Some Came Running

Fritz Lang and Pierre Menard

Debra Paget in The Tiger of Eschnapur, part one of Fritz Lang's Indian Tomb epic, 1959

Perhaps, or perhaps not, you have heard of Blue, a 2014 album by the virtuosic jazz combo Mostly Other People Do The Killing. It is a note-for-note re-creation, or "cover version" of Miles Davis' seminal 1959 LP Kind of Blue. MOPDTK is known for, among other things, an antic sense of humor that manifests itself in cheeky album cover artwork, as in the piss-take of Keith Jarrett's seminal The Koln Concert on its own 2011 disc The Caimbra Concert. That record also featured this provocative liner note: “In fact, every note and sound on this recording is a reference to some other recording or performance, real or imaginary. Enjoy!”

Blue is a record that raises all sorts of questions beyond the initial "Why?" It is useful to remember that, its one-time reputation as an ultra-suave makeout disc notwithstanding, the recording by the Davis quintet was a significant building block for free jazz: in putting into action some particular ideas provoked in him by the work of George Russell, and hooking improvisation to modes rather than chord changes, Davis was taking down a particular net, and one of the things Blue is asking is for the listener to experience the music of Kind of Blue in the explicit context of fifty years of the net being down. So it is apt that, for the liner notes to Blue, that disc's booklet reproduces in full the translated text of Jorge Luis Borges' droll and dizzying short story Pierre Menard, Author Of The Quixote.

Trying to do in music what Borges' Menard—a fictional character, we have to keep reminding ourselves—accomplished in writing is, practically speaking, a whole different enterprise. Here are three key paragraphs from Borges' story that illustrate pertinent problems (the translation, here as in the Blue liner notes, is Andrew Hurley's): 

Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one have to say that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

“My purpose is merely astonishing,” he wrote me on September 30, 1934, from Bayonne. “The final term of a theological or metaphysical proof—the world around us, or God, or chance, or universal Forms—is no more final, no more uncommon, than my revealed novel. The sole difference is that philosophers publish pleasant volumes containing the intermediate stages of their work, while I am resolved to suppress those stages of my own.” And indeed there is not a single draft to bear witness to that years-long labor.

Initially, Menard’s method was to be relatively simple: Learn Spanish, return to CatholIcism, fight against the Moor of Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918—be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard weighed that course (I know he pretty thoroughly mastered seventeenth-century Castilian) but he discarded it as too east. Too impossible,!, rather, the reader will say. Quite so, but the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all the impossible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting. To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twentieth seemed to Menard to be a diminuation. Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving thereby at the Quixote—that looked to Menard less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard. 

The members of Mostly Other People Do The Killing, augmented by a pianist, obviously came to Kind of Blue via their own experiences as human beings, white men, musicians, jazz musicians, readers of music, readers of music theory and criticism, and so on. But unlike Menard they were practically obliged to come to their Quixote, Kind of Blue, via all manner of mediating technology, beginning with their musical instruments. 

As with music, so, even more so perhaps, with film. I thought of Borges' story, and of Blue, while watching again, for the first time in some time, and with a concentration suggested by my thoughts about Borges and Menard and Blue, Fritz Lang's two 1959 films The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb, a two-feature quasi-serial. (I viewed them via the excellent UK import set from Eureka!/Masters of Cinema, a Region B issue, alas.) The movie is a remake of a 1921 picture that, I must admit, I have not seen: Das indische Grabmal erster Teil, another two-parter, silent, directed by Joe May, then a cinematic colleague and rival of Lang's. The scenario of the film was a creation of Thea von Harbou and, as it happens, Lang. If I read David Kalat's account (in his invaluable 2001 book The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse) correctly, the scenario was the first collaboration between what was to become the husband-and-wife team, an adaptation of von Harbou's own novel. Said novel, like the popular "Westerns" of Karl May, trucked in German pop culture's fascination with "the exotic." (It is crucial, of course, that we continually locate this fascination in the first three decades of the 20th Century.) German film industry machinations led to May, and not Lang, handling the direction of the film, which starred Conrad Veidt.

At the end of the 1950s Lang's Hollywood career was winding down as his eyesight degenerated. His final American-produced film was the severely pessimistic 1957 Beyond A Reasonable Doubt, its death-penalty centered plot making it, among other things, a mordant answer-film/companion piece to Lang's U.S. debut, the galvanic Fury, an anti-lynch mob parable. Both Doubt and Lang's prior While The City Sleeps took film noir fatalism into the realm of the police procedural and depicted modes of modern life corrupted in ways that Lang's romantic Metropolis had never foreseen. According to Kalat, when German producer Artur Brauner offered Lang a deal to remake the May film, he had no idea that Lang had been so intimately involved in the original: “Ironically, Brauner did not recognize what it meant to Lang: Brauner was unaware that Lang had been involved with the original and was ignorant of the entire story of Lang’s history with Joe May. As far as Brauner was concerned, he was simply pairing a remake of a golden oldie with one of the leading lights of the old school.” To Peter Bogdanovich, discussing the remake in 1965, Lang said simply "You should make a picture you started." He elaborated, reflecting that doing this at the end of his career was "like a circle that was beginning to close—a kind of fate." 

I don't know that Lang read Borges, or even that he saw Performance for that matter; I cannot extrapolate from Lang's admiration of certain Jess Franco films the extent to which Lang had any kind of great enthusiasms for meta-narratives. What is certain is that the tropes which support the entire scenario of what I'll now refer to as a whole as The Indian Tomb had undergone a cataclysmic contextual shift between 1921 and 1959, and Lang's choice to ignore that shift in a sense represents a sort of triumph of Menardian thinking. Remember the way, in his story, Borges marvels at the two different representations of the notion of history being the mother of truth. In Cervantes, writes Borges, the phrase is "mere rhetorical praise of history." In Menard, "the idea is staggering." So in Tomb, observations concerning "Western" ideas, and dialogue like "I'm a European; we count in hours" carries a charge that simply could not have been present in the original version. 

