Some Came Running

"Tiny Furniture"

"Show business kids making movies of themselves/you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else"—Steely Dan, "Show Biz Kids," 1973

"Not an untalented man, by the way."—Christopher Lee, referring to director Jess Franco, interview with the author, 1993

"Art people are assholes."—Charlotte, played by Jemima Kirk, in Tiny Furniture, written and directed by Lena Dunham, 2010

If I at first choose to describe Lena Dunham as "not untalented" rather than "promising," it's because of my vestigial irritation with her debut feature, Tiny Furniture, a largely adroit film concerning largely insufferable people. I've got nothing against films about insufferable people, but the extent to which I engage with them more often than not is determined by the filmmaker's perspective on/distance from these characters, and while much commentary has been expended on the blurry lines Dunham draws between life and art here, those don't bother me as much as an incoherence of tone that a more seasoned, or if I wanna be stern, better artist could have avoided even while using the exact same method as Dunham. That method, in case you're not aware, includes the 22-or-so year-old writer/director Dunham casting herself in the film's lead role, that of Aura, a 22-year-old recent college graduate who, upon returning to the domestic nest, just doesn't know what to do with herself. It also includes Dunham casting her mother, artist Laurie Simmons in the role of Aura's mother, Siri, and her younger sister, Grace Dunham, in the role of Aura's high-school sister Nadine, and shooting much of Tiny Furniture in the rather enviable lower Manhattan apartment/photo studio in which the three of them, from what I understand, still reside (a portion of said apartment is seen in the still at the top of this post). You probably don't need me to point out that if this is the sort of thing that makes you throw up your hands and say "Jesus H. Christ, not another one of these...", then Tiny Furniture is likely not a film for you. 

And yet... Only, wait...there's a little more equivocating before I can get to the "and yet" part. In being a certain age (in my own case, just a hiar over fifty) and dealing with material by and ostensibly for people in their uncertain twenties, one must be ever-wary of falling into the "they are scum" trap that ensnared Somerset Maugham when he assessed a seminal work by and about a then-younger generation, Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim. One must be also mindful that there's really not much new about the type that Dunham herself represents, and she depicts in Tiny Furniture. One merely has to remember. I myself used to meet aimless overprivileged Manhattan semi-drips of this ilk all the time at the Mudd Club back in the early '80s. I think I myself might have slept with one or two of them, even. Thing was, back in the early '80s, these types weren't so much into making movies or any other kind of art, for the most part; they were mostly patrons-in-training, a.k.a. hangers-on. (For an interesting window into the kind of interactions that took place between such types and actual artists, most of whom tended to be musicians, see the sections of Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk pertaining to Duncan Hannah and Tom Verlaine.)

It is also true, however, that Tiny Furniture is not Lucky Jim. That book's title character may be Amis' representative, and certainly carries a number of what those familiar with Amis' biography will recognize as his traits, but Amis was able to create a sufficient amount of distance between himself and Jim Dixon to create a dispassionate portrait that the reader can approach with no compunction. Dunham's depiction of Aura has an insufficient amount of distance, and this is detectable, I think, even if you know nothing about Dunham or the circumstances under which she made the movie. This creates a situation in which one watches the movie not so much engaging with the characters and what they're going through, but constantly trying to second-guess the movie's own attitude towards its characters. Aura is such a weirdly lumpy sad-sack at the film's opening that one tends to take pleasure in her humiliations; for a while I was particularly delighted by the acerbic putdowns delivered to Aura by the precocious younger sister Nadine; this movie ought to be about her, I remember thinking. One also finds one rolling one's eyes at Aura's taste in men, if you can call them that (if nothing else, the film provided me with an insight as to why Dunham, in real-life interviews, tends to refer to the individuals she dates as "boys"); she's rather inexplicably drawn to a smarmy creep named Jed (Alex Karpovsky, who I hear through the grapevine is a bit of a micro-indie heartthrob, yeesh) who makes videos of himself philosophizing on a rocking horse under the rubric "The Nietschean Cowboy," and also to a sleazy self-described "chef" (David Call) who will "date" Aura if Aura can score some pills from the eclectic medicine cabinet of her glam unsupervised artist's-daughter friend Charlotte (Jemima Kirk). 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. But within the context of the film, sympathy is not likely to emerge; one is rather more likely to ask what the hell is Aura's glitch that she's drawn to such quasi-monsters. There's a difference between observing abhorrent individuals via a prism of artful contrivance—as in, say, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaum's—and feeling as if you're actually trapped in a room with those people. That Tiny Furniture feels too often like the latter and not often enough like the former is its biggest problem. (And incidentally, watching Karpovsky spin out Jed's pompous schtick, I was increasingly reminded of another predatory asshole character I'd seen in a film recently...who was that guy? And then when Jed told Aura he was staying in "Hell...perhaps you've heard of it?" it hit me: of course, The Erotic Connoisseur in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, who as it happens asks of Sasha Grey's Chelsea: "Dubai...maybe you've heard of it?" I look forward to having a nice long talk with Mr. Karpovsky some time.) 

