Colin Marshall

Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999)

Aoyama, a middle-aged single dad whose wife is seven years buried, begins to worry about the loneliness to which he'll be subject when his son moves out of the house. Aided by a producer buddy, Aoyama holds auditions for the female lead in a movie that will never be produced, evaluating the women who show up as not actresses but potential wives. He's drawn to Asami, a fragile-looking 24-year-old with an unverifiable background and an oddly flat affect. Refusing to heed the various warnings that she spells trouble, Aoyama takes Asami out on a few dates where she reveals her abuse-filled childhood. When she later disappears, Aoyama's search for her takes him to a pedophilic ballet studio owner with no feet and a boarded-up bar where, investigating a murder, police once discovered more body parts than bodies missing them.

Meanwhile, a suspicious Asami breaks into Aoyama's house. Discovering a photo of his dead wife, she flies into a rage of jealousy, puts a paralyzing agent into his drink and hides. By the time Aoyama's motionless on the floor, Asami's got her bag of needles and piano wire primed, and she's ready to perform the world's worst acupuncture session on what she assumes is yet another heartless love-'em-and-leave-'em film industry playa.

* * *

Audition is a horror movie, but it's better described as a member of a very specific subgenre of horror: torture porn. That's the fans' term, not mine, though the name pretty much says it all. It's a somewhat illustrious cinematic tradition, at least within the horror context, going at least as far back as Hideshi Hino's 1985 The Flower of Flesh and Blood, which once spooked a coked-out Charlie Sheen a party so much that he called the cops. (I don't mean to imply that it's just a Japanese thing, either; Australia, for instance, gave us Wolf Creek not long ago, in which the torturer is a sort of amoral Mick Dundee.)

I'm not a big horror guy and certainly not a big horror subgenre guy, but these seem to be the prime directives of torture porn (TP): first, include as much gore as possible. Second — and this truly is secondary to the first directive — make the over-the-top gore look as real as possible, so it's a believable, visceral experience for the audience. Third, think up as many creative, unusual ways as possible to present that gore. If you can do all three better than the last guy, you win. If any genre is amenable to quantitative measurement, this is it.

So in a forum as driven to push the envelope as TP, I'm not sure how high Miike's nearly decade-old Audition ranks anymore. Its tendency to cause audience faintings and walkouts drew a fair bit of press in 1999, but after watching the movie, I can't imagine doing either. Maybe I'm just one jaded, desensitized S.O.B., but the experience reminded me being twelve and looking over a friend's collection of 1960s issues of Playboy, all of which his grandpa sent him: "This is supposed to get a reaction out of me?"

But even though it made the likes of Rob Zombie and John Landis turn away in shock and revulsion, it seems pretty clear to me that the film is crossover TP, retaining conventions of its breed but doing so in a form that brings it closer to the mainstream. Whereas The Flower makes with the torture just about from the get-go, Audition packs it all in right at the end, which allows for a horror technique that, unlike most horror techniques, I find effective: the slow build. (See The Shining for a perfect example of the slow build in action.) If you were to watch the movie knowing nothing about it, you'd believe it was a romantic comedy all the way through the first act: lonely pop, precocious son, goofy friend, zany scheme — it's all there. In the second, you'd start thinking that it was maybe more of a psychological thriller. In the third, it seems to shape up as a regular Scary Movie and then, bam, TP until the credits roll. Bold move.

I've been going back and forth about whether I like that Audition was shot on crappy video instead of film. Though the producers may have been forced to use it for budgetary reasons, the video actually lends an effective something's-not-right air to the proceedings, even when still in the rom-com stage. You know that what you're watching shouldn't look like a twenty-year-old deep-cable soap opera, but you're not quite sure why. And of course the chintzy means of production tie the movie back to its sleazy underground TP heritage; time was, you couldn't watch yourself a TP without it being some grainy, wobbly tenth-generation VHS dub.

I'm going on here like I'm some kind of knowledgable TP fan, maybe an enthusiastic casual follower, but I'm not; I find the stuff fairly unappealing, not for the obvious gross-out reasons — I can't really suspend disbelief in the cinema anymore, so they're obviated — but because extended torture scenes, much like extended fight scenes, extended chase scenes and extended musical numbers, are dull. They hit one note and have nowhere to go but to hit it louder and louder until you press fast forward, which I would do if pressing fast forward was not against my cultural moral code. (I don't do walkouts, either.) It doesn't help that the characters involved in the torture are so poorly developed that the action is impossible to invest in; even Aoyama is a cipher, though by TP standards he's basically Hamlet.

Thematically, the movie isn't much richer, hinging as it does on the "abused child perpetuates the horror" trope, which, on the hierarchy of narrative originality, ranks right there with "hotshot maverick and by-the-book veteran learn to cooperate". It's somewhat intruguing that the child is a girl and, rather than become a stripper — as would be the case in our own universe — she becomes a torturer, and there are a handful of impressive filmmaking choices that pop up now and again, but the unavoidable conclusion is that, while Audition is decent in a handful of ways, it's not particularly, y'know, good. But it did manage to smuggle a piece of genuine TP into a wide audience by wrapping it in an otherwise garden-variety thriller, so that's a fun stunt.

Ghost World (Daniel Clowes, 1997)

Enid and Rebecca, a pair of cynical late-teenage hipsters in the mid-1990s, go around peoplewatching, looking for ironically enjoyable diners, and snarking on everything they see. When Enid kind of sort of starts thinking about maybe going to college, a rift opens between the two friends.

* * *

 

Ghost World is recommendable for a whole bunch of mild reasons: it's a well-observed slice-of-life, it's well-paced, and the art (in black, white and some kind of light blue I can't describe very well) is neat. But perhaps Clowes' greatest achievement is the two main characters, who also happen to be the two of the most loathsome characters I've ever encountered, fictitious or otherwise.

Madelaine called Enid and Rebecca "modern monsters," a description accurate enough to warrant my appropriation. They're ironigirls, bundles of attitude all posed, horn-rimmed and faux-jaded with no place to go. What do they do with their time? Nothing so square as as school or work: they hang out in eateries, badmouth their mutual acquaintances and eyeball grotesques all day long. Enid is thrilled when they happen upon a dingy 1950s-themed restaurant ("This place is god") or when they see a hunched old man with wilted flowers ("It's so cute! I'm dying!"). After donning a leather jacket, spiking and dying her hair green, putting in a safety pin as an earring and cuffing her jeans above her Chuck Taylors, Enid gives the following monologue, revealing much about her worldview:

It's not like I was "going punk" or something... I'm not fucking thirteen... anybody with half a fucking brain could see that I wasn't dressed like some modern hardcore asshole... it was like an old 1977 punk look... [ ... ] I wish I could just come up with one perfect look and stick with it... like what if I bought some entire matching 1930s wardrobe and wore that every day... the trouble with that is you look really stupid and pretentious if you go to a mall or a Taco Bell or something... and you have to act a certain way and drive an old car and everything and it's a real pain in the ass!

