in favor of focusing on Frank and Cora's attempt to run away to Chicago.
This plan is unclearly motivated—we're not sure, at this juncture, exactly what kind of future either Cora and Frank envision—and their decision to break the plan off and return to life at the motel is equally unclear. It's not long after that that they begin to plan to kill Nick, although in the absence of the scenes I talk about above—the ones that establish that Nick might be suspicious, and the ones that establish his suspicion as a threat—the decision to kill him seems effectively arbitrary. I'm willing to be sympathetic to characters who give in to selfish lust (if they're charismatic enough) and I'll even be sympathetic to them being forced to murder someone if there's a self-preservation angle—but take that angle away and they simply seem like utterly amoral figures, driven to kill out of simple nihilism. (Which is not to say that you can't make a film exploring that idea—take Badlands as perhaps the most successful example—but this film ain't Badlands.)
So, anyway, yes, the film does away with all the setup and has Cora and Frank kill Nick, shortly before the halfway point in the film. Not long afterwards, they're tried and eventually acquitted. The film has thrown away enough narrative elements that it's managed to compress a pretty basic three-act story into 1:20 of run-time, leaving it with roughly another forty minutes to... do what, exactly?
It's easy to view that final forty with something like hope, to believe that Mamet and Rafelson have telescoped the meat-and-potatoes of the murder plot because they something up their sleeve for the second half of the film. Whatever it has in mind, however, doesn't quite come off: the film never regains narrative momentum, and we're left with a series of odd little left-turns like Frank running off with the circus for a week and having a romance with Angelica Huston, who plays a sexy lion-tamer. No, seriously:
It's a curious choice, and it's not the only curveball that the film throws us in its final third. It seems almost like the film does these things in order to not have to do something else. If we ask ourselves this question—what isn't the film doing?—it becomes evident that it almost never shows us are scenes of Cora and Frank happy in their post-Nick home, and in fact spends much of its narrative energy contriving reasons for one or the other of them to be away. This could be read as a failure of nerve: it's not too hard to imagine a squeamish filmmaker balking at the opportunity to show a pair of unrepentant killers happy and in love. One could also, of course, read it as a sort of moralizing critique: an indicator that neither Frank nor Cora have thought through a vision for a sustainable future together.
There is, ultimately, something interesting about that read, which imagines that Rafelson and Mamet are attempting to set up a tension between the directed, criminal-minded lust of Frank and Cora's "courtship" and the ambient malaise of their post-trial "relationship." This read is aided, a smidge, by Rafelson's use of longtime Bergman collaborator Sven Nyquist as the film's director of photography: true to form, Nyquist shoots the film less as a noir and more as, well, a Bergman-esque European relationship drama:
This read generates a certain degree of promise, but the film never figures out exactly what it wants to do with this tension (if in fact it is intending to present it at all), and it never confidently establishes a coherent stance towards Frank and Cora—even at the film's conclusion, it's still unclear whether we're meant to feel sympathy for them or hold them in judgment. It reaches the end of its run-time and allows a more-or-less chance event to simply wipe the questions off the table.
So, in conclusion: a curious and frustrating film, but one that made me think about two things: 1) how an audience responds to a charismatic criminal couple— either by judging them, or by developing sympathy for them, and 2) how filmmakers approach the long-term success or failure of romantic relationships born in the heat of an impulsive moment. I do believe there are good films that deal with this exact pair of questions—Badlands (1973) is one, and my pick for next week, Bonnie and Clyde (1967) may be another. Stay tuned!
So last week, after a brief holiday hiatus, Skunkcabbage and I returned to the business of Film Club. The last film we looked at, The Maltese Falcon, featured Humphrey Bogart playing private detective Sam Spade, and we decided to carry on in that vein this week, taking a look at Bogart playing private detective Philip Marlowe in Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep.
I often think of a movie's plot as consisting of all the narrative "questions" that are unanswered at any given moment. In order for a film to be plot-driven, it needs to have at least a few questions "open" (unanswered) at each moment of its run-time; that's what keeps viewers curious and invested in seeing how the story turns out. Watching The Big Sleep, however, is like seeing this principle in total overdrive. The film dumps so many questions in your lap, and has so many of these questions "open" at any given moment, that to even try to hold them all in your head is nearly impossible without a notepad.
The film opens with Marlowe being called to the home of one General Sternwood, who wants him to investigate a scheme in which someone is blackmailing one of his daughters, Carmen. This leads to some obvious questions: Who is blackmailing Carmen? Why? What do they have on her? Before Marlowe leaves, the film throws a few more in our direction: What's the deal with Sean Regan, Sternwood's companion, who has mysteriously vanished? Why does Vivian, Sternwood's other daughter, seem to take such an interest in trying to figure out why Marlowe's been hired?
Once the investigation begins, the questions really begin piling up. Who killed this guy?
Or this guy?
What's gangster Eddie Mars' relationship to all of this? What about Joe Brody, another blackmailer? What about Mars' wife, who appears to also be missing? By midway through the film has so many "open" questions that its plot begins to resemble a kind of porous texture, shaped almost entirely by the narrative gaps that its puzzles define.
Most of these questions, although not all of them, do eventually end up answered, although the answers aren't particularly satisfying or memorable. (I watched the film twice this month, and even with it fresh in my memory I'd still struggle to answer all of the questions I listed above.) But the film is still totally enjoyable and entertaining, and this led me to realize that The Big Sleep is not actually plot-driven, but rather character-driven. The real pleasure is not in navigating and decoding the puzzle-structure but rather in watching Philip Marlowe, as embodied by Bogart.
When writing on The Maltese Falcon, I wrote that male viewers watching the film are likely to have the experience of wanting to be Sam Spade. That experience is redoubled here: watching The Big Sleep is like browsing through a primer on how to perform the codes of masculinity. (In this way, they can be seen as forerunners of the Bond films, which serve something of the same cultural purpose.) The Big Sleep teaches men how to dress, drink, and smoke, how to remain cool under pressure, how to be funny, and how to gather and synthesize information. It teaches men how to throw a punch:
...as well as how to take one:
Above all, it teaches men how to flirt. Director Hawks stacks the deck a bit in this regard, placing Bogart / Marlowe in a universe pretty much universally inhabited by charismatic (and receptive) women. To close, then, here's a brief gallery of some of the women Bogart encounters, opening with the most notable of the batch, the stunning Lauren Bacall:
And now the rest:
Whew. OK, so, next? Next we're sticking with noir, but we're leaving the 1930s and 40s (where we've been parked since, wow, October!). We'll be checking out the 1981 version The Postman Always Rings Twice, featuring David Mamet's adaptation of the James M. Cain novel.
Want more on Big Sleep director Howard Hawks? Film blog Only the Cinema is currently doing an "Early Hawks Blog-A-Thon," devoted to writing on Hawks films that predate Bringing Up Baby (1938). Check it out!
Note: the following post contains some discussion of the resolution and closing scenes of the film.
So last week, when Film Club looked at It Happened One Night, I presented a pair of screenshots and did a quick little analysis of the power dynamic reflected between the man and the woman depicted therein. This week, we watched The Maltese Falcon (1941), and if you wanted to play the same game, you could... try doing a read on this image:
It doesn't take a degree in semiotics to figure out which one appears to be in charge here. And yet the gender politics of Falcon are more complicated than this image might initially suggest.
The woman who Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is haranguing here is Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), and she's a prime example of that quintessential noir figure, the femme fatale. The question of whether the noir fatales are progressive is a thorny one, but one thing that can be said in the affirmative is that O'Shaughnessy certainly possesses a certain autonomy, with goals that are, for lack of a better word, self-directed. (Specifically, she's one of a number of people in search of a priceless figurine, the falcon of the title.)
Now, to be sure, there's a certain degree of self-directedness in last week's female lead, Ellie Andrews—the plot of It Happened One Night is set into motion by her active resistance of her father's wishes for her—but a lot of the "comedy" of that film actually involves the breaking-down of her will in a variety of humiliating and debasing ways. The Maltese Falcon also ultimately punishes O'Shaughnessy—she's shipped off to prison for her role in one of the film's murders—but it's hard to know, exactly, how to read that fact. If I were to read the film from a feminist perspective, I would argue that the film is built around the notion of masculine authority, and the presence of a sufficiently headstrong woman unsettles that authority—it is only once that "uncontrollable feminine" is safely contained that the film's equilibrium is restored, and the narrative can draw to a close.
It's a tempting read, and yet there's a way in which the film's ending seems more bittersweet, or even downright bleak, rather than triumphant. Part of this is complicated by the (improbable) romance that erupts between Spade and O'Shaughnessy:
...and part of it is complicated by the fact that the film and Spade both always seem to maintain a respect for this headstrong woman, even when she's at her most manipulative and dishonest. In fact, you could make the argument that the film respects her because she's manipulative and dishonest. (On more than one occasion, Spade catches her in some sort of lie, and he replies (ungrudgingly) "You're good.")
In order to really buy this as a read, however, one has to understand that, in the moral universe of The Maltese Falcon, the people with the greatest claim to authority are the people who are the most proficient in their ability to control and manipulate the truth. O'Shaughnessy lies, hedges, and omits key information throughout the entire film, but Spade himself does the same, and at least as frequently. Viewed through this lens, the film's narrative can be understood as being "about" various characters attempting to establish their version of the film's narrative as dominant. Half the fun as an audience member is attempting to keep on top of the ever-shifting narrative, which means managing an incessant flow of reversals, revisions, and reveals.
Spade and O'Shaughnessy, of course, are both experts here, as is Spade's "girl Friday," Effie Perine (Lee Patrick), another tough-headed female character held in high regard by the film. The process of watching them managing and responding to this flow of information is a delight—and we're listening as well as watching, given that so much of the information is deployed verbally, through dense, nearly impenetrably rapid patter. (This is a continuation, most likely, of the sound-enabled motion picture industry of this era being "drunk on speech"—and yet these characters also feel utterly contemporary in their way: they are, essentially, prototypes for the knowledge-workers and data-managers of our own current 21st century.)
Returning to the gender issue, however, it does have to be said that in the end Spade emerges as the one highest in this hierarchy—both Effie and Bridget, ultimately, are subordinated to his mastery (Effie is in Spade's employ, and Bridget's eventually loses control of the narrative and goes down in flames). Part of the reason that Spade maintains his enduring appeal as a character, of course, is because of his ability to think so effectively on his feet: to fast-talk his way through even the most dire circumstances until he works his way back into control. (Full disclosure: as a male viewer, it's hard for me not to want to be Spade, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only man who has had this experience.)
And yet our director, John Huston, makes this process of identification a little more complicated than it might be in the hands of a less-ambitious director. Specifically, the film is full of little hints that Spade is kind of a creepy guy. At one point he grabs Effie's wrist and squeezes it, unconsciously, until she has to protest "Sam—you're hurting me."
And the film's closing moments don't exactly show Sam as the most noble fellow, either. This is compounded by the fact that he delivers much of his final monologue with a glassy, faraway look in his eye that makes him look sinister, almost sociopathic:
In a way, what Huston is doing in this film is sort of the reverse of what Hitchcock does in Psycho (Film Club XXXIX). In Psycho, we're introduced to a person who is obviously creepy and later forced into unsettling identification with him; here in The Maltese Falcon we're introduced to a character who's easy to identify with and only as the film proceeds are we made to question just exactly what we've gotten ourselves into by doing so. Genius stuff.
For next week, we'll stick with Bogart, noir, and unstable narratives: we'll be looking at 1946's The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks from a William Faulkner screenplay.
