Some Came Running

Observations on "White America" from all over

"It's not an accident that the prank caller preys on a fast food joint, the province of minimum wage workers supervised by dues-paying lifers. Not only are even those at the top of this food chain unlikely to be well-educated, but everyone from the top to the bottom likely needs their job too much to risk questioning authority."—Karina Longworth, "Sundance Film Festival 2012: Beasts of the Southern Wild and Compliance," L.A. Weekly, online editon, January 25, 2012

"16. How many times in the last year have you eaten at one of the following restaurant chains? Applebee’s, Waffle House, Denny’s, IHOP,Chili’s, Outback Steakhouse, Ruby Tuesday, T.G.I. Friday’s, Ponderosa Steakhouse.

"Four points maximum. Score a point for each time you ate at one of them up to 4.

"However much they disapprove of fast food in theory and restrict their visits, almost all members of the new upper class at least know what the inside of a McDonald’s looks like. But how about the chains of sit-down restaurants that form such an inte-gral part of life in most of America? The nine I listed are the ones with the most outlets in the United States.

"I could not get statistics on meals served by them, but given that these nine chains had revenues of more than $12 billion in 2009 (probably much more),and all of that comes from dinner checks that ran around $5 to $25 per person, the aggregate number of meals served by just the top nine chains has to be in the high hundreds of millions, at least.

"Why a list of nine chains instead of the more natural top ten? Because one of the top ten is Chipotle Mexican Grill, which is to the casual-dining genre of restaurants as Whole Foods is to grocery stores." —Charles Murray, from Chapter 4, "How Thick Is Your Bubble?," Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Crown Forum, 2012.

Hat tip: Alicublog.

Pop quiz

Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, or grievously overworked quasi-meta record album promo art?

A.

B.

C.

Nicol Williamson, 1936-2011

In Robin and Marion, Richard Lester, 1976.

It's interesting that he began his career as an almost relentlessly contemporary kind of actor, known for his radical reinventions within the classics; and that, as far as his film work is concerned, he's best remembered for seemingly unselfconscious, very lived-in portrayals of legendary characters that are all the more timeless for their, well, coziness. It's lamentable that a good deal of his film work is either accessible to us only in indifferent iterations (The Seven Percent Solution may not warrant Criterion treatment, but still...) or hardly at all (he's really wonderful in Preminger's odd and oddly affecting The Human Factor, and I've never been able to see Richardson's Laughter in the Dark). Williamson spent the last fifteen years out of the film world, working on his music (which I'm curious to hear), and he was missed, and he will be missed more. 

Recommended reading

Spoiler alert: Both of the linked texts fall into the category of writing about writing or reviews of reviewers or what have you, and specifically deal with ruminations published on Slate. If such content tends to not appeal to you, you might not want to check out either of the recommended pieces. But, you know, if it DOES appeal:

Naughty.

Pointed, But Exquisitely Well-Mannered, Albeit Never Reaching The Level Of Blandness That Would Allow One To Characterize It As "Nice," So There's My False Parallel For Me. 

You better stay away from him; he'll rip your lungs out, Jim

...or Liam, as the case may be. The Grey, reviewed for MSN Movies. 

Bingham Ray, 1954-2012

I can't say that Bingham Ray and I were particularly close, but I think I can say that we were tight. This is because Bingham did me the honor of opting to recognize me as a kindred spirit pretty shortly after we were introduced, in 1997, I believe. October Films, the outfit that he ran with Jeff Lipsky, was behind the David Lynch picture Lost Highway, which Premiere had chronicled the making of—sort of—in a 1996 piece by David Foster Wallace that some of you may have heard of. I was VERY enthusiastic about the picture and even though I hadn't started writing film reviews for Premiere at that time, Bingham was very pleased that I saw it as I did, and he took the fact that I saw it as I did as an indication that I understood the larger scheme of things in a way not unlike his own, and that was that. In conversation, our minds moved at the same speed and on very similar frequencies, which had the peculiar effect of making a lot of our chats rather brief. We'd agree on something being wonderful, or something being awful, and then one of us would start to extrapolate on that, and we'd look at each other and it'd be like, well, I don't need to tell YOU, and that was pretty much that. Or, after a screening, Bingham: "So what'd you think?" Me: "Pretty fucking great." Bingham: "WASN'T IT?" Yeah.  

We also knew that we shared a similar impulsiveness. Peter Biskind's book Down And Dirty Pictures drafts this grandiose narrative of October versus Miramax, indie David taking on the Goliath of its particular realm and not triumphing, and while Bingham certainly had issues with certain personalities and was as fierce and as fiercely competitive as anyone you could name in his field, he sure as hell had, throughout his career, very different priorities from a Harvey Weinstein. And a very different personality. While Biskind's book squares off Weinstein and Ray as matched separates, as it were, the two men were...well, for one thing, Bingham certainly did not have anything you could conceivably call a bullying side. A snappish temper, yeah, a bit, but it didn't go far in the service of pushing anybody around. Like Harvey,though, Bingham was known for his bluntness, but there was even nothing remotely cagey about his bluntness, which there definitely is with Weinstein. Weinstein would prefer you not recognize that caginess, because he thinks if you don't see it that adds to his negotiating advantage (this is not entirely unlike the old Nixonian make-them-believe-I'm-just-crazy-enough-to-do-it ploy), but of course it's there more often than not. Bingham was entirely more transparent, which was both blessing and...well, I won't say curse, but you can understand how that can sometimes be a liability. I've got something like that same damn problem myself, and that's another reason we got along, and why it was kind of automatic. 