(All the ellipses read better on the page, I swear.)

And no, I don't think Enid's fixation on the cultivation of a "look" is supposed to be sympathetic, but... yow. She reminds me of why, even though I wasn't drawn to the mainstream kids in high school, I also found the self-proclaimed outsiders repellent, focused as they were on outwardly defining themselves without a whole hell of a lot of inward self to define in the first place. The quest for a lost childhood record aside, there's not much in Ghost World about music, but I can totally picture Enid and/or Rebecca — Rebecca goes with the flow a bit more smoothly, except when she doesn't — being the type for whom it's critically important to demarcate precisely the dividing line between the music she does and does not listen to. I was very nearly the same way — though, I would submit, only at a fraction of the normal magnitude — at their age, but now I look back and laugh: could there ever have been a time when our lives were so small that we had to cling so desperately to the identity loaned us by the genre of organized sound we put in our backgrounds? (Or by the primary color of our hair? Or by the brand of safety pin in our ears?)

There is nothing in the world that could induce me to spend a day with real-life versions of these two, but when they're flat on the page I can get just enough breathing room. (And breathing room is precisely what I needed to read the book, looking up and away as I did every so often just to momentarily distract myself from these personalities with the world around me.) It's a testament to Clowes' skill as an artist and writer that, despite their awfulness, Enid and Rebecca don't come across as one-dimensional strident slackers; they're neither his piñatas nor his mouthpieces, though they may contain ingredients of both. Just as Enid and Rebecca are well-rendered and fascinating in a sort of unappealing way, so is Clowes' work as a whole: just excellently put together and highly compelling, but simultaneously repulsive on a deep, hard-to-articulate level. It comes through in a visceral way in the visuals: Clowes is one of the most skilled artists working in "alternative" comics and it shows, but he draws everything in this subtly ugly way that seems designed to seep into the reader's subconscious. Witness Enid's bulbous nose, jutting philtrum, slight overbite and the quease-inducing sneery edge to most of her facial expressions — and she's supposed to be one of the attractive characters.

I'm not going to be among the first thousand to make a Catcher in the Rye comparison, but here goes: these two kids are kinda like Holden Caulfield, huh? Am I right or am I right? The only problem is that, because Holden Caulfield is a guy, I could spend the entire length of Catcher in the Rye fantasizing about beating the living crap out of him, especially if he were to utter the word "phony" just one more time. (Friends ask, "But couldn't you identify with Holden's attitudes?" God, no.) Enid and Rebecca are girls, so as a nonalcoholic, I can't beat them up. And to Clowes' credit, he avoids creating protagonists that are just bundles of psychodramas. Holden Caulfield is really a concept, and hey, there's nothing at all the matter with beating up a concept. Enid and Rebecca, on the other hand, exist as reasonably nuanced, well-defined people in their own world — distasteful, inconsequential people, but people nonetheless. That's not something you can count on getting in any given narrative, let along those of the comic book variety.

(Also, I credit Ghost World with cluing me in to the term "homeless tan"; I'd been looking for a descriptor for the sort of tan you see on the homeless, and now I've got one.)

After Dark (Haruki Murakami, 2004)

Mari, a young, geeky student of Chinese, is reading at Denny's in the middle of the night when she's approached by Takahashi, trombonist-about-to-turn-lawyer with whom she once went on an uneventful date. Later, apparently on Takahashi's reference, she's asked for help by the former-female-pro-wrestler manager of a nearby love hotel ("love ho"): some angry salaryman just beat up a Chinese prostitute in one of the rooms, stole her clothes and scrammed. Mari helps the girl get back to her "manager", chats with the love ho staff for a while, then goes on a sort of miniature date with Takahashi.

Meanwhile, Mari's legendarily beautiful sister Eri sleeps in her room as a masked man watches her from the screen of her unplugged television set. She's been asleep for months and shows no signs of stirring. For a while she finds herself seemingly awake, alone on the room on the television screen, but then she returns to her bed. An exhausted Mari joins her.

* * *
After Dark begins with this sentence: "Eyes mark the shape of the city."

Aw, sheezis. If I didn't know this was a Murakami book — or at least just a Japanese book, which lets me explain it away as a linguistic incompatibility — I'd have set it right down after reading those first seven words. I cannot stand — cannot stand — these sentences you find in literary novels whose components seem to add up to a coherent whole but don't. "Eyes mark the shape of a city"? I mean, zuh? So are someone's eyes tracing the outline of a city, maybe? Or is someone using their laser-beam eyes to etch a city skyline into something? Or is someone passing a road sign depicting a pair of eyes, which somehow signifies the approach of the shape of the a distant city? As Lisa Simpson once said in response to a theater marquee advertising a "Yahoo Serious festival", "I know all those words, but that sign makes no sense."

But this is a Murakami book, so I hung in there, desperate for another hit of his calm, precise prose. I'm happy to report that "Eyes mark the shape of the city" is the only "Eyes mark the shape of a city" sentence in the entire book; all the rest of them activate actual brain states. Good brain states, too; this is a much better book than the break-even Kafka on the Shore.

Now, these aren't meant to be reviews, per se, so I'll try to keep the evaluative stuff to a minimum, but it's worth noting that Murakami gets a much more enjoyable result from a structure very similar to that of his previous novel: two threads, one mostly realistic and one mostly surrealistic, that ultimately converge. (I doubt I need to indicate which, here, is which.) Also as with Kafka, I found the realistic thread grippingly well-observed and the unrealistic thread kind of enh; every chapter about Eri I took as a breather between the real chapters, the ones about her much more conscious sister.

The book's weaker half does have style to recommend it, though; in it, Murakami switches to a pumped-up screenplay-like prose that describes how the reader would be viewing the "action" — primarily a motionless, expressionless man and a sleeping girl, after all, though not solely — were it depicted in a film rather than in text. For example:

Just now, it seemed there might have been a tiny movement at the corner of Eri Asai's mouth. No, we might not even be able to call it a movement. A tremor so microscopic we can't be sure we even saw it. It might have been just a flicker of the screen. A trick of the eyes. A visual hallucination aroused by our desire to see some kind of change. To ascertain the truth, we focus more intently on the screen.

