Some Came Running

Triumphalism Of The Davids

Yesterday Instapundit founder and Pajamas Media personality Glenn Reynolds, using the byline "Glenn Harlan Reynolds," contributed a rumination on the Roman Polanski case to the Washington Examiner. Reynolds theory is that the Hollywood reaction to Polanski's arrest, being so utterly out of step with mainstream America's feelings about it, could be, in fact, one more ding in Hollywood's death knell. His logic, at least in part, is thus: "Why hand your money to a bunch of obvious moral cretins, when there are so many better things to do with it? Technologically and market-wise, Hollywood is in the weakest position it's ever been, and yet it is more arrogant than it was in its golden age...Such circumstances seldom end well."

Of course Reynolds has something like a vested interest in the demise of the rather amorphous entity he refers to as "Hollywood." He's the author of the book An Army Of Davids, whose subtitle is "How Markets And Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths." I'm not sure what his precise ties to Pajamas Media (which I'll call an "alternative content portal") are, other than that he hosts at least one show for it. But obviously he has something invested in the success of that venture, whose aim, if the visual metaphors used in some of its promo material are to be believed, is to smash what we'll call "Big Media."

But before we take on the argument cited above, there are one or two others to dispose of. 

The uses of sacrilege: On Von Trier, Tarkovsky, and "Antichrist"

On the one hand, Lars von Trier's new provocation, Antichrist, often seems hardly worth the trouble of discussing. Its opening—that is, its opening once you get past the ostentatious title cards announcing the auteur, the title of his latest opus, and the fact that this first section of the film is a, ahem, "prologue"—depicts, in luscious, satiny black-and-white, the film's unnamed central couple making violently uncontrolled love as their adorable toddler toddles out of his crib, onto a window sill, and out the window, stuffed animal in tow, falling to his death. Not only does the sequence include the requisite hardcore-sex insert shot (a staple of Scandanavian cinema since 1974's They Call Her One-Eye, I guess; here stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are doubled by Horst Stramka and Mandy Starship), but it's scored to the aria "Lascia ch'io pianga" ("Let me weep," doncha know) from Handel's Rinaldo. Underscoring the difference between know-something-ishness and blatant pretentiousness by partaking equally of both, it's a scene so silly that it practically begs you to laugh at it. And, as the sage Spencer Pratt once said, "that's the problem." 

Or, rather, that's one of the problems. By now you've no doubt heard of the putative cinematic atrocities that follow as von Trier transports his troubled couple—he's a therapist, she's a stalled academic—to their place in the woods, called Eden of course, wherein the male intends to cure the female of her grief. It's not just the sickening violence, sexual mutilation, boogity-boogity lighting effects and other shock maneuvers that rankle. It's the intellectual incoherence, the scattershot introduction of nonsensical ideas that doesn't quite camouflage the fact that all von Trier is doing is showing a lot of behavior. It's that despite all this behavior—and Dafoe and Gainsbourg don't flinch from any of it, although you might not come away from the movie believing that that's necessarily to their credit—we never really understand who these people are, their characters are so woefully underwritten, underdeveloped. It's the damn red herrings—wait a minute, their child, named Nick, had...cleft feet? What, is this movie The Omen all of a sudden?

It's all of that and more. So my question for myself is, why the hell is this movie still working me over, to the point that I believe it's the main cause of my waking up in a completely shitty mood this morning?

Such are the mysteries of cinema. 

Oh, but I see I haven't yet addressed the title of this post. 

The Pleasure Of Being Cuckolded (Or Is That Castrated?): Notes inspired by some links between Brian DePalma's "Hi, Mom!" (1970) and "Body Double" (1984)

This is my contribution to the Brian DePalma Blogathon, hosted by Cinema Viewfinder, where it is cross-posted. Thanks to Tony Dayoub for encouragement. 