So after last week's dip into Chaplin's body of work, by way of Modern Times, Film Club opted to try contrasting it against what many consider to be his masterpiece, City Lights (1931).
Just to give you some idea of the degree of reverence City Lights has generated, this master list of the top 1,000 films of all time—generated by aggregating a wide variety of "best lists" made by different critics—ranks it as No. 21. (In the year and a half that Film Club has been convening, we've only watched one film more highly ranked on that list: Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, checking in at No. 16.)
It's easy to see why people are fond of City Lights: it's a very charming early example of the romantic comedy. Essentially, you have Chaplin's tramp falling in love with a blind flower-girl:
Due to an accident of circumstance, she comes to believe that he's actually incredibly wealthy. The Tramp spends much of the film maintaining this illusion, plying her with gifts and cash, and eventually working to finance an operation which will restore her sight.
Part of the reason he can keep this up is because he's saved the life of an eccentric (bipolar?) millionaire. Out of gratitude, the millionaire assumes a sort of patron role in the Tramp's life, loading him up with ample cash, and even taking him out on the town on occasion, which leads to a whole series of fish-out-of-water gags:
Those gags are often quite winning, and some of them are essentially cornerstones in the physical comedy playbook. At a formal party, for instance, the Tramp accidentally swallows a whistle just as some musicians are about to begin a performance. A screenshot doesn't really do the sequence justice:
...but you don't need a screenshot to tell you how it plays out: eighty years of follow-up comedy make the gag obvious, possibly even a little bit tired. (In fairness we should remember that for its time it's technically inventive—the gag hinges on the use of synchronized sound effects, which only break into motion picture history around five years earlier (with 1926's Don Juan)).
So there's a sweet love story in it, and everybody loves a good gag. But is there more to like about this film? The narrative is set up in such a way that it could, if it wanted, add some dramatic tension to this situation. For one thing, the millionaire's memory is unreliable, so sometimes he can't remember that he's supposed to be pals with the Tramp; for another thing, if the eye operation goes as planned, the blind girl will learn that the Tramp isn't wealthy. These are elegant narrative devices, but Chaplin isn't Hitchcock, and by and large he seems disinterested in exploiting these devices for anything resembling suspense. (The millionaire always eventually remembers, and even when he's out of the country for a spell the Tramp can still find a more-or-less effortless ways to keep the flow of gifts going.)
Modern Times, the companion piece we're working with, isn't exactly a masterpiece of taut narrative tension either, but it's rewarding to think about deeply because of its thematic complexity and interesting ambiguities. Those signs of a mature filmmaker, however, are almost completely absent from City Lights. Ask what City Lights is "about," in a thematic sense, and one comes up weirdly blank.
The title gives us a potential clue, suggesting that the film might have something to say about Depression-era urban life... and the opening scene of the film, in which a couple of nabobs unveil a statue dedicated to "Peace and Prosperity," suggest that the film may have a few satirical cards up its sleeve:
...but the film doesn't really have any interesting observations to make about urbanism, peace, or prosperity. Class is present in the film, obviously, but it's tough to glean a coherent stance on the topic from the unsustained way that Chaplin uses it. The Tramp is out of work, then he finds work, then he's out of work again: it sounds like commentary, but it doesn't really carry any narrative or conceptual weight. He's a poor person who befriends a millionaire, but the film uses this relationship only as a way to generate gags (see above), and in this way is no more "interested" in class than, say, a Three Stooges routine.
This even carries over to color the relationship between our two primary characters: there's a very real way in which you could say that the film isn't even really "about" the relationship between the Tramp and the flower-girl. Their scenes together often generate considerable pathos (fledgling Blade Runners out there might consider using the final scene as part of your Voigt-Kampff tests), but they're both essentially ciphers. We love the blind flower-girl because she is a Noble Poor Person, straight from central casting, not because we think of her as a real human being. (When you think about it in that light, some of the pathos begins to curdle into sentimentality.)
So is this film about? At its core, this film is about one thing, and one thing only: Chaplin himself. It's his prodigious physical gifts that carry the film, in scene after scene after scene. And it's easy to decide that that's OK. Who needs fleshed-out characters, or complicated thematic observations, when we can just go and enjoy the spectacle of Chaplin, say, running rings around some palooka in the boxing ring?
The sequence has next to nothing to do with the narrative, but in terms of the pleasure it yields, it's pure gold. And yet... well, let me put it this way. It's a maxim of Film Club that a film we watch doesn't have to be good, it only has to be interesting. And, indeed, we've watched our share of films that are interesting, but ultimately pretty bad. (Hell, we just watched Showgirlsa few weeks ago.) City Lights, however, may be the first movie we've watched that gets the honor of being good, but... not interesting.
Better luck next week? We'll be sticking with Early American Comedy, but turning to the Marx Brothers. A Day at the Races (1937), coming right up!
So, this week, Film Club continued our investigation into cinematic sociopaths by looking at George Sluizer's The Vanishing (the 1998 original).
The setup of The Vanishing is relatively simple: a Dutch couple, Rex and Saskia, are on a roadtrip together...
They stop at a roadside service plaza and Saskia goes in for a Coke and a beer while Rex waits outside. Rex, waits, and waits, and waits... but Saskia never returns to the car.
Like Psycho, then, The Vanishing uses a woman's disappearance as an early turning point in its narrative, and it spends the later part of its narrative following the lover of that woman as he searches for her. Both films also spend large chunks of narrative time following the psychotic or sociopathic individual to blame for the woman's disappearance.
Unlike Psycho, however, which spends its time following Norman Bates in the aftermath of his murders, The Vanishing's narrative attention goes to the sociopathic individual, Raymond Lemorne, in advance of his act: we see a number of flashbacks which show him planning out the abduction, working out key details, revising and re-revising elements of it. Here, for instance, we see him rehearsing exactly how he might chloroform someone:
This is interesting because it presents an alternate view of the psychology of sociopathy. In Psycho, Norman Bates' psychology is driven completely by emotion and impulse— grief, jealousy, arousal, rage— emotions which clash inchoately until they find form in violent outburst. Raymond functions as the exact opposite: his actions are methodical, pre-meditated, and even (we learn) in line with an internal philosophy and morality which retains integrity even as it leads him to do evil things.
Watching a character work out a plan like this tends to generate a desire to see the plan play out, although we never quite identify with Raymond the way we did (momentarily, horrifyingly) with Norman (discussed in full last week). Part of the reason for this is that this film, unlike Psycho, has the investigating male, Rex, serve as a stable protagonist throughout the entire run-time. So the (potentially troubling) desire to see Raymond's plan come to fruition is neatly folded into Rex's more socially-acceptable desire to learn exactly what happened to Saskia.
This keeps us in a "safer" space, psychologically-speaking: having Rex as the point of audience identification allows us to maintain a comfortable distance from Raymond. However, Sluizer is a canny enough director to exploit this "safe" identification to great effect. Late in the proceedings, the narrative presents Rex (and, by extension, us) with something of a diabolical choice. I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen the film, but suffice it to say that Rex is given the opportunity to learn what really transpired, although taking advantage of this opportunity will put him in the path of real danger; in fact, even at the outset of the decision it is almost certain that he will be killed, or possibly something worse (earlier on, Raymond casually makes mention that he doesn't consider killing someone to be the worst thing you can do to them).
Rex wants the knowledge of Saskia's fate, however horrible. He wants it badly enough that he's willing to risk self-annihilation. And in effect, we are presented with the exact same bargain: do we want to know what happened, enough to be willing to risk our protagonist / self-analogue? Even though we know it will be horrible? Only the most sensitive viewer could decline such a bargain. But why? What do we gain from taking in disturbing knowledge? Why would the film feel so emotionally disappointing were Rex to decide he had learned enough, and to walk away at the last second? In these final scenes, The Vanishing looks nakedly at the core offer that is at the root of horror / shock films from Psycho to Hostel II: I have something terrible to show you. Do you want to see it?
Next week: more sociopathic abduction narratives: we'll be watching Skunkcabbage's pick, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962).
This week, Film Club continued our investigation into early serial killer pictures by looking at Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (from 1960, as was our last pick, Peeping Tom). I'm making the assumption that anyone who reads this blog for the film writing already knows the major surprises in Psycho, but if you don't, you should be forewarned that this essay-let discusses most of them, so you might want to check out now.
The first forty-odd minutes of Psycho stand as one of the all-time great acts of directorial misdirection. We're introduced to Marion Crane, a nice-enough woman from Arizona, who is carrying on a relationship with Sam Loomis, a strapping young divorcee from California.
Both of them suffer from some degree of financial hardship—Marion is employed as a low-wage clerical worker, and Sam runs a hardware store but is saddled with some pretty punitive-sounding alimony payments. Consequently, they're forced to stay apart: neither one appears to have the wherewithal to up and quit their job and relocate to where the other one lives. That is, until one day some loaded Arizonan comes in waving a huge wad of cash:
Long story short: Marion, entrusted to take this wad to a safety-deposit box, instead decides to go on the run to California, planning to use the funds as a means of achieving her escape velocity. So far, this is all relatively standard fare for a romantic melodrama of the era—although what it's all doing in a movie called Psycho isn't exactly clear, at least not until the second night when she's on the road.
Marion opts to stay at the creepy-looking Bates Motel, whereupon, as you probably know, she is promptly stabbed to death in the shower.
Now, the "shower scene" is one of the most famous scenes in all of film history: even if you have never seen Psycho, odds are that you know that Psycho features a scene where someone gets stabbed in the shower with a giant knife (you can even probably imitate a short chunk of Bernard Hermann's memorable score). The scene is famous enough that we might forget just how much it flouts narrative convention: what has happened here is that Hitchcock has essentially set up a movie which, nearly an hour into it, has killed off its own protagonist. I see a lot of movies, and I'm hard-pressed to come up with another protagonist-centered movie that takes a similar chance. (Pulp Fiction kills off Vincent Vega in its second act, but has rearranged chronology so that he's back for the third. A very special and possibly nonexistent Film Club prize will go to the first person who can identify Pulp Fiction's more blatant lift from Psycho.)
Anyway. With Marion gone, the narrative leaves us in the hands of Norman Bates, the main proprietor of the motel. We follow him through the process of cleaning up the murder, disposing of the corpse, etc. There's something very odd that happens here, and Hitchcock highlights it through one profoundly troubling sequence. It comes when Bates tries to get rid of Marion's car by pushing it into the swamp. It sinks about halfway and then stops:
And then we're granted one of the great "oh fuck" reaction shots in all of cinema history:
What's remarkable about this moment is that the audience, too, thinks "oh fuck." We have somehow, through the magic of narrative psychology, bought into Norman's own wants and desires. In effect, Norman has become the film's new protagonist, the key figure of audience identification. This has an unsettling effect even if we only think he's an accomplice to his mother's murder—which is what the film, at this stage, wants us to believe—and that creepiness grows exponentially after the first viewing, because we know, in fact, that Norman is the one doing the murders. It's a nasty trick, making us realize just how easily we can identify with a murderer, and it's also vintage Hitchcock—at least as early as Strangers on a Train Hitchcock is probing the various ways in which even the most genteel-appearing people are fascinated by and attracted to ghastly violence. (1958's Vertigo also presents a variation on this theme, in the way that it radically deconstructs the folksy, likeable persona of one of the most folksy and likeable actors of all time, Jimmy Stewart.)
Ultimately, however, both Vertigo and Psycho back away from the darkest ramifications of their own nightmarish logic(s). Psycho tricks us into uncomfortably identifying with its central killer, but it chooses not sustain this discomfort. It balks at having a serial killer as the protagonist (making Peeping Tom the more daring film), and instead has to resort to bringing back Sam and introducing two new characters, Marion's sister Lila and a private investigator, Arbogast.
