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June 26, 2020
May 18, 2020
Nell Zink: The Committed Spitballer
Andrew Martin has an excellent review of Nell Zink's five novels. I read several reviews of her work before getting around to reading two of her novels (Nicotine and Doxology). The difference between reading about her work and actually reading it is like the difference between a punk band's studio album and its live performance. Zell writes headlong with a bravura wit, but her prose can miss some notes and the narrative gets sloppy in places--much like a punk rock band live. At the same time, the performance hangs together as something fresh if not wholly satisfying. The trade-off is sensation and vividness for precision and meaning. Martin is the first reviewer of her work who captures the live punk band experience of reading Zink.
Nicotine was my first Zink novel. Like Doxology, it was better in the upward slope of premise than the downward slope of resolution. Doxology is a more considered work, so its turning more more explicit. Martin puts his finger on where the novel goes wrong: the death of Joe Harris, a 1990s rock star. Joe's rise to rock stardom struck me as implausible, even by loose standards of the day. His fame was such a lark he could only come to a bad end, which he does. As Martin points out, after his death the novel downshifts as Zink subjects her heroine to a marriage plot as the 2016 election approaches. Zink’s female characters are better at reading the room than finding a comfort zone. In her latest novel, Zink has new plans for which her heroines are ill-equipped. Martin precisely identifies what Doxology means to Zink's career development:
It may be the case that her strengths as a writer are fundamentally those of the disrupter and the caricaturist rather than the nuanced social chronicler, but the madness of the current moment calls as much for disruption as it does for breadth and grace. Doxology may prove to be a transitional book in her career, like, say, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, the work of a committed spitballer creeping toward a more sober reckoning with the world, then bailing out when things get too real.
I'm not sure if "the madness of the current moment" Martin refers to is the madness of the Covid-19. Destruction seems to be happening all by itself. It wouldn't seem necessary for Zink to come along and topple things over. Yet shelter at home seems to be more promising material for Zink than finding Mr. Right, where she landed in her last novel. The improvisatory culture that's bound to emerge from all this might be just the thing for her. She writes fast, so we may learn very soon.
December 11, 2019
The End of Hollywood Hegemony
Richard Brody draws an interesting parallel between the Republican Party and Hollywood studios:
At the same time, while directors are freer to be themselves, so are the studios. With franchises and superheroes, they’ve become the brazen cash machines that they’d always been suspected of being, and that the occasional work of great high-budget art belied. The studios have unmasked themselves, in an eerie but apt parallel to the national political unmasking that has occurred in this decade. Just as the Republican Party has, in the age of Donald Trump, been liberated to be openly what it has been functioning as for the past half-century—a white people’s party—so Hollywood has been liberated by superhero and franchise fandom from the effort to make dignifying and self-justifying productions, and the studios are, for the most part, pursuing their commercialism and peddling their illusions unabashed.
In other words, American power is no longer interested in hegemony. Now they just want to be more of what they already are.
September 25, 2019
Tarantino Cruises into Trouble
Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood is said to be Quentin Tarantino’s second to last film, so presumably he’s given a lot of thought to what kind of movie he wants to make. At a time when Hollywood is still under a cloud of a thousand censorious hashtags, Tarantino has decided to create a kind of Playboy Hollywood—fun perhaps for someone like me, but is this right time for that sort of thing? And as long as we’re raising doubts, there’s Tarantino’s mode of spectatorship—picking through video store discards for B movies to worship. Isn’t it out of date at a time when algorithms can pick through the refuse of film history? Tastes in movies have evolved since Reservoir Dogs (1992)Has Tarantino evolved with them? With its publicity stills of Leonardo DiCapro and Brad Pitt sporting cool 1969 clothes and Harvey Keitel expressions, Tarantino seems to be asking for trouble with this movie.
Once Upon a Time takes place in the last days of the TV Western. There were a lot of Westerns on TV in the 1960s, and they were all pretty much like Gunsmoke. These productions employed a lot of actors, who were pretty much interchangeable. A few actors would distinguish themselves to become movie stars—Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen and some others—but Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) is never going to be one of them. He’s learned this by the time the movie starts. It’s the great revelation of his life. All that’s left is the struggle to keep his house in the Hollywood Hills so he can channel surf through the rest of his days. When things look especially bleak he takes a stab at being an Actor. He’s invited to audition for a role in a pilot for yet another TV Western and he puts everything he has into it, which for Rick means rehearing his lines while floating in his pool the night before the audition. The next day at the studio he‘s unnerved by a child actor steeled by her own precociousness. All Rick has going for him is a dim understanding of what desperation will make a man do. Tarantino likes to give veteran actors room to do what they do best; it’s one of his most winning qualities. He trains his camera on DiCaprio driving his character into a paroxysm of self-loathing after screwing up the first take. Rick vows to do better, but in a way a C-minus student might do because he think it’ll get the teacher off his back.