In Brian DePalma's giddy, absurdist, radical early feature Hi, Mom, Robert DeNiro plays a disturbingly disaffected young man named Jon Rubin. The character was introduced in DePalma's prior film, 1969's Greetings. He's an ardent voyeur and would-be filmmaker, and he's got an inspiration. He intends to invent gonzo porn some two decades avant le lettre by surreptitiously filming himself getting it on with woman from the building across from his own (a fantasy object he's discovered in his obsessive peeping, played by Jennifer Salt).   Of course, in order to make the scheme work, he's got to meet, attract, and seduce her first, which he does by putting on the mask of a sensitive square and inventing some malarkey about a computer date. Once he's gotten her out—they attend a double feature of David and Lisa and Porgy and Bess before going to dinner—he elicits her sympathy by relating this tale of woe:

"...reminds me of something that happened to me. I was coming home... I was living with a girl, Barbara, a few years ago and, uh, it was her birthday and I came home and I had presents and, uh, cake and candles and all kinds of confetti and crepe paper, and I was rushing up the stairs, ecstatic. I opened the door very quietly, crept in, and I heard the shower running. Well I open the door to the bathroom...and I hear some voices...and all of a sudden I open the shower curtain and there...there she is with another person...they were naked...and the funny thing about it is he had this kind of laugh, this kind of evil grin...and it really threw me and I naturally ran out of the place in a state of shock, I didn't know what to do..."

As tales of cuckolding and in flagrante discovery go, it's pretty banal, and wouldn't be worth noting had not DePalma put nearly exactly the same scenario on film almost 15 years later in his controversial Hitchcock/porn-schlock pastiche Body Double. 

Young and dumb versus old and in the way

I began writing professionally about 25 years ago. As was befitting to someone with no degree and little practical training, I started as a rock critic. And I was a man on a mission. I wanted to share my enthusiasms with the world. My first piece for the then still-fabled-as-a-"writer's paper" The Village Voice was about the first solo album by the great singer and songwriter Peter Blegvad, a work I rather optimistically deemed "The Great Lost Pop LP Of 1983." (Some might recall that Thriller was a rather big record in 1983.) And so for a couple of years I went my merry way, extolling the virtues of Tom Verlaine, They Might Be Giants, Robert Wyatt, The Golden Palominos, none of whom went on to conquer the charts as a result of my exertions (except, to a certain extent, They Might Be Giants, I guess, and yes, that is odd). I don't think I published a negative review in the Voice until Doug Simmons sent me to cover a Tears For Fears show at Radio City Music Hall. (I don't know why Doug thought they'd be up my alley; maybe on account that they'd dedicated one of the tunes on their album to Wyatt.) The twee-anguished synth rockers actually brought out that fucking chimp from the "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" video when they did that song. I slagged them, titling my review "Schlock Therapy," and so began honing my alternate critical identity as a snarkster.

I had a lot of fun in those days, but I was frustrated, too, in that way that young men and women of particular enthusiasms can be frustrated. With all the great music out there that I was trying to bring to light, why did mass taste suck so bad? Why weren't music fans beating a path to Peter Blegvad's door? I decided the reason was lack of coverage. At a panel at the 1985 New Music Seminar, I laid out a "J'accuse" to Bob Guccione, Jr. of Spin, on account of the fact that he wasn't putting the likes of Blegvad on any of Spin's covers. Jon Pareles, then of Musician and The New York Times, was not unmoved by my impassioned gibberish, but he was also kind of amused. "I used to carry a big torch for that kind of dreck when I first started writing," he told me. (I knew that—I had read his against-all-odds defense of Peter Hammill's solo oeuvre in The Voice.) He assured me that I would get over it.

And so I did, up to a point. I learned that critic's weren't marketers, for one thing, and couldn't function as such. I also learned that there wasn't a whole hell of a lot that one could do about mass taste, particularly if you didn't really share it. The best you could do was write honestly, champion stuff you loved/believed in, and hope that you'd attract the attention of like-minded individuals with which you could conduct at least some kind of virtual give-and-take. 

Of course this was not the only approach a critic could take. A critic could also just say "fuck it," and, to show that he or she was not entirely alienated from the zeitgeist, embrace popular taste. It didn't hurt that the '80s and '90s were ripe with highbrow theorizers putting together substantial toolboxes for just such a product. In popular music criticism, the invention of this not-quite-but-might-as-well-be straw man called "rockism" (which holds, among other things, that admiration for such artists as listed above is a particularly pernicious form of elitism) achieved the aim of letting practitioners of such writing believe that they "mattered" again.It is the anti-rockist, pro-mass taste arm of popular music criticism that enables a thumbsucker in The New York Times, for instance, to refer to the eldest Jonas Brother as "the brooding auteur" of the group. Nice work if you can get it. 