We were also big smokers when we first met, so we logged in a fair amount of time standing around outside in places like Park City and Toronto and having cigarettes and being all like "What the hell are we doing?" about it. The man was an incredible idealist about movies but also a stone cold realist and he never compained, never really complained, about the uphill battle he had with pretty much every film he believed in, every film he knew deserved a shot, and he had a healthy sense of not-quite-spite but definitely defiance in the face of the forces that stood between him and getting that movie seen. By the same token, he did what he had to do when he had to do it. We once discussed a gig that was less-than-optimum for him and he shrugged and said, "What are you gonna do? I gotta put the kids through college." He took ALL his responsibilities seriously. And it made me shudder, during the post-October periods when I saw him in scrambling mode. To think that a guy as sharp as that, with that kind of taste and tenacity and understanding of both art and commerce was NOT running things...I couldn't fathom it.

Through the ups and downs, he was an invariably friendly face, even if in the crush of the crowd at a given event all you and he could do was smile at each other across a room and give a "we're still here" shrug.  I hadn't seen Bingham for a few years when I learned the other day of his being taken ill, and then of his death today, and so now he's not here. I suppose that he and I and my old friends and colleagues are getting to be that age, the age when someone you prize comes to mind and you think, oh, it's been too long since I've spoken/had coffee with that person, I really need to do that some time soon and catch up...and you don't follow up on that thought, and then maybe the person is gone. It is I suppose commendable that, as one fellow mourner chose to put it, Bingham died "with his boots on," checking out the Sundance Film Festival. Commendable, but hardly comforting. What are you gonna do?

In his famous 1973 letter to Jean-Luc Godard excoriating his one-time friend and colleague, François Truffaut wrote: "Opposed to you are the small men, from Bazin to Edmond Maire and taking in Sartre, Buñuel, Queneau, Mendes-France, Rohmer and Audiberti, who ask others how they're getting on, who help them to fill out a social-security form, who reply to their letters—what they have in common is the capacity to think of others rather than themselves and above all to be more interested in what they do than in what they are and in what they appear to be." In that tradition, I can sincerely attest that Bingham Ray was one of the best of the small men. 

Big evil

So we were watching Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 Strangers on a Train the other night, and among its fascinations I was most struck, this time, by the director's visual conception of the film's "villain," Bruno Anthony (masterfully embodied by Robert Walker) who is of course the increasingly not-so-secret sharer of its "hero," Guy Haines. As Bill Krohn aptly points out in his excellent book Hitchcock at Work, Bruno "is the Monster from the Id," and, more importantly from Guy's unconscious point of view, he represents a means by which Guy may scratch—as in permanently eliminate—an itch. Hence, up until his apotheosis as a means, that is, his murder of Miriam, Guy's troublesome wife, Bruno is almost always visually outsize, the dominating figure in pretty much every frame in which he appears. 

As in the above shot, in which Bruno makes himself at ease in his private compartment, putting his feet up (of course we recall that the respective protagonists were introduced, and their characteristics indeed limned, by way of their shoes, walking). Hitchcock keeps every part of Bruno in focus even as the soles of his shoes loom in the center of the frame. As in the shot at the top of the post, from the soon-to-be-late Miriam's point of view, of Bruno at the fairground entrance, a slash mark in the middle of the frame, a sharply defined malignant man in full, as it were.

As I said, this version of Bruno stays in play up the the point Bruno murders Miriam, and as reflected in her glasses he is at the height of monstrousness. Having done the deed, he does not quite recede, but he is rather peskily incorporated into Guy's existence, like a wart; note Bruno's forward-gazing presence as one of Guy's tennis matches: just another face in the crowd, only different. 

But up until the murder, Hitchcock's visual conception of Bruno is inflexible, to the point where it could not necessarily be entirely accomodated by the filmmaking technology of the time. You see this a lot in Hitchcock, not just the early stuff but in the middle, all the way up to The Birds: visual ideas so audacious and imaginative that they could only be acheived by way of special effects, or kluges incorporating a mix of effects and techniques. The recent Criterion Blu-ray disc of Hitchcock's 1938 The Lady Vanishes reveals in great detail the particularities of the dolls and model cars used in the film's opening shot, an ostensible camera-swoop from a height onto a train station and chalet on a fictional mountain range. Unable to accomplish the aerial shot "for real," Hitchcock and his team did it via minatures. Two decades later, Hitchcock conceived a similar opening for Psycho, and was able to use actual aerial shots, but still had to resort to dissolves to finally get the camera into the hotel room where we find Sam and Marion. 