As if sensing our will, the camera lens draws nearer to its subject. Eri's mouth appears in close-up. We hold our breath and stare at the screen, waiting patiently for whatever is to come next. A tremor of the lips again. A momentary spasm of the flesh. Yes, the same movement as before. Now there is no doubt. It was no optical illusion. Something is beginning to happen inside Eri Asai.

He's an ace at this, which, considering his descriptive strength and ability to conjure up a mood even in more standard writing, comes as no big surprise; were I in the mood, I bet I could construct some grandiose argument about how Murakami is "artistically" a filmmaker, but just happens to manipulate words instead of celluloid, that he makes "prose films", etc. But I'll leave that one as a freebie for the lit grad students out there. You're welcome.

"Evocative prose" is a fairly common phrase to associate with Murakami, and on reflection, yep, evocativeness is his forté. As an exercise in sketching the feel of life for those who operate nocturnally in the big city, After Dark succeeds: the alienated student, the quitting jazz musician, the retired brawler, the runaway love ho staff, the intense programmer; they're all here, living and working in that isolated, focused-yet-floaty way you do when it's 3:00 in the morning. And at no extra charge, Murakami'll throw in a whole other section where, in contrast to the characters who stay awake when society expects them to be asleep, one character stays asleep when society expects her to stay awake! And if you call now, you'll get some Ginsu knives too.

Also, since the story linearly covers the time period of 11:56 p.m. through 6:52 a.m. and is told in only 191 pages, you can read it in faster than real time. There aren't many books you can say that about. (I suppose Nicholson Baker got there first.)

* * *
Though I'm not enough of a transhumanist to convince myself that I'll one day eliminate sleep entirely, I've long fantasized about the idea of a 24-hour world. (This, alongside being able to freeze time — which Nicholson Baker also took on, though he fumbled it — ranks as my top fantasy.) In a 24-hour world, no business or public service closes. No service is ever unavailable. Some people work the standard 9-5, sure, but others work the 5-1, or the 1-9, or the 9, 11, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 10; they work any schedule imaginable, in fact. With human activity spread around the clock, road traffic and human crowding during the rush hours both thin out. There's less crush, and there's also less desolation; no more walking down dark, deserted streets, because at least a decent fraction of the population will still be up and around taking care of business at any time, no matter how 3:00 a.m.-y. Best of all, we do away with the dreadful "lunch hour", which today puts you in line behind ten khaki'd, polo-shirted guys at the Quizno's at noon. Man, I hate the lunch hour.

Outside of NYC — and even in the Big Apple, the average sketchiness of those out and about shoots up, as it were, during the wee hours — America hasn't done much to instantiate my fantasy. But where has the 24-hour lifestyle made inroads? Tokyo. From all I've heard, if you're going to be nocturnal, do it there, where goods and services come your way all night and all day, and not just at Denny's, which is open 24-hours even in, say, Muskogee. Fear of looking like an animu geek is one reason why I study Korean rather than Japanese, but man, if Seoul doesn't get with the program...

Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008)

In 1974, Philippe Petit and a team of assistants executed his clandestinely planned, elaborately constructed dream: stringing a wire between the roofs of New York's Twin Towers, then walking on the wire between the buildings. Then walking across it again. And again. And again. And again and again and again and again.

* * *

Since watching Man on Wire, I've noticed two highly apropos phrases printed on t-shirts:

1. "If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun"
2. "Art is what you can get away with"

Both lines express a concept at the very core of Philippe Petit's being. This is a man who walked a tightrope over the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Sydney Harbo(u)r Bridge, the Louisiana Superdome, the Hennepin County Government Center and the space between the Palais de Chaillot and the Eiffel Tower. And of course the WTC, after which he got carted off to jail, was let out, and then immediately did some girl. This is a man who has well and truly lived. Compared to Philippe Petit, the rest of us are all just breathing corpses.

Though I have no wire-walking aspirations, I have much sympathy for the sort of character Petit is: the man who must live the dream at any cost. He describes first seeing an image of the then-unbuilt Twin Towers in a dentist's office magazine, knowing that he would have to "conquer" those towers and then, "under the cover of sneeze," discreetly tearing out the page and running, forgetting all about his appointment in the process. When the towers went up, he launched into every sort of research, preparation and practice he could think up, recruiting a bunch of buddies, girls and ne'er-do-wells and making several trips (signified in the film by a tacky bit of CGI repeated ad nauseam) back and forth between Paris and New York. Due to unforeseen teammate flakiness, technical issues and security problems, initial attempts crash and burn. Petit, of coruse, always gets right back up on the horse, steadfastly determined to walk between those towers. At one point, remembering reaching the roof of one of the buildings for the first time in order to size up the challenge, Petit recalls saying that "what we want to do is impossible, that's sure. So let's start working." A man after my own psychodramas, you might say.

Discussion of Petit's story is, unfortunately, extremely amenable to cliché, but then again, it's also a reminder of why the applicable concepts became clichés in the first place. Motivation for accomplishment of any kind is often described not as the need to do something, but the need to not not do it, and that's borne out once again here. Petit recounts that first shift of weight from the safety of the roof to the untested wire, saying that he thought he'd probably die, but that he had no choice but to step forward: he couldn't not do the walk. And I think it's the same for anyone who does stuff, even if not similarly life-threatening stuff. Ask an accomplished novelist why they write novels — I've actually done this, so it's not total non-empirical baloney — and they'll tell you that they can't not write novels. Ask a comic artist, a scientist, an entrepreneur or a musician the same question, and you'll get the same brand of response: they couldn't stand not to make comics, do research, found businesses or play music. That's drive.

The other big but meaningful cliché comes toward the end of the documentary in the form of a surprisingly eloquent speech from Petit. (English isn't the man's first language and he's not exactly a wordsmith, so it's stunning what he busts out when he feels like it.) I can't hope to replicate it here, but his thrust is that, for him, life on the wire is the only life worth living. He has over and over again risked it all to create something magnificent, and it's not just that the magnificence was the payoff for putting his life on the line; chancing, say, a 110-story fall is itself part of the payoff. When Petit implies that we've all got our own wires of various forms to walk and we're missing out on existence itself by staying off of them, I found myself a thousand percent in agreement. As I've referenced here before, risk is proportional to payoff. From a strictly humanistic point of view, pursuing one's goals, realizing one's dreams, identifying and instantiating the things that one must bring into this world — that's all life is.

If I can't quote the wire-walker verbatim, I can at least quote another sage of our time, Homer Jay Simpson:

I can't live the button-down life like you. I want it all: the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles. Sure, I might offend a few of the bluenoses with my cocky stride and musky odors. Oh, I'll never be the darling of the so-called city fathers, who cluck their tongues, stroke their beards, and talk about "what's to be done with this Homer Simpson?"