Written on water: Paget and Paul Hubschmid. 

The casting of the Oklahoma-born Debra Paget as Seetha alone has implications that could fill a doctoral dissertation. Reputed love object of both Elvis Presley and Howard Hughes, not infrequent player of "Indian" girls in Hollywood Westerns, her skills as a seductively undulating dancer were first (as far as I know) and most convincingly displayed in believe it or not, the 1952 John Philip Sousa biopic Stars And Stripes Forever. In Tomb she is also a dancer, Seetha, and her moves, witnessed surreptitiously by German architect Harold Berger, bring about a change in the sculpted goddess to whom she dedicates her dance. Soon the couple are on the run pursued by a vengeful maharaja. Paget, as it happens, is the only truly vivid performer in the whole movie; the rest of the cast, and Hubschmid in particular, emit a generic anonymity that's actually rather in keeping with their functions in what is on a surface level an anachronistic exercise. 

Lepers.

But as Tom Gunning points out in his invaluable study, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity,  the German critics who savaged this work on those grounds on its initial release could not have been more wrong: "Lang's control of colour photography [...] represents a truly modern aspect of film-making. The non-realistic, semi-abstract plot and characters would inspire the most advanced filmmakers of the 60s, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Marie Straub." (As we all know, Godard would also hire Lang to act, as himself, in Le Mepris, and offer therein an implicit explanation as to why he shot Tomb in color but not in widescreen.) Reflecting on the enterprise as a whole, Gunning writes that Lang's “return to Germany from exile […] yields a profound sense of the untimeliness of history, the knowledge that nothing can ever truly be repeated, and that in repetition lies not so much the promise of rebirth as the harbinger of death. Repetition involves a profound mourning for the passage of time.” Seeing the lepers of Tomb and recalling the underground dwellers of Metropolis certainly supports this idea. But the exercise was not without its drollery. Paget's dance, while in the context of the plot is meant to be part of a sacred rite, cannot help but recall the dance with which the Robot Maria seduces the scions of the ruling class in Metropolis, and it's kind of funny that Paget's moves in the film wound up running afoul of Hollywood prudery: they were cut from an American release of the film. Lang is not a director one customarily thinks of as playful, but we can see his pleasure principle at work in this, and in several other sequences of the film. In spite of the constraints of the source material, or maybe because of them, this movie feels like another example of Rossellini's "film of a free man." 

Kittie!

Menard’s Quixote, which, I will once again point out, never really existed, was conceived and only partially executed in the circumscribed sphere of Borges’ story, in order to answer certain questions—some of which had not been in evidence at all until the "second" Quixote was manifested. MOPDTK’s Blue was conceived and executed with a large number of questions already in mind; and the work is an explicit posing of those questions. Just having them out there in that form fulfills the purpose of the enterprise. Lang’s work, I think, falls somewhere in between those of Borges/Menard and the jazz group. In a sense, this least sentimental of filmmakers was going on a kind of sentimental journey, sure. But there is also at work in every frame of Tomb a conscious and diligent  testing of the elasticity of form. In returning to the narrative mode that helped make him one of the primary architects of dramatic cinema as we still  know it today, Lang conducts an inquiry as to both its durability and whether its innocence can be recaptured. Except the second is a trick question; the movie lays bare the naivete of the scenario von Harbou and Lang and Joe May concocted in the first place, and reveals that what so many viewers process as innocence was in fact a contrivance. It’s for that reason that Lang's next and final film, The Thousand Eyes Of Dr. Mabuse, so seemingly inapposite a followup to this ostensibly romantic saga, is really its inevitable next move. Its anti-televisual paranoia and vision of a surveillance state further pulls the rug out from under Tomb's attempted romance.  And to explicitly locate Tomb between the brackets of Beyond A Reasonable Doubt and Thousand Eyes evokes a frisson that's both undeniable and undeniably unpleasant. But very Lang.  

"Gone Girl" and the deplorable evolution of the "Cool Girl"

"and every thang is keeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwllll....ooh lord!..."

Back in 1985, when I was beginning my “career” as a relatively feisty and entirely earnest rock critic, I began dating a woman of my own age (25) who worked (as a stockbroker) and lived (in a studio apartment in a cramped arrangement with another woman who wasn’t quite living with her fiancé, and who became so used to my presence in the place that she once inadvertently started changing her clothes as I sat at the small table by the fridge) in Manhattan. As I was still living in my mom’s basement in West Paterson, New Jersey, at the time, this was a big deal. Also big deals: she was stunningly beautiful, incredibly witty, prodigiously energetic and worldly in ways that I’d never even known existed. She introduced me to sushi.

Early on in our dating, we were discussing music, as I, a rock critic (not full-time, mind you; I also worked, spectacularly badly, in telemarketing) would have been wont to do; I mentioned that one of my favorite bands was Pere Ubu, then known largely as an aggressively abrasive post-punk combo distinguished by a heavyset frontman who made a performance virtue out of being tone deaf. “Oh, I love Pere Ubu,” said My First New York Girlfriend. “When I was at Antioch, I used their song ‘Chinese Radiation’ as the soundtrack for my Sight And Sound film!”

“Oh really?” thought I to myself at the time. All this and she likes Pere Ubu, too?  How lucky can you get?