In a way, it could be said that the film's reluctance to stick with Norman as the new protagonist creates something of a "protagonist vacuum," into which the film's remaining characters temporarily step. For a while, we follow Arbogast on his investigations...
But then he comes to a bad end, too:
Inasmuch as Arbogast had become the protagonist for a while, this is essentially the same trick the movie used when it did away with Marion, although it functions less well the second time, for three main reasons: 1) we care less about Arbogast, having followed him for less time and having less sense of his motivations and character, 2) the film doesn't toggle back to Norman as the protagonist, but rather back to Sam and Lila, and 3) perhaps most simply of all, any shock repeated in a film is less shocking the second time.
So, in the end, this is Psycho's flaw: in its third act, when the tension should be ratcheting up to a great finale, we're instead left swamped in a bunch of talky scenes with a bunch of, well, nobodies:
This perhaps explains why, although Psycho is such a seminal film (all the great slasher franchises owe something to it), its most notable narrative moment has been copied so infrequently. (Of course, trying to keep a central protagonist alive for the whole run of a horror movie can sometimes post its own sort of challenge: see my write-up of Aswang (Film Club XVII) for a reminder about those perils.)
Next week: the latter half of Psycho becomes something of a missing-persons drama, so we'll take a look at a similarly-minded picture, The Vanishing (the 1988 Dutch original, not the 1993 American remake). Stay tuned~
So this week, continuing on our "films about writers" thread, we turned to David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991).
Like many films in our recent sequence, this film blurs the line between biography and fiction, being partially a retelling of events from the life of writer William S. Burroughs, and partially a retelling of the novel Naked Lunch... a novel which, just to muddy the waters a little bit more, expends some of its narrative energy telling the tale of a Burroughs-esque writer, Bill Lee.
At first glance, Lee looks like a semi-autobiographical stand-in for Burroughs himself, an interpretation that's certainly helped along by the fact that Burroughs writes his first book, Junkie, using "William Lee" as his pseudonym. But try to read Naked Lunch as straight autobio and you won't get far: the book's narrative is so alien that it really lands closer to the realm of nightmarish science fiction than it does to the realm of memoir. So, long before Cronenberg comes along to complicate matters even further, one can already make onesself dizzy by playing the game of trying to discern which events in Naked Lunch are "real," which are false perceptions induced by drug addiction, and which are pure fiction invented by Burroughs.
Ultimately, of course, the answer to the question can never be determined (it's doubtful that even Burroughs himself could, or would, have distinguished between these three layers in a way we could have called "authoritative"). This confusion between reality and fantasy, between external realities and internal perceptual states, is perhaps a necessary precondition for the onset of paranoia, and, indeed, Burroughs is one of the 20th century's great chroniclers of the paranoid mindset. The world of Naked Lunch and Burroughs' later works is a world utterly riddled with conspiracies and confidence artists, a world in which the individual is, at best, a naive mark, and at worst, an unwitting cog in some vast, sinister operation. In Burroughs' world, it is possible to learn at any moment that all your human activity, whatever you thought you were doing out of free will, has in fact been merely you toiling in the service of a conspiracy designed to enslave and control you.
Cronenberg zeroes in on this aspect of Burroughs' work, and makes it the central narrative mechanism of the film. Cronenberg has explored this territory fruitfully in the past, most notably with his own Videodrome (1982), in which television executive Max Renn ends up as a kind of zomboid drone, having had his consciousness programmed and re-programmed by a pair of warring secret societies. But Renn has further to fall: at the outset of Videodrome he's essentially a functional member of society, and much of the film details the way he becomes enmeshed in the conspiracy, and begins to lose his identity. Lee, by contrast, begins Naked Lunch already on the fringes, his personality already only halfway operational, his status as a perceiving individual already questionable. This allows the hallucinatory / paranoid hijinks to kick in much earlier: nearly everyone he encounters in the film seems to know more about his life than he does, and before a dozen minutes have elapsed he's been picked up by police who officially inaugurate him into the film's mysteries by presenting him with a mysterious box:
—which contains this nasty fellow, who begins to give Bill cryptic instructions, and will continue to for much of the remainder of the film.
So, basically, Naked Lunch feels like the last twenty minutes of Videodrome expanded into feature length. It's so rife with double-agents and perplexing alliances that it becomes impossible to discern impossible to discern who's on which side, much less which side might constitute the "good guys." Puzzling out the intrigue is really beside the point anyway; the appeal of the film comes much more from watching Bill Lee's identity grow increasingly tattered under the grinding force of conspiracies and drugs. Poor Bill's personality ends up being so emotionally reversed that he scarcely reacts when he finds one of his only friends fucking his wife, but he's reduced to tears by the sight of a bowl of dried centipedes in a marketplace:
And that's only twenty minutes into a film that's about two hours long!
Final note: part of the disorienting effect of Naked Lunch derives from the fact that it's a very interior film. Although the film is ostensibly set in picturesque locales (New York City, and Interzone, a fictional analogue for Tangiers), Cronenberg bucks the demands of cinematic grammar by pointedly avoiding the use of any sort of establishing shot, in fact almost entirely avoiding any exterior shots whatsoever. This helps create a very effective insular feeling, adding to the overall menace and claustrophobia. Part of the credit here belongs to production designer Carol Spier, whose eclectic, jumbled interiors are some of the most lastingly memorable elements of the film for me:
This week, Film Club continued examining films about writers, looking at Steven Daldry's 2002 film The Hours. Like previous Film Club picks Adaptation and American Splendor, The Hours is interested in both telling the story of a writer's life (in this case Virigina Woolf) as well as retelling a story that that writer has written (in this case, Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway). (As a side note, it's a little bit surprising to me just how many movies split along these lines, once you start looking for them: next week we'll be looking at a fourth, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991).)
It gets a little more complicated than that, in that this split in and of itself is not Daldry's conceit, but rather originates in a second book, Michael Cunningham's The Hours. So even though Daldry's film retells the story of Mrs. Dalloway (in a way), it's not an adaptation of Woolf's novel in the strictest sense, but rather an adaptation of Cunningham's re-working of it, in his own novel.
Cunningham's novel (which I haven't read) retells the story of Dalloway (which I also haven't read), but transplants it to the contemporary era, specifically via the figure of Clarissa Vaughn (played nicely by Meryl Streep). The party-throwing, flower-buying Vaughn is presented as a modern-day analogue to Dalloway:
...although this analogy is complicated rewardingly by the fact that Vaughn exists in the same world as Woolf, and Woolf's novel, and is at least partially aware of the parallels between herself and Woolf's character. (She's referred to explicitly as "Mrs. Dalloway"—a literary friend has given this to her as a long-running, semi-affectionate nickname.)
The film also, albeit less explicitly, explores the way Woolf sees herself as a Dalloway analogue (or possibly sees Dalloway as an extension of herself). Furthermore, the film adds in a third analogue, Julianne Moore's Laura Brown, a bookish 1950s-era housewife, who is reading the novel Mrs. Dalloway, and clearly relates to the protagonist's ennui.
Much of the film's energy and appeal is generated by establishing parallels, echoes, and relationships between these three narrative strands. (The fact that this works at all means that editor Peter Boyle deserves a healthy share of credit: since the narrative strands are in distinct time-periods, and (mostly) don't overlap, the creation of these "echoes" often hinges upon effective use of cross-cutting.)
This could have been done as an experiment in postmodern gamesmanship, (keeping us firmly in Adaptation territory), but ultimately it tries to naturalize some of its strangeness. It also resists the tendency to treat the relationships between these characters as synchronicities or weird recurrent patterns in the universe (it would be rewarding to contrast this film's treatment of parallels between characters and narrative levels in the recent work of David Lynch (Mulholland Dr. (2001), say, or especially Inland Empire (2006)). Its usage of these parallels and echoes,ultimately, is in service of something more user-friendly, romantic even: an investigation of the appeal of an enduring fictional character. The film treats Clarissa Dalloway as a kind of template, archetype, or form—a persistent pattern which any number of women can overlay upon their own experience. In doing so, they align themselves, additionally, with Woolf, the figure from whom the character emerged.
This goes a long way, actually, towards explaining the lasting force of the notion of character itself.
Adaptation (2002) is ostensibly a film adaptation of New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean's 2000 piece of nonfiction, The Orchid Thief. But it's really about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's struggle to translate the book into a film. The film brings Kaufman in as a character, and spends a good portion of its run-time dramatizing his confusion, hesitation, distraction, and doubt; as such, it's one of the most memorable, and I would say accurate, depictions of the creative process ever brought to the screen.
Kaufman—at least the character Kaufman, as we see him in the film—struggles with a handful of distinct challenges in the adaptation process. One of them is that Orlean's book doesn't have a strong narrative arc, and furthermore, being highly meditative and reflective, the book doesn't have a lot of material in it that translates well to a visual medium. (The end product uses a lot of voice-over, and explicitly debates the merits and drawbacks of voice-over at more than one point in the film.)
Another problem is that Kaufman seems to have varying additional agendas for his screenplay that go beyond merely wanting to adapt the book successfully. He repeatedly says that he wants the finished film to be a genreless film "about flowers," that will have the end effect of showing audiences how "amazing" flowers are. ("Are they amazing?" Kaufman's fictional agent asks him at one point, to which the fictional Kaufman responds, despairingly, "I don't know.")
In addition to that, Kaufman wants the screenplay to be a work of realism. The desire for a truly realistic fiction, one that shrugs off the various artifices of fiction in favor of the "real stuff" of life has been an obsession of experimental writers for well over a century—it's clearly articulated as early as Zola—but it's no less a grail today than it ever was. (I'm not immune to the pull: nearly all of my own fiction written over the last ten years has been organized around this impulse.) Kaufman declares, early on in the film, that he doesn't want to write something "artificially plot-driven," without "sex or guns or car chases or characters learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like one another or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end."
And this raises yet another problem, namely, the demands of commercialism. The hypothetical adaptation that the fictional Kaufman proposes (within the space of the actual adaptation) sometimes sounds amazing (I, for one, might go to see a genreless movie about flowers) but also runs the risk of being an enormous mess, and looming constantly in the background is the threat of not only creative failure but also commercial failure. The danger that Kaufman might be taken off the project or that the project itself might entirely fail is never really stated outright, but it's underlined constantly by the inclusion of Kaufman's fictional twin brother, "Donald," who is crashing with Charlie and writing a screenplay of his own.
Donald's screenplay is for an unbelievably trite thriller called The Three. Trite, yes, yet also seemingly far more bankable, and towards the end of the film Charlie elicits Donald's help to finish the Adaptation screenplay, and the entire narrative lurches nauseously towards a passably commercial finale. There's some very sharp satire embedded here about the kinds of stories that a massive capitalist industry like the film industry is willing to invest in telling.
Ultimately, Kaufman seems to want to celebrate the power in the creative process: writers, after all, have a literally infinite number of ways to tell a story. At one point, Kaufman makes a decision that the film needs to incorporate a history of life on earth, and, indeed, the finished film dutifully provides this as a montage:
And yet this near-omnipotence is held endlessly in check, not only by the accompanying neurosis and crippling self-doubt, but also by the strictures of capitalism, the existence of a "professionally skeptical" financing system that determines which stories get told (or at the very least produced, or distributed). In its sharp-eyed analysis of this point, the film has a real tragic dimension to accompany its comic moments and metafictional playfulness.