* * *
2008

1. James Marsh's Man on Wire
2. Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind
3. Randall Miller's Bottle Shock

The Book Against God (James Wood, 2003)

Thomas Bunting, an aging grad student who's spent seven years working none too hard on his Ph.D. dissertation on Epicureans and English philosophy, finds himself distracted by a side project, The Book Against God. The BAG, as he calls it, is a sprawling cobbling-together of quotes from religious thinkers intermingled with commentary built on scraps from Thomas' own personal life, all of which add up to, presumably, an argument against the existence of god. His lack of progress, his shabby lifestyle and his constant lying drive away his concert pianist wife, and so poor Tom is left to drink, worry about the Ph.D., obsess over the BAG and tangle with his vicar father, who soon dies.

* * *

My loose policy is not to write up books I read in preparation for interviews, because these posts are meant to ensure that I think about my cultural experiences and if I'm going to speak to the author of a work, I'm damn sure to have given the work some thought along the way. It is a loose policy, though — like all of my policies — and I'm going to break it here. One reason The Book Against God deserves a writeup is, well, the writing. My word, is it ever well-written; it's as if the book was somehow penned by the Anglophone world's foremost book critic. Oh wait.

Thomas Bunting wavers between atheism, hardcore agnosticism and phony seeking; he's not about to follow in his father's footsteps, even though his dad's own belief is apparently riddled with Swiss cheese-y holes, opt-out clauses and grains of salt. And yet he spends most of the book grappling with his and others' ideas about god: does he just disagree with Kierkegaard, or does he really disagree with Kierkegaard? Is there almost certainly no god, or is there very almost certainly no god? This is evidently a huge crisis for the poor philosopher-in-training, though I found it hard to identify, perhaps because I'm not a vicar's son myself.

The younger Bunting's struggle reminds me of a post (which I can't find) that Steven Levitt made on the Freakonomics blog. He wondered aloud who the audience could be for the then-recent spate of popular atheism books — Hitchens' God is Not Great, Dawkins' The God Delusion, whatever that smirking Ben-Stiller-lookin' guy had out at the time — because the wave struck him in much the same way as would a spate of popular anti-birdwatching books. The books against birdwatching would never be picked up by a birdwatcher, and who but birdwatchers care about birdwatching, so what effect could they possibly have? Levitt couldn't see himself reading any of the pop-atheism releases because, just as he never thinks about birdwatching, he somehow manages to get through his days never once thinking about god.

I'm the same way: not pro-god, certainly, but with no reason to be anti-god, either. I mean, sure, wars of religion and human sacrifices and 9/11 and all that, but in those cases it's not so much the deities invoked I'm against as the meaningless slaughter. God simply doesn't enter my equation; in fact, I deny entry to any entity that's undetectable by definition, because why bother? It's not belief in god that strikes me as nonsensical; it's having any position on god whatsoever. Not only does my brain not use the concept of god, I can't imagine any set of circumstances, no matter how far-fetched, that would lead it to start using one. Yes, quite a lot has been written about god over the centuries, but because many people have thought many thoughts about something doesn't convince me to do the same. Penning a book for or against god seems to be to be a waste of one's precious time and energy.

So Thomas' internal battle doesn't resonate with me, but Wood tells it with such wit and art that I'd strongly recommend The Book Against God nonetheless. It so happens that Wood is also the son of sternly Anglican parents and, so I understand it, an atheist or at least an agnostic himself. According to the chattering classes, he put literature on the pedestal of belief vacated by god — for Wood, the book really was against god — but I'm not sure how far I'd carry that assertion. I do wonder why belief itself remains such an issue for him, though; I'm just mystified that it looms large enough to have motivated him to write such a good novel.

Chilsu and Mansu (Kwang-su Park, 1988)

After Chilsu, a movie-billboard-painter-slash-slacker tells his boss to take this job and shove it, he joins up with Mansu, another ad-painter he happened to meet on his previous job. Chilsu and Mansu begin living (in Mansu's hovel) and working (on gigantic wall ads and such) together. Despite their poverty, Chilsu pursues a girl he meets at Burger King, pretending to be an art student and generally just lying, lying and lying some more to whoever he suspects can enable his desultory lifestyle.

Mansu thinks he's scored a coup when he lands a commission to paint a rooftop beer billboard overlooking a busy Seoul street, but his mood falls when he finds out that his (alleged) onetime commie-sympathizer father won't be let out of jail for his 60th birthday. Chilsu discovers that the object of his obsession is already promised away, which has just about the same effect on him. After the foreman of the beer ad job browbeats them especially blowhardily, Chilsu and Mansu climb on top of the sign and loudly vent their frustrations at the urbanites below, inadvertently drawing a massive crowd of police, rescue workers and rubber-neckers under the impression that the painters are threatening suicide.

* * *

This movie fits into an East Asian cinematic tradition that I've only recently begun to identify: I call it "Society Done Me Wrong". (Think of it as a blues song.) The best example of this "genre" is Takeshi Kitano's Kids Return, which boils down to a polemic about how the Japanese people's stubborn lack of enjoyment of their lives really harshes on the younger generation's mellow. Chilsu and Mansu has more to do with social problems than individual ones, but it's still a statement film, with the pluses and minuses inherent to the form.

Both main characters spend the runtime more or less crushed under the heel of the collective: it's got Mansu's dad locked away, and it's somehow keeping Chilsu from using his artistic skills for anything that will even cover his train fare. Then things gets worse when it their inconsequential outcry against the injustice of it all as a threat. Like so many Korean movie characters, Chilsu and Mansu can't catch a break; they're simply tossed around by forces beyond their control. The thrust? The system sucks, man.

I don't necessarily think the film is wrong; history shows that the authoritarian regime ruling South Korea in and before Chilsu and Mansu's time was clumsy and repressive, as authoritarian regimes are. Under a military government only arthritically adopting democratic leanings, the system does suck. Still, it couldn't have been worse than the one on the other side of the DMZ, though as vile as communism is, keeping pinkos like Mansu Senior behind bars just makes a government look insecure and faintly ridiculous. How society is failing the layabout Chilsu is less clear, but it reminds me of the strident complaints of the three girls, now highly unaccomplished middle-aged women, in Michael Apted's Up documentaries: "They told us there would be opportunities." ORLY?

Maybe this has something to do with the wild frontier culture of my country, but "Society failed me" sounds in my mind like an ill-formed sentence. It's like saying the ground failed you; failed to do what that's expected of it, exactly? I guess this counts as another rift between me and East Asian culture: first it was an inability to identify with crushing family obligations, now it's an inability to identify with expecting something from the nebulous, shifting entity that is "society". In Mansu's shoes, I would say that a specific entity — the court — is actively wronging me, or at least my dad. In Chilsu's shoes, I would say that, yeah, I'm sort of a screwup.