In any event, for a shot of Bruno speaking on the phone prior to going out and committing "his" murder, Hitchcock wanted to foreground Bruno in a sort of family portrait, showing his dotty, doting mother and his increasingly irritated father squabbling over Bruno's mental state even as Bruno's on his way to committing homicide. He wanted every figure in focus but didn't want to use a wide-angle lense to get the "deep focus" effect and I presume that as of the time of the film's making there were no flat lenses with a focal length sufficient for the depth the director was going for. So Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks opted for a process shot, which results in a slight degradation of detail but gets the desired effect.

I don't follow lens advances as much as I ought to, so I wonder if the shot as Hitchcock conceived it would be possible without having to split it in two, as the maestro did then, today. I do recall, in an interview with Premiere pegged to his 2000 film What Lies Beneath, Robert Zemeckis waxing enthusiastic about how Hitchcock would have loved new-fangled tools like CGI. There were a couple of wags on the staff who snorted at this for a variety of parochial reasons; to tell you the truth, I might have been one of them. But I think Zemeckis was precisely correct. When I look at something like the opening shot of Martin Scorsese's Hugo, which in a sense approximates the opening of The Lady Vanishes, train station and all, and ups the ante on the camera mobility aspect...only this time the fake people are computer-generated, and not models, I think: Yes. By any means available/necessary.  

Literary interlude

Y cuál es la relación, dijo Pancho,

Entre Morfeo, dios

Del sueño

Y morfar, vulgo

Comer?

Sí, eso dijo,

Abrazado por la cintura

De la bella Margarita,

Flaca y casi desnuda

En un bar de Lince, una noche

Leída y partida y

Poseida

Por los relámpagos

De la quimera.

Nuestra necesidad.

Nuestra boca abierta

Por la que entra

La papa

Y por la que salen

Los sueños: estelas

Fósiles

Coloreadas con la paleta

Del apocalipsis.

 

And what is the relationship, asked Pancho,

Between Morpheus, god

Of Sleep,

And morfar, slang

To eat?

Yes, that’s what he said,

Hugged around the waist

By the lovely Margarita,

Skinny and almost naked

In a bar in Lince, one night

Glimpsed and fractured and

Possessed

By the lightning bolts

Of the chimera.

Our necessity.

Our open mouth

Where bread

Goes in

And dreams

Come out: vapor trails

Fossils

Colored with the palette

Of the apocalypse.

—Roberto Bolaño, "Los neochilenos" ("The Neochileans"), in Tres, translated by Laura Healy, New Directions 2011 (NOTE: Fixed a small typo in the Spanish; thanks to commenter Rotch for pointing it out.)

"Red Tails"

Above, Elijah Kelly in a film that it gave me no pleasure to pan. For MSN Movies. 

Class warfare the Robert Bresson way

The future 1%, probablement, circa 1983

"You know, I think it's about envy."—Mitt Romney, January 11, 2012

So I was watching this wonderful new print of Robert Bresson's final film, the magnificent L'argent, at Film Forum this afternoon, and as a peripheral mental exercise my imp brain started wondering what an American election-year conservative argument with the film might subsist of, and of course it would probably center, at least until the utterly non-negotiable ending, around protagonist Yvon's almost immediate turn to criminality once he loses his job, and of course around the notion that he actually gives up his job willingly, so to speak. That is, after the trial concerning the counterfeit notes (initially passed around by the teenage charmer seen above, and a buddy named Norbert) exonerates Yvon, the door is open for him to try to "explain" the situation to his former employers, but Yvon tells his wife that he's not about to go "crawling like a dog" to the bosses at the heating oil company. And this is the first of Yvon's sins: the sin of pride, and in case you have ever wondered why pride is considered a "deadly" sin, then, well, you absolutely ought to see this film. (Its run at the Film Forum, part of a fantastic Bresson retrospective, has its final day this Thursday, the 19th of January, but the Janus logo that opened the aforementioned wonderful new print—the screen cap above is from an old New Yorker Video DVD, made from less stellar material—indicates a Criterion edition of the film is in the future.) While Yvon's prideful gesture is easy to miss, it sets in motion all the further awfulness to come, but the point of including the gesture is not, I think, to condemn Yvon. Scenes coming a little after this show the ability of the film's better-off characters to pay off their sins, with money. The teen snot Norbert's mother buys the silence of the photo-store clerk who first took a fake 500 franc note with a discreet little envelope and a self-abasing (it seems) insistence; the punchline comes, of course, when the rich mom stands at the door expecting the clerk she's just bribed to hold it open for her. And of course the photo-store clerk rushes over to do exactly that. In this fallen world, money—"l'argent"—literally has the power to buy sin. And those without money have to work it off in other ways. Or maybe just sin more, and bigger. I imagine that when Mitt Romney talks about envy, there's a part of him that very deeply understands that that envy is not just over material goods, but also over a particular, um, standard of living.