Next week we continue with reflections on the art of adaptation with Skunkcabbage's pick, The Hours. His write-up on Adaptation is here.
As promised, here's the second half of what I'm thinking of as my Well-Intentioned Hypertext Rant, in which I argue that even literary / narrative works that aren't traditional hypertext as such are often nevertheless designed to be rewardingly navigated in non-linear fashion (hypernavigated?). Ready? Here goes:
"[M]y [earlier] examples are all non-fictional, a little bit of a cheat on my part given that this whole thread got started discussing the merits (or lack thereof) of hypertext as a literary / fictional form. I'll grant that most fiction is designed to be read sequentially, although I'd point to the existence of a "scene selection" menu on nearly every DVD out there as evidence that people value and appreciate non-linear ways of navigating narrative as well. (I can only think of one filmmaker who has successfully resisted the popular pressure to segment the DVD release of their movies this way: David Lynch.)
This also gets a little trickier when moving out from the level of the individual text into a "mega-corpus" of related stories, or a storytelling ecology. If we were Star Wars fans, we might read Star Wars tie-in novels in the order of their publication, or in the chronological order that continuity prescribes, or just randomly: each contributes another puzzle-piece to the overall Star Wars mega-corpus in a way that traditional hypertext theory very tidily provides a framework for describing. Comics continuity works similarly: only the most hard-core X-Men collector(s) can even begin to make an attempt to read the overall "story" of the X-Men in the order in which it occurred: the vast majority of readers are instead navigating the mega-corpus in partial, fragmentary ways, assembling the logic of it as they go. Again, hypertext theory provides a very handy way of thinking about this kind of reading.
Mythic narrative systems work similarly: Dan [another commenter on the thread] observes that "[r]eligious texts can be read for narrative or as fiction, but that kind of reading generally doesn't involve skipping around." That's definitely true for the Old and New Testament, but less true for the heavily-annotated Torah, and even less true for pre-book mythic systems like the Greek, Egyptian, or African myths, which can be appreciated as fiction or narrative but have no coherent sequential order.
Thanks for putting up with me while I indulged my need to be this guy.
film club XXII: american splendor, by berman and pulcini
American Splendor, a film about autobiographical comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, sets its first act in the 1970's-era Cleveland, and in this way it completes Film Club's triangle of films about the 1970s (the other two points are Dazed and Confused (Film Club XXI) and The Virgin Suicides (Film Club XX)). Like those others, American Splendor has value as a reflection upon the Americana of that period, but it's interesting in other ways, too.
American Splendor could have ended up as a rather run-of-the-mill biopic, or even an exemplary one: the material of Pekar's life is certainly engaging enough, and Giamatti is a gifted interpreter of the "character":
But directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini are significantly more canny and ambitious than that. They seem to have a keen sense of the fundamental strangeness of the endeavor of making a biopic in the first place, of the distortions and misrepresentations that will inevitably emerge from the process. They exploit this strangeness by pairing the biopic narrative with documentary material, bringing in the "real" Harvey Pekar to provide commentary and reflection on the events we see unfolding in the biopic material:
Pekar's an especially interesting figure to be doing this kind of thing with, given that what the film is adapting in its narrative segments is not so much the "raw material" of Pekar's life, but rather the creative work that Pekar has produced over his lifetime. The film ambitiously shoehorns some of this material in as well, forming a third representational layer:
Pekar's comics work is autobiographical, yes, but the production of any autobiography involves its own degree of highlighting and omission. That's accentuated in Pekar's creative output, of course, because he's working as a writer in collaboration with artists, whose stylistic "takes" on the Pekar "character" only serve to further obscure the "real" Pekar. The film seems distinctly aware of this point, exploiting it strikingly:
An even more dizzying example comes at the point in the narrative where a California theatrical company does a stage adaptation of American Splendor:
What we're watching here is a cinematic re-creation of a stage re-creation of a comic book re-creation of a real experience—four distinct layers of representation, for those of you keeping score. The fact that Pekar spends a lot of the movie railing against "phoniness" and "bullshit," and striving to create a body of work that represents the trials and tribulations of "real" everyday life is perhaps a crowning irony. And the fact that he succeeds to such a remarkable degree, in spite of the artifice inherent to the technologies and techniques of representation, is perhaps a crowning triumph.
There are a few possible choices here for follow-up films—both David Lynch's Inland Empire (2007) and Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life (1998) have a similar awareness of the vertiginous hall-of-mirrors that can open up between narrative and reality. (I also considered the harrowing documentary Capturing the Friedmans (2003).) But the film that best exploits this tension, to my mind, is Spike Jonze's Adaptation (2002): next week's pick!
j. k. rowling, pirates of the carribean, and world-building
One fact that has not escaped mention in the cloud of discourse surrounding the Harry Potter phenomenon is this one: there are certain metrics that traditionally characterize "good writing," and viewed through some of these metrics, J. K. Rowling does not appear to be a very good writer at all.
A few examples: she abuses space-filling adverbs, she circulates through the entire array of distracting synonyms for "said" (including the especially unfortunate "ejaculated"), she relies enormously on wordy expository dialogue (often at the climax of a book), her sense of prose rhythm is clunky, her metaphors are rarely vivid, she intermittently dips into cliche, her combat sequences read like a transcript of a Dungeons and Dragons melee round... etc etc etc. I could continue to populate this list, but really, any fan of the books (and I count myself among their number) could tell you that these things detract from the enjoyment of the books only marginally, if at all. And the unprecendted size of her global legion of fans suggest that there is a whole other unspoken set of "good writing" metrics that Rowling is in fact the undisputed contemporary master of.
So what might that be?
A clue is provided by Chris Stangl, of the great Exploding Kinetoscope film-blog, who has not written on Harry Potter as such (at least not that I've seen) but who understands something about that sprawling subculture we call fandom (just as a for-instance, note his in-depth appreciation / critique of the comic-book-only Season Eight of Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
Anyway, in his 2006 year-end list, Stangl writes about, of all things, Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest, and in doing so he says:
"The story is built out of the elements that satisfy and inspire fan-fiction writers. Careful, obsessive attention to the arcs and quirks of every periphery character, piling on the backstory and complicated relationships, until the puffy summer blockbuster assumes Wagnerian proportion. Every character combination would be a potentially interesting pairing for slashfic. Holes in character histories and the timeline are left open for imagining more adventures. New fantasy elements and characters are introduced with such color and variety, they expand the Pirate-verse in every direction. Any Pirates fan gets a three hour cruise on the funniest, sexiest, most breathless, dreamiest galleon on the water. The rest of you may be lost at sea."
Interesting, I thought: and it reminded me of the "mixed or average reviews" that the new Pirates movie, At World's End, had been receiving. Complaints of the movie being over-plotted, talky, tedious, and cluttered made me wonder if these critics weren't just judging it, like some have judged Rowling, by the wrong metric. So let's pop over to see what one of fandom's primary academic champions, Henry Jenkins, has to say:
Unsurprisingly, he calls it "one of the best summer movies that I have seen in a long long time."
More:
"The film ... throws a lot of stuff at us and expects us to catch it. ... [T]he parts add up to a satisfying whole if we connect all of the pieces. For someone really engaged in watching this film, the result is epistemaphilia, a mad rush of information being brought together and being clicked into the right mental category."
And still more:
"The modes by which we consume [franchise] films have shifted. Most films don't warrant a first look, let alone a second viewing, but for those films that do satisfy and engage us, a much higher percentage of the audience is engaged in what might once have seemed like cult viewing practices. Once we find a franchise which floats our boats, we will settle in for an extended relationships and we want to explore all of the hidden nooks and crannies. We want to know everything we can possibly know about this world and contemporary franchise films are designed to accommodate our interests."
And still more:
"Plots cross each other: a choice which seems to bring resolution to one plotline opens up new complications for another; a decision which makes sense from one perspective seems enigmatic from another; and the reader must be alert to all of these different levels of development, must think about what the scene means for each character and each plot if they are going to get full pleasure from the story."
And so all those negative reviews?:
"[I]f [people] suddenly realize that the film is much more complex and layered than they anticipated, they may start to flounder and ultimately drown, which seems to be what happened to a high percentage of the film critics. They went into the film expecting a certain kind of experience; they hadn't successfully learned how to take pleasure from its world-building; they don't want to dig into the film more deeply after the fact, comparing notes online with other viewers, because their trade demands constant movement to the next film and a focus on their own private, individualized thoughts."
Hmm. Nice. I haven't seen any of the Pirates of the Carribean movies, but I think that all the praise that Stangl and Jenkins are loading onto the franchise applies perfectly to the Potter books. People don't care about Rowling's work on the level of prose style, because the books offer a different pleasure from the pleasure of simply reading stylistic prose. Rowling has created a world that people engage with and enjoy. The vast networked ensemble of characters attended to within that world provides a staggering number of points for further engagement. The fact that, ultimately, the amount of information she can supply about these characters is finite is not a disappointment but rather explodes the universe into a practically infinite number of jumping-off points for further imagination, participation, and still deeper engagement. This is what Rowling is good at. To judge from the success of her books it may be the thing that primarily matters. Teachers of storytelling, take note.
(Film club this week was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), a film that engages in world-building narrative in its own fashion. But more on that later.)
One of the unexpected pleasures of getting older (I was born in 1972) is seeing the emergence of more and more feature films that are made by people roughly my own age, and which can thus draw on a bank of cultural experiences and references that feel intimately familiar to me. I'm thinking of this specifically because I saw Knocked Up last night, directed by Judd Apatow (b. 1967), but I had similar reactions of pleasure and comfort upon seeing the aptly-titled Me and You and Everyone We Know by Miranda July (b. 1974), Clerks by Kevin Smith (b. 1970), and even Swingers by Doug Liman (b. 1965).
In a less realistic, more absurdist vein, we could also mention Wet Hot American Summer by David Wain (b. 1969), Anchorman by Adam McKay (b. 1968), and Shaun of the Dead by Edgar Wright (b. 1974). But I want to stick with realism for a minute. Because if you're in your thirties, as many of these directors are, and if you're attempting to make films that are faithful to a reality recognizable as our own, one of the things your characters are going to need to be seen grappling with are the questions of Getting Older, Being an Adult, and What That Means. Knocked Up indeed raises these questions, and unlike less thoughtful romantic comedies targeted roughly to the same audience (Wedding Crashers, let's say), it has points to make about the hard aspects of those questions that are incisive and seem drawn from actual lived experience, which is why it ultimately felt like something of a disappointment that the film ultimately closes in such a readily-available, genre-determined, unambiguous way.
Which is not to say that the chosen ending isn't heartwarming and uplifting, etc. It is—that's why it's the ending the genre demands. It feels good to see the bungling slacker clean up his act a bit, get his life together, and start playing straight (see also: Shaun of the Dead, High Fidelity). The option to play it straight (if you're in a position where you have such an option) is always very seductive; seeing the narrative played out in these films make it seem even more so. It's seductive, yes, but the seductiveness hides a certain grinding progression towards joylessness: note that the Slacker Who Cleans Up is a slightly more palatable version of similar "grownups" like the Activist Who Finally Got Realistic or the Artist Who Started To Do His Art Only On Weekends As A Hobby.
But we do, in fact, live in a world where there are adult activists, and there are adult artists, and there are adult bohemians, and there are ways to be one of these people and to simultaneously be a responsible, non-pathetic adult. Anything that tells you otherwise is a part of the pulsating IT-brain from A Wrinkle In Time. Knocked Up, ultimately, is smart enough to realize that there's something crushing about the traditional narrative (witness the beaten happiness of the "successful" couple in the film, Pete and Diane, sympathetically and complexly played by Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann) but it never manages to visualize an alternative. Apatow's previous film, The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, does a bit better: although it also tells a version of the Outsider Becomes Normal story, it also firmly makes the point that outsider-ness has its own value, and the relationship that comprises the film's happy ending remains non-traditional (albeit in a non-threatening way).