What I'm getting at, in my roundabout way, is why I can't quite join Roger Ebert and Jeffrey Wells when they lament the paucity of young people seeing and/or enthusing over Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. Ebert's August 6 post has the portent-filled title "The gathering Dark Age," while Well's more, shall we say, straight-from-the-gut rumination is called "Eloi." Both combine a frustration with their inability to shape mass taste with a disdain—more measured and mournful in Ebert's reflection, more fear-and-loathing filled in Wells'—for these kids today, with their loud hair and long music. 

I grant you—as the Rolling Stones once sang, things are different today. I saw In The Loop a couple of weeks ago and thought it was just splendid—hilarious, kind of chilling, boasting a script of magnificent structure and content. 

And coming out of the theater, I thought, "You know, in the '70s, there's a good chance this would have been a major studio film, something like Network or The Hospital, featuring major movie stars in pretty much all the roles. It would have gotten nationwide distribution and marketing support and been up for a lot of awards. Now it's an import from an indie and it's gonna play maybe 50 theaters top nationwide before it goes to DVD, pay-per-view and cable."

What would The Hurt Locker's place be in the '70s movie landscape? That's a tougher question. I suspect, to be quite honest, that it might have ended up as one of those tough, under-the-radar B pictures of a not-quite-one-thing and not-quite-the-other ilk, sorta like Rolling Thunder. I'm not quite sure.

And I'm also not quite sure just why Ebert and Wells feel that the film's middling profile among the 17-and-under crowd says such dire things about the lack of intellectual curiosity among contemporary teens. If I recall specific scenes and individuals of my own adolescence accurately—say, the long-haired kids who mocked me for carrying around books of Buñuel scripts before repairing to behind the football field to smoke dope while listening to Deep Purple's Made In Japan on a portable 8-track player—I can conclude that intellectual curiosity wasn't all that much in vogue back in the day, either. Add to that the fact that The Hurt Locker was never aggressively marketed to a youth demographic anyway and you finally don't really have too much to complain about.

Unless, that is, you just like complaining, wallowing in your own impotence, and concluding that said impotence is actually tied in with the soon-coming demise of Western Civilization itself. Ebert and Wells' posts come hot on the heels of a controversial bunch of pronouncements by walking smirk Bill Maher, who has assembled not-unconvincing pieces of evidence to support his assertion that America is a "stupid" country. Here's the thing, though—America might be a stupid country, but so's every other damn country in the world. Paris Match's cover last week was of Sharon Stone flashing her tits—how fucking smart is that? 

I'm not arguing for a quiet acceptance of the status quo, nor, for that matter, for an anti-rockist analog one can apply to film criticism, wherein post-Derrida-theory can be distorted in order to posit that G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra is actually Teh Awesome. What I'm saying is, a man's gotta know his limitations, and the limitations of his discipline...and then do all that he can nevertheless.(That goes for a woman, too. But I didn't want to spoil the Magnum Force evocation.) Tearing one's hair out and venting about how stupid everyone else is may have some short term therapeutic effect, but doesn't get much done. The kids of today didn't invent dumb. They inherited it. 

Against the grain

Sonny Bunch of The Washington Times, who interviewed me a while back on the subject of film grain and its place in video representations of cinema, has been blogging from the SIlverdocs documentary film festival. Where he met up with one of the giants of American documentaries, and put the grain question to him. The answer Bunch got might surprise you, and it just goes to show you can never really tell with these things. Find out here. 

Block that metaphor!

I understand that everybody's allowed their own interpretation of, like, stuff, but I have to admit I'm a little bemused by some of the reviewers who seem to believe that my casting as a rather unsavory internet escort reviewer in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience constitutes some kind of smackdown of the entire film criticism racket. "Is that what you really think of us, Steven?" asks Scott Collura at IGN. Kirk Honeycutt says my casting constitutes "a clear shot at the critical profession." And there's more.