The romantic component of our relationship didn’t last much longer than a year. At some point before that, she confessed to me—not angrily, or bitterly, or anything; it was more that we had just gotten comfortable enough with each other that we knew that, whatever else was going on or was going to go on, we both really liked and enjoyed each other, as human beings and stuff—that she actually didn’t really like Pere Ubu at all, and she had not used “Chinese Radiation” as the soundtrack to her etc. etc. “That was Suzi who did that,” she revealed, referring to her best friend. (Who later went on to found ISSUE Project Room, and died in 2009.) “I just thought if I told you that you would like me more.”

I was gobsmacked, honestly. Because there was no real way at the time that I could have liked her more, for the reasons I mentioned above and a few others. I was genuinely moved that she’d had such an interest in impressing me, an opinionated loudmouth schmuck from Jersey with impressively thick hair and some slightly marketable writing skills. And while she and I fell out of touch for a long time, and now just intermittently catch up without being in regular communication, she has ended up being a really important friend to me in very trying times. So, you know—all good.

In any event, many years later, around the turn of the century, I made the acquaintance of a woman who was at the time in her senior year of college (“I don’t wanna talk about it”—Warren Zevon) and in one of our conversations she bemoaned the fact that a fair number of the fellows she had dated on campus were extremely eager to put anal sex on the table right away, as in, pretty much before appetizers were finished if they were even bothering to take her out to dinner in the first place. I considered this pushy, at best, as well as an interesting if not entirely palatable example of the weird kind of sex-entitlement guys who grow up around a lot of porn are likely prone to. I distinctly remember thinking of a phrase from Robert Christgau: “This reflects poorly on the moral and intellectual resources of young people today.”

Similarly, in 2010, considering Lena Dunham’s film Tiny Furniture, in which Dunham’s character, Aura, is treated like a doormat with a vagina by at least one male character, and stands for it, I wrote, “one is rather used to men being awful in Manhattan-set films concerning the romantic travails of young women, but man, if these two guys are really representative of the dating pool these days, ladies, you have my utmost sympathy.”

Somehow this all brings us to Gone Girl, both Gillian Flynn’s novel and Flynn and director David Fincher’s film version of it, in which Amy Dunne’s massive resentment of what she calls the “Cool Girl” construct compels what one might charitably characterize as several overreactions. As articulated in the novel, and reproduced (I think) pretty much verbatim in the film, it goes like this: “Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”

Cross this with Dunham’s vision of sexual relations and a young woman is likely to get a very disturbing message: you should consider yourself lucky if a guy is engaged enough to even put you up for consideration as a “Cool Girl.”

Of course Flynn/Amy’s complaint exaggerates somewhat, for both comic and grotesque effect. The “shit on me” business, if taken entirely literally, is a bit of a reach; statistically speaking, Today’s Man isn’t that much into scat. Or maybe he is, how do I know. But Gone Girl’s overstatement is useful not just for its considerable genre entertainment value, but for indirectly pointing out the really toxic roots of this construction that, no matter how much it might seem is being willingly adopted by women, is entirely male. Esquire magazine’s “Funny Joke From A Beautiful Woman” is Cool Girl nonsense writ small. Any profile of a young female celeb who is depicted liking a dish that involves rib sauce, same thing. Those Chris Evans and Channing Tatum profiles were Cool Girls Who Know Where To Draw The Line (Or Did They?) buy-ins—written by women, but in men’s magazines, so there you are. As my wife pointed out to me the other day when I brought up the topic, the economics of this game are pretty potentially devastating; for instance, these days a bikini wax is considered de rigueur, and a bikini wax is about fifty dollars: fifty dollars that goes out of a woman’s pocket and into, mostly, a man’s. And by the same token (this was my observation, not my wife’s), as sex is further and further commoditized through porn, the actual having of pubic hair itself becomes a fetish. In the first anecdote I cited, you can discern some kind of grey area; My First New York Girlfriend, a genuinely terrific person, maybe wasn’t going for Cool Girl status, but just putting on a small mask to make herself more appealing at a particular stage of our relationship. I guess I did the same thing, by pretending that I was a person fit for gainful employment. But anyway. That’s not to say the construct didn’t exist back in the day, but I’d still argue that in the days before Tad Friend coined the egregious phrase “Do-Me Feminism,” a bit of misogynist water-muddying if there ever was one, there existed among young heterosexuals a certain raised consciousness. Sexism wasn’t banished; hell, I don’t think my own socially-conditioned/ingrained sexism is even close to a thing of the past, my best efforts notwithstanding. If Gone Girl has any "relevance"—and I have to say that I have little patience with a lot of the breathless “rips the lid off American marriage” and “The Way We Live Now” proclamations—it’s in the truth it unveils, in a Fractured Fairy Tale fashion, about how sexist expectations can drive someone from Amazing to Avenging. Andrea Dworkin got a lot of shit during her lifetime for, among other things, her absolute refusal to tailor her presentation to what might have been appealing or even ingratiating to men. Some say she went too far, that the worthwhile things about her message got lost as a result. I’m beginning to wonder if in her way she was not exactly correct. 

How Steely Dan REALLY feel about Wes Anderson

Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen has a book out, a collection of essays and one diary entitled Eminent Hipsters. It's real good. The topics of the essays range from the singing group The Boswell Sisters to the influence of pulp sci-fi and semantic theory on the "work" of L. Ron Hubbard. The showcase piece, comprising over a third of the book, is the tour diary "With The Dukes of September." By turns snide, poignant, antically hilarious, and genuinely heartbreaking, it's a remarkable piece of writing: the "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" of musicians-on-the-road chronicles, I'd reckon. (I don't want to get into any kind of pissing contests with other critics who've praised the book, but I will insist that the "Donald Fagen hates his audience" reading that a number of enthusiastic critics have given this section is lamentably superficial, and a genuine mischaracterization.) On July 4, dyspeptic Donald finds himself in Ashland, Oregon, with a night off.