The movie's a lot of fun, though. Looks as nice as every other Korean feature I've seen, plus the soundtrack features "Never Gonna Give You Up", which I didn't realize was a hit over there. I unironically listened to that album a lot back in high school — it once stayed in my car's CD player for a personal-record-breaking three weeks — so I'm a little disappointed the song is now an internet meme. (It's okay, though, since the album's title single is, to my mind, a better track. "The Love Has Gone", though, was the one that had me repeatedly stabbing the reverse button so I could hear it again and again.)

David Boring (Daniel Clowes, 2000)

Having spent a good deal of his mental bandwidth determining his ideal of feminine beauty — which just so happens to directly coincide with the appearance of a cousin he spent one summer kissin' — the titular nineteen-year-old security guard happens upon Wanda, a woman who fits the bill and then some. After she disappears without explanation and an unidentifiable assailant shoots David non-fatally, the Boring family — sans the long-absent father, who David never met and has only a single issue of a superhero comic the man drew in the 50s as proof of his existence — and David's lesbian roomate Dot take a trip to their island vacation home, where they find the mother's cousin's family staying. An old uncle later shows up claiming that nuclear war has commenced, causing things to get pretty Lord of the Flies on the island: one member of the group drowns, the food runs out, accusations are flung.

Eventually, David winds up back on the non-nuclearly-devastated mainland, dating a vegetarian who lacks the posterior of size that he so desires. He discovers that the guy who shot him is a professor who also fell for Wanda, and after meeting and commiserating it becomes clear to them that she's one of those girls who presents herself as the picture of purity — to each of the many dozens of guys she's run off with since, like, thirteen. Investigating Wanda's background, David then falls for her older sister Judy, who's essentially a less flaky version of her sibling. David and the professor tack Wanda down in a nearly-abandoned cult commune, some cops get on David's trail, and David ultimately finds himself back in the island house, kissin' his cousin.

* * *

Madelaine brought home a bunch of Daniel Clowes comics last week, and out of curiosity I read them all. I'd been aware of the guy's work for years, but for some reason always preferred that of his close artistic cousin (and Marketplace of Ideas guest) Peter Bagge. My judgment so far is that Clowes, like Bagge, has mastered the skill of portraying loners and losers in alternative comics, but he draws more realistically and writes less realistically. Bagge combines wildly cartoonish artwork with plots that could happen to your roommate; Clowes combines almost grotesquely real-looking artwork with plots that only kind of make sense.

Consider David Boring. Though in these writeups I prefer to provide the premise of the work in question rather than the complete story, that wasn't really possible here; I couldn't have just described the background of the book and let your imagination go to work, because you wouldn't have imagined anything remotely resembling the comic's actual narrative. I suppose I could have written "and then a bunch of weird stuff happens" after Wanda drops out of sight and David gets plugged, but that seems somehow... unsatisfying.

Not that the story really adds up, even in full. I can't help but read a lot of Clowes' work as autobiographical — the details feel a little too authentic, and they appear in the lives of characters with uncanny biographical similarity to the author — but the events of David Boring are too weird to have happened to anyone, except maybe in a dream. The trouble with stories like these is that they don't stick, at least to me; I had to consult Wikipedia to make sure I even had the plot right, which really doesn't bode well for my ability to pull themes out of the thing.

I don't know how much this says about me, but the most resonant one I could identify was the straight man's struggle against — or, as the case may be, capitulation to — his precisely dialed-in preferences in the female form. (Maybe women and gay men have equivalent problems, but I can't claim direct experience.) By this I don't mean male enslavement to the pursuit of female beauty in general; that's a way-overblown idea, and besides, it doesn't feel like enslavement from the inside. I mean the way that some guys can define to the smallest practical level of detail what they can't do without in a woman. (As opposed to the guys for whom anything biologically female with a body temperature of eighty degrees or more means game on — I don't understand those guys.) Such a practice brings the practitioner face to face with one big question: better to compromise the ideal in the name of expediency, or hang on through the long, hard slog in order to satisfy your every little requirement?

In most cases, I don't think the ideal these men hold is that of a centerfold: blonde, DD cup, turn-ons: sense of humor and long walks on the beach, turn-offs: war. In fact, the appeal of having specific preferences is in part that they are idiosyncratic. David Boring describes his ideal woman thusly:

I am cursed by two things: an unsympathetic eye for perfection and a blossoming knowledge of my own feminine ideal, specifically: the head (round eyes and mouth, a jaunty arc to the nose bridge), smallish and ovoid, leading with a particular tilt to an extended neck, swooping outward at the shoulders. A substantial carriage and arms; smallish round breasts; a convex stomach dividing powerful hips which, from side to back, describe a meaty semi-circle; proceeding downward to thick, girlish legs and insignificant feet.

This ideal conflicts with that held by his quick-to-die buddy Whitey: "gaunt, fashionable and dumb." Neither much coincide with my even-more-detailed vision of the Perfect Woman^TM, probably because I don't have one: I've got more like a thousand small preferences that don't add up to a coherent whole. (None conflict directly, though most don't correllate; it's like wanting a car with pop-up headlights, a t-top, an ultra-specialized sound system and an unturned odometer.) But I'm a pragmatic sort of dude, so this sort of thing doesn't bend my life out of shape as it does David's.

It's clear that his pursuit of the ideal is what gets David into this surrealistic mess. But it's less clear that he could do otherwise: I mean, it's his ideal. When you've got the ideal in the crosshairs, you don't care about the consequences of locking on. And after being knocked around emotionally, roughed up, shot twice, chased by the fuzz and knocked out with a baseball bat, he winds up with the woman who formed his ideal, the original, so the hassle was presumably well worth it. So listen well, kids: follow your dream, but know that the path may grow nightmarish and that you might be satisfied only in an indirect way. But don't worry; it'll be a big, indirect, marginally incestuous way.

Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami, 2002)

Fifteen-year-old "Kafka" Tamura runs away from his Tokyo home to the southern island of Shikoku. There he finds himself drawn to a small library, at which he eventually becomes the live-in caretaker. He grows attracted to the library's middle-aged director who was once a pop star, but comes to fear that he's hastening the realization of the Oedipal prediction once made for him by his distant, hostile sculptor father, who's found dead several days after Kafka's flight. Meanwhile, a simple old man named Nakata, who after an unexplained WWII-era incident as a kid lost the ability to read or do much of any high level thinking but gained the ability to talk to cats, happens upon a bizarre character while searching for a neighbor's lost pet. The man, who calls himself and is dressed as Johnnie Walker, demands that Nakata kill him. When Nakata does the job, he flees in fright. With the aid of a friendly, directionless truck driver, he too goes all the way to Shikoku, where an indescribable impulse sent him in order to perform a task that it won't explain.

