Some Came Running

Cut your throat in your sleep

I

The journalist-turned-screenwriter Joe Eszterhas has, either in spite or because of his standing as something of a self-important clod, made several significant contributions to the lexicon of show business. I was reminded recently of his late ‘80s citation of his former agent, the diminuitive and feisty Michael Ovitz. Ovitz, according to Eszterhas, responded to Eszterhas’ announcement that he was leaving Ovitz and his agency CAA by telling Eszterhas that he, Ovitz, had “foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard each day” who would “blow [Eszterhas’] brains out.” Such colorful language. Hollywood, like so many other fields of endeavor, is full of emotionally disturbed people who often fancy themselves tough guys.

What brought the denied-by-Ovitz Ovitz pronouncement to mind was a piece that appeared on New York magazine’s Vulture website nearly two weeks ago, by one Brian McGreevy, entitled “Don’t Call Lena Dunham ‘Brave.’” I need not go into the larger substance of the piece here; I’m not a television critic and I’ve already (I think) expressed my opinions on the use of the word “brave” as applied to performers, artists, what have you. What struck me was what came after McGreevy’s largely sensible exhortation that Lena Dunham’s public persona does not necessarily line up with Lena Dunham’s function as a creator or artist. “Lena Dunham is not weak,” McGreevy warns the reader. “Lena Dunham will cut your throat in your sleep.”

“She will do no such thing,” I laughed. I laughed even more because prior to his fulminations in this vein (and there are a lot of them), McGreevy included a clause reading “as a producer.” What has McGreevy produced? According to his bio below the piece, he has executive-produced a Netflix series based on a book he has written.

I know that David Foster Wallace once made mild fun of Susan Faludi for referring to a porn movie set as an “ecology,” but reading McGreevy’s piece I myself found myself contemplating a cultural ecology in which an individual with precisely one producing credit to his name feels sufficiently confident to swing an inflated rhetorical dick around like he’s Mace Neufeld or something (I’ve actually met Mace Neufeld and I doubt he’d stoop to anything so vulgar, or unnecessary). A cultural ecology in which the Internet arm of a major publication will pay probably-not-that-good money for the inflated rhetorical dick swinging. And most of all, a cultural ecology in which consumers are expected to be pleased to be told that Lena Dunham will cut their throats in their sleep.

“[A]ll art is a product of shameless opportunism that deserves to be applauded,” McGreevy continues. “[Dunham] is a woman who has risen through a masculine power hierarchy to become one of the most important culture-makers of the 21st century without compromising her artistic identity, and is fucking a rock star, this is more or less as baller as it gets.”

The unfortunate adolescent quality of McGreevy’s language aside, we are, once again, quite a long way from the ethos of our old friend Andrei Tarkovsky, who once wrote: “Ultimately artists work at their profession not for the sake of telling someone about something but as an assertion of their will to serve people. I am staggered by artists who assume that they freely create themselves, that it is actually possible to do so; for it is the lot of the artist to accept that he is created by his time and the people amongst whom he lives. As Pasternak put it:

“Keep awake, keep awake, artist,

Do not give in to sleep…

You are eternity’s hostage

And prisoner of time.

“And I’m convinced that if an artist succeeds in doing something, he does so nly because that is what people need—even if they are not aware of it at the time. And so it’s always the audience who win, who gain something, while the artist loses, and has to pay out.”

II

Call me crazy, but I see a pretty straight line connecting a skepticism toward the “difficult” in art and “We Saw Your Boobs,” a production number I’ll admit to having missed during its initial broadcast, and still haven’t caught up with. Hostile, ugly, sexist: these are the words that The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson uses to describe Oscar host Seth MacFarlane’s schtick as host of the ceremonies. I have to admit my reaction to some of the outrage (not Davidson's, I hasten to add), in part, is to say, in my imagination, and now here, to a certain breed of multi-disciplinary pop-culture enthusiast, well, you picked your poison, now you can choke on it. It’s all well and good to make “fun,” “irreverence,” “FUBU” or any number of related qualities the rocks upon which you build the church of your aesthetic, or your worldview. But you might want to remember the precise parameters of the choices you made on the occasion that they bite you on the ass. Not to mix metaphors or anything.