"In the evening, having zero interest in the town fireworks display, Vince [the tour's accountant and Fagen's de facto assistant] and I saw a film at the cute little movie theater, Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, which was intelligent and carefully made, as his films always are. Walter [Becker, Fagen's partner in Steely Dan] and I once had a bizarre interaction with Anderson's fans over the Internet, which started when we posted a couple of humorous letters (we thought) on the Steely Dan website.

"I think one of the reasons we're intrigued by Anderson is that he seems to be fixated on the sort of geekish, early-sixties adolscent experience that he's too young to have had but that Walter and I actually lived through. And yet he nails the mood precisely, using comic exaggration and fantasy to do the job. Although it was no picnic, it's too bad everyone's coming-of-age can't take place in the early sixties. Seeing the scouts in Moonrise Kingdom, I was reminded of my own experience at Boy Scout camp. I remember spending a lot of time in my tent worrying over a huge pot of boiling water in which I was trying to brew just the right blend of herbal tea, mostly wintergreen picked in the forest, following some recipe in the Scout handbook."

So there you have it. I recall the "bizarre interaction," so dispiriting that I am not even going to bother finding relevant links; basically it was a lot of dumb snotty humorless kids sniffing that these progenitors oa "dad rock" didn't "get" Wes. Fagen's observations here strike me as entirely apt. (As a Scout camp kid in the late sixties, I found my own solace in making Sassafras tea.) Anyway, get the book. It's fantastic. 

Cormac McCarthy/Truman Capote/Herschell Gordon Lewis

"He strums the wire with his fingers." From The Counselor, Ridley Scott, 2013

Ridley Scott's The Counselor, from an original script by Cormac McCarthy, inspired quite a bit of critical hyperbole on both sides of the assessment scale, the most ridiculous of which was Andrew O'Hehir's very silly "worst movie ever made" screed, which was in part based upon the extremely dubious proposition that Hollywood executives use the phrase "the devil's candy" with the regularity of  a Porky Pig stammer. I don't want to be "meh" about the movie, which I greatly liked in part, but...I was kind of "meh" about the movie. The profound moral schema that a few of its admirers cite was kinda spoiled for me on account of the whole (speaking of spoilers, um, skip this part if you're still looking forward to seeing the movie) femme-fatale-comes-out-on-top finale, which is the sort of thing that tries to raise misogyny to a near-mystic level and never really comes off. (See Basic Instinct.) (I also found Cameron Diaz's performance as said femme fatale to be borderline disgraceful.)

There's also the fact that this is a genre movie with an almost self-consciously literary veneer on it. Now this doesn't bother me, except, in this case, for the self-conscious part. That's to say, Cormac McCarthy is in a sense both a literary writer and a genre author. I've never found the two to be mutually exclusive myself. In McCarthy's case, the genre could well be some kind of horror (see Child of God), crime (No Country For Old Men), or the Western, sort of (see of course, Blood Meridian, a novel very much beloved of David Foster Wallace, who knew quite a bit about fiction both literary and genre). My reservations about how this works in the context of an original script directed by a visual virtuoso such as Ridley Scott are...well, they're actually immaterial to what I want to talk about in this post, which is this whole decapitating-a-guy-on-a-motorcycle-with-a-wire -strung-across-the-highway thing.

You read that right. There's a lot of talk in The Counselor, but every now and again there's some grisly, vividly shot and edited action, and one of these sequences involves stopping a speeding motorcyclist—a criminal courier of sorts—in the most extreme way possible. By cutting off his head as he's speeding down the road. 

In McCarthy's screenplay, the description of the setting up of the decapitating wire is done in sober, meticulous detail that would likely pass muster in Popular Mechanics. McCarthy introduces a man "carrying a roll of thin monel wire over one shoulder," crossing the road and going to where "a tall metal pipe is mounted to one of the fenceposts."

"He loops the wire around the corner post and pulls the end of the wire through the loop and wraps it about six times around the wire itself and tucks the end several times inside the loop  and then takes the wire in both hands and hauls it as tight as he can get it. Then he takes the coil of wire and walks out and crosses the road, letting out the wire behind him."

At the side of the road from whence this man walked, there's a "vertically mounted iron pipe at the right rear of the truckbed." The man "threads the wire through a hole in the pipe and pulls it taut and stops it from sliding back by clamping the wire with a pair of visegrips. Then he walks back out to the road and takes a tape measure from his belt and measures the height of the wire from the road surface. He goes back to the truck and lowers the iron pipe in its collars and clamps it in place again with a threaded lever that he turns by hand against the vertical rod. He goes out to the road and measures the wire again and comes back and wraps the end of the wire through a heavy three-inch iron ring and walks to the front of the truck where he pulls the wire taut and wraps it around itself to secure the ring at the end of the wire and then pulls the ring over a hook mounted in the side rail of the truck bed. He stands looking at it. He strums the wire with his fingers. It gives off a deep resonant note." See, I wasn't kidding about that Popular Mechanics stuff.

"The wire hums." And so it goes, until McCarthy calls for a "shot of the green rider with his face turned back to the floodlight now behind him." And... "suddenly his head zips away and in the helmet it goes bouncing down the highway behind the bike."