Then, in the second take, Rick nails it. In a slow-burn scene of long tracking shots and moody lighting Rick draws on everything he’s learned about failure, dashes the girl actor to the floor (you can hear the gasps from the #MeToo crowd), and forcefully delivers an ultimatum to the respectable townspeople he’s managed to keep at bay. The ultimatum itself is completely forgettable—something about a demand for money or land or maybe just a drink. What’s memorable is the way Tarantino shoots the scene. It’s supposed to be a TV pilot, but Tarantino shoots it like the auteur he’s always considered himself to be. With its dramatic tracking shots, diegetic lighting, and deep-focus shooting, you don’t see this type of mise-en-scene in television now, let alone in late 1960s television Westerns. You’d swear the dust hanging in the air is the dust they used while shooting High Noon. The scene is a self-referential form of drama, but it’s drama nevertheless.
And that about does it for Rick. Nothing comes of the pilot, so Rick goes off to make Spaghetti Westerns and other trifles for Sergio Corbucci (a real person). For his labors Rick is paid in lira, which isn’t real money, so he returns to Hollywood with nothing but an overdressed Italian wife and the same problems he had before he left.
While Rick is busy in Italy, our full attention now turns to Rick’s stunt double, Cliff Booth, who lives in a battered metallic world lit only by the glow of a movie screen. Cliff glides untroubled through the indignities of driving a battered car and inhabiting a ramshackle trailer. A few B-movie villains materialize and he dispatches them in a bored and distracted way, as if he were in a video game. He’s only adding to his score and not yet saving anyone. Should Marvel Comics ever create a superhero called Whateverman, this would be his origin story.
Without Rick to drive around, Cliff doesn’t have enough to do, so Tarantino pulls the Manson Family off the shelf. Cliff tools around LA in Rick’s Cadillac, bought from the same used car lot all Tarantino characters get their cars. Cliff picks up a teenaged sexpot from the Family. In his younger days Tarantino would have gone for it, making something funny and dangerous out of the encounter. Instead, Cliff brushes the girl aside, declaring he doesn’t get involved with “poontang” (derisive laughter from the #MeToo crowd). From there Tarantino takes the old fud’s route of staging a Western-style showdown at the Spahn Ranch, where the Manson Family lives. Tarantino juggles several scenes of action, among them shots of the Family members lounging around like snakes and Bruce Dern looking like he has no idea what he’s doing in this movie. Even though the dramatic raw materials for the Spahn Ranch scene are richer than the audition scene, Tarantino lacks the classical Hollywood directors’ feel for cross-cutting, so it doesn’t come off as well as the audition scene, which relies heavily on mise-en-scene.
At the end, though, Cliff saves the beautiful Sharon Tate from the savagery to which history subjected her. Tarantino furnishes Cliff with a dose of LSD for the ordeal, but the joke peters out midway through the mayhem. A hero stoned through the climactic action is a Tarantino touch, just as John Ford would burden his gunslinger with a tragic past. You know you’re in a Tarantino movie when you’re cackling with glee at a moment when you should feel pathos.
The credit for saving Sharon Tate’s life accrues to Rick, who is finally recognized as the Rick Dalton, movie star, as if he’s been a blurry presence the past few years and he’s finally come into focus. The last shot of the film shows Rick walking up a hill to party with Sharon and her friends. This is all Rick wants out of life, so happy ending, right?
Yes . . . but. Tarantino can be sour when he means to be profound, and this is one of those moments. The pleasure of Hollywood movies, he says, comes at the cost of rewriting history. (Never mind Tarantino himself has rewritten history in his own films when it pleases him.) Classical Hollywood concerned itself with little else besides wish fulfillment. It’s the kind of point a jerk would make.