* * *

There's only so much I can do to summarize a Haruki Murakami premise. Some aspects are well-worn and thus easy to describe — a kid running away from home, that's a tale as old as time — but others are... less so. I've had a few conversations recently about how Steven Spielberg and Stephen King — bear with me, now — trade on much the same storytelling skill: the ability to place the recognizably mundane next to the thrillingly outlandish and somehow have it actually work. One paragraph you're reading about a character eating Cheerios^TM — hey, you eat Cheerios^TM! — and the next they're getting eviscerated by a sewer clown who is also the embodiment of evil. In one scene a kid's calling his older brother "penis breath", and in the next he's flying across the moon with a wrinkled alien in the basket of his bike. I'm thinking that the total amount of implausibility the author of any narrative work can get away with is a constant, and that if you're going to throw in spherical monsters that eat the past or have a mothership touch down in Richard Dreyfuss' yard, then you need to ratchet up the realism of all the other parts to compensate. Murakami pulls much the same maneuver, though rather than juxtaposing the hyper-real with the bald-faced nonsense, he treats the claptrap as if it were the stuff of everyday life.

Describing the fantastic in matter-of-fact terms is, I hear, the stock in trade of magic realism, a genre I'm not sure how to feel about. On one hand, I really like the idea of tweaking an aspect or two of our world and then following, rigorously, all the consequences of that change. (The very best science fiction does this.) On the other hand, a lot of the magic realism that gets held up as literature is still, at its core, escapist junk. I'm not particularly friendly to the idea of "escapism"; if you want to escape your life that badly, you're better off spending your time improving it into something you don't want to escape rather than reading gimmicky novels. But I digress.

Getting into Murakami, I first read Norwegian Wood, the none-dare-call-it-autobiographical novel that rocketed him to a level of fame he found so uncomfortable that he had flee his country. I loved the book because of its calmly detailed picture of a time, place and person — the 1960s, Japan, a drama student — of which I have no personal experience. Murakami fans tell me that, while its detached, observant narrator is very similar to those of the man's other work (nonfiction included), Norwegian Wood is unrepresentative of the rest of his oeuvre because every event in it could conceivably occur in the real world. And that got me wondering, because his straightforward realism was what I most liked about that book; told fancifully, I probably would have forgotten it.

Kafka on the Shore is supposed to be a more Murakami-like Murakami novel, and if "Murakami-like" means "peppered with weirdness", then I believe it. The story's primary thread begins promisingly, quickly developing one of my favorite themes, solitary self-reinvention. (See also The Count of Monte Cristo or, more recently, Mark Sarvas' Harry, Revised, which is full of Monte Cristo references.) The young Kafka settles into an appealing-sounding — to me, anyway — routine of weight training and library reading:

Every morning I do some easy stretching exercises in my room, and when the time rolls around I go to the gym and run through the usual circuit training. Always the same amount of weight, the same number of reps. No more, no less. I take a shower and wash every inch of me. I weigh myself, to make sure my weight's staying steady. Before noon I take the train to the Komura Library. Exchange a few words with [desk clerk] Oshima when I give him my backpack, and when I pick it up. Eat lunch out on the veranda. And read. When I finish The Arabian Nights I tackle the complete works of Natsume Soseki — there're still a couple of his novels I haven't read yet. At five I exit the library. So most of the day I'm in the gym or the library. As long as I'm in one of those two, nobody seems to worry about me. Chances are pretty slim a kid skipping school would hang out in either one. I eat dinner at the diner in front of the station. I try to eat as many vegetables as I can, and occasionally buy fruit from a stand and peel it using the knife I took from my father's desk. I buy cucumbers and celery, wash them in the sink at the hotel, and eat them with mayonnaise. Sometimes I pick up a container of milk from the mini-mart and have a bowl of cereal.

So far, so good. But the chapters pertaining to Kafka alternate with the chapters pertaining to Nakata. After a few chapters detailing the incident that left him unable to read or write but able to talk to cats, we get straight to, well, Nakata talking to cats:

"Hello there," the old man called out.

The large, elderly black tomcat raised its head a fraction and wearily returned the greeting in a low voice.

"A very nice spell of weather we're having."

"Um," the cat said.

"Not a cloud in the sky."

"... for the time being."

"Is the weather going to take a turn for the worse, then?"

"It feels like it'll could up toward evening." The black cat slowly stretched out a leg, then narrowed its eyes and gave the old man another good long look.

Murakami has gotten mad props for making the cat-talk sound so much like regular human chit-chat as opposed to something more whimsical, but I dunno. Finishing the early Kafka chapters, I began automatically steeling myself for the slog of the Nakata chapter to follow. It's not as if I have anything explicitly against making small talk with felines, stabbing guys dressed as liquor mascots or hitchhiking toward a stone with mystical powers, but neither could I invest in such proceedings. I kept thinking to myself, "But this stuff is all just made-up!" Now, since this is a work of fiction, Kafka's adventures are made-up as well, but at least a boy traveling to a distant prefecture, working out, chilling at the library and eating veggies is a plausible thing.

Alas, the plausibility frays. When Kafka moves into the library, the ghost of the fifteen-year-old version of Miss Saeki, the director, appears in his bedroom every night. This made me groan — ghost stories are lame — but I kept on keepin' on. Then Kafka really does fall in with the fiftysomething Miss Saeki, which was naturally pretty intriguing but outweighed by the carnival on Nakata's side: a rain of leeches, a rain of some other kind of creature, a magical omnipotent pimp dressed as Colonel Sanders.

So I'll call Kafka on the Shore a wash. I remain unsold on magic realism, but I'm totally sold on on Murakami's prose, even when it's used to convey an image than I don't buy and that my brain thus refuses to process. He expertly lays on the textual (and textural) qualities that keep me coming back to modern Japanese fiction in translation: "Heartfelt and sincere, if sometimes clumsy. Literal writing style," as Waggish's inquest on left-brained literature told it. It seems that slogging through Murakami's rapidly tiresome "magic" is the price I pay for his engaging "realism".

The Bat Segundo Show (Edward Champion, 2004 - )

First, three overarching questions: why isn't this show huge? Why isn't it in the pantheon of podcasts to which everyone insists you must listen? Why isn't its creator a big star?