 Yikes! Ridley Scott being the visual virtuoso that he is, he pulls off the scene with great dispatch and to ostensibly impressive effect, so much so that you might forget for a moment that the whole thing is preposterous on several levels. Yet there's something about the whole Guignol aspect of the killing method that makes it arguably irresistable for a writer. As it happens, another literary writer who showed an oblique affinity for genre, Truman Capote, described just such a mode of murder, while simultaneously acknowledging its preposterousness, in his 1975 sort-of non-fiction novella Handcarved Coffins. Handcarved Coffins finds Capote trying to return to the form he claimed to have invented with In Cold Blood, but having dissipated a good deal of his genius, he here approaches it from an easier angle, making himself a character in the crime narrative and telling quite a bit of the story in the form of scripted dialogue. Capote's guide and docent in this "account of an American crime" is an investigator named Jake Pepper, and early in the narrative he tells Capote of the killing of his friend Clem Anderson, decapitated while driving what's described as his "homemade jeep" over a "narrow ranch road." Here's their exchange:

TC: The wire, yes. I have never understood about the wire. It’s so—

JAKE: Clever?

TC: More than clever. Preposterous.

JAKE: Nothing preposterous about it. Our friend had simple figured out a nice neat way to decapitate Clem Anderson. Kill him without any possibility of witnessed.

TC: I suppose it’s the mathematical element. I’m always bewildered by anything involving mathmatics.

JAKE: Well, the gentleman responsible for this certainly has a mathematical mind. At least he had a lot of very accurate measuring to do.

TC: He strung a wire between two trees?

JAKE: A tree and a telephone pole. A strong steel wire sharpened thin as a razor. Virtually invisible, even in broad daylight. But at duck, when Clem turned off the highway and was driving in that crazy little wagon along that narrow road, he couldn’t possibly have glimpsed it. It caught him exactly where it was supposed to: just under the chin. And, as you can see, sliced off his head as easily as a girl picking petals off a daisy.

TC: So many things could have gone wrong.

JAKE: What if they had? What’s one failure? He would have tried again. And continued till he succeeded.

TC: That’s what’s so preposterous. He always does succeed.

JAKE: Yes and no. But we’ll come back to that later. 

Lifting, or borrowing, from Capote, is one thing. But given that the ostensibly factual content of Handcarved Coffins has, since publication, been cast into considerable doubt...well, there's a lot of stuff on the Internet featuring latter-day variations on this improbable decapitation scenario, but its actual origin in the arts may in fact go back to 1968, and to uber-schlock-meister Herschell Gordon Lewis' very hard to watch (I couldn't even bring myself to look at it again for the purposes of this piece) She-Devils On Wheels. In which the aforementioned She-Devils contrive to kill some guy in precisely the same way as it plays out in The Counselor, only on a cheap budget and with an anti-virtuoso directing the proceedings. 

This infuriated description of the scene, from an equally infuriated long-form account of Lewis' movie, at the very dedicated website Jabootu's Bad Movie Dimension, is a vivid an, to the best of my own recollection, accurate one: "The gang slowly trundle out to their bikes, and after a cut we see them wrap wire around a pair of telephone poles, so that it stretches across the road at neck-height. HGL doesn’t actually tell us what the wire’s for, but he sure takes his time letting us see the girls get it prepared. Then we see the biker poster girl spin around.

"Remember how the bartender didn’t know where Joe-Boy’s gang hides out? You’re smarter than HGL, because HE didn’t remember that event – we now see Whitey and another Man-Eater ride up to Joe-Boy’s hot-rodders. Seriously, HGL – it was like a minute ago you told us that Queenie didn’t know where Joe-Boy was.

"Anyway the Man-Eaters get off their bikes, and again it takes both of them to put one of the bikes on its kickstand. While Joe-Boy’s gang watches quietly, Whitey stabs a hole in a car’s tire. Joe-Boy runs up all aggressive and in-your-face but gets sprayed with a can of … deodorant? Hairspray? Something like that. Joe-Boy, horrified at the threat of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer, recoils, hands to his eyes, and the girls double up on Whitey’s bike and ride off, leaving one of their bikes behind.

"Joe-Boy, enraged, gets on the abandoned bike bait without a second thought, and his gang rush to their cars. Don’t worry about the gang though – we never see them again. Any of them.

"Off Joe-Boy rides in pursuit to the sound of the James Bond theme(!). We see him on the bike, then we see the wire with all the Man-Eaters watching. Then we see him. Then the wire. Then the Man-Eaters. Yes, HGL, I think we 'get it.' You’ve explained it enough. At least this time you only did it with repeated camera shots, not with dialog. That’s a slight improvement.

"Joe-Boy rides into the wire with what one of my viewing companions immediately dubbed, 'The worst decapitation I’ve ever seen.'"

So there you have it. A compelling backward line from Cormac McCarthy to Herschell Gordon Lewis. Who says that "blogs" don't do relevant work in cultural archeology? 

UPDATE: Commentator Jason LaRiviere, below, cites "the greatest film to ever feature motorized decapitation by wire is Fellini's Toby Dammit." Indeed. The best segment in the omnibus film Spirits of the Dead, and one that Lewis could not have ripped off (unless he'd just heard about it), because that film was premiering at the Cannes Film Festival just as She-Devils was making its non-illustrious  U.S. theatrical run. Hmm.

And the movie didn't even occur to me as I was writing this, even though it's an old favorite of mine. The reason: In the Fellini movie, there's no attempt to make the event plausible in a materialist empirical sense. The wire that cuts off Toby's head is, for all intents and purposes, put in place by a supernatural agent who need not concern him or her self with, say, the chances that the wire will catch some other idiot in a sports car. I am reminded, I have to say, of the Patti Smith poem "robert bresson," and its treatment of a scene in Au hasard Balthasar, and the scene's larger implications. This is the last section of the poem: 

there is oil on the road.

the oil is the cause of the car going out of control.

what we want to find out is who put the oil there

and what the motive was.

who put the oil there?

i did

motive

art

 

i had to recreate the death of Jackson Pollock

w/the same radical destiny that spun from the

hallowed designs of his own death.

image: no. 11, 14 and portrait of a dream

image: the woman, lee krasner, shading her eyes

with hands brown and spotted.

here we have no accident no crime but a lateral

translation of a man going out of control

the initiation of a girl

(the intimacy of model and clone)

who would teach

as her teacher

taught her.

axle grease

film of sorrow

who put this oil here?

i did.

motive

art.

who was your teacher?

robert bresson

"Vampyr"/"Shoah"

Henriette Gérard, Vampyr, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932

Henrik Gawkowski, Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, 1985

Hitchcock's bubbles

In Robin Wood's 1981 introduction to his seminal study of Howard Hawks, Wood cites "an extreme and habitual self-consciousness" as a characteristic of modern art, one to which he has an ambivalent response; citing Losey's Eve, a film he expresses a qualified admiration for, he enumerates several shots containing an "insistence on significance." The most egregious, to Wood's mind, being a "waste of a whole camera movement" to show the viewer that a character in the film is reading Eliot.