Also published on the Internet around two weeks ago, on the website Buzzfeed, was something I guess is referred to as a listicle, entitled “What’s The Deal With Jazz?” in which the author, Amy Rose Spiegel, expressed her immense disdain for the musical form in digital rebus style. She takes immaculate care to only lampoon the white, and rather hackish (per conventional wisdom), practitioners of the form, until the very end, in which she allows “But really, the worst part of despising jazz is when people say ‘No, no, you just haven’t heard the good stuff! Blah blah blah Miles Davis Charles Mingus blah blah blerg.’ Actually, I have. I have, and I hate it.”

Now all this is arguably ignorant, arguably hateful, arguably racist. It excited a fair amount of disapprobation in my circle on Twitter, where it became clear that some of the people complaining about it were friendly with the piece’s “editor,” to whom I myself expressed some displeasure, and she in turn expressed displeasure that I was making it “personal.” Call me crazy, again, but I can’t see too much of a way not to respond “personally” to such a piece. Plenty of people in the “conversation” allowed that, well, Buzzfeed DOES do great things, but that this wasn’t one of them, and that it was regrettable. I see it completely the opposite way. I see “What’s The Deal With Jazz?” as absolutely emblematic of Buzzfeed and all it stands for, just as I see the charming piece called “Django Unattained: How Al Sharpton Ruined A Cool Collector’s Item” as absolutely emblematic of the site Film School Rejects. I know I’m possibly coming off like Susan Sontag yammering about how a million Mozarts could not cancel out the fact that the white race is the cancer of civilization. I’m aware of the good that is out there. But let’s face it: Robert Fure, Amy Rose Spiegel, and tens of thousands of others are eager to bulldoze it, and the Jeff Jarvises of the world are happy to let them do it, if only because it will prove their theories about the Internet to be correct.

In 1998 a couple of writer friends, who I’ll call K and L,  made me the gift of a personal introduction to a man I’ll call D, whose work as a journalist and an artist I had long admired. Our first dinner was at a steakhouse on Tenth Avenue, after which we went to see P.J. Harvey at the Hammerstein Ballroom. Great show, you shoulda been there. Anyway, during the course of the dinner conversation, K was talking about how he had recently seen the movie Belly, a kind of hip-hop gangster movie starring DMX and Nas and directed by Hype Williams. K described his discomfort with the movie and some of its depictions, but was having trouble articulating that discomfort. D, a person of exceptional perspicacity and directness, and someone who had been something of a professional mentor to K in the past, cut to the chase.

“Did you find it morally objectionable?”

K thought this over for a bit. It was clear that he did not want to seem prim. It was also clear that trying to bullshit D wouldn’t do.

“Yes,’ he said. “Yes, I found it morally objectionable.”

D smiled and cut into his steak and said, “Well then you should say: ‘I found it morally objectionable.’”

Ellis island

Over on Twitter, my pal Brian Koppelman wrote yesterday, "My friend @Glenn_Kenny gets fired up (and aggro) at a moment's; yet he's been quiet despite @BretEastonEllis attack on DFW." Well, relatively quiet. I will not reflect on the irony that it is partially due to the ministrations of Brian and a few other friends that I've made an effort to be Not Such An Asshole On Twitter, despite the intuition I have that one of the few things Twitter is kind of good and amusing for is just that sort of thing. But my reasons for not weighing in more fully on Mr. Ellis' fulsome expression of negative opinion on David Foster Wallace...as I am about to do now...have more to do with an attachment to some old-school journalistic ethics than with what Richard Hell once referred to a "share of excess nice." 