A good deal of the film's content that's supposed to be commendably frank is merely vaguely unsettling, as in the "art" video or YouTube piece—it's so hard to tell the difference these days—of a bikini-clad Aura not-quite cavorting by a fountain—that generates a lot of "user comments" about how unattractive and dumpy Aura is. Of which Charlotte says "you can't possibly take that seriously." Right. (For myself, I was reminded of Robert Christgau's rejoinder to the complaint of Janis Ian in her hit song "At Seventeen," about being picked last in gym class by those "choosing sides for basketball:" "Face it, Ms. Ian—you're short." The critic Amy Taubin, who's a longtime habitué of the New York art world that Dunham's film unfolds on the periphery of, dug further into certain of the film's tendencies to articulate her suspicions about it: "[...] stickier still, [Dunham] courts our rejection by walking around the house in nothing more than a T-shirt, flaunting her ass and thighs for anyone who’s looking—and we can’t help but look—as if daring us to pass judgment on her body. It’s a game I dislike being roped into, just as I dislike being roped into speculating about whether Simmons knew she was playing an art-world Mommie Dearest, and whether she worried that her daughter really thought she was a monster, or whether the audience would think that, and was this movie meant to be a satire or a psychodrama." Game or no game aside, Taubin's concerns also tie in to the fact that Dunham herself gives arguably the weakest performance in a picture that's filled with what are undeniably, erm, vivid characterizations. And this tends to undercut her sometimes excellent dialogue. At one point Aura explains to a nosy neighbor that her college boyfriend dumped her to hie to the Burning Man festival: "Something about having to build a shrine to his ancestors out of an ancient tree." That's a great absurdist line, real Woody Allen stuff (Allen's an acknowledged influence here, as Jed is often seen reading the former's collection Without Feathers, and not laughing) but Dunham's reading of the line really undersells it. Of course it could just be that she distrusts the notion of actually going for a big laugh line. But why would she?

And yet: I think Taubin's being a bit stingy, because there are scene in which Tiny Furniture comes close to succeeding as both satire and psychodrama. A scene in which Aura and Charlotte childishly usurp a loft party Nadine throws for a raftful of her younger friends is at first funny, then painful, then painfully funny; it's almost as good as a similar generational-clash party scene in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg. And the picture has a fleet, fluent visual style; one is tempted to ascribe this quality to the protean young cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes (who shot the thing in digital video with a Canon7D camera, a rig that would seem to have very fine optics indeed) and editor Lance Edmands; but of course part of being a good filmmaker, and particularly a good indie filmmaker, is recognizing talented people and getting them to work with you, so Dunham ought not be slighted in this respect. As I mentioned before, the writing is quite good; I don't know to what extent the dialogue was improvised, but the slight story has a pretty tight structure and Dunham seems to have a knack for purposefully deploying conventional devices of dramaturgy; there's a little sub-theme here involving Aura discovering and reading her mother's journal from when the mother was Aura's age that Dunham makes just enough of; it works. And even at its most queasy-making, Tiny Furniture never registers as genuinely hateful in the way that gets cranks such as myself so worked up about when we're faced with what we take as blinkered hipster solipsism; rather, I sensed that Dunham herself is too young and too confused to be able to distinguish between showing compassion for her characters and slathering her own self with masochistic love. Tiny Furniture finally shows sufficient promise to make me hope she grows out of that. 

On a side note: I saw this film with an L.A.-based pal who was interested in checking it out because, as he put it, "We don't have mumblecore in Hollywood." Looking at the running time in the press notes and seeing it was 98 minutes, I joked, "I bet about eight of those minutes will be taken up with the 'Special Thanks' in the end credits." It wasn't eight minutes, but it's not as if I didn't have a point. (And what's with that Early McSweeney's credit design, anyway?) Oh, the predictability.