Some people have had it with Tarantino. Richard Brody has called Once Upon a Time “obsessively regressive.” A number of people have complained that Sharon Tate is the only meaningful female presence in the movie. Others have shrugged and enjoyed watching DiCaprio and Pitt hang out on screen. All in all, a typical range of reactions to a Tarantino film. Word on the street is that Once Upon a Time is an early favorite for Best Picture Oscar, indicating Hollywood isn’t too concerned about the film’s snarky ending and featherweight female characters. Personally, I thought Once Upon a Time was the first time since Jackie Brown that Tarantino was more interesting than his sources. He’s constructed a male space out of inadequacy rather than fear, his usual practice. This shows growth, I suppose. Still, for his next, last film, I hope he demonstrates he’s continued his film education past the movies he saw by the time he was 19.
May 21, 2019
Worldmaking and Showrunning: The End of Game of Thrones
So I watched the series finale of Game of Thrones on Sunday night. Watching the finale it occurred to me that GoT, like all limited series, ends both too early and too late. Game of Thrones didn't end when it should have because of the differences in its source material and the imperatives of television production.
Adapted from George R.R. Martin's novels, GoT started as the history of an entire world and ended with a reformed libertine dwarf sobbing in front of his brother, "You were the only one who treated me well." At some earlier point in the body count GoT reached the limits of its known world and became a melodrama of interpersonal relationships--with dragons. Perhaps not coincidentally, somewhere around season five GoT switched from a literary adaptation to an original TV production--in other words, from novelistic worldmaking to costume and set design for celebrity actors.
This isn't to say that the novel is a superior medium to television. I want to suggest merely that GoT extended its story beyond what Martin's initial premise could support. The series finale made choices that made sense given developments from the last few seasons but were unsatisfying dramatically. Tyrion is arrested yet again, but he doesn't suffer his long-overdue execution. Experience has softened his self-interest, so he's thrust, almost literally, into a position in which he speaks for the showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Tyrion argues for Bran's ascent to the throne, even though Bran is a flimsy vehicle for such power and narrative weight. In effect, Tyrion posits that storytellers are ultimately more important than the people, which is consistent with Martin's original vision of the series but inconsistent with the ways in which the showrunners have developed the female characters, especially the Stark sisters. His creepiness and lack of charisma aside, Bran is a disappointing king because he isn't a storyteller. Rather, he's a repository of narrative details which he dispenses whenever the narrative wheels threaten to grind to a halt. A novelist would have handled these problems through a third-person narrator. A television series needs a character to provide the same information. Bran is sort of the hand of the showrunners. Ever the narrative functionary, at the conclusion Bran was there to brush aside unresolved conflicts.
Storytelling is important, and so is television production. The narrative sped up to television pace up once the series moved beyond Martin's novels. At some point in season five GoT transitioned fully to television production and, consequently, to spectacle in place of text. In the finale we saw lengthy scenes of Jon and Arya being whisked offstage with barely a word. There's no more meaning to be gleaned from these scenes. The characters have nothing left to say.
The hastiness of the last season and the last episode in particular goes against the essential pleasures of long narratives and continually partial knowledge they offer. In the endgame of GoT Cersei was clearly only a placeholder, her power arising not from change but from delay. Pretty much all she does in season eight is stare our from a balcony, waiting, like us, for a just ruler to appear to bring the story to an end. Daenerys' mad strafing of King's Landing in the penultimate episode moved the series toward this ending, but she never really explains herself, having been consumed by her passions so her lover can be freed from his. She survives only long enough to bellow out her tyrannical plans before meeting her inevitable end.
Westros is spared another bloodthirsty (and colorful) tyrant. Instead, GoT resolved itself into fantasy rather than tragedy, in spectacle rather than mimesis. Sure, there could be a sequel that follows Arya to whatever is west of Westros (or Restros, as someone joked on Twitter), but updating the adventure narrative with its exoticism may prove too great a challenge for HBO's showrunners. It would also be expensive to shoot.
Now that it's over, what to watch next? How about impeachment hearings?
October 30, 2018
August 01, 2018
The Theatre as Arcade, the Arcade as Theatre
David Hodgson, an MArch student at the University of Sheffield, has won the AJ Students Award for his design of a performing arts complex. The centerpiece of the complex is The Arcade Theatre, a space for immersive performances--meaning the audience gets involved. The project description explains, "Learning from the work of Walter Benjamin, who described the arcade as a ‘world in miniature’, the project incorporates idiosyncratic details to trigger people’s curiosity. These ‘oscillations’, as Benjamin called them, are deviations from repetitive elements such as a bright yellow arch, an exuberant light fitting and a black brick studio. The result is a rich environment full of the theatre of everyday life."