"This kind of thing is so alien to Hawks that I am almost at a loss to find anything in his films sufficiently like it to make direct comparison possible," Wood continues. "[B]ut there is one such moment in Red Line 7000. Julie (Laura Devon), the sheltered younger sister of a race-team manager, sits waiting for her lover, one of the drivers, who has in fact left her. She waits most of the night, with an opened bottle of champagne on the table before her, and when her brother comes to find her, and tells her he has seen her boy-friend out with other women, she looks at the bottle and murmurs that the bubbles are all gone. It's not a profound bit of symbolism, but the point is that Hawks doesn't treat it as if it were. It arises naturally from the scene[...]"

The scene, and Wood's description of it, crossed my mind recently when I watched a restored version of Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 melodrama The Ring, playing tomorrow night on the big screen of the Harvey Theater as part of BAM's presentation of nine silent movies by the master director. The Ring is an unusual Hitchcock picture in several respects. For one thing, it's the only Hitchcock picture for which he is credited as the screenwriter; for another, it's not a suspense or crime picture but rather an odd romance in which an up-and-coming boxer has to cope with an imposed romantic rivalry. The movie's sexual politics seem a mix of the tenor of the times and Hitchcock's own damage, and will no doubt prove scintillating to some latter-day observers, but are not the concern of this consideration. 

There's an extent to which what may be considered symbolism and what is in fact metaphor may smear into each other, the way chocolate smears into peanut butter. Near the climax of The Ring, the protagonist, Carl Brisson's Jack, wins an important bout, and he and his cronies repair to his place to celebrate. The absence of Jack's wife, known in the film only as "The Girl" (Lillian Hall Davis, and what did I tell you about the picture's sexual politics?) is noted, but Jack assures the fellas that she ought to be back soon. In the meantime, champagne! Jack pours it out. 

What then follows, in a matter of mere seconds, via a series of meticulously-executed dissolves, is a visual account of the bubbles going...

...and going...

and there they are, gone. And in the event you needed more emphasis on the literal, metaphorical, and perhaps symbolic fact, Hitchcock dissolves once more, to the whole tray of flat drinks. 

(N.b., the screen captures here are from a 2007 DVD issue of the film, not the excellent restoration BAM will be running.)  What Hitchcock accomplishes with this effect, the economy of which belies what must have been some pretty elaborate preparation in order to pull off, is kind of remarkably multivalent. Via the dissolve, he sculpts in time, demonstrating its passing while also showing the life, the liveliness, going out of the ostensible celebration. Jack's victory is an empty one, because his wife is in fact out on the town with his rival...the man he will, as the scenario has it, have to face in the title ring for the final, you know, showdown.

The champagne effect is one of the most striking in a movie that is full of cinematic storytelling touches that were innovations at the time and subsequently became part of the lingua franca. Most of the pleasure to be had from The Ring today is seeing Hitchcock working out his ideas; his cinematic apparatus, while remarkably assured, isn't entirely refined. But there's a raw exuberance to the way he throws one effect after another. For the next thirty-plus years of his career, you never see that enthusiasm flag, but you do see it applied more virtuosically. While this movie plays awkwardly to that bugaboo of cinephilia, the "contemporary sensibility," it's also entirely clear that in The Ring,  Hitchcock isn't just learning the ropes, he's making them.  

Did Julien Temple invent Baz Luhrmann?

Patsy Kensit attempting to make an anthem of a song called "Having It All" in Temple's Absolute Beginners.

I have to admit I was kind of disappointed with my level of disappointment with Baz Luhrmann's film of The Great Gatsby. At least one other critic of my acquaintance has noted that as summer movies go, it's the one that's the most fun to argue about, but I'm not much inclined to join said fun, just because I don't feel all that strongly about this Gatsby. While A.O. Scott avers that the movie is "eminently enjoyable," and good for him, I found it a bit of a slog, although when I cite its slogginess I take care to make it clear that I'm in now real way offended by what Luhrmann "does" with or to the book; as much as I was unengaged, I wasn't affronted either. If anything, I found the enterprise, for all its mammoth-ness, kind of tired. Flappers dancing to Jay-Z did not excite my sense of sacrilege at all; indeed, I found that and other such showbiz fillips as the movie offered entirely expected.