First off, I don't really know all too much of Bret Easton Ellis' writing. Once I read Greil Marcus (in what was in fact a positive review) describe a scene in the novel Less Than Zero in which a poster for the Elvis Costello album Trust played a prominent symbological role, I thought "Later for this guy." This was around 1985, when I was writing rock music criticism for the Voice, and my editor Tom Carson and I would regularly compare notes concerning poetic form in Nabokov's The Gift, or as we would refer to it, Dar.* Just as we didn't need no fascist groove thing, so too did we not need facile pop-culture referential accounts of the anomie of the rich kids of our generation. After American Psycho made its splash, or whatever it was, I read precisely enough of it to determine to my own satisfaction its authorial voice, which was/is a ventriloquist dummy's inept parroting of Alain Robbe-Grillet dressed in a "Die Yuppie Scum" t-shirt. I wound up admiring Mary Harron's film version, because the array of cine-rhetorical devices the director broke out for it wound up putting a reasonably sharp point on the book's facile satire, and Christian Bale's embodiment of Patrick Bateman had a knowing gonzo wit that was nowhere evident in the prose I read. I understand that Ellis himself was less than thrilled with the movie. Go figure.

And then I was done with the writer. I was obliged to review the movie adaptation of The Rules Of Attraction, a stacked-deck college saga that makes the uncommon mistake of trying to concoct some kind of High Tragedy out of the capricious behavior of largely unformed post-adolescents. Aside from finding the whole thing overdetermined, albeit the sort of stuff that an unformed post-adolescent actor might read and think it's REALLY HEAVY, my response was pretty much along the lines of Albert Brooks' dismissal of William Hurt in Broadcast News: "You really blew the lid off of nookie." 

And so, to now, and to Bret Easton Ellis' Twitter feed, which, the fawning of any number of literary wannabe starfuckers notwithstanding, has really been little besides sad, between the dithering about how HE would put together a movie version of Fifty Shades of Gray, and his little aperçus that come off like USA-Today-column era Larry King channelling Michael Musto (which, I know, is kind of unfair to Musto), as in, "The celebrity couple I'm most compelled by right now: Andy Samberg and Joanna Newsom." Oh, do tell. Is that because Andy Samberg's a COMEDIAN and Joanna Newsom plays the harp and writes and sings such odd, idiosyncratic songs? Oh, that's weird, right...? Okay, I'll stop now. And then there's the name-dropping, and the observations such as "The best American movie right now is Magic Mike and if you're thinking it's Moonrise Kingdom then you are a hipster douchebag," the personal hilariousness of which my newfound sense of discretion inhibits me from fully discoursing on, although I will say that, demographic-alienation wise, Ellis ragging on "hipster douchebags" seems even more ill-advised than Michael Chabon poking fun at organic-food fetishists. But never mind.

ANYWAY, the SECOND reason I haven't weighed in more is that I have yet to read the D.T. Max biography of David Foster Wallace that has set Ellis off so. I AM SUPPOSED TO HAVE GOTTEN A COMP COPY, and I have not, and I have this fucked-up rule in place right now that I am not to PURCHASE any more books until I finish War And Peace, on which I'm up to about page 800. So there's that. But it was in reading Max's book that Ellis apparently felt so many (presumably) old resentments against the late Wallace stirring up. And, so moved, he deemed the "Wallace myth" "borderline sickening" on a "purely literary level," went on to say "Anyone who finds David Foster Wallace a literary genius has got to be included in the Literary Doucebag-Fools Pantheon," to aver that Wallace's "pretentiousness" made Ellis "embarassed to have any kind of ties to the publishing scene" (n.b., that's "publishing scene," not "publishing," I presume there's some kind of distinction to be discerned there), threw around terms such as "tedious," "overrated," "tortured," "pretentious" (again!) and so on. As the hippie therapist said to the troubled kid on some early '70s Afterschool Special, "that's a lot of rage there, you wanna rap about it?"