It's not easy to visualize the kinds of alternatives I'm asking for (although these xkcd cartoons are a good start: one, two). Living the alternative is even harder. But the rewards have the potential to be great.
So the table of contents for this week's New Yorker (Mar 5 cover date) promised that the topic of David Denby's Critic at Large column would be "new non-narrative movies," which any regular reader of this blog must know is something that'll make me perk up and take interest. I was a little bit disappointed to see that the article didn't quite deliver what I expected: it is not, in fact, about "non-narrative movies," but rather about movies that have unorthodox narratives. But I still thought it might be interesting to list some of the movies discussed. As a nod to traditional narrative I've arranged them in chronological order:
Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1928)
Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)
Michaelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960)
Alain Resnais' Muriel (1963)
Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Borgeoisie (1972)
Michael Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel (2006)
Traffic, Syriana, and Miami Vice get special mention as "clogged-sink narratives," "which are so heavily loaded with subplots and complicated information that the story can hardly seep through the surrounding material."
Denby writes appreciatively about many of the films in that list, but the main point of the article is to pan Babel. Everything else is just context, although the pan resonates strongly enough to implicate all films that utilize unusual narrative forms: Denby closes by comparing Babel unflatteringly to The Lives of Others, which derives its "shattering power" from "[s]traightforward chronology, [which] still may be the best way of leading us to the paradise of a morally complicated but flawlessly told story." Needless to say, I'm not certain I agree.
I'm a passionate fan of David Lynch's work, so I was excited when his new film, Inland Empire, finally made it out into theatres. (For a while I feared it wasn't going to make it here: US distributors depressingly took a pass on it, and Lynch ended up having to distributing it himself, another instance for the "why the US film industry sucks" file.)
But anyway. It got to Chicago and I went to go see it, and I had a great time. It resists being easily written about—Jonathan Rosenbaum's four-star Reader review aptly begins with the line: "David Lynch's first digital video, almost three hours long, resists synopsizing more than anything else he's done"—but I thought I'd jot down a brief record of my impressions here nevertheless.
It's definitely a companion piece to Mulholland Dr. (2001) and Lost Highway (1997). These three, taken together, are what I think of as Lynch's "California films," and they essentially function as three different riffs on identical thematic material: filmmaking, acting, disjunctive shifts in identity, narrative displacement, power, evil. If you liked those other ones, you'll likely enjoy this one, if you didn't, you won't.
That said, trying to engage in the game of ordering the films in terms of which are "better" or "worse" than the others is tricky. It's possible, maybe, to say that Mulholland Dr. is a more refined take on the themes than the other two, although I feel, frankly, like the underrated Lost Highway is the most elegantly structured of the three (it's also the one with the shortest running time).
Certainly, in terms of "elegance," Inland Empire's narrative ranks dead last. It sprawls and drifts and takes indulgent turns and doesn't exactly earn each second of its 172-minute run-time. But that said, it's also the most ambitious take on the themes. Spoilers follow (sort of / not really). If Highway and Mulholland Dr. deal essentially with one person's slippage between two basically distinct ontological states, Inland Empire ups the ante exponentially. First off, it adds characters: there are two other women who Laura Dern seems to switch places with at points, and the "plot" of the movie, such as it is, seems to have recurred to different people in at least three different places and times. (This is an especially effective addition, I feel: the persistence of a particular menacing strangeness as a recurrent pattern through time and space ramps up the feelings of both sinister purpose and inevitability: it takes on the status of the universe trying futilely to work out some particularly diabolical flaw in itself.)
In addition, the film ups the number of slippages: Dern slips between at least three distinct ontological states (not counting the two people she switches places with that I mentioned above), and she passes through at least four distinct universes: one is essentially recognizable as our own; one is the world of On High in Blue Tomorrows, a film-within-the-film, in which Dern is performing but which seems, at times, to become reality; one is a strange limbo house in which characters seem to reside in a kind of timeless storage (essentially a return of the Black Lodge); and one is a flattened-out sitcom universe (featuring, uh, rabbits). Multiply it all together and you've got, what, something like twenty different alternate worlds jumbling into one another? At $9.75 it's a steal.
When I think of the Hold Steady, I think back to something music-journo Justin Farrar wrote about the rise of the band Comets on Fire: he calls them a bar band, in fact "the best bar-rock band ever known to man," but something about their acceptance as "in-the-vanguard, underground artists" doesn't sit well with him. His conclusion? It's because Comets on Fire are "all instruments and no storytelling." He, in fact, presents this as the very thing that relegates them to bar-rock status, arguing that bar-bands, by definition, lack storytellers.
I thought this was a pretty good axiom until I heard the Hold Steady album Separation Sunday, an album that rarely strives, sonically speaking, to provide anything more than old-fashioned bar rock, but which lyrically functions as a song cycle roughly on par with The Mountain Goats' All Hail West Texas ("fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys"). The characters on Separation Sunday are born-again Christians or drug-addled burnouts or both, and although the title of the new album, Boys and Girls In America, reveals that the Hold Steady guys are taking aim at bigger themes, the general air of dead-endedness and clutching desperation still permeates.
For instance, this track, "Hot Soft Light," which basically describes the trajectory of every Hold Steady song ever written by rhyming "recreational" with "medical" and then with "tentacles" (later "manacles").
Okay, so I'm following up on my last post here, which dealt with Henry Jenkins' assertion that (let's recap): "To be marketable ... new cultural works will have to provoke and reward meaning production through elaborate back stories, unresolved enigmas, excess information, and extratextual expansions of the program universe."
There's four traits in that sentence: eventually, I'd like to give sustained thought to all four, but for today I want to focus in on that "excess information" one.
Let's start with a given: fandom is a culture that processes information pretty swiftly and intensely (especially now that it has the ability to very closely watch / rewatch / analyze television episodes in DVD or media-file formats, and the ability to share the results of this "close viewing" via the Internet). It would stand to reason, then, that giving this culture extra information to process, then, is beneficial: there's a certain kind of pleasure that can be taken from, say, tracking down all the occurences of the "Lost numbers."
And yet... there's a problem here. There's a certain point at which this kind of self-referencing can begin to snarl up the narrative. If the information we're talking about ends up directly referenced and heavily weighted in the show (in the case of Lost, this process begins in Episode 18, "Numbers"), then it can't truly be said to be "excess," as Jenkins would have it: it becomes one of the mysteries that the show then has a duty to solve.
Compare this, for argument's sake, against the Peter Greenaway film Drowning By Numbers (1988). In this film—I'll just quote the Wikipedia entry—"the numbers one to one hundred appear in order, sometimes seen in the background, sometimes spoken by the characters." If you know this, it's fun to watch the film with this in mind, but it functions strictly on a formal layer: the characters never comment on it, it never attains the status of mystery (or even a diegetic occurence, for that matter).
If Lost were taking that sort of approach with the occurrence and re-occurence of the numbers, it might function as a fun sort of game (whether that's appropriate for Lost's supernatural-adventure genre is another question entirely). But blowing it up into high significance (having Hurley repeatedly exclaim "The numbers are bad!" in the first season's finale, for instance) drives up the interest in having a narrative explanation for what may be functioning as a formal device. Uh oh. This is a situation, I would argue, that is actually not possible to resolve in a way that will provide audience satisfaction, and the Lost producers seem content to throw it into the heap of things "explained" by the all-purpose "fate" excuse.
This problem was already beginning to reveal its intractability over a year ago, when producer Damon Lindelof said, w/r/t the question of the numbers: "I think that that question will never, ever be answered. I couldn't possibly imagine [how we would answer that question]. We will see more ramifications of the numbers and more usage of the numbers, but it boggles my mind when people ask me, 'What do the numbers mean?'"
Hey, man, don't blame us: you're the ones who raised the question in the first place.
(Postscript: I'm worrying that Heroes is going to make this exact same mistake with occurrences of their recurring symbol, referenced now as a diegetic occurence a couple of times. It appears in some places that can be explained without having to rely on "fate" or "synchronicity" as a pattern-making force, and other places where it can't. (They may be building themselves an "out" by the fact that the symbol itself references actions of God made manifest in the world, although it would be a touch unusual for a show that's been at least partially Eastern-focused to shift to an explicitly [?] Judeo-Christian orientation. But this is feeling like too much digression, and so I'll stop here.))
For Christmas, I received a copy of Henry Jenkins' Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, his new collection of essays on fandom / "participatory culture." I'm about halfway through and it's pretty great.
Perhaps the most interesting piece so far is "Interactive Audiences? The 'Collective Intelligence' of Media Fans," in which Jenkins uses Pierre Levy's notion of the cosmopedia (roughly speaking, cosmopedia can be understood as collective information-banks enabled by computer networking).
Jenkins sees Internet-enabled fan culture as an incarnation of Levy's idea:
"Online fan communities might well be some of the most fully realized versions of Levy's cosmopedia, expansive self-organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture."
and he posits a practical reason for why this might be so: "The fan community pools its knowledge because no single fan can know everything to fully appreciate [a] series."
But as the fan community develops their collective knowledge-bank, they also develop a pretty intense capability to process series-based information. Jenkins quotes Nancy Baym (who literally wrote the book on online soap opera fandom) on this point: "A large group of fans can ... accumulate, retain, and continually recirculate unprecedented amounts of relevant information."
So this would appear to be another force driving media producers to create more complex and dense works (the trend examined by Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You). And, accordingly, Jenkins has a prediction: "To be marketable ... new cultural works will have to provoke and reward meaning production through elaborate back stories, unresolved enigmas, excess information, and extratextual expansions of the program universe."
This essay was first published in 2002, predating the first episodes of Lost by two solid years, but Lost features those four methods so pointedly that Jenkins should practically get a credit on the show.
This also serves as a potential occasion to re-evaluate exactly how "marketable" those four methods are. Critics both at mainstream venues and within fandom seem to be increasingly losing patience with the precise devices that Jenkins argues should be provocative and rewarding. What's behind this frustration? Are the devices inherently misguided, or is the Lost team's particular use of the devices flawed or mishandled? I have some potential answers to this question, but they'll have to wait until the next post.
"The Myth of the 40-Hour Gamer" sets up the problem: there exists a class of gamers who admire long-form narrative adventure titles and but struggle with finding the chunks of unbroken time necessary to complete them. Thompson discusses this along age lines: the hard-core gamers playing these puzzle games are clustered in the 6-to-17 age bracket (according to US consumer research organization The NPD Group), a group that Thompson describes as having "very few distractions and commitments." By contrast, adults, busy with jobs, family duties, and other obligations, are mostly bound to compress their gameplay into smaller bursts: an hour here, an hour there, maybe longer on an occasional indulgent weekend. Which means that unless you're committing to taking an full year to complete one of these games, you're likely to get only partially through before abandoning it.
"Tune In Next Week For Gaming Fun" describes a possible solution: serialized, episodic games. Specifically Thompson looks at Valve Software's sequel to Half-Life and Half-Life 2, called (somewhat confusingly) Half-Life 2: Episode One, which is being released as the first part in a one-year "trilogy" and is designed to be played in a short burst, four or five hours instead of the whopping forty.