Like I said, everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I think Mr. Soderbergh himself is on to something when he calls such readings "a little narcissistic." (There's also the fact that, like, whaddya think I am, stupid? You think I would have participated in this project if I thought it was Soderbergh's elaborate payback for my panning The Good German?) Now it's true that many of the cast members of the film have roles therein which correspond to what they do in real life. Trainer, journalist, and so on. Now it's also true that there are really guys who review escorts on the internet. Now consider, for a moment, the reaction you might get, were you to dig up one of these guys, and ask him to play a particularly villainous version of himself in an somewhat major motion picture.

I bring this up largely because of a real-life case that I was directed to by New York magazine writer Vanessa Grigoriadis, which you can read about here. Given that GFE was shot last October, I almost feel like I have to pat myself, Steven, and screenwriters Brian Koppelman and David Levien on the back a little bit. It appears we created a portrayal that was not only accurate, but somewhat prescient as well. 

A point, conceded, up to a point (Updated)

In the extremely contentious comments thread to the post "The Cinema of Contingency: Notes on Swanberg," Don Lewis of Film Threat, a Swanberg defender, states, "I think that Joe's point in a lot of ways...i[s] that the camera is only capable of capturing truth...[A]nd maybe the truth is, the camera makes you lie?" Don was addressing my criticism of a take in Swanberg's Hannah Takes The Stairs in which lead actress Greta Gerwig appeared to be staring at something which was clearly not part of the space in which her character was existing. Don continued, "Is it possible to NOT be conscious of the camera? I mean, isn't this the question posed by several people over the years?"

Well, yes, it is. And it is a question posed quite frequently in the work of Jean-Luc Godard. There are more than a few moments in his early films with then-wife Anna Karina in which she looks directly into the camera, as if in search of encouragement, succor, or some just plain answers. As in, for example this screen grab from Godard's 1964 Bande a Part. 

Do I believe that Swanberg's aims and methods in the here and now have much to do with Godard's aims and methods in the early '60s? That's actually a tough one, but I'm going to commit myself to "no." Nevertheless, I do see Lewis' point as one worth grappling with. So. Let's continue grappling. 

UPDATE: Tom Russell has posted his lengthy comment in response to "The Cinema of Contingency" on his Son of a Seahorse blog, and I recommend it highly. In other news...hey, Mom, I finally made it into The New Yorker. Sort of. The magazine's Richard Brody puts in his two cents on the Swanberg perplex in his New Yorker blog, and as it happens, he is firmly in the pro camp, which may well be a source of some...well, I won't presume precisely what, for Swanberg champion Craig Keller, who's no fan of Brody or his Godard biography. Strange bedfellows, indeed. In the meantime, over at Spout, Karina Longworth drew some analogies between Swanberg's work and Steven Soderbergh's upcoming Girlfriend Experience, which made this GFE cast member go all "What you say?"

Some e-mail correspondents have promised further commentary, although a couple wonder whether "it's not too late." Craig's prediction that the fiery comments thread on my initial Swanberg post would soon "euthanize itself" may be true, or may not be. In the meantime, I'm still making notes on the below-gushed-over Henry Cow box for a future post (sure to be a traffic builder!) and going through Watchmaker Films' wonderful DVD presentation of Eagle Penell's The Whole Shootin' Match for a piece for the Auteurs. So I'm a bit otherwise engaged. Brody's citation of Philippe Garrel—a filmmaker I worship—as a director "whose work Swanberg's resembles," in that "Garrel film[s] his own stories, starring himself, his families, and his friends" is extremely provocative. To my mind, it's an object lesson that seemingly similar methods can yield wildly different results. Also that the vision one ends up depends—not ultimately, but quite a bit—on the vision one begins with. I believe Garrel's conception is considerably more, er, profound than Swanberg's. But I might table the discussion, at least from my end, until about a month from now, when Swanberg's latest feature, Alexander The Last, premieres at SXSW and IFC's Video on Demand. Perhaps I shall be pleasantly surprised.