I see a lot of projects that purport to be inspired by the Arcades Project. Oftentimes these projects evince a superficial resemblance to Benjamin's writings and the historical structures which they examine. Hodgson, on the other hand, has a much deeper understanding of the Arcades Project. His stress on how structure can shape an experience gets to the heart of Benjamin's interest in the Paris Arcades.
June 21, 2018
May 23, 2018
The Last Pages of Philip Roth
It's possible, although I can't confirm it, that Philip Roth passed away at the very moment I was reading the final pages of Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, a novel supposedly based on her affair with Roth. Maybe it was Roth just checking out when the "indigenous American berserk" had intensified to the point at which language was finally defeated. But I like to think of it as a Rothian moment, collapsing fiction and real life into one.
First, a few personal opinions regarding Roth's work. Of the three great white male writers who, for readers like myself, define American experience in the mid-century--Roth, Saul Bellow and John Updike--I felt the least affinity with Roth and came to him last after my first pass through the best work of Updike then Bellow. However, of the late works of the three I paid serious attention only to Roth. I returned to his work when the vastly darker Sabbath’s Theater appeared in 1995. I would choose that novel as his best over American Pastoral his greatest because it touches upon the origin of Western literature: the singing the virile rage of Achilles. At that novel Roth perfectly balanced his two themes--sex and death, the great preoccupations of the Freudian era.
My personal narrative of Roth's work has Sabbath's Theater (1995), the story of a its lust-wrecked puppeteer, as the transition from the sex books (Portnoy's Complaint, which all its delight in recklessness) to the death books in the remarkable string of late novels that followed. Roth's keen awareness of last days came out in the interview with the imaginary Roth in the last pages of Aysmmetry. It's also present in the interview the actual Philip Roth gave to the New York Times in late 2017. Roth insisted that the interview was conducted by email, and it reads like a written exchange. Every response is carefully wrought, suggesting Roth missed writing more than he let on. He was frank about his age, writing "in just a matter of months I’ll depart old age to enter deep old age — easing ever deeper daily into the redoubtable Valley of the Shadow. Right now it is astonishing to find myself still here at the end of each day."
Roth meant so much to me as a young writer. Anyway, the big 50s-60s literary (male) personalities --Roth, Capote, Mailer, Bellow, Updike, (to a certain degree) Cheever -- all gone. https://t.co/DRgfYetxf9
— Darinstrauss (@Darinstrauss) May 23, 2018
One could also add Tom Wolfe to the list of recently deceased American writers who lived in vanished literary culture, one that was dominated by white males, to be sure, but a culture that also had room for Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. There are no more Sontags or Didions, either. These writers grappled with the same themes a whole generation of Americans faced together: war, civil rights, Freud, the Holocaust, and the transition from urban to suburban life. What are the urgent themes of today? Trump, staring at iPhones too much, and a long list of other stupid things.
It's often been remarked that Roth never one a Nobel Prize or fathered a child, which is odd considering how movingly he wrote about fathers. Perhaps he could write so directly about death because he didn't have children himself, so he had no one to protect. The death of the childless writer feels like the death of a father, a literary achievement greater than a Nobel Prize.
May 07, 2018
From the Lake to the River: Santiago Calatrava's Retreat
"Architect of defunct-Chicago Spire to design riverfront sculpture" reads the headline to Blair Kamin's story about the announcement of a Santiago Calatrava sculpture to be placed between the Chicago River and a new skyscraper. The headline places the story in exactly the right context. In the days before the Great Recession Calatrava designed a 2,000-foot-tall tower to be constructed along Chicago's lake shore. The building, known as the Chicago Spire, was more big than beautiful, but it was undeniably ambitious even though no one had a plausible plan for constructing it.
The red sculpture is a retreat from the Spire in every way possible. The artwork is set in a void on the river instead of commanding the lake front. As an aesthetic object, it's not much. It's all flourish and no presence, like a necklace from Kay Jewelers. Calatrava has given up his pristine white in favor of a red that makes no sense in the context, unless the intent is to make sure the architectural boat tours don't overlook it. Perhaps the sculpture doesn't need to be beautiful, only noticeable. Calatrava likes similes, and one may be at work here: It's as if the Spire had actually been built, then someone set fire to it and a single red ember floated up the river and came to rest.
So far Calatrava can't even bring himself to name the sculpture. In the meantime, the owner of the Spire site is preparing to unveil the design for another building to be erected over the round hole over which the Calatrava's tower was supposed to rise.
One day the docents of the architectural boat tours on the Chicago River will point to the red sculpture and say, "This sculpture was designed by Santiago Calatrava, the architect of the Chicago Spire, which was never built."
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