Transcendental style in the cinema of John Ford

I was at the gym the other day, and I had put TCM on one of the televisions in the cardio room, in part because it confuses people, and in part because, well, I felt like it. And it was between movies, and so the channel was running one of its great-moments-in-cinema interstitial montages, and one of the images was, well, not quite the one I'm posting in the below screen grab, but, you know, close...

 

Taking in the image, from, of course, John Ford's 1957 1956 The Searchers, I was once again moved, but also reminded that one man's iconic cinematic moment can be another man's aberration. One thinks, of course, of the bristlingly contemptuous 2006 treatment of Ford's film by Stephen Metcalf in Slate, in one of his columns under the too-apt rubric "The Dilettante," in which Metcalf tsk-tsked that the picture is "off-putting to the contemporary sensibility," a complaint that I doubt he would dare to make about, say, Cosi fan tuti. (Then again, Metcalf's such a thorough-going twit that he just might, at that.) Ethan Edwards' reclamation of Debbie (Natalie Wood) comes in for special praise and then, of course, mockery: "I stand with the detractors of this silly film, but what follows must count as one of the more thrilling moments in anyone's movie-watching life. Wayne places his hands under the terrified Natalie Wood's armpits, then raises her up to the sky, examining her—murderously? Paternally? He then drops her into his arms and utters his first soft words of the film: 'Let's go home, Debbie.' Now, 'Why didn't he kill her?' is right up there with 'Why does Hamlet dither?' and 'Did the governess really see Quint and Miss Jessel?' as one of the great seminar unanswerables; it is sure to keep discussion going for the allotted 50 minutes, along with: Wait, why did he want to kill her in the first place? Was he in love with Debbie's mother, his milquetoast of a dead brother's dead wife? Why is Debbie the only hint of good sex in the movie? Are Ethan and Scar doppelgängers? Does Ethan spare Debbie because the scalping of Scar has purged him of his own most perturbing desires? Who knows? In later years, Wayne was asked about the strange depth of Ethan's obsession. 'He did what he had to do,' answered Wayne, mangling the basic details of the plot. 'The Indians fucked his wife.' A movie made by semiprimitives will submit more docilely to extensive Rorschaching than a self-consciously dark and mature Western like Little Big Man or McCabe and Mrs. Miller. As is so often the case, Kael deserves the last word: 'You can read a lot into The Searchers, but it isn't very enjoyable.'"

From the priggishness of the phrase "this silly film" to the predictability of making a straw man out of John Wayne to the sheer shittiness of "semiprimitives" to the hideous smug complacency of "Kael deserves the last word," this passage exemplifies everything hateful about the critical perspective embodied by Metcalf, not to mention Slate itself...not to mention, well, everything queasy-making about classic American liberal condescension in general. Which isn't to say that hatred of The Searchers doesn't extend across ideological lines. Indeed, when Metcalf's piece appeared in 2006, it found a big fan in well-known neo-con scion, Jeopardy big winner (I'll always be jealous of him for that, I have to admit), film-critic hater, and current Commentary editor John Podhoretz, who said of Metcalf and his piece that it "blows the whistle" on the "bizarre enthusiasm by cineastes" [sic] for this "turgid, wooden, boring and weird movie." Not just silly, you see, but weird. 

And right about now you're probably asking, "Geez, Kenny, you're taking the occasion of seeing an image from The Searchers on TCM while you were at the gym as an excuse for once again going after some anti-Searchers sentiments that were expressed, like, four years ago? I thought you were trying to get off of the Obsessive Rage Express there." Fair enough, but the reason I bring it up is because, yes, John Wayne's Ethan finally embracing Debbie, moving as the moment is, actually does not make rational sense, and seeing the image again the other day brought on my own personal "eureka!" moment about it. That is, yes, I finally figured out just what Ethan's motivation is, not that the explanation will please the literal-minded likes of Metcalf or Podhoretz; indeed, it just might further confirm Podhoretz's conviction that the film is "weird." For the first time, Edwards' lifting and drawing in of Debbie struck me as a transcendent moment, transcendent in the Schraderian sense. The whole point being that it doesn't parse in any rational way, and it's not meant to. It is an unabashed and matter of fact depiction of the mysterious workings of grace in the same fashion that the finale of Bresson's Pickpocket is. 