The Bat Segundo Show [iTunes link] is an interview program where "young roving correspondent" Ed Champion, creator of the litblog whose current iteration is called Reluctant Habits, roams New York with a portable recording studio and converses with authors of all stripes. He talks to them in diners, in lobbies, in apartments, wherever. Champion's pure hustling ability impresses me; he not only keeps tabs on where authors will turn up in the city, but also goes to them, lugging recording gear all the way, which on the subway must be no mean logistical feat.

A focus on literary fiction means that the show's guests tend to be writers of it. Some favorites include Cynthia Ozick (who seems like such a delightful old lady) [MP3], Nam Le (whose sheer coolness convinced me to read his work) [MP3], William T. Vollman (the intensity of whose writing and life is matched only by the laid-backness of his demeanor) [MP3, first appearance] [MP3, second appearance], and John Updike (who probably needs no parenthetical detail) [MP3].

And since it's the Max Funsters I serve, I'd be remiss in not highlighting a few of the Maximum Fun-y ("Maximum Funny"?) Segundo guests as well: you've got your Amy Sedaris [MP3], your Neal Pollack [MP3], your Austin Grossman [MP3], your George Saunders [MP3], your David Hajdu [MP3], and your Grandmaster Flash [MP3].

Plus, there are the wild cards: eccentric filmmaker David Lynch [MP3], world's best documentarian Errol Morris [MP3], semi-relevant but entertainingly outspoken Senator Mike Gravel [MP3], and crackpots like Naomi Klein [MP3] and Nicholson Baker (who became one so gradually, I didn't even notice) [MP3].

But enough with the linking; how's the podcast itself? When introducing The Bat Segundo Show to friends, I always find myself using the construction "As soon as you get used to x, you'll like it", where x is almost any element of the program. The host, for instance. Champion asks detailed, probing, observation-laden questions — that, unlike those of certain very-long-time public radio interviewers who shall remain nameless, indicate he's actually read the book in question — and sometimes takes his guests to the mat when he disagrees — which indicates that he, unlike some very-long-time public radio interviewers who shall remain nameless, knows that conversation is a two-player game. But he does this sincere questioning with oddly insincere-sounding inflection, the kind you usually only use while nudging your interlocutor in the ribs; he's a cross between Bookworm's Michael Silverblatt and a deep-cable game show host.

For another instance, well, you're probably wondering why it's called The Bat Segundo Show. Until recently, almost every interview was introduced by the titular character, a washed-up, tequila-swilling radio DJ played by none other than Champion himself, doing a voice simultaneously sleazy, bombastic, and somewhat effete. He'd introduce the "young roving correspondent" only after first being introduced himself (in what one iTunes reviewer called a "Spanish shouting theme tune that almost defies the listener to keep listening despite its glass-shards-in-the-eardrums assault") and giving a short monologue about his recent activities, such as being arrested for masturbating in a video store or desperately trying to arrange a tryst with his ex-wife. Yeah.

So that's hugely divisive, which might explain the character's recent "disappearance". I've heard that Champion has pitched the show not-quite-successfully to radio stations, and while I'm not totally against Bat Segundo himself — hell, I just friended his Facebook page the other day — I wouldn't be surprised if he's what's been holding the program back. In his absence, other goofy (though, admittedly, well-produced) introductions have occupied his stead, but they still feel a tad out of place. This might be a case where less is more; some people get by just fine with "Welcome to the broadcast."

But my point is this: Ed Champion should be on public radio. He finds stellar guests, and his interviewing skills are on the top tier of the podcasting world. For me The Bat Segundo Show comes second only to The Sound when I've got the interview podcast jones. And since the show has been in a spot of trouble lately, it needs your fandom. That is, if it's the sort of thing of which you're a fan.

I will now do the program the ultimate honor of making it a drinking game:

• When Bat Segundo references a sexual misadventure, drink
• When Champion starts an interview with the word "okay", drink
• When a guest breaks down and admits they "don't understand the question", drink
• When Champion bases a question on an assumption about the author's intention and the author flatly denies having that intention, drink
• When you hear a cement truck, a cop car, gunfire, or a Top 40 song in the background, drink
• When Champion bases an entire question on a single written word, drink
• When a waiter comes to the table and diverts the guest from the interview, drink
• When a guest shows surprise at the fact that Champion has done, like, research, drink

[Originally published at Maximumfun.org.]

Mindwalk (Bernt Amadeus Capra, 1990)

After losing the primary, a U.S. senator and erstwhile presidential candidate visits his poet buddy (and former speechwriter) in France. They travel to the Medieval abbey on Mont Saint-Michel together, and while wandering around catch the eye of a Norwegian particle physicist living in self-imposed exile on the island. The three wind up in an all-day discussion about early clocks, quantum field theory, William Blake, politics, Pablo Neruda, Descartes, lasers, ecology, systems theory and related subjects.

* * *

I try to take on all cultural experiences without prejudice. Thus, before watching Mindwalk, I strained to forget that the film was directed by the brother of and based on a story and book by Fritjof Capra, author of The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. It seems that, back in the mid-70s, it was all the rage to desperately try to legitimize the remaining threadbare beliefs of hippiedom with references to the "counterintuitive" nature of quantum physics. I've read Capra's book, possession of which I understand was once an astoundingly effective means to win over the chyx ("Wanna come upstairs and see my Hilbert Space?"), and since I'm being charitable, I will say that it's at least better than Gary Zukav's execrable The Dancing Wu-Li Masters. Both titles, however, belong to the class of works you'll come away from knowing less about physics than when you picked them up. Jeremy Bernstein said it all when he observed, "At the heart of the matter is Mr. Capra's methodology — his use of what seem to me to be accidental similarities of language as if these were somehow evidence of deeply rooted connections," which I call "reasoning by pun".

But we're here to talk about a movie, not to trash a book. Though it's barely known today — it's never seen DVD, but Capra himself has uploaded it to Google Video — Mindwalk was a full-fledged Paramount release back in 1990. I've heard it discussed over the years, with one common complaint: "It's just three people walking and talking!" That's a juvenile objection. Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre is a wonderful film, one of my very favorites, and it's just two people talking without walking. Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy resides in my top three of 2006, and it's just two people driving, walking, and barely talking at all. Gripes about form alone are groundless; every form is acceptable. What matters is how form and substance unite, and that's where the picture at hand has, well, Issues.