Now when Luhrmann had the cheek to put "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in Moulin Rouge, and have it bellowed by Jim Broadbent, that was my idea of purposeful, almost revelatory sacrilege, and a reminder that an anti-showbiz protest is in fact an irreplaceable staple of showbiz. The anachronisms of Gatsby don't just tell us what we already know, they make points that unduly flatter us, as we intone sentences about how the materialism of the so-called Jazz Age is echoed in today's hip-hop fueled madness for "bling," and man, I just lost a little bit of the will to live merely typing that. The more people have been talking about Gatsby, the less I've been inclined to think about Gatsby. Instead, my thought turn to Julien Temple, about ten years Luhrmann's senior, and I think, why isn't HE allowed to make these sorts of movies anymore. By "these sorts of movies" you might think I mean, yeah, Baz Luhrmann movies, that is, gargantuan-budgeted lavish real-or-quasi-musicals—and think how genuinely sacreligious Gatsby would have been as a real musical, with its lead character, say, rapping about how good it felt to be, well, him; how queasily exhilarating the picture could have been if Luhrmann had risked that sort of ridiculousness and made it pay off—that take years in the gestation and production. Not quite, I'd answer. But in thinking, or not thinking, about Gatsby I also got to really thinking about Absolute Beginners, the musical Temple, a punk-weaned filmmaker who assembled a Sex Pistols feature of sorts before moving to music videos, made in 1986, quite some time before Luhrmann's film debut, Strictly Ballroom. The picture was poorly recieved at the time it came out. Looking at it now, it seems practically prophetic of the whole Luhrmann aesthetic, albeit with some interesting differences—none of which really explain why Temple's career in doing this sort of thing faltered, while Luhrmann's took off. That's not to say that Absolute Beginners is anything like a perfect film, but in terms of its conception and overall "attitude" it's remarkably and often giddily free. Adapted from a Colin MacInnes novel of social upheaval in '50s London, it stays true to its source in its fashion (e.g., a sense of social consciousness/conscience) while exercising a colorful fluidity in most other respects. I looked at it the other day and thought it held up pretty well; not only that, all the things that critics of its day gave it a hard time for—established pop songs lip-synched by the actors/characters within the diegisis, a purposeful carelessness in coloring outside the lines of its ostensible period, and more—are now regarded as, depending on the critic,  entirely acceptable devices (particularly when Luhrmann uses them), or no big deal. It's true that Temple doesn't nose around the vicinity of Camp as much as Luhrmann does, and that the relentless Brit-centricness of Absolute Beginners' content might have been as much of a roadblock to its making a wide impact as its formal playfulness was...but all things considered I have to say that Beginners qualifies as a movie that was genuinely ahead of its time, and that Luhrmann came along with an ethos that flirted with the postmodern even as it gave up big fat heartfelt melodramatic frissons in a superelaborate package just when mass audiences were ready for it. Temple's subsequent Earth Girls Are Easy is also way better than its reputation suggests, but doesn't function as well for my case because it's more overtly frivolous. 

These days Temple mostly gets to make imaginative, knowledgable documentaries about music and musicians, but his last fiction feature, 2000's Pandaemonium, which sort of makes rock stars of Wordworth and Coleridge, albeit not in a stupid way, showed that he's still in possession of the technical chops and the perspective to make cheekily new the things audiences have become accustomed to thinking of as old. It rather makes one regret that the only filmmaker today with permission to make Baz Luhrmann movies is, well, Baz Luhrmann. 

Riefenstahl/Sontag/Nabokov/Monty Python

Adolf Hitler in Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), Leni Riefenstahl, 1934.

"Triumph of the Will and Olympia are undoubtedly superb films (they may be the two greatest documentaries ever made) but they are not really important in the history of cinema as an art form. Nobody making films today alludes to Riefenstachl, while many filmmakers (including myself) regard Dziga Vertov as an inexhaustible provocation and source of ideas about film language. Yet it is arguable that Vertov—the most important figure in documentary films—never made a film as purely effective and thrilling as Triumph of the Will or Olympia. (Of course, Vertov never had the means at his disposal that Riefenstahl had. The Soviet government’s budget for propaganda films in the 1920s and early 1930s was less than lavish."—Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," 1974

"To exaggerate the worthlessness of a country at the awkward moment when one is at war with it—and would like to see it destroyed to the last beer-mug and last forget-me-not—means walking dangerously close to that abyss of poshlust which yawns so universally at times of revolution or war. But if what one demurely murmurs is but a mild pre-war truth, even with something old-fashioned about it, the abyss is perhaps avoidable. Thus, a hundred years ago, while civic-minded publiscists in St. Petersburg were mixing heady cocktails of Hegel and Schlegel (with a dash of Feurbach), Gogol, in a chance story he told, expressed the immortal spirit of poshulst pervading the German nation and expressed it with all the vigor of his genius.

"The conversation around him had turned upon the subject of Germany, and after listening awhile, Gogol said: 'Yes, generally speaking the average German is not too pleasant a creature, but it is impossible to imagine anything more unpleasant than a German Lothario, a German who tries to be winsome...One day in Germany I happened to run across such a gallant. The dwelling place of the maiden whom he had long been courting without success stood on the bank of some lake or other, and there she would be every evening sitting on her balcony and doing two things at once: knitting a stocking and enjoying the view. My German gallant being sick of the futility of his pursuit finally devised an unfailing means  whereby to conquer the heart of his cruel Gretchen. Every evening he would take off his clothers, plunge into the lake and, as he swam there, right under the eyes of his beloved, he would keep embracing a couple of swans which had been specially prepared by him for that purpose. I do not quite know what these swans were supposed to symbolize, but I do know that for several evenings on end he did nothing but float about and assume pretty postures with his birds under that precious balcony. Perhaps he fancied there was something poetically antique and mythological in such frolics, but whatever notion he had, the result proved favorable to his intentions: the lady's heart was conquered just as he thought it would be, and soon they were happily married.'

"Here you have poshlust in its ideal form, and it is clear that the terms trivial, trashy, smug and so on do not cover the aspect it takes in this epic of the blond swimmer and the two swans he fondled."—Vladimir Nabokov, from Nikolai Gogol, 1944. 