 

In Pickpocket, the love that the young, nihilistic Michel (Martin LaSalle) has been so stridently denying and acting against suddenly rushes up and out in a flood as he presses his face to that of Jeanne (Marika Green) in the film's final prison sequence. Like Michel, Ethan in The Searchers has acted against, in denial of, love throughout, seemingly intent only on vengeance. And just as Pickpocket goes into great detail as to just how Michel accomplishes his violations of other people and their belongings, so too does The Searchers almost make a fetish of Ethan's intimate methods of visiting various depredations on the hated Comanches. And yet when it comes down to the wire, both characters are visited by an irresistible force. One could call it grace, as I have; one could call it the Holy Spirit. One might be best off in calling it love. 

But whatever it is, no, it doesn't make "sense," and no, I don't think it's meant to, not as such. And to place such an out-and-out spiritual moment as the sort of icing on the cake in a film in which so much tension between tradition and modernity is already present, right from its opening VIstaVision logo, is a more-bravura-than-usual bit of artistic daring. "Off-putting to the contemporary sensibility," no kidding. Ford is often accused of laying on the schmaltz, and the temptation to read his every heart-tugging moment as the knowing manipulation of an archetypal gruff-but-sentimental Irish storyteller can be strong. But the less-obvious moments of transcendence; I wonder if there aren't more of those in the man's cinema than we had previously thought. Surely Dallas and Ringo's quiet ride away from the "blessings of civilization" at the end of Stagecoach could count. And of course, Ford's world being Ford's world, the moment of transcendence at the end of his extraordinary 1955 The Long Gray Line comes not as Marty Maher (Tyrone Power, below, at left) nearly tears up as he "sees" all of the old friends and lovers he's lost over his West Point years gathering at a tribute to him, but when he re-gathers his composure and stands at attention with the group of men he's always longed to be part of.

 

Ford made Line two years prior to The Searchers, and boy, if John Podhoretz thinks the latter film is "weird" he ought to check out its predecessor some time.

I'm very nearly certain that some of the Fordians among this blog's readership will be able to provide some other fruitful examples. The floor is open. 

"Shutter" to think

In the venerated tradition of the legendary "What does the ending of No Country For Old Men mean?" podcast of 2008 comes another such Exagmination Round Factification For Incamination, this one on Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. It's  divided into discrete topical segments (in ascending order: on the film's big opening, where the film fits in the Scorsese/DiCaprio collaborative body-o'-work, the advantages of seeing the film more than once, the film's classic influences, and, of course, "what does the ending mean?"), the links to which can be found below the jump. 

Anatomy of a reputation

Near the end of Midnight Movies, the seminal book on cult film he co-wrote with Jonathan Rosenbaum, J. Hoberman recalls his early attempts to run a rep cinema of sorts. In 1972, in a "bombed-out old church on West Thirty-sixth Street," he and a pal founded the "Theater of Gibberish" and screened "mostly Sirk and Fuller" pictures, mainly to facilitate Hoberman's own education in those directors' oeuvres. "We used to get listed in the Voice," Hoberman recalls, "but we couldn't advertise the Sirk films by name. One of the sixteen-millimeter distributors mentioned that they were very popular in old-folks homes, rest homes, and hospitals, so we cited that and Rock Hudson in the ads. The local Sirk freaks—all seven of them—got the message and turned up."

How times have changed. These days it seems that just about every higher-education-aspiring American young person who signs up for a single Film Studies course—or, God help him or her, actually majors in Film Studies—has a pallette load of Sirk shoved down his or her throat, and some of the manly men who follow Hollywood Elsewhere seem not to have enjoyed the experience one bit. Nor do they like being told that they don't know what they're on about. "We understand them, but we think they're shit," one commenter notes of the Sirk work.

These commenters are responding to HE proprieter Jeffrey Wells' post called "Respectful Sirk Takedown"—and boy, is that title wrong on maybe five levels—in which, spurred on by a YouTube clip from Sirk's 1957 Imitation of Life, Wells unloads on the director. The acting in the clip—which features Sandra Dee and Susan Kohner—is "awful." The dialogue has a "comical phoniness." And so on. Sirk's critical rep constitutes some kind of shell game perpetrated by elitist dweebs who aver that "you have to be a serious cineaste to recognize Sirk's genius, and that if you don't recognize it then you need to think things through because you're just not as perceptive as you need to be."