In a blog post in which he gives Ellis more of the benefit of the doubt that I'm inclined to, the always-amused-by-literary-kerfuffles James Wolcott gets some insight from venerable New York editor Gerald Howard, who worked with both Wallace and Ellis and who's also the editor of Wolcott's own diverting memoir Lucking Out. Trying to be a good dad to both his sort-of kids, Howard notes, "At the moment the Wallace style is dominant and that is what drives Bret Ellis nuts." There's a lot of issue to be taken with this sentence, one of which would be that the Wallace style is, at its best irreproducible, but there's little doubt that SOMETHING is driving Ellis nuts. Howard goes on to wax skeptical about This Is Water, which is, I think, a little unfair to Wallace, who did not supervise its publication (what with being dead and all) and who I do not think really considered it as among his signature works. But anyway. While the Wallace "style" may be "dominant," the Wallace backlash has always been with us. Not just that awful Maud Newton piece in the Times Magazine (no fucking link). Back when he was alive, and he and I would work together (yeah, you KNEW I was gonna get around to this sooner or later, didn't you?) on occasion, I can't tell you the number of colleagues who would almost literally nudge me in the ribs and make reference to "Footnote Boy." You know how the eccentric movie blogger Jeffrey Wells likes to go on about how if director Terrence Malick had a REAL producer like Bert Schneider, than he'd be disciplined into making another Days of Heaven instead of all that airy-fairy not-narrative-enough wackadoodle nonsense? Well, I was the anti-Bert-Schneider to Wallace. "You commissioned the piece at 300 words and he gave you 3,000? That's SO undisciplined. I would never stand for that." And so on. And you know, it WAS kind of a pain in the ass to have to patiently talk it out with Wallace why we were gonna have to pass on 3,000 words on Terminator 2, and then have to go and find another writer, do another agent negotiation, and so on. But in the end, such as it was, it was all worth it, because, Douchebag-Fool that I am, I thought Wallace was a fucking genius. Still do. 

I would think that Ellis would be delighted that, while an undergraduate, Wallace rhapsodized over the "smell of cunt in the air;" it makes him sound like a particularly loathesome character in, well, a Bret Easton Ellis book. The Wallace I knew and worked with was over that way of thinking about women, and was quite well-mannered, and chivalrous. I remember him being very sweet to my future wife, and saying very nice things about her in conversation thereafter. But wait...I think I'm banking near that "middlebrow sentimentality," the rejection is the most "furiously important thing an artist can achieve in this historical moment," according to...hey, wait, who's being "pretentious" now, Bret Easton Ellis?

Back to the tweets; the latter ones have gotten, not unpedictably, a bit, yes, sad. "No problem that David Foster Wallace was smarter than me and a better writer but he was so much colder than I ever was. He faked it. Almost." And then: "David Foster Wallace: when I say 'better' writer I don't know what the fuck that means except he knew big words, syntax, grammar. Big deal." Any time a self-styled creator of literature complains over "big" words it is once again time to bail, and yet there's something poignant about all this. After excoriating "Saint Dave," Ellis wants you to know that HE, Bret Easton Ellis, is really the good person. I am reminded of Ellis' high regard for Don DeLillo, and I remember the incredibly moving eulogy DeLillo delivered for Dave at NYU at a memorial for the writer there, and I recall the correspondence that DeLillo and Wallace shared to the end of Wallace's life. And I see Bret Easton Ellis sitting in the back of the classroom, alone, putting his hand up and biting his lower lip, and keeping it up so long he needs to put his other hand under his arm to prop it. And then starting to quietly piss himself.

*This is made up. Tom Carson and I never did that. But one of us may have thought of it. 

Some new entries for the "Dictionary Of Received Critical Ideas"

Tim Grierson, writing at Deadspin, allows that he "likes" Beasts of the Southern Wild, further generously admitting that he's impressed by the "boldness of its ambitions" and the "depth of its emotional pull." That's the good news. But Tim has some bad news too, which is that the movie exemplifies the five worst indie-film clichés EVER!

But does it really? I don't know Mr. Grierson, and up until now I haven't sampled his work much (thanks a pantload, Jeffrey Wells), but it's clear he went to school and learned a little jargon and has a kit bag from which he can produce terminology to prove his point. Or has/can/does he? My general counter-argument to Mr. Grierson's is that his agenda here and perhaps in general is to outsmart art, rather than to examine and describe it. And that, proceeding from there, he merely unpacks a bunch of received academic/critical ideas, throws them at Beasts, and figures they'll stick, mainly because his terminology is kid-tested/mom-approved. This is my nice/fancy way of saying I think his theses are full of shit. Let's look at them one at a time.