Let it be said, though, that the premise described above does get my blood flowin'. A feature-length conversation between three people of very different points of view that covers countless topics in art and science, all in an unusual, highly photographable setting? Sweet. Sign me up. I'm on board. Let's go. Here's how it rolls out: after an (ugh!) voiceover thought monologue from the poet about how simultaneously irritatingly and endearingly "American" the senator is — the poet's American too, mind you — the pair chat about the usual did-I-sell-out anxieties that plagued Baby Boomers during the George H.W. Bush era. While looking at a Rube Goldberg-y clock in the castle, they run across the physicist, who proceeds to denounce the mechanistic worldview that, while vital to building such an elaborate machine, cannot work when trying to solve the Earth's problems, which is how those stuffed shirts in Washington do it. The men then listen more or less rapt, interjecting only occasionally, as she expounds upon her ideas and the folly of everyone who does not subscribe to them: the United States government, pretty much all industries, other scientists, litterers.

What are her ideas? As someone who reads philosophy books for fun and profit, I can't resist breaking down the physicist's argument and seeing what makes it tick. It comes down to this: nothing is really reducible, and the reason the world is in such an awful state — that the world is in an awful state is simply asserted, by all three characters, as an axiom — is that everybody thinks everything is reducible. (She hooks reducibility up with masculinity and patriarchy, but the sleight-of-hand is tough to document.) For example, a reducibility-loving politician might consider the benefits of a coal-burning power plant in isolation, without so much as a thought to its effects on the people around it. Fair enough; I myself believe that unintended consequences lie at the heart of most political misadventures. Also, she says that it's a mistake to think only in terms of the individual; one should think in terms of the community, too, and the trees in the community, and the roots of the trees that collect water, and the clouds that drop that water from the sky, and the oceans from which the water gets to the sky, and the creatures in the ocean, and the salt the ocean deposits on the grass when the tide comes up, and the sheep that eat the grass, and the Medieval castle the sheep walk around. And don't forget to always, without exception, calculate your effect on our children's children's children's children. Thus the Norwegian makes her pitch for "systems thinking".

The problem here is obvious: not even the Earth Simulator can take that many variables into account, and it can do over 35 trillion FLOPS. (Though I've heard that NEC is working on a new 131-TFLOPS version, so hey, you never know.) A human who can't reduce is a human who can't think. For a while, her thesis seems to be that people would be better off if, in all choices, they considered more variables, which is not really an assertion amenable to inquiry, but hey. Near the end, she nearly breaks down in tears as she harangues her companions about the importance of a "sustainable" human lifestyle, showing herself to be at least a decade ahead of her time, buzzword-wise. Decoct all the verbosity, and what's her message? "Give a Hoot!^TM"

But the annals of cinema are peopled by plenty of eccentric characters with inconsequential beliefs, some of whom argue for them even less coherently than does Sonia the physicist. For instance, in Old Joy, one of the thirtysomething protagonists explains his theory of a teardrop-shaped universe while sharing beers with his friend over a campfire. His monologue, of sorts, reveals a lot about this particular character, why he is the way he is and where he's likely to go afterward. But in Mindwalk, Sonia's hundreds of lines about the importance of systems thinking don't reveal trait one about her character, because she's not a character; she's a mouthpiece for the viewpoint that systems thinking is the one true faith. If Sonia were to offer up the exact same theory as did Old Joy's neo-hippie, the movie wouldn't be shedding light on her inner life; the movie would be arguing that the universe is teardrop-shaped.

Mindwalk has no characters; it has puppets, their clapping wooden jaws manipulated directly by the Capra brothers. Either Sonia is a stand-in for Fritjof or she just happens to share all of the man's views as espoused in the book The Turning Point, on which the film is partially based. Thomas the poet sometimes fills the role of the fool, providing wisecracks and semi-apropos lines of verse, but he mostly fills the role of Sonia's cheerleader. Jack the senator is the straw man who exists only for Sonia to knock down: at first he spouts a few trivial counterarguments, but shortly caves, awed by the physicist's wisdom and serenity. "She's right, of course," he says to Thomas as they walk away from the abbey. "About damn near everything. Even the parts I didn't understand felt right." (Note the verb in that last sentence.) He even offers her a job.

If you don't read much of it, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that anyone who writes philosophy as a dialogue is cynically trying to play you like a fiddle. Of course the figure representing the opposing viewpoint is a doofus who doesn't even know the word mechanistic — the writer, and thus the picture, is actively selling Sonia's claims. This is an illustrious tradition going back Plato, but it's still a fundamentally dishonest one. Mindwalk's tagline is "A film for passionate thinkers", but how on Earth is a thinking person supposed to respond to Jack and Thomas' genuflection before Sonia's pronouncements? "Boy, she's really showing those stogdy old patriarchal Cartesians what's what"? Surely not. I do wonder, though, about the sort of person who believes anything because they saw one fictional entity convince two other fictional entities of it; I've got some swampland in Florida to sell them.

Far from having too little in the way of visuals and action, I would argue that the film has too much. The core material is essentially a persuasive essay, so it might hold up in a lecture format, but here it's expected to sustain an on-location, multi-character feature film. As I said, listening to a physicist, senator and poet hash out life would be fascinating; find a real one of each, plunk them on an island, and you've got yourself a solid documentary. Listening to a Fritjof Capra screed by way of three cardboard cutouts is less so. The problem with the movie isn't its form, and it's not exactly its (questionable) substance; it's the dishonesty that causes and is a product of form and substance that mesh so badly that the gears catch fire and melt the whole mechanism. The film is a lie, a polemic shabbily disguised as narrative; it purports to be a conversation, one of humanity's most enduring pleasures, but it's nothing of the sort. It's a sham, expressly designed to place one suite of assertions in the best possible light.

This gets me wondering, as I often do, about the place of politics in art. Again I arrive at the conclusion that it doesn't have one. If you want to make a political argument, write a book, or better yet, write an essay. Don't write a piece of fiction, because a piece of fiction isn't subject to the constraints of the real world, which is the only place politics matters. The makers of Mindwalk may have guessed, correctly, that the ideas they have to peddle would play much better in a fictional world, where they could control not only the arguments, but the counterarguments and the counterarguments to the counterarguments — and the effectiveness of them all. I could make a film where my veiled self proposes that we'd all be happy if only we used sardines as a medium of exchange, and I could prop up a couple of one-dimensional interlocutors who initially show skepticism but ultimately, after a carefully constructed imitation of conversation, come to accept — to love — the oracle-like originator of the sardines-as-money idea. But that wouldn't make a pocketful of rotten fish any more appealing.

adamcadre runs the Lyttle Lytton contest, where participants vie to write the worst possible short sentence with which to open a novel. (My personal favorite: "The foot delivered an unending holocaust of pain as it rocketed into Zamboni’s crotch.") One year, someone sent in the worst possible opening for a screenplay they could think of:

INT. MY MANSION - DUSK

A study in subdued luxury. A tall, handsome figure enters — it's ME.

ME

I have ninety minutes and lots of unpopular opinions, so let's get started.

Let's not.