Three installments in a year is still a good half a world away from the 20-odd installments modeled by television drama, but I think moving in this direction has a lot of potential benefits. As Thompson points out, some of these might be aesthetic:
"Serial narrative ... lets writers create increasingly labyrinthine plots. Audience members can tolerate only so many twists and turns in a single, monolithic movie before they get confused. But in an episodic narrative, a writer can weave oodles of subplots -- because we've got months and years to puzzle them over. The tangled plots of Lost simply wouldn't be possible anywhere other than episodic TV. Now imagine how dense and twisty Half-Life or SiN could become if the game companies stretched them out to five, 10 or 50 episodes."
There are adavantages to serialization from a capitalist point of view, too. In this article over at Gamasutra, Rick Sanchez unpacks some of the industry benefits:
"[A] growing percentage of your potential audience might be more inclined to buy your product if they know the commitment is smaller, and if they like it, there is more where that came from ... The time and money commitment by the game player for a single episode in a series is small, so the hurdle to purchase is much lower than a $60 SKU. Build into your game the release schedule for future episodes or teasers for previously released episodes, and after you sell one episode to a consumer, you have a built in viral marketing tool and a shot at getting them to buy again. Music downloads trained the consumer to focus on tracks instead of albums, and that trend ultimately led the consumer to focus on TV episodes rather than seasons. It isn’t a huge leap to turn that trend around and get people to focus on buying additional episodes in a game series if we provide them the opportunity."
Seems obvious enough, although I'd quibble with the notion that consumers are now focused "on TV episodes rather than seasons"—one of the side effects of the recent advancements in serial television is that "the season" has strengthened its identity as a coherent aesthetic unit. This is a textbook example of "bootstrapping" or "reciprocal feedback": as DVD technology made it more feasible to package and market an entire season of television, television creators began to make shows that rewarded complete-season viewing, which in turn made entire-season DVDs even more readily marketable. This is a phenomenon that is likely to still be in the process of development.
That said, there are pitfalls here. Thompson's promise that video games could be more like Lost sounds less glowing than it once did, now that people are raising the question of how successfully Lost is managing its "oodles of subplots"—and we shouldn't forget that it's easier to count the ignominious deaths of once-promising serialized SF dramas than it is to count the fondly-remembered successes. Plus there seem to be signs of "narrative fatigue" among viewers: the 06-07 TV season is littered with the corpses of serialized shows that didn't make it). Having every show that ever aired at your fingertips is great, and it makes byzantine ongoing plotlines possible in a way that they haven't been in the past (soap operas being the possible exception here), but if you're only watching an hour or two of television a day it's no small thing to commit to watching an entire season of a TV show (or, at least hypothetically, to commit to playing the backlogged set of episodic video-games that constitute a complete arc).
I'm still struggling with a winter cold that showed its first symptoms on December 20. There was a brief period in the middle where it looked like I might be getting better, but the cold roared back into life on Friday and has been pummeling me full-bore ever since. So the grand total here is, what, nineteen days? Unbelievable. Although it did enable me to lie on the couch last night and watch four consecutive episodes of Heroes and not feel guilty about not doing anything else.
My verdict: it's flashy, breezy, unreservedly stupid on occasion, fun but low on import. "Candy," said my viewing partner, and that's a pretty good one-word summation.
I could probably say something thoughtful to fold it into the larger thoughts about "seriality" from last time, but I'm sick, so I'll let Abigail Nussbaum do it instead:
"[Comic books and television] share a large number of similarities which make them ideal for cross-pollination: continuous, open-ended storytelling; a mixture of standalone and multi-part stories; large casts of characters; slowly accumulating backstories and ever-complicating settings. Perhaps most importantly, whereas film is ultimately ingested in solitude, television, like comics, is a communal medium, constantly engaged in a dialogue with its audience. More interesting, however, than the question of how comics can use television are the ways in which television can learn from comics--by far the more innovative and experimental field--about its own capabilities as a storytelling medium. [more]"
(Thanks to DMF for the Nussbaum link; I'd read her whip-smart piece on Battlestar's second season a while back but hadn't poked more around at her writing since. I'm starting to think that her blog is pretty much a must-read for people who want to think seriously about television and narrative.)
Post on seriality and videogames still in the works. Stay tuned.
this week's thoughts on seriality (part one: comics)
Finally (last night) got caught up to the present point in the ongoing Lost narrative, a project that took probably about a year. Suggestions are now being taken for new televisions shows to start in on, with priority being given to long serial- narrative-type shows over shows more made up of stand-alone single episodes.
Some of my associates in the world of fandom are pushing me to watch Heroes, which I haven't seen a single episode of yet. This plan has three big "pros" in its column: 1) it's a serial narrative, but one that only has, what, a dozen or so episodes to its name so far, so catching up should be relatively easy 2) I have, already in my possession, a DVD containing episodes 1-9 (thanks greenapricot) and 3) hey, superheroes.
Although I still consider myself a comics reader (100 things I love about comics, here), I read superhero comics nowadays only intermittently. There are probably lots of reasons for this, but one of them might be that (most) superhero comics don't seem to have developed a solution to the question of long-term continuity. I have less of a sense now than ever that any given comics arc is part of a continuous narrative that stretches back in any meaningful way. In today's comics industry, with rare exceptions, plot arcs seem designed to function as stand-alone narratives, essentially interchangeable in order, leading to an overall feeling of stasis in the universe and reducing the amount of import or weight that any given arc might carry. (Old-man griping here: this felt different during the 80s when I was reading Claremont's famously long-form run on the Uncanny X-Men.)
Adam Cadre summarizes what I'm talking about in his sharply-written distinction between the X-Men runs of Stan Lee, Chris Claremont, and Grant Morrison, respectively:
"[A] problem that has always plagued superhero comics is that of stasis. Though there are some amazing writers on a few of the titles, these are still commercial properties they're writing. In the early days, characters' status quo changed enormously over time: characters grew up (Spider-Man went through high school almost in real time and then went off to college, for instance), their relationships with one another changed, as did their looks and powers... but then that all stopped. Marvel's core business is no longer comics; it's maintaining a stable of properties that can be turned into movies and toys. These properties have to stay recognizable. So if a writer dares to allow characters to grow, to overcome their problems — the hard-luck college guy ends a string of bad relationships and is happily married, the android develops human emotion, the villain goes straight, a character dies a noble death — someone else gets brought in and it's 'back to basics!' Divorce the wife! Wipe the robot's memory! Make the reformed guy go bad again! Resurrect the dead chick!"
Nicely put. This isn't entirely bleak: it just means that comics characters are functioning more as mythic figures / archetypes / symbol systems then as "characters," per se. (One could argue, in fact, that the best comics creators are the ones who work with this in mind—Morrison here would qualify, and possibly Paul Pope (more notes on that here)).
Still, there's a way in which I can't help but feel like Marvel and DC missed the chance to do something amazing (amazing artistically, not so much commercially) by having their characters "age out." The analogy I keep thinking of is with sports: why not have the Justice League of America be a storied institution like the Chicago Cubs, with young rookies, older vets, and elderly players bowing gently into retirement? The idea of sport as long-form narrative has been explored thoughtfully (see this essay on "Hypertext and Baseball" over at the Eastgate site, or, more poetically, Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association). And it's notable, I think, that two of the most beloved and critically-acclaimed graphic novels of all time—The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen—are both centrally about being a superhero in middle age.
All of that said, here's the Comics Should Be Good editors' picks for 2006, in two parts (one, two). Lots of superhero stuff on there, some of it even looks good. Part two of "this week's thoughts on seriality" will be on videogames, although whether I'll finish it within a week is anybody's guess.
Ever since I wrote that post last Monday, I've been thinking about cultural products other than videogames / "interactive fiction" that utilize frustration as part of their aesthetic.
Worthy of consideration in this regard might be Lost, which Henry Jenkins rightly considers to be part fiction and part puzzle, not unlike Twin Peaks or The X-Files before it. Part of the pleasure of these sorts of shows comes from the pleasurable frustration of having "the answers" deferred week after week, although the way that these shows tend to famously implode would indicate that they're basically navigating Scylla and Charybdis: if there's not enough frustration the puzzles won't be engaging, and if there's too much people will shut it off.
Videogame manufactures face this same dilemma, as I was saying here, although they at least have the advantage that most videogames of the modern era have a built-in end-point: it can't be easy to produce a chain of puzzles in an open-ended serial narrative format. (My gut wants to say that it might not even be possible to do satisfingly, although I've played some long-form Dungeons and Dragons campaigns that suggest otherwise, and if we count "the mystery" as a genre similarly situated at the intersection of fiction and puzzle, then there's the whole genre of "series mysteries" to reckon with.)
I've also been thinking about ways to interpret science fiction as another literary genre that traffics in frustration. Consider the opening lines of WIlliam Gibson's short story "Burning Chrome":
"It was hot, the night we burned Chrome. Out in the malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to death against the neon, but in Bobby's loft the only light came from a monitor screen and the green and red LEDs on the face of the matrix simulator. I knew every chip in Bobby's simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the 'Cyberspace Seven,' but I'd rebuilt it so many times that you'd have had a hard time finding a square millimeter of factory circuitry in all that silicon."
This passage violates John Gardner's Art of Fiction rule, namely, to try to avoid including things that are going to snap your reader out of the "dream" of the narrative: at least once per sentence there's a term or phrase that isn't going to make immediate sense to the reader, and thus is going to function as a stumbling block of sorts. But readers of SF enjoy the way that the initial frustration of these sorts of stumbling blocks are exactly the component that provides the meta-pleasure of world building.
Some cat on the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup takes the sentence "I spent a demimonth working as an oretracer in the monopole mines through the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni" and, from it, identifies four major components of an imagined model that this sentence yields up, specifically "the sociological (it is a world where a person can spend a demimonth as an oretracer), technological (it is a world in which asteroid belts are mined), economic (it is a world in which monopole ores are in sufficient demand to be worth mining), and physical (it is a world in which Delta Cygni has at least two asteroid belts)".
It may be possible to say that there's an analogy here: as SF frustrates readers at the level of the individual word or phrase only to yield the pleasure of imagining the vaster model that contains those stumbling-block words and phrases, so do video games frustrate their players by variously constraining their actions, only to yield the pleasure of learning how to "play" the model.
The rec.arts.sf.written dude is drawing on Samuel Delany's notion of "reading protocols"—which, as I understand it, is an idea that readers of any literature bring with them a set of unspoken assumptions about "how to read it," and that the protocols of SF are different from the protocols of mimetic fiction, so that as people learn to read SF they learn to tolerate certain kinds of ambiguity and frustration (as a part of the model-building process). These ideas are written about at greater length in Delany's collection Starboard Wine, which I haven't read and which appears to be out of print. But I'll track it down.
benign masochism III: the aesthetics of frustration
Continuing on in the same vein as before, I came upon an interesting set of posts over at Writer Response Theory dealing with the notion of "frustration" in interactive fiction.
If we treat interactive fiction as narrative, which I've been arguing that we shouldn't, then frustration is disruptive: it snaps us out of the narrative, John Gardner gets cranky at us because we've broken the vivid and continuous dream of fiction, etc. But if we treat interactive fiction as a game, then the frustration is a necessary component of the game, and can be developed as an aesthetic. Jeremy Douglass's posts start us off there, asking: "What would it mean for a piece or a medium to be 'better at frustration?'"
There's a lot to digest here, but a quick glance-through brought me to this line, which I think sums things up nicely: "The art is the error message, and the error message is the art."
I know, being awake before noon on a Saturday and mad about narrative is probably about the geekiest thing ever.