Grierson kicks off by accusing Beasts of "fetishizing 'authenticity'." If you know your Lacan and Zizek, and if you've read the occasionally feisty music critic lay out a lecture you on how, you know, Charlie Patton was actually a POP musician, you'll recognize in this phrase a very big double no-no. Lucky for us, then, that when marshalling proof for this claim, he only refers to promotional materials about the making of the film, not with what's actually on screen. "[P]eople lap up stories about how Zeitlin and his cast and crew essentially lived in the handmade world of their fictional Bathtub while making the movie," Grierson sighs (I assume). "Knowing that the filmmaker personally pounded nails into wood doesn't tell us a thing about how he did at making a movie." Agreed. I don't ever wonder if Godard got seasick while shooting Film socialisme myself. But, I'm sorry, you were saying Beasts of the Southern Wild fetishizes "authenticity." Are you suggesting that its hype is inextricable from the movie itself? Because if you are, that's a different argument. That you are also not making. 

Next, Grierson says Beasts "Tries Way Too Hard To be Gritty". Like a few of his other complaints, this definitely falls into the realm of the judgment call, although the extent to which one's argument that a film is "trying to hard" is effective is of course relative to the number of pertinent examples one lays out in support of the assertion. Here Grierson does not do as well as he might. He cites "stale art-house moves" such as "shaky handheld" and...and...and...oh, "other self-conscious camera tricks." Oh. Those. "Contrary to popular opinion"...UH-OH..."having the occasionally out-of-focus shot doesn't automatically suggest 'realness.'" Oooh, snap. OK, aside from the fact that the term "realness" has some Urban Dictionary cred and a vague peripheral connection to what some contemporary philosophers refer to as "the Real," it's a pretty vague term, and Grierson has little leg to stand on in assuming that it is the precise quality that Beast's director Benh Zeitlin was after. For myself, one of the things that impressed me with respect to the visuals in Beasts was a certain deceptive quality; that the way certain shots were set up, handheld or not, giving the viewer the expectation of something relatively mundane happening in the frame, and then something rather unexpected and thrilling and literally dangerous taking place, as in the scene in which a trailer catches fire, which literally had me holding my breath. This elaborate effect was all the more startling for being approached in such a seemingly offhand way, and in retrospect gives one the impression that Zeitlin is a filmmaker in very tight control over his effects, and that the "accidents" that one might take the "occasional" out-of-focus shots for are not accidents, or any such like thing.

The really rich seam of pernicious bullshit is contained in Gierson's assertion and argument with respect to supposed indie-film-cliché number three, "It Treats Poverty As Something Noble." The ostensible nobility of poverty is a complex and vexed issue, as Saint Francis would no doubt tell you were he to appear on earth at this very moment. But after making this assertion, Grierson declines to go directly there. Rather, he just writes: 'There have been eyebrows raised about the fact that Hushpuppy and Wink are black, while Zeitlin is white." Grierson then cites Richard Brody, who makes a not entirely laughable proposition—whether the movie taps into "magical, mythical blackness" is certainly worth arguing about, but not so much if you preface it with an admonishment concerning the film's "love for its characters," oy—and...that's it. Again, how convenient to have all these raised eyebrows at your disposal.

Fact is, there should not be a single eyebrow raised, and for the record, I just got off the phone with a film-savvy friend who was very taken with Beasts and didn't have a single idea as to the ethnicity of its director. Years ago, Anthony Burgess made some cranky noises at the forces of what is incorrectly termed "political correctness" and asserted that as an artist, he had every right to imagine himself into the world and voice of a homosexual, which he was not, or of a black man, which he was not. (He did exactly that in the novels Earthly Powers and M/F, respectively, if I'm not mistaken.) To deny the artist his or her imaginative prerogative on the grounds that the artist is not the thing that he or she is imagining is a form of aesthetic totalitarianism, pure and simple, and if that's the way Grierson wants things that's fine but he should at least be honest about it. But where were we? Oh, the "poverty as something noble" bit. Again, it's a judgment call. I think the residents of the movie's "Bathtub" who refuse to clear out are a bunch of loony drunks, myself. Yes, the film sets them apart as unique, and depicts the forces that come to clear them out in a way that's almost as sinister as the Orwellian campaign van in Altman's Nashville. But with respect to nobility, or a desirable way to live, I don't see how Beasts is actively selling that. Yes, its subjectivity deals with how its protagonist Hushpuppy perceives/survive the insanity and physical calamity around her, and the things within that matrix she's become attached to, but that's hardly the same thing as validating/valorizing a way of life. Again, the baggage here is not the film's but the perfectly insipid counterintuitive don't-love-me-I'm-really-not-THAT-kind-of-liberal non-response Grierson's so invested in erecting. 