I responded to Wells' post in several, probably too many, comments. Here's the stuff, I guess, that sums up my objections most coherently:

[Well]'s putatively "respectful" takedown of Sirk is so choked with resentment that it's simultaneously self-canceling and impossible to formulate a rationale response to. I happen to think that a lot of the critical response to Sirk takes the "subversive" angle too far. I don't think, for example, that there's anything particularly "coded" about Imitation of Life; it's a completely sincere statement on race in America that works within the conventions of a Ross Hunter/Fanny Hurst melodrama. Of course because Sirk was an absolute visual master he imbues those conventions with added value, employing a mise-en-scene that often expresse[s] exquisite irony, but I don't think that's same thing as putting anything over on the audience. I agree that one ought to check out The Tarnished Angels,  There's Always Tomorrow, and particularly A Time To Love And A Time To Die to get a fuller measure of the artist.

But [Wells is] clearly not interested in having an intelligent discussion of Sirk. Tired of trouncing the Eloi, he arbitrarily decides to have a go at the "dweebs," or as he sometimes calls them, the "monks," the "cloistered" "urban" types he's got some sort of complex about because he thinks they're lording it over him or something.

What's maybe a little bit genuinely interesting about Wells' attitude with respect to Sirk's reputation, and the attitude of the meat-tossers whooping it up in the comments thread, is the "these elitists are trying to con us" perspective. Wells makes no bones about letting everybody know how "progressive" his actual politics are, but in rants like these he exhibits pretty much the exact kind of resentment that's the lifeblood of Andrew Breitbart's entire career. To backtrack a bit to the sentiments that inspired some of the observations in my above-excerpted comment, Wells cites Roger Ebert as a proponent of the kind of obfuscation that gets Wells so riled up, to wit, Ebert's pronouncement that understanding a Sirk film "takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman's masterpieces, because Bergman's themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message."

The thing is, and no disrespect to Roger Ebert intended, I believe that he's precisely wrong. I reiterate: Sirk never speaks in code, and his "conceal[ment]" is not what makes him a great filmmaker...and the early champions of the director understood this utterly. In The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris wrote, "The essence of Sirkian cinema is  the direct confrontation of all material, however fanciful and improbable. Even in his most dubious projects, Sirk never shrinks away from the ridiculous, but by a full-bodied formal development, his art transcends the ridiculous, as form comments on content." (For "ridiculous," read "Sandra Dee," and you've got a basis for a defense of at least some of what Wells finds objectionable about the Imitation of Life clip.) Not too many years later, in an appreciation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson outlined Fassbinder's affinities with Sirk, whom the younger filmmaker revered and collaborated with: "He has taken a number of tactics from the Sirk melodramas (the flamboyant lighting, designing décor and costumes that indelibly imprint a character's social strata, being patient with actors and playing all the movie's elements into them, backing your dime-store story and soap-opera characters all the way) and stapled Sirk's whirlwind into a near-silent film style which is punctuated with terse noun-verb testiness." (Emphasis mine.) I infer that the "code-talking" Sirk is the one that's taught in Film Studies classes, then, which is too bad. I don't accept that as an excuse, though. Autodidact cinephile that I am, I came to Sirk my own way, and I'm very happy I did.

The top screen cap is from Sirk's superb 1956 There's Always Tomorrow, out very soon in a wonderful U.K. Eureka!/Masters of Cinema edition, and shortly after that on domestic DVD in a Universal multi-disc set devoted to co-star Barbara Stanwyck, which will also include Sirk's All I Desire. 

Films without continuity errors: towards a master list

"Master," get it? Huh, huh?

For context, see post directly prior to this one.

1) La sortie des usines Lumiére, L'arivée d'un train á La Ciotat, etc., etc., Auguste and Louis Lumiere, 1895-96

2) Un chien andalou and L'age d'or, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, 1929 and 1930

3) Dodsworth, William Wyler, 1936

4) The entire oeuvre of Stan Brakhage, 1952-2003

5) L'année derriere derniére a Marienbad, Alain Resnais, 1961

6) Wavelength and La région centrale, Michael Snow, 1967 and 1971

7) Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman, 1975

8) Stranger Than Paradise, Jim Jarmusch, 1984 (pictured)

9) Russian Ark, Alexander Sokurov, 2002

10) The Girlfriend Experience, Steven Soderbergh, 2009

Notes:

2): These Buñuel films are apt demonstrations of the adage, "When you've got no continuity, you can't have any continuity errors!"