But one more thing that unnerves me about the drive to have games tell better stories is the way it overlooks one important fact: playing, or even watching, a game already has an inherent narrative dimension to it. Namely, the sequence of events that constitutes the experience of playing (or of spectating). A game of football, for instance, doesn't require additional plot to be grafted onto it, and it doesn't require the players to adopt characters or avatars or anything like that.
This type of narrative is defined as "experiential" by Celia Pearce in her piece "Story as Play Space," which appears in Game On: The History and Culture of Videogames, and is probably the single most intelligent thing I have ever read on the topic of the relationship between narrative and play. She defines "experiential" narrative as "The emergent narrative that arises out of the game 'conflict' as it is played out, as experienced by the players themselves."
Related are "performative" narrative ("The emergent narrative as seen by spectators watching and/or interpreting the game underway") and "descriptive" narrative ("The retelling of game events to third parties, and the culture that emerges out of that. In terms of sports, an entire section of the newspaper is devoted to this.").
I couldn't agree more strongly that these are important narrative elements of any game, and I feel like any discussion of "how to make games better narratives" should focus on these things first, and only then focus on how to make a game more traditionally "storylike" (in terms of making them more closely resemble fiction).
I think this approach is exemplified by the following comments from ARG designer Jane McGonigal (from her interview in the New Media Writing issue of Iowa Review Web), in which she seems to be discussing her attempts to script something that will yield a blend of "experiential" and "descriptive" narrative:
"The story I help write and tell is the story of the players. My relationship to story and games is in giving players stories to tell about their experiences, creating narratives of their interaction in particular spaces and with each other... Those stories about the ingenious, impassioned action and interactions of the players--that's the narrative."
It's this kind of thinking that makes McGonigal one of the most exciting game designers working today. Interested parties might want to dig around on her site, Avant Game, or check out her blog.
And then over here at Gamasutra, we have Chris Crawford, who wrote The Art of Computer Game Design back in 1984 but who for the last fourteen years has been out of the videogame biz and working instead on something called "Storytronics," a development platform for "interactive storytelling" (those of you trying to keep score at home may be dismayed to learn that Crawford's "interactive storytelling" is totally different from text-adventure-style "interactive fiction").
Initially, when Crawford describes "interactive storytelling" as "a story you get to participate in as the protagonist" I start to seize up, preparing to go back on the same rant that I've been on twice already (one, two) . But then Crawford makes it a bit more interesting: "It's not at all like a regular story... You don't charge down a plot line towards the end, you meander through a social environment... The primary thing you do [in] interactive storytelling is talk to other people."
"Meandering": that's sounding promisingly more "game-like" rather than "story-like," and starts making me wonder whether Crawford has in mind something like a massively multiplayer online game, which has both "game" and "talk" elements. But then he draws this distinguishing line: "Most online multiplayer games, functionally they operate as chat rooms with some structure behind them ... [T]here's a game interaction going on outside the chat room, but the two are pretty distant. So if you want to talk about social interaction, well hell, you're talking about a chat room. We don't need a game for that."
Well, OK, except now I'm confused: it's become unclear to me how Crawford distinguishes "interactive storytelling" from a garden-variety chat room, or (more pointedly) from MOOs or MUDs, virtual spaces which enable the exact kind of socially-oriented environment-meandering that Crawford seems to be claiming as the province of interactive storytelling. And then we're once again up against the problem of (it seems to me, shortsightedly) trying to graft a narrative into these sorts of spaces, which are not inherently well-suited for producing narrative... getting a MUD to produce something that feels like "storytelling" hinges upon all the participants behaving more or less consistently in character, something that's extremely difficult for people who haven't been trained as actors, and that the average MUD-user may or may not have any interest in. I'm not the first person to point out that for every person who attempts to play, say, World of Warcaft in character, there are at least a dozen others who don't. (Some online games have gotten around this problem by stripping out the chat function and radically constraining the array of available character behaviors: see, for example, The Endless Forest, in which characters play deer.)
I'm open to the idea that Crawford has something interesting up his sleeve, but for the life of me I can't discern what it might be. Maybe poking around the Storytron website will help...
Earlier this month, I griped a bit about the impulse to make [video]games better narratives. The gist of my gripe, for those of you just tuning in, more or less revolves around the point that some of the features that make videogames entertaining as play don't generally make for compelling narrative, and attempts to constrain the play-element to enhance the narrative element seem to be understanding the point of playing a game almost exactly backwards.
I can't take credit for inventing this argument: it's basically a recap of some of James Paul Gee's ideas about "probing" in videogames, ideas which I was exposed to through Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good For You, which I read this summer. So it didn't come as too much of a surprise when Steven Johnson said the following in the "Literacy in the Age of Video Games" roundtable in the September issue of Harper's:
"[O]ne of the problems we have in understanding games is that we see them as being driven by their narratives. In fact, I think the narratives tend to be a vestigial part of games that has been carried over from earlier forms. When people play games, they aren't playing them for the story. They aren't playing them for a narrative arc of any kind. In fact, if you're looking for an analogy, I would say that game design is closer to architecture than it is to novel writing. The designers do create certain resistances to certain types of behavior and encourage other types of behavior within the space, but first and foremost, they're creating a space that can be explored and occupied in multiple ways."
Sometimes I'm not sure about the merits of the term "electronic literature." I've used it loads of times, including spending some labor in this very blog working on an unfinished taxonomy of "forms of electronic literature." Although even perusing that list will reveal some instances where I refer to certain types of electronic literature as really being more akin to "toys" or "films" then as "literature" per se.
I think about this a lot in relation to the term "interactive fiction" or "interactive narrative," a category which encapsulates what used to be known as the more lowly "text adventure." "Interactive fiction" (IF) seems to have become the commonly-accepted term for these sorts of creative works, and I've stated some of the things I like about the term on record, but I wonder sometimes if it doesn't distort the way people think about the end product. Specifically, I wonder if it's useful to assess IF using the critical tools one would use to assess a piece of literature: I wonder if IF wouldn't be better assessed using the critical tools one would use to assess a video game.
This came up for me recently when I was reading the transcript of "Interactive Narratives Reconsidered," an interesting speech that Ernest W. Adams delivered at last year's Game Developers Conference.
Adams' speech mostly attempts to answer the question of "how can we make interactive narratives better as narratives?" In order to establish the need for improvement in this regard, Adams points out a set of "key problems" that make it "difficult to create interactive narratives."
For instance, "The Problem of Amnesia": "What do we do about the fact that story characters understand the world they live in, but the player is amnesiac about that world? Why does the player have to spend time at the beginning of every game exploring what is supposed to be his own natural environment?"
I think it's a valid point that this maybe doesn't make for a very realistic story, and it may not be compelling as literature, but it's never bothered me very much in the text adventures I've played (or, if you prefer, "in the pieces of interactive fiction I've read"). It's never registered as a "problem," exactly. And in trying to think about why that is, it occurred to me that a big part of what's pleasurable about a video game is this process of exploring and testing the environment. In Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good For You, he refers to this process as "probing," a concept originally theorized by social scientist James Paul Gee.
Gee is a pretty smart guy (Stanford Ph.D.) who has some things to say on the topic of games as narratives (from this interview):
"Stories in video games work very differently than do stories in books or movies, and we really don't understand well how they work, yet, because we keep treating games like movies. In books and movies, the story is 'top-down,' someone else has made it and you discover it in the order and at the pace the designer has determined. In games, stories are 'bottom-up.' The player picks up bits and pieces sometimes in an order and at a pace determined by the player."
Well, exactly. The sort of "mimetic gap" between the way a player explores a game and the way a heroic protagonist would realistically behave in fiction, seems to me to be a key part of what makes a game a game.
Apply Adams' "Problem of Amnesia" to a classic video game like, say, Defender. I've been playing Defender for approximately 26 years now and I'm still terribly bad at it: the fast gameplay and complicated controls make it a game of near-infernal difficulty. But that's the fun of it. Treating this game as narrative would be laughable: you wouldn't ask "why does this character need to spend valuable time trying to figure out the controls of his own ship?" or "why did this planet choose such an inept defender, thereby insuring their immanent doom?" (It's true that the planet in Defender only has ten humans on it, so their talent pool is pretty limited.)
Similar is Adams' "Problem of Internal Consistency": "What if the player is controlling Superman as his avatar, but wants to do something very unlike Superman: killing people at random, for example?"
This wouldn't make for a very canonical Superman story, agreed, but attempting to do something like that seems to me to be a fundamental part of the process of playing a video game. Part of the fun of a game is figuring out what constitutes its internal consistency, which means that sometimes you're going to do things which don't make consistent or realistic sense were we to be watching the thing as a narrative. Play Shadow of the Colossus and it's only a matter of time before you make the protagonist leap to his doom off a staggeringly high cliff. Taken as story, this makes no sense: why would a protagonist so seemingly driven to complete his goal suddenly opt for suicide? Taken as an instance of "probing"—testing the parameters of a game world—it makes perfect sense.
I just don't think a text adventure / piece of interactive fiction should be held to different standards just because it's made of words and not polygons.
"Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003) is a beautiful film, so languidly quotidian, and yet so dreamily gorgeous, that its utter naturalism verges on the surreal ... The camera floats from student to student, with long tracking shots following one or another kid down the hallways or across the grass, looping backwards and forwards in time so that the same events are captured several times from several viewpoints."
The end result of this technique is that Van Sant creates a vivid evocation of a school as a rich narrative space: densely layered with multiple stories running in simultaneous sequence. Although the students are the film's focus we also glimpse the administrators, teachers, office staff, and cafeteria workers often enough (and vividly enough) to get a sense that they too have their own narratives directing them through the environment of the school. The film opts not to "follow" these particular branches but we're aware of their existence.
This design helps the Columbine-Littleton-style shootings of the film to carry more weight, to feel more palpable as tragedy: one of the reasons that violence feels shocking in lived experience is precisely because of its disruptive potential, its capacity to radically reroute (or terminate) the narrative "direction" of a life. Most filmic, televisual, or videogame violence, by contrast, fails to shock because the narrative context that we would need to feel that sense of disruption is not provided, or is only provided as a perfunctory sketch or a selection from the circulating set of readymade cliches. When the film's violence cuts through all the film's stories simultaneously, we feel the disruptive sense of that act in that space: this is the most (possibly the only) valuable contribution that Van Sant makes to the cultural discourse around these kinds of shootings.
Another nice Shaviro passage:
"The film is about teenage awkwardness and grace (which coexist in all the characters, in different proportions), and it is wonderfully attentive to the life of the body, to bodies in motion, with their microscopic habits and routines and glitches and disruptions, their momentary tropisms and encounters."
I almost wish that the film had not even had the shootings in it: by including them, the film inevitably becomes "about" the shootings, and I feel that Van Sant has considerably more to say on the life of teenagers in their "momentary tropisms" (what a film like My Own Private Idaho is really all about) than he does on the topic of school shootings. A full exploration of the former would render an exploration of the latter wholly unnecessary.
This will be my last Quentin Tarantino post for a while, lest this become an all-Tarantino blog. Leftover scraps on various topics:
Textual poaching
Interview with Tarantino, where he discusses the (many) stylistic influences on Kill Bill, and, in particular, the casting of kung-fu stars like Sonny Chiba and Gordon Liu:
"As I am framing shots, I'm thinking 'I can't believe Gordon Liu is in my movie! I can't believe it.' And to have been so influenced by seventies kung fu films and to have, as far as I'm concerned, my three favorite stars of kung fu from three different countries .. Gordon Liu representing Hong Kong. Sonny Chiba representing Japan. And David Carradine representing America. That's a triple header. A triple crown. If Bruce Lee was still alive, he'd be in it."