Bringing us to four, "It Confuses Simple Characters For Memorable Ones." I wonder, had Grierson been on the set of the film, and then in the editing room, at what point he could have said to Zeitlin, "Hey, wait a minute, you're making a mistake..." But again, Grierson doesn't make the argument. Instead, he says that the young girl who plays Hushpuppy is "undeniably captivating" but that the "filmmakers don't really give her a character to play." Huh? It's pretty clear she's a resourceful resilient very young person in an impossible situation, and she's certainly mythologized at least a bit, I can't deny that, but you know, she does also have a kind of quest, that being a reconnection with an absent and herself somewhat mythologized mother. But that's not enough "character" I guess. Further evidence that Grierson's assembling a straw man comes when he bitches that her "banal voiceover musings" are "treated as cockeyed wisdom." Well, they are in voice-over, so they clearly have some significance to them. Does the film make a church out of them? No. The girl is five goddamn years old. The viewer is meant to weigh the pronouncements against the fact that they're coming out of a five year old. Finally, Grierson lays the hammer down and damningly compares Hushpuppy to Forrest Gump, clearly one of the least memorable characters in all cinema, indie or studio, Nyah. Nyah. Nyah. (I'm not even going to get into the assertion that by putting a five-year-old in the lead role Zeitlin was self-consciously "critic-proofing" the movie. No more adorable children in movies, indie filmmakers; that's CHEATING.)

God, I'm exhausted.

Fortunately, we are up to cliché five, which I believe Orson Welles would characterize as "Impossible! Meaningless!," and it is that the film "Touches On Real-Life Events Without Saying Anything About Them." I know I've bored the tits off of most of you with my reiteration of Nabokov's "or still worse, 'What is the guy trying to say?'" So I don't need to get into that again. I'm not a big fan of "allegory" myself, but I don't argue that it ought not exist. Grierson's assertion that Beasts "tries to have it both ways" with respect to Hurricane Katrina is, one more time, more to do with the baggage he wants to load the film down with than anything that actually occurs when the film itself is onscreen.

It occurs to me that I went through a whole lot of trouble here when the sheer shittiness of Grierson's project here is handily epitomized by the way he uses the phrase "Sundance darling" in his headline. 

Finally, I am more in sympathy with David Edelstein's review of the movie. And if you consider Edelstein to be precisely the "type" of critic who would be suspicious of a movie coming in on Beast's wheels of promotion, well, that's kind of my point. 

UPDATE: On his Twitter feed, a critic friend notes: "So I guess the new rule is: 'Privileged' people shouldn't make art about themselves (Girls) or anyone else (Beasts)." Hmm, pretty much. Although I suspect there may be an exception codicil for Louis C.K.. (No disrespect to Mr. C.K., who is indeed great.)

The war for cliché

It seems like over the weekend I've read and/or heard the phrase "star-making performance," or some variant thereof, something like a dozen times, relative to Jennifer Lawrence's performance in The Hunger Games, and something or other that Jessica Paré did on Mad Men. Well, bully for Lawrence and Paré and all, but isn't the conventional wisdom nowadays that stars don't matter? That they're not the thing that, um, "puts butts in seats," and are hence immaterial? And, if the conventional wisdom is indeed the case, then what good is a "star-making performance," or "being" a "star?" Is "being" a "star" even possible, or desirablem, given this circumstance? Or is it just that opinion-mongers are so obsessed with the sound of their own voices that actual coherence, let alone consistency, doesn't even figure into their pronouncements at all? (Never mind the sheer utter unimaginative rhetorical entropy that a phrase such as "star-making performance" embodies.) I dunno, maybe Smash has changed everything?

Just asking.