"Art which evokes the themes of fascist aesthetic is popular now, and for most people it is probably no more than a variant of camp. Fascism  may be merely fashionable, and perhaps fashion with its irrepressible promiscuity of taste will save us. But the judgments of taste themselves seem less innocent. Art that seemed eminently worth defending ten years ago, as a minority or adversary taste, no longer seems defensible today, because the ethical and cultural issues it raises have become serious, even dangerous, in a way they were not then. The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocuous ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed."—Sontag, 1974 

Three frames from the sketch sometimes called "Killer Joke," from the first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Its first airing occured October 5, 1969, on the British Broadcasting Corporation's Channel One. 

Hell/Carax/Tosches

There's nothing to win by
this sort of an outcry
Oh yeah we all know why

Cuz the world a person lives in
is his brain. Well mine just gives in...

—Richard Hell, "Who Says? (It's Good To Be Alive?)," from Blank Generation, Richard Hell And The Voidoids, SIre Records, 1977

Michel Piccoli, Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant, Mauvais sang, Leos Carax, 1986.

Denis Lavant, Holy Motors, Leos Carax, 2012.

In a recent comment the reader calling himself "That Fuzzy Bastard" expressed surprise/curiosity that Holy Motors was ranked so highly on my best-of-the-year list given the skepticism I expressed about it on first seeing it. As I mentioned in my first writeup, some of that skepticism was fueled in a reactive mode relative to Carax's Cannes 2012 status as the Approved-Creative-Fireworks-Wackadoodle of the Know-Somethingish American contingent of the festival attendees. Also there was some subsequent annoyance at self-satisfied predictions concerning a shift in the film's reception. 

A second viewing was, for me, more demonstrative of the movie's not just melancholy but its anger, its futile regret over a life badly lived because, in the immortal words of Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, "I got no choice!" As the ultimately nameless (I believe) actor played by Denis Lavant, once more I think acting for/as both himself and his director, goes through a day of demands and insults and winds up having to spend the evening with (spoiler alert) a family of chimps, if I'm not mistaken, the movie drives any number of sad and pissed-off stakes through The Imaginative Life As It Is Lived In These Times, but avoids (to use David Thomas' phrase) "I'm a miserable artiste, pity me!" special pleading, in part via a genuine empathy expressed through certain of the roles Lavant enacts. The imaginative life is not so far removed from what's referred to a the life of the mind after all. Unlike That Fuzzy Bastard, I came out not seeing "light, context-less emotion-tweaking" so much as a melange of modes and of alienated reactions to those modes, those reactions not making much of a dent in "reality" along the way. Yes, the green-suited "Merde" monster does succeed in disrupting a fashion photo shoot, but aside from a hard-on and a cigarette, what does it get him? 

Nick Tosches' latest novel, Me And The Devil, is a pretty problematic piece of work, but in the aggregate I have to say it left a mark, one that's not entirely segregated from the local anger that Tosches often expresses therein in a fashion many will take not unreasonable exception to. It's that kind of book, one where the acheivement seems in too-uncomfortable proximity to the things that make it objectionable. Where Holy Motors stumbles, it's in the realm of sentimentality (forgivable with respect to the movie's treatment of Edith Scob, less so in the It's A Wonderful Life-inspired talking-limos coda); Me And The Devil errs, as regular Tosches readers should not be surprised to learn, in the area of sort-of nihilist-tough-guy posturing. But it's not entirely purposeless. For instance:

Only an utter fool would rather express himself than simply be himself. To live was a beautiful thing. To write about it was a labor. And the pay had given way to pay cuts. 

Writing was not an act of imagination or, may the Devil take me for even using the word, creativity. (How I cringed when people used the word 'creative" in referring to me in my presence. I knew then and there that they did not know what work was. I knew then and there that they lived in a dream world. Often they themselves were make-believe "artists," living the "creative" life under the shelter of trust funds, inheritances, or family money of some kind. Often they were trying to imply an intimacy that did not, could not exist with me or what I did.) There was nothing to be romanticized in what I did. If flower garlands of words and phantoms of imagery had come to me in visions, so had some of the stupidest ideas I have ever had: ideas that landed me in jail, emergency rooms, or hock.

While Carax's film is a fantasy depiction of the working life of the artist, it is relatively unsparing in its depiction not just of toil but of emotional deprivation and loss. If it is a work of "creative" "exuberance" that exuberance is in a certain sense a gob of spit from the bowels of hell. 

Tosches again:

When I was young, I thought it would get easier. But as it turned out, each novel got harder. Maybe this was because, with each one, I was flaying a further layer from inside me, exposing yet another, deeper layer. Maybe this was what made it harder. When I was young and thought it woudl get easier—the days when I was thrilled to see my name or my picture on a book—I hid. I did not even dare to write in the first person. Then all that changed, and when it did, it reminded me of that sixteenth-century anatomical engraving by Amusco something-or-other, or something-or-other Amusco, the one of a guy stripped to his inner anatomy holding a knife in one hand and the drooping entirety of his body's own freshly removed skin in the other. 

The special knife, I thought as I recalled this: the special knife. Maybe I needed to write. Maybe, even with all the illness it brought, it was the least destructive, least dangerous alternative that I had. And I should be thankful that I had it. 

Every gift a curse, every curse a gift.

It was 50 years ago today

 

In England, the Beatles make their debut television appearance, on the Sid-Bernstein-founded Granada TV, a northwest-servicing commercial television franchise. They perform the songs "Some Other Guy" and "Love Me Do."

 

 

In Osaka, Japan, American modernist composer John Cage gives a concert at Mido-Kaikan, for which he is joined by artist Yoko Ono for the piece 26'55.988" for 2 Pianists & a String Player. Ono served as Cage's interpreter for much of the artist's 1962 tour of Japan, and participated in several other performances, including the one pictured above, featuring Cage, David Tudor and Toshiro Mayuzumi.