3): I actually can't vouch for the fact that this film contains no lapses in continuity. Its inclusion is merely a ploy to get more people to seek it out and see it.

5): A similar principle to the one applied to 2) applies here. That is, in a picture of such unremitting irreality, continuity as such cannot apply. That said, I also cannot find anything in it that would constitute a supposed "error>"

10): Not just because of the specific way it was shot, but because its anti-linear editing pretty much cancels out the possibility of a conventional gaffe.

The others ought to be self-explanatory, I reckon.  

A note on Rohmer and "mumblecore"

  

Above, Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach, 1983: from left, Simon de La Brosse, Frank Zappa, Don Van Vliet, Amanda Langlet

You ever wonder why so few critics and cinephiles yoke directors John Farrow and Otto Preminger together? I mean, after all, both directors did substantial work in the film noir genre, using very similar types of plots; in Farrow's 1950 Where Danger Lives, Robert Mitchum plays a doctor who falls in love with a deranged femme fatale played by Faith Domergue; in Preminger's 1952 Angel Face Mitchum plays an ambulance driver who falls in love with a deranged femme fatale played by Jean Simmons. Beyond subject matter, the directors shared stylistic traits, including a fondness for the long take; see the bravura one-shot climax of Farrow's Danger, in a border hotel room and any number of shots in Preminger's 1945 Fallen Angel. Am I carving out a new road in film scholarship even as we speak? No, because when all is said and done, some superficial similarities aside, the two oeuvres are not, in point of fact, germane to each other.

I bring this up because, looking at the coverage of the death of Eric Rohmer, I spotted what I fear will become a trend, in this sentence from Boston Globe critic Wesley Morris' otherwise unobjectionable appreciation of Rohmer: "You could see him, platonically, in My Dinner With Andre, and completely in the mumblecore movie of your choice." Now it's entirely conceivable that Andre director Louis Malle picked up some solutions about turning talk into cinema from Rohmer, although it's also likely that he had some fairly definite ideas of his own about it as well. You will likely not be surprised that my problem is with the "mumblecore" comparison, which I find facile at best and near-obscene at worst. 

Setting aside the fact that many filmmakers saddled with the "mumblecore" rubric increasingly (and probably rightfully) reject it, let's look at some specifics. Andrew Bujalski's work seems the most overtly influenced by Rohmer's, and his subject matter, life and love among the twenty-somethings (it's worth noting here that Bujalski's characters are by and large more "bohemian" than Rohmer's), is very close to what Rohmer treated almost exclusively in his '80s work. A lot of what happens in Bujalski's films seems to be based on an inversion of Rohmer; Bujalski's characters speak hesitantly, ambivalently, while Rohmer's are full of (often quite silly) opinions and notions that they express in an almost hyper-articulate fashion. But I never think of Rohmer when I watch a Bujalski film—never. His work lacks both Rohmer's lightness and its particular profundity. His way of using the camera is almost diametrically opposed to Rohmer's. I can allow though, that Bujalski's vision (which I'm not rejecting here, incidentally) is definitely informed by Rohmer's. 

But I don't see much of Rohmer in the work of Aaron Katz, the putative mumblecore director whose work I find the most formally advanced. An interesting, well-conceived hybrid of Cassavetes and Jarmusch, in some respects, yes. But mostly his own vision, his own ideas. 

And then there's Swanberg. I know Morris doesn't name him, but he does say "mumblecore movie of your choice." So no. No way. To hold any one of Swanberg's slop-shots against a composition from PIalat is bad enough; put one up against an image composed by Rohmer and frequent cinematographer Néstor Almendros and, you know, forget about it. And don't even start on the dialogue.

My point being, if some of these filmmakers were inspired in part by Rohmer to pick up their cameras, that's one thing and one thing only; it doesn't necessarily mean that they actually learned anything from him. And also, if you want to see Rohmer, watch Rohmer. There's finally nobody like him. 

By the way, I contributed an appreciation of Rohmer to today's Los Angeles Times; it is here, if you're interested. 

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.