There's a whole theory that could be written that involves Quentin Tarantino as the world's most successful creator of fan fiction. If you wanted to give it an academic spin you could say he's doing textual poaching.
Artifice
Same interview. Tarantino on the artifice of the Kill Bill "universe":
"this whole movie takes place in this special universe. This isn't the real world ... this is a movie universe and in this universe, people carry samurai swords. Not only do they carry samurai swords, not only can you bring a samurai sword on an airplane, there's a place on the airplane seat to put your samurai sword!"
If I want to think through Tarantino's relationship to artifice any further I have to think more about Tarantino's relationship to Godard, a filmmaker who Tarantino has referenced repeatedly as an influence and who has also made a body of work that deals explicitly with cinema as artifice (and who also shares a fascination with themes of crime, race, femininity, etc.). I've seen maybe a half-dozen Godard films and although they're all interesting, I can't say that I have a really good grasp on Godard's "project." An area for more research...
Metareference
Fred Coppersmith writes in with a quote from the New Yorker's profile of Tarantino:
"When [Tarantino] draws up a contract with Miramax, he has his lawyer include an unusual provision that secures him all the rights to the characters in the future, so that nobody can use them -- for sequels or spinoffs or marketing or anything else -- without his permission, and so that he can use them again himself in a movie whenever he likes. He intends gradually to build a whole Tarantino world, so that his movies intersect with one another. He has already started doing this: Mr. White, of Reservoir Dogs, used to do jobs with Alabama, the heroine of True Romance; Vic Vega, of Reservoir Dogs, is related to Vincent Vega, of Pulp Fiction."
Of course, Pulp Fiction / True Romance / Reservoir Dogs all occur in a universe operating at a particular level of mimetic fidelity, whereas Kill Bill operates at an entirely different level. This hasn't stopped Kevin Smith from doing something similar: all three movies in the "Jersey Trilogy" operate at different levels of realism, but the characters cross effortlessly between them. This reaches its inevitable nadir in the abysmal Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, which proves that a movie can understand meta-referentiality and still be dumb as a post.
Authenticity
My pal Laura has written a provocative response to my reading of Jackie Brown; check it out.
Libidinal narrative
Kill Bill comes pretty close to fulfilling my criteria for a feature-length movie driven by libidinal narrative. Dramatic tension (mostly) doesn't function in the film in any traditional way: there is rarely any doubt in our mind about the outcome of any given battle that "the Bride" engages in--even though her adversaries are equally skilled. As a result, a lot of the pleasure of the film comes from watching a super-powerful entity destroy other super-powerful entities. A weirdly contemporary sort of plot.
OK. Tomorrow I will write about something else. Possibly Gertrude Stein.
The online magazine Tekka recently caught my interest. It covers topics that are near and dear to me: new media, software, narrative... In particular, I was interested in reading Bill Bly's article on "artifactual fiction":
'By "artifactual" I mean fiction made up not of simple narration but of objects, each of which has a story (it could be a document, but could as well be a photograph, a map, a song). The object may tell its story itself (as would happen with, say, a journal entry), or the object may have to be "read" -- analyzed, dissected, contemplated, then related to other artifacts in the vicinity -- before its significance can become clear, its story understood.'
But I'm put off by the registration fee—$50 is pretty steep for a year's worth of access to an online magazine. "Writers have to eat," says the site, and I know that as much as anyone. I have no serious qualms about charging for content—even charging a lot for content—but if you're going to do it, you should at least do it right.
The prime reason I'm resistant to coughing up the $50 is because there's no good way to assess the quality of what I'm paying for. If Tekka were an actual, physical magazine, I could go to a bookstore and pick up an issue, sampling the content for a low-cost, one-time investment. If I liked it, and thought that I might be interested in reading it regularly, then I'd be much more likely to put out the money for a subscription (especially if it would result in a savings over the newsstand price). Tekka isn't a physical magazine, but there are simple ways that they could mimic this model. They could make some articles available to the casual browser. Say, one feature per issue. Or just the book reviews. Or just the back issues. (Instead, they offer the first couple hundred words of each article—but the real "meat" of an article—what I most need to assess in order to make an assessment of quality—is rarely, if ever, found in an article's introductory passages.)
Perhaps they could emulate the "newsstand factor" most faithfully by allowing people to purchase a pass to all the articles in one issue. There are going to be four issues of Tekka in 2003: I'd happily pay $12.50 to read the one with the "artifactual fiction" article in it.
If we step outside of the "subscription paradigm" and the "newsstand paradigm" and think clearly about the qualities of data online, we can find other solutions as well. I've never bought a paid subscription to anything online—but I've bought individual articles online on several occasions. My most recent purchase was from the Chicago Reader archive, which charges $1.95 to $3.95 for an article (depending on length), a non-prohibitive amount. Data in an archive is, by its very nature, fragmented, nonlinear, and hypertextual—you can sell it piece-by-piece just as easily as you can sell full access to it. (Perhaps the back-end programming is trickier, but a magazine about "creating beautiful software" should be able to find someone who can manage this problem.) Our engagement with information on the Web is often context-specific, noncommittal, promiscuous, and specialized—given these truths it just makes sense to make your articles available individually, at an easily-absorbable cost, rather than asking, up-front, for a full year of pricey committment.
I'd expect the people who are thinking critically and intelligently about new media to be the ones who understand that the most.
I'm currently reading Mutations, a sprawling, white-hot anthology on the contemporary city.
One of the prominent contributors to this book is Rem Koolhaas (and his students involved in the Harvard Design School's Project on the City) and the book, at least on initial glance, seems to be a towering sheaf of disorganized data, similar to Koolhaas' deliriously unassailable S, M, L, XL. There's definitely something appealing about trying to approach an enormously complex topic (be it the metropolis or the creative work and theoretical contexts of an individual) by essentially collating a vast supply of raw documentary material and allowing the reader to sift and select from it as they wish, in accord with their own purposes. (In some ways we can imagine that this is what a non-electronic hypermedia would look like.)
There is no good reason why this strategy need be the exclusive province of hip architecture / urbanism books. Indeed, I've been thinking a lot about what this strategy might mean for fiction, how it fits in to my ideas about information prose, what effects the use of such a strategy might have on narrative. Lots of notes have ensued.
(Note: close inspection will reveal that Mutations does, indeed, have a structure, albeit one flexible enough to accomodate bewildering variety: ten pages of statistics are followed by roughly two hundred pages of essays, which are followed by a series of photographic dossiers, which are followed by several massive hybrid-form projects from various groups and individuals, which are followed by an index of "urban rumors"...)
The ability to change Web texts through time (to create "time-shifted" media, to borrow a phrase from this essay) is one of the fundamental, unique properties of Web-writing, and thus it should be a key consideration for current practicioners of electronic writing. And yet I find myself surprised that so few of the current crop of electronic writers are producing work that makes use of the temporal dimension. I'm also surprised that none of the web journals that publish electronic writing make allowances for time-shifted work (to the best of my knowledge).
There's certainly a huge populist explosion of this type of writing, however. Tens of thousands of people use content management systems like Blogger and LiveJournal: these systems essentially automate the organization of material into chronological streams. I wouldn't generally consider most weblogs or LiveJournals to be "electronic literature," but there's a contiunuum here, with the hyperlinked brevity of Robot Wisdom on one end. On the other end we find the literate, essay-like entries of, say, Michael Barrish's Oblivio, Steve Cook's Snarkout, or Paul Ford's FTrain (this last also includes things that apear to be personal essays but which are actually fiction). Are these sites still weblogs? Arguable, but the important point is that these sites make use of temporality: the sites are not static, and this makes us read them differently from how we would read, say, a book of short nonfiction pieces.
When applied to fiction, temporal writing often takes the form of serialized narrative, such as Phantomnation or my own Imaginary Year. A key related text is Michael Stutz's piece, "Episodic Writing."
Forerunners of temporal writing: content-management applications, syndicated newspaper columnists, periodical narratives (such as comic books), Thomas Wolfe's episodic novels, film serials, Victorian-era serializations / series novels.
I've been thinking a lot lately about literary realism, and whether it's a good thing or not.
Many of my favorite twentieth-century writers (Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, etc.) consciously and deliberately violated the tenets of literary realism in their fiction. You could argue that the textual experiments of Burroughs or Barthelme (or, more recently, those of Ben Marcus) constitute a kind of higher order of "realism"—we live in a world densely webbed with discourse networks, and the work of those authors reflects that reality in a way that you could technically call mimetic. The experience of reading these stories matches our experience elsewhere, yes, but the characters—if there even are characters—resemble us only indirectly.
I think that there is a value to the act of telling stories about experiences that resemble our own. We can see this by looking at the last thrity years of American literary fiction, which is characterized by an explosion of women's writing, minority writing, and gay writing. The people who ran the women's presses and women's bookstores that sprang up in the 1970s understood that realistic storytelling was not only pleasurable but also political: the terrain of representation was contested terrain, on which battles could be fought and won. The early gay and minority presses had this same sense of awareness and enjoyed similar success.
I like reading fiction that evokes the fragmentation and density of our contemporary world, but I think fiction can do more than just that: it can tell a story about that world, and how people—people we recognize as being like us—negotiate it. This is something that I try to do in my own work. For my money, the only writer out there who is really doing this with regularity is Don DeLillo. This probably explains why I like DeLillo so much.
(Backstory: I've been thinking about this stuff because a while ago, The Magnificent Melting Object recommended Nathalie Sarraute. I checked out her book Tropisms / The Age of Suspicion. It's a weird hybrid—half of the book is a collection of strange microfictions, the other half is a set of four pieces of literary criticism— but the literary criticism half deals a lot with the question of realism (particularly psychological realism) in twentieth-century fiction.)
(Wishlist: I need to find people in Chicago who I can sit down and talk about books with.)
I have a new desktop computer, and am seeking a mail client. I've taken both Outlook Express 6 and Netscape Mail 6.2 for a spin over the past week, and have found that both of them have quirks that annoy me. (Netscape Mail 6.2 seems particularly gIitchy, whereas I was completely satisfied with Netscape Communicator 4.7; maybe they shouldn't have tried to rewrite all their code from scratch.)
Q: Does Opera have a mail client? A: yes. Hmmmmmmmmm.
Eclogues makes me a happy boy this week by drawing my attention back to Narrativity, a San Francisco critical journal (and also for linking to this apple soup recipe, which sounds delicious and is likely be my new-recipe-of-the-week this week).
I've only begun to poke around the Narrativity site: there's a lot there and much of it is heady. But this piece, "Long Note on New Narrative," by Robert Glück, grabbed me right away with its engaging memoirish tone. It's a piece about Bay Area writing in the 70's and 80's, and, most particularly, about how a pair of author/publishers (Glück & Bruce Boone) hammered out a genre within which they could write what they wanted to.
"I wanted the pleasures and politics of the fragment and the pleasures and politics of story, gossip, fable and case history; the randomness of chance and a sense of inevitability; sincerity while using appropriation and pastiche."
Lots of ideas which resonate with me here. For instance:
"We brought gossip and anecdote to our writing because they contain speaker and audience, establish the parameters of community and trumpet their 'unfair' points of view. ... as a collagist I had an infinite field. I could use the lives we endlessly described to each other as 'found material' which complicates storytelling because the material also exists on the same plane as the reader's life. Found materials have a kind of radiance, the truth of the already-known."
The piece provides avenues for further exploration by referencing perhaps a dozen relevant thinkers (both critics and poets) who helped Glück & Boone formulate their conception of "new narrative," and several writers who are practicioners of the form, all of whom are unknown to me.
